Well, that's exactly my point. I don't think the court is saying that Playboy owns the words "playboy " and "playmate". But what they ARE saying is that other companies can use THESE words to push their own products that are NOT Playboy. You have to be careful in what you read and not determine logically the converse (or contrapositive) statement.
And if Penthouse wants to show their ad each time someone searches for Playboy, why the hell not? Trademarks were supposed to do a very simply thing - let the customer be sure that the product A is always made by the company X (unless they sell their brand or sell a division, or are acquired - suddenly nobody cares about consumer confusion, consumers be damned).
I'm not sure how the legal domain gets when it comes to trademarks, but you make a good point. They are supposed to "let the customer be sure that the product A is always made by company X". I think the law of customer confusion is based on this trademark law.
The phrase often used about 10 years ago was "Kill your TV" as response to the mindlessness of people who watch TV like drones for several hours a day.
The fact that they are developing this for, what would be my guess, a substitute to "real exercise" makes me wonder: Have we gone too far?
Will people 10 years from now be saying:
Kill your Playstation!
Kill your Computer! Kill your Internet Connection!
My understanding is that Google sells ads based on keywords entered into search. I'm willing to guess that most ad systems work in a very similar, if not exact, way. If it does, then Excite is culpable for allowing the words "playboy" and "playmate" to be associated with non-Playboy forms of entertainment.
Excite, who is SELLING this service, has the responsibility to uphold law. You can also be culpable by "gross negligence" and/or "aiding and abetting unlawful activities".
Well, for one, it had an extreme bent against the 9th circuit. I'd call it more of an op-ed piece than a news article as it was obviously filled with bias.
Secondly, I read through most of her example and I couldn't help but think, 'They've gotta have a better example of this.' I know the 9th circuit court has liberal leanings, but a case involving search and seizure where the guy is in the shower.. i mean COME ON. First of all, the case, in itself, doesn't have much consequence IMO. Yeah yeah I'm against fighting drugs and what not but the situation in dispute doesn't have much consequence IMO.
So, even if I disagreed with the ruling, who cares? If you're going to knock the 9th circuit court provide an example of greater consequence.
I agree with you accept I think you're a bit confused. The PREVIOUS (initial) court denied any case of trademark infringement while the LATTER court said there was trademark infringement.
Additionally, I disagree with the comments by the main poster. Even though the initial decision is being overturned, I don't think the 9th circuit is disagreeing with the statement: "English words is akin to use of the trademarks, the holder of a trademark may not remove a word from the English language merely by acquiring trademark rights in it."
I think what the 9th circuit is saying is that if you use english words that are obviously trademarks in order to mislead and confuse a consumer (especially into purchasing a different product) then that goes beyond the rights granted of just using English words. (i.e. You can yell "fire" at home, in your backyard, whatever. Freedom of speech. But if you yell "fire" in a movietheater then you're liable if anyone gets injured. It's circumstantial.)
I think the article sums up the point here: "In Playboy's case, it charged Excite with trademark infringement when it sold banner ads to adult-related sites keyed to the terms "playboy" and "playmate," arguing that it created consumer confusion and diluted its trademarked names."
I imagine they are a bunch of pale white (from no sun), techie hacker nerds (from being indoors all day and hacking), with the latest cool cell phones (well, yeah).
"Put more simply, the problem is not that Linux sucks, it just needs to have larger market share before hardware manufacturers pay attention and bother with the hassle of trying to deal with Linux (multiple distros, multiple DEs, etc)."
I'm not trolling but I'm trying to make a point. If I plug in my wireless lan card and it doesn't work it DOES SUCK (relative to east automatic recognition in Windows). Yes, it's all subjective but I guess the point I'm making is that many people think that Linux sucks (or part of it sucks) because of this lack of hardware support. (In reality I have a love/hate relationship with Linux.)
I was interested by your comments about market share and it made me reflect on the many governments that are adopting Linux around the world. Perhaps, China is our answer. This is a long shot guess, but I think there's a good chance for widespread open source adoption out there and eventually this will lead to the consumer level. I can easily see groups being inspired to being dedicated to making Linux usable to the everyday user.
Well, for one, one should ask: What is the market? (yes, yes, I know this has been asked before)
As for now Linux seems to be moving more towards a user-friendly, home type of user but I still think it has a way to go and is still for the "hacker". I tried installing the Fedora Core last night on my laptop and I couldn't get the wireless lan card to work (lack of hardware support).
However, there is definitely an improvement. A couple years ago I had problems with my keyboard. Before that the installer was a bit confusing, and about 5 years ago I had even bigger problems. Progress has definitely been made.
But if we want to talk about the home user, let's just look at Mac OS (X/10/whatever..sorry dont' follow mac that well). They were able to take a unix core and make it usable to the home user. Perhaps they have the advantage of having only to support hardware made by them, but I think they are a prime example of how *nix can/have been brought to the masses.
Ah yes. I guess the key thing to note is that it's "SQL server" not "SQL Server" (note uppercase). I thought for some reason they were running something for fun. I knew they were running some open source sql (mysql or postgresql). Anyway, thx.
I'd say that the reason WHY Linux gained popularility was because it was an open OS and Linus was able to get support from the community. I find it hard to not open it and expect people to start contributing.
That's some serious hardware. From a web application point of view, it probably helps that the majority of content from/. is text instead of images. I'm sure that cuts down on bandwidth a lot.
What I found most curious was that/. runs SQL Server. May I ask why?
Re:How long before people start gaming the system?
on
IBM vs. Content Chaos
·
· Score: 1
My initial response would be that the power of data mining is supposed to make this sort of "gaming" negligible since data mining is about analyzing an incredibly amount of data sources instead of a random few.
However, there is one thing I should note. I'm not sure how sensitive Google is to gaming. I know they have Google bombing but isn't this only possible with the cooperations of thousands of bloggers? If not, then there's definitely something wrong with teh system. Theoretically, though, a data mining system should analyze an extremely large number of sources making it difficult to game the system (difficult but not impossible i suppose).
This reminds me of tech magazines (in printed form) today. You can easily pick up a tech business or tech computer magazine and you'll these "artiles" with a tiny label along the top saying "special advertising section". They are basically advertisements made to look like articles. Anyway this is the first thing that comes to mind when I read your first comment that spiders needs to distinguish when a site is selling something and when it isn't. The point is even as humans that's hard to tell.
On a broader outlook, look at media? Media is always selling something even if it's CNN News.
I suppose, though, you could distinguish between an "article" and an ecommerce page.
Lol. I didn't look at the poster until you have just mentioned it.
I disagree. You're right in the tech can add more jobs and about aerospace in the 60s but if you put those 2 facts together you've got nothing. Why? Because saying "tech helps create jobs" is too vague a statement to hold any water. It really depends on what you're talking about.
The only jobs that going to space would create is government jobs (via Nasa, JPL, whatever). Ok, so taht would be more jobs but paid by whom. Mister Taxpayer (directly). This has helped before (i.e. FDR public projects) but at least with FDR we build infrastructure to support the economy that grew thereafter. With space we woudlnt' (unless we really did need to go into space). The only way it could truly help our economy is if this journey helped create technologies that could be used elsewhere (like how DARPA created the Internet for military use at first but is now used for ecommerce, etc).
Aerospace was big in the 60-80s because of the cold war. But the cold war is dead. Big wars with insane submarines, massive fleets of planes, and millions of troops is dead. The only war left (until we encounter aliens or fight China) is terrorism which is a more focused, high-tech war. So this wouldn't create many jobs either.
Huh. I consider myself conservative, but I kinda like the idea. Go figure.
Try reading the news. There's an uproar amongst conservatives regarding Bush's desire to increase the budget on space spending. I heard it myself this morning on CNN. It makes sense anyway since the conservative fiscal policy is for SMALLER government not bigger government.
I thought it was obvious that I was talking about the general notion, not every geek's.
First: point taken on the mud-hut issue. I stand by my point, though, that there is much more -- let's call it investment latency, I'm sure there's a real econ term for it -- in getting money back from dollars spent in Bangalore than there is from dollars spent in the valley.
Well, yes and no. Perhaps there is investment latency in IT but not in other areas. Sure companies might not be fighting to buy more IT products in India, but I'm sure the amount of dollars they spend on 1) American clothing, 2) American Coca-Cola, 3) American SUVs/trucks have skyrocketed. America actually has brands and products that people like outside of IT.
The yawning trade gap tells us that we're sending much more money overseas than we're getting from them. The world still need us more than we need them.
Ok, but it still seems like a fool's errand to try to keep the money here. It assumes that if we started hiring people in droves (less than 1999 but more than now) that it would remarkable improve our economy. I think this is very, very wrong. Companies have had to cut costs to offer cheaper prices JUST TO SURVIVE. Look at how much profits have fallen for companies since the bust. There just isn't the demand for IT, so even if we hired more here we wouldnt' necessarily have more people to sell it too. The only way it seems to increase demand is to decrease the cost (which increases the supply).
It's to slap a 33% tariff on SAP until they can certify that they're paying all of their workers and all their subcontractors' workers a fair wage while maintaining environmental and human rights standards.
I know how you feel but I don't think it's a solution. If anything I think it's throwing a wrench into the system because what it means is that companies here will have to spend more for products. That money lost could've been spent producing other things, or making other things cheaper. On their end, their companies make less profit and the same happens to them. It's the classic fall behind isolationism and protectionism. I guess you can call me a free trader considering how I feel that Clinton's free trade policies help produced a record amount of jobs.
Could someone verify this? This sounds very wrong.
The sky on every other planet in our solar system is NOT blue. Mars looks red, Jupiter looks red, Saturn looks a bit more orange, etc.
Feel free to prove me wrong but I was always under the impression that Earth was unique because of our atmosphere in that it is saturated with water (urr or hydrogen and oxygen) and therefore scatters blue light whereas other planets DO NOT. I thought this is part of what made our planet uniquely habitable (since our atmosphere protects us from deadly x-rays while others do not).
Is it political? OF COURSE! One would be an idiot not to think so.
Let's take a look at the current state of our union. We're facing record deficits, we're engaged in a two-front war, the economy is in the shitter and Bush still wants to expand the space program/NASA/JPL/whatever? Even the conservatives are shocked and angered by these words.
Don't get me wrong. As a geek and someone who really used to be into astronomy there's be nothing more I'd like to see more than space exploration. I'm just trying to say it like it is.
I skimmed the article and, personally, I think it's less about uniting the people and more about crony capitalism. How would a mission to mars (habitation, more satellites, whatever) unite the people? It's ludicrous to compare it to Kennedy. At that time, no one had gone to the moon and we were in competition with Russia. Since then we've built a space station so I think the popular opinion is that it wouldn't be so much of a quantum leap to colonize a planet (I'm not saying it's easy, I'm just talking about popular notion). Plus we have no competition so there would be less of a sense of patriotism behind it.
The way I see it he just wants to throw some funds back into his home state. That seems like the most logical and simple explanation.
This leads me to question whether it's even possible or relevant to compare these languages (as has been repeated many times over). Perhaps it's like comparing a hammer to a screwdriver (in the sense that people use the right language for the job).
Perhaps they've gone the way of HP (and many other consumer electronic companies for that matter) who moved their product to other countries that have worse quality controls and make for cheaper products (both in price and quality).
That's why you see this odd paradox where old products (10 years old) that were made in Japan still work great but new products made elsewhere (Indonesia, Mexico, Phillipines?) have a shelf-life of 2 years.
Yes, I was about to say that sooner or later laptops will be so light that people will be afraid to use them outdoors lest they be blown away in the wind. Soon we will be needing laptop-weights just to hold them down.
If the US wants to still be the leader in this world it's going to have to work out like that. But that's what happened with farming and textiles. The country went dirt poor when we stopped farming so people left rural cities for urban ones. Then we shipped textiles and white collar jobs became popular. What scares me is that now we're shipping white collar jobs, so what's next?
I'll venture a guess: a massive creation of people with advanced degrees. Take a look at any tech job today and you either have to have 8-10 years experience in a specific technology and/or a master/phd. The only work staying here is the specialty work which requires advanced degrees. So there's your demand. Supply-wise more and more students are going back to school for advanced degrees.
This makes sense in the global picture because the only advantage we really have now is to re-train ourselves (either horizontally (like in another trade) or vertically (more advanced knowledge)).
But dont' take my words for as someone who is not sympathetic. I've been out of work for a good amount of time and if it weren't for unemployment or the security of parents to support me I might have ended up on the streets. Sadly, there seems to be no end in sight except for 1) a crappy job ( which is a blessing and a curse in itself) or 2) switching careers.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that's exactly my point. I don't think the court is saying that Playboy owns the words "playboy " and "playmate". But what they ARE saying is that other companies can use THESE words to push their own products that are NOT Playboy. You have to be careful in what you read and not determine logically the converse (or contrapositive) statement.
And if Penthouse wants to show their ad each time someone searches for Playboy, why the hell not? Trademarks were supposed to do a very simply thing - let the customer be sure that the product A is always made by the company X (unless they sell their brand or sell a division, or are acquired - suddenly nobody cares about consumer confusion, consumers be damned).
I'm not sure how the legal domain gets when it comes to trademarks, but you make a good point. They are supposed to "let the customer be sure that the product A is always made by company X". I think the law of customer confusion is based on this trademark law.
The phrase often used about 10 years ago was "Kill your TV" as response to the mindlessness of people who watch TV like drones for several hours a day.
The fact that they are developing this for, what would be my guess, a substitute to "real exercise" makes me wonder: Have we gone too far?
Will people 10 years from now be saying:
Kill your Playstation!
Kill your Computer! Kill your Internet Connection!
Interesting point.
My understanding is that Google sells ads based on keywords entered into search. I'm willing to guess that most ad systems work in a very similar, if not exact, way. If it does, then Excite is culpable for allowing the words "playboy" and "playmate" to be associated with non-Playboy forms of entertainment.
Exactly.
Excite, who is SELLING this service, has the responsibility to uphold law. You can also be culpable by "gross negligence" and/or "aiding and abetting unlawful activities".
Read the article.
Well, for one, it had an extreme bent against the 9th circuit. I'd call it more of an op-ed piece than a news article as it was obviously filled with bias.
Secondly, I read through most of her example and I couldn't help but think, 'They've gotta have a better example of this.' I know the 9th circuit court has liberal leanings, but a case involving search and seizure where the guy is in the shower.. i mean COME ON. First of all, the case, in itself, doesn't have much consequence IMO. Yeah yeah I'm against fighting drugs and what not but the situation in dispute doesn't have much consequence IMO.
So, even if I disagreed with the ruling, who cares? If you're going to knock the 9th circuit court provide an example of greater consequence.
I agree with you accept I think you're a bit confused. The PREVIOUS (initial) court denied any case of trademark infringement while the LATTER court said there was trademark infringement.
Additionally, I disagree with the comments by the main poster. Even though the initial decision is being overturned, I don't think the 9th circuit is disagreeing with the statement: "English words is akin to use of the trademarks, the holder of a trademark may not remove a word from the English language merely by acquiring trademark rights in it."
I think what the 9th circuit is saying is that if you use english words that are obviously trademarks in order to mislead and confuse a consumer (especially into purchasing a different product) then that goes beyond the rights granted of just using English words. (i.e. You can yell "fire" at home, in your backyard, whatever. Freedom of speech. But if you yell "fire" in a movietheater then you're liable if anyone gets injured. It's circumstantial.)
I think the article sums up the point here: "In Playboy's case, it charged Excite with trademark infringement when it sold banner ads to adult-related sites keyed to the terms "playboy" and "playmate," arguing that it created consumer confusion and diluted its trademarked names."
Or how about something commonly seen on slashdot?
Trollers troll trolls
Finnish mafia?
I imagine they are a bunch of pale white (from no sun), techie hacker nerds (from being indoors all day and hacking), with the latest cool cell phones (well, yeah).
"Put more simply, the problem is not that Linux sucks, it just needs to have larger market share before hardware manufacturers pay attention and bother with the hassle of trying to deal with Linux (multiple distros, multiple DEs, etc)."
I'm not trolling but I'm trying to make a point. If I plug in my wireless lan card and it doesn't work it DOES SUCK (relative to east automatic recognition in Windows). Yes, it's all subjective but I guess the point I'm making is that many people think that Linux sucks (or part of it sucks) because of this lack of hardware support. (In reality I have a love/hate relationship with Linux.)
I was interested by your comments about market share and it made me reflect on the many governments that are adopting Linux around the world. Perhaps, China is our answer. This is a long shot guess, but I think there's a good chance for widespread open source adoption out there and eventually this will lead to the consumer level. I can easily see groups being inspired to being dedicated to making Linux usable to the everyday user.
Well, for one, one should ask: What is the market? (yes, yes, I know this has been asked before)
As for now Linux seems to be moving more towards a user-friendly, home type of user but I still think it has a way to go and is still for the "hacker". I tried installing the Fedora Core last night on my laptop and I couldn't get the wireless lan card to work (lack of hardware support).
However, there is definitely an improvement. A couple years ago I had problems with my keyboard. Before that the installer was a bit confusing, and about 5 years ago I had even bigger problems. Progress has definitely been made.
But if we want to talk about the home user, let's just look at Mac OS (X/10/whatever..sorry dont' follow mac that well). They were able to take a unix core and make it usable to the home user. Perhaps they have the advantage of having only to support hardware made by them, but I think they are a prime example of how *nix can/have been brought to the masses.
Ah yes. I guess the key thing to note is that it's "SQL server" not "SQL Server" (note uppercase). I thought for some reason they were running something for fun. I knew they were running some open source sql (mysql or postgresql). Anyway, thx.
Chicken and the egg.
I'd say that the reason WHY Linux gained popularility was because it was an open OS and Linus was able to get support from the community. I find it hard to not open it and expect people to start contributing.
Interesting.
/. is text instead of images. I'm sure that cuts down on bandwidth a lot.
/. runs SQL Server. May I ask why?
That's some serious hardware. From a web application point of view, it probably helps that the majority of content from
What I found most curious was that
My initial response would be that the power of data mining is supposed to make this sort of "gaming" negligible since data mining is about analyzing an incredibly amount of data sources instead of a random few.
However, there is one thing I should note. I'm not sure how sensitive Google is to gaming. I know they have Google bombing but isn't this only possible with the cooperations of thousands of bloggers? If not, then there's definitely something wrong with teh system. Theoretically, though, a data mining system should analyze an extremely large number of sources making it difficult to game the system (difficult but not impossible i suppose).
This reminds me of tech magazines (in printed form) today. You can easily pick up a tech business or tech computer magazine and you'll these "artiles" with a tiny label along the top saying "special advertising section". They are basically advertisements made to look like articles. Anyway this is the first thing that comes to mind when I read your first comment that spiders needs to distinguish when a site is selling something and when it isn't. The point is even as humans that's hard to tell.
On a broader outlook, look at media? Media is always selling something even if it's CNN News.
I suppose, though, you could distinguish between an "article" and an ecommerce page.
Lol. I didn't look at the poster until you have just mentioned it.
I disagree. You're right in the tech can add more jobs and about aerospace in the 60s but if you put those 2 facts together you've got nothing. Why? Because saying "tech helps create jobs" is too vague a statement to hold any water. It really depends on what you're talking about.
The only jobs that going to space would create is government jobs (via Nasa, JPL, whatever). Ok, so taht would be more jobs but paid by whom. Mister Taxpayer (directly). This has helped before (i.e. FDR public projects) but at least with FDR we build infrastructure to support the economy that grew thereafter. With space we woudlnt' (unless we really did need to go into space). The only way it could truly help our economy is if this journey helped create technologies that could be used elsewhere (like how DARPA created the Internet for military use at first but is now used for ecommerce, etc).
Aerospace was big in the 60-80s because of the cold war. But the cold war is dead. Big wars with insane submarines, massive fleets of planes, and millions of troops is dead. The only war left (until we encounter aliens or fight China) is terrorism which is a more focused, high-tech war. So this wouldn't create many jobs either.
Huh. I consider myself conservative, but I kinda like the idea. Go figure.
Try reading the news. There's an uproar amongst conservatives regarding Bush's desire to increase the budget on space spending. I heard it myself this morning on CNN. It makes sense anyway since the conservative fiscal policy is for SMALLER government not bigger government.
I thought it was obvious that I was talking about the general notion, not every geek's.
First: point taken on the mud-hut issue. I stand by my point, though, that there is much more -- let's call it investment latency, I'm sure there's a real econ term for it -- in getting money back from dollars spent in Bangalore than there is from dollars spent in the valley.
Well, yes and no. Perhaps there is investment latency in IT but not in other areas. Sure companies might not be fighting to buy more IT products in India, but I'm sure the amount of dollars they spend on 1) American clothing, 2) American Coca-Cola, 3) American SUVs/trucks have skyrocketed. America actually has brands and products that people like outside of IT.
The yawning trade gap tells us that we're sending much more money overseas than we're getting from them. The world still need us more than we need them.
Ok, but it still seems like a fool's errand to try to keep the money here. It assumes that if we started hiring people in droves (less than 1999 but more than now) that it would remarkable improve our economy. I think this is very, very wrong. Companies have had to cut costs to offer cheaper prices JUST TO SURVIVE. Look at how much profits have fallen for companies since the bust. There just isn't the demand for IT, so even if we hired more here we wouldnt' necessarily have more people to sell it too. The only way it seems to increase demand is to decrease the cost (which increases the supply).
It's to slap a 33% tariff on SAP until they can certify that they're paying all of their workers and all their subcontractors' workers a fair wage while maintaining environmental and human rights standards.
I know how you feel but I don't think it's a solution. If anything I think it's throwing a wrench into the system because what it means is that companies here will have to spend more for products. That money lost could've been spent producing other things, or making other things cheaper. On their end, their companies make less profit and the same happens to them. It's the classic fall behind isolationism and protectionism. I guess you can call me a free trader considering how I feel that Clinton's free trade policies help produced a record amount of jobs.
Could someone verify this? This sounds very wrong.
The sky on every other planet in our solar system is NOT blue. Mars looks red, Jupiter looks red, Saturn looks a bit more orange, etc.
Feel free to prove me wrong but I was always under the impression that Earth was unique because of our atmosphere in that it is saturated with water (urr or hydrogen and oxygen) and therefore scatters blue light whereas other planets DO NOT. I thought this is part of what made our planet uniquely habitable (since our atmosphere protects us from deadly x-rays while others do not).
Is it political? OF COURSE! One would be an idiot not to think so.
Let's take a look at the current state of our union. We're facing record deficits, we're engaged in a two-front war, the economy is in the shitter and Bush still wants to expand the space program/NASA/JPL/whatever? Even the conservatives are shocked and angered by these words.
Don't get me wrong. As a geek and someone who really used to be into astronomy there's be nothing more I'd like to see more than space exploration. I'm just trying to say it like it is.
I skimmed the article and, personally, I think it's less about uniting the people and more about crony capitalism. How would a mission to mars (habitation, more satellites, whatever) unite the people? It's ludicrous to compare it to Kennedy. At that time, no one had gone to the moon and we were in competition with Russia. Since then we've built a space station so I think the popular opinion is that it wouldn't be so much of a quantum leap to colonize a planet (I'm not saying it's easy, I'm just talking about popular notion). Plus we have no competition so there would be less of a sense of patriotism behind it.
The way I see it he just wants to throw some funds back into his home state. That seems like the most logical and simple explanation.
Yes another good point.
This leads me to question whether it's even possible or relevant to compare these languages (as has been repeated many times over). Perhaps it's like comparing a hammer to a screwdriver (in the sense that people use the right language for the job).
Mod this baby up!
Yes, let me re-iterate, this is a test of compilers NOT languages.
Perhaps they've gone the way of HP (and many other consumer electronic companies for that matter) who moved their product to other countries that have worse quality controls and make for cheaper products (both in price and quality).
That's why you see this odd paradox where old products (10 years old) that were made in Japan still work great but new products made elsewhere (Indonesia, Mexico, Phillipines?) have a shelf-life of 2 years.
Yes, I was about to say that sooner or later laptops will be so light that people will be afraid to use them outdoors lest they be blown away in the wind. Soon we will be needing laptop-weights just to hold them down.
If the US wants to still be the leader in this world it's going to have to work out like that. But that's what happened with farming and textiles. The country went dirt poor when we stopped farming so people left rural cities for urban ones. Then we shipped textiles and white collar jobs became popular. What scares me is that now we're shipping white collar jobs, so what's next?
I'll venture a guess: a massive creation of people with advanced degrees. Take a look at any tech job today and you either have to have 8-10 years experience in a specific technology and/or a master/phd. The only work staying here is the specialty work which requires advanced degrees. So there's your demand. Supply-wise more and more students are going back to school for advanced degrees.
This makes sense in the global picture because the only advantage we really have now is to re-train ourselves (either horizontally (like in another trade) or vertically (more advanced knowledge)).
But dont' take my words for as someone who is not sympathetic. I've been out of work for a good amount of time and if it weren't for unemployment or the security of parents to support me I might have ended up on the streets. Sadly, there seems to be no end in sight except for 1) a crappy job ( which is a blessing and a curse in itself) or 2) switching careers.