Do you even know any programmers? I don't know a single one (out of dozens and dozens) who thought "hey, I wonder what I should do with my life" and picked up the idea of coding from a career fair or something. Every single one started on their own, and it's easier than ever to do that nowadays.

I'm sure they would. It can't do them any less good than their war with the British, and continued attempts to convince the actual residents that they don't want to be British citizens.

Yes, this is called multimedia redirection and it seems to work with any DirectShow-using application (so you'd expect VLC to blow up).

AIUI the idea is that you just stream the compressed video, plus some metadata for "it goes here, it's this big, and it's at this point". It seems to work pretty well, because obviously the compressed video is much smaller than 30 images a second that need to be individually compressed.

There you go with ad homenims again. Who cares what Al Gore does? Even if global warming was going to swamp his house in the short term, surely he can afford to shore up, or even lose, a house.

What exactly do you think "hide the decline" means? Do you have a counter-explanation that's more plausible than the given one? Which, to save you the trouble, is:

The final analyses from various subsequent inquiries concluded that in this context 'trick' was normal scientific or mathematical jargon for a neat way of handling data, in this case a statistical method used to bring two or more different kinds of data sets together in a legitimate fashion. The EPA notes that in fact, the evidence shows that the research community was fully aware of these issues and that no one was hiding or concealing them.

Note that it needs to be compelling enough to justify the complexity of the "thousands of people are perpetrating a fraud on a massive scale with very little evidence" conclusion that follows naturally.

No, when you object to some of the most well-researched science around these days, and want it to be replaced with a bunch of ad homenims, that's drilling an ideology.

Omitted in this “scientific text” is the existence of other scientific data and theories, for example, the fact of mercury in vaccines. Nor does it mention the fact that the concept of vaccines preventing diseases is most actively promoted by those politicians who have a vested interest in imposing government regulations, which would allow them a greater control over the economy and people’s lives.

On the one hand you have established, well-understood science, and on the other you have vague incredulity that nobody else has ever thought of your arguments, plus the vague (or not-so-vague) suspicion that it's really all a conspiracy. I've yet to meet any of these pseudoscientific proponents who was really willing to argue the science - and because of it, people get tired of trying to explain things to these people and start telling them to just shove off, which is a shame because they interpret that as further evidence of the conspiracy, that they've found a hole in the argument as opposed to just exhausting everybody else's tolerance of willful cluelessness.

Thanks for the tip about trimming up ASAP for passenger's benefit. Yeah, the further I get, the more I appreciate trim - and I thought I appreciated it plenty! My instructor (I think deliberately) let me struggle through a few landings without trimming every attitude change. I certainly learned my lesson - if you don't touch the trim after midfield downwind, by short final you need so much back pressure you have a hard time rounding out and flaring. This gives you heavy hands, which makes you more likely to over-control, etc. But it creeps up on you, so you don't even realize how much you're fighting the plane until you get trimmed up and it just goes where you want it, no hands. My problem was I was thinking of trimming as an extra thing I had to do - really, it means you have less to do.

I made a comment somewhere else on this page to the effect of "don't think time in your home computer sim prepares you for flying". Trim is (IMO) the single biggest reason why - or perhaps the reason you need trim is. It's an afterthought at best if you're actually trying to fly a consumer sim, and certainly not emphasized. Plus, it's an extremely tactile thing (in a cables and bellcranks plane) - both to set up trim (just relieve the pressure) and the feedback of "man, I wish I didn't have to push/pull so hard to keep altitude/airpseed", because there's usually no force feedback. FBW and hydraulics usually are free of feedback too, but by the time you get to those planes you've spent enough time in a cables and pushrods plane to know what you're doing regardless.

The real thing is you need a very sophisticated setup to get something at all useful for training. If you just have a joystick, it's really hard to make precise movements, if you only have one screen it's hard to get the FOV you have while actually in a plane, see the instruments at the same time as outside, etc. My concern about (consumer) sims is that they give people a false idea of what sort of control inputs they'll actually need - especially when it comes to landing.

Mod parent up, and up, and up. Clearly a lot of people around here have spent a lot of time in flight simulators.

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).