We invaded their land, killed them, attempted cultural genocide
Back in the height of 80s anti-communist propaganda, there was a TV show/movie that was a fictionalized account of the USA after the Soviet Union had conquered North America. One of the scenes showed an elementary school, where children were being taught US history. Part of their lessons explained that when the US was first formed, it was done so by slaughtering millions of indigenous peoples through large-scale warfare and very brutal techniques.
The idea was (from the Soviet perspective) to show how horrible the Imperialists were, how they didn't care about anyone else, how they were willing to kill anyone to achieve their goals. Thankfully the blessed Soviet had liberated the American people from their overlords, etc.
It's funny that 20 years later we've managed to convince many of our own citizens of this.
I don't know who this "we" is that you speak of, but there isn't a single Canadian alive today who "invaded" Canada. Did you mean "white people with probable European ancestry"?
Racism is abhorrent when applied against ANY group of people.
There's no single answer for us all
on
Obesity Contagious?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
It's funny, whenever a discussion on obesity arises (whether on Slashdot or IRL), people seem to settle into 2 camps:
1. Eat less, exercise more! Guaranteed you'll lose weight! 2. Do you think fat people REALLY want to be fat? It's not their fault! It's their metabolisms (or a virus, perhaps)!
Call me crazy, but I think there's a bit of truth in BOTH statements.
Fact is, ON AVERAGE, the more you eat, the more weight you will gain. ON AVERAGE, the more exercise you get, the more weight you will lose. I can't see anyone disputing this, for the AVERAGE case. Hell, it really applies to everyone, but to differing degrees. Personally, I've been in both camps.
Some people burn as many calories as they intake, no matter what. I used to be one of them. 4000, 5000 calories a day, combined with sitting around watching TV, and I stayed incredibly slim. As I finally emerged from what seemed like 10 years of puberty, this changed, and changed a lot. Lately I can put a pound or two on per day, if I'm not careful. I have to be very careful in what I eat or I'll balloon up in a month - well, for someone of my weight it IS ballooning, anyway. However, I can still have weeks where I eat a ton of food, so long as I exercise myself silly. In my case, it's hiking 20kms up the side of a mountain. After that I can eat damn near everything in sight for a week. In the winter when I slow down, I have to eat a LOT less or the pounds pile on.
I think it's safe to say that most people are in a range from hummingbird to tortise when it comes to metabolism. The key is figuring out where you lie on that scale, and adjusting your habits accordingly. I know of people who will just put on fat forever. They need to eat very nutritious, low calorie foods, and get plenty of exercise in order to stay reasonably thin. Does it suck? Yup. Is it "unfair" that some people can eat whatever they want, whenever they want? Sure - but you're not going to get very far whining about it. There are some extreme cases of people who simply cannot do anything but gain weight - their bodies are totally out of whack. Seems to me that these people are in a very small minority though - or else obesity wouldn't be such a recent thing. You don't often see 400 lb people in poorer countries, for instance, and you sure didn't see many of them 100 years ago.
Some days I wish I was still 16, and could eat all the time. Then again, in those days I couldn't put on muscle to save my life, no matter what or how much I ate, or how much I exercised.
Long story short? Live with the cards you've been dealt, and know that it's actually OK to feel hungry sometimes. Far too many people insist on feeling very full after every meal - hell, after every hour for the extreme snackers out there.
While playing Trivial Pursuit once, the question was something to the effect of "This president's last words were 'Oh dear, I think I have a headache'".
Person answering the question replied "gee, I hope it wasn't Kennedy"....
You're right. What the GP was referring to was what we usually term "civil/human rights".
Incidentally, this is also the reason very few countries are ever set up as true democracies. A true democracy is only good to live in when your views happen to coincide with the majority's.
So what you're saying is, we might see a repeat of the summers of 89-91. Hotter than average, dryer than average. Or maybe we'll see a repeat of the 30s. Or any other year where temperatures have been above average. Great. We've seen many where they've been below average.
The long-term forcasts you linked to aren't interesting - they're forcasting a warmer than average year? Hate to break it to you, but by definition, WE HAVE TO HAVE SOME YEARS WARMER THAN THE AVERAGE. Otherwise each and every year will be exactly the same.
You're doing what is the very meaning of Chicken Little. One year of climate data is not an indication of a problem, or any serious change. You have to average this out over decades, if not centuries.
Oh btw, even EC admits that their long-term forecasts are rarely accurate - check the 2nd graphic in each of those links. Most of the country could have been forecasted by randomly guessing, and you'd be as statistically accurate as EC.
A long-term, global change in climate is something to worry about. Saying "gee, it seems hot this year, it must be global warming"... yes, you might as well claim that the sky is falling.
Did these guys really need that much in stock options?
If the market (in this case, investors) wanted to pay them that much, then yes. They didn't use violence to obtain their money, they didn't bribe the government to pass laws in their favour, they simply produced a product (stocks) that other people of their own free will were willing to buy.
Welcome to freedom.
Incidentally, no one on this planet is starving due to lack of food. We produce far more than we require, even for all 6 billion of us.
There is no boss worse than the boss's kid, if s/he hasn't been brought up through the ranks properly. I've experienced this (straight to V.P. 6 months after finishing college), and it's by far been the worst boss to work for. The company owner was an amazing boss, but his children just didn't seem to have a hot clue about anything. You can't just plop someone in a desk with the attitude of "I'll own this someday, so everyone should listen to me".
I was in this particular situation just as we were doing our Y2K upgrades. It got compounded by the fact that the kid thought he was an IT guru because he knew how to burn a CD.
Personally, I'd take government work over working in another family owned business. And that's saying a LOT, as anyone who's worked for the government will attest.
Well, 2 summers ago Winnipeg experienced its first August snow in recorded history. It was the coldest summer overall, by leaps and bounds. Calgary just experienced a colder than average spring and summer, with snow in the mountains lasting well into August that normally melts by June.
For every anecdote of a warmer-than-average day/month/season, you can find one of a colder-than-average day/month/season. It doesn't mean the sky is falling, it means that there's no such thing as "normal" temperatures.
If it's loved so much (and it is), why is the industry constantly under attack?
There's a town in a rural area near the city I grew up in, that's extremely religious, to the point where it's like the town in Footloose: dancing is banned. Also, selling alcohol within town limits is against the law there. There are no other communities within at least 50 miles of any sizable population.
Someone set up a liquor store literally on the other side of the town line. It's one of the most profitable in the country. You do the math.
Morality attacks against booze and "adult" entertainment generally come from two groups: one, the (very) vocal minority. Two, the hypocritical majority.
I find it both ironic and hypocritical that the community here is constantly bashing corporate America; that is, until Microsoft makes certain corporations pay to make get their system-critical software tested and verified. Oh, then we're all sad for those poor corporations that have to pay $500 a year. Mercy me...
Firstly, the "community" here is just that - a community. Made up of more than one individual. There's nothing hypocritical in the slightest about different people having different opinions on a subject.
Secondly, assuming we're only talking about one person's opinions, "Corporate America" is well understood to refer to large (and these days multi-national) corporations. Not too many people attack the small mom-n-pop shops that *would* be impacted by an annual $500 tithe.
Thirdly, the most obvious impact here is to the Free/OSS/whatever developers. These people can't afford to pay one red cent, and I don't blame them - they've already contributed enough. I've used all sorts of experimental drivers that were basically developed by some guy in his basement one evening. That can no longer happen in Windows.
Oh well, all the more reason to use Linux I guess...
an odd 43 degree F temperature change overnight... A temperature change of such a large amount, overnight, is not normal at all during January in NY. All the snow melted overnight.
Come visit Calgary, Alberta. We have these all the time. They're called Chinooks, which incidentally is an aboriginal word for "snow eater". In California they're known as a Santa Ana wind.
Sure you didn't grow some high mountain ranges just west of you recently?:)
Migrate, migrate, migrate. Unless Microsoft locks Vista down like we've never seen, we're just going to run through this entire process all over again. I had genuine hope for XP. I really did. It turned into a worse nightmare than 2000, until SP2 - and that didn't even fix the damn problem. When will people learn, a software firewall is not only useless as a security measure, it just adds another possible attack vector? CLOSE YOUR DAMN DEFAULT NETWORK PORTS.
Most things I see Windows used for in the enterprise could easily be replaced with something else. Exchange is a bit of a pain, granted, and the new AD features are handy. But file storage? Gateways? General workstation use?
The "use this mac mini with none of the software you need, now we're broke from replacing all our hardware" is a bit of a strawman. Well, not exactly a strawman, but it's not like we haven't done this before. People have used computers in the workplace for decades, and Windows has existed for only a small portion of that time. The vast majority of "you NEED Windows" software are programs for home use (and no, listing your favourite 3 Windows-dependent programs does not refute this, hence the word "majority" and not "every last one"). Most business functions can be switched to another platform tomorrow, and for those that can't, like I said, it's not like we haven't done this before.
Everyone moved to Windows to save money, time, sanity, or whatever floated their boat at the time. I don't see why we can't migrate off of it, if we can save that same money, time, etc again. And quite frankly, if it isn't worth it, then we can stick using Windows - it may just be the cheaper/better option in a lot of cases. For most business analysts, it seems to be so as of today.
Not that I'm thrilled about Windows, but it's the real world, not your fantasy dream world where everyone runs Debian. You either live in it or sit in your basement and call Microsoft "M$".
I don't know if you're a Linux or a Mac fanboy
Sounds to me like he's someone over 25, is all. Notice something about the article:
Looking back at my company, 10 years ago, our machines were connected directly to the Internet, no proxy, no firewall, no antivirus software.
Looking back 10 years ago, Windows was just coming onto the market in a big way. At that point networked machines were all sorts of wonderful beasts, from diskless DOS boxes to an endless variety of Unix hosts to the venerable Novell servers every office large and small had. In the "real world", as you refer to it, there was a time before Windows. There was even a time before Windows where a lot of places had Internet access, a lot of hosts were on it, and virus/worm/trojan writers were doing their damnedest to get in, mostly unsucessfully.
The difference is, back then every host wasn't sitting listening to all sorts of needless network traffic just waiting to be exploited, trusting that any data sent its way would be benign.
Well, at one point that was the case. Then the Morris worm hit. Nothing like it would come again until Microsoft decided to release 9 years of software written so that the network stack, by default, listens to all sorts of incoming traffic for no good reason.
Combine a near-monoculture with an incredibly stupid security design, and you get Wormfest2000 (tm).
It's not wrong to dislike something just because the groupthink says you should like it... can't have been getting any decent viewing figures.
So was it a largely popular show or not? Make up your damn mind.
Oh wait, you didn't actually have a coherent point - you were just aiming for the free "post used the word groupthink" karma.
For the record, folks, it's not exactly a stunning revelation that not everyone shares the same opinions on everything. Some people liked Firefly, some hated it, some were only lukewarm about it. Wow, just like everything else in the world.
the lack of variety that's generally encouraged when a small number of corporations control it, makes it much more lokely that a disease or other biological threat could just wipe the whole lot out.
Sounds a lot like the situation we face with modern computing, actually. I'm starting to really appreciate the people here who bemoan our "monoculture".
something as simple as streaming stuff off a different computer is enuf to get an article and be featured on/. Pity!
Considering how poorly device manufacturers are at making this work, you have no business making fun of this article.
I've looked at about a dozen consumer-level devices to do this, and so far, every single one has some stupid dependency or other. Whether it's the need for their "server" software, or the full-blown "you must run Windows or get the fuck out of my face" like Media Centre, NO ONE has come up with this:
A device that plays DVDs, AND can read files from a SMB (Windows, or Samba) share. Maybe something else. I don't care, as many of the available devices force you to navigate a directory heirarchy anyway. Plays mp3, ogg, mpeg2 and 4, avi (Divx and xvid), qt, etc. Preferably with the ability to update codecs/container formats as required, but even being able to play what was current a year ago today would be nice.
You laugh, but multi-billion dollar companies haven't managed this yet. A basic PC with a good Knoppix/Ubuntu install/CD would do this. I think it's worth an article, if only to show just how stupid the consumer electronics market is.
Slashdot Mirror
We invaded their land, killed them, attempted cultural genocide
Back in the height of 80s anti-communist propaganda, there was a TV show/movie that was a fictionalized account of the USA after the Soviet Union had conquered North America. One of the scenes showed an elementary school, where children were being taught US history. Part of their lessons explained that when the US was first formed, it was done so by slaughtering millions of indigenous peoples through large-scale warfare and very brutal techniques.
The idea was (from the Soviet perspective) to show how horrible the Imperialists were, how they didn't care about anyone else, how they were willing to kill anyone to achieve their goals. Thankfully the blessed Soviet had liberated the American people from their overlords, etc.
It's funny that 20 years later we've managed to convince many of our own citizens of this.
I don't know who this "we" is that you speak of, but there isn't a single Canadian alive today who "invaded" Canada. Did you mean "white people with probable European ancestry"?
Racism is abhorrent when applied against ANY group of people.
It's funny, whenever a discussion on obesity arises (whether on Slashdot or IRL), people seem to settle into 2 camps:
1. Eat less, exercise more! Guaranteed you'll lose weight!
2. Do you think fat people REALLY want to be fat? It's not their fault! It's their metabolisms (or a virus, perhaps)!
Call me crazy, but I think there's a bit of truth in BOTH statements.
Fact is, ON AVERAGE, the more you eat, the more weight you will gain. ON AVERAGE, the more exercise you get, the more weight you will lose. I can't see anyone disputing this, for the AVERAGE case. Hell, it really applies to everyone, but to differing degrees. Personally, I've been in both camps.
Some people burn as many calories as they intake, no matter what. I used to be one of them. 4000, 5000 calories a day, combined with sitting around watching TV, and I stayed incredibly slim. As I finally emerged from what seemed like 10 years of puberty, this changed, and changed a lot. Lately I can put a pound or two on per day, if I'm not careful. I have to be very careful in what I eat or I'll balloon up in a month - well, for someone of my weight it IS ballooning, anyway. However, I can still have weeks where I eat a ton of food, so long as I exercise myself silly. In my case, it's hiking 20kms up the side of a mountain. After that I can eat damn near everything in sight for a week. In the winter when I slow down, I have to eat a LOT less or the pounds pile on.
I think it's safe to say that most people are in a range from hummingbird to tortise when it comes to metabolism. The key is figuring out where you lie on that scale, and adjusting your habits accordingly. I know of people who will just put on fat forever. They need to eat very nutritious, low calorie foods, and get plenty of exercise in order to stay reasonably thin. Does it suck? Yup. Is it "unfair" that some people can eat whatever they want, whenever they want? Sure - but you're not going to get very far whining about it. There are some extreme cases of people who simply cannot do anything but gain weight - their bodies are totally out of whack. Seems to me that these people are in a very small minority though - or else obesity wouldn't be such a recent thing. You don't often see 400 lb people in poorer countries, for instance, and you sure didn't see many of them 100 years ago.
Some days I wish I was still 16, and could eat all the time. Then again, in those days I couldn't put on muscle to save my life, no matter what or how much I ate, or how much I exercised.
Long story short? Live with the cards you've been dealt, and know that it's actually OK to feel hungry sometimes. Far too many people insist on feeling very full after every meal - hell, after every hour for the extreme snackers out there.
it appears the lesson is to just say something and pretend to know what you are talking about
:)
Congrats! You're no longer new here!
True story:
...
While playing Trivial Pursuit once, the question was something to the effect of "This president's last words were 'Oh dear, I think I have a headache'".
Person answering the question replied "gee, I hope it wasn't Kennedy".
Too soon?
You're right. What the GP was referring to was what we usually term "civil/human rights".
Incidentally, this is also the reason very few countries are ever set up as true democracies. A true democracy is only good to live in when your views happen to coincide with the majority's.
Sounds like Canada, at least.
I kid, I kid! We're a very hospitable people up here.
Ever have one of those moments where you think "MAN! The Internet is SO COOL!".
Usually followed by "some people have WAY too much time on their hands".
Diefenbaker and Laurier were on your ballot? Damnit, I'm in the wrong riding!
So what you're saying is, we might see a repeat of the summers of 89-91. Hotter than average, dryer than average. Or maybe we'll see a repeat of the 30s. Or any other year where temperatures have been above average. Great. We've seen many where they've been below average.
... yes, you might as well claim that the sky is falling.
The long-term forcasts you linked to aren't interesting - they're forcasting a warmer than average year? Hate to break it to you, but by definition, WE HAVE TO HAVE SOME YEARS WARMER THAN THE AVERAGE. Otherwise each and every year will be exactly the same.
You're doing what is the very meaning of Chicken Little. One year of climate data is not an indication of a problem, or any serious change. You have to average this out over decades, if not centuries.
Oh btw, even EC admits that their long-term forecasts are rarely accurate - check the 2nd graphic in each of those links. Most of the country could have been forecasted by randomly guessing, and you'd be as statistically accurate as EC.
A long-term, global change in climate is something to worry about. Saying "gee, it seems hot this year, it must be global warming"
Did these guys really need that much in stock options?
If the market (in this case, investors) wanted to pay them that much, then yes. They didn't use violence to obtain their money, they didn't bribe the government to pass laws in their favour, they simply produced a product (stocks) that other people of their own free will were willing to buy.
Welcome to freedom.
Incidentally, no one on this planet is starving due to lack of food. We produce far more than we require, even for all 6 billion of us.
So long as the small company isn't family owned.
There is no boss worse than the boss's kid, if s/he hasn't been brought up through the ranks properly. I've experienced this (straight to V.P. 6 months after finishing college), and it's by far been the worst boss to work for. The company owner was an amazing boss, but his children just didn't seem to have a hot clue about anything. You can't just plop someone in a desk with the attitude of "I'll own this someday, so everyone should listen to me".
I was in this particular situation just as we were doing our Y2K upgrades. It got compounded by the fact that the kid thought he was an IT guru because he knew how to burn a CD.
Personally, I'd take government work over working in another family owned business. And that's saying a LOT, as anyone who's worked for the government will attest.
Well, 2 summers ago Winnipeg experienced its first August snow in recorded history. It was the coldest summer overall, by leaps and bounds. Calgary just experienced a colder than average spring and summer, with snow in the mountains lasting well into August that normally melts by June.
For every anecdote of a warmer-than-average day/month/season, you can find one of a colder-than-average day/month/season. It doesn't mean the sky is falling, it means that there's no such thing as "normal" temperatures.
If it's loved so much (and it is), why is the industry constantly under attack?
There's a town in a rural area near the city I grew up in, that's extremely religious, to the point where it's like the town in Footloose: dancing is banned. Also, selling alcohol within town limits is against the law there. There are no other communities within at least 50 miles of any sizable population.
Someone set up a liquor store literally on the other side of the town line. It's one of the most profitable in the country. You do the math.
Morality attacks against booze and "adult" entertainment generally come from two groups: one, the (very) vocal minority. Two, the hypocritical majority.
I find it both ironic and hypocritical that the community here is constantly bashing corporate America; that is, until Microsoft makes certain corporations pay to make get their system-critical software tested and verified. Oh, then we're all sad for those poor corporations that have to pay $500 a year. Mercy me...
Firstly, the "community" here is just that - a community. Made up of more than one individual. There's nothing hypocritical in the slightest about different people having different opinions on a subject.
Secondly, assuming we're only talking about one person's opinions, "Corporate America" is well understood to refer to large (and these days multi-national) corporations. Not too many people attack the small mom-n-pop shops that *would* be impacted by an annual $500 tithe.
Thirdly, the most obvious impact here is to the Free/OSS/whatever developers. These people can't afford to pay one red cent, and I don't blame them - they've already contributed enough. I've used all sorts of experimental drivers that were basically developed by some guy in his basement one evening. That can no longer happen in Windows.
Oh well, all the more reason to use Linux I guess...
Grandparent's just jealous because Jobs makes more money creating children's entertainment than he would Producing Adult Films.
Maybe it's actually Ron Jeremy posting incognito?
Why go to Mars when we can bring it to us?
people clapped when Bush announced his "vision" to return to the Moon and put men are[sic] Mars
We go because we want to. Same reason we do anything.
an odd 43 degree F temperature change overnight ... A temperature change of such a large amount, overnight, is not normal at all during January in NY. All the snow melted overnight.
:)
Come visit Calgary, Alberta. We have these all the time. They're called Chinooks, which incidentally is an aboriginal word for "snow eater". In California they're known as a Santa Ana wind.
Sure you didn't grow some high mountain ranges just west of you recently?
Windows is also 20 years old, give or take a couple of months.
:)
Laugh, it's a joke. Windows wasn't even natively network aware until 10 years later
Do the ambulances have to wait their turn after a kill?
What do we do?
Migrate, migrate, migrate. Unless Microsoft locks Vista down like we've never seen, we're just going to run through this entire process all over again. I had genuine hope for XP. I really did. It turned into a worse nightmare than 2000, until SP2 - and that didn't even fix the damn problem. When will people learn, a software firewall is not only useless as a security measure, it just adds another possible attack vector? CLOSE YOUR DAMN DEFAULT NETWORK PORTS.
Most things I see Windows used for in the enterprise could easily be replaced with something else. Exchange is a bit of a pain, granted, and the new AD features are handy. But file storage? Gateways? General workstation use?
The "use this mac mini with none of the software you need, now we're broke from replacing all our hardware" is a bit of a strawman. Well, not exactly a strawman, but it's not like we haven't done this before. People have used computers in the workplace for decades, and Windows has existed for only a small portion of that time. The vast majority of "you NEED Windows" software are programs for home use (and no, listing your favourite 3 Windows-dependent programs does not refute this, hence the word "majority" and not "every last one"). Most business functions can be switched to another platform tomorrow, and for those that can't, like I said, it's not like we haven't done this before.
Everyone moved to Windows to save money, time, sanity, or whatever floated their boat at the time. I don't see why we can't migrate off of it, if we can save that same money, time, etc again. And quite frankly, if it isn't worth it, then we can stick using Windows - it may just be the cheaper/better option in a lot of cases. For most business analysts, it seems to be so as of today.
Not that I'm thrilled about Windows, but it's the real world, not your fantasy dream world where everyone runs Debian. You either live in it or sit in your basement and call Microsoft "M$".
I don't know if you're a Linux or a Mac fanboy
Sounds to me like he's someone over 25, is all. Notice something about the article:
Looking back at my company, 10 years ago, our machines were connected directly to the Internet, no proxy, no firewall, no antivirus software.
Looking back 10 years ago, Windows was just coming onto the market in a big way. At that point networked machines were all sorts of wonderful beasts, from diskless DOS boxes to an endless variety of Unix hosts to the venerable Novell servers every office large and small had. In the "real world", as you refer to it, there was a time before Windows. There was even a time before Windows where a lot of places had Internet access, a lot of hosts were on it, and virus/worm/trojan writers were doing their damnedest to get in, mostly unsucessfully.
The difference is, back then every host wasn't sitting listening to all sorts of needless network traffic just waiting to be exploited, trusting that any data sent its way would be benign.
Well, at one point that was the case. Then the Morris worm hit. Nothing like it would come again until Microsoft decided to release 9 years of software written so that the network stack, by default, listens to all sorts of incoming traffic for no good reason .
Combine a near-monoculture with an incredibly stupid security design, and you get Wormfest2000 (tm).
It's not wrong to dislike something just because the groupthink says you should like it ...
can't have been getting any decent viewing figures.
So was it a largely popular show or not? Make up your damn mind.
Oh wait, you didn't actually have a coherent point - you were just aiming for the free "post used the word groupthink" karma.
For the record, folks, it's not exactly a stunning revelation that not everyone shares the same opinions on everything. Some people liked Firefly, some hated it, some were only lukewarm about it. Wow, just like everything else in the world.
How Insightful.
Most draw the line at WMD.
Nonsense.
Tactical nukes don't kill people, people kill people.
the lack of variety that's generally encouraged when a small number of corporations control it, makes it much more lokely that a disease or other biological threat could just wipe the whole lot out.
Sounds a lot like the situation we face with modern computing, actually. I'm starting to really appreciate the people here who bemoan our "monoculture".
something as simple as streaming stuff off a different computer is enuf to get an article and be featured on /. Pity!
Considering how poorly device manufacturers are at making this work, you have no business making fun of this article.
I've looked at about a dozen consumer-level devices to do this, and so far, every single one has some stupid dependency or other. Whether it's the need for their "server" software, or the full-blown "you must run Windows or get the fuck out of my face" like Media Centre, NO ONE has come up with this:
A device that plays DVDs, AND can read files from a SMB (Windows, or Samba) share. Maybe something else. I don't care, as many of the available devices force you to navigate a directory heirarchy anyway. Plays mp3, ogg, mpeg2 and 4, avi (Divx and xvid), qt, etc. Preferably with the ability to update codecs/container formats as required, but even being able to play what was current a year ago today would be nice.
You laugh, but multi-billion dollar companies haven't managed this yet. A basic PC with a good Knoppix/Ubuntu install/CD would do this. I think it's worth an article, if only to show just how stupid the consumer electronics market is.