Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956
Tesla fatal crash: 'autopilot' mode sped up car before driver killed, report finds
A Tesla driving in "autopilot" mode crashed in March when the vehicle sped up and steered into a concrete barrier, according to a new report on the fatal collision, raising fresh concerns about Elon Musk's technology.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said that four seconds before the 23 March crash on a highway in Silicon Valley, which killed Walter Huang, 38, the car stopped following the path of a vehicle in front of it. Three seconds before the impact, it sped up from 62mph to 70.8mph, and the car did not brake or steer away, the NTSB said.
[...] The NTSB report [...] has once again raised serious safety questions about the limits and performance of the autopilot technology, which is meant to assist drivers and has faced growing scrutiny from experts and regulators. Mark Fong, an attorney for Huang's family, also said the report appeared to "contradict Tesla's characterization" of the collision.
The NTSB press release includes this link to the preliminary report, for anyone inclined to read the slightly longer version of events.
The Mountain View Fire Department applied about 200 gallons of water and foam to extinguish the post-crash fire. The battery reignited five days after the crash in an impound lot and was extinguished by the San Mateo Fire Department.
Layoffs at Tesla
Tesla Lays Off 9 Percent Of Workforce
Tesla will lay off about 3,500 workers in an effort to boost profitability, CEO Elon Musk wrote in a company email.
"What drives us is our mission to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable, clean energy, but we will never achieve that mission unless we eventually demonstrate that we can be sustainably profitable," Musk wrote.
Musk conceded that Tesla has not made an annual profit in 15 years. The company posted its largest quarterly loss, of more than $700 million, earlier this year.
Original Submission #1 Original Submission #2 Original Submission #3
Related Stories
Tesla Autopilot Crash Driver 'Was Playing Video Game'
BBC:
An Apple employee who died after his Tesla car hit a concrete barrier was playing a video game at the time of the crash, investigators believe.
The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said the car had been driving semi-autonomously using Tesla's Autopilot software.
Tesla instructs drivers to keep their hands on the wheel in Autopilot mode.
...
But critics say the "Autopilot" branding makes some drivers think the car is driving fully autonomously.The NTSB said the driver had been "over-reliant" on the software.
Tesla does instruct drivers to keep their hands on the wheel when using Autopilot, and an audible warning sounds if they fail to do so.
Does the Tesla branding of "autopilot" lure drivers into driving dangerously?
Tesla Crash Likely Caused by Video Game Distraction
The NTSB has published a review of a fatal crash involving a Tesla in March 2018 that includes a set of safety recommendations.
(Score: 2) by Snow on Thursday June 14 2018, @02:56PM (9 children)
I don't believe that the layoffs and the crash are related at all. The layoffs are because Tesla continues to fall short of production quotas as I understand it.
Re: The crash. I saw a story somewhere (Arstechnica?) about the vehicle detecting technologies that are used, and they are programmed to ignore non-moving objects to reduce false positives. You don't want your car slamming on the brakes because it is about to pass under an overhead road sign.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 14 2018, @03:12PM (1 child)
that is why the two parts of the title are separated by ";" semi-colon -- they are only related because both are about Tesla. I watched this story sit in the queue for awhile and various "MERGE" items were added along the way.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday June 14 2018, @04:40PM
You can generally think of a semicolon in this usage as a replacement for a conjunction. Some examples:
and or but however
Let's not assume it means "because," people.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 4, Informative) by ledow on Thursday June 14 2018, @03:13PM
If you're being driven by a driver who confuses an overhead road sign for a solid block of concrete in their path at ground level, I suggest you might want to try a different Uber driver next time (if you survive).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 14 2018, @03:27PM (5 children)
i would not have even opened the article here on soylent were it not for my desire to reply and say Headline Fail
editors, do not do this again. it is far too misleading and i'd expect something like it someplace else
(Score: 3, Touché) by janrinok on Thursday June 14 2018, @05:33PM (4 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 14 2018, @05:52PM (1 child)
Sure why not, as long as you aren't implying that a comment's grammar is nearly as important as the posted title's grammar. Cause you'd be wrong about that.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday June 15 2018, @07:34AM
"cause" should be "because" - :)
You could always become an editor!
(Score: 2) by Fluffeh on Thursday June 14 2018, @10:25PM
Don't take the bait Janrirok.
The site is a great source of news thanks to folks such as yourself - and if people come here "just to laugh at the headline" or some such nonsense, let them. The overwhelming majority come here to participate in the conversation. And some come here to push their partisan views. Oh, and some come here to simply argue with each other. But... you know.. most come here to participate in the conversation... mainly... or at least some of the time.
*sips coffee*
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 15 2018, @10:29AM
Maybe he is e.e. cummings.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JustNiz on Thursday June 14 2018, @03:08PM (29 children)
Look, there's a LOT of Software and other Engineers that read this site, and we all know that the problem space is far too massive for any software to ever be able to deal with every situation, and this reality isn't about to change no matter how "cool" the tech is or how much political and commercial motivation there is to make self driving cars a thing,
Software-controlled cars are never going to be as safe as a GOOD driver. Lets just drop this whole crazy idea and finally focus on actually making Americans better drivers instead.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Thursday June 14 2018, @03:22PM (18 children)
You put your finger close to the artery, but you're still not on it, so you can't take the corpse's pulse. :^)
True, software will never be as good as a good driver, and certainly not as good as an excellent driver. But, software may well be better than the average driver, and if it isn't, it may be soon. And, those average drivers, along with less-than-average drivers are the ones who kill people every day.
Think about the stupid things you've seen average drivers do. Then, consider the even stupider things that less-than-average drivers do. Driving the wrong direction on an interstate? I've seen it. Driving while distracted by any of a myriad of devices? Yep. Driving while falling down drunk? Of course.
I'm not making a case for software controlling a car, but I can make a case that nearly half of the drivers on the road should never have control of a hunk of metal, glass, and plastic weighing more than a ton. Because we are collectively far too candy-assed to tell young assholes that they aren't fit to drive, we, collectively, are willing to trust experimental software to control those previously mentioned hunks of metal, glass, and plastic hurtling down the highway.
This is the future. This is the painful near future, and hopefully the less painful mid-future. Maybe in 50 years, the software will have "matured" to the point that rational people are willing to trust it. Maybe.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 14 2018, @04:05PM (2 children)
The software will work when we rewrite the rules of the road, firstly to only allow software driven vehicles on the road. This might actually work in a dual-mode infrastructure where, for instance, expressways have software controlled only lanes.
Asking software to navigate the parking lot at a busy grocery store is just insane, and always will be as long as we allow humans to walk in that parking lot, push buggies full of stuff around with the cars, bring their kids, and pets, etc.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday June 14 2018, @10:16PM (1 child)
Its a hipster sacrament to bicycle, so that'll never fly. Also, see pedestrians and skateboards and all that. Not to mention truly wild animals. If you hit a stray cow and die, you're dead, but at least you can blame a farmer, but a truly wild elk or deer, well, there's literally no one to blame so thats unacceptable. I guess you could exterminate all the wild animals.. probably an easier cheaper task than self driving cars.
By the time you build the legal and physical infrastructure for software driven cars, it'll be cheaper to have installed grade-separated elevated trains. It's cheaper to put a monorail thru my backyard, and everyone else's backyard, than to replace the entire driving infrastructure of the country.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 14 2018, @11:38PM
I think that's what I'm getting at with the "software driven only" lanes on the expressways, except with multi-modal vehicles that can drive themselves the bulk of the commute in those lanes, with human responsibility to get it on the on ramp and off the off ramp.
Cue stories about Florida man doing X in his auto-driven car, failing to take control at the final exit point on a spur line...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Thursday June 14 2018, @04:12PM (10 children)
While you're mostly right, there are some important things you left out:
1. Driving skill more or less follows a bell curve. Odds are, you're somewhere in the middle. However, Dunning-Kruger Effect ensures that you probably think you're near the top.
2. The difference between a good driver and a bad driver can be things like "a few drinks" or "sleep deprivation" or "just found out a family member died" or "I've never driven in this kind of thick fog before". Under the wrong conditions, a professional race-car driver [latimes.com] could cause an accident just as easily as Joe Average.
3. As a good driver ages, they become a less-good driver as their vision gets worse, their reaction times get slower and they're less able to handle the controls. Some places have systems in place for handling that problem like periodic re-testing after a certain age, but many don't.
4. As for why we allow people to drive who probably shouldn't, it's because the US more than most industrialized countries is built around using cars to get everywhere. There are lots of places in America where you cannot reasonably live without a car, and efforts to keep things that way in many areas so that "those people" won't have a way of getting there. In addition, if you don't have a car, you are assumed to not be middle class, which can actually prevent you from getting certain jobs. So the alternative to having people drive who shouldn't is creating shut-ins and even more poverty in a lot of places.
We're in an odd middle stage here, where the automated driving systems are good enough to exist but not so good that they're definitely known to be better than humans. I sure hope that that line gets crossed, because I want to have to explain to little ones decades from now how we had to live in a world where dozens of people were killed every day in car crashes and lots more were on the receiving end of life-altering injuries, and our response was along the lines of "Oh well, that's life".
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday June 14 2018, @04:16PM (4 children)
overpopulation?
What are we going to do without wars, and drunk drivers?
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday June 14 2018, @04:37PM (3 children)
You can mostly cure overpopulation with the widespread availability of sexbots, and/or birth control. Also good are child labor laws which make it so children hurt rather than help the family's finances, which creates an incentive to avoid having more kids.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Informative) by suburbanitemediocrity on Thursday June 14 2018, @07:13PM (2 children)
The best thing to do to reduce over population is to decrease child mortality. It may seem counter intuitive, but the reason people have so many kids is because many of them die.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 14 2018, @08:32PM (1 child)
because of abundant observational evidence to the contrary. People from traditionally fecund cultures do NOT stop at 1-2 babies even when living in first-world countries with best medical care.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 15 2018, @10:56AM
Maybe not, but their kids do.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by janrinok on Thursday June 14 2018, @05:51PM (4 children)
You make some very good observations, but I think that there is also something else to take into consideration.
Or they can do the reasonable thing and drive within their current (and entirely legal) abilities. But then they get criticised for going 1 mph less than the speed limit or they get told they shouldn't be allowed on the road at all. The majority of us are going to get older, our vision might deteriorate (of course, no-one under retirement age wears spectacles, do they?), and we know that the super sharp reflexes that we had when we were younger are not there any more. However, that doesn't mean that we should be condemned to never leaving our homes. If people are medically unfit to drive then they should have their licence revoked, but that only applies to a small minority of older drivers.
Perhaps if we all had a little more tolerance of other road users we could still reduce the number of accidents without anything else being changed. If those who still believe that they have the fast reflexes and perfect eyesight tried thinking a little more about what other drivers might do and started using their perfect driving skills to drive defensively to avoid accidents this discussion wouldn't even be necessary.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 14 2018, @06:06PM (1 child)
Do some get criticized for driving 1 mph under? Sure. And thats not fair in most contexts
Most of the times I criticize the ones that stay stopped at green lights. The ones that refuse to pull onto a road unless they can directly get in the lane they want. The ones that drive through town OBVIOUSLY lost, turning their blinker on, slowing down turning it off and scooting to the next intersection. And then the ones that drive slow in the left hand lane on a highway.
Impeding traffic, failure to properly enter a roadway, impeding traffic, and impeding traffic.
Honestly it seems like as people retire they stop caring about making it anywhere in a timely manner, they want to dawdle through life, and good for them, they have earned a break. But they do so in a manner that has NO consideration for other drivers who are trying to get somewhere by a certain time. Nope its ok for them to sit at a green light till it turns yellow and then take off screwing everyone behind them, its ok to sit in the left hand lane and force faster traffic into the right hand lanes dangerously. Its hunky dory to take time to get up to speed and then cut off the person trying to pass you.
This has nothing to do with being medically unfit. These drivers could always pull over and let the 15 cars behind them pass them but won't. These drivers could take the less busy surface streets and avoid highways, but they wont. These are baby boomers. The world is theirs and if anyone doesn't like it they will call them a millennial snowflake.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday June 15 2018, @07:08AM
I don't think that this has anything to do with the age of the driver, but rather the driver's abilities and consideration of other road users. I certainly haven't seen any evidence to support the age linkage. However, anyone who drives in such a manner should be penalised by the appropriate authorities. Anyone whose reflexes or medical condition means that they are unfit to drive should have their licence revoked - no matter what age they are.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday June 14 2018, @06:21PM (1 child)
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that slower = safer, when what really matters is deviation from the average speed. For instance, on a busy highway with a speed limit of 65 and an average speed of 75, one of the most dangerous things you can do is travel at 60. You can by that simple act create utter havoc behind you, as the cars that were going 65 in the right lane move left a lane to get around you without speeding up, thus causing the people in the next lane over to move left to get around that person, and so on all across the highway until you're in the far left lane where some speed demon has to slam on the brakes to avoid rear-ending someone. And that use of the brakes can be enough to trigger a traffic jam that goes back for miles, as the person behind the one hitting the brakes brakes even harder to account for being too close to slow down properly and overreacting, and the person behind them brakes even more than that, and so forth. Furthermore, all this lane changing creates an increased risk of an accident.
A better approach would be to drive on slower roads as your reflexes slow down. For instance, you might not be able to handle a 75 mph freeway, but can handle a 50 mph state route that goes the same direction. And if you can't handle the 50 mph state route, you might be just fine in town going 35. And if you can't handle that, you can still prefer the side streets where 25 mph is the norm.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday June 15 2018, @07:00AM
I disagree - people have to learn to be more tolerant of other road users and know how to overtake safely. People driving within their comfortable limits is is the safest for them. Vehicles carrying animals might also find it safer to drive at slower speeds and leave a greater stopping distance in front of their vehicle. Heavy goods vehicles cannot stop as quickly as cars and they too will often need a longer stopping distance The real problem are the other idiots that insist on being able to do the maximum speed all the time that is, in my opinion, the cause of more accidents.
Most roads have a maximum speed limit, but relatively few have a minimum speed limit. Where such limits exist in Europe they are usually significantly lower than the maximum limit and thus take into account each vehicles' needs and drivers' abilities. Not all vehicles are best suited to going at the maximum permissible speed, but the roads are intended for use by the maximum number of vehicles and not only by those that want to travel that fast. Here, we have a lot of tourists who simply do not wish to drive at the maximum speed but also want to enjoy the journey while arriving at their destination in a reasonable time period. Why shouldn't they benefit from a road system that is designed to get them there under just such conditions? Leaving the major arterial routes and using lesser roads means that they also have to share the road with agricultural vehicles, construction plant and other users which are all forbidden from using the 'freeways'.
Of course, you might not agree but here, in Europe, the cost of insurance for older drivers is significantly less than that for younger people and many other groups of road users. So if the insurance companies know that older drivers are less likely to be involved in accidents why are you suggesting that they are the problem? It is the other road users who refuse to drive a little bit slower until they have safely passed the vehicle in front that are actually not as good a driver as they might believe themselves to be.
If you are suggesting that without everyone driving at maximum speed some might be late for work then perhaps by leaving home a little bit earlier would avoid the problem? If it is a problem with traffic congestion then that is the problem, and not those who wish to drive at a slower speed than the maximum permitted. Get the roads sorted out, use less vehicles and more public transport.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Thursday June 14 2018, @04:29PM (3 children)
Sure. But Tesla acts like a suicide driver - it accelerates toward unknown. Tesla has no LIDAR, its autopilot is driven by a few cameras [electrek.co]. This is all by design. The stop instead of acceleration would be safer (and quickly taught the drivers the limitations of the system) - but no, Tesla cars are made to be dangerous. And they don't stop in front of an obstacle - though this is the most valuable function of any automation. They just cannot figure it out because all they have is a single-camera 2D view. They have to have LIDAR to say what is a shadow, what is an obstacle.
In other words, the complaint is not against self-driving cars or automatic lane followers, but against bad, deadly implementations of them. Tesla is the world leader in causing accidents where a human driver would have sailed through without a worry. The solution here is not to clench the teeth and sacrifice ourselves so that the coders could review the crash and patch their software, but to demand conformance to strict standards of behavior - in other words, to save the driver instead of killing it. Those standards have to be worked out, testing centers constructed - otherwise car manufacturers will be testing on the public streets. We know how safe that is (see Uber.) The standards will demand that a car must not be equipped with an aid that lures the drivers into danger. Tesla demands hands on wheel - but does nothing. Why not to ring all the bells and gradually slow the car? The driver will quickly learn the safe practices. But no, it's done so you can sleep behind the wheel, and the car still flies ahead.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by NewNic on Thursday June 14 2018, @05:59PM (2 children)
While everyone focuses on Tesla, it's important to note this snippet from the report:
"The crash attenuator was an SCI smart cushion attenuator system, which was previously damaged on March 12, 2018, in a single-vehicle crash involving a 2010 Toyota Prius (see figure 3). "
The safety device on the road was damaged and not functioning following a prior accident.
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 14 2018, @08:05PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 14 2018, @08:41PM
> After all, a human drove into the barrier just a few weeks prior to the Tesla.
Before that human/Prius hit the barrier, how many hundreds of thousands of human-driven cars passed that point safely? And how many more after the Prius accident, in the weeks before the Tesla cleaned it out? Don't know, but most of them did. Is there any data on the Prius driver, were they impaired or distracted? Did they just graze the barrier enough to damage it, or did they auger in?
Now -- how many Tesla cars on Autopilot passed that point safely? I don't know, but many, many times less, maybe only this one? It was an area with merging and I'll wager that at least some Tesla drivers would have their hands on the wheel and their eyes on the road at a critical point like this.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 14 2018, @03:43PM
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 14 2018, @04:02PM (1 child)
https://youtu.be/-KufFjcWOUQ?t=3s [youtu.be]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 14 2018, @08:46PM
Not as hopeless as your choice of video...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjyZV8zIJ0k [youtube.com]
Go hit some cones and get some practice.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday June 14 2018, @04:18PM (3 children)
I don't see why not. 99% of cars are currently driven by rather esoteric software running on squishy neural networking hardware. I don't see why we couldn't do something similar in silicon.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday June 14 2018, @04:36PM (1 child)
Are you a programmer?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Thursday June 14 2018, @05:03PM
Clearly he works in management. :P
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday June 14 2018, @10:03PM
The real solution is parallel processing. With massive increases in income inequality and inflation driving the cost of a fast electric car ever higher, there will never be anything other than a small very rich minority of people owning and driving electric sports cars.
The legacy population in the USA likes to LARP like they're middle class, even when they aren't, so having servants like a nice driver is not possible... directly... however indirectly, hook up a large odd number of drivers from rural or poor USA to each car, and average their responses... So you get a wisdom of the crowd effect, combined with using AI appropriately, in this case AI would "monday morning quarterback" each driver's extensive historical record of driving output vs sensor input vs crowd decision, to give them a weighting on the control of the car, but never give any driver more than, perhaps, 1/5 authority over the car. Because of massive income inequality you can have maybe 1/2 the drivers at any given time running pure sims for AI training purposes.
Odds are we're going to run out of cheap gasoline before we run out of poor people to drive rich peoples cars, and once we run out of gas guzzlers the market will fall out from under, making road travel roll back to horses and such making the whole topic moot. You don't need a solution that scales to seven billion middle class (or higher) people for centuries... you merely need to keep a couple rich jackasses puttering about in a "self driving car" until we run out of cheap gas, probably no more than a decade or two at most.
This should be scalable for aircraft.
(Score: 2) by jimtheowl on Thursday June 14 2018, @08:00PM
Are you sure you have identified the correct impossible task? You cannot make people better drivers unless they really want to.
Autopilot will never be perfect, but some form of it might have saved them, or the people they killed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 15 2018, @12:32AM
Swap 'Americans' for 'Human Beings' to gain worldwide applicable-ness, but I'd still rather bet my money and my life on the technology instead of your idea. Relying on educating the populace is a losing game, and always has been. I don't like it, but that doesn't make it less true.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 15 2018, @12:44AM
Why was the parent modded up? It's clearly false. It only takes time for the hardware and software to develop. We're not there yet, but to say it's impossible to get there is complete bullshit.
There are an infinite amount of numbers. For languages with dynamically expandable number ranges, the following 5 lines cover all possible numbers. You don't need to programmically check each individual number, you can check groups of numbers and cover everything. My software logic covers every numerical situation:
* if don't have an inputValue then ...
* if inputValue is imaginaryNum then ...
* if inputValue greaterThan 5 then ...
* if inputValue lessThan 5 then ...
* if inputValue equals 5 then ...
Cars don't need to be programming for every possible occurrence of anything. Software-based cars will eventually be better than every human driver. The only thing in debate is how long that'll take to happen. Some companies are claiming it's in a couple years. I think it's still a lifetime off, but only one lifetime, assuming a good enough society survives that long.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 14 2018, @03:59PM (1 child)
TSLA stock surges from 344 to 355 on news of the layoffs.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 14 2018, @06:05PM
because the layoffs were both expected and well reasoned (I know, tell that to the folks holding pink slips)
(Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Thursday June 14 2018, @04:14PM
Wow those are some good pictures on that report PDF, really illustrates it well.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by VLM on Thursday June 14 2018, @10:10PM
Whats not discussed is the massive PR shift from "I'm never gonna buy a Tesla because I don't care if it has 25 mile range or 250 mile range, unless I can drive 26 or 251 miles I'll never buy an electric car" aka the whole psychological dysfunction of range anxiety, into a totally separate and PR manageable problem of "Well theres a minor software bug that crashes the car somewhat less often than human drivers" which is certainly easy to push sales thru.
Yup, I love recreational conspiracy theories and I'm proposing that crashing and killing a dozen people or so is the cheapest PR move to get people to ignore the "electric car" aspect in favor of "its dangerous but safer than human drivers" aspect. Hell, send a software "upgrade" next week that disables the killer self driving feature entirely, and you have a fast as hell electric car... I imagine sales go thru the roof once the buggy software is disabled.
I mean, its not entirely insane to propose a conspiracy theory like this. Remember the engineering lessons of "unsafe at any speed" where a $10 part was left out of the suspension of a car because it was cheaper to pay off the dead driver's family than to fix the suspension? That wasn't a crazy conspiracy theory, that was General Motors management. So I'm about 50:50 serious vs recreational about this particular conspiracy theory.
I would not be surprised if centuries of experience of financial market manipulation is going on, too. Flip a bit in the software, value of the company and stock tanks, buy a shitload, flip the bit back, price doubles, ten-tuples, hundred-tuples in a couple years, profit....