You people had better be upset about this, because if somehow this altered-redistribution is somehow established as legal - it's bye bye GPL.
Errr...I totally disagree.
If I was to say to somebody "I want to buy a copy of xmms that has been modified so the equalizer does not exist and the songs menu always comes up in the same place on my screen no matter where it was last time", I think they should be able to edit xmms and sell it to me.
They should have to tell me it is an edited version of xmms, but I don't see how that would be illegal, immoral, or even against the GPL.
I don't blame the directors for being upset. I live in Utah and I have to put up with these whiny "oooh..reality is scary" people. Makes you want to squash a smurf.
But, they have the right. Just as I have the right to mute the sound on my TV whenever Eminem (however he spells his "name") comes on the screen.
But this is not a classic work of art. It is a copy of a movie. You can edit it, change it...even burn it and you have not changed the "artwork".
Some countries allow censorship of books that the government does not like, but in the US that is also forbidden. There is a cost, but I think it is worth it.
If you took out the inner-city uneducated "welfare mothers", I think the rates would be similar. And I don't think the birth situation has anything to do with it, although the more realistic drug problem management (I would not call it better, but certainly more reasonable) in Holland probably helps a lot.
The "ghetto population" of our large crowded cities pulls down all the health rates in the US. Europe managed to get rid of many of those families by shipping over here (can't blame you). Those are the same groups in the US with the large drug abuse and crime problems, which adds significantly to the infant/maternal mortality rates.
Also adding to that problem is the "Working Poor" in the US who can't afford prenatal health care and won't take advantage of the free programs, due to ignorance or pride.
Remember that there is a vast difference between those people and the average United States citizen...the inner-city masses are the ones I always saw on European programs who could not find France on a map. There seems to be a strong desire in Europe to find some uneducated jerk and put them on television to make the US look bad. Either that or they put on an American pop star, which is just as bad.
The US has the best health care in the world...if you can afford it. But I would suspect we also have close to the most expensive.
I still run some servers on 2.0. They have been up for years, only failing after hardware fries or a power outage.
Why should I mess with them? I have software on another machine that requires an old verson of gcc (due the changes in the String library) and I don't want to rewrite it. Everything works. Everything is stable.
I also run old distros, even with the 2.2 kernel. I upgraded one machine to Slackware 4.0 when that was the New Thing and it took me a while to get it stable. Now I don't want to mess with it; just upgrade the kernel for security issues. It just runs apache and WordPerfect, it is a PPro200 with 128Mb RAM and is solid as can be. If I upgrade it, my old copy of WordPerfect won't work anymore and I don't like the new one.
Many friends who came from the Windoze world always have the need to be upgrading. As long as the old software still works, why change it?
This time, the fake GPU card would have fooled me. There are a couple things that look wrong, but it was a good enough job that I would have been fooled had I not known it was a fake.
There was a fake post here in 2000 where somebody took an Adaptec 2940 card and tweaked it a bit, then claimed it was a Russian-surplus vector-based supercomputer-on-PCI card. Ignoring the fact that the fake graphic was obvious (you could still see the Adaptec logo and QC stickers on the card), I could not believe people would fall for a "cray on a chip" from Russian surplus. While Russia is a fine country with a great history, they are not known for their high-tech electronics. This is the same country that was still uses tube computers and radios in the mid-1990s, and used to buy new pinball machines just so they could pull the 68000 CPUs. If the Russians had any infrastructure to develop such a bleeding-edge device, the certainly would not be selling it. I posted my feelings then and got flamed for it.
But I could fall for the ATI card. ATI has a history of Dual-GPU cards. I strongly disagree with the poster who said "dual is not as good"; depending on how it is done, it can be much better. Don't use Windows NT as your baseline for multiprocessor applications. Design an application (in this case, a driver) that expects to see certain CPUs in certain places and hardware that automagically divides the load. There are good ways to do this if you ALWAYS know what sort of hardware resources you will have. Systems that don't (standard Windoze or Linux applications) will suffer greatly as they try to adapt on-the-fly.
(2) The US is huge. You don't understand it unless you have lived here...in particular the west. I have driven 43 miles today already and I still have not gone home from work. That is driving to work and two errands. Why don't I take public transportation? It would add two hours to my day. I already work 8-10 hours per day, with only two weeks off a year. Another 2 hours I cannot handle. Perhaps if I had a 30 hour work week and 1-2 months of vacation I would feel differently, but the extra fuel is nothing to me if it allows me another two hours of life per day.
(3) The dense US cities are much more efficent, because everything is close by, like Europe. Also, it is 38C where I am right now. That's bloody hot. That means I run my air conditioner. If it never got over 25C I could save a lot of energy, but it does not work that way here.
(4) Citizens of the US are not of one genetic group. We are comprised of people from nations and cultures all over the world...I am surprised you don't know that. But for the last 20-or-so years we keep hearing "you are Americans, therefore you are, by definition, violent and bad." I find this amusing from Europe, who did their best to self destruct not once but twice in the last century....one duke gets shot so you decide to kill 8.5 million people to make up for it.
(5) The US does need to work on its energy use, I agree. But Europe is poisoning the environment as well. How many major rivers have US companies killed in the last ten years...easy, Zero. Europe has destroyed all life in TWO major rivers in the same time span. Long after the US realized how terrible above-ground and ocean nuclear testing was, France did not give a damn about detonating their bombs wherever they please. Although I am an anglophile, the British have poisoned entire islands with experimental weapons. So there is PLENTY of environmental blame to go around.
The reason many Americans are so sensitive is that we get tired of hearing that we are all rotten people who sit around all evening being violent while the cultured Europeans save the earth.
That being said, I know what you meant in your message. And you are correct that many people are hypersensitive, but in multi-national forums I have frequently been attacked...posters saying things like "as an American, you know nothing about x", where x has been everything from the history of World War I to computer technology.
I get really tired of being told that all Americans are lazy, stupid, uneducated, fat and rich. I work hard, I have degrees in Electrical Engineering, Anthropology, Computer Engineering and a minor in Chemistry. I know about history and I don't like Football of any sort. I don't like violent action films, I know my wines and can have an intelligent conversation about the history of Bath, if required.
So that's the nerve even a well-intentioned poster like you can hit. Remember though the problem of text-only postings where people can't tell your comment may have been some ironic humor...and many of the people flaming you are the "14 year old slashdotters" who have chased many of us from this forum...I only rarely post now.
BUT, that being said there is a tendancy that anytime there is a case where a European country does something better (or different) than the US, there seems to be a flurry of slashdot posts along the lines of "What do you expect from a stupid American anyway".
This post is pointless, 'cause nobody will read it. But I fell better anyway.
Doing it the way you did it is cheap, doing it propely is quite a bit more expensive.
Will your method work? Yes, sort-of, for a while. I have done it "properly" and all those little costs really add up.
You have a limit of four repeaters (hubs, switches) TOTAL on a point-to-point ethernet connection, so you would need routers or bridges every 184m. I assume you are breaking that rule which, again, will work for a while.
DSL is a very good solution for their community. Another would have been to run two pairs to each home and run a T1 connection. That's what I would have wanted. And I already have two spare CSU/DSUs....
As a collector of classic computers and arcade video games, I loved your story and understand it well!
My only horror story is when I bought myself a pdp11/60 (double-wide rack with a control panel in the middle). This was the tall cabinet pdp11/60, not the small one.
My friend did not bring the pickup he promised, he brought a 1975-era full-size Blazer.
With me on the verge of panic, we get the thing on its back sticking out of the tailgate. Broke the back seat getting it in far enough.
But there is no room for the disk drives. Despite my protests, he puts them on top of of the computer "it's a short trip, they won't fall off...trust me, I know what I am doing", he says.
As we drive home, I am in the passenger seat with my torso stretched over the PDP11 holding onto the disk drives. All the time, my friend is laughing at me for being so paranoid. As he goes up the last hill, the load shifts and I watch in horror as one of the drives begins to slide backwards. It is heavier than I can hold with the two fingers that can reach it and it scratches the paint of the front of the rack, falls off the back of the computer, and crashes into the ground about three inches from the hood of a car following us. They just miss catching it in their hood, and run over the front panel. Disk drive is a total loss, and I used parts of it to prop up my monitor stand.
I still have nightmares about what that would have cost me had that monitor landed on the hood of the car. Turned out friend had no insurance on this truck.
ANY hard drive company will tell you that. I've been doing this for 20 years. I've had all the brands crash. From Micropolis (back when they were the Big Thing), Seagate, Shugart, Control-Data, Hitachi, Quantum, Maxtor ("old" and "new") and many other companies that you have never heard of. Plus, dozens of Western "Plastic Stepper Arm" Digital drives.
IBM makes--or rather, made--some of the best drives out there. They invented much of the technology.
No way to back up? Try a tape drive. 1960s technology, works just fine. Or a a proper RAID. Or just buy another hard drive and copy them over by hand.
IDE drives are all crap. They are the cheap end of the line. You get what you pay for....
There are advantages to both. The contrast on an LCD is lousy for photorealism, but for text they can be excellent. The monitor that came with the apple cube is quite nice, so you have a bit of a biased opinion there....
I think they would be okay for a lot of graphics design work, but not photo editing.
One of the "questions and answers" claims that when purchasing a tube-type (CRT) monitor, "any CRT will do".
I won't bother being graceful here. That's a bunch of crap.
Cheap monitors are junk. The CRT is the major difference between cheap and good-quality monitors. I am typing this on an NEC MultiSync FE950+ which is a beaufiful flat-face CRT monitor. It costs a lot more, but it is worth it. The other two monitors on my desk (a Sun/Sony 20E20 and a Misubishi DiamondTron) are of similar quality. They will last me through several computers...in fact, the Mitsubishi already has.
I've got news for you. If companies did not need a clean room and a dust-free environment to produce working drives, they would not pay for one.
I work for a research company with a fairly small clean room. We have a class-10K zone, a class 1000 zone and a class 100 zone. Cost on the clean room was about US$750,000, and that is going the cheap route.
A real clean room costs a lot more. A whole clean production line with things like chases for the cryopumps and massive amounts of floorspace taken by production sputtering machines takes even more room, and clean rooms are rated in $$$ per square foot. Trust me, they don't have them just "too fool you".
Fixed discs NEED to be clean to work properly. You might be able to swap platters in your basement, but then again you might fry the lot. There is a lot of technology in that $200 crappy IDE drive that Joe CaseMod Dude does not understand.
I would never open a hard drive outside of a clean room that I expected to work again, except in a last-ditch scenario.
Iomega and Syquest (among others) developed removable rigid platters that are fairly dust-tolerant. But even those drives--devices that are DESIGNED to be exposed to dust--have problems. Iomega has had real problems with failure from dirt on their Jaz drive. Take a look at an internal Jaz versus a Jaz-II and look at all the seals they added! That's because dust was killing their products.
You could rig up a home-brew laminer flow unit with some HEPA filters to do your own fixed disk servicing and it would probably even work out okay most of the time...the first fixed disk drives I used actually had filters in them that needed to be changed. But then again, the dust tolerance was much higher.
The kiddies who are sticking plexiglas windows in their hard drives are at least cutting their lifetimes in half. The plexiglas itself will offgas and spew particles into their drive. God knows what the glue will do; I don't even let things like that into the cleanroom without some research.
But who cares...all these guys will lose will be their script kiddie kits, quake screen grabs and MP3 collections. Good riddance.
Ah! Another chance for Europeans to slam Americans
on
Last Word on Loki
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
So I'm just curious...do you use assume all idiots (like the poster) to be Americans?
This seems to be a very popular among the English, who badmouth Americans for being violent while their own fine English football fans murder people in stadiums. Then they talk about how Americans are crude and stupid while they let their elderly citizens die forgotten on a hospital trolly waiting 60 hours for treatment of a stroke.
There are 260 million Americans, give-or-take. Perhaps you should not paint us all with the same brush.
Stupid Americans started the Open Source movment, wrote Unix, and provided most of those neat tools that Linux was later based on. Not to mention the bloody internet you are using now.
Slashdot Mirror
You people had better be upset about this, because if somehow this altered-redistribution is somehow established as legal - it's bye bye GPL.
Errr...I totally disagree.
If I was to say to somebody "I want to buy a copy of xmms that has been modified so the equalizer does not exist and the songs menu always comes up in the same place on my screen no matter where it was last time", I think they should be able to edit xmms and sell it to me.
They should have to tell me it is an edited version of xmms, but I don't see how that would be illegal, immoral, or even against the GPL.
I don't blame the directors for being upset. I live in Utah and I have to put up with these whiny "oooh..reality is scary" people. Makes you want to squash a smurf.
But, they have the right. Just as I have the right to mute the sound on my TV whenever Eminem (however he spells his "name") comes on the screen.
But this is not a classic work of art. It is a copy of a movie. You can edit it, change it...even burn it and you have not changed the "artwork".
Some countries allow censorship of books that the government does not like, but in the US that is also forbidden. There is a cost, but I think it is worth it.
If you took out the inner-city uneducated "welfare mothers", I think the rates would be similar. And I don't think the birth situation has anything to do with it, although the more realistic drug problem management (I would not call it better, but certainly more reasonable) in Holland probably helps a lot.
The "ghetto population" of our large crowded cities pulls down all the health rates in the US. Europe managed to get rid of many of those families by shipping over here (can't blame you). Those are the same groups in the US with the large drug abuse and crime problems, which adds significantly to the infant/maternal mortality rates.
Also adding to that problem is the "Working Poor" in the US who can't afford prenatal health care and won't take advantage of the free programs, due to ignorance or pride.
Remember that there is a vast difference between those people and the average United States citizen...the inner-city masses are the ones I always saw on European programs who could not find France on a map. There seems to be a strong desire in Europe to find some uneducated jerk and put them on television to make the US look bad. Either that or they put on an American pop star, which is just as bad.
The US has the best health care in the world...if you can afford it. But I would suspect we also have close to the most expensive.
Cheap cases are like cheap motherboards. You get what you pay for. I love it when I pick up a cheap case and it bends the board.
A case under $80 is not worth looking at. I usually (I work in IT) spend around $100-$120, most expensive was $800 but that was a server case.
I still run some servers on 2.0. They have been up for years, only failing after hardware fries or a power outage.
Why should I mess with them? I have software on another machine that requires an old verson of gcc (due the changes in the String library) and I don't want to rewrite it. Everything works. Everything is stable.
I also run old distros, even with the 2.2 kernel. I upgraded one machine to Slackware 4.0 when that was the New Thing and it took me a while to get it stable. Now I don't want to mess with it; just upgrade the kernel for security issues. It just runs apache and WordPerfect, it is a PPro200 with 128Mb RAM and is solid as can be. If I upgrade it, my old copy of WordPerfect won't work anymore and I don't like the new one.
Many friends who came from the Windoze world always have the need to be upgrading. As long as the old software still works, why change it?
That's true, but it is also because they could not design radiation-hardened chips. Other countries did.
Also, the sophistication of a vacuum-tube computer is limited by the size, heat, power consumption and failure rate of the components.
You can't do a supercomputer in tubes. Not with present tube technology.
Sorry, this was back in 1989 or so. I don't remember where I read it, but if I find it I'll post it here.
This time, the fake GPU card would have fooled me. There are a couple things that look wrong, but it was a good enough job that I would have been fooled had I not known it was a fake.
There was a fake post here in 2000 where somebody took an Adaptec 2940 card and tweaked it a bit, then claimed it was a Russian-surplus vector-based supercomputer-on-PCI card. Ignoring the fact that the fake graphic was obvious (you could still see the Adaptec logo and QC stickers on the card), I could not believe people would fall for a "cray on a chip" from Russian surplus. While Russia is a fine country with a great history, they are not known for their high-tech electronics. This is the same country that was still uses tube computers and radios in the mid-1990s, and used to buy new pinball machines just so they could pull the 68000 CPUs. If the Russians had any infrastructure to develop such a bleeding-edge device, the certainly would not be selling it. I posted my feelings then and got flamed for it.
But I could fall for the ATI card. ATI has a history of Dual-GPU cards. I strongly disagree with the poster who said "dual is not as good"; depending on how it is done, it can be much better. Don't use Windows NT as your baseline for multiprocessor applications. Design an application (in this case, a driver) that expects to see certain CPUs in certain places and hardware that automagically divides the load. There are good ways to do this if you ALWAYS know what sort of hardware resources you will have. Systems that don't (standard Windoze or Linux applications) will suffer greatly as they try to adapt on-the-fly.
Really great story, in particular the way the
way they both wanted each other to feel okay about it.
(1) the US does waste energy
(2) The US is huge. You don't understand it unless you have lived here...in particular the west. I have driven 43 miles today already and I still have not gone home from work. That is driving to work and two errands. Why don't I take public transportation? It would add two hours to my day. I already work 8-10 hours per day, with only two weeks off a year. Another 2 hours I cannot handle. Perhaps if I had a 30 hour work week and 1-2 months of vacation I would feel differently, but the extra fuel is nothing to me if it allows me another two hours of life per day.
(3) The dense US cities are much more efficent, because everything is close by, like Europe. Also, it is 38C where I am right now. That's bloody hot. That means I run my air conditioner. If it never got over 25C I could save a lot of energy, but it does not work that way here.
(4) Citizens of the US are not of one genetic group. We are comprised of people from nations and cultures all over the world...I am surprised you don't know that. But for the last 20-or-so years we keep hearing "you are Americans, therefore you are, by definition, violent and bad." I find this amusing from Europe, who did their best to self destruct not once but twice in the last century....one duke gets shot so you decide to kill 8.5 million people to make up for it.
(5) The US does need to work on its energy use, I agree. But Europe is poisoning the environment as well. How many major rivers have US companies killed in the last ten years...easy, Zero. Europe has destroyed all life in TWO major rivers in the same time span. Long after the US realized how terrible above-ground and ocean nuclear testing was, France did not give a damn about detonating their bombs wherever they please. Although I am an anglophile, the British have poisoned entire islands with experimental weapons. So there is PLENTY of environmental blame to go around.
Just my $0.02 here.
The reason many Americans are so sensitive is that we get tired of hearing that we are all rotten people who sit around all evening being violent while the cultured Europeans save the earth.
That being said, I know what you meant in your message. And you are correct that many people are hypersensitive, but in multi-national forums I have frequently been attacked...posters saying things like "as an American, you know nothing about x", where x has been everything from the history of World War I to computer technology.
I get really tired of being told that all Americans are lazy, stupid, uneducated, fat and rich. I work hard, I have degrees in Electrical Engineering, Anthropology, Computer Engineering and a minor in Chemistry. I know about history and I don't like Football of any sort. I don't like violent action films, I know my wines and can have an intelligent conversation about the history of Bath, if required.
So that's the nerve even a well-intentioned poster like you can hit. Remember though the problem of text-only postings where people can't tell your comment may have been some ironic humor...and many of the people flaming you are the "14 year old slashdotters" who have chased many of us from this forum...I only rarely post now.
BUT, that being said there is a tendancy that anytime there is a case where a European country does something better (or different) than the US, there seems to be a flurry of slashdot posts along the lines of "What do you expect from a stupid American anyway".
This post is pointless, 'cause nobody will read it. But I fell better anyway.
Doing it the way you did it is cheap, doing it propely is quite a bit more expensive.
Will your method work? Yes, sort-of, for a while. I have done it "properly" and all those little costs really add up.
You have a limit of four repeaters (hubs, switches) TOTAL on a point-to-point ethernet connection, so you would need routers or bridges every 184m. I assume you are breaking that rule which, again, will work for a while.
DSL is a very good solution for their community. Another would have been to run two pairs to each home and run a T1 connection. That's what I would have wanted. And I already have two spare CSU/DSUs....
Sharing of an intenet connection is not illegal in most cases. It depends on the agreement with your ISP.
I used to be polite, but then they would try to argue with me, or worse, call me back again.
After some nights when I got 4-6 phone calls, all from telemarketers, after a 12 hour shift at work I just decided to get as rude as possible.
They waste my time so who cares if I waste their time?
A drug pusher is just "doing his job", so is an AIDS-infected prostitute...
As a collector of classic computers and arcade video games, I loved your story and understand it well!
My only horror story is when I bought myself a pdp11/60 (double-wide rack with a control panel in the middle). This was the tall cabinet pdp11/60, not the small one.
My friend did not bring the pickup he promised, he brought a 1975-era full-size Blazer.
With me on the verge of panic, we get the thing on its back sticking out of the tailgate. Broke the back seat getting it in far enough.
But there is no room for the disk drives. Despite my protests, he puts them on top of of the computer "it's a short trip, they won't fall off...trust me, I know what I am doing", he says.
As we drive home, I am in the passenger seat with my torso stretched over the PDP11 holding onto the disk drives. All the time, my friend is laughing at me for being so paranoid. As he goes up the last hill, the load shifts and I watch in horror as one of the drives begins to slide backwards. It is heavier than I can hold with the two fingers that can reach it and it scratches the paint of the front of the rack, falls off the back of the computer, and crashes into the ground about three inches from the hood of a car following us. They just miss catching it in their hood, and run over the front panel. Disk drive is a total loss, and I used parts of it to prop up my monitor stand.
I still have nightmares about what that would have cost me had that monitor landed on the hood of the car. Turned out friend had no insurance on this truck.
The drive cannot "decide it wants the other IRQ numbers". That is a problem in your BIOS or OS.
I have purchased at least 40 IBM drives and been very happy with them.
Welcome to the Real World!
ANY hard drive company will tell you that. I've been doing this for 20 years. I've had all the brands crash. From Micropolis (back when they were the Big Thing), Seagate, Shugart, Control-Data, Hitachi, Quantum, Maxtor ("old" and "new") and many
other companies that you have never heard of. Plus, dozens of Western "Plastic Stepper Arm" Digital drives.
IBM makes--or rather, made--some of the best drives out there. They invented much of the technology.
No way to back up? Try a tape drive. 1960s technology, works just fine. Or a a proper RAID. Or just buy another hard drive and copy them over by hand.
IDE drives are all crap. They are the cheap end of the line. You get what you pay for....
There are advantages to both. The contrast on an LCD is lousy for photorealism, but for text they can be excellent. The monitor that came with the apple cube is quite nice, so you have a bit of a biased opinion there....
I think they would be okay for a lot of graphics design work, but not photo editing.
One of the "questions and answers" claims that
when purchasing a tube-type (CRT) monitor, "any CRT will do".
I won't bother being graceful here. That's a bunch of crap.
Cheap monitors are junk. The CRT is the major difference between cheap and good-quality monitors. I am typing this on an NEC MultiSync FE950+ which is a beaufiful flat-face CRT monitor. It costs a lot more, but it is worth it. The other two monitors on my desk (a Sun/Sony 20E20 and a Misubishi DiamondTron) are of similar quality. They will last me through several computers...in fact, the Mitsubishi already has.
Back in the 1980s, many companies were willing to work with
The day when being a great programmer was the top priority may be gone. Now the first concerns are all legal issues.
Easy! Ban all exports of electronic equipment to third-world nations.
How does that sound to you?
I've got news for you. If companies did not need a clean room and a dust-free environment to produce working drives, they would not pay for one.
I work for a research company with a fairly small clean room. We have a class-10K zone, a class 1000 zone and a class 100 zone. Cost on the clean room was about US$750,000, and that is going the cheap route.
A real clean room costs a lot more. A whole clean production line with things like chases for the cryopumps and massive amounts of floorspace taken by production sputtering machines takes even more room, and clean rooms are rated in $$$ per square foot. Trust me, they don't have them just "too fool you".
Fixed discs NEED to be clean to work properly. You might be able to swap platters in your basement, but then again you might fry the lot. There is a lot of technology in that $200 crappy IDE drive that Joe CaseMod Dude does not understand.
I would never open a hard drive outside of a clean room that I expected to work again, except in a last-ditch scenario.
Iomega and Syquest (among others) developed removable rigid platters that are fairly dust-tolerant. But even those drives--devices that are DESIGNED to be exposed to dust--have problems. Iomega has had real problems with failure from dirt on their Jaz drive. Take a look at an internal Jaz versus a Jaz-II and look at all the seals they added! That's because dust was killing their products.
You could rig up a home-brew laminer flow unit with some HEPA filters to do your own fixed disk servicing and it would probably even work out okay most of the time...the first fixed disk drives I used actually had filters in them that needed to be changed. But then again, the dust tolerance was much higher.
The kiddies who are sticking plexiglas windows in their hard drives are at least cutting their lifetimes in half. The plexiglas itself will offgas and spew particles into their drive. God knows what the glue will do; I don't even let things like that into the cleanroom without some research.
But who cares...all these guys will lose will be their script kiddie kits, quake screen grabs and MP3 collections. Good riddance.
So I'm just curious...do you use assume all idiots (like the poster) to be Americans?
This seems to be a very popular among the English, who badmouth Americans for being violent while their own fine English football fans murder people in stadiums. Then they talk about how Americans are crude and stupid while they let their elderly citizens die forgotten on a hospital trolly waiting 60 hours for treatment of a stroke.
There are 260 million Americans, give-or-take. Perhaps you should not paint us all with the same brush.
Stupid Americans started the Open Source movment, wrote Unix, and provided most of those neat tools that Linux was later based on. Not to mention the bloody internet you are using now.
While that is true, high-voltage guys also don't care about bending, crushing, folding or otherwise destroying the integrity of your CAT-5.
If you tell them that a bend in the cable will ruin it, or that it cannot handle greater than a 50lb pull force, they assume you are an idiot.