Posted by Greg D. Moore \(Strider\) on 03/07/06 15:39

"Doug" <drmiller100@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1141706342.190761.230170@j33g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> >A bad ptrogrammer can kill or maim a lot more people than a bad
> carpenter.
>
> Oh???? I'll bite. How does a programmer kill or maim a lot of people?

One of several ways.

There's a recent case in Panama where a radiological machine used to deliver
doses of radiation to kill cancer was improperly used and killed a number of
patients. Besides the techs being indicted there was at least talk of
bringing the programmers to court since they wrote the software that
permitted the misuse of the machine w/o proper feedback.

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_zdbln/is_200403/ai_ziff120920


Or imagine the case of the Shuttle Software (which is among the most
"perfect" ever written) where a condition was found (preflight fortunately)
that locked up the shuttle arm. Evidently the programmer made a simply
mistake and assumed that its rotational functionality extended from 0 to 360
degrees rather than 1-360 or 0-359. A search found a couple of other places
where a similar error (i.e. overrunning by 1) was in the code.

In the case of the arm, they could have jestisoned it. In the case of a
botched landing, a similar error could have crashed the shuttle.

It's not hard to imagine extended such errors to avionics software or
software controlling a nuclear reactor, etc.


>

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