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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The Chevrolet Malibu sedan is subject to a new recall that surrounds a software bug may lead to disabled fuel injectors.
Documents filed with NHTSA show the automaker will https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/make/chevrolet/ the 2018 Chevy Malibu. Total, the recall hits 177,276 Malibus with the 1.5-liter turbo-4 engine. The problem rests in an error that can occur in the engine control module (ECM). Should the fault occur, data may become corrupted in the ECM, and in turn, the computer could disable the fuel injectors.
If the fuel injectors are disabled, owners may find the engine will not start. In some cases, the engine could stall while driving, which increases the risk of a crash. Chevy did not mention any incidents related to the safety recall. If the problem is present, owners will likely see the check engine light illuminate. Other Malibus without the 1.5-liter turbo-4 do not house the same ECM software and are not included in the recall.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 4, Funny) by c0lo on Monday September 23 2019, @01:07PM (10 children)
We got to live the days of You’d have to press the “Start” button to turn the engine off. [york.ac.uk]
Question is: will we live some more or get killed tomorrow by software engineers working crunch time?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday September 23 2019, @01:19PM (8 children)
In which case, are we being killed by software engineers, or upper management demanding a particular launch schedule?
Were the Challenger astronauts killed by the O-ring engineers, or the engineers who openly loudly (but not effectively) voiced warnings about the hazards of freezing temperatures on the launch pad?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday September 23 2019, @01:47PM (3 children)
Ummm... an exercise of empathy here: do you think it matters much for the dead guy?
Besides, the software engineers agreed themselves to an agile dev cycle when they put themselves up for the advertised job. And they mean it, they even like to "release early, release often", that's what motivates them.
You see? Even if they'd tried something else, they don't know anything except to code their apportioned amount of bugs every sprint and to patch the older bugs with new ones, more subtle and harder to detect.They were taught in the colleges and their CS classes in Uni, they see the guys getting rich on this professional lifestyle in SillyValey, of course that's true, the hackernews is Ycombinator, no? Upper management? But that's their role to ask tight delivery schedule, the software engs are there to show they can deliver... ummm, something... we'll just improve it later.
So, again the question... really, does it matter much who killed you? Maybe it was the upper management, maybe it was the teachers, maybe Silly Valley, maybe the competition in the job market... maybe all and none of them - it's just the industry's culture, see?... bottom line, you're still dead.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday September 23 2019, @02:40PM (2 children)
Actually, according to ISO9000 et.al. it is the role of upper management to provide adequate resources, including trained personnel and time, to execute the established quality plan and ensure a safe product. Too bad that standards don't have any real teeth, or even much transference to civil law cases. Normally, I hate lawsuits, but if the lawsuits could be effectively brought against CEOs who run corporations that kill people with shoddy product not in compliance with the quality standards they, as CEO, signed off on - with damages to extend through all compensation received during said tenure as CEO over the company making dangerous non compliant products... that's a tort I'd like to see baked into common practice.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday September 23 2019, @03:02PM (1 child)
Pssst, lemme tell you a secret: ISO9000, ISO9000:2000, CMM(i) are speaking with the fishes - the agile mob [agilemanifesto.org] took over.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday September 23 2019, @03:32PM
The agile mob has, indeed, taken over - but in any industry which produces regulated product sold into the EU, they do have to follow the appropriate kin of 9001 in order to CE mark - no CE mark, no admittance of product for import or permission to produce domestically.
What happens in our shop is an agile day to day workflow, wrapped in a thin waterfall quality process - it's not exactly quick, but it's more realistic than waiting until one stage is "done" to start work on the next. For US domestic, there are similar but different waterfall based regulations, and yes, they're still "enforced" even though the day to day software does scrum, etc.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday September 23 2019, @03:58PM (3 children)
Shuttle is too exotic of an example. We have plenty of case law going back 3773 years for collapsed houses.
Hammurabi 229:
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday September 23 2019, @04:56PM (2 children)
But, from the time of Hammurabi, there has been considerable evolution of "who is the builder?"
Do we make all builders of a product liable to all consumers of the product? In that case, when someone with photosensitive epilepsy (1/10,000 in the general population) has a costly seizure from watching Incredibles 2, do they get to sue the entire credits roll of content producers who "brought Incredibles 2 to them"? Just those who were directly involved in the production of the offensive scenes? Just the projectionist at the theater who failed to play the warning reel again after they came in late from the popcorn line? The projection was an automated program, you say? Well, do we sue that programming team as well?
When thousands of people contribute to the creation of a product, none has the capacity to ensure the final delivery to the consumer will be safe. Five pieces of independently "safe" code can later be used in combination causing an unsafe condition - is it the fault of a programmer, no longer with the company, that a single threaded routine he wrote got imported to a multithreaded project and used, inappropriately? How about if someone threw a comment on his function: "Thread safe" because they tested it on their desktop for 5 minutes and nothing blew up?
In the time of Hammurabi, a single builder both designed and constructed single homes - the trail of liability was clear.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday September 27 2019, @11:07AM (1 child)
Its an interesting hack against the problem of "imaginary property" or "intellectual property" to sue the owner.
Kinda like if someone slipped and broke their leg in front of my house on ice... in theory some good lawsuit targets would be the city contractor who cast the sidewalk, the mfgr of the shovel I cleared the sidewalk with, the mfgr of the salt I applied to the sidewalk, etc, but in practice it would be me and my house / umbrella insurance as the owner.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 27 2019, @11:54AM
In practice, it's easier (and much more predictable) for the lawyers to do what they always have done and to sue the property owner / insurance, and not bother suing if there's no insurance because they know from experience that the realistic outcome of that scenario is that they spend more in legal work than they recoup from the broke-ass owner who has no insurance.
In a case where the city poured the sidewalk for you, and the sidewalk was poured and cured at an unusually high slope, e.g. some dumbass contractor thinking that if he gets the concrete good and thick and cures it with a big slope that the water will drain off better, and it does most of the time, training people who walk on your sidewalk to think that they don't have to worry about ice because there's never ice there, but that one particular storm manages to deposit a nice glassy layer of hard ice even with the slope, and now your confident neighbors hit the ice, on a relatively high slope that they've never encountered ice on before, and slip, fall and break their leg... yeah, sure, that is traceable fault to the non-standard construction of the sidewalk, but... who's going to bother arguing that in court when you can just get paid for taking the standard settlement from the owner's insurance?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday September 23 2019, @03:53PM
The irony is that's an electric passenger train and they are really old tech.
Oh boy are those things great. They almost never go where I actually need to go, but if I have to go somewhere they serve, they're pretty awesome.