Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
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I hate to break it to you, but computer geeks of college age generally tend to do this to each other, irrespective of sex. The constant attempts by geeks to start pissing contests is probably the most annoying thing about being a computer science major, in my experience. I'm a guy.
Perhaps I should have clarified... I'm in a graduate Urban Planning program. And while this was one of the more computer-savvy individuals in the program, he was far more interested in urban design than chipset design.
As for why men typically invited women on dates, I suspect it has something fundamentally to do with the respective roles of the sexes in procreation, same as it does for most animals. I'm glad we're getting past that, though.
I personally had a couple of really annoying experiences trying that asking-out thing with guys. I finally decided that, since women tend to be more emotionally involved in the relationship pretty much the whole time, men could take that first step. But that's my own personal rationale; I don't preach it to everyone.
On the other hand, my last... four? As far back as I can distinctly recall, anyway... relationships didn't start with a date or anything. They were all just-kinda-happened-while-hanging-out sort of things. (Well, one was sort of a blind date... except the guy I ended up with was my "date's" ride. Not to worry, the "real" date ended up marrying my roommate a year later.) So it's not like a guy *had* to ask me out to launch a relationship, either.
I honestly have to say that might have been the case 10 years ago, but in the age of the Internet everything you mentioned is availabe in seconds, including albums covers if indeed you need to look at it for some reaon.
You may have one of those $3000 200-dpi monitors, but I sure don't. Offset is still easier to look at than my computer screen for something like that.
I can't remember that last time I even looked at the insert that came with the CD.
I'd say you're missing out. But I dunno, I haven't bought any new CDs in a few years... maybe they just suck more now. But even the last few I bought maybe 4-5 years ago have the artist's actual words on them... not what some kid copied down... and original art, interesting tidbits and credits, all kinds of fun stuff.
Maybe they need to do more of this, though. Make it worth it.
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
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(society tells females that they are bad at math, and doesn't encourage them, and then when they score poorly on a math test later in life it is held as evidence that they "aren't as smart as everyone else")
Beyond that... society tells females that:
- You are bad at math. - If you are *good* at math, you are unattractive and intimidating. - If you go into a field even vaguely math-like (physical science, engineering, etc.), you will not be taken seriously, and you will be miserable. - You really should concentrate on English more. That's a good girl.
This is not a vision out of the 1950's. It still happens... that's why my best friend when I was in college was a journalism major instead of a physics major.
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
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Why is that whenever any group does poorly at something compared to the majority, it is assumed that the activity in question is biased against that group? Perphaps women and some minorities simply aren't as smart as everyone else? But it would be heresy to say that, so we have to pretend that it's because of discrimination and bias in the tests.
Because a whole hell of a lot of research has been done on this. Use the word "yacht" when setting up a word problem, and poor kids don't do as well on it as rich kids do. Frame a situation with a man in a positive light and a woman in a negative light, and women don't do as well on the question as men do. Take the *same question*, but remove the bias in the way the question is set up, and you remove the discrepancies.
Also, timed tests are biased against women, since women are taught to be more deliberative and less decisive. When the same tests are untimed, women do much better relative to men. But the time restriction tells us relatively little about someone's "aptitude..." what it really does is makes the test easier to administrate. (Strangely enough, I'm not at all this way myself. I always finish tests quickly, and rarely go back to change answers. I had to learn to go back over my answers or skip things that didn't come to me right away while doing test-prep courses.)
Even simple things like whether or not there are men in the room can affect how women do on tests. This is known as "skill shadowing." You take two groups of women, with similar educational background, and give them a math or science test. In one room, everyone, including the proctor, is female. The other group is gender-mixed. The female-only group always does better on average. This has also been observed (less clinically and more anecdotally) on other "male" skills, such as driving, and to some extent on males practicing "female" skills, such as cooking.
But then we get back to "heresy"... it would be, after all, heresy to suggest that women and men should be segregated for test-taking.
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
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Actually I don't think it does, nor do I think the rarity of women as Fortune 500 CEOs is necessarily a result of discrimination. Billions of years of evolution have resulted in men tending to have more desire and skill for leadership roles, on average.
I don't think this is necessarily borne out by the fossil record. Early humanoids were not pack animals.
If men have more desire for leadership roles (and this is debatable), that could just as easily be explained by social conditioning as evolution. If they have more skill for them (and this is VERY debatable), this too is just as easily explained by socialization.
Yes; according to your linked article when this is taken into account, the ratio rises to 88% or higher.
So women without children to care for gain 8% better salaries, on average? That says to me that direct child-care responsibilities are a relatively small part of the explanation.
And I recall recently reading a article claiming that women weren't as good at negotiating prices and salaries as men, which could account for the rest.
It could account for it, but it's not an explanation. *Why* are women not as good at negotiation? Is it because they are somehow innately, due to that extra leg on the 43rd chromosome, missing some vital genetic code required for salary negotiation? Or maybe it's because women are consistently socialized to believe they're worth less than men? (I recall a fascinating exercise in one of my sociology classes... "Japanese Community and Family," oddly enough... where everyone wrote out on a 5-point scale how satisfied they were with seven aspects of themselves, including things like their body, their face, their national origin, their school affiliation [obviously this was the same for everyone], etc. When split by gender, the women's averages were consistently 1-2 points lower than the men's.... *even for school affiliation*, which was, as I said, the same for everyone. The professor had done this experiment on larger scale, and assured us that our results were quite typical.) Perhaps women learn different negotiating and bargaining skills than men do as they grow up. We don't know, but simply saying that their skills at this aren't as good doesn't explain away the discrepancy.
Evolution and statistics dictate that *on average*, women will have a greater desire to care for children.
But our current societal structure dictates that this is no longer useful, except for very young children. Yet we have to make *laws* to try to keep employers from discriminating based on this, and they routinely violate them anyway. Usually without malice or intent, they just don't realize (maybe because management is still a male-dominated area in most businesses?)
Yeah, that's a problem. The thing is, it may be "rational" for the employer to discriminate in that manner. From his (yeah, I know) perspective, there *is* a danger that your child will interfere with your job duties, or that you may decide to quit altogether to stay at home. This is also a problem for women who haven't had kids; from the employer's perspective she could get pregnant at any time, which is a risk that doesn't exist for a male applicant. Sadly I don't see a good solution.
How about this one: Cut it out. Just stop. Employers need a little old-fashioned consciousness-raising in this regard, so that they can notice and counteract when they're engaging in this behavior. We no longer have the infant mortality rates of a century ago, which dicated that women should keep having kids as much as they can so that the family legacy can live on. We're in no danger of dying out as a species. So it's ridiculous to keep punishing women for being female and being capable of pregnancy, especially in professional positions where employees are more educated and, presumably, have the resources to decide whether or not to get pregnant.
Either that, or we need to start treating men the same way. I don
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
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But since feminism reached its goals (enjoy that voting and education girls), feminism has stagnated and has decayed into nothing more than a form of sexism.
There are all kinds of things wrong with the way the modern feminist movement has approached the problem of gender inequality. But the notion that the feminist movement achieved its goals is, at best, fantasy.
Yes, women have the right to vote, and I don't know of any evidence that they are unable to use it, though the still terribly few number of women in the political arena suggests we still have a long way to go there. Yes, women are no longer barred from most educational institutions, but in spite of massive evidence showing that test like the SAT and ACT are biased against women (as well as minorities and the poor), they are still used by most colleges to determine admittance. Years ago, when I was an undergrad, a not-too-suprising article in the Daily Bruin noted that GRE scores were a lousy predictor of performance in grad school, especially for women vs. men. Women with the same GRE scores could be expected to get significantly higher grades.
Furthermore, all that education (which is really only beginning to actually balance out, and is doing so fastest among minorities), isn't really repairing the disparities in employment and pay. When you control for experience and education, women still only earn 81% of what men earn.
There are a lot of explanations for this. Most common is that women are more likely to take lower-paying jobs that offer more flexibility, so that they can be available for child-care duties. However, men with children don't seem to experience a similar pay disparity, so this indicates a disparity in how child-care duties are distributed in households. It's still the case in most US states that, if a couple divorces, the mother generally gets the lion's share of custody of the kids. (My cousin in Arkansas raised his three kids singlehandedly *and* paid court-mandated child support to his ex-wife, because a mother who was a prescription drug addict wasn't, in the court's opinion, less fit to care for the kids than their father.)
But the fact that, as a society, we assume that women take care of the children affects women who aren't in this situation. My husband and I are having our first child in July. Since I'll (theoretically) be getting a master's degree in June, I can probably make more than he currently makes. So, after a few months to recover, I'll start looking for a job and, assuming I find one, he will quit his job to be a full-time dad. However, I'm already carefully considering how I'm going to handle my job-seeking, because if an employer knows that I just had a baby it will probably hurt my chances of getting hired, no matter how illegal that is. It's also very difficult to prove.
Then there are just general societal notions about what women can and can't do, as well as what they do and don't want to do. Women who are into computers and technology find this all the time. I had a classmate in my graduate program start "testing" me when I said that I was a computer geek. (He starts off with "Well, then, if I want to get a new Pentium 4 computer..." to which I responded "Why a Pentium? Why not AMD instead?" I tried to engage him in a conversation on what uses might indicate one over the other, and the issue of motherboard chipsets to support each processor, but he quickly changed the subject.)
Frankly, I'm angry with the feminist movement for getting rid of the compensations that we had without *first* fixing the problems we have. Why did men always pay for dates? Because they generally make more money. (It was always my policy to pay if I made more, and let him pay if he made more, and alternate if it was about the same.) Why did men open doors for women? Well, that's harder to answer, but maybe because women are more likely to be loaded down with kids and their accoutrements.
Manufacturing output in the United States has doubled in the last twenty years. See this.
I saw it. Those weren't per-capita numbers, so they're not comparable to the previous poster's info. Here's the per-capita data:
1970: Exports $787.01; Manufacturing GDP not listed 1980: Exports $1765.65 (Wow, a 124% increase!); Manufacturing GDP $3531.29 1990: Exports $1708.44 (a 3% decrease); Manufacturing GDP $4421.84 (a 25% increase) 2000: Exports $2060.96 (a 20% increase); Manufacturing GDP $5685.41 (a 28.5% increase)
So the increases are heartening, except that during the same time period, the gap between the top quintile and the bottom quintile in income in the US grew. So the gains are concentrated with the wealthiest individuals, and those at the bottom actually lost ground.
Still, at no time in the past 20 years have we anything like doubled our on a per-capita basis. Manufacturing GDP went up 61% from 1980 to 2000, and exports went up only 17%. And, if we compared the US data to the same data for other countries, we'd probably find that globally, we're falling behind.
This is completely bogus zero-sum economics. It has no correspondence to reality.
Except that the numbers come from reality. Maybe you'd like to explain what you mean a little more? If production moving to China and India doesn't come *from* somewhere, is there some way the magic production fairies can be manufactured and bottled here in the US and sold for a profit overseas?
What are you talking about? Fewer than 5% of adult full-time workers earn minimum wage. The average blue-collar wage is $14.51/hour. For the category "machine operators, assembers, and inspectors", the average is $12.94/hour. The lowest wage occupation in this category is "laundering and dry cleaning machine operators", who still average $8.49/hour. So your comment about the minimum wage has zero relevance.
Where are your numbers from? Blue-collar traditionally doesn't include the fastest-growing segment of the working world... so-called "pink collar" or service-industry jobs. Those blue-collar workers earning an average of $14.51/hour are a shrinking population. The country's (the world's?) largest employer is Wal-Mart, not Ford. And I notice that you qualify that with "full-time," so the increasing trend toward hiring more part-time workers to avoid paying benefits conveniently ignores a lot of people. The underemployment rate is becoming as big a problem as the unemployment rate. (BTW, I don't suppose these figures include people who work two jobs at minimum wage for a total of 40 hours or more per week?)
Besides which, to show just how out-of-whack the minimum wage is, let's look at the numbers you gave:
$14.51/hour: $30,180.80/year, at full-time employment for the whole year. This isn't too bad. You can live on this in most parts of the country, though in many you wouldn't want to try to support a whole family on it.
$12.94/hour: $26,915.20/year. Still doing all right, not that much lower.
Looks like the current median home price in the US is about $160,000. With a 10% down payment (not sure how you save up more than half your annual salary for a home, but I'm being generous here) and a 5% interest rate, which is pretty doable these days, on a 30-year fixed mortgage you're paying $773/month for your home. Ok, that's about a third of your $12.94/hour wage, which is decent.
Now let's look at that $8.49/hour person. Coincidentally, $8.50/hour is the average wage for Wal-Mart employees... which possibly includes the executives, but almost certainly includes the store managers. That person is making $17,659.20, or about $1,471.60 a month. They would be paying more than half their gross pay to try to buy a home, so they're renting, which means no wealth accumulation. They can't afford the typically $150/month for an individual health plan (much less the $400 or so for a family plan), so we're paying for them to visit the emergenc
Workers are only part of the system. Money going into a country at all is a big benefit, wether it goes to workers, a corporation, or a government.
But about the only money that goes into the country is the pitifully low wages the company pays, and the relatively slight taxes and fees they pay to the government for doing business in that country. It's a whole lot less than they'd be putting into the US economy, which is why they manufacture somewhere else.
Money is made to be spent. Eventually that money works its way into the hands of the workers, wether it's the company president getting themselves a new yacht built, or a politician buying a new jet.;-)
What on earth are you smoking? Who builds luxury yachts and private jets? Assembly-line workers in China? Not hardly. They're paying that money to *other markets*. And very little gets back to workers.
And anyway, if workers are paid pitifully little, they're not suddenly paid *more* because they're building more stuff. The individuals are still making that same pitiful sum. And the standard of living is still pegged to that sum. Sure, in the western world, where we have work hour laws, if there's more work you can get another job or two. But if you're already working 10-12 hours a day, 6 days a week, and no one wants you for less than that, even if the yachts and jets *were* being built locally it wouldn't help raise the standard of living.
What's this? Here in California, we have bi-annual smog checks, but that's it... they make sure your emissions system is working perfectly, but nothing else. To re-register your car every year, you just mail them a check.
Crying Wolf for years ? Crying wolf implies that someday your bluff will be called. Remember the Story of the Boy Who Cried Wolf ?
If the bluff ain't ever going to be called then is it really crying wolf ?
The real moral of the story of the Boy who Cried Wolf wasn't in that eventually there was a wolf, but that eventually people stopped paying any attention to him, so when there really was a threat, he couldn't get any help.
It's time to stop listening to the recording industry. If something happens that really threatens them... oh, well, sucks to be them.
RIAA has never lost an album sale because of P2P for me. I use P2P as kinda a sampling system to see what I wanna buy. Too many times there has been 1 or 2 good songs by a band, then you buy the CD, and get screwed because the rest is horrible.
I hate to nitpick, but it sounds from this like they *have* lost album sales from you because of P2P.
Unless you meant to add that before you could "sample," you just didn't buy *anything* because of the possibility of the album being junk, and now you do buy stuff, because you hear it beforehand and like it.
It also raises yet another issue regarding p2p music: Do you believe that you should be able to download (without paying) a song that is on a vinyl album that you own? In other words, how many times do you feel you should have to pay for a copyrighted piece of work?
I've often wondered about this. I've downloaded two songs, both of which had been on CDs I owned, but misplaced. In those cases, I owned a digital copy of the music and a license to use it, so therefore I don't think any court would convict me of violating copyright in downloading the songs.
But I own a lot of LPs, and would like to digitize them while record needles still exist. It would be simple to just download the album contents, but I didn't *buy* a digital version. If I could be sure that the version I'm downloading was ripped from an LP, then I think that would be within the realm of fair use... it's more like lending my records to a friend who has the equipment to rip them. But downloading a copy ripped off of a CD to replace a vinyl LP would, I think, stretch things too far... the medium has a higher price, and higher quality, and I didn't pay for it.
Why is this important to prove? Even though downloading music doesn't hurt CD sales, does it make it more right? If downloading music becomes legal, *then* it will hurt CD sales. Without doubt.
I have many doubts.
After all, here's the current situation:
- RIAA and their analogues around the world claim that unlicensed downloading is hurting their sales.
- This is not borne up by the actual statistics, which show sale prices falling slower than production prices, and comparable unit sales year to year.
- Independents who allow free downloading of their music report *increased* sales from these downloads.
- Independent analysis shows that unlicensed downloading broadens sales base for record companies and makes people more likely to buy from that other 90% of the catalogue.
So it follows from that that if music downloading becomes somehow quasi-legal (i.e. in a not-for-profit, non-targeted manner) or better yet, if the record labels simply realize that they can't lick 'em, and must join 'em, so they put up their own download services where, for the royalties they'd normally charge plus a small amount for operations, they can sell *everything* in their catalog 24/7... their sales would increase hugely.
When Napster was popular, a lot of what my friends were downloading (I never got into it) was stuff that they *couldn't* buy. It hasn't occurred to the music industry yet that people may want stuff that they can't get from them.
Not to put too fine a point on it, say I'm the only bee in your bonnet, make a little birdhouse in your soul. (to mention just one band that built a cult following among geeks and ultimately sold a lot of records, but were classed as "starving" for years. I should point out that it's also a band that was well-pirated for years)
Also a band that has a long history of giving away music for free, even before it was easy. Sure, it was a toll call for most folks outside New York, but I wonder how many people bought more of their stuff just because they *had* a Dial-a-song Hotline with a new song each day?
This holds up because *someone* buys a copy of every CD ever made
Well, not exactly. I used to work in a record store. We had two full-time employees that just worked returns... sending CDs back to the record companies. Granted, many of those were inadequately-marked promotional CDs brought in by local DJs to sell as used, but the DJs had no interest in playing the music, and we knew it wouldn't sell.
Even so, we had a $2.99 bin of used CDs that we'd occasionally clean out the old stuff from and make coasters. (This is back in the day when new CDs were routinely $20 or so, and Wal-Mart and Target didn't exist in our market. I think that same bin is $0.99 now.)
People don't pay for stuff if given the choice not to. Sure, some do, but vast vast majority don't.
Sure, but then you've got the goose that laid the golden egg issue, too.
If you hear an independent band's music, and like it, and can download it for free... you want more of it. And chances are, they haven't *recorded* more of it yet. You won't get it unless they have the funds to record it. What's the simplest way to ensure they have the money to continue their endeavors? Buy the CD. And the T-shirt, the baseball caps, and the bumper stickers.
Furthermore, if you download music, you *don't* have the whole product. Not even if you legally download every second of recorded sound that's on their CD. Because the liner notes, the cover, the case... it's all part of it. Want to know what the band members look like? Want to know what the heck that guy is saying? Wondering how they got that funky name? Often you'll find it out from the liner notes. Bands who want to sell CDs should make these as interesting as possible.
What people have empirically observed is that their CD sales (or book sales) increase when they make the material available for free download. This is usually the case for folks without a big reputation, or a concert tour, or money for advertising. Maybe it's not the case for big-name artists, but if it's not, that's probably because they've reached market saturation. It might hurt sales, true... but probably only if it turned out the album sucked.
Which begs the question... how many lives is the US President worth?
I mean, seriously, if you're going to shoot a plane with 300 people on board because it might, *might*, be faking trouble in order to fly into the White House, you've made a decision about the worth of some lives vs. others.
Now, what if there's a foreign ambassador on board that plane? Or a senator? Or a movie star? Do they find this out first?
Could shooting down a plane in a circumstance like this be considered an act of war by an unfriendly nation with a delegation on board?
This seems oversimplified to me. I *hope* the situation isn't as cut-and-dried as they make it sound in this blurb. If it is, then dammit, we *should* turn over control of aircraft to computers, and get those pilots *out* of there... no sense in putting *more* people in danger.
Everybody's thought about automobile systems that drive for you, and I think most of us suspect it will simply be a matter of time before it happens.
Think about it: Doing a similar system in the air is a great place to learn about how to do this with cars...since asside from takeoff and landing, there's a much bigger tollerance for error in the wide blue skys.
There are "car train" systems in testing somewhere in San Diego county. I think it's on a stretch of the 8 Freeway, where you can occasionally see chains of automatically piloted cars tooling along at 65 mph 5 feet apart on a magnetic guideway.
The big practical concern that has kept these strictly operated by crash-test dummies is, *people get scared when they're in them.*
While you don't have the same issue of travelling 5 feet from another plane, I'm sure that pilots would be a bit uncomfortable with the notion that the plane might just lock them out, for whatever reason. As a passenger, I'd be pretty uncomfortable with this too.
if they can control where the plan IS, don't you think they'd be able to see the same information as the pilot? at least as far as gauges go. I mean come on.
The system isn't designed to turn over control of the plane to a *real live person* in a control center, but to give it over to an automated guidance system. The computer will probably have access to all the gauges, but whether or not it can react appropriately to them depends on whether the programmers foresaw that particular situation and programmed the computer to respond appropriately.
The real purpose of the system is to prevent crashes into mountains, which are referred to by the euphemism "controlled flight into terrain". Basically, the pilot doesn't realize that a mountain or hill is in the flight path and just slams the plane right into it. This system will go a long way to preventing that type of accident, which is actually one of the more common.
Hm... looks like about 7 of the 30 or so plane crashes (there are 35 recorded, but some are helicopters) in 2003 are from crashing into mountains, according to this database. Seems like the most common cause of accidents is a mechanical failure of some sort, and they tend to happen during take-off or landing. Still, yeah, that is a lot of planes crashing into mountains, though many of those flights were pretty small and would be unlikely to be equipped with this system anyway.
Whatever the real reasons for this system, though, I don't see it as necessarily preventing more fatalities than it could potentially cause. What I'd like to know is, how many near misses with terrain would have triggered this system, and in how many of those cases would the outcome have been better than it was? And, how many times were those near misses the result of mechanical failures which the pilot could compensate for, but the automated guidance system might not have been able to?
This is not about "taking control away from pilots". The system responds only if they pilot fails to respond to the warnings. And why do half the sheep assume that "respond" has to involve flying out straight out of the no fly zone?
Well, this quote from the article implies it:
Using the plane's GPS navigation system, the computer would constantly monitor where the pilot flies. And if the aircraft approached a no-fly zone -- such as a Manhattan skyscraper or the White House, for example -- the system would alert the pilot to turn away.
If the pilot did not turn, the computer would take over the controls and steer the plane itself. No human in the plane could override the system.
If it were designed the way you speak of, people probably wouldn't find this concept so scary... but, at risk of being modded redundant for repeating myself, if a pilot has to overfly lower Manhattan to save my skin, I damn well want him to be able to do it.
But the upshot of the past few years is that a 9/11 is no longer practical. We no longer live in a world where cooperation with a hijacker insure our safety. And a plane load of passengers can easily take several hijackers. A few passengers might be killed, but I cannot at this point imagine being on a hijacked plane and not taking that risk.
It became impractical the second news of the WTC strike reached the folks on the fourth plane. You know, the one that crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, after passengers heard on their cell phones from friends and family what became of the first three planes. They knew they were all going to die; they decided not to take the intended targets with them.
Frankly, as much as I admire firefighters and police for doing the jobs they do, I think of those people as the biggest heroes of 9/11. They're the ones that may have saved the greatest number of lives, for all we know... and with no training, no special equipment, and no decision to put themselves in danger. They simply found themselves there, and did what had to be done.
9/11 may have overall made air travel a bit safer... not because we're more careful (we're not really), but because hijacking is a dead art now.
To me it is a no-brainer. This sort of technology will save far more lives -- maybe from terrorism, but mostly from simple pilot error -- than it will kill.
This isn't a no-brainer to me. Before I'll get on a plane with this system in place, I want to see a run-down of:
- What percentage of airplane crashes or near-misses in the last two decades would have triggered this system
- What percentage of those cases could we have expected the system to improve the survival prospects of the passengers/crew
My gut feeling is, the overwhelming majority of situations that would have triggered this automatic override were due to mechanical failures that the autopilot was not as well-equipped to handle as the real pilot. I wouldn't be surprised if we found that the number of crashes that this system could theoretically have averted would have been nullified by the increased death toll when this system kicked in and prevented pilots from making safe emergency landings. Think about it... 200 people on a typical plane flight. Cause 15 crashes, and you make up for the entire WTC losses.
Found an interesting site with a database of airplane crashes. Starting from 2003 and scanning back through all those with >100 on board, I got to 1998 before I found a crash that might have been averted by this system. Of course, since it only lists crashes, we don't know about other incidents when this system would have triggered.
Interestingly enough, looking at this database I'm surprised to find that there were fewer than 100 people aboard any of the 9/11 flights. Maybe it would take more than 15 plane crashes to compensate for the 3000 lost in the WTC strike. Still, I'm not sure I'd feel more comfortable with losing a friend or relative to a computer's decision to take control away from a pilot than with losing them to an act of outright anger and destruction.
By all means I think it's safer than cars [though not buses]
Hrm? Buses are safer than cars, last I checked... after all, they have such a high degree of inertia, they're far less likely to stop as quickly. They also can't achieve as high a speed or accelerate as quickly as cars. Finally, they're generally driven by professional drivers, with stricter licensing procedures and more road hours.
In what way are buses less safe than cars? You scared of that guy sitting next to you?;-)
The pilot has time to respond to the warning. During this time, he is fully in control of the plane. If he heads back out, he maintains control of the plane. If he does not head out, he is assumed to be incapable of operating the plane and is relieved of duty by the automation software.
You know what happens when we assume...
Think about all the airplane crashes you've ever seen news stories about or read about in the papers. Now, think about how many of them happened because pilots, intentionally or accidentally, flew into large obstacles. On the other hand, think about how many of them happened because of mechanical failures on the aircraft.
Now, think harder... how many *averted* disasters have you heard of from pilots taking "unorthodox" action in the face of unforseen circumstances?
What you're saying is, since the threat of someone flying into an obstacle when they could reasonably prevent it is *so big*, we need to take control away from the folks in the cockpit if it looks like they're going to do it. But what I'd say in response is, if a pilot has to overfly lower Manhattan to save my life, I damn well want him to be able to.
Think about it... if a plane is flying for a mountain because of a mechanical failure that makes it impossible to prevent, wouldn't you rather have a *human* in the cockpit making decisions about how to possibly save his own life, not to mention the lives of a couple hundred passengers?
The assumptions behind this type of mechanism are simply unimaginative. I'd like to see an analysis of, say, the accidents in the last 20 years that would have triggered this system, and see what percentage of them could have been prevented by it. I'll bet it's pretty small.
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I hate to break it to you, but computer geeks of college age generally tend to do this to each other, irrespective of sex. The constant attempts by geeks to start pissing contests is probably the most annoying thing about being a computer science major, in my experience. I'm a guy.
Perhaps I should have clarified... I'm in a graduate Urban Planning program. And while this was one of the more computer-savvy individuals in the program, he was far more interested in urban design than chipset design.
As for why men typically invited women on dates, I suspect it has something fundamentally to do with the respective roles of the sexes in procreation, same as it does for most animals. I'm glad we're getting past that, though.
I personally had a couple of really annoying experiences trying that asking-out thing with guys. I finally decided that, since women tend to be more emotionally involved in the relationship pretty much the whole time, men could take that first step. But that's my own personal rationale; I don't preach it to everyone.
On the other hand, my last... four? As far back as I can distinctly recall, anyway... relationships didn't start with a date or anything. They were all just-kinda-happened-while-hanging-out sort of things. (Well, one was sort of a blind date... except the guy I ended up with was my "date's" ride. Not to worry, the "real" date ended up marrying my roommate a year later.) So it's not like a guy *had* to ask me out to launch a relationship, either.
I honestly have to say that might have been the case 10 years ago, but in the age of the Internet everything you mentioned is availabe in seconds, including albums covers if indeed you need to look at it for some reaon.
You may have one of those $3000 200-dpi monitors, but I sure don't. Offset is still easier to look at than my computer screen for something like that.
I can't remember that last time I even looked at the insert that came with the CD.
I'd say you're missing out. But I dunno, I haven't bought any new CDs in a few years... maybe they just suck more now. But even the last few I bought maybe 4-5 years ago have the artist's actual words on them... not what some kid copied down... and original art, interesting tidbits and credits, all kinds of fun stuff.
Maybe they need to do more of this, though. Make it worth it.
(society tells females that they are bad at math, and doesn't encourage them, and then when they score poorly on a math test later in life it is held as evidence that they "aren't as smart as everyone else")
Beyond that... society tells females that:
- You are bad at math.
- If you are *good* at math, you are unattractive and intimidating.
- If you go into a field even vaguely math-like (physical science, engineering, etc.), you will not be taken seriously, and you will be miserable.
- You really should concentrate on English more. That's a good girl.
This is not a vision out of the 1950's. It still happens... that's why my best friend when I was in college was a journalism major instead of a physics major.
Why is that whenever any group does poorly at something compared to the majority, it is assumed that the activity in question is biased against that group? Perphaps women and some minorities simply aren't as smart as everyone else? But it would be heresy to say that, so we have to pretend that it's because of discrimination and bias in the tests.
Because a whole hell of a lot of research has been done on this. Use the word "yacht" when setting up a word problem, and poor kids don't do as well on it as rich kids do. Frame a situation with a man in a positive light and a woman in a negative light, and women don't do as well on the question as men do. Take the *same question*, but remove the bias in the way the question is set up, and you remove the discrepancies.
Also, timed tests are biased against women, since women are taught to be more deliberative and less decisive. When the same tests are untimed, women do much better relative to men. But the time restriction tells us relatively little about someone's "aptitude..." what it really does is makes the test easier to administrate. (Strangely enough, I'm not at all this way myself. I always finish tests quickly, and rarely go back to change answers. I had to learn to go back over my answers or skip things that didn't come to me right away while doing test-prep courses.)
Even simple things like whether or not there are men in the room can affect how women do on tests. This is known as "skill shadowing." You take two groups of women, with similar educational background, and give them a math or science test. In one room, everyone, including the proctor, is female. The other group is gender-mixed. The female-only group always does better on average. This has also been observed (less clinically and more anecdotally) on other "male" skills, such as driving, and to some extent on males practicing "female" skills, such as cooking.
But then we get back to "heresy"... it would be, after all, heresy to suggest that women and men should be segregated for test-taking.
Actually I don't think it does, nor do I think the rarity of women as Fortune 500 CEOs is necessarily a result of discrimination. Billions of years of evolution have resulted in men tending to have more desire and skill for leadership roles, on average.
I don't think this is necessarily borne out by the fossil record. Early humanoids were not pack animals.
If men have more desire for leadership roles (and this is debatable), that could just as easily be explained by social conditioning as evolution. If they have more skill for them (and this is VERY debatable), this too is just as easily explained by socialization.
Yes; according to your linked article when this is taken into account, the ratio rises to 88% or higher.
So women without children to care for gain 8% better salaries, on average? That says to me that direct child-care responsibilities are a relatively small part of the explanation.
And I recall recently reading a article claiming that women weren't as good at negotiating prices and salaries as men, which could account for the rest.
It could account for it, but it's not an explanation. *Why* are women not as good at negotiation? Is it because they are somehow innately, due to that extra leg on the 43rd chromosome, missing some vital genetic code required for salary negotiation? Or maybe it's because women are consistently socialized to believe they're worth less than men? (I recall a fascinating exercise in one of my sociology classes... "Japanese Community and Family," oddly enough... where everyone wrote out on a 5-point scale how satisfied they were with seven aspects of themselves, including things like their body, their face, their national origin, their school affiliation [obviously this was the same for everyone], etc. When split by gender, the women's averages were consistently 1-2 points lower than the men's.... *even for school affiliation*, which was, as I said, the same for everyone. The professor had done this experiment on larger scale, and assured us that our results were quite typical.) Perhaps women learn different negotiating and bargaining skills than men do as they grow up. We don't know, but simply saying that their skills at this aren't as good doesn't explain away the discrepancy.
Evolution and statistics dictate that *on average*, women will have a greater desire to care for children.
But our current societal structure dictates that this is no longer useful, except for very young children. Yet we have to make *laws* to try to keep employers from discriminating based on this, and they routinely violate them anyway. Usually without malice or intent, they just don't realize (maybe because management is still a male-dominated area in most businesses?)
Yeah, that's a problem. The thing is, it may be "rational" for the employer to discriminate in that manner. From his (yeah, I know) perspective, there *is* a danger that your child will interfere with your job duties, or that you may decide to quit altogether to stay at home. This is also a problem for women who haven't had kids; from the employer's perspective she could get pregnant at any time, which is a risk that doesn't exist for a male applicant. Sadly I don't see a good solution.
How about this one: Cut it out. Just stop. Employers need a little old-fashioned consciousness-raising in this regard, so that they can notice and counteract when they're engaging in this behavior. We no longer have the infant mortality rates of a century ago, which dicated that women should keep having kids as much as they can so that the family legacy can live on. We're in no danger of dying out as a species. So it's ridiculous to keep punishing women for being female and being capable of pregnancy, especially in professional positions where employees are more educated and, presumably, have the resources to decide whether or not to get pregnant.
Either that, or we need to start treating men the same way. I don
But since feminism reached its goals (enjoy that voting and education girls), feminism has stagnated and has decayed into nothing more than a form of sexism.
There are all kinds of things wrong with the way the modern feminist movement has approached the problem of gender inequality. But the notion that the feminist movement achieved its goals is, at best, fantasy.
Yes, women have the right to vote, and I don't know of any evidence that they are unable to use it, though the still terribly few number of women in the political arena suggests we still have a long way to go there. Yes, women are no longer barred from most educational institutions, but in spite of massive evidence showing that test like the SAT and ACT are biased against women (as well as minorities and the poor), they are still used by most colleges to determine admittance. Years ago, when I was an undergrad, a not-too-suprising article in the Daily Bruin noted that GRE scores were a lousy predictor of performance in grad school, especially for women vs. men. Women with the same GRE scores could be expected to get significantly higher grades.
Furthermore, all that education (which is really only beginning to actually balance out, and is doing so fastest among minorities), isn't really repairing the disparities in employment and pay. When you control for experience and education, women still only earn 81% of what men earn.
There are a lot of explanations for this. Most common is that women are more likely to take lower-paying jobs that offer more flexibility, so that they can be available for child-care duties. However, men with children don't seem to experience a similar pay disparity, so this indicates a disparity in how child-care duties are distributed in households. It's still the case in most US states that, if a couple divorces, the mother generally gets the lion's share of custody of the kids. (My cousin in Arkansas raised his three kids singlehandedly *and* paid court-mandated child support to his ex-wife, because a mother who was a prescription drug addict wasn't, in the court's opinion, less fit to care for the kids than their father.)
But the fact that, as a society, we assume that women take care of the children affects women who aren't in this situation. My husband and I are having our first child in July. Since I'll (theoretically) be getting a master's degree in June, I can probably make more than he currently makes. So, after a few months to recover, I'll start looking for a job and, assuming I find one, he will quit his job to be a full-time dad. However, I'm already carefully considering how I'm going to handle my job-seeking, because if an employer knows that I just had a baby it will probably hurt my chances of getting hired, no matter how illegal that is. It's also very difficult to prove.
Then there are just general societal notions about what women can and can't do, as well as what they do and don't want to do. Women who are into computers and technology find this all the time. I had a classmate in my graduate program start "testing" me when I said that I was a computer geek. (He starts off with "Well, then, if I want to get a new Pentium 4 computer..." to which I responded "Why a Pentium? Why not AMD instead?" I tried to engage him in a conversation on what uses might indicate one over the other, and the issue of motherboard chipsets to support each processor, but he quickly changed the subject.)
Frankly, I'm angry with the feminist movement for getting rid of the compensations that we had without *first* fixing the problems we have. Why did men always pay for dates? Because they generally make more money. (It was always my policy to pay if I made more, and let him pay if he made more, and alternate if it was about the same.) Why did men open doors for women? Well, that's harder to answer, but maybe because women are more likely to be loaded down with kids and their accoutrements.
Manufacturing output in the United States has doubled in the last twenty years. See this.
I saw it. Those weren't per-capita numbers, so they're not comparable to the previous poster's info. Here's the per-capita data:
1970: Exports $787.01; Manufacturing GDP not listed
1980: Exports $1765.65 (Wow, a 124% increase!); Manufacturing GDP $3531.29
1990: Exports $1708.44 (a 3% decrease); Manufacturing GDP $4421.84 (a 25% increase)
2000: Exports $2060.96 (a 20% increase); Manufacturing GDP $5685.41 (a 28.5% increase)
So the increases are heartening, except that during the same time period, the gap between the top quintile and the bottom quintile in income in the US grew. So the gains are concentrated with the wealthiest individuals, and those at the bottom actually lost ground.
Still, at no time in the past 20 years have we anything like doubled our on a per-capita basis. Manufacturing GDP went up 61% from 1980 to 2000, and exports went up only 17%. And, if we compared the US data to the same data for other countries, we'd probably find that globally, we're falling behind.
This is completely bogus zero-sum economics. It has no correspondence to reality.
Except that the numbers come from reality. Maybe you'd like to explain what you mean a little more? If production moving to China and India doesn't come *from* somewhere, is there some way the magic production fairies can be manufactured and bottled here in the US and sold for a profit overseas?
What are you talking about? Fewer than 5% of adult full-time workers earn minimum wage. The average blue-collar wage is $14.51/hour. For the category "machine operators, assembers, and inspectors", the average is $12.94/hour. The lowest wage occupation in this category is "laundering and dry cleaning machine operators", who still average $8.49/hour. So your comment about the minimum wage has zero relevance.
Where are your numbers from? Blue-collar traditionally doesn't include the fastest-growing segment of the working world... so-called "pink collar" or service-industry jobs. Those blue-collar workers earning an average of $14.51/hour are a shrinking population. The country's (the world's?) largest employer is Wal-Mart, not Ford. And I notice that you qualify that with "full-time," so the increasing trend toward hiring more part-time workers to avoid paying benefits conveniently ignores a lot of people. The underemployment rate is becoming as big a problem as the unemployment rate. (BTW, I don't suppose these figures include people who work two jobs at minimum wage for a total of 40 hours or more per week?)
Besides which, to show just how out-of-whack the minimum wage is, let's look at the numbers you gave:
$14.51/hour: $30,180.80/year, at full-time employment for the whole year. This isn't too bad. You can live on this in most parts of the country, though in many you wouldn't want to try to support a whole family on it.
$12.94/hour: $26,915.20/year. Still doing all right, not that much lower.
Looks like the current median home price in the US is about $160,000. With a 10% down payment (not sure how you save up more than half your annual salary for a home, but I'm being generous here) and a 5% interest rate, which is pretty doable these days, on a 30-year fixed mortgage you're paying $773/month for your home. Ok, that's about a third of your $12.94/hour wage, which is decent.
Now let's look at that $8.49/hour person. Coincidentally, $8.50/hour is the average wage for Wal-Mart employees... which possibly includes the executives, but almost certainly includes the store managers. That person is making $17,659.20, or about $1,471.60 a month. They would be paying more than half their gross pay to try to buy a home, so they're renting, which means no wealth accumulation. They can't afford the typically $150/month for an individual health plan (much less the $400 or so for a family plan), so we're paying for them to visit the emergenc
Workers are only part of the system. Money going into a country at all is a big benefit, wether it goes to workers, a corporation, or a government.
;-)
But about the only money that goes into the country is the pitifully low wages the company pays, and the relatively slight taxes and fees they pay to the government for doing business in that country. It's a whole lot less than they'd be putting into the US economy, which is why they manufacture somewhere else.
Money is made to be spent. Eventually that money works its way into the hands of the workers, wether it's the company president getting themselves a new yacht built, or a politician buying a new jet.
What on earth are you smoking? Who builds luxury yachts and private jets? Assembly-line workers in China? Not hardly. They're paying that money to *other markets*. And very little gets back to workers.
And anyway, if workers are paid pitifully little, they're not suddenly paid *more* because they're building more stuff. The individuals are still making that same pitiful sum. And the standard of living is still pegged to that sum. Sure, in the western world, where we have work hour laws, if there's more work you can get another job or two. But if you're already working 10-12 hours a day, 6 days a week, and no one wants you for less than that, even if the yachts and jets *were* being built locally it wouldn't help raise the standard of living.
Then at your annual safety inspection
What's this? Here in California, we have bi-annual smog checks, but that's it... they make sure your emissions system is working perfectly, but nothing else. To re-register your car every year, you just mail them a check.
Crying Wolf for years ? Crying wolf implies that someday your bluff will be called. Remember the Story of the Boy Who Cried Wolf ?
If the bluff ain't ever going to be called then is it really crying wolf ?
The real moral of the story of the Boy who Cried Wolf wasn't in that eventually there was a wolf, but that eventually people stopped paying any attention to him, so when there really was a threat, he couldn't get any help.
It's time to stop listening to the recording industry. If something happens that really threatens them... oh, well, sucks to be them.
RIAA has never lost an album sale because of P2P for me. I use P2P as kinda a sampling system to see what I wanna buy. Too many times there has been 1 or 2 good songs by a band, then you buy the CD, and get screwed because the rest is horrible.
I hate to nitpick, but it sounds from this like they *have* lost album sales from you because of P2P.
Unless you meant to add that before you could "sample," you just didn't buy *anything* because of the possibility of the album being junk, and now you do buy stuff, because you hear it beforehand and like it.
It also raises yet another issue regarding p2p music: Do you believe that you should be able to download (without paying) a song that is on a vinyl album that you own? In other words, how many times do you feel you should have to pay for a copyrighted piece of work?
I've often wondered about this. I've downloaded two songs, both of which had been on CDs I owned, but misplaced. In those cases, I owned a digital copy of the music and a license to use it, so therefore I don't think any court would convict me of violating copyright in downloading the songs.
But I own a lot of LPs, and would like to digitize them while record needles still exist. It would be simple to just download the album contents, but I didn't *buy* a digital version. If I could be sure that the version I'm downloading was ripped from an LP, then I think that would be within the realm of fair use... it's more like lending my records to a friend who has the equipment to rip them. But downloading a copy ripped off of a CD to replace a vinyl LP would, I think, stretch things too far... the medium has a higher price, and higher quality, and I didn't pay for it.
Why is this important to prove? Even though downloading music doesn't hurt CD sales, does it make it more right? If downloading music becomes legal, *then* it will hurt CD sales. Without doubt.
I have many doubts.
After all, here's the current situation:
- RIAA and their analogues around the world claim that unlicensed downloading is hurting their sales.
- This is not borne up by the actual statistics, which show sale prices falling slower than production prices, and comparable unit sales year to year.
- Independents who allow free downloading of their music report *increased* sales from these downloads.
- Independent analysis shows that unlicensed downloading broadens sales base for record companies and makes people more likely to buy from that other 90% of the catalogue.
So it follows from that that if music downloading becomes somehow quasi-legal (i.e. in a not-for-profit, non-targeted manner) or better yet, if the record labels simply realize that they can't lick 'em, and must join 'em, so they put up their own download services where, for the royalties they'd normally charge plus a small amount for operations, they can sell *everything* in their catalog 24/7... their sales would increase hugely.
When Napster was popular, a lot of what my friends were downloading (I never got into it) was stuff that they *couldn't* buy. It hasn't occurred to the music industry yet that people may want stuff that they can't get from them.
Not to put too fine a point on it, say I'm the only bee in your bonnet, make a little birdhouse in your soul. (to mention just one band that built a cult following among geeks and ultimately sold a lot of records, but were classed as "starving" for years. I should point out that it's also a band that was well-pirated for years)
Also a band that has a long history of giving away music for free, even before it was easy. Sure, it was a toll call for most folks outside New York, but I wonder how many people bought more of their stuff just because they *had* a Dial-a-song Hotline with a new song each day?
This holds up because *someone* buys a copy of every CD ever made
Well, not exactly. I used to work in a record store. We had two full-time employees that just worked returns... sending CDs back to the record companies. Granted, many of those were inadequately-marked promotional CDs brought in by local DJs to sell as used, but the DJs had no interest in playing the music, and we knew it wouldn't sell.
Even so, we had a $2.99 bin of used CDs that we'd occasionally clean out the old stuff from and make coasters. (This is back in the day when new CDs were routinely $20 or so, and Wal-Mart and Target didn't exist in our market. I think that same bin is $0.99 now.)
People don't pay for stuff if given the choice not to. Sure, some do, but vast vast majority don't.
Sure, but then you've got the goose that laid the golden egg issue, too.
If you hear an independent band's music, and like it, and can download it for free... you want more of it. And chances are, they haven't *recorded* more of it yet. You won't get it unless they have the funds to record it. What's the simplest way to ensure they have the money to continue their endeavors? Buy the CD. And the T-shirt, the baseball caps, and the bumper stickers.
Furthermore, if you download music, you *don't* have the whole product. Not even if you legally download every second of recorded sound that's on their CD. Because the liner notes, the cover, the case... it's all part of it. Want to know what the band members look like? Want to know what the heck that guy is saying? Wondering how they got that funky name? Often you'll find it out from the liner notes. Bands who want to sell CDs should make these as interesting as possible.
What people have empirically observed is that their CD sales (or book sales) increase when they make the material available for free download. This is usually the case for folks without a big reputation, or a concert tour, or money for advertising. Maybe it's not the case for big-name artists, but if it's not, that's probably because they've reached market saturation. It might hurt sales, true... but probably only if it turned out the album sucked.
Today, that plane would be shot down.
Which begs the question... how many lives is the US President worth?
I mean, seriously, if you're going to shoot a plane with 300 people on board because it might, *might*, be faking trouble in order to fly into the White House, you've made a decision about the worth of some lives vs. others.
Now, what if there's a foreign ambassador on board that plane? Or a senator? Or a movie star? Do they find this out first?
Could shooting down a plane in a circumstance like this be considered an act of war by an unfriendly nation with a delegation on board?
This seems oversimplified to me. I *hope* the situation isn't as cut-and-dried as they make it sound in this blurb. If it is, then dammit, we *should* turn over control of aircraft to computers, and get those pilots *out* of there... no sense in putting *more* people in danger.
Everybody's thought about automobile systems that drive for you, and I think most of us suspect it will simply be a matter of time before it happens.
Think about it: Doing a similar system in the air is a great place to learn about how to do this with cars...since asside from takeoff and landing, there's a much bigger tollerance for error in the wide blue skys.
There are "car train" systems in testing somewhere in San Diego county. I think it's on a stretch of the 8 Freeway, where you can occasionally see chains of automatically piloted cars tooling along at 65 mph 5 feet apart on a magnetic guideway.
The big practical concern that has kept these strictly operated by crash-test dummies is, *people get scared when they're in them.*
While you don't have the same issue of travelling 5 feet from another plane, I'm sure that pilots would be a bit uncomfortable with the notion that the plane might just lock them out, for whatever reason. As a passenger, I'd be pretty uncomfortable with this too.
if they can control where the plan IS, don't you think they'd be able to see the same information as the pilot? at least as far as gauges go. I mean come on.
The system isn't designed to turn over control of the plane to a *real live person* in a control center, but to give it over to an automated guidance system. The computer will probably have access to all the gauges, but whether or not it can react appropriately to them depends on whether the programmers foresaw that particular situation and programmed the computer to respond appropriately.
The real purpose of the system is to prevent crashes into mountains, which are referred to by the euphemism "controlled flight into terrain". Basically, the pilot doesn't realize that a mountain or hill is in the flight path and just slams the plane right into it. This system will go a long way to preventing that type of accident, which is actually one of the more common.
Hm... looks like about 7 of the 30 or so plane crashes (there are 35 recorded, but some are helicopters) in 2003 are from crashing into mountains, according to this database. Seems like the most common cause of accidents is a mechanical failure of some sort, and they tend to happen during take-off or landing. Still, yeah, that is a lot of planes crashing into mountains, though many of those flights were pretty small and would be unlikely to be equipped with this system anyway.
Whatever the real reasons for this system, though, I don't see it as necessarily preventing more fatalities than it could potentially cause. What I'd like to know is, how many near misses with terrain would have triggered this system, and in how many of those cases would the outcome have been better than it was? And, how many times were those near misses the result of mechanical failures which the pilot could compensate for, but the automated guidance system might not have been able to?
Well, this quote from the article implies it:If it were designed the way you speak of, people probably wouldn't find this concept so scary... but, at risk of being modded redundant for repeating myself, if a pilot has to overfly lower Manhattan to save my skin, I damn well want him to be able to do it.
But the upshot of the past few years is that a 9/11 is no longer practical. We no longer live in a world where cooperation with a hijacker insure our safety. And a plane load of passengers can easily take several hijackers. A few passengers might be killed, but I cannot at this point imagine being on a hijacked plane and not taking that risk.
It became impractical the second news of the WTC strike reached the folks on the fourth plane. You know, the one that crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, after passengers heard on their cell phones from friends and family what became of the first three planes. They knew they were all going to die; they decided not to take the intended targets with them.
Frankly, as much as I admire firefighters and police for doing the jobs they do, I think of those people as the biggest heroes of 9/11. They're the ones that may have saved the greatest number of lives, for all we know... and with no training, no special equipment, and no decision to put themselves in danger. They simply found themselves there, and did what had to be done.
9/11 may have overall made air travel a bit safer... not because we're more careful (we're not really), but because hijacking is a dead art now.
To me it is a no-brainer. This sort of technology will save far more lives -- maybe from terrorism, but mostly from simple pilot error -- than it will kill.
This isn't a no-brainer to me. Before I'll get on a plane with this system in place, I want to see a run-down of:
- What percentage of airplane crashes or near-misses in the last two decades would have triggered this system
- What percentage of those cases could we have expected the system to improve the survival prospects of the passengers/crew
My gut feeling is, the overwhelming majority of situations that would have triggered this automatic override were due to mechanical failures that the autopilot was not as well-equipped to handle as the real pilot. I wouldn't be surprised if we found that the number of crashes that this system could theoretically have averted would have been nullified by the increased death toll when this system kicked in and prevented pilots from making safe emergency landings. Think about it... 200 people on a typical plane flight. Cause 15 crashes, and you make up for the entire WTC losses.
Found an interesting site with a database of airplane crashes. Starting from 2003 and scanning back through all those with >100 on board, I got to 1998 before I found a crash that might have been averted by this system. Of course, since it only lists crashes, we don't know about other incidents when this system would have triggered.
Interestingly enough, looking at this database I'm surprised to find that there were fewer than 100 people aboard any of the 9/11 flights. Maybe it would take more than 15 plane crashes to compensate for the 3000 lost in the WTC strike. Still, I'm not sure I'd feel more comfortable with losing a friend or relative to a computer's decision to take control away from a pilot than with losing them to an act of outright anger and destruction.
By all means I think it's safer than cars [though not buses]
;-)
Hrm? Buses are safer than cars, last I checked... after all, they have such a high degree of inertia, they're far less likely to stop as quickly. They also can't achieve as high a speed or accelerate as quickly as cars. Finally, they're generally driven by professional drivers, with stricter licensing procedures and more road hours.
In what way are buses less safe than cars? You scared of that guy sitting next to you?
Situation: non-issue.
The pilot has time to respond to the warning. During this time, he is fully in control of the plane. If he heads back out, he maintains control of the plane. If he does not head out, he is assumed to be incapable of operating the plane and is relieved of duty by the automation software.
You know what happens when we assume...
Think about all the airplane crashes you've ever seen news stories about or read about in the papers. Now, think about how many of them happened because pilots, intentionally or accidentally, flew into large obstacles. On the other hand, think about how many of them happened because of mechanical failures on the aircraft.
Now, think harder... how many *averted* disasters have you heard of from pilots taking "unorthodox" action in the face of unforseen circumstances?
What you're saying is, since the threat of someone flying into an obstacle when they could reasonably prevent it is *so big*, we need to take control away from the folks in the cockpit if it looks like they're going to do it. But what I'd say in response is, if a pilot has to overfly lower Manhattan to save my life, I damn well want him to be able to.
Think about it... if a plane is flying for a mountain because of a mechanical failure that makes it impossible to prevent, wouldn't you rather have a *human* in the cockpit making decisions about how to possibly save his own life, not to mention the lives of a couple hundred passengers?
The assumptions behind this type of mechanism are simply unimaginative. I'd like to see an analysis of, say, the accidents in the last 20 years that would have triggered this system, and see what percentage of them could have been prevented by it. I'll bet it's pretty small.