I recently became the legal guardian of my 11 year old half brother. This has meant that I had to put my money where my mouth is on certain issues.
I agree that it sucks that a small child can search for a site innocently and end up at a hardcore porn site. I don't however think that the legal attack vector will work or that putting in place Net Nanny style software is the answer.
The answer is simple, it's to be a good parent. That involves a combination of education (a cyber version of the "do not talk to strangers" conversation) and supervision (I monitor what sites my brother visits, not some software).
I used to preach about poor parenting being the root of all evil and since I became a parent my opinions have not changed... the people who complain about their children being vulnerable online are only blaming technology for their own bad parenting and there is no danger in the cyber world which has not been around for ages in the real world and the same steps to keep your kids safe apply in both worlds.
I would not let my brother have unsupervised access to the internet at age 11 any more than I would leave him alone in Soho after dark.
Microsoft already bids for this honour. By lowering the cost of the OS to OEM's they encourage them to stick with Microsoft for search, browser etc. If this priviledge is opened up to the likes of google, firefox and real we will just see Microsoft separate the payment for these services from the discount for OEM software.
Ultimately it looks like the customer will suffer (because if google can bid for your search, surely Alexa can too) and the OEM's will make a tonne more cash!
Introducing an auction for default setups seems to actually reduce choice and competition rather than supplying everything with an uninstall option and letting the user decide what to use.
I admit I did not make it clear enough for you fools to understand. The comment I was responding to was "The only acceptable time for "trys" is when you're on the way to "tryst"." which is not true because we already agree that the word 'trys' is acceptable as a plural noun when used in rugby. The poor illiterate sod who said that the plural noun is also 'tries' is totally wrong.
Thank you all for the poorly constructed posts and also well done to the person who thought that the parent to this post was somehow a karma modifier! Believe all you like, you are still wrong.
First off, it is spelling rather than grammar.
Secondly, 'trys' is a perfectly acceptable word in another context. The England rugby team often scores more trys than the opposition.
Are you by any chance an american? If so, and I am not trolling, please refrain from commenting on a language you do not understand.
I grew up with fear all around me. As the son of a naval officer I remember very clearly the day we were all told at (boarding) school not to use our parents military titles on letters addressed home because it was a terrorist threat. I also remember the mirror on a stick which was issued to my father to check for bombs under the wheel arches.
Of course all this was back in the days before the USA thought that funding terrorist organisations was a bad thing. This was back in the days when America openly funded the IRA through a variety of front organisations in the same way that many of the countries they now bully also do.
I am sick of hearing what homeland security is doing to make the US people more scared. By trying to put all these pointless measures in place they only serve to make the people feel more insecure and fearful. Rather than concentrating on these useless measures to defend yourself why not look at the reasons so many countries hate the US and address those problems first?
It is a common misconception that Americans have that all the little brown people in far off lands hate the freedom of the USA and are anti democracy... this simply is not true. They are anti decades of US meddling in their area. They are anti globalised US corporations raping their natural resources and they are also anti CIA tinkering with their chosen government.
I was in the US on 11/9 and witnessed a nation change in a way similar to watching the school bully get kicked in the shins by one of its victims and then go crying to the teacher. During July last year I saw Britain, and in particular London, deal with the aftermath in a more pragmatic way.
There is currently more chance of being hit by a bus than being blown up by a terrorist, so you take reasonable precautions and get on with your life without banning buses. There is more change having a heart attack than being killed by a bomb, so you take reasonable precautions but don't live in fear. There is more chance of your daughter getting raped than being killed by a terrorist bomb (yes, that's one in three all you caring fathers) but I bet the government has not spent anywhere near as much money trying to safeguard people against that threat.
In America the terrorists achieved a nation gripped with fear. The US is full of worried people. The government does not how to make them feel safe so it makes them feel even more scared by validating the threat.
In Britain we live under a constant threat but do not let it upset our daily lives. I was on the tube a few days after the bombings last July and my little brother (11 years old) told me that he was a little scared and I explained that fear is the objective so we do not stop doing what we are doing and carry on with our lives regardless... that's the way to win the war on terror.
That may be the most verbose/obscure way of saying "the Internet" that I've ever seen. And why do they imply that BT owns it?
OK, here's Internet 101.
A network running internet protocol is not necessarily The Internet. The Internet is a network running internet protocol however BT have a network running internet protocol which is part of The Internet and although they do not own The Internet, they own their own internet protocol network.
Let me break it down for the idiots. If you create a network using internet protocol as your method of transporting your data (a company LAN for example) they you have an internet protocol network. If you make that a huge global network using all your own kit they it is a global internet protocol network. If you peer it with other internet protocol networks and allow their traffic to flow over your network and you pass traffic over their network then you become a part of The Internet.
The Internet is made up of a lot of internetworked systems. BT happen to be a tier 1 carrier so they connect up a whole bunch of smaller networks and peer with other large networks. Goonhilly is their main UK satelite earth station where they have loads of large dishes which beam voice and data traffic all over the world. If you are plugged directly into BT's global network you are basically on one of the backbones of The Internet and are as close to the heart of it as most people get allowed to be.
Goonhilly is owned by BT, the BT global IP (internet protocol) network is owned by BT and to a certain extent that whole large chunk of The Internet is owned by BT. Sever BT's network from The Internet and they still have an internet (notice the use of upper and lower case), just not a part of The Internet.
So do you get it? BT don't own The Internet however they do own an internet which is part of The Internet.
Re:Why football (soccer) isn't more popular in N.A
on
IT Meets the World Cup
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I am probably going to get modded troll by every north american here but this needs to be said.
Football, or "soccer" as you so quaintly call it does not lack the strategy of american games however it does lack the 30 second break every two or three seconds so the teams can take a breather and the TV pundits can explain what just happened. Hockey is, and always will be, much more interesting when it is played by 18 year old girls rather than burley frat boys in pads and american "football" is an enigma: as Giles from Buffy said once, I have never understood why a nation which prides itself on its virility has to put on 40lbs of protective clothing just to play rugby.
Football (not the american sort) has been labelled "the beautiful game" throughout the world because of the grace and skill needed to play it at a high level. The game has a true World Cup in which countries come together and compete on a level field... you do not need to be an american college frat boy to get into the team and some of the best players in the world have come from the poorest parts of the world.
If you have not developed a love for fast paced games then it is likely you have not taken the time to understand how they are played and never felt the rush of watching your team win from a losing position.
And as modern bar code systems use a check digit at the start, middle and end which are normally a number 6 the three sixes are already in use in commerce. One theory also puts the 666 as refering to the sixth letter of the hebrew alphabet which means that all things engaged in commerce would be marked with www.
Me: "No, it is not a program that I downloaded or installed. It is on a website. I log in, select a certain option and try to click on the "go" button and IE 7.0 fails to load the next screen. IE 6.0 had no problem. That's all i want to solve. Load up the info. If no, there are going to be several hundred state employees calling me because they cannot fill out their time sheets and get paid."
MS Employee: "So you cannot open the program?"
Me: "No, it is within IE 7.0 that opens it and everything is on the Internet. Nothing is on my computer."
MS Employee: "Ok, I understand. Can you hold?"
So let me get this right... you deployed IE7 BETA to your several hunder state employees before you tested the app?
Please tell me someone was smart enough to fire you.
Oh no... Microsoft have done something nasty to the EU... good old EU for wanting to use Linux.
No wait?
The EU are doing something nasty to a large US corporation... bomb them!
Oh hang on... that EU, not OPEC.
The US Government are the ones to blame because they are spying on everyone and...
Nope... they are not the bad guys here...
No wonder all the posts are drivel... you can't fit this into one of the standard Slashdot Linux using American mindsets. Next thing we know Google will be doing evil.
No creatures alive today hunt humans for food, although many kill us for other reasons.
Does this mean you are under the deluded impression we are still evolving? If we are then the future of humanity is lost as the birthrate among successful intelligent and educated couple is far lower than the birthrate to single lazy state sponsored slags!
In Britain, as with most nations which have a democratic system developed to maturity over centuries, we have a parliament with at least two main parties. The majority party is the government while the collection of all members of parliament make up the parliament. Normally the majority party, the government, win the votes however if party members choose to vote against their party whips then it is possible for the parliament as a whole to vote against the wishes of the governint party.
This bill won't do a goddamned thing. It's a waste of our lawmakers' time and energy.
And there it is ladies (yeah right... this is/.) and gentlemen. Lawmakers of the world do not want to make the world a better place, because if they did then they would be aiming at reducing the power of the big corporations, not increasing it. The lawmakers want to fill their time in office with stuff that looks important so they can justify their paycheck and they also want to ensure that when they retire from politics there is a nice little sideline available to fund their golden years.
The lawmakers of the western world are inherently corrupt and will continue to abuse the powers they have until the people withdraw their source of power (ie their democratic support).
Have you never been to the/.'s much pimped sister site Think Geek? On said site you can buy all sorts of caffeine related wares because the standard geek stereotype would have us believe that us geeks are unable to get a good nights sleep because we drink lots of coffee and have all night Quake/Code sessions.
Well assuming that this puppy has a life span of 10 years (my research on the net suggested sats last anywhere from 5-15) then your $100 dollars contribution would only buy you about 8 hours and 40 minutes at the helm of the slashsat.
That is assuming that everyone does not try to log on in the first few seconds and we then spend 10 years looking at 500 errors while we save up for enough money to send someone up to reboot it.
The work one is a Treo 650 which does pretty much everything I want it to do including email and web surfing (so I can blog on the train). It also has a qwerty keyboard so I can type things easily.
My other phone is the weekend phone and is a Motorola Razr. It does some cool stuff but to be honest all I have it for is making calls and it does that well. It is also really small which is a big bonus because I can slip it into the pocket of my jeans and forget it is there (unlike the treo which weighs down my suit jacket on one side).
I do not want tv on a mobile because during the week while I am at work I can just fire up a screen if there is anything I need to see and at the weekend I do not want tv unless I am in front of my big plasma.
This stuff should so not be modded as troll... it is pure 100% funny when some little 15 year old Hax0r d00dz get their hands on old bbs ascii art work and think it is really cool... reminds me of the time a 15 year old kid came up to me and tried to 'educate' me about this band he had just started listening to... he thought they were really cool and underground... this was two years ago and the band was Nirvana... he kinda missed the boat on that one.
On a large team, the contributions of the best people are always smaller, and overall productivity is always lower. As a general rule, you can count on each new software project doubling in team size and in the amount of code involved -- and taking twice as long -- as the preceding project. In other words, the average duration of your projects will go from 2 years to 4 years to 8 years to 16 years, and so on. You can see that cycle with almost any technology. Two or three people invent a brilliant piece of software, and then, five years later, 1,000 people do a bad job of following up on their idea. History is littered with projects that follow this pattern: Windows, Unix, Java, Netscape Navigator.
The smaller the team, the faster the team members work. When you make the team smaller, you make the schedule shorter. That may sound counterintuitive, but it's been true for the past 20 years in this industry, and it will be true for another 20 years. The only method that I've found that works is to restrict the size of teams arbitrarily and painfully. Here's a simple rule of thumb for techie teams: No team should ever be larger than the largest conference room that's available for them to meet in.
At Novell, that means a limit of about 50 people. We separate extremely large projects into what we call "Virtual CDs." Think of each project as creating a CD-ROM of software that you can ship. It's an easy concept: Each team has to ship a CD of software in final form to someone else -- perhaps to another team, perhaps to an end user. When you treat each project as a CD, you enable one group to say to another, "Show me the schedule for your CD. When is this deliverable coming?" It's the kind of down-to-earth approach that everyone can understand, that techies can respect and respond to, and that makes almost any kind of project manageable.
Actually this sounds like a really good arguement against open source collaborative projects!
Well then she was not physically capable of doing the job... you would not hire a person with no arms to be a bell boy/bag carrier would you?
And no... before you try it, this is not flamebait... it is an opinion which I am entitled to have so stop waving your mod points around like somebody cares.
I have to say... this sort of behaviour has M$ written all over it... I am surprised they have not erected a 72 foot bronze statue of Ballmer to mark Microsoft 'winning' the OS war.
While we are comparing people to the Nazi's let me tell you a story I heard from one of the engineers who worked on the refurbishment of part of the Manchester Ship Canal in the UK...
While they were working on the ship canal they needed a very large bit of granite, a solid block about the size of a small family house. The engineers contacted granite quarries on Dartmoor and could not find a suitable piece however they were advised to visit a quarry in somewhere in scandanavia which was reputed to have very large cut pieces available. One of the engineers visited the quarry and to his delight found a cut piece of granite almost exactly the right size for what they needed just sitting there in the quarry... all cut to size but not needed for an order. Now this is not normal because the pieces are normally quarried to order so the engineer asks around to find out how the granite came to be quarried and not used... it turned out that the particular bit of granite which now sits at the bottom the the Manchester Ship Canal where it joins the Mersey was ordered up by Adolf Hitler as a memorial to celebrate the victory against the British in WWII. It was cut and ready but never delivered.
I wonder if the styrofoam from the Yahoo! statue will one day be used as packing material for Google's first mail server on Mars?
Slashdot Mirror
I recently became the legal guardian of my 11 year old half brother. This has meant that I had to put my money where my mouth is on certain issues.
I agree that it sucks that a small child can search for a site innocently and end up at a hardcore porn site. I don't however think that the legal attack vector will work or that putting in place Net Nanny style software is the answer.
The answer is simple, it's to be a good parent. That involves a combination of education (a cyber version of the "do not talk to strangers" conversation) and supervision (I monitor what sites my brother visits, not some software).
I used to preach about poor parenting being the root of all evil and since I became a parent my opinions have not changed... the people who complain about their children being vulnerable online are only blaming technology for their own bad parenting and there is no danger in the cyber world which has not been around for ages in the real world and the same steps to keep your kids safe apply in both worlds.
I would not let my brother have unsupervised access to the internet at age 11 any more than I would leave him alone in Soho after dark.
Microsoft already bids for this honour. By lowering the cost of the OS to OEM's they encourage them to stick with Microsoft for search, browser etc. If this priviledge is opened up to the likes of google, firefox and real we will just see Microsoft separate the payment for these services from the discount for OEM software.
Ultimately it looks like the customer will suffer (because if google can bid for your search, surely Alexa can too) and the OEM's will make a tonne more cash!
Introducing an auction for default setups seems to actually reduce choice and competition rather than supplying everything with an uninstall option and letting the user decide what to use.
OK, go back to your little box now flame boy. Any grown ups around here to mod this turkey?
I admit I did not make it clear enough for you fools to understand. The comment I was responding to was "The only acceptable time for "trys" is when you're on the way to "tryst"." which is not true because we already agree that the word 'trys' is acceptable as a plural noun when used in rugby. The poor illiterate sod who said that the plural noun is also 'tries' is totally wrong.
Thank you all for the poorly constructed posts and also well done to the person who thought that the parent to this post was somehow a karma modifier! Believe all you like, you are still wrong.
First off, it is spelling rather than grammar. Secondly, 'trys' is a perfectly acceptable word in another context. The England rugby team often scores more trys than the opposition. Are you by any chance an american? If so, and I am not trolling, please refrain from commenting on a language you do not understand.
I grew up with fear all around me. As the son of a naval officer I remember very clearly the day we were all told at (boarding) school not to use our parents military titles on letters addressed home because it was a terrorist threat. I also remember the mirror on a stick which was issued to my father to check for bombs under the wheel arches.
Of course all this was back in the days before the USA thought that funding terrorist organisations was a bad thing. This was back in the days when America openly funded the IRA through a variety of front organisations in the same way that many of the countries they now bully also do.
I am sick of hearing what homeland security is doing to make the US people more scared. By trying to put all these pointless measures in place they only serve to make the people feel more insecure and fearful. Rather than concentrating on these useless measures to defend yourself why not look at the reasons so many countries hate the US and address those problems first?
It is a common misconception that Americans have that all the little brown people in far off lands hate the freedom of the USA and are anti democracy... this simply is not true. They are anti decades of US meddling in their area. They are anti globalised US corporations raping their natural resources and they are also anti CIA tinkering with their chosen government.
I was in the US on 11/9 and witnessed a nation change in a way similar to watching the school bully get kicked in the shins by one of its victims and then go crying to the teacher. During July last year I saw Britain, and in particular London, deal with the aftermath in a more pragmatic way.
There is currently more chance of being hit by a bus than being blown up by a terrorist, so you take reasonable precautions and get on with your life without banning buses. There is more change having a heart attack than being killed by a bomb, so you take reasonable precautions but don't live in fear. There is more chance of your daughter getting raped than being killed by a terrorist bomb (yes, that's one in three all you caring fathers) but I bet the government has not spent anywhere near as much money trying to safeguard people against that threat.
In America the terrorists achieved a nation gripped with fear. The US is full of worried people. The government does not how to make them feel safe so it makes them feel even more scared by validating the threat.
In Britain we live under a constant threat but do not let it upset our daily lives. I was on the tube a few days after the bombings last July and my little brother (11 years old) told me that he was a little scared and I explained that fear is the objective so we do not stop doing what we are doing and carry on with our lives regardless... that's the way to win the war on terror.
I thought the BSD community were already working on that?
A network running internet protocol is not necessarily The Internet. The Internet is a network running internet protocol however BT have a network running internet protocol which is part of The Internet and although they do not own The Internet, they own their own internet protocol network.
Let me break it down for the idiots. If you create a network using internet protocol as your method of transporting your data (a company LAN for example) they you have an internet protocol network. If you make that a huge global network using all your own kit they it is a global internet protocol network. If you peer it with other internet protocol networks and allow their traffic to flow over your network and you pass traffic over their network then you become a part of The Internet.
The Internet is made up of a lot of internetworked systems. BT happen to be a tier 1 carrier so they connect up a whole bunch of smaller networks and peer with other large networks. Goonhilly is their main UK satelite earth station where they have loads of large dishes which beam voice and data traffic all over the world. If you are plugged directly into BT's global network you are basically on one of the backbones of The Internet and are as close to the heart of it as most people get allowed to be.
Goonhilly is owned by BT, the BT global IP (internet protocol) network is owned by BT and to a certain extent that whole large chunk of The Internet is owned by BT. Sever BT's network from The Internet and they still have an internet (notice the use of upper and lower case), just not a part of The Internet.
So do you get it? BT don't own The Internet however they do own an internet which is part of The Internet.
I am probably going to get modded troll by every north american here but this needs to be said. Football, or "soccer" as you so quaintly call it does not lack the strategy of american games however it does lack the 30 second break every two or three seconds so the teams can take a breather and the TV pundits can explain what just happened. Hockey is, and always will be, much more interesting when it is played by 18 year old girls rather than burley frat boys in pads and american "football" is an enigma: as Giles from Buffy said once, I have never understood why a nation which prides itself on its virility has to put on 40lbs of protective clothing just to play rugby. Football (not the american sort) has been labelled "the beautiful game" throughout the world because of the grace and skill needed to play it at a high level. The game has a true World Cup in which countries come together and compete on a level field... you do not need to be an american college frat boy to get into the team and some of the best players in the world have come from the poorest parts of the world. If you have not developed a love for fast paced games then it is likely you have not taken the time to understand how they are played and never felt the rush of watching your team win from a losing position.
And as modern bar code systems use a check digit at the start, middle and end which are normally a number 6 the three sixes are already in use in commerce. One theory also puts the 666 as refering to the sixth letter of the hebrew alphabet which means that all things engaged in commerce would be marked with www.
Please tell me someone was smart enough to fire you.
Oh no... Microsoft have done something nasty to the EU... good old EU for wanting to use Linux. No wait? The EU are doing something nasty to a large US corporation... bomb them! Oh hang on... that EU, not OPEC. The US Government are the ones to blame because they are spying on everyone and... Nope... they are not the bad guys here... No wonder all the posts are drivel... you can't fit this into one of the standard Slashdot Linux using American mindsets. Next thing we know Google will be doing evil.
No creatures alive today hunt humans for food, although many kill us for other reasons.
Does this mean you are under the deluded impression we are still evolving? If we are then the future of humanity is lost as the birthrate among successful intelligent and educated couple is far lower than the birthrate to single lazy state sponsored slags!
In Britain, as with most nations which have a democratic system developed to maturity over centuries, we have a parliament with at least two main parties. The majority party is the government while the collection of all members of parliament make up the parliament. Normally the majority party, the government, win the votes however if party members choose to vote against their party whips then it is possible for the parliament as a whole to vote against the wishes of the governint party.
This bill won't do a goddamned thing. It's a waste of our lawmakers' time and energy.
/.) and gentlemen. Lawmakers of the world do not want to make the world a better place, because if they did then they would be aiming at reducing the power of the big corporations, not increasing it. The lawmakers want to fill their time in office with stuff that looks important so they can justify their paycheck and they also want to ensure that when they retire from politics there is a nice little sideline available to fund their golden years.
And there it is ladies (yeah right... this is
The lawmakers of the western world are inherently corrupt and will continue to abuse the powers they have until the people withdraw their source of power (ie their democratic support).
Umm, I think so Brain, but me and Pippy Longsockings? I mean what would the children look like?
Have you never been to the /.'s much pimped sister site Think Geek? On said site you can buy all sorts of caffeine related wares because the standard geek stereotype would have us believe that us geeks are unable to get a good nights sleep because we drink lots of coffee and have all night Quake/Code sessions.
Who gets to shoot it down?
Whoever has a gun big enough and the inclination.
Well assuming that this puppy has a life span of 10 years (my research on the net suggested sats last anywhere from 5-15) then your $100 dollars contribution would only buy you about 8 hours and 40 minutes at the helm of the slashsat.
That is assuming that everyone does not try to log on in the first few seconds and we then spend 10 years looking at 500 errors while we save up for enough money to send someone up to reboot it.
I have two phones, a work one and a home one.
The work one is a Treo 650 which does pretty much everything I want it to do including email and web surfing (so I can blog on the train). It also has a qwerty keyboard so I can type things easily.
My other phone is the weekend phone and is a Motorola Razr. It does some cool stuff but to be honest all I have it for is making calls and it does that well. It is also really small which is a big bonus because I can slip it into the pocket of my jeans and forget it is there (unlike the treo which weighs down my suit jacket on one side).
I do not want tv on a mobile because during the week while I am at work I can just fire up a screen if there is anything I need to see and at the weekend I do not want tv unless I am in front of my big plasma.
This stuff should so not be modded as troll... it is pure 100% funny when some little 15 year old Hax0r d00dz get their hands on old bbs ascii art work and think it is really cool... reminds me of the time a 15 year old kid came up to me and tried to 'educate' me about this band he had just started listening to... he thought they were really cool and underground... this was two years ago and the band was Nirvana... he kinda missed the boat on that one.
On a large team, the contributions of the best people are always smaller, and overall productivity is always lower. As a general rule, you can count on each new software project doubling in team size and in the amount of code involved -- and taking twice as long -- as the preceding project. In other words, the average duration of your projects will go from 2 years to 4 years to 8 years to 16 years, and so on. You can see that cycle with almost any technology. Two or three people invent a brilliant piece of software, and then, five years later, 1,000 people do a bad job of following up on their idea. History is littered with projects that follow this pattern: Windows, Unix, Java, Netscape Navigator. The smaller the team, the faster the team members work. When you make the team smaller, you make the schedule shorter. That may sound counterintuitive, but it's been true for the past 20 years in this industry, and it will be true for another 20 years. The only method that I've found that works is to restrict the size of teams arbitrarily and painfully. Here's a simple rule of thumb for techie teams: No team should ever be larger than the largest conference room that's available for them to meet in. At Novell, that means a limit of about 50 people. We separate extremely large projects into what we call "Virtual CDs." Think of each project as creating a CD-ROM of software that you can ship. It's an easy concept: Each team has to ship a CD of software in final form to someone else -- perhaps to another team, perhaps to an end user. When you treat each project as a CD, you enable one group to say to another, "Show me the schedule for your CD. When is this deliverable coming?" It's the kind of down-to-earth approach that everyone can understand, that techies can respect and respond to, and that makes almost any kind of project manageable.
Actually this sounds like a really good arguement against open source collaborative projects!
Well then she was not physically capable of doing the job... you would not hire a person with no arms to be a bell boy/bag carrier would you?
And no... before you try it, this is not flamebait... it is an opinion which I am entitled to have so stop waving your mod points around like somebody cares.
I have to say... this sort of behaviour has M$ written all over it... I am surprised they have not erected a 72 foot bronze statue of Ballmer to mark Microsoft 'winning' the OS war.
While we are comparing people to the Nazi's let me tell you a story I heard from one of the engineers who worked on the refurbishment of part of the Manchester Ship Canal in the UK...
While they were working on the ship canal they needed a very large bit of granite, a solid block about the size of a small family house. The engineers contacted granite quarries on Dartmoor and could not find a suitable piece however they were advised to visit a quarry in somewhere in scandanavia which was reputed to have very large cut pieces available. One of the engineers visited the quarry and to his delight found a cut piece of granite almost exactly the right size for what they needed just sitting there in the quarry... all cut to size but not needed for an order. Now this is not normal because the pieces are normally quarried to order so the engineer asks around to find out how the granite came to be quarried and not used... it turned out that the particular bit of granite which now sits at the bottom the the Manchester Ship Canal where it joins the Mersey was ordered up by Adolf Hitler as a memorial to celebrate the victory against the British in WWII. It was cut and ready but never delivered.
I wonder if the styrofoam from the Yahoo! statue will one day be used as packing material for Google's first mail server on Mars?
Yeah... that would be the Pepsi which claims to have won what is often remembered as the 'Coca Cola Wars'.