there are two flight recorders

There are two data recorders on civilian airliners, which record different things : a flight DATA recorder (FDR) and a separate cockpit VOICE recorder (CVR). Though quite what new data these would provide is not at all clear to me. Do you think that the alleged Ukrainian fighter plane would have been in conversation with the plane or something? Why would they do that? What's the FDR going to contain? [Flying][More Flying][More Flying]All hell breaks loose, with many sensors and/or power and/or hydraulic buses going down. That's going to tell us that the plane wasn't CFIT by a mad pilot (which is an allegation I've not heard from anyone), and that there wasn't piecemeal falling apart of the plane because the welders were pissed the day they built that airframe (another allegation I've not heard). So what new information are they going to add?

I've never heard of any aircraft carrying two FDR and/or two CVR. Unless you know differently (citation, please). They're expensive bits of kit and take non-trivial maintenance, so only the minimum required is fitted.

What data did the FDR record? That's up to the operator - after the 88 parameters required by FAA specifications. (I assume the FAA requirements will be a minimum, as the airframe was by Boeing, so has made at least one flight originating in the US, and therefore subject to FAA regulations ; it may never have been subject to FAA regulations since, but re-programming and/ or re-wiring the FDR to comply with some other relevant standard would be a significant maintenance task, and why spend the money. I checked the FAA's standard here, and to my surprise they refer back to a European standard "European Organization for Civil Aviation Electronicsâ(TM) (EUROCAE) publication ED-112, Minimum Operational Performance Specification for Crash Protected Airborne Recorder Systems" ; if you want to follow the paper trail, feel free.)

CFIT - one of the most terrifying of aviation acronyms : Controlled Flight Into Terrain.

Oh, and why have I been "accused" of being an American?

Because you're posting on Slashdot, which has a large majority of Septics with their typically abysmal grasp of the world outside America.

Yep. It'd be in shadow all the time which means it would be perpetually cold. 26 to 35 Kelvin cold.

Not so. From Wikipedia :
Surface temp.
min mean max
Equator 100 K 220 K 390 K
85ÂN [6] 70 K 130 K 230 K
(Near-surface) cave systems internally attain the mean temperature of their surface environment over a period of decades or centuries (depending considerably on the rate of heat movement by air flow ; negligible in this case). So a mean temperature of 220K is comparable to the Antarctic Plateau stations in winter, but doesn't have the wind chill. The 85deg N station shouldn't be much of a problem.

Our experience (an important word and concept that) with space stations of various types, from the Apollo 13 use of their lunar lander as a lifeboat to the present ISS and Tiangong 1 space stations (and the planned Tiangong 2 and successors) shows that temperature control is not insurmountable, at which point, the radiation and meteorite shielding becomes more of an issue.

It is possible that there have been human-like creatures before, they evolved, left the planet,

You missed out the bit about cleaning up every sign that they'd ever existed. Which is not a trait that any human society has ever had.

Which is code for "extremely cold all the time".

And managing "extremely cold all the time" is much easier than having to manage rapidly changing temperatures.

40 minutes wasting their time. 50 minutes if the microphone slave was still idle while the boss was yelling at you. Good result. Got a recording?

Actually, scrub the last bit. While it'd be amusing, we all know in general what they're trying to do.

List of the domains / ISPs they host their malware on and of the exploits they tried? Just for shits'n'giggles.

Our point about 1984 not being SF was that the sociology etc was very much what Orwell was seeing happening around him in 1947, extrapolated in the directions that Orwell could see happening already. The convergence between right-wing and left wing that we're continuing with between the Russian oligarchic kleptocrats and the western corporate monopolists, for an example. Propaganda replacing information.

None of the important plot elements needed any technology which wasn't do-able in 1947 when he was writing, classifying it as general fiction, not as SF. I take the Niven line that good SF normally only requires you to believe in a small number of impossible things (if you follow Dodgson, six, before breakfast), then you follow the people. Orwell could have written 1984 as "1950" without stretching his user's credibility much and without the esoteric (to 1947) technology, so I don't think it fits "SF".

Sure, it's a future dystopia. That in itself doesn't make it SF. By that standard, Agatha Christie probably wrote things you might classify as SF (she may have done ; inventive woman with a poison pot and a locked room).

No. People who live in the same area. So I still think thats a good reason for killing everyone who lives close to you and your family. That's the logic of war.

BTW, are you talking about killing Russians who live in Russia (including Vladivostok, 9000+km away), Ukranians who live in the Ukraine, Russians who live in the Ukraine, Ukranians who live in Russia, or all of the above? Or shall we just glaze the whole area with nuclear weapons with the same success there has been in Iraq and Afghanistan (and which the Russians had in Afghanistan and Chechnya)? Don't forget that the Russians do still have a large and capable stock of nuclear weapons too.

I do a string-along about once a week (instead of just putting the phone back on it's charging cradle and doing something interesting). It normally takes them about 3 minutes to realise that I'm not running Windows XP (or 7 ; I don't know what they're going on about sometimes which I guess is them targetting Win8), then the cry "Mac, Mac!" goes out to their "tech expert". They then waste several minutes more trying to make Mac instructions work on my Linux machine. I've kept them from attacking other people for nearly 15 minutes in total before! A good investment of time.

OTOH, it remains a good indication of the relative popularity of systems.

So, the problem with first-person shooters is that you're running or crouching or jumping in the game but not in the real world, and because it's so realistic it can make some people (not everybody) feel nauseated if they start doing it for extended periods of time.

Wasn't there a whole series of hacks, starting with Doom-2 and probably continuing to every FPS since, which hooked up treadmills (or bicycles on stands), barbells on springs, grip-strength testers and suchlike fitness equipment so that you HAD to do the exercise to make the moves in the game.

Weren't very popular, as I recall - people couldn't do a 20-hour session every day without ending up looking like they were Special Forces dudes willing to get shot at for a pittance.

route directly above the conflict zone is somewhat counter intuitive.

Route along a great circle passing through the origin and destination points of the flight is the shortest possible route. Check out a globe, or learn some junior-school geometry.

In practice, you'd need to adjust the route slightly to get the correct directions of take-off and landing (runways aren't very flexible). And you'd have to avoid military restricted airspace (e.g., above and around Chernobyl, and the multiple NATO air bases in Germany.)

Ukraine subtends around 20degrees as seen from Schipol (the departure airport), so it's going to be very hard to avoid without adding substantially to the fuel bill. People want cheap flights. (I notice there were several Filipinos on the manifest ; there's a good chance they were seafarers returning home on leave from their vessels (I work with a LOT of these - over 80 on my vessel alone), and their employers are ALWAYS going to get the cheapest possible ticket. The guys themselves don't get a say in their routing.

In my book, everyone in that region is considered an idiot. Just nuke the damned area and get it over with.

Can we nuke your friends and family first. After all, they probably care as much about the Ukraine-Russia conflict as my friends and family in Eastern Ukraine do. So it seems only fair that they die first.

Sounds so much better than your plan, I think.

By coincidence I was discussing Orwell with a friend last night. We decided that while 1984 was fine sociology and politics, the plot really didn't depend at all on the small amounts of technoogy he described. The surveillance could have been provided by spies as well as by TV screens and cameras. "SF" isn't a category we'd put Orwell into.

How many times has that pistol been used?

Often enough.

Also do you have a high speed camera for a dramatic slow motion shot

Why? to fulfil your desire for snuff porn?

heh

Not laughing. People die in this sort of event.

I just checked again. Your desire for snuff pornography of my friends and colleagues dieing still doesn't cause me hilarity.

I was offshore when this happened. Our radio operator relayed the "abandoning radio room" message at 2:50 into that video, and I still can't watch any more. We flew home (and back out to work) over the smouldering stump that was the grave of 167 of our friends and colleagues for the next 3 months, until the flight paths were finally changed.

You know, I'm still not breaking out into laughter.

Remember that next time you fill up your car.

Google define:pariah
1.
an outcast.
"they were treated as social pariahs"

I'm not sure what word you were looking for, but I don't think it was that one. How about this one?

Regarding the art appreciation stuff, one of the things that makes it so hard for me to change mental gears from being a scientist to giving a shit about art is that everyone's opinion on art seems to be subjectively correct, from the bat-shit insane to the just incomprehensible.