Earlier this week I replaced my two and a half year old laptop with a shiny new PowerBook G4, on which I am writing this very post. Using the handy Migration Assistant I was able to copy my user account, passwords, programs, and documents over to the new laptop with just a FireWire cable and a few mouse clicks. Sadly, not all went as planned, and I had to erase some buggy configuration files on the new machine before I could get it to work without crashing every few seconds. Luckily, my first hunch turned out to be the correct one, and the machine now works like a dream.

I'm often fond of quoting the the adage, "Computers only do what they're told". That is, a computer is a machine that follows a predefined instruction set. We apply malevolent personalities and chaos theory to our computers because of their complexity. Nevertheless, they are merely following instructions dictated by flawed human masters, be they users or the programmers themselves. This is why bugs have been around since the very dawn of computing, and will likely continue to be with us in the future.

But bugs don't just cause inconveniences, sometimes they cause serious damage or even death. Wired magazine has compiled a list of what are arguably History's Worst Software Bugs, and MAN, some of them were doozies.