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The Eiffel Tower was built using a wooden scaffold http://www.tour-eiffel.fr/teiffel/uk/documentation /dossiers/page/construction.html . I imagine that the 300 steelworkers who built the Tower were "real men". I can hear the hordes of American french-bashers, you guys need to read up on history http://www.exile.ru/2003-October-02/war_nerd.html .

The reason why almost nothing radically new (on the order of the idea of a personal computer, the ethernet, the laser printer, etc.) has been invented in computing in the past fourty years is because most of the people who work with this stuff today don't really care about transforming the world.

I'm not trying to get be overly difficult here (watching Cowboy Bebop on my Mac mini MythTV frontend; how could I, with such a blatant stereotype?) but I have just one thing to say to you:

What the fuck?

The transformations we have seen in the past 20 years have brought all of our fantastically cool toys out to everybody. And that's expanded the scope of digitally available information from "what random l33t k1d5 post on Apple II BBS textfiles" (btdt) to make the authoring of the new Library Of Everything vaguely possible. Even to weirdos who think that cataloging the differences between various railroad market games to the 72 eggheads listed on the Eiffel Tower to groups flailing to understand the etiology of autism. Oh, and lots of sites with pictures of celebrities and NASCAR drivers, but I'm not hip enouugh to know which ones to cite here.

Not to mention the absurdly cheap laptop (dynabook) I'm typing on, nor the self-supporting ideology of Open Source that props all of this up. You too, of course---what software did you type your response into? Even if it was IE, the open standards let you type your words into a program written in perl hundreds of miles away running a giant pile of stuff written by people like you and me as a collaborative effort that may eventually be mentioned in the same breath as the physical cathedrals of Europe.

I think the problem we have, in the here and now, is that the things that will prove truly transformative of the next era are not readily identifiable in the same way that PostScript, Smalltalk, network mail, etc are visible to us today.

Besides, the article summary says the Alto was doomed. Says who? One of the environments hosted on the Alto was Mesa (think Modula-2 or Lilith), which led to Cedar (think Modula-3 or the Oberon UI), which was vastly influential on Java. Which is a language you might have heard of; surely monster.com (heh heh heh) has heard of it.

Oh, and one more thing. There's some possibility that anything we write here may be remembered for as long as humans recognizably exist. The Wayback Machine is just a start. You trolls: your "only old Stephen Kings die in Korea" posts may be considered a part of the archeological record.

At least as a statistic.

Eiffel Tower:
(copied from Wikipedia)

Images of the Eiffel Tower have long been in the public domain; however in 2003, the operating company SNTE installed a new lighting display on the tower, which they then copyrighted. The effect is to put the night-time image of the tower under copyright. It follows that it is no longer legal to publish contemporary photographs of the tower without permission. The imposition of copyright is not without some controversy. The Director of Documentation for SNTE, Stéphane Dieu, commented in January 2005 "It is really just a way to manage commercial use of the image, so that it isn't used in ways we don't approve". However techically it also applies to tourist photographs of the tower. external link

Also see the Eiffel Tower FAQ

The light display on the Eiffel Tower at night is copyrighted by SNTE, the company that maintains it. They require fees for the right to publish photos taken at night. You can find more info in the story here and at the official site's FAQ.

Considering that the Eiffel Tower was opened in 1889, and Marconi sent his first transmissions in 1896, it is highly unlikely that it was designed to be an antenna. However, Eiffel realized its potential, and a permanent radio station was installed in 1906. The first experimental television broadcasts began in 1921.

It's right here

Yeah, but do you think service will stay up during one of the notorious french labor strikes?

stupid extrans... grrr

The Boeing Everett Factory (where they build the 747, 767, and 777) is absolutely awe-inspiring.

The Hoover Dam is deceptively MASSIVE.

The Eiffel Tower is a whole lot of iron!

The Leaning Tower of Pisa was actually quite terrifying before they put up the railings!! (Think about walking, 10 meters up, on wet, smooth-as-glass marble at like a 15 degree angle)

The Pyramids are one hell of an engineering feat!

And, although not human engineering, my favorite has to be Uluru. Yeah, it looks like just a big hunk 'o rock, but when you walk all the way around it, it's quite amazing how the hues change with literally every footstep.