In emergency cases a passenger was selected and thrown out of the plane (2004)
I guess I'm one of the few people(?) who like the OOM killer. If all your deployed software is written to be crash-only[1], and every process is supervised by some other process which will restart it on failure, then OOM is basically the trigger for a rather harsh Garbage Collection pass, where software that was leaking memory has its clock wound back by being forcefully restarted.<p>Of course, this works better when you have many small processes rather than few monolithic ones. But now you're designing an Erlang system :)<p>---<p>[1] <a href="http://lwn.net/Articles/191059/" rel="nofollow">http://lwn.net/Articles/191059/</a>