Here’s my guess. I don’t know anything about this particular device, but I have worked with medical devices.

A powered exo-skeleton sounds like it might be a class II medical device. Being a medical device, the OEM was required to produce a safety risk analysis per ISO 14971 in the EU and 21 CFR 820 in the US. I don’t know what all was listed, but probably one of the safety risks was thermal runaway from the (assumed) lithium ion batteries.

Lithium ion battery packs have a well known problem with occasionally overheating and catching fire. This famously delayed the launch of the 787 Dreamliner. This is also why you can’t put your phone or laptop battery into your checked luggage.

In the original risk analysis, there will be a number of mitigation steps identified for each hazard. For the lithium thermal runway, these probably include a mix of temperature monitoring, overheat shutdown, and passive design features in the battery pack itself to try to keep the impacts of over temperature and fire away from the patient.

So how does the price get to 100k? It could be some kind of unique design features that are now out of production and the original tooling is not available. The 100k cost is probably something like to redesign the production tooling, particularly if you have to remake injection molds.

You can’t just use any off the shelf battery pack, because that would invalidate the risk analysis. You’d need to redo the risk analysis, repeat at least some amount of validation testing, and possibly resubmit an application to the FDA.

TLDR: you can get some MEs and EEs together to solve this problem, but once they’re on the case, you can blow through 100k real fast.

So seems like Iran intends this to be a one and done response for everything Israel has done the last few months.

i.e. “Please don’t escalate this any further. We prefer this level of escalation and no more.”

the sacred chickens do not approve.

It used to be that 640K oughta be enough for anyone.

Most places in the US will have nothing about severance written down anywhere, but it’s very common to actually pay severance in a mass layoff situation (unless the whole business is going under).

Current IT best practice is that passwords should never expire on a set schedule, but they should expire if there is evidence they’ve been breached.

Medical devices are required to comply with 21 CFR 820 in the United States, which establishes quality management standards. This includes minimum standards for the software development lifecycle, including software verification and validation testing.

In the EU, broadly equivalent standards include ISO 13485 and IEC 62304.

If an OEM wants to do a software update, they at minimum need to perform and document a change impact analysis, verification testing, and regression testing. Bigger changes can involve a new FDA submission process.

If you go around hacking new software features into your medical device, you are almost certainly not doing all of that stuff. That doesn’t mean that your software changes are low quality–maybe, maybe not. But it would be completely unfair to hold your device to the standard that the FDA holds them to–that medical devices in the United States are safe and effective treatments for diseases.

This may be okay if you want to hack your own CPAP (usually a class II device) and never sell it to someone else. But I think we all need to acknowledge that there are some serious risks here.

The Linux software you can get as a regular user from your typical Linux distributions is absolutely not any more secure on average than your typical Windows software.

I say this as someone who writes application programs on both systems.

I think it’s really debatable whether the Linux kernel is really any more secure than the Windows NT kernel. Linux advocates have pushed the “many eyes, shallow bugs” line for a long time, but high profile lapses seem to really have put the lie to that.

There’s a technique called “heel-toe” shifting which involves using different parts of the right foot to operate the brake and throttle at the same time, while the left foot works the clutch.

If wasn’t full garbage collection in the spec. It was some infrastructure support in the spec that would make it easier to write garbage collectors in C++.

And Roe v. Wade increased access to abortion about the same time, together with the leaded gas.

122.75 is assigned for air-to-air communications.

In some ways that’s good: you don’t want someone shouting about “YOU’RE ON GUARD”. On the other hand, in this situation you want to choose a frequency that your target is actually monitoring, and guard may fit that bill better.

That kid looks ready to raise your health insurance deductible again and deny your claim for insulin.

I think I’ve seen at least one that has returned to Pizza Hut after leaving the folks for a while.

I thought they catch fire and burn down slowly.

Correct. Both the recent pager and radio attacks, and the 1996 cell phone attack, were performed by planting military explosives inside the devices in advance.

There is no magical way to hack the electronics to make a lithium battery straight up explode.

Also, Israel already assassinated someone by exploding their cell phone way back in 1996.

When I started on Debian, there was only apt-get. (And dpkg if you manually pulled .debs from somewhere).

Then a little while later, there was aptitude, which was nice.

apt the command didn’t show up until 2014.

Technically I think that’s still “put us first on the search bar” money. You’re giving the real under-the-table explanation.

None of the current ICBM platforms were designed for missile defense. Missile defense simply did not exist at the time.

Sentinel is busting its budget because it’s renovating and rebuilding all of the ground segments: all of those decrepit silos and computer systems. It’s still money well spent in my opinion.

Missile guidance is not a computationally hard problem, and it hasn’t changed much since the 50s. Terminal missile defense is a fantastically hard problem, and wasn’t mastered until the last decade or two. And the current generation missile defense capabilities still haven’t all been demonstrated in combat.

Having said that, I would generally expect NATO’s missiles to work as advertised in a hot war. And I would plan for Russia’s missiles to be somewhat less effective than they advertise, but still a credible threat.

I’m just repeating what happened or what the plan was the last couple of go arounds, with Napoleon and Hitler.

Napoleon did occupy Moscow, but it didn’t help him very much.

Hitler was turned back just short of Moscow, but the Russian government had all sorts of continuity plans that involved moving further east. Entire factories were uprooted and shipped into the Urals.