&gt; Please consider dropping the adversarial attitude.<p>A debate is by definition adversarial.  I do tend to be more passionate when debating certain topics.  If I&#x27;ve come across to you as aggressive I apologize.  It&#x27;s just my style of writing and you can freely ignore any aggression you see in it.<p>&gt; &gt; Only if the programmer or his management were incompetent<p>&gt; This is just short of a personal attack, which is against the rules.<p>That comment wasn&#x27;t about you so it can&#x27;t be a personal attack against you.  It was about a fictitious programmer and his fictitious management used in our examples.<p>Attacking what you&#x27;ve written is not a personal attack against you.  I will rip your words apart, try to prove they are wrong, show where you&#x27;ve either made a faulty assumption or an error in logic.  That&#x27;s what a debate is.<p>I will never, ever under any circumstances attack <i>you</i>.  If you can see that distinction I will gladly continue to debate with you.<p>This whole thing basically ballooned from this statement of yours:<p>&gt; The antivirus basically unplugged the disk. What can it do to recover? There&#x27;s nothing to be done.<p>Those are the words I&#x27;m challenging.  You have two points there.  The first is that the antivirus unplugged the disk.  While I know you&#x27;re not being literal you&#x27;re not being accurate either.  It locked one or more files.<p>The second was that there was nothing the program could have done.  To this I gave an example of a program that does handle this exact situation and more.<p>From your other comment replying to someone else but still quoting me:<p>&gt; &gt; Think of your torrent software. If you crank your firewall to block it while it&#x27;s running it will not crash. If your disk fills up it won&#x27;t crash.<p>&gt; No one was saying it was okay for the program to crash.<p>This is the example program I&#x27;m talking about.  I wasn&#x27;t implying that you think it was okay for the program to crash.  I was giving you an example of a program that can handle disk and network error conditions without the need to restart itself (automatically or manually) nor crash itself or the system.<p>&gt; GPUs are bastards. They ignore what programmers want, almost by definition. And as someone who has spent way-too-many years wringing as much performance as possible from them, I assure you that this is a realistic characterization of a possible outcome.<p>I believe you in in that situation.  GPUs have been designed with speed in mind and that makes for a very complex interface to them.  But that reinforces a few arguments made by others in regards to this story, that being should medical equipment be using hardware not specifically designed for the purpose.<p>But going back to my comment of:<p>&gt; &gt; As for displaying random data, why would the programmer want to do this?<p>Based on your GPU comment above we may using different definitions of random data.  I took your &quot;random data&quot; as &quot;looks right on the screen but the numbers are wrong&quot;.  If the programmer knows that his data source is temporarily unavailable, showing stale or corrupted data is the last thing he should do.