> > > Mister President! We cannot allow a mine shaft gap! Chris Devers wrote: > Like greg said, it' "Dr Strangelove". Near the end of the movie, the good > Herr Doktor makes a strategic proposal very similar to the one above, with > the note that a small population can survive in mine shafts through > decades of radioactive fallout and them come to the surface to rebuild > society. But of course, the Russkies are already building their own mine > shafts for similar reasons, hence the line above.... > > Kind of like saying "so what if this is a dumb idea, we can't let the > others beat us at implementing it!" :)
Historical note: at the time DrS was made, and subsequently, there were periodic worries about "missile gaps", "bomber gaps" etc - where the Warsaw Pact were believed to have greater quantities of missiles, bombers, mineshafts, salt, llamas etc... even when the USA already had enough missiles/bombers/salt/etc to render the world virtually uninhabitable (cf Carl Sagan's "nuclear winter" concept, a climactic version of the doomsday device). This is a sysadmin doomsday device: (as root crontab script) cd ~tim/tmp rm -rf . If anyone ever removes ~tim, next time that script runs, bye bye system. I came across something like this once, and it was a complete nightmare cuz we'd restore the system and overnight a bunch of / would disappear. The script wasn't built maliciously, it was just all-powerful and insufficiently error-trapped. Sociological note: I seem to recall that the Netherlands has a scheme for introducing severely disabled people, who would be able to find a suitable partner without enormous luck or a global sequential scan[1], to prostitutes. Mostly I end up spending time in the "geek-friendly" zone - amongst people who, if not necessarily geeks, value intelligence/originality/etc in general. Those with a broad enough outlook that they don't usually make statements like "geeks can't form long-term relationships", which, at the moment, seems to exclude this list. (Pauses to discuss mining irony ore from london.pm with geologist) (Pauses to be passed a note reading "it was a joke", frowns, & bins it). There seems to be an assumption in certain circles that geek <--> intelligent. The Wired article wanders *in this direction* by switching from "passionately bright people" to "fraternal association of loners". Lack of social skills is not a feature. Cheers Tim "Ti'" Sweetman [1] Meg Ryan: "What if The One for me is around here somewhere and I just haven't met him yet?" DBA: "If we all asked that, we'd be here until the end of the universe. Several times. Just deal with it..." ---- "transactionless in seattle"
