This license is for FAT, not FAT32 which is a different format covered by different patents.
As such it is virtually irrelevant to the general computing field these days and really only applies to those manufacturers who supply preformated storage devices, most of whom use good, old fashioned, DOS era FAT.
"Everything's been thought of before. The trick is to think of it again."
Don't get your knickers in a knot just because someone else once had the same brilliant idea you had. It happens. A lot. It doesn't in any way diminish your own insight, no matter what some dimwitted nebish in the third cube over says.
Or even what you think.
I've always liked Pete Seeger's definition of "sophmoric," the itch to be original. Let it go.
I've never had the "pleasure" of working in a cube farm, but I tend to work in open office like enviroments of one sort or another. I like to dress up my space on a periodic basis. Right now it's a simulated Japanese tatami room, floor seating with the computer on a kotatsu with nonfunctioning wooden hibachi ( actually, it functions as a waste basket). A scroll painting and a rack of swords as a finishing touch. Very comfortable actually, and a damned sight cheaper than an Aeron. It's pretty easy to do in a cube space.
In the past I've done a simulated traditional Mongolian yurt, the rectangular Tibetan equivilent, various native American styles and an English country cottage.
Of course on a workaday basis it helps to have enough authority that no one can give you shit over it.
Next Christmas you might want to try a traditional middle eastern house or nomadic tent for the true Christmas spirit.
Well, it depends on the game really. A game is not a game is not a game.
In some games, Myst for instance, there's really no such thing as frame rate at all. In others, like shooters, the cpu requirements to handle the physics are fairly minimal and nice graphics sells games. These are the ones that require the latest hot card. If you're into sims though, like IL-2 or NASCAR 2003 the physics calculations put the hardest load on the system and for these the hottest cpu, particularly the math coprocessor, will give you the best performance overall.
Everything is always tradeoffs and compromise. Many games even have "favorite" video cards, right down to the particular model and driver. The best you can really do is optimize for your favorite game and play the rest as is possible.
You are confusing ideas of commercial, open source and propriatary.
Commercial Open Source software, while unusual at the moment, is hardly an oxymoron and not unheard of.
It would be more proper to say that if you wish to develop closed source propriatary software based on Qt for distribution (which may, in fact, not be a commercial distribution) you must purchase a commercial license from Trolltech.
Call me anal if you wish ( the line has already formed to the right, take your place at the rear of the line), but I think it's still important to make this distinction as many are confused by it.
Believe it or not, business is not about shipping apps. Most businesses never develop an app in their entire business lives. They ship chairs, oranges, clean kitchen floors, music lessons, entertainment, green lawns laden with chemicals but free of dandelions, katana, baskets, candles, etc.
The world is not a world of commercial software development. Even in the software world most apps are not for commercial release.
To most of these businesses the toolkit is completely irrelevant. Hell, most businesses hardly have more than a handful of custom shell scripts they can call their own and rely entirely on off the shelf solutions. That's one of the things that slows Linux adoption on the desktop in the first place, the lack of certain off the shelf "business oriented" apps.
I'm a business. I've tried both Gnome and KDE. I used to use Gnome. I've standardized on KDE.
Why? Because it's a better business desktop at the moment.
Maybe I should put together The Other User Linux distro for people who like KDE.
Which is why there will never be a "standard" Linux. Which, contrary to the opinions of many, is a Good Thing.
There's more than one breed of dog, and if you don't like dogs there are cats. There's no "need" for this. Wouldn't it be easier for everybody if we just had a "User Pet"? Then we wouldn't have to "support" parrots and the like.
There's also the idea of the strength of genetic diversity. Did you know that geneticists now tend to believe that Cheetahs are the walking extinct? Simply not enough genes left in the pool for viability. That's what makes Microsoft so vulnerable to Linux as well. Too rigid a niche. One good idea away from oblivion.
This is why User Linux is a doomed idea from the start. Businesses, like my own, can already make a choice of a standard distro and desktop. That's what most already do. User Linux offers nothing here. The core to the idea of User Linux is that the majority have to adopt the distro as their standard to create a shared pool of development against that one distro's choice of packages.
Of course you would. Per cut. Against your entire collection (and/or the total number of songs you listened to on the radio).
However, since you aren't locked into a complete propriatary system right on down to the music itself you can assemble a surprisingly good system for surprisingly little money these days.
Ok. Point taken on the iPod ownership thingy though. If you own a Mac and don't want the portability you might be set.
As it happens I own two Macs. One runs System 7 and the other OS8.
And even that's a marked improvement. Most artists don't ever get a single penny from a traditional CD release, let alone a dime a cut.
About the only way they see any money from their own work is by direct retail sales on their own, and they have to pay full wholesale to obtain them as well as go through all the rigermarole (permits, sales tax, etc.) that retail selling implies.
Well yeah. If that's the way you typically buy music you might just as well stick to iTunes where the damage will be limited.
You could, of course, consider changing your taste in music and patronize "artists" capable of producing at least 15 good cuts per 16 cut CD and then purchasing such CDs for five bucks which gives you both the music and a piece of property still worth five bucks, but I suppose you consider it easier to just click "Buy Now."
By the way, if you're worried about being able to pay that loan back, don't sweat it. I'll even give you a job to insure you the income.
I think young people of legal working age should have a place to go to work if they so choose, yes. Wal-Mart at least beats working a frier at Burger King. Most jobs are non-union, by the way, virtually all retail and programming for instance, so if you object to non-union I suggest you stop buying anything retail, especially computer programs and games.
On the other hand they have many pension paying jobs.
This doesn't mean they're not assholes, one way of which they of demonstrating this is by the selling of bowdlerized (you can look that up in your Golden Book Dictionary. Oh, sorry. No you can't.) CDs without labeling them as such. In my book this pretty much writes them off as a place to buy CDs since I object to such behaviour and don't mind bad fucking language in the fucking least.
Wal-Mart now often has a full grocery store under the same roof these days and yes, people grocery shop there. Not that I'd actually buy CDs (or food) from Wal-Mart myself, but most do.
Large cities are less likely to have one of these (but often have other alternatives). A friend visited me from LA once and when I took her to one of our local supermarkets ( just a supermarket, not a Wal-Mart thingy) she couldn't believe it. She wanted to take pictures to show her LA friends what a supermarket out in the "sticks" ( actually the NYS captial district, but comparitively "out in the woods") looked like.
If store one and store two sell an item that looks the same, but store one's is really a better made item with included long term warranty and they sell it for less than store two (which also loads some sort of pay for service agreement into the deal as a requirement of purchase), why would I get mad at store two?
I simply buy the item from store one. On those items in which the situation is reversed I'm perfectly happy to patronize store two as well.
Nor is there any reason for me to be angry with people who buy the item from store two. Sad maybe. They've wasted their money and I presume they had to do something they'd rather not have to aquire that money in the first place. I feel for them.
Let's take a worst case scenario look, an old vinyl album with only 10 tracks. It's eleven bucks at Amazon. A buck more than downloading, but for that I get it already on a CD, in a jewel case (and I like jewel cases for storage) and liner notes. The music is at full bit rate and I retain my fair use rights to rip it for my own use, in any device I wish.
Comes out about even that way I suppose, if rights and bitrate don't mean anything to you.
I can buy it used online, like new, for $5.49, or at my local used shop for five bucks even. Now I'm six bucks ahead of the game, have the CD, have my rips ( of superiour quality) on my HD, have my rights to fair use, etc.
No, I'd guess things are the other way around. You're a happy iTunes patron and are a bit miffed at my pointing out that it isn't a good deal.
Well, ok. People often take bad deals for various reasons, and if they do it knowing it's a bad deal but feeling they get some other benefit out of it, it's their money. I didn't have to exchange my time in someone's salt mine for it.
I'm not analysizing every second of my life. Hell, much of may family considers me a "slacker."
I'm analysing iTunes.
It's a bad deal in terms of time and money and gets me less for either, and it takes me no more that a few seconds to realise that.
If you're not in the habit of taking care of your time and money in such a manner, hey, come on over here, I've got some lottery tickets you might be interested in.
Most Americans are horrible at "time and efficiency" analysis of their own lives, generally "saving" seconds at the cost of later hours and for no particular purpose.
Much as they the gambler thinks he "won" ten bucks on the lottery the other night and ignores the five hundred he spent to become a "winner."
People who sell convienience make a good living off of this tendency. You spend money to avoid irritation, not save time, and don't even count the time you have spend to earn that money into the equation.
It does not take you only two minutes to download a song. You are not counting your losses, such as the time to fire up the app and find the song.
Your milage may vary, of course, but in my case (and in the case of most Americans I would posit)even if I have to make a special trip to the store (open 24/7) for music I'm there inside of ten minutes by bicycle and can do my grocery shopping in the same store while I'm at it, thus saving the time I would have otherwise spent on the special trip to the grocery store.
Or, conversely, I can go do my grocery shopping and pick up several CDs of music at no more expense in time than it takes to toss them into my cart and the additional time it takes to ring them up while ringing up my groceries.
No, I'm afraid that, overall, what you save isn't so much time as it is saving having to move your butt out of your chair. Which is a different issue, and which, in all likelyhood, you have to move anyway to earn the money, so just stop at the music store you pass on your way home from work.
Saving irritation ( and needing to have it now is an issue of irritation, not time)is not the same thing as saving time and/or money, and more often than not must be payed for with greater irritation and money later.
And remember you need to prorate the cost of the iPod itself into the cost of each track. Buy a base level iPod and download 300 tracks and you've actually payed $2 apiece for them.
This is what you get for accepting a propriatary marketing structure.
Hell, if you want to play the tracks on a generic machine you don't even save the time and trouble of ripping them, since, as I understand it, you have to burn them and rip them anyway to do that.
This is the only place where iTunes has the advantage and yes, there have been times when I've bought an entire CD for a single tune ( but I'd note I almost always end up pleasantly surprised by a few of the others I would have otherwise missed), but only because I am a working musician who needed to learn that tune.
Also bear in mind that I grew up in an age when the majority of music was sold as a single for fairly nominal fee. Why did this practice die out?
Because the public prefered to buy albums. Not only can an album be a better artistic work than a single (think Sgt. Pepper or Tommy), but they're overall a better deal. Even if you occasionally get the worst of the deal in a particular instance.
And if you buy a CD for a single tune, well, rip it and then sell the CD. Or find a friend who has it and rip his.
Sneakernet still works and happens completely under the radar.
People pay more, for an inferior product and give up most of their legal rights in the process, all for the "convienience" of downloading music ( which really doesn't take much less in terms of time overall than walking into a music store the next time you happen to be in the mall).
What's more Apple gives all of this money they collect to the music industry who themselves have to do virtually nothing for it but trade a bit of paper. Kicking and screaming. Yeah, right. In the back rooms the execs are shouting bloody Hosannas day and night. They can't get the public to pay for DRMed CDs but Apple has somehow gotten them to buy DRMed rips for a premium price.
I'll keep doing it the old fashioned way until I get a better deal, thank you very much.
It has to do with that Fifth Ammendment thingy. You can't be compelled to testify against yourself. Since you are compelled to provide financial information for tax purposes that information cannot be used to prosecute a criminal charge.
This is not to say that certain authorities won't watch you very, very closely afterwards though. Saying that something is not admisable in court isn't at all the same thing as saying that inadmissable evidence can't be used as leverage to gain admisable evidence. Many have been convicted of crimes for not paying attention to this fact.
The infamous New York City madam who made millions from her house of considerable repute was caught and convicted, of promoting prostitution. A fairly minor charge. As I recal she served something like 18 months.
Why? She learned the lesson of Al Capone and payed her taxes scrupulously. Had business permits, Workman's Comp insurance for her employees, in fact ran it as a completely legitimate business, except, of course, for the fact that her trade was itself illegal.
When they finally got her it was only for that illegality that they could prosecute.
Number one rule. Never violate any law except those you explicitly set out to violate. It's daft to get nailed for an otherwise successful robbery because you sped away from the scene with a taillight out and an expired vehicle registration.
And yet that very opinionated preaching provided you with a valuable clue as to how his opinion may, or may not, diverge from your own.
All opinion is biased in one way or another. This one had the honesty to wear its bias on its sleeve, however distasteful that bias might be.
Reference to other works is also a valid, I might even say necessary, tool of review.
"I hate Shakespeare. The language sucks. How can he call himself a playright when he can't even spell proper? Therefore I don't like Marlowe either and anybody who does is just a longhair pansy."
Having read some Shakespeare but no Marlowe this review would give me far more information about whether I would like to read Marlowe than:
"I didn't like it very much."
Especially if I can deduce that I'm the sort of person he would consider a long haired pansy
Slashdot Mirror
This license is for FAT, not FAT32 which is a different format covered by different patents.
As such it is virtually irrelevant to the general computing field these days and really only applies to those manufacturers who supply preformated storage devices, most of whom use good, old fashioned, DOS era FAT.
KFG
"Everything's been thought of before. The trick is to think of it again."
Don't get your knickers in a knot just because someone else once had the same brilliant idea you had. It happens. A lot. It doesn't in any way diminish your own insight, no matter what some dimwitted nebish in the third cube over says.
Or even what you think.
I've always liked Pete Seeger's definition of "sophmoric," the itch to be original. Let it go.
I've never had the "pleasure" of working in a cube farm, but I tend to work in open office like enviroments of one sort or another. I like to dress up my space on a periodic basis. Right now it's a simulated Japanese tatami room, floor seating with the computer on a kotatsu with nonfunctioning wooden hibachi ( actually, it functions as a waste basket). A scroll painting and a rack of swords as a finishing touch. Very comfortable actually, and a damned sight cheaper than an Aeron. It's pretty easy to do in a cube space.
In the past I've done a simulated traditional Mongolian yurt, the rectangular Tibetan equivilent, various native American styles and an English country cottage.
Of course on a workaday basis it helps to have enough authority that no one can give you shit over it.
Next Christmas you might want to try a traditional middle eastern house or nomadic tent for the true Christmas spirit.
KFG
Well, it depends on the game really. A game is not a game is not a game.
In some games, Myst for instance, there's really no such thing as frame rate at all. In others, like shooters, the cpu requirements to handle the physics are fairly minimal and nice graphics sells games. These are the ones that require the latest hot card. If you're into sims though, like IL-2 or NASCAR 2003 the physics calculations put the hardest load on the system and for these the hottest cpu, particularly the math coprocessor, will give you the best performance overall.
Everything is always tradeoffs and compromise. Many games even have "favorite" video cards, right down to the particular model and driver. The best you can really do is optimize for your favorite game and play the rest as is possible.
KFG
Google is great. Google is good. There is no Google but Google.
But for some things you still want the Yellow Pages.
Virtual reality still rests on a bedrock of good, old fashioned, real reality. Learn how to cope with it and all things go smoother.
KFG
You are confusing ideas of commercial, open source and propriatary.
Commercial Open Source software, while unusual at the moment, is hardly an oxymoron and not unheard of.
It would be more proper to say that if you wish to develop closed source propriatary software based on Qt for distribution (which may, in fact, not be a commercial distribution) you must purchase a commercial license from Trolltech.
Call me anal if you wish ( the line has already formed to the right, take your place at the rear of the line), but I think it's still important to make this distinction as many are confused by it.
KFG
Believe it or not, business is not about shipping apps. Most businesses never develop an app in their entire business lives. They ship chairs, oranges, clean kitchen floors, music lessons, entertainment, green lawns laden with chemicals but free of dandelions, katana, baskets, candles, etc.
.gonna. . . happen.
The world is not a world of commercial software development. Even in the software world most apps are not for commercial release.
To most of these businesses the toolkit is completely irrelevant. Hell, most businesses hardly have more than a handful of custom shell scripts they can call their own and rely entirely on off the shelf solutions. That's one of the things that slows Linux adoption on the desktop in the first place, the lack of certain off the shelf "business oriented" apps.
I'm a business. I've tried both Gnome and KDE. I used to use Gnome. I've standardized on KDE.
Why? Because it's a better business desktop at the moment.
Maybe I should put together The Other User Linux distro for people who like KDE.
Which is why there will never be a "standard" Linux. Which, contrary to the opinions of many, is a Good Thing.
There's more than one breed of dog, and if you don't like dogs there are cats. There's no "need" for this. Wouldn't it be easier for everybody if we just had a "User Pet"? Then we wouldn't have to "support" parrots and the like.
There's also the idea of the strength of genetic diversity. Did you know that geneticists now tend to believe that Cheetahs are the walking extinct? Simply not enough genes left in the pool for viability. That's what makes Microsoft so vulnerable to Linux as well. Too rigid a niche. One good idea away from oblivion.
This is why User Linux is a doomed idea from the start. Businesses, like my own, can already make a choice of a standard distro and desktop. That's what most already do. User Linux offers nothing here. The core to the idea of User Linux is that the majority have to adopt the distro as their standard to create a shared pool of development against that one distro's choice of packages.
Not. .
KFG
Of course you would. Per cut. Against your entire collection (and/or the total number of songs you listened to on the radio).
However, since you aren't locked into a complete propriatary system right on down to the music itself you can assemble a surprisingly good system for surprisingly little money these days.
Ok. Point taken on the iPod ownership thingy though. If you own a Mac and don't want the portability you might be set.
As it happens I own two Macs. One runs System 7 and the other OS8.
Well, gotta buy a new Mac I guess.
KFG
I've only bought vinyl while in a third world country, and they don't employ children in their pressing plants.
KFG
So sticking with your approach I'd just never buy anymore music at all.
:)
Well that's one way to save money on music.
KFG
And even that's a marked improvement. Most artists don't ever get a single penny from a traditional CD release, let alone a dime a cut.
About the only way they see any money from their own work is by direct retail sales on their own, and they have to pay full wholesale to obtain them as well as go through all the rigermarole (permits, sales tax, etc.) that retail selling implies.
KFG
Well yeah. If that's the way you typically buy music you might just as well stick to iTunes where the damage will be limited.
You could, of course, consider changing your taste in music and patronize "artists" capable of producing at least 15 good cuts per 16 cut CD and then purchasing such CDs for five bucks which gives you both the music and a piece of property still worth five bucks, but I suppose you consider it easier to just click "Buy Now."
By the way, if you're worried about being able to pay that loan back, don't sweat it. I'll even give you a job to insure you the income.
How can you go wrong with a deal like that?
KFG
I think young people of legal working age should have a place to go to work if they so choose, yes. Wal-Mart at least beats working a frier at Burger King. Most jobs are non-union, by the way, virtually all retail and programming for instance, so if you object to non-union I suggest you stop buying anything retail, especially computer programs and games.
On the other hand they have many pension paying jobs.
This doesn't mean they're not assholes, one way of which they of demonstrating this is by the selling of bowdlerized (you can look that up in your Golden Book Dictionary. Oh, sorry. No you can't.) CDs without labeling them as such. In my book this pretty much writes them off as a place to buy CDs since I object to such behaviour and don't mind bad fucking language in the fucking least.
KFG
Wal-Mart now often has a full grocery store under the same roof these days and yes, people grocery shop there. Not that I'd actually buy CDs (or food) from Wal-Mart myself, but most do.
Large cities are less likely to have one of these (but often have other alternatives). A friend visited me from LA once and when I took her to one of our local supermarkets ( just a supermarket, not a Wal-Mart thingy) she couldn't believe it. She wanted to take pictures to show her LA friends what a supermarket out in the "sticks" ( actually the NYS captial district, but comparitively "out in the woods") looked like.
KFG
If store one and store two sell an item that looks the same, but store one's is really a better made item with included long term warranty and they sell it for less than store two (which also loads some sort of pay for service agreement into the deal as a requirement of purchase), why would I get mad at store two?
I simply buy the item from store one. On those items in which the situation is reversed I'm perfectly happy to patronize store two as well.
Nor is there any reason for me to be angry with people who buy the item from store two. Sad maybe. They've wasted their money and I presume they had to do something they'd rather not have to aquire that money in the first place. I feel for them.
Let's take a worst case scenario look, an old vinyl album with only 10 tracks. It's eleven bucks at Amazon. A buck more than downloading, but for that I get it already on a CD, in a jewel case (and I like jewel cases for storage) and liner notes. The music is at full bit rate and I retain my fair use rights to rip it for my own use, in any device I wish.
Comes out about even that way I suppose, if rights and bitrate don't mean anything to you.
I can buy it used online, like new, for $5.49, or at my local used shop for five bucks even. Now I'm six bucks ahead of the game, have the CD, have my rips ( of superiour quality) on my HD, have my rights to fair use, etc.
No, I'd guess things are the other way around. You're a happy iTunes patron and are a bit miffed at my pointing out that it isn't a good deal.
Well, ok. People often take bad deals for various reasons, and if they do it knowing it's a bad deal but feeling they get some other benefit out of it, it's their money. I didn't have to exchange my time in someone's salt mine for it.
But it's still a bad deal.
KFG
I'm not analysizing every second of my life. Hell, much of may family considers me a "slacker."
I'm analysing iTunes.
It's a bad deal in terms of time and money and gets me less for either, and it takes me no more that a few seconds to realise that.
If you're not in the habit of taking care of your time and money in such a manner, hey, come on over here, I've got some lottery tickets you might be interested in.
Don't worry about the money, I'll loan it to you.
KFG
That is convienience, not time overall.
Most Americans are horrible at "time and efficiency" analysis of their own lives, generally "saving" seconds at the cost of later hours and for no particular purpose.
Much as they the gambler thinks he "won" ten bucks on the lottery the other night and ignores the five hundred he spent to become a "winner."
People who sell convienience make a good living off of this tendency. You spend money to avoid irritation, not save time, and don't even count the time you have spend to earn that money into the equation.
It does not take you only two minutes to download a song. You are not counting your losses, such as the time to fire up the app and find the song.
Your milage may vary, of course, but in my case (and in the case of most Americans I would posit)even if I have to make a special trip to the store (open 24/7) for music I'm there inside of ten minutes by bicycle and can do my grocery shopping in the same store while I'm at it, thus saving the time I would have otherwise spent on the special trip to the grocery store.
Or, conversely, I can go do my grocery shopping and pick up several CDs of music at no more expense in time than it takes to toss them into my cart and the additional time it takes to ring them up while ringing up my groceries.
No, I'm afraid that, overall, what you save isn't so much time as it is saving having to move your butt out of your chair. Which is a different issue, and which, in all likelyhood, you have to move anyway to earn the money, so just stop at the music store you pass on your way home from work.
Saving irritation ( and needing to have it now is an issue of irritation, not time)is not the same thing as saving time and/or money, and more often than not must be payed for with greater irritation and money later.
KFG
And remember you need to prorate the cost of the iPod itself into the cost of each track. Buy a base level iPod and download 300 tracks and you've actually payed $2 apiece for them.
This is what you get for accepting a propriatary marketing structure.
Hell, if you want to play the tracks on a generic machine you don't even save the time and trouble of ripping them, since, as I understand it, you have to burn them and rip them anyway to do that.
KFG
This is the only place where iTunes has the advantage and yes, there have been times when I've bought an entire CD for a single tune ( but I'd note I almost always end up pleasantly surprised by a few of the others I would have otherwise missed), but only because I am a working musician who needed to learn that tune.
Also bear in mind that I grew up in an age when the majority of music was sold as a single for fairly nominal fee. Why did this practice die out?
Because the public prefered to buy albums. Not only can an album be a better artistic work than a single (think Sgt. Pepper or Tommy), but they're overall a better deal. Even if you occasionally get the worst of the deal in a particular instance.
And if you buy a CD for a single tune, well, rip it and then sell the CD. Or find a friend who has it and rip his.
Sneakernet still works and happens completely under the radar.
KFG
People pay more, for an inferior product and give up most of their legal rights in the process, all for the "convienience" of downloading music ( which really doesn't take much less in terms of time overall than walking into a music store the next time you happen to be in the mall).
What's more Apple gives all of this money they collect to the music industry who themselves have to do virtually nothing for it but trade a bit of paper. Kicking and screaming. Yeah, right. In the back rooms the execs are shouting bloody Hosannas day and night. They can't get the public to pay for DRMed CDs but Apple has somehow gotten them to buy DRMed rips for a premium price.
I'll keep doing it the old fashioned way until I get a better deal, thank you very much.
KFG
Dear Sir,
If nobody listened to me I wouldn't have karma.
KFG
Because they are boogeymen and that's what boogeymen do. I mean geez, get with it, every two year old knows that.
KFG
Number two rule. If you use a rented vehicle as a car bomb don't go back to the rental agent and try to reclaim your security deposit.
KFG
It has to do with that Fifth Ammendment thingy. You can't be compelled to testify against yourself. Since you are compelled to provide financial information for tax purposes that information cannot be used to prosecute a criminal charge.
This is not to say that certain authorities won't watch you very, very closely afterwards though. Saying that something is not admisable in court isn't at all the same thing as saying that inadmissable evidence can't be used as leverage to gain admisable evidence. Many have been convicted of crimes for not paying attention to this fact.
The infamous New York City madam who made millions from her house of considerable repute was caught and convicted, of promoting prostitution. A fairly minor charge. As I recal she served something like 18 months.
Why? She learned the lesson of Al Capone and payed her taxes scrupulously. Had business permits, Workman's Comp insurance for her employees, in fact ran it as a completely legitimate business, except, of course, for the fact that her trade was itself illegal.
When they finally got her it was only for that illegality that they could prosecute.
Number one rule. Never violate any law except those you explicitly set out to violate. It's daft to get nailed for an otherwise successful robbery because you sped away from the scene with a taillight out and an expired vehicle registration.
KFG
And yet that very opinionated preaching provided you with a valuable clue as to how his opinion may, or may not, diverge from your own.
All opinion is biased in one way or another. This one had the honesty to wear its bias on its sleeve, however distasteful that bias might be.
Reference to other works is also a valid, I might even say necessary, tool of review.
"I hate Shakespeare. The language sucks. How can he call himself a playright when he can't even spell proper? Therefore I don't like Marlowe either and anybody who does is just a longhair pansy."
Having read some Shakespeare but no Marlowe this review would give me far more information about whether I would like to read Marlowe than:
"I didn't like it very much."
Especially if I can deduce that I'm the sort of person he would consider a long haired pansy
KFG
. . . the reader should be able to decide for themselves whether they might like it or not, regardless of whether the reviewer actually liked it.
Q.E.D.
KFG