The post under discussion was about the door plug incident.

As far as the 787 flight which, according to a passenger relaying what the pilot supposedly told them, lost instrumentation for 30 seconds. At this time we have little idea what actually happened. This incident may have been the result of a maintenance failure (the airlines are responsible for maintenance once Boeing turns the plane over), a "black swan" event caused by failure of a component that was fully tested and met all design standards, or any of a number of other things. I'd wait for the report from the relevant regulatory agency before jumping to conclusions.

Just because a Boeing airliner has a problem does not mean it's necessarily Boeing's fault.

Yes, Boeing does appear to need to tighten up its QA (although, driving to the airport is still far, far, far more dangerous than flying on a Boeing airliner operated by a US domestic carrier) to meet the hyper high standards modern "first world" air travel is held to. That, however, does not imply criminal behavior on the part of anyone.

There are always cost/benefit tradeoffs.

For example, requiring that every seat have a weight sensor and, if there's a butt in the seat, and the seat belt has been unfastened for more than 20 seconds an alarm is raised and the passenger is guilty of a crime would probably have prevented almost all the injuries on that "loss of instrumentation" flight -- yet, we are not willing to go to that expense or imposition and merely "recommend" rather than "require" that passengers keep their seat belts on whenever seated.

For another example, a 777 has three main hydraulic systems and each of them have some form of safeguards even within them. Any TWO can completely fail and the plane can still be safely flown and landed (with additional effort by the pilots and, for example, likely a less silky smooth touchdown). However if some day all three fail due to a very very rare, but possible, combination of failures (each of which is known to be possible) chance and results in a crash with deaths, would you think Boeing execs should be criminally charged because they didn't redesign the 777 to have ten redundant hydraulic systems (resulting in greater weight and maintenance costs and higher ticket prices)?

For that matter, do you think every driver who causes a fatal accident because they failed to anticipate a patch of "black ice" on a bridge in otherwise clear weather with no ice/snow on the "normal" roads should be convicted of manslaughter and imprisoned? After all, careful study of the weather, bridge construction, shade, thermal transfer, etc would have prepared the person to expect "black ice" and failing to do that study before embarking on their trip is what caused the accident. After all, people without advanced engineering knowledge shouldn't be driving.

Much as people hate to believe it, "good enough" applies to airplanes as well as everything else in life.

The US does have a safety net - no, it's not great and it's unlikely to result in a lifestyle that most people in the US would like to live (although, it beats the lifestyle from a "western" standpoint of many hundreds of millions of people worldwide).

Unemployment is low right now and jobs are plentiful - even low skill jobs in many areas. The alternative to working at Amazon is not (and should not be) sucking off the safety net - it's going down the street or moving to the next state if needed and getting another job. That's the choice I speak of.

Yes, most people in the US have little choice but to work to maintain the lifestyle they seek rather than a pretty dismal lifestyle. However they have the choice to work where they choose and, if necessary, to invest the time and energy to "upskill" to a better paying job. Realistically, it's ridiculous to to think that animals, of which humans are an example, won't spend most of their life working to feed, shelter, and procreate - that's their purpose in life. If no one needed to work to maintain the lifestyle they desire through some magical economic system, few would work and production would crawl to a halt. For example, few people would work cleaning sewer lines or pumping septic tanks as a hobby -- but these things need doing.

The US has a high degree of personal freedom and, with that, an expectation for people to earn their own keep if they are able to. Some, of course, choose to use drugs etc rendering them incapable of doing so, but that's their choice.

No one died in the "door plug" incident. Someone dying is an essential element of a "manslaughter" charge.

Perhaps there was a potential for death. But if you're in the development arena, do you think you should go to prison because you missed, for example, a defect during a code review and the defect could, theoretically, have caused a death?

Perhaps something like not properly recovering from a SQL insert failure caused by a deadlock in the underlying database in very rare circumstances resulting in the insert being silently swallowed and, subsequently, the possibility of a nurse giving an lethal overdose a few minutes later as they were unaware of the earlier drug administration -- even though all the bug actually caused was failure to charge a hospital patient $20 for one aspirin?

To imply that people who every day have the freedom to make a choice to go to work or not and even every minute of the work day have the freedom to make the choice to simply walk off the job (and get paid up through the last minute before they walked off) is dismissive of those who historically suffered from slavery and those, in some countries, who still do. It is, in fact, extremely insulting to such individuals.

The meaning of slavery is the practice or institution of holding people as chattel involuntarily and under threat of violence. It typically also results in being forced to perform labor of some form.

Not a single Amazon worker is a "slave" or anything close to it.

I've not looked beyond the /. summary, but...

Perhaps "signature" came up because a signature is what is used to validate that the person accepting a contract is, in fact, the person they claim to be. Traditionally this was a pen on paper (or stamp on paper) but now includes such things as digital signatures.

When claiming that another party entered into a contract there are couple things, among others, that the person making the claim needs to show:

(1) That the other party accepted the contract (vs. rejected it or simply didn't respond). This could be indicated by a "thumbs up" (vs. a "thumbs down").

(2) That the other party is who they claim to be rather than an imposter. This would traditionally be demonstrated by a "pen on paper" signature which is potentially compared to exemplars as needed. In the case of texting this could be simply that it is very likely that the person sending the text is the person who owns and uses the sending device exclusively.

be when possible ready and prepared to remove Timmy (where possible on an airplane it obviously isnt)

Timmy's parents should book flights only on Boeing 737 MAX 9s and make sure to sit near a plugged exit to simplify removing Timmy midflight.

Sometimes you need to transport babies.

Don't they fit in the overhead bins - at least if you don't overfeed them?

Generally I think "Constitutional originalists" and "conservatives" think these are good things while advocates of a "living constitutionalism" and "liberals" believe they are bad things.

Rational Democrats realize that they won't always be in the majority which is why they don't want to be the ones who squash the filibuster for legislation. They know it's quite possible that come January 20, 2025 Republicans will be in control of the Executive branch and both houses of Congress but won't have a 60 seat majority in the Senate. Without the filibuster, this would allow Republicans to pass anything they wanted for at least two years with barely a whimper from Democrats. Republicans feel similarly constrained because they know that Democrats will, some day, control the Executive branch and both houses of Congress.

Many remember that it was Reid, a Democrat, who used the "nuclear option" to eliminate the filibuster for all executive nominees' confirmation except for Supreme Court Justices. At the time, that probably seemed like a good idea to some although I warned at the time it was a bad idea that many may regret in the future.

Now I'm sure, if being honest, many regret Reid's actions as it greased the skids for the Republicans to extend it just slightly to include eliminating the filibuster for Supreme Court Justices with very little push back as, logically, it's hard to support eliminating the filibuster for some, but not all, nominees for lifetime appointments and the vast majority of cases that actually impact individuals are decided at the District and Circuit court levels anyway. The result has been Dobbs, Bruen. In the near future, it will likely also result in overturning more gun regulations at all levels and decimation of Chevron deference. The latter will result in elected members of Congress having to directly legislate on matters of importance rather than allowing them to shelter from accountability by delegating legislative power to administrative agencies which don't directly report to the voters and who don't get regular performance reviews at the ballot box.

It sounds like HP is pivoting to a new business model - that of compiling and selling "sucker lists" of gullible consumers to companies and scammers who find such lists very valuable in improving their "conversion rate".

If I could obtain a sizeable list of suckers who would fall for HP's deal as described here, I'd likely be very rich very quickly.

Four years of lost full time income seems like a pretty high stakes deal - esp. when you would acquire all those same skills, likely much better, by just working and not eschewing social contact for those four years.

If the CNC machine's operation is critical to the functioning of the company, bring it up with with management at higher and higher levels until the CEO says (usually more diplomatically than my exact wording here)

The IT policy that's in your way is so important that no exceptions are allowed - damn your CNC machine

or, alternatively, tells the VP responsible for IT

Karen, fix this ASAP!!! Efficient and cost effective operation of these CNC machines is critical to our success and your job is to help, not hinder, the company. Henceforth and at the CNC team's discretion, materials and time wasted by reboots of a CNC machine because IT insists it be connected to the intranet will be charged to your department - get back to me by EOB today informing me that the problem is now solved and how it was solved. Remember, the CNC team is your customer, not the other way around.

On the occasions where I have had the misfortune of working at a large corporation with annoying and disruptive IT rules, I've had success with similar strategies. Yes, it's a pain, but I've always gotten the problem solved.

For example, we told customers of our product (a relatively small portion of the corporate revenue but perceived as being a fairly outsized "future" for the company) to disable virus scanning on the directory we cached temporary files in. Yet our IT prevented us from doing so on machines we were using for performance testing/characterization. I never had to go above the IT director level to get that resolved (albeit, I had to rinse and repeat every six months or so as some audit caught the "non conforming" machines).

Or, for another example that's happened at more than one company I was at, is the edict that comes down from IT that

All software not on the IT approved list must be uninstalled from all machines.

At which point I do a quick audit of my dev machines and my group's dev machines and find various open source software (such as emacs, gnuplot, etc) that developers are using that are not on the "approved list" (mostly because IT can't find someone to pay for the product and 'support' - and the deniability that comes with that). I then send the list to IT (ccing the level above the drone whose issuing the edict) asking them to

Please verify that we must uninstall these products immediately. Be aware that, due to the resulting unanticipated decrease in productivity, we will have to extend existing schedule commitments (including those that external contracts are contingent on) so I will need to raise this up to the executive level.

They invariably respond with something like

Okay, for now you can keep these programs installed while we research these products.

I then follow up with

When is the review scheduled for completion?

to which the answer is usually something like (which they just make up having no idea what to do)

Within a month.

I then put an item in my calendar for one month in the future and when that's hit and no update has been received (and it never has been), send off a note along the lines of

I'm checking up on the status of the developer installed product list I sent one month ago - is the review completed and when can I expect to see the results as I need to know so I can adjust schedules we have made, and are continuing to make, based on productivity levels with all of these programs being available.

and usually get a response from someone in IT who dearly wants to stay out of the hornets' nest along the lines of

The review is ongoing, your group may continue using the programs on your list until it's completed.

It's never gone beyond that and no developer in my group has ever had to delete a single such program. Sure, I sometimes have to repeat this process once every year or two, but I've got it down to a science.

Similar techniques have worked in the past to get IT to stop nagging me (and eventually my boss) about me exceeding email quotas (which IT didn't dare enforce by just rejecting email to my inbox so was stuck with "soft edicts"). My boss eventually came to me and asks why he's being bugged about my email quota and I told him "I've x emails in my inbox from the several years I've worked here. From time to time I search through them looking for something from the past. It's true that probably on 10% of the emails in my inbox are likely to be needed, but I estimate it will take me 3 work days to identify and delete the other 90%. When would you like me to schedule that?" and I never again heard from anyone about my email quota and never spent any time purging "unneeded" emails.

Make it an economic argument with evidence (details on the latter is rarely needed - the drones making these rules don't understand how, you, the customer actually uses their "services"). That usually works. Once you've stood up and roared and embarrassed IT a couple times, things get much easier -- but make sure you're standing on firm ground, not just complaining because you "don't need no stinking badges". It is sometimes much more effective to be feared than loved (you can outsource those issues requiring "love" from IT to others when necessary).

I'm not a Windows expert (and would like to abandon it but Quicken and HR Block software preclude me from doing that completely), but why wouldn't the CNC application precede every run by a check for MS updates and, if any exist, apply the updates (followed by a reboot if needed) and then reset the 'Pause Updates Until' option to be 35 days in the future?

Is that not possible to do programmatically or would this not work (at least for jobs that take less than 35 days) for some reason?

You figure out all that stuff when you have your first apartment with roommates or your first job if you didn't figure it out earlier. Little about college life in particular "taught" me to do any of those things (pay bills, deal with social drama, manage time) and I doubt that anyone had to teach Prof. Volokh or that he's had any problems in "adult life" in those areas as a result of perhaps having learned those things at a slightly different time and in a slightly different way than you than you think is "appropriate".

Are you suggesting that those that don't go to college are doomed to lack all those skills?

You learn to manage time starting as a toddler if your parents are present and doing their jobs. You typically will observe your parents paying bills throughout your life unless your household is wealthy enough to have all that handled by a professional staff (in which case it's likely your bills in college are also being handled by that same staff). "Dorm drama" is little different from "playground drama" and "high school quad drama" (and, in my experience, there's quite a bit less such drama in college as most of the most obnoxious and drama filled kids don't seem to go to college).

I interviewed Prof Volokh shortly after his graduation w/his BSc and he seemed much more mature and much more "adult" than any other "freshout" I've ever interviewed - in fact, in most respects, he seemed more mature and adult than perhaps half of those I interviewed with ten years working experience who went through the "normal" route and graduated from college at an "appropriate" age.

I'd bet that he did less partying than his undergrad classmates, but then I knew people who did little or no partying as undergrads even they they were "appropriate age" yet they turned out fine (and probably with less liver damage than the rest of us).

Tell that to this guy. When he was 12 years old, he was a sophomore at UCLA and graduated when he was 15. He's been quite successful and independent. There's no evidence that I've seen that he had any problem adjusting to "real life".

What purpose would there have been in holding him back (except, perhaps, preventing people from being jealous of the fact that there was someone in the room smarter than they were and who was younger than them)?