One thing I've learned from the past 10 years of supporting Windows 10/11 is it's almost always software. I had a problem with a keyboard doing runaway repeats on the Windows Hello PIN entry screen, and I swapped keyboards till I was blue in the face until I realized that it was the supplemental support software (SetPoint) which was causing the fault. Yes. Software is even screwing basic I/O devices now. It's a solved problem and software developers still manage to out-clever themselves into system instability.

It is sometimes hardware. I had some kernel panics on my new machine that black screened it. I ran MemTest86 and found out that the RAM was clocked down to 3800MT instead of the 5200MT it was supposed to be getting. It was failing on the first pass. Isolated it to the second channel pair. Blew out the slots. 90% Isopropyl on the sticks. Reinstall RAM. Done. Passes MemTest86 without a hitch, through multiple passes. Last time I checked, I did 4.

And I'm still getting black screens from memory exceptions. Just less often. The RAM is now fine. I had the problem because Windows is screwed up. The hardware fault made it worse, but the software is also fucked. (Last time it faulted was during a compile. I heard the POST beeper go off and thought "Oh no. Not again.")

Software people, ie: Linus, think it's hardware. Hardware people think it's software. Generally, these days, the hardware people are right. Hardware is very reliable, and I've rarely had a recent memory stick actually go bad.

They tried, but quarreling parent groups couldn't agree on whether to teach the kids that they were coding with 3 registers or 259 registers.

No worries!

My MIL had Alzheimer’s, so I had to find out about it quickly. I happen to have a pal who is an incredibly senior dementia physician in the NHS, and he was helpfully blunt with me in managing expectations. She ended up dying of oral cancer, and probably the AD was helpful in that it took the edge of what was happening for her.

Because TPM takes the users computer and makes it Microsoft's. It is a builtin, pre-installed rootkit. It was never about making the computer safer for the user, but safer for Microsoft.

Not that suprising with a software person.

With ECC, memory will go "bad" too, just a bit later. If you buy good quality memory, it will be fine for far longer than the time you are going to use it. Bad memory will overwhelm ECC way before that time.

I havent seen a blue screen in 10 years, except deliberately when trying new boundaries for over clocking.

AGI? Hahaha, no. The fake just gets more complex.

So now it can "confess" to being an incompetent asshole. Already more than the typical CEO can do, but still unusable.

I think that many of those people were also recent DOS users. Given that DOS systems would often simply freeze up several times per day and require a reboot (easy to do since any bug in the user's application could do this), once they added a protected mode pseudo-kernel to Windows (maybe starting with Windows/386 2.1), it was actually a slight improvement over what they were used to since DOS crashes could sometimes be isolated to one virtual terminal.

Win9x and Win2k (and the other NT descendants) are fundamentally different operating systems. In general, NT had a much more robust kernel, so system panics were and remain mainly hardware issues, or, particularly in the old days, dodgy drivers (which is just another form of hardware issue). I've seen plenty of panics on *nix systems and Windows systems, and I'd say probably 90-95% were all hardware failures, mainly RAM, but on a few occasions something wrong with the CPU itself or with other critical hardware like storage device hardware. There were quite a few very iffy IDE cards back in the day.

The other category of failure, various kinds of memory overruns, have all but disappeared now as memory management, both on the silicon and in kernels, have radically improved. So I'd say these are pretty much extinct, except maybe in some very edge cases, where I'd argue someone is disabling protections or breaking rules to eke out some imagined extra benefit.

I think you’re limited here in that your frame of reference is only what was offered on the US market. Lots of the rest of the world has always had access to fantastic smaller cars, and still does. In the UK, for example, just this last year we’ve had launches of the R5, the Inster, the eC3, the Epiq, with plenty more to come, like the Twingo.

I’d argue that this has less to do with unsuccessful messaging from Biden and more to do with horrendously successful messaging from an unholy alliance of anti-vaxxers, MAGA types, right wing media, etc. Amoral people decided to sow doubt, and it’s a lot easier to break than it is to fix

There is absolutely *no* Alzheimer's medication that can halt a patient's progression in a clinically meaningful way. I love the idea of him clinging to false hope, though, as his mind erodes.

(The best drugs for Alzheimer's are capable of slowing the progression of a single symptom, memory loss, by six months. So if he started on them at 78, then by age 83, he'll have the memory he would otherwise have had at age 82.5. The effect is so small it can only be detected in population studies. There's lots of trials, but there's also lots of grandiose claims that never go anywhere)

You ask a stupid question. Try harder.

Nonsense. But you nicely show the stupidity of the average person here.

First, obviously a self-driving car comes with accountability. It just sits in a different place. And second, most humans cannot adapt to unusual situations either.

The bottom line is that self-driving cars already kill less people per distance driven than regular cars or are close to it. But I guess people like you are fine with people dying just so long you have not adjust to anything new.