Ummm...most airplanes aren't fit for urban areas. My airplane http://www.gecko-ak.org/N600LW only has a 50hp Rotax engine, but I'd bet my neighbors would lynch me if I were to fire it up in my back yard.
I agree that a jet pack is inherently inefficient, but I'm not so sure it's inherently foolish. A classical jet pack requires one thing: brute force, much like a Saturn-V. It's not flying, it's simply a matter of exerting enough thrust to shove you into the air, and yes, that's inherently inefficient. As for whether or not that's foolish...well, that depends upon how it is being used. One hundred years ago, people thought it was foolish to try to fly -- we're humans, not birds, and if God had meant for us to fly, etc., etc. But look at how crippled our society would be without air travel now. If a jet pack is built that can be used by rescue crews, then I suspect 10 out of 10 people rescued would think the jet pack was the greatest thing EVER.
I imagine that you are probably correct about the stability issues in a jet pack, but the Wright Flyer was inherently unstable, too. IIRC (I don't have a link handy, sorry, but I think this was in AOPA magazine within the last year), there was a group that tried to build and fly a duplicate of the Wright Flyer for the 100th anniversary of powered flight, and their pilots -- all experienced pilots -- found the thing to be incredibly difficult to control. I imagine that with further refinement, stability and controllability problems in jet packs can be ironed out just as they were overcome in fixed wing airplanes and later, in helicopters.
I hope this doesn't sound harsh (it's not intended to), but that sounds like a very Western point of view.
1) Suppose that engineering isn't the passion, but is instead a means to an end (an Islamic utopia, for example, or a radical Christian's sinless society). If you are an engineer only because it helps you to build better weapons and work your way around existing counter-measures, then you aren't necessarily interested in openness.
2) Even the most orderly engineer will recognize that sometimes it is necessary to remove the old before you can rebuild with the new. In western cities, for example, engineers with skills at demolition are called in to blow up condemned buildings so new, grander buildings can be built on the same real estate. There is a *period* of chaos as the old building comes crashing down followed by the order inherent in the new building.
3) Yes, engineering is a path to the good life. However, if you are a deeply religious person -- which is inherent in being a radical fundamentalist in any religion -- then you aren't aiming for the good life here on earth. You are aiming for the good afterlife.
If engineering is the end goal, you are exactly right. If building your utopia is the end goal and engineering is just a means to an end, however, then I think you might be missing something in your analysis.
I'm reasonably good at what I do, after a few years of hard work, I have both the credentials and experience to show that I can do what I say I can do, and therefore, I am typically able to negotiate a salary and benefits on my own. If the company I work for tries to screw me over, I will voice my opinion, and if I'm not listened to, I'll leave and find a better job somewhere else. Kind of negates the need for a union in my opinion.
I used to work in a Union shop a few years ago. The union I was in wasn't all bad, but it wasn't all good, either. In short, what I found was that a union is a lot like a bureaucracy -- it exists to perpetuate its own existence and if that helps the worker then good, but if not that's too bad. Case in point: I worked for a manager who was a really good guy. Before our shop went Union, our manager gave us a lot of flexibility in our jobs. If we wanted to work slightly non-standard hours, that was okay. If we needed a little extra time off to run errands, that was fine. If we needed to stay late to fix something, that was kosher, and we could come in late/go home early later as we needed. I negotiated a 4-10 work schedule and really enjoyed three-day weekends every week. Then we went union, and everything changed. Now there was a contract that said our shifts were 8-5,4-midnight and midnight-8. If were just minutes late, we were reprimanded. If we were still working on something at the end of our shift, we were to pass it off to the next shift. In short, our work environment went from a very happy, very relaxed, very "do what it takes, and we'll make it work" kind of place to a very adversarial, workers vs. management environment within a few months. It just wasn't any fun working there anymore. So I quit and found a better (non-union) job, and I've never looked back.
Not to mention that my six year old daughter could provide better tech support than Barracuda does:(
We use a pair of Barracudas where I work to filter incoming e-mail, and in all truth, they work really, really well. That is, until something breaks. One of our units had problems with its hard drive, so we called tech support. They dinked around with the box (on our network) for over a week without fixing it -- all the while it was spooling up mail, but not delivering it -- and then things got bad. The Tech Support genius working on the box finally figured out the drive was having problems writing to/var, so he *comments the line mounting/var from/etc/fstab* and reboots the box.
Question for all you *nix gurus out there -- can a unix-like OS reboot without/var being mounted?
Anyway, at this point we're livid. Our box has been out of commission for over a week, the Tech Support n00b has finally hosed the box beyond in-the-field repair, and now we've got to send the box to Barracuda for replacement. Unfortunately, we don't have instant replacement on our warranty service any more, so they want us to ship the box back to them, and then once they get it they will ship a replacement unit to us. Since that means something like another 5-10 days of downtime on a box that's already been down for over a week, we ask about buying the instant replacement policy on the unit, and they tell us that yes, we can do that, but we'll have to buy the policy from the date it expired, meaning we will have only another month or two left on the policy after we buy it, and that buying the instant replacement policy is something like 3/4 the cost of simply buying a new unit outright.
Actually, another thought just occurred to me...in England and South America, sporting events result in rather agressive activity. Have you ever been to -- or watched video clips of -- a football game (soccer" to us Yanks) and seen the spectators erupt in a melee? If we can't even watch a *game* without breaking out in fighting, do you think we would ever walk peacefully away from our homes, our natural resources, our religions, etc. because of the outcome of a game?
That's a great idea, but it doesn't account for the human factor. Specifically, just because someone else's army of robots defeats your army of robots doesn't mean you are going to give the winner whatever it is you were "fighting" for. The reason war (not battle-bot games) works is because one side beats the living crap out of the other until one side or the other decides that the prize, be it land, socio-political power, religion, whatever, is no longer worth dieing for.
I suspect it would take a lot of robots "dieing" before that would happen. Most likely, two sides will go send their robots against each other, and when one side loses all of its robots, it starts sending people. Only *AFTER* the war gets costly in terms of human lives will one side or the other capitulate.
If a competition could possibly settle international disputes, I would expect we would have started going to the Olympics rather than going to war a long time ago...
IANAL, etc., but I would really like to see some actual references for this. If what you claim is strictly true, then if I were to write a book, poem, song, etc., and mail a copy to someone, then I would no longer own the copyright to that original work. If *this* is correct, then it seems to me that such artistic works would have to be hand-delivered for the original author to maintain copyright (actually, I'm not sure that even that would suffice, if "the act of delivery transfers ownership to the recipient"). If *THAT* is true, then you now own copyright in every book, CD, software, etc. that has ever been mailed to you!
Just a few weeks ago, I caught a show on Discovery about a new field of study called "epigenetics". In a nutshell, after the human genome project, scientists discovered that there are different diseases triggered by the exact same genomes -- something that the study of genetics alone didn't predict. After a lot of research, they discovered that it's not the just the genomes that determine our characteristics; it's the combination of genomes and a handful of other chemicals that bond to the genomes. So not only do we have to map the DNA sequence of every living thing on the planet, but we also have to map how those DNA sequences interact with various other molecules.
I think your fears are only scratching the surface of what could happen. Not just bang -- KABOOM!!!
No doubt -- I've seen enough SSH attacks against my servers to be nervous about possibilities like that. But that's why I've used iptables to block ssh from everything except the handful of networks from which I might connect.
You know, I thought that if you license it as creative commons then all derivative works and the like from that work must also be CC... although I think I am wrong about that last part, I am so used to and in love with the GPL that it's just how I think.
IANAL, etc., etc.
I think it depends upon which flavor of the CC license you use. I've put the CC license on most of my web pages at home, music I've written (http://www.sounclick.com/elementop/ if you will excuse the shameless self-plug), etc., and I've always used the Creative Commons US Share-and-share-alika (SA) non-commercial (NC) version because, like you, I'm a big fan of the GPL.
However, IIRC, there are versions of the CC license that *don't* require you to "share and share alike". But I've only studied the CC license enough to put me at ease about releasing my works under it. Don't quote my post when you are explaining things to the judge;)
That's one of the big reasons I like Perl so much:)
What about capacitance fuel sensors?
on
Electricity Over Glass
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I thought capacitance based fuel sensors solved most, if not all, of the problems of sparking inside fuel tanks by keeping the powered components on the *outside* of the fuel tank. Is there some problem with accuracy or reliability that makes them unsuitable for commercial aviation that I'm not aware of or is this a solution searching for a problem?
And for all of the people asking how often sparking inside a fuel tank causes a tank to explode, yes, it *does* happen sometimes. The final NTSB report on the airliner that crashed off New York about a decade ago (you know, the one that the conspiracy theorists said was shot down by a hand-held SAM) was due to sparking inside the fuel tank. I'd link to it, but I can't recall the flight number, and I don't have time to search for it right now...
In light of the fact that you continue to redefine what is and what is not illegal in an ever more restrictive fashion, I have but one response for you:
The C-64 was actually my third computer, after a Sinclair ZX-81 (which is still in my parents' garage...wonder if it works???) and then a TRS-80 Model III, but I've still got a soft spot in my heart for the Commodore. While graphics, processing speed, memory and storage have improved immensely since the C-64 era, the 6581 SID chip was way, way ahead of its time. IIRC, the guy who designed the 6581 went on to found Ensoniq or one of those pro synthesizer companies.
I'd still love to get my hands on a pair of 6581s to see if I could build a decent hardware synth with them.....
No doubt. Whatever happened to "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt?"
While it seems (this is/. -- I haven't R'dTFA) that the defendent is probably guilty of copyright infringement, the alleged damages are a long ways from being "beyond a reasonable doubt."
If you are talking about GA, or "general aviation", airplanes (i.e., Cessnas, Pipers, etc.), then yes, most airplanes still use magnetos -- typically two, since us aviator types like redundant systems. If it's a homebuilt, like the http://www.gecko-ak.org/N600LW/Falcon XP that I own, then all bets are off. Some use mags, some use CDI (Capacitor Discharge Ignition) systems, some use one mag and one CDI system.
Do they now use microprocessors or fancy electronics somewhere in either the fuel system or ignition system?
That depends upon the airplane. Until fairly recently, no, there weren't very many microprocessors of electronic fuel injection systems on general aviation airplanes. Technology in GA tends to change VEEEEERRRRRYYYYYY slowly. Getting the FAA to approve anything is a chore, doubly so for electronics that are necessary for safe flight (like fly-by-wire systems, electronic engine or ignition systems or glass cockpits). Most GA fuel injection systems of which I am aware are mechanical fuel injection systems, such as the Ellison Throttle Body kit. Some of this may have changed recently with the advent of "Technically Advanced Aircraft" (TAA) such as the Cirrus SR-22. Most of my flight experience is in older Cessnas and a couple of Piper Cherokees so I really can't tell you much about the systems on airplanes like the Cirrus. They might have electronic ignitions, but I would be very, very surprised if there were no redundant mechanical systems on them since, IIRC, the FAA requires at least some analog "steam guage" backup instruments in all of the glass cockpit airplanes.
Sounds like a standard build on the corporate desktops where I work and yes, I am one of the people who build them. Unfortunately, our field techs have convinced their management that they have to have admin rights on their laptops -- you know, in case they have to install something or hard-code an IP address when they are 500 miles away from the nearest IT person (not unusual). And install things they do. We actually had one of our techs remove all of his work-related applications so he could install Doom on his corporate laptop.
Even that would be fine if our upper management would spank users for blatant violations of our corporate compliance policy. The guy mentioned above should have been canned for being stupid...but he wasn't.
Point taken. However, I'm not entirely sure that this is an apples to apples comparison. Does the gag order in the Grand Jury example you mention above prevent you from discussing matters in the case at hand with your attorney (not that I can think of a likely reason why you would want or need to, but that's irrelevant)? Somehow, I don't think it does, but as I understand, the Patriot Act prohibits discussing or revealing the contents of an NSL with anyone for any reason at all.
You are correct that forcing an ISP to reveal this information without judicial oversight is a huge frigging problem, but preventing anyone who receives an NSL from discussing the Letter with legal counsel before taking action that might -- no, make that "DOES" -- violate the 4th amendment protection against search and seizure without due process of law is every bit as big an issue.
So yeah, 1.5 million kilometers is probably a pretty useful distance, and it should also answer a lot of the questions above regarding aiming at a moving target, since Lagrange points are somewhat like geostationary orbits (that is, it is an orbit that is in a fixed position relative to the earth). As I understand, what with not being a rocket scientist and all, rotation of the earth will still cause an object in orbit at a Lagrange point to traverse the sky, but the object won't be orbiting the earth as well, which should simplify the math somewhat.
It seems from the article and the provisions of the patriot act, this person does not have the right to speak under threat of prosecution or jail.
Huh-uh. According to the 1st Amendment to the Constitution:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Did you catch that? "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..." Regardless of what the so-called "Patriot Act" says, we do have the right to speak out unless we choose to keep silent and let the government sacrifice the Constitution on the altar of "National Security".
Wish I had mod points -- you are right on the money.
IANAL, so do your own research, but the courts have upheld time and again that you cannot waive your rights in a contract. If I cannot waive my rights by signing a contract, then the fourth amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure is granted to me regardless of my ISP's TOS contract.
Many amateur videographers don't (yet) have much experience with the timing, editing, rhythm or natural structure of film. Think of it this way: music is taught to children from preschool, yet the recent explosion in home studio hardware and software has lead to a lot of mixed results. Some amateur music is really, really good; some is not. On the other hand, how many of us have *ever* had a chance to try being creative on film?
This isn't a new phenomenon. We saw the same thing when people suddenly had the ability to create personal web pages. As I mentioned above, we saw the same thing when people suddenly had the ability to create their own multi-track audio recordings. Now, we are seeing the same thing with videography. There will be a period where there are a lot of people producing junk (not like Hollywood doesn't already do this...), but eventually, the dilettantes will find something else to occupy their time, and those who are left will begin refining their skills until they are producing films that are as good as or better than anything commercially available today.
Slashdot Mirror
Ummm...most airplanes aren't fit for urban areas. My airplane http://www.gecko-ak.org/N600LW only has a 50hp Rotax engine, but I'd bet my neighbors would lynch me if I were to fire it up in my back yard.
I agree that a jet pack is inherently inefficient, but I'm not so sure it's inherently foolish. A classical jet pack requires one thing: brute force, much like a Saturn-V. It's not flying, it's simply a matter of exerting enough thrust to shove you into the air, and yes, that's inherently inefficient. As for whether or not that's foolish...well, that depends upon how it is being used. One hundred years ago, people thought it was foolish to try to fly -- we're humans, not birds, and if God had meant for us to fly, etc., etc. But look at how crippled our society would be without air travel now. If a jet pack is built that can be used by rescue crews, then I suspect 10 out of 10 people rescued would think the jet pack was the greatest thing EVER .
I imagine that you are probably correct about the stability issues in a jet pack, but the Wright Flyer was inherently unstable, too. IIRC (I don't have a link handy, sorry, but I think this was in AOPA magazine within the last year), there was a group that tried to build and fly a duplicate of the Wright Flyer for the 100th anniversary of powered flight, and their pilots -- all experienced pilots -- found the thing to be incredibly difficult to control. I imagine that with further refinement, stability and controllability problems in jet packs can be ironed out just as they were overcome in fixed wing airplanes and later, in helicopters.
I hope this doesn't sound harsh (it's not intended to), but that sounds like a very Western point of view.
1) Suppose that engineering isn't the passion, but is instead a means to an end (an Islamic utopia, for example, or a radical Christian's sinless society). If you are an engineer only because it helps you to build better weapons and work your way around existing counter-measures, then you aren't necessarily interested in openness.
2) Even the most orderly engineer will recognize that sometimes it is necessary to remove the old before you can rebuild with the new. In western cities, for example, engineers with skills at demolition are called in to blow up condemned buildings so new, grander buildings can be built on the same real estate. There is a *period* of chaos as the old building comes crashing down followed by the order inherent in the new building.
3) Yes, engineering is a path to the good life. However, if you are a deeply religious person -- which is inherent in being a radical fundamentalist in any religion -- then you aren't aiming for the good life here on earth. You are aiming for the good afterlife.
If engineering is the end goal, you are exactly right. If building your utopia is the end goal and engineering is just a means to an end, however, then I think you might be missing something in your analysis.
I'm reasonably good at what I do, after a few years of hard work, I have both the credentials and experience to show that I can do what I say I can do, and therefore, I am typically able to negotiate a salary and benefits on my own. If the company I work for tries to screw me over, I will voice my opinion, and if I'm not listened to, I'll leave and find a better job somewhere else. Kind of negates the need for a union in my opinion.
I used to work in a Union shop a few years ago. The union I was in wasn't all bad, but it wasn't all good, either. In short, what I found was that a union is a lot like a bureaucracy -- it exists to perpetuate its own existence and if that helps the worker then good, but if not that's too bad. Case in point: I worked for a manager who was a really good guy. Before our shop went Union, our manager gave us a lot of flexibility in our jobs. If we wanted to work slightly non-standard hours, that was okay. If we needed a little extra time off to run errands, that was fine. If we needed to stay late to fix something, that was kosher, and we could come in late/go home early later as we needed. I negotiated a 4-10 work schedule and really enjoyed three-day weekends every week. Then we went union, and everything changed. Now there was a contract that said our shifts were 8-5,4-midnight and midnight-8. If were just minutes late, we were reprimanded. If we were still working on something at the end of our shift, we were to pass it off to the next shift. In short, our work environment went from a very happy, very relaxed, very "do what it takes, and we'll make it work" kind of place to a very adversarial, workers vs. management environment within a few months. It just wasn't any fun working there anymore. So I quit and found a better (non-union) job, and I've never looked back.
Not to mention that my six year old daughter could provide better tech support than Barracuda does :(
/var, so he *comments the line mounting /var from /etc/fstab* and reboots the box.
/var being mounted?
We use a pair of Barracudas where I work to filter incoming e-mail, and in all truth, they work really, really well. That is, until something breaks. One of our units had problems with its hard drive, so we called tech support. They dinked around with the box (on our network) for over a week without fixing it -- all the while it was spooling up mail, but not delivering it -- and then things got bad. The Tech Support genius working on the box finally figured out the drive was having problems writing to
Question for all you *nix gurus out there -- can a unix-like OS reboot without
Anyway, at this point we're livid. Our box has been out of commission for over a week, the Tech Support n00b has finally hosed the box beyond in-the-field repair, and now we've got to send the box to Barracuda for replacement. Unfortunately, we don't have instant replacement on our warranty service any more, so they want us to ship the box back to them, and then once they get it they will ship a replacement unit to us. Since that means something like another 5-10 days of downtime on a box that's already been down for over a week, we ask about buying the instant replacement policy on the unit, and they tell us that yes, we can do that, but we'll have to buy the policy from the date it expired, meaning we will have only another month or two left on the policy after we buy it, and that buying the instant replacement policy is something like 3/4 the cost of simply buying a new unit outright.
Do you have nosy neighbors? Put an end to their peeping tom peskiness with The Torch :D
Actually, another thought just occurred to me...in England and South America, sporting events result in rather agressive activity. Have you ever been to -- or watched video clips of -- a football game (soccer" to us Yanks) and seen the spectators erupt in a melee? If we can't even watch a *game* without breaking out in fighting, do you think we would ever walk peacefully away from our homes, our natural resources, our religions, etc. because of the outcome of a game?
That's a great idea, but it doesn't account for the human factor. Specifically, just because someone else's army of robots defeats your army of robots doesn't mean you are going to give the winner whatever it is you were "fighting" for. The reason war (not battle-bot games) works is because one side beats the living crap out of the other until one side or the other decides that the prize, be it land, socio-political power, religion, whatever, is no longer worth dieing for.
I suspect it would take a lot of robots "dieing" before that would happen. Most likely, two sides will go send their robots against each other, and when one side loses all of its robots, it starts sending people. Only *AFTER* the war gets costly in terms of human lives will one side or the other capitulate.
If a competition could possibly settle international disputes, I would expect we would have started going to the Olympics rather than going to war a long time ago...
IANAL, etc., but I would really like to see some actual references for this. If what you claim is strictly true, then if I were to write a book, poem, song, etc., and mail a copy to someone, then I would no longer own the copyright to that original work. If *this* is correct, then it seems to me that such artistic works would have to be hand-delivered for the original author to maintain copyright (actually, I'm not sure that even that would suffice, if "the act of delivery transfers ownership to the recipient"). If *THAT* is true, then you now own copyright in every book, CD, software, etc. that has ever been mailed to you!
Just a few weeks ago, I caught a show on Discovery about a new field of study called "epigenetics". In a nutshell, after the human genome project, scientists discovered that there are different diseases triggered by the exact same genomes -- something that the study of genetics alone didn't predict. After a lot of research, they discovered that it's not the just the genomes that determine our characteristics; it's the combination of genomes and a handful of other chemicals that bond to the genomes. So not only do we have to map the DNA sequence of every living thing on the planet, but we also have to map how those DNA sequences interact with various other molecules.
I think your fears are only scratching the surface of what could happen. Not just bang -- KABOOM!!!
No doubt -- I've seen enough SSH attacks against my servers to be nervous about possibilities like that. But that's why I've used iptables to block ssh from everything except the handful of networks from which I might connect.
IANAL, etc., etc.
I think it depends upon which flavor of the CC license you use. I've put the CC license on most of my web pages at home, music I've written (http://www.sounclick.com/elementop/ if you will excuse the shameless self-plug), etc., and I've always used the Creative Commons US Share-and-share-alika (SA) non-commercial (NC) version because, like you, I'm a big fan of the GPL.
However, IIRC, there are versions of the CC license that *don't* require you to "share and share alike". But I've only studied the CC license enough to put me at ease about releasing my works under it. Don't quote my post when you are explaining things to the judge
That's one of the big reasons I like Perl so much
I thought capacitance based fuel sensors solved most, if not all, of the problems of sparking inside fuel tanks by keeping the powered components on the *outside* of the fuel tank. Is there some problem with accuracy or reliability that makes them unsuitable for commercial aviation that I'm not aware of or is this a solution searching for a problem?
And for all of the people asking how often sparking inside a fuel tank causes a tank to explode, yes, it *does* happen sometimes. The final NTSB report on the airliner that crashed off New York about a decade ago (you know, the one that the conspiracy theorists said was shot down by a hand-held SAM) was due to sparking inside the fuel tank. I'd link to it, but I can't recall the flight number, and I don't have time to search for it right now...
In light of the fact that you continue to redefine what is and what is not illegal in an ever more restrictive fashion, I have but one response for you:
(_|_) *smooch*
The C-64 was actually my third computer, after a Sinclair ZX-81 (which is still in my parents' garage...wonder if it works???) and then a TRS-80 Model III, but I've still got a soft spot in my heart for the Commodore. While graphics, processing speed, memory and storage have improved immensely since the C-64 era, the 6581 SID chip was way, way ahead of its time. IIRC, the guy who designed the 6581 went on to found Ensoniq or one of those pro synthesizer companies.
I'd still love to get my hands on a pair of 6581s to see if I could build a decent hardware synth with them.....
No doubt. Whatever happened to "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt?"
/. -- I haven't R'dTFA) that the defendent is probably guilty of copyright infringement, the alleged damages are a long ways from being "beyond a reasonable doubt."
While it seems (this is
You make sense. What are you doing on /. ? :D
If you are talking about GA, or "general aviation", airplanes (i.e., Cessnas, Pipers, etc.), then yes, most airplanes still use magnetos -- typically two, since us aviator types like redundant systems. If it's a homebuilt, like the http://www.gecko-ak.org/N600LW/Falcon XP that I own, then all bets are off. Some use mags, some use CDI (Capacitor Discharge Ignition) systems, some use one mag and one CDI system.
That depends upon the airplane. Until fairly recently, no, there weren't very many microprocessors of electronic fuel injection systems on general aviation airplanes. Technology in GA tends to change VEEEEERRRRRYYYYYY slowly. Getting the FAA to approve anything is a chore, doubly so for electronics that are necessary for safe flight (like fly-by-wire systems, electronic engine or ignition systems or glass cockpits). Most GA fuel injection systems of which I am aware are mechanical fuel injection systems, such as the Ellison Throttle Body kit. Some of this may have changed recently with the advent of "Technically Advanced Aircraft" (TAA) such as the Cirrus SR-22. Most of my flight experience is in older Cessnas and a couple of Piper Cherokees so I really can't tell you much about the systems on airplanes like the Cirrus. They might have electronic ignitions, but I would be very, very surprised if there were no redundant mechanical systems on them since, IIRC, the FAA requires at least some analog "steam guage" backup instruments in all of the glass cockpit airplanes.
Sounds like a standard build on the corporate desktops where I work and yes, I am one of the people who build them. Unfortunately, our field techs have convinced their management that they have to have admin rights on their laptops -- you know, in case they have to install something or hard-code an IP address when they are 500 miles away from the nearest IT person (not unusual). And install things they do. We actually had one of our techs remove all of his work-related applications so he could install Doom on his corporate laptop.
Even that would be fine if our upper management would spank users for blatant violations of our corporate compliance policy. The guy mentioned above should have been canned for being stupid...but he wasn't.
Point taken. However, I'm not entirely sure that this is an apples to apples comparison. Does the gag order in the Grand Jury example you mention above prevent you from discussing matters in the case at hand with your attorney (not that I can think of a likely reason why you would want or need to, but that's irrelevant)? Somehow, I don't think it does, but as I understand, the Patriot Act prohibits discussing or revealing the contents of an NSL with anyone for any reason at all.
You are correct that forcing an ISP to reveal this information without judicial oversight is a huge frigging problem, but preventing anyone who receives an NSL from discussing the Letter with legal counsel before taking action that might -- no, make that "DOES" -- violate the 4th amendment protection against search and seizure without due process of law is every bit as big an issue.
Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point. 1.5 million kilometers is the distance to the L2 Lagrange point (scroll down until you see the boldface title "L2", or just download the drawing http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1c/L2_rendering.jpg/300px-L2_rendering.jpg.
So yeah, 1.5 million kilometers is probably a pretty useful distance, and it should also answer a lot of the questions above regarding aiming at a moving target, since Lagrange points are somewhat like geostationary orbits (that is, it is an orbit that is in a fixed position relative to the earth). As I understand, what with not being a rocket scientist and all, rotation of the earth will still cause an object in orbit at a Lagrange point to traverse the sky, but the object won't be orbiting the earth as well, which should simplify the math somewhat.
Huh-uh. According to the 1st Amendment to the Constitution:
Did you catch that? "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..." Regardless of what the so-called "Patriot Act" says, we do have the right to speak out unless we choose to keep silent and let the government sacrifice the Constitution on the altar of "National Security".
Wish I had mod points -- you are right on the money.
IANAL, so do your own research, but the courts have upheld time and again that you cannot waive your rights in a contract. If I cannot waive my rights by signing a contract, then the fourth amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure is granted to me regardless of my ISP's TOS contract.
Many amateur videographers don't (yet) have much experience with the timing, editing, rhythm or natural structure of film. Think of it this way: music is taught to children from preschool, yet the recent explosion in home studio hardware and software has lead to a lot of mixed results. Some amateur music is really, really good; some is not. On the other hand, how many of us have *ever* had a chance to try being creative on film?
This isn't a new phenomenon. We saw the same thing when people suddenly had the ability to create personal web pages. As I mentioned above, we saw the same thing when people suddenly had the ability to create their own multi-track audio recordings. Now, we are seeing the same thing with videography. There will be a period where there are a lot of people producing junk (not like Hollywood doesn't already do this...), but eventually, the dilettantes will find something else to occupy their time, and those who are left will begin refining their skills until they are producing films that are as good as or better than anything commercially available today.
I, for one, can't wait.