I was going to point out the fact that Apple stole the idea of Widgets from Konfabulator, but then I realised you were obviously being ironic.

I would assume that, if the NSA had a back door in TrueCrypt, it would be in their best interest for people to keep using it. So in that case, they definitely would not want to have it taken down.

On the other hand, maybe someone discovered the back door, wanted to remove it, was told by the NSA not to, and then decided the project should be scrapped.

The most likely explanation, though, was that the NSA did not have a back door and therefore sent a letter to have it taken down.

Oh Eh Sex Eye Oh point Gee

The only airplanes where a pilot has to do nothing from roll out to landing, are military drones. And they crash frequently. There is no airliner in existence (or even planned right now) that can take off automatically at all, successful tests have been done but it was decided that the decision to abort or continue a take-off was better left to a pilot and he had to be able to react so quickly that he had to be actually at the controls without losing time by having to take over from an autopilot. So the software for automatic take-offs was never installed in any actual passenger aircraft in service. Landing can be done automatically BUT with a pilot giving instructions to the autopilot, and special equipment at the airport. And it's not just a matter of "push a few buttons and the airplane will fly to the proper airport and land itself". You have to give the right instructions at the right time, extend the landing gear and flaps when at the correct speed, etcetera.

Automatic landing systems are indeed required for Cat III, but the vast majority of landings are not Cat III. Whenever visibility is sufficient, we land manually. We only use autoland when visibility is very poor, and in that case we have a special checklist and lots of extra items to continuously check during the approach, with special procedures to react quickly when failures occur (either in ground equipment or the aircraft itself). These procedures have to be trained regularly. If for some reason one of the two pilots is not certified for Cat III, they are allowed to fly but can only land manually.

And trust me, an automatic landing is MORE work, not less.

Crashes due to pilot error are more common than crashes due to mechanical failures because when the mechanics fail, the pilots can usually rectify the situation and avoid a crash. Those failures simply don't enter the crash statistics. Take the pilots out, and the number of crashes will skyrocket because there's nobody left to correct the many, many failures that occur in an automated aircraft.

I have never crashed a plane, but have experienced plenty of cases where the mechanics failed and the airplane would have crashed if we hadn't been there to take over.

You cite Air France 447 as "a great example" but it's quite the opposite: in that case, the mechanics had already failed. Without pilots, the aircraft would have crashed just the same. Even more, this exact kind of failure had already happened several times to other crews, and they had always managed to rectify the situation. So basically, the success rate for automation for this particular failure was zero while the success rate for pilots was more than 80%.

In the case of Air France 447, automation was actually working against the pilots, giving them false warnings: stall warning combined with overspeed warning, and later the stall warning disappearing and coming back precisely when the pilots were temporarily applying the correct input, making them reverse their correct action again. So the automation did not just give up, it actually created a much more confusing situation for the pilots. Add to that the fact that many Airbus pilots had never even been trained in stall recovery for a large aircraft because Airbus insisted that it was impossible for an Airbus to stall. They thought the automation was so infallible that they could squeeze that extra half hour of training out of the curriculum to save money.

Another example, not long after that Air France crash, another Airbus plane also experienced an airspeed indication problem and the automation decided, incorrectly, that the airplane was stalling so it violently pushed the nose down. It would have crashed if the pilots had not quickly switched off two computers to put the aircraft into a basic direct control law that allowed them to pull the nose back up. Otherwise, the aircraft would have crashed because it refused to obey the pilots' orders to pull the nose up.

However, I still think driving a car is definitely more complex to automate. An airplane can rely on all sorts of electronic signals, GPS, ILS, VOR/DME, etc. It doesn't need to look outside, it has plenty of space to avoid obstacles and other aircraft. A car has to actually analyze visual data, recognize objects and pedestrians, etcetera. That is incredibly more complex and error-prone. Sure, great strides have been made, but compared to "if the signal says you're right of track, correct to the left", analyzing video images is far more demanding. And the margins are a lot smaller, cars have to pass other cars with maybe a meter between them, while airplanes are considered to be in "near collision" if they are still hundreds of meters apart.

Drones are capable of doing a lot of things automatically, but they also have a lot of crashes. If passenger aircraft had the same crash rate, there would be several crashes per day (if not per hour).

In many countries, elevators have a sign saying that children under a certain age are not allowed to use them without adult supervision.

Exactly, all automatic cars still have manual overrides. As long as these overrides are considered necessary, nobody without a license will be allowed to drive them.

Once the technology is so well proven that manual overrides are no longer necessary (and can even be disabled by a parent), it will be safe for a 12 year old to drive. Just like riding one of the many automatic transit systems already in use today.

Flying a jet liner is not exactly "almost 100%" automated. The machine can do all relatively simple and boring tasks remarkably well (following a route, maintaining a speed, following an ILS or GPS signal very precisely, even pulling up the nose to flare and land the aircraft) but still has to be told what to do by humans. It will never start an approach or extend landing gear and flaps without someone pushing the right buttons and levers. It doesn't even change altitude without being explicitly told to do so. In short, it doesn't make decisions, it just executes. The work done by the automation is extremely simple and mathematical. "If the glide slope goes up, pull the nose up a little bit", not much more complicated than that (with the right adjustments to prevent oscillations). It's a machine that's built to be as simple and predictable as possible with very little sophistication.

If a pilot is in the cockpit, on the jump seat, sure, he could talk a 12 year old into pushing the right buttons and pulling the right levers to land the plane. (No, not that button, the one to the left of it... no, the left, not the right). Many planes have autoland capability and even autobrakes, so the plane will even come to a stop on the runway without anyone touching the actual flight controls. Try talking someone in from the ground, though, and everything becomes a lot more complicated since you can't see what they're doing. In a company I used to fly for, they tried letting a stewardess land an A330 simulator by being told what to do by a pilot who was not allowed to see the cockpit, just a radar display. It seems perfectly doable (and I like to think I would be able to talk someone in just like that) but they did end up crashing.

By the way, doing an automatic Cat 3 approach is actually more work than a normal manual approach and requires special training and certification. Al sorts of things can go wrong, and we have to be able to take over at any moment. It's quite stressful to just have confidence in a machine which you know may well screw up at any time (or ground equipment could fail, etcetera). And that's just for the extremely simple task of following an ILS signal and then pulling the nose up when reaching a certain radio altimeter readout. Imagine the much more complicated task of driving a car...

The problem was that, even though they don't use the brakes at high speeds, those break disks are still on the wheels and spinning at whatever speed the wheels are spinning at, for the entire duration of the run. And apparently just that centrifugal force was enough to shatter carbon brakes. Vibrations at 1000 mph over desert ground certainly didn't help either.

Yeah, people are funny. Oh, look at all this free ad-supported stuff! I love those ads, because they make everything free!

What they don't realise, is that the products themselves have to be paid for somehow. They don't actually become cheaper to produce. So who pays for them? Advertisers. And where do they get the money to pay for the ads? From the products they sell! And who pays for those products? We do! In the end, the money is still coming from us in a roundabout way. Nothing free about it.

So we now live in a world where we are really paying for all sorts of seemingly free stuff, and getting the added inconvenience of ads!

The only way to profit from this system, is by making a list of stuff you saw ads for, and then buying the other products whenever possible. Don't pay for the ads they made you watch. Now the dumbwits who buy the advertised stuff are paying for your free stuff.

The colors are just identifiers for the pieces. In any of the three dimensions the cube has three layers of pieces. I solved one layer (not just a uniform color on one side, but also the correct color on the sides of those pieces), my dad showed me how to do the second layer (four edge pieces), and then I found the most difficult part, the last four edges and corners.

About the same, maybe a few minutes longer, but I did figure it out the solution myself. How about you?

The only hard bit is having enough patience and determination to keep trying. It's not exactly rocket science. It may seem that way when you see all those "formulas" on the internet, but anybody with a little bit of intelligence and determination can solve it rather intuitively. It just takes some time to figure it out.

My dad solved it over the course of a few months. I was still a small kid, 6 years old or so, and wanted him to show me, and unfortunately he finally gave in and showed me a small part. I had already solved the first face, he showed me how to solve the second layer but fortunately refused to show the last layer. Many years later, I picked up the cube again and found the rest (last corners and edges) in a few weeks. I'm still sort of upset that I can't claim I completely solved it by myself. Even though in the mean time I found completely different methods so I don't even need the part my dad taught me anymore. It still feels like he showed me the first part of the way, a method of thinking, and therefore I didn't get there by myself :-(

Anyway, since then I've solved many similar puzzles (bigger cubes, conjoined cubes, magaminx, gigaminx, face-turning octahedron, master skewb, square one,...), always without looking up the solution. But the first one you try to solve (for most people the regular 3x3x3 cube) is always the hardest. Once you've acquired a certain way of thinking, it helps a lot when solving other similar puzzles even though they're often a lot harder.

There are quite a few operations that cannot be done:

- Flipping a single edge piece (you can only flip them in pairs)
- Twisting a single corner (you can twist one clockwise and another one counterclockwise)
- Swapping two pieces

The swapping bit is the easiest to prove mathematically: all you need to know is the difference between odd and even permutations. Imagine for a moment that you can swap any two pieces, for example by taking the puzzle apart. Now for any real permutation (for example a twist, or a rotation of three corners, or whatever other operation you want to achieve), you can come up with a sequence of two-piece swaps (and ONLY two-piece swaps) that results in that operation. For example, if you would want to rotate 4 corners, you could do that with three swaps: 1-2, 2-3, 3-4. You could do it in a different order, and with lots of extra swaps, for example 5 or 7 or 101 swaps. But you'll NEVER be able to do it with an even number of swaps. A permutation is either odd (can be achieved with an odd number of swaps) or even (can be achieved with an even number of swaps). So now it's really easy to prove that you can't swap two pieces without taking the cube apart: any twist of any face rotates 4 corners (which could be done by doing 3 swaps) and 4 edge pieces (another 3 swaps). That's 6 swaps total, which is even. No matter how many of those even permutations you do, you can never achieve the result of a single swap because that's an odd permutation.

Another way of looking at it, is saying that any twist is an odd permutation on the corners and also an odd permutation on the edges. If you manage to swap two corners, that can only be done with an odd number of turns (otherwise you'd have an even permutation again). But then you'll also have performed an odd permutation on the edges, so thay can never be back in their original positions (which is 0 swaps, therefore even).

Proof of the fact that you can't twist a single corner or flip a single edge piece is slightly more complicated, but not really that hard either.