There are several airports in Delaware, they just don't have scheduled airline service.

The entire point of the above articles is that this information was NOT a matter of public record. This request revealed information about all flights, including flights that were previously blocked from public view for privacy reasons. The government sure as hell has no business handing out the travel habits of everyone for public consumption. This isn't even remotely comparable to having your home address linked with your name, it's more like showing every movement your car has ever made.

The incredibly piss poor design of the original 360 in terms of airflow amazes me. You'd think that they would have at the very least brought someone in to do some basic consulting on heat dissipation in the case, but obviously they didn't spend any time at all thinking about it.

Seriously, if I remember right there were only two small exhaust fans in the entire system. Processor / Graphics were cooled only by a passive heatsink, nowhere near the intake of those fans. The only way to get any appreciable airflow past that heatsink would be to use a very restrictive shroud that forced those fan's intake to pass over the heatsinks. They used nothing. Nothing at all. The air around those heatsinks was pretty much completely stagnant.

With the first revision, they finally wised up and put a shroud in, but it only extends up to the front of the heatsinks and doesn't cover them. This most likely pulled air past the heatsink where they were near the shroud, but the far side still wouldn't have had much airflow.

They really just needed a fan blowing on the heatsink. It's the same basic strategy used in most computers. Move a lot of air past the areas of concentrated heat, then use case fans to slowly change the heated case air for fresh cool air. Heats up other components away from the big heat sources a bit more, but dramatically lowers temps for the processor. Either that or use properly designed shrouds that force ALL the intake air for those fans through the whole heatsink. Also, bigger fans so the thing didn't sound like a damn vacuum cleaner wouldn't have hurt.

I had basically the same experience. Many a marathon gaming session ended with me realizing I hadn't eaten anything since breakfast. My friends seemed to have similar experiences. Hell, it still happened when I played co-op games with them in college.

What are you talking about? The vast majority of Cat 5 is unshielded. On the off chance it does have shielding it's usually foil. The main noise rejection strategy with twisted pair is running a balanced signal, thus the requirement for signal lines in pairs.

Weekly tests are run individually at each station, and are not required to be automatically triggered. Programming should never be interrupted by a weekly test unless the station operator chooses to interrupt programming. At the radio stations I worked at, it was always placed into a regular break specifically to not cause an interruption.

What do you think Wildblue is?

Satellite internet is crap. There just isn't enough bandwidth available to get decent speeds out of it, not to mention the horrid latency.

Actually outside the US, it's common to see pressure in millibars. Common enough that text based weather products in the US commonly have both inches of mercury and millibars. If I remember right, the bar isn't an SI unit, but it is based off of the pascal.

As far as speed goes, cruising speed is usually given as a mach number, which is unitless. Slower speeds are commonly given in knots or nautical miles per hour. Despite the name, the international definition of the nautical mile is actually based off the meter (1852m) and yes, even the US uses this definition.

Measuring fuel in pounds and gallons still shows up, although I understand that gauges are just reprogrammed to display kilograms and liters when sold to countries where that would be more appropriate. There isn't really much in aviation that is still truly imperial.

You'd have to be falling pretty close to the speed of sound to get any appreciable compression effect. Air up to Mach 0.3 is usually treated as incompressible. From 0.3 to 0.7 it becomes more significant, but not nearly enough to do something like double in pressure. The only way to really get a "ram air" style pressure increase is with a supersonic flow.

If my estimations are correct, I highly doubt that at 30,000 feet terminal velocity would be above Mach 0.4. At that speed, pressure increase would almost certainly be in the single digit percentages at most. I'd be surprised if the effect was greater than about 3%.

Why not? There's nothing inherent about a GUI that prevents you from making mistakes. A poorly designed GUI could very well allow you to select conflicting options, and a good one could make it obvious and prevent it.

On the other hand, a program using a text based config could just fail silently, or it could print a useful error message that points you directly to the problem. I'm quite certain you can make configuration from great to shitty and everywhere in between in either a GUI or CLI environment.

When I was a sysadmin at a radio station, I wrote scripts that processed audio, including cutting and splicing. Having it automated saved a hell of a lot of time for the people that used to have to sit in front of a GUI and do it.

Of course, there's all kinds of audio work that couldn't be done by script. The point is, you need both kinds, even for audio and video.

Really??

The first (widely used) jet powered airliner went into flight testing in 1949. The first civilian nuclear power generating station went into service in the Soviet Union in 1954. I'm not sure that extra five years really made that much of a difference in terms of our knowledge of the particular technologies.

Keep in mind that the jet I'm referring to, the de Havilland Comet, killed a lot of people because of various design problems. The initial wing design didn't fare well in a stall, and the engine inlets tended to cause power loss at high pitch angles. Of course they're quite famous for several structural failures caused by metal fatigue. Our relatively poor understanding of how stress and fatigue affected the aircraft skin resulted in a bad design with lots of sharp corners.

I suppose you could argue that we've been flying for much longer than jets have been around, but I think comparing the use of the jet engine in flight with the use of nuclear energy in power generation is a more solid comparison. The jet really enabled air transportation in the form that we know it today. My point is that we were still at some pretty basic stages of learning how to make airplanes safe when nuclear power sprang into being, and a hell of a lot of advancement has been made in both industries since then.

That isn't how things work. Of course the shape of the falling object is important, but the mass is also a big factor. An object as light as an iPhone almost certainly has a much slower terminal velocity than a human. Remember F=ma. Small drag forces create enough acceleration to oppose gravity very quickly with light objects. Also, the iPhone is much less aerodynamic than you seem to think. It will almost certainly tumble during the fall, which will increase drag by quite a bit.

Also, objects do not approach terminal velocity linearly. It is true that it will probably take a human around 2000 ft to reach terminal velocity, but they will probably be 90% of the way there in less than half half that distance. If I had to guess, I'd say that an iPhone could reach terminal velocity in 1000 feet, but even if it didn't it would still be damn close.

Bullshit.

Let's assume a complete and total failure of the pitot static system. That takes out 3 instruments: airspeed, altimeter, and vertical speed indicators. Everything else would be fine. Yes, it's true they had no direct measure of the aircraft's speed but they still should have had a working attitude indicator. That would have given them pitch and roll information, and I'm sure there would have been at least some form of skid/slip indication which would have provided yaw information. Engine instruments should have also continued to work normally.

Now, let's talk about how the information they had was enough to keep them alive even in zero visibility. Since their engine instruments were indicating normal performance, and they had pitch and roll information from the attitude indicator, all they needed to do was place the aircraft in a typical climb attitude. This would have resulted in a normal climb, with an airspeed indication that was decidedly not normal.

At this point, it's up to the pilot to decide which of the instruments depicting this impossible situation are wrong. Their situation was also complicated by altimeters that were also not indicating correctly, but the method of resolution should still be the same. Increase throttles to climb power, maneuver the aircraft to a normal climb attitude, then troubleshoot. The pilot's reliance on the least reliable instruments and fixating on them rather than try to use secondary indications of the aircraft's speed (cockpit noise, control surface responsiveness) were what caused that crash. They were in a bad situation, but were in no way "doomed once they took off."

I've personally experienced an airspeed indicator failure while at the controls of a light aircraft at night. Mine was caused by a failure of the instrument itself, but it was still the only direct speed indication in the cockpit. Shortly after takeoff, the airspeed indicator suddenly stopped increasing. I pitched down to accelerate, but saw no change in the gauge. It became clear that it was impossible for me to have pitched down so far and not increased speed, so I checked the other instruments and found I was in a shallow dive and actually losing altitude. I returned the aircraft to what I knew to be a standard climb attitude and returned to the airport without incident. In the beginning, I was far too focused on the failed airspeed indicator, and should have not let things escalate to the point that I was slowly descending at low altitude. I certainly understand how it's tempting to focus in on that and not step back and consider the big picture, but it's what needs to happen in such a situation.