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.

Have we read the same article?

I disagree. The accused's computer was searched and nothing was found. A person owning the account from which the messages were sent is not enough evidence to send that person to jail, not in any sensible justice system. What even is the point of the search, if the outcome of the search does not matter? What difference would it have made if they had found evidence on that computer? This is not a rhetorical question.

Also, the accused shouldn't have to prove that he got hacked, especially not in the absence of any evidence on his computer. The burden of proof is on the accusation.

More generally, a judge needs to know that identity theft is a thing, because it is very much a thing. A judge who doesn't know that is incompetent. Incompetence is not a valid excuse for ruining someone's life. If your argument is that we should accept that judges are ignorant and tech-illiterate, and not expect that they fulfill their mission, then it is a bad argument. The judge decides which evidence is admissible, and bears the responsibility for that decision. I am not arguing that judges cannot make mistakes, they are humans and so they make mistakes all the time, it is inevitable. I am however arguing that this mistake is so gross, and with such consequences, that it warrants punishment.

Society does not say to convict without evidence, so I'm not sure what point you are trying to make.

Also, you have not answered my question.

Ad hominem is unnecessary by the way, using it to attack me only says something about you, and what it says isn't great.

Are you saying that judges should have great power but without great responsibility, that they should not be accountable? If yes, how do you justify that they, unlike most of us, shouldn't be accountable for their grave mistakes? Otherwise, what are you actually saying?

Police made a mistake, it sucks but they're humans, mistakes are bound to happen. As much as I distrust and dislike the police, i don't blame them for the outcome here. The prosecution worked with what they had. The real issue here, in my opinion, is declaring someone guilty without evidence. Whoever made that judgement shouldn't be allowed to make judgements, and should be punished for having done so.

Isn't there a professional judge involved? There should be one, and they should bring up the absence of evidence. It could as well have been the correct username but a case of identity theft, the accused should only defend themselves against evidence, which apparently did not exist. This is absurd and would also have been absurd with the correct username.

Regardless of underscore count, this is a real issue:

So they just assumed he must be the guy despite having no evidence that he was the guy, then sent him to jail, essentially ruining his life. Shouldn't this have been a big issue already then? Shouldn't there be consequences for the person(s) who made that judgement?

The mental gymnastics you go through are astounding. You have cornered yourself into a silly stance. If a rabid dog charges at a kid, do we watch to see how they handle it? How extreme an example do you need until you finally admit that your position is untenable?

Same, I don't think this hurts anyone's bottom line significantly. Either people can afford to see it in a theatre and they will, or they can't and this doesn't make a difference because they were never going to spend that money anyway, let them have the bootleg.

Even if you do that, you still reward people with bad intentions. In the scenario you describe, they only change their behaviour because they got caught. Rest assured that they will cheat again but more carefully or with different teachers. If that is how things work in our society, then we have collectively failed (and I believe we have). We can't base a society on "you will be caught and there will be consequences" because quite often people do not get caught. We fail at fostering good intentions, and no amount of surveillance will fix that.

I mostly do heavy multi-disciplinary engineering problems (these I also use for checking an AI, as they're typically not good at these sorts of problems), complex coding, OS analysis, stuff like that. However, sometimes I do throw the occasional odd-ball - I've used ChatGPT to propose a workable quantum mechanics that will cope with Doctor Who canon, for example, and to produce an outline for a story in which symphonic metal appears in 1964 that is compliant with current sociological and psychological models of behaviour.

Claude Opus 4.6 was coping surprisingly well with just about everything I threw at it (but ran out of credits fast), but Opus 5 is churning out incoherent babblings to the point I'm worried I may have accidentally summoned Cthulhu.

But Gemini, Grok, and DeepSeek got hopelessly confused on just about everything past a very low level of complexity. They can handle large problems, yes - Gemini has a huge context window - but complex interactions baffle them.

ChatGPT is able to identify issues correctly, but can only outline solutions, it's just not good at depth. 5.6 is a lot better, but still not good at deep answers. ChatGPT is also prone to agreeing for the sake of it, which makes me nervous about trustworthiness.