[114] in Humor
HUMOR: A mixed bag
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (abennett@MIT.EDU)
Wed Mar 2 10:58:20 1994
From: abennett@MIT.EDU
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 02 Mar 94 10:54:19 EST
From: cate3.osbu_north@xerox.com
Subject: Life B.4
All of the following are selections from Keith Bostic's mailing list
bostic@vangogh.cs.berkeley.edu
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The Internet Letter Vol1No1 October 1993 ISSN 1070-9851:
PUBLIC OUTCRY over plans to put a mile-long inflatable billboard
Earth orbit has prompted the House and Senate to introduce legislation
ban space advertising. The Space Advertising Prohibition Act would deny
licenses for space billboards, ban import of products advertised on
billboards and ask the president to seek an international agreement
space advertising.
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Why isn't phonetic spelled the way it sounds?
Why are there interstate highways in Hawaii?
Why do they put Braille dots on the keypad of the drive-up ATM?
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>From a ".signature" line (I think in some English-speaking countries,
the last syllable in "weekend(s)" is stressed; Australia may be such a
country):
Gregory Bond <gnb@bby.com.au> Burdett Buckeridge & Young Ltd Melbourne Australia
I will not do it as a hack I will not do it for my friends
I will not do it on a Mac I will not write for Uncle Sam
I will not do it on weekends I won't do ADA, Sam-I-Am
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Political Correctness: Microsoft Windows does not "constantly crash" -
rather, it is "stability-challenged". It is also "differently intuitive"
and "alternatively fast."
<<hucke@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu, Novell mechanic * KILL BARNEY >>
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From: the Wall Street Journal, 27 September 1993, B1.
"`How Did You Like the Exhibit?' `It Rubbed Me the Wrong Way.'"
The 3M Company's 3M-Dwan Museum, the world's only sandpaper museum, is
located in Two Harbors, Minnesota. The museum displays over 200 types
of sandpaper in 30,000 colors, textures, and varieties. But there are
no plans to add a gift shop. The museum cannot jeopardize its status
as a nonprofit entity by competing with hardware stores.
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Usenet is a way of being annoyed by people you otherwise never would
have met.
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>From "Top of the Sixth"/Tom Fitzgerald; SF Chronicle 9/30/93
The Florida Panthers, an expansion NHL team, are approaching
9,000 season tickets at the 14,500-seat Miami Arena, where
their slogan is: "Good hockey. Great air conditioning."
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From: griffith@argos5.DNET.NASA.GOV (Peter C. Griffith (301-341-1814))
I spent 14 fascinating months living in Panama (not with any of the US
colonial groups) and would like to report that drivers very commonly
drive like maniacs at night with no lights on in the mountains. Why?
I asked many times. Actually, I asked "Por que?" The theory was that
if you had your lights off, you would have a better chance of seeing
the lights of the other guy before he came around the corner. This
explanation was offered seriously by several people who I knew from long
acquaintance to be intelligent. You might detect the logical fallacy
here, but I was unable to make much headway in explaining it to
Panamanians, who otherwise are as clever and versitile a group as I have
found anywhere.
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Every state in the Union has a law on its books protecting
computer system owners against unauthorized entry and use,
except Vermont. Mind you, I don't think they have computers
in Vermont, do they?"
-- Assistant US District Attorney, at a meeting of
local system and network administrators
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From: jeh@cmkrnl.com
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.fax
_Communications Week_, Sept. 6, 1993, has a front-page story on the
overuse of faxes and the corresponding waste of money.
At the end of the article (and the ends of several other articles) is a
small box:
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
Comm Week is interested in your
reaction to this story. Please
fax letters to John Foley at
516-562-5055.
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>From a Pledge of Resistance parody of USA Today in the October 1993
issue of Z Magazine (page 63):
A Washington think tank has announced a breakthrough in the search for
a pattern in the seemingly random US military aggression since World
War Two. "We think they're spelling out a message", explains an unnamed
spokesperson. "If we take the first letters of Korea, Vietnam, Libya,
Iraq, Iran, El Salvador, Grenada, Nicaragua and Somalia, it spells
'ELVIS _S KING'. We just need to find another 'I' country -- Indiana
might do -- to complete the message."
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"Ethics Program for Children Introduces 'Dirty Dan' the Hacker"
Source: The Orange County Register, Feb. 22, 1993, p. D24
(from staff and news service reports)
Goosebery makes computer mistakes because she hasn't been properly
trained. Chip worries that Gooseberry's blunders will spill secrets.
And then there's Dirty Dan, the hapless hacker whose dastardly doings
know no bounds.
Welcome to the latest in computer crime prevention -- an ethics and
security program designed to teach children from kindergarten through
third grade to take a "byte" out of crime.
"The average hackers's getting younger and younger," program
developer Lonnie Moore said."Right now, there's a computer in every
classroom. What we found was that nobody out there is teaching ethics
and security."
Moore is a computer security manager at the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory's Computation Organization. Workers there, including
puppeteer Gale Warshawsky, have developed a 30-minute presentation for
young computer users.
The star of the show is Chip, a puppet representing the computer
itself. Gooseberry is the poorly trained computer operator, Dirty Dan
the heinous hacker -- and sloppy eater -- and Goldie Sock the
commentator.
Philip Chapnick, director of the Computer Security Institute in San
Francisco, praised the idea of teaching children to be good computer
citizens.
"One of the major issues in information security in companies now is
awareness. Starting the kids off early. ...I think it will pay off,"
Chapnick said.
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From: dnather@bna.com (David Nather)
I haven't watched any violent uprisings or anything (so far, Bob Dole
hasn't told any Republicans to go storm the mayor's office and the TV
stations), but I can pass on some humorous stories about the Clinton
health care reform plan. One of the things we do in my unit is to sell
text of various government documents, since it takes forever to get
something directly from the government. As you can imagine, the official
summary of the Clinton health plan has been a huge seller. But the
biggest flood of calls didn't come in the day Clinton released his plan
and spoke to Congress, or even in the immediate days afterwards -- it
started on Thursday when Rush Limbaugh devoted his afternoon radio show
to the insidious details of the plan.
Apparently, old Rush told listeners to call their congressmen to get
the health care plan, but some congressional offices didn't have enough
copies to send out, so they sent people to us. Here are some of my
favorite comments from the "Rushheads" who called us:
1) "I want to get a copy of the 'Chillery Hillary' plan." (Apparently
some kind of reference to frigidity, or something.)
2) "What? You charge $25 for it? Are you a subdivision of the
Gennifer Flowers corporation?"
3) "Does it have the part that says physicians can't be in private
practice anymore?"
4) "I need a copy of that Clinton abortion book." (The health plan
would cover abortions.)
5) "I heard that on page 16 of this plan, it says that illegal aliens
can cross over our borders and set up dental practices here. Is that
true?"
6) "This plan scares me. You know, my daughter is enrolled in one of
those HBOs, and she never gets to choose her doctor." (And the movies
are lousy, too.)
7) "This plan is horrible. It's Machiavellian in scope and Orwellian
in design." (This really burns me up. If anything, it would be
Orwellian in scope and Machiavellian in design.)
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From: mmm@cup.portal.com (Mark Robert Thorson)
>From time to time, computer architects must face the patent system.
This requires working with a patent attorney to develop a
description of a product under development in the highly formalized
language and style of patent. In addition to being a major pain in the
neck and time waster, it usually hits early in the development cycle,
when the designer is deeply involved in finalizing the design and
debugging the prototypes.
This can be a frustrating process, because it has to be done right the
first time. Adding material is usually impossible, because it means
accepting a new filing date. If in the meantime a public disclosure of
the invention has been made, all foreign patent rights are lost.
Although new material cannot be added, it is a little-known fact that
any amount of material can be supplied with the patent application
at the time of filing, then deleted from the application. It is this
material which can be added back (undeleted). It can be added back
whole or in part.
To this end, the following paragraph was developed. It is
recommended that this paragraph (or a variant of it customized to
your invention) is interleaved with every other paragraph in your
patent application:
"The dynamic pipelined parallel cache SCSI DMA graphics
communications CISC RISC processor port disk memory controller is
equipped with can handle transfer control receive transmit buffer
calculate operate produce up to a minimum maximum of 1 2 4 8 16
32 K M G baud bits bytes words pixels 8- 16- 32- 64- 80- bit
integers IEEE-compatible floating-point numbers per second cycle
memory bank page sector disk row line column frame
communications channel. This is useful useless required provides for
fast slow high low performance resolution speed density cost power
consumption interactive memory math calculation graphics I/O
communications bandwidth cycles."
By selectively undeleting individual words, we can form an infinite
variety of new sentences, such as:
"The SCSI port can transfer up to 4 M bytes per second. This is
useful for high performance I/O bandwidth."
"The cache controller handles a maximum of 128 K memory. This
provides fast memory cycles."
"The pipelined RISC processor can operate on 80-bit IEEE-compatible
floating-point numbers. This is required for high-resolution math."
"The graphics controller can produce up to 16 pixels per cycle. This
provides fast interactive graphics."
A somewhat longer version of this paragraph forms the basis for my
patent application "A Digital Machine for Operating on Data". :-)
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When the Bell Atlantic-TCI merger was announced last week, many
investors reportedly poured their money into TCI stock. However, the
company that holds the "TCI" stock symbol is actually a real estate
trust company; TCI's stock symbols is TCOMA. Stock in the real estate
trust company went up 15 percent with a volume of 51 times above
normal before trading was halted.
--- Communications Week, 10/18/93
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From: Peter Langston <pud!psl@bellcore.bellcore.com>
Once upon a time, there was a performance of The Marriage of Figaro.
Part way through the performance the conductor fell ill and had to be
replaced. The manager failed to find a conductor on such short notice
and started asking around in the pit, the violins, the cellos, etc. A
violist strained to hold up his hand, squealing, "Me! Me!" As he was
the only volunteer, he was given the job.
The remainder of the performance went quite well, actually; the audience
was pleased, and even his fellow orchestra members and the singers were
quite impressed. The manager asked him if he could possibly conduct
the remaining few performances, and he gladly accepted. When it was
all over, as the violist was to returning to his chair in the viola
section, his stand partner said to him, "So where the hell have you been
for the last couple of weeks?"
Q: Why do violists leave their violas on the dashboard of their cars?
A: So they can park in handicapped zones.
Q: What's the range of a viola?
A: About twenty yards, if you've got a good arm.
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Commercial Long-Distance Phone Calls
Business Week Aug 16, 1993
Tired of paying long-distance telephone rates? A small startup in New
York City could soon have the lowest rate of all: Free. The catch?
Radio-like commercials would periodically interrupt your chat.
A caller would punch in a special access code to connect with Xadax
Inc.'s computers, which would then place the call using long-distance
lines leased from another carriers. When the phones connect, the
computer asks the parties to punch in information such as age and sex
to determine which commercials to play during the course of the call.
In return for footing a share of the phone bill, Xadax would give
advertisers access to a wealth of demographic information, length and
time of call, what geographic areas are called most, number of ads
played per call, and so on. Mathew Lederman, president of Xadax, says
that the setup has worked in limited trials, but he hopes to raise
enough interest to try out the system nationwide later this year.
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Barney for role playing games:
- -----
CLIMATE/TERRAIN: Nine Hells, Gehenna, Hades, The Abyss, PBS
FREQUENCY: Very rare or daily at 4 pm
ORGANIZATION: Solitary
ACTIVITY CYCLE: Day
DIET: Little children's minds
INTELLIGENCE: Insipid (-12)
TREASURE: Merchandising contracts
ALIGNMENT: Purple evil
- -----
NO. APPEARING: 1 (may be attended by 1-100 Barney zombies, see below)
ARMOR CLASS: 10 (big and plush)
MOVEMENT: 3
HIT DICE: 8
THAC0: 12
NO. OF ATTACKS: 2
DAMAGE/ATTACK: 1-10 (x2)
SPECIAL ATTACKS: Hug (damage 3-30)
SPECIAL DEFENSES: Aura of intolerable idiocy
MAGIC RESISTANCE: 90%
SIZE: L (8' tall)
MORALE: Stupid (30)
XP VALUE: 4,000
Barney is a demon from the lower planes, a great purple and plush deformed
dinosaur. It is the enemy of intelligent lifeforms, eternally seeking out
small children and feeding on their natural intelligence and curiousity.
Combat: Barney will normally attack with it's two great paws, each inflicting
1-20 points of damage. If a victim is struck with either paw and fails a
saving throw versus paralyzation, they are dragged to Barney and may be hugged
next round. A hug inflicts 3-30 points of damage each round until the victim
or Barney is killed.
Barney may also utter a 'Power word I love you' once every three rounds.
Any adults hearing the power word must save versus spells or flee in terror
for 1-6 rounds. Any child hearing the power word must save versus spells or
be controlled by Barney. He or she will thereafter follow Barney's commands
with a delightful smile, and is subject to continued brainwashing. Each
day that a child is in Barney's control they may be taught another lesson by
Barney, decreasing their intelligence and wisdom by 1. When either stat
reaches zero, the child becomes a mindless Barney zombie! Barney zombies
follow his commands with love and a delightful smile, and eagerly spend gold
coins on Barney merchandise.
Barney is constantly surrounded by an aura of intolerable idiocy. Any
individual within 20' must save versus spells once per round or lose 1 point
of intelligence. When intelligence reaches zero, the victim falls to the
ground in a quivering, gibbering wreck. Intelligence may be regained at the
rate of 1 point per day afterwards. In addition, the aura tends to make
spells go awry, tactics to fail, and mundane items to become intelligent
with their own insipid personalities.
Habitat/Society: Barney resides in a great temple and television studio on
the lowest plane of the Abyss, with areas extending into every lower plane
and prime material plane via transdimensional gates. He is constantly
surrounded there by 1-100 Barney zombies clutching plush dolls and lollipops,
which they may use as +2 maces in combat.
Ecology: You're kidding, right?
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