Actually, "25 years ago" includes the beginning of the Iran-Iraq War, which the US were involved in to an extent unclear as of yet. So that could certainly shed some light on the history of US involvement in Iraq. However, since that information heavily involves George Bush senior, I very much doubt it will actually see light.
Thank you for your explanation. So we're not talking about a hypothetical cloak, we're talking about hypothetical spherical vehicles that cannot use any conventional means of propulsion because that'd defeat their invisibility.
The UFO enthusiasts are going to be all over that one.
Those guys don't "hate kids" as has been said elsewhere, so they have a different reason to spread their FUD. Money. I'm sure most of us could think of a couple of uses for $100 laptops, and of a couple of people who'll never need more than that but keep buying overpowered "entry systems" that you could get several of those laptops for.
And it gets worse. Third world countries, needing to export less of their resources for imported first world goods, might actually get to accumulate some wealth. If the $100 laptop works, people will attempt to build $500 vehicles (steam engine powered?) and similar things. By trading among themselves instead of the big importers/exporters, they'd suddenly have a much easier time constructing primitive but stable economies. In time, they could even work around our preciously huge barriers to entry on the "free" market.
No one in their right mind should think this possibility, slight as it may be, wouldn't get flak from a lot of places with assets to defend. Remember that markets are all about scarcity.
Gabbad the shaman, in a talk given today, announced that more and more service were absorbed by housing. "Look at the leatherer over there - he has abandoned his own tent and started using a house for his work. Likewise, the shepherds down south have given up the freedom of their own pastures and moved into houses at least over the winter. This means they aren't craftsmen anymore, they are sort of sub-services of housing. While there certainly are incentives for this trend, we should understand we are becoming dangerously dependent on the providers of housing. Masons and carpenters are monopolizing our economy!"
The shaman went on to warn: "If this trend continues, at some point there could be no craftsmen living outside of houses anymore! It is obvious this would be a great loss to our culture and society!"
There are a couple of shops, in Germany and I'm sure in other places as well, which happily sell prepaid phones without proof of your identity. Telecafes, where you can make international calls at reduced prices, do that rather routinely. Some go as far as to offer three-day provider contracts, where they get to end the contract relationship (i.e. may delete your customer data) before any telephone surveillance order can even reach them.
What you're experiencing may be an attempt (made by whoever) to respond to these anti-surveillance strategies. Did you buy your phones in a known "hot zone" like Berlin-Neukölln?
That is extremely unlikely. The ones who disregard evolution theory tend to be those too ignorant to understand biology. The new Pope is an exceedingly learned man and probably knows more about biology (and history, and philosophy, and theology, and a dozen other fields) than most of us. I.e. he can be counted on to understand how evolution makes sense. I'd trust him with that way more than I'd trust the average Protestant minister (or Buddhist, or Hindu, for that matter).
Including Wikipedia makes sense. I now rely on Wikipedia way more than I rely on Google for my informational needs, because it isn't cluttered with pseudo-information that has no other purpose other than sell me something. To me, although perhaps not to Google, this is spam and it makes me not want to use Google. Of couse I can exclude pages involving "buy" or "customer service" from my results, but this is an inconvenience and I rarely bother to do so if (more often than not) I can find what I need on the wiki.
And when I want to use Wikipedia, I do not need to go via Google. Google would make themselves useful in a more unique way if they offered optional filtering of sales sites. Let me see pages on Catholic Saints that don't involve "special price" candles with pictures of them, give me information on my car without hundreds of businesses offering to replace it. And when I do want to spend money on the web (which is way less often than the times I look for information), I'll tell you Google, thank you very much.
Most poor do not live in rural villages. Estimates put around 1 billion of them into suburban slums. So they can buy water and food if they have money. But the rampant lack of it means no one has interests to protect against those who thrive from the situation, i.e. gangs. What these people need most is some means of income that doesn't involve crime and, chiefly, is accessible to a larger fraction of the population than just the mobile, young, single males who work as day-laborers downtown. I.e. they need some viable economy, and while they don't need to compete with the big inner-city businesses, they need to be strong enough to warrant some police protection and allow some resistance against gang rule.
I do think processing power is an important part of that, because it makes possible small businesses and social organization (unions, churches, even soccer leagues), thus creating a stable society where it plainly doesn't exist now. Most significantly, masses of laptops are more likely than individual valuable items (like wells) to escape seizure and monopolization by those with the means to just take things. Even if One Laptop Per Child only allowed teenagers to mass-produce copies of current movies and sell them downtown, that's a move into the direction of equal distribution of wealth, and a stable society.
> If Rumsfeld were a competent Defense Secretary, he would have protected the US by winning in Afghanistan
This is another of those unpopular "told you so" news, but... the Afghanistan invasion has never been more winnable than Iraq, and there were experts (anthropologists, military historians) who said so in 2001.
The same story repeats in all attempted conquests of harsh mountainous tribal areas: as soon as the invader looks the other way, people pick up weapons and re-draw the lines of their claims. Ask Alexander about it, or Genghis Khan, or Xerxes, or Gorbachev. Kurdistan is very similar, having been conquered and reconquered for three millenia and never failing to return to its own power structure and jurisdiction whenever the invader reduced pressure. Historically, there has never been successful conquest of this type of region without a) mass genocide, b) full replacement of local culture (say by spread of a new religion) or c) military occupation over the course of several generations. Barring those options, the invasion of Afghanistan wasn't winnable.
Allow me to use your post as a stepping-stone for my more general argument.
In a long-running trend towards universal, free, correct, unbiased knowledge for everyone, Wikipedia the most recent step. Of course we are still far from the goal, but we are much closer than we were a few years ago. I believe Wikipedia is very far from perfect and must be modified/replaced in time. But overall, and including factors other than accuracy (esp. price, volume, topicality), it a better provider of knowledge availability than everything we had before. And that's why all progress-oriented discussion circles around it. As the cutting edge of knowledge availability, it has to have its problems exposed so it can be followed up with the next step. This is most obvious in how all proposed superior replacements of Wikipedia are variations on its theme.
1. Top Ten Levels of all Time
2. The 20 Worst Games Ever
3. Games That Advanced The Art Of Storytelling
4. Today's Best Dreamcast Games
5. What Are Your Top Five 'Comfort' Games?
6. Next-Gen's Top 20 From Tokyo
7. The Top 5 Games of All Time
8. The Top 100 Best-Selling PC Games of the Century
9. ?????
10. Profit!
Seriously, it is getting ridiculous. I didn't even have to look back further than September this year. And none of those lists was any less arbitrary than this one.
> The risk of stolen thermonuclear warheads is far far greater than any wild possibility of some third party manufacturing working hydrogen bombs.
Isn't this a classical problem where you can tell that given enough time, the catastrophe eventually must happen? I mean it does remind me of the inevitability of my firewall being breached at some point in the (hopefully distant) future. I backup my data, and I make sure that the problem, when it happens, will have limited impact. Is there a strategy for when, not if, terrorist nuke prevention fails? I should be confident, but there wasn't a Plan B for Iraq either.
Jail time is a less effective deterrent for business crime because to many people, a year in prison is a lower price to pay than a million dollars. It is not too uncommon that fraudsters will try and earn serious amounts of money, hide them somewhere in Switzerland, and be rich after they leave prison, when noone is watching. Large fines mean they and their spending are being under close observation until everything is repaid (which may take a lifetime), so they are less likely to gain much from their crimes.
And spamming being profitable or not, I don't think it is likely they have several millions to spare.
Are there? So where are you decent Christians when your fundamentalist (would-be) brethren push their latest "Bible vs. Reality" project? I keep hearing most Christians aren't fundamentalists, but all the input I get from the Christian camp is so fundamentalist it makes me sick. So if you are a non-fundamentalist, and if you have friends who will take the advice, will you finally make a noise about it and start a proper theological debate that seperates what is wacko about fundamentalism from what is cool about Christianity. Until you do that, you are freeriders on the fundamentalist rise to power and no non-religious person in their right mind will offer you many more respect than they do towards fundamentalists.
Sorry if this sounds like flamebait. I'm just really disappointed with the moderate Christians' PR job.
The most important fact about that affirmations chapter is that 98% of readers probably never tried it, because it just sounds "wacko" or "supersitious". Especially when he claims to have used it for things he cannot influence subconsciously accodring to any accepted psychological paradigm (e.g. extremely good test results). Sounds like, for lack of a better word, magic or PSI, and being good geeks we ignore that.
It works anyway.
Yes, do see for yourself. Occasionally, I get the creeps thinking about what other stuff might be working as well, if you learn how to trick your brain into doing it. I think Scott Adams indicates the possibility of somewhat paranormal-ish things better than any parapsychologist.
To define "Western ideals" will not suffice. You need to find ways to
measure adherence vs. non-adherence to these ideals, make them (intersubjectively) verifiable, and somehow rationalize how you came up with your particular measures without designing them into giving you the results you want from the data you knew you were going to feed them.
I'd say best of luck, but I'll rather say change your subject, fast. What you are attempting to do is social science and I'm afraid that as an IT guy, you have no ideas of the complexity and methodological difficulty of this.
Memory recall and IQ are correlated. And unlike memory performance, IQ is easily measured via a questionaire. When you need to ask hundreds to take part in your study, you often cannot use sophisticated emperimental designs. Or complete medical checkups, for that matter - of course BMI isn't perfect, but it made completion of the study realistic.
> I like games where you actually develop a motor skill by virtue of playing it. Those are the most satisfying.
Funny thing happened when I went back to Doom2 after a many years hiatus. I wanted to show somebody Level 20, but I couldn't for the life of me remember the cheat code (and I didn't have web access to look it up). So I tried to just type it and BANG I was in the level before I even knew what the code was! Motor skills rock.
He wrote "Illuminatus!", which is (among many other things) about the Illuminates, who are after Illumination, which is also known as Enlightenment. I thought it was a rather nifty joke, but I'm still ruining it. Heh.
> There must be better ways, and there are. For instance, Gandhi is an example.
This is not only wrong, it is the sort of fallacy that keeps the ruthless in power. Gandhi's hunger strike was successful because it caused mass riots. Similarily, Martin Luther King is a pretty face that we put on the fact suppression of the blacks was becoming too expensive. For a more recent example, look at the Paris suburb riots of last year. Those people had asked for better standards of living for a long time, through voting and petitions and serious talk and citizen initiatives, with no substantial results over decades. When the riots started, it took less than two weeks for a new legislative measure to launch, which is improving everyone's life in french suburbs right now. Violence works because it increases the cost of the status quo, thus making policy changes more attractive.
Now I'm not a revolutionary, just a sociology geek. I'm not saying you should finally put those quarter of a billion privately owned firearms to work. I'm just asking you to look past the "peaceful resistance" FUD and get some understanding of the situation.
>You should realize, the equivalence nakedness == pornography is virtually unique to the USA.
And to those sorry people who have girlfriends with the last names of GIF and JPG. With the population of American geeks here, it surprises me that noone has yet wondered why we don't do it properly and send those aliens goatse.cx.
> > Republicans called it a test before the election of whether Democrats want to fight or coddle terrorists.
> Bullshit. This isn't about terrorists, it's about my privacy and my rights as an American.
Well, every even-numbered year, right before an election, they come up with some security issue.
In 2002, our party supported them in undertaking weapons inspections in Iraq and was 100 percent for what happened in Afghanistan, and they didn't have any way to make us look like we didn't care about terror.
And so, they decided they would be for the homeland security bill that they had opposed. And they put a poison pill in it that we wouldn't pass, like taking the job rights away from 170,000 people, and then say that we were weak on terror if we weren't for it. They just ran that out.
This year, I think they wanted to make the questions of prisoner treatment and intercepted communications the same sort of issues, until John Warner and John McCain and Lindsey Graham got in there. And, as it turned out, there were some Republicans that believed in the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions and had some of their own ideas about how best to fight terror.
So basically the two parties are in a race of who can be more crass than the other in "security" politics. The Republicans are jaded enough to sacrifice your privacy in order to make Democrats look bad before the election. And the Democrats couldn't do anything about it even if they wanted to save your privacy. The ignorant and scared populace would just whack them if they did. I dare say America is paying a very high price for allowing itself to be kept ignorant and scared.
I cannot believe geographical distance wasn't a factor. Who is going to date someone a two hours drive away? Then again, ignoring this probably helped in making the number of messages sent the best predictor for number of messages received, giving more false hope to quicktyping nerds. Bet the author was one.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, "25 years ago" includes the beginning of the Iran-Iraq War, which the US were involved in to an extent unclear as of yet. So that could certainly shed some light on the history of US involvement in Iraq. However, since that information heavily involves George Bush senior, I very much doubt it will actually see light.
Thank you for your explanation. So we're not talking about a hypothetical cloak, we're talking about hypothetical spherical vehicles that cannot use any conventional means of propulsion because that'd defeat their invisibility.
The UFO enthusiasts are going to be all over that one.
Those guys don't "hate kids" as has been said elsewhere, so they have a different reason to spread their FUD. Money. I'm sure most of us could think of a couple of uses for $100 laptops, and of a couple of people who'll never need more than that but keep buying overpowered "entry systems" that you could get several of those laptops for.
And it gets worse. Third world countries, needing to export less of their resources for imported first world goods, might actually get to accumulate some wealth. If the $100 laptop works, people will attempt to build $500 vehicles (steam engine powered?) and similar things. By trading among themselves instead of the big importers/exporters, they'd suddenly have a much easier time constructing primitive but stable economies. In time, they could even work around our preciously huge barriers to entry on the "free" market.
No one in their right mind should think this possibility, slight as it may be, wouldn't get flak from a lot of places with assets to defend. Remember that markets are all about scarcity.
Gabbad the shaman, in a talk given today, announced that more and more service were absorbed by housing. "Look at the leatherer over there - he has abandoned his own tent and started using a house for his work. Likewise, the shepherds down south have given up the freedom of their own pastures and moved into houses at least over the winter. This means they aren't craftsmen anymore, they are sort of sub-services of housing. While there certainly are incentives for this trend, we should understand we are becoming dangerously dependent on the providers of housing. Masons and carpenters are monopolizing our economy!"
The shaman went on to warn: "If this trend continues, at some point there could be no craftsmen living outside of houses anymore! It is obvious this would be a great loss to our culture and society!"
Beckstein also currently has to draw attention away from a scandal around overspending for the country's faulty new police managment software. The sociopathic half-human breed known colloquially as "gamers" are being a useful distraction.
There are a couple of shops, in Germany and I'm sure in other places as well, which happily sell prepaid phones without proof of your identity. Telecafes, where you can make international calls at reduced prices, do that rather routinely. Some go as far as to offer three-day provider contracts, where they get to end the contract relationship (i.e. may delete your customer data) before any telephone surveillance order can even reach them.
What you're experiencing may be an attempt (made by whoever) to respond to these anti-surveillance strategies. Did you buy your phones in a known "hot zone" like Berlin-Neukölln?
Of course the new Pope may very well change that.
That is extremely unlikely. The ones who disregard evolution theory tend to be those too ignorant to understand biology. The new Pope is an exceedingly learned man and probably knows more about biology (and history, and philosophy, and theology, and a dozen other fields) than most of us. I.e. he can be counted on to understand how evolution makes sense. I'd trust him with that way more than I'd trust the average Protestant minister (or Buddhist, or Hindu, for that matter).
Including Wikipedia makes sense. I now rely on Wikipedia way more than I rely on Google for my informational needs, because it isn't cluttered with pseudo-information that has no other purpose other than sell me something. To me, although perhaps not to Google, this is spam and it makes me not want to use Google. Of couse I can exclude pages involving "buy" or "customer service" from my results, but this is an inconvenience and I rarely bother to do so if (more often than not) I can find what I need on the wiki.
And when I want to use Wikipedia, I do not need to go via Google. Google would make themselves useful in a more unique way if they offered optional filtering of sales sites. Let me see pages on Catholic Saints that don't involve "special price" candles with pictures of them, give me information on my car without hundreds of businesses offering to replace it. And when I do want to spend money on the web (which is way less often than the times I look for information), I'll tell you Google, thank you very much.
Most poor do not live in rural villages. Estimates put around 1 billion of them into suburban slums. So they can buy water and food if they have money. But the rampant lack of it means no one has interests to protect against those who thrive from the situation, i.e. gangs. What these people need most is some means of income that doesn't involve crime and, chiefly, is accessible to a larger fraction of the population than just the mobile, young, single males who work as day-laborers downtown. I.e. they need some viable economy, and while they don't need to compete with the big inner-city businesses, they need to be strong enough to warrant some police protection and allow some resistance against gang rule.
I do think processing power is an important part of that, because it makes possible small businesses and social organization (unions, churches, even soccer leagues), thus creating a stable society where it plainly doesn't exist now. Most significantly, masses of laptops are more likely than individual valuable items (like wells) to escape seizure and monopolization by those with the means to just take things. Even if One Laptop Per Child only allowed teenagers to mass-produce copies of current movies and sell them downtown, that's a move into the direction of equal distribution of wealth, and a stable society.
> If Rumsfeld were a competent Defense Secretary, he would have protected the US by winning in Afghanistan
This is another of those unpopular "told you so" news, but... the Afghanistan invasion has never been more winnable than Iraq, and there were experts (anthropologists, military historians) who said so in 2001.
The same story repeats in all attempted conquests of harsh mountainous tribal areas: as soon as the invader looks the other way, people pick up weapons and re-draw the lines of their claims. Ask Alexander about it, or Genghis Khan, or Xerxes, or Gorbachev. Kurdistan is very similar, having been conquered and reconquered for three millenia and never failing to return to its own power structure and jurisdiction whenever the invader reduced pressure. Historically, there has never been successful conquest of this type of region without a) mass genocide, b) full replacement of local culture (say by spread of a new religion) or c) military occupation over the course of several generations. Barring those options, the invasion of Afghanistan wasn't winnable.
Allow me to use your post as a stepping-stone for my more general argument.
In a long-running trend towards universal, free, correct, unbiased knowledge for everyone, Wikipedia the most recent step. Of course we are still far from the goal, but we are much closer than we were a few years ago. I believe Wikipedia is very far from perfect and must be modified/replaced in time. But overall, and including factors other than accuracy (esp. price, volume, topicality), it a better provider of knowledge availability than everything we had before. And that's why all progress-oriented discussion circles around it. As the cutting edge of knowledge availability, it has to have its problems exposed so it can be followed up with the next step. This is most obvious in how all proposed superior replacements of Wikipedia are variations on its theme.
1. Top Ten Levels of all Time
2. The 20 Worst Games Ever
3. Games That Advanced The Art Of Storytelling
4. Today's Best Dreamcast Games
5. What Are Your Top Five 'Comfort' Games?
6. Next-Gen's Top 20 From Tokyo
7. The Top 5 Games of All Time
8. The Top 100 Best-Selling PC Games of the Century
9. ?????
10. Profit!
Seriously, it is getting ridiculous. I didn't even have to look back further than September this year. And none of those lists was any less arbitrary than this one.
> The risk of stolen thermonuclear warheads is far far greater than any wild possibility of some third party manufacturing working hydrogen bombs.
Isn't this a classical problem where you can tell that given enough time, the catastrophe eventually must happen? I mean it does remind me of the inevitability of my firewall being breached at some point in the (hopefully distant) future. I backup my data, and I make sure that the problem, when it happens, will have limited impact. Is there a strategy for when, not if, terrorist nuke prevention fails? I should be confident, but there wasn't a Plan B for Iraq either.
Jail time is a less effective deterrent for business crime because to many people, a year in prison is a lower price to pay than a million dollars. It is not too uncommon that fraudsters will try and earn serious amounts of money, hide them somewhere in Switzerland, and be rich after they leave prison, when noone is watching. Large fines mean they and their spending are being under close observation until everything is repaid (which may take a lifetime), so they are less likely to gain much from their crimes.
And spamming being profitable or not, I don't think it is likely they have several millions to spare.
There are ways of smelling like that which I certainly prefer.
Are there? So where are you decent Christians when your fundamentalist (would-be) brethren push their latest "Bible vs. Reality" project? I keep hearing most Christians aren't fundamentalists, but all the input I get from the Christian camp is so fundamentalist it makes me sick. So if you are a non-fundamentalist, and if you have friends who will take the advice, will you finally make a noise about it and start a proper theological debate that seperates what is wacko about fundamentalism from what is cool about Christianity. Until you do that, you are freeriders on the fundamentalist rise to power and no non-religious person in their right mind will offer you many more respect than they do towards fundamentalists.
Sorry if this sounds like flamebait. I'm just really disappointed with the moderate Christians' PR job.
The most important fact about that affirmations chapter is that 98% of readers probably never tried it, because it just sounds "wacko" or "supersitious". Especially when he claims to have used it for things he cannot influence subconsciously accodring to any accepted psychological paradigm (e.g. extremely good test results). Sounds like, for lack of a better word, magic or PSI, and being good geeks we ignore that.
It works anyway.
Yes, do see for yourself. Occasionally, I get the creeps thinking about what other stuff might be working as well, if you learn how to trick your brain into doing it. I think Scott Adams indicates the possibility of somewhat paranormal-ish things better than any parapsychologist.
To define "Western ideals" will not suffice. You need to find ways to
measure adherence vs. non-adherence to these ideals,
make them (intersubjectively) verifiable,
and somehow rationalize how you came up with your particular measures without designing them into giving you the results you want from the data you knew you were going to feed them.
I'd say best of luck, but I'll rather say change your subject, fast. What you are attempting to do is social science and I'm afraid that as an IT guy, you have no ideas of the complexity and methodological difficulty of this.
Memory recall and IQ are correlated. And unlike memory performance, IQ is easily measured via a questionaire. When you need to ask hundreds to take part in your study, you often cannot use sophisticated emperimental designs. Or complete medical checkups, for that matter - of course BMI isn't perfect, but it made completion of the study realistic.
> I like games where you actually develop a motor skill by virtue of playing it. Those are the most satisfying.
Funny thing happened when I went back to Doom2 after a many years hiatus. I wanted to show somebody Level 20, but I couldn't for the life of me remember the cheat code (and I didn't have web access to look it up). So I tried to just type it and BANG I was in the level before I even knew what the code was! Motor skills rock.
He wrote "Illuminatus!", which is (among many other things) about the Illuminates, who are after Illumination, which is also known as Enlightenment. I thought it was a rather nifty joke, but I'm still ruining it. Heh.
> There must be better ways, and there are. For instance, Gandhi is an example.
This is not only wrong, it is the sort of fallacy that keeps the ruthless in power. Gandhi's hunger strike was successful because it caused mass riots. Similarily, Martin Luther King is a pretty face that we put on the fact suppression of the blacks was becoming too expensive. For a more recent example, look at the Paris suburb riots of last year. Those people had asked for better standards of living for a long time, through voting and petitions and serious talk and citizen initiatives, with no substantial results over decades. When the riots started, it took less than two weeks for a new legislative measure to launch, which is improving everyone's life in french suburbs right now. Violence works because it increases the cost of the status quo, thus making policy changes more attractive.
Now I'm not a revolutionary, just a sociology geek. I'm not saying you should finally put those quarter of a billion privately owned firearms to work. I'm just asking you to look past the "peaceful resistance" FUD and get some understanding of the situation.
>You should realize, the equivalence nakedness == pornography is virtually unique to the USA.
And to those sorry people who have girlfriends with the last names of GIF and JPG. With the population of American geeks here, it surprises me that noone has yet wondered why we don't do it properly and send those aliens goatse.cx.
> > Republicans called it a test before the election of whether Democrats want to fight or coddle terrorists.
> Bullshit. This isn't about terrorists, it's about my privacy and my rights as an American.
No, it is about the elections. From a recent Bill Clinton interview worth reading:
Well, every even-numbered year, right before an election, they come up with some security issue. In 2002, our party supported them in undertaking weapons inspections in Iraq and was 100 percent for what happened in Afghanistan, and they didn't have any way to make us look like we didn't care about terror.
And so, they decided they would be for the homeland security bill that they had opposed. And they put a poison pill in it that we wouldn't pass, like taking the job rights away from 170,000 people, and then say that we were weak on terror if we weren't for it. They just ran that out.
This year, I think they wanted to make the questions of prisoner treatment and intercepted communications the same sort of issues, until John Warner and John McCain and Lindsey Graham got in there. And, as it turned out, there were some Republicans that believed in the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions and had some of their own ideas about how best to fight terror.
So basically the two parties are in a race of who can be more crass than the other in "security" politics. The Republicans are jaded enough to sacrifice your privacy in order to make Democrats look bad before the election. And the Democrats couldn't do anything about it even if they wanted to save your privacy. The ignorant and scared populace would just whack them if they did. I dare say America is paying a very high price for allowing itself to be kept ignorant and scared.
I cannot believe geographical distance wasn't a factor. Who is going to date someone a two hours drive away? Then again, ignoring this probably helped in making the number of messages sent the best predictor for number of messages received, giving more false hope to quicktyping nerds. Bet the author was one.