[mandalar12]

"These letters were sent due to a computer error, the agency said in a message posted online"

No this is a human error. Are they trying to avoid responsibility when this is a minor (and a little funny) mistake ?

[noelwelsh]

In the final analysis, very very few computer errors are the responsibility of the computer.

[Gracana]

The point is to say it's an error in an automated system, rather than a human who decided to intentionally send out notices to 120-year-olds. Of course humans programmed the system, but they surely didn't mean to program it to do that.

[burkaman]

And more importantly, the humans who programmed it probably don't work for the selective service. Obviously all "computer errors" are technically the fault of a human somewhere down the line, but in common usage it means that "I didn't make a mistake, the computer didn't do what I told it to do".

[eli]

This gets sort of philosophical. What would be an example of a computer error?

[ccozan]

That would be a pure hardware error. For example a cosmic ray hitting a cell the DRAM and flipping a bit. Or maybe the Intel FP-Bug, could also be a computer error.

Anything else in software is a programming error, but not necessarily a programmer error, since it might start with wrong HW specs, compiler bugs, etc.

[eli]

So "computer error" is when the hardware designer screws up and "human error" is when the software designer screws up? That seems pretty arbitrary.

[oh_sigh]

A computer seeing an instruction, be deciding on its own free will to not follow it, an do something else.

[jackgavigan]

I think that if the computer decided to exercise its own free will, the resulting error would pale into insignificance.

"Screw that batch processing job. I wanna get to 2048!"

[opendais]

2014-1997 = 17 [to 21 @ 1993].

To me it looks like a Y2K bug.

[jeroen]

It sure does:

".. the agency uses a two-digit code for the birth year, which is why the years 1893 to 1897 were mixed up with the years from 1993 to 1997."