So I guess the idea of someone buying a smartcard writer/reader and tinkering with it to develop some new use / application for it not involving fraud is completely out of the question then?
~sign~
"Nothing is intrinsically good or evil, but its manner of usage may make it so." -St. Thomas Aquinas
If I get one more invite to the "Watch Grass Grow" app, I'll just poke out an eye. Seriously - if it's not fun in real life, what makes people think it's fun because "it's on Facebook"
And yeah - I did a sanity check. Thankfully, no such app actually exists on Facebook...yet.
Don't worry, Rule 34 has you covered.
Ooh, you mean you didn't want there to be grass growing porn? Shouldn't have thought about it.
I seriously doubt that stand alone gps can truly ever be replaced... not for gps apps/solutions that rely on connectivity.
Perfect example: I recently finished a 6,000 mile road trip across Canada and back. Both my traveling companion and I had iPhones. We both turned off all data for the entire time we were in Canada... if we hadn't we'd have gotten multi-thousand dollar bills from Rogers Internet for data roaming. Think I'm kidding? last Canada road trip, my traveling companion didn't turn hers off. Got a call from AT&T halfway into the trip asking if she meant to be racking up $2000 in data roaming. Took us a couple days to get the pucker marks out of the passenger seat.
(okay, I kid about the pucker marks, but not about the bill or the call from AT&T).
Google Maps is great, but it relies on an active data connection... something you don't always have available whether due to low signal or STUPID high prices.
I'm not a Mac, I'm not a PC... I own both, and I use Linux and Solaris for servers. I see my computers are tools, but I am not.
As for the crapware, I tend to agree with TFA: My Macbook Pro had little (though, I'm an amateur photographer so I kind of think of iPhoto as a crapware version of LightRoom and PhotoShop). Dells that I've ordered through Small Business division (both for work and personal) have been free of it. Sony Vaios, HP Pavillions have been kind of loaded with it, and my Samsung netbook really wasn't too bad.
Wow, I've got way too many computers.
What.. have... I... said? That's just the crazy talk right there!
It occurs to me that if they need to build a separate, secure, private, insert-adjective-here system, then it doesn't really speak much for the bog-standard cloud they're offering the rest of us.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing Google deliberately. I use google apps... signed up for it with one of my domains and two users so I could have a chance to really play with the service... and I like it a lot.
Still, if they need to make a separate cloud for government, then aren't they kind of breaking the "cloud" paradigm and just providing outsourced hosting / SAS?
Now I'm just me, but it would strike me as just slightly odd if 300 people all handed in Onyxia's dead body to Stormwind one after another.
Actually, you're right it DID seem odd. When the first news leaked out that Ony was getting an upgrade, lots and lots of folks must have decided they wanted to get that achievement in its old form (probably so they'd have a feat of strength when it got removed from the game / replaced with the new one).
It seemed like an awful lot of Ony Heads were getting racked up in Org on Rexxar anyway.
For some strange reason, I decided to follow along.
Wow, what a bunch of whargarble. I think I could go through the entire list of logical fallacies and find at least one example of each somewhere on that site.
Thank you for such an interesting diversion.
I think I prefer the TM-1000 myself.
Re:Generic Advice, agreement and disagreement.
on
Why Developers Get Fired
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Actually, he doesn't sound like a sociopath.
He sounds like a pretty bright guy who has figured out how to play the business game and survive amongst all the sociopaths, narcissists, malingerers, and general d-bags without becoming one himself.
The fact is that he sounds very much like the kind of person I'd either like to be working with or for.
I never really put it all into words, but it occurred to me while I was reading his post that this is more or less how I manage to get along.
I am just about the only person in my organization who will look the head of IT in the eye and said "Dude, are you smoking crack?". Ive often found that when the the crack quotient seems high, it's due to some external (to the IT department) force, be it customer driven or from another department. Either way, there's usually very little that can be done to stop the stupid once it gains momentum... but you can often harness and direct it to some degree to end up in a semi-sane place.
Really, there are three things I'd add to Don's rules:
1) Know / Understand your bosses real objectives, and know / understand THEIR bosses real objective, and always keep them in mind. It will help you keep your sanity and it will make you better able to have their backs. This is especially helpful if your boss doesn't understand this rule and is oblivious to the real goals and objectives of their higher-ups. If this is the case, try and being them around. It will benefit them greatly and that will trickle down to you.
2) Try not to care more about your task/assignment/job than your company / chain of command. I fall victim to this one all the time, but am trying to get better. Don kind of said it already - it was the part about screaming/shouting/jumping up and down on stacks of printouts while the issue was open, but accepting it once the issue was closed/decided.
In simple terms, part of what makes a star programmer good is that they often really give a damn about what they're doing. Properly applied, this is what makes you much more productive than the run of the mill developer, but if you don't keep it in check - applying it at the wrong place/time or you're not aware of the higher-ups real objectives as stated previously, then caring too much can lead you astray.
3a) Never cook fish in the lunchroom microwave: It really stinks up the place and everyone will hate you.
3b) Never pop popcorn in the lunchroom microwave: It tends to bring productivity to a screeching halt as everyone takes a break to go make some for themselves. Also, anyone in the office who is on a diet will hate you.
It seems to me you really only need one: Mossberg.
And lo it did come to pass that the frustrated IT geek spaketh "Go ahead, make my day", as they prepared to dispense final judgment upon the failing storage device. And there was a joyous noise and the bits and pieces were taken up unto the Lord in his mercy. Amen.
I coulda sworn that I heard something like this about some glowie aquatic doomahickie before.
In that case, the defense mechanism was all about getting loads of brightly glowing goo stuck to the attacker... I guess in the hope that "There's always a bigger fish"
Either that, or it's just an anti-shoplifting mechanism gone horribly wrong.
Just saying, not everything needs to be suitable for kids. There's plenty of stuff that's ready made for them and is still enjoyable to parents.
THANK YOU.
I wish I had mod points, but instead, I'll just quote you and say, "hear hear!"
In a society where a mom who has a neighbor videotape Beavis & Butthead so she can use it to pacify her kids, then sues the network when one of the kids burns down the family trailer (reference way at the bottom), we need more people to understand this simple truth.
Once you've taken over someone's iPhone in this manner, it seems to me you've got more power to use the thing than the original owner had (unless they had Jailbroken their phone already).
Interestingly enough, this vulnerability is in the factory-spec iPhone - it doesn't require it to have been jailbroken.
So, yeah, Apple claims they're jailing your phone to protect you from bad guys and to protect the infrastructure from you, but this goes to prove that the only thing they're protecting are their (and AT&T's) pockets.
All this from a company where the CEO's liver is replaceable, but the battery in your phone or laptop is not.
FYI: It's not that one character can break your iPhone, it's about 512 text messages sent at your phone, causing certain buffer overflows. The proof on concept ended up where the slew of messages (apparently arrived at originally by fuzzing) winds up only showing one visible character (appears as a box).
The author said that it could probably be refined so that it wouldn't send anything that would show up.
500 or so un-seen text messages, and you're iPwned.
At first when I was reading the story, I was all like, "oh, guy with only keys to kingom hit by a bus?", then I saw how he controlled the funds and I was all like "he's so on a beach in the tropics threatening to burn the hotel down if he doesn't get his paper umbrella".
Seriously though, I hope it's simply a case of needing a break, not something more ominous. I like CentOS, and I'd hate to see the project fall apart due to losing one key person.
In thinking about things like Apple's abuse of patenting on their power/dock connectors, I think I have a logical solution:
The holder of the patent is the only one allowed to produce products that use them, but ANYONE can produce accessories MADE TO WORK WITH THOSE PRODUCTS.
So, I can't make my own laptop or other device with the MagSafe connector, but I can make any number of products to charge/power devices that have them.
I mean, the MagSafe connector really is a neat idea and is novel enough that they deserve patent protection, but to use that protection to keep third parties from making power adapters for their devices? that's abuse clear and simple.
As to software patents, I agree.
Actually, I really think we need to roll back the clock to when patents were on devices... on physical things, and not ideas/conceptions.
The only thing more annoying than Software patents are business method patents... no, wait, patents on discoveries of existing biological processes... eh, the whole system has been co-opted and corrupted.
The revolution has begun. Unfortunately, due to patent restrictions, it will not be podcasted.
Ever notice an SSID for "Free Public WiFi" just pop up while you're at your place of work?
When I first saw these, I assumed "someone got infected with some trojan which sets them up to pretend to be an open WiFi either to do a man-in-the-middle attack, or to infect my system with some kind of worm."
After a bit of digging, I discovered that this was actually not malicious, but was a viral-like spread due to some strange way that one of the MS Operating systems was handling ad-hoc wireless connections.
However, my initial suspicians (about MitM or worm infections) could easily be made to come true, and anyone who google'd it would say "oh, I guess it's that 2006 thing, no worries"
Of course, being an ad-hoc node, it'll be kinda obvious to most geeks... and of course, most geeks would probably make sure they were tunneling or otherwise using the network safely anyhow.
John Q. Public on the other hand? hoo boy.... AND it doesn't help that so many products, in the name of making things easier on John Q. Public, will just auto-associate when they see an available connection.
I don't really know where I'm going with all this except to say "Never trust any network outside your own, never EVER trust the Interwebs, and only trust your own network as far as you have to in order to make things work... especially if you're not the only one using it.", but you knew that already.
Seriously, I realize I'm being a curmudgeon, but I've thus far completely avoided Silverlight. This new development just reinforces my feelings that I made the right move.
Let's see, there's nothing in the game mechanic stopping me from waiting until all the members of my party greed on a piece of loot, then hitting "need", or if master looter in a raid instance, of just looting myself anything interesting.
There's no game mechanic to stop me taking as much out of the guild bank as my guild's withdrawl limits allow and/gquitting
There's no game mechanic to stop me offering to craft an item for another player with their materials, then running off with their mats instead of crafting it.
There's no game mechanic against me taking a level 80 geared out toon into a lowbie starting area and killing every mob (monster) around so that no newbies can gain experience and level, or against me going to the opposing faction's starting area and killing all the mobs and all the questgivers so that nobody can get/turn in quests or kill mobs.
There's nothing stopping any of those COMPLETELY ASSHATTISH activities except for the fact that they're utterly contemptible.
Even if my own moral compass didn't tell me that these were wrong, I still would NOT be surprised to find myself to be a social pariah if I acted in such a manner.
There are MANY things you can "get away with" by the letter of the rules and the game mechanics that are still completely inappropriate. Amazingly enough, real life is like that too.
Players had found a use for a PVP area that was interesting and creative. From the sounds of it, there was a bit of a truce and a social context that had developed there. I would think that a researcher would find it fascinating to see how despite the fact that people COULD act like an Twixt, they chose not to. Instead, he makes some lame whining about how the rules and game designs allow for it, but people don't play by those rules.
Just what is society / civilization then?
The laws of physics allow someone to set his house on fire. The laws of man say that someone who did set his house on fire would be guilty of arson and subject to imprisonment and possibly worse depending on whether they only damaged property or injured/killed people in the process.
Summary: Douchebag griefer is a Douchebag whether or not he's got some self-important idea of what "acceptable behavior" means.
Came here for the Dr. Who (Pertwee) reference... leaving satisfied.
On a serious note, I hope they manage to make it work. It would be really nice to think that we're working on as many different possible (green or at least greener than coal and oil) solutions to our energy needs as possible.
Ok, I'm a bit bothered by how many responses here are going along the lines of "ASCAP are evil IP mongers who I'd normally want to fight against, but I personally don't like others' ringtones, so I don't mind so much".
HYPOCRITES!
If you don't like obnoxious ringtones (obnoxious is usually defined as 'stuff that isn't coming from your phone' of course), then fine, discuss noise pollution or novel technical means to battle them. Whatever... just don't be a hypocrite and decide that its ok to let the ASCAP be douchebags to someone else just because you happen to agree with the side-effects of their douchbaggery. If you do that, you're no better than the folks who claim to be pro-life, but then applaud the murder of a doctor who performs services they don't like.
Just for the record, I'm not saying this to be a troll. I seriously feel this way. Yes, I am often annoyed by others' obnoxious tones, but supporting the ASCAP or the **AA in this one instance would be really shortsighted and hypocritical.
Slashdot Mirror
So I guess the idea of someone buying a smartcard writer/reader and tinkering with it to develop some new use / application for it not involving fraud is completely out of the question then?
~sign~
"Nothing is intrinsically good or evil, but its manner of usage may make it so." -St. Thomas Aquinas
Don't worry, Rule 34 has you covered.
Ooh, you mean you didn't want there to be grass growing porn? Shouldn't have thought about it.
Oh, or the Verruca Gnome.
I seriously doubt that stand alone gps can truly ever be replaced... not for gps apps/solutions that rely on connectivity.
Perfect example: I recently finished a 6,000 mile road trip across Canada and back. Both my traveling companion and I had iPhones. We both turned off all data for the entire time we were in Canada... if we hadn't we'd have gotten multi-thousand dollar bills from Rogers Internet for data roaming. Think I'm kidding? last Canada road trip, my traveling companion didn't turn hers off. Got a call from AT&T halfway into the trip asking if she meant to be racking up $2000 in data roaming. Took us a couple days to get the pucker marks out of the passenger seat.
(okay, I kid about the pucker marks, but not about the bill or the call from AT&T).
Google Maps is great, but it relies on an active data connection... something you don't always have available whether due to low signal or STUPID high prices.
Stand-alone units don't have this problem.
Well played sir, well played.
I'm not a Mac, I'm not a PC... I own both, and I use Linux and Solaris for servers. I see my computers are tools, but I am not.
As for the crapware, I tend to agree with TFA: My Macbook Pro had little (though, I'm an amateur photographer so I kind of think of iPhoto as a crapware version of LightRoom and PhotoShop). Dells that I've ordered through Small Business division (both for work and personal) have been free of it. Sony Vaios, HP Pavillions have been kind of loaded with it, and my Samsung netbook really wasn't too bad.
Wow, I've got way too many computers.
What.. have... I ... said? That's just the crazy talk right there!
Yep, if you want to avoid the crap build your own or order from a small business division instead of consumer outlet.
It occurs to me that if they need to build a separate, secure, private, insert-adjective-here system, then it doesn't really speak much for the bog-standard cloud they're offering the rest of us.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing Google deliberately. I use google apps... signed up for it with one of my domains and two users so I could have a chance to really play with the service... and I like it a lot.
Still, if they need to make a separate cloud for government, then aren't they kind of breaking the "cloud" paradigm and just providing outsourced hosting / SAS?
Yep, that's what I was thinking too.
/g
Of course, my concern would be that it would then be kind of easy to strip back out... all you'd have to do would be to run
s/ /
until it came beck with no matches.
If you think they may be substituting other white-space characters, come up with a standard for mapping that out too.
Actually, you'll have to pay for that too... John Cage owns the rights
Enjoy the silence
DOH! That's Depeche Mode's
Um, if you RTFA, Forbes (Stephen Manes), said that at best it was annoying and at worst, he wanted to drive to Redmond and rip someone's liver out.
Not exactly a glowing review (and very akin to my personal opinion).
Actually, you're right it DID seem odd. When the first news leaked out that Ony was getting an upgrade, lots and lots of folks must have decided they wanted to get that achievement in its old form (probably so they'd have a feat of strength when it got removed from the game / replaced with the new one).
It seemed like an awful lot of Ony Heads were getting racked up in Org on Rexxar anyway.
For some strange reason, I decided to follow along.
Wow, what a bunch of whargarble. I think I could go through the entire list of logical fallacies and find at least one example of each somewhere on that site.
Thank you for such an interesting diversion.
I think I prefer the TM-1000 myself.
Actually, he doesn't sound like a sociopath.
He sounds like a pretty bright guy who has figured out how to play the business game and survive amongst all the sociopaths, narcissists, malingerers, and general d-bags without becoming one himself.
The fact is that he sounds very much like the kind of person I'd either like to be working with or for.
I never really put it all into words, but it occurred to me while I was reading his post that this is more or less how I manage to get along.
I am just about the only person in my organization who will look the head of IT in the eye and said "Dude, are you smoking crack?". Ive often found that when the the crack quotient seems high, it's due to some external (to the IT department) force, be it customer driven or from another department. Either way, there's usually very little that can be done to stop the stupid once it gains momentum... but you can often harness and direct it to some degree to end up in a semi-sane place.
Really, there are three things I'd add to Don's rules:
1) Know / Understand your bosses real objectives, and know / understand THEIR bosses real objective, and always keep them in mind. It will help you keep your sanity and it will make you better able to have their backs. This is especially helpful if your boss doesn't understand this rule and is oblivious to the real goals and objectives of their higher-ups. If this is the case, try and being them around. It will benefit them greatly and that will trickle down to you.
2) Try not to care more about your task/assignment/job than your company / chain of command. I fall victim to this one all the time, but am trying to get better. Don kind of said it already - it was the part about screaming/shouting/jumping up and down on stacks of printouts while the issue was open, but accepting it once the issue was closed/decided.
In simple terms, part of what makes a star programmer good is that they often really give a damn about what they're doing. Properly applied, this is what makes you much more productive than the run of the mill developer, but if you don't keep it in check - applying it at the wrong place/time or you're not aware of the higher-ups real objectives as stated previously, then caring too much can lead you astray.
3a) Never cook fish in the lunchroom microwave: It really stinks up the place and everyone will hate you.
3b) Never pop popcorn in the lunchroom microwave: It tends to bring productivity to a screeching halt as everyone takes a break to go make some for themselves. Also, anyone in the office who is on a diet will hate you.
It seems to me you really only need one: Mossberg.
And lo it did come to pass that the frustrated IT geek spaketh "Go ahead, make my day", as they prepared to dispense final judgment upon the failing storage device. And there was a joyous noise and the bits and pieces were taken up unto the Lord in his mercy. Amen.
Thus ends the reading from the book of Jobs.
I coulda sworn that I heard something like this about some glowie aquatic doomahickie before.
In that case, the defense mechanism was all about getting loads of brightly glowing goo stuck to the attacker... I guess in the hope that "There's always a bigger fish"
Either that, or it's just an anti-shoplifting mechanism gone horribly wrong.
THANK YOU.
I wish I had mod points, but instead, I'll just quote you and say, "hear hear!"
In a society where a mom who has a neighbor videotape Beavis & Butthead so she can use it to pacify her kids, then sues the network when one of the kids burns down the family trailer (reference way at the bottom), we need more people to understand this simple truth.
Actually, that's exactly what I was thinking.
Once you've taken over someone's iPhone in this manner, it seems to me you've got more power to use the thing than the original owner had (unless they had Jailbroken their phone already).
Interestingly enough, this vulnerability is in the factory-spec iPhone - it doesn't require it to have been jailbroken.
So, yeah, Apple claims they're jailing your phone to protect you from bad guys and to protect the infrastructure from you, but this goes to prove that the only thing they're protecting are their (and AT&T's) pockets.
All this from a company where the CEO's liver is replaceable, but the battery in your phone or laptop is not.
~ducking~
FYI: It's not that one character can break your iPhone, it's about 512 text messages sent at your phone, causing certain buffer overflows. The proof on concept ended up where the slew of messages (apparently arrived at originally by fuzzing) winds up only showing one visible character (appears as a box).
The author said that it could probably be refined so that it wouldn't send anything that would show up.
500 or so un-seen text messages, and you're iPwned.
Gotta love the Black Hat Briefings.
Follow The Money.
At first when I was reading the story, I was all like, "oh, guy with only keys to kingom hit by a bus?", then I saw how he controlled the funds and I was all like "he's so on a beach in the tropics threatening to burn the hotel down if he doesn't get his paper umbrella".
Seriously though, I hope it's simply a case of needing a break, not something more ominous. I like CentOS, and I'd hate to see the project fall apart due to losing one key person.
In thinking about things like Apple's abuse of patenting on their power/dock connectors, I think I have a logical solution:
The holder of the patent is the only one allowed to produce products that use them, but ANYONE can produce accessories MADE TO WORK WITH THOSE PRODUCTS.
So, I can't make my own laptop or other device with the MagSafe connector, but I can make any number of products to charge/power devices that have them.
I mean, the MagSafe connector really is a neat idea and is novel enough that they deserve patent protection, but to use that protection to keep third parties from making power adapters for their devices? that's abuse clear and simple.
As to software patents, I agree.
Actually, I really think we need to roll back the clock to when patents were on devices... on physical things, and not ideas/conceptions.
The only thing more annoying than Software patents are business method patents... no, wait, patents on discoveries of existing biological processes... eh, the whole system has been co-opted and corrupted.
The revolution has begun. Unfortunately, due to patent restrictions, it will not be podcasted.
Ahh, and here I thought it was an acute case of concrete poisoning.
Ever notice an SSID for "Free Public WiFi" just pop up while you're at your place of work?
When I first saw these, I assumed "someone got infected with some trojan which sets them up to pretend to be an open WiFi either to do a man-in-the-middle attack, or to infect my system with some kind of worm."
After a bit of digging, I discovered that this was actually not malicious, but was a viral-like spread due to some strange way that one of the MS Operating systems was handling ad-hoc wireless connections.
Here's a 2006 advisory on the issue
http://www.nmrc.org/pub/advise/20060114.txt
Here's a less technical explanation (in case you have to convert it to "boss speak")
http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2007/01/ad-hoc-wifi-virus.html
So, pretty much everyone says it's harmless.
However, my initial suspicians (about MitM or worm infections) could easily be made to come true, and anyone who google'd it would say "oh, I guess it's that 2006 thing, no worries"
Of course, being an ad-hoc node, it'll be kinda obvious to most geeks... and of course, most geeks would probably make sure they were tunneling or otherwise using the network safely anyhow.
John Q. Public on the other hand? hoo boy. ... AND it doesn't help that so many products, in the name of making things easier on John Q. Public, will just auto-associate when they see an available connection.
I don't really know where I'm going with all this except to say "Never trust any network outside your own, never EVER trust the Interwebs, and only trust your own network as far as you have to in order to make things work... especially if you're not the only one using it.", but you knew that already.
This will turn out well....
Seriously, I realize I'm being a curmudgeon, but I've thus far completely avoided Silverlight. This new development just reinforces my feelings that I made the right move.
Time will tell.
I don't play CoH/CoV, but I do play Warcraft.
Let's see, there's nothing in the game mechanic stopping me from waiting until all the members of my party greed on a piece of loot, then hitting "need", or if master looter in a raid instance, of just looting myself anything interesting.
There's no game mechanic to stop me taking as much out of the guild bank as my guild's withdrawl limits allow and /gquitting
There's no game mechanic to stop me offering to craft an item for another player with their materials, then running off with their mats instead of crafting it.
There's no game mechanic against me taking a level 80 geared out toon into a lowbie starting area and killing every mob (monster) around so that no newbies can gain experience and level, or against me going to the opposing faction's starting area and killing all the mobs and all the questgivers so that nobody can get/turn in quests or kill mobs.
There's nothing stopping any of those COMPLETELY ASSHATTISH activities except for the fact that they're utterly contemptible.
Even if my own moral compass didn't tell me that these were wrong, I still would NOT be surprised to find myself to be a social pariah if I acted in such a manner.
There are MANY things you can "get away with" by the letter of the rules and the game mechanics that are still completely inappropriate. Amazingly enough, real life is like that too.
Players had found a use for a PVP area that was interesting and creative. From the sounds of it, there was a bit of a truce and a social context that had developed there. I would think that a researcher would find it fascinating to see how despite the fact that people COULD act like an Twixt, they chose not to. Instead, he makes some lame whining about how the rules and game designs allow for it, but people don't play by those rules.
Just what is society / civilization then?
The laws of physics allow someone to set his house on fire. The laws of man say that someone who did set his house on fire would be guilty of arson and subject to imprisonment and possibly worse depending on whether they only damaged property or injured/killed people in the process.
Summary: Douchebag griefer is a Douchebag whether or not he's got some self-important idea of what "acceptable behavior" means.
Came here for the Dr. Who (Pertwee) reference... leaving satisfied.
On a serious note, I hope they manage to make it work. It would be really nice to think that we're working on as many different possible (green or at least greener than coal and oil) solutions to our energy needs as possible.
Ok, I'm a bit bothered by how many responses here are going along the lines of "ASCAP are evil IP mongers who I'd normally want to fight against, but I personally don't like others' ringtones, so I don't mind so much".
HYPOCRITES!
If you don't like obnoxious ringtones (obnoxious is usually defined as 'stuff that isn't coming from your phone' of course), then fine, discuss noise pollution or novel technical means to battle them. Whatever... just don't be a hypocrite and decide that its ok to let the ASCAP be douchebags to someone else just because you happen to agree with the side-effects of their douchbaggery. If you do that, you're no better than the folks who claim to be pro-life, but then applaud the murder of a doctor who performs services they don't like.
Just for the record, I'm not saying this to be a troll. I seriously feel this way. Yes, I am often annoyed by others' obnoxious tones, but supporting the ASCAP or the **AA in this one instance would be really shortsighted and hypocritical.