The Year 2038 Problem

[Stephen Sprunk]

Does liquid hydrogen ignite spontaneously in air? I wouldn't have
thought so.

Not in the scientific sense, but if you vented a significant mass of H2 in
an urban area, e.g. around automobiles, transformers, electric relays or
switches, etc, then ignition is almost guaranteed before it dissipates.

S

PS- We really need to find a more appropriate newsgroup for this thread.

 

[Richard Bos]

Probably you did, but surely you didn't believe all of them.

Of course not..

Of course there were scare stories, and lots of ridiculous rhetoric,
but that's true of any issue the media decides to hype. Much of it
wasn't true, and sensible people knew better.

Precisely. This is exactly what

means. The _scare_ turned out to be vastly overblown. There was a real
problem, but it was mostly solved before the media even got hold of it;
and then there was a media scare.

Richard

 

[Casper H.S. Dik]

Pull your head out of the sand for a moment, and take
a look at: http://www.grantjeffrey.com/article/y2kretro.htm

The article does not list the failures which occured as the
result of Y2K fixes, some of which were completely unneeded (merely
cosmetic); so I don't think it's a fair assesment; it certainly
does not proof that a "fix as event occurs" would have been as
dramatic as some would have it.

Casper

 

[Richard Bos]

As I mentioned in another reply, I was ignoring that bit of rhetoric.
Should have said so at the time.

Ignoring the rhethoric makes no sense when the original remark was
_about_ the rhethoric.

Richard

 

[Richard Bos]

I suspect just the opposite. In the ensuing uproar over renegade,
unprincipled, greedy software developers, government would just enact the
Federal Software Quality Commission to oversee and regulate the software
industry into submission.

Ah, yes. And all the world is the USA, of course. Snigger.

Richard

 

[August Derleth]

Ah, yes. And all the world is the USA, of course. Snigger.

Ok, then: Regulate the US economy into submission.

Better? ;-)

 

[SM Ryan]

# > Does liquid hydrogen ignite spontaneously in air? I wouldn't have

No, but it will volatise and diffuse with oxygen more quickly. Fire occurs
at the surface of the fuel and oxidiser, so the greater the surface, the
faster the burn. The same gasoline which burns cheerfully and nonexplosively
in a bucket makes a powerful fuel-air bomb if diffused as a vapour before
ignition.

Gasoline and propane vapours will sink until they ignite. Hydrogen vapours
will rise. That means if gasoline and propane can spread out underneath
a car and then burn upwards through the car, incinerating anybody unlucky
enough to still be inside. If hydrogen can vapourise and rise to a safe
distance before igniting, it might be spectacular but leave the car
occupants unharmed.

The situation depends on the physical distribution of gasses, liquids,
and oxygen as much as the chemistry.

# > The Hindenberg, in any case, was full of gaseous hydrogen, probably
# > safer than liquid, but anyway different. AFAIK, more than half of the
# > passengers survived, largely because a hydrogen fireball produces a
# > relatively small proportion of radiant heat.

Large amounts of any flammable material are dangerous. Texas City was
hit with a 4-kiloton blast when a load of fertilizer caught fire.

 

[Dan Pop]

But there are also branches that recognised the adjustments, but diverge
in the year I mentioned.

Even the branches that recognised the adjustments ignore them when
computing the Easter date. As a result, all the Orthodox people have the
Easter at the same time, but not the Christmas (which is Dec 25th for some
and Jan 7th for others).

Dan

 

[Nonymous]

When I was in middle school, mid to late 70's, they told us with

completely /authoritative tones/ that if the world were entirely hollow
and filled with oil that it would be used up before the year 2020.

Gee, wonder where they thought all the emmissions would go?

 

[Nonymous]

I assume that $20 is after inflation, which means it'll be on par

Now you are really trying to pull my chain. Better known as a
silly way to boil water.

'boil water'? How does one get hydrogen from vaporized water? Electrolysis
would be the way it would likely be extracted. i.e., run an electric
current through some water and the H2O molecules start to break apart with
the hydrogen atoms attracted to the negative current and O2 attrracted to
the positive. Capture the hydrogen gas at the negative current and you have
your hydrogen. Where do you get the electric current to do this? Doesn't
take much... try some solar panels.

 

[John Smith]

OK, Topic Nazi!

Godwin's Law invoked. Thread terminated.

 

[Lew Pitcher]

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'boil water'? How does one get hydrogen from vaporized water?

1) A nuclear power plant uses atomic decay to heat water to steam.
2) The steam goes into a steam turbine to generate electricity.
3) The electricity is used to electrolize water into hydrogen and oxygen
4) The oxygen is discarded, leaving hydrogen to power those hydrogen
engines.


[snip]


- --

Lew Pitcher, IT Consultant, Enterprise Application Architecture
Enterprise Technology Solutions, TD Bank Financial Group

(Opinions expressed here are my own, not my employer's)
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[Alan Balmer]

AB> The only reason it didn't happen was because we fixed it.

I was actually tasked with fixing one of these "y2k Bugs".

I had to rewrite a CGI script for the Air Force. The old one only
cared about the last 2 digits of the year I had to modify the
script to accept all 4 digits. (Presumably the air force can't infer
that a birthday marked 82 means 1982 and not 2082 (or 1882) and
has to be explicitly told.)

I obviously can't speak to that particular application, but the
so-called "window" solutions to the problems have limitations. In
fact, last month I invested significant effort to fix a program (data
storage in an educational environment) which broke when the university
involved enrolled an 82 year old student.

Of course this broke the badly
designed reporting format that the marketing company used and that
had to be redone too.

Quite a bit of work so it could be labeled Y2K compliant and make
DoD happy when the original script was quite sufficient.

For what range of years would it have been sufficient? Do you know for
a fact that it will never have to handle dates outside that range?

I got caught several years before Y2K. In 1973, I wrote a serial date
function (in assembler, fortunately) which would overrun its 16-bit
word size on a certain date in 1993. I even added a comment to that
effect. Neither I nor my employer ever imagined that software package
would still be in use twenty years later. You can guess the end of the
story - in early 1993, I was contracted to fix it. I was able to use
the overflow bit to double the function's range. If it overflows
again, I'll be many years past caring

 

[Mabden]

Godwin's Law invoked. Thread terminated.

Ah, at last someone gets it!

It hard to be a Troll in the City these days!

 

[Robert W. McAdams]

That's a small date problem, easily corrected. All it takes is an
amendment of a tiny expression to a still not complicated expression.
No changes to any interface are needed, so this is very straightforward
to put into effect.

It is certainly a much smaller problem than Y2000 was, since it will
not require changes to files or databases (which, in turn, have to be
coordinated with changes to all the programs that use those
files/databases), and since application programmers will not have to
wait for system software changes before addressing the problem. But
it does mirror other aspects of Y2000, in that it will take effect
everywhere at the same time and will affect all platforms and
languages (which could potentially overload available staff if it is
not dealt with in advance), and there is no way to determine which
applications need to be changed short of actually looking at the logic
in each one.


Bob McAdams
Fambright

 

[Robert W. McAdams]

Well, if I am not completely mistaken, there's quite a bit of a
difference in the _concentration_ the stuff has been hidden 'under
the rug' by nature (plus stuff like plutonium doesn't seem to be very
common there) and the one the waste products are going to be stashed
away in. Or did they come upt with a way to distribute that stuff
evenly over a volume of a small mountain range and nobody told me?

Actually , the issue is not CONCENTRATION, but RADIOACTIVITY. Nuclear
waste is, initially, much more radioactive than the uranium ore that
was mined to produce the nuclear fuel that, in turn, produced the
waste. But the most radioactive isotopes contained in the waste also
have short half-lives. The result is that if you can isolate the
waste from the biosphere for 1,000-10,000 years (depending on the type
of waste), at the end of that time it is less radioactive than the
uranium ore that was mined to produce it. (This is in sharp contrast
to, e.g., the toxic chemical wastes produced by coal combustion, which
never decay.)

Technologies already exist for isolating nuclear wastes from the
biosphere for that period of time. (In fact, the best of these
technologies utilizes a layered approach, in which a number of
isolation techniques are used together, each of which, by itself, is
capable of isolating the waste from the biosphere for substantially
more than 10,000 years.)


Bob

 

[Thomas G. Marshall]

Pull your head out of the sand for a moment, and take
a look at: http://www.grantjeffrey.com/article/y2kretro.htm

-- Bob Day

Indeed, I agree totally. But even if someone doesn't agree, /WHY/
*must* there always such a rush to 20-20 hindsight condemnation?

 

[Thomas G. Marshall]

Ah, at last someone gets it!

It hard to be a Troll in the City these days!

Nice try.

 

[Thomas G. Marshall]

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1) A nuclear power plant uses atomic decay to heat water to steam.
2) The steam goes into a steam turbine to generate electricity.
3) The electricity is used to electrolize water into hydrogen and
oxygen 4) The oxygen is discarded, leaving hydrogen to power those
hydrogen engines.

The pure O and O2 are fed into an O2 combustion engine to generate even
more....

(maybe?)

[snip]


- --

Lew Pitcher, IT Consultant, Enterprise Application Architecture
Enterprise Technology Solutions, TD Bank Financial Group

(Opinions expressed here are my own, not my employer's)
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[Thomas G. Marshall]

Gee, wonder where they thought all the emmissions would go?

ROTFLMAO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

YES!

I actually even remember one such similar argument from a clearly
ignorant teacher. Words to the effect of:

If we continue our throw-away society, the world will
be gaining mass from all the garbage...

Jeepers.