well, there actually has been a mid air collision of two planes off the coast of africa, a C-141 and another cargo plane <URL:http://www.c141heaven.com/65/pic_65_9405.html>, the accuracies of the flight control systems put them on exact paths and... well, the big sky theory <URL:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_sky_theory> was proven wrong once again... there are fundamental flaws in the current design of the airspace system, and the fact that we use walkie talkies to communicate in this digital age is rediciulous... I know there are some messaging systems out there (I have used them)... but in general.. we use 1950's tech to do our most critical communication (tower/approach, etc) - I don't even wanna think of the other safety concerns such an old system has such as hacking, or jamming of those comm systems during a critical phase of flight.

a similar incident happened over hawaii as well: <URL:http://blogs.abcnews.com/rapidreport/2008/02/sleeping-pilots.html>

JP
Commercial Multi Engine Pilot

TCAS: Traffic Collision and Avoidance System
each plane has an active TACAN and they peer -to- peer negotiate away from each other..... been available for a while now...
when coupled to an autopilot it even lets you sleep through your daily commute up the Hudson... ok not really...

John
3000+ hours Commercial Multi Engine Instructor Pilot

I'm sure I saw this quote on the bottom of slashdot a couple of months ago: "Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do." (Mark Twain) In my experience this is absolutely true. I love my work/coding when I'm working on the frivolous bits of projects that I'm not going to get paid for, or perhaps even finish - the moment any obligation sets in it totally ceases to be fun, right?

Just remove the dialer and you're set, Google! You're the paragon of innovation, you'll find a way to, you know, call people without actually dialling them!

Of course, I haven't read TFA, but is that possible? I mean, have Google not integrated the app into the normal contacts list in any way? That would seem to be the best thing, if you could add a 'Google Voice' field to the contact database with the calling details, then just select that 'address' from the list when you want to call somebody via GV and have the call automatically routed through the 'Google Voice' caller.. does Apple have an API that would support all that?

So it's ok for a company to produce baby food with melamine in as long as their directors have to pay more to buy that same polluted product ? Where does that leave the public ? Should we just issue refunds ?

Arnold is disputing the idea that all renewable energy used in CA be generated in CA. Fixed that for you. He doesn't care where it comes from. Fair play to the man. He's doing a better job than most US officials. Surprising considering he isn't a career politician. Or is that the reason ?

Not "that and" anything. Concorde had one crash, ever, a good 20 odd years after the stupid woman in NY complained about the noise. You wouldn't hear it over the cars these days. Concorde was making a profit. Politics took that bird down, the same as every other British technological advance since the US became the saviour of the human race. Our rocketry was part of the space race, our technology and innovation helped create satellites, manned rockets, computers and the atom bomb, and yet here we are buying shit from the US of A. So much for trans-atlantic cooperation. We cooperate, you sell us the results. cheers. 10 to 1 the next supersonic airplane looks just like concorde. I wonder if we'll get royalties ?

I think you need to stop loving it quite so much. Freeview varies in quality depending on the channel, but it's transmitted at 720x576 or less, and with 2-3Mbit average bandwidth.

Oh really ?

• bbc 1 - 15 Mbps 1024x576
• bbc 2 - 15 Mbps 1024x576
• itv 1 - 15 Mbps 764x576
• itv 2 - 15 Mbps 1024x576
• itv 3 - 15 Mbps 1024x576
• itv 4 - 15 Mbps 1024x576
• Ch 4 - 10 Mbps 1024x576
• more 4 - 10 Mbps 1024x576
• film 4 - 15 Mbps 1024x576
• E4 - 10 Mbps 1024x576
• Five - 15 Mbps 764x576
• FiveUSA - 15 Mbps 1024x576
• Fiver - 15 Mbps 1024x576
• Sky 3 - 9 Mbps 1024x576
• Dave - 9 Mbps 1024x576
• Yesterday - 15 Mbps 764x576
• Virgin 1 - 15 Mbps 764x576

The only reason some of those are lower resolution is because the program they are showing is lower resolution. 50s cowboy movies, Trek, and old episodes of soaps. I misremembered the vertical resolution in my previous post but the horizontal is right. By my calculations the average bitrate is 13.4 Mbps.

Come on mods, that was worth more than +3 funny.
I suddenly had a vision of a load of lab coated techs getting their knees up.

Ok, don't get confused, here is a summary: there are autonomous uav's (they have the intelligence to takeoff land, fly a mission ( waypoints, altitudes, orbit, drop bombs, return ), then there are standard UAV's: controlled totally by a human remotely. A third class of a uav - in development: an autonomous UAV that would - in theory - start to make decisions about its mission profile: pick targets, decide when to take off, respond to ground troop requests, etc.

there is no real technical difficulty in landing or takeoff - planes have had auto-land ability for decades- the problem is that the UAV: 1) doesn't have a 3d stereoscopic visual collision avoidance system like humans do 2) doesn't have a voice recognition system to hear other humans verbal avoidance commands: doesn't understand "dude! look out!" and 3) doesn't have the AI to deal with all the weird things that come up in flying big / small aircraft. (deciphering weather forecasts, deciding whether a target is legal/ethical, balancing mission profile with needs of ground troops, when to sacrifice itself to save others, etc , how to limp back to base under system failure (gracefully degrade), picking out an emergency landing field, etc etc

JP

Billie Jean (1983)
This is the video that changed history - the first video by a black artist to be aired on MTV. When the network refused to play the video the president of Jackson's record label threatened to go public with their stance on black musicians. MTV caved and Billie Jean was added to heavy rotation.

Due to the anti-ghosting features (or maybe multipath rejection) the current standard is unusable in a car/fast moving vehicle. There is an update to the standard to aleviate this oversight, but for now, all of those RV drivers /van drivers, and boaters who used broadcast TV will be SOL.

I think to date there are no (or very very few) ATSC capable portable tv's... hopefully someone corrects me, but that spells bad news for folks in hurricane prone areas who could lose power for weeks at a time....

JP