Playing devil's advocate but I have worked for Airbus for a couple of years and for each aircraft designed in the past 20 years (A380, A400M, A350), I can find dozens of workers ready to say that plane was 'designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys'.
Such an unsubstantiated declaration is covered in news just because is is compliant with what is known because of other, better documented sources about the failures at Boeing that led to the 737MAX fiasco but it brings zero information.
I've worked with mechanical fitters for quite a few years now and going by what they say I don't think there's a single machine ever built that wasn't designed by clowns.
> I can find dozens of workers ready to say that plane was 'designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys'.
But are they saying it as a form of venting, or in the context of bringing up serious concerns? And do they say this consistently, refusing to accept the validity of the design?
> Can you imagine some open source toolchain used in corporate setting?
I am working on a multi-billion dollar project and we rely on GCC to build our software. It seems obvious when dealing with "pure" software. It seems unthinkable with "hardware level" software (for FPGA).
> Who’s supporting it?
Each time we have needed specific expertise, we have paid an external company (Embedded Brains) to provide expertise and updates/fixes.
Everything they do ends up being-opensourced. Their expertise is valuable. However, if they disappear tomorrow, we have everything needed to keep the rest of the project going without major disruptions.
> And who is liable?
I guess every entity involved is liable for its own scope/level. It's not like we will sue the company that provided the toolchain if they are the root cause for a critical anomaly makes it to the end product and nobody noticed that during testing.
> Only the A350 introduction has so far been relatively event free.
I am biased on this since I have spent a couple of years working on the development of A350XWB systems (and only marginally contributed to other programs) but I always had the feeling that, after the trauma of the A380 (rampant production issues, lengthy delays and management mishaps/stock fraud), the focus for A350XWB was put on accountability at all levels.
This might not be sustainable for a large corporation but retrospectively, that seemed to have had the desired effect at least for this particular aircraft program.
The editor of a book decides at what price it is going to be sold. Then, whether you go to your local bookshop, a huge mall or Amazon, the price is going to be the same.
> The decision comes after the Catalan government insisted on imposing a 15-minute delay before passengers could be picked up.
I agree that the Uber model is problematic but making the taxi service worse for everyone (harder to order a cab for right where you are / right now) to level the field seems really shortsighted.
The law about VTCs (that is, vehicles rented with a driver [which are not taxis]) is, similarly to limo services in some other countries, that they cannot pick people on the street, and they need, previously to picking up the client, some short of "service sheet": A sheet detailing their trips and the client information. (I'm simplifying a lot)
In the past that meant they needed to go back to the base, pick their "service sheet" for the next jobs, and then go make their thing. If you needed a ride for "right now", the VTC wasn't your choice. VTC, are/were widely used, for example, on TV production. The VTC driver received their "work sheet" in the morning and they would go and "pick the host at 7, the guest at 9, the other guest at 10, take the host to the airport at 12...".
Now, with the apps, the app is your "work sheet", so even if you can't pick people on the street in theory, in practice it's like you can, because I can check in the app how many VTCs are near, and "order" one which will get here almost instantly, because they don't need to go back to the base to get their "work sheet".
So, that's the argument on requiring some minimum delay when ordering a VTC. For me, the 24h delay is ridiculous, as even with the classic "analog paper work sheet", you could call the base for a driver, and if they had somebody there, send you one in half an hour, so it makes no sense.
Anyway, my main concern with VTCs is workers rights, as, AFAIK, none of them have contracts, and are freelancers stranded with an expensive car renting, with promises of having steady work from their employers.
I don't know the details but it could because in many countries there are different licenses for taxis that can pick up off the street, as opposed to licensed car services that can only be pre-booked.
Uber tends to operate as the latter, using the laws for a pre-booked taxi service.
This law is obviously protection for the classic taxis by giving a legal standard to what it means to be pre-booked. They can claim to be just clarifying an existing law.
It is rational from a self-serving standpoint from the taxist point of reference. The rational is to hurt Uber and consumers and by doing so giving Taxis an advantage (ie, they can now reach you faster than a Uber).
It is a huge loss if you look at it from a societal welfare point of view.
I agree it is more complicated than what I outlined above, but I do think the aggregate welfare lost from the detriment in service quality of car-hailing multiplied by the number of potential consumers hurt represents a bigger loss than any gain cab-drivers could obtain with this measure.
I find the measure exactly the wrong type of regulation, the one that hurts a large segment of society to protect a small group (which had already benefited from a decades-long state imposed monopoly and became stagnant and comformist as a result).
As a small disclaimer, I do admit I have a bias against cab-drivers in general, but I do not think it clouds my judgement in this case.
Except they have already lost two major European agencies (European Medicines Agency and European Banking Authority) that are being relocated to Amsterdam and Paris.
I thought that was an hyperbole. Then I checked on Wikipedia: "While not yet profitable as of February 2018, Udacity is valued at over $1B USD having raised $163M USD from noted investors".
Probably a good moment to remember that "unicorn" is an arbitrary label and valuations are entirely based on subjective speculation and extrapolations that may be entirely unrealistic.
It's never about how much money a company can make, it's only about how much someone might pay for that company. At the end of the day, a lot of startup investment is more like trading baseball cards than producing anything of actual value to consumers.
That is a quote of Richard Feynman's conclusion to his report on the shuttle Challenger accident: "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."
Such an unsubstantiated declaration is covered in news just because is is compliant with what is known because of other, better documented sources about the failures at Boeing that led to the 737MAX fiasco but it brings zero information.