P*Funk

Everyone wants to talk about eyesight in your 70s, but maybe we should be talking about runway markings....

I think I don't like the font.

I'm not dismissive, I'm just trying to take a balanced view and not letting crazy westerner fear syndrome colour my conclusions. FScamp apparently insists that we have to listen to the labels more than the actual psychology of human behavior but labels are so misleading and often the labels we apply to things and even the labels others self apply aren't relevant. China calls itself democratic in some mode, should I take that at face value? But we should respect the labels shouldn't we? This is not to underestimate the threats but I'm not about to just shrug and make some sweeping generalization because its convenient and indulges fear. The idea of ISIS creating the mythic Islamic state, brilliantly doing so by ignoring the arbitrary borders created by Western powers which have been directly responsible for so much sectarian violence, is a powerful symbol and it will draw many many people to it. That is something altogether different from the broader goal that would see violence visited upon Western shores. I have no doubt that the puritanical elite of the organization are every bit as dangerous as we think they are, but thats very different from thinking the grunts that drawn in by a massive symbolic fight in the muslim homeland are in any way identical in their resolve. We will see how it hashes out over time of course, but no organization in history has on this scale had the kind of homogeneous belief and resolve that we're seeing assumed in this thread. Thats not how people work on large scales. Any part of this organization that will be focused on directly attacking the West at home will be like any other terrorist organization: small, carefully selected and groomed, highly secretive (meaning we won't read their names in newspapers as often), and nothing like the populist paramilitary part of the organization. If having a balanced and guarded but still vigilant perspective is dismissive then I'm a very very dismissive person.

+1 I've had a much more enjoyable time flying recently when I said sod it and stopped trying to load up on pretty pretty scenery, instead focusing on accurate up to date AFCADs mostly from freeware and allowing myself to have excellent frames in my expensive add on planes. Who really gives a damn about scenery half the time anyway? If I'm in a tubeliner 90% of my time is spent staring at instruments or looking for a runway papi while focusing on whats being said to me or managing a descent while observing charts and what not. I get much more gratification out of my higher frame rates that let me focus on the act of flying rather than geting obsessed with the bottomless pit of min maxing the visuals on an obsolete rendering platform. There are some pretty amazing freeware airports though and they often look nearly as good as payware but with significantly lower frame and VAS hits. There is a LOT of fluff stuck into payware that needn't be there. Stuff you wouldn't even notice if it wasn't there but its there because it MUST be accurate. Less is more, especially when it means more FPS and more smoothness and most importantly more peace of mind. I simply could not be one of those paranoid "Save and reload at TOD" 777 guys.

There's something depressing about decades of personal cultural collecting being reduced to single mundane plastic object as indistinct as the next, bearing none of the personality that the physical collection itself held. Where in the hyper efficient future is the character of libraries or the raw individualism of an LP collection? Digital is so soulless. Even if you have to surrender your physical collection, or at least part of it, there is still something special about used books and albums, something being worn and resold, a total stranger picking it up and using it again. There is no such thing in the digital sphere. I love used books so much more than new ones. Yellowed pages speak to that silent connection to previous readers, and used books are just as cheaps as brand new kindle books if not cheaper.

The labels are misleading and yet again I have to tell you that individuals are not uniform or homogeneous. Not every person who joined the National Socialist Party in the 1930s felt the same way, thought the same way, and were willing to go to the same lengths. There are abstract ideals but anybody who knows anything about people knows that what motivates one person to join is different from another. The bigger ISIS gets, the more it becomes a popular front and attracts a wider body of young impressionable muslims the less likely the bulk of their numbers are going to be anything other than young stupid guys who want to point an AK at a bad guy in the muslim homeland. Extremism isn't a mainstream thing, so as the movement gets more mainstream the body of the group becomes diluted with the (relative) moderates and the wishful thinkers and the ones who'll balk at going to some lengths. Many many people are joining up now just because they love the idea of the Muslim nation being created which ignores the irrelevant and arbitrary borders created by the western powers that have sown so much of the sectarian violence of the last century. That does not equal a uniform desire to visit a war upon the lands of the West, not from the people who join almost exclusively to create the vaunted muslim nation. Right now thats where they're getting most of their new membership from. That draw is different from the one of targeting the West in a traditional al Qaeda attack. You don't just turn around and go from being an organized paramilitary group fighting conventionally in the Middle East to an elusive underground terrorist one and bring everyone along for the ride. If labels should be applied uniformly based on the purest and worst case scenario then the Nuremberg hearings really went easy on all those Nazzzis that they didn't incarcerate. We have to stand back and realize that the labels we apply, and even the labels that the group self applies isn't necessarily accurate or even relevant to the whole truth. As the movement grows in size and even succeeds in some areas it will have to respond to what its own members feel. If they manage to actually find a way to secure a pretty decent chunk of land and defend it you'll suddenly find some smart person talking about trying to not provoke the west or something. Governance does weird things to people's whacky resolve. Its foolish to just say "they're brainwashed zealots, they will do this no matter what" because honestly thats not true. You can take a lot of the wind out of the sails of these groups just by killing the leaders, and thats what the West has done and with success against many groups apparently (ignoring the obvious issues of sowing more future animosity and hate thanks to the casualties). I don't want anyone to think I'm defending any part of ISIS, but I'm not prepared to just generalize things. There's something more than just a pure terrorist group forming out there. There's a lot of pent up energy being poured into it and a lot of that is based on things other than just extremists trying to start wars in the West. There is a sleeping giant in the muslim culture thats been held back by Western involvement in the region for a very long time and a powerful movement can build with youth behind the idea of regaining that sense of power and self determination. Besides, your own analysis is that there are people being drawn to it because of disenfranchisement over a lack of opportunities. People like that aren't just going to overnight turn into a guy on the level of Mohammad Atta or even ever become him.

Who cares how we treat them? You're making the fatal flaw of defining them based on your own limited perception of their nature. You can't define an entire movement by the propaganda and abstract goals of the select few at the very top. Whether they like it or not those people who act confident and want to do all kinds of absolute things will find interesting issues in executing that, as will any group. Lets not forget that at one point Al Qaeda Iraq fell out with the rest of Al Qaeda over major differences. These are not homogeneous groups. The words of the leaders are not automatically equal to the will of every person who'll willing to throw on the garb of that army. You can't seriously believe that 100% of those people fighting for ISIS in the middle east are wiling to come over to the West to wage a hopeless and mostly symbolic terrorist war right? Its just not rational or logical and there is no evidence that at any point in time any group has ever functioned like that. Whether we like it or not ISIS is a popular front in the middle east. It is gaining lots of traction with people but this isn't something as simple as the Taliban. The Taliban are largely Afghan-centric in nature, but what parts of their organization operate from Pakistan are not identical. Their goals and the individuals they recruit are more easily focused on a single entity which allows for a more straight forward governance of its activities. ISIS is linking popular support from all over the place, across multiple borders. This means that you will start to see much more disparate personalities getting involved and varied levels of interest in different goals. They have a lot of big goals but they're quite diverse so its not logical to believe that all of their members can be expected to enthusiastically embrace it uniformly. Honestly if this were true then ISIS must be doing something right that every other movement in history never managed to do. Such uniformity of support is a fantasy. This doesn't change the threat posed by those few movers and shakers at the top, but it also doesn't mean we can just say "he's an ISIS fighter ergo he is this" because thats foolish. If ISIS really had that kind of support from their members, that kind of resolve to destroy the West regardless of where they come from, then we would be in much worse trouble than we actually are. Lets not let the propaganda and the kind of fear mongering that politicians will feed us with cloud the sober rational risk assessments that someone in an intelligence agency would probably give us. Its well known that what has been said pretty much since the beginning of the War on Terror by politicians and intelligence operatives like in the CIA are often at odds when some revelations are made. There are videos of CIA analysts testifying to congress arguing with politicians about the nature of terrorist groups because the politicians wants to defend his nonsense talking point that is far too simplistic for the likes of legitimate intel work. Basically if the neat and tidy explanation of how things work that's used on the campaign trail were tried in the actual prosecution of the war against these entities then we'd be cocking it up far worse than we already have. I often wonder if CIA agents laugh at the absurdity of what they hear some politicians try to sell when they know the true, and confusingly indistinct, nature of how the game is actually played.

Books are great, even in this digital era. On the bus: "What are you reading?" "Oh its great, its about..." versus "What are you looking at?" "My phone, ##### is your problem? Can't you see that I'm desperately trying to distract myself with inane social banter with witless friends I don't really like?"

I noticed that he never said it was hard to understand controllers because of extremely low quality microphones. I guess thats just a VATSIMism.

Can't you just rout the cables for the Throttle and stick behind the desk out to the side you want your sidestick on? The extra length afforded by the throttle should make it act like an extension cord if anything.

I still think the best way to do that is to have a very progressive and integrated relationship with their communities. Its the same thing with things like stopping gang affiliation. The same principles of marginalization apply. Without that it just becomes another case of having cops infiltrating mosques rather than working with the elders. The muslim leaders will be just as unhappy about radicalization as the rest of us because their communities suffer for it. Indeed, but that is thankfully not the issue posed by this story. Basically thats my whole point. There is a huge gap between the guys who go to fight some romantic war overseas to liberate the homeland or whatever and the guys who'll come back here to blow stuff up. Its necessary that we not conflate the two because there will always be countless more doing the former rather than the latter. I think this story is therefore misleading us with the wrong perspective because the system didn't fail by having him with a clearance there, unless there was some previous information that wasn't accounted for. I think the more interesting fact is that he was openly unhappy with the difficulties in finding work to support his family, a cornestone of the disenfranchisement that can lead people to reach for radical ideas to satisfy themselves. This of course is very relevant even to Western value systems as evidenced by places like Greece seeing the rise of more traditionally Western radical ideas such as Neo-Naziism in the wake of the economic recession and the application of harsh austerity measures. I think we really need to look inward for our solution and ask if we are doing everything we can to help avoid this from more than just an executive branch enforcement strategy. The real solution long term to avoiding this issue exists in more social avenues. The greatest danger is our own paranoia being stoked by irresponsible propaganda that puts us into an "us vs. them" mentality when we should be looking at any person with native citizenship as one of us regardless of how different their origin culture is. More than anything the fact that they live here and are having children here says they want to be one of us, so thats where the real strength in our fight against radicalism should begin. In the mean time I have yet to see a real sign that the improvements in our security infrastructure across most Western nations since 9/11 are not sufficient.

Except that this guy clearly wasn't going to be that person. Its not like he had spent 8 months in a training camp in the middle east then went back to the US and got a job in an Airport. Generally speaking once you go over there and start training its pretty hard for some intelligence to not link you. The fact that you're there at all is enough to raise the scrutiny on you. So if the system had failed to pick that up then it would be a big deal, but given these circumstances its not as if there was any indication he was a domestic threat. The airport job is just a coincidence. The whole American passport thing is totally separate from this story. Thats something thats as much a talking point if he was a burger flipper at McDonald's. How do you know if someone is radicalized? We don't know, so far we thankfully live in countries that don't judge you on your general bias or vague beliefs. Like I said, we can't make airport clearance checks based on ethnicity and religion. Its also generally a fact though that when someone is trying to do some dastardly stuff to a Western nation there's an indication, some intel trail. If the system can't catch him on his way BACK from an ISIS training camp then we have problems, but until he actually leaves the country to become radicalized how do you screen for that? You don't. As far as I can tell this whole thing about the airport job is coincidental. It was just a job to the guy. There's no real indication that he was radicalized in a way that held any malice towards America either. You can't just say ISIS is this and say case closed. Any movement or institution contains various types of people of various biases. Not every person who supported the IRA believed in everything they did or wanted to see happen. No organization is that homogeneous. There are ISIS supporters who will go to fight for some abstract goal over there and there are ones who'll come over here and fight for some goal to be achieved here. They are not the same people. I'm sure there are scores of ISIS members who don't want to do anything bad to America because the very nature of that organization and the way its picking up broad support in the Middle East is going to mean there's more moderate members too. They are fighting for a lot of things, appealing to a lot of ideas. Some people will be drawn just by the idea of setting up something in an area they see as being muslim and deserving independence from western influence. That does not automatically lead to direct terrorist action on American soil, not for every person in that group. I think in many ways its much less likely that you'll find a violent terrorist whose origins are in America simply because the ones with passports have family here, have a life here and are going to be less willing to attack that. So far the people who have executed attacks on western soil have been foreigners and there's a good reason for that. I'm not saying its not a threat, I'm just saying there's a lot more nuance to the case of radicalized Americans than just saying "they are this group now ergo they are uniformly to be expected to be like this". Whats more any excessive response to the perceived threat of these radicals with American passports can lead to institutional actions against them that could greatly increase the likelihood of them becoming upset and disenfranchised from their home ie. America. Then it can be easy for the radicals over there to say to them "you see, you're not really one of them, look how they treat you, look how they treat your family, we must change that". The nature of the threat can be greatly exaggerated by the incorrect response. Its as dangerous to overreact as it is to be unprepared. We should be both very vigilant and prepared but also thoughtful in how we approach the perceived threat. Its much more productive to treat that immigrant community as a resource in fighting than an enemy in the making. You'll get to those youths who can be swayed to the ISIS message much more easily through their communities, through their mosques than through some aggressive state enforcement and paranoia campaign.

The relevance is in the fact that you're scared by it. But when it comes to the whole "what can we do?" part there's nothing. How is it really relevant that he worked in an airport BEFORE he went and fought for ISIS? Its only relevant because we're freaking out because of it, but in actual fact he didn't do anything when he was there, had access, and it doesn't appear that he planned to do anything or that there was any information available at the time that would suggest he would have or that he was an unsavory character or had done anything to warrant getting him out of there. Therefore has the system failed by letting him work there? By any criteria I can think of no, unless you think the background check should include access to a quantum singularity that taps into government databases from the future. So like I said, other than being freaked out by it what exactly went wrong with the system?

The reason that lots of people in immigrant groups often end up being swayed by things are usually cultural and based in ignorance and poverty. There's a reason that you don't see many well fed middle class white people going overseas to die, and that includes joining the military. Yes, the Military is another example of how poor uneducated people are more likely to be sucked into doing something that more well fed or educated people generally don't. So why do Somalis fall for ISIS more than the US Army? Because culturally that institution better represents their values and their origins. I'm not saying the US Army and ISIS are the same, clearly, but you also have to realize that for cultural reasons some groups will not see much difference between joining the Army and going overseas to fight for them. Just think about all the westerners that went to fight for the Spanish back in the 1930s. Another example would be Jews going overseas to fight for the new state of Israel back in the late 40s. Would that be surprising? No not really. Even more compelling would be the idea of Jewish Americans going overseas to become part of the Irgun before the creation of Israel. A headline from that time might read "Jewish American who mopped floors in the House of Representatives was killed this week after firing on British soldiers in the Protectorate of Palestine" His access to airports and his sympathies really don't show any relevance ultimately other than to the fear of that association. He hadn't done anything wrong before he left to fight overseas. If he'd come back and tried to get back to the airport job I can imagine then that that'd be the real test of the current system. What exactly are they supposed to screen these people for? Being muslims, somalis, and having a sympathy that only manifests itself in the future? This is a scary headline only because of how people perceive it. In actual fact there isn't much of a story. Here's the real headline "Man who died overseas fighting for ISIS had a security clearance from before he ever did anything wrong or had any reason to be in any database". The only practical solution to this is one of institutionalized racism against muslims in security intensive jobs. "You are denied security clearance because we can't be sure you're not sympathetic to a generic threat from a general area of the world".

No, but why bother? The throttle is the superior piece of kit. I suppose you have a perfectly good reason, but as it is there's no real issue with having the throttle connected anyway, other than having to find a way to hide it somewhere that allows the cable for the stick to snake out. The only issue would be in dealing with axis priority if you want to override the X52 throttle with something else. Not a problem in most modern games I think, particularly if you can set it up so that the X52 is not the first gaming device in the list which should make its so that whatever else you want to use for a throttle will be seen as the priority device.

Don't let the trolls get you down. There might be a lot of numpties around but this place also has a lot of moderation, in fact its so aggressive that where a troll treads once he rarely treads twice. The price you pay for an active forum I suppose.

Who's naive enough to think that in this day and age we aren't all being filmed at at least our work places? Between security cameras and paranoid managers I doubt I could get away with much without there being something to catch it these days.

So why doesn't this mean that all airline ACARS systems aren't huge security risks?

Yea that doesn't do anything for me. In order to get any info you need to select at the minimum an approach. Doesn't matter really since it doesn't display anything useful if you do. Instead its better to use a pseudo-VOR to draw out the runway heading if you feel you need it.

I remember reading something about how decades ago they debuted an exterior camera for all the passengers on some American aircraft and very early on it was featured on an aircraft that did a very steep nosedive after takeoff so I think they removed the system from use after it became apparent that the last thing all the passengers saw was probably the ground rushing straight at them. I wonder if their new system would involve an automatic cutoff in the event of an abnormal attitude to avoid a similar situation.

Heh, well that makes sense. My computer is such pants that I only have some nice airport sceneries, but everything in between looks like default so no point in gawking. I'm a procedural guy so I spend more of my time in the abstract world of routing in my head. I might be convinced to err more towards VFR sensibilities though if I could just get a better PC. @Travis Thats wonderful. Exactly the kind of thing I hoped existed. I do fly NA alot, in fact until this month I hadn't flown England in a long time. I'll definitely check it out.

Simbrief and VATSpy is all I ever need for IFR flying on VATSIM. If you're flying in the UK the NATS site even has a PDF that contains a list of preferred routes between pretty much every airport in the UK as well as route segments. This doc includes the SID and STAR if appropriate and in the case of route segments the start and end waypoint. I find a lot of the overlap of these various programs to be part of why I never bother with buying any of them. I like my tools surgical in their precise utility. Simbrief for the OFP. Flightware or VRoute or the NATS doc for route planning. VATSpy for the ATC tracking. http://www.nats-uk.ead-it.com/public/index.php%3Foption=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=186&Itemid=258.html That link plus Simbrief pretty much makes PFPX useless to me in the UK. Flightaware does the same for me in North America most of the time. Most regular services tend to include a STAR in the flight plan so I usually put it in. I think you GA guys get really obsessed with the full colour GPS moving map don't ya.

Oh come now. Everyone knows that the vast majority of NGX owners could fly that thing with the Up keyboard key all by itself, just enough to get them to rotate and climb to the required 400 feet for autopilot activation.

Easily? lol Its not different. Its all the same control surfaces, its just a different style of control. Its all in your heads guys. I suppose some of you refuse to buy any ERJ addons until someone can fix you a handlebar yoke lest it feel less than genuine. :rolleyes: \ I'm not even kidding though, its pretty silly, sacrificing the quality of your direct input link from your actions to the simulated aircraft's behavior for the sake of a totally arbitrary conceit. The Thrustmaster Warthog is a masterpiece of analog input design. Downgrading to a Saitek is just... baffling. Whats more important than the fidelity of the link between your will and the aircraft?

Its definitely more the former than just about all the tubeliners everyone flies these days. No autothrottle, alarmingly ineffective yaw damper, manual RPM control separate from Power lever, a very limited VNAV that you can happily not use, very short landing roll, STOL capability, insanely powerful engines, a high wing aircraft thats very lively in heavy wind conditions. The systems aren't Airbus or Boeing level, that is to say the real airplane isn't meant to be flown with hands off all the time. Sure, you can mostly leave it on the FMS route if you want, but its not an autoland aircraft. In fact the systems can be very twitchy so you need to constantly monitoring whatever you automate to be ready to just take over. Interesting thing is that its also nearly as fast as a jet on short flights, only about 5 minutes slower on a typical 1 hour flight. Its a very interesting mix of everything. Frankly other than following the magenta path as a matter of normal operations the autopilot systems aren't too much more complex than what you find in advanced GA aircraft. Its all pretty much user generated. Even the VNAV has to be programmed by the user, it doesn't automatically calculate the descent path like a Boeing, and if you go off it too much it disconnects and you're back to flying it yourself. You can even just use the VNAV as a calculator to put the TOD on the map and then when you manually fly down the descent path the VNAV page will tell you whether you're high or low on the path telling you what VS to fly to stay or get onto it. Its pretty much the opposite of the way people seem to be beholden to the typical Boeing VNAV where they don't know what its doing but they're afraid to turn it off. In the Dash you're pretty much always eying the VNAV like you know it can't be relied on to do it all by itself. Soon as the ATC gives you a vector from the magenta, it becomes utterly useless and you have to start doing mental math to figure out speed against descent rate to reach a certain alt at a given point so many minutes ahead. Its so much fun, and landing it is so weird too. Think about it. This aircraft actually wants you to buy rudder pedals. Ever since I recently started to really focus on it I haven't touched another plane. I can fly 3 or 4 sectors over several hours, seeing all sorts of scenery, doing multiple landings, approaches, all that jazz, meanwhile the Boeing or Airbus people have spent all that time on Facebook during the cruise. Its the most fun IFR plane I've ever used.