Here's my attempt, from several years of long-ago High School French class. No fish were involved in this translation.
Mandrake will have to change its name
Mandrake, French writers of its self-titled Linux distrubtion, has been ordered by the Paris TGI to pay 70,000 Euros to the American companies, Hearst Holdings and King Feature Syndicate, owners of the trademark "Mandrake the Magician", and writers of the [bande dessinee] of the same name. The American companies filed suit in France for "trademark infringement". Now, the court has forbidden the use of the name in French, and is pressuring Mandrake to transfer its domain names to the two American companies. It's an order that could be a fatal blow to the French writers, for whom the foundation of their business rests entirely on their eponymous Linux distribution.
For now, Mandrake has appealed, which suspends the judgement and, for the moment, preserves its trademark and domain names.
Remember that a previous judgement on Mandrake's logo was ruled in favor of the two American companies. The French subsidiary had already had to rework its artwork.
Used to be that one of the cool things about the net was that you would get email from total strangers... "Hi, I'm from {some far away place}. I saw your {Usenet post|web page|profile on some bulletin board site} and really liked your ideas about {something}. I've also been experimenting with {something} and I have some ideas about {whatever}..."
This won't go away, unless you like getting email from people who "really liked" *your* web page *and* the hundreds of other web page their spider surfed.
Remember, since you *did* RTFA, you read that the tool can only say "yea" or "nay" to about half the mail. The messages you're describing, from people that aren't obvious friends or obvious spammers, is in that "other" 50%.
Foo:Am I missing something? I read the whole article and the part about lead poisoning made no sense. Bar:Acute lead poisioning = Getting shot.
Moderation: +4
50% Funny
50% Informative
This is definitely an argument for another new moderation option: +1, Explaining the Joke. Although you could make an argument for -1, It's Not Funny Anymore If You Have To Explain It.
Myself, I'm still trying to figure out why I now get M2 twice a day, but haven't had M1 in months...
Putting aside any military/war/ethics concerns, there are several interesting civilian benefits that jump out from the article:
* "But [burning fat] for extended periods can produce toxins and can dial down the amount of energy the brain receives. Darpa wants to see if there are ways to burn fats without the side effects."
There's a mega-million-dollar industry in burning off fat, mostly by ingesting snake oil products. Obvious spinoffs here.
* "Mitochondria supplies energy to the cells; the agency would like to see if the powerhouses could be temporarily increased."
Again, weight loss... but beyond that, aren't there metabolism-related illnesses that this would help cure?
* "Increased body heat can boost the production of certain proteins, and these can trigger apoptosis -- programmed cellular death. Darpa wants to find a way to control these proteins..."
Programmed cellular death is the two-edged sword of middle and old age. If it doesn't happen at all, you can get cancer. But if it happens faster than cellular reproduction, you get aging. Any research into this topic will help on both counts.
* "...anaerobic metabolism produces lactic acid -- which is why you feel your biceps burn after lifting dumbbells. Scientists wonder if production of the acid can be slowed or dissipated quicker."
This sort of advance would be snapped up by athletes, but you can also imagine the benefits for others who exert themselves regularly -- from firefighters to construction workers. And exercise is another way to lose weight... though it's laziness, not muscle pain, that keeps *me* from working on my spare tire.
* "And the agency is looking at nutraceuticals, natural products and traditional nutritional supplements to give the body what it requires when there's no food around."
Well, that sounds like the meal-in-a-pill that's been bounced around for a hundred years, from the World's Fair to Willy Wonka. I hear they still have problems with the blueberry dessert.
And speaking of dessert...
* "...$900,000 grant to examine the effects of echinacea and other plants. He believes extracts from the herb can be added to rations -- and that should give soldiers an extra oomph."
Be careful with those herbs... the military wants to eliminate the need for food, but some herbs are known to cause the opposite effect!
To an Anonymous Coward. I wouldn't start planning my shopping spree yet.
To answer your original question -- I'd probably pay $10 for your number, just like I'd pay it for the other, much higher number. $10 just happens to be the amount I've set aside for "frivolous 'net stuff" this week. Sorry!
Or just disable autoplay for embedded sounds and movies like the rest of us in the cube farm...
Actually, I thought I'd done this. I run Opera, and F12 brings up a menu where one of the options is "Activate sounds in web pages" (or something like that -- I'm running the French version, just for kicks). It's unchecked, but I still run into the occasional annoyance.
Interesting note, current ISS commander Michael Foale was onboard Mir when they had the accident with the Progress vehicle. This guy seems to be really unlucky.
Or perhaps it's a case of once-bitten twice-shy. Foale was busy conducting experiments in Spektr when the Progress bounced off it on its little detour past the docking port.
Underneath that cool test-pilot exterior (and a pair of Ray-Bans) is a guy whose eyes are always moving, always watching... ready for that *thump* *crunch* *hissssss* that means IT'S ALL HAPPENING AGAIN!!! OH MY GOD!!! EVAC PROCEDURES, SOYUZ SEPARATION SEQUENCE STA... oh, never mind, just a piece of insulation, sorry.
For those of you who can't get to it, don't worry--you didn't miss much. It's just a compilation of Scotty quotes, and contrary to the submitter's assertion, hardly any of them apply to the current situation.
Unlucky me, I fell in Geocities' good graces and was welcomed by an auto-playing sound file. I'm supposed to be in the middle of a big project, typing away furiously, and suddenly my speakers burst out with "Hello, Computer"!
Now, people are looking around the cube wall seeing me surfing Slashdot.
Quite an honor to get the lead question, and even cooler to know that people in India now have the opportunity to question my clarity of thought!
Others echoed his reply, and a few thought the questioner wasn't "thinking very clearly." One Perl programmer asked, "Does he think we don't have email lists and Web sites? We are techies. We stay in touch all over the world. We know what's going on everywhere, same as you."
Consider me properly chastened. However... the reason I asked the question is because it's a topic that came up while talking to a fellow programmer of Indian heritage. She pointed out the H1-B visa's hidden pitfalls as a problem in the Indo-Pak community.
I guess the answer to my question is that *most* H1-B recipients knew what they were getting into, though a few either didn't do their research or chose to ignore the warnings. Which sounds like a pretty universal situation -- as the interviews showed, we're more alike than different.
But just one little swipe. When the Perl programmer questioned my fuzzy thinking, he said "We know what's going on everywhere, same as you." Well, despite all the time I spend on Slashdot, I *don't* know what's going on everywhere, and I can't imagine that Mr. Perl does, either... Oh, well, there's one know-it-all in every crowd.
Who know after three months of pumping up this m-life that it was for a mobile phone plan.
I remember the billboard with an 8-year-old girl, thinking "what's an mlife, and how do I get one?" The answer, Virginia, is that nobody really knows, but it costs about $40 billion.
Those mlife ads always gave me the creeps, anyway. There was always something a little too close to a religious overtone to them... they looked like they were designed by the same folks who put together a local megachurch's billboard campaign. Kinda like "contemporary Christian" music is disturbingly similar to pop music, with "Jesus" in the place of "Baby".
Gives me the creeps. Just give me that old time religion... it's good enough for me!
To that extent, I will agree with you, because we do use an industrial-ag model of crop production. We don't need to, though.
Unfortunately, the standard method of ethanol production from growing and processing your own corn is illegal in the US: the end product is usually known as Moonshine.
musicians are f*ed. apparently, we can't look at other peoples copywritten music without 'taining' our ability to write original music.
There was a science fiction short story I read that detailed that exact scenario. It was either in Omni or in a compilation in the early '80s, and it went somewhat like this:
In a future society, your career path is chosen for you soon after birth, by a semi-benevolent system that can tell what you'll like to do. The main character is chosen to be a musician, and creates beautiful music in complete isolation. But a shadowy figure lets the kid listen to a Bach fugue. The kid knows he's in deep doo doo, because the music has influenced him in a forbidden way. Despite his efforts, he's discovered -- because his compositions now have no fugues at all.
The story goes on to reveal the dark side of the supposedly benevolent society, showing what happens to those who don't fit in. Very dark story with an ambiguous ending, IIRC. Wonder what the name and author was?
I had toyed with the idea of a cyber cafe, until I ran the numbers through a spreadsheet and realized there was no way I could come anywhere near my current salary workin' for the man. Harder work, longer hours, and less pay makes RobertB a dead boy.
But one idea that came to mind was to set up in Dallas' pseudo-punk Deep Ellum strip, where the preppies dress goth and gawk at each other. There would be booths with Internet terminals, a nominal quarter-hour fee, and overpriced drinks.
Here's the twist: the bartender controls several large-screen TVs, which he/she can connect to whichever surfer is most interesting at the time. Like a DJ, the barkeep would be able to adjust the "mix" -- maybe some softcore porn on one screen, a CNN ticker on the other, and someone's hacking session over in the geek corner.
For added enjoyment of the crowd, add picture-in-picture: the surfer, and what they're checking out at the moment. Why is the guy looking at porn so bored, and why is the hot chick reading Reuters so...
Of course, not everyone would want to surf with the world looking over their shoulder. No problem -- for a small additional fee, the bartender would be blocked from showing your mug... a little more to block your surfing altogether.
Just a crazy idea! I'll stick with the steady paycheck, for now.
Sorry, but my first thought was the solution pioneered by Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr in this 1983 documentary. Of course, it doesn't work as well without the unique preservative solution devised by evil genius Dr. Alfred Necessiter.
"You.. You cooked her nines!... OUT! Out of my HOUSE! Out of my LIFE!"
-- Steve Martin, "The Man With Two Brains"
I'm afraid this gadget has too much real-world application to be of interest to the geek crowd.
We just bought a few acres of land, and this device would have been the ideal tool for the surveyor. It's clear from the discrepancies between the survey drawing and the aerial views that the surveyor made his measurements, wrote them down, then made his drawing from his notes. The numbers are right, but the outlines of the buildings aren't quite where they should be.
This device, plus a windoze PC with appropriate software, will let the surveyor simply walk to the survey points, point & shoot, hotsync, and print. It's just what the surveyor needs to do his/her job.
From the article: So what are the faithful to do if they don't want to watch the altered 1997 editions of the trilogy? Either give in, or don't buy. "We realize there's a lot of debate out there," says Ward. "But this is not a democracy. We love our fans, but this is about art and filmmaking. [George] has decided that the sole version he wants available is this one."
So you say it's not a democracy? That George "Artist" Lucas can do what he damn well pleases?
Perhaps Lucas has forgotten that he's in the marketplace -- where democracy indeed rules, and the cash register is the ballot box.
My vote will be for the version where Han shoots first. For me, it *is* about "art and filmmaking". Both of which were evident in the original, absent from the remake, and forgotten in the prequels.
These could be pebbles (i.e. sedimentary) or they could be lapilli (volcanic structures formed by the sticking-together of ash particles). They could also be zones of cementation that developed long after deposition (e.g., concretions), in which case they do not say much about conditions at time of deposition. The latter two are more likely, because the "balls" are so spherical (most pebbles are not so perfectly equidimensional).
I've been excited about the spheres, too. Unfortunately, there seem to be so many (and as you noticed, so perfect) that I can't imagine them ever being tumbled about in a Martian spring.
I imagine they're the result of volcanic or impact processes throwing molten material up into the air. With a gravity one-third of Earth's, large, hot particles would have more time to coalesce into a sphere before they hit the ground.
Bad news for the search for life, though. But part of me roots for the "dead planet" theory. We can put all the strip miners in a refurbished Saturn V, point it at Mars, and let them fight out mineral rights on the trip!
I think perhaps you are confusing American Airlines with The Sabre Group (current owners of Travelocity).
You're right, in part. I worked for TSG (the acronym du jour, IIRC) just before they were about to be spun off. In the convulsions leading up to the spinoff, there was a constant shuffling of staff -- some of which was managers using the confusion to unload bum steers.
That finally led to "the cloud process", where upper management would be reorganizing across all departments. We knew that there would be layoffs. Nobody knew what their status would be, but everyone was afraid that they'd be let go in favor of a less qualified and/or cheaper alternative.
My contacts in HR told me that the company was aggressively recruiting H1-Bs at that time, despite the uncertainty among the current employees. The business reasons were perfectly valid, in the artificial Wall Street world where increasing profits are the only measure of success. The ethics were as debatable as they were irrelevant.
At the height of the confusion, an atmosphere of extreme distrust developed between the knowlege workers and the management. In one famous episode, the then-president of TSG (whose name I can't recall) told us that we were at "a fork in the road" -- and was greeted with a chorus of boos. That week, he was flooded with intracompany mail envelopes containing... forks. From the cafeteria. He was said to be not amused.
I bailed out shortly before the AA/Sabre split became complete, so I've probably gotten the names wrong... but you can see why I didn't split hairs in the original post. (And I still didn't get FP!)
Long before outsourcing to India became an issue, large IT companies like American Airlines were virtual H1-B "hardship" visa factories, importing large numbers of technical experts from India and other countries during the dot-com boom.
But when the boom went bust, and the layoffs came, H1-B visa holders were left out in the cold, unable to even look for a new job due to the terms of their visas.
Do the IT professionals you've met feel that US companies and the US government used bait-and-switch tactics to take advantage of cheaper non-US workers? Or did those applying for H1-B visas know what they were in for?
And a follow-up question: does anyone think that US companies will hesitate to leave their outsourcing partners high and dry as soon as they (again) find a cheaper alternative?
If you've never had to get a forklift to help you lift your computer, you aren't qualified to pass judgment on Mel.
I have to agree. When I found the original story in the Jargon File, I passed it on to my mom -- a now-retired Old School programmer, with a Masters in Mathematics because there was no such thing as a CS degree in those days.
She'd heard of Mel, and though I can't remember exactly what she said about him, I recall that there was a large amount of respect.
That drum-memory computer with Mel's blackjack program ought to be in the Smithsonian... if it isn't already.
How will the world end? In fire? In ice? More like in a bunch of tiny pieces that were smelted into raw metals.
While I see your point, I hope it wouldn't come to that. I don't have a problem dismantling "dead" planets like Mercury and Mars, maybe even Venus, and certainly the asteroids.
But the Earth has so many unique features that you can't preserve outside an Earth-sized gravity well. You're not going to be able to recreate Yellowstone's hot springs and geysers on the surface of a Dyson Sphere, for example.
On the other hand, there's the.sig I see here on Slashdot: Earth First! We'll strip-mine the other planets later...
Slashdot Mirror
Here's my attempt, from several years of long-ago High School French class. No fish were involved in this translation.
Mandrake will have to change its name
Mandrake, French writers of its self-titled Linux distrubtion, has been ordered by the Paris TGI to pay 70,000 Euros to the American companies, Hearst Holdings and King Feature Syndicate, owners of the trademark "Mandrake the Magician", and writers of the [bande dessinee] of the same name. The American companies filed suit in France for "trademark infringement". Now, the court has forbidden the use of the name in French, and is pressuring Mandrake to transfer its domain names to the two American companies. It's an order that could be a fatal blow to the French writers, for whom the foundation of their business rests entirely on their eponymous Linux distribution.
For now, Mandrake has appealed, which suspends the judgement and, for the moment, preserves its trademark and domain names.
Remember that a previous judgement on Mandrake's logo was ruled in favor of the two American companies. The French subsidiary had already had to rework its artwork.
Used to be that one of the cool things about the net was that you would get email from total strangers... "Hi, I'm from {some far away place}. I saw your {Usenet post|web page|profile on some bulletin board site} and really liked your ideas about {something}. I've also been experimenting with {something} and I have some ideas about {whatever}..."
This won't go away, unless you like getting email from people who "really liked" *your* web page *and* the hundreds of other web page their spider surfed.
Remember, since you *did* RTFA, you read that the tool can only say "yea" or "nay" to about half the mail. The messages you're describing, from people that aren't obvious friends or obvious spammers, is in that "other" 50%.
Foo: Am I missing something? I read the whole article and the part about lead poisoning made no sense.
Bar: Acute lead poisioning = Getting shot.
Moderation: +4
50% Funny
50% Informative
This is definitely an argument for another new moderation option: +1, Explaining the Joke. Although you could make an argument for -1, It's Not Funny Anymore If You Have To Explain It.
Myself, I'm still trying to figure out why I now get M2 twice a day, but haven't had M1 in months...
Putting aside any military/war/ethics concerns, there are several interesting civilian benefits that jump out from the article:
* "But [burning fat] for extended periods can produce toxins and can dial down the amount of energy the brain receives. Darpa wants to see if there are ways to burn fats without the side effects."
There's a mega-million-dollar industry in burning off fat, mostly by ingesting snake oil products. Obvious spinoffs here.
* "Mitochondria supplies energy to the cells; the agency would like to see if the powerhouses could be temporarily increased."
Again, weight loss... but beyond that, aren't there metabolism-related illnesses that this would help cure?
* "Increased body heat can boost the production of certain proteins, and these can trigger apoptosis -- programmed cellular death. Darpa wants to find a way to control these proteins..."
Programmed cellular death is the two-edged sword of middle and old age. If it doesn't happen at all, you can get cancer. But if it happens faster than cellular reproduction, you get aging. Any research into this topic will help on both counts.
* "...anaerobic metabolism produces lactic acid -- which is why you feel your biceps burn after lifting dumbbells. Scientists wonder if production of the acid can be slowed or dissipated quicker."
This sort of advance would be snapped up by athletes, but you can also imagine the benefits for others who exert themselves regularly -- from firefighters to construction workers. And exercise is another way to lose weight... though it's laziness, not muscle pain, that keeps *me* from working on my spare tire.
* "And the agency is looking at nutraceuticals, natural products and traditional nutritional supplements to give the body what it requires when there's no food around."
Well, that sounds like the meal-in-a-pill that's been bounced around for a hundred years, from the World's Fair to Willy Wonka. I hear they still have problems with the blueberry dessert.
And speaking of dessert...
* "...$900,000 grant to examine the effects of echinacea and other plants. He believes extracts from the herb can be added to rations -- and that should give soldiers an extra oomph."
Be careful with those herbs... the military wants to eliminate the need for food, but some herbs are known to cause the opposite effect!
YAY! I'm worth $200.
To an Anonymous Coward. I wouldn't start planning my shopping spree yet.
To answer your original question -- I'd probably pay $10 for your number, just like I'd pay it for the other, much higher number. $10 just happens to be the amount I've set aside for "frivolous 'net stuff" this week. Sorry!
Just out of curiosity...What would someone pay for mine??? =)
I'll start the bidding at ten bucks, $US, payable by Paypal.
Really, I'm serious! I'd just spend it on pizza, anyway. Which reminds me, it's lunch time...
I have never been to one, but I know people who do. I guess more people prefer to game at home on their PC/console. I don't blame them.
Parent *really* should have been modded up as "+1, Psychic", based on this Slashdot article!
Or just disable autoplay for embedded sounds and movies like the rest of us in the cube farm...
Actually, I thought I'd done this. I run Opera, and F12 brings up a menu where one of the options is "Activate sounds in web pages" (or something like that -- I'm running the French version, just for kicks). It's unchecked, but I still run into the occasional annoyance.
Still, it's not as bad as my fellow cubesters' annoying polyphonic ringtones, so I guess I'm safe for the moment.
Interesting note, current ISS commander Michael Foale was onboard Mir when they had the accident with the Progress vehicle. This guy seems to be really unlucky.
Or perhaps it's a case of once-bitten twice-shy. Foale was busy conducting experiments in Spektr when the Progress bounced off it on its little detour past the docking port.
Underneath that cool test-pilot exterior (and a pair of Ray-Bans) is a guy whose eyes are always moving, always watching... ready for that *thump* *crunch* *hissssss* that means IT'S ALL HAPPENING AGAIN!!! OH MY GOD!!! EVAC PROCEDURES, SOYUZ SEPARATION SEQUENCE STA... oh, never mind, just a piece of insulation, sorry.
For those of you who can't get to it, don't worry--you didn't miss much. It's just a compilation of Scotty quotes, and contrary to the submitter's assertion, hardly any of them apply to the current situation.
Unlucky me, I fell in Geocities' good graces and was welcomed by an auto-playing sound file. I'm supposed to be in the middle of a big project, typing away furiously, and suddenly my speakers burst out with "Hello, Computer"!
Now, people are looking around the cube wall seeing me surfing Slashdot.
Oops, gotta go.
Quite an honor to get the lead question, and even cooler to know that people in India now have the opportunity to question my clarity of thought!
Others echoed his reply, and a few thought the questioner wasn't "thinking very clearly." One Perl programmer asked, "Does he think we don't have email lists and Web sites? We are techies. We stay in touch all over the world. We know what's going on everywhere, same as you."
Consider me properly chastened. However... the reason I asked the question is because it's a topic that came up while talking to a fellow programmer of Indian heritage. She pointed out the H1-B visa's hidden pitfalls as a problem in the Indo-Pak community.
I guess the answer to my question is that *most* H1-B recipients knew what they were getting into, though a few either didn't do their research or chose to ignore the warnings. Which sounds like a pretty universal situation -- as the interviews showed, we're more alike than different.
But just one little swipe. When the Perl programmer questioned my fuzzy thinking, he said "We know what's going on everywhere, same as you." Well, despite all the time I spend on Slashdot, I *don't* know what's going on everywhere, and I can't imagine that Mr. Perl does, either... Oh, well, there's one know-it-all in every crowd.
Who know after three months of pumping up this m-life that it was for a mobile phone plan.
I remember the billboard with an 8-year-old girl, thinking "what's an mlife, and how do I get one?" The answer, Virginia, is that nobody really knows, but it costs about $40 billion.
Those mlife ads always gave me the creeps, anyway. There was always something a little too close to a religious overtone to them... they looked like they were designed by the same folks who put together a local megachurch's billboard campaign. Kinda like "contemporary Christian" music is disturbingly similar to pop music, with "Jesus" in the place of "Baby".
Gives me the creeps. Just give me that old time religion... it's good enough for me!
To that extent, I will agree with you, because we do use an industrial-ag model of crop production. We don't need to, though.
Unfortunately, the standard method of ethanol production from growing and processing your own corn is illegal in the US: the end product is usually known as Moonshine.
Here are a few references on the subject.
Interestingly, moonshine enjoys a quasi-legal status in New Zealand. Looks like the Kiwis are going to be ahead of us USers again.
musicians are f*ed. apparently, we can't look at other peoples copywritten music without 'taining' our ability to write original music.
There was a science fiction short story I read that detailed that exact scenario. It was either in Omni or in a compilation in the early '80s, and it went somewhat like this:
In a future society, your career path is chosen for you soon after birth, by a semi-benevolent system that can tell what you'll like to do. The main character is chosen to be a musician, and creates beautiful music in complete isolation. But a shadowy figure lets the kid listen to a Bach fugue. The kid knows he's in deep doo doo, because the music has influenced him in a forbidden way. Despite his efforts, he's discovered -- because his compositions now have no fugues at all.
The story goes on to reveal the dark side of the supposedly benevolent society, showing what happens to those who don't fit in. Very dark story with an ambiguous ending, IIRC. Wonder what the name and author was?
I had toyed with the idea of a cyber cafe, until I ran the numbers through a spreadsheet and realized there was no way I could come anywhere near my current salary workin' for the man. Harder work, longer hours, and less pay makes RobertB a dead boy.
But one idea that came to mind was to set up in Dallas' pseudo-punk Deep Ellum strip, where the preppies dress goth and gawk at each other. There would be booths with Internet terminals, a nominal quarter-hour fee, and overpriced drinks.
Here's the twist: the bartender controls several large-screen TVs, which he/she can connect to whichever surfer is most interesting at the time. Like a DJ, the barkeep would be able to adjust the "mix" -- maybe some softcore porn on one screen, a CNN ticker on the other, and someone's hacking session over in the geek corner.
For added enjoyment of the crowd, add picture-in-picture: the surfer, and what they're checking out at the moment. Why is the guy looking at porn so bored, and why is the hot chick reading Reuters so...
Of course, not everyone would want to surf with the world looking over their shoulder. No problem -- for a small additional fee, the bartender would be blocked from showing your mug... a little more to block your surfing altogether.
Just a crazy idea! I'll stick with the steady paycheck, for now.
Sorry, but my first thought was the solution pioneered by Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr in this 1983 documentary. Of course, it doesn't work as well without the unique preservative solution devised by evil genius Dr. Alfred Necessiter.
"You.. You cooked her nines!... OUT! Out of my HOUSE! Out of my LIFE!"
-- Steve Martin, "The Man With Two Brains"
Don't know too much about distortion and aerial photography, (or surveying for that matter) do you?
:)
Duh. This is Slashdot. If I had a clue what I was talking about, I would have to recuse myself from the discussion.
I'm afraid this gadget has too much real-world application to be of interest to the geek crowd.
We just bought a few acres of land, and this device would have been the ideal tool for the surveyor. It's clear from the discrepancies between the survey drawing and the aerial views that the surveyor made his measurements, wrote them down, then made his drawing from his notes. The numbers are right, but the outlines of the buildings aren't quite where they should be.
This device, plus a windoze PC with appropriate software, will let the surveyor simply walk to the survey points, point & shoot, hotsync, and print. It's just what the surveyor needs to do his/her job.
So it's obviously too useful to be a geek toy.
From the article:
So what are the faithful to do if they don't want to watch the altered 1997 editions of the trilogy? Either give in, or don't buy. "We realize there's a lot of debate out there," says Ward. "But this is not a democracy. We love our fans, but this is about art and filmmaking. [George] has decided that the sole version he wants available is this one."
So you say it's not a democracy? That George "Artist" Lucas can do what he damn well pleases?
Perhaps Lucas has forgotten that he's in the marketplace -- where democracy indeed rules, and the cash register is the ballot box.
My vote will be for the version where Han shoots first. For me, it *is* about "art and filmmaking". Both of which were evident in the original, absent from the remake, and forgotten in the prequels.
These could be pebbles (i.e. sedimentary) or they could be lapilli (volcanic structures formed by the sticking-together of ash particles). They could also be zones of cementation that developed long after deposition (e.g., concretions), in which case they do not say much about conditions at time of deposition. The latter two are more likely, because the "balls" are so spherical (most pebbles are not so perfectly equidimensional).
I've been excited about the spheres, too. Unfortunately, there seem to be so many (and as you noticed, so perfect) that I can't imagine them ever being tumbled about in a Martian spring.
I imagine they're the result of volcanic or impact processes throwing molten material up into the air. With a gravity one-third of Earth's, large, hot particles would have more time to coalesce into a sphere before they hit the ground.
Bad news for the search for life, though. But part of me roots for the "dead planet" theory. We can put all the strip miners in a refurbished Saturn V, point it at Mars, and let them fight out mineral rights on the trip!
I think perhaps you are confusing American Airlines with The Sabre Group (current owners of Travelocity).
You're right, in part. I worked for TSG (the acronym du jour, IIRC) just before they were about to be spun off. In the convulsions leading up to the spinoff, there was a constant shuffling of staff -- some of which was managers using the confusion to unload bum steers.
That finally led to "the cloud process", where upper management would be reorganizing across all departments. We knew that there would be layoffs. Nobody knew what their status would be, but everyone was afraid that they'd be let go in favor of a less qualified and/or cheaper alternative.
My contacts in HR told me that the company was aggressively recruiting H1-Bs at that time, despite the uncertainty among the current employees. The business reasons were perfectly valid, in the artificial Wall Street world where increasing profits are the only measure of success. The ethics were as debatable as they were irrelevant.
At the height of the confusion, an atmosphere of extreme distrust developed between the knowlege workers and the management. In one famous episode, the then-president of TSG (whose name I can't recall) told us that we were at "a fork in the road" -- and was greeted with a chorus of boos. That week, he was flooded with intracompany mail envelopes containing... forks. From the cafeteria. He was said to be not amused.
I bailed out shortly before the AA/Sabre split became complete, so I've probably gotten the names wrong... but you can see why I didn't split hairs in the original post. (And I still didn't get FP!)
Long before outsourcing to India became an issue, large IT companies like American Airlines were virtual H1-B "hardship" visa factories, importing large numbers of technical experts from India and other countries during the dot-com boom.
But when the boom went bust, and the layoffs came, H1-B visa holders were left out in the cold, unable to even look for a new job due to the terms of their visas.
Do the IT professionals you've met feel that US companies and the US government used bait-and-switch tactics to take advantage of cheaper non-US workers? Or did those applying for H1-B visas know what they were in for?
And a follow-up question: does anyone think that US companies will hesitate to leave their outsourcing partners high and dry as soon as they (again) find a cheaper alternative?
If you've never had to get a forklift to help you lift your computer, you aren't qualified to pass judgment on Mel.
I have to agree. When I found the original story in the Jargon File, I passed it on to my mom -- a now-retired Old School programmer, with a Masters in Mathematics because there was no such thing as a CS degree in those days.
She'd heard of Mel, and though I can't remember exactly what she said about him, I recall that there was a large amount of respect.
That drum-memory computer with Mel's blackjack program ought to be in the Smithsonian... if it isn't already.
How will the world end? In fire? In ice? More like in a bunch of tiny pieces that were smelted into raw metals.
.sig I see here on Slashdot: Earth First! We'll strip-mine the other planets later...
While I see your point, I hope it wouldn't come to that. I don't have a problem dismantling "dead" planets like Mercury and Mars, maybe even Venus, and certainly the asteroids.
But the Earth has so many unique features that you can't preserve outside an Earth-sized gravity well. You're not going to be able to recreate Yellowstone's hot springs and geysers on the surface of a Dyson Sphere, for example.
On the other hand, there's the
Foo: I guess my initial reaction was fsck 'em. Fsck 'em all.
Bar: don't you mean rm -rfP 'em?
No, he doesn't think they should be deleted... they've just been corrupted. Or perhaps he thinks they're inconsistent.