A vacuum doesn't explain why is there a recovery period required before the joint can be "cracked" again. The explanation in the article seems to leave this well-known aspect unexplained. If it's a simple cavitation bubble (unliklely), then you should be able to crack the joint again immediately.
Of course, you're wrong about unlimited liability - that's the whole point of corporations in the first place.
But beyond that, it's the rise of egregiously intrusive regulation (SarbOx, SEC, FTC, etc.) and the near-impossibility of compliance that's the real driving factor behind no one in their right mind wanting to go public. The effect of such punitive regulation is to hang a Federal Govt sword of Damocles over every public company, which only the very largest can even begin to afford to protect themselves against (generally, those companies are so big, they should be broken up under our now-irrelevant anti-trust law, anyway...)
The death of the IPO is really just simply business owners rejecting Big Government overreach - it is, in fact, showing a place where the market still works...
Methane doesn't smell. Farts smell because of the organosulfur compounds that go along with them. Natural gas smells because the utility adds stinky mercaptans (also organosulfur compounds, like most smelly stuff) so you can smell dangerous gas leaks.
Stephen Green had what may be the best comment possible on this at Instapundit the other day (He's edging on @Iowahawk quality snark here):
Please keep this technology out of the hands of my young sons, who would undoubtedly ingest several of these along with Pop Rocks and a two-liter bottle of Coke.
Cattle don't damage rangeland, rather they are an integral part of grassland/rangeland ecosystems. The number of cattle in production today is dwarfed by the number of bison that once (naturally) roamed the American plains.
Learn some facts before spouting B.S. You might want to start with some of the excellent research findings of the Bamberger Selah Ranch in central Texas, which has proven that when grasslands are restored, ground water and springs are also restored. Amazing how that works - gosh, it's almost like it was designed that way...
BTW, even the worst foreign CAFOs are hardly anything like you describe. Sick or dead animals don't bring much at auction...
The difference is that Linus Pauling was right, and was a Nobel Prize winner. FWIW, recent research (2017) at the University of Iowa (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213231716302634) has confirmed that megadoses of Vitamin C do indeed kill cancer cells, but only when taken intravenously rather than orally, as Pauling, Klenner, et al always claimed was essential.
That said, Gael Duval is probably a really nice guy, but I used Mandrake for several years, and based on the product, can say that holistic, consistent and integrated thinking was not as evident as hoped. (IMO, San Mehat did a far better job with the ill-fated CorelLinux when it was primarily aimed at the decades-ahead ARM-based Corel NetWinder - it was definitely better sorted than Mandrake at the time as a roughly equivalent and ambitious distro...)
Agreed. You certainly can't come up with technical mandates in law that will make any sense. (And we should all be opposed to further government intrusion into our lives anyway - we've gone far too far down that road already...)
That said, it does seem to me that what Apple has done here clearly and flagrantly violates several significant Federal laws around antitrust and warranty issues. The sad thing is that, like Hillary, they will almost certainly get away with it because they are the darlings of the "in" crowd...
I stand by my comment. While the glue problem isn't as bad with the phones, it's bad enough to cause a great many screens to break in the process of trying to open the phones. (The only reason this isn't seen as a bigger problem is that screen replacement is a more common reason than battery replacement for taking the phone apart in the first place.)
I'm well familiar with iFixit, and have used their guides. And yes, tablets and 2-in-1s are a true nightmare.
No, as someone who's designed battery charging systems for mobile devices, I can tell you that there are FAR better ways of dealing with this problem than what Apple did. Don't let any tech handwaving fool you - the PRIMARY purpose of this code in iOS is to make old phones so annoyingly slow that users are more or less forced into buying a new one. This only confirms what's been widely suspected for years - that Apple's updates continually slow down their phones and iPads, and the only way to avoid that is to not upgrade - a process that is became far harder with 10.3.3.
(For those who don't know - you really can't turn down an iOS "upgrade" any more - it insists on downloading and trying to install it. Even "declining" the installation just postpones it to the upcoming night. You have to do that, then go an manually delete the update through Apple's deliberately clunky "Manage Storage" interface in Settings. This will work for about a week or two, until it decides for you that you really do need to upgrade, since it's their phone, not yours, and the whole customer-pissing-off process begins again...)
The deliberate slowdown of all but the newest hardware, in conjunction with the new policy of effectively forcing "upgrades" is in my mind, prima facie evidence of an antitrust violation far worse than the one that got IBM slapped for decades. I'm as done with Apple as I am with the NFL. Never again. Ever.
This is a good point - until relatively recently, replacing a battery (even in pre-iPhone smartphones like my old Treo) was easily accomplished with just fingers...
BTW, the Treo 755P is still better as a phone, contact manager, and calendar than ANY modern IOS or Android phone. It totally sucks as a browser, though...
Many hardware failures could be fixed with a $0.50 component and a soldering iron instead of a $800 replacement logic board. But iPhone batteries seem an odd rallying cry for the movement.
I call BS - there is virtually nothing that can be fixed with even nice home soldering equipment on a modern smartphone logic board - everything is super fine pitch SMA components, which have moved to mostly BGA-like packages and contacts over the past few years. I became an expert at super-fine high-temp soldering as a kid (soldering a half dozen or more 40 ga wires to 1/8" strain gages down inside a 1/2" hole for my Dad's instrumentation company), and repairing high-density SMA boards just isn't really doable without the right tools. You need very specialized equipment to do this sort of thing right.
Batteries are a rallying cry because they and the display assembly and the entire logic board(s) are essentially the only components large enough to be replaceable by an ordinary tech-competent person.
Note a couple of substantial caveats: 1) Like everything else, Apple charges super-premium prices for their replacement batteries, and 2) I happen to live 10 minutes away from an Apple store here in Austin, but there are lots of folks just in other parts of the state, who are *several hours* away from one. Lubbock or Midland/Odessa, for instance, get to choose between Fort Worth or El Paso: about 4-1/2 to 5-1/2 hours!
And most of the time you can't just walk in - you have to have an appointment, which no one expects the first time.
Most modern super-thin phones and other devices are glued together in such a way that it's difficult or impossible for even a fairly careful, experienced person with small nimble fingers to get them apart without destroying some expensive component, usually, the screen/digitizer/glass assembly.
This isn't just a problem for phones, but tablets and many modern computers (Surface, cough, cough), too.
Checkout the reviews on sites like teardown.com, and you can see that most (thin) modern electronic devices are held together with glues that are clearly selected with no concern for the device ever coming apart again.
There is no punishment too severe for Apple for deliberately degrading the performance of devices after they have been sold. (This is argualbly far worse than the hardware/software tying & lying that got IBM put under antitrust consent decree back in the 1960's!)
I've uncomfortably used Apple phones for the last several years, but I'm done with that - replaceable batteries and expandable storage are on the required list for my next phone!
This is probably headed to being a monumental cock-up. The browser is the only application that really matters much on any platform anymore.I've been a dedicated Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox user for years, but breaking extensions is losing me.
There are really only two things keeping me on FF the last 10 years: TabMixPlus, combined with the only browser on the planet that doesn't fall over with 400-500 tabs. This allows non-sucking session management to make sure you (almost) never lose all those tabs. (My tab sessions are my most frequently backed-up files. And yes, I know about bookmarks - I have tens of thousands of those, in hundreds of categories. I'm typing this into one of the 380-something tabs I have open at the moment. It's the way I prefer to work, and my tools must serve me, not the other way around...)
Not sure I'll switch to 57 soon, if ever - it's guaranteed to break all kinds of things, and I imagine reverting will be a far from trivial process. FF has gutted me several times in the past couple of years - losing tab groups was the biggest. If I'm going to have to go to all the trouble to learn, find extensions for, and configure a new browser, I'm not sure there's really any reason to stay in the Firefox fold - they're not giving me any reason at all that I can think of...
I'm not giving Google any more influence over my life, so Chrome's out - maybe Brave is the best bet these days...
And if you believe "On Trusting Trust" (and if you don't, you're just in denial) you know that it's impossible to verify their claims even *with* the source...
Ultimately, trust can never be in things, systems, methods, processes, etc. Trust has to have *people* as its object.
The longer we go, the more Scott McNealy gets proven right when he said, "You have no privacy anyway - get over it." It's entirely possible to assemble the information MS is collecting, and quite a bit more, from other sources - and it's being done all day, every day. That's not an excuse, justification, or rationalization, but it is reality.
Bingo. I'd go further and say that even though most people here are fully capable of keeping their machines updated and secure, most of us wind up doing a piss-poor job of it in the real world. The cobbler's barefoot kids and all that. Despite the fact that all of us know better, the frequency with which even technology professionals fail to apply security updates or even back up their data is really shocking... (I write this on a Surface Pro 4 that hasn't been backed up in over a month other than by the built-in Windows backup (I let my previous backup subscription expire and I haven't yet settled on a replacement), so I'm one of those guilty parties.)
Making at least the basic stuff happen "automagically" (at least by default) is not necessarily bad and can be wonderful for the folks who don't know (and don't want to know) how all the sausage gets made. I agree it would be nice to have more granular controls, but this is a good step in the right direction. It would be even better if this disclosure puts pressure on other big coercive companies to be more open and transparent about what data they collect and what they do with it. I'd bet lunch that a similar disclosure by Google would be nothing short of terrifying.
Also there seems to be a double standard at play here (possibly justified, given Microsoft's past actions and behaviors): Windows actually gives you quite a bit more control over much of this stuff than say, Android or Chrome, yet far fewer people seem to be lining up to bust Google's chops over even more egregious behavior.
Again, with WSL/Ubuntu for Windows, I've got a dev platform that gives me truly the best fusion of the Windows and Linux worlds. This is arguably superior to Apple's approach from an openness point of view...
If you're writing code to run in the cloud and/or containers, then it really doesn't make much difference what desktop OS you use, so long as it's one that makes things easy and has a good set of tools that make you productive - that's kinda the whole point of those sorts of abstractions in the first place...
No, I'm not shilling for Microsoft (check my posting history, especially back around 1997-2000 - I've been brutally and vocally critical of Redmond's abuses), but this is a good step that should be applauded.
The reality today is that Microsoft is among the most open and forthcoming of modern tech companies in disclosing what information it collects and how it's used. They're not offering all the options we'd like to see, for sure, but it really seems to me that they're close to leading among big companies, and certainly way out ahead of the likes of Google, Facebook, and Apple, to name just a few of their competitors in one space or another. And for that, they deserve some credit...
And the youngstas forget that probably the biggest thing that held Linux back in the early days was the lack of a decent window manager and desktop environment. (Back then, all the good ones were either strictly proprietary or required expensive corporate foundation licenses.)
Sun's open sourcing of OpenWin was definitely one of the things that really allowed Linux to take off. Sun started things rolling and soon, there were many good choices, and sadly, the contribution of OpenWin is mostly forgotten today. I've often really wondered if Linux would have ever had a prayer without OpenWin as its first, modern, great-looking GUI platform...
With WSL (Ubuntu for Windows), there's a pretty decent chance that Windows will be the most widely used Linux *desktop* OS within two years.
This is Microsoft's deal to screw up - if they execute well, then Windows and Linux may become far stronger together than either could be separately. WSL is just the first step, bringing Unix/Posix text stream pipeline semantics to Windows in the most standard and useful way ever - way better than MKS/SFU/Interix/SFA. Imagine, now, that Canonical integrates all the 21st century structured object pipeline concepts from PowerShell and Mono/.NET into Linux - *that* is something that could benefit the entire Unix/Linux community, as well as the Windows community.
I think it's a bit early to say they've given up on mobile convergence, given the persistent and reasonably well-backed reports that MS is working on a new kind of mobile device (usually tagged as the "Surface Phone" although that may not be an adequate or accurate description of it). In fact, it seems that they've doubled down on being able to go that direction, even though they have no really compelling Win10 Mobile devices right now (the HP Elite X3 being the most notable potential exception...)
While there are some valid security issues with X (and audio is a bloody nightmare), the fundamental idea of network extensibility in desktop environments is needed more now than ever. It seems like a real shame that most all of the things angling to replace X can't do one of the most important things it's always given us...
because Redmond has conned the shiny new hardware vendors into writing drivers for them...
Not conned, they just recognize market share when they see it. Linux has conquered the server world when even Microsoft has a large portion of its Azure instances running Linux), but Linux on the desktop is walking dead. This loss of Unity is sad news because IMO, Unity had one of the few chances of reviving desktop Linux - for a number of reasons, including the really important one of being a native Linux for mobile. (No, Android really doesn't count as Linux just because there are a few Linux bits remaining if you dig deep enough.)
On the other hand, with the advent of Ubuntu for Windows (WSL), most Linux users and developers will find that Windows is now nearly as good a Linux as any other Debian/Ubuntu-based distro, and the combination of Windows and Linux without emulators, VMs, or the need to reboot really does offer the best of both OSes.
WSL is a work in progress, for sure, but it has awesome potential, and is already changing the way I work... (BTW, the Creators Update next week includes upgrades to both WSL and to the MS command shell to (finally) support proper color control, among other things.)
Actually, it can be far more complicated than you may think - Consider that a typical robotic workcell may have several robots and quite a few other devices (tooling, clamps, material handling/motion control equipment, process equipment, etc.), each with it's own, mostly or entirely independent control logic. In most cases, there simply is no overarching view of the logic or the policy that's supposed to be implemented (that requires *understanding*, and hence humans), so it's surprisingly easy to run into potentially dangerous conditions that weren't anticipated by the people who designed the system. (I say this as someone who has 30 years experience in both robots and IoT.)
You're right that that's the way safety *should* work, but getting to that point in the real world (which is a messy place) is a lot harder than you might expect - as evidenced in this case by the failure to anticipate or realize the potential danger from a second robot.
Slashdot Mirror
A vacuum doesn't explain why is there a recovery period required before the joint can be "cracked" again. The explanation in the article seems to leave this well-known aspect unexplained. If it's a simple cavitation bubble (unliklely), then you should be able to crack the joint again immediately.
Of course, you're wrong about unlimited liability - that's the whole point of corporations in the first place.
But beyond that, it's the rise of egregiously intrusive regulation (SarbOx, SEC, FTC, etc.) and the near-impossibility of compliance that's the real driving factor behind no one in their right mind wanting to go public. The effect of such punitive regulation is to hang a Federal Govt sword of Damocles over every public company, which only the very largest can even begin to afford to protect themselves against (generally, those companies are so big, they should be broken up under our now-irrelevant anti-trust law, anyway...)
The death of the IPO is really just simply business owners rejecting Big Government overreach - it is, in fact, showing a place where the market still works...
Methane doesn't smell.
Farts smell because of the organosulfur compounds that go along with them.
Natural gas smells because the utility adds stinky mercaptans (also organosulfur compounds, like most smelly stuff) so you can smell dangerous gas leaks.
Stephen Green had what may be the best comment possible on this at Instapundit the other day (He's edging on @Iowahawk quality snark here):
Please keep this technology out of the hands of my young sons, who would undoubtedly ingest several of these along with Pop Rocks and a two-liter bottle of Coke.
Cattle don't damage rangeland, rather they are an integral part of grassland/rangeland ecosystems. The number of cattle in production today is dwarfed by the number of bison that once (naturally) roamed the American plains.
Learn some facts before spouting B.S. You might want to start with some of the excellent research findings of the Bamberger Selah Ranch in central Texas, which has proven that when grasslands are restored, ground water and springs are also restored. Amazing how that works - gosh, it's almost like it was designed that way...
BTW, even the worst foreign CAFOs are hardly anything like you describe. Sick or dead animals don't bring much at auction...
The difference is that Linus Pauling was right, and was a Nobel Prize winner. FWIW, recent research (2017) at the University of Iowa (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213231716302634) has confirmed that megadoses of Vitamin C do indeed kill cancer cells, but only when taken intravenously rather than orally, as Pauling, Klenner, et al always claimed was essential.
That said, Gael Duval is probably a really nice guy, but I used Mandrake for several years, and based on the product, can say that holistic, consistent and integrated thinking was not as evident as hoped. (IMO, San Mehat did a far better job with the ill-fated CorelLinux when it was primarily aimed at the decades-ahead ARM-based Corel NetWinder - it was definitely better sorted than Mandrake at the time as a roughly equivalent and ambitious distro...)
Agreed. You certainly can't come up with technical mandates in law that will make any sense. (And we should all be opposed to further government intrusion into our lives anyway - we've gone far too far down that road already...)
That said, it does seem to me that what Apple has done here clearly and flagrantly violates several significant Federal laws around antitrust and warranty issues. The sad thing is that, like Hillary, they will almost certainly get away with it because they are the darlings of the "in" crowd...
I stand by my comment. While the glue problem isn't as bad with the phones, it's bad enough to cause a great many screens to break in the process of trying to open the phones. (The only reason this isn't seen as a bigger problem is that screen replacement is a more common reason than battery replacement for taking the phone apart in the first place.)
I'm well familiar with iFixit, and have used their guides. And yes, tablets and 2-in-1s are a true nightmare.
So tired of fanbois...
No, as someone who's designed battery charging systems for mobile devices, I can tell you that there are FAR better ways of dealing with this problem than what Apple did. Don't let any tech handwaving fool you - the PRIMARY purpose of this code in iOS is to make old phones so annoyingly slow that users are more or less forced into buying a new one. This only confirms what's been widely suspected for years - that Apple's updates continually slow down their phones and iPads, and the only way to avoid that is to not upgrade - a process that is became far harder with 10.3.3.
(For those who don't know - you really can't turn down an iOS "upgrade" any more - it insists on downloading and trying to install it. Even "declining" the installation just postpones it to the upcoming night. You have to do that, then go an manually delete the update through Apple's deliberately clunky "Manage Storage" interface in Settings. This will work for about a week or two, until it decides for you that you really do need to upgrade, since it's their phone, not yours, and the whole customer-pissing-off process begins again...)
The deliberate slowdown of all but the newest hardware, in conjunction with the new policy of effectively forcing "upgrades" is in my mind, prima facie evidence of an antitrust violation far worse than the one that got IBM slapped for decades. I'm as done with Apple as I am with the NFL. Never again. Ever.
This is a good point - until relatively recently, replacing a battery (even in pre-iPhone smartphones like my old Treo) was easily accomplished with just fingers...
BTW, the Treo 755P is still better as a phone, contact manager, and calendar than ANY modern IOS or Android phone. It totally sucks as a browser, though...
Many hardware failures could be fixed with a $0.50 component and a soldering iron instead of a $800 replacement logic board. But iPhone batteries seem an odd rallying cry for the movement.
I call BS - there is virtually nothing that can be fixed with even nice home soldering equipment on a modern smartphone logic board - everything is super fine pitch SMA components, which have moved to mostly BGA-like packages and contacts over the past few years. I became an expert at super-fine high-temp soldering as a kid (soldering a half dozen or more 40 ga wires to 1/8" strain gages down inside a 1/2" hole for my Dad's instrumentation company), and repairing high-density SMA boards just isn't really doable without the right tools. You need very specialized equipment to do this sort of thing right.
Batteries are a rallying cry because they and the display assembly and the entire logic board(s) are essentially the only components large enough to be replaceable by an ordinary tech-competent person.
Note a couple of substantial caveats: 1) Like everything else, Apple charges super-premium prices for their replacement batteries, and 2) I happen to live 10 minutes away from an Apple store here in Austin, but there are lots of folks just in other parts of the state, who are *several hours* away from one. Lubbock or Midland/Odessa, for instance, get to choose between Fort Worth or El Paso: about 4-1/2 to 5-1/2 hours!
And most of the time you can't just walk in - you have to have an appointment, which no one expects the first time.
Most modern super-thin phones and other devices are glued together in such a way that it's difficult or impossible for even a fairly careful, experienced person with small nimble fingers to get them apart without destroying some expensive component, usually, the screen/digitizer/glass assembly.
This isn't just a problem for phones, but tablets and many modern computers (Surface, cough, cough), too.
Checkout the reviews on sites like teardown.com, and you can see that most (thin) modern electronic devices are held together with glues that are clearly selected with no concern for the device ever coming apart again.
There is no punishment too severe for Apple for deliberately degrading the performance of devices after they have been sold. (This is argualbly far worse than the hardware/software tying & lying that got IBM put under antitrust consent decree back in the 1960's!)
I've uncomfortably used Apple phones for the last several years, but I'm done with that - replaceable batteries and expandable storage are on the required list for my next phone!
This is probably headed to being a monumental cock-up. The browser is the only application that really matters much on any platform anymore.I've been a dedicated Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox user for years, but breaking extensions is losing me.
There are really only two things keeping me on FF the last 10 years: TabMixPlus, combined with the only browser on the planet that doesn't fall over with 400-500 tabs. This allows non-sucking session management to make sure you (almost) never lose all those tabs. (My tab sessions are my most frequently backed-up files. And yes, I know about bookmarks - I have tens of thousands of those, in hundreds of categories. I'm typing this into one of the 380-something tabs I have open at the moment. It's the way I prefer to work, and my tools must serve me, not the other way around...)
Not sure I'll switch to 57 soon, if ever - it's guaranteed to break all kinds of things, and I imagine reverting will be a far from trivial process. FF has gutted me several times in the past couple of years - losing tab groups was the biggest. If I'm going to have to go to all the trouble to learn, find extensions for, and configure a new browser, I'm not sure there's really any reason to stay in the Firefox fold - they're not giving me any reason at all that I can think of...
I'm not giving Google any more influence over my life, so Chrome's out - maybe Brave is the best bet these days...
And if you believe "On Trusting Trust" (and if you don't, you're just in denial) you know that it's impossible to verify their claims even *with* the source...
Ultimately, trust can never be in things, systems, methods, processes, etc. Trust has to have *people* as its object.
The longer we go, the more Scott McNealy gets proven right when he said, "You have no privacy anyway - get over it." It's entirely possible to assemble the information MS is collecting, and quite a bit more, from other sources - and it's being done all day, every day. That's not an excuse, justification, or rationalization, but it is reality.
Bingo. I'd go further and say that even though most people here are fully capable of keeping their machines updated and secure, most of us wind up doing a piss-poor job of it in the real world. The cobbler's barefoot kids and all that. Despite the fact that all of us know better, the frequency with which even technology professionals fail to apply security updates or even back up their data is really shocking... (I write this on a Surface Pro 4 that hasn't been backed up in over a month other than by the built-in Windows backup (I let my previous backup subscription expire and I haven't yet settled on a replacement), so I'm one of those guilty parties.)
Making at least the basic stuff happen "automagically" (at least by default) is not necessarily bad and can be wonderful for the folks who don't know (and don't want to know) how all the sausage gets made. I agree it would be nice to have more granular controls, but this is a good step in the right direction. It would be even better if this disclosure puts pressure on other big coercive companies to be more open and transparent about what data they collect and what they do with it. I'd bet lunch that a similar disclosure by Google would be nothing short of terrifying.
Also there seems to be a double standard at play here (possibly justified, given Microsoft's past actions and behaviors): Windows actually gives you quite a bit more control over much of this stuff than say, Android or Chrome, yet far fewer people seem to be lining up to bust Google's chops over even more egregious behavior.
Again, with WSL/Ubuntu for Windows, I've got a dev platform that gives me truly the best fusion of the Windows and Linux worlds. This is arguably superior to Apple's approach from an openness point of view...
If you're writing code to run in the cloud and/or containers, then it really doesn't make much difference what desktop OS you use, so long as it's one that makes things easy and has a good set of tools that make you productive - that's kinda the whole point of those sorts of abstractions in the first place...
No, I'm not shilling for Microsoft (check my posting history, especially back around 1997-2000 - I've been brutally and vocally critical of Redmond's abuses), but this is a good step that should be applauded.
The reality today is that Microsoft is among the most open and forthcoming of modern tech companies in disclosing what information it collects and how it's used.
They're not offering all the options we'd like to see, for sure, but it really seems to me that they're close to leading among big companies, and certainly way out ahead of the likes of Google, Facebook, and Apple, to name just a few of their competitors in one space or another. And for that, they deserve some credit...
And the youngstas forget that probably the biggest thing that held Linux back in the early days was the lack of a decent window manager and desktop environment. (Back then, all the good ones were either strictly proprietary or required expensive corporate foundation licenses.)
Sun's open sourcing of OpenWin was definitely one of the things that really allowed Linux to take off. Sun started things rolling and soon, there were many good choices, and sadly, the contribution of OpenWin is mostly forgotten today. I've often really wondered if Linux would have ever had a prayer without OpenWin as its first, modern, great-looking GUI platform...
With WSL (Ubuntu for Windows), there's a pretty decent chance that Windows will be the most widely used Linux *desktop* OS within two years.
This is Microsoft's deal to screw up - if they execute well, then Windows and Linux may become far stronger together than either could be separately. WSL is just the first step, bringing Unix/Posix text stream pipeline semantics to Windows in the most standard and useful way ever - way better than MKS/SFU/Interix/SFA. Imagine, now, that Canonical integrates all the 21st century structured object pipeline concepts from PowerShell and Mono/.NET into Linux - *that* is something that could benefit the entire Unix/Linux community, as well as the Windows community.
I think it's a bit early to say they've given up on mobile convergence, given the persistent and reasonably well-backed reports that MS is working on a new kind of mobile device (usually tagged as the "Surface Phone" although that may not be an adequate or accurate description of it). In fact, it seems that they've doubled down on being able to go that direction, even though they have no really compelling Win10 Mobile devices right now (the HP Elite X3 being the most notable potential exception...)
While there are some valid security issues with X (and audio is a bloody nightmare), the fundamental idea of network extensibility in desktop environments is needed more now than ever. It seems like a real shame that most all of the things angling to replace X can't do one of the most important things it's always given us...
because Redmond has conned the shiny new hardware vendors into writing drivers for them...
Not conned, they just recognize market share when they see it. Linux has conquered the server world when even Microsoft has a large portion of its Azure instances running Linux), but Linux on the desktop is walking dead. This loss of Unity is sad news because IMO, Unity had one of the few chances of reviving desktop Linux - for a number of reasons, including the really important one of being a native Linux for mobile. (No, Android really doesn't count as Linux just because there are a few Linux bits remaining if you dig deep enough.)
On the other hand, with the advent of Ubuntu for Windows (WSL), most Linux users and developers will find that Windows is now nearly as good a Linux as any other Debian/Ubuntu-based distro, and the combination of Windows and Linux without emulators, VMs, or the need to reboot really does offer the best of both OSes.
WSL is a work in progress, for sure, but it has awesome potential, and is already changing the way I work... (BTW, the Creators Update next week includes upgrades to both WSL and to the MS command shell to (finally) support proper color control, among other things.)
Actually, it can be far more complicated than you may think - Consider that a typical robotic workcell may have several robots and quite a few other devices (tooling, clamps, material handling/motion control equipment, process equipment, etc.), each with it's own, mostly or entirely independent control logic. In most cases, there simply is no overarching view of the logic or the policy that's supposed to be implemented (that requires *understanding*, and hence humans), so it's surprisingly easy to run into potentially dangerous conditions that weren't anticipated by the people who designed the system. (I say this as someone who has 30 years experience in both robots and IoT.)
You're right that that's the way safety *should* work, but getting to that point in the real world (which is a messy place) is a lot harder than you might expect - as evidenced in this case by the failure to anticipate or realize the potential danger from a second robot.