The problem is that you can ALWAYS get around rules. It isn't possible to make perfect rules for anything above a minimal level of complexity - that's just a variant of the Turing-Church Halting Problem.

So you are forced to invert the dynamics. There's no real alternative. Instead of you creating a high level of complexity that the departments will work their arses off to avoid, you force the departments themselves to create the regimens that they're prepared to live with. But you have to do so cleverly. They will always create regimens that mean they do the least work necessary (because that's cheap on resources and they will ALWAYS consider this sort of extra work to be an imposition) and have the least amount of culpability.

So you need to meet three conditions:
1. The department can't evade the bits they're actually able to do
2. The department CAN pass on work they're not equipt to do, but ONLY if it's their responsibility to oversee the department they pass it onto
3. The department IS inescapably culpable for failure to either do the work OR ensure that others do it

You do NOT need the frameworks for each department, and should not attempt to draw those up. Those will be departmentally-specific and timeframe-specific. Far, far better have people who actually know the specific context do that work. No department likes to look like it's being forced to do anything, so making the actual detailed specifics internal, you're utilising their psychology. They're not being "forced", they're defining their additional responsibilities and duties. From a psychological angle, they're much more likely to be receptive to this perspective.

But because the departments are all internally writing their own management protocols, YOU DON'T HAVE TO. You only need to have a framework which obliges them to write up what they will request. This is MUCH lighter and, because it is much lighter, it is far less prone to have failure points where generic ideas don't work for a specific type of work.

If we want to look at this in software terms, only an idiot would write an overly-restrictive langauge that imposes a strict model of thought regardless of the type of work. If you want to provide a high level of confidence in correctness, you don't try to impose it through a myriad of complex hurdles and rigorously controlled APIs. You achieve it by incorporating contracts (function X is guaranteed to take in data meeting these requirements, and is guaranteed to deliver data meeting these other requirements). Contract programming is much, much lighter on the development process, doesn't impose on the programmer, and yet creates a very high level of assurance. Mostly because programmers aren't working to try and cheat with irritating APIs.

In Linux terms, you want a lightweight virtual layer handling filesystems in general, the filesystem policies should be handled by the filesystem not the main kernel. You want the main kernel to be doing as little of the work as possible. As soon as it is heavy and micromanaging everything, you're going to end up with something slow and unstable, that really can't do a whole lot.

You want to push the complexity to the edges, that's where complexity belongs. The bit that changes slowly, can't handle special cases, has least visibility into what is needed, and is really a very blunt instrument wants to be lightweight. One reason for having things like Common Law and Case Law is precisely because the legal system figured all this out centuries ago.

This seems like a situation where it's very hard to get excited about the idea that it's the regulator's problem. Did some Canadian fed technically have the authority to inspect? Quite possibly. Is there some sort of justification for even the cost of performing the inspection, much less any undesired knock-on effects of the notion that literally all vessels must be inspected no matter what, in a case like this? Seems harder to make that case.

There are a lot of situations where large portions of the public have no choice but to use products and services that they have no reasonable ability to be "informed" about. Either it's simply not possible if you aren't in a position to legally compel honesty from the vendor or it's a case where "informed" is PhD-level work in the area, or a combination of the two; but some rando's aggressively contrarian submarine that loudly and proudly skips all industry certifications and is available on boutique scale for very wealthy customers doesn't seem like one of those cases.

I disagree. It actually needs less regulation.

The siloing of knowledge and duties is why it was always somebody else's problem. So you simply take out all the regulations that obligate siloing and replace all of that kerfufle with a single rule: "If it's on your plate and nobody else has published that they've done the work so far, it's your responsibility, silos be damned, and failure leaves you liable".

That's it.

That's all we need. A removal of siloed thinking and a duty to complete all of the scheduled work regardless of whose toes it tramples.

That would have solved the problem. But, because departments never like to give up powers they obtain, a side-effect would be that departments would be proactive. They wouldn't walk down piers, looking for strange things. Rather, if they heard of strange things that are their department, if they don't want to be shamed, then they need to ask the company for more information. Because then it's on their plate and not that of a rival department.

The other benefit of using this approach is that it isn't about the special cases, it's about the general problem that underlies all of the special cases of this sort: nobody takes responsibility until it's already a disaster.

If a department is liable for pretending the problems aren't there, then the department wil CYA. If the only way to do so is to do all the outstanding work, regardless of title, then that work will get done. If the only way to get it done right IS to give it to the right department, and they're on the hook until that has happened, you're damned right it'll happen.

I've worked in the public sector, I've seen the paranoia and closed-mindedness first-hand. That's not going to go away. So you solve the issue by exploiting those traits, since you can't eliminate them.

And before you complain about LPCAMM2 being much slower than the high-bandwidth RAM on the CPU package: It's perfectly fine to design a system with a non-uniform memory access paradigm, treating the memory behind the LPCAMM2 interface as a RAM disk. That way you have 8 GB of high-bandwidth DRAM swapping to 16+ GB of somewhat lower-bandwidth DRAM, and the soldered-in SSD lasts longer because it doesn't have to (ab)use its intake buffer to hold the swap file.

What's next? Screwsharks? Shit usually exists for a reason, even if unclear and sometimes bad ones. Taking a chainsaw to all of it has caused havoc and probably cost more than it saved.

Screwworms prevention was a mission of USAID. The US was giving aid to many countries which meant that screwworms were being stopped in those countries before it came close to US soil.

The research into screwworms was part of the whole "trans mice" research they openly mocked as they proudly cut funding to. The "trans" refers to transgenetic - i.e., genetically modified mice. The kind of thing you use to do all sorts of research into (especially things like cancer).

The "FO" part of DOGE cuts is coming up. A lot of those programs were humanitarian, but also practical in keeping disease off US soil

Ah, I see what you mean, now. Yeah. I do my best to make lore make sense, but that's one I can't fix.

I suppose one could argue that you want the more dselicate computers behind the pilot, since then it has the greatest achievable shielding on all sides without having excessive distance from the flight controls and without becoming inaccessible if the pod that is loaded into the middle is not traversible. Similar reasoning is used in Formula 1 - delicate bits of the car (such as the fuel tank) are placed between the driver and the engine, to keep them as safe as possible without creating a burden. This would necessitate there being a step down to get to the pilot's chair. It's not a particularly good piece of "lore repair" but it's the best I can do.

The nuclear waste silos were, though.

The feet operated as vertical rockets, so I'd say the designer was thinking along the same lines you are.

The landing pads are also vertical thrusters (which is how they can skim), so you need space for the nozzle, engine, and fuel. The size of the landing pads would seem fine, given everything that needs to be in them.

I'm calculating mass in terms of filled volume. The entire mid-section of the Eagle was a mesh of girders, rather than a solid hull. Since the total space filled is 1/Nth that of a solid hull that has to be able to handle the same rotational forces, the total mass is reduced. The cross-hatch patterning is likely to be good there, as it's strong along those lines. We don't need to specifically know what the material is, or the specific mass, as long as we can use engineering techniques to figure out the percentage of material we need relative to having a solid hull.

That's true of all sci-fi, by nature. The challenge, though, is to make it as plausible as possible. The "traditional" rule (variously ascribed to Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov) was that good sci-fi was allowed to violate one law of physics (although this had to be justified and explained) but everything else shoud be as plausible as possible. S:1999, as a whole, certainly did not comply with that, but if we restrict ourselves to the Eagle, then I'd say that it would just about pass muster there.

Let's look at the various aspects of the Eagle design.

1. It was "designed to work in space" so wasn't designed to be aerodynamic
2. It was modular
3. Mass was kept to a minimum without compromising strength, which is precisely what you would want if your job is to carry a significant mass in space and be able to manoever without ripping apart
4. Cockpits were functional and minimal, not glamorous or more advanced than necessary to do the job

There were terrible aspects as well (nowhere to keep fuel, for example), but if you were going to design a sci-fi ship that is intended to be a simple short-range transport, then the design for the Eagle is close to perfect in a way that most sci-fi vessels really aren't.

Brian Johnson really did a superb job of actually making something LOOK like a practical workhorse.

Fixed-point decimals and scaled integers are fundamentally the same thing. The only real difference is that decimal data types use base-10 at the representation level (aka binary-coded decimal, or even straight ASCII numerals. You can do math directly on both using techniques that are practically identical, save a few differing constants.). Of course, I doubt you meant actual decimal data types. Fixed-point binary and scaled integers are exactly the same thing.

Historically, money was computed using only BCD representations, largely because that's what COBOL used. BCD representations are fixed-point by nature. Most COBOL implementations used packed BCD (2 digits per byte), although modern implementations often use either integer types with a scaling factor or straight ASCII numbers. Using integer types is WAY more efficient, both cycles- and storage-wise, but using ASCII is convenient. Other languages with a native Decimal type do the same.

Using floating-point of any kind for monetary values is a VERY bad idea. When numbers get large, you silently lose precision. When you get big enough, you can no longer store cents. You also get issues with not being able to represent cents exactly unless you scale the numbers anyway.

Which was the wrong call. The Republicans ordered the National Guard into California as a political act, Trump happened to be the stooge with the button. This was all obvious from the start.

Anthropic ran a marketing campaign comprised almost entirely of bullshit with some hokey story that it's "too dangerous" to release to the public. The reality is that shit doesn't work but they need to pretend it does long enough to pocket people's money and run. Republicans, being too stupid to see their own game played by someone else, went apeshit for bullshit. Anthropic staff, not wanting to blow their grift at best, go to prison at worst, are now caught in a position where they either tip their hand to a terrorist group that happens to control the US at the moment and lose their freedom, or tip their hand to the world and lose their grift (and probably their freedom anyway. Republicans might be as stupid as they think the world is, and as easily manipulated as they are manipulative themselves, don't exactly care for having that thrown back at them in practice in such a high profile way.