The Year 2038 Problem

[Christian Bau]

What will it do in 2800 (or 2700, i disremember), when the Greek Orthodox
church and the Gregorian calendar will disagree?

I think they invested 1 dollar in a bank account at four percent
interest per year, and when the day comes they will buy either the Greek
Orthodox church or whoever else they need to buy

 

[Dik T. Winter]

>
> The two calendars disagree right now. As far as I know, there
> are branches of the Orthodox Church which never recognized
> Pope Gregory's adjustments.

But there are also branches that recognised the adjustments, but diverge
in the year I mentioned.

 

[Dik T. Winter]

>
> Apart from the nasty tendency of those awfully small molecules to
> slip through almost everything else (the main effort in creating
> storage solutions for it is in storing it in a form where it's bound to
> something else), it's mostly fear factor I guess.

Yup. In one recent news report on a fire in a hydrogen tank somewhere in
the Netherlands, the conclusion was that there was no safety hazard as no
toxic chemical stuff did emerge.

 

[Peter J. Acklam]

I'm sorry, but what are the reason Hydrogen is less safe than
petrol or natural gas?

I'm sorry, but what has this got to do in *any* of these
newsgroups.

Peter

 

[Nick Landsberg]

But there are also branches that recognised the adjustments, but diverge
in the year I mentioned.

The probability approaches 0.99999999 ... ad infinitum
that both you and I will be dead by that time and
it will be up to our descendants to handle that problem

 

[CBFalconer]

(e-mail address removed)-berlin.de says...

The irony is that that (dispersion) is precisely the sort of thing that
people object to! The result is that radioactive waste is held in
concentrated form and everyone is afraid of it. If it were diluted, the
environmentalists would protest that where there were once a thousand
tons of nuclear waste, there are now a million.

Chernobyl did an admirable job of dispersing radioactive waste
over a fairly wide area. Places such as Love Canal demonstrate
the efficacy of burying and forgetting wastes in general. 20 or
30 years after the banning of leaded gasoline, many highways
border vegetation show the benefits of lead dispersion.

I think we must belong to the genus Homo Non Sapiens.

 

[Thomas G. Marshall]

I'm sorry, but what has this got to do in *any* of these
newsgroups.

Peter

I no longer worry about OT posts in ng's. I've discovered that often a
subject is raised because of the /audience/ known to exist in the ng,
not its particular subject.

That is supposedly against the charter of the big 8. So be it.

 

[Thomas G. Marshall]

"Those bastards in the twenty-first century could have prevented the
ice age, but they insisted on reducing CO2 emissions..."

In my life, the spirit of your point here has been echoed by me in a
very many circumstances and subject matters.

 

[q]

The United States does NOT use reactor designs like the one
at Chernobyl. Also, Chernobyl did NOT have a containment
building.


Helsinki (AFP) May 24, 2002
Finland's parliament on Friday approved construction of a fifth nuclear
reactor, the first such plant to be authorized in Western Europe or
North America since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.

 

[August Derleth]

With a floating-point type, the precision of your clock is also
determined by how far you are from the epoch. I'd rather have a
consistent precision over the entire representable range than be able
to measure picoseconds close to the epoch, but have the precision drop
by a factor of two every now and then.

Of course, more advanced beings would presumably have learned to cope with
that phenomenon, and have learned to focus on the more important concepts
in the Universe, such as universal mortality and alienation.

Singing:

"Does anybody really know what time it is?
Does anybody really care?
If so, I can't imagine why.
We've all got time enough to die."
-- Chicago

Sorry. ;-)

 

[August Derleth]

You mean systems which use a signed 32-bit int for time_t. Modern systems
use a 64-bit int for time_t, so the problem is moot (unless you're running
code in 2038 that hasn't been recompiled since the early 1990s).

Which, in the real world, is very possible. The IA-64 architecture and the
Sparc-64 architecture both have explicit provisions to run 32-bit machine
code compiled for earlier iterations of the family tree. I think all
commercially viable 64-bit architectures will need very similar provisions.

Plus, in a world where PDP-8s are still used in mission-critical
applications by big organizations (BART), 32-bit systems will be around
long after 2038.

There already is a solution, consensus for it, and implementations of it.
The sky is NOT falling.

We knew, in a very real way, how to fix Y2K back in the 1980s. Hell, we
knew in the 1970s, but we thought it would be too expensive to do things
right.

IOW, the panic will set in, and it will be averted in 2037 or thereabouts
by the same method Y2K was averted in 1999.

 

[Keith Thompson]

You (and he) are too young. Back in gas shortage times, when
prices worked their way above 50 cents a gallon, most pumps
couldn't handle that wildly excessive level. The operators set
them to charge half-price, and created a sign stating as much.

I don't remember that, but I do remember that when gasoline started to
reach $1/gallon, some stations started selling by the liter because
their pumps couldn't handle the extra digit. It was a temporary
workaround, though; they went back to gallons as soon as the pumps
were upgraded.

It occurs to me that they might have been able to fix the problem by
dropping the last digit rather than the first one. (US gas prices are
almost universally $X.XX9/gallon; that extra nine-tenths of a cent has
always annoyed me. I'd gladly pay an extra cent or two for a tank of
gas if they'd price the stuff in whole numbers of cents.)

 

[Mark McIntyre]

On 29 May 2004 13:19:43 GMT, in comp.lang.c ,

Well, if I am not completely mistaken, there's quite a bit of a
difference in the _concentration_ the stuff has been hidden 'under
the rug' by nature (plus stuff like plutonium doesn't seem to be very
common there) and the one the waste products are going to be stashed
away in.

There are some people who live in parts of the UK where the radon gas
density is high enough to cause concern. Its coming from some quite large
granite plutons that some inconsiderate immortal shoved up through all the
limestone.

Not much we can do about it, except note that people have lived there for
~500,000 years and there's nothing especially unusual about them apart from
the funny accents, strange dress sense and tendency to have one enormous
eye.

 

[Mark McIntyre]

I'm sorry, but what are the reason Hydrogen is less safe than petrol or
natural gas?

Think "Hindenberg"

If you pour a gallon of petrol on the floor, you can tap dance in it. If
you pour a gallon of natural gas on the floor, it dribbles out through the
drains in gaseous state. Trust me, I've done both. Heck I've even done it
with a gallon of iso-propanol (they're all handy coolants. The trick with
the last was to open the lab windows before I fell over dead drunk, and
then died of asphyxiation).

If you pour a gallon of H on the floor, you can kiss your ass goodbye as it
passes your head on its way to kingdom come. There /is/ a reason that the
LH test rig at RAL was about a mile from the rest of the lab, behind 20ft
thick earth banks, and inside a concrete bunker with one disposable wall.

 

[Mark McIntyre]

Yup. In one recent news report on a fire in a hydrogen tank somewhere in
the Netherlands, the conclusion was that there was no safety hazard as no
toxic chemical stuff did emerge.

Tank fires are fairly safe, as its the vapour that burns and in tanks, not
much can escape. Also tanks for storing Hydrogen tend to be filled with an
inert material to retard any heat.
Mind you I heard a great (but probably apocryphal) story about someone at
RAL who accidentally ignited the a coolant bath of the stuff, and was
running around with the top ablaze, searching for a suitable place to chuck
it before the heat convected in and boiled the rest. At that point, there
would have been one heck of an explosion.

 

[Mabden]

I no longer worry about OT posts in ng's. I've discovered that often a
subject is raised because of the /audience/ known to exist in the ng,
not its particular subject.

That is supposedly against the charter of the big 8. So be it.

Perhaps you both missed the "[OT]" tag. What that means is that the post you
are about to read, or ignore - your choice, is Off Topic for this newsgroup.
It's a courtesy to explain to you that you would be wasting you time if you
thought this thread was related to the newsgroup. When you see [OT], you are
guaranteed to have a subject that does not relate to the proper purpose of
the newsgroup. Therefore, if you only want to read topics that ARE targeted
to your newsgroup, please, in the future, ignore posts with [OT] in the
subject, as you may find them to be not what you would expect in the
newsgroup.

 

[Mabden]

Think "Hindenberg"

The Hindenberg didn't burn because of the hydrogen. You can't see hydrogen
burn (perhaps a little bluish glow).

The Hindenburg burned the cloth coating which was treated with the same
stuff we now use in rocket fuel. It went up because of static discharge that
was supposed to be mitigated by using wire to attach the cloth panels (to
ground it), but because they used rope instead the charge was allowed to
build until a flammable condition occured. It was a case of compounded
errors.

Learn a little history (and chemistry) before posting urban legends.

 

[Thomas G. Marshall]

"Thomas G. Marshall"

I no longer worry about OT posts in ng's. I've discovered that
often a subject is raised because of the /audience/ known to exist
in the ng,
not its particular subject.

That is supposedly against the charter of the big 8. So be it.

Perhaps you both missed the "[OT]" tag. What that means is that the
post you are about to read, or ignore - your choice, is Off Topic for
this newsgroup. It's a courtesy to explain to you that you would be
wasting you time if you thought this thread was related to the
newsgroup. When you see [OT], you are guaranteed to have a subject
that does not relate to the proper purpose of the newsgroup.
Therefore, if you only want to read topics that ARE targeted to your
newsgroup, please, in the future, ignore posts with [OT] in the
subject, as you may find them to be not what you would expect in the
newsgroup.

Have you lost your mind? I was agreeing with that very premise, and in
fact was pointing out a reason for it: People often like to discuss
things because of the ng's audience, not because of the ng's subject
topic. It's how most folks view it these days I think.

And, no by the way, I've seen purists attack even posts that were
labeled as "OT" under the argument that OT doesn't excuse a post
deliberately in the wrong ng. I certainly don't feel that way.

You seemed to have missed what I was saying entirely.

 

[Mabden]

"Thomas G. Marshall" <[email protected]>
wrote in message
[snip vile attacks]

And, no by the way, I've seen purists attack even posts that were
labeled as "OT" under the argument that OT doesn't excuse a post
deliberately in the wrong ng.

OK, Topic Nazi! I get your point, you want the "purity" of the newsgroup to
supersede the rights of posters who go off on tangents! Don't kill the
messenger, but people will sometimes have "side conversations" that are not
particularly "on- topic". That is just life, and the way people are.

Are you going to change the world, Net-Cop?! NO, I don't think so!

Is it *YOUR* job to police this newsgroup? NO!

Do I need this bad attitude after a hard day? No!

So keep your stupid opinions and attitude to yourself, Dick (Tracy)!

 

[Thomas G. Marshall]

Which, in the real world, is very possible. The IA-64 architecture
and the Sparc-64 architecture both have explicit provisions to run
32-bit machine code compiled for earlier iterations of the family
tree. I think all commercially viable 64-bit architectures will need
very similar provisions.

Plus, in a world where PDP-8s are still used in mission-critical
applications by big organizations (BART), 32-bit systems will be
around long after 2038.


We knew, in a very real way, how to fix Y2K back in the 1980s. Hell,
we knew in the 1970s, but we thought it would be too expensive to do
things right.

IOW, the panic will set in, and it will be averted in 2037 or
thereabouts by the same method Y2K was averted in 1999.

Yep, and then in 2039 the 20-20 hindsighters will say: "Y2038 was blown
way way out of proportion, nothing went wrong!!!!!"