Catastrophe in Theory and Practice

The old joke goes, "To err is human; to really screw things up, you need a computer." The Alaska Department of Revenue is probably not laughing at this any more. A routine reformatting of a disk drive managed to wipe out a $38 billion account, and the backup drive was reformatted with the same effect. They then discovered that their backup tapes were unreadable. Thus, there was only one source for backup: the original pieces of paper, 300 cardboard boxes worth of the stuff. So much for the paperless office, and thanks to Yahoo! News for feeding this from Associated Press!