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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • For those who didn’t know, the previous standard that still applies to pilots is that paid time runs from parking brake release to parking brake set. In fact, the aircraft parking brake is usually connected to a time clock computer system.

    A typical domestic duty day might run for 14 hours, but only include 4 to 6 hours of paid flying. The rest of that time is preflight and post flight duty, including safety checks, managing catering, flight planning (for pilots), and a whole lot of waiting around in airports for the next connection.

    If the boarding time pay is really only the boarding period, that’s just a small part of it.





  • The data that goes into those products comes from some satellites but also from Hurricane Hunter recon flights operated by the Air Force reserve. Those flights use highly specialized planes and specialized crews to penetrate these powerful hurricanes. It would not be so easy for the private sector to just replicate that capability.



  • Medical devices are required to comply with 21 CFR 820 in the United States, which establishes quality management standards. This includes minimum standards for the software development lifecycle, including software verification and validation testing.

    In the EU, broadly equivalent standards include ISO 13485 and IEC 62304.

    If an OEM wants to do a software update, they at minimum need to perform and document a change impact analysis, verification testing, and regression testing. Bigger changes can involve a new FDA submission process.

    If you go around hacking new software features into your medical device, you are almost certainly not doing all of that stuff. That doesn’t mean that your software changes are low quality–maybe, maybe not. But it would be completely unfair to hold your device to the standard that the FDA holds them to–that medical devices in the United States are safe and effective treatments for diseases.

    This may be okay if you want to hack your own CPAP (usually a class II device) and never sell it to someone else. But I think we all need to acknowledge that there are some serious risks here.


  • The Linux software you can get as a regular user from your typical Linux distributions is absolutely not any more secure on average than your typical Windows software.

    I say this as someone who writes application programs on both systems.

    I think it’s really debatable whether the Linux kernel is really any more secure than the Windows NT kernel. Linux advocates have pushed the “many eyes, shallow bugs” line for a long time, but high profile lapses seem to really have put the lie to that.



  • The line items look like a pretty standard “workup”, as they call it. The blood and urine tests are probably a fishing expedition to make sure you don’t have some other bizarre disease. If it turns out you did have this hypothetical bizarre disease, I’m sure you’d be disappointed if the emergency department missed it.

    $7k CT seems pretty steep, but CTs are also a marvel of modern technology. I know MRIs have a price floor because they need medical grade liquid helium for cooling, which is thousands per liter. I don’t know if CT has a similar consumable item or not.

    I would hazard a guess that most real kidney stones would be revealed by x ray. But it’s also possible that x ray would not reveal other physiological abnormalities that could be causing your symptoms.









  • Another aspect to this is that Android is Linux, but it is not GNU / Linux. This is true both in the literal sense of not using GNU coreutils or glibc, and also in the broader sense.

    What I mean by the “broader” sense:

    • no X or Wayland
    • GTK or Qt support is something an application has to bring with them.
    • filesystem is substantially reorganized
    • users and system permissions setup substantially differently

    To the application programmer Android / Linux looks like a completely different ball game.