Having the Go open sourced and hackable could result in some really interesting re-purposing of this device. I'm looking forward to what might come out of this. It is a neat device, but I have mostly used it for watching movies.

To be properly reliable, it should be polling three angle of attack sensors at once. Then if one fails, it could go for the majority reading. With two sensors, the system can't know which reading is real and which is eroneous.

Yes, and it's even worse than that. The MBA's decided that the market "wanted" a more fuel efficient 737 that had the same flight characteristics as before, to minimize pilot training. The MBA's then decided that the most "cost efficient" way to do this was to put a very large fuel efficient engine on the existing airframe. Never mind that to do that, the engines had to be shifted forwards and up on the wings so they wouldn't hit the ground. This shift fundamentally altered the aerodynamic stability of the plane, causing it to, for example stall under full power in a steep climb (as in doing an aborted landing). To "fix" this problem and make it behave like the older plane, they created a software system that forced the nose down if the angle of attack went over a certain level. But the angle of attack was measured by a single, fragile wind vane near the nose. When that wind vane failed, the software system forced the nose down on at least two separate flights, killing hundreds of people.

What should have been done: the 737 air frame should have been redesigned for the new engines. That's it. It would have worked. But the bean counters didn't want to do that. Which is why I will NEVER fly on a Boeing 737 Max 8, or as they seem to have renamed it, the 737-8.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: MBA's are wrecking the American economy.

From Wikipedia's entry on him

A degree in economics is nothing like an MBA. Management schools teach an ideological approach to managing what they often claim could be "any" company without direct knowledge of what the company actually does or makes. It teaches such things as systemization of job roles where workers are treated like modular widgets that can just be "dropped" into one job or another. This tends to stifle creativity in otherwise brilliant workers, causing them to behave like mindless drones within their tightly defined roles. It teaches managers to run a company nearly entirely based on various financial and production parameters, with little reference to the reality on the ground of what happens in a company.

Examples include Boeing, where managers moved the corporate headquarters to Chicago, away from the main production centre in Seattle. This was done to separate managers from the actual factory floor. We can see the results of this with the 737 Max 8, where they mounted a new larger engine on an existing legacy airframe, fundamentally messing with the aerodynamic stability of the plane. They tried to fix this problem by concocting a half-baked software solution which relied fundamentally on the data from a single angle of attack wind-vane on the front. When that little wind-vane fails, it can bring down the airplane, as it did...twice.

What really galls me, based on the original article, is that Bill Gates appears to be saying that his big mistake was in not pulling more political levers so that he could get away with his illegal anti-competitive behavior. Even now, "nice" Bill Gates shows no remorse for the harm done by his actions. I don't care that he is donating so much money. In my opinion, the harm he did far outweighs his charitable actions. I have little respect for him. I don't even think he was a good designer. Under his helm, Microsoft included the crime against the gods of software design known as the registry. A single file that all other software must rely on, a file that can progressively be wrecked by bad behavior by various external pieces of software. The fact that the registry still exists within Windows is testament to the broken design culture that is the legacy of Bill Gates. Microsoft's core competency is polishing turds using brute force from a huge staff of programmers. Windows is now usable, but its probably best not to look too closely under the hood.

I am bitter to this day about what Microsoft did. Their anti-competitive behavior held back widespread adoption of far superior operating system technology. For example, NextStep existed in 1989. It was BSD Unix based and used vector graphics (PostScript) for its display. It later became the codebase for Mac OSX. It's hardware abstraction was so good that the system was able to be relatively easily ported from the PowerPC processor to Intel, and then to ARM (for the iPhone and iPad). Again, this system existed in 1989. I am not arguing that NeXT should have won the OS wars. Rather I mention it to show the level of OS technology that was possible at the time.

Meanwhile, most of the public was stuck with years of buggy and insecure Microsoft operating systems. I would say that conservatively, Microsoft's illegal anti-competitive behavior held back the widespread adoption of quality operating technology by at least ten years, and arguably more. I remember working in an office on a company's Access 97 database. Crashes were frequent and frustrating. I remember having conversations with office staff where they said their desktops were crashing or giving blue screens. They said they rebooted and still it didn't work. I would respond saying something like "well there's your problem...you only rebooted twice. Reboot four or five times while praying to the computer gods, and then your problem will be fixed". Multiply that frustration by all the office workers worldwide that had to suffer with Microsoft's horridly unstable architecture, and you will imagine why I hate Microsoft so much. And I have no respect for Bill Gates, even despite his attempts to copy Alfred Nobel with his charity work. Bill Gates has done great harm to the tech industry.

Well that depends on the distance of transmission. The laws of physics state that light travels faster in a vacuum than it does through a solid material like a fiber optic cable. If they get the laser inter-satellite transmission system working, then Starlink could have lower latency than fiber over long distances since the light would travel faster in space. They have already tested an early version of the "space laser" system between two satellites. The current system is really an early version, and even 30ms latency and 20Mbps is actually pretty good, especially if you are living in a remote area.

HP is a textbook example of how the business school "MBA cult" has ruined American business. They have turned a once brilliant creative company like Hewlett Packard and changed it into a cheap brand name for shitty peripherals. Boeing is another excellent example of what MBA's do. Funny thing is that even when MBA's screw up, they just keep hiring clones of themselves. Notice that at Boeing they fired the one actual engineer from the board, while keeping everyone else.

Some counter-examples of successful companies that haven't followed the playbook of the MBA cult: Apple (under Steve Jobs at least), SpaceX, and Tesla (both under Elon Musk). If you truly want to "make America great again", stop hiring so many MBA's to the boards of companies.

According to this link, ocean acidification is interfering with the formation of the silica shells of diatoms. Since most of the oxygen we breath is produced in the ocean by phytoplankton such as diatoms and coccolithophores, this should concern all of us. In my opinion, ocean acidification could be the most concerning issue for the sustainability of civilization in the long term. In the short to medium term I am most concerned with widespread crop failures due to shifting precipitation and drought patterns, along with sea level rise. If Europe could barely cope with migrants in the millions, imagine migrants in the many tens of millions.

Countries that aspire to sexual equality usually have lower birth rates. In that regard, the above points need to be equally applied to both men AND women.

There was some discussion on the Boca Chica FB page that this might have been an over-pressure incident. To quote:

Source

It kind of makes sense. If they were testing for maximum pressure, automatic pressure relief systems on the tank would probably be turned off, with pressure being controlled by some external system. Perhaps that external system failed. If you look at the video, it appeared that not only did the top bulkhead blow off, but there appeared to be release of LN2 from the lower part of the rocket as well. Either way, it was probably a really useful test to see the true limits of tank pressure.

The Max 8 has overlarge engines fixed to and older air frame that wasn't designed for them. The engines are shifted forward and have a large surface area, which gives them a wing-like effect. This can cause the nose of the airplane to tip upwards at times. Also because the engines are far forward, when full thrust is applied on a climb, that thrust force can create a torque that pushes the nose up. Pushing the nose up on a climb can be a bad thing as it can cause a failure of lift, otherwise known as a stall. The software solution known as MCAS is basically a bandaid to force the nose down if the plane's unfortunate aerodynamics are beginning to cause the airplane to stall. Even if that software works perfectly, the plane still has a fundamental aerodynamic flaw...full thrust on a climb can cause a stall.

For that reason, I will never board a 737 Max 8 (even if they rebrand it as the 737-802). The ONLY solution here is to redesign the air frame. I used to have great respect for Boeing. Not any more. Yet another victim of the "management cult" (aka. MBA ideology)

ROFL

This is what fascists do. Like Bart Simpson saying "I didn't do it" when it is blatantly obvious that he did. Like Trump denying he said something, even when presented with a recording of him saying what he denied. Doing this is a tool of intimidation. It's basically saying "fuck you" to the idea of verifiable truth. It is, like George Orwell wrote, like saying 2 + 2 = 5.

I just finished watching The Edge of Democracy" on Netflix (English speakers don't forget to turn on the English audio track, as the subtitles don't cover the narration). I pity Brazil. For the social chaos. For the economic chaos. For the endemic corruption. For the fact that when President Dilma tried to flush out the corruption, that the elites basically flushed the economy down the toilet and destroyed democracy in order to avoid being held accountable. I pity that country that has a leader that removed restrictions on those who had incentives to burn the rain forest, and then turned around and tried to blame those who most wanted to save the rain forest. The simple fact is that it is in the economic interest of a narrow segment of people to burn as much of the rain forest as they can. Bolsonaro has basically given that narrow segment of people carte blanche to do what they want. He has done this by removing the enforcement mechanisms that prevented them from burning. Removing the penalties. Removing the enforcers. So I stand by what I say. Bolsonaro DOES want the rain forest burned. His actions and policies show this.

Bolsonaro actually WANTS the Amazon to burn, because that burnt Amazon forest will become grazing land for cattle. Never mind that the grazing land will only be viable for about two years, before they will have to burn more forest.

I used to buy a huge box of spaghetti from Costco (went with a friend so I didn't pay for membership). A flat of tomato paste. Maybe canned stewed tomatoes. Some bulk ground beef. Onions. Potatoes. Peppers once in a while. Dried beans. A big bag of rice. Frozen kippers. A bag of flour. Perhaps bulk eggs. Bulk spices at Costco (before they switched to only selling spice-flavored salt). In uni I was living on a few dollars a day for food. And I was a bicycle road racer, riding a 300 to 400km per week. Of course that required having a kitchen. And Costco. And sometimes a bulk food store that sold dried goods. And sometimes access to a friend's car for shopping trips.