Congress voted to extend daylight savings time, which means that TVs, VCRs, Computers, Cell Phones, and other electronic toys may display the wrong time for parts of the year, or need to be updated manually.

An energy bill President Bush is to sign Monday would start daylight time three weeks earlier and end it a week later as an energy-saving measure.

And that has technologists worried about software and gadgets that now compensate for daylight time based on a schedule unchanged since 1987.

"It is unfortunately going to add a little bit of complexity to consumers," said Reid Sullivan, vice president of the entertainment group at Panasonic Consumer Electronics Co. "In some cases, depending on the product, they may have to manually increase or decrease the time."

The upcoming transition evokes memories of Y2K, the Year 2000 rollover that forced programmers to adjust software and other systems that, relying on two digits for the year, never took the 21st century into account...

Businesses and governments around the world threw some $200 billion at the problem, and the transition occurred without any worldwide disaster, even leading some critics to suggest they were victims of a big-money bamboozle.

This problem will likely be much smaller. But it's a good illustration of the law of unintended consequences.