Date: 2 Nov 93 13:19:23 PST (Tuesday) Subject: Life B.4 ------------------------------------------------------------ Selections from Keith Bostic's mailing list: bostic@vangogh.cs.berkeley.edu. \ 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. ------------------------------ From: bostic@vangogh.cs.berkeley.edu Why isn't phonetic spelled the way it sounds? ------------------------------ From: bostic@vangogh.cs.berkeley.edu Why are there interstate highways in Hawaii? ------------------------------ From: bostic@vangogh.cs.berkeley.edu Why do they put Braille dots on the keypad of the drive-up ATM? ------------------------------ From: bostic@vangogh.cs.berkeley.edu 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 on a Mac I will not do it for my friends I will not do it on weekends I will not write for Uncle Sam I won't do ADA, Sam-I-Am ------------------------------ From: bostic@vangogh.cs.berkeley.edu 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 ]] ------------------------------ 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. ------------------------------ Usenet is a way of being annoyed by people you otherwise never would have met. ------------------------------ 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." ------------------------------ 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 "Porque?" 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 versatile a group as I have found anywhere. ------------------------------ 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 ------------------------------ 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. ------------------------------ 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." ------------------------------ "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) Gooseberry 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. ------------------------------ 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.) ------------------------------ 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". :-) ------------------------------ 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 ------------------------------ 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. ------------------------------ 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. Matthew 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. ------------------------------ 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 curiosity. 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? ------------------------------------------------------------ 1995 Copyright by Henry Cate III All Rights Reserved The above collection can be forwarded for non commercial use as long as the signature file below is included The individual entries of the Life Collection are owned by the individual contributors who should be contacted if you wish to forward their entry. -- Henry Cate III [cate3@netcom.com] To learn how to get a MS Windows 3.1 Application with 15,000 jokes from the Life Humor collection, send E-Mail to life@netcom.com with "Info" in the Subject. Or check out http://www.offshore.com.ai/lifehumor
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