> You obviously do not believe in freedom of speech as defined by US law.
Neither do you. The Supreme Court of the United States has repeatedly held in numerous rulings that freedom of speech and/or freedom of expression is not absolute and you can be sanctioned, prosecuted and/or imprisoned for some forms of speech and/or expression -- i.e. you do have consequences.
- Schenck v. United States (1919) -- Speech that has intent and a clear and present danger of resulting in a crime is not protected under the First Amendment
- Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942) -- The First Amendment does not protect fighting words, which are those that inherently cause harm or are likely to result in an immediate disturbance
- Feiner v. New York (1951) -- The police are permitted to take action against those exercising speech that is likely to disturb the peace
- United States v. O'Brien (1968) -- You can be prosecuted for destroying certain property as an act of political speech; the law forbidding this was not unconstitutional
- Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) -- It is permissible to restrict speech that advocates for imminent unlawful violence and is likely to incite people to perform such
- Paris Adult Theatre I v. Slaton (1973) -- Restrictions on the dissemination of obscene material are not by themselves unconstitutional (see also the ruling immediately below)
- Barnes v. Glen Theatre Inc (1991) -- Public indecency laws banning dancing nude are not unconstitutional
- Virginia v. Black (2003) -- Partial reversal: While a broad ban on cross-burning is unconstitutional, banning cross-burning for the express intent to intimidate is not
- Garcetti v. Ceballos (2006) -- As a public official, you can be sanctioned by your government employer for speech contrary to employment policy
- Morse v. Frederick (2007) -- Schools can ban students from sharing speech about illegal drug use at school
- Counterman v. Colorado (2023) -- True threats of violence are outside the bounds of the First Amendment, and laws covering stalking and making threats in this manner are not unconstitutional
> Non redundant fuel pump that doesn't even restart on power failure
The crew weren't using the redundant fuel pumps. They were using the non-redundant fuel line flushing pump as a generator fuel pump, a task it was never designed for and which was not compliant.
That it doesn't restart on restoration of power is by design; you don't want to start flushing your fuel lines when the power returns because this could kill your generators and cause another blackout.
> Main engine shutting of (sic) when water pressure drops
Yeah, this is quite bad. There ought to be an override one can activate in an emergency in order to run the engines to the point of overheating, under the assumption that even destroying the engine will cause less catastrophic consequences than not having propulsion at the time.
> backup generator not even starting in time
There were 5 generators on board. Generators 1 through 4 are the main generators on the HV bus side, and the emergency backup generator is on the LV bus side.
When the incident occurred, the ship was being powered by generators 3 and 4, which were receiving their fuel via the non-redundant fuel line flushing pump. These generators powered the HV bus, which powered the LV bus via a transformer. The emergency backup generator was not running, so the LV bus was only receiving power from the HV bus via 1 transformer.
The incident tripped the circuit breaker for this transformer, disconnecting the HV bus from the LV bus, resulting in the first LV bus blackout. This resulted in main engine shutdown (coolant pump failure) and an automatic emergency backup generator startup.
There is an alternate (backup) set of circuit breakers and transformer that could have energised the LV bus, but the transformer switches were left in the manual position, so this failover did not happen automatically and immediately. There were no company procedures or regulations which required them to be left in the automatic position.
The LV bus also powered the fuel line flushing pump, so this pump failed. As a result, generators 3 and 4 started to fail (being supplied with fuel by a pump which was no longer operating). The electrical management system automatically commanded the start of generator 2 in response to the failing performance of generators 3 and 4.
Generator 1 and generator 2 were fed by the standard fuel pumps, which were available. One main generator is capable of powering the entire ship, so there was no need to start generator 1 as well; this would have just put more load on the HV bus (by having to run the fuel pump for generator 1 as well).
Instead of the automatic transformer failover (which was unavailable), the crew manually closed the same circuit breaker that had already tripped, 1 minute after the first LV bus blackout.
This restored power to the LV bus via the same transformer that was originally powering it, but did not restart the fuel line flushing pump supplying generators 3 and 4 (which were still running, but spinning down because they were being fed fuel via gravity only). This also restored full steering control, but this in itself was inadequate to control the vessel's course without the engine-driven propeller.
The main engine was still offline and takes upwards of half a minute to restart, assuming everyone is in place and ready to do so immediately, which was unlikely.
The emergency backup generator finally started 10 seconds later (25 seconds too late by requirements, 70 seconds after the first LV bus blackout).
Generator 2 had not yet gotten up to speed and connected to the HV bus before generators 3 and 4 disconnected (having exhausted the gravity-fed fuel in the line ahead of the inoperative fuel line flushing pump), resulting in an HV bus blackout and the second LV bus blackout. With only the emergency backup generator running on the LV side, only one-third of steering control was available, but again, this was inadequate without the engine.
3 seconds later, generator 2 connected to the HV bus. 26 seconds later, a crew member manually activated the alternate transformer, restoring power to the LV bus for the second time.
The collision was preventable:
- It is no longer a requirement that the engine automatically shuts down due to a loss of coolant pressure. It was at the time the vessel was constructed, but this was never re-evaluated. If it were, the system may have been tweaked to avoid losing the engine.
- If the transformer switches were left in the automatic position, the LV bus would have switched over to being powered by the second transformer automatically, and the engine coolant pumps and fuel line flushing pump would not have been lost.
- Leaving the emergency backup generator running (instead of in standby configuration) would have kept the LV bus energised after the first transformer tripped, and the engine coolant pumps and fuel line flushing pump would not have been lost.
- If the crew had opted to manually activate the second transformer within about half a minute (twice as fast as they reactivated the first one), and restarted the fuel line flushing pump, a second blackout would have been avoided, and the engine could have been restarted in time to steer away.
This shows the importance of leaving recovery systems armed and regularly training on power transfer procedures. It also illustrates why you shouldn't be running your main generators from a fuel pump which isn't designed for that task. This same pump setup was found on another ship they operated.
Ah so the crew modified the Generator to use the flush pumps instead? i really don't understand that. Why would using the flush pumps even be a viable alternative? were the normal pumps broken or was this just how the ship was built?
It saved them time on switching the fuel they were using. Within US waters they were required to either burn cleaner fuel or scrub the dirty (high-sulfur) diesel fuel they would use in open waters.
They didn't have a fuel scrubber and they didn't want to spend the time flushing the dirty fuel out of the fuel lines to switch to the clean fuel, so they bypassed the fuel lines and fuel pumps for generators 3 and 4 and used the fuel line flushing pump as a fuel pump to feed generators 3 and 4 with clean fuel (marine gas oil) instead.
They would then presumably start generator 1 and/or generator 2 once in open waters, feeding them with the regular, cheaper, dirtier diesel fuel, and shut down generators 3 and 4.
Bypassing the fuel lines and fuel pumps for generators 3 and 4 made them prone to the very failure they experienced.
The ship would not have been built this way; it wasn't up to code.
> and file lookup through $PATH (which is not done by the kernel, maybe it's some shell trickery)
It's libc. Specifically, system(3) and APIs like execvp(3) will search $PATH for the file specified before passing that to execve(2) (which is the only kernel syscall; all the other exec*() stuff is in libc).
If the OS doesn't recognise it as an emergency number then it may fail the call if it believes that whatever network it is associated with won't connect it ("No service" vs "Emergency calls only" indicators etc if you are out of coverage from your SIM's network but within range of other networks).
Emergency calling is supposed to work over any network (even without a SIM card inserted, much less an activated, registered, associated one), but only if the OS tries to dial it as an emergency call.
It's not about the "age" of the number at all, devices are mandated to try all available networks when it is a recognized emergency number. In this case, even though the number was indeed a device-recognized emergency number, it failed to try all available networks as mandated. The article mentions Triple Zero several times, but not because that is specifically noteworthy beyond it being the typical emergency number.
Probably because it was the London team that was actively investigating the incident and initially came to the conclusion that it may be a DDoS while being unable to authenticate to their own systems.
I wonder if they'll backport this fix to Windows 10 (Very much doubt).
I also wonder if they'll ever fix the menu entry delay bug. At the moment neither of the "Update and ..." options is in the menu when you first open it. Opening the shutdown menu then checks if there are updates available to install and will then add those options, shifting the existing menu entries. Which makes it incredibly easy to quickly click on an option you didn't want.
htop(1) can also highlight running processes that have had their on-disk executable replaced (highlights in red) or one of its shared libraries (highlights in yellow). I find this very useful.
> Windows locks files when they're in use, so that you cannot overwrite them. Linux doesn't do this.
Linux does do this (try overwriting or truncating a binary executable while it's running and you'll get -ETXTBSY).
The difference is that Linux allows you to delete (unlink) a running executable. This will not free the on-disk space occupied by that executable (so anything you write to disk in the immediate future will not overwrite the executable, and it can continue executing even if not all of the executable has been paged in) until all references to its inode are freed (e.g. the program exits and there are no other hardlinks to it).
Then you can install a new version of the executable with the same name (since a file by that name no longer exists). This is what install(1) does.
I jumped ship over a decade ago and have been using Linux Mint as my daily driver; there hasn't been one day I've regretted it. Seeing the recent news about the constant full-screen Windows Backup/OneDrive popovers and needing a Microsoft Account just to install the OS (they recently killed the OOBE workaround) is just the stale icing on this dumpster fire of a cake.
Don't even get me started on all the AI crap in Edge.
Neither do you. The Supreme Court of the United States has repeatedly held in numerous rulings that freedom of speech and/or freedom of expression is not absolute and you can be sanctioned, prosecuted and/or imprisoned for some forms of speech and/or expression -- i.e. you do have consequences.
- Schenck v. United States (1919) -- Speech that has intent and a clear and present danger of resulting in a crime is not protected under the First Amendment
- Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942) -- The First Amendment does not protect fighting words, which are those that inherently cause harm or are likely to result in an immediate disturbance
- Feiner v. New York (1951) -- The police are permitted to take action against those exercising speech that is likely to disturb the peace
- United States v. O'Brien (1968) -- You can be prosecuted for destroying certain property as an act of political speech; the law forbidding this was not unconstitutional
- Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) -- It is permissible to restrict speech that advocates for imminent unlawful violence and is likely to incite people to perform such
- Paris Adult Theatre I v. Slaton (1973) -- Restrictions on the dissemination of obscene material are not by themselves unconstitutional (see also the ruling immediately below)
- Barnes v. Glen Theatre Inc (1991) -- Public indecency laws banning dancing nude are not unconstitutional
- Virginia v. Black (2003) -- Partial reversal: While a broad ban on cross-burning is unconstitutional, banning cross-burning for the express intent to intimidate is not
- Garcetti v. Ceballos (2006) -- As a public official, you can be sanctioned by your government employer for speech contrary to employment policy
- Morse v. Frederick (2007) -- Schools can ban students from sharing speech about illegal drug use at school
- Counterman v. Colorado (2023) -- True threats of violence are outside the bounds of the First Amendment, and laws covering stalking and making threats in this manner are not unconstitutional