This was definitely a hit and not a water spout.
If that’s true then some evil supervillain or governmental three-letter-agency has a working severe weather machine. The yacht was visible on a nearby security camera, and it disappears as fierce rain & waves obscure it.
In cases like this also contact the US Postal Inspection Service. They won’t take kindly to stolen mail, especially if it’s stolen right out of a US Post Office.
If it’s US Mail then contact the US Postal Inspection Service. They’re federal law enforcement specifically for the USPS, and they don’t fuck around.
More importantly, a recall is a legal process initiated by NHTSA that covers any sort of safety related defect. When they issue a recall there are very specific steps the manufacturers are legally mandated to perform.
“Recall” is a legal term defined by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. It means an issue was reported to them, they investigated it and determined that there is an unreasonable safety risk, or minimal safety standards have not been met. As part of that investigation they also work with the manufacturer to identify the range of vehicles involved. NHTSA then issues the formal recall notice, which legally requires the manufacturer to address the issue by notifying the impacted owners and either repairing or replacing the defect, or in extreme cases issuing a refund or buying back the vehicle. Again, this is all a legal process that NHTSA and the manufacturer must follow, and it makes no distinction between software and other components.
I’ve actually had a car with a rather significant software issue that I had to go to a dealer to fix. Long story short, the battery would die every few weeks and leave me needing a jump start. I replaced the battery twice and even the brand new batteries would die quite often. I eventually found two recall notices on my own that perfectly described the symptoms I was seeing. The recalls documented bugs in the firmware in the ECU that would randomly disable the alternator, preventing the battery from charging. I had to bring the car to a dealer to have them update the ECU firmware since that’s not something you can do yourself.
I doubt it. The liability would be far too great. Ambulance chasing lawyers would salivate at the chance to represent the families of pedestrians struck and killed by buggy self driving cars. Those capitalists don't want endless years of class action cases tying up their profits.
Not until a self driving car can safely handle all manner of edge cases thrown at it, and I don’t see that happening any time soon. The cars would need to be able to recognize situations that may not be explicitly programmed into it, and figure out a safe way to deal with it.
My wife and I just streamed a movie a few days ago. It had a ton of bloopers intermixed with the end credits.
Well there’s extreme weather and there’s extreme weather. There have been reports that the yacht was struck by a waterspout, which is basically a tornado but over the water. I’m not sure if the strength of it has been reported or not, but given tornadoes have been known to throw trucks and train cars it doesn’t surprise me that it was likely powerful enough to capsize the yacht.
Unlike trucks & trains, a sailboat is designed to roll side-to-side. One current theory I’ve read is that the waterspout damaged the mast, causing it to unbalance the yacht (and possibly damaging the hull). The combination of being unbalanced and being slammed by the waterspout likely rolled the hull enough to flood it within seconds. Even if the mast wasn’t damaged, a tornado striking the yacht broadside would have likely been catastrophic depending on the strength of the storm. And waterspouts that powerful are still rather rare so I wouldn’t blame the captain for not anticipating it.
There are now some reports as well that the yacht sank in roughly one minute. If that’s the case then it means the yacht indeed rolled very quickly and took on a huge volume of water in very little time, so much that it was unable to right itself or that its bilge pumps could contend with it. Again, not something that could have really been anticipated.
He’s also being walloped by a woman.
Worked in a small Unix team under a broader IT department at a university. The manager of our team was awesome in part because his attitude was “I deal with all the university politics so you can focus on your work”. Anybody who has worked at a large university knows what the politics can be like.
The VP of IT retired and the replacement was hired from an IT department at another university. The new VP’s overall policy was “We will do things this way because that’s how we did it at my old university”. Within about 6 weeks we had a round of “layoffs” that targeted our manager and one other manager that was also known to push back against the university politics. They were the only two people let go out of a department of roughly 100.
Within about a year of that happening every last member of our tight knit Unix team left for greener pastures.