What exactly was he expecting? Even if he didn't have a plan, you'd think that after Gnutella was pulled he would know where he stood.
No kidding. Why'd he sign a contract saying all his work belongs to the company, if he wanted his work to be his own?
This guy probably made a ton off the buyout. Not only that, he's had other stuff pulled by his management. He gets no sympathy from me for not negotiating a better contract at the beginning or at any point thereafter, or not leaving and starting another company as soon as he could. He sounds like he's just whining about how he'll have to let go of the gravy train if he wants to keep doing stuff that isn't in the company's interests.
On the other hand, of course, if he didn't sign that type of contract, and he didn't use any company resources or time to work on his own projects, and put them up on his own website (so much for the argument that nullsoft.com is his only outlet, etc., his blog is on another website already) then I agree with him, and he should sue them if they try to force him to take his independent stuff down. Otherwise, it sounds like AOL's in the right, here, and he's just trying to make them look bad because he no longer wants to play by the rules he agreed to and is getting paid to follow.
I'd never want to "be tracked" by anyone when I drive. When do they start sending me speeding tickets because I travelled too many miles in too short a time??
It's my understanding that they already do this on some turnpikes. They don't send you a ticket, though - they bill you when you try to get off.
I expect, as you state, it's similar for newspapers and their advertisers, so they charge a token cost at the newsstand.
I suspect it's a lot to do with the fact that they want provable numbers of readers, which is hard to do with these freebie weeklies you see in stands everywhere.
Also, bookstores and magazine stands are not in the habit of carrying things they can't make any money from, so to increase availability, they have to give the carriers a reason not to just throw the bundle that comes out into the street for the homeless people.
Speaking of homeless people, if you put your newspaper out for free, you can bet that a lot of copies are going to be used for unintended purposes, like keeping people warm at night. Charging a token amount just keeps them from walking up and taking stacks at a time.
By the way, anyone charging more than a token amount for their newspaper is probably cashing in on monopoly power. What makes a Sunday paper with fewer pages than the Saturday paper "worth" 2 or 3 times as much? They know people have no choice but to pay it if they want a paper and there's no competition, and peak demand is highest on Sunday. If anything, they could claim that Sunday's revenues from advertising and sales subsidize the rest of the week's production.
I don't want to look over on the train and see someone else enjoying his favorite pr0n. Praise $DEITY the screen is small enough that my chances of doing so are minimal.
Yes, but with a screen that small, he only needs one hand to hold it... I think you're more likely to see him "enjoying" it.
Why do the old systems go to Europe to die? Arn't the Germans responcible for keeping the Amiga alive?
Europeans seem to make much better use of their machines than people in the U.S. This is not just a difference in how they treat hardware, but how they feel about software, too. Many people in the rest of the world don't have the budgets at work or home to have "current" tech, and they just have better sense in realising that learning to use your tools effectively makes you more productive in general.
Face it, people here in the U.S. buy new machines every couple of years to play the latest FPS or run the latest bloatware. But they never fully realise what their machine is capable of doing.
Meanwhile, Europeans do things like win contests for the best 1-k demo. Remember in the 90s, when some people worried that they'd lose their programming jobs to counterparts from the former Soviet Republics? Do you think they had anything like current machines? In reality, they learned to squeeze every bit (pun intended) from the 70s- and 80s-era hardware their universities had.
I'm sure other people can detail this exhaustively, but the point is, people outside the US seem to be a lot less wasteful and a lot more productive with the tools they have.
loved your work on PRO-MOD for JK2:D
I hope you have an INDUSTRY job for the dues you put in.
thanx I know ur work:D
I don't believe you do. Look at my prior posts here over the last couple of years, and tell me if you see anything about me working for any software company. The closest I came was working for Babbage's store #1 when I was just out of high school, for a single Christmas season, and that rarely gets mentioned, even on my resume.
My last job was as engineer for a Tier 1 ISP, and before that, I was an English literacy tutor for disadvantaged and ESL elementary school children. I take great personal pride in my past work, particularly the tutoring, but that's not the sort of thing that gets random recognition from strangers.:)
Sorry, you must have me confused with someone else who has a similar handle. It came from a job title in a Neal Stephenson book, and I've seen others use it as well.
I'm definitely unemployed now, though, so anyone who needs a router jockey/engineer/teacher type, let me know.:)
Uh. A 3,000 megawatt hour nuclear power plant uses a whole lot less raw materials to build than the 100 to 200 square feet per *kilowatt hour* equivalent photovoltaic system.
I can believe that. Sorta. But notice that I was comparing to traditional coal and gas-burning electrical generation, and not nuclear power. Personally, I think nuke plants, at least those that reprocess and minimize their waste, are great.
From a practical matter, however (as in, will the US and the other nuclear powers allow countries, corporations, and individuals own these), the obstacles to entry are much more difficult to overcome than for any other serious method.
Ok, so what, exactly, are they planning to sue him for? It's not like he can be held responsible for what IBM may or may not have put into the kernel. Or can he?
The bigger question is, why does SCO think it can sue IBM for putting stuff into the kernel that SCO doesn't even offer? This has been covered to death the last few days, but jeez, SCO can't claim true enterprise scalability of any sort in its own products, so where can they claim the IP was theirs?
Not to mention that if anyone has a claim to sue Linus, it's the people who created Minix, for creating a workalike - and even then, he didn't copy code. Go look at the UNIX heritage charts for a much better understanding.
SCO is an emaciated, rabid dog nearing its death-frenzy howling and trying to scratch or bite as many others as possible. It's only natural for its foamings to get worse and its anger to increase when presented with images of people playing in the open-sourced software fountain (rabies induces hydrophobia, you know). If you can't shoot this rabid dog, grab your children and run away from it. If you wait a few days, it will have drowned in its own spew - but anyone coming near, especially investors, will find that even its carcass is less than worthless and should be avoided.
Re:In case it gets /.'ed (it's already getting slo
on
Nucular Hydrogen Economy
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Not quite the whole story. Anyone looked at the industrial waste that making solar panels creates? IIRC, it's nontrivial.
We're talking about emissions during generation of electricity, not during creation of the device used to generate it.
If you want to talk about waste during production, don't forget that gas and coal generators have nontrivial waste as side products of their creation, as well. Compare a couple of buckets of nice sand, maybe some heavy metals, wire, and some plastic for solar cell production, to lots of steel and other metals that get strip-mined, not to mention oil, a lot more wire, etc., for gas/coal-burning generation.
If that doesn't convince you, take a look at all the oil and stuff needed to keep generators going, versus maybe spraying the surface of the solar cells with water every now and again to get the grit off...
I've tested everything from Asheron's Call to the new Everquest Online PS2 edition (and some now I can't talk about yet), getting into most of them at the closed beta stage. I've never paid. I just sign up when I hear about them, and they often let me in.
On the other hand, I've also never volunteered to be a game guide, or whatever, after a game starts. I have no idea why any of them would voluntarily pay to provide what amounts to a company's in-game customer service department, but some do.
What happens if someone under the legal age to view pornography in the UK makes use of the network to start viewing porn? Wouldn't MS and the guard be liable for criminal and civil damages? Or do they have Net Nanny or something in there?
Could you imagine, not being able to go to the bathroom without your NetNanny?
Hmmm... two business model questions: If a movie is in demand, why do they preferentially give it to people who will take the longest to return it? And, since frequent renters presumably have a full queue, they save no money on mailing costs; I know I'll get SOMETHING, just maybe not what's first on my list. It is not clear to me this is a well thought out policy.
I really only saw one question. Here's your answer:
- they save money on the mailing costs for that guy who is only renting a couple per month - take the postal cost both ways (I've seen it given elsewhere here as around 75 cents) and divide it by the number of days it's out. Someone whose turnaround on a movie is ten days costs them 7.5 cents a day, postage alone, before any other costs are considered, while someone whose turnaround is five days costs them 15 cents a day. Another way of looking at it: the same movie goes twice as far in the hands of the guy who holds it twice as long.
- If someone with a big queue is satisfied getting something from their queue, great. Let them watch the back catalog, stuff that is cheaper to buy (and replace) than the just-released megablockbuster. If not, the customer base trims down through attrition to those who are the highest margin. If you're someone who watches beyond a certain number, they lose money on you, so why would they want you to stay, anyway?
It's an interesting strategy. Consumers don't self-identify and say "Hi, I want to rent 3/6/20 movies a month," so you bring them in by saying "all you can eat... but not always what's highest on your list." Their actions identify them, and then, assuming you tweak the algorithm properly, the marginal people stay satisified and you break even or make a profit on them, the hogs leave and you stop losing money on them, and the people giving you the most margin stay the happiest, which is as it should be.
You arrive in the middle of lunch hour, and you see they've got good pizza with the styles and toppings you want, so you pay and settle in... then about 10 minutes later, when you're ready to go back for more (remember these are small plates), you realize the ones your eally wanted are gone, and you're left with something that has wilted jalepenos and dehydrated pineapple on it, and a bunch of sugar-coated bread. You ask them to make a pizza of a kind you like, and even though nobody in the place is buying pizzas, and it only takes them 10-15 minutes to slap one together and heat it, and maybe even other people ask for the same pizza, you wait for 1/2 an hour. Then you grab 3 or 4 slices of that pizza, and someone else walks in and sees it, and the others who have been waiting see it...
For those who rent more than 5/month, they could encourage them to double-up their discs. (In fact, I think I'll ask them about this)
The excuse you'll get back is probably that the system inserts each selection as a separate order for processing, because they might be sending your two or three or whatever, from more than one service center. Even when they are from the same center (I don't have Netflix, mind you, but it sure sounds like most people get theirs from only one center), the process would have to change, where instead of dropping one from a hopper into an envelope that's printed and deleivered to you, they drop one from the hopper, have to put it somewhere until the rest of your order comes off other hoppers (what if it's 5?), remember how many envelopes to stick in there for return, then shove them all onto one envelope (where the cost from postal loss is now multiplied) and then get the package out to you.
They've probably already looked at this and decided that the confusion to the humans in the chain (having to pack different numbers of envelopes, having to scan the returns in with just 1 barcode if they only use one return mailer, etc.) is just not worth it right now.
I think a better idea, as someone else has mentioned (maybe several others), is to cover those mail-out envelopes with ads. I'm sure the people who make the instant grocery store coupons would love to do this, especially if the same device printing your address on your mailer could print targeted ads to you on the back. Remember, they have, or think they have, all kinds of information about what you'd be interested in, based upon your viewing history. This is better from a business standpoint, and kind of mixed from a privacy standpoint. But people who use grocery store discount cards that are registered with real information and people who shop at Amazon shouldn't have a problem with this type of advertising, since both examples use purchase history extensively already.
On a related note, I hate businesses that can't understand that my PO Box is my *only* USPS-servicable address, businesses that insist on sending correspondence to my shipping address instead of my billing address, and rebates that don't accept PO Boxes.
Do they still have "general delivery" service? Send the rebates there. As far as businesses that send stuff to the shipping address, not the billing address, that's just plain retarded of them, but it's not the USPS' fault. Call them up and tell them if they can't get it right you can't do business with them. Or tell them to make both the shipping & billing address be the box, but then when you actually order, have them make a secondary shipping address - they have to be able to do this, for people who buy presents and stuff.
And they ran out of PO boxes back in 2000, and again, they don't plan on ever getting any more of them. And they think there is nothing wrong...
Ever think of opening a Mailboxes, Etc. on that street? You could probably do pretty good business, especially if you tout the fact that you'll hold deliveries, and you won't have to use box numbers, so everyone with similar complaints will flock to you...
400 spam emails in the period of 2-apr upto 12 - apr. That's 40 a day. My spamfilters can cope with that, but it is annoying.
What I don't understand is how it is financially still possible. Someone has to pay the bill for the used bandwidth/server usage..
In my case, my 40/day translates into at least 120/day total transactions, because every spam I get ends up getting shoved to uce@ftc.gov (go ahead, spammers, copy that!) and a Spamcop.net address. That makes 120 mails even before Spamcop starts sending out its notices, which add anywhere from one to a dozen or so new mails.
As you can see, the problem is even greater than we want to admit - I am sending out a larger volume of messages in spam-related complaints per day than I'm getting back as useful mail.
You do realize that was probably a set-up, right? I tried to go back and look at the source after leaving the page, to see if it had been posted as alpha tags, but the site's already been slashdotted.
Write up something on the Lotus Elise when it arrives in the U.S. and I'll be pleased.:)
Bah. I'm waiting for Koenigsegg to come to the U.S. It's a sexy transformer, even just sitting around. The website claims it's the fastest car in production, but I don't care, because I'd never drive it 1/3 that speed. It's just the kind of thing that makes you realize that Ferraris and Porsches are boxy and swollen, and that you don't have to give up the dreams about cars you had as a boy.
It's a freaking super-sized matchbox car for grownups, and I want one.
P.S. That top? It's removable! I can't find any pictures of it off, however. Just kidding, here's one, though that color scheme is a bit retrograde, and makes that console look too shagadelic for me, with that giant rotary thing in the middle. This one is better, looks like a spaceship from above, but it's the 2001 model, and I think the shape of the back's changed.
P.P.S. Reminds me of Speed Racer from the back, too, with the twin cowling thing.
Oh, and according to some wording that seems new since the last time I read the site... they now sell it in the U.S.?!? I was told they weren't cleared here yet, but cool.
P.P.P.S. Yet another thing to make you think Sweden has more dibs on the word "lust" than the Germans. Except it probably costs as much as my parents' house, so I guess that also qualifies as envy:(
Slashdot Mirror
No kidding. Why'd he sign a contract saying all his work belongs to the company, if he wanted his work to be his own?
This guy probably made a ton off the buyout. Not only that, he's had other stuff pulled by his management. He gets no sympathy from me for not negotiating a better contract at the beginning or at any point thereafter, or not leaving and starting another company as soon as he could. He sounds like he's just whining about how he'll have to let go of the gravy train if he wants to keep doing stuff that isn't in the company's interests.
On the other hand, of course, if he didn't sign that type of contract, and he didn't use any company resources or time to work on his own projects, and put them up on his own website (so much for the argument that nullsoft.com is his only outlet, etc., his blog is on another website already) then I agree with him, and he should sue them if they try to force him to take his independent stuff down. Otherwise, it sounds like AOL's in the right, here, and he's just trying to make them look bad because he no longer wants to play by the rules he agreed to and is getting paid to follow.
No, first crackers and kool-aid, then a long nap.
You mean, besides reading all of the articles, we now have to read all of the replies, too?
It's my understanding that they already do this on some turnpikes. They don't send you a ticket, though - they bill you when you try to get off.
I suspect it's a lot to do with the fact that they want provable numbers of readers, which is hard to do with these freebie weeklies you see in stands everywhere.
Also, bookstores and magazine stands are not in the habit of carrying things they can't make any money from, so to increase availability, they have to give the carriers a reason not to just throw the bundle that comes out into the street for the homeless people.
Speaking of homeless people, if you put your newspaper out for free, you can bet that a lot of copies are going to be used for unintended purposes, like keeping people warm at night. Charging a token amount just keeps them from walking up and taking stacks at a time.
By the way, anyone charging more than a token amount for their newspaper is probably cashing in on monopoly power. What makes a Sunday paper with fewer pages than the Saturday paper "worth" 2 or 3 times as much? They know people have no choice but to pay it if they want a paper and there's no competition, and peak demand is highest on Sunday. If anything, they could claim that Sunday's revenues from advertising and sales subsidize the rest of the week's production.
Yes, but with a screen that small, he only needs one hand to hold it... I think you're more likely to see him "enjoying" it.
Europeans seem to make much better use of their machines than people in the U.S. This is not just a difference in how they treat hardware, but how they feel about software, too. Many people in the rest of the world don't have the budgets at work or home to have "current" tech, and they just have better sense in realising that learning to use your tools effectively makes you more productive in general.
Face it, people here in the U.S. buy new machines every couple of years to play the latest FPS or run the latest bloatware. But they never fully realise what their machine is capable of doing.
Meanwhile, Europeans do things like win contests for the best 1-k demo. Remember in the 90s, when some people worried that they'd lose their programming jobs to counterparts from the former Soviet Republics? Do you think they had anything like current machines? In reality, they learned to squeeze every bit (pun intended) from the 70s- and 80s-era hardware their universities had.
I'm sure other people can detail this exhaustively, but the point is, people outside the US seem to be a lot less wasteful and a lot more productive with the tools they have.
So that giant sucking sound... is just you with a vacuum cleaner? Cool. Do you do "windows," also?
I don't believe you do. Look at my prior posts here over the last couple of years, and tell me if you see anything about me working for any software company. The closest I came was working for Babbage's store #1 when I was just out of high school, for a single Christmas season, and that rarely gets mentioned, even on my resume.
My last job was as engineer for a Tier 1 ISP, and before that, I was an English literacy tutor for disadvantaged and ESL elementary school children. I take great personal pride in my past work, particularly the tutoring, but that's not the sort of thing that gets random recognition from strangers.
Sorry, you must have me confused with someone else who has a similar handle. It came from a job title in a Neal Stephenson book, and I've seen others use it as well.
I'm definitely unemployed now, though, so anyone who needs a router jockey/engineer/teacher type, let me know.
I can believe that. Sorta. But notice that I was comparing to traditional coal and gas-burning electrical generation, and not nuclear power. Personally, I think nuke plants, at least those that reprocess and minimize their waste, are great.
From a practical matter, however (as in, will the US and the other nuclear powers allow countries, corporations, and individuals own these), the obstacles to entry are much more difficult to overcome than for any other serious method.
The bigger question is, why does SCO think it can sue IBM for putting stuff into the kernel that SCO doesn't even offer? This has been covered to death the last few days, but jeez, SCO can't claim true enterprise scalability of any sort in its own products, so where can they claim the IP was theirs?
Not to mention that if anyone has a claim to sue Linus, it's the people who created Minix, for creating a workalike - and even then, he didn't copy code. Go look at the UNIX heritage charts for a much better understanding.
SCO is an emaciated, rabid dog nearing its death-frenzy howling and trying to scratch or bite as many others as possible. It's only natural for its foamings to get worse and its anger to increase when presented with images of people playing in the open-sourced software fountain (rabies induces hydrophobia, you know). If you can't shoot this rabid dog, grab your children and run away from it. If you wait a few days, it will have drowned in its own spew - but anyone coming near, especially investors, will find that even its carcass is less than worthless and should be avoided.
We're talking about emissions during generation of electricity, not during creation of the device used to generate it.
If you want to talk about waste during production, don't forget that gas and coal generators have nontrivial waste as side products of their creation, as well. Compare a couple of buckets of nice sand, maybe some heavy metals, wire, and some plastic for solar cell production, to lots of steel and other metals that get strip-mined, not to mention oil, a lot more wire, etc., for gas/coal-burning generation.
If that doesn't convince you, take a look at all the oil and stuff needed to keep generators going, versus maybe spraying the surface of the solar cells with water every now and again to get the grit off...
I've tested everything from Asheron's Call to the new Everquest Online PS2 edition (and some now I can't talk about yet), getting into most of them at the closed beta stage. I've never paid. I just sign up when I hear about them, and they often let me in.
On the other hand, I've also never volunteered to be a game guide, or whatever, after a game starts. I have no idea why any of them would voluntarily pay to provide what amounts to a company's in-game customer service department, but some do.
What happens if someone under the legal age to view pornography in the UK makes use of the network to start viewing porn? Wouldn't MS and the guard be liable for criminal and civil damages? Or do they have Net Nanny or something in there?
Could you imagine, not being able to go to the bathroom without your NetNanny?
No kidding. If they follow the guidelines and use body tags, they should be fine.
That would have made finding the rest of the wreckage a lot easier, though.
I really only saw one question. Here's your answer:
- they save money on the mailing costs for that guy who is only renting a couple per month - take the postal cost both ways (I've seen it given elsewhere here as around 75 cents) and divide it by the number of days it's out. Someone whose turnaround on a movie is ten days costs them 7.5 cents a day, postage alone, before any other costs are considered, while someone whose turnaround is five days costs them 15 cents a day. Another way of looking at it: the same movie goes twice as far in the hands of the guy who holds it twice as long.
- If someone with a big queue is satisfied getting something from their queue, great. Let them watch the back catalog, stuff that is cheaper to buy (and replace) than the just-released megablockbuster. If not, the customer base trims down through attrition to those who are the highest margin. If you're someone who watches beyond a certain number, they lose money on you, so why would they want you to stay, anyway?
It's an interesting strategy. Consumers don't self-identify and say "Hi, I want to rent 3/6/20 movies a month," so you bring them in by saying "all you can eat... but not always what's highest on your list." Their actions identify them, and then, assuming you tweak the algorithm properly, the marginal people stay satisified and you break even or make a profit on them, the hogs leave and you stop losing money on them, and the people giving you the most margin stay the happiest, which is as it should be.
You arrive in the middle of lunch hour, and you see they've got good pizza with the styles and toppings you want, so you pay and settle in... then about 10 minutes later, when you're ready to go back for more (remember these are small plates), you realize the ones your eally wanted are gone, and you're left with something that has wilted jalepenos and dehydrated pineapple on it, and a bunch of sugar-coated bread. You ask them to make a pizza of a kind you like, and even though nobody in the place is buying pizzas, and it only takes them 10-15 minutes to slap one together and heat it, and maybe even other people ask for the same pizza, you wait for 1/2 an hour. Then you grab 3 or 4 slices of that pizza, and someone else walks in and sees it, and the others who have been waiting see it...
The excuse you'll get back is probably that the system inserts each selection as a separate order for processing, because they might be sending your two or three or whatever, from more than one service center. Even when they are from the same center (I don't have Netflix, mind you, but it sure sounds like most people get theirs from only one center), the process would have to change, where instead of dropping one from a hopper into an envelope that's printed and deleivered to you, they drop one from the hopper, have to put it somewhere until the rest of your order comes off other hoppers (what if it's 5?), remember how many envelopes to stick in there for return, then shove them all onto one envelope (where the cost from postal loss is now multiplied) and then get the package out to you.
They've probably already looked at this and decided that the confusion to the humans in the chain (having to pack different numbers of envelopes, having to scan the returns in with just 1 barcode if they only use one return mailer, etc.) is just not worth it right now.
I think a better idea, as someone else has mentioned (maybe several others), is to cover those mail-out envelopes with ads. I'm sure the people who make the instant grocery store coupons would love to do this, especially if the same device printing your address on your mailer could print targeted ads to you on the back. Remember, they have, or think they have, all kinds of information about what you'd be interested in, based upon your viewing history. This is better from a business standpoint, and kind of mixed from a privacy standpoint. But people who use grocery store discount cards that are registered with real information and people who shop at Amazon shouldn't have a problem with this type of advertising, since both examples use purchase history extensively already.
"Is This Stuff Sci-Fi, SF, Or Skiffy?"
skiffy?!?
Do they still have "general delivery" service? Send the rebates there. As far as businesses that send stuff to the shipping address, not the billing address, that's just plain retarded of them, but it's not the USPS' fault. Call them up and tell them if they can't get it right you can't do business with them. Or tell them to make both the shipping & billing address be the box, but then when you actually order, have them make a secondary shipping address - they have to be able to do this, for people who buy presents and stuff.
Ever think of opening a Mailboxes, Etc. on that street? You could probably do pretty good business, especially if you tout the fact that you'll hold deliveries, and you won't have to use box numbers, so everyone with similar complaints will flock to you...
In my case, my 40/day translates into at least 120/day total transactions, because every spam I get ends up getting shoved to uce@ftc.gov (go ahead, spammers, copy that!) and a Spamcop.net address. That makes 120 mails even before Spamcop starts sending out its notices, which add anywhere from one to a dozen or so new mails.
As you can see, the problem is even greater than we want to admit - I am sending out a larger volume of messages in spam-related complaints per day than I'm getting back as useful mail.
You do realize that was probably a set-up, right? I tried to go back and look at the source after leaving the page, to see if it had been posted as alpha tags, but the site's already been slashdotted.
Bah. I'm waiting for Koenigsegg to come to the U.S. It's a sexy transformer, even just sitting around. The website claims it's the fastest car in production, but I don't care, because I'd never drive it 1/3 that speed. It's just the kind of thing that makes you realize that Ferraris and Porsches are boxy and swollen, and that you don't have to give up the dreams about cars you had as a boy.
It's a freaking super-sized matchbox car for grownups, and I want one.
P.S. That top? It's removable! I can't find any pictures of it off, however. Just kidding, here's one, though that color scheme is a bit retrograde, and makes that console look too shagadelic for me, with that giant rotary thing in the middle. This one is better, looks like a spaceship from above, but it's the 2001 model, and I think the shape of the back's changed.
P.P.S. Reminds me of Speed Racer from the back, too, with the twin cowling thing.
Oh, and according to some wording that seems new since the last time I read the site... they now sell it in the U.S.?!? I was told they weren't cleared here yet, but cool.
P.P.P.S. Yet another thing to make you think Sweden has more dibs on the word "lust" than the Germans. Except it probably costs as much as my parents' house, so I guess that also qualifies as envy