10.06.03

When Physicists Attack

A couple of days ago, I wrote about the saga of John Titor, self-proclaimed time traveler. Now Robert Brown, a professor of physics at Duke University, has taken a look at the details of Titor's story. And by 'taken a look', I mean 'utterly destroyed with the unquenchable fires of his all-consuming righteous anger':

Seriously, I could go on and on and on. I haven't even gotten to the raw thermodynamics of it all. That suitcase would require a small lake to cool in operation, for example. And then the culture capable of these miracles of technology that indicate total mastery of materials science, quantum mechanics, gravity, superconductors, a society that has in its possession a star drive (for the goddamn thing would clearly work as such as easily as a "time machine" -- arbitrary translation in four space is arbitrary translation in four space and they have to play all sorts of games to NOT go off into space FTL) then is sending somebody back to our time to get an IBM 5100, a piece of **** computer that is an embarrassment to IBM to this day, because it is somehow capable of some translation chore that appears to be beyond them and is related to the Unix non-problem of a 4 byte unsigned int counter for its current time?

What, did all the programmers in the world suffer brain damage in the war? Physics got really popular and they could no longer get anybody to learn to program? Computers do all the programming now and programming in C or perl is a lost art? Computers have come to life and are on strike for better working conditions so they are reduced to finding and bringing "back" an IBM 5100 (out of ALL THE COMPUTERS THAT WERE EVER BUILT) in preference to just bringing back a goddamn programming reference for the language(s) they need to translate and building a translator with e.g. perl on a 2036 teraflop PDA?

He does go on and on and on. It's wonderful.

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