Your use of microbes in your argument is ironic since farmers are also a huge part of the problem of driving bacterial evolution for resistance through misuse of antibiotics.

Antivirals, antibiotics and pesticides should be used in the minimal amounts exactly where most needed. They should not be routinely used everywhere indiscriminately. That's the mode that these GMO crops are encouraging.

The GMO plants I was referring to were designed specifically accommodate increased usage of chemicals. Look up "Roundup ready".

Herbicide use in this country has skyrocketed due to the widespread adoption of GMO crops.

Making a plant manufacture its own insecticide is one thing. Modifying it so that it can withstand being soaked with ever-increasing quantities and varieties of synthetic pesticides is another.

Weeds are gradually evolving to resist this chemical onslaught. Most people would rather not have themselves subjected to such evolutionary pressure within their lifetimes.

The weeds are destined to eventually win this arms race anyway, so this huge experiment in chemical exposure to the US population is eventually going to be for naught.

All the plastic helps with the incremental increments in fuel economy: approximately 2X better over the past 57 years. I also neglected to mention safety, which has improved a good deal more than fuel economy. That's all OK, but it's nothing like the dramatic changes that happened previous to the 707. After nearly six decades, today's planes still look very similar to a 707, are about the same size, and go the same speed.

I don't think that it's necessarily "inevitable". Take aviation, for example. There was arguably exponential increases in the capability of aircraft for 55 years from 1903 to 1958, when the Boeing 707 was introduced. Ever since, further progress on economically viable aircraft has been pretty much limited to incremental increases in fuel economy and marketing strategies to keep costs down by keeping planes full.

Waiting to hear "stories" would be of no use if, for example, attackers choose to wait until a nationwide cold-snap and then simultaneously brick one million thermostats.

If there's a public safety concern about people hacking code in cars, then copyright is not the way to address it. The purpose of copyrights is purportedly to encourage the production of more works. It is certainly not intended to be a tool for ensuring public safety.

Ideally, hacking safety-related code (and then driving it on a public highway) should be legal only if the hacker got the appropriate certifications to work on that area, along with insurance riders to go with it. This would be completely unrelated to the copyright status of the original code.

Projectiles from your puny weapons will simply bounce off my armored playground robot.

Now, hand over your weapon and your lunch box to the machine.

Why compromise?

All the city bus drivers in my area are on video surveillance. We routinely get to see footage of accidents and altercations with crazed passengers on the local news.

If it's good enough for a bus, it should be good enough for someone responsible for the safety of a 500mph $200M machine.

It reverts to an incandescent bulb with an average lifetime of about 500ms.

Umm, that's why I originally said that languages should explicitly support both trapping and non-trapping versions.

Can anyone identify a product or service that Amazon doesn't sell or provide?

Job prospects are going to be few and far between if you leave Amazon.

The different flow of execution triggered by an overflow trap should almost always be a simple call to "abort()". At this point, your program has already failed and should be stopped.

I disagree with your premise. Garbage input values should be checked and rejected in software before the overflow ever occurs. The hardware overflow check should be a last resort to enforce this at every instruction step, and in the worst case it converts privilege exploits into less serious DOS attacks.

Allowing "garbage output" as you propose just creates more opportunities for attacks when that output gets consumed somewhere.

On an X86, "V".

Not that checking it after every add instruction is really that practical. It would be better to have trapping and non-trapping versions of integer arithmetic, and to have languages with semantics which expose that choice to the programmer.

I'd like to invest in your fascinating scheme to sink $Trillions into needlessly duplicating infrastructure. Your concept of buying new 5X cost buried cables to compete with existing overhead wires just brilliant as well. Are you offering stock yet?