If the German government kicks in x% for a film, that means that they believe that producers can't break even if they have to pay those x% themselves. That's not a "tax loophole", it's government subsidies working as intended, keeping the German film industry in business and keeping actors and film crews from starving between the occasional blockbuster. Of course, most of the subsidized movies will be trash, but it's either lots of bad movies with the occasional good movie, or just commercial, generic US imports.
I don't get it. Why petition the guy to stop making movies? Maybe his movies will be quickly forgotten, maybe they'll be cult classics 50 years from now. As long as he manages to finance them somehow and stay in business, who cares? If you don't like his movies, do what I do: just don't go.
I'm not sure left handedness needs such a far fetched explanation. It makes sense for cells to pick one handedness or another, otherwise they need twice the machinery. And there are plenty of pathways that connect different amino acids and other compounds, so if one of them is left handed, chances are most of the rest are as well. And which handedness it ended up being may just have been chance.
it's a sweat detector. It has the same problems as other lie detectors: sweating and similar reactions don't mean you're lying. Maybe you find the interrogator hot, or maybe he or she reminds you of your mother in law, or maybe you just generally fall apart under pressure.
They didn't force Apple to do anything because I'm not aware of any other successful DRM-free ventures
I'm sorry you've been living under a rock, but other companies have been selling DRM-free MP3s for years before Apple got around to it.
I think the big record labels would insist on DRM no matter what until someone proves them wrong and drags them kicking and screaming into the 21st century, like Apple is help doing.
Apple is providing a tidy profit to record labels through their DRM-based service. As a result, Apple is helping keep DRM around. If Apple didn't have a successful DRM-based service, DRM would probably already be history because nobody else managed to make it work technically.
No, that's not correct. Most of the photos are still there, and you can still see the Borings' house. You can also see that there is no "No Trespassing" or "Private Road" sign anywhere. Even if there were a "Private Road" sign, that would not necessarily mean that the public can't use the road: the road may be presumed to be for public access, it may be a "public space", or there may be easements.
Google appears to have removed the last few hundred feet of street photography as a courtesy. I doubt they legally had to.
They don't have a case. Anyone can take pictures from a public location; if you don't want to be photographed, you have to put up a fence.
Contrary to what they claim, the road in question wasn't even clearly marked a "Private Road" (you can see that in street view itself; there's no sign anywhere).
However, Google has apparently voluntarily removed the images anyway, which makes their case collapse.
Yes, and so does the US. Now, the US can lead and try to change the system, or the US can cower in a corner squandering the power it temporarily has.
And it's also in our best interest to keep our jobs here.
Sure: through educating US workers better than those in other nations, not through protectionism and force.
Because domestic production insulates us from currency fluctuations and is easier to control,
I suppose if the dollar becomes worthless, it can't fluctuate much anymore. But you can still get horrible recessions.
And why do you think the US currency is "fluctuating" right now? It's because the US government has attempted to keep the dollar high for decades, despite increasing trade deficits, with all sorts of interventions and deals. Now, the whole house of cards is falling apart rapidly. If the US government had just let the dollar float freely, there would be no trade deficit, the currency would have changed much more gradually, and US industry and markets would have had time to adapt.
Anyway, it's not like you see the savings - if I can make a widget for a dollar less , I'll pocket the difference.
Why do you think you can buy $30 DVD players, $20 jeans, $500 large screen TVs, and $8000 cars? It's because you do see those savings. If those items were manufactured domestically, you would be paying several times that.
Unless you do a trade, then they don't, and are trying to get your job done for cheaper in india and china. Haven't you been paying attention for the past decade? [...] Why can't you?
I have always competed for my jobs against people from all over the world. Literally: they apply for the same jobs I do. So I can and I do. And I see no reason why other people shouldn't. If you're a factory worker, you should compete against people from China and India, just like I do.
What a self-centred, egotistical and rude statement to make. The GP poster gives a case example where a 10-year-old child familiar with Windows didn't adapt to
The guy forces his daughter to use an operating he knows nothing about and hates on 10 year old hardware. You think it's surprising she doesn't like Ubuntu? Then he goes on mouthing off, without any evidence, about how Windows is so much more usable. The guy is either a liar or an idiot or both.
Actually, people do give a very big damn about people like the GP and his daughter, since they are the ones that will determine the place of desktop Linux in mainstream computing, and how much hardware manufacturers will pay attention to the demand for Linux-compatible drivers.
You erroneously consider the guy representative of home users in general. He is not. He is a self-admitted Linux hater. One can't make everybody happy, and people like him aren't worth bothering with for the Linux community. There will always be some percentage of Microsoft fanboys.
Hope your account (isn't a nick like "nguy" tantamount to saying "I'm a sock puppet"?) gets downmodded to hell.
As if I care what you or some other Microsoft fanboy thinks or does.
This must mean that Microsoft has started ripping off technology that's less than 20 years out of date. Obviously, there is some progress in Windows-land after all.
Furthermore, the university should be protecting these students by threatening to end the contract.
Hey, this is Florida we're talking about. They had a student thrown in jail and working chain gang duty for two months because he refused to sign over his inventions to the university:
As an experiment I wiped a spare machine of Windows 2000 (which my 10 year old daughter was so fond of) and installed a copy of Ubuntu 7.10 on it. After 1 month of struggling with learning the machine, she won't even touch that computer.
Well, you probably biased her against it then. A lot of my relatives are using Ubuntu, they love it, and they are not having any problems with it.
But what Microsoft and other for profit companies do better than FOSS systems and software is provide easy user interfaces, which can be learned fast.
Bullshit. The Microsoft Windows UI is no better than that of Gnome or KDE.
Anyone who has used any version of Windows, can fairly (with a 2 - 6 hour learning curve) get up and running with little to no hiccups.
Translation: if you know Windows, learning a new version of Windows doesn't take that much time. Only, that's not even true. Vista's UI is a headache even for experienced Windows users, with configuration options and utilities having been moved around without rhyme or reason.
And while I'll tough it out (to my extreme dismay) and learn Linux and other free systems, truthfully, I just don't like them
You know, nobody gives a damn what you use or don't use. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
On a postiive note though, going back to the Ubuntu OS, I do see promise and potential, and I don't say that lightly.
Are there really people who would pick up their pitchforks if confronted with Firefox?
Well, Ballmer throws chairs. Other Microsoft employees may pick up pitchforks. Firefox and open source to them represents the end of their stock price gravy train, the end of the era when they could produce any kind of turd and the industry would just fall all over themselves to buy it.
Actually, Microsoft's shoddy software has made a whole cottage industry of software developers, consultants, IT managers, and service providers very, very wealthy. Those people are Microsoft's marketing secret, and they will fight open source tooth and nail: they don't like that open source works better, and they don't want to have to learn anything new anyway.
You should care, because the kind of world that the US creates while it is still in power is the kind of world that the US will have to live with when it's not in power anymore. If the US fucks over developing nations and creates an international system of protectionism and trade barriers, that's gonna come home to haunt us.
[Buying imports] will change as the dollar lowers.
Of course it will change, and as a consequence, the standard of living will go down.
It's not the responsibility of the citizens of this country to provide these companies a place that's conducive to their growth or continued existence
Of course it isn't the "responsibility", it is simple common sense: it's in the best interest of our nation to do that.
What I don't understand is why you're so eager to fuck yourself over some CEO who doesn't give two shits about you
Oh, but they do, because I'm a skilled worker. And those people bring home the bacon and make the economy tick. Of course, they aren't always behaving ethically, but that's what we need to establish international laws and enforcement for. But we can only do that if we create consensus among nations.
or some chinese factory worker who doesn't give two shits about you.
Because he's giving me a better product at a lower price than a US worker. Why should I give a shit about a US factory worker? Why should I pay more taxes to support services for him, and why should I pay more for the goods he produces? Why can't he get off his butt and study and work harder so that he becomes competitive with the Chinese worker?
They're free to make profit, but it's still a lousy attitude when the first words out of their mouths are about "intellectual properties" rather than about the results.
And with an attitude like that, you can be pretty certain that they are going to try and patent miniscule variations on well-known technologies and are going to make a legal nuisance of themselves.
Actually, all I need is protectionism (which works fairly well);
Protectionism is unfair towards other nations, and sooner or later, they are going to fight back with their own protectionism. It's also increases prices and lowers the standard of living.
the dollar being high just makes the guys in china more attractive - let it go down and jobs will come here.
Yes, letting the dollar devalue is a good thing for US workers because it makes them internationally more competitive. However, it does lower the standard of living substantially, because a lot of stuff that Americans want is imported.
So, why are you asserting that it's okay for companies to take advantage of all the US has to offer, but telling its workers that they should make rent on $15k/year?
It's not the responsibility of companies to provide welfare for globally uncompetitive US workers, and if you try to force them to, the companies will move those jobs elsewhere.
Who needs to justify that morally? It isn't immoral to demand a market rate (market being a country or a state) for your work, and it isn't wrong for a country to look out for its citizens. Doesn't matter if it's fair, either.
Oh, but it is. If you can make several times as much in the US for the same work as someone in some developing country, then that difference between the US and that country needs to be maintained somehow, otherwise the jobs would move there. Ways of maintaining that are unfair trade practices, protectionism, support for oppressive governments, and maintaining the value of the US dollar artificially high, among others. Those practices clearly aren't fair. They also can't be sustained in the long run.
And it's all starting to fall apart: there's a huge trade deficit, the US dollar is crumbling, and the US is more and more disliked in developing nations. And the root cause of it all is that we Americans are living beyond our means: we're trying to maintain higher salaries and a higher standard of living than we should have in an efficient market.
Stop it. Answer the question: how do you explain that they sell DRM-free music? These are DRM-free AACs, playable on any music player sold today.
Actually, AAC doesn't play on "any music player". And Apple's DRM-free offerings are so limited that iTunes is meaningless for non-iPod users; DRM-free music on iTunes is primarily a way of squeezing more money out of iPod users.
The reason Apple has started selling DRM-free music is simple: other DRM-free vendors pioneered that business model and started cutting into Apple's business, and they can charge a premium for it.
Apple's sales of DRM-free music aren't an indication that the company wants to do the right thing, they are an indication that the market is forcing them to do the right thing, and they are still fighting it every way they can.
I appreciate that Apple doesn't license it's DRM, it helps keep DRM from spreading to everything and everyone.
My god, did you get a free lobotomy with your iPod? Apple is trying to monopolize the music market. And they are forcing users to use their shitty iTunes software and store.
As soon as Apple loses their bargaining chips, RIAA will start going to other vendors who don't have a problem with increasing DRM limits.
Apple is making DRM work and keeping it alive. No other company has the ability to deliver credible, usable DRM.
Without Apple, we'd already have widespread DRM-free music distribution.
... to see a 7 years old OS making the news because it will be extended to 10 years!
The really sad thing is that even Windows XP was already old technology when it first came on the market. XP was little more than a compilation of operating system technologies from the 1970's and 1980's, with some OOP and web technologies that Microsoft pilfered from other systems from the 1990's.
"'We are creating a set of intellectual properties and software assets that can be employed to gauge and improve levels of preparedness to tackle unforeseen natural disasters,' says Dr. Gyana Parija.
Many research groups are working on simulation and prediction of behavior, natural disasters, preparedness, etc. But the first words out of an IBM researcher's mouth are "intellectual properties and software assets".
that will take your job for half the pay. What utterly unique skills do you have that are worth double the going rate of pay? [...] Jobs are going to go to the lowest bidder, and as an employer I get to choose, you don't. There are laws about employment discrimination that make it illegal to use just about any form of constructive "discrimination", like choosing to only hire native-born Americans.
If US companies can't hire cheap labor in the US, they are going to move their facilities to Mexico or China and save even more money.
No nation owns jobs, and any nation that tries to keep salaries artificially high is going to make itself uncompetitive and destroy its purchasing power and its industrial base.
Besides, what moral justification do you have for making several times the amount of money as a Mexican or Chinese for the same work? Where do you think the difference in salary is coming from? It's being paid, one way or another, in part by other US workersand in part by people in the rest of the world, and neither is fair.
Slashdot Mirror
If the German government kicks in x% for a film, that means that they believe that producers can't break even if they have to pay those x% themselves. That's not a "tax loophole", it's government subsidies working as intended, keeping the German film industry in business and keeping actors and film crews from starving between the occasional blockbuster. Of course, most of the subsidized movies will be trash, but it's either lots of bad movies with the occasional good movie, or just commercial, generic US imports.
I don't get it. Why petition the guy to stop making movies? Maybe his movies will be quickly forgotten, maybe they'll be cult classics 50 years from now. As long as he manages to finance them somehow and stay in business, who cares? If you don't like his movies, do what I do: just don't go.
I'm not sure left handedness needs such a far fetched explanation. It makes sense for cells to pick one handedness or another, otherwise they need twice the machinery. And there are plenty of pathways that connect different amino acids and other compounds, so if one of them is left handed, chances are most of the rest are as well. And which handedness it ended up being may just have been chance.
1) A supreme being did it, or 2) blah blah amino acids blah blah meteorites blah blah neutron star light rays blah blah?
The "supreme being" also comes with plenty of incomprehensible, meaningless jibberish: the Bible, the Koran, the Torah, etc.
it's a sweat detector. It has the same problems as other lie detectors: sweating and similar reactions don't mean you're lying. Maybe you find the interrogator hot, or maybe he or she reminds you of your mother in law, or maybe you just generally fall apart under pressure.
They didn't force Apple to do anything because I'm not aware of any other successful DRM-free ventures
I'm sorry you've been living under a rock, but other companies have been selling DRM-free MP3s for years before Apple got around to it.
I think the big record labels would insist on DRM no matter what until someone proves them wrong and drags them kicking and screaming into the 21st century, like Apple is help doing.
Apple is providing a tidy profit to record labels through their DRM-based service. As a result, Apple is helping keep DRM around. If Apple didn't have a successful DRM-based service, DRM would probably already be history because nobody else managed to make it work technically.
No, that's not correct. Most of the photos are still there, and you can still see the Borings' house. You can also see that there is no "No Trespassing" or "Private Road" sign anywhere. Even if there were a "Private Road" sign, that would not necessarily mean that the public can't use the road: the road may be presumed to be for public access, it may be a "public space", or there may be easements.
Google appears to have removed the last few hundred feet of street photography as a courtesy. I doubt they legally had to.
They don't have a case. Anyone can take pictures from a public location; if you don't want to be photographed, you have to put up a fence.
Contrary to what they claim, the road in question wasn't even clearly marked a "Private Road" (you can see that in street view itself; there's no sign anywhere).
However, Google has apparently voluntarily removed the images anyway, which makes their case collapse.
India and China already do that sort of thing.
Yes, and so does the US. Now, the US can lead and try to change the system, or the US can cower in a corner squandering the power it temporarily has.
And it's also in our best interest to keep our jobs here.
Sure: through educating US workers better than those in other nations, not through protectionism and force.
Because domestic production insulates us from currency fluctuations and is easier to control,
I suppose if the dollar becomes worthless, it can't fluctuate much anymore. But you can still get horrible recessions.
And why do you think the US currency is "fluctuating" right now? It's because the US government has attempted to keep the dollar high for decades, despite increasing trade deficits, with all sorts of interventions and deals. Now, the whole house of cards is falling apart rapidly. If the US government had just let the dollar float freely, there would be no trade deficit, the currency would have changed much more gradually, and US industry and markets would have had time to adapt.
Anyway, it's not like you see the savings - if I can make a widget for a dollar less , I'll pocket the difference.
Why do you think you can buy $30 DVD players, $20 jeans, $500 large screen TVs, and $8000 cars? It's because you do see those savings. If those items were manufactured domestically, you would be paying several times that.
Unless you do a trade, then they don't, and are trying to get your job done for cheaper in india and china. Haven't you been paying attention for the past decade? [...] Why can't you?
I have always competed for my jobs against people from all over the world. Literally: they apply for the same jobs I do. So I can and I do. And I see no reason why other people shouldn't. If you're a factory worker, you should compete against people from China and India, just like I do.
What a self-centred, egotistical and rude statement to make. The GP poster gives a case example where a 10-year-old child familiar with Windows didn't adapt to
The guy forces his daughter to use an operating he knows nothing about and hates on 10 year old hardware. You think it's surprising she doesn't like Ubuntu? Then he goes on mouthing off, without any evidence, about how Windows is so much more usable. The guy is either a liar or an idiot or both.
Actually, people do give a very big damn about people like the GP and his daughter, since they are the ones that will determine the place of desktop Linux in mainstream computing, and how much hardware manufacturers will pay attention to the demand for Linux-compatible drivers.
You erroneously consider the guy representative of home users in general. He is not. He is a self-admitted Linux hater. One can't make everybody happy, and people like him aren't worth bothering with for the Linux community. There will always be some percentage of Microsoft fanboys.
Hope your account (isn't a nick like "nguy" tantamount to saying "I'm a sock puppet"?) gets downmodded to hell.
As if I care what you or some other Microsoft fanboy thinks or does.
This must mean that Microsoft has started ripping off technology that's less than 20 years out of date. Obviously, there is some progress in Windows-land after all.
Furthermore, the university should be protecting these students by threatening to end the contract.
Hey, this is Florida we're talking about. They had a student thrown in jail and working chain gang duty for two months because he refused to sign over his inventions to the university:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0DE2D81739F937A25755C0A960958260
As an experiment I wiped a spare machine of Windows 2000 (which my 10 year old daughter was so fond of) and installed a copy of Ubuntu 7.10 on it. After 1 month of struggling with learning the machine, she won't even touch that computer.
Well, you probably biased her against it then. A lot of my relatives are using Ubuntu, they love it, and they are not having any problems with it.
But what Microsoft and other for profit companies do better than FOSS systems and software is provide easy user interfaces, which can be learned fast.
Bullshit. The Microsoft Windows UI is no better than that of Gnome or KDE.
Anyone who has used any version of Windows, can fairly (with a 2 - 6 hour learning curve) get up and running with little to no hiccups.
Translation: if you know Windows, learning a new version of Windows doesn't take that much time. Only, that's not even true. Vista's UI is a headache even for experienced Windows users, with configuration options and utilities having been moved around without rhyme or reason.
And while I'll tough it out (to my extreme dismay) and learn Linux and other free systems, truthfully, I just don't like them
You know, nobody gives a damn what you use or don't use. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
On a postiive note though, going back to the Ubuntu OS, I do see promise and potential, and I don't say that lightly.
Get lost.
Are there really people who would pick up their pitchforks if confronted with Firefox?
Well, Ballmer throws chairs. Other Microsoft employees may pick up pitchforks. Firefox and open source to them represents the end of their stock price gravy train, the end of the era when they could produce any kind of turd and the industry would just fall all over themselves to buy it.
Actually, Microsoft's shoddy software has made a whole cottage industry of software developers, consultants, IT managers, and service providers very, very wealthy. Those people are Microsoft's marketing secret, and they will fight open source tooth and nail: they don't like that open source works better, and they don't want to have to learn anything new anyway.
Who cares?
You should care, because the kind of world that the US creates while it is still in power is the kind of world that the US will have to live with when it's not in power anymore. If the US fucks over developing nations and creates an international system of protectionism and trade barriers, that's gonna come home to haunt us.
[Buying imports] will change as the dollar lowers.
Of course it will change, and as a consequence, the standard of living will go down.
It's not the responsibility of the citizens of this country to provide these companies a place that's conducive to their growth or continued existence
Of course it isn't the "responsibility", it is simple common sense: it's in the best interest of our nation to do that.
What I don't understand is why you're so eager to fuck yourself over some CEO who doesn't give two shits about you
Oh, but they do, because I'm a skilled worker. And those people bring home the bacon and make the economy tick. Of course, they aren't always behaving ethically, but that's what we need to establish international laws and enforcement for. But we can only do that if we create consensus among nations.
or some chinese factory worker who doesn't give two shits about you.
Because he's giving me a better product at a lower price than a US worker. Why should I give a shit about a US factory worker? Why should I pay more taxes to support services for him, and why should I pay more for the goods he produces? Why can't he get off his butt and study and work harder so that he becomes competitive with the Chinese worker?
They're free to make profit, but it's still a lousy attitude when the first words out of their mouths are about "intellectual properties" rather than about the results.
And with an attitude like that, you can be pretty certain that they are going to try and patent miniscule variations on well-known technologies and are going to make a legal nuisance of themselves.
Actually, all I need is protectionism (which works fairly well);
Protectionism is unfair towards other nations, and sooner or later, they are going to fight back with their own protectionism. It's also increases prices and lowers the standard of living.
the dollar being high just makes the guys in china more attractive - let it go down and jobs will come here.
Yes, letting the dollar devalue is a good thing for US workers because it makes them internationally more competitive. However, it does lower the standard of living substantially, because a lot of stuff that Americans want is imported.
So, why are you asserting that it's okay for companies to take advantage of all the US has to offer, but telling its workers that they should make rent on $15k/year?
It's not the responsibility of companies to provide welfare for globally uncompetitive US workers, and if you try to force them to, the companies will move those jobs elsewhere.
Like a bad flu, this comes up every few years. It still isn't a good idea for oh-so-many reasons.
Who needs to justify that morally? It isn't immoral to demand a market rate (market being a country or a state) for your work, and it isn't wrong for a country to look out for its citizens. Doesn't matter if it's fair, either.
Oh, but it is. If you can make several times as much in the US for the same work as someone in some developing country, then that difference between the US and that country needs to be maintained somehow, otherwise the jobs would move there. Ways of maintaining that are unfair trade practices, protectionism, support for oppressive governments, and maintaining the value of the US dollar artificially high, among others. Those practices clearly aren't fair. They also can't be sustained in the long run.
And it's all starting to fall apart: there's a huge trade deficit, the US dollar is crumbling, and the US is more and more disliked in developing nations. And the root cause of it all is that we Americans are living beyond our means: we're trying to maintain higher salaries and a higher standard of living than we should have in an efficient market.
Stop it. Answer the question: how do you explain that they sell DRM-free music? These are DRM-free AACs, playable on any music player sold today.
Actually, AAC doesn't play on "any music player". And Apple's DRM-free offerings are so limited that iTunes is meaningless for non-iPod users; DRM-free music on iTunes is primarily a way of squeezing more money out of iPod users.
The reason Apple has started selling DRM-free music is simple: other DRM-free vendors pioneered that business model and started cutting into Apple's business, and they can charge a premium for it.
Apple's sales of DRM-free music aren't an indication that the company wants to do the right thing, they are an indication that the market is forcing them to do the right thing, and they are still fighting it every way they can.
I appreciate that Apple doesn't license it's DRM, it helps keep DRM from spreading to everything and everyone.
My god, did you get a free lobotomy with your iPod? Apple is trying to monopolize the music market. And they are forcing users to use their shitty iTunes software and store.
As soon as Apple loses their bargaining chips, RIAA will start going to other vendors who don't have a problem with increasing DRM limits.
Apple is making DRM work and keeping it alive. No other company has the ability to deliver credible, usable DRM.
Without Apple, we'd already have widespread DRM-free music distribution.
Yeah, they are also one of the few to push selling DRM-free music. So how does that fit in with your little conspiracy theory?
That's bullshit. There have been several companies trying to sell DRM-free music. Apple started offering it because those pioneers forced them to.
Do you honestly believe that Apple would still sell DRM music if the music labels didn't require it?
Do you honestly believe the labels would insist in selling with DRM if companies like Apple didn't give them a big profit?
Apple's commercial success and leveraging of the iPod is what keeps DRM alive.
... to see a 7 years old OS making the news because it will be extended to 10 years!
The really sad thing is that even Windows XP was already old technology when it first came on the market. XP was little more than a compilation of operating system technologies from the 1970's and 1980's, with some OOP and web technologies that Microsoft pilfered from other systems from the 1990's.
"'We are creating a set of intellectual properties and software assets that can be employed to gauge and improve levels of preparedness to tackle unforeseen natural disasters,' says Dr. Gyana Parija.
Many research groups are working on simulation and prediction of behavior, natural disasters, preparedness, etc. But the first words out of an IBM researcher's mouth are "intellectual properties and software assets".
Shame on you.
that will take your job for half the pay. What utterly unique skills do you have that are worth double the going rate of pay? [...] Jobs are going to go to the lowest bidder, and as an employer I get to choose, you don't. There are laws about employment discrimination that make it illegal to use just about any form of constructive "discrimination", like choosing to only hire native-born Americans.
If US companies can't hire cheap labor in the US, they are going to move their facilities to Mexico or China and save even more money.
No nation owns jobs, and any nation that tries to keep salaries artificially high is going to make itself uncompetitive and destroy its purchasing power and its industrial base.
Besides, what moral justification do you have for making several times the amount of money as a Mexican or Chinese for the same work? Where do you think the difference in salary is coming from? It's being paid, one way or another, in part by other US workersand in part by people in the rest of the world, and neither is fair.