Thanks for that. I needed a good laugh today.

Give them time. They seem to be gearing up to do just that.

Seems to me this would be more accurately described as a Century-based computer error.

At first I was amazed that we're still running into these things. But I shouldn't be surprised -- often problems like this aren't fixed until they cause some inconvenience for the people responsible for fixing them.

I think it's already been done.

That's... actually a really good point. Let's hope the lessons are shared.

And this is a new thing? Cities everywhere tend to do this.

s/Blitzer would/Blitzer wouldn't/g

Ok, right. I was excoriated once for using "invented", and it drove me to research the quote and the original context, (and it turns out both sides of the argument are partially correct) the content of which I keep along with references in a file called al_gore_invented_the_internet. When the subject comes up (as it still does periodically) I have actual quotes and references on tap. :-)

Incidentally, I believed at the time that he simply blew his lines in the heat of the moment, and meant to say "I took the initiative in co-authoring legislation that helped create the internet as it is today". Which would have been true and really was a good thing. But Gore has displayed arrogance to such a degree since then that I'm tipping back to "he exaggerated and hoped Blitzer would call him on it".

Before someone else jumps on this, the actual quote was "I took the initiative in creating the internet".

So, it's "created", not "invented". Pedants will take one to task for getting that wrong.

But should such a lawsuit ever take place, I'd be in the front row, with popcorn.

...why not sue the internet?

Or is that next?

This seems a little like suing a typewriter manufacturer because their product defeats handwriting analysis.

Wait a minute. People haven't been regularly vaccinated for Smallpox since 1971. (Don't take my word for it, check the Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.) Not because of "the anti-vaxxer thing" but because the disease was eradicated. *Four* decades ago. This is why you don't see people in civilized countries with smallpox vaccination scars who aren't old enough to be grandparents.

According to the CDC, the last known case in the US was 1945 and the last naturally occurring case in the world was in Somalia in 1977. (This is really easy to look up...)

So, I have to ask, is someone telling you that smallpox is raging through the world population because some former playmate is against vaccination? Is that the story they're telling now? Or have you confused smallpox with some other disease, perhaps?

And in your heart of hearts, do you really think they will actually accomplish this?

Wait, I was alive during that time -- the smallpox vaccine wasn't made from smallpox, it was made from cowpox. So samples of the vaccine would not be smallpox, dead or otherwise. Samples of smallpox would be from labs specifically testing the disease. (Hopefully, testing for means to eradicate it.)

> And, apparently, in a dusty cardboard box in an old storage room in Maryland.

And, who knows? Maybe a dozen other places. How did that rule of thumb go? For every security breach you find, there's probably several you didn't find.

True. I'm thinking the $100B is the budget over a number of years, not a huge up-front payment. And so, when it's canceled later and we decided to upgrade the Apache again, we probably will have wasted some subset of that.

I wasn't trying to imply that we'd pop that much cash, but that we sorta have a record of starting programs for new aircraft only to cancel them after a few billion and go back to something already in the field.