Even more depressing is the fact that the US Army knew about this problem and, on February 16, 1991, it had released a new version of the software to fix it. As this would take a while to distribute to all the Patriot systems, a message was also sent out to warn Patriot users not to let the system run continuously for long periods of time. But what constituted a “long period of time” was not specified. As well as the mathematical problems, those twenty-eight deaths were also the result of poorly fixed code and the lack of a message simply saying to restart once a day. The software fix arrived
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