Posts by Alan Brown

Re: Bullshit Alert

"If those records are being kept in servers on US soil, then they are absolutely in scope and will remain so"

It doesn't matter if they are on US soil or not. if they are kept on servers operated by a US _COMPANY_ then they are in scope.

And by "US company" - I mean "any company which does business and has an office in the USA", which includes a surprising number of European outfits.

Re: planes/cars

" MAP sensor is giving implausible reading. Assume sensor is faulty. Replace map sensor"

The first thing my mechanic assumes is a bad plug somewhere.

Re: If a plane can do this, what happens to cars?

"I can guarantee that until we get drivers cars people will continue to die on the roads at a rate of over one million per year. "

This is the point. Driverless cars will kill people at a rate of less than 1% of meatsacks, but that's not good enough for the "what about" and "but what" brigade.

The insurance industry will drive the change. As soon as they see statistically lower claim rates from automated vehicles, you're going to see lower premiums when vehicles are in automated mode and significantly higher ones with a monkey in control. The fact that automated vehicles are loaded with cameras will kill claims of "the robot crashed into me" stone dead and leave 90% of meatsack drivers who crash into a robot facing full liability (and probably careless driving charges). When the knee point happens the change will be rapid.

Re: If a plane can do this, what happens to cars?

"The solution to the problem was to just tap the accelerator pedal and release it quickly"

The other solution was simply to turn the ignition off and coast to a halt.

But not to the lock position, that would be silly. Taking the key out would be even sillier - but that's exactly what a significant number of drivers actually did.

Duh.

Re: If a plane can do this, what happens to cars?

Cars can pull over. Signs can have transponders.

One of the more exciting parts about automated vehicles (in urban areas at least) is that outside of feeder roads we can actually start enforcing significantly lower speed limits - primarily because we DON'T have to deal with impatient irritable overconfident monkeys at the controls.

Automated vehicles don't need to be perfect. They just need to be better than most drivers and that's an astoundingly low bar to pass.

Re: Lack of systems thinking

"Surely the underlying issue is a lack of whole systems thinking."

Yup. This in spades. One of the things that always stood out is how badly disconnected (and disorganised and just plain dis-ergonomic) most flight deck systems are. There are a lot of things that "should" be automated but simply aren't (because noone thought about it, or "it's too hard") or where having various systems talk to each other would save a lot of hassle.

The L1101 and the Tristar both proved that things could be done a lot better, but "better" doesn't always sell well.

Human factors

"Accident rates have plummeted since the computers took over."

Exactly this. Since the 1970s there have been exceedingly few crashes which weren't caused by human factors(HF) - and that's why the study of them has become obsessional in aviation.

HF led to the realisation that hiring ex military fliers for civil transport jobs was a bad idea, because military fliers are trained to press on regardless when they should have diverted or gone around - that in turn led to the establishment of all those airline-funded flying schools and aviation degree colleges, etc

When HF started to be applied on the ground it was realised that bad road _design_ was a major factor in traffic crashes and that drivers pay little attention to posted speed limits - they take their cues from the road design and furniture - and perversely the more "protective" furniture there is (signs, fences, parking restrictions, light controlled crossings), the safer the drivers feel, the faster they drive and the LESS attention they pay to their surroundings - leading to a problem that adding crossings or lights to protect pedestrians frequently results in them being less safe.

Lion Air seems to have thrown HF out the window with the reported requirements of pilot conversion and training (a few hours of PC simulation, vs other airlines requiring actual time in a flight simulatior) and the reported safety culture there is an order of magnitude worse than reports that came out of MAS (shifting faulty kit from aircraft to aircraft instead if actually fixing it, or overriding a safety inspector's grounding order by pulling political strings to get his boss to issue a countermand are actively undermining safety, vs simple sloppiness).

HF is most successfully applied across an entire organisation to find out why safety culture is failing, but in this case I'm willing to bet that it's coming from criminal levels of mismanagement in pursuit of profit above all else.

Re: Hey software, get the fuck out of the way!

"I suggest that the pitot tube icing was a cause of the incorrect instrumentation reading, and that the icing was picked up by flying too close to a thunderhead."

In the case of AF447 it was also related to the _type_ of pitot used (although why you'd want them all from the same maker I'm not quite sure, it means they may all fail the same way. Nonetheless, that's what airlines insist on) and the factor that the pilots didn't turn on deicing heat when approaching said thunderhead (which should be automated anyway)

Re: Hey software, get the fuck out of the way!

"You can't really have an effective redundant system with only 2 lines, you need 3"

AT LEAST 3 and preferably an odd number, if not prime.

Re: Hey software, get the fuck out of the way!

"I think you'll find that you're better off avoiding travelling in Indonesia. Altogether."

Not just Indonesia. I wasn't happy to notice that the Plimsoll line had been adjusted several feet upwards on most ferries I used in the Philippines.

Re: Hey software, get the fuck out of the way!

"It looks like Boeing has started to ape Airbus in that the computer has the ultimate say when it comes to the flight controls. "

The difference is that the airbus is an aerodynamically _stable_ design.

The 737MAX has pushed the 737 design out from aerodynamically stable (the originals and turbofans out to the 1990s - when trimmed, pilots only need to touch the controls occasionally to nudge the aircraft back on course when flying "straight and level") to neutral (1990s to now) and into "unstable" territory - (pilot or computer needs to constantly fly the aircraft to keep it straight and level - fighter jets are an extreme example of this kind of thing)

Instability should never be allowed in a civil transport and the MAX should not be allowed in the air. There are a bunch of questions that need to be asked of the FAA's approval processes and why a 50-year-old design has been allowed to be progressively modified to the point where it's become inherently unstable whilst retaining the basic type approval.

I suspect this is going to be an example used in textbooks in future.

Re: Worst possible time

"Pssssttttt Going cheap, large car plants...(workforce not included)"

Nor assembly lines. Those will be crated up and shipped off to eastern europe like the Chinese did with British Leyland.

Re: Not that straightforward...

" They might not bugger off to the EU or go bust."

And when either one starts happening in any significant numbers, there will be an exodus of skilled people, leaving the (mostly unskilled, unemployable) brexiters to wallow in their own shit.

Britain's economy, the new Albania.

Just do it

Or " You don't need an electrician. Just replace that electrical socket".

In many countries it's a criminal offence to do that for "hire or reward" if you don't have the appropriate pieces of paper - so having the order in writing is absolutely critical to ensure shit doesn't flow downhill.

Re: It's got me wondering...

"I never knew they were such fucking mindless idiots."

There are two ways to deal with Facebook's surveillance capitalism - try and avoid it (which is nearly impossible), or choke the cat with cream (ie, fill your feed with so much non-personal crap that it's useless). Think of it as Warfarin for trolls.

Re: History lesson

"the government that invented modern democracy several hundreds of years ago"

Unfortunately for the government that invented modern democracy, it doesn't (usually) resort to snatching people from the street in foreign lands in order to ensure that it gets the people it wants in front of a court where it has jurisdiction. That "honour" goes to the government that's destroying it.

Re: Why?

"They all believe that Santa Clara Superior Court has jurisdiction over the entire Universe."

An East Texas judge and his family of lawyers certainly seem to when it comes to patent cases....

Re: Why?

"You disable all javascripts so they can't spy on you from their Facebook Like buttons plastered on other sites?"

Take a closer look. There are more pernicious javascripts hiding away tracking you that don't have like buttons on them. The buttons just show that someone knows what javascript they're running.

Re: Why?

"A US court in California has no jurisdiction over the UK Government or UK courts or the UK in general..."

And there have been previous rulings that something which is sub judice in a _commonwealth_ country (Australia) is not sub judice in the UK - so a non-commonwealth country isn't going to get higher priority.

Re: Off to the tower with Zuck

"Did they explain to him that if the Parliament decides to put their words into actions they can confine him ONLY in the Tower of London"

Um, no. These days the favoured location for detainment on the charge of contempt of parliament is the cells in the base of the clock tower - which isn't going "bong" at the moment or it'd be even more fun.

Re: Off to the tower with Zuck

"I'm not sure you could make the case for trying someone for treason who isn't a subject of the country doing it."

The USA has made a habit of trying to snatch and charge people for espionage when they haven't even set foot in that country, etc etc.

Re: Build a wall!

(WP does have a bureau in London).

Exactly this. WP does business in the UK - and as such the ICO ruling can (MUST!) be challenged.

They've been fucking up a number of decisions recently.

Re: Wait, what?

"I thought the rest of the world was just going to *have* to tremble and comply with this legislation ... if they wanted to do any business with EU citizens."

The problem here is that each EU country gets to choose its own level of enforcement.

UK "authorities" love to play the game of "oh, it's out of the country, we wash our hands of it", even when you can prove the trail comes back into the country later on.

_other_ EU authorities take a far different point of view on the matter and the UK is regarded as the dog in the manger about this issue.

It's one of the reasons that a lot of EU states are saying "about bloody time, good riddance" regarding Brexit. The UK has been systematically sabotaging a huge number of law changes aimed at protecting individuals and consumer rights, along with deliberately nobbling its own enforcement agencies when laws are forced to be passed, in order to be "appearing" to be enforcing, but not actually doing anything.

"The Ad-X software is run by an organisation outside the UK and is not on the regisrar of Data Controllers."

If they're targetting UK individuals, they need to be on the register. Tell the ICO.

"That worked for around a month until a futher update went through that forced consent and doesn't allow the withdrawal of consent"

Which is completely and utterly illegal under EU _AND_ USA laws.

Re: The EU vs US?

"From a technical perspective, you *MUST* have cookies if you log into the site."

Only for as long as the site login is maintained. My ones evaporate after 12 hours.

Re: Priorities

"I am almost certain that a helicopter could suffer no damage at all if it was to make contact with a drone.."

Unless it was to somehow get _below_ the drone it's unlikely to make contact.

Rotor wash will pretty much ensure that. US pilots have downed drones using theirs.

Re: Rather it wasn't destroyed.

" A bit like when cars are crushed for no tax. "

They seldom are. The owner has a chance to pay the fine & get his car back and then the car goes up for auction if he fails to do so. 90% of crushings are old bangers noone in their right mind would want and the remainder are ones the police have decided they want publicity with (or are dangerous mods that can't be allowed back on the road)

Re: GPS?

the US GPS system used to be known as NAVSTAR GPS. Some people still call it NAVSTAR.

GPS is a pretty pretty generic name, GNSS is a messy workaround for someone asserting IP rights on a generic name shortening of a longer one that should have been tossed out (the USA spent quite a long time building the NAVSTAR name, but media called it GPS and the name stuck)

GPS is as generic as "tissue" or "vacuum cleaner". NAVSTAR is not.

Re: What could possibly...

"OK how is this going to impact space aviation in the future?"

Believe it or not, "not that much". These things are all going into the same orbital belts (so instead of 1 or 2 sats in one orbit you might have 100 looping around) and "space is big, very big" in terms of being 3 dimensional.

There's a lot of effort going into ensuring these things don't shed parts and are de-orbital at end of life - and besides stuff at lower altitudes has a very short halflife anyway (months to years). It's things in the 600-6000km range that's annoying and worrying as it can stay up there for centuries.

The vast majority of junk up there is from missions predating the 1980s. Attitudes changed when things like 2nd stage boosters left shut down in orbit (without venting everything) started exploding and the Skylab guys spent an anxious few months worrying about where their launch vehicle would come down, not having planned a return trajectory and then realising that it was large enough to cause mayhem if it landed on a populated area.

These days just about _everything_ which doesn't need to be in orbit (eg, second stages, etc) is left in deeply eccentric orbits where the lowest point is low enough into the atmosphere that it'll come down in a few orbits thanks to friction.

There's still a shitload of stuff to bring down, particularly from higher orbits, but a laser broom is probably the most viable option. One of the biggest impediments to getting it underway isn't cost, but the politics of actually getting all the countries with stuff in LEO to agree to allow it, as starting to bring down debris could be interpreted as a hostile act. Remember how the USSR were shitting bricks about Shuttle's return from orbit capabilities?

Re: What could possibly...

"You want broadband? Cover your own country in infrastructure"

One of the unstated parts of these kinds of networks is that it effectively _destroys_ all hope of any one government managing to censor their citizens Internet access. Think of it as VoA or Radio Free Europe on steroids.

In the case of the USA, this may be aimed at "rural dwellers" but with a huge number of folks having a choice of one broadband provider or no broadband provider it's the kind of market shakeup that comes along one in a lifetime.

The FCC may approve this for USA and other countries may not, but as Iridium proved with satellite phones, once you have low powered enough technology it's virtually impossible for hostiles to pick up on it - and between proposed clouds of observation sats and uncontrolled broadband, places like Rakhine State in Myanmar are going to benefit from the inability of the government to make a single hostile step without it being documented (it will also allow targets of other military forces to document atrocities in a way that I think military planners haven't even begun to appreciate, let alone plan for.)

(The Rohingya have been facing Burmese extermination campaigns since Burma first invaded the (then) Arakan Kingdom in 1784 (before being beaten out by the British in 1826), resuming in 1962 as part of their ongoing religious clensing policy. What's happening there isn't recent developments - just recently getting better coverage - and the Burmese attitude is somewhat like a certain Saudi Prince inasmuch as "they've been doing it for years, what's the big deal now?")

Re: SI

"Why use exact powers of 10? Why not use binary numbers? The power of 2 used will still be arbitrary."

The Babylonians used 12 and 60 (can you guess where we still use those?)

The Romans used 12 a lot. 10 was mostly only used for military work.

In both cases it's because the number of divisors make them easier to work with than 10s.

Re: SI

"if eventually you ended up describing the width of a horse's arse"

Two of those has an intrinsic tie-in to the width of a standard gauge rail line. Can you guess why?

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Railways use 4'8 because that's what was already in use most places (+- a couple of inches)

Railways originally used the same track width width as horse drawn tramways

Horse drawn tramways used wagon chassis, with standard widths

Wagons were a standard width due to ruts in the road. Noone built to other widths as doing so was to invite broken wheels.

Roads had ruts in them due to centuries of wear, many dating back to the roman empire (when they were better maintained)

Ruts in roman roads were caused by chariots, wagons and other horse drawn traffic.

Roman roads were as wide as they were to allow two way traffic

Wagons tended to be the same width as chariots because chariots defined the width of the roads

Chariots defined the width of the roads as they were military traffic and the roads were military roads.

Roman chariots were built to a standard width to allow interchangability of most parts (and to ensure they would pass freely across the empire.)

That width was defined by rear ends of the two horses operating side by side in front of the chariot.

Re: My calculator is out of date

Mine said 5318008618 (until the teacher saw and asked to have the joke explained. She pretended not to be amused)

Re: yard/mile on our roads for some strange reason

Having lived through such a change (Imperial to metric) in two countries in 1973 and 1974, the roadsign and car odometer change isn't that difficult to deal with, people just deal with it.

For starters, all UK roadsigns are already positioned so they can be changed to 400m, 800m, 1/2km, 1km or 2km and have been for a very long time, despite being written in miles (1/4 mile and 400m are interchangable)

Fahrenheit to Celcuis is far more annoying. Using a scale which choose frozen brine as zero and Ox blood as one hundred didn't make a heck of a lot of sense at the time and it really still doesn't. At least Celcuis stuck with the same substance at both ends of the scale.

Re: So we've gone from six to five

"I'd really hate for our measurement standards to end up as one big Catch 22 or chicken/egg paradox"

What, you mean like being dependent on something as parochial as the rotation period of a particular planet in a binary planet/satellite pair(*), in a particularly short window of a period of their 7-8 billion year lifespan?

Or the circumference of that particular planet?

(*) Earth/moon are frequently described as a binary due to the size of the satellite having an easily observable effect on the barycenter of the pair (it's about 75% of the way towards the surface from the earth's core). It's not a classic binary inasmuch as the barycenter is still below the surface of the earth but it does mean there's a hell of a wobble in there and it would have been a true binary originally)

Re: Sad case of science ignoring the evidence

"At one time this would have been enough to warrent an investigation"

It did. Several. And then several more. Some variances were explainable (fingerprint contamination, etc) and others just seem to be random noise of the universe

The things may have been under jars, but it's not an inert space and they were periodically cleaned. The opportunity to pick up or lose a few molecules of contamination arose, but even when the greatest of care was taken to ensure no contamination took place, successive measurements on the same balances would give different results on different days.

Even le grand K has varied a few nanograms between measurements - sometimes when measurements were taken within weeks of each other. This variance and the continued variances between the lesser Ks is what drove the search for a better reference (which started about 40 years ago)