Word: problem
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...expect that any time soon they will see the seven-headed beast from The Revelation of St. John, the New Testament's dense and cryptic vision of the last things. But in these final days of the 20th century, religious millennialism has once again found a real world problem on which to hang its visions of doom--the Y2K (that's the year 2000) computer...
...problem is this. Many of the world's computers and microchip circuitry, the ones that run everything from cash machines and VCRs to interstate electric-power grids and intercontinental ballistic missiles, contain a programming oversight that makes them incapable of reading the date 2000. To represent years, computers generally use just the last two digits. When 1999--that's 99 in computer language--rolls over at midnight to 00, computers that have not had the glitch repaired will conclude that the date is 1900. That can lead to a surprising range of malfunctions, and not just in such obviously date...
...problem is that there is no clear agreement, even among sober experts, of how bad the Y2K computer problem will be. Mike McClure, who is in charge of making sure that Georgia's electric-power giant Southern Co. is Y2K compliant, has the attitude of a lot of the techno-savvy elite. In safeguarding his personal affairs, McClure says he will be "very diligent" in keeping bank and stock records for the months prior to January 2000. He will file away his 401(k) statements and buy plenty of candles and water and withdraw several weeks' worth of cash...
...year on the website of the Christian Coalition speculated that President Clinton might use the chaos that Y2K unleashes as an opportunity to seize dictatorial powers. The televangelist Pat Robertson is marketing a video called Preparing for the Millennium: A CBN News Special Report, which summarizes both the Y2K problem and Robertson's novel, The End of an Age, in which Armageddon is triggered by a meteor crash...
...control my environment." Near Boulder, Colo., Paloma O'Riley, an ex-Navy computer security specialist, has helped organize more than 200 groups nationwide through her Cassandra Project, an online Y2K advice network that gets half a million hits a month at its website. "Everybody's coming to this [problem] late," she says. "Most 'contingency plans' were written 10 years ago and put on a shelf...