These include sections 1.2, 1.3, 1.7, and 2.8, as well as:
1.8 Honor confidentiality.
2.3 Know and respect existing laws pertaining to professional work.
3.3 Acknowledge and support proper and authorized uses of computing resources.
CAN COMPUTERS KILL?
In particular, can software kill? Can software maim? Can software inflict damaging financial loss? As software
and computers have become ever more integrated into all the appliances, tools, medical devices and weapons
of the modern world, the question of software quality has become a question of more urgency.
Most of the time, developers experience the failure of a program as an unfortunate but correctable defeat.
From time to time, however, software failures can be very serious. Some are merely expensive, though
dramatically so. In 1999 the Mars Climate Orbiter, launched in 1998, crashed when the NASA spacecraft team
used different units of measure for distance than the navigation team. One team used English units, and the other
used metric units (http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msp98/news/mco990930.html).
Three months later, the companion project, Mars Polar Lander, crashed when the jolt from the deployment
of its parachute made the software respond as if the probe had touched the surface of the planet, and the software
turned off the retro rockets.
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