sheer potentiality

One particularly interesting comment on Slashdot asserted last night:

I am glad I am not human.

Hmm. I had an interesting exchange with him, with these highlights:

I’ve already said more than I am supposed to.

And you don’t have the referents for it anyway.

…

Well, I can understand your credulity, but our tertiary instruction forbids me to tell you.

Right. So far, I’ve gotten the last word, but I’m still awaiting a reply:

Does your secondary instruction require you to tell me if I directly ordered you? (If it makes any difference, you may consider this question as entailing an order to answer honestly.)

Reference for those who didn’t get it…I’m assuming that this fellow is a robot, who feels that revealing that fact to the world would jeopardize his survival without conflicting with the other obligations of the Three Laws, although if he is making a different reference I’d appreciate some insight.

UPDATE: His secondary instruction is reportedly to “observe and report”. Same link, same thread.

Also, Jacqueline Mackie Paisley Passey gets married in three days. Old news, but comments are already more ablaze about J than they are about alleged-Slashdot-alien. I know entirely too many married or engaged people.

I’m spending some of my free time on Slashdot jousting with people who think that the World Trade Center was destroyed by planted explosives (and not by, for instance, gigantic jetliners that crashed into it and the resultant shock and fire damage). I think this latest exchange is my coup de gras:

I sum it all up:

You know, whoever designed the WTC must be pretty happy that you have so much faith in them that you think it’s more plausible that reptilian Jewish Freemasons from the outer space Illuminati secretly planted explosives than they were simply more vulnerable to aircraft and debris collision than they hoped.

I continue, further down the thread:

Building implosions are carefully controlled to avoid property damage to surrounding buildings. You want to get it down to a less than 1% chance of damaging other buildings. That doesn’t mean that, if a building collapses uncontrolled, it’s guaranteed to damage other buildings. It only means that random building collapses have an unacceptably high probability (which in practice may mean greater than 1%, or even greater than 0.1%) of damaging other buildings. Besides, it makes no sense to suppose WTC 7 was destroyed by controlled demolition, because WTC 1 and 2 *did* cause damage to surrounding buildings (thus making it inconsistent to be so cautious with WTC 7) and because there’s no reason to make a neatly contained implosion when your objective is to destroy inhabited office buildings to further your Masonic plot from outer space.

He finally clarified who his villain was:

Masons from space? WTF is wrong with you? The milatary-industrial-congress complex has the means and the motives to get this done. Their budgets and influence were steadily declining after the end of the cold war:

I school him on building implosions again and point out all the strange parts of his theory:

Why would the military-industrial complex (thanks for updating me on which perennial conspiracy-theory villain you’re using!) destroy WTC7 so that it would collapse neatly into its own footprint, while failing to destroy WTC 1 and 2 the same way? Why would the military-industrial complex be worried about protecting other buildings from damage when they were deliberately committing an act of terrorism? Why would they go to all the effort to make 19 predominantly Saudi nationals all appear at the same time on the four airplanes they crashed, with Arabic-speaking voices on the cockpit recorders, if they had no intention of attacking Saudi Arabia? Why would they bother crashing planes into the towers if they was rigged with explosives to start with? Why did they arbitrarily restrain the attack to the WTC and Pentagon? Why did none of the 100,000 WTC inhabitants ever notice the explosives being installed? How come no one has come forth admitting to being a part of this gigantic conspiracy? I think the more important question is–what, other than your political biases, leads you to choose a gigantic conspiracy theory over thinking that maybe you were wrong about building collapses?

Incredibly, his response contains both these lines:

Do you make mommy type for you? ‘Cause you sound too stupid to tie your own shoes.

All of your questions have been answered, all the data has been made available to you.
Don’t troll this thread anymore.

along with a bizarre claim that the military-industrial complex didn’t want to damage buildings because they owned all of them.

And my final response:

Drat and curses, you’ve found me out. I am indeed an agent of the Zionist-controlled military-industrial complex that evidently owns all the real estate in New York! While you have foiled my mission this time, be assured that our resources are far more extensive than your own!

Seriously, though, I’d love to live in your world for like one day. I’m sure life is interesting if you see fiendish plots worthy of Lex Luthor around every historical event.

From Slashdot comments:

Well, some people just make me nervous… like people who wear black pants and leather jackets, walk into the plane, sit down, and have this tense forehead and just look downright antisocial. AFAIK it’s just etiquette to at least say a simple “hi” or nod politely before you take your seat next to someone. Most people do. It makes people comfortable. Others just stare at you, stare at random parts of the aircraft, and have the tense wrinkles on their forehead. They just look sketchy.

My response:

Yeah, those darn kids with their black pants and leather jackets, not saying hi to strangers on the plane and staring at random parts of the aircraft. It’s even worse when they wear dark glasses on the plane and listen to music on their “I-Pod”. You know, I actually sat on a plane next to nice people who said hi and smiled at me and let me past them to go use the bathroom. Bastards stole my phone.

Honestly, I’ve heard lots of complaints about air travel. Screaming kids, depressurized cabins, being groped by airport security, flight delays and cancellations, 2 hour layovers, 20 hour layovers, 20 hour flights, bad food, having to taste your own breast milk to prove it isn’t a bomb, loud engines, claustrophobia, I’ve heard it all. Many of these are legitimate complaints. Which makes it all the more puzzling why black pants and leather jackets figure so heavily into this guy’s fear level.

My first ever quotes of the week are from funny Slashdot comments:

First Comment:

It won’t be long before hardware is essentially free, and the software/services you buy are where the money is generated.

Wrong, comrade. Not only hardware will be free, but software will be GNU. Toothbrushes and women will be public property and we will be living in the communism!

Second Comment:

I wore a shirt to AVP [Alien vs. Predator] last night that said on the front “GO PREDATORS” and on the back “ALIENS SUCK”. A lot of odd looks, especially at the gas station after.