In May 2007, Toby King, a former Navy nuke technician and flight engineer, joined POWER Testing and Engineering Inc. as a field engineer.

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After graduation he landed at a firm that built industrial-control-and-testing equipment, working as chief engineer.

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Merloni can connect machines to a service centre via a phone line, making possible off-site billing, testing and the dispatch of an engineer who knows what needs fixing in advance.

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The problems, says David Champion, a former Land Rover and Nissan engineer who runs the auto testing program for Consumer Reports, are electronic.

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Richard Pemberton, a research engineer at the university who took part in the testing, says he feels the project has potential.

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So I tracked down an engineer with direct knowledge both of the government interference testing and the design of cellphone GPS chips to find out more.

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Within about a half-hour, the retired computer network engineer had sewn up a sizeable gash in the portrait and was testing settings that might provide more visual data to help clean the apparently sepia-toned image.

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"The Spark EV battery has undergone more than 200, 000 hours of testing in our global battery systems labs, " said Pamela Fletcher, Chevrolet executive chief engineer of electrified vehicles.

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