OTOTOT
I once heard a story about a Driver Ed. teacher taking a new student out for his first drive. They drove around the neighborhood, did stop lights, turns, signals, all that stuff. No problem. So, the teacher directs the student to the interstate. He gets in the entry lane, then the right lane. Everything is going just fine, doing the speed limit in the right lane while cars whiz past to the left.
They come up behind a little old lady in the right lane whose view of the road is the space between the dash and the inside of the steering wheel. She is doing 45. The instructor, feeling confident of the student's ability, tells him to check his mirrors, and pass on the left. The student looks to see that nobody is coming and starts over into the left lane. In order to get up to the prevailing speed of the traffic, he shifts the car into "P" for "pass."
Now, your Corvette is a manual, so fortunately this couldn't happen. Say, however, that you managed to shift it into reverse while you were doing 90. Is the resulting carnage the fault of the manufacturer, or your fault? Can the instructor be held responsible for the student doing something so completely stupid that it is unforeseeable?
I am not saying that my analogy is closer to what happened in the WCOM/LU story, but I think we cannot know at the moment whether LU hosed the software before it was even installed, or installed the software improperly, or whether WCOM screwed up the internal state of the switches, rendering moot any hope of getting perfectly good software to run properly when installed properly.
It remains to be seen (that is, if we in the public will ever really get the whole story.) IMHO.
Regards,
Doug |
