A safety engineer isn't the right person for that task. The person for that role will take input from the safety engineer along with the rest, and needs to be smart enough to understand what's being said and to provide a path forward.

The project engineer and the safety engineer are at-loggerheads. It's the program manager's job to work with them to find a way forward.

That's what I was thinking too.

I've known engineers that were good at business, that were great at business, and that were absolutely terrible at business.

I've known business-types that were reasonably good at managing their departments/organizations, that were great at it, and that were terrible at it, very easily taken-in by suckups and the nature of workplace socialization.

And the problem is that it can be very difficult to know exactly how someone will behave in a role. It sounds like the legacy of the McDonnell-Douglas capture-merger was that the aircraft equivalent of tech-bros got to be in charge. The damn-the-consequences-it'll-get-fixed-later mentality only really works for the short term. The revolution into jet passenger liners has showed us that these products last for decades and the engineering behind them and thus the corporate mindset behind the development and manufacturing process needs to be similarly long-term.

The top brass at Boeing don't themselves absolutely need to have been engineers designing product or working quality or doing floor work with the assemblers, but they need to be able to understand when they're being lied-to, or when there are lies of omission, or when the arguably guilty parties are deflecting rather than doing their jobs properly.

Unfortunately the Boeing shareholders are also partly to blame, because they are looking for short-term profits in a business whose profits are based on product development cycles that require basic research and years of development just to bring designs to maturity, plus the manufacturing time and order fulfillment schedules for individual units that take months to assemble and deliver. When a company in this sort of market sees its owners switch to an eye on short-term profit, that short-term profit only really happens once before the whole thing starts coming apart at the seams.

The new upper management needs to work the stockholders as much as working the departments, suppliers, and employee groups.

What, to you, makes a PC exciting?

Last time I found computer hardware exciting I was buying surplus-before-their-time high-end dual Xeon workstations from the local college surplus when school programs were closed down prematurely or unexpectedly and the equipment sent for disposal. That was the better part of fifteen years ago now.

I'm using a seven year old laptop at home and it's still more computer than I actually need. What I do need are physical page-up and page-down keys, SD-card readers, and copious numbers of USB ports, but fewer and fewer manufacturers are catering to that in their laptop lineups unless I want to go with a monstrously-huge device.

Mercedes and Porsche weren't illuminating indicator lamps denigrating other vehicles on the road as one drove around.

I started with the HTC Dream badged as the T-Mobile G1. I miss the physical keyboard. I was a Palm Pilot user and the biggest advantage Android and Google's services offered were OTA synchronization and the ability to use any device with a web interface to perform updates to my phone's content, like calendars, contacts, maps, e-mail, etc.

The rest of this stuff is largely a matter of style to me, not of substance.

If it was limited to "an old Android phone" that would be one thing, but they're doing this to any Android interaction regardless of how new it is.

And that's why it's stupid. They are relying on their own proprietary protocols and then denigrating anyone that isn't using their proprietary protocols.

Spirit Areosystems is one of Airbus' subcontractors too. So of course the problems within the Boeing supply-chain could affect the Airbus supply-chain.

As was commonly the case during the DOS/Windows and MacOS era, many applications will only come to the Apple platform after the DOS or Windows platform proves successful. It didn't matter how slick or easy the Apple product was, the risks were higher and in that era of small teams or individual software developers it didn't make sense to pursue the higher-risk platform before the lower-risk one.

Frankly I'm surprised with these walled-garden models that this hasn't happened even sooner.

Being Classified is an actual... classification.

Being proprietary has no actual classification, and could refer to any of a number of classifications.

No we don't. "Late-stage" implies that we're approaching a limit for the insanity that businesses will come up with. I am under no such illusions that they can't continue to screw around in new and revolutionary ways for as long as capitalism exists.

Mmhmm.

Gas stations publish their prices on a huge sign at the street so when the customer pulls in, it's a known quantity. A decade or so ago most gas stations made the swap to LED signs that could be updated very easily, so if gas prices fluctuated during the day itself the store clerks could change them to reflect the new prices easily, or it could even be automated without requiring the clerk to do anything at all.

If a fast food restaurant doesn't publish its prices where potential customers can see them without having to wait in line first (think the drivethrough) then they're simply going to enrage their customers and drive them away. I have my choices of places to eat, and to be honest, fast food is already at risk of pricing itself out of being worthwhile for someone who has time for a sit-down lunch. Only the 'value' items are really cheaper these days. Wendy's might be conveniently located to where I work and usually provides my meal quicker than sitting down for service from a more traditional restaurant, but they're already borderline for value. If they do this then I'm simply going to budget the time to eat at other restaurants or will go to other fast-food chains that aren't unknown quantities.

The problem with the consumer-writable media was the use of organics in the substrate, organics which made the media cheap to manufacture but not enduring for the long term.

Inorganic media were developed, particularly for DVD and BD, and tended to be sold under monikers like archive quality . They also cost more and required writing devices capable of using them.

I had started getting into this as a way of archiving that which I've saved locally in case media servers died, but in the end it required a lot of my time.

Like the GP post I'm a skeptic, but that doesn't mean I can't be convinced. Unfortunately in order to convince me the technology will need to mature and be in service for long enough to confirm that it's truly a viable, durable solution, and typically by the time that happens we're moving on to whatever the next new hot thing is regardless of how good it is.

The cost to orbit has come down dramatically in the last decade. My expectation is that setting up the automated production process is harder than the launch, but if the product can be made much more efficiently in microgravity than on the surface, and if the machinery needed to perform the production can be standardized and used to just send-up, produce, and return, then it might not be as bad as it initially sounds.

Consider too, if they can integrate this into satellites that already are expected to have short service-lives, where it can piggyback up, do its thing, and then deorbit when the life of satellite is ended, that might further help.

It's nice to want things.

No, we spent 4% of GDP getting to the moon in the 1960s, if my math is correct, in 1969 alone that was around $40,000,000,000.

Inflation has been roughly a full order of magnitude since then. Are you prepared to spend $400,000,000,000 to send a half-dozen people to the moon?