My preference is to consume the fermented fruit matter prior to the generation of methane.

Let's keep up the momentum and invalidate a host of other stupid patents.

It was also said in French. And Quebec French at that. So this would have had to have been translated by someone in the US before it was decided that this was a threat. Possibly poorly translated...

But on top of that TFA is merely speculating about the cause of the arrest. Both the prosecutor and defendant are not talking specifics so we really don't know what the cause was. I doubt very much that the Americans built a terrorist profile from a single text message in a foreign language.

I think you meant:

Cheers,
Mike.

Nonetheless, you made my day. Thank you.

If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend watching the Curiosity Launch Video. I don't think the rover has to worry about radiation so much as the landing. I'd like to start a pool on which part of the untested landing sequence will fail and deliver a smoking hole in Mars instead of the rover.

I seriously hope it works - if it does it will be one of humanity's most amazing technological feats. But I fear the worst.

I was 12 years old. I worked for a summer and made enough money to buy the unassembled version. It was essentially a bag of parts that you soldered together yourself. Add an old black and white TV, a cassette tape recorder and you were on your way. That way back when "built your own computer" meant that either you assembled it or actually designed the darn thing. Today it means you connected the major components together and hoped everybody followed spec.

The best part of the ZX81 was the fantastic instruction manual it came with that essentially taught you how to program (in BASIC). Very well written. I eventually left basic behind and started programming in Forth.

I don't have mine anymore, but I wish I did. The membrane keyboard was truly horrible to use, the RAM (1K) insufficient (I eventually purchased the 16K add-on), and the entire thing painfully slow. But it was an affordable, functional computer back when that was a rarity. I owe it and it's designers a great debt.

37% nuclear
26% renewable (including hydro-electric power)
21% coal
16% natural gas

From Ontario Power Generation

Some parts of the world have "distracted driving" laws. In retrospect I should have written "I try pairing my car's bluetooth with the phones of those I see nearby who are operating their phones by holding them up to their heads. Where I live operating a cell phone in a non-handsfree manner in a motor vehicle is illegal."

I tend to use parentheses (and frankly, ellipses) too often, and sadly Slashdot still does not have the ability to edit your comments after you post them...

For the record, I cannot and have no interest in identifying illegal immigrants by sight, or by any other means in any country (my own is not the US). I am also not making a statement about the efficacy of distracted driving laws. My car's bluetooth system is integrated into the car and will not allow me to make configuration changes (like pairing with a new device) while moving so this only works in stop and go (for those who thought I had some hardware hack).

Finally a general observation: It is our nature now to try to make the best use of every minute of every day. When people get stopped in traffic the first thing they do is pick up their phone (I see Blackberries the most around here) and check their e-mail or check their voicemail or call someone. One a good day (for me) the second thing they do is see "Connection Request from POLICE" on their phone.

Juvenile I know. But highly entertaining in the right context.

I changed the bluetooth ID of my car's hands-free unit to "POLICE" and whenever I'm stopped in rush-hour traffic I try connecting my "car" to people I see nearby who are (illegally here) holding their cell phones to their ears. Fun times. The reactions I get are priceless.

Probably I should stop doing that...

"Jemison ... is a professionally trained dancer".

Spider Robinson must be thrilled.

The story goes that at the height of the cold war DARPA was working on some machine language translation software. English to Russian and Russian to English. When the felt that they had finally got it right they set the system up to take a phrase in English, translate it to Russian, and then translate that back to English to see how closely the phrases matched.

The first researcher stepped up to the console and typed in: "Out of sight, out of mind."
The computer returned: "An invisible lunatic."

Sorry, seemed like the right time to tell that one...

I've been here for a long time. It used to be that I would very rarely if ever read comments submitted by other Slashdotters as I was far more interested in TFA. But as time has gone on I find I am more interested in what others here have to say. Everybody has the same news stories now and it is the insights and comments from the people in this community that are the real value.

Not certain how you're planning to define "sponsors", but if you're planning to accept money from people who would like to mine this community for information I would caution you to tread carefully. You may be trying this on the wrong group of people...

Hope it boots!

That sounds a bit like a VIC-20 to me. I managed to squeeze an english language command interpreter into BASIC on that machine at one point! Alas, there wasn't much room left to do anything interesting with it once it was running. The 1K computer stored its programs out to an "audio" device and it didn't have any control over the devices motors (like the CBM machines did). You had to jot down where the program started and ended when you recorded it. Then when you wanted to load a program cue the device up to the beginning (I used a reel-to-reel), tell the computer to load something from it, then quickly flip the tape machine to play and hope you timed it right.

Now I've got 2x2TB drives in my machine which are mirrored and another 1TB drive for Time Machine backups. And a laptop with a 128GB SSD... Life is good.

You're just a young'un. My first computer came with only 1K of memory (1024 bytes) and I had to assemble it myself. No kids, I don't mean plug the cards in and put the cover back on. I had to *solder* it together myself.

I've got 12GB in my current machine (a Mac Pro). When I recently dropped two new 4GB DIMMs into it it booted up and explained in a nice friendly way that I really should put them in a different order for maximum performance (complete with a diagram on how to do it). My how times have changed...