Setting a protocol to handle air traffic control and collision prevention in airspace around airports is a 100% automatable problem. You don't even need a centralized control system. This can be handled entirely with software running on each plane. Same way a flock of birds can fly and never collide with each other.
Unfortunately that's not how things work in practice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain_(computing) If Jepsen fails every database coming from single source, imagine the chaos of synchronising a P2P of various clients of various versions over a very noisy link. We can't even achieve that with home automation meshes that send maybe 3 types of messages!
Also you need to handle planes without computers - you can land a personal plane at almost any airport. (With lots of caveats but still) Also you need to handle planes with failing automation. Also you really want to know the situation on the runways, so there's really no need to remove the single source of truth here.
We operate cars on the road with not only no centralized system, but also minimally defined and enforced protocol, and yet Waymo has achieved a near zero collision rate inside a swarm of cars that are not running equivalent software. And this is in a situation where cars are only a few feet from each other while operating at top speed. So you can come up with a million objections but they are all solvable. As for automation failure, the rate of that can be easily made lower than the rate of human failure, which currently is fatal to a plane.
Waymo is significantly more dangerous than air travel to a degree that the comparison is actively offensive to everyone currently alive on Earth.
We can't even get cars, working in more-or-less two dimensions, to go without constantly running into each other and being one of the major causes of death in human civilizations. Waymo "solved" that problem in about, oh let me see here... yeah 0.0001% of cases. So, we're almost there! That's, like a couple cities out of all cities on Earth.
Yeah that's bad. Really, really, really bad. Like so bad it's not even worth talking about and comparing to air travel.
99.9% success rate is probably not good enough when you consider that the vehicle in question costs $200 million, and has 150 - 350 humans on board. It’s not a “whoopsie” like with cars where the damage is $50k at most (waymo vehicle) and maybe 2-3 people injured or dead. Also dead pilots who are already in short supply.
Also cars only care about what’s going on in a horizontal plane. 3D space is clearly more complex and probably requires more computational power i’m sure. Consider that boeing couldn’t even correctly write software to keep their 737 MAX planes from crashing into the ground (MCAS software issue). Something that simple was too hard for them. Speaks volumes doesn’t it?
Not saying it’s impossible. Just saying that this clearly isn’t a “just do it” problem. Waymo’s been working on their software for how many years now? and they still have minor crashes lol. Not an easy problem at all.
Also consider that airlines usually outsource their software development so they don’t have cutting edge expertise in house.
So what happens when a plane has a critical failure (related to this P2P communication), how does it land? How would other planes nearby magically know what the plane that is in distress is going to do? It’s basically an unpredictable peer in the network.
YOLO i guess? :)
Hypothetically the nearby planes can detect that unresponsive plane on radar or other sensors, and try to react together as an intelligent swarm, to avoid it and let that plane land manually. But it’s not so simple. Planes are not loaded with full fuel tanks, only a bit extra. Some planes may have already underwent a go-around if the airport is busy. So it’s not just “land without crashing”, it’s also a prioritization issue.
IMO we certainly need humans in the loop, in a centralized fashion, to “orchestrate” a manual emergency landing if there is some critical cascading failure or bug in the software. I agree that in the happy path (99% of cases) it’s possible to automate it all. In theory.
Things get more complicated when you consider that small planes (flown for hobby, flight school, etc) have waaaaay less tech. That can’t work in some peer to peer fashion without a major upgrade to all those planes too. And the owners of those planes are not corporations making billions.
What happens when an airplane's pilots have to radio ATC to request an emergency landing, and the planes' sensors have failed so it can't safety land itself?
If the plane is able to communicate with ATC it is able to broadcast to the other planes that it is on an emergency landing, so this is not an issue. Even if it has lost all communication this is still not an issue because all the sensors of the other planes can see it. So if the disabled plane immediately goes for an emergency landing, all other planes in the area are able to see its position and that it is not responding to pings, and therefore set safe courses that avoid it. This really isn't a very difficult problem.
The first of this macOS WMs that implement something that understands the wayland protocol -- bridges it to macOS compositor or whatever -- will really have my money.
Japan has different standards and driving environment around kei cars (I'm going to use K-car going forward).
- Their top speed limit even on highways is 100kmh / 60mph
- K-cars have yellow license plates and yellow license plates are not allowed on highways
I have a memory of seeing one of the infamous white K-trucks on an interstate in Nashville and was gobsmacked. These cars are not rated for highway / interstates in Japan, let alone the U.S.
I'm not sure if the U.S. has a similar visible markings for farm vehicles to allow K-cars city road travel and deny interstate travel. If not, I agree they should be banned until some sort of classification is made and driver culture / knowledge is propagated.
What happens when small-firm doctors, therapists, dentists, etc. are suddenly having your (their patients') medical information backed-up to OneDrive? Microsoft only provide HIPAA compliance if a certain paid tier is purchased. If they automatically turn OneDrive on how will this not be a privacy nightmare?
From what I've gleaned from my social worker/therapist house mate is that you're not supposed to be storing any of that data on a non-compliant device to begin with. They can't keep anything local, and use some portal to a company that specializes in HIPAA storage.
I agree in general though, there are plenty of documents that really shouldn't be suddenly dumped to the cloud
This is light on details, but according to the article, this only happens during the initial Windows 11 set-up, and not for existing users: "Quietly and without any announcement, the company changed Windows 11's initial setup so that it could turn on the automatic folder backup without asking for it."
Surely this has happened with this latest change? It got turned on for my work machine a few months ago and tried to upload some very large modelling files to the cloud. I have to keep that stuff in the root dir now, but most PC users don't even know what the root dir is.
can winehq save the day in the interim or in the transition?
reply