Had to read the link myself to understand it, the article summary is less than clear.
Basically, the idea was you could initially only buy third level domains such as IAAL.law.pro, but you had to provide credentials to establish your professional status to buy them.
ICANN then allowed second level domains to be sold - e.g. IAAL.pro - but you had to own a third level domain first and hence have gone through the credential-establishing process.
EnCirca are selling second level domains to be sold without having a third level domain first, thus skipping the credential-establishing bit entirely, and this is bad.
That's as far as I understand it anyway. Does that make sense?
I honestly don't understand why all these get cancelled.
I mean... is it because they're unprofitable? It's hard to believe they all could be - sure, sci-fi series in general cost a fair bit to make, but all these series (and I'll throw Futurama in as well) certainly seem to have pretty large numbers of dedicated fans.
And if they're unprofitable... why do they then eventually commission other sci-fi series? What are they hoping for? Actually, how many sci-fi series haven't ended up being cancelled?
Erm... how many people are there out there who have everything they could possibly want to spend their disposable income on? If that's the basis of your logic, I think there's a bit of a flaw there.:-)
And besides - if they want nothing, what are they saving for?:-) (that last point is a somewhat flippant one, before you take it overly seriously).
And of those people who want for nothing, how many of them wanted music enough to buy it previously, but not enough to continue to buy it now they can download it, despite buying it being within their means, easier, and morally justifiable?
I'm thinking we're not talking significant numbers here...
Aassuming that people will spend money assumes there are things people want.
That seems to be a pretty safe assumption.
Assuming that people will spend money they've saved somewhere on something else assumes that there were things they would have bought previously, but felt they couldn't afford. Or things they want more of.
That also seems, on the whole, to be a pretty safe assumption. Of course, it's not a certainty for a specific individual - but then, no-one said it was.
So I can't quite see what part of that logic you don't follow.
The original poster did say "spare cash... that we spend on something" - spare cash that we save would be a different category.:-)
Or to put it another way, you could say that before p2p a person might have spent X amount a week on non-essentials, of which Y was spent on music. That amount will still exist after p2p, so the person will generally still spend it. That's not an unreasonable statement in itself.
You could, and also not unreasonably, go on to say that 'well, with p2p, someone might want to reduce the amount they spend on music so they can spend more on something else (or save it, whatever).'
And you could then, and again not unreasonably, say that some people who are really into music will spend more on it as they find more music they like from being able to easily try recommendations through p2p.
So in order to really put forward a case of whether p2p is likely to affect music sales on that basis, you'd have to assess all the different types of people who buy music, why they chose to spend their money on it, how the availability of music through p2p affects their spending, and hence the affect of p2p on overall sales when it's all balanced out.
That's odd. There seem to be an awful lot of people out there buying things they can get for free, including me.
You'd almost think saying 'no one is going to pay for something they can get for free' is at best a massive over-simplification, or otherwise just plain wrong.
Alternatively, I don't exist, and this post is just a figment of your imagination.:-)
I've never understood that tradition. I mean, things with 'day' in the title usually are actually a day long. I'd be pretty annoyed if someone told me to stop celebrating my birthday at noon. That'd only give me an hour in the pub. Anyway, I think there are two possibilities here.
I think the 'stopping at noon' thing was intended to be an April Fool's joke in itself that people fell for.
Or. more likely, it was a desperate attempt to get people to stop playing stupid stupid jokes without resorting to violence.
Either way, it didn't work. Bring on the violence.:-)
They are operating system APIs used by IE, he says so - just none that are 'not documented on MSDN as part of the platform SDK and available to other browsers and any other software that runs on Windows', i.e. no secret undocumented APIs. So you can rest easy in the knowledge that if someone finds a bug letting them use a malformed website and IE to read files off your local hard drive, IE is only using a documented API to do it.
And he also says that IE is indeed part of the operating system 'so that parts of the OS and other applications can rely on the functionality and APIs being present'. Which presumably would mean a bug in IE could affect those parts of the OS and other applications. Which seems to be to go right along with what I thought the Mozilla guy was saying.
To be fair, it's not like the article claims otherwise:
"Phase Change Cooling systems like the VapoChill are essentially not all that different from the fridge that's likely in your kitchen right now, however of course the end application is different."
Goes into a fair amount of detail, not a bad read if you don't know much about it.
No it doesn't. People clearly are willing to pay for downloaded music, because they do. If they weren't, they wouldn't. The continuing existance of 'piracy' doesn't disprove that statement.
I think part of the problem here is the habit people have of thinking in black & white. This isn't an either/or situation. People can both buy AND copy, and I suspect that's what a lot of people do, they both buy some music and then they download some, or get a copy from a friend, etc.
Why do they buy some and not others? There's the argument of quality, but I suspect it's more often because they don't have unlimited money. You say it's available at a 'negligible price'. Well, as the saying goes, 'a penny is a lot of money - if you don't have a penny.'
I think the real situation is that people are quite willing to pay for music at whatever price - but they may well quite like to have more music than they're willing, or able, to spend money on - so they'll just buy less and copy more if it's more expensive, and vice versa.
I think the point is that introducing predators (or encouraging a greater localised population) is generally a tricky business and has the potential to go horribly horribly wrong. It's not exactly guaranteed to be elegant.
For starters, you can't tell predators which insects are 'bad', and which are 'good'. With a robot this would be theoretically possible. You can also tell a robot to do nothing.
Of course, we could breed a race of super-intelligent birds and bats...
Erm... to be honest, I don't think you've really thought it through yourself.
I mean, places far away from humans are totally irrelevant. There's no need to control the insect population far away from humans, and the point is that the robot approach would allow the precision to control the insect population in designated areas. Even in that small quote I gave, it's being presented as an alternative to chemical pesticides in specific areas and refers to a level of population control rather than eradication.
So there would be no question of 'without insects' or even reduced numbers of insects significant enough to have the effects you describe.
Interestingly (well, I find it interesting), Isaac Asimov suggested the use of robots to control insect population in '...That Thou Art Mindful of Him' in 1974.
'Harriman said, "We cannot control insects effectively without risking damage to the ecology. Chemical insecticides are too broad; juvenile hormones too limited. The robo-bird, however, can preserve large areas without being consumed [...] If the fruit-fly supply runs short, the robo-bird does nothing. It does not multiply, it does not turn to other foods, it does not develop undesirable habits of its own. It does nothing.'
Obviously that's not going to happen just yet - it'll take a lot more than water-walking and fly-digestion - but it does seem that maybe we're on our way to this sort of thing.
I'm not an Asimov nut by the way, I just finished reading 'The Complete Robot' the other day and still have it by my desk.:-)
I suppose it's a credible alternative to a laptop if the only thing you use the laptop for is working at both home and work.
Just have a machine without hard drive at each location and take the usb drive.
Otherwise, yes, you could hardly rely on there being available host hardware without password-protected BIOS setups available wherever you want to use it.:-)
I think not RTFA is taking not believing everything you read one step too far.:-)
For example, the section on 'SOURCES AND METHODS', which says:
Most of the data comes from press releases from the companies themselves. Verant/Sony (EQ), Origin/EA (UO), and Mythic (DAoC) have been particularly good at doing this on a regular basis. Much of the rest of the data comes from news articles in a variety of industry magazines and web sites. I have tried to be careful to only select those reports that contain "official" numbers given in response to a reporter's request for information, but in some cases they are estimates at best. Still other numbers have come from "off the record" numbers given to me by trusted insiders, or in less public forums like the MUD-Dev Mailing List. In a few cases where numbers seemed to conflict, I have picked the one that seemed the most reliable and which seemed to fit with the other data. The upshot of all this is that these numbers should not be taken as gospel. They represent the best research to date.
Makes your whole comment somewhat redundant, don't you think?
...a lot of the men in the field are completely inept individuals with the people skills of a rat?
I would like to say that comparing the inept individuals of the IT field to rats is highly insulting. To the rats.
Speaking as someone who lives with several rats, and as someone who is also only too familiar with the denizens of the IT field (because I'm one of them) I can honestly say that I would prefer to socialise with the rats any day.
I mean, rats don't seem to feel the need to constantly womble over to me and remind me of their complete idiocy, in case I'd forgotten in the few minutes since they previously did it. Rats will sit quietly and lick my fingers. Admittedly I wouldn't want the IT guys to do that, but small furry mammals can get away with it. They both may try to steal my biscuits, but the rats take smaller quantities and seem to appreciate it more. They also both steal my pens and chew on them, but the rats seem to do it less, and can easily be distracted by a small piece of biscuit - and they don't claim they were 'just borrowing it' and accuse me of being overprotective of my stationery. Rats don't laugh/snort at their own bad jokes. Rats don't think that everyone in the world wants to hear their opinion on the latest developments in the Star Trek universe. They also don't think it's more important than anything else I could possibly be doing. And they don't tell me, whatever I'm doing, that I'm doing it wrong. Admittedly rats will occasionally chew through unprotected cables, which isn't something I can say I've seen the IT guys doing. But IT guys will occasionally steal, sorry, 'borrow' the cables, or unplug my computer, or delete my files, etc., so I think that balances out in the rat's favour.
And I can put rats in a cage, and they're not too bothered about it. IT guys complain if I shut them in the closet. Admittedly non-IT people complain about that too though. I should probably stop doing that.
Rats are also cleaner, better groomed, and smell less. A lot less. And I'm not kidding about that.
Personally, I've never even loaded a pistol let alone reloaded one.
But anyway, what's your point?
I mean, given that I haven't suggested that the flashlight should be glued to the marine's other hand or that he should have a hand chopped off and replaced with a flashlight, the fact that he'd logically occasionally have to use his other hand for something other than flashlight-holding seems pretty irrelevant.
By 'manage' I was referring to having to pack and unpack them and sit there waiting realistic times while that happens, and to having to load individual pieces of the correct ammo.
You see, accepting he can carry lots of guns and ammo and switch between them almost instantly is fine. If you want, you can explain it away with some unconvincing pseudo-science babble. Or you can just accept it as a gameplay convenience. After all, having to carefully manage the various guns and ammo wouldn't really be much fun, both to design and implement, and to play.
But having to switch from a flashlight to a pistol isn't really fun either. And being able to use both at once is the opposite to being able to carry lots of guns - it's a simple thing that's easily possible conceivably, but is impossible in the game, and is inconvenient. I imagine that's why many people have latched onto this - because they find it annoying. Having to switch from a flashlight to a gun isn't particularly tension building either, especially after you've had to do it umpteen times already. It's just annoying.
It's also not something that would be technically difficult to implement, as shown by the existance of the mod implementing it.:-)
I just want to know why he can't hold a flashlight in one hand and a pistol in the other. I mean, you can see his reflection in the bathroom mirror in game. It's a one-handed flashlight. It's a one-handed pistol. The maths isn't hard.
I was also slightly disturbed that the majority of people on Slashdot and elsewhere, rather than thinking along those lines, seemed to instead jump to the idea of duct tape, and occasionally helmets. But then I realised that perhaps if the majority of people, a) only use one hand for everything, and b) have an obsession with duct tape, I would probably be happier not thinking too much about it.:-)
Here's a question: if you only had enough money to buy, say, 15 CDs instead of the 30 you think are worth paying for, what would you do?
I suspect most people would keep the MP3s they'd downloaded, on the grounds that they would buy them if they could, and given that they can't, there's no deprivation involved for the record companies or artists and hence it's ethically ok.
Hence, you'd arguably need to track three things to get something approaching a full picture - downloads which caused a direct increase in sales, downloads causing a direct decrease in sales, and downloads which didn't directly affect sales at all. Even that's simplified of course, aside from anything else, they can all affect future sales too.
So all the database here is going to do, by itself, is show that some downloads lead to sales. Well, duh. Without proportions, the numbers are totally meaningless (even disregarding the inherent unreliability of the figures). I'd be more interested in an attempt to get an indication of how downloads are split between the possible categories, but I also don't think it'd be possible to get that indication through any formal means - it's too subject to manipulation to get the desired result. Still, even given that, it could still be interesting to see.
Which is great, and very true. I totally agree with you. Unfortunately, the option only exists for people who live within convenient distance of a decent record store, and often then it's limited by whether they can visit outside of peak times and have a chance of getting a free deck.
Everyone else still has a problem. What's the answer? Downloading!
That's as much a comment on the lack of decent record stores, by the way, as it is a pro-filesharing argument. Which in itself is a comment on the nature of the music industry that leads to the prevalence of the shrinkwrapped cd store over the record store in the first place.
I mean, if you can sample everything in your record store of choice, surely you could have found out about the music that way instead of illegally downloading it?
Or could it be that you can't sample everything in your record store of choice, making your whole reply largely pointless in context?
Slashdot Mirror
Had to read the link myself to understand it, the article summary is less than clear.
Basically, the idea was you could initially only buy third level domains such as IAAL.law.pro, but you had to provide credentials to establish your professional status to buy them.
ICANN then allowed second level domains to be sold - e.g. IAAL.pro - but you had to own a third level domain first and hence have gone through the credential-establishing process.
EnCirca are selling second level domains to be sold without having a third level domain first, thus skipping the credential-establishing bit entirely, and this is bad.
That's as far as I understand it anyway. Does that make sense?
I honestly don't understand why all these get cancelled.
I mean... is it because they're unprofitable? It's hard to believe they all could be - sure, sci-fi series in general cost a fair bit to make, but all these series (and I'll throw Futurama in as well) certainly seem to have pretty large numbers of dedicated fans.
And if they're unprofitable... why do they then eventually commission other sci-fi series? What are they hoping for? Actually, how many sci-fi series haven't ended up being cancelled?
Erm... how many people are there out there who have everything they could possibly want to spend their disposable income on? If that's the basis of your logic, I think there's a bit of a flaw there. :-)
:-) (that last point is a somewhat flippant one, before you take it overly seriously).
And besides - if they want nothing, what are they saving for?
And of those people who want for nothing, how many of them wanted music enough to buy it previously, but not enough to continue to buy it now they can download it, despite buying it being within their means, easier, and morally justifiable?
I'm thinking we're not talking significant numbers here...
Hmm. Well.
Aassuming that people will spend money assumes there are things people want.
That seems to be a pretty safe assumption.
Assuming that people will spend money they've saved somewhere on something else assumes that there were things they would have bought previously, but felt they couldn't afford. Or things they want more of.
That also seems, on the whole, to be a pretty safe assumption. Of course, it's not a certainty for a specific individual - but then, no-one said it was.
So I can't quite see what part of that logic you don't follow.
The original poster did say "spare cash ... that we spend on something" - spare cash that we save would be a different category. :-)
Or to put it another way, you could say that before p2p a person might have spent X amount a week on non-essentials, of which Y was spent on music. That amount will still exist after p2p, so the person will generally still spend it. That's not an unreasonable statement in itself.
You could, and also not unreasonably, go on to say that 'well, with p2p, someone might want to reduce the amount they spend on music so they can spend more on something else (or save it, whatever).'
And you could then, and again not unreasonably, say that some people who are really into music will spend more on it as they find more music they like from being able to easily try recommendations through p2p.
So in order to really put forward a case of whether p2p is likely to affect music sales on that basis, you'd have to assess all the different types of people who buy music, why they chose to spend their money on it, how the availability of music through p2p affects their spending, and hence the affect of p2p on overall sales when it's all balanced out.
That's odd. There seem to be an awful lot of people out there buying things they can get for free, including me.
:-)
You'd almost think saying 'no one is going to pay for something they can get for free' is at best a massive over-simplification, or otherwise just plain wrong.
Alternatively, I don't exist, and this post is just a figment of your imagination.
I've never understood that tradition. I mean, things with 'day' in the title usually are actually a day long. I'd be pretty annoyed if someone told me to stop celebrating my birthday at noon. That'd only give me an hour in the pub. Anyway, I think there are two possibilities here.
:-)
I think the 'stopping at noon' thing was intended to be an April Fool's joke in itself that people fell for.
Or. more likely, it was a desperate attempt to get people to stop playing stupid stupid jokes without resorting to violence.
Either way, it didn't work. Bring on the violence.
This has no effect on me.
/. anyway.
:-)
I always find myself thinking 'geek' when I'm reading
Mind you, I also find myself thinking 'geek' when I'm at work. Or at home. Or looking in a mirror. I really need to get out more.
They are operating system APIs used by IE, he says so - just none that are 'not documented on MSDN as part of the platform SDK and available to other browsers and any other software that runs on Windows', i.e. no secret undocumented APIs. So you can rest easy in the knowledge that if someone finds a bug letting them use a malformed website and IE to read files off your local hard drive, IE is only using a documented API to do it.
:-)
And he also says that IE is indeed part of the operating system 'so that parts of the OS and other applications can rely on the functionality and APIs being present'. Which presumably would mean a bug in IE could affect those parts of the OS and other applications. Which seems to be to go right along with what I thought the Mozilla guy was saying.
As responses go, it's not the best is it?
To be fair, it's not like the article claims otherwise:
"Phase Change Cooling systems like the VapoChill are essentially not all that different from the fridge that's likely in your kitchen right now, however of course the end application is different."
Goes into a fair amount of detail, not a bad read if you don't know much about it.
No it doesn't. People clearly are willing to pay for downloaded music, because they do. If they weren't, they wouldn't. The continuing existance of 'piracy' doesn't disprove that statement.
I think part of the problem here is the habit people have of thinking in black & white. This isn't an either/or situation. People can both buy AND copy, and I suspect that's what a lot of people do, they both buy some music and then they download some, or get a copy from a friend, etc.
Why do they buy some and not others? There's the argument of quality, but I suspect it's more often because they don't have unlimited money. You say it's available at a 'negligible price'. Well, as the saying goes, 'a penny is a lot of money - if you don't have a penny.'
I think the real situation is that people are quite willing to pay for music at whatever price - but they may well quite like to have more music than they're willing, or able, to spend money on - so they'll just buy less and copy more if it's more expensive, and vice versa.
I think the point is that introducing predators (or encouraging a greater localised population) is generally a tricky business and has the potential to go horribly horribly wrong. It's not exactly guaranteed to be elegant.
For starters, you can't tell predators which insects are 'bad', and which are 'good'. With a robot this would be theoretically possible. You can also tell a robot to do nothing.
Of course, we could breed a race of super-intelligent birds and bats...
Erm... to be honest, I don't think you've really thought it through yourself.
I mean, places far away from humans are totally irrelevant. There's no need to control the insect population far away from humans, and the point is that the robot approach would allow the precision to control the insect population in designated areas. Even in that small quote I gave, it's being presented as an alternative to chemical pesticides in specific areas and refers to a level of population control rather than eradication.
So there would be no question of 'without insects' or even reduced numbers of insects significant enough to have the effects you describe.
Interestingly (well, I find it interesting), Isaac Asimov suggested the use of robots to control insect population in '...That Thou Art Mindful of Him' in 1974.
:-)
'Harriman said, "We cannot control insects effectively without risking damage to the ecology. Chemical insecticides are too broad; juvenile hormones too limited. The robo-bird, however, can preserve large areas without being consumed [...] If the fruit-fly supply runs short, the robo-bird does nothing. It does not multiply, it does not turn to other foods, it does not develop undesirable habits of its own. It does nothing.'
Obviously that's not going to happen just yet - it'll take a lot more than water-walking and fly-digestion - but it does seem that maybe we're on our way to this sort of thing.
I'm not an Asimov nut by the way, I just finished reading 'The Complete Robot' the other day and still have it by my desk.
I suppose it's a credible alternative to a laptop if the only thing you use the laptop for is working at both home and work.
:-)
Just have a machine without hard drive at each location and take the usb drive.
Otherwise, yes, you could hardly rely on there being available host hardware without password-protected BIOS setups available wherever you want to use it.
I think not RTFA is taking not believing everything you read one step too far. :-)
For example, the section on 'SOURCES AND METHODS', which says:
Makes your whole comment somewhat redundant, don't you think?
I searched google for "weighs 5g" to see what it could carry, and on the first page of results it had this.
It feels like there should be a use for a flying sapphire buddha. I just can't think what.
Although it would explain why he's got his hands over his eyes.
I would like to say that comparing the inept individuals of the IT field to rats is highly insulting. To the rats.
Speaking as someone who lives with several rats, and as someone who is also only too familiar with the denizens of the IT field (because I'm one of them) I can honestly say that I would prefer to socialise with the rats any day.
I mean, rats don't seem to feel the need to constantly womble over to me and remind me of their complete idiocy, in case I'd forgotten in the few minutes since they previously did it. Rats will sit quietly and lick my fingers. Admittedly I wouldn't want the IT guys to do that, but small furry mammals can get away with it. They both may try to steal my biscuits, but the rats take smaller quantities and seem to appreciate it more. They also both steal my pens and chew on them, but the rats seem to do it less, and can easily be distracted by a small piece of biscuit - and they don't claim they were 'just borrowing it' and accuse me of being overprotective of my stationery. Rats don't laugh/snort at their own bad jokes. Rats don't think that everyone in the world wants to hear their opinion on the latest developments in the Star Trek universe. They also don't think it's more important than anything else I could possibly be doing. And they don't tell me, whatever I'm doing, that I'm doing it wrong. Admittedly rats will occasionally chew through unprotected cables, which isn't something I can say I've seen the IT guys doing. But IT guys will occasionally steal, sorry, 'borrow' the cables, or unplug my computer, or delete my files, etc., so I think that balances out in the rat's favour.
And I can put rats in a cage, and they're not too bothered about it. IT guys complain if I shut them in the closet. Admittedly non-IT people complain about that too though. I should probably stop doing that.
Rats are also cleaner, better groomed, and smell less. A lot less. And I'm not kidding about that.
:-)
Personally, I've never even loaded a pistol let alone reloaded one.
But anyway, what's your point?
I mean, given that I haven't suggested that the flashlight should be glued to the marine's other hand or that he should have a hand chopped off and replaced with a flashlight, the fact that he'd logically occasionally have to use his other hand for something other than flashlight-holding seems pretty irrelevant.
By 'manage' I was referring to having to pack and unpack them and sit there waiting realistic times while that happens, and to having to load individual pieces of the correct ammo.
I don't think Halo made you do that, did it?
Yes. That's right.
:-)
You see, accepting he can carry lots of guns and ammo and switch between them almost instantly is fine. If you want, you can explain it away with some unconvincing pseudo-science babble. Or you can just accept it as a gameplay convenience. After all, having to carefully manage the various guns and ammo wouldn't really be much fun, both to design and implement, and to play.
But having to switch from a flashlight to a pistol isn't really fun either. And being able to use both at once is the opposite to being able to carry lots of guns - it's a simple thing that's easily possible conceivably, but is impossible in the game, and is inconvenient. I imagine that's why many people have latched onto this - because they find it annoying. Having to switch from a flashlight to a gun isn't particularly tension building either, especially after you've had to do it umpteen times already. It's just annoying.
It's also not something that would be technically difficult to implement, as shown by the existance of the mod implementing it.
I just want to know why he can't hold a flashlight in one hand and a pistol in the other. I mean, you can see his reflection in the bathroom mirror in game. It's a one-handed flashlight. It's a one-handed pistol. The maths isn't hard.
:-)
I was also slightly disturbed that the majority of people on Slashdot and elsewhere, rather than thinking along those lines, seemed to instead jump to the idea of duct tape, and occasionally helmets. But then I realised that perhaps if the majority of people, a) only use one hand for everything, and b) have an obsession with duct tape, I would probably be happier not thinking too much about it.
Here's a question: if you only had enough money to buy, say, 15 CDs instead of the 30 you think are worth paying for, what would you do?
I suspect most people would keep the MP3s they'd downloaded, on the grounds that they would buy them if they could, and given that they can't, there's no deprivation involved for the record companies or artists and hence it's ethically ok.
Hence, you'd arguably need to track three things to get something approaching a full picture - downloads which caused a direct increase in sales, downloads causing a direct decrease in sales, and downloads which didn't directly affect sales at all. Even that's simplified of course, aside from anything else, they can all affect future sales too.
So all the database here is going to do, by itself, is show that some downloads lead to sales. Well, duh. Without proportions, the numbers are totally meaningless (even disregarding the inherent unreliability of the figures). I'd be more interested in an attempt to get an indication of how downloads are split between the possible categories, but I also don't think it'd be possible to get that indication through any formal means - it's too subject to manipulation to get the desired result. Still, even given that, it could still be interesting to see.
Which is great, and very true. I totally agree with you. Unfortunately, the option only exists for people who live within convenient distance of a decent record store, and often then it's limited by whether they can visit outside of peak times and have a chance of getting a free deck.
Everyone else still has a problem. What's the answer? Downloading!
That's as much a comment on the lack of decent record stores, by the way, as it is a pro-filesharing argument. Which in itself is a comment on the nature of the music industry that leads to the prevalence of the shrinkwrapped cd store over the record store in the first place.
You sound confused too!
I mean, if you can sample everything in your record store of choice, surely you could have found out about the music that way instead of illegally downloading it?
Or could it be that you can't sample everything in your record store of choice, making your whole reply largely pointless in context?