Here's a thought, a trend doesn't need to reverse for it to be affected. Yes accident rates are declining. I'd wager they'd decline faster if people spent less time staring at their phones while driving.

But hey you know better than all the research right?

Think embedded. A device in complete sleep state can be powered for eons on a battery. Waking, doing whatever it needs to do and then going back to sleep waiting for the next interrupt is critical to battery life. In the micro-controller world the difference in battery life of 2 seconds of wake-up time can mean the difference between swapping out your batteries in a day or in a year. I have not very fond memories of counting how many cycles various assembly instructions will take to ensure the CPU on small micro controllers isn't awake for more than a few microseconds to meet some power requirements. The prospect of running a small linux machine the same way is quite interesting.

20min vs multi-hour flight times. You do not want to use quads for search and rescue unless the search area is VERY small.

Search and rescue is not about flying down in between trees or careful manoeuvring, it's about flying high and getting an areal view of any signs of life. As for your definition of "decent search radius" in the reply below, a person can walk out of linear range of a quadrocopter in about 2 hours, and that's not taking into account moving back and forward or searching a grid.

Typical search areas are in the orders of hundreds of square km. You'll be there all year with your quad searching that area.

Sorry you're scaring me now. Are you saying there's a scenario where you would make a change to a WMD without a form of change control?

I'm sure I missread what you were intending to write but if not, please tell me which country you are so I can stay the heck away.

So am I. I'm a chartered engineer and registered with the government in my country as all engineers are required to be. That charter requires amongst other things to act ethically in the profession at all times and that is actually something that I signed.

See that's how "professional" jobs work in countries which treat them as a profession. Not just engineers either, medical professionals in this country typically display signed copies of the hippocratic oath on their wall too. That's the difference between building something, and working as a professional, and I'm quite sad for you.

As for killing people? I worked in defence briefly. My job was actually protecting people by building instruments of war. You're not ethically bound to ensure your device can't ever harm, just that it doesn't harm the user when used as intended. If you actually killed one of the people using your device as intended then you should be in jail.

No we're not talking unskilled workers here. An engineer even in the middle of the GFC could have easily stood up and left their employer and found work in short notice.

No people don't hold that value in general. That's what sets most professions apart from engineering. In many countries around the world a professional engineer needs to be registered with the government and can't sign away any responsibilities to anyone other than another professional engineer. The responsibility of the profession is that you act ethically at all times. If you can't do that, and you worry about feeding your children (oh the poor think of the children comment, do you work for Fox News by chance?) then you should change profession to something less demanding on your weak mind.

Also there are ways of saying no to management without your poor children going foodless.

No it was not either or. It is never either or. See part of this thing called ethics is to not act unethically at the request of others. It's part of the charter of being a professional engineer. If you can't say NO to the people who are paying you then you have absolutely no business being a professional engineer.

Quite the opposite actually.

Do you staff an operation 24 hours to have people sit on their arses doing nothing? Or do you staff during the day and provide on-call support for rare occasions when something goes wrong?

The former will land you a one way ticket to bankruptcy in the face of competition who can make sensible staffing decisions. Your complaints about running things on the cheap is really falling flat when I see almost weekly instances in the news paper of more job losses, and more companies shutting down and moving production elsewhere.

Right so your argument boils down to:

Phones provide information for plebs and access for experts to do some serious debugging.
Computers provide access for experts to do some serious debugging.

Therefore computers are better.

Thanks I've heard enough.

Not a hero. An engineer has a responsibility to act ethically. It's part of what makes the profession ... err professional. A cover up to save face of management is not something that should have been done under any circumstance.

And following on that I fully expect software engineers to be held to account in a similar way. If the Heartbleed bug was silently fixed and then historical logs messed with to make it look like it never existed in the first place then the person responsible should have their name in lights.

Professional Engineers have an obligation to act ethically, not an obligation to be right all the time. Software engineers and other professionals in the IT industry should be held to the same account.

The world doesn't need to hear about screw-ups, it does however need to hear about cover-ups.

Yes. Well nearly. That is a good thing. If these engineers were found to act unethically in this regard they should be punished. Where I live professional engineers are registered and the charter of professional engineers put a great deal of weight on the ethical practice of engineering. Should the same go for software? Absolutely. I have long held the belief that software can be life critical at times and software engineers should be held to the same professionalism as any other form of engineering.

Now I said well nearly because these people didn't get their name in the news for mis-designing a part. They got their name in the news for trying to cover up the fact that they mis-designed a part and potentially put the public in danger in the process. I don't believe they acted alone since it would take more than 2 people to pull off something like this unless GM really has no oversight structure, but if a software engineer made a mistake that was discovered to potentially cause a fatality and then attempted to cover it up by messing with the system so it looks like the bug never existed then by all means they should definitely have their name up in lights.

They need to be bloody hot before they get to that point. Most problems which are capable of destroying the battery are detectable by monitoring current, voltage, and temperature. The rest are the result of physical battery damage which can not be fixed by isolating the supply.

Try it yourself. Short the terminals of a fully charged Li Ion or LiPo battery briefly. It won't burst into flames. Hooked the terminals together for about 20 seconds on the other hand and you have a problem.

You mock the poster yet a lot of people are in this situation. One of the biggest problems we have in Australia at the moment is rising electricity prices (nothing to do with carbon emissions, but rather to do with infrastructure spending). Yet there are people going broke with the 300% increase in electricity costs. Sure it's not everyone, but people in general are on edge, we've just crept out of a global economic fuck-up, manufacturing in this country has gone down the shit, and the cost pressures are being felt more and more.

Something's going to give, and you can see clearly what that is: Donations to disaster appeals and health research is number one, green energy is number two. Both of them are classed in the average person's view as something we can invest in tomorrow when the finances are looking a bit better.

People look out for number 1 first.