| Craig Daniel on Sat, 19 Dec 2009 16:24:35 -0700 (MST) |
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| Re: [s-d] [s-b] Telephone |
On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 6:19 PM, James Baxter <jebaxter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Heh, I thought you might try something like that (why else would you have chosen 17?) so I decided to beat you to it. > Well, the other reason for choosing seventeen is that it is the only truly random number. There's a story here. See, when my parents were in college, the school's room draw assignment program (and doing it by computer was high-tech at the time; this was in the seventies) one year gave everybody the same room draw number. They re-ran it, and got the same result. This is, obviously, a bad thing. So they called up the guy that wrote the program to inspect his code and see if it had been tampered with. No, he said, everything was working just fine. Turned out some joker had hacked the random number generator said program was calling to always return seventeen. - teucer _______________________________________________ spoon-discuss mailing list spoon-discuss@xxxxxxxxx http://lists.ellipsis.cx/mailman/listinfo/spoon-discuss