Didn't airbus get yelled at for not stopping the pilot from ripping of the vertical stabilizer.
If so, it goes to the central idea behind Airbus designs, which is the very European mentality of design by committee and the government knows best. Remember, Airbus is a conglomerate of nearly all the European nations.
That's not how it works at all.
Airliners pretty much since the jet age have had at least some measure of "envelope protection". In the 60s this was pretty simple - just a stick pusher to prevent stalls since stalls in many airliners can easily become unrecoverable. Airbus's envelope protection is much more sophisticated than just a stick pusher.
However when there's a systems failure the Airbus systems will automatically drop to a different control law that effectively works like basic stick and rudder flying.
So if the system is working perfectly fine, but the pilot wants to do something that the system thinks the pilot shouldn't do, then who gets to determine the end result? What if doing what the system wanted to do would lead to the system having an issue? Or if the system did not detect that one of its sensors (and the backups) had degraded because they all failed the same way?
There are a million scenarios where the system thinks it is right and the pilot knows the system is wrong but needs to do something else. Time matters in all scenarios where the plane may be in trouble.
Boeing uses fly by wire now too by the way.
Beoing may be fly-by-wire, but there is a difference between fly-by-wire and pilot vs computer being in control. You can design fly-by-wire such that the pilot still has the last say in the matter without having to have the system enter into a degraded mode first.
I know both SAS and R, and I think that for people who've never programmed, the GUI-based version of SAS wins on end-user usability because end-users can click together (simple and limited) analyses on really big datasets. This has far-reaching consequences for the learning curve.
For R there exist attempts at GUI's (like e.g. R-commander) that offer point-and-click functionality but they're more sketchy.
Others have mentioned Rstudio, and that looks like it would fit the bill just fine for those users from a cursory glance; and if they could drop the money on SAS they could certainly drop the money for commercial versions of RStudio and get the extra help.
I think that giving non-programmers access to R will result in a flood of help requests because they really do need some notion of programming to use the R language. With SAS that's more in the background because the GUI tool is relatively well done, and use of the butt-ugly, antiquated and clumsy mainframe-style SAS language can usually be avoided.
Never touched that version. I only had a single desktop license for the small company that I worked at. We had it b/c the guy I replaced knew SAS very well and sold the management on it. Management just wanted the functionality; they didn't care and had the money to spare.
I think that statisticians, real analysts and data-scientists will soon feel constrained by SAS and will prefer to use SAS to prepare a dataset for analysis, and then carry out any actual analysis in R.
If they're feeling constrained, then they'll be looking for better tools. And more likely than not, if they can do it SAS they can do it in R too. So why have two tools when you only need one?
Last but not least, R is still an in-memory analysis program, which practically limits analyses to what you can be fit in core. There are packages that try to extend R in this direction, but I consider them to be poor quality and cumbersome.
Good to know; but that will probably change as things grow. I know SAS is really good at Flat File databases, but not much more; it probably has some similar constraints.
Python on the other hand is aimed squarely at programmers, and nobody else.
Very true, and I never said otherwise.
R has an excellent gui in RSTudio: www.rstudio.com I would recommend it as a much better interface to R.
Looking at that website and seeing their prices they are almost certainly aiming to compete with SAS and using an Open Source product to boot. Good for them!
KDE and Qt are synonymous with C++. They prove that C++ is the best language around, because the best apps and GUI frameworks around are built using C++. KDE 5 is fast, it's stable, and it just plain great software to use, all thanks to C++.
Then there's Gnome. They're still pissing around with C, JavaScript, and their homegrown Vala poopfest. And Gnome is a total disaster these days! That's what happens when you use inferior languages instead of a professional language like C++. C++ means your code is good, which means that your libraries and apps are good. Other languages mean that your code is bad, which means that your libraries and apps are bad.
There's one lesson here and that is to use C++ if you want to have the greatest software known to humankind. C++ is where it's at, baby!
Just be aware that a Plasma takes advantage of a lot of QML usage - e.g JavaScript. But yes, C++ plus Qt is a phenominal experience.
Ah yes, the user is wrong. Well, do as you see fit anyway, this discussion would have been useful a couple of years ago. Your side with the 'user is always wrong, lets change it anyway' has won, and now KDE (and also Gnome, with the exact same reasoning) has become irrelevant for all but a handful of users (actually, I am one of these users that still uses KDE 4 daily, mostly because kioslaves is great). Hope you enjoy your victory!
If that's the case, then why is everone - Apple and Microsoft included - copying what KDE did in KDE4? KDE is still extremely relevant and really on the forefront of the tech.
On top of that, they're still the only ones that have targetted multiple kinds of devices with a unified programming experience and able to deliver customized UIs for each device type (e.g. netbook vs desktop vs tablet...)
The TSA is probably thinking that if the battery in your gadget doesn't work, it might not actually be a battery...so, just to be on the safe side....
Most likely, this is tied to the announcement of the discovery of explosives that don't trigger the standard explosive detectors. So the battery really could be a bomb.
More likely than not they were just reviewing the laws and regulations already on the books and found this one and decided to start enforcing it.
There is nothing new about this - it has been on the books for decades.
So the thing is... this isn't really new. I can remember back long before there even WAS a TSA, back when laptops were the hot new portable device . . . And security would often ask you to power it on. And if its battery was dead, you could plug it in first. I agree it can be a bit of a problem because batteries often get used up in the course of travel, and I'd be interested to see how security actually handles it. I traveled just a few days ago, and they certainly weren't requiring EVERY passenger to demonstrate their devices. Also: When first going through security, I very rarely have a problem with my phone being dead because, you know, I'm just STARTING to travel, not after a long day of it. (Although I won't say never. It has happened)
Mod parent up as informative!
When the instruments are gone (somehow), the pilot would certainly rather have windows than not. It provides a very good chance of survivability where no windows means practically no chance.
I'm not getting on a plane that has no backup plan.
so you won't get on an Airbus already?
Seriously, Airbus designs their planes so that the computers override the pilots. If the pilot wants to do something that the computer doesn't think they should do, then they have to enter override codes to be allowed to do so - which means, in an emergency, that the pilots have to spend precious time overriding the computer to resolve the emergency.
So honestly this is no surprise from Airbus; just a natural evolution of their already computer controlled systems with people as a secondary system.
They also look out the window to realize when the instruments are wrong. As didn't really happen with the South Korean plane crash at SFO.
No the instruments were right in that case; the pilots failed to use them properly.
Slightly different beasts I think. R is a really impressive analysis tool. Python is a scripting language. The latter is quite a bit more versatile, but
However, his question was related to coming from SAS. SAS Scripting is not a general language eithers; it very much like using GNU Octave, Mathamatica, Matlab, and R - able to do some general things (open/read/write/close files) but is generally very data set oriented. So R is very much a suitable replacement.
The cost of training them to use R will be signifantly cheaper than what you are spending on the SAS licenses And yes, while I have not used R myself, I would certainly recommend it over Python for this use case
So not having used R yourself, why do you believe it is the better and cheaper solution?
B/c I don't do much in data modeling and working with that kind of data. The SAS scripts I wrote were over 10 years ago (2002). R isn't that old. I had one time which it might have (last summer), but then forgot about it. But for me that's 1 time in >10 years. If I needed to get into doing the stuff I did with SAS again, then yes I'd be looking at using R; but that's unlikely for me.
And yes, I have seen others use it so I know how much easier it would be for me to get into using R than updating myself on SAS and getting back into that.
It's not even that. The military is getting their budget cut the same as every other government agency. A more accurate statement would be:
"Still, I guess there are budget hawks who need to get re-elected, so something had to give."
Well that is not fair, the military's budget is so colossal that they should be cut at a much higher rate than everything else.
The militar budget is a very small fraction of the entire budget - something like 4%.
If you want to talk about colossal budgets then look at entitlements - Healthcare, Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare, etc - which compromise over 50%.
The real question is: should the court order such an action, and under what conditions? Analogy alert: GS mistakenly sends me a letter by physical mail, then asks the post office (or asks a judge to order the post office) to send a mailman round, break into my house, and retrieve the letter. That clearly won't happen; worst case is that the judge would order me to surrender the letter. In case of email, is Google (under their terms & conditions and the letter of the law) allowed to "break into" my mailbox and remove the offending letter? And should they be?
You analogy would be better if the mail had been left in the mailbox, which is regulated by the USPS and Federal Law, and which the postman has rights to access.
So it would be more like:
GS sends you a letter by mistake. They get a court order to order the USPS to remove it from the mailbox that they put in it, which happens to be yours. The postman then looks at the contents of the mailbox, verifies it is still there, and then removes it, sending it back to the sender or as otherwise directed by the courts. If, however, you checked your mail and took the mail out and into your house, then there is nothing for the USPS to do - it is no longer in the mailbox. If, however, you keep all your mail in your mailbox then the USPS would be within their ability to remove it from the mailbox.
So, to keep all your e-mail on Google's servers (or any ISPs servers) opens up the opportunity for this to happen. To keep the opportunity from happening then you need to download your e-mail from anyone else's servers and store it locally, deleting it from the providers servers after you have your local copy.
Alternatively, you can rent your own server and host your own e-mail server; but then you get into another situation in which the service you are renting from may be required by the courts to turn over the server to the courts, or get shutdown and you've now lost everything except what you had backups for. And yes, that has happened where the FBI shutdown a hosting provider and took all the servers in order to get to one of their clients; everyone else was screwed for a while.
That will be the last time I fly commercial. The LAST thing I want to do is be couped up in an aluminum can for 1+ hours listening to half of other people's mindless drivel conversations on their phones. It's already bad enough the second the plane hits the runway on landing everyone pulls out their phones to call people. And they don't just have the "ok we just landed I'll meet you out front in 20 minutes" short talk. - No it turns into long drawn out annoying conversations hat CERTAINLY can wait until they are off the plane to have.
In-flight phones in the back of the seat have been available for years. Were in-flight calls a problem for other passengers, you'd think we would have realized it by now.
Those phones were also largely ignored because of the expense. Of course, they didn't necessarily communicate to the cell towers like your phone does either - they probably went through the plane's standard communications mechanisms (f.e sat-com, etc.) and then got routed out to a phone system on the ground.
HELP!!!! I'm being held prisoner in /usr/games/lib!
