No, you have it right, except that it's Medvedev now (two leaders that agree with each other a lot does not necessarily mean that one is the other's puppet - especially not when they've been working together and influencing each other for many years). The thing is that overall he's improved life in Russia. The average Russian is happier to have a job and food on the table (and the table and the chairs and the room they're all in...) than he is upset over the death of Ms. Politkovskaya or the feelings of BP's shareholders. Remember, rigged or not Medvedev would have won the vote by a landslide - that wouldn't have been the case if Putin's reign had been a continuation of the disaster that was Yeltsin.
The Soviet Union functioned for a long time without the freedoms we seem to predicate our very existence on, and the restrictions Putin's imposing in Russia are nothing compared to what came before. And as long as they're not launching their nukes at us and willing to trade (even if it is strictly on their terms) I'm content to let them govern their land as they see fit.
I for one hope that all DHS employees investigate these potential terrorist threats with full body cavity searches, preferably starting with the mouth.
I don't care how they search the bears. I want it televised.
While the rest of the world runs out of resources, us Canadians are sitting on a veritable goldmine of oil, precious metals, and uranium.
Said resources are located in one of the most hideously inhospitable climates on Earth. In the winter, you can die of more than ten minutes exposure to the cold and the equipment constantly freezes up. When it warms up the land melts into twenty meter deep ultra-sticky mud that you can easily lose heavy machinery in (and many companies do, it's the cost of doing business up north). Injuries are very common in that line of work, often after only a few years of doing it, and deaths are not unheard of. I mean, it isn't hell, but it's not like we're rolling around being decadent on giant heaps of gold and precious gems, either. Getting those resources out of the ground is expensive no matter who's doing it, and most countries are just as happy buying them as losing soldiers to capture them and then losing workers to dig them up themselves.
Now if global warming floods the coasts and a few hundred million people need to move somewhere dry...well, then we have issues, but that will be the start of a world war anyway and we'd be doomed in one of those even if we conscripted half the population and started training them tomorrow.
This is suicide without a large military to assert your control over said resources.
Canada already doesn't control its resources. It's sold a controlling stake to pretty much everything of value to various large foreign interests.
And given that the Americans have given their economy AND military the royal shaft over these past few years, they'd be hard pressed to come to ANYONE's aid at this point.
What makes you think the Americans would come to Canada's aid? My money's on them "liberating" us from our evil socialist government some time in the next twenty years or so. And short of them torturing and literally enslaving the local population we probably won't even notice as our much-loved social programs will have decayed to nothing or been sold off to private interests by then.
If Russia is to reassert itself as a power its prime time is coming soon.
Russia is already asserting itself. You just don't hear about it because small bits of news like "Russia and China Conduct Joint Military Exercises", or "Russia Resolves Border Dispute With China", or "Russia Signs Energy Deal With X, Y, and Z EU Countries", or "Big Company X is Builds Giant Factory in Russia" get lost under the more important issues like "Are Americans Bitter?" and "The Friend of the Aunt of the Candidate's Wife's Stepbrother Hates Apple Pie, Will the American People Think Less of Mr. Candidate Because of This?" and the ever-interesting "Brittney's Not Dead Yet!" story. And that's why most North Americans still can't wrap their heads around the fact that Russia's economy is growing very quickly...we didn't hear about all the little steps they took to fix things and now we can't believe the results because it seems it came out of nowhere - which probably suits the Kremlin just fine.
but it is true that many of the local tech companies have blacklisted the students in the class.
Can someone explain the mentality behind this to me, please? I simply don't understand it, and yet given the number of people here expressing concern over this I'm starting to wonder what it is that you all know that I don't...
Are they afraid their new employees are going to use their 1337 h4x0r skills to steal company info? That's retarded thinking at a tech company. It's like a warehouse manager refusing to hire strong people because they might be able to break down the office door and go snooping through the company files. Sure, his precious files are safe (until he forgets to lock his door), but what about all those workers hurting themselves and the pile of big crates on the broken pallet in the corner that nobody's been able to move since the new hiring policy came into effect?
Usually this would be where someone makes a sarcastic comment about you liberating the polar bears...but if you could just kill Celine first then I swear we really would welcome you as liberators.
Meh. I vacationed in Europe this summer. Went through Athens, Sofia, Rome, and Frankfurt at various points in my trip. The security, while well armed (as you say) in all instances, was polite, efficient, and competent. In Athens the guard at the checkpoint even helped me repack my bag (I had a marble chess set in it that the machine couldn't penetrate so I had to dump it out for them). In Frankfurt I was half asleep going through and I dropped the tray with my stuff and the guard there helped me pick it up (in Canada the best you get is an irritated sigh as you hold up the line, no idea what's typical for the US). So not all European airports are shitty. I'm told there are even some good US airports remaining where the TSA goons aren't semi-retarded, though I can't speak for that from experience as I stopped flying to/from the US some time ago due to some really stupid TSA BS at San Fransisco's airport a few years ago.
Like you can not shift overnight to let's say, a communist system?
I don't know if you're being sarcastic or not, so I'm not sure if I'm agreeing or disagreeing here, but...
You can't shift to any drastically different system overnight. It's a disaster every time. It was bad enough in the early days of Russian communism that Lenin himself introduced capitalistic reforms to avert an economic disaster. Millions of Chinese died when Mao made drastic economic changes. And Easter Europe is full of people who can tell you all about the joys of switching back to market systems overnight after decades of central planning.
In general I agree with you. But there are some notable exceptions...
Game consoles, smartphones, even APIs for stinking video cards.
Microsoft has already half-opened up the 360 with the XNA Game Studio. No, it's not open to the point where you can run Linux on it, but it's better than what was available before. And since every release adds a bit more functionality it may actually lead to a decently open XBOX at some point. It might be enough to force Sony to unlock the rest of the PS3 (right now it runs Linux, but the GPU can't be put into 3D graphics mode when anything but a signed PS3 game is loaded). Who knows, hell might even freeze over and Nintendo might allow homebrew games on the Wii.
Smartphones I don't know much about so I won't comment.
But as for video cards, I'm not exactly sure what you're talking about. The DirectX and OpenGL SDKs are publicly available for free. Do you want to use the GPU without jumping through the Direct3D/OpenGL hoops? NVIDIA already has a freely available API out for that (CUDA) and last I heard AMD was going that direction too. Want access to the hardware specs so you can hack it as you please? AMD has already released those (NV probably won't for a long time, but they may go that route some time in the future).
Having the opening brace on its own line doesn't just show me where the conditional code starts, it also keeps conditions that have to be split over multiple lines from looking like they might be part of that code. I mean, yeah, I could create a temporary variable and assign the result of the long condition to it and then do an if on that, but I consider it even worse since it introduces extra, and unnecessary, variables into the scope (which should be a shooting offense, IMHO).
The other issue I have with that is that with syntax highlighting you end up looking for opening text that's one of several colors (but not the comment color), which is harder for me to scan for than a line with a single brightly colored curly brace in it.
To each their own, I guess. This is the style I use in my code. When hacking someone else's, I use their conventions.
PS2: 300MHz MIPS CPU, no L2 cache but there's 16K of on-chip "scratch RAM" that's used to get around that limitation. 32 MB of RAM, though 1 MB is reserved for Sony's micro-kernel (or whatever). Two independent vector units. One is attached to the CPU and can either run independently or it acts as a SIMD unit for the CPU. It's actually semi-useless as an independent unit due to restrictions on how you can DMA out of it, but some developers find a good use for it. The second unit is attached to the rasterizer and is the programmable transform unit. There's an entire PS1 console in there. You can use it's CPU and everything if you like. Usually it just handles I/O (since the controllers and memory cards are physically attached to it and the actual PS2 just DMA's in/out of its memory to get data). Fixed function texturing and lighting with semi-broken blend modes. Vast amounts of fill rate. God's own DMA controller. Direct access to every memory address and register in the box (though a few are off limits).
Wii: 729 MHz PowerPC with 256K L2 cache and SIMD extensions; 88MB of stupidly fast (or so goes my understanding - I base that on my colleagues' assertions) RAM; fixed function transform unit; up to 8 textures per pass (1 texture per clock) with programmable blending. No idea what the API is like. My best guess is it's direct access to the hardware like the PS2.
360: Three PowerPC CPUs running at 3.2 GHz with two hardware threads each. Effective clock rate is lower since cache-misses are obscenely expensive. One SIMD vector unit per CPU. 1 MB L2 cache on each CPU. 512 MB unified memory. Blazing fast GPU with lots of fill rate, but there are restrictions on the frame buffer (as it is held in special uber-fast on-chip RAM in the GPU). Fully programmable transformation (with the ability to pull and push data to arbitrary memory locations). Fully programmable texturing and shading. Fixed-function blending. Mini OS is always running in the background. All drawing done through D3D9-like API. Dashboard can hijack your frame buffer or input (or anything, really) any time it likes to do fancy XBOX stuff.
For smaller developers DRM is often mandated by the publisher. And the publisher doesn't give a damn about the developer or their game so long as it sparkles well enough to attract consumers. In the PC gaming world that standard is ridiculously low.
If you refuse to DRM, they refuse to publish your game and you make no money. And no, self-publishing is not a viable option for a lot of companies. Almost all major video games sell mostly on hype. If you can't afford a major advertising campaign and don't happen to already have a pack of rabid fans refreshing your home page for the latest scrap of news, then there's no way you can recoup the development costs of a AAA title just selling stuff off your web site. And that's not even taking into account the problem of getting said money in the first place without whoring yourself out to a publisher.
Having said that, I have no fucking clue what Ubi's excuse is, as they're certainly big enough that they aren't at some evil publisher's mercy. Maybe they've grown large enough that they're like EA, with enough bureaucracy between the studios and the publishing execs that they may as well be separate companies.
No, no, no. Two weeks from now Europe, Russia, and Central Asia unite and declare the second Soviet Union. Then the CIA (which is secretly a branch of the KGB) sends secret agents to hijack the International Space Station (secretly insured by the guy that owned the Twin Towers) and crash it onto their own headquarters. After that, Canada, the USA, Mexico, and (just because it'd be weird) Chile unite and invade Iran, at which point the Chinese (who are secretly controlled by New Zealand) nuke us. Then we nuke them. And then the Russians nuke Australia, just for good measure.
In the mean time, Charlton Heston (who secretly isn't actually dead) has somehow gotten into a light-speed rocket, and...
Did I miss anything? Oh right, the Antichrist. Well fuck him, this conspiracy theory is already full. Besides, nobody likes Dick Cheney anyway.
I'm pretty confused by the bottled water thing myself. Fine, you don't trust the city to provide clean water. Buy a damn filter. They're not that expensive (well, not unless you want to filter the water you shower and flush your toilets with too), especially when you compare them to what you're paying for bottled water over a year.
It turns out one of out neighbors had issues with my grandfather and was trying to use the cops as his private thugs.
My parents used to have exactly the same sort of neighbors. They told the city we'd redone the inside of our house in marble (or something like that) to get us reassessed for taxes three years before that was due (joke's on them, even with the home improvements we did do our taxes went down). They called the city to see if our big dog was licensed. They called the cops to write tickets when we parked so much as an inch too close to the curb (usually nothing happened). The list goes on...
You know, the only difference between this and what went on in the USSR is that the authorities (generally) don't do really nasty things on mere suspicion like the KGB did. Apart from that, people are the same everywhere, and it scares the shit out of me that all sorts of government agencies are getting more power and less oversight. That's just begging for trouble...
"I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The US Government will lead the American people - and the West in general - into an unbearable hell and a choking life." - Osama bin Laden, as quoted in his only post-9/11 interview, ca. November 2001, and as aired on CNN in early 2002.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you have it right, except that it's Medvedev now (two leaders that agree with each other a lot does not necessarily mean that one is the other's puppet - especially not when they've been working together and influencing each other for many years). The thing is that overall he's improved life in Russia. The average Russian is happier to have a job and food on the table (and the table and the chairs and the room they're all in...) than he is upset over the death of Ms. Politkovskaya or the feelings of BP's shareholders. Remember, rigged or not Medvedev would have won the vote by a landslide - that wouldn't have been the case if Putin's reign had been a continuation of the disaster that was Yeltsin.
The Soviet Union functioned for a long time without the freedoms we seem to predicate our very existence on, and the restrictions Putin's imposing in Russia are nothing compared to what came before. And as long as they're not launching their nukes at us and willing to trade (even if it is strictly on their terms) I'm content to let them govern their land as they see fit.
I for one hope that all DHS employees investigate these potential terrorist threats with full body cavity searches, preferably starting with the mouth.
I don't care how they search the bears. I want it televised.
While the rest of the world runs out of resources, us Canadians are sitting on a veritable goldmine of oil, precious metals, and uranium.
Said resources are located in one of the most hideously inhospitable climates on Earth. In the winter, you can die of more than ten minutes exposure to the cold and the equipment constantly freezes up. When it warms up the land melts into twenty meter deep ultra-sticky mud that you can easily lose heavy machinery in (and many companies do, it's the cost of doing business up north). Injuries are very common in that line of work, often after only a few years of doing it, and deaths are not unheard of. I mean, it isn't hell, but it's not like we're rolling around being decadent on giant heaps of gold and precious gems, either. Getting those resources out of the ground is expensive no matter who's doing it, and most countries are just as happy buying them as losing soldiers to capture them and then losing workers to dig them up themselves.
Now if global warming floods the coasts and a few hundred million people need to move somewhere dry...well, then we have issues, but that will be the start of a world war anyway and we'd be doomed in one of those even if we conscripted half the population and started training them tomorrow.
This is suicide without a large military to assert your control over said resources.
Canada already doesn't control its resources. It's sold a controlling stake to pretty much everything of value to various large foreign interests.
And given that the Americans have given their economy AND military the royal shaft over these past few years, they'd be hard pressed to come to ANYONE's aid at this point.
What makes you think the Americans would come to Canada's aid? My money's on them "liberating" us from our evil socialist government some time in the next twenty years or so. And short of them torturing and literally enslaving the local population we probably won't even notice as our much-loved social programs will have decayed to nothing or been sold off to private interests by then.
If Russia is to reassert itself as a power its prime time is coming soon.
Russia is already asserting itself. You just don't hear about it because small bits of news like "Russia and China Conduct Joint Military Exercises", or "Russia Resolves Border Dispute With China", or "Russia Signs Energy Deal With X, Y, and Z EU Countries", or "Big Company X is Builds Giant Factory in Russia" get lost under the more important issues like "Are Americans Bitter?" and "The Friend of the Aunt of the Candidate's Wife's Stepbrother Hates Apple Pie, Will the American People Think Less of Mr. Candidate Because of This?" and the ever-interesting "Brittney's Not Dead Yet!" story. And that's why most North Americans still can't wrap their heads around the fact that Russia's economy is growing very quickly...we didn't hear about all the little steps they took to fix things and now we can't believe the results because it seems it came out of nowhere - which probably suits the Kremlin just fine.
but it is true that many of the local tech companies have blacklisted the students in the class.
Can someone explain the mentality behind this to me, please? I simply don't understand it, and yet given the number of people here expressing concern over this I'm starting to wonder what it is that you all know that I don't...
Are they afraid their new employees are going to use their 1337 h4x0r skills to steal company info? That's retarded thinking at a tech company. It's like a warehouse manager refusing to hire strong people because they might be able to break down the office door and go snooping through the company files. Sure, his precious files are safe (until he forgets to lock his door), but what about all those workers hurting themselves and the pile of big crates on the broken pallet in the corner that nobody's been able to move since the new hiring policy came into effect?
...because we've already taken her off your hands and stuffed her into one of our desert hell-holes.
Holy shit. Deserts sequester Carbon and awful musicians?! Excuse me, the local bands in my city suck. I'm off to chop down a few trees...
Usually this would be where someone makes a sarcastic comment about you liberating the polar bears...but if you could just kill Celine first then I swear we really would welcome you as liberators.
Meh. I vacationed in Europe this summer. Went through Athens, Sofia, Rome, and Frankfurt at various points in my trip. The security, while well armed (as you say) in all instances, was polite, efficient, and competent. In Athens the guard at the checkpoint even helped me repack my bag (I had a marble chess set in it that the machine couldn't penetrate so I had to dump it out for them). In Frankfurt I was half asleep going through and I dropped the tray with my stuff and the guard there helped me pick it up (in Canada the best you get is an irritated sigh as you hold up the line, no idea what's typical for the US). So not all European airports are shitty. I'm told there are even some good US airports remaining where the TSA goons aren't semi-retarded, though I can't speak for that from experience as I stopped flying to/from the US some time ago due to some really stupid TSA BS at San Fransisco's airport a few years ago.
So, how many virgins per minute does it require to keep going?
This is Slashdot. Your question is making people...uncomfortable.
Like you can not shift overnight to let's say, a communist system?
I don't know if you're being sarcastic or not, so I'm not sure if I'm agreeing or disagreeing here, but...
You can't shift to any drastically different system overnight. It's a disaster every time. It was bad enough in the early days of Russian communism that Lenin himself introduced capitalistic reforms to avert an economic disaster. Millions of Chinese died when Mao made drastic economic changes. And Easter Europe is full of people who can tell you all about the joys of switching back to market systems overnight after decades of central planning.
The release of this April Fools gag was handled by the Vista team.
Excel Project Manager: Hey! No fair! The Vista team stole our credit!
In general I agree with you. But there are some notable exceptions...
Game consoles, smartphones, even APIs for stinking video cards.
Microsoft has already half-opened up the 360 with the XNA Game Studio. No, it's not open to the point where you can run Linux on it, but it's better than what was available before. And since every release adds a bit more functionality it may actually lead to a decently open XBOX at some point. It might be enough to force Sony to unlock the rest of the PS3 (right now it runs Linux, but the GPU can't be put into 3D graphics mode when anything but a signed PS3 game is loaded). Who knows, hell might even freeze over and Nintendo might allow homebrew games on the Wii.
Smartphones I don't know much about so I won't comment.
But as for video cards, I'm not exactly sure what you're talking about. The DirectX and OpenGL SDKs are publicly available for free. Do you want to use the GPU without jumping through the Direct3D/OpenGL hoops? NVIDIA already has a freely available API out for that (CUDA) and last I heard AMD was going that direction too. Want access to the hardware specs so you can hack it as you please? AMD has already released those (NV probably won't for a long time, but they may go that route some time in the future).
And we, the public,
Who?
are disappointed
Why? What do you need? Bread? Circuses?
that our public servants
Bwahahahahahahahahahaha! Hahahahahaha! Ahahahahaha! Hoo. Ha. Seriously though, who are you talking about here?
are to goddamn stupid that they think COPA had any chance of accomplishing that.
You misunderstood. We think that you are goddamn stupid enough to think COPA would accomplish that.
- Your Government
Fuck the children!
George Carlin FTW.
I just wish I didnt have to select it every fucking time)
You don't. There's a setting for that.
How do you do multi-line if statements, then? I usually type:
if( some_dumb_library_function_that_takes_lots_of_params(
param1, param2, param3, oh_em_gee_will_it_never_end,
stop_the_pain_please, param6, param7, true, false, true, -1
functions_with_this_many_params_should_be_a_compiler_error,
create_temp_context( ctx ) ) == fourty_two )
{
lots_o_code();
}
Having the opening brace on its own line doesn't just show me where the conditional code starts, it also keeps conditions that have to be split over multiple lines from looking like they might be part of that code. I mean, yeah, I could create a temporary variable and assign the result of the long condition to it and then do an if on that, but I consider it even worse since it introduces extra, and unnecessary, variables into the scope (which should be a shooting offense, IMHO).
The other issue I have with that is that with syntax highlighting you end up looking for opening text that's one of several colors (but not the comment color), which is harder for me to scan for than a line with a single brightly colored curly brace in it.
To each their own, I guess. This is the style I use in my code. When hacking someone else's, I use their conventions.
Hahahahaha...
Oh man. I would so give you my +5 Funny if I could right now.
Bit more info:
PS2: 300MHz MIPS CPU, no L2 cache but there's 16K of on-chip "scratch RAM" that's used to get around that limitation. 32 MB of RAM, though 1 MB is reserved for Sony's micro-kernel (or whatever). Two independent vector units. One is attached to the CPU and can either run independently or it acts as a SIMD unit for the CPU. It's actually semi-useless as an independent unit due to restrictions on how you can DMA out of it, but some developers find a good use for it. The second unit is attached to the rasterizer and is the programmable transform unit. There's an entire PS1 console in there. You can use it's CPU and everything if you like. Usually it just handles I/O (since the controllers and memory cards are physically attached to it and the actual PS2 just DMA's in/out of its memory to get data). Fixed function texturing and lighting with semi-broken blend modes. Vast amounts of fill rate. God's own DMA controller. Direct access to every memory address and register in the box (though a few are off limits).
Wii: 729 MHz PowerPC with 256K L2 cache and SIMD extensions; 88MB of stupidly fast (or so goes my understanding - I base that on my colleagues' assertions) RAM; fixed function transform unit; up to 8 textures per pass (1 texture per clock) with programmable blending. No idea what the API is like. My best guess is it's direct access to the hardware like the PS2.
360: Three PowerPC CPUs running at 3.2 GHz with two hardware threads each. Effective clock rate is lower since cache-misses are obscenely expensive. One SIMD vector unit per CPU. 1 MB L2 cache on each CPU. 512 MB unified memory. Blazing fast GPU with lots of fill rate, but there are restrictions on the frame buffer (as it is held in special uber-fast on-chip RAM in the GPU). Fully programmable transformation (with the ability to pull and push data to arbitrary memory locations). Fully programmable texturing and shading. Fixed-function blending. Mini OS is always running in the background. All drawing done through D3D9-like API. Dashboard can hijack your frame buffer or input (or anything, really) any time it likes to do fancy XBOX stuff.
So yeah, completely dissimilar.
Yup.
For smaller developers DRM is often mandated by the publisher. And the publisher doesn't give a damn about the developer or their game so long as it sparkles well enough to attract consumers. In the PC gaming world that standard is ridiculously low.
If you refuse to DRM, they refuse to publish your game and you make no money. And no, self-publishing is not a viable option for a lot of companies. Almost all major video games sell mostly on hype. If you can't afford a major advertising campaign and don't happen to already have a pack of rabid fans refreshing your home page for the latest scrap of news, then there's no way you can recoup the development costs of a AAA title just selling stuff off your web site. And that's not even taking into account the problem of getting said money in the first place without whoring yourself out to a publisher.
Having said that, I have no fucking clue what Ubi's excuse is, as they're certainly big enough that they aren't at some evil publisher's mercy. Maybe they've grown large enough that they're like EA, with enough bureaucracy between the studios and the publishing execs that they may as well be separate companies.
...this was a problem well before Steve ever even thought of the iPhone.
What? Did the universe even exist back then?
No, no, no. Two weeks from now Europe, Russia, and Central Asia unite and declare the second Soviet Union. Then the CIA (which is secretly a branch of the KGB) sends secret agents to hijack the International Space Station (secretly insured by the guy that owned the Twin Towers) and crash it onto their own headquarters. After that, Canada, the USA, Mexico, and (just because it'd be weird) Chile unite and invade Iran, at which point the Chinese (who are secretly controlled by New Zealand) nuke us. Then we nuke them. And then the Russians nuke Australia, just for good measure.
In the mean time, Charlton Heston (who secretly isn't actually dead) has somehow gotten into a light-speed rocket, and...
Did I miss anything? Oh right, the Antichrist. Well fuck him, this conspiracy theory is already full. Besides, nobody likes Dick Cheney anyway.
you can't filibuster is there is cloture
Which, unless I'm mistaken, he also voted for.
And the law will be enforced based on what it says, not on what anyone thinks it should have said instead.
Which is ironic, given the way the Constitution is treated...
I'm pretty confused by the bottled water thing myself. Fine, you don't trust the city to provide clean water. Buy a damn filter. They're not that expensive (well, not unless you want to filter the water you shower and flush your toilets with too), especially when you compare them to what you're paying for bottled water over a year.
It turns out one of out neighbors had issues with my grandfather and was trying to use the cops as his private thugs.
My parents used to have exactly the same sort of neighbors. They told the city we'd redone the inside of our house in marble (or something like that) to get us reassessed for taxes three years before that was due (joke's on them, even with the home improvements we did do our taxes went down). They called the city to see if our big dog was licensed. They called the cops to write tickets when we parked so much as an inch too close to the curb (usually nothing happened). The list goes on...
You know, the only difference between this and what went on in the USSR is that the authorities (generally) don't do really nasty things on mere suspicion like the KGB did. Apart from that, people are the same everywhere, and it scares the shit out of me that all sorts of government agencies are getting more power and less oversight. That's just begging for trouble...
"I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The US Government will lead the American people - and the West in general - into an unbearable hell and a choking life."
- Osama bin Laden, as quoted in his only post-9/11 interview, ca. November 2001, and as aired on CNN in early 2002.
I still remember laughing when I heard that...