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Comment by jasonmaydie | Hacker News Reader

The scud missile lead to their deaths, not the software. There's no absolute guarantee it would have intercepted it, plus rebooting a deployed machine regularly is an acceptable fix when it's live in the field

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That's a reductio fallacy. If you want to play that game, it was being deployed to that specific place that caused their deaths. Or was it enlisting in the first place? Maybe merely having been born?

This is a strictly technical examination of the proximate cause of their deaths; it makes no claims about their ultimate cause. Whether or not a missile system with an accurate clock might have hit the target, it is unambiguous that this one missed specifically because of clock drift.

So much could go right or wrong, especially when in a war, or even when depending on technology in our households (fire alarms, replace your batteries!).

I feel "preventable deaths" is a preferable focus over "cause of death".

How so? The implication you and the article are asserting is that the clock error caused their deaths.. rather than the more accurate description "could have prevented death".

Well, it wasn't the missile that caused their deaths. Strictly speaking, it was the explosion of the missile.

Well, wait. It wasn't the explosion - technically, it was the impact of the pressure wave on their bodies that caused ... well, no. Really, it was the fact that their organs stopped working after impact of the ... well. If you really want to be accurate, it was the fact that metabolism ceased to be practicable after their organs stopped working.

Well, no, actually, the fact that their mental processes depended on their metabolism - that was really the cause of their... Well, no...

At this point we are already used to these trashy titles. There is no logic reasoning game to play; simply the bad faith in the title must be mentioned. And considering that the death of 28 persons is involved, it's in poor taste.

More technically information on the math behind the failure. http://www-users.math.umn.edu/~arnold/disasters/patriot.html

If you are going to be pedantic, you might want to be very careful about what you write... How do you figure it would be more accurate to say that the clock error "could have prevented death?"

It would depend on whether they were relying on it to work or not.

People have been conditioned by using badly designed software that systems naturally drift into broken states in the course of normal operations and that having to start the system from scratch regularly is therefore very reasonable.

This just isn't so. Also the degree of acceptable reliability that is reasonable is different in a missile defense system vs the toy your grandma uses to browse facebook.

It had to be rebooted because a bug caused it to be increasingly inaccurate the longer it was booted up. This was always broken. It wasn't an acceptable fix because you manifestly can't trust users to do so as shown by the 28 corpses. It was however probably the best that could be done on short notice.

Taking 60-90s completely out of protection to reboot a critical defensive system when someone might, at any moment, toss a Mach 5 projectile at you from a couple hundred miles away is a far-from-ideal fix, even if it had been communicated properly to the end users (which it wasn't.)

https://embeddedgurus.com/barr-code/2014/03/lethal-software-...

I've seen clock drift first hand. I have an old Windows XP machine that would drift ahead about 3-30 seconds an hour while watching YouTube with Adobe flash. Playing video games, compiling gcc and other things in cygwin (hell) would not drift.

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