Nextgen and Privatizing Air Traffic Control

Trump was pushing these two ideas on TV yesterday.  Right now air traffic control (ATC) has been run by the FAA and paid for thru appropriations of federal tax money.  Trump (and others) want to set up a private or semi private company to run ATC and be funded by levying  fees on the airlines who use ATC.  The airline industry is in favor, as is the ATC union.   The issue really comes down to funding.  Right now, every time Congress gets its panties in a twist, the FAA funding bill doesn't get passed, and when it finally does pass, it leaves out funding for capital improvements, new radars, new control towers, new computers, Next Gen and such.   With a private company funded from fees, the cash flow is steady and predictable, every one's paycheck comes thru on time, and  capital improvements can be made, especially long term multi year projects.   The down side is the private company can hire more people, buy more equipment and just raise the fees to pay for it all.   They have a monopoly, and they will exploit it to grow. 
    The capital improvement under consideration is "Next Gen" an expensive plan to force every airplane in the country (and out of the country) to buy an pricey GPS receiver/transponder.  This gadget uses the GPS part to find the plane's location, speed and course, and when interrogated by a ground transponder would transmit the plane's ID and location back to the ground to update the ATC displays in control towers.  Transponders start at a couple of K for a light plane model, and a lot more for an airliner grade model.  The advantage of Next Gen is greater accuracy, say 10 feet of so, as compared to  5 miles or so for today's ground radar.  Which is said to allow controllers to fly planes closer together, allowing more air traffic in the same amount of airspace. 
   Maybe.  But it relies on vulnerable technology.  The GPS signal from satellites is quite weak and could be jammed in wartime.  The NextGen GPS/transponder is complicated and should it fail the aircraft disappears off ATC display screens.  And there is plenty of airspace for flying from place to place.  The congestion occurs around airports.  We only have 50 odd airports in the whole country and each one can only handle one operation (takeoff or landing) a minute.  There is plenty of airspace inbetween airports for all the planes now flying and all the planes that will be flying in the future.
   We should not do Next Gen.  Too expensive, too vulnerable, and we don't get anything for spending all that money. 

Reality Winner??

Unlikely name.  NSA contractor arrested Saturday for leaking classified information.  She had a history of flakiness, including a posting about whiteness is racism, or some such malarkey.  She was an Air Force veteran.   The newsies haven't said what kind of discharge she had.
   Question:  How did somebody so flaky ever get a security clearance?  Did who ever granted her clearance talk to her former Air Force commander?  And how did she keep her clearance?
  Another Question:  Why was a contractor given access to this classified?  What was their need to know. 
   Seems to me, NSA has lost it's grip.  Back when I was a NSA contractor they gave us polygraph tests as part of gaining a clearance.   NSA was the only place I was ever at where they inspected your briefcase on the way in and out of secured areas.   Letting "Reality Winner" (is that really a name?)  in and giving her the run of the files makes me think NSA is getting sloppy. 

Cortana: What can it do and do I care?

According to net rumor, Cortana does some searching and accepts voice commands and gives voice responses and does snooping for Microsoft.   It used to suck up better than 100 Mbytes of RAM and a smidgen of CPU time.  Since putting in Creator's update big patch the other day it is down to 66.6 Mbytes of RAM and zip for CPU time. 
   After go rounds with Dragon Dictate and the average robocaller, I am not impressed with voice recognition.  I haven't gone thru a training session with Cortana.  I don't think I'm using it at all. I think I want to blow it away to save RAM and speed up things.
   So far, net searching only say you can use Regedit to add a key to the registry  (AllowCortana = 0) that inhibits Cortana from doing something while searching.  No directions for blowing Cortana clean off the hard  drive.   The only searching I ever do is with a web browser and Google, or on my harddrive with Windows Explorer.  
  Question:  Is it worth  adding the magic key to the registry?   Will it recover that 66.6 Mbytes of RAM, or does it leave Cortana sucking up RAM and doing nothing?  
   

HP Laptop battery recall. Lack of nameplate

While futzing around after the "Creative Update" big patch, I find that HP has a recall out on some laptop batteries.  Hmm.  I saw that photo for some years ago of a laptop bursting into flames on a conference room table.  Could be bad.  Could burn your house down. 
   So, a few clicks and the website asks for the product name of my laptop.  I get choices of Pavilion G4, thru Pavilion G16.   Top of my laptop just says "Pavilion"  I look on the back, on the bottom, sides, top, everywhere.  No data plate.  PITA.  Battery compartment needs tools to open.  Rather than going down to the shop for tools, I download an 800KB program to figure out which battery I have.  It reports that my battery is NOT on the recall list.  Nice.   
    I wish HP wasn't so cheap and had bothered to put a real dataplate, readable by humans, on their product. 

Creator's update to Win 10: aka Big Patch 2017

So I let Windows Update do the "Creators Update".  It is big and fat.  Took hours to download and more hours to install after download.  It fixed the power button on my HP laptop.  The last big patch, last summer, broke the button.  I had to keep my finger on the power button for the count of ten to make the laptop power down AND turn off the LED in the power button.   Granted a LED only draws 10 milliamps out of a battery rated for an amp-hour or more, but even 10 milliamps will run the battery down if you put the laptop on the shelf for a week or so.  Anyhow Win 10 Creator's update fixed the button that the last big patch broke.  
   And then Creators update broke HP 3D Driveguard.  That's an HP program that does an emergency hard drive head park should the internal accelerometer sense the laptop is taking a fall.  Sounds cool IF it is really fast enough to get the heads parked before the laptop hits the floor.  Net searching offered advice to uninstall HP 3D Driveguard and then download the latest version and reinstall.   Uninstall worked, but download and reinstall not so much.  My first reinstall crapped out with an error message about a bad file in the download.  I tried a second download from another site and it might have worked.  It never bothered to report success or failure.  HP 3D Driveguard does not show in Task Manager.  Neither do it's aliases, of which it has two.  So, either it hides from task manager or it isn't there at all. 
    A Creators Update puff piece on the 'Net  was vague about what all this updating buys you.  You get a 3D Paint program (whoopie) and a lot of stuff for gamers.  I don't draw with my computers and games are for kids.  
     Another productive year for the Micro$oft software weenies. 

Wipe Islamic Terrorists off the Internet

We ought to do it.  We can do it, the backbone carriers are mostly American.  We  furnish a list of terrorist URL's to the backbone carriers, and presto, they go into the bit bucket for good.  The terrorists will undoubtedly open new ones, but we can make those go into the bit bucket too.  And their audiences, who just pop a URL into their browsers will be confused when they get the 404 error message after the site got blackholed.  It will take time for the audience to discover the new URLs and by which time we can discover them too and make the new ones go away. 
   Everyone agrees that a lot of Islamic terrorists get started, get instructed, and get encouraged over the internet.  For instance we know that Anwar Al Awlaki  set up the shoe bomber, and engaged in emails with Major Hassan, the Ft Hood shooter.  Awlaki got so bad that the weak kneed Obama administration summoned up a little resolve and snuffed Awlaki in a drone strike.  If we can snuff them from the air, surely we can turn off their internet access.
   Every other media, print newspapers, radio, TV, movies, books, music, engage in censorship.  There are some things they simply will not show.  Examples:  death threats, calls to violence, pornography, wardrobe malfunctions, overly  raunchy lyrics, and hate speech.  Only the internet gets away scot free.  With Islamic terrorist racking up more and more kills (149 kills just this Ramadan) we need to shut down their internet access. 
   We need to do this right, and prevent censorship of other perfectly legitimate internet activities.  Probably a small board of respected and impartial  people ought to OK each request to blackhole a URL for being an Islamic terror site.  We have done a fairly good job at snuffing out spammers, no reason why we should not do the same to Islamic terrorists. 

Mandatory Minimum Sentences.

Used to be, back in the 60's and 70's, judges had broad discretion in sentences.  Unfortunately a number of judges abused this discretion, letting criminals off with slap-on-the-wrist sentences when the community wanted the throw the book at them. 
  As a result, in the 70's and 80's, Congress and state legislatures  passed laws requiring judges to impose mandatory minimum sentences in all cases, mitigating circumstances be damned.  Judges have been whining about this ever since.  But the mandatory minimum sentencing laws still mostly stand, the voters have little interest in the whines of judges.