I was only contesting the false claim that one has to pay a private company something to fulfill their obligation to file federal income taxes in the United States because that's simply not the case. That one can get a refund faster by filing electronically through, say, TurboTax was not the issue and does not change the fact that the claim was false.
Of course, if you really about time value of money, you would virtually never get a refund anyway. If you don't care about the time value of money, why would you care about waiting a couple extra weeks to receive your refund?
You don't "have to pay a company to fulfill your legal obligation" -- you can file on paper and pay the USPS (a quasi-government) agency to deliver your return to the IRS.
The IRS should develop more free online filing systems that meet the needs of 99% of the typical consumers who are not in business for themselves. The IRS should only certify tax software that produces, at no additional cost, the standard output needed to input to the IRS's free online filing system. In the long run, it would likely save the IRS money as they would receive less handwritten dead tree forms and those with math errors in them.
Tax filing companies can make their money offering better interfaces, more help, etc. (as, I expect, the IRS native solution would end up being usable, but clunky).
Every year, I'm actually tempted to file my taxes on paper -- copying, by hand, each field from my H&R Block forms onto IRS dead tree forms just to encourage the IRS to offer better, free, online filing options (although, since I use H&R Block, I can file Fed online for "free" -- for the state I have to pay something like $20 -- so the state still gets paper - but I don't bother copying it over by hand to state forms).
Of course, the question posed here was "Why Aren't People Abandoning Windows for Linux?" Anyway, I'm not interested in Apple's overpriced inflexible hardware or their walled gardens. As well, switching to Apple wouldn't solve my Quicken problem anyway.
usage: handle [[-a [-l]] [-u] | [-c [-y]] | [-s]] [-p |] [name] [-nobanner]
-a Dump all handle information.
-l Just show pagefile-backed section handles.
-c Closes the specified handle (interpreted as a hexadecimal number).
You must specify the process by its PID.
WARNING: Closing handles can cause application or system instability.
-y Don't prompt for close handle confirmation.
-s Print count of each type of handle open.
-u Show the owning user name when searching for handles.
-p Dump handles belonging to process (partial name accepted).
name Search for handles to objects with (fragment accepted).
-nobanner Do not display the startup banner and copyright message.
I don't run Linux as my primary native desktops (but do run it on my laptop and in a bunch of VMs). The primary reasons are:
- I rely on Quicken (not the online "my financial data is only one hacker away from being published" or "my data is gone because the vendor disappeared or just decided to delete it due to a 'retention policy' " version) and it's not available/supported on Linux (yes, I tried to run it on WINE but it was unusable from a performance standpoint and, anyway, then it's only one Quicken or WINE update away from breaking on an unsupported platform).
- I also rely on HR Block tax software (again, not the online "my financial data is only one hacker away from being published" or "my data is gone because the vendor disappeared or just decided to delete it due to a 'retention policy' " version) for my tax prep every year and, again, no Linux version exists (and, for a variety of reasons, I need to look back at taxes for many years beyond the "norm" so "working today" is not good enough).
- While BSOD used to be a modestly regular occurrence on Windows even just 15 years ago, I haven't had it happen for years on Windows (Win 8.1 Pro now), Ubuntu updates break my systems from time to time (which is one reason I run them in a VM -- just restore a checkpoint and try to isolate the problem by selective updating) - I currently have several VMs that I have to remember to uncheck the GRUB updates when doing updates or the system won't boot (yes, I'm sure I could figure out what's wrong, but it worked fine just a few months ago and I've got other things to do than dig into code that I will never update or contribute to).
Perhaps, when forced to Win 10, I will downgrade to a single Win desktop with RDP access for the family for use of essential "Windows Only" software -- but that will depend on the state of Linux desktop then (and, my hopes are not high).
Anonymity is important if you're a whistle-blower, but if you cannot prove your identity, your crazy rant on some social-media platform shouldn't be visible, and you shouldn't be able to share it or like it.
One person's "rational statement" is another person's "crazy rant". Defending the Second Amendment or each state having (as the Constitution specifies) equal suffrage in the Senate or deportation of illegal immigrants would qualify as "crazy rants" in some circles and companies.
In a world where technology companies have gone overboard with political and societal issues unrelated to their product, anyone who doesn't adhere to the hive-mind is putting their career at risk by posting under their real identities. It's easy for Torvalds to take this stance as he doesn't need to work for anyone else on a regular basis and he's already known as a "flaming asshole" (which, by the way, was something I used to like about him -- as a thought leader in his area, he made high contrast statements without sugercoating which got the message across to all much more effectively than carefully worded "policy statements" and advice to "you may want reconsider introducing an error not previously returned by an API").
So, no, it's not just whistle-blowers who should enjoy anonymity. Apparently when Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay were publishing the Federalist Papers under the anonymous pseudonym "Publius" they didn't think so either.
Of course, being a native Finn, perhaps Torvalds doesn't quite grok a diverse culture for some reason.
True, but breaking links would also have a cost in reputation and make some people very angry. My guess is that they will decide the minimal cost of leaving the links on autopilot for many, many years is less than the reputational cost of cutting them off. But, I thought Trump wasn't going to win the U.S. Presidential election so my magic ball seems to be flawed sometimes.
Of course that is possible. But, I expect they won't do that for a long time as the cost of maintaining the static forwarding service will drop every year both as hardware gets more efficient and cheaper and as usage of the links decreases as the pages using them go away and as the targets go away. As well, static data has much less stringent backup, recovery, and real time replication requirements. Dropping the analytics associated with usage should save quite a lot of resources. Eventually the forwarding service will probably just run in a few small VMs in each region from static images. Very, very inexpensive to maintain.
Now, when usage of the links worldwide drops to a few hundred a day, google might drop the service -- but then google may go out of business before then for other reasons.
Well, at least he had an educational opportunity and may have learned something. He hopefully learned that windshields are made of laminated safety glass and are much more difficult to break through with a hammer than the side windows which typically shatter easily because they are made of tempered glass. This will be an important skill to speed his progression through the criminal ranks.
There will probably still be some human fossils around and archeological digs being done. This digs will presumably done by highly intelligent and evolved cockroaches who will be able to ascertain that there were once human made structures in some areas. Our landfills will be an interesting find to keep them busy also -- if they can resist the temptation to eat scraps they find.
And the excite.com customized personal dashboard which I've used since back when dashboards were cool (probably within weeks of excite.com's first becoming available) just went away. Both of us users will miss it.
Since the op-ed was in the Washington Post, primarily a domestic United States publication with a primarily US readership, it's reasonable to assume that Zuckerberg was primarily addressing this at US lawmakers as there are no "international" lawmakers. The use of the word "need" implies a law or regulation of some sort.
The First Amendment applies to all residents, not just citizens, of the United States. Of course it does not apply to residents of any other country in another country. As far as US citizens in another country, obviously the laws of that other country apply and the First Amendment doesn't matter in that case.
Any law that the US Congress passed could not do what he requests without running afoul of the First Amendment.
He, personally or on behalf of Facebook, is of course free to consult with any third party he desires to evaluate either his personal posts or all Facebook posts to determine if they are "harmful" and delete them if so. Obviously some Facebook users will detest this and stop using the platform. On the other hand, some Facebook users who like "safe spaces" will likely become more comfortable using Facebook and use it more -- assuming the third party agrees with them on what is "harmful". It's a simple business decision, no government involvement needed or helpful.
...or even better a third party authorized by the government.
Common rules that all social media sites need to adhere to, enforced by third-party bodies, to control the spread of harmful content
And, exactly, who will decide what "harmful content" is. Perhaps Trump? Perhaps AOC? Perhaps Sanders? Perhaps ISIS?
Zuckerberg, go read the First Amendment - no, go ahead, I'll wait. There are no big words in it so you should be able to understand it eventually. Okay read it again. And, one more time, Very. Slowly. This. Time.
Okay, now, did you notice the "abridge the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press" part?
And, don't forget, some people think Facebook itself is "harmful".
Laws that not only apply to candidates and elections, but also other "divisive political issues", and for laws to apply outside of official campaign periods
Computers and computer resources are dirt cheap compared to coders
In some cases this is true locally but not globally.
For example, a product like Hadoop is/was very widely used and the aggregate global usage consumes/consumed vast computing resources (and the attendant real estate to house them, energy to power them, energy to cool them, etc -- i.e. TCO). Squeezing, on the average, a 0.5% performance improvement may be well worth the initial development cost when viewed globally across all organizations as it could eliminate the need for thousands of nodes with an aggregate annual TCO of millions of dollars. For example, a 1000 node system might only need to only be a 995 node system - a savings of 5 nodes in a modestly large system. The effect of such changes is hard to measure or isolate, but ultimately hardware is often upgraded (usually just replaced) because it gets too slow for the application so sometimes just extending the upgrade cycle by one month represents a substantial TCO savings.
However, no individual company, even the big ones who contribute to Hadoop and use it extensively internally, have much motivation to invest in such changes as it would only reduce their annual TCO by tens of thousands of dollars - well below the development (including test etc) costs. As well, these companies benefit from expending their limited development resources on features, often released to the community, that optimize mostly their usage rather than the global good.
Hadoop product companies like Cloudera have no motivation to make such changes as it wouldn't gain them any customers or allow them to charge any more for their proprietary offerings.
Obviously if such changes for small performance improvements crufts up the code, the ongoing maintenance costs (or just the diversion of resources from feature innovation to cruft maintenance) may exceed the benefit even globally, but basically virtually no one even looks at these opportunities -- a decision that makes good business sense locally.
This is something I have found very frustrating having been in such environments. Perhaps this identifies me an exemplar for the very article although I'm more into reliability (including engineering in capabilities to avoid, detect, and help corral and fix the inevitable heisenbugs and rarely occurring timing related bugs or sporadic, but serious, performance anomalies) rather than raw performance.
Yes, if the scenario involving the Lion Air crash is what the public consensus has concluded and the Ethiopian Airline crash months later was a largely similar scenario, it seems to be mostly pilot error in the second case. The situation was well known, had clear symptoms, should have been in the forefront of every 737 MAX 8/9 pilots brain, and had a very easy and well documented workaround which, it appears, was not executed. In this case, I suspect the first item in the memory checklist for "runaway trim", after the obvious use of the control yoke and its trim switch not resolving the problem, would be to flip the two STAB TRIM switches on the control stand to CUTOUT and then take manual control of the trim and other functions as needed. It will be interesting to see if these switches got flipped and the pilots just did it too late to be able to recover control or if they never even attempted to do so.
By the time of the Ethiopian Airline crash, an AOA sensor failure interacting with MCAS is little different than an engine failure on takeoff causing a crash - except the engine failure case requires more immediate action. Yes, there may be a reason the engine failed that can be tracked to a maintenance failure or a faulty part -- but the crash is almost always because the pilots failed to react correctly to the well understood failure condition. Now, if both engines fall off on takeoff (and not because a pilot did something outside of training that drove the plane beyond its limits), that's not pilot error (it could be design, manufacturing, or maintenance error or just a freak condition that reasonably was not considered or a test that was reasonably not included in the manufacturing or maintenance process).
We are approaching the point that the only good reason to have one, let alone two, pilots in the cockpit of a state of the art passenger airliner is to deal with exception cases -- and we expect them to do that if those exception cases are understood.
This problem is not a "critical bug". It's a bad UI, it's a design flaw, it's a failure to adequately train pilots to the condition in training, and it's something that should be fixed but that doesn't mean it's not something that merits grounding all affected planes. A problem like jackscrew failures that caused the Alaska Airlines Flight 261 to crash off the coast of California in 2000 is an example of something that should ground all possibly affected planes until inspections and any necessary repairs are completed to insure they are airworthy. This is because there is no "workaround" for a jackscrew failure -- the pilot has no possible way of controlling the plane.
Nope - the lawsuits they are screwed on. But they (and their insurance company) have plenty of money and it will be mostly forgotten in two years. Although, they are lucky that most of the dead are not from the US, the land of ridiculous lawsuit outcomes (at least until appeal).
The 737 MAX is perfectly capable of flying safely with MCAS disabled. It's disabled with autopilot on so that's not an issue. It's only when autopilot is off that MCAS can be active and then it's just a backup in case the pilots screw up so if it's been disabled during manual flight control, the pilots have to be particularly careful - esp. not to react incorrectly to a stall (something they seem to be unlikely to do - but the behavior of the737 MAX would be somewhat different than of the other 737 models with less powerful engines tucked in a bit further back and lower).
There are all sorts of situations where pilots have to be trained to react quickly and correctly in the light of a failure of some component - such as engine failure during takeoff in a 737. This will be another. But hopefully the fix will include detecting that the AOA sensors don't agree and alerting the pilot to this and, perhaps, modifying MCAS behavior when that condition is detected, esp. when the pilot seems to be trying to do just the opposite of what MCAS keeps trying to do (although the latter may just create another layer of complication that will confuse pilots so may be ill-advised).
MCAS is not active when the autopilot is engaged, it is active when autopilot is disengaged and a couple of other conditions are met (one of which is that flaps are not extended in a takeoff configuration). I assume this is because autopilot is presumed not to do stupid stuff but humans are assumed to do stupid stuff. MCAS would, however, be turned of via a switch on the "center console" as part of the "runaway trim" procedure.
I can understand, given the apparent lack of knowledge about MCAS by at least some 737 MAX pilots and the stress of the moment how the Lion Air pilots didn't think to execute the runaway trim procedure. However, by the time the Ethiopian Airline accident occurred, every 737 MAX pilot should have been acutely aware of the possible problem just from reading the popular press reports - even without Boeing bulletins on the topic so if that crash was also the result of MCAS interacting with a faulty AOA sensor, I'm perplexed why the first thing that didn't come into the pilot's mind was "hmm, this seems like recently happened to Lion Air - time to execute the runaway trim procedure". Hopefully the data and voice recorders will explain this oddity.
If you really believe that you will invest every penny you have or can beg, borrow, or steal to bet on the downside - selling short, options etc.
Nope, Boeing will survive this. Yes, there's some engineering changes needed and it will hurt their reputation a bit for a couple years but I'd wager that this won't result in many cancelled orders. A few billion dollars is easily absorbed. The sooner they can get the 737 MAX back in the air, the better for them of course.
If both the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airline crashes were caused by the same thing and that was a faulty AOA sensor driving the MCAS to do the wrong thing, I'd happily fly on a 737 MAX even without any fixes -- as long as I know the pilots have trained for this scenario. It's really fairly easy to detect this problem and recover from it if the pilots are trained in it. Of course, I'd rather fly on a 737 MAX with some engineering fixes (just warning the pilots that the AOA indicators don't agree and training the pilot to disable automatic trim control and "take the wheel" would be a step in the right direction).
Boeing's contention seems to be "this looked like runaway trim", detect that and follow the "runaway trim procedure". If that's bears out, then I think it's primarily pilot error with, likely, significant contributing factors of design and/or training deficiencies.
Obviously the design could have been "better" (else, why update the software - except for political reasons), but that doesn't mean it's necessarily a "failure".
There are two AOA sensors. What the software does with their inputs is of course another matter. It seems like it would be nice to have three, but there other things that there are only two of (like engines on most commercial airliners) and pilot input is needed to respond to a failure of one. Of course, the pilot needs to understand that there's been a failure.
Slashdot Mirror
I was only contesting the false claim that one has to pay a private company something to fulfill their obligation to file federal income taxes in the United States because that's simply not the case. That one can get a refund faster by filing electronically through, say, TurboTax was not the issue and does not change the fact that the claim was false.
Of course, if you really about time value of money, you would virtually never get a refund anyway. If you don't care about the time value of money, why would you care about waiting a couple extra weeks to receive your refund?
You don't "have to pay a company to fulfill your legal obligation" -- you can file on paper and pay the USPS (a quasi-government) agency to deliver your return to the IRS.
This is completely backwards.
The IRS should develop more free online filing systems that meet the needs of 99% of the typical consumers who are not in business for themselves. The IRS should only certify tax software that produces, at no additional cost, the standard output needed to input to the IRS's free online filing system. In the long run, it would likely save the IRS money as they would receive less handwritten dead tree forms and those with math errors in them.
Tax filing companies can make their money offering better interfaces, more help, etc. (as, I expect, the IRS native solution would end up being usable, but clunky).
Every year, I'm actually tempted to file my taxes on paper -- copying, by hand, each field from my H&R Block forms onto IRS dead tree forms just to encourage the IRS to offer better, free, online filing options (although, since I use H&R Block, I can file Fed online for "free" -- for the state I have to pay something like $20 -- so the state still gets paper - but I don't bother copying it over by hand to state forms).
Of course, the question posed here was "Why Aren't People Abandoning Windows for Linux ?" Anyway, I'm not interested in Apple's overpriced inflexible hardware or their walled gardens. As well, switching to Apple wouldn't solve my Quicken problem anyway.
I find it easier to use the sysinternals command line tool handle rather than procexp for this use.
C:\Temp>handle /?
Nthandle v4.21 - Handle viewer
Copyright (C) 1997-2018 Mark Russinovich
Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com
usage: handle [[-a [-l]] [-u] | [-c [-y]] | [-s]] [-p |] [name] [-nobanner]
-a Dump all handle information.
-l Just show pagefile-backed section handles.
-c Closes the specified handle (interpreted as a hexadecimal number).
You must specify the process by its PID.
WARNING: Closing handles can cause application or system instability.
-y Don't prompt for close handle confirmation.
-s Print count of each type of handle open.
-u Show the owning user name when searching for handles.
-p Dump handles belonging to process (partial name accepted).
name Search for handles to objects with (fragment accepted).
-nobanner Do not display the startup banner and copyright message.
No arguments will dump all file references.
For example:
C:\Temp>handle VBoxSharedClipboard
Nthandle v4.21 - Handle viewer
Copyright (C) 1997-2018 Mark Russinovich
Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com
VirtualBox.exe pid: 6088 type: File 50: C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxSharedClipboard.dll
VirtualBox.exe pid: 8008 type: File 50: C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxSharedClipboard.dll
I don't run Linux as my primary native desktops (but do run it on my laptop and in a bunch of VMs). The primary reasons are:
- I rely on Quicken (not the online "my financial data is only one hacker away from being published" or "my data is gone because the vendor disappeared or just decided to delete it due to a 'retention policy' " version) and it's not available/supported on Linux (yes, I tried to run it on WINE but it was unusable from a performance standpoint and, anyway, then it's only one Quicken or WINE update away from breaking on an unsupported platform).
- I also rely on HR Block tax software (again, not the online "my financial data is only one hacker away from being published" or "my data is gone because the vendor disappeared or just decided to delete it due to a 'retention policy' " version) for my tax prep every year and, again, no Linux version exists (and, for a variety of reasons, I need to look back at taxes for many years beyond the "norm" so "working today" is not good enough).
- While BSOD used to be a modestly regular occurrence on Windows even just 15 years ago, I haven't had it happen for years on Windows (Win 8.1 Pro now), Ubuntu updates break my systems from time to time (which is one reason I run them in a VM -- just restore a checkpoint and try to isolate the problem by selective updating) - I currently have several VMs that I have to remember to uncheck the GRUB updates when doing updates or the system won't boot (yes, I'm sure I could figure out what's wrong, but it worked fine just a few months ago and I've got other things to do than dig into code that I will never update or contribute to).
Perhaps, when forced to Win 10, I will downgrade to a single Win desktop with RDP access for the family for use of essential "Windows Only" software -- but that will depend on the state of Linux desktop then (and, my hopes are not high).
One person's "rational statement" is another person's "crazy rant". Defending the Second Amendment or each state having (as the Constitution specifies) equal suffrage in the Senate or deportation of illegal immigrants would qualify as "crazy rants" in some circles and companies.
In a world where technology companies have gone overboard with political and societal issues unrelated to their product, anyone who doesn't adhere to the hive-mind is putting their career at risk by posting under their real identities. It's easy for Torvalds to take this stance as he doesn't need to work for anyone else on a regular basis and he's already known as a "flaming asshole" (which, by the way, was something I used to like about him -- as a thought leader in his area, he made high contrast statements without sugercoating which got the message across to all much more effectively than carefully worded "policy statements" and advice to "you may want reconsider introducing an error not previously returned by an API").
So, no, it's not just whistle-blowers who should enjoy anonymity. Apparently when Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay were publishing the Federalist Papers under the anonymous pseudonym "Publius" they didn't think so either.
Of course, being a native Finn, perhaps Torvalds doesn't quite grok a diverse culture for some reason.
True, but breaking links would also have a cost in reputation and make some people very angry. My guess is that they will decide the minimal cost of leaving the links on autopilot for many, many years is less than the reputational cost of cutting them off. But, I thought Trump wasn't going to win the U.S. Presidential election so my magic ball seems to be flawed sometimes.
Of course that is possible. But, I expect they won't do that for a long time as the cost of maintaining the static forwarding service will drop every year both as hardware gets more efficient and cheaper and as usage of the links decreases as the pages using them go away and as the targets go away. As well, static data has much less stringent backup, recovery, and real time replication requirements. Dropping the analytics associated with usage should save quite a lot of resources. Eventually the forwarding service will probably just run in a few small VMs in each region from static images. Very, very inexpensive to maintain.
Now, when usage of the links worldwide drops to a few hundred a day, google might drop the service -- but then google may go out of business before then for other reasons.
Google claims:
Well, at least he had an educational opportunity and may have learned something. He hopefully learned that windshields are made of laminated safety glass and are much more difficult to break through with a hammer than the side windows which typically shatter easily because they are made of tempered glass. This will be an important skill to speed his progression through the criminal ranks.
There will probably still be some human fossils around and archeological digs being done. This digs will presumably done by highly intelligent and evolved cockroaches who will be able to ascertain that there were once human made structures in some areas. Our landfills will be an interesting find to keep them busy also -- if they can resist the temptation to eat scraps they find.
And the excite.com customized personal dashboard which I've used since back when dashboards were cool (probably within weeks of excite.com's first becoming available) just went away. Both of us users will miss it.
Posting takes attention! (And even suggests that enough attention was paid to this to determine it was worthy of no additional interest.)
Empirical evidence suggests you paid more than zero attention to this.
Since the op-ed was in the Washington Post, primarily a domestic United States publication with a primarily US readership, it's reasonable to assume that Zuckerberg was primarily addressing this at US lawmakers as there are no "international" lawmakers. The use of the word "need" implies a law or regulation of some sort.
The First Amendment applies to all residents, not just citizens, of the United States. Of course it does not apply to residents of any other country in another country. As far as US citizens in another country, obviously the laws of that other country apply and the First Amendment doesn't matter in that case.
Any law that the US Congress passed could not do what he requests without running afoul of the First Amendment.
He, personally or on behalf of Facebook, is of course free to consult with any third party he desires to evaluate either his personal posts or all Facebook posts to determine if they are "harmful" and delete them if so. Obviously some Facebook users will detest this and stop using the platform. On the other hand, some Facebook users who like "safe spaces" will likely become more comfortable using Facebook and use it more -- assuming the third party agrees with them on what is "harmful". It's a simple business decision, no government involvement needed or helpful.
...or even better a third party authorized by the government.
And, exactly, who will decide what "harmful content" is. Perhaps Trump? Perhaps AOC? Perhaps Sanders? Perhaps ISIS?
Zuckerberg, go read the First Amendment - no, go ahead, I'll wait. There are no big words in it so you should be able to understand it eventually. Okay read it again. And, one more time, Very. Slowly. This. Time.
Okay, now, did you notice the "abridge the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press" part?
And, don't forget, some people think Facebook itself is "harmful".
See above.
In some cases this is true locally but not globally.
For example, a product like Hadoop is/was very widely used and the aggregate global usage consumes/consumed vast computing resources (and the attendant real estate to house them, energy to power them, energy to cool them, etc -- i.e. TCO). Squeezing, on the average, a 0.5% performance improvement may be well worth the initial development cost when viewed globally across all organizations as it could eliminate the need for thousands of nodes with an aggregate annual TCO of millions of dollars. For example, a 1000 node system might only need to only be a 995 node system - a savings of 5 nodes in a modestly large system. The effect of such changes is hard to measure or isolate, but ultimately hardware is often upgraded (usually just replaced) because it gets too slow for the application so sometimes just extending the upgrade cycle by one month represents a substantial TCO savings.
However, no individual company, even the big ones who contribute to Hadoop and use it extensively internally, have much motivation to invest in such changes as it would only reduce their annual TCO by tens of thousands of dollars - well below the development (including test etc) costs. As well, these companies benefit from expending their limited development resources on features, often released to the community, that optimize mostly their usage rather than the global good.
Hadoop product companies like Cloudera have no motivation to make such changes as it wouldn't gain them any customers or allow them to charge any more for their proprietary offerings.
Obviously if such changes for small performance improvements crufts up the code, the ongoing maintenance costs (or just the diversion of resources from feature innovation to cruft maintenance) may exceed the benefit even globally, but basically virtually no one even looks at these opportunities -- a decision that makes good business sense locally.
This is something I have found very frustrating having been in such environments. Perhaps this identifies me an exemplar for the very article although I'm more into reliability (including engineering in capabilities to avoid, detect, and help corral and fix the inevitable heisenbugs and rarely occurring timing related bugs or sporadic, but serious, performance anomalies) rather than raw performance.
Yes, if the scenario involving the Lion Air crash is what the public consensus has concluded and the Ethiopian Airline crash months later was a largely similar scenario, it seems to be mostly pilot error in the second case. The situation was well known, had clear symptoms, should have been in the forefront of every 737 MAX 8/9 pilots brain, and had a very easy and well documented workaround which, it appears, was not executed. In this case, I suspect the first item in the memory checklist for "runaway trim", after the obvious use of the control yoke and its trim switch not resolving the problem, would be to flip the two STAB TRIM switches on the control stand to CUTOUT and then take manual control of the trim and other functions as needed. It will be interesting to see if these switches got flipped and the pilots just did it too late to be able to recover control or if they never even attempted to do so.
By the time of the Ethiopian Airline crash, an AOA sensor failure interacting with MCAS is little different than an engine failure on takeoff causing a crash - except the engine failure case requires more immediate action. Yes, there may be a reason the engine failed that can be tracked to a maintenance failure or a faulty part -- but the crash is almost always because the pilots failed to react correctly to the well understood failure condition. Now, if both engines fall off on takeoff (and not because a pilot did something outside of training that drove the plane beyond its limits), that's not pilot error (it could be design, manufacturing, or maintenance error or just a freak condition that reasonably was not considered or a test that was reasonably not included in the manufacturing or maintenance process).
We are approaching the point that the only good reason to have one, let alone two, pilots in the cockpit of a state of the art passenger airliner is to deal with exception cases -- and we expect them to do that if those exception cases are understood.
This problem is not a "critical bug". It's a bad UI, it's a design flaw, it's a failure to adequately train pilots to the condition in training, and it's something that should be fixed but that doesn't mean it's not something that merits grounding all affected planes. A problem like jackscrew failures that caused the Alaska Airlines Flight 261 to crash off the coast of California in 2000 is an example of something that should ground all possibly affected planes until inspections and any necessary repairs are completed to insure they are airworthy. This is because there is no "workaround" for a jackscrew failure -- the pilot has no possible way of controlling the plane.
Nope - the lawsuits they are screwed on. But they (and their insurance company) have plenty of money and it will be mostly forgotten in two years. Although, they are lucky that most of the dead are not from the US, the land of ridiculous lawsuit outcomes (at least until appeal).
The 737 MAX is perfectly capable of flying safely with MCAS disabled. It's disabled with autopilot on so that's not an issue. It's only when autopilot is off that MCAS can be active and then it's just a backup in case the pilots screw up so if it's been disabled during manual flight control, the pilots have to be particularly careful - esp. not to react incorrectly to a stall (something they seem to be unlikely to do - but the behavior of the737 MAX would be somewhat different than of the other 737 models with less powerful engines tucked in a bit further back and lower).
There are all sorts of situations where pilots have to be trained to react quickly and correctly in the light of a failure of some component - such as engine failure during takeoff in a 737. This will be another. But hopefully the fix will include detecting that the AOA sensors don't agree and alerting the pilot to this and, perhaps, modifying MCAS behavior when that condition is detected, esp. when the pilot seems to be trying to do just the opposite of what MCAS keeps trying to do (although the latter may just create another layer of complication that will confuse pilots so may be ill-advised).
MCAS is not active when the autopilot is engaged, it is active when autopilot is disengaged and a couple of other conditions are met (one of which is that flaps are not extended in a takeoff configuration). I assume this is because autopilot is presumed not to do stupid stuff but humans are assumed to do stupid stuff. MCAS would, however, be turned of via a switch on the "center console" as part of the "runaway trim" procedure.
I can understand, given the apparent lack of knowledge about MCAS by at least some 737 MAX pilots and the stress of the moment how the Lion Air pilots didn't think to execute the runaway trim procedure. However, by the time the Ethiopian Airline accident occurred, every 737 MAX pilot should have been acutely aware of the possible problem just from reading the popular press reports - even without Boeing bulletins on the topic so if that crash was also the result of MCAS interacting with a faulty AOA sensor, I'm perplexed why the first thing that didn't come into the pilot's mind was "hmm, this seems like recently happened to Lion Air - time to execute the runaway trim procedure". Hopefully the data and voice recorders will explain this oddity.
If you really believe that you will invest every penny you have or can beg, borrow, or steal to bet on the downside - selling short, options etc.
Nope, Boeing will survive this. Yes, there's some engineering changes needed and it will hurt their reputation a bit for a couple years but I'd wager that this won't result in many cancelled orders. A few billion dollars is easily absorbed. The sooner they can get the 737 MAX back in the air, the better for them of course.
If both the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airline crashes were caused by the same thing and that was a faulty AOA sensor driving the MCAS to do the wrong thing, I'd happily fly on a 737 MAX even without any fixes -- as long as I know the pilots have trained for this scenario. It's really fairly easy to detect this problem and recover from it if the pilots are trained in it. Of course, I'd rather fly on a 737 MAX with some engineering fixes (just warning the pilots that the AOA indicators don't agree and training the pilot to disable automatic trim control and "take the wheel" would be a step in the right direction).
Boeing's contention seems to be "this looked like runaway trim", detect that and follow the "runaway trim procedure". If that's bears out, then I think it's primarily pilot error with, likely, significant contributing factors of design and/or training deficiencies.
Obviously the design could have been "better" (else, why update the software - except for political reasons), but that doesn't mean it's necessarily a "failure".
There are two AOA sensors. What the software does with their inputs is of course another matter. It seems like it would be nice to have three, but there other things that there are only two of (like engines on most commercial airliners) and pilot input is needed to respond to a failure of one. Of course, the pilot needs to understand that there's been a failure.