I guess I shouldn't be surprised that this thread took a political tone very quickly, given that the recent issues of the digest contains reports and speculations of a political nature. It makes sense that people's attention would get consumed by these more recent speculations. After all the digest covers risks that reside in the intersection between politics and technology, meatspace and cyberspace.<p>However, I would like to try to gently nudge this thread more towards the technological side of that intersection. A long time interest of mine has been technological failure: things like nuclear reactor meltdowns, airplane crashes, bridge collapses, and so forth.<p>For example, jhere is a link to a piece of the digest that covers exactly this kind of stuff:<p><a href="http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/1/1#subj4.1" rel="nofollow">http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/1/1#subj4.1</a><p>Sure, it's from '84, but as a software engineer I empathize with all of these (mostly) software related failures, as I have to deal with similar failures on a daily basis -- though thankfully they don't involve and fatalities or injury.<p>Furthermore I find this digest to be very helpful as an archive of safety related issues over a large span of the history of our field, than of current risks which you can find trending on HN and reddit. I suspect the former is much more instructive since most of that stuff happened before many of us were born -- thus giving us the opportunity to learn from the past with an open mind and free of bias. For example the first few years of the digest covered the SDI which was apparently a hot topic among software engineers in those days, while as present it is (to me) a vague and distant notion barely perceptible -- like a fading transmission.<p>The digest is heavy with the residue of a rich history, and I hope that we (as in humanity) can give a bit more focus to the past, since it will help us make a bit more sense out of the present.<p>Other fun things:<p>John McCarthy of lisp fame was apparently a contributor back in the day:
<a href="http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/1/7#subj1" rel="nofollow">http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/1/7#subj1</a><p>Richard Stallman made an appearance in 1990:
<a href="http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/10/20#subj5" rel="nofollow">http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/10/20#subj5</a><p>As did Bernie Cosell (form Coders at Work by Siebel):
<a href="http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/10/20#subj6" rel="nofollow">http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/10/20#subj6</a><p>And Leslie Lamport, (LaTeX, PAXOS, Turing Award):
<a href="http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/10/44#subj1" rel="nofollow">http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/10/44#subj1</a><p>Julian Assange in 1995 talking about LoadDog (the wikileaks guy):
<a href="http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/17/59#subj9" rel="nofollow">http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/17/59#subj9</a><p>Doug McIlroy in 2005 (of Unix pipes fame):
<a href="http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/24/57#subj7" rel="nofollow">http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/24/57#subj7</a><p>Anyway, hope software engineers on this board will find this historical resource useful, and apologies if anyone got trolled by it.