Over the years, we gave our daughter 4 Lego Mindstorms sets (and lot of of other Lego), 3 old laptop PCs, several Arduino boards, 2 Make: Controllers and a lot of other electronic, mechanical and computer related stuff. She participated in FIRST Lego League and FIRST. (She's now an engineering student at a nearby university.)
Even the private school was not enough of a challenge for her. "Independent Learning" has been her life. And has a good social life (many friends, band, drama club, etc). And a natural leader (she doesn't let anyone get away with claiming she's "bossy" - she replies "No, I'm being managerial").
So, looks like the UK NCA thinks our daughter is on track to become an empress of the cyber crime underground?
FYI: I have WIndows Update disabled and the service is stopped and we still go upgraded to Win10 without doing anything other than powering on the PC.
Which edition of Windows? I have Win7 Pro. Still not "updated" to Win10. (Though is an old PC that Dell claims is not supported by Win10. Don't know what won't work if it did get changed to Win7.)
Win7 support ended in Jan. I don't that it is no longer supported. I still need it for a few applications that don't run correctly under Win8 or Win10. If my PC gets infected, I will just wipe it and re-install everything. The data for those applications is stored in CSV and HEX files, and I have data validation utilities that run under Linux, so I can detect corruption and revert to a back up if/when needed.
I am working on getting Linux compatible alternatives in place for the "real" applications, though I might end up not being able to play the one game I play if I can't get it running on WINE.
The OP described 300 square foot units with a bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and living are, surrounding a shared living area with additional amenities. So, each resident would have their own private space.
This is actually more than some families (2 parents plus 1 or 2 kids - or 1 parent plus 2 or 3 kids) are able to afford.
Looking at the floor plan in TFA, the individual units are similar to some 2 room suites I've been in in hotels - except the hotel suites lacked a kitchen (having only a microwave and a minifridge under the TV in the "living room" part of the suite). The kitchen and bath are tiny. The "open" layout of the kitchen makes it less cramped than the space it occupies otherwise would be, However, the shower stall in the bath looks like it might be too small for 2 people to shower together.
For single people not yet ready to consider having a live-in romantic partner, I think it could work.
As a point of comparison, my girlfriend and I lived in a 400 square foot apartment for 2 years after we graduated from university. As it was more space then we had in the university residence hall, we were comfortable. At the time, our main reason for looking for a bigger place was so we could have a child. We quickly discovered we could buy a 1200 square foot house (plus basement, giving us a total of 1800 square feet) for about the same total monthly cost as renting the apartment.
The poster was not claiming dual use reactors. Presumably meant that because research was pushed in the direction of development of uranium based reactors, it was less work to derive commercial reactors from that research than to research thorium based reactors.
I call myself a Software Developer. I am generally responsible for the design, construction, and testing of the software I develop. I use a combination of techniques, including frequent testing, to ensure that the software does what I intend.
Some might argue that what I'm doing is Engineering. I don't.
Your job description is basically the same as mine (though my position description also includes "team leader" responsibilities). My employer calls me an engineer. My past employers called me an engineer.
My employer also employs people it calls "Electronics Engineer", "Electrical Engineer", "Mechanical Engineer", "Test Engineer", "Systems Engineer" and a few other "____ Engineer". Despite calling us "engineers", they don't actually treat us as engineers. They just want us to - quickly - create things that work well enough to be salable. If we actually followed the processes they claim they expect us to follow, we'd be taking a month or more to do tasks we are lucky to be given a week to get done.
As for my use of the title "Software Engineer", if I didn't use that in my resume, I would not have gotten my current job, nor any of the previous 2 or 3.
I do have degrees in Electrical/Electronic Engineering and Computer Science. I have even carried out a few software projects as engineering projects. That's not what my employer really wants. It wants, as I said, people to create things that work well enough to be salable. And do so, quickly.
I like the work, I need the work. I need the pay. I will use whatever job title gets me the job and helps me keep it.
Or the well-tested library is either proprietary or copylefted and cannot be lawfully combined with a copylefted or proprietary application respectively. This affected me at work when I was looking for transliteration libraries to make addresses in foreign scripts recognizable to the U.S. Postal Service, but the good one that everyone recommended was GPL (not LGPL), and the boss chose that we roll our own rather than make our own application free software.
There is a way around this: Turn the GPL library into a service, then the (proprietary) application can contact the service to perform the conversion and provide the result. Only the service based on the library would need to be GPL.
Using "localhost" (IPv4: 127.0.0.1, IPv6:::1), there will be no network traffic involved. If running this on some flavor of Unix (BSD, Linux, Mac OSX, etc), you could use named, Unix domain sockets instead.
This would probably have been less effort to get working than creating your own library.
IANAL, so can't speak to legal matters, but I am aware of many proprietary applications that use GPL services (and vice-versa) everyday. Also, many proprietary applications come with bundled GPL applications/tools. For example, several of the vendor specific compilers I use at work have copies of GNU Make and several other GPL licensed tools included in the package.
Disclaimer: Always ask your intellectual property lawyer about any potential legal issues.
Now go ahead and convince me that a) You would definitely be blind now if you weren't wearing glasses then, and then how not wearing glasses would have been a sensible thing for where you were, and.... all the other little bits that might actually give your post some substance.
Acceleration due to gravity. When the shot is fired up, the slowing of it will be much more due to gravity than air resistance. Then as the shot falls, it will increase velocity due to gravity. Even accounting for air resistance, the shot's velocity when it impacts a person on the ground will still be a very significant percentage of the muzzle velocity.
I understand that the US constitution makes it so, but I don't think this is really a sane thing to do.
The Second Amendment to the US Constitution was put there because the original 13 states had recently won their independence from Briton by an armed uprising against Briton. The founders intended the Second Amendment as a "last resort" of the people to keep the government in check.
Yes, over the past 200+ years, many have argued that the states would protect the people against a too powerful national government. So far, that argument has been successfully countered. It might only be a matter of time before that argument ultimately prevails.
Also, the vast power of the national government effectively moots the Second Amendment.
How come gun ownership is a right but... access to public health care and decent education in your country are not?
The Ninth Amendment not withstanding, because the US Constitution doesn't mention them. At least not in language today's politicians would recognize. This is exemplified by the debate over whether the Fourth Amendment confers a right to privacy. While the words "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,...." do not include the word "privacy", the words used do describe privacy. Still, a significant faction argues that the absence of the word "privacy" infers the right is not granted. Except the Ninth Amendment says otherwise. Indeed, the US Constitution was intended to limit the government's power, not grant rights that the founders believed to be inherent and inalienable.
I agree, good health care and education are basic human rights. I would even argue that the Declaration of Independence supports that. Again, not specifically, so the politicians feel free to ignore it as is convenient for them. Indeed, the Declaration of Independence is largely ignored, just as the Ninth Amendment is largely ignored. True the Declaration of Independence is not part of the Constitution, but it is the preeminent founding document of the US. What it says is no less important than the Constitution.
I have friends in the automotive industry, including 2 that work for suppliers of in-vehicle entertainment systems.
The automotive companies isolate entertainment system modules from the rest of the vehicle to minimize legal liability for the operation of modules that are not part of the actual vehicle operation. Basically, they are treated as untrusted. Any vehicle status information gets to the entertainment system via a special gateway module. The information that is relayed is carefully reviewed for potential legal liabilities. The fact that a given signal is required to be available via the OBD port is not sufficient justification for relaying it to the entertainment system.
Even, for example, in vehicles where notification sounds are played through the entertainment system's speakers, the sounds are generated as a secondary function of a vehicle control module and provided to the entertainment system as an audio input. AND the sounds are also emitted by a speaker connected to the module providing the sounds.
Also, in vehicles where "driver information" is presented via the same display used for controlling the entertainment system, the display and it's user controls are part of the Driver Information System, which sends (among other things) commands to the entertainment system and receives (among other things) status from the entertainment system.
why do they even need to know if the car is in MOTION at all just to play music??
So they can add features that could be distracting to the driver if used while driving the vehicle.
In theory, the entertainment system could use it's own sensors to detect vehicle motion, however, this puts additional legal liability on the entertainment system manufacturer. Also, the legal definition of "vehicle in motion" may differ from the physical definition. For example, any time the transmission is not in "park" might legally be considered as the vehicle being in motion. Simpler and less risky to use information already being determined by another module in the vehicle.
When I was a kid, in my school's science classes, we did lots of hands-on stuff. Did we "re-invent the _____". Yes. So what? We learned how to "do science" by doing science ourselves. And I don't mean just mindless following directions. We started with describing things we "discovered" as we went through our days. Then the concept of doing simple tests to learn more about "every day" things. We were even encouraged to figure out how to test things, so were starting to do scientific experiments. Yes, some procedures had to be given to us. And, all the while we were doing this "fun stuff", the teachers managed to slip in lots of background facts. Guess what? We actually remembered - not just the things we did, but the background stuff as well.
Yes, all those facts facts we learned are important to have learned. And yes, we couldn't possibly learn more than a tiny fraction of them purely by hands-on science. By learning them along side the hands on things we did do, we could actually "connect" those facts with the real world. And, therefore, understand them.
Otherwise, they are just items of information to be coughed up on command.
Coughing up formulas from, for example, the "CRC Book of Standard Formulas" may be faster, but if you can't derive the formulas you need, how can you be sure you are using them correctly?
Nobody ever said, "go forth and flaunt the law" maybe $Engineer did not even realize what he was doing violated the testing rules.
Ok... read this:
Specifically, VW manufactured and installed software in the electronic control module (ECM) of these vehicles that sensed when the vehicle was being tested for compliance with....
You are trying to seriosly tell me an engineer responsible for this didn't know exactly what he was doing here? That he could design, impement, and test a clean running profile that was activated when and only when the vehicle thought it was running on a dyno under the conditions of an EPA test?
And that he also had sufficiently large rocks in his head to fail to suspect this would somehow be against the rules?
In one ECM, or across multiple ECMs?
Designing complex machinery, such as cars, is often managed using compartmentalization. The engine control ECM need not have been the only module involved with the cheat.
A single requirements engineer or manager (not all managers are stupid) at VW could have manipulated the requirements for several ECMs. Each piece of the cheat would be innocuous on its own, but together, when interacting with each other, accomplish the cheat.
Probably ordered by management but executed and carried out by engineers who damn well knew or should have known
You seem to be assuming the cheat was implemented entirely in the engine controller.
Not all managers are stupid. Some are even very devious. It's very possible that a manager in VW's requirements department could have inserted extra specifications into the requirements of several control modules, each piece of the cheat seemingly benign and reasonable.
Do these engineers have no morals or shame? There's no way you can argue that they didn't understand the impact of what they were tasked with designing.
You are assuming the engineers are seeing more than their little piece of the final product. Complex products are often managed by compartmentalizing the components and sub-assemblies.
Disclosure: I do software for electronic control modules. Not automotive, but I have friends in the auto industry.
Like other complex machinary, cars and trucks can have several electronic control modules (ECM). So a questionable requirements manager could insert extra specifications in the requirements for multiple ECMs to implement a cheat. A devious enough manager could even hide the purpose from the engineers writing the requirements documents.
The engineers designing and implementing the ECMs almost always see only the requirements for the ECM they are responsible for.
For example, the engine controller engineers would not know the message commanding a "special performance mode" was really a "special status" message from another ECM. And that ECM's engineers would not know their module was sending anything other than a special status message. And the test engineers would not know that any of the ECMs they were commanding to "not interfere with out test" was, in turn, "commanding" the engine controller to use a "special performance mode".
This would make Mr Gru proud of his protege at VW.
I would like to see better sand-boxing in Android. Even if an app has a legit reason to access x, y and/or z, the option to divert the access to a "fake" x, y and/or z would be very useful. And each app would have its own sandbox, so the fakes are not shared between apps. The fakes would act like the the real things. For example, fake contacts would contain a few "preloaded" default contacts. It could even allow the app to add a very few contacts to the fake.
Any app that refused to work because it detected a fake should not be allowed.
This settlement is less than a tenth of the dollar amount necessary to actually punish these companies more than they benefited. And if you are a regular who doesn't punish someone more than they benefited, you are explicitly endorsing their behavior.
Also, companies often pass along the cost of fines to their customers.
There are a lot of people who thing they have no internet if there's no big blue E icon on the desktop. The same goes for document editing. If there's no MSWord icon, they don't have any document editing software period.
I did an experiment once. Coworkers would look at my (Linux) PC's desktop and say "Other than FireFox, I can't find anything on your desktop." So, one day, I changed the icons to ones that looked very similar to ones on MS Windows. Those same coworkers were then able to understand my PC's desktop, many asking when did I switch to Windows. When I told them I had only changed the icons, they responded "Why don't Linux PCs always like a normal PC?"
I changed the icons back. And despite having seen, for example, my "start" menu button is in the same lower left corner their "start" menu buttons are, because mine has a penguin icon, not "Start" (nor the "Microsoft flag"), they can't find it.
FWIW, years ago, I read a review of Red Hat Linux (which was using KDE at the time) by a MS Windows user. One thing he said was "I like that it has multiple 'Start' menus."
Supposedly, the X-35 prototype for the F-35 did at least one STO, supersonic flight ending with a VL. (Not yet found records for a similar flight of the F-35)
For the life of me I don't understand why Chase, Capital One, or Bank of America have any retail customers at all.
They seem to be buying the small banks. At least that keeps happening to every bank I've been a customer of.
So I joined a credit union. but it is just a vassal of one of the mega banks. Found that out while reviewing a transaction summary from the web hosting company I used to use. My payments were listed as coming from one of the mega banks. When I asked at the credit union, they told me that the CU had a master account with the mega bank and all the members' CU accounts were actually accounts at the mega bank, managed as subaccounts of the CU's master account. I do get the benefit of lower fees as negotiated by the CU, but the mega bank still processes my payments and deposits the same as if I were a retail customer of the mega bank.
Oh really? My grandparents would say "sorry to drop by uninvited". Seriously. And they sure as hell wouldn't call at meal times - even on the phone (there was no internets when they were alive). I have no idea what my great-grandparents would have thought. No pre-teen pregnancies in my family that I know of.
Well, I know a co-op student, where I work, who has 2, still living, great grand parents. They are over 100. Her parents, grand parents and great grand parents were in their early to mid 20s when they had children.
They grew up in a time when there were 2 "snail mail" deliveries per day, so they could send/receive invitations for same evening - or the next day, if a reply was needed (they didn't have phones as those were a luxury back then). While unanounce/univited visits's to friend's homes was infrequent, meeting friends and other people in parks was routine. Visting people's offices unannounced/univited was also routine. The vast majority of their interaction with other people was "real time" and not pre-arranged. Even now, they talk alot on the telephone with friends and family. Also, they use email (with fullsized, high contrast keyboards) and voicemail. With the voice control feature, they can make calls from their smart phones, but that's their only cellphone use. They only send/receive text messages via an email/sms gateway.
Even though they use text/email messages, they still prefer non-pre-arranged, "real time" intereaction with other people. They neither like nor dislike this new etiquit. And they are not baffled by it.
Gender studies majors do. See, they make their career out of pushing to get more women into careers that nobody is keeping women out of....
Maybe not keeping them out of, but many women and girls are discouraged from entering STEM fields. Both my girlfriend and our daughter were strongly discouraged from STEM fields by teachers, advisors and others. Those people claimed that such careers were "not appropriate for girls." They both said "BS, I'm going to be an engineer." My girlfriend is an engineer and our daughter will soon get an engineering degree. Very few of their classmates who were also interested in STEM (and got A's in highschool science classes) actually went on to pursue STEM degrees.
My Palm T3 does this with IR. But then, few phones/tablets have an IR receiver - even if they have an IR transmitter (which can be used for remote controlling TVs).
Slashdot Mirror
Over the years, we gave our daughter 4 Lego Mindstorms sets (and lot of of other Lego), 3 old laptop PCs, several Arduino boards, 2 Make: Controllers and a lot of other electronic, mechanical and computer related stuff. She participated in FIRST Lego League and FIRST. (She's now an engineering student at a nearby university.)
Even the private school was not enough of a challenge for her. "Independent Learning" has been her life. And has a good social life (many friends, band, drama club, etc). And a natural leader (she doesn't let anyone get away with claiming she's "bossy" - she replies "No, I'm being managerial").
So, looks like the UK NCA thinks our daughter is on track to become an empress of the cyber crime underground?
FYI: I have WIndows Update disabled and the service is stopped and we still go upgraded to Win10 without doing anything other than powering on the PC.
Which edition of Windows? I have Win7 Pro. Still not "updated" to Win10. (Though is an old PC that Dell claims is not supported by Win10. Don't know what won't work if it did get changed to Win7.)
Win7 support ended in Jan. I don't that it is no longer supported. I still need it for a few applications that don't run correctly under Win8 or Win10. If my PC gets infected, I will just wipe it and re-install everything. The data for those applications is stored in CSV and HEX files, and I have data validation utilities that run under Linux, so I can detect corruption and revert to a back up if/when needed.
I am working on getting Linux compatible alternatives in place for the "real" applications, though I might end up not being able to play the one game I play if I can't get it running on WINE.
The OP described 300 square foot units with a bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and living are, surrounding a shared living area with additional amenities. So, each resident would have their own private space.
This is actually more than some families (2 parents plus 1 or 2 kids - or 1 parent plus 2 or 3 kids) are able to afford.
Looking at the floor plan in TFA, the individual units are similar to some 2 room suites I've been in in hotels - except the hotel suites lacked a kitchen (having only a microwave and a minifridge under the TV in the "living room" part of the suite). The kitchen and bath are tiny. The "open" layout of the kitchen makes it less cramped than the space it occupies otherwise would be, However, the shower stall in the bath looks like it might be too small for 2 people to shower together.
For single people not yet ready to consider having a live-in romantic partner, I think it could work.
As a point of comparison, my girlfriend and I lived in a 400 square foot apartment for 2 years after we graduated from university. As it was more space then we had in the university residence hall, we were comfortable. At the time, our main reason for looking for a bigger place was so we could have a child. We quickly discovered we could buy a 1200 square foot house (plus basement, giving us a total of 1800 square feet) for about the same total monthly cost as renting the apartment.
The poster was not claiming dual use reactors. Presumably meant that because research was pushed in the direction of development of uranium based reactors, it was less work to derive commercial reactors from that research than to research thorium based reactors.
I call myself a Software Developer. I am generally responsible for the design, construction, and testing of the software I develop. I use a combination of techniques, including frequent testing, to ensure that the software does what I intend.
Some might argue that what I'm doing is Engineering. I don't.
Your job description is basically the same as mine (though my position description also includes "team leader" responsibilities). My employer calls me an engineer. My past employers called me an engineer.
My employer also employs people it calls "Electronics Engineer", "Electrical Engineer", "Mechanical Engineer", "Test Engineer", "Systems Engineer" and a few other "____ Engineer". Despite calling us "engineers", they don't actually treat us as engineers. They just want us to - quickly - create things that work well enough to be salable. If we actually followed the processes they claim they expect us to follow, we'd be taking a month or more to do tasks we are lucky to be given a week to get done.
As for my use of the title "Software Engineer", if I didn't use that in my resume, I would not have gotten my current job, nor any of the previous 2 or 3.
I do have degrees in Electrical/Electronic Engineering and Computer Science. I have even carried out a few software projects as engineering projects. That's not what my employer really wants. It wants, as I said, people to create things that work well enough to be salable. And do so, quickly.
I like the work, I need the work. I need the pay. I will use whatever job title gets me the job and helps me keep it.
Or the well-tested library is either proprietary or copylefted and cannot be lawfully combined with a copylefted or proprietary application respectively. This affected me at work when I was looking for transliteration libraries to make addresses in foreign scripts recognizable to the U.S. Postal Service, but the good one that everyone recommended was GPL (not LGPL), and the boss chose that we roll our own rather than make our own application free software.
There is a way around this: Turn the GPL library into a service, then the (proprietary) application can contact the service to perform the conversion and provide the result. Only the service based on the library would need to be GPL.
Using "localhost" (IPv4: 127.0.0.1, IPv6: ::1), there will be no network traffic involved. If running this on some flavor of Unix (BSD, Linux, Mac OSX, etc), you could use named, Unix domain sockets instead.
This would probably have been less effort to get working than creating your own library.
IANAL, so can't speak to legal matters, but I am aware of many proprietary applications that use GPL services (and vice-versa) everyday. Also, many proprietary applications come with bundled GPL applications/tools. For example, several of the vendor specific compilers I use at work have copies of GNU Make and several other GPL licensed tools included in the package.
Disclaimer: Always ask your intellectual property lawyer about any potential legal issues.
Now go ahead and convince me that a) You would definitely be blind now if you weren't wearing glasses then, and then how not wearing glasses would have been a sensible thing for where you were, and.... all the other little bits that might actually give your post some substance.
Acceleration due to gravity. When the shot is fired up, the slowing of it will be much more due to gravity than air resistance. Then as the shot falls, it will increase velocity due to gravity. Even accounting for air resistance, the shot's velocity when it impacts a person on the ground will still be a very significant percentage of the muzzle velocity.
As JustNiz said, too much code and you're leaking internal logic.
Try:
int foo() {
if (do_stuff() != 0) {
if (do_more_stuff() != 0) {
return SUCCESS;
}
}
clean_up_the_mess();
}
I understand that the US constitution makes it so, but I don't think this is really a sane thing to do.
The Second Amendment to the US Constitution was put there because the original 13 states had recently won their independence from Briton by an armed uprising against Briton. The founders intended the Second Amendment as a "last resort" of the people to keep the government in check.
Yes, over the past 200+ years, many have argued that the states would protect the people against a too powerful national government. So far, that argument has been successfully countered. It might only be a matter of time before that argument ultimately prevails.
Also, the vast power of the national government effectively moots the Second Amendment.
How come gun ownership is a right but ... access to public health care and decent education in your country are not?
The Ninth Amendment not withstanding, because the US Constitution doesn't mention them. At least not in language today's politicians would recognize. This is exemplified by the debate over whether the Fourth Amendment confers a right to privacy. While the words "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, ...." do not include the word "privacy", the words used do describe privacy. Still, a significant faction argues that the absence of the word "privacy" infers the right is not granted. Except the Ninth Amendment says otherwise. Indeed, the US Constitution was intended to limit the government's power, not grant rights that the founders believed to be inherent and inalienable.
I agree, good health care and education are basic human rights. I would even argue that the Declaration of Independence supports that. Again, not specifically, so the politicians feel free to ignore it as is convenient for them. Indeed, the Declaration of Independence is largely ignored, just as the Ninth Amendment is largely ignored. True the Declaration of Independence is not part of the Constitution, but it is the preeminent founding document of the US. What it says is no less important than the Constitution.
At some point, the definition of the gram was refined to the mass of 1 cubic centimeter of water at water's maximum liquid density.
Was in some physics text I read in high school. A web search found several confirmations of that definition.
I have friends in the automotive industry, including 2 that work for suppliers of in-vehicle entertainment systems.
The automotive companies isolate entertainment system modules from the rest of the vehicle to minimize legal liability for the operation of modules that are not part of the actual vehicle operation. Basically, they are treated as untrusted. Any vehicle status information gets to the entertainment system via a special gateway module. The information that is relayed is carefully reviewed for potential legal liabilities. The fact that a given signal is required to be available via the OBD port is not sufficient justification for relaying it to the entertainment system.
Even, for example, in vehicles where notification sounds are played through the entertainment system's speakers, the sounds are generated as a secondary function of a vehicle control module and provided to the entertainment system as an audio input. AND the sounds are also emitted by a speaker connected to the module providing the sounds.
Also, in vehicles where "driver information" is presented via the same display used for controlling the entertainment system, the display and it's user controls are part of the Driver Information System, which sends (among other things) commands to the entertainment system and receives (among other things) status from the entertainment system.
why do they even need to know if the car is in MOTION at all just to play music??
So they can add features that could be distracting to the driver if used while driving the vehicle.
In theory, the entertainment system could use it's own sensors to detect vehicle motion, however, this puts additional legal liability on the entertainment system manufacturer. Also, the legal definition of "vehicle in motion" may differ from the physical definition. For example, any time the transmission is not in "park" might legally be considered as the vehicle being in motion. Simpler and less risky to use information already being determined by another module in the vehicle.
When I was a kid, in my school's science classes, we did lots of hands-on stuff. Did we "re-invent the _____". Yes. So what? We learned how to "do science" by doing science ourselves. And I don't mean just mindless following directions. We started with describing things we "discovered" as we went through our days. Then the concept of doing simple tests to learn more about "every day" things. We were even encouraged to figure out how to test things, so were starting to do scientific experiments. Yes, some procedures had to be given to us. And, all the while we were doing this "fun stuff", the teachers managed to slip in lots of background facts. Guess what? We actually remembered - not just the things we did, but the background stuff as well.
Yes, all those facts facts we learned are important to have learned. And yes, we couldn't possibly learn more than a tiny fraction of them purely by hands-on science. By learning them along side the hands on things we did do, we could actually "connect" those facts with the real world. And, therefore, understand them.
Otherwise, they are just items of information to be coughed up on command.
Coughing up formulas from, for example, the "CRC Book of Standard Formulas" may be faster, but if you can't derive the formulas you need, how can you be sure you are using them correctly?
Nobody ever said, "go forth and flaunt the law" maybe $Engineer did not even realize what he was doing violated the testing rules.
Ok... read this:
Specifically, VW manufactured and installed software in the electronic control module (ECM) of these vehicles that sensed when the vehicle was being tested for compliance with ....
You are trying to seriosly tell me an engineer responsible for this didn't know exactly what he was doing here? That he could design, impement, and test a clean running profile that was activated when and only when the vehicle thought it was running on a dyno under the conditions of an EPA test?
And that he also had sufficiently large rocks in his head to fail to suspect this would somehow be against the rules?
In one ECM, or across multiple ECMs?
Designing complex machinery, such as cars, is often managed using compartmentalization. The engine control ECM need not have been the only module involved with the cheat.
A single requirements engineer or manager (not all managers are stupid) at VW could have manipulated the requirements for several ECMs. Each piece of the cheat would be innocuous on its own, but together, when interacting with each other, accomplish the cheat.
Probably ordered by management but executed and carried out by engineers who damn well knew or should have known
You seem to be assuming the cheat was implemented entirely in the engine controller.
Not all managers are stupid. Some are even very devious. It's very possible that a manager in VW's requirements department could have inserted extra specifications into the requirements of several control modules, each piece of the cheat seemingly benign and reasonable.
Do these engineers have no morals or shame? There's no way you can argue that they didn't understand the impact of what they were tasked with designing.
You are assuming the engineers are seeing more than their little piece of the final product. Complex products are often managed by compartmentalizing the components and sub-assemblies.
Disclosure: I do software for electronic control modules. Not automotive, but I have friends in the auto industry.
Like other complex machinary, cars and trucks can have several electronic control modules (ECM). So a questionable requirements manager could insert extra specifications in the requirements for multiple ECMs to implement a cheat. A devious enough manager could even hide the purpose from the engineers writing the requirements documents.
The engineers designing and implementing the ECMs almost always see only the requirements for the ECM they are responsible for.
For example, the engine controller engineers would not know the message commanding a "special performance mode" was really a "special status" message from another ECM. And that ECM's engineers would not know their module was sending anything other than a special status message. And the test engineers would not know that any of the ECMs they were commanding to "not interfere with out test" was, in turn, "commanding" the engine controller to use a "special performance mode".
This would make Mr Gru proud of his protege at VW.
I would like to see better sand-boxing in Android. Even if an app has a legit reason to access x, y and/or z, the option to divert the access to a "fake" x, y and/or z would be very useful. And each app would have its own sandbox, so the fakes are not shared between apps. The fakes would act like the the real things. For example, fake contacts would contain a few "preloaded" default contacts. It could even allow the app to add a very few contacts to the fake.
Any app that refused to work because it detected a fake should not be allowed.
This settlement is less than a tenth of the dollar amount necessary to actually punish these companies more than they benefited. And if you are a regular who doesn't punish someone more than they benefited, you are explicitly endorsing their behavior.
Also, companies often pass along the cost of fines to their customers.
There are a lot of people who thing they have no internet if there's no big blue E icon on the desktop. The same goes for document editing. If there's no MSWord icon, they don't have any document editing software period.
I did an experiment once. Coworkers would look at my (Linux) PC's desktop and say "Other than FireFox, I can't find anything on your desktop." So, one day, I changed the icons to ones that looked very similar to ones on MS Windows. Those same coworkers were then able to understand my PC's desktop, many asking when did I switch to Windows. When I told them I had only changed the icons, they responded "Why don't Linux PCs always like a normal PC?"
I changed the icons back. And despite having seen, for example, my "start" menu button is in the same lower left corner their "start" menu buttons are, because mine has a penguin icon, not "Start" (nor the "Microsoft flag"), they can't find it.
FWIW, years ago, I read a review of Red Hat Linux (which was using KDE at the time) by a MS Windows user. One thing he said was "I like that it has multiple 'Start' menus."
Supposedly, the X-35 prototype for the F-35 did at least one STO, supersonic flight ending with a VL. (Not yet found records for a similar flight of the F-35)
And I thought APL was hard to read. (One of my math professors used APL.)
For the life of me I don't understand why Chase, Capital One, or Bank of America have any retail customers at all.
They seem to be buying the small banks. At least that keeps happening to every bank I've been a customer of.
So I joined a credit union. but it is just a vassal of one of the mega banks. Found that out while reviewing a transaction summary from the web hosting company I used to use. My payments were listed as coming from one of the mega banks. When I asked at the credit union, they told me that the CU had a master account with the mega bank and all the members' CU accounts were actually accounts at the mega bank, managed as subaccounts of the CU's master account. I do get the benefit of lower fees as negotiated by the CU, but the mega bank still processes my payments and deposits the same as if I were a retail customer of the mega bank.
Oh really? My grandparents would say "sorry to drop by uninvited". Seriously. And they sure as hell wouldn't call at meal times - even on the phone (there was no internets when they were alive). I have no idea what my great-grandparents would have thought. No pre-teen pregnancies in my family that I know of.
Well, I know a co-op student, where I work, who has 2, still living, great grand parents. They are over 100. Her parents, grand parents and great grand parents were in their early to mid 20s when they had children.
They grew up in a time when there were 2 "snail mail" deliveries per day, so they could send/receive invitations for same evening - or the next day, if a reply was needed (they didn't have phones as those were a luxury back then). While unanounce/univited visits's to friend's homes was infrequent, meeting friends and other people in parks was routine. Visting people's offices unannounced/univited was also routine. The vast majority of their interaction with other people was "real time" and not pre-arranged. Even now, they talk alot on the telephone with friends and family. Also, they use email (with fullsized, high contrast keyboards) and voicemail. With the voice control feature, they can make calls from their smart phones, but that's their only cellphone use. They only send/receive text messages via an email/sms gateway.
Even though they use text/email messages, they still prefer non-pre-arranged, "real time" intereaction with other people. They neither like nor dislike this new etiquit. And they are not baffled by it.
Gender studies majors do. See, they make their career out of pushing to get more women into careers that nobody is keeping women out of ....
Maybe not keeping them out of, but many women and girls are discouraged from entering STEM fields. Both my girlfriend and our daughter were strongly discouraged from STEM fields by teachers, advisors and others. Those people claimed that such careers were "not appropriate for girls." They both said "BS, I'm going to be an engineer." My girlfriend is an engineer and our daughter will soon get an engineering degree. Very few of their classmates who were also interested in STEM (and got A's in highschool science classes) actually went on to pursue STEM degrees.
My Palm T3 does this with IR. But then, few phones/tablets have an IR receiver - even if they have an IR transmitter (which can be used for remote controlling TVs).