It would be like a gun maker giving pistols to a police department a substantial savings, but making them purchase their own magazines, springs, etc. I personally don't see a problem with what Microsoft is doing.
With most any other company, there wouldn't be. But given Microsoft's past behavior, what do you suppose their position will be on using any non-MS software whatsoever?
It's like a gun maker giving pistols to the cops at a discount, then making them purchase their own magazines, springs, etc, but also decreeing what type of ammo they will use, what kind of range targets they'll use, what kind of cleaning oil, how the cops will use the guns, whether or not they are allowed to use any brand other than theirs, who they're allowed to shoot with them, etc, etc. They will take over the decisions usually left to people who actually own and use the stuff.
That is saying that if I don't have a car alarml, it is ok to steal it.
No, it's like saying that if you not only don't have a car alarm, but leave it unlocked and the keys inside and put a sign on it that says, "Drive me to your heart's content", you don't get to complain when people do so.
We don't have trans-continental tunnels because continental drift is a bitch. Sure, it's only a few centimeters a year, but a high-speed vacuum tunnel has to be made to rather close tolerances. Those few centimeters per yr would add up rather quickly.
The moon and other tectonically (sp?) dead bodies are where you could get away with something like that.
And as was pointed out, a scramjet is not a rocket. Needs oxygen. In fact, that's one of the big advantages it has over rockets. It can breathe the surrounding atmosphere without having to carry it's own oxidizer.
So this single-celled organism, without so much as a finger to type with, has managed to acquire a Clue whilest the entire Recording Industry Association has not. I swear, sometimes it's a real shame we humans have insulated ourselves from 'survival of the fittest' because there's an awful lot of chumps out there that need to be Darwinized.
Actually, an advertiser pays money for the privelege to put something into my a mailbox. A advertiser cannot legally walk up to a mailbox and put advertising into it without paying postage.
Sure they can (hang it on my doorknob, anyway). I get that particular brand of crap rather often. They just don't get to use the USPS to deliver it.
If you put your car onto my property, it may be towed or seized.
Exactly my point. Equating 'sending spam' to 'using my lawn as a parking lot' doesn't work. That I'm allowed to walk onto your property doesn't mean I have any freedom there. You send me spam, I delete it without hesitation. You park your car in my driveway and I'll test out my new chain saw. In both cases, the attempt to put something into my 'sphere of influence' essentially results in it being totally at my mercy. In both cases, you _could_ change the situation and give only 'authorized personnel' the ability to enter your property, but you risk barring people who would be authorized if only they could get past the not-very-intelligent spam filter/barbed wire fence. So we don't, and instead focus our efforts on trying to make very smart barbed wire that will let the meter readers, bug man, pizza delivery guy, gorgeous babes, etc in but keep the Jehovah's Witnesses and salesmen out.
Basically, I'm saying that people who end up with a lot of spam (yes, this includes myself) are in that situation because they feel that the lack of false positives is worth the abundance of false negatives. Any one of us, at any time, could turn our filters on to the max and reduce spam to a bare trickle, but it would be at a high cost. A former girlfriend of mine did exactly this, and while she got nothing she didn't want, there was a lot she did risk missing. A smart, effective, adaptive piece of software that stands to have the best of both worlds is simply amazing. I want it.
There's a difference. While you are very stringent about who you let onto your property, most people will happily let anyone mail something to them. An inbox without deny filters really is a public site.
This is not the way things have to be; you could easily deny any mail except for what's on your whitelist. But to lessen the risk of false positives, you give mailers the benefit of the doubt. Similarly, unless you have barbed wire running around your property, you are pretty much giving permission to anyone to walk on and 'ask for permission to be there', as it were. They don't get to stay if you tell them to get lost, nor does the spam have any say in whether or not you trash it.
I have to call bullshit on just about everything that came out of this guy's mouth.
Actually, we're not lobbying for copy-restriction technologies.
Ok, even supposing for one minute that that were true, they seem awfully eager to jump on the DMCA bandwagon. Napster, Felton, Webcasting, to name a few, all got smacked upside the head with copyright-circumvention legislation courtesy of the RIAA.
You mention Enhanced CDs. As it happens, lots of consumers have had trouble with Enhanced CDs,
So actually adding value to the purchase is beyond their ken, but fscking up the disc so it won't play in a computer or on a Mac or in many stand-alone or car CD players is easy as 1-2-3? Nice to see what their R&D funding priorities are.
Also contrary to your impression, record companies want Internet radio to succeed.
Sure, to the same extent that a wolf wants the farmer's herds to be healthy. Web radio is a stone's throw away from being as impenetrable a market as regular radio. The RIAA evidently has a radically different notion of 'successful'.
It would not allow, and we would never seek the right, to go into people's computers and "scan" their files. No viruses; no deleting MP3 files; no hacking; just technical measures to prevent distribution of a file after it leaves someone's computer
Being a computer science major with training in networks and telecom, I for one an extremely interested in how they, acting purely as a third party, plan to go about stopping a packet once it has left my computer.
Of course record companies want to embrace the technology for greater profits
These fucktards have fought tooth and nail against every technology that could possibly reduce the grip they have on the music industry. Recordable cassettes, recordable CD's, DAT, and even normal radio all had attempts made on them to outright ban, tightly control, or merely tax into oblivion.
So the market for downloads is developing, and it will probably start to move more quickly now that a lot of the clearance problems have been solved.
They've been saying that for years. It's bogus. They want to have it both ways: easy use of digital music (i.e., enough fair use to keep the masses from rioting) but with strict/total control over how it gets used _on someone else's equipment_. They will work on this for another century and still not have it.
filesharing. (I hate that term, by the way.
This from the same guy who gives the act of copying data the same name as theft, rape, and murder on the high seas. Tell you what Sherman, if you call it what it really is, 'copying bits', then we will too.
To me, "sharing" means we each get a little less. If I share my pie, I only get to eat half. I share my car, I can't use it when the other person has it.
Remind me never to let this guy so much as be in the same room with a kindergarten class. Sharing means spreading a good thing around; it's generally encouraged and for good reason. The absolute best kind of sharing is one in which we can share with everyone and never run out. To hear this grown man implying "Anything that detracts from my pleasure is a bad thing. Only legitimate publishers (like myself!) are allowed to share", is utterly appalling.
That the signal-to-noise ratio for this interview approaches zero doesn't really come as a surprise to me. These were exactly the questions the RIAA doesn't want the public to know the answers to. The RIAA needs to take a lesson from the tobacco industry about lying to anyone and everyone. I just wish this had been a debate like the MPAA one awhile back; Lessig would have chewed him up like he did Valenti.
They build it by launching a large roll of very thin cable with the shuttle. That little cable gets used to pull progressively larger ones up, much like using a string to pull a thick wire through wall conduit. Conversely, you could build the whole thing in space and then just lower it into the correct orbit, but...
The sectional approach is rather clever, but to be of any use safety-wise, the stations would have to be able to hold their own in the wierd altitude/velocity combo they'd have to have. After all, the only place on a beanstalk moving at true orbital velocity is at geosynchronous; everything else stays in place because its counterpart on the other side of the midpoint keeps balances it.
Here's an idea; concentric, spoked Ringworlds! Build a dozen ringworlds at varying distances from Earth's surface. Each would stay in orbit no matter how fast or slow they rotated. So we spin them up so that they all have the same angular velocity, and then connect them with nanotube elevators. It'd be a fairly rigidly defined structure, and any one piece of the spoke could break and it wouldn't affect the rest.
I'm imagining the first ring sitting just a few klicks off the ground. What a wild sight that would be!
Hell yeah. With a beanstalk, orbital launch costs go from "being chauffered from LA to New York in a solid gold limo with diamond hubcaps" down to about normal air freight charges.
It'd probably be designed solely to lift up thicker pieces of ribbon and of little use otherwise. The first one would need to be very thin indeed to be able to fit a couple hundred kilometers of it onto a shuttle.
None of the analogies you present offer the victim a way out. Someone in front of a looting mob or the leading edge of a Third Reich blitzkreig had better get the hell out of the way. Not much of an alternative.
Let's go with the almost-Godwin's Law scenario, since I think it might prove entertaining. In this case, the German people (P2P users) aren't invading Poland (the -AA's), but rather simply emigrating there en masse, willfully ignoring Poland's immigration control procedures, in order to do something that is basically harmless (though on these scales it definitely has effects) and enjoyable.
Now, Germany (the US government) is pretty much ambivalent about it at first. But Poland gets in such a fit that it starts yelling at Berlin to do something about the problem. They start coming up with all kinds of crazy schemes, like using German troops to patrol the Polish side of the border to keep people from crossing. The Polish government starts deporting anyone they find who might be German (catching a lot of genuine Poles in the process) across the border into German prisons. They start asking for Germany's permission to imprison without trial German citizens found in Poland, regardless of their business there. They get Germany to start closing down it's own borders everywhere, to outlaw the German equivalent of AAA on the grounds that easily accessible maps are helping people roam freely around Europe, and even go so far as to suggest requiring radio-controlled shock collars be required by law so nobody will be able to cross a border without permission. They start alienating their own citizenry. In short, they go crazy.
Now, all the while, the Polish government has been crying out about its national soveriegnty and right to control it's own borders and so forth. Which, I will admit, they have every right to do. But not once did they ever stop and think, "You know, maybe having a steady stream of intelligent and hardworking foreigners might just be a good idea. Rather than fighting it, maybe we could co-opt it and, in the process, make a shitload of money."
I agree, mob rule is a terrible thing. But this scenario has two key factors. One, the ability to commit the crime simply cannot be undone and two, the 'victim' cannot prove that harm is even being done. It just cannot be compared to wholesale violence.
You do realize my post was a joke? Tesla Towers are the Soviet stationary defense buildings in Command & Conquer's Red Alert game. Prism Towers are the Allied equivalent. I prefer playing the Allies, therefore...
Believe me, Westwood games aside, I'm of the opinion that Tesla was one kickass mad scientist.
Was it just me or were prism tanks ridiculously powerful? Once I had 20 or so grouped together, there wasn't a thing my soviet enemies could do to stop them. Infantry just died, buildings went even faster, and their range is so great that Apocalypse Tanks just got beaten like drums before they ever got close enough to fire. Yuri stuff was the only thing that ever came close, but even then it couldn't cut it. Anyone care to enlighten me as to what defense my compatriots and I were overlooking?
Think of the -AA's as a particularly vicious loan agency. They charge ridiculous interest rates, are ruthless in their collections, and, unfortunately, are about the only game in town. However, in recent years, the development of matter transporters has made stealing from the vault a very simple prospect. Since they are not particularly popular, many people have taken to simply helping themselves. In response, the loaners have raised their interest rates even higher and told their collections agents to be extraordinarily brutal to their dwindling supply of legit customers.
Fact: Very few people really liked them before. Fact: Recent events have only made this worse. There are now a lot of people who truly hate them. Fact: People are stealing from them. Most people don't think of taking from them as 'right'. Morally neutral _at best_. Fact: If things continue, the loaners will soon be out of business, either from becoming obsolete or suing their last customer.
Now, this loan agency has a choice. They can continue to try to hold the moral high ground and the pre-transporter status quo, but, short of taking over the town as a tightly run dictatorship, there's no way they will survive doing so. Or they can switch to a totally different system that is far more immune to theft. Something like an electronic cash-less system, perhaps.
It's all very well and good that the entertainment industry wants to continue using their old system of making money; it's the American Dream, after all. But they are now trying to deny the fact that it is now impossible to make information a scarce commodity. Things. Are. Different. And if they don't change their ways, they will go, screaming and kicking to the last, straight into oblivion.
A zillion P2P users may not be right, but neither can they simply be told to go to their rooms and behave themselves. As you said, "That ain't right", but it is also definitely beyond the -AA's power to stop.
Depends on whether or not they want to start reusing numbers, thereby erasing people from bureaucratic history (not such a bad idea, now that I think about it...)
Let's see, Japan's population is 127 million, and with a net growth rate of 0.17% a year, it's safe to say it'll level out at not much more than its present value, tops. Assume the birth rate falls to the death rate, 0.8%, and we have a bit over 1 million new Japanese citizens every year. A permutation space of 100 billion, minus the initial 127 million, divided by 1 million per annum, puts the Land of the Rising Sun in a tough spot in the not-so-distant future of 98,000AD.
A "couple of meters" change in ocean levels would destroy cities and, in some cases, whole nations. Much of my home state, Florida, would simply disappear. If we were to get more than one or two centimeters increase in just one year, you would do well to consider moving to higher ground within the next decade or so.
But that's just us. The planet as a whole has indeed been through far worse and emerged unscathed.
Going with a 365.2422-day long year, I get a one-day error after 3333 years. When did the Gregorian first start being used? Add 3333 to that year and that's when we'll need the adjustment.
Given a day of 365.2422 days, the error for our current system is 25.92 seconds extra per year. But the error for un-skipping every 500th-year leap year is 17.28 seconds per year too little, almost a third less!
And if we un-skipped every 456th-year leap year, then the error is only 0.6 seconds per year! We need to do this right away! I demand accuracy!
Of course... 365 + 1/4 - 1/100 + 1/456 + 1/142500 gets it right on the button. So if we use the new system starting on 2000, then 2400 will skip a leap year (just like 2100, 2200, and 2300), but February 2456 will be 30 days long! As will 2912, 3368, 3824, etc. Feb 7700 will gain two days (1/4 and 1/456) and lose one (1/100), so will only be 29 says. Feb 144500AD, not lining up with 456, would have only 29 days, but 28700 would, so would have 30 days again! Fortunately, no year will have a February with 31 days in it. That would just be wrong.
Use an unsigned integer and 32 bits lasts till 2106, but then can't refer to any date before 1970. 33 bits would get you 2106 signed, 2242 unsigned, but it's pointless since a 32-bit chip archictecture has to look at it as two integers anyway. The other 31 bits get used but not utilitzed. Might as well utilize it all and have clocks that last longer than the Sun.
Slashdot Mirror
With most any other company, there wouldn't be. But given Microsoft's past behavior, what do you suppose their position will be on using any non-MS software whatsoever?
It's like a gun maker giving pistols to the cops at a discount, then making them purchase their own magazines, springs, etc, but also decreeing what type of ammo they will use, what kind of range targets they'll use, what kind of cleaning oil, how the cops will use the guns, whether or not they are allowed to use any brand other than theirs, who they're allowed to shoot with them, etc, etc. They will take over the decisions usually left to people who actually own and use the stuff.
No, it's like saying that if you not only don't have a car alarm, but leave it unlocked and the keys inside and put a sign on it that says, "Drive me to your heart's content", you don't get to complain when people do so.
We don't have trans-continental tunnels because continental drift is a bitch. Sure, it's only a few centimeters a year, but a high-speed vacuum tunnel has to be made to rather close tolerances. Those few centimeters per yr would add up rather quickly.
The moon and other tectonically (sp?) dead bodies are where you could get away with something like that.
And as was pointed out, a scramjet is not a rocket. Needs oxygen. In fact, that's one of the big advantages it has over rockets. It can breathe the surrounding atmosphere without having to carry it's own oxidizer.
So this single-celled organism, without so much as a finger to type with, has managed to acquire a Clue whilest the entire Recording Industry Association has not. I swear, sometimes it's a real shame we humans have insulated ourselves from 'survival of the fittest' because there's an awful lot of chumps out there that need to be Darwinized.
Sure they can (hang it on my doorknob, anyway). I get that particular brand of crap rather often. They just don't get to use the USPS to deliver it.
If you put your car onto my property, it may be towed or seized.
Exactly my point. Equating 'sending spam' to 'using my lawn as a parking lot' doesn't work. That I'm allowed to walk onto your property doesn't mean I have any freedom there. You send me spam, I delete it without hesitation. You park your car in my driveway and I'll test out my new chain saw. In both cases, the attempt to put something into my 'sphere of influence' essentially results in it being totally at my mercy. In both cases, you _could_ change the situation and give only 'authorized personnel' the ability to enter your property, but you risk barring people who would be authorized if only they could get past the not-very-intelligent spam filter/barbed wire fence. So we don't, and instead focus our efforts on trying to make very smart barbed wire that will let the meter readers, bug man, pizza delivery guy, gorgeous babes, etc in but keep the Jehovah's Witnesses and salesmen out.
Basically, I'm saying that people who end up with a lot of spam (yes, this includes myself) are in that situation because they feel that the lack of false positives is worth the abundance of false negatives. Any one of us, at any time, could turn our filters on to the max and reduce spam to a bare trickle, but it would be at a high cost. A former girlfriend of mine did exactly this, and while she got nothing she didn't want, there was a lot she did risk missing. A smart, effective, adaptive piece of software that stands to have the best of both worlds is simply amazing. I want it.
This is not the way things have to be; you could easily deny any mail except for what's on your whitelist. But to lessen the risk of false positives, you give mailers the benefit of the doubt. Similarly, unless you have barbed wire running around your property, you are pretty much giving permission to anyone to walk on and 'ask for permission to be there', as it were. They don't get to stay if you tell them to get lost, nor does the spam have any say in whether or not you trash it.
Actually, we're not lobbying for copy-restriction technologies.
Ok, even supposing for one minute that that were true, they seem awfully eager to jump on the DMCA bandwagon. Napster, Felton, Webcasting, to name a few, all got smacked upside the head with copyright-circumvention legislation courtesy of the RIAA.
You mention Enhanced CDs. As it happens, lots of consumers have had trouble with Enhanced CDs,
So actually adding value to the purchase is beyond their ken, but fscking up the disc so it won't play in a computer or on a Mac or in many stand-alone or car CD players is easy as 1-2-3? Nice to see what their R&D funding priorities are.
Also contrary to your impression, record companies want Internet radio to succeed.
Sure, to the same extent that a wolf wants the farmer's herds to be healthy. Web radio is a stone's throw away from being as impenetrable a market as regular radio. The RIAA evidently has a radically different notion of 'successful'.
It would not allow, and we would never seek the right, to go into people's computers and "scan" their files. No viruses; no deleting MP3 files; no hacking; just technical measures to prevent distribution of a file after it leaves someone's computer
Being a computer science major with training in networks and telecom, I for one an extremely interested in how they, acting purely as a third party, plan to go about stopping a packet once it has left my computer.
Of course record companies want to embrace the technology for greater profits
These fucktards have fought tooth and nail against every technology that could possibly reduce the grip they have on the music industry. Recordable cassettes, recordable CD's, DAT, and even normal radio all had attempts made on them to outright ban, tightly control, or merely tax into oblivion.
So the market for downloads is developing, and it will probably start to move more quickly now that a lot of the clearance problems have been solved.
They've been saying that for years. It's bogus. They want to have it both ways: easy use of digital music (i.e., enough fair use to keep the masses from rioting) but with strict/total control over how it gets used _on someone else's equipment_. They will work on this for another century and still not have it.
filesharing. (I hate that term, by the way.
This from the same guy who gives the act of copying data the same name as theft, rape, and murder on the high seas. Tell you what Sherman, if you call it what it really is, 'copying bits', then we will too.
To me, "sharing" means we each get a little less. If I share my pie, I only get to eat half. I share my car, I can't use it when the other person has it.
Remind me never to let this guy so much as be in the same room with a kindergarten class. Sharing means spreading a good thing around; it's generally encouraged and for good reason. The absolute best kind of sharing is one in which we can share with everyone and never run out. To hear this grown man implying "Anything that detracts from my pleasure is a bad thing. Only legitimate publishers (like myself!) are allowed to share", is utterly appalling.
That the signal-to-noise ratio for this interview approaches zero doesn't really come as a surprise to me. These were exactly the questions the RIAA doesn't want the public to know the answers to. The RIAA needs to take a lesson from the tobacco industry about lying to anyone and everyone. I just wish this had been a debate like the MPAA one awhile back; Lessig would have chewed him up like he did Valenti.
The sectional approach is rather clever, but to be of any use safety-wise, the stations would have to be able to hold their own in the wierd altitude/velocity combo they'd have to have. After all, the only place on a beanstalk moving at true orbital velocity is at geosynchronous; everything else stays in place because its counterpart on the other side of the midpoint keeps balances it.
Here's an idea; concentric, spoked Ringworlds! Build a dozen ringworlds at varying distances from Earth's surface. Each would stay in orbit no matter how fast or slow they rotated. So we spin them up so that they all have the same angular velocity, and then connect them with nanotube elevators. It'd be a fairly rigidly defined structure, and any one piece of the spoke could break and it wouldn't affect the rest.
I'm imagining the first ring sitting just a few klicks off the ground. What a wild sight that would be!
The day is getting longer all by itself. This _might_ speed up the slowdown by a few percent, up to a whopping 5 milliseconds per day per century.
Hell yeah. With a beanstalk, orbital launch costs go from "being chauffered from LA to New York in a solid gold limo with diamond hubcaps" down to about normal air freight charges.
It'd probably be designed solely to lift up thicker pieces of ribbon and of little use otherwise. The first one would need to be very thin indeed to be able to fit a couple hundred kilometers of it onto a shuttle.
Let's go with the almost-Godwin's Law scenario, since I think it might prove entertaining. In this case, the German people (P2P users) aren't invading Poland (the -AA's), but rather simply emigrating there en masse, willfully ignoring Poland's immigration control procedures, in order to do something that is basically harmless (though on these scales it definitely has effects) and enjoyable.
Now, Germany (the US government) is pretty much ambivalent about it at first. But Poland gets in such a fit that it starts yelling at Berlin to do something about the problem. They start coming up with all kinds of crazy schemes, like using German troops to patrol the Polish side of the border to keep people from crossing. The Polish government starts deporting anyone they find who might be German (catching a lot of genuine Poles in the process) across the border into German prisons. They start asking for Germany's permission to imprison without trial German citizens found in Poland, regardless of their business there. They get Germany to start closing down it's own borders everywhere, to outlaw the German equivalent of AAA on the grounds that easily accessible maps are helping people roam freely around Europe, and even go so far as to suggest requiring radio-controlled shock collars be required by law so nobody will be able to cross a border without permission. They start alienating their own citizenry. In short, they go crazy.
Now, all the while, the Polish government has been crying out about its national soveriegnty and right to control it's own borders and so forth. Which, I will admit, they have every right to do. But not once did they ever stop and think, "You know, maybe having a steady stream of intelligent and hardworking foreigners might just be a good idea. Rather than fighting it, maybe we could co-opt it and, in the process, make a shitload of money."
I agree, mob rule is a terrible thing. But this scenario has two key factors. One, the ability to commit the crime simply cannot be undone and two, the 'victim' cannot prove that harm is even being done. It just cannot be compared to wholesale violence.
Believe me, Westwood games aside, I'm of the opinion that Tesla was one kickass mad scientist.
So when given enough time to have 2 dozen of them clanging around, they really and truly are unstoppable? Good job on the beta testing, Westwood.
Was it just me or were prism tanks ridiculously powerful? Once I had 20 or so grouped together, there wasn't a thing my soviet enemies could do to stop them. Infantry just died, buildings went even faster, and their range is so great that Apocalypse Tanks just got beaten like drums before they ever got close enough to fire. Yuri stuff was the only thing that ever came close, but even then it couldn't cut it. Anyone care to enlighten me as to what defense my compatriots and I were overlooking?
Prism Towers are far better.
Fact: Very few people really liked them before.
Fact: Recent events have only made this worse. There are now a lot of people who truly hate them.
Fact: People are stealing from them. Most people don't think of taking from them as 'right'. Morally neutral _at best_.
Fact: If things continue, the loaners will soon be out of business, either from becoming obsolete or suing their last customer.
Now, this loan agency has a choice. They can continue to try to hold the moral high ground and the pre-transporter status quo, but, short of taking over the town as a tightly run dictatorship, there's no way they will survive doing so. Or they can switch to a totally different system that is far more immune to theft. Something like an electronic cash-less system, perhaps.
It's all very well and good that the entertainment industry wants to continue using their old system of making money; it's the American Dream, after all. But they are now trying to deny the fact that it is now impossible to make information a scarce commodity. Things. Are. Different. And if they don't change their ways, they will go, screaming and kicking to the last, straight into oblivion.
A zillion P2P users may not be right, but neither can they simply be told to go to their rooms and behave themselves. As you said, "That ain't right", but it is also definitely beyond the -AA's power to stop.
Since when did a little thing like fact ever stop a powerful government from saying whatever the hell it wants to?
Let's see, Japan's population is 127 million, and with a net growth rate of 0.17% a year, it's safe to say it'll level out at not much more than its present value, tops. Assume the birth rate falls to the death rate, 0.8%, and we have a bit over 1 million new Japanese citizens every year. A permutation space of 100 billion, minus the initial 127 million, divided by 1 million per annum, puts the Land of the Rising Sun in a tough spot in the not-so-distant future of 98,000AD.
Yeah. If the ocean goes up in one place and down in another, big whoop. But up everywhere...
But that's just us. The planet as a whole has indeed been through far worse and emerged unscathed.
That might explain why Linux hasn't done well on the desktop market...
Going with a 365.2422-day long year, I get a one-day error after 3333 years. When did the Gregorian first start being used? Add 3333 to that year and that's when we'll need the adjustment.
365 + 1/4 - 1/100 + 1/500 = 365.2420
Given a day of 365.2422 days, the error for our current system is 25.92 seconds extra per year. But the error for un-skipping every 500th-year leap year is 17.28 seconds per year too little, almost a third less!
And if we un-skipped every 456th-year leap year, then the error is only 0.6 seconds per year! We need to do this right away! I demand accuracy!
Of course...
365 + 1/4 - 1/100 + 1/456 + 1/142500 gets it right on the button. So if we use the new system starting on 2000, then 2400 will skip a leap year (just like 2100, 2200, and 2300), but February 2456 will be 30 days long! As will 2912, 3368, 3824, etc. Feb 7700 will gain two days (1/4 and 1/456) and lose one (1/100), so will only be 29 says. Feb 144500AD, not lining up with 456, would have only 29 days, but 28700 would, so would have 30 days again! Fortunately, no year will have a February with 31 days in it. That would just be wrong.
Everyone start marking your calendars!
Use an unsigned integer and 32 bits lasts till 2106, but then can't refer to any date before 1970. 33 bits would get you 2106 signed, 2242 unsigned, but it's pointless since a 32-bit chip archictecture has to look at it as two integers anyway. The other 31 bits get used but not utilitzed. Might as well utilize it all and have clocks that last longer than the Sun.