Desiging for failure...

I watched a History Channel series on engineering disasters in September and posted my thoughts about the shows here, this is a followup pointer to two essays I read this weekend by Dan Bricklin: Software That Lasts 200 Years and Learning from Accidents and A Terrorist Attack.

I have no insights to post (yet) except that assuming successful operations at all times seems to be an open invitation to failure, possibly catastrophic failure at that.