20981956
submission
longacre writes:
In the biggest breakthrough yet toward discovering the cause of the mysterious crash, French investigators this past weekend successfully downloaded the entire record of data from the recently retrieved flight data and voice recorders of Air France Flight 447.
20510788
submission
longacre writes:
Rarely is much attention paid to one of the most important design aspects of modern jet engines: the pieces of metal and composites that enclose them. Aviation safety expert David J. Williams explores the history and evolution of the engine cowling.
18980580
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longacre writes:
"At this year’s Super Bowl, AT&T is promising free wi-fi for all its customers. With over 100,000 fans expected to be in attendance, some serious computing power is needed. Here are details on the 8 million feet of ethernet cable, 6 million feet of copper wiring, 260 miles of fiberoptic cable and computing power aimed at giving fans instant digital gratification."
18980068
submission
longacre writes:
At this year’s Super Bowl, AT&T is promising free wi-fi for all its customers. With over 100,000 fans expected to be in attendance, some serious computing power is needed. Here are details on the 8 million feet of ethernet cable, 6 million feet of copper wiring, 260 miles of fiberoptic cable and computing power aimed at giving fans instant digital gratification.
17468592
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longacre writes:
The corpse of a Bolivian pilot was found in the country's snow capped mountain tops east of its capital, La Paz, 20 years after a plane crash, local media reported Wednesday. Benjamin Pabon Galindo died on October 19, 1990 after crashing a plane while transporting meat from Bolivia's northern Amazonian region of Beni to La Paz. Apparently, due to technical failure and severe weather conditions, the plane crashed into the Huayna Potosi mountain. Around 7 years after the accident, the body of another pilot that was also on board was found, but Pabon's bodily remains were not found until last Sunday by mountaineers hired by family members.
17373342
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longacre writes:
A Nicaraguan military commander is blaming Google Maps for accidentally leading his troops across the border into neighboring Costa Rica for a river cleanup operation. The official maps of both nations agree that Calero Island is within Costa Rican territory, but commander Eden Pastora inexplicably used Google Maps to plan his operation, in which Nicaraguan troops allegedly destroyed a Costa Rican forest, scooped sediment out of a river and dumped the sludge on Costa Rican land. SearchEngineLand notes that use of Bing Maps would not have resulted in an international incident.
17214370
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longacre writes:
On Tuesday, the online travel powerhouses Expedia, Kayak, Sabre and Farelogix launched an alliance to lobby the Department of Justice--and the public--against Google's purchase of ITA, arguing that the deal would give Google an unfair influence over the air travel market. Not only could Google's own flight search detract from how these sites attract travelers on Google, but they fear Google could limit access to ITA products and services while keeping them for their own use. The alliance's website, FairSearch.org, details a number of their interests in the market, and their concerns based on Google's previous brushes with anti-trust regulators. They are also pooling their resources to put lobbying boots on the ground in Washington.
15629902
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longacre writes:
"The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has selected two companies to proceed with the next stage of its Transformer, known as TX—a fully automated four-person vehicle that can drive like a car and then take off and fly like an aircraft to avoid roadside bombs. Lockheed Martin and AAI Corp., a unit of Textron Systems, are currently in negotiations with DARPA for the first stage of the Transformer project, several industry sources told Popular Mechanics at a robotics conference here in Denver. DARPA has not announced the official winners yet."
15245108
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longacre writes:
Primitive technology and a cowboy mentality might have been to blame for the deaths of former Senator Ted Stevens and now the legendary Alaskan bush pilot John Graybill. Jeff Wise writes: "What makes it especially bitter is that technology exists which could make flying much safer, if only pilots would use it. Unfortunately, the frontier mentality so prevalent among bush pilots is often resistant to relying on technological solutions. ... The major killer in bush flying is "VFR into IMC," short for visual flight rules into instrument meteorological conditions--in other words, a pilot who is navigating by looking out the window suddenly finds himself in clouds. ... Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast, ADS-B, is a new technology that can prevent crashes. It relies on GPS receivers in each aircraft that broadcast their location to ground controllers and to other aircraft."
14793102
submission
longacre writes:
Erik Sofge trudges through NASA’s latest free video game, which he finds tedious, uninspiring and misguiding: "Moonbase Alpha is a demo, of sorts, for NASA's more ambitious upcoming game, Astronaut: Moon, Mars & Beyond, which will feature more destinations, and hopefully less welding. The European Space Agency is developing a similar game, set on the Jovian Moon, Europa. But Moonbase Alpha proves that as a recruiting campaign, or even as an educational tool, the astronaut simulation game is a lost cause. Unless NASA plans to veer into science fiction and populate its virtual moons, asteroids and planets with hostile species, it's hard to imagine why anyone would want to suffer through another minute of pretending to weld power cables back into place, while thousands of miles away, the most advanced explorers ever built are hurtling toward asteroids and dwarf planets and into the heart of the sun. Even if it was possible to build an astronaut game that's both exciting and realistic, why bother? It will be more than a decade before humans even attempt another trip outside of Earth's orbit. If NASA wants to inspire the next generation of astronauts and engineers, its games should focus on the real winners of the space race—the robots."
14502310
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longacre writes:
Blogger, lawyer and Popular Mechanics contributor Glenn Reynolds calls out the legally dubious practice of restricting photography in public places in the name of national security. From the article, "Legally, it's pretty much always okay to take photos in a public place as long as you're not physically interfering with traffic or police operations. As Bert Krages, an attorney who specializes in photography-related legal problems and wrote Legal Handbook for Photographers, says, "The general rule is that if something is in a public place, you're entitled to photograph it." What's more, though national-security laws are often invoked when quashing photographers, Krages explains that "the Patriot Act does not restrict photography; neither does the Homeland Security Act." But this doesn't stop people from interfering with photographers, even in settings that don't seem much like national-security zones."
13040442
submission
longacre writes:
Glen Derene at PopMech defends AT&T's new pricing plan: "AT&T's move away from all-you-can-eat pricing on June 2 has enraged many in the tech press--most of whom, I assume, own iPhones. I agree that some aspects of AT&T's pricing plan are unfair and even nonsensical. For example, charging an extra $20 a month for tethering, on top of an existing data plan, means that you are essentially paying twice for the same data usage. That being said, AT&T is taking its first, albeit clumsy, step toward a more equitable and sane way of moving data around the country--one that may end up solving the largely misunderstood problem of net neutrality."
He compares bandwidth to electricity: "Imagine, for a moment, if we bought electricity the way we buy data in this country. Every month, you would pay a fixed amount of money (say, $120), and then you would use as much electricity as you wanted, with an incentive to use as much as you could. That brings price stability to the end user, but it's a horrible way to manage electricity load."
And says that the current system gives no incentive for carriers to improve service: "There's no extra revenue generated by all that extra usage, so they are content to offer a quality of service that is only as good as their customers will bear (and many of those customers are trapped by multiyear contracts). If customers pay by the megabyte, then bad service directly equates to lost revenue for the carrier. This becomes especially important as we migrate toward 4G networks. Because on 4G networks, everything is data--including voice calls, which are handled as VoIP. Dropped calls equal undelivered bits, and undelivered bits should mean less revenue."
