I used the links2 browser (doesn't support JS) and was prompted to download the PDF, which is perfectly readable. Perhaps there is an issue of conversion of the PDF to google docs.
IMHO, partly for marketing bluster, but partly because hardware compression in the tape drive is a useful feature if you don’t want to handle 1000MB/sec of compression workload on the host during backups.
But that's not why the FAA is regulating it, and these regulations won't stop that. They're regulating because people are flying recklessly above 400ft, above roadways, and in restricted airspace.
Flying above 400 feet is only a problem because aircraft can fly down at 500 feet. Do we really want aircraft at only 500 feet? I wouldn't want even a typical general aviation aircraft going over my house at that height. Make it an Airbus 380 and it might be entertaining.
The solution is to raise the height for normal aircraft. That makes room for drones. We could give the drones from 500 to 1900 feet, putting normal aircraft at 2000 feet and above.
There already are restrictions about how low and where you can fly a 'real' airplane. There is even a regulation that would keep an airplane from flying over your house at 500 ft. under most circumstances. The reality is that most pilots don't want to be 500ft above terrain unless they are VERY close to the runway
There are also plenty of good reasons to be under 2,000 ft. The most general is that all training and approach for VFR ops at airports is done at 1,000 ft. by default.
Airspace and altitudes are pretty complex, for a more involved example: A VFR flight departing North from Boeing field in Seattle HAS to stay below 1800 ft but above the highest parts of the city at ~750 ft. Because the air-space above 1800 belongs to jets on instrument approach to Sea-tac. In other words, to get out of that airfield you have to fly underneath the 747s. Seattle is just one example, there's weird airspace like this that balances the needs of different users just about everywhere.
For what it's worth, in any urban area, the 1000 feet above highest object within 2000 feet horizontally is much more likely to apply. While the actual regulations are somewhat loose on definitions, most pilots I know would describe the "500 feet from anything" fallback regulation as being applicable only when there are no structures or other populated places nearby.
In any case, raising floor altitude for non-RC/unmanned aircraft to 2k feet would pose fairly substantial challenges as, even ignoring the fact that airports require approaches below 2k feet and are often near populated areas, lots of commercial applications for light aircraft require low altitudes. Survey, photography, news gathering, law enforcement, sightseeing, etc. These are many of the same applications drones are posed for... there doesn't really seem to be any way to simply separate these types of traffic entirely.
Only because externalization of costs of storage as well as start up and shut down of more consistent power sources that supplement their variable electricity generation.
In the billion or so years life has existed on earth, there’s no evidence any species built a nuclear bomb or had large plastic manufacturing or left anything in GEO, all of which we’ve achieved in the last 100 years.
Progressing to that stage this seems unlikely for a planet with life on.
It's not like every species rolls the dice independently to see if it will be an advanced civilization. That the smartest animal to ever live on this planet is alive right now is no less probable than the largest animal to ever live on this planet (the blue whale) is alive right now - both are products of evolutionary processes that took many millions of years and are continuing. In addition to increasing size, there is a trend in the fossil record of improving intelligence for species throughout the animal kingdom since the extinction of the dinosaurs, which themselves had undergone many millions of years of increasing complexity since the previous mass extinction.
As for the sudden nature of humanity's major technological advances, that's just the nature of geometric growth - every advancement makes more advancements easier. The humans that took thousands of years to go from agriculture to writing were biologically no different from and no less capable than those who went from first flight of a plane to first walk on the moon in a single lifetime.
Which manned abort in 1963 is that specifically? Why are you trying to skew discussion into some direction?
Note: LES stands for Launch Escape System, usually a small solid rocket that activates in case of a failure during ascent to take the manned capsule away from exploding rocket under it, perhaps equivalent to airbags in a car.
People gets hurt by airbags all the time trying to service them. That doesn’t tell if it’s worth having them in actual situations they’re designed for, nor whether the situations are worth preparing for.
It is relevant. If (giving an extreme example to make the point), statistically two humans were killed servicing airbags for every life saved by airbags, cars wouldn’t have airbags (with possible exceptions for cars of the super rich and super important such as the POTUS)
Also, an escape system adds weight to a rocket. That weight could be used for other stuff that makes the rest of the system more reliable (slightly stronger fuel tanks, redundant pumps, whatever). Designing the escape system also takes resources away that could be used to improve the safety of the primary system.
For rockets, it’s not easy to decide what’s the best choice; we launch too few of them, and the ones we launch change too often to gather reliable statistics. Getting real-world data on the reliability of escape systems definitely is hard, as it requires numerous rocket failures or elaborate test setups (a full test must include high speed and an explosion that may throw material through the engine of the escape capsule)
> All of standalone LES activation ever in the history of human spaceflight had been successful in saving all occupants' lives.
> Space Shuttle failed twice on the other hand, each time killing all aboard, and in neither cases of it its integral abort systems/abort modes did help at all.
> So in theory the lack of capsule-only LES do not necessarily mean safer rocket, in the history and in the statistics it does.
Is this supposed to be a recursion joke? Sorry if I'm not getting it.
Rather ironic that a letter to a group that is about communication can’t use an appropriate technology to communicate.