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Comment Re:Just recycle the energy! (Score 3, Insightful) 221

Takeoff and landing are easy to the point where a computer can do it. You don't have to have any human interaction at all in those events. Many aircraft are already capable of automatic landing.

That's exactly what the crew of Asiana thought when they landed at SFO :)

You will still need a pilot who understands aviation in case the computer fails.

Comment Re:I hate online classes. (Score 2) 85

In-person back-and-forth interaction with the teacher is faster than online interaction. But one advantage of online over in-person is that you can ask questions any time, not just during the teacher's office hours.

In an ed2go.com class, you can discuss the homework online, but not the test questions. You can post your code online, and the teacher (and sometimes a student) will tell you what your mistake was. I've taken lots of classes from them. I was happy with most (not all) of my class's teachers.

I graduated from Western Governors University last year and got my master's degree. Everything was online, with the exception of the graduation party.

Teachers were just a phone call or e-mail away. And because they did not have to attend any classes either, they were usually *always* available. Some of them even in the weekends (since that's when most people study, next to their daytime jobs) until the late hours.

I did a two year program in less than 18 months. Try that with your traditional on-campus university.

Comment Re:Why Force Your Children to Live in the Past? (Score 2, Interesting) 734

move to sweden. Have fun with that 75% tax.

This. Exactly This.

Stay in Europe, and you won't be paying US taxes effectively, due to the foreign tax credits. Yes, you'll have to file a tax return every year, but that's not extremely difficult, especially if you don't have to pay any taxes. Taxes are significantly higher in most of Europe.

I faced a more or less similar choice a few years ago. Me and the misses were in the U.S. on a non-immigrant visa, and my wife was about to deliver. We could have chosen to deliver outside of the U.S. and avoid U.S. citizenship for my daughter. We chose to give birth in the U.S. so out little peanut would have dual (actually triple) citizenship. She will always be free to work in both the E.U. as well as the U.S. without any immigrant processing. She can choose to attend U.S. college, or European.

We reckoned that the simple fact that she would have to file a tax return every year would be an acceptable cost of all the benefits.

Comment Re:Let me be the first to say. (Score 4, Informative) 117

Harrison is such a badass that he survived the crash and was awake and alert when he was taken to hospital.

Looking at the pictures, he glided the aircraft to an open field and landed without the landing gear. This picture shows the cockpit intact, as well as the skidmarks from the belly-first landing.

Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing. If the aircraft is still serviceable afterwards, it was an excellent landing.

This was definitely a good landing :)

Comment Re:Ya Think? (Score 1) 60

You're just trying to impress everyone with you knowledge by pulling a regulation out of your hat.

Yes, this actually got me laid last night. Ain't that cool?

You actually need a damned compelling reason to exercise 91.3(b), which is why 91.3(c) exists. If you have been denied access to Class B / C / D (yep, they can deny you access), your engine quits, and you go gliding into the primary when you could have easily glided to a perfectly good airport, even a nice soft grassy field, outside the Class B for no reason other than you thought you could do whatever you want under 91.3(b)...you're fucked. In fact, even if that was the only reasonable option (other runway was too short, covered in clouds, mountainous terrain with no fields, whatever), you still better hope to hell no one can ever possibly blame you for the engine failure.

It's not that black and white. First of all, once I utter the words "I declare an emergency", or just squawk 7700, not a single controller will deny me class B clearance. They're trained to deal with the emergency first, handle the rest later.

Second, if I mess up in flight, that does not mean I deserve a death sentence by ATC denying me the best possible option to get out of my emergency. A very good example of this would be a VFR pilot flying into IMC. It is his own fault for getting in that situation, but ATC will do their best to help him out.

Yes, you may need to explain yourself to the FAA. But I rather be in the hot seat in front of the FAA than have my wife and kids say their last farewells.

You cannot exercise 91.3(b) if the emergency is your fault. If you forgot to switch tanks, cannot show that you were properly performing maintenance (like changing the oil), the FBO where you rented the airplane didn't do a 100 hour, whatever...you're fucked.

Total utter bullshit. You can exercise 91.3(b) at any time if the safety of the flight requires you to do so. Feel free to cite the rule that provides an exception for self-induced emergencies.

That does not say that you can do whatever the fuck you want. It means that the accountability comes afterwards, in the sense of "we have a number for you to call", once you're safely on the ground.

Comment Re:Ya Think? (Score 1) 60

Yeah, yeah, yeah. 14 CFR 91.3. Going by your logic, ATC has no job. Obviously, ATC's job is to safely operate the National Airspace System. 91.3 isn't going to get an airliner into a busy terminal through a layer of weather. When a pilot observes a conflict between an ATC clearance or regulation and the safety of flight, however, the pilot has the authority to deviate.

I don't think you get the idea behind 14 CFR 91.3.

Pilot makes mistake, pilot dies. Controller makes mistake, pilot dies. Pilot is the ultimate authority and thus has the ultimate responsibility over any flight. But he'll gladly take any help he can get.

I'm a big fan of ATC. I like flying in Bravo airspace. I like flight following when in Echo airspace. It helps me stay safe. But in the end, when I'm flying, I am flying.

Comment Re:Ya Think? (Score 3, Informative) 60

Getting everyone on the ground safely is the pilots' job. Keeping planes in the air safely is ATC's job.

Nope. Once an aircraft is moving on the ground under its own power, the flight has started and the pilot in command has the ultimate responsibility and authority over the safety of the flight. A pilot in command can deviate from any rule, clearance or law to the extent necessary to ensure the safety of the flight.

Comment Re:Uh ...wat? (Score 3, Insightful) 467

It's using information to garner a public lynching response

which, in this particular case, was the best thing he could have done.

His only three alternatives were, in order of saneability:

- do nothing;
- go to a local police station and see the complaint archived in a desk;
- do what I probably have done and get a shotgun out to protect his little girl from threats of sexual assault and worse;

This guy is the best dad this girl could have right now.

Comment Re:Because you're an idiot? (Score 1) 93

The systems I'm buying now will be obsolete by the time SSD can even think about touching hard drives in terms of capacity per $. Typically, the ONLY reason to go full SSD now for large storage capacities is because you absolutely need the performance and are willing to pay essentially "whatever it costs" (at least 8x+ the price) because it's that important to get the IOPS. Maybe by the end of next year we'll get it down to "only" 4x the price (not counting that though because price per GB for large capacity hard drives still continutes to fall, balancing out a part of the cost reduction in SSDs).

You're right, but also somewhat wrong.

"Raw capacity" is indeed quite expensive. However, the increased speeds of flash have made it possible to provide in-line data reduction services. Data reduction is a widely used term for two techniques: de-duplication and compression. This works on a block level. When the host writes a block, the system will look in its table to see if that block has already been written. If so, it will simply write a pointer. If not, it will be forwarded to the compression engine and stored. In the storage industry, a data reduction ratio of 1:6 is accepted as generally achievable, with higher rates possible on large virtualization clusters. This means that the effect cost per GB is reduced dramatically and even reaches the price of high-end disks. So your 80TB raw capacity array will store ~300TB of data, depending on the data reduction ratio.

On top of that, since flash performs so well, other features such as continuous data protection by (a)synchronous replication are possible with very little performance degradation.

If you still doubt this technology, go have a look at the technological advances in hard drives, versus the technological advances of flash in the last 5 years. Hard drive vendors have very little to innovate while flash/rram are at the lower end of a hockey stick figure when it comes to innovation and price reduction. Within the next 5 years, flash/rram will replace disk, both in the enterprise as well as the consumer market.

I'd love to see your all-disk array do 2M IOPS, something that all flash arrays are capable of today. Again, at the price that (with dedupe and compression) comes darn close to your disks. Even legacy storage vendors are increasingly investing in solid state technology. Investing in disk is equal to investing in Greek government bonds.

Comment Re:I don't think so... (Score 1) 59

Could the baseband access or change data on the Android partitions or the efs data? I'm not sure, but the articles suggest to me that they could.

I'm not sure either but if so then I sure hope that the developers of the Blackphone took precautions against that. I do agree with you that it could be a potential exploitable hole: very bad indeed!

Comment Re:Let me guess (Score 1) 59

So apparently it does matter.

It looks like that what you're quoting concerns spyware on the SIM card, not the underlying OS on the phone/tablet.

In this discussion, the software running on the SIM card would be similar to the firmware on your cable modem. It no longer matters that your neighbors can see your traffic as long as everything you transmit is properly secured and encrypted.

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