Posts by Tyson Boellstorff

NZ woman sacked for SHOUTY EMAILS

@ Scott 19

You've got to be more creative, dude. There are two ways you can go about the grammar issue.

1) make a drinking game out of it. Every time the phrase is uttered, have a chug.

2) mentally do this operation:1,$s/you know/I am an idiot/gi

Either does wonders. The nice part about the drinking game is that eventually you'll kill enough brain cells so that the phrase isn't so obnoxious.

Or, if Clippie could be superclassed to invoke an SNMP-managed cattle prod every time the phrase comes out. That would be righteous fun, and very likely something Blackbeard would have done!

Not too quick on the uptake

Having worked for people like this in the past, I would not have been all that sorry to see her go. If a managerial type has to be held to a minimum level of education and to a minimum level of communication skills, then she fails the test and should go. The problem is that there are probably many more feckless people in the organization that should have gone first.

I used to have a manager who (unintentionally) wrote her emails in Yoda-ese, and it was a never ending source of amusement to us to repeat them in Yoda's voice. She took it in pretty good grace -- it was just the way her brain worked. Down deep, she was a very talented and intelligent IT manager, just that her personal demons kept her from being as effective as she could have been.

However, this woman sounds like a first class tin pot "look at me, I'm in charge" hitler. I'd have canned her, too, for pissing off the troops to the point where they don't get any more work done while they're standing around the water cooler bitching about her. The root problem is that the higher-ups have no sense of creativity when it comes to firing skills. The firing gimme here is that they could have found a minority/opposite gender employee, asked him if he/she felt threatened by loud, shouting voices, reminded him/her that all caps emails are considered shouting, and then fired the manager for creating a threatening environment. People get fired all the time for creating threatening environments -- new age psycho BS that it is, it works just fine for cleaning house, and wouldn't have made the papers and created a PR nightmare that will cause more managerial heads to roll. I still can't figure out if that's a good thing or not.

In cases like this, you have to ask yourself, "What would Blackbeard do?"

Dan Brown is most unwanted author says Oxfam

To: John Savard

Seriously, no one expects the spanish inquisition. Among their chief weapons are such elements as fear, surprise...

Cat awarded online high school diploma

@Nate -- re education quality

Too true. American HS degree consists of sitting on your arse in a chair collecting social promotions for 4 years. Only a total imbecile could blow that. Natch, the list of offenders from Hollywood is rather long.

OTOH, the GED actually forces them to know something, since they have to pass a test, which the little snowflakes don't hardly have to do to graduate (it might damage their 'self esteem'.) Your only chance of an education in the US is to go to a university -- they'll take you if you're warm, but you have to pass a test to graduate. <cue music="tinytinyviolin">Oh, the pain of being asked to prove what you know.</cue>

Greenpeace unleashes Captain Kirk on HP

...as long as he doesn't sing at you.

<shudder>

Microsoft abolishes Money

I use kmymoney

Got sick of intuit changing the user interface and forcing upgrades to a product that still worked. It is a little clunky, but it does the job good enough, and I don't need to re-learn it at someone else's whim.

BOFH: Cable entanglements

Only thing my vendor gave me was

a candy dispenser and #&# candy that came from china. Mmmmm. Tasty melanite.

Can I ask...

WTF is wrong with people that can't wait patiently for a BOFH installment, choosing instead to dole out abuse for a free article either not updated to a set time schedule, or without exactly 7 gut-wrenching laughs?

Do they not realise that Simon, as the creator of the BOFH, has diabolical plans for lusers that annoy? You would think the spade, carpet, & quicklime would motivate fucktards of the 3rd order.

Maybe abuse motivates other humour writers (something I doubt), but the BOFH is the BOFH for a reason. Looking forward to the installment where BOFH handles the situation at hand.

I am very pleased with the quality rather than quantity model. Carry on, Simon!

Indefinite liability for online libel must end

There's reasonable,

and there's unreasonable. The US law is not a perfect model, and allows unjust or ambiguous situations to arise. I think that if there were clear standards as to publication date, such as a time/date stamp within the file, and a checksum on the article or storage in a relatively immutable form, then the publication date works. If there is no date on the article, then the access date is the only publication date that makes any sense whatsoever.

As an example, 7 years from now, an article that appears current saying bad things about me and is undated should be redacted. A reasonable person cannot tell when undated material was published, and has to assume it is current. In the internet world, contextual relationships (e.g. a query based upon date that retrieves an undated article) should be considered undated, as that context is often lost. However, I can see that one getting better defined, as once the document chain of custody is established in order to prove who must pay or provide relief, the query with attendant contextual information is demonstrable.

However, if people are accessing a file that is clearly past the statutes of limitations, then the publication date must be used, as to do otherwise is to ignore the historical aspect of this data in favor of a crass manipulation for reasons that were apparently not sufficient to process when it was more timely. In other words, we could have criminals rewriting our history.

I'm a big fan of centera storage and locked down pdf's for information of this nature as they significantly reduce the pain of compliance with such measures. Checksums within a dated file are really the only way to go. I like pdf's because storage in most other formats simply does not stand the test of time (changing vendor standards), or requires external verifications that can lose their contextual relationship.

Really, the law that should have been passed 10 years ago is what archival document format is legally admissible, especially within the context of news reportage (and MS Word is NOT it -- too many incompatible changes...), along with the corresponding retention parameters.

It's just like the remedy to some libel cases is a published retraction to headlines -- which finds itself on page 3 hidden in 2 point type far, far away from more salacious content on the same page. No satisfaction there in terms of actual fairness.

Laptops to blame for Qantas jet plunge?

beepbeepbeep

I think the 'beepbeepbeep' I heard after the "musta been a laptop" explanation was *not* a stall detector, but instead the Bullshit Detector that I got surplus from the Ministry of Housinge. They aren't just out for cat detection anymore!

BOFH: Licensing model

Wow.

It wouldn't happen to a nicer guy. Really.

Time for genuine 'write-once, run-anywhere' Java

It really boils down to the implementation

Take these sentences: "For example, we had an application running on one hardware platform using a 64-bit JVM and all was fine. In moving to a new platform, there was only a 32-bit JVM available. On this platform the application suddenly started experiencing out of memory exceptions." What was he doing? Some high performance application that soaked up every iota of memory on the system? In general, the java apps I've worked with do not do this when going from platform to platform, so it's something in the code.

Odds are all too good that it is another app where the developers "assumed" they had unlimited amounts of memory available, and good memory management practices went out the window. Or, worse, they just didn't give any thought as to the memory footprint. No wonder most java apps are slow, clunky memory hogs. Just because the platform reclaims unused memory doesn't mean you don't need to manage it. I can write a perl script for ETL that can use everything our mainframes have and then some, or I can write them to manage what I use. It's up to me and my program, not the language.

I speak from the receiving end of having to push these apps out and manage them -- not all apps are equal, and not all coding memes fix things. Remember the coders that thought their memory problems in wfw 3.11 would go away with win95? It was BS then, and it is BS now. Well written, .NET and java apps are useful and portable. So are perl scripts. But when good practices go by the wayside, portability is lost.

It's not to say that they are poor programmers -- just that apps written that don't follow portability guidelines and best practices won't port all that good, and who should be surprised? As to waving the magic .NET wand at it -- wow. Portability within the Windows platform? <sarcasm>Mighty portable, mighty portable.</sarcasm>

Florida cops issue shock 'Butthash' warning

getting my coat.

Really, no sh*t?

Neanderthals had key speech gene, researchers say

@Steven Davison

Same thing we do every night, Pinky.

Try to take over the world!

Hospital's brand new '£1m' server room goes up in smoke

It's simple, nobody was thinking.

Building a server room for a friend. Has 30 dell 2u boxes. rule of thumb: they draw 250 watts on power up, 100 to run.

250*30=7,500 watts to power up after an outage, divided by 110 (it's the us...)= 68amps. Can probably do it on 3 20 amp circuits, but will use 4 for safety.

100*30=3,000 watts continuous power use. He bought an air con that removes 1000 watts. I asked him where the other 2,000 watts were supposed to go, got a blank look.

I suppose he'll figure it out, or I will have a nice, warm place to go in the winter, at least until the servers have shat themselves. ;-)

All goes to show, it isn't rocket science here -- just too many managers and too little thinking.

Man sues God

To know Ernie is to know Ernie

He's a good guy, does a good job representing his constituents, and agree with him or not, you can never say that he doesn't make a person think. He's had a long, productive career thwacking beehives, metaphorically speaking.

The problem is, when a legislator and lawyer takes steps to address frivolous lawsuits, he may be viewed as the guy that will force lawyers to have to make a decent living. Pity, that.

Personally, I think that God would just laugh this one off -- but I'm not ready to face Him personally at the moment for a more direct inquiry.

Chinese couple give birth to @ symbol

Nethack?

Cool! Is their cat named f? Just wishing them the best, and hoping little @ stays away from L and &.

I'll get my [.

Net bride Aussie kidnapped in Mali

dowry - bride price not same thing

"Des Gregor, 56, flew last month to the impoverished African nation's capital Bamako in search of "Natacha" and a dowry of AU$100,000 in gold bars"

The first line of a google on dowry:

Definitions of dowry on the Web:

* money or property brought by a woman to her husband at marriage

wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

I maintain that the guy is a greedy 'tard.

There was nothing there but his own naked greed

Before people start hacking on 'luurv' over the internet, I have to say that I married someone I met on the internet, and they have been the happiest years of my life. However, I wasn't looking for $100,000 as part of the deal -- that not only sounds too good to be true, it defies all logic that someone in such dire straits couldn't *buy* something better locally. Face it, if they're any kind of decent person at all, they'd be as poor as a church mouse, not offering cash to the first idiot that comes along.

Let's review. He wasn't thinking with his upper brain. He wasn't even thinking with his lower brain. His greed ruled him, and he got the beating he deserved. I just love his quote: "You see this in a movie, you read about it in a book. It happens to someone else, not you. But it does." -- I have a better quote for him to ponder. "That's some mighty profound stupidity you got there, son. Your life'd make a good episode of 'The Brady Bunch, or even a nice entry on the Darwin Awards web page."

Astronauts chuck fridge off space station

Clay, your hometown of (tr)Ashland, NE, US is right proud of you.

Try to get it into Arlo's junkyard, will you?

Day-of-silence protest hits Net radio

re: That's why!

Say -- as long as we're talking about somebody else's livelihood, why don't you take the plunge first and start working for free?

The life of a musician ain't all roses, bub. Try spending 6 hours every day for a month practising for a concert, and then have some idiot think that if you play for an hour, you ought to get paid $6 an hour for the whole concert, because it doesn't look that hard to him? How about you write a song that is original and fresh, and see what happens when people think that you don't deserve to get paid?

My guess is you don't know *how* to play an instrument, and you don't know enough about music or music theory to write a good song. If you don't, how can you justify the statement about 'egotistical dipsticks masquerading as musicians'? Got *any* qualifications to back yourself up with?

If not, then how about you shut up, and let people make a living in peace? The OP was about excessive royalties, which is a valid point, not the fact that they exist. I'll be the first to agree the retroactive hike is excessive. You can't make any sort of business plan if the gov't will give away your gross for the past couple of years.

Need hard facts? Try Conservapedia

All just rumours file

Why is any of this important to anybody. Nothing in any wiki is authoritative -- by its architecture, anything can be edited by anyone with any kind of random agenda/bias/mental disorder, just as it can be edited by the most brilliant minds in the business.

As entertainment, they are all pretty good. As a source of facts, you're pretty much at sea for any of them -- any fact there is only there by virtue of the last sane person to touch it, and subject to change at the whim of the next editor.

All of the vitriol for the conservapedia is just as valid for any of these information sources. Watching these entries is like watching people on opposing mountains of sh*t, flinging sh*t at each other and pronouncing 'their source is better than the other guys' source'. Evidently, volume and nastiness are acceptable debate styles, and no longer a disqualification from the discourse.

However, in terms of intellectual debate, I see more tolerance of alternative opinion in the conservative ideology than in the others -- where else can you have several opinions that so wildly differ from each other? The fact that some don't make any sense whatsoever is more than balanced to me by the fact that differences of opinion are tolerated. I refuse to march in lock step with anybody else just because I agree or even understand none, any, some, or most of what they say.

Debate is messy. You have to suffer through the opinions of people that p*ss you off. Some of what they say makes no sense to you. Remember, some of what you say p*sses them off, and makes no sense at all to them. A little more tolerance from people who think of themselves as tolerant is in order -- tolerance is more than just agreeing with people you already agree with.

TV ads too loud, industry watchdog says

I think it's a sad statement on commercial creativity.

If there ever was such a thing. You hire an ad agency to get people's attention, not p*ss them off. There is a fine line between getting attention with your soap commercial, and just being an ass. Good commercials can get your attention and charge your imagination.

What next? Olympic logos that cost in the millions that appear to depict strange sex acts between cartoon characters? I don't suppose they'll ever stoop that low. You have to wonder about the mental health of such people and the people that hire their services.

If there's anybody that deserves ridicule over this, it's the pinheads that hire an ad agency and don't demand any sort of quality whatsoever. After all, for some 50,000,000, you'd think that women would be swooning over something that looks like it was designed by professionals, instead of something that came straight off the bathroom wall of the juvenile lockup, or adverts that automatically are muted or skipped.

Killer Wi-Fi panics London's chattering classes

stupid, gullible people make my head hurt

Please remove them. It's For The Children (TM) It's reminiscent of that foul dihydrogen oxide poisoning episode.

For the record, some router noise is bad design, and some is capacitor squeal. I look on it as a feature. I suppose I could hunt it down, and do something about it, but as my hearing's going anyway, figure problem should solve itself shortly.

Creationists open biblical history museum

Don't confused half-baked beliefs with philosophy

Sorry, but many of the comments against the museum bear the exact same hallmarks of bigotry and intolerance that the standard religious nutcases use. It's mostly "you're different from me, so you're stupid" arguments.

Not everybody sees evolution as the only explanation of life. It's certainly possible that there is a higher power that could have steered life out of the primordial soup into the world we know of. If you evolution nutters would stop putting all of your efforts into your 'all or nothing' arguments and figure that your fellow human beings are just as likely to have a grasp on a kernel of truth in there somewhere, you may learn something.

I think this museum is a sad display of how poorly understood science and a half-read and selectively understood bible can get hammered into an illogical ethos that scores $20 a head. However, it does make somebody a living, and entertainment based upon what people believe is nothing new.

However, just because some Americans are nuts doesn't mean that you can smugly conclude that all of us are. In terms of tolerance, it doesn't line up that neatly. If your fellow man decides to start his own religion on worshipping cheese, if you want your own religion to enjoy its protection, you need to tolerate the foul Camembert worshippers. Otherwise, you're no better than the rest of the world, which does not tolerate dissent.

Missing German doctor reappears after 22 years

Good job, Lester

Thanks for another shining example of exactly why I read El Reg -- to maintain my sanity, with a minor dose of IT news, so I can claim that it's work related.

I suppose the best explanation of why the doc wasn't missed for 22 years is that his wife didn't look very hard because he didn't have any life insurance. A warning to all of us males out there to make sure we put the seat down and pay our bills on time.

Robbers superglue naked man to exercise bike

...the other penny should drop about now

...I don't think the Vaseline was used to *free* the poor naked man, while he was sitting there, exposed to the world.

I don't know anybody that's used Vaseline to free something from a superglue bond.

BOFH: OutBOFHd

Remember the old Jim Croce song?

You don't tug on Superman's cape;

You don't spit into the wind;

You don't poke the mask of the ol' Lone Ranger,

and you don't mess around with s/Jim/Slim/g

This is gonna be good.

UN waffles furiously on biofuels

It's not an either/or

Bio fuels produce several outputs. Just like with oil extraction, where steep liquor and steep feed go to feed livestock and other uses, the byproducts of ethanol production are used. In fact, bio-fuel byproducts are improved -- as an example, corn (maize) used in ethanol production can be substantially inferior to that used for oil production, and the resulting mash has a consistent feed quality, and significantly higher protein content than raw corn. It's a good fit, improving corn used for animal feed, reducing the need for tankage (reduces the chance for BSE to propagate into the food chain) to improve protein content, and producing usable fuel into the bargain.

The problem is, every time someting like this comes up, some knothead starts b*tching about SUV's. Usually, it's some jerk that is sitting on top of their own enormous pyramid of consumption (hello pot, meet kettle), purchasing some sort of fool's pardon by buying a brand-new, 'efficient' electric or hybrid vehicle that uses some thousands of tons of coal to produce so they can feel smug about themselves, not to mention the coal, uranium, and fossil fuel they need to propel it down the road. When I see them actually make a sacrifice, then maybe I'll start thinking they've got something to say that isn't something smug and self-righteous.

I wish these people, if they want the moral high ground, would forgo their own consumption pyramid before they point out the error of everybody else's ways. Maybe do more walking, and less b*tching.

Everybody that trots out the tired arguments about the poor omits a lot of things in an effort to absolve themselves. Here's just a couple:

1) Poor people live in poor areas need to improve their lives. No handout can replace the desire to improve their own situation. It may or may not be their fault, but as long as they do what they've always done, they'll get what they've always got.

2) Grains don't export all that well, unless the recipient has the means to pay for shipping. Making ethanol and using products close to their source is just a good use of natural resources. I know it's frustrating to see abundance in one part of the world and need in another, but bashing people for their successes will not fix the failures.

I see no difference between a warlord keeping his people in extreme poverty so the aid checks keep coming and a do-gooder that wants to tell the rest of the world that their SUV's are the cause of world hunger. Both exploit the poor in support of their own twisted agendas. Neither truly has any interest in actually alleviating any of this poverty. Both just want into the pockets of the better-off for their own reasons. Neither has any chance of providing a world without hunger, in fact, it's their means of support. The only thing they are capable of is just a lot of photo-ops, jet-setting and collective misery, and the world can certainly do without that.

If people are seriously interested in helping the poor, instead of just exploiting them for their own agendas, then see to it they have:

a) a good economy

b) access to a good education

c) the ability to find work at better than starvation wages

d) better knowledge of how to grow their own food

e) better government

f) better medical care

You cannot do any of this with socialism or a dictatorship, and a healthy market economy is probably the only way to get it going. The solution to bad government and inept social organisations is not more bad government and more inept social organisations. (Not inept? How many trillions have been spent, and how many millions are still starving?) If you want to help from the comforts of home, then give to the micro loan providers -- they stand a decent chance of doing all of that, as unfashionable as they may be in Hollywood and elsewhere...

Computer saves shredded Stasi files

First shred, then burn, then leave your, erm, 'calling card' in the bin

I don't know whose bright idea it was that thought that just shredding sensitive docs made them safe. Burning has to happen, or you have to make the shredded documents a less attractive source of private information. It's like running away from a bear -- you don't have to be faster than the bear -- just faster than your red-shirted friend.

Coalition forces offer Iraq action footage

Kinder, gentler snipers...

Go ahead, call me sick.

http://eatliver.com/i.php?n=2018

Pic OK for work (unless you work for the easily traumatised anti military sort), but can't say the same for the whole site.

For the rest of you, I highly recommend taking a big swig of milk before you view, just for the effect.

Russian teacher fined for MS piracy

Re: Re: It costs the same...

...any of a thousand ways that doesn't diminish their rights and gets them positive PR. That's how.

Send the guy a check for $150, and tell him 'don't do it again'. You obviously haven't lived that close to the edge to understand the effect of losing half of a month's income, and the goodwill generated by an act of kindness. There are people out there looking to cheat, and there are people whose hearts are in the right place but have wound up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The worst thing you can do when your fellow humans are suffering is nothing.

It costs the same...

Around Moscow, people may have the salaries to pay for such items. In remote areas, where a teacher/administrator can get paid a salary of R10.000, ($360US), which is enough to get by (barely), high priced products like Office simply are out of reach. It was a deal that was too good to be true, and they're making an example out of him for not being aware of that.

I feel sorry for the poor guy, and would like to point out that FreeBSD has a lot of useful Russian-language options and remains free. If software vendors want to combat piracy, they have to price their products so they can be bought relative to the local economy, or force their potential customers away from their products.

In the final analysis, he just wanted to help his students -- that Microsoft didn't step in speaks volumes about what kind of an organization they are.

Space shuttle crashes in Alabama

Great headline

If you don't think about what you read, now's a good time to start. The headline caught your eye, was true, but not what anybody would normally think it was.

eBay, PayPal face court action

re: nameless' post: How Courts Work 101

Lots of courage there for somebody who's convinced they're in the right and possessing the 'nads to try to lecture somebody on the error of their ways.

FYI, lawsuits are generated based upon the assumption of either a successful payout in court, or a financial decision to cut losses and settle. The courts exist to adjudicate, but by their very definition are not in a position to throw the truly stupid and frivolous cases out before the respondent has had to spend large sums of money defending themselves. Justice doesn't enter into it. Any other explanation is a laughably flimsy justification and an attempt to prove that government is fair and reasonable based upon naivete and bong smoke. Lawyers have to eat. They are notorious for not working for free. There's an old saying -- one lawyer in a small town will starve, but if you have two lawyers in the same small town, they will both live in mansions. They exist to take advantage of how the law works, and if they did not, they simply would not exist. People would just handle their own legal matters.

Sadly, there is no effective disincentive to file frivolous lawsuits, and as long as some 90% of our government is composed of people in or related to the legal professions, this won't change.

Nobody is under any compulsion to buy and sell on ebay. There are other auction sites out there. The fact that they are not as good is a function of many factors, including poorer service, less advertising, and the simple fact that people go where the sales are. A lawsuit based upon an antitrust perspective actually harms competition, because better businesses should not be penalized for gaining the majority of the market, and worse businesses should not be rewarded for not being as good at what they do. I do not agree with ebay's policies -- sniping sucks. However, when I have something to sell, I go straight to ebay, because for all the problems with their policies, I make more money, because my products get a better price. After all, 3% of 200 is $6. I make $194. 2% of $100 is $2. I make $98. It's a no-brainer. You of the high morals are welcome to go elsewhere.

However, ebay is big, and has deep pockets. They are a private business. They can charge what they want as long as sellers sell and buyers buy. They are concerned with making a profit, like any business should, and will make decisions on the overall good of the company, rather than what is the right way. Therefore, they are an ideal target for a lawsuit. The public interest is not served by making them a governmental institution. I can only imagine how crap online auctions would be with all of the 'governmental efficiency' I currently observe. It is entirely possible for people to come up with a case that will make it far enough in the court system to get a payout. That's exactly what's happening here. It's slimy, and it makes the people with a whiney-arsed, unjustifiable complaint a lot of money by taking advantage of the court system. It's the same system that drives doctors out of poor communities, closes down employers, and even makes my morning coffee lukewarm because somebody cannot understand that hot coffee should be, well, hot, and hot can be, well, hot, and hot things can burn you. The very definition of whiney-arsed.

Quit your whining.

I don't care how people pay me, as long as they pay me, and promptly. If paypal's cut is too high, you can always refuse to take it, and negotiate the payment at the auction close. There is and remains no fee at all for the seller for using checks, money orders, wampum, zorkmids, or barter, but it takes longer, you can't use credit cards or take the money from the buyer's bank account, and chickens tend to die in transit. This is just another whiney-arsed attempt at using the courts to extort money from a business. The point is, there are alternatives, and if you like them, use them.

So far as paypal security goes, at least they do a better job of protecting your financial identity that regular US banking outfits do. US banks have created the potential for massive financial fraud in the name of easy credit, and when you've been boned by this, they will sit there and make you pay the price instead of fixing it like they ought.

The Western Union string is blocked for financial security -- too much fraud -- not because they couldn't stand the competition. I remember when ebay did it. WU payments have no guarantee. The money goes, and your stuff never arrives. As a seller, if you were defrauded by a buyer using WU, you were gullible indeed to ship before you saw the colour of their money. On a *totally* unrelated note, I would like to know your ebay id, so I can buy lots of stuff from you.

Get over it, guys.

Polar caps wane as Mars tries global warming

Everybody knows that the Mars sun is different that Earth's

It's all part of our foul plan to bring global warming back to where the Romans had left it the last time -- we still have 6 feet of sea level to go before we catch up to them. (Look up the archaeology of salt harvesting sometime -- it takes a large flat area at sea level, and the last Roman fields were 6 feet above current sea level)

Basically, those who would create a total worldwide nanny state through fear mongering have discovered the weather. Nothing new there.

Denise Van Outen ordered to get Joss Stoned

Our (the rest of the US) apologies for Hollywood perfecting stupid.

Let's see. Hire somebody because her accent is popular in the US. Tell her to lose said accent. Maybe they can then have Dick Van Dyke do the voice overs. This comes from the same brilliant minds that chopped classic Benny Hill episodes down to 30 minutes, because they figure the public can't understand the accent and the intellectual humor. ;-)

I have to admit, convoluted plots and cerebral humor like Benny Hill and Monty Python do keep the average LA media exec sounding stupid, or is that just their total failure to comprehend that they base their estimates of what is popular on what the other networks are doing, and it's all one long, rapid slide into the lowest common denominator.

They didn't invent stupid, but they've gone a long, long, long way towards perfecting it. The first step was when they started believing their own BS.