PowerShell cracks meaning of life in Shakespearian codex shocker.

Everyone knows that the answer to life, the universe and everything is 42 and conventional wisdom holds that the question to the answer to life, the universe and everything is unknowable because of [... "a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something more bizarrely inexplicable." - Fit The Seventh]

Bart de Smet's blog, however, reveals a shocking truth. The question to the answer to life, the universe and everything has been known to an Opus Deic few for centuries. William Shakespeare even went so far as to "out" the question, like some kind of beruffed, fifteenth century Robert Langdon, when he wrote, "2B or not 2B, that is the question."

So now we have both the question, "2B or not 2B" and the answer, 42.

Or do we?

Here is where PowerShell comes in useful because, as everyone knows, computers are much cleverer than we are when it comes to cracking and verifying codes.

I started out by simply typing in the question:-

$ 0x2B -or -not 0x2B
True

Interesting. The answer to the question to the answer to life the universe and everything appears to be... True.

Okay, perhaps, since the question is phrased in a way that PowerShell can understand (this, if you were wondering, explains the 0x-es and hyphens) , it is forcing the answer to be expressed as a boolean truth. What I really needed to do was rephrase the question to reveal the value of the expression - to reveal the deeper truth.

$ 0x2B -bor -bnot 0x2B [1]
-1

Hmm... -1. No, that couldn't be it [2]. It had to be "True". But then light dawned - what is that "True" telling us? Surely, if the question is "0x2B -or -not 0x2B", the "True" must mean "0x2B", yes?

Lets see...

$ 0x2B
43

Yes! That's within about 2.3% of Deep Thought's "answer" and well within experimental error.

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[1] See how I added 2 "B"s? Clever, eh? Irrelevant, sadly.

[2] Interestingly, -1, to a computer means "everything" due to a curious property of signed binary integers. I think that's quite spooky.