They actually taught us this in intelligence school and gave it the name "PIZZA-INT", by analogy with SIGINT (signals intelligence), IMINT (imagery intelligence), HUMINT (human intelligence), etc.
Countries who care what the US is up to always know when something important is about to happen, because the number of late-night pizzas delivered to offices at the Pentagon and State Department skyrockets.
It doesn't seem too covert, though. After all, the spy school instructors knew all about it and it was a common joke throughout the US intelligence community.
If you shake hands with a tar baby, you're going to get stuck...
A tar baby figures in the Uncle Remus story "Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby", where Brer Fox fashions an anthropomorphic figure out of tar and places it alongside a road for Brer Rabbit to see. Sure enough, Rabbit comes a-hoppin' and a-skippin' along and greets the tar baby. Receiving no answer, he gets angry and strikes the tar baby for its rudeness, and of course is immobilized by the gooey tar. Brer Fox, of course, comes along and captures po' Brer Rabbit.
It's a racist term only in the sense that it has entered our vocabulary through the medium of paternalist Jim Crow-era children's books and movies (have you ever seen Disney's "Song of the South?")
If you remember, the Shuttle mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope was cut short specifically so that the astronauts would be safely on the ground when Y2K rolled around. The complete absence of humans in space on that date was entirely intentional.
>First, You mistaken in your idea that books differs MP3s because you don't have to pay for the media with books, while you don't with MP3s. As you yourself state, "all you need is diskspace", you pay for that don't you? Paper costs next to nothing as does disk space, but that does not mean they are without cost.
Well, yes, but...
A sheet of 8.5x11 paper holds about 3000 text characters, when printed efficiently. On the copy machine in my office, we reckon the costs of paper+toner+electricity+maintenance at about 0.25 cents per page. 0.0025 dollars divided by 0.0030 megabytes equals 83 cents per megabyte -- much more than the 0.65 cents per megabyte that 20 gig hard drives cost nowadays. Figure in the labor and time taken to produce those copies, and I bet the paper cost is several orders of magnitude higher.
>Why is this? As the majority of hobbysts must be aware, most >of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but soft- >ware is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked >on it get paid? Just a curious aside... The reason Bill Gates was asked to withdraw from Harvard is that he was using the university's PDP-8 to create the software for his own private for-profit business. So I guess hardware doesn't _always_ need to be paid for...:) Of course, he and Ballmer just donated millions for a spanking new computer science building at Harvard, so I guess all is forgiven.
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Countries who care what the US is up to always know when something important is about to happen, because the number of late-night pizzas delivered to offices at the Pentagon and State Department skyrockets.
It doesn't seem too covert, though. After all, the spy school instructors knew all about it and it was a common joke throughout the US intelligence community.
Chris
A tar baby figures in the Uncle Remus story "Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby", where Brer Fox fashions an anthropomorphic figure out of tar and places it alongside a road for Brer Rabbit to see. Sure enough, Rabbit comes a-hoppin' and a-skippin' along and greets the tar baby. Receiving no answer, he gets angry and strikes the tar baby for its rudeness, and of course is immobilized by the gooey tar. Brer Fox, of course, comes along and captures po' Brer Rabbit.
It's a racist term only in the sense that it has entered our vocabulary through the medium of paternalist Jim Crow-era children's books and movies (have you ever seen Disney's "Song of the South?")
Chris
If you remember, the Shuttle mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope was cut short specifically so that the astronauts would be safely on the ground when Y2K rolled around. The complete absence of humans in space on that date was entirely intentional.
Chris
Well, yes, but...
A sheet of 8.5x11 paper holds about 3000 text characters, when printed efficiently. On the copy machine in my office, we reckon the costs of paper+toner+electricity+maintenance at about 0.25 cents per page. 0.0025 dollars divided by 0.0030 megabytes equals 83 cents per megabyte -- much more than the 0.65 cents per megabyte that 20 gig hard drives cost nowadays. Figure in the labor and time taken to produce those copies, and I bet the paper cost is several orders of magnitude higher.
Chris
Robert Underwood (D - Guam)
Carlos A. Romero-Barcelo (D - Puerto Rico)
Eleanor Holmes Norton (D - District of Columbia)
Eni F. H. Faleomavaega (D - American Samoa)
Donna M. C. Christensen (D - US Virgin Islands)
Chris
I also recently acquired the Bard's Tale trilogy and Sid Meier's Pirates! in an all-out effort to regress to childhood.
Chris
>Why is this? As the majority of hobbysts must be aware, most >of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but soft- >ware is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked >on it get paid? Just a curious aside... The reason Bill Gates was asked to withdraw from Harvard is that he was using the university's PDP-8 to create the software for his own private for-profit business. So I guess hardware doesn't _always_ need to be paid for... :) Of course, he and Ballmer just donated millions for a spanking new computer science building at Harvard, so I guess all is forgiven.