I did not say that this is impossible. It seems you are confused between accidental bugs and deliberate pranks. So, to address your issue: 1) it would not be unreasonable to expect that the "normal update" to their cars/robots should have passed some serious and rigorous testing/verification and the business/physical impact on end-user experience must have been assessed before rolling the "normal" updates; 2) and a serious business entity will not allow any such deliberate/damaging prank to slip through such a process.
> 1) it would not be unreasonable to expect that the "normal update" to their cars/robots should have passed some serious and rigorous testing/verification and the business/physical impact on end-user experience must have been assessed before rolling the "normal" updates;
So your point here is that safety-critical updates need to be rigorously tested? I agree with that, but I don't see any connection to whether it's okay to have pranks. I'm not confusing bugs and pranks, my entire point is that they're quite separate. Your bug risk is there with or without pranks. So if you feel like adding a prank, go ahead, just subject it to the same safety testing. That they released a UI update that annoys people does not imply anything about their ability to do safety testing.
> 2) and a serious business entity will not allow any such deliberate/damaging prank to slip through such a process.
I'll split "deliberate/damaging" into multiple cases.
Deliberate pranks: those are deliberate, they don't "slip through".
Safety-related damages: these are important, and not what happened here.
Non-safety-related damages: this getting through does not imply they have bad safey testing, so the comment about cars/robots going berserk is a non-sequitur.
>>Safety-related damages: these are important, and not what happened here.
Please define safety.
People lost their jobs due to this irresponsible prank. People might have missed replies from their doctors due to such foolishness. If now Google says that that's according to their "terms and conditions" then well, it clearly shows that Google is unreliable.
That's your notion of safety. For me (and I am sure for many others too) it means a product that is critical to my my workflow and the one on which my financial, health and other such critical aspects of life depend, if such a product (here Gmail) goes berserk due to some foolish prank played by the company then the company (here Google) is irresponsible and unreliable. Cars and robots present only some kinds of safety problems, not all.
If you weren't making any distinction then I don't understand why you brought up cars/robots going berserk in the first place.
(Or do you make a distinction, but you would call it something different? Then just say that, and I'll use the term you want. My contention has nothing to do with word choice. Nobody wins an argument about word choice.)
>>If you weren't making any distinction then I don't understand why you brought up cars/robots going berserk in the first place.
I brought up the issue mainly for these reasons: a) safety issues in cars/robots are more obvious; b) if google can do this (such harmful pranks) with email, then they can do such (harmful) pranks with their other products too, including cars/robots.
I wanted to bring out these issues on the discussion.
