North Coast Online

Apple Goes After The Heathens

I read today that Apple has launched a Web browser for Windows and my interest was piqued.  I've been sorely tempted to defect to the Apple camp many times over the years, but have stuck with Windows because of my previous employment as a Windows software developer and the sad fact that Apple has never allowed anyone the opportunity to become an independent Apple software developer. 

Nonetheless, I downloaded a copy of Safari to see what Apple software looks like on a PC and I've got to say that it's pretty good.  The browser is still in beta and so there are still mucho bugs, but it is obviously very fast.  I can't use it to blog, though, because the Typepad posting screen doesn't display properly.   Apple has provided a helpful bug-reporting icon which I duly used and I look forward to improved versions to come.

Dropping the barriers between PC's and Apples can only be a good thing.

Youtube World

Kos advises his adoring readers to record everything they do.

 

Every appearance by a top Republican official or candidate should be recorded. Every one of them.

 

All it takes is one "Macaca" incident to transform a race or create one where one didn't exist. As the Montana incident blogged earlier today showed, a video can knock out prospective candidates before they even enter.

 

And this is no longer about finding one big blunder to put on a campaign commercial. It's about using video and (free) technologies like YouTube to build narratives about opponents, using their own words, at their own events.

Who, on the left or the right, could disagree?  Of course, leftists, most of whom don't work -- or if they do, work for the government which is about the same thing -- will have much more time for this.  But the stray conservative will be out there, too, and that can only be a good thing.

For years we've been treated to repeated media examples of Ronald Reagan's, Dan Quayle's, George H.W. Bush's and certainly GWB's malapropisms, missteps and verbal blunders.  It all served, of course, to cement the left-wing zeitgeist that conservatives are bumbling fools.  But now, in the age of Youtube, we can highlight the Democrats' mistakes, too.

Rush Limbaugh has been doing it for years, but of course it never broke into the mainstream media.  My favorite has always been the clip of Al Gore and Bill Clinton touring Monticello when Al Gore asked the docent whom a particular bust represented.  Rather flustered, the tourguide responded, "Um, that's George Washington."  This should all be great fun.

Finally!

Via the Instapundit I find out that flying cars are just around the corner.  It turns out that NASA's been working on them but is holding back its announcement until that pesky problem of keeping us from hitting trees, your neighbor's house, power lines and each other's flying car is solved.  In the meantime, though, good old Yankee ingenuity is at work.

Paul Moller has developed his own flying car and is working hard to get it into production.

The current model is a cherry-red coupe that looks as though it should be dogfighting TIE fighters outside the Death Star. The futuristic Skycar has four seats (carrying up to 750 lbs.), a maximum air speed of 350 mph, and a range of about 750 mi. In theory, it gets more than 25 mpg. On the ground, the Skycar should travel a dinky 30 to 35 mph, just fast enough to get to an empty parking lot and stun everyone with a sweet vertical takeoff.

Oh, and wouldn't that be sweet, indeed.

Free Wi-Fi No Bargain?

Does Mayor Brown really want to subject Buffalonians to this?

I Want My Flying Car!

Since I was a little boy in the early 60's, I've been promised flying cars.  And dammit, here I am in 2007 and I'm still driving a f*****g Ford pickup just like Dad was in 1953 (albeit his didn't have a cassette player.)  So, when I see video, like this one, I know I'm just setting myself up for more disappointment -- it is tantalizing though.

I have to say that the wings, when folded up, don't exactly scream Acura, but you have to make some allowances for the ability to actually fly to work in Tonawanda each morning.  Just imagine avoiding that traffic-crush at Symphony Circle each day.    

I Won't Uninstall It But . . .

OK, I admit it.  I'm a Microsoft schmuck, a lay-down, a patsy.  I first touched a Microsoft product in 1983 when I got my hands on an IBM-PC XT running PC-DOS. And over the years I became the DOS master.  Eventually, and only under duress, I made the transition to Windows, learned to love it and actually made my living programming applications for it throughout the late 90's.  I still hold a soft spot in my heart for ol' Bill Gates's creations.

But today I gave up on Internet Explorer 7.   When Microsoft finally implemented Firefox's tabbed interface, I downloaded it in a heartbeat but, alas, it isn't quite there.  I could put up with its inability to properly render a page at smaller and smaller resolutions and it wasn't a huge deal that when you switch to another tab and then return to the original, it was likely garbled gibberish that required a refresh.  That's just a button-click after all.

But its proclivity to freeze up every, oh I don't know, 2 minutes, has done me in.  Yes, if you open another copy of IE7 and switch your focus to it, the frozen copy will likely start up again.  And yes, occasionally you need to open another copy, load a site, hit 'Refresh' and then -- and only then -- will the recalcitrant "spawn" come back to life.

But it's all just become too much of a pain to live with and so I've sheepishly returned home to Firefox.  Microsoft should know better.  What the hell are they thinking when they roll out new stuff full of bugs? I bought a brand new Toshiba laptop last month and it's working beautifully -- I love it.  And I'm just thankful for one thing -- it didn't come loaded with Vista.  I can't imagine what fresh hell its users are suffering through.

Show Me The Paper

New York's foot-dragging in approving a new voting system has had at least one unintended consequence -- and this time it's a good one.  We've been able to watch what's worked and what hasn't in other states.  For example, Florida jumped on the electronic voting bandwagon early and is now scrambling to get back off.

During the chad-hanging agony of Florida's 2000 presidential election, it would have been hard to imagine a politician appearing before a crowd and promising more manual recounts - and getting applause.

But after six years and a contentious experiment with paperless electronic voting in much of the state, Democratic U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler last week made hand recounts sound as appealing as low-cost prescription drugs when he spoke to a senior-dominated audience west of Delray Beach.

"Florida law wisely says, in a close election, the people deserve a manual recount," Wexler declared.

He then introduced Gov. Charlie Crist, who wants legislators to approve $32.5 million to end paperless voting in Florida. The Republican governor got wild applause from the Democrat-dominated audience as he, too, called for a return to paper ballots and the prospect of more recounts.

"We need to be able to find out, if there is a question about a vote, that there's a ballot to recount," Crist said.

There are obviously problems with paper-based voting systems, too, but well-designed rules defining a properly-cast vote can overcome most of those.  There's still nothing like a good-old stack of reassuring paper to fall back on, though, when the outcome of an election is disputed.  New York can still benefit from Florida's (and Ohio's and North Carolina's and . . .) mistake, if only for once we'll pay attention.

The Key To A Stolen Election

More e-voting shenanigans.

Imagine if all it took to get inside widely-used Diebold electronic voting machines--perhaps with malicious intentions, such as installing tally-altering software on its memory card--was a photograph of the key to the system's physical lock.

Thanks to a little help from the e-voting outfit itself, it may actually be that simple, a security researcher from Princeton University suggested this week.

According to J. Alex Halderman, a computer science PhD student, a picture of the key published at Diebold's online store was a veritable blueprint for filing down ordinary hardware-store cabinet keys to an identical shape.

Ross Kinard of the site SploitCast, which calls itself "the podcast for hackers, geeks, and the security paranoid," alerted Halderman to the vulnerability. Kinard recently mailed three of his homemade keys to Halderman, who then successfully used them to unlock a Diebold AccuVote-TS machine.

Paper ballots, anyone?  New York shouldn't even consider spending our money on computerized voting equipment.  It isn't necessary and it isn't secure.  That should end the discussion.

Internet Explorer 7 Update

Dissecting Leftism hears from a reader who had much the same experience I did after downloading IE7.

After being prompted by my computer to download and install the latest Windows update, it asked me to also upgrade my browser to IE7 (I was using IE6).I like to use IE most of the time because I run so many websites, and I like to see them through the same viewer as the majority of the population. So I decided to go ahead and update IE. After it finished, I was no longer able to launch an IE browser. In fact, any time I attempted to, it froze my entire computer. I even tried right clicking the IE icon on my desktop, so I could check on the settings and THAT made my computer freeze too. At first I thought it killed my internet connection, but fortunately I was able to connect using Mozila FireFox so I could do a quick search. What I discovered was that hundreds (probably thousands) of people have posted similar problems in the past week, meaning it is likely affecting MILLIONS of people. I simply did a Windows System Restore to yesterday's restore point, and all is good again. If you haven't updated to IE7 yet, I would suggest waiting for a few months and making sure the general word on the street is a "go" before trying it.

Yes! I inexplicably forgot to mention that after downloading IE7, my computer, upon rebooting, would bring up Windows XP with nothing but the landscape:  no icons and no menus.  I, too, had to reboot in "safe mode" and specify "last known safe settings."  That did take care of the problem, but I'm not so sure that the majority of Windows users would know to try it.

I was perilously close to losing everything and reinstalling the original software disk.  Be afraid, be very afraid.

Internet Explorer 7

Just an aside.  If you're hankering to download Internet Explorer 7.0, just lie down for a couple minutes and get over it.  I got it last week only after removing an old and seemingly unused program completely screwed up my Internet connection settings.

I decided that as long as I had to reload Explorer anyway I might as well go for the new one.

It's not horrible.  It contains the tabbed interface we've come to like in Firefox but there are annoying display problems.  At certain zoom settings, hyperlinks don't line up with the text, the cursor tends to disappear in editing boxes (always annoying for a blogger) and I'm sure someone will soon inform me that Vladimir Putin now has free access to the contents of my hard drive.

It'll get there, I'm sure.  It's not bad enough that I'd scrap it and go back to 6, but it's not there yet.

The Cat Is Out Of The Bag

On the topic of that hysterically-funny picture that a bunch of soldiers took imploring John "Carry" to get them out of "Irak," Steven Den Beste comments on the sea-change in communications it represents.

The picture is hilarious, but think about the process: a handful of smartass soldiers currently serving in Iraq (from the Minnesota National Guard) created that poster, and someone used a digital camera to take a picture of 8 others holding it up with (deservedly) big grins on their faces.

Then the picture was downloaded into a computer and, I assume, emailed to someone in the US. I haven't got the slightest idea where it first appeared, but it spread like wildfire and at this point I've seen various versions of it on at least five sites, and many others have linked to one or more of those. Within just a few hours of when that photograph was taken in Iraq, at least a million people in the US, halfway around the world, had seen the picture and laughed at it. Probably by now it's many millions. And that's without any participation by TV or magazines or the newspapers who, considering the prevailing political bias in such organizations, probably wouldn't have given it any exposure if they could possibly manage not to.

Not only would the mainstream media have squelched the picture, we never would have heard of the Kerry gaffe in the first place.  The "Silent Majority" isn't silent anymore and that's made all the difference.

Sunday, Bloody Sunday

President Bush sings U2.

Don't Ask Me What I Meant

Google keeps on trying.

Slow News Day

Am I the only one surprised that taking tests on a computer was considered so important as to be on the front page?  Makes me wonder what story got yanked at the last minute.

In Memory Of Eileen Dover and Jack Meeoff.

Via The Conspiracy To Keep You Poor And Stupid comes this list of, um, poorly thought-out web-domain names.

3. Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island at http://www.penisland.net

5. There's the Italian Power Generator company, http://www.powergenitalia.com

7. If you're looking for IP computer software, there's always http://www.ipanywhere.com

8. The First Cumming Methodist Church Web site is http://www.cummingfirst.com

9. And the designers at Speed of Art await you at their wacky Web site, http://www.speedofart.com

Buffalo Unwired

The Buffalo News on the push to spread the wonders of wi-fi .

The Albright-Knox Art Gallery now is part of BuffaloNiagaraWiFi, after recently installing access points on the front and back of the building, said Bryan Gawronski, head of technical services at the gallery. Trust me when I tell you that I think wi-fi is the coolest thing since, um, hi-fi (and if you're too young to know what that is go look it up,) but don't fall for the claims that we absolutely must have it or we'll fall behind the other cities.  If ever wi-fi becomes an economic necessity then private business will jump on the opportunity to unwire Buffalo with both feet.

Across Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo State College soon will link into the municipal Wi-Fi network, providing wireless access inside E.H. Butler Library and outside on campus quads.

"It has a real benefit for the area," said Maryruth Glogowski, the college's assistant vice president for library and instructional technology.

Hoffman said BuffaloNiagaraWiFi is following a conservative, financially viable model while closely watching what other cities are doing.

However, Torke, the blogger, said the region is making a mistake by not putting in place a broader network that covers every corner of the city.

"It would put Buffalo on the map," Torke said.

With all due respect to my friend David Torke [the News should at least have linked him,] no it won't.

It might get us a mention in some USAToday article about the wireless trend but very, very few would actually care.  Now, tt probably is a good marketing tool for businesses that cater to college kids who tend to lug their laptops around with them -- but who else does that?  And as for fostering economic development, actual businesspeople are either at their office, at the client's office, at home, at the airport or in a hotel room.

Those places already have Internet access.  All the talk about wi-fi as a business development tool is mere wishing.

In the end, government-funded wi-fi is nothing more than providing a utility to residents --and a frivolous one at that.  Why not just offer free electricity in Buffalo?  Now that would put us on the map and would actually be a business-booster -- a huge one.   

Let's let them take the risk, we've got enough to worry about as it is.

Townhall

For those of you who enjoy Townhall.com, it's been completely redesigned and expanded.  Looks good.

A New Must-Have

Korean cell-phone maker LG is introducing a phone with a built-in breathalyzer.

Here's how it works: Users blow into a small spot on the phone, and if they've had too much to drink the phone issues a warning and shows a weaving car hitting traffic cones.

"So they test it and it says don't drive so they leave their car or call the taxi," explained Sung Mee Cho of Seju Engineering Inc.

The company also sells plug-in Breathalyzer adapters for some phones. None of the models tell you exactly how much you may be over or under the legal limit, but it can keep you from making other alcohol-related mistakes.

Very handy, indeed, but here's the really valuable feature.

The LP4100 also allows users to set up the phone so on certain nights and after a certain time they do not call certain people in their phone book. Think ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend.

If you have a blood alcohol level over .08, the phone will not let you dial that person. So it not only promotes sobriety, but chastity — and probably your dignity, as well.

That feature alone should make it a best-seller.

Join The Revolution

I feel sorry for this contributor to Everybody's Column.

My phone wasn't working back in March, so I called the phone company. The representative told me that if the problem was beyond the interface relay box, it would be the company's problem but if it was before the box, it was my problem because I don't have line charge on my bill. She also said that if the repairman said the problem was mine, it immediately was a $91 charge.

OK, I have to have a phone, right? So the repairman replaced a line that was bad. In all, he was here two and half hours. When my bill came - $360 - I almost fainted. That's half of what I get each month in disability. Folks, I'd advise you to get line charge on your bill. It costs $3.45 a month - that is until the price goes up again.

Carol Jimerson

Gowanda

$360!  Won't someone please help this woman get a cellphone?  She should join the ranks of us who've eliminated our land-lines and plunge in.  $360 would just about get her through an entire year with free long distance to boot.

Citi-Stat

I'm not altogether sure that a failed computer system is really part of the problem with New York's child welfare program;  but it's entirely possible.  Large custom-designed software projects are notorious -- in private business as well as in government -- for costing more than expected and delivering less.  But it sure seems that the government's end up running a lot worse.

That's due of course to bureaucracies' inherent lack of accountability, lack of urgency and lack of need to make a profit to get paid.  But those don't make the foul-ups any easier to accept.  Mayor Brown has recently stepped into the software-fray by vowing to get the Citistat software package up, running and effectively used in Buffalo.  I'll watch this project closely.

I, foolishly enough, assumed that when Masiello first announced that Citistat would be implemented here -- that it had been.  It wasn't; but if Brown does nothing else during his time as Mayor but make Citistat work and use its data to improve the city's services, he'll have really accomplished something very important.

Free Ride's Almost Over

AOL and Yahoo take lead in putting price on e-mail

Companies will soon have to buy the electronic equivalent of a postage stamp if they want to be certain that their e-mail will be delivered to many of their customers.

 

America Online and Yahoo, two of the world's largest providers of e-mail accounts, are about to start using a system that gives preferential treatment to messages from companies that pay from a quarter of a cent to one cent each to have them delivered. The Internet companies say this will help them identify legitimate mail and cut down on junk e-mail, identity-theft scams and other scourges.

 

The two companies also stand to earn millions of dollars a year from the system if it is widely adopted.

 

AOL and Yahoo will still accept e-mail from senders who have not paid, but the paid messages will be given special treatment. On AOL, for example, they will go straight to users' main mailboxes and will not have to run the gantlet of spam filters that could divert them to a special bulk e-mail box or strip them of images and Web links.

There's nothing wrong with that; what's amazing is that we've had 'free' email for so long.  Of course we've all paid for an Internet-service provider and now that ISP will probably have to weigh the benefits of continuing free email 'privileges' or charging for them.  Throw in the desperate desire of the state governments to force sales tax on Internet transactions and the Web may find its seemingly inexorable growth become, um, exorable.

Your Public Servants At Work

. . . falsifying Wikipedia records.

We already know, of course, that politicians live primarily for re-election and typically view the truth as an impediment to the higher purpose of unfettered self-aggrandizement.

Still, we can be excused for feeling mildly nauseated when fresh confirmation of this distasteful aspect of modern politicking surfaces.

The latest episode appeared last week in the form of a report that aides to Rep. Marty Meehan, a Massachusetts Democrat, deleted references to his broken term-limits pledge and massive campaign war chest on Wikipedia.

Then the trusty editors at Wikipedia got together and compiled a list of over 1,000 edits made by Internet addresses allocated to the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. The IP address subsequently was blocked and unblocked.

An extensive analysis reveals how juvenile official Washington secretly is, behind the mind-numbingly serious talk of public policy.

One edit listed White House press secretary Scott McClellan under the entry for "douche." Another said of Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma) that: "Coburn was voted the most annoying Senator by his peers in Congress. This was due to Senator Coburn being a huge douche-bag."

(Keep in mind these are the same holier-than-thou political climbers tasked with writing laws telling the rest of the country how to behave. Or else.)

This juvenalia is, of course, thoroughly bipartisan. Another change to the Iraq invasion entry shows that the anonymous congressional editor played up the dubious connections between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

It's true, of course, that the cretins who are behind the Wikipedia alterations can (and probably will) do this from their home computers in the future. But the difficulty in policing the political class shouldn't make us any less alarmed at the most recent evidence of its misdeeds.

Computer!

As an honorary neo-con, techno-geek warmonger, I find this very cool.

Five dozen men, many of them former pilots who have helped shape naval aviation for the past 50 years, were spellbound as they looked into the simulated cockpit of the Navy’s next-generation fighter jet.

Two 8-by-20-inch touch  screen displays dominated the dashboard.

Tapping the screen changes radio channels. Touching it elsewhere selects a weapon to use: missile, bomb, cannon. 

Pointing to a landing spot on the map display tells the computer to fly the plane there – nearly hands off.

A visual system built into the pilot’s helmet projects an image onto the visor, giving real-time navigation and targeting information. No matter which way the pilot’s head turns, the data are always in view.

Voice commands are integrated into the controls to rapidly react to changing mission requirements. 

There is no control stick in the floor. It’s been replaced by sliding knobs on each side of the cockpit, with fingertip switches.

The one on the left is the throttle. The right one controls direction.

“If you have two fingers and can touch the screen, you can fly this thing,” an F/A-18 Hornet pilot quipped from the back of the crowd of admirers.

"Voice commands are integrated into the controls to rapidly react to changing mission requirements."  If only Scotty were around.

"Computer!"

Evil Americans Retain Control

Hey, if it ain't broke . . .

Open Office

I've been reading more and more about something called the open office standard which the EU has been pushing for some time now but really made its first big splash over here when the State of Massachusetts made known its intent to adopt it for all state government computerized record-keeping..

The point is that no citizen (or government agency) of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts should be compelled to buy any Microsoft product (or products from any other single vendor) in order to have access to public records. Period.

I finally got around to checking out the website OpenOffice.org today and found that Version 2.0 is available for free and unrestricted download.  It's a 76 mb file so plan your time accordingly.  After playing with it for just a couple hours it looks pretty good.

If any of you have been suffering along with Microsoft Works or an elderly version of Office, I'd suggest giving this a try.  It includes a database program, spreadsheet, word processor, presentation software (a la Powerpoint,) a drawing program, and a Math module that, well, I'm not too sure what that one does. 

All of the applications are very professionally written, have a Microsofty look and feel and appear -- at first glance -- to be as fully-featured as their Office counterparts.  They read and save documents in virtually every format known to man (including Word docs) -- and, big bonus, you can save your word-processor documents as Adobe .pdf files.  Microsoft has promised that in its next release, but I think that given the growing ubiquity of Adobe documents, this feature is worth the download by itself.

The release is pretty new and may have bugs so as always proceed at your own risk.  And you might want to think about cashing in a little of your Microsoft stock while you're at it.  Amazon's selling Microsoft Office 2003 Professional Edition for $414.99 today.  If OpenOffice takes off like I think it will, that won't last.

Next year this time look for $49 MS Office or maybe it'll just come free with Windows.

Yum, Cookies Good

Jeff Jarvis on the benevolence of cookies.

I am a cookie monster. I firmly believe we need more cookies. We need cookies on blogs so we, too, can make that money and support this medium. We need cookies on RSS so we can count that audience, too (everybody's linking to TLB ecosystem traffic counts but the truth is that they're pretty meaningless because they don't include RSS readership -- I'm now serving four times more RSS than HTML -- because RSS isn't cookied).

But there is an idiotic belief in some quarters that cookies are bad because they somehow impinge on our privacy -- when, in fact, I dare anyone to say how a content site's simple traffic-tracking cookie violates your privacy in any meaningful way.

Privacy is the boogeyword of the age. It is tech's version of politically correct idiocy. All you have to do is invoke the spectre of "privacy" against someone and they're assumed to be evil. It's a particularly comical form of nerd McCarthyism: I have in my hand a list of cookies!

All this is leading to stupid moves that hurt the internet: its convenience, its revenue, its business.

A Laptop In Every Hut

A group at MIT is trying to develop a laptop aimed at the developing world that would sell for $100.

The $100 Laptop will be a Linux-based, full-color, full-screen laptop, which initially is achieved either by rear projecting the image on a flat screen or by using electronic ink (developed at the MIT Media Lab). In addition, it will be rugged, use innovative power (including wind-up), be WiFi- and cell phone-enabled, and have USB ports galore. Its current specifications are: 500MHz, 1GB, 1 Megapixel. The cost of materials for each laptop is estimated to be approximately $90, which includes the display, as well as the processor and memory, and allows for $10 for contingency or profit.

Great idea -- and at that price even I could justify giving them to school-kids.  I suspect that a $50 IPod would sell even better, though.

When They're Right, They're Right

While the Guardian is not one of my favorite papers editorially-speaking, it's been way out in front of the rest of the print media in its recognition of the influence of blogs and in its outright advocacy of the phenomenon.  It often attempts to spur UK bloggers to attempt to match the influence their American counterparts have occasionally managed.

It's all the more interesting when compared to the American press which, by and large, has either ignored the development of blog-power or has given it grudging credit in a couple instances while, at the same time, feeling obligated to disparage it as unprofessional and uncontrolled. 

Yesterday's Guardian on how blogs are changing and combining efforts as they move from commentary to reporting news.

Wi-Fi Phone

Vonage is close to releasing a Wi-Fi phone .

The phone uses a form factor similar to a standard cell phone, but connects to 802.11b Wi-Fi networks. Once connected to the Internet, the phone utilizes Vonage's voice over IP infrastructure to make calls. In tests by BetaNews, the phone performed admirably and automatically acquired network access without a hitch.

Very cool.  Vonage plans to release it by the end of the year and says it will sell for about $100.

The Instapundit and I agree with Kos .

Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, who runs the liberal blog Daily Kos, told Salon that he'll stop linking to Times Op-Eds once the new policy goes into effect. "I think this is the best way they can become irrelevant," he said.

"If my readers can't read it, why would I link to it? The key to blogging is that readers can look at the source material and make up their own minds."

One of the biggest punishments the NYT could receive would be for Kos and Reynolds to stop linking to them.  A link from those two sends a couple hundred thousand readers to the Times website.  Just as advertising pays for the dead-tree version, so it will online.  And it's much moreso for the Internet Times.  I, for one, never buy the New York Times -- n-e-v-e-r.  I do, however follow links to its articles and am thus exposed to its ads.

I think they goofed on this decision.  I bet it's retracted before its scheduled September rollout.

A380 Lifts Off

Amazing.

Although I do wonder about its future. Airbus is gambling that a significant number of airports will make very costly modifications to handle this plane, and so far not many seem willing. 

Which can only mean one thing.  Before long we'll be hearing the calls to spend millions at Niagara Falls Airport to attract A380s.

Mark my words.