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Wow, we've come back full circle if we're backing up our cloud data to a local SSD :-)


IMHO, that has always been a good idea.

It’s basically the good old 3-2-1 backup rule: Three copies of your data (your production data and two backups) on two different media, with one copy off-site.


I’d assume having your data in two cloud services is already good enough, assuming they are different companies in different locations.


as an archivist 3-2-2-1 is better. The second 2 indicates that the two backups should be on two different brands of media in case of a catastrophic design flaw.


The article says "The new CarePod modules are being deployed in malls, gyms, and offices starting in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Chicago and Philadelphia.", and yet the only video posted by the company is a 3D animation?

I'm confused, do these pods exists or not?


It just had to be non-symmetrical on the Z-axis, that's all. Like an HDMI connector.


Or displayport. Personally I find hdmi almost as annoying as usb, though I can’t explain why that happens!


One problem with HDMI is that it has no clips or screws or similar holding it in, unlike DP, DVI, VGA, BNC... I remember I used to knock the HDMI out of one of my monitors with my foot all the time. It plugged in going straight up and barely could resist a bit more force than gravity, and the cable dangled behind the desk since the tower was on the floor.


the correct solution there is to manage your cables. yanking your monitor off the desk would not be an improvement


I don't think there's a realistic chance of that happening. The weight of the monitor would make it so that at most it shook a bit or something.


I can not express how much infuriating the DP retaining clip can be.

Often manufacturers don't leave much space for fingers around the cable ends, which means trying to squeeze fingers in to release the clip.


That has not been my experience with HDMI, I've never had a cable anywhere close to popping out because of gravity, no matter the orientation.


Yes, I hear this a lot, and it's not like it happens to me all the time these days, but it's a clear flaw in the design that there's nothing extra to hold it in like those other things.


Because when you have to plug hdmi on a wall mounted tv or monitor that is close to wall and hard to rotate - you end up not only guessing orientation but having a hard time to find that port... :)


I feel like it’s the aspect ratio of the plug too. Being long and thin you have to get it perfectly straight AND the right way round


or perfectly symmetrical, i.e. round.


Given sufficient road width, takeoff/landing length, and road "quality" (smoothness, etc), why wouldn't an aircraft be able to takeoff from and land on to a highway? I mean, what is the actual significance of this?


Jet engine intake is basically a giant vacuum cleaner... and the jet engine itself can be destroyed by a small debris like small stones etc which is plentiful around any kind of a road. And a damaged jet engine is kinda bad news on takeoff, especially if there's only one to begin with.

A-10's high mounted jet engines are up there for a reason. It can operate from almost anything resembling a runway.


The Soviets/Russians seem to have solved that problem, this runway [1] looks worse than many county roads around these parts of Eastern Europe where I live.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCLpnQPTWww


Some fighters are especially good at sucking road debris into the engine.


s/Some/All/g

They clean the road from FOD [0] before such operations.

[0] Foreign object debris, can cause foreign object damage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_object_damage


I wish this text file had a last-updated-date in it.

Just recently we had a OUI chip which was being used in one of our boards, which was throwing off our post-production automated tests. Turns out the vendor added a new OUI, but didn't update all the references to its datasheets on their website. Took us a while to figure out what the problem was.


Maybe "Last-Modified" header combined with "ETag" would be good enough alternative?


Anyone know why the TCAS only instructs the two approaching aircraft to change altitude only, but not heading?


I met someone who says he helped develop TCAS, and that it decides which one to climb or descend based on the registration number.

I'm guessing that it does not issue turn instructions because it only gives a Resolution Advisory when a collision is imminent (otherwise they would be giving RAs all the time). At altitude, where the air is thinner, it is much easier for a plane to immediately climb or descend, planes turn very slowly when the air is thin.


That's only partially true, in the case of a tie.

https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/92495/how-does-...

> But what if the other aircraft is "thinking" the same thing? That's the heart of this question. The answer is, whichever TCAS makes a decision first, and then in case of a tie, the lower Mode S address "wins":


Thanks for answering my question, namely how does the collision resolution in TCAS work? (Different from, say, TCP, which uses randomness)

EDIT: FAA PDF on TCAS 7.1 - https://www.faa.gov/documentlibrary/media/advisory_circular/...

This story is a moving example of the self-improvement going on in global air traffic industry; perhaps sometimes slowly, but definitely self-improving. The following book compares the transparency of the air traffic industry with the lack of transparency that currently exists in the medical sector, where errors are denied:

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Box-Thinking-Psychology-Paperba...


Good answers in sibling comments, but for those who don't want to grovel through a lot of stackexchange answers here is the TLDR: There are two reasons:

1. When TCAS was originally developed, the direction information to the other aircraft was not very accurate, being obtained only via the TCAS antenna. Nowadays GPS information is transmitted via ADS-B and so it's much more accurate, but taking advantage of this would require a major redesign. It may happen eventually, but...

2. Aircraft can change altitude faster than they can change heading. Also, most aircraft can change pitch faster than they can roll, and they are longer and wider than they are high. So effecting enough altitude change to avoid a collision can be done faster than effecting enough heading change to do so.


I don't think the GP was asking about changing heading instead of altitude; I think they were asking about changing heading in addition to altitude. Sure, the altitude change is going to achieve better separation faster, but a heading change in addition to the altitude change will act as a backup in case for some reason something goes wrong with the altitude change.

In this particular accident, it seems like commanding a heading change (to the right for the Tupolev and to the left for the DHL flight) in addition to an altitude change would have avoided the collision.


This is fallacious reasoning. "X would have prevented Y, and Y was a bad outcome, therefore we must do X." You can plug in many things for X which reveal this to be an unsound argument.

Yes, intuitively being able to change headings seems like a good thing except that 1) it adds expense and complexity, and thus produces new potential points of failure and 2) it's not necessary. The problem was not that an altitude change was insufficient, the problem was that two sources of command authority (TCAS and ATC) contradicted each other. The solution is simply to add a new rule: if TCAS and ATC disagree, go with TCAS.


> This is fallacious reasoning. "X would have prevented Y, and Y was a bad outcome, therefore we must do X."

I never said we must do X. It's a suggestion which might or might not be worth considering. From the article it appears that the TCAS system was designed with the assumption that pilots would always immediately do what it said. This accident obviously violated that assumption. The question is how best to respond to that as far as the design of TCAS is concerned; the eventual tradeoffs might lead to the answer "do nothing to TCAS" but that doesn't mean it isn't worth considering possible changes.

> it adds expense and complexity

Yes, this is always a tradeoff with safety systems. But the heading change rule would be even simpler than the altitude change rule (which requires negotiation of possible conflicts between the TCAS systems in the two aircraft): the heading rule is simply "turn away from the other aircraft", i.e., if the other aircraft is to your right, turn left, if it's to your left, turn right. That seems like logic that could be implemented, checked, and verified fairly easily, if it were decided to do so.

> it's not necessary

When it comes to safety systems, "necessary" is always a judgment call. Yes, cases in which adding a heading change to TCAS instructions would be helpful are rare (like this crash was). But all aircraft accidents are rare. No rule gets followed exactly as it's given 100% of the time. Taking that into account when deciding on what safety systems to implement is perfectly justified.

> The solution is simply to add a new rule: if TCAS and ATC disagree, go with TCAS.

Or more precisely, to explicitly make that a rule worldwide, instead of just in the US as it was before this accident.

Yes, this is the response the system settled on, but this, too, involves a tradeoff: this rule has to be implemented by humans, and humans are less reliable than automated systems. The international air safety system evidently decided that humans were reliable enough in this case for this rule to be sufficient; but that doesn't mean they didn't make a tradeoff.


> I think they were asking about changing heading in addition to altitude

Heading and altitude are NOT independent. When an aircraft makes a turn, it banks (it's not like a flat turn you make in your car), and inevitably loses some speed because of extra drag, and some altitude because of loss of lift.

It can be compensated by increasing the engine power, but then you really need to predict that as well.


> Heading and altitude are NOT independent.

Yes, I know how planes make turns. It is valid to point out that a TCAS instruction that included a heading change would, at least for the plane whose TCAS instruction was to increase altitude, also have to include an engine power increase, which might not be feasible depending on the altitude (cruise power might already be pretty close to max power). Or else make the turn a very slow one, which would decrease its usefulness in collision avoidance.


Also that bank means you have a wing tilted up and a wing tilted down, increasing the vertical height of the plane at a time you’re trying to increase vertical separation.

Doing both reeks to me of a solution in search of a problem that’s going to end up the target of some later NTSB report when you hit some weird edge case where the dynamics and dimensions of the two planes aren’t fully accounted for.


> bank means you have a wing tilted up and a wing tilted down, increasing the vertical height of the plane at a time you’re trying to increase vertical separation

Yes, but it's also increasing horizontal separation (from a predicted value of zero), which might still be a reasonable tradeoff to consider.


ADS-B is not guaranteed to be available from all aircraft in most of the airspace below 10K feet MSL. (Basically, if a transponder used to be optional before, ADS-B out is also optional.) Mode-C (altitude encoded transponder replies) are also not required, but the equipage rate is very high at this point, which is less the case for ADS-B among GA aircraft.

https://www.aopa.org/go-fly/aircraft-and-ownership/ads-b/whe...


> ADS-B is not guaranteed to be available from all aircraft in most of the airspace below 10K feet MSL.

Sure, but so what? The lack of universality is not an impediment to implementing a new TCAS system that uses ADS-B data when it's available. (And BTW, the places where ADS-B is not required are generally places where traffic is sparse and so the risk of a collision is pretty low to begin with.)


If the expense and lead time for the redesign now that more reliable and precise position (and first derivative thereof) are available from GPS via ADS-B are to be considered, it's fair to ask "well, what are the downsides as compared to using altitude for separation as today?" and one of them is "a higher percentage of aircraft are transmitting mode-C than will be transmitting ADS-B out".

Given that the clear priority is now to follow a TCAS RA (resolution advisory) over an ATC instruction, I think that the current TCAS approach is good enough to cause aircraft to miss each other and that a GPS-based redesign is unlikely.


I have to imagine that if there was a #3 on that list it would be that introducing a random heading change adds follow-on complexity that could be dangerous itself. Now the planes are not just at different altitudes, but pointed who-knows-where.



You could imagine if, in addition to obeying the altitude change, every plane began to turn rapidly to the right, it could only help the situation? As long as we all agree to turn right in case of a collision warning?


It does say "edit PDF", but it doesn't really seem to allow editing any text on any PDF files.


“Editor” is that people Google and look for.

You can add (“merge”), remove, delete pages, which is technically editing.

You can annotate the document by adding text, pictures, signatures, checkboxes as well as fill PDF form fields: unfortunately as you noticed you cannot “edit” existing text.

(I initially used the term annotator but it confused people so much that I changed it for edit and editor)


Just as a reminder, in 2021 there were close to 250 million estimated malaria cases worldwide, with an estimated ~600.000 deaths according to WHO, so it is very much a concern for the world even though it was eradicated in the USA


I mean it clearly hasn't been eradicated in the USA?

By comparison in 2021 there were twice as many COVID deaths.


The CDC reports that, previously, the last case of malaria to be "locally acquired" in the US was 2003. [0] See also [1] for a history of the effort to eliminate malaria in the US, which took place primarily from 1947 - 1952.

[0] https://emergency.cdc.gov/han/2023/han00494.asp

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.htm...


Was and is are two different things.

Also the US military warned years ago that increased climate temperature would bring back malaria to the states, and here we are.


My wife's phd research 10 years ago was confirming those original warnings. Literally - confirming the change in habitat range for Aedes Aegypti and Anopheles Darlingi (mosquitos, also a malaria/yellow fever/dengue/zika vector) across both south/central America and the southern US in response to changing climate.

It's absolutely coming back to the US. Mosquitos are moving north to stay in their optimal temperature range as the climate warms.

edit: My wife saw my comment and got annoyed that I listed the wrong subspecies. Updated to include Anopheles Darlingi.


Question for your wife:

Can we use bats or nematodes to fight this return?

I spray my lawn with beneficial nematodes. I saw some small decline in the number of mosquitoes born in my yard but it doesn't stop mosquitoes from surrounding areas. My next move is to install a bat house on my house.


So I asked and she said it seems sane, but academically the answer is basically "no idea".

Her advice:

- Remove standing water anywhere you can

- Use nets/screens on open windows/doors to reduce access

- Avoid outdoor activities at dawn/dusk when they are most likely to feed

- Don't plant bushes near outdoor seating (apparently they hide there during the day, but will choose to feed outside normal hours if it's convenient)


My understanding of malaria and its spread is essentially the winters are cold in the states and kill off all mosquitos in the winter. The larva (or whatever the correct term is) don’t carry malaria, so the mosquitos must grab it from an infected animal.

So the warmer the states get, the warmer the land south of the states get. More and more mosquitos survive winters closer to the states, and so smaller travel distance.

But based on what you just said it seems that understanding is not actually how it works?


I didn't do the research and am not the expert, but essentially:

Temperature impacts mosquitos in several ways that change their effectiveness as a vector for disease.

The temperature during egg/pupa/larva stages impacts adult body size and fitness of the mosquito. That in turn tends to impact total lifespan.

A change as small as 2 to 4 degrees C can add or remove more than a week of lifespan for a mosquito (huge change, the average lifespan is 10-14 days), and the longer a mosquito is alive, the more likely it is to become a vector for malaria (and other diseases). For malaria in particular - the life cycle of the disease means the mosquito usually needs to make it at least 10 days to become a vector.

Throw on top that changes in temperature can change the feeding habits (shift them in time to make mosquitos more likely to feed when humans are out) and that parts of the southern US are now considered viable habitat for these subspecies and you get Malaria.

They do still need to interact with an animal/person carrying malaria during their adult stages - and the general strategy in the US is still to contain and treat those carriers.

We just expect it to get much more expensive as these mosquitos become more fit for our region.


My goodness. The effort that has been put into this site!!

I can't tell whether the entire site is satire though. For example: http://www.techzonics.com/ebay-ebola-sordid-history.htm


Wow, apparently he's not wrong about the original eBay site being about ebola? He's wrong about the weird conspiratorial/xenophobic stuff of course, but it seems like the original eBay site probably had similar energy to this one:

"The eccentric engineer was obsessed with t he public-health system's inability to cope with large-scale health crises, particularly ebola It was around the time of the movie "Outbreak," so the idea of a pandemic was in a lot of people's minds.

After purchasing the domain ebay.com he filled the site with pages of ebola-related content.

So "e" stood for 'ebola,' and 'Bay' for 'Bay Area.'"

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ebay-got-name-originally-ebol...


At this point, it feels like chipmakers are just eager to find yet another excuse to slow down production.

This plant closure appears to have been in the works for several years so it is unfathomable that the chipmakers are not prepared for this.


I would not underestimate the power of denial mixed with a healthy dose of arrogance and stupidity.

Based on what I've seen in the corporate world, I think it's far more likely that chip makers convinced themselves that, given how critical this plant is to the chip supply chain, either 3M would finally address the issue or the Belgium government would blink, and so continued to operate as usual.

Frankly, I expect 3M thought the same, hence their half-assed and illegal attempt to fix the issue.


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