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when the buying stops, the killing can too.
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-----Original Message-----
From: Luke
Sent: Wednesday, March 24, 2004 8:06 PM
To:

Subject: he shoots, ...


"Due to a software glitch, the computer display in the 2004 model year GM Grand Prix shows the wrong day of the week, Pontiac spokesman Jim Hopson said on Monday. Engineers overlooked the fact that 2004 is a leap year, with an extra day, "Somehow or other, the fact that this was a leap year got missed," Hopson said. "

ok - engineering is pretty easy most of the time, but people are pretty stupid and organisational systems fail. mistakes like this happen, somehow. there will always be a way to fuck up anything complex (heck, even the easy things are pretty difficult to do consistently) and its way within the realm of possibility to imagine how the leap year thing got omitted - despite the fact that cars cost a billion or wotever to make.

but heres the thing - if we cant guarantee that we get little things like leap years spot on, then what sort of problems are we gonna have with son-of-starwars? the missile defence system could make diebold's systems look like great technology. what happens eg if it has the same leap year problem and therefore miscalculates where the earth is in its rotation and blows up moscow? how many thousands of other similar possible problems are there? presumably at least as many as any other part of the space program, but the costs of mistakes are obviously millions of time greater when u start blowing up cities from space and praps trigger a terrestial nuclear war.

i just dont trust that projects can be sufficiently robust - even in the most benign environments. we only need to look at the history of Nasa for evidence of (collective) human stupidity - from memory, one of the explosions was caused by an american scientist assuming that the british input was metric instead of imperial. another explosion was apparently cos someone used a plus, rather than a minus or some such. and the problems with the current mars probe was apparently cos they didnt use a sufficiently large flash memory chip - i think they only used 128meg of flash memory or something.

and thats just the stuff they admit to. i dont wanna go into any detail here - but im curious about how the metric/imperial mistake actually happened in practice (i dont know the detail). but how, for exaxmple, do u use, say a pipe that is 3 meters long when its only sposed to be 3 feet? or a bolt thats an inch wide instead of a cm.

so i reckon that starwars is a dumb idea - even in the best of circumstances - but heres the rub (theres always a rub) - the spookily named defense shield, is based on the spookily named patriot missile - a spookily named smart bomb. there are two problems with the patriots - firstly they dont work. secondly, and more importantly, they have been surrounded in lies and corruption since bush41 and cheney had their first iraqataq a decade ago. http://wsws.org/articles/2003/feb2003/cbc-f07.shtml

thats the problem with these people, they knowingly lie and then doubledoubleup based on their own lies. its their m.o. but its also instructive to the extent that it shows that they havent got the slightest interest in anything but raping coffers. (i hope they get paper cuts)

after iraq 1.0, they claimed that every one of their 156 patriot missiles were successful. this later got readjusted downward - to about zero. to sell the later versions (pacs), they just rigged all the tests. i think the success rate started at about zero, so they just kept removing unfavourable conditions until the success rate went up. (i think for the last test they lay a stationary target on the ground and pushed the patriot off a table. inside. once. direct hit. 100%. woohoo.) apparently theres not the slitest chance of them ever working in reallife.

the good news is that when pacs dont work, they only blow up a market or hospital or something. what on earth will an innocent starwars mistake look like? and wot if the people in charge are a scruple or 2 short of a picnic? and when was the last time we invented a weapon that went unused?

the raytheon/gm link is purely incidental - this rant was actually just triggered by the leap year accident and the difficulties of complex systems and risk management.

in a good world, they will just steal the money and leave us alone.

the military industrial complex is an industrial disease


looneybomber