And if the German factory that makes them also burns out, then all of a sudden you're missing some critical pieces with which to help society run. . . . What will bring society down, or what will cause society enormous inconvenience, are accidents that interact in unpredictable ways, and that are very, very difficult to recover from. For example, New Zealand experienced a five-week blackout for one of its major cities. And it's my feeling that these accidents will be more and more frequent, because we are not establishing any standards at all for the communications and computing industry. One of the reasons that I support hackers is that they have been telling us for over 10 years that the emperor is naked.
Hackers are more like astronauts pushing the edge of the envelope.
Hackers have been identifying major vulnerabilities in Microsoft products and Sun products and Dell products and all kinds of computer and communications products. And nobody has wanted to listen. Nobody wanted to listen. So we're making some progress. But we will not really come to grips with this problem until every individual citizen demands of their government that it legislate standards of responsibility for the private sector, and then holds the private sector accountable for essentially writing safe software that will stand up to various kinds of unanticipated disasters.