Please mod the parent down! Serious Slashdot articles should not be befouled with this obvious tripe!
No one could seriously beleive that the Field Commander of an advanced race stealthily taking over the Earth could possibly get confused as to which window he was typing in and accidently post revealing Alien internal memoranda on Slashdot, when he meant to Hyper-Email it to his Supreme Lord. Inconceivable! We, that is hypothetical Aliens are too advanced to such mistakes!
Obviously the parent article should be ignored by all rational humans!
SETI's famous 1977 'Wow' signal has been discredited in the Astrophysical Journal
Your most Fearsome Bearer of the Sixteen Tenctacles, And Ruler of the Huizaw-Killish LORD VOGON, from your most humble servant ZARALOAGLISH, Zaraloaglish, Field Commander "Earth"
You see, Lord Vogon, as I told you, these humans are easily mislead.
All we had to do was plant the story in that Journal (and yes, we had to replace a few scientists with pod-humans, but that's just a matter of an abduction and some fertilizer for the pod), and the humans will now relegate the "Wow Signal" to a few references on the "X-Files" (which you'll remember my recruiting of Chris Carter got off the air) and some call-ins on Art Bell (I'm making arrangements for him this very Earth-day).
Soon the "Wow" signal will be no more remembered than that careless Ensign who mis-calibrated the Hyper-Dimensional Communicator and set it off in the first place. And thank you once again, that Ensign's tentacle-cluster was so tasty! So nice of you to send me the leftovers after you devoured the rest of him.
Through my continuing efforts, an article calling attention to the "debunking" of the "Wow" signal has been posted to a human web site called "Slashdot" (don't ask, don't ask!t).
Not only will this help to disguise our trail, it will futher discredit the few humans who suspect us by associating them with the Slashdot "tin-foil hat" crowd, anti-social paranoids who can find a "conspiracy" in their own microwave ovens. (But they never find in their pants! I apologize, Lord Vogon, a Earth-joke.)
In fact, I am writing a comment on the Slashdot article in another window, to further, as the humans say, "muddy the waters" -- and will post it as soon as I've finished this note to you.
Your humble servant, Zaraloaglish, Field Commander "Earth"
"Jeffrey Zeldmans Alistapart ("ALA"), a very educative website for everything concerning webdesign, that also heavily promotes web standards, has come back online in it's third incarnation.
Ah, if only we an "educative" web site for everything concerning grammar!
("Jeffrey Zeldman's Alistapart ("ALA"), a very educational(yes, "educative" is a word, and highly awkward one in this context, too) web site (but "website" is also apparently accepted) for everything concerning web design("webdesign", however, is not -- perhaps in German?), which also heavily promotes web standards, has come back online in its third incarnation.)
But they're not going to disappear anytime soon, and I doubt MP3 will either. Other formats may be technically superior, but (like technically superior primate brains) also require superior resources to support them; superior processor speed (OGG) or superior storage space (FLACC or Monkey).
MP3 also probably has the largest share of the compressed audio formats, and there are definite drawbacks to transcoding: loss of fidelity, time to transcode, need to store both the old format and the new during the transition phase. So a significant portion of the corpus in MP3 will likely not be replaced with newer, better formats.
And just as plenty of music has been compressed with MP3, plenty of players play MP3 -- and only MP3. Players like my 60GB portable. I've invested quite a bit in my portable, and that locks me into MP3. MP3 will stay around, because people with MP3 (only) players will still want music.
Since MP3 is sufficient unto my needs, I certainly won't abandon it until and unless my portable breaks down (it's an Archos, so that might be soon). Even after my portable breaks down, I'll still have over 7000 MP3s, many of which were purchased through emusic.com, so I can't re-rip them. Unless transcoding to $next_format sounds better than a MP3, I won't be transcoding those files, which means when my portable MP3 player breaks down, I'll insist that the replacement play MP3. Only if my next portable plays both MP3s and $next_format will $next_format begin to interest me at all.
So MP3 may well be an evolutionary dead end, but evolutionary dead end and species extinction are two very differnt things that don't necesarily correlate.
And another problem: misinformed audiophiles "Oh no the stereo image is holy, joint-stereo is from the devil!"
Maybe I'm misinformed too, but I thought stereo meant recording seperate numbers for each channel, and joint stereo meant recording a number for one channel and a delta for the other channel(s), and that one could be trivially converted to the other.
The benefit (as I understood it) of joint stereo was that the delta was usually of smaller magnitude, and thus had a smaller range and more repeats of the same numbers, making Huffman encoding of the deltas more efficient.
What am I missing? Are stereo and joint-stereo not simple isomorphisms?
Ok, ok, I stand corrected. Apparently there is a legitimate argument about invading Iraq for its water, but I note that not even Pelletiere is saying it's the only or primary reason.
Remember: When you contact your representative, do NOT e-mail. Congressmen do not take e-mails seriously. E-mailing tells the congressman that you don't care enough about the issue to actually sit down and put effort into your contact.
This is pretty much true. I know a number of persons who work as Congressional staff; many House and Senate offices aren't really up to speed with email, and even those that are ususally just count pro and con emails: "we got 40 for the bill, and 10 against." Phone calls are generally treated the same way: at best, a cumulative tally is recorded.
An actual letter won't get a whole lot more attention, but it's probably taken more seriously because writing a letter takes more effort on your part than sending an email.
It's also more likely an LC (Legislative Correspondent -- the bottom level staffer who reads mail to, and sends responses from, your Congressperson) will actually send a letter back detailing the Congressperson's stance on the issue, or promising to look into the matter.
having a response leter can be useful, because you can refer to this response in your subsequent letters: "As your office said in your reply to my letter of October 20th, 'children are out most precious resource'; I cannot agree more, Congressman, and I think we are robbing our children when we tie up their patrimony in overly broad patents, just because someone has suffixed 'with a computer' to an obvious and traditional business practice."
Copyright law as it stands is absurd. Why not "let the punishment fit the crime". You download the latest Britney Spears album, you pay the cost of the album.
I figure if you actually listen to a Britney Spears album, that in itself should be punishment enough in anyone's book.
Were Dante Alighieri alive today, perhaps he'd replace the Lake of Fire with an eternal duet by Britney Spears and Celine Dion.
I nominate SCO's corporate policy: on the basis of dubious reasoning, lay claim to the work of thousands of Open Source programmers, while simultaneously ensuring that if your claims are accepted, you'll kill the Golden Goose in the act of getting your hands on it!
I'm sure we'll all miss SCO (soon), even if you weren't a fan of their thievery there's no denying their contribution to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
"[in EverQuest], every 1 out of 2 or 3 female characters is being played by a male player, while every 1 out of 100 male characters is being played by a female player."
As one of the few women posting to Slashdot, I wonder what the ratio of "gender-benders" is here?
Re:Been saying it for years
on
CNet on WinFS
·
· Score: 1
There may be a far-less-nefarious reason why it won't let you create a FAT32 partition of size >32GB, namely that the FAT table would be ridiculously large and inefficient.
It may be inefficient, though I don't think it need be. As I point out, I'm dealing almost exclusively with large files (and despite another reply, I think an average of 5MB per file is large, at least compared to say, 512 byte.txt notes), so the cluster size can be correspondingly large. Larger clusters, of course, mean a smaller FAT table.
Be that as it may, my MP3 player only reads FAT32 partitions. However efficient NTFS might be compared to FAT32, if I can't use NTFS, it's not a good solution for me.
The fact that you get security, journaling, and far better error recovery than FAT32 is just a bonus.
Again, it's no bonus if I can't use NTFS. There's no technical reason that FAT32 partitions larger than 32GB can't be written -- mkfs will write one -- or read -- even Windows 2000 will read one. It's a purely arbitrary limitation on the part of Microsoft, because, they, like you, apparently never thought there'd be a legitimate need for a FAT32 partition larger than 32GB.
And that's my beef with Microsoft; and again, I was using this arbitrary limitation as an example of what's wrong with Microsoft's thinking: a program shouldn't arbitrary limit the user based on assumptions made by the programmer, especially when it actually involves extra work to add the limitation.
It's like Clippy interrupting you, and saying "It looks like you're writing a letter! I'm going to add your return address line block of whether you want it or not! And I won't let you delete it!"
Come to think of it, that's pretty much what Word's auto-correct does. Try starting a sentence "e. e. cummings said...." or "Intentionally misspelling 'the' as 'teh' frequently signals sarcasm in/. posts" in Microsoft Word, and notice how Microsoft assumes capitalization and spelling that is not what you wanted.
t's despicable no matter who does it, and the perpetrators - whether Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, or whatever - should be thrown in prison.
Speaking as a former Libertarian (and as someone who is still a small "l" libertarian -- that is, not a Libertarian Party member but ideologically libertarian), I think it would be pretty obvious if Libertarians stuffed the ballot:
"Clem, seems like them Liberal-tarians done got eight whole votes in this heah precinct!"
"Ya'll say eight votes, Cletus?? Damn straight, that there's obvious fraud. Ain't but one crazy linux hippie living in th' holler since we run off them boys livin' outa the VW Microbus!"
yea, but then there is a written record of who voted for who. One thing about voting is that it is nessecary to insure anonomity, to protect the voters.
Just to clarify the parent post: it's dangerous to print out a receipt that the voter can leave with.
Why? Imagine an employer (or landlord or borough/township/ward boss) demanding that you vote for the candidate you're told to, and that you bring the receipt to prove you did so. Or else you lose your job (or apartment or city job or benefits).
If receipts are to be given (and they should be; as a programmer, there's no way I trust electronic voting), they also need to be collected and stored at the place of voting, within the voting booth.
As far as voting machines in general, I think anybody who reads Slashdot knows that a principle utility of electronic memory is that it can be easily (and often undetectably) changed. In many cases this is what's needed, but in the case of voting it almost ensures that someone, eventually, will take advanatge of that malleability to fix an election.
Maybe Diebold won't be the perpetrator, maybe it'll be a 1337 script kiddie changing everyone's vote to Britny Spears, but eventually, somebody will take advantage of the electronic ballot box.
It's a risk we shouldn't take if we value our democracy at all.
Re:Been saying it for years
on
CNet on WinFS
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Filesystems are just inefficient, shitty databases.
And sometimes all I want is a shitty database.
What worries me is that Microsoft already overrides my wishes; if they think they've created the "holy grail", they'll be even more likely yo impose it on me even if I know it's not what I want.
Case in point: Windows 2000 and above has no problem reading FAT32 partitions greater than 32GB in size. But it refuses to create FAT32 partitions > 32GB in size. Why? Because at that size, Microsoft knows better, Microsoft knows you should be uses NTFS and get the benefits of meta-data and journaling.
Except, I don't want the overhead for my MP3 collection. The meta-data's already present in the ID3 tags, and I don't need journaling -- once the ID3 tags are written, they're essential read-only. I want low overhead storage for very large (several MB) files.
And I want something that is a mirror of my portable plaayer, which can only read FAT32, can only read the first partition, and is 60GB. Since my portable only reads FAT32 (but doesn't format), and since Microsoft, in its wisdom knew better than to allow me to format it as FAT32, instead I got to watch it run the drive for over an hour before telling me the partition was too big. Talk about a linux killer app: I nearly had to switch to linux if I wanted to be able to use my portable.
Fortunately for me that the open-source world exists: somebody had actually compiled the linux mkfs for cygwin, and I formatted the portable with it. I can't use Windows' chkdsk on it, of course, and I haven't yet looked at compiling fsck under cygwin to further work around Microsoft's collosal arrogance.
Given my experience, if Microsoft thinks they have the "holy grail" of filesystems, it, and Microsoft's arrogance, will once again be rammed down the throats of every Microsoft user. But by that time, I'm sure I'll have fully transitioned to linux.
Slashdot Mirror
Ref: Amazon has this book for $3.50 cheaper than bn
And soon, Amazon will have a patent on "$3.50 less" too.
What I think the writer is asking is if it is possible to have two cameras and stitch the feeds together so it's twice as wide.
Yeah! I got an email today telling me they could make it twice as wide!
Something about a pill.
Come to think of it, I get one of these emails almost everyday.
Obviously this is a forgery!
A hoax!
Please mod the parent down! Serious Slashdot articles should not be befouled with this obvious tripe!
No one could seriously beleive that the Field Commander of an advanced race stealthily taking over the Earth could possibly get confused as to which window he was typing in and accidently post revealing Alien internal memoranda on Slashdot, when he meant to Hyper-Email it to his Supreme Lord. Inconceivable! We, that is hypothetical Aliens are too advanced to such mistakes!
Obviously the parent article should be ignored by all rational humans!
SETI's famous 1977 'Wow' signal has been discredited in the Astrophysical Journal
Your most Fearsome Bearer of the Sixteen Tenctacles,
And Ruler of the Huizaw-Killish
LORD VOGON,
from your most humble servant
ZARALOAGLISH, Zaraloaglish,
Field Commander "Earth"
You see, Lord Vogon, as I told you, these humans are easily mislead.
All we had to do was plant the story in that Journal (and yes, we had to replace a few scientists with pod-humans, but that's just a matter of an abduction and some fertilizer for the pod), and the humans will now relegate the "Wow Signal" to a few references on the "X-Files" (which you'll remember my recruiting of Chris Carter got off the air) and some call-ins on Art Bell (I'm making arrangements for him this very Earth-day).
Soon the "Wow" signal will be no more remembered than that careless Ensign who mis-calibrated the Hyper-Dimensional Communicator and set it off in the first place. And thank you once again, that Ensign's tentacle-cluster was so tasty! So nice of you to send me the leftovers after you devoured the rest of him.
Through my continuing efforts, an article calling attention to the "debunking" of the "Wow" signal has been posted to a human web site called "Slashdot" (don't ask, don't ask!t).
Not only will this help to disguise our trail, it will futher discredit the few humans who suspect us by associating them with the Slashdot "tin-foil hat" crowd, anti-social paranoids who can find a "conspiracy" in their own microwave ovens. (But they never find in their pants! I apologize, Lord Vogon, a Earth-joke.)
In fact, I am writing a comment on the Slashdot article in another window, to further, as the humans say, "muddy the waters" -- and will post it as soon as I've finished this note to you.
Your humble servant,
Zaraloaglish,
Field Commander "Earth"
"Jeffrey Zeldmans Alistapart ("ALA"), a very educative website for everything concerning webdesign, that also heavily promotes web standards, has come back online in it's third incarnation.
Ah, if only we an "educative" web site for everything concerning grammar!
("Jeffrey Zeldman's Alistapart ("ALA"), a very educational (yes, "educative" is a word, and highly awkward one in this context, too) web site (but "website" is also apparently accepted) for everything concerning web design ("webdesign", however, is not -- perhaps in German?), which also heavily promotes web standards, has come back online in its third incarnation.)
MP3 is an evolutionary dead end
So are sharks and lichens.
But they're not going to disappear anytime soon, and I doubt MP3 will either. Other formats may be technically superior, but (like technically superior primate brains) also require superior resources to support them; superior processor speed (OGG) or superior storage space (FLACC or Monkey).
MP3 also probably has the largest share of the compressed audio formats, and there are definite drawbacks to transcoding: loss of fidelity, time to transcode, need to store both the old format and the new during the transition phase. So a significant portion of the corpus in MP3 will likely not be replaced with newer, better formats.
And just as plenty of music has been compressed with MP3, plenty of players play MP3 -- and only MP3. Players like my 60GB portable. I've invested quite a bit in my portable, and that locks me into MP3. MP3 will stay around, because people with MP3 (only) players will still want music.
Since MP3 is sufficient unto my needs, I certainly won't abandon it until and unless my portable breaks down (it's an Archos, so that might be soon). Even after my portable breaks down, I'll still have over 7000 MP3s, many of which were purchased through emusic.com, so I can't re-rip them. Unless transcoding to $next_format sounds better than a MP3, I won't be transcoding those files, which means when my portable MP3 player breaks down, I'll insist that the replacement play MP3. Only if my next portable plays both MP3s and $next_format will $next_format begin to interest me at all.
So MP3 may well be an evolutionary dead end, but evolutionary dead end and species extinction are two very differnt things that don't necesarily correlate.
And another problem: misinformed audiophiles
"Oh no the stereo image is holy, joint-stereo is from the devil!"
Maybe I'm misinformed too, but I thought stereo meant recording seperate numbers for each channel, and joint stereo meant recording a number for one channel and a delta for the other channel(s), and that one could be trivially converted to the other.
The benefit (as I understood it) of joint stereo was that the delta was usually of smaller magnitude, and thus had a smaller range and more repeats of the same numbers, making Huffman encoding of the deltas more efficient.
What am I missing? Are stereo and joint-stereo not simple isomorphisms?
you'd still be living in a cave and wouldn't be able to post as an Anonymous Asshat on Slashdot.
I etch my Slashdot commets on the walls of my cave in Lascaux using bison blood and charcoal, you insensitive clod!
Do you still loose [sic] if you are referring to said [Godwin's] law?
No, by analogy with the usenet custom that meta-discussion is always on topic.
By Stephen C. Pelletiere
New York Times | Opinion
Ok, ok, I stand corrected. Apparently there is a legitimate argument about invading Iraq for its water, but I note that not even Pelletiere is saying it's the only or primary reason.
Remember: When you contact your representative, do NOT e-mail. Congressmen do not take e-mails seriously. E-mailing tells the congressman that you don't care enough about the issue to actually sit down and put effort into your contact.
This is pretty much true. I know a number of persons who work as Congressional staff; many House and Senate offices aren't really up to speed with email, and even those that are ususally just count pro and con emails: "we got 40 for the bill, and 10 against." Phone calls are generally treated the same way: at best, a cumulative tally is recorded.
An actual letter won't get a whole lot more attention, but it's probably taken more seriously because writing a letter takes more effort on your part than sending an email.
It's also more likely an LC (Legislative Correspondent -- the bottom level staffer who reads mail to, and sends responses from, your Congressperson) will actually send a letter back detailing the Congressperson's stance on the issue, or promising to look into the matter.
having a response leter can be useful, because you can refer to this response in your subsequent letters: "As your office said in your reply to my letter of October 20th, 'children are out most precious resource'; I cannot agree more, Congressman, and I think we are robbing our children when we tie up their patrimony in overly broad patents, just because someone has suffixed 'with a computer' to an obvious and traditional business practice."
Iraq is blessed with an abundant supply of water, so much so in fact that some had speculated we did not go there for the oil as much as the water.
Who in hell speculated we went to Iraq for their water??
The Fremen High Council?
Are the Bene Gesserit speculating we went there for the Spice or the Sandworms too?
How can you assume you are one of the few women posting to slashdot? Sounds like you are stereotpying the geek crowd from the inside.
Slashdot smells like testosterone and frustration.
Not to mention motherboard coolant and D&D-miniture-figurine paints.
(And mom's basement -- I guess it's obligatory for me to mention that.)
Copyright law as it stands is absurd. Why not "let the punishment fit the crime". You download the latest Britney Spears album, you pay the cost of the album.
I figure if you actually listen to a Britney Spears album, that in itself should be punishment enough in anyone's book.
Were Dante Alighieri alive today, perhaps he'd replace the Lake of Fire with an eternal duet by Britney Spears and Celine Dion.
But then I tend to play light, fast characters, rather than big, burly fighters.
So not character classes like Fighters or Barbarians, more like Hair Dressers and Interior Decorators?
And preferrably Elf... or Fairy?
And you like to enter Dungeons with big, burly fighters, is that where this is going?
(Not that there's anything wrong with that.)
Great. So if my site gets Slashdotted does my pacemaker time out in sympathy?
Seriously, give it a break, man. We can use Google and Google Cache without your help. If you want karma, post something insightful - NOT A DAMN LINK.
Sir Haxalot's posts help me, becaue I have to type with a straw held in my teeth, you insensitive clod!
--yours sincerely,
Dr. Stephen Hawking
I dunno. It'd be really hard to identify around here, since there's nothing like an actual model to indicate Male or Female.
Oddly enough, for many male Slashdotters, it's not only hard to identify around here, but even in person.
It helps to have tweezers and a magnifying glass handy.
I nominate SCO's corporate policy: on the basis of dubious reasoning, lay claim to the work of thousands of Open Source programmers, while simultaneously ensuring that if your claims are accepted, you'll kill the Golden Goose in the act of getting your hands on it!
I'm sure we'll all miss SCO (soon), even if you weren't a fan of their thievery there's no denying their contribution to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
"[in EverQuest], every 1 out of 2 or 3 female characters is being played by a male player, while every 1 out of 100 male characters is being played by a female player."
As one of the few women posting to Slashdot, I wonder what the ratio of "gender-benders" is here?
Be that as it may, my MP3 player only reads FAT32 partitions. However efficient NTFS might be compared to FAT32, if I can't use NTFS, it's not a good solution for me.Again, it's no bonus if I can't use NTFS. There's no technical reason that FAT32 partitions larger than 32GB can't be written -- mkfs will write one -- or read -- even Windows 2000 will read one. It's a purely arbitrary limitation on the part of Microsoft, because, they, like you, apparently never thought there'd be a legitimate need for a FAT32 partition larger than 32GB.
And that's my beef with Microsoft; and again, I was using this arbitrary limitation as an example of what's wrong with Microsoft's thinking: a program shouldn't arbitrary limit the user based on assumptions made by the programmer, especially when it actually involves extra work to add the limitation.
It's like Clippy interrupting you, and saying "It looks like you're writing a letter! I'm going to add your return address line block of whether you want it or not! And I won't let you delete it!"
Come to think of it, that's pretty much what Word's auto-correct does. Try starting a sentence "e. e. cummings said...." or "Intentionally misspelling 'the' as 'teh' frequently signals sarcasm in
t's despicable no matter who does it, and the perpetrators - whether Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, or whatever - should be thrown in prison.
Speaking as a former Libertarian (and as someone who is still a small "l" libertarian -- that is, not a Libertarian Party member but ideologically libertarian), I think it would be pretty obvious if Libertarians stuffed the ballot:
"Clem, seems like them Liberal-tarians done got eight whole votes in this heah precinct!"
"Ya'll say eight votes, Cletus?? Damn straight, that there's obvious fraud. Ain't but one crazy linux hippie living in th' holler since we run off them boys livin' outa the VW Microbus!"
yea, but then there is a written record of who voted for who. One thing about voting is that it is nessecary to insure anonomity, to protect the voters.
Just to clarify the parent post: it's dangerous to print out a receipt that the voter can leave with.
Why? Imagine an employer (or landlord or borough/township/ward boss) demanding that you vote for the candidate you're told to, and that you bring the receipt to prove you did so. Or else you lose your job (or apartment or city job or benefits).
If receipts are to be given (and they should be; as a programmer, there's no way I trust electronic voting), they also need to be collected and stored at the place of voting, within the voting booth.
As far as voting machines in general, I think anybody who reads Slashdot knows that a principle utility of electronic memory is that it can be easily (and often undetectably) changed. In many cases this is what's needed, but in the case of voting it almost ensures that someone, eventually, will take advanatge of that malleability to fix an election.
Maybe Diebold won't be the perpetrator, maybe it'll be a 1337 script kiddie changing everyone's vote to Britny Spears, but eventually, somebody will take advantage of the electronic ballot box.
It's a risk we shouldn't take if we value our democracy at all.
Filesystems are just inefficient, shitty databases.
And sometimes all I want is a shitty database.
What worries me is that Microsoft already overrides my wishes; if they think they've created the "holy grail", they'll be even more likely yo impose it on me even if I know it's not what I want.
Case in point: Windows 2000 and above has no problem reading FAT32 partitions greater than 32GB in size. But it refuses to create FAT32 partitions > 32GB in size. Why? Because at that size, Microsoft knows better, Microsoft knows you should be uses NTFS and get the benefits of meta-data and journaling.
Except, I don't want the overhead for my MP3 collection. The meta-data's already present in the ID3 tags, and I don't need journaling -- once the ID3 tags are written, they're essential read-only. I want low overhead storage for very large (several MB) files.
And I want something that is a mirror of my portable plaayer, which can only read FAT32, can only read the first partition, and is 60GB. Since my portable only reads FAT32 (but doesn't format), and since Microsoft, in its wisdom knew better than to allow me to format it as FAT32, instead I got to watch it run the drive for over an hour before telling me the partition was too big. Talk about a linux killer app: I nearly had to switch to linux if I wanted to be able to use my portable.
Fortunately for me that the open-source world exists: somebody had actually compiled the linux mkfs for cygwin, and I formatted the portable with it. I can't use Windows' chkdsk on it, of course, and I haven't yet looked at compiling fsck under cygwin to further work around Microsoft's collosal arrogance.
Given my experience, if Microsoft thinks they have the "holy grail" of filesystems, it, and Microsoft's arrogance, will once again be rammed down the throats of every Microsoft user. But by that time, I'm sure I'll have fully transitioned to linux.
Trolls gotcha. "Seth FinkLEstein" is a troll, faking "Seth FinkELstein".
The real Seth never pretends to be a lawyer.
Thanks. I did miss that.
Still, I think we can assume the original poster isn't a lawyer either.