Agreed - these price-comparison sites are almost universally leeches. They provide no added content, the contents are often out-of-date, and you can get the same functionality by just clicking on individual links in Google. I wish they would all go away. That said, I have never seen Google shopping come up in the results of a search for a product. I am always skipping over spammed results from other price comparison sites - not to mention eBay (I hate eBay). If Google is cheating, they surely are doing a lousy job of it:-)
According to one article, Foundem is a case study in SEO fail. Perhaps it's easier to sue than to fix your business concept.
Assuming the cars charge with 220v, this represents 15 amperes, 30 amperes and around 75 amperes. Most houses will have a 15 amp circuit available - probably you have some appliance plugged into it. Not all that many will have an extra 30 amp circuit, and none have a 75 amp circuit anywhere.
As far as the worries of the power companies: if the greens were serious, they would get behind this. Of course, if you want to reduce our usage of oil, we do need a few new power plants. Nuclear would be best, but even if you try to go full-on green, the eco-nuts willopposethemall. Don't bother asking what they would support - most of them apparently think that power magically comes out of the wall-socket, with no need for nasty things like power plants...
Who says downloading, or making copies for private use is illegal? It depends on where you are.
In many countries, people are forced to pay fees on blank CDs, on printers, on copy machines, even on the memory in MP3 players. Why? The justification for these fees is that people do, in fact, make copies of copyrighted media. Irritating: whatever happened to the presumption of innocence? More irritating: extraordinarily little of this money actually makes it to the artists.
A very few countries got it right: "if our consumers must pay these fees, because you assume they are copying, then they have paid for the right to copy, and this must then be legal". Two countries that I am aware of: Switzerland and Italy. As I understand the law in these two countries (IANAL), uploading is illegal, as is making copies for sale. However, making copies for private use is legal, and this includes both downloading and also making individual copies for friends. The claim that downloading is illegal is therefore disingenuous. The MAFIAA would like for it to be illegal, but it depends on your jurisdiction.
Does anyone know of other countries where downloading is legal? Or have more specific information on the situation in Switzerland and Italy?
If the employee is aware of the policy, and has accepted it, then legally there is nothing wrong here. However this is a nasty policy. You know that people have masses of personal data on their phones, you know that most people don't do regular backups, and you know that most people are not aware of (or are going to forget about) such a policy.
Moreover, if someone wants to steal company data, wiping their phone is not going to prevent it. If you want this level of control, provide the employee with the phone, and physically collect it when they leave the company.
This misses the point. First (and least important), if you can distort the images, you can undistort them.
More importantly: people finally seem to be waking up to this simple fact: The government has no right to search you unless it has probable cause and a warrant. TSA, in fact, does not even have the right to demand an id. The right to interstate travel without government interference has been upheld by the courts: flying is a right, not a privilege. Nude scanners (even if distorted) and genital gropes violate your fourth amendment rights. Trying to make this violation more palatable is the wrong approach.
The right approach is to eliminate the TSA (and all of its regulations) and let the airlines and airports be responsible for their own security. As private companies, they have an interest in finding ways to guarantee security without humiliating their customers.
Just an anecdote here. I have a small software company in Europe. We sold our software to one customer in the USA - against the advice of our lawyer, who said to stay out of the US market. A year or so later, a person in that company who had been using our software lost her job. Her hubby had free legal services through UAW, and she could use them. So she figured she'd give it a try: sue us and claim that our software caused her to be fired.
Needless to say, we had to look into the situation. It turns out that basically any US court, even the local court in Nowhereville, can use the so-called "long-arm statute" to claim jurisdiction - just because you sold to a customer in their neighborhood. The fact that the signed purchase contract specifies a different jurisdiction is apparently irrelevant.
Sure, one could just not show up in court. But then you lose, regardless of the merits of the case. While any verdict might be impossible to collect, ultimately it might mean that no one from our company would dare travel to the US. It's not the kind of thing you want hanging over your head forever.
In our case, there was a happy ending. The fact that we actually got a US lawyer to write a rather pointed letter about the stupidity of the claim was enough to get the UAW attorney to back down. Still, it could have gotten really ugly. Needless to say, we have never taken another US customer. Life is too short for this kind of crap.
I knew of a lovely, quaint old shop in New England, in a building built more than 200 years ago. The ceiling and doorways were so low that I had to duck (and I am not particularly tall). There was no handicapped ramp, if they had a toilet, it certainly will not have been wheelchair accessible. I have no idea if the shop still exists, as I haven't been that way in some time. It was clearly only a matter of time before some ADA nut closed it down. And yet, how does closing such a shop make the world a better place?
Why should a private business be required to cater to the disabled? What principle is at stake here? What fundamental right of the disabled is being violated by a business without a ramp, or without alt-tags on its website?
A private business should be able to cater to whomever it pleases. Adults only. Children only. English-speaking only. Men only. Women only. You cannot require customers to patronize a particular business, and you should not be able to require a business to cater to particular customers. If you believe otherwise, I want a membership at that women's gym across the street...
The federal government is overstepping its bounds. There is no Constitutional right at stake, and the ADA simply should not exist. If anything, this may be a subject for State legislation.
The ADA is already hugely abused: people sue businesses for trivial reasons, not because they have been harmed in any way, but because the ADA lets them financially rape any business that fails to meet any aspect of the guidelines. Even if the business would likely win in court, the costs of defending yourself are such that most settle out of court.
If the government starts enforcing the ADA on website, you may be sued because you forgot an ALT-tag somewhere in a website with a thousands of images. And, yes, it really will be that trivial - just like the brick-and-mortar business that was sued because the mirror in their bathroom was a couple of inches too high.
Here is the non-PC question that needs to be asked: Why should the government force business owners to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to cater to a tiny portion of the population? Why should the non-disabled not be allowed to patronize a mom-n-pop restaurant on the top floor of an old building with no elevator? Is it really better to force the restaurant out of business? Being disabled means - guess what - that you cannot do everything a non-disabled person can. The ADA goes much, much too far...
"Could it be that the free market... actually tends toward monopolies?"
That's economics 101: economy of scale means that a pure free market tends to monopoly. Why anyone should expect the Internet to be different escapes me. The usual argument is that the role of the government in a free market economy is to provide regulation to limit this tendency: first, by preventing the abuse of the monopoly (to prevent competition, or to take over related fields), and second, by limiting the maximum size of companies, if necessary, by breaking them up.
The recent banking mess is a good illustration of the failure of modern governments. They should never allow companies to become "too big to fail". If a company has achieved such a size, the government has failed its regulatory responsibility - at the cost we all saw: hundreds of billions of dollars/euros of your tax money used to prop up companies whose mistakes should have simply bankrupted them.
...the best outcome of this would be for Google to prevail, and take down Oracle's patents along with it. Not only would this teach Oracle a (much needed) lesson
Yes.
I devoutly hope that Google fulfills my expectations, and refuses to back down until they have killed Oracle's patents. This would be good in so many ways.
Logical and functional languages are great - absolutely wonderful. I have written tens of thousands of lines of code in them, and would take them over Java, C#, Ruby, and all the rest any day. As long as you do not need side effects. For pure algorithms, for pure data processing, they are great. As soon as you want to handle ugly, practical things like user interfaces, they are just awful. And, let's face it, most applications don't need complex algorithms - they are driven by the need to interact with users and save data to databases. Pure side-effects. And for that - I really hate to say it - no language out there has really improved much on good ole pre-.NET Visual Basic.
Java is ok, Ruby is nice, the other languages I've used all have their pluses and minuses. I confess I've somehow managed to miss Python. Unfortunately, none of the languages I know make the grunt-work of writing, testing and debugging user interfaces and databases any easier. In fact, the nicer a language is in an aesthetic, theoretical sense, the more likely it is to make real-life things like GUI and database development really difficult. For all the praise of the Apache libraries, things like Apache Hibernate are really just patches that try to hide the fundamental mismatch between an OO language and a relational database. They don't fix anything, they just sweep the dirt under the rug.
So, I've groused enough. Somebody please tell me which wonderful language I've overlooked that makes GUI and database development genuinely easier?
This really has gone too far. TSA should be eliminated. Let the airlines and airports provide security - they, at least, have no interest in intimidating and humiliating their customers.
I'm not the type to write Congresscritters, but it can do no harm. A bit of Googling... It turns out that both the House of Representatives and the Senate provide convenient web forms that let you contact your Congresscritters.
Even if you are not normally political, please consider taking the time to send a message. It takes no more time than posting on/.
First, to TFA: there is no problem with the ID itself, just with the security of the special PC software than can work with them. As most/.ers know, there is quite a hacker community in Germany, and these problems are really not too bad. In order to compromise the software you first have to do a DNS hack, then fake a certificate, then... In a nutshel, yes, there are problems, but they aren't too bad and will be relatively easy to fix.
The ID itself is really cool. Among other things, it supports secured anonymous transactions. How many governments are there that willingly support anonymity for their citizens?
If you are going to post a "missive to the world" slamming someone's product, you ought to at least proofread it. It's just a bit embarrassing that the very first sentence doesn't make any sense. “...our hardware is” - yes, it's very existential hardware.
While I'm no MS fan, this is a good thing. Note: they only add MSE if no other virus checker is present. MSE actually does a pretty decent job, and it is a lot less intrusive than version McAfee, Norton, etc. available to private users.
Microsoft has a vested interest in improving the security of Windows without disturbing the rest of the user experience. Their motivation for MSE is roughly the same as the users'.
It has always bothered me that the interests of Norton, McAfee and the rest are not aligned with the user. You want a clean, fast machine. They want to sell you AV subscriptions. Which means they want to convince you how necessary those are. False alarms are fine, as are in-the-face dialogs and interruptions to remind you what a wonderful piece of crapware you have on your machine.
Interesting that this is from Google. One of the most frequent causes of delay I see are links to external sites. In recent times, I have specifically noticed lots of web-pages waiting for Google Analytics.
Are you serious? People expect companies to provide tech support via twitter? Maybe I'm getting to be an old fogey, but that strikes me as just plain weird... What do others think?
Don't get the wrong idea - it's as much a marketing gag as anything. During and after WWII, the Swiss determined that their best defense was to be able to retreat to - and then attack from - the mountains. In the last couple of decades, the Swiss military has been reducing the number of bunkers that it uses. This company picked up an army-surplus bunker and decided to market it as the safest place to store your data.
So, sure, the bunker was originally designed to survive a nuclear strike. Which means that it certainly ought to survive any sort of lesser event, like floods and earthquakes. And physical security is, of course, easy. The single-site problem, and script kiddies - these are not really huge concerns: big businesses tend to use this place as their extra, just-in-case offsite backup. Of course, if you really want to pay them money to run your normal web-site there, I expect you can...
"SCRUM has sort of become a device for a manager to avoid managing."
Bingo. Yet another buzzword system to allow marginally competent middle managers to report something to marginally competent upper-middle managers. For good teams, with good managers, you will succeed with - or without - SCRUM. For poor teams and/or poor managers, it doesn't keep your project from sinking, but does give you the good of moving the deck chairs around.
In a training document I'm writing, I have a footnote along the lines of: "using any sort of automatically generated code is bad practice". You get mediocre results - maybe better than what a poor programmer would create on his/her own. However, the good programmers write all their own code. In the end, the bit of time they would save using a framework would be more than lost fighting with and fixing the results. And most likely they use abstraction, so that they can easily re-use large portions of their code in later projects.
I have accounts both in the US and outside. Outside the US, security tokens are pretty normal. Security at US banks is far, far worse. I especially like the banks that make you feel secure by asking you a security question. From a list they define and you cannot. For example: your wedding anniversary, or the year your mother was born. Oh, I feel so much more secure, I mean, nobody else could ever figure out that information.
Another example: in the US it seems to be pretty normal to call up a company and authorize them to deduct money from your bank account. How do they know who is on the phone? The first time a company offered to do this, I almost fell of my chair: "you want to do what? You can *do* that?!?!" Unbelievable... I asked at the bank, and there is not even any way to prohibit this!
Sure, proportional representation would be a huge improvement. As the parent says, it gives smaller parties a chance - one they will never have under the current system. Proportional representation also completely eliminates the problem of Gerrymandering. All representatives are representatives of the entire State, elected by the State as a whole. It genuinely is a better system.
Unfortunately, in order to make such a fundamental change, you will need the support of - guess who - the existing political parties. There is zero chance of them supporting a measure that would dramatically reduce their power and influence.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed - these price-comparison sites are almost universally leeches. They provide no added content, the contents are often out-of-date, and you can get the same functionality by just clicking on individual links in Google. I wish they would all go away. That said, I have never seen Google shopping come up in the results of a search for a product. I am always skipping over spammed results from other price comparison sites - not to mention eBay (I hate eBay). If Google is cheating, they surely are doing a lousy job of it :-)
According to one article, Foundem is a case study in SEO fail. Perhaps it's easier to sue than to fix your business concept.
Assuming the cars charge with 220v, this represents 15 amperes, 30 amperes and around 75 amperes. Most houses will have a 15 amp circuit available - probably you have some appliance plugged into it. Not all that many will have an extra 30 amp circuit, and none have a 75 amp circuit anywhere.
As far as the worries of the power companies: if the greens were serious, they would get behind this. Of course, if you want to reduce our usage of oil, we do need a few new power plants. Nuclear would be best, but even if you try to go full-on green, the eco-nuts will oppose them all. Don't bother asking what they would support - most of them apparently think that power magically comes out of the wall-socket, with no need for nasty things like power plants...
208.100.11.174
Who says downloading, or making copies for private use is illegal? It depends on where you are.
In many countries, people are forced to pay fees on blank CDs, on printers, on copy machines, even on the memory in MP3 players. Why? The justification for these fees is that people do, in fact, make copies of copyrighted media. Irritating: whatever happened to the presumption of innocence? More irritating: extraordinarily little of this money actually makes it to the artists.
A very few countries got it right: "if our consumers must pay these fees, because you assume they are copying, then they have paid for the right to copy, and this must then be legal". Two countries that I am aware of: Switzerland and Italy. As I understand the law in these two countries (IANAL), uploading is illegal, as is making copies for sale. However, making copies for private use is legal, and this includes both downloading and also making individual copies for friends. The claim that downloading is illegal is therefore disingenuous. The MAFIAA would like for it to be illegal, but it depends on your jurisdiction.
Does anyone know of other countries where downloading is legal? Or have more specific information on the situation in Switzerland and Italy?
If the employee is aware of the policy, and has accepted it, then legally there is nothing wrong here. However this is a nasty policy. You know that people have masses of personal data on their phones, you know that most people don't do regular backups, and you know that most people are not aware of (or are going to forget about) such a policy.
Moreover, if someone wants to steal company data, wiping their phone is not going to prevent it. If you want this level of control, provide the employee with the phone, and physically collect it when they leave the company.
This misses the point. First (and least important), if you can distort the images, you can undistort them.
More importantly: people finally seem to be waking up to this simple fact: The government has no right to search you unless it has probable cause and a warrant. TSA, in fact, does not even have the right to demand an id. The right to interstate travel without government interference has been upheld by the courts: flying is a right, not a privilege. Nude scanners (even if distorted) and genital gropes violate your fourth amendment rights. Trying to make this violation more palatable is the wrong approach.
The right approach is to eliminate the TSA (and all of its regulations) and let the airlines and airports be responsible for their own security. As private companies, they have an interest in finding ways to guarantee security without humiliating their customers.
Fourth amendment, folks, use it or lose it.
Apparently simple games that require strategy rather than luck. Example: four-in-a-row, where you drop colored disks into a 2D matrix.
Just an anecdote here. I have a small software company in Europe. We sold our software to one customer in the USA - against the advice of our lawyer, who said to stay out of the US market. A year or so later, a person in that company who had been using our software lost her job. Her hubby had free legal services through UAW, and she could use them. So she figured she'd give it a try: sue us and claim that our software caused her to be fired.
Needless to say, we had to look into the situation. It turns out that basically any US court, even the local court in Nowhereville, can use the so-called "long-arm statute" to claim jurisdiction - just because you sold to a customer in their neighborhood. The fact that the signed purchase contract specifies a different jurisdiction is apparently irrelevant.
Sure, one could just not show up in court. But then you lose, regardless of the merits of the case. While any verdict might be impossible to collect, ultimately it might mean that no one from our company would dare travel to the US. It's not the kind of thing you want hanging over your head forever.
In our case, there was a happy ending. The fact that we actually got a US lawyer to write a rather pointed letter about the stupidity of the claim was enough to get the UAW attorney to back down. Still, it could have gotten really ugly. Needless to say, we have never taken another US customer. Life is too short for this kind of crap.
I knew of a lovely, quaint old shop in New England, in a building built more than 200 years ago. The ceiling and doorways were so low that I had to duck (and I am not particularly tall). There was no handicapped ramp, if they had a toilet, it certainly will not have been wheelchair accessible. I have no idea if the shop still exists, as I haven't been that way in some time. It was clearly only a matter of time before some ADA nut closed it down. And yet, how does closing such a shop make the world a better place?
Why should a private business be required to cater to the disabled? What principle is at stake here? What fundamental right of the disabled is being violated by a business without a ramp, or without alt-tags on its website?
A private business should be able to cater to whomever it pleases. Adults only. Children only. English-speaking only. Men only. Women only. You cannot require customers to patronize a particular business, and you should not be able to require a business to cater to particular customers. If you believe otherwise, I want a membership at that women's gym across the street...
The federal government is overstepping its bounds. There is no Constitutional right at stake, and the ADA simply should not exist. If anything, this may be a subject for State legislation.
The ADA is already hugely abused: people sue businesses for trivial reasons, not because they have been harmed in any way, but because the ADA lets them financially rape any business that fails to meet any aspect of the guidelines. Even if the business would likely win in court, the costs of defending yourself are such that most settle out of court.
If the government starts enforcing the ADA on website, you may be sued because you forgot an ALT-tag somewhere in a website with a thousands of images. And, yes, it really will be that trivial - just like the brick-and-mortar business that was sued because the mirror in their bathroom was a couple of inches too high.
Here is the non-PC question that needs to be asked: Why should the government force business owners to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to cater to a tiny portion of the population? Why should the non-disabled not be allowed to patronize a mom-n-pop restaurant on the top floor of an old building with no elevator? Is it really better to force the restaurant out of business? Being disabled means - guess what - that you cannot do everything a non-disabled person can. The ADA goes much, much too far...
"Could it be that the free market ... actually tends toward monopolies?"
That's economics 101: economy of scale means that a pure free market tends to monopoly. Why anyone should expect the Internet to be different escapes me. The usual argument is that the role of the government in a free market economy is to provide regulation to limit this tendency: first, by preventing the abuse of the monopoly (to prevent competition, or to take over related fields), and second, by limiting the maximum size of companies, if necessary, by breaking them up.
The recent banking mess is a good illustration of the failure of modern governments. They should never allow companies to become "too big to fail". If a company has achieved such a size, the government has failed its regulatory responsibility - at the cost we all saw: hundreds of billions of dollars/euros of your tax money used to prop up companies whose mistakes should have simply bankrupted them.
...the best outcome of this would be for Google to prevail, and take down Oracle's patents along with it. Not only would this teach Oracle a (much needed) lesson
Yes.
I devoutly hope that Google fulfills my expectations, and refuses to back down until they have killed Oracle's patents. This would be good in so many ways.
Logical and functional languages are great - absolutely wonderful. I have written tens of thousands of lines of code in them, and would take them over Java, C#, Ruby, and all the rest any day. As long as you do not need side effects. For pure algorithms, for pure data processing, they are great. As soon as you want to handle ugly, practical things like user interfaces, they are just awful. And, let's face it, most applications don't need complex algorithms - they are driven by the need to interact with users and save data to databases. Pure side-effects. And for that - I really hate to say it - no language out there has really improved much on good ole pre-.NET Visual Basic.
Java is ok, Ruby is nice, the other languages I've used all have their pluses and minuses. I confess I've somehow managed to miss Python. Unfortunately, none of the languages I know make the grunt-work of writing, testing and debugging user interfaces and databases any easier. In fact, the nicer a language is in an aesthetic, theoretical sense, the more likely it is to make real-life things like GUI and database development really difficult. For all the praise of the Apache libraries, things like Apache Hibernate are really just patches that try to hide the fundamental mismatch between an OO language and a relational database. They don't fix anything, they just sweep the dirt under the rug.
So, I've groused enough. Somebody please tell me which wonderful language I've overlooked that makes GUI and database development genuinely easier?
Yeah, something like this.
This really has gone too far. TSA should be eliminated. Let the airlines and airports provide security - they, at least, have no interest in intimidating and humiliating their customers.
I'm not the type to write Congresscritters, but it can do no harm. A bit of Googling... It turns out that both the House of Representatives and the Senate provide convenient web forms that let you contact your Congresscritters.
Even if you are not normally political, please consider taking the time to send a message. It takes no more time than posting on /.
First, to TFA: there is no problem with the ID itself, just with the security of the special PC software than can work with them. As most /.ers know, there is quite a hacker community in Germany, and these problems are really not too bad. In order to compromise the software you first have to do a DNS hack, then fake a certificate, then... In a nutshel, yes, there are problems, but they aren't too bad and will be relatively easy to fix.
The ID itself is really cool. Among other things, it supports secured anonymous transactions. How many governments are there that willingly support anonymity for their citizens?
If you are going to post a "missive to the world" slamming someone's product, you ought to at least proofread it. It's just a bit embarrassing that the very first sentence doesn't make any sense. “...our hardware is” - yes, it's very existential hardware.
Serving as your local grammar nazi today...
And if we do it all together, is it a gang bang?
While I'm no MS fan, this is a good thing. Note: they only add MSE if no other virus checker is present. MSE actually does a pretty decent job, and it is a lot less intrusive than version McAfee, Norton, etc. available to private users.
Microsoft has a vested interest in improving the security of Windows without disturbing the rest of the user experience. Their motivation for MSE is roughly the same as the users'.
It has always bothered me that the interests of Norton, McAfee and the rest are not aligned with the user. You want a clean, fast machine. They want to sell you AV subscriptions. Which means they want to convince you how necessary those are. False alarms are fine, as are in-the-face dialogs and interruptions to remind you what a wonderful piece of crapware you have on your machine.
Interesting that this is from Google. One of the most frequent causes of delay I see are links to external sites. In recent times, I have specifically noticed lots of web-pages waiting for Google Analytics.
Are you serious? People expect companies to provide tech support via twitter? Maybe I'm getting to be an old fogey, but that strikes me as just plain weird... What do others think?
TFA doesn't seem to have a link: Swiss Fort Knox
Don't get the wrong idea - it's as much a marketing gag as anything. During and after WWII, the Swiss determined that their best defense was to be able to retreat to - and then attack from - the mountains. In the last couple of decades, the Swiss military has been reducing the number of bunkers that it uses. This company picked up an army-surplus bunker and decided to market it as the safest place to store your data.
So, sure, the bunker was originally designed to survive a nuclear strike. Which means that it certainly ought to survive any sort of lesser event, like floods and earthquakes. And physical security is, of course, easy. The single-site problem, and script kiddies - these are not really huge concerns: big businesses tend to use this place as their extra, just-in-case offsite backup. Of course, if you really want to pay them money to run your normal web-site there, I expect you can...
"SCRUM has sort of become a device for a manager to avoid managing."
Bingo. Yet another buzzword system to allow marginally competent middle managers to report something to marginally competent upper-middle managers. For good teams, with good managers, you will succeed with - or without - SCRUM. For poor teams and/or poor managers, it doesn't keep your project from sinking, but does give you the good of moving the deck chairs around.
In a training document I'm writing, I have a footnote along the lines of: "using any sort of automatically generated code is bad practice". You get mediocre results - maybe better than what a poor programmer would create on his/her own. However, the good programmers write all their own code. In the end, the bit of time they would save using a framework would be more than lost fighting with and fixing the results. And most likely they use abstraction, so that they can easily re-use large portions of their code in later projects.
I have accounts both in the US and outside. Outside the US, security tokens are pretty normal. Security at US banks is far, far worse. I especially like the banks that make you feel secure by asking you a security question. From a list they define and you cannot. For example: your wedding anniversary, or the year your mother was born. Oh, I feel so much more secure, I mean, nobody else could ever figure out that information.
Another example: in the US it seems to be pretty normal to call up a company and authorize them to deduct money from your bank account. How do they know who is on the phone? The first time a company offered to do this, I almost fell of my chair: "you want to do what? You can *do* that?!?!" Unbelievable... I asked at the bank, and there is not even any way to prohibit this!
Sure, proportional representation would be a huge improvement. As the parent says, it gives smaller parties a chance - one they will never have under the current system. Proportional representation also completely eliminates the problem of Gerrymandering. All representatives are representatives of the entire State, elected by the State as a whole. It genuinely is a better system.
Unfortunately, in order to make such a fundamental change, you will need the support of - guess who - the existing political parties. There is zero chance of them supporting a measure that would dramatically reduce their power and influence.
But it is a nice dream...