I was about to scream bloody murder. Thankfully, the Prius is only mentioned as a "hook" -- something to tie the article into recent news and bring the concept home to everyday tasks. It makes the Prius' glitch seem worse than it really is -- of however many thousand vehicles are affected by the recall, what's the percentage that encountered the problem? (Not that they shouldn't all be fixed, of course.)

But there's no such thing as bad publicity, and the article is a good read. I'd read the case study on the Therac-25 before and while it's probably more technical than the non-computer or -medical types would care for, it really is interesting how all the assumptions and business decisions and good-but-not-great software developers came together to cause what was unfortunately a deadly defect.

At least Toyota found the problem and is fixing it... which is more than can be said for other problems in other products.