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Computers Key To Air France Crash 911

Posted by kdawson from the who-or-what-do-you-trust dept.
Michael_Curator writes "It's no secret that commercial airplanes are heavily computerized, but as the mystery of Air France Flight 447 unfolds, we need to come to grips with the fact that in many cases, airline pilots' hands are tied when it comes to responding effectively to an emergency situation. Boeing planes allow pilots to take over from computers during emergency situations, Airbus planes do not. It's not a design flaw — it's a philosophical divide. It's essentially a question of what do you trust most: a human being's ingenuity or a computer's infinitely faster access and reaction to information. It's not surprising that an American company errs on the side of individual freedom while a European company is more inclined to favor an approach that relies on systems. As passengers, we should have the right to ask whether we're putting our lives in the hands of a computer rather than the battle-tested pilot sitting up front, and we should have right to deplane if we don't like the answer."
Image

Is Playing a DVD Harder Than Rocket Science? 464

Posted by samzenpus from the too-much-TV dept.
dacut writes "After successfully repairing the Hubble Space Telescope, astronauts aboard the shuttle Atlantis found themselves with a free day due to thunderstorms which delayed their return. They attempted to pass the time by watching movies, only to find that their laptops did not have the proper software, and Houston was unable to help. No word, alas, on what software was involved, though we can assume that software/codec updates are a tad difficult when you're orbiting the planet at 17,200MPH."
Technology

Nanomaker's Toolkit — Methods For Self-Assembly 48

Posted by Soulskill from the careful-with-those-nanites dept.
gabrlknght writes with this excerpt from Science News: "Because nanoparticles are small, a large proportion of their atoms are near the particle's surface. Having fewer neighbors, those relatively unconfined atoms can link in unusual ways, giving materials made of nanoparticles novel properties. But the same characteristic that makes nanostructures useful — size — also makes working with them no small task. Engineering on the nanoscale is like building a ship in a bottle while wearing mittens. It would be far cheaper and easier, researchers agree, if nanoparticles could just arrange themselves into nanomaterials — like dropping the pieces of the ship into the bottle and then sitting back to watch the ship build itself. What scientists are working on now is finding the right chemistry — creating just the right conditions so that natural properties such as charge or magnetism direct the pieces of the ship to come together just so, with the mast above the deck and never below or to the side. This idea, called self-assembly, isn't exactly new. Examples range from the simple separation of oil and vinegar in a bottle of salad dressing to the complex movements of proteins and enzymes — themselves nanosized — reacting in living cells. Scientists have long been inspired by these naturally self-assembling systems. But designing self-assembling systems in the lab, with nanoparticles, presents its own scale of difficulty. And making self-assembled nanomaterials grow large enough to actually be useful is even more challenging."
The Internet

Submission + - Morality of throttling a Local ISP? 3

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: I work for a small (400 customers) local cable ISP. For the company the ISP is only a smaller side business, so my whole line of expertise lies in other areas, but since I know the most about Linux and networking I've been stuck into the role of part time sysadmin.

In examining our backbone and customer base I've found out that we are oversubscribed around 70:1 between our customer's bandwidth and our pipe. I've gone to the boss and showed him the bandwidth graphs of us sitting against the limit for the better part of the day, and instead of purchasing more bandwidth, he has asked me to start implementing traffic shaping and packet inspection against P2P users and other types of large downloading. Because this is in a certain limited market, the customers really have the choice between my work, and dial-up.

Being a person on the other side of that coin with my local ISP I'm struggling with the desire to give the customers I'm administering the best experience and the desire to do what my boss wants.

In my situation, what would you do ?
Movies

Submission + - Netflix Throttling Instant Video Streaming (breakitdownblog.com) 1

Submitted by
rsk
rsk writes: "For the last few weeks I've been experiencing terrible streaming video performance from Netflix on both my Xbox 360 and PC. While my Xbox 360 would at least stream at a lower resolution, my PC cannot seem to avoid 2hr buffering times before playback even started. I smelled shenanigans and started digging. With some help finding the debug menu for the streaming video player, I set out to figure out why playback was so slow. It seems that Netflix is significantly throttling Watch Instantly users (on the PC) down to an unusable cap on a per-connection basis."
Google

Submission + - Pirate Bay malware site or is it? 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: All piratebay torrent user links (eg uploaded by http://thepiratebay.org/user/nadim1/) seem to bring up "Reported Attack Site!" messages or to search for them through google gives "This site may harm your computer." warnings on the search page. Is someone being sneaky?
Image

Crocodiles With Frickin' Magnets Attached to Their Heads 304

Posted by samzenpus from the stick-one-on-the-fridge dept.
Brickwall writes "Florida, faced with a problem of crocodiles returning to residential neighborhoods after being relocated elsewhere, is trying to solve it by affixing magnets to the crocs' heads. The theory is the crocodiles use the Earth's magnetic field for navigation, and the magnets may interfere with that. What I'd like to know is, whose job is it to put the magnets on?" So far the magnet program appears to be working, unfortunately the crocs have started to collect huge amounts of take-out menus and child artwork.

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