More "space opera" with the emphasis on opera. Lots of badly acted interpersonal drama with an occasional shoot-out. Why? Because no-name actors playing kissy face are cheaper in their first couple years than special effects.
The Star Trek folks even figured out how to deal with the now-famous actor (read $$) problem. Cancel the series and start a new one. Frequently.
The people you currently work for have expectations that don't align with your vision of what you want to do. You can find a different environment that has expectations more to your liking, but it will take more effort.
Apparently you have particularly high-minded ideas of the kind of systems you want to put your effort into. You want to make quality, enduring products that are elegantly designed and well tested. Find an employer that has those expectations (for real, not just lip service) and try to get a position with them.
Perhaps you need to look at aerospace and build high quality, well tested embedded systems. Maybe you need to consider doing "research" development in academia. Maybe you should work for yourself and see if you high-minded vision of how things are supposed to be done can actually earn you a living.
My point is that you're trying to change the behavior of your employer, when I think what you need to change is your employer. If that's not an option because you haven't built the necessary credibility in your career to interest such an employer, consider this; early UNIX (itself crap, but less crappy that what came before,) was put to work grinding out documents. It's creators are now off building elegance into their various Plan 9's. All the years they spent porting MULTICS crap to UNIX and writing printer drivers to print deadtree legal stuff eventually earned them them opportunity to do the sort of work you have in mind. The operative word there is "earned."
No, not the same. While it helps, Mozilla takes the problem more seriously and is more thorough. Thanks for the tip though, it definitely does improve IE quite a bit and it's better than nothing.
Fire up Nutscrape 4.5 sometime. You can still download it. You'll need to select the proper language from the builds... something most of us haven't had to do for several years since i8n is now standard equipment in modern browsers. That's all that is needed to see how far off this washed up has-been is. Just because he wanted to turn Nutscrape into a TV, and that miracle hasn't yet occurred, doesn't mean "innovation" stopped.
The rest of the world moved on, and they STILL don't see that.
Can't stop the popups without exotic proxy crap. Mozilla's simple "stop window.open() on load" does the trick. Highly useful while doing recreational browsing at work and not getting lots of scantly clad X-10 models all over my employer provided screen.
And that war on drugs is going real well, isn't it? NEWSFLASH:...
Actually, it's doing quite well. In the US, "hardcore" drugs have largely been isolated to the underclass. The worthwhile classes don't get beyond marijauna for the most part. A notible exception is extasy.
What do I mean by "engineering process?" http://www.sei.cmu.edu/cmm/cmm.html (o r comparable methods)
Can a bridge be engineered before the river it's suppose to cross it known? If it can, can the same guarantees be given about stability for this bridge as can be given for conventional bridges, where the engineers get to know what their trying to cross beforehand? Are you certain that your engineering methods are really applicable to general purpose software development?
I personally believe that the software engineers responsible for building enterprise business automation software have not yet managed to discover the fundamental structures they need to build large structures with integrity. My attempt to draw a parallel with engineering would be to say that present day ERP developers work like engineers that don't know about triangles. No matter how much "method" you throw at that, you'll still end up with a pile of rubble, and hopefully it'll be flat enough to drive stuff over.
I think we'll need a few more decades to begin to understand the common underlying structures and make them available in a general way. At that point, most of the implementation of a common business application will be codeless, like a large distributed concurrent stateless spreadsheet, where the whole model adds up to zero at any point in time. When we're there, measuring correctness will stop being impossible and we may be able to provide correctness guarantees.
All we need is another century or so. Discoveries will need to be made, taught to teachers who, in turn, educate a few generations of students... Traditional engineers have had much longer to mature their profession.
The management mindset of "do it right now", as opposed to "do it right"
Your attempt to simplify your "management mindset", as you call it, is badly misleading. The real management mindset is; "do it right, quickly." When someone shells out umpteen million dollars for a system, they are attempting to fulfill the axiom; faster, better, cheaper, pick two. They have every right to expect good results; they paid for it.
I'd kill for direct access to the underlying DB or a nice clear way of moving data in and out, or a great way to make custom GUI... but the company is more concerned with ensuring that we are locked in FOREVER than with providing the tools we could use to make their software more friendly to our over all IT enviroment.
J.D. Edwards has a design that accommodates things like a custom GUI. In JDE, the business logic of the "system" is implemented in a layer of "business functions". These are API function calls that perform the usual create, update, delete operations, but at the level of business abstractions, such as documents (orders, customers, etc.) All of the necessary validation is performed in these functions. The APIs are documented and there are several thousand of them. The APIs are then exposed through multiple mechanisms to the developer (C libraries, Java objects, XML, proprietary forms/report methods, etc.) This design provides the developer with a means to wrap the full functionality of the system in a custom interface, with the same validation as the vendor provided interface.
The only problem with the JDE system is a lack of solid documentation on the interaction of all of the functions. A single business "document", such as an invoice, may involve a minimum of 6 business function calls. Exactly what calls are necessary, and in what order, is not public knowledge, as far as I know. You can discover it by examining system source code or doing debug traces, but that's a major roadblock in some cases.
Who is this we? You know squat about me or my ego. Keep your presumptions to your high-horsed self, mkay? If you're blathering about some general "we", you're a dime a dozen and I can't for the life of me figure out why anyone would bother to moderate you up. So many self-loathing muckitymucks stumbling around...
Do you suppose the Inca had ancestors they failed to revere? Did they also overlook the contribution of their ancestors to the minutia of their existence? I'll bet there were even backbiting little Inca self-haters, much like yourself, that took whatever opportunity presented itself to berate his peers for their ignorance.
It chills me to think that I'd need a lawyer to operate a blog just to ensure I've complied with the extra fine detail of the law. Rich people will always have a means to harass and abuse poor folks. If a "poor" guy starts a controversial blog, pisses off a "rich" guy, and then fails to comply with this Right of Reply nonsense in some minor way, he'll end up defending himself against powerful lawyers. Bank on it.
"that's like saying that Girls Gone Wild is offering anyone watching TV at night, despite age, and should be punished"
Your analogy is full of holes.
The late-night content you're talking about follows various regulatory statutes that control it. Despite your probable sleeping habits, most parents do put young children to bed before Girls Gone Wild starts showing, thus no outrage. Further, that stuff only appears on cable channels. Cable is not unsolicited; you pay for it. Finally, concern about unintended exposure of children to this content is greatly moderated by the fact that damn near all cable boxes (or whatever is in the way of the path between the wire and the screen) allow the owner to lock-out selected channels (I think this is codified in various laws in the US, no?) Yes, people actually do want and use that.
None of the above applies to email. Email is asynchronous, so a bit of spam sent at 23:00 Friday can be read at 08:00 Saturday. You don't have to pay someone to send it to you, so there is no way to opt-out of being a recipient other than email abstinence. You can't selectively block it based on content (you can try, but there are no guarantees.) The people sending it are not actively trying to circumvent your blocking mechanism.
Someone said it best in a previous post; less typey, more thinky.
"if you gave her a cell phone whats to stop some creep from calling her and talking nasty and/or lurring her out someplace."
The creep would be breaking several laws in this case. Also, it is possible to block calls when the caller's number can't be identified. Circumventing that would involve breaking more laws. Preventing (note: not blocking, preventing) email spam would be a lot easier if certain email headers were legally immutable. Applying the moral equivalent (moral, not in the sense of ethics, but rather functional analogy,) of prank caller laws and minor protection laws to Internet medium is a symptom of the Internet growing up. Something that is way overdue.
"But every person I actually talked to said, essentially, that it was crap and they regretted it, but don't tell anyone."
I spent 6 years working on and around Oracle 10.6 - 11i on HPUX. Since then I've spent 2.5 years doing essentially the same with/for J.D. Edwards OneWorld on iSeries (AS/400).
It's all crap. However, it's the best available crap. The fact is that the products in this market are all infants. They represent the best of what is currently possible in large scale (big understatement there) integrated software solutions for the business world. The problem (part of it, anyhow) is that the problem domain is a rapidly changing, ambiguous target, and that the tools available (between languages and databases) are just barely adequate.
The software systems are highly interesting. Each version of each implementation represents a snapshot of some designer attempting to abstract the business world into an RDBMS. These products represent some of the largest software products in history. Every conceivable design can be found inside these systems, ranging in quality from masterpieces to unadulterated crap.
OneWorld, for instance, has a deep mainframe legacy. You can find the influence of COBAL throughout the system. Regardless, it is a scalable, highly general application platform that has earned my respect. The current implementation has a fundamentally distributed design, is fully database agnostic and is implemented primarily in C, along with JDE's own proprietary language. Some of the C is really amazing in a morbid sort of way. I've been thinking it might be fun to send a hardcopy of certain bits I've read to a CS professor somewhere and see if it doesn't cause an aneurysm.
Oracle's business software is tightly wedded to the Oracle RDBMS. This fact leads to some obvious incest between the two products. This is both good and bad, because while Oracle's RDBMS is an outstanding platform, the applications suite cannot see beyond it's horizon. Some of the designs inside the system are really cool. Much of the actual implementation is poor. I remember working about 12 hours rewriting migration scripts for 11i to cut data migration time from an estimated 3 weeks to 48 hours. The original code was on par with slapdash shell scripting, written by a non-english speaking amateur. At least I had the source...
I believe that good integrated business software is possible, and that the main ingredient necessary is patience. It will take decades for the builders to create structures that work well in generalizing business. At this time, however, integrated business suites are costly, flaky and limit(ed|ing). If you need it you should get it, but don't expect to like it. If you approach all this with a pragmatic attitude, you can make any of these products work well. If you bought the sales pitch and actually expect to realize it, you'll lose.
Linus is taking exactly the correct approach to this whole mess. Whether it's deliberate I can't tell you. His approach is best described as public indifference. There are three reasons why this is best;
SCO would like nothing more than to have Linus apoplectic over their actions. Nothing would serve the FUD machine better than to have Linus acting hysterical and muddying the water. If Linus started saying or doing dramatic things the targets of SCOs threats would be that much more nervous. Linus is not a court of law, CEO or powerful shareholder. He can't force anyone to do anything about any of this. I think the best thing he can contribute is quiet indifference.
Indifference is the ultimate insult. At the very bottom of public discourse we find the Troll. The Troll feeds off anger. The Troll creates as much trouble as possible and feeds off the results. Anger registers as a negative on the attention scale, but at least it's non-zero. Having people pissed off you is clearly less than being admired and loved, but being ignored is worse. The more indifference SCO encounters, the more dramatic they become, because being ignored is not acceptable.
Indifference, by default, prevents anything stupid being said. Rule #1 when dealing with lawyers and courts; Shut Your Mouth. It doesn't matter how exonerating what you say might be. It will eventually end up on the point of the dagger you find sticking out of your chest.
Those are three good reasons why Linus not being an activist in this matter is best. Now you'll have my opinions;
You want Linus to be an activist. In my opinion we have far more than enough of those already. Why can't we allow at least some of the non-activists in this world a little oxygen? Must everyone who wishes to matter be a megaphone for some cause? Have you lost the ability to appreciate spin-less competence? I long ago concluded that the vast bulk of activists we seem to spend so many of our mental computons listening to have zero interest in what their advocating anyhow. Most often they appear to be playing to their peers.
UNIX has been a legal football for going on 20 years. Wouldn't it be nice to just let the damn court dates arrive and get it over with, with as little drama as possible? Maybe, just maybe, if everyone took the Linus approach, we could avoid creating anymore celebrity lawyers/judges out of all of this. God that would be nice.
Oh yes. Anytime one of our precious fellow geeks gets himself caught in the switches it is worth a front page story. Additionally, it is to be exaggerated and have as much drama associated with it as possible. In the end we'll chalk it up the oppression by da Man and blame it on Bush, then get back to fretting about whatever copywrite protection scheme we're most recently worried about.
Go stand around on a busy corner of Boulder sometime. It's like a car show. Don't be fooled by the pathologic behavior of the Boulder city/county governments into thinking Boulder is some sort of western meca for liberals. This place is jam packed full of the biggest snobs you can find anywhere in fly-over country. Here, you're either very wealthy or you live at their pleasure. Naturally the leftists take full advantage of the patronage. To me, Boulder feels like the most uptight place on Earth. The only exception is the student population. Absolutely everything else is under a microscope of social scrutiny.
Another corporate conspiracy urban legend... exactly how is this "interesting"? It's not like there is some shortage of this nonsense around here. I suspect this moderation represents folks that are just thrilled to see their kook ideas posted first.
Slashdot Mirror
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
Guess we're at the "fight" part. Wake me up when it's over.
Thanks!
More "space opera" with the emphasis on opera. Lots of badly acted interpersonal drama with an occasional shoot-out. Why? Because no-name actors playing kissy face are cheaper in their first couple years than special effects.
The Star Trek folks even figured out how to deal with the now-famous actor (read $$) problem. Cancel the series and start a new one. Frequently.
The people you currently work for have expectations that don't align with your vision of what you want to do. You can find a different environment that has expectations more to your liking, but it will take more effort.
Apparently you have particularly high-minded ideas of the kind of systems you want to put your effort into. You want to make quality, enduring products that are elegantly designed and well tested. Find an employer that has those expectations (for real, not just lip service) and try to get a position with them.
Perhaps you need to look at aerospace and build high quality, well tested embedded systems. Maybe you need to consider doing "research" development in academia. Maybe you should work for yourself and see if you high-minded vision of how things are supposed to be done can actually earn you a living.
My point is that you're trying to change the behavior of your employer, when I think what you need to change is your employer. If that's not an option because you haven't built the necessary credibility in your career to interest such an employer, consider this; early UNIX (itself crap, but less crappy that what came before,) was put to work grinding out documents. It's creators are now off building elegance into their various Plan 9's. All the years they spent porting MULTICS crap to UNIX and writing printer drivers to print deadtree legal stuff eventually earned them them opportunity to do the sort of work you have in mind. The operative word there is "earned."
No, not the same. While it helps, Mozilla takes the problem more seriously and is more thorough. Thanks for the tip though, it definitely does improve IE quite a bit and it's better than nothing.
Very good; i18n. tyop on my part.
http://www.i18ngurus.com/index.html
Mod the parent up. It is the simple truth.
Fire up Nutscrape 4.5 sometime. You can still download it. You'll need to select the proper language from the builds... something most of us haven't had to do for several years since i8n is now standard equipment in modern browsers. That's all that is needed to see how far off this washed up has-been is. Just because he wanted to turn Nutscrape into a TV, and that miracle hasn't yet occurred, doesn't mean "innovation" stopped.
The rest of the world moved on, and they STILL don't see that.
It is astonishing.
Uninstall whatever Mozilla version you have, delete Program Files/mozilla.org, reboot, then install 1.4.
Works fine now.
This doesn't happen with a quality, commerical product like IE
Heh.
Can't stop the popups without exotic proxy crap. Mozilla's simple "stop window.open() on load" does the trick. Highly useful while doing recreational browsing at work and not getting lots of scantly clad X-10 models all over my employer provided screen.
W2K, just installed it. Attempt to launch it and...
mozilla.exe - Application Error
The instruction at "0x610f0769" referenced memory at "0x4349656f". The memory could not be "read".
Click on OK to terminate the program
Click on CANCEL to debug the program
And that war on drugs is going real well, isn't it? NEWSFLASH:...
Actually, it's doing quite well. In the US, "hardcore" drugs have largely been isolated to the underclass. The worthwhile classes don't get beyond marijauna for the most part. A notible exception is extasy.
What do I mean by "engineering process?"o r comparable methods)
http://www.sei.cmu.edu/cmm/cmm.html
(
Can a bridge be engineered before the river it's suppose to cross it known? If it can, can the same guarantees be given about stability for this bridge as can be given for conventional bridges, where the engineers get to know what their trying to cross beforehand? Are you certain that your engineering methods are really applicable to general purpose software development?
I personally believe that the software engineers responsible for building enterprise business automation software have not yet managed to discover the fundamental structures they need to build large structures with integrity. My attempt to draw a parallel with engineering would be to say that present day ERP developers work like engineers that don't know about triangles. No matter how much "method" you throw at that, you'll still end up with a pile of rubble, and hopefully it'll be flat enough to drive stuff over.
I think we'll need a few more decades to begin to understand the common underlying structures and make them available in a general way. At that point, most of the implementation of a common business application will be codeless, like a large distributed concurrent stateless spreadsheet, where the whole model adds up to zero at any point in time. When we're there, measuring correctness will stop being impossible and we may be able to provide correctness guarantees.
All we need is another century or so. Discoveries will need to be made, taught to teachers who, in turn, educate a few generations of students... Traditional engineers have had much longer to mature their profession.
The management mindset of "do it right now", as opposed to "do it right"
Your attempt to simplify your "management mindset", as you call it, is badly misleading. The real management mindset is; "do it right, quickly." When someone shells out umpteen million dollars for a system, they are attempting to fulfill the axiom; faster, better, cheaper, pick two. They have every right to expect good results; they paid for it.
I'd kill for direct access to the underlying DB or a nice clear way of moving data in and out, or a great way to make custom GUI... but the company is more concerned with ensuring that we are locked in FOREVER than with providing the tools we could use to make their software more friendly to our over all IT enviroment.
J.D. Edwards has a design that accommodates things like a custom GUI. In JDE, the business logic of the "system" is implemented in a layer of "business functions". These are API function calls that perform the usual create, update, delete operations, but at the level of business abstractions, such as documents (orders, customers, etc.) All of the necessary validation is performed in these functions. The APIs are documented and there are several thousand of them. The APIs are then exposed through multiple mechanisms to the developer (C libraries, Java objects, XML, proprietary forms/report methods, etc.) This design provides the developer with a means to wrap the full functionality of the system in a custom interface, with the same validation as the vendor provided interface.
The only problem with the JDE system is a lack of solid documentation on the interaction of all of the functions. A single business "document", such as an invoice, may involve a minimum of 6 business function calls. Exactly what calls are necessary, and in what order, is not public knowledge, as far as I know. You can discover it by examining system source code or doing debug traces, but that's a major roadblock in some cases.
We tend to have such an ego about ourselves.
Who is this we? You know squat about me or my ego. Keep your presumptions to your high-horsed self, mkay? If you're blathering about some general "we", you're a dime a dozen and I can't for the life of me figure out why anyone would bother to moderate you up. So many self-loathing muckitymucks stumbling around...
Do you suppose the Inca had ancestors they failed to revere? Did they also overlook the contribution of their ancestors to the minutia of their existence? I'll bet there were even backbiting little Inca self-haters, much like yourself, that took whatever opportunity presented itself to berate his peers for their ignorance.
Thanks.
It chills me to think that I'd need a lawyer to operate a blog just to ensure I've complied with the extra fine detail of the law. Rich people will always have a means to harass and abuse poor folks. If a "poor" guy starts a controversial blog, pisses off a "rich" guy, and then fails to comply with this Right of Reply nonsense in some minor way, he'll end up defending himself against powerful lawyers. Bank on it.
"One big reason was to get away from all this technology crap."
Heh. Hardly. I like my technology. It's the morons that usually congregate around it that bug me.
Obviously.
"that's like saying that Girls Gone Wild is offering anyone watching TV at night, despite age, and should be punished"
Your analogy is full of holes.
The late-night content you're talking about follows various regulatory statutes that control it. Despite your probable sleeping habits, most parents do put young children to bed before Girls Gone Wild starts showing, thus no outrage. Further, that stuff only appears on cable channels. Cable is not unsolicited; you pay for it. Finally, concern about unintended exposure of children to this content is greatly moderated by the fact that damn near all cable boxes (or whatever is in the way of the path between the wire and the screen) allow the owner to lock-out selected channels (I think this is codified in various laws in the US, no?) Yes, people actually do want and use that.
None of the above applies to email. Email is asynchronous, so a bit of spam sent at 23:00 Friday can be read at 08:00 Saturday. You don't have to pay someone to send it to you, so there is no way to opt-out of being a recipient other than email abstinence. You can't selectively block it based on content (you can try, but there are no guarantees.) The people sending it are not actively trying to circumvent your blocking mechanism.
Someone said it best in a previous post; less typey, more thinky.
"if you gave her a cell phone whats to stop some creep from calling her and talking nasty and/or lurring her out someplace."
The creep would be breaking several laws in this case. Also, it is possible to block calls when the caller's number can't be identified. Circumventing that would involve breaking more laws. Preventing (note: not blocking, preventing) email spam would be a lot easier if certain email headers were legally immutable. Applying the moral equivalent (moral, not in the sense of ethics, but rather functional analogy,) of prank caller laws and minor protection laws to Internet medium is a symptom of the Internet growing up. Something that is way overdue.
"But every person I actually talked to said, essentially, that it was crap and they regretted it, but don't tell anyone."
I spent 6 years working on and around Oracle 10.6 - 11i on HPUX. Since then I've spent 2.5 years doing essentially the same with/for J.D. Edwards OneWorld on iSeries (AS/400).
It's all crap. However, it's the best available crap. The fact is that the products in this market are all infants. They represent the best of what is currently possible in large scale (big understatement there) integrated software solutions for the business world. The problem (part of it, anyhow) is that the problem domain is a rapidly changing, ambiguous target, and that the tools available (between languages and databases) are just barely adequate.
The software systems are highly interesting. Each version of each implementation represents a snapshot of some designer attempting to abstract the business world into an RDBMS. These products represent some of the largest software products in history. Every conceivable design can be found inside these systems, ranging in quality from masterpieces to unadulterated crap.
OneWorld, for instance, has a deep mainframe legacy. You can find the influence of COBAL throughout the system. Regardless, it is a scalable, highly general application platform that has earned my respect. The current implementation has a fundamentally distributed design, is fully database agnostic and is implemented primarily in C, along with JDE's own proprietary language. Some of the C is really amazing in a morbid sort of way. I've been thinking it might be fun to send a hardcopy of certain bits I've read to a CS professor somewhere and see if it doesn't cause an aneurysm.
Oracle's business software is tightly wedded to the Oracle RDBMS. This fact leads to some obvious incest between the two products. This is both good and bad, because while Oracle's RDBMS is an outstanding platform, the applications suite cannot see beyond it's horizon. Some of the designs inside the system are really cool. Much of the actual implementation is poor. I remember working about 12 hours rewriting migration scripts for 11i to cut data migration time from an estimated 3 weeks to 48 hours. The original code was on par with slapdash shell scripting, written by a non-english speaking amateur. At least I had the source...
I believe that good integrated business software is possible, and that the main ingredient necessary is patience. It will take decades for the builders to create structures that work well in generalizing business. At this time, however, integrated business suites are costly, flaky and limit(ed|ing). If you need it you should get it, but don't expect to like it. If you approach all this with a pragmatic attitude, you can make any of these products work well. If you bought the sales pitch and actually expect to realize it, you'll lose.
I wish that Linus had a reason to be afraid
Linus is taking exactly the correct approach to this whole mess. Whether it's deliberate I can't tell you. His approach is best described as public indifference. There are three reasons why this is best;
SCO would like nothing more than to have Linus apoplectic over their actions. Nothing would serve the FUD machine better than to have Linus acting hysterical and muddying the water. If Linus started saying or doing dramatic things the targets of SCOs threats would be that much more nervous. Linus is not a court of law, CEO or powerful shareholder. He can't force anyone to do anything about any of this. I think the best thing he can contribute is quiet indifference.
Indifference is the ultimate insult. At the very bottom of public discourse we find the Troll. The Troll feeds off anger. The Troll creates as much trouble as possible and feeds off the results. Anger registers as a negative on the attention scale, but at least it's non-zero. Having people pissed off you is clearly less than being admired and loved, but being ignored is worse. The more indifference SCO encounters, the more dramatic they become, because being ignored is not acceptable.
Indifference, by default, prevents anything stupid being said. Rule #1 when dealing with lawyers and courts; Shut Your Mouth. It doesn't matter how exonerating what you say might be. It will eventually end up on the point of the dagger you find sticking out of your chest.
Those are three good reasons why Linus not being an activist in this matter is best. Now you'll have my opinions;
You want Linus to be an activist. In my opinion we have far more than enough of those already. Why can't we allow at least some of the non-activists in this world a little oxygen? Must everyone who wishes to matter be a megaphone for some cause? Have you lost the ability to appreciate spin-less competence? I long ago concluded that the vast bulk of activists we seem to spend so many of our mental computons listening to have zero interest in what their advocating anyhow. Most often they appear to be playing to their peers.
UNIX has been a legal football for going on 20 years. Wouldn't it be nice to just let the damn court dates arrive and get it over with, with as little drama as possible? Maybe, just maybe, if everyone took the Linus approach, we could avoid creating anymore celebrity lawyers/judges out of all of this. God that would be nice.
Sheesh, this is worthy of a front page story?
Oh yes. Anytime one of our precious fellow geeks gets himself caught in the switches it is worth a front page story. Additionally, it is to be exaggerated and have as much drama associated with it as possible. In the end we'll chalk it up the oppression by da Man and blame it on Bush, then get back to fretting about whatever copywrite protection scheme we're most recently worried about.
Go stand around on a busy corner of Boulder sometime. It's like a car show. Don't be fooled by the pathologic behavior of the Boulder city/county governments into thinking Boulder is some sort of western meca for liberals. This place is jam packed full of the biggest snobs you can find anywhere in fly-over country. Here, you're either very wealthy or you live at their pleasure. Naturally the leftists take full advantage of the patronage. To me, Boulder feels like the most uptight place on Earth. The only exception is the student population. Absolutely everything else is under a microscope of social scrutiny.
Another corporate conspiracy urban legend... exactly how is this "interesting"? It's not like there is some shortage of this nonsense around here. I suspect this moderation represents folks that are just thrilled to see their kook ideas posted first.