Living with the surveillance state

Posted Nov 8, 2013 0:55 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Living with the surveillance state by ms
Parent article: Living with the surveillance state

> That's a good point I often fail to remember - at the end of the day, you're just trying to prove some form of equivalence between one model of your program and another.

And this is a perfect example of the trap I rail at quite often - THE MODEL IS NOT REALITY.

Just because it is proven that your software (a mathematical construct) is mathematically correct doesn't mean that it will actually work. I'll just quote two luminaries:

Knuth: "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."

Einstein: "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."

Cheers,
Wol