real engineers build things that can kill people if they do things wrong. they have all the same pressures from management, but they still (theoretically) have standards, and licensing bodies, and like, rules and stuff.
This is part of the current problem. Software Engineers are writing lots of things that can kill you and we don't have any licensing body or laws requiring a PE to make specific applications. It generally means we can't be held responsible, but that cuts both ways. If we're working on a serious application we have nothing to hold back from management if we know the design doesn't pass muster. A PE must attach his signature to his work to approve it so a PE has leverage in the ability to refuse to do so unless the work meets his professional standards. As software engineers they can just take our work any day of the week and throw it into a production system and if we don't like it we can GTFO. So to sum up, we have the same pressures, the same dangers and moral responsibilities, with none of the leverage over management or our peers to enforce professional standards.
No. As a Software Engineer myself I see this 'blame the management not the engineer' mindset as an unacceptable abdication of responsibility. Management isn't the technical expertise, the engineer is. If your a Civil Engineer PE and your MBA boss asks you to sign off on a design, that's great and all, but you don't sign off unless you're sure that the designs are sound and acceptable according to your trained, professional opinion. The company is paying you to make that call honestly, they did not and can not simply buy your signature unless you have no sense of honor or integrity to your profession, in which case you shouldn't call yourself an engineer in the first place and can rightly look forward to being 'thrown under the bus' for signing off on a design that causes harm to others.
In your bridge example you state the designs are cross-checked and reviewed by a slew of other engineers. Guess whose job that is to make sure that's all been done properly before they sign their name on it? The CE with the PE license that's in charge of the bridge. If management doesn't give him the resources to have the designs cross-checked and reviewed he doesn't sign and the bridge doesn't open. He most certainly does not piss and whine about management privately, pocket the money, sign the design and say it's the fault of the MBA's who don't know anything about bridges when 20 people die on it.
Are management dicks? sometimes. Is it easy to stand up to them? No. Might there be negative consequences for doing the right thing and acting like a professional? Yes. Welcome to real life and having responsibility of a profession rather than a job.
This is the Christian equivalent of Embrace, Extend and Extinguish
That doesn't make sense on any level. How does one extend science with vendor lock in and get everyone to switch to it before they kill it off? Are you telling me the Big Bang theory (first put forward by a catholic priest) is a clever extension of science to lead us down the wrong path before they somehow destroy all scientific knowledge completely? You can't throw that phrase around just because you hate the person/group embracing whatever idea you also like and are thus faced with having to live in a world where your enemy isn't quite as ubiquitously evil as you'd prefer them to be. Can't let that happen or next thing you'll be self reflecting on whether the stereotypes you hold true are correct and you should be hating them at all!
Why do you think that older people who have a good grasp of history say that this (Homeland/Security/Terrorism theater) can only lead to Interment camps and execution squads?
Because they have a less firm grasp of the slippery slope fallacy?
Funny that the people railing against things like this are so quick to call upon TEH CONSTITOOSHUNZ for debating power and feel-goodiness, but are more than willing to quickly point out how little power it has when someone thinks to actually look it up.
There's no contradiction in saying the Constitution which is the supreme law of the land has a lot of power while at the same time correctly pointing out that the pre-amble of the Constitution has little to no bearing on established law and neither grants nor limits federal power or individual rights. From Wikipedia:
The Preamble serves solely as an introduction, and does not assign powers to the federal government,[1] nor does it provide specific limitations on government action. Due to the Preamble's limited nature, no court has ever used it as a decisive factor in case adjudication,[2] except as regards frivolous litigation.[3]
You might as well be mad that they consider the Articles of the Constitution important but for some reason refuse to recognize moral obligations cited in Sesame Street Episodes
Scary question: at what level of certainty do they let the guy piloting the UAV push hellfire missile button based on this platform's "identification" of an enemy?
I think the idea of this is "higher then currently employed". For example, an analyst tracking a target that walks under a bridge and out the other side might be confident enough to give the go-ahead but assisted by a software bio-metrics package the analyst can be warned that based on height calculations the guy that just came out on the other side of the bridge isn't the target being tracked unless he just grew 3 inches.
what part of 'remote control from half a mile away' does supervision deter?
The part where you have to break the seals on the machine, take it completely apart, hook up circuitry to it, close it back up, and re-seal the now broken tamper-proof tape, let the election run, break back in, break the seals on the machine again, pull your electronics back out of the machine to eliminate evidence and then reseal the machine and fix the tamper-proof seals again.
After Goliath's defeat, giants ceased to command respect. - Freeman Dyson