The ATC / Control Tower is never responsible for controlling the aircraft... Even in a busy place like the San Francisco Bay, the ATC advises of traffic and coordinates inbound and outbound traffic lanes to keep traffic well spaced. ATC typical instructions, even with hills very nearby (1nm) usually consist of a destination landmark or vector, and an altitude.
If you're VFR! If you're IFR (and I'm an instrument rated pilot, flying in the San Francisco Bay Area) you bet ATC "controls" you. I put that in quotes, because as an instructor of mine once said, "you are the one who's going to die if he vectors you into a hillside." That said, if you're IFR (every airline flight is IFR) then ATC separates you from other traffic [airline traffic stays in Class B airspace], and gives you radar vectors. "Cherokee 12345, vector for traffic, turn left heading 275." However, the gist of your argument holds: regardless of what ATC will or won't do, no pilot should let ATC put him or her into a bad situation.
Sadly, a couple of years ago two pilots in the area flew a vector into a hill. They thought they were IFR, the controller thought they were VFR; he gave them a vector and then as his workload increased, he forgot about them. The lesson is: fly every ATC instruction as though he's trying to kill you. Sure, it's his responsibility, but it's your life.
It is important, not only to update the ATC gear, but that the FAA institude a complete overhaul of avionics.
Not so fast!!! The airplanes I like to fly (tube-and-fabric taildraggers, sailplanes, aerobatics) cost $20,000. TCAD-like [collision avoidance] devices are around $20,000 installed. See the problem?
Maybe one of these "bugs" will misreport the location of things like the Sears Tower, or the Capitol Building....
No sane pilot relies on ATC to keep herself from flying into a building or a mountain.
Even while on "radar vectors" (means the controller has identified your blip on the scope and gives you headings to fly) a pilot will always know where he is at all times. (The pilots who don't might not see old age.)
problem is people WILL die first time this fucks up.
Unlikely. Remember, airplanes have been flying since before computers and radar.
If the system goes down, the controllers will revert to manual. Of course the capacity of the system is greatly reduced, and there will be delays. Lots of pissed of passengers, but no dead ones.
And my dad says tubes suck, smoke signals made by an authentic wool blanket and damp mesquite is the only way to go. I bet my dad can beat up your dad.
Most classical concert halls use tube amplifiers.
Classical concert halls use no amplification -- what you kids would call "unplugged." (I am a musician. I also have season tickets to the San Francisco Symphony.)
You can design a solid-state amplifier that has exactly the same distortion and non-linearities of tube amps (but why?) -- that's not good enough for golden-ear audiophiles though. They'd rather listen to their "Test LP" on their custom turntables and talk about sound-stage separation and the "special warmth" added by the special green CD markers and about how analog is obviously better than digital because what if the signal changes between those digital samples?
Me, I'd prefer no distorion, and in any case I'd rather spend my time and money on music, not equipment.
(There are a couple of reasons to use tubes, where solid state devices don't work very well: very high power applications, like broadcast radio and TV transmitters' final stage RF amplifiers; and microwave tubes, like klystrons and magnetrons.)
... setting up OpenBSD is a great learning experience. For example, csh is the default shell, which until you add and configure your users, is painful.
If something is a learning experience, you're doing it right!
How can you tell someone else that csh will be a painful experience? You might find it a painful experience; I know I find it a painful experience. But Billions and Billions (tm) of people in the world use csh every day, and don't seem to be suffering any ill effects. The first time you run adduser it will ask you what you want the default shell to be; just make sure you install the shell you want before first running adduser.
... in order to avoid dependency issues when installing from the Packages collection, I ended up copying them all to a directory, installing everything I wanted, and then blowing away the directory.
This leaves me puzzled. What dependency issues? For instance, my shell of choice is bash, and I know I'll need to add it after installing. So in my login environment, I set up the env. variable PKG_PATH to ftp://ftp2.usa.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/3.1/package s/i386/ (you would pick the mirror closest to you, of course.) Now all I have to do is: # pkg_add ${PKG_PATH}/bash-2.05.tgz
Voila!! Bash is installed. This handles dependencies automatically; if package foo depends on package bar which depends on package foobar, running pkg_add -v ${PKG_PATH}/foo.tgz will automatically install foobar first, then bar, then install foo.
Personally I take offence at the fish wearing a crucifix.
I they want us atheists to run it, they'd better sort that out..
You need to read misc@ for a bit -- you'll soon see that the one thing you don't find among the developers is any kind of dogma. The only thing you can say about them is what they say about themselves: "we write code because that's what we like to do, and we're doing it for ourselves -- if you want to use what we make, here you go!" They're an iconoclastic bunch, and that's what I like about the OpenBSD crowd. (It also leads to the impression many people have about OpenBSD folk -- as prickly as the mascot.)
This atheist is very happy to be using OpenBSD. It's the only system I get the "feel" of old-time Unix from, back in the 80s -- the VAX/BSD days. The layout is just right, and the documentation is superb. Manpages are actually comprehensive and up-to-date! Most other Unix-like systems of today (I won't mention any names) give me the feeling of being designed by committee.
For an OS all about "security," you'd think they'd get rid of sendmail.
This sounds an uninformed knee-jerk rant from someone pretending to know something by shooting off his mouth. What insecurities exist in the OpenBSD sendmail package? If you don't describe them you run the risk of sounding stupid. Is the OpenBSD claim of "Five years without a remote hole in the default install!" a lie?
Why should OpenBSD replace something that has been audited and debugged extremely rigorously just to follow the dictates of fashion? Just like OpenBSD BIND will stay at version 4 instead of jumping to 8 or 9, it will continue to use sendmail. After all, sendmail works.
Remember, if sendmail is something you have strong feelings about, you don't have to install it; every other major MTA -- postfix, smail, qmail, etc. -- is in/usr/ports/mail/. It's your machine, you can run whatever you want. Even BIND 8!
Something that I want to do is add a rule to my.procmailrc file that will trigger if the incoming message is not from a sender in a list of approved senders.
Ask, and ye shall receive! Run, don't walk, to http://www.spambouncer.org/ -- a wonderful and configurable set of procmail rules. You create a file with known good addresses, and you can also define a secret keyword that if present in the subject, lets the message through. It also has support for blacklists and used to support ORBS and MAPS; now it uses ORBL/ORBZ/ORDB/etc.
The thing with email is that it is even easier! How hard is it to push the delete key?
You wouldn't by any chance happen to be this Barry Dennis shithead, would you?
I just checked my procmail logs. How many spam messages do you think I got today? 221 messages! In one fucking day! And they're all fucking multipart MIME or have crappy fucking attachments so each message is hundreds of K in size. In contrast, even counting high-traffic mailing lists, I got 41 real messages today -- and they're all plain text so they're a few K each. This is the price I pay for having been "on the Internet" since 1986. Yup, you read that right -- sixteen years ago.
Do I have to pay for physical junk mail to get delivered to me? No. And there is exactly one third-class bundle in my physical mailbox every day, easy to toss out. Do I have to pay -- in bandwidth, disk space, and time for setting up my procmail filters -- so some piece of shit marketing jackass can make a few bucks? You bet.
Spam is killing email. You kids today, you don't know what the golden age of email was like! Email was not like sending a physical piece of mail. I could publicise my email on the network (think Usenet), and anyone anywhere could send me email and I could send email to people I'd never met before. They always replied, just like I always replied. I made many friends, got a lot of help on various matters, and helped others on various matters. Today, to be able to send me email, you have to get on my "white list" -- I only accept email from people I know.
I notice that this Barry Dennis asshole doesn't give out his email address so we can forward all our spam to him.
If he likes spam, it must be because he has a small dick, wants porn, has small boobs, wants porn, craves herbal viagra, wants porn, wants some more porn, needs a second mortgage, wants porn, free airline tickets, and porn. Oh, and some more of that porn, with the hairy barely 18 models with big boobs getting raped by animals in an orgy.
Fuckers.
Incidentally, this "netweb" shit is the one with the Geocities page and the AOL email address, right? Obviously a class act.
Or so says Wayne Mansfield [asshole] -- 'we have been in business because we dare challenge the right of people to "shut us down," becuase [sic] we use an effective lawful method of business promotion' (quoted in this page on fighting spammers in Oz run by McNichol).
Funny, I didn't read a law anywhere that publicizing a know scumbag's IP addresses is unlawful! (It certainly is effective!)
Let's say I spread the word that if you see elderly people dressed a certain way carrying sheafs of a magazine called The Light Tower, they're Jehovah's Witnesses, don't answer the door (like you didn't know that already.) Can the J.W.s sue me because they had to buy new clothes, and knocking on someone's door is "lawful and effective"?
The spammers should be tarred, feathered, run out of town on a rail, then drawn, quartered, and thrown into the Iron Maiden. Their corpses should then be incinerated, ground up, and shot into the sun.
And what pisses me off even more is that I'm a pacifist and believe that violence is never the solution to a problem. The fucking spammers make me think that perhaps my philosophy is not universally applicable.
I can add digits to infinity to any radio station so that instead of tuning into 95.3 I could tune into 95.3000 - 95.3999. If the hardware/software can differentiate between such small differences in frequency then in the example above we just turned one setting on the radio dial into 1000. Why stop there? Am I missing something?
Yes -- it's called bandwidth. If you have an AM station broadcasting at 1550 kHz, and the audio signal is band-limited to 10 kHz, then the signal uses frequencies from 1540 kHz to 1560 kHz. This means other stations can be no closer than 1530 kHz or 1570 kHz.
For other modulation techniques, similar things apply; FM bandwidth usage is not a simple relation as in AM but similar. The "richer" your signal is, the more bandwidth you need. CD quality audio will need more bandwidth than what we get with commercial AM stations. TV signals require more bandwidth still.
Spread-spectrum techniques etc. work in a different way but the concepts are similar. The theoretical limit is that the information carrying ability depends on the signal-to-noise ration and the bandwidth. Add to this the fact that electronics, antennae, wires, propagation through the atmosphere etc. all behave very differently in different parts of the EM spectrum -- as a practical matter, the information carrying ability of the airwaves is very much a limited resource.
the cost of operating system software is typically $100 per machine or less and the cost of hardware is typically $800 or more?
More lies.
How much does Windows XP cost? (Not the "home use only" version.) How much does Office cost? And how often do you have to keep paying Micros**t?
Schools often have a lot of donated machines that don't cost anywhere near $800 each.
Unix is not at all suitable for general introductory courses.
Also untrue. I have taught your average US high-school students (i.e. the "dumb" ones that the media and the Republicans keep telling us about) intro computer stuff on Linux. I taught them how to use emacs (optional) and LaTeX (required). Not that the US public education system doesn't need serious help -- but you are doing students an even greater injustive if you underestimate them and feed them pablum.
the only problem is the small number of people taking up ham radio.
Why is this a problem?
ham radio technology has not changed drastically in many many years. maybe it's due for a technological overhaul.
Ham radio is not just about technology.
there no reason for ham radio operators to have precedence over anyone just because they were there first.
When I get on a bus and sit down, 50 other people (each of whom has more money than me) might want to throw me off that seat; but I was there first. It's not just about who was there first either -- ham radio provides a valuable service to all society. It's not just a frivolous hobby. Ham radio operators add more good to society than every O'Reilly sycophant put together ever will.
Helpful suggestion for Cheeze: Please learn how to use capital letters.
Disclaimer: I am not (and have never been) an amateur radio operator.
Which is more important to the economy and to social progress in general: digital broadband or ham radio? The truth is that ham radio trumps digital broadband, just because ham radio has been around longer and therefore is sanctified with a license to use the spectrum. (Yes, it's happened--a ham radio operator has actually shut down an 802.11 network.)
This one section is enough for me to dismiss anything else this crackpot has to say. Yer damn right ham radio trumps your stupid unlicensed network. When there's a disaster and all the landlines are down -- and that includes fiber backbones, broadband-boy -- hams are the ones who relay messages for rescue services.
Now, about a ham radio operator "actually" shutting down a network -- where and when? Hams are perhaps the most conscientious users of spectrum anywhere. They have clean signals and stay in their bandwidth -- bandwidth they are licensed to operate in. Consumer electronics, on the other hand, are the worst offenders. And 802.11b is unlicensed and must accept all interference caused to it by licensed users -- which includes microwave ovens. Read Part 15 and Part 18 of the FCC regulations.
ObDisclaimer: I am not (and have never been) a ham radio operator.
The FCC's rules are simple. If your product causes interference then you can't sell it. Period. Fusion Lighting is SOL unless they can shield their product
Please go and read the article.
Pay attention to what Part 15 and Part 18 of the FCC regulations are.
I know I'm going to get modded down by some free as in beer geek, but I think it's only fair to be paid for work you do & anything else is freeloading.
No, fair is to abide by any conditions the writer of the code puts on it. You want to get paid for your code; I don't expect to. If people download my code and use it, with nothing coming back to me -- not even kudos and fame -- that's fine by me.
I may have certain opinions about people who want to get compensated for all their code, but that shouldn't keep anyone from doing whatever the hell they want to do.
Question: what do you mean when you say that your code is "free [as in choice], not free as in [free beer]"? My tiny little brain hurts, because it thinks "free as in freedom" implies "free as in beer".
My website is not a store. It is more like my house. By accessing it you are trespassing on my private property. It doesn't matter whether or not I locked the doors.
This is idiotic.
Looking at a web site is not like trespassing. Guessing (or somehow obtaining) your password and logging in is like trespassing (or breaking and entering). Looking at your web site is like looking at your front garden while standing on your sidewalk. "Deep-linking" is like me telling people looking at my flowers "Hey, Joe on 17th and Maple has some nice red roses, on the right towards the back." Objecting to "deep-linking" is like saying "You can only look at my red roses if you start by looking at those petunias first."
(How thin can we stretch this "argument by analogy" crap?)
The usual objection to links is that they are out of context. E.g., I have some things on my web site that are out of date, but of historical interest to some people. I'm perfectly happy if people get to the old material after they go to the main page, which tells them that the old material is available, and links to it.
Why not edit the old page and put a notice in front: "This is old stuff! The new stuff is <ahref="some-doc.html"> here</a> -- don't read any further unless you want OLD STUFF!"
I think the answer is that there is no law against stupidity and laziness. Much easier to pay your attack-dog team of lawyers to file stupid lawsuits.
how does light (photons) propogate? Not at the speed of light. Infinite speed apparently.
Why do you claim that photons don't travel at the speed of light?
Even at a purely linguistic level: if a light beam consists of photons, then whatever speed photons travel at is the speed of light!
If one needs a model for gravity, why not waves? The physical analogy (magnetism) we use to compare it with is measured in a field (of which light is a part)
This is so mysterious a passage I just had to quote it here. Have you been using those immortality rings?
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Sadly, a couple of years ago two pilots in the area flew a vector into a hill. They thought they were IFR, the controller thought they were VFR; he gave them a vector and then as his workload increased, he forgot about them. The lesson is: fly every ATC instruction as though he's trying to kill you. Sure, it's his responsibility, but it's your life.
Not so fast!!! The airplanes I like to fly (tube-and-fabric taildraggers, sailplanes, aerobatics) cost $20,000. TCAD-like [collision avoidance] devices are around $20,000 installed. See the problem?Even while on "radar vectors" (means the controller has identified your blip on the scope and gives you headings to fly) a pilot will always know where he is at all times. (The pilots who don't might not see old age.)
If the system goes down, the controllers will revert to manual. Of course the capacity of the system is greatly reduced, and there will be delays. Lots of pissed of passengers, but no dead ones.
We know the current administration would rather listen to Kenny Lay, any partner at Andersen, any board member of Halliburton, etc. etc.
You can design a solid-state amplifier that has exactly the same distortion and non-linearities of tube amps (but why?) -- that's not good enough for golden-ear audiophiles though. They'd rather listen to their "Test LP" on their custom turntables and talk about sound-stage separation and the "special warmth" added by the special green CD markers and about how analog is obviously better than digital because what if the signal changes between those digital samples? Me, I'd prefer no distorion, and in any case I'd rather spend my time and money on music, not equipment.
(There are a couple of reasons to use tubes, where solid state devices don't work very well: very high power applications, like broadcast radio and TV transmitters' final stage RF amplifiers; and microwave tubes, like klystrons and magnetrons.)
How can you tell someone else that csh will be a painful experience? You might find it a painful experience; I know I find it a painful experience. But Billions and Billions (tm) of people in the world use csh every day, and don't seem to be suffering any ill effects. The first time you run adduser it will ask you what you want the default shell to be; just make sure you install the shell you want before first running adduser.
This leaves me puzzled. What dependency issues? For instance, my shell of choice is bash, and I know I'll need to add it after installing. So in my login environment, I set up the env. variable PKG_PATH to ftp://ftp2.usa.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/3.1/packag# pkg_add ${PKG_PATH}/bash-2.05.tgz
Voila!! Bash is installed. This handles dependencies automatically; if package foo depends on package bar which depends on package foobar, running pkg_add -v ${PKG_PATH}/foo.tgz will automatically install foobar first, then bar, then install foo.
This atheist is very happy to be using OpenBSD. It's the only system I get the "feel" of old-time Unix from, back in the 80s -- the VAX/BSD days. The layout is just right, and the documentation is superb. Manpages are actually comprehensive and up-to-date! Most other Unix-like systems of today (I won't mention any names) give me the feeling of being designed by committee.
Why should OpenBSD replace something that has been audited and debugged extremely rigorously just to follow the dictates of fashion? Just like OpenBSD BIND will stay at version 4 instead of jumping to 8 or 9, it will continue to use sendmail. After all, sendmail works.
Remember, if sendmail is something you have strong feelings about, you don't have to install it; every other major MTA -- postfix, smail, qmail, etc. -- is in /usr/ports/mail/. It's your machine, you can run whatever you want. Even BIND 8!
I just checked my procmail logs. How many spam messages do you think I got today? 221 messages! In one fucking day! And they're all fucking multipart MIME or have crappy fucking attachments so each message is hundreds of K in size. In contrast, even counting high-traffic mailing lists, I got 41 real messages today -- and they're all plain text so they're a few K each. This is the price I pay for having been "on the Internet" since 1986. Yup, you read that right -- sixteen years ago.
Do I have to pay for physical junk mail to get delivered to me? No. And there is exactly one third-class bundle in my physical mailbox every day, easy to toss out. Do I have to pay -- in bandwidth, disk space, and time for setting up my procmail filters -- so some piece of shit marketing jackass can make a few bucks? You bet.
Spam is killing email. You kids today, you don't know what the golden age of email was like! Email was not like sending a physical piece of mail. I could publicise my email on the network (think Usenet), and anyone anywhere could send me email and I could send email to people I'd never met before. They always replied, just like I always replied. I made many friends, got a lot of help on various matters, and helped others on various matters. Today, to be able to send me email, you have to get on my "white list" -- I only accept email from people I know.
If he likes spam, it must be because he has a small dick, wants porn, has small boobs, wants porn, craves herbal viagra, wants porn, wants some more porn, needs a second mortgage, wants porn, free airline tickets, and porn. Oh, and some more of that porn, with the hairy barely 18 models with big boobs getting raped by animals in an orgy.
Fuckers.
Incidentally, this "netweb" shit is the one with the Geocities page and the AOL email address, right? Obviously a class act.
Funny, I didn't read a law anywhere that publicizing a know scumbag's IP addresses is unlawful! (It certainly is effective!)
Let's say I spread the word that if you see elderly people dressed a certain way carrying sheafs of a magazine called The Light Tower, they're Jehovah's Witnesses, don't answer the door (like you didn't know that already.) Can the J.W.s sue me because they had to buy new clothes, and knocking on someone's door is "lawful and effective"?
The spammers should be tarred, feathered, run out of town on a rail, then drawn, quartered, and thrown into the Iron Maiden. Their corpses should then be incinerated, ground up, and shot into the sun.
And what pisses me off even more is that I'm a pacifist and believe that violence is never the solution to a problem. The fucking spammers make me think that perhaps my philosophy is not universally applicable.
Fucking bastards!
For other modulation techniques, similar things apply; FM bandwidth usage is not a simple relation as in AM but similar. The "richer" your signal is, the more bandwidth you need. CD quality audio will need more bandwidth than what we get with commercial AM stations. TV signals require more bandwidth still.
Spread-spectrum techniques etc. work in a different way but the concepts are similar. The theoretical limit is that the information carrying ability depends on the signal-to-noise ration and the bandwidth. Add to this the fact that electronics, antennae, wires, propagation through the atmosphere etc. all behave very differently in different parts of the EM spectrum -- as a practical matter, the information carrying ability of the airwaves is very much a limited resource.
How much does Windows XP cost? (Not the "home use only" version.) How much does Office cost? And how often do you have to keep paying Micros**t?
Schools often have a lot of donated machines that don't cost anywhere near $800 each.
Also untrue. I have taught your average US high-school students (i.e. the "dumb" ones that the media and the Republicans keep telling us about) intro computer stuff on Linux. I taught them how to use emacs (optional) and LaTeX (required). Not that the US public education system doesn't need serious help -- but you are doing students an even greater injustive if you underestimate them and feed them pablum.Helpful suggestion for Cheeze: Please learn how to use capital letters.
Disclaimer: I am not (and have never been) an amateur radio operator.
Now, about a ham radio operator "actually" shutting down a network -- where and when? Hams are perhaps the most conscientious users of spectrum anywhere. They have clean signals and stay in their bandwidth -- bandwidth they are licensed to operate in. Consumer electronics, on the other hand, are the worst offenders. And 802.11b is unlicensed and must accept all interference caused to it by licensed users -- which includes microwave ovens. Read Part 15 and Part 18 of the FCC regulations.
ObDisclaimer: I am not (and have never been) a ham radio operator.
Pay attention to what Part 15 and Part 18 of the FCC regulations are.
I may have certain opinions about people who want to get compensated for all their code, but that shouldn't keep anyone from doing whatever the hell they want to do.
Question: what do you mean when you say that your code is "free [as in choice], not free as in [free beer]"? My tiny little brain hurts, because it thinks "free as in freedom" implies "free as in beer".
(How thin can we stretch this "argument by analogy" crap?)
I think the answer is that there is no law against stupidity and laziness. Much easier to pay your attack-dog team of lawyers to file stupid lawsuits.
Even at a purely linguistic level: if a light beam consists of photons, then whatever speed photons travel at is the speed of light!
This is so mysterious a passage I just had to quote it here. Have you been using those immortality rings?A truly baffling message.