COTS: for simple things (backups, etc), *if* it hasn't been limited (or management hasn't paid for the full version, or let support lapse), it's not bad.
For things vital to *your* core business, if you don't have the source, you *will* have disasters and losses, a few of which will cost far more than the software you paid for.
That being said, there's also the problem of PHBs - upper management who keeps changing their mind while the first release is being worked on, then gives both fuzzy specs and utterly unrealistic deadlines (unless, of course, they have live-in programmers who work 15 hours a day, every day), Then they don't want to pay for what they get - they won't hire good experienced people and managers; instead they'll hire someone with a bunch of certificates who has little RW experience, much less success.
Whose fault are so many failed in-house projects? Upper management, who never took a technical writing course, and so have no idea how to scope a project, and not ask for the moon on a dollar and time budget for an oil change.
and for the overwhelming majority of companies, the answer is "no".
I've worked at a number of companies in my two-dozen year career (more than I really wanted to), and
1) hardly *any* of them believed in training 2) at my first job, without even an AA, I was
hired as a "sr. p/a". When I asked my friend
who'd helped me get the job why I wasn't a
junior p/a, he told me that the college had
eliminated those positions several years
earlier, because they were eligible to
join the union.
Since then, about 75% of the companies I've
worked for have used "whatever it takes"
quite happily...and that's happened more
and more in the last 10 years.
I should say "when I am working", since I've been unemployed almost the entire Bush Depression (the longest job I've had was a bit over 4 mos. last year, and business got bad, and LIFO, y'know).
Right now I'm looking around the country, and have been for months. Let me know if you find a company that can use a good, experienced person....
Let's see, something like 40% of the US is on the Net - that's, what, well over 100M? And they're on how many chat channels, and sending out how many emails a day, and some large percentage is encryptying their messages....
And then there's spam, with random words.
So, how many Evildooers(tm) has Carnivore caught? And just how many FIB, er, FBI agents are there reading the algorythmically-detected Evildooer Messages? Soviet-era Bulgaria, I have read, had about a quarter or more of its citizens *officially* spying on each other. We've got how may tens of thousands of agents? And how many of *them* are on Important Missions To Save Civilization As We Know It, like busting folks for medical marijuana?
FDR: We have nothing to fear but fear itself. GWB: Be afwaid. Be vewwy afwaid.
At least we're no longer at Code Fuschia (danger of gay marriage being legalized).
If so, then I'm not interested in us peasants, 90% of whom get little-to-no stocks, but I want to know that Bill the Gates, and Kenny-boy Lay, and Eisner, and all the rest of the CEOs with tens of *millions* in stock options have to be expensed.
Gee, what might happen to all that money if it didn't go to CEOs? Maybe it would get wasted on utterly frivilous things, like better employee salries and benfits, and maybe even capital plant development!
Back when I started, working on mainframes, the standard, everywhere, was that you had a development environment, and when you were done making your changes, you passed it over to the admins, who moved it into a test environment that replicated the production environment (often with less data, but otherwise identical), ran regression tests, and *then* put it into production.
Oh, but that's mainframes, where they run whole companies, not workstations/servers that, uh, oops... Well, maybe you could lower yourself to provide a real test environment for the vendors, and y'all from the company take responsibility for final testing and promotion to production?
So anyone 'o walks up and announces 'imself king is one? You mean, like I can announce "I am king of the US", and tell Georgie-poo to leave the White 'Ouse, and I don't even need some obscure ritual with a watery tart?
mark "the Baron of NASA is sitting
next to me...."
Now, see, I've had an actual class in ergonomics, and so I can say, without fear of argument, that my standard work position meets all ergonomic criteria.
That is, with my feet on my desk, and the keyboard in my lap.
First, my wrists are supported, and comfortable. Second, the monitor is at eye level. Third, I'm at least half a meter from the screen. Now we *know* that strobes, and even fluorescent lights can set off epileptics. When you're close, half or three-quarters of all the light falling on your eyes is strobing at 60 or 80 cycles per second, so further back is safer.
And if you don't like *that*, then I don't care if you call it a monitor, a CRT, or whatever, it's still A TV set, and didn't your mother never tell you not to sit so close to the TV?!
Jeez, not a *single* mention on the first page of replies about the Classic Holiday toy: trains. Not too expensive to start, not to expensive to continue (unless you're one of those who think that a "hobby" is a way to dispose of excess money....)
Under $100 for a basic set, $4-$40 for more cars, or scenery, etc.
And if that's too much, the Wham-O wheel, makes noise, drives viewers nuts....
SF has *science* in it - one definition is that it must obey all known scientific laws, unless breaking one is required for the story, and then even the handwaving explantion must be reasonable.
Fantasy is *NOT* SF - the two are related, but not the same. However, as Lord Dunsay said, fantasy is *very* hard to do right: you have to make all the rules...and then *NEVER* break any of them, or the reader's suspenders of disbelief go "snap", and you've lost it.
X-Files was inconsistant conspiracy theory. This is about one step short of, say, Bush's energy policy, or his fight against accepting that global warming exists, and is human-caused - that is, the Hollywood idea that a "theory" is what you come up with in the nightmare after you've had too much bheer and pizza.
Non-space sf on tv? Max Headroom. Non-space fantasy on tv? The Chronicle.
None of the above? Cattlecar Galaxative (22 planets strafed to death, and a flamable covered wagon, er, spaceship in the hard vacuum of space).
mark "s'ppose a movie of Charles de Lint
would be too much to ask for"
I WAS IN THE STREETS IN CHICAGO IN 1968. *IF* there were any things thrown at the cop, it was they were isolated incidents, and quite possibly by agents provocateurs.
I can personally tell you about the cops attacking with no warning, and the first time I'd ever seen two-and-a-half foot riot batons. I have a picture etched in my memory of one pig (not to be confused with the regular Chicago cops) swinging it at someone's head as they were falling to the ground, not 10 yards from me.
The federal commission on the riots declared it to be 100% a police riot.
So take your lieing revisionism and shove it where the sun don't shine.
Oh, and I saw *reporters* with they heads bleeding, so take that "from upper floors of the hotels" back, too.
I'm currently volunteering with the Kerry campaign in Brevard Co, FL (home to Cape Canaveral and KSC). In this county we have optical-scan ballots.
The last two days, I've spent about five-plus hours as a poll watcher. In this office, they use the same ballots for the early voting as they do for the absentee ballots. All of them are pre-folded - three or four folds.
About every 10 minutes or so, one of the folks in the office has to clear a paper jam. The ballot is counted...but then hangs up trying to go into the receiving box (the whole unit's the size of a 55 gal. drum, except plastic and with a square cross-section).
Unfolded ballots drop...but the manufacturer obviously DID NOT CONSIDER folded ballots at all. A cheap scanner or print that I bought that jammed that often would be returned for another brand within days.
Oh, and just to make me even more confident, I called the Supervisor of Elections a few weeks ago, and found out that the software that tabulates the votes is from everyone's favorite, non-buggy, no-back-doors maker, Diebold.
As excited as I am about SS1, this is *NOT* *NEAR* leo - come *on*, 100k klicks is 60 miles or so, and there's still *way* too much atmosphere for orbit, nor do they come anywhere *near* orbital velocity.
mark "still want to buy my ticket on PanAm
to the Moon three years ago...."
I saw one reply to this article claiming that the "middle class was being squeezed upwards". I'd love to know where he lives, and if he has any friends. I live in Florida, moved here from Chicago after not finding a job in a year and a half (8/2001-1/2003), and didn't find work until April...and got laid off last month.
I know folks in Chicago, and Philadelphia, and Boston, and Austin, and it's the same everywhere. The raw numbers, not the spun ones, are far worse than the Bush administration's reports.
The unemployment rate is *way* higher - I, for example, not "eligible" for unemployment, am "not unemployed". Come on, "gave up, and is no longer in the workforce"? So I'm homeless?
No, it's a *LIE*. We're all still looking - it just ain't there.
I agree that cheap imported goods is as bad as offshoring. A *lot* of us were VERY unhappy with the Eisenhoweresque Clinton's NAFTA and GATT. That China, instead of the US, is "the world's workshop", as I heard in a news report the other day, is appalling. I've also just read that 80% of US production is not in this country. Appalling doesn't even *begin* to describe how I feel about that.
Have any of you screamed at your Congresscritter and Senators to cancel the H1-B, etc, visas?
Enough of us scream, esp. right now during the election, it might get their attention.
Remember, with Raygun's breaking of the unions in this country, the *only* thing we have to protect us against Big Business is the government.
I *sincerely* hope the unions come down on this like a ton of bricks.
Oh, I know, we don't need unions, they may have been necessary once, but now we have all these wonderful benefits, and secure jobs, and they're all useless and only want dues from us....
mark "and to think, with the destruction of
the unions in the US, we have only the
government to defend us against the abuses
of big business...."
I *really* liked 1.x, that came up in 8 seconds flat on a 233MHz w/ 192M RAM.
Then I tried to upgrade to AbiWord 2.
1) the *required* aspell upgrade *broke* Apache 2) trying to install an rpm on RH9 wants package
after package upgrade. The 1.x was no problem.
On the *other* hand, OpenOffice.dog runs...like a dog. I see no real speed difference between my old 250MHz, my 500MHz laptop, and my new-to-me 950MHz system: 30 seconds to come up, and three-quarters of a minute more to get to a new text document.
Remember I said AbiWord got there in *8* seconds?
Maybe I should just blow them *all* off, and run my copy of WordPerfect 6 for DOS under XDOS....
All the paper versions of ballots are *so* complicated, and touch screen is easier... so could someone tell me how we never hear of problems with the state lottery, which has paper ballots, er, tickets, that you can mark with a pencil, and hand to a clerk....
mark "who counts the ballots, and how?"
PS Thanks, [Ll]ibertarians, for helping bring the would-be one party state to power.
is for a roof-mounted radar-controlled.50 cal machine gun to shoot down drunks and *ssholes on their cellphones before they crash into my roof or bedroom from above.
Oh, and $20M insurance for me and/or my heirs, with a COLA clause....
Now, think you can afford one of those babies?
mark "not even going to bring up the steel
umbrellas we'd need if there *were*
flying horses, cows, dragons...."
If Corel can find a single marketing executive who can sell his way out of a wet paper bag, with the help of Arnie, it would slaughter Word.
On the other hand...TEN YEARS AGO and more, I was reading reviews of word processors in PC Mag pointing out that 90% of all users used only 10% of the features, *ever*, and the 10% that used any of the other features only used them 10% of the time.
They're *supposed* to be word processors, not desktop publishers. How about *word* *processors*, with plugins for desktop publishing?
Alternatives: - is there a version of Abiword 2 that does *not* break Apache (with aspell)? Abiword came up with a blank page for a new document in under 10 seconds on my 250MHz K-6 - is there *any* chance that OpenOffice.dog developers could be kidnapped, and forced to develop on something *other* than the machine that they play Doom3 on? I mean, for all practical puroses, I notice *zero* difference in how long it take me to bring OO.o up, and get to new text document, one my old 250MHz K-6, my laptop's 450, or my new-to-me 950MHz Athlon: about 30 sec. from file to to new text document. It takes that long, or longer, to open an existing 8k.sxw doc.
"American icon" my *ss. Guthrie was a socialist, and an organizer, and would have been writing anti-Bush songs and new verses for his old ones.
"Damage the song"? Uh, how many know *all* the verses? Let the "rights owners" eat *THESE* verses:... As I was walkin' - I saw a sign there And that sign said - no tress passin' But on the other side.... it didn't say nothin! Now that side was made for you and me!
Chorus
In the squares of the city - In the shadow of the steeple Near the relief office - I see my people And some are grumblin' and some are wonderin' If this land's still made for you and me.
Oh, and to the troll who thinks this confirms their suspicions - he's got it bass-ackwards. Those on the left make choices based on their enlightened self-interest (getting the community to pay for their kids' schooling, instead of shouldering the burden themselves, protecting themselves against big business as a group, etc), while the Republicans make their choices based on emotion and ideology.
Time to start singing "Every Sperm Is Sacred", while we attack Iraq, and stop stem cell research, and family planning funding...?
Slashdot Mirror
COTS: for simple things (backups, etc), *if* it hasn't been limited (or management hasn't paid for the full version, or let support lapse), it's not bad.
For things vital to *your* core business, if you don't have the source, you *will* have disasters and losses, a few of which will cost far more than the software you paid for.
That being said, there's also the problem of PHBs - upper management who keeps changing their mind while the first release is being worked on, then gives both fuzzy specs and utterly unrealistic deadlines (unless, of course, they have live-in programmers who work 15 hours a day, every day), Then they don't want to pay for what they get - they won't hire good experienced people and managers; instead they'll hire someone with a bunch of certificates who has little RW experience, much less success.
Whose fault are so many failed in-house projects? Upper management, who never took a technical writing course, and so have no idea how to scope a project, and not ask for the moon on a dollar and time budget for an oil change.
mark
and for the overwhelming majority of companies, the answer is "no".
I've worked at a number of companies in my two-dozen year career (more than I really wanted to), and
1) hardly *any* of them believed in training
2) at my first job, without even an AA, I was
hired as a "sr. p/a". When I asked my friend
who'd helped me get the job why I wasn't a
junior p/a, he told me that the college had
eliminated those positions several years
earlier, because they were eligible to
join the union.
Since then, about 75% of the companies I've
worked for have used "whatever it takes"
quite happily...and that's happened more
and more in the last 10 years.
I should say "when I am working", since I've been unemployed almost the entire Bush Depression (the longest job I've had was a bit over 4 mos. last year, and business got bad, and LIFO, y'know).
Right now I'm looking around the country, and have been for months. Let me know if you find a company that can use a good, experienced person....
mark
Linux, someone asked?
Nahhhh, embedded WinDoze. That's why it occasionally gives you blue toast.
mark "and in shadow letters, 'abort...'"
Anyone read Kim Stanley Robinson's [Red/Green/Blue] Mars?
Reminds me of the *big* space elevator cable that fell. If that caused lava flows/vulcanism in a line....
mark
I have *real* trouble believing that's natural.
Damn, we missed 'em by how many millions of years?
mark
Let's see, something like 40% of the US is on the Net - that's, what, well over 100M? And they're on how many chat channels, and sending out how many emails a day, and some large percentage is encryptying their messages....
And then there's spam, with random words.
So, how many Evildooers(tm) has Carnivore caught? And just how many FIB, er, FBI agents are there reading the algorythmically-detected Evildooer Messages? Soviet-era Bulgaria, I have read, had about a quarter or more of its citizens *officially* spying on each other. We've got how may tens of thousands of agents? And how many of *them* are on Important Missions To Save Civilization As We Know It, like busting folks for medical marijuana?
FDR: We have nothing to fear but fear itself.
GWB: Be afwaid. Be vewwy afwaid.
At least we're no longer at Code Fuschia (danger of gay marriage being legalized).
mark
If so, then I'm not interested in us peasants, 90% of whom get little-to-no stocks, but I want to know that Bill the Gates, and Kenny-boy Lay, and Eisner, and all the rest of the CEOs with tens of *millions* in stock options have to be expensed.
Gee, what might happen to all that money if it didn't go to CEOs? Maybe it would get wasted on utterly frivilous things, like better employee salries and benfits, and maybe even capital plant development!
Nahhh, never happen, ship it all off to India.
mark
Back when I started, working on mainframes, the standard, everywhere, was that you had a development environment, and when you were done making your changes, you passed it over to the admins, who moved it into a test environment that replicated the production environment (often with less data, but otherwise identical), ran regression tests, and *then* put it into production.
Oh, but that's mainframes, where they run whole companies, not workstations/servers that, uh, oops... Well, maybe you could lower yourself to provide a real test environment for the vendors, and y'all from the company take responsibility for final testing and promotion to production?
mark, m'frame, *and* pc, *and*
workstation/server experience
So anyone 'o walks up and announces 'imself king is one? You mean, like I can announce "I am king of the US", and tell Georgie-poo to leave the White 'Ouse, and I don't even need some obscure ritual with a watery tart?
mark "the Baron of NASA is sitting
next to me...."
...is, one assumes, climbing the Empire State Building. With that, of course, they'd have to life one of those giant inflatable gorillas....
mark "so who plays Fay Wray?"
Now, see, I've had an actual class in ergonomics, and so I can say, without fear of argument, that my standard work position meets all ergonomic criteria.
That is, with my feet on my desk, and the keyboard in my lap.
First, my wrists are supported, and comfortable.
Second, the monitor is at eye level.
Third, I'm at least half a meter from the screen. Now we *know* that strobes, and even fluorescent lights can set off epileptics. When you're close, half or three-quarters of all the light falling on your eyes is strobing at 60 or 80 cycles per second, so further back is safer.
And if you don't like *that*, then I don't care if you call it a monitor, a CRT, or whatever, it's still A TV set, and didn't your mother never tell you not to sit so close to the TV?!
mark
Jeez, not a *single* mention on the first page of replies about the Classic Holiday toy: trains. Not too expensive to start, not to expensive to continue (unless you're one of those who think that a "hobby" is a way to dispose of excess money....)
Under $100 for a basic set, $4-$40 for more cars, or scenery, etc.
And if that's too much, the Wham-O wheel, makes noise, drives viewers nuts....
mark
from *many* years ago. It was a text adventure game, and the best thing you could buy in the market at the beginning was a shovel.
With that, you could dig for treasure, beat off lions in the jungle, bandits in the desert, sharks in the ocean, and, oh, yes, meteors in Outer Space.
mark "do you know where your shovel is?"
Not a bloody chance.
SF has *science* in it - one definition is that it must obey all known scientific laws, unless breaking one is required for the story, and then even the handwaving explantion must be reasonable.
Fantasy is *NOT* SF - the two are related, but not the same. However, as Lord Dunsay said, fantasy is *very* hard to do right: you have to make all the rules...and then *NEVER* break any of them, or the reader's suspenders of disbelief go "snap", and you've lost it.
X-Files was inconsistant conspiracy theory. This is about one step short of, say, Bush's energy policy, or his fight against accepting that global warming exists, and is human-caused - that is, the Hollywood idea that a "theory" is what you come up with in the nightmare after you've had too much bheer and pizza.
Non-space sf on tv? Max Headroom. Non-space fantasy on tv? The Chronicle.
None of the above? Cattlecar Galaxative (22 planets strafed to death, and a flamable covered wagon, er, spaceship in the hard vacuum of space).
mark "s'ppose a movie of Charles de Lint
would be too much to ask for"
Dear anonymous coward,
I WAS IN THE STREETS IN CHICAGO IN 1968. *IF* there were any things thrown at the cop, it was they were isolated incidents, and quite possibly by agents provocateurs.
I can personally tell you about the cops attacking with no warning, and the first time I'd ever seen two-and-a-half foot riot batons. I have a picture etched in my memory of one pig (not to be confused with the regular Chicago cops) swinging it at someone's head as they were falling to the ground, not 10 yards from me.
The federal commission on the riots declared it to be 100% a police riot.
So take your lieing revisionism and shove it where the sun don't shine.
Oh, and I saw *reporters* with they heads bleeding, so take that "from upper floors of the hotels" back, too.
mark
I'm currently volunteering with the Kerry campaign in Brevard Co, FL (home to Cape Canaveral and KSC). In this county we have optical-scan ballots.
The last two days, I've spent about five-plus hours as a poll watcher. In this office, they use the same ballots for the early voting as they do for the absentee ballots. All of them are pre-folded - three or four folds.
About every 10 minutes or so, one of the folks in the office has to clear a paper jam. The ballot is counted...but then hangs up trying to go into the receiving box (the whole unit's the size of a 55 gal. drum, except plastic and with a square cross-section).
Unfolded ballots drop...but the manufacturer obviously DID NOT CONSIDER folded ballots at all. A cheap scanner or print that I bought that jammed that often would be returned for another brand within days.
Oh, and just to make me even more confident, I called the Supervisor of Elections a few weeks ago, and found out that the software that tabulates the votes is from everyone's favorite, non-buggy, no-back-doors maker, Diebold.
Wannaful, wannaful.
mark
As excited as I am about SS1, this is *NOT* *NEAR* leo - come *on*, 100k klicks is 60 miles or so, and there's still *way* too much atmosphere for orbit, nor do they come anywhere *near* orbital velocity.
mark "still want to buy my ticket on PanAm
to the Moon three years ago...."
I saw one reply to this article claiming that the "middle class was being squeezed upwards". I'd love to know where he lives, and if he has any friends. I live in Florida, moved here from Chicago after not finding a job in a year and a half (8/2001-1/2003), and didn't find work until April...and got laid off last month.
I know folks in Chicago, and Philadelphia, and Boston, and Austin, and it's the same everywhere. The raw numbers, not the spun ones, are far worse than the Bush administration's reports.
The unemployment rate is *way* higher - I, for example, not "eligible" for unemployment, am "not unemployed". Come on, "gave up, and is no longer in the workforce"? So I'm homeless?
No, it's a *LIE*. We're all still looking - it just ain't there.
I agree that cheap imported goods is as bad as offshoring. A *lot* of us were VERY unhappy with the Eisenhoweresque Clinton's NAFTA and GATT. That China, instead of the US, is "the world's workshop", as I heard in a news report the other day, is appalling. I've also just read that 80% of US production is not in this country. Appalling doesn't even *begin* to describe how I feel about that.
Have any of you screamed at your Congresscritter and Senators to cancel the H1-B, etc, visas?
Enough of us scream, esp. right now during the election, it might get their attention.
Remember, with Raygun's breaking of the unions in this country, the *only* thing we have to protect us against Big Business is the government.
That stick in your craw, [Ll]ibertarians?
mark
I *sincerely* hope the unions come down on this like a ton of bricks.
Oh, I know, we don't need unions, they may have been necessary once, but now we have all these wonderful benefits, and secure jobs, and they're all useless and only want dues from us....
mark "and to think, with the destruction of
the unions in the US, we have only the
government to defend us against the abuses
of big business...."
I *really* liked 1.x, that came up in 8 seconds flat on a 233MHz w/ 192M RAM.
Then I tried to upgrade to AbiWord 2.
1) the *required* aspell upgrade *broke* Apache
2) trying to install an rpm on RH9 wants package
after package upgrade. The 1.x was no problem.
On the *other* hand, OpenOffice.dog runs...like a dog. I see no real speed difference between my old 250MHz, my 500MHz laptop, and my new-to-me 950MHz system: 30 seconds to come up, and three-quarters of a minute more to get to a new text document.
Remember I said AbiWord got there in *8* seconds?
Maybe I should just blow them *all* off, and run my copy of WordPerfect 6 for DOS under XDOS....
mark
All the paper versions of ballots are *so* complicated, and touch screen is easier... so could someone tell me how we never hear of problems with the state lottery, which has paper ballots, er, tickets, that you can mark with a pencil, and hand to a clerk....
mark "who counts the ballots, and how?"
PS Thanks, [Ll]ibertarians, for helping bring the would-be one party state to power.
is for a roof-mounted radar-controlled .50 cal machine gun to shoot down drunks and *ssholes on their cellphones before they crash into my roof or bedroom from above.
Oh, and $20M insurance for me and/or my heirs, with a COLA clause....
Now, think you can afford one of those babies?
mark "not even going to bring up the steel
umbrellas we'd need if there *were*
flying horses, cows, dragons...."
If Corel can find a single marketing executive who can sell his way out of a wet paper bag, with the help of Arnie, it would slaughter Word.
.sxw doc.
On the other hand...TEN YEARS AGO and more, I was reading reviews of word processors in PC Mag pointing out that 90% of all users used only 10% of the features, *ever*, and the 10% that used any of the other features only used them 10% of the time.
They're *supposed* to be word processors, not desktop publishers. How about *word* *processors*, with plugins for desktop publishing?
Alternatives:
- is there a version of Abiword 2 that does *not* break Apache (with aspell)? Abiword came up with a blank page for a new document in under 10 seconds on my 250MHz K-6
- is there *any* chance that OpenOffice.dog developers could be kidnapped, and forced to develop on something *other* than the machine that they play Doom3 on? I mean, for all practical puroses, I notice *zero* difference in how long it take me to bring OO.o up, and get to new text document, one my old 250MHz K-6, my laptop's 450, or my new-to-me 950MHz Athlon: about 30 sec. from file to to new text document. It takes that long, or longer, to open an existing 8k
Ain't my idea of competetive....
mark, ready to run WP 6 under Wine
"American icon" my *ss. Guthrie was a socialist, and an organizer, and would have been writing anti-Bush songs and new verses for his old ones.
... .... it didn't say nothin!
"Damage the song"? Uh, how many know *all* the verses? Let the "rights owners" eat *THESE* verses:
As I was walkin' - I saw a sign there
And that sign said - no tress passin'
But on the other side
Now that side was made for you and me!
Chorus
In the squares of the city - In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office - I see my people
And some are grumblin' and some are wonderin'
If this land's still made for you and me.
Cho.
mark the red
Only if you never took a science course.
Oh, and to the troll who thinks this confirms their suspicions - he's got it bass-ackwards. Those on the left make choices based on their enlightened self-interest (getting the community to pay for their kids' schooling, instead of shouldering the burden themselves, protecting themselves against big business as a group, etc), while the Republicans make their choices based on emotion and ideology.
Time to start singing "Every Sperm Is Sacred", while we attack Iraq, and stop stem cell research, and family planning funding...?
mark