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Today In Year-based Computer Errors: Draft Notices Sent To Men Born In the 1800s
sandbagger (654585) writes with word of a Y2K-style bug showing up in Y2K14: "The glitch originated with the Pennsylvania Department of Motor Vehicles during an automated data transfer of nearly 400,000 records. The records of males born between 1993 and 1997 were mixed with those of men born a century earlier. The federal agency didn't know it because the state uses a two-digit code to indicate birth year." I wonder where else two-digit years are causing problems; I still see lots of paper forms that haven't made the leap yet to four digits.
Get with the times! Switch to Y10K compliance already.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y...
A method of slavery which belongs in a century of slavery calls on men born in that century.
It's clear that Pennsylvania was taking a cue from Heroes of Might and Magic 3 and attempting to build an unstoppable army of 14,000 skeletons. I wonder what the Pennsylvania governor's necromancy score is?
The DMV existed in the 1800's?
I dont see why we should use just four digits.. throw in some letters also for the heck of it and some obscure unicode signs. We are all computers right? and space are sooooo cheep this year
I see the plot of a new Micheal Bay (or maybe J.J. Abrams) movie: The US military, unable to get qualified recruits to fight the new Zombie wars, takes a cue from the Zombie playbook and develops the technology to bring life old soldiers. After a bit of a difficult start, the program exceeds all expectations until the previously dead soldiers revolt at being put back in the grave and bring Washington to it's knees by filing for Social Security benefits.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Seems to me this would be more accurately described as a Century-based computer error.
At first I was amazed that we're still running into these things. But I shouldn't be surprised -- often problems like this aren't fixed until they cause some inconvenience for the people responsible for fixing them.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
This affects what, 3 actual living persons?
You're looking for quotes? See my journal.
Shouldn't the DVM only keep data related to current license holders? How many 120+ year olds in Pennsylvania are legally able to drive?
While the linked to article, a US TV station news site, does call it a "draft notice", I suppose I should explain to the non-US people here that this is not technically correct. There has been no draft in the US since the end of the Vietnam War. For roughly 40 years now, the US has had an all volunteer army. What Selective Service is required to do is to contact US citizen males on their 18th birthday and advise them that for the next 10 years they need to let Selective Service know their new address every time they move because in theory, in a national emergency Congress could pass a law reinstating the military draft and Selective Service is required to maintain accurate records of those who might theoretically be subject to such a draft. Whether such a draft would ever be done again is a great question, given how Congress currently seems incapable of passing anything non-controversial, let alone something as controversial as reinstating the draft. A crackpot Congressman or two has tried to get the draft reinstated and it's never had enough support to even get a vote on the floor of the House of Representatives. Whatever this is, technically speaking it's not a "draft notice".
Not to digress, but for those who don't know, the draft was very controversial during the Vietnam War, with the rich and powerful were able to get their sons exceptions to the draft or get them plum assignments in the National Guard that wouldn't require them to actually go to Vietnam. Listen to Credence Clearwater Revival's "Fortunate Son", which was written about the practice. There was so much animosity about the unfairness of the draft and the compulsion to fight in a war that nobody but a small number of politicians seemed to want that the US switched to a voluntary system, but one of the deals cut to move to this system was that Selective Service had to know where to get young men should the draft ever get reinstated. And yes, female US citizens are not subject to this at all.
Wondering if there's some 140 year old person living in the Appalachian mountains who responded?
Is there anyone left who was born between 1893 and 1897?
The best kind of correct.
Start the countdown until conservatives, who rush to de-fund and eliminate government technology offices and run slash&burn on government tech budgets, rush in to decry this as more evidence for their rhetoric of how "government can't do anything right!" with the usual "See. SEE! WE TOLD YOU SO! We know, because we broke it!" nonsense.
5 .. 4 .. 3 ..
The agency realized the error when it began receiving calls from bewildered relatives last week.
It is the relative if the intended recipients that have the issue.
Nitpick: WHY call it Y2K14. Just say 2014. You even save yourself a keystroke.
So where did they send the notices to? Last known address? Hell most of the buildings are probably gone.
...this is SOP when it comes to voter registration.
My father died in 2002 but 5 years later got a jury summons: It turns out they use drivers licenses to call the panel, and the dmv does not bother to check the social security death index, indeed he got a notice to renew his drivers license in 2006. I called and would have to have spend a couple hours at the DMV to cancel the license. (so I just let it expire).Just another case of left hand not keeping the right hand in the loop. Since the folks did at one time have DLs the DMV never purged the database. (Noting the 2 digit years used it appears that it was older sections of the db not affected by the y2k fixes, likley records that became static in 1960s 1970s and 1980s.)
...these guys.
How else are we going to beat the Kaiser?
This affects what, 3 actual living persons?
But with the usual mess in government records, quite a number of dead souls.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
That bug is so stupid it shows up 14 years late to the party. Geez.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Our programs use 4-digit years. We tell our customers that they must notify us by the year 9,995 if they want year-10,000 updates. And, if we are expected to go to a different galaxy, they must pay for travel.
Wasn't this supposed to be fixed before the year 2000?
But with the usual mess in government records, quite a number of dead souls.
The dead are often a pivotal election demographic.
One scenario: some systems have tables that use a separate field for storing the century. Whoever wrote the query, sql statement, or whatever, left out the century, and there you have it. Probably not a Y2K problem, but more like a dumbass programmer problem.
Proverbs 21:19
During George W. Bush's first term, prior to the invasion of Iraq, Charles Rangel introduced a bill to reinstate the draft. While Rangel probably should have retired a few years ago I think this was a good move even if it amounted to nothing...
The New York Democrat told reporters his goal is two-fold: to jolt Americans into realizing the import of a possible unilateral strike against Iraq, which he opposes, and "to make it clear that if there were a war, there would be more equitable representation of people making sacrifices."
"I truly believe that those who make the decision and those who support the United States going into war would feel more readily the pain that's involved, the sacrifice that's involved, if they thought that the fighting force would include the affluent and those who historically have avoided this great responsibility," Rangel said.
One thing that was easy to overlook was the fact that the state of PA is automatically sharing a large subset of its DB with the federal government:
The glitch originated with the Pennsylvania Department of Motor Vehicles during an automated data transfer of nearly 400,000 records to the Selective Service
If dead people can vote, they can go to war also.
Table-ized A.I.
Good point. I suppose in Pennsylvania this could be perceived as a problem, but in New York or Illinois draft eligiblity would just be the dead's civic duty, right alongside voting and jury participation.
Don't disenfranchise our patriotic dead!
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
A war at stake...
It looks like 6 people worldwide and 0 people in Pennsylvania. So they should also remark that it is not just sending them out to people who were born in the 1800s but also that it is sending out to people who are no longer alive. Kind of like a Chicago voter registration.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I think that is a myth. Can you name any elections in which the number of voters later determined to be dead was greater than the margin of victory? (A very low hurdle if they are "often pivotal.")
What puzzles me most about this story is how the old records got digitized and put into a live computer system in the first place. Some WWII draft records have been digitized, but they're sure not in the active Selective Service database today. Did someone actually take the time to digitize 100+ year old draft registrations and put them into a live database? Most of the time, the world sprang into existence in 1997 as far as digitizing things goes - new stuff from around 1997 onward was digital from the beginning, but old stuff has never been digitized. Even if it has, it wouldn't be in a current, live database - it would be in some kind of historical database. There's more to this story than we are being told, I think. Probably work done by the same contractors that did the Goldman mailing list a few days ago.
I have a daughter born in 1999. I suspect that in the years 2200+ that she will encounter problems (assuming a long life) with the 256bit operating systems of the next century when an int could easily encompass every millisecond since the big bang, yet they will still use two digit numbers. With most programmers being very young I don't think that many can think of a whole century as being something a computer must deal with.
What on earth has a department of motor vehicles got to do with issuing draft notices of any kind?
I presume a DMV in the States is all about who can drive cars on public roads. Draft notices are all about your country sending you out to kill foreigners.
The mind boggles.
Never mind the date screw up.
I think any election a century or so ago qualifies now.
if they are on the dmv they may still be on the jury duty and voting lists
Last night I watched a re-run of the Daily Show. Jon Stewart was commenting about how the US Congress was trying to subpoena the US Internal Revenue Service for emails sent, and the sworn-in director said that they only keep e-mail records for six months (Stewart commented that a government agency that insists that people behave like hoarders keeping records for a minimum of seven years shouldn't be let off the hook). He also mentioned that Google G-mail offers 50 times as much storage as a typical IRS email backup, and the US government (NSA) just installed a new site in Utah designed to keep every byte and bit send by every American for twenty years, but the IRS can't keep email data for more than six months. ... And so now we are 14 years past the Y2K charlatan show, where every salesman/weasel trying to make the killing of the millennium yelped long and hard about how we were all going to die, and how everything was all outdated and we all had to buy brand new. I know a guy who (I thought) was reasonably intelligent, thought that his car would stop working. I worked for a company which put extra fuel into equipment and kept people on standby. I went across the street and told my elderly neighbours (both have since passed) who had survived the great depression and served in world war 2 that no, they had seen worse in the world, and it wasn't going to end, all they had to do was change the batteries in their smoke detectors and get a good nights sleep. Now there is a data problem with 2 digit date codes. Don't use them, all data more than 100 years old will easily get mixed in with data less than 100 years old. Even a 3 digit date code would give you hundreds of years worth of time to remove and archive very old data. And here we have the problem re-surfacing. What the hell?!? As Jon Stewart said: "Can't you go buy a fucking thumb drive?"
OMG, we're all gonna die!
2038 Will be fun
Meh. Crap like that happens all the time, Y2K or no. Migrating 400k records stuff is bound to come up, particularly with old data, likely legacy systems, and probably shoddy migrations the 3 previous times this occurred. What is more concerning is the lack of QC or validation that led to the issue. Meaning likely those doing the migration no nothing of the DB contents, or are understaffed and underfunded to the point that no one has time to do it properly.
I've seen 01/01/1900 time date mix ups which is likely a formatting issue combined with assigning NULL values. When you analyse the data (even 400,000) a boatload that say 01/01/1900 sort of stick out as a red flag. From the sounds of it, not only did they not understand the content, but perhaps not the structure and relationships either as how else are you going to mix up data like that? Some weird composite key using two digit birthdays? Yuck. Then again I have had to interpret some pretty ugly "designs" without a shred of any real documentation and it isn't easy. I'm sure they made sense at some time, but after the nth migration, and the nth attached application, and nth half completed enhancement, what you are left with can be pretty confusing.
Though good ole Zeb actually thinks of him as "Nephew Sam."
But with the usual mess in government records, quite a number of dead souls.
The dead are often a pivotal election demographic.
A dead soul is a prerequisite for becoming a politician.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Makes perfect sense - which would make for a more fearless army, a bunch of 18 year old boys, or a retirement home full of centenarians with Alzheimer's and/or stage 4 cancer?
Human-wave attacks of volunteer centenarians against ISIS FTW.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
How do you think Penn. has clung to one party rule for so many years?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Not dead. Sold.
You're looking for quotes? See my journal.
The computer issue is one thing and just further proves how inept government is at doing anything. Anyone not think it is weird that draft notices were sent? Draft notices? When was the last time we had a draft? 40+ years ago? Why are they bringing it back to life?
Not dead. Sold.
They aren't mutually exclusive.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
The dead only matter where the Democrats are rigging the election. Where the Republicans are rigging the election, there will be more votes placed than eligible voters, with no attempt to get the numbers of votes to match the number of voters.
The amount of vote fraud doesn't change, just the M.O.
Wait! How do we know the dead soldiers are even citizens, qualified to serve in the new Zombie Army? We can't have the newest branch of the armed forces infiltrated! Everyone knows that the army of old was riddled with "heroes" and "the brave" and "patriots".
Only the naÃfve think that dying for your country proves anything about character!
When people die the county coroner complies death certificates and they are filed with the counties. So why is it that the dead are not taken off agency lists? My brother in law had his driver's license voided 16 months after he died. A police officer reported that his medical condition might make him an unsafe driver and it took Florida about twenty months to process it and deliver the notice. This reminds me of those lawyer ads that state that if you have died due to using a medical product you have limited time to file a suit.
Given the rate at which life expectancy is rising, a lot of people are going to be alive a lot longer than they expect.
I'm sure they will try to send these old men to jail.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
But with the usual mess in government records, quite a number of dead souls.
Mr. Gogol, is that you?
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Why did we skip three digit years?