More in sorrow

Dear Mozilla,

I've been using Firefox, loyally, since before it existed. I used it when it was called Firebird, and Phoenix, and before that I was using the Mozilla browser. Occasionally - maybe once a month or so - I'll fire up some other browser for a specific task, but Firefox has always been my standard, everyday, all-purpose browser. The interface is clean and simple, the extensions are beautiful, I like the focus on privacy and putting the user in control. It just - works the way a browser should.

Until now.

The Quantum leap was, for me, not a good thing. True, pages rendered faster. But that performance came at a price: pages sometimes crashed, or slowed the whole system to treacle (Trello was particularly badly affected, presumably because of something in their Javascript - but whatever it was, it didn't affect other browsers). Nevertheless, I persisted. I told myself that Quantum had been a huge change, and teething problems were only to be expected. The next major update, I thought, would cure some of these ills.

Sadly, the opposite has happened. The "next major update" has landed, and while it has cured whatever ailed Trello, it has reduced several other sites to "completely unusable". As in, it simply no longer renders the page content at all. It will load a frame, or maybe a background image, but not display the content; or the content will disappear when I scroll. This happens across multiple sites and multiple computers, with and without extensions enabled; so I'm picking Firefox as the culprit.

(The content is loaded, it's still "there". It's sometimes possible to select it, by clicking and dragging with a mouse, and sometimes when this is done it will remain visible after deselecting. But sometimes not. At any rate, this is not an acceptable workaround.)

It is therefore with a heavy heart that I have decided, I can no longer wait for Firefox to get this excrement back together. Right now I have little choice but to adopt Chrome at work; for home use, I will probably prefer Vivaldi. A lot of people speak highly of Palemoon and Waterfox; I may give one or both of them a try within the next month. But Firefox, most sadly, is a broken vessel.

Goodbye. I wish you nothing but the very best of luck in the future; but from today, I'm no longer a user. I just don't have the time to deal with this level of crap.

Caveat venditor

I've just been reading perhaps the most thoughtful essay I've ever seen come out of a Microsoft source. It describes why computer security is a waste of time.

Not "waste of time" in the normal colloquial sense, that it does no good. "Waste of time" in the strict economic sense, that the costs (in time) associated with basic security measures outweigh the plausible economic benefit. Basically, if (in any given year) 0.1% of computer users suffer direct monetary losses averaging $5,000 to computer-based fraud attacks, then the expected benefit to the average user of protecting themselves from such attacks is $5.00 per year - or, about half an hour of time at a low wage. Since it's impossible even to read the current set of security advice, much less implement it, in so little time - and since it provides no guarantee of safety anyway - most users, quite rationally, ignore it.

The paper goes on to dissect three popular "security" provisions: password rules (password expiry "will help only if the attacker waits weeks before exploiting the password"), user education about URLs ("a user who conscientiously follows the rules on URL parsing shoulders a considerable burden. The ΔBenefit is that he avoids some subset of phishing sites") to SSL (secure website) certificates ("Ironically, one place a user will almost certainly never see a certificate error is on a phishing or malware hosting site. [...] The rare cases that employ certificates use valid ones.")

Or there's the occasionally-quoted figure that "an unpatched Windows machine connected to the Internet will be compromised within 12 minutes" - the intended message being that you should keep your machine patched. But of course, to patch the machine, you need to connect to the Internet. And it would take considerably more than 12 minutes connected to download the patches on such a hopelessly outdated machine. You could only do it safely from behind a solid firewall - the kind that would make the security patches redundant.

Anti-virus software. What is it good for? It prevents someone else from installing and running software on your machine that you don't want. But it requires you to instal and run - and worse, maintain - software on your machine that you don't bloody want. It protects you from a limited set of types of damage (that might potentially cost you money and time), but it inflicts other costs (in money and time). It updates itself to protect against new threats, but only if you connect to the Internet and thus expose yourself to those threats. (If you haven't connected in a while, your anti-virus will start nagging you to update it - even though "not connecting to the Internet" is far better protection than it can ever offer.)

(Incidentally, most of these objections to anti-virus software also apply to Windows itself.)

The trouble with computer security is that it's been left up to the market. If seatbelts had never been mandated in cars, how many people would choose to pay extra to have them fitted? If there were no government regulation of food safety, how would we think about the steady trickle of deaths from poisoning and disease? Judging by our attitude to computer viruses, the default response would be: "It's their own fault, I always check my Symantec Bacteriograph before eating anything".

The market's solution to such things is not based on making things or people safer: it's based on selling stuff, which is best achieved by making people feel threatened. When the question is about safety, "the market" is not only not the best answer - it's quite possibly the worst.

It's probably too late, now, to try to impose seatbelt laws and driving-license requirements on computers, as well as being way beyond the competence of any government anyway. But there's nothing to stop us passing laws that put the costs where they belong: on the people who sell crappy software. Everyone who sells software should be directly liable for any damage occurring to its users as a result of security holes in that software, and there should be no disclaiming of that responsibility, no matter what contract the buyer signs. After all, it's no more than we expect of people who sell cars, or food, or electrical goods, or drugs.

Of course there are problems with vendor liability (how do you decide which piece of software was at fault? what do we mean by "selling" software? what about "free" software? what about people who charge you to instal or customise someone else's software?) But these are just the sorts of complications that the industry likes to throw up, to make it seem as if the whole idea is impracticable. In fact, once you get over the sheer number of such objections, it's not hard to come up with simple, equitable answers to all of them. Once we've agreed to the principle, the details will be solved in short order.

Darth Google

A few of weeks ago now, I installed a new widget on this page that records where (it thinks) my readers are located, where they come from, and what links they click when they're here.

It's fascinating reading, although slightly dispiriting that I don't get visited nearly as often as I should. But among other things, it lets me see what people were searching Google for when my blog popped up.

An uncommon lot of people - well, half a dozen at least - seem to have been drawn here by the picture included in my unflattering review of Watchmen. I wonder if they were disappointed when they didn't find a full online version of the comic. (If so, tough. I don't support digital piracy.)

Recently there was some poor sap from Miami searching for "the science of karma", and they were apparently so disappointed that they must've complained to Google, because my post of that name currently doesn't show up at all in a search for that phrase.

Then last week there was someone searching for "Mr Darcy is all politeness" (without quotes). I wonder what they were looking for.

I know what they found, though. Apparently, if you Google for a random text from Pride & Prejudice, the number one result you get is the "Google Books" edition of the text.

I don't know if you're familiar with Google Books. It's a stupid idea, the misbegotten offspring of an idiot's compromise between Google and the major publishers whereby Google gets to "publish books" online. By way of throwing a bone to the copyright Gestapo, Google agreed to leave out some pages in these works, the theory being that people should be allowed to search the text online but not able to read it. The choice of pages omitted depends on what you searched for. (It also, I've discovered in the course of researching this, varies from one day to the next. Last week I could page all the way through the book, with some random omissions such as p.145; this week, it's skipping directly from p.60 to the back cover.)

The irony being, of course, that Pride & Prejudice is not a copyright work. Not unless Jane Austen lived to be 200 years old, anyway. Anyone can reproduce this text as many times as they like; rewrite, repackage, adapt, perform, distribute, sell, loan or hire it, or any original work they may derive from it, completely at will. That's how Wordsworth Classics (Google's edition) were entitled to publish it in the first place; for them now to assert copyright over the text is indefensible, and should be illegal if it's not already.

But I digress. My real point here is that no human being in their senses would search for the Google Books edition of this work, because it's fecking useless. Instead, they could look for the Gutenberg version, which is easier to read, easier to search, and complete. And one hundred per cent legal to distribute in every country I know of, unless of course it meets someone's idea of obscenity...

And yet that page doesn't show up at all in the first page of Google results when searching for the text.

Ten years ago, Google became famous for its motto: "Don't be evil". "Evil" was always somewhat nebulously defined, but it was commonly understood as contrasting with Microsoft's standard operating practice of abusing every part of its business to give various (arguably) unfair advantages to every other part, generally at the expense of its own users. But it's hard to see the above Google result in any other light. The top result for the search is the one that's least useful for the user, and most profitable for Google.

Literary challenge, part II

Mark Twain was too easy, clearly. Let's try something less widely read, in schools at least. Something a little racier, perhaps.

Once again, the text is downloaded raw from Project Gutenberg, pasted into a Word document (I'm using Word 2007, in case that makes a difference); the Gutenberg preamble and notes are stripped out; then I click the "Summarize" button and ask for 100 words. No further editing of any kind has taken place.

I think this one is pretty tough, although it's certainly a famous book, probably available in the classics section of any big bookshop. But let's see...

Summary

"Sweet-heart, do you want a place?

what pain could stand before a pleasure so transporting? The present possession was all my little head could find room for.

Then, who can express the fire his eyes glistened, his hands glowed with! whilst sighs of pleasure, and tender broken exclamations, were all the praises he could utter. the unnumbered kisses! You would ask me, perhaps, whether all this time I enjoyed any perception of pleasure? A little eternity in love!

I felt the prodigious keen edge, with which love, presiding over this act, points the pleasure: love!

Competitive lit

Jane Austen didn't seem that popular, so let's try a quite different Literary Classic this time. To add a little zest to the wossname, I'm not telling you what it is. You should be able to work out the protagonist's first name without too much difficulty; bragging rights go to the first commenter who correctly guesses his second name, which has been redacted in the one place it occurs below.

Herewith the second classic, as abbreviated by MS Word in 100 words:

Summary

"TOM!"

"TOM!"

You TOM!"

No Tom. Tom!"

Tom said:

Tom said:

"Can't, Mars Tom. Tom exhibited. "Tom."

Tom lay thinking. "Tom! Say, Tom!" "Here, Tom! TOM! Tom moaned out:

Tom's dying!"

"You, Tom! Tom said:

Tom said:

"Oh, Tom! Tom said:

"Tom! Tom called:

"Hold! Presently Tom said:

Then Tom whispered:

Tom [Surname] swears

"Please, Tom. "DO, Tom!"

Tom quailed. Tom said:

Tom's cheeks burned. Tom said:

Tom hurried up. Tom shuddered.

Tom's followed. "Try harder, Tom! "Tom! "Don't Tom! Tom whispered:

Tom shouted. "Tom, Tom, we're lost! Tom was grateful. "Tom!"

Tom whispered:

Tom said:

Tom broke it:

Pride and Prejudice. No, really.

So, I was talking to a friend the other day about republishing classic, i.e. out-of-copyright, literature. And he, with an unerring talent for going off at the most ridiculous tangent, hit upon the idea of summarising it.

And so, for the benefit of time-pressed (or lazy) Eng Lit students everywhere, I present the first in a series of Classics, As Summarised by Microsoft Word.

Summary
by Jane Austen

"Bingley."

Elizabeth felt Jane's pleasure. "Never, sir."

Mr. Darcy bowed.

"Miss Elizabeth Bennet."

"Miss Elizabeth Bennet!" repeated Miss Bingley. "CAROLINE BINGLEY"

Elizabeth silently attended her.

"How strange!" cried Elizabeth. Mr. Collins then returned to Elizabeth.

Elizabeth was in agonies. Elizabeth replied that it was. Oh, sister! Poor Jane! Elizabeth made no answer. Elizabeth looked surprised. "FITZWILLIAM DARCY"

"Oh, no!" said Elizabeth. Elizabeth was distressed. Elizabeth was delighted. "LYDIA BENNET."

"Oh! Elizabeth read on:

Well! "Mr. Darcy!" repeated Elizabeth, in utter amazement.

Elizabeth smiled.

"If! Darcy mentioned his letter. Mr. Darcy! Dear, dear Lizzy. "Dearest Jane!

Now, I don't know about you, but I think some of the subplots and character nuances are slightly obscured in this 100-word rendition. You need to read between the lines somewhat, to do justice to the high comedy and acute social observation of the original. So here, for the completists among us, is the 500-word version:

Summary
By Jane Austen

"Bingley."

Elizabeth felt Jane's pleasure. "Never, sir."

Mr. Darcy bowed.

"Mr. Darcy is all politeness," said Elizabeth, smiling.

Elizabeth looked archly, and turned away. Mr. Darcy replied with great intrepidity:

"Miss Elizabeth Bennet."

"Miss Elizabeth Bennet!" repeated Miss Bingley. "MY DEAR FRIEND,--

"CAROLINE BINGLEY"

Elizabeth silently attended her.

I thought Miss Elizabeth Bennet looked remarkably well when she came into the room this morning. "All young ladies accomplished! "Removed!" cried Bingley. Do not you, Darcy?"

"Your humility, Mr. Bingley," said Elizabeth, "must disarm reproof."

shocking!" cried Miss Bingley. "Mr. Darcy is not to be laughed at!" cried Elizabeth. Elizabeth turned away to hide a smile.

Mrs. Bennet's eyes sparkled. "Dear Sir,--

"WILLIAM COLLINS"

Elizabeth could not but look surprised.

"How strange!" cried Elizabeth. This information made Elizabeth smile, as she thought of poor Miss Bingley. Elizabeth felt herself completely taken in. "Insolent girl!" said Elizabeth to herself. Mr. Collins then returned to Elizabeth.

Elizabeth now began to revive.

Elizabeth was in agonies. Elizabeth replied that it was. Charlotte's reply was spared by the entrance of Jane and Elizabeth.

Mr. Collins!"

Elizabeth took an opportunity of thanking her. Neither Jane nor Elizabeth were comfortable on this subject. "My dear Jane!" exclaimed Elizabeth, "you are too good. Oh, sister! Poor Jane! "Elizabeth, you are not serious now."

_that_ abominable Mr. Darcy! Elizabeth shook her head over this letter. Elizabeth's courage did not fail her. Lady Catherine then observed,

Your younger sisters must be very young?"

Elizabeth immediately began playing again. Elizabeth made no answer. Elizabeth looked surprised. Elizabeth was surprised, but said not a word. Elizabeth's astonishment was beyond expression. The pause was to Elizabeth's feelings dreadful. "FITZWILLIAM DARCY"

Lady Catherine seemed resigned. "Poor Wickham! Jane was not happy. Poor little Lizzy! "Oh, no!" said Elizabeth. Elizabeth was distressed. Elizabeth was delighted. "Does that young lady know Mr. Darcy?"

Elizabeth coloured, and said: "A little."

Elizabeth almost stared at her. Elizabeth answered only by a slight bow. Darcy was fixed in astonishment. Darcy made no answer. Elizabeth soon observed, and instantly understood it. "I do indeed," replied Elizabeth, colouring. From Elizabeth's thoughts it was never absent. "Not yet," replied Jane.

"LYDIA BENNET."

"Oh! Elizabeth impatiently caught it from his hand. Elizabeth read on:

GARDINER."

"My dear, dear Lydia!" she cried. My dear, dear Lydia! Well! Mrs. Wickham! Elizabeth was disgusted, and even Miss Bennet was shocked. Jane was distressed. Elizabeth could bear it no longer. "Mr. Darcy!" repeated Elizabeth, in utter amazement.

"Exceedingly well. Mr. Bingley arrived. Jane looked at Elizabeth with surprise and concern. Elizabeth dared not lift up her eyes. Elizabeth smiled. Elizabeth was forced to go.

"I suspected as much," replied Elizabeth. Elizabeth replied very concisely that she was.

Elizabeth looked with unaffected astonishment.

"If! No, never. Lady Catherine seemed pleased.

"Oh!" cried Elizabeth, "I am excessively diverted. Darcy mentioned his letter. Mr. Darcy! Dear, dear Lizzy. "Dearest Jane! "DEAR SIR,

Elizabeth will soon be the wife of Mr. Darcy.

Just call me Alex

I'm having an agreeable yuppie fantasy today.

That probably sounds contradictory. What it involves is a little window in the corner of my second monitor that shows me the exchange rate between the UK pound and the NZ dollar, and -- and this is the nifty bit -- updates itself once per minute. This window is provided courtesy xe.com, a lovely little site that epitomises the service industry ideal of doing one thing and doing it well. And, most importantly, for free.

This rate is of interest to me because I still have a noticeable amount of money in the UK, and I've been meaning to bring it over, for house-buying purposes, when the rate looks good. As I type this, 1GBP would buy me NZ$2.68159, up from $2.67496 when I first checked this morning.

Over the day, the pound has been trending slightly upwards. But every time I watch it actually make its update, the pound weakens (which is bad). It's almost touched 2.686, before dropping back again when I got too excited and began watching too closely.

This is, of course, entirely in keeping with the known laws of economics, and will come as no surprise to anyone.

When the rate hits 2.71 -- which, for the record, I don't think is going to happen this week -- I'll call my trader and finally switch over my millions from sterling. That's the agreeable fantasy part, anyway. In the meantime, however, it really is pretty exciting to watch it out of the corner of my eye.

(D'oh! Just lost another $200.)

So here's this information that, when I was entering the job market, would have been available only to braying young wine-bar-haunting gits with bicycle clips on their sleeves, whose employers paid more for the service than for the people to watch it... and today, it's freely available to anyone with a broadband connection. Today, a mere twenty years too late to make my fortune, I get to play at being a yuppie for free, without even having to take time out from my real job.

That's so cool.

Addendum (added Thursday lunchtime): So much for my powers of prediction. Today the pound is over $2.72. I'm not pushing my luck any further.

Intellectual vandalism

As a student, I read some book -- I think Michael Scott Rohan's original Winter of the World trilogy -- in which the hero, a blacksmith, had his legs deliberately broken to keep him from leaving town.

I thought then that this was the essence of barbarism. To deliberately maim someone -- to intentionally make an able body less able -- and to do it, for no better reason than that you didn't want the burden of having to treat them decently. Surely, I thought, this is what the Law is really for: to protect us from such arbitrary and selfish uses of power.

In 1989, the 80486 computer chip came onto the market -- the fourth in the series that began with the 8086, and direct ancestor of the various types of Pentiums that probably power the computer you're reading this on. It was shockingly expensive. But among its advances over its predecessor, the 80386, it had a floating-point co-processor built into the chip itself.

I'd always wanted one of those. It meant you could play games that involved drawing detailed graphics on the screen in real time. Things like flight simulators. I waited, eagerly, for the price to come down to the point where I could afford one.

In 1991, the chip manufacturer, Intel, produced the cheap version: the 80486SX. As everyone knew in those days, the "-SX" suffix meant "cut-down"; in this case, it meant "without the co-processor". To me that seemed the epitome of pointlessness. But by then I was a technical journalist, and it was my business to read lots of reports and writings about developments just like this. And I learned something that shocked me deeply:

The 486SX did have the co-processor built onto the chip -- it was exactly the same chip, built on the same lines in the same factory as the full version -- but the co-processor was artificially disabled. Like Rohan's blacksmith hero, the chip had been deliberately crippled to make it less useful.

In my economics lessons, I'd learned that the purpose of work is to add value to something. Everyone who adds value makes the world a slightly better, or at least richer, place; somebody, somewhere, gains some utility that they would not otherwise have had.

So what should I think of people who work, on purpose, to make a product less useful?

To me that seemed, and still seems, no better than vandalism, or at best theft. I can understand the motivations -- but then I can understand the motives of vandals and thieves, too, and it doesn't mean I accept them as legitimate.

And today the same argument is going on with a much higher profile, although no-one seems to recognise it.

It's called "digital rights management". What it means, in a nutshell, is that publishers add bits of code to their products that prevent them from being used in ways they otherwise could.

Now, the amount of virtual ink that's been spilt in debating the rights and wrongs of DRM in general is, approximately, enough to fill the Atlantic. You don't have to look far to find rants or measured opinions on either side of the subject, including some by yours truly. (I have mostly taken the position that publishers have no moral or legal right to do most of the things they do. The vast majority of their measures are used to enforce "rights" that the law was never meant to grant them in the first place.)

But that's not my real objection. That's just the legalistic formulation of the underlying problem, which is a moral one. It is intrinsically wrong, I believe, to devote time and effort to make your product less useful than it would be if you didn't. That means you're working to make the world a poorer place. And that means you're a vandal, and you belong in jail.

But our economic system is so perverse that it rewards such behaviour. Even worse: our laws are being perverted to not merely protect, but actively support, it. To my mind, that's enough to discredit the entire consumerist economic system; what we are fighting over now is whether the legal and political systems that go with it can be redeemed. They're meant to protect us, the consumers, from this kind of abuse. If they won't do that, what are they good for?

"These are not the facts you're looking for"

"Open-plan offices are bad for productivity and employee health", says an Australian study.

Now, I've been a technical journalist. I know how the news reports "studies". And this is one of those (countless) cases where I'd really like to see the parameters, as well as the results, of the original study. Because "open-plan office" can mean pretty much anything.

"The research found that the traditional design was better - small, private closed offices." There's that whore of a word, "traditional", again. What does it mean this time? How many industries have "traditionally" given people private offices?

Not journalism, for sure. Every newsroom in the world, I believe, is and always has been open-plan. It's fitting that the news should be written in a noisy, distracting environment, because that's just how most people will be reading it.

Education. How many schools give each teacher their own private office? Not many, where I come from. Heck, even at university, my tutor had to share an office.

Police officers. Hospital doctors and nurses. Travel agents. Bankers. Air traffic controllers. The 25% or so of the population that works in manufacturing or construction industries. The much higher number that works in retail. What percentage of these spend most of their working hours in their own private offices? And yet the expectation exists -- as if we all, somehow, thought we were destined to be treated like middle-managers in some 60s sitcom. In some sense, it feels almost as if we should expect that. A private office is a sign of status, of privilege, something we're somehow supposed to aspire to.

And that, of course, is how the issue has become politicised, and that's why I'm going to treat any study on the subject with grave suspicion. I now want to know, not only the complete employment history of these researchers, but also who funded them.

"The problem is that employers are always looking for ways to cut costs, and using open-plan designs can save 20% on construction."

And what about rent? Even allowing for the extra meeting rooms and social spaces you need to provide, you can still fit at least twice as many generous-sized desks in a given floor space if you don't have to lay out a whole room around each one.

I've spent a lot of my life working in at least four very different open-plan offices. (Well, six really, but for just four different companies.) In publishing, there is no doubt that open-plan is the only sane layout to have; if anyone in that industry claims that their colleagues are distracting them from their work, they haven't understood what their work is.

In software, the picture is more mixed. There's a persuasive argument for letting team members communicate with minimal barriers. In this view, if you put someone in a position where they have to stand up to communicate with team-mates, you cut down the flow of information by at least two-thirds; if you force them to get up and walk somewhere, it's more than 90%. But (the counter-argument goes), in practice these informal, personal communication channels don't scale well; they're fine when there's just three or four people in the room, but at any size bigger than that, someone will be left out of the loop. You need more formal communication, less reliance on informal.

On the other hand, there's an argument (put forcefully by, among others, Joel Spolsky) that says -- backed up by a whole pile of alleged facts -- that programmers in private offices are "more productive". Microsoft, apparently, is famous for putting all its programmers in private offices. Which just goes to show that productivity is no guarantee of quality.

I've enjoyed working in an open-plan office. It was quiet, because there was rigid self-discipline on all sides about talking; and the lack of privacy didn't bother me, because we all had a degree of trust in our management. You could spend a week doing nothing but surf the web, without feeling the need to conceal it; people would assume either you were working, or you were legitimately trying to work but simply blocked for the moment. Motivation was high, productivity was high.

But I've also seen the opposite. Partitions, stifling that easy, collegial non-verbal communication, while doing nothing to cut sound or provide privacy. Three or four conversations going on at once, sometimes across several intervening desks. Managers who make no pretence that they even want to know what we're doing, as long as it's work. Morale low, productivity suffers.

How many of these factors has the study taken into account? I don't know, and I doubt if I could find out, even if I tried. It's a politicised issue, and it's not hard to frame the parameters of any study to make sure it comes up with the right answer.

Reasons to hate Vista, part 4 (I think)

Windows Vista gets a lot of stick. Microsoft claims that this is unfair, caused by biased reviewers read by people who haven't given it a fair chance. But Microsoft is, as ever, full of it. I've yet to see them explain why these malicious reviewers are so prejudiced against this Windows version in particular.

I've had this computer, and this crappy excuse for an operating system, for a year and a half now. And it still manages to surprise me with all the ways it can think of to go wrong on boot-up.

Usually it's something to do with the screen that gets screwed up. Recent irritations have included:

• showing a 1280 × 1024 background image on a 1920 × 1200 monitor.
  Usually when this happens it will realise its error and correct it within, ooh, about five minutes. But last week it stuck with that setting for an entire session, lasting some hours.
• images switching to and fro between left and right monitors
• refusing to show any desktop at all -- just a black screen with a cursor.

But it's really amazing how many variations on these themes it can come up with. Nothing if not inventive, Vista is.

Today it was a practical issue. I'm accustomed to the computer taking more than five minutes (timed) to restore from standby. That's fine, it fits my morning routine, I use the time to make coffee. But when it takes another four minutes, on top of that, to open Outlook...

The Microsoft VP who famously "got burnt" by Microsoft's "Vista-capable" scam -- for scam it was -- at least ended up with what he described as "an e-mail machine". He's still better off than me.