Subject: Re: smtpupd-09 date errors

From: Jacob Palme <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 11:42:42 +0100

At 20.23 +0100 99-01-29, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> The odds that we will be using these formats in eighty years are
> small. The odds that we will be using them in EIGHT THOUSAND YEARS are
> zero.

In at least one area, people are seriously planning more than eight
thousand years ahead. And that is in the area of nuclear waste storage.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jacob Palme <[email-masked]> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/~jpalme

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From: "Nathaniel S. Borenstein" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 09:56:26 -0500 (EST)

> thousand years ahead. And that is in the area of nuclear waste storage.

I want to thank Jacob for coming up with a fairly compelling example
here.  (As you may remember, I was unhappy with allowing a Y10K bug, but
hadn't come up with a good argument as to why it was important.)  Most
code doesn't deal with nuclear waste storage, but if anyone is writing
it today, they surely won't be around to fix the bugs in the year
10,000.  

For my part, I feel quite strongly that if we're going to have another
"Y2K" type of event, it should be far enough in the future that it can't
threaten the health of our descendants.   Management of nuclear waste is
probably the most forward-looking example that really matters, so I
would argue that our year fields should extend long enough for the most
toxic of such wastes to become relatively harmless.
--------
Never practice:  you can only      | Nathaniel Borenstein
practice mistakes.  Learning is    |  <[email-masked]>
always new.  -- Krishnamurti       | http://nsb.si.umich.edu/~nsb