ROOTing out the Higgs Boson at CERN

UPDATED! - See Below

1. CERN says it's removed 40,000 bugs from ROOT, the software that analyzes the data from the Large Hadron Collider.
2. ROOT - made up of 3.5 million lines of C++ code - crunches the 15 PB (petabytes) of data generated by the LHC's collisions each year.
3. Several million additional lines of code have been added in the search for the Higgs boson by the physicists on staff.
4. They admit there is no guarantee that they've gotten all the bugs - "software doesn't work that way," said Axel Naumann of the ROOT development team.

It's quite interesting that not long after the LHC@Home project was instituted, "bugs" are found in the ROOT system of the LHC at CERN. It would appear that the physicists and managers underestimated the potential threat to their software from connecting to vast numbers of "home" computers.
My colleague, Gyro Gearloose, has unearthed statistics indicating that a large plurality of home computers - whether Windows or MacOS - are compromised by viruses, trojans, or rootkits which could easily threaten the software of other computers which communicate with them. While it's a bit of a stretch to think that CERN is running Windows or Mac software to control much of anything, C++ is a common language, and rogue hackers are more than conversant with it. C++ may be the back-door leading to the derailing of the search for the Higgs boson.
I hesitate to exonerate the leadership at CERN without more evidence, but it may be that my past criticism has been somewhat too stern.
Should developments confirm that suspicion, you will find my apology here (but I'm not ready to bet on it).

Update:

CERN has announced they've found neutrinos going faster than light, but they're not confident of this result and are asking other physics teams to check their results and replicate their experiments. Could this be an artifact of compromised analysis software? It's looking more and more as if these folks are simply incompetent, rather than malicious. I'm not sure which is worse, when handling the powerful equipment and vast budgetary resources which are a part of this kind of science.

Posted by Procrustes 17 (with thanks to Gyro Gearloose)

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