Word: fixedly
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Americans looking for another quick weight-loss fix may soon be tempted by orlistat, a new diet drug that's nearing approval by the Food and Drug Administration. Hopes previously pinned on Redux and the drug combination Fen-Phen were dashed by revelations that they can cause heart valve damage. But a study published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association says that orlistat has no such life-threatening side effects. Where Redux and Fen-Phen worked in the brain to suppress appetite, orlistat, made by Hoffman-La Roche, blocks the absorption of some fat in the intestines...
...wind of potential Y2K trouble a few years ago when they came across newspaper articles mentioning the computer glitch that led them to the Internet, which--surprise!--is full of alarming Y2K websites. That's when Bruce concluded that "there are not enough people on the planet who can fix this problem in time...
Programmers ignored Bemer's fix. And so did his bosses at IBM, who unwittingly shipped the Y2K bug in their System/360 computers, an industry standard every bit as powerful in the '60s as Windows is today. By the end of the decade, Big Blue had effectively set the two-digit date in stone. Every machine, every manual, every maintenance guy would tell you the year was 69, not 1969. "The general consensus was that this was the way you programmed," says an IBM spokesman. "We recognize the potential for lawsuits on this issue...
This alarmist language may yet be justified. By 1999 folly has compounded folly. In many cases, the original COBOL code has been rejiggered so many times that the date locations have been lost. And even when programmers find their quarry, they aren't sure which fixes will work. The amount of code that needs to be checked has grown to a staggering 1.2 trillion lines. Estimates for the cost of the fix in the U.S. alone range from $50 billion to $600 billion. As for Y2K compliance in Asian economies still struggling with recession? Forget about...
...what should Clinton have proposed? Even his critics have no concrete plans of their own. Some make vague suggestions about stock market-based fixes. A few states are offering tax breaks as incentives to purchase insurance. But no proposal looks like a national panacea. Other experts suggest raising the Medicaid income eligibility level but can't say how to pay the huge bill. The best chance for a fix may come as 76 million baby boomers retire over the next 30 years--what Clinton calls the "senior boom." That generation could change the face of America again, forcing reform...