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:

StoreParameterChanges();

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

StoreParameterChanges();

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

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. [↩]