I didn't really hear anything about LTT - then again, I kind of focused on topics more relevant to embedded systems development. There may have been some mention of LTT in the talks on the more high-end enterprise systems stuff.
RedHat was following the rules (particularly the ones about switching auditors), and their new auditors convinced them to use a slightly different accounting method for their subscription accounting. It looks as if their previous accounting method was not neccesarily incorrect, flawed, or false - just different.
How is it that someone can bring a class action lawsuit against a company for changing their accounting practices from one one allowed method to another allowed method?
The base conmponents are too much biased towards its prime target: be an IDE.
No so anymore. They very much want Eclipse to be useful as a general framework for building arbitrary applications. For Eclipse 3.0, the team made a good effort to seperate out the basic platform functionality from the IDE aspects.
Take a look at the "Rich Client Platform" notes in the New and Noteworthy docs for Eclipse 3.0.
Apparently:-/ Your language (or my reading) made it seem to me like you were criticizing the schools for their policies, instead of the students for complaining when they already knew it was a pretty well-regulated environment.
...many students are heavily influenced by their parents to attend restrictive religious institutions like this. It's either that, or the parents won't pay, or maybe even support the kid.
I'd argue that this is really just another factor in their decision. The majority of the students are legally adults, and their parents can't force them to go to this school. Likewise, they can't force their parents to support them, financially or otherwise. The decision on where to go to college (or eve if you want to go) is one of the first choices you get to make in your adult life. It's a heck of a thinig to realize that your negotiating with your parents over somthing like this, but that's really what happens.
BTW - also not relevant to the conversation - I'm currently attending a religious institution that meets the "restrictive" criteria, though it's not as restrictive as some I've been able to pass up. I'm not sure my parents really approve, but as I'm 35 years old with a wife and two kids, I was more influenced by my immediate family than my parents.
The restrictions on PCs become a lot more relevant since this restrictive college sounds like they basically force people to live on campus.
I suspect that most students were aware of the restrictions at the college before they applied. I've taken a look at a number of Christian schools, and all were very up-front about their policies and restrictions. A good thing, IMHO; whether or not you agree with their policies, it would be best to know about them before plunking down that first semester's tuition. I'd be willing to bet that for a good number of folks, the nature of the campus environment was actually a positive factor influencing their decision.
In other words: most of the students made their choice, paid their money, and are attending Wheaton because they would rather be there than somewhere else. Why do you feel the need to be critical of the school for providing what their students want?
Wow...yeah, that's Microsoft alright. Don't bother writing software for anything but the One True Platform. Amen. Never mind the fact that Windows runs on...hmm, lets see...x86 and ummm...well.
"Platform" does not neccesarily equate to "hardware" (x86 Windows, x86 Linux, and x86 BSD are three different platforms). Keep that in mind, and go back and read the statement on portability. What he's describing sounds an awful lot like POSIX - hardware abstractions handled by the OS, a standard API available for userland apps.
Ok... so why don't you volunteer a few hours a week to help them?
Maybe because he feels that after he's had a good chunk of his salary taken away by property, state, federal, and local income taxes that are supposed to help fund these schools, that he's already done enough?
But if that were gone I would still volunteer my time as a parent and member of the community.
Just so you understand: that's great - and I mean it. If he wants to volunteer a few hours a week, good for him. I'd encourage him to do so, as much for his sake, as for the sake of the kids in school.
The problem here is that we're not really talking about something that should be done solely through volunteer work. It can be done that way (and done well, as you've demonstrated). But schools shouldn't have to rely on volunteer help for IT support. I mean, for the love of Pete! - most school districts wouldn't even think of calling for volunteers to work on the phone system, run new electrical wiring, fix the plumbing, clean the building, or teach classes. In most cases, they aren't even allowed to think about doing that.
There is just something wrong when a school finds itself having to rely solely on volunteer efforts to fix a broken government program.
I'd like to think that Terry Prachett is like Monty Python meets JRR Tolken.
In some sense, yes. The Rincewind books are definitely in this vein. On the other hand... the Witches and Guards books, IMHO, have changed significantly from their beginnings, and are no longer humorous. Oh, they've got their funny bits, sure - quite a lot of funny bits, as a matter of fact. But...
"Lords and Ladies"? "Carpe Juggulum"? "Night Watch"? "The Truth"? "Wee Free Men"? Hardly laugh-a-minute riots. They're a little bit darker, a little bit too serious to be classified as comedy. The characters are less caricatures and more believable, more real, and the problems they deal with are... well, problems. The kind that can't be solved by the classic bumbling wizard, or (extremely) experienced barbarian horde, and that sometimes are a bit uncomfortable because they seem too much like real problems instead of parodies of problems.
The change came upon the books gradually, I think, so that it can be hard to notice unless something brings it to your attention. For me, it was "Night Watch", when Carcer and Vimes were up on the University roof, and Carcer said something like:
"I can see your house from up here."
That sent chills down my spine. It wasn't funny. It wasn't melodramatic. It wasn't a parody. It wasn't even scary, in a typical fantasy/horror way. It was an amoral killer casually threatening the life of a woman and a child - nothing at all like either Monty Python or JRR Tolken.
Didn't mean to come across as attacking you - my apologies; I was somewhat surprised, myself, at the vehemence of my post. As time goes on, I find myself getting less and less able to deal with examples of obvious stupidity, and in my mind, DUI is exactly that.
OTOH, I think I can agree with you and your points on how the WoD and the overall increase in harsher penalties "carried along" DUI penalties as well; still, I think there was as much (or more of) a recognition of the seriousness of DUI. I missed your point on civil damages; too subtle, or maybe I just wasn't paying attention:-/ While I don't think that someone guilty of DUI deserves to be financially ruined, I do understand that some financial damage is intended to be part of the deterrent. In fact, that may be the primary deterrent for some people. Short of scaling the penalties to match the offendor's income (which may not even be legal in the US), I can't think of any way to make this perfect - any level of fine/penalty will always have the ability to "financially ruin" someone.
When they get drink... ...less to do with the "get touch" stance mentioned...
No, I haven't been drinking myself... that's what you get from hitting "submit" instead of "preview". Grrr... s/drink/drunk/ s/touch/tough/ if you please.
Drunk Driving. In the 1970's (when Niven wrote the story), it was a "slap on the wrist" offense. Now, with pressure from MADD, multiple DUIs result in prison time, mandatory counseling, and exposure civil damages that can easilly (if justifiably) ruin an offender.
Good. There's a reason why DUIs are treated this way: it results in people dying. When a supposed adult drinks, that's fine. That's their right. When they get drink - knowing how it will affect their judgement, reaction times, and ability to concentrate - and then get behind the wheel of a car, they have knowingly and callously decided to put the lives of other people in danger because they would rather not be inconvenienced.
I think the real reason that DUI laws are changing has less to do with the "get touch" stance mentioned, and more to do with a change in perceptions and better education about how utterly, abysmally, incredibly and mind-bogglingly STUPID you need to be to think that drinking and driving is anything except unreasonable and dangerous.
I'm more concerned that someday the rest of the world may need to bend over [backward] to support China's standards.
I would expect that this is at least part of their plans... if China established their own standards within their country, then any foreign company wanting to sell in China will need to comply with those standards. I expect that before those foreign comapnies are allowed to implement those standards and sell in China, they will be required to enter into cross-licensing agreements with the Chinese government. It's not a bad strategy to help reduce the cost that China has to pay in order to compete in the global marketplace.
personally, I'd hope there to be more character in the characters in games and not always be so black and white, THE WORLD ISN'T JUST GOOD VS. BAD. most of the time the 'BAD' guys have solid motives for their actions as well as the good guys can and have 'bad' motives
I was rereading the Hugo Winners Vol II last night, and in the introduction to "Gonna Roll Dem Bones", Isaac Asimov related a coversation he had with Fritz Lieber... in short, Lieber pointed out to Asimov that his stories had people who opposed the hero, but that he never had any villans. Asimov reasoned that it was because he tended to write a more cerebral sort of stoy, more about the conflict of ideas than anything else; and in that case, the a good story demanded reasonable, intelligent villans who did not see themselves as bad/evil, and were capable of explaining themselves and their motives clearly. While they opposed the heros of the story, they had (at least, by their own thoughts) good reasons for doing so.
This reminded me a lot of the role that Magneto eventually grew into in the X-Men comic books - an intelligent opponent who had what he thought were very good reasons for his actions. IMHO, this leads to a much deeper, more satisfying type of story than things like Star Wars, where the villans are villans because... well, just because, you know, they're evil. You never get any background on why they're acting the way they are.
If Asimov had written the Star Wars scripts, he'd probably have set up a situation where Palpatine saw the existance of the Jedi leading to the eventual development of a hereditary ruling class, the destruction of the Trade Federation, and an interminable galaxy-wide dark age of stagnation. A few scenes, a little bit of exposition, and voila! - Palpatine goes from being evil to being a tragic figure, someone who initially desires good, but who finds himself seduced into thinking that the only way to save the Trade Federation from the Jedi is to forge an Empire strong enough to resist them if they were ever to rise again...
(I am not a doctor, what follows is not medical advice, unless you consider "listen to your doctor" to be medical advice...)
A friend of mine in college was schizophrenic. He was fine as long as he took his meds...
I want to echo this, and emphasize it:
If you have a treatable mental illness of any type, take your meds. Do not ever stop your meds unless your physician tells you to do so.
My wife and I worked for a company about 10 years ago, putting together educational literature for the families of people suffering from schizophrenia and clinical depression. The one point the literature - pamphlets, web sites, CD-ROMs, videos, etc. - hammered home was that if you have these conditions, and start taking your medication, you will eventually get to the point where you feel fine and think you can skip your meds. You might even get away with it once or twice, and because most meds have side effects of some sort or another, you may even (temporarily) feel better if you skip your meds. That feeling can give a false sense of security which quickly leads to disaster, exactly as the above poster described.
It is like all those potions in baldurs gate. Protection against gold...
Protection from gold? Gah! What kind of sick, twisted alchemist would come up with that particular concoction? (Probably one who had too much contact with your average everyday adventurer, I guess...)
Well, SCO itself obviously outputs 1.0 SCOs worth of FUD, so that would seem to be the benchmark.
Depends on how you measure it, really. I'd argue that you should measure SCOs by the reaction to FUD...
10 SCOs : FUD causes you to grimace.
20 SCOs : You to call out "Hey, Bahb..." and point it out to a coworker.
30 SCOs : You start muttering to yourself.
40 SCOs : You email a link to your friends, with a "Can you believe these bozos?" note.
50 SCOs : You start muttering to your SO.
60 SCOs :/. creates a new category for the
originator.
70 SCOs : Your SO starts muttering to you.
80 SCOs : You start to draft a rebuttal, only to find out that 392 people have beaten you to it.
90 SCOs : Your SO notices an tangentially related article and brings it to your attention. You mutter at each other and growl at passersby..
100 SCOs : You start a web site to dedicated to fighting the FUD.
By this measure, SCO's FUD comes in at at least 100 SCOs. Microsoft, on the other hand, would typically come in somewhere between 60-90 SCOs (at least in my household).
Agreed, you are obviously not an expert, and you do not understand tax law/payment requirements
I never claimed to be. The rancor in your reply is uncalled for. I probably shouldn't be surprised that there are two apparently contradictory guidelines for SS tax payments, in any case. That's government for you.
While I thank you for pointing me towards the applicable regulations and clearing up my misunderstanding, I'm curious as to what your credentials are, since you seem to imply that you are an expert in US tax law. At the moment, you appear to be npothing more than a somewhat knowedgeable individual using (and possibly misusing) someone else's statistics.
Collected SS receipts.. (You know that little old flat tax on Salaries and wages, no deductibles or exemptions allowed)
Has not been keeping up with inflation.. (And that's assuming zero job growth in the intervening year !!!)
Employers are required to pay social security taxes quarterly. Additionaly, if I'm understanding some of the other references on SS tax payments, employers are only required to make estimated payments quarterly, with any excess paid at the end of the tax year.
I'm not an expert on tax law, and tax documentation makes my eyes water, so I may be misunderstanding. But it appears that it would take at least 3 months for the SS payments for new hires to show up as SS receipts. If anyone has more accurate information on how companies actually pay SS and other payroll taxes, I'd be interested to hear how it actually works.
This is entirely by accident, but I've talked to others who have done the same thing, and they've reported similar results.
About 2 years ago, my wife and I set up our own mail server in-house. While we set up the normal "service@domain" addresses for various things, I also had her create a "spam@ourdomain" address for me - something I could use as a generic address for one-time registration pages, that sort of thing. I've been using my "spam@" address pretty regularly since it's been created. More so as time wore on, when something became pretty apparent:
I was getting almost no spam directed to that address.
Now, I've used that address in a number of places, including on Usenet. I get (perhaps) one or two prices of spam per month. The only thing I can figure is that spammers, or folks putting together mailing lists for spammers, have decided that "spam@" just isn't worth sending email to. Maybe I've just been lucky; maybe my "spam@" address will be inundated with spam tomorrow morning. I don't know. I do know that it's worked well enough for me that if I ever end up managing a mail server for another domain, I'm going to make sure that I have a "spam@" address there as well.
My wife and I were in Butler, PA about 2-3 years ago to consult a doctor. We arrived early, and decided to wander around a bit and grab a bite to eat.
So, we walked by a storefront with a sign on it that said "Attrition". I glanced in the windows, saw a bunch of hardware, and took a few more steps before I realized "Hey... I *know* who that is!" I went back and poped in with my daughter, just to say hi. Gist of the conversation:
Attrition guy: Can I help you?
Me: Are you the guys that run attrition.org? AG: Yes, that's us. Me: Wow. I had no idea that you were in Butler. AG: Um... yeah. Me: OK, just wanted to say hi. Later!
What really registered with me was that here was a fairly well-known web site, being run out of Butler, of all places. No need to live in NY, LA, Chicago, Boston, or any of those other urban sprawls... just find a nice town, get yourself a net connection, and you're in business.
Grab a copy of win95 or 98, find a good 200mhz, and you're off.
Heh. This is exactly what I ended up doing in order to play some old Might & Magic games. Before that, I tried using DOSBox, FreeDOS, and even VMWare - for different reasons, none worked out for me. Turned out it was overall easier to just grab an old machine and throiw DOS on it.
Slashdot Mirror
The semantic web is bogus :-)
I didn't really hear anything about LTT - then again, I kind of focused on topics more relevant to embedded systems development. There may have been some mention of LTT in the talks on the more high-end enterprise systems stuff.
RedHat was following the rules (particularly the ones about switching auditors), and their new auditors convinced them to use a slightly different accounting method for their subscription accounting. It looks as if their previous accounting method was not neccesarily incorrect, flawed, or false - just different.
How is it that someone can bring a class action lawsuit against a company for changing their accounting practices from one one allowed method to another allowed method?
No so anymore. They very much want Eclipse to be useful as a general framework for building arbitrary applications. For Eclipse 3.0, the team made a good effort to seperate out the basic platform functionality from the IDE aspects.
Take a look at the "Rich Client Platform" notes in the New and Noteworthy docs for Eclipse 3.0.
Apparently :-/ Your language (or my reading) made it seem to me like you were criticizing the schools for their policies, instead of the students for complaining when they already knew it was a pretty well-regulated environment.
I'd argue that this is really just another factor in their decision. The majority of the students are legally adults, and their parents can't force them to go to this school. Likewise, they can't force their parents to support them, financially or otherwise. The decision on where to go to college (or eve if you want to go) is one of the first choices you get to make in your adult life. It's a heck of a thinig to realize that your negotiating with your parents over somthing like this, but that's really what happens.
BTW - also not relevant to the conversation - I'm currently attending a religious institution that meets the "restrictive" criteria, though it's not as restrictive as some I've been able to pass up. I'm not sure my parents really approve, but as I'm 35 years old with a wife and two kids, I was more influenced by my immediate family than my parents.
I suspect that most students were aware of the restrictions at the college before they applied. I've taken a look at a number of Christian schools, and all were very up-front about their policies and restrictions. A good thing, IMHO; whether or not you agree with their policies, it would be best to know about them before plunking down that first semester's tuition. I'd be willing to bet that for a good number of folks, the nature of the campus environment was actually a positive factor influencing their decision.
In other words: most of the students made their choice, paid their money, and are attending Wheaton because they would rather be there than somewhere else. Why do you feel the need to be critical of the school for providing what their students want?
"Platform" does not neccesarily equate to "hardware" (x86 Windows, x86 Linux, and x86 BSD are three different platforms). Keep that in mind, and go back and read the statement on portability. What he's describing sounds an awful lot like POSIX - hardware abstractions handled by the OS, a standard API available for userland apps.
Maybe because he feels that after he's had a good chunk of his salary taken away by property, state, federal, and local income taxes that are supposed to help fund these schools, that he's already done enough?
Just so you understand: that's great - and I mean it. If he wants to volunteer a few hours a week, good for him. I'd encourage him to do so, as much for his sake, as for the sake of the kids in school.
The problem here is that we're not really talking about something that should be done solely through volunteer work. It can be done that way (and done well, as you've demonstrated). But schools shouldn't have to rely on volunteer help for IT support. I mean, for the love of Pete! - most school districts wouldn't even think of calling for volunteers to work on the phone system, run new electrical wiring, fix the plumbing, clean the building, or teach classes. In most cases, they aren't even allowed to think about doing that. There is just something wrong when a school finds itself having to rely solely on volunteer efforts to fix a broken government program.
In some sense, yes. The Rincewind books are definitely in this vein. On the other hand... the Witches and Guards books, IMHO, have changed significantly from their beginnings, and are no longer humorous. Oh, they've got their funny bits, sure - quite a lot of funny bits, as a matter of fact. But...
"Lords and Ladies"? "Carpe Juggulum"? "Night Watch"? "The Truth"? "Wee Free Men"? Hardly laugh-a-minute riots. They're a little bit darker, a little bit too serious to be classified as comedy. The characters are less caricatures and more believable, more real, and the problems they deal with are... well, problems. The kind that can't be solved by the classic bumbling wizard, or (extremely) experienced barbarian horde, and that sometimes are a bit uncomfortable because they seem too much like real problems instead of parodies of problems.
The change came upon the books gradually, I think, so that it can be hard to notice unless something brings it to your attention. For me, it was "Night Watch", when Carcer and Vimes were up on the University roof, and Carcer said something like:
That sent chills down my spine. It wasn't funny. It wasn't melodramatic. It wasn't a parody. It wasn't even scary, in a typical fantasy/horror way. It was an amoral killer casually threatening the life of a woman and a child - nothing at all like either Monty Python or JRR Tolken.
At least, as practiced by Ubersoft.
Stock Linux is neither. I personally know of at least one company that offers a hard real-time version of Linux.
ObDisclaimer: yes, I work for TimeSys.
I'm doomed.
Didn't mean to come across as attacking you - my apologies; I was somewhat surprised, myself, at the vehemence of my post. As time goes on, I find myself getting less and less able to deal with examples of obvious stupidity, and in my mind, DUI is exactly that.
OTOH, I think I can agree with you and your points on how the WoD and the overall increase in harsher penalties "carried along" DUI penalties as well; still, I think there was as much (or more of) a recognition of the seriousness of DUI. I missed your point on civil damages; too subtle, or maybe I just wasn't paying attention :-/ While I don't think that someone guilty of DUI deserves to be financially ruined, I do understand that some financial damage is intended to be part of the deterrent. In fact, that may be the primary deterrent for some people. Short of scaling the penalties to match the offendor's income (which may not even be legal in the US), I can't think of any way to make this perfect - any level of fine/penalty will always have the ability to "financially ruin" someone.
Good. There's a reason why DUIs are treated this way: it results in people dying. When a supposed adult drinks, that's fine. That's their right. When they get drink - knowing how it will affect their judgement, reaction times, and ability to concentrate - and then get behind the wheel of a car, they have knowingly and callously decided to put the lives of other people in danger because they would rather not be inconvenienced.
I think the real reason that DUI laws are changing has less to do with the "get touch" stance mentioned, and more to do with a change in perceptions and better education about how utterly, abysmally, incredibly and mind-bogglingly STUPID you need to be to think that drinking and driving is anything except unreasonable and dangerous.
I would expect that this is at least part of their plans... if China established their own standards within their country, then any foreign company wanting to sell in China will need to comply with those standards. I expect that before those foreign comapnies are allowed to implement those standards and sell in China, they will be required to enter into cross-licensing agreements with the Chinese government. It's not a bad strategy to help reduce the cost that China has to pay in order to compete in the global marketplace.
I was rereading the Hugo Winners Vol II last night, and in the introduction to "Gonna Roll Dem Bones", Isaac Asimov related a coversation he had with Fritz Lieber... in short, Lieber pointed out to Asimov that his stories had people who opposed the hero, but that he never had any villans. Asimov reasoned that it was because he tended to write a more cerebral sort of stoy, more about the conflict of ideas than anything else; and in that case, the a good story demanded reasonable, intelligent villans who did not see themselves as bad/evil, and were capable of explaining themselves and their motives clearly. While they opposed the heros of the story, they had (at least, by their own thoughts) good reasons for doing so.
This reminded me a lot of the role that Magneto eventually grew into in the X-Men comic books - an intelligent opponent who had what he thought were very good reasons for his actions. IMHO, this leads to a much deeper, more satisfying type of story than things like Star Wars, where the villans are villans because... well, just because, you know, they're evil. You never get any background on why they're acting the way they are.
If Asimov had written the Star Wars scripts, he'd probably have set up a situation where Palpatine saw the existance of the Jedi leading to the eventual development of a hereditary ruling class, the destruction of the Trade Federation, and an interminable galaxy-wide dark age of stagnation. A few scenes, a little bit of exposition, and voila! - Palpatine goes from being evil to being a tragic figure, someone who initially desires good, but who finds himself seduced into thinking that the only way to save the Trade Federation from the Jedi is to forge an Empire strong enough to resist them if they were ever to rise again...
(I am not a doctor, what follows is not medical advice, unless you consider "listen to your doctor" to be medical advice...)
I want to echo this, and emphasize it:
If you have a treatable mental illness of any type, take your meds. Do not ever stop your meds unless your physician tells you to do so.My wife and I worked for a company about 10 years ago, putting together educational literature for the families of people suffering from schizophrenia and clinical depression. The one point the literature - pamphlets, web sites, CD-ROMs, videos, etc. - hammered home was that if you have these conditions, and start taking your medication, you will eventually get to the point where you feel fine and think you can skip your meds. You might even get away with it once or twice, and because most meds have side effects of some sort or another, you may even (temporarily) feel better if you skip your meds. That feeling can give a false sense of security which quickly leads to disaster, exactly as the above poster described.
Protection from gold? Gah! What kind of sick, twisted alchemist would come up with that particular concoction? (Probably one who had too much contact with your average everyday adventurer, I guess...)
Depends on how you measure it, really. I'd argue that you should measure SCOs by the reaction to FUD...
By this measure, SCO's FUD comes in at at least 100 SCOs. Microsoft, on the other hand, would typically come in somewhere between 60-90 SCOs (at least in my household).
I never claimed to be. The rancor in your reply is uncalled for. I probably shouldn't be surprised that there are two apparently contradictory guidelines for SS tax payments, in any case. That's government for you.
While I thank you for pointing me towards the applicable regulations and clearing up my misunderstanding, I'm curious as to what your credentials are, since you seem to imply that you are an expert in US tax law. At the moment, you appear to be npothing more than a somewhat knowedgeable individual using (and possibly misusing) someone else's statistics.
Employers are required to pay social security taxes quarterly. Additionaly, if I'm understanding some of the other references on SS tax payments, employers are only required to make estimated payments quarterly, with any excess paid at the end of the tax year.
I'm not an expert on tax law, and tax documentation makes my eyes water, so I may be misunderstanding. But it appears that it would take at least 3 months for the SS payments for new hires to show up as SS receipts. If anyone has more accurate information on how companies actually pay SS and other payroll taxes, I'd be interested to hear how it actually works.
This is entirely by accident, but I've talked to others who have done the same thing, and they've reported similar results.
About 2 years ago, my wife and I set up our own mail server in-house. While we set up the normal "service@domain" addresses for various things, I also had her create a "spam@ourdomain" address for me - something I could use as a generic address for one-time registration pages, that sort of thing. I've been using my "spam@" address pretty regularly since it's been created. More so as time wore on, when something became pretty apparent:
I was getting almost no spam directed to that address.
Now, I've used that address in a number of places, including on Usenet. I get (perhaps) one or two prices of spam per month. The only thing I can figure is that spammers, or folks putting together mailing lists for spammers, have decided that "spam@" just isn't worth sending email to. Maybe I've just been lucky; maybe my "spam@" address will be inundated with spam tomorrow morning. I don't know. I do know that it's worked well enough for me that if I ever end up managing a mail server for another domain, I'm going to make sure that I have a "spam@" address there as well.
My wife and I were in Butler, PA about 2-3 years ago to consult a doctor. We arrived early, and decided to wander around a bit and grab a bite to eat.
So, we walked by a storefront with a sign on it that said "Attrition". I glanced in the windows, saw a bunch of hardware, and took a few more steps before I realized "Hey... I *know* who that is!" I went back and poped in with my daughter, just to say hi. Gist of the conversation:
What really registered with me was that here was a fairly well-known web site, being run out of Butler, of all places. No need to live in NY, LA, Chicago, Boston, or any of those other urban sprawls... just find a nice town, get yourself a net connection, and you're in business.