Updates are just part of the story. Just be a day late with your monthly payment, or even better accidentally exceed the speed limit on some vacant road and receive a ticket in the mail a few days later.

 

A successful software update could be even worse than a failed update.
”welcome to version 11.2”
and then you find that everything on the dashboard has been rearranged, it measures in kilometres instead of miles, and the pedal that used to make it go slower now speeds it up.

I am thinking that software errors will be the bigger threat than the hackers. Not that hackers will not be a problem, but that errors in the 400 million lines of code will certainly cause the controls to do the wrong thing, or fail to do thr correct thing. we have seen that already, and it killed people.

 

Seems like since post #10 this has gone greatly off topic. Kirchhoff's law simply states that all parts must eventually equalize. Start with zero, climb to some point and you must come back to zero. That may be an oversimplification of it - but that's my understanding of it. School me if I'm wrong.

 

Seems like since post #10 this has gone greatly off topic. Kirchhoff's law simply states that all parts must eventually equalize. Start with zero, climb to some point and you must come back to zero. That may be an oversimplification of it - but that's my understanding of it. School me if I'm wrong.

It's correct up to the point that it not longer correct.

 

What Kirchhoff’s laws state, at the basic level, is that charge cannot be created or destroyed, and that the electric field is conservative, meaning integrating the work needed to move a charge around any loop results in zero.

 

What Kirchhoff’s laws state, at the basic level, is that charge cannot be created or destroyed, and that the electric field is conservative, meaning integrating the work needed to move a charge around any loop results in zero.

KCL isn't really not saying that charge can't be created or destroyed, but rather that it assumes that nodes are not able to store charge. For instance, in a Van der Graaf generator, the shell is a node with two "wires" attached to it and the current coming in is not the same as the current going out. Charge is still perfectly conserved, but the node is a charge-storage node and therefore KCL doesn't apply.

Similarly, I wouldn't say KVL states that the electric field is conservative, but rather that KVL only applies WHEN the electric field is conservative. If you are working with nonconservative electric fields, then KVL goes out the window. In fact, proper formulations of KVL always begin with the caveat, "For conservative electric fields...."

In both of these situations, Maxwell's equations still hold. Kirchhoff's laws are merely practical simplifications of Maxwell's equations when certain very common and practical, but not universal, conditions hold.