While watching the Jerry Springer Show this morning, "Update: I Cut Off My Manhood," I realized that the solution to the year 2000 problem is simple. On Jan 1, 2000, all the TV stations can begin showing nothing but Jerry Springer shows until programmers have time to work out all of the bugs in the system. This will keep the people most likely to panic and cause all sorts of problems busy, while giving people with brain cells left time to fix whatever problems may remain. (Even if this takes a few years to sort out, the Power of The Tube is capable of the task.) I have to go prepare my Nobel Prize acceptance speech... TruthMonger Harka wrote:
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Monday October 6 10:02 AM EDT
Millennium Bug Threatens Financial Chaos
By Nick Edwards
SINGAPORE - The millennium bug computer crisis threatens a global liquidity lock-up that could send the world's financial markets crashing.
With computers and automated systems now dominating global financial trade, experts fear the failure of a small proportion of systems on January 1, 2000, would bring chaos.
Machinery installed to make markets more efficient could cause their collapse, shattered by computers that fail to recognize the start of another working day.
At the end of 1999, many computers will either crash or start gushing out meaningless data because of programming shortcuts taken decades before to save computer memory.
Abbreviating years to two digits did save memory, but set a time bomb ticking for the end of the century when clocks inside computers will read a meaningless '00' for the year 2000.
And when the machinery controlling the money that makes the world go round seizes up, so too will the markets.
It is our prediction that it will only take five to 10 percent of the world's banks payments systems to not work on that one day to create a global liquidity lock-up," said Robert Lau, managing consultant at PA Consulting in Hong Kong.
I don't think the markets have quite grasped the implications of what will happen if the entire system goes down, " Lau told Reuters.
Peeling back the layers of the millennium bug problem is a little like peeling back the layers of an onion and the end result is the same -- it brings tears to the eyes, analysts say.
Banks will not be able to settle accounts, investors will not be able to access funds, traders will not be able to make deals, consumers will not be able to get cash, companies will not be able to buy materials.
Computer experts and business analysts are concerned that the scale of the problem is severely underestimated.
Lawyers say millennium litigation in the United States will be huge.
We forecast $1 trillion of litigation in the U.S.," Jeff Jinnett of U.S. law firm LeBoeuf Lamb Greene & MacRae told a conference in London earlier this year.
Taskforce 2000, a body working with Britain's Department of Trade and Industry, thinks the cost of ridding computers of their millennium bugs in Britain will be about 31 billion sterling.
In the U.K. it would take the commitment of the entire IT (information technology) industry and that is not about to happen," said Taskforce 2000 executive director Robin Guenier.
IT experts believe that if everybody in the world who has even a modest understanding of computer programming were to begin work correcting the millennium bug today, only 25 percent of the world's affected systems could be rectified.
With international financial markets entirely intertwined, curing the millennium bug on Wall Street would be pointless if Asia were crippled.
Some analysts think Asia's millennium problem is not as great as that of the West because computerization of routine business functions is not as widespread.
But key financial markets like Tokyo, Singapore and Hong Kong are exposed.
There might be less computing power in Asia, but that does not mean there is any less risk," Lau said.
A global survey of millennium bug awareness and preparedness is under way at PA Consulting, which aims to publish it by the end of the year. Lau expects the findings to make depressing reading.
One problem is that companies underestimate the problem significantly. Once they begin to work on it, their estimates of the cost of correcting it begin to escalate. Company directors do not see it initially as a business issue but an IT issue. Really it's the biggest business issue they face," Lau said.
On the international foreign exchange markets for example, more than $1 trillion a day changes hands.
Insurance is seen as one solution -- at least in terms of compensating firms hit by losses from the bug.
But insurers face myriad millennium problems themselves and could end up being the biggest victims of the crisis.
Not only do they have to tackle their own internal systems problems, their financial market transactions could be frozen by a global systems failure, their investments could plunge and the tangle of liability claims could be immense.
Clients have not set aside enough money to deal with the millennium bug and the scale of the problem is too large for them to handle alone," said Singapore-based Aruno Salvi, general manager of Reliance National Asia Re.
Sorting out who will pay for the damage by the thousands of cars likely to be in accidents caused by computer-controlled traffic lights that just blink out all over the world on January 1, 2000, is just one example.
But there is a silver lining to the millennium cloud for some, as PA Consulting estimates it could see the end of three percent of the world's companies.
On one level the millennium bug is a great opportunity. Some of your biggest competitors are going to go out of business," Lau said.
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