I had a similar experience just last year in a Honda Accord, however in my case the cruise control mechanism cam broke and jammed the throttle in a wide-open position. I was doing 90 on the interstate in fairly short order. You could slow the car with the brakes, but you were fighting the engine... and as soon as you let off it would speed back up. Toggling cruise control or turning the ignition on and off had no effect, because the throttle mechanism was physically jammed by the broken cam.

I was able to safely stop by simply popping the transmission into neutral at speed (where the unloaded engine would then race at high RPMs) and brake to a stop on an off-ramp where I pulled off the road and shut off the engine. Had the brakes not worked correctly I would have used the emergency brake to stop. Had none of the brakes worked I would have shut off the engine and rolled to a stop. If it got too dicey I would have jammed the transmission into park, which would have been abrupt and damaging to the car, but is better than an uncontrolled wreck.

It's really too bad about the people who have died, but I just don't understand why the drivers didn't take one of these actions. The one policeman (and his family) who died should have known this... I think perhaps, he didn't want to damage his Lexus? They were on the phone with 911 for a minute and a half before the crash, which is plenty of time to pick a spot to shut off the engine and coast.

Just to expand upon the parent's point: Native Americans most certainly knew of the wheel and applied it where they felt it was useful, however for most tribes it simply wasn't useful. To make it more useful you'd have had to construct decent paths or roads, and the benefits of improved roads would have been of little help save for facilitating wheeled-transport use. It was not that inventing uses for the wheel was beyond them... but that the wheel's continued use requires a level of "buying into" the idea across the entire culture. Frankly, their choice to use canoes and horses was probably optimal for the purposes they wanted to achieve.

Logically define right and wrong.

If you want to speak universally (or at least as universally as you can from the perspective of a given sentient species) then I think that Heinlein's source for moral behavior is correct: right and wrong are judged solely against how the actions impact the survival and advancement of the species. Any other test or condition is just noise against that cosmic imperative. This test of right or wrong is meted out by the universe, so you don't have to worry about a human judgement getting involved.

See http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein for some better direct quotes on this topic. Include the section entitled "Pragmatics of patriotism" for ideas that build further upon this basic idea.

The problem is the conversation on the tour winds up going like this:

"Is this... uhhh... auto...erotica?"
"No, no, there are no animatronics on this tour. This is the real thing!"

Followed shortly thereafter by running and screaming. It's best to keep science and tours very far apart.

This reminds me of the "Broken Windows" theory. (Please, don't make the OS joke that is begging to be said.) A good explanation is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixing_Broken_Windows Whatever the original root cause, of course, the effect is the same once it takes hold: The lowest common denominator often is the expression of the group as a whole. (Barring a really great leader of some sort.) This is expressed most succinctly in the following: http://despair.com/teamwork.html So bad behavior (or making poor decisions) is virus-like. The question to be answered is: can good behavior (making good decisions) also be formed to be virus-like?

We are in a financial crisis, and the government wants to see if there is ice on the moon? There's plenty on this planet. I can make some for you in my freezer and you can save 20 billion dollars.

Why do you hate science? And, no, I'm not being facetious. Humanity is reaching a potential ceiling on this planet's resources, and you deride efforts to determine whether we can ever get off this rock and sustain ourselves?

For example, CRPGs don't all trace back to Ultima. Within that same age of gestation there were also such luminaries as Wizardry, Bard's Tale, Might & Magic, Phantasie, Questron, and others. In fact, I always kind of disliked the single-avatar system of Ultima/Questron and preferred the controlling a party of players ala Bard's Tale/Wizardry/Phantasie. Also, Questron was one of the first games that I came across that used mini-games for certain tests, which was quite novel.

I agree that the arcade was the birthplace of a lot of great titles and ideas, but the Apple ][, C=64, Amiga 500, and Atari ST all were fantastic petri dishes for the wild growth and speciation of all the games we know and love. I think some of the titles mentioned in the book can be traced back to much more fundamental roots and that in many cases those roots are plural, in the form of several good games that were synthesized into a transformative game title that broke through to the mass market.

I also agree that some of these games really aren't "vintage." If you can play it without digging out old equipment of finding an emulator, then it doesn't really qualify.

...DIDN'T have the skills...

Ugh. Screw up one little contraction and the whole comment goes haywire.

If you read Cringely's article, make sure you also read through the comments, as there are several really insightful threads (and Bob says as much in his replies) posted by readers. Specifically the comments that talk about the fact that while the TMI design and control room layout was extremely bad, it was really an incompetent operations staff (or one operator) who did have the skills/training to kick the non-technical managers out of the room and use their expertise to get the situation under control.