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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
It makes sense that geeks would be the ones making crop circles. Aliens surely have better things to do.
Maybe that's how Jeff Goldblum uploaded the virus to the mothership...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I guess that's how you amuse yourself when you live in Idaho's Portugal.
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.
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
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.
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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.
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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)
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.
Great pics, especialy the good looking lil geek babe in pic #77. Bonus!
At the moment; viewed 98 times
Close up of tape measure; 73 times
Out of focus closeup of oats; 68 times
Geek guy; 47 times
Well, there you have it guys, you're less interesting than an out of focus picture of oats.
KFG
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...
I suspect an overabundance of sugar in your diet.
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.
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Actually, that's my OLD BLOG. Don't GO THERE.
I'm at pennyhero.net now. my blogspot one is going bye bye.
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.
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That great big overhead shot finally gave me something to change my wallpaper to! Sorry Elisha Cuthbert.. you will be missed.
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.
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
Couldn't you get a cut of the profit if you only helped with the crops but stayed away from your grandpa's shit? He sounds like one cranky old dude.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
For anyone too lazy to do it themselves, I've made 1600x1200 and 1280x1024 wallpaper files of the cropcircle image.
I think most of us here are only familiar with girls dancing when there is a pole involved.
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.
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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