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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?
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!
It did! It was called the Department of Manure Vehicles (AKA horses) then.
"Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get" - Jerry Avins
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.
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.
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?
The DMV existed in the 1800's?
People don't get driver's licenses when they are born. Thousands of people born in the 1890s were still driving in the 1990s, and a few were still driving in the 2000s.
A quick search on Google showed that California's DMV was established in 1915, at which point they would definitely be working with people born in the 1890's.
The problem seems to be with drivers who were born between 1893 and 1897. If the DMV existed with computerized records in 1960, these people would have been in their sixties and probably still have drivers licenses. Apparently their records are still in the system.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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.
People don't generally drive at 100 or 110...
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.
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.
This ticket would be a high schooler by now. Scary thought.
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.
They probably shouldn't anyway
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.
I think any election a century or so ago qualifies now.
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?"
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!
back on that fateful night of Dec 31, 1999 in Santa Clara County CA, all police depts and sheriff units had all three shifts and reserves on duty. May seem silly but local officials wanted to be sure just in case. So in middle of night, someone figures he's gonna rob a liquor store (for much of the county it was pretty quiet). 211 call comes in, many many units respond, and arrive on scene quickly. "Damn, looks like I picked the wrong night to do a stick-up!"
mfwright@batnet.com
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.
Not dead. Sold.
They aren't mutually exclusive.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
People don't generally drive at 100 or 110...
My car is fast enough. Though it isnt safe to travel that fast away from a track.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
AIUI (I don't live in the US so their may be errors in this)
To issue notices to register for the draft (there is no draft in the US at the moment but registration is still required in case there is one) you need two things, firstly a list of people with their addresses, secondly a list of people who have already registered for the draft. Then they can take the people who are in the first list and not in the second list and send them notices.
So the question becomes where to get that list, why the DMV well it's kinda simple.
1: most people drive and hence are issued driving licenses by their state's DMV
2: driving licenses are used as ID cards
3: you have a minority of people who don't drive, these people nevertheless need some kind of ID card, the states decided that it was simpler to have the DMV issue ID cards to people even if they don't drive than to set up a separate ID card department.
So the DMV database is the closest thing to a "database of all people in the state" that is readily available.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I'm pretty sure they regulate the Amish buggies you see in many parts of the state. At least as much as the Amish will be regulated (which isn't much).
I don't there is anyone in the US who was born in 1897 or earlier.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
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
I'm guessing here (I didn't read TFA), but people are probably more likely to keep their addresses updated with the DMV than they are with anything that could potentially lead to them being called up for service in the military. As such, to make sure that the database is as accurate as possible, it would make sense to periodically merge data from the DMV. As for the records still being in the database, despite the demise of those to whom they refer, I'm one of those people who believes that once a record is in a database, unless it should never have been there in the first place, it should NOT be deleted. If no longer relevant, then set a status flag of some kind, but don't delete it. I'm not an American, and, more to the point, am not familiar with how data exchange occurs between state and federal government departments, but if it's anything like it is over here in the UK, when someone dies the death is registered with the local register office. That information is not automatically shared with the DVLA (our equivalent of your DMV, but just one at a national level) or any other organisation. If the US system is anything like ours (and with the added complications inherent with some government bodies being federal, some state and possibly some at even more localised levels, it would surprise me a HUGE amount if such automatic data exchange was commonplace), it's understandable that those records were not only still in the database, but were still marked as active. Would we rather they simply assumed that once a person reaches a given age that they are obviously dead and can hence have their record updated accordingly? Obviously none of this excuses how that data merge was handled. If my assumption above is correct about the data from the DMV being imported purely to ensure that addresses and contact numbers are up to date, the obvious question that follows is why these older records led to letters being sent out. The date of birth field should only have been used for identifying records to receive address updates and, as such, if anyone born in the 1800s received such letters it would be due either to a poorly written query, or to the date of birth field already being wrong prior to the merge (or, of course both).
Just my $0.03 (At current exchange rates, my £0.02 is worth more than your $0.02)
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
I think he's about 6 million jews short of being Hitler's reincarnation...
You've obviously never been to Florida...
Well he'll (the AC) have fixed Fukushima, which will have made the pacific into a dead salt water body like the Salton Sea except a hundred thousand times bigger, so at least we'll be healthy rebels..
Well he'll (the AC) have fixed Fukushima, which will have made the pacific into a dead salt water body like the Salton Sea except a hundred thousand times bigger, so at least we'll be healthy rebels..
Mind you, once people start worshiping him (The AC, again) for that, we'll have a continent wide plague of Ebola, so I guess things ain't perfect. sorry (!)
Why did we skip three digit years?