Remember the 39 questions?

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Sam Meddis from USA Today finally responded to my email regarding the piece he wrote about the 39 questions. Here is the original text of my emails and his reply, (the entire one word of his reply).

Mr. Meddis, It's very brave of you to wait until after the rollover to respond. It's also very easy to dimiss Y2K completely after only 2.5 days into the new year, when there have been few (reported) problems so far. I admit I am encouraged by the apparent scarcity of failures, but I would wait to assume there will be no serious repercussions from Y2K bugs until well into, or even after, the new year.

Of course these will never be reported as such. Even in the face of blatant Y2K errors on New Years Eve and Day, any and all problems were invariably reported as having nothing to do with Y2K. Even President Clinton said "...no problems..." after the Pentagon had admitted it's own Y2K related problems with a spy satellite.

I still believe there is a possibility of errors resulting in serious problems. The cause may be minor, but the effect could be catastrophic. To draw a parallel, the 1986 Challenger explosion was, in essence, caused by the failure of a single component, the O-ring on an engine. A complicated system requires the nearly perfect function of all it's parts. Would you consider the international banking system, or the world-wide supply chain to be any less complicated? Or any less dependent on all it's parts to function properly?

I, for one, will not breath any easier until more and more time passes without major problems surfacing.

"Meddis, Sam" wrote:

Reaction?

-------------------- Sam Vincent Meddis Technology Editor USATODAY.com

-----Original Message----- From: BlahBlahBlah [mailto:BlahBlahBlah@Blah.Blah] Sent: Wednesday, December 15, 1999 To: meddis@usatoday.com

Mr. Meddis, I'm just curious, sir. This isn't spam. In fact, I have usatoday.com as my home page. I read it every day. I have a master's degree, and am slowly on my way to a PhD, so I'm not one of the "great unwashed" you may think I am. Why would you write such a piece and actually publish it, when you didn't even make an attempt to read it, let alone make an attempt to address the questions?

You wrote: "What the paranoiac e-mail messages had in common was a list of 39 preposterous Y2K-related questions, most of them of the "when did you stop beating your wife" variety."

Did you REALLY read the questions? It's obvious you either didn't, or you did, and found that the answers (or lack thereof) terrified you. In my opinion, most of the 39 questions were valid, and the concerted effort to dismiss them offhand as spam is typical of liberal media. I suppose you also believe that oral sex isn't sex. Don't worry, be happy, because the government told me to, right?

Regarding the 39 questions, I would hardly call them paranoiac, but then someone who would write such a poor piece of journalistic trash, would be quick to resort to name-calling wouldn't they? But then I guess that depends on what your definition of IS is.

Sincerely, BlahBlahBlah

-- Powder (Powder47keg@aol.com), January 03, 2000

Answers

Powder,

Get a life! Before it's too late!!

-- Andy Kaufman (AndyKaufman@heaven.com), January 03, 2000.


Hey Powder,

What field are you receiving the PhD in...

Regards,

-- joe thomas (jthomas@hotmail.com), January 03, 2000.


Computer Science

-- Powder (Powder47keg@aol.com), January 03, 2000.

Can anyone provide a link to the 39 questions?

-- Malcolm Taylor (taylorm@es.co.nz), January 03, 2000.

To the 39 questions: http://www.michaelhyatt.com/discuss/ubb/Forum14/HTML/002359.html

To the article which pronpted my first email: Couldn't find the original article, but here's what this guy thinks like (starring our very own Steve Heller):

http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/ccarch/ccc0215.htm

-- Powder (Powder47keg@aol.com), January 03, 2000.



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