On Wed, 02 Nov 2005 18:50:38 -0400, Michael D. Crawford wrote Just a point of moderation here -- aside from the question about shared_ptr these posts seem mostly off-topic for this list. I would suggest critiques of the article go off-list somewhere else -- like directly to Michael....
...snip long post...
I'm lucky I only lost my job. Think of the poor Morton Thiokol engineer who didn't trust his conscience when he knew the Space Shuttle's O-rings had frozen. He settled for reporting the risk of explosion through company channels, and trusted that Morton Thiokol would do the right thing. By not raising Hell and going directly to NASA when he realized the launch hadn't been canceled, he allowed seven people to lose their lives, a billion dollar spacecraft to be destroyed, and the US space program to be set back several years.
And now for one really off-topic comment ;-) Not sure it was the same engineer, but I read that one of the Morton Thiokol engineers committed suicide later after not being able to convince management to stop the launch -- he knew the launch was doomed. You also might want to check out Edward Tufte's Visual Explanations. He describes why the charts the engineers used to communicate the issues to management were completely ineffective in communicating the obvious peril of launching at a temperature 25 degrees F lower than the temperature of any other launch. A basic scatterplot of the right data would likely have prevented the whole accident. With software, things are rarely this clear... Jeff