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Article 1812 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: weemba@libra.wistar.upenn.edu (Matthew P Wiener)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: The Forever War
Keywords: Numerical Partial Differential Equations
Message-ID: <57964@netnews.upenn.edu>
Date: 2 Dec 91 20:15:57 GMT
References: <1991Dec2.005246.2168@morrow.stanford.edu>
Sender: news@netnews.upenn.edu
Reply-To: weemba@libra.wistar.upenn.edu (Matthew P Wiener)
Followup-To: alt.conspiracy
Organization: The Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology
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In-reply-to: dow@nova1.stanford.edu (Keith Dow)

Keith has apparently seen nothing but wimpy UN approved propaganda
regarding the war against the alien Nipdee.  He has of course seen
the sanitized films of the liberation of Poissonville and Laplaceland,
where the brave human soldiers armed with nothing but finitediff dart
guns overran fortifications packed with immature larval Nipdees, help-
lessly waving their curleydee blasters.  Keith may have even visited
the Disneyland Nipdee exhibit, where he could have played with the
ever popular Finelem(TM) sound toasters, using wave methods to burn
Nipdee dolls.  The UN would have you think this was a clean war, with
victory just around the corner, and that the only human casualties
were the results of friendly fire (bugs in the code, they told us,
so easy to fix for the next battle).

But there is a dark side to this war, and it must be told.  The
following sorts of information are being censored, but you must
know it, and share it with everyone you know!!  Patriotism is too
late for these casualties.  But maybe not for those still alive.

Have you ever seen a soldier reduced to screaming extrapolations when
his best buddy's boundary was blown off by a large h-bomb?  Or seen the
black carnage when a forward propagator jeep runs over a discontinuity
minefield?  The agony!  Have you seen what the Dodecahedron euphemizes
as "discretization error" up close?  Have you seen the bloody piles of
bodies that resulted when General Taylor's and General MacLaurin's
parallel series failed to converge, allowing the Nipdee to engage in
stiff counterterm blowups?  And this is just on Earth, where at worst
the Nipdee have sent first order adults.

The war in space and hyperspace has been much more ugly.  When our boys,
God bless them, first warped into Forward Time Center Space, second order
Nipdee were waiting with roundoff artillery shells, that left our troops
so many smoking corpses.  When the UN forces tried to Cayley transform
in three dimensions near the Nipdee base on Pluto, an unexpected third
order Nipdee contingent fully implicitized the UN ships in alternating
directions, leaving no one in explicit command.  In the resulting chaos,
O(N^2) of the ships were lost in o(h^2) time.  Their backup, a staggered
leapfrog support team, never got their initial values.  

All attempts to counterattack the Nipdee home base, near Sirius B, have
been dreadful failures.  Specially equipped space tanks with our greatest
of weapons, the universal Turing machine gun, have been reduced to non-
deterministic finite state automata by a secret Nipdee weapon, which is
suspected to be an unsolvable Goedel-Cantorian diagonalizer field.  Our
new probability phasers are the only weapon that has a chance against
this field, but their accuracy is still pitiful.
 
Or maybe, just maybe, Keith has seen this, and is a Nipdee spy, here to
lull the rest of us into a false sense of security, here to insure the
Nipdee victory.  The horror!  The horror!
-- 
-Matthew P Wiener (weemba@libra.wistar.upenn.edu)


