Although I swore off Mega Blocks as uselessly shoddy Lego imitations after one purchase, as far as I'm aware (and for what little it's worth, Wikipedia backs me up on this), Mega Blocks are made in Canada, which is not, technically, a third world country. Not even Quebec!
I don't see any other name for the school in the article... is the place actually called "School of the Future"? Like the kids are running around with letterman jackets that say SOTF on them? That seems almost too cheesy to be true.
By odd coincidence, it was just a couple days ago that I was watching "Lesser of Two Evils" and got inspired to write a little program to determine whether Bender and Flexo's serial numbers really were expressible as the sum of 2 cubes (although I didn't doubt for a moment they were... just to ruin everybody else's fun, the answers are 119^3 + 119^3 = 3370318 and 952^3 + (-951)^3 = 2716057). Astonishingly, this anecdote failed to impress a job interviewer who asked me what kinds of things I did to keep my programming skills sharp. As if I want to work somewhere that doesn't appreciate a nerdy Futurama fan!
In fact, someone's doing exactly that (as mentioned in the article), but I found this more interesting:
"subtle, silent visual cues to replace cellphone rings or vibrations - say, an animatronic rabbit or parrot turning toward you in a room to signal that you have a call"
That's right, instead of allowing the quiet and solemnity of your church or theatre to be disrupted with ringing cell phones, just install a giant robotic parrot that stares at people. Sounds subtle all right.
I've actually had the opportunity to use these "space-available" tickets from time to time (my dad worked for an airline), and unfortunately "there are / aren't some free seats" isn't enough information to plan your trip... your seat basically isn't confirmed until all the paying customers are physically on the plane, so knowing whether there are 2 or 20 seats available the day before makes a big difference as to how likely you are to end up stuck at the airport.
That having been said, since I wasn't an actual employee I couldn't use the web site myself, I had to call and speak to a human operator. They'd tell me the actual number of open seats, but it seems unlikely WestJet would be able to do this 240,000 times without somebody catching on:P. (of course, then Air Canada would have their former employees suing them over interminable hold times, but that's a whole different problem.)
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Although I swore off Mega Blocks as uselessly shoddy Lego imitations after one purchase, as far as I'm aware (and for what little it's worth, Wikipedia backs me up on this), Mega Blocks are made in Canada, which is not, technically, a third world country. Not even Quebec!
I heard Weird Al blew his brains out in the late '80s after people stopped buying his records. My dad lied to me!
I don't see any other name for the school in the article... is the place actually called "School of the Future"? Like the kids are running around with letterman jackets that say SOTF on them? That seems almost too cheesy to be true.
By odd coincidence, it was just a couple days ago that I was watching "Lesser of Two Evils" and got inspired to write a little program to determine whether Bender and Flexo's serial numbers really were expressible as the sum of 2 cubes (although I didn't doubt for a moment they were... just to ruin everybody else's fun, the answers are 119^3 + 119^3 = 3370318 and 952^3 + (-951)^3 = 2716057). Astonishingly, this anecdote failed to impress a job interviewer who asked me what kinds of things I did to keep my programming skills sharp. As if I want to work somewhere that doesn't appreciate a nerdy Futurama fan!
In fact, someone's doing exactly that (as mentioned in the article), but I found this more interesting:
"subtle, silent visual cues to replace cellphone rings or vibrations - say, an animatronic rabbit or parrot turning toward you in a room to signal that you have a call"
That's right, instead of allowing the quiet and solemnity of your church or theatre to be disrupted with ringing cell phones, just install a giant robotic parrot that stares at people. Sounds subtle all right.
I've actually had the opportunity to use these "space-available" tickets from time to time (my dad worked for an airline), and unfortunately "there are / aren't some free seats" isn't enough information to plan your trip... your seat basically isn't confirmed until all the paying customers are physically on the plane, so knowing whether there are 2 or 20 seats available the day before makes a big difference as to how likely you are to end up stuck at the airport.
That having been said, since I wasn't an actual employee I couldn't use the web site myself, I had to call and speak to a human operator. They'd tell me the actual number of open seats, but it seems unlikely WestJet would be able to do this 240,000 times without somebody catching on :P. (of course, then Air Canada would have their former employees suing them over interminable hold times, but that's a whole different problem.)
On the assumption that less legible -> more geeky, I present my solution in Befunge: :!#v_
:P)
z>80:p0>#@~'0-:v
z, $ 1
#$ ^ w
z|!:-1gj#:0+*2\< <
z>0:p 2^
(God, I think it took longer to get that to display semi-properly than it did to write it
Jeez, I just did it by hand. I'm not sure if that makes me more or less "hardcore". Or just stupider.