This strikes at the very foundation of the Internet, so tread carefully. Empires are at stake!baldeagle wrote: The idea of actually getting to know their subject before pontificating on it never crosses their feeble minds.
I've suspected for a long time that the Internet is an experiment run by the sociology department at a midwest liberal college with Federal funding, it goes without saying, to prove whether or not an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters for an infinite length of time would produce all the Great Books.
They have had to surmount a number of problems. First, an infinite length of time is really, really long. They will have to resort to some statistical alchemy on this.
The second problem was where to find an infinite number of typewriters. It turned out that the solution to the third problem resolved the second problem rather neatly.
The third problem was originally rounding up all those monkeys and the logistical difficulties of supplying all those bananas, not to mention the environmental impact of all that errr, banana waste. It also turned out to be surprisingly difficult to keep all those monkeys at their keyboards when they weren't eating bananas. Monkeys get bored and start throwing banana waste at other monkeys, neglect their typing for hours while they pick parasites from each other's coat and other distractions.
The invention of the Internet resolved all those difficulties, with only moderate violence to the original inquiry. First, with the Internet, there is no need for typewriters, ribbons, paper, etc. The savings on this alone were dramatic.
Secondly, the Internet allowed (required) substitution of humans to replace monkeys. This was a Godsend! Humans not only provide their own bananas, and take care of their own wastes, and use keyboards, they are far, far easier to keep motivated to spend countless hours happily pounding away without boredoom or respite, and the output is not particularly distinguishable from that of monkeys.