It's really quite simple if you've ever gone elbows deep into a modern engine...

To meet new CAFE numbers, you have to get your engine as small and light as possible for the parameters it needs to meet for the product. So, all aluminum 3 or 4 cylinder blocks, under 3 liters of displacement. These don't produce great power naturally aspirated so you add some form of forced induction. Turbocharging tends to be the most efficient and easiest to control to provide variable boost so you bolt one of those on, with all the plumbing and controls.

Forced induction leads to higher chamber pressures. Add direct injection and you start getting some rather "dynamic" effects during combustion. All this energy gets transmitted down the conrod to the main crank. What's protecting the crank? Soft metal bearings that expect a certain amount of oil film of a certain strength to be between the parts to cushion, cool and lubricate the crank and conrod.

Thanks to other parts of CAFE and EPA regulations, the oil specified by some engine manufacturers is light...very light. 0W-20 or even 0W-18. And, it has fewer "old school" additives like zinc sulfate or similar, that act to protect against metal to metal damage, should the oil film get too thin.

Finally, your average car owner in the US is not the best when it comes to maintenance and will run an engine long past its oil-change point. This is where the trouble starts. These thin oils don't have great additive packages because they have to be thin to keep the lubricating friction losses down to meet efficiency benchmarks. As the engine racks up hours they tend to overwhelm the oil detergent packages (detergents suspend fine particles swept up by the oil, hopefully to be filtered out) and start shedding ash and other particulates. At this point, the oil isn't meeting the lubrication requirements, and you start seeing bearing damage. Keep this up and eventually you'll trash a bearing as everything's been engineered down to the Nth degree with little margin for slop.

Incorrect in the US. You can call yourself "engineer", or your company can designate a position as an "engineer" position if you're engaged in a non-regulated activity. We have things like "Process Engineers", which are internal to a company so are not regulated. Sound Engineers may hold privately issued certifications but are also not regulated so not licensed.

A true engineer in the US is called a "Professional Engineer" and holds licenses in the states that they work in. PEs usually start out as a degreed Engineer (the degree diploma grants the Engineer title), works for some period of time as an EIT (Engineer in Training) under a PE, then sits for some exams (like the bar) to obtain a license.

Software development is currently unregulated so you can't get a license for writing code or designing software systems.

And, back on topic, I agree that C should be a foundational language that all programmers should know, especially if you're going to do anything with hardware. I've personally helped a few folks that were doing some bit-banging on Arduinos via Python and getting frustrated with the experience of having to deal with an interpreted language in a real-time environment. Getting them to use C wasn't too hard and allowed them to meet their design goals with cleaner code.

You kinda of missed the point of your own header: Email was never secure. Encryption of the contents doesn't help as SMTP can bounce all over place, including through relays that bad actors have access to and keeps a record of where it's been, right in the header.

Anyone needing real secure comms won't use email, regardless of how "bulletproof" the provider claims to be. Use something E2E like Signal. OSS E2E platforms are also significantly easier for people to set up and operate on their own vs. email. Hopefully this little incident opens up some of these journalists' eyes. Too many of them rely on email too much.

With WSL2, it's on my Windows 11 desktop and has been for a few years, working side-by-side. I get the steak AND the salad.

Slashdot: Get Off My Lawn, You Kids!

They're great if they're curated and controlled like what Microsoft does with its "AKA" service. I know of a few organizations that run OSS shorteners like URLS for managed short URLs to what would otherwise be horrendous symbol salads to type into an address bar.

Very informative, thanks. I know that pretty much every turbine engine, industrial or aircraft, has a fuel cutoff before the FADEC and a dump valve after the FADEC so that one can instantly cut fuel flow to the burners.

I'll start worrying about AI-generated code once it submits the winning entry to the Obfuscated C Code Contest.

Maybe "C+=1" works? ;-)

Purloined Purple, Stolen Silver and Burglary Blue.

My understanding is that most of the work phones issued to LA City political staffers is in Retard Red for easy identification.

Back in the 70s we had a few of these mail-order places. ISTR a place called "Molly's" that sold a fair amount of remaindered parts like passives, LEDs and some subassemblies. I've been to All Electronics (they had two locations, the other one was on Vermont St. in Koreatown, Los Angeles...parking was fun) a few times for oddities specialty connectors for WW2 radio equipment and high-power tapped (i.e. adjustable) wire-wound resistors. Most of these places had fun mail order catalogs.

Parts evolve so fast these days that these kind of places can't keep up. As museums they're fun, but no longer practical.

CoPilot seems to like either PowerShell or C# for some reason. Go figure.

I don't know of anyone who offers an infinite warranty. We all die eventually. The problem with old Windows stuff is that you have to airgap it these days, which can limit the functionality. I know of several BMS (building automation systems) that require Win98 for the controller software. The BMS controllers themselves are not internet connected and the Win98-based configuration software doesn't need to be connected continuously so we built VMs for them that get spun up on modern hardware when needed. Fortunately, they use serial interfaces (-232 or -485) so can get proper emulation for that.

It is squatting if those 13 million are in less than 70% of the licensed geography, which is one of the things being asserted. Have a read through Carr's letter to Echostar on May 9 (see the FCC web site for it). He lays out the conditions that needed to be met to keep the licenses.

Yes, this looks like invisible hand of Musk, but Dish/Echostar has been slow to build their network. Can't blame them too much as it is very capital-intensive and Echostar isn't well-capitalized.

Just throwing this out there, but unless you're sure where your network-connected drones and robots are sourced from and where they "call home" to, it's not an irrational policy to not allow that stuff. Some of the cheaper crap does phone home to some China-based server infrastructure, sometimes over VPN tunnels to get around basic filtering. Do you know what's being passed on to those servers?