Autopilot could kill the engine and lock the brakes without turning itself off. By turning itself off and giving control to a human mere instants before a crash it's effectively ensuring the engine isn't turned off (as there'll be no time to do it before the crash, and the human may not be in a fit state to do it afterwards).
But more to the point, regardless of whether there's a good reason for it to do that or not, it shouldn't be used to claim on a "technicality" that autopilot wasn't active "at the time of the crash", as clearly it meaningfully was at all points leading up to it.
Maybe I'm a lone voice here, but my Skoda has QNX and it's...not very good? It takes an age to start up, and an age to load navigation mode to a point where it's ready to start being used. Bluetooth integration is rudimentary (in the context of the age of the vehicle) and unpredictable. The touch UI is spongy and easy to make mistakes, even if you're the passenger giving it your full undivided attention. The voice command system is almost unusable.
It's not terrible, don't get me wrong. But I don't understand why anyone would be writing any lovesongs about it.
The Budgie desktop team announced today the release and general availability of Budgie 10.9 as the latest version of this modern desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions.
If you need more than "modern desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions" to figure out what the project is, then you're probably not the target audience for 9to5Linux.
It's a fair point. Curiosity has "only" travelled about 20 miles over its 12 year life so far. And while it weighs some 900 kilos, Martian gravity is only 38% that of Earth.
Obviously it's absurd to compare the wear and tear on something rumbling around the Martian tundra cut off from any support or maintenance for a decade, but it is a very different use case to your average Earthly car or lorry. What lasts a decade going at 0.1mph for 20 miles in an alien desert is not necessarily going to last a week going at 70mph down an asphalt highway.
At some point we're just getting bogged down in semantics. Someone invented the internal combustion engine, and the earliest versions ran on gaseous fuels. Somebody else "invented" versions that than on liquid fuels. Engines that ran on petrol (gas) and diesel were "invented" by separate people. Engines based on turbine, reciprocating pistons, and rotary mechanisms were all "invented" by separate people.
The degree to which you consider any of those independent "inventions" versus simply modifying and improving existing inventions is essentially arbitrary.
but isn't your national post serving an important competitive function, keeping other (fully private) mailing and courrier services in the pricing ballpark?
private companies would fill the void - at the consumer's expense, no?
Royal Mail is fully private; no part of it is nationally owned.
It was sold off on the cheap a decade ago (while it was still profitable) with a major "caveat emptor" stipulation that the universal service obligation would remain as it was.
The private owners have since hived off the profitable parcel delivery arm (GLS) into a legally distinct entity, and have started whinging that the now isolated letter delivery business is unprofitable without degrading the service obligation.
"Unfounded fears about spooky microwaves makes using them unhealthy. But take my advice and add extra salt into your diet in new and inventive ways because it might make things taste marginally, subjectively better."
You don't fill a whole kettle, you just put in the water you need.
British kettles legitimately boil faster than ones stateside because of our higher mains electricity voltage. A quick boil kettle in the UK is far quicker than a standard domestic microwave.
Edit: I just timed my kettle (I was craving a cuppa anyway); one cup of water, 53 seconds. I bet your microwave can't top that (mine certainly can't).
In an earlier iteration of the script, the machines were using connected humans as a distributed computer network rather than a power source. Which makes much more sense, but apparently they deemed it too difficult a concept for audiences to grasp so we ended up with the power source thing instead.
Not only does that make more sense in the sense of "humans don't make a great power source" (why not just use cows, or wind power, or geothermal, or nuclear?), but it also explains why the simulated world of the Matrix is so intertwined with the machine world itself, why The One is so important etc.
My head canon is that the distributed computing thing is in fact what was going on, and the humans of Zion have just gotten the wrong end of the stick.
Desecrates could think that if he has an idea it has to be true
That's not what Descartes said, by the way.
"I think therefore I am" was all about "I know I must exist, because I'm here to think about it". It wasn't about "if I think something it must be true".
In Discourse he sets about trying to establish what things you can know for sure, vs which things are subjective (and could just be a trick of the mind or an illusion). He establishes the first principle that the one thing he knows is definitely true is that he is an entity that is capable of thought (because otherwise, who else is doing all this thinking?) and therefore at the very least he must exist, even if nothing else does.
If you're of the position that truth isn't subjective, "Cartesian doubt" should be right up your alley. Trust nothing until you can prove it! Not a bad position for a philosopher to take.
In the context of the people who did it, I think it's just a "bit of fun"; a hobbyist hacking project to see how far you can take something.
But that said, it is absolutely insane how much disk space Windows needs. Windows Server 2022, with its most minimal "core" installation option, still has a minimum requirement of a baffling 32GB of hard disk space. By comparison, Ubuntu Server's published minimum requirement is for only 2.5GB (with more specialist minimalist distros like Alpine coming in at well under 1GB).
The headline is kinda burying the lede. You're absolutely right that "kamikaze drones" already exist. Others have rather glibly pointed out that cruise missiles that have existed for decades are essentially this, and more recently there have been a great many "loitering munitions" drones which are what this startup is talking about.
The thing that seems to be novel here is that they are intending to make them fully automated, with AI-driven target acquisition, and capable of operating in a zero-comms environment. Currently drones generally still need a human at the controls.
The idea of what amounts to the equivalent of Tesla's "Full Self Driving" tech being in charge of deciding who lives and dies and what should be reduced to a smouldering crater is, it has to be said, faintly unnerving.
It can be Occam or Ockham. It's named after William of Ockham, but it was the fashion at that time for scholars to "Latinise" their names, hence the alternative spelling.
If you want to announce your disapproval or approval of a certain post, there's this great mechanism built right in to do so. There are a couple of little arrow buttons; just click the down arrow on anything that you don't enjoy.
Personally I find it dead easy just to not click on any posts that don't pique my interest, and it's not like this community has so much content that "high quality" posts are getting buried under the sheer volume.
If you want to start a new community which is just Linux news aggregation, you go right ahead though.
Valve's Proton is open source but is it also free to use and distribute in commercial software?
Yes.
Valve's Proton code is licensed under the BSD licence, which is a "do anything you like with this code" licence.
Wine code is under the LGPL. You can ship this in commercial software as long as you "make the source code available" (which, assuming the distributor isn't modifying the Wine code further, can be achieved by just linking people back to the main Wine project code repository).
DXVK is licensed under zlib, which is functionally the same as the BSD licence.
Autopilot could kill the engine and lock the brakes without turning itself off. By turning itself off and giving control to a human mere instants before a crash it's effectively ensuring the engine isn't turned off (as there'll be no time to do it before the crash, and the human may not be in a fit state to do it afterwards).
But more to the point, regardless of whether there's a good reason for it to do that or not, it shouldn't be used to claim on a "technicality" that autopilot wasn't active "at the time of the crash", as clearly it meaningfully was at all points leading up to it.