All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem • Hacker News Board

Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem

#211

Post by srtjstjsj » Sun, Jun 07, 2015, 12:05 AM UTC

keeperofdakeys wrote: post #210

krschultz wrote: post #2

I was flying from Dublin to Newark on Saturday on a United flight. At some point during our flight the entertainment system needed to be rebooted. When it came back up, the splash screen hit me with a huge amount of nostalgia. It was RedBoot with a kernel build date from 2004. Obviously this is the entertainment system and not something more critical, but it's telling. There is a huge cadence mismatch between softwar…

19 January 2038 will be a very interesting day, since that's when signed 32 bit unix time will overflow. I don't want to think about how much software would rely on that, especially critical embedded hardware.

An embedded system with a 30-year lifespan and no maintenance plan?

Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem

#212

Post by srtjstjsj » Sun, Jun 07, 2015, 12:09 AM UTC

netizzio wrote: post #84

It's interesting that the Wired article mentions the recent controversy about claims that aircraft systems can be hacked, but explicitly ignores the incident last week as having any possible relation to these events, where a bigoted employee denied a Muslim passenger an open can of Diet Coke because it "might be used as a weapon", while giving the passenger in the adjacent seat an open can of beer. The response from…

The blowback hit them and they changed the response (and removed the original response)

>>> UPDATED: Jun 3, 2015 at 1:45PM

While United did not operate the flight, Ms. Ahmad was our customer and we apologize to her for what occurred on the flight.

After investigating this matter, United has ensured that the flight attendant, a Shuttle America employee, will no longer serve United customers.

United does not tolerate behavior that is discriminatory – or that appears to be discriminatory - against our customers or employees.

All of United’s customer-facing employees undergo annual and recurrent customer service training, which includes lessons in cultural awareness. Customer-facing employees for Shuttle America also undergo cultural sensitivity training, and United will continue to work with all of our partners to deliver service that reflects United’s commitment to cultural awareness. <<<

Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem

#213

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jun 07, 2015, 12:09 AM UTC

netizzio wrote: post #84

It's interesting that the Wired article mentions the recent controversy about claims that aircraft systems can be hacked, but explicitly ignores the incident last week as having any possible relation to these events, where a bigoted employee denied a Muslim passenger an open can of Diet Coke because it "might be used as a weapon", while giving the passenger in the adjacent seat an open can of beer. The response from…

[deleted]

Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem

#214

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jun 07, 2015, 12:09 AM UTC

netizzio wrote: post #84

It's interesting that the Wired article mentions the recent controversy about claims that aircraft systems can be hacked, but explicitly ignores the incident last week as having any possible relation to these events, where a bigoted employee denied a Muslim passenger an open can of Diet Coke because it "might be used as a weapon", while giving the passenger in the adjacent seat an open can of beer. The response from…

[deleted]

Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem

#215

Post by wutbrodo » Tue, Jun 09, 2015, 9:19 PM UTC

caskance wrote: post #208

wutbrodo wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the increasingly minuscule chance that you're not just trolling (posterior probability!), it should be trivially obvious that what makes TV-smartness a "feature" but not stochastic microwave self-destruction is not some objective measure of usefulness, but rather the fact that only the former is marketed as beneficial with the reasonable expectation (on the part of the marketers) that some/many consumers will beli…

A bold claim coming from someone who thinks "It's not a bug, it's a feature" is successful marketing rather than a punchline.

> A bold claim coming from someone who thinks "It's not a bug, it's a feature" is successful marketing rather than a punchline.

Thanks for confirming my suspicion; the fact that "it's a feature not a bug" is pretty unethical has nothing to do with whether it can successful or not. It's a useful logical tool to learn to distinguish "is" from "ought"; whether or not you think that Smart TVs are better than dumb TVs or not has no bearing on whether or not they're marketed as such and most importantly believed as such by the majority of consumers.

Hell it's not even one of the worst heuristics in play: (higher) price and popularity of a product as a heuristic for quality may be even worse than "more features" as a heuristic, and these two are extremely prevalent. And yet just because I don't like them doesn't mean I pretend that these tendencies simply don't exist.