Phone booths have all but vanished from the American landscape, to the delight of the myriad faceless number crunchers who toil at Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile. It's bad enough that the extinction of the public telephone has created so much hardship for cellphoneless citizens like myself, ... Continue reading
Blind faith
June 26, 2009 By 3 Comments
When a Fail-Safe system fails, it fails by failing to fail safe. — John Gall, Systemantics: How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail, 1975. "I truly believe Metro is a safe system." — DC Metro General Manager John B Catoe, Jr., quoted in the Washington Post. A "fail-safe" automatic traffic ... Continue reading
