A large central courtyard with a building wrapped all the way around it. You walk in the front door, turn right and explore all the outside-facing rooms in the building. But, so long as it's possible to go all the way around the building "ring" inside (say, there's a single circular hallway through the middle of the ring), you'll never reach any of the rooms facing the courtyard, nor the courtyard itself.
Really, it only *seemed* like a frivolous use of network resources? In exactly what way is playing Doom, or any game generally, not *actually* a frivolous pursuit?
Not that I'm opposed to frivolous pursuits, far from it - but if you're making the implied claim that playing a game *isn't* completely frivolous, a little evidence would be appreciated. Or at least a decent argument. Heck, even an anecdote would be a big step up from making such a ridiculous claim completely unsupported.
You realize that strategy only actually works for solving traditional "one path" mazes, right? All you need is one cyclic path curving to the left with further spaces inside it, and you'll never reach those additional spaces. A lot of paths and architecture, (not to mention labyrinths, where maze paths might not have any dead ends), will keep many of its secrets against such a strategy.
Still, a not a bad starting point, so long as you're alert to its stark failings.
Repayment of incentives is a good start, but offers no discouragement. Perhaps repayment of X*incentives received, where X is at least 2. Even if it's accidental, you still lose at least as much as you temporarily won. Make sure everyone has a substantial incentive to validate their data *before* applying for the benefits.
With further penalties for any _individuals_ found to be involved in intentional deception. If you want to risk jail or personal fines in order to obey your boss, that's your business - but if they get caught, you're going down.
In this case though they lied to the federal oversight organization in order to secure extra incentives. It'd be nice to see that carry the same penalties as intentionally lying on any other federally mandated oversight, such as taxes or other financial statements.
Personally I think that should at a minimum involve jail time for the executive responsible for having the reports produced, but I'm not holding my breath.
I'm not sure I agree that genetic engineering is a less drastic solution than surgery. Especially since you'd likely have to make the call for your kids, rather than yourself.
Still, at first glance it seems like it might be a fairly benevolent modification to actively spread in the species. It'll probably give a rough time to our descendants in places and times where civilization has collapsed, but those will hopefully be only fill a tiny percentage of our future.
I believe you are correct. Not so sure the last part is particularly funny though - I suspect it's just down to signal processing speed. After all 4k@30Hz and 1080@120Hz translate to the same number of pixels per second.
If weather patterns changes smoothly that would work - however it doesn't appear that will be the case. The problem is that when weather becomes unstable you can no longer use last year's weather to predict the coming year.
Think of it this way - if for the last decade there were 5 years where corn would have survived, 3 years for wheat, and 2 for soy - and they were all jumbled up, then what should you plant this year? Corn maybe? You've got a 50% chance of getting a crop, if the last decade is representative, but that's still not very good odds. And of course slow growing tree crops and the like can't be readily picked up and moved from year to year, so we'll likely lose most of those, or at least make them much more expensive (hope you're not too attached to coffee or nuts)
Similarly, if we cross the tipping point to a hothouse Earth, and could just jump a few millenia into the future, things would probably look pretty rosy. All of Canada and Russia, Northern China, etc. will likely be warm and fertile. The problem is not the destination, it's the long, unpredictable journey to get there.
Depends how you define "killing ourselves". It almost certainly won't drive us to extinction, our technology does make us remarkably adaptable. However, it will quite possibly kill the overwhelming majority of our species.
I did tell you my "killing a lot of people" was a simple answer (and thus likely false in all but the most straightforward scenarios - I figured that was implied)
I apologize if I made the distinction too subtle. Let me try again, perhaps I can phrase it better:
In both your examples, the planes functioned as designed, right up until they were subjected to a situation they were never designed to deal with. Whether that's losing an engine at low altitude, or suddenly colliding with a building - the moment that happens, "functioning as designed" becomes an undefined concept. Which logically means that literally *anything* can happen while still "functioning as designed", but more practically just means "we don't care", or "no, because it's outside the scope of the design, so the question is invalid"
Hmm... on second thought there's probably a good bit of design on how a plane comes apart in a collision, so the crashing plane was quite possibly operating as designed even after impact.
The big problem I suspect they were addressing is that programs often weren't effectively organized - seems like half the software I installed defaulted to "Publishing Company\Program name", making it effectively impossible to find unless you could remember the name of the publisher.
As for settings, etc.? You'll get no argument from me. Only justification I can even imagine is that they want to force everyone to get used to using search. Which wouldn't be so bad if it actually worked well, but half the time you have to search Google just to find what you need to do a Windows search for. You can't even count on settings remaining in the same place after a major update. It's absolutely infuriating.
Or more precisely, they decided that a failure at low altitude was outside the design scope, and so if it happens, the aircraft by definition cannot function as designed, because it was not designed function in that scenario. They didn't design it to kill everyone - if they did, then it would be functioning as designed. They just ignored the problem, knowing that was the likely outcome.
That's standard behavior in engineering - everything is a compromise, and perfect safety is impossible. So you mediate the risks you can, and ignore the ones that are too expensive or unlikely to deal with.
They could have designed it to be able to recover from an engine failure at low altitude. The people calling the shots decided that being able to do so wasn't worth the assorted costs it would impose, and so they didn't.
The same cost-benefit reasoning goes into every car, building, bridge, elevator, etc. you've ever seen. Some problems they're designed to deal with - hopefully all the most likely ones. The rest? If you ever find yourself in one of those situations pray hard and hope for the best.
Sure it can - just make the dominant browsers completely incapable of running any scripts at all! No massive security holes that can be enabled by the user means no gullible users enabling massive security holes.
Of course that would also mean we'd lose access to all those incredibly useful sites that actually need scripting to function like... umm... let me think... Google Maps?
it wasn't the "searching" part I was responding to, but the "resort to". If you're used to searching, then it's by far the superior option even compared to a well-organized menu - you search by default, and only resort to browsing the menu when you're looking for something you don't remember enough details about to search for. Though admittedly Microsoft's implementation is by far *not* the best I've seen. Often frustratingly laggy and easily confused by typos - if a Linux launch menu search worked that badly a decade ago it would have drowned in bug reports.
But yeah, I really don't understand why Microsoft decided the start menu could only be one folder deep and thus impossible to organize. Well, I probably do - having seen far to many programs that by default install their shortcuts into their own branded top level folder. Really [insert company name here]? You think I want your program grouped together with whatever other of your programs I happen to have installed, rather than with other functionally related programs? It would have been nice if MS had moved to organize things, rather than just flatten them into a useless mess - It wouldn't even be that hard, just only display the hierarchical folders provided by default (e.g. office, games, system, etc), and those explicitly created by the user, everything else gets flattened as is currently done.
I think you're confusing "functioning nominally" - i.e. everything is working as intended, with "functioning as designed", which also includes all the myriad ways that things can fail that the engineers have anticipated and made allowances for.
> If two identical planes suffer the same engine-loss event but one aircraft is at the right altitude to make it survivable while the other one is not... in your world, one of those aircraft functioned perfectly to design, while the other did not?
Well, you seemed to want a simple answer, so I gave you one. But yes, more or less. Design is always context sensitive - the planes were not designed to deal with an engine failure at low altitude, and so when such a failure occurs, it's now operating outside the designed functionality, with fiery death being the probable result. There's a reason takeoff and landing are the most dangerous parts of a flight, and part of it is that low altitude failure tolerance mostly comes at a much higher cost(by price, weight, efficiency...) and is thus intentionally left out in favor of operating profits.
It's bad, but you can make it a lot better by stepping back and rethinking your usage patterns a bit (and ignoring Microsoft's apparent recommendations)
First don't "resort to searching", do what every terminal user has known all along and go directly the much more efficient keyboard interface to begin with. Leave the mouse out of it entirely. [Windows-key] "some related text", cursor down if necessary to select what you want from the results, and [Enter]. Starting with the search is specially important given what a mess setting have become.
Then take the abomination of a "smart-tile" start menu, stretch it to be as large as possible, and unpin everything you don't use from it. (I assume it's basically empty now?) Then replace all those useless "smart" tiles with the shortcuts to frequently used applications and folders that would normally be on your desktop or "common programs" start menu folder. You can organize them into groups, select different icon sizes as desired, and even create pop-up "subgroups" like you have on your phone/tablet by dragging icons on top of each other (if you can convince them not to dodge - I've had the best luck dragging between top-level groups).
Now you've got a faster-than-ever access to your programs, and a far more powerful and well-organized "desktop" that's always easily accessible at the touch of a button instead of being buried behind open windows, and stays free of all the randomly accumulating clutter than plagues most people's actual desktop.
Oh, and to pin folders to the start "menu" you probably need to first make a shortcut to the folder someplace, pin that to the menu, and then delete it.
Sadly their file search is pretty appallingly bad - but if you install Everything.exe from VoidTools you can add find-as-you-type filename search that updates within seconds of any filesystem change.
Not quite - if it's displaying interpolated frames interleaved with a 60Hz signal, then it *must* have 120Hz panel. Maybe not a particularly *good* panel, but it can unquestionably display 120 frames per second.
What it lacks is the driving electronics/software to decode a 120Hz input signal. Which seems strange to me - you'd think decoding a frame of video wouldn't be substantially more demanding than generating an intermediate frame. Perhaps it isn't, and it's a purely artificial market segmentation to encourage customers to buy more expensive sets. You'd think there'd be at least some break in the ranks if that were the case, but I suppose there are only a small handful of companies making TVs, and the executives are probably all drinking buddies.
We're not talking about the English language - we're talking about engineering design.
When is an airplane not operating as designed? When a whole lot of people die in a crash caused by equipment failure.
If you design an airplane only to fly when everything is working properly, then the first major component failure will kill everyone on board. If you want it to continue to stay in the air and have some measure of control so that it can hopefully land without killing too many people, then you have to design it to be able to do so. You think a plane can fly with only one engine because they got lucky? You think the backup avionics systems just appeared by magic? Not a chance - a whole lot of design work went into making sure people could survive the inevitable failures.
Nobody *intends* for a plane to land with only one engine (outside of safety testing) - but they do *design* it to do so, because they know that sooner or later an engine *will* die in flight, there's no way to avoid that. And designing it to keep flying anyway is the only way that anyone will survive the experience.
Sure, and if I have to repair a car at night, I'll bring it into a garage/worksace to do so if I have the option. That's pretty rare though, and it's not going to live there the rest of the time, preventing me from using the workspace for other projects.
As for climate - yeah, there's a few places where it might be justified. But most of the world doesn't get into the mid-hundreds (F) or 40+ below on a regular basis, nor deal with baseball sized hail (no, I don't consider minor cosmetic dents to be damage).
New flash - the entire history of the modern human species has occurred in a single ice age - the current Quaternary Ice Age started about 2.6 million years ago, about a half-million years before homo erectus evolved.
You may be thinking of the latest glacial period within that ice age, and yes, we were possibly coming out of that before our carbon-based economy gathered anything like its current momentum. However, we've accelerated the process considerably by adding major new forcing factors in the form of deforestation, desertification, and significantly boosting the heat retention of the atmosphere - and that's changing things considerably faster than normal, and there is a very real risk that on our current course we'll cause the ice age to end, and the Earth to transition to it's opposing quasi-stable hothouse state.
And while the Earth is always changing, it's the speed of that transition which can be a problem - most trees and other plants can't migrate very quickly, and if the climate lines move faster than they can, they likely go extinct, and take much of their associated ecosystems with them. And we're already in the midst of one of the larger extinction events the planet has seen thanks to pollution, over-hunting and ecosystem destruction. A second, independent extinction event on a similar scale may well reduce biodiversity to the point of ecosystem collapse. It's happened several times before, and it can take the planet many thousands of years to recover. Bad news for anyone who wants to eat regularly in the interim.
Perhaps even worse, at least for us, is that it's looking like such transitions don't happen smoothly. As the thermal engines driving weather destabilize, weather patterns become less predictable from year to year, and the rate of crop failure increases considerably as a result. And when people get hungry, wars break out.
No, actually most of it was built by the generation before them. If not earlier. Infrastructure construction, and even maintenance, has been largely neglected for the better part of a century.
Listen to the engineers. We're the ones that actually create the designs you're critiquing. (Okay, so I'm not technically an engineer, but I was a stone's throw from getting my certification when life took me in a different direction)
One question: Was the airplane designed to be able to continue to fly after an engine failure?
Yes? Then operating with an engine failure is operating according to design. It's a part of the design that everyone hopes will never be needed, but it IS part of the design.
A very big part of engineering is recognizing that entropy always wins, and something WILL inevitably fail, possibly at the worst possible moment. And then designing the system to be as sure that doesn't automatically mean that a lot of people die.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a common design where the strategy would fail: https://www.curbed.com/2017/5/...
A large central courtyard with a building wrapped all the way around it. You walk in the front door, turn right and explore all the outside-facing rooms in the building. But, so long as it's possible to go all the way around the building "ring" inside (say, there's a single circular hallway through the middle of the ring), you'll never reach any of the rooms facing the courtyard, nor the courtyard itself.
Really, it only *seemed* like a frivolous use of network resources? In exactly what way is playing Doom, or any game generally, not *actually* a frivolous pursuit?
Not that I'm opposed to frivolous pursuits, far from it - but if you're making the implied claim that playing a game *isn't* completely frivolous, a little evidence would be appreciated. Or at least a decent argument. Heck, even an anecdote would be a big step up from making such a ridiculous claim completely unsupported.
You realize that strategy only actually works for solving traditional "one path" mazes, right? All you need is one cyclic path curving to the left with further spaces inside it, and you'll never reach those additional spaces. A lot of paths and architecture, (not to mention labyrinths, where maze paths might not have any dead ends), will keep many of its secrets against such a strategy.
Still, a not a bad starting point, so long as you're alert to its stark failings.
Why? It's not the buyer that's betraying the nation, it's the seller.
I'm still waiting for political corruption to be recognized as the treason it is, but I'm not holding my breath.
Repayment of incentives is a good start, but offers no discouragement. Perhaps repayment of X*incentives received, where X is at least 2. Even if it's accidental, you still lose at least as much as you temporarily won. Make sure everyone has a substantial incentive to validate their data *before* applying for the benefits.
With further penalties for any _individuals_ found to be involved in intentional deception. If you want to risk jail or personal fines in order to obey your boss, that's your business - but if they get caught, you're going down.
In this case though they lied to the federal oversight organization in order to secure extra incentives. It'd be nice to see that carry the same penalties as intentionally lying on any other federally mandated oversight, such as taxes or other financial statements.
Personally I think that should at a minimum involve jail time for the executive responsible for having the reports produced, but I'm not holding my breath.
I'm not sure I agree that genetic engineering is a less drastic solution than surgery. Especially since you'd likely have to make the call for your kids, rather than yourself.
Still, at first glance it seems like it might be a fairly benevolent modification to actively spread in the species. It'll probably give a rough time to our descendants in places and times where civilization has collapsed, but those will hopefully be only fill a tiny percentage of our future.
I believe you are correct. Not so sure the last part is particularly funny though - I suspect it's just down to signal processing speed. After all 4k@30Hz and 1080@120Hz translate to the same number of pixels per second.
If weather patterns changes smoothly that would work - however it doesn't appear that will be the case. The problem is that when weather becomes unstable you can no longer use last year's weather to predict the coming year.
Think of it this way - if for the last decade there were 5 years where corn would have survived, 3 years for wheat, and 2 for soy - and they were all jumbled up, then what should you plant this year? Corn maybe? You've got a 50% chance of getting a crop, if the last decade is representative, but that's still not very good odds. And of course slow growing tree crops and the like can't be readily picked up and moved from year to year, so we'll likely lose most of those, or at least make them much more expensive (hope you're not too attached to coffee or nuts)
Similarly, if we cross the tipping point to a hothouse Earth, and could just jump a few millenia into the future, things would probably look pretty rosy. All of Canada and Russia, Northern China, etc. will likely be warm and fertile. The problem is not the destination, it's the long, unpredictable journey to get there.
Depends how you define "killing ourselves". It almost certainly won't drive us to extinction, our technology does make us remarkably adaptable. However, it will quite possibly kill the overwhelming majority of our species.
I did tell you my "killing a lot of people" was a simple answer (and thus likely false in all but the most straightforward scenarios - I figured that was implied)
I apologize if I made the distinction too subtle. Let me try again, perhaps I can phrase it better:
In both your examples, the planes functioned as designed, right up until they were subjected to a situation they were never designed to deal with. Whether that's losing an engine at low altitude, or suddenly colliding with a building - the moment that happens, "functioning as designed" becomes an undefined concept. Which logically means that literally *anything* can happen while still "functioning as designed", but more practically just means "we don't care", or "no, because it's outside the scope of the design, so the question is invalid"
Hmm... on second thought there's probably a good bit of design on how a plane comes apart in a collision, so the crashing plane was quite possibly operating as designed even after impact.
The big problem I suspect they were addressing is that programs often weren't effectively organized - seems like half the software I installed defaulted to "Publishing Company\Program name", making it effectively impossible to find unless you could remember the name of the publisher.
As for settings, etc.? You'll get no argument from me. Only justification I can even imagine is that they want to force everyone to get used to using search. Which wouldn't be so bad if it actually worked well, but half the time you have to search Google just to find what you need to do a Windows search for. You can't even count on settings remaining in the same place after a major update. It's absolutely infuriating.
Yes. Exactly.
Or more precisely, they decided that a failure at low altitude was outside the design scope, and so if it happens, the aircraft by definition cannot function as designed, because it was not designed function in that scenario. They didn't design it to kill everyone - if they did, then it would be functioning as designed. They just ignored the problem, knowing that was the likely outcome.
That's standard behavior in engineering - everything is a compromise, and perfect safety is impossible. So you mediate the risks you can, and ignore the ones that are too expensive or unlikely to deal with.
They could have designed it to be able to recover from an engine failure at low altitude. The people calling the shots decided that being able to do so wasn't worth the assorted costs it would impose, and so they didn't.
The same cost-benefit reasoning goes into every car, building, bridge, elevator, etc. you've ever seen. Some problems they're designed to deal with - hopefully all the most likely ones. The rest? If you ever find yourself in one of those situations pray hard and hope for the best.
Sure it can - just make the dominant browsers completely incapable of running any scripts at all! No massive security holes that can be enabled by the user means no gullible users enabling massive security holes.
Of course that would also mean we'd lose access to all those incredibly useful sites that actually need scripting to function like... umm... let me think... Google Maps?
it wasn't the "searching" part I was responding to, but the "resort to". If you're used to searching, then it's by far the superior option even compared to a well-organized menu - you search by default, and only resort to browsing the menu when you're looking for something you don't remember enough details about to search for. Though admittedly Microsoft's implementation is by far *not* the best I've seen. Often frustratingly laggy and easily confused by typos - if a Linux launch menu search worked that badly a decade ago it would have drowned in bug reports.
But yeah, I really don't understand why Microsoft decided the start menu could only be one folder deep and thus impossible to organize. Well, I probably do - having seen far to many programs that by default install their shortcuts into their own branded top level folder. Really [insert company name here]? You think I want your program grouped together with whatever other of your programs I happen to have installed, rather than with other functionally related programs? It would have been nice if MS had moved to organize things, rather than just flatten them into a useless mess - It wouldn't even be that hard, just only display the hierarchical folders provided by default (e.g. office, games, system, etc), and those explicitly created by the user, everything else gets flattened as is currently done.
I think you're confusing "functioning nominally" - i.e. everything is working as intended, with "functioning as designed", which also includes all the myriad ways that things can fail that the engineers have anticipated and made allowances for.
> If two identical planes suffer the same engine-loss event but one aircraft is at the right altitude to make it survivable while the other one is not ... in your world, one of those aircraft functioned perfectly to design, while the other did not?
Well, you seemed to want a simple answer, so I gave you one. But yes, more or less. Design is always context sensitive - the planes were not designed to deal with an engine failure at low altitude, and so when such a failure occurs, it's now operating outside the designed functionality, with fiery death being the probable result. There's a reason takeoff and landing are the most dangerous parts of a flight, and part of it is that low altitude failure tolerance mostly comes at a much higher cost(by price, weight, efficiency...) and is thus intentionally left out in favor of operating profits.
It's bad, but you can make it a lot better by stepping back and rethinking your usage patterns a bit (and ignoring Microsoft's apparent recommendations)
First don't "resort to searching", do what every terminal user has known all along and go directly the much more efficient keyboard interface to begin with. Leave the mouse out of it entirely. [Windows-key] "some related text", cursor down if necessary to select what you want from the results, and [Enter]. Starting with the search is specially important given what a mess setting have become.
Then take the abomination of a "smart-tile" start menu, stretch it to be as large as possible, and unpin everything you don't use from it. (I assume it's basically empty now?) Then replace all those useless "smart" tiles with the shortcuts to frequently used applications and folders that would normally be on your desktop or "common programs" start menu folder. You can organize them into groups, select different icon sizes as desired, and even create pop-up "subgroups" like you have on your phone/tablet by dragging icons on top of each other (if you can convince them not to dodge - I've had the best luck dragging between top-level groups).
Now you've got a faster-than-ever access to your programs, and a far more powerful and well-organized "desktop" that's always easily accessible at the touch of a button instead of being buried behind open windows, and stays free of all the randomly accumulating clutter than plagues most people's actual desktop.
Oh, and to pin folders to the start "menu" you probably need to first make a shortcut to the folder someplace, pin that to the menu, and then delete it.
Sadly their file search is pretty appallingly bad - but if you install Everything.exe from VoidTools you can add find-as-you-type filename search that updates within seconds of any filesystem change.
Sure you can - you just have to use an appropriate Linux distro instead.
Not quite - if it's displaying interpolated frames interleaved with a 60Hz signal, then it *must* have 120Hz panel. Maybe not a particularly *good* panel, but it can unquestionably display 120 frames per second.
What it lacks is the driving electronics/software to decode a 120Hz input signal. Which seems strange to me - you'd think decoding a frame of video wouldn't be substantially more demanding than generating an intermediate frame. Perhaps it isn't, and it's a purely artificial market segmentation to encourage customers to buy more expensive sets. You'd think there'd be at least some break in the ranks if that were the case, but I suppose there are only a small handful of companies making TVs, and the executives are probably all drinking buddies.
We're not talking about the English language - we're talking about engineering design.
When is an airplane not operating as designed? When a whole lot of people die in a crash caused by equipment failure.
If you design an airplane only to fly when everything is working properly, then the first major component failure will kill everyone on board. If you want it to continue to stay in the air and have some measure of control so that it can hopefully land without killing too many people, then you have to design it to be able to do so. You think a plane can fly with only one engine because they got lucky? You think the backup avionics systems just appeared by magic? Not a chance - a whole lot of design work went into making sure people could survive the inevitable failures.
Nobody *intends* for a plane to land with only one engine (outside of safety testing) - but they do *design* it to do so, because they know that sooner or later an engine *will* die in flight, there's no way to avoid that. And designing it to keep flying anyway is the only way that anyone will survive the experience.
Nope. I've got rain, snow, searing sun, and occasional golf-ball sized hail. Cars can handle all of it.
Sure, and if I have to repair a car at night, I'll bring it into a garage/worksace to do so if I have the option. That's pretty rare though, and it's not going to live there the rest of the time, preventing me from using the workspace for other projects.
As for climate - yeah, there's a few places where it might be justified. But most of the world doesn't get into the mid-hundreds (F) or 40+ below on a regular basis, nor deal with baseball sized hail (no, I don't consider minor cosmetic dents to be damage).
New flash - the entire history of the modern human species has occurred in a single ice age - the current Quaternary Ice Age started about 2.6 million years ago, about a half-million years before homo erectus evolved.
You may be thinking of the latest glacial period within that ice age, and yes, we were possibly coming out of that before our carbon-based economy gathered anything like its current momentum. However, we've accelerated the process considerably by adding major new forcing factors in the form of deforestation, desertification, and significantly boosting the heat retention of the atmosphere - and that's changing things considerably faster than normal, and there is a very real risk that on our current course we'll cause the ice age to end, and the Earth to transition to it's opposing quasi-stable hothouse state.
And while the Earth is always changing, it's the speed of that transition which can be a problem - most trees and other plants can't migrate very quickly, and if the climate lines move faster than they can, they likely go extinct, and take much of their associated ecosystems with them. And we're already in the midst of one of the larger extinction events the planet has seen thanks to pollution, over-hunting and ecosystem destruction. A second, independent extinction event on a similar scale may well reduce biodiversity to the point of ecosystem collapse. It's happened several times before, and it can take the planet many thousands of years to recover. Bad news for anyone who wants to eat regularly in the interim.
Perhaps even worse, at least for us, is that it's looking like such transitions don't happen smoothly. As the thermal engines driving weather destabilize, weather patterns become less predictable from year to year, and the rate of crop failure increases considerably as a result. And when people get hungry, wars break out.
No, actually most of it was built by the generation before them. If not earlier. Infrastructure construction, and even maintenance, has been largely neglected for the better part of a century.
Listen to the engineers. We're the ones that actually create the designs you're critiquing. (Okay, so I'm not technically an engineer, but I was a stone's throw from getting my certification when life took me in a different direction)
One question: Was the airplane designed to be able to continue to fly after an engine failure?
Yes? Then operating with an engine failure is operating according to design. It's a part of the design that everyone hopes will never be needed, but it IS part of the design.
A very big part of engineering is recognizing that entropy always wins, and something WILL inevitably fail, possibly at the worst possible moment. And then designing the system to be as sure that doesn't automatically mean that a lot of people die.