"Len Over 21" wrote:
"Dwight Stewart" writes:
Who would one talk to over those vast
distances? We use Morse code, while
most off-world residents used Zugth code.
Besides, code use elsewhere is still
declining after being dropped as a testing
requirement about 6,406k years ago.
:-)
Careful, Dwight, now you will start the
morse-zugth code wars all over again (done
in this newsgroup 8,192 years ago...according
to Google).
A risk I had to take to illustrate the point.
At the Interstellar Telecommunications Union
(ITU) of Stardate 1928 on the 3rd planet of
Arianna Huffington IV, Mrs. Hiram Percy Maxim
spoke French to the assembled delegates thereby
starting an interstellar dispute over which on-off
coding was superior. [French is not an inter-
stellar language] She had used naughty French
words after being refused to use the specially-
constructed Terran rest room.
I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who thinks Arianna Huffington just
flew in from some other planet. Suze Orman is another of my "favorites" - I
suspect she still is on another planet.
The Interstellar Telecommunications Union
standardized all amateur licensing at 5 WPM
(Words Per Month) of the de facto standard,
Interstellar Zugth Code. (snip)
To be fair, we should point out that the words in some of those off-world
languages are fairly long. As such, it does take time to send them using any
operating mode. That's one reason they dropped the ID requirements - some
couldn't finish a word before they had to ID again. I'm still listening to a
guy that started talking about four years ago. I don't know which planet he
is from - he hasn't got that far yet. Whatever the case, I'm darn sure glad
it's not a CW contact.
(snip) --- from an Appendix of the Orange
Catholic Bible published in 16,391, Princess
Irulan and F. Herbert, editors.
Thanks for that fine recount of those events. We all benefit from repeated
looks at the past.
[or, on a more serious note, to write all of that, you have too much time
on your hands] ;-)
Dwight Stewart (W5NET)
http://www.qsl.net/w5net/