Pretty amazing that we've had colossal company screw-ups that have resulted in tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of human deaths, environment disasters that will be felt for decades or centuries -- and the fact that somebody's drunken pictures are missing makes such headlines?

A fair point. I meant to ask for comparable tech disasters -- my bad. Call that one a minor screwup of my own.

On the tech side, R. B. nominates NASA's losing the original high-def tapes of the 1969 moon landing as a pretty big oops. Commenter JamesMartin adds Enron, and its own board members, and the city of San Francisco, for putting behind bars for 14 months for taking extreme measures to protect the city's network.

Ki Mae Heussner at ABCnews.com put together a nice rogue's gallery of recent tech snafus; her include the , , the , and the , which was initially caused by overgrown trees in Ohio but engulfed much of the northeastern United States and Canada thanks to a cascading computer systems failure.

Or how about Chernobyl? That puts the whole Sidekick debacle in perspective.