Just ask management a very simple question: Which policy requires IT to read pupils' communication? DON'T leave out the "policy" - because that is the part management is directly responsible for! Then just watch them boil...

Let me add: things generally considered ok today may be viewed as not ok in the future.

Cockpit-Popup:
"Do you want to update Java or crash?"
|_______________ [Ok ]

For better ergonomics sit on the laptop and type with your toes. That way you have your hands free for motion control!

Everyone in the free world should read the closing statements from the members of the punk band Puss Riot http://nplusonemag.com/pussy-riot-closing-statements- A fascinating insight in how the oppressive system works on individual levels.

One defendant's psych eval identified her values as: "justice, mutual respect, humaneness, equality, and freedom."

Those are values that I hope still define the majority of people in the free world!
And we should NEVER forget to defend them in our societies.

If you trust someone, make proper legal arangements! As long as you can talk to each other contracts don't get in your way. Contracts are needed for future times in case people cannot work out agreements anymore.

He perfidiously collected names of all the CIA agents in the world...
dates when they entered his organization allegedly,
fictitious amounts of their salaries,
and how they benefited his organization...

I do not know anything about the NYT. But I have seen large European corporations: 5 layers of management: 3-4 of these layers doing nothing but exchanging and adjusting project plans (using Power Point!) with each other - and of course: finding arguments to increase their project's budgets. And of course making a lot of fuss about their busyness. I have also heard of a project which needed to cut costs. This is what they did: add another one or two managers, reduce the staff of developers (who do the actual work) by two and cut all others' hourly wages. If a project has a good manager, that is great! But unfortunately my experience tells me that for every great manager there are about 20 managers who act like a trainee.

That's bad publicity. And this error must lead to a loss of users due to lost trust in the reliability of it's operation. If I were using hotmail I'd switch to Gmail or some other trusted provider.
What could be the advantage of such a measure - if it was on purpose?!

the authors make a clear distinction between the mythical man month and what they did!

No other industry has as much freedom as the food industry when it comes to the ingredients of their products! WORLDWIDE! There are laws, but they only cover a tiny fraction of the possible substances the industry can put into their "food".

That's the point!

Don't trust computers.
Even though testing in the airplane industry must be really(!) good - you can only test the cases that you think of before hand.

Now take all the rules of physics, airodynamics, weather dynamics etc. and put well-known and working models together into a silicon-box and let it process all the information from sensors to make the right decisions.

1. well-known ... not yet unjustified (Popper)
2. airodynamics & weather... as far as know models do have problems to predict tomorrows weather... so can we say we understand it or are there possibly conditions we do not even know of?
3. silicon-box ... theoretically it is possible that a single electron gets stuck inside a cpu. Now think of extrem temperatures, condensed water, ...
4. I do not know much about the sensors. Though - current media report- it seems that airbus had recommended to airfrance the exchange of certain speed-sensors...


I work for more than a decade now in the software industry and unfortunately I have seen many projects where everything was flawed from the beginning: the whole planning and design process, the development by underqualified programmers, the testing inexistent and the project management is often a complete joke!

One of the craziest things I saw (from a distance): A project manager had skipped testing just to have a new version of a financial planning software released on time. He did ignore the risk of miscalculating budgets and costs for a large corporation. He would not see the consequenses for company-wide decision-making based on possibly false numbers - as long as he would get his bonus (~500 euros!) for releasing on time.
This guy was lucky - since there were no errors detected. but he put the whole company at stake - and all the others did not know. (That whole company and its' processes were flawed by the way...)

I do not know the software-process of airbus or boeing and I am sure they spend a great deal on testing. And we can certainly, statistically say that their machines work fine (there are very few plane crashes)

The point I am trying to make is that complex-software is very difficult to test - even when it is well designed and well programmed.

And just because of the fact, that you can never really be sure whether your tests are complete or whether you forgot one combination of variables (like wether, aerodynamics, sensor-failure,..) there should always be the possibility to override a computer by the push of one button.

Computers can collect more information and they can react much faster than humans can. But only under specific conditions. Conditions that the engineers could think of. This is true for all technology: your plane, PC, iPhone, cars..

Example from the car industry: lately I brought my German-car to have it serviced. There was a man whose brand new car's electronics had locked his trunk - everything he needed for his next meeting was in there. The key would not work. With some effort the mechanic opened the trunk and explained that the mechanical lock would not open without working electronics.
The owner of the car asked what he should do if the trunk locks up again. The mechanic said in that case they would look after it again... but he could not explain what caused this failure! I bet that some untested condition e.g. a combination of broken sensor signals, water, temperature, manufacturing problem, material has led to that lock up.

I do not want to buy a car, computer, phone or any device that does not have a manual override. Under regular conditions, computers work well. No doubt to this. But there will always be situations where a human can react better.

Humans AND Computers both have their limitations.
Humans should always have the final say!