42

Shodan:

Yes, but what's the question?

The Empty Bottle Collector wrote in message news:[email]...

Either "what is the meaning of life" or "what is six times seven"

I hate to be a nit-picker (replace hate with love)...but the quotes are:

The answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything

"What do you get when you multiply six by nine"

"WAV king" wrote:

Which is true, if you're on a planet where everybody has 13 fingers.

WAV king wrote in message news:eDU_4.7336$[email]...

But that was cos arthur was decended from the golgafrinchans, not the earthlings who were dying out. -- Alex

"Veni, Vermini, Vomui"

"I came, I got ratted, I threw up"

"WAV king" busts into alt.tv.futurama at Mon, 05 Jun 2000 21:06:18 GMT and shouts, rather insanely:

I always knew there was something fundamentally wrong with the Universe...

Or "how many roads must a man walk down?"

It sounds very significant without actually tying you down to meaning anything at all!

Edwin

W...H...A...T...I...S...S...I...X...T...I...M...E...S...N...I...N...E....

[email] () busts into alt.tv.futurama at Tue, 06 Jun 2000 02:00:04 GMT and shouts, rather insanely:

Erm, that would be "what is six _multiplied by_ nine?" But then who really wants to type that out?

--J(s)P, certainly not you.
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Soul Coughing 1992-2000

I think the Hitchiker�s first three books are really really great but then they get worse and are only really great.

Shadow

Shadow writes:

"I give you the worst grade possible: an A minus minus!"

Tomas

The fourth one "so long and thanks for all the fish" was crap; the next one of the trilogy, "mostly harmless" wasn't bad.

wrote in message news:[email]. ..

wrote:

I quite enjoyed Douglas Adams, but he was only a John the Baptist to Terry Pratchett's Jesus

"Edwin Korving" writes:

• Seven!
• Dad, it's a retorical question.
• Retorical, eh? Eight!
• Do you even know what retorical means?
• Do *I* know what retorical means?

Tomas

What is the meaning of life ?

• Sami Partanen .

El�m�n tarkoitus on yritt�� vastata mahdollisimman moneen typer��n kysymykseen.

"Sami.Partanen" wrote:

"The Empty Bottle Collector" wrote in message news:[email]...

It amazes me no else I've met has gotten the joke. The ultimate *answer* is 42. The *ultimate* question is "what do you get if you multiply 6 by 9?".

The ultimate answer need not be the answer to the ultimate question.

Don't tell me you don't know the whole story.....

from memory: some race of people set out to discover the answer to the ultimate question of "life, the universe, and everything." They built a super computer to perform the task and it came up with the answer: 42.

It explained that "you really didn't explain the question very well." So they built an even BIGGER computer to discover what the question is to which the answer is 42. And that computer is called Earth.

But, alas, in the early stages of the "program," earth gets infected by a race of people who escaped their own planet and landed on earth. The "program" is corrupted, therefore the "question" is wrong.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ What's REALLY amusing is that part of the Altavista website features a language translator that they have named Babel fish. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

is

ICQ #10176400 Inst Msngr SN: Thewavekng www.wavking.com www.anewhope.org

WAV king wrote:

<Paul Harvy>And now you know the rest of the story.</Paul Harvy>

"Mike Zaite" wrote in message news:[email]...

which

Not exactly correct. They built the Earth to discover the ultimate question, NOT the "question to which the answer is 42".

a

No, the "question" was right. The hypothesis that the Golgafrinchans had somehow corrupted the program was Ford's attempt to explain why the question and answer didn't match. The Earth was far too sophisticated a computer to be vulnerable to such incursions, and was no doubt designed with self-correcting procedures to guard against such eventualities. Just because you locate your computer in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory in an unlighted basement of an abandoned building doesn't mean you guarantee someone won't find it. In fact, you can pretty much be assured that if someone does find it, they will feel perfectly safe in taking their time mucking it up. Hyper-dimensional pan-galactic beings would no doubt take these sorts of things into account.

On Sat, 10 Jun 2000 00:32:37 -0400, "LooseChanj" wrote:

I didn't read the entire series, so perhaps more is explained later on, but I thought that the Earth was destroyed shortly before the program finished. They were working on a new Earth to finish the project.

--Larry

Sorry, but Arthur and the girl are not parts of the program. They are descendants of the Golgafrichams (sp?) the useless hairdressers and telephone sanitizers that crashed on earth in prehistoric times. Macro viruses in the biological computer! Alien to the design of Earth by the Magrathians. Therefore the answer they would have come up with would have been wrong!

HA!

LooseChanj wrote in message news:[email]...

the

that's

actually

<x> wrote in message news:[email]...

Like I said before, it stands to reason that the situation of the Golgafrinchans would have been forseen by the Earth's designers, who would have created mechanisms to ensure the data's fidelity. In much the same way we have antivirus programs. You're a dumbass.

LooseChanj ate a baby:

Well yes, it stands to reason. If by "reason" you mean "spew random gibberish". By what reasoning would earth's designers forsee the crash landing of an alien race's spurned segment of the population?