It has been well over twenty years, and probably closer to thirty years or more, since enough data had been amassed to prove conclusively that women were SAFER pilots than men.
At the time, no one knew why. I suspect no one knows now. I saw one writer speculate, very carefully, that women MIGHT be a bit more risk-averse than men, to the point that they MIGHT make the determination that "this is getting just a bit too interesting for my taste" a bit sooner than a man might, exercise the Captain's prerogative to choose the alternate plan, a bit sooner than a man might.
A lot of pilot training is teaching judgment and caution and knowing how to recognize that a situation is getting a bit too "interesting", for a suitable definition of "interesting".
Boeing has been building heavy airplanes for a long time. They know how to do it, and they know how to do it safely.
If memory serves me, the last airplane Boeing built that required that kind of planning and in-flight fuel management (and hence a flight engineer in the cockpit) was the 747.
This sounds like something went suddenly, badly wrong.
And: I have friends who are former, current, and future pilots, including airline pilots. I get this really sick feeling whenever I hear about something like this.
The problem with your point of view is that the contractors themselves committed a serious Federal crime when they put that classified information onto computers that were accessible from the outside world.
Someone is going to have to do a lot of explaining on all this.
Unfortunately, we will probably never hear the full story.
That was not my experience when I was working in Ada.
I looked carefully at the generated object code, because of exactly those concerns. The compilers I used all generated good, reasonable object code for what we were doing.
I believe it was Tony Hoare who opined, back in the late Jurassic Period, that running with checks enabled during checkout and turning them off for production was akin to wearing your life jacket in the harbor and then taking it off when you ventured out to open ocean.
While SOME people do in fact learn, as you suggest, not all of them do. I saw too much sloppiness in production code at Nortel Networks - I can say that because the company is now dead and gone - to be optimistic about people's ability to learn.
However, in this particular case, the asshole was not the worker, but rather the management.
The guy had a very serious health episode, was in hospital, went home, and asked the company to let him cut back on his hours while he recovered. This was an eminently reasonable request, under the circumstances, and a reasonable manager would not have hesitated for a moment before granting it.
However, Pimlico Plumbers was not a reasonable manager. Instead of allowing him to cut back on his hours, and continue recovering, Pimlico "fired" him and demanded he return the mandatory company uniforms and company truck.
I finally made the decision to drag myself kicking and screaming into the DSLR world when I learned that Nikon had discontinued almost all of their film SLRs. The only ones left in the film SLR line were the absolute most basic student SLR and the absolute top-end pro SLR.
It was easy to settle on a Nikon. A short period of research showed that Nikon and Canon were shooting it out for First and Second, and everyone else was well back in the pack. More careful investigation showed me, essentially, that Canon made professional DSLRs and consumer DSLRs, while Nikon made professional DSLRs for all levels of professional, including consumers who were still learning what a professional camera was. A bit more study showed me that Nikon's entire line at the time made sense, from bottom to top [*], and the D80 and D300 were the two closest matches for what I needed/wanted.
I have been very satisfied with my D80.
[*] There was one camera in the Nikon DSLR line, toward the top, I don't remember which model, that was an obvious outlier from the progression. A bit more study explained it: that model was specifically optimized for high-speed active sports photography, which is a horse of a different color.
This is the THIRD time they've done it. From the article: "This incident marks the third time in the past year when Microsoft has mistakenly updated v1703 users to v1709. It happened before in November 2017 and January 2018 when Patch Tuesday security updates accidentally upgraded some users."
Goldfinger's Rule: "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action."
Claiming that this is just another bug... Sorry, Elmo, that dog just won't hunt.
Goldfinger's Rule, as chronicled by I. Fleming, tells us that "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action."
From the article: "This incident marks the third time in the past year when Microsoft has mistakenly updated v1703 users to v1709. It happened before in November 2017 and January 2018 when Patch Tuesday security updates accidentally upgraded some users."
In 1981, I worked a summer job at Charter Information Corp. in Austin TX. They'd recently moved to Austin from Woburn MA. They were a small data processing service bureau, and ran a Xerox Sigma 6 computer.
In Massachusetts, they'd run a duct, with a valve, from the waste heat outflow from the Sigma 6 cooling system to their building HVAC ducts. They had NEVER had to light their oil burner for office heat in the winter: waste heat from the Sigma 6 was more than adequate to keep their offices quite comfortable.
If that is truly the case, then it is the mark of a lousy AI programmer.
It has been known, and taught, for literally decades that an AI program has to be able to explain to its human programmers HOW or WHY it came to a particular conclusion or chose a particular course of action. This started with medical work: the AI has to be able to tell the doctors WHY it thinks the patient has this particular condition, and not that one, or why it recommends this drug over that one. It also has to tell the doctors why it wants this particular test run. (The PATIENTS demand this, as well: A doctor who wants to do a bone marrow biopsy on me is going to have to give me a REALLY good reason for wanting to run one of the most painful tests known to Man.)
If the AI doesn't have an explainer, it is incomplete.
... that has the range, power, and payload of a standard TurboDiesel ambulance.
If California wants to ban internal combustion engines, OK, then let the Great State of California, and LA County LEAD the way, by junking every gasoline-burning police car and ambulance and fire truck they have, and replacing them ALL with electric vehicles.
I saw something like this happen at/to a large company in the US many years ago. They had a number of engineers in on contract through one particular contracting firm. GD/FW was paying the contracting firm, in full and on schedule, but the engineer paychecks were bouncing. One guy I heard about flew up to the contracting firm's bank's home office, and presented the check in person, so that the bank would have no choice but to tell him why they refused to pay a valid check drawn against them.
It turned out that the owner of the firm had taken the money and ran.
Friends of mine got badly hurt.
It did not help that the guy who ran the office inside the large company that dealt with the various contracting firms absolutely HATED Shoppers, because of his perception that they made a lot more money than the direct employees made for the same work. Nobody had ever explained to him about unpaid time between jobs, or about the realities of living in motels for most of the year and being away from family and friends all that time.
Eventually, with the help of one of the big contracting firms, they set up a new branch of the contracting firm to pick up all the affected Shoppers. I never found out what happened with the missing money.
From the sound of this, the owner(s) of Plutus have quite probably also taken the money and absconded. As it stands right now, it will certainly take serious legal action, from everyone who can bring force to bear, to get any real answers.
First language was FORTRAN IV on the CDC 6600 at UT Austin.
I learned BASIC a couple of years later, then various assembly languages (specifically including 6600 CP COMPASS), then PASCAL on the 6600. LISP on 6600 a little, more assembly languages (PDP-11 and DEC-10 in particular, Intel 8080, Motorola 6800 and 6809, and I don't know what all else).
Starting in about 1988, I was doing Ada and C. I started doing C++ while doing refresher work at UT Austin in 2003-2004, and still am.
It gives end-to-end point-to-point traceability. At every moment between when the package is handed to the clerk and when it is handed to the recipient, it is either in someone's hands or in a locked storage container. Every time the package changes hands, the new holder has to sign for it.
The US Postal Service HATES it. They try HARD to talk you out of using it. It is a pain in the patootie for them, being forced to do their job properly.
If you ever want to see a postal clerk get a SICK look on his face, tell him "I need to trace a missing Registered Mail piece." He knows, in that instant, that one of his co-workers may be about to lose his nice cushy job, and quite possibly move into a Federal zero-star hotel, the kind with iron bars on the windows and doors.
You evidently missed the furor a few years ago when the glacier retreated, revealing some of the old farms.
The AGW crowd screamed at the top of their lungs, that this PROVED that Global Warming was happening. They were strangely silent when the area re-glaciated, again burying the farms.
Back in the Dark Ages, before smartphones and Pokemon Go, every schoolchild in the United States of America learned about the Viking settlements in Greenland.
Those settlements included dairy farms.
Those settlements were there, doing well, for 269 years.
They eventually shut down when the glacier moved south, it being really difficult to graze cattle on top of a glacier.
The Greenland ice sheet has not been there forever, people. Its progress southward can be tracked in the historical records from the Vikings. They left behind detailed notes on the development of the glacier, because it affected where the boats could make landfall.
The problem is life support systems: heating and pressurization.
Each passenger pod has to have an independent life support system, to keep the passengers and flight attendants alive while they're sealed into their pressurized spam can.
Each carrier airplane has to have its own life support system, to keep the pilots alive while they're taxiing and driving their spam can carrier.
Depending on the spam can sizing and count, those life support systems together will likely add up to MORE weight and volume than would be required for a comparably-sized unitary airplane.
Also note that the structural problems for handling multiple detachable spam cans are quite a bit different from the structural problems of building a large unitary airplane. (You would not believe me if I tried to tell you what military airplane designers go through, figuring out how configurable external stores affect an airplane.)
And there are other safety issues: If you have a problem in one spam can, and you jettison it, what does that do to the flyability of the carrier airplane and its remaining UNBALANCED load of spam cans? Or do you jettison a perfectly good spam can, to avoid the unbalanced loading? Or maybe if you have to jettison one can, you have to drop ALL of them - at which point there's no real advantage to detachable spam cans and a spam can carrier airplane over the original unitary airplane.
For that matter, you also have to ensure that a life support problem in one spam can doesn't affect any of the others. If the main power bus to the can shorts in the can, you have to be able to cut it, so that it doesn't disable the main power bus to the carrier airplane. (More cans, more failure points, more requirements to contain the failure.)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, this is blatantly untrue.
It has been well over twenty years, and probably closer to thirty years or more, since enough data had been amassed to prove conclusively that women were SAFER pilots than men.
At the time, no one knew why. I suspect no one knows now. I saw one writer speculate, very carefully, that women MIGHT be a bit more risk-averse than men, to the point that they MIGHT make the determination that "this is getting just a bit too interesting for my taste" a bit sooner than a man might, exercise the Captain's prerogative to choose the alternate plan, a bit sooner than a man might.
A lot of pilot training is teaching judgment and caution and knowing how to recognize that a situation is getting a bit too "interesting", for a suitable definition of "interesting".
I strongly doubt it.
Boeing has been building heavy airplanes for a long time. They know how to do it, and they know how to do it safely.
If memory serves me, the last airplane Boeing built that required that kind of planning and in-flight fuel management (and hence a flight engineer in the cockpit) was the 747.
This sounds like something went suddenly, badly wrong.
And: I have friends who are former, current, and future pilots, including airline pilots. I get this really sick feeling whenever I hear about something like this.
The problem with your point of view is that the contractors themselves committed a serious Federal crime when they put that classified information onto computers that were accessible from the outside world.
Someone is going to have to do a lot of explaining on all this.
Unfortunately, we will probably never hear the full story.
Would you settle for ALGOL?
Burroughs did that with the B5000 series, several decades ago.
That was not my experience when I was working in Ada.
I looked carefully at the generated object code, because of exactly those concerns. The compilers I used all generated good, reasonable object code for what we were doing.
I believe it was Tony Hoare who opined, back in the late Jurassic Period, that running with checks enabled during checkout and turning them off for production was akin to wearing your life jacket in the harbor and then taking it off when you ventured out to open ocean.
While SOME people do in fact learn, as you suggest, not all of them do. I saw too much sloppiness in production code at Nortel Networks - I can say that because the company is now dead and gone - to be optimistic about people's ability to learn.
They still do.
CRC Handbook of Standard Mathematical Tables
https://www.amazon.com/Standar...
Perhaps.
However, in this particular case, the asshole was not the worker, but rather the management.
The guy had a very serious health episode, was in hospital, went home, and asked the company to let him cut back on his hours while he recovered. This was an eminently reasonable request, under the circumstances, and a reasonable manager would not have hesitated for a moment before granting it.
However, Pimlico Plumbers was not a reasonable manager. Instead of allowing him to cut back on his hours, and continue recovering, Pimlico "fired" him and demanded he return the mandatory company uniforms and company truck.
He then sued, with the results everyone has seen.
TL;DR: Pimlico shot themselves in the foot.
It seems to me that the US repaid that debt, with interest, on June 6, 1944, on the beaches at Normandy.
CFC-11, trichloromonofluoromethane, commonly known as Freon (tm).
NOT toxic.
I finally made the decision to drag myself kicking and screaming into the DSLR world when I learned that Nikon had discontinued almost all of their film SLRs. The only ones left in the film SLR line were the absolute most basic student SLR and the absolute top-end pro SLR.
It was easy to settle on a Nikon. A short period of research showed that Nikon and Canon were shooting it out for First and Second, and everyone else was well back in the pack. More careful investigation showed me, essentially, that Canon made professional DSLRs and consumer DSLRs, while Nikon made professional DSLRs for all levels of professional, including consumers who were still learning what a professional camera was. A bit more study showed me that Nikon's entire line at the time made sense, from bottom to top [*], and the D80 and D300 were the two closest matches for what I needed/wanted.
I have been very satisfied with my D80.
[*] There was one camera in the Nikon DSLR line, toward the top, I don't remember which model, that was an obvious outlier from the progression. A bit more study explained it: that model was specifically optimized for high-speed active sports photography, which is a horse of a different color.
"Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters". I thought it was by Michael Crichton, but apparently not.
It was a bug the FIRST time they did it.
It was a screwup the SECOND time they did it.
This is the THIRD time they've done it. From the article: "This incident marks the third time in the past year when Microsoft has mistakenly updated v1703 users to v1709. It happened before in November 2017 and January 2018 when Patch Tuesday security updates accidentally upgraded some users."
Goldfinger's Rule: "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action."
Claiming that this is just another bug... Sorry, Elmo, that dog just won't hunt.
Goldfinger's Rule, as chronicled by I. Fleming, tells us that "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action."
From the article: "This incident marks the third time in the past year when Microsoft has mistakenly updated v1703 users to v1709. It happened before in November 2017 and January 2018 when Patch Tuesday security updates accidentally upgraded some users."
The rule would seem to apply.
It is not a new idea even in computing.
In 1981, I worked a summer job at Charter Information Corp. in Austin TX. They'd recently moved to Austin from Woburn MA. They were a small data processing service bureau, and ran a Xerox Sigma 6 computer.
In Massachusetts, they'd run a duct, with a valve, from the waste heat outflow from the Sigma 6 cooling system to their building HVAC ducts. They had NEVER had to light their oil burner for office heat in the winter: waste heat from the Sigma 6 was more than adequate to keep their offices quite comfortable.
If that is truly the case, then it is the mark of a lousy AI programmer.
It has been known, and taught, for literally decades that an AI program has to be able to explain to its human programmers HOW or WHY it came to a particular conclusion or chose a particular course of action. This started with medical work: the AI has to be able to tell the doctors WHY it thinks the patient has this particular condition, and not that one, or why it recommends this drug over that one. It also has to tell the doctors why it wants this particular test run. (The PATIENTS demand this, as well: A doctor who wants to do a bone marrow biopsy on me is going to have to give me a REALLY good reason for wanting to run one of the most painful tests known to Man.)
If the AI doesn't have an explainer, it is incomplete.
You have to understand the actual political system in the People's Republic of California.
Look into California water politics. Look where the water goes in California, and why.
... that has the range, power, and payload of a standard TurboDiesel ambulance.
If California wants to ban internal combustion engines, OK, then let the Great State of California, and LA County LEAD the way, by junking every gasoline-burning police car and ambulance and fire truck they have, and replacing them ALL with electric vehicles.
I'll wait.
Correction.
The Hon. Mr. Rohrabacher asked NASA about Shuttle launch costs.
It cost one billion dollars per flight.
I saw something like this happen at/to a large company in the US many years ago. They had a number of engineers in on contract through one particular contracting firm. GD/FW was paying the contracting firm, in full and on schedule, but the engineer paychecks were bouncing. One guy I heard about flew up to the contracting firm's bank's home office, and presented the check in person, so that the bank would have no choice but to tell him why they refused to pay a valid check drawn against them.
It turned out that the owner of the firm had taken the money and ran.
Friends of mine got badly hurt.
It did not help that the guy who ran the office inside the large company that dealt with the various contracting firms absolutely HATED Shoppers, because of his perception that they made a lot more money than the direct employees made for the same work. Nobody had ever explained to him about unpaid time between jobs, or about the realities of living in motels for most of the year and being away from family and friends all that time.
Eventually, with the help of one of the big contracting firms, they set up a new branch of the contracting firm to pick up all the affected Shoppers. I never found out what happened with the missing money.
From the sound of this, the owner(s) of Plutus have quite probably also taken the money and absconded. As it stands right now, it will certainly take serious legal action, from everyone who can bring force to bear, to get any real answers.
First language was FORTRAN IV on the CDC 6600 at UT Austin.
I learned BASIC a couple of years later, then various assembly languages (specifically including 6600 CP COMPASS), then PASCAL on the 6600. LISP on 6600 a little, more assembly languages (PDP-11 and DEC-10 in particular, Intel 8080, Motorola 6800 and 6809, and I don't know what all else).
Starting in about 1988, I was doing Ada and C. I started doing C++ while doing refresher work at UT Austin in 2003-2004, and still am.
This is what Registered Mail is for.
It gives end-to-end point-to-point traceability. At every moment between when the package is handed to the clerk and when it is handed to the recipient, it is either in someone's hands or in a locked storage container. Every time the package changes hands, the new holder has to sign for it.
The US Postal Service HATES it. They try HARD to talk you out of using it. It is a pain in the patootie for them, being forced to do their job properly.
If you ever want to see a postal clerk get a SICK look on his face, tell him "I need to trace a missing Registered Mail piece." He knows, in that instant, that one of his co-workers may be about to lose his nice cushy job, and quite possibly move into a Federal zero-star hotel, the kind with iron bars on the windows and doors.
You evidently missed the furor a few years ago when the glacier retreated, revealing some of the old farms.
The AGW crowd screamed at the top of their lungs, that this PROVED that Global Warming was happening. They were strangely silent when the area re-glaciated, again burying the farms.
Back in the Dark Ages, before smartphones and Pokemon Go, every schoolchild in the United States of America learned about the Viking settlements in Greenland.
Those settlements included dairy farms.
Those settlements were there, doing well, for 269 years.
They eventually shut down when the glacier moved south, it being really difficult to graze cattle on top of a glacier.
The Greenland ice sheet has not been there forever, people. Its progress southward can be tracked in the historical records from the Vikings. They left behind detailed notes on the development of the glacier, because it affected where the boats could make landfall.
The problem is life support systems: heating and pressurization.
Each passenger pod has to have an independent life support system, to keep the passengers and flight attendants alive while they're sealed into their pressurized spam can.
Each carrier airplane has to have its own life support system, to keep the pilots alive while they're taxiing and driving their spam can carrier.
Depending on the spam can sizing and count, those life support systems together will likely add up to MORE weight and volume than would be required for a comparably-sized unitary airplane.
Also note that the structural problems for handling multiple detachable spam cans are quite a bit different from the structural problems of building a large unitary airplane. (You would not believe me if I tried to tell you what military airplane designers go through, figuring out how configurable external stores affect an airplane.)
And there are other safety issues: If you have a problem in one spam can, and you jettison it, what does that do to the flyability of the carrier airplane and its remaining UNBALANCED load of spam cans? Or do you jettison a perfectly good spam can, to avoid the unbalanced loading? Or maybe if you have to jettison one can, you have to drop ALL of them - at which point there's no real advantage to detachable spam cans and a spam can carrier airplane over the original unitary airplane.
For that matter, you also have to ensure that a life support problem in one spam can doesn't affect any of the others. If the main power bus to the can shorts in the can, you have to be able to cut it, so that it doesn't disable the main power bus to the carrier airplane. (More cans, more failure points, more requirements to contain the failure.)