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Comment Re:Would you like next door kid reprogram his car? (Score 1) 292

If there's a public safety concern about people hacking code in cars, then copyright is not the way to address it. The purpose of copyrights is purportedly to encourage the production of more works. It is certainly not intended to be a tool for ensuring public safety.

Ideally, hacking safety-related code (and then driving it on a public highway) should be legal only if the hacker got the appropriate certifications to work on that area, along with insurance riders to go with it. This would be completely unrelated to the copyright status of the original code.

Comment Re:DARPA SJW (Score 1) 101

If it's acceptable for machines to be playground equailizers than all schoolchildren should be issued sidearms and be given training on how to employ deadly force to stop bullying.

Projectiles from your puny weapons will simply bounce off my armored playground robot.

Now, hand over your weapon and your lunch box to the machine.

Comment Re:Still photos (Score 1) 447

A compromise could be the use of still photographs..

Why compromise?

All the city bus drivers in my area are on video surveillance. We routinely get to see footage of accidents and altercations with crazed passengers on the local news.

If it's good enough for a bus, it should be good enough for someone responsible for the safety of a 500mph $200M machine.

Comment Re:Not really needed (Score 1) 40

If his garbage causes you take take a different flow of execution, however, that provides him a way to reach bugs in the little-used parts of your code.

The different flow of execution triggered by an overflow trap should almost always be a simple call to "abort()". At this point, your program has already failed and should be stopped.

I disagree with your premise. Garbage input values should be checked and rejected in software before the overflow ever occurs. The hardware overflow check should be a last resort to enforce this at every instruction step, and in the worst case it converts privilege exploits into less serious DOS attacks.

Allowing "garbage output" as you propose just creates more opportunities for attacks when that output gets consumed somewhere.

Comment Re:Not really needed (Score 2) 40

What flag is that then?

On an X86, "V".

Not that checking it after every add instruction is really that practical. It would be better to have trapping and non-trapping versions of integer arithmetic, and to have languages with semantics which expose that choice to the programmer.

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