Except Tesla probably have a significantly higher BOM than most car makers, due to low volume and new tech. Apple have no such excuse, using no more advanced tech than anyone else, and having massive volume to boot, yet still charging a massive premium.

A better analogy would be Ford charging Tesla prices for their everyday cars, and people still buying them.

Exception handling in modern C++ compilers incurs no overhead other than a small amount of memory that isn't referenced until the exception is thrown. Search for table driven exception handling.

In fact, exception handling should improve performance in the common case, as you'll be reducing the constant "if (failed) {recover()}" operations employed by regular return code error handling. The non-error code path will be much more linear, with fewer pipeline busting branches.

Urgh, no. Never, ever do this. assert() usually becomes a no-op when compiling stuff without debug flags, so binaries shipped to the field will mysteriously ignore errors in ways that can't be reproduced in a debugger.

One thing that shouldn't change between debug and production code is error detection and handling. In this sense, exceptions are ideal, as handling only needs to happen as and when errors occur, and the common case of no errors incurs little (setjmp/longjmp) to no (exception tables) overhead.

Plus exceptions are less laborious to handle. You can have a single try/catch for a whole block of code, instead of testing and handling each and every function that could fail. If you write exception safe code, then that's all you need to do, and you can clean up failed operations in the exception handlers.

Single threaded exceptions with setjmp/longjmp can be implemented very cheaply and portably with just a fixed size static array, and a counter to track the nesting level. So long as you don't recursively try/catch, this should be good for small environments, and can be nicely wrapped in CPP goodness for syntactic sugar and easy portability to larger and/or threaded environments (which may require a more sophisticated exception stack.) While setjmp/longjmp can have a performance cost, if it makes error handling easier, then the cost may well be worth it in higher reliability. Make it work first, then make it fast.

You'd have to be very resource constrained or trivial to make it impractical to use an exception model for error handling.

Which may be perfectly valid, so long as you don't leak resources. Just abandoning the current transaction and moving on to the next might be perfectly adequate so long as proper diagnostics are available so that someone can determine why the failure occurred if required. However, making code exception safe can be non-trivial.

I'm not sure how that is Tesla's problem? They spell out what the autopilot is capable of, what the driver's responsibilities are etc.

Also, I assume the big rig driver is being taken to task in all this? He was essentially at fault for the whole incident, lets not forget.

And they use less fuel, because they're more efficient.

Or even better, have a plug in diesel hybrid, where you can trundle round town on the battery and so not emit NOx in built up areas (where NOx emissions matter) then fire up the diesel for extended journeys on open roads where NOx matters less.

Diesel engines are just more efficient than even turbo gasoline engines, largely due to not being throttled and being lean burn. At low loads (which is probably where engines spend most of their time) diesels have less pumping losses (due to unrestricted throttle-less induction) and direct fuel injection.

The very same UK where that TV license funds an independent, unbiased and world renowned BBC. BTW, my phone, 50mbps broadband, cable TV and TV license still comes out less than the figures bandied about here from US ISPs (assuming the $130/month price I saw elsewhere).

Actually, due to what I think is a gtk3/glib3 bug, firefox regularly spins up the CPU, heating up the machine to the point it burns my lap, as well as making firefox perform poorly, for extended periods of time. Have also noticed it in other applications, such as Eclipse based applications (Lotus Notes for my sins) but it makes my Ubuntu installations very battery hostile.

All the goose-stepping, WWII collecting Americans must be loving this thread....

You must be so proud

I'm not aware of a single CCTV camera within a 1 mile radius of my home. Plenty of council ones in the town centre, but not in the wider suburbia.

Oh, and how's that mass surveillance working out for you?

In the UK, at least, you can use "reasonable force" to defend yourself. But it's true, I can't use disproportionate force, like shooting someone dead for wanting to steal my TV. We grew out of that in the early 19th century.

It can, but it just wouldn't make for good viewing.

I actually like Win10 (privacy/telemetry issues aside), and it's the first MS OS I've actually been (mostly) impressed with since NT 3.51 (which was solid as a rock.)

But the main reason I would want to upgrade any machine I can is that once installed and activated, you can re-install Windows with the download ISO image from Microsoft. That means you can take a crapware laden OEM piece of shit, upgrade to Windows 10, wipe it and reinstall a virgin Windows 10 with no further activation issues, no OEM crapware.

Is this a bad time to mention hard disks?

Actually, it does. From the Theft Act 1968:

"A person is guilty of theft, if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it"

Therefore, with no intention to permanently deprive someone of the object, no theft has taken place.

From TFA though:

"All four pleaded guilty to two counts of using threatening, abusive, or insulting words or behaviour with intent to cause fear of, or provoke unlawful violence for their involvement in the two hoaxes."

Bloody hell, half of the MPs in the country could be done for that if they didn't hide behind their parliamentary privilege. The above words could be easily applied to the Brexit referendum FUD being spouted on both sides.

Last time I was assaulted in the street, the next police officer I flagged down was more concerned that I happened to be inadvertently spitting blood in his face.