[continued from previous message]

(if still available) allegedly $1,000 or so + labour + cost of recalibrating the computers. The factory manual for my car gives instructions for
rebuilding the steering pump and box on my kitchen table (not that I'd
actually want to do this). The *real* reason for electric power steering is that it can be integrated with the (mandated) braking-stability control,
which detects the steering-wheel angle and compares the actual car's turning movement with a yaw sensor, then distributes the braking force accordingly
to reduce the chance of a skid. That's apart from 'lane-assist' and similar collision-avoidance features, of course. Dunno how these things are checked
at vehicle inspection times ("MoT" in UK) -- presumably heavily dependent on self-diagnostics?

As the original poster said, it's not clear what the future holds. Many of these 'fragile' features, like the CAN bus mentioned, are legal requirements
in a lot of countries so car buyers can't just choose to avoid them, and
it's likely that running older cars will become more difficult over time; I believe that in mainland Europe there are often restrictions on using 'historic' vehicles, typically by selecting required days per year with a scratch card. Some British cities are proposing low-emission schemes and reduction of traffic with varying degrees of aggression -- in London there's the daily congestion charge for all vehicles in the central area, with a
hefty supplementary charge for those not meeting the latest emission
standards.

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2020 10:18:09 +0200
From: Anthony Thorn <anthony.thorn@atss.ch>
Subject: Re: Risks of Excel (RISKS-32.31)

Risk of Spreadsheets

In view of the recent RISKS entries about Excel, I was mildly amused to
learn that the Covid 19 Aerosol Transmission model recently published by the Max Planck institute is an Excel spreadsheet. https://www.mpic.de/4747065/risk-calculation For an academic paper Excel is probably appropriate.

However after thinking a bit I was no longer amused. I believe that many of the (unpublished) models used by epidemiologists and policymakers probably
also use Excel spreadsheets.

There is a real risk of bad decisions resulting from errors in large complicated spreadsheets, which could have serious consequences.

The other risk is that an application will in the future be used in an application for which it was not intended and is not suitable.

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2020 09:46:13 +0100
From: A Michael W Bacon <amichaelwbacon@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Botched Excel import may have caused loss of 15,841 UK
COVID-19 cases (RISKS-32.31)

The "dumbed-down" reports of this in British mainstream media, including that quoted by Thomas Dzubin, did not expose the basic issue ... which was that Public Health England (PHE) was apparently using Excel 2003 (or earlier). Office 2003 went out of
support in Spring 2014, but it was (reportedly) only in July this year that PHE identified a need to upgrade.

------------------------------

Date: Sun, 11 Oct 2020 07:56:05 -0700
From: Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com>
Subject: Re: Apple marches to a different beat (Klein, RISKS-32.31)

Thanks to Steve and everyone else who replied to my message.

As best I can determine, my problem started with the 'Catalina' MacOS
upgrade. I never had a problem with the clock prior to this upgrade.

Apparently, the Catalina upgrade turned *off* automatic time sync'ing for
me, thus allowing a slow clock drift over a number of months which resulted
in a several minute discrepancy.

Thanks to several replies, I turned automatic time sync'ing back on,
and everything is working again.

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 1 Aug 2020 11:11:11 -0800
From: RISKS-request@csl.sri.com
Subject: Abridged info on RISKS (comp.risks)

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