> Can you imagine working on a complicated Excel document when you run into a 2038 bug and you lose all your work instead of just having one of your future date

> Can you imagine working on a complicated Excel document when you run into a 2038 bug and you lose all your work instead of just having one of your future dates calculated as being in the 1970s? if your program loses data on a crash it is not worth using. What is this, 1970? > Or flying a plane and the system has to reboot midair instead of saying you're at -32768 feet of altitude? I'm pretty sure that's exactly what happens in fact: a quick reboot temporarily handling control to lower level or redundant controls is better than feeding wrong information to a sophisticated flight control system. I think this is generally true for all high reliability control systems.