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Firefox Crop Circles Prove Intelligent Alien Life
This past weekend, the OSU Linux Users Group descended on a field in Oregon to create a 45,000+ square foot crop circle of Firefox. The photos and write-up are worth checking out.
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Bonus geek points for using an HP graphing calculator and string instead of GPS. Though I'm not quite sure why the farmers would give permission for parts of their crop to be destroyed (even if he/she's an OSS advocate).
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
Not implying that this is, but... how hard would it be to make a web gadget that would auto-generate an image of a crop circle based on a simple 2-color bitmap.... (image only, don't want something that hacks into automated tractors)...
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
Slashdot headline disproves intelligent human life.
It makes sense that geeks would be the ones making crop circles. Aliens surely have better things to do.
ET prefers Firefox!
Maybe that's how Jeff Goldblum uploaded the virus to the mothership...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
But I have a life.
"I see crop circles..."
While it may be fun and games, doing this without permission causes great losses to farm land. It can cost on the order of tens of thousands of dollars in damage when people go out in hopes of creating one of these hoaxes.
Glad they got permission for this one.
I guess that's how you amuse yourself when you live in Idaho's Portugal.
This just shows the dedication to OSS!
I would imagine they got permission from the farmer or at least I would have. Farmers up that way tend to carry guns!
Great pics, especialy the good looking lil geek babe in pic #77. Bonus!
The fox will eat the explorer and spoil the opera.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
It proves a collection of browser zealots have plenty of free time and not much else to do with it. I mean, cool advertising, but some extraterrestrial's gotta be laughing at us.
My problem with spontaneous human combustion is that never seems to happen to the "right" people.
But there's nothing funny about a shitty browser.
Just goes to prove that aliens are for OSS too...
Otherwise, I'd have to suggest the perpetrators be sentenced to muck-out a feedlot or two.
"Use Open-Source on My FARM!?! That's what did more damage to my oats than a hailstorm followed by locusts last year!"
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
How is this news? What a waste of time and resources
... this is what Fifo had to say...
This makes the local news (and maybe gets picked up somewhere), and a few pissed off IE6 users might hear "Firefox, firefox, firefox" a few more times. And that might be all it takes for a few hundred more converts.
Nice to see at least someone wearing a kilt.
Also, as for the naysayers, I suspect the farmer gave permission because:
- that many people milling around the farm would have been noticed
- taking off a light plane AND a Robinson R22 helo off the farm would certainly get noticed by the farmer.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
This was probably the most fun I ever had in my life. And now it's on slashdot! It can't get any better!
:)
I challenge others to come up with other ways to creatively promote the stuff they love. Try and beat this! muahahaha.
TAKE BACK THE [insert your geek-dom here].
... one Washington farmer reported a complete loss after IE enthusiasts recreated a blue screen of death across his soybean field.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
man, talk about beating the magic out something - that's a hell of a lot of pictures.
but I guess sometimes it's just really hard to decide between posting this shot or this one on your website.
ôó
The multiple T1 internet connection that keeps students and faculty plugged in to the net was lost for over four hours, says an OSU student. Apparently after half an hour without it caused mass hysteria. People fled to the "out of doors" in droves, and hospitals are reporting epidemic level cases of sunburn. Back to you Burnie...
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
Within the report though was also the statement that the financial institution is forecasting that the Nintendo Wii will retail in for 19,800 yen.
Uhh... sure.
If you dont want to bother looking through all the pics (lots!) - here are the best arial shots: http://lug.oregonstate.edu/gallery/firefox-crop-ci rcle?page=12
"Though I'm not quite sure why the farmers would give permission for parts of their crop to be destroyed (even if he/she's an OSS advocate)."
Because of the subsidies the crops have been overproduced into worthlessness. In the case of corn it fetches something around $2 per bushel on the open market, but $3 per bushel to grow the stuff. You the taxpayer, well, essentially burn money to keep farmers buzzing around on their big tonka toys feeling productive.
Oh and in the process, devastating the economies and agricultural markets of third world countries causing widespread famine and poverty.
Deleted
Isn't the tail in the logo supposed to be on fire?
Karma: Excer..ex...excellahhh...realll good (mostly affected by drinking not done in moderation)
I wonder if they bothered to ask Jon Hicks, the graphic designer who drew the Firefox logo, for the original vector outlines.
Since drawing that logo, incidentally, Jon has dumped Firefox in favor of Safari, which integrates much better with its host OS, has superior support for standards, and is in general much more asthetically aware (as is its core development team). What does Jon know that thousands of rabid Firefox fans don't?
Look at the size of that thing! It's almost as big as Firefox' memory footprint!
"Maybe the google earth cameras picked it up! "
Hope they will soon!
The location of the crop circle is somewhere in the vicinity of here
Sigs are for Terrorists.
I mean, I swear-by firefox as my web browser, but c'mon, get a life people.
If the aliens were really intelligent, they would have left an Opera circle.
Hi,
I think you meant to call it a Firefox Crop Sign.
Thanks,
M. Night Shyamalan
hype it up mister.
My grandfather gets paid $7 a bushel for his corn crop - wherever you get your resorces is BULLSHIT, because I get a cut of the profit every year as a farm-hand in Mississippi and Alabama. I even cut my hands on the cotton bolls when I go to harvest my grandpa's shit. Whatever you're talking about, you're not a farmer - and before any economist idiot can come by with "Standard" prices - depends upon the grower's reputation/quality of the grown product as to what makes the price - don't you ever fucking forget that. Remember that nice cashmere sweater that costs 200 bucks as opposed to the same plant material that's only judged inferior going for 300 because it's a more recognized name? Bingo - it's all about the name, pal. People will pay more for Name-brand cotton than corporate-cheapass name cotton. It's been proven thruout the times , and it will almost always work until the general population gets smarter and discovers this simple truth - untiul then, we're still stucvk with the capitalist ideal of "More expensive is better," even though I paid *NOTHING* for my 64-bit AMD 3000+.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Will all virgins please raise their hands... http://lug.oregonstate.edu/gallery/firefox-crop-ci rcle/img_5374_1
Really awesome stunt. Would any MSIE users do something like this to show their enthusiasm for the product? Probably not. This stunt is somewhat the same principle as when geeks on Linux meetings bring their penguins with them in all shapes and sizes. I mean, you don't see MS Windows users arrive with big amounts of glass...
Hey, this was done by fanatic fanGIRLS too, you insensitive clod.
Ref
Real geeks would have used string and a slide rule.
Wiat, real OLD geeks would have used string and a slide rule.
paintball
That's right, with the subsidies, the american produce is cheaper than they can produce in the developing and third world. Imagine that, you have a farmer with American wages to pay, capital investment in equipment, debts to the banks and with the subsidies it's still cheaper to ship the stuff half way round the world.
The farmers in the third world can't enter the American market, the American market is busy dumping the produce on their market.
Deleted
I love the way some of you have bad mouthed these students for taking sometime to do something that required team work and a fair amount of ingenuity. Let them enjoy the moment.
Huh? How would this "destroy the environment" any more than actually harvesting the damned oats? Not to mention the plowing and planting of the field to begin with. And if you're against any of that, good luck finding some wild berries to snack on, because nothing you pick up at the local Safeway or buy from Taco Bell has impacted the environment any less. Damned hippies.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&si d=aIUBO99o5fTw&refer=home
On the open market. What part of the word "subsidies" don't you understand? The "profit" you're getting a cut of is welfare. It's handed to you still warm from the taxpayers wallet.
Deleted
Space... oats? Space wheat? Corn? Space corn?
I'm just beginning to think that space oats isn't the answer.
...and quite obviously have no idea what you're talking about - because you get a maximum of more like 100 to 150 bushels per acre in *ideal* conditions, and more like 40-60 bushels per acre in average conditions:
e ld+%22bushels+acre%22+OR+%22bushels+per+acre%22&bt nG=Search
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=wheat+yi
How is it destroying the environment? Nothing was damaged other than oat stocks, and provided that the oats were not stomped into oblivion, they may still even be harvestable.
Call me flamebait, but the fact the farmer allowed it is proof that Maddox is always right!
That great big overhead shot finally gave me something to change my wallpaper to! Sorry Elisha Cuthbert.. you will be missed.
Had you any knowledge of the supposed "tribal" artwork for tattoos out nowdays, and compared it to the older style of tribal tats, you'd easily notice the "scythes" in the logo's tail which represent fire and power. But, hey, nobody can be expected to understand something that's based totally off of another religion and it's general symbolism in it's patterns and artwork, can we?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Emily is hott. More pics of her please. With hot grits.
they didn't walk along the rows. They didn't look fat in the pictures that I saw.
Why would a rancher know about corn field? wouldn't that be a farmers job?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This isn't corn. These were oats. Dry as sin oats, growing densely together. It was impossible to step anywhere without knocking some down, because they're so closely packed together, and were already just about falling down under their own weight. It was a choice between making a bunch of trails which would have been seen from the air as an ugly, less dense area, or making one trail.
Crop Circles are a hoax, the Aliens who made them told me so.
As a former rancher, you should then know the difference between wheatfields (RTFA, or look at the pics with all of the heads formed on the wheat) and cornfields.
Ahh...I get it! I guess that is one of the reasons you're a FORMER rancher.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
I speak as a former rancher. I know fucking better.
Then you'd also know that there's a difference between a farm and ranch.
Farm = place where plants are grown and harvested
Ranch = place where animals are raised
I grew up on a horse ranch. What animals did you raise? btw, the circle was done in an Oat Field!
Lemme check http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/trademarks/polic y.htmlMoFo trademark policy...
...
1) modified logo
2) high-resolution
3)
4) We gonna sue their ass for trademark infrigement!
5) Profit of course from the buzz
Granted that Safari integrates better with its host OS and is more aesthetic... what makes you think it has better standards support than Firefox? Not Acid2, I hope.
Acid2, by its own admission, is not a compliance test, and passing it does not indicate a particular level of standards compliance. What Acid2 tests is a set of relatively unused pieces of the specs that most browsers got wrong at the time it was written. Think of it as making sure the corners are covered. It's still possible for one browser to cover 80% of the room, missing the corners, and another to cover 70% of the room, but get the corners.
Webdevout's comparison is pretty reliable, though unfortunately they haven't checked Safari as thoroughly as Firefox, IE, and Opera. In the sections on which Safari has been tested most thoroughly: CSS 2.1 and the changes for CSS 3, Firefox matches or exceeds Safari on all points except for pseudo-elements.
Or look at two browsers that both pass Acid2: Safari 2 and Opera 9 (same link). Notice that there are some places where Safari exceeds Opera's coverage, and some where Opera exceed's Safari's. There are even places where Firefox 1.5 -- which doesn't pass Acid2 -- exceeds Opera's coverage (HTML and CSS 3 changes), though Opera has better coverage of CSS 2.1.
I would guess that, if someone has a more thorough comparison, Firefox 1.5 would have better standards support overall than Safari 2, and Opera 9 would either be slightly ahead or more or less tied with Firefox 1.5 (again, overall).
Whew, was worried for a second. The guy with the linux T-shirt in the front has his hands down (unless, given the suggestive positioning, he considers himself devirginized by... well look at the picture and see!)
I was in the pattern at McMinville yesterday and a blue & white supercub departed to the east. They said where they were going a few times but I couldn't understand the word until today -- "Amity"! I should have followed them!
Most impressive.
...and heroin, cocaine,...
Isn't it great how the only crops developing countries can profitably grow are those which feed our addictions?
For anyone too lazy to do it themselves, I've made 1600x1200 and 1280x1024 wallpaper files of the cropcircle image.
Is it just me, or does the Firefox logo look like a fox knowing the Earth. In the Biblical sense, I mean.
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST
for a farm-hand in Mississippi and Alabama you sure dont know what the market rates are.
would be better if it had added: " get firefox now "
;)
convert those aliens in space to some good Earth technology...
It'll make us invincible for them too since its memory footprint will be too big for their computer
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Dang it! I got modded "Troll". Boy, I didn't see that one coming!
Goooooooooooooooooooooooooo fanboys!
Like mutilating cattle!
I think most of us here are only familiar with girls dancing when there is a pole involved.
Call me when they move on to anal probes.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
The verdict is still out on whether the OSULUG perpetrators had any form of intelligence, let alone a life ;-)
For the record, I'm posting this via Bon Echo. I think I've just incriminated myself.
Sure, let's kill off the main source of income for a large portion of the midwest and south... Nothing like a nice boost to inflation, jobless/welfare claims, foreclosures, and everyone's grocery bill to make you feel all nice and cozy in your insane and impossible world.
That "income" for the Midwest and South comes from every U.S. taxpayer. Why are we spending billions to encourage farmers to plant fields that would be more productive razed? That will just go to waste? That worsen the problem of low crop prices by encouraging farmers to flood the market? It's expensive and counterproductive, and benefits large corporate plantations - the people who lobby for these price supports - more than anyone else.
explaining to the children there that you think it's better to take away their father's job, farm, their house, and throw them on welfare because some "third world" country needs the US's support more.
Bullshit. Nobody's "supporting" the third world by eliminating farm subsidies. Every dollar per bushel taxpayers give to a farmer lets him sell his crops one more dollar below cost. If crop X costs $2/bushel for both American and African farmers to produce but American farmers get $1/bushel in subsidies, the cost of the African crop will be double relative to the American's crop. Eliminating the subsidies doesn't give free money to third world countries - it just lets them sell their crops, like everyone else.
This also means crop X will be more expensive - even if the crop sells for "less" because of the subsidies, remember that it still cost $2/bushel to make in addition to the $1/bushel of subsidies.
These subsidies also produce wastage - farmers will grow much, much more of crop X at $3/bushel the government effectively gives them than they will at the $2/bushel the free market will give. Remember that the free market doesn't want to buy all of this - farmers are growing more because they get more money for it, not because there's anybody to actually buy it. Besides wasting perfectly good land and resources, farming has environmental consequences such as water contamination from runoff and the chemicals and pesticides used on a modern farm, not to mention the fuel usage of modern farming implements.
Early societies began to evolve from subsistence-level standards of living when it became possible for one man to grow more than he immediately needed, allowing him to sell the rest. Because others could buy food instead of growing it themselves, this allowed for the specialization and division of labor - not everyone had to be farmers, they could do something else for a living.
Farm subsidies artificially make it cheaper to buy imported food from abroad than to grow it domestically. This is the "real" support to third world countires. It also prevents this critical first step for the evolution of third world societies - nobody will ever grow food (or, at least more food than they need for themselves) if they can buy it cheaper than they can grow it. And, most people will agree that nobody growing food in a starving country is a Bad thing.
DATABASE WOW WOW
Well, you did attack the poster himself, and insulted him. That's a good reason to be modded too oblivion on it's own :P
To create an authentic circle, the makers would have to. . .
1. Create the circle entirely at night without any lighting systems. (In none of the several thousand circles formed have pranksters been observed.)
2. Leave no impressions on the earth at all. (No foot prints or ladder or pole impressions on powder-dry or moist earth.)
3. Create a much more complex formation.
4. Make sure the flattened grains fall in mathematically precise overlapping weaves. (In authentic circles, the multi-layered pattern of the weave is one of the mystifying features.)
5. No plant stalks may be damaged during the process. (Real circles do not interrupt the life-process of the plants; In such formations, the plants eventfully spring back up entirely undamaged.)
6. Bend the stalks, never break them.
7. Create the formation in under 20 minutes. (Probably circles are formed instantaneously, but the only observed time lapse has been by a pilot and photographer flying over an a field without a circle only to see one twenty minutes later on a return flight path).
8. Witness unnumbered black helicopters coming to check things out.
9. Create the phenomenon of seeds from inside a formation growing in a peculiar manner as compared to control seed samples.
Do all of this, and the firefox logo would indeed be special.
-FL
You can just see them down at the student bar bragging about how, like, cool it was to, like, do crop circles for Fiyurfox.
250 images of utter American toss.
BUTT a herd of nerds hardly qualifies as intelligent, nor are they considered a form of actual real life. har har... very phoney!!
someone should have sponsored them a tachimeter, would have made it much easiert.
I have a widescreen display you insensitive clod.
You are suppressing me! Did you all see him suppressing me?
What part of the word "subsidies" don't you understand?
Erm.. "bsid"?
You seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that there is such a thing as a "genuine crop circle". All crop circles (or whatever shape they are) are made by people.
No but, yeah but, no but...
I've added a 1680x1050 widescreen version.
...found this on Digg yesterday and tweaked the colors in photoshop to make a 10x7 desktop. Assuming anyone cares, I can host larger versions as well. Just be sure to specify the exact dimentions you want.
So, I suppose this is now, officially, the world's largest icon?
Where is this exactly, I do a lot of flying in that area and I'd love to go see it and maybe fly above it at like 50 feet.
Abuse my rationalization of rhetoric as either metaphor or monotomy.
You state this with massive assertiveness. Do you know something unique or are you making assumptions and presenting them as facts?
-FL
>Why would a rancher know about corn field? wouldn't that be a farmers job?
A rancher who grows his own corn could have an economic advantage over one that buys corn.
Makes perfect sense to me, if a ranch is in a climate that allows it. It's just a build-vs-buy decision.
Corn's pretty easy. It makes a good fallow crop, since it holds the soil together very well, and the mulch you can make from the stalks is rich. Needs a lot of water though.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.