Neracked

Playing devil's advocate but I have worked for Airbus for a couple of years and for each aircraft designed in the past 20 years (A380, A400M, A350), I can find dozens of workers ready to say that plane was 'designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys'.

Such an unsubstantiated declaration is covered in news just because is is compliant with what is known because of other, better documented sources about the failures at Boeing that led to the 737MAX fiasco but it brings zero information.

it is ridiculous having a device, which cools down one compartment while heating up everything else

Does that include refrigerators ?

How would a nation state block access?

Make it illegal to enter your country with an unauthorized receiver like India does for Iridium and various satellite phone services.

Make a deal with the network and make it mandatory to use a local service provider or register SIM cards for visitors like Russia does for Iridium.

Can you imagine some open source toolchain used in corporate setting?

I am working on a multi-billion dollar project and we rely on GCC to build our software. It seems obvious when dealing with "pure" software. It seems unthinkable with "hardware level" software (for FPGA).

Who’s supporting it?

Each time we have needed specific expertise, we have paid an external company (Embedded Brains) to provide expertise and updates/fixes.

Everything they do ends up being-opensourced. Their expertise is valuable. However, if they disappear tomorrow, we have everything needed to keep the rest of the project going without major disruptions.

And who is liable?

I guess every entity involved is liable for its own scope/level. It's not like we will sue the company that provided the toolchain if they are the root cause for a critical anomaly makes it to the end product and nobody noticed that during testing.

Only the A350 introduction has so far been relatively event free.

I am biased on this since I have spent a couple of years working on the development of A350XWB systems (and only marginally contributed to other programs) but I always had the feeling that, after the trauma of the A380 (rampant production issues, lengthy delays and management mishaps/stock fraud), the focus for A350XWB was put on accountability at all levels.

This might not be sustainable for a large corporation but retrospectively, that seemed to have had the desired effect at least for this particular aircraft program.

The editor of a book decides at what price it is going to be sold. Then, whether you go to your local bookshop, a huge mall or Amazon, the price is going to be the same.

The decision comes after the Catalan government insisted on imposing a 15-minute delay before passengers could be picked up.

I agree that the Uber model is problematic but making the taxi service worse for everyone (harder to order a cab for right where you are / right now) to level the field seems really shortsighted.

Just to remain under the existing terms

Except they have already lost two major European agencies (European Medicines Agency and European Banking Authority) that are being relocated to Amsterdam and Paris.

[1] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2018...

Unicorns like Udacity

I thought that was an hyperbole. Then I checked on Wikipedia: "While not yet profitable as of February 2018, Udacity is valued at over $1B USD having raised $163M USD from noted investors".

That is a quote of Richard Feynman's conclusion to his report on the shuttle Challenger accident: "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."

I am French and there are rumors that some people inside the police forces are earning side money by funneling information from the police files to former police officer working as private investigators (with the advantage of having insider access to police data).

I always assumed that this practice was widespread. That is just an extension of the traditional practice of "tricoche" (police officers performing investigations for private customers).

LinkedIn sucks [...] I understand that I’m using LinkedIn wrong [...] I have 16,000 connections.

That was really some pointless article.

Only thing I could find about Softbank and paradise papers is a few lines in a NHK world article [1]:

Telecom giant Softbank Group set up a business entity based in the Cayman Islands to operate an investment fund four years ago. The name of the company's CEO, Masayoshi Son, was mentioned in one of the documents.

Softbank says it registered the investment fund there to avoid dual taxation for its investors.

While suspicious, this seems like too little evidence to support a broad statement such as "softbank is the acceptable face of dodgy money".

[1]https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/nhknewsline/backstories/bign...

It seems strange to use the present tense ("moves to GSuite", "ditches Microsoft") for a change that should take (at least) 5 to 10 years to implement.

Also, the change should be to move away from Microsoft Office in favor of tools suited for the tasks at hand (databases, project-management applications, bug trackers, requirement management tools...) and only migrate to GSuite for the subset of tasks where having an office suite makes sense.

The 16 Bi$ figure is for 36 aircrafts (including the 16 options) and means a price per unit of 445 Mi$. This is exactly the unit cost listed on Wikipedia. So we can assume the real price for the contract is lower.

This seems odd.

I am French and switch operators every year (because they have those stupid offers with significantly cheaper subscription that only last 12 months and it only takes a couple of minutes to subscribe to a new one) and I have used tethering frequently with Free, Numericable, Bouygues and SFR without getting any warning or noticing any oddity in the content served.

Also, Orange has a bit more inertia than the others (it used to be the French public phone company France Telecom), but their support page says that tethering is part of the regular mobile subscriptions.

[1] https://boutique.orange.fr/mobile/fonction-modem

and France (as mentioned in the article) [1]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/20/world/europe/france-farm-...

How much art

Hard to tell.

Rich people store art in freeports (along with gold bars, like in the Geneva Freeport) to secure their assets while avoiding paying taxes. And from times to times, they lend some of their art pieces to museums in countries where they want to further reduce their taxes.

According to an article in The Economist[1] in 2013: "Because of the confidentiality, the value of goods stashed in freeports is unknowable. It is thought to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and rising."

[1] https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21590353-ever-more-w...

This could change if they keep trying to make more "interactive" the newer models though.

The airline wants to transfer equipment health data as soon as possible to its headquarters using air/ground communication systems (satcom, cellular, airport wifi...) to plan for maintenance and delays.

Pilots want to use their iPad to browse their mail and the logbook listing the history of system failures and displaying the current state of the aircraft to know if it is flyable.

The centralized maintenance system that provides these information to the airline and the pilots has to be connected to all avionic equipments to collect health data.

Now, everything is connected [1].

[1]https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2007/12/28/E7-2507...

I am in France and it seems Visa Premier and Mastercard Gold with payments deferred to the end of month - with zero interest - are now considered "credit cards" (because they can be regarded as a limited form of credit, I suppose).

I have a small "CREDIT" label next to the chip of my new card and airlines (EasyJet, Ryanair...) now reject my card if I select the cheaper "Debit card" payment option.

Ireland is basically selling multinational corporations the right to avoid paying their taxes to other European countries in which they have significant activity.

The Federal Aviation Administration has issued special conditions for the certification of the 787 to deal with the fact that there is no "literal airgap" in recent airliners even though that was initially mandated by the airworthiness standards:

These special conditions are issued for the Boeing Model 787-8 airplane. This airplane will have novel or unusual design features when compared to the state of technology envisioned in the airworthiness standards for transport category airplanes. The architecture of the Boeing Model 787-8 computer systems and networks may allow access to external systems and networks

[1] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2007/12/28/E7-2507...

Not really familiar with the Boeing architecture, but having worked on similar systems for other commercial aircraft, "firewall" is an understatement for the systems that act as gateways between the aircraft network domains with different criticality levels.

The IFE is in the Passenger Information and Entertainment Services Domain (as defined by the standard ARINC664 Aircraft Data Networks). A basic assumption regarding the connectivity to more sensitive domains is that PIESD is totally insecure and anything can happen.

Finally to people wondering why aircraft designers would physically connect networks with vastly different security requirements: it's for making it possible to share aircraft/ground communication means (satcom...)

I see the stock market as almost a casino; with odds rigged for the rich with not-quite insider trading.

The stock market is a casino if you want it to be one. And historical data shows that the odds are rigged in favor on the people investing consistently in diversified low-fee funds over a long period of time (decades) which is compliant with the timeline for preparing ones retirement.