' Sol Government Officials Urge Y10K Restraint
By Terry Dactyl
New Chicago, August 9999 - Officials of the Sol government are advising
citizens throughout the solar system to exercise restraint and common
sense when discussing the impending transition to the new deca-millium,
or Y10K as it is more commonly known. Y10K fears have in the past few
months caused a level of concern and panic not seen among the planets
since the unsuccessful Titan invasion attempt in 7155 by a small fleet
of methane-based lifeforms from Alpha Centauri.
"We in particular want to point out that the rumors of possible atomic
dispersion of users of interplantary teleports at midnight, 9999, has
never been justified by any laboratory tests or evidence whatsoever. All
these tele-portals are very recent systems, no more than three or four
centuries old. Moreover, the quasi-organic AIs that programmed them were
cultivated specifically to use extreme caution and foresight in their
approach to software design. There is simply no reason to worry about
stepping through a tele-portal as we enter the next deca-millenium
When asked about the recent reports of potentially serious problems due
to the recent unexpected find of 4-digit legacy date code within the
interplanetary infrastructure, officials grew more guarded in their
answers. They emphasized that they had the problem well in hand, and
would be able to resolve the issues fully despite the new deca-millenium
being only a few months away.
"It is true that we have uncovered a number of highly unexpected areas
of the interplanetary infrastructure that depend on software dating back
all the way to the origins of information technology. It seems that as
the early robotic AI programmers took over work from humans in early and
mid 2000s, they built upon earlier software infrastructure in a way that
made it largly invisible to later generations. No one from that time
period expected that their code would still be in use 8000 years later,
and no one 8000 years later expected to find their code still there at
the base of our infrastructure. It's a bit like going though your DNA
and finding out that your basic metabolism still depends critically on a
few very archaic bacterial genes."
"We realize that everyone is concerned about the impact of these various
dependencies on the solar infrastructure, but we want to emphasize that
we are well on the way to solving the problem permanently."
"Since none of our current generations of AI understand the archaic
languages of "Cobol" and "Ada" and "C" that were used to program these
peculiar relics, we've built up one of the most massive time-accelerated
cloning and memory engrams implantation programs of all time. At this
very moment we have over five thousand re-created programmers from the
late 1900s and early 2000s fully developed into adult bodies and ingram
implanted with knowledge of the same environments and work that they
originally did back in the early late 1900s and early 2000s. We were
able to get so many of them by using the very latest in quantum-level
entropic reversers, which allowed us to rebuild both their DNA and their
memory engrams."
"To make them comfortable and productive, we've also duplicated their
original working environments and made the apparent transition from then
to now completely transparent to them. As far as they are able to tell,
they simply woke up one morning and went to work again."
When asked about whether even this large number of archaic programmers
would be able to resolve the interplanetary infrastructure problems in
the short time remaining, officials went on to describe additional
measures that they have been taking to ensure full resolution in time.
"What we've had to do is use the latest in time contraction gravimetrics
to create an accelerated environment for the programmers. For every
solar hour that passes, they live out about ten thousand hours of
programming effort. With our current technology, we believe we can crank
that level of amplification up almost indefinitely, so that our team can
work for hundreds or even thousands of years if necessary. Since we took
the liberty of altering their DNA to provide immortality when we
recreated them, they can last a long, long time in there."
Officials also discussed the ethical and pragmatic issues of re-creating
a team of programmers from eight millenia ago and forcing them to work
for hundreds or even thousands of years non-stop to fix the problems
that they originally helped create.
"Well, as you may well guess, the general feeling hear is that this crew
probably sort of deserves this to happen to them anyway, given that
they've placed several trillion people in serious risk in our time. The
odd thing is, though, that so far none of them seem to have even noticed
that they've already been going to work every day for about a hundred
years. They just shuffle off to their cubicles and start coding away. We
think it must be a legacy of their times, a sort of enforced reduction
in overall awareness and initiative that we call cubicle-blindness. They
just don't seem to be aware that there is a world outside their little
cubicles, so we keep shoveling in the work and they just keep coding."
Asked about the eventual fate of the programmers, officials described a
"break it to them easy" approach to re-synchronizing them with reality.
"One idea that we've had is to introduce hints to them via, say, their
email systems. For example, we have given some serious thought to taking
this very interview and translating it back into their language, then
feeding it back to them as a humorous email from their friends. That way
we can size up their reactions ahead of time, and see how they might
react to the idea that they may be doing programming in their cubicles
for a long, LONG time before we can let them out to meet real people."
=======================================================================
To: "Roger A. Duncan" <rduncan@mail04.mitre.org>
Subject: Y10K
From: Terry Bollinger <terry@mitre.org>
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1999 15:57:08 -0500
======================================================================
Sol Government Officials Urge Y10K Restraint
By Terry Dactyl
New Chicago, August 9999 - Officials of the Sol government are advising
citizens throughout the solar system to exercise restraint and common
sense when discussing the impending transition to the new deca-millium,
or Y10K as it is more commonly known. Y10K fears have in the past few
months caused a level of concern and panic not seen among the planets
since the unsuccessful Titan invasion attempt in 7155 by a small fleet
of methane-based lifeforms from Alpha Centauri.
"We in particular want to point out that the rumors of possible atomic
dispersion of users of interplantary teleports at midnight, 9999, has
never been justified by any laboratory tests or evidence whatsoever. All
these tele-portals are very recent systems, no more than three or four
centuries old. Moreover, the quasi-organic AIs that programmed them were
cultivated specifically to use extreme caution and foresight in their
approach to software design. There is simply no reason to worry about
stepping through a tele-portal as we enter the next deca-millenium
When asked about the recent reports of potentially serious problems due
to the recent unexpected find of 4-digit legacy date code within the
interplanetary infrastructure, officials grew more guarded in their
answers. They emphasized that they had the problem well in hand, and
would be able to resolve the issues fully despite the new deca-millenium
being only a few months away.
"It is true that we have uncovered a number of highly unexpected areas
of the interplanetary infrastructure that depend on software dating back
all the way to the origins of information technology. It seems that as
the early robotic AI programmers took over work from humans in early and
mid 2000s, they built upon earlier software infrastructure in a way that
made it largly invisible to later generations. No one from that time
period expected that their code would still be in use 8000 years later,
and no one 8000 years later expected to find their code still there at
the base of our infrastructure. It's a bit like going though your DNA
and finding out that your basic metabolism still depends critically on a
few very archaic bacterial genes."
"We realize that everyone is concerned about the impact of these various
dependencies on the solar infrastructure, but we want to emphasize that
we are well on the way to solving the problem permanently."
"Since none of our current generations of AI understand the archaic
languages of "Cobol" and "Ada" and "C" that were used to program these
peculiar relics, we've built up one of the most massive time-accelerated
cloning and memory engrams implantation programs of all time. At this
very moment we have over five thousand re-created programmers from the
late 1900s and early 2000s fully developed into adult bodies and ingram
implanted with knowledge of the same environments and work that they
originally did back in the early late 1900s and early 2000s. We were
able to get so many of them by using the very latest in quantum-level
entropic reversers, which allowed us to rebuild both their DNA and their
memory engrams."
"To make them comfortable and productive, we've also duplicated their
original working environments and made the apparent transition from then
to now completely transparent to them. As far as they are able to tell,
they simply woke up one morning and went to work again."
When asked about whether even this large number of archaic programmers
would be able to resolve the interplanetary infrastructure problems in
the short time remaining, officials went on to describe additional
measures that they have been taking to ensure full resolution in time.
"What we've had to do is use the latest in time contraction gravimetrics
to create an accelerated environment for the programmers. For every
solar hour that passes, they live out about ten thousand hours of
programming effort. With our current technology, we believe we can crank
that level of amplification up almost indefinitely, so that our team can
work for hundreds or even thousands of years if necessary. Since we took
the liberty of altering their DNA to provide immortality when we
recreated them, they can last a long, long time in there."
Officials also discussed the ethical and pragmatic issues of re-creating
a team of programmers from eight millenia ago and forcing them to work
for hundreds or even thousands of years non-stop to fix the problems
that they originally helped create.
"Well, as you may well guess, the general feeling hear is that this crew
probably sort of deserves this to happen to them anyway, given that
they've placed several trillion people in serious risk in our time. The
odd thing is, though, that so far none of them seem to have even noticed
that they've already been going to work every day for about a hundred
years. They just shuffle off to their cubicles and start coding away. We
think it must be a legacy of their times, a sort of enforced reduction
in overall awareness and initiative that we call cubicle-blindness. They
just don't seem to be aware that there is a world outside their little
cubicles, so we keep shoveling in the work and they just keep coding."
Asked about the eventual fate of the programmers, officials described a
"break it to them easy" approach to re-synchronizing them with reality.
"One idea that we've had is to introduce hints to them via, say, their
email systems. For example, we have given some serious thought to taking
this very interview and translating it back into their language, then
feeding it back to them as a humorous email from their friends. That way
we can size up their reactions ahead of time, and see how they might
react to the idea that they may be doing programming in their cubicles
for a long, LONG time before we can let them out to meet real people."
=======================================================================
Frank Ney N4ZHG WV/EMT-B LPWV NRA(L) GOA CCRKBA JPFO
Fan Guest of Honor, Technicon 16 technicon.org
--
"One of the neat things about computers is that they don't respond
well to dynamic personalities with take-charge attitudes and well-
tailored suits. In fact, computers don't generally give a rat's behind
about anything."
- Cory Hamasaki, Clueless |
