They could try to settle the counterclaims. Sure, they have no full control over that, but than again they may not need to have that. See also an other post of mine.
Actually, at least based on the limited info I have seen, from a purely financial point of view Novell should be happy. SCO does not have the money that it owes Novell, but YCM does. So, actually, I wouldn't be surprised to find out later that Novell helped to set it all up.
Please note that the deal will cost YCM more than $36m, so their valuation of the thing they'd be acquiring must be considerably higher as well.
If they behave sensibly, they will stop the lawsuits and pay Novell (that is: on top of the $36m). Next they will need to spend some money to clean up the mess and carve up the pieces. Only after that has been resolved, can they think of selling the viable bits and making a profit.
If they do not behave sensibly, they will continue the lawsuits and loose more money in the process (e.g. on legal fees). Even if they think they still have a chance of winning something along the way, they sure know very well that odds are against them and they will have taken that into account during their risk calculations while valueing SCO.
Companies such as YCM do not step into a very risky deal like this one without a clear view on a sizeable return on investment that would compensate for all the risk. I have a feeling that a few years from now the YCM-SCO example might become standard case study in business schools.
Because they're just buying the assets and not the debts, bad name, lawsuits, etc. SCO gets to keep all that junk.;-)
Which as such would seem like good news for Novell, because then there would be $36m more to grab from the SCO corpse.
However, TFA clearly states that YCM would be taking over the litigation claims as well. The whole idea is that said SCO corpse actually remains viable by focusing on something other than UNIX and litigation. Novell will then need to collect the money it is due from YCM (which is a good thing for them as well, since YCM actually has that money).
The thing that I don't like about this scheme, is that YCM will (wisely) withdraw all the lawsuits before focusing on making a profit out of the deal. This means that at the end of the whole 4 year mess, there will be no clear verdict stating how badly SCO has behaved.
I can't know whether he's listening, but for York Capital Management to make a profit out of the operation, they need something viable they can sell. The parent post is in essence pointing at the support contracts for already installed POS devices as that viable thing.
The world does not consist of only IT admins and users such as secretaries and pointy-haired drones. There are all sorts of intermediate levels of "users" who actually develop software. While the latter are the ones affected most by these problems, they are more often than not "not IT staff". I.e. they are not the ones who decide (e.g. under pressure from some vendor who no longer supports XP on the newest lease PC model) to upgrade the standard company desktop config.
I've been in the situation (not with Vista, fortunately) and I can assure you that the average decision maker w.r.t. such issues has no clue of how it all impacts the developers. What's more, even the real gurus within IT don't know: they may be expert admins, but generally will be amateur developers. A similar relation usually holds in the opposite direction. Being a senior developer who also ha(s/d) a decent understanding of administration, one of my many tasks in my former company was to line up IT and users - developers as well as others - on exactly these issues. It sure was not always easy.
One word (at least on any decent UNIX-like system):/etc/shadow. That reduces the set of dangerous inside people to just those who don't need to crack because they can bypass/read anyway. Sure, even those might have a use for actually cracking your system password and trying to use it to decrypt stuff for which their mere root powers won't help, but you simply always have to trust somebody. Unless you're so paranoid you only want to be a one-(wo)man shop, of course.
And how do you plan to identify the winner amongst those that still post regularly? And what do you plan to do about people who used to post only every so often due to lack of time, but who have since returned to their old habbits due to no more lack of time? Hint, there's someone like that very close by...:-)
Vtwm has had this since at least February 1992. Admittedly that's later than the 1991 patent date, but with some further digging into history, vtwm might stil become prior art. I have memories of using it earlier than that, at least.
In any case, the fact that nobody filed suit against the vtwm developers/distributors for over 15 years shows that the owners for a very long time didn't exploit their patent the way they should have.
I won't say that photoshop professionals can't do better, but please note:
I did not say I'm a photoshop novice, I only said that I tried that particular thing once and thet the result was no perfect;
Mirroring faces does not work, as human faces are not symmetrical.
Try it: take a picture of a face, and make one in which the left half is a mirror image of the right half and one in which the right half is a mirror image of the left half. Not only will you find that both versions differ, but it is even the case that one of them consistently looks more friendly/pleasant than the other one. This implies that if you just mirror a complete face, the manipulation is easily detected, since the wrong half will now yield the nicer picture.
Besides, the whole mirroring thing can not even be considered if the picture shows the face at angle.
That might be doable with one picture, but to do it multiple times is in another league. For starters he'd have to have multiple suitable pictures of his victim, fitting the pose and lighting of each of the filthy pictures that he'd want to plug them into.
Just for fun and for exploring technology, I once tried to photoshop one picture of my own head onto another of my own torso. Even though I was wearing very similar shirts (color, but especially shape of colar) in both pictures, it was bloody hard to do. And even though it looked reasonable in the end, it never fully worked. One part of the hair had an identifiable false edge, and the lighting was not perfect either (too much difference in direction between both originals).
The way out (for them) is to have - and show when asked - a list of whatever number they previously claimed to have, even if they know full well that some of those patents don't hold up to scrutiny. As there is no proof that the one particular patent that might trigger the whole discussion to become "real" in court was or was not in their original list, all they need to do is to claim a lower number than what they really think they might be able to use. That way they can always produce a suitable list, hiding any specific patent that they really think stands a chance until the very last day and claiming that thet one was not on the list.
You don't want anyone to read your email ? Then encrypt it. Period.
That's fine with non-webmail. But with webmail (assuming you even can encrypt it in that case, which I doubt very much with any of the available providers) at least the webmail provider must read the mail in order to display it to you.
More importantly, there's a big difference between being able to catch individual mails along the way and reading and analysing my 20 (yes: two-zero) years of e-mail history.
Yes and no. What the Royal Navy did at Taranto was indeed "the corect thing to do". But overall, they generally operated their carriers as eskorts of their other (battle)ships, whereas the Japanese set up fully autonomous carrier battlegroups that they operated as such. That, to me at least, shows a deeper understmding of where things were going.
The Japanese battleships at Midway were a waste, indeed, meant to kill anything left standing by the time they'd have gotten there, be it crippled US carriers or the island defences. But, crucially, the core of the Midway plan was to use the island as diversion to draw in and kill the US carriers in a direct carrier-to-carrier battle.
To me, this is clear proof that they - or at least their commander-in-chief, which in the given context is/was enough - knew what they needed and wanted to do. Yes, a considerable part of their (senior) officer corps was not yet convinced - as a naval reserve officer I have a bit of a right to say that navies are very conservative communities:-) - but what matters is that who's really in charge has understood. In any case, some US officials still want to see the by now totally anachronistic battlewagons come back into service even in 2007. Idiots and fools are of all times and nations.
The problem for the Japanese at Midway was that the US flattops were already present at the scene and didn't need to be drawn in (combined with the fact that the Yorktown should not have been there at all, but that it in fact was). So, while they knew what they wanted do to, the Japanese didn't know what they were actually doing, which went on to be their downfall. At least within the scope of Midway, that is, because overall they would have lost the Pacific war in the end anyway, even if Midway would have worked out to perfection.
Which makes how much, 0.001% perhaps, of the current market for cars?
That's beside the point. It has been stated above that the Japanese only copy and do not invent and it has even been implied that they are incapable of inventing anything that requires a major breakthough or paradigm shift. (That's a racist claim, actually!) The hybrid car serves as counterproof to those claims. It is not meant as proof of immediate commercial success of everything the Japanese do.
Ditto for the photography market...
Again, that's beside the point.
The short answer is "NO". The long answer is "it was invented by Philips, a Dutch company, but Sony came in right at the beginning, because Philips didn't have all the manufacturing capability available".
At least you got that one right. But there's more to it than meets the eye. Philips did not just lack manufacturing capability. They also had no clue what to do with the product to make it a success. It's actually an instance of "the Philips disease": they invent a lot of great stuff, but they suck quite badly at making it a commercial success, because the company is run in essence by engineers and scientists. (*) Sony, on the other hand, knows how to make a product a succes, be it they own (the walkman) or someone else's (the CD). Which is one of the reasons why people in this thread are confident that the Japanese can beat the shit out of the competition if they want to.
(*) Without explaining the details, let's just say that I know that phenomenon/feeling and how it affects Philips first-hand, OK? I'd have to go AC to explain this in more detail, something that at this point I can not do anymore in this dicsussion.
Slightly off topic, but anyway: Hybrid cars are the future. Just do the maths on oil reserves, oil prices, cost of exploitation, natural oil formation rates, etc.: there is no way out of running dry if we continue down the current paths. People who claim that "more reserves will be found" and "pollution caused by cars will be reduced as science progresses" miss the point. If another 50 years of oil supply are found, we only get exactly that: 50 more years. Since we consume at a greate rate than the stuff is being formed, running dry at some point is an unavoidable mathematical certainty. Long before then people will finally (have to) get it and accept that they need to change their ways, for instance by means of hybrid cars. As for the "pollution will get solved argument": that's exactly one of the things the hybrid is for!
Which proves my point. They could outperform the opposition on pure and raw performace and "went for it". At that time they also had the very best naval pilots, because they correctly understood the importance of excellent well-trained pilots in naval warfare and "went for it" all the way, with their typical persistence. But they could not outproduce. WW-II was a war of attrition, which is why the Japanese lost it and were doomed to do so from day 1. Yamamoto knew this very well.
Their new stealth plane does not need to be produced in huge volumes. It just needs to be good (ideally for them, read that as: better).
The Japanese surpised the US at Pearl Harbour, not only because it was a sneak attack, but also because it proved once and for all that in naval warfare the era of big-guns was over and the airplane would rule. In contrast to the Nippon Kaigun, the US navy had not yet understood this at the time, but the Pearl Harbor attack forced them into it. Many navies had carriers in 1940-1941, but only the Japanese understood what they were good for. That's not exactly an example of "take an existing success and improved it to perfection", but of a "change the paradigm". Actually, an American general saw the light in the 1920s as well, but was not believed in the US and court-martialled for his persistence. (So yes, it could be argued that the Japanese heard the idea from him, and I cannot prove that they had it already, but Mitchell's idea was not generally believed to be a good one. And that crucially is what the Japanese understood before embarking on their naval building programs.)
Interestingly, the ever-imaginative rocket-inventing Germans - who by the way also invented the true submarine (their revolutionary Type XXI) for replacing the "boats that also could dive if really needed" that everyone else was using, completely failed to see the importance of carriers throughout the war. With that I want to point out that it is not correct to extrapolate from one (actually even misunderstood) failure to do something to a general caracteristic. Carrier building and developing the correct doctrine to use them effectively takes time, and since the Germans didn't have a real navy in between 1918 and roughly about 1936 they didn't have that time. It doesn't make them idiots, though.
The Japanese collapse started at the combined battles in the Coral Sea and Midway (exactly after the six months predicted by Yamamoto), where they crucially lost most of their carrier fleet and experienced pilots. They simply did not have the resources to replace those. At that moment in time, the US was dangerously close to running out of carriers as well (just imagine Midway going the other way), but they had the resources to build many more in no time and they had the people to man them.
And on top of all that there is the entire Japanese oil shortage thing that prevented them from doing many things they would have liked to do. What use it is to mass-produce new planes (assuming for a moment you can do that) for carriers that you no longer have and can't build and that you couldn't effectively operate anyway for lack of oil and pilots.
The military game is not about volume and mass production anymore, as it was back in those days. The Zero was better than anything the allies had at the time, but in terms of people volume and production volume the US was non-beatable, at least once they were awake, something Admiral Yamamoto predicted very accurately when he said "I can run wild for six months... after that, I have no expectation of success." The Pacific half of WWII was one of attrition. (The other half of it also was one, actually, once the little madman in Germany pulled in the USSR and the US.) There will never again be a war like WWII, and certainly to between Japan and anyone.
The military game nowadays is about high-tech capabilities, and its economic counterpart is about producing the support for those and selling that. I have no doubt whatsoever that the Japanese can beat the sh*t out of the US in this area if they really want to. If they don't, it'll only be for a "lack of wanting" imposed by their history. not for a lack of ability.
Besides, Japan beat the US in the car industry hands-down by doing just that: focus on becoming, being, and remaining better and persist until success is assured, no matter what. And that even was partly a volume game, meaning they beat the US on its home turf.
509 is also still around. As is 508, a gentleman I've never met until yesterday, as documented in my posting history. But we all loose big time compared no 1, anyway, so let's stop bragging.
Maybe the exagerated collective interest in her on this site back when she was young? Especially as they all wanted her petrified, besides naked. Now if that isn't suspicious...
Hey, after 10 years I finally get the meet the man standing just in front me in the line of uids... Pleased to meet you...:-) I was slowly getting convinced that by now I was about the only one still standing in that range. Sort of a lonely "last of the real slashdotians" feeling.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
They could try to settle the counterclaims. Sure, they have no full control over that, but than again they may not need to have that. See also an other post of mine.
Actually, at least based on the limited info I have seen, from a purely financial point of view Novell should be happy. SCO does not have the money that it owes Novell, but YCM does. So, actually, I wouldn't be surprised to find out later that Novell helped to set it all up.
Please note that the deal will cost YCM more than $36m, so their valuation of the thing they'd be acquiring must be considerably higher as well.
If they behave sensibly, they will stop the lawsuits and pay Novell (that is: on top of the $36m). Next they will need to spend some money to clean up the mess and carve up the pieces. Only after that has been resolved, can they think of selling the viable bits and making a profit.
If they do not behave sensibly, they will continue the lawsuits and loose more money in the process (e.g. on legal fees). Even if they think they still have a chance of winning something along the way, they sure know very well that odds are against them and they will have taken that into account during their risk calculations while valueing SCO.
Companies such as YCM do not step into a very risky deal like this one without a clear view on a sizeable return on investment that would compensate for all the risk. I have a feeling that a few years from now the YCM-SCO example might become standard case study in business schools.
Because they're just buying the assets and not the debts, bad name, lawsuits, etc. SCO gets to keep all that junk. ;-)
Which as such would seem like good news for Novell, because then there would be $36m more to grab from the SCO corpse.
However, TFA clearly states that YCM would be taking over the litigation claims as well. The whole idea is that said SCO corpse actually remains viable by focusing on something other than UNIX and litigation. Novell will then need to collect the money it is due from YCM (which is a good thing for them as well, since YCM actually has that money).
The thing that I don't like about this scheme, is that YCM will (wisely) withdraw all the lawsuits before focusing on making a profit out of the deal. This means that at the end of the whole 4 year mess, there will be no clear verdict stating how badly SCO has behaved.
I can't know whether he's listening, but for York Capital Management to make a profit out of the operation, they need something viable they can sell. The parent post is in essence pointing at the support contracts for already installed POS devices as that viable thing.
The world does not consist of only IT admins and users such as secretaries and pointy-haired drones. There are all sorts of intermediate levels of "users" who actually develop software. While the latter are the ones affected most by these problems, they are more often than not "not IT staff". I.e. they are not the ones who decide (e.g. under pressure from some vendor who no longer supports XP on the newest lease PC model) to upgrade the standard company desktop config.
I've been in the situation (not with Vista, fortunately) and I can assure you that the average decision maker w.r.t. such issues has no clue of how it all impacts the developers. What's more, even the real gurus within IT don't know: they may be expert admins, but generally will be amateur developers. A similar relation usually holds in the opposite direction. Being a senior developer who also ha(s/d) a decent understanding of administration, one of my many tasks in my former company was to line up IT and users - developers as well as others - on exactly these issues. It sure was not always easy.
One word (at least on any decent UNIX-like system): /etc/shadow. That reduces the set of dangerous inside people to just those who don't need to crack because they can bypass/read anyway. Sure, even those might have a use for actually cracking your system password and trying to use it to decrypt stuff for which their mere root powers won't help, but you simply always have to trust somebody. Unless you're so paranoid you only want to be a one-(wo)man shop, of course.
You're not the only one. A single idiot can do more damage than 10 wise men can repair.
Nope! :-)
And how do you plan to identify the winner amongst those that still post regularly? And what do you plan to do about people who used to post only every so often due to lack of time, but who have since returned to their old habbits due to no more lack of time? Hint, there's someone like that very close by... :-)
:-P you! :-)
Vtwm has had this since at least February 1992. Admittedly that's later than the 1991 patent date, but with some further digging into history, vtwm might stil become prior art. I have memories of using it earlier than that, at least.
In any case, the fact that nobody filed suit against the vtwm developers/distributors for over 15 years shows that the owners for a very long time didn't exploit their patent the way they should have.
I won't say that photoshop professionals can't do better, but please note:
I did not say I'm a photoshop novice, I only said that I tried that particular thing once and thet the result was no perfect;
Mirroring faces does not work, as human faces are not symmetrical.
Try it: take a picture of a face, and make one in which the left half is a mirror image of the right half and one in which the right half is a mirror image of the left half. Not only will you find that both versions differ, but it is even the case that one of them consistently looks more friendly/pleasant than the other one. This implies that if you just mirror a complete face, the manipulation is easily detected, since the wrong half will now yield the nicer picture.
Besides, the whole mirroring thing can not even be considered if the picture shows the face at angle.
That might be doable with one picture, but to do it multiple times is in another league. For starters he'd have to have multiple suitable pictures of his victim, fitting the pose and lighting of each of the filthy pictures that he'd want to plug them into.
Just for fun and for exploring technology, I once tried to photoshop one picture of my own head onto another of my own torso. Even though I was wearing very similar shirts (color, but especially shape of colar) in both pictures, it was bloody hard to do. And even though it looked reasonable in the end, it never fully worked. One part of the hair had an identifiable false edge, and the lighting was not perfect either (too much difference in direction between both originals).
The way out (for them) is to have - and show when asked - a list of whatever number they previously claimed to have, even if they know full well that some of those patents don't hold up to scrutiny. As there is no proof that the one particular patent that might trigger the whole discussion to become "real" in court was or was not in their original list, all they need to do is to claim a lower number than what they really think they might be able to use. That way they can always produce a suitable list, hiding any specific patent that they really think stands a chance until the very last day and claiming that thet one was not on the list.
You don't want anyone to read your email ? Then encrypt it. Period.
That's fine with non-webmail. But with webmail (assuming you even can encrypt it in that case, which I doubt very much with any of the available providers) at least the webmail provider must read the mail in order to display it to you.
More importantly, there's a big difference between being able to catch individual mails along the way and reading and analysing my 20 (yes: two-zero) years of e-mail history.
Yes and no. What the Royal Navy did at Taranto was indeed "the corect thing to do". But overall, they generally operated their carriers as eskorts of their other (battle)ships, whereas the Japanese set up fully autonomous carrier battlegroups that they operated as such. That, to me at least, shows a deeper understmding of where things were going.
The Japanese battleships at Midway were a waste, indeed, meant to kill anything left standing by the time they'd have gotten there, be it crippled US carriers or the island defences. But, crucially, the core of the Midway plan was to use the island as diversion to draw in and kill the US carriers in a direct carrier-to-carrier battle.
To me, this is clear proof that they - or at least their commander-in-chief, which in the given context is/was enough - knew what they needed and wanted to do. Yes, a considerable part of their (senior) officer corps was not yet convinced - as a naval reserve officer I have a bit of a right to say that navies are very conservative communities :-) - but what matters is that who's really in charge has understood. In any case, some US officials still want to see the by now totally anachronistic battlewagons come back into service even in 2007. Idiots and fools are of all times and nations.
The problem for the Japanese at Midway was that the US flattops were already present at the scene and didn't need to be drawn in (combined with the fact that the Yorktown should not have been there at all, but that it in fact was). So, while they knew what they wanted do to, the Japanese didn't know what they were actually doing, which went on to be their downfall. At least within the scope of Midway, that is, because overall they would have lost the Pacific war in the end anyway, even if Midway would have worked out to perfection.
Which makes how much, 0.001% perhaps, of the current market for cars?
That's beside the point. It has been stated above that the Japanese only copy and do not invent and it has even been implied that they are incapable of inventing anything that requires a major breakthough or paradigm shift. (That's a racist claim, actually!) The hybrid car serves as counterproof to those claims. It is not meant as proof of immediate commercial success of everything the Japanese do.
Ditto for the photography market...
Again, that's beside the point.
The short answer is "NO". The long answer is "it was invented by Philips, a Dutch company, but Sony came in right at the beginning, because Philips didn't have all the manufacturing capability available".
At least you got that one right. But there's more to it than meets the eye. Philips did not just lack manufacturing capability. They also had no clue what to do with the product to make it a success. It's actually an instance of "the Philips disease": they invent a lot of great stuff, but they suck quite badly at making it a commercial success, because the company is run in essence by engineers and scientists. (*) Sony, on the other hand, knows how to make a product a succes, be it they own (the walkman) or someone else's (the CD). Which is one of the reasons why people in this thread are confident that the Japanese can beat the shit out of the competition if they want to.
(*) Without explaining the details, let's just say that I know that phenomenon/feeling and how it affects Philips first-hand, OK? I'd have to go AC to explain this in more detail, something that at this point I can not do anymore in this dicsussion.
Slightly off topic, but anyway: Hybrid cars are the future. Just do the maths on oil reserves, oil prices, cost of exploitation, natural oil formation rates, etc.: there is no way out of running dry if we continue down the current paths. People who claim that "more reserves will be found" and "pollution caused by cars will be reduced as science progresses" miss the point. If another 50 years of oil supply are found, we only get exactly that: 50 more years. Since we consume at a greate rate than the stuff is being formed, running dry at some point is an unavoidable mathematical certainty. Long before then people will finally (have to) get it and accept that they need to change their ways, for instance by means of hybrid cars. As for the "pollution will get solved argument": that's exactly one of the things the hybrid is for!
Which proves my point. They could outperform the opposition on pure and raw performace and "went for it". At that time they also had the very best naval pilots, because they correctly understood the importance of excellent well-trained pilots in naval warfare and "went for it" all the way, with their typical persistence. But they could not outproduce. WW-II was a war of attrition, which is why the Japanese lost it and were doomed to do so from day 1. Yamamoto knew this very well.
Their new stealth plane does not need to be produced in huge volumes. It just needs to be good (ideally for them, read that as: better).
The Japanese surpised the US at Pearl Harbour, not only because it was a sneak attack, but also because it proved once and for all that in naval warfare the era of big-guns was over and the airplane would rule. In contrast to the Nippon Kaigun, the US navy had not yet understood this at the time, but the Pearl Harbor attack forced them into it. Many navies had carriers in 1940-1941, but only the Japanese understood what they were good for. That's not exactly an example of "take an existing success and improved it to perfection", but of a "change the paradigm". Actually, an American general saw the light in the 1920s as well, but was not believed in the US and court-martialled for his persistence. (So yes, it could be argued that the Japanese heard the idea from him, and I cannot prove that they had it already, but Mitchell's idea was not generally believed to be a good one. And that crucially is what the Japanese understood before embarking on their naval building programs.)
Interestingly, the ever-imaginative rocket-inventing Germans - who by the way also invented the true submarine (their revolutionary Type XXI) for replacing the "boats that also could dive if really needed" that everyone else was using, completely failed to see the importance of carriers throughout the war. With that I want to point out that it is not correct to extrapolate from one (actually even misunderstood) failure to do something to a general caracteristic. Carrier building and developing the correct doctrine to use them effectively takes time, and since the Germans didn't have a real navy in between 1918 and roughly about 1936 they didn't have that time. It doesn't make them idiots, though.
The Japanese collapse started at the combined battles in the Coral Sea and Midway (exactly after the six months predicted by Yamamoto), where they crucially lost most of their carrier fleet and experienced pilots. They simply did not have the resources to replace those. At that moment in time, the US was dangerously close to running out of carriers as well (just imagine Midway going the other way), but they had the resources to build many more in no time and they had the people to man them.
And on top of all that there is the entire Japanese oil shortage thing that prevented them from doing many things they would have liked to do. What use it is to mass-produce new planes (assuming for a moment you can do that) for carriers that you no longer have and can't build and that you couldn't effectively operate anyway for lack of oil and pilots.
The military game is not about volume and mass production anymore, as it was back in those days. The Zero was better than anything the allies had at the time, but in terms of people volume and production volume the US was non-beatable, at least once they were awake, something Admiral Yamamoto predicted very accurately when he said "I can run wild for six months ... after that, I have no expectation of success." The Pacific half of WWII was one of attrition. (The other half of it also was one, actually, once the little madman in Germany pulled in the USSR and the US.) There will never again be a war like WWII, and certainly to between Japan and anyone.
The military game nowadays is about high-tech capabilities, and its economic counterpart is about producing the support for those and selling that. I have no doubt whatsoever that the Japanese can beat the sh*t out of the US in this area if they really want to. If they don't, it'll only be for a "lack of wanting" imposed by their history. not for a lack of ability.
Besides, Japan beat the US in the car industry hands-down by doing just that: focus on becoming, being, and remaining better and persist until success is assured, no matter what. And that even was partly a volume game, meaning they beat the US on its home turf.
509 is also still around. As is 508, a gentleman I've never met until yesterday, as documented in my posting history. But we all loose big time compared no 1, anyway, so let's stop bragging.
Maybe the exagerated collective interest in her on this site back when she was young? Especially as they all wanted her petrified, besides naked. Now if that isn't suspicious...
Did you notice that the poll question actually childishly asks people to read the editorial before voting? Boy, have we grown up since then...
Hey, after 10 years I finally get the meet the man standing just in front me in the line of uids... Pleased to meet you... :-) I was slowly getting convinced that by now I was about the only one still standing in that range. Sort of a lonely "last of the real slashdotians" feeling. :-)