If God had meant us to live naked in a cave with no fire while hunter-gathering, he wouldn't have given us these big brains that can figure out how to make clothes and shoes and houses and fire and fridges and supermarkets and big screen TVs.
Why can't people accept that the way humans live right now IS 'the natural way'.
Our way of living right now isn't sustainable, which means we can't continue like this, we simply run out of resources. Therefore I'd say it can't be natural.
At most it could be said that it's natural for us to not have any natural way of life, but instead be in an exponential state of change. Then our current way of life isn't natural, but it's natural that it will be very different already in just a few decades.
Somehow, the deletionism group win the war, and has Wikipedia ransom. Live in some "HardDisk is full" scenario, where having more articles is bad, so theres the need to remove these that don't fit some limited vision of notability. Limited as in... how can people that have no idea of quake engines discuss about the notability of some quake thing? Is like me discussing the notability of some greek poet... I know nothing of that. Lame and sad.
Ah, but don't you understand. If you know about something, you're obviously biased when estimating if it's noteworthy. Only people who have no idea what something is are able to estimate that it's not notable enough, because if it were, they'd know about it. And if they have the power to decide the issue and overrule your clearly biased opinion, then clearly they are doing the right thing. It's all very logical, really, you just need to warp your brain a bit to see it the right way.
Link, please. My experience has been that users who are griping about having been blocked usually deserved it, and the facts of the case are typically not as they present.
Do you even realize what your comment sounds like? Let me ask one question: in cases where user deletion/banning/whatever was not deserved, what typically happens to the admin who does it?
I mean, I'm sure there are cases of admins who have even apologized for wrongdoing, and probably cases where people have lost their admin privileges. But I'm asking, what happens to the admin in typical case of wrongful deleting/banning of a contributing normal user?
It'd be nice to reward that category before rewarding people that just want to make money and don't care about the field.
People that do a job that they love to exclusion of other life (you know, hobbies, friends not related to work, kids&family) are suckers. Typically this excluding other things is due to spending all their time at work, but it can also be due to not having the money to do anything else. It can be both, spending too much time at work to make enough money or to ensure keeping the job, while also not having enough money to do other exciting stuff so spending too much time at work just to pass time.
This is why I love the Canadian method: paper with circles, make an "X" in the circle you want, fold the paper and put it in the ballot box.
Yes, except I personally think that having to write a number is better. If somebody is unable to do that, it's probably for the better... (blind and other disabled people need an assistant anyway).
OK, peak oil is bad enough. But now also peak swine flu? Imagine the effects on the vaccine producers!
Don't worry, the viruses will come back. They always come back... They're patient, just biding their time.
Or, if they get bored waiting, they just release the sharks with lasers to shoot everybody who's immune. So don't get the vaccine! You've been warned now!
You can't know something has peaked or bottomed out until way after the fact. It's like having a sign of relief when in the eye of a hurricane or ignoring the possibility of aftershocks from earthquakes.
They have pretty good infection models for the flu. So yes, they can have a good idea of when the flu peaks.
Of course (as even the summary says) it's bitch that making and publishing a prediction may change the outcome:-). But I guess they can take that into account in their models too. So, when they report something like this, what do their models *really* say is likely to happen, hmm...
Considering that the majority of deaths in the so-called flu pandemic of 1918 were actually from tuberculosis (which would have made it a tuberculosis pandemic) and pneumonia...
Just like today, it was mostly killing off people who had weakened immune systems and chronic diseases.
Are you implying that it's ok that those who died, died (and are going to die in this pandemic)?
I hope not!
Also, those diseases don't really kill anybody. What ultimately kills in almost all disease related deaths is lack of oxygen in the brain, caused for example by heart stopping.
I agree that research should be allowed on this stuff but some of the opposition isn't crazy Christians. People like me are concerned about at what specific point does a person turn from a pile of cells to a "human".
Well, there's no specific point, and even any unspecific point is totally arbitrary. I think the reasonable range is from the fertilization of the egg to the birth, or possibly even to a point where a baby recognizes him/herself as separate being (somewhere between 6-12 months old, IIRC), or whatever.
I personally would pick some point in pregnancy when the fetus can have some kind of thoughts in the most basic sense of the word. But there's a large gray area between the absolutes (from no brain cells to well developed sensory nerves connecting to the brain and giving it real sensory input).
It's a shame this game has no coop or multiplayer. I know a lot of you will say there is nothing wrong with a well-done single player game, and I agree with you in spirit. But, in practice, a part of me looks at a game like this in 2009 and can't help but see it as, well...old-fashioned.
I dare say it's impossible to do a good single player campaign so that it's also playable (by today's standards, raised by current MMORPGs) in co-op. If it has an immersive BG-like plot tree and deep characters (implying deep conversations), doing that in multiplayer isn't very fun. If you're playing for the hack&slash, pillage&burn kind of fun, it needs a different game, something like NWN (which was rather mediocre as a single player game IMHO), or a real MMORPG.
So first of all doing a best possible single player campaign without compromising for multiplayer was a great great decision. And after that, not wasting time and money on adding some half-assed multiplayer mode was an excellent decision too.
If you're writing here, I very much doubt you provide for you. You do some pretty abstract "work" in a 21st century society, and get compensated with some abstract "currency", which you use to "buy" stuff you want and also stuff you need. You only rely on yourself to find somebody else to provide the "currency", but most likely you totally rely others to grow and transport your food, make and transport the things you use, keep bad people from taking your stuff and your life, etc.
And if you're some of those few who could actually rely on themselves and survive if the need arose, I'm sure you agree that most people wouldn't.
Don't change the code, and you have no changes to publicize.
GPL doesn't work like that. If your software depends on GPL software (like a GPL library or copy-pasted GPL source code), then your software must also be GPL. LGPL is more like what you describe, and even with LGPL, the user of the software must be able to change the LGPL part (so LGPL really only works for dynamically linked libraries, so you can eg. use your own versions of those if you wish). So in this case even LGPL wouldn't help, if the "stolen" code was "copy-pasted".
Dark matter is sort of like violence. If it doesn't work, just use more of it.
Well it is certainly convenient. Anytime your theory doesn't add up, or fails to predict the results of a new observation, why go through all the trouble of considering your theory falsified, questioning your premises, and coming up with new ideas? Just add dark matter to make the math work out. Don't let it concern you that it's the one and only scientifically accepted form of matter that has never once been observed in any laboratory, after all, we have equations to balance!
Well there's the thing with stuff like Nobel prizes. That kind of stuff tends to fall on people who came up with new ideas that worked. So there's plenty of reason to come up with new ideas instead of fine-tuning the old ones. It's just that dark matter seems to work. There are the gravitational effects (especially lensing), and there are the equations that add up when you add approximately the amount of dark matter you'd expect there to be by the gravitational effects.
Have you ever considered that maybe the dark matter hypothesis indeed holds, that there is this dark matter in our universe?
In my nonscientific, anecdotal observations, skinnier women have less children due to birth control, not because of some genetic problem.
If being skinny is genetic, and if being skinny leads to less children, then from evolutionary point of view, it's the skinny genes leading to less children, ie. it is a genetic "problem".
The short form is "The universe has one measure of success: the number of your descendants."
Well, no. Universe doesn't care and doesn't measure. You might define "success" as "spreading your genes", but that's just one possible human definition.
Also, it's not just "your descendants". It's almost as much "your parents' descendants", quite a lot of "your grandparents' descendants", and so on. So if you worry about spreading your genes, but don't have any children, just make sure your siblings (or their children) breed like rabbits, and you're set;-).
Another point is, that there's no inherent reason why having genetic offspring would be more important than having cultural offspring. In current human society, I might go as far as to say that spreading your culture and values is better measure of success than spreading your genes.
Suppose that humankind made a concerted attempt to voluntarily produce less children. Our population declines from 6 billion to 3 billion. Then, humankind does not need so much food and so much energy. The farmer in this thread of discussion can shutdown his farm and engage in another activity.
Brilliant idea, but it falls flat due to one simple reason: evolution. Whoever doesn't go with this, whoever produces more children than they should, for whatever reason as long as it is affected by genes at least a bit, will have an evolutionary advantage.
So, whatever you do to reduce population growth, evolution will counter it. Those that were "resistant" to you method of population control will prosper and spread their "resistant" genes. Absent-minded, careless and/or uncaring people are resistant to birth control methods. People with strong maternal/paternal instinct are resistant to high standard of living and active lifestyle reducing number of children. Etc.
No, the only way to sensibly limit number of people is to decide how many people there should be. Then if there are too many, have peope fight each other until only desired amount is left. Not only would it solve the overpopulation problem, it'd make great reality TV too ("Remember, you could be the next Real Survivor(tm)!").
Just a quick note: closed source drivers are a problem, because if the driver provider goes under, device owners are left out in the cold, without ability to keep their devices up to date. We'll see what direction Nokia goes with those. On the other hand, closed source "normal" software, is completely ok by me. I mean, what kind of open system would it be if it were closed to non-open source software? Not very open, that's for sure. If you don't like the closed source app, just install an open source alternative.
But, on the other hand, I have to say, remote display really is not a priority for me on my phone at all.:)
Just think about it. Running not just compatible, but running the same (either remotely with X or local version compiled from same sources) apps from your home PC, from work PC, from laptop and from your phone.
That's a paradigm shift, and it's hard to match with any other available technology. Www-based "cloud" apps have clunky UIs. Other remote desktop systems aren't as efficient or as widespread or as flexible as X11 and have more trouble fitting in a small screen. And X11-based stuff has enormous amount of existing software, libraries and tools that are actually available (thanks to GPL and BSD licenses), and many many existing developers.
In fact, if Maemo takes off, I see the X11 apps moving to the cloud. Not sure if anyone offers this as a real service yet, though obviously it's easy to implement just by buying a virtual server and installing whatever X apps you want (eg. "apt-get install whatever"). But there's definitely both need and opportunity for a specialized service business here, especially considering that there are quite decent X servers for Windows too (free like Xming, as well as commercial), so the customer base wouldn't be just non-Windows users.
Maemo might be a bit late compared to iPhone or Android, but it has potential created by two decades of software and technology development. It'll be interesting to see what happens with it!
I work in a very well-known Fortune 500 company, and it's all RHEL here, with a few people running Fedora on the desktop. You see, in the REAL real world, it's still almost all Red Hat and Novell Suse (and some CentOS).
What does a Fortune 500 company have to do with the real world?
"Punctuated equilibrium" is what mutation based evolution necessarily looks like at some points (regularly). When something radically better appears and manages not die out immediately, then it inevitably spreads and replaces old and inferior.
But the one more relevant to your point about this disproving the concept of irreducible complexity has problems of its own. Yes, there was indeed an evolution of the bacteria being able to process citrate. However, that's a smaller step than, say, if E. Coli bacteria started to be able to perform photosynthesis, or vice versa. There are other extremely wide gaps (asexual reproduction to sexual reproduction, live birth vs. egg laying, visual and audible processing, etc. etc.) that are still a challenge for gradual, incremental evolution to explain.
Ok, consider that a few petri dishes and two decades produced one nover feature that came about from combined effect of two mutations.
Then Now you need to make a few multipliers.
First multiplier: divide the area of all terrestial environments habitable to bacteria with the area of these petri dishes.
Second multiplier: divide a few hundred million years (time to develop photosynthesis) with 20 years.
Then multiply 2 benefical mutations with these two multipliers.
Do you think that photosynthesis can develop with this many benefical mutations accumulating?
Or sexual reproduction, multiply above by about 10 (a few billion years to develop sexual reproduction). Does it sound plausible that that many benefical mutations accumulating could produce sexual reproduction?
Now I'm not saying this happened. I'm just asking you to evaluate if it's plausible or not.
Stallman refers to EMACS virgins, specifically "women who had not been introduced to EMACS" along with the advice that "relieving them of their virginity" was some sort of sacred duty for members of "The Church of EMACS".
Well, you know RMS. He's a shining beacon in the FOSS world. A bit like lighthouse really, something that if you venture too near of it, you'll get shipwrecked in underwater rocks, yet something that helps you to find your way...;-)
Slashdot Mirror
If God had meant us to live naked in a cave with no fire while hunter-gathering, he wouldn't have given us these big brains that can figure out how to make clothes and shoes and houses and fire and fridges and supermarkets and big screen TVs.
Why can't people accept that the way humans live right now IS 'the natural way'.
Our way of living right now isn't sustainable, which means we can't continue like this, we simply run out of resources. Therefore I'd say it can't be natural.
At most it could be said that it's natural for us to not have any natural way of life, but instead be in an exponential state of change. Then our current way of life isn't natural, but it's natural that it will be very different already in just a few decades.
Somehow, the deletionism group win the war, and has Wikipedia ransom. Live in some "HardDisk is full" scenario, where having more articles is bad, so theres the need to remove these that don't fit some limited vision of notability. Limited as in... how can people that have no idea of quake engines discuss about the notability of some quake thing? Is like me discussing the notability of some greek poet... I know nothing of that. Lame and sad.
Ah, but don't you understand. If you know about something, you're obviously biased when estimating if it's noteworthy. Only people who have no idea what something is are able to estimate that it's not notable enough, because if it were, they'd know about it. And if they have the power to decide the issue and overrule your clearly biased opinion, then clearly they are doing the right thing. It's all very logical, really, you just need to warp your brain a bit to see it the right way.
Link, please. My experience has been that users who are griping about having been blocked usually deserved it, and the facts of the case are typically not as they present.
Do you even realize what your comment sounds like? Let me ask one question: in cases where user deletion/banning/whatever was not deserved, what typically happens to the admin who does it?
I mean, I'm sure there are cases of admins who have even apologized for wrongdoing, and probably cases where people have lost their admin privileges. But I'm asking, what happens to the admin in typical case of wrongful deleting/banning of a contributing normal user?
Only suckers do science right now.
And people that actually love it.
It'd be nice to reward that category before rewarding people that just want to make money and don't care about the field.
People that do a job that they love to exclusion of other life (you know, hobbies, friends not related to work, kids&family) are suckers. Typically this excluding other things is due to spending all their time at work, but it can also be due to not having the money to do anything else. It can be both, spending too much time at work to make enough money or to ensure keeping the job, while also not having enough money to do other exciting stuff so spending too much time at work just to pass time.
This is why I love the Canadian method: paper with circles, make an "X" in the circle you want, fold the paper and put it in the ballot box.
Yes, except I personally think that having to write a number is better. If somebody is unable to do that, it's probably for the better... (blind and other disabled people need an assistant anyway).
I just can't wait to take my cell phone SCUBA diving, or wake boarding, or sky diving, or...
Me neither! Alas, the technology isn't here yet :-(
But I bet there are designs and possibly even prototypes in the labs of diving computer makers...
Not to mention, a phone designed to be robust enough for SCUBA diving would be excellent for BAR diving as well!
OK, peak oil is bad enough. But now also peak swine flu? Imagine the effects on the vaccine producers!
Don't worry, the viruses will come back. They always come back... They're patient, just biding their time.
Or, if they get bored waiting, they just release the sharks with lasers to shoot everybody who's immune. So don't get the vaccine! You've been warned now!
You can't know something has peaked or bottomed out until way after the fact. It's like having a sign of relief when in the eye of a hurricane or ignoring the possibility of aftershocks from earthquakes.
They have pretty good infection models for the flu. So yes, they can have a good idea of when the flu peaks.
Of course (as even the summary says) it's bitch that making and publishing a prediction may change the outcome :-). But I guess they can take that into account in their models too. So, when they report something like this, what do their models *really* say is likely to happen, hmm...
Considering that the majority of deaths in the so-called flu pandemic of 1918 were actually from tuberculosis (which would have made it a tuberculosis pandemic) and pneumonia ...
Just like today, it was mostly killing off people who had weakened immune systems and chronic diseases.
Are you implying that it's ok that those who died, died (and are going to die in this pandemic)?
I hope not!
Also, those diseases don't really kill anybody. What ultimately kills in almost all disease related deaths is lack of oxygen in the brain, caused for example by heart stopping.
You can't falsify "God did it." What you can do is move further back in time the moment when He set the wheel in motion, or didn't.
"You" maybe can, but the creationists can't. They have a wheel that started rotating 6000 years ago, end of discussion (but preaching can continue).
I agree that research should be allowed on this stuff but some of the opposition isn't crazy Christians. People like me are concerned about at what specific point does a person turn from a pile of cells to a "human".
Well, there's no specific point, and even any unspecific point is totally arbitrary. I think the reasonable range is from the fertilization of the egg to the birth, or possibly even to a point where a baby recognizes him/herself as separate being (somewhere between 6-12 months old, IIRC), or whatever.
I personally would pick some point in pregnancy when the fetus can have some kind of thoughts in the most basic sense of the word. But there's a large gray area between the absolutes (from no brain cells to well developed sensory nerves connecting to the brain and giving it real sensory input).
It's a shame this game has no coop or multiplayer. I know a lot of you will say there is nothing wrong with a well-done single player game, and I agree with you in spirit. But, in practice, a part of me looks at a game like this in 2009 and can't help but see it as, well...old-fashioned.
I dare say it's impossible to do a good single player campaign so that it's also playable (by today's standards, raised by current MMORPGs) in co-op. If it has an immersive BG-like plot tree and deep characters (implying deep conversations), doing that in multiplayer isn't very fun. If you're playing for the hack&slash, pillage&burn kind of fun, it needs a different game, something like NWN (which was rather mediocre as a single player game IMHO), or a real MMORPG.
So first of all doing a best possible single player campaign without compromising for multiplayer was a great great decision. And after that, not wasting time and money on adding some half-assed multiplayer mode was an excellent decision too.
I rely on me to provide for me.
If you're writing here, I very much doubt you provide for you. You do some pretty abstract "work" in a 21st century society, and get compensated with some abstract "currency", which you use to "buy" stuff you want and also stuff you need. You only rely on yourself to find somebody else to provide the "currency", but most likely you totally rely others to grow and transport your food, make and transport the things you use, keep bad people from taking your stuff and your life, etc.
And if you're some of those few who could actually rely on themselves and survive if the need arose, I'm sure you agree that most people wouldn't.
Don't change the code, and you have no changes to publicize.
GPL doesn't work like that. If your software depends on GPL software (like a GPL library or copy-pasted GPL source code), then your software must also be GPL. LGPL is more like what you describe, and even with LGPL, the user of the software must be able to change the LGPL part (so LGPL really only works for dynamically linked libraries, so you can eg. use your own versions of those if you wish). So in this case even LGPL wouldn't help, if the "stolen" code was "copy-pasted".
Dark matter is sort of like violence. If it doesn't work, just use more of it.
Well it is certainly convenient. Anytime your theory doesn't add up, or fails to predict the results of a new observation, why go through all the trouble of considering your theory falsified, questioning your premises, and coming up with new ideas? Just add dark matter to make the math work out. Don't let it concern you that it's the one and only scientifically accepted form of matter that has never once been observed in any laboratory, after all, we have equations to balance!
Well there's the thing with stuff like Nobel prizes. That kind of stuff tends to fall on people who came up with new ideas that worked. So there's plenty of reason to come up with new ideas instead of fine-tuning the old ones. It's just that dark matter seems to work. There are the gravitational effects (especially lensing), and there are the equations that add up when you add approximately the amount of dark matter you'd expect there to be by the gravitational effects.
Have you ever considered that maybe the dark matter hypothesis indeed holds, that there is this dark matter in our universe?
Black hole and dark matter have very precise meanings in physics.
Yeah, the very precise definition of dark matter being "the invisible shit with gravitational mass, about which we don't know what the fuck it is".
In my nonscientific, anecdotal observations, skinnier women have less children due to birth control, not because of some genetic problem.
If being skinny is genetic, and if being skinny leads to less children, then from evolutionary point of view, it's the skinny genes leading to less children, ie. it is a genetic "problem".
The short form is "The universe has one measure of success: the number of your descendants."
Well, no. Universe doesn't care and doesn't measure. You might define "success" as "spreading your genes", but that's just one possible human definition.
Also, it's not just "your descendants". It's almost as much "your parents' descendants", quite a lot of "your grandparents' descendants", and so on. So if you worry about spreading your genes, but don't have any children, just make sure your siblings (or their children) breed like rabbits, and you're set ;-).
Another point is, that there's no inherent reason why having genetic offspring would be more important than having cultural offspring. In current human society, I might go as far as to say that spreading your culture and values is better measure of success than spreading your genes.
Suppose that humankind made a concerted attempt to voluntarily produce less children. Our population declines from 6 billion to 3 billion. Then, humankind does not need so much food and so much energy. The farmer in this thread of discussion can shutdown his farm and engage in another activity.
Brilliant idea, but it falls flat due to one simple reason: evolution. Whoever doesn't go with this, whoever produces more children than they should, for whatever reason as long as it is affected by genes at least a bit, will have an evolutionary advantage.
So, whatever you do to reduce population growth, evolution will counter it. Those that were "resistant" to you method of population control will prosper and spread their "resistant" genes. Absent-minded, careless and/or uncaring people are resistant to birth control methods. People with strong maternal/paternal instinct are resistant to high standard of living and active lifestyle reducing number of children. Etc.
No, the only way to sensibly limit number of people is to decide how many people there should be. Then if there are too many, have peope fight each other until only desired amount is left. Not only would it solve the overpopulation problem, it'd make great reality TV too ("Remember, you could be the next Real Survivor(tm)!").
And regarding Maemo, for something free and open, it has a lot of closed source software : http://wiki.maemo.org/Why_the_closed_packages and http://blog.1407.org/2009/09/01/nokias-free-software-bullshit-and-insults-in-maemo/
Just a quick note: closed source drivers are a problem, because if the driver provider goes under, device owners are left out in the cold, without ability to keep their devices up to date. We'll see what direction Nokia goes with those. On the other hand, closed source "normal" software, is completely ok by me. I mean, what kind of open system would it be if it were closed to non-open source software? Not very open, that's for sure. If you don't like the closed source app, just install an open source alternative.
But, on the other hand, I have to say, remote display really is not a priority for me on my phone at all. :)
Just think about it. Running not just compatible, but running the same (either remotely with X or local version compiled from same sources) apps from your home PC, from work PC, from laptop and from your phone.
That's a paradigm shift, and it's hard to match with any other available technology. Www-based "cloud" apps have clunky UIs. Other remote desktop systems aren't as efficient or as widespread or as flexible as X11 and have more trouble fitting in a small screen. And X11-based stuff has enormous amount of existing software, libraries and tools that are actually available (thanks to GPL and BSD licenses), and many many existing developers.
In fact, if Maemo takes off, I see the X11 apps moving to the cloud. Not sure if anyone offers this as a real service yet, though obviously it's easy to implement just by buying a virtual server and installing whatever X apps you want (eg. "apt-get install whatever"). But there's definitely both need and opportunity for a specialized service business here, especially considering that there are quite decent X servers for Windows too (free like Xming, as well as commercial), so the customer base wouldn't be just non-Windows users.
Maemo might be a bit late compared to iPhone or Android, but it has potential created by two decades of software and technology development. It'll be interesting to see what happens with it!
I work in a very well-known Fortune 500 company, and it's all RHEL here, with a few people running Fedora on the desktop. You see, in the REAL real world, it's still almost all Red Hat and Novell Suse (and some CentOS).
What does a Fortune 500 company have to do with the real world?
"Punctuated equilibrium" is what mutation based evolution necessarily looks like at some points (regularly). When something radically better appears and manages not die out immediately, then it inevitably spreads and replaces old and inferior.
YouTube video about clock evolution simulation which clearly demonstrates this phenomenon. Of course things in nature are a lot more hairy and not this clear-cut.
But the one more relevant to your point about this disproving the concept of irreducible complexity has problems of its own. Yes, there was indeed an evolution of the bacteria being able to process citrate. However, that's a smaller step than, say, if E. Coli bacteria started to be able to perform photosynthesis, or vice versa. There are other extremely wide gaps (asexual reproduction to sexual reproduction, live birth vs. egg laying, visual and audible processing, etc. etc.) that are still a challenge for gradual, incremental evolution to explain.
Ok, consider that a few petri dishes and two decades produced one nover feature that came about from combined effect of two mutations.
Then Now you need to make a few multipliers.
First multiplier: divide the area of all terrestial environments habitable to bacteria with the area of these petri dishes.
Second multiplier: divide a few hundred million years (time to develop photosynthesis) with 20 years.
Then multiply 2 benefical mutations with these two multipliers.
Do you think that photosynthesis can develop with this many benefical mutations accumulating?
Or sexual reproduction, multiply above by about 10 (a few billion years to develop sexual reproduction). Does it sound plausible that that many benefical mutations accumulating could produce sexual reproduction?
Now I'm not saying this happened. I'm just asking you to evaluate if it's plausible or not.
Stallman refers to EMACS virgins, specifically "women who had not been introduced to EMACS" along with the advice that "relieving them of their virginity" was some sort of sacred duty for members of "The Church of EMACS".
Well, you know RMS. He's a shining beacon in the FOSS world. A bit like lighthouse really, something that if you venture too near of it, you'll get shipwrecked in underwater rocks, yet something that helps you to find your way... ;-)