I'm not sure if you are attacking the Czech system as anti-social or not. When you are there, it doens't feel anti-social. Here's why:
Germany and the Czech Republic (and many other countries around there) are basically the same: you go the pub with your friends to talk and drink, and maybe eat a bit. You typically sit with them at a table, not at the bar (with the bartender). Some places have no seating at the bar -- it is laid out like a restaurant. You have to order everything from the same waiter (they run their own purse and tabs).
A big (huge!) problem in Germany, is that the unmotivated beer servers (no tips) go to your table and take an order, and then go back to get it. The order is almost always the same -- "another beer, please." It can take 10-15 minutes to get a beer on a bad night -- they don't hire enough waiters because it would kill their budgets. I was there one night with a Pole suffering though that, and he said that back in Poland, if they couldn't keep the beer coming fast enough, there would likely be some sort of customer-revolt. Again, ordering from ther bar is not OK, you have to order from your waiter, so when things are busy and you aren't getting food/beer, you start to resent your lazy waiter.
So if I'm going to drink in Central Europe, I'd rather do it Czech style, as at least then I (and friends) don't have to suffer without beer. Infinitely better than the German system. It just comes, magically, when you need it. If it weren't so busy you could perhaps chat with the staff, but you're there to talk with your companions anyway, not necessarily the staff.
The Czechs at U Zlateho Tigra have a simpler system.
They serve one beer. (an excellent one). They serve one kind of mug (half-liter). It is presumed that if you have an empty in front of you, you want another.
A guy goes around the room looking for empties. He carries as many beers as he can hold. He takes your empty, puts down the new beer and marks your coaster to "add" the new beer to the tally. Then he goes back to the bar, loads up with more beers and heads out.
If you don't want the beer, you must say "no!"
When finished, you pay. He counts up and you are done.
That's it: free but for the paper (or coaster) used for the tab. Works great. No need to even talk to the guy.
If I recall correctly, Bronfman (the name refers to making brandy, in German -- but Bronfman is as kosher as gefilte fish), is from a long line of alcohol makers. They supposedly made their fortune dealing in liquor illegally during Prohibition by making a huge fraction of the illegal alcohol sold in the US.
His daddy was in essence a kosher Pablo Escobar.
Little Bronfy himself presided over the shameful shakedown of Swiss banks in the 90s.
It doesn't surprise me at all that Little Bronfy vants his money.
I'ver never really got how people conflate DNS and the TLDs with "control of the internet".
Isn't it that you've got a function that maps a string ("AMAZON.COM") to a 32-bit number (more for IPV6).
So here it is (for the mathematically inclined):
F: string -> number
Big deal, right? Anyone could plug in their own naming function, and they "control the internet?"
Indeed, as soon as the USA gets uppity, I would expect to see a distributed naming system up very quickly. There'd be chaos for a while -- but it would get worked out one way or another.
It wouldn't be so bad to have a distributed naming system, either -- especially if you could somehow reify the naming function and share it full or partially with your friends.
Why don't you make a legal argument instead of being childish?
"I take it back" is pretty close to "I'm revoking the license."
The issue has to do with bare licenses, consideration and contracts. Please just read the few pages the IP lawyer wrote, and try to make a reasonable argument.
Arguing, "what you say can't be true because if it were, SCO could do something shitty" doesn't make sense. Plenty of tech-related law gets decided in crappy ways, with bad results for almost everyone. Software patents spring to mind.
Conceivably, with the "consideration" your are talking about, there's no exchange of anything from the user of the program back to the licensor. E.g. you say you'll give me changes. You are giving me a promise -- but you won't necessarily ever give me any changes.
The proverbial "in consideration of $1" seems a lot more like consideration to me than this promise.
Also, the GPL doens't require that I give changes to you -- but to others (to whom I distribute the work) -- so you are not necessarily going to ever get anything back. How is that consideration? I can see you say, "well, to me, that warms my heart, so I consider it 'consideration'" -- but normal people don't necessarily get that. [I do, of course].
As the lawyer mentions in the book, these licenses haven't been tested in court. I really hope we get a big fat test that clears things up.
Also, I'm aware that the revocability of a bare license applies to MIT/BSD stuff too -- I'm not saying those are better. But their overall simplicity and clear intent make it seem a lot less risky to me.
Well, I'm just going by what I learned about contracts -- there has to be consideration, right?
You write "You can't take just "take back" the license at your pleasing; once the user has downloaded the software, he has entered into the license...", but what is the justification for your statement? And what is "enter into a license?" Don't folks enter into a contract? And for contracts, don't you need "consideration"?
I'd like to think the law works that way, but I know full well that contract law doesn't necessarily work the way I think it should.
Isn't it the case that if I saw I'll give you something (a license), but there's no consideration, that promise is not enforceable. OK, there's the concept of "promissory estoppel", but that's pretty vauge. Consideration is really simple.
This will be great for things with an MIT/Berkeley license (e.g. *BSD). The license allows you to do with the code as you please (as long as you preserve the Copyright notice) and hold the author harmless.
That's really simple.
There seems to be a lot of confusion about the GPL, even among people who like it a lot. The simplicity of the MIT license makes it a no-brainer.
Also, there is some question as to whether or not the GPL is a contract or not. There is the possibility that someone could "take back' the license. As there is no apparent consideration (e.g. you didn't pay for the license, did you?), a court might say, OK, he took it back. There was no contract.
That sort of ambiguity, until put to rest, causes trouble for some.
So the MIT (modified Berkeley) license will look better than ever.
"Take Adaptec for instance. Before the 3.7 release we disabled support for the aac(4) Adaptec RAID driver because negotiations with the Adaptec had failed. They refused to give us documentation."
and
"But having been ignored for so long by these vendors, it is not clear when (if ever) we will get around to writing that support for Adaptec RAID controllers now. And Adaptec has gone and bought ICP Vortex, which may mean we can never get documentation for the gdt(4) controllers. The "Open Source Friendly liar" IBM owns Mylex, and Mylex has told us we would not get documentation, either. 3Ware has lied to us and our users so many times they make politicians look saintly.
"Until other vendors give us documentation, if you want reliable RAID in OpenBSD, please buy LSI/AMI RAID cards. And everything will just work."
Yeah, I guess I am the acronym Nazi. Names and words matter, and I'm conservative about their usage.
I'm not sure what you mean when you write, "you knew what they were talking about, right?" --- I certainly knew enough to know that AJAX is a fundamentally flawed acronym. I even dug up that guy's article where he explains why it is so flawed.
Acronyms, in general, are a pile of shit. We'd all be better off if folks were not pulling acronyms (and other "marketing" based names) out of their ass.
To wit: "Javascript"
That has nothing to do with Java (TM) -- the language that Sun created and marketed. The name suggests a much deeper connection, and it continues to cause trouble even today.
But this doesn't make sense: systems that people call "Ajax" don't even use XML. There's no particular reason for them to use it, either. Saying you throw on the 'x' because you use "XMLHttpRequest" is ridiculous too, considering that XMLHttpRequest is misnamed -- it might as well just be HttpRequest.
Furthermore, you're coming up with justifications for the 'X' after the fact -- which is silly. The guy who came up with the term explains his whole irritating thought process. So if you wnat to know where the 'X' came from (and the retarded acronym, "AJAX"), you just read what he wrote. E.g.
Q. Some of the Google examples you cite don't use XML at all. Do I have to use XML and/or XSLT in an Ajax application?
A. No. XML is the most fully-developed means of getting data in and out of an Ajax client, but there's no reason you couldn't accomplish the same effects using a technology like JavaScript Object Notation or any similar means of structuring data for interchange.
So according to the Ajax master-blaster, you don't need XML to get shit in and out of an "AJAX" application.
XMLHttpRequest is only one of the methods of accomplishing asynchronous communication. A hidden IFrame is another technique (which Google, the master of this sort of thing uses -- or so I hear).
The IFrame doens't have to use XML, right? Sometime it does, but it doesn't have to.
The way easy, low-cost hackability and freedom is disappearing fast.
It the old days, processors with DRM, on board boot flash and encryption didn't exist, because it would have cost too much, the theory wasn't known and it wasn't so obvious that schmucks would pay so much for fucking ringtones.
In the last decade, it has become clear that:
* hardware encryption is key * schmucks (by the millions) will pay for ringtones * downloading music is the future * encryption works -- you can build a good cryptosystem for DRM * hacker-types are the small, small minority of computer users (as opposed to 1977 -- when they helped make Apple the DRM-king that it is today)
So why would a businessman cut off 99% of the market, just to please a bunch of fat, bearded GNU/Linux fans, or a bunch of old, crabby BSD guys? Billions want their ringtones and pop tunes -- what do they know from freedom anyway? What is freedom, when you live in China/Africa/India and are bascially poor as dirty anyway?
More and more the question is just -- "why not" load it with DRM. The hacker types can either A) use other hardware or B) have a reduced-content experience.
Which makes me think hackers have had it pretty "easy" all along.
Cheap and secure DRM -- looks like San Disk has done it.
There needs to be integration with the processor (e.g. processor starts up, decrypts and runs a boot program using a special key) -- but that's already been done. Secure storage makes those two things work better. Note: if your processor is old school and non-DRM, you just snoop the bus and get the secrets.
Looks like a real home run: this is the "right place" (from an economic standpoint) to put the DRM. It will be cheap and secure.
However, it then becomes a juicy target for attack: if they are selling these chips by the millions, and they are protecting IP worth billions, then it is time to break out the acid and electron microscopes, and figure out how to deactivate it. And then it is busted.
The DRM fits the "customer is a schmuck from whom we suck our pound of flesh, one ringtone at a time."
The phone companies are living and dying on their ringtone money these days, right? I can imagine that smart folks said, "well, if the phone guys want a long-term micropayment system, let's just load it up with DRM, and then they can suck to their cold-hearted heart's content."
It got me to reflecting that the average Linux hacker couldn't be more put off by DRM, other than to say to them: sorry guy, you can't load programs on this secure hardware. At all. No opting for a "reduced content experience" --- our way or the highway. And no specs for you either, you tricky hacker.
But then, as I said, phones are for schmucks. There are about 2 billion more potential phone customers than phone+PC customers. The phone is where it is at. PC's are not a growth area.
Some schmuck living in Xinjiang province who scrapes together money to get a phone doesn't give a hoot. Neither does some shepheard in Tajikistan. Or some guy in Lesotho -- he just needs a phone. And if ringtones cost a bit more, whatever.
You can use imperative languages too. That's the neat thing about the tournament -- given a choice, most of the folks choose languages that offer more expressivity than the typical imperative language.
There have been "C" programs that won previously, I believe.
The word "blogs", esp. blogger (and all derived words) have rubbed me the wrong way from the beginning -- especially when we have words like "write" and "writer."
I went to the website and I couldn't view it -- I clicked on the tree.
It said something about "Macromedia Shockwave Flash".
Running Macromedia's software is against me security policy, so I can't view it. I'd appreciate any reports on what you actually see.
Also, whenever I have a letdown feeling like this (it happens whenever Slashdot posts a stupid slashvertisement from a company I despise, and then links to a useless shockwave flash site), I like to remind myself that at least I'm not Mr. Hands.
In case you are wondering who Mr. Hands is, here you go. [WARNING -- TOTALLY WORK UNSAFE! -- features horse/human intimacy -- this guy died of acute peritonitis after doing stuff like show in the video]
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure if you are attacking the Czech system as anti-social or not. When you are there, it doens't feel anti-social. Here's why:
Germany and the Czech Republic (and many other countries around there) are basically the same: you go the pub with your friends to talk and drink, and maybe eat a bit. You typically sit with them at a table, not at the bar (with the bartender). Some places have no seating at the bar -- it is laid out like a restaurant. You have to order everything from the same waiter (they run their own purse and tabs).
A big (huge!) problem in Germany, is that the unmotivated beer servers (no tips) go to your table and take an order, and then go back to get it. The order is almost always the same -- "another beer, please." It can take 10-15 minutes to get a beer on a bad night -- they don't hire enough waiters because it would kill their budgets. I was there one night with a Pole suffering though that, and he said that back in Poland, if they couldn't keep the beer coming fast enough, there would likely be some sort of customer-revolt. Again, ordering from ther bar is not OK, you have to order from your waiter, so when things are busy and you aren't getting food/beer, you start to resent your lazy waiter.
So if I'm going to drink in Central Europe, I'd rather do it Czech style, as at least then I (and friends) don't have to suffer without beer. Infinitely better than the German system. It just comes, magically, when you need it. If it weren't so busy you could perhaps chat with the staff, but you're there to talk with your companions anyway, not necessarily the staff.
The Czechs at U Zlateho Tigra have a simpler system.
They serve one beer. (an excellent one).
They serve one kind of mug (half-liter).
It is presumed that if you have an empty in front of you, you want another.
A guy goes around the room looking for empties. He carries as many beers as he can hold. He takes your empty, puts down the new beer and marks your coaster to "add" the new beer to the tally. Then he goes back to the bar, loads up with more beers and heads out.
If you don't want the beer, you must say "no!"
When finished, you pay. He counts up and you are done.
That's it: free but for the paper (or coaster) used for the tab. Works great. No need to even talk to the guy.
Ruthelessly efficient.
If I recall correctly, Bronfman (the name refers to making brandy, in German -- but Bronfman is as kosher as gefilte fish), is from a long line of alcohol makers. They supposedly made their fortune dealing in liquor illegally during Prohibition by making a huge fraction of the illegal alcohol sold in the US.
. htmlr onfmanking.html
His daddy was in essence a kosher Pablo Escobar.
Little Bronfy himself presided over the shameful shakedown of Swiss banks in the 90s.
It doesn't surprise me at all that Little Bronfy vants his money.
Here are some references:
http://www.forward.com/issues/2002/02.06.07/news6
http://www.davidicke.net/tellthetruth/reststory/b
http://www.blacksandjews.com/bronfman.html
I'ver never really got how people conflate DNS and the TLDs with "control of the internet".
Isn't it that you've got a function that maps a string ("AMAZON.COM") to a 32-bit number (more for IPV6).
So here it is (for the mathematically inclined):
F: string -> number
Big deal, right? Anyone could plug in their own naming function, and they "control the internet?"
Indeed, as soon as the USA gets uppity, I would expect to see a distributed naming system up very quickly. There'd be chaos for a while -- but it would get worked out one way or another.
It wouldn't be so bad to have a distributed naming system, either -- especially if you could somehow reify the naming function and share it full or partially with your friends.
Why don't you make a legal argument instead of being childish?
"I take it back" is pretty close to "I'm revoking the license."
The issue has to do with bare licenses, consideration and contracts. Please just read the few pages the IP lawyer wrote, and try to make a reasonable argument.
Arguing, "what you say can't be true because if it were, SCO could do something shitty" doesn't make sense. Plenty of tech-related law gets decided in crappy ways, with bad results for almost everyone. Software patents spring to mind.
Please look at p. 56 of the book linked to here.
Conceivably, with the "consideration" your are talking about, there's no exchange of anything from the user of the program back to the licensor. E.g. you say you'll give me changes. You are giving me a promise -- but you won't necessarily ever give me any changes.
The proverbial "in consideration of $1" seems a lot more like consideration to me than this promise.
Also, the GPL doens't require that I give changes to you -- but to others (to whom I distribute the work) -- so you are not necessarily going to ever get anything back. How is that consideration? I can see you say, "well, to me, that warms my heart, so I consider it 'consideration'" -- but normal people don't necessarily get that. [I do, of course].
As the lawyer mentions in the book, these licenses haven't been tested in court. I really hope we get a big fat test that clears things up.
Also, I'm aware that the revocability of a bare license applies to MIT/BSD stuff too -- I'm not saying those are better. But their overall simplicity and clear intent make it seem a lot less risky to me.
Well, I'm just going by what I learned about contracts -- there has to be consideration, right?
...", but what is the justification for your statement? And what is "enter into a license?" Don't folks enter into a contract? And for contracts, don't you need "consideration"?
You write "You can't take just "take back" the license at your pleasing; once the user has downloaded the software, he has entered into the license
I'd like to think the law works that way, but I know full well that contract law doesn't necessarily work the way I think it should.
Isn't it the case that if I saw I'll give you something (a license), but there's no consideration, that promise is not enforceable. OK, there's the concept of "promissory estoppel", but that's pretty vauge. Consideration is really simple.
Here's a lawyer who agrees with me: page 56.
I'm assuming he knows something, he wrote the book (freely downloadable) Open Source Licensing Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law
If you can, please explain to me how this guy is just wrong. If you can site some case law so I can follow up, that'd be nice too.
This will be great for things with an MIT/Berkeley license (e.g. *BSD). The license allows you to do with the code as you please (as long as you preserve the Copyright notice) and hold the author harmless.
That's really simple.
There seems to be a lot of confusion about the GPL, even among people who like it a lot. The simplicity of the MIT license makes it a no-brainer.
Also, there is some question as to whether or not the GPL is a contract or not. There is the possibility that someone could "take back' the license. As there is no apparent consideration (e.g. you didn't pay for the license, did you?), a court might say, OK, he took it back. There was no contract.
That sort of ambiguity, until put to rest, causes trouble for some.
So the MIT (modified Berkeley) license will look better than ever.
I like how Stallman and Theo De Raadt both have incrmental approaches. Continually chipping away.
E.g. here's some of the latest on OpenBSD and RAID:
"Take Adaptec for instance. Before the 3.7 release we disabled support for the aac(4) Adaptec RAID driver because negotiations with the Adaptec had failed. They refused to give us documentation."
and
"But having been ignored for so long by these vendors, it is not clear when (if ever) we will get around to writing that support for Adaptec RAID controllers now. And Adaptec has gone and bought ICP Vortex, which may mean we can never get documentation for the gdt(4) controllers. The "Open Source Friendly liar" IBM owns Mylex, and Mylex has told us we would not get documentation, either. 3Ware has lied to us and our users so many times they make politicians look saintly.
"Until other vendors give us documentation, if you want reliable RAID in OpenBSD, please buy LSI/AMI RAID cards. And everything will just work."
Software patents are so incredibly awful for new entrants that I just cannot get excited about this.
Sure, I hate -- HATE -- Microsoft with a passion. But the existing patent system will only help them.
Thanks! That makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, I guess I am the acronym Nazi. Names and words matter, and I'm conservative about their usage.
I'm not sure what you mean when you write, "you knew what they were talking about, right?" --- I certainly knew enough to know that AJAX is a fundamentally flawed acronym. I even dug up that guy's article where he explains why it is so flawed.
Acronyms, in general, are a pile of shit. We'd all be better off if folks were not pulling acronyms (and other "marketing" based names) out of their ass.
To wit: "Javascript"
That has nothing to do with Java (TM) -- the language that Sun created and marketed. The name suggests a much deeper connection, and it continues to cause trouble even today.
The ninja who invented the term doesn't seem to think so.
Here's an in-depth summary of my points, with references to the guy who invented the term. And a critique by another guy, with whom I agree.
But this doesn't make sense: systems that people call "Ajax" don't even use XML. There's no particular reason for them to use it, either. Saying you throw on the 'x' because you use "XMLHttpRequest" is ridiculous too, considering that XMLHttpRequest is misnamed -- it might as well just be HttpRequest.
Furthermore, you're coming up with justifications for the 'X' after the fact -- which is silly. The guy who came up with the term explains his whole irritating thought process. So if you wnat to know where the 'X' came from (and the retarded acronym, "AJAX"), you just read what he wrote. E.g.
Q. Some of the Google examples you cite don't use XML at all. Do I have to use XML and/or XSLT in an Ajax application?
A. No. XML is the most fully-developed means of getting data in and out of an Ajax client, but there's no reason you couldn't accomplish the same effects using a technology like JavaScript Object Notation or any similar means of structuring data for interchange.
So according to the Ajax master-blaster, you don't need XML to get shit in and out of an "AJAX" application.
Here's a nice piece by a guy who sees things my way, and explains it in detail, step-by-step, with references (OK, he's not totally pissed off the way I am but...) he covers my main points:
* AJAX was invented as a marketing term ("masturbatory acronaming")
* it doesn't have to use XML
I don't think you get to hit me over the head:
2 /08/iframe.html
XMLHttpRequest is only one of the methods of accomplishing asynchronous communication. A hidden IFrame is another technique (which Google, the master of this sort of thing uses -- or so I hear).
The IFrame doens't have to use XML, right? Sometime it does, but it doesn't have to.
So XML looks entirely optional.
Here's a reference: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2002/0
That's why I think the 'X' in XML is pure, masturbatory acronaming.
"AJAX" as an acronym is completely annoying.
"Asynchronous Javascript and XML" -- but there's often no XML in there at all.
You see, the acronym idiots needed an 'x' in there -- AJA! didn't sound cool enough.
So they through in 'XML' to get the X.
Better to have thrown in 'xylophone' or "xanthax" or "xanthan gum", because then you'd think -- oh, I see, its just some stupid acronaming.
This is the sort of thing that I despise. I wish I could hit that guy over the head with a brick.
OK, so I take it it was just a crappy photo? Do they not photograph well?
It just wan't compelling -- and I "know" that E-ink is supposed to be really great.
I've been looking forward to this stuff for about 10 years.
I know this is supposed to be great technology -- basically, like paper, not a stupid LCD. Easier on the eyes.
S CLZZZZZZZ_.jpg
And yet, when I looked at the photo, I thought -- hey, that looks like crap. I don't want that. Stay away, UGLY!
What gives? Does the E-ink display really look so bad? Or is it just a bad photo for the dev kit?
Here's a typical product that looks way more appealing:
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B0007Y79B2.01._
The way easy, low-cost hackability and freedom is disappearing fast.
It the old days, processors with DRM, on board boot flash and encryption didn't exist, because it would have cost too much, the theory wasn't known and it wasn't so obvious that schmucks would pay so much for fucking ringtones.
In the last decade, it has become clear that:
* hardware encryption is key
* schmucks (by the millions) will pay for ringtones
* downloading music is the future
* encryption works -- you can build a good cryptosystem for DRM
* hacker-types are the small, small minority of computer users (as opposed to 1977 -- when they helped make Apple the DRM-king that it is today)
So why would a businessman cut off 99% of the market, just to please a bunch of fat, bearded GNU/Linux fans, or a bunch of old, crabby BSD guys? Billions want their ringtones and pop tunes -- what do they know from freedom anyway? What is freedom, when you live in China/Africa/India and are bascially poor as dirty anyway?
More and more the question is just -- "why not" load it with DRM. The hacker types can either A) use other hardware or B) have a reduced-content experience.
Which makes me think hackers have had it pretty "easy" all along.
Cheap and secure DRM -- looks like San Disk has done it.
There needs to be integration with the processor (e.g. processor starts up, decrypts and runs a boot program using a special key) -- but that's already been done. Secure storage makes those two things work better. Note: if your processor is old school and non-DRM, you just snoop the bus and get the secrets.
Looks like a real home run: this is the "right place" (from an economic standpoint) to put the DRM. It will be cheap and secure.
However, it then becomes a juicy target for attack: if they are selling these chips by the millions, and they are protecting IP worth billions, then it is time to break out the acid and electron microscopes, and figure out how to deactivate it. And then it is busted.
I think you've hit the nail on the head.
The DRM fits the "customer is a schmuck from whom we suck our pound of flesh, one ringtone at a time."
The phone companies are living and dying on their ringtone money these days, right? I can imagine that smart folks said, "well, if the phone guys want a long-term micropayment system, let's just load it up with DRM, and then they can suck to their cold-hearted heart's content."
It got me to reflecting that the average Linux hacker couldn't be more put off by DRM, other than to say to them: sorry guy, you can't load programs on this secure hardware. At all. No opting for a "reduced content experience" --- our way or the highway. And no specs for you either, you tricky hacker.
But then, as I said, phones are for schmucks. There are about 2 billion more potential phone customers than phone+PC customers. The phone is where it is at. PC's are not a growth area.
Some schmuck living in Xinjiang province who scrapes together money to get a phone doesn't give a hoot. Neither does some shepheard in Tajikistan. Or some guy in Lesotho -- he just needs a phone. And if ringtones cost a bit more, whatever.
You can use imperative languages too. That's the neat thing about the tournament -- given a choice, most of the folks choose languages that offer more expressivity than the typical imperative language.
There have been "C" programs that won previously, I believe.
I'm a crabby old guy resistant to jargon.
The word "blogs", esp. blogger (and all derived words) have rubbed me the wrong way from the beginning -- especially when we have words like "write" and "writer."
Thankfully, I've found this guy who really says it all better than I can.
I bet they mammas can't hardly spell they names. [even when they are not smoking rock]
Just try not to be so snippy next time.
I went to the website and I couldn't view it -- I clicked on the tree.
It said something about "Macromedia Shockwave Flash".
Running Macromedia's software is against me security policy, so I can't view it. I'd appreciate any reports on what you actually see.
Also, whenever I have a letdown feeling like this (it happens whenever Slashdot posts a stupid slashvertisement from a company I despise, and then links to a useless shockwave flash site), I like to remind myself that at least I'm not Mr. Hands.
In case you are wondering who Mr. Hands is, here you go. [WARNING -- TOTALLY WORK UNSAFE! -- features horse/human intimacy -- this guy died of acute peritonitis after doing stuff like show in the video]