What [if] the instruments were showing the pilot was pushing forward on the stick, but the video shows he was pulling back? Clear sign were the problem was, but your blackbox would never show it. Seriously, you need to read up on the 88 data points these things record. The FDR records both the control input positions* and the control surface positions**. Really, essentially everything that affects the craft's flight is recorded. There isn't anything for a camera to see!
* FAA regs Sec 121.344, parts 12, 13, 14
** as above, parts 15 16 17
even if it could, you'd still see what the pilots saw, which obviously didn't help them Why even bother having a black box at all, obviously none of the information it records helped the pilots in any way it can't be of much user to anyone else either? You're missing the point. We're talking about a camera vs no camera. Two scenarios: No Camera
CVR: pilot-"Fire in engine number one. Shutting engine one down."
FDR: Cockpit switch is thrown shutting down engine number TWO
FAA investigator: "Why did he shut off the wrong engine?"
WITH Camera
(same as above from CVR and FDR)
Video shows pilot flipping the switch to shut off engine TWO
FAA investigator: "Why did he shut off the wrong engine?"
Seriously, what could they possibly point the camera at that would give them one iota more useful information?
I'd like to know what happened in the cockpit of United 93 on 911, the audio recordings didn't make it clear. Eh. No point in doing it now. Those hijackings were a supreme anomaly, the first and last of their kind. United 93 was basically proof of that. It took only minutes for the passengers to hear about the other planes and decide to abandon the previously standard hijacking strategy of "cooperate and wait till it's over" and adopt the current one of "attack the bastards and beat the crap out of them" (see the Richard Reid "shoebomber" incident).
It seems unreasonable. Why should humans fail last? Safety means machines should operate correctly over complete human "alive" domain. It could be done, but at that point you'd be carrying fewer people due to the tremendous weight of shock-absorbing safety equipment. "Overengineering" doesn't come free. At some point, you end up with planes too expensive to buy, too unprofitable to fly, and too impractical to use. All of life is a cost-benefit analysis. No, you can't have 100% safe flight. It's completely irrational to chase after those trailing "9's" in the accident ratio. This is engineering. You push the stats out to the 7-sigma point and you say "good enough; it's safer than walking to the corner store".
I'm sure this has been considered, but why not transmit the data continuously during a flight via satellite Errr...bandwidth? In 2006 there were a total of around 22.8 million commercial (10+ seats) flight hours logged in the US. That is, on average, 2600+ planes in the air at any given moment. There does not exist the massive satellite infrastructure necessary (much less the terrestrial communication and storage capacity) to handle the live data streams of that many aircraft.
there has to be a way to shock proof 1GB of circuitry required to record a whole flight Well yeah, there is. It just ain't cheap. It requires building special packaging (pronounced "expensive") for the ICs. I knew a guy who worked on the Copperhead laser guided artillery shell. He said it's non-trivial to make circuits that can survive the acceleration of being shot out of an artillery piece. Certainly it could not be done by trying to "cushion" a regular iPod.
So "black box"es are actually orange? What a misnomer. They're "black boxes" in the engineering sense of "compartmentalization". That is, they have a number of internal functions that are entirely outside the scope of the cockpit avionics engineers' jobs. The engineers are told what sort of data the boxes eat, and have to feed the boxes exactly that sort of data and not give a moment's thought about what the boxes are DOING with the data. It's about maintaining input standardization. For example, if the input spec said "12-14v nominal, never more than 16v on pin 37" you'd expect the engineer to stay within that spec. Well, if Engineer X knew the circuit (as designed in the box he was connecting to) watching pin 37 could actually handle up to 48v, there's the chance he might design a "better" input system that used fewer parts, but occasionally spiked to 30v, knowing the box could handle it. 5 years later, a new recorder box is put in service, and really can only handle 16v on pin 37. The box complies with the spec, but now all the Nimwit Aviation A-123 aircraft with avionics designed by Engineer X silently destroy their cockpit voice recorders' input amplifiers with that 30v spike, and the next time an A-123 crashes, no one knows why....
Most engineers can be trusted not to violate spec, but if you give them nothing but the spec and make the CVR and FDR black boxes, you don't have to worry about trusting them.
So, basically this is what I imagined. I trust you can open that box and replace the tape recorder and the rest of the device will function well. That should be cheap and easy, unless all of the innards are closely guarded company secrets. If that's the case, and the instrumentation recording also has to be replaced, your company has the ability to rape the flying public that I worried about.
Christ almighty, people like you drive me out of my mind. A fucking iPod (regardless of the box it's wrapped in) can't survive a 500mph impact with submerged bedrock, followed by being pummeled by the entire rest of the plane accordioning and disintegrating on top of it. You come up with a way to make a $5 chinese MP3 recorder survive that, and you'll make a fucking mint. Aircraft "black boxes" have two jobs: 1) the easy job, which is recording the data, and 2) the very hard job, which is surviving the crash. Come back when you understand the basic fucking physics problem inherent in part (2). You're like that dipshit who tried to pay his $90K tax bill by bringing three Mr Coffee machines into the IRS office, citing the fact that the Air Force "paid $30K for a coffeemaker", but not bothering to find out that the Air Force "coffee makers" were custom built hot coffee/tea/soup dispensers built into cargo planes so that Rapid Deployment Force troops could have hot beverages while packed into the barely heated hold of the plane for 16 hours en route the the latest shithole the politicians have decided needs to be "liberated".
Please excuse my profanity, but I've had it up to here with wise-ass fools who think they're clever shooting their mouths off about shit they clearly don't understand.
If my (slightly unhappy) experience with former SU consumer goods is any help, the SU products were overengineered for robustness while consuming a lot of electricity and looking kind of ugly. Could you give me some reference to stories of SU engineers sent to unpleasant jobs because they said "it can't be done on these therms" ? No, because as you can imagine, this was something simply not talked about. Generally, the unspoken threat of reassignment to an unpleasant job from a very prestigious one would be enough. The number of close calls and near disasters aboard Mir illustrate quite well that the Soviet design philosophy tends to put functionality over safety. Perhaps the most concrete example of the "do it or else" Soviet management system is, well, concrete. All over the former USSR you can see hundreds of concrete buildings that are crumbling. Corners are craking, flaking off, and/or held in place with chain link fence material. The problem comes from lack of cement due to over-optimistic production forecasts. A Soviet construction manager would say "we need 15 more cubic meters of concrete to finish this project", and his boss, usually a party idiot, would say "there is not enough cement--- you can have 11 meters, now get it done". So what does the manager do? He gets it done the only way he can. He orders the crew to add sand and aggregate to the concrete they do get to "stretch" it to 15 meters. It will eventually crumble, but it will last long enough for the manager to be dissociated with the project enough to not have to worry about being reassigned for "failure to perform". The post-Stalin Soviet Union had a serious problem in that regard. Granted, those working in the Soviet space program had more room to demand better resources, but the mindset was still there.
Fluoride strengthens teeth when used in a topical application. 'course, that's the whole crux of the matter with fluoridating the water. How much time does your drinking water spend "topically applying" its contents on your teeth? Really fluoride in the water is asinine. Like you say, brush your damn teeth if you want to keep your teeth, and do it with fluoridated dentifrice. As much as I think the fluoride=commie plot people are nuts, I can easily see it as a case of "industry, left with tons of toxic fluorine and no way to dispose of it, comes up with a brilliant idea".
Can you imagine trying to dictate a regular expression?:) ouch. I've come up with regex's that couldn't even have been typed. Some of the stuff I was looking for I had to use ALT+### on the keypad to get it to come up. If there's not even a key for it. I can't imagine trying to get a voice command system to bring it up.
"That double squiggle thing with a line through it!"
As the proud owner of an iMate JAM, an iMate K-JAM and a Mio P550, as well as having a number of friends with older HTCs and other iMates, I can assure you that yes, they do crash...
I have some friends with the newer HTC phones, and they report that WM6 seems to be more stable, but a few of them have reported serious problems with battery life. Indeed, I used to use a Mio A701 (WM5) and it was a bloody nightmare. It required a reboot every 6-8 hours because the radio driver would quietly crap out (no error message, the phone would simply no longer receive or place calls!). I've had much better luck with my HTC TYTN II/Kaiser (an AT&T Tilt I reflashed with the HTC Kaiser ROM) with WM6. Battery life was indeed an issue at first, but if you're a dork like me you can try different radio ROMs until you find the one that lasts longest with your hardware. I recently flashed it to WM6.1 (requiring a 6.1 compatible radio ROM) and battery life is even better. As much as I'd love a non-Microsoft OS on my phone, I have to admit that WM6 is perfectly serviceable for my needs. It's relatively open so there's lots of software and hacks for it, and the phones with the features I require* all run it.
* slide out keyboard, GPS, touch screen, simple USB laptop tethering, and HSDPA, so don't point that stupid toy "1 out of 5 ain't bad" iPhone at me!
...it costs a lot money to get 'em into orbit, and keeping them there would most likely be less expensive than launching something else if/when we need an orbital taxi for something. See, right there is the trouble with your entire line of reasoning. It's not less expensive to keep a fairly heavy empty box in LEO on the off chance you might find a use for it later. They have to send the resupply ships all the time just to keep the ISS running. You sound like my mother. Stop cluttering up the garage with empty boxes! If you need a box for something, you can just buy one, and then you'll get the right size box to begin with. With the enormous costs associated with the delivery of space cargo, arguing over the box it came in is ridiculous.
Yes, it's tragicomically wasteful.
I don't understand why they can't design a cargo/supply ship that STAYS IN ORBIT. I mean, sure, let's go ahead and de-orbit the ISS trash in some kind of disposable carrying module They could, but in doing so they'd have to redesign it from its current philosophy of disposable carrying module to that of
reusable spacecraft. Then they'd have to design a new disposable carrying module to hold all the garbage, which people like you would again decry as "wasteful" and demand it be refueled and parked up on blocks in the ISS front yard "jest in case we needs a 'nuther pickup truck someday".
The whole concept of multi-million-dollar disposable rockets is just ludicrous! The rockets are all disposable. The spacecraft you want to "save for later" is just the small bit at the end of the rocket.
Look, this is stupid. Space travel is inherently costly in terms of resources. You just can't look at it the same as (say) driving a semi from Los Angeles to Phoenix. So much has been expended in getting that tiny cargo there that arguing over throwing out the box it came in is just ridiculous.
Isn't it sad that 50 years into the space program our resupply plan for the ISS is based on single-use ships? No, it's no sadder than the fact that 100 years into the carbonated soft drink program our containment strategy has gone from nothing but reusable glass bottles to largely PET and aluminum containers of a disposable nature. Designing an item for reuse is not always better.
actually Mir never wore out, it had a few broken bits, but it could have kept on going just fine. The only reason it was destroyed was because it was replaced by the ISS, Russia agreed to ditch Mir to focus on the ISS. The trouble with Mir was that it was a serious accident waiting to happen. Mir was built on the classic Soviet engineering model of "expediency rather than telling your boss it can't be done without (X) and getting sent to the gulag*".
* OK, engineers weren't sent to the gulag for that, but it was not unheard of to suddenly be reassigned as Third Assistant Headlight Bezel Engineer at the GAZ Truck Factory for "not being a team player".
While the FCC has many flaws, be careful to not throw out the baby with the bathwater. While I mention ham licenses, they do have a place in technical matters as well. I'm a ham myself, and I tend to think the baby is not much better than the bath water. All the "technical matters" I've had assistance with came from other technophiles. The fact that a few of them were affiliated with the FCC was secondary. They were associated with the FCC because they were hams, not the other way around.
What exactly do you think would happen if we just tossed those characters out of the UN. Straw man. No one suggested throwing them out of the UN. What was called into question was the rationality of a (would be) governing body that allows Syria, Libya, et al hold positions of authority on committees dealing with the very areas in which their records are quite poor--- i.e. human rights. It's like putting spammers in charge of a committee on email reform, or cigarette manufacturers on a committee on public health, or giving NAMBLA seats on a committee on paedophilia....
...editors pick the most accurate ones for posting... Heh. If we could only get these "editors" of which you speak, Slashdot might become just such a site!
If you could just get the firmware out of most chips, the Linux driver problem wouldn't exist the way it does. Really, it'snot that difficult to get at the firmware. The difference between the unpaid, unfunded Linux crowd and a Chinese chip fab is that the chip fab has dozens of paid specialists in that very field to work on it full time, plus millions of dollars worth of expensive lab equipment, plus a huge financial incentive to crack it.
Craiglist was in the right spot to open another auction site, very easy for them. Then came ebay, and bought it. Ebay wont let any competition, it will simply buy them up. Wrong. eBay only holds a 25% share of CraigsList, purchased from one of the original principals of the company. Not enough to do anything but claim 1/4 of the profits, really. It's a privately held company, so they're not getting any more--- particularly when Craig Newmark likely holds a controlling interest himself.
After sitting, with engine off, for about 5 minutes there was still no sign of a train. Normal American procedure at that point would be to mosey around the gates and cross the tracks anyway. Just as I started thinking this, an electric-lcomotive express train blew through the crossing at >100MPH with no warning and little sound. Here in Los Angeles we have a relatively new commuter rail service. Every once in a while, some impatient fool goes around the gates and gets killed by the 60MPH+ Metrolink train they didn't see because they were expecting the more usual 20-30MPH freight train. What I find most amazing is that there are a lot of people that apparently think that the malfunction of a railroad crossing signal is both a) common, and b) something they can accurately determine from the driver's seat of their car.
Railroad signals are 100+ year old technology, folks. They've gotten pretty much all the bugs out. If it's blinking and ringing, there IS a train coming!
The goal is not traffic density (cars per mile of roadway, f'ex) but rather traffic throughput (cars per hour).
If you double following distance you reduce density by half*. If you were to continue at the same speed you'd also cut throughput by half. But if the extra following distance avoids propagating perturbations that would cause slowdowns your average speed may well more than double thereby increasing throughput.
And it may not, but your claim is insufficient to show increased following distance is counterproductive to throughput (never mind safety concerns).
It doesn't. The problem that causes most jams in the first place is excessive traffic density pushing the speed to following distance ratio too close for comfort, which is what causes the mild braking that escalates into traffic "waves". It requires MORE than double the following distance to safely sustain double the speed. Traffic slows to the comfort level of the drivers, which is generally based on safety.
* Since horses are all frictionless spheres, naturally cars must have zero length.
P.S. The linked site is truly one of the classics of the internet. I believe it's been posted on slashdot before. And then presumably duped a couple times for good measure. Indeed, it makes an interesting read. It is quite well reasoned and logical, which many find compelling. Unfortunately, it also doesn't show a complete understanding of the reality of traffic. It's written by an engineer, so it sounds completely logical; unfortunately, he's an electrical engineer, so he doesn't have the background to draw any conclusions on anything more than the basics of traffic engineering. Would you trust a traffic engineer to design an electrical circuit based solely on his experience installing motherboards in his relatives' computers? Of course not. Neither should you go to an electrical engineer for traffic management strategy. Traffic engineering is extremely complicated. There are the obvious basics, but there's a lot of shit that you can't see without analysis of aggregate data. Without an understanding of the dozens of potential external tweaks to the Q=KV formula*, you're basically talking about Horses = Frictionless Spheres.
The best solution to the problem is to have a law that every car on the highway (at-speed or not) has to leave at least three carlengths of distance between them and the driver in front of them Good job. You've just legislatively declared that 50% of the cars on the road must vanish into thin air*. Why don't you also propose a law banning bad weather during football games. It's just as realistic.
* given 1 car = 10 feet: congested traffic consists of cars with 1 car length in front of them, which is 20 feet per car, or 10 cars per 200 lane-feet. 3 car lengths space per car is 40 feet per car, or 5 cars per 200 lane-feet.
Slashdot Mirror
* FAA regs Sec 121.344, parts 12, 13, 14
** as above, parts 15 16 17
No Camera
CVR: pilot-"Fire in engine number one. Shutting engine one down."
FDR: Cockpit switch is thrown shutting down engine number TWO
FAA investigator: "Why did he shut off the wrong engine?"
WITH Camera (same as above from CVR and FDR)
Video shows pilot flipping the switch to shut off engine TWO
FAA investigator: "Why did he shut off the wrong engine?"
Seriously, what could they possibly point the camera at that would give them one iota more useful information?
Most engineers can be trusted not to violate spec, but if you give them nothing but the spec and make the CVR and FDR black boxes, you don't have to worry about trusting them.
So, basically this is what I imagined. I trust you can open that box and replace the tape recorder and the rest of the device will function well. That should be cheap and easy, unless all of the innards are closely guarded company secrets. If that's the case, and the instrumentation recording also has to be replaced, your company has the ability to rape the flying public that I worried about.
Christ almighty, people like you drive me out of my mind. A fucking iPod (regardless of the box it's wrapped in) can't survive a 500mph impact with submerged bedrock, followed by being pummeled by the entire rest of the plane accordioning and disintegrating on top of it. You come up with a way to make a $5 chinese MP3 recorder survive that, and you'll make a fucking mint. Aircraft "black boxes" have two jobs: 1) the easy job, which is recording the data, and 2) the very hard job, which is surviving the crash. Come back when you understand the basic fucking physics problem inherent in part (2). You're like that dipshit who tried to pay his $90K tax bill by bringing three Mr Coffee machines into the IRS office, citing the fact that the Air Force "paid $30K for a coffeemaker", but not bothering to find out that the Air Force "coffee makers" were custom built hot coffee/tea/soup dispensers built into cargo planes so that Rapid Deployment Force troops could have hot beverages while packed into the barely heated hold of the plane for 16 hours en route the the latest shithole the politicians have decided needs to be "liberated".Please excuse my profanity, but I've had it up to here with wise-ass fools who think they're clever shooting their mouths off about shit they clearly don't understand.
"That double squiggle thing with a line through it!"
computer: ?
* slide out keyboard, GPS, touch screen, simple USB laptop tethering, and HSDPA, so don't point that stupid toy "1 out of 5 ain't bad" iPhone at me!
...it costs a lot money to get 'em into orbit, and keeping them there would most likely be less expensive than launching something else if/when we need an orbital taxi for something. See, right there is the trouble with your entire line of reasoning. It's not less expensive to keep a fairly heavy empty box in LEO on the off chance you might find a use for it later. They have to send the resupply ships all the time just to keep the ISS running. You sound like my mother. Stop cluttering up the garage with empty boxes! If you need a box for something, you can just buy one, and then you'll get the right size box to begin with. With the enormous costs associated with the delivery of space cargo, arguing over the box it came in is ridiculous.Look, this is stupid. Space travel is inherently costly in terms of resources. You just can't look at it the same as (say) driving a semi from Los Angeles to Phoenix. So much has been expended in getting that tiny cargo there that arguing over throwing out the box it came in is just ridiculous.
* OK, engineers weren't sent to the gulag for that, but it was not unheard of to suddenly be reassigned as Third Assistant Headlight Bezel Engineer at the GAZ Truck Factory for "not being a team player".
Which ones? Anything we might remember? The C64 port of the DOS game (Mumble mumble mumble...)
What exactly do you think would happen if we just tossed those characters out of the UN. Straw man. No one suggested throwing them out of the UN. What was called into question was the rationality of a (would be) governing body that allows Syria, Libya, et al hold positions of authority on committees dealing with the very areas in which their records are quite poor--- i.e. human rights. It's like putting spammers in charge of a committee on email reform, or cigarette manufacturers on a committee on public health, or giving NAMBLA seats on a committee on paedophilia....
...editors pick the most accurate ones for posting... Heh. If we could only get these "editors" of which you speak, Slashdot might become just such a site!Railroad signals are 100+ year old technology, folks. They've gotten pretty much all the bugs out. If it's blinking and ringing, there IS a train coming!
If you double following distance you reduce density by half*. If you were to continue at the same speed you'd also cut throughput by half. But if the extra following distance avoids propagating perturbations that would cause slowdowns your average speed may well more than double thereby increasing throughput.
And it may not, but your claim is insufficient to show increased following distance is counterproductive to throughput (never mind safety concerns).
It doesn't. The problem that causes most jams in the first place is excessive traffic density pushing the speed to following distance ratio too close for comfort, which is what causes the mild braking that escalates into traffic "waves". It requires MORE than double the following distance to safely sustain double the speed. Traffic slows to the comfort level of the drivers, which is generally based on safety.
* Since horses are all frictionless spheres, naturally cars must have zero length.
P.S. The linked site is truly one of the classics of the internet. I believe it's been posted on slashdot before. And then presumably duped a couple times for good measure. Indeed, it makes an interesting read. It is quite well reasoned and logical, which many find compelling. Unfortunately, it also doesn't show a complete understanding of the reality of traffic. It's written by an engineer, so it sounds completely logical; unfortunately, he's an electrical engineer, so he doesn't have the background to draw any conclusions on anything more than the basics of traffic engineering. Would you trust a traffic engineer to design an electrical circuit based solely on his experience installing motherboards in his relatives' computers? Of course not. Neither should you go to an electrical engineer for traffic management strategy. Traffic engineering is extremely complicated. There are the obvious basics, but there's a lot of shit that you can't see without analysis of aggregate data. Without an understanding of the dozens of potential external tweaks to the Q=KV formula*, you're basically talking about Horses = Frictionless Spheres.
* Q=flow K=vehicles per mile V=mph
* given 1 car = 10 feet: congested traffic consists of cars with 1 car length in front of them, which is 20 feet per car, or 10 cars per 200 lane-feet. 3 car lengths space per car is 40 feet per car, or 5 cars per 200 lane-feet.