The joke of the week on the SDL site at the moment reminds me of
a joke I played on a physics undergrad about 13 years ago when I
was one myself…
We had a network of BBC micros (6502-based, simple ‘econet’ protocol
between them all, with minimal security). I was playing around with
the networking possibilities (taking over other people’s screens and
keyboards, monitoring other people’s screens etc. But only between
friends of mine, we were all doing it.)
I wrote some code to do the equivalent of an ‘rsh’, so I could send
a local executable down the network and run it on the remote
machine. There was a (pretty good, for the time) speech synthesizer
available for the BBC micro (you can see where this is going 
Anyway, my “victim” came into the lab to write up her report - sweet
girl who wasn’t as up on computers as me, and I typed into my BBC
*RSAY “HELLO”
Which made the machine say ‘HELLO’ in a very computer-like voice. I
should mention that there were only 4 or 5 of us in the lab at the
time, and I heard a from two rows down. Anyway, she seemed
to pause for a time, then must have decided she’d imagined it or
something, and I heard her start to type.
So, next I made the machine next to me monitor her screen so I could
see what she was typing, and sent another:
*RSAY “DONT YOU LIKE ME”
The typing stopped.
*RSAY “PLEASE TYPE YOU LIKE ME”
Wonder of wonders, on the screen appeared “I like you” :-)) immediately
followed by a syntax error, of course
The “conversation” went on for about 5 minutes, before I just couldn’t
contain myself, and collapsed, laughing on the floor. At that point I
think she became suspicious , walked over, and the game was up.
Despite all of that, we actually became friends. She got me back about
3 months later (after I’d let my guard down a bit
ATB,
Simon.–
Freedom ? What’s that ? (see http://www.domesday.co.uk/ )