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Comment Re:The movie looks pretty bad (Score 3, Interesting) 57

Most people want things to just work, and then they delude themselves into thinking they do even when they do not.

If I had a dollar for every person who I've seen join a 3d printing group and ask how they can print more than the models shipped on the machine, I could buy another printer. It's a desktop-sized industrial robot, not a games console.

Comment Re:The movie looks pretty bad (Score 3, Informative) 57

Getting a coherent style good or bad from AI requires training, which is a lot harder than just prompting. Since AI isn't actually working from pictures, just statistical analyses of them, it has a really hard time giving consistency. A real art department making a real film has a body of concept art, samples, and other resources to draw from and compare to, and brains to do it with.

Comment Re:UPGRADE POTS (Score 1) 111

emergency speed capping or prioritization for disasters

What good is emergency speed capping when the tower loses power? When we had our last earthquake the local cell site went down after a few hours and they never bothered to bring in a generator, I had no phone for almost three days.

1st responders get their own radio band...

Yes, they do, in fact typically every FD has their own for example and then there's one for each county as well, but what's the relevance of that to this?

Comment Re:CA laws/rules/regulations (Score 2) 111

I've lived in CA nearly 35 years now. I gotta say they sure have some really weird, even dumb, laws. Nobody uses landline anymore.

Apparently you live in a big city, and not in the country (which describes most of California, despite persistent misconceptions) because in my area, POTS service is absolutely necessary for a large percentage of the population, and in particular a big share of those on fixed incomes who don't have the money to change because COLAs don't keep up with the actual cost of living.

There're countless other stupid laws that when you hear about them, you must think CA lawmakers eat shit for lunch.

I think you eat crayons while doing paperwork. For someone who's lived in California for so long, you sure don't know shit about it.

Comment Re:POTS advantages (Score 1) 111

Dumping POTS absolutely will reduce power consumption, because they won't have to push analog signals through copper over long distances. It's just not sufficient justification for doing it, because that functionality is irreplaceable. We should be keeping some POTS service around for customers out of wireless range, and for alarm systems. A lot of those have gone cellular, and in some case that might be fine, but it's inferior and cellular should be used in addition and not as a replacement. (It can be text only, so the cost can be very low.)

Submission + - Air France, Airbus guilty of corporate manslaughter in 2009 Air France 447 crash (bbc.com)

UnknowingFool writes: The Paris Appeals Court found that both Air France and Airbus were "solely and entirely responsible" for the crash of Air France 447 over Atlantic Ocean which killed 228 people on June 1, 2009. The court overturned a lower court's April 2023 ruling which had cleared both companies. Both companies were fined the maximum of €225,000. While both companies blamed the cause of the accident on pilot error, prosecutors contend that poor training and failing to fix an known flaw led to the accident. In the accident analysis identified a root cause of the accident was pitot tubes which iced up during certain flying conditions. That icing caused erratic air speed readings fluctuating between low to supersonic within seconds of each other. Those conflicting readings led to a chain of confusing errors and warnings from the flight system including a stall warning. The plane was stalling however the flying pilot's (PF) attempted to climb out of a stall by pulling back actually caused the plane to stall into the ocean.

While not in the official report, a contributing factor noted by experts is the design of Airbus cockpits. One issue is the electronic fly-by-wire controls where the physical position of certain controls like the throttle does not match the input in the system. In this case, the autopilot had lowered the thrust output during flight, but it could not move the throttle position. The throttle position appeared that plane had more thrust than it did. In the Airbus cockpit, joysticks are used instead of a control yoke. The joysticks are symmetric in the layout of the cockpit in that the pilot on the left has the joystick on the left and the pilot on the right has their joystick on the right. The joysticks are also not linked to provide feedback to each other. The other pilot (pilot in command or PIC) could not know the PF was trying to climb unless he was looking directly at the PF's hands. The PIC realized the error too late to overcome the stall.

As for responsibility, Airbus had identified an icing problem on their Airbus 320 model planes and recommended those pitot tube be replaced as early as September 2007. Air France 447 was an Airbus 330, and Air France delayed replacing the pitot tubes until further recommendations. However, Air France themselves recorded had nine incidents between May 2008 and March 2009 on Airbus 330/340 planes where the pitot tubes failed due to icing conditions. Air France found six unreported incidents after the AF447 crash.

While the cockpit situation was confusing, crash investigators faulted the pilots for failing to follow procedures which would have been to first re-establish controls after the autopilot turned off. After the accident, pilot training now includes scenarios like AF447 where there is conflicting warnings. Also there was more emphasis placed on manually flying instead of relying on the autopilot.

Comment Re: Criminal conspiracy to defraud (Score 2) 111

I'm reasonably certain that was sarcasm, but... mostly because it actually literally kills people, like PGE skipping maintenance for 99 years and burning down Paradise[, CA] or ATT taking away the POTS so people in the hills can't call 9-1-1 since the cellular network doesn't reach them. This is an active issue in my town, which is in Humboldt county CA. I live about a block from the CO, which is absolutely tiny, because so is the town. (It's technically a city but it does not act like one in any regard. We don't even have a fucking disaster plan despite needing to cross a bridge or drive a road with "slide" in the name to get in and out of here. Yet Cal Fire is going to put a new HQ here, it's insane.

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