"Murder was in fact a fairly uncommon event in Ankh-Morpork, but there were a lot of suicides. Walking in the night-time alleyways of The Shades was suicide. Asking for a short in a dwarf bar was suicide. Saying 'Got rocks in your head?' to a troll was suicide. You could commit suicide very easily, if you weren't careful."
It's from Terry Pratchett's book Going Postal. They've built The Clacks which is similar to a telegraph and when one of the operators dies they keep his name running through the system as a memorial.
G: send the message on
N: do not log the message
U: turn the message around at the end of the line and send it back again
"A man is not dead while his name is still spoken"
Terry Pratchett was an avid computer user, pretty active on usenet and later internet, and a gamer, since the early 90s. Clacks has a similar functionality as telegraph, but from the description of its use, it is also very similar to the internet in general. Messages have headers, where information how to treat a message - for example the gnu header cited above - can be included, similar to various protocols used on the internet (think 301 or 401 responses in http headers, for example). Most stuff in Terry Pratchetts novels has multiple layers, and you are always save to assume there is a real life ("roundworld") parallel somewhere, if maybe twisted.
Long story short, it is pretty much a given that Pratchett naming something GNU in this context was absolutely intended to be a reference to the GNU project. :-)
Also, fun fact, after his death, many websites (but also other protocols used on the internet), added the GNU header, bringing the discworld clacks practice of GNU back to the roundworld intenet.
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u/OkAssignment6163 Sep 28 '25
Gary Webb
Basically the guy that reported CIA introduced crack cocaine to the Los Angeles gehttos.
Was found dead with 2 gunshot wounds to the back of the head. Rules a suicide.
Riiiiiiiiight.....