Given that the game was released two months earlier than originally planned
And in other news, our weather reporter mounted on a flying pig advises all you denizens of Hell to wrap up warm, because there's a cold snap coming on.
Actually, it's not that surprising. I'm about to embark on a port of some software for the Japanese market, and I've been told to multiply my estimate by 3. I mean, pad it as much as I usually do, then multiply by 3. The Japanese market habitually underpromises and overdelivers, in stark contrast to marketing driven North America and Europe. How quaint!
What you are saying basically boils down to: it's easier to support an illegal monopoly than it is to support alternatives.
I find anti-trust laws distasteful, but you've just demonstrate exactly why we actually need them. Laziness, least-common-denominator thinking, quantity before quality. Not values I want my children to learn, not at all.
A Soviet tanker in 1965 came across a battle between a giant squid and a sperm whale
Referenced in several places, along with claims that Architeuthis will aggressively attack whales and ships. Bear in mind though, that the beak of an Architeuthis only opens a few inches, and is ill suited to eating anything as large as a human, let alone a 40 ton whale or a 15,000 ton ship!
This new species is certainly unusual (compared to the surface beasties that we're used to), but bear in mind that it's part of a subclass that varies in length from 6mm to 16,000mm (and nearly half a ton, that we know of).
But, if Wil is a red shirt, he'd be the security goon
Sigh. It's a giggle either way; in fact, it's even more cathartic if Wil is the Security Goon and gets to execute J. Spunky Teenager. And both security and engineering wore red shirts in TOS. And "Red Shirt" is now just a generic term for any doomed character that gets one line like "I'll just take a quick look behind this polystyrene rock - AARGH!". And don't forget that pedantry and nit picking never wins you friends - look at Wesley "no mates" Crusher.;-p
[Maybe] You [CleverNickName aka Wil Wheaton aka Wesley Crusher] can get a job as a Red Shirt?
Lt. Wezley Crasher: Captain, there's a critical trans-temporal variance in the antimatter plasma conduits! Our only chance is for me to crawl down the Jeff-, er Access Tubes and reroute the phase transducence through the gamma confluguence array!
Why, here in Canada, we've not only created a supernova but in fact a whole 'mirror universe'. Although virtually identical to the US in most ways, in this 'twin world' the dollar is almost worthless [...]
And wait a minute... you all have beards... so you must be the Evil Mirror Universe!
And now you control the very power of the stars. God help us all.
Re:For once, I'm sympathising with MS
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al Qaeda Hacks XP?
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· Score: 2
Anthrax is a bacterium, not a virus.
Ouch, idiot rash, I knew that. On the other hand, I'm strangely pleased that it slipped my mind. The most meaningful contribution that I (as Joe Public) can make to fighting terrorists is just to ignore their attempts to spread FUD. The WTC was an appaling human tragedy, but not one that's going to make me hide in a bunker or obsessively follow every context free shock-o-rama news report.
Let's keep this in context: every day that we report that someone has died from Anthrax, report how many people died from influenza. Every time a terrorist claims that there might be backdoors or bugs in WinXP, remind ourselves that Microsoft might have left plenty in there all by themselvs, and yet the world keeps turning.
So there I am trying to solve a ballistics problem for a game. I need to drop artillery shells on target, based on launch speed, required horizontal distance and gravity, but not, thankfully, air resistance or other accelerations. We need this to work right, but more than that, we need it to work quickly for an imminent product demo, so a co-worker is thrown at it as well. He has his Halliday and Resnick Fundamentals of Physics Extended Third Edition, and a couple of years of college maths.
So we get to work. I do a quick napkin calculate and can solve for the range based on the speed, angle and gravity, but I can't figure out how to solve the equation for the angle. It's fairly easy, but I'm an absolute duffer at maths (it nearly dropped me out of college). My coworker has started right, trying to solve it for the angle.
Five minutes later, I'm done, and I mean done. I'm dropping shells within spitting distance of the target. "Oh, you solved it then?" asks co-worker. Heh, not exactly. I'm pumping angles into my napkin equation and doing a bsearch until I get a distance that looks close enough.
Coworker is outraged! It's inefficient, he claims, which is technically true, but it's a few iterations happening every few seconds at most, which isn't even worth our time profiling. It's not perfect, which is also true. But our engine is using cheap and nasty "X += dX * dt" anyway, so even a perfect calculation wouldn't be accurate.
My points: it's hitting the target. We hit the time target. It's a game.
Sure, physics has a place, and it's aesthetically appealing, but as long as you get the results that you need, the method isn't important. The games that you think have great physics? Probably fudged nine ways from Sunday to make them feel great.
Right. Have fun going around thinking you're better than everyone else, just like damn near everyone else does
Thanks! I will!
Oh, wait... this is that monkey prank called "sarcasm", isn't it? Did you have a point, or were you just flinging some faeces to let off steam?
My point was that the original article (remember that?) painted Aspergers and autism in a negative light, that it is something that we should "cure". There's a contrary view to that, and to express it necessitates a value judgement. I think that I am better off with Aspergers than I would be without it, and that means (like it or not) that I tend to think that I'm better off than most people without it.
Being better than them is another matter. How do we want to measure value? Productivity? I win. Personal development? I lose. Achievement of contentment? I win. Pick your own criteria, if it makes you happier.
For once, I'm sympathising with MS
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al Qaeda Hacks XP?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
A suspected member of the Al Qaeda terrorist network claimed that Islamic militants infiltrated Microsoft and sabotaged the company's Windows XP operating system, according to a source close to Indian police.
Look at the effect they've already had on the global airline and tourist industries, based on a net increase in danger that's insignificant compared to road deaths. Score one for the terrorists.
And here come the ill considered security measures and infringements of civil liberties. We defend Freedom by taking it away. Score two.
Then it was time to target the the government, postal service and law enforcement with a few packets of a not particularly lethal virus (sympathies to the victims though). Again, the big impact is from the FUD, as law enforcement chase hoaxes and benign packages all over the country. Score three.
Now it's software. "All your code base belong to us!" they rant. Expect the hoaxers to jump on this and a new rash of bin Laden themed virii and worms to appear. It's pure FUD, but the problem is reassuring easily frightened and confused non-techies that it isn't true. How do you disprove the existence of allegedly hidden code?
And so for once I'm actually going to get on the bandwagon with Microsoft and give this zero credibility. This pathetic piece of bluster should not be allowed to put anyone off using XP. There's plenty of real reasons for not using it, but this isn't one of them.
Meanwhile, I stare at the corner of the ceiling with a beautific smile on my face, utterly content with what I have and who I am.
Dude, I hate to break it to you, but you're not a geek, you're a Buddhist.
Funny and astute. Some important tenets of Buddhism are to avoid conflict, and to be content within oneself. I sometimes wonder if Buddhism is an attempt to replicate the state of autism that got muddled up along the way with a bunch of religious themes.
Has it ever occurred to you that the reason you don't have much social connections is that people don't want to hang around someone so full of themself?
What else would autism mean? However, I do have friends, just not many, carefully chosen, and carefully cultivated (Asperger's does mean you can indeed be a selfish fuck, if you aren't careful). What I was talking about was forced interaction, the repeated declining of invitations to social events, and trying to find a polite way to decline without just coming out and saying "We have nothing in common, and I have no interest in being your friend or spending any more time with you than I have to."
In case you missed it though, I'll make my point clearer. Autism in its various forms is a blessing to those who have it. Severe Aspergers or full blown autism is a curse on the family and carers, but that's a different issue. Saying that you want to cure a child of autism is a selfish (but very understandable) act. Saying that you want to do it for their benefit is a cosy lie. I understand why monkey parents want to make their child behave normally, but some of my most traumatic childhood memories are of being forced to interact socially with the monkey tribe. I can forgive, but I can never forget, and my children will be enabled and perhaps encouraged but never, ever forced to join the herd.
Mild autism is a wonderful state to be in. I can find words to describe what I imagine that you must be feeling when you type. Anger, resentment, an urge to dominate another individual. However, it doesn't affect me. I don't feel any urge to make a personal attack back, or to hurt you. In the nicest possible way, you're beneath my contempt. If you can't bother me (and you can't), I have no real interest in you, other than as a foil to help explain what mild Asperger's is like.
My view is that the point of progress is to make people happier. Autism makes for happy people. The problem is resourcing and providing for that. Classic SF stories where humankind has reached the stage where planets are inhabited by a few individuals surrounded by silence and a plethora of technology - that's the autists dream. The alternative, where everyone is forcibly normalised and socialised, is a nightmare that doesn't bear thinking about.
it's obvious that you have to [assert your superiority] here since you can't win in the real world.
What's the prize for winning? But if it bothers you, OK, you win. Does that make you happy? Are you typing with a smile on your face? I am.
The simple fact of the matter is that there are people out there with high intelligence and good social skills. These are the people who make lots of money and become your bosses
Why do most of them seem so unsatisfied, I wonder? Always striving to position themselves as the person with the handle on the Big Picture, the vital cog in the corporate machine. And meanwhile, I concentrate on minutia, to my own personal satisfaction, and to the actual completion of software. Anyone who tells you that the Big Picture is more important than minutia isn't a software developer, they're monkeying around in marketing.
Joe and Jane Normal are tedious herd beasts. Never mind dressing it up as "neurotypical", anyone with fewer than 2 SD's from 100 IQ (either way) is a dragging knuckle away from being a fully integrated member of the monkey tribe. Note the mindless chattering, the social grooming, the dominance displays and the obsession with screwing those monkey people who display the most normal traits. WWF and Survivor are made for Joe and Jane Normal. Jerry Springer features actual human beings, hooting and shrieking and flinging faeces. These are normal people being invited to display the extremes of their normal monkey behaviour for the amusement of the millions of other normal people watching them.
An interesting part of this state of affairs is that Joe and Jane pursue happiness constantly, but (apart from brief moments of faeces flinging) they can never achieve it. Their busy monkey minds can focus only on how they can aquire what they believe that they need to be happier later. Never any pause to contemplate how happy they are now. I (and probably you, dear reader) revel in the buzz from untangling a glottic knot of code, or catching a split infinitive, or even just from staring at a corner of the ceiling and considering the angles. Joe and Jane can't understand how anyone could get pleasure from doing that - it's not something that a normal person would do. Normal people pursue happiness, they don't experience it. During lunch at work, I have to listen in an abstract way to Jane and Joe speculating on how much they must must own, and how many other monkeys they need to screw before the magical switch is flicked and they achieve the happiness that their aspirational books and TV promise them. Meanwhile, I stare at the corner of the ceiling with a beautific smile on my face, utterly content with what I have and who I am.
The only thing that intrudes on my idyll is that I am aware that I am elitist, and that has negative connotations, especially if Asperger's is genetic. Like the parent poster, I do view myself as one of the master race, but I have no wish to be anybody's master. I already have everything that I want, so the monkey people are free to go back to their monkey antics and leave me alone to enjoy the thrill of creating software. I have no objection to Joe Facilities and Jane Manager sharing in the rewards from my work, nor does it bother me that Jane Manager considers her contribution more important, or that her financial rewards are higher (and yet still she must pursue happiness). Monkey dominance games are amusing and irritating in equal measure, but as it's clear that I won't play them, I'm not often bothered by them.
And that's the world of Asperger's. When the monkey people leave you alone, it's a happy world. "Low functioning" Asperger's and autists are in an even more blissful place, farther removed from the monkey jabber and the last lingering urge to watch Oprah. I can't pretend that I don't envy them, just a little.
The OFLC was firm on the point that the game would not allowed in Australia, saying "if you have already purchased a game you will need to contact your retailer about return procedures."
Holy fuck. That's a lovely precedent.
And hey, we were watching that Australian cut of "Last Tango in Paris", and actually, we not think that we didn't cut enough depravity. Hand it over, you sickos.
And that "Clockwork Orange" book, holy shit, have you seen it? I can't believe we let that through. Burn it, burn it now.
Anyone got the National Geographic that shows the Yanomamo using drugs in a religious ceremony? Turn them in. We're thinking of the children.
Anyone got more details on this retroactive censorship crap?
Well (assuming you're with a cableco), that's not at all true. You contribute to paying for the overall bandwidth usage.
The issue here is that what cableco's want to do is charge by the byte, but they know that they need to market their product as flat rate to attract the mythical "average user" who does nothing but suck pay-per-view content from the cableco's portal (no, idiots, that's a cable TV customer, you already own that market).
So what they are doing (in the UK as well, where I am based) is writing clauses into the AUP's that are designed to prohibit the sort of things that high bandwidth users are likely to do, without actually mentioning bandwidth per se. The aim isn't primarily to stop those activities, it's to limit bandwidth usage either directly (by not bringing in traffic to servers) or indirectly (by punting the high usage customers).
The UK basically has three broadband providers, DSL from the monopoly telco, and cable modems from two cableco's. And that's it. The telco acts exactly like the cableco's highlighted here; abusive, obstructive, restrictive, incompetent and internally muddled. It's impossible to get a straight answer out of them on policies.
In contrast, the two UK cableco's are (currently) behaving strangely honestly. One of the two, NTL, brought in a blanket ban on all servers. In the outcry that followed, they reversed this, and instead made their policy clear; it's all about bandwidth (as above). They acknowledged that they would only pursue those customers who generated an unfair amount of external traffic, like were running a server that was constantly attracting more traffic than their cable could cope with, leaving packets to expire alone and unloved throughout the network. The other UK cableco, Telewest, recently sent out a huge email about their technical policies. It named names internally, it gave usage numbers, server details, it basically treated the customers as intelligent, informed people, and solicited feedback. "Tell us how you want us to develop your network," they said, and I think they meant it. They understand that a prerequisite to having customers is to have happy customers who aren't just sitting fuming and waiting for their contracts to expire. There will probably be some dissenting followups here, and it's certainly the case that NTL and Telewest do screw over some customers, but they are getting better.
So my point is that there are different ways of doing things. Marketing droids can be invited to consider that it's OK to talk about bandwidth usage upfront, as long as you make it clear that you're only concerned with extreme cases and not 95% of Joe Users. Technical guys can be made to realise that if you involve your customers and don't lie to them or dissemble, they will be more understanding when you have problems. Lawyers can be instructed to stick to the important issues when writing AUP's, and not to create sleepless nights for low usage customers who just want to set up secure remote access to their boxen.
Honesty, clarity. It's all we ask for, really. Target the users that are costing you money, do it directly, and don't make vague threats that will just piss off the 95% of low usage customers that you rely on to generate money.
Is that so hard to understand? NTL and Telewest in the UK get it.
Fucking saying fuck every second fucking word doesn't actually fucking address the fucking issue.
The issue is that what cable providers mean is that high bandwidth customers should pay more (which they should). But they're too chicken shit to say it, and instead choose to wrap it all up in convoluted small print (sorry, "small font", and what's that all about?) that is really just designed to let them punt high usage customers whenever they feel like it.
It's mendacious and dishonest, and that's the issue here.
When spam arrives with no usable return address [...] who do you take to court?
The upstream provider? Really, it hacks me off that so many places run open relays, are RFC ignorant, and basically don't give a damn about the use of their networks (regardless of what their AUP's say). Sure, there are good providers that don't dick around when you send them abuse reports, but the amount of crap I'm seeing coming from.ac.somewhere-in-asia (that's international.edu) is staggering.
They're outside your country? Contact them anyway. If they don't respond, and the spam keeps coming, keep moving upstream. Sooner or later you'll hit your own ISP or ASP. Let them know that they're handling packets from RFC ignorant peers, and dump it on them. If that drives costs up, good, I'm sick of hearing that ISPs don't have the resources to deal with spam.
Instead of giving money to lawyers (directly) and courts (through taxes), let's get it to the ISPs instead.
The war in Afghanistan has nothing to do with US law. [context: the USA projecting laws globally]
Everything that the US government does has to do with US law. The 1973 War Act attempts to limit the President's ability to declare war, while also giving the option to pass a euphemistic "use of force" resolution rather than old fashioned (and honest) declaration of war. Bush followed the procedures of this Act under protest, as Presidents like to think that as Commander-in-Chief, they're not answerable to Congress. But he did follow them.
My point is actually that the Law is defined by Congress (50% of whom are members of the American Bar Association, so much for separation of powers), and they can pass any law they damn well like to allow the USA to project power - military or economic - across the world if it's convenient to them. If there was a political will, we could very easily re-define spammers as [h|c]rackers and have them punished anywhere in the world. Remember DeCCS?
competition is pretty much grounds for a lawsuit these days
Breathing is pretty much grounds for a lawsuit these days.
Our entire retail and service sector economy is based on giving half of our money to lawyers, and letting them decide where to spend it.
I'm not exaggerating for effect. More lawyers than gas pumps, more law students than practicing lawyers, 50% of Congress and Senate are members of the American Bar Association, as was President Clinton and her husband, as were the people who chose Bush as President over the other candidate, what's-his-name, the one who'd been to law school.
Is it any wonder that we're so screwed? Separation of powers my huge hairy ass. The USPTO is just one of the more visible aspects of having Government that is By the Lawyers, Of the Lawyers and For the Lawyers.
And just how is this patent-circus supposed to be good for the economy ?
There are more lawyers in the USA than there are gas pumps. There are more law students in college than are currently in practice. Half of both Congress and the Senate are members of the American Bar Association, as were the previous President and her husband. The winner of the most recent Presidential election studied at Vanderbilt Law School, and the people who gave the Presidency to the other guy were all law graduates.
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Don't get me wrong, I enjoy FF, but it really does seem like a candidate for an annual subscription and "Software as a Service"... ;-)
And in other news, our weather reporter mounted on a flying pig advises all you denizens of Hell to wrap up warm, because there's a cold snap coming on.
Actually, it's not that surprising. I'm about to embark on a port of some software for the Japanese market, and I've been told to multiply my estimate by 3. I mean, pad it as much as I usually do, then multiply by 3. The Japanese market habitually underpromises and overdelivers, in stark contrast to marketing driven North America and Europe. How quaint!
What you are saying basically boils down to: it's easier to support an illegal monopoly than it is to support alternatives.
I find anti-trust laws distasteful, but you've just demonstrate exactly why we actually need them. Laziness, least-common-denominator thinking, quantity before quality. Not values I want my children to learn, not at all.
Referenced in several places, along with claims that Architeuthis will aggressively attack whales and ships. Bear in mind though, that the beak of an Architeuthis only opens a few inches, and is ill suited to eating anything as large as a human, let alone a 40 ton whale or a 15,000 ton ship!
This new species is certainly unusual (compared to the surface beasties that we're used to), but bear in mind that it's part of a subclass that varies in length from 6mm to 16,000mm (and nearly half a ton, that we know of).
Sigh. It's a giggle either way; in fact, it's even more cathartic if Wil is the Security Goon and gets to execute J. Spunky Teenager. And both security and engineering wore red shirts in TOS. And "Red Shirt" is now just a generic term for any doomed character that gets one line like "I'll just take a quick look behind this polystyrene rock - AARGH!". And don't forget that pedantry and nit picking never wins you friends - look at Wesley "no mates" Crusher. ;-p
You'd need to sell it damn quick before it decayed into FeS2
And wait a minute... you all have beards... so you must be the Evil Mirror Universe!
And now you control the very power of the stars. God help us all.
Ouch, idiot rash, I knew that. On the other hand, I'm strangely pleased that it slipped my mind. The most meaningful contribution that I (as Joe Public) can make to fighting terrorists is just to ignore their attempts to spread FUD. The WTC was an appaling human tragedy, but not one that's going to make me hide in a bunker or obsessively follow every context free shock-o-rama news report.
Let's keep this in context: every day that we report that someone has died from Anthrax, report how many people died from influenza. Every time a terrorist claims that there might be backdoors or bugs in WinXP, remind ourselves that Microsoft might have left plenty in there all by themselvs, and yet the world keeps turning.
So there I am trying to solve a ballistics problem for a game. I need to drop artillery shells on target, based on launch speed, required horizontal distance and gravity, but not, thankfully, air resistance or other accelerations. We need this to work right, but more than that, we need it to work quickly for an imminent product demo, so a co-worker is thrown at it as well. He has his Halliday and Resnick Fundamentals of Physics Extended Third Edition, and a couple of years of college maths.
So we get to work. I do a quick napkin calculate and can solve for the range based on the speed, angle and gravity, but I can't figure out how to solve the equation for the angle. It's fairly easy, but I'm an absolute duffer at maths (it nearly dropped me out of college). My coworker has started right, trying to solve it for the angle.
Five minutes later, I'm done, and I mean done. I'm dropping shells within spitting distance of the target. "Oh, you solved it then?" asks co-worker. Heh, not exactly. I'm pumping angles into my napkin equation and doing a bsearch until I get a distance that looks close enough.
Coworker is outraged! It's inefficient, he claims, which is technically true, but it's a few iterations happening every few seconds at most, which isn't even worth our time profiling. It's not perfect, which is also true. But our engine is using cheap and nasty "X += dX * dt" anyway, so even a perfect calculation wouldn't be accurate.
My points: it's hitting the target. We hit the time target. It's a game.
Sure, physics has a place, and it's aesthetically appealing, but as long as you get the results that you need, the method isn't important. The games that you think have great physics? Probably fudged nine ways from Sunday to make them feel great.
Thanks! I will!
Oh, wait... this is that monkey prank called "sarcasm", isn't it? Did you have a point, or were you just flinging some faeces to let off steam?
My point was that the original article (remember that?) painted Aspergers and autism in a negative light, that it is something that we should "cure". There's a contrary view to that, and to express it necessitates a value judgement. I think that I am better off with Aspergers than I would be without it, and that means (like it or not) that I tend to think that I'm better off than most people without it.
Being better than them is another matter. How do we want to measure value? Productivity? I win. Personal development? I lose. Achievement of contentment? I win. Pick your own criteria, if it makes you happier.
Look at the effect they've already had on the global airline and tourist industries, based on a net increase in danger that's insignificant compared to road deaths. Score one for the terrorists.
And here come the ill considered security measures and infringements of civil liberties. We defend Freedom by taking it away. Score two.
Then it was time to target the the government, postal service and law enforcement with a few packets of a not particularly lethal virus (sympathies to the victims though). Again, the big impact is from the FUD, as law enforcement chase hoaxes and benign packages all over the country. Score three.
Now it's software. "All your code base belong to us!" they rant. Expect the hoaxers to jump on this and a new rash of bin Laden themed virii and worms to appear. It's pure FUD, but the problem is reassuring easily frightened and confused non-techies that it isn't true. How do you disprove the existence of allegedly hidden code?
And so for once I'm actually going to get on the bandwagon with Microsoft and give this zero credibility. This pathetic piece of bluster should not be allowed to put anyone off using XP. There's plenty of real reasons for not using it, but this isn't one of them.
- Meanwhile, I stare at the corner of the ceiling with a beautific smile on my face, utterly content with what I have and who I am.
Dude, I hate to break it to you, but you're not a geek, you're a Buddhist.Funny and astute. Some important tenets of Buddhism are to avoid conflict, and to be content within oneself. I sometimes wonder if Buddhism is an attempt to replicate the state of autism that got muddled up along the way with a bunch of religious themes.
What else would autism mean? However, I do have friends, just not many, carefully chosen, and carefully cultivated (Asperger's does mean you can indeed be a selfish fuck, if you aren't careful). What I was talking about was forced interaction, the repeated declining of invitations to social events, and trying to find a polite way to decline without just coming out and saying "We have nothing in common, and I have no interest in being your friend or spending any more time with you than I have to."
In case you missed it though, I'll make my point clearer. Autism in its various forms is a blessing to those who have it. Severe Aspergers or full blown autism is a curse on the family and carers, but that's a different issue. Saying that you want to cure a child of autism is a selfish (but very understandable) act. Saying that you want to do it for their benefit is a cosy lie. I understand why monkey parents want to make their child behave normally, but some of my most traumatic childhood memories are of being forced to interact socially with the monkey tribe. I can forgive, but I can never forget, and my children will be enabled and perhaps encouraged but never, ever forced to join the herd.
Mild autism is a wonderful state to be in. I can find words to describe what I imagine that you must be feeling when you type. Anger, resentment, an urge to dominate another individual. However, it doesn't affect me. I don't feel any urge to make a personal attack back, or to hurt you. In the nicest possible way, you're beneath my contempt. If you can't bother me (and you can't), I have no real interest in you, other than as a foil to help explain what mild Asperger's is like.
My view is that the point of progress is to make people happier. Autism makes for happy people. The problem is resourcing and providing for that. Classic SF stories where humankind has reached the stage where planets are inhabited by a few individuals surrounded by silence and a plethora of technology - that's the autists dream. The alternative, where everyone is forcibly normalised and socialised, is a nightmare that doesn't bear thinking about.
What's the prize for winning? But if it bothers you, OK, you win. Does that make you happy? Are you typing with a smile on your face? I am.
Why do most of them seem so unsatisfied, I wonder? Always striving to position themselves as the person with the handle on the Big Picture, the vital cog in the corporate machine. And meanwhile, I concentrate on minutia, to my own personal satisfaction, and to the actual completion of software. Anyone who tells you that the Big Picture is more important than minutia isn't a software developer, they're monkeying around in marketing.
+1 harsh but true.
Joe and Jane Normal are tedious herd beasts. Never mind dressing it up as "neurotypical", anyone with fewer than 2 SD's from 100 IQ (either way) is a dragging knuckle away from being a fully integrated member of the monkey tribe. Note the mindless chattering, the social grooming, the dominance displays and the obsession with screwing those monkey people who display the most normal traits. WWF and Survivor are made for Joe and Jane Normal. Jerry Springer features actual human beings, hooting and shrieking and flinging faeces. These are normal people being invited to display the extremes of their normal monkey behaviour for the amusement of the millions of other normal people watching them.
An interesting part of this state of affairs is that Joe and Jane pursue happiness constantly, but (apart from brief moments of faeces flinging) they can never achieve it. Their busy monkey minds can focus only on how they can aquire what they believe that they need to be happier later. Never any pause to contemplate how happy they are now. I (and probably you, dear reader) revel in the buzz from untangling a glottic knot of code, or catching a split infinitive, or even just from staring at a corner of the ceiling and considering the angles. Joe and Jane can't understand how anyone could get pleasure from doing that - it's not something that a normal person would do. Normal people pursue happiness, they don't experience it. During lunch at work, I have to listen in an abstract way to Jane and Joe speculating on how much they must must own, and how many other monkeys they need to screw before the magical switch is flicked and they achieve the happiness that their aspirational books and TV promise them. Meanwhile, I stare at the corner of the ceiling with a beautific smile on my face, utterly content with what I have and who I am.
The only thing that intrudes on my idyll is that I am aware that I am elitist, and that has negative connotations, especially if Asperger's is genetic. Like the parent poster, I do view myself as one of the master race, but I have no wish to be anybody's master. I already have everything that I want, so the monkey people are free to go back to their monkey antics and leave me alone to enjoy the thrill of creating software. I have no objection to Joe Facilities and Jane Manager sharing in the rewards from my work, nor does it bother me that Jane Manager considers her contribution more important, or that her financial rewards are higher (and yet still she must pursue happiness). Monkey dominance games are amusing and irritating in equal measure, but as it's clear that I won't play them, I'm not often bothered by them.
And that's the world of Asperger's. When the monkey people leave you alone, it's a happy world. "Low functioning" Asperger's and autists are in an even more blissful place, farther removed from the monkey jabber and the last lingering urge to watch Oprah. I can't pretend that I don't envy them, just a little.
Holy fuck. That's a lovely precedent.
And hey, we were watching that Australian cut of "Last Tango in Paris", and actually, we not think that we didn't cut enough depravity. Hand it over, you sickos.
And that "Clockwork Orange" book, holy shit, have you seen it? I can't believe we let that through. Burn it, burn it now.
Anyone got the National Geographic that shows the Yanomamo using drugs in a religious ceremony? Turn them in. We're thinking of the children.
Anyone got more details on this retroactive censorship crap?
Well (assuming you're with a cableco), that's not at all true. You contribute to paying for the overall bandwidth usage.
The issue here is that what cableco's want to do is charge by the byte, but they know that they need to market their product as flat rate to attract the mythical "average user" who does nothing but suck pay-per-view content from the cableco's portal (no, idiots, that's a cable TV customer, you already own that market).
So what they are doing (in the UK as well, where I am based) is writing clauses into the AUP's that are designed to prohibit the sort of things that high bandwidth users are likely to do, without actually mentioning bandwidth per se. The aim isn't primarily to stop those activities, it's to limit bandwidth usage either directly (by not bringing in traffic to servers) or indirectly (by punting the high usage customers).
The UK basically has three broadband providers, DSL from the monopoly telco, and cable modems from two cableco's. And that's it. The telco acts exactly like the cableco's highlighted here; abusive, obstructive, restrictive, incompetent and internally muddled. It's impossible to get a straight answer out of them on policies.
In contrast, the two UK cableco's are (currently) behaving strangely honestly. One of the two, NTL, brought in a blanket ban on all servers. In the outcry that followed, they reversed this, and instead made their policy clear; it's all about bandwidth (as above). They acknowledged that they would only pursue those customers who generated an unfair amount of external traffic, like were running a server that was constantly attracting more traffic than their cable could cope with, leaving packets to expire alone and unloved throughout the network. The other UK cableco, Telewest, recently sent out a huge email about their technical policies. It named names internally, it gave usage numbers, server details, it basically treated the customers as intelligent, informed people, and solicited feedback. "Tell us how you want us to develop your network," they said, and I think they meant it. They understand that a prerequisite to having customers is to have happy customers who aren't just sitting fuming and waiting for their contracts to expire. There will probably be some dissenting followups here, and it's certainly the case that NTL and Telewest do screw over some customers, but they are getting better.
So my point is that there are different ways of doing things. Marketing droids can be invited to consider that it's OK to talk about bandwidth usage upfront, as long as you make it clear that you're only concerned with extreme cases and not 95% of Joe Users. Technical guys can be made to realise that if you involve your customers and don't lie to them or dissemble, they will be more understanding when you have problems. Lawyers can be instructed to stick to the important issues when writing AUP's, and not to create sleepless nights for low usage customers who just want to set up secure remote access to their boxen.
Honesty, clarity. It's all we ask for, really. Target the users that are costing you money, do it directly, and don't make vague threats that will just piss off the 95% of low usage customers that you rely on to generate money.
Is that so hard to understand? NTL and Telewest in the UK get it.
Fucking saying fuck every second fucking word doesn't actually fucking address the fucking issue.
The issue is that what cable providers mean is that high bandwidth customers should pay more (which they should). But they're too chicken shit to say it, and instead choose to wrap it all up in convoluted small print (sorry, "small font", and what's that all about?) that is really just designed to let them punt high usage customers whenever they feel like it.
It's mendacious and dishonest, and that's the issue here.
Beverly Crusher, Deanna Troi or Tasha Yar?
The upstream provider? Really, it hacks me off that so many places run open relays, are RFC ignorant, and basically don't give a damn about the use of their networks (regardless of what their AUP's say). Sure, there are good providers that don't dick around when you send them abuse reports, but the amount of crap I'm seeing coming from .ac.somewhere-in-asia (that's international .edu) is staggering.
They're outside your country? Contact them anyway. If they don't respond, and the spam keeps coming, keep moving upstream. Sooner or later you'll hit your own ISP or ASP. Let them know that they're handling packets from RFC ignorant peers, and dump it on them. If that drives costs up, good, I'm sick of hearing that ISPs don't have the resources to deal with spam.
Instead of giving money to lawyers (directly) and courts (through taxes), let's get it to the ISPs instead.
Everything that the US government does has to do with US law. The 1973 War Act attempts to limit the President's ability to declare war, while also giving the option to pass a euphemistic "use of force" resolution rather than old fashioned (and honest) declaration of war. Bush followed the procedures of this Act under protest, as Presidents like to think that as Commander-in-Chief, they're not answerable to Congress. But he did follow them.
My point is actually that the Law is defined by Congress (50% of whom are members of the American Bar Association, so much for separation of powers), and they can pass any law they damn well like to allow the USA to project power - military or economic - across the world if it's convenient to them. If there was a political will, we could very easily re-define spammers as [h|c]rackers and have them punished anywhere in the world. Remember DeCCS?
Breathing is pretty much grounds for a lawsuit these days.
Our entire retail and service sector economy is based on giving half of our money to lawyers, and letting them decide where to spend it.
I'm not exaggerating for effect. More lawyers than gas pumps, more law students than practicing lawyers, 50% of Congress and Senate are members of the American Bar Association, as was President Clinton and her husband, as were the people who chose Bush as President over the other candidate, what's-his-name, the one who'd been to law school.
Is it any wonder that we're so screwed? Separation of powers my huge hairy ass. The USPTO is just one of the more visible aspects of having Government that is By the Lawyers, Of the Lawyers and For the Lawyers.
There are more lawyers in the USA than there are gas pumps. There are more law students in college than are currently in practice. Half of both Congress and the Senate are members of the American Bar Association, as were the previous President and her husband. The winner of the most recent Presidential election studied at Vanderbilt Law School, and the people who gave the Presidency to the other guy were all law graduates.
Won't someone please think of the lawyers!