It's not much of an algorithm. They usually go for a 95% confidence interval, which translates to this simple formula: 1.96*sqrt(p*(1-p))/sqrt(n), where p is the percentage of votes and n is the survey sample size. Often this is over-simplifed to 0.98/sqrt(n).
Of course this formula assumes random sampling of the entire population, which most of this surveys certainly aren't -- they are a sample of people who have a landline and are lonely or bored enough to take random surveys over the phone.
Good luck with that. It works for the WSJ because the WSJ reports actual news; investors will not tolerate op-ed rants being passed off as news because it would make the WSJ worthless for financial analysts.
As a financial analyst, I call bullshit on that. Serious investors don't rely on the WSJ alone, exactly because it is full of brainless neocon op-eds, and gratuituos deliberate political spin even in its news articles. Anybody with a brain wouldn't rely on it for political/economic coverage, even if it often gets some basic company news right (though even there it doesn't hurt to double-check with the FT, or Bloomberg News, or the Economist or some other more reputable paper).
Call it PR, or negotiation, or leverage. Fundamentally, it is the same thing at the scale Google is talking about.
Google wants something, and thinks that now is the time to discuss it. I would guess there is more going on than just this hackery. It may well be that what they want is to close down, but I can't imagine, even if they do, that that's the whole of it - they don't seem the sort of company to simply give up on such a huge market in their core markets simply because Baidu out-"competed" them (for values of competition that do include government-level lobbying).
Well they might be on the verge - I think they slowly realize that they don't stand a chance if any of their chinese competitors can have them blocked on a whim on a pretext of porn or lacking censorship - and this happens to Picasa, to Search, to Gmail, to Youtube... They are probably not making money at the moment anyway, and if their services are artificially impaired to benefit the homegrown competitors, they will never gain the market share necessary.
Ok, now try that with the right spelling of "tiananmen", and you'll see that there's only 41,000 results left... (Not to mention that the most effective part of the Great Firewall is the automatic connection reset for clients where this sort of string is detected in the traffic - which of course only happens inside of China.)
Free digital copy of "Blade Runner" with every Nexus One (director's cut, of course). Google gets to demo the phones' video chops and gets the coolness cred, PKD's heirs get a chunk of the royalties. Win-win.
Huh? You want to reward the trademark trolls? You want them to be able to sue even more people once they get the royalties? In my opinion, Google should take an example from IBM vs. SCO and sic their nazgul on the P.K.Dicklets, pour encourager les autres.
Economically viable (outside NASA type applications) photovoltaics don't exceed 10% much less 20%
Give it 20 years but not now, maybe never. It might just be cheaper to use low efficiency ones and use more of them.
That's not true anymore. Even the cheap-ass thin-film printed CIGS cells now have efficiencies of 10-14% when deployed, current multi-/monocrystalline silicon cells reach 17-22% and the 'NASA-spec' tripe junction cells are at 30+%.
Have you ever written anything where a single misplaced semicolon can break the whole document in bad bad non-obvious ways? Or where every paragraph is manually cross-referenced with at least two more? That's is routine complexity for code...
Yes, that sounds suspiciously like just about every legal document or draft law or business contract out there. I.e. things that lawyers and their ilk have been coping with for hundreds of years, without the luxury of instant debugger feedback. Not to speak of accountancy, where a single misplaced dot can mean a lot more than to a program (with a rulebook that is way more arcane than that of any programming language around).
Suppose you expect to win the lottery in the future. You write an IOU
to yourself (or a friend) for the present value of the expected lottery winnings, and buy a car. You now have a real debt, and the economy has been injected with real money. This is debt in action, and is essentially what caused the banks to fail, but only after the IOUs became much too big to ignore.
No, this is NPV in action - the lottery winnings are like a share in a company or the expected rental income from a property. If you look at the whole "macro-economy" of you, your friend the bank and the car producer, then it doesn't matter whether your transactions involved debt, equity or barter: in the big scheme of things, one car (=present wealth) was produced and was swapped against promises of future wealth. (People have been doing this since the stone age, and it doesn't have to do anything with fiat money or lack of gold standard either.)
The problem starts if too many people have to rely on this uncertain future outcome for paying debts or mortgage payments or buying food for their families -- which was exactly my point above: unrealized wealth from future expectations (i.e. stocks/rental income/promises/lotteries) are not wealth in the sense that they are secure collateral like cash and other liquid commodities/securities -- unless and until they have been exchanged for liquid cash to somebody external to the economy which you are observing.
Of course those trillions were "there". This is the problem with modern finance. Banks can create value out of thin air, and this value can be used like real money. That means those trillions that were "never there" have bought houses,
yachts, companies, etc. The failure to regulate Wall St has resulted in real debt for real people.
It was a bad idea to leave the gold standard, but the worst idea was to
allow creative accounting and do away with debtor's prison.
Ah yes, enlighten me why it would be a good idea to send another couple of millions of Americans to prison? You know, all those "evil" bankers would be quite happy about the returns of the debtors prison -- because they gave the greedy "homeowners" of America the money to finance their sadly illusory wealth, only to be left holding the hot potato as the speculators are sending in the jingle mail...
And no, those trillions of wealth in company shares and housing wealth aren't really "there" -- not like actual cash or cars or manpower... because their value depends on what happens in the far future (the Net Present Value of discounted cash flows - ask your trusted MBA) and peoples' expectations of the future can change a lot, especially in a huge recession.
As a result of the actions of a few idiots, a TRILLION FUCKING DOLLARS (that is, the life's work of at least a million people) has been blown reacting to these idiots
Taken out of context, that could apply to the bankers on Wall Street.
Only by people who are ignorant of banking and the crisis. The trillion dollars that were "lost by bankers" in the crisis were never there (loans that were _thought_ to be worth 100% though they would be never repaid, the US housing stock which was _thought_ to be twice as valuable as collateral for ABS/CDOs as it really is). Whereas the War on Terror and Homeland Security are pissing real wealth down the drain - gasoline, goods, vehicles, human lives and untold man-years of manufacturing/planning/organization etc).
Sorry but you are wrong. The iPhone has 17% of the mobile share globally, 50% of the global app usage, and an insane 65% of the mobile HTML request. Unlike you I did the research instead of making shit up. Want the source? Here
Sorry, but the MorganStanley slide is talking about 'smartphone' share - and not even market share but _shipment_ share. I am very sure that my current phone along with hundreds of millions of other SonyEricsson or Nokia phones didn't count in their survey, although they've been dealing with GMail or Google Maps just fine years before the iPhone was a glimmer in Steve's eye.
In short: GP is very likely closer to the truth than you are.
Online advertisers will ensure their ads aren't too annoying
Yeah. Because this has worked REAL well so far.
Never mind the war going on between the crapvertisers and the adblockers.
Never mind the annoying fucking pop-overs.
Never mind the stupid in-video adverts now being used that cover over 1/3 of the content being displayed and don't go away until you click them away.
the company says, and netizens will ultimately realize that online advertising is a good thing.
And I say "Stick to search. When it comes to the psycho-social aspects of the advertising debate, you're just a piker (albeit a big, burly, heavily armed piker, but still a piker) giving tactical and strategic advice to people who know their business better than you do."
A piker? Are we talking about GOOG, the company that is forecasted to sell $20 billion in advertising space next year? The one who can (and does) put hundreds of PhDs to work analyzing the psychosociology of your clicking behaviour?
You might find that with their less-obtrusive text ads, they have pretty much won the ad war on the internet...
Photosynthesis extracts a whole lot more of the sun's energy per square meter than our best solar panels..
No it doesn't. Most plants only operate at 1-2% photosynthetic efficiency, the most efficient crops maybe at 7%, and the theoretical maximum is 11%.
Compare that to solar cells which have 15-20%, in the laboratory even 40% efficiency. The advantage of photosynthesis is not efficiency, but price and resiliency, with the "cells" manufacturing themselves.
Natrium is called SODIUM in English. (Not sure, but I think that English is the only language that does not use the word "natrium" for Na).
No, both are used very widely, actually: "Sodium" (from arabic suda: soda headache tablets) is used in most Romance and Slavic languages and "Natrium" (from ancient Egyptian natron: baking soda/soda ash) is used in Germanic languages and Hungarian/Serbocroatian, mostly due to the influence of Berzelius (who was a Swede).
If you read the actual report your article links to you'd have seen that the numbers mentioned were already adjusted for inflation.
The actual dollars spent were 2.1B (1993) to 5.1B (2004). The 3.3B mentioned in the article was the adjusted 2.1 value.
I apologize; you are right about the inflation adjustment: research spending has increased (though the actual number in 1993 was apparently 2.4 instead of 2.1).
And what exactly does the net income of a private company have to do with government spending on research?
I mentioned it to provide a reference point for comparison of the resources that climate change advocates have available vs. those of the industry, and to show that the oil/coal industry would have both means and motivation to easily swamp academic research results with their own PR and studies.
Does it matter that that huge profit only represents about a 7.6% margin, which actually under performs against the majority of the US manufacturing market by nearly 2%.
No, that doesn't matter. Margins are irrelevant in out-of-sector comparisons. What matters is ROE or ROA. (And even if Exxon were inefficient, that wouldn't change the staggering absolute number.)
You won't get to 100 mpg with the low-hanging fruit... Even the most advanced efforts like the VW Lupo or the small-engine Smart car only get 80 mpg -- and these are cars that people from the US are conditioned to reject because for them, only big is beautiful.
And the most frequent complaint that I hear about cars that implement fuel saving without compromise like the Aptera is that they are "gay as hell". Supplying good cars isn't enough if the demand is not there; and the demand will only come once fuel is expensive. (Whether that is from scarcity-induced price spikes or a gradual tax increase on petrol is your guess.)
All your link does it point out that Federal research funding increased from 1.85 billion to 1.99 billion ANNUALLY, (and tries to make it sound like the poor little researchers are struggling to get by).
Okay, now include inflation into your calculation. In the period from 1993 to 2004, US price inflation was 29.8%. So if you adjust the 1993 number for inflation, you will see that in real terms, the funding for climate research actually decreased by more than $400mn (OMG BIG NUMBER)!
Do you even have the slightest hint how much 1.99 billion dollars is?
I do indeed know. It is about one-twentieth of the annual net income of ExxonMobil, which in turn represents a tiny fraction of total profits of oil/coal vested interests. (Less polemically: the salary of about 20,000 people, not even including the equipment they need.)
I really don't think some people understand what the 'B' in billion represents.
That SciAm link itself links to a RC page titled The CRU hack: Context.
One of the points it makes is:
HARRY_read_me.txt. This is a 4 year-long work log of Ian (Harry) Harris who was working to upgrade the... legacy CRU TS 2.1 product... The CSU TS 3.0 is available now... and so presumably the database problems got fixed
Two responses:
Who says the TS 3.0 data isn't as fudged up as the 2.1 data was?
By what basis should we assume that the database problems got fixed? Faith in the people who hid the decline?
Claim #6 has nothing to do with climate time series, but I'll bite: The "database problems" and their fixes in CRU2.1 are discussed and explained in detail in a peer reviewed article: Mitchell and Jones, 2005:An improved method of constructing a database of monthly climate observations and associated high-resolution grids.Int. J. Climatology, 25, 693-712, Doi: 10.1002/joc.1181.
I have more faith in reviewed articles written, discussed and refined by people who have worked in the field for decades, rather than people who believe what suits their pocketbook best without any knowledge of the subject matter. How about you?
No, the link addressed your factually incorrect claim. The PR spend by the pollution industry is an educated guess (this is what the word "perhaps" indicates).
Also, your claim that Al Gore has significant prospects for untold riches from climate change propaganda is risible -- if he were to renounce his claims and go on the industry after-dinner speech circuit, he would rake in megabucks every year. It is to his credit that he doesn't.
I'll grant you XP mode not being in Home editions is irritating, but the ability to join a domain is hardly a problem for the vast majority of HOME users.
My university required every notebook user to join their domain (at least if you wanted access to the WiFi and the shared drives with class materials). Classmates with Home versions were screwed and had to pirate^Wbuy Pro versions...
People are outraged for no good reason. If one uses GPS, one has a reasonable expectation of being tracked, if only by the GPS provider!
There is no such thing as a "GPS provider", GPS works perfectly well without your phone company being informed of your whereabouts. Even if you wish to use location-aware services (say, Google Maps), it is only the service provider (Google) who needs to know, and not your phone company. (Only rare cases like 911 calls would warrant the phone company knowing, but given this article, I would give up that feature in exchange for privacy...)
This is greedy Big Brother behavior by phone providers, pure and simple.
If you use Firefox, upgrade to version 3.5+ and install Better Privacy and you can blow away these nasties (each one can be up to 100kb binary data by default, with no expiration, ever), which btw are OS- and browser-independent. You will be shocked at the baggage they've saddled you with till now...
Thanks for the tip - I am installing it right now.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course this formula assumes random sampling of the entire population, which most of this surveys certainly aren't -- they are a sample of people who have a landline and are lonely or bored enough to take random surveys over the phone.
Good luck with that. It works for the WSJ because the WSJ reports actual news; investors will not tolerate op-ed rants being passed off as news because it would make the WSJ worthless for financial analysts.
As a financial analyst, I call bullshit on that. Serious investors don't rely on the WSJ alone, exactly because it is full of brainless neocon op-eds, and gratuituos deliberate political spin even in its news articles. Anybody with a brain wouldn't rely on it for political/economic coverage, even if it often gets some basic company news right (though even there it doesn't hurt to double-check with the FT, or Bloomberg News, or the Economist or some other more reputable paper).
Call it PR, or negotiation, or leverage. Fundamentally, it is the same thing at the scale Google is talking about.
Google wants something, and thinks that now is the time to discuss it. I would guess there is more going on than just this hackery. It may well be that what they want is to close down, but I can't imagine, even if they do, that that's the whole of it - they don't seem the sort of company to simply give up on such a huge market in their core markets simply because Baidu out-"competed" them (for values of competition that do include government-level lobbying).
Well they might be on the verge - I think they slowly realize that they don't stand a chance if any of their chinese competitors can have them blocked on a whim on a pretext of porn or lacking censorship - and this happens to Picasa, to Search, to Gmail, to Youtube... They are probably not making money at the moment anyway, and if their services are artificially impaired to benefit the homegrown competitors, they will never gain the market share necessary.
http://www.google.cn/search?hl=zh-CN&source=hp&q=tianamen+square+massacre currently gives 1,350,000 results. If it's also doing that on the other side of the great firewall of China, then they have already done something BIG.
Ok, now try that with the right spelling of "tiananmen", and you'll see that there's only 41,000 results left... (Not to mention that the most effective part of the Great Firewall is the automatic connection reset for clients where this sort of string is detected in the traffic - which of course only happens inside of China.)
Free digital copy of "Blade Runner" with every Nexus One (director's cut, of course). Google gets to demo the phones' video chops and gets the coolness cred, PKD's heirs get a chunk of the royalties. Win-win.
Huh? You want to reward the trademark trolls? You want them to be able to sue even more people once they get the royalties? In my opinion, Google should take an example from IBM vs. SCO and sic their nazgul on the P.K.Dicklets, pour encourager les autres.
[...]liquid latex Fridays[...]
I find your ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter...
Economically viable (outside NASA type applications) photovoltaics don't exceed 10% much less 20%
Give it 20 years but not now, maybe never. It might just be cheaper to use low efficiency ones and use more of them.
That's not true anymore. Even the cheap-ass thin-film printed CIGS cells now have efficiencies of 10-14% when deployed, current multi-/monocrystalline silicon cells reach 17-22% and the 'NASA-spec' tripe junction cells are at 30+%.
Have you ever written anything where a single misplaced semicolon can break the whole document in bad bad non-obvious ways? Or where every paragraph is manually cross-referenced with at least two more? That's is routine complexity for code...
Yes, that sounds suspiciously like just about every legal document or draft law or business contract out there. I.e. things that lawyers and their ilk have been coping with for hundreds of years, without the luxury of instant debugger feedback. Not to speak of accountancy, where a single misplaced dot can mean a lot more than to a program (with a rulebook that is way more arcane than that of any programming language around).
Suppose you expect to win the lottery in the future. You write an IOU to yourself (or a friend) for the present value of the expected lottery winnings, and buy a car. You now have a real debt, and the economy has been injected with real money. This is debt in action, and is essentially what caused the banks to fail, but only after the IOUs became much too big to ignore.
No, this is NPV in action - the lottery winnings are like a share in a company or the expected rental income from a property. If you look at the whole "macro-economy" of you, your friend the bank and the car producer, then it doesn't matter whether your transactions involved debt, equity or barter: in the big scheme of things, one car (=present wealth) was produced and was swapped against promises of future wealth. (People have been doing this since the stone age, and it doesn't have to do anything with fiat money or lack of gold standard either.)
The problem starts if too many people have to rely on this uncertain future outcome for paying debts or mortgage payments or buying food for their families -- which was exactly my point above: unrealized wealth from future expectations (i.e. stocks/rental income/promises/lotteries) are not wealth in the sense that they are secure collateral like cash and other liquid commodities/securities -- unless and until they have been exchanged for liquid cash to somebody external to the economy which you are observing.
Of course those trillions were "there". This is the problem with modern finance. Banks can create value out of thin air, and this value can be used like real money. That means those trillions that were "never there" have bought houses, yachts, companies, etc. The failure to regulate Wall St has resulted in real debt for real people.
It was a bad idea to leave the gold standard, but the worst idea was to allow creative accounting and do away with debtor's prison.
Ah yes, enlighten me why it would be a good idea to send another couple of millions of Americans to prison? You know, all those "evil" bankers would be quite happy about the returns of the debtors prison -- because they gave the greedy "homeowners" of America the money to finance their sadly illusory wealth, only to be left holding the hot potato as the speculators are sending in the jingle mail...
And no, those trillions of wealth in company shares and housing wealth aren't really "there" -- not like actual cash or cars or manpower... because their value depends on what happens in the far future (the Net Present Value of discounted cash flows - ask your trusted MBA) and peoples' expectations of the future can change a lot, especially in a huge recession.
As a result of the actions of a few idiots, a TRILLION FUCKING DOLLARS (that is, the life's work of at least a million people) has been blown reacting to these idiots
Taken out of context, that could apply to the bankers on Wall Street.
Only by people who are ignorant of banking and the crisis. The trillion dollars that were "lost by bankers" in the crisis were never there (loans that were _thought_ to be worth 100% though they would be never repaid, the US housing stock which was _thought_ to be twice as valuable as collateral for ABS/CDOs as it really is). Whereas the War on Terror and Homeland Security are pissing real wealth down the drain - gasoline, goods, vehicles, human lives and untold man-years of manufacturing/planning/organization etc).
Sorry but you are wrong. The iPhone has 17% of the mobile share globally, 50% of the global app usage, and an insane 65% of the mobile HTML request. Unlike you I did the research instead of making shit up. Want the source? Here
Sorry, but the MorganStanley slide is talking about 'smartphone' share - and not even market share but _shipment_ share. I am very sure that my current phone along with hundreds of millions of other SonyEricsson or Nokia phones didn't count in their survey, although they've been dealing with GMail or Google Maps just fine years before the iPhone was a glimmer in Steve's eye.
In short: GP is very likely closer to the truth than you are.
Online advertisers will ensure their ads aren't too annoying
Yeah. Because this has worked REAL well so far.
Never mind the war going on between the crapvertisers and the adblockers.
Never mind the annoying fucking pop-overs.
Never mind the stupid in-video adverts now being used that cover over 1/3 of the content being displayed and don't go away until you click them away.
the company says, and netizens will ultimately realize that online advertising is a good thing.
And I say "Stick to search. When it comes to the psycho-social aspects of the advertising debate, you're just a piker (albeit a big, burly, heavily armed piker, but still a piker) giving tactical and strategic advice to people who know their business better than you do."
A piker? Are we talking about GOOG, the company that is forecasted to sell $20 billion in advertising space next year? The one who can (and does) put hundreds of PhDs to work analyzing the psychosociology of your clicking behaviour?
You might find that with their less-obtrusive text ads, they have pretty much won the ad war on the internet...
Photosynthesis extracts a whole lot more of the sun's energy per square meter than our best solar panels..
No it doesn't. Most plants only operate at 1-2% photosynthetic efficiency, the most efficient crops maybe at 7%, and the theoretical maximum is 11%.
Compare that to solar cells which have 15-20%, in the laboratory even 40% efficiency. The advantage of photosynthesis is not efficiency, but price and resiliency, with the "cells" manufacturing themselves.
Natrium is called SODIUM in English. (Not sure, but I think that English is the only language that does not use the word "natrium" for Na).
No, both are used very widely, actually: "Sodium" (from arabic suda: soda headache tablets) is used in most Romance and Slavic languages and "Natrium" (from ancient Egyptian natron: baking soda/soda ash) is used in Germanic languages and Hungarian/Serbocroatian, mostly due to the influence of Berzelius (who was a Swede).
If you read the actual report your article links to you'd have seen that the numbers mentioned were already adjusted for inflation.
The actual dollars spent were 2.1B (1993) to 5.1B (2004). The 3.3B mentioned in the article was the adjusted 2.1 value.
I apologize; you are right about the inflation adjustment: research spending has increased (though the actual number in 1993 was apparently 2.4 instead of 2.1).
And what exactly does the net income of a private company have to do with government spending on research?
I mentioned it to provide a reference point for comparison of the resources that climate change advocates have available vs. those of the industry, and to show that the oil/coal industry would have both means and motivation to easily swamp academic research results with their own PR and studies.
Does it matter that that huge profit only represents about a 7.6% margin, which actually under performs against the majority of the US manufacturing market by nearly 2%.
No, that doesn't matter. Margins are irrelevant in out-of-sector comparisons. What matters is ROE or ROA. (And even if Exxon were inefficient, that wouldn't change the staggering absolute number.)
And the most frequent complaint that I hear about cars that implement fuel saving without compromise like the Aptera is that they are "gay as hell". Supplying good cars isn't enough if the demand is not there; and the demand will only come once fuel is expensive. (Whether that is from scarcity-induced price spikes or a gradual tax increase on petrol is your guess.)
All your link does it point out that Federal research funding increased from 1.85 billion to 1.99 billion ANNUALLY, (and tries to make it sound like the poor little researchers are struggling to get by).
Okay, now include inflation into your calculation. In the period from 1993 to 2004, US price inflation was 29.8%. So if you adjust the 1993 number for inflation, you will see that in real terms, the funding for climate research actually decreased by more than $400mn (OMG BIG NUMBER)!
Do you even have the slightest hint how much 1.99 billion dollars is?
I do indeed know. It is about one-twentieth of the annual net income of ExxonMobil, which in turn represents a tiny fraction of total profits of oil/coal vested interests. (Less polemically: the salary of about 20,000 people, not even including the equipment they need.)
I really don't think some people understand what the 'B' in billion represents.
Flamebait.
Unfounded denier claim #6 of 7.
That SciAm link itself links to a RC page titled The CRU hack: Context.
One of the points it makes is:
Two responses:
Claim #6 has nothing to do with climate time series, but I'll bite: The "database problems" and their fixes in CRU2.1 are discussed and explained in detail in a peer reviewed article: Mitchell and Jones, 2005:An improved method of constructing a database of monthly climate observations and associated high-resolution grids.Int. J. Climatology, 25, 693-712, Doi: 10.1002/joc.1181.
I have more faith in reviewed articles written, discussed and refined by people who have worked in the field for decades, rather than people who believe what suits their pocketbook best without any knowledge of the subject matter. How about you?
Also, your claim that Al Gore has significant prospects for untold riches from climate change propaganda is risible -- if he were to renounce his claims and go on the industry after-dinner speech circuit, he would rake in megabucks every year. It is to his credit that he doesn't.
Unfounded denier claim #6 of 7. The coal/oil/transport industry probably spend more money in PR than all scientists taken together.
I'll grant you XP mode not being in Home editions is irritating, but the ability to join a domain is hardly a problem for the vast majority of HOME users.
My university required every notebook user to join their domain (at least if you wanted access to the WiFi and the shared drives with class materials). Classmates with Home versions were screwed and had to pirate^Wbuy Pro versions...
People are outraged for no good reason. If one uses GPS, one has a reasonable expectation of being tracked, if only by the GPS provider!
There is no such thing as a "GPS provider", GPS works perfectly well without your phone company being informed of your whereabouts. Even if you wish to use location-aware services (say, Google Maps), it is only the service provider (Google) who needs to know, and not your phone company. (Only rare cases like 911 calls would warrant the phone company knowing, but given this article, I would give up that feature in exchange for privacy...)
This is greedy Big Brother behavior by phone providers, pure and simple.
notepad %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
HTH. HAND.
If you use Firefox, upgrade to version 3.5+ and install Better Privacy and you can blow away these nasties (each one can be up to 100kb binary data by default, with no expiration, ever), which btw are OS- and browser-independent. You will be shocked at the baggage they've saddled you with till now...
Thanks for the tip - I am installing it right now.