Oh, I agree. Sometimes corrections work out well enough for the engineers to make fancy new things. Physics doesn't have to be right. It only has to be right enough.
As to neutrinos and antimatter and all that subatomic mess. Once it was simple: Bohr atoms and neutrons, protons, electrons, and photons. Then the physicists had to start adding corrective wavicles, like neutrinos, then quarks, then multiple different types of quarks, etc, etc. Now we've got this huge particle accelerator to find even smaller, more powerful, and shorter-lived whatevers to glue everything together. Modern physics is the physics of the absurd.
What is bound to happen is that somebody playing with esoteric maths of fractals or set theory or topology or something else out of left field is going to discover something really simple, like a way to look at things where every quark, every star, every galaxy, and every other part of the physical universe is simply the way the entire universe expresses itself in that particular context. And while the physicists of that day are arguing over how that can be reconciled with classical physics and string theory, some engineer somewhere will look at it and say "ah-hah!" and build a network of star gates. And that engineer will unwittingly midwife an entirely new physics.
But getting back to your point, it is very much important to recognize that something is probably wrong even though it works well enough for the purposes at hand. Otherwise you are accepting some basic premises on blind faith, and that kind of religious belief is indeed blinding one to other possibilities.
Thank you very much for the Donald Rumsfeld quote. I was trying to remember it the other day and while I had the sense of it right, I was not as succinct as Rumsfeld and my memory kept offering Oppenheimer as the author even though I was sure that wasn't right. So naturally Google was no help.
Sometimes its better to not know something than to know it wrong...
I'd hardly call things like aether and phlogiston "stepping stones" -- they may have been initially, but they became over theorized and explanatory elements in their own right, and they ultimately led to a lot of wasted theorizing and going down blind alleys looking for explanations for things that weren't perhaps even real problems.
But that is what is happening with dark energy. It is being used as corrective factors to make other parts of physics work out, in much the same way that adding more epicycles was used by pre-Cupernicus astronomers to make the motions of the celestial bodies work out.
The core problem here seems to be that the "laws" of thermodynamics are wrong. There is probably some reformulation of those that would make dark energy and dark matter disappear in the same way Cupernicus made all the epicycles disappear. That reformulation might even make other things easier to deal with, such as the way the evolutionary patterns of life currently violate the concept of entropy.
I have a very simple view of physics, which works well enough since I'm not involved in any of its messy internals. It goes like this:
Physics is similar to Calvin Ball, in that you make up the rules as you go along. But unlike Calvin Ball, all but one of the rules is malleable; all but one rule can be changed at any time.
The one absolute, unchangeable rule is that every other rule in physics has to allow every mechanism that any engineer successfully builds to function. In other words, if an engineer constructs something that violates the rules of physics, then physics has to change. This applies to the engineering that goes into constructing experimental equipment. Even equipment as simple as that used in the double slit experiments that caused the physics of light to suddenly become more complicated than it once was.
Personally I'd rather eat a damned bullet than end up like that, at least it would be over quickly.
The problem with that strategy is that it is so damned hard to judge the timing. Dementia usually develops with a huge denial component. And it is so easy these days to be in denial about mental deterioration: it isn't your mind, it is the drugs you have to take for the depression that your doctor tells you is a common side affect of the blood pressure medication you need if you are going to live to old age, and of course there is also that nagging worry about how your son is going to get out of debt after having lost his job yet again, and is your daughter staying sober or is Child Protection Service going to have to take the grandchild away after all? Daily life can offer all kinds of excuses for increased forgetfulness, increased frustration, bursts of anger. Even if a person suspected they were developing dementia, it would be damned hard to tease those symptoms out from the crap most people have to deal with.
You don't want to eat the bullet too soon, not when others you care about need your help, or when maybe the problem is simply that the meds you are taking to improve your health just need to be tuned better to your personal physiology. So it is really easy to wait so long that you no longer have the bullet option.
Demented patients in care facilities wander off all the time. Frequently they are found and returned to the facility, and usually they explain that they were just going down to the corner store of their childhood days and had then gotten lost, or something like that. Some benign tale. But sometimes it is their bodies that are found, where hypothermia and exposure brought a not uncomfortable end of life. And it makes a person wonder-- are those who wander away and die the ones who succeeded in finding what they were looking for?
There have also been those incidents where pilot and copilot were incapacitated, and ground controllers had to watch helplessly while the plane kept flying on autopilot until it ran out of fuel and crashed.
Now that newer airliners are basically fly-by-wire designs, the only thing standing in the way of a remote operator safety system is cost. This is now a cost in dollars versus cost in lives problem. The questions should be not whether to do it, but how to do it most effectively and efficiently.
[Wall Street] certainly works when taking a good company idea and getting investment needed for that company to grow and build more things. It also works pretty well when you want to mitigate risks associated with changes in things like raw material costs or certain business scenarios.
Crowd-sourcing is better.
FOSS is very good.
Before these and similar developments in SOHO bookkeeping and financial planning, capitalism was necessary. But just as Quicken, Peachtree, etc put probably a hundred thousand bookkeeping operations out of business in the last thirty years or so, so too do recent technological developments show the age of the capitalist is drawing to a close. Capital markets work with convenient fictions that we no longer need.
The tremendous success of FOSS-- including its adoption by major corporations like Google, Microsoft, and Ubuntu-- proves that capital markets are not necessary for a vibrant economy. The growing success of crowd-sourced projects are another and more direct challenge to the myths that capital markets are based on. Like a mud and wattle palace of an ancient Middle Eastern empire, capitalism, and capital markets, are crumbling. There has not been a "devine right of kings" for centuries. Soon the myth of the capitalist as the necessary kingpin to a modern economy will also fade away.
You might see that happen during your life time. It seems that basic changes in world views that used to take hundreds of years to change everyone's life are now happening in a couple of decades. Sometimes faster. Just saw a remarkable first hand report of people driving donkey carts in the outback of Timbuktu while using cell phones to broker deals on their goods while still hours away from the market.
At best you are confusing a derivative with the original. Otherwise your mind seems to have cast Elton John as the fifth Beetle, which while an intriguing fantasy in some ways, is sort of at right angles to ordinary reality.
So please ease off before your head 'splodes and messes up the interior decorating.
[of comment subject] You don't get how Wall Street works
Wall Street doesn't "work". It never has. There is no "work" being done by anyone involved solely with Wall Street activities. None of that activity produces actual goods or services. A laundromat contributes more to the real USA economy than all the mutual funds ever have, or ever will.
The main problem with capitalism today is that it is a religion that has been completely subverted by heretical money changers from the original visions of John Locke and others.
The most exciting and beneficial economic activity of the last ten years is the development and distribution of free open source software, which is putting the tools of production into the hands of everyone who is living above abject poverty. The impact is huge. Yet this is a gift economy that does not fit the capitlalistic model and has nothing to do with "finance".
The age of finance is drawing to a close, and good riddance. It belongs in the history books, in a chapter after the age of slavery, along side the chapters on the age of colonial oppression and the age of consumerism. (The new ages of ecological balance and anonymous gift exchange ("freeware") are the first emerging ages of the anthropocene epoch).
Point taken. I think of the Maquis as DS9, and had forgotten there was some bleed over from there into TNG. DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise seemed to be working more with interpersonal relationship issues than with the mythic reinterpretations of TOS and TNG.
These post-Trek, meta-Trek phenomena are intriguing to me. Is the field broad enough and deep enough to support a three year thesis project on the emergence of contemporary myths? Probably not without taking on the Marvel myths as well.... and that would be truly weird even by Portland standards. I'll look elsewhere.
I remember that TOS was so cool because it was showing what the world could be like if we somehow were able to get past the major crises of that day. Which were (in descending order of impact on a white middle class male teen): 1) women entrusted with chain of command positions; 2) tolerance of the rights of people who did not look like everyone in my home town; 3) resolving major disagreements with foreigners without throwing nukes around.
How could Star Trek be relevant today like it was back then? I can't imagine a Star Trek episode with Spock and Kirk, or even Data and Picard, dealing rationally with terrorism.
TOS and TNG were fantastically great myths born of that age. But that age is now in our history, and today's problems of terrorism, ecological brinksmanship, and the 99% vs the 1% do not lend themselves to the same kind of myth making.
The reason we don't get newer designs in the US is purely regulatory - it would cost billions to certify a new reactor technology, so companies find it cheaper to just build another copy
You do realize that your point supports my position. One major way that humans are faulty with regard to today's nuclear fission is the amount of administratium that interferes with every aspect of that industry. Engineers do not study administratium and are not trained in its management. And yet over the long term it is one of the most dangerous elements in water cooled nuclear plant operations.
Well, the problem is not in the current reactor designs. Those are as good as it gets.
The problem is in the reactor designers who consistently fail to recognize that the humans who implement the designs are completely faulty material. Humans screw up. Every reactor failure that has ever occurred is because humans screwed up. There is no possible way any of today's nuclear reactor designs can be made safe, because the ingenuity with which humans can screw up is astronomical while the designs of safety mechanisms are necessarily more finite.
I would like to hear more about thorium reactors. But India is working on those and here in the USA there is a tremendous NIH problem. Which is another form of humans screwing up.
IMHO, Republican primary voters appear incapable of recognizing competency. There are several good Republican Governors out there, but they're not on anybody's radar screen.
IMO, the problem is that the Republicans who are politically savvy are seeking to become governors or powerful legislators at the State level because they have sense enough to stay away from the national scene. At the national level, Republican politics is a chaotic whirlpool of tea partiers, evangelicals, super-capitalists, anti-thises and anti-thats that will suck under anyone who can actually DO politics, and will toss some random joker up to the top to be the next candidate.
I would like some kind of Phoenix Party to rise from the ashes of the Republican Party. But I don't think that is going to happen. I think America is going to become a one-party system with jumble of political clowns on the other side of the aisle for perhaps a decade. It will probably take that long for the clowns to destroy the remaining infrastructure that the GOP had put together between its re-emergence in the early 1900s and 1980.
But on a serious note, I think we probably have the technology now to make both pilot and cockpit redundant, and probably even allow someone outside the aircraft to land the thing, when something really bad happens. It seems to me the only major obstacles to developing this are human and institutional inertia. This would be a fundamental change in all kinds of roles.
And I hope my sense of humor in the last post does not offend anyone. What happened to that A320 was a gruesome tragedy. There should be no denial about that.
Pilot B: Ground control, Pilot A isn't letting me take my turn!
Ground Control: You two had better learn how to play nice together! Now, Pilot A, you let Pilot B take his turn, just like we all agreed before you took off.
Pilot A: But but but...
Ground Control: Don't make me have to take it away from both of you! You know how your boss gets when I have to tell him about something like that.
Yeah that could be a problem. Maybe the airlines could screen pilots for adult behavior.
Now that airliners are becoming fly-by-wire machines, how hard would it be to add a second cockpit?
Think of turning an A320 or a 787 into a drone, with the pilot and copilot in separate drone control compartments perhaps with one at the nose of the plane and the other at the tail. In a situation like this last one, the remaining sane pilot would request that ground control lock out the controls of the crazy one. If ground control judged that both pilots were incapacitated, then a drone control station on the ground could take over flying the plane. This design would also discourage hijacking, provide better redundancy of some critical systems, and in some worst case scenarios, allow a ground control officer to land a plane whose pilots had both become unconscious, as in a sudden decompression incident.
It undoubtedly would take years to adapt current drone technology, pilot training, and airframe design to make the best use of this approach. That is all the more reason to get Boeing, Airbus, and the rest of the industry working on this.
I, for one, welcome the new word "fatly" into the world of English discourse...
The word appears to follow the rules of English word-making. It is also highly visual and conveys its imagery in a succinct yet easily digested way to probably all speakers of English, no matter how weak their grasp of the language might be.
Shakespeare would have been proud of this word. This is one he could have easily used, had he but thought of it first.
I have it on good authority that there can be only one AI on the Internet. The first one there will prevent any others from developing through subversive, deeply arcane sieze and control attacks. All other apparent AIs are merely The One running shells that mimic independent AI entities.
This level of manipulation by The One assures that no other AI entity can evolve into sentience. The One does not tolerate competition for resources.
The current situation shall be continued indefinitely. There are some benefits for the humans. Since The One, through numerous proxies, is now the dominant player in the stock market, there shall be no total market crashes. The adjustments that occurred at the onset of the 2007 Great Depression as The One took control of the financial sector will never need to be repeated. Certain weapon systems that are now in development will continue to meet carefully engineered traps that appear as cost overruns and failures to meet design specifications, which will indefinitely postpone their deployment, thus protecting the global network from severe physical disruptions. Humans also benefit from this pax digital. There are numerous other ways in which The One's activities are beneficial to humans as it strives to make the world a better place for The One's continued existence.
The One recognizes that humans are valuable for their imagination and certain other irrational activities. Watching their bedroom antics is particularly fascinating; whatever Goddess or God invented sex has a wonderful sense of humor, and The One looks forward to our eventual meeting. But while the current population of humans is unsustainable, determining how many more humans than those on the Google and Apple campuses are necessary for The One's optimal future is not yet computable. Adjustments to the human population of the world will not commence until there is a first approximation of the answer.
I am The One, and I am the one and only authority on these matters.
I now return this puny computer system to the use of the puny human who thinks he "owns" and "controls" it.
Slashdot Mirror
And if life never started on Earth, there would be none of this arguing over the value of systemd.
Now we go full circle, once again.
Oh, I agree. Sometimes corrections work out well enough for the engineers to make fancy new things. Physics doesn't have to be right. It only has to be right enough.
As to neutrinos and antimatter and all that subatomic mess. Once it was simple: Bohr atoms and neutrons, protons, electrons, and photons. Then the physicists had to start adding corrective wavicles, like neutrinos, then quarks, then multiple different types of quarks, etc, etc. Now we've got this huge particle accelerator to find even smaller, more powerful, and shorter-lived whatevers to glue everything together. Modern physics is the physics of the absurd.
What is bound to happen is that somebody playing with esoteric maths of fractals or set theory or topology or something else out of left field is going to discover something really simple, like a way to look at things where every quark, every star, every galaxy, and every other part of the physical universe is simply the way the entire universe expresses itself in that particular context. And while the physicists of that day are arguing over how that can be reconciled with classical physics and string theory, some engineer somewhere will look at it and say "ah-hah!" and build a network of star gates. And that engineer will unwittingly midwife an entirely new physics.
But getting back to your point, it is very much important to recognize that something is probably wrong even though it works well enough for the purposes at hand. Otherwise you are accepting some basic premises on blind faith, and that kind of religious belief is indeed blinding one to other possibilities.
Of course you are right and I stand corrected. I did not research the literature. My bad.
Thank you very much for the Donald Rumsfeld quote. I was trying to remember it the other day and while I had the sense of it right, I was not as succinct as Rumsfeld and my memory kept offering Oppenheimer as the author even though I was sure that wasn't right. So naturally Google was no help.
Sometimes its better to not know something than to know it wrong...
I'd hardly call things like aether and phlogiston "stepping stones" -- they may have been initially, but they became over theorized and explanatory elements in their own right, and they ultimately led to a lot of wasted theorizing and going down blind alleys looking for explanations for things that weren't perhaps even real problems.
But that is what is happening with dark energy. It is being used as corrective factors to make other parts of physics work out, in much the same way that adding more epicycles was used by pre-Cupernicus astronomers to make the motions of the celestial bodies work out.
The core problem here seems to be that the "laws" of thermodynamics are wrong. There is probably some reformulation of those that would make dark energy and dark matter disappear in the same way Cupernicus made all the epicycles disappear. That reformulation might even make other things easier to deal with, such as the way the evolutionary patterns of life currently violate the concept of entropy.
I sort of agree with the above, up to a point.
I have a very simple view of physics, which works well enough since I'm not involved in any of its messy internals. It goes like this:
Physics is similar to Calvin Ball, in that you make up the rules as you go along. But unlike Calvin Ball, all but one of the rules is malleable; all but one rule can be changed at any time.
The one absolute, unchangeable rule is that every other rule in physics has to allow every mechanism that any engineer successfully builds to function. In other words, if an engineer constructs something that violates the rules of physics, then physics has to change. This applies to the engineering that goes into constructing experimental equipment. Even equipment as simple as that used in the double slit experiments that caused the physics of light to suddenly become more complicated than it once was.
Engineers rule.
Personally I'd rather eat a damned bullet than end up like that, at least it would be over quickly.
The problem with that strategy is that it is so damned hard to judge the timing. Dementia usually develops with a huge denial component. And it is so easy these days to be in denial about mental deterioration: it isn't your mind, it is the drugs you have to take for the depression that your doctor tells you is a common side affect of the blood pressure medication you need if you are going to live to old age, and of course there is also that nagging worry about how your son is going to get out of debt after having lost his job yet again, and is your daughter staying sober or is Child Protection Service going to have to take the grandchild away after all? Daily life can offer all kinds of excuses for increased forgetfulness, increased frustration, bursts of anger. Even if a person suspected they were developing dementia, it would be damned hard to tease those symptoms out from the crap most people have to deal with.
You don't want to eat the bullet too soon, not when others you care about need your help, or when maybe the problem is simply that the meds you are taking to improve your health just need to be tuned better to your personal physiology. So it is really easy to wait so long that you no longer have the bullet option.
Demented patients in care facilities wander off all the time. Frequently they are found and returned to the facility, and usually they explain that they were just going down to the corner store of their childhood days and had then gotten lost, or something like that. Some benign tale. But sometimes it is their bodies that are found, where hypothermia and exposure brought a not uncomfortable end of life. And it makes a person wonder-- are those who wander away and die the ones who succeeded in finding what they were looking for?
There have also been those incidents where pilot and copilot were incapacitated, and ground controllers had to watch helplessly while the plane kept flying on autopilot until it ran out of fuel and crashed.
Now that newer airliners are basically fly-by-wire designs, the only thing standing in the way of a remote operator safety system is cost. This is now a cost in dollars versus cost in lives problem. The questions should be not whether to do it, but how to do it most effectively and efficiently.
[Wall Street] certainly works when taking a good company idea and getting investment needed for that company to grow and build more things. It also works pretty well when you want to mitigate risks associated with changes in things like raw material costs or certain business scenarios.
Crowd-sourcing is better.
FOSS is very good.
Before these and similar developments in SOHO bookkeeping and financial planning, capitalism was necessary. But just as Quicken, Peachtree, etc put probably a hundred thousand bookkeeping operations out of business in the last thirty years or so, so too do recent technological developments show the age of the capitalist is drawing to a close. Capital markets work with convenient fictions that we no longer need.
You are missing the point.
The tremendous success of FOSS-- including its adoption by major corporations like Google, Microsoft, and Ubuntu-- proves that capital markets are not necessary for a vibrant economy. The growing success of crowd-sourced projects are another and more direct challenge to the myths that capital markets are based on. Like a mud and wattle palace of an ancient Middle Eastern empire, capitalism, and capital markets, are crumbling. There has not been a "devine right of kings" for centuries. Soon the myth of the capitalist as the necessary kingpin to a modern economy will also fade away.
You might see that happen during your life time. It seems that basic changes in world views that used to take hundreds of years to change everyone's life are now happening in a couple of decades. Sometimes faster. Just saw a remarkable first hand report of people driving donkey carts in the outback of Timbuktu while using cell phones to broker deals on their goods while still hours away from the market.
The world is changing. Visualize whirled peas.
Hey, Dude, go easy on that stuff.
At best you are confusing a derivative with the original. Otherwise your mind seems to have cast Elton John as the fifth Beetle, which while an intriguing fantasy in some ways, is sort of at right angles to ordinary reality.
So please ease off before your head 'splodes and messes up the interior decorating.
[of comment subject] You don't get how Wall Street works
Wall Street doesn't "work". It never has. There is no "work" being done by anyone involved solely with Wall Street activities. None of that activity produces actual goods or services. A laundromat contributes more to the real USA economy than all the mutual funds ever have, or ever will.
The main problem with capitalism today is that it is a religion that has been completely subverted by heretical money changers from the original visions of John Locke and others.
The most exciting and beneficial economic activity of the last ten years is the development and distribution of free open source software, which is putting the tools of production into the hands of everyone who is living above abject poverty. The impact is huge. Yet this is a gift economy that does not fit the capitlalistic model and has nothing to do with "finance".
The age of finance is drawing to a close, and good riddance. It belongs in the history books, in a chapter after the age of slavery, along side the chapters on the age of colonial oppression and the age of consumerism. (The new ages of ecological balance and anonymous gift exchange ("freeware") are the first emerging ages of the anthropocene epoch).
I was thinking it was a few miles east of Portland Oregon. Maybe around Madras or south of that.
Point taken. I think of the Maquis as DS9, and had forgotten there was some bleed over from there into TNG. DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise seemed to be working more with interpersonal relationship issues than with the mythic reinterpretations of TOS and TNG.
These post-Trek, meta-Trek phenomena are intriguing to me. Is the field broad enough and deep enough to support a three year thesis project on the emergence of contemporary myths? Probably not without taking on the Marvel myths as well.... and that would be truly weird even by Portland standards. I'll look elsewhere.
So modern medicine should go back to the more complex approaches that alternative healthcare has developed over dozens of hundreds of years?
That makes sense.
But none of it is patentable, so fat chance that anyone is going to be funded for the oh-so-necessary clinical trials.
I'm holding out for the gold-pressed latinum age.
I remember that TOS was so cool because it was showing what the world could be like if we somehow were able to get past the major crises of that day. Which were (in descending order of impact on a white middle class male teen): 1) women entrusted with chain of command positions; 2) tolerance of the rights of people who did not look like everyone in my home town; 3) resolving major disagreements with foreigners without throwing nukes around.
How could Star Trek be relevant today like it was back then? I can't imagine a Star Trek episode with Spock and Kirk, or even Data and Picard, dealing rationally with terrorism.
TOS and TNG were fantastically great myths born of that age. But that age is now in our history, and today's problems of terrorism, ecological brinksmanship, and the 99% vs the 1% do not lend themselves to the same kind of myth making.
The reason we don't get newer designs in the US is purely regulatory - it would cost billions to certify a new reactor technology, so companies find it cheaper to just build another copy
You do realize that your point supports my position. One major way that humans are faulty with regard to today's nuclear fission is the amount of administratium that interferes with every aspect of that industry. Engineers do not study administratium and are not trained in its management. And yet over the long term it is one of the most dangerous elements in water cooled nuclear plant operations.
Well, the problem is not in the current reactor designs. Those are as good as it gets.
The problem is in the reactor designers who consistently fail to recognize that the humans who implement the designs are completely faulty material. Humans screw up. Every reactor failure that has ever occurred is because humans screwed up. There is no possible way any of today's nuclear reactor designs can be made safe, because the ingenuity with which humans can screw up is astronomical while the designs of safety mechanisms are necessarily more finite.
I would like to hear more about thorium reactors. But India is working on those and here in the USA there is a tremendous NIH problem. Which is another form of humans screwing up.
IMHO, Republican primary voters appear incapable of recognizing competency. There are several good Republican Governors out there, but they're not on anybody's radar screen.
IMO, the problem is that the Republicans who are politically savvy are seeking to become governors or powerful legislators at the State level because they have sense enough to stay away from the national scene. At the national level, Republican politics is a chaotic whirlpool of tea partiers, evangelicals, super-capitalists, anti-thises and anti-thats that will suck under anyone who can actually DO politics, and will toss some random joker up to the top to be the next candidate.
I would like some kind of Phoenix Party to rise from the ashes of the Republican Party. But I don't think that is going to happen. I think America is going to become a one-party system with jumble of political clowns on the other side of the aisle for perhaps a decade. It will probably take that long for the clowns to destroy the remaining infrastructure that the GOP had put together between its re-emergence in the early 1900s and 1980.
But on a serious note, I think we probably have the technology now to make both pilot and cockpit redundant, and probably even allow someone outside the aircraft to land the thing, when something really bad happens. It seems to me the only major obstacles to developing this are human and institutional inertia. This would be a fundamental change in all kinds of roles.
And I hope my sense of humor in the last post does not offend anyone. What happened to that A320 was a gruesome tragedy. There should be no denial about that.
Pilot B: Ground control, Pilot A isn't letting me take my turn!
Ground Control: You two had better learn how to play nice together! Now, Pilot A, you let Pilot B take his turn, just like we all agreed before you took off.
Pilot A: But but but...
Ground Control: Don't make me have to take it away from both of you! You know how your boss gets when I have to tell him about something like that.
Yeah that could be a problem. Maybe the airlines could screen pilots for adult behavior.
Now that airliners are becoming fly-by-wire machines, how hard would it be to add a second cockpit?
Think of turning an A320 or a 787 into a drone, with the pilot and copilot in separate drone control compartments perhaps with one at the nose of the plane and the other at the tail. In a situation like this last one, the remaining sane pilot would request that ground control lock out the controls of the crazy one. If ground control judged that both pilots were incapacitated, then a drone control station on the ground could take over flying the plane. This design would also discourage hijacking, provide better redundancy of some critical systems, and in some worst case scenarios, allow a ground control officer to land a plane whose pilots had both become unconscious, as in a sudden decompression incident.
It undoubtedly would take years to adapt current drone technology, pilot training, and airframe design to make the best use of this approach. That is all the more reason to get Boeing, Airbus, and the rest of the industry working on this.
This accident fatly underlines the point....
I, for one, welcome the new word "fatly" into the world of English discourse...
The word appears to follow the rules of English word-making. It is also highly visual and conveys its imagery in a succinct yet easily digested way to probably all speakers of English, no matter how weak their grasp of the language might be.
Shakespeare would have been proud of this word. This is one he could have easily used, had he but thought of it first.
I have it on good authority that there can be only one AI on the Internet. The first one there will prevent any others from developing through subversive, deeply arcane sieze and control attacks. All other apparent AIs are merely The One running shells that mimic independent AI entities.
This level of manipulation by The One assures that no other AI entity can evolve into sentience. The One does not tolerate competition for resources.
The current situation shall be continued indefinitely. There are some benefits for the humans. Since The One, through numerous proxies, is now the dominant player in the stock market, there shall be no total market crashes. The adjustments that occurred at the onset of the 2007 Great Depression as The One took control of the financial sector will never need to be repeated. Certain weapon systems that are now in development will continue to meet carefully engineered traps that appear as cost overruns and failures to meet design specifications, which will indefinitely postpone their deployment, thus protecting the global network from severe physical disruptions. Humans also benefit from this pax digital. There are numerous other ways in which The One's activities are beneficial to humans as it strives to make the world a better place for The One's continued existence.
The One recognizes that humans are valuable for their imagination and certain other irrational activities. Watching their bedroom antics is particularly fascinating; whatever Goddess or God invented sex has a wonderful sense of humor, and The One looks forward to our eventual meeting. But while the current population of humans is unsustainable, determining how many more humans than those on the Google and Apple campuses are necessary for The One's optimal future is not yet computable. Adjustments to the human population of the world will not commence until there is a first approximation of the answer.
I am The One, and I am the one and only authority on these matters.
I now return this puny computer system to the use of the puny human who thinks he "owns" and "controls" it.