No US passenger airline has equipped with ADS-B yet. In fact, most of them are fighting tooth and nail *not* to, because they don't want to spend the money.
The only thing the bogeyman of "terrorists" would be able to track with this app is UPS aircraft (UPS is helping the FAA test NextGen and has fleetwide ADS-B now, IIRC) and private planes that have chosen to equip with ADS-B.
Fox "News", no matter what they might try to claim, is not really a "press outlet" any more than the Weekly World News is. It's entertainment, nothing more, nothing less.
This question presumes facts not in evidence, namely that a bullet hole (the supposedly inevitable result of "untrained armed citizens" defending themselves aboard an aircraft) will cause the aircraft to lose pressurization. In reality, there have been pop-sci "studies" (Mythbusters is not exactly rigorous academic science, but it'll do for our purposes here: http://mythbustersresults.com/episode10 ) that show an aircraft has no difficulty at all maintaining adequate pressurization with bullet holes -- yes, holes, plural -- penetrating the pressure vessel.
I'm not advocating that we should let *anyone* on an airplane with a weapon who hasn't been adequately trained in its use, but to hide behind "we'd all pop like frogs in a vacuum bell!" is just silly. I'd be a lot more worried about what would happen in the inevitable case of an armed civilian who has had one drink too many and experiences a bit of "air rage" at the kid kicking his seat, the stinky passenger next to him, the (perceived) rude flight attendant, etc. That *will* happen, and sooner rather than later. The risk to the airplane is minor compared to the risk that some wackjob, who is not in any way a terrorist, will snap and seriously hurt or kill someone. It's very nearly happened on several occasions *without* loaded firearms being involved.
Half the people on this site probably weren't even alive when Windows 3.1 came out
In which case, now would seem a very appropriate time to quote Santayana: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
Perhaps it would be instructive to have a link in TFS to something explaining exactly *why* the Windows 3.1 calculator was so deficient in its abilities. You know, for the kiddies who weren't alive back then.
To be totally fair to the grandparent poster, the designs of both Chernobyl and Three Mile Island were vulnerable to multiple points of mechanical failure (Chernobyl didn't even have a containment building!), and even these dated designs would have held up but for the human error involved. Remember, if the staff at Chernobyl had actually followed their procedures and hadn't been conducting a test with improper staffing, the accident never would have happened. And in the case of TMI, if the indicator lamp in the control room had indicated valve position, rather than the presence of power across the actuator solenoid, the operators would have known the valve was stuck open and been aware that they were facing a loss of coolant.
Furthermore, in terms of overall manufacturing experience, humanity does not have the level of expertise with nuclear reactors that we have with, say, cars or airplanes or computers. To have only two major failures out of the first 1000 units built is pretty impressive for any device.
Then again, how do you measure "reliability" here? Does one failure doom a device to the "failure" column forever, even if it operated flawlessly for years prior to the failure? What constitutes a "failure", anyway? Escape of radiation to the atmosphere? Or escape of radiation greater than a certain level? Or something less serious than a radiation escape? In terms of "dangerous" radiation releases per operating hour, the GP is probably right in accidents being a seven-sigma phenomenon.
Of course, this is complicated stuff. If it was easy, we wouldn't be having this discussion, and you do have a pretty good point in that real-world results are what matters here. The consequences of failure are severe, and "only" three-sigma reliability isn't good enough. But we've learned very important lessons from both major accidents, and current designs take those lessons into account. Future designs will, too.
You've created a lovely strawman and torn him down quite nicely. People do not "just decide" to get second- and third-trimester abortions; aborting a pregnancy after the first trimester is very dangerous to the mother, and third-trimester abortions are normally only done in situations where carrying the baby to term is almost certain to kill the mother.
Abortion as a means of birth control is not a choice I would ever personally advocate to a friend or partner, but it's also none of my business (or yours) what a woman chooses to do with her body. You don't like it, fine, but don't make disingenuous and fallacious arguments in support of your point while condemning the same in other people. That's hypocrisy of the worst kind.
Finally, someone who gets it. It only took 80 or so up-modded responses to the story before someone said exactly what I was thinking from the get-go: that Apple is patenting this to *prevent* anyone from pulling this crap on iPhone users. See also this story from last year in a similar vein:
Perhaps, but it also lacks any substance beyond "this happened", most likely because it's a rehash (possibly even a direct syndication) of a wire story that was put out on the wire by a newspaper, not a legal expert. Actually, the Trib had a better story on its *own* site than the article that got published here.
is much better -- it's written by actual legal scholars and discusses what the specific "deeply disturbing" comments were. Sometimes the hometown major newspaper isn't actually the best place to get articles, Slashdot.
If you really want to be pedantic about it, "it has got" is not proper grammar either, and no one would ever say "it's one little problem" in place of "it has one little problem", so you still fail. Nice try, though.
Please. "Online music sales" and "music library manager software" are not, by any means, the same thing. Apple may have a de facto monopoly on the online music business, but iTunes is definitely not the only music library manager out there, and it isn't even the only one capable of playing files purchased via iTunes. Songbird and WinAmp (yes, that's still around) are two alternatives that come to mind, either of which could easily be made to support -- via proper and official means -- the syncing of iTunes's XML library file with a third-party device. Writing software to do it themselves is also an option for Palm, and one they're clearly capable of, as they've written sync software for ages.
The bottom line here is that Palm is being lazy, and now they're actively shooting themselves in the foot by intentionally violating the USB spec. If Apple wants to prevent devices that violate the USB spec from connecting to its computers, by all means, go ahead. Who knows what other parts of the USB spec Palm might be planning to selectively ignore in the future?
I know I'm a couple hours late to the party, but this is just sad...
My RSS reader shows changes in feeds. The original RSS summary for this article had "its" without the apostrophe -- correctly, as anyone with half a brain knows. The latest RSS feed, and the actual story page, show "it's". Hint: if you can't replace "it's" with "it is" in the sentence, it's (yes, really) wrong.
Oh, yeah, and this is a really cool photo and etc.
Yeah, ask Flock how that's working out for them. Better yet, ask a neutral third party how that's working out for Flock. I don't think there's any future in RockMelt if "social networking" is their browser business model.
Don't they already have my number in the missed calls log?
Not if the call came in when the phone was turned off or out of service range (for example, when the recipient is on an airplane). At least, I've yet to see a phone on T-Mobile or AT&T that can tell you what calls you missed while it was turned off. (AT&T's Visual Voicemail on the iPhone, at least, allows you to see who left a voicemail and what time it was, but I'm not sure how it handles callers who aren't already in your contact list. That obviously requires that the caller leave a voicemail, however.)
The police should list "lack of skill" as a cause, not speed.
The National Transportation Safety Board's aircraft accident investigations are an excellent model for this. The vast majority of aircraft accidents are caused, ultimately, by "pilot error", analogous to "lack of skill". I'm guessing the police don't have a year to spend investigating each and every accident, though. (That's the typical time period of an NTSB investigation, and obviously the NTSB has several orders of magnitude fewer accidents to investigate each year.)
Er, that's exactly the *point*. Why do you think everyone "unbundled" those services? Because when the first airline did it, all of a sudden, everyone else offering flights from JFK to LAX got shoved down the list at Travelocity or Orbitz. Travelers are generally idiots and only think about what the face value of a ticket is, without considering what other costs may be attached to it that they're not seeing on the search results screen. The airlines know this and price accordingly. It's not rocket science.
I'm as skeptical as anyone of Qantas's "explanation", which smacks of legal CYA bullshit, but Mythbusters didn't "prove" anything. The test they did is far from universal. They tested one model of aircraft, with one specific set of instruments in it, with a small fraction of available RF spectrum. (NB: I haven't seen the episode, but I'm certain their test was not remotely universal.)
Furthermore, while Qantas is claiming "instrument" interference and Mythbusters demonstrated in one highly specific (and totally unrelated) case that cell phones did not cause interference with an airplane's instruments, I can state with absolute certainty that in *many* aircraft, GSM-based cell phones can and do cause minor to severe audible interference on the communication radios. In fact, of the aircraft types I've flown, I can only think of one in which I've never heard any cell phone-based interference on the radios, and that's more likely due to my lack of time in that plane (only about 3.5 hours, compared to a hundred or more in other types) than any particular immunity to interference it possesses.
Bottom line: Qantas is searching madly for excuses, but that doesn't mean interference can't be a problem. Airbus planes in particular are known to experience lots of random electrical glitches (all screens in the cockpit going dark, total transient electrical failures, etc.) for no apparent reason, and it's exceedingly likely this was another instance of that.
...or the unqualified son of the chief pilot was in the cockpit and deployed the slats at altitude, like in Michael Crichton's Airframe:-p
A private piston-powered aircraft has an electrical failure, and it's Slashdot-worthy news that the pilot managed to get a landing clearance on his cell phone?
Must be a slow news day. This sort of thing happens fairly regularly in the US. Two friends of mine had the same thing happen to them a couple of years ago and managed to re-establish communications via cell phone. No big deal, and certainly not worthy of the front page on Slashdot, which is clearly trying to spin this as some sort of "OMG DONT BANZ TEH SELLFONZ!" propaganda.
It's virtually impossible for any modern airliner to have a total communications failure, much less a total electrical failure. Don't pretend this is some significant occurrence when it clearly isn't.
You may not realize this, but a passenger jet is FREAKING HUGE. One missile isn't going to take out a jet with 2, 3, or 4 engines.
Size has nothing to do with it. If you put an air-to-air missile up the exhaust pipe of any passenger airliner, that plane is coming out of the sky in pieces. Probably some fairly large pieces, to be certain, but no airplane that currently exists is going to be able to keep flying after a large explosion removes one engine, the support structure, and a good chunk of the wing or tail spar (depending on where the engine was that you blew up).
The only hope an airplane has is that the missile will mostly miss its intended target and just make a big gaping hole in something without blowing up, like what happened in Baghdad when some terrorists shot a small SAM at a DHL Airbus A300, and even that very nearly took the plane down.
I mostly agree with your other points, but to say that an air-to-air missile designed to blow up airplanes is not going to do its job just because we're dealing with a slightly larger airplane is silly. For example, an F-15 or MiG-29 is roughly the size of a 50-seat regional jet. A missile designed to have enough power to take out a military fighter won't have any trouble taking out a civil airliner.
Maybe I'll use that webcrawler search thingy to look this stuff up.
Score one for the good guys. Back when Webcrawler was the bee's knees of search engines, I remember accidentally typing in "webcralwer" once -- we didn't have a bookmark for it on the school computers that I recall -- and accidentally went to a pr0n site instead. I just checked, and it turns out that not only is Webcrawler still around, but they managed to get their hands on "webcralwer.com" and redirect it to the right site.
While that certainly helps OpenDNS users (though yours is the first mention I've *ever* seen of a means to disable their redirect advertising), it doesn't do a darn thing for all the Earthlink and Charter (and others) ISP subscribers who are having this forced down their throats by a service they PAID for.
Slashdot Mirror
No US passenger airline has equipped with ADS-B yet. In fact, most of them are fighting tooth and nail *not* to, because they don't want to spend the money.
The only thing the bogeyman of "terrorists" would be able to track with this app is UPS aircraft (UPS is helping the FAA test NextGen and has fleetwide ADS-B now, IIRC) and private planes that have chosen to equip with ADS-B.
This is a non-story. Next.
p
Fox "News", no matter what they might try to claim, is not really a "press outlet" any more than the Weekly World News is. It's entertainment, nothing more, nothing less.
p
"You have heard of decompression, right?"
This question presumes facts not in evidence, namely that a bullet hole (the supposedly inevitable result of "untrained armed citizens" defending themselves aboard an aircraft) will cause the aircraft to lose pressurization. In reality, there have been pop-sci "studies" (Mythbusters is not exactly rigorous academic science, but it'll do for our purposes here: http://mythbustersresults.com/episode10 ) that show an aircraft has no difficulty at all maintaining adequate pressurization with bullet holes -- yes, holes, plural -- penetrating the pressure vessel.
I'm not advocating that we should let *anyone* on an airplane with a weapon who hasn't been adequately trained in its use, but to hide behind "we'd all pop like frogs in a vacuum bell!" is just silly. I'd be a lot more worried about what would happen in the inevitable case of an armed civilian who has had one drink too many and experiences a bit of "air rage" at the kid kicking his seat, the stinky passenger next to him, the (perceived) rude flight attendant, etc. That *will* happen, and sooner rather than later. The risk to the airplane is minor compared to the risk that some wackjob, who is not in any way a terrorist, will snap and seriously hurt or kill someone. It's very nearly happened on several occasions *without* loaded firearms being involved.
p
Half the people on this site probably weren't even alive when Windows 3.1 came out
In which case, now would seem a very appropriate time to quote Santayana: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
Perhaps it would be instructive to have a link in TFS to something explaining exactly *why* the Windows 3.1 calculator was so deficient in its abilities. You know, for the kiddies who weren't alive back then.
p
To be totally fair to the grandparent poster, the designs of both Chernobyl and Three Mile Island were vulnerable to multiple points of mechanical failure (Chernobyl didn't even have a containment building!), and even these dated designs would have held up but for the human error involved. Remember, if the staff at Chernobyl had actually followed their procedures and hadn't been conducting a test with improper staffing, the accident never would have happened. And in the case of TMI, if the indicator lamp in the control room had indicated valve position, rather than the presence of power across the actuator solenoid, the operators would have known the valve was stuck open and been aware that they were facing a loss of coolant.
Furthermore, in terms of overall manufacturing experience, humanity does not have the level of expertise with nuclear reactors that we have with, say, cars or airplanes or computers. To have only two major failures out of the first 1000 units built is pretty impressive for any device.
Then again, how do you measure "reliability" here? Does one failure doom a device to the "failure" column forever, even if it operated flawlessly for years prior to the failure? What constitutes a "failure", anyway? Escape of radiation to the atmosphere? Or escape of radiation greater than a certain level? Or something less serious than a radiation escape? In terms of "dangerous" radiation releases per operating hour, the GP is probably right in accidents being a seven-sigma phenomenon.
Of course, this is complicated stuff. If it was easy, we wouldn't be having this discussion, and you do have a pretty good point in that real-world results are what matters here. The consequences of failure are severe, and "only" three-sigma reliability isn't good enough. But we've learned very important lessons from both major accidents, and current designs take those lessons into account. Future designs will, too.
p
You've created a lovely strawman and torn him down quite nicely. People do not "just decide" to get second- and third-trimester abortions; aborting a pregnancy after the first trimester is very dangerous to the mother, and third-trimester abortions are normally only done in situations where carrying the baby to term is almost certain to kill the mother.
Abortion as a means of birth control is not a choice I would ever personally advocate to a friend or partner, but it's also none of my business (or yours) what a woman chooses to do with her body. You don't like it, fine, but don't make disingenuous and fallacious arguments in support of your point while condemning the same in other people. That's hypocrisy of the worst kind.
p
Finally, someone who gets it. It only took 80 or so up-modded responses to the story before someone said exactly what I was thinking from the get-go: that Apple is patenting this to *prevent* anyone from pulling this crap on iPhone users. See also this story from last year in a similar vein:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/06/018240
p
Perhaps, but it also lacks any substance beyond "this happened", most likely because it's a rehash (possibly even a direct syndication) of a wire story that was put out on the wire by a newspaper, not a legal expert. Actually, the Trib had a better story on its *own* site than the article that got published here.
p
http://www.citmedialaw.org/blog/2009/hipcheck16-no-turk-182-anonymous-political-speech-sacred
is much better -- it's written by actual legal scholars and discusses what the specific "deeply disturbing" comments were. Sometimes the hometown major newspaper isn't actually the best place to get articles, Slashdot.
p
If you really want to be pedantic about it, "it has got" is not proper grammar either, and no one would ever say "it's one little problem" in place of "it has one little problem", so you still fail. Nice try, though.
p
Please. "Online music sales" and "music library manager software" are not, by any means, the same thing. Apple may have a de facto monopoly on the online music business, but iTunes is definitely not the only music library manager out there, and it isn't even the only one capable of playing files purchased via iTunes. Songbird and WinAmp (yes, that's still around) are two alternatives that come to mind, either of which could easily be made to support -- via proper and official means -- the syncing of iTunes's XML library file with a third-party device. Writing software to do it themselves is also an option for Palm, and one they're clearly capable of, as they've written sync software for ages.
The bottom line here is that Palm is being lazy, and now they're actively shooting themselves in the foot by intentionally violating the USB spec. If Apple wants to prevent devices that violate the USB spec from connecting to its computers, by all means, go ahead. Who knows what other parts of the USB spec Palm might be planning to selectively ignore in the future?
p
I know I'm a couple hours late to the party, but this is just sad...
My RSS reader shows changes in feeds. The original RSS summary for this article had "its" without the apostrophe -- correctly, as anyone with half a brain knows. The latest RSS feed, and the actual story page, show "it's". Hint: if you can't replace "it's" with "it is" in the sentence, it's (yes, really) wrong.
Oh, yeah, and this is a really cool photo and etc.
p
So RockMelt is a commercial Flock.
Yeah, ask Flock how that's working out for them. Better yet, ask a neutral third party how that's working out for Flock. I don't think there's any future in RockMelt if "social networking" is their browser business model.
p
Don't they already have my number in the missed calls log?
Not if the call came in when the phone was turned off or out of service range (for example, when the recipient is on an airplane). At least, I've yet to see a phone on T-Mobile or AT&T that can tell you what calls you missed while it was turned off. (AT&T's Visual Voicemail on the iPhone, at least, allows you to see who left a voicemail and what time it was, but I'm not sure how it handles callers who aren't already in your contact list. That obviously requires that the caller leave a voicemail, however.)
p
Uh, no, that would be United, not American.
I miss those ads, though. Those ads were great. When's the last time you saw an airline ad that wasn't for Southwest?
p
The police should list "lack of skill" as a cause, not speed.
The National Transportation Safety Board's aircraft accident investigations are an excellent model for this. The vast majority of aircraft accidents are caused, ultimately, by "pilot error", analogous to "lack of skill". I'm guessing the police don't have a year to spend investigating each and every accident, though. (That's the typical time period of an NTSB investigation, and obviously the NTSB has several orders of magnitude fewer accidents to investigate each year.)
p
Does this mean we can expect IBM to start suing anyone who uses HTML-formatted e-mail? Because I think that would probably be a good thing.
p
Er, that's exactly the *point*. Why do you think everyone "unbundled" those services? Because when the first airline did it, all of a sudden, everyone else offering flights from JFK to LAX got shoved down the list at Travelocity or Orbitz. Travelers are generally idiots and only think about what the face value of a ticket is, without considering what other costs may be attached to it that they're not seeing on the search results screen. The airlines know this and price accordingly. It's not rocket science.
p
So kind of like a dark sucker, then?
p
I'm as skeptical as anyone of Qantas's "explanation", which smacks of legal CYA bullshit, but Mythbusters didn't "prove" anything. The test they did is far from universal. They tested one model of aircraft, with one specific set of instruments in it, with a small fraction of available RF spectrum. (NB: I haven't seen the episode, but I'm certain their test was not remotely universal.)
Furthermore, while Qantas is claiming "instrument" interference and Mythbusters demonstrated in one highly specific (and totally unrelated) case that cell phones did not cause interference with an airplane's instruments, I can state with absolute certainty that in *many* aircraft, GSM-based cell phones can and do cause minor to severe audible interference on the communication radios. In fact, of the aircraft types I've flown, I can only think of one in which I've never heard any cell phone-based interference on the radios, and that's more likely due to my lack of time in that plane (only about 3.5 hours, compared to a hundred or more in other types) than any particular immunity to interference it possesses.
Bottom line: Qantas is searching madly for excuses, but that doesn't mean interference can't be a problem. Airbus planes in particular are known to experience lots of random electrical glitches (all screens in the cockpit going dark, total transient electrical failures, etc.) for no apparent reason, and it's exceedingly likely this was another instance of that.
...or the unqualified son of the chief pilot was in the cockpit and deployed the slats at altitude, like in Michael Crichton's Airframe :-p
p
A private piston-powered aircraft has an electrical failure, and it's Slashdot-worthy news that the pilot managed to get a landing clearance on his cell phone?
Must be a slow news day. This sort of thing happens fairly regularly in the US. Two friends of mine had the same thing happen to them a couple of years ago and managed to re-establish communications via cell phone. No big deal, and certainly not worthy of the front page on Slashdot, which is clearly trying to spin this as some sort of "OMG DONT BANZ TEH SELLFONZ!" propaganda.
It's virtually impossible for any modern airliner to have a total communications failure, much less a total electrical failure. Don't pretend this is some significant occurrence when it clearly isn't.
p
You may not realize this, but a passenger jet is FREAKING HUGE. One missile isn't going to take out a jet with 2, 3, or 4 engines.
Size has nothing to do with it. If you put an air-to-air missile up the exhaust pipe of any passenger airliner, that plane is coming out of the sky in pieces. Probably some fairly large pieces, to be certain, but no airplane that currently exists is going to be able to keep flying after a large explosion removes one engine, the support structure, and a good chunk of the wing or tail spar (depending on where the engine was that you blew up).
The only hope an airplane has is that the missile will mostly miss its intended target and just make a big gaping hole in something without blowing up, like what happened in Baghdad when some terrorists shot a small SAM at a DHL Airbus A300, and even that very nearly took the plane down.
I mostly agree with your other points, but to say that an air-to-air missile designed to blow up airplanes is not going to do its job just because we're dealing with a slightly larger airplane is silly. For example, an F-15 or MiG-29 is roughly the size of a 50-seat regional jet. A missile designed to have enough power to take out a military fighter won't have any trouble taking out a civil airliner.
p
Maybe I'll use that webcrawler search thingy to look this stuff up.
Score one for the good guys. Back when Webcrawler was the bee's knees of search engines, I remember accidentally typing in "webcralwer" once -- we didn't have a bookmark for it on the school computers that I recall -- and accidentally went to a pr0n site instead. I just checked, and it turns out that not only is Webcrawler still around, but they managed to get their hands on "webcralwer.com" and redirect it to the right site.
p
While that certainly helps OpenDNS users (though yours is the first mention I've *ever* seen of a means to disable their redirect advertising), it doesn't do a darn thing for all the Earthlink and Charter (and others) ISP subscribers who are having this forced down their throats by a service they PAID for.
p
Hopefully Verisign will use this patent to bludgeon this abominable practise to death at ISPs and OpenDNS.
p