Over the weekend, I got linked to https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/reaping-the-whirlwind-in..., which is an exhaustive look at the causes of the first airspace collision in the US in several decades. After reading that, my conclusion is that, if the software being rolled out is what I think it is, it would be a borderline impeachable offense to not first trying it out in the DC airspace.
The fundamental problem with DCA, and one of the two main causes of the crash [1], is that they are required by political pressure to operate at a higher operational tempo than they can safely operate at. DCA has essentially 1½ usable runaways--large planes can only use the larger runway, and given the capacity restrictions, airlines have been pushing to use fewer small planes at the airport. This shift in plane size means the effective safe slot capacity has gone down, but people still keep citing the same number as justification for safe numbers, and the politicization of the issue has shut down everyone who complained that the actual traffic just couldn't be safely handled.
If DCA's theoretical slot capacity (36 landings and takeoffs each per hour) is to be reached one just one runway, you have about 100 seconds to go from plane 1 touchdown; exit the runway, letting plane 2 on to take off; plane 2's wheel leaving the runway, clearing plane 3 touchdown. That's doable, but with essentially 0 margin for error. Alternating the runways used for each landing would give you closer to 30s of margin, but if only 10-20% of the planes can use the alternate runway, you can't divert enough planes to use the alternate runway.
Now DCA and the FAA aren't stupid enough to actually schedule 36 landing slots every hour, but the problem is that because of a few various factors, what was scheduled as, say, 30 slots for an hour (giving 120 seconds between landings, probably sufficient margin) ends up being 12 slots used in the first half-hour and 18 slots used in the second half-hour, which means a lot of the actual operation ends up having no safety margin even though on paper you have sufficient margin.
One of the ways you can rectify that is to assign slots further in advance so that you don't get the bunching. Effectively saying "oh, if you leave right now, you'll arrive at 3:30 with three other planes, but if I hold you for 10 minutes, I can push you into a less busy arrival time." Doing this requires good, accurate prediction of the actual flight travel times, and my understanding is that this is what the new software is meant to provide.
[1] The other main cause is essentially that the DoD's aviation practices in the area is a giant clusterfuck that endangers lives, and unfortunately that sentence is not relegated to the past tense.
Honestly. Of all the places to deploy first I’m happy it’s that one.
The government politicians who approved this are frequent flyers out of there, so they’re at least getting their lives out on the line before the rest of the country if it proves ill managed or conceived.
This whole situation has severely killed my faith in organizations and people. Snowden put a lot of trust in people that he had every right to believe they would do the right thing, and unfortunately it's been shown that that trust was misplaced.
Through a combination of blackmail, personality clashes, vanity and ego, incompetence, the whole thing just fizzled out completely. A real shame.
It feels like there is "backpressure" that has been backed into our current world that makes people like Snowden and Assange an impossibility. The collective control of politics, media, and corporations have built a society that is inoculated to truth and no longer have a response to evil.
Even when the truth is told to us directly to our faces, no one seems to care.
IMO the underlying reason for this is one or more of:
1) Americans are [statistically speaking] doing very well, high GDP, lots of consumer products to buy, lots of entertainment, lots of cheap food... and wikileaks is not doing anything to help but maybe destroy this.
2) Americans are also doing very poorly, the bottom 25% have bigger problems to deal with than wikileaks. Why would they care if the CIA is watching them if they can't afford next month's rent?
3) Information overload: Similiar to 1, we get overloaded with things we ought to care about, climate, wiki leaks, wars.... it's too much and people really just want. #1.
Re 2): because you can't have a handful of extremely wealthy people in a completely equal world; so one wonders if enough accidental topplings of foreign democracies would not an "inequality" enforcement agency make?
Reading a bit, it's become somewhat apparent to me that that little independent government agency is the instability enforcer in order to sustain the world as a set of abstractions to keep people artificially poor: from cartels (involvement in Contra cocaine trafficking), to toppling of budding democracies (IIRC, Iran 1953) ... further revealing they and their masters consider that progress is a zero-sum game for them.
I'm not sold on anyway we will ever reach inequality, and I don't think it is a actual goal we should have as a target. I think it is a political wedge issue. I'm happy have my mind changed though.
The rest of your reply is getting too much into conspiracy theory for me to reply.
Something tells me in that future he would never be allowed to leave Russia. His entire value to the Russian government is to prove to Russians that the US is also repressive. If the US magically stopped being repressive enough to hail snowden as a hero, he would suddenly turn into a liability for Russia: proof that a repressive government can be changed by ordinary people fighting back. A very dangerous thought for any authoritarian government to allow unchecked, Russia and US alike
> Something tells me in that future he would never be allowed to leave Russia. His entire value to the Russian government is to prove to Russians that the US is also repressive.
They don't need him to be physically in the country for that though. What he leaked is proof enough and there's plenty of evidence that's come to light since.
I do wonder how easy it'd be for him to leave if the US welcomed him back and he was willing to risk returning though
Doesn't really seem possible. The two party system is so deeply wound into the structure of the u.s. political machinery that a new party doesn't really stand a chance.
Wrong phrasing, a new political party could absolutely come into power. It would just replace one of the two-parties ideologies but be called the same thing and you still have 2 parties.
His only condition for going back to the states is a fair trial, in which he can make his case in front of a jury. Something that the constitution guarantees, but is "prohibited" under the Espionage Act. He's not asking for anything close to a pardon, just basic due process. Yet the government denies him of that basic right.
He's got more moral integrity than all of us combined. But nice high horse you have there.
The Constitution guarantees Snowden an impartial jury trial on the criminal charges against him. It does not guarantee him the right to have the jury decide whether breaking the law was morally justified or beneficial to society. The Sixth Amendment requires a jury to determine the elements of the crimes; it doesn't constitutionalize every defense a defendant would like to make.
Taking refuge in a country isn't an endorsement of their political system or leadership. He was fleeing political persecution. Most of us would do the same thing in his place
Fleeing the country, to a rival country no less is not the best way to come back as a hero. If he really wanted to stand as a hero, he would have stayed in the US and stood for trial, all while being as loud as possible.
It would probably have ruined his life, but being a martyr makes an even stronger point.
Instead he chose to live a (hopefully) good life in Russia, I mean, good for him. The archive is out, he did his thing, he doesn't have anymore duty to anyone. But he pretty much burned his chance to be recognized as a hero in the US. He has his chance in other countries however. He has overwhelming support in countries like Germany and the rest of western Europe, these are nice countries that value privacy and freedom, that's probably where he should go (should he want to and can leave Russia) instead of the US.
He destroyed his life and he is a hero for that. Movie type symbolisms and ethics would offer nothing more and good for him that he was lucky and resourceful enough to save his physical self.
A disgrace that although he is available and what he revealed is now more relevant than ever, he has been buried in the media, which is another continuous signal on the limits of freedom vs elite interests and control.
I think it's unreasonable to expect whistleblowers to volunteer to be tortured or killed. The US would likely seek extradition from most countries that don't have antagonistic relationships with the US and the fact that his passport was revoked would have limited his ability to travel around looking for protection anyway.
As loud as possible? That's naive. They would have black bagged him instantly, no trial. In fact a public trial is his only stipulation for voluntary return - that this has been denied should tell you everything.
Panama papers - a couple token people charged and many more acquited so that also fizzled out
Epstein files - clearly fizzling out
It just doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what you expose and uncover and dump into the press. It doesn't matter how many reddit threads go over the corruption in detail coupled with available documentation. It doesn't matter how many podcasters talk about it.
It just doesn't ever matter. If the powers that be don't want the boat to rock, it simply will not rock. We've seen this time and time again over this past century. As sobering as that is to realize, the current crop of power has an absolute chokehold on this planet. We can openly talk about how corrupt they are and they know we won't do anything material about it.
I was going to add a little more to my comment on how the powers that be have gotten us just comfortable enough to not care to be the radicals that our grandparents might have been. The squeeze was too hard in the early 20th century and triggered revolutions and the toppling of governments in favor of socialist causes. The squeeze was too soft by the mid 20th century and the powers that be figured they were leaving too much money on the table in the form of worker vs say executive pay. Seems today the boot on our neck is just right: just enough to ensure high inequality and an anything goes business environment without very many of us threatening to cut their heads off.
It's all fun and games until the mind wanders to you getting polonium-210'd for your work, and you decide 'my life isn't worth _this_.' It's kind of dumb people choose fear, but I understand it.
My pet theory is the elimination of the third place[1] where socialization can happen. Much of this is because the push for higher and higher levels of productivity and profit has made people more and more busy, which leaves less time and energy for these third spaces.
> For Google’s project, the risk is big if concentrated: $200bn of contracts tied to Anthropic’s ability to pay its chip and data centre leases. It is one piece of a larger dilemma, with demand across the industry resting on a handful of large hyperscalers and frontier AI labs.
I tried Tangled and tried to run my own Knot, the problem I had was I'd create a repository, have it get created correctly on my Knot, but then would never see any updates to the repo on Tangled itself.
The main issue is that even though I had the knot with IPv6 connectivity, it only really reliably worked once I enabled lots of IPv4 NAT'ing and also created a dummy A record for the Knot.
> I would much rather have an onboard AI that can discriminate between unarmed civilians and military assets,
Has this been proven to actually occur? There have been lots of reports that similar systems in Israel that use AI, struck hundreds of targets that were civilian. They did not discriminate.
"implode" is not testable. A good prediction is specific, time bound, measurable, etc. Otherwise you can flatter yourself however you like with confirmation bias. This is basic stuff.
https://www.airwaysmag.com/new-post/faa-smart-first-deployme...
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