The engine is perhaps the most durable part, with many high-strength components inside of it. It wouldn't survive a hit, but it'd act as a very good place to be hit while preserving the rest of the aircraft in a flyable condition. A hit to the empennage would condemn the plane immediately, for example.

An automatic collision prevention system is entirely passive. It doesn't transmit, only receives transponder and possibly ACARS transmissions. There is absolutely no reason why a modern drone, presumably with a fully digital wideband radio shouldn't receive transponder transmissions from civilian airplanes and implement automated collision avoidance as a standard feature.

LOL, this drone's development has cost so far $0.5 billion and was in fact scrapped because of this cost. $2k is 1/250'000th of the total project cost. Peanuts.

Since the testers are a purpose-made TDR/network analyzer, the ones I've seen measure the cable length too. If your entire office seems to be wired with 55.8ft cables, you should get suspicious :)

You're right, of course, there must be some acceptance tests as part of final approval of any job "finished" by contractors. Yet there are some cabling guys who don't even have a tester. They just shrug and say that they use "Cat6 approved parts", LOL.

There are different kinds of "matches". There's a big difference between a marker match (the usual meaning of the phrase "DNA match"), and a full sequence match. That's why, as much as people despise the idea, there should be a push towards full sequencing since then there's really no question about where the DNA came from.

Interesting. I'd have thought that the whole point of slapping a Cisco box on customer premises as the effective demarcation point is to reliably monitor everything up to this point, using some $$$ infrastructure management solution they surely have deployed. Otherwise it would make no sense.

I recall gathering some scorn from a provider by basically taking their fiber and their GBIC from their gateway (figuring the less points of failure, the better), skipping their router, and plugging directly into our L2 switch. That fiber was then trunked over a dedicated VLAN to a linux server that then did the magic necessary to couple this to a soft pbx. It of course worked very well, but they "couldn't" support such a setup. I wonder how effective their "management" was since if they really managed those circuits they should have immediately noticed that their router and gateway have vanished from the face of the planet all the while the fiber link and the SIP trunks are up. I figure if I had never told them about it, they might have been none the wiser, and that's a scary realization.

An order of magnitude better is not much, in a grander scheme of things. It's basically the minimum improvement needed, in terms of light sensitivity, to even be worth talking about if we're to talk about fundamental improvements. Night vision optics mainly cope with more mundane sort of a problem. You are around light sources and your vision can't ever fully adapt. Also you haven't got an hour or two sometimes needed to fully adapt. Those mundane sort of issues reduce the effective sensitivity of your retina by orders of magnitude - not because the retina ultimately is "bad", but because it's only "good" in circumstances that are not very practical.

With standard hardware, only the POTS line supplies power to the end-user equipment. A T1/E1 line doesn't, not the way it's normally implemented. Pushing power through T1 pairs is certainly possible, but it's not something done as standard by last mile providers. You'd need special power injectors and power sources.

A PBX is just a bunch of software on a bunch of hardware. A minimal PBX is Raspberry PI doing switching of SIP trunks. You can run fairly large PBX systems without any ISDN, and with nothing but IP-based protocols throughout.

The solution is, then, for them to run SIP trunks to a router they manage, and you run your SIP trunks to that router as well. That way it's on them to get it going, and their management infrastructure will monitor what's up.

I wouldn't worry too much. For the price of a T1/E1 card, a small 1U server, and a bunch of softmodem licenses, you can have the same thing, only running on modern, supported hardware.

What? There's not much to tune. It's a digital, fixed bandwidth connection. You buy a codec box that has ISDN on one end and an XLR connector on the other end and you're set. Your choice is basically what codec to use.

Exactly. When the electricity is out you'll often see a truck with a generator parked next to a DSLAM to keep it going.

It's real easy with Cat 6: unless you test it with a tester than runs standard-mandated tests (crosstalk, echo, bandwidth, skew, etc.), you don't have Cat 6, you're just deluding yourself. So if an installer claims that they've "laid Cat-6", you better ask for a binder with test result printouts for every drop, because they must have tested them and they must have maintained the test results to ensure that everything got tested. Otherwise it's a scam.