They are taking a calculated risk knowing that very few GPL lawsuits actually went to court. They know it takes money to fight a legal battle and hope the opposing side doesn't have it, or will run out of it before reaching a final verdict. And finally, from the fact that they've been at this since 2012 - they probably think that it's a fairly cost-efficient way to buy more time and make business.

Not the last time I took the bridge from Detroit to Canada. The canada guy was a raging asshole, I almost thought he was the American guy and I went the wrong way for a moment.

"Detecting a malfunction in a sensor is hard, really hard. "

it depends. you have a known range the sensor will read and you have a known rate of change. For example the sensor in my BMW that measures steering angle will go from 10 to 65525 it can read from 0 to 65535 but the physical limits of the mounting will not allow it. which is fine. the computer system also knows that it is 100% impossible to have more than a rate change of + or - 3500 per second. so if any rate changes are high than that, like a glitch that causes it to jump? fail the sensor fall back to limp mode and illuminate the "bring your wallet to the dealer" light.

What if the sensor falls off and does not change? you can make assumptions based on time If I don't see a sensor change within a time frame, sensor is bad.

Systems with only one sensor does not exist in anything other than entertainment devices like your wall thermometer. A car has enough data points to easily identify sensor failures without redundant sensors on each measuring point.

If there is any way the driver can disable the 100% automated stuff. Then they need to prove they are not a drooling moron and get a license. If the manual overrides are all locked out, so if it goes off a cliff, the rider's only choice is to die horribly... Then ok, no license required.

The only way you can have losses that exceed your net-worth is if someone has given you a huge amount of money that they really shouldn't. Typically, it means the banks gave these guys credit beyond even the most loose definition of sanity.

More and more I'm thinking that the fantasy worlds we live in when we play roleplaying or computer games are much closer to reality than the fantasy world of the financial industry.

Yeah, I wonder if these two could be in any way related...

MS is a design and UI fiasco and always has been. The only reason few people realize how unusable the crap is, is that we are so used to it that we don't notice anymore - until the next major update, or if you don't use it daily and then suddenly sit in front of it and wonder who the fuck came up with this stupidity.

And everyone who knows anything at all about mobile devices and usability knows that nobody on the planet wants a windows desktop experience on their smartphone. People want a smartphone experience on their smartphone, what's so difficult to understand about that?

Oh, speaking of that: People also don't want a mobile experience on their desktop. They want a desktop experience on their desktop, that's not so difficult, either.

It works for bombs and tanks, but not for computer networks and communications. It might have even worked in the time of telegraphs and snail mail letters. But for encryption, it doesn't work. A cipher is either weak, or strong. You can compromise a foreign postal system without affecting the security of your own, but you can't secretly build a backdoor into an encryption algorithm that works only for you.

Now you're trying to reverse the chain of causality just to make a cute finishing sentence. :-)

When they dont have the money they need, they cant do squat. The entire ATC system has been underfunded even before the Reagan years.

Almost everyone that has seen the systems in place have know this for over 2 decades.

It's a mess, an unholy mess that they really need to dump a couple billion into to do a full upgrade and redesign. The whole ATC system is a giant ball of bandaids.

Cartel leader: "My phone is broken, fix it!"
IT Guy: "Ok what is wrong with it?"
Cartel Leader: "IT IS BROKEN ESE! YOU GET ME BACK MY FLAPPY BIRDS OR YOU DIE!"
IT Guy: " I cant, they removed it from the App market"
Cartel Leader, pulls gun and points it at the IT guy..
Cartel Leader: " GET ME BACK FLAPPY BIRD OR WE PLAY ANGRY BIRD WITH YOUR HEAD!"

One place I worked at we had a horribly out of date NW server on the network that nobody knew where it was... I searched for weeks and could not find it. Finally years later it was found inside a wall because of previous construction it was placed out of the way and covered with a plastic tarp.

So it was running all those years WITH NO AIRFLOW and no reboots. A testament to old SCSI hard drives.

Very cool that you can now patch and reload the core without a reboot, I just wonder how they handle when data structures change dramatically between major versions, will they replace the running data with predefined?

Everyone knows about the evil bit. That's what prompted me to write the bracket remark. But it's not quite the same as a "we're from the NSA, nothing to see here" flag.

What's with the clickbait headlines? By itself, the headline is total BS. The actual statement made, however, is spot on. The hole in your security doesn't care who exploits it. There's no "good guy" flag in IP headers (though I'm sure some April 1st RFC will soon introduce it).

What worries me most is that we could win this fight, if it weren't for our own governments deciding to betray us. There are vastly more people interested in secure communication and other people not being able to spy on or subvert our computers and mobile devices than there are people interested in compromised communications and systems (basically only criminals and some deluded, criminal-if-the-laws-were-right elements of governments).

There is just one problem to Bruce's argument: The largest and most powerful spy agency in the world disagrees with his fundamental assumption. We often forget that the NSA has two missions, and they are exactly the two things that Bruce argues cannot co-exist: To secure the computing infrastructure of the US against foreign espionage, and to provide espionage on foreign communication.
The NSA believes, and/or is tasked with exactly these two things that Bruce says (and I agree) are mutually exclusive. No surprise they've gone rogue, their very mission statement is a recipe for a mental breakdown through cognitive dissonance.