That's The Spirit

Mother Of All Martian Panoramas... So Far.
Mars Rover Spirit became the first Terrestrial to climb a Martian mountain. Spirit climbed 'Husband Hill', which stands 110metres above th Gustav Crater where Spirit originally landed. It should go down as a big moment in robotics history, if the rest of the rover missions already haven't. These two machines have shown the kind of tenacity of an errant R2-D2:

Steve Squyres, NASA's principal investigator for Spirit's science program, now visiting Australia, said that while the 110-metre-tall feature might technically be a hill, "to our little rover it's a mountain … Spirit's a Martian mountaineer".

Named after Rick Husband, the astronaut commander killed in the Columbia shuttle accident, the peak is the highest point in a range now known as the Columbia Hills. Spirit took almost 15 months to crawl more than one kilometre through the hills to reach the top.

"It's really been a struggle," Dr Squyres said. "In places the terrain was very slippery and in places it was very steep.

"When we landed on Mars and we saw the Columbia Hills off in the distance I thought just getting to their base was impossible."

He described the first low-resolution black-and-white images beamed by Spirit from the top as fantastic.

"You can see the plains to the east and plains to the west."

Peering north, Spirit could look down into terrain dubbed the Tennessee Valley.

Dr Squyres said Spirit would remain parked on the peak to snap the sprawling view in high-resolution wide-angle colour pictures likely to be made public next week. "We are taking the mother of all panoramas."

It's interesting how the expression "The Mother Of All..." has entered the English vernacular since Saddam Hussein's promise to deliver the Mother Of All Battles back during the first Gulf War. It's such a cool phrase and clearly, the man has some literary merit; apart from being an ousted dictator. They should give him an award or something.

While We're At It
This is an excerpt of Saddam Hussein's poetry in case you can't be bothered to click the link above:

Unsheathe your sword without fear, without hesitation,
Unsheathe your sword and let Saturn bear witness,
Unsheathe your sword, the enemy is smoldering, No one can (intrigue) him but a prudent hero, Saddle the horses and unleash them,
For in their wedding there is hope,
Let the lightening echo at the night of fire,
So that truth appears and injustice is defeated,
Shine, in the face of darkness as it turns deeper, Torches, whereas the frail and the weak,
Spark your lighter and keep the fire glowing Feared by the subservient vile,
Draw your sword and make it gleam, No winner but the determined man,
Make the banner fly on each pole, Pray to God, the wound will heal.

As the guy on the link quipped, it sounds like Iron Maiden's 'Run To The Hills' or something.

This Was In Technology news
Amazingly:

Google nicked my porn

Mens' mag sues search giant
By Nick Farrell: Friday 26 August 2005, 09:41

THE PUBLISHER of a men’s mag ‘Perfect 10’ is suing Google for nicking thousands of its eight by ten colour glossy pictures of girls with no clothes on.
In a statement, Perfect 10 said that it was going for a preliminary injunction against the search outfit to stop distributing its copyrighted images.

The mag filed a complaint against Google in November 2004 saying that the site was displaying the images to draw massive traffic to its website, which it is converting into hundreds of millions of dollars of advertising revenue.

Perfect 10 claims that Google is only pretending to be a search engine and that it is displaying, free of charge, thousands of copies of the best images from Perfect 10, Playboy, nude scenes from major movies, nude images of supermodels, as well as extremely explicit images of all kinds.

Norm Zada, (no really) who is the magazine’s founder said that since most of the traffic to search engines is sex-related, Google's must be doing it on the back of a massive misappropriation of intellectual property.Or so it says here.

Tut tut. They should re-name it 'Ogle' (And I'm not being a Wowser). :)