It's probably just encrypted, that provides the security-focused part of write protection, at least while it's not been unlocked for boot.

Computers used to have stuff in ROM, stuff used to be a lot smaller, you used to be able to burn your own ROMs and put them on your own boards and have it be meaningful. But none of that is true today of course any more than that you could put a useful amount of storage on a floppy.

Read/write protection on flash is mostly done in firmware and therefore could theoretically be bypassed, I wonder if there were floppy drives before LS120 where that was also true.

It seems like a better solution would be to virtualize the Windows installation in the first place, and then you can do whatever you want with it later if it's compromised. While IT is checking it over to determine whether it's time to revert it to a snapshot or actually try to gather data from it, you can be using an alternate system of whatever kind. The user ought to ideally be basically unaware that anything has happened (why would you boot into Linux when a user is used to Windows?) except that they don't have access to some files.

The constitution is clear. Trump is ineligible to become president after January 20, 2029 unless he becomes Speaker of the House (the highest line-of-succession post in which he can legally take office) and both POTUS and VPOTUS resign or die, or unless he takes some post even lower in the line of succession and an even larger number of people resign or die. And even that path to the presidency isn't clearly constitutional; it just isn't absolutely black-and-white unconstitutional.

So no, Trump cannot win a third term. He cannot even legally appear on the ballot for a third term, short of him somehow managing to get a two-thirds majority of Congress to pass a constitutional amendment and subsequently getting three-fourths of all states to ratify that amendment, or somehow managing to get two-thirds of all states to call for a constitutional convention, neither of which is much more likely than him winning the lottery.

He might, however, be able to win a Senate or House posting, in which case he could continue to be a distracting thorn in the side of proper governance for years to come.

The Gulf of America Act didn't make it through the Senate. It was never codified into law, and the name will be reverted by executive order on or around January 20, 2029 unless the next Congress has enough of a Democrat majority in the house to formally reverse it sooner.

Nowhere in the Constitution does it grant the president the authority to rename bodies of water by executive order. And constitutionality questions aside, this will likely be overturned; it's only a question of whether it happens now or in the first week of the next Congress.

Compounding that is the racism problem. The name Ontario is a Native American word that means "Great Lake". So not only is our president (illegally) renaming the great lake of the Great Lakes, which is bordering on idiotic on the surface, but he is also replacing a word that has meaning to the cultural heritage of Native Americans with the name of a dead white guy from Europe. You can't get much more offensive and flagrantly racist than that.

This is Mt. McKinley all over again, but without decades of historical precedent for the non-native name, and I find it to be an utterly disgusting, contemptible name change by an utterly disgusting, contemptible president. I have never looked forward to any day more in my life than I look forward to January 20, 2029, when all of this racist insanity can start being rolled back.

Debian is four things besides contributors: Governance/COC, license, code, and a network of repos. Debian's code is a tiny amount compared to the overall distribution, but code is not a trivial percentage of Debian.

I'd like to see them be resistant to AI contributions to the code that makes up Debian, I don't care as much if AI is used to do packaging. That's probably a place it could succeed, especially since Debian uses systemd and there will already be unit files which just need paths corrected in predictable ways... and which I will read before bashing init scripts out of other init scripts in five minutes or so.

s/u/i/

Fluid bed pyrolysis isn't profitable, but it is close enough to be viable. If recycling were meaningfully mandated (hahaha etc I know) then it could certainly be done without making plastics outrageously expensive.

On one hand, good luck to us if we try to make that happen, but on the other hand we are not realistically going to stop using fuel or plastics any time soon, the two go hand in hand anyway, and looking the other way accomplishes nothing.

What the fuck are you doing on a tech forum like Slashdot?

I am actually thinking about my next BMW (my current one is getting old). Knowing this, the iX3 is off the list.

BMW had a great control system, intuitive, possible to do many things without even looking. "Young people prefer" ? Really? The young people that actually buy your cars? Well, they'll learn and not prefer touchscreens anymore on the 2nd car.

The newer controls are more affordable. In the case of the non-button "buttons" a chip and some megaohm resistors and a piece of plastic with some labels screen printed on it replace a whole bunch of custom-designed injection-molded buttons with special labels which have to be applied with sub-millimeter accuracy, and switches for them which have to be able to survive hundreds of thousands of cycles in an extreme temperature environment. Only in the most basic vehicles which still have manual climate controls, if such a thing even exists any more, are the buttons potentially cheaper because they are attached directly to functions.

I had an A8 Quattro. It was a fairly marvelous driving machine when it was working well enough for that, but it was a horribly overcomplicated rolling nightmare when it comes to system design. It had a vacuum system about as stupid as the one on the infamous 300ZX TT and the electrical system had a truly peerless level of unneeded complexity designed apparently only to make the vehicle easier to assemble. There was a sealed-ish plastic "e-box" containing the principal control units and a bunch of junction plugs which then connected through to a related box inside in the center console, into which interior harness components would plug. This is unnecessary and only adds a lot of cost and points of failure. Put the fucking computers inside the cabin where they belong (because as hostile as environment as it can be, it's still less so than the engine bay) and you don't need any of this bullshit. Even Nissan got (and gets) that one right.

The Germans know how to make an amazing vehicle, but they are today apparently uninterested in making it reliable. Maybe Porsche is better, I can't speak to that brand.

Yes, you need the windows to do that to get a good seal when the doors are frameless. It is not strictly necessary, but it reduces wind noise.

People only think there's something special about BMW or Mercedes because they have not worked on cars. Once you have worked on a couple dozen different vehicles and gotten to know how they are put together you realize there is nothing at all special about modern BMWs or Mercedes compared to other modern cars. After the Lexus LS ate their luxury car lunch they all have been relentless cost cutters, but even before that they were starting to worsen the value proposition and depend on their logos and interiors to sell cars. The interiors matter, but if the underpinnings aren't as special as they are, they also aren't sufficient.

The Japanese figured out much better ways to design and build cars than the Germans, and it has showed since the nineties, and it still shows today. German cars are overwrought, with unnecessary complexities in basic components like electrical harnesses which cause more problems than they're worth, instead of overbuilt like they were in the 80s. This isn't even so much about mass because the W126 wasn't very heavy at all, it's about design iteration and spending money perfecting parts and systems. They don't even care about mass any more except for the most special or most budget cars, everything else is now heavy AF.

German cars aren't special since the nineties. The last time they overbuilt them was in the eighties. The W126 Mercedes was the last great S class. The W140 was a rolling electrical failure. Well, sometimes it rolled anyway. BMW followed exactly the same trajectory. They had to learn to complete with the Japanese after the LS.

Yeah, this is kind of an outdated article and this is most certainly misleading: "And in recent years, established brands like Mazda and Mercedes-Benz have moved more and more functions to touchscreens."

In actual recent years, the backlash against touchscreens has caused "established brands" (including Mercedes) to move _back_ to physical buttons:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...

The interview mainly shows a CEO out of touch with his consumers and reasoning based on shiny looking designs and his own 'vision' of how the world 'is evolving'. So par for the CEO course. Notably this guy is also the CEO of BMW _Australia_, who pretty certainly doesn't influence BMW interior design significantly.

That's not having more computer, that's having more computers. DCs are concentrations of power, it doesn't matter how many computers are in them really but we have to organize the logic into many computers because otherwise interconnection becomes unmanageably expensive. Drones inherently depend on many distributed computers, but none of them have to be very powerful. The more processing power you have the more fancy tricks they can do, but drones are inevitably energy-limited and therefore have limited loiter capability, so the types of tricks you will want them to play are also limited.

Yeah, it's called fast fashion.