Word: paranoid
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There are ways to make the technology more reliable. Fault-tolerant computers like those built by Stratus, Tandem and, for that matter, AT&T reduce runaway system errors by a kind of "paranoid democracy," where modules working in parallel constantly evaluate whether their electronic co- workers are "sane" or "crazy." Unfortunately, as last week's breakdown showed, it is possible for all the modules to go crazy at once. Software, always the skittish part of any system, can also be made more dependable by imposing the kind of discipline on programmers that engineering standards impose on, say, bridge designers...
...Johnson was found to be an acute paranoid schizophrenic; she died of alcohol-related liver disease in 1986. But by then the prosecution no longer needed her. The police had written to 200 parents stating that the authorities were investigating oral sex and sodomy at the McMartin school. To the parents of affluent Manhattan Beach who thought the McMartin school was the first step on the road to Stanford, this was a bombshell. They soon had fantastic stories to tell after their children were interviewed by Kee MacFarlane, an administrator turned therapist at Children's Institute International...
...lack of central control was an obvious problem last week. Under Ceausescu's paranoid purges and the vigilance of his secret police, no significant resistance movement was able to form. The explosion that ended his reign resulted from spontaneous combustion, and the people who powered it were only beginning to get organized. Nobody had a plan for the revolution; the participants only knew what they were against. Said Iliescu: "It was not the movement that led to the overthrow, but the overthrow that created the movement...
Scenarios for a Soviet invasion of Western Europe have always had a touch of paranoid fantasy about them. In the late 1940s, when Western Europe was weak and virtually defenseless, the Soviet Union itself was exhausted and overextended. Yes, Joseph Stalin "conquered" Eastern Europe -- Exhibit A in the charge of Soviet expansionism -- but he did so in the final battles of World War II, not as a prelude to World War III. The Red Army had filled the vacuum left by the collapsing Wehrmacht. By the early 1950s, any Kremlin warmonger would have to contend with a Western Europe that...
...people's overthrow of President Nicolae Ceausescu's paranoid dictatorship last week seemed to take ten hours. On Thursday night the megalomaniacal leader and his wife Elena were ensconced in the presidential palace in Bucharest; by Friday morning, they were gone. But unlike the bloodless revolutions in the rest of the Warsaw Pact countries, the Rumanian convulsion was soaked in blood. The number of casualties is still not known, but if the estimates of thousands killed turn out to be correct, Ceausescu's name will be indelibly linked to one of the largest government-inflicted massacres since World...