I'm sending this to the list for anyone else thinking about writing
time travel stories depending on GPS rather than newspapers, etc.
to figure out the time.

At 08:20 PM 9/14/97 -0400, you wrote:

One day after the -3rd anniversary of the Second Impact, my third fic.
And, surprisingly, it's a take on the events surrounding the second
impact. 

A very clever story; however, there's one technical issue:

  Within seconds he remembered that he could display a window with
global positioning information, but it seemed that Asuka had beaten
him to it. "It looks like we're in... Antarctica? And this can't be
right. The time signals says that we're in the year 2000."

  Shinji checked the same display on his system. It read September
13, 2000 04:28 am GMT, and also indicated that it thought this was 
an illegal time. "Antarctica. September 13, 2000...", he wondered out
loud.

It's my understanding, which I am double checking at the relevant site

	http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/gps_week.html

(when it's back on the air), that the GPS system uses a 13 bit counter for
days and weeks.  I think 10 bits are used for the week and 3 (obviously)
for the day of the week.  I.e. it can count up to 1024 weeks or slightly
less than 20 years, and then it starts over again.

What I know for sure is that this clock rolls over on August 22, 1999.
It will not have rolled over again by 2014, and that means the Evangelions
will have to guess---are they around 6 years in the future, or 14 years
in the past?

If the coders for the Evangelion computer system have their act together,
and expect the EVAs to last a few years (they don't know what Gendou/SEELE
knows...) they'll probably be prepared for roll over, and the EVAs will
interpret the date to be in the future.  If the programmers are lazy, the
EVAs will think it's the past....

Does WWV announce the date every minute?  Not that I remember.  (WWV in
Colorado and another station in Hawaii send out shortwave time information;
I believe the Russians do this sort of thing as well.)

I can't help but close by saying that the real Second Impact, which will
almost certainly kill thousands of people at minimum (I expect > 10K and
hope less than 100K), will happen from late 1999 through 2001, and is
know today as the Year 2000 bug....

					- Harold