Lightning strike in the backyard took out our microwave oven and our garage door opener, as well as two neighbors' garage door openers.

"The bill also proposes 10-20 year prison sentences for senior executives who knowingly lie to the FTC."

This might actually get some results if implemented.

When I hired testers to do similar things* at a financial institution (I was IS Director which included banking operations and security systems), I gave them a letter from me to carry with them. Then if/when something hit the fan, I was called. It did happen once and they were very happy to have that letter in their possession.

Non-destructive electronic and physical pen testing.

Pretty much every industry worldwide is like this. Auditors check that various reviews and things have been done. The reviews etc. are done by the manufacturers. Take a look at the auto industry and the emissions issues the last few years. The government seldom does the testing, etc. They just set the standards and the manufacturers claim they meet them. Same with the drug manufacturers (see the recent worldwide recall of the blood pressure medicine irbesartan). There isn't enough government expertise or manpower to check everything.

Another thought is that the system needs to have a sense of time as well when working with real sensors. There should be some time smoothing (exponential is simple to implement and usually pretty good at reducing noise in the signal) as well as some tracking of rate of change of the readings as a reality check.

One in 100,000 what? Seconds, minutes, hours, lifetimes?

It is stupid to make something that can kill people rely on a single input sensor. I programmed experimental tests in nuclear reactors and we always had multiple inputs (thermocouples, flow sensors, etc.) and had sanity checks on the values to identify failed equipment.

Seems like Boeing's software could have taken more things into consideration than just the angle of attack? What about speed, altitude, rate of climb/descent, etc.

Great book. When I taught, it was my textbook.

They are old, but all of the books that Brian Kernighan was involved with: Software Tools, The Elements of Programming Style, etc. The writing and editing in these books is excellent. Too bad there isn't a new generation of them.

It also implies that a rogue employee could have done this at any time.

I ran a large credit union IS department for years and made sure that no one person, even me, could have pulled this off. Various on-line (but in-house at local and remote site) backups done minute to minute in most cases and off-line backups done daily. Various permissions required to access electronic data stores, and different people with physical access. Tapes taken offsite every day AND MOUNTED AND READ AND VERIFIED at the remote site then stored in the custody of yet other employees. No single point of human or electronic failure.

Not sure learning to code is nearly as important as the more general concept of learning to think clearly. I'd hate to depend on any program written by most people.

Understanding the basic logic of how programming is done is probably valuable for everyone to know, but really learning to program is not useful for most people.

The flaw in your reasoning is that although your statements are correct for the average man or woman, they might be quite wrong for individual men or women. I grew up in a farm community also, and did a lot of manual labor. Some of the ladies were more than capable of moving hay bales and some of the men were not. Everyone is different.

Actually where I used to work, we got lots of misdirected medical faxes. Our phone number was just 1 digit off from one of the local clinics and our fax machine would receive medical reports it wasn't supposed to. We'd call them and let them know then feed it to the shredder. So faxes may or may not be "the most secure form of communication when it comes to HIPAA" but it is far from foolproof.

I want wide. I also want tall. I'll take 4:3 over any of the wider choices.

When I'm watching video, wide is fine. When I'm programming (or any other kind of creative writing) I want lots of lines visible, so tall is better.

"thousands of reactors worldwide"

Actually the world has built way fewer than even one thousand reactors.

And don't confuse commercial power nukes with the Hanford stuff. That was WW II and cold war production and they made a mess. Cleaning it up is a difficult technical challenge.

The commercial nuclear stuff is a much smaller problem, mostly financial. The actual physical volume of used fuel rods in the world isn't that great compared to many other pollution problems.

The tanks are old. They are actually still in service past their design life.