Basically...yes, there are theories that say life can only exist in similar conditions to our own. We look for a certain habitable range where life could conceivably exist. Which doesn't mean there couldn't be life on a completely different type of planet, but how would we ever know it's there? We haven't even made it to mars, much less some gas giant in a completely different solar system.
Also keep in mind that according to our planetary creation theories, any planet that large isn't going to be a terrestrial planet. No Rocks, no oceans(unless you count oceans of liquid hydrogen that probably form from the enormous pressure). There's just no way life in any way similar to us could exist in such an environment. Really, right now we're just trying to see if life like us *could* exist elsewhere, not that it actually does.
And also, until we find other terrestrial planets, we have no way of proving that our planetary creation theories hold water. Sure, we think there should be earth-like planets out there, but we just have no proof. These discoveries are very encouraging when you remember that until very recently, we hadn't found *any* other planets out there. The more we learn about other systems, the more we can correct our vision of the universe as a whole.
I just figure the ratings have never been what they hoped. Didn't it start off airing in the slot right after the simpsons, where they liked to nurse new shows to see if they'd pick up an audience? The fact is, most of the time that you get a show that people really fanatically love, the people who don't like it *really* hate it. Trying asking my parents about the family guy sometime. Point is, just because you think a show is the greatest thing on earth, it far from guarantees that anyone else does.
Besides, I always had a theory on futurama. I saw the question as less 'why did they cancel it?' and more 'why did they keep it around so long?' They obviously haven't really been supporting it in years, with the shitty time slot and frequent preemptions(including one season premiere, at least on the east coast). I figured it was Millenium Syndrome. Remember the show Millenium, by Chris Carter? I never actually watched it, and supposedly not many other people did, either. When it was on, i always heard rumors that it was Chris Carter's 'pet project' and that fox just kept it on to keep him doing the X-Files. So maybe it was the same deal with Futurama, and fox just got sick of it.
Frankly lots of people have made the connection between star wars and old pulp fiction rags long ago. You can see it just from the titles. And incidentally, from this perspective, episode 2's title makes sense. Just add some exclamation points and imagine them on the covers of Shocking Tales! or something.
The Phantom Menace!
Attack of the Clones!!
?
A New Hope!
The Empire Strikes Back!!
Return of the Jedi!
That said, paying homage to something is not the same as ripping it off. Just because there's a connection doesn't lower the value of the movies(or raise it, for that matter).
A lot of people are talking about how if we open it up, we could lose local content, but I think one thing people are missing is that a lot of us already live without local content to speak of.
My hometown is a small suburb(about 4000 people) around Worcester, Massachusetts. The 'local' stations are all based in Boston. If you watch the news, you'll hear lots of news about Boston events, but unless there's a grisly murder in my town, you're not gonna hear anything about it. And for that matter, you won't hear anything about Worcester, which is a major city. People in Boston just don't give a rat's ass about what happens in Worcester, and Worcester isn't quite big enough to support its own stations.
My point is that someone who's in a tiny town isn't gonna lose access to local information, because they already don't have it. The Boston stations aren't going to suddenly go under because of deregulation, because they've got a large market interested in the local news. Any place that's big enough to support local programming now is pretty unlikely to suddenly lose all that programming.
In the mean time, those of us looking for serious local news coverage already turn to alternate sources than television...newspapers in particular. Most small towns have some sort of local paper, even if it is a tiny piece of fluff.
I say open it up, let technology do what it can. If anything, the competition could only make the content better.
I'd have to say the only thing surprising about this is that it doesn't happen more often. Haven't we all come to expect rather shady things from advertising? (I *hope* we have, anyway) In the days when Ain't It Cool News makes it on tv ads for quotes, something like this just can't shock me.
Personally i'm far more outraged by the results of tonight's iron chef bout. It was fixed, i tell ya, fixed! --
Microsoft is able to 'win' in the same way. With huge cash reserves already built up, the can stumble, fall, and roll around in the mud a while and still get up and win. They can bleed cash for years and still pull it out of their asses.
Comments like this really puzzle me. Microsoft is a public company, accountable to their shareholders. They're not just going to burn cash so that they can turn to the competition and say "haw haw! we won!" If they didn't believe they could turn a *profit* in the console market, they wouldn't be entering it. And sure, some people will say, "oh, they're just building a monopoly now so they can have profits in the future." But the history of the console industry does not support the concept of a lasting console monopoly at all. With every new generation of consoles, a company's fortune can change dramatically. I'm sure microsoft realizes this.
And also, about this whole "microsoft has lots of cash so they'll win!" thing...just what the hell is Sony, some kind of sniveling upstart company?
Courting developers like this is common in the gaming industry. There's really nothing special about this.
I've always wondered about these attempts to deliver linux to the common man. What i've always found appealing about the unix design is that it doesn't dumb things down in an attempt to be more 'user friendly'. The command line is a beautiful thing, but it doesn't mean my mother should be exposed to it. Personally, i've always seen true user friendliness as a sacrifice to power. I would rather have a high learning curve but more power than an OS that's easy to use, but offers me less power.
In short, marketing UNIX to my mother would be a mistake. She neither wants nor needs most of the benefits that it provides. She has a hard enough time using Windows. I see no problem in having different operating systems aimed at different audiences, rather than having one OS that tries to do everything. Why exactly does linux *want* world domination? The entire UNIX philosophy is that it's better to have things be the best at what they do, rather than trying to do everything.
ObHolyWarFodder: I suspect that emacs users may disagree with this. =P
But really. We are an average planet around an average star. The hubris required to think that we are along in the universe is almost unmeasurable.
Well, there are certainly a few things that seem unusual about our planet. That big moon being one of them. But then again, like everything in life, i suspect that the planet that exactly fits the norm is more unusual than all the ones that don't quite.
People often point to the lack of communication from other worlds as proof (or at least evidence) that we are alone. Hogwash! We haven't heard from them because there are invariant rules in the universe. This lack of communication is much better evidence that faster than light travel is insurmountable than it is that somehow in the great sea of chemistry that is the universe *we* managed to defy the odds and not only create life, but multicellular life. And not only multicellular, but thinking. And not only thinking, but self aware and communicative. Those are long odds, eh?
People always seem to forget that if there is other life out there, that it'd most likely be *completely* different from us. Not in a looking funny kind of way, in *every* way. To the point that most likely the biggest challenge in finding other life in the universe will be recognizing it as life. Even if other beings have life, why would they think anything like us? This isn't star trek, folks, where everything has two legs and can actually mate with one another.
The fact that there's no communication means nothing. Who says that another species would *want* to communicate? Who says they would ever develop tools, much less a desire to travel across the universe? Remember, the insects are for the most part far better adapted to this planet than we are.
I realized something when I first saw this headline. When you see the phrase "Debian Woody is Frozen," and it makes sense to you, you know too goddamn much.
The problem is that gnutella is very stoppable if no one wants to use it. Everybody is scrambling right now to find a replacement for Napster. Something that everyone can flock to the day Napster is shut down in court. All the college kids who are competent with windows but just aren't interested in going further with their computers. The majority of people who use Napster now have probably never heard of gnutella, and probably wouldn't be bothered to set it up. (Huh? I don't get it...it doesn't connect automatically! Forget it...)
I honestly thought the problem with gnutella was bandwidth...it just wouldn't work well on 56k. Well, I just had my cable modem installed, and i went to gnutella...and it's still no good. I got 10 connections going and put in a search for metallica(someone has to have metallica, right?). Five minutes later, *nothing*. It's all well and good that it's an experiment, but Napster may not have much time left, and 90% of Napster users aren't gonna mess around with something that isn't completely working yet. (OK, Napster is in beta right now, but i question their versioning scheme.) And worst of all, gnutella isn't visibly improving...it should be open source, with a CVS, and should have new versions coming out all the time, *fixing* the problems that people complain about instead of just being some mystery.
If you're designing a distributed searchable peer-to-peer file sharing system, and you want it to change the world, you need to make it appeal to the people who don't care about the philosophy behind it, and just want it to work. I had high hopes for gnutella, but the bottom line is, when i want to find a song, I go to napster. It's just easier that way.
OK, so we've got a nice new format, but now all of a sudden it's insecure. So now people are afraid that people won't put out DVDs? What's the alternative? The oh-so-secure VHS? The now-defunct LD? VHS has been the standard of choice among most movie buyers for years, and most VHS tapes have no security whatsoever. Has this stopped the industry from releasing VHS tapes? I just don't understand all the concern with dvd and security. Everything becomes insecure eventually, if this hadn't been cracked through what was basically luck now, the fairly weak encryption probably still would've been cracked later. There will always be a market for the real thing, despite pirated material, just like there's still a market for cds right now despite mp3s. And I still think we're a *bit* off from the point where people are going to routinely download 9gig dvds off the net. Sure, people can convert them to other formats, but doesn't that defeat the point of having a dvd in the first place?
In closing, I don't see how this changes *anything* in reality. Piracy has always existed. If this slows industry acceptance, it'd just be completely silly. Fortunately, I don't think that's going to happen...I think we're past the point where DVD's gonna be so easily killed. Let's hope, anyway.
OK, so a lot of you take this article as insulting. I can see why. But while maybe the doctor conducting the study doesn't quite get it, I think maybe there's a lesson to be learned here: people do not all have to think exactly the same way to be healthy. One of my biggest problems with modern psychology is that it's desperate to class anything slightly out of the ordinairy as something bad that can be fixed. But recently, with the advent of newer, more powerful drugs that promise to make us all 'normal', we have to ask ourselves, do we *want* to be normal?
I for one would never give up my geekhood. I know lots of others feel the same way. And in a strange sort of way, if this turns out to be true, it feels like justification to me. Before, it seemed like we were misguided folk who just never learned. But now, maybe we really are wired different. We're driven by different things. Some would call this a problem to be corrected, but I say that it's mother nature acknowledging our right to be unique. And seeing how much of modern technology is founded on geek accomplishment, I damn well don't see how people can say how we are is *wrong*.
So don't take this as discouragement, take it as a sign to keep the path. While some psychologists may see this as another thing that needs 'cured', it may just show that abnormality is more normal than most people thought. And hey, we already knew that anyway, right?
-- 'I love it when somebody's own sig describes how much they suck so much more concisely and elegantly than I possibly ever could.'
This is one of the more obvious pitfalls of self-regulation, and just about all forms of censorship: different people view different things differently. Perhaps it's a cliched example, but should a nude painting be marked as 'porn' due to the nudity? You're never going to get *everyone* to agree on whether something is obscene or not, and considering this is supposed to apply to the whole net, local standards are irrelevent.
I *hope* something like this could never pass, but i fear it could. Even if it were for the most part unenforcable, the worst laws are the ones that aren't consistently enforced. And the part that scares me most about these stories is how 99% of the population will probably never hear about them.
-- 'I love it when somebody's own sig describes how much they suck so much more concisely and elegantly than I possibly ever could.'
Well, it's trivial, but I think the new colors could help. The imac is a pretty good machine for what it is(admittedly not gonna appeal that much to the geekier set), but damn if i wouldn't feel silly having to look at the thing all the time. Personally, I like beige cases just fine...they're more mysterious or something.
-- 'I love it when somebody's own sig describes how much they suck so much more concisely and elegantly than I possibly ever could.'
Cool Geek Toys have always been standard procedure for slashdot. If you're looking for straight news without any of the editorial stuff, then there are better sites for that. People come to slashdot because they like hearing about cool things that interest them along with their news. Since I don't really think slashdot has ever claimed to be journalism, i don't see why we should care if they're hyping a product.
Personally, I ordered the thing, and I'm glad slashdot alerted me to it.
-- 'I love it when somebody's own sig describes how much they suck so much more concisely and elegantly than I possibly ever could.'
Basically, I agree that there's a lot wrong with high school, but i don't think that's why these guys cracked. Sometimes I think it just comes down to there being something wrong with the individuals involved. I do know that crackdowns such as banning trenchcoats and such are just plain misguided, though. Going into a school and killing a bunch of people is not about their choice in fashion.
I just wish people would stop looking for the simple answer. Sometimes, there is none. We may never know why exactly this happened, and there's a pretty good chance that nothing we could have done would have prevented it.
-- 'I love it when somebody's own sig describes how much they suck so much more concisely and elegantly than I possibly ever could.'
Slashdot Mirror
Basically...yes, there are theories that say life can only exist in similar conditions to our own. We look for a certain habitable range where life could conceivably exist. Which doesn't mean there couldn't be life on a completely different type of planet, but how would we ever know it's there? We haven't even made it to mars, much less some gas giant in a completely different solar system.
Also keep in mind that according to our planetary creation theories, any planet that large isn't going to be a terrestrial planet. No Rocks, no oceans(unless you count oceans of liquid hydrogen that probably form from the enormous pressure). There's just no way life in any way similar to us could exist in such an environment. Really, right now we're just trying to see if life like us *could* exist elsewhere, not that it actually does.
And also, until we find other terrestrial planets, we have no way of proving that our planetary creation theories hold water. Sure, we think there should be earth-like planets out there, but we just have no proof. These discoveries are very encouraging when you remember that until very recently, we hadn't found *any* other planets out there. The more we learn about other systems, the more we can correct our vision of the universe as a whole.
Local FBI Agent Discovers Religion; Gets Laid
If you read the articles, they talked about ticket sales as well. It also compared to older films on adjusted grosses.
I just figure the ratings have never been what they hoped. Didn't it start off airing in the slot right after the simpsons, where they liked to nurse new shows to see if they'd pick up an audience? The fact is, most of the time that you get a show that people really fanatically love, the people who don't like it *really* hate it. Trying asking my parents about the family guy sometime. Point is, just because you think a show is the greatest thing on earth, it far from guarantees that anyone else does.
Besides, I always had a theory on futurama. I saw the question as less 'why did they cancel it?' and more 'why did they keep it around so long?' They obviously haven't really been supporting it in years, with the shitty time slot and frequent preemptions(including one season premiere, at least on the east coast). I figured it was Millenium Syndrome. Remember the show Millenium, by Chris Carter? I never actually watched it, and supposedly not many other people did, either. When it was on, i always heard rumors that it was Chris Carter's 'pet project' and that fox just kept it on to keep him doing the X-Files. So maybe it was the same deal with Futurama, and fox just got sick of it.
Young kids don't understand they're being lied to...
No offense, but i don't think you've paid much attention to any young kids lately.
Frankly lots of people have made the connection between star wars and old pulp fiction rags long ago. You can see it just from the titles. And incidentally, from this perspective, episode 2's title makes sense. Just add some exclamation points and imagine them on the covers of Shocking Tales! or something.
The Phantom Menace!
Attack of the Clones!!
?
A New Hope!
The Empire Strikes Back!!
Return of the Jedi!
That said, paying homage to something is not the same as ripping it off. Just because there's a connection doesn't lower the value of the movies(or raise it, for that matter).
A lot of people are talking about how if we open it up, we could lose local content, but I think one thing people are missing is that a lot of us already live without local content to speak of.
My hometown is a small suburb(about 4000 people) around Worcester, Massachusetts. The 'local' stations are all based in Boston. If you watch the news, you'll hear lots of news about Boston events, but unless there's a grisly murder in my town, you're not gonna hear anything about it. And for that matter, you won't hear anything about Worcester, which is a major city. People in Boston just don't give a rat's ass about what happens in Worcester, and Worcester isn't quite big enough to support its own stations.
My point is that someone who's in a tiny town isn't gonna lose access to local information, because they already don't have it. The Boston stations aren't going to suddenly go under because of deregulation, because they've got a large market interested in the local news. Any place that's big enough to support local programming now is pretty unlikely to suddenly lose all that programming.
In the mean time, those of us looking for serious local news coverage already turn to alternate sources than television...newspapers in particular. Most small towns have some sort of local paper, even if it is a tiny piece of fluff.
I say open it up, let technology do what it can. If anything, the competition could only make the content better.
I'd have to say the only thing surprising about this is that it doesn't happen more often. Haven't we all come to expect rather shady things from advertising? (I *hope* we have, anyway) In the days when Ain't It Cool News makes it on tv ads for quotes, something like this just can't shock me.
Personally i'm far more outraged by the results of tonight's iron chef bout. It was fixed, i tell ya, fixed!
--
Microsoft is able to 'win' in the same way. With huge cash reserves already built up, the can stumble, fall, and roll around in the mud a while and still get up and win. They can bleed cash for years and still pull it out of their asses.
Comments like this really puzzle me. Microsoft is a public company, accountable to their shareholders. They're not just going to burn cash so that they can turn to the competition and say "haw haw! we won!" If they didn't believe they could turn a *profit* in the console market, they wouldn't be entering it. And sure, some people will say, "oh, they're just building a monopoly now so they can have profits in the future." But the history of the console industry does not support the concept of a lasting console monopoly at all. With every new generation of consoles, a company's fortune can change dramatically. I'm sure microsoft realizes this.
And also, about this whole "microsoft has lots of cash so they'll win!" thing...just what the hell is Sony, some kind of sniveling upstart company?
Courting developers like this is common in the gaming industry. There's really nothing special about this.
--
I've always wondered about these attempts to deliver linux to the common man. What i've always found appealing about the unix design is that it doesn't dumb things down in an attempt to be more 'user friendly'. The command line is a beautiful thing, but it doesn't mean my mother should be exposed to it. Personally, i've always seen true user friendliness as a sacrifice to power. I would rather have a high learning curve but more power than an OS that's easy to use, but offers me less power.
In short, marketing UNIX to my mother would be a mistake. She neither wants nor needs most of the benefits that it provides. She has a hard enough time using Windows. I see no problem in having different operating systems aimed at different audiences, rather than having one OS that tries to do everything. Why exactly does linux *want* world domination? The entire UNIX philosophy is that it's better to have things be the best at what they do, rather than trying to do everything.
ObHolyWarFodder: I suspect that emacs users may disagree with this. =P
But really. We are an average planet around an average star. The hubris required to think that we are along in the universe is almost unmeasurable.
Well, there are certainly a few things that seem unusual about our planet. That big moon being one of them. But then again, like everything in life, i suspect that the planet that exactly fits the norm is more unusual than all the ones that don't quite.
People often point to the lack of communication from other worlds as proof (or at least evidence) that we are alone. Hogwash! We haven't heard from them because there are invariant rules in the universe. This lack of communication is much better evidence that faster than light travel is insurmountable than it is that somehow in the great sea of chemistry that is the universe *we* managed to defy the odds and not only create life, but multicellular life. And not only multicellular, but thinking. And not only thinking, but self aware and communicative. Those are long odds, eh?
People always seem to forget that if there is other life out there, that it'd most likely be *completely* different from us. Not in a looking funny kind of way, in *every* way. To the point that most likely the biggest challenge in finding other life in the universe will be recognizing it as life. Even if other beings have life, why would they think anything like us? This isn't star trek, folks, where everything has two legs and can actually mate with one another.
The fact that there's no communication means nothing. Who says that another species would *want* to communicate? Who says they would ever develop tools, much less a desire to travel across the universe? Remember, the insects are for the most part far better adapted to this planet than we are.
I realized something when I first saw this headline. When you see the phrase "Debian Woody is Frozen," and it makes sense to you, you know too goddamn much.
Time to drink off a few braincells.
The problem is that gnutella is very stoppable if no one wants to use it. Everybody is scrambling right now to find a replacement for Napster. Something that everyone can flock to the day Napster is shut down in court. All the college kids who are competent with windows but just aren't interested in going further with their computers. The majority of people who use Napster now have probably never heard of gnutella, and probably wouldn't be bothered to set it up. (Huh? I don't get it...it doesn't connect automatically! Forget it...)
I honestly thought the problem with gnutella was bandwidth...it just wouldn't work well on 56k. Well, I just had my cable modem installed, and i went to gnutella...and it's still no good. I got 10 connections going and put in a search for metallica(someone has to have metallica, right?). Five minutes later, *nothing*. It's all well and good that it's an experiment, but Napster may not have much time left, and 90% of Napster users aren't gonna mess around with something that isn't completely working yet. (OK, Napster is in beta right now, but i question their versioning scheme.) And worst of all, gnutella isn't visibly improving...it should be open source, with a CVS, and should have new versions coming out all the time, *fixing* the problems that people complain about instead of just being some mystery.
If you're designing a distributed searchable peer-to-peer file sharing system, and you want it to change the world, you need to make it appeal to the people who don't care about the philosophy behind it, and just want it to work. I had high hopes for gnutella, but the bottom line is, when i want to find a song, I go to napster. It's just easier that way.
--b.
OK, so we've got a nice new format, but now all of a sudden it's insecure. So now people are afraid that people won't put out DVDs? What's the alternative? The oh-so-secure VHS? The now-defunct LD? VHS has been the standard of choice among most movie buyers for years, and most VHS tapes have no security whatsoever. Has this stopped the industry from releasing VHS tapes? I just don't understand all the concern with dvd and security. Everything becomes insecure eventually, if this hadn't been cracked through what was basically luck now, the fairly weak encryption probably still would've been cracked later. There will always be a market for the real thing, despite pirated material, just like there's still a market for cds right now despite mp3s. And I still think we're a *bit* off from the point where people are going to routinely download 9gig dvds off the net. Sure, people can convert them to other formats, but doesn't that defeat the point of having a dvd in the first place?
In closing, I don't see how this changes *anything* in reality. Piracy has always existed. If this slows industry acceptance, it'd just be completely silly. Fortunately, I don't think that's going to happen...I think we're past the point where DVD's gonna be so easily killed. Let's hope, anyway.
OK, so a lot of you take this article as insulting. I can see why. But while maybe the doctor conducting the study doesn't quite get it, I think maybe there's a lesson to be learned here: people do not all have to think exactly the same way to be healthy. One of my biggest problems with modern psychology is that it's desperate to class anything slightly out of the ordinairy as something bad that can be fixed. But recently, with the advent of newer, more powerful drugs that promise to make us all 'normal', we have to ask ourselves, do we *want* to be normal?
I for one would never give up my geekhood. I know lots of others feel the same way. And in a strange sort of way, if this turns out to be true, it feels like justification to me. Before, it seemed like we were misguided folk who just never learned. But now, maybe we really are wired different. We're driven by different things. Some would call this a problem to be corrected, but I say that it's mother nature acknowledging our right to be unique. And seeing how much of modern technology is founded on geek accomplishment, I damn well don't see how people can say how we are is *wrong*.
So don't take this as discouragement, take it as a sign to keep the path. While some psychologists may see this as another thing that needs 'cured', it may just show that abnormality is more normal than most people thought. And hey, we already knew that anyway, right?
--
'I love it when somebody's own sig describes how much they suck so much
more concisely and elegantly than I possibly ever could.'
This is one of the more obvious pitfalls of self-regulation, and just about all forms of censorship: different people view different things differently. Perhaps it's a cliched example, but should a nude painting be marked as 'porn' due to the nudity? You're never going to get *everyone* to agree on whether something is obscene or not, and considering this is supposed to apply to the whole net, local standards are irrelevent.
I *hope* something like this could never pass, but i fear it could. Even if it were for the most part unenforcable, the worst laws are the ones that aren't consistently enforced. And the part that scares me most about these stories is how 99% of the population will probably never hear about them.
--
'I love it when somebody's own sig describes how much they suck so much
more concisely and elegantly than I possibly ever could.'
Well, it's trivial, but I think the new colors could help. The imac is a pretty good machine for what it is(admittedly not gonna appeal that much to the geekier set), but damn if i wouldn't feel silly having to look at the thing all the time. Personally, I like beige cases just fine...they're more mysterious or something.
--
'I love it when somebody's own sig describes how much they suck so much
more concisely and elegantly than I possibly ever could.'
Ambrosia is the #1 thing I miss from my mac days...They're not open source, but they're a cool company still.
--
'I love it when somebody's own sig describes how much they suck so much
more concisely and elegantly than I possibly ever could.'
Cool Geek Toys have always been standard procedure for slashdot. If you're looking for straight news without any of the editorial stuff, then there are better sites for that. People come to slashdot because they like hearing about cool things that interest them along with their news. Since I don't really think slashdot has ever claimed to be journalism, i don't see why we should care if they're hyping a product.
Personally, I ordered the thing, and I'm glad slashdot alerted me to it.
--
'I love it when somebody's own sig describes how much they suck so much
more concisely and elegantly than I possibly ever could.'
Terminator 2.
Not exactly geek fare, but when you're in the mood for a blow stuff up movie, it certainly does the job.
--
'I love it when somebody's own sig describes how much they suck so much
more concisely and elegantly than I possibly ever could.'
I wrote some more detailed comments at
http://www.ultranet.com/~bem/colorado.txt
I hope some of you will take the time to read it.
Basically, I agree that there's a lot wrong with high school, but i don't think that's why these guys cracked. Sometimes I think it just comes down to there being something wrong with the individuals involved. I do know that crackdowns such as banning trenchcoats and such are just plain misguided, though. Going into a school and killing a bunch of people is not about their choice in fashion.
I just wish people would stop looking for the simple answer. Sometimes, there is none. We may never know why exactly this happened, and there's a pretty good chance that nothing we could have done would have prevented it.
--
'I love it when somebody's own sig describes how much they suck so much
more concisely and elegantly than I possibly ever could.'