Working Perfectly 2013-05-20

[jwhouk]

...or not.

[Hanineal]

From the look on her face, definitely not perfect.

[NOTDilbert]

Well,....

That IS Bud helping her and - the mind boggles at what error she might have introduced....moved the babies to their own storage crystals - and the mothers reproductive systems, so the entire race is now sterile....inadequate life support for a generation of premies.... on and on.

[nerf-dweller]

Brandy seems very so much more confident in the last few strips. I think this is the moment when shw get's ditzy. I think some sort of feedback she didn't take into account which scrambles her mind. Perhaps related to the separation of mother and child?

[Dave]

For some unusual value of "perfectly", I suppose.

And "... really bad" sounds really bad - considering that Brandi's immediately-most-recent little oopsie seems to have involved the triggering of an extinction-level worldwide volcanic eruption. If this latest little programming error is "really bad" in comparison to a VE7, then everybody is in for a very interesting ride!

($ME goes to hide under a couch)

EDIT: I'm going to guess that in her hurry, she neglected to put an identity-tracer tag on the crystals, so as to keep mother and child together (or at least linked or associated). She may have just created a whole civilization's worth of pseudo-orphans.

[My2Cents]

Sounds like a buffer overrun error ...

"This program is running perfectly." Brandi's fault, she tempted the demon Murphy.
Could have been worse, she didn't "What could possibly go wrong?"

[as363]

Well - what else do you expect from a "cliff-hanger" Monday??

[KnightDelight]

Division by zero?

Or, maybe we're about to have a "The Fly" moment. Only this time it's a spider that gets mixed in? Whatever it is, it could be why no one has been reconstituted yet. Brandi doesn't know how to fix the problem. So they have to stay in stasis until she does.

[shadowinthelight]

Yeah, "I fucked up really bad" is not something you want to hear while somebody is technomagically separating unborn babies from their mothers.

[Stigmartyr762]

All it takes is one misplaced decimal point.

[shadowinthelight]

All it takes is one misplaced decimal point.

Great, now you made me want to watch Office Space again.

[MerchManDan]

I'm going to guess that in her hurry, she neglected to put an identity-tracer tag on the crystals, so as to keep mother and child together (or at least linked or associated). She may have just created a whole civilization's worth of pseudo-orphans.

That was my guess too; although, considering what precisely is happening -

technomagically separating unborn babies from their mothers

- having a whole generation of kids being switched-at-birth (so to speak) doesn't seem so bad.

[My2Cents]

All it takes is one misplaced decimal point.

You think that's bad, try getting the wrong sign on a large (absolute value) exponent.

[Wyvern]

I'm going to guess that in her hurry, she neglected to put an identity-tracer tag on the crystals, so as to keep mother and child together (or at least linked or associated). She may have just created a whole civilization's worth of pseudo-orphans.

That was my first thought. You really need the database to be able to re-link the two records again in the output stage. It's important that the pairings at either end are identical...

Notice that Brandi's forehead Bia-sign is back.

Also, yes, that is a nice dress. Maybe Brandi can find one like that in Minneapolis; it suits her better than Bud's discount mummy outfit.

[Sidhekin]

Basis: "Even women [plural] who are pregnant are getting a crystal for their unborn baby [singular]."

Speculation: Forgot to account for twins, Brandi?

Observed result: Curve ball.

Response: ACACIA!

[txmystic]

Somewhere around line 105356, there is perhaps a filter to remove any entities not designated for storage in a crystal...

for proc in (subprocess.call(["ps", "-ef"]))
..if (proc in crystal)
....subprocess.call(["kill", "-9", "proc"])

She forgot to insert "not" between "proc" and "in".

[txmystic]

Sounds like a buffer overrun error ...

Stack Overflow, mayhap?

[scantrontb]

what if the seven women that were lost in the desert were mothers that didn't yet know they were pregnant and those injuries were the results of the extraction process? if they didn't know they were pregnant, having those areas get removed would be a shock that none of them would be expecting, and it wouldn't be until later that they could compare notes as it were, and figure out what happened... the "Spider Woman" is Brandi with her manipulating and behind-the-scenes string-pulling, they are the seven Kachina Dolls, and the wrapped up Baby is them ?mourning? ?wondering if they're safe? about the fate of their unborn babies! rather than the computer separating the fetus from the mother and tagging them to be merged again on reconstitution, it literally just cut'n'pasted "chunks" out of their bodies and either they were ejected as an "error" kinda unbeknownst to Brandi, and that's what she's yelling about right now, or maybe as part of Buds "fix" to get rid of a "non-essential" piece of the problem, thus making it "go away", but her not really caring about the actual PEOPLE involved? (with her look, and seemingly callous attitude from Thursdays comic, i think that seems a likely outcome)?

Either way it goes, I think that the reason the girls woke up with no recollection of how they got there is simple... they set their Stargate for Mapimi (or wherever Brandi's location is during all of this) and expected to arrive there in good health (or at least having known injuries pre-existing due to the volcanic activities already), BUT... they DIDN'T arrive there AND had those chunks cut/edited out of their bodies, all in the supposed "instantaneous travel" of the Stargate system, and i'll also bet that none of them knew the things were able to be buffered like that... SO, of course, they wouldn't know how they got there, as Lily said. I'm curious as to what their reasoning was for not trying to Stargate in again... was it a logical fear of even worse injuries and even more random location drops, or did they try and were rejected from the system as an error? or did the system itself break in the passage of time it took for them to wake up and decide to try again and they were now unable to?

[Yamara]

Yeah, "I fucked up really bad" is not something you want to hear while somebody is technomagically separating unborn babies from their mothers.

Twins, perhaps. [EDIT: Sidhekin beat me by a few hrs there.]

A lot depends on how (and when; and if...) souls are created, assigned, and placed in the Wapsiverse.

[zachariah]

A more common programming error in storing data is you forget to change address you store sub records in. Allow customer information to connect multiple living address. If you forget to update the key for each new address the old one is over written instead of saved. If this happened that it could be all the babies ended up in the same crystal. That would be an even bigger problem as how would you be able to separate them? A single crystal could hold many unborn babies as they would each be a smaller amount of data than an adult.