348 karma · joined February 18, 2014
And what does that have to do with it? In the event of a passenger jet crashing into the ocean an enhanced transponder system would not raise passenger survival by any notable rate (because aircraft crashes where the passengers survive and aren't immediately rescued are incredibly rare in the modern age).
Aircraft hijacking where the craft and passengers go missing is incredibly rare even among hijacking incidents.
Dual transponders linked to engines is not a safe design. You are significantly increasing the chance of an aircraft crash for a slight reduction in uncertainty of the location of crashed/hijacked aircraft.
>You've heard of LoJack, right? We track cars worth far less than a jet airliner.
People voluntarily deploying tracking systems is different from mandating tracking systems.
Cars and buses are at a much higher risk of hijacking per passenger/travel distance than planes.
How would the system determine it is in-flight and thus prevent a maintenance shut down? You would need another device to determine in-flight from ground operations, and thus another device that can malfunction and thus can be defeated by an attacker.
>Give me any reasonable response to why this is not something that should be fixed.
Give me a reasonable response why spending a bunch of money to fix this rare issue is worth it over other safety improvements? Old aircraft, poor maintenance, and overworked pilots kill many times more people than hijackers.
P.S. Why don't we track buses? Why don't we track cars? Why don't we track everybody?
Iridium only has ~8Mhz of bandwidth, that is fine for a sensor platform that probably only transmits a couple of times a day, but could quickly run into trouble with constant positional updates from thousands of planes (especially with streaming of cockpit data recorders, as has been argued for as well). And the saturation of the Iridium network is not something that can be controlled without extensive re-engineering to enable QOS.
Such a system also wouldn't be immune to being disabled as the current tracking systems are. People need to learn to live with uncertainty instead of trying to remove it.
A plane being hijacked in this way is so incredible rare that having always-on transponders is not worth the safety trade off.
The current system favors entrenched elites who can use their money and media connections to smear opponents.
At 40,000 ft altitude the horizon is still only ~240 miles, which will still give LOS problems for VHF and above, particularly in bad weather.
Yeah see the expectation is the problem. Here in Australia most of the people with teaching degrees are waiting for the boomers to retire, because there are very few full time positions (unless you are willing to move to the most remote and poor communities).
>But there was nothing unreasonable in his thought process, from my perspective at least.
The unreasonable thing is believing that just getting a degree will get you into a middle-class profession. That hasn't been true for at least twenty years. You need good grades, co-ops, and connections.
As the article points out the market for tertiary educated workers is smaller than the pool of tertiary educated workers.
I already mentioned low-paid jobs.
Also, at least here in Australia the only pure degrees that the high-school education system cares about are maths and science, everything else is "generalist" and can be filled by any teacher. In addition, at least here a general degree isn't good enough any more, you either need a teaching degree or a graduate diploma in teaching.
A degree in history or sociology is seen as useless because it mostly is outside academia. The people who are good in the field will most likely end up on the academic track, and those who aren't will most likely end up in low paying jobs having wasted several years and tens of thousands of dollars.
The problem isn't history or sociology degrees, it is people thinking that a degree is a ticket to a good job.
Also, functionally an eTextbook with a clickable link to a video is the same as an eTextbook with a built in video.
This aircraft was built in '87, by which time the Soviet economy was in serious trouble and training was at reduced levels. The Bear always projected a scarier image than was reality.
And I am not being snooty, I only have a diploma from a vocational college (I studied CS a long time ago but dropped out).
Places like Harvard and MIT produce hackers because of the students they attract, not because they teach "hacker oriented programming".
Zuckerberg didn't study "Social media websites 101" he hacked together a project in his spare time.
Because tanks only have that sort of armour on their frontal aspect and turret sides, and the top armour is very thin. Even if the turret top is armoured enough it is likely the engine deck can be penetrated and produce a mobility kill.
Also, hardly anyone besides the US and extremely close allies has ultra-modern tanks like late series Abrams or the Challenger II (and I have seen no evidence that those tanks are immune to the GAU-8).
P.S. There are also cheap ways to reduce shape charge effectiveness that don't work against solid penetrators. Things like the TUSK upgrade are designed to defeat RPGs not 30mm cannon.
If the passwords were stored properly hashed then the attacker has to do a lot more work to recover the plain text.
Bitcoin as a solution to human greed and corruption will work as well as Communism did.
Which funnily enough was done to aid them in creating enough demand for their app store to become a player in the closed garden model. If it had worked I bet Win 9 would have been closed garden by default, with a special edition for enterprises.
Single byte XOR is just child's play, even if the "key" was only used once. They may as well have used ROT-13.
It is easy. In those cases the owner hasn't been deprived of anything but potential profit. If there was a competing game some of the potential pirates might buy that instead, they might watch TV or read a book instead of playing a game. It is just competition.
I find it ridiculous that under current law it is illegal to make unauthorised copies of games, but perfectly legal to make a clone/reimplementation. Both can deprive the original author of potential profit.
Of course this is why some of the big players in the IP industry have been muttering about "patents" on creative works.
In our system the government sets prices and directly pays the education provider for "commonwealth supported places". The student has to repay the government only a part of that cost, and it is indexed to inflation and you don't have to make repayments until your income is around ~$50,000 AUD.
As an outside I think Americas two big problems with higher education is the lack of national standards, which is feed by your student loan system.
I'm waiting for someone to reinvent IRC for smart phones.
Sorry, that seems like a personal hang-up to me.
For most games I don't pretend to be the character, I play the game. The character is usually too discordant with my own self-image for identification or is just a mute pawn (eg Gordon Freeman/Chell).
For games like decent RPGs where I can actually make the character I want I regularly play female characters.
And seeking role models in games seems just bizarre to me. Lots of game characters are "bad ass" but exceedingly few are decent role models (Lara Croft is an awful person for damaging archaeological evidence and stealing other cultures relics).
Again, how does that stop women enjoying games? Most games which force a character I don't identify with the character at all because being of the same gender is no grounds for identification.
>Also did you know that "we wanted to make a game starring a woman and a bunch of publishers turned us down because only guys buy games and they never want to be ladies" is a common refrain from AAA-level developers who want to try to fix this imbalance?
I think that comment is true for most teen males due to the kneejerk machismo that still exists at that age, but most men grow out of it.
Also, if that comment is true for men in general what compelling argument would you offer to publishers to get them to not focus on the desires of their primary customers? If the publisher can sell HyperViolent MurderSim 2014 to the men and DressUp Dollies 2014 to the women they are still maximising their market.
Anyone who argued that men couldn't enjoy The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins because the protagonist is a women would be laughed at.
They don't finish the last coat of paint, load an air wing, and send it out on deployment.
Most of the time I spend on the net I spend reading forums like this or reading technical articles.
The only difference between that and reading a book is that I read more authors per unit of time.