To quote Dwight D. Eisenhower, "In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable."
If you go into a major project without some sort of project management, it's not going to end well. However, the management of the project needs to be flexible enough to adapt to the changing environment. Decent project management will see when things are under resourced, and help to fill in those gaps (if possible), and should keep the project going in the right direction.
The whole point of Ctrl-Alt-Del was that it's protected in the BIOS. Invoking it would jump to a routine that was hard to override. In most cases, though, under DOS the subroutine just caused a reboot. Later operating systems, it was trapped for and was the one key combination that a user application couldn't map.
Said someone who doesn't now the history of these protocols. SS7 has been around for a long, long time, longer than the IPv4 we all love to hate. It was developed in the days of yore, before the breakup of Ma Bell, when there were only a handful of telephone companies, and they all had reasonably tight control over their signalling networks (having started to learn their lesson from Captain Crunch, blue boxes, and the other phreakers. It was never intended to be used as it is today.
Besides, if the national authorities want to follow you, they just use the resources of the phone company, there's no need for them to harness SS7 or anything like that.
The thing is, though that in this case you can have your cake, and eat it too. It's Entirely possible to illuminate an area while confining the light to produce little to no sky glow. In a lot of these situations the lighting is actually far more effective, producing dramatically less glare, more even illumination, and a reduction in shadowed areas.
The problem is that it takes actual thought, design, and quality fixtures to implement.
Dropping into the sun would have required escaping Saturn's gravity well-- which Cassini didn't have the fuel to do--
Actually escaping Saturn's orbit and going into solar orbit was one of the possible end-of-mission scenarios. When they were looking at the options, it would only have required 5-35m/s of delta-v, well within Cassini's capabilities. However, having a planetary probe in heliocentric orbit doesn't get you much science, as its instruments aren't designed for that kind of thing. At most they would have had a semi-long term observation of the solar wind, which can be done with missions that are much easier to maintain and control.
In the end, the wealth of data obtained by the final proximal orbits to Saturn were considered to be the best bang for the buck at the end of the probe's lifespan. The final retirement option chosen required about the same delta-v as an escape from Saturn, but achieved a whole lot more than just drifting around for ever.
Yet it doesn't stop us from dropping dozens of probes and landers onto Mars and Venus...
As I mentioned above, there is an entire policy (and in fact a portion of the organization) dedicated to planetary protection. Surface landers, such as what are sent to Mars (and in the future Europa and/or Enceladus) are required to go through very strict decontamination regimens before they are launched. In addition to being assembled in clean rooms (as are all the probes), they are baked/irradiated/cleaned with caustic chemicals/etc... prior to launch to sterilize them as much as possible. They don't want to discover life on another planetary body, only to realize that it's life they brought with them.
Venus is a slightly different beast, its surface conditions are so inhospitable (sulfuric acid rain, 400+C temperatures, etc...) that there is not much of a worry about possible contamination. The conditions would denature/destroy all known forms of life present here on Earth.
The larger orbiters (Cassini, Galileo, and Juno) are a) a lot harder to sanitize to the same degree and b) are orbiters not intended to settle on a planetary body that could possibly harbor life. They're not cleaned to the same degree, so the general policy is to dispose of them safely so that there is no chance that they will impact a protected body. Due to the complexity of the Saturn system, the safest way was to drop it into Saturn itself.
The other reason for this was that it is realistically a consequence of the final mission. For the past several months, Cassini has been plunging through the gap between Saturn and its rings. It did not have the fuel left to get out of that. This mission design gave the planetary scientists a wealth of new data on the rings, their mass, and composition.
Also, why should US citizens get any special treatment up here as Canadians do not get any special treatment south of the border.
Well, assuming NAFTA survives, there is special treatment both ways. Canada has an equivalent of the US TN visa that allows Americans with specified certifications and professions to obtain temporary residency in Canada, just like Engineers and so forth from Canada can legally work in the US (in Engineering positions) without much difficulty.
We have 43% incomes tax plus crazy corporate tax rates (Federal and Provincial), small businesses have all the same red tape as large ones which impedes growth.
Say what? I just looked at my most recent pay stub, and while I make a good middle class salary, the total deductions from my gross comes out to 24%, including CPP, EI, & Tax. In order to hit that 43% you would have to be well into the six figures, at which point you can bloody well afford it.
It was a worry over biological contamination. JPL (and NASA) have very specific protocols for planetary protection. Huygens went through some extreme decontamination prior to launch. Cassini, as an orbiting probe, not so much. Also, at launch we didn't know as much about the Saturn system and it's moons. The RTGs aren't really a concern, as they're not all that radioactive. Pu-238 is primarily an alpha emitter, and is mostly just toxic.
There are many use cases where the a security signature or certificate needs to be transmitted once and the data transmitted orders of magnitude more times. In which case, the computational overhead of establishing an encrypted channel needs to be accepted infrequently and for a relatively small payload instead of every time for a large payload.
A prime example of this is software updates. From Microsoft, from Apple, from whomever. Everyone should be keeping their systems as up to date as possible. That said, the downloads for these updates are huge, so leaving them in the clear allows transparent caching infrastructure to work properly. What about a MITM attack on the binaries? Well, you can resolve that by making the control link from update service to the update client HTTPS, and including sha256 checksums in the system to verify the cleartext download.
Yes, it's an edge case, but I run a network with about 100 users at a remote site, on the far end of a satellite link. For our corporate machines, we run our own internal WSUS, but for personal computers, they still need to update. Because Microsoft sends the body of the updates in cleartext, my WAAS system actually does a really good job of caching the updates, even for our non-domain users. If Microsoft were to go to SSL only, every patch Tuesday would wind up taking 2 weeks to complete and render the network virtually useless.
Unless you've ever done a live demo in front of a lot of people, nobody can quite understand how freaky it is to have stuff go wrong like this.
One of the products I worked with was an auto-acquire satellite dish. The idea is that you assemble the unit, hit the button, and the thing goes and finds your desired satellite in the sky. It was brand new, we were just breaking into that space (if you'll pardon the pun), and we had tested the hell out of it. It was pretty quick, and quite reliable.
Then we had to do a sales demo in front of a major distributor in East London. We get to London, I setup the thing at the Hotel and check it out, everything's going well. We pack up, and the next day go to the customer site. I put the unit together, showing how easy it is, and hit the go button, and immediately the thing starts going crazy. Well, the one thing we had missed? We had tested it entirely in the Western Hemisphere. There was a bug in the software that couldn't handle longitude on the east side of the prime meridian. Oops.
So, I just sort of carry on and say "and if you're in a GPS denied environment, you can pick a nearby city from the included database, and it will use that instead." and boom, it works.
As a former Sales Engineer, I always hated doing live demos in front of (potential) customers. Yeah, it's like Milli Vanilli lip syncing, but I would always always push for doing canned demos, or ones that depended on my skill. When something has a 0.1% surprise rate, that means it will happen in a demo 100% of the time.
Yes, but hearing aids draw a lot less power than something with a display, nor do they have the computing power of a lot of these devices. They're pretty incredible bits of engineering (if overpriced), but they're in a different league. Also, have you seen how much they charge for hearing aid batteries? All the other devices you cite are also significantly larger than what fits on your wrist.
It all depends on the use case. I spent a pretty significant chunk of change on a pair of Shure IEMs. Great quality sound, but more importantly, they're extremely comfortable to wear for long periods of time (at least for me), and they provide about as much isolation as industrial earplugs. When I was logging 140,000 airline miles a year, they're what kept me sane... And they were good enough to protect my hearing when I was bouncing around the sandbox in blackhawk helicopters.
The law needs to be changed so that batteries have a minimum 2 year warranty and must be user replaceable.
Great in theory, not so practical in the real world. The first part is fine, require an expected lifespan of n years with acceptable performance. But lets take the example of a fitbit, a pebble watch, or any of the other wearable devices. Even if the battery is theoretically user replaceable, they are either going to have to standardize on a format, and secondly the battery is going to need to be far more mechanically robust so that it doesn't explode when some idiot tries to mash it in with his screwdriver.
A different solution might be to require a manufacturer to offer battery service for a reasonable fee, for, say 5 years after the product was discontinued.
For any problem there is always a solution that is both simple, and wrong.
A brick wall has lots of different angles, and the probability is very high that at least some part of the brick wall will reflect the echo back to the source.
Assuming the mortar has been pointed properly, and so forth, a brick wall (and virtually anything else) will have a significant number of corner reflectors that will reflect ultrasonic frequencies right back to the transmitter (aka the bat). Think of it like the cat-eye reflectors on roads, or the corner reflectors left on the moon. No matter what angle you hit them with, after a double/triple bounce, it comes right back in the direction of its originator.
Are you thinking of the (now retired) stealth "fighter"? It was obviously faceted, mostly as an artifact of the computing power available when it was originally designed. The B-2 bomber, on the other hand, uses very specifically chosen curves and angles to avoid any corner reflections or edges that might reflect radar back.
In addition, there are significant quantities of radar absorbing materials used throughout (think graphite impregnated rubber, and so forth) to reduce the intensity of any reflected energy. The latter is why the maintenance on the aircraft is so expensive, and why they require specialized/airconditioned hangars. The materials do not hold up well in the environment, and need to be repaired constantly, with very specific techniques to maintain the stealth characteristics.
Organic foods are not more healthy than non-organic. It is a big scam for idiots like you.
Sure, but along with organic (which I don't really care about) comes more varieties. Things like your "heirloom" tomatoes or apples. Are they any better from a nutrition standpoint? unlikely. But they have different flavours, different textures, and can be much more visually interesting. IMHO it's also good to support the biodiversity that keeping these old/small varieties around.
It's a similar thing when it comes to cheeses and other dairy products. While I don't really care that it's "Organic" by the official definition of the word, it's more that organic cheeses tend to be more interesting, unpasteurized (which has a significant impact on some cheeses), and so forth compared to the standard variety. It's a similar thing when it comes to whipping cream. Standard cream contains various stabilizers to help it whip consistently, but at the expense of texture. The organic stuff I buy has more milkfat, none of the stabilizers, and produces what I consider a nicer result.
Lastly, in the case of animal products (Dairy, Poultry/eggs, and meat), it's pretty typical that the "Organic" choices are also the more ethical choices, where the animal had a better life.
So yeah, I'll buy a reasonable amount of organic food, but not because it's organic, but because of the other properties that are correlated to it.
Well, yes and no. In a previous job, I was the primary after sales support and training Engineer for the company. The end result is that I built a very strong relationship with a number of our customers. Part of the role of our sales people was to build and maintain those relationships because, well, it's always easier to sell something to a happy, existing customer than it is to build a new relationship. In the industry I was in, the smallest sale we usually made was in the low six figures, and we made fair margin on each sale.
The thing that annoyed me, though, is often I did a significant amount of work to get the sale... Heck, in more than a few occasions, the customer would come to me and say "We've found an extra 400,000 euros in our budget, how should we improve our system?" it always kind of annoyed me that even when I was managing a significant portion of the relationship, and coming up with the ideas, and being that "Trusted Advisor" to the customer, I didn't get a slice of the pie.
"what do the HECK do they have *300 models* for?!?!?!?!
Volkswagen Auto Group is one of the largest vehicle manufacturing companies on the planet.
Between VW, Audi, Seat, Skoda, Porsche, Lamborghini, Bentley, Bugatti, Ducati, MAN, and Scania, plus world-wide distribution of different models, 300 seems on the low side.
It all depends on the situation, I suppose. One of my hobbies is sailing (I have a 27' sloop), and the basic rule on the water is that if someone is in distress, you respond to it if you are able, and it is safe to do so. This is a tradition that is almost as old as history itself. The last one I responded to was a guy in a power vessel with a dead engine, and slowly drifting towards rocks. I passed within a few feet of him, tossed him a line, and took him under tow.
That said, in the modern era, this is usually done in coordination with the coast guard. When a distress call comes in, they're up on the radio asking for any available vessel to respond. In some cases, they just want to have additional eyes on the scene, and in other cases to search and/or perform what rescue is possible until they arrive on scene.
One of the more interesting calls I ever heard, though, was the Coast Guard looking for someone who would be willing/able to take command of a 35' sailboat in one of the local bays. From what I could gather, what was going on is that a husband and wife had been out, he got injured and subsequently evacuated, and she wasn't comfortable single-handing the boat to get herself and it to the nearby town so she could join her husband. I was already 3 hours away at that point, but otherwise I'd have offered my services.
Is this the same as a disaster area? No, but it is a situation where "civilians" are performing rescue/safety type tasks, at the direction and usually in coordination with the authorities.
Could somebody please tell me why the h*** a phone needs a barometer?
The barometric sensor also gives you altitude. For things like HealthKit, it's how the phone counts flights of stairs. It also gives the phone a way of knowing what floor you're on for location manager. GPS gives you this in the open, but the other positioning techniques used indoors don't.
Your own examples show that national registration programs work just fine.
Well, yes and no. The international agreements set out standards for these registries, and the interchange of data between them. The national authorities collect and maintain the data, and make it available to international partners, under the agreements and treaties organized through the organizations.
Lolwut? I checked here in Norway and even though all commercial craft are required to have it I found an old article saying 90% of private boats don't have VHF radio. With the spread of cell phones and towers it's probably even less today. If anything it's a counter-example that registering large ships is fine but trying to register all boats would be completely ridiculous.
I've never encountered a vessel beyond a typical open fishing boat that didn't have a Marine VHF. You'd be considered to be radically unsafe to go out without one. A cell phone is fine, but doesn't work out at sea, also a cell phone doesn't summon all the other boaters around you, who are the ones best able to rescue you should shit go wrong.
Further, Cell phones don't allow you to monitor VTS when navigating through a busy port, nor do they allow you to call for bridge raises, or other things that are required to conduct safe navigation of a recreational vessel. They're a great adjunct, but they do not replace VHF.
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To quote Dwight D. Eisenhower, "In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable."
If you go into a major project without some sort of project management, it's not going to end well. However, the management of the project needs to be flexible enough to adapt to the changing environment. Decent project management will see when things are under resourced, and help to fill in those gaps (if possible), and should keep the project going in the right direction.
The whole point of Ctrl-Alt-Del was that it's protected in the BIOS. Invoking it would jump to a routine that was hard to override. In most cases, though, under DOS the subroutine just caused a reboot. Later operating systems, it was trapped for and was the one key combination that a user application couldn't map.
Said someone who doesn't now the history of these protocols. SS7 has been around for a long, long time, longer than the IPv4 we all love to hate. It was developed in the days of yore, before the breakup of Ma Bell, when there were only a handful of telephone companies, and they all had reasonably tight control over their signalling networks (having started to learn their lesson from Captain Crunch, blue boxes, and the other phreakers. It was never intended to be used as it is today.
Besides, if the national authorities want to follow you, they just use the resources of the phone company, there's no need for them to harness SS7 or anything like that.
The thing is, though that in this case you can have your cake, and eat it too. It's Entirely possible to illuminate an area while confining the light to produce little to no sky glow. In a lot of these situations the lighting is actually far more effective, producing dramatically less glare, more even illumination, and a reduction in shadowed areas.
The problem is that it takes actual thought, design, and quality fixtures to implement.
Dropping into the sun would have required escaping Saturn's gravity well-- which Cassini didn't have the fuel to do--
Actually escaping Saturn's orbit and going into solar orbit was one of the possible end-of-mission scenarios. When they were looking at the options, it would only have required 5-35m/s of delta-v, well within Cassini's capabilities. However, having a planetary probe in heliocentric orbit doesn't get you much science, as its instruments aren't designed for that kind of thing. At most they would have had a semi-long term observation of the solar wind, which can be done with missions that are much easier to maintain and control.
In the end, the wealth of data obtained by the final proximal orbits to Saturn were considered to be the best bang for the buck at the end of the probe's lifespan. The final retirement option chosen required about the same delta-v as an escape from Saturn, but achieved a whole lot more than just drifting around for ever.
Yet it doesn't stop us from dropping dozens of probes and landers onto Mars and Venus...
As I mentioned above, there is an entire policy (and in fact a portion of the organization) dedicated to planetary protection. Surface landers, such as what are sent to Mars (and in the future Europa and/or Enceladus) are required to go through very strict decontamination regimens before they are launched. In addition to being assembled in clean rooms (as are all the probes), they are baked/irradiated/cleaned with caustic chemicals/etc... prior to launch to sterilize them as much as possible. They don't want to discover life on another planetary body, only to realize that it's life they brought with them.
Venus is a slightly different beast, its surface conditions are so inhospitable (sulfuric acid rain, 400+C temperatures, etc...) that there is not much of a worry about possible contamination. The conditions would denature/destroy all known forms of life present here on Earth.
The larger orbiters (Cassini, Galileo, and Juno) are a) a lot harder to sanitize to the same degree and b) are orbiters not intended to settle on a planetary body that could possibly harbor life. They're not cleaned to the same degree, so the general policy is to dispose of them safely so that there is no chance that they will impact a protected body. Due to the complexity of the Saturn system, the safest way was to drop it into Saturn itself.
The other reason for this was that it is realistically a consequence of the final mission. For the past several months, Cassini has been plunging through the gap between Saturn and its rings. It did not have the fuel left to get out of that. This mission design gave the planetary scientists a wealth of new data on the rings, their mass, and composition.
Also, why should US citizens get any special treatment up here as Canadians do not get any special treatment south of the border.
Well, assuming NAFTA survives, there is special treatment both ways. Canada has an equivalent of the US TN visa that allows Americans with specified certifications and professions to obtain temporary residency in Canada, just like Engineers and so forth from Canada can legally work in the US (in Engineering positions) without much difficulty.
We have 43% incomes tax plus crazy corporate tax rates (Federal and Provincial), small businesses have all the same red tape as large ones which impedes growth.
Say what? I just looked at my most recent pay stub, and while I make a good middle class salary, the total deductions from my gross comes out to 24%, including CPP, EI, & Tax. In order to hit that 43% you would have to be well into the six figures, at which point you can bloody well afford it.
It was a worry over biological contamination. JPL (and NASA) have very specific protocols for planetary protection. Huygens went through some extreme decontamination prior to launch. Cassini, as an orbiting probe, not so much. Also, at launch we didn't know as much about the Saturn system and it's moons. The RTGs aren't really a concern, as they're not all that radioactive. Pu-238 is primarily an alpha emitter, and is mostly just toxic.
There are many use cases where the a security signature or certificate needs to be transmitted once and the data transmitted orders of magnitude more times. In which case, the computational overhead of establishing an encrypted channel needs to be accepted infrequently and for a relatively small payload instead of every time for a large payload.
A prime example of this is software updates. From Microsoft, from Apple, from whomever. Everyone should be keeping their systems as up to date as possible. That said, the downloads for these updates are huge, so leaving them in the clear allows transparent caching infrastructure to work properly. What about a MITM attack on the binaries? Well, you can resolve that by making the control link from update service to the update client HTTPS, and including sha256 checksums in the system to verify the cleartext download.
Yes, it's an edge case, but I run a network with about 100 users at a remote site, on the far end of a satellite link. For our corporate machines, we run our own internal WSUS, but for personal computers, they still need to update. Because Microsoft sends the body of the updates in cleartext, my WAAS system actually does a really good job of caching the updates, even for our non-domain users. If Microsoft were to go to SSL only, every patch Tuesday would wind up taking 2 weeks to complete and render the network virtually useless.
Unless you've ever done a live demo in front of a lot of people, nobody can quite understand how freaky it is to have stuff go wrong like this.
One of the products I worked with was an auto-acquire satellite dish. The idea is that you assemble the unit, hit the button, and the thing goes and finds your desired satellite in the sky. It was brand new, we were just breaking into that space (if you'll pardon the pun), and we had tested the hell out of it. It was pretty quick, and quite reliable.
Then we had to do a sales demo in front of a major distributor in East London. We get to London, I setup the thing at the Hotel and check it out, everything's going well. We pack up, and the next day go to the customer site. I put the unit together, showing how easy it is, and hit the go button, and immediately the thing starts going crazy. Well, the one thing we had missed? We had tested it entirely in the Western Hemisphere. There was a bug in the software that couldn't handle longitude on the east side of the prime meridian. Oops.
So, I just sort of carry on and say "and if you're in a GPS denied environment, you can pick a nearby city from the included database, and it will use that instead." and boom, it works.
As a former Sales Engineer, I always hated doing live demos in front of (potential) customers. Yeah, it's like Milli Vanilli lip syncing, but I would always always push for doing canned demos, or ones that depended on my skill. When something has a 0.1% surprise rate, that means it will happen in a demo 100% of the time.
Yes, but hearing aids draw a lot less power than something with a display, nor do they have the computing power of a lot of these devices. They're pretty incredible bits of engineering (if overpriced), but they're in a different league. Also, have you seen how much they charge for hearing aid batteries? All the other devices you cite are also significantly larger than what fits on your wrist.
It all depends on the use case. I spent a pretty significant chunk of change on a pair of Shure IEMs. Great quality sound, but more importantly, they're extremely comfortable to wear for long periods of time (at least for me), and they provide about as much isolation as industrial earplugs. When I was logging 140,000 airline miles a year, they're what kept me sane... And they were good enough to protect my hearing when I was bouncing around the sandbox in blackhawk helicopters.
The law needs to be changed so that batteries have a minimum 2 year warranty and must be user replaceable.
Great in theory, not so practical in the real world. The first part is fine, require an expected lifespan of n years with acceptable performance. But lets take the example of a fitbit, a pebble watch, or any of the other wearable devices. Even if the battery is theoretically user replaceable, they are either going to have to standardize on a format, and secondly the battery is going to need to be far more mechanically robust so that it doesn't explode when some idiot tries to mash it in with his screwdriver.
A different solution might be to require a manufacturer to offer battery service for a reasonable fee, for, say 5 years after the product was discontinued.
For any problem there is always a solution that is both simple, and wrong.
A brick wall has lots of different angles, and the probability is very high that at least some part of the brick wall will reflect the echo back to the source.
Assuming the mortar has been pointed properly, and so forth, a brick wall (and virtually anything else) will have a significant number of corner reflectors that will reflect ultrasonic frequencies right back to the transmitter (aka the bat). Think of it like the cat-eye reflectors on roads, or the corner reflectors left on the moon. No matter what angle you hit them with, after a double/triple bounce, it comes right back in the direction of its originator.
Are you thinking of the (now retired) stealth "fighter"? It was obviously faceted, mostly as an artifact of the computing power available when it was originally designed. The B-2 bomber, on the other hand, uses very specifically chosen curves and angles to avoid any corner reflections or edges that might reflect radar back.
In addition, there are significant quantities of radar absorbing materials used throughout (think graphite impregnated rubber, and so forth) to reduce the intensity of any reflected energy. The latter is why the maintenance on the aircraft is so expensive, and why they require specialized/airconditioned hangars. The materials do not hold up well in the environment, and need to be repaired constantly, with very specific techniques to maintain the stealth characteristics.
Organic foods are not more healthy than non-organic. It is a big scam for idiots like you.
Sure, but along with organic (which I don't really care about) comes more varieties. Things like your "heirloom" tomatoes or apples. Are they any better from a nutrition standpoint? unlikely. But they have different flavours, different textures, and can be much more visually interesting. IMHO it's also good to support the biodiversity that keeping these old/small varieties around.
It's a similar thing when it comes to cheeses and other dairy products. While I don't really care that it's "Organic" by the official definition of the word, it's more that organic cheeses tend to be more interesting, unpasteurized (which has a significant impact on some cheeses), and so forth compared to the standard variety. It's a similar thing when it comes to whipping cream. Standard cream contains various stabilizers to help it whip consistently, but at the expense of texture. The organic stuff I buy has more milkfat, none of the stabilizers, and produces what I consider a nicer result.
Lastly, in the case of animal products (Dairy, Poultry/eggs, and meat), it's pretty typical that the "Organic" choices are also the more ethical choices, where the animal had a better life.
So yeah, I'll buy a reasonable amount of organic food, but not because it's organic, but because of the other properties that are correlated to it.
Tofu, raw milk cheese and amber ale.
I tried going to my local cheese shop, but they were sold out of everything.... and that damned bouzouki player...
Well, yes and no. In a previous job, I was the primary after sales support and training Engineer for the company. The end result is that I built a very strong relationship with a number of our customers. Part of the role of our sales people was to build and maintain those relationships because, well, it's always easier to sell something to a happy, existing customer than it is to build a new relationship. In the industry I was in, the smallest sale we usually made was in the low six figures, and we made fair margin on each sale.
The thing that annoyed me, though, is often I did a significant amount of work to get the sale... Heck, in more than a few occasions, the customer would come to me and say "We've found an extra 400,000 euros in our budget, how should we improve our system?" it always kind of annoyed me that even when I was managing a significant portion of the relationship, and coming up with the ideas, and being that "Trusted Advisor" to the customer, I didn't get a slice of the pie.
"what do the HECK do they have *300 models* for?!?!?!?!
Volkswagen Auto Group is one of the largest vehicle manufacturing companies on the planet.
Between VW, Audi, Seat, Skoda, Porsche, Lamborghini, Bentley, Bugatti, Ducati, MAN, and Scania, plus world-wide distribution of different models, 300 seems on the low side.
It all depends on the situation, I suppose. One of my hobbies is sailing (I have a 27' sloop), and the basic rule on the water is that if someone is in distress, you respond to it if you are able, and it is safe to do so. This is a tradition that is almost as old as history itself. The last one I responded to was a guy in a power vessel with a dead engine, and slowly drifting towards rocks. I passed within a few feet of him, tossed him a line, and took him under tow.
That said, in the modern era, this is usually done in coordination with the coast guard. When a distress call comes in, they're up on the radio asking for any available vessel to respond. In some cases, they just want to have additional eyes on the scene, and in other cases to search and/or perform what rescue is possible until they arrive on scene.
One of the more interesting calls I ever heard, though, was the Coast Guard looking for someone who would be willing/able to take command of a 35' sailboat in one of the local bays. From what I could gather, what was going on is that a husband and wife had been out, he got injured and subsequently evacuated, and she wasn't comfortable single-handing the boat to get herself and it to the nearby town so she could join her husband. I was already 3 hours away at that point, but otherwise I'd have offered my services.
Is this the same as a disaster area? No, but it is a situation where "civilians" are performing rescue/safety type tasks, at the direction and usually in coordination with the authorities.
Could somebody please tell me why the h*** a phone needs a barometer?
The barometric sensor also gives you altitude. For things like HealthKit, it's how the phone counts flights of stairs. It also gives the phone a way of knowing what floor you're on for location manager. GPS gives you this in the open, but the other positioning techniques used indoors don't.
Your own examples show that national registration programs work just fine.
Well, yes and no. The international agreements set out standards for these registries, and the interchange of data between them. The national authorities collect and maintain the data, and make it available to international partners, under the agreements and treaties organized through the organizations.
Lolwut? I checked here in Norway and even though all commercial craft are required to have it I found an old article saying 90% of private boats don't have VHF radio. With the spread of cell phones and towers it's probably even less today. If anything it's a counter-example that registering large ships is fine but trying to register all boats would be completely ridiculous.
I've never encountered a vessel beyond a typical open fishing boat that didn't have a Marine VHF. You'd be considered to be radically unsafe to go out without one. A cell phone is fine, but doesn't work out at sea, also a cell phone doesn't summon all the other boaters around you, who are the ones best able to rescue you should shit go wrong.
Further, Cell phones don't allow you to monitor VTS when navigating through a busy port, nor do they allow you to call for bridge raises, or other things that are required to conduct safe navigation of a recreational vessel. They're a great adjunct, but they do not replace VHF.