While that sort of analysis probably isn’t impossible, it is computationally unrealistic to do in realtime on a language which wasn’t designed for it.

It’s the sort of thing which is simple in 99% of cases, but the last 1% might well be impossible. Sadly it’s the last 1% you need to worry about, because anyone trying to defeat your system is going to find them

There’s no need to leave earth, just lift it into a medium earth orbit. There are literally thousands of kilometres in between low earth orbit (where there are lots of communications, spy, navigation and weather satellites) and geosynchronous (where there are lots of communications satellites), and outside of those two there’s virtually nothing there

Oh, sure. It’s not likely to be a serious threat, but not for the reason people keep saying

People keep saying that, but it isn’t true that the leak being in the disposable part of the vehicle means it’s not a safety problem.

It’s the pressurisation system for the thrusters. If that fails, then they won’t be able to control the capsule until it hits the atmosphere. That could mean they get stuck on the ISS, in the most extreme case, or it could mean that they lose thrust mid-manouvre and they re-enter the atmosphere incorrectly. That could be anywhere from inconvenient (they miss their landing spot and someone has to come get them), to dangerous (they land so far away that they’re in danger of sinking or being eaten by bears before anyone reaches them) to outright fatal (they skip off the atmosphere, or tumble their way into reentry and burn up)

It’s a matter of perspective. To someone who’s job is to write the system which interprets ASM, ASM is high level

“dissolving parliament” means they’ve announced a general election. Parliament won’t meet any more, and all the existing members of parliament will go home and begin campaigning

You declaring a debt isn’t meaningful because you don’t have legal authority to do so.

A licence statement is describing in what way you’re granting permission for something you do have the right to control, which makes it meaningful

Nah, we’re alright. I don’t think anyone has clearly defined the requirements of earth citizenship, we can assume it’s like Ireland who hand it out like candy

No it wouldn’t. Whoever touched it last is responsible for it, that’s entirely consistent with the metaphore

I’m pretty sure it means exactly what it says, but you lot are all misreading it.

I interpret it as “all rights, except the right to commit, are reserved” (which doesn’t mean you surrender the right to commit, but rather that it’s the only right you aren’t depriving everyone else of)

In principle they could have pulled out slightly, if there’s jostling and tiny movements in skull then you’d expect them to work loose over time if they’re not securely anchored

Well it’s definitely alive, that’s not a terribly high bar (plants and sponges qualify, after all).

The ethics question is whether it’s a person yet (or should be treated like one)

He’s the foreign secretary. I’m pretty sure that makes him the person who’s permission they’d need, unless the prime minister immediately overrules him

The default is as long as it is because most people value not losing data, or avoiding corruption, or generally preserving the proper functioning of software on their machine, over 90 seconds during which they could simply walk away.

Especially when those 90 seconds only even come up when something isn’t right.

If you feel that strongly that you’d rather let something malfunction, then you’re entirely at liberty to change the configuration. You don’t have to accept the design decisions of the package maintainers if you really want to do something differently.

Also, if you’re that set against investigating why your system isn’t behaving the way you expect, then what the hell are you doing running arch? Half the point of that distro is that you get the bleeding edge of everything, and you’re expected to maintain your own damn system

The question you should be asking is what’s wrong with that job which is causing it to run for long enough that the timeout has to kill it.

Systemd isn’t the problem here, all it’s doing is making it easy to find out what process is slowing down your shutdown, and making sure it doesn’t stall forever

Also, it’s probably possible to fix the partition so that it’s as big as it used to be. It’s likely that some of your data is corrupted already, but the repartitioning won’t have erased the old data except here or there where it’s written things like new file tables in space it now considers unused

What they’re suggesting is to back up the whole disk, rather than any single partition. Anything you do to the partition to try and recover it has the potential to make a rescuable situation hopeless. If you have a copy of the exact state of every single bit on the drive, then you can try and fix it safe in the knowledge that you can always get back to exactly where you are now if you make it worse

The black box isn’t like a modern hard drive, with terabytes of storage. They’re often old, and even the modern ones need to put so much effort into protection against things like fire, seawater and collisions that they don’t have as much space as you might imagine.

They have to rely on someone going out of their way to take the box out, or shut down the plane, because the alternative would be for them to have some way to decide for themselves to stop recording. If they could do that then a false positive would cause them to miss potentially important data, so they’re designed to keep going until someone makes it stop

It might not make him wrong, but he also happens to be wrong.

You can’t compare AI art or literature to AI software, because the former are allowed to be vague or interpretive while the latter has to be precise and formally correct. AI can’t even reliably do art yet, it frequently requires several attempts or considerable support to get something which looks right, but in software “close” frequently isn’t useful at all. In fact, it can easily be close enough to look right at first glance while actually being catastopically wrong once you try to use it for real (see: every bug in any released piece of software ever)

Even when AI gets good enough to reliably produce what it’s asked for first time & every time (which is a long way away for quite a while yet), a sufficiently precise description of what you want is exactly what programmers spend their lives writing. Code is a description of a program which another program (such as a compiler) can convert into instructions for the computer. If someone comes up with a very clever program which can fill in the gaps by using AI to interpret what it’s been given, then what they’ve created is just a new kind of programming language for a new kind of compiler

Perhaps not, but it would make it far easier for any sympathetic brain surgeon you managed to find who was willing to try and fix the problem for you.

The key thing is not needing that specific company to help, but needing generic expert assistance is fine