Unfortunately for your argument, it is what it is regardless of what the ignorant and ill-informed trumpet they think it is, no matter how strongly they think so.
"The 'villians' (sp)" of the world hold veto power in the Security Council? China is in there, but the only other veto-holding states are the US, France, England and Russia. The other ten rotating seats do not have veto power.
Beyond that, the United Nations is by definition not sovereign, by definition not only does not have a monopoly on legitimate use of force--it scarcely even has the ability to use force because it has no standing armed forces and the UN Peacekeepers it may collect and deploy are absolutely, 100% defensive and by definition is not a "World Government" as absolutely, positively NOTHING that comes out of that organization is truly binding on anyone who does not assent voluntarily---and who said anything about "selling" anyone on the idea of "World Government" anyway?
It's a shame we can't count the United States in there.
The fact is, the UN is useful for its intended purposes. In a nutshell: debate of issues affecting the whole of humanity and establishing consensus toward maintaining peace and economic and social development. Oooh, scaarrry.
The problem is, the foaming-at-the-mouth opponents scream and holler about all the things it was neither designed to do nor does it in fact attempt to do. This treaty is a prime example of what the various branches of the U.N. actually do accomplish--they simply establish totally voluntary common standards of behavior between sovereign countries, yet the most "burn-it-to-the-ground" opponents come out in hysterics thinking that it is some kind of unelected superstate.
It makes me wonder if such rabid detractors have ever set foot in the building or read a single, solitary resolution in their lives. Ever read the language of these things? "The General Assembly Recognizing this, recalling that, noting something, deploring such-and-such, further yammering on at length, decides that this is bad, requests that you stop doing that, affirms that we shall say things in very strong terms if you keep doing that bad thing, further requests that you be thought very ill of if you ignore us, recommends that we talk about this again sometime amongst polite company over coffee and biscuits."
In short, it's diplomacy. So, we have a big building for all the diplomats to hob nob in. It is only "broken" insofar as the act of diplomacy itself has inherent limitations that, really, are quite dry and boring and certainly nothing to go all Guy Fawkes crazy about.
- Including introductory presentations of Professor Delia Lipszyc, Buenos Aires University and Chair, InterAmerican Copyright Institute (IIDA), Buenos Aires, Argentina and Professor André Lucas, Nantes University, Nantes, France.
"Protection of the Rights of Broadcasting Organizations. Comparison of Proposals of WIPO Member States and the European Community and its Member States Received by September 15, 2003"
"Proposal on the Legal Protection of Broadcasting Organizations (Submitted by Kenya)" "Protection of the Rights of Broadcasting Organizations (Submitted by Egypt)" "Protection of the Rights of Broadcasting Organizations (Proposal Submitted by Canada)"
It's an attempt by a group of national governments to synchronize their understanding and treatment of [fill-in-the-blank]. It is _not_ "creating" ANYTHING. It is simply a document that says "we're all going to agree to do things the same way so we don't have confusion."
If people would actually READ the !#%$ing document, they'd see that it is not all that spectacularly upsetting:
As NATIONAL laws change, all this treaty is basically saying is that each contracting member of the treaty will apply those laws uniformly, not playing favorites to anyone.
Big flipping whoop-dee-do. I wish people understood better how these things work instead of trotting out the "OMG!!1!11!! THE UN IS A SUPERSTATE!!!!" bull that is so far from the truth it isn't even laughable--it's just sad.
Bidding 20 hours, working 5 and still billing the full amount? Wow, we used to refer to that as "ripping someone off." But, I digress...
Only the cellphone/pda and laptop in that whole laundry list of things could be truly considered "tools." The rest were redundant and/or unnecessary. I use one soft-sided leather briefcase that holds two cellphone/PDAs, my laptop, power cables, a handful of DVDs, a journal, a schetchbook and pencil set, my sunglasses, headphones, a digital camera, a half dozen PCMCIA cards and room enough for as much paper as I've ever had to schlep to any meeting.
If you're carrying more, perhaps you sould just get two bags as, yes, you may need all that in the space of a day or a week, but it's pretty unlikely you'll need it 24/7 and no one will fault you for running out to the car/hotel/whatever to get your equipment. If you really feel you need to lug around 35lbs of crap positively everywhere at all times, I'd suggest getting a third bag for your meds.
The only major shift in U.S. airline security practices as they directly affect passengers is that those measures previously ubiquitous in international travel are now used for domestic travel as well--and some of the gizmos have gotten a bit better. I've been travelling internationally for 25 years and save for updating the X-Rays and adding aerosol analyzers to the routine, I feel no more violated by U.S. security measures than I did twenty years ago going through, say, British customs who rifled through every panty and sock of every passenger on every plane...and why was that? Ta-dah, terrorists! Better known as "the Irish."
Want to talk of government policy being _really_ personally invasive? Try Australia in the late 80's--when they mandated that all inbound planes be fumigated with pesticide...with the passengers still inside. I haven't been back, so I don't know if they still do that, but damn, talk about being violated, yet people bitch that the U.S. wants them to take off their shoes--and yes, I got flagged for extra screening twice this weekend, flying domestically and the worst offense I felt was when they confiscated my $0.99 cigarette lighter. Silly? Yeah, maybe, but not as silly as dumping out the entire contents of my luggage to separately send my toothbrush and razor through the X-Ray at Heathrow.
In the case of this article, no, the thief was interested in the vehicles, not the contents.
I think the whole point of the article and my sarcasm was that hacking the car is far more dangerous because the "break-in" can be done out of sight and the actual theft is so nonchalant that no casual observer would think they were witnessing anything but the rightful owner driving off. Smashing up the car to get in carries a much higher chance of alerting people that a crime is in progress than just walking up whistling a tune and driving off in a totally disarmed, unlocked, running, fully functional (i.e. no steering lock) vehicle.
...that little box somehow renders vast numbers of users totally incapable of typing "google" in the address bar, forever doomed to be inescapably drawn in a hypnotic, drooling trance to whatever stupid widget happens to be placed in the top right corner of their screens. I think there is a case to be made that such easily trained troglodytes are of questionable legal competency and quite possibly should be institutionalized for their own safety and that of society in general.
The Department of Agriculture occupies the largest federal building complex in Washington, DC and has a perennial habit of writing a great number of entitlement checks. Hardly an invisible hand.//Okay, the Pentagon is a bit bigger, but it isn't in Washington...
I used it because it's amusing and makes the point. If some pissy pedant couldn't see the forest but for a toothpick, I'd just use a different amusing example of why names are important and culturally sensitive. Say, this one:
Single IP addresses could be multiple people. Check. Multiple IP addresses could be individual people. Check. Cookies cannot be trusted to be persistant, since people routinely clear their caches. Check.
However,
Not all DSL customers are on dynamic ip. Not all cable customers are on static ip. The reverse of the above is also not true, so why even get into that?
So, what can we learn about IP address->Unique visitors from the above collection of information? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.
However, you could come up with a reasonable approximation if you went to the effort of constructing a sample of known individuals and recorded their behavior and against the selection of IP addresses they use throughout a day/week/month/year. Hell, take a site like/. and run the stats on registered users. THAT would be [vaguely] useful. This, on the other hand, was just pure, pull-it-out-of-your-butt speculation.
The people who will invest a great deal of time trying to make the games to run on the console are living in fear that a crap name will make their work worth less (or downright worthless) because the juvenile customers will respond saying "dude, I don't want to play with your wee-wee, okay? Go get an X-Box 360 and we'll talk." They're screaming "please, for the love of god, name this thing something that will sell so MY products will sell." The fact that you could come up with so many painful it-could-be-worse puns should be an indication of how the 14-24 market will respond.
Imagine if you were lined up to make the aftermarket parts in Latin America for the Chevy Nova. You'd be quite astute to full-stop your production and bitch about the doomed-to-failure name. It's hardly childish. It's educated foresight and straight-forward, cold, bottom-line business sense.
Stallman has nothing to do with Open Source? Fine, he has a major semantic hair up his butt about the term "Open Source," but the whole idea of "Free Software" is his raison entière d'etre. Methinks this is why some people roll their eyes. Okay, we "get it." Now can we stop splitting hairs over it, puhhhleeaase without devloving into some asininely pedantic semiotic circle-jerk?
The first paragraph of the article explains why these are a good idea. Seventeen cards in common use--by one government. Take the United States where we have as many, then add fifty-one different driver's licenses, multiplied by however many versions of each are in circulation at any point in time (they're good for a very long time).
I have had a passport for decades, so this nonsensical chicken-little crap about a "national ID card" just makes me guffaw--and I use that passport as my de facto primary ID for employment, opening bank accounts, writing/cashing checks, notarizing documents, applying for financing--and, yes, identifying myself to police on the rare occasion I am compelled to. I welcome things like biometrics and memory chips in those documents because I've had passports stolen before when you could just, with some skill, swap the photo and no one would be the wiser. Adding these electronic measures narrows the number of people who could make use of such documents to a much, much smaller number of people and that's a good thing.
This knee-jerk reaction to the word "biometric" is also rather silly. You have had biometrics in everything from driver's licenses to passports for decades: height, weight, hair color, ethnicity or for that matter the PHOTO? Those are ALL biometrics. Adding "distance between eyes and from eyes to chin" is not a huge departure from those--and for legal purposes, those data are just simple measurements ("metrics" if you will), not DNA, so calm down.
...would NOT sort it out, as evidenced by the fact that it hasn't. The theoretical market in which all things work out to the best of all possible words has never, does not and will not ever exist. This market is not a free market, so all the collusion, political corruption, monopoly power and adverse selection that define it must be taken into account. Ignoring it and hoping to [g|G]od that "the market will sort it out" is a pipe dream.
If it requires more regulation in order to make a market freer, this should tell you something about the nature of markets.
Internet2 was designed as a response to the commercial bastardization of "Internet1." It was never intended to be soiled by consumer hands, but reserved exclusively for the ivory towers of academia. That is to say, the whole idea was in effect to return that portion of the net to its pristine pre-1995 state...only a hell of a lot faster, not least as it would not be constipated by ordure of the unwashed masses.
There's also this ridiculous assumption that "WE" are "supposed" to be the only ones both producing and consuming this stuff. Hello! India, China, central and eastern Europe need programmers for their own stuff, not just ours. Yeah, they're going after our money in western Europe and N. America and we're going after their cheap labor, but these doomsday numbers don't take into account the bulk of the workforce that is doing the same day to day necessities that we can't outsource at home either.
That we're showing some frayed edges competing with them doesn't really indicate that we're in decline, it just indicates that we're finally having to compete.
That we have simply redefined what is merely a tort as a crime. That much alone is frightful, regardless of the tort. It would be as if suddenly we redefined personal injury as a crime. So, someone comes to your house, slips and breaks a hip. Now, not only do they sue you for eleventy billion dollars, they sue to get you thrown in prison for ten years. This is no different and if we can declare something is vaguely damaging as copyright infringement as a crime, prison sentences for fender-benders--a FAR more quantifiable and real liability--are just around the corner.
Unfortunately, there is so much schadenfreude in this country that people willfully assent to this constant increasing severity in punishment for offenses of constantly decreasing severity in damages. Don't be do quick to blame just one politician or another. Their constituents--read: your neighbors--actually want this and, frankly, get off on the idea of it being applied to "those people." Everything is "their" fault and "they" should be punished severely so "we" good, upstanding citizens can be comfortable that the problem was never "us" but "them."
What a lame example. OBVIOUSLY a frakking church is exempted. Just because I didn't copy verbatim the entirety of federal and state anti-discrimination law doesn't mean I'm "naive" for not citing every conceivable circumstance where x, y or z do and do not apply. It just means it wasn't relevant to the discussion at hand.
It's a bloody website forum, not a damned thesis defense.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately for your argument, it is what it is regardless of what the ignorant and ill-informed trumpet they think it is, no matter how strongly they think so.
"The 'villians' (sp)" of the world hold veto power in the Security Council? China is in there, but the only other veto-holding states are the US, France, England and Russia. The other ten rotating seats do not have veto power.
Beyond that, the United Nations is by definition not sovereign, by definition not only does not have a monopoly on legitimate use of force--it scarcely even has the ability to use force because it has no standing armed forces and the UN Peacekeepers it may collect and deploy are absolutely, 100% defensive and by definition is not a "World Government" as absolutely, positively NOTHING that comes out of that organization is truly binding on anyone who does not assent voluntarily---and who said anything about "selling" anyone on the idea of "World Government" anyway?
It's a shame we can't count the United States in there.
The fact is, the UN is useful for its intended purposes. In a nutshell: debate of issues affecting the whole of humanity and establishing consensus toward maintaining peace and economic and social development. Oooh, scaarrry.
The problem is, the foaming-at-the-mouth opponents scream and holler about all the things it was neither designed to do nor does it in fact attempt to do. This treaty is a prime example of what the various branches of the U.N. actually do accomplish--they simply establish totally voluntary common standards of behavior between sovereign countries, yet the most "burn-it-to-the-ground" opponents come out in hysterics thinking that it is some kind of unelected superstate.
It makes me wonder if such rabid detractors have ever set foot in the building or read a single, solitary resolution in their lives. Ever read the language of these things? "The General Assembly Recognizing this, recalling that, noting something, deploring such-and-such, further yammering on at length, decides that this is bad, requests that you stop doing that, affirms that we shall say things in very strong terms if you keep doing that bad thing, further requests that you be thought very ill of if you ignore us, recommends that we talk about this again sometime amongst polite company over coffee and biscuits."
In short, it's diplomacy. So, we have a big building for all the diplomats to hob nob in. It is only "broken" insofar as the act of diplomacy itself has inherent limitations that, really, are quite dry and boring and certainly nothing to go all Guy Fawkes crazy about.
The 70's called. They want their security model back.
Yawn.
Well if by "American" you mean "the AmericaS," well, maybe, but last I checked, Nantes was not in the Americas.
: //www.wipo.int/edocs/mdocs/sccr/en/sccr_14/sccr_14 _1_rev.doc
n g_id=5762
n g_id=5022
n g_id=4823
From the agenda for this week's meetings:
http://www.wipo.int/meetings/en/html.jsp?url=http
Protection of broadcasting organizations
- Including introductory presentations of Professor Delia Lipszyc, Buenos Aires University and Chair, InterAmerican Copyright Institute (IIDA), Buenos Aires, Argentina and Professor André Lucas, Nantes University, Nantes, France.
And let's see
http://www.wipo.int/meetings/en/details.jsp?meeti
"Treaty on the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations and Cablecasting Organizations (submitted by Singapore)"
Nope, not America.
http://www.wipo.int/meetings/en/details.jsp?meeti
"Protection of the Rights of Broadcasting Organizations. Comparison of Proposals of WIPO Member States and the European Community and its Member States Received by September 15, 2003"
America? Where are you?
http://www.wipo.int/meetings/en/details.jsp?meeti
"Proposal on the Legal Protection of Broadcasting Organizations (Submitted by Kenya)"
"Protection of the Rights of Broadcasting Organizations (Submitted by Egypt)"
"Protection of the Rights of Broadcasting Organizations (Proposal Submitted by Canada)"
Oh hey! FINALLY!!! Canada! That's American!!!
Honestly, folks, dig a little deeper, okay?
It's an attempt by a group of national governments to synchronize their understanding and treatment of [fill-in-the-blank]. It is _not_ "creating" ANYTHING. It is simply a document that says "we're all going to agree to do things the same way so we don't have confusion."
: //www.wipo.int/edocs/mdocs/sccr/en/sccr_14/sccr_14 _2.doc
If people would actually READ the !#%$ing document, they'd see that it is not all that spectacularly upsetting:
http://www.wipo.int/meetings/en/html.jsp?url=http
As NATIONAL laws change, all this treaty is basically saying is that each contracting member of the treaty will apply those laws uniformly, not playing favorites to anyone.
Big flipping whoop-dee-do. I wish people understood better how these things work instead of trotting out the "OMG!!1!11!! THE UN IS A SUPERSTATE!!!!" bull that is so far from the truth it isn't even laughable--it's just sad.
Bidding 20 hours, working 5 and still billing the full amount? Wow, we used to refer to that as "ripping someone off." But, I digress...
Only the cellphone/pda and laptop in that whole laundry list of things could be truly considered "tools." The rest were redundant and/or unnecessary. I use one soft-sided leather briefcase that holds two cellphone/PDAs, my laptop, power cables, a handful of DVDs, a journal, a schetchbook and pencil set, my sunglasses, headphones, a digital camera, a half dozen PCMCIA cards and room enough for as much paper as I've ever had to schlep to any meeting.
If you're carrying more, perhaps you sould just get two bags as, yes, you may need all that in the space of a day or a week, but it's pretty unlikely you'll need it 24/7 and no one will fault you for running out to the car/hotel/whatever to get your equipment. If you really feel you need to lug around 35lbs of crap positively everywhere at all times, I'd suggest getting a third bag for your meds.
The only major shift in U.S. airline security practices as they directly affect passengers is that those measures previously ubiquitous in international travel are now used for domestic travel as well--and some of the gizmos have gotten a bit better. I've been travelling internationally for 25 years and save for updating the X-Rays and adding aerosol analyzers to the routine, I feel no more violated by U.S. security measures than I did twenty years ago going through, say, British customs who rifled through every panty and sock of every passenger on every plane...and why was that? Ta-dah, terrorists! Better known as "the Irish."
Want to talk of government policy being _really_ personally invasive? Try Australia in the late 80's--when they mandated that all inbound planes be fumigated with pesticide...with the passengers still inside. I haven't been back, so I don't know if they still do that, but damn, talk about being violated, yet people bitch that the U.S. wants them to take off their shoes--and yes, I got flagged for extra screening twice this weekend, flying domestically and the worst offense I felt was when they confiscated my $0.99 cigarette lighter. Silly? Yeah, maybe, but not as silly as dumping out the entire contents of my luggage to separately send my toothbrush and razor through the X-Ray at Heathrow.
The threat of U.S. anti-satellite lasers, for instance...maybe taking out, say, Galileo.
In the case of this article, no, the thief was interested in the vehicles, not the contents.
I think the whole point of the article and my sarcasm was that hacking the car is far more dangerous because the "break-in" can be done out of sight and the actual theft is so nonchalant that no casual observer would think they were witnessing anything but the rightful owner driving off. Smashing up the car to get in carries a much higher chance of alerting people that a crime is in progress than just walking up whistling a tune and driving off in a totally disarmed, unlocked, running, fully functional (i.e. no steering lock) vehicle.
I thought the point was to *steal* the car, not just bust it up to the blares of the alarm.
...that little box somehow renders vast numbers of users totally incapable of typing "google" in the address bar, forever doomed to be inescapably drawn in a hypnotic, drooling trance to whatever stupid widget happens to be placed in the top right corner of their screens. I think there is a case to be made that such easily trained troglodytes are of questionable legal competency and quite possibly should be institutionalized for their own safety and that of society in general.
The Department of Agriculture occupies the largest federal building complex in Washington, DC and has a perennial habit of writing a great number of entitlement checks. Hardly an invisible hand. //Okay, the Pentagon is a bit bigger, but it isn't in Washington...
I used it because it's amusing and makes the point. If some pissy pedant couldn't see the forest but for a toothpick, I'd just use a different amusing example of why names are important and culturally sensitive. Say, this one:
n gkong-services.html
http://www.nytimes.com/specials/hongkong/062797ho
Single IP addresses could be multiple people. Check.
/. and run the stats on registered users. THAT would be [vaguely] useful. This, on the other hand, was just pure, pull-it-out-of-your-butt speculation.
Multiple IP addresses could be individual people. Check.
Cookies cannot be trusted to be persistant, since people routinely clear their caches. Check.
However,
Not all DSL customers are on dynamic ip.
Not all cable customers are on static ip.
The reverse of the above is also not true, so why even get into that?
So, what can we learn about IP address->Unique visitors from the above collection of information? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.
However, you could come up with a reasonable approximation if you went to the effort of constructing a sample of known individuals and recorded their behavior and against the selection of IP addresses they use throughout a day/week/month/year. Hell, take a site like
The people who will invest a great deal of time trying to make the games to run on the console are living in fear that a crap name will make their work worth less (or downright worthless) because the juvenile customers will respond saying "dude, I don't want to play with your wee-wee, okay? Go get an X-Box 360 and we'll talk." They're screaming "please, for the love of god, name this thing something that will sell so MY products will sell." The fact that you could come up with so many painful it-could-be-worse puns should be an indication of how the 14-24 market will respond.
Imagine if you were lined up to make the aftermarket parts in Latin America for the Chevy Nova. You'd be quite astute to full-stop your production and bitch about the doomed-to-failure name. It's hardly childish. It's educated foresight and straight-forward, cold, bottom-line business sense.
Stallman has nothing to do with Open Source? Fine, he has a major semantic hair up his butt about the term "Open Source," but the whole idea of "Free Software" is his raison entière d'etre. Methinks this is why some people roll their eyes. Okay, we "get it." Now can we stop splitting hairs over it, puhhhleeaase without devloving into some asininely pedantic semiotic circle-jerk?
The first paragraph of the article explains why these are a good idea. Seventeen cards in common use--by one government. Take the United States where we have as many, then add fifty-one different driver's licenses, multiplied by however many versions of each are in circulation at any point in time (they're good for a very long time).
I have had a passport for decades, so this nonsensical chicken-little crap about a "national ID card" just makes me guffaw--and I use that passport as my de facto primary ID for employment, opening bank accounts, writing/cashing checks, notarizing documents, applying for financing--and, yes, identifying myself to police on the rare occasion I am compelled to. I welcome things like biometrics and memory chips in those documents because I've had passports stolen before when you could just, with some skill, swap the photo and no one would be the wiser. Adding these electronic measures narrows the number of people who could make use of such documents to a much, much smaller number of people and that's a good thing.
This knee-jerk reaction to the word "biometric" is also rather silly. You have had biometrics in everything from driver's licenses to passports for decades: height, weight, hair color, ethnicity or for that matter the PHOTO? Those are ALL biometrics. Adding "distance between eyes and from eyes to chin" is not a huge departure from those--and for legal purposes, those data are just simple measurements ("metrics" if you will), not DNA, so calm down.
...would NOT sort it out, as evidenced by the fact that it hasn't. The theoretical market in which all things work out to the best of all possible words has never, does not and will not ever exist. This market is not a free market, so all the collusion, political corruption, monopoly power and adverse selection that define it must be taken into account. Ignoring it and hoping to [g|G]od that "the market will sort it out" is a pipe dream.
If it requires more regulation in order to make a market freer, this should tell you something about the nature of markets.
Internet2 was designed as a response to the commercial bastardization of "Internet1." It was never intended to be soiled by consumer hands, but reserved exclusively for the ivory towers of academia. That is to say, the whole idea was in effect to return that portion of the net to its pristine pre-1995 state...only a hell of a lot faster, not least as it would not be constipated by ordure of the unwashed masses.
There's also this ridiculous assumption that "WE" are "supposed" to be the only ones both producing and consuming this stuff. Hello! India, China, central and eastern Europe need programmers for their own stuff, not just ours. Yeah, they're going after our money in western Europe and N. America and we're going after their cheap labor, but these doomsday numbers don't take into account the bulk of the workforce that is doing the same day to day necessities that we can't outsource at home either.
That we're showing some frayed edges competing with them doesn't really indicate that we're in decline, it just indicates that we're finally having to compete.
"WebOS" means there's a great PXE server in the sky. Until then, I simply refuse to refer to a shoddy scripted application as an "Operating System."
That we have simply redefined what is merely a tort as a crime. That much alone is frightful, regardless of the tort. It would be as if suddenly we redefined personal injury as a crime. So, someone comes to your house, slips and breaks a hip. Now, not only do they sue you for eleventy billion dollars, they sue to get you thrown in prison for ten years. This is no different and if we can declare something is vaguely damaging as copyright infringement as a crime, prison sentences for fender-benders--a FAR more quantifiable and real liability--are just around the corner.
Unfortunately, there is so much schadenfreude in this country that people willfully assent to this constant increasing severity in punishment for offenses of constantly decreasing severity in damages. Don't be do quick to blame just one politician or another. Their constituents--read: your neighbors--actually want this and, frankly, get off on the idea of it being applied to "those people." Everything is "their" fault and "they" should be punished severely so "we" good, upstanding citizens can be comfortable that the problem was never "us" but "them."
"The real problem is that they don't have any real world skills. "
...to paraphrase the old routine, you only get to choose two.
Why the hell are you interviewing recent graduates?
You want:
a) cheap
b) educated
c) experienced
To ask ANYONE with higher than a fifth-grade command of the English language to read that man's words.
What a lame example. OBVIOUSLY a frakking church is exempted. Just because I didn't copy verbatim the entirety of federal and state anti-discrimination law doesn't mean I'm "naive" for not citing every conceivable circumstance where x, y or z do and do not apply. It just means it wasn't relevant to the discussion at hand.
It's a bloody website forum, not a damned thesis defense.
Ass.