In switch statements, it's interesting how enlightening putting this in the default case can be:

cout "This should never be seen\n";

And by all apparent logic, it shouldn't. Should be impossible to get the right value into the right variable.

Of course, there is always some silly error, or "this will work ok" shortcut, or maybe "screw it, I'll fix it later I'm on a deadline", and those messages get seen.

I do find defaults like this to be very useful though, if I don't need the default for something else it can be a very fast way to find subtle but serious bugs in the code. I'll use the default for something else if the problem warrants, but "impossible" values get assigned often enough that I find this to be a good "default default".

My car was fairly difficult. I was able to get home without a problem, but it was one of the more difficult driving situations I've been in.

Then again, I really can't rule out a more complicated failure than just power steering. It was close to 20 years old, over 200k miles, and the previous owners had not taken very good care of it at all. I sometimes marveled that it could move under its own power.

I got it home and my brother did something with it and steering was good again, but the car did not last much longer before an oil pump failure killed the engine.

At least I only paid $275US for the thing.

If your engine is going full out and you are in gear, your brakes will be stressed far harder than they are meant to ever be stressed.

Now, under normal circumstances your engine will not be going full out when you are braking, but we are not discussing normal circumstances here.

This event you describe really has nothing to do with car computers such as those that are alleged to be the cause of these runaway cars.

All it takes is a fault in the fuel system allowing fuel vapors to reach a faulty electrical line. Then the car draws power across that line, a spark is generated, and the vapors ignite. There are also some situations where car batteries can emit hydrogen gas which can then be ignited by a spark.

My 93 Sunbird is probably just as vulnerable to such a random fire event as that Escalade was. It's not something to really worry about... the chances of this sort of fuel system fault happening at the same time as this sort of electrical fault are extremely small, and even then you need fairly precise vapor concentrations for it to actually result in fire. But it is entirely the result of simple failures in systems that all cars have had... well pretty much since cars existed.

Responsive when it is designed and implemented correctly.

Mechanical and hydraulic systems are much better understood. While drive by wire certainly has potential advantages, and if done well reliability and durability can be included, it is a more complicated and less mature technology. It is certainly possible for a drive by wire system to be flat out superior to mechanical and hydraulic systems, but if you want a safe bet that it will all work as designed, regardless of manufacturer, go with the traditional systems.

Clicking through a couple links on the article gets you to a video on what to do.

Put the car into neutral first. Then apply the brakes and come to a stop as you would for any other serious problem with your car. Do not turn off the engine until you have come to a complete stop, or else you lose all your power assists and that is kind of bad. I've had power steering suddenly fail on me. It is not easy to drive a car in that condition, and trying to drive it in an emergency situation? Yeah, not something I'd recommend if you can help it.

Even automatics can do this. The video did note that neutral isn't used often, so people might not be familiar enough with their transmission controls to quickly find it, so check the control, find where it is and how to shift to it quickly.

Turning off the engine should basically be a last resort to be used only if the transmission won't go to neutral. You're probably out a few grand if your car is fucked this badly.

What exactly were they testing?

Were they testing implementation of the design and build quality issues, or were they reviewing the design itself?

Passing the former by no means guarantees you'll pass the latter.

That said, are there any reports of this happening in vehicles that for whatever reason lack floor mats?

Any first year compsci student should know that this happens, and should know to choose data types that can represent the data to the needed degree of accuracy.

A simple struct {int integral_part, int decimal_part}; would do the job for this. Or since you care exactly about .1 second increments, you could even use integral values in the first place. With 24 bits, you can cover 19 days before it overflows, and almost half a day on top of that to provide a buffer if bad guys show up right as the scheduled reset comes up.

100 hours = 3,600,000 ticks? Wait, summary math is wrong. One hour = 60 minutes. Each of those 60 minutes is 60 seconds. 60 sets of 60 seconds is 60 * 60 = 3,600 seconds per hour. 100 hours means 100*3,600 = 360,000. Either they missed a digit and the system was online for 1,000 hours straight or they added one to the final result.

Mostly I agree, though Discovery has gotten better as History gets worse.

I did like an Ancient Astronaut one History ran a few months ago.

For most of the hour, they let the nutters run wild with all sorts of ridiculous crap.

And proceeded to demolish all of the nutters arguments in the last five minutes. It was a beautiful piece of debunking the way they did it. I wish I rememberd the exact title or what exactly was said, I really only remember my impressions of it.

For simple image quality, especially fast animation, yes, CRTs are superior.

The desk space advantage of an LCD can be very significant though. It's enough space to fit stuff like books that you wouldn't be able to put in a convenient place otherwise. This is the primary reason I'm a fan of LCDs.

Granted, if I was more of a gamer or used the computer mainly as a media center, I'd give CRTs a closer look. But for many real world tasks, the desk space advantage can be a big practical benefit to LCDs.

Well, technically, they do, I don't think WinFS has been nuked yet.

It might as well be. Better odds of seeing Duke Nukem Forever.

When SSDs come down A LOT in price, and up in size, maybe.

Go do a search on Newegg. Biggest they've got is 256GB, of those, the cheapest is $595. You can get several terabytes for that price with a magnetic hard drives.

SSDs have a place, but as a general replacement for magnetic hard drives they are too expensive with too little capacity.

There is also more to the file system than access speed.

Gordon Brown bears no personal responsibility for Alan Turings treatment.

However, he leads an organization which does bear responsibility for it. That organization owed an apology, and due to his leadership position, Gordon Brown was the correct one to deliver it on behalf of that organization.

It can prove that the invention was created no later than the date of the postmark.

This might not be enough in all cases to survive a challenge. But if the deciding factor is date of invention, it can prove your case. Or destroy it. Either way, it can provide reliable information to decide the issue.

The GPL has no provisions relating to the price of the compiled binaries. You can set these to whatever you want for whatever reason you want.

I can't recall offhand if you can charge anything for source code, if you can, charging more than distribution even if permitted would definitely be iffy from an ethical perspective IMO.

There is no universal ethical tradition regarding selling GPL code, provided you fullfill the terms of the license and don't exploit any loopholes you find to restrict source availability- any such loopholes you find should be reported to the FSF and the copyright holder(if different) so they can be plugged, you should not take any advantage of them.

So it's really up to you. Just remember that while you have a right to expect credit, if someone takes your port, compiles it, and starts distributing it for free, you cannot do anything to stop them. The most you might be able to do is demand credit for your part of the code.

If the entire project team asks you to stop charging, I'd consider it, but it's really not their call to make. I personally think you should be nice and consider their request, but keep it firmly in mind that it is a request only, it has no legal force, and only as much moral force as you choose to give it.