IANAAP either, but I see it like this: imagine you have 4 spinning tops in the corners of a square. (The spinning tops are the galaxies.) The square itself doesn't spin, but the round things in the corners do. If all 4 rotate in the same direction, the system has a decidedly non-zero angular momentum, namely the sum of the 4. You can also easily find a frame of reference (e.g., centered the centre of the square and with the X and Y axes aligned with the side of the square) that doesn't rotate, and measure everything relative to it.
Or if it makes it easier to imagine, think of the science gag of having a very fast spinning flywheel in a suitcase. Ask someone to carry it for you, or leave it around and see if anyone tries to steal it. (Though these days it'll more likely be the blown up by the SWAT or whatever equivalent your country has.) If the suitcase is horizontal (lying on the side), someone's going to have a beast of a time trying to pick it up. Or if it's standing, they'll have a beast of a time taking a corner with it. Though the suitcase (universe) doesn't rotate, the flywheel (galaxy) in it does, and the angular momentum of it all is very much non-zero.
Now think of a suitcase with 4 flywheels in it, or 200,000 little flywheels. The suitcase itself doesn't rotate, the centres of the wheels don't rotate around anything, but the total system has a total angular momentum. Anyone trying to mess with that piece of luggage is in for a bit of surprise.
For years the big trend was to "steal" Microsoft software... was your copy of Windows 98 legit?
Actually, it was. And so was my copy of NT 4.0. (I must be the only dolt who bought NT for a gaming computer at home, but there you go.) So is my XP on my current gaming machine, and the Windows 2000 the other computer dual boots to. (Well, it used to be my gaming machine back then. How fast they go obsolete...)
Linux? Well, any download is legit there, but I like to buy boxed versions anyway. I'm writing this on a SuSE 10.0 installation. (And anyone feeling like splitting hairs along the lines of "no, you're writing it in Mozilla" is cordially invited to go fuck themselves;) The bought DVD and manuals are over there. I still have a stack of previous versions of it too.
Why? Because I believe in paying for stuff I use and find some value in. That's how capitalism is supposed to work. Even the issue of testing what works with what library version, and with which compiler options, is actually worth paying for, because my time is more valuable than that. Some people compile everything by hand, kudos to them, I don't.
Plus, hey, I've been raised to be the stereotypical D&D Lawful Good kinda guy. If I started pirating stuff, I might get my alignment adjusted by the GM;)
Now seriously, I don't know where everyone is getting their ideas that everyone is a pirate. Whether used pro-MS or anti-MS, the notion that everyone runs a pirated copy of Windows is just false. Even BSA's statistics for most of the western world don't put estimated piracy percentaces anywhere _near_ high enough for that to be the case.
And, hey, the BSA are the guys paid to cry wolf. Plus, you should look how those statistics are calculated. They don't actually measure a sample, they pull some numbers out of the ass as to how many copies should have been sold, and anything less is counted as piracy. If their numbers say every 1 computer sold should have 1 OS copy sold with it, then even if you only install an otherwise legit downloaded version of Gentoo or Ubuntu on it, you still count as a pirate because that's 1 less copy sold than their tables say. Plus other questionable assumptions. So their numbers are already inflated a lot as it is.
If even those don't say piracy is that high, you know, you can cut it out with repeating that falsehood already. If you're talking China or Russia, those pirate a lot, yes. (Partially, due to not being able to afford that stuff otherwise.) But in the western world it's just a bizarre axiom pulled out of the arse.
Basing an argument on something you do not beleive is generally considered bad form.
It's called Reductio Ad Absurdum and it's a very valid logical device to poke holes in any claim or hypothesis. Surely you must have used it in school before. And if someone finds it bad form to have their hypothesis dismantled, well, the way I see it, they should have refrained from claiming it in the first place.
As I was saying, I don't believe his claims, but there's a whole horde of new age hippies and disillusioned nihilists who'd accept any crap as absolute truth, if it comes from the far east. And doubly so if it comes from the Dalai Lama. I mean, whoa, dude, this guy is some great enlightened dude that learned stuff over 600 years. Consider the whole exercise done for their benefit.
And all I'm saying is that _if_ you believe that, then you also have to accept a lot of Tibetan history that doesn't look very enlightened to me. Plus such stuff as that at one point (e.g., in the 18'th century) he had nothing against being a puppet of China if it helped him get more privileges and political power. Etc.
Jim is a well-respected games journalist who apparently knows little about the games industry.
You're sorta right that he doesn't seem to "get" what made The Sims popular, but I wouldn't necessarily say you have to know little about the game industry to be stumped there.
The fact is, a lot of _members_ of the industry are just as stumped trying to understand it. I can think of at least three games which tried to bolt-on some kind of "at home" mode to their game, apparently for no other reason than to try to get a bit of that market too, and got it _all_ wrong. Not just a little wrong, but they "streamlined" out everything that was fun to anyone, and left only the mundane parts in... and even managed to get those wrong. Considering that Will Wright gave interviews and speeches all over the place as to what worked and why, just makes it even more surprising to see someone "streamline" out exactly those.
As a short detour, that seems to be a more general illness of the industry. Someone who doesn't even understand or like a genre, sets out to make a clone of last year's bestseller... and gets it all wrong. Whether it's The Sims, or RPGs, or car racing games or whatever.
Thing is, it's hard to explain _why_ people like The Sims, to someone who doesn't. Explanations like "because it's simulated life" or "because you can watch someone do chores around the house" are too superficial and somewhat mis-leading. Listening to Will Wright talk about fluid dynamics and such in an interview is actually a lot closer to describing it, but conversely leaves most people wondering something like "so WTF does that have to do with games?" or "so how the heck would one make a game like The Sims based on that?"
So a lot come out with half-baked, and occasionally pejorative, explanations like "maybe it's for the sex" or "maybe it's to pretend they live someone else's life".
People like The Sims for a variety of disconnected reasons, like using it to experiment with home layouts, or as props to film a story, or actually playing with the constraints and interdependencies to some goal they set for themselves. For some that goal will be creating love triangles and dodecahedrons, for some it will be something else.
And some will just get bored and start doing stuff like downloading stuff that turns it into a porn game or killing sims left and right, because that's the kind of event that's more like what they want to play.
The problem, and source of such articles, IMHO is that surprisingly few people seem to realize that there's more than one personality and more than one gamer type. Almost everyone seems to assume that he's the yardstick of gamer tastes, everyone else should like exactly the same things, and if they don't, there must be something hideously wrong with them. It's the stuff that fanboy flamewars are made of, and, sadly, more than one serious article.
The Sims is one of the best selling PC games of all time, and I wouldn't be shocked if it was the single best selling PC title of all time.
It is. It outsold all Quake games _combined_, for example.
Other "Sim" games seemed to evolve in the challenges that would develop as your city/anthill/whatever progressed, but with The Sims, gameplay and the challenges contained within basically stayed the same. Empty your bladder, keep up your energy, do something social. The game never changed, yet people just ate it up.
To some extent they do.
As you progress up any career path, for example, you start needing more friends, and more time keeping them friends, while at the same time needing more time to improve your skills for a promotion. Higher job levels also routinely involve longer hours, or more bizarre hours, and usually tax your needs more. While the entry job got your sim back home at 3 PM and as fresh as when they left, the highest job level would often get your sim back in the evening and almost ready to cry.
Worse yet, all that army of friends has wildly different personalities and interests, and often just getting them all in one room for a all-in-one socializing evening is a recipe for disaster. (Unless you created/edited a small army of identical sims.) Some will get to be enemies by just boring each other to death, some insecure guy will go ballistic because his wife danced with someone else (for bonus points: with another woman), etc.
You start needing more time, and having less time, basically. You start upgrading your objects just to get more out of them in less time (e.g., a more confortable sofa instead of a park bench in front of your TV, so you get some comfort points faster) or to combine effects (e.g., lying in a bathtub gets you some comfort too, while a shower doesn't.)
It may seem like "yeah, but you take care of the same needs in the end", but then the same thing can be said about SimCity too. There too, essentially you need water, electricity, employment, education, and a couple of other things. They stay the same throughout the game. There is no entirely new challenge that springs up as your city grows, it's just a matter of quantities and interdependencies: raising one factor (e.g., employment) causes another to lower (e.g., air quality.) So now you build something else to raise this one (e.g., parks) but that just impacts you in another way (e.g., longer drive times and more congestions from home to work, through all that forest you planted to keep pollution away.) And so on. All while managing a budget.
By and large, The Sims isn't any different. It's just managing some variables and interdependencies, and it does subtly change over time.
For all their "we love modders" hot air, EA and Maxis never released any tools, specs or support, other than (very late) for clothes and wallpapers. (And recently even took to giving you scary warnings that bad things might happen to your game if you enable third party mods.) But for making new objects? Nope. EA makes a good living selling those "Stuff Packs" (Livin' Large and wossname party were just stuff packs for the original The Sims 1 too) which give you a couple of objects and no new interactions or anything. So it's not actually in their interest to support modders.
So it took years of reverse engineering to get any kind of a grip on scripting it, and even then it involved essentially editing bytecode FFS, because EA never released a compiler. It's like scripting in assembly.
So, yes, at first there were only recoloured objects. But even for those, someone had to reverse engineer the file format and find out where the images are, and how they can be replaced without crashing the game.
If you compare it to the Quake community, those got all the tools and specs they needed from ID, so _of_ _course_ those had a headstart.
So calling The Sims community pathetic just because it took a while, is... surrealistic. There were thousands of people doing voluntary unpaid work, in their free time, for years. Just to figure out how to mod a game that EA never really wanted modded. WTH did you expect? That someone has a stroke of enlightenment, and gets the file and scripting specs from an archangel the next night after the game is released? It's been hard work and _of_ _course_ it took time.
That said, once scripting and stuff did get figured out -- by now The Sims 2 was already out -- some _amazing_ mods came out. E.g., Christianlov's all-in-one-NPCs on Mod The Sims 2 are all that the butler was in EA's The Sims Superstar, and a hell of a lot more. And it's for free too.
Heck, his nanny NPC alone made me grateful. Maxis's nanny was so idiotic, it made me want to brain her each time I watched her do exactly the wrong things while the toddler is bawling his little lungs out. A toddler which can already speak FFS, so you'd imagine there wouldn't be as much guessing, realistically. How stupid can one be to keep trying to stuff an already full toddler, until he shits himself and falls asleep in the chair, because he never had a chance or way to get out and take care of those needs? Dunno, maybe others found it funny, but for me watching that kind of a tortured childhood just made me _angry_.
Christianlov's actually feeds the toddler when he's hungry, puts him in the crib when he's sleepy, on the potty when he... umm... needs to go potty, and gives some social interaction when the kid wants attention. And mostly stays out of the way the rest of the time. How hard a concept can that be? Watching Christianlov's nanny do it right just made me realize how much Maxis's nanny sucked all along.
It may seem like a small detail, and not as glorious as editing 10 maps for a Quake mod, but it's such quality-of-life things that make me happy I can get TS2 mods.
Nope. In The Sims 1 there was no such thing, until Hot Date introduced the "love bed". And then it would work only with the love bed, normal beds were still only for sleeping.
So given that you're describing the animation for the love bed, I'm really curious _how_ you got that before Hot Date.
I'm not discounting that maybe later, much later, someone copied the scripts to the regular bed or made a new skin (ok, new sprite) for the love bed. (Most objects for The Sims 1 were actually this latter category: they just took an existing object and changed what it looked like.) But before Hot Date? Nope, people hadn't figured the scripting yet.
So it's a bit bizarre to hear that Sex was essential to The Sims 1's success, when it took two expansion packs for that to happen at all. The game was already a great hit when, yes, like the GP correctly mentioned, babies were produced by kissing and hugging. (And I don't mean some removing-tonsils-with-the-tongue two-hands-up-her-blouse kinda kiss, either. It was all really really tame at that point.) Then a popup would come up asking if you want a baby.
I'm sorry, but that was as non-erotic as you can possibly get. If anyone considered it "scoring" that their sim gave a backrub and had a friendly kiss, or worse yet as some pornographic material to choke the chicken to, I'd seriously worry about their mental health. Then they'd probably be as turned on by a bowl of rice.
Yes, later more was introduced, but The Sims 1 was already a huge success long before that.
Actually, that makes me wonder about an extra technical aspect. AFAIK, writing in Egypt wasn't left to right, same size. They sometimes wrote left to right (with the faces of the hieroglyphs pointing that way), sometimes right to left (ditto), sometimes vertically, and, here's the kicker, sometimes just turned it all into a sort of a painting. I.e., sometimes the symbols were rearranged, and some some made bigger, some smaller, to get an aesthetic picture.
So I'm really curious how they'd help a totally clueless guy like me input the last case.
Not saying it can't be done, so hold your horses with the "OMG be sure they already thought of everything" posts, folks. Just asking how. Would I be able to just run it through a scanner and upload the image? If I was smart and learned enough to figure it out on my own, which is kinda a pre-requisite to inputting it then with a keyboard, I wouldn't need an online translator.
Also, would they include a dictionary of the common phrases, metaphors, etc? Remember, I'm a guy who can't even read it (or I wouldn't need an online translator), so any cultural references would go even higher over my head.
E.g., AFAIK, 110 being a perfect number in their numerology, it also ended up the perfect lifespan of a human, so phrases like "he lived 110 years" were a metaphor for "he was a perfect guy" (or really really liked, at least) or "he lived a perfect life." You can find that kind of stuff about people who actually died in their 30's (which was actually the peak of the gauss curve for males in the Old Kingdom, so 110 would have been an _extreme_ improbability) or 40's.
E.g., some addressed letters "to your scribe" or complimented said scribe, which would seem a bit bizarre. That is, unless you figure out it was a fancy way of saying "I know you can read and write, and you're reading this yourself, as opposed to having a scribe read it to you", which, apparently, was something appreciated.
Well, then I guess you're not disaggreeing with rucs_hack too much after all, if you say "they are just another system of feudal theocratic society." Way I read it, that was his point too.
1. Well, the funny thing is, the Tibetan theocracy is based on the idea that essentially they didn't have several Dalai Lamas. They had exactly one, which was reincarnated again and again and again in different bodies, but still was the same guy.
I can see how that had a stabilizing effect, though. It's hard to argue the legitimacy of a succession when, so we're told, there was no succession, silly. There never was one. It's the same guy on the combined secular and spiritual throne, for the last several centuries straight.
Now if you're more secular minded, like I am, you probably won't give a damn about such claims. Pfft, of course there were several Dalai Lamas, and each must be judged by his own merits and shortcomings.
But let's pretend that we believed that reincarnation claim. There was always the same guy on the throne. The same applies to most of the other Lamas, btw. So essentially the not only they had the same ruler all along, but they had the same guys as his councillors/cardinals/whatever-you-want-to-call-th em. It was the same gang at the top all along, uninterrupted.
Then, pray tell, why _shouldn't_ we hold him responsible for what he's done at various points in the last few hundred years?
Since you mention the Tsar, I'd do the same if there was one and the same Tsar on their throne ever since Ivan the Terrible assumed that title. If anyone's claim to authority was that he, essentially, _is_ Ivan the Terrible, plus all other Tsars ever since... then I'd also hold him responsible for all the atrocities those did at various points.
2. The point that things sucked everywhere if you go far enough in the past, is true and insightful, but it still doesn't remove another question: then how enlightened were they after all?
A lot of disillusioned westerners have this idea that even shit smells great if it's packed as some ancient asian mysticism. Surely every single religion, cult, superstition, heresy or divine right excuse is pure enlightenment, if it comes from the far east. And their monks and gurus? Whoa, if they're from the far east, they surely were all enlightened, selfless, generous, open-minded, and so learned that they were a walking Wikipedia. Why surely if you gave a bunch of them secular power, that'd rock, right?
So then you look at one state that was ruled like that, and the best that you can say is, well, as you were saying, that it wasn't much worse than any other medieval totalitarian state.
Basically to answer to your example about the European medieval kings of 1300: no, of course, I wouldn't condemn them for being medieval back then. But I wouldn't hold them as an enlightenment model for the present generation either.
It seems to me that a religious figure or authority is based on little more than people actually believing it. E.g., if I were to proclaim that my brother is the new Pope, would anyone take that seriously? Just having someone give you a religious title (or conversely revoke it) doesn't mean anything unless a large enough percentage of the population actually believes that you're what that title says.
Ok, so China now fabricated a claim of authority over that process. Is it one anyone sane would want to believe?
If you believe that claim, then the implications are those I've written. If they can control the Dalai Lama's reincarnation, what's to stop them from controlling yours? Sure, they might not bother doing it to everyone, but do you want to be the first one who gets the shit end of that stick?
Yes, I know it sounds surrealistic to worry about that, but remember that they're essentially trying to mod religion there. So try to think like someone who takes buddhism and reincarnation very very seriously, because that's the people China tries hard to control with this coup.
Even skipping past the fact that China didn't have the religious authority to do such a change to buddhism, why would you want to start believing in their new government-sponsored heresy? Essentially there's no carrot there, but just some extra stick. The whole change is that you're supposed to believe that now the already unpopular and oppressive party and government can have a say in your reincarnation. And that they can do one of the scariest things imaginable by most people to you even post-mortem. Why would you want to join such a sect?
Regardless of whether you think they'll bother doing it to random buddhists on the street or not, the fact is, they're asking you to believe that they _can_ if they wanted to.
So basically it seems to me like a pretty stupid and heavy-handed thing to do. Appointing a new Dalai Lama is only worth anything if people actually believe him to be the Dalai Lama and you to have enough authority to select one. Otherwise they'll just ignore yours and follow theirs. And the "we can now control reincarnation" excuse isn't helping there IMHO. They didn't have the religious authority to decree such a change in the first place, _and_ it's a freakin' scary change to believe in. The incentive for people to start believing that new doctrine, and thus actually follow a Dalai Lama appointed based on it, just isn't there IMHO.
It's not just an euphemism, it's what happens after you die, according to that religion. Just like christians prefer to believe in heaven and hell than that it ends for ever.
The prospect that it's the end of the line at some point, is freakin' scary for a lot of people. It's not just religion that gets built on that, but also stuff like trying to be remembered somehow afterwards, or trying to make enough kids that the line will go on that way. (It's why countries where survival is a crapshot people make 10 kids or more, while after they get sanitation, medicine, etc, it eventually dawns upon them that if 1-2 kids are just short of guaranteed to survive, you don't really need more.) Anything to maintain a belief that somehow it's not really game over.
So the government saying they can stop you from reincarnating? Oooer. That's a claim that they can really end that game. It's exactly like, if you're a christian, the government saying that you need their stamp of approval to go anywhere after death. Otherwise you're going nowhere. Not to heaven, not to hell, not to purgatory (if your flavour of Christianity has a purgatory), just nowhere. To a lot of people that'll be a scarier thought than even going to hell.
Anyway, they're not saying you need permission to die. You can still jolly well die whenever you wish. Just go demonstrate for democracy in front of some tanks, if you ran out of other suicide ideas, and they'll oblige. They're saying that they can make your death a lot more permanent and scarier.
Well, you don't necessarily have to guess there. The games market has both already: service models (MMOs) and shrink-wrap, one-time sales (everything else.) So we've already seen what happens in an (admittedly, not 100% equivalent) market segment already.
1) Software provider has an 'incentive' to ensure the product is bug free or that the bugs get fixed quickly
Actually, MMOs were for a long time the buggiest games released. The idea that you have a permanent way of upgrading everyone's programs for ever, dropped quality to abysmal lows.
Thing is, with a normal program or game, you don't know how many people have applied the latest patch, and you can get bitten in the ass by reports of people getting virused by opening a file in an unpatched Word '97. With online service-type apps and MMOs, you know that they can't even connect without getting the latest version.
The psychological effect is quite reversed: it gives you the assurance that you _can_ patch it reliably anytime you wish. So basically, "it compiles, let's ship it" just became a lot more viable a choice. And the resulting quality showed it. Read the review of Anarchy Online for example on Something Awful someday, and know this: they actually barely scratch the surface of how bad it was. As an early subscriber I can confirm every single bug they mention there, and a lot more they never discovered.
And the funny thing is, that ability to patch didn't work better in the long run either, for most MMOs. The patches were released just as half-arsed and untested as the initial release, and most games bounced through years of patches that introduced two new bugs for each bug fixed. I've been on games where more than one patch got rolled back within hours of its release, because it had catastrophic effects.
We've already seen a similar effect before, in PC vs Console gaming. The easier it is to patch after release, the less incentive to get it right the first time. What should have been a major PC advantage, the ability to patch, actually worked as a disadvantage. Games released for the PC only recently started getting any serious QA, because the knowledge was there that, eh, you can always patch it later or blame it on the user's hardware anyway. (And if you think I'm exaggerating about how low it could go, I can think of one PC game I bought which would throw a script _syntax_ error if you tried to get past the main menu.)
Mind you, I'm not saying necessarily Microsoft will be as bad with their online office version. (But then again, there's nothing to say they necessarily won't either.) But some other people? Heh.
With shrink-wrap software, they have your money and are providing fixes for free.
That's assuming that sales only happen in the first week after release. This is one thing especially game fanboys don't seem to understand: patches aren't provided for free, and purely out of kindness, they're provided to ensure continued sales (though not necessarily of the same product) and continued customer goodwill. In end effect, they _are_ paid for those patches, by the fact that people continue to buy their stuff.
That goes double for stuff like Windows or MS Office. Those aren't products that get sold for two weeks and then go to the bargain bin. There's a continuous revenue stream from people keeping buying them, individually or together with their brand new computer, for years after release. If you just let your product have year-old security holes, people just stop buying it. Having an image of someone who takes problems seriously and will fix them in a timely fashion, isn't kindness, it's needed to keep making money.
(Again, I'm not saying whether MS is any good at it or not. Just that that's an image they struggle hard to maintain. Whether it's actually true or not, well, I'm not going to discuss that today. Make your own decision there.)
So basically IMHO that incentive isn't any different from a shrink-wrapped produc
As in anything that depends on taste, I'd actually expect quite a bit of variation. There is no "better" or "worse" as such, there's only "better" or "worse" for a given taste or personality type. At best, you can say more people like X than Y.
E.g., if I'm allowed to give a counter-anecdote to your anecdote, I'm the exact opposite.
Resident Evil never did much for me. The only "horror" in it for me were the awkward rotational controls and artificial view limitations because of the fixed camera. There was an additional (and for my taste unnecessary) extra learning curve and extra difficulty caused just by dealing with the weird control scheme. The decision to have limited saves was yet another thing that just said "artificial". Worse yet, it tripped my suspension of disbelief, because I had that artificial stuff in my face all the time and had to think about it instead of getting immersed in the world. Having to wrestle the controls doesn't make me go "OMG, I'm so scared", it makes me go "oh, FFS..."
I'm sure someone will mod that "troll" because it badmouths his favourite game, but it's not. I'm _not_ saying "Resident Evil is bad", I'm just saying that different people have wildly different tastes. The same game can be "bad" for some, but "bestest game evar" for some others.
And so it is with games vs movies too. I don't get scared by most movies, but a couple did manage to trip a particular phobia of mine big time. Still, I find well-done horror movies entertaining in their own non-scary way. I can't remember any game that triggered a similar response to either, so (while most were otherwise entertaining as a game) I wouldn't count any game I've played so far as truly a replacement to horror movies. More like something different, that can coexist. Again, I expect that for different people your mileage might vary. A lot.
Also as a handicap in proclaiming games as the total replacement there, is the factor that _most_ video game designers can't write a good story or choreograph it well if their life depended on it. A couple of them can, no doubt, but, honestly, most video game plots and stories don't hold a candle to a good movie. At least half are barely more than a vague background story as to why are you killing those monsters there, and you just give it a nod as you happily shoot zombies or whatnot in the head.
And at least half the rest are made by people who don't really understand whatever genre they're making, they don't even like it, but they figured they'd make a clone of whatever sold last year. And it shows. There is no mathematical formula or algorithm to make a fun game or a scary game, just some vague hypotheses and a lot of taking guesses and using your own gut feeling. Someone who doesn't really fall in the same market segment, just won't have the same "gut feeling" as to what should be fun. As I was saying, different people like different things. If you're different from your target market, well, you won't like the same things they like.
Now admittedly, (A) there have been exceptions, and (B) the situation _is_ (very) slowly improving, and (C) Hollywood makes plenty of duds too. Still, on the whole, I'd say it'll be a few more years before games are really a reliable replacement for any movie genre. Don't get me wrong, they're fun in their own right, as _games_, but I see that really as more of a different kind of entertainment at the moment, rather than something set to replace movies altogether.
Well, before I go any further, I should say I'm not an economist, so I'm not really qualified to judge that kind of changes. I'm just a guy who reads lots, but other than that and remembers a lot of trivia, but on the whole, it's no more reliable than googling for yourself. In fact, probably less. Generally, unless I claim first hand experience on some topic, the safe assumption is that you should take it with more than a grain of salt.
That's why I went into what Adam Smith says, rather than whether he's right and wrong. I'm a bit more Keynesian in my personal views of it, but again I'm not an economist, so take it as no better or worse than a taxi driver ranting about what the government should do.
That said, hmm, being in Europe, more exactly Germany, we already pay a tax at the pump, though it doesn't completely replace other kinds of taxes.
Superficially, the main change that can be noticed, is that here small cars and Diesel cars (even after tax, Diesel is cheaper than Gasoline) are a _lot_ more popular. It's no shame even for a relatively well-to-do IT guy to be seen in a small fuel-eficient car, though a lot still go for the sports car image. Though even there, you can buy all the way to sports cars and executive cars with Diesel engines. But, anyway, you still see plenty of small cars on the streets, and SUVs never got too popular.
Another difference here, although I couldn't say whether it's the policy or fuel prices, is that public transportation is ubiquitous, and a lot of people take the bus or light rail instead of driving their own car.
Also, all neighbourhoods are built with the assumption that you must be able to (A) walk, and (B) get access to some kind of public transportation.
There's also a lot less of a cultural drive to move to some sparse suburb. In fact, quite the contrary, a lot of my well paid coleagues actually prefer to live in the middle of a populated city. Some even commute so they can live in an even denser place. Of course, that's not just fuel prices, but also a matter of (A) a lot lower criminality, and practically no inner-city crime problem (if you're going to get mugged, unlikely as it is, it's no different in the inner city) and (B) land costs. We have a lot less free land down here, and there are even whole areas (e.g., the NRW) which are almost a contiguous metropolis.
Of course, even in those factors, it's more complex than just the taxes. A lot of other policy decisions influence it indirectly, to various degrees. E.g., the better social security and more reasonable GINI index than the USA mean that a lot less people face a choice along the lines of "mug someone or starve".
Another thing I notice is that shops are a lot more distributed inside the city, instead of being concentrated in some super-mall that you have to drive to. From most places you can just walk to the next place where you can get the groceries. I'm sure the fuel prices played _some_ role there, but it's also a matter of policies and lobbying. In France, for example, they seem a lot more fond of malls outside the city, although they pay the tax at the pump too.
Whether other more subtle changes exist... I wouldn't know, and I'm not qualified enough to judge.
So basically all this was just a very verbose and roundabout way of saying "beats me.";)
viii. restrict, inhibit, interfere with, or otherwise disrupt or cause a performance degradation, regardless of intent, purpose or knowledge, to the Service or any Comcast (or Comcast supplier) host, server, backbone network, node or service, or otherwise cause a performance degradation to any Comcast (or Comcast supplier) facilities used to deliver the Service;
I'm sorry, but the _only_ reason a "performance" degradation exists there at all, is because they _massively_ oversold the bandwidth and can't actually deliver what they've promised. We're not talking about people using botnets or whatever other malicious acts, we're talking people who just use the bandwidth advertised and sold.
Trying to reword that to sound like it's the users who do evil stuff to Comcast is just stupid and, above all, _dishonest_. It's Comcast that oversold, not the users who somehow steal the neighbour's bandwidth.
If you ping-flooded Comcast DNS server, or if your malformed packet headers caused some router to lock up, _that_ would count as being guilty of disrupting or degrading performance. Just using the bandwidth? Gimme a break. Blaming that on the customers and not on the overselling ISP... that's such a fucked-up definition of responsibility, it's not even funny. By the same definition, you could accuse people of creating a disruption for:
- not missing enough flights they booked at an overselling airline,
- talking too much on the phone when they're on a flat-rate local-calls scheme,
- actually using the parking spot they pay for (directly, or as part of the rent, or any other arrangement) all day, instead of providing some generous oportunity to oversell parking space,
- travelling too much by bus when they have a month card,
I'm sure it'd be so00 much of an improvement to everyone if we apply that model and start throwing accusations at mothers using the bus to go to work _and_ shopping _and_ to take their kid from school _and_ occasionally to visit a friend, instead of using it just twice a day like an average person should. Not.
Nope, sorry, I still stand by what I've said: if you can't actually provide a service, don't advertise it and don't sell it. Or at the very least, have the decency to not try to weasel-word it into sounding like the customers are some kind of criminals.
Not to mention there is one about using their service to download copyrighted content, regardless of performance degredation; you can have your service suspended. Anyone clearing 300GB/month cannot tell me all they download are demos and linux distros. I call Shenanigans to the nth degree on that one.
Nice use of a fallacy there, but:
1. It's a strawman anyway, since it's not the reason Comcast claimed. I wish I could even say "nice strawman", but truth is it's a pretty silly one, because;
2. "Copyrighted" is such a broad term that it's akin to saying you disallow digital downloads. Get this: everything is automatically copyrighted. This message is automatically copyrighted by me, for example. There's an implicit assumption that I grant you a right to read it, and Slashdot to offer it on their site, but it's still copyrighted by me. If you were to put it on music and make a hit single out of it, you _could_ talk to my lawyer at some point in the future. So by your logic, Comcast should disconnect you for downloading it in your browser. Linux distros, since you mention those, are certainly copyrighted too. Read the GPL some day.
So maybe you mean _pirated_ instead? Even that's flawed, because
3. there's plenty of stuff you can do on the network _without_ involving any pirated material. No, it won't be all linux distros. You just need to watch enough Youtube videos -- yes, there are plenty of non-pirated ones too -- for example, to easily go over the limit.
Or here's the ISPs themselves offering a handy-dandy example: in all their calling the customers names, they claim all over t
If nothing else, and this is the crux of my grievance: the airline won't call you names, accuse you of wrongdoing the other passengers, and generally treat you like a thieving scumbag for just showing up at the airport for the flight you booked. At the very least, they'll acknowledge that it's the problem they created and try to give you some compensation, as you were saying.
That's already a _massive_ difference. In and by itself. I'm willing to even forget and forgive mistakes, even motivated greed, flukes, whatever, as long as they have the decency to, you know, apologise for it and try to do better next time. Such bullshit as the ISP's demonizing the very customers they oversold to, calling them names, etc, is just unforgivable in my book. It's just bullshit.
Imagine going to the airport and finding out that the air company you booked with can and will:
A. treat you like some kind of criminal because you didn't miss at least half the flights you booked, and
B. occasionally call you various unflattering names for it, and
C. try to guilt-trip you and present you as some great malefactor that preys on the other passengers who might need that seat, and
D. might just kick you out for nothing more than not missing enough flights.
I mean, heck, I'm sure they too could make more money if they restricted their business to only people who miss 3 flights out of 4. Then they could oversell the plane by a factor of 4, instead of a measly couple of extra tickets. Should it be allowed then?
And that's just what these ISPs are doing. Trying to kick out everyone who doesn't stay below 1/5 of the capacity they thought they bought or lower.
And when I hear such other BS as secret quotas, lying tech support, etc... I can't see how that's defensible at all.
Well, I'm aware of that, and it's insightful in its own right, but it still doesn't justify fraud.
If it takes 600+ per month to provide the service they advertised, then they can say so. Arguments boiling down to, "but we'd go bankrupt for actually providing the service we advertised," are still just fancy wording for fraud. If you can't deliver what you sold, it's fraud by any other name. If you can't afford to provide it at that price, then just don't in the first place.
Redefining "unlimited" is bogus. That's just word play. If they wanted to mean exactly that and only that, it's damn easy to just say so. It takes at most one sentence. Heck, it just takes two extra words: "unlimited connect time." There, now it's perfectly clear what's meant.
It's like putting a shield outside a pub that says "free unlimited beer" and then getting into wordplay games like "yes, well, see, we meant free and unlimited as in speech. We're not limiting your rights to do whatever you wish with your beer." It's still false advertising nevertheless.
The truth is, "unlimited" used to mean exactly that: unlimited everything. And bandwidth used to cost a fair bit in the modem days too, because there was a lot less backbone cable laid. The problem was just the same. They just bet that you wouldn't use most of it. At the time, it wasn't that modems made it any different, it was just that there wasn't that horribly much to do on the net. And it was sorta self-throttling for everyone: if too many people try to see a web page at the same time, all of them get it a little slower. If there's anything that made a difference, it's not cable modems, it's that P2P programs came along. And those don't play as nice: they open hundreds of channels to stuff the bandwidth to the max.
They also knew what they're getting into when they kept upgrading the DSL or cable speed without actually increasing the backbone speeds. They kept advertising higher and higher speeds, while fully knowing they can't actually deliver.
Even the word redefinition falls on its face if you look at the examples and justifications they use to demonize their customers. Most are along that line of "but they kept downloading all day!" Ah-ha. So they used the connection and advertised bandwidth for actually an unlimited amount of time.
At any rate, it's still fraud. They sold a service based on an expectation that's just short of explicit.
Claiming "unlimited internet access" at, say, 1 megabit speed, is already making a claim about how much a cap you're getting. It means, 30 days times 24 hours times 3600 seconds times 1 megabit. Per month. XCalc says that's 2592000 megabits per month. Assuming 10 bits transmitted are roughly 1 content byte (the rest accounting for overhead, handshake, packet headers, etc), that's 259,200 megabytes or roughly 259 gigabytes. If you advertised more speed, that's more. E.g., if you advertised 6 megabit/s, for example, that's a bit over 1.5 terrabytes per month.
That's the underlying assumption.
For most people (myself included) it's more than they'll ever need, but nevertheless, that's the implicit quantity they sold. That's what those people bought. Not being willing and able to actually deliver it, just means fraud. Trying to demonize those who actually use all they bought is lame.
It's no different than if I claimed that for X$ a month you can get 1.5 square miles of land on my hypothetical third country island, on the assumption that almost noone would actually get that much land. Then when you actually buy a tractor and build a fence around exactly that much land, the ISP way would be that I coome and kick you out for being a bad community member and using that much land at the expense of others. You should have known that regardless of what the contract says, you're not actually supposed to get more than 100 acres.
That's another thing that gets my goat in that fraud, btw: trying to present those users as some arch-villains that steal from the community. It's not the IS
Wasn't that exact same clause ruled unconscionable for AT&T already? I'm pretty sure there was a story about that on Slashdot's front page a couple of weeks ago. So the precedent already exists.
And frankly, while IANAL, it should have been obviously so all along, even in corporation-owned USA. A clause saying "if you have any grievance with me, I'm the sole judge, jury and executioner on that" just isn't how the rule of the law was supposed to work. It's not just a blatant conflict of interest all the way, it's essentially proclaiming someone exempt from the laws and rules that bind everyone else.
The contract is _not_ sacrosanct and doesn't override laws in any civilized country. E.g., you can't sell yourself into slavery even if you wanted to, because there's a law against that. Otherwise everyone would sneak "you are now my property" in the fine print or some would go beat someone up until they sign such a contract.
Heck, AFAIK even in the USA there is this provision that contract clauses that are unexpected and unreasonable to a normal person, are essentially worthless. If you rent a car from my hypothetical car loan shop, I can't come afterwards and say "ha ha, in the small print says I now own your home and I just adopted your firstborn too", because that's clauses which don't belong there and aren't expected. I certainly can't see how an "I'm above the law" clause would be any more allowed.
So it's just one of those crap EULA-type clauses that's there just to hopefully scare you into believing it, not because it's actually legal or enforceable. Some corporations figured out that instead of just lobbying for more power, they'll just claw away at your rights by just telling you that you're bound to give them some powers, and hoping that you'll actually believe it.
Look, I'm not a high downloader myself. In fact, most of my bandwidth usage is from playing MMOs, because the rest of time is, well, spent like now: my connection idles while I type a huge message on a board or another. I'd even be a fan of returning to a pay-per-MB scheme, since I don't see why I'd have to subsidize those downloading terrabytes of porn and ripped HD movies. Plus, let's face it, shiny-happy communal resource schemes just result in the poor subsidizing the rich, and "tragedy of the commons" situations.
That says, I'd draw the line at calling people "asshats" just because they use the bandwidth they were sold. They got sold a service on the explicit claim that it's unmetered and unlimited, and they're actually using it as such.
I'm not surprised that the text you quote comes from another ISP, because it's a widespread disease: sell based on outright lies, then try to demonize the users who actually use what they bought. And I find that lame.
It's like advertising an all-you-can-eat breakfast hour at your restaurant, then starting calling people names when they take more than a cup of tea, two slices of bread and a slice of cheese. Or like advertising that a hotel includes a free swimming pool, and then starting treating people like thieves if they're in there for more than half an hour a day. I'm betting not many people would go to that restaurant or hotel again.
Talks about what "normal people" should use or about downloading porn are just a stupid strawman there, plus some appeal to shame when invoking the downloading porn all night argument. It's just freakin' irrelevant. Those people never signed a contract that said "thou shalt not download more than thy neighbour" or "thou shalt never use it for porn", and that's certainly not the service that the ISP advertised. If they're against downloading porn, just advertise as "the family-friendly network where porn is forbidden and a termination offense" and see if that flies in the market.
Those people were advertised unmetered, unlimited access, and there was no talk about what they can't use it for, either. Period. Now deliver what you sold.
Because all the talk about "asshats" and "bad network citizens" and such is just weasel wording to justify a _fraud_. The ISP sold something he can't deliver, and now is calling the customer names when he actually wants what he's bought.
It's no different than, say, me selling you a PS3 on ebay and then starting calling you names when you actually want it. "Auugh, he's an asshat! If all people actually received their PS3s we'd go bankrupt! I bet he just wants to watch Blue Ray porn on it all night! Someone shame him and drive him away already!" It's just not right.
So basically my message to those ISPs is: fuck you, if you can't afford to really offer that kind of service, then fucking stop selling it. Because presenting people as some kind of supreme-evil arch-villains for just using the service they bought, is just lame. Go back to pay-by-hour or pay-by-MB if you can't afford to live up to the unlimited service you promised. But have the fucking _decency_ to not demonize people who just use the service they were advertised and sold.
Actually, since you mention Adam Smith, the funny thing is that this is a case where he wouldn't have advised laissez-faire capitalism in the first place. In fact, the only change there to make it fully Adam Smith compliant would have been to make it a public institution, or I suppose regulate it to the point of being effectively one.
The funny thing about Adam Smith is that he may well be the most mis-understood and mis-quoted author. People seem to assume him to be the shining beacon of laissez-faire market-solves-all-by-itself proponent, especially when they themselves subscribe to that kind of a view.
He actually proposed a _lot_ of government involvement in infrastructure. Ok, so what he said is public works and institutions (remember the institutions part too), with emphasis on public works that would facilitate commerce in general. He sees it as the government's duty to provide and maintain good road, bridges, navigable canals, harbours, etc, in other words: infrastructure.
That's actually a lot of taxation and public spending to maintain that, with Britain's economy at the time when Adam Smith wrote that.
(It's funny how so many of those discussing why the industrial revolution in Britain miss the factor that their canal network was a precursor to railroads that served the same purpose: getting raw materials from here to there in large quantities and cheaply.)
At any rate, blimey, telephone is infrastructure.
If I'm allowed to go into an OT detour into his public institutions views too, he also was for public schooling (above and beyond what any country does nowadays, as it would involve a school in every parish), public health (to "prevent leprosy or any other loathsome and offensive disease"), and generally wasn't too much for a lean and cheap government the way I see it, since he has nothing against expense for "supporting the Dignity of the Sovereign". He also didn't seem too bothered by government co-ownership in some (heavily-regulated) corporations, either.
So basically, it's funny to see him quoted as some beacon of ol' school conservative laissez-faire, either by the proponents or detractors of it, when really that's not what he proposed at all.
To get back to his invisible hand, basically all he says there is what we nowadays call supply and demand. If there's a demand for product X and a profit to be made in fulfilling that demand, someone will start making more of it. You don't need the crown to tell someone to start producing X, someone will start it anyway, "led by an invisible hand." He's not horribly wrong, either: as long as the market has a certain structure, we already know that it works.
The only problem is that the ideal(istic) capitalist free market is not the perversion it tends to become when left unregulated. The assumption that the free market solves everything is based on a structure where there are many producers for each good, the different brands of goods are perfectly interchangeable (e.g., you could drop an AMD CPU into your Intel mobo if you don't like Intel any more, or could switch between Windows and BSD or Solaris without noticing any difference in what you can do with that computer), the buyers are perfectly informed, etc.
That was the only kind of market you could possibly get in the 18'th century, but nowadays it's possible to subvert it massively. And the incentive is there too. That ideal market is a commodity market, and there's not much money to be gained in it. As they say, the only way to make a small fortune in the commodity market is to start with a big fortune. The big money is in making your product non-interchangeable (e.g., by making other stuff work with only your brand of it, see: Microsoft), keeping the number of competitors low (e.g., by raising artificial trade barriers), and keeping the public as uninformed or even mis-informed as possible (e.g., marketing, PR and FUD.) So that's what the perverted direction the market tends to take by itself: if it's more profitable to do that, the succ
wow you get kudos for repeating The Scientific Method now? Seriously, i usually agree with this: But slashdot has quite a large number of people who actually understands the scientific method. So please stop preaching to the choir and go post this on fark or something (they REALLY need it waaaaay more):)
Normally, I'd assume the same. But if you'll hit the "Parent" link on the message you were answering to, you'll see that it was an answer to someone who didn't seem to have it quite figured out, one way or another.
Plus, you only need to look around in almost any topic to notice that "a large number" doesn't mean "all". As I was saying, for point 1 alone, you just need to read almost any science- or tech-breakthrough (or the occasional PR job disguised as such) to run into the mandatory "noooo, these guys are smarter than you, you're not worthy to question them" (or some variant thereof) crapflooders these days. So there you go, proof that not everyone quite gets the scientific method.
I dunno, really... "A large number" are probably smart guys indeed, but the whole looks bleaker by the year, to be honest. At some point Slashdot seems to have started attracting large numbers of astroturfers, PR hacks and con-artists peddling their latest attempt at redefining reality or science, religious self-appointed missionaries, paranoid nutcases on a jihad against medicine/science/whatever, has-beens and never-weres, PHBs looking for some screwed-up idea of street cred among nerds, and bored trolls who are here only because that's what their corporate firewall allows. Not all, mind you, probably not even a majority, but enough to make me wonder.
Can't hurt if someone figured out how to hammer into their heads how science actually works, you know. It probably won't be me, but, eh...
1. _Nothing_ is sacrosanct and beyond questioning in science. "Consensus" just means the stuff we already have plenty of data to confirm, but noone's stopping you from finding new data that shows the limits or shortcomings of it.
2. You are, however expected to present the data and logical train of thought from data to conclusion, if you want to question anything. And more specifically,
2.A. any hypothesis, if it's going to make it to "theory", is supposed to explain the data we already have.
2.B. if we're to replace an existing theory with a more complicated one, well, Occam's Razor still applies. We don't do complexity for complexity sake. You're supposed to show exactly what wasn't adequately explained by the old theory, but follows naturally and reproducibly from yours.
To pick an example out of the hat, take general relativity:
1. Yes, even something as accepted as newtonian gravity could be questioned, but
2. It had to show the data and maths that people can examine and decide for themselves. Among other things, as I was saying: (A) It still had to match the measured data. E.g., applying general relativity to an apple, still had to match the measured time to fall. And (B) it had to be useful on at least one case where newtonian gravity doesn't produce the measured results. E.g., light deflection near a massive star.
Anyway, I'm surprised at the number of people who don't understand one of the two. We have no shortage of nutcases who either:
1. treat science as some fucked-up religion. (I'd give more examples, but you only have to look at the wave of retards postings stuff along the lines of "nooo, don't try to think about it! You're not worthy enough to question these guys!" each time a science or tech story comes up and someone dares ask "well, then how did they solve well known problem X?")
2. think that "questioning" or "investigation" means making up bullshit, supported by nothing more than handwaving, generous application of logical fallacies, plus a lot of wishful thinking.
In a nutshell, noone's stopping you from questioning any theory you wish. Take your pick, really. You may not necessarily get a grant, but noone's stopping you. Who knows? You might even be right. But show us the hard, reproducible data you base that on. If you don't, well, then you qualify as a crackpot. We're still not stopping you, but we might do mean things like point and laugh.
The sad example there is the Soviet army in WW2. Whenever they liberated some of their female prisoners from the Germans, they proceeded to rape them. That's "hardwired to protect women" to you, eh? I mean, that's not even picking on the fact that they raped all German (or Romanian, Hungarian, Czech, etc, whatever was along their way, really) female between 8 and 80 years old, because, abominable at it still is, it can be (piss-poorly) justified as doing it to "the enemy". But here they raped their own russian female volunteer soldiers. It's as sad as it gets.
From what I gather, the US Army isn't always above raping a female recruit either. Not saying it's necessarily often, but it's been known to happen before.
Anyway, to get back to the Soviet army in WW2, they actually had quite a few women serving in mostly-male regiments too. Or such cases as a husband and wife serving as tank crew on the same tank, in an otherwise male tank brigade. I'm not aware of any data saying that those units did dumber things than the male-only regiments.
In fact, if there were any crazy things being done, the all-female units ranked even higher. Mind you, not "crazy" as in "insubordination", but "crazy" as in "suicidally fanatical." If you thought men did suicidal stuff to show they're all macho fearless, those gals could teach you a thing or two about it.
E.g., all-female bomber squadrons actually chose to fly without parachutes or sometimes even radio, so they can fit an extra bomb on the plane. Mind boggles. E.g., they actually pulled some stunts as cutting off the engines and gliding without any lights at treetop level at pitch-black night to release the bombs with complete surprise on the Germans. I'm a guy and I get goosebumps at just the thought of trying something like that.
What I meant was that averages over whole populations are useless as the only value, rather than an individual's averages. Obviously, I should have made that clearer.
To give an example paraphrasing your question, let's say the following was true: "on the average, Russians are better at chess." Would that give you any usable info on whether you should play against my coleague Igor?
Basically, I claim that extrapolating from whole population averages to individuals is counter-productive.
Slashdot Mirror
IANAAP either, but I see it like this: imagine you have 4 spinning tops in the corners of a square. (The spinning tops are the galaxies.) The square itself doesn't spin, but the round things in the corners do. If all 4 rotate in the same direction, the system has a decidedly non-zero angular momentum, namely the sum of the 4. You can also easily find a frame of reference (e.g., centered the centre of the square and with the X and Y axes aligned with the side of the square) that doesn't rotate, and measure everything relative to it.
Or if it makes it easier to imagine, think of the science gag of having a very fast spinning flywheel in a suitcase. Ask someone to carry it for you, or leave it around and see if anyone tries to steal it. (Though these days it'll more likely be the blown up by the SWAT or whatever equivalent your country has.) If the suitcase is horizontal (lying on the side), someone's going to have a beast of a time trying to pick it up. Or if it's standing, they'll have a beast of a time taking a corner with it. Though the suitcase (universe) doesn't rotate, the flywheel (galaxy) in it does, and the angular momentum of it all is very much non-zero.
Now think of a suitcase with 4 flywheels in it, or 200,000 little flywheels. The suitcase itself doesn't rotate, the centres of the wheels don't rotate around anything, but the total system has a total angular momentum. Anyone trying to mess with that piece of luggage is in for a bit of surprise.
Actually, it was. And so was my copy of NT 4.0. (I must be the only dolt who bought NT for a gaming computer at home, but there you go.) So is my XP on my current gaming machine, and the Windows 2000 the other computer dual boots to. (Well, it used to be my gaming machine back then. How fast they go obsolete...)
Linux? Well, any download is legit there, but I like to buy boxed versions anyway. I'm writing this on a SuSE 10.0 installation. (And anyone feeling like splitting hairs along the lines of "no, you're writing it in Mozilla" is cordially invited to go fuck themselves;) The bought DVD and manuals are over there. I still have a stack of previous versions of it too.
Why? Because I believe in paying for stuff I use and find some value in. That's how capitalism is supposed to work. Even the issue of testing what works with what library version, and with which compiler options, is actually worth paying for, because my time is more valuable than that. Some people compile everything by hand, kudos to them, I don't.
Plus, hey, I've been raised to be the stereotypical D&D Lawful Good kinda guy. If I started pirating stuff, I might get my alignment adjusted by the GM
Now seriously, I don't know where everyone is getting their ideas that everyone is a pirate. Whether used pro-MS or anti-MS, the notion that everyone runs a pirated copy of Windows is just false. Even BSA's statistics for most of the western world don't put estimated piracy percentaces anywhere _near_ high enough for that to be the case.
And, hey, the BSA are the guys paid to cry wolf. Plus, you should look how those statistics are calculated. They don't actually measure a sample, they pull some numbers out of the ass as to how many copies should have been sold, and anything less is counted as piracy. If their numbers say every 1 computer sold should have 1 OS copy sold with it, then even if you only install an otherwise legit downloaded version of Gentoo or Ubuntu on it, you still count as a pirate because that's 1 less copy sold than their tables say. Plus other questionable assumptions. So their numbers are already inflated a lot as it is.
If even those don't say piracy is that high, you know, you can cut it out with repeating that falsehood already. If you're talking China or Russia, those pirate a lot, yes. (Partially, due to not being able to afford that stuff otherwise.) But in the western world it's just a bizarre axiom pulled out of the arse.
It's called Reductio Ad Absurdum and it's a very valid logical device to poke holes in any claim or hypothesis. Surely you must have used it in school before. And if someone finds it bad form to have their hypothesis dismantled, well, the way I see it, they should have refrained from claiming it in the first place.
As I was saying, I don't believe his claims, but there's a whole horde of new age hippies and disillusioned nihilists who'd accept any crap as absolute truth, if it comes from the far east. And doubly so if it comes from the Dalai Lama. I mean, whoa, dude, this guy is some great enlightened dude that learned stuff over 600 years. Consider the whole exercise done for their benefit.
And all I'm saying is that _if_ you believe that, then you also have to accept a lot of Tibetan history that doesn't look very enlightened to me. Plus such stuff as that at one point (e.g., in the 18'th century) he had nothing against being a puppet of China if it helped him get more privileges and political power. Etc.
You're sorta right that he doesn't seem to "get" what made The Sims popular, but I wouldn't necessarily say you have to know little about the game industry to be stumped there.
The fact is, a lot of _members_ of the industry are just as stumped trying to understand it. I can think of at least three games which tried to bolt-on some kind of "at home" mode to their game, apparently for no other reason than to try to get a bit of that market too, and got it _all_ wrong. Not just a little wrong, but they "streamlined" out everything that was fun to anyone, and left only the mundane parts in... and even managed to get those wrong. Considering that Will Wright gave interviews and speeches all over the place as to what worked and why, just makes it even more surprising to see someone "streamline" out exactly those.
As a short detour, that seems to be a more general illness of the industry. Someone who doesn't even understand or like a genre, sets out to make a clone of last year's bestseller... and gets it all wrong. Whether it's The Sims, or RPGs, or car racing games or whatever.
Thing is, it's hard to explain _why_ people like The Sims, to someone who doesn't. Explanations like "because it's simulated life" or "because you can watch someone do chores around the house" are too superficial and somewhat mis-leading. Listening to Will Wright talk about fluid dynamics and such in an interview is actually a lot closer to describing it, but conversely leaves most people wondering something like "so WTF does that have to do with games?" or "so how the heck would one make a game like The Sims based on that?"
So a lot come out with half-baked, and occasionally pejorative, explanations like "maybe it's for the sex" or "maybe it's to pretend they live someone else's life".
People like The Sims for a variety of disconnected reasons, like using it to experiment with home layouts, or as props to film a story, or actually playing with the constraints and interdependencies to some goal they set for themselves. For some that goal will be creating love triangles and dodecahedrons, for some it will be something else.
And some will just get bored and start doing stuff like downloading stuff that turns it into a porn game or killing sims left and right, because that's the kind of event that's more like what they want to play.
The problem, and source of such articles, IMHO is that surprisingly few people seem to realize that there's more than one personality and more than one gamer type. Almost everyone seems to assume that he's the yardstick of gamer tastes, everyone else should like exactly the same things, and if they don't, there must be something hideously wrong with them. It's the stuff that fanboy flamewars are made of, and, sadly, more than one serious article.
It is. It outsold all Quake games _combined_, for example.
To some extent they do.
As you progress up any career path, for example, you start needing more friends, and more time keeping them friends, while at the same time needing more time to improve your skills for a promotion. Higher job levels also routinely involve longer hours, or more bizarre hours, and usually tax your needs more. While the entry job got your sim back home at 3 PM and as fresh as when they left, the highest job level would often get your sim back in the evening and almost ready to cry.
Worse yet, all that army of friends has wildly different personalities and interests, and often just getting them all in one room for a all-in-one socializing evening is a recipe for disaster. (Unless you created/edited a small army of identical sims.) Some will get to be enemies by just boring each other to death, some insecure guy will go ballistic because his wife danced with someone else (for bonus points: with another woman), etc.
You start needing more time, and having less time, basically. You start upgrading your objects just to get more out of them in less time (e.g., a more confortable sofa instead of a park bench in front of your TV, so you get some comfort points faster) or to combine effects (e.g., lying in a bathtub gets you some comfort too, while a shower doesn't.)
It may seem like "yeah, but you take care of the same needs in the end", but then the same thing can be said about SimCity too. There too, essentially you need water, electricity, employment, education, and a couple of other things. They stay the same throughout the game. There is no entirely new challenge that springs up as your city grows, it's just a matter of quantities and interdependencies: raising one factor (e.g., employment) causes another to lower (e.g., air quality.) So now you build something else to raise this one (e.g., parks) but that just impacts you in another way (e.g., longer drive times and more congestions from home to work, through all that forest you planted to keep pollution away.) And so on. All while managing a budget.
By and large, The Sims isn't any different. It's just managing some variables and interdependencies, and it does subtly change over time.
That seems a bit harsh. Let me point out that:
For all their "we love modders" hot air, EA and Maxis never released any tools, specs or support, other than (very late) for clothes and wallpapers. (And recently even took to giving you scary warnings that bad things might happen to your game if you enable third party mods.) But for making new objects? Nope. EA makes a good living selling those "Stuff Packs" (Livin' Large and wossname party were just stuff packs for the original The Sims 1 too) which give you a couple of objects and no new interactions or anything. So it's not actually in their interest to support modders.
So it took years of reverse engineering to get any kind of a grip on scripting it, and even then it involved essentially editing bytecode FFS, because EA never released a compiler. It's like scripting in assembly.
So, yes, at first there were only recoloured objects. But even for those, someone had to reverse engineer the file format and find out where the images are, and how they can be replaced without crashing the game.
If you compare it to the Quake community, those got all the tools and specs they needed from ID, so _of_ _course_ those had a headstart.
So calling The Sims community pathetic just because it took a while, is... surrealistic. There were thousands of people doing voluntary unpaid work, in their free time, for years. Just to figure out how to mod a game that EA never really wanted modded. WTH did you expect? That someone has a stroke of enlightenment, and gets the file and scripting specs from an archangel the next night after the game is released? It's been hard work and _of_ _course_ it took time.
That said, once scripting and stuff did get figured out -- by now The Sims 2 was already out -- some _amazing_ mods came out. E.g., Christianlov's all-in-one-NPCs on Mod The Sims 2 are all that the butler was in EA's The Sims Superstar, and a hell of a lot more. And it's for free too.
Heck, his nanny NPC alone made me grateful. Maxis's nanny was so idiotic, it made me want to brain her each time I watched her do exactly the wrong things while the toddler is bawling his little lungs out. A toddler which can already speak FFS, so you'd imagine there wouldn't be as much guessing, realistically. How stupid can one be to keep trying to stuff an already full toddler, until he shits himself and falls asleep in the chair, because he never had a chance or way to get out and take care of those needs? Dunno, maybe others found it funny, but for me watching that kind of a tortured childhood just made me _angry_.
Christianlov's actually feeds the toddler when he's hungry, puts him in the crib when he's sleepy, on the potty when he... umm... needs to go potty, and gives some social interaction when the kid wants attention. And mostly stays out of the way the rest of the time. How hard a concept can that be? Watching Christianlov's nanny do it right just made me realize how much Maxis's nanny sucked all along.
It may seem like a small detail, and not as glorious as editing 10 maps for a Quake mod, but it's such quality-of-life things that make me happy I can get TS2 mods.
Nope. In The Sims 1 there was no such thing, until Hot Date introduced the "love bed". And then it would work only with the love bed, normal beds were still only for sleeping.
So given that you're describing the animation for the love bed, I'm really curious _how_ you got that before Hot Date.
I'm not discounting that maybe later, much later, someone copied the scripts to the regular bed or made a new skin (ok, new sprite) for the love bed. (Most objects for The Sims 1 were actually this latter category: they just took an existing object and changed what it looked like.) But before Hot Date? Nope, people hadn't figured the scripting yet.
So it's a bit bizarre to hear that Sex was essential to The Sims 1's success, when it took two expansion packs for that to happen at all. The game was already a great hit when, yes, like the GP correctly mentioned, babies were produced by kissing and hugging. (And I don't mean some removing-tonsils-with-the-tongue two-hands-up-her-blouse kinda kiss, either. It was all really really tame at that point.) Then a popup would come up asking if you want a baby.
I'm sorry, but that was as non-erotic as you can possibly get. If anyone considered it "scoring" that their sim gave a backrub and had a friendly kiss, or worse yet as some pornographic material to choke the chicken to, I'd seriously worry about their mental health. Then they'd probably be as turned on by a bowl of rice.
Yes, later more was introduced, but The Sims 1 was already a huge success long before that.
Actually, that makes me wonder about an extra technical aspect. AFAIK, writing in Egypt wasn't left to right, same size. They sometimes wrote left to right (with the faces of the hieroglyphs pointing that way), sometimes right to left (ditto), sometimes vertically, and, here's the kicker, sometimes just turned it all into a sort of a painting. I.e., sometimes the symbols were rearranged, and some some made bigger, some smaller, to get an aesthetic picture.
So I'm really curious how they'd help a totally clueless guy like me input the last case.
Not saying it can't be done, so hold your horses with the "OMG be sure they already thought of everything" posts, folks. Just asking how. Would I be able to just run it through a scanner and upload the image? If I was smart and learned enough to figure it out on my own, which is kinda a pre-requisite to inputting it then with a keyboard, I wouldn't need an online translator.
Also, would they include a dictionary of the common phrases, metaphors, etc? Remember, I'm a guy who can't even read it (or I wouldn't need an online translator), so any cultural references would go even higher over my head.
E.g., AFAIK, 110 being a perfect number in their numerology, it also ended up the perfect lifespan of a human, so phrases like "he lived 110 years" were a metaphor for "he was a perfect guy" (or really really liked, at least) or "he lived a perfect life." You can find that kind of stuff about people who actually died in their 30's (which was actually the peak of the gauss curve for males in the Old Kingdom, so 110 would have been an _extreme_ improbability) or 40's.
E.g., some addressed letters "to your scribe" or complimented said scribe, which would seem a bit bizarre. That is, unless you figure out it was a fancy way of saying "I know you can read and write, and you're reading this yourself, as opposed to having a scribe read it to you", which, apparently, was something appreciated.
Well, then I guess you're not disaggreeing with rucs_hack too much after all, if you say "they are just another system of feudal theocratic society." Way I read it, that was his point too.
1. Well, the funny thing is, the Tibetan theocracy is based on the idea that essentially they didn't have several Dalai Lamas. They had exactly one, which was reincarnated again and again and again in different bodies, but still was the same guy.
h em. It was the same gang at the top all along, uninterrupted.
I can see how that had a stabilizing effect, though. It's hard to argue the legitimacy of a succession when, so we're told, there was no succession, silly. There never was one. It's the same guy on the combined secular and spiritual throne, for the last several centuries straight.
Now if you're more secular minded, like I am, you probably won't give a damn about such claims. Pfft, of course there were several Dalai Lamas, and each must be judged by his own merits and shortcomings.
But let's pretend that we believed that reincarnation claim. There was always the same guy on the throne. The same applies to most of the other Lamas, btw. So essentially the not only they had the same ruler all along, but they had the same guys as his councillors/cardinals/whatever-you-want-to-call-t
Then, pray tell, why _shouldn't_ we hold him responsible for what he's done at various points in the last few hundred years?
Since you mention the Tsar, I'd do the same if there was one and the same Tsar on their throne ever since Ivan the Terrible assumed that title. If anyone's claim to authority was that he, essentially, _is_ Ivan the Terrible, plus all other Tsars ever since... then I'd also hold him responsible for all the atrocities those did at various points.
2. The point that things sucked everywhere if you go far enough in the past, is true and insightful, but it still doesn't remove another question: then how enlightened were they after all?
A lot of disillusioned westerners have this idea that even shit smells great if it's packed as some ancient asian mysticism. Surely every single religion, cult, superstition, heresy or divine right excuse is pure enlightenment, if it comes from the far east. And their monks and gurus? Whoa, if they're from the far east, they surely were all enlightened, selfless, generous, open-minded, and so learned that they were a walking Wikipedia. Why surely if you gave a bunch of them secular power, that'd rock, right?
So then you look at one state that was ruled like that, and the best that you can say is, well, as you were saying, that it wasn't much worse than any other medieval totalitarian state.
Basically to answer to your example about the European medieval kings of 1300: no, of course, I wouldn't condemn them for being medieval back then. But I wouldn't hold them as an enlightenment model for the present generation either.
It still makes me wonder...
It seems to me that a religious figure or authority is based on little more than people actually believing it. E.g., if I were to proclaim that my brother is the new Pope, would anyone take that seriously? Just having someone give you a religious title (or conversely revoke it) doesn't mean anything unless a large enough percentage of the population actually believes that you're what that title says.
Ok, so China now fabricated a claim of authority over that process. Is it one anyone sane would want to believe?
If you believe that claim, then the implications are those I've written. If they can control the Dalai Lama's reincarnation, what's to stop them from controlling yours? Sure, they might not bother doing it to everyone, but do you want to be the first one who gets the shit end of that stick?
Yes, I know it sounds surrealistic to worry about that, but remember that they're essentially trying to mod religion there. So try to think like someone who takes buddhism and reincarnation very very seriously, because that's the people China tries hard to control with this coup.
Even skipping past the fact that China didn't have the religious authority to do such a change to buddhism, why would you want to start believing in their new government-sponsored heresy? Essentially there's no carrot there, but just some extra stick. The whole change is that you're supposed to believe that now the already unpopular and oppressive party and government can have a say in your reincarnation. And that they can do one of the scariest things imaginable by most people to you even post-mortem. Why would you want to join such a sect?
Regardless of whether you think they'll bother doing it to random buddhists on the street or not, the fact is, they're asking you to believe that they _can_ if they wanted to.
So basically it seems to me like a pretty stupid and heavy-handed thing to do. Appointing a new Dalai Lama is only worth anything if people actually believe him to be the Dalai Lama and you to have enough authority to select one. Otherwise they'll just ignore yours and follow theirs. And the "we can now control reincarnation" excuse isn't helping there IMHO. They didn't have the religious authority to decree such a change in the first place, _and_ it's a freakin' scary change to believe in. The incentive for people to start believing that new doctrine, and thus actually follow a Dalai Lama appointed based on it, just isn't there IMHO.
It's not just an euphemism, it's what happens after you die, according to that religion. Just like christians prefer to believe in heaven and hell than that it ends for ever.
The prospect that it's the end of the line at some point, is freakin' scary for a lot of people. It's not just religion that gets built on that, but also stuff like trying to be remembered somehow afterwards, or trying to make enough kids that the line will go on that way. (It's why countries where survival is a crapshot people make 10 kids or more, while after they get sanitation, medicine, etc, it eventually dawns upon them that if 1-2 kids are just short of guaranteed to survive, you don't really need more.) Anything to maintain a belief that somehow it's not really game over.
So the government saying they can stop you from reincarnating? Oooer. That's a claim that they can really end that game. It's exactly like, if you're a christian, the government saying that you need their stamp of approval to go anywhere after death. Otherwise you're going nowhere. Not to heaven, not to hell, not to purgatory (if your flavour of Christianity has a purgatory), just nowhere. To a lot of people that'll be a scarier thought than even going to hell.
Anyway, they're not saying you need permission to die. You can still jolly well die whenever you wish. Just go demonstrate for democracy in front of some tanks, if you ran out of other suicide ideas, and they'll oblige. They're saying that they can make your death a lot more permanent and scarier.
Actually, MMOs were for a long time the buggiest games released. The idea that you have a permanent way of upgrading everyone's programs for ever, dropped quality to abysmal lows.
Thing is, with a normal program or game, you don't know how many people have applied the latest patch, and you can get bitten in the ass by reports of people getting virused by opening a file in an unpatched Word '97. With online service-type apps and MMOs, you know that they can't even connect without getting the latest version.
The psychological effect is quite reversed: it gives you the assurance that you _can_ patch it reliably anytime you wish. So basically, "it compiles, let's ship it" just became a lot more viable a choice. And the resulting quality showed it. Read the review of Anarchy Online for example on Something Awful someday, and know this: they actually barely scratch the surface of how bad it was. As an early subscriber I can confirm every single bug they mention there, and a lot more they never discovered.
And the funny thing is, that ability to patch didn't work better in the long run either, for most MMOs. The patches were released just as half-arsed and untested as the initial release, and most games bounced through years of patches that introduced two new bugs for each bug fixed. I've been on games where more than one patch got rolled back within hours of its release, because it had catastrophic effects.
We've already seen a similar effect before, in PC vs Console gaming. The easier it is to patch after release, the less incentive to get it right the first time. What should have been a major PC advantage, the ability to patch, actually worked as a disadvantage. Games released for the PC only recently started getting any serious QA, because the knowledge was there that, eh, you can always patch it later or blame it on the user's hardware anyway. (And if you think I'm exaggerating about how low it could go, I can think of one PC game I bought which would throw a script _syntax_ error if you tried to get past the main menu.)
Mind you, I'm not saying necessarily Microsoft will be as bad with their online office version. (But then again, there's nothing to say they necessarily won't either.) But some other people? Heh.
That's assuming that sales only happen in the first week after release. This is one thing especially game fanboys don't seem to understand: patches aren't provided for free, and purely out of kindness, they're provided to ensure continued sales (though not necessarily of the same product) and continued customer goodwill. In end effect, they _are_ paid for those patches, by the fact that people continue to buy their stuff.
That goes double for stuff like Windows or MS Office. Those aren't products that get sold for two weeks and then go to the bargain bin. There's a continuous revenue stream from people keeping buying them, individually or together with their brand new computer, for years after release. If you just let your product have year-old security holes, people just stop buying it. Having an image of someone who takes problems seriously and will fix them in a timely fashion, isn't kindness, it's needed to keep making money.
(Again, I'm not saying whether MS is any good at it or not. Just that that's an image they struggle hard to maintain. Whether it's actually true or not, well, I'm not going to discuss that today. Make your own decision there.)
So basically IMHO that incentive isn't any different from a shrink-wrapped produc
As in anything that depends on taste, I'd actually expect quite a bit of variation. There is no "better" or "worse" as such, there's only "better" or "worse" for a given taste or personality type. At best, you can say more people like X than Y.
E.g., if I'm allowed to give a counter-anecdote to your anecdote, I'm the exact opposite.
Resident Evil never did much for me. The only "horror" in it for me were the awkward rotational controls and artificial view limitations because of the fixed camera. There was an additional (and for my taste unnecessary) extra learning curve and extra difficulty caused just by dealing with the weird control scheme. The decision to have limited saves was yet another thing that just said "artificial". Worse yet, it tripped my suspension of disbelief, because I had that artificial stuff in my face all the time and had to think about it instead of getting immersed in the world. Having to wrestle the controls doesn't make me go "OMG, I'm so scared", it makes me go "oh, FFS..."
I'm sure someone will mod that "troll" because it badmouths his favourite game, but it's not. I'm _not_ saying "Resident Evil is bad", I'm just saying that different people have wildly different tastes. The same game can be "bad" for some, but "bestest game evar" for some others.
And so it is with games vs movies too. I don't get scared by most movies, but a couple did manage to trip a particular phobia of mine big time. Still, I find well-done horror movies entertaining in their own non-scary way. I can't remember any game that triggered a similar response to either, so (while most were otherwise entertaining as a game) I wouldn't count any game I've played so far as truly a replacement to horror movies. More like something different, that can coexist. Again, I expect that for different people your mileage might vary. A lot.
Also as a handicap in proclaiming games as the total replacement there, is the factor that _most_ video game designers can't write a good story or choreograph it well if their life depended on it. A couple of them can, no doubt, but, honestly, most video game plots and stories don't hold a candle to a good movie. At least half are barely more than a vague background story as to why are you killing those monsters there, and you just give it a nod as you happily shoot zombies or whatnot in the head.
And at least half the rest are made by people who don't really understand whatever genre they're making, they don't even like it, but they figured they'd make a clone of whatever sold last year. And it shows. There is no mathematical formula or algorithm to make a fun game or a scary game, just some vague hypotheses and a lot of taking guesses and using your own gut feeling. Someone who doesn't really fall in the same market segment, just won't have the same "gut feeling" as to what should be fun. As I was saying, different people like different things. If you're different from your target market, well, you won't like the same things they like.
Now admittedly, (A) there have been exceptions, and (B) the situation _is_ (very) slowly improving, and (C) Hollywood makes plenty of duds too. Still, on the whole, I'd say it'll be a few more years before games are really a reliable replacement for any movie genre. Don't get me wrong, they're fun in their own right, as _games_, but I see that really as more of a different kind of entertainment at the moment, rather than something set to replace movies altogether.
Well, before I go any further, I should say I'm not an economist, so I'm not really qualified to judge that kind of changes. I'm just a guy who reads lots, but other than that and remembers a lot of trivia, but on the whole, it's no more reliable than googling for yourself. In fact, probably less. Generally, unless I claim first hand experience on some topic, the safe assumption is that you should take it with more than a grain of salt.
;)
That's why I went into what Adam Smith says, rather than whether he's right and wrong. I'm a bit more Keynesian in my personal views of it, but again I'm not an economist, so take it as no better or worse than a taxi driver ranting about what the government should do.
That said, hmm, being in Europe, more exactly Germany, we already pay a tax at the pump, though it doesn't completely replace other kinds of taxes.
Superficially, the main change that can be noticed, is that here small cars and Diesel cars (even after tax, Diesel is cheaper than Gasoline) are a _lot_ more popular. It's no shame even for a relatively well-to-do IT guy to be seen in a small fuel-eficient car, though a lot still go for the sports car image. Though even there, you can buy all the way to sports cars and executive cars with Diesel engines. But, anyway, you still see plenty of small cars on the streets, and SUVs never got too popular.
Another difference here, although I couldn't say whether it's the policy or fuel prices, is that public transportation is ubiquitous, and a lot of people take the bus or light rail instead of driving their own car.
Also, all neighbourhoods are built with the assumption that you must be able to (A) walk, and (B) get access to some kind of public transportation.
There's also a lot less of a cultural drive to move to some sparse suburb. In fact, quite the contrary, a lot of my well paid coleagues actually prefer to live in the middle of a populated city. Some even commute so they can live in an even denser place. Of course, that's not just fuel prices, but also a matter of (A) a lot lower criminality, and practically no inner-city crime problem (if you're going to get mugged, unlikely as it is, it's no different in the inner city) and (B) land costs. We have a lot less free land down here, and there are even whole areas (e.g., the NRW) which are almost a contiguous metropolis.
Of course, even in those factors, it's more complex than just the taxes. A lot of other policy decisions influence it indirectly, to various degrees. E.g., the better social security and more reasonable GINI index than the USA mean that a lot less people face a choice along the lines of "mug someone or starve".
Another thing I notice is that shops are a lot more distributed inside the city, instead of being concentrated in some super-mall that you have to drive to. From most places you can just walk to the next place where you can get the groceries. I'm sure the fuel prices played _some_ role there, but it's also a matter of policies and lobbying. In France, for example, they seem a lot more fond of malls outside the city, although they pay the tax at the pump too.
Whether other more subtle changes exist... I wouldn't know, and I'm not qualified enough to judge.
So basically all this was just a very verbose and roundabout way of saying "beats me."
I'm sorry, but the _only_ reason a "performance" degradation exists there at all, is because they _massively_ oversold the bandwidth and can't actually deliver what they've promised. We're not talking about people using botnets or whatever other malicious acts, we're talking people who just use the bandwidth advertised and sold.
Trying to reword that to sound like it's the users who do evil stuff to Comcast is just stupid and, above all, _dishonest_. It's Comcast that oversold, not the users who somehow steal the neighbour's bandwidth.
If you ping-flooded Comcast DNS server, or if your malformed packet headers caused some router to lock up, _that_ would count as being guilty of disrupting or degrading performance. Just using the bandwidth? Gimme a break. Blaming that on the customers and not on the overselling ISP... that's such a fucked-up definition of responsibility, it's not even funny. By the same definition, you could accuse people of creating a disruption for:
- not missing enough flights they booked at an overselling airline,
- talking too much on the phone when they're on a flat-rate local-calls scheme,
- actually using the parking spot they pay for (directly, or as part of the rent, or any other arrangement) all day, instead of providing some generous oportunity to oversell parking space,
- travelling too much by bus when they have a month card,
I'm sure it'd be so00 much of an improvement to everyone if we apply that model and start throwing accusations at mothers using the bus to go to work _and_ shopping _and_ to take their kid from school _and_ occasionally to visit a friend, instead of using it just twice a day like an average person should. Not.
Nope, sorry, I still stand by what I've said: if you can't actually provide a service, don't advertise it and don't sell it. Or at the very least, have the decency to not try to weasel-word it into sounding like the customers are some kind of criminals.
Nice use of a fallacy there, but:
1. It's a strawman anyway, since it's not the reason Comcast claimed. I wish I could even say "nice strawman", but truth is it's a pretty silly one, because;
2. "Copyrighted" is such a broad term that it's akin to saying you disallow digital downloads. Get this: everything is automatically copyrighted. This message is automatically copyrighted by me, for example. There's an implicit assumption that I grant you a right to read it, and Slashdot to offer it on their site, but it's still copyrighted by me. If you were to put it on music and make a hit single out of it, you _could_ talk to my lawyer at some point in the future. So by your logic, Comcast should disconnect you for downloading it in your browser. Linux distros, since you mention those, are certainly copyrighted too. Read the GPL some day.
So maybe you mean _pirated_ instead? Even that's flawed, because
3. there's plenty of stuff you can do on the network _without_ involving any pirated material. No, it won't be all linux distros. You just need to watch enough Youtube videos -- yes, there are plenty of non-pirated ones too -- for example, to easily go over the limit.
Or here's the ISPs themselves offering a handy-dandy example: in all their calling the customers names, they claim all over t
That's still massively different.
If nothing else, and this is the crux of my grievance: the airline won't call you names, accuse you of wrongdoing the other passengers, and generally treat you like a thieving scumbag for just showing up at the airport for the flight you booked. At the very least, they'll acknowledge that it's the problem they created and try to give you some compensation, as you were saying.
That's already a _massive_ difference. In and by itself. I'm willing to even forget and forgive mistakes, even motivated greed, flukes, whatever, as long as they have the decency to, you know, apologise for it and try to do better next time. Such bullshit as the ISP's demonizing the very customers they oversold to, calling them names, etc, is just unforgivable in my book. It's just bullshit.
Imagine going to the airport and finding out that the air company you booked with can and will:
A. treat you like some kind of criminal because you didn't miss at least half the flights you booked, and
B. occasionally call you various unflattering names for it, and
C. try to guilt-trip you and present you as some great malefactor that preys on the other passengers who might need that seat, and
D. might just kick you out for nothing more than not missing enough flights.
I mean, heck, I'm sure they too could make more money if they restricted their business to only people who miss 3 flights out of 4. Then they could oversell the plane by a factor of 4, instead of a measly couple of extra tickets. Should it be allowed then?
And that's just what these ISPs are doing. Trying to kick out everyone who doesn't stay below 1/5 of the capacity they thought they bought or lower.
And when I hear such other BS as secret quotas, lying tech support, etc... I can't see how that's defensible at all.
Well, I'm aware of that, and it's insightful in its own right, but it still doesn't justify fraud.
If it takes 600+ per month to provide the service they advertised, then they can say so. Arguments boiling down to, "but we'd go bankrupt for actually providing the service we advertised," are still just fancy wording for fraud. If you can't deliver what you sold, it's fraud by any other name. If you can't afford to provide it at that price, then just don't in the first place.
Redefining "unlimited" is bogus. That's just word play. If they wanted to mean exactly that and only that, it's damn easy to just say so. It takes at most one sentence. Heck, it just takes two extra words: "unlimited connect time." There, now it's perfectly clear what's meant.
It's like putting a shield outside a pub that says "free unlimited beer" and then getting into wordplay games like "yes, well, see, we meant free and unlimited as in speech. We're not limiting your rights to do whatever you wish with your beer." It's still false advertising nevertheless.
The truth is, "unlimited" used to mean exactly that: unlimited everything. And bandwidth used to cost a fair bit in the modem days too, because there was a lot less backbone cable laid. The problem was just the same. They just bet that you wouldn't use most of it. At the time, it wasn't that modems made it any different, it was just that there wasn't that horribly much to do on the net. And it was sorta self-throttling for everyone: if too many people try to see a web page at the same time, all of them get it a little slower. If there's anything that made a difference, it's not cable modems, it's that P2P programs came along. And those don't play as nice: they open hundreds of channels to stuff the bandwidth to the max.
They also knew what they're getting into when they kept upgrading the DSL or cable speed without actually increasing the backbone speeds. They kept advertising higher and higher speeds, while fully knowing they can't actually deliver.
Even the word redefinition falls on its face if you look at the examples and justifications they use to demonize their customers. Most are along that line of "but they kept downloading all day!" Ah-ha. So they used the connection and advertised bandwidth for actually an unlimited amount of time.
At any rate, it's still fraud. They sold a service based on an expectation that's just short of explicit.
Claiming "unlimited internet access" at, say, 1 megabit speed, is already making a claim about how much a cap you're getting. It means, 30 days times 24 hours times 3600 seconds times 1 megabit. Per month. XCalc says that's 2592000 megabits per month. Assuming 10 bits transmitted are roughly 1 content byte (the rest accounting for overhead, handshake, packet headers, etc), that's 259,200 megabytes or roughly 259 gigabytes. If you advertised more speed, that's more. E.g., if you advertised 6 megabit/s, for example, that's a bit over 1.5 terrabytes per month.
That's the underlying assumption.
For most people (myself included) it's more than they'll ever need, but nevertheless, that's the implicit quantity they sold. That's what those people bought. Not being willing and able to actually deliver it, just means fraud. Trying to demonize those who actually use all they bought is lame.
It's no different than if I claimed that for X$ a month you can get 1.5 square miles of land on my hypothetical third country island, on the assumption that almost noone would actually get that much land. Then when you actually buy a tractor and build a fence around exactly that much land, the ISP way would be that I coome and kick you out for being a bad community member and using that much land at the expense of others. You should have known that regardless of what the contract says, you're not actually supposed to get more than 100 acres.
That's another thing that gets my goat in that fraud, btw: trying to present those users as some arch-villains that steal from the community. It's not the IS
Wasn't that exact same clause ruled unconscionable for AT&T already? I'm pretty sure there was a story about that on Slashdot's front page a couple of weeks ago. So the precedent already exists.
And frankly, while IANAL, it should have been obviously so all along, even in corporation-owned USA. A clause saying "if you have any grievance with me, I'm the sole judge, jury and executioner on that" just isn't how the rule of the law was supposed to work. It's not just a blatant conflict of interest all the way, it's essentially proclaiming someone exempt from the laws and rules that bind everyone else.
The contract is _not_ sacrosanct and doesn't override laws in any civilized country. E.g., you can't sell yourself into slavery even if you wanted to, because there's a law against that. Otherwise everyone would sneak "you are now my property" in the fine print or some would go beat someone up until they sign such a contract.
Heck, AFAIK even in the USA there is this provision that contract clauses that are unexpected and unreasonable to a normal person, are essentially worthless. If you rent a car from my hypothetical car loan shop, I can't come afterwards and say "ha ha, in the small print says I now own your home and I just adopted your firstborn too", because that's clauses which don't belong there and aren't expected. I certainly can't see how an "I'm above the law" clause would be any more allowed.
So it's just one of those crap EULA-type clauses that's there just to hopefully scare you into believing it, not because it's actually legal or enforceable. Some corporations figured out that instead of just lobbying for more power, they'll just claw away at your rights by just telling you that you're bound to give them some powers, and hoping that you'll actually believe it.
Disturbingly enough, it seems to actually work.
Look, I'm not a high downloader myself. In fact, most of my bandwidth usage is from playing MMOs, because the rest of time is, well, spent like now: my connection idles while I type a huge message on a board or another. I'd even be a fan of returning to a pay-per-MB scheme, since I don't see why I'd have to subsidize those downloading terrabytes of porn and ripped HD movies. Plus, let's face it, shiny-happy communal resource schemes just result in the poor subsidizing the rich, and "tragedy of the commons" situations.
That says, I'd draw the line at calling people "asshats" just because they use the bandwidth they were sold. They got sold a service on the explicit claim that it's unmetered and unlimited, and they're actually using it as such.
I'm not surprised that the text you quote comes from another ISP, because it's a widespread disease: sell based on outright lies, then try to demonize the users who actually use what they bought. And I find that lame.
It's like advertising an all-you-can-eat breakfast hour at your restaurant, then starting calling people names when they take more than a cup of tea, two slices of bread and a slice of cheese. Or like advertising that a hotel includes a free swimming pool, and then starting treating people like thieves if they're in there for more than half an hour a day. I'm betting not many people would go to that restaurant or hotel again.
Talks about what "normal people" should use or about downloading porn are just a stupid strawman there, plus some appeal to shame when invoking the downloading porn all night argument. It's just freakin' irrelevant. Those people never signed a contract that said "thou shalt not download more than thy neighbour" or "thou shalt never use it for porn", and that's certainly not the service that the ISP advertised. If they're against downloading porn, just advertise as "the family-friendly network where porn is forbidden and a termination offense" and see if that flies in the market.
Those people were advertised unmetered, unlimited access, and there was no talk about what they can't use it for, either. Period. Now deliver what you sold.
Because all the talk about "asshats" and "bad network citizens" and such is just weasel wording to justify a _fraud_. The ISP sold something he can't deliver, and now is calling the customer names when he actually wants what he's bought.
It's no different than, say, me selling you a PS3 on ebay and then starting calling you names when you actually want it. "Auugh, he's an asshat! If all people actually received their PS3s we'd go bankrupt! I bet he just wants to watch Blue Ray porn on it all night! Someone shame him and drive him away already!" It's just not right.
So basically my message to those ISPs is: fuck you, if you can't afford to really offer that kind of service, then fucking stop selling it. Because presenting people as some kind of supreme-evil arch-villains for just using the service they bought, is just lame. Go back to pay-by-hour or pay-by-MB if you can't afford to live up to the unlimited service you promised. But have the fucking _decency_ to not demonize people who just use the service they were advertised and sold.
Actually, since you mention Adam Smith, the funny thing is that this is a case where he wouldn't have advised laissez-faire capitalism in the first place. In fact, the only change there to make it fully Adam Smith compliant would have been to make it a public institution, or I suppose regulate it to the point of being effectively one.
The funny thing about Adam Smith is that he may well be the most mis-understood and mis-quoted author. People seem to assume him to be the shining beacon of laissez-faire market-solves-all-by-itself proponent, especially when they themselves subscribe to that kind of a view.
He actually proposed a _lot_ of government involvement in infrastructure. Ok, so what he said is public works and institutions (remember the institutions part too), with emphasis on public works that would facilitate commerce in general. He sees it as the government's duty to provide and maintain good road, bridges, navigable canals, harbours, etc, in other words: infrastructure.
That's actually a lot of taxation and public spending to maintain that, with Britain's economy at the time when Adam Smith wrote that.
(It's funny how so many of those discussing why the industrial revolution in Britain miss the factor that their canal network was a precursor to railroads that served the same purpose: getting raw materials from here to there in large quantities and cheaply.)
At any rate, blimey, telephone is infrastructure.
If I'm allowed to go into an OT detour into his public institutions views too, he also was for public schooling (above and beyond what any country does nowadays, as it would involve a school in every parish), public health (to "prevent leprosy or any other loathsome and offensive disease"), and generally wasn't too much for a lean and cheap government the way I see it, since he has nothing against expense for "supporting the Dignity of the Sovereign". He also didn't seem too bothered by government co-ownership in some (heavily-regulated) corporations, either.
So basically, it's funny to see him quoted as some beacon of ol' school conservative laissez-faire, either by the proponents or detractors of it, when really that's not what he proposed at all.
To get back to his invisible hand, basically all he says there is what we nowadays call supply and demand. If there's a demand for product X and a profit to be made in fulfilling that demand, someone will start making more of it. You don't need the crown to tell someone to start producing X, someone will start it anyway, "led by an invisible hand." He's not horribly wrong, either: as long as the market has a certain structure, we already know that it works.
The only problem is that the ideal(istic) capitalist free market is not the perversion it tends to become when left unregulated. The assumption that the free market solves everything is based on a structure where there are many producers for each good, the different brands of goods are perfectly interchangeable (e.g., you could drop an AMD CPU into your Intel mobo if you don't like Intel any more, or could switch between Windows and BSD or Solaris without noticing any difference in what you can do with that computer), the buyers are perfectly informed, etc.
That was the only kind of market you could possibly get in the 18'th century, but nowadays it's possible to subvert it massively. And the incentive is there too. That ideal market is a commodity market, and there's not much money to be gained in it. As they say, the only way to make a small fortune in the commodity market is to start with a big fortune. The big money is in making your product non-interchangeable (e.g., by making other stuff work with only your brand of it, see: Microsoft), keeping the number of competitors low (e.g., by raising artificial trade barriers), and keeping the public as uninformed or even mis-informed as possible (e.g., marketing, PR and FUD.) So that's what the perverted direction the market tends to take by itself: if it's more profitable to do that, the succ
Normally, I'd assume the same. But if you'll hit the "Parent" link on the message you were answering to, you'll see that it was an answer to someone who didn't seem to have it quite figured out, one way or another.
Plus, you only need to look around in almost any topic to notice that "a large number" doesn't mean "all". As I was saying, for point 1 alone, you just need to read almost any science- or tech-breakthrough (or the occasional PR job disguised as such) to run into the mandatory "noooo, these guys are smarter than you, you're not worthy to question them" (or some variant thereof) crapflooders these days. So there you go, proof that not everyone quite gets the scientific method.
I dunno, really... "A large number" are probably smart guys indeed, but the whole looks bleaker by the year, to be honest. At some point Slashdot seems to have started attracting large numbers of astroturfers, PR hacks and con-artists peddling their latest attempt at redefining reality or science, religious self-appointed missionaries, paranoid nutcases on a jihad against medicine/science/whatever, has-beens and never-weres, PHBs looking for some screwed-up idea of street cred among nerds, and bored trolls who are here only because that's what their corporate firewall allows. Not all, mind you, probably not even a majority, but enough to make me wonder.
Can't hurt if someone figured out how to hammer into their heads how science actually works, you know. It probably won't be me, but, eh...
You don't seem to understand how it works.
1. _Nothing_ is sacrosanct and beyond questioning in science. "Consensus" just means the stuff we already have plenty of data to confirm, but noone's stopping you from finding new data that shows the limits or shortcomings of it.
2. You are, however expected to present the data and logical train of thought from data to conclusion, if you want to question anything. And more specifically,
2.A. any hypothesis, if it's going to make it to "theory", is supposed to explain the data we already have.
2.B. if we're to replace an existing theory with a more complicated one, well, Occam's Razor still applies. We don't do complexity for complexity sake. You're supposed to show exactly what wasn't adequately explained by the old theory, but follows naturally and reproducibly from yours.
To pick an example out of the hat, take general relativity:
1. Yes, even something as accepted as newtonian gravity could be questioned, but
2. It had to show the data and maths that people can examine and decide for themselves. Among other things, as I was saying: (A) It still had to match the measured data. E.g., applying general relativity to an apple, still had to match the measured time to fall. And (B) it had to be useful on at least one case where newtonian gravity doesn't produce the measured results. E.g., light deflection near a massive star.
Anyway, I'm surprised at the number of people who don't understand one of the two. We have no shortage of nutcases who either:
1. treat science as some fucked-up religion. (I'd give more examples, but you only have to look at the wave of retards postings stuff along the lines of "nooo, don't try to think about it! You're not worthy enough to question these guys!" each time a science or tech story comes up and someone dares ask "well, then how did they solve well known problem X?")
2. think that "questioning" or "investigation" means making up bullshit, supported by nothing more than handwaving, generous application of logical fallacies, plus a lot of wishful thinking.
In a nutshell, noone's stopping you from questioning any theory you wish. Take your pick, really. You may not necessarily get a grant, but noone's stopping you. Who knows? You might even be right. But show us the hard, reproducible data you base that on. If you don't, well, then you qualify as a crackpot. We're still not stopping you, but we might do mean things like point and laugh.
The sad example there is the Soviet army in WW2. Whenever they liberated some of their female prisoners from the Germans, they proceeded to rape them. That's "hardwired to protect women" to you, eh? I mean, that's not even picking on the fact that they raped all German (or Romanian, Hungarian, Czech, etc, whatever was along their way, really) female between 8 and 80 years old, because, abominable at it still is, it can be (piss-poorly) justified as doing it to "the enemy". But here they raped their own russian female volunteer soldiers. It's as sad as it gets.
From what I gather, the US Army isn't always above raping a female recruit either. Not saying it's necessarily often, but it's been known to happen before.
Anyway, to get back to the Soviet army in WW2, they actually had quite a few women serving in mostly-male regiments too. Or such cases as a husband and wife serving as tank crew on the same tank, in an otherwise male tank brigade. I'm not aware of any data saying that those units did dumber things than the male-only regiments.
In fact, if there were any crazy things being done, the all-female units ranked even higher. Mind you, not "crazy" as in "insubordination", but "crazy" as in "suicidally fanatical." If you thought men did suicidal stuff to show they're all macho fearless, those gals could teach you a thing or two about it.
E.g., all-female bomber squadrons actually chose to fly without parachutes or sometimes even radio, so they can fit an extra bomb on the plane. Mind boggles. E.g., they actually pulled some stunts as cutting off the engines and gliding without any lights at treetop level at pitch-black night to release the bombs with complete surprise on the Germans. I'm a guy and I get goosebumps at just the thought of trying something like that.
What I meant was that averages over whole populations are useless as the only value, rather than an individual's averages. Obviously, I should have made that clearer.
To give an example paraphrasing your question, let's say the following was true: "on the average, Russians are better at chess." Would that give you any usable info on whether you should play against my coleague Igor?
Basically, I claim that extrapolating from whole population averages to individuals is counter-productive.