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Slow Scan TV capture from MIR Space Station
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"Al Gore believes that he has won the election in Canada also"
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Richard Milhouse Nixon was the first US President whose name contains all the letters from the word "criminal.".....William Jefferson Clinton is the 2nd.
American Ingenuity?
Computer Programming Humor ![]() Sometimes you can reuse too much code...The Australian military has been working on some really nifty military-grade virtual reality simulators. Most of the people they employ on this sort of thing are ex-computer game programmers. To create an extremely realistic environment, they decided to include things like trees and animals.For Operation Phoenix out near Katherine, the latter included kangaroos. In particular, they had to model the kangaroo with realistic movements and reactions to helicopters. (since hordes of disturbed kangaroos might well give away a low-flying helo's position.) Being good programmers, they looked to see if they could find pre-existing programming that demonstrated a similar behavior pattern. They decided to steal some code that was originally used to model infantry reactions under the same stimuli; they simply changed the mapped icon, the speed parameters, etc. and had instant kangaroos. The first time they went to demonstrate this to some visiting Americans, the hotshot pilots decided to get "down and dirty" with the virtual kangaroos. Screaming in at low-level, they buzzed the unwary kangaroos and watched them scatter. The visiting Americans nodded appreciatively... then gaped as the kangaroos ducked around a hill and launched about two dozen Stinger missles at the hapless helicopter!! The programmers looked rather embarrassed at forgetting to remove the "defensive response" subroutine from the infantry coding! The Americans left muttering comments about not wanting to mess with the Aussie wildlife. |
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