I was woundering after reading some of the more disturbing posts here as to just why some doomsayers state that it cannot be fixed. I wondered to my self "Why fix the damm thing? Just move to a stable platform that can handle the year 2000, ie any Unix varient which are good till 204x? and the Macintosh platforms." You do not have to rebuld the wheel per say just mimic what is NEEDED, what the user needs, or just what is the bare minimum. On another note some of the posts here really scare me, not because of the direct y2k association just the concept that the whole system will blow up and we need to run to the hills with our bibles and guns. Stuff like that scares me.

-- Carlos A. Andrade (candrade@elp.rr.com), August 21, 1998

Answers

Carlos,

You seem to have the technical fix for Y2k all figured out. Go to it.

Meanwhile, I'll just be watching from a good distance, because THESE are the people who will be in charge if your fix doesn't work, and stuff like THIS scares ME:

On August 25, 1992, the California home of a law-abiding citizen named Donald Carlson was invaded by agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration shortly after midnight on the claim that they were looking for illegal drugs. Mr. Carlson, asleep at the time, thought robbers had broken in; he dialed 911 and reached for his hand gun. DEA agents riddled him with bullets; After seven weeks in intensive care, he survived -- sort of. No drugs were found.

In October the same year, the DEA paid a similar visit to Donald Scott, also in California, this time bringing along the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department for extra protection against the dangerous Mr. Scott, also a law-abiding citizen. Busting into the house while he was asleep, a deputy sheriff shot Mr.Scott and killed him. Again, no illegal drugs were found.

A year earlier, in September, 1991, a small federal army composed of some 60 agents from the DEA, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) the National Guard and the U.S. Forest Service (where, you have to wonder, were the Boy Scouts and the Little League) arrived in the living rooms of Mrs. Sina Brush and two neighbors in New Mexico just after dawn. Mrs. Brush and her daughter were handcuffed in their underwear and forced to kneel while the American gestapo searched the house for drugs. No drugs were found.

Last summer, the ATF paid a visit to Harry and Theresa Lumplugh in Pennsylvania. The ATF needed only 15 to 20 men, armed and masked, to handle the couple, whom they forced to open safes and handover private papers while held at the point of a machine gun. One of America's finest kicked the Lumplughs' pet cat to death. No charges were brought against the Lumplughs.

Last year, four ATF agents raided the bedroom of Monique Montgomery at four in the morning. She reached for a gun and was shot four times and killed. Nothing illegal was found. In Ohio, the ATF raided the house of businessman and part-time police officer Louie Katona III, pushing his pregnant wife against a wall and causing her to miscarry. Nothing illegal was found.

In almost all of these cases, the feds showed up in the middle of the night, garbed like Arnold Schwarzenegger in his latest thriller and proceeded to bully, beat, humiliate, intrude and sometimes wound or kill the victims they'd selected. In none did any of the victims violate any law; in several, the police had relied on intelligence known to be unreliable. In the Scott case, the Ventura County District Attorney's Office found that the raid was in part motivated by the desire of the Sheriff's Office to seize Mr. Scott's ranch under federal asset-forfeiture laws.

Don't be scared of the people who are running, Carlos. Turn around and take a long look at what they're running from.

E.

-- E. Coli (nunayo@beeswax.com), August 21, 1998.

E

Yes, there are bound to be collateral casualties in the war against our own citizens, er I mean the war against drugs.

-- Uncle Deedah (oncebitten@twiceshy.com), August 21, 1998.

Carlos, that suggestion might solve the platform problem. Now, waht are you going to do, in that nice neat stable platform, with all the computer programs (applications) that are the problem?

Even if you could port the stuff (difficult in its own right), you'd have to fix the programs. In some cases you'd benefit, and a lot of companies are doing that. In other cases, trying to stuff the programs and data bases from large mainframes into unix or macs is blivet building of the highest order. [In case you don't know, a blivet is 10 pounds of shit in a 1 pound bag.]

-- Al (alsprout@usa.net), August 26, 1998.