4 ms·

I'll admit to a pause for reflection around 9pm UK time (Midnight Moscow time). After that, no worries. ADA has robust time and date libraries.

AnimalMuppet 10y ago
I hadn't thought of that as a serious possibility, but a friend and I considered writing a novel on it. The basic idea was that a bunch of US weapons systems wouldn't work due to Y2K - things like ballistic missile navigation. So the US was frantically trying to get all this patched so that they would have a credible defense after Y2K. The Chinese knew this, and launched on New Years Day... ... and completely missed, because they had used borrowed Russian code for their ballistic missile navigation. The Russians had stolen US ballistic missile navigation code, which had the Y2K issue in it.
- acqq 10y ago
  > I hadn't thought of that as a serious possibility Not serious? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accid... http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/launch-code-for-us-nukes-was-00000000-for-20-years/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/launch-code-for-u... "Launch code for US nukes was 00000000 for 20 years" http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/01/21/air-force-swears-our-nuke-launch-code-was-never-00000000/ http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/01/21/air-force-swears-our-nuk... So it was not actually eight zeros but apparently 6 zeroes and the "key under the doormat" (in the safe, but not really something you needed the president to access, the opposite of what was claimed then).
  - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
    That's all very different from "launch because of a Y2K bug", though...
    - acqq 10y ago
      No technology is perfect, it's always a process. And effectively every computer-related technology has undiscovered bugs. https://around.com/ariane.html https://around.com/ariane.html ""The board wishes to point out," they added, with the magnificent blandness of many official accident reports, "that software is an expression of a highly detailed design and does not fail in the same sense as a mechanical system." (...) (...) really important software has a reliability of 99.9999999 percent. At least, until it doesn't. " The statistics is against that generous number of nines.

AnimalMuppet 10y ago

I hadn't thought of that as a serious possibility, but a friend and I considered writing a novel on it. The basic idea was that a bunch of US weapons systems wouldn't work due to Y2K - things like ballistic missile navigation. So the US was frantically trying to get all this patched so that they would have a credible defense after Y2K. The Chinese knew this, and launched on New Years Day... ... and completely missed, because they had used borrowed Russian code for their ballistic missile navigation. The Russians had stolen US ballistic missile navigation code, which had the Y2K issue in it.

acqq 10y ago
> I hadn't thought of that as a serious possibility Not serious? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accid... http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/launch-code-for-us-nukes-was-00000000-for-20-years/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/launch-code-for-u... "Launch code for US nukes was 00000000 for 20 years" http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/01/21/air-force-swears-our-nuke-launch-code-was-never-00000000/ http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/01/21/air-force-swears-our-nuk... So it was not actually eight zeros but apparently 6 zeroes and the "key under the doormat" (in the safe, but not really something you needed the president to access, the opposite of what was claimed then).
- AnimalMuppet 10y ago
  That's all very different from "launch because of a Y2K bug", though...
  - acqq 10y ago
    No technology is perfect, it's always a process. And effectively every computer-related technology has undiscovered bugs. https://around.com/ariane.html https://around.com/ariane.html ""The board wishes to point out," they added, with the magnificent blandness of many official accident reports, "that software is an expression of a highly detailed design and does not fail in the same sense as a mechanical system." (...) (...) really important software has a reliability of 99.9999999 percent. At least, until it doesn't. " The statistics is against that generous number of nines.