Well, the good news is that "soon" this foolish will be over. The patent is due to expire on either 10-Dec-2002 (17 years from granting) or 20-Jun-2003 (20 from filing) (depending on which rule is in effect) http://164.195.100.11/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1='4,558,302'.WKU.&OS=PN/4,558,302&RS=PN/4,558,302

>> I've heard that Microsoft uses Apache servers for hosting some of their web pages. Does anyone know if this is true? << A persisent rumour, and one very easy to disprove (visit www.netcraft.com, which does surveys). I heard one varient that, two weeks after the launch of MSN, Microsoft realize the NT wasn't up to it, and switched to UNIX. (The rumourmongers never quite explain how MS was able to pull off such a massive switchover, over night, with no downtime) The truth is, that is MS buys a company which is using Apache for thier webserver, they will leave the Apache server up until they get around to switching the site entirely over to Win2000. For Hotmail, the complete conversion took three years. For LinkExchange (bCentral) the conversion is going much faster.

Well, It's not quite that big a deal... I mean, they use the word "ball" a lot in the Olympics, and that means pretty much the same thing in the US.

But it's a very nicely done parody.....

It's almost certainly a fake. I heard the first (rope) and last (janitor) solutions as a brain teaser back in the '70's (i.e. "Name two ways of using a barameter to learn the height of a building"). It's unlikely that the puzzler would remove five possible answers and the origin of the puzzle. Later, (still while I was in High School, so before 1980) I heard it, still as a puzzle with 4 possible answers with the second (dropping) and fifth (staircase) added. Further, let's consider the story itself. What kind of idiot professor gives a "joke" question but becomes "incensed" at a correct joke answer? Also, note that on all the physics-based answers the formula is given --- except for the "obvious" answer. Why is that? I believe it's because the "obvious" answer doesn't actually work (hence it making a good brain teaser)! If that is the case, then it's completely pointless on a physics test. (Perhaps someone who knows physics well can answer that). Next, consider the time. Bohr was in college from 1903 - 1911. Back then, they didn't have "skyscrapers" (certainly not in Copenhagen), and barometers weren't quite portable enough do most of the methods mentioned here. So, putting it all together, I suspect that it was originally written as a brain teaser in the '60s or '70s with 2 answers. Adding new solutions would then become a "party trick" for Physics students in the '80s, and then recently someone just wrapped it all up in a fictional story about Niels Bohr. However, further research brings up another problem. Niels Bohr's son Aage Bohr, along with his partner Ben Mottleson, won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1975, become the 2nd & 3rd Danes to win. So, either that story is very screwed up, or it was written prior to 1975.

>> If you know where it is suppoosed to be.. << Trust me, you don't want to go there.... PL/I has the annoying behavior of whenever it finds an error, it would print an error message, and then GUESS at what it though you meant. It almost always guessed wrong. Anyway, what would you WANT it to do? Just silently ignore the error? But what if it's guess is not what you actually wanted. (Using an undecalred datat type will erroneously give you that message). Should it get an error, but continue? But then, your correctly working program would still produce dozens of errors. You'll have to fix them eventually. Should it edit your source code? But again, what if it's view of the problem isn't the real trouble?

First of all, MS didn't "try and fail" to convert Hotmail to Win2000. They just took their time making the switch over. *YOU* try to transfer 50 million email accounts to a different OS overnight (with no down time allowed). Further, note that FreeBSD couldn't handle the load either. Hotmail was running a version which they had heavily modified for that specific purpose. Now, to see that MSN, Hotmail and bCentral are all truly being run off Windows, all you have to do is look at the sites themselves. Every link is either an .ASP or a .DLL -- clearly indicatoring that they are running IIS. (OK, most of bCentrals links go to linkexchange.com, which is still FreeBSD, but that will probably change soon

According to Microsoft, "If the browser is HTTP 1.1 compliant (for example, Internet Explorer 3.x and later, or Netscape Navigator 3.x and later), the HTTP header contains the actual domain name requested. IIS uses this to determine which site should answer the request. " (http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q190/0/08.ASP) For my own website (www.NJTheater.com), that would mean just 39 of the last 9266 visitors weren't using a browser good enough (ie, a 99.579% success rate)

And did we get a screen shot of that????????

Well, the TV show is carefully editted for the previous few days, so it'll never show anything "juicy". In fact, they've been rather careful with what they show on the webcams even -- Despite the shower being right in the hall, apparently the only shot of nudity that was webcast was one shot of Will (Mega's) butt. (Pity, though.... Jordan apparently would dance naked in front of the mirrors to tease the cameramen....

>> The ideal would be to be pitted against Richard, who is never going to win that final vote. << I believe Kelly has now found the flaw in your logic. (But I'd agree that if she had picked Rich instead of Rudy to be kicked off, Rudy would have won by a larger margin

The US gets it's version of "The Mole" in the fall