On Wed, 07 May 2008 23:13:03 -0500,
Moe Trin <ibuprofin@painkiller.example.tld> wrote:
We don't, and if we do we'd get different ballots, one for each issue.
I'm inclined to think that both many small things to vote for and many
issues on a single ballot could stand improvement, but that may very
well be cultural background.


Meaning they're not there to represent the people they're representing,
other than themselves. Arguably a weakness in the system.


Count'em. I come up with ``Too many''. Not quite infinity, but close.


Arizona is somewhat of a minority, though. :-)


That was TXL - Tegel. It also helps that it is laid out in a way that
facilitates getting in and out (provided you don't get lost, the
interior is somewhat confusing). This was when traveling by Air Berlin,
who list short waiting periods for a number of German airports on
internal flights, when not checking in luggage and when printing your
own boarding pass, &c.


Tempelhof (THF), yes. Built in the 30s, megalomaniac architecture, built
around a very clearly circular ``field'' (with two concrete airstrips).
I still can't help but like it, though.


The thing is, I don't agree with the rabid socialists. :-)

I've been around small airports a couple times, and while the people
there usually tend to be more likely of the well-to-do type, extreme
wealth is not necessairy. In fact, forego getting a new fat mercedes
every two years (or just your second one), and you could probably afford
an airplane. Alright, a small one, but even small airplanes tend to
be larger than mercedeses. With a bit of creative financial planning
and/or altering your priorities in a non-conventional way airplanes are
affordable for more people than you think. Thing is, nobody does that.


True. Heck, even the small airport (informally known as EHHO) where I
used to fly gliderplane was under endless attack from someone who lived
under the approach, and knew perfectly well that this was the case when
they'd moved there. And this when the biggest airplane landing there was
a turboprop flying shed picking up parachutists.

But, I like to point to LCY - London City Airport at this point. It's
down-town, pretty small, doesn't see heavy traffic, doesn't operate at
night, and comes with strict capability and noise-abatement requirements.
Still, it's useful to have where it is, even if you can't use it 24/7.
I would've thought such a model workable for THF, too.

The socialists argument is that THF costs all of 10 million to maintain
each year and it's making losses (because many flights got booted, so
they could make this argument). In the face of an essentially bankrupt
city building a multi-billion brand spanking new airport next to SXF, to
replace all three existing airports, I find that a bit dishonest.


Except that wouldn't translate to 15 trucks/hour, but more like, oh,
45 roadtrains/hour. If not more.

The comparison is a bit hobbled also in that in Europe it tends to be
a bit harder to find cheap contiguous free land to build railroads on.


Of course. Doesn't make either excusable.


Alright. :-)

Also gives you a reason to not forget; a reason many others don't have.


Of course. Doesn't make it snappy or an especially good name.


Yes, indeed. And then there's normal inflation and all that. This was
just one more excuse for everyone to hike their prices a bit.


Some european countries' bills were already quite hard to counterfeit,
so while it probably didn't worsen for those, successful counterfeiting
now gives much more choices where to ``cash'' the produce, so trying is
more attractive.


For some, though the more experienced ones probably could do it by hand.
Their heads don't explode when offered, though. On occasion they'll ask
whether the customer doesn't have an extra $coin to ease change.


Prices on pricetags, yes. Same here. I was talking about what happens
after the end total is presented. The actual cash that changes hands
there doesn't contain 1 or 2ct coins, and here it does.


Then again, I go and get more money whenever I need it (currently once
or so per month), and the less I hand out the longer between intervals.


Those started out as icons, but learning to read (and write) never
was easy for them. They have 10000 or so ``icons'' to learn. ISTR the
japanese forcibly reducing the number to 2000 for use in newspapers.

Now, learning a language involves learning something like 5000 words
just to get started, and the average learned adult will know 50000 words
or something to that tune (this from hazy memory).

That means that you'd need at least 2000 (newspaper), but more likely
20000, pictograms to have a stab at replacing written language, and
you'll end up spending serious effort at remembering them anyway.


Didn't say it was. :-)

It was something ISTR I spotted in a computer hobbyists' magazine, and
was, again ISTR, done on system 6 or 7. Someone'd come up with it and
said it might be interesting.


That, or a way to pass parameters, maybe store them in softlinks, or
whatever. ``unix'' stuffs a lot of things in parameters that other
systems put in specific buttons that you have to find, sometimes buried
deep in multi-level menu structures. I know what I prefer, but *cough*
certain other systems *cough* are also very popular.


--
j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l .
This message was originally posted on Usenet in plain text.
Any other representation, additions, or changes do not have my
consent and may be a violation of international copyright law.

On 8 May 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.unix.admin, in article
<slrng25er2.2t8q.read_the_sig@mantell0.local>, jpd wrote:

I think this has been thrashed out in the monastery. Here, the elected
officials will often put questions on the ballot for voters to decide.
The election in two weeks is such an example - question about keeping
a 0.1% addition to the general sales tax in the county. One could ask
if the legislature passes these questions to the voters, why are we
wasting money on a legislature - but that's another question.

;-)

Puerto Rico, the (US) Virgin Islands, Hawaii and the Pacific islands also
ignore it. Sections of Indiana _used_ to ignore it as well.

What little I remember of Tegal - I had an escort who knew what they
were doing.

Park under the roof of the terminal - I kind of liked it, and thought
it world be nice in the winter.

Haven't priced a Merc in a while, but last time I looked, the C-172 or
PA-28 sized plane (Max 2550 pounds / 1160 KG was running about 3 times
the cost of the SL, and got substantially less milage (9 GPH at 120
Kts). And 100LL is selling about twice the price (I paid $6.63 a gallon
two weeks ago - JET-A was $6.60) of auto gas and the cost of "required"
maintenance... Still, you tend to keep the plane a lot longer than the
car.

Is that Hoogeveen? We have this problem all the time. There is some
resistance to this, as aircraft owners took the real-estate agent who
sold the house to court for lack of full disclosure or mis-representing
the property.. The result is that agents now make it a point to mention
"problems" about the house. Yes, anyone who isn't deaf and blind knows
the airport exists, but that does not stop the idiots from buying a
house on short final, and then being surprised months later to discover
there is an airport with the planes skimming 200 feet overhead 15 hours
a day.

Jeez, we've got dozens - how about KDCA (Reagan National Airport
just across the river from the US capital. But you have the same
thing with Chicago Midway (KMDW), Kansas City Downtown (KMKC), Phoenix
(KPHX), San Diego (KSAN), or San Jose (KSJC), and these are all
used for airline service (and only KMKC no longer has that).

Somewhat surprising, as many capital or major cities have more than one
airport serving them. My division office is in the San Francisco area,
and I can get airline service to San Francisco (KSFO), Oakland (KOAK)
or San Jose (KSJC). For non-airline service, there are four more
airports (HWD, SCL, PAO and RHV) about the same distance away (and two
more military airports).

Today, sure. But when the railways were built 100+ years ago, they were
essentially without competition (wagons and canal boats?), and it was
easier to get the land. Today, rail is a special case generally dealing
with bulk goods that are not economical to put on the road. Thus, roads
are easier to sell to the voters. We're still constructing them here (a
"ring road" is being completed at roughly 30 KM radius from down town).

Yes, I can understand that. We've had this problem for the past 60 years
with everyone and his dog trying to pass relatively poor copies of the
greenbacks. That's also why the older notes are being replaced with
more difficult ones to fake. Still, the people in South Nowhere in
Whooseistan don't know what the real ones look like.

I don't listen to VOA that often, but they used to use "Special English"
which only needed 1000 words. Yes, the native speaker should know 35000
words, and this might peak at over twice that number, but the common
conversation tends to run under 5000 words.

I had some exposure to OS7 but never really got into it. Go back to it's
progenitor (Xerox Global-View) if you want to see some interesting ideas
that lead no-where.

But the standard arguement is that this mode only allows you to do what
that application author thought you'd like to do. If you need to do
something else - how many IPv4 addresses are assigned/allocated to .nl?

[compton ~]$ bzcat delegated-[ar]* | grep 'NL.ipv4' | awk 'BEGIN { FS="|"
} ; { total += $5 } ; END { print total }'
20015912
[compton ~]$

That's from the RIPE and ARIN databases, which have lines that look like

ripencc|NL|ipv4|62.25.0.0|16384|20000329|allocated

OK - why would anyone need this kind of data, and how could you arrange
a set of menus, icons, or what-ever to do this, other than by a shell
script or similar?

I know what you are saying, but not everyone using a computer in the
world is doing anything like the same tasks.

Old guy

On Thu, 08 May 2008 23:07:28 -0500,
Moe Trin <ibuprofin@painkiller.example.tld> wrote:
Probably a good `bad' example, but it arguably beats getting hit with
a 3% VAT increase without further ado. There is the problem of ``voter
wear'' or however one'd term that.

The legislature could, in theory, provide a valuable service providing
good choices of what to ask the voters. In practice, as usual, it's
different.


Plenty of SUVs get close, especially if you factor in traffic jams.


It was indicated to me that the main difference is water removal and
quality control. Maybe there'll be economies of scale differences,
too. ISTR there are airplane-usable motors that are happy with regular
petrol, though.


Which was the point. :-)


Yep. Haven't been there in a while, though.


EHHO didn't see heavy traffic; the airplane used to tow gliders was
probably the most intensive use, as winch operation was prohibited, that
with the general aviation strip right next to it (150m wide grass runway,
50m gliders, 100m GA). Other airfields (EG. in Germany) do allow combined
winch and GA operation -- with a bit more separation, of course.

That (club owned) towing plane had a `climbing screw' and was probably
a bit louder than others -- though it did get retrofitted with sound
dampening devices at noticeable cost, that TPTB then ignored WRT its
noise-abatement classification. That wasn't fun.


The idea seems to be quite novel here, though. Or maybe my dark thoughts
about the political agenda are entirely true. Who knows?


The greenbacks didn't seem to get updated much, compared to some other
currencies. Which lead to speculation that the USA govt. doesn't really
care, as long as the counterfeits stay out of the USA itself.


There is that, of course.


True enough. As soon as you get into specialised areas, such as, well,
anything, including government (form this, procedure that, yadda yadda),
you suddenly need a slab of extra words.

There was a study in the Bijlmer (of el-al cargo crash fame), as there
are a lot of illegals, aliens, and generally non-native speakers.
The kids there were reported to speak an amalgam of a whole sack of
languages, but with a total vocabulary of 500 words or so. No wonder
they had trouble keeping up in school.


With which I agree. ``WYGIWSETYWLTD''?

It already seems to make the populace happy, though. Then again, many
people accept what gets put in front of them, without much thought. I do
recall getting fed up with the default messages of the ticketing system
(rolled out in a s/w development company, by software developing project
managers), and just started hacking on the message templates.

It wasn't difficult to kick out all the unneeded cruft and come up with
messages that contained *only* what was strictly needed plus a minimum
of context to make it useful, formatted for easy perusal.

Instead of the default of, oh, dumping the entire ticket history and
maybe that of adjacent tickets in it as well, with lots of separation
bars and fluff. ASCII-soup, that was. Apparently the populace suddenly
recognized this was more useful and was happier. Hadn't seen much
complaints before, though.

I didn't manage to figure out how to add a workflow that was somewhat
useful to systems administration without interfering with the
development workflow thing. Didn't spend much time on it, as I was
perpetually short on time anyway.

Another pet peeve: Why do ticketing systems all fail to set email
headers such that it works with the built-in threading system in decent
mailclients? (Dark thoughts: because all ticketing system designers
haven't a clue about email. Grr.)

Right now I don't need to use ticketing systems, and just the threading
plus some folders is sufficient. Maybe when I manage to find a paid
position again. :-)


Import into /that one brand of spreadsheet/, then tinker for a while.
The barrier to ``macro-ize'' buttonclicks is probably higher too.


Many people are ``productive'' by the virtue of prefab buttons. Yes, one
could argue that, altough I personally find it a poor show, and I guess
you'd agree, as I'd expect would most in this group.

Then again, open any mainstream computer magazine and see how they
rate computing equipment. With ``(web) content creation'' and
``productivity'', and whatever they thought up this week indices.
Apparently the numbers are a big deal, though to me they're ironically
meaningless. Is it the machine that does the creation now? What would be
the ``productivity index'' of, oh, this here hammer?

Of course, such magazines are full of lies anyway. ``Because $vendor
were lazy asses, this week's top-10 of $products is a top-8''. So it
wasn't a ``top-10'' after all; the entire list was 10 to start with.


--
j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l .
This message was originally posted on Usenet in plain text.
Any other representation, additions, or changes do not have my
consent and may be a violation of international copyright law.

On 9 May 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.unix.admin, in article
<slrng28chk.31bj.read_the_sig@mantell0.local>, jpd wrote:

Another initiative working it's way forward for inclusion on the November
2008 ballot is an increase in the 'sales tax' (a tax levied on _most_
sales of goods) of one percent effective for the next 30 years to pay
for additional transportation infrastructure. Various counties and
cities tack more taxes on top of the state levy, and I'm currently
paying 8.9%.

9 GPH @ 120 KTS is actually 70% cruise, and consumption is higher
during takeoff/climb, and less during descents. But that translates
to 15.3 MPG. You don't have to factor in traffic - the SUV can be as
low as 7 MPG. It feels so good to be standing at the gas pump and
watching some idiot filling the 40 gallon tank on his penis extension.

No, there are substantial other differences - like the fact that it's
usable from below sea-level on up to 25000 feet or more with only an
adjustment of the fuel/air mixture ratio. The vapor pressure of the
two fuels differ drastically, and this shows up in higher altitudes.
If you stay at lower altitudes and aren't flogging the engine, there
are some conversions (Supplemental Type Certificate) that allow use of
auto gas. As I recall, plug life is the pits as is the overhaul period,
and the STC puts an altitude restriction which around here would be
painful. (If I'm not staying in the pattern, I normally climb to 7500 to
10500 feet.) Oh, and don't forget that 100LL is Low Lead - it contains
Tetra Ethyl Lead which would be death to an automobile catalytic converter,
but is needed as a valve lubricant in the aviation engine. But that's
also true for the pre-1980s monster cars, which is why auto supply stores
have a lead additive you can buy for them.

That's certainly the case. 100LL is the only gasoline you can get now,
compared to (example) 25 years ago when you could get 80/87 (Red),
90/96 (Blue), 100/130 (Green) and 115/145 (Purple). Gasoline powered
general aviation is less common. All of the company aircraft (which
I not being hired as a company pilot can't fly myself) are turbines
of one kind or another.

As long as you don't beat them. Auto gas is typically 86 to 90 octane
which is cruel and unusual punishment to 1000 inch/16.6 liter engines,
never mind anything larger. And yes, there are a number of R1820s,
R1830s, R2600s, R2800s, and four R3350s flying out of my local. The
"green" additives in auto gas are also incompatible with flight.

All of the glider operations here are tows, with the rare self-launcher,
but GA outnumbers them by a huge factor. It's not as bad as during the
1970s, but early evenings and weekends may see 4-6 planes in the bump
and go pattern. (In the 1970s, the airports I was flying around had
rules that 7 in the pattern was the limit, which when you add the
normal departures and arrivals meant something like 90-100 operations
per hour per runway. You got used to busy patterns pretty quickly.

Most of the tow birds I've seen are a fine pitch prop if fixed. On
the other hand, it seems that every airport I've been based at had
at least one _large_ single, with a minimum 750 horse engine. There's
something magic about the sound of a Merlin pulling 50 inches of
manifold at 3000 RPM (50 inches rather than 61 because 150 Octane
gas is no longer available).

Many of the "in close" airports were built in the piston era, and
were limited in size. The old Rome 'Ciampino', or Paris 'Le Bourget'
didn't have the room to grow when the jets came in (and an early
B707-320A or DC-8-30 needed a lot of runway - 3500 meters or more -
at gross on a standard day at sea-level). The paved surfaces at
Templehof were 6867 and 6943 feet (2094 and 2117 meters) but because
of the buildings, the longest landing distance was 6090 and 6120
feet (1857 and 1866 meters). Looking at AC 150/5325-4, the 707-320A
and DC-8-30 could marginally _land_ there at light weights, but
neither has enough runway to take off carrying anything useful.
(Even the 727s that Pan Am was flying were weight restricted.)

There were minor changes, but a 1936 era note would not look very
different from it's 2000 counterpart.

Actually, we see plenty of them here. But the government gets very
interested when "larger" sums of money (banknotes or bank transfers)
occur, but we still see the occasional winner get busted in customs
with 10000 dollars in cash. Hard to say if this is a currency or
Darwin violation.

[compton ~]$ cat news.posts/* old.news.posts/* | wc -w
16132
[compton ~]$ cat news.posts/* old.news.posts/* | tr ' ' '\n' | sort -uf
| wc -l
4915
[compton ~]$

That's a word check on the articles I've posted in the past 14 days
to technical newsgroups - this being one crude example. Yes, I know
I'm posting where readers may not use English as primary, but that's
more than the "special English" vocabulary.

I haven't done first or even second line support (other than Usenet
where you can ignore things) in years, but I've always found the
information provided to describe a problem - whether to a ticketing
system or verbally face to face has been lacking, and often describes
the wrong things anyway. Starting with the "is smoke coming out of
the hardware" and working down might take longer for a knowledgeable
user, but most users aren't.

s/about email//. The system we're using now allows threading
by date, O/S version/install, application and version, machine asset
tag, and username. With minor hoop-jumping, you can also thread by
IP and subnet. I'm glad I don't support it except in extreme cases.

Luckily, we're primarily a UNIX shop, and the support people are
expected to know their way around common commands. We're even
luckier, because there is virtually no Redmondware - it's mainly
at corporate in sales/marketing and a few systems in accounting (to
file on-line crap with the government).

Absolutely agree. My wife tells me they make use of command lists at
her place (some Sloaris and Linux - less than 20% Redmondware). That's
pitiful, as their average worker is old enough to have been trained
to do the jobs by hand (mainly accounting and sales tracking) and you
were expected to think to the extent that you had some clue what the
data should look like, and thus at least identify situations where
things weren't running correctly.

s/they thought up/the advertiser suggested they use/

Remember the target audience - many have no idea what is actually
useful in the computer.

Probably pretty low - no place to plug in the mouse, and it won't
run vista. (Heck, it won't run a lot of things - not enough RAM.)

Mainly because the reader is the product that is being sold to the
customer - the company whose ads are in there. The articles are merely
there to support the advertisements. (Moi, cynical??? Certainly not.)

Old guy

On Fri, 09 May 2008 22:06:22 -0500,
Moe Trin <ibuprofin@painkiller.example.tld> wrote:
I don't really like fixed ear-marking practice. Just take all the money
you (well, the state) receives and pass it on to those things that need
it, as needed. Fixed budgets and the games of musical chairs that arise
probably account for multi-percent inefficiencies accross the system.

VAT in Europe varies from... 15% to 25%, I believe. Many places have it
at 19%. So it's a pass-on tax, but 19% is still a sizeable chunk of the
final price.

I wouldn't know where to start with the math, but I do wonder whether
removing all the overhead, including silent overhead spent on
administration details by tax payers, wouldn't pay for the reduced tax
intakes if we'd switch to a flat income tax and perhaps one `unmoving
value' tax, like a property or total wealth tax or something. Just ditch
all the penny pinching on all the little details everywhere. If that
wouldn't work, I'm still interested in finding out what absolute minimum
`touch' would be needed to fund the services the state provides.


:-)

Amazingly, you increasingly see them here too. Here, of course, the
taxes on fuel account for, half or more, I forgot, of the final price.

By the same token I don't see any finance-technical reason to add extra
levies on using a car to pay for the roads and such. Efficient use of
fuel presumably correlates reasonably well with efficient use of roads,
with the possible exception of the damage done by overloaded large
road transports). (Dark thoughts again: But apparently an excuse to
follow each individual car wherever it goes --using cameras or RFID or
whatnot-- is what our beloved and wise representatives really wanted.)


[interesting explanation snipped]
Agree. :-)


That doesn't have to be a problem. LCY has a short runway (1,508m,
4,984ft) but also requires a steeper-than-usual approach. If that has
the side-effect of forcing the use of smaller, new-ish planes with
relatively silent motors, all the merrier.

The big flights should go to the big airport, but smaller short haul
flights and the occasional charter can use a pleasant and relatively
quiet airport. To my mind there should be no need to be ``super rich''
to organize travel such that it's actually enjoyable.


Same experience here, whether the asker is some board level waste of
breath or a developer proving himself to be less than clueful. In
fact, talking with newbies and not-so-newbies about C++ and their
problems with it, the experience is the same. It takes an experienced
interrogator to get to the bottom reasonably quickly. In that particular
setting most are non-native speakers of English, and plenty aren't very
good at it either.

Then again, when I have occasion to file a bug or ask for explanation,
it invariably takes more time than expected (altough by now I expect
that) to come up with a good, usable, case description. And that while I
know from experience this is important. Most people don't realise this
at all.

Of course, then there's a good chance the other side turns out to plain
not understand what's wrong and blithely blames something else.


Recently flunked a phone interview because, well, a couple of things,
among them the sudden onset of lots of redmondware questions. If any
of that would've been mentioned in the ad, I'd skipped right over it
and saved me a bunch of work. *sigh*.


Personally, I think that setting up systems so that interfacing with
them requires any specific platform (especially commercial, but that
is just icing on the cake, really) means you've deliberately hobbled
and obsoleted your platform, and is inexcusable for public services.


Yes, but that doesn't mean they've been trained to use the platform
that now underpins the calculations. Before that, it was ``pencil and
paper'', which is quite different. But I agree that people who know that
part inside out shouldn't have much trouble with training for the pencil
and paper replacement. Providing the training would be useful, though.

The problem with redmondware is that it's sold as ``requires no
training'', with the effect of unleashing many computer illiterates on
computers with the expection they'll pick up literacy as they go. We
don't expect that to work with language, or maths, and so on. ``We''
accept it from computer salesmen, and in fact the loudmouthed wannabe
replacement providers pitch the same thing (with less success). Curious.


There is that.


Well, the computer magazine I actually got this from used to be,
before its merger with the largest competitor (which was pure lies^W^W
commercial) the organ of the /computer hobbyists club/, and for some
token value of that still is. Of course, that only adds to the irony.


Ram it hard enough into the skulls of the editors and watch the indices
soar. If the metric were anywhere near realistic, the guarantee of not
being able to run windows, notably vista, would increase the numbers
even more. Useful, or at least meaningfully measurable, metrics for that
platform should be called ``eyecandy index'', ``invitiveness to tinker
index'', ``corporate timewasting index'', and so on.

Administratively? ``Expected blood pressure increase index.''


--
j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l .
This message was originally posted on Usenet in plain text.
Any other representation, additions, or changes do not have my
consent and may be a violation of international copyright law.

On 10 May 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.unix.admin, in article
<slrng2arnr.3ek.read_the_sig@mantell0.local>, jpd wrote:

I don't have actual figures, but the coin that the government gets has
to be divided such that you meet wages (usually set by law), and
so-called fixed expenses (water, power, fuels, postage, telephone bills,
etc.) no matter what. Then there are semi-fixed costs, such as vehicles
and a percentage for maintenance (light bulbs, TP, you name it). Then you
get into improvements, and replacement of non-economical to repair
things, some of which simply must be done (the population of this state
is growing at a significant rate, and that means new schools, police
and fire stations as one example). Government budget procedures are a
problem that isn't solved overnight. "Where can we steal 60 million to
pay for this, which has to be done." In several states, there are laws
that require a (minimum) percentage of revenue (or in some cases, a
fixed absolute amount plus a yearly increase for inflation) to go to
schools and education - a result of previous years when the schools
didn't get the needed cash. It's a sore spot for people with kids.
Many states also have balanced budget requirements, and in times like
this when the state income is reduced, something has to give. But then,
you can't stop the construction job and lay off the workers. As the EU
is discovering with the Eurofighter, it may cost substantially more to
buy less than the agreed quantities, or stretch out the delivery times.

The cost of government - specifically those legislative bodies that
handle the budget - is usually fixed, so having a magic fairy come
in and wave the magic wand to solve the budget overnight (verses the
klowns trashing it out for two-three months) isn't going to improve
costs.

Europe tends to have higher taxes, and more free/low-cost social services.
Different philosophies. In some areas of this country, a sure way to
unite the voters is to propose increasing taxes. You'd better have a VERY
good argument, or you'll be one the target of the pitchfork and torches
groups.

I doubt it would fly - there are to many variables. Do you tax the
professional couple with no kids (we call them 'DINKs for dual income,
no kids) at the same rate as the single mother of two, or the family of
six kids where the father is working part time as a window washer? What
about those renting their living space verses those who own? Whose ox
are you going to gore? Who are you going to make happy, and who are you
going to piss off?

A local radio station reported the morning of 01 April 2008 that a late
night session of the legislature passed a law, and the governor signed
it - the would convert three of our state freeways in Phoenix (SR 51,
101, and 202 - roughly akin to the A1, A2, and A4 in Amsterdam) into
toll roads because of the state budget shortfall. The toll on SR51
would be US$0.51, while the toll of SR101 would be US$1.01 and of course
US$2.02 on SR202. Rather than build toll collection booths (think of the
construction time, and the traffic screwup during construction), they
would station toll collectors at each freeway on-ramp (which here tend to
be a mile apart). Oh yes - exact change only and no credit/debit cards.
You might be able to imagine this created a _monumental_ sized shit storm.
With that many toll collectors, the costs would vastly exceed the tolls
collected, what kind of id10t decided on those rates anyway as opposed
to an even dollar or what-ever. Rant, Rave, Bitch, Moan, Revolution, you
name it. The radio station (and a Department of Transportation spokesman
they conned in) thought this would be recognized as a gag. It wasn't. It
was interpreted as another example of the way those idiots we've elected
displayed massive st00pidity - a surprising number of people thought it
was real, because they have zero confidence in those elected officials.

Do you have any idea where-all the government gets taxes now? When I was
a wee-child in the 1940s, they used to have signs on the gasoline/petrol
pumps listing the base price, national tax, city/county/state tax, and
the total that you actually paid. Those signs disappeared a LONG time ago.
Do you like beverages distilled from various grains? Any idea how bad they
are screwing you there? Do you smoke? Those are the obvious ones, but
I also find taxes on my utilities bills, telephone, airline tickets (they
probably also hit train and bus tickets as well).

We've never heavily taxed fuel, because the population is spread out so
much that public transportation is not very useful/popular. The nearest
bus route to my house is 7 miles in one direction, 6.8 in another. My
commute to work is 19 miles one way, and bus service (every 20 minutes
during commute time) only covers 8 miles of that. My wife works in a
different direction, about the same number of miles.

The tax on fuel varies WIDELY. For gas, there is a national tax of $0.184
per gallon ($0.244 a gallon for diesel). Then the local taxes are piled
on top, and that varies by state, county, and city. Most of the taxes are
cents per gallon, but some states ALSO hit you with a percent of sale tax
on top of a fixed tax. Lowest tax seems to be around 37 cents/gallon,
while the highest is 65 cents/gallon PLUS ~8 percent of the sale.

I think Unca MikeA discussed this last year in the monastery. Trucks
pay a road tax because they do cause significant wear on the road
even when they are within weight limits.

Landing distance is determined by the distance it takes to put it on
the runway (500 to 1200 feet in airline service), and the measured
distance (function of weight and landing speed) that it takes to
stop the aircraft using brakes ALONE on a level dry runway in zero wind
at standard temperature, plus a percentage to account for wet runways.
Reverse thrust is a bonus that isn't to be counted on.

Takeoff distance is that distance needed to accelerate to a critical
speed, LOOSE AN ENGINE, and then be able to either stop in the remaining
runway (same rules as landing distances) or get that puppy into the air
and climb (at a much reduced rate) sufficient to clear all obstacles.
This is the reason a normal takeoff in a twin is so impressive - they've
got nearly twice the power needed to fly, compared to a 4 engine bird
that merely has 30ish percent extra.

But is it going to be economical to operate that way? LCY verses LGW or
LHR - do all short-hauls need to use the smaller LCY? How about when
you want to go from Bremen to Brisbane - where are you going to change
planes? Is it going to mean surface transport between airports in a city?
By the way, the A380-800 now flying with Singapore Airlines needs about
400 feet less landing runway, but a 12% shorter takeoff runway than an
A340-[2-6]00 (many airlines) that is half it size. For giggles, compare
the flights at Chicago (KORD verses KMWD), Washington (KIAD verses KDCA),
New York (KJFK verses KLGA) Dallas (KDFW verses KDAL and KFTW), Houston
(KIAH verses KHOU)... there are a lot more - and I haven't mentioned
Tokyo, Bangkok, Paris, Stockholm or Moscow.

Oh, you mean like the 40 to 60 passengers on an aircraft normally used
for 200? There are a couple of airlines flying that way - Lufthansa
has a Stuttgart - New York Liberty (Newark) flight daily, as do several
others. Enjoyable flight... back in the late 1980s, San Francisco
to Tokyo on JAL. Another one was Bangkok to Vienna on Qantas in 1977.
Since then? Nada.

And that's not limited to computers. I spent six hours on the phone with
the medical insurance carrier trying to figure out who was billing who
and why. It sounded like I was transferred up the chain three times
before the person at the other end of the phone understood what I was
asking, and even then it took close to an hour to get the questions
formed correctly (and two days before they got back to me with the
answer).

Pimp, or prospective boss? At least HR has learned not to "improve"
the job description and technical requirements we put on job reqs. We
had such a problem, and HR didn't see why we were so unhappy with them.
We've also had problems with pimps improving the resumes they offer. It
is hard on the candidate, but we take it out on the pimp or his company
by banning them company wide.

Is this because the attitude is that "everyone supports redmondware"?

I agree - and see this problem a lot just the same. Commercially, I
simply go elsewhere, but when it's a government site, the cheese can
get binding.

And there is the problem. A lot of it is the "just click on this icon"
quality, with little explanation of what their super software is
actually doing under the sheets. Part of the problem is that there
is no standard. Bookkeeping is done using a computer adaptation of the
ledger that the great-great-great-grandfather of the company president
used back in the 1870s. If things were standardized, there would be
only a handful of people needed, because all of accounting (for example)
could be run as a cron-job with everything automated. That ain't gonna
happen any time soon, even in one industry.

Of course - "It's so simple that only a child can do it."

Recall that the person who makes the decision to buy is usually dependent
on his secretary to turn on his computer, grab his mail, filter it, and
then print the ones he needs. He _can't_ do that on his own, and we're
stuck with the results.

The son of my golfing buddy says we should be using...

Old guy

On Sat, 10 May 2008 23:03:49 -0500,
Moe Trin <ibuprofin@painkiller.example.tld> wrote:
Ah, but I wasn't talking about that. What I wanted to point to, and did
perhaps poorly, was the practice of taking some specific tax and saying
that has to go to some specific goal. What I'd like to do is two things:

First, take the total income from all taxes, dump it on a big heap, then
dish it out as needed, and see if anything is left over (which then goes
to paying off debts, instead of inventing porkbarrels and moneyshowers
for just a few people--less debt means more can be done with less money,
including racking up new debts, if that is the fancy).

Second, reduce the fixation on budgeting, as it results in tucking away
cash by departments just to justify next year's budget, even if it isn't
really needed now.

EG. a military installation was slated for decomissioning in a few
years, so a lot of things were wound down, maintenance among them. Yet
one day a new and freshly laid terrace was added. It turns out there was
an excess in a budget to be tucked away. It would've been more useful to
put the money to work on building maintenance, but that was prohibited.

Now, I don't know how to do budgeting better such that you retain
good enough financial control with less overhead, but I think it's a
worthwhile subject to pursue. Getting rid of ``use it or lose it''
mentality at both the budget users and budget approvers is a start.


So I basically want to remove internal accounting barriers in the
taxflow and see if that doesn't make way for improving efficiency.

You're quite right that this goes right against the grain for
politicians' instincts to meddle.


Plenty of things wrong with those social services. More government means
a more pronounced need for good governance and good management, and I'm
failing to see either. It could very well be me, but I'm not convinced.


:-)

While I like the ideal of solving governmental problems by coming up
with a better-informed and better-educated voter, the reality doesn't
quite live up to that. Not as disastrous as some other large government
experiments, but that doesn't mean there isn't need for improvement.

Then again, I won't expect ever be in a position to fix things, but
that again is no reason not to have an amusing discussion.


Depends on whether you want to care for the details or not. If it turns
out that not caring will gain more free money through overhead reduction
which in turn would result in a lesser tax burden, then I count it as a
win. Bonus points for taking reasonable precautions that the lower end
doesn't end up worse. But even so, every change in the tax system will
affect changes in the populace as well; most --but not all-- affected
will able to reposition themselves so as to reduce the impact on their
situation.

In a nutshell, I think that it might be the case that our politicians'
wish for ``tax fairness'' costs us more than it benefits us.

The point wasn't to make it fly, though. I was merely wondering what the
numbers would say, taking into account the usual wild guesses and so on.


Ah, let me recount another of those. There was a pretty large turnup at
an ANWB (Dutch AA/AAA/ADAC/...) service outfit a few years ago, as they
had advertised that there'd be free changing of winter air for summer
air in car tyres. Offer valid Today! Only! april first.

Plenty people didn't even understand that it was a gag, after it was
explained to them. The interpretation comes after the falling for it.


Yes, I know everything is taxed to the gills. Following the money from
getting paid (and before) down to paying for a cup of coffee may become
a grizly horror story of the taxman ripping your buying power to shreds.
All for the greater good, of course.

So I can't help thinking that with all that plus the extra work needed
to administrate paying the taxman, a lot of it is makework that we can
safely do without: Less administrative costs mean less overhead means
more effective use of tax intake means less need for tax intake.


If we have, say, staggered 30..40..50% tax brackets, causing lots of tax
evasion on the high end, and extra controls, details, things, that keep
lots of bureaucrats plenty busy, and suppose that by slashing it to a
flat-fee 30% income tax we reduce evasion, can boot a lot of overhead
and overall can run a government more efficiently on less income, then
that would be a win.

Or if we'd removed taxes that come with a relatively high administrative
burden on merchants or taxpayers, and as a result also require lots of
taxman oversight. Less wasted time, more time to make money, of which
the government sees some returns too through income taxes.


I'm not saying this is realistic. It may be pure wishful thinking.
Doesn't stop my curiosity in seeing the mechanism, to what degree this
conjecture is attainable, what its effects would be, and whether that
wouldn't net a benefit for government and taxpayer, in the long term.

It will necessairily not be for the individual bureaucrats losing jobs
and having to earn an income in the non-overhead sector. Or maybe
they'll make better wages there too. Who knows? But my concern is with a
leaner government overall that does what it does for the people more
effecgively.


Here it's fuel tax plus yearly (well, quarterly) car-road-right tax,
which is presumably higher for trucks. I don't own roadgoing equipment
so I don't know the details.

The ``extra levies'' I ment were those involving using cameras to
automatically read licence plates and bill you extra based on that, or
do the same but using RFID or some other wireless/smartcard/whatever
technology. That seems to be police state wet dreams built on because we
can technology.


Pretty sure they don't. I wasn't advocating forcing the use of a smaller
airport, just making it available and attractive enough that it runs
economonically. It appears LCY can survive, though I haven't really
looked at the numbers.

The point is to have the service when it's convenient. Large airports
are ``convenient'' in the sense that you can easily transfer, but if
that isn't a goal --on that airport--, them being large, which implies
out of the way, becomes an inconvenience.


I wouldn't want to, but starting or ending at a small airport doesn't
have transfer problems. Not all travel includes transfers, nor does it
necessairily need to. Nothing wrong with having a ``leaf'' airport in
the city that is much more accessible than the large hub a ways outside
the city. It works in London, with its five(!) airports. Large cities
tend to see plenty ``city hop'' flights where a sizeable chunk of the
passengers will not transfer.

Perhaps I should've added expressly that I wasn't advocating more
than restrictions as to what to allow on the city airport to keep it
palatable for everyone. I'm not advocating removing small flights
from large airports. I'm interested in keeping or creating more
possibilities, not less.


Modern planes. :-)

Now for the noise abatement, as larger planes tend to make more noise.
Doesn't have to be, of course. Glimpsed an interesting snipped about
reducing sonic booms by unspecified trickery.


I skimmed them a bit, but it fit the expected pattern. :-)

And yeah, I don't see why it wouldn't work in Berlin. But if you're
broke, the best thing to do is build a bigger airport from scratch.


My grandfather liked to fly on friday 13th, as nobody else would. And of
course, being rich enough to fly rotan chair style would be nice too.
But I'm pretty sure those days are gone for good.

I like getting on a flight quickly, short flights, and getting off again
quickly too. Businesspeople seem to like the same thing. I like good
public transport, though, and will use it whenever useful to do so.

I don't like being stuck in a gigantic airport full of weary travelers
or worse, hordes of TOURISTS[3]. The larger the airport the more likely
it is setup for mass handling of masses of people. I hate that.

Apparently, flying cattle class is the only ``good'' flying in the
eyes of the reigning socialists. *I* think that other ways may well be
economocally viable too, provided you don't go out of your way to squash
them with premeditated prejudice.


At which point I'd be inclined to just write a letter or a fax. It also
helps that people tend to have some institutionally ingrained idea of
how to write a letter, where email still causes lots of interesting
atrocities. I dug up a second-hand faxmodem just for that purpose.
Doesn't stop my ISP from ignoring the reports, though. Maybe time to
find another one. (I was actually planning to move far enough to need to
choose from new evils. Doesn't seem to be working so far.)


Prospective technical lead, setup by pimp. Pimp failed to get back at
me after my email to him with the rundown, though. Hm.


More people should do that. Well, at least people here do. :-)

As to the candidate, I am in the peculiar position of having a
reasonable skillset, but precariously little to show for it, making me a
hard sell. I still don't mind having a company boot the pimp even if I
ended up a ``victim'' of that. Can't imagine I'd notice the difference
from the other shit recruiters pull anyway.

I do have a list of pimps and companies I will no longer talk to, though
in my case it won't make much of a dent. With very few exceptions, the
most successful interviews were landed by going to the company directly.
The most successful jobs so far were all by word of mouth, even.

I probably should stop talking to pimps at all and *cough* strategically
refocus on more effective ways to revenuize my synergies. *cough*


I don't know. I'm still sitting on an advert I can't find it in my heart
to apply for, after I called them and asked them about their shop.
There, the redmondware requirement is because they're planning to grow
and move to 24/7 operation, and require the ops to fix everything --
including the redmondware needed to point the dishes. They're soon to
launch their own satellite(s?).

The way this interview went I would've needed to think long and hard
whether I'd really want to work there; I don't think that mere linux
trivia run a good shop, and trying to shoot your applicant with them is
arguably not the most effective way to find *good* unix people. I did
get caught rather embarassingly with a couple questions, so they're not
likely to offer me anything.

Thinking back, I think they should've specified ``linux certification''
and be done with it. Trivia all you want, understanding not required.


I think I have to disagree on grounds that we're dealing with people.
People cause anomalies that have to be corrected or worked arround and
accounted for, and so on and so forth. Of course, the same pops up with
paper-based bureaucracies.

A lot of things can be automated, but the skillsets are not combined, in
fact so separate as to be entirely different industries. I think that's
one reason why SAP and BAAN are such monstrosities. (There are many more
reasons why they are, too.)

You still occasionally see the odd hobbyist coming up with halfbakery
that through sheer enthousiasm and dedication is transformed into
something commercially usable. I'm not sure whether ``putty'' is a good
example, but it is an amazingly small program for the features it packs.
I know one police department's dispatch desk ran on MSX computers with
custom software someone's came up with in their free time. Of course,
comissioning such a thing is quite obviously risky from a business
continuity perspective, but it does seem to have a better potential to
peak. Not to mention that other models often have hidden risks. ``Does
not work well'', or ``at all'', for one.


:-)

Now for the rest of the world to pick up on the inconvenient truth
that the knowledge and information based society means more training,
especially WRT using the main tool for information dissemination. Ok,
secondary tool, the first is still our brain.


Which is bad management. I've been reading a bit about that[1]. It can
be fixed, but it'll take a while, and is hard work. Also, it will lose a
lot of warm bodies their cosy management jobs.


[1] _The Essential Drucker_. Took me the better part of a year[2] to get
through the first reading and understand it, and it's not that thick,
really. One of the more interesting books I read lately.
[2] This intertwined by me slowly reducing my blood pressure and finding
shreds of my will to live back, so this is likely not indicative.
[3] Having lived in several small places that saw their fair share of
tourists, I positively despise the assuming a god-given right to
obstruct everyone else while deliberately not paying attention to
people who maybe just want to pass, please. Sure, take your time,
relax, but do be decent enough to look around you and step aside if
needed. There is no reason to play roadblock with your supermarket
cart or your excess of baggage or just your fat asses.

--
j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l .
This message was originally posted on Usenet in plain text.
Any other representation, additions, or changes do not have my
consent and may be a violation of international copyright law.

On 11 May 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.unix.admin, in article
<slrng2ei80.78p.read_the_sig@mantell0.local>, jpd wrote:

As noted - in some cases this is already required by law.

In a number of cases, this also is against existing laws. At our
national level, taxes collected against airline tickets MUST only be
used on airport/airways improvements. Same is true on motor fuel taxes
only being spendable for road repair/improvement.

Unspent authorizations hasn't been a significant problem in a while.
What _has_ been a problem is in-consistent funding of multi-year
programs. Defense and space related projects are the easiest example.
No matter how you try, you can't design, build, launch, and fly a
satellite to Mars in a single year - yet spending MUST be on a yearly
basis. Are you going to tell EADS that we don't have money this year
for the Eurofighter or A400, and they need to stop work until we find
the cash? I'm sure the workers would appreciate the time off.

Yeah, I've seen that.

That would be much of the problem. You'll also have to change some
laws, but not that many.

Part of the bureaucracy is fraud avoidance. The money can be spent
for approved categories and perhaps for specific projects.

I don't think anyone has come up with a fair scheme. Someone will
always be seen to be being screwed, but how to correct this without
creating an enormous bureaucracy full of conditions and rules to
meet. Example - the Alternative Minimum Tax which was designed to
make those with "creative" deductions to still have to pay some
taxes no matter how they wiggled. It did that, but wasn't perfectly
written, and is now effecting far more than the most abusive it was
aimed at. Re-write it? Surely you jest.

It's not supposed to happen, but there are situations where you are
paying tax on taxes. A case being the motor fuel in California, where
there is the base price, national and local taxes (about $0.65 per
gallon), and then the entire thing is subject to "sales tax" of 7 to
9 percent more.

Cup of coffee? Depends on the location, but it may be taxable if
seating is provided (again - California tax law). Here in Arizona,
it is taxable unless sold as part of a (sit-down) meal.

We have this - and the Alternative Minimum Tax laws as well.

You run into a fairness issue - the people at the bottom of the income
pile - earning minimum wage, lots of kids, lots of living expenses will
be hit harder than the singing star whose drug habit is costing 30% of
his income. There are all kinds of special conditions. To encourage
home ownership, interest on the mortgage is deductible (the lender is
taxed with the interest being considered income).

There are three basic national tax forms - 1040, 1040A and 1040EZ
with more and more restrictions on who can use the "simpler" forms.
Each form comes with a table that estimates how long it takes to
fill out the form (I don't have the forms handy, but recall it was
something like 35, 20 and 10 hours - but that includes the time used
to gather the needed data, etc.). You wonder why there is a huge
business in software applications, and tax service stores (bring in
the data and your check, and we'll fill in the forms for you... for
only $$$). To this, you _also_ have to add the time to fill in
similar tax forms for each state where you earned taxable income.

Each country has their own concepts, and from what I've seen, few
have the perfect solution. Within the US, each state is different.
There are several states that don't have a state income tax, but they
manage by taxing the daylights out of other things. Fair? Hah!

Varies by state and possibly by county. Here, there is fuel tax, sales
tax on the vehicle (each time it is sold, along with a transfer tax),
and a calendar tax based on the supposed value of the vehicle (based on
the suggested list price of the vehicle, depreciated over the years).
We don't at this time have toll roads or bridges. Next state over
(California) has similar rules, but also has toll roads and bridges.
Commercial vehicles (cars used for business, buses, trucks) have
additional use taxes often based on mileage.

Unfortunately, those numbers are the killers. The smaller aircraft
are significantly less efficient (fuel, crew) and each one takes a
similar fraction of space in the air - it doesn't matter if that's a
Cessna 150 or an A380-800 on the runway - the runway is occupied for
half a minute or more. A trade magazine I read (Aviation Week and
Space Technology) mentions there is a bubble in the 50 seat jet market
for this reason. Are you going to ban older aircraft because they are
less efficient or are noisier/dirtier? Who is going to pay for that?

Well, there isn't direct service, A quick scan of a recent OAG shows
3 flights a week from Europe, but tons of flights from Sydney,
Melbourne, and Darwin. Flights to Sydney from a number of places in
Europe, but not Bremen. Looks like Frankfort or Amsterdam.

There has to be the traffic that wants to go "there" at the time[s]
you offer. If it were easy or cheap, the airlines would be doing it,
because they don't make money flying empty planes, any more than they
make it when the bird is on the ground some where or delayed enroute
because of traffic congestion. That means that when the plane
arrives at the destination, it's got to get into the air flying
passengers somewhere else. The highest maintenance priority is "AOG"
which stands for Aircraft On Ground. Not only is it not _making_ any
money there, it's costing a bundle in parking fees, customer incon-
venience, and so on. Getting a schedule together such that the
birds are in the air over nine hours every day isn't easy, and the
best (usually long haul) can reach 15 hours a day, but that pretty
exceptional. Then, what do you do when airports in one region are
at/near weather minimums?

because Heathrow and Gatwick are at capacity. But then, the Port
Authority (of New York and New Jersey) runs four of the ten air
ports (KSWF, HPN, CDW, MMU, KTEB, KEWR, KLGA, KJFK, FRG and KISP) in
the New York metro area with commercial, charter, or biz-jet ops, and
the big three (KEWR, KLGA and KJFK) are essentially at capacity.

In the Southeast US, it used to be said that you couldn't go anywhere
(including to he!! in a hand-basket) without changing in Atlanta. The
same is true for Chicago, Seattle, Denver, Phoenix, KLAX (one of five
major airports in Los Angeles county), or San Francisco. Those
airports are major hubs, and I should probably include six to ten more
without including air-freight hubs. Flying from here to my sister's
about 100 KM NE of New York City, again - no direct flights, but I've
a choice of six airlines which means a choice of eight cities where
I'll change planes - from Minneapolis in the North, to Atlanta in
the South.

If we're talking airliners, from 50 to 900 passengers, those of similar
age tend to be _relatively_ similar in noise. Hard to believe, but
true. Sonic booms - lots of interesting tricks, but I wonder if they
will ever be economically sensible. The Concorde was EXTREMELY loud
on takeoff and landing, and ate fuel like it was water. The problem
is drag has to be minimized, and that costs efficiency big time.

Smaller airports mean shorter range and less payload. In some cases
(KLGA, KDAL, KFTW being notable examples) there are legal restrictions
of size of plane and maximum distance served.

Like Tokyo, Bangkok. Seattle and London? In a few places, they
flat out replaced the older airport, Denver being the most recent
example. Denver Intercontinental is about 8 miles further out of
town than Stapleton, but the old airport was destroyed and converted
to housing.

That's why business class exists, and why short/zero notice fares are
higher. There are people who will pay.

What is this "public transport" you speak of? ;-)

Infrastructure isn't cheap - never has been. If you want to fly in
other than steerage, that means more planes to carry the same number,
and that means more airports because of existing capacity restrictions
and that means more fun designing routing from runway A to runway ZWD.
You have an alternative _now_ in the biz-charter and air-taxi market,
but the price per seat-mile/kilometer is _substantially_ higher.

====================

Hmmm... Yeah, I'd be pounding on the pimp

There are a substantial number really horrible pimping services. In
a number of cases I've seen what are obviously part-timers working out
of their home or a postal box. We have to watch the legal aspects, but
passing word to friends and colleagues who work elsewhere helps.

The problem for us is even if the candidate is otherwise interesting,
we can't talk to them if we nuke the pimp. Business law.

That's true as well - we give our employees "finder's fees" if they can
recommend some one that we hire and who then lasts a probation period.
It costs the company less than the pimps, and we seem to always get a
better candidate. I'm guessing, but think that we get over half of
our new employees that way.

Pimps and pimping companies do get a bad reputation - one doesn't have
to look far to see why.

You really do want to be pounding on that pimp to find out.

I'm not in your shoes, nor do I know enough to be accurate, but that
sounds pretty unappetizing.

You won't get a disagreement here.

That may actually be good news (yes, I know).

I hate to say it, but certification is looked on as a bad word here.
It _usually_ means (there are exceptions) that the candidate has
memorized someones ideas of facts rather than getting the hands and
brane dirty. All to often, the certification teaching/test is flat out
wrong ("thicknet uses RG6/U or RG8/U" two wrongs for the price of one,
as RG6 is 75 Ohm, and both coax have the wrong jacket material - that
was a Novell test, or "what is the default network mask for a Class A
network" - thanks microsoft and I've seen similar gaffes from A+, and
others who ought to know better).

Tom Leher - "New Math"

I find it interesting that the new airliners being built (specifically
the 787, but it's also true of Airbus models) now use laptop computers
as a *major* part of the maintenance tools. Part of it is that things
are getting so complicated that you need all the help you can get,
and part of it is that the old ways of doing things no longer apply.
"Pilot says that VHF#2 is intermittent." You can't go out to the
plane and swap the radio, because that box is now integrated up the
whazoo, and the problem could be totally unrelated. Another 787 fact
is that we don't use tin-bashers any more - the bird is made of lots of
plastic. Slightly different skill set required.

Old guy

On Mon, 12 May 2008 23:33:56 -0500,
Moe Trin <ibuprofin@painkiller.example.tld> wrote:
Which I'm saying might not be such a great idea after all. A compromise
might be adding a provision to make sure all needs are covered there
first, and the overflow --if any-- will go to long term interests like
paying off government debts. The interests paid on that are also pure
tax money.


Because everybody's adept at tucking it away.


Which goes to show that politicians can't manage their way out of a wet
paper bag to save their own lives either. Bad management at the overboard
level, but still bad management.


Yes, so, any replacement plan should include ways to prevent or at least
detect-and-deter fraud. Doesn't change that overhead reduction would
still be desirable.


That is sort-of what I'm saying: Stop adding thousands of little detail
rules to add ``fairness'' to the system, which will invariably fail in
some way, and see if you can't get a reasonable result with a very few
simple taxes and almost no bureaucratic overhead.

Yes, lots of things will change. I don't think the overall unfairness
needs to rise much, or at all, though. Of course, it goes right against
the meddling nature of politicians. Taoism advocates this, though
(horribly paraphrasing; too lazy to come up with a good reference): The
country is fine as long as the prince sits on his trone, and does nothing.


So, first you give them wiggle room, then try to tax that. Sounds
like make-work to me.

The more you make exceptions, the more you need to raise overall tax
levels to make up for it. How is that fair to the rest?


So we have a system with bugs and source available, but fixing is
not done? Time to fix that, then.

Much like the not-much-a-joke of ISO certification. First thing you
do is document the change process, otherwise you can't change your
processes once you've stuck yourself to adhering to your own processes.


Silly rules to try to be ``fair''. Why should lawmakers care whether
it's sold as part of a meal and whether you sit while drinking coffee?

If you're interested in taxing sales, you tax sales, so you'd tax the
whole transaction, period. Here, VAT differs based on whether it's a
basic foodstuff or something else. While as a taxpayer I like getting
taxed less, I'd still prefer to have everything be the same (low) rate.

Then again, I'm not sure VAT is such a good idea overall, seeing how
it has wonderful opportunities for fraud and incurs a significant
administrative overhead.


My goal would be to reduce the need for taxes as much as possible and
hopefully end up at lower rates overall than we had before, or at least
finding out whether that would be possible.

I'm not really interested in having to decide what's fair and what
is not. In fact, I'd rather avoid creating situations that give rise
to such a need. This is of course the opposite of what bog-standard
politicians like to do. ``Look ma! I decided, very decisively!''

I'm not sure that flatrate taxes are more or less fair than staggered
rates to go after the rich. Why should the government encourage specific
things like home ownership? Why stop at homes and not, oh, subsidize
SUV ownership? Or for that matter, is it really ``fair'' to support the
masses at the bottom for the children they can't really afford?

By the same token, are you saying that earning a lot of money gives
someone else the right to decide that what you do with it is not your
business? If I want to drink myself to death, well, why not? It's
something between me and my family and friends, but not really a matter
for the government. Of course, that only flies as long as I don't
infringe the right of others to not be affected by my actions, where
such a right is recognized. (I would recognize such a right, but hey.)


Are there any states that have only an income tax, nothing else?


Oh, there's a specific car sales tax here as well, but IIRC only on first
sale.


Not a problem if you're not /at capacity/. The point is to have the
facility and it would be nice if it could support itself, but that
doesn't mean it has to have to squeeze out every last cent it can.

By its very nature an airport tends to have a geographic position if
not outright monopoly. Until, say, maglev trains finally come along,
it doesn't have much of a competition it needs to keep on innovating
against. Which is why train stations right under the airport aren't a
threat but a good idea.


I'd make it difficult for old/inefficient/noisy commercial craft on the
small in-the-city airport, much like LCY does, but said nothing about
other airports. Yes, it puts up a barrier for using _that_ airport. That
was the point, with the specific goal of keeping having the facility
palatable to the people living around it.

I said nothing about other airports, as I'm not interested in
restricting them, taking flights away from them, or anything else.


Of course. There also will be less traffic if you discourage airlines
from using the airport you want to close, which is what has been
happening at THF. I don't think it's perfectly honest to boot the
airlines then point at absence of same as valid reason for closing the
facility.


I haven't a clue. :-)


I don't think that's the sole reason. Both are large airports and just
going there starts to be a waste of time.


Berlin's pet project is right next to SXF. It seems somewhat unlikely
they'll demolish the old airport to put housing there. TXL might be, and
THF's grassy field could very well be, which I'd think a shame.


rate my pimp dot com?

Or to be web two point oh compliant, pimpr dot com. Oh, that already
exists (says whois). Oh well.


I just looked at the ad again (it had been a while since I last saw it,
for various reasons), and it did include vague threats of cygwin/win32.
So mea culpa. Not that I mind the failure much.


Yeah, figured as much.


You're looking for something different, then. :-)


I remember that the people responsible for maintaining the dutch F16s
were happy with the fancy costs savings of replacing the wall-of-paper
with a few CDroms. This was well before laptops were widespread; back
then CDroms tended to have more capacity than desktop computers too.

Nothing really wrong with that in principle, of course. The trouble
only starts to pop up when it emerges that the platform is inferior,
unmaintainable, infection-ridden, and so on and so forth. Much like you
don't print manuals on toilet paper with vanishing novelty ink.


--
j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l .
This message was originally posted on Usenet in plain text.
Any other representation, additions, or changes do not have my
consent and may be a violation of international copyright law.

On 13 May 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.unix.admin, in article
<slrng2iusc.f9t.read_the_sig@mantell0.local>, jpd wrote:

That was what it took to get the tax in place. Recall that the governed
have some say in how their tax money is spent. Here, it was "you can
impose this tax, but the taxes collected can only go to $FOO."

No, because a lot of the excess is siphoned off back to the allocator.
Government spending entities can't salt it away, because that is
against the law.

They don't have control over the government income, and that is going to
vary every year.

So you think that gifts to charitable organizations should be taxable?
Job development credits? Scholarship funds? Taxes themselves?

And it goes back to the point of whose ox are you going to gore? No matter
what you do, you are going to screw someone. Who is it going to be?

They try not to tax necessities - basic foodstuff for example is rarely
taxed. PREPARED foods, is not a necessity,

Whose ox are you going to gore? Remember that tax law wasn't created
overnight, but is the result of (at least) decades of adjustments and
improvements to fix things to (then) current conditions.

So you let the politicians decide?

Give it a try - again, I don't think it will fly. Home ownership is
"subsidized" by taxing the receiver of interest (it's income) rather
than the payer - or would you tax both? For income tax purposes, the
taxes you pay (to other entities) on the sale or the annual property
tax may be deductible, but you are still paying them.

Of course not. Taxes on products like motor fuel, sales, property,
booze, tobacco, are pretty wide spread (almost universal), although
the rates are different.

Well, you're going to have to make some incentive that it's not at
capacity. Right now, the airlines are screaming at the US FAA because
of slot limitations at several key airports. Never mind that everyone
schedules flights at the hour for competitive reasons even though they
_know_ that 25 aircraft can't take off in the period seven to twelve
minutes after the hour. So you are limited to 90 flights per hour
among several airlines - does it make sense to use 50-100 passenger
aircraft, or 300-600 passenger aircraft in a capacity limit situation?

That's why there are five airports in Los Angeles with air service.

I doubt in the extreme that maglev will be here (North America) any
time soon. Cost. Who is going to pay for it? Remember, our rail system
is private companies, not state-run. Amtrak is renting the rights to run
over commercial rail.

But who is going to pay for the lost use? Aircraft are not cheap, and
are expected to earn their keep for decades. Are you going to prevent
them from earning the coin to repay the purchase loans? Aircraft don't
exist in one airport. They have to connect the dots in a manner that
keeps them earning money. In the 1970s, "China Air Lines" (Taiwan)
had one Convair 880, and six days a week it was scheduled to fly 14
hours a day from Tokyo to Taipei to Hong Kong to Singapore or Kuala
Lampur one day, and the opposite on the other day. On Sunday, it flew a
round trip to Taipei and the rest of the day was in maintenance. Thai
International had five Caravelles flying similar routes, with the
addition of Seoul. Bali, and three places in India. They were
_scheduled_ from about 8 AM to 9:30 PM every day, but invariably
something would happen, and flights would be delayed. Screw up things in
one place, and watch it ripple through the system.

Who is going to pay for the inability of the airline to fly the plane
so that it makes money? How is the airline supposed to repay the
purchase loan or the lease?

When Heathrow was opened in 1946, it had six runways. 4 got closed
because they weren't usable that often AND because there wasn't
convenient room to extend them. So now you've got 2 (09L/R and 27L/R)
and they are fully in use. They WANT to add a third parallel runway to
increase the capacity. I don't offer much hope of that, so the solution
is to move the flights to Gatwick (can't, because it's at limits), LCY
(but as you've pointed out, it's to small and restricted), or Stansted
or Luton which both have crap connections. There are other alternatives
- fly into Manchester or Liverpool. Nice and convenient. NOT!

====================

No, it's generally word of mouth.

No, word of mouth - it's harder to prove discrimination.

If you are going to use a pimp, lean hard on it that you don't do windoze.

Experience. Knowledge. Symptoms of clue. Does the person know what a
command line is? What's the layout of /etc/passwd? What is the purpose
of /etc/resolv.conf, and what would you expect to find there? What is the
most common symptom of a missing /etc/resolv.conf? What is the most
obvious difference between FreeBSD and Solaris? Why? If you are serious,
you may have a box handy - is the candidate fumbling around or has some
confidence? Actually, if you look in this group, I believe the subject
has been discussed in a lengthly thread in the past 6-8 months.

I take it you've never had to "maintain" those paper manuals. Every
couple of weeks, you'd get a package with anywhere from a few to a few
hundred pages that had to replace existing pages in 3 ring binders.
Every copy. And perhaps once a year, you'd have a manual check, where
you checked every page and page date against a check list. Great fun.

The electronic manuals I've seen are tremendously useful because you
have them very close to the job. Some seem to be running a crippled
version of windoze or Linux, but the specialized application is
restricted of what it can do, and with whom. You probably have limited
access to central databases, and limited messaging ("I need this part
for aircraft 98345 - hardstand A43" - username, location, and other
details are semi-hard coded).

Old guy

On Tue, 13 May 2008 22:41:40 -0500,
Moe Trin <ibuprofin@painkiller.example.tld> wrote:
I'm well aware of the endless horse-trading that passes for democracy.
Then again, reality in no way needs to be a restriction on speculating
on idealized systems. :-)


Governments aren't the only ones with that problem. Even so, that can be
managed; some things can be easier skimmed on for this year to support
something else without much damage than some other things -- provided
you make up for it later. However, that requires administrative insight
and a long-term view. This usually is not fashionable in politics.


Well, is there a fundamental reason why this type of person (in casu:
non-natural, charitable) should be treated different than other persons?

Plenty of places do tax gifts and inheritances and whatnot. Plenty of
charities are themselves so inefficient as to waste more money than they
would if they were taxed and ran even a bit more efficiently. Remember
that any exception raises the overall cost, so the question to me is not
so much ``having rights'' as it is whether the tradeoff is worth it in
the bigger picture.


Reduced the number of taxes enough, and plenty of deductibles and
subsidies will have to go too. Some because they no longer make sense,
others on general principle. With less taxes overall, then *overall*
more money will be ``free'' so it would be easier to just add a bit to
the gift to make it ``do'' the same after income tax.

I don't think taxes themselves should be taxed again, but I prefer a
simple solution, such as: If all you have is one single tax at one
point (I took ``income'' a while back), you'll have to contort your own
finances quite a bit to make that one tax apply to itself again. There
is something to be said for a system that's cheaper to use ``straight''
than to spend time and money finding and exploiting its loopholes.

My point is not to squibble over individual taxes and perks, Moe, but to
boot as many as possible and still come up with a reasonable tax system
capable of funding a viable government. I have a hunch it's cheaper in
the long run.


If that is a given anyway, as you say, then explain to me why that would
be any reason to keep bad law, instead of trying again, please.


``Improvements'' often enough in the form of some nitwit's bright idea
or petty hate.


I think I said something quite different in that paragraph.


--------------------
I wasn't about to, actually. What the airport does beyond comply with a
bunch of noise abatement measures, frankly, I don't care about, except
that it makes enough revenue to pay for its own existence.


I would just flat out ignore that ``problem''. This sounds like
something for the respective marketing departments to figure out. :-)

Of course, I'm not the FAA.


Flying a 600 passenger aircraft when there's only 50 people willing
to play passenger to the destination probably has problems too.


I'm not expecting it here either, even if state run. The technology
seems to be just as attainable as that of working, viable aircars.


There's no lost use if the airline has a) only suitable aircraft or b)
enough other lines to use craft not usable on /this/ airport elsewhere.

You're making it sound like the mere existence of aircraft artificially
prohibited from going somewhere is prohibitive for the existing of that
somewhere. If that is your position, I can't but disagree.


====================
He knows I don't own any windows licences and therefore couldn't supply
a word format CV. This seems to've been accepted. :-)

We'll see what he comes up with, if anything. If not, there'll be a
note asking him to delete all info he has on me in a couple months.


*checks* Oh, tricky question. Wrong entries there are somewhat more
interesting, though.

Or the one time a developer/project manager asked for my help with
some unspecified box (turned out to be FreeBSD) as he was getting
``sendto: permission denied'' errors using ping. I remember sitting
there for a minute, stumped, (``permission denied? wtf, this isn't the
filesystem!'') then having the proverbial lightbulb go on.


I wasn't criticising. In fact, I think most of my reading is from
screens too. I just remember reading about it.

Come to think of it, that was even before CD-Rs existed. I wonder how
they'd do the updates. It might be that even a full CD run just for a
couple hundred CDs back then was economical compared to printing lots of
paper and shipping it everywhere around the globe.


That runs the additional risk of depending on the manufacturer to keep
the central database running. Local copies stay around longer and can be
passed on with the sale of the thing.

For fighter jets that are otherwise heavily regulated and constricted
anyway that might be acceptable, but for, say, a car, I would really
prefer something that isn't dependent on the whims of the manufacturer's
service division.

You know, a standard file format and a standard board computer interface
would be useful: Just keep (a copy of) the manual on there. :-)


--
j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l .
This message was originally posted on Usenet in plain text.
Any other representation, additions, or changes do not have my
consent and may be a violation of international copyright law.

On 14 May 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.unix.admin, in article
<slrng2l826.jtm.read_the_sig@mantell0.local>, jpd wrote:

I was more referring to the airlines - they're the ones that schedule when
(supposedly) the birds are going where.

Technically, airspace (and that includes access to runways) is more or
less on 'first come, first served', but then we talk about airport
domination. I think United has 70% of the flights at Dulles (KIAD),
while US Air has half the departures at Reagan (KDCA). United also is
the major player at O'Hare (KORD), while Delta absolutely dominates
Atlanta (KATL). The marketing types use that to block competitors.
The FAA finally stepped in and limited flights at some airports because
there was (literally) no place to put the aircraft. (Thinking about
that, the Chinese recently withdrew authorization for something like 25
flights with the worst "on-time" performance at Beijing - that's 25
flights a day!)

But we've always been dependent on having lots of flights. Before
deregulation (the government used to have some say in fares and who
flew where), there used to be 26 non-stops every day from New York to
Los Angeles (20 more to San Francisco, and 8 others to other West Coast
airports). There were also the same number of non-stop returns just to
balance things. That doesn't include the 7 "one-stops" (meaning no
change of plane, usually at Chicago, St Louis, Dallas or Denver), or
the connecting flights (same cities, plus Washington, Detroit, and
Minneapolis).

True - but look at those 26+7 New York - Los Angeles flights. The
smallest aircraft scheduled was 180 seats, and they were the one-stops.

[maglev]

Wonder how they would handle snow accumulations - say 10 cm.

'a)' would be great, but trying to keep your fleet age so low is very
expensive. (An average age less than ten years is unusual, and less
than six unheard of.) The second hand market isn't that robust. As for
'b)', that can also be interesting. Scheduling is a bit of torture
balancing the "right" size aircraft (capacity, range, cost) verses
restrictions like noise or weight limits or curfews, verses the
departure/arrival times at all of the airports verses flight crew
scheduling, and having a place to go after you've flown from Berlin to
Bremen - does the bird next go to London, Lisbon, Stockholm or... and
where does it go after it gets 'there", and where after that. There
really is a reason that flight schedules don't change very often.

No, it's an economical burden to work around those restrictions. Do you
abandon the aircraft, or the airport? It's not as if you can walk down
to the show-room and buy a new aircraft off the dealer's floor even if
you had the cash (which is _highly_ unlikely). Both Airbus and Boeing
are sold out for the next 2-3 years, and the leasing companies are not
awash in brand new aircraft. Old aircraft we can find, but it probably
won't meet the restrictions either. Whatever you get has to be
compatible with your existing fleet (spares, licenses and similar) or
you've just opened another can of worms. If noise is the restriction,
maybe there are operational tricks you can try at the cost of payload
or fuel burn, or maybe you can fit a "hush-kit in a couple of months
(they aren't on the shelf either), but they are costly and are not as
economic as a new aircraft.

====================
Aside - did he accept one in troff, or tex? ;-) I know most are loath
to accept non-editable forms, and it's so hard for them to retype it on
their own windoze box.

I hope it won't take that long for unrecovery.

Yeah - or having non-authoritative non-recursive servers listed in
addition to authoritative ones. 'NXDOMAIN' does not mean "ask some
one else".

It helps to have run into the problem (or heard about someone else who
has), but yeah that one has several possible causes all of which are
easy to check. But unless you are thinking in that direction, it may
not be obvious.

I was merely pointing out one of the less-obvious costs of paper manuals.
On-line manuals are trivial for the user to maintain... as long as you
haven't misplaced the CD - but then you've got the replacement, so the
problem is partially solved.

The ones I've dealt with, remove and return (or remove and destroy) the
old one, insert the new one - done.

Don't forget your customers who have to remove the old paper pages and
insert the new ones - that isn't your direct cost, but your customer
sure sees the savings and appreciates it. An offset press run isn't
going to be cheap either (photocopies are not acceptable).

Local copies of non-dynamic material saves bandwidth, and that's it.
For things on the scale of aircraft and aircraft parts (and that goes
down to major automotive parts and similar), as long as the product is
economically in service, the manufacturer may be required by law to
have the support up and running (do you need parts for a Douglas C-47D
that was built in 1943?). For high value parts (the airline industry),
you want the part ASAP, but it's _highly_ unlikely to be stored locally,
so a central database is the only way to go. Few (if any) airlines have
a "complete" set of spares for each type of aircraft in their fleet,
never mind having those spare on the right continent/country. You say
your left engine just ate a 5 kilo seagull and isn't operating properly?
Hmmm... we own a spare engine, but it's being repaired after another
seagull hit... ah, $FOO airlines has one located in $BAR, while $BAZ
airlines has one in $QUX, and we have parts sharing agreements with
both. Which one can get "here" quicker?

If the car is under warranty, that's one thing. If it's out of warranty
the manufacturer may be the place to go, but there's usually what's
called "after market" suppliers. My car hasn't been near a dealer in
three years, but gets regular service and repairs as needed. For normal
consumables (brake pads, filters, tires, light bulbs, batteries, etc.) I
wouldn't think of (an overpriced) dealer. Had an accident and ripped off
a fender? It's HIGHLY unlikely to see the dealer unless it's really new.

I don't have the specific advertisement handy, but here's an article
that mentions the mechanic using "Boeing's Maintenance Performance
Toolbox, a wireless notebook". The picture isn't large enough to see
a brand name, but the picture credit is Thales.

Old guy

On Wed, 14 May 2008 21:07:07 -0500,
Moe Trin <ibuprofin@painkiller.example.tld> wrote:
The least one can do is not trying to shoo them away from the airport. :-)


Sounds like someone got a bit greedy.

China is pretty big. Presumably that means lots of traffic to the
capital. :-)


Which is pretty different here, as we do have more or less viable
long-range trains, lots of people just drive, and in general
distance*passengers I expect to be smaller.


Haven't a clue. The coils and whatnot in the rail might have a heating
feature, or just are generally too warm to stay snowed under for very
long (unless it was a lot of snow).

A high speed German (250..300km/h `ICE') train derailed recently because
it ran into a flock of sheep right before a tunnel. In this case the
tunnel walls kept it more-or-less straight so there were a bunch of
wounded, a totaled train, and a score dead sheep. A single sheep
would've been no problem; a flock apparently is.

A couple days later another train ran into cattle. Slower train so
much less damage, except for a bunch of dead cows. Coincidence?


There are a couple of low cost operators that I'm told keep their prices
low because their fleet is much newer than the incumbments. That and
planning tricks and advertising prices without the airport fees.


As you note, scheduling already is quite tortous so that's just a few
more parameters for this one airport. 'Sides, I'm not the airline; at
best I'd be the airport and busy figuring out what the minimum set of
restrictions would be to get what I'm after.


In general, you need both. If a restriction on this airport means you
can't use this airplane there, well, shift it elsewhere and use another
airplane here.


All the more a pity that Fokker got the life sucked out of it, then
died, right before the market picked up again.


I'm working in troff, but since recruiters are invariably button pushers
that doesn't help him. He had problems copy/pasting the ghostscript
generated PDF into word (xpdf's pdftotext also gets strange results),
which could have something to do with the tricks I'm using to get the
subsection headers to line out: The heading macros use \Z'' to move back
and forth for the occasion, thus avoiding emitting linebreaks.

I fed it through nroff and fiddled with the parameters a bit to get
non-hyphenated lines to make copy-pasting a bit easier, and sent the
resulting ascii.


It has already taken more, though just now (as noted elsewhere) the
cash is running dry, everybody pops up and wants a piece, and $lastjob
seems to've done painfully (to me) creative tax things, and due to (AOT)
certain people's litigous full-assery I'm going to fail the tax deadline
for fixing that abortion. So it's really a case of seeing whether the
joint burns down or drowns in the quench first. Best of all, I can't
really be arsed to care anymore. But that's neither here nor there.


A high-volume PS laser could still do it.


That and having a much better probability of staying around after the
manufacturer has stopped supporting $product, or stopped existing for
that matter. If in 100 years some bunch of yoyos wants to restore a
rusty dreamliner to flying condition (I can think of better projects,
but in 100 years I'll be dead), then a scratchy CD with the plans is
preferrable over a database that has long ceased to exist. Though it
may not matter anyway, that with firmware bitrot and all that.


A lathe with the plans available is probably faster and cheaper. Come to
think of it, just a CD with the CNC plans would make for an interesting
airplane kit.


For that, I agree, a central database isn't a bad idea.


Probably windows, might not even be properly ``kiosked'', but it should
be. If only for trying to keep malware at bay. Pretty amazing how even
many people with deep technical clue (in electronics, other engineering)
often still can't be arsed to learn how to be effective at techical
computing. I no longer think that it is purely my unix bias that
classifies windows as entirely unsuitable for that.

Then again, while I can solder well enough, I wouldn't be able to build
a bridge or design a circuit to save my life. That comparison is unfair,
though. While I don't need to be able to build a pencil from scratch to
draw a bridge design, I do need to know how to use it.


--
j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l .
This message was originally posted on Usenet in plain text.
Any other representation, additions, or changes do not have my
consent and may be a violation of international copyright law.

On 15 May 2008 in the Usenet newsgroup comp.unix.admin, in article
<slrng2nvfa.nli.read_the_sig@mantell0.local>, jpd wrote:

There's only one commercial airport in Beijing, "Capital International
Airport" with two runways. In 2004, it was the 20th busiest airport in
the world, doing about a half the business of Heathrow, or 80 percent of
Schiphol.

I suspect you have more _international_ trains in .nl than we have
inter-city trains in .us. Commuter trains in some of the large cities
like New York, Chicago, San Francisco or Los Angeles, but there is one
train a day between San Francisco and Los Angeles (and it doesn't even
go into San Francisco, but is across the bay in Oakland).

You need only look at our freeway/Interstate highway systems.

[maglev]

That doesn't sound good.

That's a comparative statement. Ryanair has a young fleet, but I don't
think the airline itself is that old. Easyjet is similar. Air Berlin is
unloading the oldest aircraft. But none of them are large fleets.

That's common - at least here, they're required to mention that there are
additional fees and taxes, though they only mention the 'per departure'
tax having a specific value.

It gets rather interesting when you are trying to schedule 400+ aircraft
a day when the average flight is 90 minutes (gate to gate), and your
goal is a ground time under 60 minutes. (Southwest Airlines is a bit
harder, with over 500 aircraft, and an average flight time under 75
minutes - and a scheduled ground time under 40 minutes.)

KLM - nearly a third of their fleet is "old". Lufthansa... looks like
about 13% (34 of 260), British - 36 of 240, Alitalia... 80 of 150, well,
you get the idea. Even with small fleets like these, you soon run out of
places when you can use them.

As an aircraft producer, they were aiming at what is a VERY competitive
target. The F28/F70/F100 jets were all "local service" (50-100 pax,
used in flights up to two hours, and they were slow. If you look at the
business today, Bombardier (Canadair) and Empresa Brasilera are the
major players, but companies in Japan, China, and Russia have what look
to be as-good if not better coming down the pipe. But Fokker isn't the
only one who is out of that business. We _used_ to have four very
energetic builders in this country (Convair, Douglas, Lockheed in
addition to Boeing). Douglas got borged twice, and what's left is a
small part of Boeing.

====================

"The good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose
from."

Nothing new there.

Here, the employee is responsible only for telling the employer his
marital status and number of dependents (both effect the "standard"
tax withholding). Everything else is the employers problem, and the
various tax authorities don't tolerate much mucking about.

Sounds as if you really need unrecovery.

Depends on the customer. The government still specifies printing rather
than lasers, even for small jobs. But then, they'll often accept a single
master and they'll do the printing (for a fee). If it's not classified,
office support places like Kinkos will also do the job.

Something like the company in Washington state that is building
copies of the WW2 German Me-262. They have some of the plans, and
have gone to museums to measure the very few existing birds. The
Smithsonian had completed a _museum restoration several years ago,
and that helped. But the current model is using "modern" engines
(from used Lear Jets) because the original engines simply won't meet
even 40 year old standards.

As long as you carry no one who is not a required crew member. The
aviation authorities take a VERY DIM view of people hacking parts.
Quality inspections, materials standards, done by licensed people.
And your insurance carrier is going to be charging HUGE premiums
(even larger than what they charge for a fully airworthy Goon, which
couldn't be certified today due to stability problems at aft CG
conditions, and it's difficulty meeting engine out performance).

Actually, there are several companies that are in the business of
spare parts support. They own parts, and have them in warehouses at
airports in many countries. As I said earlier - an Aircraft On
Ground is loosing money big time every minute it on that status. The
parts company can be looked at as an insurance scam that's legal.

A passenger is sitting in an airliner using his laptop, and on the
screen appears:

Bluetooth: new device found: Airbus A310

(reported in Risks Digest 23.72 17 Feb 2005 - article dated 13 Feb 2005,
but doesn't mention the issue of *c't* it originally appeared in.) The
manufacturers are aware of that problem, as are the aviation certification
authorities.

I'm equally distressed to find the attitude that "the computer says" is
an absolute answer. Never mind that it's redmondware and has been 0wn3d,
never mind that the programmer screwed up and didn't (couldn't) test
everything, or that some id10t operated keyed in the wrong data or
fumble-fingered something. "The computer says" as if to say the problem
is your mistake - the computer being perfect of course.

The pencil, or the bridge ;-)

Old guy

On Thu, 15 May 2008 22:02:20 -0500,
Moe Trin <ibuprofin@painkiller.example.tld> wrote:
I don't know what their train situation is. Come to think of it, I don't
know whether the Chinese are even allowed to travel around within China.


And then there's the sleeper trains.

Incidentally, I'll be hopping on an international train in a few
hours, and likely will be off usenet for a week or so.


Not particularly, no. Then again, I never understood why maglev was
such a great idea. Sure, the floating-in-air thing is pretty neat, but
a couple of steel bars in concrete sure is a heck of a lot simpeler.
Possibly simpler than a highway, even. (Altough getting high-speed
tracks right is fairly tricky too.) Simplicity and cheapness are pretty
important for the static part of a long-haul transportation system.


Yes, I should've fixed that. Either comment their prices are lower than
the others or drop the newness comparison. I forgot.


Which is sad for the airlines, but not unreasonable. If you want to keep
on running filthy planes you'd best be the USA govt. (B52, anyone?)


:-)

Altough in this case the problem some specific text handling thing
within one format. Maybe I should go back to the previous method, or
instruct it to artificially insert an invisible linebreak equivalent
into the output stream.


A big bag'o'cash would do it; I've got enough other things that I want
to get around to tinker and play with. I'm getting a bit sick of wasting
time chasing button pushers to no avail and seeing myself forced to do
other things I really don't care about, other than that they give me the
distinct feeling I'm being screwed, hard.


That doesn't surprise me at all, with them being the first functioning
jets and all that. We've come some way in the meantime. :-)


Oh, I know that. The glider club had an old tubing-and-cloth glider
where some silly bit had broken (the bits of tubing that attached the
tail-sled, I think), and they had to go to the national glider centre to
get it fixed. Five minute welding job, huge price tag. Also: done quite
sloppily; good enough because the welder was ``certified'', but that
doesn't mean he was much good beyond that. The thing is, the guy who had
it done is both a very experienced glider instructor, and a competent
welder. Not surprising he sourly commented he could've done a much
better job -- but he wasn't allowed to due to missing and hard-to-get
paperwork.

To me, most of the paperwork is make-work. Yes, the principles behind
the requirements, or rather, the reasons, are sound and necessairy, but
the implementation could stand some improvement.


Then again, the airlines could do that themselves too, only they don't
because they choose not to.


Ouch.

Technically, it doesn't have to be a problem, but realistically, it's
a vivid illustration why we end up with lots of little rules that bog
down the industry in hopes of stopping planes falling from the sky: This
is clearly not a good idea, but nobody's seen to regulate it away, yet.
Until then, it won't be fixed.


I fully agree. Though, while it is what they're saying, it could be that
they're saying it because they don't know how to perform those changes
in the system. With a paper form it's easy to take a pencil and scribble
something extra on it, hoping it'll fix things -- despite that some
clerks will get all huffy about soiling their beautiful form like that.
Like the missing ``none of the above'' button on voting machines, other
automated systems have similar problems with implementing support only
for narrow use cases and having insufficient exception handling.

There was a mention of a couple of lawyers (where?) working on legal
underpinings for as-of-yet nonexistent AIs to be given ``person rights''
(IIRC legal rights to take certain actions unsupervised, IE. adult
responsibility). I think that before we go there we'll first have to
recognize *and take* responsibility ourselves.

Also, with humans, there are ways to punish and force to pay damages,
but with computers?


Depends on whether you're Wylie E. Coyote or not.


--
j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l .
This message was originally posted on Usenet in plain text.
Any other representation, additions, or changes do not have my
consent and may be a violation of international copyright law.

On 16 May 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.unix.admin, in article
<slrng2qa3f.26l6.read_the_sig@mantell0.local>, jpd wrote:

No doubt. Maintenance of the right-of-way has got to be substantially
higher, even compared to existing "high speed" rail lines. But the
mechanical tolerances over short distances are probably a bit easier.

It is if you are the one who owns (or partially owns) the planes.

While the YB-52A dates from March 1952, the only early model still in
existence is the NB-52B (52-008) that was used by NASA Dryden, and it
was retired in 2004. The only ones left are a handful of B-52H models,
built between 9/1960 and 6/1962, and all of those are turbo-fan engines
(TF-33-P3, comparable to the JT3D-7). These are the same engine used on
some very late models of the C-135, E-3 (AWACS) and E-8 (both of which
are based on the late model 707-320B). Now if you'd like to complain
about old/dirty engines, you might look at the older series KC135, such
as are flown by the US and French Air Forces. (Air forces of 21
countries are still flying 707s or C/KC135s). Or you could also look at
those four old Fokkers or three DC-10-30CFs being flown by the KLu ;-)

====================
Big bags of cash are nice, but they tend not to fall from the sky when
you need them, and the banks and transfer companys don't like the idea
of just leaving them on the street for anyone to pick up.

I've seen mention of un-recovery in .gb and .nl, but it does seem
spotty. We're probably going to loose several slots merely because
the money isn't available (I'm in the R&D division) due to the slowing
economy. But that doesn't make me feel any better/worse.

That surprises me. A weld shouldn't depend on paperwork, but on the
skill and materials used.

There have been some pretty severe abuses over the years, and that's
where the paperwork comes in. Something as simple as using non-certified
bolts bought on the sly. Turns out the bolts were intended for
automotive service, rather the aeronautical, AND they were rejects
even in the original service. Something like 30 people died when they
failed in flight, and while the authorities were able to prosecute
the mechanic, the inspector who signed off the repair, and the clown
who bought the bolts, it probably didn't satisfy the families of the
victims. In the past (I dunno) 30-ish years, the government inspectors
have been looking hard at unauthorized or unapproved parts, and have
dealt harshly when they find any.

You also don't have to have insurance - you can pay the total cost out
of pocket if it ever comes to that. The airlines are looking to save
costs where ever they can, and not owning spares that you may never
use, and not having to store and account/inspect for those parts is
another cost. Parts pools, and spare parts companies allow fewer
spares to be available over a wider geographic area, which means the
spare is available sooner.

Yup
What is slightly scary if you're knowledgeable of networking is that the
whole mess is interconnected - the flight control systems and the
passenger entertainment networks are on a common switched network (to
the best of my understanding). Supposedly, they've investigated flooding
the passenger side and that it has no effect on the flight control side.

or as more likely, they haven't got a clue how the system works. "It's
magic" seems to be a common perception. Risks Digest (nntp://comp.risks)
covers this fairly often.

Or that the data is actually entered by character recognition software
that only looks in specific areas on the form. And that assumes that
the papers get put into the scanner in a timely manner. I wasted 20
minutes on the phone waiting to talk to a human and then spent another
10 minutes while he tried to chase things down. A form I mailed in
last month only took 12 days to get entered. On line delivery of the
form isn't possible, and the "local" office is merely acting as an
agent for the national agency, but that's OK because the actual work
is being done in a regional office 1300 miles away. And we can't do
anything by phone, as we need that signature. Smiling service. The
surely public officials you guys spoke about last month exist here too.
But here, they've got armed guards at the customer entrance (along with
metal detectors) to protect the staff - I suppose if I tried to get in
with a sword-cane, they'd get suspicious.

But blaming the computer is so _convenient_!!! Everyone understands and
accepts that excuse. "The reason I was late was that the computer in
my car blue-screened." (Of course I didn't run out of gas.)

That will be an interesting exercise. Even today, you have some legal
recourse against the company/government that employees the person who
screwed up, and at the same time, it's often difficult to take legal
actions against that employee. Ah well, more work for lawyers.

I have _NEVER_ purchased anything from Acme, but he (or a relative)
lives about 350 meters from my house. I hear them every evening.

Old guy

On Fri, 16 May 2008 20:22:26 -0500,
Moe Trin <ibuprofin@painkiller.example.tld> wrote:
Oh, I don't know. But then I'm from yurp where there's laws that
demand silly things like factory plants need to meet at least these->
regulations. Altough that sort of thing invariably leads to huffing and
puffing it doesn't allow for the really old and extremely inefficient
machinery I'm told is still in use in places in the yoosah.

Yes, it's spendy, but in the long run it might be all that bad. OTOH, we
don't have a market force that promotes efficient machinery and reduces
smog-promoting emissions, so we'll have to invent a flawed substitute by
passing laws.

Looking at that again, I could argue that in yoosah the corporations
are to the government as the unions used to be to the employers in
non-continental yurp.


Alright. :-)


<histrionic> Such injustice! </>


Ah, but the part beyond chasing wasn't directed there, but more at all
those other moneygrubbing people (gas companies, taxmen). Just got a
fully automated letter informing me they're charging me 2.50 EUR for the
privilege of receiving it. They sent it because at their magic checking
point it hadn't seen other money yet, altough it was underway.

``We noticed that [...]'', it starts, but clearly no human was involved
in sending the letter after that automated system got setup. I hate lies
like that, even supposedly polite lies. At least the taxwoman, in this
case, wrote the letter by herself, even if the message wasn't very nice.


It's entirely natural for paperwork-frameworks to cause stuff like that.
Any formalised system runs the risk of documenting the completion of
jumping through a series of hoops more than actual skill acquired.

Maybe I should've clarified that in the example the relater of the story
was a tech of the flying club (so craft are NOT experimental), and
he happened to be a very good to excellent welder. The certified guy
clearly was more certified than skilled (``good enough'' welding skill
and had put in the effort to get the paperwork -- supposedly not as hard
if you work at the institute certifying people).

Basically the same complaint ``we'' have about the various ``industry''
certifications, except that those usually don't involve lives at stake.
Of course the complaint there is also that the courses are crap; I can't
comment on the quality of this certification thing, only that this
particular person produced an ugly and not particularly good weld.


Regulators rarely manage to come up with the essence of what to
formalise, so lacking ``better'' they'll settle for ``more''.

Every incident causes screams for ``more'' rules, not ``better'' rules.
Even if it is clear that the existing rules failed to work because the
regulatory bodies supposed to make them work failed miserably. Asleep
at the wheel, bribes, lying about it, etc. etc. Even in enlightened and
formalized-to-the-gills .nl.


That and kicking them all out of the trade for life is about the only
recourse you have.


The victims are dead and all we can do is not even ensure it can never
happen again, but only look at what happened and learn from it, to
reduce the chances of it happening and/or reducing the impact when it
does. We can't bring back the dead and 100% security doesn't exist.

Seeking compensation, a popular pastime everywhere and especially in the
USA, is rightly a civil and not a criminal issue.

Of course, if it happened to mine I'd be hopping mad, and I don't know
what I'd do, but in this discussion I'm preferring to look at it from a
perspective a bit larger than that of the individual.


But as with the mechanic's skill, the key is that the parts are good
enough. If I do have the skills, materials, and machinery to create the
parts and sufficiently assess whether the produce is good enough, there
should be no problem building the parts on-site, then documenting the
whole thing. But, the system for formally documented airplane-quality
parts does not allow for that use case.

I see this as a failing of the system. In itself that is not a critique
for the need for formally documented high quality parts, just of the
implementation of the system that supposedly does that.


So this niche is a result of airlines seeking to reduce costs, altough
they're paying now more per part when they find out what they need. I
don't think it's a scam; there are reasonable alternatives and the niche
is a result of choices by airlines.


I think it was Marcus Ranum who came up with a bit of math why the
whole due diligence thing of trying to find vulnerabilities first is a
losing proposition. It's basic chance calculations, really. If out of an
imaginary pool of a million vulnerabilities, your team of a hunderd full
time people can pick out, say, ten thousand vulnerabilities, in a year,
what are the chances the 100 vulnerabilities a lone ebil h4xx0r could
pick out of the same pool in the same year are all covered?

Or, how many does the adversary have to find to have at least a 50%
chance of finding one that your team hasn't already found?

How certain are these aviation engineers they've found everything
possible, not just everything they managed to think of?

The military learned this the hard wa