Quite frankly, I won't form an opinion until we've heard an official response from the most influential contingent in fan-fiction:
Furries.
Without their unique insight into subjects like "Kirk romances a full sized Gadget from Chip n' Dale's Rescue Rangers" or "What would happen if the crew of the NX-01 were anthropomorphic animals and there's maybe a crossover with the X-Men why not?", we would have no way of knowing what we did and didn't like about the various trek series, and, by extension, an online repository of stories.
So count me out until the "Commander Troi as a sexy lemur" crowd weighs in, THEN I'll know what to think.
Nah, I don't waste time on ACs. Call me elitist, call me 'Marie Antoinette with a mustache', but AC posts really don't matter, and nobody takes them seriously.
Mentioning Wikipedia Review is not, on it's own, terribly crazy. It's just the context you choose.
For example, Wikipediareview has made a policy of harassing editors and admins, the users coordinated attacks where they call people at their houses late at night and call their employers to complain about them to get them fired. Do you support that? Since you're probably not going to respond to this, it's probably fruitless to ask, but you opened the door with your line of comment. You REALLY want to use Wikipedia Review as a reference?
So mentioning that site to bolster your viewpoint (presumably, you're an editor who disagreed with a decision that applied to you, as in perhaps you tried to use Wikipedia as a MySpace site, or were pushing a point of view in contravention of the site policies, or were upset when the article your wrote about your math teacher was deleted as 'non-notable') is similar to starting a conversation with "Now, the Nazi medical experiments were terrible, but we _did_ learn some useful things from them..." (howdy Godwinists!)
So, your credibility is basically shot. The cabal reference underscores it. I'm an admin there, and we can't even agree on what to order for our pizzas, much less plot to push some sort of wacky political agenda.
If the community controls it, that means censorship through mob rule. Post something from Ogrish? Maybe it'll get zapped even though that's a form of censorship.
Freedom of speech exists not so people can say things that other folks agree with, it's so that the unpopular opinions can exist too. That's why Illinois Nazis (I hate those guys) can do their thing, not just the civil rights marchers.
So, in practice, I bet there'll be little difference between the end product and YouTube. New boss will be same as the old boss, except instead of a room of guys with thin mustaches and black eyebands that cackle as they zap content, it'll be legions of computer users doing the same thing.
I've had a touchscreen in my car for years now for my PC, and I quickly learned to adjust some of my habits to it. Specifically, I: 1. Use my fingernails. No fancy glue on stylus or anything, but finger nails don't leave oily traces unless I've just finished gutting a whale by hand or something. 2. I do it palm facing towards me, pointed up. This keeps the contact area visible the whole time. If the computer were british, it might look like I was flipping it off, sure, but it works well.
When you have limited screen real-estate (like on MP3 players and phones), there isn't a lot of room for fancy hacks like what the article suggests. I'm pretty sure customers will meet the technology half way by necessity if nothing else.
When something like this happens where a direct financial impact can be measured, do any of the rules change regarding the protections that the reporting website operate under?
If the New York Times reports that Microsoft was filing bankruptcy and the stock plummeted, The NYT would be held to some sort of standard. Sometimes a retraction isn't enough, for instance, to protect from a lawsuit.
Now when it's a website, do any of the protections exist, and what are the implications for these guys in terms of liability?
Prediction: Within a year, all Apple products with displays will have multi-touch. Laptops, external monitors, iPods, the whole shebang. Sure, most people won't use it all in the beginning. The UIs we have today aren't set up for it, neither are our office spaces. But Apple will bet the farm and just make is a Standard Feature on the bet that while the demand doesn't exist NOW, it'll appear out of whole cloth once it's so ubiquitous.
They did it w/ USB. They did it with mice.
"Blah blah greasy fingerprints on monitors" Yeah, anyone with half a brain can think of 10 reasons why this is dumb. But it's the crazy guy in the back of the auditorium who's going to figure out how to get rich off of it, and in doing so will make the standard transition from 'crazy wacked out goofball' to 'eccentric visionary'.
This is a standard disruptive technology situation. When they first come out, disruptive tech items usually don't offer a clear immediate advantage. Like when hydraulics came out, compared to the cable operated equipment of the time they were expensive, underpowered, and overcomplicated. But the nascent technology of hydraulics was able to develop in leaps and bounds and eventually beat the cable operated stuff in all those areas, plus it added safety.
Hybrid transportation might be in that early phase where sure, it's not a slam dunk, but on the other hand, it's the _beginning_ of its development lifecycle compared to the non-hybrid options that are at an incremental improvement phase right now with over a hundred years of refinement under its belt.
I wouldn't write off hybrids just yet, there's a lot of 'low hanging fruit' still out there for the R&D organizations to pluck in terms of improvement. It's shortsighted to call the game just yet.
I have old copies of Popular Mechanics going back twenty years, and let's discuss some of their predictions. According to them:
* I have a landing pad built into the roof of my house for my flying car. * When I need to get to Europe from New York, I take the subway to a special terminal that connects me to a train that shoots under the Atlantic at thousands of miles per hour in a vacuum. * On the rare instances I don't take the super train, I take a Bell Osprey derivative shuttle to the local airport where I don't even need to get out of my seat, because it follows a track built into the shuttle and the airport and automatically zips me into my waiting hypersonic sub-orbital jetliner (which, for some reason, seems to go nowhere but Tokyo). * I can fix my hot water heater by removing the broken heating element and replacing it with a new one from the hardware store. Possibly the most ridiculous prediction/claim of all.
I like their enthusiasm, and the pictures and ads are great, but I'm not quite ready to start shorting stock in companies based on a Popular Mechanics prediction.
The discussion about local e-mail clients vs. web clients is similar to discussions about digital cameras and pistols.
When talking about cameras to buy, some folks advocate SLR, expandable, large cameras that have huge optical zoom, attachment points, and a huge slew of features. Other folks will say "I'll take an Elph" (or some other small format, quality camera that's the size of a pack of cigarettes. The most common argument the big camera people will use is something to the effect of 'yes, but you're sacrificing 20% image quality' (or something along those lines. A common response? "Sure, but I'm about X times more likely to actually HAVE the camera on me when something interesting happens. A big camera that takes slightly better pictures that's at home is less useful to me than this."
Concealed pistol arguments have both sides too. "I prefer the 9MM Glock" or "Nothing less than a.45 will do the job, it has _stopping power_." There will usually be folks on the other side who say "Those are nice, but I prefer a.22 Pistol. It's small enough that I'm much more likely to actually have it on me if something happens in public. A heavy, bulky gun that's sitting on the dresser is much less useful to me when I'm in danger than a small.22 that I can carry every day."
E-Mail clients seem to be heading in the same direction. T-Bird has some great features and rationales for using. It does stuff that can only really be done from a fixed location (private mail, etc), and yes, it can integrate with desktop apps. But... I rarely use those extra features. I've switched to webmail knowing that I'm trading off some features, but the payoff of being able to actually GET to it wherever I am has paid off many more times than not having integration into MS Word or something.
Different audiences, different needs, but both sides have their reasons.
This technology, like GPS, would most likely have military as the initial customer, hence the customer that sets the design. For GPS, a completely passive system was designed so that an asset could calculate where it was without giving out information to nearby enemies that it was there.
The primary customer for something like this would probably also be the military, so I imagine the actual equipment would be passive as well. There's no persuasive reason to make the sensors wait for a query, just have them send out a pulse at regular intervals that contain their location, a precise time stamp, depth and water temperature. This is enough data for a passive submarine to use to calculate position (the depth and temperature affect the propagation of sound waves). There would be imprecision because the speed of sound is variable, of course, but you'd have a system that won't give away the presence of a submarine the way you would if said sub was "pinging" for the info.
Credit where credit's due, it's important to note that LSL is the first scripting language to have furry specific classes. This is an oft-overlooked aspect of modern languages.
The summary claims that it "could be used by post-apocalyptic people to feed a hungry planet". If it were a system of distributed vaults spread around the planet, I could see this happening.
But a single vault in an inaccessible area? Let's consider the situation. If the world is 'post-apocalyptic', that means some seriously bad stuff has happened. To assume that whatever happened was so selective as to leave the worldwide transport infrastructure needed to take the seeds and "feed a hungry planet" but happened to kill all seed stores and food sources... requires a stretch of the imagination that would snap a logical mind.
I'm all for dramatic story summaries that play fast and loose with the facts to get me to- hey, wait a second, no I'm not.
This is a classic 'disruptive technology' situation. The Flash memory is more expensive and has less capacity than the moving disc, but in the long term, the benefits would outpace the downsides. When the 3.5" hard drives started coming out, they had lower capacity, cost more, and were slower than the 5.25" hard drives, but they were smaller. How many 5.25" hard drives are being made today? Many of the companies that built 5.25" hard drives failed to survive the transition because it was obvious that the public wouldn't stand for paying more for less. Obvious and correct weren't in agreement, as history showed us.
On a side note, I'm betting we'll see bluetooth enabled iPods before too long. Wireless headsets are cool, sure, but the real money maker will be as a wireless link for the iPods to be available as external storage for things like the iPhone. Doesn't need to be super fast to stream or one-up songs from "The archive" to the iPhone, and there's a continuing market for iPods even for people who just dropped $500+ on the iPhone.
The editorial is interesting, but I found myself stuck on something: The author appears to be imbuing Citizendium with an inordinate amount of credit before it has even come into existence.
Consider the story of the Phantom console. Slashdot collectively said "Interesting, but let's see some proof". The more flowery or adrenaline pumped the prose, the more skeptical we should be when there's nothing we can actually get our hands on. This article about the greatness of Citizendium falls into the same trap, and our response here should be to hold off on our praise until there's something that can be evaluated.
One other thing is the issue of graffiti. It's given quite a bit of exposure, heck, it's even in the title of the article itself. But realistically speaking, how big of a problem is it? Wikipedia has a pretty darn good response time when it comes to defacement/graffiti. There are vandalbots that autorevert some changes that meet certain heuristics, there are groups of people who skim through the latest changes, there are IRC channels that make it easy for people to see a feed of what's happening... I'd like to suggest that vandalism isn't really a _problem_ in the sense that it hurts the project, because even though there's lots of vandalism, it's nipped in the bud so quickly that 99.9% of the end users who are just _using_ the project don't see it. I think there are people who perceive vandalism as a bigger issue that it is because they either take the knowledge that vandalism is possible and logically extrapolate that it must therefor be widespread, and the other group are the folks who specifically fight vandalism, and because of that, it's the only thing they see on the project.
Citizendium is a neat idea, but I hope that as a community we'll let it succeed or fail on its own merits and not because we want to "teach wikipedia a lesson" or because the PR behind that project is controlling our feelings.
With iPhone sales potentially eating into the high-end iPod market, I think it's probably safe to assume that future HD based iPods will come with Bluetooth. Not for synchronizing, but to be remote storage devices for things like the iPhone.
It's a clever way for Apple to keep selling the big iPods, and opens up other possibilities. Last year I speculated here about cell phones serving as 'cockpit voice recorders' for life, the main obstacle being storage and battery life. With something like this, one down, one to go.
One in five... of people who actually attempted to run the WGA. I'd imagine there's a sizable group of people who already know they won't pass it, so they never even try.
I anticipate that some folks will say 'lolz if WGA doesn't false positive!!11!!eleventy!' (translated: Assuming that WGA doesn't falsely label a machine as pirated). The number of these seems to be reeeeeally low, I'm guessing it's not a big part of the final numbers.
"I hope they sue this radio station and the individuals involved into the poorhouse..."
I'd like to weigh in quickly regarding this part of your post. It seems to reflect the widespread consensus that personal responsibility in our nation is happily being handed off to anyone but ourselves. At what point does the individual assume some blame for something going wrong? We read this week about someone in Germany swerving their car off a highway onto a trolley track because his GPS said 'Turn left'. He just blindly did it, should the GPS company be sued? Or should the driver have maybe exercised some better judgment in blindly following the instruction?
If a radio station held a 'Let's play Russian Roulette' contest for a prize, should the family of the person who shoots themselves be able to sue?
Our civil courts have a purpose, and they serve that purpose daily. But our society seems hellbent on using the same system to try and get "the payout", a claim paid by an insurance company or by the liquidation of assets of a company that did some perceived slight. The american dream shouldn't be 'Succesfully sue someone' and make mad-kash.
Slashdot Mirror
Quite frankly, I won't form an opinion until we've heard an official response from the most influential contingent in fan-fiction:
Furries.
Without their unique insight into subjects like "Kirk romances a full sized Gadget from Chip n' Dale's Rescue Rangers" or "What would happen if the crew of the NX-01 were anthropomorphic animals and there's maybe a crossover with the X-Men why not?", we would have no way of knowing what we did and didn't like about the various trek series, and, by extension, an online repository of stories.
So count me out until the "Commander Troi as a sexy lemur" crowd weighs in, THEN I'll know what to think.
Nah, I don't waste time on ACs. Call me elitist, call me 'Marie Antoinette with a mustache', but AC posts really don't matter, and nobody takes them seriously.
Mentioning Wikipedia Review is not, on it's own, terribly crazy. It's just the context you choose.
For example, Wikipediareview has made a policy of harassing editors and admins, the users coordinated attacks where they call people at their houses late at night and call their employers to complain about them to get them fired. Do you support that? Since you're probably not going to respond to this, it's probably fruitless to ask, but you opened the door with your line of comment. You REALLY want to use Wikipedia Review as a reference?
So mentioning that site to bolster your viewpoint (presumably, you're an editor who disagreed with a decision that applied to you, as in perhaps you tried to use Wikipedia as a MySpace site, or were pushing a point of view in contravention of the site policies, or were upset when the article your wrote about your math teacher was deleted as 'non-notable') is similar to starting a conversation with "Now, the Nazi medical experiments were terrible, but we _did_ learn some useful things from them..." (howdy Godwinists!)
So, your credibility is basically shot. The cabal reference underscores it. I'm an admin there, and we can't even agree on what to order for our pizzas, much less plot to push some sort of wacky political agenda.
Your bozo bit has been set, good day.
Last year, I did a similar indepth analysis of Wikipedia, generating a map describing the major components of the project with their interlinks:
http://www.hallert.net/images/mapofwikipedia.GIF
If the community controls it, that means censorship through mob rule. Post something from Ogrish? Maybe it'll get zapped even though that's a form of censorship.
Freedom of speech exists not so people can say things that other folks agree with, it's so that the unpopular opinions can exist too. That's why Illinois Nazis (I hate those guys) can do their thing, not just the civil rights marchers.
So, in practice, I bet there'll be little difference between the end product and YouTube. New boss will be same as the old boss, except instead of a room of guys with thin mustaches and black eyebands that cackle as they zap content, it'll be legions of computer users doing the same thing.
I've had a touchscreen in my car for years now for my PC, and I quickly learned to adjust some of my habits to it. Specifically, I:
1. Use my fingernails. No fancy glue on stylus or anything, but finger nails don't leave oily traces unless I've just finished gutting a whale by hand or something.
2. I do it palm facing towards me, pointed up. This keeps the contact area visible the whole time. If the computer were british, it might look like I was flipping it off, sure, but it works well.
When you have limited screen real-estate (like on MP3 players and phones), there isn't a lot of room for fancy hacks like what the article suggests. I'm pretty sure customers will meet the technology half way by necessity if nothing else.
When something like this happens where a direct financial impact can be measured, do any of the rules change regarding the protections that the reporting website operate under?
If the New York Times reports that Microsoft was filing bankruptcy and the stock plummeted, The NYT would be held to some sort of standard. Sometimes a retraction isn't enough, for instance, to protect from a lawsuit.
Now when it's a website, do any of the protections exist, and what are the implications for these guys in terms of liability?
Prediction: Within a year, all Apple products with displays will have multi-touch. Laptops, external monitors, iPods, the whole shebang. Sure, most people won't use it all in the beginning. The UIs we have today aren't set up for it, neither are our office spaces. But Apple will bet the farm and just make is a Standard Feature on the bet that while the demand doesn't exist NOW, it'll appear out of whole cloth once it's so ubiquitous.
They did it w/ USB. They did it with mice.
"Blah blah greasy fingerprints on monitors" Yeah, anyone with half a brain can think of 10 reasons why this is dumb. But it's the crazy guy in the back of the auditorium who's going to figure out how to get rich off of it, and in doing so will make the standard transition from 'crazy wacked out goofball' to 'eccentric visionary'.
This is a standard disruptive technology situation. When they first come out, disruptive tech items usually don't offer a clear immediate advantage. Like when hydraulics came out, compared to the cable operated equipment of the time they were expensive, underpowered, and overcomplicated. But the nascent technology of hydraulics was able to develop in leaps and bounds and eventually beat the cable operated stuff in all those areas, plus it added safety.
Hybrid transportation might be in that early phase where sure, it's not a slam dunk, but on the other hand, it's the _beginning_ of its development lifecycle compared to the non-hybrid options that are at an incremental improvement phase right now with over a hundred years of refinement under its belt.
I wouldn't write off hybrids just yet, there's a lot of 'low hanging fruit' still out there for the R&D organizations to pluck in terms of improvement. It's shortsighted to call the game just yet.
I have old copies of Popular Mechanics going back twenty years, and let's discuss some of their predictions. According to them:
* I have a landing pad built into the roof of my house for my flying car.
* When I need to get to Europe from New York, I take the subway to a special terminal that connects me to a train that shoots under the Atlantic at thousands of miles per hour in a vacuum.
* On the rare instances I don't take the super train, I take a Bell Osprey derivative shuttle to the local airport where I don't even need to get out of my seat, because it follows a track built into the shuttle and the airport and automatically zips me into my waiting hypersonic sub-orbital jetliner (which, for some reason, seems to go nowhere but Tokyo).
* I can fix my hot water heater by removing the broken heating element and replacing it with a new one from the hardware store. Possibly the most ridiculous prediction/claim of all.
I like their enthusiasm, and the pictures and ads are great, but I'm not quite ready to start shorting stock in companies based on a Popular Mechanics prediction.
You mean Windows?
The discussion about local e-mail clients vs. web clients is similar to discussions about digital cameras and pistols.
.45 will do the job, it has _stopping power_." There will usually be folks on the other side who say "Those are nice, but I prefer a .22 Pistol. It's small enough that I'm much more likely to actually have it on me if something happens in public. A heavy, bulky gun that's sitting on the dresser is much less useful to me when I'm in danger than a small .22 that I can carry every day."
When talking about cameras to buy, some folks advocate SLR, expandable, large cameras that have huge optical zoom, attachment points, and a huge slew of features. Other folks will say "I'll take an Elph" (or some other small format, quality camera that's the size of a pack of cigarettes. The most common argument the big camera people will use is something to the effect of 'yes, but you're sacrificing 20% image quality' (or something along those lines. A common response? "Sure, but I'm about X times more likely to actually HAVE the camera on me when something interesting happens. A big camera that takes slightly better pictures that's at home is less useful to me than this."
Concealed pistol arguments have both sides too. "I prefer the 9MM Glock" or "Nothing less than a
E-Mail clients seem to be heading in the same direction. T-Bird has some great features and rationales for using. It does stuff that can only really be done from a fixed location (private mail, etc), and yes, it can integrate with desktop apps. But... I rarely use those extra features. I've switched to webmail knowing that I'm trading off some features, but the payoff of being able to actually GET to it wherever I am has paid off many more times than not having integration into MS Word or something.
Different audiences, different needs, but both sides have their reasons.
There is the theory of the moebius, a twist in the fabric of space where time becomes a loop, where time becomes a loop, where time becomes a loop...
It's possible to make cars that are 'manufacturable' that meet this, the real problem will be making cars that are manufacturable... AND sellable.
Is there a market for super efficient cars that look like tampons with wheels?
The best apologies are the ones that are forced by court order.
BTW, here's a good indicator of how sincere he is: http://www.stopfairuse.info/
This technology, like GPS, would most likely have military as the initial customer, hence the customer that sets the design. For GPS, a completely passive system was designed so that an asset could calculate where it was without giving out information to nearby enemies that it was there.
The primary customer for something like this would probably also be the military, so I imagine the actual equipment would be passive as well. There's no persuasive reason to make the sensors wait for a query, just have them send out a pulse at regular intervals that contain their location, a precise time stamp, depth and water temperature. This is enough data for a passive submarine to use to calculate position (the depth and temperature affect the propagation of sound waves). There would be imprecision because the speed of sound is variable, of course, but you'd have a system that won't give away the presence of a submarine the way you would if said sub was "pinging" for the info.
It's a shame, if they had chosen ReplayTV instead, they could automatically skip commercials.
Credit where credit's due, it's important to note that LSL is the first scripting language to have furry specific classes. This is an oft-overlooked aspect of modern languages.
The summary claims that it "could be used by post-apocalyptic people to feed a hungry planet". If it were a system of distributed vaults spread around the planet, I could see this happening.
But a single vault in an inaccessible area? Let's consider the situation. If the world is 'post-apocalyptic', that means some seriously bad stuff has happened. To assume that whatever happened was so selective as to leave the worldwide transport infrastructure needed to take the seeds and "feed a hungry planet" but happened to kill all seed stores and food sources... requires a stretch of the imagination that would snap a logical mind.
I'm all for dramatic story summaries that play fast and loose with the facts to get me to- hey, wait a second, no I'm not.
This is a classic 'disruptive technology' situation. The Flash memory is more expensive and has less capacity than the moving disc, but in the long term, the benefits would outpace the downsides. When the 3.5" hard drives started coming out, they had lower capacity, cost more, and were slower than the 5.25" hard drives, but they were smaller. How many 5.25" hard drives are being made today? Many of the companies that built 5.25" hard drives failed to survive the transition because it was obvious that the public wouldn't stand for paying more for less. Obvious and correct weren't in agreement, as history showed us.
On a side note, I'm betting we'll see bluetooth enabled iPods before too long. Wireless headsets are cool, sure, but the real money maker will be as a wireless link for the iPods to be available as external storage for things like the iPhone. Doesn't need to be super fast to stream or one-up songs from "The archive" to the iPhone, and there's a continuing market for iPods even for people who just dropped $500+ on the iPhone.
Consider the story of the Phantom console. Slashdot collectively said "Interesting, but let's see some proof". The more flowery or adrenaline pumped the prose, the more skeptical we should be when there's nothing we can actually get our hands on. This article about the greatness of Citizendium falls into the same trap, and our response here should be to hold off on our praise until there's something that can be evaluated.
One other thing is the issue of graffiti. It's given quite a bit of exposure, heck, it's even in the title of the article itself. But realistically speaking, how big of a problem is it? Wikipedia has a pretty darn good response time when it comes to defacement/graffiti. There are vandalbots that autorevert some changes that meet certain heuristics, there are groups of people who skim through the latest changes, there are IRC channels that make it easy for people to see a feed of what's happening... I'd like to suggest that vandalism isn't really a _problem_ in the sense that it hurts the project, because even though there's lots of vandalism, it's nipped in the bud so quickly that 99.9% of the end users who are just _using_ the project don't see it. I think there are people who perceive vandalism as a bigger issue that it is because they either take the knowledge that vandalism is possible and logically extrapolate that it must therefor be widespread, and the other group are the folks who specifically fight vandalism, and because of that, it's the only thing they see on the project.
Citizendium is a neat idea, but I hope that as a community we'll let it succeed or fail on its own merits and not because we want to "teach wikipedia a lesson" or because the PR behind that project is controlling our feelings.
You appear to have mistaken "DVD Movie Playback" with "Support for the DVD disk format". The Wii has a DVD drive.
How very awkward.
With iPhone sales potentially eating into the high-end iPod market, I think it's probably safe to assume that future HD based iPods will come with Bluetooth. Not for synchronizing, but to be remote storage devices for things like the iPhone.
It's a clever way for Apple to keep selling the big iPods, and opens up other possibilities. Last year I speculated here about cell phones serving as 'cockpit voice recorders' for life, the main obstacle being storage and battery life. With something like this, one down, one to go.
One in five... of people who actually attempted to run the WGA. I'd imagine there's a sizable group of people who already know they won't pass it, so they never even try.
I anticipate that some folks will say 'lolz if WGA doesn't false positive!!11!!eleventy!' (translated: Assuming that WGA doesn't falsely label a machine as pirated). The number of these seems to be reeeeeally low, I'm guessing it's not a big part of the final numbers.
"I hope they sue this radio station and the individuals involved into the poorhouse..."
I'd like to weigh in quickly regarding this part of your post. It seems to reflect the widespread consensus that personal responsibility in our nation is happily being handed off to anyone but ourselves. At what point does the individual assume some blame for something going wrong? We read this week about someone in Germany swerving their car off a highway onto a trolley track because his GPS said 'Turn left'. He just blindly did it, should the GPS company be sued? Or should the driver have maybe exercised some better judgment in blindly following the instruction?
If a radio station held a 'Let's play Russian Roulette' contest for a prize, should the family of the person who shoots themselves be able to sue?
Our civil courts have a purpose, and they serve that purpose daily. But our society seems hellbent on using the same system to try and get "the payout", a claim paid by an insurance company or by the liquidation of assets of a company that did some perceived slight. The american dream shouldn't be 'Succesfully sue someone' and make mad-kash.
What have we become?