4,696 karma · joined September 15, 2010
I wasn't trying to cover all that, I was just pointing out that MIL-SPEC is a very wide category and therefore effectively meaningless unless you're pointing out what type of application it is.
There are also various levels of auditors within the organisation, some of whose reports are used as inputs for the IG and GAO.
Compare the cost of a MIL-SPEC ThinkPad with that of an actual flight control computer designed to be an integral part of an aircraft's avionics.
It's not dissimilar to the way criminal gangs will ensure that they have dirt on anyone joining or intentionally implicate others in order to ensure compliance.
You're also assuming that the GMMR would not have been commissioned by another Libyan government, and perhaps even been completed more efficiently, had Gaddafi not seized power and held onto it for decades.
While NATO's bombing of the Brega plant was controversial, it was in my view justified by Gaddafi's forces staging rocket launchers at the location. If you're staging active military assets inside civilian locations, and they're part of hostilities, those locations lose their protection under international law.
The Brega plant was also not critical to the ongoing operation of the GMMR, as there was a second plant at Sarir that was able to make the pipe sections and had sufficient capacity to handle maintenance and sustainment needs.
The ones I was reading emphasised the need for a strong sanctions regime with penalties for third party workarounds, with the reasoning given that Russia had prepared its economy for war and already isolated it to some extent.
Maybe your typical cable TV talking head pundit might’ve been confident about Russia’s economy collapsing, but the actual professional analysts and civil servants who advise governments were much more cautious.
I merely said that Musk didn’t start from ‘nothing’ and complete poverty, as the OP’s post was claiming.
Errol invested a bit later.
I didn’t say that $28 000 was a stratospheric amount, I said it’s something the vast majority of people don’t have access to, let alone the angel investors. They also don’t have access to the doors that were opened by his family’s connections.
Again, I’m not saying Musk was merely gifted his success. Clearly that’s not true, there were hundreds if not thousands of others with similar connections and opportunities who didn’t achieve anything near his success. But your assertion that he started from rock bottom and was entirely self made is far from an accurate representation of events.
> Musk was the richest man in the world when he acquired x.com. He didn't need family connections for that.
Source? Zip2’s sale only brought in $300 million. That’s not richest man in the world stuff.
You edited your comment to remove the bit about living in youth hostels and working menial jobs, this was my reply to it:
A rite of passage. It was quite common for upper middle class and wealthy South African kids to spend a year working menial jobs and living in hostels as a way to build character and find themselves. I know, personally, people who worked in tree clearing in Canada, picking fruit in Australia, manual labour at ski resorts in New England, and living in youth hostels all before going to university to start the courses their parents were paying full tuition fees for. All of the people I mentioned are doing well in their careers, because none were actually poor despite working manual labour jobs for a year.
In short, it would require such huge and heavy landing legs and landing barges that it probably wouldn't be feasible.
ATC’s role is to help manage the reshuffling when slots are missed, because there’s still finite landing and take off capacity at very busy airports.
In both cases it’s centrally managed, rather than a free for all.
Neither the UK nor the Netherlands choose to not enforce slot misuse. We’re not talking only about the US and the FAA as examples here.
Whether it’s an appropriate model for ports and especially truck traffic at ports is a different topic, one I’m not qualified to speak on. I was just pointing out the misconception on how airline traffic at airports works and how it’s certainly not just a first-come, first-served ad hoc model.
At the most congested airports slots are highly valuable, to the point where they’re often listed separately as part of an airline’s assets, and airlines will sometimes trade slots.
Many countries will fine airlines if they miss their slot time for reasons that aren’t related to emergencies or bad weather, as well as fine them for any other slot misuse such as hoarding, strategic cancellation, etc.
Now, sure, it’s not a case where if you miss the slot you can’t land or take off. The airport and ATC will always try to accommodate flights no matter what. But it usually means fairly substantial delays to avoid impacting on other take off, landing, and gate slots.
And yes, the Hubble official history makes it clear that NASA intentionally sought to reuse industrial capacity and tooling developed for the NRO's surveillance satellite programme.
My point was only that the Hubble was not a donated KH-11, not that it didn't share the same industrial base as the NRO's satellites.
NASA initially considered a 3m main mirror for the HST, but opted for a 2.4m mirror especially to take advantage of the existing industrial base for 2.4m mirrors for the KH-11. As it was a proven industrial process that derisked the project and reduced cost compared to a 3m mirror.
Hubble was a programme dating back to the 1960s as the Large Space Telescope (LST)[0], but first given the full go ahead in 1978. It was designed and developed in the open, with the Marshall Space Flight Center as the main design location.
The donated NRO satellites were the two donated in 2012[1] and were reportedly KH-11s. Only one of those is being developed into a space telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. [2]
[0] https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble/overview/the-history...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman_Space_Telesc...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...
I didn't say they did. Being part of command and control networks means that troops are informed of air operations by their own side over radio or other communications channels.
> I don't know where you heard this. From what i heard - they frequently even can't discern whether this is their drone or an enemy's one.
From acquaintances and friends in the Ukrainian armed forces on or near the front lines.
None of that is part of the regular FAA-regulated private pilot training syllabus.
There are different ATCs and areas of responsibility. The only one the article says he spoke to was the Tower at an airport in Charlotte, over 100km away. They're only going to have been concerned with what he was doing in the immediate airport vicinity as crossing traffic, not where he was going to and what he'd be doing there.
There obviously wasn't a no-fly zone over Charlotte at the time, so the ATC would not have had to disseminate the info during their communications. Instead, that would be reflected in NOTAMS issued by the FAA.
There are several approaches to this problem, but it usually requires that the drones are all running compatible control and communication software. e.g. [0] https://www.flytbase.com/blog/drone-disaster-relief
> Is it so really? In Ukraine war a lot of de-facto random individuals from both sides are flying a lot of drones without pretty much any coordination and control system and in combat conditions, much tougher than civilian emergency, and mostly in FPV mode without direct LOS, frequently at night, yet no drone-helicopter/aircraft collisions have so far been reported (and everybody watching the aircraft and helicopter losses very closely)
Those people aren't random, they're part of organised military forces and are part of command and control networks. Troops do reduce certain types of drone activities when they're informed that their own aircraft will be overlying their positions. And that's even though both sides are flying comparatively few helicopter sorties at the front lines because of the constant threat from air defence.
As an aside, there have been collisions, at least one of which was intentional.