Re: Y2K -- A Broader Perspective -- BAH!

[jeff.king@srs.gov]

     IMHO that was a pretty silly piece of drivel.  Let's examine it 
     further in a variety of ways:
     
     Substitute Low Level Radiation for Y2K and you get a fairly good 
     commentary on DU and the LNT theory.
     
     Change the heading from Y2K to "Warning!  Good Times E-Mail Virus" and 
     look at it again.  This is a thought virus.  It has the same sinister 
     quotes from unindentified experts and pleads at you to forward it 
     along to "your circle of associates".
     
     Programmers recognized the problem 20 years ago?  Hello, McFly!  
     Twenty years ago, ATMs were barely a novelty.  If the problem has been 
     recognized in the programming circles for twenty years, you might 
     think that people would have started using four digit dates.  Unless 
     of course, it was all a sinister plot of the computer programmers!  
     And the aliens in Warehouse 23 as well.
     
     Yes, there are going to be problems with Y2K, but they are managable 
     and are not going to appear all at once on 1/1/2000 in some sort of 
     apocolyptic fury.
     
     The trouble with Y2K is that it sounds scary and very few actually 
     know enough about computers to understand the problem.  Thus the 
     scare-mongers will be successful and a lot of money will be made.  
     
     Whew, apparently I am in a diatribical mood today.  (They'll get my 
     non-break-away badge lanyard over my cold, dead body.)
     
     Jeff King
     US DOE Facility Representative
     jeff.king@srs.gov