QUIZZICAL QUOTATIONS

Answers, as usual, next issue or from the usual address.

• They'll talk to ya and talk to ya and talk to ya about individual freedom, but they see a free individual, it's gonna scare 'em.
• We just put Sir Isaac Newton in the driver's seat.
• You know the saying - "Human see, human do."
• Waiter, I'm in my soup!
• Don't call me a mindless philosopher, you overweight glob of grease!

Last issue's quotations were:

• I got a new game we can play. It's called "Hide the Soul." Trust me, you'll love it.
  -- Child's Play 3
• Rosebud...
  -- Citizen Kane
• There's nothing more exhilarating than pointing out the shortcomings of others, is there?
  -- Clerks
• Old people can be so sweet!
  -- Clueless
• You turds sit here while I listen to my Britney Spears record.
  -- South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut

Y2K Special edition

While for the most part the Y2K bug has failed to bite there have been a few fairly minor incidents. Here are our favourites so far...

The computer-regulated clock in a church belltower in Bonate Sotte, Italy, reset its year to 1980 and started ringing the bells at 6.15 a.m. New Year's Day, no doubt much to the consternation of townspeople trying to sleep off the night before...

Not a direct bug incident, but we can't help feeling sorry for Thai street food vendor Kieuthong Attaparb who was so worried about the potential threat of the bug that she withdrew 100,000 baht (about $2,700) from the bank to keep at home over the new year weekend, only to lose the lot when her house burned down on Sunday morning. The bank, meanwhile, has reported no Y2K troubles.

A Colonie, New York, video store's computer failed to interpret the year as 2000, opting for 1900 instead and deciding that a customer returning a copy of The General's Daughter a day late was instead 100 years overdue and owed $91,250. Terry Field, owner of the Super Video store, saw the humorous side, wiped out the late charge and gave the customer a free rental.

Medical history was almost made in Denmark when a woman gave birth to an - apparently - 100-year-old baby, after a nurse found that the hospital computer would not acccept the year 2000 being entered as Jette Kristiansen's second child's birth year.

The most noticeable effect of the bug so far seems to have been a fault with interpreting the tm_year element of C's tm structure, which returns a value of year-1900. As long as this was less than 99 it was possible to just print "19" followed by the value returned. Unfortunately this doesn't work any more and a number of websites and old software have been reported as giving the year as 19100. Perhaps most ironically this included the New York Times website, on a page whose subheading was "Few Y2K Glitches Reported So Far".

IRREGULAR WEBSITE OF THE WEEK

If you have not already seen it, this is the last daily Peanuts strip:

http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/peanuts/lastorig.html

THE AMAZING NOT-QUITE-RANDOM LOTTERY PREDICTOR!

Madame Jennifer, our in-house psychic predicts the following numbers will be lucky:

2, 8, 10, 19, 44, 46

...end of line