You should never feel ashamed of doing the best you can, even if that means being on welfare. I agree, and perhaps "shame" was a poor word choice.
I just think more people need to take a hard look in the mirror and ask themselves if they're really doing the best they can, or if they're just making excuses for not doing everything they could do to pay their own way through life.
There are plenty of situations where people truly have no choice but to rely on someone else to help them through, but the anecdotal evidence provided by my own experiences working for a living suggests that far more people are just being lazy and making excuses.
"I could get a better paying job, but I'd have to work crappy hours and get dirty. Ewww. I'd rather stand here talking on my iPhone and bitch about how much poverty sucks."
That's fine by me. You can do whatever you want as long as you don't have your hand in my pocket. If you do, then seeing that really pisses me off. The difference between me and you more than anything else is most likely that I get up and go to work on time, work my ass off, and I do whatever job I can find, even if it's crappy.
This is what responsible people do. If you do everything you should to be a responsible person and try to take care of yourself, then I don't have a problem in the world with lending you a hand if you need it. I've been there. I worked to get out of there, and you can too.
Kill all IP laws, but force any company over 500 employees to split into two completely independent entities, neither of which has an employee base greater than 300.
Great plan. Just what the world needs! Now we'll have 3,333 different variations on Walmart.
YES! I loved HeatKit! My dad and myself would work on those kits when I was young.
Back when if something went wrong (soldering an electrolytic cap in backwards, say) you could actually go to Radio Shack and buy useful parts from somebody who knew more than you did about electronics.
Actually, I've found that the most wasteful people are the poor ones.
If I had mod points, I'd mod you up. This is so true it's tragic.
I interact with a lot of people at the low end of the income spectrum, and the very last thing any one of them will ever give up is the damn cell phone. Food, shelter, heat, transportation to work, who cares about any of that stuff? Normally you don't see this level of addiction unless crack or something is involved, and it's just tragic to see.
It's even more tragic to think about how the government is pissing my money away to feed and clothe these people, so they can waste what little they do earn on frivolous luxury items. I mean look, I started my adult life on welfare, and I'm not saying all welfare recipients are automatically worthless parasites. I'm just saying people who are on welfare should have some shame. Use your food stamps to buy Cheery-Ohs and Wheat-eez in bulk bags, and stretch that government assistance as far as you can. Don't stand there paying for your pork rinds with my money, talking on the phone with a shopping cart full of beer and cigarettes behind you. I earned that money you're pissing away by working my ass off, and I really don't appreciate seeing you light it on fire right in front of my face like that.
I think a little shame can be a good thing. I was mortified to have to resort to welfare, and the day my social worker told me I no longer qualified was one of the happiest days of my life. If you need it, use it, that's what it's there for, but try your best to get off, and don't give me that shit about how important it is that you have an iPhone for work.
Probably 99% of Linux users have only used a 2.0 series kernel.
That's definitely true here. I've been around over a decade, and never used anything but a 2.0 series kernel. What I find really interesting, though, is the fact that I have no idea what kernel I'm running at this moment. I really haven't had to pay attention to the kernel in years. When I got started, I used to spend a lot of time diddling the compile options on the kernel and waiting for every new release with bated breath, hoping it would cure my woes. These days, meh, everything basically just works.
Have cheap ass users who don't want to pay for anything.
In fairness, if I had an iPhone or a Blackberry or something, I'd still be a cheap ass user who didn't want to pay for anything.
When I want/need an app for my Android phone, I start with the free stuff first. It seems like it's not the best software out there, but it's free, and there's plenty of it. So far I haven't actually paid for anything at all. I really am too cheap to spend $2 for something; especially when you can't just charge it to your phone account, but have to set up some kind of payment account thing at the app store; or at least it looks that way at a glance. Meh. Too much trouble. I'm cheap and lazy.
No, that's only after Jupiter ignites and becomes a star.
Besides, by the look of things all of that is obviously not going to happen for a good while yet. We're an extremely long way from achieving anything that's supposed to have happened according to those books.
Normal people don't give two shits about any particular company.
So that guy every one of us knows who has an iPad, an iPhone, an iMac, an iPod and has Apple stickers plastered all over the back of his Prius and/or Corolla is not normal? Or is he just a shill? Which is it?
After thinking about this seriously for a moment, it makes me realize that if they had followed the standard pattern up to that time, Uranus would have been named Caelus anyway.
I guess it's just as well they didn't, as millions of third graders (and Slashdotters) wouldn't have anything to make cheap jokes about if they had gone that route.
I used to wonder what sort of parental restrictions I was going to try to put in place. I mean sure, I had Hustler and stuff, but my goodness man, the depravity available on the net is like absolutely nothing that was available in small town America before. I didn't want my kids to find the goatse man, or donkey porn or whatever, before they were ready. What might happen? They might be scarred for life! They might grow up to be completely depraved!
Well, I never got around to installing any parental restrictions, and my kids turned out fine. While porn is ubiquitous, it's actually pretty easy to avoid if you don't feel like looking at it, and neither of them ever did. Not when they were younger anyway. I have no idea if they look at porn now, but if they do, who cares.
Looking back on it, I could have done all kinds of Draconian cloak and dagger stuff to look after their every move. They run Linux, but don't really know how Linux works, and I can take command of their machines from here, because I know how. I could log their keys, monitor their browsing histories, read their emails, etc., but I've never felt any need.
But somewhere around the time of Windows 95, things seemed to change and it became expected that the "average user" had no interest or time in learning how anything works.
It was a combination of Windows 95 being comparatively idiot-friendly along with an absolutely massive influx of idiots when public access to the Internet started to take off, and the web began to come into its own.
Those two things happening at about the same time changed the world in a lot of ways. For example, the terms "top posting" and "bottom posting" came into existence right around this time, as millions of new users exposed to email for the first time got their hands on Outlook Express, with its completely broken editor that made formatting a message correctly almost physically impossible.
When I really think about it, the biggest difference between being an old-school DOS hacker and being a modern Linux hacker was that in the DOS days we had BBSes, and those of us with net access had Gopher and Archie. I got out of development around 1995 not simply because everyone demanded GUI applications, and early Windows development sucked, but also because when I first got on the web, I found a good many alternatives to every application I had ever developed. You think KDE vs. GNOME is a big waste of resources? One of the DOS applications I actually made money on was a utility that has a close equivalent as part of the GNU toolchain, and I abandoned development when I realized there were about six alternatives that predated my own, and were further along.
We DOS hackers were working alone for the most part, or in small, isolated teams. The web changed all that, and then sites like SourceForge took it all to the next level. Now, collaboration is easy.
little girls who spent hours in front of a Commodore 64 telling the machine......I'm sorry but those don't exist.
I can't imagine she played text adventures, but I did, in fact, know an actual girl who played with a C64. It was pretty sad, really. Her parents bought on on clearance in the late '80s. She didn't even have a cassette tape machine for the thing, so her only amusement was typing in BASIC programs that persisted until the power was cut.
If I had been more enterprising at the time, I should have introduced her to mass storage. She was cute. Alas. At the time I was more interested in being a morally superior pompous ass, and pointing out what a pile of crap her computer was.
Qt is on LGPL for some time now. What you wrote was true few years backwards.
http://qt.nokia.com/about/licensing/
It's still true today. You can probably do anything you need to do under the LGPL, but in the event you find some need to have a commercial license, then you still have exactly the same old impossible model. Whoops, we have to rewrite all the code from scratch, since we didn't begin development with a commercial license. Or we can just pretend we started over from scratch, since there's no way to prove anything.
Their commercial licenses are a completely stupid model.
Personally, I found English classes (once we stopped doing grammar/spelling) to be mentally abusive.
If we s/English/foreign language/g then I'm right there with you.
I was a foreign language major because I'm good at learning languages. I hadn't really considered or understood that this was essentially the same thing as being an English major (ie. basket weaving) except in different languages. My Great Moment of Disenchantment came when I decided to teach this one professor a lesson once and for all. More references, more references, I'll show you more references! So I didn't read the book at all, and my big paper was one continuous series of citations from random people's doctoral theses and so on. I had citations everywhere, and everything was either a direct quote or a paraphrase. The extent to which I injected original thought or analysis into this work consisted of conjunctions, articles, and perhaps a two- or three-word connecting phrase in a couple of places. I was impressed with how horrific this paper was, because it was the utmost extreme exercise in not thinking and not having any original thoughts or genuine insights whatsoever.
The result?
(Everybody probably already saw this coming...)
"Fantastic! A++ This is your BEST work EVER! Why can't you ALWAYS write papers this good! This is what I have been trying to get you to do all along!!"
And that, boys and girls, is why I was a truck driver for 15 years after college.
"Truly Designed for Human Comfort and a major update to the computer keyboard in over 140 years."
Whenever people Use Lots of Capital Letters for no good reason as part of a sentence that doesn't parse at all, it makes me rather uncomfortable with the prospect of committing $200 for something that might never materialize. Yes, of course I can decipher what the message was supposed to have been here, but the copywriter or editor failed utterly on this one.
The layout looks pretty severely obnoxious too. It would take a long time to get used to these key positions, and it would be difficult to move to a conventional keyboard smoothly.
I'll stick with my Microsoft Natural 4000. I used one of the original, early '90s Naturals until this thing came along, and they have finally offered a worthy successor. I think mechanical switches are over-rated anyway. Yes, the Natural felt squishy in the beginning, because I, too, was a big fan of clicky keyboards. This used to be the one thing about the Natural that really disappointed me. I got used to it, and I got 8-10 million words out of my original Natural before I finally wore it out.
So far, so good. I have to wear night splints, and I'm definitely having problems with my wrists, but I haven't had to have the surgery yet. I'd just as soon not have a surgeon sever a major ligament in my wrist if I can possibly avoid it.
I agree this is a huge understatement, and that the people who commented further down about how easy this is have never worked on trying to port an application of any size or consequence to this device.
The hardest thing is that while the screen real estate you've got to work with seems ample, a well-designed app has to have touchable control surfaces, and this requires the use of on-screen controls that are absolutely enormous relative to the number of pixels available. This really limits the number of controls you can fit on a screen.
Make them too small, pack them too close together, and the interface doesn't work well. It's even possible to get false readings with the stylus, because the responsiveness of this touch screen really is pretty seriously crappy. I've plotted data points from attempting to touch the same control 100 times in a row; it's a shotgun blast doing it with a finger, and the stylus brings that down to something more like a short-barreled pistol shooting really big, ragged groups. An accurate input device, this screen ain't.
It may be trivial to port some text editor or something of the sort, but try implementing something like the GIMP on this thing. For instance, just my standard tool palette in the GIMP measures about 170x212 as sampled from my desktop screen. It uses 32x32 icons, which are quite small for use on the N900. A more comfortable version of this tool palette would use 64x64 icons, and now you've got 340x424 out of 800x480 devoted just to one small tool palette, which is just a small portion of a much larger standard control palette in the GIMP.
It would be possible to get the GIMP to run on this thing (I suppose; I'm actually a Qt guy, and I'm treating the GIMP as though it were a Qt application for this thought exercise), but it would require considerable thought and planning to execute all of that interface on this scale and still leave the user some room to actually do something interesting with the tools.
In short, we're not talking a little tweak, we're basically talking about a fork, possibly within the same code tree as the original UI. It's going to have to have some dramatic amount of work done to cut it up and think about how to present what for maximum utility. This would a be a huge project, and the majority of software I use on my desktop fits into this same kind of category. Try porting Rosegarden to this thing, for instance, ignoring the fact that conventional Linux audio is basically impossible to do on the N900 in the first place. Rosegarden barely functions on a 1024x768 desktop display, and scaling it down to 800x480 would require a massive and complete rewrite of the entire GUI from the ground up.
I just can't see how anybody who has ever worked on any sort of complicated graphical application could think porting to this device is as simple as unpacking a tarball, firing up the cross-compiler, and then doing some minor tweaking. Not unless completely rewriting just about every part of the entire user interface to work in this form factor is "minor" anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you should never feel ashamed of your life.
You should never feel ashamed of doing the best you can, even if that means being on welfare. I agree, and perhaps "shame" was a poor word choice.
I just think more people need to take a hard look in the mirror and ask themselves if they're really doing the best they can, or if they're just making excuses for not doing everything they could do to pay their own way through life.
There are plenty of situations where people truly have no choice but to rely on someone else to help them through, but the anecdotal evidence provided by my own experiences working for a living suggests that far more people are just being lazy and making excuses.
"I could get a better paying job, but I'd have to work crappy hours and get dirty. Ewww. I'd rather stand here talking on my iPhone and bitch about how much poverty sucks."
That's fine by me. You can do whatever you want as long as you don't have your hand in my pocket. If you do, then seeing that really pisses me off. The difference between me and you more than anything else is most likely that I get up and go to work on time, work my ass off, and I do whatever job I can find, even if it's crappy.
This is what responsible people do. If you do everything you should to be a responsible person and try to take care of yourself, then I don't have a problem in the world with lending you a hand if you need it. I've been there. I worked to get out of there, and you can too.
Kill all IP laws, but force any company over 500 employees to split into two completely independent entities, neither of which has an employee base greater than 300.
Great plan. Just what the world needs! Now we'll have 3,333 different variations on Walmart.
YES! I loved HeatKit! My dad and myself would work on those kits when I was young.
Back when if something went wrong (soldering an electrolytic cap in backwards, say) you could actually go to Radio Shack and buy useful parts from somebody who knew more than you did about electronics.
Now get off my lawn!
Actually, I've found that the most wasteful people are the poor ones.
If I had mod points, I'd mod you up. This is so true it's tragic.
I interact with a lot of people at the low end of the income spectrum, and the very last thing any one of them will ever give up is the damn cell phone. Food, shelter, heat, transportation to work, who cares about any of that stuff? Normally you don't see this level of addiction unless crack or something is involved, and it's just tragic to see.
It's even more tragic to think about how the government is pissing my money away to feed and clothe these people, so they can waste what little they do earn on frivolous luxury items. I mean look, I started my adult life on welfare, and I'm not saying all welfare recipients are automatically worthless parasites. I'm just saying people who are on welfare should have some shame. Use your food stamps to buy Cheery-Ohs and Wheat-eez in bulk bags, and stretch that government assistance as far as you can. Don't stand there paying for your pork rinds with my money, talking on the phone with a shopping cart full of beer and cigarettes behind you. I earned that money you're pissing away by working my ass off, and I really don't appreciate seeing you light it on fire right in front of my face like that.
I think a little shame can be a good thing. I was mortified to have to resort to welfare, and the day my social worker told me I no longer qualified was one of the happiest days of my life. If you need it, use it, that's what it's there for, but try your best to get off, and don't give me that shit about how important it is that you have an iPhone for work.
/rant
But stop pretending that Linux (on the desktop) actually matters to anyone but the 100 of us here on /. that like to bitch.
One hundred and one, you insensitive clod!
Their response time to this problem is a great advertisement for their services.
Now if only they'd offer Subversion hosting...
Probably 99% of Linux users have only used a 2.0 series kernel.
That's definitely true here. I've been around over a decade, and never used anything but a 2.0 series kernel. What I find really interesting, though, is the fact that I have no idea what kernel I'm running at this moment. I really haven't had to pay attention to the kernel in years. When I got started, I used to spend a lot of time diddling the compile options on the kernel and waiting for every new release with bated breath, hoping it would cure my woes. These days, meh, everything basically just works.
Company website (goes without saying that it's NSFW)
Wow. Check follow to the "Love Doll Separate" and click on the third tab. That's the creepiest thing I've ever seen.
We certainly don't have the month's long waiting lists.
Sure we do. It always takes me at least a month to get an appointment with my dentist, and I keep my bill paid in full.
Have cheap ass users who don't want to pay for anything.
In fairness, if I had an iPhone or a Blackberry or something, I'd still be a cheap ass user who didn't want to pay for anything.
When I want/need an app for my Android phone, I start with the free stuff first. It seems like it's not the best software out there, but it's free, and there's plenty of it. So far I haven't actually paid for anything at all. I really am too cheap to spend $2 for something; especially when you can't just charge it to your phone account, but have to set up some kind of payment account thing at the app store; or at least it looks that way at a glance. Meh. Too much trouble. I'm cheap and lazy.
So, is it "who is an pedantic ass" or "whom is a pedantic ass"? Doesn't really matter because the answer is "you are a pedantic ass".
No, dolt, it's your a pedantic ass.
Yes, but we can attempt no landing there
No, that's only after Jupiter ignites and becomes a star.
Besides, by the look of things all of that is obviously not going to happen for a good while yet. We're an extremely long way from achieving anything that's supposed to have happened according to those books.
Normal people don't give two shits about any particular company.
So that guy every one of us knows who has an iPad, an iPhone, an iMac, an iPod and has Apple stickers plastered all over the back of his Prius and/or Corolla is not normal? Or is he just a shill? Which is it?
What we need is a species of Kentucky Blue Grass that is drought-resistant...
There already is one. It's called Astroturf.
After thinking about this seriously for a moment, it makes me realize that if they had followed the standard pattern up to that time, Uranus would have been named Caelus anyway.
I guess it's just as well they didn't, as millions of third graders (and Slashdotters) wouldn't have anything to make cheap jokes about if they had gone that route.
I used to wonder what sort of parental restrictions I was going to try to put in place. I mean sure, I had Hustler and stuff, but my goodness man, the depravity available on the net is like absolutely nothing that was available in small town America before. I didn't want my kids to find the goatse man, or donkey porn or whatever, before they were ready. What might happen? They might be scarred for life! They might grow up to be completely depraved!
Well, I never got around to installing any parental restrictions, and my kids turned out fine. While porn is ubiquitous, it's actually pretty easy to avoid if you don't feel like looking at it, and neither of them ever did. Not when they were younger anyway. I have no idea if they look at porn now, but if they do, who cares.
Looking back on it, I could have done all kinds of Draconian cloak and dagger stuff to look after their every move. They run Linux, but don't really know how Linux works, and I can take command of their machines from here, because I know how. I could log their keys, monitor their browsing histories, read their emails, etc., but I've never felt any need.
I think it turned out really well.
But somewhere around the time of Windows 95, things seemed to change and it became expected that the "average user" had no interest or time in learning how anything works.
It was a combination of Windows 95 being comparatively idiot-friendly along with an absolutely massive influx of idiots when public access to the Internet started to take off, and the web began to come into its own.
Those two things happening at about the same time changed the world in a lot of ways. For example, the terms "top posting" and "bottom posting" came into existence right around this time, as millions of new users exposed to email for the first time got their hands on Outlook Express, with its completely broken editor that made formatting a message correctly almost physically impossible.
When I really think about it, the biggest difference between being an old-school DOS hacker and being a modern Linux hacker was that in the DOS days we had BBSes, and those of us with net access had Gopher and Archie. I got out of development around 1995 not simply because everyone demanded GUI applications, and early Windows development sucked, but also because when I first got on the web, I found a good many alternatives to every application I had ever developed. You think KDE vs. GNOME is a big waste of resources? One of the DOS applications I actually made money on was a utility that has a close equivalent as part of the GNU toolchain, and I abandoned development when I realized there were about six alternatives that predated my own, and were further along.
We DOS hackers were working alone for the most part, or in small, isolated teams. The web changed all that, and then sites like SourceForge took it all to the next level. Now, collaboration is easy.
It seems derring-do is indeed the correct form of the phrase.
little girls who spent hours in front of a Commodore 64 telling the machine... ...I'm sorry but those don't exist.
I can't imagine she played text adventures, but I did, in fact, know an actual girl who played with a C64. It was pretty sad, really. Her parents bought on on clearance in the late '80s. She didn't even have a cassette tape machine for the thing, so her only amusement was typing in BASIC programs that persisted until the power was cut.
If I had been more enterprising at the time, I should have introduced her to mass storage. She was cute. Alas. At the time I was more interested in being a morally superior pompous ass, and pointing out what a pile of crap her computer was.
Way to score with the ladies, Spugglefink.
Qt is on LGPL for some time now. What you wrote was true few years backwards.
http://qt.nokia.com/about/licensing/
It's still true today. You can probably do anything you need to do under the LGPL, but in the event you find some need to have a commercial license, then you still have exactly the same old impossible model. Whoops, we have to rewrite all the code from scratch, since we didn't begin development with a commercial license. Or we can just pretend we started over from scratch, since there's no way to prove anything.
Their commercial licenses are a completely stupid model.
Personally, I found English classes (once we stopped doing grammar/spelling) to be mentally abusive.
If we s/English/foreign language/g then I'm right there with you.
I was a foreign language major because I'm good at learning languages. I hadn't really considered or understood that this was essentially the same thing as being an English major (ie. basket weaving) except in different languages. My Great Moment of Disenchantment came when I decided to teach this one professor a lesson once and for all. More references, more references, I'll show you more references! So I didn't read the book at all, and my big paper was one continuous series of citations from random people's doctoral theses and so on. I had citations everywhere, and everything was either a direct quote or a paraphrase. The extent to which I injected original thought or analysis into this work consisted of conjunctions, articles, and perhaps a two- or three-word connecting phrase in a couple of places. I was impressed with how horrific this paper was, because it was the utmost extreme exercise in not thinking and not having any original thoughts or genuine insights whatsoever.
The result?
(Everybody probably already saw this coming...)
"Fantastic! A++ This is your BEST work EVER! Why can't you ALWAYS write papers this good! This is what I have been trying to get you to do all along!!"
And that, boys and girls, is why I was a truck driver for 15 years after college.
Meh. They just need to switch over to a salami rocket instead. Problem solved.
"Truly Designed for Human Comfort and a major update to the computer keyboard in over 140 years."
Whenever people Use Lots of Capital Letters for no good reason as part of a sentence that doesn't parse at all, it makes me rather uncomfortable with the prospect of committing $200 for something that might never materialize. Yes, of course I can decipher what the message was supposed to have been here, but the copywriter or editor failed utterly on this one.
The layout looks pretty severely obnoxious too. It would take a long time to get used to these key positions, and it would be difficult to move to a conventional keyboard smoothly.
I'll stick with my Microsoft Natural 4000. I used one of the original, early '90s Naturals until this thing came along, and they have finally offered a worthy successor. I think mechanical switches are over-rated anyway. Yes, the Natural felt squishy in the beginning, because I, too, was a big fan of clicky keyboards. This used to be the one thing about the Natural that really disappointed me. I got used to it, and I got 8-10 million words out of my original Natural before I finally wore it out.
So far, so good. I have to wear night splints, and I'm definitely having problems with my wrists, but I haven't had to have the surgery yet. I'd just as soon not have a surgeon sever a major ligament in my wrist if I can possibly avoid it.
Tweak the UI a bit? Understatement of the thread.
I agree this is a huge understatement, and that the people who commented further down about how easy this is have never worked on trying to port an application of any size or consequence to this device.
The hardest thing is that while the screen real estate you've got to work with seems ample, a well-designed app has to have touchable control surfaces, and this requires the use of on-screen controls that are absolutely enormous relative to the number of pixels available. This really limits the number of controls you can fit on a screen.
Make them too small, pack them too close together, and the interface doesn't work well. It's even possible to get false readings with the stylus, because the responsiveness of this touch screen really is pretty seriously crappy. I've plotted data points from attempting to touch the same control 100 times in a row; it's a shotgun blast doing it with a finger, and the stylus brings that down to something more like a short-barreled pistol shooting really big, ragged groups. An accurate input device, this screen ain't.
It may be trivial to port some text editor or something of the sort, but try implementing something like the GIMP on this thing. For instance, just my standard tool palette in the GIMP measures about 170x212 as sampled from my desktop screen. It uses 32x32 icons, which are quite small for use on the N900. A more comfortable version of this tool palette would use 64x64 icons, and now you've got 340x424 out of 800x480 devoted just to one small tool palette, which is just a small portion of a much larger standard control palette in the GIMP.
It would be possible to get the GIMP to run on this thing (I suppose; I'm actually a Qt guy, and I'm treating the GIMP as though it were a Qt application for this thought exercise), but it would require considerable thought and planning to execute all of that interface on this scale and still leave the user some room to actually do something interesting with the tools.
In short, we're not talking a little tweak, we're basically talking about a fork, possibly within the same code tree as the original UI. It's going to have to have some dramatic amount of work done to cut it up and think about how to present what for maximum utility. This would a be a huge project, and the majority of software I use on my desktop fits into this same kind of category. Try porting Rosegarden to this thing, for instance, ignoring the fact that conventional Linux audio is basically impossible to do on the N900 in the first place. Rosegarden barely functions on a 1024x768 desktop display, and scaling it down to 800x480 would require a massive and complete rewrite of the entire GUI from the ground up.
I just can't see how anybody who has ever worked on any sort of complicated graphical application could think porting to this device is as simple as unpacking a tarball, firing up the cross-compiler, and then doing some minor tweaking. Not unless completely rewriting just about every part of the entire user interface to work in this form factor is "minor" anyway.
I would give my left nut to make 50k again. I will cut it off myself.
At this point, I'd cut my left nut off for $40K.
Hell, I'd cut both of them off for $40K.