I discovered last fall that the U.S. Postal Service can send a package into the future. Apparently, they can send objects into the past as well. Here’s the status report on my most recent amazon.com order. Just what exactly did happen on the afternoon of December 31, 1969?
Comment by 
BeckoningChasm
May 4, 2007 @ 4:58 pm
There was a science fiction story some time ago, positing that since letters sent within a city took weeks to arrive, while those across country took a matter of days, that anything mailed to Alpha Centauri would cause the discover of faster-than-light drive. Now I find out it wasn’t fiction!
Comment by 
Steven Den Beste
May 4, 2007 @ 7:24 pm
Oh, by the way, all of this is UMT. The reason the timestamp displayed is one second before 4PM is that it was in timezone -8.
Comment by Steven Den Beste
May 4, 2007 @ 7:25 pm
And just now I remembered something that had been nagging me. In the classic computer game “Maniac Mansion”, it’s necessary to get a letter delivered to a certain place and time. The solution is to use a time machine to send it into the past with appropriate era-postage.
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Comment by
Steven Den Beste
May 3, 2007 @ 9:24 pm
I know you’re joking, but in case you’re interested, midnight on January 1 1970 is referred to as “the epoch“. That’s time 0 for the Unix file system, and by infection for a lot of other things.
My guess is that the date stamp got filled in with -1 as a default placeholder value, which would make it look like one second before midnight on Decenber 31, 1969 if a conditional somewhere didn’t realize that it wasn’t supposed to interpret it at all.