Slashdot Mirror
Trump Orders Government To Stop Work On Y2K Bug, 17 Years Later (bloomberg.com)
The federal government will finally stop preparing for the Y2K bug, seventeen years after it came and went. Yes, you read that right. Bloomberg reports: The Trump administration announced Thursday that it would eliminate dozens of paperwork requirements for federal agencies, including an obscure rule that requires them to continue providing updates on their preparedness for a bug that afflicted some computers at the turn of the century. As another example, the Pentagon will be freed from a requirement that it file a report every time a small business vendor is paid, a task that consumed some 1,200 man-hours every year. Seven of the more than 50 paperwork requirements the White House eliminated on Thursday dealt with the Y2K bug, according to a memo OMB released. Officials at the agency estimate the changes could save tens of thousands of man-hours across the federal government. The agency didn't provide an estimate of how much time is currently spent on Y2K paperwork, but Linda Springer, an OMB senior adviser, acknowledged that it isn't a lot since those requirements are already often ignored in practice.
Gotta keep track of those unsigned 32-bit int timestamps, they're going to creep up on you in 2038.
Seriously? Is there anything else they are preparing for that has already come and gone?
Well reputedly in 1803 the British government prepared for the potential invasion of Napoleon by creating a civil service position for someone to stand on the white cliffs of Dover with a spyglass and ring a bell if they saw Napoleon coming. The position was finally cancelled in 1945, 124 years after Napoleon died.
He most certainly not removing burdens with the new burden that government software will now have y2k problems again.
One thing the simpler man doesn't understand is that problems like Y2K (or 2038) don't go away once the date has passed. Too small storage containers used in already existing data won't magically transform. Someone needs to make that happen, each and every time old data is accessed. Do a study of things like census records, and you'll be hit by the Y2K bug.
The very preparation for Y2K caused additional problems. Uncoordinated preparation caused forms that suddenly changed from YY/MM/DD to mandatory YYYY/MM/DD at arbitrary dates in the late 90s.
This means that you'll run into the problem when handling and comparing data from the same sources from before 2000.
Relatedly, the "2038 problem" will also still be with us long after 2038, because of all the data stored in signed 32-bit time format won't magically transform. Someone needs to make sure it's done.
The regulations are probably too specific, and focus on the specific instance of the problem when a generic regulation[*] would have been better. But then again, politicians who couldn't see the bigger picture existed back then too.
[*]: Like "All data is to be converted to representations not subject to container size prior to processing, or a justification for and implications of the limited container size must be documented."
Among the effects, this could lead to a resurgence of BCD and CPUs who handle them natively again, which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.
What is your point? First you state that the democratic will of the people is sometimes wrong and the electoral college should correct it. Then you say that the populist vote should win no matter what in a democracy.
These are conflicting.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal
The declaration of independence is not a legal document. If it were, we would not have had a need for that pesky civil war. An honest mistake.
The electoral college system, like nearly all political systems, was put in place as a compromise of many views. Preventing tyranny, as you put it, was just one view. The most important part of the electoral college was its design in being an extension of the bicameral congress. One side represents states as population dictates, the other does not. Reasoning behind this is two fold:
The US is a federation. The president is elected by the states, not the people. It just so happens that everyone agrees in letting people have a say anyway, as opposed to many parliamentary systems where the leader is chosen by the winning party.
Small population states still matter and the people that live there deserve to be heard. If we went full democratic, only a handful of counties in the country out of thousands would have their values respected and listened to while the rest will be ignored or abused. Clearly not a good outcome, and so people in different states do have different weighting by design: to ensure the people that produce the food which everyone survives with gets to have their say in how the country is run.
No, I did not say that's what I think, I said I'm under the impression that that's the reason behind EC's existence. But to clarify yes the people can sometimes be cheated into voting for candidates that should not be allowed to rule because they hold immoral/unconstitutional views (see, third reich among other things, Adolf was democratucally elected). HOWEVER, this is not the case now as what's happened in the 2000s is that the EC does the reverse, helping to automatically nominate a person that gets less of the votes without it having anything to do with consideration of the candidates but simply following preset rules.
No they are not. See, what I'm saying is precisely that the EC does not prevent a populist from winning in is current shape, it makes it easier by shrinking the amount of the popular vote one needs to secure to win the nomination. The EC on paper is an organ of governance which is supposed to be able to affect the outcome of the election based on their own judgement of the candidates, but it does not do so under any circumstances so it's just become an automated engine for wannabe-populists to gain power by winning the 'right' votes. This makes no sense and is in contradiction with what I understand to be the point of something like the EC.
I never claimed it is legally binding, I just loaned the phrase from there to reflect the fact that i do not think the EC in its current function serves the american ideal of people being equal.
They won't be ignored or abused. In a popular vote the vote of everyone counts the same, no matter the location. The idea of a democracy is that everyone has an equal say in the matter on the vote. The fact that a city has millions of people living in it does not logically translate to 'therefore the people in the countryside need to have more votes." The geographical location you inhabit should not bear any weight in a democratic vote in my view, It doesn't do so here (Finland) or anywhere else in the west, and you don't see the people in the countryside being 'ignored or abused'. The people in the countryside hold power in proportion to their numbers and still have the local municipal governments to represent them on a national level.
But this turns the system on its head giving undue power to those people. Why should someone living on the countryside have any more say in who rules over the entire country? The people in the cities are just as much citizens as the people in the countryside. Just because someone lives in a sparsely populated area does not mean their opinion of who should rule should count any more. That's what equality means, that's what democracy as a decision making method means.
There are other means of making sure that the majority cannot override the rights of the minorities. That's why countries have constitutions which guarantee rights to people and protect them from being eaten by majority votes. You're arguing that in addition to this the people on the countryside deserve to get to choose the president moreso than the people in the cities, which makes no sense to me.
I understand why the system is the way it is, I just think it'
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead