Brexit

[Witton Park]

This all reminds me of the Millenium Bug.
On the stroke of the new millenium, computers were supposed to fail causing power supplies to fail, planes to fall from the sky, everything to stop working. In a word, Armageddon.
And what happened? A load of IT people made a shedload of money, companies shelled out thousands on bug fixes and the rest of us crossed our fingers and hoped.

Apart from a massive hangover, I did not notice anything different about Jan 1 2000. The harbingers of doom were all piss and wind!!

and we are repeating it again with the climate change emergency. Apparently money invested in Green technology is among the best returns at the moment, averaging 9%.

[Derby Tup]

Witton Park in support for former Revolutionary Communist shocker

[Witton Park]

Witton Park in support for former Revolutionary Communist shocker

a bit of thread hopping there DT

But it shouldn't be a shock.

I've long held the view that traditional left and right is no longer relevant and the Brexit debate is evidence of that.

It is now a libertarianism against stateism.

I would renationalise the Royal Mail.

I'm also open to letting two or three rail franchises run down and bringing them back in to public ownership to see if the service can be improved without hitting the public purse.

I'm for enhancing the working time directive to address some of the anomalies in it that drive the volume of part-time contracts, short shifts and erratic shift patterns making a home life and financial security out oft he reach of many.

They would be perceived as leftish policies, but I see them as libertarian policies that can be embraced by left and right.

[Witton Park]

I found the link to this on a professor's twitter feed.

I was more surprised to see a prof putting this sort of info out there. He must be a crank

and even more surprised to see it in the Guardian.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...ithin-20-years

"Majority of Europeans 'expect end of EU within 20 years"

the prof states "as Aristotle said, someone who actually lives in a house can know more about it than those who designed and built it."

[DrPatrickBarry]

This all reminds me of the Millenium Bug.
On the stroke of the new millenium, computers were supposed to fail causing power supplies to fail, planes to fall from the sky, everything to stop working. In a word, Armageddon.
And what happened? A load of IT people made a shedload of money, companies shelled out thousands on bug fixes and the rest of us crossed our fingers and hoped.

Apart from a massive hangover, I did not notice anything different about Jan 1 2000. The harbingers of doom were all piss and wind!!

I am an I.T professional so I know something about this. Let me expain PCs were never the issue with the Millenium Bug. Devices with issues included small devices (hand helds, etc) that contained internal clocks and were optimized as much as possible (due to power/memory constraints) and could not support a four digit year and very old devices, namely old Unix servers running COBOL/DB2 and other old languages. All of these retired COBOL programmers were rehired by the banks to update their ancient programs to support four digit years.

My own company at the time spent a fortune testing and working with manufactures to fix issue with the vibration monitors that were key to our business.

The media were so smarmy with their "there never was a problem" There was not a problem becasue of millions of hours of work by I.T professionals.

[biaraV2]

Dr Patrick Barry beat me to it!! Millennium bug was sorted by alot of programming by alot of people hence no issue!!

[noel]

That's the problem with fixing things. People then say "you see, it wasn't a problem after all". Hopefully we'll get to this with climate change, but I doubt it.

[anthonykay]

So: we have another vote on the EU Withdrawal Agreement in the week beginning 3rd June. Theresa May will resign when (not if) she loses the vote. Donald Trump arrives on 4th June; so Mrs May will have a cast-iron excuse for not meeting him: "I've resigned, I am not in a position to meet a visiting President." The woman's a genius!

[Witton Park]

That's the problem with fixing things. People then say "you see, it wasn't a problem after all". Hopefully we'll get to this with climate change, but I doubt it.

not until we can develop a thermostat for the Sun, control the earth's tectonic plates, divert the Jet Stream and control the flow of ocean currents.

But never mind, according to Rebecca Long-Bailey nationalising National Grid will help to save the planet and the new York City Council Coalition have appointed a Director for Climate Change.

[Llani Boy]

[QUOTE=DrPatrickBarry;650373] Devices with issues included small devices (hand helds, etc) that contained internal clocks and were optimized as much as possible (due to power/memory constraints) and could not support a four digit year and very old devices, namely old Unix servers running COBOL/DB2 and other old languages. All of these retired COBOL programmers were rehired by the banks to update their ancient programs to support four digit years.

How come 1999 was not a four digit year?