What's changed since is that our general infrastructure and our most critical institutions (think electronic voting machines) now all hang by this same easily unraveled thread.<p>There's a book by a Dutch fellow about the disaster that is truly harrowing, it paints a picture in which NASA engineers fully understood the shuttle was going to blow, soon, and that's precisely why they were willing to cut so many corners - they knew that so many faults had already been built into the Shuttle that the chances that their additional cheat would be the final straw - rather than some other department's cheat - were very small.