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"World's longest single web page" indeed.

This is spoken like a person who completely missed timecube and its associated sites while it was up.

But there's no excuse for having not seen orgyofthewill.net, which is still current.

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KT & SJ - thank you so much for sharing. I was running out of reading material.

Difficulty score 14.

We all know the Nazis were responsible for the holocaust. Nazi is short for National SOCIALIST Workers Party.

Economically, Nazis were Fascists, they believed in nationalizing the means of production. But, like Hillary, Hitler was beholden to big business for their money so he didn't implement all his economic theories as spelled out in Mein Kampf.

Hitler also used the Jews as scapegoats, a way to unify the German people against a common enemy. Sound familiar? Now if you substitute the rich, or the 1% for Jews who does that remind you of?

In short any political philosophy that eschews free markets leads to political tyranny. You can find examples of states without political freedom yet who do have some degree of economic freedom, but I defy you to show me one example of political freedom without economic freedom.

Hitler specifically wrote that his use of the term socialist was done in order to reassure workers. He promoted private enterprise as a part of his theory of both the master race and the superiority of particular individuals. the FIRST thing he did when he got some power was to round up communists and the union leadership. Fascism is a distortion of the right not the left, and you and Glenn Beck can't make it so.

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Facism is not a free market political philosophy.

Interesting how it seems the same people who believe in global warming/climate change also believed the y2k crock. If it's not a crock, then where are all the airplanes that fell out of the sky and all the nuclear plants that melted down because of the y2k bug?

It was never going to happen. There was a y2k bug that did exist in some FORTRAN programs, but mostly COBOL programs. These programs were database type programs that kept track of billing records and the like. They could never cause an airplane to fall out of the sky.

Thats a strawman argument: nobody said that airplanes would crash because of that bug.And the fault was not only embedded in the older programming languages; most pre-relational database management systems were at fault. I was involved in repairing the systems of one telco: we found thousands of errors, and if they would not have been repaired in time, that company would have been without the essiential systems for several weeks and would have lost many millions of revenue.

Real time control programs which might be able to cause an airplane to stop flying or a nuclear plant to melt down were mostly written in machine language. They were written by licensed engineers who are generally paranoid about anticipating all possible special cases, like y2k. But real time control software generally doesn't need to know the date or time, what is important to it are time intervals and getting the sequence of events in the right order.

As far as government involvement in the problem, there was no need to tell Boeing to make sure they didn't have the y2k bug. The threat of lawsuits and lost business was enough to make them take all the precautions necessary to prevent it.

B.T.W. As for my credentials ... I have written real time control software and even implemented clock and timer functions for it. I was a software engineer for a network bridge (Pathwise 7609) that was on the market for about 15 years.

MrO. there were sensational new stories about the worst case scenarios which included airplanes crashing and nuclear plants melting down. But of course at the bottom of the story was usually a disclaimer that it was highly unlikely.

I refer to y2k as a crock specifically because there were so many sensational news reports predicting catastrophe. Not because the bug did not exist.

Well you are an expert so you know you should listen to experts, not to sensational stories. The problem was real, it was big, but it was not unmanageable. The same with climate change/ global warming: all the experts say it is a real and big problem, and global disaster will only come if we do not do anything.

@dr who: that is not the normal definition of the y2k problem.

Well you are right, but that was not the public perception fed by media sensationalism.

The problem for your telco was more at least as much if not more of a threat to the telco than to the public. But we were led to believe the world was about to end.

MrO. just curious. Since you have experience with a telco, was (some of) the switching software was written in COBOL?

Doctor... lots of serious problems were found and corrected ... for example ... the entire power grid in the province of Ontario would have gone done and there wouldn't have been a way to restart it ... ... but the problem was found and corrected in 1998 because person were designated to look for possible problems ... ... was the talk about the situation overblown ... certainly ... was there a way to deal with it ... yes ...

doseffing, just curious, could you document the claim that a problem was found that would have taken the power grid down with no way to restart it? I would like to know more about how that would have worked.

... sorry doctor ... it was too long ago ... 18 years now ... and I wasn't working there ... the problem, as with the telco's would be to co-ordinate time ... which would go from milliseconds ( in those days) through the year ... ... now, of course, all the dates are stored as how many days from January 1st, 1900 or 1800 are we and the only place you get the year is in the display not in the stored or processing date ...

... there were undoubtedly lots of dangerous situations found but they were found early because resources were spent to find them ... was the situation overblown? ... most certainly ... because the problems were found in a timely fashion and dealt with but there is no news interest in hearing about how company X or government department Y or army Z has found a problem and dealt with it successfully ... I remember at Bell Canada where I worked we probably threw 40 or 50 person-years of labour at the problem but we were effectively done by June-July 1999 ... at least I don't remember finding any meaningful difficult situations after that time ... but who wants to hear about not having a problem ... the potential for disaster had been there and frightened so many people that my family got a free weekend at an expensive downtown Toronto hotel and front row seats for the midnight Millenial fireworks display because my wife was on call to go in and solve any disasters which occurred ... ... not did because they'd all been found ... ... it had been expected that it would be extremely difficult to solve the problem ... but with so many people working on it once a solution was found things were just fixed ...

... the problem was solved in 1998 which was before many things would be on the internet for us to look at and refer to ... and it's ancient history and can't happen again .. so who cares? ... I only heard about it on a radio news analysis show in 1998 after the problem had been solved where they were discussing the potential for problems and some person threw water on the whole reason to panic by mentioning this case had how it had been solved and saying that given we keep throwing resources at lhe problems nothing will happen ... ... he was correct ... ... sorry I've written too much

I was a Facilities Engineer working for IBM around the Y2K time frame. Our site was a mainframe chip manufacturing plant. We started throwing people at the problem in late 1997 iirc. Lots of equipment was converted to digital in the early days of computing when computer memory was extremely expensive, so the standard shortcut was to program dates assuming that the year started with 19. Time durations in calculations were done by subtraction, but once it was year 2000, the computers did not know what to do with negative durations. We crawled through every piece of equipment on the entire site, fixing the COBAL programming as we found problems. Then we prioritized equipment - life/safety first, then critical processes. When made lists of every piece of equipment in every building and printed it out in case desktop computers went down. Then we physically walked the entire plant and checked off every piece of equipment. Shifts of 16 hrs. on, 8 off. I was on Team B, so I was at home listening by 2-way radio at midnight Jan. 1, 2000. As a person finished a mechanical or electrical room, a clean room or a building, he/she would radio in that building thus-and-so had no problems and report the time the check was finished. We had one failure - the personal watch of one Maintenance Manager went to time 00:00 and stuck, which he didn't notice until 00:25 when he checked in that his area had no outages. It was a Timex Ironman, if you're wondering. And I did not have to report for my shift.

dng

DING. A little slow. 16.

no political system supports a totally free market. Every system involves itself in taxation, regulation, property rights,patent rights, banking, monopolies insurance, etc. Every political system reserves the right to involve itself in trade even more during times of war.