You have no imagination and too much confidence in your coding abilities. The world isn't a video game. As I pointed out in my longer response, robot airliners and other craft have gone wild and hurt and killed people. Refusal to look is not a rebuttal. (But of course it is- any problem can be solved by a more expensive solution combined with a complete refusal to look at any evidence that contradicts the solution).

Software piloting is fine. On a plane, with a priesthood of techs looking after it daily, and with pilots who have (one would hope) both the opportunity and the ability to take control if the computer pilot goes fuckyup. In a car, there is no time to recover, worst case, the "pilot" is playing a video game, the car's maintenance is up to the pilot, and the car is surrounded by other cars that will be in a lot of trouble from the rogue car. No comparison.

You can't synthesize a general rule from systemic failures? Keep It Simple Shithead.
Planes do fail by software errors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q...
http://it.slashdot.org/story/1...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
Antilock brakes are very simple systems, and you have a mechanical backup as well. But, for the record, I don't like computer controlled brakes. I drive a mechanical car.
If ABS do fail or malfunction, I doubt anyone is keeping track as to how or when. As no one keeps track, you can't perceive systemic failure as a problem. They'd have to fail massively for anyone to care.
Robots don't operate very much, and frankly I certainly don't want a piece of software cutting on me. It's not outlawed for the same reason automated cars aren't outlawed. Not enough experience to perceive failure, and an unwillingness to acknowledge failure when it does happen. And civilized countries allow voting via computer programs as well - the ultimate in unpercievable failure.
Pacemakers can fail via deliberate malware infestation, or an EMP attack or accident, or a software bug. Just because you don't know of a failure doesn'[t mean it doesn't happen.
Here's some automated software injuries:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
http://www.ccnr.org/fatal_dose...

As to your point about a software bug failure on Twitter being different than a software bug in a car running half a billion lines of code:

You make my point for me. Twitter failed from one point. Just one point. Half a million lines of code have damn near an infinite chance of:
1. Failure through complexity. Any real-world programmer knows that hyper-complex systems can have cascading weirdness.
2. Failure through sensor failure, processor failures, bus failures, and similar failures we can't anticipate.
http://it.slashdot.org/story/1...
http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~nachu...
And Google's robot car had to be rebooted twice during its certification run.
3. Failure through an the inability to program a PC to anticipate all the possibilities that a car swarming with other cars in a real world situation. One can't program that.
4. Failure through vulnerability to outside attack. Software on a network is very vulnerable; one hundred percent so. Physically, a high energy radio pulse fired at a car, or a whole highway of cars, would cause carnage. Carnage would be multilation and death, what happens when steel boxes swerve randomly around at 70 mph with no driver.
5. The problem isn't about ALL cars failing. One car can fail and crash the cars around it. For the system to work, all cars have to work 100% perfectly all the time.

An car - driver is eating a sandwich. Car computer failure would crash the car instantly, depending. Carnage.
An airplane - plane is, generally speaking, in the air most of the time. If the computers fail, somehow, the pilot can take control with time enough to avoid contact with other planes or the ground.
Car - failure, milliseconds to react, car may not even let you drive. Plane: seconds or minutes to recover and land.

I'm only pointing out the obvious failure points. Others will happen. I wistfully recall posting on Slashdot about the vulnerability of a NFC card being read without the owner's knowledge; I was mocked as an ignoramus. I just pointed out physics didn't rule out building a concealed reader, or very powerful pulse generator. Both have happened.

I await the stories of failed robot cars in the coming years, and either the panicked response or the determined refusal to acknowledge a problem

Try driving your own cars. If that isn't safe - and it ISN'T, cars kill more people than wars - think about building decent public trans.

Remember this conversation, about five years from now.

Think about this when they try to sell you on computer-driven cars. No amount of crazy-preparation and cleverness will save you from one, tiny mistake that blows it all to hell. This time, nothing much. With robot cars, carnage.

That can be adjusted.

Tom Bombadil served as a projection of absolute mystery in a fantasy world where much wonder was already well documented. Even the Valar didn't know who he was. Probably. Tolkien believed you should never tell all the secrets, and frankly HE didn't know what Tom was, and was happy that way. Even mysteries should have mysteries.

And TB was his young son Christopher's favorite doll, in the real world. He put it in to make his son happy, I think.

Middle Earth is never boring. I could watch a 100 hour travel documentary with NO dialogue and be fascinated. (It really would be fascinating! The place is bloody enormous, and that was just the NW tip of the northern continent)

As a cloaked and rather spiritually amnesiac Maia, Gandalf has, along with all the other Ainur now locked into Arda who listened to the Eru Illuvatar Lecture about how the new worlds would work, has sort of a feeling, based on impressive but never quite remembered foreknowledge, of how the rabbit is gonna jump. He's got prophetic mojo, in small amounts, and he's on a Really Real Mission from God, or at least God's lieutenant, Manwe.

(Ever wonder who foretold all those prophecies everyone keeps talking about? Foreknowledge is part of ME. Some have it).

The crap was in the LOTR appendices. Tolkien just never had time enough to fill in the blanks. Christopher won't let Jackson have the other books, but the story Jackson told IS what happened off-screen, as it were, in the Hobbit book. Galdalf went off mysteriously, met with the White Council, got imprisoned, went after Sauron with the others and drove him out of his body (again). He interacted with a lot of people off-book, and Tolkien wrote a history documenting it. There are other creatures under the ground than Tolkien listed - practically an infinite number left over from when Ea was a void- inumerable other sentient species and far-off lands and continents. I was happy to see a little fill - there's so much room to grow the world. Doesn't make the movie bad, unless you think the Hobbit was bad, which it kinda was, as a novel, being a child's story. The Battle of Five Armies *was* that vicious - Tolkien simply Knocked Out the Protaganist and moved the story past the hero, keeping the violence down. ME wasn't a bonnie bucholic place, not at all.

Tolkien wrote the Hobbit for small children. Twee in tone - the dwarves had green, and yellow, and blue beards, for instance. In his short piece, A Meeting in Erebor (adapted into the movie!), he had Gandalf and Aragorn meet at the Pony, I think, and they discussed dark and grave matters in an adult tone, setting the Hobbit events up for the LOTR. Had Tolkien not had a day job, he'd probably had rewritten the Hobbit to bring in in line with the LOTR and the older stories.

Jackson had the appendices of the LOTR to work with, but nothing else from the Simarillion or Untold Tales, because the Tolkien estate doesn't like what he did. Perhaps that was shooting themselves in their own feet, as he had little story material and so had to make up filler.

Do recall that the Hobbit, as a story, is rather thin.

Hm. what I am trying to say, I think, is never to accept tech as a panacea, or even a amelliorative to a problem that is human and structural. The buggers will squirm and put a new hold on the suspect, as it were. The beatings may go down - that would be good. The cameras will help, undoubtably, and already have. We techites tend to believe in our equipment and ingenuity. But, recall that Apple has a patent on a geofenced override command for multimedia recording (on a phone at least). At some point, police and the like may, probably will, get the capability to shut off our recorders at will. Then they could shut off theirs, and then the DA and a jury has to decide who's lying. Usually cops and the DA win that battle.

Problem is, as I noodle it, is that the cops have become non-civilians, in their minds. If the people are civilians, then they must be soldiers, and they are no longer employees but an occupying army beset by the enemy. They'd never even say that in their minds, but it is, you must admit at this point, obvious that they have dettached themselves from the civilians. Turning your back on your boss, for instance, smacks of the ol' Army has Turned Against El Presidente. I dunno. Time to tear it down and start over? Reduce the number of stupid crimes so that the police don't have to view EVERYone as the possible enemy (trim it down to assault, murder, theft, and dump the moral and chemical crimes).

Relative impunity. Those were the cases where they were detected and punished. There will be thousands, tens of thousands of cases when they will not be caught, or if nailed, not punished much. Or simply plead technical issues - they have done so. You will of course hear about those fired; there certainly will be a small enough number so that they will be covered. The cops will adapt and adjust, and turn off the cams for the very nastiest acts. I've posted a number of links downthread where cops shut off their cams and killed someone, claiming tech issues.

And NO cop is ever presumed guilty. Infraction at most, fired at rare intervals. We won't count the number of times they get away with it, as apparently even Slashdotters aren't aware they are already disabling surveillance - what people don't know about, they don't notice. What will almost never happen, at the end of the diminishing curve of punishment, is a charge of murder.

Tens of thousands of men and women who have all the power and relative immunity and tight solidarity will wiggle this about until they have a new advantage.

Apple got the patent. So, if implemented, a command could shut off all phone cams (airplane mode, at least, refuse to record at most) in response to legal authority in a geofenced area - movie theaters, areas around celebrities, or non-"1st Amendment" zones established by cops.

Astounding. I document it extensively in reply to a challenge, and I'm STILL downvoted. You're downvoting reality, and substituting your own.

And ... you never bothered to look. You demand facts that are already in evidence.