As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was lying on his hard, as it were armour-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his dome-like brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bedquilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis The Millennium Bug is not a bug. It is a design fault -possibly the most expensive in

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... n history. When the twentieth century ends many software applications will either stop working or give erroneous results. Perhaps it is also an allegory -for the chaos and uncertainty surrounding the transition to new uncharted territories. The Binary Utopian Gateway; a government sponsored construct, a tool for control, a symbol to mark the shared experience of transition. We are exhorted to purge our systems. Orwellian advertising warns of the dire consequences of non-New Worlds; New Landscapes Evolution, said Julian Huxley, is in three different sectors. The first is organic -the cosmic process of matter. The second is biological -the evolution of plants and animals. The third is psychological and is the development of man's cultures. It is this third stage that is now critical, and if we are to survive as a species it can only be by replacing nature's controls by our own, not only birth control but our use of the whole environment.