And to elaborate on the issue I described above, we did have to come up with a work-around and/or support staff in the interim while the issue was being fixed. Was an agonizing time dealing with all that especially with the number of people I had to talk to just to get the information I needed to troubleshoot the problem and the damn thing at first seemingly happened at random with very little debugging logs to show it.
That was also just the deluxe fix, the had 3 other simpler fixes that were cheaper. I believe the cheapest fix was something like $2. So sure, $11 per car I guess somehow people made a case, but fucking $2? That is just pathetic.
While true, there is also the problem that many of the families and people that bought that car had no idea there was a risk like this. At what point is there a cutoff? Many people will take risks like that to save money, but not all (maybe not even a majority). Is it really fair for them to make that decision for these people? I mean they even knew that almost every time it happened people would get killed. There is a huge difference in "this could cause a problem with operation of the vehicle" and "this will probably get someone killed". That to me is not taking reasonable precautions and is very unethical.
In the particular case we talked about how poorly Ford handled the issue after it was reported and specifically how instances of catastrophic failure need to be dealt with differently. The biggest take-away was the fact that when people started making the claim that the gas tank being punctured was causing the fatal fires, Ford tried to flat deny and cover up the problem. I would bet personally the engineers were not doing that, although we specifically talked about ethically they should have come forward.
I do acknowledge your point of basically hindsight is 20/20, but I would argue that even though this problem was a "rare" occurrence it should have been fixed due to the possible result. I have had things like this come up just doing software (not so much to the fatal degree, though when working on HMIs that actually can become fatal software issues...) where we found a severe issue that was rare but would cause a complete failure.
In the admittedly limited instances when this occurred regardless of the cost we had to fix it. I had one such bug make it into production not long ago (it was even legacy code) and I spent literally 4 months working on it to find out it was a problem in the lower API we were requested to use to fit in with the customers system infrastructure. There was no hesitation to fix it either, we found it, knew it would be tough (was a thread locking issue) and had to dive right in.
To me it is very strange with automobiles how they seem to be held to a different standard as far as severe safety issues like that. If a civil engineer makes a mistake like that the engineer and their company will get sued back to the stone ages, but automotive gets a pass a lot of the time... The Pinto case is one of the examples where they actually had to pay for their serious mistake and terrible handling of it upon discovery.
Agreed. We look at the Pinto specifically as a case study in my engineering ethics class back in college, there was not excuse for what they did. All engineers do have to make trade-off decisions, but the fucking deluxe fix was $11, that is it.They could have built that into the car price with virtually no impact. TFA picked one terrible example...
Yea that is one of the only exceptions, you are correct. Like I put in another post, they store those separately and just bulk give them back, rather than having to sort them like an actual gate-check bag. International they can't simply because of custom regulations. Takes a lot just to get cleared to touch anything involving an international flight even if you are in the originating country...
Yea, the bags will not be given back but strollers and equipment that is needed to get around will be. The strollers and such are generally put in an easy to get area in the hold and all of that stuff is just given back all at once. Where as the gate check bags may be loaded with the normal check bags and there is no way in hell the ground crews are going to mess with sifting through 100 to 400 bags to figure out who wants a gate check bag back, that is why they invest all that money into baggage handling and baggage reconciliation systems.
Thanks for telling me something I already know? I don't work as an airline employee, I work for a major airline/airport vendor that happens to specialize in baggage handling and sortation as our major business. If you really want to insult me and act like I don't know what I am talking about, you should actually know what you're talking about first.
Yes, there are a few airlines and some circumstance with the puddle jumper aircraft and a few narrow body aircraft where they give the bags back, but that is usually only something that happens at very small tier 2 airports or tier 3 airports that do not have the facilities to handle the industry standard practice of checking to final destination (which is by far and large what most airlines do, we have done work for a ton of the big ones, including the currently three largest). This also far and away does NOT apply to only wide body jets, as several airports I have done work at can barely even support wide body jets on the majority of their gates (LAX specifically comes to mind as it can only really support them on the ends of terminals since the space between terminals is pretty small and at TBIT because it was built with that in mind). That would be just simply idiotic to only apply that practice to certain equipment types as your ground crews would have an even BIGGER pain sorting a narrow body by hand to give bags back because they can't load ULDs on those and everything is put in bulk hold.
Regional jets are not the money makers and usually have weirdo exceptions especially since a lot of terminals/stations they fly them out of barely have a baggage handling system to begin with.
Actually, airlines and airports have some of the most complicated business models you will ever see. And due to the fact that they are heavily government regulated, they do have to get fairly creative to make money sometimes. They definitely don't have near as small a profit margin as they want everyone to believe, but it is not some massive hand over fist money making business. It requires a lot of investment and upkeep capital to run them. Some of them bounce back and forth between making and losing money, but they are not completely crippled hardly ever.
Not exactly. This is something the airlines attempt to stop, as it is a way to circumvent bag fees (they don't generally charge you for a gate check), but especially since many places are moving towards self-service check in or you can check in online and never see an agent this is rare. TSA should be the ones stopping it, but this is not their primary concern (or even secondary, tertiary... etc.). It doesn't incur any cost to the security side and because of the historically bad communications and cooperation between the TSA and airline tenants there is very little quid pro quo going on. I have spoken to a lot of operations managers about this problem before, and watched many people taking obviously large suitcases through security with both TSA and the passenger being very aware that is not of the carry on size.
I work in the industry, and actually in most instances there is no difference in gate check bags. They simply send them down to the ground crew and it is loaded like any checked bag. It would be exceptionally costly to try and separate and sort bags that need to be "returned at the gate" so they don't bother and send them up the claim units at your final destination. The tags are just hand written (sometimes they slap a ten digit tag on them, but most of their host systems don't even support automatic sorting and tracking for gate checked bags) and read when the plane is unloaded.
Normally, if you gate check a bag they also don't charge you the baggage fee as the most common cause of gate check bags is the overhead bins filling up. This causes the airline to be better off with the customer service aspect and since they generally tell you carry-on bags don't cost they don't want to spring hidden fees on you (unless you fly a budget airline like spirit or frontier, spirit charges you even if you carry the bag onto the plane with you and the charges are HIGHER if it has to be checked at the gate...).
Na, pretty simple, however you bring the wifi to the room, just turn the antenna power down so it doesn't cover 3 rooms over if there is an issue a neighbor and his pacemaker "or something." Most stock firmware on wifi routers and such has that capability.
Oh you poor mis-informed man. We absolutely do not have the processing power equivalent to a human brain. We can outperform it on one TYPE of task, but not even close to the general case (and even then it requires supercomputers and distributed computing clusters). The main problem exists with learning, highly abstract reasoning (i.e. logical leaps), and oddly enough some of our more "mundane" things such as speech. Unsupervised learning is so incredibly hard in AI because there really isn't any way to signal what is correct and what is not correct within the current context of an AI. For one to actually surpass us we would have to impart all of our specific knowledge and exact modelling to the AI first, and even then it would be very difficult to map out. Watson from IBM is probably the most advanced as far as imparting all of our knowledge, and it really still can't handle anything on that level. Almost all programming is done in one of two ways, either we tell the computer how to obtain the correct answer, or we define parameters of what a correct answer looks like. When the machine has no guidelines and has to decide what is right, wrong, or even useful things get really confusing and complicated for it.
In the wikipedia article for watson they even point out that it had trouble with questions that did not have many terms, which shows they were not able to take into account a lot of context of the question or naturally how a human would say that to one another. The machine was specifically designed to be a giant query bot and it still had problems because if it didn't have enough keywords or a long enough sentence to do decent natural language processing, so it bombed out. That kind of goes directly into the abstract reasoning. Machines work in a very step by step logic model, they don't do well with jumping steps at all and when a problem becomes insanely large, again wikipedia for quick reference combinatorial explosion, the AI pretty much loses it shit. These are also system that have been designed for ONE particular task, and while in a lot of cases they alone can outperform a human, that is the only thing they can outperform in while the human can do thousands of others tasks.
Finally, my last point about speech is less AI related just more showing how much computational power the human brain actually has. Robotics, specifically has had serious issues with a lot of the human aspects of speech and conversation (I couldn't find any good links, I read several articles and had discussions on this back in college, but those are kind of walled behind university stuff...) such that it takes a massive amount of the robots processing power to perform these functions. Even layering on things to try and brute force the problem "creating" natural speech (sort of turing test actually) and then having the bot spit it out caused some ridiculous problems.
Our models and algorithms for creating these kinds of "dangerous AI" are so hilariously far behind from what the tin foil hat community believes we will probably be dancing on a terraformed planet several galaxies away before we actually get that figured out. Unless someone stupidly stumbles across the correct "voodoo" spell of an algorithm for truly efficient and complete machine learning, it is hard to model it when WE don't even fully understand how the human brains works (see neuroscience and psychology).
Full disclosure, I am a computer scientist/software engineer that has actually had some education on the subject of AI. It was a small focus of mine in college out curiosity, but then I saw I would be better served in other focuses so I just kept up with it on the side.
Depending on how ridiculous you feel like getting you could just run a really long Cat6 cable... I mean, as a temporary solution until I finish wiring my house I have that right now (I absolutely hate it, but its motivation to finish the new network faster I guess?).
Playing devil's advocate here, but technically by asserting that you should go by the subjective nature of the tagline here you are insinuating that nerds do not need to know about politics, current events, pop culture in general (unless it is "nerdy"), or any such like in their lives what-so-ever. I don't know about you but I feel that I can identify myself as a nerd and feel that I do need to know about an impending war that Russia has decided to potentially spark and most of the other subjects I mentioned (arguably most of pop culture should be excluded, but current events and large political dealings do still matter for nerds). This is still news for nerds, as it is really news for everyone, there is just more stories that only nerds would consider important mixed into the feeds of the site.
Again, I am really just playing devil's advocate here, but I feel it is petty semantics when people argue about this crap. They are not posting about what George Clooney wore to "insert awards show or event here" which is the type of thing I would think qualifies as unimportant to nerds. I really don't care personally, the posts are pretty much fine with me, but just pointing out that there are some issues with the argument you try to make.
Interesting points. The amber light timings though I would think should have a hard floor/ceiling inside the PLC. Not sure how much adjustment you could do because when the PLC write happens it has certain limits for the logic to even recognize what is told to it via input. The cameras are a very intriguing point and probably the most dangerous. I vaguely recall a story on slashdot a while back about the camera networks though having terrible security, but don't remember the details.
This right here. The problem with any "unsafe" scenario is that these lights are usually logic controlled by PLCs or some such. I had a professor in college that used to work for one of the state roadway departments and he did work on traffic light controllers for a while. Most of them have to physically prevent anything like that from being possible just like how a civil engineer is supposed to prove their bridge is safe within x parameters. From what I understand this isn't even a concern for all traffic light controllers because ones outside of the big metro areas are not even interconnected to a central controller (this was just what I was told and know from the small towns I have lived in, if someone knows otherwise feel free to correct me here).
I personally am a huge security advocate and believe that, yes these things need to be secured to a reasonable extent, but it is overblown to think this is going to get a bunch of people easily killed just because someone wants to play around with it. Now, someone building a DIY "make light go green" device is not outside the realm of possibility... In fact, I may have a new project just to see if I can do it!
We had the same thing and I was in college less than five years ago. Most of the instructors for junior level and higher classes told people I really don't care what language you write in, you just better understand the concepts we are teaching. Most people I knew, wrote in C++ because java was just annoying half the time. Some classes required different languages, but none of them were Java (literally the only two courses that required Java were CS one and two for the beginner students). I had php, C, C++, Prolog, Haskell, MIPS assembly, and then a little Java thrown in to compare as an example OO class (except when I took mobile development which was all Android in, duh, Java, but that was learning more about the platform and ecosystem really, nothing Java specific).
My assembly was rolled into our computer organizations course. We ended up doing some fairly simple assembly problems, like creating a binary tree class in pure assembly that could handle variable memory sized objects. We then had to design a simple processor that it would run on. We got the option of doing multi phase or single phase, I ended up doing single for the project and multi later just to understand more.
Algorithms was absolutely required for my program too and we had a lot of the higher level course where they didn't teach you a database language per se (except I guess prolog half counted in my programming languages course), but you ended up having to learn one to complete the work and study in the class.
Now granted I graduated in 2011 (still somewhat recent) and I don't know how much the programs have changed now (other than graduate programs because I still want my MS), but honestly if a person is going to be a decent software engineer/developer or computer scientist the curriculum is only building the foundation. I did tons of stuff outside my classes when I was in school. If someone isn't curious enough to do research and such on their own about the subject, they are probably going to do poorly after college anyway.
I learned a large chunk of databases, web development, language integration, general IT and computer modeling, etc. because I just wanted a deeper understanding of what I was doing. My bit-wise math is probably not near as good as people that have worked in C for years, but I can handle it with some time and refresher documentation. In my opinion that is the more valuable thing, can the person learn to adapt their knowledge and take on new things?
To be fair, just because the network is properly setup and allows for certain behavior etc. does not mean the application will play well with that setup. I've seen it happen before (and have been able to demonstrate it with proprietary software) that sometimes the network will not react correctly with certain network setups. At my company we have had to implement special protocols and features in our software just to overcome some inherent network limitations that our IT group pretty much said, "we have no way around this issue, sorry."
I only have limited experience with Oracle though, so take that statement as what you will. I have seen other software exhibit this kind of behavior though.
Does that actually do a secure rewrite though? I haven't honestly looked at how the device manager does the remote wipe, but I would guess it is just like deleting or doing a factory reset and the data is still recoverable through standard computer forensic software.
Slashdot Mirror
Oops, replied to the wrong post, you're probably doing it right.
If your side view mirrors are adjusted correctly, you don't have blind spots.
Too late, Airbus is already thinking that...
http://www.engineering.com/Des...
Peter Gibbons once put it best: "This isn't Riyadh. You know they're not gonna saw your hands off here, alright? "
And to elaborate on the issue I described above, we did have to come up with a work-around and/or support staff in the interim while the issue was being fixed. Was an agonizing time dealing with all that especially with the number of people I had to talk to just to get the information I needed to troubleshoot the problem and the damn thing at first seemingly happened at random with very little debugging logs to show it.
That was also just the deluxe fix, the had 3 other simpler fixes that were cheaper. I believe the cheapest fix was something like $2. So sure, $11 per car I guess somehow people made a case, but fucking $2? That is just pathetic.
While true, there is also the problem that many of the families and people that bought that car had no idea there was a risk like this. At what point is there a cutoff? Many people will take risks like that to save money, but not all (maybe not even a majority). Is it really fair for them to make that decision for these people? I mean they even knew that almost every time it happened people would get killed. There is a huge difference in "this could cause a problem with operation of the vehicle" and "this will probably get someone killed". That to me is not taking reasonable precautions and is very unethical.
In the particular case we talked about how poorly Ford handled the issue after it was reported and specifically how instances of catastrophic failure need to be dealt with differently. The biggest take-away was the fact that when people started making the claim that the gas tank being punctured was causing the fatal fires, Ford tried to flat deny and cover up the problem. I would bet personally the engineers were not doing that, although we specifically talked about ethically they should have come forward.
I do acknowledge your point of basically hindsight is 20/20, but I would argue that even though this problem was a "rare" occurrence it should have been fixed due to the possible result. I have had things like this come up just doing software (not so much to the fatal degree, though when working on HMIs that actually can become fatal software issues...) where we found a severe issue that was rare but would cause a complete failure.
In the admittedly limited instances when this occurred regardless of the cost we had to fix it. I had one such bug make it into production not long ago (it was even legacy code) and I spent literally 4 months working on it to find out it was a problem in the lower API we were requested to use to fit in with the customers system infrastructure. There was no hesitation to fix it either, we found it, knew it would be tough (was a thread locking issue) and had to dive right in.
To me it is very strange with automobiles how they seem to be held to a different standard as far as severe safety issues like that. If a civil engineer makes a mistake like that the engineer and their company will get sued back to the stone ages, but automotive gets a pass a lot of the time... The Pinto case is one of the examples where they actually had to pay for their serious mistake and terrible handling of it upon discovery.
Agreed. We look at the Pinto specifically as a case study in my engineering ethics class back in college, there was not excuse for what they did. All engineers do have to make trade-off decisions, but the fucking deluxe fix was $11, that is it.They could have built that into the car price with virtually no impact. TFA picked one terrible example...
Yea that is one of the only exceptions, you are correct. Like I put in another post, they store those separately and just bulk give them back, rather than having to sort them like an actual gate-check bag. International they can't simply because of custom regulations. Takes a lot just to get cleared to touch anything involving an international flight even if you are in the originating country...
Yea, the bags will not be given back but strollers and equipment that is needed to get around will be. The strollers and such are generally put in an easy to get area in the hold and all of that stuff is just given back all at once. Where as the gate check bags may be loaded with the normal check bags and there is no way in hell the ground crews are going to mess with sifting through 100 to 400 bags to figure out who wants a gate check bag back, that is why they invest all that money into baggage handling and baggage reconciliation systems.
Thanks for telling me something I already know? I don't work as an airline employee, I work for a major airline/airport vendor that happens to specialize in baggage handling and sortation as our major business. If you really want to insult me and act like I don't know what I am talking about, you should actually know what you're talking about first.
Yes, there are a few airlines and some circumstance with the puddle jumper aircraft and a few narrow body aircraft where they give the bags back, but that is usually only something that happens at very small tier 2 airports or tier 3 airports that do not have the facilities to handle the industry standard practice of checking to final destination (which is by far and large what most airlines do, we have done work for a ton of the big ones, including the currently three largest). This also far and away does NOT apply to only wide body jets, as several airports I have done work at can barely even support wide body jets on the majority of their gates (LAX specifically comes to mind as it can only really support them on the ends of terminals since the space between terminals is pretty small and at TBIT because it was built with that in mind). That would be just simply idiotic to only apply that practice to certain equipment types as your ground crews would have an even BIGGER pain sorting a narrow body by hand to give bags back because they can't load ULDs on those and everything is put in bulk hold.
Regional jets are not the money makers and usually have weirdo exceptions especially since a lot of terminals/stations they fly them out of barely have a baggage handling system to begin with.
Actually, airlines and airports have some of the most complicated business models you will ever see. And due to the fact that they are heavily government regulated, they do have to get fairly creative to make money sometimes. They definitely don't have near as small a profit margin as they want everyone to believe, but it is not some massive hand over fist money making business. It requires a lot of investment and upkeep capital to run them. Some of them bounce back and forth between making and losing money, but they are not completely crippled hardly ever.
Not exactly. This is something the airlines attempt to stop, as it is a way to circumvent bag fees (they don't generally charge you for a gate check), but especially since many places are moving towards self-service check in or you can check in online and never see an agent this is rare. TSA should be the ones stopping it, but this is not their primary concern (or even secondary, tertiary... etc.). It doesn't incur any cost to the security side and because of the historically bad communications and cooperation between the TSA and airline tenants there is very little quid pro quo going on. I have spoken to a lot of operations managers about this problem before, and watched many people taking obviously large suitcases through security with both TSA and the passenger being very aware that is not of the carry on size.
I work in the industry, and actually in most instances there is no difference in gate check bags. They simply send them down to the ground crew and it is loaded like any checked bag. It would be exceptionally costly to try and separate and sort bags that need to be "returned at the gate" so they don't bother and send them up the claim units at your final destination. The tags are just hand written (sometimes they slap a ten digit tag on them, but most of their host systems don't even support automatic sorting and tracking for gate checked bags) and read when the plane is unloaded.
Normally, if you gate check a bag they also don't charge you the baggage fee as the most common cause of gate check bags is the overhead bins filling up. This causes the airline to be better off with the customer service aspect and since they generally tell you carry-on bags don't cost they don't want to spring hidden fees on you (unless you fly a budget airline like spirit or frontier, spirit charges you even if you carry the bag onto the plane with you and the charges are HIGHER if it has to be checked at the gate...).
Na, pretty simple, however you bring the wifi to the room, just turn the antenna power down so it doesn't cover 3 rooms over if there is an issue a neighbor and his pacemaker "or something." Most stock firmware on wifi routers and such has that capability.
Oh you poor mis-informed man. We absolutely do not have the processing power equivalent to a human brain. We can outperform it on one TYPE of task, but not even close to the general case (and even then it requires supercomputers and distributed computing clusters). The main problem exists with learning, highly abstract reasoning (i.e. logical leaps), and oddly enough some of our more "mundane" things such as speech. Unsupervised learning is so incredibly hard in AI because there really isn't any way to signal what is correct and what is not correct within the current context of an AI. For one to actually surpass us we would have to impart all of our specific knowledge and exact modelling to the AI first, and even then it would be very difficult to map out. Watson from IBM is probably the most advanced as far as imparting all of our knowledge, and it really still can't handle anything on that level. Almost all programming is done in one of two ways, either we tell the computer how to obtain the correct answer, or we define parameters of what a correct answer looks like. When the machine has no guidelines and has to decide what is right, wrong, or even useful things get really confusing and complicated for it.
In the wikipedia article for watson they even point out that it had trouble with questions that did not have many terms, which shows they were not able to take into account a lot of context of the question or naturally how a human would say that to one another. The machine was specifically designed to be a giant query bot and it still had problems because if it didn't have enough keywords or a long enough sentence to do decent natural language processing, so it bombed out. That kind of goes directly into the abstract reasoning. Machines work in a very step by step logic model, they don't do well with jumping steps at all and when a problem becomes insanely large, again wikipedia for quick reference combinatorial explosion, the AI pretty much loses it shit. These are also system that have been designed for ONE particular task, and while in a lot of cases they alone can outperform a human, that is the only thing they can outperform in while the human can do thousands of others tasks.
Finally, my last point about speech is less AI related just more showing how much computational power the human brain actually has. Robotics, specifically has had serious issues with a lot of the human aspects of speech and conversation (I couldn't find any good links, I read several articles and had discussions on this back in college, but those are kind of walled behind university stuff...) such that it takes a massive amount of the robots processing power to perform these functions. Even layering on things to try and brute force the problem "creating" natural speech (sort of turing test actually) and then having the bot spit it out caused some ridiculous problems.
Our models and algorithms for creating these kinds of "dangerous AI" are so hilariously far behind from what the tin foil hat community believes we will probably be dancing on a terraformed planet several galaxies away before we actually get that figured out. Unless someone stupidly stumbles across the correct "voodoo" spell of an algorithm for truly efficient and complete machine learning, it is hard to model it when WE don't even fully understand how the human brains works (see neuroscience and psychology).
Full disclosure, I am a computer scientist/software engineer that has actually had some education on the subject of AI. It was a small focus of mine in college out curiosity, but then I saw I would be better served in other focuses so I just kept up with it on the side.
Depending on how ridiculous you feel like getting you could just run a really long Cat6 cable... I mean, as a temporary solution until I finish wiring my house I have that right now (I absolutely hate it, but its motivation to finish the new network faster I guess?).
Playing devil's advocate here, but technically by asserting that you should go by the subjective nature of the tagline here you are insinuating that nerds do not need to know about politics, current events, pop culture in general (unless it is "nerdy"), or any such like in their lives what-so-ever. I don't know about you but I feel that I can identify myself as a nerd and feel that I do need to know about an impending war that Russia has decided to potentially spark and most of the other subjects I mentioned (arguably most of pop culture should be excluded, but current events and large political dealings do still matter for nerds). This is still news for nerds, as it is really news for everyone, there is just more stories that only nerds would consider important mixed into the feeds of the site.
Again, I am really just playing devil's advocate here, but I feel it is petty semantics when people argue about this crap. They are not posting about what George Clooney wore to "insert awards show or event here" which is the type of thing I would think qualifies as unimportant to nerds. I really don't care personally, the posts are pretty much fine with me, but just pointing out that there are some issues with the argument you try to make.
Interesting points. The amber light timings though I would think should have a hard floor/ceiling inside the PLC. Not sure how much adjustment you could do because when the PLC write happens it has certain limits for the logic to even recognize what is told to it via input. The cameras are a very intriguing point and probably the most dangerous. I vaguely recall a story on slashdot a while back about the camera networks though having terrible security, but don't remember the details.
This right here. The problem with any "unsafe" scenario is that these lights are usually logic controlled by PLCs or some such. I had a professor in college that used to work for one of the state roadway departments and he did work on traffic light controllers for a while. Most of them have to physically prevent anything like that from being possible just like how a civil engineer is supposed to prove their bridge is safe within x parameters. From what I understand this isn't even a concern for all traffic light controllers because ones outside of the big metro areas are not even interconnected to a central controller (this was just what I was told and know from the small towns I have lived in, if someone knows otherwise feel free to correct me here).
I personally am a huge security advocate and believe that, yes these things need to be secured to a reasonable extent, but it is overblown to think this is going to get a bunch of people easily killed just because someone wants to play around with it. Now, someone building a DIY "make light go green" device is not outside the realm of possibility... In fact, I may have a new project just to see if I can do it!
We had the same thing and I was in college less than five years ago. Most of the instructors for junior level and higher classes told people I really don't care what language you write in, you just better understand the concepts we are teaching. Most people I knew, wrote in C++ because java was just annoying half the time. Some classes required different languages, but none of them were Java (literally the only two courses that required Java were CS one and two for the beginner students). I had php, C, C++, Prolog, Haskell, MIPS assembly, and then a little Java thrown in to compare as an example OO class (except when I took mobile development which was all Android in, duh, Java, but that was learning more about the platform and ecosystem really, nothing Java specific).
My assembly was rolled into our computer organizations course. We ended up doing some fairly simple assembly problems, like creating a binary tree class in pure assembly that could handle variable memory sized objects. We then had to design a simple processor that it would run on. We got the option of doing multi phase or single phase, I ended up doing single for the project and multi later just to understand more.
Algorithms was absolutely required for my program too and we had a lot of the higher level course where they didn't teach you a database language per se (except I guess prolog half counted in my programming languages course), but you ended up having to learn one to complete the work and study in the class.
Now granted I graduated in 2011 (still somewhat recent) and I don't know how much the programs have changed now (other than graduate programs because I still want my MS), but honestly if a person is going to be a decent software engineer/developer or computer scientist the curriculum is only building the foundation. I did tons of stuff outside my classes when I was in school. If someone isn't curious enough to do research and such on their own about the subject, they are probably going to do poorly after college anyway.
I learned a large chunk of databases, web development, language integration, general IT and computer modeling, etc. because I just wanted a deeper understanding of what I was doing. My bit-wise math is probably not near as good as people that have worked in C for years, but I can handle it with some time and refresher documentation. In my opinion that is the more valuable thing, can the person learn to adapt their knowledge and take on new things?
To be fair, just because the network is properly setup and allows for certain behavior etc. does not mean the application will play well with that setup. I've seen it happen before (and have been able to demonstrate it with proprietary software) that sometimes the network will not react correctly with certain network setups. At my company we have had to implement special protocols and features in our software just to overcome some inherent network limitations that our IT group pretty much said, "we have no way around this issue, sorry."
I only have limited experience with Oracle though, so take that statement as what you will. I have seen other software exhibit this kind of behavior though.
Does that actually do a secure rewrite though? I haven't honestly looked at how the device manager does the remote wipe, but I would guess it is just like deleting or doing a factory reset and the data is still recoverable through standard computer forensic software.