Posts by Michael Hoffmann 1078 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jul 2007
Sadly, you needn't take some other "celebrity" or otherwise prominent person: inadvertent flight into IMC is one if not the biggest killer of pilots.
Every instructor will tell you "get your IFR rating and keep it current", it's a mystery why so many don't. I did mine back to back, while my PPL wasn't even dry yet.
Staying out of the discussion and focusing purely on the aviation aspect:
Aviation safety network link:
https://asn.flightsafety.org/wikibase/484185
This "ADS-B data indicates the aircraft was cruising at 9675 ft baro when it approached an area with several mountain tops and began a descending right hand turn which progressed into a spiral. The last ADS-B return showed an average rate of -17250 fpm. "
indicates the classical graveyard spiral of a non-IFR rated pilot flying into IMC (the cloud).
"At 0930 LT, about 10 minutes after the accident, the nearby Ljubljana Airport automated surface observing system reported winds from 320 degrees at 7 knots, ~4.5 miles surface visibility, light rain, 2000 ft above ground level (agl) broken layer and 3200 ft above ground level (agl) overcast ceiling, temperature 9°C, dew point 8°C, and an altimeter setting of 29.74 inches of mercury. "
indicates that icing was likely not a factor.
Looks like he managed to buy a very nice aircraft off his ill-gotten gains, the 2005 M20R is a sweet machine, but no turbo-charged engine to stay above the clouds (though at some point you have to come down). Maybe too much aircraft to handle, it's fast as, easy to fall behind the thing.
Ugh. I've never knowingly updated my firmware at all, since I threw out the HP and got the Brother close on a decade ago. It *is* networked, but foolish me, I had hope that a device that "old" would predate automatic updates.
How would I tell? What's the naughty firmware version in questions (suspect it varied by model)? Will I have to add it to the blacklist, just like my Samsung TV which I expect would have otherwise started to shove ads right into my Kodi-based stream by now?
Excellent summary.
If you ever have the stomach and the nerves to visit the US Holocaust Museum and be left either sobbing on the floor or wanting to eradicate ALL of humanity as a huge mistake of evolution, they have an entire display section (room even, IIRC) on the US both before and during the time period of 33-45.
It does not paint a pretty picture as you've shown as well.
Did you just wake up? No offense, but the majority of American voters, the vast majority in fact, either actively voted for him or sat on their hands with a "what, me worry?" shit-grin, because the other side didn't give them The Feels.
You're a Canadian, I would have thought you would know exactly what the idiocracy on the other side of the border is like by now.
There's this horrifying viral video that CNN did a few days ago with this US federal worker. The dumb bint actively voted for Trumpler - and throughout the entire interview it was pretty clear that the little sociopath was absolutely OK with the damage the new regime was doing to others. She was just shocked that it was now HER turn!, She wanted to get pregnant and thought that she would get IVF for herself under Trump, because of him protecting women's rights. Not some other undeserving woman! You can't make this shit up! You can probably still find the vid on CNN's YT channel.
What, none of the usual suspects here spouting off about "DEI"?!
Colour me surprised. Or maybe even they recognise this is decades of resource starvation in the making.
And no, the recent "flurry" of incidents is not a result of outdated ATC in the US, rather just the usual feeding frenzy of MSM and their ability to understand statistics (or stochastics, rather)
Nonsense. Mine still goes everywhere with me on client site with a library of ebooks. As I still refer to tech books (O'Reilly, Manning) for information, documentation and fundamentals, rather than copy-pasting crap out of Stackoverflow or "AI". I'd get a hernia if I had to actually schlepp the sheer number of books in dead tree form.
And that's before "having to reach a website that client blocks" and not wanting to squint at my phone.
This is the funniest bit. Trudeau was, electorally speaking, a dead man walking, together with his party.
The Canadian version of MAGA heads were looking at a cakewalk. Had Orange-Utan just waited a few months, he would have had a bunch of sycophants in power up north. They might have handed him the whole country on a platter.
FFS, he made the Quebecois feel Canadian! That takes some doing.
He may have the right ideas, but
- it's assuming that the "stock-buyback obsessed beancounters" actually give a damn. If they can make more money chopping up and flogging the corpse of Intel (all the while fellating and paying lip service to the orange shitstain's MAGA), they will do so without a thought
- is the guy who felt like he should mock what is still their biggest supplier and not just competitor, thereby blowing the 40% price discount they were enjoying, as he did with TMSC, really the right guy for this?
It isn't just for that.
I [need to] use Skype with a linked US number to call US companies where I still hold savings, because they won't even talk to you otherwise.
No idea what to use as alternative, ATM.
I've used it for talking to rellies in Europe, but that's less critical, though being able to make cheap calls to landlines and mobiles via Skype, rather than still expensive calls direct sucks. I dread talking them through switching to that POS Teams. Facetime is fine for those in the Applesphere.
My wife, who uses it way more than me to talk to landlines of her elderly family in the US, is going to be livid.
Hasn't it been the case for years that the tenor was "OSS licenses need to prove their mettle in court, and the we will see that evil corps(tm) can't simply take the code and run off with it" - and now that moment seems to have come, and the FSF would rather not take that risk?
Is that a case of "open source is legally safe as long as nobody actually takes that legality up in court"?
It seems there are new defects and issues being discovered every day! You could get one of those daily calendars with "excuse and problem of the day": Tuesday - connectors melt; Wednesday: missing ROPs.
And that's without the fake launch with no stock issues, because you launched the product to appease stock markets and "forgot" that most production plants would be shut down for a month due to Lunar New Year, bringing assembly lines to a halt.
The question is more whether this is just in the video cards, which nvidia now relegates to second tier, because Jensen enjoys taking Scrooge-like swims in his money vault as the Real Money is coming from "AI". Or whether those too have the problems which is going to make the AI tech bros and associated stock markets very unhappy.
It just occurred to me to wonder who writes these missives?
It's not execs themselves, after all, but some PR drone, themselves down in the trenches. Have they been lobotomised? Severe case of Stockholm Syndrome? Playing the "Niemoller Game" or some other "hoping day by day not to be next"?
Do they only get through a day by copious drug use and/or never looking in a mirror?
Didn't someone also use this as essential proof of NON-visitation by ET? Was it xkcd? Some scientist?
The fact that with billions of quite powerful cameras in everybody's pockets we still have no sharp, in-focus, well-lit photos of Greys or Reptiloids probing your nether regions (*), is indeed where absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
(*) oh yes, you just *know* it would show up at least on some fringe porn site! Never mind social media. There'd be a friggin Only-Friends!
Damn you, I had a whole plot outline in my head merging the abominable ROP with 007.
Arch villain is actually Sauron Returned, the Ring turns out to be another fake bought off Amazon, being his undoing. Galadriel and Bond end up rolling in the spring meadows of Lorien, which turns out to be an AI hallucination, or maybe just some Potemkin billboards like in Brazil.
I may have had too many of --->
Reminder: Germany was a, if not THE, world leader in many sciences like physics before 1933. Just look at a list of Nobel laureates up to then.
The country never recovered its preeminence after 1945. Those who fled never returned. The brain drain was terminal and shifted to the USA.
Look at how many papers from leading US unis are already written with PIs from Asian countries. If they all go elsewhere, it's over.
And at what point will you no longer even have the know-how to maintain that edge in weaponry? Before you have nothing but redneck mouth-breathers looking at a diagram of a nuke and sagely comment "hurp durp witchcraft!"
Thanks for that!
I'm only my second month into having ditched Windows for Kubuntu on my desktop, and despite test switching to Wayland every time I see an update, it's been a shitshow even just for Plasma, never mind trying to run Proton/games.
Despite having used nvidia for ever (3090 now, at least it doesn't melt and catch fire at the connector), if AMD manages to NOT mess up their upcoming launch and actually *have* a launch and not fake one like nvidia, I could be looking at switching.
A lot of my CUDA code will need rewriting though :(
Once great companies, leaders in their field, fallen on hard times due to mismanagement by exec that have long ago ejected with their golden parachutes.
Bought out, massive layoffs, the carcasses squeezed for every drop as long as possible, while their death is drawn out, and customers run for the hills.
Sic transit gloria mundi!
According to Wikipedia, the Yalta conference kicked off to discuss what the shattered world left behind by the last "master race" would look like. While mopping up continued.
At this rate US war movies showing them fighting Nazis will be next on the ban list. something something fighting the wrong enemy?
Indeed, or as I put it: the Earth has enough time for 2 full Cambrian cycles before the sun gets too hot.
That's pretty much "from nothing but extremophiles and whatever survived Snowball Earth to us".
And it's likely there will be more lifeforms surviving than that: cockroaches, rats, and, I'm almost certain, smug cats, somehow.
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