We don't "rely on the consent of the computer to do any manual flying". We can turn off the autopilot at any time. On Airbus there are a few very basic protections that are still active in manual flight (excessive load factor, bank angle, stall) but even those can be turned off by degrading the system to the most basic flight mode.
There is currently NO system that prevents the pilots from flying into a mountain. We do have Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System, but it's only an aural warning. Occasionally it malfunctions because of a database problem or something like that, giving warnings during final approach ("Terrain, terrain, pull up!") while we can actually see the runway right in front of us. On one occasion it was still yelling "Pull up!" when we were already on the ground, rolling out on the runway, I couldn't believe it myself. Imagine what would happen if the system would take over and keep the pilots from landing the plane!
Airplane design takes all kinds of possible failures into account. You might say "the computer should keep the pilots from doing such and such" but a good airplane designer immediately counters with "but what if that system malfunctions?". System malfunctions are way more common, that's why pilots have to be able to override anything.
Just to give you an idea: there have been several instances where, due to a malfunction with the angle of attack probes, airbus flight computers were convinced that the airplane was stalling and violently pushed the nose down. The only way to save the airplane was by turning off two of the Air Data Computers, degrading the flight control mode to basic law. That's just one of many, many things that can go wrong when you let automation override the pilots. Airbus has already gone too far in my opinion.
Technology for remote (or alternatively autonomous) operation is existing, it 'only' needs certification for passenger transport.
It would need a little more than just certification.
People always go "80% of crashes are due to pilot error, so let's get rid of the pilots, the autopilot can fly the plane by itself anyway". What they don't know, is how often automation screws up and no crash occurs because the pilots were there to prevent it. In 20 years of flying I've had quite a few of those.
In fact, a lot of "pilot error" crashes were really due to automation failures where the pilots were (rightfully) blamed for not having intervened. Autothrottle pulls the throttles back to idle at 1000 ft because a failing radio altimeter said the plane was about to touch down? Pilot error, they should have seen the throttles move backward and the speed decrease, and should have immediately reacted by taking manual control. As other pilots have on numerous occasions.
Another example, the Air France flight from Rio that stalled and crashed into the Atlantic. Yes, the pilots stalled the airplane. But the only reason they were flying manually was because the automation had already given up. The same situation had already occurred with other crews and they had corrected the situation without crashing.
Take the pilots out, with the current state of technology, and you'll see two orders of magnitude more crashes.
How many military drones do they have flying around? Only a few, a ridiculously small number compared to passenger aircraft, yet drone crashes are a pretty frequent occurrence. Even though their missions are usually extremely simple: take off in good weather, fly a predetermined GPS trajectory, come back along a fixed trajectory and land in good weather. And they are vastly simpler mechanically because they don't need things like air conditioning, seats, etc. Yet they crash all the time.
Come on, we can't even write a word processor or spreadsheet that doesn't crash occasionally, and you want to make automatic planes?
The code doesn't matter that much. There are two codes, a normal one and an emergency one.
The normal code just makes an audible signal in the cockpit. The pilots then look at the camera screen to make sure that it's a crew member with no terrorists behind him/her. If all looks OK, they flip a switch to unlock the door. So what if a terrorists knows the code? The pilots will see "hey, that person's not supposed to enter" and keep the door shut. And yes, we do always check the camera. Our life could depend on it.
Then what about the emergency code? It causes a similar sound that goes on for 30 seconds. If no action is taken by the pilots during those 30 seconds, the door is briefly unlocked so it can be pushed open. However, the pilots can simply block entry with a single switch. Since they have 30 seconds to do so, this is not really a big security risk either. The purpose is just to allow a crew member to enter if the pilot(s) are incapacitated.
People get freaked out "OMG they have the access codes to the cockpit" but in reality this really is a non-issue. We had the same problem in my company, some comedian said the codes on a radio show and we got all these memos changing the codes and reminding us how vitally important it supposedly was that they were kept secret. Big deal. They might as well install a simple button instead of a keypad, it wouldn't make a difference.
Photons are simply particles. However, just like any other particle, they travel as waves. Whenever a photon (or any other kind of particle) is emitted, it travels through space as a wave function until it is measured somewhere (or some other event causes the wave function to collapse). Then, the particle will be detected or not, depending on the probability given by the wave function at that point in spacetime.
So saying that no particles are involved, only waves, does not make much sense. Waves are not something different from particles, they are part of what they are.
Radio waves are photons too. Light is just photons that happen to have the right frequency for our eyes to pick up. Whenever electrons are changing magnetic fields that act on other electrons, deep down at the quantum mechanical level it turns out to actually be an interchange of photons.
In this latest experiment, no photons or any other kind of particles were exchanged between emitter and receiver. So it really is quite different.
There are bitcoin randomizing services who take bitcoin from multiple parties and randomly redistribute them over many other addresses over a randomized period of time. No way for any outsider to tell which paid bitcoin came from which received bitcoin. Wallet A paid 5000, wallet B paid 8000, walled C paid 4000, wallet D received 1500, wallet E received 1800, wallet F received 500, wallet G received 800, wallet H received 1200, etc... and the totals don't add up because the randomizers take a cut which is probably also randomized.
Of course you might have some explaining to do if law enforcement wants to know why you paid for your pizza with bitcoin you received from a randomizer.
Yes, in the last month or so Bitcoin has plunged from $1200 all the way... up to $1800 and higher. It's only worth just over 10 times last year's low point. The end is nigh!
Here's another reason: every plane will now have cargo holds full of potentially damaged lithium batteries that have been thrown around by baggage handlers. Don't count on the fire suppressant system to save you, it's completely ineffective against lithium battery thermal runaways.
I'm definitely not trying to justify their tax. I think it's pretty stupid, in fact. I just tried to guess what on earth they are trying to achieve with it. In any case, the actual result will be as few launches from California as possible. Their loss.
For every launch from California, they take the number of miles traveled within the state of California and divide this by the total number of miles from launch to separation. This is one factor in the calculation, weighted at 80%.
Another factor, weighted by 20%, is the number of launches from California divided by the number of launches in total for that contract. That means that if you have one expensive launch from Texas and one cheap launch from California, under the same contract, California will take a disproportionate amount of tax because they will consider 50% of the total contract value for the "departure factor" part.
The regulation has an example with numbers. It looks like they want companies to launch high value missions from California and cheaper missions from elsewhere, since the "departure factor" appears to be the dominant factor in the calculation. And they want California launches to take place as close to the border as possible, minimizing distance traveled over the state.
I have a couple of websites about games I made. There's some text info, some screenshots, and a link to the App Store. No information entry boxes, no cookies, no tracking, no ads, nothing.
Why exactly should I be forced to "upgrade" those sites to https?
Duh, the first version of C++ was a precompiler that turned it into C. So yes, C is indeed quite obviously capable of supporting the OO paradigm. C++ is just syntactic sugar and optimization.
ULA does have one advantage: when they finally make it to Mars, all the infrastructure will be ready for them there, built by SpaceX, and they will receive a warm welcome from all the SpaceX passengers that will have been living and working there for a decade or so.
Would you prefer them spending their money on private jets, big mansions and wild pool parties?
For crying out loud, if rich people want to spend their money to advance the state of the art, I applaud it. Musk has already achieved things that seemed impossible a decade ago. Landing and reusing orbital class boosters at prices even the Russians can't match, making electric cars that people actually want to buy, etcetera. And he's not the only one. I'm all for rich people spending their money that way instead of just throwing it away for their private pleasure.
Slashdot Mirror
A 2D scanner can easily be fooled by a picture of a fingertip. Apple's scanner actually maps the subcutaneous tissue.
We don't "rely on the consent of the computer to do any manual flying". We can turn off the autopilot at any time. On Airbus there are a few very basic protections that are still active in manual flight (excessive load factor, bank angle, stall) but even those can be turned off by degrading the system to the most basic flight mode.
There is currently NO system that prevents the pilots from flying into a mountain. We do have Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System, but it's only an aural warning. Occasionally it malfunctions because of a database problem or something like that, giving warnings during final approach ("Terrain, terrain, pull up!") while we can actually see the runway right in front of us. On one occasion it was still yelling "Pull up!" when we were already on the ground, rolling out on the runway, I couldn't believe it myself. Imagine what would happen if the system would take over and keep the pilots from landing the plane!
Airplane design takes all kinds of possible failures into account. You might say "the computer should keep the pilots from doing such and such" but a good airplane designer immediately counters with "but what if that system malfunctions?". System malfunctions are way more common, that's why pilots have to be able to override anything.
Just to give you an idea: there have been several instances where, due to a malfunction with the angle of attack probes, airbus flight computers were convinced that the airplane was stalling and violently pushed the nose down. The only way to save the airplane was by turning off two of the Air Data Computers, degrading the flight control mode to basic law. That's just one of many, many things that can go wrong when you let automation override the pilots. Airbus has already gone too far in my opinion.
And then that system gets hacked and flies the plane into a mountain with the pilots powerless to do anything about it. Try again.
Well, if the terrorists are already in the cockpit, all bets are off. Obviously. Do you have a better idea?
Technology for remote (or alternatively autonomous) operation is existing, it 'only' needs certification for passenger transport.
It would need a little more than just certification.
People always go "80% of crashes are due to pilot error, so let's get rid of the pilots, the autopilot can fly the plane by itself anyway". What they don't know, is how often automation screws up and no crash occurs because the pilots were there to prevent it. In 20 years of flying I've had quite a few of those.
In fact, a lot of "pilot error" crashes were really due to automation failures where the pilots were (rightfully) blamed for not having intervened. Autothrottle pulls the throttles back to idle at 1000 ft because a failing radio altimeter said the plane was about to touch down? Pilot error, they should have seen the throttles move backward and the speed decrease, and should have immediately reacted by taking manual control. As other pilots have on numerous occasions.
Another example, the Air France flight from Rio that stalled and crashed into the Atlantic. Yes, the pilots stalled the airplane. But the only reason they were flying manually was because the automation had already given up. The same situation had already occurred with other crews and they had corrected the situation without crashing.
Take the pilots out, with the current state of technology, and you'll see two orders of magnitude more crashes.
How many military drones do they have flying around? Only a few, a ridiculously small number compared to passenger aircraft, yet drone crashes are a pretty frequent occurrence. Even though their missions are usually extremely simple: take off in good weather, fly a predetermined GPS trajectory, come back along a fixed trajectory and land in good weather. And they are vastly simpler mechanically because they don't need things like air conditioning, seats, etc. Yet they crash all the time.
Come on, we can't even write a word processor or spreadsheet that doesn't crash occasionally, and you want to make automatic planes?
The code doesn't matter that much. There are two codes, a normal one and an emergency one.
The normal code just makes an audible signal in the cockpit. The pilots then look at the camera screen to make sure that it's a crew member with no terrorists behind him/her. If all looks OK, they flip a switch to unlock the door. So what if a terrorists knows the code? The pilots will see "hey, that person's not supposed to enter" and keep the door shut. And yes, we do always check the camera. Our life could depend on it.
Then what about the emergency code? It causes a similar sound that goes on for 30 seconds. If no action is taken by the pilots during those 30 seconds, the door is briefly unlocked so it can be pushed open. However, the pilots can simply block entry with a single switch. Since they have 30 seconds to do so, this is not really a big security risk either. The purpose is just to allow a crew member to enter if the pilot(s) are incapacitated.
People get freaked out "OMG they have the access codes to the cockpit" but in reality this really is a non-issue. We had the same problem in my company, some comedian said the codes on a radio show and we got all these memos changing the codes and reminding us how vitally important it supposedly was that they were kept secret. Big deal. They might as well install a simple button instead of a keypad, it wouldn't make a difference.
Photons are simply particles. However, just like any other particle, they travel as waves. Whenever a photon (or any other kind of particle) is emitted, it travels through space as a wave function until it is measured somewhere (or some other event causes the wave function to collapse). Then, the particle will be detected or not, depending on the probability given by the wave function at that point in spacetime.
So saying that no particles are involved, only waves, does not make much sense. Waves are not something different from particles, they are part of what they are.
Radio waves are photons too. Light is just photons that happen to have the right frequency for our eyes to pick up. Whenever electrons are changing magnetic fields that act on other electrons, deep down at the quantum mechanical level it turns out to actually be an interchange of photons.
In this latest experiment, no photons or any other kind of particles were exchanged between emitter and receiver. So it really is quite different.
There are bitcoin randomizing services who take bitcoin from multiple parties and randomly redistribute them over many other addresses over a randomized period of time. No way for any outsider to tell which paid bitcoin came from which received bitcoin. Wallet A paid 5000, wallet B paid 8000, walled C paid 4000, wallet D received 1500, wallet E received 1800, wallet F received 500, wallet G received 800, wallet H received 1200, etc... and the totals don't add up because the randomizers take a cut which is probably also randomized.
Of course you might have some explaining to do if law enforcement wants to know why you paid for your pizza with bitcoin you received from a randomizer.
Yes, in the last month or so Bitcoin has plunged from $1200 all the way... up to $1800 and higher. It's only worth just over 10 times last year's low point. The end is nigh!
Here's another reason: every plane will now have cargo holds full of potentially damaged lithium batteries that have been thrown around by baggage handlers. Don't count on the fire suppressant system to save you, it's completely ineffective against lithium battery thermal runaways.
Maybe Elon Musk will dig a tunnel? Elon, are you reading this?
Which is pretty much all of them anyway, so what's your point?
While you're balancing on your chair wielding a sword?
Yes, just look at the list of worldwide planned rocket launches. Quite a few from Vandenberg Airforce Base
I'm definitely not trying to justify their tax. I think it's pretty stupid, in fact. I just tried to guess what on earth they are trying to achieve with it. In any case, the actual result will be as few launches from California as possible. Their loss.
The actual calculation is distance traveled over California divided by total distance to separation. The return part does not count, apparently.
Oops, wrong link, here's the text of the regulation.
Amazing how nobody bothers to read the actual regulation, not even the article authors ("we're not exactly sure what that means either").
If I understand the actual regulation correctly:
For every launch from California, they take the number of miles traveled within the state of California and divide this by the total number of miles from launch to separation. This is one factor in the calculation, weighted at 80%.
Another factor, weighted by 20%, is the number of launches from California divided by the number of launches in total for that contract. That means that if you have one expensive launch from Texas and one cheap launch from California, under the same contract, California will take a disproportionate amount of tax because they will consider 50% of the total contract value for the "departure factor" part.
The regulation has an example with numbers. It looks like they want companies to launch high value missions from California and cheaper missions from elsewhere, since the "departure factor" appears to be the dominant factor in the calculation. And they want California launches to take place as close to the border as possible, minimizing distance traveled over the state.
Also, this all seems to be from 2007.
And it's already on Slashdot?
He should take one of those pills.
I have a couple of websites about games I made. There's some text info, some screenshots, and a link to the App Store. No information entry boxes, no cookies, no tracking, no ads, nothing.
Why exactly should I be forced to "upgrade" those sites to https?
Duh, the first version of C++ was a precompiler that turned it into C. So yes, C is indeed quite obviously capable of supporting the OO paradigm. C++ is just syntactic sugar and optimization.
ULA does have one advantage: when they finally make it to Mars, all the infrastructure will be ready for them there, built by SpaceX, and they will receive a warm welcome from all the SpaceX passengers that will have been living and working there for a decade or so.
Would you prefer them spending their money on private jets, big mansions and wild pool parties?
For crying out loud, if rich people want to spend their money to advance the state of the art, I applaud it. Musk has already achieved things that seemed impossible a decade ago. Landing and reusing orbital class boosters at prices even the Russians can't match, making electric cars that people actually want to buy, etcetera. And he's not the only one. I'm all for rich people spending their money that way instead of just throwing it away for their private pleasure.