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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.
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.
So they layed off one guy...whoopdedoo! Looks at those savings! Who wants a paper-trail of who the pentagon pays money too anyway?? What a zany idea.
Signed and dated: 6/15/17
Gotta keep track of those unsigned 32-bit int timestamps, they're going to creep up on you in 2038.
The issue isn't that this is bad per-se. It's that it's not very good. As the article points out, no one was really applying these regulations. Ultimately, this is grand standing more than anything else.
I'm always happy to see redundant legislation go away, but don't get grand delusions that this is Trump somehow removing burdens and making the government magically super efficient.
That's on the desktop, of course. Amongst the serious computers Linux has, what, maybe 50% of the market share?
I suppose Android's been fixed.
By "gamed the system", you mean "followed the system in place for 200+ years", right? And, according to your losing candidate, questioning this system is âoehorrifyingâ and "talking down our democracy" as recently as 2 weeks before the election?
Got any other deep thoughts to share?
It is evident that you don't understand how the Governments work. Unneeded/unenforced are traps for people/organizations that are targeted. An unused or little known regulation can wreck havoc with "out of favor" people and organizations. Laws that aren't enforced should be removed so that people/organizations can live and work in a functional manner.
Y2K38 bug already leaked over into politics:
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/ar...
“I asked CBO to run the model going out and they told me that their **computer simulation crashes** in 2037 because CBO can’t conceive of any way in which the economy can continue past the year 2037 because of debt burdens,” said Ryan."
So the CBO's forecase software could get *up* to 2037, but not past it, i.e. it couldn't compute figures for 2038. What's the more logical explanation, a "does not compute" error, or that they were using Unix 32 bit time?
It's not hard to see how someone thinks if they have no filter
Luckily the century turned a year later...
Sig?
to get the main point:
" the Pentagon will be freed from a requirement that it file a report every time a small business vendor is paid"
I foresee a _lot_ of 'small business vendors" cropping up over the years now.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I suppose Android's been fixed.
Yes, but a super majority of users won't be able to get the patch.
And how many of them will be around in 18 years?
Maybe half of them will still be around then, I don't really know. We still find Amigas running HVAC systems.
If I'm a business owner and the badge reader on my warehouses work fine for 10 years, why would I replace them? I figured they would still work fine for another 10 years, only to find out that nobody can get into the building in 2038. And that's funny, all the repair people are too busy today to do anything about it. And I can't seem to leave a voicemail to the badge suppler because it keeps hanging up.
Hopefully the traffic lights work. Depends on if your particular state's government is competent or not.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Simply switching to a 64 bit linux will be enough for linux users to avoid the bug
Technically that's not a fix, it just delays the problem. Admittedly it's a delay of about 292 billion years but still...
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.
If it has systemd you wouldn't be able to read them anyway.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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
No they won't. Get rid of the electoral college and everyone gets an equal say in who rules. The fact that more people live in place A than place B does not mean that the people in place B should be given more power in a democracy,
Please explain to me how having less than a third of the populace support the president translates to 'a broad, nationwide support'?
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
so I I'm not buying insurmountable technical justifications other than simple lack of will.
It boils down to the fact that correctly handling time is complicated. Leap years, seconds, gregorian nonsense, .. the rules just pile up higher and higher. Nobody wants to touch that code and I dont blame them.
"His name was James Damore."
This is very simple, actually. The problem statement is, "how to best conduct a single majority vote election across multiple, independent entities of varying sizes and densities of the population"? The answer is, "hold a majority election in every independent entity and the winner overall of each election is the winner overall of the race." But what if the entities are of _vastly_ different sizes and densities? Then the answer is, "weight the individual elections by population."
The Electoral College is a perfectly legitimate solution to the problem. Maybe you're getting confused by the notion of a "College". There is a body of people that forms a College, but exists only as a formality, because someone must keep a record and report the results of the election. The College, for example, is temporary and changes at every election. It is honorary.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
>...but it is my understanding that the system was originally put into place to safeguard a takeover by a tyrant...
The electoral college is an attempt to balance political power between rural and urban voters. Its an adjustment to a pure democracy designed to weaken the "Tyranny of the majority".
The biggest challenge the founding fathers faced was balancing power between urban and rural constituents. This is arguably our greatest challenge today. This is why each state has 2 senators regardless of population and representatives based on population. The number of electors in the electoral college in each state is the sum of its U.S. senators and its U.S. representatives.
In our last election, rural voters preferred Trump and that is why the rural voter trumped the urban voter to override the popular vote.
Greed is the root of all evil.
But the EC is NOT a deliberative body. It is an honorary one. There's the source of your misunderstanding, I think.
The members of the EC are picked by the winners. Membership is temporary, the entire EC is dissolved once the election results have been reported to Congress. In fact, the ACTUAL vote to confirm the election is done by Congress, not by the EC. And yes, it is an actual show-of-hands vote. The job of the EC is to simply report the official results of each state.
That is why any electors who don't report properly are called "faithless" electors. They literally make a promise to faithfully report the results when they are appointed.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
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.
I largely agree with your comment and reasoning, but the above is false. The EC has nothing to do with securing the nomination. Party nominations are done through party-specific processes which admittedly include delegate systems that look sort of EC-ish, except that those delegates actually do exercise free will in casting their ballots, so function more like the EC was intended to function. But changing or abolishing the EC would have no effect on the nomination processes.
Personally, as a resident of a small state, I'd like it if the EC were retained but EC votes were allocated proportionally to the per-state popular vote. One of the theories behind the construction of the EC was that it would give slightly more weight to the opinions of the voters in low-population states. In practice, the method of allocating all of a state's votes as a bloc causes the system to do exactly the opposite, which is why it's always a handful of large "swing" states that decide the election. Proportional allocation would give the small states a larger voice, and motivate candidates to actually campaign in them.
Failing that, simply going to a pure popular vote would also improve the small states' voice, just not as much. But it's clear that the EC, in its current form and application, is bad for everyone.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Municipal night court judge Munroe Slemp of Snakebit, NV has already responded to a petition from COBOL programmers by blocking Trump's order, citing his lack of IT expertise. The Ninth Circuit is expected to review the decision by sometime in November.
get rid of the Electoral college and a few big cities run the nation
No they won't. Get rid of the electoral college and everyone gets an equal say in who rules.
Campaigning would only occur in major cities, so they would have a much larger impact than now.
The fact that more people live in place A than place B does not mean that the people in place B should be given more power in a democracy,
It's called federalism, and it was put in place for a reason. The founding fathers realized that even though we are one country, we are composed of several different cultures with different values. A law that might make sense in a metropolitan area might not make sense in a rural area, so you don't want the population centers making all the rules for everyone else.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Guess who the real cancer on efficiency is. it's not the Republicans.
Bullshit.
If anything Republicans are the architects of government inefficiency. Democrats are only marginally better since they generally don't do stupid shit like holding votes to repeal or gut the ACA when there is no way the Senate or POTUS would go along with it. If the politician's goal was efficiency they would be working together to hammer out compromises before putting bills to a vote.
Reid had every right to do what he did, just as Lott, Daschle, and Frist did before him and McConnell does now. Just because a member of the other tribe had control of it then doesn't make it a good or a bad thing. I do agree that having one guy able to hold things up is not good, but it needs to apply to both tribes.
The House passing a bill that is completely unpalatable to the opposition that controls the Senate and/or the POTUS is fucking stupid and a complete waste of time. Pass something that doesn't contain poison pill amendments completely unrelated to the bill. Pass something that doesn't contain items completely antithetical to the other tribe's view.
In other words: Work together for the people, you fucking fucks.
THE SOFTWARE, IT NO WORKY!!!
The real reason the EC was created was appeasement of slavers
No mod points, but this is exactly the reason. Remember that slaves (obviously) and other people who didn't own land weren't allowed to vote in most states. So in a flat vote, voters in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania alone would probably have overwhelmed the votes of all the slave states combined. However, once you rig up this weird system where slave states get to count great masses of people who they would never consider allowing to actually vote (slaves, sharecroppers, etc), then suddenly 5 of the first 6 POTUS were native to Virginia.