Just tell her to do a google search for 'Napster unban'. It'll wipe out all the Napster entries in her registry.
I got banned last week, too. I must say that getting banned just pissed me off. Before I got banned, I was just sorta downloading off and on -- maybe for an hour or so every week.
But now?
Fuck that. I've got 1 30 gig hard drive packed with MP3s, 1 40 gig hard drive, and my connection is up 24/7. 70 gigs -- 24/7 on a 1.05 Mbs SDSL drive. No upload caps. Have it at.
They can keep banning me, and I'll keep running the dumb little unban crack. Obviously, they don't ban IP addresses, so what's the point?
Maybe this kinda attitude just hurts the artists -- okay, I can see that. But the idea of "banning" one person while millions of others are doing the same exact thing is just absurd.
Usually a denial just means that they're not ready to talk about it. They don't have an official press release ready, they haven't notified all the key people, legal isn't prepared for the media onslaught, etc. etc.
My bet is that within 5-7 days this news will be confirmed. I don't know anything, of course, but that's usually the case with these sorts of news items.
Hey forget about the atari games. What interests me is the "Mr. Potato Head Foot Massagers" mentioned in the article.
If this isn't a good example of marketing gone, well, awry, I don't know what is.
I mean, ya gotta wish you were a fly on the wall when the marketing guy sat down and made his pitch to management: "Hey, I got this new idea. You're gonna love it. I'm pretty sure we're first to bat with this one..."
Can someone explain where the general address "people" comes from -- as in "think people!"
It's odd.
Students -- students still in college, I mean -- use this address lot:
"Hey, people, listen to me. Just calm down and listen. If you're really a revolutionary, people, then you *know* what it means to sit here and get spat it and get dumped on. You won't try to impress anyone -- you'll just *do* it. So *think*, people. Think about what it means. Once the fuzz gets the hooks in your groovy ass, you'll *wish* you was a radical revolutionary."
Do what Cassavetes did 40 years ago -- say FU to the suits (and give a very special FU to Jack Valenti) -- and get a 16mm (or DV recorder these days) and do it yourself.
That may be the irony of the Indrema if it ever makes it to market: its hackable nature may, in fact, turn it into anything *but* the hackable console that Indrema thinks it will become. It'll be hackable, yeah, but it won't be a gaming console: it'll be a webserver appliance or MP3 appliance or internet radio.
I mean, there's nothing worse than hacking something the way that corporations (TIVO, indrema) *want* you to hack it. It's much more fun to come up with something odd.
And it's especially fun to come up with something both odd and irksome to the companies that produced the hardware. LOL.
But one thing I've noticed with hacking (and mind you, my own "hacking" has been limited to TIVO and I-Opener) is that the desire to hack a particular appliance only has a limited half-life. I've got an iOpener gathering dust and no desire to go back into the case of my TIVO and do more voodoo with the serial port and PPP.
Indrema may suffer this lethargy once it reaches market and attains a critical mass (which may, admittedly, take a while): the hackability desire will wear off very, very quickly and everyone will be left with Indrema paperweights -- or Indrema consoles used, as mentioned above, as web servers or MP3 players or hard frisbees.
Regardless, my prediction is this: Indrema won't make it to the marketplace, period. Nor will ZapStation, BTW.
Me, I'd buy the ZapStation right now -- right this minute -- but I notice no press about it, nothing new and/or tantalizing on the ZapStation website, and no advance word leaking forth. I suspect it'll be like the TIVO -- warm and fuzzy and inspire a ZapStation army and a cult of fanaticists -- but it's taking way too long to get to market. It oughta be on sale right now -- right this minute -- and I oughta be able to go to the website, purchase it, and have it shipped 2 day FedEx. But, alas, I think it, too, will be vaporware. Sorta like that 3D card from Sweden that everyone talked about right as the GeForce was coming out -- a year and a half ago -- I forget the name.
Ah well. The web is a magical thing. Lots of space to talk about technology that will never make it past some smooth-talking CEO's PowerPoint presentation.
Indrema is supposed to be available in *late-spring* 2001?
And they're not yet touting their 3 "hottest" titles?
It doesn't make sense to me. They're touting all the linux goodness -- and that's fine, don't get me wrong -- but linux goodness by itself doesn't make the cheese log a cheese log.
It's the content that makes everything smacking good and cheesy, and if they're pushing simply linux -- and the ability to "make your own stuff with our SDK" -- well, that's all well and good, but who wants to wait 3 years for some lame half-finished Quake I wannabe? ("Here's my new game done by Gilbert Wannabe III; I haven't yet finished the rendering engine, but I'm releasing it as open source in the hopes that four or five other people across the globe might want to take a look at my spaghetti mess of code and, well, maybe finish out my game. I'm a wanna-be MOD author, but, ya know, college is getting in the way, and my grades are way down, and I... I just don't have the time to support the site or the game, so, farewell, and thanks for all the memories, and here -- take this -- my code. Maybe someone can figure it out and do something with it.")
Those Indrema folks, they oughta wake up and smell the gouda.
Hey there's always a TIVO! And now's a good time to get a TIVO -- they're launching a new essay contest today or tomorrow. 10 free 20 hour TIVOs given away each day for the next month or so.
The first essay content -- a couple months ago -- was a remarkably easy way to get a 14 hour (and sometimes a 30 hour) TIVO for free.
Tivo Army Captain (Usually a 'Senior' or 'Special Member' on the forum): "Wait a sec. Wait just a goddamn sec. Do you know the percentage of people who have (cable/dsl/broadband)? Do you know the percentage of people who have a home network? NO ONE NEEDS THIS HACK. NO ONE WANTS THIS HACK. NO ONE NEEDS ETHERNET. NO ONE HAS A HOME NETWORK. THE TIVO IS NOT JUST FOR GEEKS."
It's all very nice -- this Indrema stuff -- but call me a skeptic: I'll believe it when I can order it and have it in my grubby hands within 24 hours.
Until then it's all flash, no substance. Sorta like the ZapStation: an interesting machine, a pretty good price-point (although the ZapStation should be about 200 bucks cheaper), but is it available?
Not a chance.
When is the Indrema gonna ship? By Thanksgiving? HA!
By Christmas?
I doubt it.
Show me the goods. Until then? The tease is pretty damn irksome.
Well, I spent three years at Michigan as a grad assistant and, yeah, my "salary" each year was around 10 grand. (And, of course, remember that grad assistants don't get paid from May to September, so take that into consideration...)
Try teaching three classes a year (freshmen classes, I mean), writing a doctoral thesis, and *taking* five classes a year and, well, you're a candidate for burnout.
Now, try living like this for 4-5 years.
Now, I'm not saying that my suffering should be praised or rewarded. Many people have done it, managed to do it well, and eventually got themselves good jobs out of it. (And in fact, I find more prospective employers impressed with the fact that I went the "old school" route -- English/Comp Sci BA, English MA, Creative Writing MFA, English PhD -- than some of these comp-sci hot shots who don't even graduate college. Which, of course, brings up another interesting question: are liberal arts grads -- who come to programming jobs indirectly -- more highly regarded than straight-to-work comp-sci grads? Well, my experience has been interesting. I've had more than a few employers say how refreshing it was to see someone who could code well with a background in something other comp-sci. But I've had a lot of managers who see me woefully under-qualified. Usually these are miserable people to work for, so I'm more than happy to move on. So YMMV.)
But -- getting back to my original point -- it is true to say that a PhD does (eventually) make 7-10X more than his or her pathetic grad student salary!
I expect my goddamn politicians to know who they're talking to, yes.
I expect my politicians to wonder about something called 'Slashdot' if (a) they're asked to submit questions to this thing called 'Slashdot' and (b) they don't know anything about this thing called 'Slashdot'.
And no, I don't want to pandered to. But I do expect my politicians to have enough brains to realize, well, wait a minute I'd like to figure out just who the audience is for Slashdot, what things they're concerned about, and how the issues *I'm* concerned about fit into their concerns. That's what a politician is: someone who speaks to the people and not someone who just repeats bullet points.
You want a talking head? Get the goddamn talking teeth I mentioned in the first post. Attach some fuzz to the top of the teeth, cut out some little cardboard dancing shoes, and there you go: there's your talking head. For the full effect, turn the Shrub on when he appears on CSPAN and let the teeth have at it. Let 'em chatter and skip and pop until you've had your fill.
That's what these answers are. They're talking head answers.
And yes, I expect my politicians to fscking personalize their answers. There's a big difference between "pandering" and "personalizing".
After reading through the questions and answers, am I the only one who gets the odd feeling that the candidates -- but the Shrub especially -- has no sense (at least from their answers) that they're writing for Slashdot's audience? (Or, worse yet, that they even know what Slashdot is? Or that, yeah, Slashdot is, um, actually on this "thing" called the "web"?)
The Shrub's answers sound like well-crafted speech points. Obviously, he didn't write these-- his aides did. Yeah, I realize that.
But you might as well just tape record the Shrub's answers, get one of those chit-chattering teeth things, wind it up, play the tape recorder, and watch how the teeth jump and skitter and pop with the answers on the tape recorder until they chatter right off the table and onto the floor...
After reading through all these comments (many quite good) I realized that a lot of the people posting were (probably) born *after* the halcyon days of Pong and the original Atari. That's pretty weird.
I mean, the Atari, Intellivision, and (later) ColecoVision -- and going to the Aladdin's Castle at the mall to play stuff like Donkey Kong and Pac Man and (my fav) Tron -- were staples of my later "kid" years.
I remember, too, picking up some cheesy pong game at Radio Shack. It was basically pong and some weird shoot-the-TV screen gun game.
And, of course, I remember many days in Sears playing the Sears-branded version of Atari.
It's textual instead of visual and so (I'll bet) would most certainly escape the "censorious" claws of the corporate hawks.
It's also a telling example -- and this is veering way, way off topic -- about how specific forms of "content" (in this case "visual" content as opposed to "textual" content) have been privileged above other forms of content.
True, in America this might be considered "child porn" -- but the canonized status of "Shakespeare" (and all that falls under category "Shakespeare") would probably pass a "censorware" test, whereas the noncanonized category of "Anonymous Photograph of Child Porn in a dark room with splotched colors" would certainly *fail* said censorware test. Even though in theory the photograph could *visually* represent the same "event" that the text is textually representing.
This is not to defend child porn -- not by a long shot -- but just to emphasize (in my mind, if no one else's) the ability for one media to be so drastically different and privileged than another form of media even though -- in theory -- each bit of media could be *representing* the same thing.
Kinda make you wonder who sat up one day, wiped the sleep from his (or her) eyes, and made the rules: textual stuff okay, visual stuff bad.
I've always thought it's the fault of those fucking American puritans. They pretty much ruined it for the rest of us. Work hard, do good, go to church, and live in spartan surroundings.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a detailed ZDNET story about Juno's new experiment. Even Juno admits that this new project may have its problems: http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2681 625,00.html?chkpt=zdhpnews01
Hey interiot,
9 21 9&cid=101
If I recall, you doubted me when I posted that the "rumors" about the demise of Dreamcast were true.
So, um, I hate to say it, but well: I TOLD YOU SO.
See:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=01/01/23/21
LOL. LOL. LOL.
Just tell her to do a google search for 'Napster unban'. It'll wipe out all the Napster entries in her registry.
I got banned last week, too. I must say that getting banned just pissed me off. Before I got banned, I was just sorta downloading off and on -- maybe for an hour or so every week.
But now?
Fuck that. I've got 1 30 gig hard drive packed with MP3s, 1 40 gig hard drive, and my connection is up 24/7. 70 gigs -- 24/7 on a 1.05 Mbs SDSL drive. No upload caps. Have it at.
They can keep banning me, and I'll keep running the dumb little unban crack. Obviously, they don't ban IP addresses, so what's the point?
Maybe this kinda attitude just hurts the artists -- okay, I can see that. But the idea of "banning" one person while millions of others are doing the same exact thing is just absurd.
Slate.com, too.
Hotmail is sluggish, and I can't get to MSNBC.
I'm most irritated about Slate, though. There's nothing better than waking up, going to Slate, and seeing the latest "Bushism" of the day.
Yeeeeeeehaw!
Official denials mean absolutely nothing.
Usually a denial just means that they're not ready to talk about it. They don't have an official press release ready, they haven't notified all the key people, legal isn't prepared for the media onslaught, etc. etc.
My bet is that within 5-7 days this news will be confirmed. I don't know anything, of course, but that's usually the case with these sorts of news items.
Hey forget about the atari games. What interests me is the "Mr. Potato Head Foot Massagers" mentioned in the article.
If this isn't a good example of marketing gone, well, awry, I don't know what is.
I mean, ya gotta wish you were a fly on the wall when the marketing guy sat down and made his pitch to management: "Hey, I got this new idea. You're gonna love it. I'm pretty sure we're first to bat with this one..."
But I can say that playing games drastically improves hand/eye coordination ...
Yeah. Sure. Hey, you wanna hear another one?
Time: 4:17pm
Place: Somewhere in the suburbs. A bedroom.
Characters: 1 13 year old. 1 mom.
"This? Um, this is Playboy."
"I know what it is. But why do you have it?"
"The articles. I read it for the articles."
Whatever happened to Indrema? Are they already out of business? I thought they were looking for developers, too.
Can someone explain where the general address "people" comes from -- as in "think people!"
It's odd.
Students -- students still in college, I mean -- use this address lot:
"Hey, people, listen to me. Just calm down and listen. If you're really a revolutionary, people, then you *know* what it means to sit here and get spat it and get dumped on. You won't try to impress anyone -- you'll just *do* it. So *think*, people. Think about what it means. Once the fuzz gets the hooks in your groovy ass, you'll *wish* you was a radical revolutionary."
What's a DOOLY?
I don't KNOW what it is, but I'd LIKE one.
LOL -- Drag out the freak.
..."
"Hey, look at the freak!"
"What is he?"
"Geek."
"A geek freak?"
"In the flesh."
"Does he talk?"
"I dunno. Ask him."
"Do you talk?"
Freak: "Yes."
"He talks!"
"Look, the geek freak talks!"
"What do you do?"
"I am 15."
"Freak goes to school."
"Hey, dammit, he's not a freak."
"I am not a freak."
"That's right. He's a normal guy."
"Then what's he doing here?"
"Somebody thought it would be interesting to ask him questions."
"What kind of questions?"
"What kind of questions do you answer?"
"I don't know. They dragged me out here. Ask me a question."
"Anything?"
"Yeah."
"Hmmm. Okay. How about this: why did you volunteer to be on Slashdot?"
"I didn't. Someone thought it would be a good idea."
"The idea is that he's a normal guy."
"A geek."
"Then why's he in the Slashdot JonKatz freakshow?"
"I am not a freak."
"I know you're not a freak. I understand that. But I'm asking: why are you here?"
"I don't know. Ask Slashdot."
"It's because of Katz. He figures that geeks get a rough time in school. He figures that Slashdot is a different crowd."
"We are?"
"We'd appreciate his differences."
"Appreciate what?"
"That he's
"A geek?"
"I guess."
"Did anyone think that by dragging him out and making him into an 'Ask the Geek' editorial item that you're not actually helping the guy?"
"Oh no. We're helping him. We care."
To the geek: "Do you feel helped?"
"Not exactly."
"What do you feel?"
"Awkward."
"Like you're in the spotlight and people are looking at you?"
"Um. A little. Yeah."
"Are people asking you questions?"
"Some."
"Are they good questions?"
Geek shrugs. "Some."
"A lot?"
"No."
"Not many?"
Geek shrugs again. "No."
Here's the URL for the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority.
All done in Cold Fusion, MS SQL back-end:
http://www.icjia.state.il.us
The site contains a full content admin section, pages are set to expire at specific dates, etc.
Or, better yet, make your own indie film.
Really. I'm serious.
Do what Cassavetes did 40 years ago -- say FU to the suits (and give a very special FU to Jack Valenti) -- and get a 16mm (or DV recorder these days) and do it yourself.
Actually, the money was awarded because the hackers followed the bizarre *rules* of the contest.
What hacker worth his (or her) salt would follow rules set by some corporate entity?
A whore hacker in search of a corporate pimp is who.
That may be the irony of the Indrema if it ever makes it to market: its hackable nature may, in fact, turn it into anything *but* the hackable console that Indrema thinks it will become. It'll be hackable, yeah, but it won't be a gaming console: it'll be a webserver appliance or MP3 appliance or internet radio.
I mean, there's nothing worse than hacking something the way that corporations (TIVO, indrema) *want* you to hack it. It's much more fun to come up with something odd.
And it's especially fun to come up with something both odd and irksome to the companies that produced the hardware. LOL.
But one thing I've noticed with hacking (and mind you, my own "hacking" has been limited to TIVO and I-Opener) is that the desire to hack a particular appliance only has a limited half-life. I've got an iOpener gathering dust and no desire to go back into the case of my TIVO and do more voodoo with the serial port and PPP.
Indrema may suffer this lethargy once it reaches market and attains a critical mass (which may, admittedly, take a while): the hackability desire will wear off very, very quickly and everyone will be left with Indrema paperweights -- or Indrema consoles used, as mentioned above, as web servers or MP3 players or hard frisbees.
Regardless, my prediction is this: Indrema won't make it to the marketplace, period. Nor will ZapStation, BTW.
Me, I'd buy the ZapStation right now -- right this minute -- but I notice no press about it, nothing new and/or tantalizing on the ZapStation website, and no advance word leaking forth. I suspect it'll be like the TIVO -- warm and fuzzy and inspire a ZapStation army and a cult of fanaticists -- but it's taking way too long to get to market. It oughta be on sale right now -- right this minute -- and I oughta be able to go to the website, purchase it, and have it shipped 2 day FedEx. But, alas, I think it, too, will be vaporware. Sorta like that 3D card from Sweden that everyone talked about right as the GeForce was coming out -- a year and a half ago -- I forget the name.
Ah well. The web is a magical thing. Lots of space to talk about technology that will never make it past some smooth-talking CEO's PowerPoint presentation.
I suspect more than the titles are vaporware.
... I just don't have the time to support the site or the game, so, farewell, and thanks for all the memories, and here -- take this -- my code. Maybe someone can figure it out and do something with it.")
Indrema is supposed to be available in *late-spring* 2001?
And they're not yet touting their 3 "hottest" titles?
It doesn't make sense to me. They're touting all the linux goodness -- and that's fine, don't get me wrong -- but linux goodness by itself doesn't make the cheese log a cheese log.
It's the content that makes everything smacking good and cheesy, and if they're pushing simply linux -- and the ability to "make your own stuff with our SDK" -- well, that's all well and good, but who wants to wait 3 years for some lame half-finished Quake I wannabe? ("Here's my new game done by Gilbert Wannabe III; I haven't yet finished the rendering engine, but I'm releasing it as open source in the hopes that four or five other people across the globe might want to take a look at my spaghetti mess of code and, well, maybe finish out my game. I'm a wanna-be MOD author, but, ya know, college is getting in the way, and my grades are way down, and I
Those Indrema folks, they oughta wake up and smell the gouda.
Hey there's always a TIVO! And now's a good time to get a TIVO -- they're launching a new essay contest today or tomorrow. 10 free 20 hour TIVOs given away each day for the next month or so.
The first essay content -- a couple months ago -- was a remarkably easy way to get a 14 hour (and sometimes a 30 hour) TIVO for free.
You forget #11:
11. A new hack?
Tivo Army Captain (Usually a 'Senior' or 'Special Member' on the forum): "Wait a sec. Wait just a goddamn sec. Do you know the percentage of people who have (cable/dsl/broadband)? Do you know the percentage of people who have a home network? NO ONE NEEDS THIS HACK. NO ONE WANTS THIS HACK. NO ONE NEEDS ETHERNET. NO ONE HAS A HOME NETWORK. THE TIVO IS NOT JUST FOR GEEKS."
It's all very nice -- this Indrema stuff -- but call me a skeptic: I'll believe it when I can order it and have it in my grubby hands within 24 hours.
Until then it's all flash, no substance. Sorta like the ZapStation: an interesting machine, a pretty good price-point (although the ZapStation should be about 200 bucks cheaper), but is it available?
Not a chance.
When is the Indrema gonna ship? By Thanksgiving? HA!
By Christmas?
I doubt it.
Show me the goods. Until then? The tease is pretty damn irksome.
Well, I spent three years at Michigan as a grad assistant and, yeah, my "salary" each year was around 10 grand. (And, of course, remember that grad assistants don't get paid from May to September, so take that into consideration...)
Try teaching three classes a year (freshmen classes, I mean), writing a doctoral thesis, and *taking* five classes a year and, well, you're a candidate for burnout.
Now, try living like this for 4-5 years.
Now, I'm not saying that my suffering should be praised or rewarded. Many people have done it, managed to do it well, and eventually got themselves good jobs out of it. (And in fact, I find more prospective employers impressed with the fact that I went the "old school" route -- English/Comp Sci BA, English MA, Creative Writing MFA, English PhD -- than some of these comp-sci hot shots who don't even graduate college. Which, of course, brings up another interesting question: are liberal arts grads -- who come to programming jobs indirectly -- more highly regarded than straight-to-work comp-sci grads? Well, my experience has been interesting. I've had more than a few employers say how refreshing it was to see someone who could code well with a background in something other comp-sci. But I've had a lot of managers who see me woefully under-qualified. Usually these are miserable people to work for, so I'm more than happy to move on. So YMMV.)
But -- getting back to my original point -- it is true to say that a PhD does (eventually) make 7-10X more than his or her pathetic grad student salary!
I expect my goddamn politicians to know who they're talking to, yes.
I expect my politicians to wonder about something called 'Slashdot' if (a) they're asked to submit questions to this thing called 'Slashdot' and (b) they don't know anything about this thing called 'Slashdot'.
And no, I don't want to pandered to. But I do expect my politicians to have enough brains to realize, well, wait a minute I'd like to figure out just who the audience is for Slashdot, what things they're concerned about, and how the issues *I'm* concerned about fit into their concerns. That's what a politician is: someone who speaks to the people and not someone who just repeats bullet points.
You want a talking head? Get the goddamn talking teeth I mentioned in the first post. Attach some fuzz to the top of the teeth, cut out some little cardboard dancing shoes, and there you go: there's your talking head. For the full effect, turn the Shrub on when he appears on CSPAN and let the teeth have at it. Let 'em chatter and skip and pop until you've had your fill.
That's what these answers are. They're talking head answers.
And yes, I expect my politicians to fscking personalize their answers. There's a big difference between "pandering" and "personalizing".
After reading through the questions and answers, am I the only one who gets the odd feeling that the candidates -- but the Shrub especially -- has no sense (at least from their answers) that they're writing for Slashdot's audience? (Or, worse yet, that they even know what Slashdot is? Or that, yeah, Slashdot is, um, actually on this "thing" called the "web"?)
The Shrub's answers sound like well-crafted speech points. Obviously, he didn't write these-- his aides did. Yeah, I realize that.
But you might as well just tape record the Shrub's answers, get one of those chit-chattering teeth things, wind it up, play the tape recorder, and watch how the teeth jump and skitter and pop with the answers on the tape recorder until they chatter right off the table and onto the floor...
For god sakes, is there a PDF of this somewhere?
If not, can someone make one? Something like this actually needs a little better format than just slapdashing it across a normal Slashdot page.
After reading through all these comments (many quite good) I realized that a lot of the people posting were (probably) born *after* the halcyon days of Pong and the original Atari. That's pretty weird.
I mean, the Atari, Intellivision, and (later) ColecoVision -- and going to the Aladdin's Castle at the mall to play stuff like Donkey Kong and Pac Man and (my fav) Tron -- were staples of my later "kid" years.
I remember, too, picking up some cheesy pong game at Radio Shack. It was basically pong and some weird shoot-the-TV screen gun game.
And, of course, I remember many days in Sears playing the Sears-branded version of Atari.
Wow.
This is a good example.
It's textual instead of visual and so (I'll bet) would most certainly escape the "censorious" claws of the corporate hawks.
It's also a telling example -- and this is veering way, way off topic -- about how specific forms of "content" (in this case "visual" content as opposed to "textual" content) have been privileged above other forms of content.
True, in America this might be considered "child porn" -- but the canonized status of "Shakespeare" (and all that falls under category "Shakespeare") would probably pass a "censorware" test, whereas the noncanonized category of "Anonymous Photograph of Child Porn in a dark room with splotched colors" would certainly *fail* said censorware test. Even though in theory the photograph could *visually* represent the same "event" that the text is textually representing.
This is not to defend child porn -- not by a long shot -- but just to emphasize (in my mind, if no one else's) the ability for one media to be so drastically different and privileged than another form of media even though -- in theory -- each bit of media could be *representing* the same thing.
Kinda make you wonder who sat up one day, wiped the sleep from his (or her) eyes, and made the rules: textual stuff okay, visual stuff bad.
I've always thought it's the fault of those fucking American puritans. They pretty much ruined it for the rest of us. Work hard, do good, go to church, and live in spartan surroundings.
Wankers.