[SystemSafety] Hackers take over control of a car wirelessly

Thu Jul 23 20:53:08 CEST 2015

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Concerning Monsieur Musk and Tesla, I think it is a huge mistake to try to argue from alleged
traits of a company chief to the quality of the products.

I also think it is a huge mistake to argue from the habits of engineers and scientists to their
achievements.

Les claims, I understand from Mike's note, that working 80 hours a week for six months drove him
nigh insane. I'll accept that, with the possible caveat concerning "nigh" :-)

I know someone who worked 70-80 hours a week for decades, and who won the Turing prize for his
discoveries, and is content doing what he does and being who he is.

My thesis advisor, when he was working on a problem, used to work until he couldn't any more. You
could knock on his office door, and he may well have been inside it for 60 or 80 or 100 hours,
with excursions to the toilet, and to the food+drink+cigarette store 5 minutes away, but
unfortunately not to the showers. His family was used to him not coming home for five days. He
solved some of the most intractable problems in the field this way. He was the person who found a
mistake in my PhD thesis, which included five published papers in the major conferences in the
field. Those reviewers missed my mistake - he didn't.

I worked with someone whose pleasure in life was programming. He had an earpiece telephone to
maintain his social contacts while working, and took at least two evenings off per week explicitly
to socialise. Else he was at the machine or crashed out. Had a lovely fiancee, also a hard worker
but not so hard. And only needed four or five hours sleep a night. He worked on a project I led.
One weekend, he called up. "I'm about to work on your task. Here are some questions." Followed
about two hours of detailed and insightful questions about the spec. Three days later "here's the
code". How long? 60 hours of work. Perfect. Bug free. And, besides, solving a  previously-open
algorithmic problem.

I'm not like any of those people. Neither, I would guess, are most of the people on this list.
Doesn't make anything they did at all questionable.

PBL
Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Faculty of Technology, University of Bielefeld, 33594 Bielefeld, Germany
Je suis Charlie
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de

[SystemSafety] Hackers take over *control* of a car wirelessly

[SystemSafety] Hackers take over control of a car wirelessly