I've had Speakeasy for years. Between my roommates and me, we've used quite a bit of bandwidth and never had any complaint from them. They generally deal fairly and honestly with their customers, so I think they'd be a good bet for getting clear rules and fair treatement. They actually have fair and reasonable terms of service, good reliability, good customer service, etc., but you do pay a bit more for that.
Now you're changing the subject entirely. I never said that one is assured credibility of wiki articles. Obviously that is false. All I said is that in this one particular article, my experience is that most of the information is of reasonable quality and that your assertion that no one qualified writes wiki articles is almost certainly false.
I think that by looking at the talk page and history for a wiki article a careful person can make an educated guess about its credibility; however, I agree that you really can't be too certain and it may take a fair amount of work. I'm definitely not claiming that you can read an article and take it at face value to the degree you can with Encyclopedia Britannica or most other print works you'd find in a library.
I personally think that one reasonable solution that has been floated is the idea of having a "development" and "release" version of Wikipedia. Peopled knowledge on a particular subject would go to the development version to contribute and people just wanting to know about something would go to the "release" version. That idea has pitfalls too, of course.
At this point, I wouldn't trust anything I read in there to be true...I sincerely doubt that any of the editors or contributors have any credentials. Those types of folks tend to get published in real world journals, magazines and books.
I can't speak about most of the articles on Wikipedia one way or another, but I will say, as someone who does research in quantum physics, that the wiki articles on quantum mechanics and quantum information topics are characteristically pretty good in terms of content (though not necessarily quality of writing), and I would be very surprised if there aren't a number of Ph.D. scientists who contribute to them, given the high level of some of the information there.
Just because people get published in journals it doesn't follow that they won't also publish stuff for free online. See for example John Baez's extensive collection or writing. Also bare in mind that most journals (aside from a few review journals) are for publishing new discoveries while Wikipedia is mostly about sumaraizing and explaining existing knowledge, so they're somewhat orthogonal.
Oh, and before anyone goes and gets a good idea; producing 1 g of anti-matter at the current rate takes about a billion years, so dont go selling your oil company stock just yet.
Probably more importantly, you can gain any net energy this way. Whatever energy would be liberated by annihilating the anti-matter would be less than or equal to the energy required to create it. It could be an energy storage mechanism, but it's not an energy source (unlike getting oil that already exists out of the ground).
The few teachers that I have known spent significantly more than 40 hrs/week on their work while school was in session. I've never taught K-12, but having taught a few discussion sections as a grad student, I find it hard to see how one could do a good job on most subjects and not end up working more than 40 hour weeks.
As usual, some useful discussion of these issues can be found on RealClimate.org. The following two articles are worth a look, though neither is especially recent:
The punchline from the latter article is, "There is a slight irony in people rushing to claim that the glacier changes on Mars are a sure sign of global warming, while not being swayed by the much more persuasive analogous phenomena here on Earth..."
There is a 70% drop out rate from classes designed to force that drop out rate in both those degrees.
Then on the "non weed out" courses my friends over in the teaching programs were doing maybe 10 hours a week per class (at most) while those in the COSC program were doing 35 hours a week for the database class alone. It was not uncommon at all to spend 30 hours a week studying for advanced physics and math courses either.
I stand overwhelmed by the power of your anecdotal evidence. Consider, however, the possibility that the few people you happened to know at your one school may not really provide you with a very clear idea of the situation. I will say, however, that I and most of my friends probably didn't spend much in excess of 10 hours a week on our Physics classes when getting out B.S. degrees. I don't think I spent considerably more time than that on a single class until grad school.
Another point I should have made is that I don't think pay levels generally do (or necessarily should) have much correlation to the difficulty in obtaining a degree. Hell, by that measure people with business degrees shouldn't even be able to earn minimum wage (ok, now that's my prejudice). A lot of it has to do with the danger, unpleasantness, difficulty, etc. of the day to day performance of the job. As I indicated before, I think the day to day difficulty and sometimes unpleasantness of teaching K-12 can be pretty high. Of course, what's largely important is how many people can do the job, and without proper evaluation it's really hard to say who's up to the task.
I agree that money would attract quality- but how do you determine what is quality? You often do not see the real results of good teaching for over a decade. While a good teacher has an enormous impact, there is almost no way to measure that a teacher is instilling a desire to learn into students vs simply ramming material into them for the tests. It's a very difficult to find a reasonable and reliable metric for what a "good teacher" is.
It's certainly not easy to measure the effectiveness of teaching, but there certainly are metrics that will give you some idea. In Physics, there's been a lot of research into this in recent years. For example, to address your point there are attitude surveys that help to measure if a course makes students more enthused about a subject. Testing before and after teaching can tell you something about the effect of the teacher. Together with several different measures of performance on material, this can give you some idea of which teachers are doing well and which ones aren't. Now, one obviously has to first try to train teachers and get them to improve, but in principle long term substandard performance could certainly be grounds for firing and above average performance ground for raises or bonuses.
Yes but a teacher's degree is considerably easier to get than an electrical engineering or hard science computer science degree.
Your proof?
I'm not necessarily saying your statement is incorrect, but I think it is likely more a reflection of prejudice than data.
I would simply say that, having taught some college Physics classes as a teaching assistant, when I look at people teaching high school I marvel at how tough that job must be in the long term....at least, if they are trying to do a decent job. I think that those who think the job is easy have no idea what they're talking about.
What really amazes me is people who simultaneously bemoan the lack of quality teachers and say that the answer isn't "throwing more money at the problem." I don't understand why people who otherwise acknowledge that the free market system works suddenly decide that teaching is the one case where higher pay doesn't attract more talent.
With respect to Ubuntu, I assume you're refering to the lack of ability to play mp3s out of the box. From what I gather, Ubuntu doesn't include mp3 decoding because of the terms of the license for the Fraunhofer patent on mp3. If so, this is not really a design choice on their part but rather a legal requirement imposed on them.
Again, if the iTunes software is intentionally designed to obfuscate the location of your music, that's (pretty much by definition) an instance of being defective by design. It's specifically designed to be harder to use. Like I said in an earlier post, it may be that the apparently obfuscated location of files is just an unintentional side-effect of some other design choices (as suggested by another poster). If that's the case, then it might be more proper to call the lack of a function for copying from the iPod to the computer and instance of being "deficient be design", meaning that the designers seem to intentionally have left out a feature that would have been trivial to add and would very clearly be useful to the user. The word on the street seems to be that this feature was left out to assuage RIAA fears of iPods being used to share music. Who knows if that's true. But irrespective of the reason, Apple seems to have deliberately chosen to make their software less useful. For the user, that's generally a bad thing.
The disk is, indeed, accessable as a USB mass storage device. Again, I'm not a regular iPod user, but AFAIK the problem is that the songs have been inscrutably labeled and placed in seemingly haphazard directories so that it's quite difficult to find the one you want. This has the appearance of intentional obfuscation (though it's conceivable that it's just a side effect of functional choices). Presumably, if you could read the database on the iPod it would be quite easy to determine where the appropriate song is. Again, since iTunes can already do this, adding such a copying feature would be trivial and useful but seems to have been intentionally omitted for some reason.
I was refering to the fact that, AFAIK (and I'm not an iTunes user, I simply know many people who are), iTunes includes no facility for moving music from the iPod to your mac. This would be a trivial to add (given that iTunes already knows where the songs are on the iPod) and a very useful feature (as evidenced by the many 3rd party tools just for that purpose), and it's omission is essentially an instance of being "defective by design".
It'a also true that the fact that iTunes respects DRM and, therefore, imposes artificial limitations on legal activities of CD burning, copying, etc. DRMed tracks is another reason it's defective by design. But I wasn't refering to that.
Dragging files to arbitrary directories is not condusive to indexing as the iPod would then have to store file names up to 255 characters and do all the indexing itself instead of the host computer. A 2GHz PC can do the indexing and file organization a lot faster than an 80MHz iPod.
My Sansa e260 does exactly this with no problem. The indexing doesn't even take long. Now, granted, my player only has 4GB of flash memory (expandable), so this doesn't necessarily apply to the HD-based iPods, but it does seem to suggest the Nanos could do the same. Given that an equivalent iPod nano costs considerably more than the Sansa, I'd guess it would have all least comparable system resources.
More generally, though, I agree that the lack of drag and drop doesn't mean the iPod is defective by design. It doesn't really even have to do with the iPod (beyond the fact that the iPod indexes songs). What is shows is that iTunes is defective by design.
I don't know how likely any of the senarios under discussion are; however, I do think it's important to remember that scrambling aircraft to intercept takes a while, even assuming there is a nearby air base with aircraft on standby. Many airports have approach corridors that are near to probable targets for a 9/11 style airliner suicide attack. Perhaps the best example is Reagan National Airport, which is quite close to the White House, the Pentagon, and the Capitol*. If somehow someone did take control of an airliner just before approach, it would probably not be obvious that it was headed off course toward a target until it was far too late for any aircraft on the ground to takeoff and intercept. My point here is simply that senarios involving interception by aircraft wouldn't be realistic in that sort of situation, but SAMs might. Of course, in that case there are lots of other issues (how quickly can you make the decision to fire, are there SAMs in place, would the SAMs in question even be effected by these countermeasures).
* The fact that National was re-opened is perhaps the clearest sign of the lack of commitment to changes that would actually make serious improvements in security in favor of feel-good security or "security theater".
So, it looks like from a quick google search that "Web Player" refers to the flash player itself. What I don't get is how in the world a non-PC device is defined. In their examples they mention "Tablet PCs that are not running Windows XP Tablet PC Edition", but a tablet PC running, say, Linux still seems like a PC to me (even has it in the name!). They also mention "internet appliances or other internet-connected devices" which seems pretty broad, and finally they speak of "media centers (excluding Windows XP Media Center Edition and its successors);" if I install MythTV on my PC and hook it up to my TV does it cease being a PC and become a "media center"? I really can't tell what the requiremetents are here.
The argument over whether it's appropriate to use "already" to refer such an event is clearly a rather pointless, pedantic semantic argument. Colloquial English clearly doesn't differentiate between coordinate time and proper time. All that being said, the GP poster is otherwise correct. According to Special Relativity (SR), the event in question is currently outside our past light cone, so it is not objectively in our past (see for example, here). For someone passing our current position at high spped (greater than 6/7*c) it would lie in the future, so whether the event lies in the past or the future is, at best, subjective. Most relativists would probably say that it lies in either the past nor the future. When the light from the event reaches Earth, the event will lie in the past from that point onward. This does not depend on whether humans observe it, only the fact that it could not possibly have been observed by anyone here until then.
I realise that some poor 100-level physics/relativity courses try to push the idea that events outside the "light cone" (as you like to call it) haven't happened yet but that's baloney.
The view that only events inside our past light cone are really objectively in the past is not confined to, "poor 100-level physics/relativity courses." I can tell you from experience that that is also what you would learn in a graduate level General Relativity class. When you say it's baloney, I can't tell if you're trying to say it's an incorrect interpretation of SR or if you are claiming that SR is incorrect (within it's widely accepted realm of validity). I can say with confidence that the former is incorrect. The latter claim would need some sort of evidence to back it up. Effects of SR like time dillation and length contraction have been observed in particle accelerators and elsewhere. It is the Lorentz transformations (of which these are a manifestation) that supports the claims made above, so if you're going to say they're incorrect you'd better have some evidence to bring to the table.
Your comment would be a lot more persuasive (and useful) if you said exactly what this agenda is supposed to be and actually provided some facts to back up your claim.
Right. I wasn't implying it's an unreasonable compromise, only that the answer to whether it is depends on a lot of information (which I don't have). It's definitely understandable if they've done it in response to customer requests, thought I'd still be a bit skeptical of how much it really benefits the customers.
That makes some sense, but it does rely on a number of assumptions: For example, if one could only discover how to exploit a vulnerability by looking at the patch, then this policy would clearly be well justified. In reality, some vulnerabilities will be announced by others before they are patched by MS, and people will devise exploits from those announced vulnerabilities or may find for themselves and exploit some of the vulnerabilities that MS is sitting on the patches for. In the end, whether the "patch Tuesday" system makes sense will depend on what proportion of exploitable vulnerabilities are discovered by MS and how much the availability of a patch speeds the development of an exploit for an already known vulnerability.
While what you're saying might well be true, I really don't understand the logic. If MS released patches continuously as they were completed, how would this stop major corporations from testing and deploying them on a regular cycle? Couldn't the corporation equally well still have a "patch Tuesday" where the collect all the current, undeployed patches and begin the process of testing and deploying them? All patches that became ready later than that would be processed in the next cycle. If MS released patches as they were done, each company would have the option of using whatever patching cycle they see fit. What's the benefit of MS forcing everyone to use a specific patching cycle?
My broadband ISP charges me for excessive uploading and demands that I sign up to a commercial package -- and I can't argue, as I'm supplying a commercial service.
One solution to this part of the equation is to get an ISP without such assanine rules (like the one I use, for instance). Of course, that's a solution for you, not for the service, because they're unlikely to have a successful internet business model that begins, "First, get all your customers to switch their ISP..."
Slashdot Mirror
I've had Speakeasy for years. Between my roommates and me, we've used quite a bit of bandwidth and never had any complaint from them. They generally deal fairly and honestly with their customers, so I think they'd be a good bet for getting clear rules and fair treatement. They actually have fair and reasonable terms of service, good reliability, good customer service, etc., but you do pay a bit more for that.
On the other hand, they were recently acquired by Best Buy, so I'm not certain how long they will continue to be good.
Now you're changing the subject entirely. I never said that one is assured credibility of wiki articles. Obviously that is false. All I said is that in this one particular article, my experience is that most of the information is of reasonable quality and that your assertion that no one qualified writes wiki articles is almost certainly false.
I think that by looking at the talk page and history for a wiki article a careful person can make an educated guess about its credibility; however, I agree that you really can't be too certain and it may take a fair amount of work. I'm definitely not claiming that you can read an article and take it at face value to the degree you can with Encyclopedia Britannica or most other print works you'd find in a library.
I personally think that one reasonable solution that has been floated is the idea of having a "development" and "release" version of Wikipedia. Peopled knowledge on a particular subject would go to the development version to contribute and people just wanting to know about something would go to the "release" version. That idea has pitfalls too, of course.
I can't speak about most of the articles on Wikipedia one way or another, but I will say, as someone who does research in quantum physics, that the wiki articles on quantum mechanics and quantum information topics are characteristically pretty good in terms of content (though not necessarily quality of writing), and I would be very surprised if there aren't a number of Ph.D. scientists who contribute to them, given the high level of some of the information there.
Just because people get published in journals it doesn't follow that they won't also publish stuff for free online. See for example John Baez's extensive collection or writing. Also bare in mind that most journals (aside from a few review journals) are for publishing new discoveries while Wikipedia is mostly about sumaraizing and explaining existing knowledge, so they're somewhat orthogonal.
Gah! Can't! You can't gain any net energy this way.
That'll teaching me to post just as I'm running out the door.
Probably more importantly, you can gain any net energy this way. Whatever energy would be liberated by annihilating the anti-matter would be less than or equal to the energy required to create it. It could be an energy storage mechanism, but it's not an energy source (unlike getting oil that already exists out of the ground).
The few teachers that I have known spent significantly more than 40 hrs/week on their work while school was in session. I've never taught K-12, but having taught a few discussion sections as a grad student, I find it hard to see how one could do a good job on most subjects and not end up working more than 40 hour weeks.
As usual, some useful discussion of these issues can be found on RealClimate.org. The following two articles are worth a look, though neither is especially recent:
The punchline from the latter article is, "There is a slight irony in people rushing to claim that the glacier changes on Mars are a sure sign of global warming, while not being swayed by the much more persuasive analogous phenomena here on Earth..."
I guess that keyboard goes with this case.
I stand overwhelmed by the power of your anecdotal evidence. Consider, however, the possibility that the few people you happened to know at your one school may not really provide you with a very clear idea of the situation. I will say, however, that I and most of my friends probably didn't spend much in excess of 10 hours a week on our Physics classes when getting out B.S. degrees. I don't think I spent considerably more time than that on a single class until grad school.
Another point I should have made is that I don't think pay levels generally do (or necessarily should) have much correlation to the difficulty in obtaining a degree. Hell, by that measure people with business degrees shouldn't even be able to earn minimum wage (ok, now that's my prejudice). A lot of it has to do with the danger, unpleasantness, difficulty, etc. of the day to day performance of the job. As I indicated before, I think the day to day difficulty and sometimes unpleasantness of teaching K-12 can be pretty high. Of course, what's largely important is how many people can do the job, and without proper evaluation it's really hard to say who's up to the task.
It's certainly not easy to measure the effectiveness of teaching, but there certainly are metrics that will give you some idea. In Physics, there's been a lot of research into this in recent years. For example, to address your point there are attitude surveys that help to measure if a course makes students more enthused about a subject. Testing before and after teaching can tell you something about the effect of the teacher. Together with several different measures of performance on material, this can give you some idea of which teachers are doing well and which ones aren't. Now, one obviously has to first try to train teachers and get them to improve, but in principle long term substandard performance could certainly be grounds for firing and above average performance ground for raises or bonuses.
Your proof?
I'm not necessarily saying your statement is incorrect, but I think it is likely more a reflection of prejudice than data.
I would simply say that, having taught some college Physics classes as a teaching assistant, when I look at people teaching high school I marvel at how tough that job must be in the long term. ...at least, if they are trying to do a decent job. I think that those who think the job is easy have no idea what they're talking about.
What really amazes me is people who simultaneously bemoan the lack of quality teachers and say that the answer isn't "throwing more money at the problem." I don't understand why people who otherwise acknowledge that the free market system works suddenly decide that teaching is the one case where higher pay doesn't attract more talent.
I guess they took the expression, "the marketplace of ideas" a bit too literally.
With respect to Ubuntu, I assume you're refering to the lack of ability to play mp3s out of the box. From what I gather, Ubuntu doesn't include mp3 decoding because of the terms of the license for the Fraunhofer patent on mp3. If so, this is not really a design choice on their part but rather a legal requirement imposed on them.
Again, if the iTunes software is intentionally designed to obfuscate the location of your music, that's (pretty much by definition) an instance of being defective by design. It's specifically designed to be harder to use. Like I said in an earlier post, it may be that the apparently obfuscated location of files is just an unintentional side-effect of some other design choices (as suggested by another poster). If that's the case, then it might be more proper to call the lack of a function for copying from the iPod to the computer and instance of being "deficient be design", meaning that the designers seem to intentionally have left out a feature that would have been trivial to add and would very clearly be useful to the user. The word on the street seems to be that this feature was left out to assuage RIAA fears of iPods being used to share music. Who knows if that's true. But irrespective of the reason, Apple seems to have deliberately chosen to make their software less useful. For the user, that's generally a bad thing.
Oh, I totally agree that the obfuscation is pretty remedial. But if it was put there as such, then it still qualifies as defective by design.
The disk is, indeed, accessable as a USB mass storage device. Again, I'm not a regular iPod user, but AFAIK the problem is that the songs have been inscrutably labeled and placed in seemingly haphazard directories so that it's quite difficult to find the one you want. This has the appearance of intentional obfuscation (though it's conceivable that it's just a side effect of functional choices). Presumably, if you could read the database on the iPod it would be quite easy to determine where the appropriate song is. Again, since iTunes can already do this, adding such a copying feature would be trivial and useful but seems to have been intentionally omitted for some reason.
I was refering to the fact that, AFAIK (and I'm not an iTunes user, I simply know many people who are), iTunes includes no facility for moving music from the iPod to your mac. This would be a trivial to add (given that iTunes already knows where the songs are on the iPod) and a very useful feature (as evidenced by the many 3rd party tools just for that purpose), and it's omission is essentially an instance of being "defective by design".
It'a also true that the fact that iTunes respects DRM and, therefore, imposes artificial limitations on legal activities of CD burning, copying, etc. DRMed tracks is another reason it's defective by design. But I wasn't refering to that.
My Sansa e260 does exactly this with no problem. The indexing doesn't even take long. Now, granted, my player only has 4GB of flash memory (expandable), so this doesn't necessarily apply to the HD-based iPods, but it does seem to suggest the Nanos could do the same. Given that an equivalent iPod nano costs considerably more than the Sansa, I'd guess it would have all least comparable system resources.
More generally, though, I agree that the lack of drag and drop doesn't mean the iPod is defective by design. It doesn't really even have to do with the iPod (beyond the fact that the iPod indexes songs). What is shows is that iTunes is defective by design.
I don't know how likely any of the senarios under discussion are; however, I do think it's important to remember that scrambling aircraft to intercept takes a while, even assuming there is a nearby air base with aircraft on standby. Many airports have approach corridors that are near to probable targets for a 9/11 style airliner suicide attack. Perhaps the best example is Reagan National Airport, which is quite close to the White House, the Pentagon, and the Capitol*. If somehow someone did take control of an airliner just before approach, it would probably not be obvious that it was headed off course toward a target until it was far too late for any aircraft on the ground to takeoff and intercept. My point here is simply that senarios involving interception by aircraft wouldn't be realistic in that sort of situation, but SAMs might. Of course, in that case there are lots of other issues (how quickly can you make the decision to fire, are there SAMs in place, would the SAMs in question even be effected by these countermeasures).
* The fact that National was re-opened is perhaps the clearest sign of the lack of commitment to changes that would actually make serious improvements in security in favor of feel-good security or "security theater".
Ok, that section has me completely confused.
So, it looks like from a quick google search that "Web Player" refers to the flash player itself. What I don't get is how in the world a non-PC device is defined. In their examples they mention "Tablet PCs that are not running Windows XP Tablet PC Edition", but a tablet PC running, say, Linux still seems like a PC to me (even has it in the name!). They also mention "internet appliances or other internet-connected devices" which seems pretty broad, and finally they speak of "media centers (excluding Windows XP Media Center Edition and its successors);" if I install MythTV on my PC and hook it up to my TV does it cease being a PC and become a "media center"? I really can't tell what the requiremetents are here.
The argument over whether it's appropriate to use "already" to refer such an event is clearly a rather pointless, pedantic semantic argument. Colloquial English clearly doesn't differentiate between coordinate time and proper time. All that being said, the GP poster is otherwise correct. According to Special Relativity (SR), the event in question is currently outside our past light cone, so it is not objectively in our past (see for example, here). For someone passing our current position at high spped (greater than 6/7*c) it would lie in the future, so whether the event lies in the past or the future is, at best, subjective. Most relativists would probably say that it lies in either the past nor the future. When the light from the event reaches Earth, the event will lie in the past from that point onward. This does not depend on whether humans observe it, only the fact that it could not possibly have been observed by anyone here until then.
The view that only events inside our past light cone are really objectively in the past is not confined to, "poor 100-level physics/relativity courses." I can tell you from experience that that is also what you would learn in a graduate level General Relativity class. When you say it's baloney, I can't tell if you're trying to say it's an incorrect interpretation of SR or if you are claiming that SR is incorrect (within it's widely accepted realm of validity). I can say with confidence that the former is incorrect. The latter claim would need some sort of evidence to back it up. Effects of SR like time dillation and length contraction have been observed in particle accelerators and elsewhere. It is the Lorentz transformations (of which these are a manifestation) that supports the claims made above, so if you're going to say they're incorrect you'd better have some evidence to bring to the table.
Your comment would be a lot more persuasive (and useful) if you said exactly what this agenda is supposed to be and actually provided some facts to back up your claim.
Right. I wasn't implying it's an unreasonable compromise, only that the answer to whether it is depends on a lot of information (which I don't have). It's definitely understandable if they've done it in response to customer requests, thought I'd still be a bit skeptical of how much it really benefits the customers.
That makes some sense, but it does rely on a number of assumptions: For example, if one could only discover how to exploit a vulnerability by looking at the patch, then this policy would clearly be well justified. In reality, some vulnerabilities will be announced by others before they are patched by MS, and people will devise exploits from those announced vulnerabilities or may find for themselves and exploit some of the vulnerabilities that MS is sitting on the patches for. In the end, whether the "patch Tuesday" system makes sense will depend on what proportion of exploitable vulnerabilities are discovered by MS and how much the availability of a patch speeds the development of an exploit for an already known vulnerability.
While what you're saying might well be true, I really don't understand the logic. If MS released patches continuously as they were completed, how would this stop major corporations from testing and deploying them on a regular cycle? Couldn't the corporation equally well still have a "patch Tuesday" where the collect all the current, undeployed patches and begin the process of testing and deploying them? All patches that became ready later than that would be processed in the next cycle. If MS released patches as they were done, each company would have the option of using whatever patching cycle they see fit. What's the benefit of MS forcing everyone to use a specific patching cycle?
One solution to this part of the equation is to get an ISP without such assanine rules (like the one I use, for instance). Of course, that's a solution for you, not for the service, because they're unlikely to have a successful internet business model that begins, "First, get all your customers to switch their ISP..."
Actually, if you recall Perot was doing quite well in the polls (even leading at one point) up until the point where he effecitively dropped out of the race (later to return) and thereby shot himself in the foot. His problem wasn't being smart, rich, and successful but rather that his on again, off again candidacy and claims of "republican dirty tricks" made him seem crazy.