khillo, this blog has serious problems:
I’m not sure if this is your blog, or you are just posting it, but it is riddled with logical fallacies.
Paragraph 1-
Last night I was reading an article about the birth of the DC-3, one of the world's classic airplanes. What caught my attention was the fact that the DC-3 was designed and built just 30 years after the Wright brothers made their first flight. The DC-3 was arguably the first modern airliner in form and function, completely recognizable to today's passengers.
False analogy-a DC-3 was made of metal, had seats and engines, but that’s where the simlarities end. Today’s airliners are pressurized, have jet engines, fly several times higher and faster than the DC-3, control surfaces are computer controlled, have GPS, and a whole host of other improvements. There have been incredible changes in passenger aircraft since the DC-3.
Paragraph 2-
I fly and my plane is, by almost any external measure, primitive. Even so, my 1978 Turbo Arrow is still state-of-the-art by most aviation industry standards and the envy of many private pilots. Except for where computers have affected the avionics, my plane is almost identical to any plane you would have found for sale in the 1940s and 1950s. A pilot from that era would feel perfectly at home in the cockpit of my plane (as long as you turned the GPS off so it didn't distract them).
This tends to refute paragraph 1. The controls and abilities that the author attributes to his 1978 Turbo Arrow are the very ones that a DC-3 had, yet, for this paragraph, they are “primitive.” Are airliners today primitive?
So, why am I telling you about the sorry state of flying in a blog about technology? Because I think it holds a lesson for us.
Paragraphs 3 and 4
The trajectory of progress represented by the drive from the Wright brothers to the DC-3 is a story that most techies to day would recognize as analogous to the progress that's been made in the first 50 years of the computer age. Most of us assume that that progress will continue unimpeded. We imagine, or try to imagine, what the world will be like in 5, 10 or 20 years given the pace with which computers have changed in our recent past.
Early aviation pioneers did the same thing–that's where those visions of flying cars come from. But I argue that if the designers of the DC-3 and their colleagues could be brought forward to the first decade of the 21st century, they'd be sorely disappointed by the state of aviation.
The statement about what imaginary time travelers would think is a Red Herring, it is totally unrelated to the issue of the TPM. That it is based on a false analogy only exacerbates the weakness of the argument.
Paragraph 5
How did we get to this moribund, stagnant state of affairs? Simple: the government decided to make flying safe. When I moderated a talk by Rick Adam, CEO of Adam Aircraft, he said that they'd spent $80 million before they ever got the first product they could deliver. Much of that was a direct result of responding to government regulation.
This is a combination Red Herring and a Straw Man argument. Government interference with aircraft design is the Red Herring, it has nothing to do with TPMs. The author then sets up government interference with the aircraft industry as his straw man, and proceeds to argue that it is bad. He argues against the straw man, not TPMs, which is why it is such a weak form of argument. These statements are essentially irrelevant to the issue of technology. The statement that aircraft manufacturers spend over 80 million dollars developing planes is also a Fallacy of Exclusion. The author does not reveal other information which might potentially refute his case, and instead merely attributes cost increases to one factor-the government-the figure of 80 million dollars is not adjusted to 1930s dollars, (when the DC-3 was developed) nor are other increased expenses for manufacturers noted. And who or what is Adam Aircraft, anyway? What does Boeing say?
Paragraph 6
Admittedly, there's a trade-off here. We like to be safe. Especially when the true cost is hidden. Efforts to use digital restrictions management tools like TPM (the trusted platform module–part of the Trusted Computing Platform) to reduce identity theft are a case in point. The hidden cost in this case is the potential loss of general purpose computing platforms as we know them. With TCP technology Microsoft, Apple, or even the MPAA could become the arbiters of what will and what won't run on your system. It would be possible to construct software whitelists and blacklists under the control of someone other than the person who owns the computer. TCP is essentially a rootkit you can't uninstall. That scares me.
Probably the best paragraph here, it is still filled with unsupported statements of what the government, Apple, Microsoft, etc. are going to do. Relax, issues like this are why we have representative government. Fill your congressman’s ear with your concerns and make sure to vote on election day.
goin fishn
AI
