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Stack Overflow Could Explain Toyota Vehicles' Unintended Acceleration
New submitter robertchin writes "Michael Barr recently testified in the Bookout v. Toyota Motor Corp lawsuit that the likely cause of unintentional acceleration in the Toyota Camry may have been caused by a stack overflow. Due to recursion overwriting critical data past the end of the stack and into the real time operating system memory area, the throttle was left in an open state and the process that controlled the throttle was terminated. How can users protect themselves from sometimes life endangering software bugs?"
Wow, that was moderated to a +2? /. is really run by morons now. When it is not an error for the throttle position to not change, how is software going to help? No amount of software can magically make that happen. If it failed like several throttles I've seen that use Hall Effect non-contact sensors, the sensor didn't fail. The magnet was knocked loose from the rotary encoder so further changes in the throttle position were not detected. Hey fucking moron, the sensor didn't fail. There was nothing to detect. How is software going to detect something that didn't fail? To explain it with hardware that readers here are more familiar with, If you were old enough to have experience with mice with balls (speaking of which have your balls dropped yet?), then you would get the fucking concept instead of spouting nonsense like a moron. When the encoder wheels on mice break or stop spinning due to dirt, the optical pattern between the sensors doesn't change. The sensors were working fine.
Seriously, can we do something about the twelve year-olds that are ruining this site?