I grew up believing many of the myths that this article addresses. So I'm hesitant to believe it entirely without verifying additional sources. In particular, this quote seems misleading:
> the U.S. Forest Service reports that kudzu occupies, to some degree, about 227,000 acres of forestland
I quickly verified this statistic. But I know that "forestland" is a specific category of land. What about non-forestland? How many acres of kudzu are there on land that is not considered forestland?
> experts estimate that kudzu covers another 500,000 acres in the South’s cities and suburbs
I found this statistic about 500,000 acres quoted in several places, but didn't find which experts came up with that number. Still, it was very quick to find double the acreage in one specific type of non-forestland.
That doesn't even begin to touch non-forestland countryside (i.e. non-city, non-suburb)
The US Forest Service estimates that kudzu adds 2,500 acres each year. US Department of Agriculture estimates that it spreads by 150,000 acres per year. I don't think this is a discrepancy, just that each agency is looking at specific land types and uses.
It seems like this article is seriously cherry picking data to make it seem like kudzu is less of an issue.
Have you engaged with the FAA yet? Even if you're going the experimental route, it's useful to have an active and ongoing dialog with them. And they are tremendously more receptive to working with companies on new technologies than they were 10 years ago. It's a different regulatory environment than you would have been dealing with at SpaceX.
It's also worth noting that if you own above a certain percentage of a company's stock, it's legally required to make your trades public.
Also interesting -- look at the trade volume during the big moves, like 3-June. There's no way retail investors are causing that much volume, especially when it's during pre-market and post-market trading hours.
I guess I'll be pedantic for a moment. A coup, by definition, is a seizure of power from government. If they are not successful at seizing power, then it was not a coup.
If I show up at the capitol building alone and demand to be put in charge, is that also a coup attempt? Obviously where you draw the line is subjective, but this event never had anything close to the requisite backing to become an actual coup, so calling it that feels a bit disingenuous to me. What it was is a riot and and an insurrection, but not a coup.
If you ever take commercial flights you are already being flown by autopilot, and have been for decades. It might give you comfort that there is a human pilot in the cockpit for backup, but it's only a matter of time before the human backup moves to a ground station.
The autopilot is still at the control of the pilots, and usually enabled only at higher altitude. Landing/takeoff are still manually flown by pilots most of the time.
I don't have issues with a computers ability to maintain altitude, climb, or turn to a heading. I have a problem with a computer's ability to respond to the unexpected while in the air. For instance, comms failure is a scenario pilots train for and can deal with. I imagine autopilot might have some issues with that.
There is a long list of entirely preventable human-caused accidents. Is there a reason pilot-caused crashes are less scary for you? Computer caused accidents will be fixed and won't happen again. Human-caused accidents will keep happening as long as experience is valuable.
Aeroflot Flight 593 - pilot let his son fly the plane, 63 dead
Germanwings Flight 9525 - (possibly suicidal) pilot deliberately crashed , 144 dead
Air France Flight 447 - pilot caused airplane to stall, 228 dead
Aero Flight 311 - both pilots got drunk, 25 dead
and this is just a random selection, there are long long lists of human-caused aviation accidents.
Therac-25 wasn’t a “it’s not ready yet!”-type issue. It wasn’t an expected or anticipated failure-mode - it only became a (literal) textbook case-study after people died and the industry has learned and improved as a consequence.
They ignored repeated failures and evidence of malfunction by saying it was “impossible” that it could be failing in that way.
Unexpected failure modes are the issue. The Boeing 737 max 8 failure being tied to one sensor would suggest the industry has not fully learned the lesson.
My understanding is that it was a UX issue - the "malfunctioning" was the system working as-directed by the user, but the UX was horrible for informing the user what they were doing.
That isn't really true. It was brought down by stall prevention software that was using input from a single faulty sensor, and there was no way to override the inputs from this software. Further, there were multiple incidents before boeing admitted what was happening, even though in retrospect it looks like they knew what was happening all along.
My point was that it functioned in a manner vastly more similar to a conventional autopilot than what Airbus is proposing to do in this project.
MCAS was a simple algorithm that altered flight controls in a predetermined way upon a limited set of inputs. Airbus is proposing a vastly more ambitious solution that includes additional inputs from computer vision and a global view of the state of the aircraft.
If a relatively simple algorithm was not safe because of bad engineering decisions (or bad management incentives, whatever the case is) - then wouldn't a much more complex system be even more likely to have hard to discover corner cases and failures?
In this instance, the simplicity of the system was its down fall.
I think the use of human pilots complicates a system. You are relying on a component to the system that is susceptible to tiredness, distraction, threats, rage, revenge, self destruction, and sudden death. Complete automation would replace one extremely complex and unpredictable component, with a less complex and more predictable component.
Merriam Webster dictionary says, "insect, noun, any of numerous small invertebrate animals (such as spiders or centipedes) that are more or less obviously segmented —not used technically"
I couldn't help but wonder if Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) was chosen intentionally as a fake source. WHOI can be pronounced "hooey", which is slang for a fake assertion.
If compliance were the goal, then I would be inclined to agree with you. However, this lawyer is suing first without any notification first that the shop is non-compliant. That's what makes it come across as predatory.
> These “shakedown” lawsuits, added Morin, are often based on small, “technical violations” that can be easily fixed if a letter is sent to the business owner. But under California law, a disabled person cannot claim money if they send the business owner a letter with their complaint first.
It looks like if a claimant sends a letter they would not be able to sue for damages. That seems like it might really limit any perspective plaintiff's options.
That depends. Is the plaintiff's goal to encourage a business to comply or is it to get paid? If compliance was the goal, sending a letter would always be the first step.
But if a claimant does send a letter and that letter gets ignored, what's their recourse if they can't sue? Send another, more angrily worded letter? That will show the defiant business owner what for! They'd likely have to find someone else to do file suit.
I'm not a lawyer and I'm sure that article is simplifying things, but using the information given, I would also sue first.
And it's actually comparable to the _intended_ failure mode of a 737 Max. If the system fails you can't let the computer control the trim, so there are manual trim wheels provided and you switch off electronic trim. Like the steering wheel of a large modern car, these wheels are mechanically connected to the thing you want to change but if you're feeble like me you'll struggle to even move them which is why the computer was in the loop.
As I understand it large trucks existed prior to power-assist, they just hired big strong chaps who could wrestle the steering.
We probably don't want (and Boeing doesn't want) to make 737 Max certification have a "Physical strength check" where you need to exert so-and-so much turning force for so-and-so many seconds or you can't fly their plane. So probably trim wheels need a re-think, whether that happens as part of the 737 Max work, its immediate aftermath or not for years because this incident scares manufacturers away from changing anything about trim.
Seismic shifts in safety considerations do happen, we haven't seen the last of them. And they aren't always ultimately for the better. Titanic had a few effects, many of them really good, but one notable one is that it pushed the narrative that you need to provide and test a LOT of lifeboats on an ocean liner. Titanic, as you can probably all recite, did not have enough lifeboats. But in practice lifeboats are very much a last resort for an ocean liner captain. You've got a whole lot of civilians who are incompetent at sea at the best of times, probably panicking and now you're trying to successfully get them into smaller boats under supervision of a relatively smaller number of crew. Some of them are likely to be injured or even die. A ship's master would prefer _anything_ over putting passengers into lifeboats, except them all drowning. Almost always the sensible course of action, taken by the ship's master, will be to take the still working ship to any port and unload the passengers. Yes even if the ship is somewhat on fire, or has grave engine problems, almost anything except actually sinking right now.
Meanwhile just owning the lifeboats means your crew have to keep testing them and servicing them, each time also has a chance of injury or death as crew fall into the water, boats fall on the crew, and so on. So owning a suite of lifeboats for your ocean liner (which you weren't planning to crash into an iceberg at any time) is probably a net negative in terms of injuries and deaths.
>We probably don't want (and Boeing doesn't want) to make 737 Max certification have a "Physical strength check"
Actually, I think they absolutely should. And then it should be made illegal to have a plane that has any such requirements, so these planes should be deemed unairworthy, and Boeing should be forced to scrap them. Either that, or female pilots should be able to claim discrimination, and every female or otherwise not-strong-enough pilot should get a free lifelong chief pilot salary as part of the settlement.
Basically, this plane should never have been built. It's a 1960s design, and because of crappy regulations that allowed this, Boeing kept making this 1960s tech because it was "grandfathered". Newly-built planes should not be allowed just because they were OK 50 years ago, when they aren't good enough according to modern standards.
I'm guessing you meant "bigger"? Otherwise I don't know what a bogger trim is. The wheels already have servo motors, but understandably the cut-out cuts those out also.
> the U.S. Forest Service reports that kudzu occupies, to some degree, about 227,000 acres of forestland
I quickly verified this statistic. But I know that "forestland" is a specific category of land. What about non-forestland? How many acres of kudzu are there on land that is not considered forestland?
> experts estimate that kudzu covers another 500,000 acres in the South’s cities and suburbs
I found this statistic about 500,000 acres quoted in several places, but didn't find which experts came up with that number. Still, it was very quick to find double the acreage in one specific type of non-forestland.
That doesn't even begin to touch non-forestland countryside (i.e. non-city, non-suburb)
The US Forest Service estimates that kudzu adds 2,500 acres each year. US Department of Agriculture estimates that it spreads by 150,000 acres per year. I don't think this is a discrepancy, just that each agency is looking at specific land types and uses.
It seems like this article is seriously cherry picking data to make it seem like kudzu is less of an issue.