Tired of the US intervening overseas? Well, we'll stop. The US will withdraw within its own borders, remove every soldier, ship, and aircraft stationed overseas. We will continue to patrol the oceans in protection of US vessels and those carrying goods made in or bound for the US. Other than that, we will not interfere in any way with the actions inside or between other countries.
However, we will prosecute, swiftly and with decisive force, any hostile action taken against US citizens abroad. Kidnap one, and the SEALs will be paying you a visit. Attack the US itself, its citizens at home, do so much as drop a single bomb on US soil or blow up your speedboat next to a US warship, and your country will cease to exist in the span of a few hours.
I will add that, from an engineer's perspective, Scheme was useless. Thankfully, the school wisened up (though not till after I took the scheme class...) and now has engineers doing a Matlab course. Non-technical majors take something with java or python, I think.
See, the point is not to teach all students FORTRAN (or Matlab, or whatever). The point is to teach it to those who might actually use it.
RTFS--the author was asking what language NON-CS people should be learning. For example, I was an engineering major (aerospace). Teaching me Java or php would be absolutely useless, because I am never going to use those in the real world. Matlab and FORTRAN are quite fine, though, because there's a decent chance that I would wind up using them later on in my career.
(Of course, at the time, GT made everyone take Scheme, which was completely pointless for about 80% of the student body... I would have much rather learned Matlab properly than try to figure it out on the fly later)
These are undergraduate students. It is safe to assume that each and every one of them has been writing programs in high school in Python, Perl, or Ruby.
FAIL
Where the hell did you go to high school? I went to a high-ranked public school in a nice area, and the only way you got any programming at all was if you took the special programming class... where you did visual basic.
Remember, the article is not talking about budding CS majors or programmers. It's talking about engineers and science majors. In other words, yes, they are technically-minded, but I doubt most of them have any kind of programming experience at all. At best, they've used TI-Basic on their calculators.
In basic, the "Guvmint" exists to keep us safe and provide basic infrastructure. I would add in water, police, firemen... Oh, and the EPA, FDA, etc. we need those kinds of watchdog agencies.
Fair enough. I will disagree with some of the actions those agencies have taken, but overall, we'll agree with that.
Does the government own GM now?... No. No it does not. It's just a big shareholder.
Methinks you need to reacquaint yourself with the idea of shares. When you buy a share in a company, you are buying part ownership of it, and a partial say in how it is run. When you own a majority of the shares, you essentially do own the company, as any decision you make will stand--nobody can outvote you, unless you split your own vote.
People whine about the inefficiency of the government, then they drive on the roads, enjoy the protections of police and firemen, use the public school systems, buy homes that aren't death traps thanks to building codes, reap the benefits of cheap shipping due to interstate highways..... etc etc etc.
Your argument doesn't follow. Saying something is inefficient doesn't mean you're complaining about the existence of the thing itself. We all enjoy the protection of the military, for example; I support having a strong and competent one (when and how it's used is another matter). But that doesn't mean I'm happy about the horribly f'ed up and inefficient procurement process it uses. Billions of taxpayer dollars wind up wasted due to beaurocratic screwups, political incompetence, and so on.
I'd add that the people contributed at least a little bit... they got used to the idea that insurance should pay for every little doctor's visit, shot, and boo-boo. That was, of course, accepted and encouraged by the hospitals and other providers, since they could charge the insurance a lot more and they'd still get paid. And the customer walks away saying "I only paid $10" or "it was free!"
That's human nature, of course. We'd rather the payments for the things we buy be abstracted away and paid separately, even if it means paying more, because it makes us feel like we're getting something for free. Just look at credit cards.
Perhaps someone should go study how the right people got to the right places so that stuff like the Manhattan Project could get done.
I'd suspect a lot of it was hiring qualified people who knew their shit, rather than following the almost universal practice of hiring whoever kisses ass with the most finesse. They also probably didn't half-ass stuff that they knew would need to be reworked just to show "visual progress*".
*I absolutely, positively despise that fucking phrase. Any of you manager types who demand it from your minions better learn from Boeing's example of what happens when you throw shit together in a rush to meet an arbitrary deadline of rolling something out--shit gets messed up and you spend more time and money to fix the resulting problems than you would have just to do it right the first time.
I'd suspect that China's refusal to support intervention has less less to do with wanting to leave everyone alone and more with just opposing it because it's the West.
Remember, China (or at least its government) is still a Leninist state. They may have opened up trade and dabbled in the free market, but that's just because they realized a complete command economy just doesn't work. China's like a drug dealer, in a way--we're both quite happy to do business, because it makes him rich and gets us high... but he certainly doesn't have our best interests at heart. They've been laughing all the way to the bank for a couple decades now.
To be fair, that sounds like the aerospace company I worked at for a while. The giant Samba share drives didn't store certification data or production drawings or anything like that (such things were handled in a document-control system with version tracking and all that), but it was rather a big share drive for convenience... pictures, videos, presentations, department budget data, spreadsheets, etc. It was basically just an interdepartmental shared space for things that didn't need to be emailed or whatever. It was convenient because everyone could access it, and you could get to it from anywhere in the company (like if you had to present in another building; just pull it up straight from the share on the presentation computer).
Stuff that needs versioning or document control should be handled through SmarTeam or Serena PVCS or something, at least.
I'd like to point out that the computer systems in question are not decision-making ones--they don't need or care about the weather patterns, for example. They merely translate stick movement into control surface movement according to thoroughly-documented, well-understood, and highly-tested equations.
Basically, a fly-by-wire system is a feedback controller. It (a)compares a commanded parameter like roll rate, G-force, AOA, or whatever (depending on the system) to the corresponding actual state of the aircraft, (b) runs that difference through an equation whose constants are determined by the airspeed, Mach number, AOA, etc. of the aircraft, and (c) spits out a command to the control surfaces to make the difference in the commanded and actual parameters go to zero. That's it. No decision-making, no artificial intelligence. It's just a developed version of, say, your HVAC thermostat or the ignition computer in your car.
Not exactly. Except for a couple of still-experimental programs, any feedback through the flight controls of a FBW aircraft is entirely isolated from the aircraft--they're simply some kind of spring resistance, like a cheap computer game joystick you'd buy at walmart. There is some testing underway of "active" controllers (very similar tthe force-feedback features of expensive video game joysticks, but again, that's at the preliminary stage.
THe F-16 is an interesting case. At first, the stick didn't move at all--it used force sensors to measure input. However, pilots complained, so they added in a little "give" to the stick--but it still flies from force measurements rather than by position.
Assuming that the theory of bad air data sensors is correct, force feedback (or the lack of it) would have made no difference. I'm reminded of the relatively recent B-2 crash on Guam, where moisture in the air data system caused erroneous airspeed readings, which were fed to the FCCs and resulted in a loss of control.
Hmm... "sumdumbass" is a pretty good username for you, actually. These computers do not make decisions, they do not "choose" to do things. They are actually little more than dumb feedback controllers.
You have no clue how these systems work, you have zero experience with them, you imagine that they're some kind of AI out of Star Trek or something, and they aren't. If you have no clue about how these things work, you ought to shut the hell up and stop talking about them as if you do know.
Sincerely, an aero engineer who works on FBW systems.
More accurately, there are very few people on Slashdot who have any fracking clue how a fly-by-wire system works. It's evident from the comments; just like everything else, people go spouting off and making claims about what they think things are like based on just a tiny bit of knowledge and their own prejudices, rather than looking at the facts and finding out what things actually are.
(Full disclosure: My day job is developing and testing a new FBW system, and I took an entire course dedicated to this in college.)
FBW systems are not the autopilot. They are not autonomous AIs, they do not make their own decisions, they do not just arbitrarily "decide" to go do something against the pilots' wishes. FBW systems are, in essence, little more than simple feedback control loops, similar to the familiar PDI controllers we all remember from control theory classes. All they do is compare the current state (pitch/yaw/roll angle and rate) with the one commanded through the stick, and try to make the two match by moving the control surfaces. The biggest difference is the presence of limiters which will prevent the aircraft from exceeding certain parameters (usually G load and angle of attack). That's it. That's all there is to a fly-by-wire system. It's just a controller.
In fact, let's compare a "traditional" manual system with a (simplified) FBW one from the pilot's perspective. In a traditional system, the stick/yoke in the cockpit is directly mechanically connected to the control surfaces through pushrods, bellcranks, cables, pulleys, etc. A given deflection of the stick will always result in the same deflection of the surface. For our purposes, we'll assume it's roughly linear, so Dsurface = K * Dstick. Now, let's look at the airplane as a whole. A given deflection of a control surface will not always achieve the same result--at low speeds, you need more deflection for a given response than you do at high speed. The net effect is that, at low speeds, the pilot needs to make large deflections of the stick make a given maneuver. At high speeds, he only needs to move the stick a little bit. It's kind of like your car--the steering gets more sensitive the faster you go; you wouldn't use the same inputs on the freeway as you do in a parking lot. Matching the desired response with the control input is the pilot's job--he's the feedback loop connecting control surfaces with the desired flight path.
A FBW system, on the other hand, doesn't have mechanical connections between stick and surface. Instead, the stick uses force or deflection sensors to read the pilot's input. That input is fed to the FCC, which then sends signals to the actuators on the control surfaces. Instead of commanding a given control surface deflection, the pilot's input will usually command something else, eg. roll rate or G load. Rather than varying according to speed and aircraft position, this will be constant--in other words, the command for 20 deg/sec will be the same at really low speeds as it will at high speeds. Basically, the pilot is telling the aircraft "do this", and the FCC figures out how to achieve that by moving the surfaces.
A FBW system will also often have limiters, which prevent the aircraft from exceeding certain parameters. Most common are angle-of-attack and G limiters. Angle of attack (AOA) is the relative angle of the aircraft to the oncoming air. Imagine sticking your hand out the window of your car, palm downwards. As you slowly rotate your hand so your palm faces forwards, notice that your hand wants to go up--you're making lift, and the angle of your palm to the airflow is your hand's AOA. Notice, though, that once you rotate too far, you stop generating lift--that's a stall. On a wing, the amount of lift generated is roughly linearly proportional to AOA, at least up to a point. Past that critical AOA, the air stops flowing smoothly over the top of the wing and gets all jumbled, causing a loss of lift. That's what a stall is.
Field sobriety tests, as usually performed, are absolute bullshit. I know several people who can't pass them completely sober.
What you need to do is ask the officer to demonstrate what he wants you to do. Claim you aren't sure what he means, and ask him to show you so you understand. Take charge of the stop. And when you get home, file the FOI request to get the camera footage:)
Any limitations on federal power went out the window when it became generally accepted that regulating "interstate commerce" means regulating anything that could theoretically take place across state lines. In other words, if you could somehow, in any possible way, stretch that to be done across state lines, it's "interstate commerce".
I agree it's not right. But when has a government (or branch of it) ever voluntarily given up power?
It seems to be outside the realm of allowed possibility that perhaps men, on average, enjoy being computer programmers more than women? Or that women enjoy being preschool teachers more than men? We'd be absolutely wrong to hinder in any way people who wish to pursue any career path, whether it's traditional for their gender or not.
The problem is that many people "choose" the traditional career path because their mothers and/or fathers shaped them to be that way. I agree that these sort of statistics can't show us what sort of discrimination is happening, or where it is happening, but they certainly do show discrimination at some level, in some area of society, which may or may not be intentional.
You missed the point. The problem is that you claimed all differences, any disparity at all in the gender distribution of a particular career, had to be the result of bigotry and discrimination. I agree that social pressures and discrimination may be responsible in part for such disparities (to varying degrees in different fields), but you can't claim it is the only cause. It's quite possible that, averaged over the entire population and normalized for background and all, there is some innate biological difference that would result in differences in aptitude or preference for various tasks. In either case, though, we simply don't have the data to run a proper study.
Yes, we should try and eliminate discrimination; no, we should not throw up barriers to people based on race or sex or whatever. But the goal should be equal and fair opportunity, not outcome.
The laws generally require that the kids attend some kind of school, at least up until a certain age (mid-teens or so). Whether it's public or private is up to the parents.
I'm slowly trying to learn Linux--just set up a home server with Ubuntu, although so far I'm just using it as little more than a fancy network storage disk.
The trouble for me is a combination of "look and feel" and the entire paradigm of operation.
For example, the DOS/Windows system of "C:", "D:", etc for different drives is thoroughly ingrained in my mind--I've been using that system for most of my life, ever since my parents got their first computer in 1992 (a 486 running Win 3.1). I'm used to the directory tree structure, where things are generally found, how to access various parts of a program, how to modify/tweak stuff, etc.
So far (and I could very well be wrong about it) Linux basically globs all of the storage together into one equivalent of the C drive, and then chops it up into various partitions, which I assume are like top-level folders. Certain ones seem to have significance in Linux, but I haven't figured out exactly which one does what yet. I haven't figured out where, say, firefox is installed (ie, where the executable and system files are, vs. configuration settings, etc).
The command line dependency also irks me a bit. It's not that it's super-hard to use or anything, but it's just kind of a pain. It's much easier for me to grasp what's going on when I can see a current status in a GUI than trying to keep track of things in my head. And even in the GUI, it's hard for me to find things just because I don't know where they are. That's just an experience thing, though.
Of course, the other reason I haven't switched is that the programs I use most often either aren't available for linux at all, or would be too expensive to obtain another license.
They use simple weapons because they're simple, cheap, and reliable. Plus, the manufacturing process for them is much easier, and it doesn't require advanced technology to make the reloads. It's the same reason why most colonization stories show draft animals and simple farming implements being used instead of advanced stuff. Man-portable directed-energy weapons also require some really sporty energy-storage systems; smokeless-powder-in-a-metal-case was perfected a while ago.
Actually, no. The only ones you find in geosynchronous orbits are generally communications and meteorological satellites (and those are actually in geostationary orbit--essentially geosynchronous at zero inclination, hence they seem to remain stationary in the sky).
Most spy satellites are going to be in fairly low orbit to get the resolution required. Sun-synchronous orbits (which pass overhead at the same time every day) are popular, because a constant shadow angle makes photoanalysis easier. They're usually designed with large propellant reserves, both for reboost and to allow retasking to different orbits.
This "90% of drug guns come from America" BS has been repeatedly refuted by the BATF itself in Congressional testimony--but it keeps getting repeated in the media because that's what they want to believe. In reality, only 90% of the small fraction of guns the Mexican government suspects may have come from the US actually get traced to US sources, and the overwhelming majority turn out to be stolen. The majority of the guns seized they don't even bother to trace, because they know (for various reasons) they could not have come from the US.
I mean, really. Why would a Mexican drug lord who wanted arms for his minions go through all of the trouble of getting them in the US, when he has so many better options? Obtaining firearms from the US civilian market requires either:
(a) finding someone with a clean record who is willing to commit a felony by "straw purchasing" a gun, most likely from a gun shop where the transaction is recorded and background checks performed, paying inflated costs plus tax and outrageous ammunition prices, illegally transferring the gun to someone else, and then smuggling it across the border, or
(b) finding someone willing to risk his life and freedom by stealing the gun from a gun shop or private owner, and smuggling it across the border.
Either choice essentially limits you to semiautomatic and bolt-action guns in common calibers. Trying to legally purchase a machine gun, for example, requires finding someone willing to go through a class III federal and state background check (which can take months) under false pretenses, paying several thousand dollars for the gun itself (the supply has dried up, so prices for existing registered and transferable machine guns can run from $3-4k at the low end, to $20k for an M16, to well over $50k or more for something like an M2.50), and then smuggling that across the border. Buying things like rocket launchers and grenades might be cheaper, but the process is even more involved..50cal rifles don't require special checks, but they also cost thousands of dollars, and ammunition for them is about $4 per individual round. They're also fairly rare; finding one for sale will be hard unless you're willing to wait months or more for them.
By contrast, there are several easier and cheaper ways to get fully-automatic firearms, rocket launchers, grenades, mines, and other military weaponry in Mexico. You can:
(a) Buy from/hire soldiers who deserted the army with their weapons, or police who did the same (b) Pay a corrupt cop, soldier, or government official to "lose" armament belonging to their employer (c) Buy them cheaply on the black market in South America or Africa, which for decades were flooded with military arms by both the US and the USSR to support guerrilla warfare (d) Buy them directly from China, who certainly wouldn't have qualms about selling and shipping them
As opposed to obtaining them from the US, the above options are much cheaper, involve less trouble, have fewer opportunities to be caught, and do not involve crossing the most secured border Mexico has (well, secured is a relative term...).
So: lots of trouble, limited selection, and high prices? Or much less trouble, wider selection, and much cheaper prices? Seems like a no-brainer to me. Like I said above, Mexico doesn't bother with sending most of the guns to the US for tracing because they obviously weren't purchased here. And I suspect the government also doesn't want anyone seeing just how many of them have "Propiedad del Gobierno Mexicano" stamped on the receiver...
This is why nowadays virtually all internal combustion engines of any power output use liquid cooling despite the apparent reliability benefits of air cooling. To take the transition period, WW2, as an example, you only have to look at the complexity of American rotary aircooled designs versus, say, the liquid cooled Merlin engine, to see the point.
(disclaimer: I'm an aerospace engineer who flies homebuilt airplanes)
I see what you're getting at, but comparing server cooling to aircraft engines is a little more complicated than that. The issue isn't really power output.
The biggest benefit of the liquid-cooled engines of the era was that they were more easily packaged. Instead of having to have a big, round, gaping cowling with a radial engine, you could package everything into a nice, tightly-cowled, low-drag V-12 shape with a clean radiator duct somewhere else. You got a nice clean airframe from that, but you had to put in the radiator and all of the piping and regulation equipment associated with it. Sleek, fast, high-altitude fighters like the P-51 needed this drag reduction.
Aircooling an aircraft engine, on the other hand, doesn't require ducting, radiators, or filters--you can quite literally have it just hanging out in the breeze. You do have to worry about the drag imposed by this arrangement, which is mostly done through careful attention to cowling shape and the cooling intlet/exhaust design. It's mechanically simpler.
However, the most noticable difference is apparent in damage tolerance. A liquid-cooled engine is entirely dependent on its radiator and cooling fluid to keep working. A single little hole anywhere in your coolant loop meant that it was only a matter of time until your engine overheated and seized up. On the other hand, there are countless documented cases of radial-engined airplanes returning to their base or carrier with entire cylinders shot away, but the engines were still making power.
I'd actually argue that the air-cooled engine won out for most piston-engined aircraft applications. Look at the late-war/post-war bombers and transports like the B-36, C/KC-97, Constellation, Skyraider, Tracker/Tracer, Neptune etc. All of them use radial engines. I believe the most powerful aviation piston engines were all radials. All of them were air-cooled. Air cooling is the overwhelming choice for light airplanes, with only a few special cases being liquid cooled. (the state of light airplane engines themselves is a matter for a nice long rant that I will spare you from).
Of course, large piston engines virtually disappeared once turbines were available. More power and better reliability won the day.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, I have a solution.
Tired of the US intervening overseas? Well, we'll stop. The US will withdraw within its own borders, remove every soldier, ship, and aircraft stationed overseas. We will continue to patrol the oceans in protection of US vessels and those carrying goods made in or bound for the US. Other than that, we will not interfere in any way with the actions inside or between other countries.
However, we will prosecute, swiftly and with decisive force, any hostile action taken against US citizens abroad. Kidnap one, and the SEALs will be paying you a visit. Attack the US itself, its citizens at home, do so much as drop a single bomb on US soil or blow up your speedboat next to a US warship, and your country will cease to exist in the span of a few hours.
Like that better?
Georgia Tech grad, by chance?
I will add that, from an engineer's perspective, Scheme was useless. Thankfully, the school wisened up (though not till after I took the scheme class...) and now has engineers doing a Matlab course. Non-technical majors take something with java or python, I think.
I think you're missing the point.
See, the point is not to teach all students FORTRAN (or Matlab, or whatever). The point is to teach it to those who might actually use it.
RTFS--the author was asking what language NON-CS people should be learning. For example, I was an engineering major (aerospace). Teaching me Java or php would be absolutely useless, because I am never going to use those in the real world. Matlab and FORTRAN are quite fine, though, because there's a decent chance that I would wind up using them later on in my career.
(Of course, at the time, GT made everyone take Scheme, which was completely pointless for about 80% of the student body... I would have much rather learned Matlab properly than try to figure it out on the fly later)
These are undergraduate students. It is safe to assume that each and every one of them has been writing programs in high school in Python, Perl, or Ruby.
FAIL
Where the hell did you go to high school? I went to a high-ranked public school in a nice area, and the only way you got any programming at all was if you took the special programming class... where you did visual basic.
Remember, the article is not talking about budding CS majors or programmers. It's talking about engineers and science majors. In other words, yes, they are technically-minded, but I doubt most of them have any kind of programming experience at all. At best, they've used TI-Basic on their calculators.
In basic, the "Guvmint" exists to keep us safe and provide basic infrastructure. I would add in water, police, firemen... Oh, and the EPA, FDA, etc. we need those kinds of watchdog agencies.
Fair enough. I will disagree with some of the actions those agencies have taken, but overall, we'll agree with that.
Does the government own GM now? ... No. No it does not. It's just a big shareholder.
Methinks you need to reacquaint yourself with the idea of shares. When you buy a share in a company, you are buying part ownership of it, and a partial say in how it is run. When you own a majority of the shares, you essentially do own the company, as any decision you make will stand--nobody can outvote you, unless you split your own vote.
People whine about the inefficiency of the government, then they drive on the roads, enjoy the protections of police and firemen, use the public school systems, buy homes that aren't death traps thanks to building codes, reap the benefits of cheap shipping due to interstate highways..... etc etc etc.
Your argument doesn't follow. Saying something is inefficient doesn't mean you're complaining about the existence of the thing itself. We all enjoy the protection of the military, for example; I support having a strong and competent one (when and how it's used is another matter). But that doesn't mean I'm happy about the horribly f'ed up and inefficient procurement process it uses. Billions of taxpayer dollars wind up wasted due to beaurocratic screwups, political incompetence, and so on.
I'd add that the people contributed at least a little bit... they got used to the idea that insurance should pay for every little doctor's visit, shot, and boo-boo. That was, of course, accepted and encouraged by the hospitals and other providers, since they could charge the insurance a lot more and they'd still get paid. And the customer walks away saying "I only paid $10" or "it was free!"
That's human nature, of course. We'd rather the payments for the things we buy be abstracted away and paid separately, even if it means paying more, because it makes us feel like we're getting something for free. Just look at credit cards.
Perhaps someone should go study how the right people got to the right places so that stuff like the Manhattan Project could get done.
I'd suspect a lot of it was hiring qualified people who knew their shit, rather than following the almost universal practice of hiring whoever kisses ass with the most finesse. They also probably didn't half-ass stuff that they knew would need to be reworked just to show "visual progress*".
*I absolutely, positively despise that fucking phrase. Any of you manager types who demand it from your minions better learn from Boeing's example of what happens when you throw shit together in a rush to meet an arbitrary deadline of rolling something out--shit gets messed up and you spend more time and money to fix the resulting problems than you would have just to do it right the first time.
I'd suspect that China's refusal to support intervention has less less to do with wanting to leave everyone alone and more with just opposing it because it's the West.
Remember, China (or at least its government) is still a Leninist state. They may have opened up trade and dabbled in the free market, but that's just because they realized a complete command economy just doesn't work. China's like a drug dealer, in a way--we're both quite happy to do business, because it makes him rich and gets us high... but he certainly doesn't have our best interests at heart. They've been laughing all the way to the bank for a couple decades now.
To be fair, that sounds like the aerospace company I worked at for a while. The giant Samba share drives didn't store certification data or production drawings or anything like that (such things were handled in a document-control system with version tracking and all that), but it was rather a big share drive for convenience... pictures, videos, presentations, department budget data, spreadsheets, etc. It was basically just an interdepartmental shared space for things that didn't need to be emailed or whatever. It was convenient because everyone could access it, and you could get to it from anywhere in the company (like if you had to present in another building; just pull it up straight from the share on the presentation computer).
Stuff that needs versioning or document control should be handled through SmarTeam or Serena PVCS or something, at least.
I'd like to point out that the computer systems in question are not decision-making ones--they don't need or care about the weather patterns, for example. They merely translate stick movement into control surface movement according to thoroughly-documented, well-understood, and highly-tested equations.
Basically, a fly-by-wire system is a feedback controller. It (a)compares a commanded parameter like roll rate, G-force, AOA, or whatever (depending on the system) to the corresponding actual state of the aircraft, (b) runs that difference through an equation whose constants are determined by the airspeed, Mach number, AOA, etc. of the aircraft, and (c) spits out a command to the control surfaces to make the difference in the commanded and actual parameters go to zero. That's it. No decision-making, no artificial intelligence. It's just a developed version of, say, your HVAC thermostat or the ignition computer in your car.
Not exactly. Except for a couple of still-experimental programs, any feedback through the flight controls of a FBW aircraft is entirely isolated from the aircraft--they're simply some kind of spring resistance, like a cheap computer game joystick you'd buy at walmart. There is some testing underway of "active" controllers (very similar tthe force-feedback features of expensive video game joysticks, but again, that's at the preliminary stage.
THe F-16 is an interesting case. At first, the stick didn't move at all--it used force sensors to measure input. However, pilots complained, so they added in a little "give" to the stick--but it still flies from force measurements rather than by position.
Assuming that the theory of bad air data sensors is correct, force feedback (or the lack of it) would have made no difference. I'm reminded of the relatively recent B-2 crash on Guam, where moisture in the air data system caused erroneous airspeed readings, which were fed to the FCCs and resulted in a loss of control.
Vindictive ranting is a form of stress relief for me :) Just blowing off some steam...
Hmm... "sumdumbass" is a pretty good username for you, actually. These computers do not make decisions, they do not "choose" to do things. They are actually little more than dumb feedback controllers.
You have no clue how these systems work, you have zero experience with them, you imagine that they're some kind of AI out of Star Trek or something, and they aren't. If you have no clue about how these things work, you ought to shut the hell up and stop talking about them as if you do know.
Sincerely,
an aero engineer who works on FBW systems.
The U-2 does just that, though the window is even smaller--on the order of 5 knots IAS, if I remember correctly.
More accurately, there are very few people on Slashdot who have any fracking clue how a fly-by-wire system works. It's evident from the comments; just like everything else, people go spouting off and making claims about what they think things are like based on just a tiny bit of knowledge and their own prejudices, rather than looking at the facts and finding out what things actually are.
(Full disclosure: My day job is developing and testing a new FBW system, and I took an entire course dedicated to this in college.)
FBW systems are not the autopilot. They are not autonomous AIs, they do not make their own decisions, they do not just arbitrarily "decide" to go do something against the pilots' wishes. FBW systems are, in essence, little more than simple feedback control loops, similar to the familiar PDI controllers we all remember from control theory classes. All they do is compare the current state (pitch/yaw/roll angle and rate) with the one commanded through the stick, and try to make the two match by moving the control surfaces. The biggest difference is the presence of limiters which will prevent the aircraft from exceeding certain parameters (usually G load and angle of attack). That's it. That's all there is to a fly-by-wire system. It's just a controller.
In fact, let's compare a "traditional" manual system with a (simplified) FBW one from the pilot's perspective. In a traditional system, the stick/yoke in the cockpit is directly mechanically connected to the control surfaces through pushrods, bellcranks, cables, pulleys, etc. A given deflection of the stick will always result in the same deflection of the surface. For our purposes, we'll assume it's roughly linear, so Dsurface = K * Dstick. Now, let's look at the airplane as a whole. A given deflection of a control surface will not always achieve the same result--at low speeds, you need more deflection for a given response than you do at high speed. The net effect is that, at low speeds, the pilot needs to make large deflections of the stick make a given maneuver. At high speeds, he only needs to move the stick a little bit. It's kind of like your car--the steering gets more sensitive the faster you go; you wouldn't use the same inputs on the freeway as you do in a parking lot. Matching the desired response with the control input is the pilot's job--he's the feedback loop connecting control surfaces with the desired flight path.
A FBW system, on the other hand, doesn't have mechanical connections between stick and surface. Instead, the stick uses force or deflection sensors to read the pilot's input. That input is fed to the FCC, which then sends signals to the actuators on the control surfaces. Instead of commanding a given control surface deflection, the pilot's input will usually command something else, eg. roll rate or G load. Rather than varying according to speed and aircraft position, this will be constant--in other words, the command for 20 deg/sec will be the same at really low speeds as it will at high speeds. Basically, the pilot is telling the aircraft "do this", and the FCC figures out how to achieve that by moving the surfaces.
A FBW system will also often have limiters, which prevent the aircraft from exceeding certain parameters. Most common are angle-of-attack and G limiters. Angle of attack (AOA) is the relative angle of the aircraft to the oncoming air. Imagine sticking your hand out the window of your car, palm downwards. As you slowly rotate your hand so your palm faces forwards, notice that your hand wants to go up--you're making lift, and the angle of your palm to the airflow is your hand's AOA. Notice, though, that once you rotate too far, you stop generating lift--that's a stall. On a wing, the amount of lift generated is roughly linearly proportional to AOA, at least up to a point. Past that critical AOA, the air stops flowing smoothly over the top of the wing and gets all jumbled, causing a loss of lift. That's what a stall is.
Field sobriety tests, as usually performed, are absolute bullshit. I know several people who can't pass them completely sober.
What you need to do is ask the officer to demonstrate what he wants you to do. Claim you aren't sure what he means, and ask him to show you so you understand. Take charge of the stop. And when you get home, file the FOI request to get the camera footage :)
Any limitations on federal power went out the window when it became generally accepted that regulating "interstate commerce" means regulating anything that could theoretically take place across state lines. In other words, if you could somehow, in any possible way, stretch that to be done across state lines, it's "interstate commerce".
I agree it's not right. But when has a government (or branch of it) ever voluntarily given up power?
It seems to be outside the realm of allowed possibility that perhaps men, on average, enjoy being computer programmers more than women? Or that women enjoy being preschool teachers more than men? We'd be absolutely wrong to hinder in any way people who wish to pursue any career path, whether it's traditional for their gender or not.
The problem is that many people "choose" the traditional career path because their mothers and/or fathers shaped them to be that way. I agree that these sort of statistics can't show us what sort of discrimination is happening, or where it is happening, but they certainly do show discrimination at some level, in some area of society, which may or may not be intentional.
You missed the point. The problem is that you claimed all differences, any disparity at all in the gender distribution of a particular career, had to be the result of bigotry and discrimination. I agree that social pressures and discrimination may be responsible in part for such disparities (to varying degrees in different fields), but you can't claim it is the only cause. It's quite possible that, averaged over the entire population and normalized for background and all, there is some innate biological difference that would result in differences in aptitude or preference for various tasks. In either case, though, we simply don't have the data to run a proper study.
Yes, we should try and eliminate discrimination; no, we should not throw up barriers to people based on race or sex or whatever. But the goal should be equal and fair opportunity, not outcome.
The laws generally require that the kids attend some kind of school, at least up until a certain age (mid-teens or so). Whether it's public or private is up to the parents.
Precisely this.
I'm slowly trying to learn Linux--just set up a home server with Ubuntu, although so far I'm just using it as little more than a fancy network storage disk.
The trouble for me is a combination of "look and feel" and the entire paradigm of operation.
For example, the DOS/Windows system of "C:", "D:", etc for different drives is thoroughly ingrained in my mind--I've been using that system for most of my life, ever since my parents got their first computer in 1992 (a 486 running Win 3.1). I'm used to the directory tree structure, where things are generally found, how to access various parts of a program, how to modify/tweak stuff, etc.
So far (and I could very well be wrong about it) Linux basically globs all of the storage together into one equivalent of the C drive, and then chops it up into various partitions, which I assume are like top-level folders. Certain ones seem to have significance in Linux, but I haven't figured out exactly which one does what yet. I haven't figured out where, say, firefox is installed (ie, where the executable and system files are, vs. configuration settings, etc).
The command line dependency also irks me a bit. It's not that it's super-hard to use or anything, but it's just kind of a pain. It's much easier for me to grasp what's going on when I can see a current status in a GUI than trying to keep track of things in my head. And even in the GUI, it's hard for me to find things just because I don't know where they are. That's just an experience thing, though.
Of course, the other reason I haven't switched is that the programs I use most often either aren't available for linux at all, or would be too expensive to obtain another license.
They use simple weapons because they're simple, cheap, and reliable. Plus, the manufacturing process for them is much easier, and it doesn't require advanced technology to make the reloads. It's the same reason why most colonization stories show draft animals and simple farming implements being used instead of advanced stuff. Man-portable directed-energy weapons also require some really sporty energy-storage systems; smokeless-powder-in-a-metal-case was perfected a while ago.
you'll be required to provide a mouth swab. This will be sent away for drug analysis, and destroyed. There will be no DNA evidence kept.
Do you really, truly believe that?
Actually, no. The only ones you find in geosynchronous orbits are generally communications and meteorological satellites (and those are actually in geostationary orbit--essentially geosynchronous at zero inclination, hence they seem to remain stationary in the sky).
Most spy satellites are going to be in fairly low orbit to get the resolution required. Sun-synchronous orbits (which pass overhead at the same time every day) are popular, because a constant shadow angle makes photoanalysis easier. They're usually designed with large propellant reserves, both for reboost and to allow retasking to different orbits.
This "90% of drug guns come from America" BS has been repeatedly refuted by the BATF itself in Congressional testimony--but it keeps getting repeated in the media because that's what they want to believe. In reality, only 90% of the small fraction of guns the Mexican government suspects may have come from the US actually get traced to US sources, and the overwhelming majority turn out to be stolen. The majority of the guns seized they don't even bother to trace, because they know (for various reasons) they could not have come from the US.
I mean, really. Why would a Mexican drug lord who wanted arms for his minions go through all of the trouble of getting them in the US, when he has so many better options? Obtaining firearms from the US civilian market requires either:
(a) finding someone with a clean record who is willing to commit a felony by "straw purchasing" a gun, most likely from a gun shop where the transaction is recorded and background checks performed, paying inflated costs plus tax and outrageous ammunition prices, illegally transferring the gun to someone else, and then smuggling it across the border, or
(b) finding someone willing to risk his life and freedom by stealing the gun from a gun shop or private owner, and smuggling it across the border.
Either choice essentially limits you to semiautomatic and bolt-action guns in common calibers. Trying to legally purchase a machine gun, for example, requires finding someone willing to go through a class III federal and state background check (which can take months) under false pretenses, paying several thousand dollars for the gun itself (the supply has dried up, so prices for existing registered and transferable machine guns can run from $3-4k at the low end, to $20k for an M16, to well over $50k or more for something like an M2 .50), and then smuggling that across the border. Buying things like rocket launchers and grenades might be cheaper, but the process is even more involved. .50cal rifles don't require special checks, but they also cost thousands of dollars, and ammunition for them is about $4 per individual round. They're also fairly rare; finding one for sale will be hard unless you're willing to wait months or more for them.
By contrast, there are several easier and cheaper ways to get fully-automatic firearms, rocket launchers, grenades, mines, and other military weaponry in Mexico. You can:
(a) Buy from/hire soldiers who deserted the army with their weapons, or police who did the same
(b) Pay a corrupt cop, soldier, or government official to "lose" armament belonging to their employer
(c) Buy them cheaply on the black market in South America or Africa, which for decades were flooded with military arms by both the US and the USSR to support guerrilla warfare
(d) Buy them directly from China, who certainly wouldn't have qualms about selling and shipping them
As opposed to obtaining them from the US, the above options are much cheaper, involve less trouble, have fewer opportunities to be caught, and do not involve crossing the most secured border Mexico has (well, secured is a relative term...).
So: lots of trouble, limited selection, and high prices? Or much less trouble, wider selection, and much cheaper prices? Seems like a no-brainer to me. Like I said above, Mexico doesn't bother with sending most of the guns to the US for tracing because they obviously weren't purchased here. And I suspect the government also doesn't want anyone seeing just how many of them have "Propiedad del Gobierno Mexicano" stamped on the receiver...
This is why nowadays virtually all internal combustion engines of any power output use liquid cooling despite the apparent reliability benefits of air cooling. To take the transition period, WW2, as an example, you only have to look at the complexity of American rotary aircooled designs versus, say, the liquid cooled Merlin engine, to see the point.
(disclaimer: I'm an aerospace engineer who flies homebuilt airplanes)
I see what you're getting at, but comparing server cooling to aircraft engines is a little more complicated than that. The issue isn't really power output.
The biggest benefit of the liquid-cooled engines of the era was that they were more easily packaged. Instead of having to have a big, round, gaping cowling with a radial engine, you could package everything into a nice, tightly-cowled, low-drag V-12 shape with a clean radiator duct somewhere else. You got a nice clean airframe from that, but you had to put in the radiator and all of the piping and regulation equipment associated with it. Sleek, fast, high-altitude fighters like the P-51 needed this drag reduction.
Aircooling an aircraft engine, on the other hand, doesn't require ducting, radiators, or filters--you can quite literally have it just hanging out in the breeze. You do have to worry about the drag imposed by this arrangement, which is mostly done through careful attention to cowling shape and the cooling intlet/exhaust design. It's mechanically simpler.
However, the most noticable difference is apparent in damage tolerance. A liquid-cooled engine is entirely dependent on its radiator and cooling fluid to keep working. A single little hole anywhere in your coolant loop meant that it was only a matter of time until your engine overheated and seized up. On the other hand, there are countless documented cases of radial-engined airplanes returning to their base or carrier with entire cylinders shot away, but the engines were still making power.
I'd actually argue that the air-cooled engine won out for most piston-engined aircraft applications. Look at the late-war/post-war bombers and transports like the B-36, C/KC-97, Constellation, Skyraider, Tracker/Tracer, Neptune etc. All of them use radial engines. I believe the most powerful aviation piston engines were all radials. All of them were air-cooled. Air cooling is the overwhelming choice for light airplanes, with only a few special cases being liquid cooled. (the state of light airplane engines themselves is a matter for a nice long rant that I will spare you from).
Of course, large piston engines virtually disappeared once turbines were available. More power and better reliability won the day.