IIRC, in Airbus planes the pilot has no direct control. He gives inputs which are then accepted or rejected depending on what the computer thinks is safe; at take off you can pull the stick as much as you want, the computer will not let the tail hit the ground. In Boeing you have direct control but with better feedback on what’s going to happen.
What's interesting is that modern crash-rate statistics for the two companies are essentially the same, meaning there doesn't seem to be a superior choice of the two approaches
It's an often repeated misconception, but in Airbus planes the pilot has full control of every single control surface of the plane. Disabling the flight enveloppe protection system is probably necessary if you want to tail strike, but it is perfectly doable.
Nope. It’s fine to have the substring “911” in your phone number. This guy must have experienced a hiccup in the system somewhere. What I want to know is how he managed to get a secret landline installed in his parents’ house.
There was an existing RJ11 socket in the wall behind my bed. Sadly, nothing more exciting.
It's totally possible it was a hiccup. I had been using the line for weeks with the same number, and then it suddenly started to reliably redirect to emergency dispatch.
I thought I had read previously that numbers containing 911 would redirect in the case that a potential victim has misdialed in a hurry. This incident was over a decade ago, so its possible that I misread an article or found a garbage source.
Ah, you had a secret handset, not (land)line (or, as per Ernestine, instrument).
Basically, decades ago, 411 was the first "N11" to come into common use, for "local directory assistance"; and 611 was for "repair service". But all 8 were reserved ( https://www.nationalnanpa.com/number_resource_info/n11_codes... ), and there was no way they were going to rescind all the already-existing phone numbers with "11" in them, or even with "911", since they'd been in use forever.
Some random examples of real numbers with "911" in them: 800-345-1911 is the South Hackensack office of TransAxle; 800-349-1100 is (or was) Louisiana Health Monitoring.
Great examples and I had never thought to consider the origin, or even relatedness, of the N11 numbers. Thank you for the reference!
You are correct, I should have said handset. I'm not sure if this is common, but with the involvement of cellphones in the house my family began referring to any handset in the house as "the landline."
Example: "Can you grab the landline in the kitchen, I'm on the cell."
Or they just had a spare phone they plugged into the socket their parents didn't know about (the phone not the socket). I'd be surprised if OP has gone and spliced an additional line instead of their just being a socket in their room already.
I'd be surprised if OP has gone and spliced an additional line instead of their just being a socket in their room already.
I wouldn't. This is how the nerdier of my friends got their computers online in the 80's.
In early modem days, a lot of people bought modems without thinking the whole process through. Once they got it home, they realized that either the room with the computer didn't have a phone line, the phone jack was inconveniently located, or after spending $300 on a 150-300 baud modem, they didn't realize they'd have to spend another $200 on a phone line + $50/month for the jack + $xx for dialtone.
Splicing phone lines and fishing them through the walls with a coat hangar became an art. And if it wasn't practical in your house, you sometimes ran a phone line through the trees to your buddy's house.
You're exactly correct. There was a hidden RJ11 socket behind my bed that I plugged a previously-forgotten phone into. There was only one line shared throughout the house, which occasionally caused some problems with my _master plan_.
When I was a kid I "spliced" a line (connected it to screw terminals in the box on the side of the house) from my parent's main phone to the basement so I could shotgun two dial-up modems in the middle of the night (the basement already was wired for the 2nd fax/internet line). I wasn't explicitly trying to keep it a secret, but I also didn't tell anyone, my dad found it after a couple months when he tried to make a particularly late phone call and heard modem noise.
Check your maths. A 10 digit number has 10^10 possibilities, but there are 8 different positions that the 911 can be in, each of which consumes 10^7 possibilities. So now there are 10^10 - 7*10^7, or 9920000000 possibilities.
(edit: Actually, this doesn't take account of multiple occurrences of 911 in the number, but it's a fairly close approximation.)
This is common almost everywhere in the world as the 0 and 1 prefix (the plus in the +XXX landcodes) are usually used for international selection but might require an additional 0 or 1 after the first 0. Though in my country and most of Europe the 1 is not a international prefix.
I believe I read somewhere that this is largely a myth—that some specific 555 numbers are kept empty for fictional use, but that some of them are legitimate.
While there are rules about the use of 555 numbers, there are a number of local phone companies in the U.S. that don't care, and treat it something like a 10.x.x.x IP address for local use. Things like calling the telco for repairs, or billing inquiries.
800-555-TELL used to be a voice-operated information service complete with turn by turn navigation, eventually purchased by Microsoft IIRC. XXX-555-1212 used to be an information number (both may still exist; I haven't checked).
It is entirely possible that I was wrong about numbers containing 911 redirecting. This incident was over a decade ago, and I was just recalling what I researched as a cause back when it had happened. I would be willing to bet there are people on this forum much more versed in telecom that will be able to set the record straight.
Pivot to what exactly? Suggesting that they just "pivot" is like a rich person looking at the family living out of a cardboard box under the bridge asking: "Why don't they just get more money?"
Sure both Yahoo and AOL must have talented people working there, but that's kinda useless if you don't make them work on profitable projects. Finding the profitable ideas is the hard part.
If you have equal changes of pivoting in any given direction and use a random number generator to choose which direction to go in, it's called Brownian Motion.
A startup I worked for was acquired by AOL, all the good engineers left as soon as possible. Bureaucracy, lack of any vision, slow at everything. AOL was a media company, not a software development company.
If you have a 2% interest rate, 10-15k in your account will generate that amount monthly. Totally doable if you’re living in a country with a COL that low to begin with.
Due to inflation the value of the money is going down though, so I don’t think this is really income, unless you’re getting returns greater than inflation.
