Slashdot Mirror

My next goal is to get the Palm calendar to synch cleanly with KOrganizer and then either find or build some CGI's to take the vcal file that KOrganizer uses and present it as HTML.

Why should you care? Well my point is this: The real value of a tool is not measured in any one device (Palm, my.personal.machine, mywebsite.at-my-isp.com) but in how that tool can be used in conjunction to form larger more useful constructs.

bnf

It was in the old "Webster's and in Chaucer.

As pointed out elsewhere here, the nuclear reactor is entirely believable. I might point out that the chief danger from plutonium in small amounts is not its radioactivity, but its poisonousness. Even 1 gram could kill a heck of a lot of people.

Like the article hints, you don't win these days without setting up a LAN and using some database technology. There are too many items to track otherwise. The big items everyone remembers, but there are lots of little 5- and 10-pointers, like ostrich eggs or whatever, that tend to get forgotten. Read the list, and you'll be amazed, but some teams get almost everything within 72 hours.

Back in my day, we got an airplane, a one-ton animal, a telephone pole, and a marching band. We found a collector of turn of the century train cars from the Chicago Elevated to loan us an El car, but we couldn't get permission from the city to take such a heavy load on the streets.

Teams that really contend for the top prizes are made up of 100 or more people, of whom at least 25 must be willing to dedicate the ENTIRE 72 hour period to collecting and building. Usually, you specialize, putting your smooth talkers onto tasks like wheedling Olympic medalists into loaning their medals, your skilled researchers onto finding the answers to obscure questions like the location and population of Waldo, your exhibitionists in the latex paint-on pants, etc.

I have never done anything more fun in my entire life.

May be found at: http://student-www.uchicago.edu/orgs/scavhunt/

This is the actual letter which we received here at the University of Chicago. As you can read, they are a bit too gung-ho about things.

A very clever idea from a very clever man. But I'm afraid my view of Lessig is that he's too clever by half, which is readily apparent after you start reading his proposed "solution" to the problems posed by the CDA.

He keeps trying to start up bandwagons that will name their tune for him, but they keep sputtering and stalling. Remember the "New Chicago School" notions that were supposed to supplant the "old school" law-and-economics approach of Posner and others at the University of Chicago? Well, Posner's crowd keeps flattening people everywhere with its mechanistic view of how the world works (which generally somehow, I really don't know how, always seem to end up supporting those who already have the greater economic power in any given situation -- but I digress).

And "New Chicago"? Wellll, New Chicago looks kind of old school after all, if you look at the table of contents of some of Lessig's recent confabs, such as this.

I'm sure Lessig is far smarter than I'll ever be. But he strikes me as far more a politician than an innovator or synthesizer in the field of law, and this "open law" thing looks like just another attempt to grab the limelight.

--------

This is not true. The public reading this should know that that Alison is a penguin computing employee and Sam Ockman's Girlfriend. Real nice ethics Alison, you should let the public know who you are when you slam a competitor.(In case you have trouble with the word, it's : ethics)

Chris DiBona

Evangelist, VA Research (See,that wasn't so hard, was it.

--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
VP, SVLUG

Humor

5. That quality of the imagination which gives to ideas an incongruous or fantastic turn, and tends to excite laughter or mirth by ludicrous images or representations; a playful fancy; facetiousness.