This is just unfathomable... In the Netherlands, if there is nobody home when they try to deliver, they will knock on your neighbours' doors until one of them receives temporarily the package, and then leave a note in your home saying "your package was delivered to house #123". If no neighbours are available, they will leave the package in one of the shops associated with PostNL (usually within a couple of blocks distance), and you have to go and pick it up yourself. Simple and effective. Nobody here would dream of leaving a package on the doorstep!

Google developed this exactly for these purposes. They show up in maps already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code.

... I have waited a long time to post something like this.

Up yours, US of A.

There have been three great movements shaping the information technology landscape.

I stopped reading there.

As a long-time Donald Duck fan, I am deeply hurt and offended by your post!

This is non-sensical. The verb here qualifies *one*, which is singular.

One million dollars was spent...
Two million dollars were spent...

Microsoft is (re)discovering the Linux version numbering scheme: odd is stable, even is development.

Tula means "penis" in Spanish. Considering the meaning of "lip", the name begs for trouble...

A xylophone has wooden bars. This would more correctly be called a metallophone.

With that important piece of information pointed out, you can all carry on now.

I will always remember Martin Gardner as one of the key influences in my mathematical leanings. His column in Scientific American was always interesting, even when I didn't know enough to understand half of what he wrote.

Anybody knows if one can get a collection of all his SciFi columns in a single volume or a set of volumes? I would gladly pay significant bucks to be able to have all those interesting articles in my possession.

So long Martin. Thanks for all the wonderfully wasted hours.

Does your ass hurt after pulling those numbers out of it?

Did you just use "begging the question" in its correct, proper meaning? Sir, you are banished from Slashdot forever!

Spanish is my main environmental language. You would never believe it, but things like Excel function names are TRANSLATED to Spanish in the Spanish version of Office. I HATE THAT with a passion, and find it very difficult to read. So it is not only the French (although everybody should have seen it coming from the frogs).

This has happened here in Chile twice during 2008. In both cases Dell backed out of all sales, to great outrage. The second time it happened, I thought it was rather fishy; now that I see the same thing going on in Australia, it is starting to look like a corporate "marketing" policy.