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The Traveling Salesman Problem Meets Starbucks
Call Me Black Cloud writes "John 'Winter' Smith, a contract computer programmer, is living the traveling salesman problem. His personal quest is to visit every company-owned Starbucks and he's not doing too badly. After 7 years he's hit over 4,000 locations in the United States and 167 in Britain and Japan. What motivates him? That's one for the professionals to answer, but since Starbucks opens an average of 10 stores per week it doesn't look like Winter will be stopping any time soon. His website offers insight into why he does this ('to be different') and has pictures of the 4000+ Starbucks he's visited."
Wouldn't want to mention this:
I'm scheduled for a short interview on CNN Headline News Thusday, July 8, at approximately 7:45 PM EDT.
Gotta love that Headline News. Ever since the merger they avoid any type of real news like the plague. And the average age of the news presenters is, what, 13?
Casual Games/Downloads
I think they just put that to appeal to our Slashdot nerdiness :).
He's just visiting a lot of points in an ever-expanding graph without much regard for the optimal route, so yeah, it's not the TSP.
There are a few of those. The most well known is the (Twin?) River Oaks in Houston. I couldn't find the video of it again, but it is the one Lewis Black is famous for complaining about. Here is a link to some of the double starbucks phenom.t arbucks/)
(http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/i/d/idg101/s
Use Google darn it
Actually from what I've seen and read most are not franchises. Starbucks owns the majority of the stores, unless they are a kiosk inside another retailer (Safeway or Barnes & Noble for example.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
how many Starbucks he has seen across the street from another Starbucks
While this is quite funny on the surface there is sound business reasoning behind it. Most traffic intersections are laid out in such a way that a shop on one corner is a major pain to get to from driving along the opposite side of the street. And then getting back the way you were headed requires a major detour. So in a high density area with a lot of traffic it is perfectly worthwhile to open two shops, each on opposite corners to catch customers headed in both directions. Keep in mind when opening your own shop, whether a franchise of a major chain or a private brand.
That was Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, made immortal by an accident involving an irrational particle accelerator, a liquid lunch and two elastic stripes. Arthur Dent? Arthur Phillip Dent? You're a jerk... A complete asshole.
Why is anything anything?
FarFarAway in Shrek-2 has twin Farbucks :)
.. to :)
Closer to the end of the movie, when that baked
thing walks to the castle, patrons of one of the
shops escape in horror across the street
another Farbucks. Kinda takes a couple of seconds
to realize that and it makes it twice as funny
3.243F6A8885A308D313
In English, you can end sentences with prepositions. The rule saying you can't was made up by scholars in previous centuries who thought English was derived from Latin (it isn't at all), and also thought that any deviation from Latin grammar was an error (and even if English came from Latin, why the hell would that be true?) Linguistics was not well understood then, so scholars thought that it ought to be possible to translate word-for-word from Latin to English.
Specifically, in English, you ask many questions by moving the object (often "what") to the front of the sentence, and leaving nothing in its place. (Examples: "You are doing what?" goes to "What are you doing?", and "You are talking about what?" goes to "What are you talking about?")
This can indeed leave a preposition at the end of the sentence. Moving the preposition as well is also allowed, but is much less common. (Any English speaker would find "About what are you talking?" to sound stilted.) The preposition at the end of the sentence still has a referent, it's just in another place, and this kind of movement occurs in many languages, as any linguistics course will tell you.
The only reason you couldn't do this in Latin is because the preposition was PART OF THE WORD, so of course you had to move it with the word. It's a lot like split infinitives, another classic grammatical non-error: Caesar couldn't have split an infinitive if he had tried.
And so your post had no point except to be elitist about a point whose only basis is in discredited 19th-century linguistics. Don't you feel special?
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota