I think that the part of the issue is that there's really not all that much standardization that has force of law when it comes to ECUs. It's sad to see that they use an ECM that has such silly issues.

The printed part is a concrete skeleton that acts as a form that needs to cure and then be filled with concrete. None of the finishing work is printed. It is basically a cast-concrete structure, where the typical metal forms were replaced with a 3D-printed skeleton. Of course the printed skeleton is a couple orders of magnitude rougher than what you'd get with metal forms, so the walls need heavy finishing before they can be presentable.

What they've done is perhaps a step in the right direction, but they are very, very far from truly 3D-printing an entire building. First of all, they'll need to have an inline concrete mixer that can continuously mix a fast-curing mix, so that they could print shapes that are filled-in. They also need to change the shape of the nozzle so that the deformed (compressed) shape will be rectangular, and not oval as it is now. They really did everything without much thought or understanding of what it takes to do it right. It is, at best, cargo cult 3D printing. They did all the right moves without understanding what it really takes to do it.

Nope. They simply don't take all cases to trial, and some crimes go unpunished. As happens now anyway, since with a plea bargain you're punishing some other crime, not the one that really happened. You really need to look outside of the U.S. legal system. In many a European country, a crime won't be prosecuted for the reason that it had low social consequences. It's IMHO a rather valid reason not to prosecute, it's in fact what the U.S. prosecutors have yet to learn. Yeah, the law says that you shouldn't smoke marijuana. Yeah, you did break the law. No, it didn't really cause much suffering for anyone. Thus, no prosecution. That's how it's supposed to be in the civilized world. Of course, ideally we shouldn't have stupid laws to begin with.

You're just making a bunch of stuff up. Plea bargains and prosecutorial discretion are entirely separate issues. What, you think that in jurisdictions without the plea bargain, the prosecutors take all cases? You're nuts.

The problem is that you have a system that's not inherently safe - it merely rides on the unproven safety of one single component. A resilient system would have many barriers that you have to break down in order to gain access. This one has just one. For all we know, it has already been broken.

Electrically-programmable fused PROMs suffer from bit rot and simply are not made anymore. I hate the damn things with a passion, they are one of the causes of good legacy test equipment turning getting bricked. The legacy OTP EPROMs require high voltage for programming and the only concern with them is slow charge decay. These days, it's FLASH all the way.

Alas, you're making up imaginary problems. Every high-rel firmware-based system will not only verify the integrity of the firmware upon boot-up, but continuously during operation. I mean, heck, we're not even talking about the cars here - my washer and dryer are both running continuous firmware CRCs in the background, all the time, as well as RAM integrity and plausibility checks.

Never mind that the inside of an ECU module is quite isolated from exterior noise. Every circuit going through the box has extensive filtering and surge protection. The logic supply voltages will be within spec all the while the battery voltage swings every which way (think of a range from single volts to a hundred or two).

It's not hard, it's simply not part of the usual product specs. The device is supposed to do stuff, that's the primary thrust when doing the development. The mindset of the entire industry must change before we start expecting things to be secure but otherwise buggy first, not - as it is now - functionally perfect but insecure.

Moreover: which cycles? Core? FSB? Memory? Eh? Under what test conditions?

Given that we had 80-bit extended precision FPU registers in 8087 chips 30 years ago, I don't think the 64-bit path/register assertion holds any water. I have lots of code that uses 128 bit registers and runs on pretty boring consumer CPUs. The reason to increase data path width is not to address more data, but to increase the throughput. I use 128 bit registers with code that uses no virtual memory and runs with a couple MBytes of RAM.

I was running VMs on Z80 hardware - it was slow, since they were software-emulating the CPU (I did 6502 and Z80), but hey, you don't need any special hardware or CPU features for virtualization. The special features are performance optimizations, nothing else.

Not only do their prices sting, but they suffer heavily from living on their own little island and steadfastly refuse to use standard terminology, and seem to be doing a lot of stuff differently just because they can - not because it makes sense.

For whatever reason, VirtualPC/XP was always sluggish compared to VMware with an XP VM on the same machine, with same host OS and otherwise identical settings. And this wasn't on underpowered hardware either.

I'd perhaps add that OS X didn't have any revolutionary changes in its UI, like we got with Windows 8. The dock is still here, 10 major OS X releases after the first one. The stoplights in the title bar are still there, too. Things have changed around multi-screen, virtual desktop and full screen modes, certainly, and we've got Spotlight halfway along the way (10.4). I've been using OS X as my main desktop since 10.5, and it seemed to be mostly painless experience, with very little re-learning needed to go between versions.

$200 is roughly a monthly lease on a Volt.

Volt has 350+ mile range. Prius has 500+ mile range. So I don't buy your range rambling.