I've infinitely had more blu-ray players fail than blu-ray discs fail.

ie, I've had two blu-ray players fail and I've never had a disc that stopped working.

I didn't get into vinyl but I did get into Laserdisc, and I use them for wall-art both at home and in my cubicle at work. I was able to buy replacement jackets meant for vinyl to put the actual discs into back on the shelf with the rest of the collection while the empty jackets are inserted into picture frames sized for 12" LPs, Laserdiscs happen to be the same size.

The only real headache with using Laserdiscs this way is that many widescreen releases saw the disc jackets branded as such. Those aren't quite as nice for the artwork on account of having the artwork itself letterboxed.

A safety engineer isn't the right person for that task. The person for that role will take input from the safety engineer along with the rest, and needs to be smart enough to understand what's being said and to provide a path forward.

The project engineer and the safety engineer are at-loggerheads. It's the program manager's job to work with them to find a way forward.

That's what I was thinking too.

I've known engineers that were good at business, that were great at business, and that were absolutely terrible at business.

I've known business-types that were reasonably good at managing their departments/organizations, that were great at it, and that were terrible at it, very easily taken-in by suckups and the nature of workplace socialization.

And the problem is that it can be very difficult to know exactly how someone will behave in a role. It sounds like the legacy of the McDonnell-Douglas capture-merger was that the aircraft equivalent of tech-bros got to be in charge. The damn-the-consequences-it'll-get-fixed-later mentality only really works for the short term. The revolution into jet passenger liners has showed us that these products last for decades and the engineering behind them and thus the corporate mindset behind the development and manufacturing process needs to be similarly long-term.

The top brass at Boeing don't themselves absolutely need to have been engineers designing product or working quality or doing floor work with the assemblers, but they need to be able to understand when they're being lied-to, or when there are lies of omission, or when the arguably guilty parties are deflecting rather than doing their jobs properly.

Unfortunately the Boeing shareholders are also partly to blame, because they are looking for short-term profits in a business whose profits are based on product development cycles that require basic research and years of development just to bring designs to maturity, plus the manufacturing time and order fulfillment schedules for individual units that take months to assemble and deliver. When a company in this sort of market sees its owners switch to an eye on short-term profit, that short-term profit only really happens once before the whole thing starts coming apart at the seams.

The new upper management needs to work the stockholders as much as working the departments, suppliers, and employee groups.

What, to you, makes a PC exciting?

Last time I found computer hardware exciting I was buying surplus-before-their-time high-end dual Xeon workstations from the local college surplus when school programs were closed down prematurely or unexpectedly and the equipment sent for disposal. That was the better part of fifteen years ago now.

I'm using a seven year old laptop at home and it's still more computer than I actually need. What I do need are physical page-up and page-down keys, SD-card readers, and copious numbers of USB ports, but fewer and fewer manufacturers are catering to that in their laptop lineups unless I want to go with a monstrously-huge device.

The phone companies have billions upon billions. Let's make them provide a modicum level of community service. This shouldn't even be a debate. They'll still have their billions, so screw them! The government is supposed to serve us, not AT&T. Its failure to do so is our failure

Mercedes and Porsche weren't illuminating indicator lamps denigrating other vehicles on the road as one drove around.

I started with the HTC Dream badged as the T-Mobile G1. I miss the physical keyboard. I was a Palm Pilot user and the biggest advantage Android and Google's services offered were OTA synchronization and the ability to use any device with a web interface to perform updates to my phone's content, like calendars, contacts, maps, e-mail, etc.

The rest of this stuff is largely a matter of style to me, not of substance.

If it was limited to "an old Android phone" that would be one thing, but they're doing this to any Android interaction regardless of how new it is.

And that's why it's stupid. They are relying on their own proprietary protocols and then denigrating anyone that isn't using their proprietary protocols.

Yeah, we never did get Star Trek VI: The Apology

This reminds me of the sentencing of the "January 6 insurrection" guilty pleas. As I (a non-lawyer) understand it...

Regardless of whether you consider it an insurrection or a protest march petitioning the government for redress of grievances...

In the wake of the events, the fed busted a bunch of the participants and left them rotting in prison for months (over a year), with no end in sight. In many cases this left families with no breadwinner, enormous legal costs, and expectations of losing all their property as part of some eventual conviction.

Then the prosecutors offered some of the defendants a plea deal; Plead guilty to a misdemeanor or short-sentence felony and we'll drop any other charges.

Rule of thumb: a misdemeanor generally is a crime with a max sentence of no more than a year in prison, a felony more than a year - which is why you see "year and a day" max sentences on some crimes. An accused person already in prison for over the max sentence would expect that accepting the deal would result in immediate release with "credit for time served" (and others near the max might expect release much sooner). So some of them went for it.

Came the sentencing some judges applied a two-year sentence enhancements for "substantial interference with the 'administration of justice.'" OOPS! No release for you.

I'd expect them to pull the same sort of thing on Assange if he were foolish enough to plead guilty to anything, no matter how minor.

(By the way: This particular form of the practice, as used on the Jan6 participants, was just recently struck down. But the decision was based on Congress' certification of the presidential election not qualifying as "administration of justice.'" So this wouldn't apply to whatever enhancement trick they might pull on Julian.

I don't know what you heard, but baby cells can only stay baby cells, they can't become mommy cells,

Sez who?

There's been evidence for some time that post-pregnancy mothers often have clones of stem cells derived from the previous foetus. Sure such a clone would likely start out with its epigenitc programming set for whatever function it had in the baby's development (unless, say, some error in its differentiation is what led to it migrating to the woman's body to set up shop). But once established on the mother's side of the placental barrier, and especially after the birth, the stem cell clone can be expected to continue to run its program under direction of the growth factors in the mother's blood.

That amounts to a transplant of younger stem cells which could be expected to produce differentiated cells for tissue growth and replacemtnt,, with the aging clock set farther back and with some genes from the father to provide "hybrid vigor", filling in for defective genes in the mother's genome or adding variant versions of molecular pathways.

Spirit Areosystems is one of Airbus' subcontractors too. So of course the problems within the Boeing supply-chain could affect the Airbus supply-chain.

This strikes me as a bit of a shakedown, settle with out patent claims or we'll screw up your IPO by creating a new potential liability.

Back in the early days of the personal computer explosion there was a patent for the "XOR cursor" which I hear was used as a trolling operation. Story goes that every time a new hi-tek company was in that sensitive period just as they're about to go public, they'd get a notice that they were believed to be violating that (even if whatever they were doing didn't even involve a display with a cursor, XOR or otherwise) and an offer to license the patent for something substantial but far lower than the cost and risks of fighting it. ($10,000?) So the companies generally paid up rather than derail their IPO.

It was jokingly referred to as a tax on incorporation. There are rumors of discussions of buying a hit on the trolls. Apparently this netted over $50,000,000 before the patent expired. (Also there was apparently prior art discovered - AFTER the expiration.)

As was commonly the case during the DOS/Windows and MacOS era, many applications will only come to the Apple platform after the DOS or Windows platform proves successful. It didn't matter how slick or easy the Apple product was, the risks were higher and in that era of small teams or individual software developers it didn't make sense to pursue the higher-risk platform before the lower-risk one.

Frankly I'm surprised with these walled-garden models that this hasn't happened even sooner.