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Slashback: NIC, Dastar, Defects
Was it ahead of its time or vice versa? BreadMan writes "After limping along for years, the New Internet Computer (NIC) company finally went under. Founded by Larry Ellison, NIC sold a diskless workstation running Linux targeted at home users that wanted internet access. From the spec sheet it looks like this would be fun as a hacking platform if you can get one on the cheap."
Way to GNU! xarium writes "Seems that in response to pressure from the FSF OpenTV has released the source code to all of its compilers. You can download the full package here (~18meg)."
Because a hard drive should not be a rhythm section.
Dynamoo writes "As previously noted in Slashdot, Fujitsu MPG3xx series hard drives have been failing in huge numbers. The U.S. law firm, Shepherd Finkelman Miller & Shah is currently conducting a class action against Fujitsu and HP for knowingly distributing faulty drives. According the this article in The Register, Gateway has now been lined up as a defendant.
The fault appears to impact MPG3102AT, MPG3204AT, MPG3307AT and MPG3409AT units manufactured in early 2001. If you have one of these, then it has probably failed already, if not you should replace it asap. If you're a customer of HP/Compaq you can visit the HP Hard Disk Drive Replacement Program site.
We had about 40 of these things fitted to Compaq DeskPro EXDs, and I can assure you the failure rate is pushing 100%."
In the public domain, no one knows you're a dog.
smiff writes "United Press International reports on Dastar v. Twentieth Century Fox. Reversing lower court rulings, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Dastar did not violate the origin-of-work provision of the Lanham act. Dastar had taken public domain video, made some modifications, and sold it as its own product. Twentieth Century Fox sued claiming they should have been given credit for the video. According to Antonin Scalia, Dastar would have violated the Lanham Act if it had simply repacked the material and sold it as its own. But since Dastar made some minor changes, the Lanham Act doesn't apply.
While Dastar has been cleared under the Lanham Act, the Supreme Court sent the case back for a rehearing. The Fox video entered the public domain in 1977, but the book it was based on is still protected by copyright."
... or get off the pot. Brazilian Joe writes "The LinuxTag folks, as you may know, are responsible for a restraining order against SCO's claims in Germany. As a result, SCO has shut down its Germany web site. Story here."
... thankfully, I have an IBM Death^H^H^H^H^HDeskStar :-/
purchased 8/02 dead 10/02
Wonder how this will turn out. My guess is the law firm will get some money, HP and Fujitsu will lose some money, but consumers will get almost nothing.
There have been a number of class action laws-uits I've noticed of late where the members of the class get little or nothing. Cases in point
-Best Buy gets sued by people who didn't understand the terms of it's extended warrenty. Best Buy settles, gives coupons for more crap at best buy to the members of the class.
-Salton (maker of the george forman grill) gets sued for price fixing. Settles. Money gets paid to health charities, consumers who theoretically lost money due to overcharges get nothing
There are a ton of similar cases.
I have blog like everyone else
I just took a look at www.sco.de, and it loads just fine for me. I don't read German, but it seems to be in German. Is this a diversionary tactic by SCO?
--Quentin
Well, SCO is still not out of cash... aparantly. So, for them to stop, they need to run out first. Since they have to pay for bandwidth... I guess using a little wouldn't hurt.
/dev/null them if you don't want to use disk space, but still want to download them...
z ip
So, got bandwidth? Mad at SCO? Want to learn more about their products and/or hear them talk? Last time they pulled the file when slashdot wanted to know how to administrate their Linux server. This time...
Download a 36.6mb ZIP from the SCO Authorized Eduaction Partner program from here
(for all you non-English speakers)
a 12.9mb Italian OpenLinux manual pdf from here
a 10mb Unixware administration pdf from here
a 7.9mb mp3 of a Caldera confrence call (May 2002) from here
a 4.2mb mp3 of a SCO confrence call from here
a 4.5mb vector image of the Caldera logo from here
OR
a 6.8mb SCO education Linux courseware pdf from here
***If you want to get these interesting files easier, you can also launch an unspecified number of wget processes. You can even -O
36.6mb: (removing the space in 'zip')
wget sco.com/images/pdf/education/SCO_AEP_posterfiles.
12.9mb:
wget sco.com/images/pdf/edesktop/edesktop_24_it.pdf
10mb:
wget sco.com/images/pdf/aep/UW7NET~1.PDF
7.9mb:
wget sco.com/images/pdf/06032002.mp3
4.2mb:
wget sco.com/images/pdf/q2.mp3
5.4mb:
wget http://www.sco.de/images/pdf/12-11-01.mp3
9mb:
wget sco.com/images/pdf/aep/OS5NET~1.PDF
4mb:
wget sco.de/images/pdf/unixware/946000000b.pdf
And, if you need their entire website for offline viewing... not wanting to waste bandwidth downloading things multiple times:
wget -r -l0 http://www.sco.com/
I think it would be more effective to try to get the UnixGroup to file a restraining order banning SCO from the use of the "Unix" trademark. That would _really_ hit SCO where it hurts... imagine having to rewrite all of their code and promotional material to elimate the word "Unix"!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Larry Ellison has been preaching for nearly a decade that the PC is on the verge of death, and that it would soon be replaced by a number of small devices tailor made for certain tasks.
The NIC was part of this push... why use an expensive, power hungry computer system to accomplish what can be done with a much simpler system tailor made to the task?
Unfortunately, the flaw of this ideology is that resource consolidation that is provided by a computer is perhaps one of its biggest advantages. Not only does it let you browse the web, it lets you watch movies, listen to music, watch TV, play games, etc.
I don't see the PC losing out to single purpose devices any time in the near future.
I got a NIC of one of my friends, he used to work with NetZero and they provided internet for the systems. It is a great little box for almost anything, and you can drop in a laptop hard drive in seconds. It is a good box for messing with, boots anything from the win2k install disks to knoppix perfectly, there is no unusual hardware in these things.
If you need a little terminal, get one, just add peripherals and network. I have 2 NCD Xterms on my netowork and an old 386 that has a boot rom(no moving parts in the system, quite silent) so adding another item to the boot on the network was nothing(PXE netowrk boot built into the unit) and it "just works". I have way too much running here as it is, so this unit does nothing other then random computations... I'm thinking of dropping a custom Mosix setup onto my systems in the near future(ah using my slow laptop, just run the program and it should deal with resources... I'll have fun setting that up)
These things(my version - older) have a 233Mhz processor, 64Megs ram, 4meg flashdisk, 10/100 network, 56k softmodem(drivers work), sound, usb and joystick, cdrom drive. Works great.
Anyway, enjoy!
On Arrakis: early worm gets the bird. Magister mundi sum!
MPG3xx series hard drives have been failing in huge numbers.
"Pulling a..."
Nope, just doesn't have quite the same ring to it as "Pulling a Deskstar."
The coolest voice ever.
Hmmm... "We had about 40 of these things fitted to Compaq DeskPro EXDs, and I can assure you the failure rate is pushing 100%." While it may be true that the failure rate for these drives is very high, your annecdotal evidence doesn't tell you this. I don't know how many of these drives have been sold, but assuming it is in the 10,000+ range, then your sample size is way too low. So low that you can't draw any conclusions about the overall failure rate.
Nitpicking? Perhaps, but statistics are an important tool in lots of walks of life from politics to things that really matter like baseball. If the geeks can't use them correctly, what hope have we for the broader population?
Sailing over the event horizon
Q:We are constantly losing PCs and PC parts to thieves. The NIC is physically smaller. Do they make a more attractive target for thieves?
A:You shouldn't be losing any. The NIC will not function as a standalone computer so if a machine is stolen, the thief will soon discover that there is no market for the machine.
Uhhhm, no market? Well to me it feels like they are dooming their own device right there and then from the start...
They are still claiming that they are not willing to license the patents to you for purposes of making derivatives. This directly contradicts the GPLthat they link to.
By agreeing to use the GPL they also must agree to license any OpenTV patents (royalty-free) that might be part of the OpenTV SDK.
I haven't downloaded that 18 MB zip file but the blurb on the download html page makes it sound like the zip contains binaries only. There is an accompanying offer to distribute source code on physical media for the cost of copying, saying you need to send contact and billing info to somewhere, and that the offer is valid for 3 years, language taken direct from the GPL. Basically they are being in-your-face about doing the absolute minimum that they can to conform to the letter of the GPL.
Given that OpenTV was previously in breach of the GPL and therefore had had its rights terminated, that they're now distributing the GPL'd stuff indicates that they came to an agreement with the FSF and the the FSF restored their rights. Personally I think FSF should have leaned on them a little harder and insisted on online source distribution before agreeing to restore rights, but that's just me. I do hope someone gets the source distribution and puts it up for download somewhere.
SCO got sued for posting its corporate opinion of a technology matter, got sued by the people who they pissed off, and then got its web site shut down by the courts.
If it were anything other than SCO and Linux, this site would be condemning the decision and lamenting the loss of free speech rights.
I have noticed the distressing fact that people are only willing to apply the protection of free speech to the speech that they agree with.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
If you're using one of the computers mentioned, and are running Linux, then you won't be able to run the software download they require to be eligable. Thus, here is the message returned by the software on one of the affected machines:
Please contact HP at the following:
United States: 1-800-575-3756
From the NIC Hardware FAQ page:
"...there is no market for the machine."
Beta sux! Join the Slashcott! http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4760465&cid=46173047
News.com.com.com has an article up dissecting the contract between Novell and SCO that assigned some right over UNIX to SCO. It seems to be a pretty "murky" agreement as one of the lawyers describes it, but it does show that Novell retains the rights to all the UNIX patents and copyrights.
Sailing over the event horizon
But as a computer it is fairly bad. The video is the worst offender - it uses shared RAM, and there are streaks all over the screen if some serious computations are performed (I tried to run distributed.net on it and gave up.)
The box is also abysmally slow, so much that it is basically unusable. As a browser... sure, it might just work - but who needs just a browser?
In any case, the box works for me as a player just fine, and I am glad that I have it. But it is also good that I found the right use for the thing... otherwise it would have been a total write-off. Don't buy one unless you know how you can use it.
Yeah, that is some pretty poor wording. Maybe something like: "the thief will soon discover that the machine has no black market resale value."
:-)
Of course, they also contradict themselves by saying "you won't lose any, because it can't work by itself"-- think about this. If some crackheads break into your offices, they're gonna grab as many of these things as they can carry. I doubt one of them will go, "Hey, wait, these are NETWORK computers!" And once the crackheads find out the things don't work, they'll end up in a dumpster, a rvier, or some muddy vacant lot.
Of course, who's to say these things didn't come with window stickers that say "Computers will not work if removed from premises."?
Bottom line, if a computer gets stolen, whether it works or not once it's off your premises, it's probably gone forever. The only plus side is that since it's a network computer, your valuable data won't be taken out the door unless the crackheads make off with your server as well.
~Philly
...only without the hassle of learning how to use a trojan...
You should always use protection.
I said this two weeks ago and all I got was modded down :(
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Could someone set up a bittorrent for those?
-Peter
. Penguins Surely Ca
Actually, it given a normal distribution, 34 samples will give you a better than 95% certainty on the mean and standard deviation. So 40 units is sufficent for this purpose.
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
ROFL! This is the biggest laugh I've had all week. See SCO's list of business partners. Suing your business partners and customers... RIP SCO.
From the spec sheet it looks like this would be fun as a hacking platform
:)
It was more fun to hack the platform itself. For those not in the know, the NIC basically ran a highly customized Linux distro (seemed to have parts of RedHat, Debian, and others from what I could tell), all wrapped with a minimal window manager (enlightenment iirc), and Netscape as your entire front end. The whole thing booted off CD-ROM, and came with a 4mb flash drive to store configuration changes, bookmarks, etc. A nice handy web/email/irc box for grandma, or public access kiosks, or what have you. Oh, and before anyone asks, a stock Knoppix distro refused to run on it - at least when I tried it.
Now, the interesting part were some of the apps you could launch from it - telnet, and several other xterm-wrapped applications. Pretty powerful machine, all things considered - but there is NO command shell option. So of course, let's get one:
As I said, the distro it comes with is highly custom, a LOT of standard binaries aren't even on the CD, and it's been stripped to the essentials. But of course, we have our good friend Bash, just not direcly reachable. Easiest way I found was to escape out of a telnet session. Now, when you run its telnet client, you have a pop-up window asking you the hostname and port. This gets passed direcly to the telnet binary and ran. The designers actually went to the trouble to block the space bar being hit within this window (tricky devils! I'm sure some of you see where I'm going here), so we'll just use some copy & paste to have -e passed along with the hostname. This gives us an escape character within the telnet application itself, which (ta-da!) gives us a nice shell.
The fun part was trying to get some power. You're running as a pretty unprivledged user here, but hey! No shadowing of passwords! In any event, I got lazy and Googled a bit. No word of a lie, the root password on every last NIC that I've touched is (hard-coded on the CD, of course) "4getit". Clever, no?
Moral of the story: good thing these boxes never took off as public terminals. Takes about 30 seconds from boot to get root, and yes, the 4mb flash drive is just large enough for fun things like NetCat
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I have bookmarked.... SCO
Curiouser and Curiouser
Stake
WMD
Anthrax
You know, I've thought for a while now that if you could come up with a simple, sealed box that could browse the web, read email, play audio and video, keep track of appointments and todos, and maybe do simple spreadsheets, word processing, and sell it to first-time consumers, you'd make a fortune. Imagine a ~1Ghz CPU with onboard video and sound, a modem and NIC, and a couple of USB ports, nailed up tight like the original Macintosh. It's not upgradeable, and you can't play games on it, but that's okay, because it costs 500 bucks and your market doesn't care about games. They take it home, plug in the monitor and keyboard, turn it on and go. They can't really install anything, so they don't have to worry about viruses or spyware. It doesn't run Outlook or IE, so they're pretty safe online.
It wouldn't be for everyone, but my dad would want one, and so would a whole lot of other people who didn't ever want to hassle with their computer. If you think about it, this is the direction that handhelds and cell phones are going, but who really wants to use a 2 inch screen for that? If the price was low enough, and the design was cool enough, it could be a hit.
Of course, now I've mentioned it on Slashdot, so there goes another business opportunity. Oh well, back to thinking up cool new porn site themes.
What if life is just a side effect of some other process and God has no idea we exist?
SCO admits that linux kernel implementations are different from their Unix implementations, on their own website. One of the most interesting questions on their FAQ is this:
What is the difference between the Open UNIX 8 and Linux kernels?
Both operating system kernels have the Linux system call interface. We have added the Linux kernel functions into the Open UNIX 8 kernel. The implementation of the system calls inside the UNIX kernel is different from the Linux kernel implementation. In some cases, the UNIX implementation provides better scalability, reliability, and performance than the Linux kernel.
Putin has been involved in a SCO Summit in Russia and France!! See the article. You have to search, but buried down in the third question to Putin, you see these words:
after the SCO summit and the series of major international meetings in St. Petersburg and Evian
What do you want to bet that the German court's attempt to shut down the SCO website was just a smokescreen to hide the fact that they are involved as well.
I bet you that Evian water is designed to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids!!!
Oracle8 - A Beginner's Guide by Abbey and Corey (1997) contains the following about NICs:
OT, but still amusing:
And finally, we have a section title that's about as far from the truth as you can get:
What is the inverse of the Matrix?
I don't see it as hypocrisy at all.
Free speech never has included the blatant harassment of people or corporations, nor does it give person a license to slander or commit liable.
I could say, "Linux sucks". This is free speech. While I don't believe it does suck, it's far too subjective to be considered correct or incorrect. A statement like that does no harm in it self, and doesn't require quantifiable evidence.
I can also say, "Bill Gates is a foofoo head". This is protected under free speech. The statement does no harm in it self, there is no need to defend it by actually defining what a foofoo head is. foofoo - noun. see bill gates the foofoo head.
I can say, "SCO sucks because I have to license every trivial aspect of the OS including TCP/IP". This would be a true statement, while SCO might be offended at the fact I stated that it sucks, this is not the norm. With Solaris, BSD, and Linux out there, it does indeed suck the fact that you have to pay license fees for the SCO product in anyway.
But SCO can not order companies to stop using Linux based under the assumption they own some piece of IP in it without establishing first their ownership. If they owned the property, then they could. But as it was shown in a German court they can't prove that, then they can not. This amounts to no less then extortion and deformation of character, both of which free speech does not protect. No more then I can say, "You stupid motherfucker" unless I happened to be speaking to Edipus.
There is a big difference between opinion and fact. SCO presented information as a fact, and demanded something in return.
It's not like the website was shut down without cause, but the issue was brought to court because of the issues of criminal extortion and deformation of Linux as a legitimate product. If they left it as an opinion, it might be protected under free speech. And you just can't do that. You can't make statements that damage people that simply are not true.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Btw, i have yet to have any of my 5 ibm hds fail due to mfgr defects. 1 ultrastar, 4 de(ath|sk)stars. But i did manage to kill one accidentially after the PoS Psu sorted and killed the on-board ctrlr of a 20 GB drive. After getting some really good "this will most definitely void your warranty, but...." advice from HGST tech support, I managed to get a similar drive off ebay for $50. LMAO, the replacement parts joints want $200 for it, and the DriveSaver types want $1000-5000 depending. (Damn, I should go into biz then, charge $300 each, GDR - Ghetto Data Recovery, "we do everything but open the drive") HGST/Fujistu/IBM said the only thing that mattered is that the MLC codes should match (on the label). There are 3-5 MLC's per model, equally distributed. I changed the ctrlr from the live to dead, and "It's alive!!!!" No data loss! :) Needless to say I imeddiately dd'ed that sucker. It still works, but I dont trust this drive anylonger for anything of value.
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
> As a browser... sure, it might just work - but who needs just a browser?
Agreed. For $300, I'd rather put it towards a low end dell. I've seen Dell's Dimension 2350 as low as $314 on the bargain sites (after rebates and coupons) with free shipping that more than double its features. Even HP/Compaq has a a 2GHz system for $349 AR (shipping not free, though). These are fully functional computers, people.
My reading of the Dastar decision was not that Dastar evaded the Latham act by making modifications to the original work, but rather that the point-of-origin provisions of the Latham act cannot apply to origin of creation for patentable or copyrightable ideas and expressions.
Dastar was accused of "reverse-passing-off", or selling a product made by someone else as their own, as if a Coke distributor filled Coke bottles with Pepsi and sold it as Coke. Under traditional interpretation of the Latham act (which was accepted by the Court) this is as prohibited as "passing-off", or selling their product with someone elses trade-mark on it. Both are misrepresenting the "point of origin" of the product.
The court ruled that the "point of origin" provisions of the Latham Act could not be construed to apply to the authorship of a copyrightable work.
Scalia pointed out the double-edged result of a contrary result: If Dastar had simply repackaged and resold Fox's tape series without modification, Fox could have sued them for "passing off", but if they relabelled it and didn't credit Fox, Fox did sue for "reverse-pasing-off".
Passing off someone else's copyrightable work as your own is "plagiarism", and covered by copyright. Scalia also asserted that allowing the Latham act to protect against plagiarism would, in effect, allow the Latham Act to effect a perpetual copyright, which is forbidden to it.
Fox lost the original copyright when it didn't renew it; they make no claims otherwise. Therefore, the Court rules, Fox has no claim against plagierism.
All Supreme Court cases, if the lower court is overturned, are remanded to the lower court "for further proceedings consistant with this opinion". This is boilerplate. The Supreme Court doesn't make the final decision on the case, they just answer narrowly tailored questions of law -- upon which the case usually hangs.
The kicker with this case is that it is unknown if the copyright on the original book is still valid. The copyright was renewed as a "work for hire", but the original author took tax advantages for the book as if he hadn't been hired to write it. Dastar may still be on the hook for these videos.
Even thought the IBM is about contractual considerations this is good new for Linux, as it looks like SCO indeed do not own the IP.
For the ones that watches PBS and Chalie Rose, Note that he has David Boies as guest tonight plus Andy Groove by the way.
Hopefully Charlie will ask Boies about IP terrorism, at least I send him an email asking him to.
Help fight continental drift.
A friend of mine was one of the first 7 (or so) employees at NIC. Beautiful office in Ghirardelli Square in SF. I'd never get any work done there.
In any case, some months ago he quit because Larry basically gave up on NIC and put it in the hands of investors or someone like that. The employees were given the shaft, and the company was (even more) mismanaged from that point on. He quit as a protest.
Seems like it could have been a great company with a great product if it had been given just a little more attention/funding, and if the management hadn't been so inept. I hope someone gets it right some day.
In the article found at news.com, McBride is quoted.
Sounds as if SCO got the corporate equivalent of a EULA.
The NIC was a neat idea in concept, but when I had played with one, I soon realized the hardware was complete schitt. We did manage to successfully mess with the ISO image, and even got into correspondence with some of the developers about it. They seemed pretty cool, and helped us out in hacking the image.
Oh well. That's the way it goes.
simple, sealed box that could browse the web, read email, play audio and video, keep track of appointments and todos, and maybe do simple spreadsheets, word processing, and sell it to first-time consumers, you'd make a fortune.
It's called an iMac. And, yeah, they did OK out of it.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
The most interesting line from it:
Maybe the same way you buy software and not be allowed to sell it again?Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
Aside from finally making it to FC.com, I'm going to miss working at NIC. Remove the political BS that went on, the core tech group was very capable. And for that matter, for many years, coding was done at Oracle, not Ghiradelli. So the beautiful office wasn't the problem....you get the point. =] Send my regards to your friend tux...tell him that aj says hi.
It wasn't meant to do everything you do with your pc. But it did just enough for most people.
The problem was a poor h/w design from the get-go and rush to manufacture that poor design. Couple that with shit production forecasts, you've got the makings of a major problem.
What most people don't know is that the h/w was upgraded to the Via Epia 733Mhz mobo and was smooth as silk. And the box was quiet because we didn't need fans anymore. We never got a chance to release it to the public. Hell, we were just finishing the build that could run off CD, hdd, PXE, or even large flash ram (128mb).
The money ran out trying to recover from the prior bad decision making and as a business move, I wouldn't have pumped more money into it unless there were major changes in management. But that's just me....
Yes, OpenTV powers many of the set top boxes for cable TV systems and satellite DBS.
My DishNetwork receiver has OpenTV on it, and I can't find a use for any of the services they offer, epecially at the additional charges associated with some of the stuff.
1. Instant weather: Uh... I have The Weather Channel, plus the internet
2. Games. The games you can play on a set-top box with an infrared remote made for a TV set are LAME. They charge like $5/month for the games service. A ripoff.
3. Customer support. You can choose from like 20 "FAQs" and have the answer displayed on-screen for you. In the time it takes to get through the menus, load the support application, and download the information from the satellite, I could have gotten the answer from the web site.
4. Other things so insignificant I can't even recall them.
Each of these "features" is of course accompanied by advertising. For instance, the weather service used to take up about 100% of the screen to display the information requested. Now that same information is squished in to less than 25% of the screen. The remaining parts are divinded up in to two banner ads for upcoming movies on pay-per-view and other products.
It MAY be that the channel/program guide is coded as part of OpenTV, but it doens't seem so. The parts marked as being OpentV applications are quite distinct from the rest of the interface.
Personally I wish Dish Network would stop wasting the time and resourses developing these pointless applications and give me something useful like a SEARCH feature for the program guide.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
I'm not surprised that NIC died, since "network computers" never made a whole lot of sense to me anyway. For some years now, PCs have been cheap enough that most people who want or need one can afford one. Sure, a lot of people use their computers mostly for e-mail and browsing the web, but what do you do if you only have one of these pared down machines and you want to, for example, edit a photograph? It's like having a moped (scooter, motorino, whatever): it's only really useful if you already have a car, or if you only ever go two or three streets over (I'm talking about in the U.S. here ... European countries, that's a different story). Anyway, this should be a lesson to all of us: when somebody says that the "next big thing" is going to be a crippled version of what we already have, don't believe it.
There's a contract that comes with my Happy Meal?
I looked up the Happy Meal EULA on google and found: By opening this Happy Meal (tm), Grimace can come over and sleep with your sister whenever he wants.
Geez, Grimace. She's only 8.
riding round the world on an old motorcycle