It looked pretty cool at the web front end when I looked, but it sounds like it's in some sense totally independent of the stores that have to deliver.
What I think would work is for one of the large supermarket chains (e.g. Coles or Woolworths in australia or whatever it is in your part of the world) to get into online sales.
They're already doing it.
IGA is doing it in Canada, and it actually looks pretty inexpensive. The prices seem to be the same as in-store, and the delivery charge is pretty reasonable. I spent a fair bit of time checking out their site one time, and they're pushing it as a big time saver for busy people-- one example is that if you're on business travel you can put in your order and specify a relatively narrow window when they'll deliver it (e.g. plan to have the food show up a few hours after you get home, or the next morning)
Safeway has been doing it for a while in California-- I just checked now and it seems to be available in my zip code. They've been rolling it out pretty quietly.
The idea isn't that much different than what many grocery stores (even some of the big chains) have done for a long time for people who are housebound-- they call in their order and the store puts it together and puts it in a cab to their house.
Last time Amazon cut a deal with Fedex where they would load up a bunch of trucks with the book and deliver them on saturday morning.
When the Fedex guy came driving down the street he was stopping at a good fraction of the houses. All with identical packages, and in a good mood because everyone was happy to see him. He was Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny for the day.
It's probably closer to 10-12 lbs of stuff, unless it's a really heavy laptop, but as you say, it's really not bad to ride with an extra 20 lbs of stuff as long as it's in a decent backpack or messenger bag. I prefer a messenger bag because it sits lower on my back and the back of my helmet always bumps backpacks. If it's flat terrain it shouldn't be bad at all-- I carry a bunch of stuff back and forth to work fairly often, and I even have hills.
Here in LA we have plenty of 100 degree days in the summer, but unless you're commuting in the noon sun, it's not too bad. The smog is actually worse than the heat on days like that. 100 F out in the desert is actually pleasant, compared to 100 F in the foothills here because the smog all bunches up and you can't breathe. Out in the desert if you stay hydrated it's really not bad--I'd rather ride in 100+ than -40 (and I've done both).
Everyplace has psychotic drivers year round. Try Boston, where I've had people yell at me because I caused them to stop at a red light when I wanted to cross a street. What you find when you bike a lot is that most drivers really aren't that bad, and good vehicular cycling practice makes a big difference in how you're treated.
Nah, even when the weather is bad it's more pleasant on a bike. Auto traffic gets much worse in bad weather, but if you're on a bike you're probably on alternate roads anyway, and still having a more pleasant, lower stress commute.
I've bike commuted in 3 different cities (Boston, Minneapolis, LA) year round, and it still beats driving. I'd move or change jobs rather than commute regularly by car.
A lot of it's a matter of perspective. I'd rather be on a bike. These days I actually have nice foul weather gear (Gore-Tex rules, and there are even waterproof, breathable socks), but even when I didn't, it was still a lot of fun. As you get more experienced and fitter, the distance you're willing to commute on a bike goes up.
Should I give up my 12.5 mile away job in IT and go work at McD's around the corner?
12.5 miles is close-- a reasonably fit person can do that on a bicycle every day (and become a very fit person), and it won't take much longer than driving, and probably be much more pleasant.
You can also do that round trip on batteries from some form of electric transportation.
That said, I find that the "personal projects" aspect of Google is one of the more sinister. Remember that Google can take your personal project if they want it. So it's not really a personal project, it's funded independent R&D.
It's part of the way Google tries to stay agile. By insinuating ownership over projects that their corporate culture couldn't create, they can come up with things that another company their size couldn't, and do it cheaper (remember, Google employees are salaried, and likely you're going to work on the project in your spare time as well).
Except that it is a way that they structure their corporate culture to create projects from the bottom up.
In lots of companies there are mechanisms for bottom up injection of ideas into the R&D stream. In most cases there's some sort of pool of money that you write proposals to get a piece of. Sometimes the proposals are all evaluated in a formal process, and sometimes they're evaluated ad hoc, but in most cases they get filtered early, often before anyone gets a chance to see where they might lead. Either way, the company owns the IP.
What Google does is tell people it's good for them to start working through their own new concepts to see if they can mature them. This is especially easy in a software company, where you don't have to buy any special equipment for experiements, and where they can start throwing in more support fast when the ideas turn out to be good.
Anyplace you work, even a research university, your work related ideas get economically exploited by your employer, it's just that some encourage development of independent ideas better than others. There are also variations in how the proceeds get shared-- faculty in research universities are typically given a pretty generous share, auto workers typically aren't (even if their idea saves a bunch of $$). I read recently that Google has been adjusting their reward structure so that people who came in later and don't get the benefit of nearly free stock can also be very well compensated for ideas that make the company a lot of money (but I'm too lazy to google for the source).
I've been on both sides (handing out R&D money and begging for it) and from what I've read, Google's 20% program sounds pretty good.
Hard core board wargames tend to have rather long, detailed, complex rulebooks that have to be learned and internalized in order to play. I played wargames for years as a kid, but getting opponents was often hard because of the learning curve.
One of my favorite board games was Squad Leader (I started playing long before ASL), which had 36 pages of rules, and which spawned 3 add-on gamettes that each added another 36 pages of rules, including some very particular special cases: e.g. attackers in close combat attacking a unit at lower elevation have their firepower doubled, unless they're Finns or Ghurkas, in which case it's tripled, or Italians, in which case it's normal FP.
A couple guys in the northeast (http://battlefront.com/ came up with the spiritual descendant of SL, called Combat Mission. They actually developed a very intuitive UI and made it semi-simultaneous, with each turn generating a movie (3-D, pannable, zoomable) that you have to watch to see the outcome. The computer takes care of knowing all the gruesome details (and they modeled it in immense detail) so the player just has to give fairly simple orders. You learn the various rules (e.g. speed variations on road vs. muddy ground) by simply playing a bit. They've sold enough to make two follow-ons on the same engine, and are developing a new, better engine for the next version.
Being able to hide all the complex rules like that gives complex computer games a huge advantage over boardgames in accessibility. This means you don't have to be nearly as hardcore to enjoy it. Plus you don't have to leave it set up for months in the basement, with stacks of cardboard counters on hexes (which cost a lot more to make than duping a CD), only to be knocked over by a cat or a sneeze. Play by email is much easier than play by mail ever was, and many games also offer direct on-line play with chat as well. Try that with a boardgame, or try a boardgame version of GTA.
Experimental work in most areas I've seen can involve lots of moving around. Things as simple as walking around the lab collecting materials from shelves and fridges to crawling around on the floor of a vacuum chamber while wearing a bunny suit. You get to poke at things, break things, fix things, carry things, set up equipment you've never seen before, crawl on the floor, use power tools and machine tools as necessary, and a whole host of other things. You also spend some time sitting in front of a computer or in meetings, but for a lot of people there's a lot of time spent puttering around to make things work.
If you do something like marine biology you get to do it at the beach. Or you could do network maintenance or data acq system development for some kind of experimental research group that goes out for all sorts of field tests in the ocean or desert or something.
There are tons of things like that, but it can take some work to track them down and find openings.
There's a whole cottage industry of people who bake out old audio tapes to recover them. I had a guy do this with my old 1/4" two track tapes a couple years ago. It apparently varies quite a bit among tape types. Almost all 1/4" tapes made until pretty recently suffer from sticky shed, but most cassettes don't, except for a category of them that were made from surplus studio tape that was sliced up into narrower strips and loaded into cassettes.
Yeah, I've actually been thinking of digging my old LC III out of the closet, adding a network card (you can still get them!) and trying to put it to some use. My old Wallstreet runs the webcam and web radio.
I use primarily macs at home (though OS X actually has got me started putting together a pc based linux system, now, too) and I've lied to ISP support techs on more than one occasion about what platform I was using. Generally I was calling about problems unrelated to the platform, but they often won't support macs anyway.
I work in a high tech place that would be a great setting for a game, and there are crates all over the place. There's every sort of crate you could imagine-- big wooden ones, big plastic ones, metal ones, medium sized ones of wood, plastic or metal, little ones of all materials. All sorts of different paint jobs from bare wood to fancy bright paint with all sorts of warnings. We even have an internal website for sharing surplus material and it has a whole category with hundreds of used crates and shipping cases, with pictures of them available on-line. And most crates large enough to fit over the forks of forklift have rails to hold them high enough off the ground so they don't need to be palletized to be forked. Smaller cases get palletized, and sometimes saran wrapped to hold them in place.
I hardly think we're unique, either-- all those crates come from somewhere, and when I see other peoples' facilities, they have lots of crates, too.
If you spend much time in a place where people make actual stuff as opposed to arranging ones and zeros in useful ways, you'll see lots of crates.
What is unrealistic are the signs that they put on them, but hey, they're games.
Yeah, exactly my thought. I also didn't see it in the article, but the link to the nanolab has a link for "surgical swimming robots" and on that page they say that for their applications it has to be less than 800 micrometers, not nanometers.
A wee bit of a difference there. 800 microns is still pretty small. It seems like you'd end up with a pinhole camera with a pretty tiny hole, and what size focal plane? There isn't a whole lot of light in your intestines, either, unless someones been pumping a bit of sunshine. It could be pretty tough to get much sensitivity from such a tiny camera there.
My favorite is a paper called "Clozapine and Body Mass Change". They state in the abstract that it's been documented that people gain weight on Clozapine, and they want to determine if their body mass [index] also increases.
Body mass index is defined as (weight in kg)/(height in m)^2.
Doh.
Nowhere did they mention that they wanted to know if Clozapine caused peoples' height to change.
IIRC, The body of the paper was then more of a meta-study on whether people gained weight across all studies of Clozapine, and didn't really test the trivial hypothesis that bmi would go up when weight went up.
I've always been tempted to nominate it for an Ignobel in General Relativity (as a test of the equivalence principle).
I think this is the correct paper reference: Frankenberg,F.R., Zanarine,M.C., Kando,J. & Centorinno,F. (1998) Clozapine and body mass change. Biological Psychiatry, Apr. 1, 43, 7, 520-543.
(I suppose it's fitting that it was in the April 1 issue, but it doesn't look like it's supposed to be a joke...)
Sure, you can make welding as hard as you want, but the OP is looking for a sturdy AV cart, not a precision road bike made from thinwall titanium or a bridge to support tanks crossing the Tigris.
A decent MIG welder and a bunch of cheap steel and even a beginner can be putting together AV carts in a couple hours (I was certainly doing more difficult stuff than that after an hour or two). I wouldn't even recommend buying a welder for a project like that-- borrow one or use one from somewhere at the university and have the person responsible for the welder help out at the beginning.
Why not take your request to the professors of these classes and have them build some for you?
It doesn't even have to be for a class. A lot of universities have one or more "student shops" that students can pretty much use on their own, generally for school related things (grad students in experimental physics, for example, tend to do a lot of machining). Even when the shops belong to one department, they tend to be shared to avoid duplicating resources too much. You can probably get someone who can weld (it's not hard), and weld up some nice carts on the cheap. You could probably do nice sturdy wooden ones, too, if a wood shop is easier to come by.
Space has already been privatized and commercialized to a large extent, but only for Earth orbiting systems. The largest commercial application in space so far is telecom, but the imaging market is picking up lately.
Nearly all satellites built in the US are built by private companies (sometimes with gov't funding, sometimes private, depending on the application). Launch vehicles are designed and built by private companies (typically designed under contract with the gov't, with construction paid for by whoever is getting the lift)
Deep space and earth orbiting science applications will likely remain gov't funded for the forseeable future, unless the private foundations that fund things like ground based science and telescopes decide to start funding space based research.
I wouldn't be so sure that they're privately pissed.
The whole thing has brought a lot of attention to their canned meat product, and as another poster mentioned, they may actually be doing this as much from a marketing standpoint as for real trademark protection.
They've certainly started pushing the product more over the past couple years-- a few years ago I went to reach for the tuna in my local grocery, and the shelf of chunk white had been replaced by SPAM in all varieties, with the tuna moved below it. I'm sure they paid the grocery some $$$ to do that, but it's a sign that they're definitely pushing SPAM (an in southern California).
By accepting that they aren't going to change the email meaning of it, and instead focusing on "spam=bad thing, SPAM=good thing" they get what might be a low cost, long term ad campaign that keeps both senses of spam on everyones lips and gets people who otherwise wouldn't even think about it to at least try it.
any more than reading a book can make your head explode
I'm sorry, but that's a terrible example. There have been a number of books that I've read that were so bad they caused my head to explode.
The most recent instance was Dan Brown's "Digital Fortress" last summer. It was technically so stupid, and the characters so flat, that my head exploded three times while I was reading it. The only reason I finished it was that I was on vacation in the middle of nowhere and it was all there was to read, and my traveling companions used all our duct tape to hold my head together. I later had it disposed of as hazardous waste. I'm just glad I only paid $6 for the trade paperback of that, rather than getting the DaVinci Code, which wasn't available in pb yet. I won't touch another one of his books again, and I'm going to have to go take a shower to cleanse myself after having written so much about DF here.
It's a blast in the rain, as long as you don't mind getting muddy, and the people who maintain the field don't get upset about the occasional slide through the mud.
Wind is much worse-- it takes a lot more skill to throw a disc in the wind than in the rain. It was pretty tough sometimes playing in the plains.
Slashdot Mirror
That sucks.
It looked pretty cool at the web front end when I looked, but it sounds like it's in some sense totally independent of the stores that have to deliver.
What I think would work is for one of the large supermarket chains (e.g. Coles or Woolworths in australia or whatever it is in your part of the world) to get into online sales.
They're already doing it.
IGA is doing it in Canada, and it actually looks pretty inexpensive. The prices seem to be the same as in-store, and the delivery charge is pretty reasonable. I spent a fair bit of time checking out their site one time, and they're pushing it as a big time saver for busy people-- one example is that if you're on business travel you can put in your order and specify a relatively narrow window when they'll deliver it (e.g. plan to have the food show up a few hours after you get home, or the next morning)
Safeway has been doing it for a while in California-- I just checked now and it seems to be available in my zip code. They've been rolling it out pretty quietly.
The idea isn't that much different than what many grocery stores (even some of the big chains) have done for a long time for people who are housebound-- they call in their order and the store puts it together and puts it in a cab to their house.
Last time Amazon cut a deal with Fedex where they would load up a bunch of trucks with the book and deliver them on saturday morning.
When the Fedex guy came driving down the street he was stopping at a good fraction of the houses. All with identical packages, and in a good mood because everyone was happy to see him. He was Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny for the day.
It's probably closer to 10-12 lbs of stuff, unless it's a really heavy laptop, but as you say, it's really not bad to ride with an extra 20 lbs of stuff as long as it's in a decent backpack or messenger bag. I prefer a messenger bag because it sits lower on my back and the back of my helmet always bumps backpacks. If it's flat terrain it shouldn't be bad at all-- I carry a bunch of stuff back and forth to work fairly often, and I even have hills.
Here in LA we have plenty of 100 degree days in the summer, but unless you're commuting in the noon sun, it's not too bad. The smog is actually worse than the heat on days like that. 100 F out in the desert is actually pleasant, compared to 100 F in the foothills here because the smog all bunches up and you can't breathe. Out in the desert if you stay hydrated it's really not bad--I'd rather ride in 100+ than -40 (and I've done both).
Everyplace has psychotic drivers year round. Try Boston, where I've had people yell at me because I caused them to stop at a red light when I wanted to cross a street. What you find when you bike a lot is that most drivers really aren't that bad, and good vehicular cycling practice makes a big difference in how you're treated.
Only if the weather is good...
Nah, even when the weather is bad it's more pleasant on a bike. Auto traffic gets much worse in bad weather, but if you're on a bike you're probably on alternate roads anyway, and still having a more pleasant, lower stress commute.
I've bike commuted in 3 different cities (Boston, Minneapolis, LA) year round, and it still beats driving. I'd move or change jobs rather than commute regularly by car.
A lot of it's a matter of perspective. I'd rather be on a bike. These days I actually have nice foul weather gear (Gore-Tex rules, and there are even waterproof, breathable socks), but even when I didn't, it was still a lot of fun. As you get more experienced and fitter, the distance you're willing to commute on a bike goes up.
(AC sib post said similar...)
Should I give up my 12.5 mile away job in IT and go work at McD's around the corner?
12.5 miles is close-- a reasonably fit person can do that on a bicycle every day (and become a very fit person), and it won't take much longer than driving, and probably be much more pleasant.
You can also do that round trip on batteries from some form of electric transportation.
That said, I find that the "personal projects" aspect of Google is one of the more sinister. Remember that Google can take your personal project if they want it. So it's not really a personal project, it's funded independent R&D.
It's part of the way Google tries to stay agile. By insinuating ownership over projects that their corporate culture couldn't create, they can come up with things that another company their size couldn't, and do it cheaper (remember, Google employees are salaried, and likely you're going to work on the project in your spare time as well).
Except that it is a way that they structure their corporate culture to create projects from the bottom up.
In lots of companies there are mechanisms for bottom up injection of ideas into the R&D stream. In most cases there's some sort of pool of money that you write proposals to get a piece of. Sometimes the proposals are all evaluated in a formal process, and sometimes they're evaluated ad hoc, but in most cases they get filtered early, often before anyone gets a chance to see where they might lead. Either way, the company owns the IP.
What Google does is tell people it's good for them to start working through their own new concepts to see if they can mature them. This is especially easy in a software company, where you don't have to buy any special equipment for experiements, and where they can start throwing in more support fast when the ideas turn out to be good.
Anyplace you work, even a research university, your work related ideas get economically exploited by your employer, it's just that some encourage development of independent ideas better than others. There are also variations in how the proceeds get shared-- faculty in research universities are typically given a pretty generous share, auto workers typically aren't (even if their idea saves a bunch of $$). I read recently that Google has been adjusting their reward structure so that people who came in later and don't get the benefit of nearly free stock can also be very well compensated for ideas that make the company a lot of money (but I'm too lazy to google for the source).
I've been on both sides (handing out R&D money and begging for it) and from what I've read, Google's 20% program sounds pretty good.
Hard core board wargames tend to have rather long, detailed, complex rulebooks that have to be learned and internalized in order to play. I played wargames for years as a kid, but getting opponents was often hard because of the learning curve.
One of my favorite board games was Squad Leader (I started playing long before ASL), which had 36 pages of rules, and which spawned 3 add-on gamettes that each added another 36 pages of rules, including some very particular special cases: e.g. attackers in close combat attacking a unit at lower elevation have their firepower doubled, unless they're Finns or Ghurkas, in which case it's tripled, or Italians, in which case it's normal FP.
A couple guys in the northeast (http://battlefront.com/ came up with the spiritual descendant of SL, called Combat Mission. They actually developed a very intuitive UI and made it semi-simultaneous, with each turn generating a movie (3-D, pannable, zoomable) that you have to watch to see the outcome. The computer takes care of knowing all the gruesome details (and they modeled it in immense detail) so the player just has to give fairly simple orders. You learn the various rules (e.g. speed variations on road vs. muddy ground) by simply playing a bit. They've sold enough to make two follow-ons on the same engine, and are developing a new, better engine for the next version.
Being able to hide all the complex rules like that gives complex computer games a huge advantage over boardgames in accessibility. This means you don't have to be nearly as hardcore to enjoy it. Plus you don't have to leave it set up for months in the basement, with stacks of cardboard counters on hexes (which cost a lot more to make than duping a CD), only to be knocked over by a cat or a sneeze. Play by email is much easier than play by mail ever was, and many games also offer direct on-line play with chat as well. Try that with a boardgame, or try a boardgame version of GTA.
Experimental work in most areas I've seen can involve lots of moving around. Things as simple as walking around the lab collecting materials from shelves and fridges to crawling around on the floor of a vacuum chamber while wearing a bunny suit. You get to poke at things, break things, fix things, carry things, set up equipment you've never seen before, crawl on the floor, use power tools and machine tools as necessary, and a whole host of other things. You also spend some time sitting in front of a computer or in meetings, but for a lot of people there's a lot of time spent puttering around to make things work.
If you do something like marine biology you get to do it at the beach. Or you could do network maintenance or data acq system development for some kind of experimental research group that goes out for all sorts of field tests in the ocean or desert or something.
There are tons of things like that, but it can take some work to track them down and find openings.
There's a whole cottage industry of people who bake out old audio tapes to recover them. I had a guy do this with my old 1/4" two track tapes a couple years ago. It apparently varies quite a bit among tape types. Almost all 1/4" tapes made until pretty recently suffer from sticky shed, but most cassettes don't, except for a category of them that were made from surplus studio tape that was sliced up into narrower strips and loaded into cassettes.
At least in some colleges (e.g. McGill) it's called the "principal". It might be an english thing.
Yeah, I've actually been thinking of digging my old LC III out of the closet, adding a network card (you can still get them!) and trying to put it to some use. My old Wallstreet runs the webcam and web radio.
I use primarily macs at home (though OS X actually has got me started putting together a pc based linux system, now, too) and I've lied to ISP support techs on more than one occasion about what platform I was using. Generally I was calling about problems unrelated to the platform, but they often won't support macs anyway.
Forget about furniture and walls and rendering with polygons, just construct it all from crates.
I work in a high tech place that would be a great setting for a game, and there are crates all over the place. There's every sort of crate you could imagine-- big wooden ones, big plastic ones, metal ones, medium sized ones of wood, plastic or metal, little ones of all materials. All sorts of different paint jobs from bare wood to fancy bright paint with all sorts of warnings. We even have an internal website for sharing surplus material and it has a whole category with hundreds of used crates and shipping cases, with pictures of them available on-line. And most crates large enough to fit over the forks of forklift have rails to hold them high enough off the ground so they don't need to be palletized to be forked. Smaller cases get palletized, and sometimes saran wrapped to hold them in place.
I hardly think we're unique, either-- all those crates come from somewhere, and when I see other peoples' facilities, they have lots of crates, too.
If you spend much time in a place where people make actual stuff as opposed to arranging ones and zeros in useful ways, you'll see lots of crates.
What is unrealistic are the signs that they put on them, but hey, they're games.
800nm diameter? That doesn't make any sense!
Yeah, exactly my thought. I also didn't see it in the article, but the link to the nanolab has a link for "surgical swimming robots" and on that page they say that for their applications it has to be less than 800 micrometers, not nanometers.
A wee bit of a difference there. 800 microns is still pretty small. It seems like you'd end up with a pinhole camera with a pretty tiny hole, and what size focal plane? There isn't a whole lot of light in your intestines, either, unless someones been pumping a bit of sunshine. It could be pretty tough to get much sensitivity from such a tiny camera there.
My favorite is a paper called "Clozapine and Body Mass Change". They state in the abstract that it's been documented that people gain weight on Clozapine, and they want to determine if their body mass [index] also increases.
Body mass index is defined as (weight in kg)/(height in m)^2.
Doh.
Nowhere did they mention that they wanted to know if Clozapine caused peoples' height to change.
IIRC, The body of the paper was then more of a meta-study on whether people gained weight across all studies of Clozapine, and didn't really test the trivial hypothesis that bmi would go up when weight went up.
I've always been tempted to nominate it for an Ignobel in General Relativity (as a test of the equivalence principle).
I think this is the correct paper reference:
Frankenberg,F.R., Zanarine,M.C., Kando,J. & Centorinno,F. (1998) Clozapine and body mass change. Biological Psychiatry, Apr. 1, 43, 7, 520-543.
(I suppose it's fitting that it was in the April 1 issue, but it doesn't look like it's supposed to be a joke...)
Sure, you can make welding as hard as you want, but the OP is looking for a sturdy AV cart, not a precision road bike made from thinwall titanium or a bridge to support tanks crossing the Tigris.
A decent MIG welder and a bunch of cheap steel and even a beginner can be putting together AV carts in a couple hours (I was certainly doing more difficult stuff than that after an hour or two). I wouldn't even recommend buying a welder for a project like that-- borrow one or use one from somewhere at the university and have the person responsible for the welder help out at the beginning.
Why not take your request to the professors of these classes and have them build some for you?
It doesn't even have to be for a class. A lot of universities have one or more "student shops" that students can pretty much use on their own, generally for school related things (grad students in experimental physics, for example, tend to do a lot of machining). Even when the shops belong to one department, they tend to be shared to avoid duplicating resources too much. You can probably get someone who can weld (it's not hard), and weld up some nice carts on the cheap. You could probably do nice sturdy wooden ones, too, if a wood shop is easier to come by.
Space has already been privatized and commercialized to a large extent, but only for Earth orbiting systems. The largest commercial application in space so far is telecom, but the imaging market is picking up lately.
Nearly all satellites built in the US are built by private companies (sometimes with gov't funding, sometimes private, depending on the application). Launch vehicles are designed and built by private companies (typically designed under contract with the gov't, with construction paid for by whoever is getting the lift)
Deep space and earth orbiting science applications will likely remain gov't funded for the forseeable future, unless the private foundations that fund things like ground based science and telescopes decide to start funding space based research.
I wouldn't be so sure that they're privately pissed.
The whole thing has brought a lot of attention to their canned meat product, and as another poster mentioned, they may actually be doing this as much from a marketing standpoint as for real trademark protection.
They've certainly started pushing the product more over the past couple years-- a few years ago I went to reach for the tuna in my local grocery, and the shelf of chunk white had been replaced by SPAM in all varieties, with the tuna moved below it. I'm sure they paid the grocery some $$$ to do that, but it's a sign that they're definitely pushing SPAM (an in southern California).
By accepting that they aren't going to change the email meaning of it, and instead focusing on "spam=bad thing, SPAM=good thing" they get what might be a low cost, long term ad campaign that keeps both senses of spam on everyones lips and gets people who otherwise wouldn't even think about it to at least try it.
any more than reading a book can make your head explode
I'm sorry, but that's a terrible example. There have been a number of books that I've read that were so bad they caused my head to explode.
The most recent instance was Dan Brown's "Digital Fortress" last summer. It was technically so stupid, and the characters so flat, that my head exploded three times while I was reading it. The only reason I finished it was that I was on vacation in the middle of nowhere and it was all there was to read, and my traveling companions used all our duct tape to hold my head together. I later had it disposed of as hazardous waste. I'm just glad I only paid $6 for the trade paperback of that, rather than getting the DaVinci Code, which wasn't available in pb yet. I won't touch another one of his books again, and I'm going to have to go take a shower to cleanse myself after having written so much about DF here.
It's a blast in the rain, as long as you don't mind getting muddy, and the people who maintain the field don't get upset about the occasional slide through the mud.
Wind is much worse-- it takes a lot more skill to throw a disc in the wind than in the rain. It was pretty tough sometimes playing in the plains.
Here's the UK Ultimate Federation page:
http://www.ukultimate.com/
they might have links to clubs.
There also tend to be a lot of invisible ultimate groups, because of the lack of formality to the whole sport.
You want a flame war. Just start the XTR vs SRAM debate. Should a frame be AL, Ti, or Carbon fiber. Of course you have the Steel is Real group.
Or even worse-- Road vs. Mountain.
I prefer track-- brakes and derailleurs are silly...