Trucks travelling through Switzerland already have systems like this in place, which is used to levy road user tolls on them.
It's not technically hard. Minor GPS blackouts for a mile or two don't make enough difference for it to matter. And you can easily turn it off or rip it out, and they can easily notice and fine you.
But the stupidity of California introduce tax breaks for hybrids to reduce pollution at the same time as putting in an expensive solution to increase the tax paid by hybrids is staggering.
"Since El Nino affects only the tropical Pacific regions..."
The Pacific is bigger than you think.
The area El Nino affects is about 30 times the size of the continental US. So it's affects are easily big enough to fluctuate atmospheric mean temperature for the whole damn planet.
You are claiming that Americans have more rights to Free Speech than citizens other nations. That's not true: your Free Speech rights are better in in some ways, but worse in others.
1) A govt only hassles people it considers threats. Your argument that Neo-Nazis can do their thing in the US with less govt interference than in Germany misses the point. Neo-Nazis aren't a considered a serious threat in the US. Look at groups that have been seen as political threats in the US: US Communists had their careers wrecked, were imprisoned, etc for expressing their political views. Militant muslims who are US citizens do not find that publishing extremist muslim political views calling for world revolution vs the US govt gets them left alone. Saying "we give Free Speech to people whose views we don't find threatening" kinda misses the point.
2) The US right to free speech applies to the govt, unlike many other nations 'free speech' laws. Here in my country my employer cannot fire me for expressing my political views. Citizens in the US lack that legal protection. So while they may not throw you in jail for expressing your views, expressing your views freely can easily end your career. That certainly limits the expression of free speech in a free society.
3) The US has among the worst libel laws in the world. That's why multinationals try to sue for libel in the US if the action has occurred internationally. This strongly limits free speech in the US.
You're implicitly assuming that "rights" means "legal rights in the US of A".
But "legal" and "right" are different. Slavery still was wrong, and so slaves had a right to be free and to fight for freedom, even when the US Consitution explicitly permitted slavery. Likewise Jews in Nazi Germany had a right to live, no matter what the Nazi legal system said.
Whether or not students have a right to privacy at a public school is a moral question, no matter what the US Supreme Court says. So parents claiming their students have a right to privacy aren't "mistaken about their kids rights" - they are disagreeing with the school about their kids rights.
Sean
Re:Anti-Global-Warming movement is Bad Science
on
Bad Science Awards
·
· Score: 1
The arguments against global warming, when looked at carefully, usually come out as arguments against the scientific method.
"Your evidence is not 100% complete" - of course not!
"Scientists have a vested interest in claiming that they've proved something" Of course they do!
"This science is only a few decades old!" Yes, new discoveries are usually made in new fields using new techniques.
Either admit that you think predictions of global warming are bad because you don't trust science and the scientific method, OR say why you think that modern advances in biology, geology and physics should be believed but modern advances in climatology should not.
Sean
Anti-Global-Warming movement is Bad Science
on
Bad Science Awards
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Maybe the vast majority of published climate scientists are idiots who blindly accept something which can be seen as obviously false by you and Michael Crichton, despite your lack of training in the field, because of your staggering intellect and because they are biased fools and you have no biases at all.
But I don't think so. I think they view the evidence, think very hard about it, build their climate models carefully, review other published ideas in the field, and that over the last two decades this has brought them to the consensus that man-caused global warming is real and that there will be around 3 degrees C +/- 1 degree C of increase in global mean temperatures over the next century (unless there are reductions in human greenhouse gas emissions).
Your whole "it's just a theory, they haven't proved it yet" argument is the same crap that creationists trot out against evolution (falsely) and that tobacco companies trotted out for years against the "smoking causes cancer" scientific consensus.
Climatologists have proved it to their satisfaction. You got evidence they're wrong, submit it to a refereed journal in the area. If it's not good enough to be published in such a journal, then it's not good enough.
And if you think your evidence is good enough but that there's a vast conspiracy of scientists plotting together to prevent the truth ever being published in any scientific journal, then say so explicitly and reveal yourself as a crank.
Sean
PS: and regards your specific claims, of course we have evidence about how much sunlight the earth has received and how much C02 there was in the past - do you think that we take core samples for the fun of it? And of course our evidence is not 100% complete in all ways - that's how science works. Nor is predicting the weather a month from now the same problem as predicting overall long-term climate trends - so why do you conflate them?
Like project managers, professors have to guess how much development can get done in how much time. It's just as hard to estimate in academia as in the real world, which is why professors (like project managers) very often get it wrong, especially on their first try through of a new thing.
A good professor (like a good project manager) isn't one who never makes mistakes: it's one who is reasonable about bringing their views in line with reality after making a mistake.
So just as in the real world, the correct response is to be polite but firm in pointing out that the expectations were unreasonable.
Refactoring browsers make it easier to refactor your code.
So you can, for example, split a class into a super-class and an implementing subclass, and the IDE will then find every call to create or use an instance of that class and (with some Q&A with the programmer) fix it all up for you.
Or, to give the simplest example, you can rename a method and the browser will fix every call to that method.
Clearly any OO language benefits from this sort of thing even if its core libraries API happens to map 1:1 to your personal intuitions.
Refactoring Browsers were a radical change 2 years ago, and improved coding immensely.
But the claim that they "aren't commonly used" is bunk. They are in very common use today. Eclipse, IDEA, JBuilder, etc. Java IDES have made a huge leap in the last 2 years, and they rock.
They succeeded because they weren't trying to reinvent programming. They just aim to make coding easier and better.
Why non-Java IDEs haven't caught up, I don't know. The worst part by far of having to deal with C++ is that these days the tool support just isn't up to the standard of Eclipse or IDEA. emacs does great stuff with syntax, but it can't replace an IDE that is tracking the codes semantics and making clever use of that knowledge.
Good management lets you predict how much time will be required, and set your deadlines and resourcing right.
So it's ironic to see Pausch documenting in detail such bad management practices, and then stressing how important "good management" is to EA.
Of course, exceptions happen, and unexpected things go wrong. And so inevitably long hours will be needed by some people sometimes. But a good manager who learns that people worked the weekend should be saying "Oh no, what went wrong?" and not "Great!".
HSQL works well if it runs in the same JVM as the single app that is using it. It isn't (as far as I can see from looking at it) built to be horizontally scaleable. Which means that for small Java apps (or embedded devices?) it seems to me that HSQL is a better choice.
But Derby's advantages are only really advantages if it's clusterable (I assume it is) and if you need to cluster (now or later).
"No there was real superstition along with rationality then and there is now"
I agree. I'm not claiming that all superstitions were equal with proto-science. My point is that _often_ you cannot separate supersition from science except in hindsight.
As for Occam's razor: yes, but what looks simple to you may look complex to someone else. Occam's razor was used as an argument against Newton's physics (by Berkeley) on two grounds. Newton was postulating an extra entity (action at a distance!) which is exactly what Occam forbids. And besides he had this loopy and complex new way of doing mathematics called 'calculus' where you postulate new mathematical entities called 'infintesimals' that are zero when you want them to be but non-zero otherwise.
But if we're going to claim that overly complex systems are probably bad systems, then modern computers are in trouble. We've an elegant theory based on Turing machines, but a horrifically complex practice. Which is why I wonder if a hundred years from now computing will be simpler, cleaner, better based on a better understanding of how you should approach it. Or maybe this is as good as it gets.
And since Neal has written about computing, early science, and the future, I thought he might have interesting things to say on the topic.
I think you're confusing 'irrational' and 'superstition'. They're related, but different.
Alchemy and renaissance sorcery were rational attempts to explain the world, they just were starting from the wrong premises. Attempts to use numbers and mathematics for physics worked out better, but Kepler and Newton did it for bizarre neo-pythagorean reasons to do with the 'purity' of 'good' geometric shapes.
Irrationality you can see straight up. But often you can only sort out superstition from science in hindsight.
You've written about computing, hackers, Turing (et al), and the future. You've also written about the moment in the history of 'science' when Newton (etc) were starting the separation of physics and maths from astrology and alchemy.
So where is computing, on the spectrum from superstition to proto-science to applied engineering? Are hackers like engineers and alchemists of 1600 - with coherent, well thought out theories about the world that we use becuase they work sometimes, but which will turn out eventually to be based on completely wrong ideas? Or do we really know what we're doing?
Either way - what does that mean for the future of computing?
The Ozzies were doing this with 3 mobile cell trucks in Sydney for the 2000 Olympics.
The big question is: why does the US have such a primitive telco system?
Sean
Various posters here have said things along the lines of "you can't account for options because they may not be exercised, so you can't tell what they're worth".
That is simplistic nonsense. I build corporate banking IT systems. Banks buy and sell options (on lots of things, including stocks) all the time. Of course banks value them, and treat them as assets and expenses.
Exactly which accounting treatment to use to get the best, most precise, estimate of their value (without creating loopholes) is a matter for debate. But that's true of lots of things in accounting, and it is a separate question from whether or not you should do an estimate of the value of stock options when doing your accounting.
Sean
An analysis by Prof Bernard Cohen (can't find the damned URL) of the radioactivity released at Three Mile Island (very little), people affected by it (a few thousand), and the chance of a person dying because of the radiation concluded that there is a 50% chance that one person will die because of Three Mile Island.
If you rationally calculate what risks really kill people then you find that living near a nuke power plant reduces your life expectancy by about 8 hrs. Going on a driving holiday in the US, or permitting people to smoke tobacco near you, is _much_ more dangerous.
Ours is very irrational society in what we choose to restrict and what we choose to permit.
Sean
PS: And bloody Sterling should know better than to conflate risks of nuke power (minor) and risks of nuke weapons (major).
Many more foreign students do grad work in the US than vice-versa.
That's because the US pays grad students well, by international standards. There's a standard set-up for PhD students in the US whereby you get a stipend to be a teaching assistant or (less commonly) research assistant, and it covers your fees (and almost enough to live on, too).
So why does the US pay grad students? Well...
Historically a huge number of americans go to university as undergrads compared to most other countries (though other wealthy countries are now catching up), and US academics are highly paid compared to other countries. So US universities don't want to hire sufficient academics. As a result a huge amount of the teaching (especially marking load, running labs, tutorials and other less-visible time-consuming activities) in US universities is done by grad students. Especially at the big state universities, especially for stage one and two (you Yanks call it "freshman" and "sophomore" years).
The result is keen competition for good grad students. Importantly, this raises funding levels even at universities that don't use grad students for cheap teaching resources, and even for RA as well as TA positions.
Most other university systems in wealthy countries do not have as entrenched a culture of grad student support, or (relatedly) of grad students doing most of the teaching hours. So while opportunities do exist outside the US for graduate work, they're rarer and so harder to get into. (Oxford and Cambridge are obvious counter-examples, but that relates again to teaching undergrads and to their historic 1:3 or 1:4 tutor:student ratios).
The reverse is true for post-doctoral positions. Post-docs don't teach, so the US system supports comparatively few of them by international standards.
The "play is how we learning, learning is fun" thing has a lot going for it.
BUT: The reason we go to school is to learn things that DON'T come naturally.
The school curriculum doesn't teach kids how to talk, or recognize faces, or interact socially. That's not because those skills are easy (they're bloody hard), but because those are skills that we have evolved we learn naturally..
Schools do have a hell of a time trying to teach things like basic statistics, and basic physics, because those do NOT come naturally. We have natural, evolved heuristics for physics and probability that are designed for a primate living on the savannah and just don't cut it in the modern world, and kids have to UNLEARN their basic intuitions about those things.
You can make learning those things fun, but it takes a lot of work and skill to do so.
Sean
Specialists who are true experts in their field get paid very well.
The risks are: (a) being so specialized that you can't get work and (b) having your skillset become redundant (cobol programming for VMS is not a good choice).
Stress is what we feel when our current abilities are being challenged
This whole "no pain no gain" thing is part of the macho bullshit USA business culture, and it's a myth. Try reading a bit of social psych about the real causes of stress.
It related to this absurd tendency to have programmers work 60 hour weeks for months: all the serious research shows that working such long hours harms productivity and so isn't worth it. But still there's this idea that because they are suffering more at the keyboards they must be accomplishing more.
More stress does not mean you're accomplishing more.
I.U. Bloomington was so keen on providing good network access that the head of campus computing there (McRobbie) was personally sued by Metallica at the height of the Napster fuss back in 2000.
His problem was that they'd figured out that Napster's inefficient P2P was jamming up their network, so in self-defence the IUB network guys advised Napster on how to be a bit more efficient (and download yr song from the frat boy in the next room, instead of from some geek in Japan). Good technical move, bit of a legal problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Trucks travelling through Switzerland already have systems like this in place, which is used to levy road user tolls on them.
It's not technically hard. Minor GPS blackouts for a mile or two don't make enough difference for it to matter. And you can easily turn it off or rip it out, and they can easily notice and fine you.
But the stupidity of California introduce tax breaks for hybrids to reduce pollution at the same time as putting in an expensive solution to increase the tax paid by hybrids is staggering.
Sean
"Since El Nino affects only the tropical Pacific regions..."
The Pacific is bigger than you think.
The area El Nino affects is about 30 times the size of the continental US. So it's affects are easily big enough to fluctuate atmospheric mean temperature for the whole damn planet.
sean
You are claiming that Americans have more rights to Free Speech than citizens other nations. That's not true: your Free Speech rights are better in in some ways, but worse in others.
1) A govt only hassles people it considers threats. Your argument that Neo-Nazis can do their thing in the US with less govt interference than in Germany misses the point. Neo-Nazis aren't a considered a serious threat in the US. Look at groups that have been seen as political threats in the US: US Communists had their careers wrecked, were imprisoned, etc for expressing their political views. Militant muslims who are US citizens do not find that publishing extremist muslim political views calling for world revolution vs the US govt gets them left alone. Saying "we give Free Speech to people whose views we don't find threatening" kinda misses the point.
2) The US right to free speech applies to the govt, unlike many other nations 'free speech' laws. Here in my country my employer cannot fire me for expressing my political views. Citizens in the US lack that legal protection. So while they may not throw you in jail for expressing your views, expressing your views freely can easily end your career. That certainly limits the expression of free speech in a free society.
3) The US has among the worst libel laws in the world. That's why multinationals try to sue for libel in the US if the action has occurred internationally. This strongly limits free speech in the US.
sean
You're implicitly assuming that "rights" means "legal rights in the US of A".
But "legal" and "right" are different. Slavery still was wrong, and so slaves had a right to be free and to fight for freedom, even when the US Consitution explicitly permitted slavery. Likewise Jews in Nazi Germany had a right to live, no matter what the Nazi legal system said.
Whether or not students have a right to privacy at a public school is a moral question, no matter what the US Supreme Court says. So parents claiming their students have a right to privacy aren't "mistaken about their kids rights" - they are disagreeing with the school about their kids rights.
Sean
The arguments against global warming, when looked at carefully, usually come out as arguments against the scientific method.
"Your evidence is not 100% complete" - of course not!
"Scientists have a vested interest in claiming that they've proved something" Of course they do!
"This science is only a few decades old!" Yes, new discoveries are usually made in new fields using new techniques.
Either admit that you think predictions of global warming are bad because you don't trust science and the scientific method, OR say why you think that modern advances in biology, geology and physics should be believed but modern advances in climatology should not.
Sean
But I don't think so. I think they view the evidence, think very hard about it, build their climate models carefully, review other published ideas in the field, and that over the last two decades this has brought them to the consensus that man-caused global warming is real and that there will be around 3 degrees C +/- 1 degree C of increase in global mean temperatures over the next century (unless there are reductions in human greenhouse gas emissions).
See, for some basics written for general readers, www.realclimate.org
Your whole "it's just a theory, they haven't proved it yet" argument is the same crap that creationists trot out against evolution (falsely) and that tobacco companies trotted out for years against the "smoking causes cancer" scientific consensus.
Climatologists have proved it to their satisfaction. You got evidence they're wrong, submit it to a refereed journal in the area. If it's not good enough to be published in such a journal, then it's not good enough.
And if you think your evidence is good enough but that there's a vast conspiracy of scientists plotting together to prevent the truth ever being published in any scientific journal, then say so explicitly and reveal yourself as a crank.
Sean
PS: and regards your specific claims, of course we have evidence about how much sunlight the earth has received and how much C02 there was in the past - do you think that we take core samples for the fun of it? And of course our evidence is not 100% complete in all ways - that's how science works. Nor is predicting the weather a month from now the same problem as predicting overall long-term climate trends - so why do you conflate them?
Like project managers, professors have to guess how much development can get done in how much time. It's just as hard to estimate in academia as in the real world, which is why professors (like project managers) very often get it wrong, especially on their first try through of a new thing.
A good professor (like a good project manager) isn't one who never makes mistakes: it's one who is reasonable about bringing their views in line with reality after making a mistake.
So just as in the real world, the correct response is to be polite but firm in pointing out that the expectations were unreasonable.
Sean
Refactoring browsers make it easier to refactor your code.
So you can, for example, split a class into a super-class and an implementing subclass, and the IDE will then find every call to create or use an instance of that class and (with some Q&A with the programmer) fix it all up for you.
Or, to give the simplest example, you can rename a method and the browser will fix every call to that method.
Clearly any OO language benefits from this sort of thing even if its core libraries API happens to map 1:1 to your personal intuitions.
sean
Refactoring Browsers were a radical change 2 years ago, and improved coding immensely.
But the claim that they "aren't commonly used" is bunk. They are in very common use today. Eclipse, IDEA, JBuilder, etc. Java IDES have made a huge leap in the last 2 years, and they rock.
They succeeded because they weren't trying to reinvent programming. They just aim to make coding easier and better.
Why non-Java IDEs haven't caught up, I don't know. The worst part by far of having to deal with C++ is that these days the tool support just isn't up to the standard of Eclipse or IDEA. emacs does great stuff with syntax, but it can't replace an IDE that is tracking the codes semantics and making clever use of that knowledge.
sean
Thin 'still' air? Doesn't the Antarctic plateau suffer from 200 mph+ winds? Sean
Good management lets you predict how much time will be required, and set your deadlines and resourcing right.
So it's ironic to see Pausch documenting in detail such bad management practices, and then stressing how important "good management" is to EA.
Of course, exceptions happen, and unexpected things go wrong. And so inevitably long hours will be needed by some people sometimes. But a good manager who learns that people worked the weekend should be saying "Oh no, what went wrong?" and not "Great!".
Sean
Just as well the prize is only for americans.
Because with the current trends in the US dollar that'll be worth 20 euro-cents.
HSQL works well if it runs in the same JVM as the single app that is using it. It isn't (as far as I can see from looking at it) built to be horizontally scaleable. Which means that for small Java apps (or embedded devices?) it seems to me that HSQL is a better choice.
But Derby's advantages are only really advantages if it's clusterable (I assume it is) and if you need to cluster (now or later).
Comments?
Sean
Realistically, is there a significant market for work stations in that price range? If so, who and why?
I know there are some pretty intense users of 3D rendering out there. But they are a rather small and specialized market.
Maybe I'm just jealous, but isn't this a distraction for Sun from the real desktop market?
Sean
"No there was real superstition along with rationality then and there is now"
I agree. I'm not claiming that all superstitions were equal with proto-science. My point is that _often_ you cannot separate supersition from science except in hindsight.
As for Occam's razor: yes, but what looks simple to you may look complex to someone else. Occam's razor was used as an argument against Newton's physics (by Berkeley) on two grounds. Newton was postulating an extra entity (action at a distance!) which is exactly what Occam forbids. And besides he had this loopy and complex new way of doing mathematics called 'calculus' where you postulate new mathematical entities called 'infintesimals' that are zero when you want them to be but non-zero otherwise.
But if we're going to claim that overly complex systems are probably bad systems, then modern computers are in trouble. We've an elegant theory based on Turing machines, but a horrifically complex practice. Which is why I wonder if a hundred years from now computing will be simpler, cleaner, better based on a better understanding of how you should approach it. Or maybe this is as good as it gets.
And since Neal has written about computing, early science, and the future, I thought he might have interesting things to say on the topic.
Sean
I think you're confusing 'irrational' and 'superstition'. They're related, but different.
Alchemy and renaissance sorcery were rational attempts to explain the world, they just were starting from the wrong premises. Attempts to use numbers and mathematics for physics worked out better, but Kepler and Newton did it for bizarre neo-pythagorean reasons to do with the 'purity' of 'good' geometric shapes.
Irrationality you can see straight up. But often you can only sort out superstition from science in hindsight.
Sean
Hi,
You've written about computing, hackers, Turing (et al), and the future. You've also written about the moment in the history of 'science' when Newton (etc) were starting the separation of physics and maths from astrology and alchemy.
So where is computing, on the spectrum from superstition to proto-science to applied engineering? Are hackers like engineers and alchemists of 1600 - with coherent, well thought out theories about the world that we use becuase they work sometimes, but which will turn out eventually to be based on completely wrong ideas? Or do we really know what we're doing?
Either way - what does that mean for the future of computing?
Sean
The Ozzies were doing this with 3 mobile cell trucks in Sydney for the 2000 Olympics. The big question is: why does the US have such a primitive telco system? Sean
Various posters here have said things along the lines of "you can't account for options because they may not be exercised, so you can't tell what they're worth". That is simplistic nonsense. I build corporate banking IT systems. Banks buy and sell options (on lots of things, including stocks) all the time. Of course banks value them, and treat them as assets and expenses. Exactly which accounting treatment to use to get the best, most precise, estimate of their value (without creating loopholes) is a matter for debate. But that's true of lots of things in accounting, and it is a separate question from whether or not you should do an estimate of the value of stock options when doing your accounting. Sean
If you rationally calculate what risks really kill people then you find that living near a nuke power plant reduces your life expectancy by about 8 hrs. Going on a driving holiday in the US, or permitting people to smoke tobacco near you, is _much_ more dangerous.
Ours is very irrational society in what we choose to restrict and what we choose to permit.
Sean
PS: And bloody Sterling should know better than to conflate risks of nuke power (minor) and risks of nuke weapons (major).
Many more foreign students do grad work in the US than vice-versa.
That's because the US pays grad students well, by international standards. There's a standard set-up for PhD students in the US whereby you get a stipend to be a teaching assistant or (less commonly) research assistant, and it covers your fees (and almost enough to live on, too).
So why does the US pay grad students? Well...
Historically a huge number of americans go to university as undergrads compared to most other countries (though other wealthy countries are now catching up), and US academics are highly paid compared to other countries. So US universities don't want to hire sufficient academics. As a result a huge amount of the teaching (especially marking load, running labs, tutorials and other less-visible time-consuming activities) in US universities is done by grad students. Especially at the big state universities, especially for stage one and two (you Yanks call it "freshman" and "sophomore" years).
The result is keen competition for good grad students. Importantly, this raises funding levels even at universities that don't use grad students for cheap teaching resources, and even for RA as well as TA positions.
Most other university systems in wealthy countries do not have as entrenched a culture of grad student support, or (relatedly) of grad students doing most of the teaching hours. So while opportunities do exist outside the US for graduate work, they're rarer and so harder to get into. (Oxford and Cambridge are obvious counter-examples, but that relates again to teaching undergrads and to their historic 1:3 or 1:4 tutor:student ratios).
The reverse is true for post-doctoral positions. Post-docs don't teach, so the US system supports comparatively few of them by international standards.
Sean
The "play is how we learning, learning is fun" thing has a lot going for it. BUT: The reason we go to school is to learn things that DON'T come naturally. The school curriculum doesn't teach kids how to talk, or recognize faces, or interact socially. That's not because those skills are easy (they're bloody hard), but because those are skills that we have evolved we learn naturally.. Schools do have a hell of a time trying to teach things like basic statistics, and basic physics, because those do NOT come naturally. We have natural, evolved heuristics for physics and probability that are designed for a primate living on the savannah and just don't cut it in the modern world, and kids have to UNLEARN their basic intuitions about those things. You can make learning those things fun, but it takes a lot of work and skill to do so. Sean
Specialists who are true experts in their field get paid very well.
The risks are:
(a) being so specialized that you can't get work and
(b) having your skillset become redundant (cobol programming for VMS is not a good choice).
With that in mind pick a niche, and excel at it.
This whole "no pain no gain" thing is part of the macho bullshit USA business culture, and it's a myth. Try reading a bit of social psych about the real causes of stress.
It related to this absurd tendency to have programmers work 60 hour weeks for months: all the serious research shows that working such long hours harms productivity and so isn't worth it. But still there's this idea that because they are suffering more at the keyboards they must be accomplishing more.
More stress does not mean you're accomplishing more.
I.U. Bloomington was so keen on providing good network access that the head of campus computing there (McRobbie) was personally sued by Metallica at the height of the Napster fuss back in 2000.
His problem was that they'd figured out that Napster's inefficient P2P was jamming up their network, so in self-defence the IUB network guys advised Napster on how to be a bit more efficient (and download yr song from the frat boy in the next room, instead of from some geek in Japan). Good technical move, bit of a legal problem.