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
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