"For me, I'd prefer it's this way all year long but I don't have kids that ride a school bus (isn't that the main reason they claim we do this in the first place?)"
People claim a lot of things, but my opinion is doing it all year wouldn't work. Between school bus times, business hours, work schedules, and what have you, society decides what time to get up in the morning. It's not done in an organized or unmessy way, but it eventually comes back to if enough people think the time they have to get up is too late or too early, schedules will change. But not fast enough to track seasons. We wind up stuck with one "clock time" all year. I conclude people hate getting up before sunrise in the winter more than other considerations, so that sets our schedules, even though it's wildly inapropriate other times of year. So DST let's those millions of individual decisions about what time to do stuff get changed all together, and thus makes our schedule adapt to the seasons.
"Congress wasted time on this bill that could have been spent getting something important done"
Dude, this is the previous (Republican controlled) Congress we're talking about. They spent the vast majority of their time on vacation. They convened for fewer days than any Congress in a hundred years. I suppose they could have used the time spent debating this bill to do something meaningful, but they weren't exactly hurting for time.
"You seriously don't think we can do better than 30% efficiency?!?"
I don't know or care. If it were as obvious and simple as you say, I imagine someone would do it. But let's assume there is something vastly better than current engine designs, in theory. The day that thing becomes practical to actually manufacture and run, I imagine car manufacturers will design cars around it, and it will supplant the 4 stroke engine in short order. Cars with 4 stroke engines just won't be made anymore if this new thing is better in all technical repects.
This is where the analogy fails, and is my whole point: Several microchip instruction sets have been devised that are better than x86 in every way. Chips designed around them run faster using less energy. And yet x86 isn't going anywhere; it is under no threat of being suplanted by these new technologies. It's not because years of refinement have gotten x86 chips to a point others can't reach when starting from scrath; the chips designed from scratch are actually better, right now. It's because of the legacy software.
Not to me or car maufacturers. If we started from scratch today could we do better than current engines? I guess maybe. I don't really know. If so, you'd think someone would on some significant scale.
It's considerably more obvious to me that starting from scratch one could design a more efficient microprocessor instruction set than x86. People have, repeatedly.
So the engine case seems like a pretty lame way to make any kind of argument about the instruction set case; the analogy is less clear than the question.
And that's not even getting into the basic failure of the analogy in the first place: People keep adapting x86 for backward-compatibility reasons. These do not apply in the engine case. If you can make a more efficient way of deriving propulsion from gasoline, what's stopping you?
I disagree. Being constantly, sub-conciously aware of what direction you're facing is different in interesting ways from having a compass in your pocket you can check when you think of it.
I've lived in and learned my way around several metropolitan areas. I acquired a far better geographic understanding, far faster, in the Denver area than any of the others. I think this is because anywhere in the Denver area, whether you are thinking about it or not, you are aware of your position relative to the same landmarks (the Rocky Mountains). I don't think carrying a compass, or even a GPS, in ones pocket to be looked at when you thought of it would be at all comparable.
I've noticed that since I moved to the Denver area, I almost never get lost. You never *think* about the fact that there are these great big mountains constantly visible to the west. But I get this spooky feeling if I go somewhere I haven't been before on a rare low-visibility day. Your brain just accepts that you should always know which you're facing, and be able to roughly triangulate off a couple notable peaks.
For it to be a good analogy in terms of making the point, this statement:
"If we were going to start over and design the best way to extract usable power from gasoline from the ground up, we could probably do better than the 4-stroke"
Ought to be blindingly obviously true to everyone. I'd bet most people have no idea. I think it's probably false. Not that I want to argue about engines; but just like every other automotive analogy, this one is lame.
I don't know what talking about widgets would imply, but we're not talking about food, shelter, or medicines here either. They have a "monopoly" on the works of specific artists who have sold them the rights to their works. They offer something for sale that absolutely anybody can just do without if they don't like the price. You equate that with rape? Just don't buy it.
Hey, I just scrawled a picture on a post-it note, and have decided to offer to sell it as art for 5 billion dollars. Have I just "raped" you? I have a monopoly on post-it-note scrawls by me after all.
You have no fundamental right to set the price at which others will sell you things.
The jerks! Imagine the gall! Attempting to set prices on their own product!
You don't want to pay the price they are asking, they don't want to sell for the price you're offering. I don't see how that alone makes either of you an "asshole". Just don't buy it.
"Event he best chess players in the world will admit that a computer can calculate the most obvious scenarios much faster than a human can. Given on 4 seconds to think a computer will almost always beat a human player."
Given the same total "thinking" time over the course of the entire game, the same way humans compete with each other, the best chess programs are roughly comparable to the best human players.
"Even the Expert Systems used in Real Time strategies have to be significantly handicapped if the human player is expected to be able to compete."
Not so. The best players in the world can beat AI at simple strategy games, and as the games get more complex, the humans advantage increases. The AI opponents in RTS games do not generally compete straight-up, but are given significant artificial advantages to make things interesting. AIs sometimes have an advantage at tracking 1000 units simultaneously (by looking at the internal position variables, rather than the screen) but that's not really AI. Given 1000 units that can each do any of a 1000 things, humans are vastly better than the best programs at deciding what to do, even with their less perfect understanding of everythings exact position. Computers are better at tracking every little detail, but for synthesizing all that detail and formulating plans, humans win hands down.
Targeting by calculating from internal data and perfect knowledge of the physics model, rather than analyzing screen output, is not what I would typically call "AI". Not all games are First Person Shooters, and FPS are not particularly good tests of AI since targeting is such a big part of them.
In simple, pure-strategy board games like Chess, the best AIs are only on par with the best humans. In more complex mostly-strategy games, like the various Real Time Strategy games, the AIs are hopelessly outmatched, and the difficulty of player-vs-computer scenarios is typically adjusted by how huge a head start the computer is given, or how much it is allowed to cheat in various ways.
The problem with your argument is, DRM does not prevent piracy.
"Fans will come up to them bragging about how they copied their cd from a friends."
And their friend can burn them a copy of their iTunes downloaded song just as easy. Pirated stuff goes up on P2P networks within minutes of its iTunes release.
Putting their stuff on iTunes because their fans can find and buy it there with no hassle: smart idea. Putting it there to in any way inhibit piracy: delusional.
Digitally recorded music is made of bits. Bits are easy to copy, and will not become harder to copy in the future. Your friends should seek a business model and/or mindset in which people copying their stuff is not a bad thing.
Actually, I think the stats show that Apple fanboys can't do the simplest research. Anyone got stats?
More seriously, Mac market share has floundered about in the 5ish percent range pretty much forever. Getting excited about the latest up or down tick is silly; when they go over 15% (or under 1%) it'll be worth talking about.
What you describe is largely the case. Lawyers are liable if they bring cases they know (or should know) will be unsuccessful, and can be disbarred and/or be required to pay monetary damages. Go read the letter from the defense attorney in the recent RIAA-related story; amongst other things, he states his intention to sue the lawyers, not just the plantiffs, if they don't settle.
"Whether or not this is a frivolous lawsuit is a question of fact; therefore the jury decides. Not the judge (unless they are acting as the trier of fact in that instance.)"
Whether the lawyer is liable for bringing a malicious case is generally a matter of law, and hence decided by the judge. It is possibly unreasonable to expect lawyers be correct about the facts in a case (their clients may lie to them, amongst other things). They are legally expected to understand the laws in the case. You can still sue the plantiff for misrepresenting the facts, and could sue the lawyer if you could prove he knew about and endorsed it, but that's less likely.
"I'd like to point out that the greatest works of art of all time were produced in an era where there were no such things as copyright laws."
I'd like to point out that there was no such thing as effective copying. Patronage worked great when directly hiring a creator to make something was the only way to get it, because there wasn't any technical capability to make a copy.
Does the "mindless crap" you're inundated with include the output of all programmers, architects, authors (non-fiction and fiction), engineers, etc. etc. ? Pop musicians are not very representative of the rather significant segment of our society who currently depend on copyright.
I'm a big proponent of copyright reform, but the implication that simple abolition is a no-brainer doesn't fly in my book.
"Often, it is the publisher that does so, which is good if a lawsuit is required, but it limits the author's future right to do what they wish with their work."
You right to do what you wish with something is generally limited when you sell that thing.
"why is a company that has not produced anything creative allowed to take advantage of a legal right that was supposedly enacted to protect creativity?"
Because they paid the creator for the creation. It's supposed to encourage creativity by helping the creator get paid; which it did. Sometimes creators make bad deals; sometimes because big corporations abuse their monopoly on the ability to distribute the product of particular types of creators. This is a problem, but it is not specific to copyright; in the realm of physical goods, workers in sweatshops have essentially the same difficulty.
Copyright makes it possible to own certain things one creates that are informational in nature. While the focus is on "artists", a heck of a lot of people create all sorts of things which are information in nature, and I for one think it mostly makes things a lot easier if it is possible for creators of such things to in some sense own their creations.
I can't see how you can let someone own something, and not let them sell it to a corporation. Corporations can do anything an individual can do. If they can't, can a group of people do it by just not calling themselves a corp?
I think the length of copyright terms has gotten crazily out of hand, there's a pretty obvious case to be made there. But I can't see aboloshing it entirely; it just awfully useful to society if people can own the things they make, at least initially, even when those things are made of bits.
"About the 'worst' thing the FSF could do would be to say that GPLv4 will be a permissive licence allowing anything."
They could make GPLv4 a very restrictive license, and people could use my V2-or-later code in a V4 project, and the aggregate would be restricted in ways I found undesirable. Yes, I would still have my code under V2, it would only be the combination that was restricted against my wishes, but if you buy that argument you may as well use BSD (which, for the record, I do). My point is, if you like the balance of permissions and restrictions in V2, and you are not the FSF, V2-only is a perfectly logical choice. V2-or-later is reasonable only so far as you trust the FSF, and not just as it is now, but whatever it becomes in the future.
"Now, why people keep referring to GNU and GNU-based distributions with this 'Linux' thing in the name, and even as 'Linux' alone, I don't know."
Oh, that's very simple. No amount of explaining what makes sense is going to do anything, because it's not about what makes sense. To the vast majority of people, who don't know or care about the details, but who define the terminology by their usage, it comes down to this:
"Linux" is a cool name. "GNU" is a stupid name. "GNU/Linux" is a super-stupid name.
That's all there is to it. Get over it or don't; it's not going to change.
"Imagine for instance that security officials are looking to see if there are any of 10,000 known criminal/terrorists at the superbowl. That's not gonna be done by looking at everybody's faces. But automated walk recognition might be a really nice option."
OK, and let's say the technology is just fabulously better than it seems like it will ever get, and matches people correctly 99.99% of the time. Using such a fictionally wonderful system to search for your proposed 10,000 profiles of criminals/terrorists, every single person you check will be a match.
Scanning for a large number of profiles by any error-prone mechanism is utterly worthless.
"Perhaps they had forgotten that the original purpose of Ctrl-Alt-Del was to trigger soft reboots on the IBM PC"
Perhaps they did not forget. Perhaps they realized, unlike you (or half the posters here), that the device they were designing was not, in fact, the original IBM PC. For any OS or other software this device will ever run, hitting control-alt-delete accidentally will not be a problem.
There are several *advertised* free access points within a few minutes walk of my house; strange that their providers (some coffee shops and the chamber of commerce) have yet to be busted.
While I've heard your interpretation of the law before, it doesn't sound any less bizarre and stupid this time. I've got some landscaping rocks in my front yard; if someone uses one to bash someones head in, do you think they'll haul me away?
"create a.fam domain and then make the registrar a board consisting of the LDS Church, Christian Coalition, Southern Baptist Conference, and Catholic Church."
Yikes! You think I want my kids exposed to those guys freaky ideas!?!?! That's your idea of "family-safe"? Scary! Keep those guys the hell away from my kids.
As for whoever came up with the.xxx domain, I think you're missing the key to the matter. They're not dumb, they're greedy. There may be some dumb ones defending the idea on slashdot, but the ones actually arguing for it in front of ICANN aren't saying just "I want a.xxx domain created" they're saying "I want to be the one who creates a.xxx domain, and sells the names"
Right, so on a subjective, case by case basis, it's "doable" to go with with your personal prejudices. There are wildly varying porn laws on the books in different places, and they mostly don't work very well, and a lot of people don't think they are a great idea. Which ones do you think we should use, the ones from your hometown?
Slashdot Mirror
"For me, I'd prefer it's this way all year long but I don't have kids that ride a school bus (isn't that the main reason they claim we do this in the first place?)"
People claim a lot of things, but my opinion is doing it all year wouldn't work. Between school bus times, business hours, work schedules, and what have you, society decides what time to get up in the morning. It's not done in an organized or unmessy way, but it eventually comes back to if enough people think the time they have to get up is too late or too early, schedules will change. But not fast enough to track seasons. We wind up stuck with one "clock time" all year. I conclude people hate getting up before sunrise in the winter more than other considerations, so that sets our schedules, even though it's wildly inapropriate other times of year. So DST let's those millions of individual decisions about what time to do stuff get changed all together, and thus makes our schedule adapt to the seasons.
"Congress wasted time on this bill that could have been spent getting something important done"
Dude, this is the previous (Republican controlled) Congress we're talking about. They spent the vast majority of their time on vacation. They convened for fewer days than any Congress in a hundred years. I suppose they could have used the time spent debating this bill to do something meaningful, but they weren't exactly hurting for time.
"You seriously don't think we can do better than 30% efficiency?!?"
I don't know or care. If it were as obvious and simple as you say, I imagine someone would do it. But let's assume there is something vastly better than current engine designs, in theory. The day that thing becomes practical to actually manufacture and run, I imagine car manufacturers will design cars around it, and it will supplant the 4 stroke engine in short order. Cars with 4 stroke engines just won't be made anymore if this new thing is better in all technical repects.
This is where the analogy fails, and is my whole point:
Several microchip instruction sets have been devised that are better than x86 in every way. Chips designed around them run faster using less energy. And yet x86 isn't going anywhere; it is under no threat of being suplanted by these new technologies. It's not because years of refinement have gotten x86 chips to a point others can't reach when starting from scrath; the chips designed from scratch are actually better, right now. It's because of the legacy software.
"It is blindingly obviously true."
Not to me or car maufacturers. If we started from scratch today could we do better than current engines? I guess maybe. I don't really know. If so, you'd think someone would on some significant scale.
It's considerably more obvious to me that starting from scratch one could design a more efficient microprocessor instruction set than x86. People have, repeatedly.
So the engine case seems like a pretty lame way to make any kind of argument about the instruction set case; the analogy is less clear than the question.
And that's not even getting into the basic failure of the analogy in the first place: People keep adapting x86 for backward-compatibility reasons. These do not apply in the engine case. If you can make a more efficient way of deriving propulsion from gasoline, what's stopping you?
I disagree. Being constantly, sub-conciously aware of what direction you're facing is different in interesting ways from having a compass in your pocket you can check when you think of it.
I've lived in and learned my way around several metropolitan areas. I acquired a far better geographic understanding, far faster, in the Denver area than any of the others. I think this is because anywhere in the Denver area, whether you are thinking about it or not, you are aware of your position relative to the same landmarks (the Rocky Mountains). I don't think carrying a compass, or even a GPS, in ones pocket to be looked at when you thought of it would be at all comparable.
I've noticed that since I moved to the Denver area, I almost never get lost. You never *think* about the fact that there are these great big mountains constantly visible to the west. But I get this spooky feeling if I go somewhere I haven't been before on a rare low-visibility day. Your brain just accepts that you should always know which you're facing, and be able to roughly triangulate off a couple notable peaks.
For it to be a good analogy in terms of making the point, this statement:
"If we were going to start over and design the best way to extract usable power from gasoline from the ground up, we could probably do better than the 4-stroke"
Ought to be blindingly obviously true to everyone. I'd bet most people have no idea. I think it's probably false. Not that I want to argue about engines; but just like every other automotive analogy, this one is lame.
I don't know what talking about widgets would imply, but we're not talking about food, shelter, or medicines here either. They have a "monopoly" on the works of specific artists who have sold them the rights to their works. They offer something for sale that absolutely anybody can just do without if they don't like the price. You equate that with rape? Just don't buy it.
Hey, I just scrawled a picture on a post-it note, and have decided to offer to sell it as art for 5 billion dollars. Have I just "raped" you? I have a monopoly on post-it-note scrawls by me after all.
You have no fundamental right to set the price at which others will sell you things.
The jerks! Imagine the gall! Attempting to set prices on their own product!
You don't want to pay the price they are asking, they don't want to sell for the price you're offering. I don't see how that alone makes either of you an "asshole". Just don't buy it.
"Event he best chess players in the world will admit that a computer can calculate the most obvious scenarios much faster than a human can. Given on 4 seconds to think a computer will almost always beat a human player."
Given the same total "thinking" time over the course of the entire game, the same way humans compete with each other, the best chess programs are roughly comparable to the best human players.
"Even the Expert Systems used in Real Time strategies have to be significantly handicapped if the human player is expected to be able to compete."
Not so. The best players in the world can beat AI at simple strategy games, and as the games get more complex, the humans advantage increases. The AI opponents in RTS games do not generally compete straight-up, but are given significant artificial advantages to make things interesting. AIs sometimes have an advantage at tracking 1000 units simultaneously (by looking at the internal position variables, rather than the screen) but that's not really AI. Given 1000 units that can each do any of a 1000 things, humans are vastly better than the best programs at deciding what to do, even with their less perfect understanding of everythings exact position. Computers are better at tracking every little detail, but for synthesizing all that detail and formulating plans, humans win hands down.
Targeting by calculating from internal data and perfect knowledge of the physics model, rather than analyzing screen output, is not what I would typically call "AI". Not all games are First Person Shooters, and FPS are not particularly good tests of AI since targeting is such a big part of them.
In simple, pure-strategy board games like Chess, the best AIs are only on par with the best humans. In more complex mostly-strategy games, like the various Real Time Strategy games, the AIs are hopelessly outmatched, and the difficulty of player-vs-computer scenarios is typically adjusted by how huge a head start the computer is given, or how much it is allowed to cheat in various ways.
The problem with your argument is, DRM does not prevent piracy.
"Fans will come up to them bragging about how they copied their cd from a friends."
And their friend can burn them a copy of their iTunes downloaded song just as easy. Pirated stuff goes up on P2P networks within minutes of its iTunes release.
Putting their stuff on iTunes because their fans can find and buy it there with no hassle: smart idea. Putting it there to in any way inhibit piracy: delusional.
Digitally recorded music is made of bits. Bits are easy to copy, and will not become harder to copy in the future. Your friends should seek a business model and/or mindset in which people copying their stuff is not a bad thing.
Actually, I think the stats show that Apple fanboys can't do the simplest research. Anyone got stats?
More seriously, Mac market share has floundered about in the 5ish percent range pretty much forever. Getting excited about the latest up or down tick is silly; when they go over 15% (or under 1%) it'll be worth talking about.
What you describe is largely the case. Lawyers are liable if they bring cases they know (or should know) will be unsuccessful, and can be disbarred and/or be required to pay monetary damages. Go read the letter from the defense attorney in the recent RIAA-related story; amongst other things, he states his intention to sue the lawyers, not just the plantiffs, if they don't settle.
"Whether or not this is a frivolous lawsuit is a question of fact; therefore the jury decides. Not the judge (unless they are acting as the trier of fact in that instance.)"
Whether the lawyer is liable for bringing a malicious case is generally a matter of law, and hence decided by the judge. It is possibly unreasonable to expect lawyers be correct about the facts in a case (their clients may lie to them, amongst other things). They are legally expected to understand the laws in the case. You can still sue the plantiff for misrepresenting the facts, and could sue the lawyer if you could prove he knew about and endorsed it, but that's less likely.
"I'd like to point out that the greatest works of art of all time were produced in an era where there were no such things as copyright laws."
I'd like to point out that there was no such thing as effective copying. Patronage worked great when directly hiring a creator to make something was the only way to get it, because there wasn't any technical capability to make a copy.
Does the "mindless crap" you're inundated with include the output of all programmers, architects, authors (non-fiction and fiction), engineers, etc. etc. ? Pop musicians are not very representative of the rather significant segment of our society who currently depend on copyright.
I'm a big proponent of copyright reform, but the implication that simple abolition is a no-brainer doesn't fly in my book.
"Often, it is the publisher that does so, which is good if a lawsuit is required, but it limits the author's future right to do what they wish with their work."
You right to do what you wish with something is generally limited when you sell that thing.
"why is a company that has not produced anything creative allowed to take advantage of a legal right that was supposedly enacted to protect creativity?"
Because they paid the creator for the creation. It's supposed to encourage creativity by helping the creator get paid; which it did. Sometimes creators make bad deals; sometimes because big corporations abuse their monopoly on the ability to distribute the product of particular types of creators. This is a problem, but it is not specific to copyright; in the realm of physical goods, workers in sweatshops have essentially the same difficulty.
Copyright makes it possible to own certain things one creates that are informational in nature. While the focus is on "artists", a heck of a lot of people create all sorts of things which are information in nature, and I for one think it mostly makes things a lot easier if it is possible for creators of such things to in some sense own their creations.
I can't see how you can let someone own something, and not let them sell it to a corporation. Corporations can do anything an individual can do. If they can't, can a group of people do it by just not calling themselves a corp?
I think the length of copyright terms has gotten crazily out of hand, there's a pretty obvious case to be made there. But I can't see aboloshing it entirely; it just awfully useful to society if people can own the things they make, at least initially, even when those things are made of bits.
"Basically whose responsibility is it to identify... "
Viacoms.
"...and remove..."
YouTubes.
" infringing copyright material?"
This isn't up in the air, debateable stuff; it's spelled out perfectly clearly in the law.
"I'm not a lawyer"
Clearly.
"About the 'worst' thing the FSF could do would be to say that GPLv4 will be a permissive licence allowing anything."
They could make GPLv4 a very restrictive license, and people could use my V2-or-later code in a V4 project, and the aggregate would be restricted in ways I found undesirable. Yes, I would still have my code under V2, it would only be the combination that was restricted against my wishes, but if you buy that argument you may as well use BSD (which, for the record, I do). My point is, if you like the balance of permissions and restrictions in V2, and you are not the FSF, V2-only is a perfectly logical choice. V2-or-later is reasonable only so far as you trust the FSF, and not just as it is now, but whatever it becomes in the future.
A nautical mile is 1.15... miles. A Knot is a unit of speed equal to 1 nautical mile per hour.
In the future, please refrain from correcting people when you don't know what you're talking about.
"Now, why people keep referring to GNU and GNU-based distributions with this 'Linux' thing in the name, and even as 'Linux' alone, I don't know."
Oh, that's very simple. No amount of explaining what makes sense is going to do anything, because it's not about what makes sense. To the vast majority of people, who don't know or care about the details, but who define the terminology by their usage, it comes down to this:
"Linux" is a cool name.
"GNU" is a stupid name.
"GNU/Linux" is a super-stupid name.
That's all there is to it. Get over it or don't; it's not going to change.
"Imagine for instance that security officials are looking to see if there are any of 10,000 known criminal/terrorists at the superbowl. That's not gonna be done by looking at everybody's faces. But automated walk recognition might be a really nice option."
OK, and let's say the technology is just fabulously better than it seems like it will ever get, and matches people correctly 99.99% of the time. Using such a fictionally wonderful system to search for your proposed 10,000 profiles of criminals/terrorists, every single person you check will be a match.
Scanning for a large number of profiles by any error-prone mechanism is utterly worthless.
"Perhaps they had forgotten that the original purpose of Ctrl-Alt-Del was to trigger soft reboots on the IBM PC"
Perhaps they did not forget. Perhaps they realized, unlike you (or half the posters here), that the device they were designing was not, in fact, the original IBM PC. For any OS or other software this device will ever run, hitting control-alt-delete accidentally will not be a problem.
There are several *advertised* free access points within a few minutes walk of my house; strange that their providers (some coffee shops and the chamber of commerce) have yet to be busted.
While I've heard your interpretation of the law before, it doesn't sound any less bizarre and stupid this time. I've got some landscaping rocks in my front yard; if someone uses one to bash someones head in, do you think they'll haul me away?
"create a .fam domain and then make the registrar a board consisting of the LDS Church, Christian Coalition, Southern Baptist Conference, and Catholic Church."
.xxx domain, I think you're missing the key to the matter. They're not dumb, they're greedy. There may be some dumb ones defending the idea on slashdot, but the ones actually arguing for it in front of ICANN aren't saying just "I want a .xxx domain created" they're saying "I want to be the one who creates a .xxx domain, and sells the names"
Yikes! You think I want my kids exposed to those guys freaky ideas!?!?! That's your idea of "family-safe"? Scary! Keep those guys the hell away from my kids.
As for whoever came up with the
Right, so on a subjective, case by case basis, it's "doable" to go with with your personal prejudices. There are wildly varying porn laws on the books in different places, and they mostly don't work very well, and a lot of people don't think they are a great idea. Which ones do you think we should use, the ones from your hometown?