The RIAA doesn't get paid by terrestrial radio stations. Far from it, they pay the radio stations to put songs on their play lists (not directly, it gets washed by a "promoter").
--Dave
Game companies are heavily skewed towards males. I worked for one company with over 100 employees, 3 of them female (one artist, one sound specialist, and the office manager).
On the other hand, my current company is 25% female (artists, QA, and content development, 1 programmer). Something about MMOG's draws a lot more women.
Nobody goes to jail for stealing a billion dollars. Stealing a pack of cigarrettes is a misdemeanour, stealing a car is a felony, but stealing billions of dollars from your investors and employees is the American Dream, just make sure you share enough of the skim with the elected officials and nobody but a few token flunkies will ever wear orange jumpsuits.
The funny part is, if the EU cuts off the US, they also cut most of their connections to each other. Seems that their well-regulated telco monopolies can't seem to agree on how to set up peering arrangements, so large chunks of the intra-Europe IP traffic goes by way of New York and Washington DC.
Okay, I get it, he hates America and thinks that if anyone is going to excercise hegemony over European nations, it should be other European nations. Dumbass, it's called "Divide and Conquer", if the large multi-nationals (which these days are no more American than they are Bermudan, which is where they are theoretically based) wanted to make rebuilding the Internet in their image easier, they'd start by splitting it up into chunks that were easier to manage.
There *are* two spaces, always have been. One where we eat, piss, and fuck, and another where we think, converse, cooperate, and compete. That dichotomy has always been there, all the internet did was remove the last of the trappings of a connection. There's entire worlds in there, I know because I've helped build a couple of them, that have nothing to do with meatspace.
They want to get this out there in their controlled, proprietary form, before Replay/TiVo/Ultimate TV (ie; boxes the customer *owns*) gain market acceptance. If it's the set-top box that they provide, they can forbid you to monkey with it (and have a felony criminal charge that's already on the books and well-established to back it up with).
Since cable TV is a monopoly, you don't have the option of an alternate provider with less restrictive hardware. So, no commercial skips, no sharing TV across the internet, no recording PPV or premium content.
My guess is they'll make it pretty cheap (about as much as a TiVo subscription, and nothing up-front) in order to kill the retail PVR market. If there are no consumer-owned PVR's, there's no permissive PVR use problem.
Slight, but important correction: Academics are biased in favor of tenure . As individuals they may have other biases, and at one institution may lean to the left or right, whichever increases their chances of getting a sinecure. But these other biases generally cancel out.
Since it's using XML from a web-site, if all else fails you could edit your HOSTS files and point it to a different website, or even to a dummy on your local machine. That pre-supposes a reverse engineering of the protocols, in order to generate the proper pages, but that probably won't be too hard, I doubt there's a lot of authentication built into this widget.
Of course, the flip side of that is if someone hacks the DNS for your cable modem and points it to a bogus website, you could get stuck with a Barney marathon. Unless you were *trying* to let your kids watch Barney (which should be classed as abuse), when it would kick out the Playboy Channel.
7 years or so ago, I was arguing with the other posters in net.admin.net-abuse.misc that if we didn't face up to the reality of child pronography on the internet, the congresscritters were going to stomp all over us in order to "save the children". Back then, kiddie porn was being freely and openly traded via the alt.binaries.* groups, with several groups specifically for that kind of material.
However, everyone's "official" viewpoint was "Kiddie porn? I don't see any kiddie porn around here." There was this belief that if we never admitted it was there, it would never be a problem. A few years later, we got the CDA as a result (and yes, the cause and effect chain is pretty direct).
Child predators actually finding a victim through the internet is extremely rare (there have been no more than a few dozen cases in the last decade, even though there are millions of kids online). It's also a perfect story for TV news, and is guaranteed to stick in the memory of people who hear it and don't know a lot about the internet.
You want to know my own personal worst-case PR scenario? Some young kid who plays my game meets up with their Guildmates from the game, and gets raped. For 95%+ of the people in the country, it would be the first time they ever heard of online games. Statistics don't mean a damned thing when it comes to the instincts of parents.
Flouresents don't run directly off 120VAC@60Hz, they use a unit called a "ballast" to step up the voltage. In the new ones, the balast is built into the base of the bulb and is solid state, in the older ones you needed an inductor-based ballast the size of a brick (which is where the characteristic hum of flourescents came from).
I can read by the light of a single candle. Looking at the pages at the link to the company selling these units, it looks like the 36-108 LED models are what you'd want for replacing 60-100 watt bulbs, and then you're looking at $200-550, way too rich for my blood. There's some size issues, too, the 72-108 LED models would have trouble fitting into a lot of standard fixtures.
For commercial use, they look good, reduced replacement costs and power drain would make back the investment in a couple of years (and they're supposed to be good for 10). For home use they need to be half the size and one tenth the price. Say, 5 years from now, after the commercial users have built enough of a market for economies of scale.
That's not so bad. I just bought flourescents to replace some of my incandescents for $10 apiece, and a big part of why wasn't the power savings, it was the reliability. 10 foot ceiling in the kitchen, and outdoor lamps blowing at least once a month, the flourescents went into the same sockets and have a MTBF of 5000 hours. These WLED's are supposed to be good for 20 times that, and would fail "soft" because of the multiple sources in one unit.
$25 to never need to balance on top of that stepladder in the kitchen again? Sounds like a deal to me. I could even see $50. Be even nicer if these don't have the flicker issues of flourescents (which is why I won't use them for reading or near the computer). And it beats the hell out of the RF units, which would kill both my phone and my network.
That's not much (if any) better than flourescents on power efficiency for light output, and if I'm reading that right it means $200-300 worth of WLED's could replace a $10 flourescent tube designed to fit standard sockets (which itself replaces a $1 incandescent). Now, it looks like it might work out in the long term (mean time between failures being 20 times as great for the WLED, and the multiple units involved giving a nice fail-soft capacity), but who wants to front $200 for a light bulb? I just spent 100 bucks on flourescent replacement bulbs in my kitchen and outdoor lamps, but 2 grand?
I can see specialized usages where high-reliability in lamps that are difficult to replace are involved, same way they use colored LED's for a lot of traffic lights these days. Drop the price in half and I can even see some commercial property use. But it's got to come down by a factor of 5-10 before I'd even consider home use.
If *I* write two similar pieces of software for two different employers, functionally structure them in similar ways, but the code was written separately and differs in detail, my employers don't have grounds to sue each other. Even though both them own the IP to the code I wrote.
Of course, a dirty little secret of the programming trade is that every programmer has a set of utility libraries they drag around with them from job to job. I used the same string-parsing library on 6 programs, 3 of which were released commercially from two different companies. Byte-for-byte identical code, much of it copied from various places (books, code snippets posted to Usenet, other programmers I worked with). Little things; tokenizers, white-space strippers, search-and-replace, stuff you use all the time but is never built into the language.
It's hardly an unusual practice, a productive programmer doesn't reinvent the wheel when he's got one right in front of him. But what if a few of those snippets originated in GPL'd source? I don't even *know* the original source of some of that code.
...is some of the sites that he links to (baptist.org, christiananswers.net, etc.). I am forced to believe in either a massive conspiracy to discredit christianity by making them look like complete idiots, or in a seemingly equally improbably conspiracy of idiots to convince themselves they really do have the Whole Truth, and if the rest of us don't take their Word for it, we're all going to hell.
You have a bill you can't get considered by a certain committee, because the chairman is blocking it. You find some related issue that the chairman *won't* block. You introduce a bill for that issue. Later, as the author of the original bill, you may be able to have most or all of the original (blocked) bill added to the bill as an amendment.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present you with Exhibit A: Me.
This weekend, I was fiddling around on mp3.com, and I discovered something odd: I like celtic folk songs. Don't ask me why, I remember hearing them before without it making much of an impression, and it's a little out of character for an aging headbanger.
Today, I bought 2 CD's of celtic music on CD. I ripped them to MP3 so I could actually hear them (I don't own a CD player, and my SB X-Gamer with Cambridge Soundworks speakers sounds better than any stereo I ever owned). I'm listening to them right now.
These are the first CD's I've purchased in 6 years, and the first music CD's I've purchased in 10. Somewhere out there, a musician is making a few bucks they otherwise wouldn't, because I listened (legally) to MP3's from MP3.com.
Of course, celtic folk musicians don't generally get contracts with major record labels, which is exactly the problem as far as the RIAA is concerned. Without the need for radio stations to tell me what music is worth hearing before I put down my cash, who needs the RIAA?
Okay, I'm not understanding what the hell they are talking about. I see a lot of outrage and a demand for money, but no explanation for why they should get it, or how Africa is being singled out for unfair treatment.
Anyone actually have some facts on this? Does an ISP in an African nation face any pricing structures different from those of South America? It does strike me as odd that they are only *now* talking about setting up peering arrangements between themselves, but then it's always struck me as odd that many European countries seem to have better connections to the US than to each other (to the point where they gett better connections through the US than through what little peering exists).
I dunno, I don't suppose I can understand the politics between Europe and Africa any better than Europeans seem to understand our racial politics. And this definitely smells more like a political thing than an economic one.
All it will take to kill the RIAA is *one* major musical trend that they fail to co-opt. They're already hurting, the combination of a radical drop in the cost of goods (cheap CD-burners and PC-based mixing having made it possible to start a new record label with $20K or so) and their unwillingness to clutch "gangsta rap" to their corporate bosom was enough to create a dozen new labels.
The question is, what business model could allow a new band with a new sound to say "screw you" to the RIAA and their extortionate contracts, and still come out better off that they would have?
It strikes me that two things really allow the RIAA to maintain their cartel: Their near complete control of radio playlists, and their heavy spending on advertising in teen magazines. Now, there's been a lot of press lately about how streaming internet radio will get squeezed out by the compulsory liscense, but what if.... Turn it around. What if web-radio turned away from the RIAA and all the music they control and stopped begging for the chance to pimp their manufactured crap bands, and instead signed up unknown bands, for whom the chance to be heard across the world is a chance to sell merchandise and CD's, and book gigs at clubs in other cities?
It can be done, after all. The Butthole Surfers and The Ramones survived for years as "underground" bands, and that was with nothing but word of mouth. Certainly that kind of grass-roots, bottom-up system is what the Net does best. And there are signs of it already, how many people listen to "Trance" music on MP3, *legally*? The creators see more people listening to their music as a good thing.
This is a "Tipping Point" problem. *One* breakout band that refuses to sign to a label, and makes oodles of money anyway, can bring down the whole edifice, which is what the RIAA is really afraid of, and why they want to kill MP3's and music-sharing as a *concept*. Not just because of piracy, which they know really doesn't cost them any money. But because the whole edifice is based on them being the gatekeeper between the talent and the money.
Let's see: 750 years on a high-end desktop, done in 39 days, or roughly 1/10th of a year, so this supercomp is equal to 7500 PC's. So, the SETI@Home network could have run the whole simulation in about a week, for free.
For this they spent $110,000,000 tax dollars? For that matter, how many PC's does the government already own, anyway?
Well, if you want to imagine a "Black Helicopters" scenario, try this one: The RIAA members raised their prices during a consumer spending crunch *knowing* it would hurt sales, so that they could use the resulting drop in sales as "proof" that music-sharing had to be stopped.
After all, it didn't hurt them very much, and it's far more effective political ammo than the same money spent on "Public Awareness" campaigns.
One thing most people commenting seem to miss(being an American myself, I have only an intellectual understanding), is that the UK *is* a class society. Reserving certain public benefits for privileged classes is just *normal* there.
It's normal in the U.S., as well, but we do it by privatizing (having just recently flown, I had my nose rubbed in our own version of a class preference system as first-class passensger, "Platinum Eilte Card" holders, the aged, and the handicapped were all boarded onto the plane before us hoi polloi of able-bodied riding Coach). This is attracting attention because it's a more American approach (based on ability to pay) than British (based on picking the right grandparents).
But this isn't about that, it's about the monitoring, the rest is smokescreen. If your car contains a GPS and you pay tolls based on when, where, and how much you drive, then in some computer the authorities have access to will be a complete record of all travel by all vehicles.
The *obvious* use for that data is to use in law enforcement, but it doesn't have to be limited to disproving an alibi. If you've got the data, and you know your perp was at points A, B, and C on certain dates, you can pull out a list of vehicles that were near those points near those times.
But you can go further, and implement a system similar to that about to be created for air travel in the US: You can analyze driving patterns of known criminals, and from that flag other drivers for special scrutiny. For example, most habitual drunk drivers probably follow similar patterns, driving in the early morning hours from taverns to their homes by back roads. It would be *trivial* for such a system to spot such a pattern and produce a list of places, times, and vehicles for the police to give special scrutiny to.
Of course, nobody likes drunks on the road, so just as we accept sobriety checkpoints, we'd probably accept that. And nobody likes drug smugglers, so we'd accept looking for them, as well. Of course, around the time that your soon-to-be ex-wife is introducing your toll records into court as evidence of your infidelity, you might think things have gone too far. But by then you're pretty much screwed, aren't you? After all, everyone knows those records exist, so you have *no* expectation of privacy.
This is probably the 300th comment, so I doubt anyone is still reading, but something struck me:
Looked at a certain way, the whole edifice of network television along with "branding" is a device for delivering entertainment, and it's a remarkably inefficient device. You buy products, for which a sizable chunk of the price is advertising, which is allocated by highly paid marketing drones to highly paid advertising agencies, who buy airtime from TV networks, who buy programming from producers, who pay cast and crew to make the show.
Doesn't this strike anyone else as incredibly wasteful? How much inefficiency and featherbedding are we supporting by buying products we see advertised on TV?
I mean, come on, the shows I like to watch mostly cost less than $200,000 an episode, and have an audience of around half a million weekly. I'd pay dime, or even a quarter, per episode of Farscape, which would be far cheaper for me than paying $2 more for a box of Tide, *and* would be more lucrative for the producers.
The reason why the networks are scared is because this whole house of cards is built on their being the only conduit between the talent (the production companies) and the money (the advertisers).
Okay, let's get off our "Content control is evil" mindset, and imagine a world where strict copyright controls apply. Someone can charge you money, and send you via broadband a TV program you can only watch *once*. Why do you need anyone between you and the creators of the show taking a cut? Where does the existing (incredibly inefficient) business model fit?
These poor bastards are doomed, they just don't know it. With shows amounting to only 44 minutes of a TV hour (including credits) when it isn't worse (taking 4 hours to play a one hour football game), they are killing the geese that lays the golden eggs. Even if they win, they lose. Strict content controls could be the worst thing to ever happen to them.
I work in a virtual world that exists only in a computer, where I have the powers of a god. My government is trying to use computer technology to track my every move. Mega-corporations have the power to bend that government or any other to their will. People buy robotic pets, and other robots fight each other to destruction for our entertainment. In the same year they find a way to concieve children without fathers, *and* gestate children without mothers, and before the year is out we'll probably see the birth of the first human clone.
Christ on a crutch, this author *sucks*. Pick a plot and *go* with already, I can't keep track of this one.
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The RIAA doesn't get paid by terrestrial radio stations. Far from it, they pay the radio stations to put songs on their play lists (not directly, it gets washed by a "promoter"). --Dave
On the other hand, my current company is 25% female (artists, QA, and content development, 1 programmer). Something about MMOG's draws a lot more women.
--Dave
--Dave Rickey
Okay, I get it, he hates America and thinks that if anyone is going to excercise hegemony over European nations, it should be other European nations. Dumbass, it's called "Divide and Conquer", if the large multi-nationals (which these days are no more American than they are Bermudan, which is where they are theoretically based) wanted to make rebuilding the Internet in their image easier, they'd start by splitting it up into chunks that were easier to manage.
There *are* two spaces, always have been. One where we eat, piss, and fuck, and another where we think, converse, cooperate, and compete. That dichotomy has always been there, all the internet did was remove the last of the trappings of a connection. There's entire worlds in there, I know because I've helped build a couple of them, that have nothing to do with meatspace.
--Dave Rickey
Since cable TV is a monopoly, you don't have the option of an alternate provider with less restrictive hardware. So, no commercial skips, no sharing TV across the internet, no recording PPV or premium content.
My guess is they'll make it pretty cheap (about as much as a TiVo subscription, and nothing up-front) in order to kill the retail PVR market. If there are no consumer-owned PVR's, there's no permissive PVR use problem.
--Dave
--Dave Rickey
Or maybe Brian gets a bonus based on how many people call to cancel and he talks them out of it?
Of course, the flip side of that is if someone hacks the DNS for your cable modem and points it to a bogus website, you could get stuck with a Barney marathon. Unless you were *trying* to let your kids watch Barney (which should be classed as abuse), when it would kick out the Playboy Channel.
--Dave Rickey
However, everyone's "official" viewpoint was "Kiddie porn? I don't see any kiddie porn around here." There was this belief that if we never admitted it was there, it would never be a problem. A few years later, we got the CDA as a result (and yes, the cause and effect chain is pretty direct).
Child predators actually finding a victim through the internet is extremely rare (there have been no more than a few dozen cases in the last decade, even though there are millions of kids online). It's also a perfect story for TV news, and is guaranteed to stick in the memory of people who hear it and don't know a lot about the internet.
You want to know my own personal worst-case PR scenario? Some young kid who plays my game meets up with their Guildmates from the game, and gets raped. For 95%+ of the people in the country, it would be the first time they ever heard of online games. Statistics don't mean a damned thing when it comes to the instincts of parents.
--Dave Rickey
--Dave Rickey
For commercial use, they look good, reduced replacement costs and power drain would make back the investment in a couple of years (and they're supposed to be good for 10). For home use they need to be half the size and one tenth the price. Say, 5 years from now, after the commercial users have built enough of a market for economies of scale.
--Dave Rickey
$25 to never need to balance on top of that stepladder in the kitchen again? Sounds like a deal to me. I could even see $50. Be even nicer if these don't have the flicker issues of flourescents (which is why I won't use them for reading or near the computer). And it beats the hell out of the RF units, which would kill both my phone and my network.
--Dave Rickey
I can see specialized usages where high-reliability in lamps that are difficult to replace are involved, same way they use colored LED's for a lot of traffic lights these days. Drop the price in half and I can even see some commercial property use. But it's got to come down by a factor of 5-10 before I'd even consider home use.
--Dave Rickey
Of course, a dirty little secret of the programming trade is that every programmer has a set of utility libraries they drag around with them from job to job. I used the same string-parsing library on 6 programs, 3 of which were released commercially from two different companies. Byte-for-byte identical code, much of it copied from various places (books, code snippets posted to Usenet, other programmers I worked with). Little things; tokenizers, white-space strippers, search-and-replace, stuff you use all the time but is never built into the language.
It's hardly an unusual practice, a productive programmer doesn't reinvent the wheel when he's got one right in front of him. But what if a few of those snippets originated in GPL'd source? I don't even *know* the original source of some of that code.
--Dave Rickey
I feel dirty.
--Dave Rickey
--Dave Rickey
This weekend, I was fiddling around on mp3.com, and I discovered something odd: I like celtic folk songs. Don't ask me why, I remember hearing them before without it making much of an impression, and it's a little out of character for an aging headbanger.
Today, I bought 2 CD's of celtic music on CD. I ripped them to MP3 so I could actually hear them (I don't own a CD player, and my SB X-Gamer with Cambridge Soundworks speakers sounds better than any stereo I ever owned). I'm listening to them right now.
These are the first CD's I've purchased in 6 years, and the first music CD's I've purchased in 10. Somewhere out there, a musician is making a few bucks they otherwise wouldn't, because I listened (legally) to MP3's from MP3.com. Of course, celtic folk musicians don't generally get contracts with major record labels, which is exactly the problem as far as the RIAA is concerned. Without the need for radio stations to tell me what music is worth hearing before I put down my cash, who needs the RIAA?
--Dave Rickey
Anyone actually have some facts on this? Does an ISP in an African nation face any pricing structures different from those of South America? It does strike me as odd that they are only *now* talking about setting up peering arrangements between themselves, but then it's always struck me as odd that many European countries seem to have better connections to the US than to each other (to the point where they gett better connections through the US than through what little peering exists).
I dunno, I don't suppose I can understand the politics between Europe and Africa any better than Europeans seem to understand our racial politics. And this definitely smells more like a political thing than an economic one.
--Dave Rickey
The question is, what business model could allow a new band with a new sound to say "screw you" to the RIAA and their extortionate contracts, and still come out better off that they would have?
It strikes me that two things really allow the RIAA to maintain their cartel: Their near complete control of radio playlists, and their heavy spending on advertising in teen magazines. Now, there's been a lot of press lately about how streaming internet radio will get squeezed out by the compulsory liscense, but what if.... Turn it around. What if web-radio turned away from the RIAA and all the music they control and stopped begging for the chance to pimp their manufactured crap bands, and instead signed up unknown bands, for whom the chance to be heard across the world is a chance to sell merchandise and CD's, and book gigs at clubs in other cities?
It can be done, after all. The Butthole Surfers and The Ramones survived for years as "underground" bands, and that was with nothing but word of mouth. Certainly that kind of grass-roots, bottom-up system is what the Net does best. And there are signs of it already, how many people listen to "Trance" music on MP3, *legally*? The creators see more people listening to their music as a good thing.
This is a "Tipping Point" problem. *One* breakout band that refuses to sign to a label, and makes oodles of money anyway, can bring down the whole edifice, which is what the RIAA is really afraid of, and why they want to kill MP3's and music-sharing as a *concept*. Not just because of piracy, which they know really doesn't cost them any money. But because the whole edifice is based on them being the gatekeeper between the talent and the money.
--Dave Rickey
For this they spent $110,000,000 tax dollars? For that matter, how many PC's does the government already own, anyway?
--Dave Rickey
After all, it didn't hurt them very much, and it's far more effective political ammo than the same money spent on "Public Awareness" campaigns.
--Dave Rickey
It's normal in the U.S., as well, but we do it by privatizing (having just recently flown, I had my nose rubbed in our own version of a class preference system as first-class passensger, "Platinum Eilte Card" holders, the aged, and the handicapped were all boarded onto the plane before us hoi polloi of able-bodied riding Coach). This is attracting attention because it's a more American approach (based on ability to pay) than British (based on picking the right grandparents).
But this isn't about that, it's about the monitoring, the rest is smokescreen. If your car contains a GPS and you pay tolls based on when, where, and how much you drive, then in some computer the authorities have access to will be a complete record of all travel by all vehicles.
The *obvious* use for that data is to use in law enforcement, but it doesn't have to be limited to disproving an alibi. If you've got the data, and you know your perp was at points A, B, and C on certain dates, you can pull out a list of vehicles that were near those points near those times.
But you can go further, and implement a system similar to that about to be created for air travel in the US: You can analyze driving patterns of known criminals, and from that flag other drivers for special scrutiny. For example, most habitual drunk drivers probably follow similar patterns, driving in the early morning hours from taverns to their homes by back roads. It would be *trivial* for such a system to spot such a pattern and produce a list of places, times, and vehicles for the police to give special scrutiny to.
Of course, nobody likes drunks on the road, so just as we accept sobriety checkpoints, we'd probably accept that. And nobody likes drug smugglers, so we'd accept looking for them, as well. Of course, around the time that your soon-to-be ex-wife is introducing your toll records into court as evidence of your infidelity, you might think things have gone too far. But by then you're pretty much screwed, aren't you? After all, everyone knows those records exist, so you have *no* expectation of privacy.
--Dave Rickey
Looked at a certain way, the whole edifice of network television along with "branding" is a device for delivering entertainment, and it's a remarkably inefficient device. You buy products, for which a sizable chunk of the price is advertising, which is allocated by highly paid marketing drones to highly paid advertising agencies, who buy airtime from TV networks, who buy programming from producers, who pay cast and crew to make the show.
Doesn't this strike anyone else as incredibly wasteful? How much inefficiency and featherbedding are we supporting by buying products we see advertised on TV?
I mean, come on, the shows I like to watch mostly cost less than $200,000 an episode, and have an audience of around half a million weekly. I'd pay dime, or even a quarter, per episode of Farscape, which would be far cheaper for me than paying $2 more for a box of Tide, *and* would be more lucrative for the producers.
The reason why the networks are scared is because this whole house of cards is built on their being the only conduit between the talent (the production companies) and the money (the advertisers).
Okay, let's get off our "Content control is evil" mindset, and imagine a world where strict copyright controls apply. Someone can charge you money, and send you via broadband a TV program you can only watch *once*. Why do you need anyone between you and the creators of the show taking a cut? Where does the existing (incredibly inefficient) business model fit?
These poor bastards are doomed, they just don't know it. With shows amounting to only 44 minutes of a TV hour (including credits) when it isn't worse (taking 4 hours to play a one hour football game), they are killing the geese that lays the golden eggs. Even if they win, they lose. Strict content controls could be the worst thing to ever happen to them.
--Dave
Medical equipment has no standing in Family Court, no judge is going to give custody of a child to a glorified toaster. --Dave
Christ on a crutch, this author *sucks*. Pick a plot and *go* with already, I can't keep track of this one.
--Dave Rickey