Golden Penguin Bowl 2005

Today's Golden Penguin Bowl, with its deliberate theme of good vs. evil, white vs. black, Google vs. Microsoft, was good, clean fun.  Biggest groaners among the missed questions:

• What name of a common kitchen appliance do the humans apply to the cylons in the current Battlestar Galactica series?  The Microsoft guy (Rob Curran) who knew everything about every scifi flick ever did not get this!  Dude -- you know the Nostromo from Alien but not "toasters"???  That being said, this guy seriously laid down the scifi knowledge several times.
• The Microsoft guys (Rob Mensching) correctly identified that Win32s ran on Windows 3.1, but did not get that the "s" was for "subset".
• What was the first publically released public key algorithm?  I was surprised none of the Google folks knew this one, but was happy that I was able to give the answer ("Diffie-Hellman") from the audience :-).
• Another easy miss - Why do astronomers groan when they hear the Han Solo quote about the millennium falcon "It's the ship that made the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs"?  Answer: a parsec is a unit of distance, not time.
• One that I'm sure will get followed up on is a dispute about the source of the phrase "open source".

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