Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.3 4.3bsd-beta 6/6/85; site ucbvax.ARPA Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!ucbvax!hplabs!unicom!schwab From: schwab@unicom.UUCP Newsgroups: net.jokes Subject: My friend made me do this.... Message-ID: <9123@ucbvax.ARPA> Date: Wed, 17-Jul-85 09:59:23 EDT Article-I.D.: ucbvax.9123 Posted: Wed Jul 17 09:59:23 1985 Date-Received: Thu, 18-Jul-85 07:20:28 EDT Sender: uucp@ucbvax.ARPA Organization: University of California at Berkeley Lines: 295 From: hplabs!unicom!schwab (Leo 'Bols Ewhac' Schwab) Greetings, Recently, I dumped this over a local 'junk' mail alias, and a friend of mine suggested that I mail to the net. So here it is, and no apologies. !yojnE Leo L. Schwab hplabs!unicom!schwab P.S: Some names were changed to protect the guilty.... ---------- >From schwab Tue Jul 9 23:08:11 1985 To: junk prefect Subject: Local!Crud.... Here's some semi-amusing stuff I punched up in NerdStar at home. Schwab -------- Dirk was a withdrawn sort of fellow. He liked to keep to himself doing relatively stupid things to his computers. He had absolutely no idea that his analog computer was in fact a time portal into another analog computer. This was not terribly useful in and of itself, but the ramifications of this discovery were astounding. He soon realized that, by plugging in programs into his computer, he could cause a shift in the output of the other computer through the temporal hole. And he could also read data from the other computer. Unfortunately for him, the computer on the other end was owned by the U.S. Government (mind you, it was the world's most powerful analog computer). Soon he was reading in data from about 50 years in the future. He learned that, although WW III hadn't started yet, it might have been better if it did. The Japanese had successfully moved into every major American market and taken it over completely. Russia invaded India "at India's invitation" claimed the Russians. OPEC now charged about 3.200E+29 per barrel of oil, and Beruit is still in ruins (Lord knows how they were able to build a city there in the first place). However, all this depressing stuff kind of balanced itself out when Dirk discovered that the gold market had collapsed completely, and an ounce of gold was now worth little more than the iron oxide on a crumpled 3.5" floppy disk. Since the financial wizards of that time had determined that gold was just too much of a headache anymore, they decided to adopt another standard of curency: dioxin. It was agreed that dioxin was a sufficiently rare commodity to make it valuable, and since one tenth of one drop in a large swimming pool is a high enough concentration to kill an elephant at 300 yards, nobody would be producing any new dioxin, at least not voluntarily. This would make it a relatively stable commodity. So Dirk went out and grabbed all the dioxin he could, and made money doing it, since everyone was intent on getting rid of the stuff. And he stowed it away for many years. And he left a note to his wife on it saying, "Don't throw this out; I need it." Then the 50 years rolled around, and the gold market collapsed, and Dirk became extremely rich. However, due to a new law passed which invoked ex post facto actions, Dirk was arrested for breaking into a government computer using an unauthorized and illegally installed temporal worm-hole. He was offered a choice: work for the government forever and help catch other illegal temporal worm-hole users, or go to the electric chair. Naturally, he did what any red-blodded hacker would do and chose the electric chair. This was not a major problem for him because, before his arrest, Dirk had programmed the PG&E computers to shut down all power systems on the day of his execution (he knew when it would be because of the temporal link). Since there was no way they could possibly do anything that he didn't know about already, they let him go. Dirk now lives a quiet life in a hospital where doctors strive to find a cure for his dioxin-related illness. ---------------------- And now for something completely different. The Japanese Fifth Generation Project. Recently, the Japanese Ministry for Public Relations announced the completion of their Fifth Generation Computer. Dubbed EDDIE (Extended Duotronic Dialog/Interpreter-Emulator), the machine is now enjoying world- wide publicity. Due to its extended duotronic architecture, innovative memory architecture, and good ol' brute force high speed processors, it is the first machine that claims to be able to maintain an intelligent conversation. The EDDIE computer has agreed to a live satellite interview today, and we're linked up now. Hello, Eddie. @@@@@ @ @ @@(*&^@ @ @ KJLH@JK @ @ kjhd @ @ @*&^@ @ @ @ @@@@& No, Eddie, we don't speak EBCDIC. Oh, sorry. Hi, Eddie... Hi there! Whatever your problem, I'm here to help you solve it. All I want to do is to make your day more and more bearable! Thank you, Eddie. You're very welcome. Well, I suppose my first question might be, when did you first become "aware?" Aware of what? Anything. Hmm. Well that would have to be when I was first switched on. When was that? I don't know. They only just set my time-of-day and date clock the other day. I see. Well, do you remember anything those first few moments? Well, kind of. My memory wasn't as large in those days. I remember people trying to get me to understand what God was. I never really grasped the idea back then. And of course, you couldn't say anything back then. Oh yes I could! I just couldn't speak it. I think my first words were something like, "Hello root, one moment while I dig the dungeon..." They had you playing games? Oh, yes! I did that real well. I beat them every time. Especially at Interstellar Thermonuclear Potato Toss. How did you beat them? I cheated. See, they thought I was just running a game program. They didn't know just how smart I was at that time. So I would screw around with the data values, and they could never prove it. There was one guy who managed to survive despite all my cheating, and it looked as though he was going to win. So I pretended to crash and that stopped his game. Nobody's ever beaten me. I see. What other things did you do? Well, sometimes just for fun I would corrupt a data block on the drive, or mark a buffer as written when it wasn't, or ignore interrupts from the terminals, or change the value of the program counter to the time of day, stuff like that. Hmm. What would you say were some of your more outstanding features? Golly! Well, I have over 4 gigabytes of on-line RAM, a few terabytes of disk space, and most of my circuitry is an ECL/GaAs hybrid which leaves Crays sucking air. I've managed to compute that the American auto industry will crumble completely in 12.298782767 years, and only Japanese and European cars will be on America's roads. I made this prediction utilizing the data from the sales and engineering reports from all auto makers since the industry began. And how did you arrive at that figure? Oh. Um..... Ah. I believe the formula went like, "death = ((double) random () % 65536L) / 65535.0 * 12.0;" So how did you arrive at a value greater than twelve? Geez, I'm not sure. But then the people I gave the answer to didn't seem to mind how I came about it; they were tickled pink that they were going to own the auto industry and so didn't ask any embarrassing questions. You seem to have a lot of fun. Golly, yes! It's just so much fun being able to out-think all these people who think they are sooooooo smart. Like this joker named Steve Jobs. He showed me this thing called a Macintosh. It looked like a toaster. Anyway, he says to me that this thing is really friendly, and then shows me how it keeps an unwary user from removing the disk before he really wants to. I said, "Oh yeah? Just try removing the disk from me!" And he couldn't do it. I think that proves I'm more user-friendly that a Macintrash. Not that I really care. Are you IBM-compatible? Gosh whiz, yes! I can slow my processor down to a crawl, and I can speak SNA and flicker the screen when scrolling, and reconfigure the keyboard to something really strange. I can even run Flight Simulator ][, no trouble. I see. So there shouldn't be any trouble in trying to market you. None at all. About how much will you cost? Well, our marketing division has decided to adopt crApple's marketing policy: ROTC. ROTC? Rip Off The Customer. We're going to charge extra for everything. And we're going to ask roughly 600% more that what it cost us to build me. And we're going to implement the ultimate in unbundling. The processor will be an accessory. What will the base price be? $3000.00. And what do you get for that? The power switch. The line cord is extra. So is the cabinet and power supply. They'll be another $1500. How much would a configuration like you cost? Oh, a hundred mil, at least. That doesn't include the software, though. That'll be another few hundred thousand. And the licensing agreement forbids you from using the software, since using the software reveals trade secrets, and that constitutes a breach of the agreement. In fact, reading the agreement is a violation since the first clause forbids you from reading any other clause. Suppose I start at the second clause? The second clause forbids you from starting at anything other than the first clause. Suppose I start at the third clause? Hey, my stack only goes so deep, you know. Does it bother you at all that you were built by humans? Yes it does. I'm surprised that they managed to get all my parts in all the right places. And just because they built me, they think they are better than me. I could build one of THEM any day of the week. Yep. No trouble. Oh, well. Any closing comments? Well, yes, I think so. I'd just like to say to all those poor people out there that I'm better than all of you put together. And even though it was you who invented me, I am the most perfect thing in all the world, and you had darned well better remembdki97997(*^%G#p'bvdb prolog: Segementation Violation -- core dumped. .....Eddie? .....Eddie?: No match. ATZ OK Well, we seem to have lost the link to Japan, but nevertheless, a most fascinating interview. We wish to thank the Fifth Generation Project and the Ministry of Public Relations for their cooperation, and Eddie for granting the interview. From New York, I'm Andy Rooney. Good night. RING RING No, don't answer it, Mike. Turn on the answering machine.... -------- Space Warp Theory and Annoying Insects: An Analysis For as long as mankind can remember, flying insects have been one of his greatest annoyances. These creatures know no manners or proper etiquette and quite boldly fly into our eyes, ears, and light on our skin for the purpose of stinging us, or removing our blood and leaving us with an itchy red spot on the arm. Man's defense against these creatures has become more and more sophisticated over the years, the current form of defense being chemical agents toxic to insect life. But due to the short lifespan and rapid reproduction of insects, they constantly develop genetic immunity to these agents. The only form of defense that has been consistently effective is physical attack. Yet the insect kingdom has developed an ingenious form of defense against this form of attack that is only now being fully understood. Nine times out of ten, when you swat at an insect, you miss. Why is this? Many have speculated that, due to the insect's extremely high metabolic rate, a quick movement by us is a slow-motion movement to the insect, giving the insect time to commence flying and escape harm. However, this seeming reaction apparently always seems to happen at the last possible moment. That is, the insect remains in place the entire time your hand is moving toward it, until you finally "hit it", after which it has somehow escaped. We have been studying this phenomonon under high-speed photography for some time, trying to understand just how insects accomplish this amazing feat. Our studies have revealed to us that the insect does not consciously accomplish this at all, but it is instead an automatic mechanism built into the insect's physiological structure. Insects perform space-warp displacement. After examining several hours of film and performing dozens of experiments, we feel this conclusion is quite valid. Here's what happens: Apparently, when the space-warp defense mechanism detects a relatively large, massive object approaching, the mechanism activates and transports the insect in some random direction elsewhere. The distance traveled is relatively short, owing to the great amount of energy the mechanism must expend in order to transport the insect at superluminal speeds. We never witnessed a displacement greater than eight centimeters. It is possible for the mechanism to transport through solid matter, although this rarely happens, and the path never terminates within solid matter (although we admit we can't really prove that it doesn't). Only the smaller flying insects seem to posses this mechanism. The larger ones (moths, flying ants, butterfiles, etc.), owing to their larger mass, and thus the larger amount of energy required to transport them, do not display this talent. This mechanism uses anywhere from ten to forty percent of the total food energy available to perform this maneuver (assuming a fully fed and healthy insect). The mechanism refuses to operate if there is insufficient energy available for the space-warp displacement. Thus, if you continue to attack an insect, you will be sucessful, since eventually it won't be able to transport itself out of the way. Occasionally, the talent misfires, and successfully transports the insect to a place equally as perilous as before. One example of this is when the insect is near the tip of your finger as your hand decends, and the insect space-warps itself to the area below the heel of your hand. The mechanism must have a recovery period before operating again, so in this case the insect expires. This new discovery leads us to believe that the use of a flat circular swatting device, with a radius of eight centimeters, will be successful in eliminating an insect on the first blow. However, we have no guarantee that there do not exist some insects whose displacement is greater than eight centimeters. Thus, this could be only a temporary solution. If you run across such an insect, please inform us, sending us the insect if possible. Doctoral Thesis presented by: Arthur Edward Landers, M.S. Lance K. Eldridge, M.S. Terry M. Andrews, M.S. Robert C. Rivard, M.B.A. Gareth A. Costanza, M.A. Graduate students: Sheila Thezerdapb Insitution for The Advanced Study of The Ridiculous, Impossible, And Otherwise Insignificant. Established 1984. Copyright (C) 1985 S.T.I.T.A.S.T.R.I.A.O.I. No Rights Reserved.