it was a great read on why software hadn't advanced in the same leaps and bounds as hardware.
What the hell is Cox talking about? Software has gotten much, much larger and heavier than hardware over the years. In fact, judging from the most recent releases from both RedHat and Microsoft, it's consuming resources much faster than the hardware folks can put them out. Sheesh!
Let's face it -- puny cutting-edge hardware is no match for modern developers and their revolutionary notions about the irrelevance of performance! Software will always triumph over hardware.
(mod +1 Sarcasm)
Not enough superstition?
on
Emergence
·
· Score: 2, Funny
The idea that a God figure could be there, tweaking the parameters as the model runs, or even setting the initial conditions works against his ideas.
You can hardly blame the author for writing a popular science text that fails to include wild speculation about the influence of medieval superstition on physical phenomena. I imagine he probably failed to consider phlogiston and the luminiferous ether, too, but I would have a hard time holding that against him either.
Forget Exchange -- does it interoperate with Pine?
on
Evolution 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 2
I've been watching Evolution with interest, but not enough to install the development versions. Now that it has a stable, release version (no doubt for certain values of stable), I want to give it a spin. However, one thing I don't seem to be able to find on Ximian's site is whether Evolution works with the standard mbox format so I can continue to use Pine as well. Because it's often necessary for me to ssh into my desktop box to access mail from machines that don't have X installed, I must use Pine (or Mutt), whereas it would just be an optional perk for me to have a GUI mail client.
We'd see this same kind of brinksmanship and the same sort of politically or financially motivated service outages from our telephone service providers were it not for regulations mandating a scheme of interconnection and settlement fees. But does anyone really want that same sort of regulatory scheme for broadband? I might change my mind later, but it seems like the occasional outage like this one might be the lesser of two pretty big evils.
Dear God, what are you talking about? For all of its many sins, my telco
Costs less than my broadband connection.
Goes down much, much less rarely.
Has consistent quality-of-service.
Has never disappeared for a month or two because multiple factions of grotesquely rich people decide to play head games with each other.
Normally operates so smoothly I don't have to think about it.
Never suggests that I "use the phone too much" or complains about what sort of device I have answering the phone.
Is apparently indifferent to how many phones I have in the house.
Yeah, that's a big fnarking evil for you. Sure, it might offend the idealist, pie-in-the-sky libertartian crowd, but in actual practice it works exceedingly well. Underregulation is no less an evil than overregulation. Considering how much cheaper phone service is in the US compared to just about anywhere else, I'd say we've struck a pretty good balance, and what's good for the telco is good for the cable broadband business.
Kai was not doing anything malicious. He wasn't try to compete with Infogames, trying to hurt their profits, or even trying to make a profit from himself.
True, but regardless of what he was trying to do, he was in fact competing with Infogrames and, if successful, he would have hurt their profits.
Infogames should have overlooked the fact that his might have been copyright infringiment.
There's no "might have been" here. Unauthorized derivative works, which include translations, are prohibited under the copyright law of virtually every nation on earth and have been for a long time. This is nothing new, and it's nothing sneaky. If this were not the case, I'd be making tons of money rushing German translations of the latest Stephen King novels to market.
All that being said, it was rather stupid of Infogrames to take such a ham-handed approach with an until-recently-friendly fan who could have saved them a wad of cash and gotten the game to market sooner.
The best way to punish Infogrames would be to refrain from buying the German version of Civ III until they apologize and withdraw their demand for money. I rather doubt any such boycott will ever happen in this particular market, though.
Well, if you're learning about computers, EVERY program on a Linux box is educational!
That's great, but most kids don't use computers in school to learn about computers, nor should they be expected to. They use computers to run educational software to learn about other things -- mathematics, language arts, etc., and secondarily to familiarize themselves with the One True Office Suite that will be inflicted upon them in the workplace. Beyond a certain basic understanding (which I will be the first to say is sadly neglected), the average student, like the average user, doesn't need to understand computers. Most of them are, after all, going to grow up to be something other than software developers or electrical engineers.
And unfortunately, near as I can tell, there is still vastly more educational software available for the Apple II than there is for all flavors of Unix combined.
Shamless self-promotion: The last application I wrote for Windows before I swore off MFC and moved to Linux was a front-end for about ten good text adventures called Adventure Blaster. It's a little dated at this point, but still provides a convenient way for Windows users to play some great games without facing the learning curve of setting up the interpreters. It also has a very extensive help system with walkthroughs and loads of pointers for newbies.
Re:why so negative towards xbox?
on
XBox Released
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Is this my imagination, or does slashdot take its anti-microsoft bias into everything they do?
You say this like it's some kind of big secret that the Slashdot crowd's feelings about Microsoft range from mild antipathy to deep loathing. Are you the same guy who visits Macintosh advocacy sites and wonders why there's no positive press on Gateway and Dell?
"No information that is protected by attorney-client privilege may be used for prosecution," the statement said. "There is not protection however, for communications related to the client's ongoing or contemplated illegal acts."
Right, and we can really believe that FBI Agent #1 won't tip off FBI Agent #2 to what he heard while monitoring Federal Suspect #3. Sure. The FBI would never do anything like engage in campaigns of surveillance and harassment against law-abiding political dissidents or civil rights activists, or ever do really nasty crap like try to pressure someone like Martin Luther King to commit suicide. No, of course not. Our state security agencies would never do anything like that again. Right?
Why is it that so many people who will pursue server security with a level of paranoia approaching psychosis are totally unconcerned with protecting their civil rights against liberty crackers like John Ashcroft?
Re:And if that's not enough Scott Adams for you...
on
God's Debris
·
· Score: 2
Damn. I guess I know who gets the "One Trick Pony" award for the year.
Unless the kernel has some new feature or fixes a major secutiy hole, I personally don't see how interesting each minor release is.
Well, the 2.4.x series has been marred by some serious and not-yet-entirely resolved virtual memory flaws that can cripple some mission-critical server applications. I'm not sure that qualifies as security hole, unless you consider that it makes DOS attacks easier, but it is a major performance problem. Until a final fix is in, every release in this branch is news.
However, one thing that was not evaluated in this writeup at all was stability, especially on big boxes (as in SMP and >1GB) and heavy workloads. This is where neither VM really seems to be able to hang in there.
This is a pretty significant issue to me, too, because I admin a dual processor box with 1GB running MySQL under the 2.4.2 kernel, and it bogs down under relatively light loads, swapping like mad, and eventually righting itself if given enough time. Once news of the VM problems came to my attention, I started looking into it, and I confess I'm stumped. There's no reason I can't roll back to 2.2.19 or forward to whatever the 2.4.x kernel du jour is. At this point, I'm inclined to go back to 2.2.19 for the time being because there were no problems there, but I'd certainly rather go forward if I can.
Either way, I need to fix it soon, because the database in question drives a busy commercial website, and my boss is quite legitimately upset about the problem.
When Apple killed off the CLI-driven Apple II line and produced the Macintosh, I moved on to the IBM PC and DOS. When Microsoft started trying to kill DOS, I moved on to Linux with a great sense of relief, since the GPL assured me that I wouldn't have the rug yanked out from under me again. Don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to GUIs, but they aren't enough by themselves, and many things are much easier if you can use a commandline, especially scripting.
DOS wasn't much of an OS -- and there are those who have argued, with some fairness, that it wasn't a complete OS -- but it did what it did reliably, unlike any other MS software, and it did it with a tiny smidgen of memory. For some purposes, that makes it a much better deal than Linux, depending on what you need to do.
There's not much MAPS could have done to prevent this from happening, assuming an RBL listing was necessary. It looks like their ISP is using IP-less virtual hosting, relying upon the browser-provided Host: header to determine where the user is sent.
What, you mean like the vast majority of small ISPs and their webhosting customers do because A) it can be expensive or impossible to acquire scads of IP addresses from your upstream provider, B) the HTTP 1.1 standard explicitly encourages this, and C) the current IPv4 address space is running increasingly short of free addresses and IPv6 has been coming Real Soon Now for eons?
Why should innocent parties have to go hunting for new ISPs because the vigilantes who run MAPS can't be bothered to worry about collateral damage? Unless the legal tradition has vastly changed in the last ten minutes, that's negligence on their part, and yes, they can and should be sued for it.
Please don't think I have any sympathy for either censorware or spam, but I have even less for a self-appointed judicial and enforcement agency with no legal authority and no accountability to the electorate. I might feel differently if they actually did a good job, but MAPS has a long, long history of heavy-handed tactics, incompetence, and a refusal to deal fairly with those site admins who DO fix open relays and ban customers who spam. We need actual laws to regulate spam, not arrogant nerds who neither know what they're doing nor do it in good faith.
So I visited the site to look at their AI offerings, and the first interesting package I saw, AUTOCLASS III, costs $900 to download. If that's your idea of public domain, I'll just keep hoping we encounter alien life that uses the GPL.
If Ashcroft and Fienstien both like it, it HAS to be a REALLY bad idea. Come on, I can't think of many people who have worse records when it comes to undermining the Bill of Rights than those two.
Oh that's easy: Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover. But I'd be hard-pressed to come up with another two. Feinstein in particular has yet to see a restriction of citizens' rights she doesn't like.
The question I would like to see all of these security-state morons forced to answer is this: What, in your opinion, actually would constitute excessive government intrusion into personal privacy? I'd be surprised if any of them actually had an answer. But worse, we have to deal with BS military rhetoric like this:
At a speech in Salt Lake City last week, former Desert Storm commander Schwarzkopf said he saw nothing wrong with ID cards. ``I've had a military ID card since I was a cadet at West Point and I haven't lost any freedom,'' he told a cheering crowd.
I don't know about you, but my experience in the U.S. Army was about as far and away from individual liberty as you can get outside of prison. That's not a knock against the military, BTW -- the military's job is to defend democracy, not to run one. But career brass like Gen. Schwarzkopf have spent their entire adult lives in a rigidly controlled state-within-a-state, and their qualifications to talk about what life is really like in a free society are limited at best. Of course, it's pretty clear that civilian lawyers are a little hazy on the concept, too:
``You don't give up much,'' Dershowitz said. ``Civil libertarians will come around.''
What Dershowitz doesn't get, surprisingly, is that they never ask us to give up much on any particular occasion, but it adds up to a great deal over time. I find it depressing that, only sixty years after WW2, if you want to enjoy the freedoms your grandparents had, you might want to consider emigrating to Germany. Of course, the Germans have actually had to live under the sort of state John Ashcroft would like to build for us, and of all the things I've read and heard from the people who lived under the Nazi security-state, I can't recall even one saying he felt... secure.
Books and periodicals - Some people (myself included) prefer to read anything of great length on paper. Also there is a certain pride in owning a handsome book, admiring the cover as you put it away on a shelf, where you will never touch it again.
Levy's remarks about e-books replacing real books eliminated what little credibility he had failed to squander with the rest of the article. E-books deserved to be ranked with "Internet appliances" and communism as ideas that look dumb on paper (or e-paper) and even dumber in practice.
Books are much cheaper than e-books. (When was the last time you had to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars for a machine to read a paper book?)
Books are more convenient than e-books.
Books are not harmed by electromagnetic fields or temperatures under 451 F.
You can even get books wet without rendering them unreadable, though I wouldn't recommend it.
Books don't require electricity or recharging.
Books are readable from a wide range of angles.
You can drop books. You might even drop them on purpose, just for effect.
Books formats never become unusably obsolete. The default platform for book-reading has not changed since the human species evolved. Even obsolete formats, e.g. scrolls and clay tablets, are still readable with the latest hardware.
Airport security will not ask you to boot your books at the gate, nor will the pilot ask you to turn off your books during takeoff and landing.
Best of all, there's no digital rights management BS with respect to books, which means
You can check them out from libraries for free.
There is no license to agree to and no rights to surrender.
You can usually return them without a hassle.
No company will ever revoke your ability to read a book because they don't like the way you use it.
You can legally criticize books.
You can resell books because you actually own them after you pay for them.
You can loan books to friends without acquiring a site-license.
Since the FTC has caved in to pressure from al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden to attack the rights of Americans, will the Defense Department be considering commando raids or bombing missions against FTC headquarters?
I don't think I've ever seen "Practical Extraction and Report Language" spelled out in the straight press. I wish whomever the writer of the release asked for a definition had told them "Pathetically Eclectic Rubbish Lister". Of course then, they'd probably have just used the acronym.
I am running Windows on a machine not much faster than yours and with less RAM, and it works just fine. The most processor-intensive stuff I do is run Photoshop under Windows and gcc under Linux, and while I wouldn't mind being able to do a kernel compile in a few minutes like I can on the dual 1GHz babies I manage at work, then again, I don't recompile the kernel all that often, so who cares?
Years ago, I figured we'd eventually reach the point that machines would be good enough for the average user, and eventually good enough for me, too, and then upgrading would slow way down. It seems most of us have reached that point. Gamers, as you note, are the obvious exception, but even if I had the time to play games, the main obstacle there isn't processor speed, it's the expensive and not especially well-supported graphics and sound cards. (Obviously, someone who's really into gaming will find this less of an obstacle than I do.)
My next "upgrade" is less likely to be a new desktop machine than it is a household file server with four 80GB IDE drives so my wife and I can share MP3s across the household LAN. And for that, any cheap-ass second-hand machine will probably do just fine.
When Congress makes strong crypto without backdoors illegal, I will continue using the same crypto software I'm using right now. While I usually use encryption to secure CD-ROMs full of sensitive trade secrets, if I have to transmit it over the net, I'll just use a method of steganographic concealment. It's not that I'm up to anything illegal; I just can't risk the liability involved in compromising trade secrets, and as a matter of principle, you can have my right to privacy when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
The point of this is not to boast about how I'm looking for a pissing contest with John Ashcroft. The point is that the odds are that they won't catch me, and if I'm willing to take the risk out of mere financial need and defiance to the state, a bunch of wild-eyed fanatics who aren't afraid to die certainly aren't going to be dissuaded either.
Of course, the idea that some laws are so completely unenforceable that they can be casually ignored is lost on these fools if the so-called "war on drugs" is any indication.
Of course it's blind censorship. There are several anti-war and anti-violence songs on the list. For crying out loud, they've banned the Beatles' "Obla Di, Obla Da", which has got to be one of the least offensive songs of all time. What did they do, take a list of song and throw darts at it?
I don't know about this supposed war on terrorism, but it looks like we're already losing the war on drooling stupidity.
Slashdot Mirror
What the hell is Cox talking about? Software has gotten much, much larger and heavier than hardware over the years. In fact, judging from the most recent releases from both RedHat and Microsoft, it's consuming resources much faster than the hardware folks can put them out. Sheesh!
Let's face it -- puny cutting-edge hardware is no match for modern developers and their revolutionary notions about the irrelevance of performance! Software will always triumph over hardware.
(mod +1 Sarcasm)
You can hardly blame the author for writing a popular science text that fails to include wild speculation about the influence of medieval superstition on physical phenomena. I imagine he probably failed to consider phlogiston and the luminiferous ether, too, but I would have a hard time holding that against him either.
I've been watching Evolution with interest, but not enough to install the development versions. Now that it has a stable, release version (no doubt for certain values of stable), I want to give it a spin. However, one thing I don't seem to be able to find on Ximian's site is whether Evolution works with the standard mbox format so I can continue to use Pine as well. Because it's often necessary for me to ssh into my desktop box to access mail from machines that don't have X installed, I must use Pine (or Mutt), whereas it would just be an optional perk for me to have a GUI mail client.
Dear God, what are you talking about? For all of its many sins, my telco
Yeah, that's a big fnarking evil for you. Sure, it might offend the idealist, pie-in-the-sky libertartian crowd, but in actual practice it works exceedingly well. Underregulation is no less an evil than overregulation. Considering how much cheaper phone service is in the US compared to just about anywhere else, I'd say we've struck a pretty good balance, and what's good for the telco is good for the cable broadband business.
True, but regardless of what he was trying to do, he was in fact competing with Infogrames and, if successful, he would have hurt their profits.
Infogames should have overlooked the fact that his might have been copyright infringiment.
There's no "might have been" here. Unauthorized derivative works, which include translations, are prohibited under the copyright law of virtually every nation on earth and have been for a long time. This is nothing new, and it's nothing sneaky. If this were not the case, I'd be making tons of money rushing German translations of the latest Stephen King novels to market.
All that being said, it was rather stupid of Infogrames to take such a ham-handed approach with an until-recently-friendly fan who could have saved them a wad of cash and gotten the game to market sooner.
The best way to punish Infogrames would be to refrain from buying the German version of Civ III until they apologize and withdraw their demand for money. I rather doubt any such boycott will ever happen in this particular market, though.
That's great, but most kids don't use computers in school to learn about computers, nor should they be expected to. They use computers to run educational software to learn about other things -- mathematics, language arts, etc., and secondarily to familiarize themselves with the One True Office Suite that will be inflicted upon them in the workplace. Beyond a certain basic understanding (which I will be the first to say is sadly neglected), the average student, like the average user, doesn't need to understand computers. Most of them are, after all, going to grow up to be something other than software developers or electrical engineers.
And unfortunately, near as I can tell, there is still vastly more educational software available for the Apple II than there is for all flavors of Unix combined.
Shamless self-promotion: The last application I wrote for Windows before I swore off MFC and moved to Linux was a front-end for about ten good text adventures called Adventure Blaster. It's a little dated at this point, but still provides a convenient way for Windows users to play some great games without facing the learning curve of setting up the interpreters. It also has a very extensive help system with walkthroughs and loads of pointers for newbies.
You say this like it's some kind of big secret that the Slashdot crowd's feelings about Microsoft range from mild antipathy to deep loathing. Are you the same guy who visits Macintosh advocacy sites and wonders why there's no positive press on Gateway and Dell?
Right, and we can really believe that FBI Agent #1 won't tip off FBI Agent #2 to what he heard while monitoring Federal Suspect #3. Sure. The FBI would never do anything like engage in campaigns of surveillance and harassment against law-abiding political dissidents or civil rights activists, or ever do really nasty crap like try to pressure someone like Martin Luther King to commit suicide. No, of course not. Our state security agencies would never do anything like that again. Right?
Why is it that so many people who will pursue server security with a level of paranoia approaching psychosis are totally unconcerned with protecting their civil rights against liberty crackers like John Ashcroft?
Damn. I guess I know who gets the "One Trick Pony" award for the year.
That's not a problem; I always give them Cowboy Neal's name and phone number.
Well, the 2.4.x series has been marred by some serious and not-yet-entirely resolved virtual memory flaws that can cripple some mission-critical server applications. I'm not sure that qualifies as security hole, unless you consider that it makes DOS attacks easier, but it is a major performance problem. Until a final fix is in, every release in this branch is news.
This is a pretty significant issue to me, too, because I admin a dual processor box with 1GB running MySQL under the 2.4.2 kernel, and it bogs down under relatively light loads, swapping like mad, and eventually righting itself if given enough time. Once news of the VM problems came to my attention, I started looking into it, and I confess I'm stumped. There's no reason I can't roll back to 2.2.19 or forward to whatever the 2.4.x kernel du jour is. At this point, I'm inclined to go back to 2.2.19 for the time being because there were no problems there, but I'd certainly rather go forward if I can.
Either way, I need to fix it soon, because the database in question drives a busy commercial website, and my boss is quite legitimately upset about the problem.
DOS wasn't much of an OS -- and there are those who have argued, with some fairness, that it wasn't a complete OS -- but it did what it did reliably, unlike any other MS software, and it did it with a tiny smidgen of memory. For some purposes, that makes it a much better deal than Linux, depending on what you need to do.
What, you mean like the vast majority of small ISPs and their webhosting customers do because A) it can be expensive or impossible to acquire scads of IP addresses from your upstream provider, B) the HTTP 1.1 standard explicitly encourages this, and C) the current IPv4 address space is running increasingly short of free addresses and IPv6 has been coming Real Soon Now for eons?
Why should innocent parties have to go hunting for new ISPs because the vigilantes who run MAPS can't be bothered to worry about collateral damage? Unless the legal tradition has vastly changed in the last ten minutes, that's negligence on their part, and yes, they can and should be sued for it.
Please don't think I have any sympathy for either censorware or spam, but I have even less for a self-appointed judicial and enforcement agency with no legal authority and no accountability to the electorate. I might feel differently if they actually did a good job, but MAPS has a long, long history of heavy-handed tactics, incompetence, and a refusal to deal fairly with those site admins who DO fix open relays and ban customers who spam. We need actual laws to regulate spam, not arrogant nerds who neither know what they're doing nor do it in good faith.
So I visited the site to look at their AI offerings, and the first interesting package I saw, AUTOCLASS III, costs $900 to download. If that's your idea of public domain, I'll just keep hoping we encounter alien life that uses the GPL.
Oh that's easy: Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover. But I'd be hard-pressed to come up with another two. Feinstein in particular has yet to see a restriction of citizens' rights she doesn't like.
The question I would like to see all of these security-state morons forced to answer is this: What, in your opinion, actually would constitute excessive government intrusion into personal privacy? I'd be surprised if any of them actually had an answer. But worse, we have to deal with BS military rhetoric like this:
At a speech in Salt Lake City last week, former Desert Storm commander Schwarzkopf said he saw nothing wrong with ID cards. ``I've had a military ID card since I was a cadet at West Point and I haven't lost any freedom,'' he told a cheering crowd.
I don't know about you, but my experience in the U.S. Army was about as far and away from individual liberty as you can get outside of prison. That's not a knock against the military, BTW -- the military's job is to defend democracy, not to run one. But career brass like Gen. Schwarzkopf have spent their entire adult lives in a rigidly controlled state-within-a-state, and their qualifications to talk about what life is really like in a free society are limited at best. Of course, it's pretty clear that civilian lawyers are a little hazy on the concept, too:
``You don't give up much,'' Dershowitz said. ``Civil libertarians will come around.''
What Dershowitz doesn't get, surprisingly, is that they never ask us to give up much on any particular occasion, but it adds up to a great deal over time. I find it depressing that, only sixty years after WW2, if you want to enjoy the freedoms your grandparents had, you might want to consider emigrating to Germany. Of course, the Germans have actually had to live under the sort of state John Ashcroft would like to build for us, and of all the things I've read and heard from the people who lived under the Nazi security-state, I can't recall even one saying he felt... secure.
Like matching government funds for candidates who accept campaign contributions from the RIAA?
Levy's remarks about e-books replacing real books eliminated what little credibility he had failed to squander with the rest of the article. E-books deserved to be ranked with "Internet appliances" and communism as ideas that look dumb on paper (or e-paper) and even dumber in practice.
Much of the same applies to mail.
Since the FTC has caved in to pressure from al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden to attack the rights of Americans, will the Defense Department be considering commando raids or bombing missions against FTC headquarters?
I don't think I've ever seen "Practical Extraction and Report Language" spelled out in the straight press. I wish whomever the writer of the release asked for a definition had told them "Pathetically Eclectic Rubbish Lister". Of course then, they'd probably have just used the acronym.
I am running Windows on a machine not much faster than yours and with less RAM, and it works just fine. The most processor-intensive stuff I do is run Photoshop under Windows and gcc under Linux, and while I wouldn't mind being able to do a kernel compile in a few minutes like I can on the dual 1GHz babies I manage at work, then again, I don't recompile the kernel all that often, so who cares?
Years ago, I figured we'd eventually reach the point that machines would be good enough for the average user, and eventually good enough for me, too, and then upgrading would slow way down. It seems most of us have reached that point. Gamers, as you note, are the obvious exception, but even if I had the time to play games, the main obstacle there isn't processor speed, it's the expensive and not especially well-supported graphics and sound cards. (Obviously, someone who's really into gaming will find this less of an obstacle than I do.)
My next "upgrade" is less likely to be a new desktop machine than it is a household file server with four 80GB IDE drives so my wife and I can share MP3s across the household LAN. And for that, any cheap-ass second-hand machine will probably do just fine.
The point of this is not to boast about how I'm looking for a pissing contest with John Ashcroft. The point is that the odds are that they won't catch me, and if I'm willing to take the risk out of mere financial need and defiance to the state, a bunch of wild-eyed fanatics who aren't afraid to die certainly aren't going to be dissuaded either.
Of course, the idea that some laws are so completely unenforceable that they can be casually ignored is lost on these fools if the so-called "war on drugs" is any indication.
Of course it's blind censorship. There are several anti-war and anti-violence songs on the list. For crying out loud, they've banned the Beatles' "Obla Di, Obla Da", which has got to be one of the least offensive songs of all time. What did they do, take a list of song and throw darts at it?
I don't know about this supposed war on terrorism, but it looks like we're already losing the war on drooling stupidity.
I normally try to avoid 'me too' posts, but since I don't have moderator status at the moment, well, damn, that was a well-spoken and insightful post.