I really don't know what the heck they mean by "Relatively Intact". In my 3300+ hours of piloting helicopters the only valid criteria was "Could you walk away from it?" That's the standard pilots (and I assume passengers) really care about.
Any software product written by government employees (not incorporating proprietary or OSS code) is one better than OSS--by law it's in the public domain. As long as the software is not classified anyone can use and modify the code. When I was the Admin Officer for a Navy helicopter squadron in San Diego in the late 80's, we used to get software from the local Navy Air Rework Facility, who had a code shop. They would always tell us we MUST pay them for the software (yes the military uses chargebacks just like any other business) but we would just laugh at them and tell them that their code was in the public domain--so it was free. Then they'd tell us we could not use it without paying for support and we'd tell 'em if we couldn't figure it out, we just wouldn't use it. They had not figured out that you can't charge money--even bongo bucks--for something that is free.
Sure, it's just AOL with another face; it's a process known as 'rebranding'. Another good example is Tiger Direct's purchase of the CompUSA and Circuit City names. Each has it's own Web site selling identical products at identical prices with IDENTICAL STOCK NUMBERS! Why a company would want to assume the identities of TWO failed companies is really beyond me but they must seem to think it's a good idea.
Gee, if you go to cs.com you can sign up to Compuserve with unlimited Internet access for the discounted rate of $17.95/month. Does not look like a dead company to me; it looks like a company requiring their clients to migrate to newer software (CompuServe for Windows NT 4.0.2 to Compuserve 7.0, which BTW is only 8 years old!). This sounds like such complete non-news...
Go through a third party--it doesn't have to be a lawyer or someone you pay, it could just be a friend--so that you and your business cannot be identified by the current owner. If you already have counsel, it would be best if it were your attorney. And gee willikers, as the longtime owner of PondScumAndLawyers.com, I really HATE urging anyone to use a lawyer, but this is a case where it would be best.
And who knows, maybe they just bought it on a lark; I actually owned "nobodyexpectsthespanishinquisition.com" for about three years just because I thought it was a cool domain to have--I'm such a nerd.
I also have my 1986 Prospeed 286. I also found on my current hard drive a Wordstar file from May 1986 which I was able to successfully open with Lotus WordPro.
One of the serious concerns of faculty in the undergraduage and graduate IT degree that I teach in is that as corporate America offshores application and Web development, help desk, and even system administration, we will be left with corporate IT departments made up solely of network technicians. As we all realize, you cannot plug in a network cable in Gary, Indiana if you are in Bangalore, India. Since networking requires hand work that cannot be offshored, the concern is that corporate IT departments will come to be dominated by CCNAs as there are fewer and fewer on-site roles for any other IT speciality. As these network specialists mount the rungs of management, we encounter the old adage that "when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail". We see one of two situations then: IT managers from the network staff who have a very narrow range of vision and technical knowledge outside of networking, or IT managers drawn from the ranks of MBAs who do not have the necessary technical knowledge to make the best decisions (aka the "Pointy-Haired Bosses"). We strive in our program to ensure a broad technical education for all of our graduates. Our degree is "Information Technology and Management" and we face a serious problem with students who want to come into our graduate program and try to duck our technical core couses to focus entirely on management. Consequently we have just made an intermediate-level software development course, currently taught in Java and C#, a requirement for all graduate students. Other core courses include networking, databases and Web development. Forcing everyone to code is intended to weed out the "pointy-haired" bosses, and ensure that every graduate of our program leaves with an adequate understanding of core technologies. We can only hope that as corporations look for IT management expertise thay will realize that they may have to go outside their narrow network-centric staffs and draw from industries that have done less offshoring such as financial services and hospitals. Of course we hope they look to graduates of our program as well...
We have a perfectly good National Weather Service. Just add a "National Climate Center" to their mission and fund it. They've already got the expertise and management structures in place. NOAA and the NWS are actually parts of the government that work pretty well. As a pilot I used their products for years and am a very satisfied customer.
In fact my only real complaint with the NWS is that for some bizarre reason, they don't enter tornado warnings and reports into the aviation weather system, which can make a real difference if you're flying a Jet Ranger--i.e. a little helicopter--around at 500 feet in the Florida panhandle. Instead we'd just have to listen to the local AM news station on our VHF radio for tornado warnings.
When I was an officer in the Navy, my squadron used to get software from the Naval Air Rework Facility in San Diego, written by NARF (i.e. U.S. Government) employees, and they kept telling us we had to pay for the software. We kept telling them that since the software was work of the United States government, as defined by United States copyright law, it was in the public domain and we'd be out of our minds to pay them for something that was in the public domain. Then they'd point out that we would have no support and we'd tell them that we didn't want any, thank you. Then they'd point out that if we didn't pay, they could not not keep writing this software, and we would also point out that this was not our problem. Anyway, the point is that every line of code actually written by the U.S. Government is IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN. This goes one step better than Open Source--but only if you can get the source code. This may have had much to do with taking code writing out of the hands of military members. And OBTW any software written by contractors cannot be publicly released by the government unless explicitly stated in the contract.
When the U.S. Navy announced that they were moving to Windows for a lot of operational systems, all those of us who flew Navy aircraft could immediately picture a scenario where the glass cockpit in our fighter/patrol plane/helicopter suffered a "Blue Screen of Death": the problem is that chances of actually dying if this occurs are pretty close to 100%. The equation looked like this to us: ([naval aircraft]+[Windows])*[Blue Screen of Death]=DEATH. At least the fighter pilots have the option of punching out (damn them); the rest of us would just die.
I had a student of mine bring me internship papers a couple of years ago for an internship in information security. Compensation is supposed to be one of the things listed and for this one, which was with a major New York investment firm, the pay--for an INTERNSHIP--was $5,000 a month. That's $60,000 a year! I guess they think they got their moneys' worth because they ended up sponsoring the student for an H-1B visa. So this revealed two things: 1) there really are some well-paid internships out there and 2) not all H-1B jobs are given out just to avoid paying a U.S. citizen more, because these folks clearly were paying alright.
"Business first, technology second" is a phrase we try to instill in our students' in the IT degree program where I teach. The whole purpose of IT in a firm today is to facilitate the business activities of the company, and the more the IT folks know and understand of the core aspects of of the business, the more able they will be to support that business and allow it to grow and prosper. When businesses grow and prosper, more staff is hired, more management positions open, and there are greater opportunities for advancement and growth. And believe it or not, the more money a firm makes, the more likely the bosses will be to approve the "cool toys" that the tech folks just want that might not really advance the goals of the firm. BTW, I'm not an "ivory tower" academic; I'm also the IT Director for my college within the university and I crawl under desks connecting cables too--although a bit less often as our program grows and I have more people under me.
Tech folks need to be educated on the importance of understanding the business and how that will allow them to do their job better--and in some cases they need to learn and understand that their REAL job is to facilitate the primary activities of the business, not to pulling cables or administering systems.
As a helicopter pilot and an aviation safety officer (probably one of the few on/.) I can tell you that the danger to the pilots and the aircraft cannot be overstated. Laser illumination from the ground can result in full or partial blindness, and it can be either temporary or permanent. If you get blinded while you're flying a helicopter, you and everybody on the bird are gonna die. No ifs, ands, or buts about it--you will be a smoking hole in a field somewhere, and if you come down in civilization you'll take folks on the ground with you. I'm sorry these folks didn't know about the law, but "ignorance of the law is no excuse" and I sincerely believe this to be a completely justified law.
A little known--nay, virtually unknown--fact is that career officers in the U.S. Armed Forces cannot advance beyond Major/Lieutenant Commander (O-4) without a graduate degree. And there are just not enough slots in the graduate schools run by the Department of Defense to meet the need, so many officers do their grad school in the "real world"; I certainly did--on my own time, while working as an aviation squadron department head. My MS in Systems Management qualified me to be a Computer Systems Management Subspecialist. I have many friends and acquaintances who are now Colonels or Captains (0-6) who have two or even three graduate degrees; one my classmates, who is an astronaut, has 2 Masters, an MD and a PhD (but he is a bit of an overachiever).
But look, if you want to go somewhere for grad school in a computing field where you won't be in classes with a slew of foreign students, take a look at the Civilian Master's Degree Scholarship offered by the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. Go to school in one of America's most beautiful cities, get a $34,000/year salary while enrolled in the program, with guaranteed employment upon graduation for a two year payback working in a civilian position for the Federal Government. And while in that job, you normally will get a security clearance, which is worth $10-30,000/year in additional pay in industry. But only U.S. citizens need apply.
No, I'm not a shill for the Naval Postgraduate School; yes, I am an alumni, but I teach information technology somewhere else--where 70% of my students ARE from India. I'm just trying to make a point and advance the discussion.
I have been a very, VERY loyal user of Lotus Wordpro ever since it was AmiPro 1.1. OpenOffice.org Writer allows me to work in much the same way as Wordpro (not like some other unnamed cr*p from M*******t) but there is no filter to import my existing Wordpro documents. This was possibly going to be addressed in Google's Summer of Code but I have not yet seen any results. Anyway, if IBM is this committed to OpenOffice--and since they've discontinued SmartSuite development--they ought to put one or two of these coders on writing the SmartSuite import filters for OpenOffice.org. Anybody know a name/email/phone# of a real person at IBM I can discuss this with? Thanks...
--Ray
Re:Microsoft already sells a Pirated Edition
on
Piracy Economics
·
· Score: 1
This used to be true, but with Office 2007 it was changed to "Office Home and Student" which does not require a student to be in the home for purchase and use; the only restriction is that "Office Home and Student 2007 is licensed only for noncommercial use by households." Which is, of course, pretty much unenforceable.
Macromedia and the 30 Day Demo
on
Piracy Economics
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I always wondered why all of the 30-day software demos from Macromedia could be actually registered and made permanent; not only that, but they could be registered using an enterprise key which did not even phone home. AND the enterprise key could be located with a simple Google search which did not even require you to click through the results page to retrieve the key. The only conclusion I could draw (possibly wrong, I'll freely admit) was that Macromedia wanted people to do this so they could use the products at home for free, which would lead them to tell the boss at work that they had to have these tools to do their job. It just didn't make sense otherwise why they would make it so extremely easy to do this. (BTW, my copies have always been paid for...) So from my point of view, I think there may be some validity to the idea that there are software publishers that actually facilitate or encourage piracy.
Hollywood accounting is a unique form of the art where actual Generally Accepted Accounting Practices are thrown to four winds and the profits of a movie are consumed by undocumented and unsupported ''studio charges'' against the film. Calling for an audit--even if that right is in the contract, as it is in the case of Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh--calls for sunlight to be thrown on the dark underside of the Hollywood system, and as long as the studios have lawyers who are breathing they will resist this with every ounce of their being. The real-life orcs under the mountain are the green-eyeshade Hollywood accountant crowd, who can make movie profits magically disappear. It's a shame, but that's Hollywood. Remember, always, always insist on a percentage of the gross.
My Dad, an Amiga buff up to the day of his death, always said that we would know computer animation was truly mature when someone could make a new John Wayne movie that would be indistinguishable from an original. Sounds like someone might be able to pull it off with this technology.
I'm both the IT Director of a college campus and the parent of a 20-year-old heavy-gamer son and a 17-year-old hangs-out-in-cafes daughter, all in the Chicago suburbs. I did not take the time to read other's inputs so this may be duplicative, but here's my own thoughts on what you need to do:
1. Make the place hip-looking. Not your idea of hip -- you want 13-25-year-olds' idea of hip. Places where my kids like the ambiance include Jamba Juice, Chipotle, Noodles', and Starbucks.
2. Make sure you have beverages that kids can't get at home, or are too much trouble to make themselves: Fruit and yogurt smoothies, cappuccino, espresso, and so on. Don't imitate slavishly, but take Jamba Juice as an inspiration. Also a must: Jones Soda in bottles.
3. Provide free Wi-Fi; you can even make it "free Wi-Fi with any purchase" by having a daily changing password that is printed on the receipt. It would be very cool if you could let folks on Wi-Fi log into for-fee network games but I don't know if there is software out there that supports that; if there isn't there's sure plenty of folks in the Chicago area that could write it.
4. Keep the place spotlessly clean and replace anything that shows wear, preferrably with an item with the same function that won't show wear.
5. Hire personable, outgoing, and technically competent young people as front-counter and floor staff. A hard to find combination, but well worth hunting for (full disclosure: depending on where your business will be, my kids fit the bill and are both available...).
6. Follow my Dad's very solid advice to his college business students, based on his own and many other small-business owners' experience: DO NOT even start your business if you are not prepared to lose money for the first two years.
I'm for that too. I'm sure they could tighten this whole mess up a little. I mean, if folks are going to pirate movies (which they are), it would be cool if they could actually improve the package in the process.
Slashdot Mirror
I really don't know what the heck they mean by "Relatively Intact". In my 3300+ hours of piloting helicopters the only valid criteria was "Could you walk away from it?" That's the standard pilots (and I assume passengers) really care about.
Any software product written by government employees (not incorporating proprietary or OSS code) is one better than OSS--by law it's in the public domain. As long as the software is not classified anyone can use and modify the code. When I was the Admin Officer for a Navy helicopter squadron in San Diego in the late 80's, we used to get software from the local Navy Air Rework Facility, who had a code shop. They would always tell us we MUST pay them for the software (yes the military uses chargebacks just like any other business) but we would just laugh at them and tell them that their code was in the public domain--so it was free. Then they'd tell us we could not use it without paying for support and we'd tell 'em if we couldn't figure it out, we just wouldn't use it. They had not figured out that you can't charge money--even bongo bucks--for something that is free.
Does James "Kibo" Perry know about this? Has he not commented? I think that maybe Kibo is just getting slack in his old age.
Sure, it's just AOL with another face; it's a process known as 'rebranding'. Another good example is Tiger Direct's purchase of the CompUSA and Circuit City names. Each has it's own Web site selling identical products at identical prices with IDENTICAL STOCK NUMBERS! Why a company would want to assume the identities of TWO failed companies is really beyond me but they must seem to think it's a good idea.
Gee, if you go to cs.com you can sign up to Compuserve with unlimited Internet access for the discounted rate of $17.95/month. Does not look like a dead company to me; it looks like a company requiring their clients to migrate to newer software (CompuServe for Windows NT 4.0.2 to Compuserve 7.0, which BTW is only 8 years old!). This sounds like such complete non-news...
Go through a third party--it doesn't have to be a lawyer or someone you pay, it could just be a friend--so that you and your business cannot be identified by the current owner. If you already have counsel, it would be best if it were your attorney. And gee willikers, as the longtime owner of PondScumAndLawyers.com, I really HATE urging anyone to use a lawyer, but this is a case where it would be best. And who knows, maybe they just bought it on a lark; I actually owned "nobodyexpectsthespanishinquisition.com" for about three years just because I thought it was a cool domain to have--I'm such a nerd.
I also have my 1986 Prospeed 286. I also found on my current hard drive a Wordstar file from May 1986 which I was able to successfully open with Lotus WordPro.
One of the serious concerns of faculty in the undergraduage and graduate IT degree that I teach in is that as corporate America offshores application and Web development, help desk, and even system administration, we will be left with corporate IT departments made up solely of network technicians. As we all realize, you cannot plug in a network cable in Gary, Indiana if you are in Bangalore, India. Since networking requires hand work that cannot be offshored, the concern is that corporate IT departments will come to be dominated by CCNAs as there are fewer and fewer on-site roles for any other IT speciality. As these network specialists mount the rungs of management, we encounter the old adage that "when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail". We see one of two situations then: IT managers from the network staff who have a very narrow range of vision and technical knowledge outside of networking, or IT managers drawn from the ranks of MBAs who do not have the necessary technical knowledge to make the best decisions (aka the "Pointy-Haired Bosses"). We strive in our program to ensure a broad technical education for all of our graduates. Our degree is "Information Technology and Management" and we face a serious problem with students who want to come into our graduate program and try to duck our technical core couses to focus entirely on management. Consequently we have just made an intermediate-level software development course, currently taught in Java and C#, a requirement for all graduate students. Other core courses include networking, databases and Web development. Forcing everyone to code is intended to weed out the "pointy-haired" bosses, and ensure that every graduate of our program leaves with an adequate understanding of core technologies. We can only hope that as corporations look for IT management expertise thay will realize that they may have to go outside their narrow network-centric staffs and draw from industries that have done less offshoring such as financial services and hospitals. Of course we hope they look to graduates of our program as well...
We have a perfectly good National Weather Service. Just add a "National Climate Center" to their mission and fund it. They've already got the expertise and management structures in place. NOAA and the NWS are actually parts of the government that work pretty well. As a pilot I used their products for years and am a very satisfied customer. In fact my only real complaint with the NWS is that for some bizarre reason, they don't enter tornado warnings and reports into the aviation weather system, which can make a real difference if you're flying a Jet Ranger--i.e. a little helicopter--around at 500 feet in the Florida panhandle. Instead we'd just have to listen to the local AM news station on our VHF radio for tornado warnings.
When I was an officer in the Navy, my squadron used to get software from the Naval Air Rework Facility in San Diego, written by NARF (i.e. U.S. Government) employees, and they kept telling us we had to pay for the software. We kept telling them that since the software was work of the United States government, as defined by United States copyright law, it was in the public domain and we'd be out of our minds to pay them for something that was in the public domain. Then they'd point out that we would have no support and we'd tell them that we didn't want any, thank you. Then they'd point out that if we didn't pay, they could not not keep writing this software, and we would also point out that this was not our problem. Anyway, the point is that every line of code actually written by the U.S. Government is IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN. This goes one step better than Open Source--but only if you can get the source code. This may have had much to do with taking code writing out of the hands of military members. And OBTW any software written by contractors cannot be publicly released by the government unless explicitly stated in the contract.
When the U.S. Navy announced that they were moving to Windows for a lot of operational systems, all those of us who flew Navy aircraft could immediately picture a scenario where the glass cockpit in our fighter/patrol plane/helicopter suffered a "Blue Screen of Death": the problem is that chances of actually dying if this occurs are pretty close to 100%. The equation looked like this to us: ([naval aircraft]+[Windows])*[Blue Screen of Death]=DEATH. At least the fighter pilots have the option of punching out (damn them); the rest of us would just die.
I had a student of mine bring me internship papers a couple of years ago for an internship in information security. Compensation is supposed to be one of the things listed and for this one, which was with a major New York investment firm, the pay--for an INTERNSHIP--was $5,000 a month. That's $60,000 a year! I guess they think they got their moneys' worth because they ended up sponsoring the student for an H-1B visa. So this revealed two things: 1) there really are some well-paid internships out there and 2) not all H-1B jobs are given out just to avoid paying a U.S. citizen more, because these folks clearly were paying alright.
Tech folks need to be educated on the importance of understanding the business and how that will allow them to do their job better--and in some cases they need to learn and understand that their REAL job is to facilitate the primary activities of the business, not to pulling cables or administering systems.
As a helicopter pilot and an aviation safety officer (probably one of the few on /.) I can tell you that the danger to the pilots and the aircraft cannot be overstated. Laser illumination from the ground can result in full or partial blindness, and it can be either temporary or permanent. If you get blinded while you're flying a helicopter, you and everybody on the bird are gonna die. No ifs, ands, or buts about it--you will be a smoking hole in a field somewhere, and if you come down in civilization you'll take folks on the ground with you. I'm sorry these folks didn't know about the law, but "ignorance of the law is no excuse" and I sincerely believe this to be a completely justified law.
A little known--nay, virtually unknown--fact is that career officers in the U.S. Armed Forces cannot advance beyond Major/Lieutenant Commander (O-4) without a graduate degree. And there are just not enough slots in the graduate schools run by the Department of Defense to meet the need, so many officers do their grad school in the "real world"; I certainly did--on my own time, while working as an aviation squadron department head. My MS in Systems Management qualified me to be a Computer Systems Management Subspecialist. I have many friends and acquaintances who are now Colonels or Captains (0-6) who have two or even three graduate degrees; one my classmates, who is an astronaut, has 2 Masters, an MD and a PhD (but he is a bit of an overachiever).
But look, if you want to go somewhere for grad school in a computing field where you won't be in classes with a slew of foreign students, take a look at the Civilian Master's Degree Scholarship offered by the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. Go to school in one of America's most beautiful cities, get a $34,000/year salary while enrolled in the program, with guaranteed employment upon graduation for a two year payback working in a civilian position for the Federal Government. And while in that job, you normally will get a security clearance, which is worth $10-30,000/year in additional pay in industry. But only U.S. citizens need apply.
No, I'm not a shill for the Naval Postgraduate School; yes, I am an alumni, but I teach information technology somewhere else--where 70% of my students ARE from India. I'm just trying to make a point and advance the discussion.
I have been a very, VERY loyal user of Lotus Wordpro ever since it was AmiPro 1.1. OpenOffice.org Writer allows me to work in much the same way as Wordpro (not like some other unnamed cr*p from M*******t) but there is no filter to import my existing Wordpro documents. This was possibly going to be addressed in Google's Summer of Code but I have not yet seen any results. Anyway, if IBM is this committed to OpenOffice--and since they've discontinued SmartSuite development--they ought to put one or two of these coders on writing the SmartSuite import filters for OpenOffice.org. Anybody know a name/email/phone# of a real person at IBM I can discuss this with? Thanks...
--Ray
This used to be true, but with Office 2007 it was changed to "Office Home and Student" which does not require a student to be in the home for purchase and use; the only restriction is that "Office Home and Student 2007 is licensed only for noncommercial use by households." Which is, of course, pretty much unenforceable.
I always wondered why all of the 30-day software demos from Macromedia could be actually registered and made permanent; not only that, but they could be registered using an enterprise key which did not even phone home. AND the enterprise key could be located with a simple Google search which did not even require you to click through the results page to retrieve the key. The only conclusion I could draw (possibly wrong, I'll freely admit) was that Macromedia wanted people to do this so they could use the products at home for free, which would lead them to tell the boss at work that they had to have these tools to do their job. It just didn't make sense otherwise why they would make it so extremely easy to do this. (BTW, my copies have always been paid for...) So from my point of view, I think there may be some validity to the idea that there are software publishers that actually facilitate or encourage piracy.
Hollywood accounting is a unique form of the art where actual Generally Accepted Accounting Practices are thrown to four winds and the profits of a movie are consumed by undocumented and unsupported ''studio charges'' against the film. Calling for an audit--even if that right is in the contract, as it is in the case of Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh--calls for sunlight to be thrown on the dark underside of the Hollywood system, and as long as the studios have lawyers who are breathing they will resist this with every ounce of their being. The real-life orcs under the mountain are the green-eyeshade Hollywood accountant crowd, who can make movie profits magically disappear. It's a shame, but that's Hollywood. Remember, always, always insist on a percentage of the gross.
My Dad, an Amiga buff up to the day of his death, always said that we would know computer animation was truly mature when someone could make a new John Wayne movie that would be indistinguishable from an original. Sounds like someone might be able to pull it off with this technology.
Net24 (http://www.net24i.com/) in Naperville is doing quite well; see the reviews at http://local.yahoo.com/readreviews?id=17349021&. You might want to visit there...
I'm both the IT Director of a college campus and the parent of a 20-year-old heavy-gamer son and a 17-year-old hangs-out-in-cafes daughter, all in the Chicago suburbs. I did not take the time to read other's inputs so this may be duplicative, but here's my own thoughts on what you need to do:
1. Make the place hip-looking. Not your idea of hip -- you want 13-25-year-olds' idea of hip. Places where my kids like the ambiance include Jamba Juice, Chipotle, Noodles', and Starbucks.
2. Make sure you have beverages that kids can't get at home, or are too much trouble to make themselves: Fruit and yogurt smoothies, cappuccino, espresso, and so on. Don't imitate slavishly, but take Jamba Juice as an inspiration. Also a must: Jones Soda in bottles.
3. Provide free Wi-Fi; you can even make it "free Wi-Fi with any purchase" by having a daily changing password that is printed on the receipt. It would be very cool if you could let folks on Wi-Fi log into for-fee network games but I don't know if there is software out there that supports that; if there isn't there's sure plenty of folks in the Chicago area that could write it.
4. Keep the place spotlessly clean and replace anything that shows wear, preferrably with an item with the same function that won't show wear.
5. Hire personable, outgoing, and technically competent young people as front-counter and floor staff. A hard to find combination, but well worth hunting for (full disclosure: depending on where your business will be, my kids fit the bill and are both available...).
6. Follow my Dad's very solid advice to his college business students, based on his own and many other small-business owners' experience: DO NOT even start your business if you are not prepared to lose money for the first two years.
Hope that helps; I wish you good luck!
I'm for that too. I'm sure they could tighten this whole mess up a little. I mean, if folks are going to pirate movies (which they are), it would be cool if they could actually improve the package in the process.
This illustrates why military aviators always believe there will be a role for aircraft actually flown by onboard pilots.
City Managers are not elected--they are hired by the elected officials to run things. (e.e. they have even less excuses for being stupid...)