Aaron--when I was posting my Blogless Lepolt entry today, I got a yellow bar that said that Askimet had detected an error that was preventing the software from working correctly. I did not notice any problem with how the software was working, and the post went through fine. There was a link for information about how to fix the problem, but when I followed it I was told I did not have the required permissions to view the page in question.
So I'm alerting you that the system at least thinks it has a problem.
It occurs to me that that was the beginning of the end for HAL. Hopefully this isn't so serious....(insert appropriate emoticon here).
--M. J. Young
What was the beginning of the end for HAL? Thinking he had a problem?
Trivia, according to urban legend, HAL was a play on IBM. H is one letter before I, A is one letter before B and L is one letter before M alphabetically. All involved swear it's a coincidence.
(Doing Therapy)
Yes, John--the HAL9000 had never made a mistake, and then on the way to Jupiter it reported a malfunction in one of the ship's systems. One of the crew did a spacewalk to replace the supposed errant part, and found nothing wrong with it. That led to the discussions that if HAL had made a mistake there might be something more seriously wrong with his systems, and they might have to take him offline and use the backup computer. HAL, shall we say, objected to being shut down.
And for anyone who is still lost, HAL is the name of the HAL-9000 computer aboard the ship in 2001: A Space Odyssey, which killed all the crew but one when they attempted to shut it down--and the one was not for lack of trying.
--M. J. Young
I looks like one of their servers may be down (Akismet is the Wordpress service that identifies comments as spam). But it's listing three of the four servers as being up, so let's just not worry about it and see if it goes away.
I saw the movie once that I recall. Probably more. I couldn't make heads or tails of it.
Thanks, Aaron. If I notice it again I'll mention it.
John, I think I saw the movie once, too, in theatres on a school trip when it was first released. I may have seen parts of it since, and I think I saw the sequel on PBS. I was probably in eighth grade, and everything made sense except the ending, which is classically Kubrick and doesn't make much sense to anyone (even, I expect, to Clarke). But if you want to talk about the movie, you should address it in an off-topic thread. (I'd be glad to attempt to explain it. It would be interesting as a Multiverser scenario, but that it covers such a long expanse of time.)
--M. J. Young