Comment Swine Flu perspective (Score 2, Informative) 374
Some quick "back of the envelope"
swine flu risk calculations.
Forget hair. Sand works better!
In layman's terms, formally proven software is software written twice, once as a formal specification, and once as code, and then the two are proven to be equivalent. This is a labour-intensive way to write software, and it makes bugs much less likely, but it's not perfect: there can be corresponding errors in both the code and the specification, and there can be errors in the proof too. But nothing is perfect, and this certainly can be a good approach to write code that is as close as possible to bug-free.
How many Unix hacks does it take to change a light bulb? Let's see, can you use a shell script for that or does it need a C program?