Re: the Y2K glitch...

It DID have some practical effects on the world, but they were covered fairly quickly.

I work for a company that does a fair amount of work with credit card charges, and due to a faulty update, over a period of roughly two weeks anyone who was charged suddenly found themselves being recharged on a daily basis until the company found the bug and stopped it.

As of now, I believe that they've finally fixed the problem and reversed the charges. However, it wasn't just us that got hit... The rough estimate that we heard was something in the neighborhood of 7-800,000 affected consumers.

There were other smaller problems as well, that were cleared before hand. During a test a few months before New Year's at a local Waste Management facility, a computer failed to register a real alarm during the test and dumped a few hundred gallons of raw sewage into a local drainage canal. I've also heard of a few cases of the traffic grid going briefly haywire during very late night tests that they ran in Loa Angeles.

As Amos more or less said, I feel we got off lucky.

M