From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Wed Dec 20 2000 - 17:06:08 MST
"S.J. Van Sickle" wrote:
>
> Oh, yeah? Well, I had to *walk* every day to deliver *my* email, six
> miles each way. Handforged each one and zero myself, because we were too
> poor to afford a proper Babbage Machine. Raised my first Gopher site from
> a pup...damn thing bite so bad once I needed eight stitches. Why, I
> remember one traceroute that took me 34 days and 3 pairs of shoes.
Ha! Handforged each one and zero, did you? We only we had ones. And we
didn't handforge them, because we had to make our own iron atoms from
hydrogen. Some days we didn't even have hydrogen and we had to use
primordial ylem. We sent packets by carrier pigeon until all the pigeons
died of the plague, and then we had to invent fire before we could use
smoke signals. And a Babbage Machine, oh, we never even dreamed of a
Babbage Machine. We had to use slide rules chipped out of flint and
Granpa died before his was finished booting up. Our whole village only
had one bit of RAM. It weighed thirty pounds and we had to share it with
the neighbors.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:32:29 MST