Yes, but English -- unlike, say Latin -- is a *living* language. It is dynamic and fluid; old words become replaced with new, new words are invented as needed, and even the usage of words changes over time. Ten years ago, "Google" was a proper noun (and a rather obscure one, at that). Now, it is both a proper noun ("Google" the corporation, "google.com" the web page) and a verb (to "google" something or someone; i.e., to search on-line for information, often by using "Google" the web page).
To insist that there always was, currently is and forever will be only one way to use a particular word is, at best, short-sighted.
It happens. A guy I knew in an aeroclub I used to be in collided with a Cessna 185 fly flight-seeing around Denali (that's McKinley to people who don't live in Alaska:) The resulting mid-air jammed the wheel skis on the 185 and removed a few feet from the wing tip of the Cessna 172 that the guy I knew was flying. Both of them made it safely back to Talkeetna (the launching point for expditions climbing Denali), about 50 miles south, but everyone on board both airplanes needed new shorts after they landed. About ten years ago, another guy took off from Lake Hood in a Cessna and clipped the floats on a second airplane that was landing at Lake Hood at the same time. The guy taking off didn't even know he hit another pilot until he landed. When he found out, he basically just handed the FAA his pilot's certificate (pretty good move, since he probably would have lost it anyway).
If you search NTSB records or the Aviation Safety Network (ahref=http://aviation-safety.net/rel=url2html-26369http://aviation-safety.net/> ) you'll find other instances of mid-air collisions.
The problem is that two airplanes on a collision course don't appear to be moving to each other, so you don't have the motion of an on-coming airplane as a visual cue that there's another airplane near you until it suddenly "blooms" in the corner of your eye. As I said above, this has happened to me three times since I started flying. Fortunately, in all three cases, I was able to take evasive action and avoid the other aircraft, but it still gets your heart pumping. In two of those cases, it was simply a matter of "excrement occurs" -- when you are in congested airspace, some times it's hard to see each other. In the third, the only thing that saved the other pilot's life (*after* we landed, mind you) was the fact that he landed at a different airport, and I didn't have enough time to get a good enough look at his airplane to identify it later. The moron blew through the traffic pattern of the airport at which I was landing, at the same altitude as landing traffic, going the other direction (the regs say you are supposed to cross airports at 1000 feet above the traffic pattern altitude and over the center of the airfield).
Ummm...sort of, but not exactly. If you are in uncontrolled airspace and at or above 3000 feet AGL (above ground level), then yes, you must fly at specified altitudes depending upon the nature of your flight (IFR, VFR) and heading. However, in the contiguous 48 states, uncontrolled airspace at or above 3000 AGL is exceedingly rare. Even here in Alaska where I live, uncontrolled airspace at or above 3000 AGL isn't exactly easy to find.
If you are in controlled airspace, then all bets are off, the theory being that even if *you* aren't talking to a controller (no, you do not always have to talk to air traffic control in controlled airspace), most of the significant hazards (read that "large, high-speed and/or heavy aircraft like F-15s and 747s) *will* be talking to someone, and therefore will be routed around if you if necessary.
FWIW, in the...ummm...16 years I have been a small airplane pilot, I have been uncomfortably close to other small airplanes exactly three times, but that was three times too many.
Hmmm....I'm not sure I agree that "in principle it [the ruling prohibiting the storage of IP addresses] is correct." As a web server administrator, both professionally and at home as a hobby, I have used the logging function on my web server (and e-mail server) to either file complaints with the ISP that owns the IP address used by someone who was behaving poorly on my server or to filter IP addresses used by those who behave poorly. In my logs, I have seen people trying to run exploitable PHP scripts on my server (I hadn't enabled PHP, so there was no reason to run the scripts on my host), to browse to files on the C:\ drive (it's a *nix host; there is no C:\ drive, so again, there was no legitimate reason for anyone to try to do such a thing) and to try buffer overflow attacks. Having an IP address, a date and an accurate time stamp will allow the ISP to contact their user and "encourage" them to knock it off. Without the IP address, it is impossible to know who to blacklist or who to complain to, so I for one would be loath to turn logging off.
...IT workers are called for twelve hours of overtime (after already putting in 8+ hours during a normal work day) to fix something mission critical. News at eleven.
Seriously, yes, I have slept at work before. At a job I used to have, we had a really crappy dBase-derived database program that would get corrupted at least once a week. Usually, I could fix it in a few hours, but on more than one occasion, I would have to stay at work all night long manually searching the database for corruption, then rebuilding all of the database indexes. The largest database file was 900+MB in size, and took an hour or two to re-index (this was back when a 1G hard drive was unusually large, and a 100MHz Pentium was still a smokin' fast machine), and several other files were also pretty large, and took a long time to re-index, as well. So after removing the corruption, I'd kick off the process to re-index the files, set the alarm on my watch, and take a nap since there was nothing else I could do right then, anyway.
On another occasion, I was updating a server after hours (since it couldn't be done during the business day). As in the database example above, there were a number of tasks that needed to be completed, they could run unattended for a half-hour to a couple of hours each, I had already worked an 8-5 and was back after hours and would be working another 8-5 the following morning, so again, I'd kick off an update, set my alarm for half an hour, and take a nap until it was time to check the status of the update.
In both of these cases, if I wasn't napping between tasks, I would have been making stupid mistakes due to fatigue long before the tasks were complete, and I would have been completely useless the following days. In both of these cases, napping while on the job was simply an efficient way to handle the conflicting requirements of physical and business needs.
I don't know if I qualify as an "engineer" but I am an unabashed computer geek. I like building servers, installing Linux, writing CGI scripts for my web pages, building networks, etc., etc. I have spent many nights tinkering into the wee hours trying to build/fix/learn something for myself, my work or my friends. There is a mindset that many good geeks have and that I have seen more than once in myself -- once I get my chi flowing, I don't really want to stop. I'm on a roll, and I want to make the most of it while I am in that state. And when I get called into work to fix something that broke at 11:00pm, I do so because that is a part of my job that I agreed to accept, and that my wife understood would occasionally be necessary when I became a sys admin. The simple fact is that I, like a lot of geeks, enjoy the challenge of problem solving, and don't like to let go of a really interesting problem until I've figured it out.
But don't fool yourself for a second into believing that I am one sided. In addition to being a computer geek, I am also a musician, a rock climber, a kayaker, a mountain biker, a pilot, a (former) martial artist, a husband and a dad. Despite being a sys admin, I actually spend quite a bit of time with my family, and really enjoy doing things with them. In fact, I was actually late to work today because it's my wife's birthday, and I was running late setting up a few surprises for her;)
Most places I've worked are pretty liberal with taking some time off for family/personal tasks because we geeks put in time after hours when necessary. IMHO, in the end it all averages out.
When the NSA wiretapping story broke, the anchor and legal specialist on CNN were arguing over whether that surveillance was really something to worry about. The legal specialist said yes, it's a violation of the fourth amendment. The anchor said, essentially, I don't care; I have nothing to hide.
I've argued with people here on/. about whether or not the surveillance powers claimed by the wiretapping, the Patriot Act, etc. are a problem or not (for example, see http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=296641&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=20586283). I've argued with my wife that surveillance without judicial oversight is a bad thing. My brother-in-law, an Air National Guard pilot, once told me, "You can't do too much to protect our country."
So, yeah, I've talked/posted with people who think that surveillance is a good thing, and who even think government could do more to protect the country.
I do not condone the water boarding etc. That was not the issue.
I agree; waterboarding is not the issue. For that matter, neither is electronic surveillance. The issue is that, regardless of what Executive Orders the president signs into being and regardless of what laws Congress may pass, the 4th amendment to the Constitution limits what surveillance the government can perform and how that surveillance is to be conducted. Without due process of law, the government does not have the right to search our persons, our houses, or our communications. The framers of the Constitution thought that the these rights were important enough to fight and die for. American soldiers since then have thought those rights were important enough to fight and die for. I think those rights are important enough to fight and die for.
I pray every night that my family will be safe from harm, but the simple fact is that I fear my government far more than I fear some terrorist with a vendetta against this nation. Throughout history, governments that were not bound by the same laws they created abused the populace at will, and there was very little that could be done about. Contrary to Hollywood, successful peasant uprisings are the exception, not the rule. Two hundred something years ago, a very interesting, pivotal thing happened: a group of men rallied around the notion that things didn't have to be this way, and decided to do something about it. From their blood and efforts, a nation founded on the concepts of liberty and justice was born, and so far, it's been a great success.
But, a nation that has prospered and lived in (relative) peace has forgotten about the thousands of years of history that preceded it. In the name of illusory safety and security, we have been busy dismantling the very protections that made us different than anyone else throughout history. After 200+ years of freedom, we are busy searching for the very shackles that the Bill of Rights cast off, so we can clasp them around our wrists and ankles again.
Even assuming that the Patriot Act, NSA wiretapping, this new "Protect America Act" and other such laws will actually buy us any more security (they won't -- FISA already gave the government the powers it needed while maintaining accountability -- but, I digress), is living in a fascist state worth the...ummm...let's see...6000 people died in WTC, there are ~300,000,000 million citizens in the country now...that's a 0.00002% chance of being killed in a terrorist act...okay, is a 0.00002% chance of being killed by a terrorist in the U.S. worth being arrested and convicted of treason for making a post like the one I am typing right now? Are we really THAT full of fear? I really hope not....
However if you are put in that position of telling the government no, and then 3000 people dieing because of your choice could you handle that?
What about the converse of your question? If even one person is arrested, shipped to some secret CIA prison, where he/she is waterboarded over and over again, but is ultimately determined to be totally completely freaking innocent, and you were the one that allowed the government to tap the phone call that lead to their arrest, could you live with that? I couldn't.
"It is better that a hundred guilty men should go free than that even one righteous man should suffer unjustly." --Plato (and yes, I do truly believe that).
To most of us who work in IT, yes, that seems reasonable and logical. To the 12 men and/or women sitting on a jury, it might not be quite so obvious. Just ask Randall Schwartz(http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/Intel_v_Schwartz/)about that.
I am a sys admin by trade, and I build web sites for fun, so this may be obvious to someone (read "not me") who does web development for a living, but how does Perl+HTML::Mason compare with PHP, RoR, Django, etc. in terms of speed, scalability and maintainability for commercial/very popular sites? Just curious, since Mason is what I've used on my projects...
I see the point you are making, but I don't think it's something that would work very well in practice. At the layer 1 level, the ISP will just see a virtual circuit between the end user, and another host on the network, be that Google or DoubleClick or e360. So who do you bill -- the local user or the remote end? Okay, an ISP can use something along the lines of a stateful firewall to help with the billing. This sounds okay so far -- if I request a page from Google, I get billed; if someone spams me, then they initiated the traffic and they get billed.
But wait...the spammer doesn't send to me -- they send to my ISP's mail server (okay, I run a mail server at home, too, but that's a special case, and hardly applicable to Joe User). This means the spammer doesn't get billed; whichever SMTP server first accepted the e-mail gets billed. Okay, that's not so bad -- it provides a financial incentive to mail server admins to make sure their servers are secure, since they will be paying for all e-mails that come from their server. Hmmm...but the ISP isn't going to pay those bills out of the goodness of their hearts, so they are going to have to pass those costs on to the end user. I suspect not all ISPs will charge the same amount for their bandwidth since bandwidth cost varies with locality (don't believe me? The company I work for pays ~$7K per month for a T1, since we operate out of some of the most remote areas in the U.S.; my 768K DSL line is ~$50 per month, and if/. is to be believed, you can get 2-5M DSL lines in Japan and Europe for less than I pay for my 768K line), so what happens if my ISP charges me less for bandwidth than they pay to connect to another ISP's SMTP server? You know they are going to pass the cost on to me, but how do they determine how much I owe? The accounting is starting to get complicated, but let's keep going. When the recipient checks his e-mail, he is going to initiate a POP3 connection, so he gets charged for initiating this service. But wait -- I've already payed to send that e-mail, so now it's being double-billed. Okay, so we exempt POP3 from the pay-for-bandwidth scheme...but you and I both know that won't happen. Now, let's throw one last wrinkle into the equation. Suppose I travel for my business, and therefore I frequently use WiFi at hotels when I check my e-mail or post on/. Being a geek, I know that WiFi has some potential security pitfalls (see http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=660), so I tunnel e-mail to my server at home using SSH. Now, whether I'm sending or receiving e-mail, I'm getting billed because I'm tunneling through SSH, which I initiate. I'm not too crazy about that, because now I'm definitely getting double-billed for e-mail and therefore paying for the bandwidth for every spam I receive, which is what your proposal was trying to prevent in the first place.
But don't worry because really, it's even worse than that. Now the ISP needs to log every packet across their network and needs to log the state of each packet as well, so you can determine the initiator of the traffic. You've just made your network a lot busier and greatly complicated your billing system so the ISP incurs even more expense in an effort to bill appropriately. So instead of paying a flat rate fee for Internet service, I now pay the cost of the bandwidth I use, plus the cost of the additional bandwidth for the logging/billing system, plus the cost of the more complex billing software. As a result of this additional complexity, I'm now paying ~$75 per month rather than the ~$50 per month I used pay...but at least I'm not paying for e-mails from those accursed spammers!
Quote: I think corporations that get spammed, including ISP's should be able to go to companys like DoubleClick and e360 and bill them for the aggregiate costs.
That's the logic that the big ISPs and telcos are using for their arguments in the net neutrality debate: "If you send a lot of traffic through my network, I'm going to bill you for it." And all (or a lot of) the end users (including, to some extent, me) got up in arms about that, effectively saying "I'm already footing the bill for your bandwidth with my monthly service charge. You can't charge Google or Vonage or anyone else on the Internet for using the same bandwidth that I'm already paying you for!" (sed "s/Google or Vonage/DoubleClick and e360/").
I joined digg after reading that they decided not to bow to pressure from the suits after all. But I agree that most of the users there belong on myspace...sigh.
I would think that the average/. crowd would indeed have insight into the advantages of slow-speed, very wide, heavily-curved prop blades due to the audio footprint of the many, many PCs humming in the corners of any self-respecting geek's living room/basement bedroom.
In short, while I am not a fluid dynamicist either, I am a flight instructor, and you are exactly on the money about three and four blade props on airplanes. I used to live very close to Lake Hood Seaplane base in Anchorage, AK, one of the busiest seaplane bases in the world, and the difference in noise between a Cessna 185 or Cessna 206/207 at full power with a two blade or with a three blade prop is definite and remarkable.
That's why I, a computer geek who has never, even once (no seriously -- I haven't) used KaZaA, BitTorrent, Gnutella, etc. to download pirated music, am still using a 56K modem.
No, wait...I've got a DSL connection. Why did I spend the extra money to upgrade from dial-up to DSL? Oh, yeah...that's right...I got tired of waiting days for an anti-virus update (back when I still used Windows), I'm running a web and e-mail server at my house, I got tired of getting kicked off-line every time my wife called home, I wanted faster access for the multimedia that is used in so many web pages for the last...ummm...ten?...years.
To anyone from outside of the U.S. reading this thread, please do not judge all Americans by the loud-mouths among us. Many of us cringe too when we hear/read comments like the above.
Quote: How much would a 172 weigh if it needed 5mph bumpers, door beams, and a suspension/frame strong enough to handle a pothole at 60mph?
About 2400-2600 lbs, depending upon the model of 172 you are talking about. The landing speed of a CE-172 is approximately 60 MPH, and the frame must be stressed to survive any potholes that you can reasonably expect to find on the airstrip upon which you are landing. While a good many 172s are strictly operated off of paved runways, there are plenty more throughout the 172's 50 year (? something like that, anyway) history that have been operated off of gravel and grass airstrips. If you've ever seen some of the little gravel airstrips here in Alaska, you'd really appreciate the engineering that allows a 30-50 year old airplane to operate off these airstrips year after year. Then, consider 172s that have had float kits installed -- they *really* take a beating if you land on anything more than light chop.
Quote: The aircraft spends 99% of its operating life in the smooth, pothole-free, air.
You haven't flown in the mountains much have you? While ferrying a Cessna 172 from Portland, OR to Anchorage, AK I spent about two hours getting the living %#@#*!!! beat out of me in the mountain passes of western Yukon Territory -- it was far rougher than any road I've ever driven on. I also smacked my head against the ceiling of a different Cessna 172 despite having seat belts snugged up pretty tight when I was five miles behind a 747 on approach into Anchorage Intl. Airport. Trust me -- you can find plenty of "potholes" in the air...
IMHO, it's not worries about potholes that make it difficult to design a good cross-over vehicle. It's (as you mentioned) the need for ground propulsion, (again, as you mentioned) the need to fit a lifting surface big enough to lift 2000-3000 pounds into the air into an eight foot wide lane and the need for a frame that can meet crash safety standards when running head-on into another vehicle at highway speeds.
If I had mod points and you weren't already at 5, Informative, I'd mod your post up. That is easily the clearest, most intuitive, most readable explanation of the expansion of the universe I have ever seen. Awesome job!
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but English -- unlike, say Latin -- is a *living* language. It is dynamic and fluid; old words become replaced with new, new words are invented as needed, and even the usage of words changes over time. Ten years ago, "Google" was a proper noun (and a rather obscure one, at that). Now, it is both a proper noun ("Google" the corporation, "google.com" the web page) and a verb (to "google" something or someone; i.e., to search on-line for information, often by using "Google" the web page).
To insist that there always was, currently is and forever will be only one way to use a particular word is, at best, short-sighted.
It happens. A guy I knew in an aeroclub I used to be in collided with a Cessna 185 fly flight-seeing around Denali (that's McKinley to people who don't live in Alaska :) The resulting mid-air jammed the wheel skis on the 185 and removed a few feet from the wing tip of the Cessna 172 that the guy I knew was flying. Both of them made it safely back to Talkeetna (the launching point for expditions climbing Denali), about 50 miles south, but everyone on board both airplanes needed new shorts after they landed. About ten years ago, another guy took off from Lake Hood in a Cessna and clipped the floats on a second airplane that was landing at Lake Hood at the same time. The guy taking off didn't even know he hit another pilot until he landed. When he found out, he basically just handed the FAA his pilot's certificate (pretty good move, since he probably would have lost it anyway).
If you search NTSB records or the Aviation Safety Network (ahref=http://aviation-safety.net/rel=url2html-26369http://aviation-safety.net/> ) you'll find other instances of mid-air collisions.
The problem is that two airplanes on a collision course don't appear to be moving to each other, so you don't have the motion of an on-coming airplane as a visual cue that there's another airplane near you until it suddenly "blooms" in the corner of your eye. As I said above, this has happened to me three times since I started flying. Fortunately, in all three cases, I was able to take evasive action and avoid the other aircraft, but it still gets your heart pumping. In two of those cases, it was simply a matter of "excrement occurs" -- when you are in congested airspace, some times it's hard to see each other. In the third, the only thing that saved the other pilot's life (*after* we landed, mind you) was the fact that he landed at a different airport, and I didn't have enough time to get a good enough look at his airplane to identify it later. The moron blew through the traffic pattern of the airport at which I was landing, at the same altitude as landing traffic, going the other direction (the regs say you are supposed to cross airports at 1000 feet above the traffic pattern altitude and over the center of the airfield).
Ummm...sort of, but not exactly. If you are in uncontrolled airspace and at or above 3000 feet AGL (above ground level), then yes, you must fly at specified altitudes depending upon the nature of your flight (IFR, VFR) and heading. However, in the contiguous 48 states, uncontrolled airspace at or above 3000 AGL is exceedingly rare. Even here in Alaska where I live, uncontrolled airspace at or above 3000 AGL isn't exactly easy to find. If you are in controlled airspace, then all bets are off, the theory being that even if *you* aren't talking to a controller (no, you do not always have to talk to air traffic control in controlled airspace), most of the significant hazards (read that "large, high-speed and/or heavy aircraft like F-15s and 747s) *will* be talking to someone, and therefore will be routed around if you if necessary. FWIW, in the...ummm...16 years I have been a small airplane pilot, I have been uncomfortably close to other small airplanes exactly three times, but that was three times too many.
For the love of all that is holy, PLEASE do not give them any ideas!!!
Hmmm....I'm not sure I agree that "in principle it [the ruling prohibiting the storage of IP addresses] is correct." As a web server administrator, both professionally and at home as a hobby, I have used the logging function on my web server (and e-mail server) to either file complaints with the ISP that owns the IP address used by someone who was behaving poorly on my server or to filter IP addresses used by those who behave poorly. In my logs, I have seen people trying to run exploitable PHP scripts on my server (I hadn't enabled PHP, so there was no reason to run the scripts on my host), to browse to files on the C:\ drive (it's a *nix host; there is no C:\ drive, so again, there was no legitimate reason for anyone to try to do such a thing) and to try buffer overflow attacks. Having an IP address, a date and an accurate time stamp will allow the ISP to contact their user and "encourage" them to knock it off. Without the IP address, it is impossible to know who to blacklist or who to complain to, so I for one would be loath to turn logging off.
No, not the Death Star -- Alderaan!
...IT workers are called for twelve hours of overtime (after already putting in 8+ hours during a normal work day) to fix something mission critical. News at eleven.
Seriously, yes, I have slept at work before. At a job I used to have, we had a really crappy dBase-derived database program that would get corrupted at least once a week. Usually, I could fix it in a few hours, but on more than one occasion, I would have to stay at work all night long manually searching the database for corruption, then rebuilding all of the database indexes. The largest database file was 900+MB in size, and took an hour or two to re-index (this was back when a 1G hard drive was unusually large, and a 100MHz Pentium was still a smokin' fast machine), and several other files were also pretty large, and took a long time to re-index, as well. So after removing the corruption, I'd kick off the process to re-index the files, set the alarm on my watch, and take a nap since there was nothing else I could do right then, anyway.
On another occasion, I was updating a server after hours (since it couldn't be done during the business day). As in the database example above, there were a number of tasks that needed to be completed, they could run unattended for a half-hour to a couple of hours each, I had already worked an 8-5 and was back after hours and would be working another 8-5 the following morning, so again, I'd kick off an update, set my alarm for half an hour, and take a nap until it was time to check the status of the update.
In both of these cases, if I wasn't napping between tasks, I would have been making stupid mistakes due to fatigue long before the tasks were complete, and I would have been completely useless the following days. In both of these cases, napping while on the job was simply an efficient way to handle the conflicting requirements of physical and business needs.
Dude, it's not an "either/or thing.
;)
I don't know if I qualify as an "engineer" but I am an unabashed computer geek. I like building servers, installing Linux, writing CGI scripts for my web pages, building networks, etc., etc. I have spent many nights tinkering into the wee hours trying to build/fix/learn something for myself, my work or my friends. There is a mindset that many good geeks have and that I have seen more than once in myself -- once I get my chi flowing, I don't really want to stop. I'm on a roll, and I want to make the most of it while I am in that state. And when I get called into work to fix something that broke at 11:00pm, I do so because that is a part of my job that I agreed to accept, and that my wife understood would occasionally be necessary when I became a sys admin. The simple fact is that I, like a lot of geeks, enjoy the challenge of problem solving, and don't like to let go of a really interesting problem until I've figured it out.
But don't fool yourself for a second into believing that I am one sided. In addition to being a computer geek, I am also a musician, a rock climber, a kayaker, a mountain biker, a pilot, a (former) martial artist, a husband and a dad. Despite being a sys admin, I actually spend quite a bit of time with my family, and really enjoy doing things with them. In fact, I was actually late to work today because it's my wife's birthday, and I was running late setting up a few surprises for her
Most places I've worked are pretty liberal with taking some time off for family/personal tasks because we geeks put in time after hours when necessary. IMHO, in the end it all averages out.
In this case, wouldn't it be a "beijink"?
Really? Not even once? Because I sure have.
/. about whether or not the surveillance powers claimed by the wiretapping, the Patriot Act, etc. are a problem or not (for example, see http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=296641&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=20586283). I've argued with my wife that surveillance without judicial oversight is a bad thing. My brother-in-law, an Air National Guard pilot, once told me, "You can't do too much to protect our country."
When the NSA wiretapping story broke, the anchor and legal specialist on CNN were arguing over whether that surveillance was really something to worry about. The legal specialist said yes, it's a violation of the fourth amendment. The anchor said, essentially, I don't care; I have nothing to hide.
I've argued with people here on
So, yeah, I've talked/posted with people who think that surveillance is a good thing, and who even think government could do more to protect the country.
I agree; waterboarding is not the issue. For that matter, neither is electronic surveillance. The issue is that, regardless of what Executive Orders the president signs into being and regardless of what laws Congress may pass, the 4th amendment to the Constitution limits what surveillance the government can perform and how that surveillance is to be conducted. Without due process of law, the government does not have the right to search our persons, our houses, or our communications. The framers of the Constitution thought that the these rights were important enough to fight and die for. American soldiers since then have thought those rights were important enough to fight and die for. I think those rights are important enough to fight and die for.
I pray every night that my family will be safe from harm, but the simple fact is that I fear my government far more than I fear some terrorist with a vendetta against this nation. Throughout history, governments that were not bound by the same laws they created abused the populace at will, and there was very little that could be done about. Contrary to Hollywood, successful peasant uprisings are the exception, not the rule. Two hundred something years ago, a very interesting, pivotal thing happened: a group of men rallied around the notion that things didn't have to be this way, and decided to do something about it. From their blood and efforts, a nation founded on the concepts of liberty and justice was born, and so far, it's been a great success.
But, a nation that has prospered and lived in (relative) peace has forgotten about the thousands of years of history that preceded it. In the name of illusory safety and security, we have been busy dismantling the very protections that made us different than anyone else throughout history. After 200+ years of freedom, we are busy searching for the very shackles that the Bill of Rights cast off, so we can clasp them around our wrists and ankles again.
Even assuming that the Patriot Act, NSA wiretapping, this new "Protect America Act" and other such laws will actually buy us any more security (they won't -- FISA already gave the government the powers it needed while maintaining accountability -- but, I digress), is living in a fascist state worth the...ummm...let's see...6000 people died in WTC, there are ~300,000,000 million citizens in the country now...that's a 0.00002% chance of being killed in a terrorist act...okay, is a 0.00002% chance of being killed by a terrorist in the U.S. worth being arrested and convicted of treason for making a post like the one I am typing right now? Are we really THAT full of fear? I really hope not....
What about the converse of your question? If even one person is arrested, shipped to some secret CIA prison, where he/she is waterboarded over and over again, but is ultimately determined to be totally completely freaking innocent, and you were the one that allowed the government to tap the phone call that lead to their arrest, could you live with that? I couldn't.
"It is better that a hundred guilty men should go free than that even one righteous man should suffer unjustly." --Plato (and yes, I do truly believe that).
To most of us who work in IT, yes, that seems reasonable and logical. To the 12 men and/or women sitting on a jury, it might not be quite so obvious. Just ask Randall Schwartz(http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/Intel_v_Schwartz/)about that.
I am a sys admin by trade, and I build web sites for fun, so this may be obvious to someone (read "not me") who does web development for a living, but how does Perl+HTML::Mason compare with PHP, RoR, Django, etc. in terms of speed, scalability and maintainability for commercial/very popular sites? Just curious, since Mason is what I've used on my projects...
Mr. President, I didn't realize you posted on /., too!
I see the point you are making, but I don't think it's something that would work very well in practice. At the layer 1 level, the ISP will just see a virtual circuit between the end user, and another host on the network, be that Google or DoubleClick or e360. So who do you bill -- the local user or the remote end? Okay, an ISP can use something along the lines of a stateful firewall to help with the billing. This sounds okay so far -- if I request a page from Google, I get billed; if someone spams me, then they initiated the traffic and they get billed.
/. is to be believed, you can get 2-5M DSL lines in Japan and Europe for less than I pay for my 768K line), so what happens if my ISP charges me less for bandwidth than they pay to connect to another ISP's SMTP server? You know they are going to pass the cost on to me, but how do they determine how much I owe? The accounting is starting to get complicated, but let's keep going. When the recipient checks his e-mail, he is going to initiate a POP3 connection, so he gets charged for initiating this service. But wait -- I've already payed to send that e-mail, so now it's being double-billed. Okay, so we exempt POP3 from the pay-for-bandwidth scheme...but you and I both know that won't happen. Now, let's throw one last wrinkle into the equation. Suppose I travel for my business, and therefore I frequently use WiFi at hotels when I check my e-mail or post on /. Being a geek, I know that WiFi has some potential security pitfalls (see http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=660), so I tunnel e-mail to my server at home using SSH. Now, whether I'm sending or receiving e-mail, I'm getting billed because I'm tunneling through SSH, which I initiate. I'm not too crazy about that, because now I'm definitely getting double-billed for e-mail and therefore paying for the bandwidth for every spam I receive, which is what your proposal was trying to prevent in the first place.
But wait...the spammer doesn't send to me -- they send to my ISP's mail server (okay, I run a mail server at home, too, but that's a special case, and hardly applicable to Joe User). This means the spammer doesn't get billed; whichever SMTP server first accepted the e-mail gets billed. Okay, that's not so bad -- it provides a financial incentive to mail server admins to make sure their servers are secure, since they will be paying for all e-mails that come from their server. Hmmm...but the ISP isn't going to pay those bills out of the goodness of their hearts, so they are going to have to pass those costs on to the end user. I suspect not all ISPs will charge the same amount for their bandwidth since bandwidth cost varies with locality (don't believe me? The company I work for pays ~$7K per month for a T1, since we operate out of some of the most remote areas in the U.S.; my 768K DSL line is ~$50 per month, and if
But don't worry because really, it's even worse than that. Now the ISP needs to log every packet across their network and needs to log the state of each packet as well, so you can determine the initiator of the traffic. You've just made your network a lot busier and greatly complicated your billing system so the ISP incurs even more expense in an effort to bill appropriately. So instead of paying a flat rate fee for Internet service, I now pay the cost of the bandwidth I use, plus the cost of the additional bandwidth for the logging/billing system, plus the cost of the more complex billing software. As a result of this additional complexity, I'm now paying ~$75 per month rather than the ~$50 per month I used pay...but at least I'm not paying for e-mails from those accursed spammers!
Quote: I think corporations that get spammed, including ISP's should be able to go to companys like DoubleClick and e360 and bill them for the aggregiate costs.
That's the logic that the big ISPs and telcos are using for their arguments in the net neutrality debate: "If you send a lot of traffic through my network, I'm going to bill you for it." And all (or a lot of) the end users (including, to some extent, me) got up in arms about that, effectively saying "I'm already footing the bill for your bandwidth with my monthly service charge. You can't charge Google or Vonage or anyone else on the Internet for using the same bandwidth that I'm already paying you for!" (sed "s/Google or Vonage/DoubleClick and e360/").
I joined digg after reading that they decided not to bow to pressure from the suits after all. But I agree that most of the users there belong on myspace...sigh.
I would think that the average /. crowd would indeed have insight into the advantages of slow-speed, very wide, heavily-curved prop blades due to the audio footprint of the many, many PCs humming in the corners of any self-respecting geek's living room/basement bedroom.
In short, while I am not a fluid dynamicist either, I am a flight instructor, and you are exactly on the money about three and four blade props on airplanes. I used to live very close to Lake Hood Seaplane base in Anchorage, AK, one of the busiest seaplane bases in the world, and the difference in noise between a Cessna 185 or Cessna 206/207 at full power with a two blade or with a three blade prop is definite and remarkable.
I know... :cries:
Exactly!
:rolleyes:
That's why I, a computer geek who has never, even once (no seriously -- I haven't) used KaZaA, BitTorrent, Gnutella, etc. to download pirated music, am still using a 56K modem.
No, wait...I've got a DSL connection. Why did I spend the extra money to upgrade from dial-up to DSL? Oh, yeah...that's right...I got tired of waiting days for an anti-virus update (back when I still used Windows), I'm running a web and e-mail server at my house, I got tired of getting kicked off-line every time my wife called home, I wanted faster access for the multimedia that is used in so many web pages for the last...ummm...ten?...years.
Well said.
To anyone from outside of the U.S. reading this thread, please do not judge all Americans by the loud-mouths among us. Many of us cringe too when we hear/read comments like the above.
Quote: How much would a 172 weigh if it needed 5mph bumpers, door beams, and a suspension/frame strong enough to handle a pothole at 60mph?
About 2400-2600 lbs, depending upon the model of 172 you are talking about. The landing speed of a CE-172 is approximately 60 MPH, and the frame must be stressed to survive any potholes that you can reasonably expect to find on the airstrip upon which you are landing. While a good many 172s are strictly operated off of paved runways, there are plenty more throughout the 172's 50 year (? something like that, anyway) history that have been operated off of gravel and grass airstrips. If you've ever seen some of the little gravel airstrips here in Alaska, you'd really appreciate the engineering that allows a 30-50 year old airplane to operate off these airstrips year after year. Then, consider 172s that have had float kits installed -- they *really* take a beating if you land on anything more than light chop.
Quote: The aircraft spends 99% of its operating life in the smooth, pothole-free, air.
You haven't flown in the mountains much have you? While ferrying a Cessna 172 from Portland, OR to Anchorage, AK I spent about two hours getting the living %#@#*!!! beat out of me in the mountain passes of western Yukon Territory -- it was far rougher than any road I've ever driven on. I also smacked my head against the ceiling of a different Cessna 172 despite having seat belts snugged up pretty tight when I was five miles behind a 747 on approach into Anchorage Intl. Airport. Trust me -- you can find plenty of "potholes" in the air...
IMHO, it's not worries about potholes that make it difficult to design a good cross-over vehicle. It's (as you mentioned) the need for ground propulsion, (again, as you mentioned) the need to fit a lifting surface big enough to lift 2000-3000 pounds into the air into an eight foot wide lane and the need for a frame that can meet crash safety standards when running head-on into another vehicle at highway speeds.
If I had mod points and you weren't already at 5, Informative, I'd mod your post up. That is easily the clearest, most intuitive, most readable explanation of the expansion of the universe I have ever seen. Awesome job!
MST 3000?