Re: Goooooooo Bill
"OK well I guess that's the American philosophy, i.e. "It can't be my fault, someone else must take the blame". The last hammer I bought has a fault: there is no safety mechanism to prevent you from hitting your own thumb with it, ergo the company that made it shares some of the blame for my injury."
No, it's not "American philosophy". It's the obvious and demonstrable point of fact.
When a catastrophic error occurs, there are invariably a combination of factors that contributed to it. If you can't see the dog because the car has an unusually bad field of view, or the brakes don't work as you expect then that's a contributing factor. There are no two ways about it. Ford is not absolved of blame if this were the case.
And it happens all the time in cars. They get recalls because it turns out the brakes are defective, or the steering is, or the safety belts, or the software..
It's a point that appears to elude people. Software and hardware that have a safety function have to anticipate and prevent user error. If a pilot is supposed to be calculating their takeoff then the software running on a tablet has to make such an action explicit and obvious to minimize error. If the guy is zoomed in looking at labels because they're so small then that is a flaw. Perhaps there are also procedural errors that could be corrected by requiring the copilot to independently confirm the figures. Whatever the contributing factors were it nearly cost the lives of everyone on board.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
