>As per your next statement, it's ridiculous, and > it's what's been holding back theology for > thousands of years, in my opinion. There is > no reason that religion can't be studied in a > scientific manner.
Be careful of blanket statements. I would like to see you study Zen Buddhism scientifically, for example, because it is a religion which is basically by definition the opposite of scientific analysis.
Similarly, if anyone were to use logic to examine, for example, the Bible, they would be shot down by the very same Elephant Argument you are quoting here: the Bible reveals only a part of the story, and therefore it's perfectly reasonable to find contradictions. However, once we allow a system that is by definition contradictory, then we cannot study it scientifically. It's that simple.
>imagine the Universe as the sum total of >everything that could happen, and everything >that will happen, and your life is just a path >through that multidimensional Universe
I, too, like the Many-Worlds interpretation of free will. You will note, however, that it doesn't resolve the question of free will versus fate. You imply that it does - "the blind men may have been able to realise more about the elephant", but in fact all it provides is another alternative.
>I can't understand how you're displeased with >the elephant argument. It's basically saying >"God is beyond us" - well, duh.
I dislike the Elephant Argument because I dislike the God it describes. God is all-powerful according to Christian dogma, right? If he *is* all-powerful, why did He make us so dumb that not only do we not understand him, but we cannot find any "beyond reasonable doubt" evidence that He exists, and our records of him are all confused and sometimes flat-out state the opposite of another, equally credible record?
The Elephant argument doesn't just say that God is beyond us. It says that He is way, way, way beyond us. If we don't understand God when he reveals himself, it's only because he made us that way. And frankly, that's a pathetic deity.
>Is your writing artistic expression if you share the >exact same sentences 97% of the time with a >previous work?
This argument is ridiculous. I'm sorry. I'm not Christian, I found Larry's response to be the most contrived, absurd explanation of Christianity that I've ever seen (He answered the question "How can a scientist believe in God" by starting with "First, assume God exists" - I mean, come on!) but attacking this part - on the diversity of life on the planet - is just stupid.
It's like claiming that all oil paintings are essentially the same, or that all computer images generated using the GIMP are essentially the same, or whatever. Quite obviously, it's not the fundamental building blocks that provide the diversity, it's the high-order evolutionary adapations of the various organisms.
And before you accuse me of missing the point of the parable - I understand it. Unfortunately, this parable, like all good analogies, bends the truth more than a little in order to sound better.
In the case of the blind men, the men were presented with an elephant. An elephant is a pretty big and obviously-real object, so describing it is just a matter of accumulating as much sensory information as possible.
However, we are not presented with God. We are not standing around an elephant. We cannot use scientific methods to describe God, because by definition God requires belief. To quote Douglas Adams, "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing".
The question isn't whether we are all describing different parts of the "celestial elephant". It is about whether the obscure, contradictory, impartial and above all *old* accounts of elephants had any basis in reality at all.
I think you really are addressing the wrong "bit" in Larry's terms here. The Elephant Parable doesn't seek to answer the question of whether to believe in God. What it does answer quite well is the question "Assuming God exists, why are there so many different accounts and contradictory stories"?
Naturally, as an atheist, I find the elephant parable to be unsatisfying. If I'm dealing with the type of God who chooses to reveal parts of himself so that we cluster around him like idiot blind men to an elephant, well, that God can go and get stuffed.
>One thing I have never heard a real python > programmer say is that there is only one way > to do it.
Very true, and followers of comp.lang.python would have seen the recent flamage about it.
My personal take on it is "there are lots of ways to do it, but only a few of them make any sense and are worthy of implementation". I take pride in writing simple, clean, obvious code which does the logical thing in a logical way. It's a difference of philosophy, which is a nice equitable way to end the discussion, to which I would only like to add that it is Perl, not C, not Java, and especially not Python, which is frequently described as a "write-only language".
>That was seemingly Larry's premise: That God is >"good" to people in the here and now.
You have overlooked the alternative interpretation that God is good to people after they die, if they looked for him while still alive.
Doesn't account for all the millions of primitive tribes / people on other continents / followers of other (often longer-established) religions who also thought they were looking for God, of course.
You can measure how accurately an algorithm reproduces a given input signal, but there is no objective mathematical way to measure the quality of the audio, eg, whether the signal is any good in the first place.
It goes further than that, because the basis of lossy audio compression is the psychoacoustic model which determines which frequencies can be discarded and when. The theory is that compressing and uncompressing a waveform will result in a very different output waveform which will nonetheless approach the "quality" of the original. Different MP3 encoders have different psychoacoustic models and therefore produce entirely different outputs. A waveform that is 4% closer to the original on the average isn't necessarily the product of a superior encoder.
>The real problem with Opera is that no one, and I >mean no one wants to actually pay for a web >browser.
I'm very happy with Opera on Linux, and consider the $US20 I paid for the student version to be very reasonable. It's the only program - apart from games - that I've bought in the last 5 years.
> So all in all, it seems almost as if the DVD player > manufacturers did not want the movie industry's > plan to succeed...
Well, yeah. Sounds like simple profit motive to me. If your DVD player can be made region-free then that's one more reason to buy it over the region-locked players. The Web sites of unlock codes serve as word-of-mouth advertising.
I just read a book on nutritional anthropology ("Pickled, potted and canned") which repeated the above "fallacy" and backed it up with a considerable number of references, so I'm keen to learn your source.
Opera v6 also works: "The server's certificate chain is incomplete, and the signer(s) are not registered". Mozilla on my system gives error -8183 for the same page.
>Considering it takes an entire afternoon to compile >KDE 3 I'm pretty sure that ZERO testing went into >this so called fix.
Since this person is a KDE developer, it's highly likely that he has a build tree already. I hardly think it takes an entire afternoon to recompile a single Konqueror object file and then relink libkonq.
And as the AC pointed out, it's "all *intents* and purposes". Your version is not merely incorrect - it doesn't make sense, either.
>------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than >n politicians is n+1 politicians.
In an attempt to determine the ultimate hazard to my liberty I have followed the rules outlined above and created an infinite amount of politicians, but am having difficulties finding where to store them.
It really is a vendor problem. In his paper, he has not 0wned Windows through any Microsoft service. He exploited a false assumption on the part of the VirusScan programmers to create a buffer overflow. It's a terribly beat-up story. I'm not exactly a Windows programming guru, but I have already used the capability to send fake messages to other programs in my own code. If VirusScan doesn't check the lengths of its inputs, that's a bug in VirusScan, because it's common knowledge that GUI element restrictions can be changed.
>Decreasing the resolution and wasting what your >hardware can do is *not* the answer.
This is incorrect. I don't run Return to Castle Wolfenstein at 800x600 for the fun of it, you know. I do it because running it at my usual 1600x1200 would be so ridiculously slow as to be unplayable.
"Techie fans" have been able to pirate songs for years now. Perhaps Moby's latest album just isn't that good? I haven't heard it, but that seems like the most likely explanation.
Agreed. The only person I know who liked Moby enough to buy "Play", his first album (and who makes an effort to "support the artist") didn't bother buying "18" - not because it was available as MP3s, but simply because she'd got sick of him.:-)
Since everyone's making wild assertions, my explanation for the drop in Moby's sales is that his style hasn't changed in the slightest between the two albums, and he's starting to get boring.
>In America it's singular, in England it's been >simplified to the plural during the last 80 years or so.
I don't know about England, but in Australia a company is singular, and I don't think it's special-case at all, for the same reason that I don't think it odd to refer to a country, a school, or the Government in the singular.
As the author of a (small amount of) free software, software that is, incidentally, in the public domain, I take exception to your assertion that I do not provide this software as a charity. I do. Wordnet definitions: 1. A foundation created to promote the public good, and 2. A kindly and lenient attitude towards people, and 3. An activity or gift that benefits the public at large.
Be very careful before you presume to speak for everyone.
There is no logical connection between placing code in the public domain and not intendin g to maintain it. Furthermore, your comment tha "software may be something that you can't just w alk away from", which potentially valid, has nothing to do with license choice either. The BSD license is basically a big disclaimer of liability, for example.
Interesting to see how the argument has basically divided/. into two camps. I have to agree with Wakko here. People go on a great deal about how cheap the X-Box is, but after you buy it and the DVD add-on and, say, install Linux on it or whatever, you end up with a very limited computer (albeit with a meaty graphics subsystem).
For perhaps half the price of an equivalent general-purpose computer that you don't need to stick a soldering iron into before you can get it going. Half the price would be significant if we were talking about thousands of dollars. But we're not. We're talking about a three or four hundred dollars. A couple of X-Box games' worth.
X-Box isn't the killer app for a home theatre system, a DVD player is. Nobody who does not own a computer will give much of a shit about DivXes until there's a nice easy way for non-computer-owners to create them, and possibly not even then. People here talking about DivX being "everywhere" and how non-computer-literate people will be able to copy them from their friends are show just how insular their world is. There is a *huge* number of people out there who do not have the connections or the inclication to get this stuff going, and I don't believe the pirates have the critical mass necessary to make this thing of any interest.
For years, I've been skeptical of the Linux kernel development model, and specifically the its lack of source control. While it seemed to be "working", Linus has showed the strain several times on the kernel list. As far as I'm concerned, I'm glad he's found a tool that works for him - I totally agree with Linus' attitude of "use the tool that works for you, not its ideologically better, but otherwise inferior competition".
Hopefully this will at least alleviate some of the "Linus doesn't scale" criticisms, too.
I reached the same idea independently about six months back, but instead of using my name I filtered out anything that didn't have my email address in the To: field, based on the assumption that most spammers use Bcc: lists or other tricks. It worked great.
I've since installed SpamAssassin to deal with the occassional stuff that goes directly to my email address, but as a low-tech method, simply filtering out mail not directly addressed to you works amazingly well.
Linus' hypocrisy matters because if the guy went to the trouble of stating how it should be said, then says it does'nt matter how it's said, fools like us will end up arguing about something that should not matter.
Good point, well argued.;-)
However, Line-Icks barely compares to Mac OS version Ecks. OS NINE plus ONE, is OS TEN.
It's worse! It's OS Ecks version 10.1! Seriously. You'd at least think they'd have the decency to call it "Ecks point one" or "Ecks point Eye" or something, but no! They had to go and stuff everyone around - again.:-)
Remove the 'programming'. Which of the two sounds right?
I am entitled to earn a living.
I am not entitled to earn a living.
You may disagree, but I think most people would say that in a capitalist society, they are entitled to earn a living. The "proper grounds", to use your definition, are being a citizen of the capitalist country of your choice and have nothing to do with entitlement itself. I am entitled to catch fish and eat them, but I won't have much luck until I stop fishing in the swimming pool.
How can you properly claim to deserve to earn a living being a programmer if no one wants to pay you?!
"deserve" != "furnished with the proper grounds". And even if it did, it is a silly argument, because just because something is unpopular doesn't mean it is incorrect, necessarily. CF the end of apatheid in South Africa, the vote for women, the ending of slavery.
Regarding your clarification (or possibly redefinition;-) - I agree that more efficient methods of production generally result in fewer humans required to supervise the production. The differences in the software industry which invalidate the claim somewhat are:
Programs are becoming increasingly complicated, requiring more and more programmers to work on them.
Regardless of the above, there is a continual demand for small pieces of code that perform simple functions. Every company I have worked for has required code like this, to convert databases, to strip information from reports, etc, etc. Although these tasks are very similar, the level of code re-use is rather low here because two sets of data are the same.There is no corresponding large demand in the food industry for hand-supervised bananas.
You can sell the same can of Spam to everyone, but every company has individual requirements for their software. That's why people make so much money from ordering / inventory / payroll systems. A reasonable part of the task is integration with the company's existing systems.
They're just too difficult to reconcile. I can't really hope to survive selling my home-grown fruit and vegetables, because customers can buy the same stuff, of equal (often better) quality, from the greengrocer or supermarket. However I *can* make money implementing custom software for companies, simply because the pre-made solutions won't fit their needs.
Now, if you'd like to have a discussion about the pros and cons of patent and copyright law as applied to the software industry, that's fine.
That sounds good, but what I really wanted to push was my position that private enterprise and closed source are responsible directly or very close to directly for the vast majority of the software that even the most avid Free Software zealot uses. However in my opinion the success of closed or open source software has very little to do with patents, so perhaps there is little to discuss.
Regardless, comment boxes are unwieldy - would you like to continue this via email? You sound worthy. Or at least explosive.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
>As per your next statement, it's ridiculous, and
> it's what's been holding back theology for
> thousands of years, in my opinion. There is
> no reason that religion can't be studied in a
> scientific manner.
Be careful of blanket statements. I would like to see you study Zen Buddhism scientifically, for example, because it is a religion which is basically by definition the opposite of scientific analysis.
Similarly, if anyone were to use logic to examine, for example, the Bible, they would be shot down by the very same Elephant Argument you are quoting here: the Bible reveals only a part of the story, and therefore it's perfectly reasonable to find contradictions. However, once we allow a system that is by definition contradictory, then we cannot study it scientifically. It's that simple.
>imagine the Universe as the sum total of
>everything that could happen, and everything
>that will happen, and your life is just a path
>through that multidimensional Universe
I, too, like the Many-Worlds interpretation of free will. You will note, however, that it doesn't resolve the question of free will versus fate. You imply that it does - "the blind men may have been able to realise more about the elephant", but in fact all it provides is another alternative.
>I can't understand how you're displeased with
>the elephant argument. It's basically saying
>"God is beyond us" - well, duh.
I dislike the Elephant Argument because I dislike the God it describes. God is all-powerful according to Christian dogma, right? If he *is* all-powerful, why did He make us so dumb that not only do we not understand him, but we cannot find any "beyond reasonable doubt" evidence that He exists, and our records of him are all confused and sometimes flat-out state the opposite of another, equally credible record?
The Elephant argument doesn't just say that God is beyond us. It says that He is way, way, way beyond us. If we don't understand God when he reveals himself, it's only because he made us that way. And frankly, that's a pathetic deity.
>Is your writing artistic expression if you share the
>exact same sentences 97% of the time with a
>previous work?
This argument is ridiculous. I'm sorry. I'm not Christian, I found Larry's response to be the most contrived, absurd explanation of Christianity that I've ever seen (He answered the question "How can a scientist believe in God" by starting with "First, assume God exists" - I mean, come on!) but attacking this part - on the diversity of life on the planet - is just stupid.
It's like claiming that all oil paintings are essentially the same, or that all computer images generated using the GIMP are essentially the same, or whatever. Quite obviously, it's not the fundamental building blocks that provide the diversity, it's the high-order evolutionary adapations of the various organisms.
These seem like particularly stupid blind men. :-)
And before you accuse me of missing the point of the parable - I understand it. Unfortunately, this parable, like all good analogies, bends the truth more than a little in order to sound better.
In the case of the blind men, the men were presented with an elephant. An elephant is a pretty big and obviously-real object, so describing it is just a matter of accumulating as much sensory information as possible.
However, we are not presented with God. We are not standing around an elephant. We cannot use scientific methods to describe God, because by definition God requires belief. To quote Douglas Adams, "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing".
The question isn't whether we are all describing different parts of the "celestial elephant". It is about whether the obscure, contradictory, impartial and above all *old* accounts of elephants had any basis in reality at all.
I think you really are addressing the wrong "bit" in Larry's terms here. The Elephant Parable doesn't seek to answer the question of whether to believe in God. What it does answer quite well is the question "Assuming God exists, why are there so many different accounts and contradictory stories"?
Naturally, as an atheist, I find the elephant parable to be unsatisfying. If I'm dealing with the type of God who chooses to reveal parts of himself so that we cluster around him like idiot blind men to an elephant, well, that God can go and get stuffed.
>One thing I have never heard a real python
> programmer say is that there is only one way
> to do it.
Very true, and followers of comp.lang.python would have seen the recent flamage about it.
My personal take on it is "there are lots of ways to do it, but only a few of them make any sense and are worthy of implementation". I take pride in writing simple, clean, obvious code which does the logical thing in a logical way. It's a difference of philosophy, which is a nice equitable way to end the discussion, to which I would only like to add that it is Perl, not C, not Java, and especially not Python, which is frequently described as a "write-only language".
>That was seemingly Larry's premise: That God is
>"good" to people in the here and now.
You have overlooked the alternative interpretation that God is good to people after they die, if they looked for him while still alive.
Doesn't account for all the millions of primitive tribes / people on other continents / followers of other (often longer-established) religions who also thought they were looking for God, of course.
You can measure how accurately an algorithm reproduces a given input signal, but there is no objective mathematical way to measure the quality of the audio, eg, whether the signal is any good in the first place.
It goes further than that, because the basis of lossy audio compression is the psychoacoustic model which determines which frequencies can be discarded and when. The theory is that compressing and uncompressing a waveform will result in a very different output waveform which will nonetheless approach the "quality" of the original. Different MP3 encoders have different psychoacoustic models and therefore produce entirely different outputs. A waveform that is 4% closer to the original on the average isn't necessarily the product of a superior encoder.
>The real problem with Opera is that no one, and I
>mean no one wants to actually pay for a web
>browser.
I'm very happy with Opera on Linux, and consider the $US20 I paid for the student version to be very reasonable. It's the only program - apart from games - that I've bought in the last 5 years.
> So all in all, it seems almost as if the DVD player
> manufacturers did not want the movie industry's
> plan to succeed...
Well, yeah. Sounds like simple profit motive to me. If your DVD player can be made region-free then that's one more reason to buy it over the region-locked players. The Web sites of unlock codes serve as word-of-mouth advertising.
I just read a book on nutritional anthropology ("Pickled, potted and canned") which repeated the above "fallacy" and backed it up with a considerable number of references, so I'm keen to learn your source.
Opera v6 also works: "The server's certificate chain is incomplete, and the signer(s) are not registered". Mozilla on my system gives error -8183 for the same page.
>Considering it takes an entire afternoon to compile
>KDE 3 I'm pretty sure that ZERO testing went into
>this so called fix.
Since this person is a KDE developer, it's highly likely that he has a build tree already. I hardly think it takes an entire afternoon to recompile a single Konqueror object file and then relink libkonq.
And as the AC pointed out, it's "all *intents* and purposes". Your version is not merely incorrect - it doesn't make sense, either.
>------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than
>n politicians is n+1 politicians.
In an attempt to determine the ultimate hazard to my liberty I have followed the rules outlined above and created an infinite amount of politicians, but am having difficulties finding where to store them.
It really is a vendor problem. In his paper, he has not 0wned Windows through any Microsoft service. He exploited a false assumption on the part of the VirusScan programmers to create a buffer overflow. It's a terribly beat-up story. I'm not exactly a Windows programming guru, but I have already used the capability to send fake messages to other programs in my own code. If VirusScan doesn't check the lengths of its inputs, that's a bug in VirusScan, because it's common knowledge that GUI element restrictions can be changed.
>Decreasing the resolution and wasting what your >hardware can do is *not* the answer.
This is incorrect. I don't run Return to Castle Wolfenstein at 800x600 for the fun of it, you know. I do it because running it at my usual 1600x1200 would be so ridiculously slow as to be unplayable.
"Techie fans" have been able to pirate songs for years now. Perhaps Moby's latest album just isn't that good? I haven't heard it, but that seems like the most likely explanation.
:-)
Agreed. The only person I know who liked Moby enough to buy "Play", his first album (and who makes an effort to "support the artist") didn't bother buying "18" - not because it was available as MP3s, but simply because she'd got sick of him.
Since everyone's making wild assertions, my explanation for the drop in Moby's sales is that his style hasn't changed in the slightest between the two albums, and he's starting to get boring.
>In America it's singular, in England it's been >simplified to the plural during the last 80 years or so.
I don't know about England, but in Australia a company is singular, and I don't think it's special-case at all, for the same reason that I don't think it odd to refer to a country, a school, or the Government in the singular.
As the author of a (small amount of) free software, software that is, incidentally, in the public domain, I take exception to your assertion that I do not provide this software as a charity. I do. Wordnet definitions: 1. A foundation created to promote the public good, and 2. A kindly and lenient attitude towards people, and 3. An activity or gift that benefits the public at large.
Be very careful before you presume to speak for everyone.
There is no logical connection between placing code in the public domain and not intendin
g to maintain it. Furthermore, your comment tha "software may be something that you can't just w
alk away from", which potentially valid, has nothing to do with license choice either. The BSD license is basically a big disclaimer of liability, for example.
Interesting to see how the argument has basically divided /. into two camps. I have to agree with Wakko here. People go on a great deal about how cheap the X-Box is, but after you buy it and the DVD add-on and, say, install Linux on it or whatever, you end up with a very limited computer (albeit with a meaty graphics subsystem).
For perhaps half the price of an equivalent general-purpose computer that you don't need to stick a soldering iron into before you can get it going. Half the price would be significant if we were talking about thousands of dollars. But we're not. We're talking about a three or four hundred dollars. A couple of X-Box games' worth.
X-Box isn't the killer app for a home theatre system, a DVD player is. Nobody who does not own a computer will give much of a shit about DivXes until there's a nice easy way for non-computer-owners to create them, and possibly not even then. People here talking about DivX being "everywhere" and how non-computer-literate people will be able to copy them from their friends are show just how insular their world is. There is a *huge* number of people out there who do not have the connections or the inclication to get this stuff going, and I don't believe the pirates have the critical mass necessary to make this thing of any interest.
For years, I've been skeptical of the Linux kernel development model, and specifically the its lack of source control. While it seemed to be "working", Linus has showed the strain several times on the kernel list. As far as I'm concerned, I'm glad he's found a tool that works for him - I totally agree with Linus' attitude of "use the tool that works for you, not its ideologically better, but otherwise inferior competition".
Hopefully this will at least alleviate some of the "Linus doesn't scale" criticisms, too.
It looks great, Autechre. Given the amount of time I watched Liedra enter themes I feel almost as pleased about the launch as you should be. :)
I reached the same idea independently about six months back, but instead of using my name I filtered out anything that didn't have my email address in the To: field, based on the assumption that most spammers use Bcc: lists or other tricks. It worked great.
I've since installed SpamAssassin to deal with the occassional stuff that goes directly to my email address, but as a low-tech method, simply filtering out mail not directly addressed to you works amazingly well.
>Sounds like a personal ad... hmmmm... slashdot personals...
;-)
I don't even want to *think* about that
(damn... too late)
Linus' hypocrisy matters because if the guy went to the trouble of stating how it should be said, then says it does'nt matter how it's said, fools like us will end up arguing about something that should not matter.
;-)
:-)
Good point, well argued.
However, Line-Icks barely compares to Mac OS version Ecks. OS NINE plus ONE, is OS TEN.
It's worse! It's OS Ecks version 10.1! Seriously. You'd at least think they'd have the decency to call it "Ecks point one" or "Ecks point Eye" or something, but no! They had to go and stuff everyone around - again.
Remove the 'programming'. Which of the two sounds right?
- I am entitled to earn a living.
- I am not entitled to earn a living.
You may disagree, but I think most people would say that in a capitalist society, they are entitled to earn a living. The "proper grounds", to use your definition, are being a citizen of the capitalist country of your choice and have nothing to do with entitlement itself. I am entitled to catch fish and eat them, but I won't have much luck until I stop fishing in the swimming pool.How can you properly claim to deserve to earn a living being a programmer if no one wants to pay you?!
"deserve" != "furnished with the proper grounds". And even if it did, it is a silly argument, because just because something is unpopular doesn't mean it is incorrect, necessarily. CF the end of apatheid in South Africa, the vote for women, the ending of slavery.
Regarding your clarification (or possibly redefinition
- Programs are becoming increasingly complicated, requiring more and more programmers to work on them.
- Regardless of the above, there is a continual demand for small pieces of code that perform simple functions. Every company I have worked for has required code like this, to convert databases, to strip information from reports, etc, etc. Although these tasks are very similar, the level of code re-use is rather low here because two sets of data are the same.There is no corresponding large demand in the food industry for hand-supervised bananas.
- You can sell the same can of Spam to everyone, but every company has individual requirements for their software. That's why people make so much money from ordering / inventory / payroll systems. A reasonable part of the task is integration with the company's existing systems.
They're just too difficult to reconcile. I can't really hope to survive selling my home-grown fruit and vegetables, because customers can buy the same stuff, of equal (often better) quality, from the greengrocer or supermarket. However I *can* make money implementing custom software for companies, simply because the pre-made solutions won't fit their needs.Now, if you'd like to have a discussion about the pros and cons of patent and copyright law as applied to the software industry, that's fine.
That sounds good, but what I really wanted to push was my position that private enterprise and closed source are responsible directly or very close to directly for the vast majority of the software that even the most avid Free Software zealot uses. However in my opinion the success of closed or open source software has very little to do with patents, so perhaps there is little to discuss.
Regardless, comment boxes are unwieldy - would you like to continue this via email? You sound worthy. Or at least explosive.