I hope they give him a real golden parachute--made out of real gold, and make him test it--from the space shuttle. It would be worth the $100 million just to see the Darl-th Star like a meteor...
Just kidding. I just hope he's happy living under the bridge in retirement.
Uh. Barratry is the threat without intention to sue or acting to harass by repeatedly suing without expecting to get any money. In SCO World, they actually imagine they are going to win and get paid off, while in the real world they are getting sued more than they are suing. I don't see how to apply barratry in this context...
So does Novell get the first $25 million off the top?
You see, that's the problem. If we don't stop mixing our metaphors we will never destroy the monster, Dr. Frankenstein!
Can't someone come up with a really new joke about SCO? It seems like all of them have been used by now. I really thought it was dead and buried, and I was amused to see SCO used for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Talk about a jinxed label...
Or maybe they were hoping to coast on the publicity? It was organized around 2001, which seems to be about when the SCO lawsuits started. It just feels twice as long as that.
I hope I don't say anything that compromises my friend's privacy, but his story is quite relevant to this topic... As he was going through security, he made some kind of non-serious comment about his laptop not being a bomb. He was pulled off the flight, wound up paying several thousand dollars in related costs--and my impression is that he mostly avoids business trips to America these days. His formerly very advanced English certainly seems to be deteriorating, I'm sorry to report.
(And *NO*, I do *NOT* want to hop over and help with the/. meta-moderation that supports the broken moderation system. My observations are that/. is basically dying, mostly for a lack of humor, and the broken moderation system is my pick for the #1 reason.)
"Nice to know you would have sex with me for $1 million. Okay, so would you sleep with me for $2."
"What kind of girl do you think I am?"
"We've already established that. Now we're just haggling about the price."
So Yahoo! would sell out for $40, eh? Why am I not impressed with their integrity.
The *REAL* problem is that "shareholder value" now has a circular definition of stock price, and anything that raises the price is increasing "shareholder value" even if the real assets of the company are being destroyed for the next quarter. Most of the shares of most companies are never bought or sold, but their "value" is determined based on tiny sales of crazed gamblers, AKA technical analysts and fund managers. Meanwhile, the gamblers have a perfect situation. They are gambling with *OTHER* people's money. If they "win", they get huge bonuses, and if they lose, they get slightly less huge bonuses. In the worst case, they have to take the millions and retire.
(And *NO*, I do *NOT* want to hop over and help with the/. meta-moderation that supports the broken moderation system. My observations are that/. is basically dying, mostly for a lack of humor, and the broken moderation system is my pick for the #1 reason.)
I'm not that familiar with Wikipedia, but I feel like I should note that "nice picture" was in the technical sense of very clear and illustrative of the topic.
On the actual topic, I think it is sad when people confuse trivial physical symbols with important abstract ideas. For example, freedom can't be burned.
So you don't think they would kill the soldiers if they could?
Not sure why, but in the last few months I've started reading a lot of military stuff, including books on the Vietnam "conflict". Recently a story of the first major battle in Vietnam, a history written by one of the American officers, but even including a few bits from the other side. One of the things that struck me was the unevenness of the conflict. The Vietnamese had guns, some potato masher grenades, and even a few mortar rounds. On the American side we had almost unlimited artillery rounds, and vast amounts of aircraft, large amounts of ammunition, etc., etc. At the end of the first phase of the battle we called in a large B-52 strike that dumped vast amounts of explosives in an area we thought might contain more Vietnamese.
In spite of the enormous advantages, over 300 Americans were killed. Why? My conclusion is that the CO couldn't wait for a better opportunity that might have involved fewer American deaths. He only mentions in passing, but he was up for promotion, and he was about to be rotated away from that unit--less than a week later he was moved back to a desk job. Confirms my own memories of the worst officers...
Statistically, it is probably Shinto. The Japanese were training entire battalions for kamikaze attacks. Fortunately they ran out of planes. Recycling the tires wasn't enough. (The kamikaze planes would circle the field once and drop their wheels. Rubber was in short supply, and they weren't trained in landings anyway.)
Turns out the Wikipedia article on "flag desecration" does start with a nice picture of the American flag being burned. I'd still like to check to make sure it wasn't added 10 minutes ago by the guy who made that post.
And *NO*, I do not feel like hopping over to assist in the broken meta-moderation that is supposed to help the even more broken moderation. I think I want my posts to be moderated as +5 "beyond moderation". I don't want to post anonymously, but I have no desire to be moderated by a fugging AC.
Basically off topic, but I see by your sig that you seem to agree with me on the meta-topic of moderation. One of my [rather numerous and vigorously ignored] suggestions to improve the moderation might amuse you:
I suggested that they decide on a (relatively) small number of dimensions of moderation, and moderators be allowed to give + or - mod points in each dimension, and the dimensions would then be accumulated and subject to interpretation. As it applies to your sig, I think a classic troll post would have a profile like -5 true, -5 sincere, and -5 polite. Actually, I'm not sure about including the "true" dimension there, since it is quite possible for a troll to use some parts of the truth, but almost surely not +5 true...
Part of this particular idea was to associate the mod dimensions back to the posters (as multi-dimensional karma) by tracking how their posts are moderated. For example, if a lot of your posts are moderated wise (or insightful), then you'd wind up +5 wise--and your wise moderations would also count double. (Another part of the idea was that more people should have mod points...)
Not at all, and quit trying to twist my words. The primary effect is to mark you as intellectually dishonest.
Your extension to draining money "out of taxpayers' wallets and research funds" just marks you as a fuzzy thinker. Or do you think publishing is a magical free activity that has no actual costs associated with it?
Yes, some publishers are making some money some of the time. What I said was that they are certainly not getting rich at it, and you certainly don't see any hordes of desperate newcomers trying to enter the academic publishing business. Most of the survivors are barely doing that.
Actually, one of my oldest friends worked for one of the publishers you named for some years. Some of that time, perhaps most of it, he was actually listed as the publisher for their books published in this country. He's since moved to an even larger publishing company. Still involved in academic stuff, though I'm not sure what his exact role is these days--and though I'm confident that his contributions are substantial, he isn't getting rich either.
I suppose I better include a disclaimer, too. I don't work for a publisher, but mostly for a research lab helping them prepare technical documents for publication in various venues, including on the Web. I can only speak based on the sample of the few hundred authors with whom I've worked, but most of them need some help in presenting their ideas clearly. Some of them need a lot of help. I'm not getting rich either, though I'm supposed to be unusually good at it.
Must be/. judging by the level of the article and the comments. First, government funded research is normally free from copyright. Second, no one is getting rich from publishing academic journals.
Third, why am I wasting my time commenting? My only residual interest in/. has been the humor, and there's almost none of that these days, and this article is an especially unlikely venue. Perhaps karma for funny mods would help--but I doubt it.
Case one: They recognize me on camera. If they want to keep the image, they should store it on my computer and have to ask my permission if they want to look at it again in the future. Just as with a search warrant, though should have to tell me why. (They can sign the files to prevent me from tampering with it, etc.)
Case two: They don't recognize me. It's my personal information and they should *NOT* own it, but should be required to delete it.
I forgot mention that her computer was probably hijacked either via some obscure service that she never heard of and never would have used, or via a website that warned her about installing the malware, but she just said okay because that's what Microsoft Windows has taught her to do.
Actually, I think that Microsoft OSes should be compared to Swiss Army trench mortars, not knives. It's only natural since Microsoft sees the OS and their dominance of the OS as weapons against all potential threats. Just too bad for the little old lady from Pasadena who finds that her trench mortar has been turned into a zombie DDoS attackbot by some sharp hacker.
http://cws.org/ still exists, and it used to have some content years ago. This actually goes back at least to the '80s when I was living in Austin. Not sure I should name any names, but I wonder if any of he same people are involved. I was only peripherally aware of it, though I did have one of the official CWS pencils. My recollections are fuzzy after all these years, but I think the menu venue of weirdness was called "Slope House", somewhere on West 6th street, where a number of the principals lived at the time. It was called the slope house because it was an old house and all the floors were sloping by that time...
I recommend you study self-validating statistics and the general topic of statistical validation. Popular usage is 'circular argument'.
In terms of the implementation, it's pretty simple. Toss all the meta-moderation. If the code is well structured and modularized, that shouldn't be too difficult. New moderation condition is basically each day everyone gets a certain number of mod points. No accumulation of unused points, but just reset each day. Excellent karma might be 4 mod points, and it goes down from there. (I'm thinking of zero-based indexing, and allowing for certain people having no mod points. Newbies, detected robots or sock puppets, and recent abusers, perhaps?)
I still can't decide if the ban on posting a modded thread is good... In theory, you shouldn't lose your vote if you also express an opinion. However, their arguments for this are moderately persuasive, though I think they would be substantially weakened in a context of broader moderation.
I am quite aware of the controllable bonuses, and long ago increased the bonus for "funny". Actually, in that regard I have an advantage from my time-lapse perspective. However, the/. editors could validate the data by tracking the actual number of funny-moderated posts over time. (I have a very strong impression that funny is way down, and a weaker impression that posting in general is down. It is possible that funny posts are down simply because all posts are down.)
With regards to the game of moderation, if you have mod points and don't want to use them, then don't. The rest of your comments on those aspects were basically old news. One point of clarification. No, I am not saying that the creationists have 'attained ascendancy' on/., and that was probably a poor example. I was using that as an example of the objective of an inarticulate ax-grinder with mod points.
As regards the meta-mod part of it, that's another place where I'd like to see the actual statistical data. From my study of statistics, internal validation is generally better than adding complicated layers of external validation. My belief is that the actual pool of meta-moderators is almost identical with the moderators, so the game-players are 'validating' themselves.
My algorithm is just to do a reverse search on "funny". Because I'm searching backwards, the cursor stops with "funny" at the top and the possibly funny comment displayed below it. Generally worked well, though you have to think a bit about some of the chained jokes, since this approach goes backwards through the chain. However, the *BIG* problem is that there is simply very little humor on/. these years, either in the posts that are moderated funny or in the random posts that I've looked at in search of humor that was not moderated that way. Perhaps the moderation should be adjusted to encourage humor.
Of course, the big problem is that moderation is a game, and a broken game. There are some sincere and honest moderators, but many of the negative mod points are used to suppress intelligent discussion, not encourage it.
Simplified example would be a creationist moderator who sees a sophisticated and articulate explanation of evolution. What easier response than to mod that poster into oblivion? No, I haven't seen any recent examples (though my current book, Pinker's "How the Mind Works", could motivate me in that direction), but perhaps that's because the vocal pro-evolution people have already been obliviated and left/. (and I'm on my way out the door).
In the answers I noticed that Malda is apparently aware there are problems with moderation. However, his response appears to be to increase the complexity of the game rather than to focus on his first principles. The game players will doubtless be amused and learn to play the fancier game. Me? No thanks. Actually I'm quite interested in intelligent discussion--but I file/. under my humor bookmarks, and it's about to lose even that tenuous status.
I have two concrete recommendations that might improve/. via simplified moderation. First would be the elimination of anonymous negative moderation. There are times when anonymity is justified, but this is *NOT* one of them. If you want to criticize someone, then you should be big enough to put your name on it.
Second would be to basically give everyone a voice in moderation and some mod points. One approach would be for every normal member to have from one to five mod points per day, basically linked to your karma. I would suggest one additional wrinkle for the karma: If your mod is countered several times, that would be grounds for reducing your karma.
Amusing to see the ranting against Al Gore. We all know he won in 2000, not just nationally, but even in Florida. At least we know it if we believe "the will of the voters" is supposed to count.
In a sense it doesn't matter. Reality ultimately prevails. The reality delivered by Dubya Bush is miserable failure.
By the way, I don't hate Dubya. I just love America and hate to see it harmed. Dubya is just grist for the historians' mills now--and his record of miserable failures will hopefully never be surpassed.
Regarding the actual ruler of America, the Dick Cheney just wants to die with the most toys. I hope he gets his wish--and as soon as possible.
Oh yeah. A joke. There should be a "poor joke" icon for this kind of post. Spam is Al Gore's fault. As a Senator, he was too good at getting money for them while they were developing the Internet. He kept telling them not to worry about the money, and he kept it flowing--and that's why SMTP has the built-in fantasy that email is "free". No such thing as free in a real economy. (Free is only for such things as ideas, but that's too tangential here.)
Slashdot Mirror
I hope they give him a real golden parachute--made out of real gold, and make him test it--from the space shuttle. It would be worth the $100 million just to see the Darl-th Star like a meteor...
Just kidding. I just hope he's happy living under the bridge in retirement.
Uh. Barratry is the threat without intention to sue or acting to harass by repeatedly suing without expecting to get any money. In SCO World, they actually imagine they are going to win and get paid off, while in the real world they are getting sued more than they are suing. I don't see how to apply barratry in this context...
So does Novell get the first $25 million off the top?
You see, that's the problem. If we don't stop mixing our metaphors we will never destroy the monster, Dr. Frankenstein!
Can't someone come up with a really new joke about SCO? It seems like all of them have been used by now. I really thought it was dead and buried, and I was amused to see SCO used for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Talk about a jinxed label...
Or maybe they were hoping to coast on the publicity? It was organized around 2001, which seems to be about when the SCO lawsuits started. It just feels twice as long as that.
I hope I don't say anything that compromises my friend's privacy, but his story is quite relevant to this topic... As he was going through security, he made some kind of non-serious comment about his laptop not being a bomb. He was pulled off the flight, wound up paying several thousand dollars in related costs--and my impression is that he mostly avoids business trips to America these days. His formerly very advanced English certainly seems to be deteriorating, I'm sorry to report.
/. meta-moderation that supports the broken moderation system. My observations are that /. is basically dying, mostly for a lack of humor, and the broken moderation system is my pick for the #1 reason.)
(And *NO*, I do *NOT* want to hop over and help with the
"Nice to know you would have sex with me for $1 million. Okay, so would you sleep with me for $2."
/. meta-moderation that supports the broken moderation system. My observations are that /. is basically dying, mostly for a lack of humor, and the broken moderation system is my pick for the #1 reason.)
"What kind of girl do you think I am?"
"We've already established that. Now we're just haggling about the price."
So Yahoo! would sell out for $40, eh? Why am I not impressed with their integrity.
The *REAL* problem is that "shareholder value" now has a circular definition of stock price, and anything that raises the price is increasing "shareholder value" even if the real assets of the company are being destroyed for the next quarter. Most of the shares of most companies are never bought or sold, but their "value" is determined based on tiny sales of crazed gamblers, AKA technical analysts and fund managers. Meanwhile, the gamblers have a perfect situation. They are gambling with *OTHER* people's money. If they "win", they get huge bonuses, and if they lose, they get slightly less huge bonuses. In the worst case, they have to take the millions and retire.
(And *NO*, I do *NOT* want to hop over and help with the
I'm not that familiar with Wikipedia, but I feel like I should note that "nice picture" was in the technical sense of very clear and illustrative of the topic.
On the actual topic, I think it is sad when people confuse trivial physical symbols with important abstract ideas. For example, freedom can't be burned.
So you don't think they would kill the soldiers if they could?
Not sure why, but in the last few months I've started reading a lot of military stuff, including books on the Vietnam "conflict". Recently a story of the first major battle in Vietnam, a history written by one of the American officers, but even including a few bits from the other side. One of the things that struck me was the unevenness of the conflict. The Vietnamese had guns, some potato masher grenades, and even a few mortar rounds. On the American side we had almost unlimited artillery rounds, and vast amounts of aircraft, large amounts of ammunition, etc., etc. At the end of the first phase of the battle we called in a large B-52 strike that dumped vast amounts of explosives in an area we thought might contain more Vietnamese.
In spite of the enormous advantages, over 300 Americans were killed. Why? My conclusion is that the CO couldn't wait for a better opportunity that might have involved fewer American deaths. He only mentions in passing, but he was up for promotion, and he was about to be rotated away from that unit--less than a week later he was moved back to a desk job. Confirms my own memories of the worst officers...
Statistically, it is probably Shinto. The Japanese were training entire battalions for kamikaze attacks. Fortunately they ran out of planes. Recycling the tires wasn't enough. (The kamikaze planes would circle the field once and drop their wheels. Rubber was in short supply, and they weren't trained in landings anyway.)
And *NO* I will not hop over to meta-moderate.
Yeah, "volunteer for a suicide mission" is just too clumsy. Is it possible you're just a bit too quick throwing stones from your glass house?
And *NO*, I still don't want to hop over and meta-moderate.
Turns out the Wikipedia article on "flag desecration" does start with a nice picture of the American flag being burned. I'd still like to check to make sure it wasn't added 10 minutes ago by the guy who made that post.
And *NO*, I do not feel like hopping over to assist in the broken meta-moderation that is supposed to help the even more broken moderation. I think I want my posts to be moderated as +5 "beyond moderation". I don't want to post anonymously, but I have no desire to be moderated by a fugging AC.
Looks fine to me using Firefox from Ubuntu. What are you browsing with?
Basically off topic, but I see by your sig that you seem to agree with me on the meta-topic of moderation. One of my [rather numerous and vigorously ignored] suggestions to improve the moderation might amuse you:
I suggested that they decide on a (relatively) small number of dimensions of moderation, and moderators be allowed to give + or - mod points in each dimension, and the dimensions would then be accumulated and subject to interpretation. As it applies to your sig, I think a classic troll post would have a profile like -5 true, -5 sincere, and -5 polite. Actually, I'm not sure about including the "true" dimension there, since it is quite possible for a troll to use some parts of the truth, but almost surely not +5 true...
Part of this particular idea was to associate the mod dimensions back to the posters (as multi-dimensional karma) by tracking how their posts are moderated. For example, if a lot of your posts are moderated wise (or insightful), then you'd wind up +5 wise--and your wise moderations would also count double. (Another part of the idea was that more people should have mod points...)
They don't matter? Funny, that's what I thought in 2000.
But I learn from my mistakes.
Not at all, and quit trying to twist my words. The primary effect is to mark you as intellectually dishonest.
Your extension to draining money "out of taxpayers' wallets and research funds" just marks you as a fuzzy thinker. Or do you think publishing is a magical free activity that has no actual costs associated with it?
Yes, some publishers are making some money some of the time. What I said was that they are certainly not getting rich at it, and you certainly don't see any hordes of desperate newcomers trying to enter the academic publishing business. Most of the survivors are barely doing that.
Actually, one of my oldest friends worked for one of the publishers you named for some years. Some of that time, perhaps most of it, he was actually listed as the publisher for their books published in this country. He's since moved to an even larger publishing company. Still involved in academic stuff, though I'm not sure what his exact role is these days--and though I'm confident that his contributions are substantial, he isn't getting rich either.
I suppose I better include a disclaimer, too. I don't work for a publisher, but mostly for a research lab helping them prepare technical documents for publication in various venues, including on the Web. I can only speak based on the sample of the few hundred authors with whom I've worked, but most of them need some help in presenting their ideas clearly. Some of them need a lot of help. I'm not getting rich either, though I'm supposed to be unusually good at it.
Must be /. judging by the level of the article and the comments. First, government funded research is normally free from copyright. Second, no one is getting rich from publishing academic journals.
/. has been the humor, and there's almost none of that these days, and this article is an especially unlikely venue. Perhaps karma for funny mods would help--but I doubt it.
Third, why am I wasting my time commenting? My only residual interest in
Case one: They recognize me on camera. If they want to keep the image, they should store it on my computer and have to ask my permission if they want to look at it again in the future. Just as with a search warrant, though should have to tell me why. (They can sign the files to prevent me from tampering with it, etc.)
Case two: They don't recognize me. It's my personal information and they should *NOT* own it, but should be required to delete it.
I forgot mention that her computer was probably hijacked either via some obscure service that she never heard of and never would have used, or via a website that warned her about installing the malware, but she just said okay because that's what Microsoft Windows has taught her to do.
Actually, I think that Microsoft OSes should be compared to Swiss Army trench mortars, not knives. It's only natural since Microsoft sees the OS and their dominance of the OS as weapons against all potential threats. Just too bad for the little old lady from Pasadena who finds that her trench mortar has been turned into a zombie DDoS attackbot by some sharp hacker.
http://cws.org/ still exists, and it used to have some content years ago. This actually goes back at least to the '80s when I was living in Austin. Not sure I should name any names, but I wonder if any of he same people are involved. I was only peripherally aware of it, though I did have one of the official CWS pencils. My recollections are fuzzy after all these years, but I think the menu venue of weirdness was called "Slope House", somewhere on West 6th street, where a number of the principals lived at the time. It was called the slope house because it was an old house and all the floors were sloping by that time...
If you are close enough to hear the sound of the sun, you are *TOO* close.
I recommend you study self-validating statistics and the general topic of statistical validation. Popular usage is 'circular argument'.
In terms of the implementation, it's pretty simple. Toss all the meta-moderation. If the code is well structured and modularized, that shouldn't be too difficult. New moderation condition is basically each day everyone gets a certain number of mod points. No accumulation of unused points, but just reset each day. Excellent karma might be 4 mod points, and it goes down from there. (I'm thinking of zero-based indexing, and allowing for certain people having no mod points. Newbies, detected robots or sock puppets, and recent abusers, perhaps?)
I still can't decide if the ban on posting a modded thread is good... In theory, you shouldn't lose your vote if you also express an opinion. However, their arguments for this are moderately persuasive, though I think they would be substantially weakened in a context of broader moderation.
I am quite aware of the controllable bonuses, and long ago increased the bonus for "funny". Actually, in that regard I have an advantage from my time-lapse perspective. However, the /. editors could validate the data by tracking the actual number of funny-moderated posts over time. (I have a very strong impression that funny is way down, and a weaker impression that posting in general is down. It is possible that funny posts are down simply because all posts are down.)
/., and that was probably a poor example. I was using that as an example of the objective of an inarticulate ax-grinder with mod points.
With regards to the game of moderation, if you have mod points and don't want to use them, then don't. The rest of your comments on those aspects were basically old news. One point of clarification. No, I am not saying that the creationists have 'attained ascendancy' on
As regards the meta-mod part of it, that's another place where I'd like to see the actual statistical data. From my study of statistics, internal validation is generally better than adding complicated layers of external validation. My belief is that the actual pool of meta-moderators is almost identical with the moderators, so the game-players are 'validating' themselves.
You seem to have mistaken me for someone who gives a shit about /.
My algorithm is just to do a reverse search on "funny". Because I'm searching backwards, the cursor stops with "funny" at the top and the possibly funny comment displayed below it. Generally worked well, though you have to think a bit about some of the chained jokes, since this approach goes backwards through the chain. However, the *BIG* problem is that there is simply very little humor on /. these years, either in the posts that are moderated funny or in the random posts that I've looked at in search of humor that was not moderated that way. Perhaps the moderation should be adjusted to encourage humor.
/. (and I'm on my way out the door).
/. under my humor bookmarks, and it's about to lose even that tenuous status.
/. via simplified moderation. First would be the elimination of anonymous negative moderation. There are times when anonymity is justified, but this is *NOT* one of them. If you want to criticize someone, then you should be big enough to put your name on it.
Of course, the big problem is that moderation is a game, and a broken game. There are some sincere and honest moderators, but many of the negative mod points are used to suppress intelligent discussion, not encourage it.
Simplified example would be a creationist moderator who sees a sophisticated and articulate explanation of evolution. What easier response than to mod that poster into oblivion? No, I haven't seen any recent examples (though my current book, Pinker's "How the Mind Works", could motivate me in that direction), but perhaps that's because the vocal pro-evolution people have already been obliviated and left
In the answers I noticed that Malda is apparently aware there are problems with moderation. However, his response appears to be to increase the complexity of the game rather than to focus on his first principles. The game players will doubtless be amused and learn to play the fancier game. Me? No thanks. Actually I'm quite interested in intelligent discussion--but I file
I have two concrete recommendations that might improve
Second would be to basically give everyone a voice in moderation and some mod points. One approach would be for every normal member to have from one to five mod points per day, basically linked to your karma. I would suggest one additional wrinkle for the karma: If your mod is countered several times, that would be grounds for reducing your karma.
Amusing to see the ranting against Al Gore. We all know he won in 2000, not just nationally, but even in Florida. At least we know it if we believe "the will of the voters" is supposed to count.
In a sense it doesn't matter. Reality ultimately prevails. The reality delivered by Dubya Bush is miserable failure.
By the way, I don't hate Dubya. I just love America and hate to see it harmed. Dubya is just grist for the historians' mills now--and his record of miserable failures will hopefully never be surpassed.
Regarding the actual ruler of America, the Dick Cheney just wants to die with the most toys. I hope he gets his wish--and as soon as possible.
Oh yeah. A joke. There should be a "poor joke" icon for this kind of post. Spam is Al Gore's fault. As a Senator, he was too good at getting money for them while they were developing the Internet. He kept telling them not to worry about the money, and he kept it flowing--and that's why SMTP has the built-in fantasy that email is "free". No such thing as free in a real economy. (Free is only for such things as ideas, but that's too tangential here.)