Heh. When I originally wrote the message, I had put a tag at the end of it, but/. seems to have interpreted it as an actual html tag and made it invisible (instead of translating it into named character entities like <). Oh well, next time I'll check the preview a little more closely.
Camel Pilot said: "Lets say the state of question is North Dakota. From whom would they need protection from? Saskatchewan - the war mongers that they are."
Oh, but Camel Pilot, the reason all the nasty terrorists hate us is because we're free. Not because of our involvement in their conflicts, not because of various complicated economic and socio-political reasons... no, no. Because we're free! A free state would be the PRIMARY target for terrorarism!
Vim will take over the world when most people stop using elevators and opt for climbing the stairs.
As a civilization, we had stairs long before we had elevators. Elevators were considered an advancement, not a regression. Likewise, having user interfaces that make sense to beginners is something to be commended. Sure, vim is unquestionably more powerful than Kate, gEdit, etc... but those are the ones I use for most text editing tasks when I'm in Linux, because I don't have my task at hand competing for brain real estate with obscure vi commands.
You said it yourself, though. You will never ride that coaster again. You are also that much less likely to go to the park again. So, the park owners lose some level of revenue from the price-gouging in the park because they didn't have good cushioning on their ride.
You bet that a lot of "minor" injuries are "suppressed", but you don't say how. If the park is offering settlements with anyone who complains about pain after a ride, then those customers have the choice to take the settlement or sue. I have no problem with them having that choice. I assume you're not saying that the amusement parks are using underhanded methods to suppress these incidents (threats, etc). If so, then I would need some evidence to support that if I were to agree with you.
So, going back to the park's incentive to make their rides healthier, I think they have every incentive. They don't want to make their patrons unable or unwilling to come back. If you had a problem with a park, I'd suggest you write a letter to the management citing your specific incident. They'd be idiots if they ignored complaints from their revenue source.
Capitalism can work for consumer health in many circumstances. In my opinion, government interference can work against consumer health in many more circumstances. It certainly can work against consumer freedom.
Problem is, NJ is trying to regulate it citing this incident as the reason regulation is necessary. However, it seems that either...
a. The NJ state government is dumb and doesn't realize that the way they're planning to regulate would not have applied in this specific instance, or... b. The NJ state government wants to regulate it, and will regulate it, even if there's no valid reason for them to regulate it.
I believe government is both incompetant and power-hungry. So it's a toss-up.
Larry: "God is good to people who really look for him."
"This is actually a premise we can test, and it's simply false. Many studies have been done comparing religious and non-religious people, and it's never been found that religious people end up with 'better luck'"
That doesn't sound like "simply false" to me. Sounds more like "not necessarily true", which is a far cry.
I think anyone with a basic understanding of the way religions tend to work would tell you that the perks of being religious occur when you die, not while you're alive. Many evil people have great lives, many (some of the best) good people have crap lives. The premise of the whole thing is that everyone gets their just desserts in the end.
I'm not saying that premise is correct. But you did not satisfactorily refute Larry's statement with your argument.
There will most certainly be new users, the difference will be that all the new users will be small children instead of adults. Children are biologically predisposed towards learning new things.
So you may be right, a CLI would be much more effective in the future than it is now; kids could learn it before it becomes hard to learn new things.
That doesn't mean that a CLI is anywhere near the best interface. Another interface, GUI, or otherwise, may be more efficient for people who can be indoctrinated with it from youth.
> It cannot be so difficult to mirror a site and refer to that instead of the prime site?
Slashdot already requires a buttload of bandwidth just for serving a fairly basic page over and over again. If they had to also serve the sites they link to (especially if the content of those sites is primarily images and/or movies), we would see a lot more than intrusive banner ads and subscription requests.
> Well guess what, I already know how to xerox a book and copy a movie, so whats the diff?
The diff is that the time/money investment of copying movies and books is high enough that most people will still buy the original. Notice that you already know how to copy CDs, too. And, since that is relatively trivial to do, the recording industry is trying to stop it. The publishing industry and the movie industry don't act right now solely because it's not something they have to worry about yet. As bandwidth increases, watch for the MPAA going after people copying movies (hell, you don't even have to wait... lots of colleges are cracking down on dormroom movie distributors at the request of the MPAA).
Advantageous as it may be to have gotten that much test data so quickly, the whole reason for having a development branch is so that people don't have to be guinea pigs for unstable code.
I respect how hard it is to work out the kinks without a lot of eyes, but the goal should be to minimize the number of potential bugs in the stable version, while giving people the option to try the latest-and-greatest (at their own risk) if they so choose.
It sounds very nice, but tell the maintenance crews, janitors, receptionists, and other "lower-level" employees that they can't support their family anymore because some paper-pusher thought illegally playing with the numbers would get him the promotion he wanted. Sure, the "corporation" needs to pay, but the "corporation" has real people in it, who didn't do anything wrong.
It's easy to conceptualize a "corporation" with the image of the pointy-nosed scrooge who approved the illegal activity... but it disregards that a large amount of the burden of punishment goes to those who had no hand in the wrongdoing.
"Ideally though the artists would be a little bit more technologically savvey they would allow fans to fund their music without there being so many middlemen skimming off profits"
As much as I think the RIAA has problems with their antiquated business model, I think that sending money directly to the bands is unfair. If you learn about a band through any sort of advertisement, nine times out of ten (or more than that), that ad was bought by the record industry. Now, even if there are disproportionate funds going to the higher-ups in the labels, the people who do those advertisements are some of the hardest-working people in this country (u.s.), and by sending the money directly to the band, you are taking their salary away from them.
I have to imagine that, at some point, you saw an advertisement or promotion for a band and it had some effect on your opinion of that band. Sending money directly to the band disregards the fact that that advertisement brought them revenue they might not have seen otherwise. I think bands get a raw deal, financially, but the solution is to organize and get better deals, not to just stop paying people who have worked hard.
I completely agree. The goal is to find a happy medium of "protecting your job because no one can blame you for a screwup", and "protecting your job because you protect your company from becoming poorer". Perhaps I was too hasty in categorically condemning CYOA in favor of productivity.
> you've got a convenient ass-cover with their autograph on it, and it won't cost you your job
This is all well and good if all you care about is your own job security, but from the company's perspective this is not an improvement in the situation. Even if you are blameless, data loss can still cost you your job, if the company you work for gets impacted by the loss and has to downsize to survive.
I know it's already a strong part of business culture, but ideally it's not a good idea to practice ass-covering over doing something productive.
Atari slit their throats by drastically cutting the price of thier Jaguar, 3D0 died this way and sega died this way
Those systems didn't fail because their prices were cut... their prices were cut because they were failing already.
Sure, price-cutting is usually a last-ditch attempt to save a dying system, but that doesn't establish that the cutting itself makes systems fail. Quite the contrary, it is usually at least partially successful in improving the sales of that system. The Dreamcast may have ended up in the toilet, but when the price was first cut, it had a startling boom in sales. If I remember correctly, there were even rumors that Sega might decide to reopen the manufacturing plants, though nothing ever came of it.
Not to mention CD wallets. I don't know if they still do it, but for a while Best Buy sold two products: a CD wallet and a CD-ROM wallet. The CD wallet was about five extra bucks, presumably because more people buy it. However, they were exactly the same product, with a different label. Needless to say, I bought the CD wallet. Wouldn't want it to be "incompatible".;-)
Actually, I bought the CD-ROM wallet, thinking I was foiling their plan, but as it turns out I actually keep CD-ROMs in it. Never know when you're going to need the Quake 1 demo CD, or drivers for a printer I threw out years ago.
Some people say you shouldn't comment code in a commercial product because then you can easily be replaced. My response to that is, why don't you do good work then you won't have to worry about being fired?
I agree with you that everybody should comment as well as they can and make it as easy as possible for someone else to understand their code. Ideally, their skill would make them irreplaceable to the company, and their good work would be rewarded.
Unfortunately, as I think all too many people know these days, the people making the hiring decisions will frequently not have the same appreciation for your hard work as you do, and as other coders would. For people living in a practical world, it's easy to see how building in a little job security, even at the cost of product quality, could seem like a good idea.
I hope for a day when the people who name complex variables "x" and embed important code into print statements will be punished for their treachery, and the added productivity will be used to reward programmers who actually work to improve quality. I don't think that day is coming anytime soon, however.
Re:I saw this in a screening a couple weeks ago in
on
Review: Showtime
·
· Score: 1
It is possible to make a movie that is a parody of its own genre. Just look at Scream. It's one of the best horror movies of the last 20 years (I know that's not saying much, but it is a very good movie from an absolute standpoint as well as a relative standpoint), yet it is also a biting (and unsubtle) satire of the horror movie cliches.
That's not to say that Showtime is either a good cop movie or a good satire. But it could feasibly have been done right with the proper resources.
As any Usenet or Slashdot dicussion thread created after September 11, 2001 grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis, Hitler, or Osama Bin Laden approaches one.
"Why the, in court, are we so often informed that we are not capable of understanding these laws, and that we require a professional lawyer to understand it for us?"
In actuality, we are never informed that we require a professional lawyer. The court can't force us to get professional legal help, and so they do not "admit" that we cannot know the law.
While I agree that U.S. law is far too complicated for any one person to understand, one can easily function in society with only one's common sense to judge what (probably) is legal and illegal.
A lawyer's job, therefore, is to use his or her knowledge of the law (which, as a professional, is no doubt more extensive than his or her client's), and protect his or her client against the opposing party's lawyers or the prosecuting attorneys. That way, the matchup in court is more fair.
Thus, while the court does not require one to have an attorney, they do recommend it, for good reason.
While I agree that the ending perhaps left something to be desired, only barely tying together the three movies (and really, only the first and third... there was almost nothing said about the second), I think Kreuger did the best that could have been expected. I mean, based on the first two movies, "Scream" was leading to a trilogy by name only. The first two movies had no real connection besides the main characters, so the writer for the third movie had to put in trilogy elements without any prior structure.
As for the character development in the third, I had no real problems with it, though I will grant that the dialogue was noticably different in style. But I find it ironic that you complain about characters that exist only to be played by big names, and in your next breath say that the only reason you went to see the movie was for a cameo by actors you like.:)
As much as I would like to reduce the entire Microsoft antitrust issue into a simple metaphor, the properties of the industry make it impossible.
There are obviously more elaborate ways to describe this than I am going to use, and I welcome them. However, here is my extension of the Pepsi issue which, IMO, takes into account most of the important aspects.
First, assume that Pizza Hut owns 90% of the market for pizza. This is an approximation of Microsoft with Windows-based OS's.
Second, despite what Xn has stated, having pizza is almost a necessity in today's world. I shouldn't have to point this out, large businesses (and, by association, small businesses) rely on computers to do everything. Home use is the only place where it isn't absolutely necessary to have a computer, but even there, the educational benefits of computers to children and the advantages of access to so much information to adults have been proven time and time again.
Third, there is a special property of the computer industry that does not apply to the food industry. If you want a drink, you have to have a pizza to drink it with (programs need an OS to run on, don't they?).
Finally, when people or businesses get together to have some pizza (networking and communications), it is inherently difficult to get two different types of pizza (Pizza Hut and Dominoes, or any other two). There are expenses involved that can be avoided by sticking with the mainstream pizza company (possibly associated with having to tip two pizza delivery guys/gals). Thus, most people stay with Pizza Hut because, let's face it, nobody wants to be the spoilsport at the party who insists on their own type of pizza that almost nobody else wants (I hate to say it, but that's Linux, Macintosh, etc).
Now, the status of the Windows-based web browser market (just for example, the browser wars are one of the most high-profile parts of this case) was that you could order Pizza Hut pizza, and then go to a vending machine and buy a Coke to drink with it. Pepsico then said that all vending machines would offer Pepsi for free, though you still had to go to the vending machine to get it. In response, Coke made the same move, Cokes for free in the vending machines, and there was a healthy level of competition between the two, with both companies improving their drinks greatly over that time.
However, PepsiCo then says that a Pepsi will now be offered for free with every pizza from Pizza Hut. People who get a Pepsi with their pizza (about half) typically rejoice, their lives are made easier. But the people who get Cokes are pretty much screwed. They don't want to get a Pepsi and a Coke, that's just gratuitous. They don't want to throw the Pepsi away and get a Coke, that's a waste of time. And they're not very likely to insist upon getting Dominoes (see above).
Thus, Coke's market share is reduced from about 50% to 20% or less (the people who get different pizza, plus a few die-hard fans of Coke who will throw away the Pepsi). In other words, Pepsi has used their legal monopoly in the pizza industry into an illegal monopoly in the drink industry.
In this example, Coke's reduced market share is not based on product quality or price; in many intances, Coke would have a smaller market share even if it were a better product and both drinks were free. The illegal monopoly, while it may get more people drinking soda in the short run, harms consumers in the long term.
I'm not saying there are no flaws in my logic, but this is how I see it. I welcome a rebuttal.
I am, however, sorry that PepsiCo has, by metaphor, been unjustly turned into a money-grubbing company along the lines of Microsoft. I also feel sorry for browsers like Opera, which I guess would have to be like, Diet Tab or something.:)
Pierce.
P.S. I am a Papa John's fan myself, hate Dominoes and Pizza Hut, except for the New Yorker.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh. When I originally wrote the message, I had put a tag at the end of it, but /. seems to have interpreted it as an actual html tag and made it invisible (instead of translating it into named character entities like <). Oh well, next time I'll check the preview a little more closely.
Camel Pilot said: "Lets say the state of question is North Dakota. From whom would they need protection from? Saskatchewan - the war mongers that they are."
Oh, but Camel Pilot, the reason all the nasty terrorists hate us is because we're free. Not because of our involvement in their conflicts, not because of various complicated economic and socio-political reasons... no, no. Because we're free! A free state would be the PRIMARY target for terrorarism!
Vim will take over the world when most people stop using elevators and opt for climbing the stairs.
As a civilization, we had stairs long before we had elevators. Elevators were considered an advancement, not a regression. Likewise, having user interfaces that make sense to beginners is something to be commended. Sure, vim is unquestionably more powerful than Kate, gEdit, etc... but those are the ones I use for most text editing tasks when I'm in Linux, because I don't have my task at hand competing for brain real estate with obscure vi commands.
You said it yourself, though. You will never ride that coaster again. You are also that much less likely to go to the park again. So, the park owners lose some level of revenue from the price-gouging in the park because they didn't have good cushioning on their ride.
You bet that a lot of "minor" injuries are "suppressed", but you don't say how. If the park is offering settlements with anyone who complains about pain after a ride, then those customers have the choice to take the settlement or sue. I have no problem with them having that choice. I assume you're not saying that the amusement parks are using underhanded methods to suppress these incidents (threats, etc). If so, then I would need some evidence to support that if I were to agree with you.
So, going back to the park's incentive to make their rides healthier, I think they have every incentive. They don't want to make their patrons unable or unwilling to come back. If you had a problem with a park, I'd suggest you write a letter to the management citing your specific incident. They'd be idiots if they ignored complaints from their revenue source.
Capitalism can work for consumer health in many circumstances. In my opinion, government interference can work against consumer health in many more circumstances. It certainly can work against consumer freedom.
Problem is, NJ is trying to regulate it citing this incident as the reason regulation is necessary. However, it seems that either...
a. The NJ state government is dumb and doesn't realize that the way they're planning to regulate would not have applied in this specific instance, or...
b. The NJ state government wants to regulate it, and will regulate it, even if there's no valid reason for them to regulate it.
I believe government is both incompetant and power-hungry. So it's a toss-up.
"This is actually a premise we can test, and it's simply false. Many studies have been done comparing religious and non-religious people, and it's never been found that religious people end up with 'better luck'"
That doesn't sound like "simply false" to me. Sounds more like "not necessarily true", which is a far cry.
I think anyone with a basic understanding of the way religions tend to work would tell you that the perks of being religious occur when you die, not while you're alive. Many evil people have great lives, many (some of the best) good people have crap lives. The premise of the whole thing is that everyone gets their just desserts in the end.
I'm not saying that premise is correct. But you did not satisfactorily refute Larry's statement with your argument.
There will most certainly be new users, the difference will be that all the new users will be small children instead of adults. Children are biologically predisposed towards learning new things.
So you may be right, a CLI would be much more effective in the future than it is now; kids could learn it before it becomes hard to learn new things.
That doesn't mean that a CLI is anywhere near the best interface. Another interface, GUI, or otherwise, may be more efficient for people who can be indoctrinated with it from youth.
Slashdot already requires a buttload of bandwidth just for serving a fairly basic page over and over again. If they had to also serve the sites they link to (especially if the content of those sites is primarily images and/or movies), we would see a lot more than intrusive banner ads and subscription requests.
The diff is that the time/money investment of copying movies and books is high enough that most people will still buy the original. Notice that you already know how to copy CDs, too. And, since that is relatively trivial to do, the recording industry is trying to stop it. The publishing industry and the movie industry don't act right now solely because it's not something they have to worry about yet. As bandwidth increases, watch for the MPAA going after people copying movies (hell, you don't even have to wait... lots of colleges are cracking down on dormroom movie distributors at the request of the MPAA).
Advantageous as it may be to have gotten that much test data so quickly, the whole reason for having a development branch is so that people don't have to be guinea pigs for unstable code.
I respect how hard it is to work out the kinks without a lot of eyes, but the goal should be to minimize the number of potential bugs in the stable version, while giving people the option to try the latest-and-greatest (at their own risk) if they so choose.
It sounds very nice, but tell the maintenance crews, janitors, receptionists, and other "lower-level" employees that they can't support their family anymore because some paper-pusher thought illegally playing with the numbers would get him the promotion he wanted. Sure, the "corporation" needs to pay, but the "corporation" has real people in it, who didn't do anything wrong.
It's easy to conceptualize a "corporation" with the image of the pointy-nosed scrooge who approved the illegal activity... but it disregards that a large amount of the burden of punishment goes to those who had no hand in the wrongdoing.
"Ideally though the artists would be a little bit more technologically savvey they would allow fans to fund their music without there being so many middlemen skimming off profits"
As much as I think the RIAA has problems with their antiquated business model, I think that sending money directly to the bands is unfair. If you learn about a band through any sort of advertisement, nine times out of ten (or more than that), that ad was bought by the record industry. Now, even if there are disproportionate funds going to the higher-ups in the labels, the people who do those advertisements are some of the hardest-working people in this country (u.s.), and by sending the money directly to the band, you are taking their salary away from them.
I have to imagine that, at some point, you saw an advertisement or promotion for a band and it had some effect on your opinion of that band. Sending money directly to the band disregards the fact that that advertisement brought them revenue they might not have seen otherwise. I think bands get a raw deal, financially, but the solution is to organize and get better deals, not to just stop paying people who have worked hard.
I completely agree. The goal is to find a happy medium of "protecting your job because no one can blame you for a screwup", and "protecting your job because you protect your company from becoming poorer". Perhaps I was too hasty in categorically condemning CYOA in favor of productivity.
This is all well and good if all you care about is your own job security, but from the company's perspective this is not an improvement in the situation. Even if you are blameless, data loss can still cost you your job, if the company you work for gets impacted by the loss and has to downsize to survive.
I know it's already a strong part of business culture, but ideally it's not a good idea to practice ass-covering over doing something productive.
Those systems didn't fail because their prices were cut... their prices were cut because they were failing already.
Sure, price-cutting is usually a last-ditch attempt to save a dying system, but that doesn't establish that the cutting itself makes systems fail. Quite the contrary, it is usually at least partially successful in improving the sales of that system. The Dreamcast may have ended up in the toilet, but when the price was first cut, it had a startling boom in sales. If I remember correctly, there were even rumors that Sega might decide to reopen the manufacturing plants, though nothing ever came of it.
Not to mention CD wallets. I don't know if they still do it, but for a while Best Buy sold two products: a CD wallet and a CD-ROM wallet. The CD wallet was about five extra bucks, presumably because more people buy it. However, they were exactly the same product, with a different label. Needless to say, I bought the CD wallet. Wouldn't want it to be "incompatible". ;-)
Actually, I bought the CD-ROM wallet, thinking I was foiling their plan, but as it turns out I actually keep CD-ROMs in it. Never know when you're going to need the Quake 1 demo CD, or drivers for a printer I threw out years ago.
I agree with you that everybody should comment as well as they can and make it as easy as possible for someone else to understand their code. Ideally, their skill would make them irreplaceable to the company, and their good work would be rewarded.
Unfortunately, as I think all too many people know these days, the people making the hiring decisions will frequently not have the same appreciation for your hard work as you do, and as other coders would. For people living in a practical world, it's easy to see how building in a little job security, even at the cost of product quality, could seem like a good idea.
I hope for a day when the people who name complex variables "x" and embed important code into print statements will be punished for their treachery, and the added productivity will be used to reward programmers who actually work to improve quality. I don't think that day is coming anytime soon, however.
It is possible to make a movie that is a parody of its own genre. Just look at Scream. It's one of the best horror movies of the last 20 years (I know that's not saying much, but it is a very good movie from an absolute standpoint as well as a relative standpoint), yet it is also a biting (and unsubtle) satire of the horror movie cliches.
That's not to say that Showtime is either a good cop movie or a good satire. But it could feasibly have been done right with the proper resources.
As any Usenet or Slashdot dicussion thread created after September 11, 2001 grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis, Hitler, or Osama Bin Laden approaches one.
High schools can use .edu. Check out Thomas Jefferson High School.
In actuality, we are never informed that we require a professional lawyer. The court can't force us to get professional legal help, and so they do not "admit" that we cannot know the law.
While I agree that U.S. law is far too complicated for any one person to understand, one can easily function in society with only one's common sense to judge what (probably) is legal and illegal.
A lawyer's job, therefore, is to use his or her knowledge of the law (which, as a professional, is no doubt more extensive than his or her client's), and protect his or her client against the opposing party's lawyers or the prosecuting attorneys. That way, the matchup in court is more fair.
Thus, while the court does not require one to have an attorney, they do recommend it, for good reason.
Pierce Hanley
pierce@vt.edu
As for the character development in the third, I had no real problems with it, though I will grant that the dialogue was noticably different in style. But I find it ironic that you complain about characters that exist only to be played by big names, and in your next breath say that the only reason you went to see the movie was for a cameo by actors you like. :)
There are obviously more elaborate ways to describe this than I am going to use, and I welcome them. However, here is my extension of the Pepsi issue which, IMO, takes into account most of the important aspects.
First, assume that Pizza Hut owns 90% of the market for pizza. This is an approximation of Microsoft with Windows-based OS's.
Second, despite what Xn has stated, having pizza is almost a necessity in today's world. I shouldn't have to point this out, large businesses (and, by association, small businesses) rely on computers to do everything. Home use is the only place where it isn't absolutely necessary to have a computer, but even there, the educational benefits of computers to children and the advantages of access to so much information to adults have been proven time and time again.
Third, there is a special property of the computer industry that does not apply to the food industry. If you want a drink, you have to have a pizza to drink it with (programs need an OS to run on, don't they?).
Finally, when people or businesses get together to have some pizza (networking and communications), it is inherently difficult to get two different types of pizza (Pizza Hut and Dominoes, or any other two). There are expenses involved that can be avoided by sticking with the mainstream pizza company (possibly associated with having to tip two pizza delivery guys/gals). Thus, most people stay with Pizza Hut because, let's face it, nobody wants to be the spoilsport at the party who insists on their own type of pizza that almost nobody else wants (I hate to say it, but that's Linux, Macintosh, etc).
Now, the status of the Windows-based web browser market (just for example, the browser wars are one of the most high-profile parts of this case) was that you could order Pizza Hut pizza, and then go to a vending machine and buy a Coke to drink with it. Pepsico then said that all vending machines would offer Pepsi for free, though you still had to go to the vending machine to get it. In response, Coke made the same move, Cokes for free in the vending machines, and there was a healthy level of competition between the two, with both companies improving their drinks greatly over that time.
However, PepsiCo then says that a Pepsi will now be offered for free with every pizza from Pizza Hut. People who get a Pepsi with their pizza (about half) typically rejoice, their lives are made easier. But the people who get Cokes are pretty much screwed. They don't want to get a Pepsi and a Coke, that's just gratuitous. They don't want to throw the Pepsi away and get a Coke, that's a waste of time. And they're not very likely to insist upon getting Dominoes (see above).
Thus, Coke's market share is reduced from about 50% to 20% or less (the people who get different pizza, plus a few die-hard fans of Coke who will throw away the Pepsi). In other words, Pepsi has used their legal monopoly in the pizza industry into an illegal monopoly in the drink industry.
In this example, Coke's reduced market share is not based on product quality or price; in many intances, Coke would have a smaller market share even if it were a better product and both drinks were free. The illegal monopoly, while it may get more people drinking soda in the short run, harms consumers in the long term.
I'm not saying there are no flaws in my logic, but this is how I see it. I welcome a rebuttal.
I am, however, sorry that PepsiCo has, by metaphor, been unjustly turned into a money-grubbing company along the lines of Microsoft. I also feel sorry for browsers like Opera, which I guess would have to be like, Diet Tab or something. :)
Pierce.
P.S. I am a Papa John's fan myself, hate Dominoes and Pizza Hut, except for the New Yorker.