When Things Go Wrong

There are lots of lessons here.  One is that Windows should be harder to kill, but we've known that for a while.  Another is that maybe it's a mistake to have a billion PCs using the same software that can cripple them.

And yet another is that we shouldn't depend so much on informatics, which are easily hacked, and worse yet often fail  on their own – as here – without any destructive human agency being involved at all.  Back when I was studying computer programming, a teacher said that if buildings were constructed like software, a single woodpecker could level an entire city.  Still true!

I'm a big fan of Resilience Engineering – an approach that involves systems being designed to degrade gracefully under pressure rather than fail catastrophically.  Sadly, brittle systems are usually cheaper and the people who budget and build them generally don't plan for disaster enough. ...

But then there's individual resilience, which is something we can do more about.