If you think wolves are likely to swallow forks along with their victims (which are mostly sheep, BTW), you obviously don't understand the difference in scale or sensitivity between a shark's throat and a wolf's, or the different ways in which mammals and fish chew their food.:-P
No, the fork, like the gold coin, is simply being generated by a random "treasure script" that takes the type and "level" of the creature, the player's level, and generates "appropriate" treasure. In other words, if you kill the wolf when your character is at a low "level", you probably don't get anything besides the two standard items (meat and a pelt). As you become more powerful, the game decides that it must give you more rewards to keep you from getting bored, so any sense of realism goes out the door. You get wolves carrying gold and cutlery, and you get highway robbers carrying armour sets that are worth more than a house (which makes you wonder why they go around risking their lives robbing people).
Messy design to begin with (Oblivion is a console hack'n'slash game pretending to be an RPG), but which could have been greatly minimised by proper playtesting, which Oblivion never had. It was only "tested" internally by Bethesda's own developers, which goes against the whole principle of playtesting. And each part of the game was developed by a different team, so it feels disjointed and doesn't even have Morrowind's atmosphere.
No strong driving vision (like the Ultima games had) and no extensive playtesting (like Half-Life had) always lead to a disappointing product.
There are some user-developed mods that make Oblivion much better, but still not nearly as consistent (or enjoyable) as games developed more than 10 years ago.
Bethesda are great at trying to avoid this While they might be great at trying, they suck at actually achieving it.
Oblivion and Morrowind feel dead, like worlds populated by robots, all saying exactly the same sentences (how hard would it have been to change the sentences slighty for each of the different voices...??) and all doing the same 3 or 4 meaningless actions over and over again.
Then there are the hundreds of scripting bugs and inconsistencies (Oblivion was never actually play-tested before release - extensive playtesting is what made Half-Life great), a nonsensical game world (shared by NWN), where random crates and barrels spread all over the game world each contain half a dozen gold coins (sometimes with a beggar sitting right by the crate - why doesn't he grab the coins, and why are the crates and coins there anyway?), monsters that drop random objects (in Oblivion sometimes a wolf will drop a gold coin or a fork - WTF?), and so on. Baldur's Gate, despite a more consistent and interesting story, has an even more static world (NPCs standing on the exact same spot 24/7, etc.).
It's really depressing that games made so recently, by huge teams, with several gigabytes of art and code, are so far behind a game like Ultima VII, in terms of immersion and game world consistency. You made more use of your brain just navigating the dialogues in Ultima VII than playing through Oblivion ("follow the arrow, click here, kill that monster, repeat"). The only bearable part of Oblivion was the Thieves' Guild quest line; the rest is just a good-looking (but clearly rushed) hack'n'slash game completely ruined by a bad story, bad scripting, and designed for 8-year-old Xbox players.
Valve needs to bring toghether the people who made Ultima VII and System Shock 2 and show the industry what a real RPG / free-form adventure / world simulator looks like.
Actually he has a point. Valve's server browser is notorious for forgetting all your favourite servers, forgetting your filters, and so on. I never understood why it's so hard to include a decent server browser with their games. Maybe they have a deal with Gamespy or something.
Virtually any game made in the last 10 years will simply revert to the lowest resolution if switching to the "desired" one fails. In fact, both with DirectX and OpenGL, that's handled almost automatically (you request a certain mode - optionally leaving some fields blank - and the function returns the mode it was actually able to set). Besides, display options are usually not part of the savegames.
I'm sure there will be some issues with Cloud, but I suspect they won't be of the "bloody obvious" variety.
And what happens when Valve decides that they don't want you to have a game any more? Do you keep all your money under the mattress just in case your bank decides that it doesn't want to give it back to you, some day? Wait, maybe the govenment will decide your money is worthless, so what you really need to do is carry some gold ingots. Grab your shotgun and run to the hills!
Now I wouldn't even be allowed to think about doing it - I'd have to shut my eyes and think about something else, maybe. "No, honey, I'm not thinking about Scarlett Johansson because I find her more attractive than you. It's just because I'm legally obliged to."
It was way better than 3.1.. No, it wasn't. Seriously. Windows 95 was worse than 3.0. I saw fresh installations of Windows 95 BSOD all by themselves, simply by letting the system boot and then sit there for two hours. If I had to rate the quality of Microsoft OSs, it would go more or less like this:
Usable today:
1. Windows Server 2003
2. Windows 2000
3. Windows XP SP2
Usable in their day:
4. Windows NT 4.0
5. Windows NT 3.51
6. MS-DOS 3.3 or 5 and above
7. Windows 98 SE
Barely usable if you are a bit of a masochist:
8. Windows XP pre-SP2
9. Windows for Workgroups 3.11 10. Windows 98
The article is sketchy (to say the least) about the details of this test. Were people told they were going to have to press a button? How long were they told to wait before pressing it? Did they start thinking about pressing it before they were even asked to do it? Was any of the test subjects a Jedi?
Just because you start thinking about making a "random" decision a few seconds in advance, that does not mean you cannot change your mind a fraction of a second before, if something else happens (ex., a sudden external stimulus). In fact, the article points this out:
"Also, the predictions were not completely accurate. Maybe free will enters at the last moment, allowing a person to override an unpalatable subconscious decision."
I think it's pretty obvious that people can react to external stimuli in less than seven seconds, including stimuli that they had no way of predicting.
Anyway, unless our brains have some sort of mystical particles, they are essentially very complex and highly parallel (but still fundamentally deterministic) electro-chemical computers, with an insane amount of inputs. So this really boils down to consciousness and a concept of present.
What this study shows is that decision-making isn't an instant process (did anyone think it was?), that we are not conscious of the early stages of that process (did anyone think we were?) and that there is a significant subconscious stage to random decisions, possibly because our brain tries to "validate" its decisions before submitting them to the "conscious" mind, and random ones have a low confidence level, making them go through extra sanity checks.
Subconscious: Tell Mr. Conscious to hit the left button! Mr. Conscious's P.A.: Did you say something or was that just random noise? Sub.: I said "tell Mr. Conscious to hit the left button"! P.A.: Why should I tell him that? Sub.: Because he asked me to make a random decision. P.A.: Not good enough. Mr. Conscious will need assurance that that is the ideal course of action. Please produce the complete paper trail that led you to that decision. Sub.: What paper trail? This is a *random* decision, you idiot. P.A.: I'm afraid you will at least have to find some evidence that hitting the left button will not have any negative effects. If Mr. Conscious simply followed every random advice he got, how would he justify his salary? Sub.: Look, the guy conducting the study hit the button just now and nothing happened to him, right? It's safe. Just hit it. P.A.: Well, alright. The left button, you said? Sub.: Yes! P.A.: I'll transmit that to Mr. Conscious. Sub.: About bloody time, too. Wasted seven seconds of my life.
P.S. - Several studies have shown that top athletes don't have particularly faster reflexes than other people; they just do the "Jedi trick" of starting to react before something happens. How can they react to something that hasn't happened? Experience. Their brain knows what are the 5 or 6 most likely developments, and it starts to plan ahead for all of them. When the times comes to send the decision to the body, the actual action is already buffered. On top of that, frequently we react to indicators rather than to the event itself (ex., in tennis the other player's body position will generally allow you to guess how he's going to serve before he hits the ball; if you wait for the ball to be hit, you won't get to it on time). To put it in computer terms: speculative execution and intelligent branch prediction.
P.P.S. - In Stanislaw Lem's short story "137 seconds" a news-gathering computer develops the ability to predict reality 137 seconds in advance, so this brain scanner still has a long way to go.;-)
This notion that using less memory means a program is more "efficient" is ridiculous. I have 4 GB of RAM (well, I have more, but my computer has 4 GB). What use is it to me if a given program decides to use only 100 MB, when it could use all the rest to cache stuff and / or speed up requests? For example, Opera keeps a fully rendered copy of each tab in memory, plus the last couple of history entries, so you can switch instantly between them, and I think the latest versions of Firefox do the same. That's an efficient use of memory, IMO.
Good software will regularly monitor free memory, using more when it can and scaling down to the minimum when other parts of the system need it.
Unlike Firefox and MSIE, Opera includes an e-mail client (which keeps all its messages indexed for instant searching, BTW), so this is a bit like comparing the power consumption of CPUs where one CPU has a built-in memory controller and the other one doesn't (another recurring problem with some "hardware review" sites).
Unless they can make the browsers' configuration virtually identical (which means adding a lot of extensions and plug-ins to Firefox, plus Thunderbird, to make it do everything Opera does "out of the box"), the memory usage comparison is more or less meaningless. And, even if they do all that, simply looking at the amount of RAM used won't tell us anything about how efficiently it's used. Opening 50 pages at the same time and then closing all of them is hardly a normal (or relevant) usage pattern.
It's also funny how Christopher Blizzard says that "the small memory footprint in the latest Firefox 3 beta is proof that Firefox is ready for mobile environments". Well, they tested it againt the desktop version of Opera. Do they really think the version that runs on my 6 year old Nokia phone is designed to use 200 MB of RAM...? If they think FF is ready to run on cell phones and PDAs, why don't they just make a version available for download, and let people try it? Anyone can download and try Opera Mini, for example.
FF 3 is looking quite nice, but these articles read more like marketing. The objective should be to make the best browser possible; not to try to convince people that it's better than the competition.
"researchers at Yale University have found a virus in the same family as rabies that effectively kills an aggressive form of human brain cancer in mice."
Finally those poor mice will be free from the scourge of human brain cancer!
I'm pretty sure the point he was trying to make (and which you seem to have missed - twice now, as the post above proves) is that the USA is only "the west" if you look at it geographically (i.e., it is on the west side of the the map). It cannot be taken to accurately represent all the political "west", as the article implies (by using flaws in the US electoral system to label "western style voting" as "a loser").
It seems to be a pretty straightforward metaphor / play on words. But I guess I'm not looking at it from the point of view of someone who uses the word "pwned"...
If you interpret "genetic similarity" blindly (i.e., by comparing how many genes are exactly identical), humans are extremely similar to bananas. Clearly, that kind of interpretation is pointless. It's like comparing the similarity of two digital images by counting the number of identical bytes (when two images can _look_ indistinguishable while not having a single matched byte, and completely different despite having over 50% matched bytes). Some genes have a much bigger influence on our appearance (and behaviour) than others, and some different combinations of genes can have very similar end results.
Race is not, and was never meant to be, a genetic concept. That's what "species" is there for. A "race" is simply a group of people that share similar physical characteristics. It's a visual / linguistic construct, as real as any other one ("tall", "blonde", "hairy", etc.). As long as people understand that, the concept is rather useful.
But, even if we're talking about genes, people from isolated communites will tend to be more similar to others in their community than to those in the other communities. That's simply a consequence of heredity. Most of those similarities are probably invisible, so they're not an issue. But when you change something like hair / eye / skin colour, the difference is very noticeable, and you have a "race". What matters isn't the _number_ of genes that are different or identical, it's how big an impact they have on the appearance of the individual.
Using a "race" as a shortcut to describe someone's physical features sure beats using his or her nationality, which tells you nothing about how they look, and is just a pseudo-politically-correct tribal division. Saying "he's african-american" suggests that he isn't a _true_ american, and that he has some connection to Africa which he probably doesn't. And then you get nonsense like the Trevor Richards / Westside High affair.
No, race is not a "myth" any more than talking about "blondes" and "brunettes" is a "myth". A "race" is simply a description given to people who share some similar (physical) traits. It's a shortcut. If I say a guy "looks nordic", that saves me the trouble of saying "he has pale skin, blond hair and blue eyes". Think of it as a prototype library.
Races form when communities live isolated for a long time (either as adaptations to the environemnt or as consequences of cultural selection), and they fade when different communities mix (and interbreed) regularly. The fact that there's a lot of genetic variation within, say, the Tutsi tribe, does not mean a Tutsi isn't likely to be more similar (both physically and genetically) to another Tutsi than to a native of Japan.
In any case, 90% of humans are innately tribal (hey, it was really useful until 100 thousand years ago, or so), so even if physical racial distinctions become meaningless, they'll simply divide people in tribes based on their place of birth, language or culture. In fact, this is what most people already do in "modern societies" where being a "racist" is considered a bad thing (so, instead, you talk about the superiority of your "culture"; how civilised your society is, how erudite your language is, how deeply moral your religion is, and so on).
If 1 dollar = 1 euro, and the materials are priced in euros (at, say, 80 euros total), then the american assembler would have to pay 80 dollars, add the cost of assembly (say, 20 dollars), and then sell the laptop for 100 dollars (which is equal to 100 euros).
Now, if 1.4 dollars = 1 euro and the materials cost the same 80 euros, then the american assembler will have to pay 112 dollars, add the cost of assembly (20 dollars) and sell the laptop for 132 dollars. It might seem like more money inside the USA, but, at an exchange rate of 10:14, 132 dollars is actually just over 94 euros. In other words, the laptop just got cheaper in global terms (although it's now a "132 dollar laptop" instead of a "100 dollar laptop").
In other words, if the laptops are assembled in the USA (which I doubt), the low dollar would only make them cheaper, not more expensive. The only place where they might end up more expensive is in countries whose currencies are pegged to the dollar (which means China and one or two african countries).
But since China is going to make a knock-off OLPC anyway (for $9.99, including lead paint), and African countries are going go get theirs through some corrupt foreign aid program, it won't make any difference.
No, 5.6% is the actual Apple laptop market share in the USA, for last month. The 17.6% figure is if you ignore online and direct (i.e., corporate) sales. Quoth the copulating article:
"NPD, which collects its data primarily from retail sources and excludes most online and all direct sales, said Apple's MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops accounted for 17.6% of June's unit sales"
In other news, market research firm SJB, which collects its data primarily from Apple stores and excludes all other sources, said Apple's MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops accounted for 100% of unit sales.;-)
Also, the numbers from IDC (also mentioned in the article) put Apple's share at 5.6%, not 17.6%:
Research firm IDC also has Apple in the third spot; data it released last month put Apple's share of U.S. sales at 5.6%, far behind leaders HP (28.4%) and Dell (23.6%) but tied with Gateway.
In other words, 1 laptop out of every 18, not out of every 5.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think wolves are likely to swallow forks along with their victims (which are mostly sheep, BTW), you obviously don't understand the difference in scale or sensitivity between a shark's throat and a wolf's, or the different ways in which mammals and fish chew their food. :-P
No, the fork, like the gold coin, is simply being generated by a random "treasure script" that takes the type and "level" of the creature, the player's level, and generates "appropriate" treasure. In other words, if you kill the wolf when your character is at a low "level", you probably don't get anything besides the two standard items (meat and a pelt). As you become more powerful, the game decides that it must give you more rewards to keep you from getting bored, so any sense of realism goes out the door. You get wolves carrying gold and cutlery, and you get highway robbers carrying armour sets that are worth more than a house (which makes you wonder why they go around risking their lives robbing people).
Messy design to begin with (Oblivion is a console hack'n'slash game pretending to be an RPG), but which could have been greatly minimised by proper playtesting, which Oblivion never had. It was only "tested" internally by Bethesda's own developers, which goes against the whole principle of playtesting. And each part of the game was developed by a different team, so it feels disjointed and doesn't even have Morrowind's atmosphere.
No strong driving vision (like the Ultima games had) and no extensive playtesting (like Half-Life had) always lead to a disappointing product.
There are some user-developed mods that make Oblivion much better, but still not nearly as consistent (or enjoyable) as games developed more than 10 years ago.
Oblivion and Morrowind feel dead, like worlds populated by robots, all saying exactly the same sentences (how hard would it have been to change the sentences slighty for each of the different voices...??) and all doing the same 3 or 4 meaningless actions over and over again.
Then there are the hundreds of scripting bugs and inconsistencies (Oblivion was never actually play-tested before release - extensive playtesting is what made Half-Life great), a nonsensical game world (shared by NWN), where random crates and barrels spread all over the game world each contain half a dozen gold coins (sometimes with a beggar sitting right by the crate - why doesn't he grab the coins, and why are the crates and coins there anyway?), monsters that drop random objects (in Oblivion sometimes a wolf will drop a gold coin or a fork - WTF?), and so on. Baldur's Gate, despite a more consistent and interesting story, has an even more static world (NPCs standing on the exact same spot 24/7, etc.).
It's really depressing that games made so recently, by huge teams, with several gigabytes of art and code, are so far behind a game like Ultima VII, in terms of immersion and game world consistency. You made more use of your brain just navigating the dialogues in Ultima VII than playing through Oblivion ("follow the arrow, click here, kill that monster, repeat"). The only bearable part of Oblivion was the Thieves' Guild quest line; the rest is just a good-looking (but clearly rushed) hack'n'slash game completely ruined by a bad story, bad scripting, and designed for 8-year-old Xbox players.
Valve needs to bring toghether the people who made Ultima VII and System Shock 2 and show the industry what a real RPG / free-form adventure / world simulator looks like.
Actually he has a point. Valve's server browser is notorious for forgetting all your favourite servers, forgetting your filters, and so on. I never understood why it's so hard to include a decent server browser with their games. Maybe they have a deal with Gamespy or something.
Virtually any game made in the last 10 years will simply revert to the lowest resolution if switching to the "desired" one fails. In fact, both with DirectX and OpenGL, that's handled almost automatically (you request a certain mode - optionally leaving some fields blank - and the function returns the mode it was actually able to set). Besides, display options are usually not part of the savegames.
I'm sure there will be some issues with Cloud, but I suspect they won't be of the "bloody obvious" variety.
Usable today:
1. Windows Server 2003
2. Windows 2000
3. Windows XP SP2
Usable in their day:
4. Windows NT 4.0
5. Windows NT 3.51
6. MS-DOS 3.3 or 5 and above
7. Windows 98 SE
Barely usable if you are a bit of a masochist:
8. Windows XP pre-SP2
9. Windows for Workgroups 3.11
10. Windows 98
Barely usable if you are on Prozac:
11. Windows 3.1
12. Windows Vista
13. Windows 3.0
Unusable even with a Prozac + Xanax drip-feed:
14. MS-DOS 4
15. Windows 95
16. Windows ME
there's a reason US ships still stock astrolabes.
They're afraid someone will jam their sextants?
Welcome to MS Surgery 2008 (c) Microsoft 1983-1992
> run appendix
appendix is undefined.
> run "appendix"
appendix not found.
> run "Appendix"
- Appendix script started...
- Setup complete.
- Loading scalpel vector data.
- Reticulating splines.
- Blade initialized.
- Cutting...
[Message from AutoUpdater: an update for LifeSupport.sys is available and will now be installed.]
LifeSupport.sys has performed an illegal operation and was terminated.
Restart? Y/[N]
> y
Restart? Y/[N]
> Y
LifeSupport.sys failed to start due to error:
0000 - General error
Patient has terminated unexpectedly.
The word "and" was invented a long time ago; use it.
Whoa, talk about a coincidence.
The article is sketchy (to say the least) about the details of this test. Were people told they were going to have to press a button? How long were they told to wait before pressing it? Did they start thinking about pressing it before they were even asked to do it? Was any of the test subjects a Jedi?
;-)
Just because you start thinking about making a "random" decision a few seconds in advance, that does not mean you cannot change your mind a fraction of a second before, if something else happens (ex., a sudden external stimulus). In fact, the article points this out:
"Also, the predictions were not completely accurate. Maybe free will enters at the last moment, allowing a person to override an unpalatable subconscious decision."
I think it's pretty obvious that people can react to external stimuli in less than seven seconds, including stimuli that they had no way of predicting.
Anyway, unless our brains have some sort of mystical particles, they are essentially very complex and highly parallel (but still fundamentally deterministic) electro-chemical computers, with an insane amount of inputs. So this really boils down to consciousness and a concept of present.
What this study shows is that decision-making isn't an instant process (did anyone think it was?), that we are not conscious of the early stages of that process (did anyone think we were?) and that there is a significant subconscious stage to random decisions, possibly because our brain tries to "validate" its decisions before submitting them to the "conscious" mind, and random ones have a low confidence level, making them go through extra sanity checks.
Subconscious: Tell Mr. Conscious to hit the left button!
Mr. Conscious's P.A.: Did you say something or was that just random noise?
Sub.: I said "tell Mr. Conscious to hit the left button"!
P.A.: Why should I tell him that?
Sub.: Because he asked me to make a random decision.
P.A.: Not good enough. Mr. Conscious will need assurance that that is the ideal course of action. Please produce the complete paper trail that led you to that decision.
Sub.: What paper trail? This is a *random* decision, you idiot.
P.A.: I'm afraid you will at least have to find some evidence that hitting the left button will not have any negative effects. If Mr. Conscious simply followed every random advice he got, how would he justify his salary?
Sub.: Look, the guy conducting the study hit the button just now and nothing happened to him, right? It's safe. Just hit it.
P.A.: Well, alright. The left button, you said?
Sub.: Yes!
P.A.: I'll transmit that to Mr. Conscious.
Sub.: About bloody time, too. Wasted seven seconds of my life.
P.S. - Several studies have shown that top athletes don't have particularly faster reflexes than other people; they just do the "Jedi trick" of starting to react before something happens. How can they react to something that hasn't happened? Experience. Their brain knows what are the 5 or 6 most likely developments, and it starts to plan ahead for all of them. When the times comes to send the decision to the body, the actual action is already buffered. On top of that, frequently we react to indicators rather than to the event itself (ex., in tennis the other player's body position will generally allow you to guess how he's going to serve before he hits the ball; if you wait for the ball to be hit, you won't get to it on time). To put it in computer terms: speculative execution and intelligent branch prediction.
P.P.S. - In Stanislaw Lem's short story "137 seconds" a news-gathering computer develops the ability to predict reality 137 seconds in advance, so this brain scanner still has a long way to go.
When you add the eBay and PayPal fees, it's actually cheaper to develop this stuff from scratch.
This notion that using less memory means a program is more "efficient" is ridiculous. I have 4 GB of RAM (well, I have more, but my computer has 4 GB). What use is it to me if a given program decides to use only 100 MB, when it could use all the rest to cache stuff and / or speed up requests? For example, Opera keeps a fully rendered copy of each tab in memory, plus the last couple of history entries, so you can switch instantly between them, and I think the latest versions of Firefox do the same. That's an efficient use of memory, IMO.
Good software will regularly monitor free memory, using more when it can and scaling down to the minimum when other parts of the system need it.
Unlike Firefox and MSIE, Opera includes an e-mail client (which keeps all its messages indexed for instant searching, BTW), so this is a bit like comparing the power consumption of CPUs where one CPU has a built-in memory controller and the other one doesn't (another recurring problem with some "hardware review" sites).
Unless they can make the browsers' configuration virtually identical (which means adding a lot of extensions and plug-ins to Firefox, plus Thunderbird, to make it do everything Opera does "out of the box"), the memory usage comparison is more or less meaningless. And, even if they do all that, simply looking at the amount of RAM used won't tell us anything about how efficiently it's used. Opening 50 pages at the same time and then closing all of them is hardly a normal (or relevant) usage pattern.
It's also funny how Christopher Blizzard says that "the small memory footprint in the latest Firefox 3 beta is proof that Firefox is ready for mobile environments". Well, they tested it againt the desktop version of Opera. Do they really think the version that runs on my 6 year old Nokia phone is designed to use 200 MB of RAM...? If they think FF is ready to run on cell phones and PDAs, why don't they just make a version available for download, and let people try it? Anyone can download and try Opera Mini, for example.
FF 3 is looking quite nice, but these articles read more like marketing. The objective should be to make the best browser possible; not to try to convince people that it's better than the competition.
"researchers at Yale University have found a virus in the same family as rabies that effectively kills an aggressive form of human brain cancer in mice."
Finally those poor mice will be free from the scourge of human brain cancer!
Is that the active ingredient in flour?
I'm pretty sure the point he was trying to make (and which you seem to have missed - twice now, as the post above proves) is that the USA is only "the west" if you look at it geographically (i.e., it is on the west side of the the map). It cannot be taken to accurately represent all the political "west", as the article implies (by using flaws in the US electoral system to label "western style voting" as "a loser").
It seems to be a pretty straightforward metaphor / play on words. But I guess I'm not looking at it from the point of view of someone who uses the word "pwned"...
If you interpret "genetic similarity" blindly (i.e., by comparing how many genes are exactly identical), humans are extremely similar to bananas. Clearly, that kind of interpretation is pointless. It's like comparing the similarity of two digital images by counting the number of identical bytes (when two images can _look_ indistinguishable while not having a single matched byte, and completely different despite having over 50% matched bytes). Some genes have a much bigger influence on our appearance (and behaviour) than others, and some different combinations of genes can have very similar end results.
Race is not, and was never meant to be, a genetic concept. That's what "species" is there for. A "race" is simply a group of people that share similar physical characteristics. It's a visual / linguistic construct, as real as any other one ("tall", "blonde", "hairy", etc.). As long as people understand that, the concept is rather useful.
But, even if we're talking about genes, people from isolated communites will tend to be more similar to others in their community than to those in the other communities. That's simply a consequence of heredity. Most of those similarities are probably invisible, so they're not an issue. But when you change something like hair / eye / skin colour, the difference is very noticeable, and you have a "race". What matters isn't the _number_ of genes that are different or identical, it's how big an impact they have on the appearance of the individual.
Using a "race" as a shortcut to describe someone's physical features sure beats using his or her nationality, which tells you nothing about how they look, and is just a pseudo-politically-correct tribal division. Saying "he's african-american" suggests that he isn't a _true_ american, and that he has some connection to Africa which he probably doesn't. And then you get nonsense like the Trevor Richards / Westside High affair.
No, race is not a "myth" any more than talking about "blondes" and "brunettes" is a "myth". A "race" is simply a description given to people who share some similar (physical) traits. It's a shortcut. If I say a guy "looks nordic", that saves me the trouble of saying "he has pale skin, blond hair and blue eyes". Think of it as a prototype library.
Races form when communities live isolated for a long time (either as adaptations to the environemnt or as consequences of cultural selection), and they fade when different communities mix (and interbreed) regularly. The fact that there's a lot of genetic variation within, say, the Tutsi tribe, does not mean a Tutsi isn't likely to be more similar (both physically and genetically) to another Tutsi than to a native of Japan.
In any case, 90% of humans are innately tribal (hey, it was really useful until 100 thousand years ago, or so), so even if physical racial distinctions become meaningless, they'll simply divide people in tribes based on their place of birth, language or culture. In fact, this is what most people already do in "modern societies" where being a "racist" is considered a bad thing (so, instead, you talk about the superiority of your "culture"; how civilised your society is, how erudite your language is, how deeply moral your religion is, and so on).
Is it a coincidence this happened so shortly after Microsoft finally accepted to comply with the EC's decision in the anti-trust case?
It might be totally unrelated, but I noticed no one had mentioned this yet.
Optimists believe we live in the best possible world. Pessimists fear that might be true.
Whaaa...? Does that make any sense to you?
If 1 dollar = 1 euro, and the materials are priced in euros (at, say, 80 euros total), then the american assembler would have to pay 80 dollars, add the cost of assembly (say, 20 dollars), and then sell the laptop for 100 dollars (which is equal to 100 euros).
Now, if 1.4 dollars = 1 euro and the materials cost the same 80 euros, then the american assembler will have to pay 112 dollars, add the cost of assembly (20 dollars) and sell the laptop for 132 dollars. It might seem like more money inside the USA, but, at an exchange rate of 10:14, 132 dollars is actually just over 94 euros. In other words, the laptop just got cheaper in global terms (although it's now a "132 dollar laptop" instead of a "100 dollar laptop").
In other words, if the laptops are assembled in the USA (which I doubt), the low dollar would only make them cheaper, not more expensive. The only place where they might end up more expensive is in countries whose currencies are pegged to the dollar (which means China and one or two african countries).
But since China is going to make a knock-off OLPC anyway (for $9.99, including lead paint), and African countries are going go get theirs through some corrupt foreign aid program, it won't make any difference.
At the current exchange rate, 188 dollars is what, 3 euro cents?
No, 5.6% is the actual Apple laptop market share in the USA, for last month. The 17.6% figure is if you ignore online and direct (i.e., corporate) sales. Quoth the copulating article:
;-)
"NPD, which collects its data primarily from retail sources and excludes most online and all direct sales, said Apple's MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops accounted for 17.6% of June's unit sales"
In other news, market research firm SJB, which collects its data primarily from Apple stores and excludes all other sources, said Apple's MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops accounted for 100% of unit sales.
Also, the numbers from IDC (also mentioned in the article) put Apple's share at 5.6%, not 17.6%:
Research firm IDC also has Apple in the third spot; data it released last month put Apple's share of U.S. sales at 5.6%, far behind leaders HP (28.4%) and Dell (23.6%) but tied with Gateway.
In other words, 1 laptop out of every 18, not out of every 5.