Posts by I ain't Spartacus

Re: Seems a bit mixed

We do have legislation. Google 'libel twitter uk facebook' for examples of British courts taking action against Brits for their published content on US services

bartsmit,

That's not the point of this legislation. The problem isn't single users choosing to libel someone for which they can be normally punished. It's when Facebook take that post from someone's feed and choose to amplify it massively by inserting it into the "news" feeds of a few million other users. Then claim that an algorithm did it and ran away, so it's not their fault. Hopefully this legislation is going to make them responsible for those editorial decisions - like any other publisher.

If one person libels another on FB, then all FB should have to do is be responsible for taking it down on request. The same with El Reg's forums. And I don't want to see Facebook or El Reg made responsible. If, however, El Reg or Facebook take that forum post and put it on the front page, then I expect them to take editorial responsibility for that choice, and to suffer the consequences if that content is illegal or actionable. At the moment, El Reg (and other news organisations) do take responsibilty, and Facebook don't.

Same with recommended content on Youtube. That people posted accusations that the victims of a US school shooting were "crisis actors" and not real victims at all is horrible. But that's the internet, and there's horrible people out there. That Google then chose to promote those videos on their trending lists, and had them autoplaying after other "news" content is disgusting. That Google can then claim legal immunity from the consequences of that decision (in a way a TV station wouldn't) is appalling, and something that needs to be changed.

Re: Seems a bit mixed

You may well be right. But currently we have no legislation, and it's a big fucking mess. At least with legislation causing a different mess, it's out in the open and can be publicly debated and changed. As opposed to the current situation of Google and Facebook doing virtually whatever the fuck they want, and getting handsomely rewarded for it.

Nobody cares about your VPN.

This bill is about making the internet companies responsible for what they publish, in the same way that newspapers and TV are.

If you've got the technical ability, you can get round any internet legislation. But then you're probably going to be ad-blocking anyway (and certainly showing from the wrong geographical location) - so you're no/little use to those same interent companies.

The point is to hit them with the big stick until they comply with the law of the land like everybody else has to. And all that requires is to hit their income stream, which is the normal users who they make their money off.

If you want to use a VPN to look at beheading videos, or content designed by the Russian government to fuck with our elections, then please go ahead. It'll never go away. Just become less mainstream again.

Obviously there's a danger that once they're responsible for their content, the big internet companies will go too far in self-censorship - as it's cheaper than making proper editorial decisions. Or they'll just give up on promoting contentious content from random peoples' posting into everyone else's news-feeds. But if they do that, then they'll lose user-engagement, and so lose money. This levels the playing field with the traditional media, who at least have some standards.

Re: Once again, Australia sets the gold standard

The US don't need to extradite them. You can start the case and force them to lose sleep at night, and hire lots of lawyers. That gets the problem onto their desk, from something they're currently just ignoring.

But this means they can't travel. Because every time they go to a country, you can put up an extradition request. North Korea can't do this, and China would struggle - because nobody trusts their judicial system - but Australia or the UK would find it quite an effective strategy. As the US do.

Isn't that already happening? After all, he's not let a boring impediment like death stop him from continuing to publish new work...

Re: *BEER* shouldn't be 'cold cold'

No you warm the pot, so that your tea stays warm for longer. That's why you also use a tea cosy. This is because the second mug of tea is the nicest. and you wouldn't want it to have gone cold.

Extra bonus points for lining your tea cosy with tinfoil, so you can use it as head gear in mind-control emergencies where you wish to disguise yourself as a bishop...

Re: Liability

It's a bit difficult. We've only had the preliminary report on the Lion Air crash, and a really, really early report on the Ethiopia one - where the press conference has not been clear.

I suspect the Lion Air report was enough to tell them there was a design flaw in MCAS - in that it appeared able to do stuff that their certification documents say it shouldn't. But whether that report gives all the information is another question. And we're still at an incredibly early stage for the Ethiopia report - although as Boeing will be helping the enquiries, they should be getting data faster than the press do.

So while I personally think they've fucked this up - they may still not know exactly how. My personal suspicion is that it was the test flying requiring MCAS to be given more control authority, but nobody sat down and fundamentally looked at how the system should now work - as it had been beefed up and was therefore a higher risk to the aircraft and needed a full re-design. But there are other possibilities.

As I understand it, Boeing's original procedure for MCAS failure was to treat it like trim runaway. So you cut power to the stabiliser trim motor from the control panel - and then you have to fall back to trimming the aircraft with the manual trim wheels. Which is a bugger if MCAS has managed to get the thing all the way to the stops, as it takes quite a lot of turns of the wheel to get you back to a sensible trim level.

The Telegraph report on this press conference implied the pilots re-enabled power - either because they thought they were rebooting the system, or to get electric power back to their trim switches on the control yokes (which are way quicker than spinning the manual trim wheels). The Guardian and Reg pieces just said they "followed procedures".

I guess this confusion is what comes of speculation before we've got the data.

Re: Bah!

dajames,

Don't bore me with these petty details! I want giant railways built up the side of volcanoes - so we can chuck stuff in. And I want to see it crashing into a nice pool of molten lava too. Which means we may need to use lots of explosives to keep the caldera active. There's no possible downsides to that right?

Nice sacrificial platforms are an optional extra, which would make the whole thing look nice. And railways need platforms...

Re: HMS Dreadnought

My recollection is that Dreadnougth was retired early, because it was relatively noisy - and so it wasn't deemed worth upgrading all the other systems in order to keep it in operation for another decade. But given it was a horribly complicated prototype, it's also possible that noise wasn't the only reason.

Re: why not strip the weapons and upgrade them

Jellied Eel,

Some of the Trafalgar class boats were decommissioned early due to cracking in the reactors. So I don't think you'll be able to buy one of those army surplus. And new Astutes go for £2 billlion. I'm sure you could negotiate a discount, on the grounds you don't want the horribly expensive sonars and computers - but it's still a pretty substantial chunk of change.

A decommissioned aircraft carrier would be far cheaper, and you'd have loads more room.

Re: why not strip the weapons and upgrade them

Too expensive. They've been heavily used, so keeping them in service basically means ripping everything out and starting again. Which means cutting huge holes in the structure (and pressure hull), which means it's as cheap to start again.

That's not to mention nuclear. Radiation makes changes to the crystal strucuture of the metal bits of the reactor. Which probably means ripping all that out and replacing.

Anyway subs are horrifically expensive to maintain and operate. So civilians use surface ships. Cheaper, safer and easier to maintain. Plus more room for sleeping and stuff.

They did use the words "first operational" in the article. Though I thought Dreadnought was used in operations, even though it was a prototype. Plus the post below has the list in order.

Adding two zeros makes it £6.5 billion. Which is probably not far short of Google's whole turnover in the UK, including the advertising sales that they push through Ireland. Which would be silly.

Re: Seems obvious

There's a bit of a difference though between NATO military excercises off Scotland, where they publicly announce they're going to jam GPS signals, and Russia actively interfering with them on a regular basis and not announcing it. Hence the report.

Re: crap CEO

One of the things Warren Buffet said during the dot-com bust was that he'd avoided a bunch of dodgy companies because he simply didn't understand what they did. And he only invests in stuff he can understand, so as to try to avoid utterly fucking up.

But he also avoided a lot of the market darlings because he said he read their financial reports. He looked for where the cash came and went.

Accounting is as much an art as a science at high levels. There are often quite large transactions that can be recorded in various ways that are all correct, and picking the right one should be about giving as accurate a statement of the company's position as possible. But there's often no perfect way. However there's often a wrong way, where you can move profits deliberately to pimp your current results, knowing that your future ones will now look much worse - which easy to get away with if you're in a high growth industry and can cover your sins with future growth - or a sale to some other poor schmuck before it shows up.

But short of the outright fraud that seems to have happened at say Patisserie Valerie, what you can't hide is the cash going in and out of the business. If more cash is going out than coming in, then something is probably very wrong somewhere. The auditors have a much easier time of checking the cashflow than they do of making sure profits in multi-year deals get put into the correct year. And that's why yould should closely read the financial reports, for clues of those kind of shennanigans.

Remember Amazon and Groupon? Both reported profits in their early days, by inventing strange new accounting metrics. As I recall Amazon were doing things like counting buying stock as investment, that could be spread over multiple future years - and that way they could hope to attract investors. I think the SEC even rapped Groupon over the knuckles for doing this in the run-up to their IPO. The difference was Amaazon had a decent cashflow and a viable market, and were deliberately sacrificing current profits, to grow future market share so they could make huge profits later. Ironically they subsequently went to great effort to avoid making any profits for the next 15 years...

Re: Units

The useful imperial equivalent of m/s is surely miles per hour. Given that most of us doin't measure wind speeds in m/s in our normal lives.

Pen-y-gors,

In the scheme of things Trident and HS2 are pretty cheap. The Trident replacement's entire build and 30-year operating costs are expected to be a bit less than one year's NHS budget. So cancelling the Trident replacement entirely would basically allow about a 3% increase in the NHS budget - so it's not an enormous effect.

On the other hand £100bn is enough to make a serious space program.

Re: I would expect a longer process for re-certification

ChrisG,

I don't disagree with you. However, I'm cautious. I've only read newspaper reports so far - and neither crash investigation is complete. The Ethiopia crash is barely even started - and even the info from the Lion Air crash is only preliminary.

If true, I find the info from the Seattle Times really disturbing. Because it implies failure everywhere:

1. Boeing didn't fully understand the requirements the airframe imposed on the MCAS design until test flying - which is fair enough that's why we test. But then on finding such radical differences, didn't re-asses the system. Or even report the problem back to regulators. The documentation wasn't updated.

2. Boeing also seem to have misunderstood what their own software could do. MCAS should only have authority to move the stabiliser by 0.6°. Then on test flying that was upped to 2.5° without telling anyone. But in reality the authority is unlimited, since the system has no memory of what it's previously done - so it will keep adjusting the stabiliser until it reaches the stop - setting which will crash the aircraft.

3. Why is there a stabiliser setting which can cause unavoidable aircraft loss anyway? I'm no expert, but I can imagine there might be reasons for this, but it does surprise me a little.

4. Finally failure of regulation. The FAA push less important stuff off to self-certification. But only the FAA get to decide what bit they'll certify and what bits Boeing get to. The Seattle Times allege that FAA management were pushing the certification team to push more-and-more areas off to Boeing in order to get the plane certified quicker. Either because the FAA's resources have been cut, or because of pressure to get the plane into service to meet competition from Airbus' A320Neo. If true this suggests regulatory capture, pressure from government due to lobbying or underfunding - or some of all three.

Re: Odd

There's a standard procedure for trim runaway - an already existing problem where the auto-trim system isn't working. And Boeing decided that MCAS failure should be treated in the same way. Which is to disable the the stabiliser trim motor - and do it by a manual wheel. The problem being that MCAS doesn't fail in the same way as trim runaway, so pilots weren't thinking that was the problem and responding in the way Boeing had hoped for.

Re: Pull Breakers

Jos V,

I guess you'd expect the planes to be going fast. If they'd got the throttles set to high power for climb-out, but weren't climbing because the stupid MCAS is trying to kill them, then the plane is going to be gaining speed instead of altitude. Which perhaps they were too busy to notice, or wanted to keep high power as they were trying to get the plane to go up, if only the computer wasn't actively working against them.

Re: I would expect a longer process for re-certification

But it takes a lot of turning. It's some large number of turns between full trim both ways - which matters if you're in full nose-down trim and in a hurry to avoid hitting the ground.

It should have been "go to" rather than "get to" though.

Re: I would expect a longer process for re-certification

The article doesn't quite say 40 seconds - even if the headline does. You've got 40 seconds to respond after MCAS has triggered in that fault condition - in order to kill MCAS and recover.

But the normal response of the Lion Air pilots was to adjust the trim from their joysticks - which used the same motor as MCAS does to adjust the trim of the aircraft. So they are warring over the same system as MCAS uses. MCAS operates every ten seconds, and can move that trim all the way to the end if the pilots don't stop it. But they can keep countering it successfully, as the Lion Air pilots did for 8 minutes.

The correct procedure is to kill the trim motor power, which stops MCAS from killing you. The rush is then that if MCAS has trimmed the aircraft nose-down you have to get to the manual trim wheel, and turn that for a while until you've got back to level trim. Though as long as MCAS hasn't managed to move the stabiliser trim all the way to the stop yet, your work-out correcting it with the trim wheel will be less. And normal flight controls (pulling back on the stick) will overcome that nose-down trim, again so long as MCAS hasn't moved it all the way to the stops.

Re: Why not just disable the system and put the planes back in the air?

DaveK,

I've forgotten who now, but an airline cancelled an order for 50 737MAX yesterday. It's got a lot of orders. So Boeing can survive that. But on the other hand a lot of the orders are for huge numbers of the things, so it only takes a few airlines cancelling to be losing hundreds of orders.

Re: I would expect a longer process for re-certification

If the Seattle Times piece I read is true, then I think the aircraft will need to be re-certified. Or at least the MCAS fix will not be quick - and will need lots of work.

This boils down to two quesions:

1. Can you make MCAS not kill everyone, by flying the plane into the ground, without a major re-design?

2. Can the plane safely be flown with MCAS disabled.

The answer to 1. is easy. You can turn it off at the slightest sign of sensor error. Even though it only operates on one sensor, it has access to two - and the plane has other sensors that can be compared with it.

But the answer to 2 is the killer. Can the plane be flown safely with MCAS turned off? The FAA were told that MCAS only needed authority to change the stabiliiser pitch by 0.6°. And that was considered safe, as it could be easily compensated for by the main flight controls. But the Seattle Times said this was then changed in test flying to 2.5°. So does that mean the plane becomes dangerous without MCAS? It's because the engine cowlings generate more lift as the plane's angle of attack rises - and if this needed 4 times as much correction as first thought - then does it mean the plane is unsafe due to being longitudinally unstable? The certification files were then not updated to show this changed MCAS design.

But according to Seattle Times there's worse. MCAS keeps on working. It looks at the AOA data from it's single sensor and says do I need to push down on the nose? But doesn't apparently take account of earlier actions it has already taken. Thus if the AOA sensor is knackered it will just keep pushing the nose down until it's moved the stabiliser all the way to the stops! Which looks like a software design error to me. And also means that the certification documents that say it only has authority for a 0.6° correction are utter bollocks!

If all the above is true and you take an alarmist/worst-case attitude, then you could argue that flight testing showed the airframe to be unsafe and MCAS has a fundamental design flaw over-and-above the only operating on one sensor fuck-up.