I hope you got permission from the San Jose Airport to do this.
Jesus! Read the goddamn page! He talks about the FAA and FAR Part 101.
That picture was taken at an altitude of 47,000' which puts it in Class A airspace which belongs to Oakland ARTCC (aka Oakland Center). San Jose has nothing to do with it. They can't frown on on people sending up balloons or model rockets if it's not their airspace.
He actually called the NOTAM number, I haven't been able to find the NOTAM, though... it would be just like the FAA to lose it. Of course Nov. 3 2002 was a little while ago which makes it a little hard to look for the NOTAM.
From the article: "For a research investment to be justified, it must produce value equal to or greater than that of the investment."
I find this extremely questionable.
You missed his point. It is precisely because research cannot return value (in the short term) greater than or equal to the investment made that a corporation cannot justify it. Businesses exist to make money for their owners, not to increase the store of knowledge that society has. A scientist who works for a company thus is torn between two conflicting desires: the desire to find "truth" and the desire to keep food on the family's table. A huge part of science is the null result: good experiments are those that try to falsify a theory, and since we hope we have for the most part good theories, good experiments tend not to result in financial gains for the corporation.
I believe that fundamental research in science should be supported by society. Computer science research (e.g. new layout algorithms, not new whiz-bang word-processor programs) should be also. Scientists should only be supported (either by society or by corporations) with no strings attached besides those of general acceptance of results in the scientific community, e.g. peer-reviewd publications.
Obligatory correction: The chute and all assorted equipment (lines, anchors, squibs) weighs 88lbs.
I don't dispute the fact that airplanes can be designed with a BRS chute in mind; however, it does have a significant cost, and the final decision will be based on taking all factors into account. I can't afford a new airplane of any kind, and STCs to my kind of airplanes will detract from the load. My 100 lbs. weight figure is (I think) remarkably close to the 88 lbs. you mention, since I was not talking about any specific airplane. The airplanes I fly also don't have 81 gal. fuel tanks.
It also happens that I like to fly acro, and wear a chute when doing so; that is a much better tradeoff for me.
I couldn't agree more. Fuel, fuel, fuel, fuel. It's all about the fuel. All engine failures happen due to fuel exhaustion. (Well, not quite all, but close enough that it makes no difference.)
And about onerous FAA requirements -- a couple of months ago they were trying to pass a regulation requiring that only certificated GPS installations be allowed in an aircraft. Since no portable GPS will ever be certificated, the FAA was saying "we don't care if portable GPS can save people's lives, if we can't control it you can't have it inside the airplane!"
I see writeups and pictures of MFDs (multi-function displays) and digital engine-monitoring and control systems (including FADECs, full-authority digital engine control). They leave my mouth watering, but I wonder if they'll be common enough that I'll actually get to fly them in my lifetime. It's laughable to think that ADF installations are approved routinely, but MFDs and GPSs have these incredible hoops to jump through.
(ADF is automatic direction finding, a medium-wave -- like AM radio -- device. A little needle in the airplane points at the station, an NDB -- non-directional beacon. A friend of mine once said to me "if I have to fly an NDB approach in IMC [instrument meteorological conditions] -- it's an emergency." I sympathise. I don't ever want to fly NDB approaches again, and I will just not fly an airplane where I might have to resort to the ADF. I'll use it if one is there, but not for an approach.)
Or there are the many times I've seen small craft crashes where the control surface fell off the plane.
Or (as we have seen with alarming frequency here in NJ) mid-air collisions. How do you dead stick a plane that has it's wing sheared off by some moron who isn't paying to the traffic while he's showboating?
You obviously don't know many pilots, and are instead completely convinced by the crap that goes for journalism on the TV news.
I'm going to call you on this bullshit. How many instances are there where a control surface "fell off" an airplane? This only happens with completely crappy maintenance. An airplane that was that badly maintained is not likely to have a $15,000 BRS chute.
How many instances of mid-air collisions where a BRS chute would have saved lives? I'll grant that this number is non-zero. Is this number large enough that we will see (or should have) large-scale deployment of BRS chutes? No.
You don't "look for" a place to land when there's an emergency; when you're flying along, you always know how you're going to handle an emergency. This means (among other things) you always have a landing site picked out.
It's funny how, when I was getting my Private, the engine always mysteriously failed on every flight, usually at the worst part of the flight (from a workload point of view).
I'd much rather come down vertically and slowly into a stand of trees as opposed to horizontally and fast.
An airplane like a Cessna 172 can be landed at 50 mph. A 10 g deceleration will not cause any injuries to occupants (if they're all wearing shoulder+lap seat belts). You need about 10 feet to slow down from 50 mph at 10g. (Damn non-metric units, I didn't want to convert and find the exact answer.)
When that parachute leaves you and the airplane stuck in a tree 50 feet off the ground, what's the next move? There are no magic bullets in aviation (just like anywhere else). You weigh both sides and decide which option works for you. For my kind of flying, the BRS chute is not good. For others, it may be just like mother made.
First thing to remember is: this thing is heavy. The old joke goes: how do you know if something is too heavy for aviation use? Hold it out at arm's length and let go. If it falls, it's too heavy. If I remember correctly the BRS parachute for a 4-seat airplane is about 100lb. That's about 16 gallons of fuel -- about 1.5 hours of flying, or about 200 miles of range. (Or 100 lbs. of baggage.)
Also, the airplane has to be designed for it, and the chute is custom designed for the airplane. Just like any system on an airplane, pilots have to be trained in its use, and they need to maintain that knowledge; and the chute itself needs to be maintained. The whole thing is covered by much FAA paperwork, and anyone who's a pilot knows how expensive that is. There are a couple of airplanes that BRS has an "STC" (Supplemental Type Certificate, i.e. FAA permission to install) for the chute, but they are smaller training aircraft like the Cessna 152 and 172.)
The number of people that can afford a new Lancair is small. Pilots like me will continue to fly older and cheaper airplanes, and if there's an emergency, we will just land the airplane. Structural failures are rare, and there is not much country where a forced landing will result in injuries to occupants. Prudent pilots won't fly at night over hostile terrain. (In an emergency, I don't give a shit about saving the airplane; at that point it belongs to the insurance company, and I'd rather save life than their money.)
If you own a piece of copyrighted work, you can alter it for your own use legally. Try this. Pick up the newspaper, and put a mustache on GW Bush. It is legal !!!
True; however, can you now re-distribute (in a magazine, say) that doctored picture of Dubya? Not necessarily. This is where the "fair use" doctrine applies; satire (like a moustache on Dubya) is covered. A source patch to djbdns -- unclear. People who write patches may have to support their patches ad infinitum to track changes in djbdns.
Note: I'm not making any claims about how the djbdns license is written; merely that since it doesn't include the right to modify and re-distribute, it is not completely free. In practice Bernstein may be good about accepting patches and incorporating them into the main trunk of the code.
Very interesting to modify each outgoing URL to contain a time-stamp. Even better to add some authentication code to it. But very computationally expensive, no?
Not really. Remember, a 486 can saturate a T-1 serving static files; with a modern system (we use Sun Netras) it's no problem. The only overhead is one cryptographic hash (say MD5) to verify the signature per request. (There are a few other technical details like key management -- changing compromised keys etc. -- but with intelligent caching there is no significant overhead. Note that you don't need to use public-key crypto since the signing authority and the verifying authority are at the same site.) Since you don't have to keep track of web sessions, load balancing is easy too.
On the dynamic HTML generation side, most app. server based sites have to do that anyway; there's just one additional step of replacing some URLs with signed ones. If you handle web sessions through URL-rewriting rather than some hack like HTTP Basic Auth or cookies (ugh!) you pretty much get it for free.
checking the referer is pretty much guaranteed to prevent deep linking because no one is going to go around forging referer strings just in case they go to a site that does deep links.
That's why you don't fake the Referer: string by hand; you use an HTTP proxy to do it. An ad-blocker like Privoxy does this automatically; if your browser requests a page a http://www.foo.com/bar/foobar/img.gif then the Referer: header is set to http://www.foo.com/. This works for the vast majority of the referrer checking sites out there.
The only way to do it right is to generate pages on the fly, with all URLs in it being re-written to be cryptographically signed and timestamped. A link would look something like
The web server checks the signature and lifetime of every request before serving up the file. (I implemented Apache modules etc. to do all this at my job.)
Yes, referrer information makes an excellent authentication scheme for highly confidential system dealing with transfer of mission critical information.... Just also check for a magic string in the user agent and voila! trusted computing reinvented.
Heh-heh! It's amazing how moronic some "security" is. I use an HTTP proxy (Privoxy) that not only blocks all ads, it allows me to set the Referer: on all outgoing requests to the base URL. Most of these sites just check that Referer: is a URL on their own site.
Do what I do: use Privoxy. Not only can you use it right now with whatever your favourite browser is, it's free. Not only does it block ads, it allows you to set Referer: on all outgoing requests to whatever you want. (I set it so Referer: is always the base URL of the page being viewed.)
Incidentally, I don't know why anyone bothers with logging referrer information. The only use sounds like what the bloggers do. If you're not a blogger, why do you even care who the referrer is? Half the time it's bogus or one of your own pages.
I used to be the telephony guy (architecture, design, and lots of implementation) for a VOIP company. The servers ran Solaris and Windows NT.
Why? Simple: it was dictated by the hardware we used. To support a few hundred VOIP connections, you need to offload work like the codecs and in some cases the H.323 stack to DSPs and CPUs on the cards. These cards -- usually CompactPCI -- are very expensive. These cards don't give you a lot of choice on the platform to run: "you can have any color as long as it's black."
If you want telephony to use free OSs, talk to the vendors -- e.g. Dialogic (now Intel). Natural Microsystems (NMS) actually does release Linux drivers now (it didn't two years ago, Solaris was the only Unix available) but it's doubtful Intel ever will.
In roughly the same orbit around the sun, a much smaller mass has to travel MUCH slower than the Earth to maintain that orbit.
Ye gods! This is false.
Hint: why does a low earth orbit -- like the Space Shuttle's -- always take the same time? Orbital period depends only on the mass of the earth and the radius of the orbit, not of the satellite.
So why won't 2002 AA29 ever hit the earth?
Do a google search on the Jovian Trojans. Or look up Lagrange Points. Or just consider the complexity of a three body system.
I do believe that it is well within someone's right to not have their picture taken if they don't wish it to be.
Well, that's fine, but in the USA and in other countries you do not have that right. Images of you cannot be used for commercial gain without a model release; but if you're in a public place, you can be photographed by anyone. (The laws are a little dim on whether the police can take photographs of people without probable cause.)
Perhaps it is an invasion of privacy; but only if you have an "expectation of privacy." Think of it this way: do I, as a private citizen, have the right to take a picture of a street? How about a city skyline? Do I have to track each recognisable person down and ask their permission? (Of course most photographers will put their camera away if you ask them to not take your picture. Not a choice you get with non-government rent-a-cops, or if you're on private property like a shopping mall.)
Am I alone in thinking that there have been an excessive number of racist and stereotypical views posted on this story? Is it a typical American perception of the indians that they all smell of curry and don't know how to wash?
Never having lived in Britain I can't compare directly; but if anyone here in the US said any of those things, they'd (at the very least) be socially ostracised in any of the places I've lived. It's the anonimity of electronic discussions that seems to bring out people's worst tendencies.
The Indian immigrant community in the US is mostly doctors and software folk -- i.e. rich people. People might even feel they can get away with trash talking about Mexican immigrants or black people, but not the rich. (That's sad when you think about it.)
As the article itself says, this is no rocket science (or even clever hackery). It's just the "analog hole" that the RIAA/MPAA/Disney Axis Of Evil (TM) wants to block with Palladium and similar crap; the rights of consumers and what copyright law actually says be damned.
Film is a chemcial reaction with light and a photosensitive chemically treated film. This captures things at the atomic level...
Sorry. Have you heard of grain? Clumps of metallic silver form; and due to the thickness of the emulsion, many clumps roughly line up to form the shadow called grain.
Good general purpose film properly developed will resolve about 100 lp/mm (line-pairs per millimetre). That's about four orders of magnitude larger than atomic dimensions.
How do you propose we use "analog" for transmitting real-time colour video on mobile phones and PDAs? After all, that is the problem being discussed here!
Don't forget that broadcast TV is analog. PAL, NTSC etc. are atrocious for accurate colour. When we want accurate colour, we adjust gamma etc. and match colour profiles end to end or use systems like Pantone. We use calibrated light sources. We use carefully selected emulsions and develop them carefully.
In this application we don't want accurate colour; we want colour that's inoffensive to human visual perception, i.e. renders skin tones decently, and no banding or obvious posterisation. You don't care if your car's colour -- the exact shade of blue -- is not accurately depicted on your friend's Palm Pilot.
... anybody who's ever tried to print from a Linux box to a printer hosted on a Windows machine can sympathize.
FUD alert!
I don't understand this at all. How long ago was this situation you're talking about? Under Mandrake 8.2 (and possibly other distributions) if you use "new lpr" as the print system, printtool or the "Control Center" will set up printing to Windows -- just type in a few parameters into a dialog.
Jesus! The photographer is just someone trying to make money in a legal and ethical manner. What do you mean by:
It's legal to imply that you will provide top-notch wedding photography service, and then once the once-in-a-lifetime experience is over, refuse to provide any real service at all?
The service the photographer provides is: "I will come to your wedding and take pictures; and I will provide you with prints as requested." What do you mean by "refuse to provide service" -- are they refusing to sell you more prints? That was the original agreement, surely?
If you want the copyright on the images, you pay. If it wasn't in the original contract (which means you paid less money), you can enter into a new contract and purchase the copyrights. Right or wrong, this is what copyright is -- it establishes a right that can be sold.
In fact, a wise photographer would offer two payment plans: the traditional one, and one that charges more per hour for taking photographs but offers the negatives and lower-cost reprints.
Exactly! There is full knowledge on both parties' sides, which is much more likely to lead to a fair contract.
There are wedding photographers that do this -- I know one in Oakland, California.
I have to say I'm not sure I agree with copyright on photography.
I think we actually do agree. My statement was about the copyright on the photographs, not on any kind of "ownership" of the scene by the photographer. I don't believe that a person can own a view.
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That picture was taken at an altitude of 47,000' which puts it in Class A airspace which belongs to Oakland ARTCC (aka Oakland Center). San Jose has nothing to do with it. They can't frown on on people sending up balloons or model rockets if it's not their airspace.
He actually called the NOTAM number, I haven't been able to find the NOTAM, though... it would be just like the FAA to lose it. Of course Nov. 3 2002 was a little while ago which makes it a little hard to look for the NOTAM.
I believe that fundamental research in science should be supported by society. Computer science research (e.g. new layout algorithms, not new whiz-bang word-processor programs) should be also. Scientists should only be supported (either by society or by corporations) with no strings attached besides those of general acceptance of results in the scientific community, e.g. peer-reviewd publications.
It also happens that I like to fly acro, and wear a chute when doing so; that is a much better tradeoff for me.
Or, in other words, I agree with you!
And about onerous FAA requirements -- a couple of months ago they were trying to pass a regulation requiring that only certificated GPS installations be allowed in an aircraft. Since no portable GPS will ever be certificated, the FAA was saying "we don't care if portable GPS can save people's lives, if we can't control it you can't have it inside the airplane!"
I see writeups and pictures of MFDs (multi-function displays) and digital engine-monitoring and control systems (including FADECs, full-authority digital engine control). They leave my mouth watering, but I wonder if they'll be common enough that I'll actually get to fly them in my lifetime. It's laughable to think that ADF installations are approved routinely, but MFDs and GPSs have these incredible hoops to jump through.
(ADF is automatic direction finding, a medium-wave -- like AM radio -- device. A little needle in the airplane points at the station, an NDB -- non-directional beacon. A friend of mine once said to me "if I have to fly an NDB approach in IMC [instrument meteorological conditions] -- it's an emergency." I sympathise. I don't ever want to fly NDB approaches again, and I will just not fly an airplane where I might have to resort to the ADF. I'll use it if one is there, but not for an approach.)
Fuel!
I'm going to call you on this bullshit. How many instances are there where a control surface "fell off" an airplane? This only happens with completely crappy maintenance. An airplane that was that badly maintained is not likely to have a $15,000 BRS chute.
How many instances of mid-air collisions where a BRS chute would have saved lives? I'll grant that this number is non-zero. Is this number large enough that we will see (or should have) large-scale deployment of BRS chutes? No.
It's funny how, when I was getting my Private, the engine always mysteriously failed on every flight, usually at the worst part of the flight (from a workload point of view).
An airplane like a Cessna 172 can be landed at 50 mph. A 10 g deceleration will not cause any injuries to occupants (if they're all wearing shoulder+lap seat belts). You need about 10 feet to slow down from 50 mph at 10g. (Damn non-metric units, I didn't want to convert and find the exact answer.)When that parachute leaves you and the airplane stuck in a tree 50 feet off the ground, what's the next move? There are no magic bullets in aviation (just like anywhere else). You weigh both sides and decide which option works for you. For my kind of flying, the BRS chute is not good. For others, it may be just like mother made.
Also, the airplane has to be designed for it, and the chute is custom designed for the airplane. Just like any system on an airplane, pilots have to be trained in its use, and they need to maintain that knowledge; and the chute itself needs to be maintained. The whole thing is covered by much FAA paperwork, and anyone who's a pilot knows how expensive that is. There are a couple of airplanes that BRS has an "STC" (Supplemental Type Certificate, i.e. FAA permission to install) for the chute, but they are smaller training aircraft like the Cessna 152 and 172.)
The number of people that can afford a new Lancair is small. Pilots like me will continue to fly older and cheaper airplanes, and if there's an emergency, we will just land the airplane. Structural failures are rare, and there is not much country where a forced landing will result in injuries to occupants. Prudent pilots won't fly at night over hostile terrain. (In an emergency, I don't give a shit about saving the airplane; at that point it belongs to the insurance company, and I'd rather save life than their money.)
Note: I'm not making any claims about how the djbdns license is written; merely that since it doesn't include the right to modify and re-distribute, it is not completely free. In practice Bernstein may be good about accepting patches and incorporating them into the main trunk of the code.
On the dynamic HTML generation side, most app. server based sites have to do that anyway; there's just one additional step of replacing some URLs with signed ones. If you handle web sessions through URL-rewriting rather than some hack like HTTP Basic Auth or cookies (ugh!) you pretty much get it for free.
The only way to do it right is to generate pages on the fly, with all URLs in it being re-written to be cryptographically signed and timestamped. A link would look something like
The web server checks the signature and lifetime of every request before serving up the file. (I implemented Apache modules etc. to do all this at my job.)Incidentally, I don't know why anyone bothers with logging referrer information. The only use sounds like what the bloggers do. If you're not a blogger, why do you even care who the referrer is? Half the time it's bogus or one of your own pages.
Why? Simple: it was dictated by the hardware we used. To support a few hundred VOIP connections, you need to offload work like the codecs and in some cases the H.323 stack to DSPs and CPUs on the cards. These cards -- usually CompactPCI -- are very expensive. These cards don't give you a lot of choice on the platform to run: "you can have any color as long as it's black."
If you want telephony to use free OSs, talk to the vendors -- e.g. Dialogic (now Intel). Natural Microsystems (NMS) actually does release Linux drivers now (it didn't two years ago, Solaris was the only Unix available) but it's doubtful Intel ever will.
Hint: why does a low earth orbit -- like the Space Shuttle's -- always take the same time? Orbital period depends only on the mass of the earth and the radius of the orbit, not of the satellite.
So why won't 2002 AA29 ever hit the earth? Do a google search on the Jovian Trojans. Or look up Lagrange Points. Or just consider the complexity of a three body system.
When we say 1 Mbps, we mean "1 megabit per second." If the movie is 90 minutes long, it takes 90 * 60 * 1Mbit = 675 Mbytes.
Perhaps it is an invasion of privacy; but only if you have an "expectation of privacy." Think of it this way: do I, as a private citizen, have the right to take a picture of a street? How about a city skyline? Do I have to track each recognisable person down and ask their permission? (Of course most photographers will put their camera away if you ask them to not take your picture. Not a choice you get with non-government rent-a-cops, or if you're on private property like a shopping mall.)
The Indian immigrant community in the US is mostly doctors and software folk -- i.e. rich people. People might even feel they can get away with trash talking about Mexican immigrants or black people, but not the rich. (That's sad when you think about it.)
Good general purpose film properly developed will resolve about 100 lp/mm (line-pairs per millimetre). That's about four orders of magnitude larger than atomic dimensions.
Don't forget that broadcast TV is analog. PAL, NTSC etc. are atrocious for accurate colour. When we want accurate colour, we adjust gamma etc. and match colour profiles end to end or use systems like Pantone. We use calibrated light sources. We use carefully selected emulsions and develop them carefully.
In this application we don't want accurate colour; we want colour that's inoffensive to human visual perception, i.e. renders skin tones decently, and no banding or obvious posterisation. You don't care if your car's colour -- the exact shade of blue -- is not accurately depicted on your friend's Palm Pilot.
> 2. Pray to god, rich Green Peace Loving geeks didn't all buy MACs.
3. ???
4. PROFIT!
Sorry, someone had to say it.
Jesus! The photographer is just someone trying to make money in a legal and ethical manner. What do you mean by:
The service the photographer provides is: "I will come to your wedding and take pictures; and I will provide you with prints as requested." What do you mean by "refuse to provide service" -- are they refusing to sell you more prints? That was the original agreement, surely?If you want the copyright on the images, you pay. If it wasn't in the original contract (which means you paid less money), you can enter into a new contract and purchase the copyrights. Right or wrong, this is what copyright is -- it establishes a right that can be sold.
There are wedding photographers that do this -- I know one in Oakland, California.