Well, Debian has signed updates. I assume most other distros do. I'm not clear what the benefit of this is. Who are you going to trust to do the signing? Does the entire system need to be resigned after every update? At first glance this only works if your entire system is in one "file", and you sign that file with a unique signature. But who's going to know what the proper signature is?

Signing individual packages seems much more reasonable. Then two people can compare the signatures on a particular piece of software to determine that they are the same. (But for that, why rely on signatures when things like sha256 exist...unless that what they mean by signature, in which case the prior caveats still apply.)

*You* may know that, but that doesn't make it true. It *may* be true. At this stage I expect most attempts to use AI to fail. The same thing happened when computers came out. And again when personal computers came out.

Power new tools have a learning curve. AI is definitely a powerful new tool, but it's currently changing so rapidly that we haven't really started learning how it should not be used.

Well, the first computer game I found really attractive was Orbquest, a text game on a Unix system. No graphics at all.

Obsessing over graphic is at right angles to the quality of the game.

Enjoy your 320x200 streams.

It might be too soon but the Exodus Technologies third-order Coulomb devices (IIRC) are built for this kind of very low impulse long duration lifiting.

Getting a rig up there to clamp on to the Hubble is probably the hard part of the project.

High-impulse propulsion is more likely to damage it than low and slow.

This was during the "NJ Drone Flap".

Trump was on TV saying he'd been briefed on them and the drones were "tracked back to their garage".

Last thing he said about it before his FAA said "they were authorized, we're not explaining, stop asking".

Matthew Livelsberger said they were of Chinese origin.

Robert Hastings wrote an entire book on unidentified craft over nuclear facilities covering four decades of documented incursions.

The FoIA request sounds like good data but nothing new.

As the price of DRAM, SSD storage, electric power, and data center real estate rise, what prevents LLM service providers from suddenly raising their rates such that it's no longer less expensive than hiring a human? Compare what happened when Broadcom jacked up the price of VMware.

And what prevents programmers whose copyrighted programs have been included in the LLMs' training set from suing LLM service providers for copyright infringement on grounds that the output of the LLM is substantially similar to their programs, and the LLM is not following the license? I remember that demonstration where an LLM had effectively memorized the reciprocal square root routine from the GPL source code of Quake III Arena and failed to include the "appropriate copyright notice" mandated by the GNU GPL. Even permissive licenses, such as Apache 2, MIT, 3BSD, and zlib, require preservation of the copyright notice in derivative works. Doe v. GitHub, pending in the Northern District of California.

In Slashdot's home country, both copyright and radio transmission are regulated at the federal level. So what's the plan for to peterww and tepples to start to change the laissez-mourir policies popular among conservative members of the U.S. Congress? See "antisocialist", "extreme capitalism", and "laissez-mourir" in RMS's glossary.

I wouldn't be so sure of that momentum. Several countries in the European Union have implemented age gating through an application that runs only on an iPhone or a certified Android phone. An iPhone runs proprietary iOS, published by foreign monopolist Apple Inc. A certified Android phone runs proprietary Google Play Services, published by foreign monopolist Google LLC. The EU talks out both sides, regulating foreign "gatekeepers" on one side (the Digital Markets Act and provisions of Digital Services Act that apply to very large online platforms) and requiring use of services provided by said "gatekeepers" (provisions of Digital Services Act that apply to "protection" of minors).

What ID do Brits use if they use public transport instead of a motor vehicle?

Last I checked a few years ago, the United Kingdom offered no domestic non-driver ID. It offers only a driving licence, which requires access to a motor vehicle and probably paying someone to let the learner practice driving in their vehicle for some number of hours, or a passport, which is valid for international travel but expensive. If this has changed, let me know.

Well, for things headed out, power supplies are the crucial problem. For things in the inner solar system, solar storms are irregular, but *will* happen. So I'm not really convinced by this test for anything but LEO (as those are temporary anyway).

That said, as long as it's intended for "special missions" it's reasonable. But AI is power hungry compared to fixed electronics, so that's going to be a continuing problem.

The problem with testing radiation hardness that way is that solar storms are quite erratic and severe ones are infrequent...but definitely not absent.

This test may work for things intended for low Earth orbit, as those are temporary anyway, but I don't think it's going to validate other uses. A better choice would be to send something to orbit Jupiter, where harsh radiation challenges are predictably present.

Closer to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy tradition. All they need are the words "Don't Panic" on the front cover.

If it doesn't, it has no real value.

Almost nothing on Wikipedia is true, but all of it is "verifiable" in that there's at least one published source making the claim. Even if 99.9% of all other sources say the opposite.

(The Haka is not, for example, a war chant. Which is attested to, but because it's claimed to be online, it is "verifiable".)

The number of errors is huge, the number of "official editors" who know anything about the subject is extremely small, and this has always been the case. This is why nobody reputable cites Wikipedia. Wikipedia is where you go to find out what is potentially interesting, but you ALWAYS obtain the facts from elsewhere, if you've any sense.