What else would be more important to maximize than happiness?
Means of getting happiness are a different discussion, and what happiness is might differ from person to person. But why would you e.g. accumulate more money or power if it didn't bring you any happiness?
Why not use Varnish? POST messages of 500 bytes could easily be rewritten / proxy'd to GET requests. That might not be 100% restfull but seems like a lot less work. On our production environment Varnish always responds in less then 2 ms. Even on my development VM I never see response times > 5 ms. It has all the other requirements they state.
Perhaps I'm prejudiced because Varnish has proven to be such an awesome caching mechanism (we still use Redis as a key/value store), but this seems like NIH.
Varnish is actually difficult to use for POST requests unless you know C and can tweak the existing vmods. I just came off the same basic requirements and ended up going with Nginx (OpenResty) with Lua & Redis.
I'm not opposing this idea, but I'm not sure it would have helped in the VW case. There were some people (engineers? Managers?) who were cheating and they knew that what they were doing was wrong. I don't believe a license would have changed that.
Other people have raised the question of how well the prospect of losing a license would act as a deterrent.
One other aspect which might be even stronger would be if the professional organization had a role not unlike a union in protecting its members’ professional decisions. Imagine if you worked at VW and your boss told you to make a change which affected safety, emissions, etc. – how different might your reaction be if you know that if you refused or reported it to the appropriate regulators and there were repercussions the Bitpackers Guild could provide legal representation and expert witnesses for you, stage a strike where no licensed engineer would work for an irresponsible company, or simply ensure a lot of publicity? Suddenly it's not “go lean on Sally until she gives the engineering sign-off. She can't afford to quit until her kid's out of college” but “do we want a team of professional engineers to hold a press conference saying we're cutting corners over our experts' judgement?”
There are certainly potential downsides but … anyone who drives a car, uses medical equipment, etc. might reasonably conclude they're worth it, particularly if the system was structured to focus on transparency and due process rather than the pathology some unions are prone to where members are always defended even when they're in the wrong.
If a developer is asked to do something obviously wrong they might not feel they can refuse, because they can be replaced with someone willing to do it.
If an architect is asked to design a bridge that isn't safe they can refuse, secure in the knowledge they can't be replaced with someone willing to do it, as no licensed architect will knowingly design an unsafe bridge.
Of course, a licensing scheme would probably have a bunch of disadvantages.
Perhaps the threat of having their license pulled, thereby nullifying potential future employment might have caused them to think twice about wilfully cheating emissions controls?
While the FDA may not be a great regulatory group, if someone at a pharmaceutical were found to cheat like this they could potentially be barred from working in the industry again. This works in some cases, at least in theory.
The Mona Lisa's not with it - it's very small, kept in the dark, and they won't let you near enough to it to get a good look. You really do get a better impression of it from reproductions.
Go to Glasgow instead and take a look at Dali's _Christ of Saint John of the Cross_ instead. It's huge and absolutely stunning.
There are a lot of people outside of the US, and most of them aren't using either Bing nor Yahoo. Over here in europe, google is still king and I think that in Asia it's Baidu. I don't want to downplay the successes of Bing, Yahoo or Baidu, but looking globally Google is still pretty much uncontested.
Baidu is only popular in China, not the rest of Asia where it doesn't appear on the radar at all. Also, blocking Google probably has something to do with Baidu's success. And it's a crappy search engine, the Chinese I know use Bing for serious searches if they don't have a VPN to use google.
The best way to look into such games imho is to watch a Youtube Lets Play and jump a few episodes in. Official gameplay videos by the producer usually show Best Of scenes, which does hide the boring parts.
Search for "$GAME lets play". Filter for "playlist". Watch.
