Are you sure that's all to it? Many of the top developers at my company (we do low level system programming) are in their 40s (or 50s). We recently put out an opening for a senior developer, and hired someone in his mid-forties. I've heard about ageism as a problem, but I'm not sure it's that big.
The one thing about being older is that if you want to stay in the field, it's important to commit yourself to constantly renewing any obsolete skills. Back when I was a columnist, I wrote an article about how the addition of branch-prediction to newer microprocessors made me have to relearn performance programming essentially from scratch. My reaction should have been happiness that I no longer needed to spend all my effort worrying about branches, but my actual reaction was a feeling that I no longer knew how to program. All of my idioms and rules-of-thumbs had become incorrect. I had to make a decision at that point as to whether I was going to stay on the cutting-edge of implementation or move into management. I explicitly chose the former and relearned how to do performance programming more or less from scratch.
It's possible you are interviewing as technically solid but old-fashioned. Another possibility is that you are one of the many excellent coders of all ages right now who are struggling for work. We turned down a number of excellent candidates just because we didn't have enough openings.
I have no doubt that/.'s owners and other advertisers would prefer me not to block their ads, but where have I accepted an obligation to view ads just because advertisers want me to?
There is nothing immoral about blocking ads because last I heard, no one has ever explicitly given away the right to ignore ads. I hope no one on/. would dispute that I have the right to use a spam filter on my mail client. A spam filter on my email client is not enough different from an ad-filter on my browser to warrant an implicit change in my moral obligations.
In Max Headroom, it was against the law to turn off a TV because the advertisers paid good money for you to watch those ads. I'm certainly not going to feel guilty about not voluntarily taking us down this path.
I'm not against/. having paid subscriptions, but they need to come up with a better value proposition than just blocking the ads that you could block yourself. I'll be looking to see if they come up with some more compelling plums.
If Microsoft accomplishes its goal (according to the article) and manages to move gaming off the PC, then there will be much less incentive to upgrade PCs. I'll bet the PC manufactuers are going nuts about this behind the scenes. Perhaps Microsoft is taking revenge on the PC manufacturers for not supporting MS in the antitrust trial.
Both your response and the Java Developer's Journal article begin with the same point: C# is roughly as good as Java (maybe a little worse/better). However, you need to go on and read the rest of the article.
The gist of the article is that he fears that a comparable technology combined with Microsoft's muscle could wipe Java off the map. He gives some examples of this from his experience with the tech industry.
This point needs to be taken seriously. Look at how Microsoft has monopolized markets with inferior technologies, such as Windows. If they actual offer a decent (even if not superior) solution to go with their market clout (and exploitation of their monopoly), Java could be in trouble. The winner isn't necessarily the better technology (i.e. betamax), it just has to be close enough that business people can get away with choosing Microsoft.
The difference is established practice. All other differences or similarities are minor by comparison. Most industries and associations have a vested interest in the status quo and will fight to maintain it. Auto dealers have a tradition of selling both new and used cars. Booksellers have a tradition of separate stores for new and used books (with the upscale stores only selling new). If the auto industry had a time machine, they might try to stop the practice of selling used cars before it got too established, but it's too late for that now.
In the same vein, Slashdot has been reporting how the RIAA is trying to charge royalty to Internet radio but not to establish one for on-air radio. The only difference is that the industry and legal practices for Internet radio are not yet set in stone, so they have a chance to change them.
Most of the recommendations here have been similar in flavor to Harper and Greenberg. If you've had trouble with that, you're probably better off with a wholly different approach. Try Bott and Tu, Differential Forms in Algebraic Topology.
This book covers a lot of ground, but avoids a lot of messy algebra by restricting (until late in the book) to the intuitive differential forms case. For example, most algebraic topology books spend a chapter constructing products using messy (and unmotivated to the beginner) homological algebra. By sticking with differential forms, Presto! cup products are just the exterior product of differential forms. Want a two line proof of Poincare duality? Cap product is integration along the fibre: Verify it on an open disk and apply Mayer-Vietoris. You get all this in the first couple of chapters. Of course, if you are interested in torsion, you have to work harder, but that can wait.
One of the benchmarks suggests processors are getting fast enough for a new killer app. According to the review, the P4 2.4G was the first (non-overclocked) machine to run the speech recognition test in realtime. As long as this isn't a totally artificial benchmark, the ability to interpret speech in realtime could have huge ramifications for personal computers.
I don't think there is a question about Apple's need to obtain and follow good legal advice, but how it handled the situation is clearly wrong (assuming Dobbie's account is accurate).
There may well be valid legal issues that Apple needs to be concerned about. I have spent enough time with lawyers for several lifetimes, and the law often forces you to do illogical things.
However, there is always a business decision associated with any legal opinion and Apple f'ed this one up badly. Someone should have contacted him, informed him of the legal situation, and made a good faith effort to see if a legally acceptable resolution was possible. There is no legal reason why they couldn't have done this. Instead, out of the blue, he was locked out of his account without a word of explanation.
> I must confess that since Purify is not > available for Linux, we are always looking for > interesting pieces of software to do this job.
> Now the only question I have are: > 1) can it be used as a debugger too ? Yes
> 2) how does it compare to other systems like electricfence ? Take a look at the demo (perhaps when it is less slashdotted) and draw your own conclusion. It is pretty self-explanatory.
What do you get for the fees?
on
More on MPEG4
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The first question I would ask about the licensing fees is whether MPEG4 provides enough added value to justify choosing it over the less expensive/free alternatives.
The quality doesn't appear to justify it. My experience with various mpeg video formats is that they are not better (and probably worse) than On2's open-source and (reasonably priced) commercial solutions. It is certainly worth forming your own opinion by checking out On2's demos at their website.
As the quality is not sufficiently better to achieve an ROI based on reduced bandwidth, what is MPEG counting on to entice people to pay their fees? Several possibilities (some mentioned in the article):
Brand value. mpeg is much better known than the alternatives. This can be a powerful asset. I switched my long-distance from Qwest to PowerNet Global. There is no difference in quality because PNG uses Qwest's infrastructure, but I pay less than half as much as I did, but I realize a lot more people go with Qwest than PNG. In effect, the extra fees go to paying Qwest's marketing, which gives them more market share than the extra price costs them.
Useful features in MP4. I have no idea what features MP4 has over VP3/4/5 that are not visible by viewing the demos on the web, but the article suggests there may be some.
Patent muscle. This surprised me as On2 has been around for some time and once had a market cap of about $1 billion (I miss those days!). They could have sued them when they had the prospect of getting real money in a judgment, where now there is no prospect of getting money from them or the open-source alternatives. I suspect this implies they don't have much of a case.
Negotiating strategy. I have been involved in quite a few enterprise-level business negotiations. Both sides often take extreme initial positions to give them room to negotiate. The belief is that if you begin with your best offer, you'll have to settle on something unacceptable. My experience suggests this is a rational negotiating strategy. The mpeg team is going to face tough negotiating with the major media companies and may feel they need some things they can give away. In this case, they will expect to end up reducing their fees but still be better off than if they had started with a more reasonable offer.
Why are we discussing this announcement so seriously?
Microsoft is a commercial software company that is being threatened by open-source projects. Of course they are going to say bad things about open-source. The comments were almost certainly put together by Microsoft's PR department and Craig Mundle's name slapped on.
Raise your hand in you develop software for a living. Now, keep your hand raised if your company never suggests that competing software products are not as good as yours.
I think there are roles and uses for both commercial and open-source software products and that dialogue about this is valuable, but I wouldn't view marketing-oriented press releases from either side (Redhat has done its share of these as well) as a serious part of the dialogue.
Whenever I go to a new site, I tell mozilla to block images from the advertising servers for that site. This doesn't work for slashdot because the banner ads use the same images.slashdot.com server used by the rest of the site. Depending on how they implement the new ads, this may or may not be a free way to get the same benefit.
I am not opposed to slashdot trying to make some (well deserved I think) money by charging for page views. Charging for ad-free pages probably isn't enough added (adless?) value because it is to easy to filter out ads at the client side. If the ads got obnoxious enough it shouldn't be hard to make the "block images" functionality finer-grained.
Re:Can there ever be a perfect digital shredder?
on
Self-Shredding E-Mail
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I have been looking at the Authentica. It appears to me that Authentica's product (prominently mentioned in the article) has a lot of powerful access control features that address the issues in the above email, but offer no protection against a court-ordered review of email. In particular, Bill Gates can't use such systems to protect himself from legal review.
Backups do not defeat the system because the emails are encrypted and can only be viewed using a secure viewer. According to a review:
On the viewer side, recipients need Authentica's plug-in to Netscape and Microsoft browsers for viewing protected content....Authentica's plug-in...decrypts into protected memory, so that recipients never have direct access to decrypted content.
The "mail chain" is not destroyed, but instead is made more explicit. Again, from the review:
The "recall" name also refers to the user's ability to see what's been done with a specific piece of content. The system keeps a complete audit trail of all access and changes to rights and permissions.
The person in charge of granting rights can apparently change them anytime in the future to either "unshred" a message or make an existing message unreadable even in the viewers mailbox:
The person granting rights can change-and even revoke-privileges after content has been delivered.
What I conclude from this is that even if the system works as designed (a big if), it is at most useful for protecting your documents against people who cannot influence the "person granting rights". In particular, this wouldn't seem to protect documents in a court fight. The judge could require that the person granting rights unshred the document and cough up the audit chain to see exactly who viewed it and when.
If this technology develops further, there will be some staggering implications for premature births. Our daughter was born eleven weeks early at 820g (~1 lb 13oz). She spent 3 amazing/stressful months in a neonatal intensive care unit and is now a perfectly normal 2 1/2 year old.
If a high-quality artificial womb were around, we probably would have been advised to put our daughter into it. If she was smaller/earlier/worse prognosis, we might even have been told that not using an artifical womb would kill her. Someone using an artifical womb to conceive (like IVF) at least makes a decision about what to pursue in advance based on their own ethics. In a problem pregnancy, the mother might well be compelled/pressured to use one, regardless of her beliefs.
A war of incompatible email formats with Microsoft is one that can only be lost, not to mention being pointless. Microsoft has much heavier artillery in this war. For example, Outlook's dreaded "winmail.dat."
When I receive winmail.dat emails that I cannot read in my mailreader, I politely ask for it to be resent in a format that can be read by all. This is the only way I can survive in my job with a non-Microsoft mailreader. The same comment applies to most people whose job requires them to interact with outside emails. I have no intention of being cowed into using Outlook, but I would not be able to communicate with my customers or many of my friends if I sent email that couldn't be read by Outlook. It's hard for me to see any purpose that would be served by this suggestion (other than to drive the world away from non-Microsoft mailers).
Although the review says that using the i845 chipset with DDR memory gives "a nice level playing field when it comes to pure processor verses processor benchmarking," the i845 chipset is actually known to be a dog and the Pentium 4 performs much better with other DDR chipsets. The LinuxHardware review may be a valid comparison of an all Intel solution against a multi-vendor AMD solution, but its not a reasonable "processor versus processor" benchmark until they pair both processors with their best DDR chipsets and motherboards.
I've watched VP3, and its quality is astounding even at surprisingly low bitrates. The scifi channel exposure section used to have films encoded in both VP3 and ordinary RealVideo. The VP3 versions were a million times better.
I think the site used a 300kbps encoding. Of course, that was over a year ago, and the codec has been improved since then.
I don't know if this is the explanation, but VP3 was a closed-source codec for several years before they opened it up. Major design wins from its closed-source days are certainly reasonable for them to mention as "validating" that the codec is real robust software and not vaporware.
Re:Traffic Safety Statistics
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 1
I am not impressed with this argument. While many motorcycle fatalities are avoidable, but the same is true for car accidents. It is not fair to compare the unavoidable motorcycle fatalities with all types of auto fatalities. If you throw out motorcycle fatalities due to drinking, you have to throw out drunk-driving fatalities too. Once you've done this, the unavoidable motorcycle fatalities will probably still be approximately 18 times the unavoidable auto fatalities. At least no justification for thinking otherwise has been presented.
I think people are perfectly free to accept the risk of riding motorcycles, but the fallacious reasoning used to deny the scale of the risk in the above post makes motorcyclists look like good candidates for natural selection.
We have done exactly this. My father gave a Ceiva to my grandfather. It's turned out to be marvelous! My grandfather is 100 yrs. old and has children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren all over the world, who can upload pictures to it. Whenever I go to his house, there are always new pictures in it of people he cannot see as often as he likes.
All of this quibbling about how the technology could be better or hacked can easily overshadow the fact that a Ceiva digital picture frame is perfectly adequate for its primary function straight out-of-the-box.
I'd go with a different comparison. Different distros are like different PC vendors. Intel doesn't sell PCs (for the most part). Instead, many vendors assemble PCs, configure them, ship them, and support them, just like the distro providers do for Linux.
In this analogy, asking what is wrong with RedHat is little like asking "What is wrong with Dell?" For many people, the answer would be "nothing," but the PC industry has definitely benefited from the competition without having to sacrifice compatibility. I think the same competition will keep the Linux distro providers focused on improving there distros. And that is a good thing.
Unfortunately, no. I hope she wasn't just referring to me! Actually, I got the feeling that there had been a number of them, but the phone clearly wasn't ringing off the hook.
Another interesting aside is that she was very explicit that she was willing to protect my anonymity (not that I felt the need), repeatedly volunteering in advance that I did not need to disclose my name. Perhaps some earlier callers were so scared that Microsoft would retaliate against them that they wanted to remain anonymous.
I did (Jim Ryan of Illinois 217-782-1090). I talked for about 5 minutes with a women there whose job was tallying constituent input. She said that *every single call* she had received was against the deal. Because these are elected officials, a concerted (unanimous?) message from their constituency could have a big effect.
I just called mine (Jim Ryan of Illinois at 217-782-1090). I talked for about five minutes to a woman in her office who was tallying the responses. She said that *every single response* she had gotten so far was against the proposed settlement. If the AG cares about his constituency, this has got to have an effect. Let's overwhelm them with responses.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you sure that's all to it? Many of the top developers at my company (we do low level system programming) are in their 40s (or 50s). We recently put out an opening for a senior developer, and hired someone in his mid-forties. I've heard about ageism as a problem, but I'm not sure it's that big.
The one thing about being older is that if you want to stay in the field, it's important to commit yourself to constantly renewing any obsolete skills. Back when I was a columnist, I wrote an article about how the addition of branch-prediction to newer microprocessors made me have to relearn performance programming essentially from scratch. My reaction should have been happiness that I no longer needed to spend all my effort worrying about branches, but my actual reaction was a feeling that I no longer knew how to program. All of my idioms and rules-of-thumbs had become incorrect. I had to make a decision at that point as to whether I was going to stay on the cutting-edge of implementation or move into management. I explicitly chose the former and relearned how to do performance programming more or less from scratch.
It's possible you are interviewing as technically solid but old-fashioned. Another possibility is that you are one of the many excellent coders of all ages right now who are struggling for work. We turned down a number of excellent candidates just because we didn't have enough openings.
I have no doubt that /.'s owners and other advertisers would prefer me not to block their ads, but where have I accepted an obligation to view ads just because advertisers want me to?
/. would dispute that I have the right to use a spam filter on my mail client. A spam filter on my email client is not enough different from an ad-filter on my browser to warrant an implicit change in my moral obligations.
/. having paid subscriptions, but they need to come up with a better value proposition than just blocking the ads that you could block yourself. I'll be looking to see if they come up with some more compelling plums.
There is nothing immoral about blocking ads because last I heard, no one has ever explicitly given away the right to ignore ads. I hope no one on
In Max Headroom, it was against the law to turn off a TV because the advertisers paid good money for you to watch those ads. I'm certainly not going to feel guilty about not voluntarily taking us down this path.
I'm not against
If Microsoft accomplishes its goal (according to the article) and manages to move gaming off the PC, then there will be much less incentive to upgrade PCs. I'll bet the PC manufactuers are going nuts about this behind the scenes. Perhaps Microsoft is taking revenge on the PC manufacturers for not supporting MS in the antitrust trial.
Both your response and the Java Developer's Journal article begin with the same point: C# is roughly as good as Java (maybe a little worse/better). However, you need to go on and read the rest of the article.
The gist of the article is that he fears that a comparable technology combined with Microsoft's muscle could wipe Java off the map. He gives some examples of this from his experience with the tech industry.
This point needs to be taken seriously. Look at how Microsoft has monopolized markets with inferior technologies, such as Windows. If they actual offer a decent (even if not superior) solution to go with their market clout (and exploitation of their monopoly), Java could be in trouble. The winner isn't necessarily the better technology (i.e. betamax), it just has to be close enough that business people can get away with choosing Microsoft.
The difference is established practice. All other differences or similarities are minor by comparison. Most industries and associations have a vested interest in the status quo and will fight to maintain it. Auto dealers have a tradition of selling both new and used cars. Booksellers have a tradition of separate stores for new and used books (with the upscale stores only selling new). If the auto industry had a time machine, they might try to stop the practice of selling used cars before it got too established, but it's too late for that now.
In the same vein, Slashdot has been reporting how the RIAA is trying to charge royalty to Internet radio but not to establish one for on-air radio. The only difference is that the industry and legal practices for Internet radio are not yet set in stone, so they have a chance to change them.
Most of the recommendations here have been similar in flavor to Harper and Greenberg. If you've had trouble with that, you're probably better off with a wholly different approach. Try Bott and Tu, Differential Forms in Algebraic Topology.
This book covers a lot of ground, but avoids a lot of messy algebra by restricting (until late in the book) to the intuitive differential forms case. For example, most algebraic topology books spend a chapter constructing products using messy (and unmotivated to the beginner) homological algebra. By sticking with differential forms, Presto! cup products are just the exterior product of differential forms. Want a two line proof of Poincare duality? Cap product is integration along the fibre: Verify it on an open disk and apply Mayer-Vietoris. You get all this in the first couple of chapters. Of course, if you are interested in torsion, you have to work harder, but that can wait.
One of the benchmarks suggests processors are getting fast enough for a new killer app. According to the review, the P4 2.4G was the first (non-overclocked) machine to run the speech recognition test in realtime. As long as this isn't a totally artificial benchmark, the ability to interpret speech in realtime could have huge ramifications for personal computers.
I don't think there is a question about Apple's need to obtain and follow good legal advice, but how it handled the situation is clearly wrong (assuming Dobbie's account is accurate).
There may well be valid legal issues that Apple needs to be concerned about. I have spent enough time with lawyers for several lifetimes, and the law often forces you to do illogical things.
However, there is always a business decision associated with any legal opinion and Apple f'ed this one up badly. Someone should have contacted him, informed him of the legal situation, and made a good faith effort to see if a legally acceptable resolution was possible. There is no legal reason why they couldn't have done this. Instead, out of the blue, he was locked out of his account without a word of explanation.
The site is no longer slashdotted and check outable now.
> I must confess that since Purify is not
:
> available for Linux, we are always looking for
> interesting pieces of software to do this job.
> Now the only question I have are
> 1) can it be used as a debugger too ?
Yes
> 2) how does it compare to other systems like electricfence ?
Take a look at the demo (perhaps when it is less slashdotted) and draw your own conclusion. It is pretty self-explanatory.
The quality doesn't appear to justify it. My experience with various mpeg video formats is that they are not better (and probably worse) than On2's open-source and (reasonably priced) commercial solutions. It is certainly worth forming your own opinion by checking out On2's demos at their website.
As the quality is not sufficiently better to achieve an ROI based on reduced bandwidth, what is MPEG counting on to entice people to pay their fees? Several possibilities (some mentioned in the article):
It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Why are we discussing this announcement so seriously?
Microsoft is a commercial software company that is being threatened by open-source projects. Of course they are going to say bad things about open-source. The comments were almost certainly put together by Microsoft's PR department and Craig Mundle's name slapped on.
Raise your hand in you develop software for a living. Now, keep your hand raised if your company never suggests that competing software products are not as good as yours.
I think there are roles and uses for both commercial and open-source software products and that dialogue about this is valuable, but I wouldn't view marketing-oriented press releases from either side (Redhat has done its share of these as well) as a serious part of the dialogue.
Whenever I go to a new site, I tell mozilla to block images from the advertising servers for that site. This doesn't work for slashdot because the banner ads use the same images.slashdot.com server used by the rest of the site. Depending on how they implement the new ads, this may or may not be a free way to get the same benefit.
I am not opposed to slashdot trying to make some (well deserved I think) money by charging for page views. Charging for ad-free pages probably isn't enough added (adless?) value because it is to easy to filter out ads at the client side. If the ads got obnoxious enough it shouldn't be hard to make the "block images" functionality finer-grained.
If this technology develops further, there will be some staggering implications for premature births. Our daughter was born eleven weeks early at 820g (~1 lb 13oz). She spent 3 amazing/stressful months in a neonatal intensive care unit and is now a perfectly normal 2 1/2 year old.
If a high-quality artificial womb were around, we probably would have been advised to put our daughter into it. If she was smaller/earlier/worse prognosis, we might even have been told that not using an artifical womb would kill her. Someone using an artifical womb to conceive (like IVF) at least makes a decision about what to pursue in advance based on their own ethics. In a problem pregnancy, the mother might well be compelled/pressured to use one, regardless of her beliefs.
A war of incompatible email formats with Microsoft is one that can only be lost, not to mention being pointless. Microsoft has much heavier artillery in this war. For example, Outlook's dreaded "winmail.dat."
When I receive winmail.dat emails that I cannot read in my mailreader, I politely ask for it to be resent in a format that can be read by all. This is the only way I can survive in my job with a non-Microsoft mailreader. The same comment applies to most people whose job requires them to interact with outside emails. I have no intention of being cowed into using Outlook, but I would not be able to communicate with my customers or many of my friends if I sent email that couldn't be read by Outlook. It's hard for me to see any purpose that would be served by this suggestion (other than to drive the world away from non-Microsoft mailers).
Although the review says that using the i845 chipset with DDR memory gives "a nice level playing field when it comes to pure processor verses processor benchmarking," the i845 chipset is actually known to be a dog and the Pentium 4 performs much better with other DDR chipsets. The LinuxHardware review may be a valid comparison of an all Intel solution against a multi-vendor AMD solution, but its not a reasonable "processor versus processor" benchmark until they pair both processors with their best DDR chipsets and motherboards.
I've watched VP3, and its quality is astounding even at surprisingly low bitrates. The scifi channel exposure section used to have films encoded in both VP3 and ordinary RealVideo. The VP3 versions were a million times better.
I think the site used a 300kbps encoding. Of course, that was over a year ago, and the codec has been improved since then.
I don't know if this is the explanation, but VP3 was a closed-source codec for several years before they opened it up. Major design wins from its closed-source days are certainly reasonable for them to mention as "validating" that the codec is real robust software and not vaporware.
I am not impressed with this argument. While many motorcycle fatalities are avoidable, but the same is true for car accidents. It is not fair to compare the unavoidable motorcycle fatalities with all types of auto fatalities. If you throw out motorcycle fatalities due to drinking, you have to throw out drunk-driving fatalities too. Once you've done this, the unavoidable motorcycle fatalities will probably still be approximately 18 times the unavoidable auto fatalities. At least no justification for thinking otherwise has been presented.
I think people are perfectly free to accept the risk of riding motorcycles, but the fallacious reasoning used to deny the scale of the risk in the above post makes motorcyclists look like good candidates for natural selection.
We have done exactly this. My father gave a Ceiva to my grandfather. It's turned out to be marvelous! My grandfather is 100 yrs. old and has children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren all over the world, who can upload pictures to it. Whenever I go to his house, there are always new pictures in it of people he cannot see as often as he likes.
All of this quibbling about how the technology could be better or hacked can easily overshadow the fact that a Ceiva digital picture frame is perfectly adequate for its primary function straight out-of-the-box.
I'd go with a different comparison. Different distros are like different PC vendors. Intel doesn't sell PCs (for the most part). Instead, many vendors assemble PCs, configure them, ship them, and support them, just like the distro providers do for Linux.
In this analogy, asking what is wrong with RedHat is little like asking "What is wrong with Dell?" For many people, the answer would be "nothing," but the PC industry has definitely benefited from the competition without having to sacrifice compatibility. I think the same competition will keep the Linux distro providers focused on improving there distros. And that is a good thing.
Unfortunately, no. I hope she wasn't just referring to me! Actually, I got the feeling that there had been a number of them, but the phone clearly wasn't ringing off the hook.
Another interesting aside is that she was very explicit that she was willing to protect my anonymity (not that I felt the need), repeatedly volunteering in advance that I did not need to disclose my name. Perhaps some earlier callers were so scared that Microsoft would retaliate against them that they wanted to remain anonymous.
I did (Jim Ryan of Illinois 217-782-1090). I talked for about 5 minutes with a women there whose job was tallying constituent input. She said that *every single call* she had received was against the deal. Because these are elected officials, a concerted (unanimous?) message from their constituency could have a big effect.
I just called mine (Jim Ryan of Illinois at 217-782-1090). I talked for about five minutes to a woman in her office who was tallying the responses. She said that *every single response* she had gotten so far was against the proposed settlement. If the AG cares about his constituency, this has got to have an effect. Let's overwhelm them with responses.