If every copy of GTA in the game received events from the outside world at the same time, then that approach (sharing a random seed) would work. Unfortunately it ain't quite that simple.
Initially, everyone's game will be perfectly in sync. But when Johnny squishes Alice with his car, Johnny's game knows about it before Alice's, because the message needs time to propagate across the network. So Johnny's game makes his pedestrians react a split second before Alice's pedestrians react, and those in turn react a split second before Fred's peds react, and so forth.
Repeat 100,000 times, and peoples' games quickly become desynchronized.
+1 Informative, baby! I had no idea that one could buy off-the-shelf components to perform infrared rangefinding. I retract my statement; their advertising isn't misleading, simply hyped. (And if it didn't bear hype, it wouldn't be advertising.)
Don't forget X-ray specs, magic decoder rings, action figures with Kung-Fu grip... have I left anything out?
Or, a classic from my own childhood: the small plastic plane, tethered to a wire and powered by a tiny battery-driven motor. Its box always advertised it as "Electromic flying aircraft." Not electronic, mind you -- which would imply the use of a transistor somewhere. It was a pretty cool toy, but even as a 12 year old I used to laugh at how someone went through the trouble of inventing a *new word* just to fool consumers.
Man... come to think of it, the toy industry has been nothing but shysters and hustlers for decades now! I shouldn't be offended by RoboSapien's false claims more than I'd be offended by anyone else's.
I'm not doubting that they've got infrared LEDs in the toy, or that they use them for simple obstacle detection -- but to call it "radar" is rather grand and misleading, don't you think? For one, "radar" connotes the use of the radio portion of the RF spectrum -- or more often these days, the microwave. When you perform rangefinding with light, then it's called "lidar."
Of course, lidar is quite uncommon, and certainly beyond the capabilities of a $200 children's toy. I doubt very much that the RoboSapien does any sort of rangefinding at all. Either it detects an obstacle within a fixed radius of its sensor, or it detects no obstacle. Hyperbole and pedantry aside, that's my real beef with their use of the word "radar."
Someone needs to read his physics textbook! Marketing hacks amuse me. Sometimes, I get the impression they're arbitrarily stringing together half-remembered words until their bullet point sounds cool enough.
This might work most of the time... but when you're writing the advertising copy for a toy marketed toward geeks? Really, now!
Next, they'll be claiming that Robo Sapien is capable of a running crawl. He'll be compatible with wired WiFi! He'll be able to jump to great depths, leaping tall buildings in a single dive!
Then again, maybe Robo Sapien really CAN emit both infrared and radar. Perhaps in 2006 he'll come in x-ray and microwave flavors, followed in 2008 by the gamma ray Robo Sapien.
Don't forget that most.NET apps load innumerable assemblies (DLLs) into their address space -- basically the entire.NET runtime and then some. This has the unfortunate side effect of making any.NET-using process look like the world's largest memory hog.
Don't worry; any discontent you experience due to our military units being away from home is simply due to the fact that we are a vestigial Democracy. When our newly elected President is inaugurated in January, he will no doubt choose to change the government to Despotism or Monarchy. Taxes will increase, but just think of all the mechanized infantry units we'll be able to build!!
Myself, I'm waiting for the five turns of Anarchy after Bush chooses to change government styles... it's the perfect time to settle old scores, blow off steam, and loot those things you've always wanted but never been able to afford.
Oy! That's what I get for not reading The Rules closely enough. How long have we been wasting money maintaining these useless structures? How many gold-coin-like monetary units of our contented citizens' tax money have gone to this useless end? I DEMAND ACCOUNTABILITY!
Surely, you can't be serious in suggesting we fund yet another Wonder of the World. While another Manhattan Product or an Apollo Mission would bring us valuable influence and perhaps lead Canadian and Mexican border cities to rebel and join our nation, there is little chance that we would complete either project.
Our scout units have reported that the Chinese and the Indians are both working on these Wonders, devoting the output of their largest cities. You and I both know that our industrial output, measured in shields, cannot compete with theirs.
The long-term path to victory is clear, my friends. We must build Improvements on a city-by-city basis in order to solve the energy problem. Most of our cities have a Granary and an Aqueduct now, which is a good first step. I recommend a Factory to boost production, followed by a Recycling Center and a Power Plant in each city. This will both reduce pollution and increase industrial output, allowing us to build ever more military units and product ourselves from ever-more-frequent Barbarian uprisings.
Once we have adequately defended ourselves, we can turn our industrial output toward the most important goal: building Modules for the starship that will someday take our descendants to Alpha Centauri and allow us to win The Game. Scuttlebutt has it that our scientists have almost completed the research necessary to build a Propulsion Module for our starship!
(Ignore this post if you've never played Civilization.)
I've been writing software for fifteen years, and games for ten. I've worked on a major 3D game title (albeit not in the critical path to development) and have voluntarily stayed at my desk for 12-18 hours a day, seven days a week, for 2-3 months at a stretch. I am no stranger to hard work.
But my game development time was spent in a small team, three coders and two artists, funded out of our own pockets and creating our own 3D engine from scratch.
Game programming is not special. It's not fundamentally different from any other area of software design. Do you intend to claim that 80-hour work weeks are the norm in the game programming industry? I have half a dozen friends working at variously-sized game development houses in the bay area who will dispute that claim.
If EA is so mismanaged, and their employees so underproductive, that they are throwing their teams into 85-hour-work-week crunch mode for upwards of HALF the project's development time, then there is something very, very wrong at EA. They need to come up with more realistic schedules for their projects, or find more productive coders, or find managers who have a clue about software design, or learn to reuse code, or SOMETHING.
OTOH, it sounds to me like EA is WELL managed. They've cottoned to the idea that more productive teams means smaller teams and a shorter development cycle. By setting aggressive schedules, they're insisting on a level of productivity from their employees that is unattainable to the employee of average skill and intelligence. So they ramp the hours up, ever more, in order to fit the overly-aggressive schedule they've devised.
Now, if there is no incentive against EA -- or any company -- employing such a practice, why don't all of our employers go that route? How would you like to live in a world where every job keeps you at the desk from 8am to 10pm, seven days a week? If all employers have been obliged to adopt the same grueling labor practices in order to compete, then you no longer CAN leave your job -- any other job you find, will be just as bad.
The problem with letting the market do what it will is this: optimal efficiency is achieved through destructive means. The greatest profit can be had by he who is able to create the most externalities and therefore seat others with the cost of his operations, while taking the gains for himself. This is true in the mining industry, it's true in the petroleum industry, and it's true in the software industry. If you don't impose SOME regulation, then a rational entity will always choose to maximize its own gain regardless of others' losses.
The goal of labor legislation should be the same as the goal of environmental legislation: to close the loop, to provide a feedback path that curbs the number and magnitude of the externalities that businesses can create, and holds them accountable for the negative consequences of their actions in situations where they are not already fiscally responsible for those consequences.
All good points. When the technology matures to the point where its failure rate is virtually nil, *then* we can begin addressing the use cases for a weapon that authenticates its user.
From what you've said (and I'm too lazy to go ask my cop friend, so I'll trust you), most shots fired are snap shots. In that case, we'd need to optimize the smart gun system so it worked flawlessly under those conditions. I agree that the weapon's "intelligence" is secondary to a cop's -- but it never hurts to add a fail-safe to your system, whatever it be.
Perhaps the weapon will allow one round to be fired before it's authenticated the user. Perhaps it stays enabled as long as it's in the holster, and allows for a 1-2 second grace period after being removed before ceasing to operate if it hasn't re-authenticated. I don't know the answer -- and I agree the technology isn't ready yet -- but that shouldn't stop us from researching it.
In scenario #2, what would happen if the gun weren't smart? Correct! The officer would still be killed, if he were foolish enough to let a bad guy get control of his weapon.
In scenario #3, what would happened if the gun weren't smart? Bad Guy would disarm Cop, and instead of taking Cop hostage on account of the useless gun, he'd just shoot Cop in the head. (If the gun were smart, OTOH, Cop could use any number of rasslin' techniques to disable Bad Guy without necessarily moving his hand near Bad Guy's gun.)
So you see, in most scenarios, the cop's, bad guy's, and innocent bystanders' chances for survival actually *improve* when the gun is smart.
Let's not forget that cops aren't trained to act like cowboys, which is to say they don't draw and shoot. When a cop fires his weapon, he's usually been aiming his gun for some seconds or minutes in the classic two-hand stance (which, btw, provides some natural redunancy for the gun's recognition device, if both his hands are chipped).
Imagine a system that authenticates the weapon by recognizing the offier's chip, and then *stays* authenticated as long as there is pressure on the grip. Even if the system glitches and recognition fails, the cop can still fire at will. (What's with this misplaced anger toward Will?)
There's a future in law enforcement for well-designed and well-tested smart weapons. But there's an even bigger future for nonlethal wepaons.
I've often wondered about that myself. The technology is certainly there -- witness the successful deployment of Java Cards in various markets. IIRC, those use Java bytecodes as their native instruction set (I can't imagine there would be room for a translator, much less a general-purpose kernel, memory management, etc on those tiny wafers of silicon.)
I guess Java was embraced too soon by the business apps crowd and the web design crowd, and its APIs quickly grew humongous to accomodate the varied uses to which people were putting it... and so, all to soon, it became known as a huge bloated toolbox of write-once-run-anywhere goodness. Not a reputation the embedded systems people would look kindly upon.
Oh, I didn't mean to imply that Java was the best choice for implementating a speech recognition engine. I wasn't aware of specifics (and thank you for them), but I had an inkling that speech recognition is pretty computationally intensive.
I was just trying to point out, in a humorous way, that virtual machine-based languages such as Java can be just as fast as compiled languages in some circumstances. And I wanted to make the corollary point that there is no "one true language" -- there is only the right language for the job, and that varies depending on the nature of the job.
KNOWN CAUSES: Recent research results from information-theoretic psychoanalysts shows that Virtual Machine Syndrome is most likely a pre-emptive defensive discourse strategy. VMS sufferers typically become symptomatic after months or years of constant haranguing at the hands of colleagues, friends and professional contacts that anything they write, regardless of its execution environment or portability requirements, could have been done "better and faster in C." Oftentimes, such criticism is levied against VMS sufferers even when the application in question is I/O-bound and spends 80% or more of its time suspended, waiting for network or disk I/O to complete.
TREATMENT: Implement reliable and efficient systems using virtual machine of choice, regardless of criticisms. Apply free-market therapy judiciously, allowing adopters of Virtual Machine technology to thrive and become prosperous if warranted. VMS symptoms typically disappear when sufferer's stock options are valued at 300% of their strike price. Symptoms may also be temporarily relieved through just-in-time compilation.
RELATED SYNDROMES: Ossified Self-Important Myopia (OSIM), which is the tendency to assume that one's favorite programming paradigm, language, or OS is unconditionally and unreservedly the best choice for any software project. Characterised by the inability to understand that the only way to guarantee maximum efficiency is to write everything in assembly language, with complete and perfect knowledge of all quirks of the specific target instruction set.
I tend to be anti-death penalty, but like you, I believe in judicious and application of the death penalty, with extreme discretion on the part of the judge and jury.
That having been said: if I were genuinely guilty of a crime, and I were convicted given a choice between death, and life in prison without possibility of parole -- I would choose the former. For people like me, the death penalty would be a mercy. Perhaps this man was like me.
Thanks.:) I'm so accustomed to seeing the phrase "deus ex machina" translated as "[holy] ghost in the machine" that I didn't pause to consider meaning of the actual Latin word deus -- which can't be mistaken for anything other than God, when you think of it. ("Deity," and so forth.)
Keep in mind that the guy lives in mainland China, so his English is not only sub-par, but anachronistic as well. When's the last time we shipped a crop of English teachers over there?
Nonetheless -- point taken. I'd never dream of bidding on this (or any other antique) without being able to inspect it in person. So look -- don't touch -- and thereby get some value out of the scam.
Stephenson went on for pages about how beautiful it is, how uncommonly strong, etc -- in the context of the book, of course. I guess I assumed we've developed better materials and metallurgic processes by now, but I fell hook, line and sinker for Neal's yarn about how the process had been lost. Thanks for clearing things up.
Dovetailing nicely with this review, an antique katana of "Damascus steel" has recently gone up for auction on eBay.
Readers of the Baroque Trilogy will be familiar with watered steel after wading through dozens of pages of Stephenson's discourse on its nature and origin.
If you'd like to see what watered steel looks like for yourself, check it out!
IANALS (I Am Not A Latin Scholar), but I'd hazard a guess that it means "the ghost in the gold," or something similar. The chemical symbol for gold is Au, which is derived from its Latin name, which we can posit is something resembling "aurum" (although of course, as with all Latin nouns, the ending changes depending on the grammatical case of the word).
So, most likely, Deus Ex Aurum refers one of two things:
1) The sudden and inadequate resolution of all outstanding affairs upon the conclusion of the story, or
2) The enchanted gold that's been tossed around throughout the trilogy.
Good point. And, given that voting turnouts in this country are abysmal, there are more indifferent minds out there waiting to be swayed than indecisive minds.
The Dems must be hoping the movie does its job (incite the apathetic masses to use their rights, for once) without eroding their current base of support by too much. The numbers are certainly on their side.
When the populace drops the reins of power, the nation always gets taken for a ride. I'd thought America hadn't quite gotten to the bread-and-circuses stage yet, but I suppose the politicos wouldn't be spending bazillions of dollars on attack ads and appeals to sentimentality if it didn't all work frighteningly well.
I fear you're right, and hope you're wrong. Is there anything we can do to recover, any measure we might take to cause people to vote based on the policy position of their candidates, instead rah-rah-rah-go-teamism? If there isn't, then we're already doomed.
Slashdot Mirror
If every copy of GTA in the game received events from the outside world at the same time, then that approach (sharing a random seed) would work. Unfortunately it ain't quite that simple.
Initially, everyone's game will be perfectly in sync. But when Johnny squishes Alice with his car, Johnny's game knows about it before Alice's, because the message needs time to propagate across the network. So Johnny's game makes his pedestrians react a split second before Alice's pedestrians react, and those in turn react a split second before Fred's peds react, and so forth.
Repeat 100,000 times, and peoples' games quickly become desynchronized.
When you view the comments, at the top of the page, you will see a BUTTON (not a link) labeled "Reply". It is next to a button labeled "Change".
Click that "Reply" button and you'll post a top-level comment in reply to the thread.
+1 Informative, baby! I had no idea that one could buy off-the-shelf components to perform infrared rangefinding. I retract my statement; their advertising isn't misleading, simply hyped. (And if it didn't bear hype, it wouldn't be advertising.)
Don't forget X-ray specs, magic decoder rings, action figures with Kung-Fu grip ... have I left anything out?
Or, a classic from my own childhood: the small plastic plane, tethered to a wire and powered by a tiny battery-driven motor. Its box always advertised it as "Electromic flying aircraft." Not electronic, mind you -- which would imply the use of a transistor somewhere. It was a pretty cool toy, but even as a 12 year old I used to laugh at how someone went through the trouble of inventing a *new word* just to fool consumers.
Man... come to think of it, the toy industry has been nothing but shysters and hustlers for decades now! I shouldn't be offended by RoboSapien's false claims more than I'd be offended by anyone else's.
I'm not doubting that they've got infrared LEDs in the toy, or that they use them for simple obstacle detection -- but to call it "radar" is rather grand and misleading, don't you think? For one, "radar" connotes the use of the radio portion of the RF spectrum -- or more often these days, the microwave. When you perform rangefinding with light, then it's called "lidar."
Of course, lidar is quite uncommon, and certainly beyond the capabilities of a $200 children's toy. I doubt very much that the RoboSapien does any sort of rangefinding at all. Either it detects an obstacle within a fixed radius of its sensor, or it detects no obstacle. Hyperbole and pedantry aside, that's my real beef with their use of the word "radar."
Someone needs to read his physics textbook! Marketing hacks amuse me. Sometimes, I get the impression they're arbitrarily stringing together half-remembered words until their bullet point sounds cool enough.
This might work most of the time... but when you're writing the advertising copy for a toy marketed toward geeks? Really, now!
Next, they'll be claiming that Robo Sapien is capable of a running crawl. He'll be compatible with wired WiFi! He'll be able to jump to great depths, leaping tall buildings in a single dive!
Then again, maybe Robo Sapien really CAN emit both infrared and radar. Perhaps in 2006 he'll come in x-ray and microwave flavors, followed in 2008 by the gamma ray Robo Sapien.
At that point, who'll need the US army anymore?
Don't forget that most .NET apps load innumerable assemblies (DLLs) into their address space -- basically the entire .NET runtime and then some. This has the unfortunate side effect of making any .NET-using process look like the world's largest memory hog.
Don't worry; any discontent you experience due to our military units being away from home is simply due to the fact that we are a vestigial Democracy. When our newly elected President is inaugurated in January, he will no doubt choose to change the government to Despotism or Monarchy. Taxes will increase, but just think of all the mechanized infantry units we'll be able to build!!
Myself, I'm waiting for the five turns of Anarchy after Bush chooses to change government styles... it's the perfect time to settle old scores, blow off steam, and loot those things you've always wanted but never been able to afford.
Oy! That's what I get for not reading The Rules closely enough. How long have we been wasting money maintaining these useless structures? How many gold-coin-like monetary units of our contented citizens' tax money have gone to this useless end? I DEMAND ACCOUNTABILITY!
Surely, you can't be serious in suggesting we fund yet another Wonder of the World. While another Manhattan Product or an Apollo Mission would bring us valuable influence and perhaps lead Canadian and Mexican border cities to rebel and join our nation, there is little chance that we would complete either project.
Our scout units have reported that the Chinese and the Indians are both working on these Wonders, devoting the output of their largest cities. You and I both know that our industrial output, measured in shields, cannot compete with theirs.
The long-term path to victory is clear, my friends. We must build Improvements on a city-by-city basis in order to solve the energy problem. Most of our cities have a Granary and an Aqueduct now, which is a good first step. I recommend a Factory to boost production, followed by a Recycling Center and a Power Plant in each city. This will both reduce pollution and increase industrial output, allowing us to build ever more military units and product ourselves from ever-more-frequent Barbarian uprisings.
Once we have adequately defended ourselves, we can turn our industrial output toward the most important goal: building Modules for the starship that will someday take our descendants to Alpha Centauri and allow us to win The Game. Scuttlebutt has it that our scientists have almost completed the research necessary to build a Propulsion Module for our starship!
(Ignore this post if you've never played Civilization.)
I've been writing software for fifteen years, and games for ten. I've worked on a major 3D game title (albeit not in the critical path to development) and have voluntarily stayed at my desk for 12-18 hours a day, seven days a week, for 2-3 months at a stretch. I am no stranger to hard work.
But my game development time was spent in a small team, three coders and two artists, funded out of our own pockets and creating our own 3D engine from scratch.
Game programming is not special. It's not fundamentally different from any other area of software design. Do you intend to claim that 80-hour work weeks are the norm in the game programming industry? I have half a dozen friends working at variously-sized game development houses in the bay area who will dispute that claim.
If EA is so mismanaged, and their employees so underproductive, that they are throwing their teams into 85-hour-work-week crunch mode for upwards of HALF the project's development time, then there is something very, very wrong at EA. They need to come up with more realistic schedules for their projects, or find more productive coders, or find managers who have a clue about software design, or learn to reuse code, or SOMETHING.
OTOH, it sounds to me like EA is WELL managed. They've cottoned to the idea that more productive teams means smaller teams and a shorter development cycle. By setting aggressive schedules, they're insisting on a level of productivity from their employees that is unattainable to the employee of average skill and intelligence. So they ramp the hours up, ever more, in order to fit the overly-aggressive schedule they've devised.
Now, if there is no incentive against EA -- or any company -- employing such a practice, why don't all of our employers go that route? How would you like to live in a world where every job keeps you at the desk from 8am to 10pm, seven days a week? If all employers have been obliged to adopt the same grueling labor practices in order to compete, then you no longer CAN leave your job -- any other job you find, will be just as bad.
The problem with letting the market do what it will is this: optimal efficiency is achieved through destructive means. The greatest profit can be had by he who is able to create the most externalities and therefore seat others with the cost of his operations, while taking the gains for himself. This is true in the mining industry, it's true in the petroleum industry, and it's true in the software industry. If you don't impose SOME regulation, then a rational entity will always choose to maximize its own gain regardless of others' losses.
The goal of labor legislation should be the same as the goal of environmental legislation: to close the loop, to provide a feedback path that curbs the number and magnitude of the externalities that businesses can create, and holds them accountable for the negative consequences of their actions in situations where they are not already fiscally responsible for those consequences.
All good points. When the technology matures to the point where its failure rate is virtually nil, *then* we can begin addressing the use cases for a weapon that authenticates its user.
From what you've said (and I'm too lazy to go ask my cop friend, so I'll trust you), most shots fired are snap shots. In that case, we'd need to optimize the smart gun system so it worked flawlessly under those conditions. I agree that the weapon's "intelligence" is secondary to a cop's -- but it never hurts to add a fail-safe to your system, whatever it be.
Perhaps the weapon will allow one round to be fired before it's authenticated the user. Perhaps it stays enabled as long as it's in the holster, and allows for a 1-2 second grace period after being removed before ceasing to operate if it hasn't re-authenticated. I don't know the answer -- and I agree the technology isn't ready yet -- but that shouldn't stop us from researching it.
In scenario #2, what would happen if the gun weren't smart? Correct! The officer would still be killed, if he were foolish enough to let a bad guy get control of his weapon.
In scenario #3, what would happened if the gun weren't smart? Bad Guy would disarm Cop, and instead of taking Cop hostage on account of the useless gun, he'd just shoot Cop in the head. (If the gun were smart, OTOH, Cop could use any number of rasslin' techniques to disable Bad Guy without necessarily moving his hand near Bad Guy's gun.)
So you see, in most scenarios, the cop's, bad guy's, and innocent bystanders' chances for survival actually *improve* when the gun is smart.
Let's not forget that cops aren't trained to act like cowboys, which is to say they don't draw and shoot. When a cop fires his weapon, he's usually been aiming his gun for some seconds or minutes in the classic two-hand stance (which, btw, provides some natural redunancy for the gun's recognition device, if both his hands are chipped).
Imagine a system that authenticates the weapon by recognizing the offier's chip, and then *stays* authenticated as long as there is pressure on the grip. Even if the system glitches and recognition fails, the cop can still fire at will. (What's with this misplaced anger toward Will?)
There's a future in law enforcement for well-designed and well-tested smart weapons. But there's an even bigger future for nonlethal wepaons.
1) Buy a male Allercat and a female Allercat
2) ???
3) Profit!
I've often wondered about that myself. The technology is certainly there -- witness the successful deployment of Java Cards in various markets. IIRC, those use Java bytecodes as their native instruction set (I can't imagine there would be room for a translator, much less a general-purpose kernel, memory management, etc on those tiny wafers of silicon.)
... and so, all to soon, it became known as a huge bloated toolbox of write-once-run-anywhere goodness. Not a reputation the embedded systems people would look kindly upon.
I guess Java was embraced too soon by the business apps crowd and the web design crowd, and its APIs quickly grew humongous to accomodate the varied uses to which people were putting it
Oh, I didn't mean to imply that Java was the best choice for implementating a speech recognition engine. I wasn't aware of specifics (and thank you for them), but I had an inkling that speech recognition is pretty computationally intensive.
I was just trying to point out, in a humorous way, that virtual machine-based languages such as Java can be just as fast as compiled languages in some circumstances. And I wanted to make the corollary point that there is no "one true language" -- there is only the right language for the job, and that varies depending on the nature of the job.
KNOWN CAUSES: Recent research results from information-theoretic psychoanalysts shows that Virtual Machine Syndrome is most likely a pre-emptive defensive discourse strategy. VMS sufferers typically become symptomatic after months or years of constant haranguing at the hands of colleagues, friends and professional contacts that anything they write, regardless of its execution environment or portability requirements, could have been done "better and faster in C." Oftentimes, such criticism is levied against VMS sufferers even when the application in question is I/O-bound and spends 80% or more of its time suspended, waiting for network or disk I/O to complete.
TREATMENT: Implement reliable and efficient systems using virtual machine of choice, regardless of criticisms. Apply free-market therapy judiciously, allowing adopters of Virtual Machine technology to thrive and become prosperous if warranted. VMS symptoms typically disappear when sufferer's stock options are valued at 300% of their strike price. Symptoms may also be temporarily relieved through just-in-time compilation.
RELATED SYNDROMES: Ossified Self-Important Myopia (OSIM), which is the tendency to assume that one's favorite programming paradigm, language, or OS is unconditionally and unreservedly the best choice for any software project. Characterised by the inability to understand that the only way to guarantee maximum efficiency is to write everything in assembly language, with complete and perfect knowledge of all quirks of the specific target instruction set.
I tend to be anti-death penalty, but like you, I believe in judicious and application of the death penalty, with extreme discretion on the part of the judge and jury.
That having been said: if I were genuinely guilty of a crime, and I were convicted given a choice between death, and life in prison without possibility of parole -- I would choose the former. For people like me, the death penalty would be a mercy. Perhaps this man was like me.
Thanks. :) I'm so accustomed to seeing the phrase "deus ex machina" translated as "[holy] ghost in the machine" that I didn't pause to consider meaning of the actual Latin word deus -- which can't be mistaken for anything other than God, when you think of it. ("Deity," and so forth.)
Armchair etymology is fun!
Keep in mind that the guy lives in mainland China, so his English is not only sub-par, but anachronistic as well. When's the last time we shipped a crop of English teachers over there?
Nonetheless -- point taken. I'd never dream of bidding on this (or any other antique) without being able to inspect it in person. So look -- don't touch -- and thereby get some value out of the scam.
Stephenson went on for pages about how beautiful it is, how uncommonly strong, etc -- in the context of the book, of course. I guess I assumed we've developed better materials and metallurgic processes by now, but I fell hook, line and sinker for Neal's yarn about how the process had been lost. Thanks for clearing things up.
Dovetailing nicely with this review, an antique katana of "Damascus steel" has recently gone up for auction on eBay. Readers of the Baroque Trilogy will be familiar with watered steel after wading through dozens of pages of Stephenson's discourse on its nature and origin. If you'd like to see what watered steel looks like for yourself, check it out!
IANALS (I Am Not A Latin Scholar), but I'd hazard a guess that it means "the ghost in the gold," or something similar. The chemical symbol for gold is Au, which is derived from its Latin name, which we can posit is something resembling "aurum" (although of course, as with all Latin nouns, the ending changes depending on the grammatical case of the word).
So, most likely, Deus Ex Aurum refers one of two things:
1) The sudden and inadequate resolution of all outstanding affairs upon the conclusion of the story, or
2) The enchanted gold that's been tossed around throughout the trilogy.
Good point. And, given that voting turnouts in this country are abysmal, there are more indifferent minds out there waiting to be swayed than indecisive minds.
The Dems must be hoping the movie does its job (incite the apathetic masses to use their rights, for once) without eroding their current base of support by too much. The numbers are certainly on their side.
When the populace drops the reins of power, the nation always gets taken for a ride. I'd thought America hadn't quite gotten to the bread-and-circuses stage yet, but I suppose the politicos wouldn't be spending bazillions of dollars on attack ads and appeals to sentimentality if it didn't all work frighteningly well.
I fear you're right, and hope you're wrong. Is there anything we can do to recover, any measure we might take to cause people to vote based on the policy position of their candidates, instead rah-rah-rah-go-teamism? If there isn't, then we're already doomed.