smdyc1

Well I got myself an Information Technology degree and I'm working as a product manager for a Saas product that supports the building industry. Really different environment. I like it, but still miss the Air Force.

I actually did, joined joined the Air Force 3 years later as soon as I turned 18. Only recently got out after 10 years. I was on holiday at the time with my family, and we saw the first news at at a train station when we were waiting for a connection. It had a tremendous impact on me at the time. Once we got to our hotel, we were glued to the TV 10 hours afterwards, and I can vividly remember the horror of watching replay after replay of those planes hitting the towers.

I second that, it was a riveting book. There's a really good audio version as well.

Yes, I think we have come full circle.

The content is becoming more and more fragmented across an increasing number of services, so to obtain the content legally, you will have to pay a lot more than we are now.

Piracy will definitely increase again and I'll have no sympathy for these companies who will cry poor over the issue. If you want to silo your own content, then you're just thing to have to suck it up.

That sounds awfully like Boeing's 737-MAX MCAS debacle.

The argument makes sense to me. This is a problem in Australia that is exacerbated by the tax write-offs investors get in the form of what they call Negative Gearing. My possibly flawed laymen's understanding of it is that for each property owned in addition to your primary home, any losses incurred through the ownership of these additional investment properties can be claimed as a tax write-offs. Couple this with short term interest free loans and a continual rise in prices (a trend that may be disappearing, at least temporarily) and the ability to leverage the home you already have, then you encourage speculative investment. Buy now and sell higher in a few years.

It's much harder for first home buyer's to break into the property market by the very fact they don't own property to leverage in the first place. And this isn't necessarily something only particularly wealthy people do. It's become ingrained in Australian society to treat housing as a financial asset and use it to generate wealth. The problem is if you don't already have one, or substantial means to acquire one, you are at a much greater disadvantage.

I only have my own perspective to rely upon after trying and failing to buy a home a few years ago.

I find this topic fascinating. As a defensive measure these could have immense value. I'm sceptical of any present long range value however.

The ballistic nature of artillery, missiles, and other projectiles allows hitting targets beyond the horizon. Lasers are uni-directional so whilst they would be great against targets in line of sight, I doubt you'll see laser weapon systems employed as long range weapons for a very long time.

Of course, you could deploy them from a platform like a satellite, or aircraft, but the power requirements are immense and any current day aircraft would probably be so large as to be a sitting duck. I recall they've carried out testing of this nature using a 747 as a test platform. Until they can make planes of that size more survivable, I guess we're stuck with defensive applications.

I'm wondering if the autopilot contains the same correction algorithm that MCAS is using.

I'm wildly speculating here, but since wing loading is also a factor in calculating the angle of attack at which a potential stall condition could occur, I'm also wondering if it relies on the accuracy of the weight and balance the pilots enter into the flight computer. Pilots have missentered such critical information before.

Amazing footage. The precision Landing of stage 1 was something I hasn't expected.

It seems the second something on hacker News is related to a topic that can be interpreted as negative to the CCP, the downvoting begins.

None of this is criticizing China and Chinese culture, only the authoritarianism of the communist party.

This can only be a means for the Chinese Communist Party to exert more authoritarian control over it's population. Depending on the actual implementation, I'd compare this to East Germany except in this case, the social credit system replaces the Stasi and their network of informers. If there is no way to opt out of such a system then freedom of thought and action are potentially gone. My question is, how do they justify such a system when the only apparent threat is to the Chinese Communist Party's waning influence and control in this information age.

Now I don't know about fighters, but I used to work on C-130s. Countermeasure systems (flare and chaff) rely on a weight on wheels microswitch completing a circuit when the aircraft is in the air, safety pins being removed from a panel to arm the system, an on switch, and a guarded switch being activated before the system can be used.

Now sometimes the weight on wheels switches need to be bypassed for testing a wide range of aircraft systems. Perhaps the aircraft was on jacks (tyre replacement?) or some sort of EMI occurred... But ultimately there really is a great deal of safety layers that had to be compromised for this to happen, including human factors.

Like with software development, you can't predict every possible action of your users (air or ground crew), and sooner or later you'll encounter an edge case nobody had considered.

Yep. I'm reasonably new to software development, and I've always found JSON is simple yet effective. Less so for XML. It has its place, but I think less so for a simple and reliable data interchange format.