I’ve had a scene from the movie “Man of the Year (2006)” rolling around in my mind for the past several weeks. For those who’ve not seen the movie, it about a comedian by the name of Tom Dobbs, played by Robin Williams, who decides to run for president as a third-party candidate. While he isn’t on the ballot in every state, he does win the states where he is on the ballot and achieves the majority of electoral votes to become the next President of the United States. Many of the voting machines used in the election were made by a company called Delacroy, and after the election one of its employees, Eleanor Green, played by Laura Linney, performs a unit test (or possibly systems test) on the devices. She discovers that when the devices are given a known set of input votes, the tally isn’t consistent with that input; it was miscounting. The reason for the error is related to the fact that the candidates have repeated letters in their names and the double b in Dobbs is the real reason why he won these states. (As a professional software developer, this is an idiotic rational unless the software is doing something really screwy with the candidates names. The names should be nothing more than an opaque string but I digress) So she first takes this to her boss, Stewart, played by Jeff Goldblum, and he decides try to supress this information presumably for he sake of the company’s reputation. Anyway, she managed to convince Dobbs of all this, he withdraws from the race, and as a result Time Magazine names him Man of the Year.