We demand that/. stop the dissemination of all the bleading-heart liberal opinion.
Just because the Manongehela river caught fire, we blew up parts of Texas, your cars were death-traps before the damn guvmint got involved and made us have collapsible steering columns, doesn't mean we don't care.
Okay we don't, but we'll sue your ass off for defamation and even if you're right, we have more money than you so we'll win. Bwahahahahaa.
Brave new world with such wondrous monsters in it.
on
Information Poisoning
·
· Score: 2
While Huxley's world was grim, I didn't want want the readers drawn back to the fantasy of Shakespeare's "Tempest".
Its not that I have no hope, its just that I'm realistic enough to know that nobody will see their nose until its on the floor.
IT is something BOTH can use and want to. OUCH!
on
Information Poisoning
·
· Score: 2
The usual counterbalance of government intervention into the casual and murderous corporate greed (bought a Bridgestone/Firestone tire on a Ford truck lately? It happens folks, and losing voters "in extremis," is what it takes before somebody in government takes notice,) can't be relied upon in the case of IT because both want to control you, your assets and whatever's left of your power.
One will do it because all they see is the bottom line while the other will be doing it to "protect" you (from who or what is always nebulous ain't it? Kiddie Porn. Give me a break! Its an State-run industry in Asia. Porn tours of Malasia. "Bangkock and bang pre-tit poon-tang for foreigners")
Basically, get down on your knees, spread 'em and kiss your ass goodbye. Orwell just had the timing wrong by fifty years.
Hopefully I'll be dead before then. I'm childless, intent on remaining that way and won't subject any progeny to the shit that's coming.
OS X makes some pretty steep demands of the hardware. It won't be supported on the older hardware and there's a LOT of it out there.
If the LinuxPPC crowd, and a certain Quebequer in particular, can take a page from Apple and design (and f*ckin' DOCUMENT,[1]) LinuxConf better it could make LinuxPPC a powerful alternative.
As it is, I'm probably going to trash my old hardware and get OS X capable boxes because Linux and Linux app configuration is an absolute f*ckin' nightmare. The configs are as fragile as Linux isn't once you finally get it running. The frustration factor isn't worth it.
1] when you have a field, its a good idea to give the format of what it's supposed to contain and to pop up something (like a URL) to some more information about the possible values, and where to find them, that go into that field. The field labels are uninformative and about as cryptic as you can get.
That's the difference between professional software (too damn much of it, even when its sold is of the other kind:) and rinky-dink amateur kludges.
But if you really want to make people, uh, productive, buy a 10 cup coffee maker per employee and a microwave to reheat the coffee. Do NOT leave the coffee maker turned on after if has perked the coffee 'cause the coffee will get a burnt flavor. (When I work at home, that's what I do.)
My employer has a couple of "Flavia" coffee brewing machines which can churn out hundreds of cups a day but the coffee is not the most flavorful.
While I am an unrepentant Canadian, I have traveled on both sides of the pond, I've been through the US on more that one occasion and I've been in New York City since '95. That has provided me with some perspective.
The major political systems here and abroad, are republican systems parliementary systems or monarchic. These are all more alike than not. (If you have to RUN for office or STAND for it or get knighted for it, its still the same. Its NOT democratic. Get that foolishness right out of your head.)
But all the political systems want is to try to insure that you don't stray too far, pay your taxes and avoid hurting anybody. They want your loyalty and are willing to compromise to get it (armed revolution has taught them some lessons and some humility after all.)
The real worry is corporate machination, unfettered by reason or treason and guided by the morals of people who dump waste where YOU eat, pour waste in YOUR water and have only an eye on the next quarterly earnings (or the outcome of the next great five year plan in the late and unlamented Soviet regime.)
Corporations will justify anything for the bottom line. Corporations have absolutely no morals, no conscience and neither heart nor head.
They don't care, they really DON'T CARE about how many people get killed, maimed and ruined by their corporate lack of conscience.
Corporationism can readily weigh profits versus the volume of lawsuits resulting from injuries caused by the products of shoddy workmanship.
Corporationism can readily sell crack to kids while forcing them to fuck for food and shove me and thee to wage-slave jobs in the "maquiadoras" by rationalizing that they are merely "filling a need."
As someone I knew put it, "It doesn't matter whether your pimping pots and pans or pot and pussy, you're still a pimp."
The internet is being dismantled by people who want to stop paying anything to produce any content but make you pay everytime you access the same old content, over and over, because its gravy, all gravy.
The political borders are merely inconvenient fictionalities because of different taxation rules to evade.
You have to make sure that the OEMs and the "mom 'n pop" chop shops in Taiwan get the message that you don't want to buy these drives.
The MnP chop shops are so used regulation they won't even see it as rolling you over in pig manure. And if they don't see the point, (like it costing them more,) YOU are so screwed.
You may all be buying Apples to run OS X to hang onto your rights or using aging, fragile and perishable drives. If you think Jobs is going for this, you're nuts.
Oh and I hate Mac haters. To the people stupid enough to name their site that way, I can only say: LUST AFTER MY UNENCUMBERED MACHINE. I'll be able to back it up.
LinuxPPC docs suck. Welcome OS X. CAN'T be worse.
on
LinuxPPC 2000 Update
·
· Score: 2
OS X will wipe the floor with LinuxPPC on all iMacs and newer. It's a complete BSD Unix not rinky-dink Mac OS 1->9.
LinuxPPPC will only ever get onto whatever hardware OS X won't run on. And that's a shrinking legacy base.
Sad fact: LinuxPPC docs suck and the installation software's even worse. If something's not documented, it doesn't exist. The job's not done until the docs are there and the docs aren't there.
The installation software and manual are a sad, sorry piece of butt-wipe. If it installs, you're okay. If it doesn't, you'll never have enough information to figure out why or what to do about it. (Hey we're talking Linux here. I should have the source, right? Wrong, its NOT Linux, its BEFORE you can INSTALL Linux.)
If you're the average user, you toss it and the old hardware into the trash. I just wasted time and money trying to get a usable system because my old Apple hardware is so damn durable.
But given the results, I can't recommend it. No QA... Might as well use M$. I'll toss out my old Macs before I attempt to use LinuxPPC again.
Its not worth my time. (12 hours @ my billing rates to get nowhere? [Expletive deleted] it!)
Given the history of competition vs collaboration, I can sadly predict that the internet will be dismantled by 2005 by the same people who want you to pay for even having seen "Gone with the Wind" and for everytime you think of seeing last years superbowl. Notice how its no longer the"inter" net. Its the "net.
Face it, the people who stupidly shout into the night and charge for what they're shouting have absolutely no incentive for shutting up.
They'll shout at the politicians who'll screw us all over for a dollar so they can get run to try to get re-elected.
I have seen the future and its all reruns (pure gravy for the network who charge for every site that store 'em,) delivered from sites which charge a fee for every download. You will be able to watch "Gilligan's Island," for a price of course, until the alternative becomes attractive.
The internet, the grand experiment, is going to Hell. Venality and cupidity ally with stupidity to blow down the walls of Jerico and to smear the tracks to the New Jerusalem.
Soddom wins. Replay at 11:15, 12:15, 1:15 etc. and over the 'net when ever you pay to want to watch yesterday's news.
You really have to hand it to the management of the USPO, since Bush Senior, or was it under Reagan, turned the patent office into a "profit center" they are just shoving patents out the door.
Prior art? Never heard of it!
Research? I doan even reed da formz!
Boss says I got a quota to make. I don't care if I have to patent breathing. My Christmass bonus is based on how many I get out the door so hand me my rubber stamp and don't get betwen me and the ink pad.
I'd rather hire a BA in history or indust-design.
on
CS vs CIS
·
· Score: 2
In twenty-five years of software development from putting together payroll systems to putting GUIs on object models, I have yet to use any math more complicated than arithmetic. I can do Rheinmanninan manifolds and quaternion fractals and that's about as useful to me as tits on a bull (great scenery for a Quake Arena though.)
Its more useful to be a non-linear thinker. Read books by Victor deBono and try to retain some originality despite what the system's about to do to you.
M$ is a monolithic entity. That is its Achille's heel. Breaking it up compounds the problem by forcing it on them and they'll try to force themselves on us.
I don't want M$ to start thinking out of the box. With luck, there'll never be a M$ product ported to any version of Unix (OS X) or Linux or to any other platform than the x86.
Keep M$ right where they are while the rest of the world goes past 'em.
This won't stop the professional bootleggers who get their copies even before the studio (I've seen bootleg daylies!)
Its going to screw that bored 15 year old though. Every drive will carry several tracks full of encryption code (including who owns it and what's on it?) Catching the kid may be as simple as a simple database lookup.
This is about to throw RAID, backup and encryption software into a cocked hat along with OS support for these drives.
M$ now has every other OS by the short and curlies? You can't reverse engineer it. That's now illegal. All M$ have to do is pay the manufacturers to NOT write drivers for any other OSs and they competition is dead.
Sun and Solaris? Never heard of 'em!
Apple OS X, BSD? Hunh?
All those x86 machines running Linux software? Wha..?
And this is to protect ephemera. Face it, is anything as dead as "Rugrats, the movie" or "Tarzan and the Green Godess"?
But you'll be carrying a few megs of crap on your hard drive to ensure that the wrong solution is applied to protecting it, from you. Oh yeah... And your OS better be able to decrypt it.
The next millenium is starting off really lousy.
Somebody shoot me.
Do away with elections. Conscript congress and the senate, for a single term only, by picking names out of the phone book. And a lot of this bull-{expletive deleted] disappears.
The power lusting don't have to raise hundreds of millions of dollars running for election because there are NO elections. Its a crap-shoot instead of a $100,000,000 a year game that comes out of YOUR pockets.
The greedy can't curry favors because, there's no way they can know who's going in and since they only last one term, there are no "relationships" that evolve with the usual tit-for-tat, quid-pro-quo, "you fill my coffers and I'll fill yours."
Imagine, the past month, and the year long run up to it, would never have occurred.
This is the kind of $100,000,000 boondoggle that gives politicians the reputation they so richly deserve.
Take a bill about "A." Tack on things that have absolutely NOTHING to do with "A." (Which IMHO should be illegal.)
Bury a provision which will have every wage earning American paying $3 for the privilege of having somebody trample over their feet. And "voila," political contributors from the security equipemnt community will be amply rewarded for something that is unmonitored (and isn't going to happen since that costs money and the idea here is PROFIT!)
Why not start with a bill called the "Widows and Orphans" protection bill and tack on legalization for recreational pharmacopea, enforced under-age sex and very high-stakes gambling (televised Russian Roulette ["a la" Deer Hunter.]) Then lambaste anyone who dares vote against protection of widows and orphans.
The only thing that stops me from going out into the streets right now is that I'm secure in the knowledge that the collection mechanisms are already in place, the analysis equipment is already in place but the software lags way behind in capability and that I'm a Canadian and I can laugh at the Americans for screwing themselves with this utter stupidity.
It picks up electromegnetic variances (field potentials,) at various points on the skull. If you buy the rest of the model&math, it works like seismographs do at depicting the inside of inside of the earth except that its depicting electrical disturbances.
Having been through an "evoked potential" test, I can tell you that it can be done but its still at a very crude stage of interpretation.
Imagine you're a reviled butt-much who wants to make everybody pay for being hwo they are and not spending every second kissing you *ss.
Your basic psycho- or socio-path will not do. You have to have an ego as big as the pile of bodies in your back yard. Paranoid schizophrenia is an asset in this political arena. You want to kill _everybody_.
Imagine you have minions who say: "But 'O great leader, we need computers to make bombs that'll really scare people and make then pucker when they see you walking away!"
Imagine you have one who says: "Hey, a CPU's a CPU and RAM's RAM. And check out the polygon drawing speed on these babies. We'll out-DARPA DARPA. Uh 'O great leader buy a boat load of these suckers and we'll be able to deliver things that can really go boom."
If I were thee, I would worry.
Hardware's hardware and just imagine the joy YOU'd have hacking some flight sim game to RC a real plane or a real missile.
Its not just the allies who saw the CNN reports of smart bombs doing pin-point landings through the stairwell on top of the roof to blow up in the middle of the building and take out the infrastructure while inflicting the maximum 'colateral' damage...
And these babies were MADE for the kind of fun Sadam wants to have with your office building...
Slashdot Mirror
We demand that /. stop the dissemination of all the bleading-heart liberal opinion.
Just because the Manongehela river caught fire, we blew up parts of Texas, your cars were death-traps before the damn guvmint got involved and made us have collapsible steering columns, doesn't mean we don't care.
Okay we don't, but we'll sue your ass off for defamation and even if you're right, we have more money than you so we'll win. Bwahahahahaa.
While Huxley's world was grim, I didn't want want the readers drawn back to the fantasy of Shakespeare's "Tempest".
Its not that I have no hope, its just that I'm realistic enough to know that nobody will see their nose until its on the floor.
The usual counterbalance of government intervention into the casual and murderous corporate greed (bought a Bridgestone/Firestone tire on a Ford truck lately? It happens folks, and losing voters "in extremis," is what it takes before somebody in government takes notice,) can't be relied upon in the case of IT because both want to control you, your assets and whatever's left of your power.
One will do it because all they see is the bottom line while the other will be doing it to "protect" you (from who or what is always nebulous ain't it? Kiddie Porn. Give me a break! Its an State-run industry in Asia. Porn tours of Malasia. "Bangkock and bang pre-tit poon-tang for foreigners")
Basically, get down on your knees, spread 'em and kiss your ass goodbye. Orwell just had the timing wrong by fifty years.
Hopefully I'll be dead before then. I'm childless, intent on remaining that way and won't subject any progeny to the shit that's coming.
OS X makes some pretty steep demands of the hardware. It won't be supported on the older hardware and there's a LOT of it out there.
If the LinuxPPC crowd, and a certain Quebequer in particular, can take a page from Apple and design (and f*ckin' DOCUMENT,[1]) LinuxConf better it could make LinuxPPC a powerful alternative.
As it is, I'm probably going to trash my old hardware and get OS X capable boxes because Linux and Linux app configuration is an absolute f*ckin' nightmare. The configs are as fragile as Linux isn't once you finally get it running. The frustration factor isn't worth it.
1] when you have a field, its a good idea to give the format of what it's supposed to contain and to pop up something (like a URL) to some more information about the possible values, and where to find them, that go into that field. The field labels are uninformative and about as cryptic as you can get.
That's the difference between professional software (too damn much of it, even when its sold is of the other kind:) and rinky-dink amateur kludges.
Subject says it all.
But if you really want to make people, uh, productive, buy a 10 cup coffee maker per employee and a microwave to reheat the coffee. Do NOT leave the coffee maker turned on after if has perked the coffee 'cause the coffee will get a burnt flavor. (When I work at home, that's what I do.)
My employer has a couple of "Flavia" coffee brewing machines which can churn out hundreds of cups a day but the coffee is not the most flavorful.
I still go to the Starbucks up the street.
Yeah, dude. Who needs to know what to do with all that money anyway or who the customers might be or where the company's ganna be in five years?
Those parasites are there to keep yutzes like you employed, though I wonder why...
All the new towers have twin G4 processors.
While I am an unrepentant Canadian, I have traveled on both sides of the pond, I've been through the US on more that one occasion and I've been in New York City since '95. That has provided me with some perspective.
The major political systems here and abroad, are republican systems parliementary systems or monarchic. These are all more alike than not. (If you have to RUN for office or STAND for it or get knighted for it, its still the same. Its NOT democratic. Get that foolishness right out of your head.)
But all the political systems want is to try to insure that you don't stray too far, pay your taxes and avoid hurting anybody. They want your loyalty and are willing to compromise to get it (armed revolution has taught them some lessons and some humility after all.)
The real worry is corporate machination, unfettered by reason or treason and guided by the morals of people who dump waste where YOU eat, pour waste in YOUR water and have only an eye on the next quarterly earnings (or the outcome of the next great five year plan in the late and unlamented Soviet regime.)
Corporations will justify anything for the bottom line. Corporations have absolutely no morals, no conscience and neither heart nor head.
They don't care, they really DON'T CARE about how many people get killed, maimed and ruined by their corporate lack of conscience.
Corporationism can readily weigh profits versus the volume of lawsuits resulting from injuries caused by the products of shoddy workmanship.
Corporationism can readily sell crack to kids while forcing them to fuck for food and shove me and thee to wage-slave jobs in the "maquiadoras" by rationalizing that they are merely "filling a need."
As someone I knew put it, "It doesn't matter whether your pimping pots and pans or pot and pussy, you're still a pimp."
The internet is being dismantled by people who want to stop paying anything to produce any content but make you pay everytime you access the same old content, over and over, because its gravy, all gravy.
The political borders are merely inconvenient fictionalities because of different taxation rules to evade.
You have to make sure that the OEMs and the "mom 'n pop" chop shops in Taiwan get the message that you don't want to buy these drives.
The MnP chop shops are so used regulation they won't even see it as rolling you over in pig manure. And if they don't see the point, (like it costing them more,) YOU are so screwed.
You may all be buying Apples to run OS X to hang onto your rights or using aging, fragile and perishable drives. If you think Jobs is going for this, you're nuts.
Oh and I hate Mac haters. To the people stupid enough to name their site that way, I can only say: LUST AFTER MY UNENCUMBERED MACHINE. I'll be able to back it up.
OS X will wipe the floor with LinuxPPC on all iMacs and newer. It's a complete BSD Unix not rinky-dink Mac OS 1->9.
LinuxPPPC will only ever get onto whatever hardware OS X won't run on. And that's a shrinking legacy base.
Sad fact: LinuxPPC docs suck and the installation software's even worse. If something's not documented, it doesn't exist. The job's not done until the docs are there and the docs aren't there.
The installation software and manual are a sad, sorry piece of butt-wipe. If it installs, you're okay. If it doesn't, you'll never have enough information to figure out why or what to do about it. (Hey we're talking Linux here. I should have the source, right? Wrong, its NOT Linux, its BEFORE you can INSTALL Linux.)
If you're the average user, you toss it and the old hardware into the trash. I just wasted time and money trying to get a usable system because my old Apple hardware is so damn durable.
But given the results, I can't recommend it. No QA... Might as well use M$. I'll toss out my old Macs before I attempt to use LinuxPPC again.
Its not worth my time. (12 hours @ my billing rates to get nowhere? [Expletive deleted] it!)
Given the history of competition vs collaboration, I can sadly predict that the internet will be dismantled by 2005 by the same people who want you to pay for even having seen "Gone with the Wind" and for everytime you think of seeing last years superbowl. Notice how its no longer the"inter" net. Its the "net.
Face it, the people who stupidly shout into the night and charge for what they're shouting have absolutely no incentive for shutting up.
They'll shout at the politicians who'll screw us all over for a dollar so they can get run to try to get re-elected.
I have seen the future and its all reruns (pure gravy for the network who charge for every site that store 'em,) delivered from sites which charge a fee for every download. You will be able to watch "Gilligan's Island," for a price of course, until the alternative becomes attractive.
The internet, the grand experiment, is going to Hell. Venality and cupidity ally with stupidity to blow down the walls of Jerico and to smear the tracks to the New Jerusalem.
Soddom wins. Replay at 11:15, 12:15, 1:15 etc. and over the 'net when ever you pay to want to watch yesterday's news.
The M$ problem exists ONLY on the x86 platform. Buy something else.
Imagine if everybody decides their PCs are now "good enough..."
:-)
M$ would have to get out of the "'shirk'wrap" business and into something that's long-term and sustainable. It'll be "Back-side to the Future"
You really have to hand it to the management of the USPO, since Bush Senior, or was it under Reagan, turned the patent office into a "profit center" they are just shoving patents out the door.
Prior art? Never heard of it!
Research? I doan even reed da formz!
Boss says I got a quota to make. I don't care if I have to patent breathing. My Christmass bonus is based on how many I get out the door so hand me my rubber stamp and don't get betwen me and the ink pad.
In twenty-five years of software development from putting together payroll systems to putting GUIs on object models, I have yet to use any math more complicated than arithmetic. I can do Rheinmanninan manifolds and quaternion fractals and that's about as useful to me as tits on a bull (great scenery for a Quake Arena though.)
Its more useful to be a non-linear thinker. Read books by Victor deBono and try to retain some originality despite what the system's about to do to you.
M$ is a monolithic entity. That is its Achille's heel. Breaking it up compounds the problem by forcing it on them and they'll try to force themselves on us.
I don't want M$ to start thinking out of the box. With luck, there'll never be a M$ product ported to any version of Unix (OS X) or Linux or to any other platform than the x86.
Keep M$ right where they are while the rest of the world goes past 'em.
IBM has some great software development tools like VisualAge for Java & VisualAge for Smalltalk (I'm specially interested in a port of the latter.)
This movie has some exquisite locale shots and a tavern fight right out of "Legend of Drunken Master."
The advantages of using cross-platform and implementation independent standards are three fold:
1) XML separates your content (XML) from your structure (DTD) from your presentation (XSL) leading to far more concise and rational documents.
2) They are open standards, unlike Word, FrameMaker or other proprietary formats.
3) The tools for document creation are open (and closed,) cross-platform and not dependent on the largesse of any single source.
This won't stop the professional bootleggers who get their copies even before the studio (I've seen bootleg daylies!)
Its going to screw that bored 15 year old though. Every drive will carry several tracks full of encryption code (including who owns it and what's on it?) Catching the kid may be as simple as a simple database lookup.
This is about to throw RAID, backup and encryption software into a cocked hat along with OS support for these drives.
M$ now has every other OS by the short and curlies? You can't reverse engineer it. That's now illegal. All M$ have to do is pay the manufacturers to NOT write drivers for any other OSs and they competition is dead.
Sun and Solaris? Never heard of 'em!
Apple OS X, BSD? Hunh?
All those x86 machines running Linux software? Wha..?
And this is to protect ephemera. Face it, is anything as dead as "Rugrats, the movie" or "Tarzan and the Green Godess"?
But you'll be carrying a few megs of crap on your hard drive to ensure that the wrong solution is applied to protecting it, from you. Oh yeah... And your OS better be able to decrypt it.
The next millenium is starting off really lousy.
Somebody shoot me.
Do away with elections. Conscript congress and the senate, for a single term only, by picking names out of the phone book. And a lot of this bull-{expletive deleted] disappears.
The power lusting don't have to raise hundreds of millions of dollars running for election because there are NO elections. Its a crap-shoot instead of a $100,000,000 a year game that comes out of YOUR pockets.
The greedy can't curry favors because, there's no way they can know who's going in and since they only last one term, there are no "relationships" that evolve with the usual tit-for-tat, quid-pro-quo, "you fill my coffers and I'll fill yours."
Imagine, the past month, and the year long run up to it, would never have occurred.
This is the kind of $100,000,000 boondoggle that gives politicians the reputation they so richly deserve.
Take a bill about "A." Tack on things that have absolutely NOTHING to do with "A." (Which IMHO should be illegal.)
Bury a provision which will have every wage earning American paying $3 for the privilege of having somebody trample over their feet. And "voila," political contributors from the security equipemnt community will be amply rewarded for something that is unmonitored (and isn't going to happen since that costs money and the idea here is PROFIT!)
Why not start with a bill called the "Widows and Orphans" protection bill and tack on legalization for recreational pharmacopea, enforced under-age sex and very high-stakes gambling (televised Russian Roulette ["a la" Deer Hunter.]) Then lambaste anyone who dares vote against protection of widows and orphans.
The only thing that stops me from going out into the streets right now is that I'm secure in the knowledge that the collection mechanisms are already in place, the analysis equipment is already in place but the software lags way behind in capability and that I'm a Canadian and I can laugh at the Americans for screwing themselves with this utter stupidity.
It picks up electromegnetic variances (field potentials,) at various points on the skull. If you buy the rest of the model&math, it works like seismographs do at depicting the inside of inside of the earth except that its depicting electrical disturbances.
Having been through an "evoked potential" test, I can tell you that it can be done but its still at a very crude stage of interpretation.
Imagine you're a reviled butt-much who wants to make everybody pay for being hwo they are and not spending every second kissing you *ss.
Your basic psycho- or socio-path will not do. You have to have an ego as big as the pile of bodies in your back yard. Paranoid schizophrenia is an asset in this political arena. You want to kill _everybody_.
Imagine you have minions who say: "But 'O great leader, we need computers to make bombs that'll really scare people and make then pucker when they see you walking away!"
Imagine you have one who says: "Hey, a CPU's a CPU and RAM's RAM. And check out the polygon drawing speed on these babies. We'll out-DARPA DARPA. Uh 'O great leader buy a boat load of these suckers and we'll be able to deliver things that can really go boom."
If I were thee, I would worry.
Hardware's hardware and just imagine the joy YOU'd have hacking some flight sim game to RC a real plane or a real missile.
Its not just the allies who saw the CNN reports of smart bombs doing pin-point landings through the stairwell on top of the roof to blow up in the middle of the building and take out the infrastructure while inflicting the maximum 'colateral' damage...
And these babies were MADE for the kind of fun Sadam wants to have with your office building...