I doubt it. Any company that wants to stay in business will instead concentrate on making sure the car does not get into a position like that in the first place -- because once the car is in a "no-win" situation like that, it doesn't really matter what choice it makes, the company is going to be hit with a big lawsuit either way.

Not to mention only in a society where energy was so plentiful that they could afford to waste 99% of it by sending it in all possible directions all the time.

Apparently they are retarded in Germany...

True, but not particularly helpful since 99% of the time the user does not know what he's doing (at least, not from a computer-security standpoint -- all the user typically knows is that he's trying to accomplish task X, and here's a dialog that says it can help with that task if he clicks OK...).

Who knows? The whole point of a zero-day exploit is that it takes advantage of a previously-undiscovered flaw. So there is a bug in your email reader that causes it (under certain circumstances) to automatically activate malware, you probably wouldn't know about it until after the fact -- and if the infecting software was subtle (hi NSA!), probably not even then.

To be fair, it's a lot easier to write a compiler (or any other program) if you have an existing compiler on hand to help you do it. Writing a compiler using only assembly or machine code is well beyond most undergrads' capacity.

I think this is very close to true -- in particular, many new C++ features are there mainly so that the STL can 'magically' do the right thing in more cases. Mere mortals are not expected to make use of the new features directly; rather they are expected to use the improved STL and benefit from its smarter behavior.

Most people could learn to do those things (with greater or lesser degrees of skill) if they cared to devote the time to required do so.

Take 32 of those bits and put them together, now you've got a floating point value that can represent "true" as 1.0, "false" as 0.0, and a few million shades of "maybe" in between those two extremes.

If that's not analog-y enough for you, make it 64 bits and now you can have trillions of shades. And if that's still not enough, add more bits until you've got the resolution you're looking for.

I don't see any significant distinction between analog and digital, since digital logic asymptotically approaches analog as you add bits, and with today's memory sizes there are plenty of bits to go around.

Or perhaps because it's running a radically different kind of algorithm that no human has ever understood or implemented on a digital computer.

Ah, good old Stockholm Syndrome. Don't worry, I feel the same way about C++ ;^)

Hmm, perhaps Qt running in a NaCL environment? The only fundamental limitation would be that it's Intel-only, but then again so are most desktops these days.

I'm trying to imagine what sort of defense system a stadium could have that would prevent a rogue 747 from crashing in to it. There must be some pretty damn impressive anti-missile technologies hidden under the parking lots ;^)

Solar panels are typically warrantied for 20-25 years. The warranty specifies that they will still provide at least 80% of their rated power at the end of that period; and that is a conservative figure, so expect them to do better than that in practice. After the warranty period ends, there is no reason (that I'm aware of) that they should not continue to operate as before, albeit at a somewhat reduced capacity.

Whether or not it will be worthwhile to add additional panels, replace them all, or just keep using them as-is for longer will be a decision to make at some point, but AFAIK there is no reason why the system should suddenly stop working at the 20-25 year mark. (Your point about the inverters needing maintenance or replacement every 5-10 years is valid, though)

Totally true -- but it's probably less than the price they'd pay for not co-operating.

I prefer the opposite approach -- I've placed a paddle-wheel under my shower head, and I'm using the hydroelectricity it generates to power my house.