So very true. My play growing up was much the same - had to be home by the time streetlights came on, beyond that it was up to me to buy my own gunpowder to blow stuff up, so I had to do chores to get any money from the 'rents. We moved all over the place, and everywhere new was a world to explore and find all the fun places in. And that was just 25 years ago.
So much has changed, with plusses and minuses. This lack of real-world play experience is definitely a minus. Really though, as far as I'm concerned, that's just parents screwing up their kids (which pretty much everyone does one way or another, usually to a lesser degree). I'm expecting a big wave of "discover nature 'n stuff" amongst the technokid set as adults in another decade or two. Sort of starting to see it already in places.
I still love the smell of burned black powder. It's the magic smoke output of fun-right-now. Just thinking of it makes me smile and remember how much fun smacking two rocks together can be when friends are involved and there's stuff to blow up.
He's an entertaining curmudgeon, certainly. He's brilliant, and accomplished, and talented, and all that stuff.......but he's doing the crotchety-old-bastard thing more and more, and if he's not careful, it's going to be his vehicle into the twilight of irrelevance.
I do hope he starts to talk directly to the folks he should be addressing: The people who realize all by themselves the problems of (regression to the mean)/(difficulties of expertise)/(relevancy of relevance and evaluation)/(academy vs/cum practice)/(and so on), and seek relevancy and insight accordingly. Amongst those folks are the grand wizards of technology, the people who are able to leverage knowledge into grand effect (engineers, hardware and software designers, genomicists, politicians, economists, large-corp executives, the very rich, etc), and THOSE are the minds he needs to be talking to and conversing with.
Everyone else is pretty much irrelevant for such purposes.
And....
I hope he loses all that extra weight really damn soon and fixes his eating and exercise habits, he's going to die early (and his cognition will go down hill PDQ), and that would suck. I'm hoping to see his new ideas for quite some time to come. Take care of yourself, Jaron.
Nick of MindlessAutomata makes a comment/joke about learning about sex by taking a class about it,...responded to by nick of TubeSteak who then makes references to prostitutes AND college-environment sex when responding to a joke about sexual penetration from person with nick MindlessAutomata!!
It took quite a while, but I've developed a healthy respect for the work that program managers and project managers do. A well-run project is a thing of joy and beauty, and a poorly run project is a continuous slogging headache, and such dynamics are due to the project manager.
I personally would hate doing all the document shuffling/updating all day long, and wrangling conference call after conference all - but hey, I don't have to, because other folks who don't hate it as much as I do are willing to do it and get paid for it.
So yes, there are worthwhile and valuable jobs in tech that are not directly tech themselves. And if you get attitude or disrespect from "the techies", ignore it, as it's actually a measure of their cluelessness and professional immaturity, not a measure of the usefulness of your work.
In my experience, programmers tend to not be paranoid or methodical enough for sysadmin work. They also get frustrated too fast when faced with weird problems involving software they have no experience with or view into. (It helps a bit to point out to them that debuggers/tracers are not just for finding bugs, and they can be used on other people's software too, including closed-source vendor software).
I've seen a LOT of "we'll just try this out", with no voice in the back of their mind screaming at them "THAT IS A PRODUCTION SYSTEM YOU FLAMING IDIOT DO YOU EVEN HAVE THE CODE AND DATA BACKED UP YET OMFG!!!!" to help them pause and reconsider exactly how bad the situation can become if "just try this out" doesn't actually work. This seems to come from being used to just working in development environments that they can break and/or restructure all they want with essentially no impact to other people, or their (own personal) income/employment status.
Finally, they seem to be used to working on a single codebase at a time, with an essentially static operating platform - they don't generally have a visceral sense of multisystem interactions, or multisystems management issues, patching, platform versioning problems, and so on, because they tend to just not deal with those types of issues daily.
There's more, but that's generally the highlights of what I've personally seen. The most important part is that they tend to lack a seriously well-developed (and experienced...sigh...) sense of paranoia. Fear of horrendous production outages combined with a healthy skepticism of software's actual ability to function correctly until proven to do so (including patches...*sigh*) is, in my experience, the bedrock that a really good sysadmin stands on.
The brain is entirely possible to reverse engineer. There are several ways of doing it.
The most popular way, "take it apart and see how it works". Considering that the only prohibitions against brain disassembly are on humans, AND that human genes for brain development can easily be put into non-human primate genomes, then you grow however many big-brained primates (...yes, I'm a sly little beaver; it'd most likely be a fully sentient primate at that point, and "taking apart its brain" is now the least of your worries...), then take apart their brains to see how the human brain growth genes work, and since they're non-human primates, you don't have to deal with human murder laws and the suchlike.
The newer, increasingly popular way is to grow a brain in a computer using human brain-growth DNA instructions. There are a few bits of tech to be developed first, but development on all of them is coming along well. A brain in a computer is completely, totally knowable and controllable - you can take snapshots of it, make copies of it, run it backwards and forwards in time, turn parts of it off and on, *add on* new parts, and (best piece of it all) allow for interconnection density and reach that are entirely impossible in biological brains due to space/scale/nutrient/metabolism requirements of neurons. And, you can talk to it the WHOLE TIME and ask it what it's thinking!...and yes, I'm a sly little beaver with that one too, because then you'd have a completely immortal, completely copy-copy-copy-able sentient being inside that computer....and understanding how its brain operates is now one of the least of your worries.
But hey, it's all coming, and all coming pretty damn fast. May as well plan for it as best as possible ahead of time.
Tall people cause global warming and higher food prices.
Highly physically fit people cause global warming and higher food prices.
Healthy people who move around cause global warming and higher food prices.
People who aren't starving at the edge of metabolic functioning cause global warming and higher food prices.
Men (who are larger than women...) cause global warming and higher food prices.
Yes. People who eat more food than other people who don't eat as much as them...eat more food than other people who don't eat as much as them. Yes, they are a larger part of the demand set...than people who are a smaller part of the demand set.
I'm glad that this study has been released right now so as to get this jackass notion fixed in people's minds right now, so that we don't have to waste time considering it in the future with any seriousness at all.
Why?
Because if humanity EVER gets to the point where the food consumption habits ALONE of a portion of the population actually substantially impact the global environment and/or global economics to a serious degree (which, still, right now, it's not) then we have much bigger problems than "some fat people need to eat less". The problems are more like "serious percentages of the human race are starving to death because the food DOESN'T EXIST to feed them"...which is absolutely not the problem right now, and hopefully will NEVER be a problem. Right now, food problems are a simple matter of price, NOT actual global availability.
Here in Tampa wee (*snicker*) have a urologist named Dr. Cockburn. I wish I was kidding.
A friend of mine works for Quest Diagnostics, and has actually talked to the guy before on the phone. The Dr. is apparently a bit of a dick (*snicker*^2) about his name - tries to say that it's pronounced "Coe-burn"...which is just stupid, nevermind wrong - coe != cock. This friend of mine delights in really accenting that second hard k dipthong when talking to the good Dr. To me, it's great advertising, but hey, everyone's got their thing.
This could be the basic structural data for a TRULY EXCELLENT large-scale online or gaming environment - either as a self-contained world like Liberty City in GTA3, or as an online multiuser environment for gaming...or just as a huge 3D cool-ass online "place to go". I'd love to live in NY and be able to invite folks to visit my online apartment....hell, that's something I wouldn't mind paying 5-10 bux a month rent on, just to have. And the client feature possibilities are sooo cool - you could have a software agent that monitors visitors to your online pad, and pretty much extend any other environmental metaphors to cool features and interaction possibilities. Furnishings, lighting, parties...entirely too much coolness.
And this is ignoring the excellent possibilities for gaming - from missions, to large-scale team based warfare, and suchlike.
If I have. To click. "I accept". For EVERY DAMN PROGRAM INSTALLED during a system setup JUST TO GET IT TO INSTALL OR RUN, I foresee complete insanity in my future.
Third, or fourth time....
on
Stopping Light
·
· Score: 1
that this story has been posted on slashdot as reported by various publications. *sigh*
I hope this is a privately traded company, as this guy is the President of the company and he's making a business choice based on his personal reaction to lamers and rude people. If this was a publicly traded company, he could run the risk of setting himself up for a shareholder lawsuit.
If he's saying that this is because people are mean to him, but he really wants to change the licenses his company uses so that they can make more money and restrict competitor access to the source for their products, then he should just say so and be done with it.
And the best part is, he's blaming RMS's feedback as the last straw and the reason why he's making the change - which is ludicrous. He spoke to the one of the people most famously known for espousing the ideals of stubbornly free software ON THE PLANET and then freaks out when this person misunderstands how his business operates in a way that this person will want to complain about.
And then he writes an essay telling the whole world about it. Sorry, this whole thing is just silly.
Looks like a bunch of folks learned a very hard lesson in financial management.
What surprises me is that the corporations who invested in Loki didn't check things out more closely - they should have known better.
I think it would be a good idea if the folks who are owed salary sued the holders of the copyrights of the games they worked on for individual unlimited derivative work and distribution rights at very little or no cost in perpetuity - that way, they could get revenues from selling the games they worked on but didn't get paid for, and the folks that screwed them over would get very little or no money from it.
But that's just my view of fairness here.
Always nice to see folks well into the upper 1% of the populace in brainpower working hard on determing the most efficient way to kill a billion people.
*chuckle*
Got ya, didn't I?:)
It's a shame, really, that instantiations of entertainingly complex situations can't be adequately addressed in a pithy remark or 20, but have to have the attribute set of the given situation mapped out prior to effective discussion. Which takes time, attention, and a decent short-term memory in the least - things that plenty of folks don't have in concurrence - making many interesting conversations untenable. Issues of sanity, emotional reaction, education and world view just make things that much more quirky.
Oh well. For an adequate depicted example of a good number of the concepts in this, go see Time Machine. The image of a broken Moon floating across the sky is extraordinary - makes the movie worth seeing all by itself, and is the depiction I'm talking about.
I'm babbling. Bed time.
I find it amusing that Katz says "yet another overhyped, self-serving fantasy by deluded scientists and technocrats talking mostly to one another, foisting their ill-conceived, poorly-engineered creations on an unsuspecting public" with a straight face...and doesn't even seem to have a concept of the irony of him saying such a thing in derision about someone else.
Because these companies bray loud and long about how *fast* their services are in their advertising. Continuously.
And yet, when they get you onto their service THAT YOU'RE PAYING AT LEAST 3X DIALUP COST FOR (I can get unlimited 56k dialup for $10/month), and discover that you're actually USING IT MORE THAN A DIALUP CONNECTION (big shock there!), they then try to screw you off their service by either cutting you off, throttling your bandwidth, or threatening you with the above or legal action or both. They'll prattle endlessly about how fast their service is in their advertising...but then try to get customers that actually *use* their service for more than AOLIM and 5 emails a week (i.e. ludicrously high profit customers) off their network.
The issue here (for me, anyways) is companies lying in their advertising. If they say, loudly, UP FRONT, that there are overall usage limitations on a monthly basis for their basic service, then fine - I, the customer, know what I'm getting into.
And, btw, all you folks out there who are babbling about "the high-usage customers being supported by the low usage customers" - uh, no. You're all supporting the profit line of a company that is lying in their advertising to build up a group of users who'll *PAY* (at least!) 4X more for internet access, but won't actually *USE* 4X more.
Really, it mainly depends on how smart you are. If you're not as smart, it will take you longer to learn and understand your core subject, so taking as long on other things can make your core work more difficult. If you're really smart, however, you'll be able to pick up your core subject matter with comparitive speed, ease and completeness. This permits you more time to pick up other information outside of your core subject - which is actually a really, really important thing to have if you're going to be an effective citizen/voter/parent/etc. Literally, the more educated you are in variant subjects, the more effective your interpretation and reactions to your experiences you will be - you'll have more to work from. Additionally, you'll have a base to work from to learn more in those variant subject areas should the need arise - essentially, you'll already know where to start and how to keep from wasting your time on crap, and that knowledge cannot be underestimated for usefulness.
And...remember, not everyone is alike. To make this a canonical discussion for one direction or another is pointless - different people not only learn the same things differently, those same bits of information influences the learners' interpretation of reality differently. Also, some people are much more oriented to learning a few things deeply while others are more oriented to learning some (to varying degrees) about a very large number of things.
Slashdot Mirror
while wget --mirror --output-document=- http://www.northcountrygazette.org/ > /dev/null 2>&1 || true;do echo lol;done
Doesn't use any storage space, and emits amusing completion note per cycle. Gives that sense of accomplishment as a high note to your latte sippage.
So very true. My play growing up was much the same - had to be home by the time streetlights came on, beyond that it was up to me to buy my own gunpowder to blow stuff up, so I had to do chores to get any money from the 'rents. We moved all over the place, and everywhere new was a world to explore and find all the fun places in. And that was just 25 years ago.
So much has changed, with plusses and minuses. This lack of real-world play experience is definitely a minus. Really though, as far as I'm concerned, that's just parents screwing up their kids (which pretty much everyone does one way or another, usually to a lesser degree). I'm expecting a big wave of "discover nature 'n stuff" amongst the technokid set as adults in another decade or two. Sort of starting to see it already in places.
I still love the smell of burned black powder. It's the magic smoke output of fun-right-now. Just thinking of it makes me smile and remember how much fun smacking two rocks together can be when friends are involved and there's stuff to blow up.
....and turning into SUCH an old curmudgeon.
He's an entertaining curmudgeon, certainly. He's brilliant, and accomplished, and talented, and all that stuff.... ...but he's doing the crotchety-old-bastard thing more and more, and if he's not careful, it's going to be his vehicle into the twilight of irrelevance.
I do hope he starts to talk directly to the folks he should be addressing: The people who realize all by themselves the problems of (regression to the mean)/(difficulties of expertise)/(relevancy of relevance and evaluation)/(academy vs/cum practice)/(and so on), and seek relevancy and insight accordingly. Amongst those folks are the grand wizards of technology, the people who are able to leverage knowledge into grand effect (engineers, hardware and software designers, genomicists, politicians, economists, large-corp executives, the very rich, etc), and THOSE are the minds he needs to be talking to and conversing with.
Everyone else is pretty much irrelevant for such purposes.
And....
I hope he loses all that extra weight really damn soon and fixes his eating and exercise habits, he's going to die early (and his cognition will go down hill PDQ), and that would suck. I'm hoping to see his new ideas for quite some time to come. Take care of yourself, Jaron.
Ok, that was pure art.
Nick of MindlessAutomata makes a comment/joke about learning about sex by taking a class about it, ...responded to by nick of TubeSteak who then makes references to prostitutes AND college-environment sex when responding to a joke about sexual penetration from person with nick MindlessAutomata!!
Perfection. Diffractive crystalline perfection, even.
Yeah, 'cuz the question is indeed about a budding programmer...
YES.
It took quite a while, but I've developed a healthy respect for the work that program managers and project managers do. A well-run project is a thing of joy and beauty, and a poorly run project is a continuous slogging headache, and such dynamics are due to the project manager.
I personally would hate doing all the document shuffling/updating all day long, and wrangling conference call after conference all - but hey, I don't have to, because other folks who don't hate it as much as I do are willing to do it and get paid for it.
So yes, there are worthwhile and valuable jobs in tech that are not directly tech themselves. And if you get attitude or disrespect from "the techies", ignore it, as it's actually a measure of their cluelessness and professional immaturity, not a measure of the usefulness of your work.
In my experience, programmers tend to not be paranoid or methodical enough for sysadmin work. They also get frustrated too fast when faced with weird problems involving software they have no experience with or view into. (It helps a bit to point out to them that debuggers/tracers are not just for finding bugs, and they can be used on other people's software too, including closed-source vendor software).
I've seen a LOT of "we'll just try this out", with no voice in the back of their mind screaming at them "THAT IS A PRODUCTION SYSTEM YOU FLAMING IDIOT DO YOU EVEN HAVE THE CODE AND DATA BACKED UP YET OMFG!!!!" to help them pause and reconsider exactly how bad the situation can become if "just try this out" doesn't actually work. This seems to come from being used to just working in development environments that they can break and/or restructure all they want with essentially no impact to other people, or their (own personal) income/employment status.
Finally, they seem to be used to working on a single codebase at a time, with an essentially static operating platform - they don't generally have a visceral sense of multisystem interactions, or multisystems management issues, patching, platform versioning problems, and so on, because they tend to just not deal with those types of issues daily.
There's more, but that's generally the highlights of what I've personally seen. The most important part is that they tend to lack a seriously well-developed (and experienced...sigh...) sense of paranoia. Fear of horrendous production outages combined with a healthy skepticism of software's actual ability to function correctly until proven to do so (including patches...*sigh*) is, in my experience, the bedrock that a really good sysadmin stands on.
Are your friend. Yay imperfect UV shielding!
Supercritical update.
The brain is entirely possible to reverse engineer. There are several ways of doing it.
...and yes, I'm a sly little beaver with that one too, because then you'd have a completely immortal, completely copy-copy-copy-able sentient being inside that computer....and understanding how its brain operates is now one of the least of your worries.
The most popular way, "take it apart and see how it works". Considering that the only prohibitions against brain disassembly are on humans, AND that human genes for brain development can easily be put into non-human primate genomes, then you grow however many big-brained primates (...yes, I'm a sly little beaver; it'd most likely be a fully sentient primate at that point, and "taking apart its brain" is now the least of your worries...), then take apart their brains to see how the human brain growth genes work, and since they're non-human primates, you don't have to deal with human murder laws and the suchlike.
The newer, increasingly popular way is to grow a brain in a computer using human brain-growth DNA instructions. There are a few bits of tech to be developed first, but development on all of them is coming along well. A brain in a computer is completely, totally knowable and controllable - you can take snapshots of it, make copies of it, run it backwards and forwards in time, turn parts of it off and on, *add on* new parts, and (best piece of it all) allow for interconnection density and reach that are entirely impossible in biological brains due to space/scale/nutrient/metabolism requirements of neurons. And, you can talk to it the WHOLE TIME and ask it what it's thinking!
But hey, it's all coming, and all coming pretty damn fast. May as well plan for it as best as possible ahead of time.
Tall people cause global warming and higher food prices.
Highly physically fit people cause global warming and higher food prices.
Healthy people who move around cause global warming and higher food prices.
People who aren't starving at the edge of metabolic functioning cause global warming and higher food prices.
Men (who are larger than women...) cause global warming and higher food prices.
Yes. People who eat more food than other people who don't eat as much as them...eat more food than other people who don't eat as much as them. Yes, they are a larger part of the demand set...than people who are a smaller part of the demand set.
I'm glad that this study has been released right now so as to get this jackass notion fixed in people's minds right now, so that we don't have to waste time considering it in the future with any seriousness at all.
Why?
Because if humanity EVER gets to the point where the food consumption habits ALONE of a portion of the population actually substantially impact the global environment and/or global economics to a serious degree (which, still, right now, it's not) then we have much bigger problems than "some fat people need to eat less". The problems are more like "serious percentages of the human race are starving to death because the food DOESN'T EXIST to feed them"...which is absolutely not the problem right now, and hopefully will NEVER be a problem. Right now, food problems are a simple matter of price, NOT actual global availability.
Ugh, and duh.
Bacon. From fat people.
Here in Tampa wee (*snicker*) have a urologist named Dr. Cockburn. I wish I was kidding.
A friend of mine works for Quest Diagnostics, and has actually talked to the guy before on the phone. The Dr. is apparently a bit of a dick (*snicker*^2) about his name - tries to say that it's pronounced "Coe-burn"...which is just stupid, nevermind wrong - coe != cock. This friend of mine delights in really accenting that second hard k dipthong when talking to the good Dr. To me, it's great advertising, but hey, everyone's got their thing.
Wow.
This could be the basic structural data for a TRULY EXCELLENT large-scale online or gaming environment - either as a self-contained world like Liberty City in GTA3, or as an online multiuser environment for gaming...or just as a huge 3D cool-ass online "place to go". I'd love to live in NY and be able to invite folks to visit my online apartment....hell, that's something I wouldn't mind paying 5-10 bux a month rent on, just to have. And the client feature possibilities are sooo cool - you could have a software agent that monitors visitors to your online pad, and pretty much extend any other environmental metaphors to cool features and interaction possibilities. Furnishings, lighting, parties...entirely too much coolness.
And this is ignoring the excellent possibilities for gaming - from missions, to large-scale team based warfare, and suchlike.
*droooool*
If I have. To click. "I accept". For EVERY DAMN PROGRAM INSTALLED during a system setup JUST TO GET IT TO INSTALL OR RUN, I foresee complete insanity in my future.
that this story has been posted on slashdot as reported by various publications. *sigh*
I hope this is a privately traded company, as this guy is the President of the company and he's making a business choice based on his personal reaction to lamers and rude people. If this was a publicly traded company, he could run the risk of setting himself up for a shareholder lawsuit.
If he's saying that this is because people are mean to him, but he really wants to change the licenses his company uses so that they can make more money and restrict competitor access to the source for their products, then he should just say so and be done with it.
And the best part is, he's blaming RMS's feedback as the last straw and the reason why he's making the change - which is ludicrous. He spoke to the one of the people most famously known for espousing the ideals of stubbornly free software ON THE PLANET and then freaks out when this person misunderstands how his business operates in a way that this person will want to complain about.
And then he writes an essay telling the whole world about it. Sorry, this whole thing is just silly.
woohoo!!
500th Post!!
Looks like a bunch of folks learned a very hard lesson in financial management.
What surprises me is that the corporations who invested in Loki didn't check things out more closely - they should have known better.
I think it would be a good idea if the folks who are owed salary sued the holders of the copyrights of the games they worked on for individual unlimited derivative work and distribution rights at very little or no cost in perpetuity - that way, they could get revenues from selling the games they worked on but didn't get paid for, and the folks that screwed them over would get very little or no money from it.
But that's just my view of fairness here.
Always nice to see folks well into the upper 1% of the populace in brainpower working hard on determing the most efficient way to kill a billion people. :)
*chuckle*
Got ya, didn't I?
It's a shame, really, that instantiations of entertainingly complex situations can't be adequately addressed in a pithy remark or 20, but have to have the attribute set of the given situation mapped out prior to effective discussion. Which takes time, attention, and a decent short-term memory in the least - things that plenty of folks don't have in concurrence - making many interesting conversations untenable. Issues of sanity, emotional reaction, education and world view just make things that much more quirky.
Oh well. For an adequate depicted example of a good number of the concepts in this, go see Time Machine. The image of a broken Moon floating across the sky is extraordinary - makes the movie worth seeing all by itself, and is the depiction I'm talking about.
I'm babbling. Bed time.
Good luck you two (and any iterations thereafter)!
I find it amusing that Katz says "yet another overhyped, self-serving fantasy by deluded scientists and technocrats talking mostly to one another, foisting their ill-conceived, poorly-engineered creations on an unsuspecting public" with a straight face...and doesn't even seem to have a concept of the irony of him saying such a thing in derision about someone else.
Because these companies bray loud and long about how *fast* their services are in their advertising. Continuously.
And yet, when they get you onto their service THAT YOU'RE PAYING AT LEAST 3X DIALUP COST FOR (I can get unlimited 56k dialup for $10/month), and discover that you're actually USING IT MORE THAN A DIALUP CONNECTION (big shock there!), they then try to screw you off their service by either cutting you off, throttling your bandwidth, or threatening you with the above or legal action or both. They'll prattle endlessly about how fast their service is in their advertising...but then try to get customers that actually *use* their service for more than AOLIM and 5 emails a week (i.e. ludicrously high profit customers) off their network.
The issue here (for me, anyways) is companies lying in their advertising. If they say, loudly, UP FRONT, that there are overall usage limitations on a monthly basis for their basic service, then fine - I, the customer, know what I'm getting into.
And, btw, all you folks out there who are babbling about "the high-usage customers being supported by the low usage customers" - uh, no. You're all supporting the profit line of a company that is lying in their advertising to build up a group of users who'll *PAY* (at least!) 4X more for internet access, but won't actually *USE* 4X more.
And that, my friends, is wrong.
HOLY FUCKING SHIT!!!
Really, it mainly depends on how smart you are. If you're not as smart, it will take you longer to learn and understand your core subject, so taking as long on other things can make your core work more difficult. If you're really smart, however, you'll be able to pick up your core subject matter with comparitive speed, ease and completeness. This permits you more time to pick up other information outside of your core subject - which is actually a really, really important thing to have if you're going to be an effective citizen/voter/parent/etc. Literally, the more educated you are in variant subjects, the more effective your interpretation and reactions to your experiences you will be - you'll have more to work from. Additionally, you'll have a base to work from to learn more in those variant subject areas should the need arise - essentially, you'll already know where to start and how to keep from wasting your time on crap, and that knowledge cannot be underestimated for usefulness.
And...remember, not everyone is alike. To make this a canonical discussion for one direction or another is pointless - different people not only learn the same things differently, those same bits of information influences the learners' interpretation of reality differently. Also, some people are much more oriented to learning a few things deeply while others are more oriented to learning some (to varying degrees) about a very large number of things.
So, anyways.