Regarding certification: The rule of thumb that most aviation experts use is that certification isn't over until the weight of all the documentation exceeds the weight of the aircraft. There is more truth in this joke than most people realize.
First, it is a 24 GHz system. Anything much above 11 GHz is going to have rain-fade problems. We have had years of experience with 24 GHz systems. Even though these links are less than 2 km and have very significant fade margins, we still lose them during any significant rainfall. The reliability of a 13 km link will be frustratingly poor. Been there, done that.
Second, as the AC points out, the cost is not the unit itself. The cost is in the installation and grounding. The structure you put this thing on will be struck by lightning. The only question is one of probability.
Third, though the costs are high, remember, nobody can interrupt a microwave signal while digging on the side of the road. Microwave networks may not be cheap, but after taking all expenses in to account, you may find that it can be a very good fit if you have lots of land to traverse, no roads or rights of way to get you there, and want to stay out of a common carrier.
You are making a straw man argument. Conservative views place priorities in different places than you might, but it does not reduce to the over simplified pablum that you cite here.
"Science" is not black and white. It is a matter of discovery and interpretation of the meaning of that discovery. "Believing" science is not the same as believing scientists. It is normal and healthy to maintain a certain degree of skepticism about ALL discoveries until orthogonal experiments and/or data can document results that appear to indicate a similar conclusion.
Such behavior should never be limited to a liberal or a conservative. Nevertheless, the liberal will tend to run with a discovery a bit sooner than a conservative will. These are judgement calls and definitions, not political postures.
There is also a tendency among both liberal and conservative to selectively view the facts that appear to support your thinking. Those with liberal views look just as crazy to the conservative as those with conservative views look to the liberal.
Thus the study confirms that people's definitions of themselves tend to correlate with their other beliefs. Imagine that...
The company where I work has a dam that was meant for flood control and raw water storage for a water treatment plant. To get the water from the dam to the plant, we had a turbine that was connected to a shaft that connected to a centrifugal pump. In effect, we were using water to push water through a pipeline. However, it was a small system that could only move about 20 million gallons a day for a plant that needed 60 million gallons per day. It was a maintenance headache, so it was allowed to languish.
Recently, a firm came along that wanted to refurbish that turbine for generating electricity. Although our experience was that keeping a thing like that running is not cheap or easy, that experience is about thirty years old. They are paying to refurbish it and to maintain it. It will be interesting to see how well they do with it.
The original designs for most of the avionics dates to the 1950s and 1960s. There is a lot of infrastructure built around this concept, all over the world, and in the cockpits of aircraft that are not cheap to modify or change. The frequency and modulation methods chosen during that era were clearly designed for simplicity and accuracy, not resiliency in the presence of so many RF emitters that weren't even conceived back then.
To this day, airliners land in zero visibility using a combination of software, hardware, and an autopilot coupled to a precision landing system known as ILS, or Instrument Landing System. ILS uses signals from two phased arrays, one on VHF for right/left, and one on UHF for higher/lower. This will bring you to a window in the sky that is about 200' off the ground, 20 feet wide, and 10 feet thick. From there, heading and radar altitude data take over. If you are ever on an airliner, landing at night in foggy weather, I want you to think about this.
It is outrageously expensive to upgrade this system, and it will require international coordination to make it work. You would never be able to sell a navigation system that required different radio gear for different regions of the planet.
Frankly, it's easier to tell everyone to shut off their damned toys than it is to implement a new, more resilient system. At the end of the day, whatever technology we use, it will never be able to overcome a local signal source that jams the incoming signal. Spread spectrum technology is cool, until everyone is using it, then things just noise up and weird stuff starts happening.
So let's suppose you have a family with a checkered past. You have never been convicted of anything. However one day a partial match comes through and lo and behold, your father's DNA doesn't quite match, but they suspect a family member. Can they compel you to submit to a DNA test?
Hasn't your father 's DNA just convicted you?
In other words, old DNA evidence might be used on a fishing expedition to convict family members as well. Is that reasonable? I'm not so sure about that.
Exactly. It is the "media-free" alternative so that MPAA can say to the court that the alternative exists, so you have no reason to own ripping software.
And if the courts aren't ignorant enough to fall for this, legislators will.
Any time someone starts talking of infinite channel capacity, you know they're going to be full of crap. Shannon's limit is a Mathematical principle. There is no such thing as "infinite" bandwidth/channel capacity.
What they're actually discussing is the spatial equivalent of spread spectrum. In other words, they have their own custom reflector with its own unique shape that can be reversed so that a coherent signal with minimal inter-symbol interference would be present. It is not a bad idea, except that you would need a line of sight path with very little exposure to the first Fresnel zones. Reflections would be a bitch to deal with.
Also note this method reduced point source noise, but it doesn't eliminate it. Likewise, a spread spectrum signal is still detectable as increased noise in a narrow-band radio.
The lawyers can plead or write whatever they want. The judges, on the other hand, are bound by the Constitution. I am utterly amazed that any such proceeding could squelch a scientific paper.
We're not talking about publishing something that would decimate this planet or the human race. We're talking about a paper concerning cancer rates in miners.
This is exactly why the founders of the United States of America enshrined this right in the Constitution. Argue the case based upon the merits of the paper, not by squelching it or delaying publication.
The judge that allowed this order to go forward should be disbarred.
(Oh, and anyone who thinks I'm a wing nut for saying this: I'm a right of center, gun owning, card carrying member of the GOP. We want business to thrive, yes, but not at the expense of our constitutional rights.)
Aircraft designers call these Vortex Generators. Their purpose is to disrupt the laminar airflow. This helps the air streams to "stick" to the wing, improving control responsiveness and lowering stall speeds. The difference can be quite noticeable with some airfoil shapes, or almost unmeasurable in others, so one doesn't see them on all aircraft.
But what the article discusses here is NOT a vortex generator or anything of that ilk. It seems to be some sort groove that can mitigate the scratching caused by abrasives in the air stream. It might be interesting to see if such grooves could be integrated with Vortex Generators to improve not only wing performance but also longevity against abrasives, such as a dust or sand storm.
We discovered a nearly omnidirectional horizontally polarized antenna (think about that). It fit on the existing mount and looks pretty much like all the other sticks on the water tower. Hint: it's not really a stick. It's a slotted waveguide. Theory suggests that a vertically polarized signal will drop 20 dB when received with a horizontally polarized antenna and that's pretty much what we measured.
We filed for a license variance from the FCC to switch polarization from Vertical to Horizontal. The FCC engineers were actually impressed with our solution. They had never heard of this antenna before.
We switched master antennas while a series of teams were stationed out in the field to twist the the yagi antennas sideways. It was a significant operation.
Yes, we could have sued someone. But it wouldn't have solved our problems. The fact is that we were all operating legally. The FCC screwed up. Our company attorneys weren't really up to the task of filing a federal lawsuit of that magnitude and the costs were not worth the time and hassle we'd spend to recover the money.
Missing from the discussion is why this happened to begin with. The Federal Communications Commission was created with the explicit mission to avoid allocation problems like this with the electromagnetic spectrum. This is not the first time they've screwed up like this. In the late 1980s we installed a SCADA sytem on 928.8 MHz. A year after we were up and running, high power paging showed up on 929.03 MHz. You could light a neon bulb with the energy we were getting from our Master receiver antenna.
Our remotes were transmitting with 5 watts and the paging systems were transmitting with over 3 kW ERP. Our receivers had been optimized for sensitivity, not selectivity. But even with the state of the art receivers designed for selectivity, we were still getting clobbered. Only with massive effort did we overcome this problem.
The FCC screwed up because they don't do their homework any more. Even back then, engineers were being relegated to the broom closet while attorneys and political hacks took charge. Applicants were being told to hire consultants to suggest available frequencies, do interference studies and to submit the consultant's work with their license application. Tell me there wasn't a conflict of interest even then!
For all I know things are still like that today. LS probably paid for a consultant who told them what they and the FCC commissioners wanted to hear.
This is why we can't have nice things. We need an FCC to keep this from happening. And instead of an FCC, we get political hacks of both flavors who don't know a damned thing about the state of the art or even what the radio spectrum is.
Parent post is quite correct. The largest cost of a GPS receiver in an aircraft is NOT the electronics itself, but the installation and certification process, not to mention the database updates.
Remember that it has to work with many other transmitters and receivers nearby, including a Mode C or Mode S radar transponder required for most metropolitan regions, a UHF (403 MHz) ELT, a pair of VHF transmitters, possibly an HF SSB radio or an old DME system, and maybe even a weather radar. --and that's just the stuff that is supposed to deliberately transmit. Receivers can radiate their local oscillators...
The bottom line is that when you put safety of flight navigation equipment in an aircraft, it has to be tested and certified before it can be used. Lightsquared would like us to just "replace it" with something new.
I'd like to put their executives in an airliner filled with their damned LTE phones landing on a CAT III approach on a dark and stormy night. We'll see how "rigged" those tests were.
I agree with the sentiments, and I acknowledge that someone will try it. However, others have figured out how easy it is to defeat this Anti-satellite weapons have already been tested and it would be foolish to think that they do not exist in anyone's arsenal. The end result is lots of debris in orbits that may last hundreds of years..
A treaty of this sort would have to acknowledge this problem and put long term concerns over short term tactical needs. The answer is probably the hypersonic scram-jets they're developing right now for the military. These technologies have the potential of being on target perhaps even before an orbital platform can put something there. It has the added advantage that even if shot down, it is unlikely it would leave debris in orbit for long.
Please note that I'm not advocating such weaponry or policies; I'm merely pointing out that this is where the technology is going. I don't think we'll have to be too concerned until we have a significant colony of independent people living in space.
In every case where aviation has been stretching the envelope, there have been accidents and fatalities. The GB Racer is a classic case of this. Many of the renown WWII aircraft had A versions that were anything but safe to fly.
The venerated F-16 wasn't much to write home about either when it was first released. The engineers will learn and get experience. It will come at a horrible price. But if you wanted to live a safe life, you shouldn't be in the military in the first place.
Note to moderators, the point this AC makes is interesting, please mod up.
So if I understand what you're saying, you feel that you're making connections and getting things done that you couldn't have been able to do if you were dressed like a typical shirtsleeve engineer?
I should point out that I know guys dressed in dirty T-shirts and jeans, two I know even have dreadlocks, who are widely respected and revered. When they speak, the room goes quiet. Conversely, I know some folk who dress very well. As soon as they say something, well, they might as well be dressed in a clown suit.
Are you practicing engineering or IT, or are you managing them? Clearly you feel the clothes make the man, thus I have to ask what impressions you were able to project that you couldn't have done by speaking?
I have repeated this to my kids numerous times: a person can go from good looking to ugly in the time it takes them to open their mouths and say something.
This seems especially alien to girls because every social cue they see on TV and in print seems to scream at them to make good impressions. As such, I really do not know what to make of all the cries of perfect models casting clothes.
What is a fashion designer supposed to do? Show their clothes on physically disgusting people?
What's broken about TV? This: the vast majority of the content is utter crap pandering to the lowest common denominator.
And this is different from the older TV programs? Read whatever you like going back to the beginnings of TV and even the beginnings of Radio. There has always been someone saying stuff like this.
No, the problem with TV is that there are alternatives to getting information besides just TV. There are hundreds of channels filled with very small audiences, so the programming is dross in all but a very few cases.
Fundamentally, our media resources are spread too thinly across too many resources. Once there was just the News Paper. Then there was the news magazine. Then there was Radio, and later, television. Then the Internet took hold and many journalists who used to have nice secure jobs in major news outlets suddenly watched their audiences evaporate as the number of channels increased and the number of viewers/listeners/readers decreased.
And then we sit and wonder why the production and the thoughtfulness behind it is so thin...
Yes, but imagine trying to argue this to Judge Greene during the breakup of AT&T in the early 1980s.
AT&T stayed out of that fray because there was no way in hell that they could have argued that this was a possible outcome based upon what was going on with the state of the art at the time.
Going a step further, there should be liability for those who collect this data: If the user downloads kiddie porn, they're now liable because they were able to know this and didn't act. If the User stalks someone and they do not report this to authorities, they should be held liable. If someone tweets messages that indicate suicidal tendencies and they take no action, they can be held liable.
Collect this data at your peril. You want to know all about me? Fine. Now you become an accessory for everything I do wrong.
Would you believe that the SCADA system that runs the water utility I work for has such a button on the screen? You would? Cool. I have this used bridge I'd like to sell you in New York City.
You criticize people for not having an effective password and then promptly say something so ignorant that any plumber, civil engineer, or a fifth grader could tell you you're wrong. Ignorance happens. If you need proof, look in a mirror.
Now as for the password, yes, it is foolish. There is more truth in the character of Homer Simpson than any of us would like to admit. However, the vast majority of passwords are easy to crack with a decent rainbow table. So in that perspective, the password itself isn't the issue.
The real issue is why the HMI was accessible on the internet in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
Regarding certification: The rule of thumb that most aviation experts use is that certification isn't over until the weight of all the documentation exceeds the weight of the aircraft. There is more truth in this joke than most people realize.
First, it is a 24 GHz system. Anything much above 11 GHz is going to have rain-fade problems. We have had years of experience with 24 GHz systems. Even though these links are less than 2 km and have very significant fade margins, we still lose them during any significant rainfall. The reliability of a 13 km link will be frustratingly poor. Been there, done that.
Second, as the AC points out, the cost is not the unit itself. The cost is in the installation and grounding. The structure you put this thing on will be struck by lightning. The only question is one of probability.
Third, though the costs are high, remember, nobody can interrupt a microwave signal while digging on the side of the road. Microwave networks may not be cheap, but after taking all expenses in to account, you may find that it can be a very good fit if you have lots of land to traverse, no roads or rights of way to get you there, and want to stay out of a common carrier.
You are making a straw man argument. Conservative views place priorities in different places than you might, but it does not reduce to the over simplified pablum that you cite here.
"Science" is not black and white. It is a matter of discovery and interpretation of the meaning of that discovery. "Believing" science is not the same as believing scientists. It is normal and healthy to maintain a certain degree of skepticism about ALL discoveries until orthogonal experiments and/or data can document results that appear to indicate a similar conclusion.
Such behavior should never be limited to a liberal or a conservative. Nevertheless, the liberal will tend to run with a discovery a bit sooner than a conservative will. These are judgement calls and definitions, not political postures.
There is also a tendency among both liberal and conservative to selectively view the facts that appear to support your thinking. Those with liberal views look just as crazy to the conservative as those with conservative views look to the liberal.
Thus the study confirms that people's definitions of themselves tend to correlate with their other beliefs. Imagine that...
The company where I work has a dam that was meant for flood control and raw water storage for a water treatment plant. To get the water from the dam to the plant, we had a turbine that was connected to a shaft that connected to a centrifugal pump. In effect, we were using water to push water through a pipeline. However, it was a small system that could only move about 20 million gallons a day for a plant that needed 60 million gallons per day. It was a maintenance headache, so it was allowed to languish.
Recently, a firm came along that wanted to refurbish that turbine for generating electricity. Although our experience was that keeping a thing like that running is not cheap or easy, that experience is about thirty years old. They are paying to refurbish it and to maintain it. It will be interesting to see how well they do with it.
The original designs for most of the avionics dates to the 1950s and 1960s. There is a lot of infrastructure built around this concept, all over the world, and in the cockpits of aircraft that are not cheap to modify or change. The frequency and modulation methods chosen during that era were clearly designed for simplicity and accuracy, not resiliency in the presence of so many RF emitters that weren't even conceived back then.
To this day, airliners land in zero visibility using a combination of software, hardware, and an autopilot coupled to a precision landing system known as ILS, or Instrument Landing System. ILS uses signals from two phased arrays, one on VHF for right/left, and one on UHF for higher/lower. This will bring you to a window in the sky that is about 200' off the ground, 20 feet wide, and 10 feet thick. From there, heading and radar altitude data take over. If you are ever on an airliner, landing at night in foggy weather, I want you to think about this.
It is outrageously expensive to upgrade this system, and it will require international coordination to make it work. You would never be able to sell a navigation system that required different radio gear for different regions of the planet.
Frankly, it's easier to tell everyone to shut off their damned toys than it is to implement a new, more resilient system. At the end of the day, whatever technology we use, it will never be able to overcome a local signal source that jams the incoming signal. Spread spectrum technology is cool, until everyone is using it, then things just noise up and weird stuff starts happening.
So let's suppose you have a family with a checkered past. You have never been convicted of anything. However one day a partial match comes through and lo and behold, your father's DNA doesn't quite match, but they suspect a family member. Can they compel you to submit to a DNA test?
Hasn't your father 's DNA just convicted you?
In other words, old DNA evidence might be used on a fishing expedition to convict family members as well. Is that reasonable? I'm not so sure about that.
Exactly. It is the "media-free" alternative so that MPAA can say to the court that the alternative exists, so you have no reason to own ripping software.
And if the courts aren't ignorant enough to fall for this, legislators will.
Any time someone starts talking of infinite channel capacity, you know they're going to be full of crap. Shannon's limit is a Mathematical principle. There is no such thing as "infinite" bandwidth/channel capacity.
What they're actually discussing is the spatial equivalent of spread spectrum. In other words, they have their own custom reflector with its own unique shape that can be reversed so that a coherent signal with minimal inter-symbol interference would be present. It is not a bad idea, except that you would need a line of sight path with very little exposure to the first Fresnel zones. Reflections would be a bitch to deal with.
Also note this method reduced point source noise, but it doesn't eliminate it. Likewise, a spread spectrum signal is still detectable as increased noise in a narrow-band radio.
It's called Fog.
The lawyers can plead or write whatever they want. The judges, on the other hand, are bound by the Constitution. I am utterly amazed that any such proceeding could squelch a scientific paper.
We're not talking about publishing something that would decimate this planet or the human race. We're talking about a paper concerning cancer rates in miners.
This is exactly why the founders of the United States of America enshrined this right in the Constitution. Argue the case based upon the merits of the paper, not by squelching it or delaying publication.
The judge that allowed this order to go forward should be disbarred.
(Oh, and anyone who thinks I'm a wing nut for saying this: I'm a right of center, gun owning, card carrying member of the GOP. We want business to thrive, yes, but not at the expense of our constitutional rights.)
Aircraft designers call these Vortex Generators. Their purpose is to disrupt the laminar airflow. This helps the air streams to "stick" to the wing, improving control responsiveness and lowering stall speeds. The difference can be quite noticeable with some airfoil shapes, or almost unmeasurable in others, so one doesn't see them on all aircraft.
But what the article discusses here is NOT a vortex generator or anything of that ilk. It seems to be some sort groove that can mitigate the scratching caused by abrasives in the air stream. It might be interesting to see if such grooves could be integrated with Vortex Generators to improve not only wing performance but also longevity against abrasives, such as a dust or sand storm.
We discovered a nearly omnidirectional horizontally polarized antenna (think about that). It fit on the existing mount and looks pretty much like all the other sticks on the water tower. Hint: it's not really a stick. It's a slotted waveguide. Theory suggests that a vertically polarized signal will drop 20 dB when received with a horizontally polarized antenna and that's pretty much what we measured.
We filed for a license variance from the FCC to switch polarization from Vertical to Horizontal. The FCC engineers were actually impressed with our solution. They had never heard of this antenna before.
We switched master antennas while a series of teams were stationed out in the field to twist the the yagi antennas sideways. It was a significant operation.
Yes, we could have sued someone. But it wouldn't have solved our problems. The fact is that we were all operating legally. The FCC screwed up. Our company attorneys weren't really up to the task of filing a federal lawsuit of that magnitude and the costs were not worth the time and hassle we'd spend to recover the money.
Read the post very carefully. 928.8 is OUTSIDE the ISM band from 902-928 MHz. Yes. It was/is licensed under Part 94.
Missing from the discussion is why this happened to begin with. The Federal Communications Commission was created with the explicit mission to avoid allocation problems like this with the electromagnetic spectrum. This is not the first time they've screwed up like this. In the late 1980s we installed a SCADA sytem on 928.8 MHz. A year after we were up and running, high power paging showed up on 929.03 MHz. You could light a neon bulb with the energy we were getting from our Master receiver antenna.
Our remotes were transmitting with 5 watts and the paging systems were transmitting with over 3 kW ERP. Our receivers had been optimized for sensitivity, not selectivity. But even with the state of the art receivers designed for selectivity, we were still getting clobbered. Only with massive effort did we overcome this problem.
The FCC screwed up because they don't do their homework any more. Even back then, engineers were being relegated to the broom closet while attorneys and political hacks took charge. Applicants were being told to hire consultants to suggest available frequencies, do interference studies and to submit the consultant's work with their license application. Tell me there wasn't a conflict of interest even then!
For all I know things are still like that today. LS probably paid for a consultant who told them what they and the FCC commissioners wanted to hear.
This is why we can't have nice things. We need an FCC to keep this from happening. And instead of an FCC, we get political hacks of both flavors who don't know a damned thing about the state of the art or even what the radio spectrum is.
Parent post is quite correct. The largest cost of a GPS receiver in an aircraft is NOT the electronics itself, but the installation and certification process, not to mention the database updates.
Remember that it has to work with many other transmitters and receivers nearby, including a Mode C or Mode S radar transponder required for most metropolitan regions, a UHF (403 MHz) ELT, a pair of VHF transmitters, possibly an HF SSB radio or an old DME system, and maybe even a weather radar. --and that's just the stuff that is supposed to deliberately transmit. Receivers can radiate their local oscillators...
The bottom line is that when you put safety of flight navigation equipment in an aircraft, it has to be tested and certified before it can be used. Lightsquared would like us to just "replace it" with something new.
I'd like to put their executives in an airliner filled with their damned LTE phones landing on a CAT III approach on a dark and stormy night. We'll see how "rigged" those tests were.
I agree with the sentiments, and I acknowledge that someone will try it. However, others have figured out how easy it is to defeat this Anti-satellite weapons have already been tested and it would be foolish to think that they do not exist in anyone's arsenal. The end result is lots of debris in orbits that may last hundreds of years..
A treaty of this sort would have to acknowledge this problem and put long term concerns over short term tactical needs. The answer is probably the hypersonic scram-jets they're developing right now for the military. These technologies have the potential of being on target perhaps even before an orbital platform can put something there. It has the added advantage that even if shot down, it is unlikely it would leave debris in orbit for long.
Please note that I'm not advocating such weaponry or policies; I'm merely pointing out that this is where the technology is going. I don't think we'll have to be too concerned until we have a significant colony of independent people living in space.
In every case where aviation has been stretching the envelope, there have been accidents and fatalities. The GB Racer is a classic case of this. Many of the renown WWII aircraft had A versions that were anything but safe to fly.
The venerated F-16 wasn't much to write home about either when it was first released. The engineers will learn and get experience. It will come at a horrible price. But if you wanted to live a safe life, you shouldn't be in the military in the first place.
OK, but wouldn't a designer have to compete with those who show their clothes on better looking models?
Using that logic, wouldn't a paint shop have to show their work on a car that is dirty instead of clean?
Note to moderators, the point this AC makes is interesting, please mod up.
So if I understand what you're saying, you feel that you're making connections and getting things done that you couldn't have been able to do if you were dressed like a typical shirtsleeve engineer?
I should point out that I know guys dressed in dirty T-shirts and jeans, two I know even have dreadlocks, who are widely respected and revered. When they speak, the room goes quiet. Conversely, I know some folk who dress very well. As soon as they say something, well, they might as well be dressed in a clown suit.
Are you practicing engineering or IT, or are you managing them? Clearly you feel the clothes make the man, thus I have to ask what impressions you were able to project that you couldn't have done by speaking?
I have repeated this to my kids numerous times: a person can go from good looking to ugly in the time it takes them to open their mouths and say something.
This seems especially alien to girls because every social cue they see on TV and in print seems to scream at them to make good impressions. As such, I really do not know what to make of all the cries of perfect models casting clothes.
What is a fashion designer supposed to do? Show their clothes on physically disgusting people?
What's broken about TV? This: the vast majority of the content is utter crap pandering to the lowest common denominator.
And this is different from the older TV programs? Read whatever you like going back to the beginnings of TV and even the beginnings of Radio. There has always been someone saying stuff like this.
No, the problem with TV is that there are alternatives to getting information besides just TV. There are hundreds of channels filled with very small audiences, so the programming is dross in all but a very few cases.
Fundamentally, our media resources are spread too thinly across too many resources. Once there was just the News Paper. Then there was the news magazine. Then there was Radio, and later, television. Then the Internet took hold and many journalists who used to have nice secure jobs in major news outlets suddenly watched their audiences evaporate as the number of channels increased and the number of viewers/listeners/readers decreased.
And then we sit and wonder why the production and the thoughtfulness behind it is so thin...
Yes, but imagine trying to argue this to Judge Greene during the breakup of AT&T in the early 1980s.
AT&T stayed out of that fray because there was no way in hell that they could have argued that this was a possible outcome based upon what was going on with the state of the art at the time.
Going a step further, there should be liability for those who collect this data: If the user downloads kiddie porn, they're now liable because they were able to know this and didn't act. If the User stalks someone and they do not report this to authorities, they should be held liable. If someone tweets messages that indicate suicidal tendencies and they take no action, they can be held liable.
Collect this data at your peril. You want to know all about me? Fine. Now you become an accessory for everything I do wrong.
Would you believe that the SCADA system that runs the water utility I work for has such a button on the screen? You would? Cool. I have this used bridge I'd like to sell you in New York City.
You criticize people for not having an effective password and then promptly say something so ignorant that any plumber, civil engineer, or a fifth grader could tell you you're wrong. Ignorance happens. If you need proof, look in a mirror.
Now as for the password, yes, it is foolish. There is more truth in the character of Homer Simpson than any of us would like to admit. However, the vast majority of passwords are easy to crack with a decent rainbow table. So in that perspective, the password itself isn't the issue.
The real issue is why the HMI was accessible on the internet in the first place.