Actually, it is. It's the hardest part of learning to land, which is the hardest part of learning to fly. It doesn't take much to screw up the flare, and it doesn't take much of a screwed-up flare to royally screw up a landing.
Example: If you're going too fast and you flare, you'll "balloon" off the runway. Now you'll be 15 feet off and bleeding airspeed - fast. Unless you are pretty comfortable with flying, you'll stall up there and drop like a stone onto the runway.
If I were the instructor, I wouldn't even risk it. I'd tell him to come in fast (~75 knots "dirty") to keep him well away from stall speed and just fly it onto the runway. He had plenty of runway (~7200 feet, C172 needs ~2000 to be comfortable) and nobody was worried about damaging the plane so a nice graceful flare is wholly unnecessary. It sounds like this is pretty much what they did, because he had a prop strike.
He almost certainly did have ILS, actually, but you'd have to be crazy to try and explain shooting an approach to someone who's never flown before. Much better to say "fly at the runway, once you're over it cut the engine and try not to land".
This guy is clearly a badass, but his best trait is keeping his head on straight, knowing something about how airplanes work, and figuring out how to talk to someone. Landing is also a lot simpler if you don't care about damaging the plane (he had a prop strike) or landing on a runway that's not 4x longer than you'd usually use. Once you can talk to someone who's flown planes, you're pretty much OK as long as you don't melt down - do what they tell you, which will probably consist of a crash course in flying (what the instruments are, what's important about them, how to control the plane, etc) followed by directions to fly the plane onto the runway and hold on tight. Normally there's more finesse involved in touching down smoothly, in a short distance, at a proper approach speed - but that goes out the window in an emergency.
I don't want to sound like I'm diminishing Mr. Wildey's accomplishment - keeping cool in that situation is very hard, and avoiding being a smoking hole in the ground is even harder with no experience. This guy should take some flying lessons, if this whole thing hasn't soured him on the idea of small planes. Maybe he can even log this in his logbook (not entirely kidding!).
For anybody regularly flies with somebody in a small plane, there are classes out there that will prepare you for exactly such an emergency - a few hours of basic flying, radios, and landings. Don't assume your flight sim experience will do you any good, except for maybe knowing what the instruments are. The most important part is keeping a cool head - you're eventually going to land, and it'll turn out a lot better if you keep calm and think it through.
Unfortunately that more or less matches up with my experiences. My parents live in a 2-square-mile town in northeast NJ. Most of the town has FiOS, but their little section does not. It's been about 5 years since the town was "getting" FiOS but it's still unavailable and they've clearly stopped doing additional work.
Meanwhile, they've stopped doing any work on their older copper infrastructure, you know, because everybody has FiOS and they'd rather put the money into that. I can't blame them for that, but then fucking finish installing FiOS! Especially because my parents still use POTS and DSL (much better than paying Comcast). So they live in one of the most populous areas of the country and have DSL that tops out at 3Mbps - either that or Comcast.
Without a doubt people still use faxes, and it's stupid. But for most people (and arguably everybody at the beach) the wireless data they're going to be sending is not a fax. Instead it'll be a 12-million pixel image they took with a playing-card sized (but slightly thicker) device. Oh, and it'll probably go faster than the fax they sent in that video (well, it depends on the beach).
To be fair about the GPS thing, it was operational by 1993 (ads are 93-94) and given the success of LORAN, it was pretty clear that the ability to precisely locate one's self would be extremely useful to civilians (though this was before Clinton declared that it would officially be a "dual use system"). Toss in a little bit of Moore's Law and it was reasonable to expect that it wouldn't be too long before you could store road information, compute a route, render it in real-time, and synthesize audio to describe it.
Though I agree, those are a pretty impressive series of ads. Funny what they got wrong - that we'd be sending a fax instead of high-resolution images or live video from the beach, or that we'd make a full screen video call from a phone booth instead of a playing-card sized cellphone or magazine-sized tablet. And the strong AI right at the end.
Because patents are very time-limited and they come with public disclosure. You do understand that patents, copyrights, and trademarks are completely different, right?
It's true, I'm afraid. Worse TV/DVR/STB, quality and interface (and I have the good box apparently), less on demand, worse customer service, and more expensive.
I will grant that they have quite decent internet - they do IPv6 properly with prefix delegation, and I even get slightly more (consistently) than I pay for - but Comcast does internet pretty well also, and TWC is still more expensive.
Anecdote - when I signed up, I had to wait *2 weeks* for an appointment to hook it up. All the appointments were 8-5, and I work during the day. I would just go in an hour or two late or come home an hour or two early, but they are only willing to schedule 4 hour blocks and I couldn't take a half day off at the time - especially with no internet to work remotely. And they were all taken anyway. I was around weekends, but they only did Saturday, and they were all full for those 2 weeks. Incredibly miserable experience. I would have run the damn wire myself if they'd let me.
Chrome has certificate pinning. Basically it means that if you access a Google property, it's checking for a specific certificate - not just any old cert signed by any old CA. Sure, this doesn't help you if you're not using Chrome, but if the NSA was trying to do a blanket MITM, all Chrome browsers would blow up and you'd definitely hear about it.
I likewise work for Google (though the opinion here presented is my own), and I know a lot of people (some of whom are very high up) would be quitting if Google was kowtowing to government requests (excepting lawful warrants). There are *tons* of people who spend their days trying to protect all this information from any external entity, and if it came out that they were just wasting their time because there was some back door, they'd feel betrayed.
HDCP is already busted and has been for years. As if it mattered, because the only things worth protecting with it (HD movies) are already decryptable straight from the disk.
Ah. So the thing is, he did create the Internet with a capital I. Before that, it was the NSFnet and the ARPANET before that. What made it the Internet was that it was something the average person could actually connect to and use. Read the terms of use of the NSFnet - they're not at all conducive to the average person getting online. Even if a dial-up ISP would've been allowed to connect to it, there'd be nothing for the average person to do with it.
Nobody is claiming Gore had anything to do with the technology. But the difference between the NSFnet and Internet we know today has nothing to do with technology. Gore's contribution was realizing "hey, this could be huge for everybody else too" and making it happen. Reading Bush Sr.'s remarks on signing the bill is very interesting. Some quotes: "It holds the promise of changing society as much as the other great inventions of the 20th century, including the telephone, air travel, and radio and TV."
Gore really was the one guy who made everyone (outside of tech) realize that that sort of stuff would actually be possible if both companies and average people could connect their computers to a global network. Remember, in 1991, basically nobody even had a computer - but there they are talking about how this would be important well into the next century and already putting it on par with the telephone (which seems obvious now). So it's pretty fair to call it a remarkable bit of foresight.
Perhaps you'll take the word of Vint Cerf, you know, the guy who invented TCP/IP?
[T]here is no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore's initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet.
and
His initiatives led directly to the commercialization of the Internet. So he really does deserve credit.
He was instrumental in getting money to the NCSA, which used it to create the Mosaic web browser:
Gore's legislation also helped fund the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, where a team of programmers, including Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, created the Mosaic Web browser, the commercial Internet's technological springboard. 'If it had been left to private industry, it wouldn't have happened,' Andreessen says of Gore's bill, 'at least, not until years later.'
But I suppose those guys are just spouting bullshit too.
Amazing how the first people to shout about "political bias" are usually the only ones displaying it. If you have even the slightest shred of honesty, you'll look into the actual events and admit that you've been spouting nonsense - because even if you disagree with him on politics, shouldn't it at least be for... well, you know, actual reasons?
I have tiered passwords - one I use for a lot of stuff I don't care about, one I use for stuff I care about a little bit more (Slashdot is included;) ) and unique passwords for anything "high-security" - work account, bank/anything else involving money, etc. I happened to use the "weak" password for ubuntuforums and - by definition - I don't really care if any other accounts are compromised. To put it in perspective, that's the password I use on sites that don't even hash their passwords, so the attacker getting a salted hashed password is pretty low down on my concerns. But I have reset that "weak" password anyway.
Yeah I know... Flaky connection here, and I checked it after I clicked the preview button (by habit) and nothing happened so I clicked again. Maybe the first one (without the check) went through. I'm fine if people would rather downvote me... not short of karma
Sorry, you don't know much about how power generation works. All your points are valid, but there are market incentives in the system to provide the redundancy you talk about.
Basically a regional grid authority asks each power plant what their marginal cost is (there's separate consideration for fixed costs). This all gets put on a graph of capacity vs marginal cost - i.e., hydro and wind is lowest (negligible marginal costs), followed by nuclear, coal, gas, etc all the way to "peaker" plants. Everybody is paid the "clearing price" - the marginal price for providing the last megawatt of capacity requested (determined the night before, broadly)
- There's tons of excess capacity. Some is a hot-spare and ready to take on load at a moment's notice in case a plant goes offline, or some other fault. Some just is sitting around because they don't think they'll need it that day (peakers are usually unused, gas plants are usually unused overnight, etc).
- There are economic incentives involved to power plant operators, in the form of premiums for things like black start capability, that address exactly the sort of "redundant" excess capacity (over the unused capacity from above) that's sometimes necessary.
The blackout in question was a transmission issue. A line failed, load was shifted to another one, that took on too much load and sagged and died, power couldn't go anywhere, grid goes kaboom. That's completely separate from generation - the problem was too much generation, not not enough.
Interesting. You may want to complain to your cell company. I once was watching a severe thunderstorm come in and the radio, TV, phone, and computer all went off within about ~5 seconds of each other (TV (via cable) was actually last). I assumed it was just some common feed for all of them.
THIS IS NOT NEW! This is simply an extension of the existing alert system (a direct descendant of CONELRAD in the '60s) to cellphones. Previously it applied (with the exact same rules!) to cable companies, broadcast TV and radio, weather radio, etc. Specifically the Presidential alert that everybody seems to be annoyed about has been in place since the very beginning.
And I don't know why you put weather alerts lower down than a poisonous gas. You must not have lived in a tornado-prone area.
I receive these alerts on my cell phone. I appreciate knowing when a severe thunderstorm warning or flash flood warning is issued - I've gotten both while I was outside and away from anything else to notify me. I was actually woken up by this AMBER alert thing, and I was annoyed, but I turned off AMBER alerts specifically and went back to sleep.
This has been true since the '60s - a broadcast station had discretion about the sorts of things they wanted to show, and how they wanted to show it, but not a Presidential alert. You're just getting mad about it now because - why? there's a cellphone involved?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it is. It's the hardest part of learning to land, which is the hardest part of learning to fly. It doesn't take much to screw up the flare, and it doesn't take much of a screwed-up flare to royally screw up a landing.
Example: If you're going too fast and you flare, you'll "balloon" off the runway. Now you'll be 15 feet off and bleeding airspeed - fast. Unless you are pretty comfortable with flying, you'll stall up there and drop like a stone onto the runway.
If I were the instructor, I wouldn't even risk it. I'd tell him to come in fast (~75 knots "dirty") to keep him well away from stall speed and just fly it onto the runway. He had plenty of runway (~7200 feet, C172 needs ~2000 to be comfortable) and nobody was worried about damaging the plane so a nice graceful flare is wholly unnecessary. It sounds like this is pretty much what they did, because he had a prop strike.
He almost certainly did have ILS, actually, but you'd have to be crazy to try and explain shooting an approach to someone who's never flown before. Much better to say "fly at the runway, once you're over it cut the engine and try not to land".
(I am a student pilot, and I fly a Cessna 172)
This guy is clearly a badass, but his best trait is keeping his head on straight, knowing something about how airplanes work, and figuring out how to talk to someone. Landing is also a lot simpler if you don't care about damaging the plane (he had a prop strike) or landing on a runway that's not 4x longer than you'd usually use. Once you can talk to someone who's flown planes, you're pretty much OK as long as you don't melt down - do what they tell you, which will probably consist of a crash course in flying (what the instruments are, what's important about them, how to control the plane, etc) followed by directions to fly the plane onto the runway and hold on tight. Normally there's more finesse involved in touching down smoothly, in a short distance, at a proper approach speed - but that goes out the window in an emergency.
I don't want to sound like I'm diminishing Mr. Wildey's accomplishment - keeping cool in that situation is very hard, and avoiding being a smoking hole in the ground is even harder with no experience. This guy should take some flying lessons, if this whole thing hasn't soured him on the idea of small planes. Maybe he can even log this in his logbook (not entirely kidding!).
For anybody regularly flies with somebody in a small plane, there are classes out there that will prepare you for exactly such an emergency - a few hours of basic flying, radios, and landings. Don't assume your flight sim experience will do you any good, except for maybe knowing what the instruments are. The most important part is keeping a cool head - you're eventually going to land, and it'll turn out a lot better if you keep calm and think it through.
Unfortunately that more or less matches up with my experiences. My parents live in a 2-square-mile town in northeast NJ. Most of the town has FiOS, but their little section does not. It's been about 5 years since the town was "getting" FiOS but it's still unavailable and they've clearly stopped doing additional work.
Meanwhile, they've stopped doing any work on their older copper infrastructure, you know, because everybody has FiOS and they'd rather put the money into that. I can't blame them for that, but then fucking finish installing FiOS! Especially because my parents still use POTS and DSL (much better than paying Comcast). So they live in one of the most populous areas of the country and have DSL that tops out at 3Mbps - either that or Comcast.
Without a doubt people still use faxes, and it's stupid. But for most people (and arguably everybody at the beach) the wireless data they're going to be sending is not a fax. Instead it'll be a 12-million pixel image they took with a playing-card sized (but slightly thicker) device. Oh, and it'll probably go faster than the fax they sent in that video (well, it depends on the beach).
To be fair about the GPS thing, it was operational by 1993 (ads are 93-94) and given the success of LORAN, it was pretty clear that the ability to precisely locate one's self would be extremely useful to civilians (though this was before Clinton declared that it would officially be a "dual use system"). Toss in a little bit of Moore's Law and it was reasonable to expect that it wouldn't be too long before you could store road information, compute a route, render it in real-time, and synthesize audio to describe it.
Though I agree, those are a pretty impressive series of ads. Funny what they got wrong - that we'd be sending a fax instead of high-resolution images or live video from the beach, or that we'd make a full screen video call from a phone booth instead of a playing-card sized cellphone or magazine-sized tablet. And the strong AI right at the end.
Because patents are very time-limited and they come with public disclosure. You do understand that patents, copyrights, and trademarks are completely different, right?
It's true, I'm afraid. Worse TV/DVR/STB, quality and interface (and I have the good box apparently), less on demand, worse customer service, and more expensive.
I will grant that they have quite decent internet - they do IPv6 properly with prefix delegation, and I even get slightly more (consistently) than I pay for - but Comcast does internet pretty well also, and TWC is still more expensive.
Anecdote - when I signed up, I had to wait *2 weeks* for an appointment to hook it up. All the appointments were 8-5, and I work during the day. I would just go in an hour or two late or come home an hour or two early, but they are only willing to schedule 4 hour blocks and I couldn't take a half day off at the time - especially with no internet to work remotely. And they were all taken anyway. I was around weekends, but they only did Saturday, and they were all full for those 2 weeks. Incredibly miserable experience. I would have run the damn wire myself if they'd let me.
Chrome has certificate pinning. Basically it means that if you access a Google property, it's checking for a specific certificate - not just any old cert signed by any old CA. Sure, this doesn't help you if you're not using Chrome, but if the NSA was trying to do a blanket MITM, all Chrome browsers would blow up and you'd definitely hear about it.
I likewise work for Google (though the opinion here presented is my own), and I know a lot of people (some of whom are very high up) would be quitting if Google was kowtowing to government requests (excepting lawful warrants). There are *tons* of people who spend their days trying to protect all this information from any external entity, and if it came out that they were just wasting their time because there was some back door, they'd feel betrayed.
HDCP is already busted and has been for years. As if it mattered, because the only things worth protecting with it (HD movies) are already decryptable straight from the disk.
Ah. So the thing is, he did create the Internet with a capital I. Before that, it was the NSFnet and the ARPANET before that. What made it the Internet was that it was something the average person could actually connect to and use. Read the terms of use of the NSFnet - they're not at all conducive to the average person getting online. Even if a dial-up ISP would've been allowed to connect to it, there'd be nothing for the average person to do with it.
Nobody is claiming Gore had anything to do with the technology. But the difference between the NSFnet and Internet we know today has nothing to do with technology. Gore's contribution was realizing "hey, this could be huge for everybody else too" and making it happen. Reading Bush Sr.'s remarks on signing the bill is very interesting. Some quotes: "It holds the promise of changing society as much as the other great inventions of the 20th century, including the telephone, air travel, and radio and TV."
Gore really was the one guy who made everyone (outside of tech) realize that that sort of stuff would actually be possible if both companies and average people could connect their computers to a global network. Remember, in 1991, basically nobody even had a computer - but there they are talking about how this would be important well into the next century and already putting it on par with the telephone (which seems obvious now). So it's pretty fair to call it a remarkable bit of foresight.
Perhaps you'll take the word of Vint Cerf, you know, the guy who invented TCP/IP?
and
He was instrumental in getting money to the NCSA, which used it to create the Mosaic web browser:
But I suppose those guys are just spouting bullshit too.
Amazing how the first people to shout about "political bias" are usually the only ones displaying it. If you have even the slightest shred of honesty, you'll look into the actual events and admit that you've been spouting nonsense - because even if you disagree with him on politics, shouldn't it at least be for... well, you know, actual reasons?
I know this is a bit late for this story, but the factory images have been released.
Google uses ECDHE which makes their encryption dramatically more secure than the vast majority of others.
You don't need the adapter if your TV has USB ports. But otherwise what's the big deal? You plug your tv into power after all.
Yes it is.
I have tiered passwords - one I use for a lot of stuff I don't care about, one I use for stuff I care about a little bit more (Slashdot is included ;) ) and unique passwords for anything "high-security" - work account, bank/anything else involving money, etc. I happened to use the "weak" password for ubuntuforums and - by definition - I don't really care if any other accounts are compromised. To put it in perspective, that's the password I use on sites that don't even hash their passwords, so the attacker getting a salted hashed password is pretty low down on my concerns. But I have reset that "weak" password anyway.
Yeah I know... Flaky connection here, and I checked it after I clicked the preview button (by habit) and nothing happened so I clicked again. Maybe the first one (without the check) went through. I'm fine if people would rather downvote me... not short of karma
Weird, it showed the checkbox as checked for me...
Dupe of http://it.slashdot.org/story/13/07/21/0318243/ubuntuforumsorg-hacked
Posting anon so no karma whoring
Sorry, you don't know much about how power generation works. All your points are valid, but there are market incentives in the system to provide the redundancy you talk about.
Basically a regional grid authority asks each power plant what their marginal cost is (there's separate consideration for fixed costs). This all gets put on a graph of capacity vs marginal cost - i.e., hydro and wind is lowest (negligible marginal costs), followed by nuclear, coal, gas, etc all the way to "peaker" plants. Everybody is paid the "clearing price" - the marginal price for providing the last megawatt of capacity requested (determined the night before, broadly)
- There's tons of excess capacity. Some is a hot-spare and ready to take on load at a moment's notice in case a plant goes offline, or some other fault. Some just is sitting around because they don't think they'll need it that day (peakers are usually unused, gas plants are usually unused overnight, etc).
- There are economic incentives involved to power plant operators, in the form of premiums for things like black start capability, that address exactly the sort of "redundant" excess capacity (over the unused capacity from above) that's sometimes necessary.
The blackout in question was a transmission issue. A line failed, load was shifted to another one, that took on too much load and sagged and died, power couldn't go anywhere, grid goes kaboom. That's completely separate from generation - the problem was too much generation, not not enough.
Interesting. You may want to complain to your cell company. I once was watching a severe thunderstorm come in and the radio, TV, phone, and computer all went off within about ~5 seconds of each other (TV (via cable) was actually last). I assumed it was just some common feed for all of them.
It's not a text, it's a different (but similar) protocol. Even if it were, they're specifically exempted from fees.
THIS IS NOT NEW! This is simply an extension of the existing alert system (a direct descendant of CONELRAD in the '60s) to cellphones. Previously it applied (with the exact same rules!) to cable companies, broadcast TV and radio, weather radio, etc. Specifically the Presidential alert that everybody seems to be annoyed about has been in place since the very beginning.
And I don't know why you put weather alerts lower down than a poisonous gas. You must not have lived in a tornado-prone area.
I receive these alerts on my cell phone. I appreciate knowing when a severe thunderstorm warning or flash flood warning is issued - I've gotten both while I was outside and away from anything else to notify me. I was actually woken up by this AMBER alert thing, and I was annoyed, but I turned off AMBER alerts specifically and went back to sleep.
This has been true since the '60s - a broadcast station had discretion about the sorts of things they wanted to show, and how they wanted to show it, but not a Presidential alert. You're just getting mad about it now because - why? there's a cellphone involved?