I'm not just a member, I'm the president.:) The Ramapo College Sci-Fi Club is around 50 members strong
The parent post was accidently redacted. We aployize for the error.
I've restored the deleted content:
"We hold 5 meetings per week (anime viewing, tv viewing, movie viewing, and 2 role-playing sessions) so we hardly have time to realize that the closest we've gotten to having girlfriends is fantasizing about being the tentacle monster in the anime movies."
Oh yeah, I've even managed to set up my universal remote so the girlfriend can use it!!! Yep, made the on/off button clear and she hit's another button to fire off a macro to set up TV viewing (set correct AV channel on TV, select correct input on Amp, set up the digital TV box, etc in one hit).
Ok, this is obviously a troll.
Not that you couldn't set up a macro to run when a key is pressed on the universal remote. I'm sure there are guys geeky enough to figure out how to attach macro code to a remote button. Hey, the macro's probably even written in PERL.
But you can't do that and have a girlfriend. Not the three dimensional, non-inflatable, non-polyethylene kind anyway.
I suppose that if you sent it to the wrong department then it would take *much* longer.
Well, it's not the department actually.
What you need to do is fill in the X-Meta tag in your email (or if you use Microsoft email products, the <HEAD> <META> tags) with keywords describing your email. "Hot amine poon-tang" is often a useful meta tag.
Then, you need to get a lot of people to link to your email (that is, refer to it in their email) with a X-References tag.
You can do this just by getting it popular on a mailing list, but even more effective is to post it to a number of bloggers. Bloggers, being how they are (self-important but afraid of not being noticed), will endlessly refer to it, and will probably get into interminable "blog spats" about it -- well, to be honest, about something completely tangential to it, but what do you care? It pushes your "Mail-Rank" score up regardless.
If you can't do that, try contacting "MailKing", a commercial service that sends out a lot of email, purportedly from unrelated individuals, which refers to your email. They'll make it look like your email is really important.
When your "Mail-Rank" is high enough, Google will have no choice but to notice it and reply.
I thought you could use NULL to calculate structure offsets, so with something like
struct _x {
int a;
int b; }
it was legal to say &(((struct _x *)NULL)->b)
to figure out the offset of b within the structure?
The compiler may be able to do it; you can not, as it involves dereferencing a null pointer, which makes it undefined according to the C Standard.
You should use the offsetof macro that the Standard supplies, which your compiler may or may not define as (similar to) the construct you're attempting to use.
You'd use offsetof( struct _x, b ); add apply it to an instance of struct _x as:
#include <stddef.h>
void doit( struct _x* ix ) {
int i = offsetof( struct _x, b );
int b = *(int*)( ( (char*)ix ) + i ) ;// or
int* bp = (int*)( ( (char*)ix ) + i ); }
My Win2k solution already downloaded and installed the update last night automatically via WindowsUpdate.com. Nice system.
How nice for you. I've got a W2K box at SP3. Service Pack 4 goes through about thity minutes of installing, then tells me that "An Error Occurred". No indication of what, just a recommendation that I roll back SP4.
So after this happend four times, with both the "network" (downloaded full patch) and "express" (which is relly install over HTML TCP/IP), I decide to try the auto update.
Auto update wants to do about 11 patches. At reboot, I get a driver error of some sort. It reboots, hits the error. It reboots, hits... you get the idea.
So I do a safe boot about seven times, each time removing another patch, working backwards from the last applied patch. Finally I get rid of the problem patch.
Of course, I'm still not patched, secure, or running SP4.
So I've had to reinstall W2K on another partition. Now I just have to re-install every driver, software package, preference setting, and I'll be back to where I was.
I don't really want to just plunk down money on stuff I don't know if I'll like....
That's the real charm of emusic.com. I enjoy classical music, but I don't know it well enough to know what conductors/orchestras/arrangements to buy or to avoid. So I was always reluctent to pay $16.00 or $20.00 or more for a CD (unless I really did know about a work; I had no problem paying ~$200.00 for Solti's Ring Cycle, or ~$24.00 per D'Oyly Carte Gilbert & Sullivan).
With emusic, I can pay a set fee upfront and then download what I like, without feeling I've been taken if the music isn't quite what I want or is lacking in technical quality. So I've been able to broaden my musical tastes quite a bit.
Oh, and I carry all of it on modified 60GB portable mp3 player.
About three months ago, emusic beagn upgrading its rips to a very nice VBR that ranges from about an average 160 up to about an average of 224 kpbs. Some VBR rips of older recordings are as low as 128 kpbs, but using VBR I can't get much higher than that for old recordings I rip from CD.
In other words, it's a good quality rip, very much what you'd get with lame's -r3mix option.
All new music is ripped at the VBR rate, and most but not all existing tracks have been upgraded.
Desipte advertising unlimited downloads, from what I understand emusic will warn and then terminate the subscription of anyone downloading more than 2000 tracks in any thirty day period.
Also, emusic limits subscribers from queueing more than 35 tracks for download at any one time; this makes it somewhat more tedious to get music.
All told, however, the price is good, the service is ok (I'm still waiting to hear about a few incomplete tracks), and the download restrictions are not too onerous.
New music is added pretty regularly, notable recent additons are 1950s clasical recordings from the Urania/Qualiton lable, including a complete Das Rheingold & Die Walkure condicted by Furtwangler (the Scala recording, I think), and some Wagner conducted by von Karajon.
We are trying to add value to the MP3 albums we sell by including quality artwork that can be printed onto CD labels and jewel case inserts (so you aren't just getting a 'bunch of files'). What would make you want to buy music in this way?
The first consideration is quality.
That said, price is more important.
Huh? Since I don't know the artistic quality of the MP3s in question, I need a (very) low price to get me to risk buying what I may never listen to.
This is why emusic.com has been so useful for me: there's no (additional, beyond the monthly subscription) risk to trying something -- and so no regret if that something isn't what I was looking for.
As far as value-added products: I have no intention of burning any of the music I (all legally) download; MP3s for me mean the convenience of not changing CDs, and the convenience of carray around 60 GB of music in my pocket. So CD cover art doesn't move me -- and how much CD cover art is that great anyway.
What does add value for me is complete and accurate ID3v2.4 tags. Also valuable would be lyrics included in the ID3 tags, and even better would be synchronized lyrics (another tag).
And of course, the MP3 techical quality matters: give me something on the order of -r3mix (joint stereo, varaiable bit rate at ~192 kbps average) at a relatively constant volume over the whole album, etc. Without the buzzwords, high quality encodings, and you'll probably want lower quality versions too for the guys who complain that anything over 128 kpbs is wasted on their ears.
I am not batman, I am not Johan Sebastian Bach, and I am not Richard Feynman, I have accepted this; perhaps you are not capable of Discrete Mathematics.
<voice="Chief Wiggum"> Oh, sure, and that's exactly what Batman would say. To preserve his anonymity to fight crime.
I think you tried to be a little too clever there, Mr. Caped Crusader! </voice>
First of all, let us observe that it is very rare that hitting your customers with a massive hammer (filing lawsuits against them and treating them as criminals) ends up helping your business.
Who the hell modded this uninformed crap to two???
No, the OP has a good point. If SCO does own Linux (via copied code, or SCO's other claim, as a derivative work), why try to discourage a bunch of really big companies from using it?
You'd want them to use it, and then sue them or get them to pay a license fee. You wouldn't want to scare them away before they even started using your product.
But to the main point: "the reviewer has greater incentive to give a good review". sure, but, whith an affiliate program, we're not dealing with professional reviewers....
If I (as an amateur) like a book, and give it a good review, and make a few cents from that, I don't see much harm.
All well and good so long as there was a pretty clear distinction between "amateur" and "professional".
A professional is someone who gets paid for his work, and an amateur is, literally, someone who does the work out of a love for it (Latin, amare, to love, being the root of "amateur"). Affiliate programs quite literally turn an amateur into a (low paid) professional; that's the point of these programs.
But this conversion to professional status doesn't come with the traditional professional "baggage": codes of conducts, oaths, test, certifications, guild membership, peer review. A lawyer's conflict of interest is (supposedly) checked by the Bar Association and by statute law; a journalist's by his editor and his profession's code of conduct and his peers' review.
No such check exists (or should, in any statute law sense!) for Joe Blogger or Jane Usenet Poster, or Jeff Amazon Reviewer.
You may accuse me of exploiting the etymology of the word "amateur" to create a problem that isn't real. But the problem is even deeper than that: the distinction betweem amateur and professional has begun to disappear.
In the "Blogosphere", it's not entirely clear who is an amateur and who's a professional. With MoveableType, anyone with the money to get a site hosted can put up a professional (that word again!) looking web site. Anyone can pontificate. And everyone has an opinion.
How can the causual reader tell who is knowledgable and honest, and who is looking to cash in on a favorable review? During the recent war in Iraq, I got much of my news of the war from www.theagonist.org, a blog with the most current breaking news -- aand the most current breaking unsubstantiated rumors. Is Andrew Sullivan a professional pundit, a professional journalist, or an amateur blogger? Can I trust Amazon.com user reviews? Can Snopes serve as a reference in a paper on Urban Legends?
What web site can I go to to tell me who is professional, who is amateur, who is honest, who is out to make a quick buck as an affiliate?
And can I trust the web site that purports to make those distictions?
So I fall back on the easy distinction: if you stand to make a buck as an affiliate, your review may be tainted -- whether you realize it or not -- by your self interest. You are perhaps no longer objective, as you're a (poorly compensated) contractor to the company you're affiliated with.
You know, if someone goes to the trouble of reviewing a book, what's wrong with having an affiliate link to purchase the book?
In all seriousness (unlike my original post), it's a conflict of interest: the reviwer who gets compensated when readers of the review purchase the book has a great incentive not to pan the book, even if it deserves panning, because a bad review means fewer buyers means less pay-off to the "affliate" linker.
"Affiliate" programs also drive up the cost of the books (or Rolexes), both because the affiliate must be paid off, and to cover the administrative costs of the affiliate program.
It also means a slightly slower response time when I click the link, as the server, besides displaying the page, has to access a database to credit the affiliate -- and possibly track me all the way to purchase to see if the affiliate is to be compensated. In the case where compensation only comnes on purchase, it means another layer of tracking, and probably a web site that wants to send me cookies to identify which affiliate should get paid if I do decide to purchase. Cookies, of course, lead to individualized customer profiles and possibly higher prices when and if the tracking software decides I'll be willing to pay more than the average Joe, based on that customer profile.
So we have conflict of interest, slightly higher costs, and customer and referer tracking. None of these things benefit me as a customer, and I prefer to avoid them.
Ursus Maximus writes "If you have read an introductory book or two about Python programming, but you are far from being an expert, then you will benefit a lot from reading this book. If you are a competent programmer in any other language, you will benefit from this book. If you are an expert Python programmer, you will also benefit from this book."
Why, after reading that, do I suspect Ursus Maximus will benefit if to buy this book you click a link that embeds Ursus's "associate promoter" id?
(Note: In all fairness, I have no evidence that any such "associate id" is embedded, or that Ursus has any conflict of interest in praising this book. I'm just trying on this tin-foil hat, and pointing this out as a completely disinterested public service, that only incidently and to my complete surprise will garner me "+1 Funny" mod points. There is no man behind the curtain, Dorothy.)
It seems that NAI's IP lawyers have been billing some hours recently by sending nastygrams asking companies/individuals to stop using their trademarked term 'Sniffer.'
That's ridiculous! It would be like, I dunno, Ralph Lauren suing the U.S. Polo Association, claiming that Polo clothes owned the name of the sport.
The dead creature was mistaken for a beached whale when first reported about a week ago, but experts who went to see it said the 12-metre mass of decomposing lumpy grey flesh apparently was an invertebrate.
In other news, Darl McBride doesn't know what it is either, but has confirmed that SCO will sue it.
McBride alleged that being an "[nvertebrate] mass of decomposing lumpy grey flesh" is a business process patent owned exclusively by, and licensed exclusively to, SCO, and that therefore the sea monster is infringing SCO's IP.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not just a member, I'm the president. :) The Ramapo College Sci-Fi Club is around 50 members strong
The parent post was accidently redacted. We aployize for the error.
I've restored the deleted content:
"We hold 5 meetings per week (anime viewing, tv viewing, movie viewing, and 2 role-playing sessions) so we hardly have time to realize that the closest we've gotten to having girlfriends is fantasizing about being the tentacle monster in the anime movies."
Oh yeah, I've even managed to set up my universal remote so the girlfriend can use it!!! Yep, made the on/off button clear and she hit's another button to fire off a macro to set up TV viewing (set correct AV channel on TV, select correct input on Amp, set up the digital TV box, etc in one hit).
Ok, this is obviously a troll.
Not that you couldn't set up a macro to run when a key is pressed on the universal remote. I'm sure there are guys geeky enough to figure out how to attach macro code to a remote button. Hey, the macro's probably even written in PERL.
But you can't do that and have a girlfriend. Not the three dimensional, non-inflatable, non-polyethylene kind anyway.
So this is obviously a troll.
I suppose that if you sent it to the wrong department then it would take *much* longer.
Well, it's not the department actually.
What you need to do is fill in the X-Meta tag in your email (or if you use Microsoft email products, the <HEAD> <META> tags) with keywords describing your email. "Hot amine poon-tang" is often a useful meta tag.
Then, you need to get a lot of people to link to your email (that is, refer to it in their email) with a X-References tag.
You can do this just by getting it popular on a mailing list, but even more effective is to post it to a number of bloggers. Bloggers, being how they are (self-important but afraid of not being noticed), will endlessly refer to it, and will probably get into interminable "blog spats" about it -- well, to be honest, about something completely tangential to it, but what do you care? It pushes your "Mail-Rank" score up regardless.
If you can't do that, try contacting "MailKing", a commercial service that sends out a lot of email, purportedly from unrelated individuals, which refers to your email. They'll make it look like your email is really important.
When your "Mail-Rank" is high enough, Google will have no choice but to notice it and reply.
Best of luck getting your email noticed!
There is this thing that you can do, which will stop you being affected by this sort of problem.
It's called Backing up.
It's good advice. It's also more than I want to do for my home PC. But your point is well taken.
The compiler may be able to do it; you can not, as it involves dereferencing a null pointer, which makes it undefined according to the C Standard.
You should use the offsetof macro that the Standard supplies, which your compiler may or may not define as (similar to) the construct you're attempting to use.
You'd use
offsetof( struct _x, b )
add apply it to an instance of struct _x as:
#include <stddef.h>
void doit( struct _x* ix ) {
int i = offsetof( struct _x, b )
int b = *(int*)( ( (char*)ix ) + i ) ;
int* bp = (int*)( ( (char*)ix ) + i )
}
My Win2k solution already downloaded and installed the update last night automatically via WindowsUpdate.com. Nice system.
How nice for you. I've got a W2K box at SP3. Service Pack 4 goes through about thity minutes of installing, then tells me that "An Error Occurred". No indication of what, just a recommendation that I roll back SP4.
So after this happend four times, with both the "network" (downloaded full patch) and "express" (which is relly install over HTML TCP/IP), I decide to try the auto update.
Auto update wants to do about 11 patches. At reboot, I get a driver error of some sort. It reboots, hits the error. It reboots, hits... you get the idea.
So I do a safe boot about seven times, each time removing another patch, working backwards from the last applied patch. Finally I get rid of the problem patch.
Of course, I'm still not patched, secure, or running SP4.
So I've had to reinstall W2K on another partition. Now I just have to re-install every driver, software package, preference setting, and I'll be back to where I was.
That should only take about three weeks.
Thanks, Microsoft.
Mod parent up!
Mod grandparent up!
Mod great-grandparent up!
The United States Supreme Court said it in:
FOUNDATION, INC., et al. No. 97-930
DECEASED v. OHIO ELECTIONS COMMISSION No. 93-986
I don't really want to just plunk down money on stuff I don't know if I'll like....
That's the real charm of emusic.com. I enjoy classical music, but I don't know it well enough to know what conductors/orchestras/arrangements to buy or to avoid. So I was always reluctent to pay $16.00 or $20.00 or more for a CD (unless I really did know about a work; I had no problem paying ~$200.00 for Solti's Ring Cycle, or ~$24.00 per D'Oyly Carte Gilbert & Sullivan).
With emusic, I can pay a set fee upfront and then download what I like, without feeling I've been taken if the music isn't quite what I want or is lacking in technical quality. So I've been able to broaden my musical tastes quite a bit.
Oh, and I carry all of it on modified 60GB portable mp3 player.
I think most of the rips are 128
About three months ago, emusic beagn upgrading its rips to a very nice VBR that ranges from about an average 160 up to about an average of 224 kpbs. Some VBR rips of older recordings are as low as 128 kpbs, but using VBR I can't get much higher than that for old recordings I rip from CD.
In other words, it's a good quality rip, very much what you'd get with lame's -r3mix option.
All new music is ripped at the VBR rate, and most but not all existing tracks have been upgraded.
Desipte advertising unlimited downloads, from what I understand emusic will warn and then terminate the subscription of anyone downloading more than 2000 tracks in any thirty day period.
Also, emusic limits subscribers from queueing more than 35 tracks for download at any one time; this makes it somewhat more tedious to get music.
All told, however, the price is good, the service is ok (I'm still waiting to hear about a few incomplete tracks), and the download restrictions are not too onerous.
New music is added pretty regularly, notable recent additons are 1950s clasical recordings from the Urania/Qualiton lable, including a complete Das Rheingold & Die Walkure condicted by Furtwangler (the Scala recording, I think), and some Wagner conducted by von Karajon.
What button do I push on my portable MP3 player to cause the MAS chip to transform into one capable of decoding Windows Media Audio/
When someone can answer this, I'll be glad to "BuyMusic".
Oh, and beg pardon for Ask(ing) Slashdot a question not best answered by a lawyer or a dentist.
We are trying to add value to the MP3 albums we sell by including quality artwork that can be printed onto CD labels and jewel case inserts (so you aren't just getting a 'bunch of files'). What would make you want to buy music in this way?
The first consideration is quality.
That said, price is more important.
Huh? Since I don't know the artistic quality of the MP3s in question, I need a (very) low price to get me to risk buying what I may never listen to.
This is why emusic.com has been so useful for me: there's no (additional, beyond the monthly subscription) risk to trying something -- and so no regret if that something isn't what I was looking for.
As far as value-added products: I have no intention of burning any of the music I (all legally) download; MP3s for me mean the convenience of not changing CDs, and the convenience of carray around 60 GB of music in my pocket. So CD cover art doesn't move me -- and how much CD cover art is that great anyway.
What does add value for me is complete and accurate ID3v2.4 tags. Also valuable would be lyrics included in the ID3 tags, and even better would be synchronized lyrics (another tag).
And of course, the MP3 techical quality matters: give me something on the order of -r3mix (joint stereo, varaiable bit rate at ~192 kbps average) at a relatively constant volume over the whole album, etc. Without the buzzwords, high quality encodings, and you'll probably want lower quality versions too for the guys who complain that anything over 128 kpbs is wasted on their ears.
I am not batman, I am not Johan Sebastian Bach, and I am not Richard Feynman, I have accepted this; perhaps you are not capable of Discrete Mathematics.
<voice="Chief Wiggum">
Oh, sure, and that's exactly what Batman would say. To preserve his anonymity to fight crime.
I think you tried to be a little too clever there, Mr. Caped Crusader!
</voice>
First of all, let us observe that it is very rare that hitting your customers with a massive hammer (filing lawsuits against them and treating them as criminals) ends up helping your business.
Hey, it's working for SCO, you insensitive clod!
yours litigiously,
Darl McBride
And you can point your phone at women in the bar
and get her bio, likes and dislikes, and the statistical probability of her going home with you...
I think we can safely hardcode probability of her going home with some geek pointing his cell phone at her, at 0.01%.
Oh, wait, if it's a slashdotter with the cell phone, I suppose we'll have to allow for negative percentages.
Who the hell modded this uninformed crap to two???
No, the OP has a good point. If SCO does own Linux (via copied code, or SCO's other claim, as a derivative work), why try to discourage a bunch of really big companies from using it?
You'd want them to use it, and then sue them or get them to pay a license fee. You wouldn't want to scare them away before they even started using your product.
But to the main point: "the reviewer has greater incentive to give a good review". sure, but, whith an affiliate program, we're not dealing with professional reviewers....
If I (as an amateur) like a book, and give it a good review, and make a few cents from that, I don't see much harm.
All well and good so long as there was a pretty clear distinction between "amateur" and "professional".
A professional is someone who gets paid for his work, and an amateur is, literally, someone who does the work out of a love for it (Latin, amare, to love, being the root of "amateur"). Affiliate programs quite literally turn an amateur into a (low paid) professional; that's the point of these programs.
But this conversion to professional status doesn't come with the traditional professional "baggage": codes of conducts, oaths, test, certifications, guild membership, peer review. A lawyer's conflict of interest is (supposedly) checked by the Bar Association and by statute law; a journalist's by his editor and his profession's code of conduct and his peers' review.
No such check exists (or should, in any statute law sense!) for Joe Blogger or Jane Usenet Poster, or Jeff Amazon Reviewer.
You may accuse me of exploiting the etymology of the word "amateur" to create a problem that isn't real. But the problem is even deeper than that: the distinction betweem amateur and professional has begun to disappear.
In the "Blogosphere", it's not entirely clear who is an amateur and who's a professional. With MoveableType, anyone with the money to get a site hosted can put up a professional (that word again!) looking web site. Anyone can pontificate. And everyone has an opinion.
How can the causual reader tell who is knowledgable and honest, and who is looking to cash in on a favorable review? During the recent war in Iraq, I got much of my news of the war from www.theagonist.org, a blog with the most current breaking news -- aand the most current breaking unsubstantiated rumors. Is Andrew Sullivan a professional pundit, a professional journalist, or an amateur blogger? Can I trust Amazon.com user reviews? Can Snopes serve as a reference in a paper on Urban Legends?
What web site can I go to to tell me who is professional, who is amateur, who is honest, who is out to make a quick buck as an affiliate?
And can I trust the web site that purports to make those distictions?
So I fall back on the easy distinction: if you stand to make a buck as an affiliate, your review may be tainted -- whether you realize it or not -- by your self interest. You are perhaps no longer objective, as you're a (poorly compensated) contractor to the company you're affiliated with.
You know, if someone goes to the trouble of reviewing a book, what's wrong with having an affiliate link to purchase the book?
In all seriousness (unlike my original post), it's a conflict of interest: the reviwer who gets compensated when readers of the review purchase the book has a great incentive not to pan the book, even if it deserves panning, because a bad review means fewer buyers means less pay-off to the "affliate" linker.
"Affiliate" programs also drive up the cost of the books (or Rolexes), both because the affiliate must be paid off, and to cover the administrative costs of the affiliate program.
It also means a slightly slower response time when I click the link, as the server, besides displaying the page, has to access a database to credit the affiliate -- and possibly track me all the way to purchase to see if the affiliate is to be compensated. In the case where compensation only comnes on purchase, it means another layer of tracking, and probably a web site that wants to send me cookies to identify which affiliate should get paid if I do decide to purchase. Cookies, of course, lead to individualized customer profiles and possibly higher prices when and if the tracking software decides I'll be willing to pay more than the average Joe, based on that customer profile.
So we have conflict of interest, slightly higher costs, and customer and referer tracking. None of these things benefit me as a customer, and I prefer to avoid them.
Ursus Maximus writes "If you have read an introductory book or two about Python programming, but you are far from being an expert, then you will benefit a lot from reading this book. If you are a competent programmer in any other language, you will benefit from this book. If you are an expert Python programmer, you will also benefit from this book."
Why, after reading that, do I suspect Ursus Maximus will benefit if to buy this book you click a link that embeds Ursus's "associate promoter" id?
(Note: In all fairness, I have no evidence that any such "associate id" is embedded, or that Ursus has any conflict of interest in praising this book. I'm just trying on this tin-foil hat, and pointing this out as a completely disinterested public service, that only incidently and to my complete surprise will garner me "+1 Funny" mod points. There is no man behind the curtain, Dorothy.)
I have had a job for the past 9 years - it just isn't in America
Your "job" as an Arch-Mutant character on the planet Rubi-Ka in the MMORPG Anarchy Online doesn't really count, does it?
I mean, you can't spend the gold pices in Madison, Wisconsin, Mr. Stenlund, can you?
How big are American quarters? I've never seen one...
Then get a job, you slacker!
And clean the basement before I get home! I never should have let you move down there!
Love,
Mom
It seems that NAI's IP lawyers have been billing some hours recently by sending nastygrams asking companies/individuals to stop using their trademarked term 'Sniffer.'
That's ridiculous! It would be like, I dunno, Ralph Lauren suing the U.S. Polo Association, claiming that Polo clothes owned the name of the sport.
Oh, wait, Ralph Lauren did do that.
Of course, he didn't win.
Oh wait, he did win:
The dead creature was mistaken for a beached whale when first reported about a week ago, but experts who went to see it said the 12-metre mass of decomposing lumpy grey flesh apparently was an invertebrate.
In other news, Darl McBride doesn't know what it is either, but has confirmed that SCO will sue it.
McBride alleged that being an "[nvertebrate] mass of decomposing lumpy grey flesh" is a business process patent owned exclusively by, and licensed exclusively to, SCO, and that therefore the sea monster is infringing SCO's IP.
A girl...friend? I don't understand, we never talk about those at my LAN parties.
A "girlfriend" is described on page 63 of the AD&D Monster Manual.
Some key abilities:
+5 Pout Attack
-3 Player Saving Throw required to prevent the monster from running up player's "Magic Visa Card"
Oh, and something about a whip, I think.
I'll be flying back in late August and I don't think that I'll be able to take her [his computer] back with me
You're not planning to have a girlfriend at college, are you?
Just as well, that way you'll have plenty of time for MMORGs, and Slashdot, and her.