Traumwind - Der Computer ist Dein Freund.

It seems that not once but twice, US military personnel and Afghan allies were killed and maimed because they called down 2000-pound bombs on their own heads. The reason was a design flaw in the Precision Lightweight GPS Receiver (PLGR, pronounced "plugger"). Evidently if you transmit the coordinates of a strike, then replace the battery, the device boots up and transmits not those same coordinates but rather your present position.

[Update: apearently it was human failure to remember how friendly computers are] So in his haste, he forgot that the coordinate displayed was not the coordinate he was working on when the device powered off, so he did the transformation on the coordinates he saw (his present position) and radioed them to the aircraft.

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Martin Spernau
© 1994-2003

Big things to come (TM) 30th Dez 2002

Don't be frightened of cliches
Oblique Strategies, Ed.3 Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt

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