On 11/22/11 08:16 , Jay Ashworth wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Owen DeLong" <owen@delong.com>
As in all cases, additional flexibility results in additional ability to make mistakes. Simple mechanical lockouts do not scale to the modern world. The benefits of these additional capabilities far outweigh the perceived risks of programming errors.
The perceived risk in this case is "multiple high-speed traffic fatalities".
I believe we rank that pretty high; it's entirely possible that a traffic light controller is the most potentially dangerous artifact (in terms of number of possible deaths) that the average citizen interacts with on a daily basis.
Cars generically cause at lot more deaths than faulty traffic controllers 13.2 per 100,000 population in the US annually.