When antibiotics failed a severely ill patient, a virus saved him - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/43/heroes/will-viruses-save-us-from-superbugs <comment><USER3> I used to work in the phage field and apart from regulation (phages are near impossible to get approved by the FDA), the big problem is the phages people have isolated have a very narrow specificity - most target only individual strains of a specific bacterial species (i.e. they have a very narrow host range). This means you need to have hundred or thousands of different phages to treat even a single bacterial species.

The really interesting thing is that there are phages that have a broad host range (multi-species or even multi-genera), but due to the nature of how phages are typically isolated they are not often found by researchers. Phages, like other living organisms, show differences in ecological adaption with some being specialists (leopards) while others are generalists (rats). The specialists grow faster in their specific hosts than the generalists do so in the normal isolation process which uses a single host bacteria strain (plaque plate assay) and so they appear first. The generalists grow slightly slower and so are typically missed by the scientists.

In my lab we developed a different assay that favoured the isolation of generalist phages and we were really successful in finding broad host range phages (many were multi-genera in host range). I no longer work in this area and it is something I miss as it is such an interesting topic :(

<comment><USER4> _In my lab we developed a different assay that favoured the isolation of generalist phages and we were really successful in finding broad host range phages (many were multi-genera in host range)._

Did your group publish anything on this approach? If so, could you share a link to one or some of the papers?

<comment><USER3> Yes we did, but we didn't make a huge deal about it in the papers (it is just in the methods sections). If you want to find my phage papers just have a look at my profile on ResearchGate [1].

The basic idea is pretty straightforward. Rather than plating a filtered sample directly onto a overlay plate of a single bacterial strain, we pre- enriched for phages in a mixed culture of multiple bacterial strains (we would sometime use up to 50 different strains/species in the one enrichment flask). What this does is give the broad host range phages a competitive advantage since they can reproduce in multiple hosts and outgrow the narrow host range phages. When you plate out onto a specific strain for isolation of the phages you end up with mostly broad host range phages.

The idea is so obvious I am surprised it is not more widely used in the field. It seems to be the norm to just use a single bacterial strain for the phage isolation. I think most people just assume all phages are narrow host range.

1\. [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Daniel_Tillett2](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Daniel_Tillett2)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Do you think it is feasible to allow some kind of voluntary FDA opt-out for individuals, in extremely limited cases?

I find myself wondering what I would want to do if I were in a similar situation: long-term, treatment-resistant illness, pain and inevitable death. At this point in my life, I think I would be okay saying "okay nothing is working. I volunteer to be an experimental subject - and if I die, please absolve anyone working to cure me from punishment."

<comment><USER6> It exists:

[http://www.fda.gov/AboutFDA/Transparency/Basics/ucm194958.ht...](http://www.fda.gov/AboutFDA/Transparency/Basics/ucm194958.htm)

<comment><USER5> Thank you for teaching me something new today.

<comment><USER7> There's a bunch more info at [http://www.fda.gov/ExpandedAccess](http://www.fda.gov/ExpandedAccess).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a good example of a downside of regulation: regulations embed assumptions that favor certain outcomes. Those assumptions might have made sense when the regulations were written, but are very slow to adapt to changes in the industry.

The FDA drug approval process was basically designed for things like antibiotics: Single molecular compound, high purity, standardized dosage and application, and run trials with many many patients.

Treatments that don't fall under that umbrella (like phages) are very difficult to develop and bring to market, even if they work very well, just because of the impedance mismatch.

Phages are basically individually tailored to the patient, require a lot of work in administering, and difficult to test under the FDA's guidelines. Many people have unnecessarily died because treatments that could be are lifesaving aren't brought to market due to too much rigidity in the system.

To be fair, the FDA has been active in coming up with ways for things like phages to be brought to market safely, but it's a very slow, uphill battle.

<comment><USER9> FWIW, Silicon Valley investor Jim O'Neill, who might well be the next head of the FDA, said this in 2014 about that:

"We should reform FDA so there is approving drugs after their sponsors have demonstrated safety -- and let people start using them, at their own risk, but not much risk of safety," O'Neill said in a speech at an August 2014 conference called Rejuvenation Biotechnology. "Let's prove efficacy after they've been legalized."

[http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-12-07/trump-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-12-07/trump- team-is-said-to-consider-thiel-associate-o-neill-for-fda)

<comment><USER10> That makes a ton sense, except that one wonders if any manufacturer will ever bother proving efficacy. Worse, they may instead double-down on marketing campaigns. Doctors and other professionals, working scientists or not, are susceptible to marketing like anybody else.

So we'd need to see other mechanisms, regulatory or otherwise[1], that would counter that effect. FDA approval is a powerful motivator for 1) companies to find actually effective therapies and 2) as an extremely efficient signaling mechanism to the market regarding efficacy. But it's sub-optimal for many reasons, including erring too heavily on the side of safety. It's just not obvious what would replace it.

Don't forget, snake oil thrives in the free market.

[1] Medicare reimbursements predicated on FDA efficacy approval? I'm not sure insurance companies can be expected to do the right[2] thing. It might be cheaper to reimburse a snake oil treatment that allows the patient to die than to pay a premium for an effective treatment. And while presumably a good doctor would insist on the effective treatment, at the margins the insurance company could expect to profit from allowing their patients to choose the snake oil.

[2] Where "right" means a course of action that maximizes long-term social wealth (i.e. preferring effective treatment and therefore subsidizing research), rather than simply maximizing the short-term utility of patients and profits (i.e. allowing the patients the salve of snake oil, with reimbursements, in lieu of effective treatment).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Fun fact about the T4 bacteriophage: the dissection of its protein structure led to important refinements of SDS-PAGE, which is a protein analysis method that is still in wide use today. For that, the article that describes its analysis is one of the most widely cited in history[1]. (Also, yes, this is shamelessly a link to a tool I've developed to examine the importance of biomedical research papers.)

1 = [https://pubrank.carbocation.com/article](https://pubrank.carbocation.com/article)

</comment><comment><USER12> _One of the major critiques of phage therapy is that it will fail the same way antibiotics have failed: Bacteria can evolve phage resistance._

That's interesting. Previously I've read that evolution was one of the benefits of phage therapy because phages could evolve alongside the bacteria.

<comment><USER13> My impression is that virus evolution is much slower than bacterial evolution. They can't reproduce sexually, so there is no gene recombination to spread beneficial mutations. This difference is partly why vaccines are done for viruses and not so much for bacteria.

<comment><USER6> The flu vaccine is seasonal because it evolves so quickly.

Same with HIV, a high mutation rate complicates making a vaccine.

I was really struck by this part of _The Great Influenza_ :

[https://books.google.com/books?id=BYsW6qTP0pMC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA...](https://books.google.com/books?id=BYsW6qTP0pMC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA105#v=onepage&q=mutate&f=false)

 _Influenza is an RNA virus. So is HIV and the coronavirus. And of all RNA viruses, influenza and HIV are among those that mutate the fastest. The influenza virus mutates so fast that 99 percent of the 100,000 to 1 million new viruses that burst out of a cell in the reproduction process are too defective to infect another cell and reproduce again. But that still leaves between 1,000 and 10,000 viruses that can infect another cell._

<comment><USER13> This is very interesting, however, is it answering the right question? HIV and flu vaccine are specifically called out as having unusually high mutation rates. Apparently the difference is between RNA viruses and DNA viruses - <USER2> RNA ones have no "double checking" to repair errors, so have much higher mutation rates. The rates quoted here [1] put DNA viruses as similar to humans. I don't know if these phages are RNA or DNA ones (Wikipedia says there are phages of both types and while the T4 virus they have a picture of in the article appears to be DNA-based, they probably just chose it for its striking appearance).

More importantly - is mutation rate what we want to consider? Bacteria exchange DNA with each other through horizontal gene transfer and Wikipedia quotes that as the main means of transmitting antibacterial resistance, for example [2], even across species (to the extent that bacterial species are even well-defined). I'm not sure how to make the comparison with that to viral mutation rates. This [3] source gives the following interesting, but imprecise, quote:

> This antagonistic coevolution results from the constant emergence of > countermeasures by which bacteria resist phages, while phages, mutating at a > more rapid rate than their prey, find means to overcome this resistance.

The paper it cites [4], definitely shows phage evolution alongside bacteria evolving counter-measures. So I think that's enough to answer the original question posed, though the question of "which is evolving faster" is harder to answer and probably isn't very well-posed.

That all said, I know nothing about this field and would be happy for some better insight.

[1] [http://www.nature.com/nrmicro/journal/v11/n5/box/nrmicro3003...](http://www.nature.com/nrmicro/journal/v11/n5/box/nrmicro3003_BX1.html) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer) [3] [http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/48/8/1096.full](http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/48/8/1096.full) [4] [http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/royprsb/269/1...](http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/royprsb/269/1494/931.full.pdf)

<comment><USER6> _More importantly - is mutation rate what we want to consider?_

I think it is quite important when considering this particular interaction. Horizontal gene transfer will help a population of bacteria share a successful strategy, rampant mutation will help the virus try more strategies.

The article mentions that the particular infection reached a balance with the phage _overnight_ , so it is likely to be a quite an issue. But the population of bacteria resistant to the phage had become susceptible to an antibiotic (for reasons related to the resistance). So it can still be a valuable tool, even if resistance happens quickly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Phage therapy is very promising but it's labor intensive and specific to each particular infection. That also poses a monetization problem for pharmaceutical companies who prefer to create a pill that can be universally applied to many patients, which is perhaps why it is not more widespread.

But, it is currently practiced in Poland and Russia.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy)

</comment><comment><USER15> Is this part significant?

> A virus from a pond just 40 miles from his house apparently gave him a new > lease on life—and gave a new meaning to the term "local medicine."

That is, are phages for a specific bacterium more likely to be found local to the person infected? Would they have been even more likely to find the right phage if they had collected samples from the patient's neighborhood, family and friends? Nearby people who weren't infected?

<comment><USER16> The short answer is no. Bacteria like pseudomonas don't really have geographical ranges because they are not just human pathogens- they are prolific in temperate soils throughout the world. The same species can be found throughout the world and spread from place to place with great ease, and there will be hundreds of pseudomonas phages capable of infecting any given strain. I am fairly confident that you could isolate an infectious phage for this pseudomonas strain from many temperate soils or mucky ponds anywhere in the world. This is not universally true for all bacteria, but is mostly true for bacteria like pseudomonas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > Tbilisi draws patients from around the world who are suffering from > untreatable UTIs, acne, cystic fibrosis, and intestinal infections.

I've heard of a case where someone with a horrible Staph leg infection was desperate so flew to Tbilisi, apparently it worked for them.

Wonder if they can monetize that better. Say set up something in Mexico right across the border, so people don't have to fly half way across the world...

</comment><comment><USER18> Funny, I actually came across this the other day in my endless quest to cure my worsening gum disease: [http://aem.asm.org/content/76/21/7243.full.pdf](http://aem.asm.org/content/76/21/7243.full.pdf)

I wonder why they never pursued it further. Their results sounded promising.

</comment><comment><USER19> There was a bunch of work done on bacteriophages by the soviets in the pre antibiotic era and then later as part of the bio weapons programs.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy)

</comment><comment> norea-armozel I wonder if the study of these phages can give us better treatments than just gambling with cocktails of the phages themselves. Like understanding their point of infection and how we can exploit that to deliver some chemical to kill the hostile bacteria more effectively.

</comment><comment><USER20> I remember when i was young whenever we had a cut that had got a bit red my grandmothers solution was to go for a swim in the ocean, maybe we were phage hunting.

</comment><comment><USER21> What I found slightly disturbing from this article was that the cure for the bacterial infection, was to drink pond water.

<comment><USER22> Well, spray it in your chest cavity more than drink it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I never understood how they produce these phages. You can't just make them in a factory.

<comment><USER23> They probably reproduce the phages inside bacteria.

<comment><USER18> Wouldn't that kill the bacteria though?

<comment><USER24> Yes, but bacteria reproduce quickly enough that it's not really an issue.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pilots Say That the F-16-Cessna Crash Illustrates a Civil-Military Difference - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/07/can-the-right-stuff-become-the-wrong-stuff/399632/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> When I was training for my pilot license, my instructor was very clear about this point:

"Your responsibility is to NOT get into an accident. It doesn't matter what the air traffic controller said, what I told you to do, or what the other guy did. If you collide with another plane - IT IS YOUR FAULT. You are the PIC."

This absolute responsibility is well placed when even a "fender bender" is death for all.

It sounds like the military pilot didn't get taught that concept.

<comment><USER3> Same here. My instructor was very clear that I, as the PIC, was responsible for maintaining clearance from other airplanes at all times regardless of what ATC says. Even if I am operating in controlled airspace, ultimately, the authority over what happens to me and my airplane is my responsibility alone.

While traffic callouts are nice to have and I really appreciate ATC giving me heads up when I'm flying, I still spend the majority of my flying time looking out the windows for other airplanes. Especially before making any turn or other maneuver where I might have limited view, always dip the wings to check the area first.

Unfortunately, I know some pilots who fly as if they've never seen a radio. Used to do a lot of flying out of a semi-uncontrolled field (it's untowered, but right under the 2,000ft shelf of a nearby class C). I would be doing pattern work, turning base and some yahoo would do a straight-in without a single call on the radio. If I hadn't seen him it and turned early it might have ended badly.

<comment><USER4> So... just a thought as a non-pilot. It's 2015 - we have collision camera's on cars. Given you need to be looking literally every direction to see if something is going to hit you, why aren't planes equipped with similar technology. I feel like at cruising altitude, there aren't really enough false-positives out there that the system would be unusable.

Not necessarily expecting you personally to know. But I feel like the incremental cost to the price of a plane should make this a no-brainer. Did I just come up with a ycombinator 2016 idea?

<comment><USER5> It doesn't even have to be cameras [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision_avoidance_sy...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision_avoidance_system)

>It monitors the airspace around an aircraft for other aircraft equipped with a corresponding active transponder, independent of air traffic control, and warns pilots of the presence of other transponder-equipped aircraft which may present a threat of mid-air collision (MAC).

> The next step beyond identifying potential collisions is automatically > negotiating a mutual avoidance manoeuver between the two (or more) > conflicting aircraft.

This works along side the ADS-B broadcasts for generally knowing where other planes are without ground based radar - however that's not going to be fully implemented until 2020 in the US [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dependent_surveillan...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dependent_surveillance_%E2%80%93_broadcast#US_implementation_timetable)

<comment><USER6> For gliders, FLARM is a radio-based system that also takes turning rates into account. It alerts the pilot visually and audibly 20 seconds before a possible impact would happen. In my experience it works great even in very congested airspace such as when circling in a thermal. it's not perfect, but it's a very good complement to looking out the window.

It only tells you about other FLARM-using aircraft, though. (Some also look for transponder-carrying aircraft).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article is 100% correct about civilian (FAA) air regs - in fact the rules mentioned are pretty basic to any civil IFR pilot.

Although it's not surprising that military pilots would not be sharp on FAA regs, it does raise the question, "so how does civil and military aviation share the same airspace?"

From accidents seen around the world, you can't safely mix them. Civil pilots are "solely responsible" and military pilots are "flying under orders" and "flying a mission", which is why they defer to controllers.

</comment><comment><USER8> A couple of comments about the article. Firstly, if you're a pilot or into aviation, definitely read Fate is the Hunter. It's awesome. You'll need to get the paper version as it's not available for an ebook AFAIK.

A few folks in the article suggest 'slamming' the plane into a turn when ATC uses 'immediately'. That's really not a great idea in a variety of situations. Remember: aviate, navigate, communicate. AOPA has a great article this week on a situation where ATC screwed up and cleared a pilot for landing with another plane on final. He turned onto a tight base ready for short final and ATC told him to turn quickly. He executed a 60 degree bank/climb at 300 ft AGL and stall/spun the plane and put a 4 foot smoking hole in the ground. [http://www.aopa.org/AOPA- Live.aspx?watch={384817B3-70C4-4147...](http://www.aopa.org/AOPA- Live.aspx?watch={384817B3-70C4-4147-9C4C-2A5517FD5DEE})

I'd add that I've been in the pattern at small airports around Colorado Springs with Air Academy pilots (and flown through the MOA's in the area) and they've always been polite and helpful. Although it sounds like the culture issue described comes up with military pilots on IFR plans around VFR civilians.

<comment><USER9> _" if you're a pilot or into aviation, definitely read Fate is the Hunter."_

Second that, _" Fate is the Hunter"_ [0] by Ernest Gann [1] describes the precarious life of a US career airline pilot (including descriptions of flying DC2's, DC3's & DC4's, flight seniority and luck) between the 30's to the 50's. The book is dedicated to a hundred or so commercial pilots not as fortunate as EKG.

        "Although we can never be absolutely certain,
         we now believe the Eastern Airline crash at
         Bainbridge was caused by unporting. Do you
         know what that is?"

         I confessed that I had never heard of it.

         [Unporting: could be caused by a missing
         elevator hinge bolt, like that missing on
         Gann's DC-4, and cause an uncontrollable
         nose-dive, if the plane were flown at certain
         speeds and center of gravity loadings.]

         "Did you slow down when you first noticed
          the vibration? You did not because you had
          no fear of it. But if you had been the
          nervous type, if you slowed down, the center
          of gravity would have changed. That would have
          been quite enough to complete the process of
          unporting which had partially begun."

The title of the book is derived from the fickle nature of flight and how cumulative mistakes become catastrophic depending on luck and fear associated with flying. [2]

One interesting chapter I do remember is Ch16, "A Pretender" where an untrained pilot takes command of an aircraft only to be found out by very poor co-ordination. Gann describes how nobody checked his credentials prior to employment of commercial flying.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fate_Is_the_Hunter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fate_Is_the_Hunter)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_K._Gann](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_K._Gann)

[2] [http://rwebs.net/avhistory/fate.htm](http://rwebs.net/avhistory/fate.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does anyone know if fighters run their radar routinely, or if it's only done when required (e.g. in combat, or training for combat)? I've always wondered why modern fighters ever collide with other aircraft, since they have the hardware on board to track every aircraft in the sky within 50 miles in front of them.

<comment><USER11> Most aircraft with air-to-air radar, such as fighters, have the radar on and use it from takeoff to landing. That said, there are limitations on the number of targets it can track, and, without rereading the specifics of this accident, I think the F-16 had just made a descending turn a dozen seconds or so before the midair. That's not a lot of time to pick up and analyze new traffic as it comes into the radar's sight, especially when single seat and giving more concentration to the instrument approach procedure.

<comment><USER10> Yes, I suppose the fact that they're only scanning a cone in front of the airplane is highly relevant if they're not flying in a straight line.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One interesting Civil-Military difference is that military aircraft and civilain aircraft operate on two completely different sets of communications channels yet the air traffic controllers talk to both military and civilain aircraft at the same time.

Military aircraft typically trasmit to air traffic controllers in a frequency range between 225-380 MHz, while civilan aircraft transmit to air traffic controllers in a frequency range between 118-136 MHz.

The air traffic controllers simulcast their transmissions betweeen both frequency bands to make sure their instructions reach both military and civilan pilots, however the transmissions back to the controllers cannnot be heard between civilan and military pilots.

This is a prime example of the "Civil-Military" difference outlined in the article.

* Note: Most Military pilots have the ability to transmit on both VHF (118-136 MHz) and UHF (225-380 MHz) however it is up to pilots discretion.

<comment><USER13> Controllers don't always simulcast on the military and civilian frequencies. Sometimes they do, because its convenient, just like they sometimes simulcast on Ground and Tower or on Ground and Clearance, but often they only transmit on the frequency used by the people they're talking to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Delusions of infallibility, arrogance, defensiveness, and blind deference to > rank and regulation over common sense have all been shown, through the > history of aviation tragedies, to be much more dangerous than all other > factors.

Basically the most dangerous type of people across any situation.

<comment><USER15> > Basically the most dangerous type of people across any situation.

The amazing things is that most surgeons are like this -- the traits described are a near archetype for surgeons -- and yet outcomes for surgery are pretty damn good, and rapidly getting better for many types of surgery.

<comment><USER16> > outcomes for surgery are pretty damn good

I would say that "good" is relative to what can be reasonably expected. If most surgeons fit that description, then we may not have an independent way to establish our expectations. That is, maybe we think it's "good" because we don't know better.

Hospital error is a leading cause of death in the U.S., though I don't know how much of that is due to surgery.

<comment><USER17> The only source for that I have seen assumed that if the optimal treatment was chosen that the outcome would always be positive which I suspect is not super accurate. I wish I remembered where that source was. Do you have one? Would love to look at it again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> One question that I don't see discussed in the article, or in any of the previous ones it links to: why didn't the air traffic controller tell the F-16 to turn right? From the geometry as described, a right turn would seem to be better for avoidance. (The F-16 was northeast of the Cessna and heading west- southwest; the Cessna was heading east-southeast.)

<comment><USER19> Although this is armchair quarterbacking, having the F-16 break off the approach to climb and maintain a new altitude would have been nice. Not sure if there was traffic above him though. Altitude separation is always more comfortable than a vector away from traffic at or near your altitude.

<comment><USER20> This part baffles me as well. The Cessna was at 1200 feet indicated to begin with. AFAIK, Mode C has an error of +- 200 feet.

That doesn't sound like adequate vertical separation to me. Why not ask for a 500 foot climb instead of giving a vector?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> IFR training in a one-man airframe? That's very odd in the civilian world. One-man planes are rare enough, but a one-man plane with full instrumentation would be something special. And to then use it for training?

I suspect this crash is the result of a gap in FAA regulations. I would suggest that no pilot should be doing IFR training alone while around aircraft not flying IFR. But I can see why the rule doesn't exist: it is an extraordinarily rare situation that, probably, nobody thought needed covering.

This is one of the reasons that American's and Brits go to Goose Bay for low- level training. Canada has more empty sky than either of them combined.

<comment><USER22> It was an F16 (e.g. military, not civilian).

And if the pilot is simulating instrument conditions, there is a rule: FAR 91.109 "No person may operate a civil aircraft in simulated instrument flight unless - The other control seat is occupied by a safety pilot who possesses at least a private pilot certificate with category and class ratings appropriate to the aircraft being flown".

If not simulating IMC, it's the pilot's responsibility to see and avoid per 91.113(b)

<comment><USER17> What constitutes a "civil aircraft" in this situation?

<comment><USER23> Per the Code of Federal Regulations:

 _Civil aircraft_ means aircraft other than public aircraft.

 _Public aircraft_ means any of the following aircraft ...

(1) An aircraft used only for the United States Government ...

(2) An aircraft owned or operated by the armed forces ...

(3) An aircraft owned or operated by the National Guard ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I don't think this article is fair and borders on click bait, with a salacious headline and handpicked responses.

1\. All all the facts are NOT in, yet judgment has been reached and mudslingers are throwing.

2\. By the NTSB preliminary report, the entire time from the first pilot warning (1100:18) to midair (1100:52) was 34 seconds. Barely half a minute for life and death decisions to be made. All of which fell on ATC and the F-16 pilot with the civilian not in radio contact.

3\. ATC made the traffic call. 8 seconds later ATC gives the 'turn south' call. The F-16 pilot asks 'confirm 2 miles'. 8 seconds later ATC says 'if traffic not in sight, turn immediately 180.' The F-16 pilot complies and begins his turn south. 18 seconds later they collide.

4\. From 2 miles to collisions in 34 seconds coincides with just under 4 miles a minute closure or 240kts. Cesna at 60 and F-16 at 180 seems reasonable.

Could the F-16 driver have overbanked and started his turn quicker by a few seconds? Maybe, but there was only 16 seconds and the pilot collided in a turn, so if he'd delayed a few more seconds the collision would have been a miss.

Also, how responsible is a civilian pilot for climbing through an instrument approach near a military airfield without radio contact?

It's a tragedy. Military aviation could probably ditch Tacan approaches, but they are good training. Perhaps any that are close to civilian fields need to be given the axe.

Yet to blame this only on the military pilot and military pilots in general is a complete disgrace. An accident is like swiss cheese, with multiple holes. Errors with people, processes, and things all help cause it.

If only one thing would have changed (if the turn started earlier or later, if ATC picked up the radar hit earlier, if the F-16 pilot got a visual quicker, if the F-16 had a radar lock, if the Cesna was in radio contact, if the Cesna stayed below and didn't climb through an instrument approach) the crash wouldn't have happened.

Aviation is dangerous, especially if you aren't in a bus. Even a bus driver is mildly dangerous.[1] General Aviation and Fighter Aviation are especially dangerous. While I'm all for lessons learned, this salacious, click-bait, profiteering-off-a-tragedy, poised-as-a-question trash doesn't help.

[1] [http://qz.com/410585/garbage-collectors-are-more-likely- to-d...](http://qz.com/410585/garbage-collectors-are-more-likely-to-die-on- the-job-than-police-patrol-officers/)

<comment><USER25> "Also, how responsible is a civilian pilot for climbing through an instrument approach near a military airfield without radio contact?"

Other than responsible for not seeing a fast moving jet rear-end him, not very responsible. Even if he was under radio control and his head on a swivel, it would have have been near impossible to see the jet coming from behind and left at that speed. He wasn't "near a military airfield" \- he had taken off from a general aviation airport just north of Charleston's International airport (CHS), also shared with military, however FAA ATC and rules prevail in this airspace. There is no "military airfield" difference around CHS. The F-16 was on a practice approach to CHS, just as anyone could do a practice approach to CHS by requesting to do so from ATC. One major contributing issue to this was the controller descending the F-16 to such a low altitude so far out (1600' at 34 miles out) [1]. This is well below any slide glope and frankly, as a pilot who flies IFR and no-radio-VFR, I would never expect to see a jet on an approach that low even 15 miles out.

The incident did not occur in the military operation areas (MOA) north of CHS.

[1] [http://www.ntsb.gov/_layouts/ntsb.aviation/brief.aspx?ev_id=...](http://www.ntsb.gov/_layouts/ntsb.aviation/brief.aspx?ev_id=20150707X22207&key=1)

<comment><USER24> My main point is that there are likely multiple factors and a headline titled "Can the 'Right Stuff' Become the Wrong Stuff?" with speculation and hand picked comments doesn't help the investigation or preventing accidents in the future. It does drive traffic and revenue for James Fallows and the Atlantic though.

If you fly GA, I'd recommend you know where nearby airports are (and thirty miles isn't that far for jets), where instrument approaches are, where MOAs are, where low level routes are, etc. I'd also recommend using flight following. You can say that these things aren't your responsibility, but I don't think that's a good attitude.

Also, I'm not sure how you interpret that the Cesna was rear ended. Reading the NTSB report it sounds like the Cesna was heading southeast (135) and climbing and the F-16 was heading west (265) and turning south (180). Seems closer to head-on or perpendicular with the Cesna climbing into the F-16's altitude and the F-16 in a belly up turn with no visibility.

Regarding the Tacan, I don't see any mention that the F-16 was below altitude or off course. So just because you wouldn't expect a plane there, doesn't mean that one won't be there. Again, maybe this is a bad Tacan with nearby civilian airfields and should be axed, but it doesn't seem any rules were broken.

We don't know the results of the investigation, yet all the blame is being put on the F-16 driver. It sounds like small failures from all involved resulted in a tragic outcome. There may be lessons learned from this incident that can help prevent another in the future, but placing blame without the facts and pointing fingers in the media isn't how we figure them out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Let's pretend the perspective is true, that ATC has full responsibility for separation when the pilot is doing instrument training in visual conditions under radar contact.

Why delay doing _exactly_ what you're told to do, twice?

1\. Turn left if you don't have that traffic in sight, does not mean ask questions to confirm the distance, it means turn left if you don't have that traffic in sight. This delay is a minimum of 8 seconds difference in whether this accident happens.

2\. Turn left immediately means do it now, not beginning to turn over 18 seconds... I've put a Cessna in a 60˚ 2G bank inside of 5 seconds many times (it is an unusual attitude, done for training purposes), and this guy is in a fighter jet. He can do better than that.

From this transcript, it's a much easier case proving negligence on the part of the F-16 pilot, than defending it. About the best defense the F-16 pilot I can come up with is that he probably had no chance to see and avoid because of the nose cone of the F-16 obstructing the view of the slightly lower Cessna; and the whole see and avoid principle is probably statistically bullcrap, and all flights should be under positive control. But unfortunately that's not the system we have, and I don't understand the cause for these two delays and the seemingly slow turn when the word "immediately" was used by ATC, which has a very explicit, formal meaning in ICAO terms which is when instant action is required by a pilot.

</comment><comment><USER27> Is it really the F-16's pilot's responsibility to ensure separation when under ATC control?

Doesn't the US have MARSA (Military Accepts Responsibility for Separation of Aircraft) rules that military flights _can_ occasionally use, and which point _they_ are then fully responsible, but otherwise I thought they'd still have to generally follow ATC directions.

<comment><USER28> _Is it really the F-16 's pilot's responsibility to ensure separation when under ATC control?_

Yes:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9965658](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9965658)

<comment><USER27> That post doesn't really prove anything: obviously, if you can see you're heading towards another aircraft and it's likely you'll collide, you'll take evasive action irrespective of ATC control.

I was talking more about deciding which flight level to use and general legal responsibility.

Unless the F-16 pilot turned on his radar or could see other aircraft, how does he know exactly what other aircraft there are. Admittedly, ATC only generally knows squarked aircraft, but this is generally a good picture of what's happening, and will probably be more complete a picture than what the F-16 has access to under non-military conditions (AWACS, datalink, etc).

<comment><USER28> ATC provides a lot of guidance, but in the end responsibility for the safety of the aircraft rests with the pilot in command. If you collide with another aircraft and say "well, it can't be my fault because ATC didn't tell me there was traffic", you are not going to have a good time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> An IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) pilot in VMC (Visual Meteorological Conditions) is still responsible for looking out of the airplane. Even if the pilot was "under the hood" (wearing a view limiting device), the safety pilot (the guy in the other chair) should have ensured separation from the Cessna.

My guess is this is going to end up in court.

<comment><USER30> There was only one pilot in the F-16 (there are two seat trainer F-16s but AFAIK this was not one of them).

Also, you're basically making the same point as the article, except that (so the article conjectures) the military pilot didn't think he needed to look out for other aircraft because ATC was doing it for him.

<comment><USER17> But also failed to respond appropriately to the ATC instructions that he turn immediately. It seems to me you cannot have it both ways regardless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Aviation in itself is not inherently dangerous. But to an even greater degree than the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity or neglect.

? Captain A. G. Lamplugh

</comment><comment><USER32> I don't want to address the difference between civilian and military pilots, since I think the author has done a fine job of that.

But I would like to point out that see-and-avoid doesn't really work in general, and particularly not in the case of two small aircraft with wildly different performance characteristics. I suspect that, even if the F-16 was on a practice instrument approach, the bottom of its performance envelope is significantly higher than the top of the Cessna 150's. (According to the 'pedia, maximum speed is 109kt and Vne is 140kt.)

See-and-avoid has been the first and more-or-less primary anti-collision system in aviation use, but if you've ever tried to cross a highway with high- speed oncoming traffic, you've probably already learned that there are limits to the human visual system. It's just not built to do that sort of thing. No doubt keeping your head outside the cockpit does prevent a lot of crashes, but expecting it to have prevented any crash, much less this one, is too much of a reach.

Keep in mind that most animal's visual systems are pretty good at picking up movement, but one of the signs that you are on a collision course with another vehicle is that it _isn 't moving_ in you visual field.

From [1]: " _[The University of Washington's Autonomous Flight System Lab] came up with a novel way to [modeled the UAS collision risk], reasoning that the known behavior (and random collisions) of gas molecules could serve as a way to predict collision probabilities between VFR aircraft, including UAS. (PDF)[3] To test the hypothesis, they compared the gas-molecule data to actual midair collision data and found a remarkably good fit. This allows two conclusions: manned airplanes under VFR run into each other at about the same random rate as gas molecules do and that's pretty strong statistical evidence that see and avoid doesn't work. (Because of a variance between the gas data and actual midairs, the paper concluded that see and avoid might work 14 percent of the time, but a bit better during the past few years. Possibly for a reason.)_ "

By the way, [1] is an entertaining post with some information, while [2] is a paper from 'stralia called, "Limitations of the See-and-Avoid Principle".

[1] [http://www.avweb.com/blogs/insider/Why-See-and-Avoid- Doesnt-...](http://www.avweb.com/blogs/insider/Why-See-and-Avoid-Doesnt- Work-223680-1.html)

[2] [http://www.skybrary.aero/bookshelf/books/259.pdf](http://www.skybrary.aero/bookshelf/books/259.pdf)

[3] [https://www.aa.washington.edu/research/afsl/publications/lum...](https://www.aa.washington.edu/research/afsl/publications/lum_risk_for_uavs_2010_2.pdf)

Ps. Ok, I do want to say something about the difference between military and civilian pilots. Back in 2004, six soldiers and a general died when a Blackhawk hit a television transmission tower guy wire while in heavy fog.[4] The tower was 1800 feet tall; apparently the helicopter hit the wire about half way up. It wasn't a training mission; the helicopter was "headed to Red River to check maintenance on equipment". The first question from me, the most holster-sniffing of non-pilots, was, "What was he doing flying below 1000 feet in heavy fog?"

[4] [http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Seven- soldie...](http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Seven-soldiers- from-Fort-Hood-killed-in-Texas-1964766.php)

<comment><USER33> >But I would like to point out that see-and-avoid doesn't really work in general, and particularly not in the case of two small aircraft with wildly different performance characteristics.

This^. I was right-seat in a King Air and heard Center call traffic for us at 1/4 mile, looked once, nothing, turned head in case I might have lost my bearing, looked again and there it was. I felt I could almost read the numbers and ID on the aircraft, that's an exaggeration, but it was close. If there hadn't also been some altitude separation, we could've been in a lot worse shape because we were under the other A/C's nose. Neither myself nor the pilot could see it before it was already very close, and it closed too fast for us to do much because we didn't have much energy (climbing spiral with skydivers on board).

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Can someone more familiar with this stuff tell me why the air traffic controller had the F-16 turn left, so that its path would cross that of the Cessna's? Seems backwards.

<comment><USER35> Check the previous articles that are linked in the header, it's explained at length!

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Reminds me of the Cavales cable car disaster. ([http://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/04/world/20-die-in-italy- as-u...](http://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/04/world/20-die-in-italy-as-us-jet- cuts-a-ski-lift-cable.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/04/world/20-die-in- italy-as-us-jet-cuts-a-ski-lift-cable.html))

</comment><comment><USER37> Trying to read the actual NTSB report, but the NTSB site is completely down. "500 Internal Server Error" (not as a HTTP status, as a text web page) for their home page.

<comment><USER38> I wonder if the people who do the post-mortems on IT outages there are considered "crash investigators".

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I find it crazy that one small aircraft could collide with another small aircraft, with such a vast amount of space to avoid each other. How is a collision possible? What am I missing?

<comment><USER40> When I was going through flight training, I thought about this a lot. I think the reason is that the places airplanes go is not random. If airplanes just went to random places in the sky at random altitudes, then indeed accidents would be rare, but everyone heads towards airports, which have particular traffic pattern altitudes for instance. I don't know the specifics of this situation, but perhaps the military pilot wanted to practice IFR near the ground and there also happened to be a VFR corridor passing through there. These non-random intents of pilots mean that airplanes get a lot closer together than you would otherwise think.

<comment><USER41> > I think the reason is that the places airplanes go is not random.

This is how two planes collided 37,000 feet above the Amazon rain forest.

[http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2009/01/air_crash200901](http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2009/01/air_crash200901)

<comment><USER40> Thank you for that, that was an incredible article. I was ultra surprised that just after finishing that, this popped up on HN's front page:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9970336](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9970336)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Octopart (YC 07) Powers Product Search for EETimes - <AUTHOR> http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ee-times-new-product-center-includes-robust-vertical-search-powered-by-octopart-78766807.html

<comment><USER2> Congratulations!

Octopart has gotten some love in the How to Make (almost) Anything class here at MIT, too. We used it to find a good, cheap source for ATtiny44's when Digikey was out of stock.

</comment><comment><USER3> i was on the same yc batch as octopart. whenever i think about determination in founders, these guys are at the top of my list.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hey, congrats guys. Always been a fan of Octoparts.

</comment><comment><USER5> good stuff sam and gang

</comment><comment><USER6> Congratulations!

</comment><comment><USER7> Nice!</comment>


Lenovo stole a fan's video to promote the foldable Motorola RAZR - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2019/05/17/lenovo-motorola-razr-promo-video-stolen-waqar-khan/ <comment><USER2> What's odd about this is how easily it could have been a fan engagement story. Sloppy beyond belief or an intentional faux scandal.

<comment><USER3> Feels like the latter. When was the last time you saw a high production value rendering of a yet to be released phone for a second tier company?

<comment><USER4> Pretty sure Lenovo isn't a second tier company...

<comment><USER5> Google gutted Motorola Mobility for its intellectual property and then sold the carcass to Lenovo.

The smarter employees left for greener pastures even before the sale was complete. What's left isn't even third tier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Odds are it was some random person at an agency or in marketing, or contracted to do some little thing ... and either didn't think about the issue or didn't care to.

Frankly I'm surprised this kind of stuff doesn't happen more often.

Edit: And I'm speaking from experience. Large companies are not as specifically coordinated as people sometimes ascribe them to be. And nobody in marketing or any other dept. wants to deal with legal review of anything if they can avoid it.

<comment><USER7> Probably subcontracted so many layers deep that the person who eventually sold some random internet video as their own did not even reach a particularly high hourly rate using the shortcut.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wait, they're promoting a product that doesn't exist?

<comment><USER9> Yes, and nobody understands why. Beautiful, isn't it :-)

<comment><USER10> Post capitalism? You don't need to _make_ anything, just announce products people want to buy, regardless of whether they're actually buildable. Next step, raise billions of $ on the back of the 'product', then presumably sell[1] empty boxes for all those unboxing videos.

[1] It probably won't be selling, it'll probably licencing, or renting, or renting of other peoples boxes, or some combination thereof.

<comment><USER9> This is not a Kickstarter, it's Lenovo. They have a billion dollars in cash just lying around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Send them an invoice for the amount of work it took you. $10k per second of footage they used is a good start, with a contract saying you won't sue for copyright infringement if they pay, and you'll provide them with non watermarked footage.

If they don't pay, sue for copyright infringement. Seems like it'd be a clear cut case?

<comment><USER12> Sounds nice but suing a massive company like this is going to cost way more than $10k

<comment><USER13> He said 10k/second. At 3:47 for the original full-length video[1] that's pretty good money.

And that's without suing!

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxfI6-ZltWk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxfI6-ZltWk)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> That's very odd. Using some random YouTuber's video is very unprofessional, but taking that aside what is Lenovo's intention here?

Were they trying to test the market? If so, were they are actually planning on building the phone if the response is good?

<comment><USER15> A description of the video is in Chinese, translating to something like:

> Lenovo today unveiled its own folding screen mobile phone video in an > interview with Sina Technology and other media. The folding mobile phone > design looks similar to Motorola's classic Razer. Do you like this > lightweight folding phone?

I believe that the video wasn't meant for the English market, so they thought they could get away with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Yeah, and the Youtuber used Motorola's logo for his render -- without permission.

<comment><USER17> Fair-use allows it in the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> When the company takes the fan's content it's stealing. When the fan takes the company's content it's fine because there's no way to obtain the content conveniently or another excuse or any convoluted way to avoid saying it's stealing.

<comment><USER19> Are you trying to make a point about piracy?

<comment><USER18> No, commented on the wrong thread by accident.</comment></comment></comment>


You're More Likely to Forget Something If You Write It Down - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/11/paper-effect-note-something-youre-likely-forget/

<comment><USER2> > _Michelle Eskritt and Sierra Ma at Mount St Vincent University in Canada > challenged a group of undergraduates to play the card game Concentration on > their own (also known as Pairs). In case you're unfamiliar – the idea is to > memorize the locations of pairs of cards arranged in a grid. After the study > time, all the cards are placed face down. Each turn, the player flips over > one card and must then recall the location of its duplicate partner._

> _Here's the study's first twist – half the students were given the chance to > make notes, on paper, about the locations and identities of the picture > cards. The others had to rely on their biological memories housed in their > skulls. Here's the second twist. After the study period, to their surprise, > the note-taking students had their notes taken away. Both groups were then > tested on the locations and identities of the different cards. The alarming > result – the note-taking group performed much worse when it came to > remembering the locations of the cards._

Based on this description, I don't think this study supports the conclusion as described in the article. All this really says is that the students who were told they must memorize something did better at remembering it later—undoubtedly because they knew they needed to make more of an effort to memorize it, while the note-takers were expecting to rely on their notes as a crutch.

The abstract of the original paper[0] puts it in a much more reasonable way:

> _The findings suggest that participants adopted an intentional-forgetting > strategy when using notes to store certain types of information._

Namely, that the students were deliberately forgetting, or at least neglecting to remember, the information, presumably so that it wouldn't clutter their minds as they packed as much onto the notes as possible.

But of course, that's not as attention-grabbing in a headline, because it means nothing for your daily life unless you're a psychology researcher.

[0] [http://www.msvu.ca/site/media/msvu/Documents/eskritt%20&%20m...](http://www.msvu.ca/site/media/msvu/Documents/eskritt%20&%20ma%202014.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is overblown/unsurprising.

The students are being given a tool that allows them to solve the problem differently (allocating their mental resources in another way) and then their new approach gets SABOTAGED by the experimenters yanking the tool away while they were still in the middle of using it.

 __P.S.: __What next, "access to loans harm people's ability to budget [when the money is stolen by ninjas right before they were planning to spend it]"?

</comment><comment> buggy-cyborg As someone who writes down everything in a bullet journal, isn't this the point? I want to free up mental space for things that actually are important and at the same time I don't really trust my memory. Reminds me of that one Einstein quote: "Never memorize what you can look up in books."

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm likely to forget many things. In some cases, I'm less likely to forget them for having written them down, a form of repetition that helps reinforce my memory. I couldn't tell you the last time I wrote down information about the position of cards in a grid, but suspect it was never.

</comment><comment><USER5> The study isnt correct in its conclusions: People writing stuff down to be used in a card game, arent going to commit info to their memory. They should tell people they will take the paper away at the beginning then do the same study</comment>


Show HN: Foreman-Gui – A terminal based GUI for building Procfiles - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/herkyl/foreman-gui

<comment><USER2> This seems very well done, but it is a bit of an overkill.</comment>


Russian spacecraft landed on moon hours before Americans - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/space/5737854/Russian-spacecraft-landed-on-moon-hours-before-Americans.html A previously unheard recording of a Russian spacecraft attempting to beat NASA's Apollo 11 in 1969's race to the moon has been released. The recordings from Jodrell's Lovell radio telescope, which were hidden in archives until researchers found them, show the Russian craft orbited the Moon and crash-landed onto its surface at 15:50 on July 21 – just a few hours before the Americans lifted. <comment><USER2> Hell, if the race was the first one to touch the moon we could have just aimed a rocket and ended it at that. I do think it interesting that it took this long for this recording to come to light though. Unfortunately I think it will be all the more fodder for conspiracy theorists.

<comment><USER3> Didn't the ranger do that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The title is misleading - Luna 15 has long been known about, and it didn't land on the moon before the Americans, but in fact a few hours after they landed (as both the telegraph article and the Wikipedia entry on Luna 15 show).

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_15>

<comment><USER3> I think the headline just simply got truncated--"a few hours before the Americans Took Off".</comment></comment>


The amazing final days of 'Simpsons' co-creator Sam Simon, donating $100M - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/11/11/the-amazing-final-days-of-simpsons-co-creator-sam-simon-whos-donating-his-100-million-fortune/

<comment><USER2> Talk about going out with style. He's one classy man.</comment>


Ask HN: Can I just use an open-source function in a SaaS tool I'm reselling? - <AUTHOR> Just a quick example for the sake of having an exapmle: say my (paid) SaaS wants to add video calls as a function.<p>I know Jitsi meet is free and open-source. Can I just package it in the SaaS I'm selling? Of course, naming the fact that it's Jitsi wouldn't be a problem, as I'm not making a video calling SaaS. <comment><USER2> yep, subject to the terms of their license and attribution requirements.</comment>


The FBI wants to get into the locked iPhone of Minnesota ISIS attacker - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2016/10/fbi-wants-crack-another-dead-terrorists-locked-iphone/ <comment><USER2> Time to do some NAND mirroring: [https://threatpost.com/researcher-proves- viability-of-nand-m...](https://threatpost.com/researcher-proves-viability-of- nand-mirroring-to-bypass-iphone-passcode-restrictions/120648/)</comment>


Free global list of robot-related business and edu/research facilities exceeds 4K - <AUTHOR> http://robohub.org/free-global-list-of-robot-related-business-and-eduresearch-facilities-exceeds-4k-entries/ <comment><AUTHOR> The Robot Report has been compiling and vetting companies that manufacture robots or are directly involved in their making since 2008. Today that list has exceeded 4,000 manufacturers, integrators, service robot providers, startup companies, ancillary businesses and educational facilities. The list is global and free.</comment>


Apple Remote Code Execution with Image Files - <AUTHOR> http://blog.talosintel.com/2016/07/apple-image-rce.html <comment><USER2> I will remind people again that the issue lays within upstream libraries such as libxml and have the potential to affect not just Apple (although everyone loves to target a single brand), but other operating systems and software, remember to keep your software up to date across the board.

Security is everyone's problem.

<comment><USER3> The only XML-related bug I see in this group is the SceneKit Collada one; and as far as I'm aware, it's not the XML parser which fails in this case, it's SceneKit itself. All of these bugs are the sole responsibility of Apple Inc.

Did you even read any of these advisories before saying Apple didn't do it?

<comment><USER2> Did you even read my comment before saying that I said that Apple didn't do it?

<comment><USER3> "I will remind people again that the issue lays within upstream libraries such as libxml and have the potential to affect not just Apple" < right here, where you said somebody else did it. These issues do not exist in upstream libraries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was about to post that these exploits should be substantially mitigated by iOS sandboxing (you can get arbitrary code execution, but can't get out of the exploited process's sandbox without a second exploit), but then saw CVE-2016-4627 [1] also in the 9.3.3 release notes, which is a local privilege escalation exploit that allows arbitrary code execution with kernel privileges.

There's not a ton of detail out there on the second exploit, so I'm not sure whether or not they can actually be paired to gain kernel privileges remotely. Still, more than enough reason to take these issues seriously and make sure you upgrade in a timely manner.

[1] [http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/91831](http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/91831)

</comment><comment><USER5> If you run an older version of OS X, does Apple supply security updates? How far back?

I run Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8.5) on one of my systems. For the longest time, whenever I click "Software Update", it says that there are no updates (though it does offer OS X El Capitan as an upgrade).

I can understand that Apple or any company doesn't want to support old software indefinitely, but if security updates _are_ available as separate packages--without having to do a major OS upgrade--then you'd think that "Software Update" should offer it!

<comment><USER6> I'm pretty sure that they don't, they seem to use the iOS model: either you're on the latest version or you're insecure.

<comment><USER7> You're pretty wrong.

<comment><USER8> But Apple won't explicitly state which versions are and are not supported, so everyone could be wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Image files are an excellent vector for attacks since they can be easily > distributed over web ...

Reminds me of how easy it was to jailbreak the first iPhone (in 2007) with a malicious image. No computer required.

\- Use a quick hack to enable WiFi on a brand new unactivated phone (for which you just paid full price).

\- Visit a website with a malicious tiff file, Voila !

The best part : The above jailbreak also claimed that they patched the vulnerability after exploiting it.

[http://www.computerworld.com/article/2539680/security0/new-i...](http://www.computerworld.com/article/2539680/security0/new- iphone--ipod-touch--jailbreak--app-patches-critical-tiff-bug.html)

<comment><USER10> > brand new unactivated phone (for which you just paid full price).

Still can't believe the fact that they let people walk away with a subsidised phone without a contract to ensure they'll recoup the price.

<comment><USER11> I'm lost. Between the parentheses it says one has paid "full price", and therefore unsubsidized (or so I would assume if I paid the full retail price for a phone).

<comment><USER12> "This is how I used lockpicks to open the door. Then I proceeded to NOT enter the house as this would be a crime."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Since nobody else has said it yet, it looks like most, if not all, of these vulnerabilities would not have happened were the libraries written in Rust.

<comment><USER14> I cannot wait until the first nasty exploit due to a Rust vulnerability. I just can't.

<comment><USER15> Indeed. There's a whole universe of logic bugs that lead to serious exploits.

Memory safety is nice, but I wish Rust evangelists would 1) stop acting like it's a panacea, and 2) acknowledge that Rust isn't really fully baked yet. I have various complaints about the language and standard library, but the real show-stopper is this: [https://github.com/rust- lang/libc/issues/290](https://github.com/rust-lang/libc/issues/290)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Which version of iOS is fully patched?

Which version of OS X is fully patched?

Has this even been fixed yet?

<comment> matthew-wegner 9.3.3

10.11.6

Yes.

Previous HN discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12124683](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12124683)

Apple info here:

[https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206902](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT206902) (iOS)

[https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206903](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT206903) (OS X)

<comment><USER17> That is a misleading summary. (And out of context your link to Apple's support document is also a bit misleading.)

OS X Security Update 2016-004 applies to v10.9.5, v10.10.5, and v10.11+ [https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201222](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT201222)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is legit, kids. Take it seriously and upgrade.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm on vacation and only have access to tethered data. Can I just upgrade firefox, or do I need to upgrade OSX?

</comment><comment><USER20> Has this exploit been seen in the wild?

<comment><USER21> No. The Talos Group has the working copies of the exploit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Quick, someone rebuild jailbreak.me!</comment>


Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53637463 <comment><USER2> I'm in agreement. nVidia's history of not playing nicely with others does not make this sound like a good deal, especially for entrenched ARM vendors. (Apple won't be phased; they basically design everything themselves, so they don't really even care about the direction of ARM or the architecture. They could hard fork tomorrow, or two years ago, and nobody will notice since they're entirely vertically integrated.)

But, on the plus side, it's the biggest opportunity RISC-V will ever get. Almost overnight anyone who was building ARM cores will suddenly see investments in RISC-V prudent as a hedge against nVidia's future core designs not being licenseable. SiFive will very quickly become a multi-billion dollar organization...

<comment><USER3> I think nVidia could run into some serious anti-trust issues if they tried to interfere with the ARM ecosystem. There's far too much at stake here. Is there a phone on the planet that doesn't run ARM?

<comment><USER4> The Asus Zenfone 2, released 5 years ago, ran on x86 (Intel Atom) [1]. I know someone who was still using it this year Eventually switched but the phone still works. So, to the question:

> Is there a phone on the planet that doesn't run ARM?

Well, technically, yes ;-) This does not change anything to your point though.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_ZenFone#Second_generation...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_ZenFone#Second_generation_\(2015\))

<comment><USER5> I used the ZenFone 2 for about a year ~3.5 years ago; it worked surprisingly well. It was impressive that it really "just worked" like a normal ARM device.

There were some annoying software aspects (the Play Store only allowed me to download x86 apps even though it could run ARM apps), and the device was 100% a battery hog - but cool tech.

Surprised Intel gave up on that effort.

<comment><USER6> Intel gave up because Atom for smartphones were sold at a negative price after marketing incentives. They couldn't even get volume from manufacturers when it costed less than zero; because no one wanted to invest upfront R&D costs.

<comment><USER7> Intel should have made their own phones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The Observer proposed an interesting solution last weekend:

 _" The government could offer a foundational investment of, say, £3bn-£5bn and invite other investors — some industrial, some sovereign wealth funds, some commercial asset managers — to join it in a coalition to buy Arm and run it as an independent quoted company, serving the worldwide tech industry..." _

[https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/08/10/0358216/should- the-...](https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/08/10/0358216/should-the-uk- government-form-a-coalition-to-buy-arm)

<comment><USER9> I feel like with the current political climate in the UK this solution is fairly unlikely to happen.

<comment><USER10> Actually the UK government has started taking stakes in technology firms where it deems it has a strategic interest. [1]

I can easily see the man now running the UK (Dominic Cummings) deciding to take a stake in ARM. Maybe other ARM customers would also be willing to take (non controlling) stakes to keep it away from Nvidia (Apple of course used to be a big shareholder).

[1] [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science- environment-53279783](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-53279783)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> He's absolutely right. Unless there is a 100% firewall between ARM and Nvidia then Nvidia will influence ARM to move in directions that help Nvidia's wider business and not the ARM ecosystem as a whole - and that will adversely affect everyone who uses an ARM CPU - and that's basically everyone.

I don't believe that such a firewall is possible in any event. Who will enforce it?

For those who are saying that it's great as it will give RISC-V a boost. Fine in principle, but how long will it take before the RISC-V ecosystem is anywhere near comparable to ARM in mobile?

One final point: the UK government is now considerably more interventionist than at any time in the recent past. Not completely impossible that they intervene in this in some way.

<comment><USER11> I agree that this deal is good for Nvidia only and will hurt ARM CPU usage.

Nvidia is right now not in the same league as Intel/Apple, but having the most successful consumer and corporate GPU business along with control of Arm architecture CPUs puts them in the same league in my opinion. That kind of dominance is never good for consumers.

Having worked for a company that was acquired and became a daughter company, such a setup is not enough of a firewall.

Slowly, the acquiring company will modify internal systems and internal processes until there is not much left of the original company. And many key employees will leave as they don't identify with the way things are being done.

I would like to think that acquisitions can be a good thing, but that's not the case in my experience.

<comment><USER12> Nvidia are worth more than Intel.

<comment><USER11> It is, although it's just in the last month: [https://www.tomshardware.com/news/Nvidia-stock-beats- intel](https://www.tomshardware.com/news/Nvidia-stock-beats-intel)

In October 2019 the market cap was 226B vs 108B in favor of Intel. [https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2019/10/10/ho...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2019/10/10/how- does-nvidias-valuation-compare-to-its-peers/#bf4a6d535c08)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Seems like alarmist FUD to me. While I agree that having Arm owned by any one of its major customers creates some potential conflicts of interests, I think the notion that NVIDIA or any other company would start to drive licensees away with draconian terms/costs with some poor business planning pretty silly.

The more interesting question to me is what would any single (major customer of Arm) company gain from owning Arm? For instance, if NVIDIA wants to be competitive in data center CPUs (which would put them at equal footing with AMD and Intel, not more monopolistic), why couldn't they go the Apple approach with a perpetual license and design it entirely custom (or not) as they see fit? (AFAIK they already design custom mobile CPUs.)

What do you gain by buying out an expensive, large licensing company that essentially makes no money that leaves you in a weird position with various rivals? Doesn't quite click for me.

<comment><USER14> The most cynical view would be that they could not reup licenses for competitors.

<comment> the-dude Wouldn't they be forced into RAND?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non- discriminat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non- discriminatory_licensing)

<comment><USER14> Afaict that seems to be an agreement that a patent holder enters into a third party with to promise to license their patents to implementors of the standard. In this case there is no standard, just the patents and associates technology, so I'm not sure that applies. I would be shocked though if big players didn't have similar long term agreements with Arm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I for one would welcome this. Firstly, as mentioned, it gives people incentive to look into RiscV.

That aside, for far too long QCOM has had a monopoly on the phone chip market. Patents aside, which increasingly became irrelevant due to the death of Sprint, their major advantage has always been in Adreno, which as far as I remember AMD basically did for them. Mali is terrible. If Nvidia could revamp ARM graphics at the spec level, we'd have real competition again from Samsung, Mediatek, and potentially others.

<comment><USER16> It will be the end of Linux on ARM. They will choke platform with blobs until the inevitable death. NVIDIA and open-source is like matter and antimatter - they simply cannot coexist in the same place and time.

<comment><USER17> ARM is all about licensing and selling hardware IP, they will use Linux to the extent that it helps to sell their IP, just like most companies that actually pay for engineers to contribute some parts of their crown jewels to Linux, while leaving the rest for their own in-house distributions.

Also in case you haven't noticed, the IoT domain where ARM thrives is getting full of BSD/MIT POSIX clones, guess why.

ARM mbed, Zephyr, RTOS, NuttX, Azure RTOS ThreadX, ...

<comment><USER18> Having an liberally licensed code-base with make it very easy for entities to publish a benign version on github, and then deploy an "enhanced" version on the real hardware, cryptographiclly signed, and not dumpable. They'll find something, that can support the argument, that not all functionality can be open-sourced, and that is why the published binary will never have the same checksum as something you have compiled from the public sources.

<comment><USER17> From my comment history you will see I am pretty much into commercial and dual licensing, so I do agree with your point, however kind of feels like the way copyleft licenses have been managed has brought us back to the commercial licenses with source code, just under a different name to make them more appealing to younger generations.

<comment><USER18> Hi, thanks for replying!

> the way copyleft licenses have been managed has brought us back to the > commercial licenses with source code, just under a different name to make > them more appealing to younger generations.

I think, I'm following along (&agree), but to be sure, could you perhaps elaborate a bit on that? (Also for other? readers)

<comment><USER17> Basically Linux kernel, GNU utilities and GCC are the only projects left with a copyleft license, almost everyone else migrated to non-copyleft licenses in the context of making money with some form of open source.

And not everything gets upstream, in name of keeping the main business at the company's soul, for example those optimizations used by clang on PS4? Sure all of those that don't reveal PS4 architecture features that could eventually be "misused".

The large majority of those business have moved into clang, thus reducing GCC usage to copyleft hardliners, Linux is visible on ChromeOS and Android but not on a context that it can fully profit from and then there is Fuchsia waiting on the backstage.

So in a couple of generations, when copyleft software is just a memory in digital books, we will have gone full circle to the days when buying developer software would entitle you to an extra floppy with a partial copy the source code.

The only difference is how that partial copy gets delivered, which will be just the upstream of non-copyleft software.

<comment><USER18> O.K. so we see the same things.

I can't discern from your writing tone, if you think the above is desirable or a train_wreck_in_slow_motion coming.

I think, it's the latter, not necessarily by direct effect, but by all the bad behavior this will enable in corporations for generations to come.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Could someone explain me what the huge deal about ARM is since they only licence but don't actual fab the chips but intel, Apple and nvidia do.

Also what's the difference between ARM and RISC-V. Why chose one over the other ?

<comment><USER18> RISC-V sounds like a good idea, but (imo) could lead to a situation, where all/many device manufacturers make custom processors based of the liberally licensed code-base. At first, this sounds great, "Yah, no more reliance on Intel/ARM/, no more ME/Trustzone". But then you realize, that although you, the user/buyer, can build/run some custom code on there, you'll never be able to tell for sure, if you did not get a version/series with a gimped HWRND, or other (security-reducing) goodies. Targeted attacks will become _very_ easy for anybody, who can pressure companies/engineers into adding something for (a subset of) the customers, or can reroute/intercept device shipments to you.

ARM is a "known" situation. They have TrustZone, we know it exists, but buyers/end-users do not get full control of it (outside of some niche products, or dev-boards). That situation will not change. With ARM, get already got used to the idea, that you'll never "own" the machine, you are merely allowed to execute some code in a walled-off area of your Telescreen.

So, with RISC-V, you have even less assurance, that the processor IC really contains what you expect, and nothing more.

<comment><USER20> RISC-V allows companies to make closed systems, but it also allows them to make open systems, which wasn't viable before.

Most people will keep using closed systems because they don't care about computer architecture, but us hackers will finally have a chance at having a (small) portion of the market. A small industry of open hardware.

<comment><USER18> > RISC-V allows companies to make closed systems, but it also allows them to > make open systems

True, but can you recall any moment in history, where market forces did not actually make producing "open" devices unprofitable? So, (imo) in theory, you are right, but in practice, (successful) companies will use the technology to create "even more closed" system, and worse: Make systems, where the user can't even tell, if he got an "open" system.

> A small industry of open hardware

That you will only be able to use in a lab/isolated_env, or illegally, because mandatory signing of FWs/BLs/OSs/APPs is just around the corner for consumer devices capable of speaking to the internet.

<comment><USER21> > True, but can you recall any moment in history, where market forces did not > actually make producing "open" devices unprofitable?

I'd say that the early era of personal computers proved it. The Apple II and IBM PC were very open platforms-- thoroughly documented, developer friendly and made with very few parts you couldn't buy out of your favourite electronics distributor catalogue.

They were riotous successes in large part because the open platform meant they didn't have to guess or corral the entire market. Remember that most of the killer apps of the era (VisiCalc, WordPerfect, dBase, 1-2-3, etc.) were third party, and it was largely aftermarket firms selling "six-in-one" cards, Sound Blasters, and Hercules graphics cards that patched the gaping holes in the PC's hardware design.

Conversely, look at a machine like the TI-99/4 series: while on paper a decent machine for the time, it was as "closed" as a machine of the era could be: an unusually limited built-in development platform, and many of the desirable upgrades involved buying a very expensive expansion chassis.

It's interesting to consider what the business tradeoffs of today's walled garden model are. Apple could choose to do a "pure hardware" play, or emulate the early 1980s IBM, where they offered some popular software via their own product line as a trusted source. The result would probably be a marginally larger total addressable market, as it would bring some customers and developers to the platform who needed something that could never clear the App Store before. But would the growth in market size compensate for the reduction in the average cut they can command from the market?

<comment><USER22> > IBM PC were very open platforms

What about the whole debacle around the IBM BIOS?

<comment><USER21> I think they made a commented disassembly available officially, and there were definitely aftermarket books with blow-by-blow analysis.

You could argue it was imperfect (not exposing every feature it could, and having performance costs, sent a lot of software to bypass it and pound hardware registers directly, creating that weird world of early clones that would run MS-DOS but not 1-2-3 or Flight Simulator) but it doesn't seem like a hostile gesture to external developers.

Now it was definitely a legal hurdle if you wanted to make an outright clone, but by 1984 or so, Compaq and Phoenix had solved that problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I find it baffling that SoftBank isn't simply taking ARM public. If ever there was a company that _should_ be independent, it's ARM. Is there a good explanation out there for why this isn't the obvious choice?

<comment><USER24> Most likely, money. Specifically, they probably think they can get a better price from nVidia than on the public market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There would be a certain symmetry if Apple took a (non controlling) stake in ARM to keep it independent given that sales of ARM shares in the 1990s were a significant factor in giving Apple financial stability in the 1990s.

[1] [https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/06/09/how-arm-has- alrea...](https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/06/09/how-arm-has-already- saved-apple---twice)

</comment><comment><USER25> NVIDIA's stock is so massively pumped up. They will simply make an all-stock offer that's pretty much impossible to refuse and that will be the end of it (most likely).

<comment><USER26> NVIDIA is the only hardware company that takes software serious.

In every hardware thread, someone complains about hardware people being behind on software technology. And then there is NVIDIA, the company that provides the best development environment for GPU development, the company that used chip simulation for their first processor.

AMD was kept alive by oil money and console contracts. NVIDIA made it on their own. They were innovative in the past, they can be innovate in the future. To me, that's an opportunity for much more future growths.

How much is too much if NVIDIA can take Intel's market? And we are only at the start of machine learning and product simulations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Sounds like a protectionist who doesn't want ARM to be owned by any foreign entity.

"most of the licensees are competitors of Nvidia"

Is this true? It seems like quite a stretch. Nvidia doesn't offer a chipset for the mobile, battery powered market(it tried, and gave up because of competition from Qualcomm).

<comment><USER28> Isn't Tegra their mobile chip?

<comment><USER27> It's "mobile" as in cars and robots. It's not mobile as in cell phones.

<comment><USER28> It's also in the Nintendo Switch :)

<comment><USER29> Only the older chip series they could not sell to tablet makers. The newer chips are too power hungry for mobile and are targeted at automotive where Nvidia has gotten traction. Nintendo better hope Nvidia has something new coming up in time for a next generation.

<comment><USER27> It might happen with a process shrink but that remains to be seen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> AMD have to license their cpu to China in order to get a life line. when AMD stock was in the toilet.

Softbank doesn't want ARM anymore. what do Hermann Hauser proposed? Let ARM holding die(?). He offer no solution.

<comment><USER24> If I understand correctly, his solution is to make ARM a publicly traded independent company, rather than selling to another company like nVidia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Competition breeds innovation they never should have sold in the first place. If an investment firm won't hold them they should start an IPO instead of seeking value validation from contending clients and players in the hardware industry.

I'm tired of the tech industry's standard duopolies. ARM breaks that trend by licensing to Qualcomm, Samsung, Apple, MediaTek, & others; surrendering independence today could hurt the future of tomorrow.

</comment><comment><USER32> I would dearly love for the industry sh1tstorm that would happen if Huawei would buy ARM (please!) Would like to see Donny try to ban a Huawei ARM, or order Google to only supply to hot slow Intel Atom mobiles, with everyone of the asian makers walking away from the US market, while the world switches to an OSS Android fork.

Although I still for the life of me can't understand why Miyoshi son is holding on to wework and selling ARM.

<comment><USER33> Because ARM is one of the few things he invested in that actually makes money.

It's a cash-crunch driven deal, nothing else.

<comment><USER32> Yep - I was always told, keep your dividend-paying winners, sell your losers.

Wework is definitely a loser, ARM is a winner - its completely upside down. If he wants cash, he should sell his trash. And avoid future losses by not buying trash in the first place.

<comment><USER29> Rather Alibaba and Yahoo Japan are Softbank's dividend-payers. ARM has proven nothing more than a bargaining chip to kickstart the vision fund and now a crunch zone to keep the group liquid. ARM's valuation has barely moved despite the continued dominance of the platform.

Selling ARM lets Softbank keep WeWork living for a couple more years, enough time to bring the non-japan markets into cashflow positive status. Japan by some miricle was cash flow position from the start, he must think the model can work overseas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Surely a sale would be allowed if regulatory compliance compliance is met? I was part of a private semiconductor company bought by a public American company and the buying company had to convince the US gov they would not turn the product line into a captive portal. I expect it's the same here?

<comment><USER35> So what happened?

<comment><USER34> They had to get clearance and satisfy the USG the products would still be available to third parties. Had to do this in Korea and China too. Once the governments were satisfied, the acquisition was completed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> conversely, it may be just what RISC-V needs to go mainstream sooner.

</comment><comment><USER37> I think he's right. A sale to Nvidia would be detrimental to ARM's current business model - now Nvidia may have other plans but the thought of that would certainly scare existing licensees even more.

Should the UK government intervene? Yes. Will they? Probably not.

The detail here is more nuanced than protectionist vs free market - but I don't think most people realise that and see it as just protectionism. It isn't I don't think.

<comment><USER38> It's just protectionism with different justifications.

There is no evidence the UK government could run ARM better than NVidia. In fact the opposite is true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Any other real non US company can benefit from it except Chinese companies ?

<comment><USER40> There are all kinds of Euro-based electronics firms such as Alcatel or Phillips or Siemens.

<comment><USER39> I'm aware of them but do they really develop any mainstream devices ? I might be wrong but aren't those companies working in their niche eg cell towers etc. Isn't that a way tooo narrow application of such a great tech ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Me too in agreement. NVIDIA got interested in ARM after the launch news of Japan Supercomputer. They want to suppress, I think.. as it's bad for their business. (Twice faster than First Supercomputer ) ...

</comment><comment><USER42> This IS good news . If nvidia's history is something we can go by then the arm licencing etc will be so miserable that people will flock to riscV

</comment><comment><USER43> \--

<comment><USER44> I think you're confused. He didn't own ARM, it wasn't his choice to sell. Hauser was vehemently against the SoftBank sale.

<comment><USER43> You're right. I retract my criticism of his position. It's completely consistent. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> it's been said before, they need to just IPO.

</comment><comment><USER46> Not for RiscV ;)

</comment><comment><USER47> British government should not bother to clean up the mess capitalists make. They will have a hard enough time living with the consequences of brexit and corona without buying up companies.

</comment><comment><USER48> How could it not be?

</comment><comment> tedk-42 I suspect Apple would buy ARM before NVIDIA would ever get a chance to.

That is of course, to protect their own interests as opposed to making it into a successful business in its own right.

<comment><USER49> Apple walked away from the opportunity. Anyone know why?

<comment><USER38> Apple founded ARM and walked away with a perpetual license. They have zero need for ARM, purchasing it would be a huge distraction and conflict.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Yeah, Hermann? Where was this grave concern when you sold to SoftBank? Why don't you man up and just admit you play favorites?

Edit: His concern was far more muted when it came to SoftBank in 2016 [https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/690588/ARM- Holdings-...](https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/690588/ARM-Holdings- Hermann-Hauser-24bn-SoftBank-a-very-sad-day-Theresa-May)

<comment><USER51> So you're arguing about the level of concern? I can think of lots of reasons to be more concerned about a chip manufacturer buying the design/licensing business literally at the core of the majority of mobile phones than of a technology investment firm.

Or maybe you should just admit that your original comment was not well founded?</comment></comment>


Hong Kong protesters messing with the characters, part 2 - <AUTHOR> https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=44269 <comment><AUTHOR> Part 1 here: [https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=43784](https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=43784)

See the footnotes of part 2 for other related posts.

</comment><comment><USER2> Far less serious (and not polysyllabic), but still linguistically interesting: the Chinese character for _biáng_, one of the most complex in modern usage. There are 15 variants of the character consisting of between 56 and 70 strokes, which can be recalled with various mnemonics. It is not yet included in standard Unicode, but scheduled for inclusion in March 2020.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biangbiang_noodles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biangbiang_noodles)

<comment><USER3> Wikipedia claims that the Chinese character with the most strokes translates to the English word 'verbose' [0, 1].

Whoever came up with that one must have been a wicked deadpan humourist. I live with regret that I will never appreciate good Chinese (written) poetry.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters#Rare_and_co...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters#Rare_and_complex_characters) [1] [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%F0%AA%9A%A5](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%F0%AA%9A%A5)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can the Hk government ban these? Honest question.

<comment><USER5> Ban what exactly?

<comment><USER4> They banned cryptography in Australia recently so we can't safely assume weird characters are safe neither.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> do i have to know the cantonese roots? because the 3 components are nowhere in the red and black image.

<comment><AUTHOR> Components of each of the three characters are in the constructed character. I think it's the top two components of the first, the full second character, and the left and right components of the third. The constructed character is in calligraphic style so the components look a bit different than in the printed representations.</comment></comment>


Bacteria make major evolutionary shift in the lab - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/dn14094-bacteria-make-major-evolutionary-shift-in-the-lab.html?feedId=online-news_rss20

<comment><USER2> Based on a News.YC recommendation, I'm currently reading "The Selfish Gene" right now and in the book, Richard Dawkins, says at some point billions of years ago a critical fundamental evolution happened - a particularly remarkable molecule was formed by accident, a "Replicator" with the ability to replicate itself. He said the chance of that happening was "exceedingly improbable" and "but in our human estimates of what is probable and what is not, we are not used to dealing in hundreds of millions of years". Improbable accidents (like the one that probably occurred around generation 20,000 of the bacteria) can shape the future.

<comment><USER3> It's like "Time of the Gaps" instead of "God of the Gaps". Just sprinkle some fairy time dust on it and anything is possible? You should look into the law of large numbers and gambler's fallacy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> From the article:

>In the meantime, the experiment stands as proof that evolution does not always lead to the best possible outcome.

Wow, the author forgot something critical--there are no time constraints in this statement. It is as though the author tried a diet for a day and decided the diet did not lead to weight loss.

<comment><USER5> What is the best possible outcome?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting read. The little snip at the though about creationists seemed a bit petty. Though I can understand why an evolutionary biologist might be a bit miffed at Creationist organizations.

In any case, score one for science.

<comment><USER7> It's not petty. The experiment itself is fairly boring; it's a variant of a routine genetic mapping that we've been doing since Mendel, and the form of the outcome is unsurprising.

The only thing that makes this interesting is the length of the experiment, and how it clearly illustrates a basic principle of evolution that the creationists say is impossible.

(Also, iirc, Lenski is one of the experts who testified at the Dover trial....)

<comment><USER8> I'm sure we'll now see the creationists' argument evolve (again) in another attempt to survive the deft hand of science.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> mark-t I posted a different version of this story a few days ago: [http://scienceblogs.com/loom/2008/06/02/a_new_step_in_evolut...](http://scienceblogs.com/loom/2008/06/02/a_new_step_in_evolution.php)

<comment><USER9> Your version is much better: it explains what happened in detail and it has much less noise. I guess the one currently on the homepage is more upmoddable because of the creationists reference.</comment></comment>


Android has 'the First Natural-Sounding Synthesized Voice in the World' - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/07/google-android-hugo-barra-interview/

<comment><USER2> Slightly misleading post title. Actually Google claims to have selected the voice talent in a different manner than has been previously done. The text-to- speech technology is not otherwise claimed to have been improved.</comment>