Even potatoes are valuable only in situations where there are people around who are interested in owning/obtaining/consuming potatoes.

Given that it's a Tesla (and a dealer-owned one at that), was a chase necessary at all? I suspect that Tesla Corp could have given the police a live feed of the car's GPS co-ordinates at any time?

I have no idea if once a week is realistic, it sounds far too high. I have around 5-10 such windows a year, some are stuff I can do from home (with support from the guys on shift) and some entail me being physically there, so there have been none of the second kind this year.
Major Outages of one of our production systems have been featured on national news and Slashdot before, although it requires an outage of several hours to cross that threshold. Our windows are at around 02:00 to 03:00 depending on which system is affected.

Murphy has really bitten us in the ass a few times:

• Someone making an update (on a test system) which meant that the system did not come up properly after the next reboot which was days later. The symptoms made it look as though the test "window update" caused the problems. It was an accident but very annoying.
• A weird error on one switchable hardware unit rendered it unusable on our main production system. That unit was one of 32 and the allocation system automatically only used it on other machines, the next reboot would have cleared the problem anyway. Someone decided to use *that* unit for a critical update and brought it up manually for that purpose. The update failed and our main system was down. I drove in at 03:30 and (I thought) fixed things by falling back. Shortly after I left again, one application stopped working and dragged the rest down with it. I went back in again and did the original update cleanly - over initial management objections - after which things were fine.

There have been others but they were even more arcane. The absolute worst cases we had were with virtually everyone there. They made the news, two of them made it to Slashdot. Different causes in each case.

There aren't that many quality goods and services to spend your ransom money on in prison -- my understanding is that the selection is mainly limited to cigarettes, cell phones, drugs, and "protection".

While I share your pessimistic outlook for the foreseeable future, forever is a really long time. Are you willing to say that absolutely nobody will be living in a permanent space colony in 100 years? 500 years? 10,000 years? If so, what makes you so certain?

And how did you learn to write good code that's efficient and make sense to others? Maybe you're the rare case of a person that can just intuit what is good code and what isn't, but I think most developers (including myself) learn how to write good code by first writing lots of bad code, and then suffering the consequences until they learn from experience what works and what doesn't.

Thanks, "Assmasher". I value your learned input.

To the people who hired you, the most important thing is getting the product to work reliably so they can start making money with it. It won't matter at all how pretty the chart bubbles are in the design document, if the program crashes or is otherwise unusable. So score one for the talented programmers there.

Which is not to say software engineering isn't important -- only that exactly how important it is will vary with the size of the project. e.g. for a smaller project like a script or a one-off data processing program, just about any design (or no design) can be made to work well enough. For a large program (or one that will eventually grow into a large program), detailed software engineering is necessary to prevent its eventual collapse under the weight of its own complexity.

Whatever your yearly stipend from the government will get you.

(Hey, if it works for Alaska, it could work elsewhere -- just fund it by taxing cheap robot labor instead of petroleum)

Really? Do tell -- what was the resolution of that monitor, and how much did it cost you at the time? (Also, what computer monitor are you using today?)

I don't think that would count as learning. That ten-line program will always do exactly what it was programmed to do, neither more nor less. An adaptive program (in the sense the previous poster was attempting to describe) would be one that is able to figure out on its own how to do things that its programmers had not anticipated in advance.

An interesting feature of the Volt is that it will handle this for you -- i.e. if the gas engine hasn't been used in a long enough time, the Volt's computer will force it to be used for a little while just to give it some exercise (and keep the gas in the tank from getting too stale IIRC).

He was born in South Africa, yes. But he's also a US citizen, and lives and works in the USA.

I'd try to explain the problems with this line of thinking, but I think xkcd does a better job.

Your single data point doesn't demonstrate anything one way or another about "most accidents".