Alas, you aren't allowed to use them for ADSL in the UK. You use the ADSL router/modem BT gives you or you don't use anything. The ones for business use are OK: the one we had delivered on friday comes with a 4-port ethernet hub built in (no, I don't know what model it is - they peeled of the mfrr's labels and stuck BT ones on), but it won't listen to telnet and they put a rubber plug in the console port. They also make it quite clear that if you touch it in any way whatsoever, they cancel your service (which is what is stopping me plugging a box into the console port to have a look).
Allegedly they're going to let people use their own modems some time next year, but for the moment I may well be having a word with my chum at the Competition Commission later in the week about this.
OK, after waiting 6 months for Demon (strably no competence with the) Internet to provide ADSL here at work, I picked up on an outfit called Timewarp who managed a five day install.
It works, it's static IP, I have a block of assigned IP to work with and they don't port-block or like that there.
These people have at the very least a nodding acquaintance with A Clue
If their business service is like that, I think I may be talking to them about their home service...
Oh, and who are they to contradict you if you say you're in business? How hard is it to whip up a set of stationery these days? Ten, fifteen minutes with a halfway decent WP rig? Whatever, it's not even fraud, provided you've ever done something for pay on your own account. I mean, there's no minimum turnover requirement, is there?
Having only today spat the dummy at the users here on the subject of binaries of unknown source (no harm was done as it turned out, but it's the principle of the thing), may I recommend to UK sysadmins that they draw to their users' attention section 3 of the Computer Misuse Act 1990, which makes it an offence punishable by up to five years in Her Majesty's Holiday Camp to cause a computer to do anything unauthorised that damages data with intent to damage data.
If you explain to them what types of attachment are likely to do this, and that therefore they have no excuse, the threat(rather thin, as it happens, where it's stupidity rather than malice) of prosecution should concentrate their minds rather nicely.
I've got two little boys asleep upstairs. They both like watching daddy taking computers apart and rebuilding them, want to play games and edutainment CD-Roms (Dorling Kindersley: one of the few reasons to maintain a Windows box in the house!) and generally regard the fact that they've got their own boxes (office surplus boxes, fairly low-spec) in their rooms as a real bonus.
The interesting thing is the difference between them. James, at 5, is just starting to explore the stuff that the OS does. I frequently have to reinstall the whole shebang for him after he's tinkered it into blue-screened oblivion, and we have to ration his access to the power cable (windows security being something he learned to bypass shortly before his third birthday) to make sure he doesn't spend his entire life in front of the screen. The challenge is to teach him some social skills before he enters that teenage pupation that will see him emerge as a fully-transformed geek. This is a kid who sits on Santa's knee and asks for a Linux distro just like daddy's...
Paddy (3), on the other hand, cares about his computer only in so far as it's been set running to do something he wants to be involved in. He'll sit and run through something that he feels he's learning from or having fun with, and when it's over he's off to play dinosaurs or just go tear round the garden at about.9c.
Paddy might well learn how to take a kernel apart and put it back together, but it'll be a chore to him in a way that it won't be to James.
Me, I'm somewhere in between. About forty per cent of my job is sysadmin/IT manager: I can start with a pile of components and a few discs and have a running box in a couple of hours, I can handle small programming tasks and could tool up to do something ambitious, but frankly it's work to me: I learned it because I needed the skillset and I learned not a whit more than I needed to understand how and why it worked and how to do basic field repairs when it buggered up.
The issue is that it's a personality issue what you get out of IT. The kid in the example used his computer as a means to doing something else, I would imagine, and never needed to go further.
It says nothing about the issue of what use computing is in little hands, and my answer to that is: the same as any other tool. I teach things to my kids using computers, plastic dinosaurs, the TV, fishing tackle, and a whole pile of other stuff. None of them is a sine qua non: all are of varying utility depending on circumstance.
If you don't set the standard of proof in child pornography cases so that the offence is of possessing or making images of what appear to be children, those who have to detect and prosecute this stuff are left in the invidious position of, every time they bring charges, having to prove that Exhibit A is of an actual child or of someone who was a child at the time rather than something mocked up in PhotoShop or similar.
It's not about ensuring that ugly pictures get prosecuted, it's about denying those who make such pictures a plausible defence that'd get them away with it given a sufficiently suggestible jury (ie about 90% of them).
In so far as it's enacted by the UK's Copyrights Designs and Patents Act 1988 (which does exactly what it says on the can) "moral right" is the right not to have one's work falsely attributed to someone else, or a derivative of one's work attributed to oneself, plus some other minor bits and pieces that don't amount to much. Interestingly, it's legally impossible to sell or sign these away.
Speaking as someone who works (with a Novell box in the basement) in one of those smaller firms, I find that the backups get used about every other week as a quick and convenient way of restoring a directory that someone has deleted by mistake. Yes, I know I can set the permissions to prevent this, but the backup tests are useful. For precisely the reasons here enumerated.
This is, albeit on a larger scale, my experience. It works, it keeps working, and you can bolt anything you damned well please onto it. As long as they keep making those sales, Novell will keep going.
I don't think the Apple comparison is as near the mark as it could be. Novell haven't made half as many major strategic blunders as they could have done, and the one they did make (hanging on to IPX after it outlived its usefulness) they seem to be dealing with rather effectively. Novell's problem is Microsoft's sales force, who are rather better at their jobs than Novell's crowd. I've had six sales pitches for NT in as many weeks from people I called for advice on wholly different topice. I'm discovering that there's a limit to the number of times I can say "been there, done that, don't want it again" without resorting to violence.
Let's see, product that works, superbly documented, support site and line that actually gives a flying fuck about solving problems and support for every desktop platform you're likely to see in service. And lo! It's cheaper than running an NT shop, and everything in it is (or can be, at least) worked with open standards etc.
I grant you, I ain't running a particularly big network with it (three servers, prox 70 hosts of various kinds) but if - like me - you've got another job to do when you ain't fixing, it's a godsend. I'd have bought it at three times the price.
Classic example of why I like Novell so much: before I arrived, the network had run three years with precisely zero maintenance and a configuration that was an absolute disgrace. In that time, it had had one (1) outage. Nice.
Maybe, if I was doing the systems full-time, I'd want to be working with a Unix set-up of one sort or another. That's a hypothetical, though - I haven't any need for that kind of power and felxibility in an environment where all I need is a really, really reliable file server or three.
That aside, I'd rather bite off my own genitals than use any other NOS. I should imagine that there are a lot of other guys running networks in small business environments who feel the same way
My own CS knowledge was acquired at the University of Life, with postgrad work and the College of stuff I figured out as I went along, but I find it tremendously useful in practice as a lawyer.
Lord, if only I had anyone with the nous to do this. I think the worst it would ever get from me is a bollocking for not telling me first so's we could get the thing set up right for the rest of the firm.
And anyone I catch installing NT anywhere on my nice shiny network has not long thereafter to live.
It's soooo nice being in a firm where the IT policy is "Andrew sorts it all".
The reason for the secrecy around Colossus is actually a lot more insidious than you'd think. After the war, the Allied powers provided enigma machines to their various colonies and satellite states, telling them that this encryption had proven uncrackable. Concealing the colossus, which made the enigma fairly easy to crack, was part of this.
Probably the first ever "back door" installed ever, no?
Moving towards? Done deal at this date, I'd say. This joke, from the UK, is over thirty years old:
"In the US they have two main political parties. The Republicans, who are the equivalent of our Tory party, and the Democrats, who are the equivalent of our Tory party."
If memory serves it was a Peter Cook line originally.
I don't know if it works the same in the US, but our top Appellate Tribunal hears procedural appeals by a differently-constituted panel of Lords of Appeal.
This was what was used in the Pinochet case, when the General became the first criminal defendant in history to appeal on the grounds that his judge had a publicly-stated commitment to human rights.
I had a tenner on his lawyers taking it to the ECHR for the comedy value alone, but they declared him unfit to plead first.
Deuterium: Mars, for reasons we don't fully understand, has a different isotope mix in its water - Deuterium (current value, lots per kilo) is actually quite common there.
It actually requires less delta-V to get to Mars than to the moon, as piloted aerobraking is a known and reliable technology (shuttle does it every time it lands). In every respect save trip time, it's closer (and trip time is measured in weight of rations carried, not in any technological hurdles)
It's there, damn it.
Mars is the only feasibly-colonisable body in the solar system other than earth. It's got everything you need.
In short, the attitude that Mars is just a ball of dirt and ice is exactly equivalent to the French and the Russians regarding Louisiana and Alaska as a lot of worthless wilderness. (Until recently, the Russians thought that way about Siberia as well, but they wised up before they sold it to anyone.) Had a realistic value been set on either of those territories, the United States would never have been able to afford either.
It did here in the UK, back in the 30s, with juries removed from civil trials except where an application is made to the court for jury trial (and it almost never is, judges sitting without juries being more reliable and predictable than juries).
The exceptions are defamation and police misfeasance actions, where the rule is jury trial unless there are compelling reasons otherwise.
Jury trials in criminal matters are unaffected (yet) which is as it should be.
Our Technology and Construction Court was founded in 1890 to try cases with a heavyweight technical dimension; they cover any case that has any kind of tech angle from big civil engineering to pcbs (and I've handled cases from both ends of the spectrum there). What follows is a practitioner's view.
The judges are drawn from the bar who practice in that field of law. They're people who understand the industries they have before them as a result of working as part of the legal support of those industries for twenty or more years before elevation to the bench.
That's the theory: the practice is less than a hundred per cent as in anything with people involved. I could, but won't, name a couple of T&C judges who are blithering old idiots.
That said, I can name still others who are sharp, incisive and know their stuff very well and who aren't afraid to inform themselves on the way things work (I know at least on judge at T&C in London who knows how HTML works, principally because I explained it to him).
The software copyright and confidentiality angle is dealt with by the Chancery Division of the High Court, whose judges have a solid grounding in these sorts of issues through hearing cases and, increasingly, through having been practitioners.
Choice of forum is left to the litigants, by and large: if it's more hardware or software engineering, go to T&C. If it's copyrights, designs and patents, go to Chancery. Sometimes it's a judgment call between the two, but I think the essence of it is that either way you get a professional judge rather than <flame> an elected buffoon with the professional standards of a chartered accountant.</flame>
It wouldn't even take a traceroute. Having just spent the day recabling my office, it's surprising how easy it is to spot where things are drawing power just by watching the electricity meters, following the cabling, and wondering what the hell this is that's plugged in right where I want to put this printer box.
Add to that that most HDDs are noisy wee bastards, and that behind a dryline is a very dusty environment, and you've a recipe for a very grindy HDD that wouldn't last long at all.
The problem isn't the computer, it's the case. Nearly every factory-standard case on the market is a design disaster area. I currently have some rather nice limed oak, fretwork and a couple of leaded lights in the garage awaiting a spare moment. Thirty seconds with a brace and bit and I can have ports wherever I damned well please, and the whole thing *looks* like it belongs in my study.
After that, the antimacassar for the mouse and a monitor with brass detailing.
Sorted.
This one came about by default, owing to so seriously loopy system design and purchasing decisions. We use Groupwise here in the office, with everyone's permissions set to full. It's useful, because a lot of our business (lawyering) has to be done right now - the fact that someone's out of the office, tied up in a meeting all day or asleep at the switch won't wash with the clients.
The upshot is that everyone can read everyone else's email. The web isn't logged or monitored, but the office is open plan. So everyone can see that I'm posting to/. between drafting contract clauses.
Total openness and good old-fashioned embarrassment mean that nothing untoward goes on.
Whether this system would work in an environment that didn't consist of a majority by weight of lawyers is left as an exercise for the student.
What you're saying only holds water if the US states are sovereign nations rather than local government. The sovereignty of the states has never been more than a polite legal fiction, a fortiori since 'prox 1865.
Panama, mentioned elsewhere in this thread, is similarly not genuinely sovereign - it, and assorted other post-colonial flyspecks, are as sovereign as their former rulers and/or powerful neighbours let them be and not a whit more.
Now, if someone wanted to sue me, British Citizen, in California, the most they'd get out of me is a polite letter to the judge pointing out that I ain't submitting to the jurisdiction.
One quick thing - I assume that isn't official legal advice from you, just to cover you in case of someone getting shirty?
Actually, I'm perfectly happy for anyone to follow that advice. If the other side doesn't want to deal with you because you're following it, it's your judgement call as to whether you're better safe than sorry (which is what I advised above) or whether you want to take a risk or two.
Naturally, the advice I've given is a one-size-fits-all version in general terms, about on a par with advice that looking both ways before crossing the road is a Good Idea.
<CHEEK value="commercial">If you want a specific rundown on your particular circumstances, my rates are reasonable and my addresss is on my user page.</CHEEK>
Slashdot Mirror
Alas, you aren't allowed to use them for ADSL in the UK. You use the ADSL router/modem BT gives you or you don't use anything. The ones for business use are OK: the one we had delivered on friday comes with a 4-port ethernet hub built in (no, I don't know what model it is - they peeled of the mfrr's labels and stuck BT ones on), but it won't listen to telnet and they put a rubber plug in the console port. They also make it quite clear that if you touch it in any way whatsoever, they cancel your service (which is what is stopping me plugging a box into the console port to have a look).
Allegedly they're going to let people use their own modems some time next year, but for the moment I may well be having a word with my chum at the Competition Commission later in the week about this.
OK, after waiting 6 months for Demon (strably no competence with the) Internet to provide ADSL here at work, I picked up on an outfit called Timewarp who managed a five day install.
It works, it's static IP, I have a block of assigned IP to work with and they don't port-block or like that there.
These people have at the very least a nodding acquaintance with A Clue
If their business service is like that, I think I may be talking to them about their home service...
Oh, and who are they to contradict you if you say you're in business? How hard is it to whip up a set of stationery these days? Ten, fifteen minutes with a halfway decent WP rig? Whatever, it's not even fraud, provided you've ever done something for pay on your own account. I mean, there's no minimum turnover requirement, is there?
Having only today spat the dummy at the users here on the subject of binaries of unknown source (no harm was done as it turned out, but it's the principle of the thing), may I recommend to UK sysadmins that they draw to their users' attention section 3 of the Computer Misuse Act 1990, which makes it an offence punishable by up to five years in Her Majesty's Holiday Camp to cause a computer to do anything unauthorised that damages data with intent to damage data.
If you explain to them what types of attachment are likely to do this, and that therefore they have no excuse, the threat(rather thin, as it happens, where it's stupidity rather than malice) of prosecution should concentrate their minds rather nicely.
Thanks, that was bugging the wossnames out of me.
More accurately, "Stranger in a Strange Land" is a quote that has been borrowed as the title of all three works.
I've got two little boys asleep upstairs. They both like watching daddy taking computers apart and rebuilding them, want to play games and edutainment CD-Roms (Dorling Kindersley: one of the few reasons to maintain a Windows box in the house!) and generally regard the fact that they've got their own boxes (office surplus boxes, fairly low-spec) in their rooms as a real bonus.
The interesting thing is the difference between them. James, at 5, is just starting to explore the stuff that the OS does. I frequently have to reinstall the whole shebang for him after he's tinkered it into blue-screened oblivion, and we have to ration his access to the power cable (windows security being something he learned to bypass shortly before his third birthday) to make sure he doesn't spend his entire life in front of the screen. The challenge is to teach him some social skills before he enters that teenage pupation that will see him emerge as a fully-transformed geek. This is a kid who sits on Santa's knee and asks for a Linux distro just like daddy's...
Paddy (3), on the other hand, cares about his computer only in so far as it's been set running to do something he wants to be involved in. He'll sit and run through something that he feels he's learning from or having fun with, and when it's over he's off to play dinosaurs or just go tear round the garden at about .9c.
Paddy might well learn how to take a kernel apart and put it back together, but it'll be a chore to him in a way that it won't be to James.
Me, I'm somewhere in between. About forty per cent of my job is sysadmin/IT manager: I can start with a pile of components and a few discs and have a running box in a couple of hours, I can handle small programming tasks and could tool up to do something ambitious, but frankly it's work to me: I learned it because I needed the skillset and I learned not a whit more than I needed to understand how and why it worked and how to do basic field repairs when it buggered up.
The issue is that it's a personality issue what you get out of IT. The kid in the example used his computer as a means to doing something else, I would imagine, and never needed to go further.
It says nothing about the issue of what use computing is in little hands, and my answer to that is: the same as any other tool. I teach things to my kids using computers, plastic dinosaurs, the TV, fishing tackle, and a whole pile of other stuff. None of them is a sine qua non: all are of varying utility depending on circumstance.
If you don't set the standard of proof in child pornography cases so that the offence is of possessing or making images of what appear to be children, those who have to detect and prosecute this stuff are left in the invidious position of, every time they bring charges, having to prove that Exhibit A is of an actual child or of someone who was a child at the time rather than something mocked up in PhotoShop or similar.
It's not about ensuring that ugly pictures get prosecuted, it's about denying those who make such pictures a plausible defence that'd get them away with it given a sufficiently suggestible jury (ie about 90% of them).
In so far as it's enacted by the UK's Copyrights Designs and Patents Act 1988 (which does exactly what it says on the can) "moral right" is the right not to have one's work falsely attributed to someone else, or a derivative of one's work attributed to oneself, plus some other minor bits and pieces that don't amount to much. Interestingly, it's legally impossible to sell or sign these away.
Speaking as someone who works (with a Novell box in the basement) in one of those smaller firms, I find that the backups get used about every other week as a quick and convenient way of restoring a directory that someone has deleted by mistake. Yes, I know I can set the permissions to prevent this, but the backup tests are useful. For precisely the reasons here enumerated.
This is, albeit on a larger scale, my experience. It works, it keeps working, and you can bolt anything you damned well please onto it. As long as they keep making those sales, Novell will keep going.
I don't think the Apple comparison is as near the mark as it could be. Novell haven't made half as many major strategic blunders as they could have done, and the one they did make (hanging on to IPX after it outlived its usefulness) they seem to be dealing with rather effectively. Novell's problem is Microsoft's sales force, who are rather better at their jobs than Novell's crowd. I've had six sales pitches for NT in as many weeks from people I called for advice on wholly different topice. I'm discovering that there's a limit to the number of times I can say "been there, done that, don't want it again" without resorting to violence.
Let's see, product that works, superbly documented, support site and line that actually gives a flying fuck about solving problems and support for every desktop platform you're likely to see in service. And lo! It's cheaper than running an NT shop, and everything in it is (or can be, at least) worked with open standards etc.
I grant you, I ain't running a particularly big network with it (three servers, prox 70 hosts of various kinds) but if - like me - you've got another job to do when you ain't fixing, it's a godsend. I'd have bought it at three times the price.
Classic example of why I like Novell so much: before I arrived, the network had run three years with precisely zero maintenance and a configuration that was an absolute disgrace. In that time, it had had one (1) outage. Nice.
Maybe, if I was doing the systems full-time, I'd want to be working with a Unix set-up of one sort or another. That's a hypothetical, though - I haven't any need for that kind of power and felxibility in an environment where all I need is a really, really reliable file server or three.
That aside, I'd rather bite off my own genitals than use any other NOS. I should imagine that there are a lot of other guys running networks in small business environments who feel the same way
Go for it, my son.
My own CS knowledge was acquired at the University of Life, with postgrad work and the College of stuff I figured out as I went along, but I find it tremendously useful in practice as a lawyer.
Lord, if only I had anyone with the nous to do this. I think the worst it would ever get from me is a bollocking for not telling me first so's we could get the thing set up right for the rest of the firm. And anyone I catch installing NT anywhere on my nice shiny network has not long thereafter to live. It's soooo nice being in a firm where the IT policy is "Andrew sorts it all".
The reason for the secrecy around Colossus is actually a lot more insidious than you'd think. After the war, the Allied powers provided enigma machines to their various colonies and satellite states, telling them that this encryption had proven uncrackable. Concealing the colossus, which made the enigma fairly easy to crack, was part of this.
Probably the first ever "back door" installed ever, no?
Moving towards? Done deal at this date, I'd say. This joke, from the UK, is over thirty years old:
"In the US they have two main political parties. The Republicans, who are the equivalent of our Tory party, and the Democrats, who are the equivalent of our Tory party."
If memory serves it was a Peter Cook line originally.
Because it outlaws pretty much every OS Microsoft have ever produced and, for that matter, Novell prior to (if memory serves) 4.11.
They're perfect cracking tools. You just have to persuade your target to install them, and the poor fools are wiiiiiide open.
I don't know if it works the same in the US, but our top Appellate Tribunal hears procedural appeals by a differently-constituted panel of Lords of Appeal.
This was what was used in the Pinochet case, when the General became the first criminal defendant in history to appeal on the grounds that his judge had a publicly-stated commitment to human rights.
I had a tenner on his lawyers taking it to the ECHR for the comedy value alone, but they declared him unfit to plead first.
List from the top of my head:
In short, the attitude that Mars is just a ball of dirt and ice is exactly equivalent to the French and the Russians regarding Louisiana and Alaska as a lot of worthless wilderness. (Until recently, the Russians thought that way about Siberia as well, but they wised up before they sold it to anyone.) Had a realistic value been set on either of those territories, the United States would never have been able to afford either.
... probably never happen
It did here in the UK, back in the 30s, with juries removed from civil trials except where an application is made to the court for jury trial (and it almost never is, judges sitting without juries being more reliable and predictable than juries).
The exceptions are defamation and police misfeasance actions, where the rule is jury trial unless there are compelling reasons otherwise.
Jury trials in criminal matters are unaffected (yet) which is as it should be.
Our Technology and Construction Court was founded in 1890 to try cases with a heavyweight technical dimension; they cover any case that has any kind of tech angle from big civil engineering to pcbs (and I've handled cases from both ends of the spectrum there). What follows is a practitioner's view.
The judges are drawn from the bar who practice in that field of law. They're people who understand the industries they have before them as a result of working as part of the legal support of those industries for twenty or more years before elevation to the bench.
That's the theory: the practice is less than a hundred per cent as in anything with people involved. I could, but won't, name a couple of T&C judges who are blithering old idiots.
That said, I can name still others who are sharp, incisive and know their stuff very well and who aren't afraid to inform themselves on the way things work (I know at least on judge at T&C in London who knows how HTML works, principally because I explained it to him).
The software copyright and confidentiality angle is dealt with by the Chancery Division of the High Court, whose judges have a solid grounding in these sorts of issues through hearing cases and, increasingly, through having been practitioners.
Choice of forum is left to the litigants, by and large: if it's more hardware or software engineering, go to T&C. If it's copyrights, designs and patents, go to Chancery. Sometimes it's a judgment call between the two, but I think the essence of it is that either way you get a professional judge rather than <flame> an elected buffoon with the professional standards of a chartered accountant.</flame>
It wouldn't even take a traceroute. Having just spent the day recabling my office, it's surprising how easy it is to spot where things are drawing power just by watching the electricity meters, following the cabling, and wondering what the hell this is that's plugged in right where I want to put this printer box.
Add to that that most HDDs are noisy wee bastards, and that behind a dryline is a very dusty environment, and you've a recipe for a very grindy HDD that wouldn't last long at all.
And if it wasn't the dust, it'd be the moisture.
The problem isn't the computer, it's the case. Nearly every factory-standard case on the market is a design disaster area. I currently have some rather nice limed oak, fretwork and a couple of leaded lights in the garage awaiting a spare moment. Thirty seconds with a brace and bit and I can have ports wherever I damned well please, and the whole thing *looks* like it belongs in my study. After that, the antimacassar for the mouse and a monitor with brass detailing. Sorted.
This one came about by default, owing to so seriously loopy system design and purchasing decisions. We use Groupwise here in the office, with everyone's permissions set to full. It's useful, because a lot of our business (lawyering) has to be done right now - the fact that someone's out of the office, tied up in a meeting all day or asleep at the switch won't wash with the clients.
/. between drafting contract clauses.
The upshot is that everyone can read everyone else's email. The web isn't logged or monitored, but the office is open plan. So everyone can see that I'm posting to
Total openness and good old-fashioned embarrassment mean that nothing untoward goes on.
Whether this system would work in an environment that didn't consist of a majority by weight of lawyers is left as an exercise for the student.
What you're saying only holds water if the US states are sovereign nations rather than local government. The sovereignty of the states has never been more than a polite legal fiction, a fortiori since 'prox 1865.
Panama, mentioned elsewhere in this thread, is similarly not genuinely sovereign - it, and assorted other post-colonial flyspecks, are as sovereign as their former rulers and/or powerful neighbours let them be and not a whit more.
Now, if someone wanted to sue me, British Citizen, in California, the most they'd get out of me is a polite letter to the judge pointing out that I ain't submitting to the jurisdiction.
Actually, I'm perfectly happy for anyone to follow that advice. If the other side doesn't want to deal with you because you're following it, it's your judgement call as to whether you're better safe than sorry (which is what I advised above) or whether you want to take a risk or two.
Naturally, the advice I've given is a one-size-fits-all version in general terms, about on a par with advice that looking both ways before crossing the road is a Good Idea.
<CHEEK value="commercial">If you want a specific rundown on your particular circumstances, my rates are reasonable and my addresss is on my user page.</CHEEK>