Consider the following image, just snapped from my ATT.NET home page on Yahoo!:
Compare what it says about the current temperature with today’s forecast high. The obvious question arises: When was that forecast formulated, and why is it still in place in the face of contrary data? (For the record, when I look out the window, I see the sun shining on everything in sight. I see clouds in the sky, but I figure that this would count for “partly” rather than “mostly” cloudy!) Clearly, the forecast was generated by software (isn’t everything these days?); but should not software, particularly software put out there as a public service, be subject to that same injunction that Juvenal proposed for any “authority figure” (bearing in mind that he assumed such figures would be human): “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” One would think that such sanity checking would be second nature in any large enterprise that depends on software development expertise; but maybe this is one of those data points that warrants the sorts of things that the doom-sayers are proclaiming about Yahoo! these days. After all, can you trust any source that is easily contradicted by looking out the window?
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