If you have switched to SSD for either personal or business use, do you follow the recommendation here that spinning-disk media be used as backup as well?
First, anything stored on any kind of drive should be backed up if you care about it.
Second, if you do backup, who backs up to SSD? You don't need frequent fast random-access on backups, and SSD is about the most expensive storage technology around per-GB. Anybody doing bulk storage is going to be doing it on either hard disks, tape, or something optical.
So, if you're backing your data up, you'll be backing it up to something safe most likely.
Of course, this does bring up the need for the ability to verify the integrity of your data at-rest, and right now I'd say ZFS/btrfs are the best way of accomplishing this. You could also do hashing above the filesystem layer, but that requires a lot of overhead if your files change frequently. If your files don't change much than something like tripwire would be fine. You'd want to run that more often than you rotate your backup media so that you don't discard the last-known-good version of anything.
The universe is all of space and time. We have not observed/measured/etc. most of the universe yet to determine its shape. The parts of the universe we have observed are flat. Until we observe more of the universe, we will not know if the universe is flat or not.
Unless they say otherwise, if you hear physicists talking about the "Universe" they're probably talking about the observable universe.
The real mystery though is how the universe could be very nearly flat (without being exactly flat). Such "fine tuning" is clear evidence we're missing something quite fundamental. But then, dark energy already tells us that.
I agree. An observably flat universe is a huge coincidence if there is some force that composes half the mass-energy in the universe that is trying to rip the entire thing apart. Either that is an illusion, or some mechanism forces it to be perfectly balanced out by the other half of the mass-energy of the universe which we think exists but haven't been able to observe. Or, we just happen to be living in the one moment in time where dominance is switching from one to the other, but that seems like quite a coincidence as well.
I'd be shocked that something like this wouldn't result in a contempt finding on the spot.
Then you haven't been following the Prenda case at all.
I haven't followed it closely, but I cannot find any evidence that John Steel called a judge a moron in a courtroom. I'm not saying it didn't happen, but I'd say the burden of proof lies with whoever is making the claim that they did.
Yes. So - let's have the video. In one case, the video proves me wrong. In the next case, the video proves me wrong again. In the next case, I see the evidence that "my side" is right. And, that's the way it should be.
A cop's word should carry no more weight than your word or mine in a court of law. The cop should have to PROVE HIS CASE.
Couldn't agree more. In a day where video is so cheap, we shouldn't have to rely on eyewitness testimony.
Have the cops wear bodycams. When somebody aims a gun at them it will mean that their shooting back will be immediately exonerated and there won't be any trouble with them going back into duty. When somebody abuses a prisoner, they'll go to jail. The public's confidence in the police will be restored, and when there is a shooting instead of rioting everybody will say, "hey, let's just wait for the video before jumping to conclusions since abuse is so rare now and police departments can be trusted to punish anybody who abuses their power." In the absence of information, people will assume the worst.
That being said, American neoconservatives and "libertarians" are both far right, by an objective, international standard.
Part of the problem is that "libertarian" doesn't really have a consistent meaning. Some people consider corporations are people and nobody should tell them they can't pollute libertarian. Others believe that the true libertarian approach would be to not recognize the existence of corporations at all, and if a corporation messes up your view of the river you should just be able to sue anybody who owned stock in it. The first would be fairly neoconservative, the latter looks more like something you'd hear at Occupy Wallstreet.
My problem with libertarianism is that an awful lot of them look a lot more like neoconservatives under another name, and even in the latter sense which I find more sympathy with it still doesn't deal well with a lot of social issues, like the guy born mentally retarded.
I think the challenge lies with socialism. It is difficult to have socialism without a fair bit of authoritarianism.
As soon as you pay for somebody's diabetes, you start to care about what they're eating. My main concern with that is that the kinds of restrictions that everybody wants to impose are based on conventional wisdom but rarely have any kind of serious clinical outcomes behind them. Granted, that is pretty hard to measure when it comes to diet, but if we're going to tell people what they can/can't eat on the basis that we don't want to pay for their health problems, then we should have pretty strong evidence that they will actually have health problems.
If you don't have socialism then you can be more minimal in your regulation, since people will tend to look after their own stuff and if for whatever reason they can't, well, sucks to be them I guess is the libertarian motto. I tend to lean libertarian except where it conflicts with socialism. If you're going to interfere with somebody's life you ought to have a really good reason for it, but taking care of somebody who for whatever reason is too weak/dumb/whatever to take care of themselves is a good reason.
Then instead of people complaining that the state is dictating consolidation, the parents and tax payers in the city will have to face the facts about how much spending is appropriate in a town with 25 children, but at least they will have to come to grips with the facts, and they will have to make a decision made by them and their neighbors instead of the state government in Topeka.
The only problem with this logic is that while they and their neighbors make those decisions, it is their kids who largely have to live with the outcome of those decisions. I don't think that education should be left up to the locality. There is just FAR too much disparity in incomes to make that practical.
The problem isn't the 99.99%, but the.01% where the right thing has to be done quickly. Take for example the small tunnel near me. It's a 4 lane, 2 in each direction. While being repaired it's down to a two lane, with cones all over telling you to move into the other direction lane to proceed. Cops all over directing traffic, really it's a pretty chaotic situation with no defined way to navigate it other than taking in what is going on and doing the right thing. No two cops direct traffic the same way, no two construction zones are set up the same way. Each one is a learn as you go, something humans excel at even if it's a 16 year old kid who just got their license. This is the Achilles heel of automated driving and we're quite a number of years away from sorting it all out.
Certainly this is a problem in a hybrid system. However, I'd think that the real goal of an automated driving system would be one where everything is automated. There wouldn't be any lines, or any cones, or any guys standing around with signs. If they don't want vehicles on one side of the tunnel, they'd just tell the control system and there wouldn't be any cars on that side of the tunnel. Routing would take into account reduced capacity and cars would make very long detours to reduce the load so that everybody gets where they're going faster than having huge backups. Cars would alternate merge over a span of miles leading up to the tunnel so that there wouldn't be much of a slowdown either.
Certainly that won't happen in the short term, but that seems like where all of this is going to end up, and you don't really get most of the benefits of automation until you get there. You can't have intersections without traffic lights where all traffic just interleaves if some of the drivers are human.
There's only one: you have very little RAM. Then you may well need to use some swap to get a modern browser running well enough to hit newegg or eBay and buy some RAM.
No, not using swap means less memory for applications, buffers and caching of persistent storage. This means degraded performance.
I understand the theoretical reasons for this, and tend to agree with them.
However, in practice I've found that swap on linux tends to be pretty lousy all around. A big problem is that lots of applications do caching and such and like to expand this to the space available, often assuming they're the only thing running. I'm utterly amazed at just how much RAM chromium manages to use. I don't want it swapping out half the system to my slow swap partition when it can just re-fetch a page over my 50Mbps connection. I have my chrome disk cache on a small tmpfs for the same reason - it actually slows the browser down when it is waiting for a busy hard drive as the internet is generally much faster (my disk utilization tends to be high).
They really need to add some system calls to linux to facilitate things like caching. An application should be able to allocate memory for use as a cache. At any time the kernel would be free to de-allocate it, and obviously the application will need to handle this case. This would allow applications to more aggressively use memory, but at the same time the OS could manage resources more effectively.
Treaty proponent: “I have great respect for the critics, many of whom have shown great leadership on progressive causes, and I look forward to a continued dialogue with members of Congress based on facts and substance,” Froman told POLITICO.
Just, don't talk about any of the facts or substance in public, or in private, or even take them out of the room with you...
For example, if you say you're going to increase the duty on X 6 months out, then those with large amounts of capital simply buy and import a lot of X and store it, gaining a price advantage over those without large amounts of capital and depriving the government of revenue that means it may have to increase taxes or do other things that hit the poorer more.
A couple of issues I have with this line of argument:
1. Suppose the government charges 6% duty today and is thinking about increasing it to 20% duty in six months. If there were no agreement the duty would be 6% indefinitely. If a company was planning on paying 6% in six months, and instead pays 6% today, that actually gives the government MORE revenue compared to what it would have been without the trade agreement. It does provide less revenue than the trade agreement would provide, but presumably the government's tariff schedule worked before the agreement.
2. I don't think that governments should really be depending on tariffs as a source of revenue, per se. Tariffs should really be more about economic inequities, such as workers in foreign countries having fewer social benefits and therefore a lower cost base, or whatever. In most cases the government shouldn't be relying on them to balance the budget.
3. Just how often will tariffs be going up? I thought the reasons all the big corporations liked these agreements was that it tended to lower costs for them.
Yeah, quite a few things on your list have bothered me for a long time. Repo drives me nuts - as far as I can tell there is no real way to reproduce a source tree reliably. With git I can pick any commit and check it out - I just need to know one hash to reproduce the entire state of the tree. With Repo there isn't an equivalent - I think you can check out by branch, and I'm not even sure if you can do it by tag, so getting anything but the latest live code is a mess.
I don't think it should necessarily be Debian/ChromeOS with a different UI. I can buy that Android is a different beast. However, there is so much they've just half-baked themselves that simply doesn't need to be this way.
From what I remember about what happened 2 years ago, their scheme went something like this:..
Judge Pregerson appears to have given a half-decent summary, that was quite succinct in the number of words spoken, and somewhat, less, succinct in the time taken to speak them.:)
I'd be interested in more details around this. The document you cited doesn't actually speak to this. It simply says that the plaintiff wanted the judge to recuse themselves for doing their job. It doesn't actually make any mention of anything nearly so contemptuous as calling a district judge a moron in a courtroom. I'd be shocked that something like this wouldn't result in a contempt finding on the spot.
Or, the question I was asking and you ducked was: In what way can you change the law and still avoid those harms?
I'm actually not convinced that it is possible to do so in a democratic society purely governed by the rule of law. Many of the most harmful issues in society are the result of people completely complying with the law, and always staying one step ahead of it.
I can look at a big company paying zero taxes and say that they're doing something wrong. I can't come up with a robust law that would result in them paying taxes. I don't think anybody else can, unless you allow the law to be changed about 47 times per year to stay ahead, and then that becomes a massive burden on everybody else who just runs a mom and pop shop.
The simplest solution is to take the CEO of some company that doesn't pay taxes but "should" (for some arbitrary definition of "should"), declare that they've perfectly followed the law, lock them up for 10 years, and announce that you'll do the same to anybody else who perfectly follows the law in an abusive manner. That then creates a huge amount of uncertainty around whether a particular course of action is compliant or not, and then companies have to err on the side of over-compliance instead of following the letter of the law with all its loopholes.
But, such a society will be only nice to live in as long as the people in charge uphold the public good. Since there is no rule of law, this is likely to vary considerably. This is why democracies tend to be awful, but not nearly as awful as most non-democracies.:)
People are not tabla rasa. Evolution has baked in all kinds of assumptions.
Absolutely true. Kids learn to not touch the stove after burning themselves once. They were born with some kind of sense that pain is bad and to be avoided.
I think that if you could figure out the motivation bit, that would be half the battle.
And people aren't universally good at the motivation bit either. They buy lottery tickets, smoke, fail to estimate risk in a sane manner, and do all kinds of dumb stuff where the instincts they were born with basically reduce their chances of having surviving progeny.
I once was driving through Baltimore and wanted to grab some lunch. I saw a sign for the "Baltimore Travel Center." Hey, sounds like a rest stop, right?
More like Greyhound bus terminal. The neighboorhood surrounding it looked like it should have its photo in the wikipedia entry for "Urban Blight." And that was in broad daylight - I couldn't imagine driving around that area at night. There was trash everywhere - parking lot, inside, etc. The works. I've lived in major cities and downtown doesn't bother me at all in most of them.
We just take people who live in these neighborhoods and try to pretend that they don't exist. Then we act indignant when they lash out. They don't feel like they're a part of society, so they don't act the part either.
We already know how the current companies perform. And its generally not great.
Meh. At my workplace we use monitors/etc when we ship stuff where handling matters. If handling goes out of spec, then we'll have some words with the courier, and have procurement bring up that nice exclusive agreement we made that sends millions per year in business their way.
There's a reason the laws built up the way they did. You want to fix them, you have my blessing.
Nah, I'll leave that to you.
That was my whole point. If you want the law to be right, go ahead and fix it. Everybody else is just going to ignore it. They don't care if the law is right or not, because it doesn't really matter if nobody enforces it.
It is just too painful to fix the law. Too many entrenched interests are going to block you when you try. People realize they don't actually have to play that game, and so they don't. We end up with a society where EVERYBODY breaks the law daily as a result.
I don't think it is a good thing, but until it is easier to fix, nobody is going to bother.
Sure, but if somebody did operate an airliner in this manner, I imagine many other components would be failing, creating numerous hazardous conditions.
Maintenance schedules on big things like airliners aren't just created arbitrarily. If the manual says to inspect the turbine blades every n hours then somebody probably did a study that shows that at x% of n hours you start to get measurable deterioration. If they could make the intervals longer they would - it would be a major selling point for the plane.
Sure, this software bug should be fixed, but in general if you're going to allow companies to ignore the manufacturer's guidelines, then you can't really hold the manufacturer responsible for failure.
Agreed, taking off without charts is just dumb. I was more concerned about the iPad failing mid-flight.
It still isn't a great situation. With comms you can always bug ATC to basically read you the info you need to create your own approach charts and such, and much of the info on charts is to reduce the load on communications anyway which is less of a concern in an emergency situation. However, it still creates an "emergency" in a situation where there wouldn't otherwise be one. Granted, it probably wouldn't be a full-on emergency most likely but an airliner full off passengers in instrument meteorological conditions without charts needs special handling.
If you lost comms AND charts that would get messier. I imagine that the FMS probably has the more essential data in it as well. Certainly you could navigate to an airport in visual conditions and land there. If the FMS had frequencies in it you could also do an ILS approach I imagine, but it would make it harder to be certain you're following published procedures properly. The FMS is part of the avionics and is certified to a higher standard than an EFB.
Yup. Wasn't really disputing your overall point. I think the Russian designs are praiseworthy for their simplicity/stability. Sometimes their QC fails a bit, but the fact that these haven't resulted in casualties speaks to the robustness of the design. NASA is moving towards simpler designs themselves.
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If you have switched to SSD for either personal or business use, do you follow the recommendation here that spinning-disk media be used as backup as well?
First, anything stored on any kind of drive should be backed up if you care about it.
Second, if you do backup, who backs up to SSD? You don't need frequent fast random-access on backups, and SSD is about the most expensive storage technology around per-GB. Anybody doing bulk storage is going to be doing it on either hard disks, tape, or something optical.
So, if you're backing your data up, you'll be backing it up to something safe most likely.
Of course, this does bring up the need for the ability to verify the integrity of your data at-rest, and right now I'd say ZFS/btrfs are the best way of accomplishing this. You could also do hashing above the filesystem layer, but that requires a lot of overhead if your files change frequently. If your files don't change much than something like tripwire would be fine. You'd want to run that more often than you rotate your backup media so that you don't discard the last-known-good version of anything.
The universe is all of space and time. We have not observed/measured/etc. most of the universe yet to determine its shape. The parts of the universe we have observed are flat. Until we observe more of the universe, we will not know if the universe is flat or not.
Unless they say otherwise, if you hear physicists talking about the "Universe" they're probably talking about the observable universe.
The real mystery though is how the universe could be very nearly flat (without being exactly flat). Such "fine tuning" is clear evidence we're missing something quite fundamental. But then, dark energy already tells us that.
I agree. An observably flat universe is a huge coincidence if there is some force that composes half the mass-energy in the universe that is trying to rip the entire thing apart. Either that is an illusion, or some mechanism forces it to be perfectly balanced out by the other half of the mass-energy of the universe which we think exists but haven't been able to observe. Or, we just happen to be living in the one moment in time where dominance is switching from one to the other, but that seems like quite a coincidence as well.
I'd be shocked that something like this wouldn't result in a contempt finding on the spot.
Then you haven't been following the Prenda case at all.
I haven't followed it closely, but I cannot find any evidence that John Steel called a judge a moron in a courtroom. I'm not saying it didn't happen, but I'd say the burden of proof lies with whoever is making the claim that they did.
Yes. So - let's have the video. In one case, the video proves me wrong. In the next case, the video proves me wrong again. In the next case, I see the evidence that "my side" is right. And, that's the way it should be.
A cop's word should carry no more weight than your word or mine in a court of law. The cop should have to PROVE HIS CASE.
Couldn't agree more. In a day where video is so cheap, we shouldn't have to rely on eyewitness testimony.
Have the cops wear bodycams. When somebody aims a gun at them it will mean that their shooting back will be immediately exonerated and there won't be any trouble with them going back into duty. When somebody abuses a prisoner, they'll go to jail. The public's confidence in the police will be restored, and when there is a shooting instead of rioting everybody will say, "hey, let's just wait for the video before jumping to conclusions since abuse is so rare now and police departments can be trusted to punish anybody who abuses their power." In the absence of information, people will assume the worst.
That being said, American neoconservatives and "libertarians" are both far right, by an objective, international standard.
Part of the problem is that "libertarian" doesn't really have a consistent meaning. Some people consider corporations are people and nobody should tell them they can't pollute libertarian. Others believe that the true libertarian approach would be to not recognize the existence of corporations at all, and if a corporation messes up your view of the river you should just be able to sue anybody who owned stock in it. The first would be fairly neoconservative, the latter looks more like something you'd hear at Occupy Wallstreet.
My problem with libertarianism is that an awful lot of them look a lot more like neoconservatives under another name, and even in the latter sense which I find more sympathy with it still doesn't deal well with a lot of social issues, like the guy born mentally retarded.
I think the challenge lies with socialism. It is difficult to have socialism without a fair bit of authoritarianism.
As soon as you pay for somebody's diabetes, you start to care about what they're eating. My main concern with that is that the kinds of restrictions that everybody wants to impose are based on conventional wisdom but rarely have any kind of serious clinical outcomes behind them. Granted, that is pretty hard to measure when it comes to diet, but if we're going to tell people what they can/can't eat on the basis that we don't want to pay for their health problems, then we should have pretty strong evidence that they will actually have health problems.
If you don't have socialism then you can be more minimal in your regulation, since people will tend to look after their own stuff and if for whatever reason they can't, well, sucks to be them I guess is the libertarian motto. I tend to lean libertarian except where it conflicts with socialism. If you're going to interfere with somebody's life you ought to have a really good reason for it, but taking care of somebody who for whatever reason is too weak/dumb/whatever to take care of themselves is a good reason.
Then instead of people complaining that the state is dictating consolidation, the parents and tax payers in the city will have to face the facts about how much spending is appropriate in a town with 25 children, but at least they will have to come to grips with the facts, and they will have to make a decision made by them and their neighbors instead of the state government in Topeka.
The only problem with this logic is that while they and their neighbors make those decisions, it is their kids who largely have to live with the outcome of those decisions. I don't think that education should be left up to the locality. There is just FAR too much disparity in incomes to make that practical.
The problem isn't the 99.99%, but the .01% where the right thing has to be done quickly. Take for example the small tunnel near me. It's a 4 lane, 2 in each direction. While being repaired it's down to a two lane, with cones all over telling you to move into the other direction lane to proceed. Cops all over directing traffic, really it's a pretty chaotic situation with no defined way to navigate it other than taking in what is going on and doing the right thing. No two cops direct traffic the same way, no two construction zones are set up the same way. Each one is a learn as you go, something humans excel at even if it's a 16 year old kid who just got their license. This is the Achilles heel of automated driving and we're quite a number of years away from sorting it all out.
Certainly this is a problem in a hybrid system. However, I'd think that the real goal of an automated driving system would be one where everything is automated. There wouldn't be any lines, or any cones, or any guys standing around with signs. If they don't want vehicles on one side of the tunnel, they'd just tell the control system and there wouldn't be any cars on that side of the tunnel. Routing would take into account reduced capacity and cars would make very long detours to reduce the load so that everybody gets where they're going faster than having huge backups. Cars would alternate merge over a span of miles leading up to the tunnel so that there wouldn't be much of a slowdown either.
Certainly that won't happen in the short term, but that seems like where all of this is going to end up, and you don't really get most of the benefits of automation until you get there. You can't have intersections without traffic lights where all traffic just interleaves if some of the drivers are human.
There's only one: you have very little RAM. Then you may well need to use some swap to get a modern browser running well enough to hit newegg or eBay and buy some RAM.
No, not using swap means less memory for applications, buffers and caching of persistent storage. This means degraded performance.
I understand the theoretical reasons for this, and tend to agree with them.
However, in practice I've found that swap on linux tends to be pretty lousy all around. A big problem is that lots of applications do caching and such and like to expand this to the space available, often assuming they're the only thing running. I'm utterly amazed at just how much RAM chromium manages to use. I don't want it swapping out half the system to my slow swap partition when it can just re-fetch a page over my 50Mbps connection. I have my chrome disk cache on a small tmpfs for the same reason - it actually slows the browser down when it is waiting for a busy hard drive as the internet is generally much faster (my disk utilization tends to be high).
They really need to add some system calls to linux to facilitate things like caching. An application should be able to allocate memory for use as a cache. At any time the kernel would be free to de-allocate it, and obviously the application will need to handle this case. This would allow applications to more aggressively use memory, but at the same time the OS could manage resources more effectively.
http://arstechnica.com/securit...
Certainly they aren't fixing all of the issues.
we have not seem massive Android botnets or waves of spam from infected phones
Seems like it works as well as my tiger repellent stone then.
Treaty proponent: “I have great respect for the critics, many of whom have shown great leadership on progressive causes, and I look forward to a continued dialogue with members of Congress based on facts and substance,” Froman told POLITICO.
Just, don't talk about any of the facts or substance in public, or in private, or even take them out of the room with you...
For example, if you say you're going to increase the duty on X 6 months out, then those with large amounts of capital simply buy and import a lot of X and store it, gaining a price advantage over those without large amounts of capital and depriving the government of revenue that means it may have to increase taxes or do other things that hit the poorer more.
A couple of issues I have with this line of argument:
1. Suppose the government charges 6% duty today and is thinking about increasing it to 20% duty in six months. If there were no agreement the duty would be 6% indefinitely. If a company was planning on paying 6% in six months, and instead pays 6% today, that actually gives the government MORE revenue compared to what it would have been without the trade agreement. It does provide less revenue than the trade agreement would provide, but presumably the government's tariff schedule worked before the agreement.
2. I don't think that governments should really be depending on tariffs as a source of revenue, per se. Tariffs should really be more about economic inequities, such as workers in foreign countries having fewer social benefits and therefore a lower cost base, or whatever. In most cases the government shouldn't be relying on them to balance the budget.
3. Just how often will tariffs be going up? I thought the reasons all the big corporations liked these agreements was that it tended to lower costs for them.
Yeah, quite a few things on your list have bothered me for a long time. Repo drives me nuts - as far as I can tell there is no real way to reproduce a source tree reliably. With git I can pick any commit and check it out - I just need to know one hash to reproduce the entire state of the tree. With Repo there isn't an equivalent - I think you can check out by branch, and I'm not even sure if you can do it by tag, so getting anything but the latest live code is a mess.
I don't think it should necessarily be Debian/ChromeOS with a different UI. I can buy that Android is a different beast. However, there is so much they've just half-baked themselves that simply doesn't need to be this way.
Update Play to the latest version and you will get security updates.
Only for stuff implemented in Google Play Services. That isn't the entire OS.
From what I remember about what happened 2 years ago, their scheme went something like this:..
Judge Pregerson appears to have given a half-decent summary, that was quite succinct in the number of words spoken, and somewhat, less, succinct in the time taken to speak them. :)
More to the point, did you know that Prendateer John Steel already tried calling a district judge a moron and laughing in his face in his own courtroom, with predictable results.
I'd be interested in more details around this. The document you cited doesn't actually speak to this. It simply says that the plaintiff wanted the judge to recuse themselves for doing their job. It doesn't actually make any mention of anything nearly so contemptuous as calling a district judge a moron in a courtroom. I'd be shocked that something like this wouldn't result in a contempt finding on the spot.
Or, the question I was asking and you ducked was: In what way can you change the law and still avoid those harms?
I'm actually not convinced that it is possible to do so in a democratic society purely governed by the rule of law. Many of the most harmful issues in society are the result of people completely complying with the law, and always staying one step ahead of it.
I can look at a big company paying zero taxes and say that they're doing something wrong. I can't come up with a robust law that would result in them paying taxes. I don't think anybody else can, unless you allow the law to be changed about 47 times per year to stay ahead, and then that becomes a massive burden on everybody else who just runs a mom and pop shop.
The simplest solution is to take the CEO of some company that doesn't pay taxes but "should" (for some arbitrary definition of "should"), declare that they've perfectly followed the law, lock them up for 10 years, and announce that you'll do the same to anybody else who perfectly follows the law in an abusive manner. That then creates a huge amount of uncertainty around whether a particular course of action is compliant or not, and then companies have to err on the side of over-compliance instead of following the letter of the law with all its loopholes.
But, such a society will be only nice to live in as long as the people in charge uphold the public good. Since there is no rule of law, this is likely to vary considerably. This is why democracies tend to be awful, but not nearly as awful as most non-democracies. :)
People are not tabla rasa. Evolution has baked in all kinds of assumptions.
Absolutely true. Kids learn to not touch the stove after burning themselves once. They were born with some kind of sense that pain is bad and to be avoided.
I think that if you could figure out the motivation bit, that would be half the battle.
And people aren't universally good at the motivation bit either. They buy lottery tickets, smoke, fail to estimate risk in a sane manner, and do all kinds of dumb stuff where the instincts they were born with basically reduce their chances of having surviving progeny.
I once was driving through Baltimore and wanted to grab some lunch. I saw a sign for the "Baltimore Travel Center." Hey, sounds like a rest stop, right?
More like Greyhound bus terminal. The neighboorhood surrounding it looked like it should have its photo in the wikipedia entry for "Urban Blight." And that was in broad daylight - I couldn't imagine driving around that area at night. There was trash everywhere - parking lot, inside, etc. The works. I've lived in major cities and downtown doesn't bother me at all in most of them.
We just take people who live in these neighborhoods and try to pretend that they don't exist. Then we act indignant when they lash out. They don't feel like they're a part of society, so they don't act the part either.
I'll just leave this here... DHL in practice.
We already know how the current companies perform. And its generally not great.
Meh. At my workplace we use monitors/etc when we ship stuff where handling matters. If handling goes out of spec, then we'll have some words with the courier, and have procurement bring up that nice exclusive agreement we made that sends millions per year in business their way.
There's a reason the laws built up the way they did. You want to fix them, you have my blessing.
Nah, I'll leave that to you.
That was my whole point. If you want the law to be right, go ahead and fix it. Everybody else is just going to ignore it. They don't care if the law is right or not, because it doesn't really matter if nobody enforces it.
It is just too painful to fix the law. Too many entrenched interests are going to block you when you try. People realize they don't actually have to play that game, and so they don't. We end up with a society where EVERYBODY breaks the law daily as a result.
I don't think it is a good thing, but until it is easier to fix, nobody is going to bother.
Sure, but if somebody did operate an airliner in this manner, I imagine many other components would be failing, creating numerous hazardous conditions.
Maintenance schedules on big things like airliners aren't just created arbitrarily. If the manual says to inspect the turbine blades every n hours then somebody probably did a study that shows that at x% of n hours you start to get measurable deterioration. If they could make the intervals longer they would - it would be a major selling point for the plane.
Sure, this software bug should be fixed, but in general if you're going to allow companies to ignore the manufacturer's guidelines, then you can't really hold the manufacturer responsible for failure.
Agreed, taking off without charts is just dumb. I was more concerned about the iPad failing mid-flight.
It still isn't a great situation. With comms you can always bug ATC to basically read you the info you need to create your own approach charts and such, and much of the info on charts is to reduce the load on communications anyway which is less of a concern in an emergency situation. However, it still creates an "emergency" in a situation where there wouldn't otherwise be one. Granted, it probably wouldn't be a full-on emergency most likely but an airliner full off passengers in instrument meteorological conditions without charts needs special handling.
If you lost comms AND charts that would get messier. I imagine that the FMS probably has the more essential data in it as well. Certainly you could navigate to an airport in visual conditions and land there. If the FMS had frequencies in it you could also do an ILS approach I imagine, but it would make it harder to be certain you're following published procedures properly. The FMS is part of the avionics and is certified to a higher standard than an EFB.
Yup. Wasn't really disputing your overall point. I think the Russian designs are praiseworthy for their simplicity/stability. Sometimes their QC fails a bit, but the fact that these haven't resulted in casualties speaks to the robustness of the design. NASA is moving towards simpler designs themselves.