Yeah, it should have been a A level criticality – functionally impossible to relay bad information, tri mode redundancy, shut down if it detects itself in error, etc.
I don’t know if it’s technical detail translating poorly into journalism, but from reading up on it, I don’t believe it was just a sensor deploying at the wrong time. It was a sensor providing flight stability critical information with no tri-mode redundancy built in (sold secondarily as a “safety mechanism” reporting incorrectly, causing MCAS to react fatally.
I think that “sensor with no redundancy” is a pretty important fact.
Yes, apparently firing was ‘enough’ /s
(Off-Topic: Nice Nickname!)
If I understand right, this is a clarification (of sorts) to the standard of “true threat”. Ken White covers a lot of first amendment speech issues and has a very good explanation here: https://popehat.substack.com/p/supreme-court-clarifies-true-threats
So. To the practitioner, or to the internet tough-talker, what does this mean? It means that the law of the land, at least 7-2, is that a threat is only outside the protection of the First Amendment if:
- A reasonable person, familiar with the context, would interpret the threat as a sincere statement of intent to do harm, and
- The speaker was reckless about whether the threat would be taken sincerely — that is, they “consciously disregarded a substantial risk” that it would be taken seriously.
It was, in fact, hilarious.
Goddammit. It’s my moronic senator behind that. Figures. I’m not sure he reaches Tuberville or Inhofe levels of stupid, but he is a terrible person.