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To: IngotWeTrust who wrote (23438)	11/26/1998 10:35:00 AM
From: TEDennis	Respond to of 116753

49r: I know Bob Bemer personally, and correspond with him frequently. Did you know he has vanity Arizona license plates with "ASCII" on them? Your comment that he was "conscripted out of retirement" was interesting. That's not exactly the way I heard it. He recognized the problem, recognized that it wasn't going to get fixed in time, and dreamed up his own technique to solve it. Or, to attempt to solve it. He then came out of retirement to lead the effort to build his technique into a product. I've never discussed with him whether or not he's stockpiling. Our discussions have been primarily focused on the technical aspects of the overall problem, and the capabilities and shortcomings of his technique to solve it. There will be tons of software errors in application code. I'm certainly not denying that. The "off the deep end" group are claiming that the world will come to a standstill. That's the concept I don't agree with. The public utilities (power, gas, water) and public service organizations (police, fire department, emergency management) in and around Sedona have their act together. I expect a few days of inconvenience because of the number of problem calls they'll be getting, but it's nothing to panic about. As for application code, the major grocery stores and banks are the most exposed. There's not much else around here that is technologically enabled. The 3rd world countries are a different matter. Some of them can't even spell "Y2K". However, a large percentage of their populations live without the above mentioned facilities already, and their livelihoods don't rely on computers or other modern contraptions. It will have a business impact for sure, but the social impact will be far less than here in the good ol' USA where we're all accustomed to every convenience known to man. If more people would consider how to prepare themselves to live for a while with a few inconveniences than how to barricade themselves in a fallout shelter, this whole issue would become less a crisis and more an experience. The "Y2K panic" will be caused by people panicking, not by the Y2K. The less they panic, the better off we'll be. Preparation and information is the key. The more they now how to deal with the issues, the less likely they will be to panic. TED