Remember how Microsoft was represented in the anti-trust trial by bumbling idiots? That's not even counting Bill's less-than-stellar performance. Based on my experience with Microsoft's software, I'm not entirely surprised to see them screw up, though.;-) I'm sure lots of lawyers were watching the trial and wiping the drool from their chins. The tobacco companies expect to get sued and retain the services of lawyers who have spent years studying the best ways to get tobacco companies off the hook. Microsoft has invested most of its attention into protecting its monopoly against innovation, er, competition; they forgot about the courts. This is the logical result.
One Microsoft action which has hurt consumers is pushing around OEM's. With respect to Microsoft, an OEM may be considered a consumer, and reducing an OEM's choices directly reduces the choices of the end consumer. There are plenty of cases of Microsoft beating up on the OEM's mentioned in the FoF. That being the case, I don't expect Posner to fall for the "...but we haven't hurt the consumers" argument.
Tell me about it. True story, from about ten years ago: an electrical engineering student buys a beautiful old vintage ('40's) radio and finds that it works fine except for the power indicator light bulb being burned out. Uncertain whether this particular model of light bulb is still being made, he measures the juice flowing through the socket (60V AC) and takes the bulb to the local Radio Shack, hoping he can just pick something up without having to mail order it (waiting several days and paying shipping for a $0.60 part being a pain in the neck). He asks the clueless clerk whether they stock a replacement bulb; the clerk can't find anything with that model number in their catalog, at which point the customer mentions that it had 60V AC going through it. "Oh, that explains it," says the clerk. "We only have DC light bulbs." The student goes back to the dorm and tells his roommate (me) this story. I fall over laughing.
Right now, you see this mostly in manufacturing facilities. The $3M YoyoDyne Widget Press might have a network interface built into it, so if it stops working, YoyoDyne engineers can diagnose and possibly repair the problem remotely, minimizing downtime. In manufacturing, where downtime is expensive relative to a couple hundred bucks in extra hardware, this makes sense. In consumer electronics, it's not quite so important.
Read Alan Cox's diary; he's been excitedly watching DVD's under Linux the last few days (granted, the dialogue seems to switch arbitrarily between English and French, but it's still early). Much of the Linux community is tickled; I for one had been holding off on buying DVD's and a DVD-ROM drive until such time as there was Linux support for them. For that matter, I'd been holding off on buying videos, since I knew they were effectively obsolete. If the film industry had wanted to delay the breaking of CSS, they should have seen to it that closed-source binary-only DVD-ROM drivers were available for Linux. It would have seriously diminished the motivation to break CSS. As it is, they need to realize that they stand to make more money selling DVD's than they might lose to piracy - think of the shot in the arm that CD's represented to the recording industry. The real threat, as someone else pointed out, is that artists can use DVD to distribute original work outside established channels. DVD is to the film industry what MP3 is to the recording industry.
Expect to be similarly bored if you attend a lecture by him on the subject of pipe organs, assuming that is also a subject you don't find interesting. I don't realistically expect to find Knuth to be an enchanting lecturer on topics I don't find interesting, but that's subjective. Admirers of Knuth who have an interest in religion (I suspect Larry Wall, for instance, might fit into this category) would likely be interested in these lectures, and admirers of Knuth who have an interest in linguistics (I suspect Larry Wall, for instance, might fit into this category) might be interested in other aspects of this lecture in particular. I suspect Jon Katz might not be so interested, but that's his right, as it is yours. Please, though, don't ask people (especially the likes of Knuth and Hofstadter) to shut up just because you're not interested in what they have to say today. Some of the rest of us are trying to listen.
Note: I hope I'm not assuming too much by suggesting Larry Wall might be an admirer of Knuth.
The First Amendment does not give a blanket right to bribe public officials, nor does it give public officials the right to shake down their constituents for contributions in order to get things done. That being the case, it is clear that some measure of regulation of campaign financing is constitutional. The problem comes from going too far to close potential loopholes, and it's there that the free speech issue becomes important. The First Amendment does give me the blanket right to endorse political candidates, and it comes fairly close (excepting libel, slander, etc.) to giving me a blanket right to condemn public officials. If that's a loophole, it's one that must be kept open. Just because it's impossible to close all the loopholes doesn't mean that bribery should be legal.
In practice, the strongest check we have against corruption is the electorate. If you sell out my interests, I will vote against you. If I have reason to believe you might sell out my interests, I am that much less likely to vote for you. Having money can buy you a lot of television commercials, but taking too much money from the wrong contributors will most effectively buy my distrust. I'm curious to see whether W's immense war chest is going to come back to haunt him: it may win him the nomination but ultimately lose him the election.
The difficulty with relaxing campaing finance rules is that going too far to legalize bribery in the name of free speech does little to help free speech (which can, after all, be sold out); all it does is lower the bar for honesty in Washington. If we legalize bribery, we come to expect it, and we no longer react so negatively when it happens. It doesn't actually have to be enforced to be effective; it just has to be on the books: bribery is a no-no. The electorate will handle it from there, by recall if need be. Call it censorship if you like.
The ultimate tool for campaign finance reform, then, is a well-educated electorate which is able to smell corruption in whatever form, legal loopholes or no. Lawyers and spin doctors can't cover up a sufficiently large smell. A necessary component of this is a free press that can point out corruption. One element of a free press at this point in history is the right of common people to put up personal web pages. That's the real reason this is messed up.
Microsoft has enough money that it's difficult to trust anything that anyone says in their favor without confirming it yourself. If Mindcraft says that Microsoft is superior, you are forced to wonder whether Mindcraft is for sale. If Gartner says that Microsoft is superior, you have to wonder whether Gartner is for sale. When Sen. Gorton tries to cut the DoJ anti-trust budget, you have to wonder whether Sen. Gorton is for sale.
Re:That'll teach you to trust Dibona with your stu
on
Hemos is Homeless
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· Score: 1
It's not that hard. There were several people at work who have "accidentally" flushed their pagers down the toilet. I can't imagine how that could happen.;-)
There have been all sorts of arguments over the years about whether various things are Marxist. In the United States, it's become a good way to shoot down ideas without giving them much thought, which is probably one of the reasons ESR avoids describing Open Source in those terms.
Forgetting Stalin for the moment and going back to Marx, it is definitely true that RMS in particular has given the workers the means of production (speaking especially of gcc at the moment), and while RMS emphasizes Free Software as being more akin to free speech than to free beer, there is much to be said for the fact that it makes the software more widely accessible, and this makes a lot of people uneasy. How it comes to pass that some people equate sharing information with a Stalinist police state is beyond me.
Software isn't like money: I don't have any less of it for my having shared it with others, and this is the key to recognizing the fallacy behind many of the [Open Source | Free Software] = Marxism arguments. The "from each according to their abilities" notion is obsolete in this context. Nobody is insisting upon taking the means of production or anything else away from the bourgeouisie; it's no longer necessary. We're just talking about making more copies of the means of production, which is trivially easy to do once it's written. The Free Software = Marxism argument resembles an argument that modern agriculture is Marxist because it helps prevent poor people from starving in such large numbers: it's only seeing half the picture and thereby causing something good to appear evil.
It appears that ESR has read lots of Adam Smith, Ayn Rand, etc. Perhaps he ought to read more Marx in order to be better able to point out the distinct differences between Open Source and Marxism.
On a slightly different topic: abuse of patent law and copyright law by corporations is a (generally successful) attempt by corporations to make more money through regulation. Corporations that complain about regulation generally aren't opposed to regulation in principle; they just want only those regulations that make money for them. Patent and copyright law exist in fact only because the government recognizes and enforces patents and copyrights. At corporate urging, the United States is almost the only country in the world to grant patents to software. In a true laissez-faire system, existing software patents, copyrights, and licenses could be safely ignored, software piracy would be rampant, and the shrinkwrap software industry would wither. It's ironic that Communist China is the most often cited major market for pirated software! So much for Socialism and its excessive regulation!
There are several reasons to buy the Official version of Red Hat (or any other name brand distribution)
Support This is the big one, and this is why real money is needed. For every 1000 users of the official version, a certain number will require support, so this actually eats up a share of the cost that can't be amortized over a large number of sales. Note that the grizzled veterans can buy a less expensive version of Red Hat from Red Hat that doesn't include support. What does it include? Read on.
Coasters You're paying a little something for the CD. Note that those who sell copies only have to pay for the CD's and don't see any of the other costs. For those, keep reading.
Documentation You get some sort of book with instructions, some of which are bound to be handy. Dead trees cost money, at least a couple bucks. On top of that, someone has to write the stuff. I pay for Perl books from O'Reilly at least in part to subsidize Larry Wall, just as I pay for GNU books at least in part to subsidize RMS.
Distribution-specific Research & Development The people who design the distribution (decide where to put things, what permissions they should have, and take the time to compile, install, test, and package all the packages) need to get paid. This can be made up by volume of sales.
Non-specific Research & Development Money to support the folks who are doing research for Red Hat (or whatever distribution) that is of benefit to the whole community. Alan Cox is the poster boy for this concept, but a number of others do paid work for Red Hat and other distributions that ultimately benefits all Linux disributions. This is one reason to pay full price even if you no longer need support. The community can use about as much money as we can dump into it. Not all distributions are created equal in this regard: some give back more to the community than others. Shop around.
The cheap versions also have their uses:
Evangelism If I pay $2 for a CD, I'm more willing to loan it out to newbies who want to take Linux for a test drive. If they need support, they can call me. I tend to keep recent versions of pretty much all the major distributions, and this is the only way I can keep this affordable.
Testing I've been burned on this. If you're actually releasing binaries for Linux, it's a good idea to test them on a bunch of different distributions. Keeping up with a bunch of different distributions is most affordable when you pay $2 for them.
In defense of Red Hat:
As someone pointed out in a comment on the previous article, there's some risk of clueless newbies buying cheap copies and thinking they come with support. When Red Hat tells them they haven't paid for support, clueless newbies can get upset. Clueless newbies are like that. Still, we as a community generally want to avoid pissing off newbies, since it's bad for evangelism.
Software patents inherently suck. Keeping source code in Jack Benny's vault inherently sucks. Security through obscurity sucks. These things all exist in order to protect IP owners, and they're of no real benefit to consumers. Copyright, when abused, sucks. However, in many cases, it's actually intended at least in part to protect consumers. If some bastard sells copies of Red Hat CD's and tries to pass them off as official, he's not ripping off Bob Young nearly so much as he's ripping off the poor suckers who get mislead into thinking they're buying a support contract, keeping Alan Cox supplied with penguin mints, etc. Some of the legit bargain resellers make it quite obvious that they're selling the "you-get-no-support" version. Linux Mall even goes so far as to encourage users to buy the full-price versions. They presumably (I'm guessing here, but it's a pretty safe guess) buy the official boxed versions wholesale, making the official version more profitable for them and leaving them with no real financial incentive to sell the cheap versions.
Apparently, there's an overabundance of women in linguistics. Women are raised believing that they are capable at language and incapable at math. When you get to formal linguistics, the distinction starts to blur. Larry Wall's background is in linguistics, and I consider it a geek field. My guess is that many of the women who have the mental aptitude that would make them well suited to studying computer science go into linguistics again. Otherwise, check out library science.
Regarding correlation between intelligence and wealth: rich guys tend to study (in increasing order of brains required) business, law, or medicine. Geek fields (math, CS, engineering, science, linguistics) carry a low social status, and most rich guys wouldn't stoop to that level (major exception: pre-med science majors). Women aren't expected to impress men with their ability to make money, so more women chose less lucrative fields (literature, art, sociology, anthropology, linguistics) because they're genuinely interested in the subject matter. Other women are motivated to demonstrate that they are capable of making it in the high-pay high-prestige fields (business, law, medicine). Fewer women are motivated to show that they can handle the low-prestige fields (CS, engineering), which is one of the reasons there's a shortage of geek women.
Reminds me of the old story of how a bunch of Wobblies were asked which one of them was their leader. They answered, "We're all leaders!"
It appears that Linux itself is considered by Linus and Alan to be more important than their respective egos. This is a Good Thing, and it's part of what makes Linux stronger than other projects that serve largely to stoke the egos of their leadership. So far, I've mostly seen this in companies with corporate leader personality cults.
My understanding is that technically he owns a consulting company ("Building Number Three"), and that his company (i.e. Alan) is being paid by Red Hat to work on the kernel. IMHO, one of the best reasons to shell out for the official versions of Red Hat.
In actuality, The Onion is a newspaper. You can pick them up free at a variety of locations in Madison, Wisconsin. I think it was launched fall of 1988, so the web presence is comparatively new. The print version is also available by subscription, and I've heard that people outside of Madison who get the print version think the ads are all made up. No, we actually do have Pizza Pit, Big Mike's Super Subs, etc.
True story: The Onion contacts a professor of political science who specializes in Russia and asks whether he knows some people who could dress up like they're in the SCA. Little do they know that they've asked the submissions herald for the Middle Kingdom, who offers to do one better and provide actual SCA members. The guy in the hat is a viscount.
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno, I thought the Red Hat element of conspiracy theory was funny. It just wasn't quite outlandish enough.
Remember how Microsoft was represented in the anti-trust trial by bumbling idiots? That's not even counting Bill's less-than-stellar performance. Based on my experience with Microsoft's software, I'm not entirely surprised to see them screw up, though. ;-) I'm sure lots of lawyers were watching the trial and wiping the drool from their chins. The tobacco companies expect to get sued and retain the services of lawyers who have spent years studying the best ways to get tobacco companies off the hook. Microsoft has invested most of its attention into protecting its monopoly against innovation, er, competition; they forgot about the courts. This is the logical result.
One Microsoft action which has hurt consumers is pushing around OEM's. With respect to Microsoft, an OEM may be considered a consumer, and reducing an OEM's choices directly reduces the choices of the end consumer. There are plenty of cases of Microsoft beating up on the OEM's mentioned in the FoF. That being the case, I don't expect Posner to fall for the "...but we haven't hurt the consumers" argument.
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio.
(Horatio was standing next to Hamlet at the time.)
Not quite. I've been to Grand Marais. ;-) Still, I've seen your point. I didn't see a Fry's there.
Tell me about it.
True story, from about ten years ago: an electrical engineering student buys a beautiful old vintage ('40's) radio and finds that it works fine except for the power indicator light bulb being burned out. Uncertain whether this particular model of light bulb is still being made, he measures the juice flowing through the socket (60V AC) and takes the bulb to the local Radio Shack, hoping he can just pick something up without having to mail order it (waiting several days and paying shipping for a $0.60 part being a pain in the neck). He asks the clueless clerk whether they stock a replacement bulb; the clerk can't find anything with that model number in their catalog, at which point the customer mentions that it had 60V AC going through it. "Oh, that explains it," says the clerk. "We only have DC light bulbs." The student goes back to the dorm and tells his roommate (me) this story. I fall over laughing.
Right now, you see this mostly in manufacturing facilities. The $3M YoyoDyne Widget Press might have a network interface built into it, so if it stops working, YoyoDyne engineers can diagnose and possibly repair the problem remotely, minimizing downtime. In manufacturing, where downtime is expensive relative to a couple hundred bucks in extra hardware, this makes sense. In consumer electronics, it's not quite so important.
Linux-biased geek personal site, from Iambe of User Friendly. It worked for me.
abo ut.com has another such poll, for those who answer these things recreationally. ;-)
Read Alan Cox's diary; he's been excitedly watching DVD's under Linux the last few days (granted, the dialogue seems to switch arbitrarily between English and French, but it's still early). Much of the Linux community is tickled; I for one had been holding off on buying DVD's and a DVD-ROM drive until such time as there was Linux support for them. For that matter, I'd been holding off on buying videos, since I knew they were effectively obsolete. If the film industry had wanted to delay the breaking of CSS, they should have seen to it that closed-source binary-only DVD-ROM drivers were available for Linux. It would have seriously diminished the motivation to break CSS. As it is, they need to realize that they stand to make more money selling DVD's than they might lose to piracy - think of the shot in the arm that CD's represented to the recording industry. The real threat, as someone else pointed out, is that artists can use DVD to distribute original work outside established channels. DVD is to the film industry what MP3 is to the recording industry.
Expect to be similarly bored if you attend a lecture by him on the subject of pipe organs, assuming that is also a subject you don't find interesting. I don't realistically expect to find Knuth to be an enchanting lecturer on topics I don't find interesting, but that's subjective. Admirers of Knuth who have an interest in religion (I suspect Larry Wall, for instance, might fit into this category) would likely be interested in these lectures, and admirers of Knuth who have an interest in linguistics (I suspect Larry Wall, for instance, might fit into this category) might be interested in other aspects of this lecture in particular. I suspect Jon Katz might not be so interested, but that's his right, as it is yours. Please, though, don't ask people (especially the likes of Knuth and Hofstadter) to shut up just because you're not interested in what they have to say today. Some of the rest of us are trying to listen.
Note: I hope I'm not assuming too much by suggesting Larry Wall might be an admirer of Knuth.
The First Amendment does not give a blanket right to bribe public officials, nor does it give public officials the right to shake down their constituents for contributions in order to get things done. That being the case, it is clear that some measure of regulation of campaign financing is constitutional. The problem comes from going too far to close potential loopholes, and it's there that the free speech issue becomes important. The First Amendment does give me the blanket right to endorse political candidates, and it comes fairly close (excepting libel, slander, etc.) to giving me a blanket right to condemn public officials. If that's a loophole, it's one that must be kept open. Just because it's impossible to close all the loopholes doesn't mean that bribery should be legal.
In practice, the strongest check we have against corruption is the electorate. If you sell out my interests, I will vote against you. If I have reason to believe you might sell out my interests, I am that much less likely to vote for you. Having money can buy you a lot of television commercials, but taking too much money from the wrong contributors will most effectively buy my distrust. I'm curious to see whether W's immense war chest is going to come back to haunt him: it may win him the nomination but ultimately lose him the election.
The difficulty with relaxing campaing finance rules is that going too far to legalize bribery in the name of free speech does little to help free speech (which can, after all, be sold out); all it does is lower the bar for honesty in Washington. If we legalize bribery, we come to expect it, and we no longer react so negatively when it happens. It doesn't actually have to be enforced to be effective; it just has to be on the books: bribery is a no-no. The electorate will handle it from there, by recall if need be. Call it censorship if you like.
The ultimate tool for campaign finance reform, then, is a well-educated electorate which is able to smell corruption in whatever form, legal loopholes or no. Lawyers and spin doctors can't cover up a sufficiently large smell. A necessary component of this is a free press that can point out corruption. One element of a free press at this point in history is the right of common people to put up personal web pages. That's the real reason this is messed up.
Well, I live in Wisconsin. One of my Senators isn't for sale, and the other had enough money to buy himself out of the market. ;-)
Microsoft has enough money that it's difficult to trust anything that anyone says in their favor without confirming it yourself. If Mindcraft says that Microsoft is superior, you are forced to wonder whether Mindcraft is for sale. If Gartner says that Microsoft is superior, you have to wonder whether Gartner is for sale. When Sen. Gorton tries to cut the DoJ anti-trust budget, you have to wonder whether Sen. Gorton is for sale.
It's not that hard. There were several people at work who have "accidentally" flushed their pagers down the toilet. I can't imagine how that could happen. ;-)
There have been all sorts of arguments over the years about whether various things are Marxist. In the United States, it's become a good way to shoot down ideas without giving them much thought, which is probably one of the reasons ESR avoids describing Open Source in those terms.
Forgetting Stalin for the moment and going back to Marx, it is definitely true that RMS in particular has given the workers the means of production (speaking especially of gcc at the moment), and while RMS emphasizes Free Software as being more akin to free speech than to free beer, there is much to be said for the fact that it makes the software more widely accessible, and this makes a lot of people uneasy. How it comes to pass that some people equate sharing information with a Stalinist police state is beyond me.
Software isn't like money: I don't have any less of it for my having shared it with others, and this is the key to recognizing the fallacy behind many of the [Open Source | Free Software] = Marxism arguments. The "from each according to their abilities" notion is obsolete in this context. Nobody is insisting upon taking the means of production or anything else away from the bourgeouisie; it's no longer necessary. We're just talking about making more copies of the means of production, which is trivially easy to do once it's written. The Free Software = Marxism argument resembles an argument that modern agriculture is Marxist because it helps prevent poor people from starving in such large numbers: it's only seeing half the picture and thereby causing something good to appear evil.
It appears that ESR has read lots of Adam Smith, Ayn Rand, etc. Perhaps he ought to read more Marx in order to be better able to point out the distinct differences between Open Source and Marxism.
On a slightly different topic: abuse of patent law and copyright law by corporations is a (generally successful) attempt by corporations to make more money through regulation. Corporations that complain about regulation generally aren't opposed to regulation in principle; they just want only those regulations that make money for them. Patent and copyright law exist in fact only because the government recognizes and enforces patents and copyrights. At corporate urging, the United States is almost the only country in the world to grant patents to software. In a true laissez-faire system, existing software patents, copyrights, and licenses could be safely ignored, software piracy would be rampant, and the shrinkwrap software industry would wither. It's ironic that Communist China is the most often cited major market for pirated software! So much for Socialism and its excessive regulation!
They sell a t-shirt reading, "End racism. Kill everyone." The connection is clear!
;-)
Mathematics belongs to God, and Knuth is our prophet.
- Support This is the big one, and this is why real money is needed. For every 1000 users of the official version, a certain number will require support, so this actually eats up a share of the cost that can't be amortized over a large number of sales. Note that the grizzled veterans can buy a less expensive version of Red Hat from Red Hat that doesn't include support. What does it include? Read on.
- Coasters You're paying a little something for the CD. Note that those who sell copies only have to pay for the CD's and don't see any of the other costs. For those, keep reading.
- Documentation You get some sort of book with instructions, some of which are bound to be handy. Dead trees cost money, at least a couple bucks. On top of that, someone has to write the stuff. I pay for Perl books from O'Reilly at least in part to subsidize Larry Wall, just as I pay for GNU books at least in part to subsidize RMS.
- Distribution-specific Research & Development The people who design the distribution (decide where to put things, what permissions they should have, and take the time to compile, install, test, and package all the packages) need to get paid. This can be made up by volume of sales.
- Non-specific Research & Development Money to support the folks who are doing research for Red Hat (or whatever distribution) that is of benefit to the whole community. Alan Cox is the poster boy for this concept, but a number of others do paid work for Red Hat and other distributions that ultimately benefits all Linux disributions. This is one reason to pay full price even if you no longer need support. The community can use about as much money as we can dump into it. Not all distributions are created equal in this regard: some give back more to the community than others. Shop around.
The cheap versions also have their uses:- Evangelism If I pay $2 for a CD, I'm more willing to loan it out to newbies who want to take Linux for a test drive. If they need support, they can call me. I tend to keep recent versions of pretty much all the major distributions, and this is the only way I can keep this affordable.
- Testing I've been burned on this. If you're actually releasing binaries for Linux, it's a good idea to test them on a bunch of different distributions. Keeping up with a bunch of different distributions is most affordable when you pay $2 for them.
In defense of Red Hat:Apparently, there's an overabundance of women in linguistics. Women are raised believing that they are capable at language and incapable at math. When you get to formal linguistics, the distinction starts to blur. Larry Wall's background is in linguistics, and I consider it a geek field. My guess is that many of the women who have the mental aptitude that would make them well suited to studying computer science go into linguistics again. Otherwise, check out library science.
Regarding correlation between intelligence and wealth: rich guys tend to study (in increasing order of brains required) business, law, or medicine. Geek fields (math, CS, engineering, science, linguistics) carry a low social status, and most rich guys wouldn't stoop to that level (major exception: pre-med science majors). Women aren't expected to impress men with their ability to make money, so more women chose less lucrative fields (literature, art, sociology, anthropology, linguistics) because they're genuinely interested in the subject matter. Other women are motivated to demonstrate that they are capable of making it in the high-pay high-prestige fields (business, law, medicine). Fewer women are motivated to show that they can handle the low-prestige fields (CS, engineering), which is one of the reasons there's a shortage of geek women.
You just can't really respect a man who doesn't have a beard...
;-)>
"I am Spartacus!"
Reminds me of the old story of how a bunch of Wobblies were asked which one of them was their leader. They answered, "We're all leaders!"
It appears that Linux itself is considered by Linus and Alan to be more important than their respective egos. This is a Good Thing, and it's part of what makes Linux stronger than other projects that serve largely to stoke the egos of their leadership. So far, I've mostly seen this in companies with corporate leader personality cults.
My understanding is that technically he owns a consulting company ("Building Number Three"), and that his company (i.e. Alan) is being paid by Red Hat to work on the kernel. IMHO, one of the best reasons to shell out for the official versions of Red Hat.
In actuality, The Onion is a newspaper. You can pick them up free at a variety of locations in Madison, Wisconsin. I think it was launched fall of 1988, so the web presence is comparatively new. The print version is also available by subscription, and I've heard that people outside of Madison who get the print version think the ads are all made up. No, we actually do have Pizza Pit, Big Mike's Super Subs, etc.
True story: The Onion contacts a professor of political science who specializes in Russia and asks whether he knows some people who could dress up like they're in the SCA. Little do they know that they've asked the submissions herald for the Middle Kingdom, who offers to do one better and provide actual SCA members. The guy in the hat is a viscount.