Calm down everyone, did you have a bad day? I guess you react the same when reading "man killed by a falling tree" in the newspaper, like "stupid title, implying that trees are willingly killing people and trying to take over the world!", right?

I think the relevance is that a man died in a accident with a complex and autonomous machine (properly called "robots" since they exist in factories, like it or not), and that's not so easy in this case to predict everything that can go wrong, like, say "don't put your hand inside the press". Also, it's not so easy to say if the safety considerations are in charge of the user, or the machine's designer, and in what percentage.

Nobody said the opposite.

Nobody ever talked about AIs behind that.

Only valid for stupid people.

I think in this case it's different because the robot has an arm and hand (so to speak) capable of grabbing you, and a lot of possible complex movements, so it's much less predictable than, say, a press with respect to the safety of people around it.

I wonder how much decisive it was in the resulting waste of money and resources.

Can we stop making this clarification? WE KNOW!

IANAA, but I think the exceptional thing here is that such a huge change in an astronomical object can be seen in an human-life time scale, instead of millions years as usual.

Also, the black hole "being seated" somewhere is not so exact as well...

Sure, now you hate microwaves for probably conspiracy-related reasons, and nobody should use them anymore. My microwave allows me to defrost or heat up a piece of food in less than a minute. How much energy would it take to heat up an oven to do the same?

It's true, but Windows Vista used to ask "Are you sure" 3 times when changing a system settings, they could have put the same effort in warning you of similar activities done by installers, or restricting a little bit more what an installer can do, especially when the OS business model is relying 99% on 3rd party software.

Or you can switch to another OS that cares a minimum about your free will. I mean, there's not a single freeware program on Windows today that doesn't try to install some other crap.

Maintenance? Publishing free software themselves? Why? They could simply release the specs needed to interface with their hardware, and whoever wants would write its driver, much like the nouveau team is doing, but with much more difficulty. It would not be their business. And even if this means only 10 more users, it would be a gain anyway. But I know, I'm speaking too idealistically.

The advantage? Their hardware could be used on more operating systems, without them having to do anything, and so they could sell more cards for more computers. Their business is hardware, after all, not software.

One could argue that this is the usual cheap stab of RMS against hardware manufacturer. Hardware firmware is meant to be embedded in a piece of hardware, think microcontrollers that power everything today, and 99% of times you don't even know there are so many of them in a device.

In all these years I've been wondering why they are so jealous about their drivers. I know, it's a very complicated matter of APIs, exposing internal details, etc. But it's not that someone can suddenly copy their silicon by knowing how it exchanges data with the computer, is it? And who exactly would be able to copy their silicon with their current technology?

Or are they afraid that a cheap manufacturer could use their precious drivers with a cheap, compatible card? But if their hardware is better than the cheaper ones, what's the point?