After the explosion of the shuttle, and in the outpouring of emotional tribute to the seven astronauts lost in that fearful fireball, most Americans probably believed the cause would be found in some bloodless malfunction of technology - a failure of hardware betraying the genius and judgment of human engineers.
WASHINGTON — The implicit promise of Barack Obama's presidency, delivered during the 2008 campaign and again repeatedly since then, was that government would not face a debacle like the recent malfunction of the technology behind the president's new health care marketplaces.
While some of these were related to people of small stature, or extremely close driver positioning to the airbag ejection point, others were related to faulty deployment — or, in other words, a malfunction of the technology.
He added that hardware malfunctions often results in more interesting sounds than was originally intended: "[A] lot of the sounds that I get in the studio have been specifically the result of overloading or causing to malfunction various pieces of technology, like harmonizers or digital delays".
At a Senate hearing on computerized trading last Thursday, one market analyst called for a moratorium on the new trading venues that have popped up in recent years, while traders on the panel recommended mandatory kill switches that could be flipped in case of technology malfunctions.
But there is certainly no shortage of malfunctioning technology when it comes to digital media.
The factors most frequently mentioned as impeding actual use were related to the (kind of) technology itself, such as malfunctioning, ease of use, relevance for patients, and risks to patients.
It will be a key requirement in the future development of technology and innovations to consider the risks of technical failures or malfunctions.
A cyberpunk jungle of patched-up, malfunctioning technology - the sort of thing Terry Gilliam dreamed up for his 1985 film, Brazil?
Firstly, it is robust against malfunctions of single microphones.
