Deepening dependency on technology raises risk of breakdowns

[Mackin USA]

Article raises some interesting FOOD 4 THOUGHT

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_DEPENDENT_ON_TECHNOLOGY_?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2015-07-09-03-02-13

"Instead of just letting the technology rush ahead of us and then trying to catch up in terms of privacy and security, we should be baking those things into the systems from the start," she said. "We need to be a little smarter on how we are coding things."

[rcjordan]

>baking those things into the systems from the start

Sounds good.  Obviously, the author has never coded or designed a circuit board.  I'd bet that 60-75% of the flaws would still happen.

[ergophobe]

I'm sure this isn't still true, but it was once true that the space shuttle systems was the most expensive piece of software ever written.

It was so expensive because it had a zero flaw tolerance and had to be redundant (I think doubly redundant actually).

The problem with this assertion is that in a free market where people compete on price, you are always going to tend to lower levels of reliability. Your standard is "high enough to make customers happy for as long as you need to" not "high enough to survive every disaster"

This is why ultimately privatizing the electrical grid may not have been the best choice - I don't see how you can ever get the incentives to line up there in a free market without undue burden in terms of costs and regulatory red tape.