Isn't it actually "28 lives couldn't be saved" because of the clock issue. Also, the article states that the defense was never tried against SCUD and could have failed nevertheless.
The Gulf War Patriot was designed to shoot down Mach 2 jets, not Mach 5 Scuds.
Detonating slightly late against an aircraft is actually a good thing, since it makes the Patriot explode near the aircraft's middle instead of its nose.
A Scud is a short range ballistic missile. Once it's burnt out its fuel, it just carries on under the influence of gravity. From that point on, the only important part is the warhead in the very tip of the nose.
Detonating by the mid section of a Scud means you're just shredding empty fuel tanks. And the huge speeds involved might actually make Gulf War Patriot missiles detonate against the rear of the Scud and just shred the non-functioning engine, or even detonate behind the Scud entirely.
Fascinating to think that just 23 years ago, the only way to transmit the updated software was by physically transporting it from one location to another.
23 years ago, Slashdot didn't exist.
23 years ago, Linux had just gotten started. For all practical purposes, it wouldn't exist for another month yet.
23 years ago, Mosaic (the first "modern" web browser) didn't yet exist. That was OK, because CERN was the only website; the www didn't exist yet either.
http://embeddedgurus.com/barr-code/2014/03/lethal-software-d...
It's interesting that there were 6 software updates to the Patriot missile batteries during Desert Storm, several of them were specifically to fix the clock errors.
It would be interesting to see the data for the misses and the hits compared to how long each system had been online for and what version of the software it was using.
Today's patriots are better (PAC-3, PAC-4 in testing) but still have several issues. I remember reading somewhere where a pilot got so mad that he was constantly being locked on by friendly Patriot batteries that he shot a missile at a friendly battery. http://books.google.com/books?id=7cU8Kpzu9osC&pg=PA339&lpg=P...
These seem to be mostly RADAR issues, I can't imagine how difficult it would be to program a missile to intercept another missile, there's hundreds of variables involved. I'd be willing to bet that these days they can run them through a computer simulator and detect most of these issues.
Unrelated to the missile but relating to the original topic: http://www.wired.com/2012/11/google-spanner-time/