Did you read the article I quoted? They flew the airplane all the way to the floor in a stall. Every time they pushed the nose down the stall horn started. Every time they (erroneously) pulled *UP*, it silenced. Absent any visual cues and without cross-referencing instruments, they thought they were making things better by maintaining that attitude.

The point I was trying to make is, if the FEP would've allowed the stall horn to sound when at that high alpha, MAYBE they would've kept pushing the nose down, horn be damned, and fly the plane out of the stall. The FEP, to me, was not the cause but definitely a huge contributor.

How about this one? I jokingly call this one the Paris Lawnmower. Airbus A320, during a demo at the Paris Airshow. You know, home court. FEP again got in the way, the pilot asked for more power and up elevator, the computer told him to get bent.

There was a theory floated by some that Airbus messed with the FDR data and threw the pilot under the bus. Airbus denies this. We'll never truly know.

And I should know better than to take your flamebait, but here you go: I'm not just a fan of Boeing, I'm a fan of most airplanes out there, old and new, little and big, from many eras, from many makers. Aviation is one of humanity's most useful, influential and coolest achivements. The DC-3 transformed America, The Jet Age (on the wings of the 707 and DC-8) truly transformed the world.

Wanting to have a pilot have the ultimate say is why I'm not too keen on pilotless aircraft under the current state of the art.

AF 447 would've had a better chance if the idiotic Airbus un-overridable Flight Envelope Protection had not silenced the stall horn when the aircraft exceeded what the FEP thought was a valid angle of attack.

The high angle of attack *was* valid, it was reality, it was happening, and whenever the pilots would push the nose down to correct the stall, the stall horn would come on again, so they would pull the nose up again. Which *erroneously* silenced the alarm.

From the Wikipedia article:

You see the problem there? The plane thought for the pilot, and it thought wrong.

FWIW, Boeing's FEP can be completely over-ridden, but not Airbus'. Even with all the benefits of FEP, I think the pilot should always have final say.

Actually, if it's the Kompressor article I'm thinking of: The situation was that the husband and wife both had had well-paying jobs, then they both lost their jobs via the downturn in the economy, and the CAR WAS PAID FOR and not worth much, so they kept it, rather than - what? Trading it in on a used beater or something? So, yes, she was driving the Mercedes to pick up welfare checks, but they were, for lack of a better term, newly poor. It was likely if something happened to the Mercedes that they wouldn't be buying another one while still on welfare. Holding it up as an example of poor people owning nice cars and the handouts being out of control is misleading.

If there's more than one, I suspect I might know what happened.

OMG Ponies was the best /. prank ever! I kinda wish they made it a selectable option!

Hard to believe that shit was 9 years ago.. x.x

Let's see, what could possibly go wrong with entrusting the keeping of the nation's confidence to a CEO that pretty much steered HP right into the iceberg.

No. Just.. no. NO fucking way.

The only way I'd accept this is if she outsources Congress to a call center in India. They can't do any worse than the locals!

Well, it won't be the same price - it requires a more complex fab process - but yeah. Consumer MLC drives have proven themselves to be robust and reliable, for the most part. TLC still seems to be a bridge a little too far.

I'd like to see Tech Report re-run their endurance test with current drive models. The only "problem" is that drives are so good now that by the time the best model fails and we get the final score, none of them will be on the market any more.

A huge proportion of computing is moving to the cloud. Conventional disk storage is a nightmare for cloud services because there's such a huge disparity between sequential I/O and random I/O performance. CPU, memory, and network bandwidth all divide up nicely, but as soon as you have contention for disk I/O, it all falls apart.

This is known as the "noisy neighbour" problem. You might be happy and fine on your cheap VPS for months, and then the next day it collapses in a heap, even though you're getting the same allocation of resources you always have. It takes a lot of complex engineering and expert management to keep noisy neighbours at bay.

SSDs eliminate this, because SSD performance on multi-threaded random I/O is not far short of even their best-case sequential performance. Which means that every cloud provider wants to move to pure SSD. Exabytes worth of it. I work for a relatively small company, and we have 1.5PB of disk that we'd love to convert to SSD.

That SSD needs to be dense and reliable. Smaller process nodes improved density at a cost of write cycles. 3D flash gives us improved density and increased write cycles at a cost of more complex fabrication.

The market is there, all right.

Pilots have to go through the same security checks the passengers do. Or, at least, the pilots in the US do - I've seen them in the security checkpoints several times.

I'll miss the show as it exists now, and not just because of the cars and the trips and the stunts - I'll miss it because Top Gear UK isn't afraid to call a manufacturer out on a bad car. That's something the US version can't, and won't do -- because in the US, you don't badmouth the very people who give you money in exchange for advertising on your show / magazine.

It was good while it lasted, and it's remarkable it lasted this long.

They rotate around a common center of gravity. But that center of gravity is inside the Earth. Or to put it another way, no.

They do. This equivalent is known as "money".

You only get crevasses in iceberg lettuce.

in BOFH speak, from a couple of decades ago.

What is old is new again?

I did go to Lowes, and Target, and even the hated Walmart - none of them had what I was looking for, so yeah, Amazon had it.

For truly big-ticket items such as washers, dryers, etc - that I would buy at a local store. But vacuums, wine fridges, etc? Amazon. The local selection of those two items, for example, is thin to none. Each store carries the same crap bottom-end vaccums and dyson hi-end, nothing in between. Amazon had the in-between. Wine fridge? None locally. I called. I perused web pages. "Online only." So I did! Just not at that particular store's site.

The last two appliances I bought at local stores were a coffemaker and a toaster. Oh and some power tools from home depot.

It's telling that selection is narrower and inventory much lower than it was 10 years ago. The big-boxes are feeling pain.