You are correct, but this rule won't do anything to stop people who are breaking the rules already.
We are not talking about a new rule that has been established by the FAA.
The FAA has issued an InFO (Information for Operators) reminding that cockpit distractions are bad. The InFO is located here-- is in fact referenced by the second link in the summary.
In TFA (second link anyway), they make reference of the Sterile Cockpit Rule which they did impose in 1981.
Basically, the Sterile Cockpit Rule is that pilots shouldn't be doing anything but flying the plane when they're supposed to be flying the damned plane. Most especially, while they're supposed to be doing take-off and landing.
The FAA has issued a memo indicating that operators should stress to their pilots that they need to keep the number of personal electronics and other distractions in the cockpit to a minimum so they're not violating existing FAA rules.
This is more of a reminder that pilots shouldn't really have their laptops powered up while they're supposed to be piloting.
The timing of this likely coincides with the fact that in March:
A pair of Northwest Airlines pilots who had their licenses revoked after losing contact with air-traffic controllers for more than an hour and flying roughly 100 miles past their destination airport last fall could return to the cockpit in a matter of months, under the terms of a settlement with federal regulators.
I realize a lot of people think they can text and drive a car, but messing about with other stuff while you're supposed to be flying a plane is a big deal. The FAA is reiterating that stance.
Sorry to be so vocal (and pedantic about this), but having been around airlines as part of a previous job, it's something I kinda get a little protective of when people act like the incident this is all about wasn't really a potential disaster.
Great - does this mean we'll have to make all our calls using RPN? 1234 555 212 1+ DIAL I know it's supposed to be more logical, but it just seems so confusing...
You won't have to do it in RPN... you will, however, have to adapt to HP making yet another random variant on the layout of the keyboard as HP plays "spin the wheel of keyboards". It won't be QWERTY, but it might be QVELTI.
I swear, I have never seen two HP keyboards with the buttons in the same place -- and, sometimes they have buttons I've never seen before. I mean, seriously, I've seen HP keyboards where the left-shift key was the size of a penny with a completely redundant "\" + "|" key to the right of it when there was already one of those in the usual place above the "enter". What the hell??
There really needs to be a law about making up new keyboards layouts for no good &*^%*(*&*%# reason.
I love the over reaction to the "150 miles or so" how about you put that in perspective
Perspective? You want perspective? How about these tid-bits from the link I provided earlier...
The crew of Northwest Flight 188 was out of radio contact with radio controllers for 77 minutes
and
When the flight attendant called him, Cheney said, he looked at an onboard display and saw no flight plan, then looked at a navigation display and and saw Duluth, Minnesota, to the left and Eau Claire, Wisconsin, ahead to the right.
This isn't "missing an exit because you're having a conversation with a passenger". This is ignoring the fact that your GPS is telling you to turn right, your wife is telling you that you've missed the exit, and ignoring the police car with his lights flashing indicating that the road is closed ahead.
Then, to top it all off...
First Officer Cole told the safety board that after the pilots discovered their error, he noticed several messages on a display instructing the crew to "contact ATC [Air Traffic Control]." Cole said he then "inadvertently" pushed the "delete all" button, erasing all the dispatch messages.
Neither pilot could remember what happened to the cockpit paperwork, the report says. "Both stated they believed the Northwest chief pilot who met the aircraft may have taken possession of it," it says.
This isn't a little "oops" we're talking about here. This isn't getting slightly distracted. This is a prolonged period of not being in control of a friggin' aircraft, and then doing some really dodgy things afterward which essentially wipes out the whole audit trail the system is supposed to have. So, we don't even really know WTF they were doing.
You're trying to find plausible reasons why this shouldn't be such a big deal -- maybe you should read a little more about what happened. Because, the people who are more closely associated with this are using much harsher terms than you seem to think applies.
So then add some warning buzzers for when the plane is getting close to your programmed destination or something.
What, like having air traffic control or the airline's dispatcher repeatedly trying to hail you on the radio and by text messages to see why you're not responding like you should?
These guys weren't paying attention to the operation of the aircraft at all -- if you can't tell that someone is calling you on the radio, a buzzer wouldn't do a damned thing. Chances are, one had already gone off.
I agree with you 100%, but we are talking about Minesweeper and Solitaire. There is a big difference between minor diversion and totally engrossing secondary activity.
Actually, we're not talking about Minesweeper and Solitaire. Those got thrown in by the editor or the submitter -- neither TFA nor the referenced FAA statement specifically mention those.
This is an "InFO" (Information for Operators) -- basically it's a memo saying people should refrain from doing things which can distract them from the operation of the aircraft.
And, really, depending on the person and the context, I've seen Minesweeper become a totally engrossing activity.
but don't blame me when I take my business elsewhere
Apple doesn't blame you. They don't care, because there's people lined up around the block buying their stuff.
The fact that some people don't like their technology is largely irrelevant. There's plenty of people who do like their tech, and they buy it.
People made more or less the same arguments about the iPod -- it's too restricted, it doesn't let me to some arcane feature that most people will never use or understand, it's got freakin' white headphones, it's going to get beaten by the Zune (ha!). The reality is Apple has sold some huge number of the damned things.
The people who didn't buy them? Apple hasn't exactly had their feelings hurt. The people who buy their stuff like the managed user experience and functionality (read: just works) -- the people who don't, want something else and a little more control over their device.
I have yet to hear of a single incident where some distracted pilot crashed and killed people. And so I am forced to ask if this ban/rule ACTUALLY makes any sense. In theory it seems good; but if nobody is actually dying from distracted pilots, wtf? Really.
Sometimes you regulate before people die.
In this case, the alarmingly distracted pilots last year who way overshot their destination point out how a distracted pilot could cause some serious problems -- up to and including death on a big scale.
I understand the pilots need to keep their brain engaged on something so they don't doze off, but they can't get so engaged as to lose track of what they're doing.
When was the last time we had an airliner NOT get people safely to its destination based solely on a Pilot being distracted?
Well, ultimately they did arrive safely, but there were those guys who overshot an entire city last year because they weren't paying attention.
That might have something to do with trying to crack down on the number of possible distractions in the cockpit. I mean, getting immersed in some piece of software and not realizing you're a half hour late in your descent and that you've overshot by 150 miles or so -- that's not the kind of thing passengers want happening.
What neatly solves the problem is Google's Chrome Frame. If all those organizations stuck on IE6 would install Chrome Frame, developers would have the option to not support IE6. Legacy applications could be fixed individually whenever the companies have the resources to devote to it. And when there are no more legacy applications, then you replace IE6 with another browser.
Respectfully, that's a naive solution proposed by someone who hasn't had any experience with entities of this size.
They're using IE 6 because they're big, conservative organization with a big stake in Microsoft technologies, and a huge user base that isn't tolerant of outages and isn't always accepting of change.
They're just simply *not* going to go through the hassles of deploying Chrome to several hundred thousand users, and deal with the training and support that will come with it.
In the real world, that solution would get laughed out of the room -- precisely because it fails to address the issues they have that are preventing them from updating from IE6.
I don't fault companies for not taking the time to fully replace all the cruft that ties them to IE6, but when there's a relatively simple solution that allows them to be good netizens without forcing other companies to bear the costs of their IT infrastructure choices, they really should be using it.
Ummmm... I was specifically referring to the government of Canada, who is most concerned by their own IT infrastructure. They have a vast amount of software that has been deployed across dozens of departments. They have a baseline system which works for most everything, and unfortunately they're not tied to IE6 as a result of it.
Like I said, the scope of fixing the issue in an organization that big is *way* bigger than you seem to realize.
Call in a consulting team, get a quote for reworking it. Doesnt that neatly solve the problem?
I think you're grossly mis-underestimating the size of the organizations which are still mandating IE 6 as a corporate standard.
For instance, the government of Canada, I believe, still uses IE 6 as a standard -- that represents something like 200,000+ users.
The scope of the project to re-certify that much software isn't a small consulting team, and it's sure as hell not a "Rent-A-Coder" fix as suggested in a sibling post. You're talking about vast quantities of commercial software which are already deployed to a large user base.
The problem becomes that IE 6 is deeply entrenched, and involved in a lot of tasks organizations aren't really willing to have too much down-time with. So, the status quo tends to become a factor.
What is the intrinsic importance of making it 2/3rds? Why not 3/4ths? 1/2? 5/8ths? What is the significance of 2/3? Seems arbitrary.
To a certain extent it is arbitrary in that when the township (or any such organization) was created, the charter and rules said that in order for certain measures to be approved, they need to be approved by at least two thirds of the voting body. I suspect most corporations and organization have these things spelled out in their charters.
Once you've established the threshold for these things, you're expected to obey them. Unfortunately, once an arbitrary number becomes law, then it becomes an entirely different matter -- hence, the niggling over the "arbitrary" number.
Star Trek had cloaking devices in the mid-80's, and it was almost certainly the inspiration for WC cloaked ships being unable to fire while cloaked.
Going the slightly pedantic route here, but I believe TOS first made reference to cloaked vessel -- so, that would be in 1966. They couldn't fire when cloaked either.
Wing Commander is way too late to the game for that one.
For about ten minutes before customers realized that they could still get porn using Safari and that iTunes gladly lets them transfer their porn videos to the iPhone.
You know, being among that (apparently small) group of people who only use my phone for phone calls... I am completely baffled as to why anyone would want porn on their phone. I just can't imagine where I'd be that porn on my phone would be what I most needed.
Then again, I don't text, surf the web, or any of half a dozen things with my cell phone that everyone else seems to want to do. So, I'm likely missing the point.:-P
Increasingly often, I can't remember if I'm reading a legitimate news source or the Onion.
Well, while Slashdot has always been entertaining, and occasionally even factual, I'm not sure it was ever a 'legitimate news source' -- that's part of its charm.
Of course, increasingly, mainstream news sounds like the Onion from time to time.:-P
In fact, unless it's a real car trip, I hate the thought of bringing up kids conditioned not to be away from a screen for a minute, being fed it nonstop.
True and noble as that statement might be... I'm sure I know several sets of parents who are just happy to have something that will shut up the little monsters.:-P
They're already conditioned to being always in front of some kind of screen -- the trip to Grandma's place is too late to try to sort that one out.
You do. Don't use the internet, or at least the advertisement-supported sites.
No, I like my current strategy -- if the site is willing to serve up the ads from the same server/domain that I'm visiting, and as long as it's not heavily animated or flash, I'll accept the ad.
If it comes from a 3rd party site, is delaying my browser loading, or trying to launch popups... it gets blocked. Back in the day when popups and popunders and all sorts of drive-by shit was being installed on peoples machines, we started looking for best practices to keep ourselves safe from it. Disabling half of the crap that advertisers want to use was one of them.
A site whose revenue model requires me to be running my browser in an insecure mode is hosed from the beginning, and thinks I owe them far more trust than they deserve. And, the advertisers are paying the sites to show ads -- they're not paying me. If advertisers would like to arrange to pay me to view their ads, maybe we can work something out.
I view it the same as the cable company deciding that I shouldn't be able to skip ads on my PVR. Just because you charged the advertiser to sell the ad, doesn't mean that confers any obligation on me to watch it.
...for making a Wing Commander reference (from the books, not the horrific movie that by coincidence has the same name) in the "department" byline for this story.
Wow, given the implied Scottish accent in "you-cannae-fire-while-cloaked", I actually would have thought that was a reference to Scotty from Star Trek.
Apparently, I'd have been wrong. Of course, one can argue that any Scottish accent in Sci Fi after Scotty is, by definition, an homage to the great engineer -- and, for purposes of discussion, I believe I will.:-P
Except that Western culture has watchdogs like the SEC that will bring massive fraud lawsuits against you when you try to cheat and steal.
Usually after it's been happening for years and the money is already gone and can't be retrieved.
Nobody was filing lawsuits over asset-backed paper commodities or those stupid "NINJA" mortgages until well after all of the money disappeared, and then they bailed out the big players who made it all happen in the first place.
And, for the record, *years* ago when I saw the first article in a news paper discussing "ninja" mortgages (No Income, No Job, Accepted) I've been ranting about that ever since. It wasn't until *after* the market collapse that people started to understand what I was saying, and for there to be more coverage of that particular bit of silliness in a way that actually says it's bad as opposed to a sign of the times. People just didn't seem to think it was a big deal.
I'm just not convinced that the SEC isn't far too often ending up as too little, too late, and trying to come up with some regulations for the *next* time -- which may or may not be enforceable.
Sometimes, it seems like the SEC is a bit of a paper tiger.
Slashdot Mirror
We are not talking about a new rule that has been established by the FAA.
The FAA has issued an InFO (Information for Operators) reminding that cockpit distractions are bad. The InFO is located here-- is in fact referenced by the second link in the summary.
In TFA (second link anyway), they make reference of the Sterile Cockpit Rule which they did impose in 1981.
Basically, the Sterile Cockpit Rule is that pilots shouldn't be doing anything but flying the plane when they're supposed to be flying the damned plane. Most especially, while they're supposed to be doing take-off and landing.
The FAA has issued a memo indicating that operators should stress to their pilots that they need to keep the number of personal electronics and other distractions in the cockpit to a minimum so they're not violating existing FAA rules.
This is more of a reminder that pilots shouldn't really have their laptops powered up while they're supposed to be piloting.
The timing of this likely coincides with the fact that in March:
I realize a lot of people think they can text and drive a car, but messing about with other stuff while you're supposed to be flying a plane is a big deal. The FAA is reiterating that stance.
Sorry to be so vocal (and pedantic about this), but having been around airlines as part of a previous job, it's something I kinda get a little protective of when people act like the incident this is all about wasn't really a potential disaster.
Cheers
You won't have to do it in RPN ... you will, however, have to adapt to HP making yet another random variant on the layout of the keyboard as HP plays "spin the wheel of keyboards". It won't be QWERTY, but it might be QVELTI.
I swear, I have never seen two HP keyboards with the buttons in the same place -- and, sometimes they have buttons I've never seen before. I mean, seriously, I've seen HP keyboards where the left-shift key was the size of a penny with a completely redundant "\" + "|" key to the right of it when there was already one of those in the usual place above the "enter". What the hell??
There really needs to be a law about making up new keyboards layouts for no good &*^%*(*&*%# reason.
Perspective? You want perspective? How about these tid-bits from the link I provided earlier ...
and
This isn't "missing an exit because you're having a conversation with a passenger". This is ignoring the fact that your GPS is telling you to turn right, your wife is telling you that you've missed the exit, and ignoring the police car with his lights flashing indicating that the road is closed ahead.
Then, to top it all off ...
This isn't a little "oops" we're talking about here. This isn't getting slightly distracted. This is a prolonged period of not being in control of a friggin' aircraft, and then doing some really dodgy things afterward which essentially wipes out the whole audit trail the system is supposed to have. So, we don't even really know WTF they were doing.
You're trying to find plausible reasons why this shouldn't be such a big deal -- maybe you should read a little more about what happened. Because, the people who are more closely associated with this are using much harsher terms than you seem to think applies.
The kids are just doing what the parents are doing.
Correcting my own typo ...
What, like having air traffic control or the airline's dispatcher repeatedly trying to hail you on the radio and by text messages to see why you're not responding like you should?
These guys weren't paying attention to the operation of the aircraft at all -- if you can't tell that someone is calling you on the radio, a buzzer wouldn't do a damned thing. Chances are, one had already gone off.
Actually, we're not talking about Minesweeper and Solitaire. Those got thrown in by the editor or the submitter -- neither TFA nor the referenced FAA statement specifically mention those.
This is an "InFO" (Information for Operators) -- basically it's a memo saying people should refrain from doing things which can distract them from the operation of the aircraft.
And, really, depending on the person and the context, I've seen Minesweeper become a totally engrossing activity.
Apple doesn't blame you. They don't care, because there's people lined up around the block buying their stuff.
The fact that some people don't like their technology is largely irrelevant. There's plenty of people who do like their tech, and they buy it.
People made more or less the same arguments about the iPod -- it's too restricted, it doesn't let me to some arcane feature that most people will never use or understand, it's got freakin' white headphones, it's going to get beaten by the Zune (ha!). The reality is Apple has sold some huge number of the damned things.
The people who didn't buy them? Apple hasn't exactly had their feelings hurt. The people who buy their stuff like the managed user experience and functionality (read: just works) -- the people who don't, want something else and a little more control over their device.
Sometimes you regulate before people die.
In this case, the alarmingly distracted pilots last year who way overshot their destination point out how a distracted pilot could cause some serious problems -- up to and including death on a big scale.
As I recall, they couldn't even be hailed because they simply weren't paying attention -- " During that time, air traffic controllers and the airline's dispatchers made numerous efforts to contact the plane by radio and through text messaging devices." If you're so distracted you can't be reached by radio in the cockpit, something needs to be remedied.
I understand the pilots need to keep their brain engaged on something so they don't doze off, but they can't get so engaged as to lose track of what they're doing.
Well, ultimately they did arrive safely, but there were those guys who overshot an entire city last year because they weren't paying attention.
That might have something to do with trying to crack down on the number of possible distractions in the cockpit. I mean, getting immersed in some piece of software and not realizing you're a half hour late in your descent and that you've overshot by 150 miles or so -- that's not the kind of thing passengers want happening.
I'm sure Novell is wondering the same fscking thing. :-P
Respectfully, that's a naive solution proposed by someone who hasn't had any experience with entities of this size.
They're using IE 6 because they're big, conservative organization with a big stake in Microsoft technologies, and a huge user base that isn't tolerant of outages and isn't always accepting of change.
They're just simply *not* going to go through the hassles of deploying Chrome to several hundred thousand users, and deal with the training and support that will come with it.
In the real world, that solution would get laughed out of the room -- precisely because it fails to address the issues they have that are preventing them from updating from IE6.
Ummmm ... I was specifically referring to the government of Canada, who is most concerned by their own IT infrastructure. They have a vast amount of software that has been deployed across dozens of departments. They have a baseline system which works for most everything, and unfortunately they're not tied to IE6 as a result of it.
Like I said, the scope of fixing the issue in an organization that big is *way* bigger than you seem to realize.
Actually, I think this is at least number 3.
Number two was the previous litigious incarnation, and number one was the original Santa Cruz Organization who actually made software.
This thing just won't die.
Cheers
I think you're grossly mis-underestimating the size of the organizations which are still mandating IE 6 as a corporate standard.
For instance, the government of Canada, I believe, still uses IE 6 as a standard -- that represents something like 200,000+ users.
The scope of the project to re-certify that much software isn't a small consulting team, and it's sure as hell not a "Rent-A-Coder" fix as suggested in a sibling post. You're talking about vast quantities of commercial software which are already deployed to a large user base.
The problem becomes that IE 6 is deeply entrenched, and involved in a lot of tasks organizations aren't really willing to have too much down-time with. So, the status quo tends to become a factor.
Actually, in this case where they apparently multiplied by 0.66, it was actually small values of 2/3.
I'm just saying. :-P
To a certain extent it is arbitrary in that when the township (or any such organization) was created, the charter and rules said that in order for certain measures to be approved, they need to be approved by at least two thirds of the voting body. I suspect most corporations and organization have these things spelled out in their charters.
Once you've established the threshold for these things, you're expected to obey them. Unfortunately, once an arbitrary number becomes law, then it becomes an entirely different matter -- hence, the niggling over the "arbitrary" number.
Cheers
Going the slightly pedantic route here, but I believe TOS first made reference to cloaked vessel -- so, that would be in 1966. They couldn't fire when cloaked either.
Wing Commander is way too late to the game for that one.
No, now get off of my fucking lawn. :-P
You know, being among that (apparently small) group of people who only use my phone for phone calls ... I am completely baffled as to why anyone would want porn on their phone. I just can't imagine where I'd be that porn on my phone would be what I most needed.
Then again, I don't text, surf the web, or any of half a dozen things with my cell phone that everyone else seems to want to do. So, I'm likely missing the point. :-P
Cheers
Well, while Slashdot has always been entertaining, and occasionally even factual, I'm not sure it was ever a 'legitimate news source' -- that's part of its charm.
Of course, increasingly, mainstream news sounds like the Onion from time to time. :-P
Cheers
True and noble as that statement might be ... I'm sure I know several sets of parents who are just happy to have something that will shut up the little monsters. :-P
They're already conditioned to being always in front of some kind of screen -- the trip to Grandma's place is too late to try to sort that one out.
Cheer
No, I like my current strategy -- if the site is willing to serve up the ads from the same server/domain that I'm visiting, and as long as it's not heavily animated or flash, I'll accept the ad.
If it comes from a 3rd party site, is delaying my browser loading, or trying to launch popups ... it gets blocked. Back in the day when popups and popunders and all sorts of drive-by shit was being installed on peoples machines, we started looking for best practices to keep ourselves safe from it. Disabling half of the crap that advertisers want to use was one of them.
A site whose revenue model requires me to be running my browser in an insecure mode is hosed from the beginning, and thinks I owe them far more trust than they deserve. And, the advertisers are paying the sites to show ads -- they're not paying me. If advertisers would like to arrange to pay me to view their ads, maybe we can work something out.
I view it the same as the cable company deciding that I shouldn't be able to skip ads on my PVR. Just because you charged the advertiser to sell the ad, doesn't mean that confers any obligation on me to watch it.
Cheers
Wow, given the implied Scottish accent in "you-cannae-fire-while-cloaked", I actually would have thought that was a reference to Scotty from Star Trek.
Apparently, I'd have been wrong. Of course, one can argue that any Scottish accent in Sci Fi after Scotty is, by definition, an homage to the great engineer -- and, for purposes of discussion, I believe I will. :-P
Cheers
Usually after it's been happening for years and the money is already gone and can't be retrieved.
Nobody was filing lawsuits over asset-backed paper commodities or those stupid "NINJA" mortgages until well after all of the money disappeared, and then they bailed out the big players who made it all happen in the first place.
And, for the record, *years* ago when I saw the first article in a news paper discussing "ninja" mortgages (No Income, No Job, Accepted) I've been ranting about that ever since. It wasn't until *after* the market collapse that people started to understand what I was saying, and for there to be more coverage of that particular bit of silliness in a way that actually says it's bad as opposed to a sign of the times. People just didn't seem to think it was a big deal.
I'm just not convinced that the SEC isn't far too often ending up as too little, too late, and trying to come up with some regulations for the *next* time -- which may or may not be enforceable.
Sometimes, it seems like the SEC is a bit of a paper tiger.
No, it was merely a bad attempt at humor. :-P
Cheers