One day copyright law will be abolished, and the practice of prosecuting copyright infringers will be obnoxious to our descendants.

It's a horrible code of conduct. Pulseaudio is no more.

There's some sort of cultural issue affecting Asian airlines. The airplane in question had thirty-two reports of autothrottle malfunction. That's too many. There was no proactive initiative to take the aeroplane, diagnose and repair the issue.

The pilots had no skills. Nobody was monitoring the airplane flight path. When the asymmetric thrust issue triggered a bank angle warning, the pilot banked the airplane further in the wrong direction.

Nobody noticed that one throttle lever wasn't moving with the other. Boeing automation has this cool property: you can see the controls being physically moved by the autopilot. You don't see it on a screen or abstract numbers: the levers and controls physically move in the cockpit as if pushed by an invisible hand. That's all meant for pilots to be able to see what's going on. These guys were so disconnected from the machine they were operating that they didn't notice any of that.

A pilot must always be flying the aeroplane, that is, monitoring the flight path, even as the other pilot is going through procedures that require his full attention. The pilot flying is expected to double-check the actions that his peer is performing, but his primary task is to fly the damned plane.

Complacency sets in when automation works very well most of the time. The pilots may get distracted with other tasks. For this reason there is constant simulator practice where unexpected situations are thrown at the pilots, and they have to troubleshoot them correctly. This mindset from the simulator experience is expected to be carried over to cockpit operations, and not simply treated like a videogame that must be won to keep the job.

Cynicism towards procedures and regulations breeds a low-key contempt for them which proves to be fatal over time. The rules governing aviation have mostly been written in blood. They are not meant as an unnecessary nuisance for pilots to ignore as much as possible, which is sadly still a disposition for many aviators.

If I only had modpoints.

X-Plane uses the 3D model of the airplane, and a simulation engine based on blade element theory. I read that Microsoft Flight Simulator uses an aerodynamic 3D model that may or may not be shaped exactly as the 3D model that you see on the screen, but it usually should be, and has a finer resolution with more points on every surface where forces are computed. I presume that the algorithm is simular to blade element theory. There's additionally detailed propeller surface simulation, which is great for piston aircraft, and, of course, helicopters. I have flown both X-Plane and Flight Simulator extensively, as well as real airplanes, and the aerodynamic simulation from the latter, starting with updates done on 2021, seem to behave more like the real thing.

I tried the gliders yesterday in Flight Simulator. Yes, it got thermals. It already had wind going around buildings and terraine since the start, so you could fly some third-party gliders earlier this year, provided there was wind and mountains or cliffs. I believe this is called orographic lift, correct me if I'm wrong. Thermals were added yesterday. There's an option to see thermals in the environment, to understand how they behave visually.

With the minuscule market share of electric vehicles, I woule have expected more early efforts towards standardisation of charging early on, perhaps with a simple data protocol to negotiate parameters for power delivery between charger and vehicle. Instead we got a balkanised mess for what should be a straightforward interface.

Another case of copyright law hindering progress. If an AI who learns from public source code repositories needs to trace the origins of all the algorithms that it then suggests new programmers to properly attribute or compensate all the authors of said code, such a tool can not exist, or if it does, nobody could use it for anything serious out of fear of legal repercusions. Another case for severely limiting or abrogating copyright law entirely.

Europe is very cold in winter, but many places are quite warm in summer. I presume that milder winters and hotter summers might lead towards a move from gas and oil heaters to reversible heat pumps that can double as air conditioners. Also, I would like to know if having said heat pumps in milder winters that require less heating, but hot summers when they are used as air conditioners, would consume less energy overall compared to our current gas boilers that only warm our homes up during our current colder winters, but cannot keep us cool in summer.

One day intellectual property will be regarded like a relic of a barbaric age.

1. Paternalistic paranoid people are concerned that conspiracy peddlers will convince vast swathes of ignorant people that they shouldn't get vaccines, making vaccines less effective for reasonable people by delaying herd immunity and maintaining pressure on healthcare networks.

2. Conspiracy peddlers are banned from some public platforms.

3. Conspiracy peddlers go underground and communicate in code.

4. Code cannot be understood by people who are not already part of the conspiracy, therefore the campaign to indoctrinate new ignorant people into the conspiracy is now much less effective.

5. Paranoid paternalistic people who purportedly intend to protect ignorant masses against conspiratorial beliefs are now happy that they drove the conspiracy peddlers underground. Right?

CraP-kind?

Snow crabs so delicious they cannot help eating each other!

Random process leads to (not-so) unusual outcome. There has been many times in the past that this happened. I wrote a Bitcoin block indexing software whose health check used to verify whether the last block was mined within the last hour. It was often tripped by the not-so-rare event, and I had to bump the time span between blocks to something more reasonable, like two or three hours.

If only I had mod points, I'd give them all to you!