Exactly. Try to get a good price for buying an illiquid stock by aiming between bid and ask, and watch both bid and ask go up. Bid in between the new spread, and watch them both go up again. Finally settle for the new ask price, then watch the price drop back down again. They call it "providing liquidity".
Now try the same again, bidding higher and higher, then turn the tables around and sell at the higher price. Guess what? Your ass gets dragged into criminal court for manipulating stock prices.
The problem is that the computers are programmed by people who want to maximize their own profit. They are not sentient, moral creatures, they are simply doing what people tell them to do, so if those people are telling them to cheat or be dishonest, they will. The only difference is that the computers are better at it.
Well, a local TV station did bring this as news, and it's on slashdot, and it will be in lots of other places very soon, so yes, this might warrant slightly more info than a Twitter message.
They could say "look, he killed this many enemies in this many seconds, while only a maximum of this many can appear" or something along those lines. But if you are accused of wrongfully accusing someone of cheating, "he did cheat, we checked" doesn't quite cut it.
Wait a minute... Microsoft says the boy cheated, mother objects, everyone is outraged, Microsoft sends a Twitter message "he did cheat, we checked", and everyone says "O, that's OK then, carry on". I must be in a parallel universe.
The pulsed flow is indeed exactly what you needed to take into account. The heart pumps out some amount of blood when it contracts, and the elasticity of the aorta makes this pressure change less abrupt downstream. If you keep the aorta from expanding, the pressure peaks downstream will be higher. Average pressure should remain about the same.
The article says that both male and female officers engaged in the practice, but public outcry is only about those poor women who were taken advantage of. What about the men? It's ok to take advantage of them? Their feelings don't get hurt?
And this is modded insightful? Ever been in a cockpit, or talk to a pilot? Ever even taken a look at an airplane? Notice those big windows on the nose, where the cockpit is? Guess what they are for? For looking outside! Not just on the ground. The Concorde even had a nose that could hinge down during approach, to allow the pilots to see the runway because the nose was pointing up so much more than on other airplanes. Would they have gone through all that trouble if pilots just look at their instruments during approach? Most landings are manual, we do use the instruments for precision but, especially during the final part of the approach if weather is clear, we look outside more than inside. And you may be surprised to know that, on a clear day, while one pilot is flying, the other may very well be looking at the scenery. At some airports, with smaller aircraft flying around, we even HAVE to look around to make sure we don't hit some glider or small Cessna who got lost.
The incidents are real, all over the world, many airports have NOTAMs on it (Notice To Airmen), and in my company alone we receive several Air Safety Reports (reports from pilots) per month on this issue. Recently, one pilot even had to take medical leave for a week because of a black spot in his eyesight that would not go away. Others have been blinded for 10 seconds or so. Good thing there are two pilots on board...
Sun usually only reflects from buildings during the day. At night, the pilot's pupils are dilated more, so their eyes are a lot more sensitive. And yes, lightning does blind pilots from time to time. When flying in the vicinity of thunderstorms at night, we usually turn the cockpit lights up to the maximum to decrease our sensitivity as much as possible. Pilots have had permanent eye damage from lightning strikes at night. And bird strikes on the windshield? Yep, they can be very startling too. At 250 knots, they sometimes even crack the outer windshield layer. Any other questions?
It's not just a small dot. Laser beams are not perfectly focused, they do get wider at a distance. At such a distance, the small dot becomes a disc than can easily blind someone if the laser is powerful enough. I fly for Air France, and these incidents are regularly reported around the Paris airports as well. Several colleagues have reported being temporarily blinded, and one recently even had to take medical leave because of a black spot in his eyesight that only went away after a week. These are not the little red pointers you use on slide shows, they're more powerful than that.
Ask them if they would do this during a Cat III approach (autoland in fog). I know I would not. In visual conditions it's a different matter of course. I've forgotten to switch of my phone quite a few times, but I would never intentionally keep it on. Especially because it drains the phone's battery. (I'm an airline pilot)
Much of the older electronics in airplanes are either analog, or digital with some kind of simplistic coding with barely any error detection or correction. Nothing like the sophisticated schemes like CDMA. It's very easy for them to misinterpret signals. Maybe it doesn't happen often, and usually the only result is a computer going off line and having to be restarted (or we just continue the flight without it, as there are multiple backups for most systems). But the wrong system at the wrong time getting false information and acting upon it, can (very rarely, but occasionally) have very serious consequences. Like the simple radio altimeter error that crashed a Turkish Airlines flight at Amsterdam not long ago. I'm not saying that this was caused by interference (I don't think so), but it was a single data error combined with sloppy programming in the autopilot that led to the crash. (Combined with poor pilot reaction).
That particular case was about ten years ago, so it would not have been put onto the internet, but there are plenty of other examples if you google for "airplane interference", for example this one. (scroll down to "some anecdotes")
Lightning strikes have actually caused complete electrical failures. Entire. Plane. Dark. More than once. Although most of the time, indeed, everything keeps working, maybe the displays blink for a second or so but that's it. I've had a few strikes with no ill effects, but have read reports of much more serious incidents. So that's a bad example you gave there.
The problem with electronics is that they send signals on specific frequencies (and harmonics on unintended ones), instead of one big burst on all frequencies together. The signals from electronics have a much higher chance of being misinterpreted as data.
I don't know if you read the post you replied to, but he did say he is a pilot and had the GSM signals be loud enough to make it hard to hear ATC instructions. Yes, in an airplane. Airplane speakers are not as good as your Bose sound system, they're much closer to speakers of the sixties. Because they work, and anything new would have to be certified.
About the plane's own equipment interfering: In the airplane type I'm flying right now, the A320, we regularly reset the TCAS system because it is causing annoying sounds in the radio receivers. Just to give an example.
Recent planes are a bit better, but many airplanes flying around today were designed in the seventies or eighties. The designers didn't have cell phones in mind back then. And you can't just go "o, let's change all the electronics in all of those planes". It would not be cost-efficient.
I'm sure you've heard the speaker sounds when a phone was about to ring. Would you be surprised if, say, an analog TV would start showing wavy and jittery images if a phone was on top of it and receiving a message? Probably not. And a digital TV losing its signal temporarily, resulting in one of those weird messed up screens after a packet loss? No, all that's perfectly normal, we get that all the time. But the needle on a gauge moving? That's impossible! Especially on an airplane, because, you know, airplanes are different. They are perfectly designed to be immune to this kind of things!
I agree that there's a lot of ridiculous crap about cell phones starting fires at gas stations and things like that, but the fuel gauge event was real, and there are quite a few very similar events, leading to loss of radio reception and things like that. Airplane electronics are not as robust as people like to think. They break all the time even without interference.
The fuel gauges use an electrical probe. The presence of fuel changes the capacitance ot something like that, I'm not exactly sure how it works. This means the system has to measure some kind of voltage or current going through those probes. If it gets a jittery signal because of interference, its error checking routines may simply decide that the input is unreliable and therefore stop sending output, resulting in a zero indication on the gauges. Or something like that, I don't know exactly what went wrong, but the event did happen and was blamed on the CD player motor after a thorough official investigation.
I'm sorry, but this was an actual fact. A full investigation confirmed it, and the effect was reproduced afterwards. It was reported in our company's safety magazine. The CD player did cause fuel indications to go to zero.
I'm an airline pilot, and a colleague of mine (on a Boeing 737/300) once saw his fuel quantity indicators suddenly jump to zero. He asked a cabin attendant to check if anyone was using electronic equipment in the cabin. One passenger, sitting next to the wing, was using a portable CD player. He was asked to turn it off, and fuel quantity indication returned to normal. Switched it back on again... indications went back to zero. The cause of the interference was later determined to be the motor of the CD player, which is rapidly switched on and off to keep a variable speed necessary for reading data at different distances from the center.
Personally, while flying in the cockpit myself, I have forgotten to turn off my cell phone many times. This usually just resulted in a drained battery but no ill effects on the airplane. On a few occasions, it even started ringing during final approach. I never saw any fluctuations in the instrument indications. However, I have heard the typical noise on the radio "trrrrrrrr tkt tkt tkt tkt", which I'm sure pretty much anyone has already heard when a phone was about to ring and it was close to a radio. The instrument landing system receives signals on frequencies pretty close to those of ordinary radio, so I can imagine it being affected in the same way. But I haven't actually seen the needles jump as a result.
In any case, this interference is VERY unlikely to affect the flight controls. Most landings are done manually, so interference should not actually be able to bring down an airplane. However, in foggy weather, the plane is landed automatically and in this case, it's probably safest to just keep all electronics off just in case the autopilot suddenly behaves in some weird way. Planes have crashed because of relatively minor errors in input, for example the radio altimeter reading an altitude that is much too low, and the plane thinking it's above the runway and bringing the power back to idle while in fact it's still at a few hundred feet. That sort of thing. Yes, it can happen, and planes have crashed as a result.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. Try to get a good price for buying an illiquid stock by aiming between bid and ask, and watch both bid and ask go up. Bid in between the new spread, and watch them both go up again. Finally settle for the new ask price, then watch the price drop back down again. They call it "providing liquidity".
Now try the same again, bidding higher and higher, then turn the tables around and sell at the higher price. Guess what? Your ass gets dragged into criminal court for manipulating stock prices.
The problem is that the computers are programmed by people who want to maximize their own profit. They are not sentient, moral creatures, they are simply doing what people tell them to do, so if those people are telling them to cheat or be dishonest, they will. The only difference is that the computers are better at it.
Well, a local TV station did bring this as news, and it's on slashdot, and it will be in lots of other places very soon, so yes, this might warrant slightly more info than a Twitter message.
They could say "look, he killed this many enemies in this many seconds, while only a maximum of this many can appear" or something along those lines. But if you are accused of wrongfully accusing someone of cheating, "he did cheat, we checked" doesn't quite cut it.
How exactly are they throwing away money? You don't mean the little boy's subscription renewal, do you?
One where a single Twitter message from Microsoft is taken as an established fact completely exhonerating them.
I agree, Rain Man never hacked any computers, so the idea of an autistic kid hacking an XBox is ludricrous.
Wait a minute... Microsoft says the boy cheated, mother objects, everyone is outraged, Microsoft sends a Twitter message "he did cheat, we checked", and everyone says "O, that's OK then, carry on". I must be in a parallel universe.
The pulsed flow is indeed exactly what you needed to take into account. The heart pumps out some amount of blood when it contracts, and the elasticity of the aorta makes this pressure change less abrupt downstream. If you keep the aorta from expanding, the pressure peaks downstream will be higher. Average pressure should remain about the same.
The article says that both male and female officers engaged in the practice, but public outcry is only about those poor women who were taken advantage of. What about the men? It's ok to take advantage of them? Their feelings don't get hurt?
The incidents are real, all over the world, many airports have NOTAMs on it (Notice To Airmen), and in my company alone we receive several Air Safety Reports (reports from pilots) per month on this issue. Recently, one pilot even had to take medical leave for a week because of a black spot in his eyesight that would not go away. Others have been blinded for 10 seconds or so. Good thing there are two pilots on board...
Sun usually only reflects from buildings during the day. At night, the pilot's pupils are dilated more, so their eyes are a lot more sensitive. And yes, lightning does blind pilots from time to time. When flying in the vicinity of thunderstorms at night, we usually turn the cockpit lights up to the maximum to decrease our sensitivity as much as possible. Pilots have had permanent eye damage from lightning strikes at night. And bird strikes on the windshield? Yep, they can be very startling too. At 250 knots, they sometimes even crack the outer windshield layer. Any other questions?
What's your phone number?
Ask them if they would do this during a Cat III approach (autoland in fog). I know I would not. In visual conditions it's a different matter of course. I've forgotten to switch of my phone quite a few times, but I would never intentionally keep it on. Especially because it drains the phone's battery. (I'm an airline pilot)
Why did anyone rate lemnik's post as "troll"?
Much of the older electronics in airplanes are either analog, or digital with some kind of simplistic coding with barely any error detection or correction. Nothing like the sophisticated schemes like CDMA. It's very easy for them to misinterpret signals. Maybe it doesn't happen often, and usually the only result is a computer going off line and having to be restarted (or we just continue the flight without it, as there are multiple backups for most systems). But the wrong system at the wrong time getting false information and acting upon it, can (very rarely, but occasionally) have very serious consequences. Like the simple radio altimeter error that crashed a Turkish Airlines flight at Amsterdam not long ago. I'm not saying that this was caused by interference (I don't think so), but it was a single data error combined with sloppy programming in the autopilot that led to the crash. (Combined with poor pilot reaction).
That particular case was about ten years ago, so it would not have been put onto the internet, but there are plenty of other examples if you google for "airplane interference", for example this one. (scroll down to "some anecdotes")
The problem with electronics is that they send signals on specific frequencies (and harmonics on unintended ones), instead of one big burst on all frequencies together. The signals from electronics have a much higher chance of being misinterpreted as data.
I don't know if you read the post you replied to, but he did say he is a pilot and had the GSM signals be loud enough to make it hard to hear ATC instructions. Yes, in an airplane. Airplane speakers are not as good as your Bose sound system, they're much closer to speakers of the sixties. Because they work, and anything new would have to be certified.
About the plane's own equipment interfering: In the airplane type I'm flying right now, the A320, we regularly reset the TCAS system because it is causing annoying sounds in the radio receivers. Just to give an example.
Recent planes are a bit better, but many airplanes flying around today were designed in the seventies or eighties. The designers didn't have cell phones in mind back then. And you can't just go "o, let's change all the electronics in all of those planes". It would not be cost-efficient.
I'm sure you've heard the speaker sounds when a phone was about to ring. Would you be surprised if, say, an analog TV would start showing wavy and jittery images if a phone was on top of it and receiving a message? Probably not. And a digital TV losing its signal temporarily, resulting in one of those weird messed up screens after a packet loss? No, all that's perfectly normal, we get that all the time. But the needle on a gauge moving? That's impossible! Especially on an airplane, because, you know, airplanes are different. They are perfectly designed to be immune to this kind of things!
I agree that there's a lot of ridiculous crap about cell phones starting fires at gas stations and things like that, but the fuel gauge event was real, and there are quite a few very similar events, leading to loss of radio reception and things like that. Airplane electronics are not as robust as people like to think. They break all the time even without interference.
The fuel gauges use an electrical probe. The presence of fuel changes the capacitance ot something like that, I'm not exactly sure how it works. This means the system has to measure some kind of voltage or current going through those probes. If it gets a jittery signal because of interference, its error checking routines may simply decide that the input is unreliable and therefore stop sending output, resulting in a zero indication on the gauges. Or something like that, I don't know exactly what went wrong, but the event did happen and was blamed on the CD player motor after a thorough official investigation.
I'm sorry, but this was an actual fact. A full investigation confirmed it, and the effect was reproduced afterwards. It was reported in our company's safety magazine. The CD player did cause fuel indications to go to zero.
I'm an airline pilot, and a colleague of mine (on a Boeing 737/300) once saw his fuel quantity indicators suddenly jump to zero. He asked a cabin attendant to check if anyone was using electronic equipment in the cabin. One passenger, sitting next to the wing, was using a portable CD player. He was asked to turn it off, and fuel quantity indication returned to normal. Switched it back on again... indications went back to zero. The cause of the interference was later determined to be the motor of the CD player, which is rapidly switched on and off to keep a variable speed necessary for reading data at different distances from the center.
Personally, while flying in the cockpit myself, I have forgotten to turn off my cell phone many times. This usually just resulted in a drained battery but no ill effects on the airplane. On a few occasions, it even started ringing during final approach. I never saw any fluctuations in the instrument indications. However, I have heard the typical noise on the radio "trrrrrrrr tkt tkt tkt tkt", which I'm sure pretty much anyone has already heard when a phone was about to ring and it was close to a radio. The instrument landing system receives signals on frequencies pretty close to those of ordinary radio, so I can imagine it being affected in the same way. But I haven't actually seen the needles jump as a result.
In any case, this interference is VERY unlikely to affect the flight controls. Most landings are done manually, so interference should not actually be able to bring down an airplane. However, in foggy weather, the plane is landed automatically and in this case, it's probably safest to just keep all electronics off just in case the autopilot suddenly behaves in some weird way. Planes have crashed because of relatively minor errors in input, for example the radio altimeter reading an altitude that is much too low, and the plane thinking it's above the runway and bringing the power back to idle while in fact it's still at a few hundred feet. That sort of thing. Yes, it can happen, and planes have crashed as a result.
Then why are passengers allowed to read books or newspapers during take-off and landing?