Heh. My dad used to keep a rifle and ammunition in his school locker. He'd carry the rifle into the school and put it in his locker every morning, and reverse the process every afternoon. Why? He hunted jackrabbits every afternoon, on his way home from school. The local farmers paid a bounty for jackrabbit ears because the rabbits ate their crops. He tried using a shotgun for a while, but the shells were a lot more expensive, so assuming sufficient skill to hit fast-moving rabbits with a rifle, it was the better choice.

Simpler times...

This is Beverly Hills, and school districts are funded by property tax revenues. This school district has money coming out of its metaphorical ears.

That, of course, is also a problem, that some school districts are lavishly funded and others struggle mightily. But if the Beverly Hills school district weren't blowing $5M on questionable safety equipment, they'd be blowing it on something else.

Dude, I wish I had mod points! This is the best laugh I've had all day.

I think the whole notion of applying a behavior-management program designed for individual drivers to a company operating a fleet of robot drivers makes no sense. It's a different situation, and calls for different regulatory strategies. I'm not saying there shouldn't be regulation of autonomous vehicles, just that it should be tailored to address that problem, rather than applying a solution designed for a different problem.

And, frankly, California's strategy seems like a good one. They're allowing systems to be built and tested on public roads because the systems will, when fully operational, yield enormous benefits to the people; safer roads, lower-cost transport, recovery of vast amounts of space currently devoted to parking lots, etc. They're also overseeing this testing, requiring regular reports, being ready to intervene and impose additional requirements or revoke permission to operate, etc.

Are those mechanisms relevant or useful for regulating autonomous vehicles? It seems to me that you're applying a system designed to incentivize and manage the behavior of individual human drivers to an entirely different context. That doesn't make sense.

What does? Well, pretty much what California is doing. There's a regulatory agency tasked with defining rules for licensing self-driving systems to operate on state roads. Failure to comply with regulatory requirements, or evidence of failure to behave safely and effectively results in the state rescinding the license to operate. Of course, not every failure is of a magnitude that justifies license revocation, and how the maker of the system responds to problems is a key factor in determining an appropriate response.

In this case, Waymo had a significant problem. Waymo responded by immediately suspending service until, presumably, they figure out how to address the problem. Assuming they fix it, that's reasonable behavior that doesn't warrant much response by the regulator, except perhaps to look into Waymo's design and testing processes to see whether this gap is indicative of others.

This all makes a lot more sense than trying to fit policies designed for humans onto machines.

Thanks. I guess this requirement goes away when the system graduates out of "test" mode?

I was looking for a reference. Luckily, ObliviousGnat was actually helpful.

Provided your application already has enough users compiling it from source code to justify packaging it in the first place.

What part of that document says they have to be networked? I skimmed it and didn't see anything like that. I found some stuff about remote operators, but those appear to be optional.

Well, the Nest 2nd gen thermostat was sold from 2012-2015 (when it was replaced by the 3rd gen), and support ended in 2025, so, 10 years.

I think allo is referring to the "game-key cards": Nintendo Switch 2 cartridges that contain the title screen and nothing else, where the whole game is shipped as a day-one update. At least on the original Switch, Nintendo required the first few missions of the single-player campaign to be on the cartridge. Among early physical games for Nintendo Switch 2, only Nintendo's first-party games and CD Projekt's Cyberpunk 2077 weren't game-key cards.

It'd look like a subset of C where the compiler emits a diagnostic for every undefined behavior that's practical to detect at compile time and inserts code to catch at runtime everything else the standard calls undefined. The first step toward this is what GCC already does for -Wall -Wextra -pedantic -fsanitize=address,undefined. The second step is that a pointer variable doesn't contain a raw address but instead a base address and index, and every dereference of an array member is bounds-checked against the size of the object it came from. This ends up making the language's strict aliasing rule even stricter, and a lot of pointer casts or union puns become undefined and therefore errors. After programmers become accustomed to stricter pointer provenance, a compiler maker can add a concept of ownership, with a borrow checker to detect use-after-free and the like.

If the only programs with permission to escape the language's type system are system libraries signed by the operating system publisher, it isn't "totally useless." It'd be like Java applets, J2ME phone applications, Silverlight applets, XNA games, and Windows Phone 7 applications. Executables for these platforms are in an intermediate representation that lets the loader tell if unsafe was used. If the executable contains unsafe code but isn't signed with the permission to escape the sandbox, the loader raises a security exception. Applications were expected to perform I/O through first-party system libraries signed with this permission. Third parties weren't supposed to be doing "systems programming" on these platforms.

Which is why Google waited several years to brick early Nest and Revolv thermostats: the factory warranty had expired.

Exactly. Gasoline, mains power, and batteries are standardized. So are LTE, 5G NR, and Wi-Fi. Compare what Mike Masnick of Techdirt and other Internet user freedom advocates have called "protocols, not platforms."

Though even if there were no cryptographic lockdown of these "smart" devices' system software to interact only with the vendor's server, one big obstacle to running your own server (with proverbial blackjack and hookers) is that so many Internet providers nowadays block inbound TCP connections. T-Mobile Home Internet, for example, puts subscribers behind carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT) with the whole neighborhood behind one IPv4 address. Even through IPv6, their gateway appliance offers no port forwarding or DMZ option.