Nearly 20 years in IT with a diversified entertainment company. Think movies, TV and theme parks.
After one regime change my new boss ends up being a highly trained and well-liked mechanical engineer with no IT experience. He also ended up running the copy shop so our staff meetings had my staff - some with advanced degrees and copy shop staff. Our concerns were based on development schedules, roll out, training, service, etc and the copy shop wanted a Keurig for themselves. Guess what we talked about most of the time in the first month of weekly meetings? Yeah, why there was no budget for their Keurig. They brought in advertisements from Target and other places with the best prices. They argued. We sat there slack jawed.
As the manager new boss engineer came to me for help solving this "concern". Reach into your pocket and pull out $100 of your $150,000/year salary and buy if for them. He was dumbfounded that I would even suggest such a thing.. I bought one at a garage sale the next weekend and wrapped it in a ribbon and put it in the copy room saying "From (new bosses name)" Problem solved. Yeah they complained about having to buy their own coffee after that , but by that time no one cared.
Same boss was chatting with me in my office when he suddenly noticed that my desk was bigger than his. He assured me it wasn't that he wanted MY desk, just that he didn't know they made a larger size in the style he wanted. Much work time is lost searching for a free desk of similar propotions. His secretary cried from the frustration of having to beg for furniture because this guy wouldn't pay for anything.
One weekend me and my server lead swapped the desks. Told the boss we found one somewhere. He never noticed mine was suddenly smaller.
Finally manipulated him into taking charge of intranet requirements for upper management. After a year of no progress and reporting same to his boss, he was reassigned.
paper and PDF files cannot be "messed" with and passed on with new, incorrect, information added in (without some extra work beyond the problems in that area a wiki presents)
Remember - you are showing people how to use a product and NOT teaching them a new skill or how to do their jobs (hopefully).
It is not unexpected that your company would require some basic knowledge beyond remembering to breath in order to provide security services.
I suppose it's possible, but in the "heat" of the strike I also know that writers were telling people they were "fired" when they were actually laid off. I work in one of the Universal buildings and spoke to many picketing writers out on Lankershim blvd. The two who told me they were "fired" admitted they were actually laid off. One other guy I spoke to (who didn't claim to be fired) had a separate contract (but was not an employee) and refused to cross the picket line so I guess he was "fired" for not fullfilling his contractural obligations.
Shows in "active development" are production deals (until they actually develop something) working under union and that production companies rules. If the production company employing those writers wanted to fire them I suspect it was an internal decision.
The entire reason the studios goaded the WGA into striking was so they could kill all the "active development deals" that weren't producing crap. 90 to force majure them out and a settlement at 100 days. What a coincidence. Cleaning house was never easier.
Your first paragraph pretty much sums up what this was all about. The writers guild was coerced into striking by the studios. They didn't want to and worked without contract for months, but the studios refused to negotiate. So they felt a need to flex their muscles and went out on strike.
The studios felt they were saddled with dead weight in the form of long-term development deals that were going no where. Sure you get a good show or two out of them, but there were too many for the product that was being produced. There were some that were three years into their deals and had no product yet. All of those deals have "act of god" or "force majeur" clauses in them and most were 90-days (from what i was told by the Universal Studios folks).
After 90-days those deals were killed, the people had all been laid off earlier and now, amazingly, 10-days later the strike is settled. The WGA was a puppet used to smack down the small production companies.
The tiny concessions given to the writers have been estimated to amount to about $3,000 per year for a constantly working writer of average pay. And even in those concessions there are loopholes for the studios - like they get to wait a month after releasing a show for the web before they have to pay anything to the writer. Look for lots of "pay for it on iTunes or get it free after a month" deals from now on. So basically the writers sold out tens of thousands of actual hard-working people (grips, food workers, etc.) for hollow concession to feed their damaged egos.
The weren't "fired" technically. The work went away so they were laid off. If the work comes back they will be rehired, but in some cases the work will not come back.
The problem stems (drumroll please) from copywrite law. To make it quick and simple the "creator" owns the copywrite on his work. He could license it to the studios, but the deal is that he allows the studio to copywrite it in their name. He is not an employee creating a "work for hire". That way the studios don't have to go back to the creator every time they want to do a script change, create a spin-off, etc. In return the creator gets royalties (called residuals in the trade) for the use of their work.
I think the conspiracy theories surrounding Rife are as numerous as those on the Kennedy assassination and engines that run on water.
Rife's basic theory was everything had a frequency - including diseases. If you could find the frequency of the specific disease the person had and then bombard them with high energy RF you could disrupt the disease enough to wipe it out.
The implementations today range from quack devices to actual medical testing (outside of the U.S.) Lots to be learned still. Great to see people still talking about it and working on it.
Confidential, Secret, Top Secret, SAR, Intel, etc.
on
Bad Day To Be Sony
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
or blah, blah, blah.
It's been over ten years since i've been in that business, but i'd be seriously surprised if there were locally mountable devices, or even ports (USB, etc) on TS machines. We had no floppy drives and removable hard drives in our Secret machines, plus they were all tempest hardened, plus in lockable cabinets (those who know, know what i mean). We only had a few areas where we could even work on TS docs, much less create them from scratch. Having a CD drive (even read only) seems like something a security officer would have jumped on as a "duh" very early on in any project. If you needed a CD it would be mounted as a share to a server in the "vault" and you would be granted access to it for the time you needed it. No personal electrical devices were allowed in any way, shape, or form so no radios, CD players, etc.
I suppose if a contractor was lax this could all take place, someone could use the document blender to make margaritas, but in my experience there was no way to just pop in some disk or attach a device. I mean we didn't even have printers! They were locked up in the vault also and you had to sign for the number of pages you printed! This was just a SECRET rated facility (o.k., Secret with SAR, I'll give you that much). So be realistic. I could take CDs in all day long but they were only good as drink coasters.
Yeah, that would work with what? a three-person internet startup talking to some guy in a music company? I mean I wouldn't hire any one who came in preaching doom and destruction if I didn't buy into his act. More often than not you'll be right. So when you're wrong and it becomes a huge problem, what do you do, just say "yes" to ever huckester that comes along?
I'm not really sure what to say to your comment. I guess you're used to people just talking out of a different orifice than their mouth. We've been to Redmond, they've been here. We have the code, we're using it, and it's good so far. It's really not all that hard to get on a beta for a bloody service pack even if you're not a huge company. True - release is planned for the second half of this year, but vaporware? Hardly my son.
The authentication part is quite simple so i'm not entirely sure what your complaint about security is really about. As a multi-national we have contracts with major cel services around the world - that's the only requirement - the users must use one of the company authorized services.
you really didn't think out this comment, did you.
I forgot to mention that we have offices in 56 countries and sales people in nearly 100. That's the problem - all Blackberry provisioning to our system goes through London, NYC, or Los Angeles. If they locally procure smartphones that offloads the work to the user themselves and we have established already that they complain less and are more careful with the kit when they have to be involved in getting it repaired.
The 100 was Dead On Arrival (DOA). Maybe that is acceptable for handhelds. We just never had that kind of DOA problem with desktops or laptops. They fail at a much higher rate than 5%. I didn't mean to imply that failure was that low.
Believe me you can have that part of my job. Can you say "I'm sorry we'll get you out a new one as soon as you send the old one back" in seven languages?
Not to sound like too much of a jerk, but I can support twenty of any computer-related (end user) device (across the globe) pretty easily. I've done it before between Japan, Los angeles, and Orlando.
We have 2,000 blackberries and they suck up more support time/costs than windows does.
You had a 10% DOA rate that amounts to two units. Mine is less than 5%, but it's still a major pain to return 100 units as that task falls to the support personnel.
I cannot wait to move all of our blackberry users to an end-to-end Microsoft solution through exchange and smartphones. Go ahead and bash my "logic" to bits if you must, but RIM as a third-party vendor is not providing the value we are dearly paying for with BES licenses.
It's just not worth it and the savings in out-of-pocket costs (for those above licenses) just by switching to Magneto in Exchange 2003 will more than justify ditching the RIM technology
In addition the Microsoft solution falls under our Corporate Premier Support Services and software Enterprise Agreement for a net increase of zero $ for great support.
Ugh, this is starting to sound like a MS love note and I really didn't plan it that way. I'm just fed up with RIM and their devices that I must continually add extra-cost software to just to get some standard functionality (like reading certain documents, performing workflow, etc.)
Really, the blackberry is hardly ready for a multi-national corporating with an already over-taxed IT support division.
Give me a solution where the users purchase whatever handset they want locally (as long as the OS is compatible) and I can hook it into my corporate "solution" and i'll be happy. We've got people who spend their entire lives dealing with shipping, setting up, returning, RMAing Blackberries and it's not sustainable for us.
SUS is fine for smaller amounts of clients, you can look up the limitations. In addition please look at the MS product WUS (yes, i'm not kidding) as SUS is considered dead and will not be updated any further. Of course if you have to run MS bits SMS is the ultimate product for managing this mess in a large enterprise.
Computers are simpler to repair Software is easier to troubleshoot Remote assistance is starting to work Companies are working hard to eliminate the technician
The goal should be that the mail room guy becomes your "technician" for everything easily replaceable. He will just take a new "computer" from a box, un-plug, re-plug and mail off the failed box for off-site repair. Happily all of your data resides on a server hosted off-site and the OS is loaded into memory on each boot up.
Seriously this line of work is going to be a much smaller segment of the market as the years progress and in ten years there will be no such thing for the most part.
The guy who comes to "fix" your computer will be as unknown as the iceman is today.
This isn't a flame - it's notice to start retraining now and get ahead of the game.
When the Berlin Wall collapsed I didn't sit on my ass in my fat aerospace job waiting for it to be pulled out from under me. I changed industries, took a pay cut and crawled right back up the ladder.
If you no longer command respect maybe today is the time to take start looking elsewhere - no matter how much you enjoy what you are doing now. it's not going to get any better, but it will get far worse.
Kim Jong Il: Hans Bwix? Oh no!... Oh hewwo Hans, gweat to see you again! Hans Blix: Mr. Il, I was supposed to be allowed to inspect your palace, but your guards won't let me into certain areas. Kim Jong Il: Hans Hans Hans, we've been thwew this a dozen times. I don't have any weapons mass destwuction, okay Hans? Hans Blix: Then let me look around, so I can ease the UN's collective mind. I'm sorry, but the UN must be firm with you. Let me in, or else. Kim Jong Il: O else what? Hans Blix: Or else we will be very angry with you, and we will write you a letter, *telling* you how angry we are.
If you're over 30 years old think about how the world - just your tiny part of it - has changed since you were a kid.
There are many more humans on this planet, with little sign of a stable population anytime in the near future.
No one knows what "critical mass" is regarding population, but don't doubt for one minute that population control will be the "next big thing" at some point in the next 50 years.
Even if the planet itself can support more people think about the life you're living now and imagine even 25% more people crowded into "your" space.
"I'll bet you the Japanese bombed the U.S. MAINLAND during WWII and innocent civilians were killed because of it."
The answer (copied from some random web page):
"The only fatalities from enemy activity on the mainland of North America occurred May 5, 1945, in Bly, near southeastern Oregon's Fremont National Forest, when a church group encountered one of the explosive bombs from a balloon. The explosion resulted in six deaths of civilians."
...nitrogen! I'm almost on the brink of patenting nitrogen. I've got a little "prior art" problem, but my IP lawyers (they work for SCO too) say that's just a technicality and with the licensing fees I'll be get by suing end users with little or no cash will make the PanIP guys look like schoolchildren.
I may go to hell for this, but I bet even money they turn me back at the gates!
It's not a criminal case, it's a civil case. The judge does not have a right to dismiss it. To be perfectly correct on this I seriously doubt the the lawsuits are just against the kids anyway. They almost certainly are against the parents with the kids named as a party to the action.
What's the point in suing a kid, you can't attach their lawnmowing wages?
I agree, they settle because they can't afford a lawyer. Of course there are many law firms that would be happy to stand up in this area and do pro bono work if they thought it was good business and there was a chance of winning.
Slashdot Mirror
Nearly 20 years in IT with a diversified entertainment company. Think movies, TV and theme parks.
After one regime change my new boss ends up being a highly trained and well-liked mechanical engineer with no IT experience. He also ended up running the copy shop so our staff meetings had my staff - some with advanced degrees and copy shop staff. Our concerns were based on development schedules, roll out, training, service, etc and the copy shop wanted a Keurig for themselves. Guess what we talked about most of the time in the first month of weekly meetings? Yeah, why there was no budget for their Keurig. They brought in advertisements from Target and other places with the best prices. They argued. We sat there slack jawed.
As the manager new boss engineer came to me for help solving this "concern". Reach into your pocket and pull out $100 of your $150,000/year salary and buy if for them. He was dumbfounded that I would even suggest such a thing.. I bought one at a garage sale the next weekend and wrapped it in a ribbon and put it in the copy room saying "From (new bosses name)" Problem solved. Yeah they complained about having to buy their own coffee after that , but by that time no one cared.
Same boss was chatting with me in my office when he suddenly noticed that my desk was bigger than his. He assured me it wasn't that he wanted MY desk, just that he didn't know they made a larger size in the style he wanted. Much work time is lost searching for a free desk of similar propotions. His secretary cried from the frustration of having to beg for furniture because this guy wouldn't pay for anything.
One weekend me and my server lead swapped the desks. Told the boss we found one somewhere. He never noticed mine was suddenly smaller.
Finally manipulated him into taking charge of intranet requirements for upper management. After a year of no progress and reporting same to his boss, he was reassigned.
I agree. At least try the Space Pen and see if it meets your needs before you run out and buy a dozen different things to frustrate you even more.
paper and PDF files cannot be "messed" with and passed on with new, incorrect, information added in (without some extra work beyond the problems in that area a wiki presents)
Remember - you are showing people how to use a product and NOT teaching them a new skill or how to do their jobs (hopefully).
It is not unexpected that your company would require some basic knowledge beyond remembering to breath in order to provide security services.
I suppose it's possible, but in the "heat" of the strike I also know that writers were telling people they were "fired" when they were actually laid off. I work in one of the Universal buildings and spoke to many picketing writers out on Lankershim blvd. The two who told me they were "fired" admitted they were actually laid off. One other guy I spoke to (who didn't claim to be fired) had a separate contract (but was not an employee) and refused to cross the picket line so I guess he was "fired" for not fullfilling his contractural obligations.
Shows in "active development" are production deals (until they actually develop something) working under union and that production companies rules. If the production company employing those writers wanted to fire them I suspect it was an internal decision.
The entire reason the studios goaded the WGA into striking was so they could kill all the "active development deals" that weren't producing crap. 90 to force majure them out and a settlement at 100 days. What a coincidence. Cleaning house was never easier.
Your first paragraph pretty much sums up what this was all about. The writers guild was coerced into striking by the studios. They didn't want to and worked without contract for months, but the studios refused to negotiate. So they felt a need to flex their muscles and went out on strike.
The studios felt they were saddled with dead weight in the form of long-term development deals that were going no where. Sure you get a good show or two out of them, but there were too many for the product that was being produced. There were some that were three years into their deals and had no product yet. All of those deals have "act of god" or "force majeur" clauses in them and most were 90-days (from what i was told by the Universal Studios folks).
After 90-days those deals were killed, the people had all been laid off earlier and now, amazingly, 10-days later the strike is settled. The WGA was a puppet used to smack down the small production companies.
The tiny concessions given to the writers have been estimated to amount to about $3,000 per year for a constantly working writer of average pay. And even in those concessions there are loopholes for the studios - like they get to wait a month after releasing a show for the web before they have to pay anything to the writer. Look for lots of "pay for it on iTunes or get it free after a month" deals from now on. So basically the writers sold out tens of thousands of actual hard-working people (grips, food workers, etc.) for hollow concession to feed their damaged egos.
The weren't "fired" technically. The work went away so they were laid off. If the work comes back they will be rehired, but in some cases the work will not come back.
The problem stems (drumroll please) from copywrite law. To make it quick and simple the "creator" owns the copywrite on his work. He could license it to the studios, but the deal is that he allows the studio to copywrite it in their name. He is not an employee creating a "work for hire". That way the studios don't have to go back to the creator every time they want to do a script change, create a spin-off, etc. In return the creator gets royalties (called residuals in the trade) for the use of their work.
Airship nomenclature defined these:
Type A - Rigid
Type B - Limp (hence the nickname "blimp")
This has a rigid frame inside so it cannot be a blimp.
No need to wait until 18! UK laws states:
It's illegal for you to give alcohol to children under 5 (unless it's medical)
If you're under 14 you're not allowed in a pub/bar unless it has a suitable licence. This also includes beer gardens and family rooms.
At 14 you can enter a bar or pub but only if the landlord agrees and if you drink soft drinks (this can include low-alcohol beer).
If you're 16 or 17 you can buy or be bought beer or cider with a meal.
If you're under 18 you can't buy alcohol, anywhere, unless it's the above.
Well his story is a facisnating read anyways.
http://www.rife.org/
I think the conspiracy theories surrounding Rife are as numerous as those on the Kennedy assassination and engines that run on water.
Rife's basic theory was everything had a frequency - including diseases. If you could find the frequency of the specific disease the person had and then bombard them with high energy RF you could disrupt the disease enough to wipe it out.
The implementations today range from quack devices to actual medical testing (outside of the U.S.) Lots to be learned still. Great to see people still talking about it and working on it.
or blah, blah, blah.
It's been over ten years since i've been in that business, but i'd be seriously surprised if there were locally mountable devices, or even ports (USB, etc) on TS machines. We had no floppy drives and removable hard drives in our Secret machines, plus they were all tempest hardened, plus in lockable cabinets (those who know, know what i mean). We only had a few areas where we could even work on TS docs, much less create them from scratch. Having a CD drive (even read only) seems like something a security officer would have jumped on as a "duh" very early on in any project. If you needed a CD it would be mounted as a share to a server in the "vault" and you would be granted access to it for the time you needed it. No personal electrical devices were allowed in any way, shape, or form so no radios, CD players, etc.
I suppose if a contractor was lax this could all take place, someone could use the document blender to make margaritas, but in my experience there was no way to just pop in some disk or attach a device. I mean we didn't even have printers! They were locked up in the vault also and you had to sign for the number of pages you printed! This was just a SECRET rated facility (o.k., Secret with SAR, I'll give you that much). So be realistic. I could take CDs in all day long but they were only good as drink coasters.
Yeah, that would work with what? a three-person internet startup talking to some guy in a music company? I mean I wouldn't hire any one who came in preaching doom and destruction if I didn't buy into his act. More often than not you'll be right. So when you're wrong and it becomes a huge problem, what do you do, just say "yes" to ever huckester that comes along?
who thinks "viiv" means "64"?
I'm not really sure what to say to your comment. I guess you're used to people just talking out of a different orifice than their mouth. We've been to Redmond, they've been here. We have the code, we're using it, and it's good so far. It's really not all that hard to get on a beta for a bloody service pack even if you're not a huge company. True - release is planned for the second half of this year, but vaporware? Hardly my son.
The authentication part is quite simple so i'm not entirely sure what your complaint about security is really about. As a multi-national we have contracts with major cel services around the world - that's the only requirement - the users must use one of the company authorized services.
you really didn't think out this comment, did you.
I forgot to mention that we have offices in 56 countries and sales people in nearly 100. That's the problem - all Blackberry provisioning to our system goes through London, NYC, or Los Angeles. If they locally procure smartphones that offloads the work to the user themselves and we have established already that they complain less and are more careful with the kit when they have to be involved in getting it repaired.
The 100 was Dead On Arrival (DOA). Maybe that is acceptable for handhelds. We just never had that kind of DOA problem with desktops or laptops. They fail at a much higher rate than 5%. I didn't mean to imply that failure was that low.
Believe me you can have that part of my job. Can you say "I'm sorry we'll get you out a new one as soon as you send the old one back" in seven languages?
Not to sound like too much of a jerk, but I can support twenty of any computer-related (end user) device (across the globe) pretty easily. I've done it before between Japan, Los angeles, and Orlando.
We have 2,000 blackberries and they suck up more support time/costs than windows does.
You had a 10% DOA rate that amounts to two units. Mine is less than 5%, but it's still a major pain to return 100 units as that task falls to the support personnel.
I cannot wait to move all of our blackberry users to an end-to-end Microsoft solution through exchange and smartphones. Go ahead and bash my "logic" to bits if you must, but RIM as a third-party vendor is not providing the value we are dearly paying for with BES licenses.
It's just not worth it and the savings in out-of-pocket costs (for those above licenses) just by switching to Magneto in Exchange 2003 will more than justify ditching the RIM technology
In addition the Microsoft solution falls under our Corporate Premier Support Services and software Enterprise Agreement for a net increase of zero $ for great support.
Ugh, this is starting to sound like a MS love note and I really didn't plan it that way. I'm just fed up with RIM and their devices that I must continually add extra-cost software to just to get some standard functionality (like reading certain documents, performing workflow, etc.)
Really, the blackberry is hardly ready for a multi-national corporating with an already over-taxed IT support division.
Give me a solution where the users purchase whatever handset they want locally (as long as the OS is compatible) and I can hook it into my corporate "solution" and i'll be happy. We've got people who spend their entire lives dealing with shipping, setting up, returning, RMAing Blackberries and it's not sustainable for us.
Right you are! I guess Microsoft couldn't stand having a "wus" product.
SUS is fine for smaller amounts of clients, you can look up the limitations. In addition please look at the MS product WUS (yes, i'm not kidding) as SUS is considered dead and will not be updated any further. Of course if you have to run MS bits SMS is the ultimate product for managing this mess in a large enterprise.
*IN GENERAL*
Computers are simpler to repair
Software is easier to troubleshoot
Remote assistance is starting to work
Companies are working hard to eliminate the technician
The goal should be that the mail room guy becomes your "technician" for everything easily replaceable. He will just take a new "computer" from a box, un-plug, re-plug and mail off the failed box for off-site repair. Happily all of your data resides on a server hosted off-site and the OS is loaded into memory on each boot up.
Seriously this line of work is going to be a much smaller segment of the market as the years progress and in ten years there will be no such thing for the most part.
The guy who comes to "fix" your computer will be as unknown as the iceman is today.
This isn't a flame - it's notice to start retraining now and get ahead of the game.
When the Berlin Wall collapsed I didn't sit on my ass in my fat aerospace job waiting for it to be pulled out from under me. I changed industries, took a pay cut and crawled right back up the ladder.
If you no longer command respect maybe today is the time to take start looking elsewhere - no matter how much you enjoy what you are doing now. it's not going to get any better, but it will get far worse.
Kim Jong Il: Hans Bwix? Oh no!... Oh hewwo Hans, gweat to see you again!
Hans Blix: Mr. Il, I was supposed to be allowed to inspect your palace, but your guards won't let me into certain areas.
Kim Jong Il: Hans Hans Hans, we've been thwew this a dozen times. I don't have any weapons mass destwuction, okay Hans?
Hans Blix: Then let me look around, so I can ease the UN's collective mind. I'm sorry, but the UN must be firm with you. Let me in, or else.
Kim Jong Il: O else what?
Hans Blix: Or else we will be very angry with you, and we will write you a letter, *telling* you how angry we are.
If you're over 30 years old think about how the world - just your tiny part of it - has changed since you were a kid.
There are many more humans on this planet, with little sign of a stable population anytime in the near future.
No one knows what "critical mass" is regarding population, but don't doubt for one minute that population control will be the "next big thing" at some point in the next 50 years.
Even if the planet itself can support more people think about the life you're living now and imagine even 25% more people crowded into "your" space.
...before the Discovery Channel stuff.
"I'll bet you the Japanese bombed the U.S. MAINLAND during WWII and innocent civilians were killed because of it."
The answer (copied from some random web page):
"The only fatalities from enemy activity on the mainland of North America occurred May 5, 1945, in Bly, near southeastern Oregon's Fremont National Forest, when a church group encountered one of the explosive bombs from a balloon. The explosion resulted in six deaths of civilians."
...nitrogen! I'm almost on the brink of patenting nitrogen. I've got a little "prior art" problem, but my IP lawyers (they work for SCO too) say that's just a technicality and with the licensing fees I'll be get by suing end users with little or no cash will make the PanIP guys look like schoolchildren.
I may go to hell for this, but I bet even money they turn me back at the gates!
Not Zork. XYZZY is the magic word from Adventure.
I was playing "adventure" on various DEC systems along time ago. This is so old that it was only "finally" ported into C in 1976!
Props where they're due:
Colossal Cave by Will Crowther, extended by Don Woods and ported to C by Jim Gillogly.
It's not a criminal case, it's a civil case. The judge does not have a right to dismiss it. To be perfectly correct on this I seriously doubt the the lawsuits are just against the kids anyway. They almost certainly are against the parents with the kids named as a party to the action.
What's the point in suing a kid, you can't attach their lawnmowing wages?
I agree, they settle because they can't afford a lawyer. Of course there are many law firms that would be happy to stand up in this area and do pro bono work if they thought it was good business and there was a chance of winning.