the government which should have the most influence, and over which the electorate should have the most control, should start at the local level.

Like an HOA?

The safest strategy for connecting everything in your home to the internet is....don't.

Why the fuck do you need to connect your front door lock, your coffeemaker, and your refrigerator to the internet?
Forget to lock your door? GO BACK AND LOCK IT. People have been doing it for 1000 years and the world continues to spin.
Don't want to get up in the morning to turn on your coffeemaker? Either a) get up and stop being a pussy or b) get one of the umpteen programmable ones, or c) just plug your damn coffeemaker into a christmas-light timer set to power up before you wake up.
Want your refrigerator to tell you when you're almost out of milk or better still, to automagically order restocks of food? LOOK INSIDE IT. Decide what you need to buy. THEN GO TO THE STORE. You'll meet actual humans there, and interact with them. I suspect there's more actual human value to that than to the supposed minutes you'll save (so you can what, play more video games? Do some more work emails?) not doing those things.

One of the basic ideas of agile dev is to get a partially-working system in the field ASAP. Doing so lets you figure out much sooner (10% into a project) that the design requirements are wrong, and that you need to rethink what you're doing. In this case, the loop wasn't closed - there were plenty of early signs that it was going wrong, but the project just kept going forward without reevaluating the basic requirements (VTOL being the most obvious case).

I don't think that means agile dev won't work for aerospace generally. It's more an indication that the organizations involved (governments and military contractors) are too heavy to handle an agile process: imagine trying to go back to congress once a month to get the requirements updated based on dev feedback. Smaller, independent companies like SpaceX can manage a much faster, cheaper cycle on the space side, and I think it's possible for a new military aero supplier to do the same.

That wasn't only seen in hindsight. It's obvious that adding complicated, heavy components to something that's supposed to be fast and reliable is going to create problems. It was more of a "let's see how well we can apply modern materials and design to make this work" kind of thing... Initial tests showed it was possible, but a bit further into the program it was clear that it was still too much of a tradeoff to be worthwhile.

The new Microsoft.
Embrace. Decay. Try Again.

Politics seems to conflict with the engineering process.

We make a prototype and test it. Then we fix the problems and try again.
It is rather expensive and time consuming. But it is the process. Aircraft are not your standard PC there are factors that are still not easily simulated.

Well said, and of course, ever since the days of colonialism we have largely celebrated with goods from overseas, only now we sometimes pay for them.

A very thoughtful answer, which they will promptly ignore.

Having actually read some of the article, I notice that they confuse management with leadership. Any idiot can management - managers wouldn't be able to otherwise - but leadership is harder. Perhaps it is best expressed (accidentally) by an appalling manager I once had: "Managing engineers is like herding cats". What he meant was simply that he found it impossible; but without realizing it, he also showed that he hadn't understood leaderhip.

To the typical manager tries to do, is herding people like they were sheep; theis may work if your staffs are disenageged or simply don't have their own opinion about things. Cats, of course, DO have their own opinion, just like engineers, and will do what they want (just like engineers) - you have to LEAD a cat. A leader shows the way by going first, and engineers (as well as cats) follow because they think it is worthwhile. The problem facing most managers is that they can't lead engineers, because they themselves don't have the necessary insight; in that situation, you either become a poor manager who tries the sheep farming approach and fails, or a good manager, who understands that his job is to act as the barrier against the crap that comes from the rest of the organisation, so his engineers can get on with the important things in life.

All in all, I don't think a real engineer will see management as a step up, except in terms of pay, but many engineers can become good leaders in the real sense.

Yeah, the secret hacking method turned out to be "roll two 6-side dice, if you get over 10, you break in, under 6 and you're BUSTED."

Can't tell your boss you made that dumb a mistake, so you've got to escalate the charges somehow.

I've never had the original game, but I acquired various expansion cards over the years. It was sort of a Magic the Gathering with cards written in the style of Robert Anton Wilson, the X Files, and random paranoid conspiracies. Don't let them immanentize the Eschaton!

Your own front yard, or back yard, or the street, of course, preferably with illegal fireworks. Or the beach. As a friend put it, for any holiday celebrating the overthrow of the government, the question of whether your fireworks are legal simply shouldn't come up.

Most of California's way too dry to allow the things, but there's one town near San Francisco (Pacifica) that's always wet enough they're not worried about moderate levels of fireworks, so the local fire department sells them, and you're allowed to set them off down on the beach, and in practice locals also set them off on the street. Several friends have lived there, and we've had a few good July 4th parties and a Canada Day party (too foggy, but lots of fun; it's July 1, and it was the weekend that year.)

My town used to have a freeway exit that was closed for construction, so there was a big pile of dirt twice as high as the bridge is now, and the neighbors would all take our lawn chairs up to the top to watch fireworks, including the official town shindig (minus the traffic), and the amusement park down the road, a couple of towns north and south, and the illegal backyard fireworks. Another place I lived was on a bay, and for some big firework years we could go down to the dock and see fireworks from a bunch of different towns across the water.

A few towns I've lived in had fireworks that involved driving somewhere to watch them, which might or might not involve horrendous traffic going there, but always involved horrendous traffic leaving. Not worth it.

Even if you're just changing focus rather than the direction your eyes are pointing, you're looking away. There's very little information while driving which is so essential you can't flick your gaze away for a fraction of a second (you'd better be doing that anyway to check your mirrors). If traffic is that tight, you don't need to be looking at your speed, just stay with the flow. Your fuel gauge isn't going to suddenly leap from half-full to empty (if it does, you have other problems).

That said, a blinky light on the side mirror as a blind spot warning can't hurt, and maybe an unobtrusive but visible "master caution and warning" light could light up at the bottom of the windshield if some other instrument needs attention.

That said, for a fighter (or other high-performance aircraft) pilot who has to track multiple things simultaneously (where's the enemy? which weapons are armed, do they have a lock? what's my attitude after all this dogfighting?), a HUD is invaluable -- and said pilots are carefully selected and undergo a hell of lot of flight training and then a hell of a lot of training in using the HUD (and there's also an auditory component to that).

I used to think that a hands-free phone should be fine when driving, since I was used to a fair bit of radio chatter while flying a plane.

But there are significant differences: radio chatter while flying is about the flying -- you're giving or getting info about your flight from ATC, if you're in formation you're discussing with the other aircraft where everyone is relative to each other and what your about to do, etc. You're not having a discussion about Junior's day in school or what John and Mary are up to or the latest server crash at work. One keeps your attention focussed on flying, the other distracts you from proper driving: where's your head at?

The other thing is that driving in typical traffic you should be paying as close attention to what the other vehicles are doing as if you're flying in close formation with a bunch of other planes. The latter is unlikely except for a very few pilots under special circumstances, most of the time in a plane you're at least many seconds (or minutes) away from other aircraft or obstacles (except landing or takeoff -- and you're generally not talking to anyone outside the cockpit at that point unless they're feeding you info about it.)

The latter is why we've had autopilots on aircraft for decades but nothing much better than cruise control (about equivalent to a wing leveller in terms of percentage control) on cars -- most of the time planes are in a much simpler environment.

If you're driving a car under IFR rules there's something seriously wrong with you.

Sure, every pilot with some instrument training knows to trust the instruments when he can't see anything out the windows -- he also knows he's got ATC tracking him, helping him navigate and warning of other traffic or potential trouble (like t-storms).

If you're driving a car when you can't see out the windows you're a fucking loony, and a danger to everyone else out there. If you're relying on looking at the instruments (and hey, a GPS will work just fine in thick fog) instead of out the window, well, I just hope you run off the road quickly (oops, map was out of date) before you hit somebody else.

Original poster wasn't talking about IFR -- obviously there's no point looking out the window in that case (if you're in cloud, you couldn't even see the wingtip).

But you're not going to get a new pilot flying IFR, because it takes a while to get the training and experience needed for that rating. Thing is, because a new pilot doesn't have the experience to know what attitudes look like (where's the horizon on the window? which way is it tilted? what sound is the engine making? etc), he's tempted to keep checking the instruments ... except that he hasn't figured out (at an intuitive level) all the interrelationships yet. He's looking at the attitude indicator to figure out if he's going up or down -- when he should be paying attention to the airspeed. He's focusing on "stepping on the ball" to coordinate his turns instead of looking out the window for that traffic he might be turning into and what the horizon is doing relative to the bug smear on the windshield.

Sure, you should be checking the panel periodically -- just like you should be checking the instrument panel periodically while driving -- but if you're VFR (and all driving is VFR, although with different minimums) you should be focussed on what the vehicle (and the others around it) is doing now (and about to do), not what the instruments are telling you it did a little while ago.