Today's Topics:
Catholicism and Unix
complain? me?
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From: Christopher Maeda <cmaeda@ernst.mach.cs.cmu.edu>
Subject: Catholicism and Unix
Message-Id: <C84I2J.HHt.1@cs.cmu.edu>
Reply-To: cmaeda@cs.cmu.edu
Organization: School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon
Date: Sat, 5 Jun 1993 00:41:03 GMT
Forwarded from somewhere else:
Observe that once the phone company lost its monopoly hold on expensive,
crappy phone service, they immediately strangled the microcomputer world
by cramming unix down its throat. Now you can buy cheaper, better phone
service, but you can hardly walk by a small computer without smelling
the unwashed stench of some unix zealot. Now, as computing power gets
better, the rate of advance is slowed by the feebleness of the operating
system you're given to run on it. And who gets a royalty on each one?
The same damned phone company!
I'd believe that it was another coup by the trilateral commission if it
weren't for the obvious hand of the roman pontiff in all of this. I
wonder how much of the Vatican's wealth is in ATT stock? Consider the
parallels:
Catholicism: Unix:
Celibacy. What else can a eunich do?
Produced the Dark Ages by The Unix network protocols, sendmail.
reducing the spread of
knowledge and understanding
Abhorrence of Sex One's natural reaction to the typical
unix weenie.
The Inquisition Only a few schools teach Computer
Science any more. The rest is forced
memorisation of the "sh" manual.
Inscense in churches Back to the unwashed bodies! (plus: dope)
Borgia Popes Bill Joy, Dennis Ritchie
The Crusades The Hordes of unwashed who splatter you
with the mucous which runs down their
chins as they shriek at you "you don't
want to do that!" when you ask
innocent questions like "What if I my
string is longer than 80 characters?"
Christmas, stolen from the "Multics? Oh yea, that was a descendent
Pagans of unix which didn't pan out. By the
way, it's spelled `Multix.'"
Botticelli, Stained Glass Stupid pictures like :-~ which mean "No
need to read any more of this message;
I left my brain in my desk in the
fifth grade and never went back for it."
Bach, Handel, Gregorians Barry Manilow, Twisted Sister
Myrrh Clearasil
Selling Indulgences No error-checking
Intolerance Case-sensitive
The Pope sided with Hitler Any unix weenie with enough brains to
find a polling place votes for LaDouche
Inability to overcome Luther, The continual re-implementation of bugs,
Calvin, and other schismatics because every program depends on them.
Cathedrals, gargoyles Unix conventions
Raping the artistic treasures How many ordinary words, like "Wizard,"
of the world for the Vatican, "Hacker," or "Filesystem" are mis-used
a millenium before Goering by unix weenies every day?
Invented stories of martyrdom Invented stories of sexual encounters by
by the early christians, in usenet "news" readers, in order to win
order to build solidarity sympathy from those gullibles who
and sympathy think it might be true.
Calls itself the universal How many mailing lists have you been on
church. Will not admit the which have been changed from "A
possibility of alternatives discussion of Z" into "A discussion of
Z in the unix environment?"
Suppression of the Jews What kind of mail will I get for sending
this to unix-wizards?
Papal infallability Still won't admit that they should add
version numbers to the filesystem!
PS: The bit about unix conventions gets me worried. I would like to see
a film of one. I have this image of a huge stadium, filled with
those degenerate creatures from H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine" --
were they the Morlocs? Just imagine the whole convention floor,
filled with all manner of these vile, hairy, beasts, gnashing their
teeth, drooling acidic saliva on each others' mis-shapen backs as
they leap and shriek and roll their eyes, arms flailing, infected
claws ripping gobbets of flesh and lancing the boils of their
fellows, only to spew the pus and other unmentionable secretions
into the crowd as the uncontrolled limbs pass on.
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From: James Salsman <bovik@delta.eecs.nwu.edu>
Subject: complain? me?
Message-Id: <199306040653.AA21671@delta.eecs.nwu.edu>
Reply-To: bovik@eecs.nwu.edu
Organization: Bovik Research Inst.
Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1993 06:52:59 GMT
Prof' Tygar writes:
> That's nothing. Opinion bboard readers won't be impressed until you
> get an entry in the next edition of the Hacker's Dictionary, an
> accomplishment already achieved by our erstwhile contributor Mr.
> Salsman.
Erstwhile? Not so fast! They always underestimated me at the University....
Well, since I've gained such perspective on the matter, I'd like
to mention a few of the reasons I ended up being the darling of
opbb readers' and much of the Internet's killfiles.
When I was an undergrad I was doing pretty well, but I had *major*
test anxiety. On the rare occasion I would show up for an exam, I
usually did a bit below the class average, but not much. I took
very few midterms, and fewer finals, usually spending the day shivering
under the covers. My homework, when I decided to do it, was always
pretty good, but I probably had the lowest QPA of anyone who attended
for as long as I did.
So, howcome I was enrolled for six full-time semesters? I'm not sure
about it myself, but I kept asking the Dean and they kept letting me
pay big bucks, about $30,000 altogether to drive my ego into the dirt
for another semester. They still say I owe $4,500 plus a few years of
interest leaving it at around $7,500, which is wrong, but the cashier
has long since stopped replying to my correspondence.
Finally I developed a significant enough Cannabis addiction to cause
other sorts of insurmountable problems that got me away from CMU to
West Virginia where the U.S. Dept. of the Navy, in an early-1940's
scramble to up rope production, planted about 30,000 acres of hemp
in the upper Potomac valley which has since spread, by nature and
horticulture, to nearly every county in the state. Sigh.
But the root of my problems, even before I was arrested by the United
States Secret Service in '86 (just after my 1st freshman semester),
was that my parents were feuding with each other, and I knew much of
what they were saying to me about each other was lies. The divorce
decree from the court had a lot to do with it, and they wouldn't let
me see it. Well, it so happens that the CMU Financial Aid Office
wanted a copy too, to keep my loans and matching subsidies coming I
guess, but my parents didn't even send it! This made me very mad,
but my father decided to pay the difference (the aid I had lost) by
himself instead of releasing the divorce decree. This made me
feel much worse because I knew I was wasting his money, not just mine.
There are a lot more gory details, but the fact of the matter is that
most people who are undergoing divorce are stupid, mainly because
of the stress, and they need common sense education (at their own
expense, Dr. T.) such has been mandated in Kansas, Georgia, Utah,
Indiana, and Ohio.
I spent 55 hours in Governor Caperton's office a few weeks ago on a
hunger strike trying to get the Hillbilly-Democrat establishment in
West Virginia to recognize the need, and they finally did, after
seeing the statistics from the Cobb County, Georgia pilot program.
There will be a Divorce Education Program in the West Virginia
Family Law Masters System in about three months! The West Virginia
Parents-Without-Partners organization is doing a three-part
biography of me in their newsletter (don't worry, all of you will
figure prominently in part two.)
So anyway, I'm sorry about all those things I said about the Warp
project, and all those misguided re-sends from LIS I. And please
pardon my (now diagnosed) bipolar disorder (i.e., manic-depressive
illness.) Brian Milnes, who bore the brunt of my wierdness back when
I was trying to shake up the establishment with a SOAR-style
production system implementation for the Connection Machine, returned
the Christmas card with my apology unopened, so if you see him in the
hall, tell him he was right and I was wrong.
And yes, I'm happy working temp jobs in Charleston
(*NOBODY*IN*THE*STATE* knows more about PC word processors than I do!)
KP+412+099+013+9+ST
:James Salsman
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End of Subgenius Digest
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