When "The Man in the High Castle" was written, counter-factual SF was rare -- it's a book that was ground-breaking, but probably doesn't seem so fantastic in retrospect. (Also, very few Westerners had heard of the "I Ching" back then...).
In defense of my sense that "Ubik" was slapped together (which is different from saying "you shouldn't like it" or something like that):
consider Pat, and her odd time-shifting power. This
capability turns out to be a totally unnecessary fantastic
element, and she ultimately turns out to be nothing but a
red herring, which seems like a total waste. She starts out
as the strongest character in the narrative, and ends up
dying ignomiously off-stage (her whole-death that is... her
half-death isn't very interesting either).
(By the way, as far as historical significance goes, some younger readers looking at "Ubik" think they're seeing one of the first satires of advertising out-of-control, but 1969 is a relatively late entry into the game, compared to, say Pohl/Kornbluth's "The Space Merchants" of the early 50s. However, Ubik might be an early example of teasing the SF reader with a strange narrative that never really settles down on an explanation -- kind of an early "Dhalgren".)
If you actually read Ubik, you'll find that it's an exceedingly minor Philip K. Dick novel -- to my eye, it looks as though it was written really rapidly, with an ending tacked on at random when he had enough pages. Call Dick a great writer if you like, but every single work of a great writer is not deserving of the label "masterpiece". Not that this has anything to do with what kind of film they're going to make (if any -- most film deals flop without producing anything, you guys know that, right?) because as with all the other Dick novels that have been "filmed" the screen-writers will do whatever they want to movie-up the material. The metaphysical joke that Dick had in mind (the answer to everything is everywhere) isn't going to survive the process.
Essentially, they paid for the rights to a Philip K. Dick novel, just so they could say that they did.
While we're on the subject, can I point out that Philip K. Dick is not the only science fiction writer in the world? Like I said, call him a great writer if you like, but if so there are other great writers whose material could be raided help get the screenwriters off of the dime. You could film Brunner's "Stand on Zanibar", or Sturgeon's "More than Human", or Aldis' "Barefoot in the Head", or Delany's "Babel-17", or Fritz Leiber's "The Big Time", or Sterling's "Holy Fire"...
but why do that when you can just suck it into a hash by spiting on commas (perl/php/python/ruby)
Because that doesn't work. You'll just think it works for just long enough that eventually a competent programmer will have to fix it, along with the data you've mangled.
The OP doesn't specify language really, but if you're down on Java you may like perl (the anti-Java). Mister Mischief here has laid out the range of solutions in perl quite well.
Yes, that would explain the high rents and housing prices in New York and San Francisco. Human beings just hate being near each other. God meant us to seal ourselves up inside of metal cages and avoid contact with our neighbors.
Sarcasm is frequently a very effective way of making a point, far more so than simply stating it outright.
No, no, no. Sarcasm is mainly a great way of grinding your opponent's nose in their own stupidity, while trying to provoke flame wars. (At least, that's what I always use it for.)
The trouble with an idiom like sarcasm (or irony, or hyperbole, or...) is that you're literally not saying what you mean, and it relies on a high degree of knowledge on the part of the reader (presuming you're not going to resort to the execrable smiley face). So, sarcasm is usually a great way of telling someone something that they know already...
The problem is that, frequently, readers are too stupid or gullible to recognize sarcasm.
There are bad readers out there, and there are also a hell of a lot of bad writers, and sometimes you have both of them at the same time.
... it should have still been pretty obvious given the subject matter and the general audience of Slashdot (people who would, or should, be knowledgeable about the state of broadband in different parts of the world).
Ah yes. You expect people here to read the articles.
Telling people not to use sarcasm is, IMO, akin to telling people they shouldn't use humor in their writing, or telling people they shouldn't use "big words" in their writing.
Or that they shouldn't skateboard while writing code.
Don't blame the writer if your reading and comprehension skills aren't up to par.
Dude, I could identify it as a sarcasm misfire. Maybe I'm not the one with reading comprehension problems, eh?
I'd say the interstate highway system was a great investment on the government's part.
It acted as a subsidy for long-haul trucking, and completely screwed up rail transit, despite the fact that rail is much more energy efficient. (But who cares about that these days, eh?)
It also inspired a fad for "moving to the country" (i.e. the creation of suburban sprawl), which cut the knees out from under the urban tax base, and created a generation of American's who are nearly incapable of any physical
exercise, and have a very weak sense of community.
Further, I would argue that oil-addiction has corrupted American morals to an extent not seen
since the days of slavery... when you talk about the dubious activities of the US in the middle east
you get people quietly whispering "But we need the oil, don't we?"
Myself, I'm not an opponent of government infrastructure programs, but you guys might want to think twice before singing the praises of the interstate highway system. It's a pretty good example of unintended consequences.
The wooshing sound is a load of sarcasm going right over you.
Yeah, I know, but the original post was an example of astounding bad writing.
On the net, there's no way to tell if the author is saying something resoundingly
stupid as a joke, or if they really are resoundingly stupid -- except, of course,
that the high average level of intelligence of slashdot posters makes that seem
unlikely.
It might be a good idea to take it easy on the sarcasm button and just
say what you mean, you know?
Just for the hell of it, something on-topic, from Paul Krugman:
Slow in suburbia
I've always liked the idea of microgravity materials processes, but with launch costs the way they are, there isn't any way you're going to manufacture some novel material in space for use on the ground. There remains a lot of "interest" in microgravity processing in space, but largely it's because there's nothing else you can work on to justify having a space station.
One caveat that there might be some scientific value to cranking out samples in orbit (e.g. creating samples large enough to do x-ray crystallography on, and thus learn something about the structure of the exotic materials). On the simplest level, I would expect that if you crystallized a material in space that looked like it had some industrial use, that would provide the motivation to figure out how to manufacture it using ground-based techniques.
This is another application of the rule-of-thumb that while launch costs are high, the only thing that's practical to ship is something that doesn't weigh anything: information (think communication satellites).
I would still bet that the next big step in space industrialization would be the solar power satellite. After that we can start working on mining the moon, the asteroids, and maybe finally reduce earth-to-LEO launch costs, one way or another.
But that would take an actual commitment to a real project... so for the forseeable future, we'll continue to see lots of make-work-in-space like this.
The van had already been discovered when Reiser was pulled over. He went on his Sierra mountain roadtrip several days later.
A more reasonable conclusion might be that he initially hid the body within the area using the van and then later moved the body to the countryside using the CRX.
That's pretty good... but then what was going on with the seat? Transporting the body on the seat might make sense if it was done in a panic, but not as something he planned out later. Wouldn't you put it in the back of the CRX?
Anonymity is ultimately going to look like a failed experiment.
Reason: anything that makes it easier for the occasional volunteer whistle-blower also
makes it easier legions of corporate and/or government hired propagandists to fake being
one of those volunteers, or anything else that seems convenient.
When the pentagon's internet propaganda unit decides to subvert wikipedia, wikipedia will be subverted. I can't even see how there's a question about that, and the only solution that I can see is a new set of internet institutions with ids tied back to actual living bodies.
Anonymity only "works" for a site just as long as the site is seen as a toy.
Is the internet a toy, or does it have some serious purpose?
You wouldn't sign a contract with an "anonymous" entity, right? How is politics any less important than business?
I think the prime difference is that literate programming allows you to re-order the code; that is, you include snippet of code within the documentation, and attach tag to the snippets that allow them to be reassembled in a different order.
Yes, I believe you're right about that: this is the key piece that's missing from most languages. Though on the other hand you can fake it in many ways, e.g. you put your initialization code in a routine that needs to be called first, but the routine itself can be buried at the end if it's too boring to want to read about first.
Myself I tend to write perl using the embedded pod style that gives you a pseudo-literate approach toward programming: sometimes I do write the documentation for my methods first and then fill in the code afterwards (nothing encourages simplification of interfaces more than having to describe them coherently first).
Interestingly Damien Conway recommends against this in his "Perl Best Practices": I gather that he goes into specialized modes where he thinks in either language or code, and he doesn't like being shown language when he wants to see code.
Reality: there is at least one person (me) who has proof that this is not the case.
Oh yes, proof. I only have your word for it that you've (somehow) ruled out a hardware failure. There's also the interesting pattern that most of these anecdotes are really old, and you know, bugs do indeed get fixed sometimes.
I'm sure we could find several hundred people to say the same thing.
Oh I'm sure. And the numbers of people who've had problems with ext* would probably be even larger, if only because there are so many of them.
When do anecdotes turn into a pattern that you have to be concerned about?
When you have someone who has taken the trouble to organize the anecdotes into real data; though in the case of file-system reliability rates, what you want is an independant testing agency to hammer on them under laboratory conditions.
But in the mean time, if you're leaving data on your hard drive one day, and you expect it to be there the next day, you're being a bit of a fool, irrespective of your choice of file-system. But you know that already, right?
I'd bet that his owning books on police investigative practices may have had something to do with the conclusion it was premeditated.
He bought the books after Nina had disappeared. That's known, and it was discussed at the trial (Reiser was saying he was worried that he was a suspect and wanted to read something about police proceedures and so on).
His trial is somewhat high profile which of course means they will try extra hard, woe for him.
His trial was high-profile before it even started: the cops immediately started in with trial-by-media and kept it up until the judge told them to knock it off. How exactly do you get an "unbiased" jury after that manuever.
The fact that reiser has catastrophic directory corruption bugs is evidence of my theory.
Actually, what you have is anecdotes about nasty bugs in ReiserFS. You can also find anecdotes about ext3 trashing things. Indeed, most software has nasty bugs at some point in it's life cycle, usually fairly early in it's history. So one question is, how old are these reports of ReiserFS problems?
Another question is, what can you conclude about the character of a programmer whose software has bugs? If you heard about a nasty bug in Linux would you figure that was evidence that Linus Torvalds should never be allowed to speak in public?
Still a third question is, would you be bringing up this specious nonsense if Reiser hadn't been brought up on trial? I mean, you wouldn't have reasoned from some anti-reiserfs anecdotes to the presumption that you've gotta stay away from that dude Reiser, correct? You're going backwards, this is stictly "post facto" bullshit, yes?
If you're in a mood for sarcasm, I could say something like "wow, anyone who could post something this dumb can't possibly write good code. Make sure you don't use any of *that* guy's work."
But actually, as it happens, there's such a thing as fields of competence, and some people are good at one thing, and not so good at another thing, and making a presumption about connections between the two doesn't hold so well, eh?
(Been using ReiserFS for a half-dozen years myself: no complaints.
You can find anecdotes like this, too you see, but they're not very dramatic)
The point I'm referring to is after the defense made a motion to throw out the case for lack of evidence, the judge responded "we have enough evidence to convict". Telling choice of words, there, if you ask me.
However, after seeing a ResierFS partition truly crash and burn, I would never consider using it in either a personal or professional application. And I would seriously laugh at anyone who really couldn't think of a better alternative.
There didn't used to be that many alternatives. There was ext2 and reiserfs and that was it. It took awhile for SGI and IBM and so on to decide to hop on the open source band-wagon...
And in any case, I've always found ReiserFS to be rock-solid myself (and ext3 is far from perfect), so what you've got here is the old dueling-anecdotes problem.
A lot, especially when you have LVM running and want to resize a filesystem online. The stuff you are referring to is completly out of date and was the result of SuSE making ReiserFS the default filesystem back then when it was still brand new and not completly ready for prime time (as easily seen by the lack of proper fsck back then).
Yeah, I've been using ReiserFS nearly exclusively on a few machines a half-dozen years, without any trouble. All the anecdotes about horrible failures do seem to date from the early days. I like two things about ReiserFS myself: (1) it scales down as well as up -- there are a number of serious file-systems for linux these days, but only ReiserFS takes the many-small-files case seriously; (2) in a directory listing the size of a directory has some relationship to the amount of data inside the directory -- you can tell at a glance whether a directory is empty or full of stuff (with something like ext3 it always shows a size of 4048 even if it's empty).
I wouldn't hesitate to recommend ReiserFS 3 to anyone who thought they might have a use for it (e.g. it would seem to be the best for mail servers, usenet servers, and so on).
The real shame is Reiser 4: it sounds to me like a really interesting project... it's too bad the conflict between Hans and the kernel developers was never resolved.
But then if you want to be "optimistic" about it, it could be putting someone else in charge of the project now is just what it needs.
Ordinarily, I'd stick up for him purely out of geek pride. However, IMHO his sheer stupidity is grounds for revoking his geek card, and with what I now hear of hash collisions in ReiserFS causing directory garbage (silent corruption, always a MAJOR no-no in ANY situation, especially a kernel based file system), I feel more at ease that his conviction will not ruin too many things even if ReiserFS were to go belly up.
You know. I'm getting tired of coming up with sarcastic remarks. Do you think you could read through this and get back to me if you don't feel like a complete idiot for posting it? Thanks.
So to you who utterly proclaim she is alive in Russia with her kids, why don't you hire a detective to put the kids or her mother under surveillance? She will show up, maybe she is already there. I know it would be expensive but if enough of you chip in it wouldn't be that bad. And if you TRULY believe he is innocent don't you have a moral requirement to at least chip in $50 or $100 to help out?
Despite the sneers, it isn't a bad idea, and it may come down to that.
On the other hand, most of us are not "utterly proclaiming" that this is what happened, just that it's an alternate theory that's reasonably plausible. Another plausible theory is that she really is dead, just killed by someone else.
Nina seemed like a typical harried mom - devoted to her kids and quite kind (she got a cup of juice for my daughter).
Yes, and I'm sure she looked wonderful in that portrait the prosecution propped up in front of the jury.
Hans, on the other hand, went out of his way to be mean, petty, arrogant, and small minded.
No one denies that Hans comes off as arrogant.
I attended the trial for several days. I was impressed with how carefully the jurors followed the witnesses, even though the testimony was boring.
If only they all had mind-reading skills like yours, they wouldn't have needed to pay such close attention.
Even though I wanted him to get out of this squeeze, I quite agree with the jurors on this one: there may not be a body, but Hans committed murder.
I'm on a number of cycling related lists, and it's funny how whenever anyone drops in to post an anti-cyclist screed, they all like to lead off with "I'm a cyclist myself, but --" Do you think it's going to impress anyone that you believe this man murdered a nice, innocent mother and you wanted him to beat the rap? If we take you at your word, you're an absolute monster.
Slashdot Mirror
When "The Man in the High Castle" was written, counter-factual SF was rare -- it's a book that was ground-breaking, but probably doesn't seem so fantastic in retrospect. (Also, very few Westerners had heard of the "I Ching" back then...).
In defense of my sense that "Ubik" was slapped together (which is different from saying "you shouldn't like it" or something like that): consider Pat, and her odd time-shifting power. This capability turns out to be a totally unnecessary fantastic element, and she ultimately turns out to be nothing but a red herring, which seems like a total waste. She starts out as the strongest character in the narrative, and ends up dying ignomiously off-stage (her whole-death that is... her half-death isn't very interesting either).
(By the way, as far as historical significance goes, some younger readers looking at "Ubik" think they're seeing one of the first satires of advertising out-of-control, but 1969 is a relatively late entry into the game, compared to, say Pohl/Kornbluth's "The Space Merchants" of the early 50s. However, Ubik might be an early example of teasing the SF reader with a strange narrative that never really settles down on an explanation -- kind of an early "Dhalgren".)
If you actually read Ubik, you'll find that it's an exceedingly minor Philip K. Dick novel -- to my eye, it looks as though it was written really rapidly, with an ending tacked on at random when he had enough pages. Call Dick a great writer if you like, but every single work of a great writer is not deserving of the label "masterpiece". Not that this has anything to do with what kind of film they're going to make (if any -- most film deals flop without producing anything, you guys know that, right?) because as with all the other Dick novels that have been "filmed" the screen-writers will do whatever they want to movie-up the material. The metaphysical joke that Dick had in mind (the answer to everything is everywhere) isn't going to survive the process. Essentially, they paid for the rights to a Philip K. Dick novel, just so they could say that they did.
While we're on the subject, can I point out that Philip K. Dick is not the only science fiction writer in the world? Like I said, call him a great writer if you like, but if so there are other great writers whose material could be raided help get the screenwriters off of the dime. You could film Brunner's "Stand on Zanibar", or Sturgeon's "More than Human", or Aldis' "Barefoot in the Head", or Delany's "Babel-17", or Fritz Leiber's "The Big Time", or Sterling's "Holy Fire"...
Because that doesn't work. You'll just think it works for just long enough that eventually a competent programmer will have to fix it, along with the data you've mangled.
Like, mod parent up.
The OP doesn't specify language really, but if you're down on Java you may like perl (the anti-Java). Mister Mischief here has laid out the range of solutions in perl quite well.
Yes, that would explain the high rents and housing prices in New York and San Francisco. Human beings just hate being near each other. God meant us to seal ourselves up inside of metal cages and avoid contact with our neighbors.
Grishnakh wrote:
No, no, no. Sarcasm is mainly a great way of grinding your opponent's nose in their own stupidity, while trying to provoke flame wars. (At least, that's what I always use it for.)
The trouble with an idiom like sarcasm (or irony, or hyperbole, or...) is that you're literally not saying what you mean, and it relies on a high degree of knowledge on the part of the reader (presuming you're not going to resort to the execrable smiley face). So, sarcasm is usually a great way of telling someone something that they know already...
There are bad readers out there, and there are also a hell of a lot of bad writers, and sometimes you have both of them at the same time.
Ah yes. You expect people here to read the articles.
Or that they shouldn't skateboard while writing code.
Dude, I could identify it as a sarcasm misfire. Maybe I'm not the one with reading comprehension problems, eh?
Hey kids: just try wrapping it in aluminum foil.
It acted as a subsidy for long-haul trucking, and completely screwed up rail transit, despite the fact that rail is much more energy efficient. (But who cares about that these days, eh?)
It also inspired a fad for "moving to the country" (i.e. the creation of suburban sprawl), which cut the knees out from under the urban tax base, and created a generation of American's who are nearly incapable of any physical exercise, and have a very weak sense of community.
Further, I would argue that oil-addiction has corrupted American morals to an extent not seen since the days of slavery... when you talk about the dubious activities of the US in the middle east you get people quietly whispering "But we need the oil, don't we?"
Myself, I'm not an opponent of government infrastructure programs, but you guys might want to think twice before singing the praises of the interstate highway system. It's a pretty good example of unintended consequences.
Yeah, I know, but the original post was an example of astounding bad writing. On the net, there's no way to tell if the author is saying something resoundingly stupid as a joke, or if they really are resoundingly stupid -- except, of course, that the high average level of intelligence of slashdot posters makes that seem unlikely.
It might be a good idea to take it easy on the sarcasm button and just say what you mean, you know?
Just for the hell of it, something on-topic, from Paul Krugman: Slow in suburbia
I've always liked the idea of microgravity materials processes, but with launch costs the way they are, there isn't any way you're going to manufacture some novel material in space for use on the ground. There remains a lot of "interest" in microgravity processing in space, but largely it's because there's nothing else you can work on to justify having a space station.
One caveat that there might be some scientific value to cranking out samples in orbit (e.g. creating samples large enough to do x-ray crystallography on, and thus learn something about the structure of the exotic materials). On the simplest level, I would expect that if you crystallized a material in space that looked like it had some industrial use, that would provide the motivation to figure out how to manufacture it using ground-based techniques.
This is another application of the rule-of-thumb that while launch costs are high, the only thing that's practical to ship is something that doesn't weigh anything: information (think communication satellites).
I would still bet that the next big step in space industrialization would be the solar power satellite. After that we can start working on mining the moon, the asteroids, and maybe finally reduce earth-to-LEO launch costs, one way or another.
But that would take an actual commitment to a real project... so for the forseeable future, we'll continue to see lots of make-work-in-space like this.
That's pretty good... but then what was going on with the seat? Transporting the body on the seat might make sense if it was done in a panic, but not as something he planned out later. Wouldn't you put it in the back of the CRX?
I have news for you: your "internet license" is called a "credit card".
Anonymity is ultimately going to look like a failed experiment.
Reason: anything that makes it easier for the occasional volunteer whistle-blower also makes it easier legions of corporate and/or government hired propagandists to fake being one of those volunteers, or anything else that seems convenient.
When the pentagon's internet propaganda unit decides to subvert wikipedia, wikipedia will be subverted. I can't even see how there's a question about that, and the only solution that I can see is a new set of internet institutions with ids tied back to actual living bodies.
Anonymity only "works" for a site just as long as the site is seen as a toy. Is the internet a toy, or does it have some serious purpose?
You wouldn't sign a contract with an "anonymous" entity, right? How is politics any less important than business?
Yes, I believe you're right about that: this is the key piece that's missing from most languages. Though on the other hand you can fake it in many ways, e.g. you put your initialization code in a routine that needs to be called first, but the routine itself can be buried at the end if it's too boring to want to read about first.
Myself I tend to write perl using the embedded pod style that gives you a pseudo-literate approach toward programming: sometimes I do write the documentation for my methods first and then fill in the code afterwards (nothing encourages simplification of interfaces more than having to describe them coherently first).
Interestingly Damien Conway recommends against this in his "Perl Best Practices": I gather that he goes into specialized modes where he thinks in either language or code, and he doesn't like being shown language when he wants to see code.
But while it might help with faking some aspects of literate programming, but it isn't exactly what it's about.
Oh yes, proof. I only have your word for it that you've (somehow) ruled out a hardware failure. There's also the interesting pattern that most of these anecdotes are really old, and you know, bugs do indeed get fixed sometimes.
Oh I'm sure. And the numbers of people who've had problems with ext* would probably be even larger, if only because there are so many of them.
When you have someone who has taken the trouble to organize the anecdotes into real data; though in the case of file-system reliability rates, what you want is an independant testing agency to hammer on them under laboratory conditions.
But in the mean time, if you're leaving data on your hard drive one day, and you expect it to be there the next day, you're being a bit of a fool, irrespective of your choice of file-system. But you know that already, right?
Question: was Reiser convicted on the basis of the evidence, or on the basis of being Too Weird For The Jury?
If it was the later, this is not a good thing for "geeks", no?
But what the fuck, his software had some bugs, so who cares.
He bought the books after Nina had disappeared. That's known, and it was discussed at the trial (Reiser was saying he was worried that he was a suspect and wanted to read something about police proceedures and so on).
His trial was high-profile before it even started: the cops immediately started in with trial-by-media and kept it up until the judge told them to knock it off. How exactly do you get an "unbiased" jury after that manuever.
Actually, what you have is anecdotes about nasty bugs in ReiserFS. You can also find anecdotes about ext3 trashing things. Indeed, most software has nasty bugs at some point in it's life cycle, usually fairly early in it's history. So one question is, how old are these reports of ReiserFS problems?
Another question is, what can you conclude about the character of a programmer whose software has bugs? If you heard about a nasty bug in Linux would you figure that was evidence that Linus Torvalds should never be allowed to speak in public?
Still a third question is, would you be bringing up this specious nonsense if Reiser hadn't been brought up on trial? I mean, you wouldn't have reasoned from some anti-reiserfs anecdotes to the presumption that you've gotta stay away from that dude Reiser, correct? You're going backwards, this is stictly "post facto" bullshit, yes?
If you're in a mood for sarcasm, I could say something like "wow, anyone who could post something this dumb can't possibly write good code. Make sure you don't use any of *that* guy's work."
But actually, as it happens, there's such a thing as fields of competence, and some people are good at one thing, and not so good at another thing, and making a presumption about connections between the two doesn't hold so well, eh?
(Been using ReiserFS for a half-dozen years myself: no complaints. You can find anecdotes like this, too you see, but they're not very dramatic)
There didn't used to be that many alternatives. There was ext2 and reiserfs and that was it. It took awhile for SGI and IBM and so on to decide to hop on the open source band-wagon...
And in any case, I've always found ReiserFS to be rock-solid myself (and ext3 is far from perfect), so what you've got here is the old dueling-anecdotes problem.
Yeah, I've been using ReiserFS nearly exclusively on a few machines a half-dozen years, without any trouble. All the anecdotes about horrible failures do seem to date from the early days. I like two things about ReiserFS myself: (1) it scales down as well as up -- there are a number of serious file-systems for linux these days, but only ReiserFS takes the many-small-files case seriously; (2) in a directory listing the size of a directory has some relationship to the amount of data inside the directory -- you can tell at a glance whether a directory is empty or full of stuff (with something like ext3 it always shows a size of 4048 even if it's empty).
I wouldn't hesitate to recommend ReiserFS 3 to anyone who thought they might have a use for it (e.g. it would seem to be the best for mail servers, usenet servers, and so on).
The real shame is Reiser 4: it sounds to me like a really interesting project... it's too bad the conflict between Hans and the kernel developers was never resolved.
But then if you want to be "optimistic" about it, it could be putting someone else in charge of the project now is just what it needs.
You know. I'm getting tired of coming up with sarcastic remarks. Do you think you could read through this and get back to me if you don't feel like a complete idiot for posting it? Thanks.
Despite the sneers, it isn't a bad idea, and it may come down to that.
On the other hand, most of us are not "utterly proclaiming" that this is what happened, just that it's an alternate theory that's reasonably plausible. Another plausible theory is that she really is dead, just killed by someone else.
Yes, and I'm sure she looked wonderful in that portrait the prosecution propped up in front of the jury.
No one denies that Hans comes off as arrogant.
If only they all had mind-reading skills like yours, they wouldn't have needed to pay such close attention.
I'm on a number of cycling related lists, and it's funny how whenever anyone drops in to post an anti-cyclist screed, they all like to lead off with "I'm a cyclist myself, but --" Do you think it's going to impress anyone that you believe this man murdered a nice, innocent mother and you wanted him to beat the rap? If we take you at your word, you're an absolute monster.