Posts by rgmiller1974

Latvian drone wrests control from human overlords and shuts down entire nation's skies

Also, civilian air traffic control radars don't really detect the airplanes themselves; they detect the radar transponders installed in airplanes. If the drone doesn't have one (or it was turned off for the test flight), then air traffic control radars aren't going to be much use even if the drone flies through an area where there is ostensibly radar coverage.

Boeing boss denies reports 737 Max safety systems weren't active

Re: Blame Game

"I spent 22 years in the aircraft industry certifying and delivering new commercial aircraft to airlines."

There's something I haven't been able to find out, and it sounds like you might be qualified to comment on: How much did MCAS save in terms of certification and pilot retraining effort?

Or, to put it another way: What if Boeing had NOT developed MCAS and simply said, "Here's the 737 Max. It has a slightly more pronouced pitch-up-with-engine-thrust behavior than previous models and pilots need to be aware of it." Would the FAA have accepted that and just required some more time in the simulator for pilots? And would that extra training requirement have disuaded airlines from buying the MAX?

(As it is now, it appears pilots are going to have to get training in how to handle the aircraft when MCAS fails, and I'm beginning to suspect that will actually be more training than if MCAS just didn't exist.)

Python creator Guido van Rossum sys.exit()s as language overlord

Re: Reinventing a more limited wheel

I'm curious about the example thames posted. Is

results = [(x, f(x), x/f(x)) for x in input_data if f(x) > 0]

really any slower than

results = [(x, y, x/y) for x in input_data if (y := f(x)) > 0] ?

In the first expression, I can see that f(x) could potentially be evaluated three times, but would that actually happen? The example implicitly assumes that f(x) returns the same value each time it's evaluated. If that's the case, is the interpreter not smart enough to cache the result of f(x) for later use? (And if that's not the case - for example if f(x) returned x+time.time() - then the two expressions above aren't actually equivalent.)

No chance of flying too close to this: Icarus, the most distant star seen, is 9bn light years away

Re: Douglas said it best.

Douglas Adams' description is pretty good, but I actually think Bill Bryson said it better in "A Short History of Nearly Everything": "Space is very aptly named."

.. ..-. / -.-- --- ..- / -.-. .- -. / .-. . .- -.. / - .... .. ... then a US Navy fondleslab just put you out of a job

Is it still flashing in Morse code?

Is the light still flashing in Morse code? (It wasn't clear to me from the article.)

The reason I ask is that if you're going to have electronics on both ends, then why not use them to do something useful, like encode the data with a protocol that includes error correction?