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Men born between 1893 and 1897 reminded to register for the draft
- facorreia 12y ago> the agency uses a two-digit code for the birth year I find that surprising, I would expect even newcomer professionals to at least have heard about the Y2K bug.
- x1798DE 12y agoNot sure why anyone is memory conservative these days anyway, but it's possible they thought about it but figured that there weren't that many people over the age of 118 floating around, and even if they get a letter reminding them to register for the draft, they'd just ignore it.
- Igglyboo 12y agoOr it's a legacy system they never bothered properly fixing and just used some quick hack when 2000 rolled around.
- revelation 12y agoIt is 2014, males born in the 2000s are not yet at an age where they would be harassed by the selective service. My estimate is we will see this blow up again in 2018.
- x1798DE 12y agoI don't think so. It's always 118-126 years, no matter what year it is right now, so we'll only see this blow up if there's an explosion in that population.
- theandrewbailey 12y agoSorta knowing the sad state of government IT, it's possible that it was never "fixed" at all!
- donutello 12y ago> but figured that there weren't that many people over the age of 118 floating around The letter shown in the example was sent to someone who died in 1992 so there's at least some evidence to suggest that floating around is not a necessary condition to receive the letter.
- ajuc 12y agoWell, obviously if he died in 92 and have been born in 93 he counts as alive :)
- michaelt 12y agoI just started LibreOffice Calc (the version distributed with the latest version of Ubuntu), chose a cell and entered "1-December-2014" The program tidied it to 01/12/14 (I'm in the UK, presumably the field order is locale-dependent) then exported a CSV with the default settings. Voilia, I have a file with the date expressed as 01/12/14 My guess is this process only gets run once a year, so it's not been a high priority for automation, and someone's spreadsheet program is configured to work out two-digit years automatically.
- mandalar12 12y ago"These letters were sent due to a computer error, the agency said in a message posted online" No this is a human error. Are they trying to avoid responsibility when this is a minor (and a little funny) mistake ?
- noelwelsh 12y agoIn the final analysis, very very few computer errors are the responsibility of the computer.
- Gracana 12y agoThe point is to say it's an error in an automated system, rather than a human who decided to intentionally send out notices to 120-year-olds. Of course humans programmed the system, but they surely didn't mean to program it to do that.
- burkaman 12y agoAnd more importantly, the humans who programmed it probably don't work for the selective service. Obviously all "computer errors" are technically the fault of a human somewhere down the line, but in common usage it means that "I didn't make a mistake, the computer didn't do what I told it to do".
- eli 12y agoThis gets sort of philosophical. What would be an example of a computer error?
- oh_sigh 12y agoA computer seeing an instruction, be deciding on its own free will to not follow it, an do something else.
- jackgavigan 12y agoI think that if the computer decided to exercise its own free will, the resulting error would pale into insignificance. "Screw that batch processing job. I wanna get to 2048!"
- maxerickson 12y agoEarlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8018399 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8018399
- lukecampbell 12y agoThe article said 14,000 men. Is that possible that there are that many folks in Pennsylvania that were born between those dates?
- InclinedPlane 12y agoThe article also said that they sent letters addressed to individuals who were no longer living.
- Fuxy 12y agoTheir recruiting zombies i tell you! :P Sorry couldn't help myself.
- lukecampbell 12y agoOk, that makes more sense.
- Someone1234 12y agoThat must be distressing for the families. As an aside: Do the SS send letters to dead people born between 1993-1997? You'd assume they'd check for death records or have some way of being notified about that. For example if a boy is born in 1993 but died at age 5, do the parents get a letter from the SS in 2011 telling the boy to register for the SS?
- josu 12y agoAccording to this graph [1] and to the fact that the population of Pennsylvania is 12 million, it doesn't seem plausible. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#mediaviewer/File:USA_Sex_by_Age_20140601.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Stat...
- evan_ 12y agoIt actually gives a number twice that at the end of the article- they managed to stop it early.
- squozzer 12y agoOr maybe it's part of the global project to eliminate the world's installed base of land mines.
- dylanrw 12y agoI registered for the selective service and all of that, and it never really crossed my mind. 12 years later, the act seems alarmingly misandristic. It also makes me wonder if any feminists are fighting to have this law updated to include all citizens and not just males...
- burkaman 12y agoNot sure about feminist efforts, but all recent efforts to reinstate some kind of draft included women: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_National_Service_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_National_Service_Act I know the National Organization of Women's position has always been that they oppose any kind of draft, but if it has to continue they would like women to be included. I think most feminists would understandably rather work to get rid of all selective service rather than include women.
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- areyoumental 12y agoIt's against feminist interests to do so.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]