beeeeerp

Maintenance and operation is a big factor, but engine-outs do happen.

It also seems like you are talking about helicopters, which have a special exemption: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/91.119

In a fixed wing, altitude is absolutely your friend and gives you more options to land, which equates to a higher probability of finding a nicer emergency landing spot.

And to your point, power lines that are shorter than 199ft don’t have to be on the charts. I could erect a tower off major airways or near an airport to that height without prior warning.

I’m going to disagree unless you are in a specific area of aviation, because it severely reduces your emergency landing options.

Those pilots are in the minority, and already accept a much higher level of risk. Also, drone flights that have been problematic are typically in congested areas (much like laser problems).

What might have been better is if the FAA had created a way for those pilots to create mini low-level TFRs or protected airspace to warn drone pilots not to fly their during inspections. It’s also worth mentioning that many survey jobs are being replaced by more advanced drones due to cost.

I do respect what you are saying, but having a foot on both sides of the fence can’t help but feel like the FAA had a knee-jerk reaction to drones.

If I fly a 600g drone below treetop level in a heavily forested, rural area, it will have 0 impact to aviation. This is currently illegal without licensing, additional hardware, or a flight notification. I find this silly.

As a pilot, this has always been weird to me. I’ve come to the conclusion that people just don’t like drones. I think selling them to the masses is part of the answer.

I can build a tower (with exemptions for protected airspace) that’s 199ft in the US without any problem. To me, that basically says to any pilot “expect the unexpected if you fly lower than that,” which insanely low to aircraft (not helicopters) not near an airfield.

Yeah - I forgot about their opaque pricing tiers.

One other benefit of paying up front is that I think you are less restricted on S3/Cloudfront in what you can host. I think Cloudflare has some restrictions (video files?) to keep costs more sane. Otherwise, you could spin up a YouTube clone extremely cheap.

And just to reiterate, AWS pricing can be absurd.

Out of curiosity on the marches, was it due to electrolyte imbalance? I know army types can drink a ton of water in hot climates!

I’m in the Rocky Mtns, so it’s pretty dry up here with lots of unprepared people (maybe confirmation bias in my end).

Maybe it’s confirmation bias, but I have heard of very few over-hydration cases whereas medical dehydration seems pretty common.

Granted the pressures for dehydration are a lot more common (hiking with too little water, running competitions, maybe little access to water in a hot climate, etc). Once one has ample access to water, I doubt there is much pressure to keep drinking to over-hydration.

I like Cloudflare, but this is also what makes me skeptical. There's no such thing as a free lunch, and I've had the rug pulled out from underneath me many times before. I wish they at least charged a sustainable amount for egress, because I feel like it's coming eventually.

I actively quit producing content and deleted my account.

Maybe it’s confirmation bias, but I do feel like the quality of discourse has taken a nose dive.

It was just an example of complexity - I would imagine a new coal plant is still more complex than a solar farm.

Is that 14% different with solar? I’m just bringing this up, because solar is dead simple compared to engineering studies and infrastructure required to build something like a new nuclear plant. I wonder if the simplicity of solar and storage will start to change how power generation is approached.

That’s not entirely true - aliases to AWS resources are free (their suggested “workaround”).

Totally agree with this. In their defense (not that I like it), obviously the market is willing to pay what they charge. It’s unfortunate that the other big cloud providers haven’t driven prices down that much.

It’s still a huge problem for people that have purchased domains. I bought one that apparently used to be a BT tracker, and gets on the order of several hundred NXDOMAIN requests per second.

I understand it’s still hitting Route53 infrastructure, but I’m not using it, and it’s not commonplace to charge for NXDOMAIN records. Because of this, I’m unable to host at AWS (prohibitively expensive for my use-case).

It’s worth mentioning that DNS infrastructure for things like this are very cheap (I used to self-host the DNS infrastructure for this domain for ~$2.5/mo), so the up charge is even worse that what AWS is charging for bandwidth. If they brought it in line with actual costs, I wouldn’t have as much of a problem.

Now please do this for NXDOMAIN on Route53. This can be a big problem with acquired domains.

I think it’s worth mentioning here COTS hardware is also very resilient (things like ZFS without ECC excluded) to radiation these days.

Here’s a video of a GoPro riding through an electron beam: https://youtu.be/Uf4Ux4SlyT4?si=6z6626hrdXhvZ2x_

There are lots of bad things happening while it’s in the middle of the beam, but it appears to function normally after completing the pass.

This was really interesting!

What about COTS hardware on the ISS? I haven’t heard of major failures with things like their laptops.

It was my understanding that radiation levels at Earths surface are still very low unless you had some kind of amplifying collector (ie - large antenna).

Devices at high altitudes and space are subjected to CME events quite often, and usually don't have many side effects other than degraded RF signal propagation.

What effects might you see at ground level in a normal microprocessor device? More bit flips than normal?

I was also expecting my satellite internet to degrade during the last CME that made the news (apologies - can’t remember the date), but it kept chugging along as if nothing had happened.

Why do you think this?

That’s highly unlikely to have a CME as a root cause unless it was connected to long distance transmission lines.

CMEs tend not to affect small electronics on their own.

Yes, I find them valuable.

The quality of engineer varies wildly across my organization, so it at least gives tests some basic structure.

Sarcasm can be hard on the internet.

It actually stands for: Extended-range Twin-engine Operations Performance Standards

and is a pretty logically laid out standard.

I’ve owned some Hondas recently where the rotors noticeably warped after several years (maybe since the cars have such good longevity?).

It probably strongly depends on driving styles. I also trust OEM metallurgy far more than anything you can purchase off Amazon.

I can’t speak for the OP, but a “rotor” can mean the brake rotor on a disc brake, which can warp due to excessive use/heat. They are common on most cars, and usually need to be “turned” (ie. machined to be flat) when they are out of tolerance.

>Recommended languages are Java (ultimately a failure despite vast effort)

Why is Java a failure? Recent JVMs have come a long way, and GraalVM makes it somewhat comparable to Go-like languages.

I understand the historical hate and how Oracle bought it, but it really isn’t that bad of a language if you’re using modern Java.

I’ve never thought about it this way. What a cool idea!

The original comment was about plastic. Paper or wood are used as alternatives in many applications.

I’d call that being more neutral than a sink unless I’m misunderstanding you.

I consider paper a sink, because trees are actively sequestering atmospheric CO2.

It’s actually hard to say. The prices these companies pay can be very different than list prices for us mortals. It’s one of my biggest complaints about AWS; the prices seem high, but in reality they are very opaque.

I live in rural CO, and we get them pretty regularly. Extreme weather is pretty common out here, and the infrastructure isn’t as redundant for the mountain communities (I assume due to the cost/benefit ratio of building new lines).

It’s not just power - we had a forest fire one year that burned a microwave tower & killed our cell phones _and_ internet for a week. The local businesses struggled for a day or two, because no one really carries cash anymore.

I should add that kind of like the OP, I added an enphase LiFePO4 house battery and panels. They’ll keep critical loads running basically indefinitely, which has been a welcome change. We have gas heat, but I used to get nervous in the winter when the power went out (our boiler requires electricity to run).