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USA at some point had an anti-missile system that needed periodical reboots because it was originally designed for short deployments, so the floating point variable for the clock would start to lose precision after a while.



Floating point clocks do lose precision after long enough time though; see https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2012/02/13/dont-store-that...

Storing floating point coordinates for example is what causes the "farlands" world generation behavior in Minecraft, for example.


Which, of course, led to people dying when the drift was too great.





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