I thought I'd better to send you the follow-up (debunking?), too. Eva > >From the Los Angeles Times > Monday, February 22, 1999 > > The Y2K Bug Has Company in the Form of 'Time Dilation' Computers: Pair who > stumbled on the odd phenomenon insist it's a legitimate concern. Others > call their warnings a scare tactic. This rubbish from Elchin and Crouch has been around for a while. Here are two of my messages to the Australian Computer Society's Y2K list: 24 February > >From Mike Echlin... > > Hi Carl, > > As you say its not easily replicated, and this is why a lot of people have > wrtten it off, they tried a few times, didn't see it, so say, "not gonna > hit me." > > But they are wrong, Every year or two a rumour circulates that a time bomb virus is out there, set to go off on a certain date and do dreadful things. Each time this happens, "current affairs" programs find a few poor people who didn't take the precautions and had computer problems. Warning!!! The PBhaha virus is set to come into operation on 22/9/1999. This evil program hides itself on your computer (it cannot be detected by any anti-virus program) until it detects that the date has rolled to 22/9/1999. When it sees this date, it generates a random number and, based on the value returned, causes either your hard disk or the fan in your power supply to fail. If either of these things happen when you turn on your computer on that date you have probably become a victim. This is a hybrid virus and is equally likely to affect PCs running DOS or Windows (any flavour from 1.1 to 2000), Macs, Linux boxes and HP network printers with hard disks. (A lot of Macs are immune to the fan problem, though.) Do not switch your machine on on that date unless you have adequate backups. But seriously - a couple of dozen computers from the hundreds of millions out there exhibit some non-reproducible anomaly in the BIOS or RTC date and this guy reckons Armageddon is here. Where's the pattern? Where are the large number of machines from the same manufacturer which all exhibit the same symptoms and which do it every time the test is applied? Time Dilation! More like "Brain Dilation". Perhaps we could call it "Brain Shrinkage, or "BS" for short. Crouch's website looks like a definite Quintessence candidate. =========================== 5 March I spend a lot of my time online with people who are fighting quack medicine and other forms of ratbaggery such as those who claim paranormal powers of various kinds or are aware of events occurring through Forces Unknown To Science (FUTS). I was sceptical of Elchin and Crouch immediately, simply because they exhibit all the hallmarks of the mad scientist. Please note that scepticism does not mean immediate rejection, only a desire for truth. Cold fusion was not rejected immediately even though it looked highly probable that Fleischmann and Pons were either mistaken or deluded. It is classic quack or woowoo practice to quote slim anecdotal "evidence" and then demand that everyone else prove the findings to be false. Leaving aside the impossibility of proving a negative, the onus of proof has to be on the claimant, and, as we say in the sceptic business, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof". Many of these mad claims can be ignored because they are either obviously impossible (eg perpetual motion machines) or of no urgency. Unfortunately this one addressed a real problem with real urgency. This meant that real scientists had to spend real time and real money investigating the claims of these fools, claims based on the fact that highly improbable random events can happen. (The next time you hear of someone winning Lotto, remember that the win was less probable than your Windows machine running for 1,000 years without a problem.) The public have been scared silly by much of the talk about the Y2K problem and are susceptible to almost any stupid claim of a solution (I will talk about MFX2000 at another time). Like quack cancer cures or stories about planetary alignment, these things bring false hope (or fears) and demands for investigation. Like these other lunacies they waste everyone's time when there are real problems to solve. ..................... Peter Bowditch [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gebesse.com.au ----- End of forwarded message from Peter Bowditch -----
