If it's used against "us" then the likelihood of it being detected and disclosed is too high. They can't utilize these exploits carte blanche, but would have to save them only for specific targets, and still they face the risk of compromising an exploit every time it's used. Any evidence collected in this manner is not usable in court either, so it's really only useful for the spy game against high value foreign targets.
You're assuming that such use is detected and that people capable of creating a countermeasure are informed. Current technologies utilize a number of honeypots and detection networks to catch new releases into the public networks, but if something like Stuxnet is released and is targetted and doesn't infect many systems, the odds of it being picked up, identified as malicious, and a countermeasure devised, are all remote.
This assumption means that you (incorrectly) are basing your security on the idea that you're not valuable enough. If one of these cyberweapons is deployed against you, and it isn't picked up on your networks' "radar" as it were it can be reused. And even if it is detected, there is a lag time between detection and countermeasure deployment -- anywhere from days to months. If the detection is, in turn, detected, then maximizing its use before it is nullified is the best course of action -- so you hit all your targets then with a payload that, in a few weeks, will be worthless, and take whatever you can.
Either way, you're stupid beyond belief to make the assumption that it's only useful "for the spy game". It's quite useful for any number of things, including industrial espionage... and in cyberwarfare, attributation is a bitch... and worse, identification of an exploit usually means publication -- and publication means that the number of people who are aware of it goes up dramatically. You can no longer follow the information release back and compile a list of people who are probable initiators of aggressive action... because it's public now. It could be anyone.
It's not a question of whether you're high value as much as whether you're of any value.
It's going to be a difficult political move, but it's the right move, long term. And it took me many years before I could say that without gritting my teeth first.:)
Unfortunately, military doctrines don't change as easily as soldier's minds. In every major war there has been a side that embraced the new, and a side that kept with the tactics of the last war. And you may well guess which side won.
If the United States doesn't get on board with drone warfare, somebody else will, and then we'll be a sitting duck.
First; No. Technology doesn't fix social problems, it changes them. Take away guns and people use knives. Take away knives and they use big rocks. And so on. It's the same with any technology, for any social behavior. You can't fix relationships with technology, and fundamentally, all social problems can be expressed in relational pairings.
That said, the better question is -- are we willing to allow the government to change its relationship with us, the citizens, and if so, what will be the new boundaries for such a change? There must be things that are in and out of bounds -- and there needs to be more discussion than is happening now. Otherwise, we're going to wakeup one day and find that we're all wearing the Emperor's clothes, not just with the government, but with each other as well!
The sub-postmasters who are being charged with fraudulent accounting over the results of these bugs are mostly former Royal Mail employees who were sacked and hired back as independent retailers
...
Okay, so what they're saying is they fucked over the employees by taking away all their benefits and cutting their wages, they underfunded a software project that performed an apparently mission-critical function... and then fucked them over again when (surprise!) it didn't live up to the absurd demands of management.
Incompetence on this level by the government -- punishing the soldiers instead of the generals, has already lead to the failure of one major world economy whose various bureaucratic deitrius was "too big to fail", and I see Britain has failed to learn anything from the cluster fuck that is the remains of the US economy.
Well, British citizens... speaking as someone from the miserable colonies; It'll be nice to have some company.
Further proof that Slashdot has gone completely to the dogs; vindication. There was no "auto landing". It was pilot error. It was the exact scenario I posted earlier... and I get modded down while the trolls and shit heads take +5s...
The point is that bitcoins have been hyped up as anonymous money to buy drugs so lots of dealers should have bitcoins which makes it surprising that they haven't found any to cease before. Nothing here happened to his bitcoins that wouldn't have happened to anything else he owns.
(cringes at typo) Okay, it's not anonymous money exactly, but it is money that can be traded without being associated with a real world identity. As far as "dealers" and "drugs", that's separate -- bitcoin is popular because it's resistant to seizure -- once a sale is made, the government has to seize the account it currently resides in. It can't simply go to a bank, serve a warrant, and say, "all your base are belong to us." A far cry from, say, Paypal or any other financial service. And large amounts of cash now is considered evidence of drug dealing even when no drugs are found, and can (and have) been seized.
Resistant doesn't mean immune. Bitcoin is resistant to all of these problems. Now, as far as drug dealers and such go -- they're using Tor and hidden services. bitcoin naturally extends this because it is hard to seize, and you can't simply serve a warrant to say, PayPal. There is no central authority for serving warrants to seize the accounts of bitcoin owners -- you have to get the computer, or you get nothing.
Yes, we get that Bitcoin is potentially useful for tax evasion. Can you spell out why that is socially desirable?
Tax evasion isn't what's "socially acceptable". Unrestricted trade is. The United States has become the 300 pound gorilla in the room, telling telecommunication companies to sign secret agreements to tap all their lines, even when they aren't in the US. They freeze accounts of political enemies. And that's not even touching on all the trade restrictions from patent and copyright law, etc.
A currency controlled by no government is immune to all of these problems, and while tax evasion is a side effect of this, it is by no means the only selling point.
People do bargain directly with each other now. The government isn't involved in that. But if good or services are sold, that transaction tends to be subject to taxes, although not always. And that does ignore the underground economy that tends to involve cash transactions.
The IRS called, something about you being very wrong. The IRS also taxes barter trade. You think just because you don't use cash the IRS doesn't want its share? That's adorable.
"Airport technology called the Instrument Landing System, or ILS -- which normally would help pilots correctly approach the runway -- was not operating at the time, "
Yes. To say it's "not without precident" is just wrong. It's a stupid thing to say, and you should feel bad for saying it.We're in the information age, not some pre-industrial, largely agricultural-based society. It'd be like saying "Ghenghis Khan once gave an order to intercept carrier pidgeons of his enemies, so it's not without precident." And in terms of the amount of difference between the two societies... pre-industrial America was closer to Ghenghis Khan's world than ours is today.
And what's this crap about "the america you believed in", anyway? You think because a few government agencies decide to abuse their power the entire country is hopelessly broken and we should just give up and say the american dream is dead? What kind of bullshit self-defeatist attitude is that?
Our founding fathers said the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, which is a far different attitude than "Hey, I can't get the bottle of ketchup open, I guess I'll just have to starve now." Please! If the america you "believe in" is to exist, it's going to take more than just wishing really hard.
Autoland systems were developed in the 40s and perfected in the 60s by the Brits.
Yeah, and it wasn't until the 90s that passenger jets started rolling off the lines with them; And at that, it requires certain equipment that not all airports have to function -- and it is very expensive, so a lot of airlines, especially budget airlines, don't have category 3 landing systems... all of which is indicated in the wiki article you posted.
At least here in the United States, there aren't many CAT-III equipped aircraft -- and I'm not aware of any major passenger airline in the United States that make this standard equipment -- it's only purchased and used on very select routes due to the cost. i'm sorry for making the typo 'aircraft', when I meant 'airline', but the idea that planes today usually fly themselves is laughable.
Flight engineer? Good luck finding one. Even FedEx and UPS got rid of theirs on their DC-10s by converting them to MD-10s.
Although, for some aircraft, there is no flight engineer position as that position is increasingly being replaced by sophisticated electronics.
You must have missed it when I said it the first time. I've gone ahead and bolded the relevant part of the OP for you. But kudos for managing to restate the obvious...
Most passenger jets can (category 3) auto-land these days. It is frequently used.
It is only supposed to be used during low visibility conditions; It slows down the number of landings over a given time frame up to 50%. This is not "frequent" by any definition. This landing, like the majority of passenger-jet landings, would have been done by a human assisted by ILS.
Well, that's your problem, then, since autoland has been around for a while and I have been through a zero visibility autoland landing all the way down to the runway. On exiting the plane, I've asked the first officer...
You're not a pilot, you're a passenger, and an arrogant one at that. The "auto landing" they were referring to was probably the ILS -- it's a beacon that is positioned at the start of the runway and allows for instrument landings. Every landing is an "auto" landing on a passenger craft because they're flying instrument flight rules.
They do not just push a button in the cockpit and then nip off for a bit of tea while the plane magically lands.
I'll be willing to bet a Bitcoin that the pilot was trying to land the airplane instead of just letting the computer do it.
You obviously don't know much about aviation safety and procedures then. The most dangerous parts of flight are (as with any mechanical device) during changes of state. For a plane, the most severe emergencies happen during take off, and landing. "auto pilot" is typically only used once the plane reaches target altitude, and its primary function is to make minute and rapid corrections to the flight profile to enhance stability (passenger comfort) and reduce drag (improve fuel efficiency). It is not used during take off or landing, and although either could be handled by computer, I'm not aware of any passenger aircraft that has such a fly by wire system. All of them are on the drawing board.
Planes are not landed by computer; they are landed by human beings. Typically three of them -- the pilot, copilot, and flight engineer. Although, for some aircraft, there is no flight engineer position as that position is increasingly being replaced by sophisticated electronics. The reason for two pilots is in case one of them becomes incapacitated. This is actually an infrequent occurrance -- it's all too easy to become disoriented, especially during a night flight with turbulence. Considerable training is given to identifying these situations and providing smooth hand-off of control. Although injurous to one's pride, a captain should never feel obligated to continue flight operations if he feels disoriented or uncomfortable -- and airlines should never punish a pilot for indicating such incapacitation at any point during the flight to the crew. Sorry, getting preachy... I'll shut up now.;)
certainly did NOT cartwheel or bits would be scattered down the runway. It seems that all passengers and crew have been accounted for with no fatalities.
The term "cartwheel" has different meanings to different people. Unfortunately, just like with the Boston Bombing, CNN rushed a story out without getting its facts straight, though at least this time it was somewhat more substantial than pure speculation.
At this time, it appears the plane's air speed was too low on final approach, and the pilot may have over-corrected by throttling up and then (mistakenly) putting the nose further up as a panic measure; This resulted in a severe tail strike on the sea wall, and the plane would have become aerodynamically unstable immediately after.
Typically in these scenarios, the plane (appears) to shoot upwards briefly due to the sudden change in weight distribution, and comes down on angled heavily to one side (having lost any ability to control lateral movement). The wing will typically sheer off, as they're actually designed to break away from the fuselage in such an event, and the plane will roll onto its roof then (if speed is high enough) or the nose will take a digger, break off, and the whole thing will flip in the air and then promptly "face plant" in the dirt in one piece.
Either way, the plane did exactly what it was designed to do -- separate the flammables from the fuselage where the passengers were, and maintain integrity until all motion stops. The emergency crew's prompt response is what saved everyone's lives -- most people don't die due to the impact or fire, but rather smoke inhalation.
This is a text-book crash landing, and the investigation will now focus on whether a mechanical fault caused the plane to lose speed at the last moment (bird strike on engine is common), or whether the pilot neglected to flare correctly. Judging by the debris, it looks like it would have been a steep descent with flare at the end -- which results in a faster landing and is preferred at high-volume airports, over a shallower approach, with less flare. If the pilot is inexperienced, distracted, or any number of a dozen other things go wrong (one plane crash I know of was due to a circuit breaker trip-out which meant the captain did not have 'stick shake' or stall alarm warnings in this exact scenario) -- there's very little time to react, and even going to full power take off speed will not prevent disaster due to the steep descent angle, lack of altitude, and lack of speed.
Any airplane pilot knows the key to a successful crash landing is speed and altitude -- they add precious seconds to react to an emergency. This plane had neither.
Globalism. This is what happens when it's cheaper to move automotive manufacturing overseas only to be compounded further by the unions
Okay. Pardon the french, but I'm gonna have to ask you to take a step back, and literally go fuck yourself. Every major industrialized country except the United States has a labor party, and strong unions. The wealth gap in every other G20 country is significantly less than here in the United States. If your argument had even the slightest rootings in reality, the story would be very different. Unions had nothing to do with this; Rapid deregulation brokered by large corporations and a cozy relationship with Congress did. Unions have exactly dick to do with this -- it's just propaganda pushed out by Fox News and rabid conservatives who think profits are people too. Unions act as an economic stabilization force -- they cool the fluxuations in unemployment, wages, etc. Even Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations said Unions were a necessary part of a capitalist economy -- and he said the same about health care and unemployment insurance. He then went on to provide examples of how the long term growth of an economy improves with such policies; But they are usually not implimented because of short term focus on profit. He also advised governments to step in and create public works projects during periods of higher unemployment, back-filling the natural boot/bust cycle of capitalism, and then increasing taxation during periods of economic prosperity as an investment into the next cycle.
As much as many conservatives think they have a handle on what capitalism really is and what's best for it, they have a remarkable lack of education on the positions of its strongest supporters. It's unfortunate, really; If they weren't so fiscally irresponsible with their short term thinking and focusing on things like reducing government spending during a recession, etc., we wouldn't be stuck in these "stagflation" situations where inflation rises but unemployment remains constant. Such an (unpredicted) economic stall-out was first observed during the Reagan administration courtesy of "trickle down" economics. Its successor has resulted in the longest period of elevated unemployment in American history. And none of this has dick to do with Unions.
It's one giant death spiral that was enviable.
The death spiral isn't actually a spiral so much as a cycle. Deregulation leads to market crashes, which lead to regulation, which lead to market crashes, which lead to deregulation... Capitalism itself is fundamentally and systemically unstable, especially in its pure form. This is why almost every major world economy is a hybrid of socialist and capitalist policy, and any divisions between the two are largely arbitrary and based more on the political beer googles of the person assigning labels than what the economy is in actuality.
How many countries actually have a military that would do this sort of thing? I'm fairly certain that mine, with a military that runs an agency well known now for violating the constitution, would not.
Surely you aren't making a covert reference to America, Citizen. Remain where you are... Freedom drones are coming to you! But more seriously -- you have a real misunderstanding of our own military. I have no doubt that if there were mass protests, our own military would tell Hoeland(tm) security to take a long walk off a short pier. Our military teaches its soldiers at all levels of command not to follow unlawful orders and to make independent decisions and have autonomy as much as possible during combat operations. This is not typical of most militaries, and is one of the reasons why our military is so much more effective on the battlefield; A front-line soldier has the authority to assess the situation and speak directly to the command authority responsible for authorizing, say, an air strike on a civilian target (say, a building filled with terrorists temporarily occupying the residence) We have a chain of command of course, but it is far more flexible than with other militaries. This is why our response time to certain situations can be measured in seconds, not minutes.
Our soldiers are not dull automatons "just following orders, me-lord", and they are not about to mobilize domestically to keep a dictator in power. Reign in your own paranoia here -- I despise the surveillance society we're moving into as much as you do, but I have some perspective here: Obama is not watching live drone feeds of your masturbating sessions. -_-
If it were my guess, there are so many priorities of glitches, and with a limited budget, if it isn't something that actively shuts down operations, resources are spent on other things.
Devil here: This isn't a budget problem, this is a management problem. Going all the way back to the Challenger disaster, NASA has shown a pattern of disregard for proper engineering practice. Richard Feynman chewed their ass out in Appendix F of the Challenger report to congress, and it was so scathing that both Congress and NASA tried to kick him off the board and discard his results... prompting the entire senior engineering staff of all branches of the Shuttle project to sign a petition saying: Either publish this, or face our wrath.
This isn't a technical problem -- this is management having shitty project management skills. If the budget is insufficient, then the project scope has to be reduced. It's just that simple. This is not the engineers' fault, or is it the fault of the technology... this is management trying to do too much with too little.
Detroit has had massive funding and infrastructure problems for some time now. It's a dying city with much of the suburbs either abandoned, being reclaimed by nature, and generally being both in appearance and substance as a 3rd world country. It's so bad it has gotten national attention -- an emergency financial planner was sent in to try to right their budget, with limited success.
You can't judge Detroit the same way as you could, say, Chicago. They're no longer really part of the first world. This wouldn't be news if it happened in Afghanistan, for example. It's a sad state of affairs, but this is the inevitable result of a slide into the third world... our bridges and other key infrastructure is also rotting. Detroit is just foreshadowing what will happen to many of our cities over the next 15-20 years as our economy continues to slide into the ocean of wealth inequity.
Now taking bets on which country will be implicated next in sketchy and/or illegal domestic monitoring.
Post the house odds first, dear... I want to know where Antigua and Barbuda are on the list... because I'm guessing long odds there and I intend to "leak" their intelligence operation to the Washington Post shortly after you put it up.
This has been known publicly since the release of the book the Sword and the Shield in the 1990s, and well-known by most larger companies since well before that even. We're persecuting Snowden for being the Captain Obvious of the intelligence community. "Oh noes! The french are spying on us!" Dude. Fucking duh. The french have been spying on everyone since the dark ages. Hell, where do you think the word sabateur comes from? The french pretty much invented industrial espionage.
In other news... why are we threatening the lives of other countries leaders and going on a mad witch hunt for Snowden, wheeling and dealing in backroom deals reminiscent of the cold war era again? Oh right... because he came forward and confirmed what everyone either already suspected, or knew. Which was only necessary because so many people are living in a level of denial that makes the comment "Windows 8 is the best operating system ever!" look like criticism. -_-
I hope this doesn't mean we will now officially face an era of ever more intruding security checks at entrances to events like this.
Too late. Bend over, Citizen. We need to search you for any remaining decency you may be hiding. If you don't, you're a filthy anti-american terrorist. Your freedom is very important to us... which is why we're taking it away.
The problem with this, is that it's still programmed failure. In my experience, hardware or software faults, or combinations of both, are not nearly as effective as plain old human stupidity. Oh, and government action. There is no disaster recovery plan for "Here's a warrant. Give us all your shit." There is a similar lack of recovery options for human stupidity. And let's be honest: It's more abundant in the universe than hydrogen, and infinitely harder to defend against, precisely because stupidity is far more cunning and unpredictable than intelligence could ever hope to be.
When they say they're only collecting "metadata, not the calls themselves," they're being deliberately, disingenuously, misleading.
Well, the politicians are lying, but they've managed a rare case of using a buzzword correctly. I know, I'm as shocked as you are. Metadata refers to side-channel data. For example, a video stream may contain information about when it was recorded, the source, bitrate, etc. This is all metadata in that it isn't data needed for the file (or application) to perform its primary function.
In the case of "meta data" for cell phones, the source, destination, length of call, encoding medium, etc., is all metadata with regards to the call itself. But metadata is a subjective and context-sensitive term. One use case for a particular data set or stream may not need access to, or even knowledge of, the meta data. For other uses, the metadata is the data; The stream is what is irrelevant. So to understand what is and isn't metadata, you must first know what the intended application is.
So the politicians are correct in that call log information is "metadata" as far as placing/receiving phone calls is concerned. However, it's not metadata in the context of wire tapping -- you can claim it's not a breach of privacy, but that's like calling the tail of a dog a leg. It doesn't mean it's a leg... it means you changed the definition because you're a lying sack of shit.:}
Slashdot Mirror
If it's used against "us" then the likelihood of it being detected and disclosed is too high. They can't utilize these exploits carte blanche, but would have to save them only for specific targets, and still they face the risk of compromising an exploit every time it's used. Any evidence collected in this manner is not usable in court either, so it's really only useful for the spy game against high value foreign targets.
You're assuming that such use is detected and that people capable of creating a countermeasure are informed. Current technologies utilize a number of honeypots and detection networks to catch new releases into the public networks, but if something like Stuxnet is released and is targetted and doesn't infect many systems, the odds of it being picked up, identified as malicious, and a countermeasure devised, are all remote.
This assumption means that you (incorrectly) are basing your security on the idea that you're not valuable enough. If one of these cyberweapons is deployed against you, and it isn't picked up on your networks' "radar" as it were it can be reused. And even if it is detected, there is a lag time between detection and countermeasure deployment -- anywhere from days to months. If the detection is, in turn, detected, then maximizing its use before it is nullified is the best course of action -- so you hit all your targets then with a payload that, in a few weeks, will be worthless, and take whatever you can.
Either way, you're stupid beyond belief to make the assumption that it's only useful "for the spy game". It's quite useful for any number of things, including industrial espionage... and in cyberwarfare, attributation is a bitch... and worse, identification of an exploit usually means publication -- and publication means that the number of people who are aware of it goes up dramatically. You can no longer follow the information release back and compile a list of people who are probable initiators of aggressive action... because it's public now. It could be anyone.
It's not a question of whether you're high value as much as whether you're of any value.
It's going to be a difficult political move, but it's the right move, long term. And it took me many years before I could say that without gritting my teeth first. :)
Unfortunately, military doctrines don't change as easily as soldier's minds. In every major war there has been a side that embraced the new, and a side that kept with the tactics of the last war. And you may well guess which side won.
If the United States doesn't get on board with drone warfare, somebody else will, and then we'll be a sitting duck.
The question is: will it work?
First; No. Technology doesn't fix social problems, it changes them. Take away guns and people use knives. Take away knives and they use big rocks. And so on. It's the same with any technology, for any social behavior. You can't fix relationships with technology, and fundamentally, all social problems can be expressed in relational pairings.
That said, the better question is -- are we willing to allow the government to change its relationship with us, the citizens, and if so, what will be the new boundaries for such a change? There must be things that are in and out of bounds -- and there needs to be more discussion than is happening now. Otherwise, we're going to wakeup one day and find that we're all wearing the Emperor's clothes, not just with the government, but with each other as well!
The sub-postmasters who are being charged with fraudulent accounting over the results of these bugs are mostly former Royal Mail employees who were sacked and hired back as independent retailers
...
Okay, so what they're saying is they fucked over the employees by taking away all their benefits and cutting their wages, they underfunded a software project that performed an apparently mission-critical function... and then fucked them over again when (surprise!) it didn't live up to the absurd demands of management.
Incompetence on this level by the government -- punishing the soldiers instead of the generals, has already lead to the failure of one major world economy whose various bureaucratic deitrius was "too big to fail", and I see Britain has failed to learn anything from the cluster fuck that is the remains of the US economy.
Well, British citizens... speaking as someone from the miserable colonies; It'll be nice to have some company.
Further proof that Slashdot has gone completely to the dogs; vindication. There was no "auto landing". It was pilot error. It was the exact scenario I posted earlier... and I get modded down while the trolls and shit heads take +5s...
The point is that bitcoins have been hyped up as anonymous money to buy drugs so lots of dealers should have bitcoins which makes it surprising that they haven't found any to cease before. Nothing here happened to his bitcoins that wouldn't have happened to anything else he owns.
(cringes at typo) Okay, it's not anonymous money exactly, but it is money that can be traded without being associated with a real world identity. As far as "dealers" and "drugs", that's separate -- bitcoin is popular because it's resistant to seizure -- once a sale is made, the government has to seize the account it currently resides in. It can't simply go to a bank, serve a warrant, and say, "all your base are belong to us." A far cry from, say, Paypal or any other financial service. And large amounts of cash now is considered evidence of drug dealing even when no drugs are found, and can (and have) been seized.
Resistant doesn't mean immune. Bitcoin is resistant to all of these problems. Now, as far as drug dealers and such go -- they're using Tor and hidden services. bitcoin naturally extends this because it is hard to seize, and you can't simply serve a warrant to say, PayPal. There is no central authority for serving warrants to seize the accounts of bitcoin owners -- you have to get the computer, or you get nothing.
Yes, we get that Bitcoin is potentially useful for tax evasion. Can you spell out why that is socially desirable?
Tax evasion isn't what's "socially acceptable". Unrestricted trade is. The United States has become the 300 pound gorilla in the room, telling telecommunication companies to sign secret agreements to tap all their lines, even when they aren't in the US. They freeze accounts of political enemies. And that's not even touching on all the trade restrictions from patent and copyright law, etc.
A currency controlled by no government is immune to all of these problems, and while tax evasion is a side effect of this, it is by no means the only selling point.
People do bargain directly with each other now. The government isn't involved in that. But if good or services are sold, that transaction tends to be subject to taxes, although not always. And that does ignore the underground economy that tends to involve cash transactions.
The IRS called, something about you being very wrong. The IRS also taxes barter trade. You think just because you don't use cash the IRS doesn't want its share? That's adorable.
I am a pilot. You're wrong.
I'm the airplane. you're wrong.
"Airport technology called the Instrument Landing System, or ILS -- which normally would help pilots correctly approach the runway -- was not operating at the time, "
Source: CNN
Do I really need to say anything more?
Yes. To say it's "not without precident" is just wrong. It's a stupid thing to say, and you should feel bad for saying it.We're in the information age, not some pre-industrial, largely agricultural-based society. It'd be like saying "Ghenghis Khan once gave an order to intercept carrier pidgeons of his enemies, so it's not without precident." And in terms of the amount of difference between the two societies... pre-industrial America was closer to Ghenghis Khan's world than ours is today.
And what's this crap about "the america you believed in", anyway? You think because a few government agencies decide to abuse their power the entire country is hopelessly broken and we should just give up and say the american dream is dead? What kind of bullshit self-defeatist attitude is that?
Our founding fathers said the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, which is a far different attitude than "Hey, I can't get the bottle of ketchup open, I guess I'll just have to starve now." Please! If the america you "believe in" is to exist, it's going to take more than just wishing really hard.
Autoland systems were developed in the 40s and perfected in the 60s by the Brits.
Yeah, and it wasn't until the 90s that passenger jets started rolling off the lines with them; And at that, it requires certain equipment that not all airports have to function -- and it is very expensive, so a lot of airlines, especially budget airlines, don't have category 3 landing systems... all of which is indicated in the wiki article you posted.
At least here in the United States, there aren't many CAT-III equipped aircraft -- and I'm not aware of any major passenger airline in the United States that make this standard equipment -- it's only purchased and used on very select routes due to the cost. i'm sorry for making the typo 'aircraft', when I meant 'airline', but the idea that planes today usually fly themselves is laughable.
Flight engineer? Good luck finding one. Even FedEx and UPS got rid of theirs on their DC-10s by converting them to MD-10s.
Although, for some aircraft, there is no flight engineer position as that position is increasingly being replaced by sophisticated electronics.
You must have missed it when I said it the first time. I've gone ahead and bolded the relevant part of the OP for you. But kudos for managing to restate the obvious...
Most passenger jets can (category 3) auto-land these days. It is frequently used.
It is only supposed to be used during low visibility conditions; It slows down the number of landings over a given time frame up to 50%. This is not "frequent" by any definition. This landing, like the majority of passenger-jet landings, would have been done by a human assisted by ILS.
Well, that's your problem, then, since autoland has been around for a while and I have been through a zero visibility autoland landing all the way down to the runway. On exiting the plane, I've asked the first officer...
You're not a pilot, you're a passenger, and an arrogant one at that. The "auto landing" they were referring to was probably the ILS -- it's a beacon that is positioned at the start of the runway and allows for instrument landings. Every landing is an "auto" landing on a passenger craft because they're flying instrument flight rules.
They do not just push a button in the cockpit and then nip off for a bit of tea while the plane magically lands.
I'll be willing to bet a Bitcoin that the pilot was trying to land the airplane instead of just letting the computer do it.
You obviously don't know much about aviation safety and procedures then. The most dangerous parts of flight are (as with any mechanical device) during changes of state. For a plane, the most severe emergencies happen during take off, and landing. "auto pilot" is typically only used once the plane reaches target altitude, and its primary function is to make minute and rapid corrections to the flight profile to enhance stability (passenger comfort) and reduce drag (improve fuel efficiency). It is not used during take off or landing, and although either could be handled by computer, I'm not aware of any passenger aircraft that has such a fly by wire system. All of them are on the drawing board.
Planes are not landed by computer; they are landed by human beings. Typically three of them -- the pilot, copilot, and flight engineer. Although, for some aircraft, there is no flight engineer position as that position is increasingly being replaced by sophisticated electronics. The reason for two pilots is in case one of them becomes incapacitated. This is actually an infrequent occurrance -- it's all too easy to become disoriented, especially during a night flight with turbulence. Considerable training is given to identifying these situations and providing smooth hand-off of control. Although injurous to one's pride, a captain should never feel obligated to continue flight operations if he feels disoriented or uncomfortable -- and airlines should never punish a pilot for indicating such incapacitation at any point during the flight to the crew. Sorry, getting preachy... I'll shut up now. ;)
certainly did NOT cartwheel or bits would be scattered down the runway. It seems that all passengers and crew have been accounted for with no fatalities.
The term "cartwheel" has different meanings to different people. Unfortunately, just like with the Boston Bombing, CNN rushed a story out without getting its facts straight, though at least this time it was somewhat more substantial than pure speculation.
At this time, it appears the plane's air speed was too low on final approach, and the pilot may have over-corrected by throttling up and then (mistakenly) putting the nose further up as a panic measure; This resulted in a severe tail strike on the sea wall, and the plane would have become aerodynamically unstable immediately after.
Typically in these scenarios, the plane (appears) to shoot upwards briefly due to the sudden change in weight distribution, and comes down on angled heavily to one side (having lost any ability to control lateral movement). The wing will typically sheer off, as they're actually designed to break away from the fuselage in such an event, and the plane will roll onto its roof then (if speed is high enough) or the nose will take a digger, break off, and the whole thing will flip in the air and then promptly "face plant" in the dirt in one piece.
Either way, the plane did exactly what it was designed to do -- separate the flammables from the fuselage where the passengers were, and maintain integrity until all motion stops. The emergency crew's prompt response is what saved everyone's lives -- most people don't die due to the impact or fire, but rather smoke inhalation.
This is a text-book crash landing, and the investigation will now focus on whether a mechanical fault caused the plane to lose speed at the last moment (bird strike on engine is common), or whether the pilot neglected to flare correctly. Judging by the debris, it looks like it would have been a steep descent with flare at the end -- which results in a faster landing and is preferred at high-volume airports, over a shallower approach, with less flare. If the pilot is inexperienced, distracted, or any number of a dozen other things go wrong (one plane crash I know of was due to a circuit breaker trip-out which meant the captain did not have 'stick shake' or stall alarm warnings in this exact scenario) -- there's very little time to react, and even going to full power take off speed will not prevent disaster due to the steep descent angle, lack of altitude, and lack of speed.
Any airplane pilot knows the key to a successful crash landing is speed and altitude -- they add precious seconds to react to an emergency. This plane had neither.
Globalism. This is what happens when it's cheaper to move automotive manufacturing overseas only to be compounded further by the unions
Okay. Pardon the french, but I'm gonna have to ask you to take a step back, and literally go fuck yourself. Every major industrialized country except the United States has a labor party, and strong unions. The wealth gap in every other G20 country is significantly less than here in the United States. If your argument had even the slightest rootings in reality, the story would be very different. Unions had nothing to do with this; Rapid deregulation brokered by large corporations and a cozy relationship with Congress did. Unions have exactly dick to do with this -- it's just propaganda pushed out by Fox News and rabid conservatives who think profits are people too. Unions act as an economic stabilization force -- they cool the fluxuations in unemployment, wages, etc. Even Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations said Unions were a necessary part of a capitalist economy -- and he said the same about health care and unemployment insurance. He then went on to provide examples of how the long term growth of an economy improves with such policies; But they are usually not implimented because of short term focus on profit. He also advised governments to step in and create public works projects during periods of higher unemployment, back-filling the natural boot/bust cycle of capitalism, and then increasing taxation during periods of economic prosperity as an investment into the next cycle.
As much as many conservatives think they have a handle on what capitalism really is and what's best for it, they have a remarkable lack of education on the positions of its strongest supporters. It's unfortunate, really; If they weren't so fiscally irresponsible with their short term thinking and focusing on things like reducing government spending during a recession, etc., we wouldn't be stuck in these "stagflation" situations where inflation rises but unemployment remains constant. Such an (unpredicted) economic stall-out was first observed during the Reagan administration courtesy of "trickle down" economics. Its successor has resulted in the longest period of elevated unemployment in American history. And none of this has dick to do with Unions.
It's one giant death spiral that was enviable.
The death spiral isn't actually a spiral so much as a cycle. Deregulation leads to market crashes, which lead to regulation, which lead to market crashes, which lead to deregulation... Capitalism itself is fundamentally and systemically unstable, especially in its pure form. This is why almost every major world economy is a hybrid of socialist and capitalist policy, and any divisions between the two are largely arbitrary and based more on the political beer googles of the person assigning labels than what the economy is in actuality.
How many countries actually have a military that would do this sort of thing? I'm fairly certain that mine, with a military that runs an agency well known now for violating the constitution, would not.
Surely you aren't making a covert reference to America, Citizen. Remain where you are... Freedom drones are coming to you! But more seriously -- you have a real misunderstanding of our own military. I have no doubt that if there were mass protests, our own military would tell Hoeland(tm) security to take a long walk off a short pier. Our military teaches its soldiers at all levels of command not to follow unlawful orders and to make independent decisions and have autonomy as much as possible during combat operations. This is not typical of most militaries, and is one of the reasons why our military is so much more effective on the battlefield; A front-line soldier has the authority to assess the situation and speak directly to the command authority responsible for authorizing, say, an air strike on a civilian target (say, a building filled with terrorists temporarily occupying the residence) We have a chain of command of course, but it is far more flexible than with other militaries. This is why our response time to certain situations can be measured in seconds, not minutes.
Our soldiers are not dull automatons "just following orders, me-lord", and they are not about to mobilize domestically to keep a dictator in power. Reign in your own paranoia here -- I despise the surveillance society we're moving into as much as you do, but I have some perspective here: Obama is not watching live drone feeds of your masturbating sessions. -_-
If it were my guess, there are so many priorities of glitches, and with a limited budget, if it isn't something that actively shuts down operations, resources are spent on other things.
Devil here: This isn't a budget problem, this is a management problem. Going all the way back to the Challenger disaster, NASA has shown a pattern of disregard for proper engineering practice. Richard Feynman chewed their ass out in Appendix F of the Challenger report to congress, and it was so scathing that both Congress and NASA tried to kick him off the board and discard his results... prompting the entire senior engineering staff of all branches of the Shuttle project to sign a petition saying: Either publish this, or face our wrath.
This isn't a technical problem -- this is management having shitty project management skills. If the budget is insufficient, then the project scope has to be reduced. It's just that simple. This is not the engineers' fault, or is it the fault of the technology... this is management trying to do too much with too little.
Detroit has had massive funding and infrastructure problems for some time now. It's a dying city with much of the suburbs either abandoned, being reclaimed by nature, and generally being both in appearance and substance as a 3rd world country. It's so bad it has gotten national attention -- an emergency financial planner was sent in to try to right their budget, with limited success.
You can't judge Detroit the same way as you could, say, Chicago. They're no longer really part of the first world. This wouldn't be news if it happened in Afghanistan, for example. It's a sad state of affairs, but this is the inevitable result of a slide into the third world... our bridges and other key infrastructure is also rotting. Detroit is just foreshadowing what will happen to many of our cities over the next 15-20 years as our economy continues to slide into the ocean of wealth inequity.
Now taking bets on which country will be implicated next in sketchy and/or illegal domestic monitoring.
Post the house odds first, dear... I want to know where Antigua and Barbuda are on the list... because I'm guessing long odds there and I intend to "leak" their intelligence operation to the Washington Post shortly after you put it up.
This has been known publicly since the release of the book the Sword and the Shield in the 1990s, and well-known by most larger companies since well before that even. We're persecuting Snowden for being the Captain Obvious of the intelligence community. "Oh noes! The french are spying on us!" Dude. Fucking duh. The french have been spying on everyone since the dark ages. Hell, where do you think the word sabateur comes from? The french pretty much invented industrial espionage.
In other news... why are we threatening the lives of other countries leaders and going on a mad witch hunt for Snowden, wheeling and dealing in backroom deals reminiscent of the cold war era again? Oh right... because he came forward and confirmed what everyone either already suspected, or knew. Which was only necessary because so many people are living in a level of denial that makes the comment "Windows 8 is the best operating system ever!" look like criticism. -_-
I hope this doesn't mean we will now officially face an era of ever more intruding security checks at entrances to events like this.
Too late. Bend over, Citizen. We need to search you for any remaining decency you may be hiding. If you don't, you're a filthy anti-american terrorist. Your freedom is very important to us... which is why we're taking it away.
From what I've read, it corresponds to the 911 transcript. The operator tried to get him to back off.
From what I heard, you shouldn't make a 911 call over Skype. Apparently, talking about 911 calls over Skype is also a bad idea.
The problem with this, is that it's still programmed failure. In my experience, hardware or software faults, or combinations of both, are not nearly as effective as plain old human stupidity. Oh, and government action. There is no disaster recovery plan for "Here's a warrant. Give us all your shit." There is a similar lack of recovery options for human stupidity. And let's be honest: It's more abundant in the universe than hydrogen, and infinitely harder to defend against, precisely because stupidity is far more cunning and unpredictable than intelligence could ever hope to be.
When they say they're only collecting "metadata, not the calls themselves," they're being deliberately, disingenuously, misleading.
Well, the politicians are lying, but they've managed a rare case of using a buzzword correctly. I know, I'm as shocked as you are. Metadata refers to side-channel data. For example, a video stream may contain information about when it was recorded, the source, bitrate, etc. This is all metadata in that it isn't data needed for the file (or application) to perform its primary function.
In the case of "meta data" for cell phones, the source, destination, length of call, encoding medium, etc., is all metadata with regards to the call itself. But metadata is a subjective and context-sensitive term. One use case for a particular data set or stream may not need access to, or even knowledge of, the meta data. For other uses, the metadata is the data; The stream is what is irrelevant. So to understand what is and isn't metadata, you must first know what the intended application is.
So the politicians are correct in that call log information is "metadata" as far as placing/receiving phone calls is concerned. However, it's not metadata in the context of wire tapping -- you can claim it's not a breach of privacy, but that's like calling the tail of a dog a leg. It doesn't mean it's a leg... it means you changed the definition because you're a lying sack of shit. :}