Just because your own organization is flawed doesn't mean you are incapable of identifying similar flaws in another. NASA has, as post-event investigations showed, a lot of people who are very capable of doing good engineering work as well as investigative work despite the culture. I would argue they could also be very good at finding similar issues in other companies and recommending fixes.

Ignoring the humor in your post and not being pedantic that the LEM and Rover were two different items, NASA has a lot of experience with finding out what lead to a bad decision that result in significant, or catastrophic, failures and accidents. More to the point, if they used what was learned from investigations into what lead up to Challenger and Columbia they could shed a lot of light on GM's corporate culture and decision making process.

There is a little more to it than that if you want to be able to put P.E. after your name. To become a Professional Engineer (P.E.) you need to get a degree from an accredited university, pass an exam to become an Engineer in Training, have four years of experience under a P.E., and then pass a another exam. You can join a professional organization, in most cases, merely by paying dues. However, you do not need to be a P.E. to call yourself an engineer, unless you are performing certain types of engineering work; and many degreed engineers never get a P.E. because they do not need it in their careers.

Engineer has become somewhat of a generic term that can be used in many ways and doesn't represent any assurance of any sort of education level or certification. To your original point, the engineering profession missed the chance to establish a protective and benevolent licensure organization like doctors and lawyers to help them maintain higher salaries and limit competition. Had the done so you'd probably see a lot less offshoring and H1B visa work because they would not meet licensure requirements and the cost for doing so would make the jobs unattractive. Look at Doctors. To get a US license they need to pass an exam, complete a residency, assuming they can get a match, and meet other requirements no matter how long, or well, they have practiced medicine. The result is very few foreign trained doctors actually are able to ultimately practice in the US.

Exactly. I do not know about NTIS, but there are fee for service gov't agencies that charge other agencies for what they do. They differ from appropriated agencies, who get a fixed amount of money from the budget, in that they need to make enough to cover costs. If they don't, they ultimately need to cut expenses like any private organization. In addition, other agencies do not have to use their services, they can buy them on the open market as well if the cost is less.

INAL, but from my understanding of double jeopardy he could be retried. It appears to be a procedural error which would allow a retrial; in this case in the proper venue.

machines will get Linux to replace XP? I ask that because you will be the "guy who made us switch from MS" and take the rap for every problem that arises. Document mangled? Blame Linux (and your decision to switch). Missed email? That never happened in Outlook, must be Linux' (and the guy who made us switch) fault. I am not saying that such blame would be reasonable or even that you will get blamed, but there is more to switching than just finding a good distro. Ask yourself, "do I have the time and qualifications to take the issue start will arise, train staff, troubleshot problems, find replacement programs for all that we currently use, etc?"

Identify gender as female. I wonder what a transgender coder is worth?

There fixed it for you.

Aren't the camera videos automatically uploaded when the vehicle returns at the end of shift or when they return to the station? When I was on juries with video evidence they explained how the chain of custody was maintained so we would believe it to be an accurate depiction of events. The video files are kept for a while of evidence, so it would seem to a simple matter to see when an antenna was broken by seeing when the video degraded. As a bonus, some videos are really funny and would be you tube hits or make a great reality series. I mean, you'd think a police force would have at least one person who understands how to run an investigation. Unless, of course, you really don't want to pick a fight with your officers and their union and just want this to go away.

You don't precisely because they aren't medicine. If they were, you'd have to prove that they actually have some effect; and if they don't you can't sell them; which breaks your profit model. Instead you let people believe they work and thus sell them. It's similar to the natural supplements market in the US. They can't prove they work and thus don't want the FDA to regulate them, ad fight regulation under the banner "The Government wants to take your vitamins," which is a better slogan then "The government wants to stop you from wasting money on products that don't do what you think they do."

For uses where cost is a secondary consideration this technology would be useful. As for supplanting fossil fuels, this tech represents more of a price ceiling for fossil fuels because at some price pointy it becomes viable; just like any other fossil url sources that are expensive to extract from the ground.The real questions is how many kW are needed to produce fuels equivalent what can be refined from a barrel of crude oil. If say a 2gW nuclear plant could produce enough to be economically viable that would have significant political and economic impact world wide; especially on countries shoe economies are heavily dependent on energy exports.

While that is true, it really isn't an issue operationally. You can cram enough food onboard to last a long time, although towards the end powdered eggs get old. Given the space limitations inherent in a submarine it would make little sense to build in a food machine when the space could be better used to store real food.

Do they all have to be in the same medium? For example, could a sliding dead bolt plus sliding an icon on a hand held device be used to demonstrate obviousness?

Personally, while I realize the importance of the patent system I think it has gotten a bit out of hand. Rather than be a way to protect ideas they've become an offensive weapon against competitors; and while they may have always been used as such the current practice of adapting physical models to a digital world has made things worse, IMHO. I am not convinced that allowing patents on concepts that already exist and are in widespread use is a good idea.

Unfortunately I am at a loss as how to fix it. Perhaps rather than jury trials we should establish panels of legal and technical experts that would hear claims and the loser pays the fees; and if the patent holder loses the patent becomes invalid. Maybe adding a requirement that the patent actually be used in products or licensed within the first X years of issue or the patent becomes invalid. Beefing up the USPTO so they could do more in depth reviews would help as well.

Finally, I'm not sure juries could really understand the technical details of a patent to be able to assess prior art and obviousness. I say that because pif my experiences on a jury. We had a simple drunk driving case and the defense argued because roadside sobriety tests have a 30% false positive rate there was reasonable doubt as to guilt. Some of the jurors were buying that until I explained he failed 10 tests in a row and the odds of all of those being false positives were astoundingly low. Ultimately we convicted him; but if no one on the jury understood basic probability he may have walked. If jurors lack basic technical literacy I wonder how they can follow complex patent claims and be swayed by the best argument or emotions or who makes the most persuasive argument in the jury room.

In addition, H1B holders should be free to change companies after say six months without losing their visa. If companies are paying the prevailing wage then that should not cause problems for them; if they aren't then the free market will sort it out for them.

"Over at Microsoft on the Issues, Microsoft continues to lament the gap between computer programming skills and a willingness to work on the cheap of American kids, while simultaneously lobbying for more H-1B visas to fill that gap."

It's far cheaper to rent an H1B programmer who you can dump easily once their skills are outdated than to hire someone , train them to keep skills current, and pay based on demand for those skills.