What's the difference?

While this sometimes pays off, when circumstances line up correctly, it is vital to keep the limitations in mind:

Lower cost has made it much more likely that random bystanders have some level of video recording, rather than none; but entities with ample resources also take advantage of reduced costs, which is why, say, nontrivial areas of the developed world are effectively saturated with automated LPR systems. There is a win for those cases where it previously would have been the word of someone who counts vs. the word of some nobody; but elsewhere reduced costs and improve capabilities make having a big budget and legal power even more useful.

Improved surveillance only changes the game at the 'evidence' stage. If legal, public, or both, standards aren't sufficiently in your favor, improved evidence is anywhere from irrelevant to actively harmful. You can have all the evidence you want; but if the DA refuses to indict, or the 'viral' pile-on targets the victim rather than the aggressor, it doesn't help you much. Had McHenry's tirade been a bit cleverer, or her target a shade more unsympathetic, odds are good that the attendant in question would be being hounded as we speak.

Because "I may not like you, but I don't want you dead."

That kind of thinking is what makes us humans better than gods, who tend to be rather vengeful.

But not as good as oxen. Which are really good when slathered and barbecued.

That's a good thing. At least oxen exist.

Which drives costs up, often quite radically.

When you build something for your own company, the goal is to get as good quality as feasible within time and budget constraints. Next year's salary depends on it.

When you build something as a bidding contractor for the government, the goal is to reduce your costs by as much as you can get away with and exceeding the budget with as much as you can get away with.
It doesn't matter if what you deliver is utter crud as long as you can get away with it. Politicians ensure that next year, you will be able to bid again, and if your bid is the lowest, get the contract. At which point you hire the cheapest unskilled labor and subcontractors that can do the job and no more. Quality, shmality.

Rather the opposite. WIth the "libtards" truly in charge, there would be no outsourcing and subcontracting, and NASA would hire people to build things themselves.

The republicans are the ones that demand outsourcing and paperwork that often equals half the total costs. Because heavens forbid if a government agency did something that private companies could do. That is considered anticompetitive theft by the right. Which is why NASA can't do much themselves anymore, and get less bang for the buck.

I'm pretty sure that letting the contractors bilk NASA is the point of the exercise at this stage. The SLS isn't referred to as the Senate Launch System for nothing.

The article does not mention where the cost of this error is going to fall. This seems like an important detail. On a sufficently complex project, one of the bevy of subcontractors fucking something up isn't a huge surprise; but I would be very, very, disappointed if NASA wasn't able to contract sufficiently vigorously to make the vendor eat the cost of delivering the goods as specified, rather than paying them for their effort no matter how well or badly they do.

It's like the beloved classic '42.zip'; but can be delivered directly over the minecraft server protocol and will be naively parsed by the server, no social engineering required... Never trust the client.

Alas, the only known emergent sentience is the one that exists in the neuron colony inside each of our skulls; but there are some pretty damn cool sub-sentient emergent behaviors even in quite limited organisms. Bacteria in biofilms do some very impressive things, as do slime molds when they form masses.

It's too bad that (to the best of my knowledge, and I've hunted a bit), no organisms have evolved to exploit RF signalling. It's not inconceivable, loads of organisms use electrical signalling internally, a fair number have magnetic sensory structures, and a variety of common metals are amenable to biological chemistry if you need a better antenna; but that's the sort of thing that would make linking multiple nervous systems with reasonable speed and without direct contact possible.

I would hope that, should any impropriety be found in the contracting process, that the superintendent and any collaborators are dealt with as harshly as possible.

As for Apple, I'd be curious to know how much terminating the deal would involve for them. Obviously they'd rather have the sales than not; but there is a big difference between 'not making sales we had previously expected to make' and 'large piles of used inventory being returned and/or inventory prepared for this specific contract now without a destination.'

Particularly if it is only the former, Apple might well cave(not for honor's sake; but because an 'iPads in Education Program a Giant Clusterfuck; Lawsuits Fly!' is not a headline that Apple PR wants running any longer than necessary); if it's the latter they might be harder to convince.

In fairness to Apple, they have been working to improve the situation, and things are better now; but the state of the possible when this program started(~2 years ago) was rather less pleasant. They started tightly wedded to the 'device basically has one user, who has an account directly with Apple and a CC number on file' model; and it has been a rather slow path to getting support for a model where things like 'applications owned by the institution' actually works smoothly.

Apple's first-party support for remote management is still better than Android's; but their grip is tight enough that it is them or nothing, while Android is all over the map; but 3rd parties can actually offer options without the keys to the OS.

Wow, asking you to do the work so that they can deliver a sales pitch is really, really, nervy.

Are you running something in-house(or off the shelf but fairly heavily specialized) enough that they couldn't just put together an equivalent test environment on their end and use that for the sales pitch, or are they actually that lazy and entitled?

We certainly deal with doing the various things required to make what our users choose work; that's sort of what they pay us for; but I wouldn't have imagined a salesweasel demanding that I set up their tech demo for them.

Tendrils, not tentacles.
Enceladus, not enchilada.

Hasn't the future of 'open' android always looked bleak, more or less by design? At the bottom of the stack, we have SoC vendors who don't give a damn, handset OEMs who don't give a damn and/or actively prefer that older handsets remain as outdated as possible so you'll buy something new, and carriers who have largely the same incentives as handset vendors; but with their own crapware. This ensures that hardware support is spotty and typically weak for anything except whatever the device shipped with(and it's a moot point on the cryptographically locked devices). Markedly worse than the PC world in terms of vendor helpfullness or ability to do much of anything without a BSP or cobbling blobs together from vendors with slightly longer update support windows.

From the top of the stack, the 'free' parts of android are basically Google's hardware abstraction layer for google play services, and getting steadily more so.