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Comment By weight only? (Score 0) 587

I understand that you have to pay relating directly to your weight, but should that really be the only thing considered? It costs a flat rate for all the crew on board, regardless if they have 10 passengers or 200. Runway fees are the same regardless of the amount (or size of) the people on board. The amount of weight that the plane already carries never changes, only the cargo on board, so the cost of flying just an empty plane should be considered an overhead cost.

This system should be defined as a base rate plus a charge by the weight you add to the flight. Otherwise you get into the situation where you have a plane full of anorexic people, and the amount they paid doesn't even equal what it costs for the plane to fly empty.

Comment Re:Engineering isn't a secret club (Score 1) 146

An engineering degree is only good for checking your work. Mechanical design is purely a function of creativity, experience, and problem-solving.

Example: Any Joe Blow can design a clothes dryer (heater, blower, rotating drum). It takes an engineer to size that motor properly so that it dies 4 days after your warranty is up.

Comment Why water? (Score 0) 41

I see all these articles about assumptions that water cut this or formed that feature, but what is so inconceivable that it could have been some other liquid that did the same thing? Is there some inherent feature to water (H2O) that means it is the sole naturally-occurring liquid that could cause a feature like this? Or for that matter, what are the chances it could be an element which we've yet to discover?

Comment Not Google's Fault (Score 1) 639

I wonder if everyone realizes that it wasn't Google that designed the packaging, but likely they just designed the artwork on the outside.

As for the box itself, it seems that a packaging engineer just got their fit between the two halves a little too tight... it's not like they put it in heat-welded clamshell packaging!

Government

FDA: Software Failure Behind 24% of Last Year's Medical Device Recalls 128

chicksdaddy writes "Software failures were behind 24 percent of all the medical device recalls in 2011, according to data from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's (FDA's) Office of Science and Engineering Laboratories (OSEL). The absence of solid architecture and 'principled engineering practices' in software development affects a wide range of medical devices, with potentially life-threatening consequences, the FDA warned. In response, FDA told Threatpost that it is developing tools to disassemble and test medical device software and locate security problems and weak design."

Comment Ghost the drive... (Score 0) 143

Simply ghost the drive after a full (clean) install, and have her save the important files to a specific directory that you can have task scheduler back up once/day or on bootup if she turns the machine off when she's not using it (my mother leaves hers on all the time).

If she screws something up, nuke the main drive/partition, throw the original image back over it, and everything is good again. Unless she gets something *extremely* militant, it should work perfectly.

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