Not really. It's more like requiring all vendors who sell cash registers used in restaurants to support checking photo IDs because some restaurants also serve alcohol.

There's no safe way to prove your age to a website. Any scheme requires trusting some arbitrary third party that could secretly be the government doing timing comparisons between the verification and DNS queries and stuff to unmask anonymous users. At least with operating system or browser vendors, they presumably have a strong commitment to minimizing the risk of someone publicly posting "John Doe just visited sexwithseaturtles.com" or whatever.

It's not really that terrible. If you're going to do age verification, you have two choices: browser or operating system. All else is all but guaranteed to be either a privacy disaster, a usability disaster, or both. And either way, every operating system needs to support multiple users, or the "I used dad's iPad to browse porn and buy firearms" problem makes the verification useless.

And major operating system or browser vendors that cater to the general public should make it available by default, because doing so prevents the "You downloaded the AdultCheck module, so you must be a pervert" logic that some people might use to attack people.

What's terrible is the idea of mandating that it be performed at the OS level, rather than just mandating that the OS doesn't get in the way. Browser-level verification is actually far preferable, because there's no need to bake that into an authentication framework when you can just send it out to a browser window. Leave that tiny bit of integration complexity to the companies that actually require it. But this only works if the OS supports multiple users, so that the browser's cookies and storage are not shared across multiple users.

For devices that don't have multiple users, baking it in at the OS level really is the only way, but it could just as easily be solved by baking it in at the browser level and changing the OS to allow multiple users per device. Unfortunately, such technical details are way too subtle a point for most lawmakers to understand, so obviously they did it in the most wrong way possible.

Wait 'til they realize that Android is distributed under a license that allows people to copy, redistribute, and modify it.

As usual, a law created by people who didn't think of the consequences then got modified to fix some of the worst consequences, but because they still did not think of the consequences, the modification created different consequences. And this is why we need better lawmakers.

Maybe, but the problem is that the electronics have to run at those temperatures and not have solder joints start popping, or other fun failures.

As far as I know, it is just real-time. And it didn't even slow down at the flashing red light. So either it recognized that someone was waving it on or it didn't see the flashing light at all.

I *think* that number actually is counting them, though it's hard to be certain. I'm pretty sure servers are outnumbered by PCs by a large margin.

Cameras and LIDAR. I am not a self-driving car engineer, but from what I understand, it seems likely that it is possible to detect water with even just cameras, at least under the right circumstances, and with cameras plus LIDAR under a lot more circumstances. But doing so would require proper training data; it's not like there's a "Ooh, that's water" recognizer built into the hardware or whatever.

More to the point, they would have to train it how to recognize that some particular sensor return pattern (e.g. zero LIDAR reflections off the ground) is a problem, and do so in a way that doesn't over-correct for flooded potholes, an inch of water in the street, etc. Presumably, detecting water is the easy part; detecting the depth of water is the hard part unless you know exactly how high the curbs are.

I'm a little spooked when I see Tesla FSD beta demos where the car plows right on ahead through slightly flooded streets as though there's nothing there. It makes me wonder whether it saw it and ignored it or just didn't see it. It's the same feeling I got this morning when someone was signaling me to go ahead at a flashing red light and FSD beta (12.6.4) went right on ahead. I wonder if it somehow saw the hand gestures, or if it just didn't see the flashing red light at all.

That's what makes all this stuff fun.

Any hardware or device driver engineer will tell you that every hardware problem, once shipped, is a software problem. :-) (Translation: Hardware bugs, once the hardware is in the wild, have to be fixed with a software workaround.)

Nothing in self-driving cars is a quick fix other than geo-blocking something. You have to train a visual or LIDAR recognition model to recognize the problem situation and then train the path finding model to flag it as a bad path. How hard that is for this particular case, I have no idea. And there's probably other stuff beyond that; I'm not an expert in this area.

Yeah, there's not enough crack in the world for that to make sense. The cost-to-orbit is well documented. Artemis 2: $4.1 billion for a launch that can lift 95 tons to LEO. SuperHeavy/Starship: $90 million for a launch that can lift 150 tons to LEO. Ignoring minor details (e.g. that nobody is willing to expend a SuperHeavy to do trans-lunar injection), the reality of the matter is that the cost per ton to orbit for NASA rockets is 72x what it is expected to cost for SpaceX rockets.

And that's consistent with Falcon Heavy costs, too, so you can't hide behind "Yeah, but SuperHeavy and Starship don't work yet", because unless your payload is huge, SpaceX is still almost two orders of magnitude cheaper.

That never made much sense to me. The power requirements and cooling requirements for a data center in the vacuum of space would be completely infeasible.

The most any commercial satellite has ever dissipated, as far as I know, is only low-double-digit kilowatts worth of heat. Three high-end NVIDIA AI cards per satellite would basically fully max out a typical satellite's heat dissipation, without factoring in any of the heat produced from communication hardware, energy storage, solar heating, or heat dissipation from the computer that's powering those GPUs.

A large data center would likely include one or more clusters of 100,000 GPUs, not three. A typical communications satellite is on the order of 220 square meters. Do the math, and you get 7,333,260 square meters, or 7.3 square km. This translates to a radius of .76 km, or a diameter of 1.52 km. Sure, it might not be not as dense as a meteor of that diameter, but it would still be really, really bad to deorbit something that size. I would not be surprised if the resulting dust cloud causes crop failures for years on a scale that would wipe out a sizable percentage of human life.

If, by data center, you just mean an edge cache like Cloudflare or Akamai, then it might be slightly more feasible, but even that is pushing the limits of my suspension of disbelief.

Why would you take macOS out? It's a full UNIX environment, complete with a command line.

Agreed.

What made Linux the most widely used and successful OS was Android. But Linux and *BSD have fairly similar numbers of installations. You have 2.5 billion Apple devices (mac, iOS, etc.) versus 4 billion Android devices, you have more iOT devices on Linux, but a LOT more commercial routers and switches and other hardware on *BSD. It's really hard to calculate, but the numbers are probably within +/- 20% of being the same.

The problem is, none of those devices really qualify as Linux in any meaningful sense. Sure, they run the kernel, but that's about it. The user-space tools that GPL had such a big influence on are not there at all. Take all the iOT devices and Android devices and Chromebooks out of the picture, and Linux ends up actually being less popular than *BSD (because of macOS).

So whether Linux is or is not the most widely used OS depends on how you measure it.

I don't see any real evidence for what you're saying. Linux succeeded more because it had better support for PC graphics hardware early on, and the *BSDs didn't get a chance to really catch up. And the AT&T-Berkeley lawsuit stalled BSD development and adoption during the early 90s as well. And the *BSDs were fragmented into multiple camps (386BSD forked into FreeBSD and NetBSD, and then NetBSD further forked into OpenBSD), while the only forking on the Linux side was over distros. The lack of a strong, central leader likely made a far bigger difference than anything else.

All of these things led to Linux having more people working on it early on, and ultimately, the group with the most developers wins. Maybe GPL got them slightly more developers, or maybe it didn't. There's really no way to know. But my guess is that for every extra developer who joined because of the GPL, there were two corporate developers who didn't join because of the GPL, so I highly doubt you are correct in your assessment.

At best, GPL made it harder (but not impossible) for hardware developers to ship closed-source drivers, which made it easier to keep supporting old hardware, which probably resulted in a slight increase in the thickness of the long tail of the user base. Whether this is a meaningful benefit or not is unclear, because it also comes with the extra overhead of continuing to support that long tail. :-)

No, statutory damages are per work. The minimum is $200 if the violator could show reasonable cause to have believed that the infringement was fair use, and the maximum is $150,000 in cases of willful infringement. The nominal range is $750 to $30,000.

To receive more than that requires showing actual damages. What this means is that even if there are a hundred GPLed projects whose licenses are being violated, short of proving willful infringement, apart from in injunction against further violations, the most they would likely get without showing actual damages is $3 million dollars, which is a slap on the wrist. And it's unclear how to show actual damages for something that you give away for free.

You *might* be able to make the claim that each new product line is a new infringement, but that's about the limit to what is realistic.

If you get proprietary software and then make a derivative work, you have violated copyright. It isn't just proprietary. It can't legally exist.