Brexit Now or Y2038?

exit seems similar to Year 2000 to me - a do or die scenario.  Except with Year 2000 we knew we what to do to fix it. We weren't sure how well we would cover everything.  It was a new playing field - dates were 'sprinkled' everywhere in hardware and software. The conclusion today is that it was a better safe than sorry story.  Most at risk areas were transportation (falling planes), nuclear (war) and power facilities (survival kits).  The National Geographic says that Russia, Italy and South Korea had done little to prepare.  Australia and the U.S. prepared a lot.  The estimate was that $400 billion was spent - almost half in the U.S. to upgrade hardware and software.  National Geographic says the question remains open on whether it was warranted or might have been an exaggeration - a 'hoax'.   Since then there have been smaller issues:  In 2012, the addition of an extra second between Saturday and Sunday to account for the slowing rotation of the Earth affected flight check-ins in Australia, and hit popular websites including Yelp and Foursquare. There's one on the horizon:  It is Y2038 - the next Y2K kind of issue.  The year 2038 problem is called the end of UNIX time - it is caused by 32-bit processors and the limitations of the 32-bit systems they power. When the year 2038 strikes 03:14:07 UTC on 19 March, computers still using 32-bit systems to store and process the date and time will run out of space.  Like the Y2K bug, the computers won’t be able to tell the difference between the year 2038 and 1970 – the year after which all current computer systems measure time.  Most computers are now 64-bit systems so this issue lies with older systems.  Like Y2K, the biggest concern is transportation, power and nuclear systems.   Don't these seem so simple in comparison to Britain's "Day of reckoning"?   The Guardian has a live feed that goes 5 minutes ago, 14 minutes ago, 54 minutes ago, etc. It looks like a Y2K countdown.   Should we take the advice on this coffee cup?

More On Jokes

After selecting jokes the other day, I got to wondering about what makes some jokes funny and others not so.  This was the top-rated joke that I retrieved:   Richard Wiseman did the research in the early 2000's to find the world's funniest joke (done by public submissions and voting on the website Laughlab).  He wrote about it in his book Quirkology.   On richardwiseman.wordpress.com he has a downloadable pdf of the 1001 jokes submitted to Laughlab.  This is the first joke in the list, and it is a great one: What does an agnostic, dyslexic, insomniac do? Stays up all night wondering if there is a Dog. While Richard was busy getting people to submit jokes and evaluate what is funniest, we've got lots of people experimenting with computers generating jokes.  The motivation is to create a more natural language between computers and humans.  It turns out that generating jokes is a path towards sophisticated conversation. Computers are good at knock-knock jokes and Q and A jokes - so far, they can be taught to work 'inside the box' with a rules-based approach.  Beyond that, there's still a lot of work to do on the path to natural conversation.  You can check them out at this site with computer generated jokes HERE.  You can try out the joke generator.  This is their top-rated joke: What kind of murderer has moral fiber? A cereal killer. Along with the computer-generated jokes, an experimental site named Which Face is Real? was on the list.  I don't know how it related to computer jokes, but I checked it out.  It is HERE. The choice is between a real image of a person and a computer-generated image.  They all look real/unreal to me.  I can't tell the differences. But then can I tell when an image is photoshopped?  Remember the Grumpy Cat?  She turns out to be a real cat named Tard.  Are her pictures real or fake?  It turns out she looks like that.  Her owners have shared videos to prove her face is what it is in the pictures.     So today's pictures are colour-stretched grunge abstracts.

Why is a Computer so Smart?

Wake Up on the Bright Side - Because it has a Motherboard Mother's Day weekend saw a worldwide online extortion attack in somewhere between 74 and 150  countries.  Included are government organizations such as NHS in Britain. It is called 'ransomware' in which people are locked out of their files and presented with a demand to pay hackers. What a story of intrigue that involves the US National Security Authority code known as "Eternal Blue" which made its way from a hacking organization called Shadow Brokers to a separate crime gang. Demands have ranged from $US300 to $US600.  The campaign was spreading five million emails per hour. The malware's name is WCry.  In Spain, major firms had to shut down computers using megaphone announcements. Even Russia was hit by a virus attack. Experts believe the timing is related to the April 14 attack by the US on Syria with a message from the Shadow Brokers that they voted for Trump and are losing faith in him.  We have two lake views today - the first from Grimsby's Nelles Beach.  This canoe up on the shore just seemed like one of those absurd scenes.  There's a boat launch access at Nelles Beach, which can explain the canoe sitting there.  There is no beautiful sandy beach to stroll along this year with the high lake levels. The next one is from a lakefront home in Burlington, showing its beautiful view across the bay to the Burlington Bridge.