The calculation could have been done on paper / blood on a wall / notches on a stick
and
carried out by throwing dice / abacus / mental arithmetic
by
morons / normal people / genii
If the process was not validated and the results were not checked, why is anyone surprised when it is wrong?
Some areas can be defined as right or wrong by people with good minds and strong opinions - games
Tax and Financial software not so.
At some point in the process $product needs to be validated using $external_process by $people_who_should_know
I am betting this did not happen.

mod this as funny better yet sarcasm

hour of the pig quite good v funny

This is the same sort of discussion you get with c++ vs php - the question is what is the job.
basically it should be clear to all that if you design,code,test,doc,release,stop - that is the most efficient approach. say this takes an effort size 1
the trouble is that what is released is probably not what is wanted.

under agile effectively you take a small part of the job and design,code,test,doc,release,stop let the customer loose and then repeat.
repeating this process n times for each 1/n th of the project takes more than effort size 1 as even if you never even look at any part of the code previously written, the tests you are adding and running will - and the whole point of agile is that you iterate toward the true requirement so you will be re-working.
the trouble is that what is released at the end will cost more.

please flame me for stating the obvious, but if you know what you are doing, and what is needed you should use something like waterfall and if you do not know what you are doing/is needed, use agile

Q: a tool optimized for client server crud applications A: powerbuilder

3+3+3 = 9

someone called fishburne posting about gambas what are the chances of that? could be a variable from the poission distribution

Use Qt/ Win32/ Perl/ VB/ GCC - well just about anything You are using libraries written by someone else. For Perl it is called CPAN and is an advertised strength. The only person who arguably does not use a third party library is someone who programs FGPA arrays without a macro assembler. Engineers do not make their own screws and screwdrivers anymore, and whilst it may well be interesting to do so, the industrial revolution tells us that there are better things to do with our time. The points made on trying to make integration easier are useful.

No-one knows what intelligence is. If we did, some smart person would have done it by now.
We are not really making much progress towards answering what consciousness is.
This could be because there simply are not the words to define what we are talking about.
After all and with many apologies to Neitzsche 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must stay codeless'
The best promise / progress I have seen is the brute-force reverse engineering of some brain functions. You do not need to analyse or understand, just copy.
This includes PET scanning of humans in a vegetative state, Seeing what a cat sees through the implantation of electrodes.
I think I read some researcher is just about able to simulate an ant brain with reasonable fidelity.
Simulating a human brain or equivalent will also imply the ability to receive / simulate and process all the inputs and outputs to and from the brain - i.e. you need the body. This is a big job.
Before we get too eager or depressed, remember that people were making experiments on birds - trying to reverse engineer them - for some hundreds of years (Da Vinchi) before we managed to make powered flight work.
One problem for the AI people is that once they solve a problem to any extent, it is not AI anymore! - remember context sensitive help and text recognition used to be part of AI.