A short-term kludge is to use five or six digits for the date instead of four digits. But that only delays the problem, and raises the specter of a Y100K crisis or a Y1M crisis. The only real, permanent solution is for all computer hardware and software to be able to handle all dates between the Big Bang and the final collapse of the universe. All date-handling software should have a subroutine to calculate general relativity effects for those dates which are close to the beginning or end of the universe, so that users don't enter any illegal values.

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