Then what happened?

And their honeycomb really attracts the Martian bears!

A balloon is not static, it moves with the atmospheric system it is in. Ergo, it tells you how that system evolves. A drone cannot do this.

A drone can stay put, relative to the ground, telling you how a location's atmosphere evolves. A balloon cannot do this.

These are solving completely different types of problem.

You could, of course, construct a hybrid, as balloons are traditionally single-shot. If a balloon carries the measurement gear and a drone capable of carrying that same gear PLUS a deflated balloon, then you can have something that operates as a balloon until it reaches some pre-set location, whereupon the balloon's gas is released and the drone flies the ensemble to a collection point.

It obviously gives us guarantees in terms of what the source will do and what the compiled code should need.

These do not provide memory safety, so memory bugs would not be solved by these. They will find unexpected behavioural issues, though.

The precondition and postcondition statements are not cunningly-disguised assert statements because they're not asserted at runtime. They're enforced at static check and/or compile time.

The policy hints mean that if the kernel is doing something you're not expecting, you find this when testing the code. Equally, though, it means that users cannot cause the software to venture into realms unknown through many of the usual attack vectors because those will require permissions that aren't there.

because you don't have any idea where it got its "facts" from.

With a link you can (roughly) judge the credibility of the source. I.e., did the "facts" come from published research or some nobody on social media. Or some known propaganda outlet.

Sounds like a good strategy for a studio that expects their big movie to be a box office flop.

They also invented salmonella and body odor.

Fortunately God decided it was necessary to intervene and created his own political party to protect us from drag queens and people who take that "liberty and justice for all" kind of crap seriously.

You mean, like, a good one and a bad one?

Anyone want to buy a $100,000,000,000 data center at fire-sale prices?

I'm anticipating the first time I see the word roboticide in the news.

"Mostly" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here:

So three out of seven got home confinement, but one of them had it come after the completion of a prison sentence. One of the remaining two was "a contract intelligence analyst" which is hardly an executive. The last is "a manager of global intelligence" who reported to someone who got prison time ("senior manager of global intelligence) so I would also say "not an executive."

WRT to the CEO, I agree he got off easy and should have been prosecuted, for, at the very least, destruction of evidence. It appears his response to being notified of a litigation hold because there was an ongoing criminal probe was to... delete everything.

Oddly, the wikipedia page disagrees with the lengths of various sentences but does tend to support that "home confinement" was not really how executives were handled. It also mentions Ebay's internal investigation (which was conducted by an outside party) found that he neither directed that knew criminal acts would follow. While I am suspicious of "we investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing," the outside firm suggests this was above board. One would hazard to guess that the destroyed evidence may very well have shown that he did, but here we are.

By the way, your sig is amusing as heck.

And B.Clinton, Carter, Johnson, J.F.Kennedy, Truman, Roosevelt...