I wouldn't be surprised if this is typical late 90s shenanigans on the part of apple. I know a lot of software companies did this back in the 90s - they print up a jillion boxes of software and ship it to the stores, counting it as sales. This works in the short term, but when the stuff shows up on wooden palettes at the Qwiky Mart all marked down 50%, it travels back up the chain pretty quick, and affects share price. so, i would propose a tag to this article, stuffthechannel.
Ummmm, no. The USA is in NO position to expand its military. It is going to have to contract its empire, and quickly.
This Webpage From The Fed changes month to month, but as of 25 JAN 08, it shows that on 16 JAN 08, the AGGREGATE RESERVES OF DEPOSITORY INSTITUTIONS in the USA was at $200 million, down from $43 billion 6 weeks earlier.
The USA is INSOLVENT. It's over. Turn off the lights when you leave. The financial heart of the beast is dead, but the limbs still quiver. In a few years there will be very little discussion of military fantasy projects.
Are you sure you want to use this argument? Because, suppose you Americans (btw, I'm Brazilian) stopped purchasing Indonesian sneakers and cigarettes. In that case, how, exactly, do you suggest that nine year old girl, and probably their parents, obtain food?
Ummmm - GROW IT. Like their ancestors did.
Don't give me the crap line about how that's a double standard - how Americans get to work a desk and the Global South has to work the fields. In a few short decades, it's not going to make that much difference. Americans will be growing huge amounts of their own food. Eventually, as they slide down the energy curve, they will be just as agrarian as they ever were.
If Brazil has any sense,they will avoid the problem altoether,and focus on develping permacultural practices ASAP.
It's not the end of the world, but we can see it from here.
In the US the media is dominated by corporations, whose majority-stake owners are capitalists, and their hegemony reaches to everything - schools, churches, the current major political parties, even the currently existing unions.
SNIP
Spot on, well said. Of course, the libertarian mods here will likely slap you down, but know that Ralph Spoilsport agrees with you.
Oh - by the way - the USA is BROKE. Click this link at the Fed
Look at the bottom of the second column - non-borrowed reserves.
Yep. On 16 Jan 08, the USA banking system had 200 million in non-borrowed reserves. That's why the fed dumped billions in. Basically the banking system in the USA is completely insolvent. Next month something like $58BB in ARMs gets reset. In March, $110BB gets reset. If, as it seems, about 15% of it is crap, the banks will be left holding $30BB vacuum, and all the cash they've got is just funny money from the Fed.
The USA is now bankrupt. Bye Bye Empire Empire Bye Bye...
yeah - by that logic, why bother with democracy? Why elect your leadership when you can submit to the tyrrany of some arbitrary capitalist overlord who has every reason and incentive to fuck you over? So why bother with a democratic government? Why bother settling for a lesser evil, and go directly to pure unadulterated fascism? Unions can be more or less democratically organised. It's up to the membership.
That's life for the gutless slaves who refuse to stand up and organise and fight these fascist moterfuckers back.
Why computer workers haven't properly organised with a union is something I still don't understand. If you work for someone else: YOU'RE A SLAVE. So ORGANISE! If you employ others, you're a SLAVE OWNER so EXPECT ORGANISATION.
Britney Spears is worth something like $100M. There's a number of vastly wealthy musicians, and equally wealthy record execs. However, this is not historically normal. Yes, over the past few hundred years, some musicians got quite wealthy, and some music publishers made serious bank, but the scale created by the record industry is truly unprecedented.
Prior to the commercialisation of the recording industry (which began in the 1910s/20s but only really took off after WW2) the only way the common person understood music was in the context of someone, usually THEMSELF, playing it. On an instrument. That wasn't plugged into an amplifier.
And at the time, there were musicians, and some did very well (Salieri wasn't poor, nor was Handel) but even they had a tiny tiny fraction of the kind of wealth exhibited by the ruling classes at the time. Musicians were still, basically, hired hands. They might be rich hired hands, but not like what we know today. The important point is the context: you knew music as a performance, not as a recording.
Due to the exigencies of technology, music became a commodity, and in classic capitalist fashion, the material costs were reduced to a minimum - finally, they evapourated as data into the interweb thingie. So, now they're trying to put a meter on something that the interwebs have always had a complex and contradictory relationship: data itself. The record companies are not in the business of selling music. They sell CDs. If the CDs had recordings of dogs barking, or were flat out silent, it wouldn't matter to the record companies, as they (in theory) sell what people want.
What people want is music. What people want is something for nothing. What people want is to wish upon a star and get everything they ever dreamed of, and if they can't do that, then they want the music that takes them there....
The music biz started with printing sheet music in the 19th century. It will die trying to sell data. It was an interesting ride. But now the amusement park is closed. Time to go home and make your own music.
Give up on the star system. Make your own, and support the art made by your friends, your family and your neighbours. Give up on this hallucination of Commodity Culture. Learn to play an instrument, and learn to play it well. work with other musicians, and through your own competence and intelligence you will create the hope this world so desperately needs.
and, in the process, go piss on the grave of the music business.
and someone is getting his butt chewed by his supervisor. I used to work at Apple testing video stuff, so I know (I got my butt chewed a few times).
Apple has extensive testing, and QT is one of the more extensively tested systems. All the major programs are in a test matrix. It doesn't take THAT much effort to do a basic run on say, a dozen or so major apps - an afternoon is all it takes, really.
A minimal test matrix would be a grid with check boxes and comments.
FCP
open (Y/N) open new project (Y/N) open old project (Y/N) capture video (Y/N) process video (Y/N) export to tape (Y/N) export to QT file (Y/N)
iMovie
open (Y/N) open new project (Y/N) open old project (Y/N) capture video (Y/N) process video (Y/N) export to tape (Y/N) export to QT file (Y/N)
Premiere
open (Y/N) open new project (Y/N) open old project (Y/N) capture video (Y/N) process video (Y/N) export to tape (Y/N) export to QT file (Y/N)
After Effects
open (Y/N) open new project (Y/N) open old project (Y/N) capture video (Y/N) process video (Y/N) export to tape (Y/N) export to QT file (Y/N)
iDVD
open (Y/N) open new project (Y/N) open old project (Y/N) capture video (Y/N) process video (Y/N) export to tape (Y/N) export to QT file (Y/N)
DVD SP
open (Y/N) open new project (Y/N) open old project (Y/N) capture video (Y/N) process video (Y/N) export to tape (Y/N) export to QT file (Y/N)
etc. It isn't fucking rocket science, and a single failure on ANY of that is/should be enough to delay the project. I can't imagine someone in QT QA signed off knowing 7.4 would break Adobe AE. While QT does have a prod schedule, it's not like it's tied to NAB like FCP, or the Dev conferences like other apple apps and systems. And it's not like it's some huge number of man hours to fix it. Apple has a software library FILLED to the gunnels with all the minty goodness and this kind of testing is something they do. My guess is someone fucked up and either check AE as working without testing it, or its simply didn't get tested in some imaginary rush to get the latest rev out the door. Either way, some flunky's going to get a lot of heat.
GW is on his knees fellating the house of Saud to open the spigot. Well, the spigot is wide open, and they aren't getting any more out of the ground. Why? They peaked. They're done. And in the next few years, it will become clear that the world, as a whole, has also peaked. And that means less oil than the year before, forever. Now, if the economy completely tanks, we might keep it flat for a while, but then it will also drift down.
At that point, the price accelerates, (say, US$6 gal) and people stop driving.
Thtis drives demand destruction, and the price levels off, higher than before.(say, US$4 gal)
People adjust, and the amount pumped out reduces, and can't be lifted up, and then the price bumps up again to $8 then drifts down to $6. It will do that, essentially, forever or until people stop using petroleum as fuel.
so, there is no need to charge for congestion. It will simply disappear of its own accord in the next 10 years.
I teach in a Media department. You would think that something like Communication Theory would be something that the students would be actively engaged with. Nope. "Buh buh buh THAT'S HARD. AND BORING."
Gads. Every year, there's a solid 20% of them who whine and bitch and moan. Little fucking losers. I try to explain to them that "People who don't know theory work for people who do" but that doesn't seem to sink in.
So,I have to dumb down the class just to get them to pay the least bit of attention. forget about memorising names and dates. If I can get them to leave the class learning a few ideas like "Hegemony" or "Encode/Decode" or get them to look at ANYTHING around them with a critical eye, I consider my work well done.
I'd love to go sprinting along with stuff, but every time I do that, the imbeciles freak out.
Sometimes I think we have too many people in the university system, and not enough working in the fields.
The money isn't there. The USA is in debt 9 trillion dollars. If they pay it back at a million dollars a day, it will take 24,641 years to pay back. And that's at 1 million a day, forever, something the USA has NEVER been able to do. Ever. The country's broke. Combine that with the resources that are about to be pissed away turning India and China into Asian pseudocopies of the mind-numbing exurbs of Indianapolis or Las Vegas, and you can kiss your moon base good bye.
Don't get me wrong - I don't think a moon or Mars base is evil or bad or stupid (I do think it's unnecessary, as I think we could do better using that kind of money for a jillion robot probes and massively improved space telescopes, but I don't think they are wrong - merely suboptimal) I just think there isn't enough money and reosurces left to throw at such a project as a Moon Base, much less a Mars Base.
Seriously, November 1 can't come soon enough. The way things are going we're looking for a showdown between Clinton and McCain. For a change, we may have a win-win choice this fall. Neither's perfect, but I think either will result in a return to sanity and pragmatism, and result in a massive improvement over the current administration.
No.
I couldn't disagree more. Both are corporate shills who will keep the USA mired in Iraq for at least the next 8 years. They both are on their knees to the machine that is destroying not only the USA as a country, but the biosphere itself. They are both really really lame. Neither of them have a plan to deal with the impending energy crisis, nor do either of them have any idea how to deal with the ecocide that is part and parcel of the (according to Cheney) non-negotiable "American Way of Life" which is basically a practice of pillage and destruction. With a nice smiley face from Hollywood to make it all seem OK.
God made man
But he used the monkey to do it
Apes in the plan
Were all here to prove it
I can walk like an ape
Talk like an ape
I can do what a monkey can do
God made man
But a monkey supplied the glue
I am not surprised they want to bitch slap their employees. God ferbid they employ the same tactics on the bosses who tell them to build steaming heaps like VISTA.
So, first you put the squeeze on the little guy or gal, and then when the system still fails, you engage in a round of finger pointing, and then the one with the most clout says "ROLL OVER" and they all roll over and one falls out, and then there's a lot of back slapping and yes, now everything will be better, and of course it's NOT, because the rot starts at the head.
This is all so pathetic and predictable. The sooner M$ disappears,the happier I will be.
economics is of no value in a decreasing situation.
Example: let's say you have a car that gets 30 mpg. You are out in the desert and have 1 gallon of gas. The next gas station is 100 miles away. All The Money In The World isn't going to buy you a gallon of gas when you run out. You're going to have to push the car. If you push it 3 miles a day, you might get there in a month. So, now you know the Energy Value of one gallon of gas: one month of hard labour pushing a car 100 miles.
Another example: carting Grain by horse is limited, as the energy in a cartload of grain is eventually exceeded by the food demands of the horse and driver. All The Money In The World won't change that. As a consequence, in solar economies, (i.e. pre-industrial) most grain was grown and harvested within a week's time of a horse's efforts. 10 miles a day? So, about 70 miles. Maybe 100 if you're lucky.
Food is energy. Pure and simple. Right now we use about 10 calories of petroleum based energy for every calorie we eat. As petroleum depletes, that ratio will, NECESSARILY, decrease, and all the money in the world won't change that. It's called Thermodynamics.
So, how much energy does a cyber farm hand embody in its mining, construction, operation and maintenance, as opposed to a human and how many calories of food can it generate?
Given the average farm hand needs 2000 calories to maintain homeostasis and at least that much for accoutrement (clothing, etc.), the machine has to run on less than 4000 calories a day of energy, including its energy investment as an object.
I'm not saying one way or the other, but the analysis needs to be made before we can welcome such cyborg farmworker overlords.
And what makes now different from 1798 (Malthus's "An Essay on the Principle of Population"), or 1968 (Erlich's "The Population Bomb") or 1974 (The Club of Rom's "Mankind at the Turning Point")?
What's the difference? The ecocide that's been going on for centuries, for starters. Also, VASTLY improved resource analysis and data, as well as the apparent peak of petroleum production.
All of those writers were correct. The timing was off, and certain technologies came into play as the petroleum age came along, but as we're going to blow through the remaining oil pretty quickly, the total amount of energy per capita will collapse. So, you'll see each of them in reverse order appear - first the Club of Rome's resource and ecological depletion which will put the constraint on Ehrlich's population bomb, followed by a Malthusian Die Off.
As a civilisation we are facing Peak Everything a century of resource decline in the face of population expansion.
It's not the End of the World, but you can see it from here, and if we're not careful Things Could Go Poorly. The problem is the smartest people around think "technology" will fix the "resource" problem. Given unlimited energy and resources, perhaps this is true, but we don't live in a world where there are unlimited resources. So, if we're at the top of the heap - look around you: this is as good as it gets.
I haven't bothered DLing music in years. It's a terrifically inefficient use of my time. I just go over someone's house with my hard drive, and Click 'n' Drag what I want.
If I like it, then I buy the CD. If I don't it sits and rots and gets ignored until I need more room on the drive and delete it.
I don't see how watermarking defeats this practice of file sharing, as my music collection has ZERO internet foot print.
The point is not that they think it's worth it, the point is why it's worth it.
Who would you ask for the reasons for space exploration if not those working on it?
I would ask INFORMED individuals who are not involved with it. I would also ask CRITICS of space exploration. Asking the cheerleaders why the football team is cool is not insightful. It is predictable. I could give a large number of well founded and well researched reasons why I think space exploration is worth the money, and my career has NOTHING to do with space exploration.
So, no - I disagree. TFA is a puff piece - space geeks blowing smoke up my ass. I have an idea - let's ask Pres. Bush, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Rice, and Cheney if invading Iraq was a good idea. You'll get the same level of insight.
Slashdot Mirror
RS
thanks for picking up on that - I derive a lot of my ideas in this regard from chalmers johnson. He's a good man.
This Webpage From The Fed changes month to month, but as of 25 JAN 08, it shows that on 16 JAN 08, the AGGREGATE RESERVES OF DEPOSITORY INSTITUTIONS in the USA was at $200 million, down from $43 billion 6 weeks earlier.
The USA is INSOLVENT. It's over. Turn off the lights when you leave. The financial heart of the beast is dead, but the limbs still quiver. In a few years there will be very little discussion of military fantasy projects.
RS
Ummmm - GROW IT. Like their ancestors did.
Don't give me the crap line about how that's a double standard - how Americans get to work a desk and the Global South has to work the fields. In a few short decades, it's not going to make that much difference. Americans will be growing huge amounts of their own food. Eventually, as they slide down the energy curve, they will be just as agrarian as they ever were.
If Brazil has any sense,they will avoid the problem altoether,and focus on develping permacultural practices ASAP.
It's not the end of the world, but we can see it from here.
RS
SNIP
Spot on, well said. Of course, the libertarian mods here will likely slap you down, but know that Ralph Spoilsport agrees with you.
Oh - by the way - the USA is BROKE. Click this link at the Fed
Look at the bottom of the second column - non-borrowed reserves.
Yep. On 16 Jan 08, the USA banking system had 200 million in non-borrowed reserves. That's why the fed dumped billions in. Basically the banking system in the USA is completely insolvent. Next month something like $58BB in ARMs gets reset. In March, $110BB gets reset. If, as it seems, about 15% of it is crap, the banks will be left holding $30BB vacuum, and all the cash they've got is just funny money from the Fed.
The USA is now bankrupt. Bye Bye Empire Empire Bye Bye...
RS
Sure - as long as you're not the nine year old girl in indonesia sewing sneakers together or rolling cigarettes for the American Marketplace.
RS
RS
Why computer workers haven't properly organised with a union is something I still don't understand. If you work for someone else: YOU'RE A SLAVE. So ORGANISE! If you employ others, you're a SLAVE OWNER so EXPECT ORGANISATION.
RS
Prior to the commercialisation of the recording industry (which began in the 1910s/20s but only really took off after WW2) the only way the common person understood music was in the context of someone, usually THEMSELF, playing it. On an instrument. That wasn't plugged into an amplifier.
And at the time, there were musicians, and some did very well (Salieri wasn't poor, nor was Handel) but even they had a tiny tiny fraction of the kind of wealth exhibited by the ruling classes at the time. Musicians were still, basically, hired hands. They might be rich hired hands, but not like what we know today. The important point is the context: you knew music as a performance, not as a recording.
Due to the exigencies of technology, music became a commodity, and in classic capitalist fashion, the material costs were reduced to a minimum - finally, they evapourated as data into the interweb thingie. So, now they're trying to put a meter on something that the interwebs have always had a complex and contradictory relationship: data itself. The record companies are not in the business of selling music. They sell CDs. If the CDs had recordings of dogs barking, or were flat out silent, it wouldn't matter to the record companies, as they (in theory) sell what people want.
What people want is music. What people want is something for nothing. What people want is to wish upon a star and get everything they ever dreamed of, and if they can't do that, then they want the music that takes them there....
The music biz started with printing sheet music in the 19th century. It will die trying to sell data. It was an interesting ride. But now the amusement park is closed. Time to go home and make your own music.
Give up on the star system. Make your own, and support the art made by your friends, your family and your neighbours. Give up on this hallucination of Commodity Culture. Learn to play an instrument, and learn to play it well. work with other musicians, and through your own competence and intelligence you will create the hope this world so desperately needs.
and, in the process, go piss on the grave of the music business.
RS
Apple has extensive testing, and QT is one of the more extensively tested systems. All the major programs are in a test matrix. It doesn't take THAT much effort to do a basic run on say, a dozen or so major apps - an afternoon is all it takes, really.
A minimal test matrix would be a grid with check boxes and comments.
FCP
open (Y/N) open new project (Y/N) open old project (Y/N) capture video (Y/N) process video (Y/N) export to tape (Y/N) export to QT file (Y/N)
iMovie
open (Y/N) open new project (Y/N) open old project (Y/N) capture video (Y/N) process video (Y/N) export to tape (Y/N) export to QT file (Y/N)
Premiere
open (Y/N) open new project (Y/N) open old project (Y/N) capture video (Y/N) process video (Y/N) export to tape (Y/N) export to QT file (Y/N)
After Effects
open (Y/N) open new project (Y/N) open old project (Y/N) capture video (Y/N) process video (Y/N) export to tape (Y/N) export to QT file (Y/N)
iDVD
open (Y/N) open new project (Y/N) open old project (Y/N) capture video (Y/N) process video (Y/N) export to tape (Y/N) export to QT file (Y/N)
DVD SP
open (Y/N) open new project (Y/N) open old project (Y/N) capture video (Y/N) process video (Y/N) export to tape (Y/N) export to QT file (Y/N)
etc. It isn't fucking rocket science, and a single failure on ANY of that is/should be enough to delay the project. I can't imagine someone in QT QA signed off knowing 7.4 would break Adobe AE. While QT does have a prod schedule, it's not like it's tied to NAB like FCP, or the Dev conferences like other apple apps and systems. And it's not like it's some huge number of man hours to fix it. Apple has a software library FILLED to the gunnels with all the minty goodness and this kind of testing is something they do. My guess is someone fucked up and either check AE as working without testing it, or its simply didn't get tested in some imaginary rush to get the latest rev out the door. Either way, some flunky's going to get a lot of heat.
RS
At that point, the price accelerates, (say, US$6 gal) and people stop driving.
Thtis drives demand destruction, and the price levels off, higher than before.(say, US$4 gal)
People adjust, and the amount pumped out reduces, and can't be lifted up, and then the price bumps up again to $8 then drifts down to $6. It will do that, essentially, forever or until people stop using petroleum as fuel.
so, there is no need to charge for congestion. It will simply disappear of its own accord in the next 10 years.
RS
Gads. Every year, there's a solid 20% of them who whine and bitch and moan. Little fucking losers. I try to explain to them that "People who don't know theory work for people who do" but that doesn't seem to sink in.
So,I have to dumb down the class just to get them to pay the least bit of attention. forget about memorising names and dates. If I can get them to leave the class learning a few ideas like "Hegemony" or "Encode/Decode" or get them to look at ANYTHING around them with a critical eye, I consider my work well done.
I'd love to go sprinting along with stuff, but every time I do that, the imbeciles freak out.
Sometimes I think we have too many people in the university system, and not enough working in the fields.
Like the potato fields.
RS
Or, will all this data processing power be squandered on downloading videos of the shaved pudendum of one Britney Spears?
RS
Don't get me wrong - I don't think a moon or Mars base is evil or bad or stupid (I do think it's unnecessary, as I think we could do better using that kind of money for a jillion robot probes and massively improved space telescopes, but I don't think they are wrong - merely suboptimal) I just think there isn't enough money and reosurces left to throw at such a project as a Moon Base, much less a Mars Base.
RS
No.
I couldn't disagree more. Both are corporate shills who will keep the USA mired in Iraq for at least the next 8 years. They both are on their knees to the machine that is destroying not only the USA as a country, but the biosphere itself. They are both really really lame. Neither of them have a plan to deal with the impending energy crisis, nor do either of them have any idea how to deal with the ecocide that is part and parcel of the (according to Cheney) non-negotiable "American Way of Life" which is basically a practice of pillage and destruction. With a nice smiley face from Hollywood to make it all seem OK.
RS
But he used the monkey to do it
Apes in the plan
Were all here to prove it
I can walk like an ape
Talk like an ape
I can do what a monkey can do
God made man
But a monkey supplied the glue
-JOCKO HOMO
So, first you put the squeeze on the little guy or gal, and then when the system still fails, you engage in a round of finger pointing, and then the one with the most clout says "ROLL OVER" and they all roll over and one falls out, and then there's a lot of back slapping and yes, now everything will be better, and of course it's NOT, because the rot starts at the head.
This is all so pathetic and predictable. The sooner M$ disappears ,the happier I will be.
RS
RS
Example: let's say you have a car that gets 30 mpg. You are out in the desert and have 1 gallon of gas. The next gas station is 100 miles away. All The Money In The World isn't going to buy you a gallon of gas when you run out. You're going to have to push the car. If you push it 3 miles a day, you might get there in a month. So, now you know the Energy Value of one gallon of gas: one month of hard labour pushing a car 100 miles.
Another example: carting Grain by horse is limited, as the energy in a cartload of grain is eventually exceeded by the food demands of the horse and driver. All The Money In The World won't change that. As a consequence, in solar economies, (i.e. pre-industrial) most grain was grown and harvested within a week's time of a horse's efforts. 10 miles a day? So, about 70 miles. Maybe 100 if you're lucky.
Food is energy. Pure and simple. Right now we use about 10 calories of petroleum based energy for every calorie we eat. As petroleum depletes, that ratio will, NECESSARILY, decrease, and all the money in the world won't change that. It's called Thermodynamics.
RS
Given the average farm hand needs 2000 calories to maintain homeostasis and at least that much for accoutrement (clothing, etc.), the machine has to run on less than 4000 calories a day of energy, including its energy investment as an object.
I'm not saying one way or the other, but the analysis needs to be made before we can welcome such cyborg farmworker overlords.
RS
And what makes now different from 1798 (Malthus's "An Essay on the Principle of Population"), or 1968 (Erlich's "The Population Bomb") or 1974 (The Club of Rom's "Mankind at the Turning Point")?
What's the difference? The ecocide that's been going on for centuries, for starters. Also, VASTLY improved resource analysis and data, as well as the apparent peak of petroleum production.
All of those writers were correct. The timing was off, and certain technologies came into play as the petroleum age came along, but as we're going to blow through the remaining oil pretty quickly, the total amount of energy per capita will collapse. So, you'll see each of them in reverse order appear - first the Club of Rome's resource and ecological depletion which will put the constraint on Ehrlich's population bomb, followed by a Malthusian Die Off.
Easter Island. Look it up.
RS
It's not the End of the World, but you can see it from here, and if we're not careful Things Could Go Poorly. The problem is the smartest people around think "technology" will fix the "resource" problem. Given unlimited energy and resources, perhaps this is true, but we don't live in a world where there are unlimited resources. So, if we're at the top of the heap - look around you: this is as good as it gets.
RS
If I like it, then I buy the CD. If I don't it sits and rots and gets ignored until I need more room on the drive and delete it.
I don't see how watermarking defeats this practice of file sharing, as my music collection has ZERO internet foot print.
RS
The point is not that they think it's worth it, the point is why it's worth it.
Who would you ask for the reasons for space exploration if not those working on it?
I would ask INFORMED individuals who are not involved with it. I would also ask CRITICS of space exploration. Asking the cheerleaders why the football team is cool is not insightful. It is predictable. I could give a large number of well founded and well researched reasons why I think space exploration is worth the money, and my career has NOTHING to do with space exploration.
So, no - I disagree. TFA is a puff piece - space geeks blowing smoke up my ass. I have an idea - let's ask Pres. Bush, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Rice, and Cheney if invading Iraq was a good idea. You'll get the same level of insight.
RS
"Let's ask Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler, Stalin, and Attila the Hun if Genocide is |"
Ooops. I wrote KEWL in 1337, but I forgot /. uses html, so the 1337 ended up disappearing. Argh.
RS