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Author Topic:   Trump and Trump supporters keep using the Y2K Fallacy, and it is driving me crazy
Sarah Bellum
Member (Idle past 596 days)
Posts: 826
Joined: 05-04-2019


Message 57 of 190 (885992)
05-01-2021 9:38 AM
Reply to: Message 50 by ringo
04-23-2021 2:25 PM


I'm curious. How would changing the time on a clock result in "frozen customers"? Surely any problem an incorrect clock could cause could be fixed long before anyone got chilly. I mean, clocks do break, even when it's not 31 December 1999.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 50 by ringo, posted 04-23-2021 2:25 PM ringo has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 58 by ringo, posted 05-01-2021 10:29 AM Sarah Bellum has replied

  
Sarah Bellum
Member (Idle past 596 days)
Posts: 826
Joined: 05-04-2019


Message 61 of 190 (886042)
05-03-2021 12:37 PM
Reply to: Message 58 by ringo
05-01-2021 10:29 AM


Still, it makes me wonder. Suppose you went into a power plant, or a network of power plants and the associated distribution network, and changed the date on all the clocks to something incorrect. What would happen? Would people's bills be calculated incorrectly? Would that really be apocalyptic? Would the time change affect settings that affect usage estimates because it assumed the weather would be different? Could this happen by changing the year but not the month and the day of the month?
Software problems can certainly cause catastrophes. They may also be mere nuisances. That's all the Y2K problem ever was.

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Replies to this message:
 Message 62 by Tanypteryx, posted 05-03-2021 1:24 PM Sarah Bellum has seen this message but not replied
 Message 63 by ringo, posted 05-03-2021 2:42 PM Sarah Bellum has replied
 Message 64 by dwise1, posted 05-03-2021 4:37 PM Sarah Bellum has seen this message but not replied

  
Sarah Bellum
Member (Idle past 596 days)
Posts: 826
Joined: 05-04-2019


Message 66 of 190 (886066)
05-04-2021 9:25 PM
Reply to: Message 63 by ringo
05-03-2021 2:42 PM


There were claims that the Y2K bug would be apocalyptic if they weren't fixed (or, in the case of the echatological types, there would be an apocalypse whether or not the fix was in, for other reasons).
But has anyone found a Y2K bug that, if it had not been fixed, would have resulted in anything like the Ariane 5 crash in 1996 or the Yahoo data breach in 2017, much less an electrical grid failure or planes crashing or banking financial networks collapsing?
Sure, there were nuisances. Even with the fixes, there were nuisances. But since not a single failure worthy of screaming headlines slipped through, either:
There were serious Y2K bugs and programmers caught every single one of them, fixed them and didn't tell anyone they'd prevented the sky from falling.
...or...
There never really were any serious worries.

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 Message 63 by ringo, posted 05-03-2021 2:42 PM ringo has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 67 by AZPaul3, posted 05-04-2021 9:44 PM Sarah Bellum has replied
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Sarah Bellum
Member (Idle past 596 days)
Posts: 826
Joined: 05-04-2019


Message 80 of 190 (886457)
05-20-2021 6:08 PM
Reply to: Message 67 by AZPaul3
05-04-2021 9:44 PM


Lots of smoke here, from such a small fire! Guess I should check in more often...
It was a bug. It was a real bug that caused problems and would have caused a lot more problems had not a lot of instances of it been fixed. A lot of people spent a lot of time fixing it (as they do for all kinds of bugs) and kudos to them. It's not denigration of their programming chops to notice that, as bugs go, it was mundane, rather than apocalyptic. Apologize if I can't get around to responding to everybody's posts, but I hope this article from Nature magazine helps. GPS glitch threatens thousands of scientific instruments
quote:
Researchers worldwide are racing to get ahead of a bug in the US Global Positioning System (GPS) that could cause data loggers, including thousands of scientific instruments, to malfunction starting on 6 April. The glitch, known as the ‘week number rollover’, could trigger GPS receivers — which enable devices used throughout research to keep highly accurate time — to reset their clocks and spit out corrupted data.
Scientists in fields from seismology to particle physics are checking whether their instruments — which might be portable, or anchored in bedrock or polar ice — are susceptible. For those that are, researchers are updating them to pre-empt the issue, using instructions from manufacturers.
“The rollover is a serious issue,” says Christian Haberland, a seismologist at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam. “It means a big additional effort and work. In some cases, field equipment has to be replaced.”
The issue affects many scientific instruments, such as seismometers, that depend on GPS receivers to time-stamp their data, as well as global arrays of instruments such as radio-telescope that use GPS time to stay in sync. They do this using time signals from GPS satellites’ ultra-precise atomic clocks.
Many consumer devices such as satnavs are immune to the issue because the rollover doesn’t affect positioning accuracy or because new devices have been built to deal with the problem; people can check and update their models on manufacturers’ websites.
The glitch arises because of how the satellites broadcast the timestamp. Their signals include a binary ten-digit ‘week number’ in GPS time, which began on 6 January 1980. Receivers use the number to calculate the exact date and time. But 10 digits covers only 1,024 weeks, or 19.7 years. That limit will be reached for the second time at midnight on 6 April universal time, when the week number broadcast by the satellites will roll back to 0 (the first rollover happened in 1999 when there were far fewer GPS receivers in use around the world). Susceptible devices risk reading the 0 as being in the past and could start generating incorrectly timestamped data.
The upcoming glitch is likely to mainly affect mostly older GPS receivers or those lacking recent updates to their ‘firmware’ — software programmed into a device’s permanent memory — that ensure devices are not confused by the rollover. Vulnerable GPS receivers won’t necessarily stop working at the stroke of midnight — some may fail in weeks, months or years depending on how they were configured.
Instrument manufacturers, such as Nanometrics, Topcon and Güralp, have created web pages where users can check whether their models are vulnerable, and download firmware updates to safeguard their instruments or buy newer models.
Instruments that rely on Russia’s GLONASS system, the European Union’s Galileo network or China’s Beidou system won’t be affected by the rollover.
Field specifics
The field of geoscience is particularly affected because it uses GPS time extensively. Operators of large instrument networks in the United States, Canada and Germany have been testing and updating affected receivers for months, says Haberland.
UNAVCO, a global consortium of 230 universities and research organizations based in Boulder, Colorado, has arrays of GPS instruments deployed globally — including in polar regions — that continually measure Earth’s shape and the motion of its crust. This infrastructure is important to many fields in the Earth and atmospheric sciences.
Despite the updates, “some instruments will produce corrupt data that may be lost, or recovered only by tedious data corrections”, says Frederick Blume, a project manager at UNAVCO.
The Canadian Geodetic Survey has updated its receivers’ firmware, but “we will still be on the edge of our seat during the rollover”, says Brian Donahue, a senior geodetic engineer at Natural Resources Canada in Ottawa.
GFZ-Potsdam researchers have begun testing their pool of 934 seismic recorders. So far, they have fixed 13 of 22 field recorders dotted around the Alps that require urgent attention, and they will replace or update hundreds of receivers expected to be affected before the end of 2022. It’s arduous, says Haberland, because many recorders can’t be updated online and must be brought back to the lab.
The organization is also one of several trying to raise awareness of the rollover to individual researchers, Haberland adds.
Meanwhile, Japan’s Tokai to Kamioka (T2K) experiment — which studies neutrino particles by firing them hundreds of kilometres — uses GPS receivers to synchronize its particle beams and distant detectors. T2K is well prepared for the 6 April rollover, says Hans Berns, an engineer at the University of California at Davis who helped to design T2K’s synchronization process.
In the 1999 rollover, some high-end devices failed, but a bunch of low-cost back-up receivers saved the day, he recalls. The expensive ones “started spitting out funky date numbers”, he says.
This wasn't a story about the Y2K bug. It was an article published 3 April 2019. Software has bugs in it. Lots of bugs. The Y2K bug was just one of many and rather more pedestrian than most. It got publicity because it was scheduled to happen at the beginning of a year ending in a lot of zeroes, so it coincided with THE YEAR OF THE APOCALYPSE, unlike the similar bug in the article above. Also the description of the Y2K bug fit easily in a sound bite that the TV newsreaders can read in their short breaks between commercials. The last paragraph of the article is interesting too...
I suppose the Y2K panic falls into the same category as the story of the $400 hammer the Defense Dept supposedly bought. It didn't really happen (The extra cost was an artifact of flawed government accounting for overhead costs). Or the story of President Obama's birthplace being in Africa (Something about an erroneous listing in the Harvard Law Review about him being "born in Kenya and raised in Hawaii and Indonesia". Or maybe it was the multiculti hype in a press release issued to sell one of the books he wrote). That didn't happen either, but some people still purport to believe it, after all the publicity that fastened onto a snippet of "evidence" in the story.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 67 by AZPaul3, posted 05-04-2021 9:44 PM AZPaul3 has seen this message but not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 81 by xongsmith, posted 05-20-2021 6:31 PM Sarah Bellum has replied
 Message 82 by ringo, posted 05-22-2021 1:20 PM Sarah Bellum has replied

  
Sarah Bellum
Member (Idle past 596 days)
Posts: 826
Joined: 05-04-2019


Message 83 of 190 (886753)
06-05-2021 9:28 AM
Reply to: Message 81 by xongsmith
05-20-2021 6:31 PM


Re: what??
Oh, clearly a lot of programmers are needed to fix bugs. That doesn't alter the fact that some bugs are more serious than others, does it?
As for jobs, most likely there were lots of bureaucratic jobs at stake in the political battles that originated the $400 hammer legend, weren't there?

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Sarah Bellum
Member (Idle past 596 days)
Posts: 826
Joined: 05-04-2019


Message 84 of 190 (886754)
06-05-2021 9:30 AM
Reply to: Message 82 by ringo
05-22-2021 1:20 PM


Hmm, wasn't Global Warming supposed to alleviate that problem by now?

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 Message 82 by ringo, posted 05-22-2021 1:20 PM ringo has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 85 by vimesey, posted 06-05-2021 11:07 AM Sarah Bellum has seen this message but not replied
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Sarah Bellum
Member (Idle past 596 days)
Posts: 826
Joined: 05-04-2019


Message 87 of 190 (886964)
06-22-2021 9:48 AM
Reply to: Message 86 by ringo
06-05-2021 1:34 PM


Such scintillating repartee, no wonder I only check in here every month or so!
Sigh. The idea that the globe is boiling is one thing. The idea that the winter is -25 rather than -30 is quite a different thing. And that's the point.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 86 by ringo, posted 06-05-2021 1:34 PM ringo has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 88 by ringo, posted 06-22-2021 12:20 PM Sarah Bellum has replied
 Message 89 by Tanypteryx, posted 06-22-2021 6:24 PM Sarah Bellum has replied
 Message 90 by kjsimons, posted 06-22-2021 7:49 PM Sarah Bellum has replied

  
Sarah Bellum
Member (Idle past 596 days)
Posts: 826
Joined: 05-04-2019


Message 91 of 190 (887120)
07-11-2021 5:19 PM
Reply to: Message 88 by ringo
06-22-2021 12:20 PM


If social media is how you keep yourself "informed"...
Anyway,
If anyone is claiming I'm "wishing away" global warming, they simply haven't been reading my posts. I'm looking forward to the day when cars are all electric, and that electricity is produced by renewables. Or maybe nuclear fusion, if it turns out to actually be nonpolluting. If they actually get it past the break-even point. Of course, they've been predicting they could make nuclear fusion feasible even longer than global warming has been predicted (See Another Ice Age? - TIME for example)
But those predictions of fusion power bringing electricity too cheap to meter don't matter as much as the predictions made in the 1980s the Maldives would be underwater within 30 years or predictions in the 1980s that New York City's West Side Highway would be submerged within 30 years or predictions at the turn of the century that within a few years children in the UK wouldn't know what snow is....
It's no longer a scientific question. It's a political problem. Like vaccination. The fact that so many are skittish about vaccination is a sign of political failure. So is the debate over Global Warming.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 88 by ringo, posted 06-22-2021 12:20 PM ringo has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 92 by Tanypteryx, posted 07-11-2021 11:01 PM Sarah Bellum has replied
 Message 93 by ringo, posted 07-12-2021 12:25 PM Sarah Bellum has replied
 Message 107 by Percy, posted 08-04-2021 12:19 PM Sarah Bellum has replied
 Message 108 by Tanypteryx, posted 08-04-2021 1:33 PM Sarah Bellum has replied
 Message 109 by glowby, posted 08-08-2021 5:41 PM Sarah Bellum has replied

  
Sarah Bellum
Member (Idle past 596 days)
Posts: 826
Joined: 05-04-2019


Message 97 of 190 (887179)
07-21-2021 6:15 PM
Reply to: Message 93 by ringo
07-12-2021 12:25 PM


Where did I get that idea? From reading your posts:
In an earlier post, I wrote, "... no wonder I only check in here every month or so!" Meaning I didn't check this particular social media site (evcforum.net) very often. You replied, "That's one way to avoid learning anything," indicating that this particular social media site (evcforum.net) provides you with learning.
If you're not going to read my posts, why do you bother to respond to them?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 93 by ringo, posted 07-12-2021 12:25 PM ringo has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 101 by ringo, posted 07-21-2021 8:49 PM Sarah Bellum has replied

  
Sarah Bellum
Member (Idle past 596 days)
Posts: 826
Joined: 05-04-2019


Message 98 of 190 (887180)
07-21-2021 6:19 PM
Reply to: Message 92 by Tanypteryx
07-11-2021 11:01 PM



This message is a reply to:
 Message 92 by Tanypteryx, posted 07-11-2021 11:01 PM Tanypteryx has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 102 by Tanypteryx, posted 07-21-2021 8:56 PM Sarah Bellum has replied

  
Sarah Bellum
Member (Idle past 596 days)
Posts: 826
Joined: 05-04-2019


Message 99 of 190 (887181)
07-21-2021 6:21 PM
Reply to: Message 90 by kjsimons
06-22-2021 7:49 PM


No, definitely not a good thing!

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 Message 90 by kjsimons, posted 06-22-2021 7:49 PM kjsimons has not replied

  
Sarah Bellum
Member (Idle past 596 days)
Posts: 826
Joined: 05-04-2019


Message 100 of 190 (887182)
07-21-2021 6:22 PM
Reply to: Message 89 by Tanypteryx
06-22-2021 6:24 PM


What with the Wuhan Flu forcing us to be online so much, there's just a lot of temptation....

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Sarah Bellum
Member (Idle past 596 days)
Posts: 826
Joined: 05-04-2019


Message 103 of 190 (887426)
08-03-2021 7:47 AM
Reply to: Message 102 by Tanypteryx
07-21-2021 8:56 PM


I spent several posts explaining that reckless predictions blowing up in what are supposed to be reputable authorities' faces do a great deal to damage the cause of environmentalism. It's the Paul Ehrlich debacle all over again. Cassandra's curse may be just the thing that ruins the struggle against Global Warming.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 102 by Tanypteryx, posted 07-21-2021 8:56 PM Tanypteryx has not replied

  
Sarah Bellum
Member (Idle past 596 days)
Posts: 826
Joined: 05-04-2019


Message 104 of 190 (887427)
08-03-2021 7:49 AM
Reply to: Message 101 by ringo
07-21-2021 8:49 PM


It's easy to respond to posts without reading them. Just click the "reply" button and let your fingers start typing whatever comes into their little minds. But it's kind of a drag to watch that sort of thing. So I don't come here that often. It feels too much like SCREAM INTO THE VOID
As for "social media", if you're saying the EvC social media site is somehow more "reliable" as a source of information than FaceBook, just remember that EvC stands for "Evolution versus Creationism," as if there were some valid argument for Creationism to be found here!

This message is a reply to:
 Message 101 by ringo, posted 07-21-2021 8:49 PM ringo has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 105 by dwise1, posted 08-03-2021 8:33 AM Sarah Bellum has replied
 Message 106 by ringo, posted 08-03-2021 12:40 PM Sarah Bellum has replied

  
Sarah Bellum
Member (Idle past 596 days)
Posts: 826
Joined: 05-04-2019


Message 118 of 190 (888121)
09-05-2021 11:45 AM
Reply to: Message 105 by dwise1
08-03-2021 8:33 AM


Well, people can't be reasoned out of ideas they weren't reasoned into in the first place.

This message is a reply to:
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