I am wondering if anyone can give my a good answer, or at least point me in the direction of a good reference to the following question: How come I have never heard of a computer breaking in a very fundamental way? How come when I declare x to be a double it stays as a double? How come there is never a short circuit that robs it of some bytes and makes it an integer? Why do we have faith that when we initialize x to 10, there will never be a power surge that will cause it to become 11, or something similar?

I think I need a better understanding of memory. Thanks, and please don't bash me over the head for such a simple/abstract question.