The video has mockups which look pretty impressive.
I fell for the same issue then realized my mistake. The stock picture is not of a stealth fighter of any sort. That fighter would have a substantial radar signal.
I particularly liked the system behavior when crossing the international date line in a F-22...... We were REALLY fortunate nobody got killed on that one.
Actually, if you had been following the case and had read the indictment.....
She was tried for 3 misdemeanor counts (jury convicted) on the basis that violating the ToS was a misdemeanor in violation of the CFAA.
She as also tried for 3 felony counts (jury acquitted) on the basis that violating the ToS in furtherance of intentional infliction of emotional distress (a civil claim) was a felony violation of the CFAA.
She was also tried for a variety of conspiracy counts both misdemeanor and felony, and the jury acquitted on all felony counts and deadlocked on one misdemeanor count.
Agreed. OTOH if the web site's lawyer sends you a C&D lawyer threatening prosecution unless you top using their site, that would meet the requirements.
I would note here that Megan also violated the terms of service, but as Wu notes, the government didn't contend her behavior was criminal. That is a pretty good indication of a vagueness problem....
Oh, and Megan Meier violated the web site's terms of service too. MySpace said you had to be 14 or older to use the site.
However if what Megan did wasn't a crime, and what Lori was convicted of doing was a crime (the misdemeanor counts did NOT include a tort component) then the law is arbitrary and capricious and cannot be applied in this sort of way in a free society.
I am not saying Megan should have toughened up. However, her parents clearly should have monitored her internet usage quite a bit more.
Drew was acquitted of criminal charges relating to causing intentional harm to Megan. The jury only convicted on unrelated charges due to testimony from prosecution witnesses which threw doubt on who intended to cause harm to Megan.
Also, I don't think the Missouri law would have been any more likely to result in a sustained conviction of Lori Drew than the CFAA did. There were real questions as to what role Drew actually played in the infliction of emotional distress and the jury acquitted her of related charges in the California case.
I hope however the Missouri law gets struck down as facially Unconstitutional.
She was acquitted of those charges. She was acquitted of all charges except unauthorized access to a computer involved in interstate commerce or communication. The fraud and access in furtherance of intentional infliction of emotional distress all resulted in acquittal.
Or: 1. purposefully playing with the emotions of one specific child (not general rants on the internet) 2. a child she knows to have psychologically problems 3. over an extended period of time 4. directly suggesting suicide after manipulating, setting up, and torturing this child
Well, I think that the behavior in this case at least arguably falls outside the protections of the First Amendment. However, there are some areas where your analogy fails here according to the record of evidence developed during trial.
The basic thing is that Ashley Grills is the one who claimed to have suggested suicide, but she was given immunity in exchange for her testimony. Thus there is an open question (the basis for the jury acquitting Drew of the felony CFAA and felony conspiracy counts) as to how much your criteria apply to this case. In short, she was tried for these and acquitted.
It is worth reading the opinion. Judge Wu didn't discuss first amendment elements because he concluded that the basis for conviction of the remaining charges wa limited to contractual violations, and that the due process guarantee forbids this sort of criminalization of contractual clauses. As he noted, Megal was also in violation of the same contracts and that the government was not treating her behavior in this matter as crimina. Thus it seems to be a typical vagueness case-- the same legal standard Drew was convicted under makes everyone, including Megan, a criminal.
However, getting back to the free speech element, if Lori simply (anonymously or otherwise) and her group did similar things but without the ruse element, I think it would be protected under the First Amendment. The only real basis for this is arguing that the fraud elements of the scheme were outside first amendment protection.
I would note that by the government's standards, Megan Meier was a hardened criminal, guilty of vast numbers of CFAA violations including violations of the MySpace terms of service (which say no under-14 yo's allowed). Probably guilty of using Google despite the fact that its ToS says one must be of the age of majority.
Heck, if Lori Drew, Ashley Grills, etc. hadn't driven her to suicide, I bet that prosecutor could have gotten her locked up for life.
The fundamental issue here though is that the jury acquitted Drew of the charges involving actual malice.
The charges that were left were sufficient to have thrown Megan Meiers in jail too had she not committed suicide. After all, as Wu notes in his case, she violated the terms of service too.
I don't think that the latter two are defamatory (slander, libel, etc). After all, if I post to all of the world that so-and-so is an asshole, that is a matter of opinion and not fact, so it can't possibly be slander.
Well, the problem though is that it isn't mathematically possible to translate in all cases physical db relations into object data structures. Hence the way ORM's end up skewing development is that they make folks program around the ORM, leading to the worst of both worlds-- dysfunctional relations and objects.
A better solution would be to make intelligent use of views FIRST and then build some sort of ORM inside the db, based on these views. It can be done, but it isn't a piece of software you just plug in as it requires the real db engineering stuff be done first.
Yeah. I thought that was a poorly designed experiment too.
Another element-- the same structures cover the palms of our hands. It seems quite likely that the friction regarding a fully grasped object might pose different dynamics than looking just at fingers, and that a truly smooth surface like glass would certainly not see a major increase in friction. To be honest, I am actually surprised that the glass showed ANY increase in friction......
Next up: coming up with a technological solution to prevent cars from crashing into eachother or losing control and skidding off cliffs. Let's insist that every car MUST ship with an avitation-quality TCAS installed;-)
Yeah it did get cut off. PEBKAC....;-) I was going to say that after the pros and cons, I think that FBW is generally good, and that it would be good to have an ability to switch to direct law if necessary. However, the key to making this safe is to ensure that the input, while quick to activate, is somewhere where the pilot has to reach to get it. I would prefer not to have this accidently tripped.
One of the major justifications for envelope safety in normal mode is that the pilot can attempt manuvers and rely on the envelope safety to allow the maximum. For example: Suppose an aircraft is going to fly into a hill. The pilot pulls back hard on the yoke and engages maximum thrust.
In a conventional airplane, you have concerns about structural failures of the plane. Pull back too hard and you might damage the control surfaces. With normal law protections, the computer will allow you to pull back as hard as it thinks the is still within basic limits of aircraft safety, thus allowing the pilot to pull back without worrying about structural failure. Given the massive redundency in fbw systems, I am not entirely worried about a software glitch causing an issue.
There are pros and cons to both. On the whole, I think that
I was just thinking the other day, with pitot/static systems being so fragile, how many does an airliner have? I've heard of crashes in the past caused by incorrect readings due to a single plugged tube, so it seems that at least some have only one.
Depends on the plane. The A330 has three. However, if you think about it, this redundency only helps you in a case of a bad sending unit in one, or in a case where ONE of the three tubes was improperly maintained. Presumably if one tube got directly hit by lightening (haven't ever heard of this happening) the redundency would be similarly useful. In the case of ice, forgetting to cover them on the ground (and getting wasps' nests in them), etc. however, this redundency is of limited help, except that it allows the computer and pilots to more easily understand that there IS a problem.
Really critical systems which rely on limited inputs are in fact not only testable, they can be mathematically validated. This mathematical validation has some shortcomings (you can't prove reaction time), but it does allow you to PROVE that for every possible input you get an appropriate response (eventually). You can also prove that any single system failure is insufficient to cause catastrophy. This takes time and money, but it can be done. For critical systems, however, it IS done.
The second issue has to do with modelling. When we look at weather models in particular, there are new pheonomena being discovered with enough frequency, one can only provide some basic guidelines. One example is warm spots in MCS's which are currently thought to be caused by stratospheric downdrafts. There are documented cases of autopilots having issues here, but the solution is to disconnect the autopilot and hand-fly.
The final point comes to human/computer interactions. The current trends are that under normal operations with no system failures, the computer will override human commands which are likely to cause impending mach tuck or underspeed stalls, as well as provide various stability assistance. However, when things go wrong, the computer allows the pilot to override the computer's assessment of what is safe. This is made more safe by redundant, voting systems (typically three, as per the space shuttle). I don't know whether the primary systems on the A330 are redundant in this way, but the ADIRUs, the Pitot tubes, etc. are, so it would seem likely to me that everything is designed in this way.
Humans and computers process things fundamentally differently. Humans tend to do more pattern-matching while computers tend to be limited to decision trees.
Part of the problem is that decision trees result in bad situations when being fed bad data. Humans are FAR better equipped to handle these situations than computers are. For exmaple, if the computer gets three different readings from pitot tubes and this was not a foreseen circumstance, how does it determine airspeed, appropriate thrust, etc? A human has a better chance of coming up with SOME WAY to address an unforeseen problem than a computer does.
Before you argue with me, I would note that Airbus seems to agree with my assessment. Their flight laws degrade substantially, giving pilots final say over plan commands when the system can no longer trust its own integrity.
The bigger issue is why pilots flew the plane into a thunderstorm. It seems everytime we have an accident in a thunderstorm the advice is reiterated "don't fly a plane into a thunderstorm."
What you claim, is I think in extreme doubt. The airbus is 100% fly-by-wire. When everything is working correctly The airbus allows a pilot an envelope of operation. But it will not allow a pilot to stray outside that envelope. When sensor data is erroneous the envelope is erroneous.
Not quite sure. Airbus airplanes have three distinct FBW modes, called "laws." Depending on how you count, there are three or more of them. In Normal Law, it is as you say. The airplane won't let you go into a mach tuck, won't let you stall out by going too slow, won't let you apply the rudder too hard, has strong yaw dampering, etc.
When things go wrong, the control laws are designed to degrade gracefully. To my knowledge, the airbus does not give pilots the choice of flight laws, which is what you are complaining about. If multiple systems fail, the system goes into "alternate law" which provides speed safety and yaw dampering only. Note that in alternate law, any changes that the computer requests can be overriden by the pilot. If ADR systems fail, the speed safety, rudder travel limiter, etc. are also disabled. This means that the plane is being flown pretty much in "direct law" but with yaw dampering.
Additionally, in alternate law, if the plane enters an unusual attitude, flight laws degrade further.
If additional failures occur, the plane reverts to "direct law" which is supposed to be an equivalent to mechanical control over the airplane. In direct law, some manual/mechanical backup systems are actually used.
If all FBW systems fail, there are limited mechanical backups to the rudder and elevators.
what people are forgetting is that the airbus plane DID return nearly full control to the pilot (nearly because there are still limits to things like how much roll one can request, but these COULD be built in mechanically in the absence of fly-by-wire).
The real issue here is that the computer system detected invalid input and handed the control back to the pilots (under "alternate law" which means most safety rules are disabled), but the pilots may not have had enough information to know whether the control was handed back to them in a safe state, and if not, how to correct.
On top of that, the airplane was flying fairly close to the coffin corner (where the airplane is capable of going too fast and too slow simultaneously, and at this point, in this situation, computers are really helpful). One possible issue is that a gust of wind could have caused "mach tucks" if they were going a little too fast (thus causing downward pressure on the nose during gusts). These could have placed significant stress on the airframe until things started to fail. I have some other theories and observations about debris and ACARS messages, but this isn't the time for that now. All I will say is that all indications are the airplane was flying too fast, and there is NO indication that the instructions Airbus has sent to pilots will remedy that problem because it is unlikely that the pilots would have had sufficient information to act on them.
There are two issues involved here that need additional discussion though:
1) Are airplanes built to withstand forces as well as they used to be? Would, say, a DC8 be able to withstand more turbulance than an A330?
2) Do FBW systems provide sufficient feedback for a pilot to feel the plane? Could accidents be avoided in cases like this by adding additional feedback?
Furthermore, the fact that there is at least a reasonable argument that Google is in the clear here ought to at very least relegate this to a contract issue. I, for one, think that reasonable contract disagreements should never impose copyright infringement penalties on the losing party. (see my most recent journal post for more on this.)
I don't think it is possible to support both Lori Drew and RMS on this issue.....
Slashdot Mirror
The video has mockups which look pretty impressive.
I fell for the same issue then realized my mistake. The stock picture is not of a stealth fighter of any sort. That fighter would have a substantial radar signal.
I particularly liked the system behavior when crossing the international date line in a F-22...... We were REALLY fortunate nobody got killed on that one.
Actually, if you had been following the case and had read the indictment.....
She was tried for 3 misdemeanor counts (jury convicted) on the basis that violating the ToS was a misdemeanor in violation of the CFAA.
She as also tried for 3 felony counts (jury acquitted) on the basis that violating the ToS in furtherance of intentional infliction of emotional distress (a civil claim) was a felony violation of the CFAA.
She was also tried for a variety of conspiracy counts both misdemeanor and felony, and the jury acquitted on all felony counts and deadlocked on one misdemeanor count.
Agreed. OTOH if the web site's lawyer sends you a C&D lawyer threatening prosecution unless you top using their site, that would meet the requirements.
I would note here that Megan also violated the terms of service, but as Wu notes, the government didn't contend her behavior was criminal. That is a pretty good indication of a vagueness problem....
Oh, and Megan Meier violated the web site's terms of service too. MySpace said you had to be 14 or older to use the site.
However if what Megan did wasn't a crime, and what Lori was convicted of doing was a crime (the misdemeanor counts did NOT include a tort component) then the law is arbitrary and capricious and cannot be applied in this sort of way in a free society.
I am not saying Megan should have toughened up. However, her parents clearly should have monitored her internet usage quite a bit more.
Drew was acquitted of criminal charges relating to causing intentional harm to Megan. The jury only convicted on unrelated charges due to testimony from prosecution witnesses which threw doubt on who intended to cause harm to Megan.
Also, I don't think the Missouri law would have been any more likely to result in a sustained conviction of Lori Drew than the CFAA did. There were real questions as to what role Drew actually played in the infliction of emotional distress and the jury acquitted her of related charges in the California case.
I hope however the Missouri law gets struck down as facially Unconstitutional.
She was acquitted of those charges. She was acquitted of all charges except unauthorized access to a computer involved in interstate commerce or communication. The fraud and access in furtherance of intentional infliction of emotional distress all resulted in acquittal.
Or:
1. purposefully playing with the emotions of one specific child (not general rants on the internet)
2. a child she knows to have psychologically problems
3. over an extended period of time
4. directly suggesting suicide after manipulating, setting up, and torturing this child
Well, I think that the behavior in this case at least arguably falls outside the protections of the First Amendment. However, there are some areas where your analogy fails here according to the record of evidence developed during trial.
The basic thing is that Ashley Grills is the one who claimed to have suggested suicide, but she was given immunity in exchange for her testimony. Thus there is an open question (the basis for the jury acquitting Drew of the felony CFAA and felony conspiracy counts) as to how much your criteria apply to this case. In short, she was tried for these and acquitted.
It is worth reading the opinion. Judge Wu didn't discuss first amendment elements because he concluded that the basis for conviction of the remaining charges wa limited to contractual violations, and that the due process guarantee forbids this sort of criminalization of contractual clauses. As he noted, Megal was also in violation of the same contracts and that the government was not treating her behavior in this matter as crimina. Thus it seems to be a typical vagueness case-- the same legal standard Drew was convicted under makes everyone, including Megan, a criminal.
However, getting back to the free speech element, if Lori simply (anonymously or otherwise) and her group did similar things but without the ruse element, I think it would be protected under the First Amendment. The only real basis for this is arguing that the fraud elements of the scheme were outside first amendment protection.
I would note that by the government's standards, Megan Meier was a hardened criminal, guilty of vast numbers of CFAA violations including violations of the MySpace terms of service (which say no under-14 yo's allowed). Probably guilty of using Google despite the fact that its ToS says one must be of the age of majority.
Heck, if Lori Drew, Ashley Grills, etc. hadn't driven her to suicide, I bet that prosecutor could have gotten her locked up for life.
For having written "Das Leiden des Jungend Werther"
The fundamental issue here though is that the jury acquitted Drew of the charges involving actual malice.
The charges that were left were sufficient to have thrown Megan Meiers in jail too had she not committed suicide. After all, as Wu notes in his case, she violated the terms of service too.
I don't think that the latter two are defamatory (slander, libel, etc). After all, if I post to all of the world that so-and-so is an asshole, that is a matter of opinion and not fact, so it can't possibly be slander.
Well, the problem though is that it isn't mathematically possible to translate in all cases physical db relations into object data structures. Hence the way ORM's end up skewing development is that they make folks program around the ORM, leading to the worst of both worlds-- dysfunctional relations and objects.
A better solution would be to make intelligent use of views FIRST and then build some sort of ORM inside the db, based on these views. It can be done, but it isn't a piece of software you just plug in as it requires the real db engineering stuff be done first.
Yeah. I thought that was a poorly designed experiment too.
Another element-- the same structures cover the palms of our hands. It seems quite likely that the friction regarding a fully grasped object might pose different dynamics than looking just at fingers, and that a truly smooth surface like glass would certainly not see a major increase in friction. To be honest, I am actually surprised that the glass showed ANY increase in friction......
Next up: coming up with a technological solution to prevent cars from crashing into eachother or losing control and skidding off cliffs. Let's insist that every car MUST ship with an avitation-quality TCAS installed ;-)
Yeah it did get cut off. PEBKAC.... ;-) I was going to say that after the pros and cons, I think that FBW is generally good, and that it would be good to have an ability to switch to direct law if necessary. However, the key to making this safe is to ensure that the input, while quick to activate, is somewhere where the pilot has to reach to get it. I would prefer not to have this accidently tripped.
One of the major justifications for envelope safety in normal mode is that the pilot can attempt manuvers and rely on the envelope safety to allow the maximum. For example: Suppose an aircraft is going to fly into a hill. The pilot pulls back hard on the yoke and engages maximum thrust.
In a conventional airplane, you have concerns about structural failures of the plane. Pull back too hard and you might damage the control surfaces. With normal law protections, the computer will allow you to pull back as hard as it thinks the is still within basic limits of aircraft safety, thus allowing the pilot to pull back without worrying about structural failure. Given the massive redundency in fbw systems, I am not entirely worried about a software glitch causing an issue.
There are pros and cons to both. On the whole, I think that
I was just thinking the other day, with pitot/static systems being so fragile, how many does an airliner have? I've heard of crashes in the past caused by incorrect readings due to a single plugged tube, so it seems that at least some have only one.
Depends on the plane. The A330 has three. However, if you think about it, this redundency only helps you in a case of a bad sending unit in one, or in a case where ONE of the three tubes was improperly maintained. Presumably if one tube got directly hit by lightening (haven't ever heard of this happening) the redundency would be similarly useful. In the case of ice, forgetting to cover them on the ground (and getting wasps' nests in them), etc. however, this redundency is of limited help, except that it allows the computer and pilots to more easily understand that there IS a problem.
A few points......
Really critical systems which rely on limited inputs are in fact not only testable, they can be mathematically validated. This mathematical validation has some shortcomings (you can't prove reaction time), but it does allow you to PROVE that for every possible input you get an appropriate response (eventually). You can also prove that any single system failure is insufficient to cause catastrophy. This takes time and money, but it can be done. For critical systems, however, it IS done.
The second issue has to do with modelling. When we look at weather models in particular, there are new pheonomena being discovered with enough frequency, one can only provide some basic guidelines. One example is warm spots in MCS's which are currently thought to be caused by stratospheric downdrafts. There are documented cases of autopilots having issues here, but the solution is to disconnect the autopilot and hand-fly.
The final point comes to human/computer interactions. The current trends are that under normal operations with no system failures, the computer will override human commands which are likely to cause impending mach tuck or underspeed stalls, as well as provide various stability assistance. However, when things go wrong, the computer allows the pilot to override the computer's assessment of what is safe. This is made more safe by redundant, voting systems (typically three, as per the space shuttle). I don't know whether the primary systems on the A330 are redundant in this way, but the ADIRUs, the Pitot tubes, etc. are, so it would seem likely to me that everything is designed in this way.
Humans and computers process things fundamentally differently. Humans tend to do more pattern-matching while computers tend to be limited to decision trees.
Part of the problem is that decision trees result in bad situations when being fed bad data. Humans are FAR better equipped to handle these situations than computers are. For exmaple, if the computer gets three different readings from pitot tubes and this was not a foreseen circumstance, how does it determine airspeed, appropriate thrust, etc? A human has a better chance of coming up with SOME WAY to address an unforeseen problem than a computer does.
Before you argue with me, I would note that Airbus seems to agree with my assessment. Their flight laws degrade substantially, giving pilots final say over plan commands when the system can no longer trust its own integrity.
The bigger issue is why pilots flew the plane into a thunderstorm. It seems everytime we have an accident in a thunderstorm the advice is reiterated "don't fly a plane into a thunderstorm."
What you claim, is I think in extreme doubt. The airbus is 100% fly-by-wire. When everything is working correctly The airbus allows a pilot an envelope of operation. But it will not allow a pilot to stray outside that envelope. When sensor data is erroneous the envelope is erroneous.
Not quite sure. Airbus airplanes have three distinct FBW modes, called "laws." Depending on how you count, there are three or more of them. In Normal Law, it is as you say. The airplane won't let you go into a mach tuck, won't let you stall out by going too slow, won't let you apply the rudder too hard, has strong yaw dampering, etc.
When things go wrong, the control laws are designed to degrade gracefully. To my knowledge, the airbus does not give pilots the choice of flight laws, which is what you are complaining about. If multiple systems fail, the system goes into "alternate law" which provides speed safety and yaw dampering only. Note that in alternate law, any changes that the computer requests can be overriden by the pilot. If ADR systems fail, the speed safety, rudder travel limiter, etc. are also disabled. This means that the plane is being flown pretty much in "direct law" but with yaw dampering.
Additionally, in alternate law, if the plane enters an unusual attitude, flight laws degrade further.
If additional failures occur, the plane reverts to "direct law" which is supposed to be an equivalent to mechanical control over the airplane. In direct law, some manual/mechanical backup systems are actually used.
If all FBW systems fail, there are limited mechanical backups to the rudder and elevators.
Sourse: http://www.airbusdriver.net/airbus_fltlaws.htm
what people are forgetting is that the airbus plane DID return nearly full control to the pilot (nearly because there are still limits to things like how much roll one can request, but these COULD be built in mechanically in the absence of fly-by-wire).
The real issue here is that the computer system detected invalid input and handed the control back to the pilots (under "alternate law" which means most safety rules are disabled), but the pilots may not have had enough information to know whether the control was handed back to them in a safe state, and if not, how to correct.
On top of that, the airplane was flying fairly close to the coffin corner (where the airplane is capable of going too fast and too slow simultaneously, and at this point, in this situation, computers are really helpful). One possible issue is that a gust of wind could have caused "mach tucks" if they were going a little too fast (thus causing downward pressure on the nose during gusts). These could have placed significant stress on the airframe until things started to fail. I have some other theories and observations about debris and ACARS messages, but this isn't the time for that now. All I will say is that all indications are the airplane was flying too fast, and there is NO indication that the instructions Airbus has sent to pilots will remedy that problem because it is unlikely that the pilots would have had sufficient information to act on them.
There are two issues involved here that need additional discussion though:
1) Are airplanes built to withstand forces as well as they used to be? Would, say, a DC8 be able to withstand more turbulance than an A330?
2) Do FBW systems provide sufficient feedback for a pilot to feel the plane? Could accidents be avoided in cases like this by adding additional feedback?
Furthermore, the fact that there is at least a reasonable argument that Google is in the clear here ought to at very least relegate this to a contract issue. I, for one, think that reasonable contract disagreements should never impose copyright infringement penalties on the losing party. (see my most recent journal post for more on this.)
I don't think it is possible to support both Lori Drew and RMS on this issue.....
I don't think a Sperm Whale would survive the fall from 34000 ft.....