Many people consider that consciousness is really just a side-effect of the rest of the functioning. It might be quite interesting to find that once we begin simulating enough of the brain at once, and all interconnected, to see if consciousness just "springs up".
3D graph might be going a bit overboard - I prefer the UI to be "clean"... but the idea is basically there - under the system I was thinking, the post you describe would be a +11 in total, and the various moderations could be seen in the usual way when you get the detail of it.
A further improvement could be that people's modifiers for type (e.g. +1 interesting, -1 funny etc) would only apply to those moderations that actually occurred. So, if a post had the moderations you give, and I down-valued "insightful" by 5 (for some unknown reason), it would still only lose 3 points since there are only 3 points worth of insightful to lose.
Another idea would be for the personal type modifiers to be a percentage instead (and also able to "break the limit"), so if I assigned 300% to insightful, the post above would be +11, but to me would appear as +17 since I'm triple-counting insightfuls.
The parent post is probably one of the best posts I have ever read on Slashdot. Whoever you are, Mr AC, I tip my hat to you.
(Note: Hat tipping did actually occur; I wear a black felt fedora, and was impressed enough to tip it in the direction of my computer when reading this post)
As a developer, I find I communicate well with other developers I work with; I understand the customer's need quite well (and thankfully they're usually pretty vague, so I have the luxury of fleshing out details myself); and ALWAYS deliver on time.
My method for achieving the "always deliver on time" result is simply the Scotty method. Never underestimate it.
It's offtopic, but I actually agree fully... I'd love to see Slashdot's moderation system go to much higher numbers, and a few more mod points (but not too many more) be given out. e.g. Go to 15 instead of 5 as a maximum, and give out roughly twice as many mod points as currently. That way, each individual act of moderation has about 1/3 the value that it used to, but more people are given a "voice" in valuing posts.
It would also allow for finer grained modifiers - I currently have Friends and Fans at +1, but under the system I propose here, I'd put fans at +1 and friends at +3.
In formal British English (which is not used by the vast majority of people living there), it's still: Million = 10^6 Milliard = 10^9 Billion = 10^12
My native language is English (New Zealand/Scottish English (Southern New Zealand) to be precise), but since I live in a non-English speaking country where the local language (German) follows the same pattern, I find myself using it in English as well.
On that page, I just added the figures for the "First Language" column excluding US and it comes to 115,254,985, where'd you get "just under 60 million" from that?
Adding up the numbers on Wikipedia (not a perfect source, probably, but good enough) of people who speak English as a first language (and are not living in the US), I get just under 60 million
Ummm... which Wikipedia articles were you looking at?!
Populations:
UK: 60,943,912
Canada: 33,212,696
New Zealand: 4,173,460
Australia: 20,600,856
India: 1,147,995,898
South Africa: 43,786,115
Ireland: 4,156,119
Nigeria: 138,283,240
Jamaica: 2,804,332
Singapore: 4,608,167 (note: Wikipedia's figures were a bit out of date - 2001 for the UK for example, so I sourced all of these from the CIA World Factbook and it claims these figures are estimates as at July 2008)
Now, not all of those are 100% English speaking (especially the likes of India for example), so totalling those up would be really pretty meaningless. I dug around for some percentages and came up with the following for the above countries): People from the above countries that speak English as a FIRST language:
UK: (~95% as first language) 57,896,716
Canada: (~60% as first language) 19,927,618
New Zealand: (~98% as first language) 4,089,991
Australia: (~80% as first language) 16,480,685
India: (~0.02% as first language) 229,599
South Africa: (~8% as first language) 3,502,889
Ireland: (~98% as first language) 4,072,997
Nigeria: (~5% as first language) 7,001,683
Jamaica: (~99% as first language) 2,776,289
Singapore: (~25% as first language) 1,152,042 Total: 117,130,509
Okay, that's as FIRST language - many of the remainder are completely bi-lingual but count the "other" language as their first (that includes about 65 million Indians). Additionally, I didn't list the MANY countries with smaller populations of native English speakers (the "few thousands, few tens of thousands or even few hundreds of thousands), so the numbers should probably be much higher (I'd go so far as to add at LEAST 50%, but probably much more).
The next thing is, why are we only counting people who speak English as a first language? There are people whose English as a "definite second" (not counting the bi-lingual people from above) is significantly closer to "standard" English than many people that are counted as native speakers but speak a dialect (my own "native dialect" for example is quite far from standard English - certainly further than the English spoken by everyone I meet living here in Germany). So, we really should be including them as well. That would be about 1/8th of the population of Europe for a start (another 91 million), and MANY more. English as the "international language" of the world has a much greater effect than many people who trap themselves on one continent seem to realise.
Now, even further... the US population is (apparently) 303,824,646, with English as a first language for (apparently) 82.1% of the population, which is 249,440,034, so your figure actually looks a little low. Regardless, even taking the TOTAL population of the US (assuming they fall in to the definition of "English speaking" that I'm using here) it's still less than the "rest of the English speaking world" by a fairly significant amount.
Even if you disagree with my definition of "English Speaking World" (bi-lingual, and highly skilled non-native speakers being included), the BASE figure I started with above for primary language speakers (117 million) is just a hair short of TWICE what you quoted (60 million).
so no, it is not a common word in most of the English-speaking world.
However, on this, due to the other people who have replied, I must now eat some humble pie. It seems it's not as common as I thought - it appears to be restricted to Australia, New Zealand and some very small parts of the UK only. So, you're right, but not for the right reasons.
Ummm... "Bludge" is a common word in most of the English speaking word... Also, you could always just Google it.
Roughly, it means "avoiding work", "working very little" etc. Someone who bludges is a bludger. It's a basic intransitive verb "to bludge". However in common parlance, it can often be used as a noun in the manner the GP did, with an equally obvious meaning (if you know the verb).
Why is that inappropriate? From your description, it was an invitation to do so, which they could decline... not a case of "all female students come up here now and strip while the guys paint you".
At age 18, they're legally adults (aren't they?) and so I don't see what's inappropriate about one adult asking another to do something that has a direct relation to the topic at hand (art), is perfectly legal, and does not include any kind of coercion.
Or is nakedness THAT frowned upon in the puritanical US of A?
In New Zealand, a decade and a half ago, we started with SIMPLE trigonometry in the first year of high school (3rd Form - age 13), then progressed to more advanced stuff around 5th Form (age 15). Integrals at 14 sounds pretty heavy, but I can certainly agree with you that it's not out of the realm of possibility.
Ummm... I believe pretty much every English speaking country outside of the US says "maths" rather than "math". Don't forget all the Aussies, Kiwis, South Africans and so on!
Also, in non-English speaking countries, it tends to depend on their history and location as to what "form" of English they prefer - most of mainland Europe for example, will learn British English, and so will also say "maths" (there are some exceptions - there's a strong shift towards US English in the Netherlands); whereas I believe in South America they tend to learn US English and would be more likely to say "math".
My job relies on Microsoft's developer tools at present (Visual Studio), however after discussing it with my direct manager, he's said that everything I write (which is all C#) must also be tested under Mono just to be sure we're not stuck with massive re-writes should MS fall in to a lesser position in times to come.
I prefer Visual Studio to any other IDE that I've tried using, but if all of a sudden, 90% of our customers switched to Mac or Linux (not saying it'll happen suddenly, if ever, just "if it did"), then it wouldn't affect our business much at all, and very little indeed from my side as a developer.
When the decision was made, I found my current applications are all completely fine, and only had to do very minor tweaks to old applications (things like replacing hardcoded backslashes with "System.IO.Path.DirectorySeparatorChar" (from back in the days that I didn't know better))
I'd thought that MS might be interested in hearing that, so I dropped the dime and called their headquarters, thinking that at least they'd offer to send me a hat or T-shirt, something, anything (not that I'd wear it anyway). All I got was utter indifference
That's interesting actually - I had a similar, but not identical experience once back when I lived in Australia. I called the "anti piracy" hotline number they had (it seemed the most appropriate contact) and while they seemed fairly uninterested over the phone, they took my details as well as the details of the business I mentioned, and to my surprise sent me a $5000 (AUD) cheque about a month later.
70k is a paupers salary in Seattle. The three bedroom, 1900 sq ft house across the street from me in sleepy Ballard just went for 700k
70k USD sounds like a pauper's salary to me living here in Europe as well... however, I'm not quite sure I can follow regarding the house size - just because one can't afford a 3 bedroom 1900 sq ft (176 sq m) house does NOT make one a pauper! What's wrong with a nicely done out one bedroom apartment if you're single, or a 2 bedroom house with around 50 sq m (540 sq ft)?
I understand the US has somewhat of an obsession with large houses in many areas, but I doubt that people living in the centre of Manhattan have huge amounts of space either, so clearly it's not that hard to adapt - perhaps the people in Seattle should learn to adapt as well (or move somewhere else, at the sacrifice of salary/job quality/lifestyle/whatever else was keeping them there).
For reference, I get paid a bit more than 70k USD (currently on 58.5k Euro a year, which is around 90k USD at current exchange rates) and I am perfectly content RENTING my 30 sq m (325 sq ft) apartment, so that I can save up some money and buy a really nice place when I finally meet a nice girl and settle down. I honestly can't imagine needing or even wanting any more space than I currently have while I'm on my own.
Had you quoted just TWO more words of my post, you would've got to where I mentioned something specifically other than facilities. "and expertise". Only one more sentence later, I also mentioned "Also, if I recall correctly, at least 2 of my high school teachers had doctorates in their fields."
I agree that quality of facilities does not quality of education make, however I stand by my comments that New Zealand's education system is quite simply one of the best I've seen.
Yes, I agree completely. As someone who has lived in 5 countries and can "associate" with the cultures of at least 7, I find it pretty silly that I should be pigeonholed in to any particular category based on the birthplace of my parents/grandparents.
Yes, the GDR ceased to exist a LONG time ago, but I certainly wasn't referring to that!
The "Federal Republic of Germany" (Bundesrepublik Deutschland), which is the current "incarnation" of this country, is most certainly a Democratic Republic (in a very similar fashion to the USA).
The education in NZ may be good, but the pay in the IT world isn't. I couldn't stand Australia after 6 years there though, so moved to Germany (actually, I couldn't really stand it anymore after 4, but it took me two years to do something about it)
Not quite "pure" democracy, but getting pretty close to the ideal is Switzerland. And they seem to do alright for themselves.
Also, despite being a part of the British Commonwealth, New Zealand is also much closer to the ideal than most other English speaking nations at least, and doesn't do too poorly either.
For the first time in my life, I'm living in a Democratic Republic at the moment (Germany), and while I do love it here and they have yet to do anything that I am strongly against, it does worry me from time to time how much control the government potentially has.
(on the plus side, I'm only a few hundred km away from a country that would take me in (due to my heritage) in the unlikely event that something really bad was decided and I needed to get out of here FAST)
Go to a country of equivalent wealth but with better education and see the difference (eg: Germany).
The very disturbing thing here is that you're right... The reason it's disturbing is that Germany's education system is also pretty bad - it's well ahead of the US in terms of overall quality, but it's STILL bad enough that a lot of people are spending good amounts of time thinking about how to improve it.
If you want to see a really good education system, take a look at New Zealand. It's almost completely based on the British model, but enhanced where needed and with such excellent quality in the public schools that private schools are a rarity that only the ultra-snobbish (or deeply religious in the case of religious schools) are interested in.
I attended public education in New Zealand, and after having travelled the world, have yet to see a public school that matches the quality of facilities I had access to. Even many private schools below the "ultra expensive" don't stack up (sure, some have prettier buildings and snazzier uniforms, but that's hardly a sensible selling point!). This was around 12 to 14 years ago, and we had 2 computer labs with current (at the time) systems, a modern gym (that I never used), a school newspaper with access to the local newspaper's printing facilities and expertise for journalistic advice, and science labs that were ALWAYS stocked with the fun stuff that goes boom if you're not careful (and teachers that knew enough to explain it to you). Also, if I recall correctly, at least 2 of my high school teachers had doctorates in their fields.
I do believe I was probably quite lucky, and that not ALL public education in New Zealand is quite that good, but it's at least of a very high standard in general (I think my school was at the high end of the scale for quality). I'd imagine a city school in South Auckland for example is probably much poorer quality, but still significantly better than the schools I saw when I lived in neighbouring Australia (which look like concrete kindergartens, holding zombified students and run by zombified staff).
Yep, but I don't think it's really a linear progression. We took a LONG time to get from simple multicelled life to "basic animal life". From there, we got to "complex animal life" pretty quickly, but since then, we haven't really advanced that much at all. I wouldn't have a hard time believing an alien race even half a billion years older than us is necessarily as advanced compared to us as we are to the simple bacteria.
And, if they are, well, I won't hold it against them for not thinking of us as anything even worth thinking twice about.
Slashdot Mirror
Many people consider that consciousness is really just a side-effect of the rest of the functioning. It might be quite interesting to find that once we begin simulating enough of the brain at once, and all interconnected, to see if consciousness just "springs up".
3D graph might be going a bit overboard - I prefer the UI to be "clean"... but the idea is basically there - under the system I was thinking, the post you describe would be a +11 in total, and the various moderations could be seen in the usual way when you get the detail of it.
A further improvement could be that people's modifiers for type (e.g. +1 interesting, -1 funny etc) would only apply to those moderations that actually occurred. So, if a post had the moderations you give, and I down-valued "insightful" by 5 (for some unknown reason), it would still only lose 3 points since there are only 3 points worth of insightful to lose.
Another idea would be for the personal type modifiers to be a percentage instead (and also able to "break the limit"), so if I assigned 300% to insightful, the post above would be +11, but to me would appear as +17 since I'm triple-counting insightfuls.
Your post and your sig make an interesting combination...
The parent post is probably one of the best posts I have ever read on Slashdot. Whoever you are, Mr AC, I tip my hat to you.
(Note: Hat tipping did actually occur; I wear a black felt fedora, and was impressed enough to tip it in the direction of my computer when reading this post)
As a developer, I find I communicate well with other developers I work with; I understand the customer's need quite well (and thankfully they're usually pretty vague, so I have the luxury of fleshing out details myself); and ALWAYS deliver on time.
My method for achieving the "always deliver on time" result is simply the Scotty method. Never underestimate it.
It's offtopic, but I actually agree fully... I'd love to see Slashdot's moderation system go to much higher numbers, and a few more mod points (but not too many more) be given out. e.g. Go to 15 instead of 5 as a maximum, and give out roughly twice as many mod points as currently. That way, each individual act of moderation has about 1/3 the value that it used to, but more people are given a "voice" in valuing posts.
It would also allow for finer grained modifiers - I currently have Friends and Fans at +1, but under the system I propose here, I'd put fans at +1 and friends at +3.
In formal British English (which is not used by the vast majority of people living there), it's still:
Million = 10^6
Milliard = 10^9
Billion = 10^12
My native language is English (New Zealand/Scottish English (Southern New Zealand) to be precise), but since I live in a non-English speaking country where the local language (German) follows the same pattern, I find myself using it in English as well.
On that page, I just added the figures for the "First Language" column excluding US and it comes to 115,254,985, where'd you get "just under 60 million" from that?
Ummm... which Wikipedia articles were you looking at?!
Populations:
UK: 60,943,912
Canada: 33,212,696
New Zealand: 4,173,460
Australia: 20,600,856
India: 1,147,995,898
South Africa: 43,786,115
Ireland: 4,156,119
Nigeria: 138,283,240
Jamaica: 2,804,332
Singapore: 4,608,167
(note: Wikipedia's figures were a bit out of date - 2001 for the UK for example, so I sourced all of these from the CIA World Factbook and it claims these figures are estimates as at July 2008)
Now, not all of those are 100% English speaking (especially the likes of India for example), so totalling those up would be really pretty meaningless. I dug around for some percentages and came up with the following for the above countries):
People from the above countries that speak English as a FIRST language:
UK: (~95% as first language) 57,896,716
Canada: (~60% as first language) 19,927,618
New Zealand: (~98% as first language) 4,089,991
Australia: (~80% as first language) 16,480,685
India: (~0.02% as first language) 229,599
South Africa: (~8% as first language) 3,502,889
Ireland: (~98% as first language) 4,072,997
Nigeria: (~5% as first language) 7,001,683
Jamaica: (~99% as first language) 2,776,289
Singapore: (~25% as first language) 1,152,042
Total: 117,130,509
Okay, that's as FIRST language - many of the remainder are completely bi-lingual but count the "other" language as their first (that includes about 65 million Indians). Additionally, I didn't list the MANY countries with smaller populations of native English speakers (the "few thousands, few tens of thousands or even few hundreds of thousands), so the numbers should probably be much higher (I'd go so far as to add at LEAST 50%, but probably much more).
The next thing is, why are we only counting people who speak English as a first language? There are people whose English as a "definite second" (not counting the bi-lingual people from above) is significantly closer to "standard" English than many people that are counted as native speakers but speak a dialect (my own "native dialect" for example is quite far from standard English - certainly further than the English spoken by everyone I meet living here in Germany). So, we really should be including them as well. That would be about 1/8th of the population of Europe for a start (another 91 million), and MANY more. English as the "international language" of the world has a much greater effect than many people who trap themselves on one continent seem to realise.
Now, even further... the US population is (apparently) 303,824,646, with English as a first language for (apparently) 82.1% of the population, which is 249,440,034, so your figure actually looks a little low. Regardless, even taking the TOTAL population of the US (assuming they fall in to the definition of "English speaking" that I'm using here) it's still less than the "rest of the English speaking world" by a fairly significant amount.
Even if you disagree with my definition of "English Speaking World" (bi-lingual, and highly skilled non-native speakers being included), the BASE figure I started with above for primary language speakers (117 million) is just a hair short of TWICE what you quoted (60 million).
so no, it is not a common word in most of the English-speaking world.However, on this, due to the other people who have replied, I must now eat some humble pie. It seems it's not as common as I thought - it appears to be restricted to Australia, New Zealand and some very small parts of the UK only. So, you're right, but not for the right reasons.
Ummm... "Bludge" is a common word in most of the English speaking word... Also, you could always just Google it.
Roughly, it means "avoiding work", "working very little" etc. Someone who bludges is a bludger. It's a basic intransitive verb "to bludge". However in common parlance, it can often be used as a noun in the manner the GP did, with an equally obvious meaning (if you know the verb).
Why is that inappropriate? From your description, it was an invitation to do so, which they could decline... not a case of "all female students come up here now and strip while the guys paint you".
At age 18, they're legally adults (aren't they?) and so I don't see what's inappropriate about one adult asking another to do something that has a direct relation to the topic at hand (art), is perfectly legal, and does not include any kind of coercion.
Or is nakedness THAT frowned upon in the puritanical US of A?
In New Zealand, a decade and a half ago, we started with SIMPLE trigonometry in the first year of high school (3rd Form - age 13), then progressed to more advanced stuff around 5th Form (age 15). Integrals at 14 sounds pretty heavy, but I can certainly agree with you that it's not out of the realm of possibility.
Ummm... I believe pretty much every English speaking country outside of the US says "maths" rather than "math". Don't forget all the Aussies, Kiwis, South Africans and so on!
Also, in non-English speaking countries, it tends to depend on their history and location as to what "form" of English they prefer - most of mainland Europe for example, will learn British English, and so will also say "maths" (there are some exceptions - there's a strong shift towards US English in the Netherlands); whereas I believe in South America they tend to learn US English and would be more likely to say "math".
My job relies on Microsoft's developer tools at present (Visual Studio), however after discussing it with my direct manager, he's said that everything I write (which is all C#) must also be tested under Mono just to be sure we're not stuck with massive re-writes should MS fall in to a lesser position in times to come.
I prefer Visual Studio to any other IDE that I've tried using, but if all of a sudden, 90% of our customers switched to Mac or Linux (not saying it'll happen suddenly, if ever, just "if it did"), then it wouldn't affect our business much at all, and very little indeed from my side as a developer.
When the decision was made, I found my current applications are all completely fine, and only had to do very minor tweaks to old applications (things like replacing hardcoded backslashes with "System.IO.Path.DirectorySeparatorChar" (from back in the days that I didn't know better))
That's interesting actually - I had a similar, but not identical experience once back when I lived in Australia. I called the "anti piracy" hotline number they had (it seemed the most appropriate contact) and while they seemed fairly uninterested over the phone, they took my details as well as the details of the business I mentioned, and to my surprise sent me a $5000 (AUD) cheque about a month later.
70k USD sounds like a pauper's salary to me living here in Europe as well... however, I'm not quite sure I can follow regarding the house size - just because one can't afford a 3 bedroom 1900 sq ft (176 sq m) house does NOT make one a pauper! What's wrong with a nicely done out one bedroom apartment if you're single, or a 2 bedroom house with around 50 sq m (540 sq ft)?
I understand the US has somewhat of an obsession with large houses in many areas, but I doubt that people living in the centre of Manhattan have huge amounts of space either, so clearly it's not that hard to adapt - perhaps the people in Seattle should learn to adapt as well (or move somewhere else, at the sacrifice of salary/job quality/lifestyle/whatever else was keeping them there).
For reference, I get paid a bit more than 70k USD (currently on 58.5k Euro a year, which is around 90k USD at current exchange rates) and I am perfectly content RENTING my 30 sq m (325 sq ft) apartment, so that I can save up some money and buy a really nice place when I finally meet a nice girl and settle down. I honestly can't imagine needing or even wanting any more space than I currently have while I'm on my own.
Had you quoted just TWO more words of my post, you would've got to where I mentioned something specifically other than facilities. "and expertise". Only one more sentence later, I also mentioned "Also, if I recall correctly, at least 2 of my high school teachers had doctorates in their fields."
I agree that quality of facilities does not quality of education make, however I stand by my comments that New Zealand's education system is quite simply one of the best I've seen.
Yes, I agree completely. As someone who has lived in 5 countries and can "associate" with the cultures of at least 7, I find it pretty silly that I should be pigeonholed in to any particular category based on the birthplace of my parents/grandparents.
True - I pretty much meant "The British Model as it was around a hundred or so years ago"... (but of course updated for the modern world!)
Yes, the GDR ceased to exist a LONG time ago, but I certainly wasn't referring to that!
The "Federal Republic of Germany" (Bundesrepublik Deutschland), which is the current "incarnation" of this country, is most certainly a Democratic Republic (in a very similar fashion to the USA).
The education in NZ may be good, but the pay in the IT world isn't. I couldn't stand Australia after 6 years there though, so moved to Germany (actually, I couldn't really stand it anymore after 4, but it took me two years to do something about it)
Not quite "pure" democracy, but getting pretty close to the ideal is Switzerland. And they seem to do alright for themselves.
Also, despite being a part of the British Commonwealth, New Zealand is also much closer to the ideal than most other English speaking nations at least, and doesn't do too poorly either.
For the first time in my life, I'm living in a Democratic Republic at the moment (Germany), and while I do love it here and they have yet to do anything that I am strongly against, it does worry me from time to time how much control the government potentially has.
(on the plus side, I'm only a few hundred km away from a country that would take me in (due to my heritage) in the unlikely event that something really bad was decided and I needed to get out of here FAST)
The very disturbing thing here is that you're right... The reason it's disturbing is that Germany's education system is also pretty bad - it's well ahead of the US in terms of overall quality, but it's STILL bad enough that a lot of people are spending good amounts of time thinking about how to improve it.
If you want to see a really good education system, take a look at New Zealand. It's almost completely based on the British model, but enhanced where needed and with such excellent quality in the public schools that private schools are a rarity that only the ultra-snobbish (or deeply religious in the case of religious schools) are interested in.
I attended public education in New Zealand, and after having travelled the world, have yet to see a public school that matches the quality of facilities I had access to. Even many private schools below the "ultra expensive" don't stack up (sure, some have prettier buildings and snazzier uniforms, but that's hardly a sensible selling point!). This was around 12 to 14 years ago, and we had 2 computer labs with current (at the time) systems, a modern gym (that I never used), a school newspaper with access to the local newspaper's printing facilities and expertise for journalistic advice, and science labs that were ALWAYS stocked with the fun stuff that goes boom if you're not careful (and teachers that knew enough to explain it to you). Also, if I recall correctly, at least 2 of my high school teachers had doctorates in their fields.
I do believe I was probably quite lucky, and that not ALL public education in New Zealand is quite that good, but it's at least of a very high standard in general (I think my school was at the high end of the scale for quality). I'd imagine a city school in South Auckland for example is probably much poorer quality, but still significantly better than the schools I saw when I lived in neighbouring Australia (which look like concrete kindergartens, holding zombified students and run by zombified staff).
...our brave leader...Maybe YOUR leader - not mine!
Yep, but I don't think it's really a linear progression. We took a LONG time to get from simple multicelled life to "basic animal life". From there, we got to "complex animal life" pretty quickly, but since then, we haven't really advanced that much at all. I wouldn't have a hard time believing an alien race even half a billion years older than us is necessarily as advanced compared to us as we are to the simple bacteria.
And, if they are, well, I won't hold it against them for not thinking of us as anything even worth thinking twice about.