Yeah, they're producing general aviation aircraft, but only since Congress passed a law exempting them from liability for their older aircraft. That's precisely why I think it'll take an act of Congress for this as well, and as the above link makes clear, even that might not be enough to protect them. They, and just about every other general aviation manufacturer, stopped producing light general aviation aircraft from about 1980 until GARA passed.
This doesn't surprise me too much. One interesting fact it does indicate is that the people who very conscientiously obey the law are not strongly represented in those who are in accidents.
Personally, I feel the only real solution is to mandate self-driving cars. Our communications technology is at a point where it's a serious waste of a human being's time to be driving, and that economic fact is going to be really hard to fight with law.
I'd love for self-driving cars to happen, but I seriously doubt it ever will. Not because of technology limitations, but because of liability: the first time someone manages to provoke a wreck with a self-driving car, the companies responsible for designing its hardware and software will be sued out of business because they have deep pockets. The military will have self-driving aircraft, ships, and trucks for decades and we'll still be driving our own cars. It would take an act of Congress to change this.
When I was a kid I had a book called Space Age Mother Goose. One of the poems went:
Some things will never change
Although we travel to the stars
Arriving on the Moon we'll find
Our luggage sent to Mars.
(My personal favorite was
Little Bo-Peep has lost her sheep
The radar has failed to find them
They'll all meet face-to-face in parallel space
preceding their leaders behind them.
)
It's shorthand. "I parse your statement, using the assumption that you have..." shortened to "I take it for granted that you have..." shortened to "I take it you've..."
I don't think it's just a matter of liking the flexibility, customization, individuality, etc. We live in a world where we're barraged with news sources; there's far more than any one person could keep up with, even if they spent most of their time worrying about it. People are overwhelmed, so they throw up their hands and stick to their little corner. It's a distinctly modern phenomenon.
People have *always* stuck in their little corners: look at life in Medieval Europe, where you could go your entire life without meeting someone who wasn't from your little town, or large parts of current-day China and Africa where all you see and hear is your tiny slice of the whole world. The difference is that for some people now there's the option of finding out what's going on throughout the world. Most people have always shunned the outside world, and most people are continuing to do so.
You speak as if socialized medicine != death panels. What do you call a group of government bureaucrats who decide if you qualify for lifesaving procedures based upon your potential contributions to society versus the rationed care available?
We currently have death panels: it's called availability of decent medical care, which is currently based on how much money you have. Medical care will always be rationed and there will always be decisions about who lives and who dies, under any imaginable system. Anyone who tells you differently is either lying or ridiculously misinformed.
We used to do that when we were election judges. It was a great time. See, my mom was the precinct leader for the Republicans, and I was the precinct leader for the Democrats, and we were 2/3 of the total election judges, so we'd sit there and make (very quiet) bets as people walked in. A little tricky insofar as our precinct was about 40% Republican, 40% unaffiliated, and 20% Democratic, so we had an awfully poor record for correctly guessing Democrats (except for the ones we knew.) We very rarely had anyone who had affiliated outside R and D, though, so our choices were slimmer. Still, a good time had by all.
It's a problem that's culture-wide but is already going away. Twenty years ago people refused to use automated answering machines. Now many people prefer doing all their business via automated customer support precisely because they don't have to talk to people. As our culture as a whole gets used to automated systems, we'll stop being freaked.
And, anyway, robot technology is improving every year, and as such they're doing their best to cross the uncanny valley and getting better all the time. Meanwhile, on this side, we're doing our best to cross to their side, led by Michael Jackson, Cher, Tila Tequila, and Jocelyn Wildenstein.
If you're interested in reading more about how quirks of the language might reflect the underlying structure of speech processing and language formation in the brain, Steven Pinker has written several good books on the subject. "The Language Instinct" is a good starter, but he specifically talks about quirks like these in "The Stuff Of Thought". His assertion is that it's not generally a quirk of language, but a quirk of how our brains form a representation of the world, that shows up consistently in all languages.
Seriously, when are corporations going to realize that the PRC is an oppressive government and no matter how much they let Wal-Mart grow, or let us feed them KFC, or build our toys for us, we are not making them more free?
Corporations know that. They also know that China is where they make money. Try explaining to someone that they're doing something wrong when they're paid well to do what they're doing. Doesn't work.
More to the point, corporations *like* China. It is an entire country run as a corporation: a corporation with laws and guns to enforce its profit margins. Individual corporations don't like China so much when their interests collide with China's interests and they get mangled, but right up to that point it's a fabulous situation for them. It's like being the henchman of the schoolyard bully. If you can't be the bully, the henchman is definitely the next-best option.
My personal library is about 3000 books. I go to the library about twice a month and load up on books -- precisely because I already have 3000 books. I don't need to buy books I'm only going to read once (fiction, comics, technical books about subjects I'd like to know but will never actually need like sintering or building kayaks.) It's exposed me to hundreds of books I would never have purchased, and I've ended up buying books because of stuff I found in the library. Funny, it's just like downloading music!
Nonsense. The human body has an average resistance of 300-1000 ohms..
Speak for yourself, sweaty one. Here in Colorado, I average about 200,000 ohms. My coworkers, when we test (we're all electrical engineers) are all over 5k and mostly in the 50-100k range, but I'm always colder (and less sweaty) than anyone else in my office.
A friend of mine and I have been looking (wishfully) for any surplus T38's for years. We see lots of other trainers, but neither of us has ever seen a 38 for sale. We've done searches in the FAA registry and apparently there are a couple operated by civilians, but they appear to be civilian companies that contract maintenance for either the Air Force or NASA. Sigh. I wouldn't *mind* a T-28 but I'd be dreaming of a 38. My uncle used to be a flight instructor for the air force and has like 2000 hours of Talon time, and I'm awfully envious.
Now it's possible that the FAA wouldn't give you a Certificate of Airworthiness for a plane with a McCluskey ejector seat, be it your own design or a Fanjet, but I've never seen a Code of Federal Regulations listed that forbids it. If you know a relevant CFR I'd like to hear it.
Now, there is a wholly different issue of value: a lot of the wrecks are potentially worth millions of dollars and at least some of the issues that have arisen where the armed forces attempt to reclaim a warbird by claiming it's their property are because it's the last of a kind and an armed forces museum wants it, and the one I read about specifically, was a case where the Air Force wrote a contract specifying that it was a loan to one organization, and that organization then tried to sell it to another organization, which is when the AF stepped in and attempted to reclaim it.
It's an ambiguous relationship. Consider chlamydia or leprosy: the bacterial cells live inside animal cells and suck nutrients from them, often killing them. That's clearly parasitic. In lichen, the stuff you see on rocks at high altitude, there are bacteria and fungi growing together as practically one organism. That's symbiotic: they couldn't do without each other. Now consider many of the bacteria that live in our stomachs, who take very little energy from us, but without us, they'd be dead: that's commensal, where one side gets all the advantage and the other side doesn't get or give anything much.
So the thing about mitochondria is: it's completely possible they were parasites like chlamydia, and eukaryotic cells just managed, at some point, to live with them rather than getting killed by them -- became commensal with them, in other words -- and then, later on, found that the reactions the bacterial-derived mitochondria were performing were incredibly useful to the cell, at which point it became symbiotic, and then even later the mitochondria lost the ability to self-replicate and became a fundamental part of the cell, at which point there isn't any reasonable way to say they're separate organisms anymore.
So I'm really throwing a lot of material away when I say 'captured', and we probably can't actually know whether it was originally parasitic or what. Obviously it worked out to the benefit of both parties: whatever bug originally managed to get itself functional within a cytoplasm has had its genes spread unbelievably widely, and we rely on it for our very existence.
You have to be pretty liberal with your definition of digestion.
Here's the thing. Animal cells have the ability to do a lot of biochemistry, but they have very limited ability to do some exotic chemistry that is essential to animal life. The major example of this is a molecule called adenosine triphosphate, aka ATP. All life uses ATP as an energy source.... lemme back up. Chemical reactions are reversible. To get from the reactants to the products requires that you put in a certain amount of energy to get to an intermediate state, and then you get out a certain amount of energy as it goes to the final state. We generally regard the reactant state as higher-energy than the product state (although that's not necessarily true: if you're consistently pulling out one of the reactants, you'll consistently push the products to become reactants.) Enzymes serve to lower the energy that it takes to go from reactants to products.
There are certain classes of chemical reactions that the body *really* wants to force in one direction, so what happens is we have enyzmes that take reactants and ATP, and by splitting the ATP into adenosine diphosphate and a phosphate group, which releases a *lot* of energy, the reactant - product reaction is driven in the direction the body wants. The thing is: animal cells don't have the ability to make ATP. It's a difficult thing to make, and takes a lot of energy (of course, since it releases a lot of energy when it breaks down, it takes more to make the molecule.) So what animal cells have done is ingest bacteria, which we now call mitochondria: they were captured (maybe a billion years ago) and are now used to do the weird chemistry our cells can't do alone. The bit where eukaryotic (animal and plant) cells captured bacteria is where we developed the ability to be large multicellular creatures, rather than just a few cells sort of cooperating. Plants have done the same thing, twice: both mitochondria and chloroplasts are captured bacteria. Chloroplasts contain the structures that convert the energy of captured photons into high-energy molecules that plants use to drive their complicated reactions.
So, these sea slugs have done two interesting things: they've developed the ability to make their own chlorophyll, which is pretty amazing, the equivalent of finding a plant that can make hemoglobin, and they've managed to accomplish the same sort of symbiotic relationship with cyanobacteria that plants and animals did roughly a billion years ago when they formed mitochondria and chloroplasts. The sea slugs are engaging in convergent evolution and ending up with both plant and (primarily) animal characteristics.
Oh, they're working on it. Here is an article about the TSA refusing aircraft access to people who bought houses beside an airport and paved taxiways to their houses (which used to be a pretty common arrangement: there are lots of small communities built around runways, with each house having a combination hangar/garage.) All small airports are now supposed to have access to the runway and all aircraft controlled by fences and in many cases private security.
As a welder and metalsmith with a background in bike racing that left me with several metal-containing surgical repairs, I'm already completely hosed with respect to MRI's, so bring on the titanium bone replacements, say I!
A friend of mine used to do IT support for a company that made NMR's. They were *very* early adopters of LCD screens because CRT's were so hideously distorted even rooms away from the machines. They had security guards whose sole job it was to pat people down if they were going to be entering the part of the facility where the machines were running: a person could cause a million dollars of damage just by having a steel keyring forgotten in a pocket. He said it was a pretty cool job, from that standpoint, but not half as cool as when he was doing IT support at the place doing explosive welding fabrication.
You leave a couple things out of your analysis that might be important.
1. You can only charge what the market will bear. People who go to expensive hotels will pay for internet. People who go to hostels are much less likely to be willing to pay, so if you offer it for pay, you're unlikely to get any takers when everyone can go down the road to a cafe, buy tea, and get free internet.
2. For a hostel, "free wi-fi" is a strong advertisement, that attracts customers to pay for lodging. For an expensive hotel, it is much weaker.
I agree that the cost to the establishment of setting up an infrastructure for payment is expensive and factors into the overall picture, but I think the willingness of customers to pay is driving this more than anything else.
I'll give my stats: I live in a rural/suburban area. There are two open networks in the area, mine and someone else's, and when I check logs I see one person getting on mine maybe once every two days. My brother lives in an area that has apartments and condos close together. He can see about 14 networks, none open, and every time he opens his up just to see what happens, roughly 5 people are using it at any given time. Based on that, I think it's clearly density-related from my limited data.
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Yeah, they're producing general aviation aircraft, but only since Congress passed a law exempting them from liability for their older aircraft. That's precisely why I think it'll take an act of Congress for this as well, and as the above link makes clear, even that might not be enough to protect them. They, and just about every other general aviation manufacturer, stopped producing light general aviation aircraft from about 1980 until GARA passed.
This doesn't surprise me too much. One interesting fact it does indicate is that the people who very conscientiously obey the law are not strongly represented in those who are in accidents.
Personally, I feel the only real solution is to mandate self-driving cars. Our communications technology is at a point where it's a serious waste of a human being's time to be driving, and that economic fact is going to be really hard to fight with law.
I'd love for self-driving cars to happen, but I seriously doubt it ever will. Not because of technology limitations, but because of liability: the first time someone manages to provoke a wreck with a self-driving car, the companies responsible for designing its hardware and software will be sued out of business because they have deep pockets. The military will have self-driving aircraft, ships, and trucks for decades and we'll still be driving our own cars. It would take an act of Congress to change this.
I'll stay young the old-fashioned way: eat sensibly, exercise, and suck the life force from teenage virgins.
no offense but I'm going to try exactly the opposite: eat outrageously, slack, and get teenage virgins to suck the life force out of me.
When I was a kid I had a book called Space Age Mother Goose. One of the poems went: Some things will never change Although we travel to the stars Arriving on the Moon we'll find Our luggage sent to Mars. (My personal favorite was Little Bo-Peep has lost her sheep The radar has failed to find them They'll all meet face-to-face in parallel space preceding their leaders behind them. )
Rather like "don't", only more elaborate.
Has anyone noticed the OP never actually asked a question?
I take it you've never heard of implied questions.
Owait, lemme rephrase that.
I take it you've never heard of implied questions?
I don't think it's just a matter of liking the flexibility, customization, individuality, etc. We live in a world where we're barraged with news sources; there's far more than any one person could keep up with, even if they spent most of their time worrying about it. People are overwhelmed, so they throw up their hands and stick to their little corner. It's a distinctly modern phenomenon.
People have *always* stuck in their little corners: look at life in Medieval Europe, where you could go your entire life without meeting someone who wasn't from your little town, or large parts of current-day China and Africa where all you see and hear is your tiny slice of the whole world. The difference is that for some people now there's the option of finding out what's going on throughout the world. Most people have always shunned the outside world, and most people are continuing to do so.
You speak as if socialized medicine != death panels. What do you call a group of government bureaucrats who decide if you qualify for lifesaving procedures based upon your potential contributions to society versus the rationed care available?
We currently have death panels: it's called availability of decent medical care, which is currently based on how much money you have. Medical care will always be rationed and there will always be decisions about who lives and who dies, under any imaginable system. Anyone who tells you differently is either lying or ridiculously misinformed.
We used to do that when we were election judges. It was a great time. See, my mom was the precinct leader for the Republicans, and I was the precinct leader for the Democrats, and we were 2/3 of the total election judges, so we'd sit there and make (very quiet) bets as people walked in. A little tricky insofar as our precinct was about 40% Republican, 40% unaffiliated, and 20% Democratic, so we had an awfully poor record for correctly guessing Democrats (except for the ones we knew.) We very rarely had anyone who had affiliated outside R and D, though, so our choices were slimmer. Still, a good time had by all.
And, anyway, robot technology is improving every year, and as such they're doing their best to cross the uncanny valley and getting better all the time. Meanwhile, on this side, we're doing our best to cross to their side, led by Michael Jackson, Cher, Tila Tequila, and Jocelyn Wildenstein.
If you're interested in reading more about how quirks of the language might reflect the underlying structure of speech processing and language formation in the brain, Steven Pinker has written several good books on the subject. "The Language Instinct" is a good starter, but he specifically talks about quirks like these in "The Stuff Of Thought". His assertion is that it's not generally a quirk of language, but a quirk of how our brains form a representation of the world, that shows up consistently in all languages.
Seriously, when are corporations going to realize that the PRC is an oppressive government and no matter how much they let Wal-Mart grow, or let us feed them KFC, or build our toys for us, we are not making them more free?
Corporations know that. They also know that China is where they make money. Try explaining to someone that they're doing something wrong when they're paid well to do what they're doing. Doesn't work.
More to the point, corporations *like* China. It is an entire country run as a corporation: a corporation with laws and guns to enforce its profit margins. Individual corporations don't like China so much when their interests collide with China's interests and they get mangled, but right up to that point it's a fabulous situation for them. It's like being the henchman of the schoolyard bully. If you can't be the bully, the henchman is definitely the next-best option.
My personal library is about 3000 books. I go to the library about twice a month and load up on books -- precisely because I already have 3000 books. I don't need to buy books I'm only going to read once (fiction, comics, technical books about subjects I'd like to know but will never actually need like sintering or building kayaks.) It's exposed me to hundreds of books I would never have purchased, and I've ended up buying books because of stuff I found in the library. Funny, it's just like downloading music!
Nonsense. The human body has an average resistance of 300-1000 ohms..
Speak for yourself, sweaty one. Here in Colorado, I average about 200,000 ohms. My coworkers, when we test (we're all electrical engineers) are all over 5k and mostly in the 50-100k range, but I'm always colder (and less sweaty) than anyone else in my office.
A friend of mine and I have been looking (wishfully) for any surplus T38's for years. We see lots of other trainers, but neither of us has ever seen a 38 for sale. We've done searches in the FAA registry and apparently there are a couple operated by civilians, but they appear to be civilian companies that contract maintenance for either the Air Force or NASA. Sigh. I wouldn't *mind* a T-28 but I'd be dreaming of a 38. My uncle used to be a flight instructor for the air force and has like 2000 hours of Talon time, and I'm awfully envious.
Now it's possible that the FAA wouldn't give you a Certificate of Airworthiness for a plane with a McCluskey ejector seat, be it your own design or a Fanjet, but I've never seen a Code of Federal Regulations listed that forbids it. If you know a relevant CFR I'd like to hear it.
Now, there is a wholly different issue of value: a lot of the wrecks are potentially worth millions of dollars and at least some of the issues that have arisen where the armed forces attempt to reclaim a warbird by claiming it's their property are because it's the last of a kind and an armed forces museum wants it, and the one I read about specifically, was a case where the Air Force wrote a contract specifying that it was a loan to one organization, and that organization then tried to sell it to another organization, which is when the AF stepped in and attempted to reclaim it.
So the thing about mitochondria is: it's completely possible they were parasites like chlamydia, and eukaryotic cells just managed, at some point, to live with them rather than getting killed by them -- became commensal with them, in other words -- and then, later on, found that the reactions the bacterial-derived mitochondria were performing were incredibly useful to the cell, at which point it became symbiotic, and then even later the mitochondria lost the ability to self-replicate and became a fundamental part of the cell, at which point there isn't any reasonable way to say they're separate organisms anymore.
So I'm really throwing a lot of material away when I say 'captured', and we probably can't actually know whether it was originally parasitic or what. Obviously it worked out to the benefit of both parties: whatever bug originally managed to get itself functional within a cytoplasm has had its genes spread unbelievably widely, and we rely on it for our very existence.
Here's the thing. Animal cells have the ability to do a lot of biochemistry, but they have very limited ability to do some exotic chemistry that is essential to animal life. The major example of this is a molecule called adenosine triphosphate, aka ATP. All life uses ATP as an energy source.... lemme back up. Chemical reactions are reversible. To get from the reactants to the products requires that you put in a certain amount of energy to get to an intermediate state, and then you get out a certain amount of energy as it goes to the final state. We generally regard the reactant state as higher-energy than the product state (although that's not necessarily true: if you're consistently pulling out one of the reactants, you'll consistently push the products to become reactants.) Enzymes serve to lower the energy that it takes to go from reactants to products.
There are certain classes of chemical reactions that the body *really* wants to force in one direction, so what happens is we have enyzmes that take reactants and ATP, and by splitting the ATP into adenosine diphosphate and a phosphate group, which releases a *lot* of energy, the reactant - product reaction is driven in the direction the body wants. The thing is: animal cells don't have the ability to make ATP. It's a difficult thing to make, and takes a lot of energy (of course, since it releases a lot of energy when it breaks down, it takes more to make the molecule.) So what animal cells have done is ingest bacteria, which we now call mitochondria: they were captured (maybe a billion years ago) and are now used to do the weird chemistry our cells can't do alone. The bit where eukaryotic (animal and plant) cells captured bacteria is where we developed the ability to be large multicellular creatures, rather than just a few cells sort of cooperating. Plants have done the same thing, twice: both mitochondria and chloroplasts are captured bacteria. Chloroplasts contain the structures that convert the energy of captured photons into high-energy molecules that plants use to drive their complicated reactions.
So, these sea slugs have done two interesting things: they've developed the ability to make their own chlorophyll, which is pretty amazing, the equivalent of finding a plant that can make hemoglobin, and they've managed to accomplish the same sort of symbiotic relationship with cyanobacteria that plants and animals did roughly a billion years ago when they formed mitochondria and chloroplasts. The sea slugs are engaging in convergent evolution and ending up with both plant and (primarily) animal characteristics.
Oh, they're working on it. Here is an article about the TSA refusing aircraft access to people who bought houses beside an airport and paved taxiways to their houses (which used to be a pretty common arrangement: there are lots of small communities built around runways, with each house having a combination hangar/garage.) All small airports are now supposed to have access to the runway and all aircraft controlled by fences and in many cases private security.
Well, here's a picture of the Jonas Brothers in a security line at LAX. Here's one of Paris Hilton at LAX. Here is a whole who's-who of famous celebrities who have gotten in trouble going through standard airport security, including Naomi Campbell, Snoop Dogg, Courtney Love, Whitney Houston, and Paul McCartney. Now, I'm not saying they're treated the same: Whitney Houston had issues because they found a bunch of pot in her carry-on -- but they let her board the plane and keep the pot. Likewise if you're Britney Spears they'll hold your liter-sized container of liquid while you go through security and then give it back to you but the image of rich people only flying in private jets is completely false. They regularly fly on commercial aircraft along with the proles.
A friend of mine used to do IT support for a company that made NMR's. They were *very* early adopters of LCD screens because CRT's were so hideously distorted even rooms away from the machines. They had security guards whose sole job it was to pat people down if they were going to be entering the part of the facility where the machines were running: a person could cause a million dollars of damage just by having a steel keyring forgotten in a pocket. He said it was a pretty cool job, from that standpoint, but not half as cool as when he was doing IT support at the place doing explosive welding fabrication.
No bulletproofing. Less specific modulus than titanium. Lame.
1. You can only charge what the market will bear. People who go to expensive hotels will pay for internet. People who go to hostels are much less likely to be willing to pay, so if you offer it for pay, you're unlikely to get any takers when everyone can go down the road to a cafe, buy tea, and get free internet.
2. For a hostel, "free wi-fi" is a strong advertisement, that attracts customers to pay for lodging. For an expensive hotel, it is much weaker.
I agree that the cost to the establishment of setting up an infrastructure for payment is expensive and factors into the overall picture, but I think the willingness of customers to pay is driving this more than anything else.
I'll give my stats: I live in a rural/suburban area. There are two open networks in the area, mine and someone else's, and when I check logs I see one person getting on mine maybe once every two days. My brother lives in an area that has apartments and condos close together. He can see about 14 networks, none open, and every time he opens his up just to see what happens, roughly 5 people are using it at any given time. Based on that, I think it's clearly density-related from my limited data.