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The 20th Century: Loser Style 278

Posted by Hemos from the good-and-depressing dept.
Ant wrote to us with Wired's depressing end of the century list. Reasoning that all of these "best of the eons" lists need to have an ugly relative, they commisioned the folks at Ig Nobel to come up with a list of notable failures.
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The 20th Century: Loser Style More

The 20th Century: Loser Style

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  • Re:Hemos Sucks Ass (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Thats enough.

  • Re:Hemos Sucks Ass (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    you. are. amazing. wow. now, do you call yourself "da trollmasta" or just "icancount boy"?

  • tacoma narrows bridge (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    have you seen the video of the tacoma narrows bridge breaking up? in physics lessons we always tried to get the teacher to show us that one, and the one called "testing" (where they blow up custard powder). they were cool. i like the way someone had also left their car on the bridge.

  • League of Nations & the United Nations (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Formed in 1919 by the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I (the war to end all wars), the League of Nations had no true military power to enforce their edicts, and the United States never really joined. Japan and Italy withdrew from the League, and the USSR was kicked out in 1939 over their invasion of Finland. The League of Nations was abandoned in 1945, as...

    ...the charter for the United Nations (b. Oct 24, 1945; d. ?) was drafted in San Francisco, from April to June of 1945, which was ultimately refined, then signed, by 50 countries, on June 26, 1945. The League was merged - meaning, its Council became the Security Council of the UN, consisting of the five victors of World War II (the US, USSR, China, France, and the UK).

    The burning wick that may lead to the UN's demise (though it will surely fail to prove to be a loser any time within the '20th' century):
    1) The hard rule that any one of the above mentioned 5 nations have veto power, which means any one of those old boys can stop the UN dead in its tracks. This was taken advantage of by the USSR, in a series of vetoes that made GI generation Americans highly familiar with the term "Nyet".
    2) The UN is very selective and fickle about where they enforce the peace. While they are waging war on Milosevich in Bosnia, slave trading is rampant among Africans, and there was no UN action in Rwanda, where 1 million Africans died. (Perspective: more Rwandans died in that war, than all blacks in the US who died from racist or random black on black violence, since the 1940's. Maybe in this whole century.)
    3) The UN is attempting to breach national sovereignty (telling the US to curb its death penalty laws, for instance). This is going to make enforcement almost impossible without the excessive use of military force. (In fact, this runs against their own declared statement of intent: The UN may not interfere in the domestic affairs of any country.

    Fickleness, the Old Boy crony system, and the wavering of the UN with regards to the sovereignty of individual nations, may doom it to become a 20th century boondoggle, even if it takes well into the 21st century for it to fall over.

  • Tacoma Narrows and Cold Fusion (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The resonance theory of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge has come into some disrepute. A quick search provides the following link:

    http://www.me.utexas.edu/~uer/papers/paper_jk.ht ml

    I'm sure others can be found. Not that it detracts from its inclusion on the list. I love that video.

    There was an interesting article about cold fusion a while back on http://www.sfgate.com by Hal Plotnick that really questions how "stupid" cold fusion was. I was unable to find a link in their archives, but the bottom line is that research is still going on (not just by P&F) and getting some interesting results. Cold fusion may not be dead yet, but it may also not be fusion.

    P&F certainly earned disdain for their "peer review".

  • Re:Y2K (Score:2)

    by Gleef ( 86 )
    bmetzler wrote:

    Ah, but how much would it have cost if they'd done it right to begin with? I don't have any documentation to link to but I read that it may have cost more to be "Y2K" compliant right away then to leave it to be fixed later.

    That would be an interesting study, if not down fully already. What was the savings for leaving a problem to be fixed later?

    Certainly being Y2K Compliant in the 50's and 60's, and perhaps even in the early 70's would have been very expensive, to the point where some projects would have just become unfeasible. However, there was no excuse for anything to not be Y2K compliant once IC's became widely used for processors and memory. Anything designed since that point, unless it was specifically supporting a legacy system, should have been written with Y2K in mind.

    ----
  • According to this link, the use of hydrogen wasn't the cause of it burning up - the coating was!

    http://engineer.ea.ucla.edu/releases/blimp.htm
  • We wasted more resources and human lives fighting that horrible thing than anyone should care to think of, and for purely political reasons. I'd say everyone responsible for prolonging that useless bloodbath ought to at least be considered for induction into the halls of loserdom.

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • You are right. I e-mailed Wired and told them they booted this one. ;-)

    - Robin

  • How about the elusive 9th planet? Pluto is technically no more than a comet, and there's a concerted effort right now to get it de-certified as a planet. Of course the American astronomers aren't in favour of it because - who was it, Hubble? not sure - an American found the blasted thing. Really we're an 8-planet system with a whole bunch of smaller rocks and bits of ice orbiting too.
  • Actually, to be completely accurate, Pope Gregory asked Napoleon very nicely to switch to his Gregorian calendar, and since Napoleon was such a good person who loved his church (and wanted all the supporters he could get), he switched to it. Otherwise we'd have 10 hour days, 10 day weeks, and 100 second minutes, etc - of course the only thing that would /really/ need to change is the definition of the second.
  • Well during the First World War the Germans used Zeppelins to bomb England and France. Plus Blimps are pretty good platforms for spotting U-Boats.

    Since the US had a monopoly on He. we doled it out to the English and French (whom also had Zeppelin programs - based off of German technology taken after the First World War) we decided to be bastards and not give the Nazis any.

    Now...I saw a thing on Discovery Channel about some retired NASA propulsion engineers that went over the negatives of the Hindenberg disaster and decided that it was the fabric doping (some aluminum compound) that caused the fire. Not the Hydrogen, if it would have been a Hydrogen induced fire the first flames would have been clear.

    I'm sure someone else can shed more light on this.
  • There was an hour long thing on the History Channel about this.

    They did know about harmonics at the time. It was a real FUBAR by the engineers that designed the bridge.
  • How about the Davy Crocket?

    A 155mm or 120mm recoiless rocket with a 20 to 250 ton warhead. They were either tripod or jeep mounted. They had a tested range of 1.77 miles.

    They were removed from service because the Army didn't want to trust a nuke to a mear Sargent.

    That and it's a real bad idea to have a nuke that only fires 1.77 miles.
  • Name me a war in the last 500 years that wasn't fought for "purely political reasons."

    Maybe that one about the beards...other than that one then.
  • The only Tu-144 flying today is sponsered by NASA.

    Thats what that NASA page is about. All the other Tu-144s are no longer flying.

    http://www.bird.ch/Russians/Tu144/TU144P02.html
    "Status - Several aircraft preserved, one aircraft used as testbed."

    If I remeber right...they were used in the late 70s-early 80s on one route in Russia. Moscow to Omsk or Rostov I think.

    I have a photo here in Volume 13 of World Airpower Journal of three Tu-144s sitting at Zhukhovsky in the grass.
  • He didn't build the plant. It was given to him by the US Government after WW2. They did that to a lot of people.

    From what I know of the story it was vast Auto Industry consperacy to keep him down.

  • I think it was static electricity.
  • Why didn't they mention that? Totally pointless suffering of millions, just to test the newest toy! Hypocrites, I say.

    J.
  • This actually happens fairly frequently. Look up the etymologies of "bork," "quisling," and "spoonerism," to name a few.
  • The true loser decision was made by the Ford executive who was on the witness stand, happily explaining this reasoning to the judge. The judge got fairly angry.
  • The fact that Davilean actually entered the language as a word for stupendously massive mistake is pretty cool; the idea of someone's name being put in the dictionary as synonymous with such has been popular, but I wasn't aware it had happened.

    It goes to prove Mitch Radcliffe's contention that:

    Computers let you make more mistakes faster than any other invention in human history, with the possible exception of handguns and tequila.
  • Motorola not getting the deal for supplying the CPU for the IBM PC.

    Rather than having a nice 68000 based system, with flat memory model from the start, we end up with a segmented, "640k should be enough for anybody" pile of crap 8086 cpu from intel, which stifles development for years :P

    hrm...

    smash
  • There is a backstory behind the Hindenberg crash, the thing was desinged to run on Helium, but after the Nazi's stared re-arming Germany the US Gov banned Helium exports to Germany, and the only source of it at that time was in the US.

    Can't say I feal any sympathy for Nazi Germany.
  • Your post is full of misinformation about Vincennes and the Airbus tragedy.

    1. There was no F-14 in the air at the time. It's considered doubtful that Iran had any F-14s capable of flying at that time.
    2. The Airbus was in a civillian air corridor - Vincennes the the air corridors plotted wrong.
    3. The "separate warnings" all identifed the aircraft they were "warning" based on relative position from the ship. A civillian aircraft doesn't have any way to know where the ship is, and isn't about to respond to calls make to "Iranian F-14 30 nautical miles north of my position and diving" when it's an Airbus, it's climbing, and it doesn't know where "my position" is.
    4. Vincennes picked up no Mode 3 squawks from Iranian airspace.
    5. Vincennes disobeyed a direct order and left it's patrol area in order to put itself in that "danger" that Captain Rogers thought he was in.
    6. Rogers flagrantly disobeyed the rules of engagement many times during this incident, including when he ordered the firing of two Standard Missiles against this improperly identified target.
    7. Rogers had been cited several times for disobeying the rules of engagement in the past, and Vincennes was known in the fleet as "Robocruiser" because of it.
  • I'm sick of government-coverup paranoia over cold fusion. If you've developed cold fusion, here's how to make everyone acknowledge your genius:
    1. Create a working, power-producing reactor (should be easy--after all, you have the fusion, just dump water through some turbines).
    2. Sell the power generated to the power company. As a condition of their monopoly, they have to buy back as much power as you can produce--and at good prices, too.
    3. Take all this money and buy a scientist. Prof. David van Baak has publicly announced his availability for one million dollars, Nobel Prize winners will probably be a little more expensive.
    4. Or don't. The best revenge is living well...
  • Challenger: Several Engineers had tried to stop the use of the material in the O-rings. Several Engineers had tried to stop the launch that morning. Some NASA bearucrat pushed the launch through for internal political reasons.

    The O-rings were near the top of (IIRC) a 20-item list of critical problems--i.e. "never fly again until these are fixed." They were redesigned twice. In each case, the redesign was worse, so they returned to the original (flawed) design.

  • I think it had something to do with designing it to NOT have the resonant frequency of a car driving over it.
    --
  • Actually, the Maginot Line can be accounted for as leftover WWI stupidity.
    --
  • The Bulge was fought in eastern Belgium and northern Luxembourg. None of the Maginot Line fortifications were used, since they are all in France.

    Granted the fortifications around Metz gave Patton 40 fits in autumn of '44, but that's another story. (I don't think that the Metz fortifications were an official part of the Maginot Line anyway.)
  • Vietnam qualifies insofar as the technology available to the U.S. at the time (airmobile units, napalm, jet bombers, etc.) allowed Johnson et. al. to delude themselves into thinking that we could defeat the NVA and VC with a minimal loss of life and without calling up the reserves.

    Now *that's* a sentence.
  • The History Channel had a few specials on History's Greatest Blunders. One of the segments was on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. It was quite the sight to see - a bridge twisting and turning like that...
    What I didn't get was the fact that even through wind tunnel testing, which, inevitably proved what would happen, the engineers insisted on doing it the wrong way.
    Wasn't it because of that incident that the government stepped in and laid down huge safety requirements?
  • Quite a few inaccuracies I've noticed with their reporting. Check out
    http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/8.75.html#subj 1

    for a more technical overview...
    (no html tags. fooey.)

  • "Wrong Way" Corrigan (Score:5)

    by richieb ( 3277 ) <richieb@g[ ]l.com ['mai' in gap]> on Wednesday December 29, 1999 @07:42AM (#1435646) Homepage Journal
    Wired got this one wrong! Corrigan was a pilot who wanted to fly across the Atlantic, but the Civil Aviation Authority (the previous FAA) would not issue a formal permit for takeoff.

    So instead he said that he was flying to California, with CAA's permission, and then after take-off he just flew to Ireland.

    Afterwards, to keep the CAA off his back he said "oops, I made a mistake"...

    ...richie

  • Okay... KAL flight whatever got shot down by either A. Soviet Pilot Error or B. Soveit Pilot Boredom. In the USS Vincennes deal, the Airliner had two identifer boxes, one for making it an F-16.
    And the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.. I'm not sure anyone knew about harmonics then. I know it inspired research into the effect.
  • For the programmers among you, here's a simple flowchart-type thingie [geocities.com] which explains the whole process. (Isn't it wonderful how you can find just about anything on the Web these days?). For those of you who can't wait to click on each link (why the guy didn't just do a diagram as in the original, I'll never know), here's my pathetic pure-text rendering [linuxstart.com]. If the indentation doesn't look right on your browser, what can I tell you? Life is hell. For best results, buy the book: P.J. O'Rourke, "Age and Guile" -- worth the money for this alone.
  • An interesting note about The Tacoma Narrows Bridge....If you watch the video, you can see a car on the bridge. The driver of the car stopped, got out, and hauled his happy ass off the bridge.

    What many people don't know, is that there was a dog in the car. The owner didn't save the dog, so the poor critter was barking all the way down into the water.

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • for the list:
    • 1929 stock market crash
    • Pearl Harbour
    • Hiroshima & Nagasaki
    • the videophone (it just keeps coming back!)
    • edlin (does win2k still have it?)


    Boojum
  • I've seen a fairly detailed TV report on the Challenger failure, and if it's accurate here's what happened;
    • Ring-like segments of the booster rockets are joined together much as you would expect, with and overlap and a rubber seal
    • In fact, there are two rubber O-rings that go around the entire rocket at the (each?) join
    • As the rockets burn, the sudden change in temperature and/or pressure causes the sections of the boosters to bulge.
    • This means that the rubber O-rings have to expand quickly to stop any fuel or gas from escaping through the join
    • The escaping gas is very corrosive and if the rings can't seal the gap they will quickly fail, completely.
    • The day of the launch was one of the coldest that the shuttle was ever launched on. The cold temperatures meant that the rubber reacted slower than "normal". They failed, obviously.
    The lowly engineers wanted to stop the launch. Management wanted it to go ahead (for money reasons no doubt). The head engineer in the middle caved in on the side of management.

    Boom.

  • Wired also got the Hancock tower wrong (Score:4)

    by xyzzy ( 10685 ) on Wednesday December 29, 1999 @07:49AM (#1435670) Homepage
    The windows popping out of the Hancock tower were NOT due to the movement of the building, if I remember correctly. They were caused by a MUCH more subtle cause -- a design flaw in the double-paned construction of the windows.

    Check out the following link:

    http://www.sgh.com/hancock.htm

    ...for a report on the failure. A summary of this appeared in the Boston Globe a few years back. I would have thought that the IgNobel people (at MIT no less) would have known abou this.

    I believe it is true, however, that the sway dampener in the Hancock was put in after its construction -- but I could be wrong, and can't find verification on the web.

  • Remember when Ford actually decided that the design flaw in the Ford Pinto's gas tank would cost them more to repair if they issued recall notices than they expected to pay in lawsuits to families whose members would die due to the flaw? Talk about a loser decision ...

    Actually, there is no way to avoid making this kind of decision on any project where the product can kill someone. You can always make a car or a building safer, no matter how safe or unsafe it already is. You have to make a decision on where to draw the line. This decision is partly dictated by law, which sets minimum safety standards, and partly dictated by cost/benefit analysis.

    Yes, you can assign a cost to a human life. Depending on what kind of calculation you're doing, this might be the total cost that your customers are willing to pay to make the product safer that on average one fewer person dies, or the average cost/liability to you per death, or what-have-you. When the cost of making the product safer exceeds the actual cost of the lives saved as measured above, you stop making the product safer.

    Anyone who drives a car makes this decision. You'd have to take a hit in either pay or quality of life to work at a place within walking distance (or live within walking distance of work), so you drive a car. However, there is a chance that you or another person will die as a result of your driving or as a result of mechanical failure in your car. You are exposing yourself and your other potential victins to this risk when you get behind the wheel, willingly, rather than accept the cost of not driving.

    Is this a valid choice to make? Sure. But in making the choice, you still place bounds on how much a life is worth, which makes it possible to assign a "cost" to lives for purposes of doing risk calculations. In a myriad of ways, our own actions - personally - prove that we do not consider lives to be infinitely valuable (indeed, it is impractical for any of us act as if they were).

    The key issue here is setting the "cost" of life high enough that nobody can fault you for the decisions you make based on that "cost". The key issues in the Ford case were that: 1) the car that started it all was struct by a van going 50 miles/hour (the target car was stationary IIRC). Explosion under those conditions is pretty likely no matter what, and 2) the Ford engineers, who had seen this risk analysis and knew of the design flaws, still considered the car safe enough that they were using it to drive themselves and their families.

    This doesn't mean that Ford was blameless; they could, for instance, have offered the _option_ of either of a couple of possible upgrade devices to customers who wanted them, at a reasonable cost, and let the customers make the decision. However, there are mitigating points, as mentioned above.

    The Ford Pinto was one of the case studies used in an Engineering Ethics course I took.
  • The nuclear bomb is the biggest failure of all. Einstein foresaw what could come of his theories and passed a grave warning about the Nazis potential use of it to the US government. They took his theory and created the worst weapon ever built. He fought for the rest of his life to abolish nuclear weapons.

    I'm skeptical of this argument, for a couple of reasons.

    Firstly, the principles of the fission bomb (and of more advanced nuclear weapons) follow directly from basic physics. You can make a pretty good argument for its development being inevitable - look at all the things we'd have to *not* know about to not be able to build one or figure out how to build one. The question then becomes, "was its development and management handled in the least disastrous possible way". It would have eventually shown up no matter what.

    Secondly, nuclear weapons are one reason why there *hasn't* yet been a World War III. The consequences of a nuclear war are great enough that, while we may be crazy enough to have one, we're certainly more reluctant to have a nuclear war than a conventional war. As an all-out war would be fought with nuclear weapons, we are reluctant to press nations with nuclear capability to the point where they will _use_ these weapons.

    This made the US reluctant to start a war with the USSR, but made the USSR reluctant to start a war with the US. Or even have too big a skirmish.

    In summary, while it was a tightrope walk, I think that the inevitable development of nuclear weapons was handled adequately by the world. It certainly could have come out much worse - and there's no way short of abolishing basic science research that it could have been avoided.
  • After I read the story, I went looking for items on the Hancock Tower problems (I live in New England and have been around the tower many times). There is a piece [rr.com] on Useless News that tells the similar story of the Citibank Building near-disaster, and it has a link to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe story [pulitzer.org] on the averted collapse of the Hancock.
  • IBM had a 68000 based computer, I think it was from the laboratory systems division. Sort of an early attempt at a technical workstation.
  • At least the interrupts and DMA channels worked. My company had major problems with Apple IIs that were being used for data acquisition. Our I/O cards used interrupts and we found that interrupts didn't work properly in many of the computers. It appeared that Apple didn't test all of the features on their boards during manufacture, just the one that were commonly used.
  • Granted, some of that money goes to employees, who then recycle it back into the economy, but most of it is in the form of lost productivity and revenue, which isn't recoverable. The Y2K bug has already taken its toll, and definitely should have been on the list (under "1970s", perhaps?).

    Ah, but how much would it have cost if they'd done it right to begin with? I don't have any documentation to link to but I read that it may have cost more to be "Y2K" compliant right away then to leave it to be fixed later.

    That would be an interesting study, if not down fully already. What was the savings for leaving a problem to be fixed later?

    -Brent
  • Yes, I agree about the Hindenberg. 35 people died in that fire, and that's one of the worst screw-ups of the Millenium? You can lose that many in a bad pile-up on I-5 here in California... and this happens nearly every time the central valley has some fog.

    The really notable thing about the Hindenberg is that it was the first "disaster" reported live on the radio by a hysterical, babbling reporter. Mass media was new in those days, it didn't take much to get people going (e.g. the "War of the Worlds" fiasco).

    And the real tragedy of the Hindenberg, in my opinion, is that whenever you suggest using hydrogen powered vehicles of any kind, people look at you like you're crazy. "My god man, don't you know that hydrogen is *dangerous*?" Sure: it's explosive. Just like gasoline, except that when you burn it you just get water vapor.

  • The Finlandia House (Score:3)

    by robinjo ( 15698 ) on Wednesday December 29, 1999 @08:34AM (#1435690)

    The Finlandia House [finlandia.hel.fi] in Helsinki is covered with big bricks made of Italian Carrara marble. It is a beautiful building, a masterpiece by Alvar Aalto [alvaraalto.fi].

    However, over the years the bricks started bending and falling because the marble couldn't take the weather and air pollution. As the building is the most important congress center of Finland, the problem had to be solved and so the city started searching for a better material that would last. Lots of money was used and they found a few materials that would solve the problem. This only took many years, lots of meetings and money. But finally it was time to choose and solve the problem.

    The City Council chose the same Italian Carrara marble again.

  • DDT is still in widespread use outside the US. The magazine Invention & Technology has a great article about this in its latest issue. Malaria is no longer a real threat in this country, but in countries where it is, they have resisted all appeals to do away with it.

    A friend of mine still uses DDT. When he heard that it was going to be taken off the market, he bought mass quantities.
  • I can't believe that the average person still uses it
    Who has made an effort to see that the average person can learn the metric system effortlessly? Certainly not the government. Some sports have; I ran track and cross country in high school and learned metric distances fairly well - the 5K, 1600m, and 3200m runs helped with that. The soft drink industry has - do you want a 1 liter, 2 liter, or 3 liter bottle of soda? Time is already metric, of course. I would think that dieters would readily convert to metric - would you rather weigh 300 pounds, or 136 kilograms?
  • For example, the Chernobyl reactor didn't "melt down", it caught fire. (It was a graphite-moderated design, it got hot enough for the graphite to catch fire. Nasty.)

    And the Hindenberg "disaster" wasn't that bad -- most aboard actually survived, and zeppelins had been flying for years without incident before that. It just happened that there was a reporter present (and we know how often the news media get it right). There were numerous other air disasters they could have mentioned (like the DC-10 incident where an engine fell off, destroying hydraulic lines in the process. Turned out they'd been using a fork-lift to remove/replace the engine for servicing, messing up the mounting bolts).

    And, Windows aside, perhaps the biggest computer-related screw up was the messed up deal between IBM and Motorola that ended up with IBM using the Intel 8088 instead of the Moto 68008 chip in IBM's first PC. (Accounts differ, one version has it that Moto refused to license the design to a second source, which IBM wanted.)
  • The man would be Tucker, the car would be the Tucker Torpedo.

    Way ahead of its time in many ways, at least in initial design. Reports vary about how well the final product matched the initial design (mostly due to lack of start-up funds). The movie paints the established auto industry as the bad guys in this, they didn't want the competition. How accurate that is I don't know.

    (That movie and story always reminds me of Gary Hudson and his repeated attempts (Phoenix, Roton, etc) at bringing a small reusable spaceship to market.)
  • Okay this might be a product of me watching to many X-Files and just generally being a skeptical guy, but does anyone else here think that the suppression of cold fusion is some sort of government plot? I know I'm probably rehashing this from somewhere else but think about it. If cold fusion were (allowed) to exist think of the changes that would go on. Power companies wouldn't be needed as much because every house/building would have its own mini-fusion generator to keep the power on. That leads to less oil and coal use. Which leads to trade deficts and all that blah-blah. Not to mention the complete distruction of lots of huge mega-corporations (Mobile-Exxon anyone?). I'm sure there are other reasons but I've got to get to work.

    I'm actually surprised that Fleichmann & Pons are still alive and haven't died in some sketchy "Hunting accident" or something

    Pete
  • Well that was one of the points that I left out 'cause I had to go back to work (I'm done working for the day now. Still at the office, but done working). Anyway if we are a net importer of oil that is an even bigger reason for the government to suppress CF. What do you think would happen to most of the countries in the middle east if CF replaced the need for oil as a fuel (Still need it for lots of other stuff though)? I don't think they'd be very pleased about that. Add in the unstability of the area + our gvt's past (current) terrorism paranoia and it makes sense that we should continue to import our oil from the OPEC countries no matter what. Additionally even if we are a net importer of oil the expenditure put forth still helps our economy in some way (Any help here? I slept through Macro). I think it's the "velocity of the dollar" or something like that (i.e. the faster the money is spent the better).

    Not the best example, but I have to support my paranoid delusions somehow.

    Pete
  • Remember that some of the "Y2K updates" have actually been just updates to the latest version of software. Some companies simply decided now to update to the current version of software after ignoring updates for several years.
  • The article on the de Havalind Comet is also inacurrate. True the initial model did crash due to metal fatigue, but by redesigning the shape of the passenger windows the Comet 4 was a successful design. In fact the RAF's Nimrod was based upon rebuilt Comet 4s and should be in service for many more years to come.
  • That leads to less oil and coal use. Which leads to trade deficts and all that blah-blah.

    Actually we are a net importer of oil, and coal we use internally, and I don't believe we export a great amount of it. So free/cheap energy would help our trade deficits and be a large boost to the economy in general.

    I really think that pons and fleischman are just wrong. There was too much independent evidence that it didn't work. They setup is fairly simple to reproduce. If they really had something, someone would be using it.

    I guess the short form of this is, no I don't think there is a government conspiracy here. Plenty of other places, but not here.
  • Bhopal - no you are wrong. This is not due to those silly 'wog' incompetent rag-head's. This was a tragic safety failure. If the same thing had happened in the Europe or US, people would have had their heads handed to them.

    As for UC having to pay a fine, I cry no tears for them. Six thousand dead should be a heavy weight on someones soul. Since corporations have no soul, they have to pay in valuta, money.

    Cold Fusion - Please supply links or citations to all these marvelous validations of cold fusion. I would love for cold fusion to be true, but I don't believe it. And I've never heard from anyone credible anything to support pons and fleischman.
  • Not the best example, but I have to support my paranoid delusions somehow.

    LMAO

    Hmmm, but I don't buy it, if it was Israel that had all the oil, maybe. Were fairly buddy-buddy with them. The main reason that we care what happens to the middle east is Oil. If the bottom dropped out of it tomorrow, most of the economies there would crash into the basement. With no money to provide maintenance/parts/new equipment it would seem like the rest or the region would quickly fall behind Israel in military power.
  • Well, I'm just wishing people a Happy Rollover.

    Anyway, Millennium is that show with Lance Hendrickson.

  • Re:Tu-144 Concordski (Score:3)

    by odaiwai ( 31983 ) on Wednesday December 29, 1999 @03:00PM (#1435734) Homepage
    The nuclear hand grenade?

    1. Pull Pin
    2. Throw twenty-five miles
    3. Duck and Cover.
  • Also the Hindenberg was truely just an accident, not a screwup.

    If you want a screwup air disaster, then the winner has to the 747 piloted by Captain Jacob Veldhuyzen van Zanten, who decided to take off on a fog covered runway without launch clearance and without waiting for another 747 to clear the runway.

    This accident is still the classical case of how mismanagement in the cockpit, and sloppy procedures, will result in disaster.

  • Actually DDT affects the shells of many birds, for example Perigine falcon [learner.org], Raptor s [ai-design.com] and Brown Pelican [umich.edu]. Birds of prey are the most likely to have sufficent DDT in their bodies, as slow degrading chemicals accumulate as they go up the food chain, but any bird can suffer from the syndrome.

    Also DDT is an estrogenic drug - it can mimic the effects of female sex hormones in males. Estrogenics cause many problems, including falling sperm counts in humans.

  • Oh yes, I wasn't trying to imply that DDT was the only estrogenic compound, just that it was one of them.
  • Airships, even those using hydrogen, actually had a safer record (in terms of % deaths per accident) than airplanes do.

    I'm not aware of any airship accident which killed all on board. The Hindenburg had 97 people on board, 36 of who died. R101 (The other famous airship accident) had 54 people on board of who 48 died, however many airship accidents results in no injuries or deaths, for example the R33 accident of April 16 1925. The disadvantages of hydrogen are more than compensated for by the advatantages of having a basically stable platform.

    I'd say that airships had no worse a record than similar airplanes of the age, and a modern helium powered airship has the potential to be significantly safer than a modern aircraft.

  • One then wonders why the US is developing a nuclear "umbrella" defence?

    Er, because it makes sense to have a Plan B in case Plan A (relying on the basic sanity of other nuclear states) doesn't work?
    /.

  • A quote from the WIRED story to which you linked:

    BEGIN QUOTE

    Then came the kicker: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."

    Huh?

    Preliminary discussions of how the ARPANET would be designed began in 1967, and a request for proposals went out the following year. In 1969, the Defense Department commissioned the ARPANET.
    Gore was 21-years-old at the time. He wasn't even done with law school at Vanderbilt University. It would be eight more years before Gore would be elected to the US House of Representatives as a freshman Democrat with scant experience in passing legislation, let alone ambitious proposals.

    By that time, file copying -- via the UUCP protocol -- was beginning. Email was flourishing. The culture of the Internet was starting to develop through the Jargon File and the SF-Lovers mailing list.

    END QUOTE

    So please allow me to rephrase: Al Gore claimed to have 'taken the initiative in creating the internet' that started _growing_ (it wasn't "created", it grew) before he was out of school.

    Forgive my ranting.
  • I think it's time to set the record straight on this Al Gore thing. Mr Gore does not, nor has he ever, claimed to invent the internet. What Al Gore claims (and rightly so) is that while he was in the senate he was influenced heavily by a report (see this [isoc.org] for details)that made him believe in and become a major proponent of the internet. While in the senate he helped to pass a number of bills in support of ARPANET.

    More info see:
    Internet Pioneers [internet-history.org]
    Wired News [wired.com]
    The Slashdot story [slashdot.org]
    This doesn't mean I'm voting for Gore btw, no political endorsements

    Some general comments on this story: I don't think it's a well-done story, in that it only covers the last century; on the other hand it doesn't pretend to be the whole millenium but actually is just the century. I think they leave out lots of critical disasters, like the great depression, but put things that had almost no impact on societys (N-Rays??? Who cares?) They also leave out the invention of nuclear weapons, World War II and the Holocaust (How do you miss that?) and add things like wrong way corrigan, which are more humorous than they are true failures. All in all a halfhearted attempt, but not a bad read.

  • Re:Tu-144 Concordski (Score:3)

    by stuyman ( 46850 ) <laurenceb&gmail,com> on Wednesday December 29, 1999 @08:41AM (#1435752)
    If I recall correctly the History Channel show I saw on the Tu-144, there is no proof that its failure had any relationship to unstable design. To this day a number of engineers from around the world maintain to this day that its design (though stolen from the Anglo-French group) was improved upon to the point that it was superior to Concorde. The cause of the accident seems to be disputed [lucia.it], but it seems to be a tossup between pilot error (the pilot putting the plane in a position no commercial airliner would ever hold up to [the 144 made it further in than the rest would've]) or the interference of a mirage fighter put in the air by France. Tu-144s are still flown today, admittedly not widely (but neither are Concordes) in Russia, with a flawless safety record.

    More info on the Tu-144 "Konkordsky":
    The 144LL Initiative [nasa.gov]
    More 144LL [nasa.gov]
    Tu 144 specs [russian.ee]
    A guide to Russian Airplanes [www.bird.ch]

  • Ah, that's good to know. I'll have to tackle my programming prof if I ever see him again; he never mentioned which mission suffered because of the FORTRAN stupidity.

  • The actual "punctuation error" in that probe (Score:3)

    by devphil ( 51341 ) on Wednesday December 29, 1999 @08:42AM (#1435754) Homepage
    This has nothing to do with the English/metric thing; I just felt that this should go in the space-probe-thread rather than start a new one.

    IIRC, the punctuation mistake they're talking about was an instance of the now-infamous DO LOOP constructs in FORTRAN. You can alternate between a period and a comma, and the result is two /completely different/ blocks of code, both legal.

    With the comma, you actually get a loop. With the period, you get a funky-looking initialization statement and some useless labels. When I was a freshman in college, my introductory CS professor showed us this piece of code, explained the screwup, and added, "We lost a rocket in the 60's because of this." :-)

    (I've never formally studied FORTRAN. If I've messed up the explanation above, oh well, mea culpa.)
  • What about the Japanese fuel processing plant that had its main mixing vessel go critical a few months ago?

    A representative post as to "why this ought to count as one of the more colossal blunders of the century":

    Follow-up: Unlike the "maybe the experimenter got careless with his math and used the wrong shape of vessel" theory espoused by this post, ISTR that it was eventually determined that the root cause was an in-duh-vidual adding thirty-five pounds of uranium to the acid solution, rather than the 5ish-pounds he was supposed to use.

    That's beyond "carelessly bad math" (which in this situation still would qualify it as a Fuckup of Pretty Big Proportions) and well into the realm of "A Fuckup of Such Grand Proportion That Deming, the Man Who Taught Total Quality Management and Process Engineering to the Japanese, Is Probably Still Rolling In His Grave Three Months Later".

  • The Inevitable.. (Score:3)

    by prodeje ( 58779 ) on Wednesday December 29, 1999 @08:52AM (#1435765)
    The Slashdot Purchase (1999): Andover.net buys out slashdot.org, and while Rob swears that nothing will change, slashdot.org gradually transforms into a hardcore porn site.

    ..
    "We must move forward, not backward, upward not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom."
  • It was my understanding that the project was scrapped. Thank you for setting me straight.

    --

  • Tu-144 Concordski (Score:4)

    by theonetruekeebler ( 60888 ) on Wednesday December 29, 1999 @08:12AM (#1435767) Homepage Journal
    I nominate the Tu-144 SST. The Tu-144 was a hastily assembled, politically motivated Soviet response to the Concorde and physically resembled that plane, except for the addition of canard control surfaces. Unfortunately, the design was terribly unstable. First tested in December 1968--before Concorde's first flight--the project was scrapped after the plane's very public and spectacular crash at the 1971 Paris air show. I think the Tu-144 stands as an excellent example of the type of failure that results from panicky first-to-market projects.

    My other nomination is the Honest John, a short range missile developed for the U.S. military in the 1950s. Although a very capable weapon when carrying a conventional warhead, in 1954 the Pentagon insisted on deploying a nuclear-tipped version with a warhead of over 100 kiloton yield. Unfortunately, with a warhead that size, the blast radius of the missile exceeded its range.

    So, any other nominations?

    --

  • Tu-144 was not a hastily assembled "Concordski" by any stretch of imagination, and reflected considerable Soviet experties on building experimental high-speed strategic bombers and huge fighter aircraft in the sixties, like the Sukhoi S-100 and Tupolev Tu-128. Accidents can happen in aviation at any time. Tu-144 went on to fly in Aeroflot service in the 1970s.

    The fact that Tu-144 was a sound design has been recently verified by NASA's use of the Tu-144 as a testbed for 21st century US supersonic transport aircraft. The link is here. [nasa.gov] The Tu-144LL is flying today for NASA service, and $350 millions of taxpayer money is used for this project.
    --

    BluetoothCentral.com [bluetoothcentral.com]
    A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming in January 2000.

  • Re:Wierd Rumor I Heard About the Vincennes (Score:3)

    by TurkishGeek ( 61318 ) on Wednesday December 29, 1999 @08:54AM (#1435770)
    This rumor is complete bullshit. Iranians never had the F-16, although the US had made the blunder of selling them 80 F-14 Tomcats during the Shah era, 6 or 8 of them equipped with the ultra-powerful AN/AWG-9 radar that comes standard with the US Tomcats. During the Iran-Iraq war, the Iranians used these aircraft as fast and agile AWACS aircraft, figuring out that using the radar's long range capabilities will be much more useful and safer than sending it into direct combat. Even after almost 20 years of US embargoes, several F-14s still fly with the Iranian Air Force, despite US intelligence officers' claims every year "that existing F-14s have been cannibalized to provide spares to the flyable ones over the years, and none can fly as of today". Actually the Iranians get their kicks by flying them over Tehran every year in anniversary celebrations in front of US reporters and camera crews. They apparently can build some spare parts and expendables for F-14s, but mostly the aircraft are kept flyable by cannibalizing the others.

    This blunder has been haunting the US military for a long time. Not wanting to miss the chance of shooting down an F-14 and get a nice, shiny medal, a trigger-happy commander on USS Vincennes shot down the Iranian airliner with a Standard missile, killing 290 people. One of my friends, an Iranian grad student here in the US, happens to be a distant relative of someone killed aboard the plane.

    Loading an aircraft full of dead people and let it be shot down? Give me a break.

    --

    BluetoothCentral.com [bluetoothcentral.com]
    A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming in January 2000.

  • Tu-4 Bull - Wrong! (Score:3)

    by TurkishGeek ( 61318 ) on Wednesday December 29, 1999 @09:36AM (#1435771)
    The objective behind the Tu-4 project was not to "increase their egos", rather, to kick-start Soviet large bomber design and production process. Your post reflects some shallow comments made by some authors in the aviation history literature, but from many points, the Tu-4 Bull project was immensely successful.The Russians, even though they once pioneered the heavy bomber concept with the early "Ilya Muromets", never had long range, heavy bombers during World Word II; and they suffered because of this. The USAAF and RAF had four-engined, heavy bombers throughout the war and used them effectively; but the Russians had to make do with Ilyushin Il-2 Shturmovik and a host of other light attack aircraft, and some slightly larger designs like the Petlyakov Pe-2. Several attempts at producing larger momber designs flopped miserably.

    Some clever industrialist (probably not Stalin himself) saw that the best starting point would probably be duplicating a successful long range bomber design, and the Soviets duplicated the B-29, as you correctly pointed out, to the smallest screw. Rumor has it that a hole in the tail section, caused by a flak hit, was exactly duplicated by the Soviets in hundreds of Tu-4s produced.

    Now you might argue that the B-29 and hence Tu-4 was outdated by 1947, but the very valuable expertise gained by Tu-4 project allowed the Russians to design and built very capable bomber aircraft that scared the US military throughout the Cold War. After the Tu-4, Soviet aircraft industry produced many very good designs that held up very successfully against their Western counterparts.

    Note to nitpickers: Yes, I know Ilya Muromets has been designed by Sikorsky, who later immigrated to the US. It's a Russian design nevertheless.
    --

    BluetoothCentral.com [bluetoothcentral.com]
    A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming in January 2000.
  • ... of bueaucracies. B-)
  • Cold weather made the sealant material brittle, causing it to crack prior to Challenger's launch

    Cold weather did not made the O rings brittle, it made them less malleable. And the O rings were fine until the boosters starting to flex during launch. Check out What Do You Care What Other People Think? [fatbrain.com], by Richard Feynman, which contains (among other things) Dr. Feynman's account of his experience on the NASA comittee charged with finding out why Challenger exploded.

  • The Bhopal tragedy was not caused by failure to follow safety regulations.
    The main problem was that the systems as well as the backups failed simultaneously. A failed storage tank, failed backup tank, failed cooler occurred simultneously.
    Worse was that the company management tried to claim that the company was *not* responsible for what happened.
    Also the company has not paid a major portion of the damages yet, nor has it provided for the rehabilitation of the victims, as required by the court judgement.

    Note: The only unconfirmed point is regarding the damages.

    PS, I'm in Chem Engg in India and we have to study this disaster, so take a smaller pinch of salt.
  • Whether or not the bug results in disruptions in service anywhere in the world, the process of fixing the bug and guaranteeing compliance has cost the world economy billions of dollars.

    It has cost over a trillion dollars in the US alone. All in one-time expenditures... pretty incredible.
  • Well, if you put it in roman numerals it doesn't really look right for 2001 being the start of the next millennium. (Even though I believe it is, so I'm not flaming or anything, just pointing something that I see out.)

    If you turned Roman numerals into something like this:
    C = century
    M = millennium

    When 1999 = MCMXCIX
    and 2000 = MM
    and 2001 = MMI which looks like just another year
    in the millennium

    Doesn't it look like MM = millennium * 2, or as in second millennium? (Of course, it would be the beginning of the *third* millennium) So... you can't really use Roman numerals to say that, because it doesn't look right. It seems like it's gonna be impossible to convince those non-believers that it starts on 2001. Sorry, Arthur.
  • The reason for all of that it is a lawyer-repellant. Any company that gets caught with a Y2K bug that causes a loss of service is going to have a liability problem. And even if they don't, there is going to be an issue of comparison with similar products. Think of Y2K-compliance as a bullet item on glossy ads for a product. By a couple of months from now, all that is going to matter is that you avoided not having it. The companies that blew it are going to get beaten up pretty badly. Microsoft is taking a bit of a ribbing on Wired [wired.com] for getting the dates wrong on some documents. Arguably, those dates don't matter much. But it looks bad.
  • The canards on the TU-144 are not for control per se, they are for takeoff and landing. The canards are retractable, and provide nose-up force which can be countered by down-flaperon in the rear. This allows the flaperons to produce additional lift at low speed and lower the nose attitude at landing speed. This, from the Jan. 2000 issue of Flying, IIRC (read it at the book store, didn't buy it).
    --
  • Actually, the scare over DDT has now been discredited.
    ...NOT. The evidence that DDT leads to eggshell thinning in birds and threatened the extinction of species like the peregrine falcon and the American bald eagle is absolutely airtight.
    --
  • The Bhopal tragedy was not caused by failure to follow safety regulations.
    Yes, it was. There were severe deficiencies in maintenance at Bhopal compared to other Union Carbide plants. This included maintenance of safety systems.
    The main problem was that the systems as well as the backups failed simultaneously. A failed storage tank, failed backup tank, failed cooler occurred simultneously.
    The main problem was that the cooling system for the methyl isocyanate tank used water in the loop, and the coil developed a leak. This was known, but not fixed. I do not recall there being a backup tank, and the addition of water to methyl isocyanate creates heat, causing the tank pressure to go over limits and the vent valve to open. The tank vented to a flare stack, where any material that had to be dumped would be burned. The real problem was the lack of maintenance of the flare stack, which was not operational. The methyl isocyanate went up the flare stack, into the air, and onto the people downwind with the observed results.
    Worse was that the company management tried to claim that the company was *not* responsible for what happened.
    This is correct; by all rights, Union Carbide is not.

    The Indian government is responsible for what happened. Under India's home-rule laws, Union Carbide was required to appoint Indian managers for its plants, and was unable to do anything meaningful about the neglected maintenance. The Indian manager at Bhopal neglected to do the required maintenance at the plant, and the rest is history. Union Carbide bears no more moral responsibility for the deaths and injuries at Bhopal than Ford bears for the slave-labor conditions at its plants in Germany from 1941-44. Their control had been usurped by a government bent on its own goals. Your government, BTW, which has also written the plant history you're being taught in class.
    --

  • Still more inaccuracies! (Score:4)

    by Tau Zero ( 75868 ) on Wednesday December 29, 1999 @08:54AM (#1435788) Journal
    For example, the Chernobyl reactor didn't "melt down", it caught fire.
    Not quite. It had a power surge due to being operated incorrectly, leading to a steam explosion. The steam explosion put graphite moderator in contact with white-hot naked fuel pellets (as well as removing the lid on the reactor), and that led to the fire.
    There were numerous other air disasters they could have mentioned (like the DC-10 incident where an engine fell off, destroying hydraulic lines in the process. Turned out they'd been using a fork-lift to remove/replace the engine for servicing, messing up the mounting bolts).
    And even that needn't have led to loss of the aircraft. When the engine fell off, both hydraulic systems for the left wing slat were taken out, and the slat retracted. This left the aircraft in an asymmetrical configuration, but it was still flyable; it was going fast enough that the wing did not stall even without the slats on that side. The pilot noticed that he'd lost an engine, and slowed down to the engine-out best-climb speed. This was below the stall speed for the now-slatless left wing, the aircraft uncontrollably rolled to the left, and it went into the ground with the loss of everyone on board. All this because the pilot had no way of knowing that he'd lost hydraulics and symmetry along with that engine.

    IIRC, transport aircraft now have indicators to flag these failures to the flight crew.
    --

  • Several of these "Screw ups" are poorly explained (Score:5)

    by .havoc ( 84318 ) on Wednesday December 29, 1999 @08:00AM (#1435790) Homepage
    Bhopal:
    Union Carbide plamed for India's poorly educated workers refusing to follow safety proceedures and guidelines. UC paid dearly and mostly kept thier mouths shut.

    Challenger:
    Several Engineers had tried to stop the use of the material in the O-rings. Several Engineers had tried to stop the launch that morning. Some NASA bearucrat pushed the launch through for internal political reasons.

    Another Shoot Down:
    All of the bodies recovered from the water had been dead for more than 24 hours. Very little blood was present in the water. Suspected to be a ploy by the Iranian goverment to turn up the international Heat on the US. The approach of the "Irianian Jetliner" was wavetop and full throttle -- very un-jetliner behavior. It also failed repeatedly to respond to hails.

    Cold Fussion:
    To date, the results of Fleischmann and Pons have been replicated by 20-30 researchers -- Including Chemists at Texas A&M and Arizona State. There's something else going on here.

    Y2K Bug:
    I agree with the previous post about the cost of the Y2K bug.
  • Which also explains why we have such lovely commands as 'umount' - because that n was just *too* much :-)

  • The Vincennes tragedy (Score:4)

    by Sheik Yerbouti ( 96423 ) on Wednesday December 29, 1999 @10:48AM (#1435807) Homepage
    I served four years in the USN as an operations specialist. And at one point was responsible for tracking a very active air picture in the Persian Gulf. The area is known as the aluminum cloud due to the high volume of aircraft flying in a very small area. We were briefed about the Vincennes tragedy upon entering the theatre of operations. As I understood it and this is probably the most reliable information on the subject you will get. The tragedy was not necessarily the fault of the captain of the USS Vincennes. The tragedy was caused by several factors not the least of which being that the Iranians fly there military aircraft out of their civilian airports. In other words they don't have air force bases per se. Every civilian airport may share it runways with military aircraft. So you may have two aircraft taking off in a short period of time one an Iranian F-14 and one an Airbus. A Navy Operations Specialist can tell the difference based on which modes of IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) the plane is squawking. A civilian plane squawks two modes of IFF one that reports its altitude (mode charley I believe) and one that reports its flight number (mode one if I remember correctly) (in most cases). NATO aircraft like the F-14s we gave to the Shah can squawk up to two more modes 3 and 4. Mode 4 is US only and encrypted this is how we tell they are US. Mode 3 is NATO for interoperating with our allies. Now you have two planes coming off the runway one squawking modes 1 and Charley and one squawking modes 1,3 and Charley. You know the one squawking 3 is an F-14. By the way air warfare happens so fast these days that a computer does the actual tracking with a human operator double-checking it. A human is pretty much incapable of manually tracking the complex air picture over the gulf. So with these aircraft coming off the same runway it's a simple matter for the computer to mix up their IFF squawks as the two contacts radar blips separate. One of the tools you use in the gulf to keep things straight is a superimposed map of the civilian air corridors over your radar display. The planes in those corridors are usually civilian and not a threat. What we had in this case was a plane that looked like it was squawking a military code (due to computer human error) heading straight for the Vincennes in a fairly volatile environment (remember the USS Stark that got split in half by an Iraqi Exocet). It was also not any where near a civilian air corridor. And did not respond to three separate warnings on several different international frequencies. The captain of the Vincennes in this case was following the rules of engagement for the gulf when he pulled the trigger. They really thought they were in danger he had to make a decision. And something like this would never have happened had the Iranians not had a propensity for hit and run attacks on American ships in the gulf at the time. And also not have been flying F-14s out of a civilian airport. Even today if this where to happen again it might result in the same outcome. It perhaps shows a weakness in Military ID technology. Things like Doppler shift ID might improve this a bit in the future or may have already (I have been out of this line of work for a while now things change). Anyway that's how it went down.

  • WW2? (Score:2)

    by gargle ( 97883 )
    I'm surprised World War 2 isn't on the list. It may be repetitive to have both WW1 and WW2 on the list - but it shows that people never learn.
  • The probe that just royally screwed up (was it the Mars Polar Lander?) because some tech didn't convert from English to metric units should've been listed, if only to underscore the point that it's long past high time for this country to pick a system of units and STICK WITH IT. (Non-'merkins need not feel slighted, the rest of the world does it right!)
  • It was actually the sharp corners on the star navigation window in the roof (remember, back then, radar wasn't so good) that caused the failure.

    While Britain became world experts in metal fatigue from the resultant investigation, we also lost the jet airliner industry. Oh well. We know we were first...

  • IMHO, it seems like the good things of the "eon/decade/year/millenium" were fairly superficial. I can't even remember the names of some of the people nominated "man of the year" or "whatever of the millenium" or "Wookiee of the Month" or whatever...

    But seriously...to label the Challenger, the Hindenburg, world wars, and the like simply "screwups" like WinCE and DIVX just kinda leaves a bad taste in my mouth. These were catastrophes. People died, their loved ones grieved.

    Wired--come on. I think we can call the N-rays and cold fusion true flops, and "Wrong-way Corrigan" and Juan Pablo Davila were just kind of funny...but everything else were tragedies, and to call them mere foul-ups is, IMNSHO, a disgrace.

    Just my $.02. Fire away.
  • Microsoft WINDOWS. All of them.

  • DDT (Score:4)

    by re-geeked ( 113937 ) on Wednesday December 29, 1999 @07:56AM (#1435827)
    This was supposed to save all our crops, AND protect us against disease! Some folks were even advocating adding it to drinking water, IIRC.

    This one was so bad, it almost single-handedly started the environmental movement, as its evils were rooted out in Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring".

  • Y2K (Score:2)

    by Powers ( 118325 )
    The author said "Maybe" in regards to the Y2K bug in 2000. He's missing the point. Whether or not the bug results in disruptions in service anywhere in the world, the process of fixing the bug and guaranteeing compliance has cost the world economy billions of dollars.

    Granted, some of that money goes to employees, who then recycle it back into the economy, but most of it is in the form of lost productivity and revenue, which isn't recoverable. The Y2K bug has already taken its toll, and definitely should have been on the list (under "1970s", perhaps?).

  • Here's my list (Score:3)

    by #include ( 130485 ) on Wednesday December 29, 1999 @07:57AM (#1435844) Homepage Journal
    1) The friggin Ford Escort... man what a piece of unadulterated crap. Ford outta be ashamed of themselves

    2) big baggie droopy drawers... for christ sake, just pull em up, you look like a damn idiot. PULL YOUR FUCKING PANTS UP YOU FOOLS

    3) Packard Bell computers... heh...I don't even have to expound on this one

    4) RITA - (Regional income tax authority) I know, this one is personal, but these fuckers have their heads so far up my ass it's pathetic.

    5) Country music - Christ on a moped, It's so far beyond me how anyone can listen to this pathetic souless crap. Get a life you losers.
  • Incidentally, being born in Texas does not preclude a person from being Irish. Heres a crummy attempt at a Venn diagram to explain how this complex phenomenon is possible. ______ _________ / \ / \ | Irish x Born \ | { } in Texas | \ x / \_____/ \________/

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