Farmers only using GPS assisted planting in ideal locations? I disagree. They are used all over the place, with great success. John Deere sells tons of these units for exactly this purpose every year. Other manufacturers have similar products. Farmers wouldn't spend tens of thousands of dollars on these setups if they didn't work. Also, cloud cover should not have a significant effect on GPS signal strength. The clouds are essentially transparent to the frequencies it uses.

Not necessarily. You can run the ICE->Generator at the most efficient point of the power band constantly. Depending on the efficiencies of the generator and electric motors, you may come out more efficient.

People keep saying that there are CFLs that reach full brightness almost immediately. Someone please tell me where I can get these mythical beasts. They absolutely are not available locally(city of 200,000 people). I've bought one of every brand that I could find locally, and ALL of them have noticeable output differences over the first 10-30 seconds. I still use them and they are better than the ones from a few years ago. I haven't gone so far to try and order them off the internet, but lets face it, 95% of people get what is cheap at their local retail store. If they aren't there, they don't get used, and the locally available ones are not that great.

CFLs definitely do last longer than incandescent bulbs in most cases. My experience is maybe three times longer in my best case. Maybe I have crappy power or something. The ones in the bathroom last about half as long as the incandescent bulbs, so I quit using them there.

The mercury thing doesn't really worry me that much, but the big difference is that the power plant isn't dropping the mercury on my floor when I drop a bulb.

I think you should reconsider. It is entirely possible to only have a section of the RAM be marginal and the rest of it work fine. It might only be marginal for a certain date code, or if it was run on a certain production line in the fab, or under some other condition like high/low temperatures or high/low voltage. Usually this kind of stuff gets tracked down and the electronics manufacturers get notified of possible bad parts. If it isn't happening often(like this particular issue), and nobody has developed a repeatable test case, then it likely hasn't made it to that point. It could be a lot of things at this point, with varying levels of probability, everything from driver error, to cosmic rays, to electronics issues, to a software defect.

In addition, it isn't like there is only one controller running the show. There is probably one for the transmission, one for the engine, one for the dashboard, etc, etc. Modern cars can have dozens of micros to handle things.

One word: cost.

The problem is that many microcontrollers used in automotive systems don't have support for ECC or any other hardware based error checking mechanism. A lot of these systems only use the memory on the microcontroller chip. If there is external RAM on the unit, ECC memory isn't always used since it is more expensive. Flash is typically checksumed/CRCed/MD5 checked, but you don't typically see flash cells get flipped in the field. I've seen one unit get flash corrupted(out of many millions of possible units) in the last 11 years.

It will be interesting to see if they get to the root cause of the problem. If it is an electromagnetic interference problem, it will be very difficult.

I've mostly switched over to CFL bulbs in my house. In my bathroom, I've got a six bulb array above the sink with a mix of incandescent and CFL bulbs. In the last year I've tried every brand of CFLs that I could find locally in the proper size for that fixture. EVERY single brand takes a significant amount of time to reach full brightness when compared to the incandescent right next to it. The color is noticeably different until they are fully warmed up. Once warmed up, you can't tell the difference, but it takes anywhere from 30 seconds to over a minute to do so. The effect gets worse over time as well(probably caused by the humid environment). The newer bulbs are MUCH better than the bulbs from a few years ago, but they still warm up slowly in my experience.

Now maybe I can get better bulbs online. I don't know. But very few people are going go through the trouble. I like CFLs but I'm not going to switch all of my remaining incandescent bulbs until they warm up to a proper temperature in less than 2 seconds.

I've always thought that doctors should use shots to deliver antibiotics whenever possible. For many of the most common things like ear infections it is 1 shot or 2 weeks of pills. It also applies disincentive for idiots who ask for antibiotics for problems that don't need them(based on the fact that many people that I know hate getting shots).

My wife has Verizon service. She was able to call and get text messages disabled. No charges. It took her all of five minutes.

I once got a friend of mine to believe there was such a thing as blinker fluid. It just so happened that another friend had his car parked outside with a cracked tail light. It had rained heavily earlier that day and water had leaked in and filled the blinker right up to where the lens was cracked. She was calling bullshit until we took her outside and showed her. She bought it hook, line and sinker after seeing it. We caught hell later, but it was a lot of fun.

Wouldn't lint catch typically catch this sort of problem(possible use of a NULL pointer warning)?

My company has a pretty rigid set of processes and we find that we catch approximately 25% of our defects in code reviews. This doesn't count minor things like not following the coding conventions or bad comments, those are logged separately. We have reviews where we hand them off to just one other engineer as well as the Fagan style of reviews, depending on what we feel is appropriate for the particular piece of code. In our industry(embedded software), it isn't exactly easy to push out a patch once the code is released so that plays into how/why we do it the way we do. I wouldn't say the review process is cheap, but neither are warranty campaigns. Pay it now or pay it later I guess...

Even the best people occasionally typo, put in a bad/wrong comment or just flat out make a mistake during coding. Personally, I'd love it if we had the resources to review every single line of code I write.

Cosmic rays can cause bit flips, but in my experience it is more likely to happen to electrostatic discharge or other electromagnetic interference of terrestrial origin. The odds of cosmic rays hitting your device is partially dependent on altitude.

There was a study done by IBM that indicated that a semiconductor based device could expect one such event every year. Other studies have shown that as the number of transistors in a device goes up, the chances increase. Just because an event occurs does not mean it will be visible. It could happen in unused memory, not affect a calculation significantly, etc.

I dug up an article written by some guys at Cyprus Semiconductor(complete article at http://www.edn.com/article/CA454636.html);

The interesting bit is this: "The potential impact on typical memory applications illustrates the importance of considering soft errors. A cell phone with one 4-Mbit, low-power memory with an SER of 1000 FITs per megabit will likely have a soft error every 28 years. A high-end router with 10 Gbits of SRAM and an SER of 600 FITs per megabit can experience an error every 170 hours. For a router farm that uses 100 Gbits of memory, a potential networking error interrupting its proper operation could occur every 17 hours. Finally, consider a person on an airplane over the Atlantic at 35,000 ft working on a laptop with 256 Mbytes (2 Gbits) of memory. At this altitude, the SER of 600 FITs per megabit becomes 100,000 FITs per megabit, resulting in a potential error every five hours. The FIT rate of soft errors is more than 10 times the typical FIT rate for a hard reliability failure. Soft errors are not the same concern for cell phones as they can be for systems using a large amount of memory."

*laugh* What do you suggest replacing C with? For many of the microcontrollers I've worked on my alternative is assembly language. Ada is better in many respects, but is hard to find developers for, if you can even get a compiler for your architecture. Things like Java or C# are too damn big to fit in the microcontrollers I usually see. Auto generated code from a model has potential, but the tools are EXPENSIVE and have a steep learning curve.