This is an incident in the US and does not appear to be related to the incident between Australia and New Zealand when an aircraft lost all of its flight controls and plunged out of the sky.

I don't think it's either relevant or useful. Vitamin A is deadly in excess. So is oxygen. If you measure only the effects once you exceed the toxic threshold, you won't get an accurate profile. You need to know what the benefits are at the therapeutic threshold, AND you need to know what controls you can add to keep things in the therapeutic range.

(Alcohol in low doses impairs brain development at any dose, but it also diversifies and strenthens the microbiome, and microbiome health improves brain function. This is an optimisation problem.)

Alcohol, in small quantities, is extremely beneficial for your microbiome. It is a mutagen, so kills off bacteria that are fragile and diversifies the bacteria that are healthy.

Alcohol is only dangerous in excess, which is just as true for oxygen, iron, vitamin c, etc. True, vitamin c overdose doesn't cause psychotic behaviour, but there will be extremely healthy substances that certainly do. Danger in excess is not a valid reason for a ban, but would be a perfectly reasonable reason for better controls.

My recommendation, though, would be to start with a more European approach to alcohol. Alcohol abuse is, in part, a consequence of mystique. (Damn, those mutants get everywhere!)

De-mysticise alcohol and you'll find abuse levels drop. You'll still want better controls, but it's a critical starting point.

It's really a reimplementation of a couple of older OS'. But so is Linux. Linux did Unix better than many commercial Unices, so won. It'll be 10-15 years before we'll discover if this new OS is a better AS/400. I think we should allow for that possibility.

But it doesn't sound like the developers have a good understanding of what has been tried or what is needed for the OS to be useful. So I'm not holding my breath. Still, that can change.

From what I'm seeing, this OS might be interesting for running virtual machines. Linux and Windows are very heavy for a VM host, a VM host doesn't need a lot of what is present in these OS', but would benefit considerably from some of the benefits listed.

Might. Just because something does something useful well doesn't mean it can do enough well and doesn't mean it does anything better than a properly-configured alternative.

I want to see how this OS develops, but I think it'll be a niche OS. Which is fine, there's value in that.

I think it safe to say that the number of police in Mensa isn't reflective of their percentage of the population.

I also think it safe to say that in election years, nobody wants to accuse a major political donor who might donate to the wrong person. Remember, police chiefs and judges are elected in much of the US.

And it's also pretty safe to say, in times of economic hardship, police aren't going to invest lots of resources into cases they're not confident they can score a court victory on. They're going to focus on cheap cases they've a good chance of winning on.

These seem more likely factors than any outright conspiracy.

Correction, they have declared a suspect, himself.

The correlation between what they have and what they say is unknown at this point. It could be that that's exactly what they have. It could be that it's what they want to have. And it could be that it's what they want a potential suspect to think they have.

At this point in the game, all we know is what they're saying. What they're thinking may or may not be related.

It's also important to note that police forces have finite resources. If they think any likely suspect would be prohibitively expensive to prosecute, or is likely to get off for some reason, they're likely to put resources into cases where they can get a result. For example, in England, rape cases are notoriously difficult to prosecute, so something like 90% of cases are never investigated and most kits for obtaining perp DNA are never tested.

And, finally, it's important to remember that police forces are not filled with geniuses. In England, the Yorkshire Ripper called the police and confessed, but wasn't even added as a suspect for a year or two after that. And a number of gay men suddenly dropping dead in Scotland was chalked up to accidental overdose until a survivor reported that someone had tried to murder him. And even then, it took time for the police to take him seriously.

These are important. Most things attributed to malice are actually all about stupidity or capability.

The truth is, we'll never know the actual truth. Because governments and corporations are grotesquely incompetent, we may learn some of it eventually, but there'll be so much static that knowing what's signal will be impossible anyway.

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

It is easy to come up with theories. We know that Malaysian Airlines are grotesquely incompetent, so topping off air for the cockpit can simply mean that this has not been done in a very long time and there wasn't enough.

We could also argue that Boeing is also grotesquely incompetent and that this is a Boeing aircraft. A defective computer is well within their capabilities, as we know. It would be just as possible to create all the known effects from failures relating to Boeing.

There are simply too many theories that fit the limited known facts, and no way to distinguish between them.

It won't help much if we find the aircraft. It'll be too deep to salvage and inspect what's left (which we know is dispersing) and black boxes these days are electronic not mechanical. A mechanical tape wouldn't record much data, but if can last indefinitely without power. Something like an SSD is only going to last a couple of years without power, and we're well beyond that.

But it's also possible the fragments have dispersed enough that there's not enough left to positively identify as an aircraft.

We needed to find the aircraft quickly. Yes, everyone did their best with what was available, but clearly what was available was insufficient.

Aircraft need to transmit more data more often, if we're to avoid a repetition of the hunt fiasco, and both manufacturers and airlines need to be held to higher standards if we're to reduce avoidable disasters.

In short, we need more data and more integrity.

Eleanor "Ellie" Arroway was convinced there was a Message stored in Pi.

(True nerds will know the novel.)

The Pi search engine only looks at the first 200 million digits.

https://www.angio.net/pi/

In England, if you can show that such an ad impairs the system, it violates the Computer Misuse Act, which prohibits non-consensual use of computer services to harm users.

You'd have to show actual harm, but this is Microsoft. Actual harm is quite possible. Being the OS owner would not exempt Microsoft from the provisions of the Act.

The same will apply to their forcible upgrades.

The relevant part is section 3. Section 3 of the Computer Misuse Act makes it illegal to perform an unauthorised act with intent to impair, or with recklessness as to impairing, the operation of a computer.

In both the above cases, recklessness applies.

Section 3A of the Computer Misuse Act makes it illegal to create, supply or obtain any article for use in committing another offence under the Computer Misuse Act. Article includes software.

Non-blockable ads and imposed updates constitute creating tools for reckless interference, whether or not the tools actually cause damage.

The example on the police.uk website is this:

You downloaded a programme which was able to take remote control of a friend’s computer without their knowledge. You didn’t get a chance to use it before you were caught. This offence covers the possession of ‘malware’ but also legitimate software for which you had the intent of using it to commit an offence.

In this example, we can see that intent to use is sufficient.

Section 3ZA of the Computer Misuse Act makes it illegal to perform an unauthorised act causing, or creating the risk of, serious damage of a material kind. If the damage is caused or threatened to human welfare or national security you can go to prison for life, otherwise the maximum sentence is 14 years in prison.

We know from Heartbleed and from the effects of ransomware that ICU computers on the Internet use Windows. If these crash, due to a non-blockable popup or a forced upgrade, there's material damage. We only need to show there's a risk of it, we don't need to show it actually happening.

Clearly there's a risk. That puts Microsoft in violation of 3ZA.

The act is here: https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-g...

IANAL, but I can see that a common reading of the Act puts the popups and forced updates in violation. Ownership of the OS is not considered an exemption anywhere in the text. The text clearly refers to the computer and the users thereof, not the owners of what is running on it.

A lawyer would be needed to say if the forced popups or the forced upgrades actually broke the law. Actually, I suspect it would take a court case, so there's case law on the subject. This is because legal uses of a word don't always match common uses.

But I'd contend that there is a reasonable expectation that the law would cover such cases.

Will result in temporary gain, followed by a collapse when customers realise they can get better products for either not much more or a great deal less.

AI is "cheap" but produced vastly inferior results.

That works when your product is cheap anyway and bought by people who are themselves cheapskates, which is why automation was effective in the Industrial Revolution. Mass-producing goods is only useful when you're selling to a huge market.

Effective, but crippling in the long-term. Worker injuries and deaths were frequent, which meant there was a high turnover and low skill retention. And they were frequent because companies hired children (a practice returning to the US). Virtually none of the megacorps of the time survive into today.

It was actually crippling at the time. Many of the corporate giants operated by burning down rival factories (sometimes with the workers still inside) in order to gain an edge. They couldn't swing a healthy profit with the level of competition at the cheap end of the market. Verizon, Comcast, Microsoft and Google have clearly been taking notes.

What we're doing with AI simply repeats all this. And it'll end the same way. The big names will find that there's always someone willing to be cheaper and naffer, and the ones who can afford quality will do do.

So basically you're in favour of retaining the workers and firing management and HR.

Microsoft might not have violated antitrust law, if they'd been working with IBM, and that would have resulted in a healthier ecosystem.

OS/2 would have meant that microchannel architecture would have replaced the old bus standard, which might have accelerated bus development. Or might have throttled it entirely.

That's the problem with alternative histories, there's a lot of subtle and not-so-subtle interplays and you can't factor them all in.

IBM were partnering with Microsoft and wrote a big chunk of the code, from what I recall. It shows that programming is about discipline, and that perfectly good programmers existed at the time.