>So is Y2K *that* bad? I've heard conflicting
>accounts. What's the scoop. Should I start stocking up? If I
>get a new 'fuser, what should I look for?
An unqualified maybe. I don't think you need to stock up anymore than you do for hurricanes or earthquakes--in other words, you might want a week's worth of canned foods & water around because there may be temporary power outages since many utilities only started taking it seriously within the last year and their problem is the hardest to fix. Their Y2K problems are largely in hard-wired code in chips, not just rewritable software, and in a number of cases Y2K versions of these chips are simply not available off the shelf because so much of the equipment in a typical power plant is pretty old. So, what do they have to do? Either toss a $350,000 component and replace it with a new one, typically with some re-engineering of other inter-dependent components, or get a new chip reverse-engineered and custom-made. Now of course, "custom-made" is typically a euphemism in this case, because someone has sprung up and started making a bundle dealing with the typical components found in power plants, but all-in-all it's a major and very expensive hassle.
But will the power be out for six months? No. Will food distribution systems cease to exist? No. Will Jesus come to ask why you think those horrible thoughts about your step-mother? That's between you & your god.
As for your 'fuser, if you buy a new one, just ask if it's "Y2K compliant."
It's a no-brainer that it will be if it's truly new, but ask anyway. There's also freeware to confirm it that I'll dig around and find on Monday if you are really worried. Most Pentium and up systems will handle Y2K, although you may have to go into the system setup on 1/1/00 and manually change it to 2000 on the older Pentiums.
Finally, someone sad something about there needing to be a leftist position on Y2K. Huh? Why and what would it look like?
Patrick