"We're about ready to load our new destination into our GPS and head out onto the open road."

It seems Mars has GPS aswell. Time to start Geocaching on Mars...

Speaking of mining and ores, I find yours a bit... (how to put it?)... pun-ic?

Indeed. You can't stress that enough. The part of labwork I hated most was working with Tritium-labels. Sure, that plastic shield holds back all the alphas, but stuff gets aerosolized and that is not particular fun.

All the harry dresden books, for example, decided to be in a bold fond in the version I downloaded. Makes purchasing them a LOT more worthwhile (which I ended up doing for the first few, until I decided to give up on the series, but that's another story).

Ah, the memories! Here are some of the stories I've heard and or witnessed over the years.

1. Buttons: Every couple years, IBM would hold an open house where anyone in the community could come in and get a tour of the facility (Kingston, NY). This was back in 1984, IIRC. PCs were just starting to make an impact at this time... big iron was king. We're talking about a huge raised-floor area with multiple mainframes, storage, tape drives... MANY millions of dollars per system. A few hundred users on a system was quite an accomplishment back then and these boxes could handle a thousand users. We were also in the midst of a huge test effort of the next release of VM/SP. I had come in that Sunday afternoon to get several tests done (death marches are no fun). All of a sudden the mainframe I was on crashed. Hard. I'd grown accustomed to this as we were at a point where we were "eating our own dog food"; the production system was running the latest build of the OS. But, an hour later and it was STILL down. Apparently, a tour guide had led a group to one of the operator consoles and a child could not resist pressing buttons. Back in those days, booting a mainframe meant "re-IPL" Initial Program Load. Unless the computer was REALLY messed up and wouldn't boot. Only then would someone re-IML the system. Initial Microcode Load. Guess which button the kid pressed? It left the system in such a wonky state that it had to be reloaded from tape. All the development work of that weekend was lost and had to be recreated and rebuilt. (It was a weekend and backups were only done on weekday nights.) It took us a week to get things back to normal.

FUSCHIA I really hope that was intentional.

Of course it was... it was a setup for another poster to come along and elevate the irony level via a similarly-constructed officious-seeming announcement in order to enhance the joke and provide, hopefully, additional chuckles among the fine readers of slashdot. Instead, by observing my typo, and failing to take the opportunity to craft a joke out of it in the same vein... why that's a complete waste of a setup. Can you help a brother out and at least continue the joke when the effort of a setup has been made?

Yeah time-shifting is nothing new. It has existed ever since the Sony Umatic VCR released circa 1969. That VCR was too expensive, so Sony went back and created the Betamax (anc JVC copied it to create VHS) in 1975. DVR is not even the first digital recording method - that was miniDV and Digital VHS in the early 1990s. ----- People have been time-shifting for decades. All the DVR did was replace the magnetic tape storage with magnetic disk storage. Nothing revolutionary... it was an evolutionary change.

I'm not an engineer so I can't comment on the operating ceiling of the the thing but speaking as a former private pilot, 9,150 meters (FL 28, roughly) is already well above the point where the pilot-in-command would be allowed to operate without supplemental oxygen.In fact, up that high you'd be messing with the three-holer transport jets and would probably need a pretty high-quality heated flight suit.

The actual history of "going to the mattresses" comes from the Joey Gallo and the war between him and the Profaci family. The term appeared in the headlines in the early 60's in the headlines in New York newspapers.

Info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Gallo#Gallo-Profaci_war http://tomfolsom.com/blog/

Their Cingular bill is going to suck.