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An Open Letter to the Y2K Bug
Felis writes "Did you work on New Year's Eve? I did. So did the person that wrote this letter.
It's for those of us that worked while the rest of the world was celebrating something we'll never see again in our lifetimes. Unfortunately, there's no mention of police checkpoints or the plainclothes fuzz that harrassed my coworkers and me. Bitter? Me?"
They are intrinsically evil
I guess this is the part where I get lost. I find it hard to believe that any person is INHERENTLY evil (not hitler, or stalin, or even the guys who wake me up doing construction across the street at 7am). Especially a whole group of people with no real biological relationship. What is the cause of the evil? And how do they get through breakfast every day?
I mean, seriously -- how could an inherently evil human being survive? you'd kill your parents as soon as possible, never make any friends, and probably be strangled in your crib for being such a brat.
Certainly people do evil things (although they usually think they're doing good things -- they just turn out to be evil after the fact). The closest thing to an inherently evil person would probably be an amoral person -- one who literally doesn't understand or subscribe to morality, meaning that they just do whatever they want. But even that isn't EVIL, because some of the things they want to do will be good and some will be bad.
So these jewish kids who go to your school, do they kill people on a regular basis or eat babies or something? I would suspect that they probably get nervous giving presentations in front of the class. Probably some of them are popular, some of them aren't. One or two of the girls might even be cute, though the rest are nothing special. Some of them are smarter than the others, some of them are funnier.
I'd suspect they're not all that different from your regular group of white suburban kids, other than the occassional Jewish thing they do together (but Young Life doesn't exactly keep a low profile on most campuses either, so you can hardly single them out for showing religion on occassion).
I think everyone should live in New York City at least once in their life. Seeing so many people working so hard to get by in a city with a hundred languages is pretty interesting. Everyone gets the same embarassed look on their face when they trip on the sidewalk, regardless of where they come from.
It just strikes me as odd that we have to come up with such arbitrary distinctions in order to make an "us" and "them" -- Good lord, we're talking about people who essentially believe in Christianity 1.0. Just because they never upgraded doesn't make 'em evil, it makes them contented users (although God sure did get a lot friendlier in version 2.0, at least in the documentation). And then all the Christians sat around and missed the upgrade to 3.0 courtesy of Mohommad -- what's up with that? Granted, I don't see a lot of compelling new features in the upgrade. 30 days of not eating while the sun is up? We paid for this? give me a resurrection any day, but i can hardly work up the energy to hate a guy just because he refuses to eat pork!...
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
People are quick to accuse the media of trumping this up more than needed because nothing happened.
This is false logic.
The reason nothing happened is a direct result of the media blasting this home, so that businesses and governments would start moving their asses to get this looked after. If the media DIDN'T cover it we'd all probably be without a lot of infrastructure right now.
People see nothing happening as a sign that Y2K was a waste of time, breath, and money. They think that because nothing happened that all the preparations were for nothing. They just don't seem to understand that the preparations worked, we survived. A threat to our civilization was brought to the forefront and we mobilized to stop it, we fought off the invisible invasion of time.
Yet people are angry, because nothing happened.
This is a testament to what the human race can do when motivated. You shouldn't be angry, you should be PROUD nothing happened.
All this while some other people are angry that they were stuck at work during the celebrations of the turn of the millennium.
To this I say "You're in luck, thats not until next year."
-- iCEBaLM
I am sure that most of you know - whether you believe it or not - the story of Jonah from the Hebrew bible.
... how to say, "man page" for human problems. Think about it.
In the story, god comes down and tells Jonah that humans have to fix their ways or they will be destroyed. When humans fixed their ways, nothing happened to them and Jonah was peeved at god for making him go to the trouble of fixing their ways if nothing was to happen.
The point I'm making is we spent billions upon billions of dollars fixing this bug. The bug is squashed. Y2k comes along, and the bug is already dead and as such doesn't bite. Everyone cries because they didn't get hit by the bug to know it was real.
Disclaimer: I don't "believe" in god or subscribe to organised religion other then culturally, but the religious texts are there for just this kind of occasion. The events that have been built around them are just to make people remember that there is this set of texts as a
OFTC: By the community, for the community
I've been in the US Army for 8 years.
I've missed anniversaries, birthdays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and anything in-between so that I could go stop two races of small, rakija-drinking people from killing each other.
Take the time when you can get it. When you have days off, have DAYS OFF. A fact of life is that sometimes you have to work on fun days. If that is below your station, quit, get a job shoveling trash.
At least your computer didn't blow up or try to shoot you. That's not more than I can say about some of my holidays.
I do what the voices on my console tell me to do.
10) Embedded chips really don't care what year it is
9) There aren't 200,000 virus writers on the face of the earth.
8) Microsoft has code that reads: "99 + 1 = 2000 for purposes of getDate"
7) Some of my web pages are now Y2.1K noncompliant
6) Seattle is not a party town.
5) New Years is not an event.
4) Microsoft still has more bugs and viruses than all of y2k put together.
3) Pulling your server because the date changes makes you look like a fool.
2) 2600.com really does have a sense of humor.
1) Don't release the doves and launch the fireworks at the same time!
No Zen is good zen