Funny you mention newspapers. The primary Y2K bug I saw was all the web pages which on new years day said "January 1, 19100." Somewhere I still have a screenshot of the New York Times' web page like that.

I think I heard of one embedded system that broke due to Y2K, but I've seen many more over the years that got confused over leap years. The year 2000 was especially good for that because that wasn't a leap year even though the common, oversimplified, every-4-year rule says it should have been.

s/ICBM/cruise missile/

I've seen the same thing as you, on (Cox) basic cable. They're heavily pushing their digital cable service. I had it briefly, and with their box I had a great many additional channels which my new TV doesn't find with its own tuner / decoder.

I've also heard that a new TV can pick up all of digital cable, except for goodies like online TV guide, convenient pay-per-view, and other interactive features. I don't believe it - some other trickery is going on.

(I went back to basic cable, because after their promotion for digital cable ran out, it was very expensive.)

It's not that easy. TV stations in the VHF-High band (channels 7-13) are currently transmitting the digital version of themselves in the higher UHF channels. After they stop their analog transmissions, they'll move their digital transmissions to their VHF-High channels.

Thus many major stations (4 out of the 7 big VHF stations here) will move around after the transition. Now that transition will be gradual and not so predictable. Stations will be moving around, and we'll have to keep rescanning or otherwise updating our tuners, either in converter boxes or new TVs.

I'll have to remember not to go shopping if I'm ever there. I set those damn things off all the time. I think something in my wallet does it, but I've never isolated it.