I suspect a letter from a few congresscritters mentioning "Contempt of Congress" will soon be delivered. A year in jail would make it hard to enforce their illegal decision.

"At least as safe as a (prudent) human" seems like a reasonable standard to shoot for as a floor, presuming the vendor is willing to accept liability when their "as good as a human" system is at fault in an accident.

This a BMW thing? I've only bought three new cars in my life, but I test drove the exact vehicle I purchased. Why would you drive a different car?

The same place he's been for the last quarter century: dead. You're picking on the wrong Kennedy scion.

"Dolgov warned that camera-only systems may improve quickly before plateauing "way before the performance that is required by your product." It's almost as if he's been studying the history of your self driving claims.

Come on, I'm not in any way a fan of Musk, but he appears to have (at least until recently) let the adults run things at SpaceX while he just takes the credit for it, and when Falcon 9 was first flying, his entire net worth was "hundreds of millions" rather than having "hundreds of billions in disposable income."

Oher rich people have played with rockets, too. He's, shockingly, mostly succeeded, and while his actual personal achievements here are far closer to Al Gore's infamous claim about the internet (his real efforts in funding and commercialization while in the senate, not the sound bite we love to mock) than what Musk wants everyone to believe, the whole "other rich people playing with rockets" bit suggests that no, you probably couldn't have done as well or better with his resources.

I'm kinda impressed with this 'surreptitious' business model. I don't condone it, but I wonder what the money flow looked like before this hit the fan?

See my answer to
CaptQuark, less snark got
him a nice answer.

I admit my info is out of date. I lost a customer to this error message over 16 years ago and have since retired. Thanx for the correction.

The TDF should sue microsoft for slander. Specifically, when you try to open an ODF in an M$ product, you get a screenfull of FUD claiming it's malware, designed to scare away any non-technical user. It's an open format; they could just display it and try to save it in their own format later. This suit won't cure the problem, but it's a good start.

I doubt that drones can reach the altitudes that helium balloons can. OTOH, balloons are a one time shot; drones come back home for a charge and reuse. TCO and ROI must be a lot better.

On a side note, I live near the beach. Everyday I see small planes dragging a banner. I've been waiting for years to see a banner with just a drone at each corner, flying by itself with no plane.

"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.

sudo chroot --userspec=nobody:nobody /mnt/jail /user/local/bin/chatgpt --pleasedontgorogue?

And a funeral wreath. And, apparently, a plan to send Polynesian gangsters (one imagines that this might consist of Dwayne Johnson showing up at their house singing "What can I say, except, Ex-tor-tion!") though it thankfully appears that did not come to fruition.

They are. The summary states that seven former employees pled guilty to criminal charges. I know it's tradition not to RTFA, but you are supposed to at least RTFS.