The cover of one news magazine asked recently "Could two measly digits really halt civilisation?" and answered "Yes, yes 2,000 times yes!".If the world's companies and governments really were to do nothing about the millennium bug, then dire results would certainly follow.
Mr. Cheney recalled hotels with "green used hospital sheets and nonworking shower heads," one that "offered exposed wiring and bed bugs," another so dire that "the advance staff asked to be transferred to the local KOA campground".
The result has all the urgency of a theater piece in 2004 looking to parse the dire threats posed by the Y2K bug.
It's hugely profitable, enough to warrant grimly relentless efforts, via legal and other channels, to ensure that every do-gooder attempt to ameliorate the dire consequences is crushed like a bug.
Things crescendo to the realization (surprising to them, startling to us) that, as per the Dire Straits, sometimes you're the windshield, sometimes you're the bug.
With warm weather and mosquito season imminent, little progress has been made in passing the funding health experts seek to combat the bug-borne menace, which officials warned this week is more dire than previously thought.
In 1981 Stuart Levy, the Tufts professor, along with 200 other scientists and public health officials in numerous countries, issued one of the first dire public warnings about the misuse of antibiotics and the risks of killer bugs resistant to them.
