------------------------------------------------------------------------ Once upon a time there was a mathematician who found an equation for GOD. It was, of course, a very complicated equation but, she figured, all she had to do was find a computer system which (1) had a large enough memory to store all the necessary variables and (2) was fast enough to gather all the information together. Once this was accomplished, all the mysteries of the Universe could be solved... ...So the government took every available micro-processor, linker, loader, assembler and anything else they had available, put them all together, and then asked the computer: "IS THERE A GOD?" Unfortunately, however, the computer's response was that it would take, at the very least, a century or two to solve the problem... ...This wasn't good enough for the beaurocrats in Washington, who for the first time in their life deired something other than that status quo, so they decided to follow that up by taking every single computer in the *entire nation* and linking them all together into one giant, ever-so-much-bigger, super- powerful-computer and asked, once again, "I S T H E R E A G O D?" Well, this time the computer said that it would take only ten years to solve the equation. Not as bad, but still not quick enough to satisfy all the eager philosophers and scientists. "Something more must be done!" they would shout... ...By this time the whole world was beginning to pay some attention and everone wanted to get involved. One everyone argued about which country could claim credit and settled all the basic disputes, they drafted a joint resolution to build the computer and discover the amount of truth in the assertation that there is a God. So -- they took every computer system in the world and linked them all together into one single amazing supercomputer, the likes of which had NEVER, EVER, been seen before, and once again asked: "I S T H E R E A G O D?" And the computer's response was... "T H E R E I S N O W."
(From the "Rest" of RHF)