🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <51...@XAIT.Xerox.COM> d...@XAIT.Xerox.COM (Donald Eastlake) writes:

   If all this sounds a bit flakey, consider which you would prefer:

   (1) a single monolithic national defense computer systems that "never"
   made mistakes so that, when it said so, we would lauch a massive
   nulear retaliatory strike with little or no human evaluation of
   the system.

   (2) a hodge-podge of various incompatible and very sensitive national
   defense computer systems that produce a number of false alarms that are
   then evaluated in the overall context by human judgement.
	^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I question this latter claim.  In the few minutes the decision must be
made to counterattack I'm not so certain that a) there would be time
for any single person to truly understand what was happening inside
the computers and b) that any person would be calm enough to make
sensible decisions.  Of course, the fact that we haven't all died yet
in spite of there having been several false alarms might prove
otherwise... 
--
T. Kim Nguyen 				  kim@watsup.waterloo.{edu|cdn}
					        k...@watsup.uwaterloo.ca
			    {uunet|utzoo|utai|decvax}watmath!watsup!kim
Systems Design Engineering  --  University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada