Although, I guess we have to give it 20 billion years or so before we really write it off.

Edit 20 Dec 2009: I’m not sure when, but it looks like it’s figured out the correct non-answer (and in a good deal less than twenty billion years):

While on the subject of sci-fi, I just found this (very) short story on-line, which I really enjoyed. It’ll take you less than five minutes to read, and you’ll be glad you did; go check it out.

It’s been a bad month; first Gary Gygax, and now Arthur C. Clarke.

Eerily, I found these comments, while going through some source code, here at work, yesterday:

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StoreParameterChanges();
 
// Scheduler was written by Ramans. Everything must be done three times...
if ( (m_lLastParamIndex != CB_ERR) && (m_lLastParamIndex != iSel) )
{

543
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StoreParameterChanges();
 
// Scheduler was written by Ramans. Everything must be done three times...
if ( (m_lLastParamIndex != CB_ERR) && (m_lLastParamIndex != iSel) )
{

965
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StoreParameterChanges();
 
// Scheduler was written by Ramans. Everything must be done three times...
if ( (m_lLastParamIndex != CB_ERR) && (m_lLastParamIndex != iSel) )
{

Which, as well as being a strange foreshadowing, just goes to show how great a cultural impact he had¹.

1. OK – so a programmer quoting sci-fi isn’t that spectacularly unlikely, but you get the point. [↩]