Hmm... you know, that doesn't actually sound similar at all to me. What they said there, basically, is that they made the mice stupid. Maybe there's some other stuff at work, but not being able to learn any more looks the closest to genuine stupidity.
That's not at all similar to schizophrenia in humans. A lot of schizophrenic humans are actually highly intelligent, and perfectly able to both lean and do (more than) simple associations. Their brain does work wrong, to different degrees and with a very broad spectrum of possible symptoms (there are at least 5 fundamentally different _categories_ of schizophrenia), but not in the same way as being retarded.
The most easy to understand kind of schizophrenia, the paranoid schizophrenia kind, isn't being unable-to-learn or unable-to-associate stupid, but, according to at least one explanation, having a very fuzzy line between fantasy and reality. (In various ways and to various degrees.) They're people who otherwise are perfectly capable of logical thought and learning, but some of their input data is their own delusions, or is slightly distorted by those delusions. It can range from just slight sensory delusions, to outright seeing and hearing things that actually originated in their own minds, mixed with the real input. While you might, for example, imagine a ghost in your head or think what you'd like to tell the boss, for a really bad case of paranoid schizophrenia it might get registered as stuff that actually happened, or which _is_ currently happening, mixed with the stuff actually happening around. They might actually see that ghost in the (otherwise real) room or get the impression that that boss is communicating with him telepathically.
Of course, that's really really bad cases that end up in the loonie bin or shooting up an university dorm. Most people included in that 1% figure are a lot more slightly affected, and can function normally.
In a sense, paranoid schizophrenia is a case of "garbage in, garbage out". The mental capacity for logic and learning is there, but some of the input is corrupted. The illogical behaviour you see on the outside isn't usually stupidity, it's just the result of applying good logic on bad input data.
So basically, I'm sure they probably base their theory more on the protein similarities than on those symptoms. Because those symptoms don't sound like schizophrenia at all.
A) Early railroad made its big bucks less from transporting people, and more by transporting goods and raw materials for the industry. In fact passengers were often the necessary evil: you wouldn't get a permit to build a railroad if you didn't haul the people too.
Hence just counting how many people were there, is highly misleading. The west was by and large the captive market and source of cheap raw materials for the east coast, in much the same way as India was to England. Building a railroad there made sense.
B) Railroads were a _major_ strategic asset for the army. I don't think these bridges to nowhere count as that.
B) More importantly, railroads were built by private capital, because they were profitable. That's a freakin' huge difference between that and pork barrel contracts to at most please a village on an island.
The laissez faire capitalism of the 19'th century was pretty vehemently against using government money on something that competed with private initiative. Plus, the government didn't even have that kind of money anyway.
I must admit, though: That doctrine was often taken to absurd extremes, such as in England where, when they _had_ to support their own population in a crisis or famine... because they couldn't just give money to people (they thought it would compete with the employment market) or build something useful (it would have competed with private industry), they paid the people to build some useless stuff like roads from nowhere to nowhere (literally, unconnected, in the middle of a field) or useless towers or such. But even then, it must be said that it was only in times of extreme necessity, instead of social security. And it was openly useless stuff. Even in its stupidity, it just wasn't the same thing.
_If_ you can prove that their policies are intentionally ripping you off, then you might have a civil case, yes. But since, as I was saying, IANAL, you might want to ask a real lawyer first.
At any rate, I have no experience with that particular bank, but I'm pretty sure not all banks fall in that category. The one I'm at, for example, offered to remove the penalties even when I did that stupid typo I've mentioned before and transferred a _lot_ of money to the insurance.
So it's, you know, at the very least you can't put them all in the same "fuck 'em all" category. Which seems to me like a lot of people in this thread are doing. There seems to be this general "auugh, they're evil and the laws are evil if they don't let me keep the money I ripped them off of" sentiment, which I honestly can't understand.
Doubly so, since the situation discussed is purely theoretical. I don't know of any bank which actually sued anyone over such an ATM mis-hap, they just shut up and took the loss rather than get bad PR with their customers. It was some casino owner which was considering he could sue people abusing broken slot machines, someone compared those to ATMs, and basically the big revelation today is that technically that would be illegal too. But again, I'm not aware of any bank ever suing over a broken ATM. So it's not even like some bank was actually on a suing spree, or anything that could generate that kind of "boo, we should be allowed to rip them off" backlash anyway.
Not saying that you're in that category, because you do say you called them to tell them about the ATM brain-fart. That's morally the right thing to do, and it's head and shoulders above the gang that went back and maxxed their daily limit on a deffective ATM, and told their friends too to go get some free money.
It actually happens. On the very rare occasions when one machine is loaded with the wrong (too large) banknotes, that machine becomes ultra-popular and is almost the only one used until it runs out of money.
But you do give the perfect example of what happens when the situation is reversed, and that illustrates just my point. When the bank got your money, you were (understandably) pissed off and wanted your money back. All I'm saying is that I find it pretty normal for the bank to want its money back, too, when someone abused a broken ATM.
I'm guessing we're in agreement there, anyway, given that you say you called to offer to give those $200 back. Just explaining what I was really trying to say in this thread.
Actually, often anecdotes are plenty enough, when there isn't much statistical diversity to expect.
E.g., there aren't that many graphics cards that would be fit for gaming. In fact, there are exactly two top end manufacturers, plus Intel which outsells both in the integrated graphics slice of the market.
Plus, there isn't much of a deviation between how a game runs on two identical graphics computers. If a set of settings works well on, say, a 4000+ Athlon with a X1900XTX and 2GB RAM, you don't need a huge statistical sample to figure out how it would work on another 4000+ Athlon with a X1900XTX and 2GB RAM.
And it's possible to take a very informed guess from there. For example, it's not much of a guess that if a set of settings give a poor frame rate on that, it would very probably be even lower on a more mainstream X1550. And conversely if something runs well enough on a laptop with 512 MB and an integrated chipset, by someone who's on ICQ _and_ Teamspeak at the time, then it's a very safe bet that it can't run any worse on your high end gaming rig.
It's also pretty easy to figure out other details, too, like that the load times in COV depend primarily on how much RAM you have. Ranging from a couple of seconds at 1GB and over, to something really painful if you have 256 MB and other programs active.
And finally, in a lot of cases you don't even need to take samples and guess. Sony's own tooltip to not try the max settings in EQ2 unless you have a 512 MB graphics card (which didn't even exist when the game was launched) take a lot of guesswork out of that.
So basically, sometimes anecdotes are plenty enough. They're wrong when you can expect a huge unpredictable variation: then you need to take a big sample and do statistics. But computer hardware configurations are a lot less unpredictable than that.
While some variations exist, you can pick an example far enough from the centre to illustrate the point anyway. If you pick a machine that's considerably more underpowered than most people's gaming rigs (to illustrate that something runs well enough even on that) or conversely far enough above the minimum and indeed recommended configurations printed on the box (to illustrate that it performs poorly even there), you're essentially giving yourself a wide enough margin for error. It should be plenty enough to cover such variations as "but exactly which driver version are you using" or such, without doing a comprehensive sampling and plotting a very spike-like gauss curve.
Or to put it otherwise, it's a message, not a scientific paper. Sometimes it's implied and expected that people are capable of figuring out bits of implied logic without having it spelled out in painstaking detail for them.
Ahem... wouldn't it be more productive to wait and see what hardware it needs when released, before making that kind of decision and bitching?
And you do that, based on... what? Command and Conquer 3. It's not even the same bloody company. C&C is by Westwood, Starcraft is by Blizzard. It's like saying you'll avoid Ford cars because you had problems with a Toyota.
Blizzard games, for all their other faults they may have had, were always quite forgiving on the hardware front. Diablo 1 and 2 were still 2D games in an age when everyone was going 3D, Warcraft 3 wasn't that horribly hardware intensive either by comparison to similar games, and World Of Warcraft... let's just say I know people who've played it perfectly well on an underpowered laptop with integrated graphics. By comparison to, say, Everquest 2 which needed the graphics severely turned down even on top-end graphics cards available at the time, or City Of Villains which also needed a lot of graphics power even in the newbie villain area, WoW actually ran ok on pretty underpowered machines. As an anecdotal comparison, one of the guys with laptops had no problem in WoW except in the massively over-populated Ironforge auction house area (which at the time was the only alliance auction house, so there were _hundreds_ of players and tens of pets there), while the same laptop just choked on COV.
Mind you, I'm not saying that you should buy Starcraft 2. But it seems a bit ridiculous to dismiss it in advance, based on what _another_ company has done.
Actually, from my experience a lot of nerds are really Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder cases, meaning that they just can't see shades of grey. Their world has exactly one "perfect" solution, and everything else is crap. Aiming at any other point than that "perfect" solution is a sign of being a sheep, brainwashed, a lazy under-achiever, or an idiot with lax standards too.
I put "perfect" between quote signs, because an OCPD solution typically is more crap than anything else. Given the a problem with several variables and constraints (as RL problems usually are), a die-hard OCPD case will typically max one variable and proclaim the rest to be fluff only idiots care about. (Or have been brainwashed to care about.) Because they simply can't aim at anything except the extreme values, so they have to modify the problem for that to work. You know you got an OCPD solution when the problem is something like "find the X and Y where X + Y = 10 and X * Y is the maximum", and you get a solution saying, basically, "the One True Solution is X = 10, and Y is fluff for idiots. You've been brainwashed if you even put Y in those equations."
Well, not like that for a maths problem, because nerds tend to be good at maths. But take any other problem where it's more debatable what the variables and constraints are, and you'll get that kind of trying to handwave some of them out of the problem, to be able to maximize something else.
E.g., that's the kind of mentality that gets one to spend a month optimizing the last microsecond out of a background batch job, at the cost of causing the whole project to go over the deadline and become unmaintainable. Because that one variable, in this case speed, must be maximized, no matter what the effects on the other variables (e.g., budget) it has.
Why I've taken that long and boring detour is to explain why the same applies to space travel economics. Some people are genuinely incapable of seeing working shades of grey betweem, say, a mockery of 19'th century unrestricted capitalism (which didn't work like that even then, actually, and died in the Great Depression) and 100% Soviet-style communism. Anything else than the extreme they picked as "perfect" is deemed either as being the other extreme, or a fast slippery slope to the other extreme. And that applies to anything which needs any funding, including (but not limited to) space flight.
And there will be a bunch of them crusading for their perfect utopia. Luckily none are in a position to actually matter, but they exist.
So what I'm left scratching my head is, more or less, what's the point of an article explaining that they can coexist. Whoever is an OCPD case can't possibly accept that, other than as some inevitable evil that they can't personally prevent. And whoever isn't, didn't have a problem in the first place.
Oh please. It's not like "not reporting a beating", it's more like hitting someone's car and driving away hoping that noone knows. We're not talking prosecuting people who just were nearby and watched the ATM being ripped off, but those who actively ripped it off.
Often went back to get more money until they maxxed their daily limit, and told their friends too to go there and withdraw money from that ATM. In which case it's premeditated too.
How about this simple concept: if you harmed someone, even unintentionally, you try to rectify the situation. If you bumped someone's car, you try to contact them and pay for the repairs. If you were playing baseball with your son in the backyard and broke a neighbour's window, you call the neighbour and offer to buy him a new glass pane. And if ripped someone off of some money, you give it back. If you don't, at the very least you're an asshole.
Additionally, I dunno about the USA, but here in Europe we have this legal and moral concept that gains made by someone's error aren't yours to keep. If you transferred too much money to someone's account, or to the wrong account, they have to give it back. If you gave a cashier two banknotes stuck together instead of one, she's expected to give you the right change nevertheless if she notices, not just hope you didn't notice. You'd expect no less if it were your money down the drain, wouldn't you?
So at least here, there would be no shadow of a doubt that the extra money _aren't_ legally yours to keep.
Bank or not, WTH is so difficult a concept there? It's not money falling from of the heavens or winning the lottery, and much less some infraction you just happened to notice as a bystander. It's money coming from someone else. If it was someone else getting your money by your mistake, you'd expect them to give you your money back, not come back to rip you off more. How is it screwed or lopsided if the same applies to banks?
Even in the relationship with banks you'd expect no less if the situation were reversed. If you (e.g., after a yard sale, or let's say you have a small shop) gave the bank more money than you thought (e.g., said you were depositing a 1000, but gave them 1100), you'd expect them to count the money and tell you you were wrong. You wouldn't expect the cashier to just silently pocket the extra money.
Why is it so lopsided to expect the same courtesy when the roles are reversed? If you got too much of their money, they too expect you to do the nice thing and give it back?
While I sympathise with your predicament, my experience is that the situation isn't that lopsided.
First of all, IANAL, so take this just as someone searching Wikipedia for you, with the usual caveats that means. I say that because I'll take a bit of a legal definitions detour, but that's not really that necessary to illustrate the _moral_ point I'm making, so feel free to skip it if you want to.
The key element in any conviction in the western law system is the "Mens Rea", or "evil intent". (Well, literally "evil mind".) There are various degrees of it, ranging from premeditation (you actually planned ahead to do harm) to negligence (a reasonable person of average intelligence should have seen how an otherwise well meant plan could go wrong and harm someone.) "Criminal negligence" is somewhat a misnomer, in that it's usually not criminally punished, unless it was "gross negligence", meaning it involved "wanton disregard for human life". I.e., unless an ATM was dangling from the ceiling and fell on you, it won't qualify as such.
You'll probably have no case at all, even civil, unless it's the previous degree, namely "Willful blindness". I.e., someone had more than ample warnings that something can go bad, or it was blindingly obvious that it will cause harm, but they choose to pretend the problem doesn't exist.
Why I took that legal definitions detour is because it codifies the basic underlying moral idea: was it deliberate? Did that person _intend_ to do something wrong? Did they _know_ they did something wrong? Did they do anything to rectify the problem _if_ they became aware of it?
(Also, I don't know about the USA, but in Europe we have this clause that you can't keep an undeserved gain, even if it was an error. E.g., if you transferred some money to the wrong account by mistake, even if the recipient didn't know about it, they still have to give you your money back. That's another codifying a basic moral idea: money gotten by someone's error aren't yours to keep.)
And in that aspect, the bank doesn't seem guilty at all to me, and the situation isn't as equivalent as you paint it. Sorry.
1. The bank certainly didn't intend to rip you off there, and they _do_ correct it when they become aware of the problem.
1.a. I can assure you (well, second hand, because I have friends who worked for banks) that banking software is among the most tested and reviewed software ever made, ranking up there with the stuff they run in airplane control systems. Banks not only are more carefully monitored by the government, but also live by their reputation and face bigger money problems. Noone wants software who makes gross mistakes. And not just for little fish like you and me, but they also deal with massive corporate funds. Software which gets a brain-fart for a $100 transaction, well, you can see the problems it could cause when it does a $100,000,000 transfer for a takeover.
Most of the problems involving banks are human errors, like an absent-minded dolt putting a pack of $100 notes in the $10 tray of the ATM. And even those are very rare, actually.
1.b. At any rate, they _do_ fix the problem when they aware of it, and even offer assistance for your own problems, like when you entered the wrong sum or destination account. (As a personal anecdote, they sure have been nice and helpful when I typoed the sum I transferred to my insurance... by omitting the decimal point.)
And to get back to that moral point, you can't fault them for not automatically fixing something they don't even know about. So until you go tell them about it, wtf do you expect? Telepathy? By your own tale, you needed exactly _one_ trip to the bank to solve it, which doesn't seem that tragic.
2. By comparison the folks ripping off an ATMs and the like are not in the same category at all. You do count the money you get from the ATM, don't you? So you'd _know_ something went wrong. Plus there are cases where it's been deliberate by any reckoning. There are people who went back and took
You're not smarter or more informed than the professionals that did this study.
"blah blah blah, I have useless anecdotal evidence that only proves I'm too stupid to understand is meaningless blah blah"
Summarized your post for you.
Well, here's another thing I don't get: brainless retards polluting/. with tripe like above, boiling down to "don't use your own brains, these guys are smarter than you, just believe and don't question."
Sorry to break your delusions, my dear Neanderthal, but that's at best _religion_. In fact, it's fucking stupid even by most religion's standards, as even the most die hard Christians (e.g., the Jesuits) ended up transcribing manuscripts, operating schools or doing research.
At any rate, that's not how _science_ works. Science means that everything could be inaccurate, nothing is to be taken as absolute proof, and no figure of authority is beyond questioning. Even if Einstein came back from the dead with a great new theory, you're _supposed_ to be skeptical and try to find a hole in it. Going "noo, don't question it because he's smarter than you" is exactly the _opposite_ of science.
So why post such crap in the first place? Do you need the ego-masturbation boost of dragging everyone down to your non-thinking potted-plant level? Or what?
You know, Aristotle thought that the brains are just a big heatsink to keep the blood cool. Think water cooling for the body, if you will. And seeing the above kind of "nooo, don't dare think on your own, you're not worthy of questioning those guys" posts... I swear he must have been right about some people.
I still don't buy it. Maybe it's a cultural thing that only works like that in America and not here, or maybe I just live in some weird statistical-fluke place, but I just don't see that kind of thing happening around me. I've been in mixed fat/skinny/average groups for as long as I remember, and I haven't yet seen anyone going obese just because someone else in the group was obese. In the current group, for example, two people just joined the gym this year, instead of taking a hint from the round guys.
So peer reviewed or not, excuse me if I find that a bit hard to believe.
Additionally, I just don't like that kind of "Having Fat Friends Makes You Fat" wording. It makes it sound like some inescapable cause->effect relationship, like gravity or newtonian mechanics, when at best it can be some statistical maybe-or-maybe-not thing. Hanging around fat people _might_ make you more inclined to feel it's ok to be fat, or it might do nothing whatsoever, or it might even cause a "geesh, I don't want to end up looking like _this_ guy" reaction. Even _if_ on the whole it ends up favouring the first (I'm still not convinced, but let's assume that anyway), it's an overall influence, not some inescapable fate.
Basically the whole sounds like a rehash of the old judging someone by the company they keep prejudice, which is nothing more than a society's way to enforcing unofficial ostracisms. Basically, "stay away from the guys we don't like, or we'll start avoiding you too." And the problem with that is that, as the quote goes, "A free society is a place where it's safe to be unpopular." The more such prejudices are enforced, the more essentially any kind of having one's own opinion dies.
And peer reviewed or not, I'm automatically suspicious of any research that just "happens" to neatly confirm a prejudice. There has been entirely too much money and time dumped into pseudo-science whose only merit was "confirming" prejudices, and "peer review" occasionally means jack squat when the peers are similarly biased. The English used to build a whole pseudo-science to "prove" that the Irish are too innately retarded to be human, the white supremacists did the same for anyone who isn't caucasian, etc. Ok, this one is more subtle than that, but at the same time more perverse for it.
_Especially_ when it ends up worded like a blanket generalization that applies universally and inescapably to everyone, when reality tends to be more of a statistics and gauss curves thing.
So I don't know if this is bad science or the guy actually has a point, but the potential for skewing research just to confirm a personal bias is there. And if it is impartial research, it sure ends up giving all the wrong signals there.
And since everyone seems to have taken the "but it's peer-reviewed!" appeal to authority as a battle cry once again: none of the above mentioned prejudice-confirming pseudo-science was thrown out the window by similar-minded peers at the time, btw. Science isn't always infallible, sometimes it just takes some time to correct itself. In fact, the whole scientific process is about trying to correct itself, and that starts with keeping an open mind that something might not be entirely correct even if it's peer-reviewed. Alchemy was very peer-reviewed, for example, and so was the raisin pie atom model. Doesn't mean they didn't turn up to be all wrong.
It's not confusing at all. You assume that anyone except the die-hard nerds even has such broad and inflexible terms as "anti-terrorism is always bad".
For starters, I doubt that anyone would seriously define themselves as a "terrorist". (This isn't D&D and people cheerfully proclaiming themselves -- or their whole race -- to be chaotic evil.) The terrorists consider themselves more along the lines of "freedom fighters". You don't go blow yourself up just for the sake of making others panic a little. You need to believe in a much nobler goal for that. And more importantly the terrorist stuff isn't the goal, it's a means to an end. They want to achieve their own goals. I'm not saying they're necessarily sane or good goals, but they're nevertheless goals, and blowing shit up is just the means.
So if, for example, the goal is spreading the Islam or instituting a fundamentalist sharia regime or just showing the "evil" western world the middle finger, there's nothing confusing there. Laws forbidding people to speak against the Islam, are, essentially, just defending the territory they gain by the terrorist actions.
Note that I'm not accusing Malaysia of condoning terrorism. I'm just saying that from a terrorist's point of view, there'll be nothing confusing there. It'll be just a case of "Malayisia == good muslim state, more should follow that example, <insert secular state aligned with the west> == bad state, we should bomb them until they see the light and become like Malayisia."
Second, from another point of view, both the fundamentalist islamists and the fundamentalist christians just think whatever the imam or respectively preacher tells them to think. And we already know that A) the leaders of both are perfectly capable of being hypocritical, and B) they have no problem with presenting vague and hypocritical point of view to their followers. So basically they won't think in terms of "is terrorism good or bad?", they'll just think in terms of, "whatever serves _my_ cause or point of view is good, whatever serves an oposing point of view is bad".
The far right will have no problem taking a stance along the lines of "bombing the arabs just because they're muslims is damn good, and someone should get to it already, arabs bombing stuff for religion is bad and should be stopped", much as it both condones _and_ condemns religious terrorism in the same sentence. It's good when we do it, it's bad when our enemies do it. Duh.
In this particular example, my guess is that they can pick either side, and noone will find it confusing. You can always present it as just half, and deny the other half. E.g., either (A) phbt, that's not an anti-terror law, that's just evil muslim stuff to keep their people from seeing the light, or (B) yay, our good friends the malayisians are on our side in the war against terror, and of course they'll _never_ use such a vaguely defined and unchecked law against dissidents.
Which of them, might well depend on the interests in the area. If the good people of Malaysia are doing cheap work for the american corporations, or have any resources they're selling to the USA cheaply, it will be B. If not at all, it will be A.
And on yet another hand, when most people think of Malaysia, they think "asians" not "arabs". I don't think the extreme right has figured out what stance it needs to take about asians and their religions, and it doesn't seem to be in much of a hurry to. And, frankly, you only need one enemy to keep people scared and rallied around a (bogus) battle banner. There's no real need to manufacture a _second_ bogeyman. Which is what the muslim arabs really are to the bible-thumping right: the bogeyman to keep the congregation scared and together with.
So the religious far right, even if it picks one or the other point of view, probably won't be _too_ vocal about it. It will at most issue the occasional protest or fiery sermon, then go back to playing the "auugh, scary muslim arabs" card.
1. Even if it were so, I'd bet that showing an imperfect prototype would have done a hell of a lot more good than bitching about Englishmen.
Let's say it would have been useless past, dunno, 2 decimals. It would still have been proof of concept.
John Harrison didn't get his nautical watch right in the first try either. There's a reason why the first used version was called "H4". Because H1 to H3 weren't yet accurate enough. And H1 didn't properly compensate for the ship's movement either. But he had _something_ to show to the admiralty, as proof of concept and as proof that indeed it is at least a little more accurate than the average pocket watch one could buy at the nearest watchmaker. It worked wonders to secure more funding for the next version. Although the project was had already overrun the initial money offer and deadline, it showed that _something_ is happening there.
Basically think in terms of iterative software development. It's easier to keep the client happy if he gets _something_ usable often, or at least sees that some progress is made, than if he has to wait for the deus-ex-machina miracle where everything is just perfect at the end of a very very long time. What Babbage did was, more or less, equivalent to not only keeping the client waiting for the first version, but scrapping the design and starting from scratch, again and again and again, to the point where nothing whatsoever was ever ready or usable or even in a demo state.
Well, that sounded maybe too harsh. I'm not (primarily) trying to damn Babbage, but to say _why_ those Englismen that he damns were so skeptical. For all his claims, he worked on it from 1822, when he first presented his proposal and got funding, to his death in 1871 without ever having a version that works even as a crude tech demo. That's a whopping 49 years. You can't really blame anyone for being skeptical if your project was _half_ of that time overdue and still had nothing to show.
Even nowadays most clients would just pull the plug on a project if it was just one year past the deadline, or often less than that. And noone would blame them for it. Even if you had a project of your own funding, you'd be ridiculed long before 49 years passed if it was still going nowhere. We made fun of Duke Nukem Forever when it was overdue a tenth of that time, and also in a tenth of that time Daikatana's hype generated a _very_ nasty backlash. Just, you know, to put things in perspective.
So what I'm saying is: don't take Babbage's bitching as some great insight into the Victorian era England or into the human species as a whole. Babbage's problem wasn't that the English were blockheaded, but simply that he kept hyping a concept and asking for funding without anything to show even as a proof of concept. With or without technical problems, _of_ _course_ the English were skeptical after all that time. That's all.
2. At the risk of repeating myself, the machine built in IIRC 1991 after Babbage's schematics was deliberately built using the tolerances and precision that would have realistically been available in the 19'th century. It worked, and calculated PI with 31 decimals.
The reason Babbage had problems completing the project was that it required precision and standardization unparalleled in any previous project. The design and concept was there, the production capabilities lagged severely behind.
Wrong, actually. The machine that was built at the end of the 20'th century was built with the precision and tolerances of the 19'th century. Deliberately, to show that it was possible.
The precision argument is even more obviously false, when you look at the fact that very precise watches had existed for a long time. That's how they measured longitude before GPS. I use watches as an example, because they're cog-based machines too, and they required even higher precision. By the middle of the _18'th_ century (i.e., a century earlier than Babbage) even a pocket watch would already not deviate more than a minute per day, and the second hand gradually became common. (Previously they tended to have only hours and minutes hands.)
The first practical nautical clock, John Harrison's H4 was first used aboard the ship Deptford which set sail for Jamaica on 18 November 1761 and actually arrived there on 19 January 1762. That's two months and a day at sea. After all that time, it was only off by 5.1 seconds.
_That_ is the kind of accuracy that was already available a century before Babbage.
Babbage's design didn't even need that kind of accuracy, since it was essentially a digital device. All that mattered was how many teeth of the cog had moved, not also to do it within a very exact time interval. Half the sources of inaccuracy of a watch, didn't even apply there.
So, no, Babbage had no excuse. The production capabilities were there, the precision was enough, and standardization wasn't even necessary for a prototype. He just couldn't be arsed to actually deliver what he promised. Full stop.
1. Funny that you should mention that, given that Babbage, get this: never actually finished his machine, so he never actually delivered any value for the ample funding money he received. Other people get into the v2.0 syndrome after they completed one successful project. Babbage couldn't be even arsed to finish the first one (although, again, he did receive more than enough funding for it) before he started designing the second version. Then the third. Then the fourth. What is now known collectively as the Analytical Engine is actually a whole series of different machines: he could never be arsed to actually finish building one before he got distracted and started the next one. He kept at it until his death.
His machines _would_ have worked, if they had actually been completed. But he could never be arsed to. Whenever he got funding for one, he'd deliver exactly nothing for that money.
So, you know, maybe _that_ is why Babbage found the Englishmen somewhat reluctant to invest in his designs. Had he actually finished the Differential Engine, maybe people would have been more receptive to his next ideas. Maybe instead of bitching about his fellow Englishmen, it would have been easier to just deliver what he had promised. Just a thought.
And maybe we would have had programmable computers a lot earlier. But as it is, it took people like Konrad Zuse in Germany or Alan Turing and the other folks who built the Colossus computer in the UK, to get it started. Because they actually delivered something that worked. Bloody huge difference there.
2. The complaint about "slicing pineapple" is actually invalid too. Like many nerds today, Babbage was in it just for the fun of researching something new, and apparently thought that people should give him a lot of money just so he can have some nerdy fun.
Capitalism, even the 19'th century kind -- actually, _especially_ the 19'th century kind -- doesn't work that way. To get some funding, the question you must answer is, basically, "which of _my_ problems does this solve?" If that company is in the business of slicing pineapple, then, yes, a machine which peels potatoes is completely useless to them.
Governments too, while they do fund some fundamental research too, have a fiscal responsibility to the citizens they tax for that money. Especially in the 19'th century laissez-faire ideology, when the government was lean, mean, and barely funded to maintain the army. You can't seriously propose a tax hike just so Mr Babbage can play with something cool and high tech. So basically they too have to ask, "ok, so what do _I_ gain from this? Does it compute ballistics for our battleships? Total the census? Or what?"
You'll notice that the working examples that did get computing started, had a satisfactory answer to exactly that. The Colossus computer broke enemy codes for the UK army, and Zuse's machines did aerodynamics calculations for the German airforce. E.g., the Z2 was used to design glide bombs.
ie: PacMan is a geometric shape that "eats" dots. You must avoid opponents and are constrained to a maze. There is no "Why" to this other than the need for survival. There is no Who. We don't really care about the geometric shape's origins, motivations, or feelings.
Heh... reminds me of the high school days, when I'd occasionally be bored enough to imagine a whole touching story about such games and characters as Chucky Egg.
Admittedly, the whole was more or less part of reverse-engineering how to write a school essay. I could eventually write an essay on anything whatsoever, and put any spin whatsoever on it. (IIRC the Chucky Egg one was about the struggle of the working class against the corporate chickens. I'm not kidding.) I was all about that kind of finding the rules that work and (ab)using them.
I think I did one about Pac Man too, but I can't quite remember what it was about.
Still, there you go, even if for the somewhat disturbed reasons, someone did care about Chucky's or PacMan's life, motivations, needs, etc.
I don't think I'm the only one, though. You should see the kind of complex stories within stories that people imagine around such abstract games as Europa Universalis or Hearts Of Iron. And they're ultra-abstracted grand strategy games. You don't even command anything smaller than an army, and you don't even have access to the tactical details of a battle. It's actually more abstract than your average hex-based strategy game.
Yet people write whole stories about _why_ something happened. They don't just write "Army Group North pushed towards Berlin", they write a whole story about how that decision was taken, what the reactions were at the HQ meeting, and occasionally what happened to the ordinary soldiers in that battle. (Again, the ordinary soldiers exist only as an abstract number in the actual game.)
So what I'm getting at is: maybe it's not just blamable on "realism". I think many of us actually have a need for such stories. We can't be truly satisfied with "Knight takes Pawn at E4, check". We actually have to really know that Knight's personality, background, aspirations. What went through his head as he charged through the pikemen at E4 (a pawn) to try to capture the enemy King? Was he affraid? Did he do it for honour? For his own king and country? For some beautiful lady? (Quite a common thing in the middle ages.) Did he charge with a sword or with a lance? Etc. We have to really know that guy's story, you know?
While that is to some extent true, and insightful too, I'd say mods at least prove that it's more complex than that. E.g.,
1. There are people who actually enjoy being creative in their own right, and taking the story in their own direction
2. There are people who have strong feelings about what kind of characters they want or don't want to play. Since a game essentially requires you to be the lead actor in that story. And it has happened to me before (and to countless others) that a character was a major turn-off because that's not the kind of person or role I want to play.
And even before computers, that kind of thing has happened before too.
E.g., Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy's "The Gold Key, or Adventures of Buratino" is, by and large, the novel version of a "mod" of "Pinocchio".
E.g., the famous sixtine chapel ceiling was later "modded" by, basically, painting breeches on the originally nude characters. I'd say that's _exactly_ like buying a Picasso and then changing the colours. Except in this case it's a whole chapel painted by Michelangelo.
E.g., in theatre or opera or movies, the director (and sometimes actors) have a lot of room to subtly alter the story, and emphasize or de-emphasize various aspects regardless of what the author had in mind. Especially adaptations from novel to movie, or to opera or theatre long before such technology, things are often changed massively.
E.g., as an example of #2, in movies actors often play a major role in modifying the script. Harrison Ford, for example, is known to have had quire a bit of input in what Han Solo ended up like, or he's the reason for that famous Indiana Jones scene where Indy just draws a revolver and shoots the guy with the big sword. (The original script called for a lot of using the whip and stuff.) Plus actors routinely refuse roles they don't want to be associated with.
So, yes, in a sense he's right: technology doesn't add anything new. On the other hand he's wrong: people routinely made changes to someone else's vision, long before computers or movies.
1. Densities per whole state can be a bit misleading, because the USA has a ton of farmland or just empty space. The communities you need to connect (first) tend to be a bit more concentrated. Even if you take Montana as an example, I'm willing to bet that even the villages there have a bit more than 2.39 people per square kilometer. (Unless they're all hermits.)
By comparison, western Europe simply has less empty space to screw up the maths. For example, North Rhine-Westphalia (the heavily industrialized county in the NW of Germany) is almost one contiguous megalopolis spread across a whole state. Not exactly, but almost. You only know that, say, Düsseldorf (land capital city) ended and Duisburg ('nother city next to it) started only because the shields on the highway say so. There's just not that much empty space to screw up the maths.
2. If population spread was the real problem, then in the USA the major cities should all be on Ethernet, which AFAIK isn't the case. I mean, high population density = good for broadband, right?
Cities are a lot less dense down here in Germany, and while there isn't as much suburb sprawl (for lack of space and a different culture), houses are rarely higher than 3-4 floors (including ground floor) even in a densely populated area like NRW. The NRW has 18 million inhabitants spread over 34,083 square kilometres, which means some 528 people per square kilometre. Of course it's not uniform, but take it as a rough ballpark figure.
Düsseldorf itself ends up at 2681 people per square kilometre, according to Wikipedia, and that's a major German city.
By comparison, New York City packs 8.2 million people within 830 square kilometres, which means around 10,000 people per square kilometre, or about 4 times the density of Düsseldorf, 20 times the density of the NRW or 40 times the density of Germany. They should have some _awesome_ network access then, right? The New York City metropolitan area packs 18.8 million inhabitants in 8680 square kilometres, so the density is around 10 times that of Germany, 4 times that of the NRW and slightly less than Düsseldorf. (But the last one is slightly misleading since it's comparing the whole sprawl including suburbs and satellite towns to just the main city area of Düsseldorf. The comparison to the whole NRW is a lot more accurate.)
3. But that all becomes a lot less relevant when you notice that density doesn't correlate to net access that well in Europe either. E.g.:
A. Actually the best places for net access aren't in such dense industrial areas of Germany, but actually in many rural areas. Somehow the Telekom ended up upgrading the net access to some villages and small-ish towns before the larger and denser cities.
B. Among countries, the best access is in countries like... Sweden. According to the link you posted, it ends up at 20 inhabitants per square kilometre, which is considerably lower than the USA.
Ok, so there the frozen north is mostly empty space, so let's look up Stockholm on Wikipedia. Stockholm itself is pretty packed, at 4,136 people per square kilometre, but then that's still peanuts compared to, say, New York City. If you take it together with its suburbs, i.e., the whole metropolitan area, it's a meager 499 people per square kilometre. Compared to the NYC metropolitan area, it's outright sparse. Some of the suburbs have as low as 80 people per square kilometre.
Basically, to wrap this long rant up, population density doesn't seem to correlate to net access _that_ well. Sure, noone drags optical fibre to some lone hut on the top of a mountain, but you don't need ultra-packed communities to get broadband either. And in between those extremes, the correlation is at best imperfect, and at worst non-existant.
It's sorta like this: everyone can produce entirely too much of everything. The laissez faire capitalism of the 19'th century (that so many nerds long for a bullshit idealized version of):
A) only worked in an economy of scarcity, and
B) it wasn't a paradise, either. It produced cycles of bankruptcies, and a drive to cut the wages and demand more work hours after each hit.
Trying to undercut each other's prices always presented the easy option of cutting the wages some more. Unfortunately that had the side effect of reducing how much those people can buy. But the thing is, the wages aren't the only component there. Reducing salaries to half, doesn't also reduce the price of the end product by half, because there are other costs in there too. So essentially it's a losing spiral.
And the culmination of this was the Great Depression, when basically aggregate supply vastly outstripped aggregate demand. If you ploted units-produced vs production costs, and units-sold vs the at which price the market would buy that many, the two curves became parallel. There was no point at which you can sell all that stuff and break even, much less make a profit.
There were some other factors too, but essentially it was inevitable. That was where that downwards spiral was leading, sooner or later.
Where I'm getting at is that since the great depression, most governments _had_ to produce some extra demand. This means essentially requisitioning some of the production capacity to make something else, and create jobs in the process. But since we're not under communism, they can't outright do that, so the way it works is taking some money in taxes or as deficit spending and:
1. directly spending it on stuff
2. giving it to some people who otherwise would have not much to spend. E.g., unemployment benefits, tax breaks for people with kids, whatever. Just as long as someone goes and buys more stuff.
Especially during recession times, deficit spending is crucial to keep it going.
The multiplier effect means that 1$ spent by the government doesn't just create 1$ in employment. If the government gives a big chunk to someone producing tanks, then that factory goes and gives some money to someone producing trucks, and its employees buy cars and food. The company producing the cars and trucks then goes and buys something else with the money. That money circulates and produces more jobs and more money spent at other companies down the line.
Of course, you don't want _too_ high taxes either, because that reduces the multiplier. But basically neither extreme is some kind of ideal paradise. No taxes means no government spending, so with any multiplier imaginable, zero times that multiplier still equals zero effect.
You can see it worked too, because:
I. Look at who got out of the Great Depression when. The countries whose government overspent (e.g., USA with the New Deal, or Germany with its military spending) got out of the crisis fast, those who stuck to "nooo, the government should stay lean and cheap" ideas (e.g., Canada) got to enjoy a jolly good depression until the 40's (when they got dragged into the war anyway.)
II. Ever since we didn't have the bankruptcy cycles that plagued the previous laissez faire economy. Better yet, we've had inflation and unemployment where we want them ever since.
(That's one dirty little secret the politicians don't tell you: the Philips curve. Inflation and unemployment depend on each other, and pushing one down pushes the other up. The best you can do is pick your favourite point on that curve. So
Wrong, actually. Not in an interesting way either, since you rehash the same canned ID stuff we've all heard before. Let's just say that just because you don't know, or refuse to acknowledge, what we base those theories on, doesn't make them religion. Just because you refuse to acknowledge the long string of fossils that _do_ illustrate all the intermediate steps from worm to fish to lizard to bird, doesn't mean that that evidence doesn't exist.
ID as a whole is essentially an Argument From Ignorance fallacy. They don't know, or refuse to acknowledge, the existing evidence to the contrary, therefore their doctrine must be true. Pretty sad, and an indication of intellectual dishonesty too, but otherwise worthless. Like all fallacies, it fails to actually prove anything.
If anything, it makes it somewhat funny to see someone accusing science of being dogma, when their own whole theory is based on block-headed outright refusing to acknowledge any evidence that doesn't support their theory. No, science isn't the dogma there. Science, for better or worse, accepts proofs to the contrary. A lot of classifications were cheerfully changed when evidence to the contrary became available. Wake me up when ID can say at least the same. _Then_ it will have earned the right to call others dogmatic.
Anyway...
1. That the physics parameters had to be just right, well, that much is obvious. If carbon didn't have an excited state at exactly the right energy, no star would be able to produce anything above helium, for example.
Essentially we don't know why the universe's constants are what they are. That much is true.
That doesn't imply that life was designed though. _If_ there's a God, we don't need him to explain anything past setting those constants. Did some God set those constants just right? Maybe. But that doesn't automatically make him the designer of life too. Life is perfectly possible and capable to evolve on its own, given those constants.
There's just nothing to imply that _if_ a God exists, he _must_ be like the Bible God, carefully designing all forms of life himself. It could be just a physicist God who set the basic constants so chains of Carbon can form, and watched what happens from there. Or maybe trillions of trillions of universes exist (created or not), and ours just happened to be the one with the right constants. Maybe the whole exercise is God's college assignment to calculate the right constants for a universe where life can evolve, but doesn't involve actually designing any life form personally. Or a number of other imaginable deities.
So, so far, this actually fails to be an argument for ID _of_ _life_.
2. As I was saying, just because you refuse to acknowledge the evidence, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. We have the fossils, and in some cases living fossils, for the intermediate steps of just that: a worm evolved into a fish, a fish evolved into a lizard, the lizard evolved into a two legged dinosaur, and that one evolved into a bird.
There is no guess work involved, and no religion. All the steps from fish to dinosaur are very much available for all to see. Some fish still live which are adapted to survive out of water, or even to move (crudely) across land. The evolution to lizard is also there. The adaptation to have the legs under the body instead of sideways like the crocodiles is also very well illustrated in the fossil record. Raising itself on two legs is just a minor adaptation (hence, I'm under the impression it would be acceptable even by you.) From there we have Velociraptors and a bunch of other dinosaur which are almost identical to large chicken in their skeleton structure. And there are pressed fossils of some which show feathers.
So basically exactly what you dismiss as impossible, is what we have plenty of intermediate steps to prove that just that happened. The worm evolved into a bird.
Incidentally the same applies to cats and dogs. Although
Duly noted, theoretically speaking it is an imaginable mode of failure. That much I'll aggree. It's not one I'd worry that much, though. And here's why:
1. It would have to be a particularly _dumb_ government that resorts to that. As I was saying in the other post, we already know much better ways to organize a repression than that.
And as a lot of modern oppressive governments discovered in the 20'th century, FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) works _much_ better and cheaper than outright repression. E.g., the USSR post-Stalin didn't as much rely on outright oppression, as making people unsure who's an agent provocateur and what will be used against them if they say it. Basically it's better and cheaper to get the people too insecure to organize, than to do mass repression.
So, well, I'll reserve my fears for the future for smart governments, not to comic super-villain types that re-enact ancient societies (and presumably dress their legions of doom like Roman legionaires.)
2. Water despotism didn't even work that well as repression. It had to be backed by military threat anyway, or preople would just take control of the sluices and free themselves. And if the troubled history of Mesopotamia is anything to go by, it didn't exactly create long-lasted stability. Quite on the contrary. Empires went up and down like a yoyo, and it was one of the areas extremely hard hit by the catastrophe at the end of the bronze age. A lot of cities were razed and abandoned.
3. Water despotism was so successful back then, not as much because it's such a fearsome form of repression, but also because it was the only known way to organize a state. We're talking a very _primitive_ point in history. Humanity was just discovering how to work on bigger scales than a tribe, how to get people to pay their taxes instead of buggering off, or how to even know how many citizens you have and how much grain you're owed in taxes. The whole bureucratic mechanism didn't even exist yet, laws had yet to be invented (Hammurabi's code comes much later), it was some _millenia_ before nationalism as a way to keep people together, and even something as basic as a census or a map didn't yet exist.
Hydraulic despotism was, basically, one way to make it all work. Instead of bothering with all the organization, you'd just sell water for agriculture. That was your taxation, land measurement (instead of sending unpopular agents to assess how much land a peasant had, he'd come to you and say how many acres he wants flooded by you), incentive for the people to stay there, etc. It was a very primitive way to organize a state, more than anything else. The repression possibilities were just a side-effect. Admittedly, a nice side-effect, but a side-effect nevertheless.
In a nutshell, it was "successful" only in that it was the only competitor.
Basically, given that even the classical ancient empires were better organized than that, is another thing I base my assertion that it would have to be a particularly dumb government that tries to re-enact that. We already know to organize a state and collect taxes without basing it on selling that one vital resource.
I could go on about it some more, but it's already too late, and it's a huge message already. Basically I'm just trying to say that novels paint a very warped image of it. Historically it was a pretty complex thing, and there mostly as an early crappy solution, rather than as the ultimate scary government.
Still won't work. Insulin is well out of patent, and its production is well understood and widespread. Water back then was something you couldn't just manufacture, and couldn't "smuggle". Insulin is nothing even remotely like that. So the only thing that government could do is, basically, spend a lot of manpower to try to suppress it by force, and create massive dissent in the process. It's just begging for a revolt.
And if it would even work... well, just look at the prohibition era, for how well _that_ worked. If it's too bad a demand, someone _will_ offer a supply. And in that case it was alcohol, which is at best a luxury and even carried some pre-existing stigma. Something that's life and death? Heh. An Al Capone smuggling insulin in that scenario, would get voted mayor and be the hero of the people. He'd have entire divisions deserting to his side, if he wanted to fight that government.
It's easier and cheaper to just shoot your opponents than try something like that.
Plus a lot of other social and economic conditions are entirely different. What worked back then, only worked because of the conditions were like that. It was a primitive economy, and more importantly an economy of severe scarcity. It was also a different era and culture, where people took for granted that the ones at the top have a right of life and death over their subjects. There was a severe lack of information, population mobility was extremely limited, trade was very limited and unable to overcome that kind of control, etc, etc, etc.
That's, in a nutshell, the stumbling block of all proposed "hydraulic despotism" scenarios. If you want a city dead, it's easier to just nuke it nowadays. If you tried to eliminate it by "hydraulic despotism" methods, you'd first have to pretty much blockade it with the army until it starves off, or people will bugger off somewhere else or smuggle stuff from somewhere else. At which point, why not just fire bomb it, then march your divisions right in and shoot everyone? It's going to boil down to a lot of shooting anyway, so you might as well get it done from the start.
Or you can do even better, and cause even less unrest, without any medicine conspiracy. You only need to look at the 20'th century for very conventional massacres which were kept reasonably secret and caused a lot less resistance and unrest. We have such conventional mass-murderers as;
- Pol Pot: just told people that they were evacuated because an American air raid was expected. (And the fact that that area had gotten more bombs per square mile than Germany in WW2 sure as heck helped make that lie believable.) So they peacefully got into the trucks, and were transported to the extermination camps.
- WW2 Germany... well, let's avoid that discussion for the sake of Goodwin's Law
- The Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks in the last years of the Ottoman Empire: they just told those people they're getting relocated somewhere else. Sure, noone's happy to get deported, but it creates a lot less resistance than "omg, the government is trying to kill us." So until it's way too late, a lot of people are going to just comply.
Etc.
In a nutshell, we're already damn good at exterminating each other without "hydraulic despotism" methods. The "hydraulic despotism" scenarios add an unnecessary and inefficient level of complexity. Why would anyone realistically bother with that?
I like a good hyperbole as much as the next guy, but in this case "hydraulic despotism" is so over the top it's no longer funny.
Let's recap what it used to mean historically. It meant that your government can basically cut your only means of subsistence (as in, you _die_) if you disobey. Typically it was applied to water used for agriculture. E.g.,
- in Mesopotamia whoever controlled the sluices had, basically, the life and death of everyone else in their hand. That area was only able to produce enough food by irigation, so basically you obeyed or they could hurt you badly.
- in ancient Egypt, knowledge of the calendar was very important, since their whole agriculture depended on the Nile's yearly floods. So the priestly caste, who knew how to count days and calculate that kind of thing, accumulated disproportionate power. (Plus, used people's superstition to claim power over the river itself. You know, if you don't pay the priests well, Osiris will be angry and give you a crappy flood.)
Note that in both cases the punishment meant literally almost-guaranteed death, not just inconvenience or lack of privileges. As late as the late middle ages agriculture output was as low as 2 to 7 grains harvested per grain planted. So you'd have to work a large surface just to subsist and pay your taxes. Having your crop halved or quarterd because you were denied irrigation, would hit you _hard_. Chances are you didn't even have extra land or work power to compensate for that. And in early barter-based societies, that crop would also be your money, so you couldn't even buy much when something like that happened.
I'm sorry, but no resource imaginable nowadays comes even _close_ to that kind of life-and-death importance. And some of the examples used in SF stories (e.g., orbital rights) are outright laughable.
Also note that historically even this kind of despotism didn't work as well as SF authors like to pretend. Even with that kind of control, you can only push people so far before they revolt. The history of Mesopotamia and Egypt is full of revolts, invasions, usurpers, assassinations and other violent mishaps. The hydraulic empire didn't quite work half as well IRL as in, say, Dune.
Nowadays? Oooer. People might be complacent when it comes to minor deviations from the constitution, but I doubt that any (western) empire would have an easy time justifying to its citizens why it deliberately starved a city to death. I mean, look at the scandal around the government merely responding too late and too inefficient to the Katrina devastation. Now picture the government deliberately blockading a city and letting it starve. And flaunting it at that, because hydraulic despotism doesn't even work unless everyone knows you're willing to use that power. I doubt that even China could get away with it that easily.
So basically while it's a scary concept and makes for good novels... well, let's just say that so do Vampires, but you don't carry stakes with you IRL, do you?
I already said that life had to hit an incredibly improbable jackpot to appear, in the second half of the message, so I'm not sure who you're arguing with. Admittedly, it was a very long message, so I can't fault anyone for giving up.
That said,
1. While chlorophyll does match that spectrum well, the original photosynthesis was done by cyanobacteria, which _don't_ match that spectrum too well. So there you go, a less perfect solution was perfectly viable too, and the better solution appeared later.
So give me a break with the "too many things had to be just perfect" ID speech. Non-perfect partial solutions exist everywhere. Cyanobacteria themselves didn't disappear even after better tuned plants appeared, and are still around. They still exist and even specialized fungi exist which form lichen with the less efficient photosynthesizing bacteria. So you don't even have to guess or look at fossils there. The partial solution and intermediary step still exists.
2. I'm not sure if perfectly adapted to an atmosphere of oxygen, which is what we have now, is the same as perfectly adapted to an atmosphere of methane, which is what life started with. The argument that everything had to be designed just perfect isn't very believable, when you look at the fact that conditions were different in the first place, and changed _massively_ in the meantime.
3. "Astronomically small" chances happen eventually, if you have astronomically high populations and astronomically high time. When you have populations of trillions of trillions of bacteria, suffering mutations all the time, over a billion years, eventually one _will_ hit jackpot. Especially RNA based bacteria suffered a hideously high rate of mutations, and diverged very very fast in all directions.
As they say, "if you're one in a million, there are six thousand just like you". _That_ is how large populations and small chances work.
Let me give you an even more improbable example. Rolling 20 dice and rolling all sixes is incredibly improbable, in fact, 1 chance in 3,656,158,440,062,976. But if you had a billion people rolling dice once a second, it would only take on the average 3.6 million seconds or 1000 hours for that to happen. That's a little over a month. And when dealing with bacteria, a billion of them is actually an incredibly low population.
A bit off-topic, I know, but what often puzzles me is that all living things basically work with the same chemistry. All have DNA, and there are many proteins that are physically very similar between different species, even between animals and plants. This leads me to conclude that all life must have come form one ancestor that materialized somewhere on the planet.
Yes, and that ancestor is a very simple RNA-based bacterium. And this evolved into DNA-based simple bacteria. Then bacteria which included other simple and ultra-specialized bacteria (cloroplasts and mitochondria). Which evolved into simple multi-celular life forms like sponges and extremely simple worms (hardly more than essentially an elongated torus whose surface was a bacterial film.) Which further evolved into more and more complex stuff.
And some figured out how to eat the others. E.g., fungi evolved to take another cell apart for food. And then some of those managed to, well, more or less do agriculture with other bacteria: the lichen are more or less a combination of a fungus and a bacteria, where the fungus traps the bacteria and helps fixate water and minerals for it, then scoop the food the bacteria produced. Or sometimes just destroy and eat those bacteria for food.
So there you already see the early split between plants and animals: one branch of the fork relied on photosynthesis to produce its own food and energy, using solar energy for it, and the other branch of the fork evolved to be basically parasites on the first one. Whether literally parasites eating the live plants (mostly plankton and algae at that point), or eating the corpses.
But before that fork, they evolved from the same ancestor, hence why they're still similar inside.
And from there it was often a race between species, driven by natural selection. E.g., the lignin based plants of the carboniferous era had a major temporary advantage, in that bacteria and fungi didn't yet exist which could digest this adaptation. However, that also applied to dead plants, which is why there's so much coal left from that age (and gave the age its name.) There simply was noone around which could eat a dead plant. But then bacteria evolved that could take apart lignin and celulosis. And then some animals evolved compartmented stomachs where they could store such bacteria so they could eat plants. (Don't think just literally animals. Some insects, e.g., termites, do exactly the same.)
And so on, an so forth, branching wildly ever since, and punctuated by some extinctions that trimmed the tree.
But, yes, once you trace all the branches back, it all leads to that first primitive bacterium. That's why it's all so similar at a chemistry level. Each step was a tweak of what already existed. Each step evolved more complex proteins, or just different proteins, and more specialized roles, but it was still based on the same reactions that worked before.
E.g., it still had enzymes which copied a strand of RNA, between a "START" and an "END" marker, to a protein. Even in DNA based cells, it's still not that horribly different: there's just an extra step of transcribing the DNA to RNA, so then you can transcribe the RNA to a protein. (As to why that more complicated mechanism evolved by natural selection: because breaking a single strand of DNA, for example by radiation or some chemicals, can still be fixed, while the same break in RNA means cell death. So the DNA based mutants were hideously more survivable than their RNA based ancestors.) Anyway, we essentially we still use the same mechanism of producing the proteins as that original proto-bacterium ancestor.
Where did that original bacterium come from? Well, probably from something even simpler. A bacterium is nothing more than a drop of sea water with a membrane. It makes it easier to keep the contents isolated from the rest of the world, much like a test tube does. But ultimately you just have some reactions in liquid water inside. So probably some chemica
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Hmm... you know, that doesn't actually sound similar at all to me. What they said there, basically, is that they made the mice stupid. Maybe there's some other stuff at work, but not being able to learn any more looks the closest to genuine stupidity.
That's not at all similar to schizophrenia in humans. A lot of schizophrenic humans are actually highly intelligent, and perfectly able to both lean and do (more than) simple associations. Their brain does work wrong, to different degrees and with a very broad spectrum of possible symptoms (there are at least 5 fundamentally different _categories_ of schizophrenia), but not in the same way as being retarded.
The most easy to understand kind of schizophrenia, the paranoid schizophrenia kind, isn't being unable-to-learn or unable-to-associate stupid, but, according to at least one explanation, having a very fuzzy line between fantasy and reality. (In various ways and to various degrees.) They're people who otherwise are perfectly capable of logical thought and learning, but some of their input data is their own delusions, or is slightly distorted by those delusions. It can range from just slight sensory delusions, to outright seeing and hearing things that actually originated in their own minds, mixed with the real input. While you might, for example, imagine a ghost in your head or think what you'd like to tell the boss, for a really bad case of paranoid schizophrenia it might get registered as stuff that actually happened, or which _is_ currently happening, mixed with the stuff actually happening around. They might actually see that ghost in the (otherwise real) room or get the impression that that boss is communicating with him telepathically.
Of course, that's really really bad cases that end up in the loonie bin or shooting up an university dorm. Most people included in that 1% figure are a lot more slightly affected, and can function normally.
In a sense, paranoid schizophrenia is a case of "garbage in, garbage out". The mental capacity for logic and learning is there, but some of the input is corrupted. The illogical behaviour you see on the outside isn't usually stupidity, it's just the result of applying good logic on bad input data.
So basically, I'm sure they probably base their theory more on the protein similarities than on those symptoms. Because those symptoms don't sound like schizophrenia at all.
The difference is that:
A) Early railroad made its big bucks less from transporting people, and more by transporting goods and raw materials for the industry. In fact passengers were often the necessary evil: you wouldn't get a permit to build a railroad if you didn't haul the people too.
Hence just counting how many people were there, is highly misleading. The west was by and large the captive market and source of cheap raw materials for the east coast, in much the same way as India was to England. Building a railroad there made sense.
B) Railroads were a _major_ strategic asset for the army. I don't think these bridges to nowhere count as that.
B) More importantly, railroads were built by private capital, because they were profitable. That's a freakin' huge difference between that and pork barrel contracts to at most please a village on an island.
The laissez faire capitalism of the 19'th century was pretty vehemently against using government money on something that competed with private initiative. Plus, the government didn't even have that kind of money anyway.
I must admit, though: That doctrine was often taken to absurd extremes, such as in England where, when they _had_ to support their own population in a crisis or famine... because they couldn't just give money to people (they thought it would compete with the employment market) or build something useful (it would have competed with private industry), they paid the people to build some useless stuff like roads from nowhere to nowhere (literally, unconnected, in the middle of a field) or useless towers or such. But even then, it must be said that it was only in times of extreme necessity, instead of social security. And it was openly useless stuff. Even in its stupidity, it just wasn't the same thing.
_If_ you can prove that their policies are intentionally ripping you off, then you might have a civil case, yes. But since, as I was saying, IANAL, you might want to ask a real lawyer first.
At any rate, I have no experience with that particular bank, but I'm pretty sure not all banks fall in that category. The one I'm at, for example, offered to remove the penalties even when I did that stupid typo I've mentioned before and transferred a _lot_ of money to the insurance.
So it's, you know, at the very least you can't put them all in the same "fuck 'em all" category. Which seems to me like a lot of people in this thread are doing. There seems to be this general "auugh, they're evil and the laws are evil if they don't let me keep the money I ripped them off of" sentiment, which I honestly can't understand.
Doubly so, since the situation discussed is purely theoretical. I don't know of any bank which actually sued anyone over such an ATM mis-hap, they just shut up and took the loss rather than get bad PR with their customers. It was some casino owner which was considering he could sue people abusing broken slot machines, someone compared those to ATMs, and basically the big revelation today is that technically that would be illegal too. But again, I'm not aware of any bank ever suing over a broken ATM. So it's not even like some bank was actually on a suing spree, or anything that could generate that kind of "boo, we should be allowed to rip them off" backlash anyway.
Not saying that you're in that category, because you do say you called them to tell them about the ATM brain-fart. That's morally the right thing to do, and it's head and shoulders above the gang that went back and maxxed their daily limit on a deffective ATM, and told their friends too to go get some free money.
It actually happens. On the very rare occasions when one machine is loaded with the wrong (too large) banknotes, that machine becomes ultra-popular and is almost the only one used until it runs out of money.
But you do give the perfect example of what happens when the situation is reversed, and that illustrates just my point. When the bank got your money, you were (understandably) pissed off and wanted your money back. All I'm saying is that I find it pretty normal for the bank to want its money back, too, when someone abused a broken ATM.
I'm guessing we're in agreement there, anyway, given that you say you called to offer to give those $200 back. Just explaining what I was really trying to say in this thread.
Actually, I do remember it pretty well, and it ran perfectly well on my computer. Admittedly, I had a pretty high end computer, though.
Actually, often anecdotes are plenty enough, when there isn't much statistical diversity to expect.
E.g., there aren't that many graphics cards that would be fit for gaming. In fact, there are exactly two top end manufacturers, plus Intel which outsells both in the integrated graphics slice of the market.
Plus, there isn't much of a deviation between how a game runs on two identical graphics computers. If a set of settings works well on, say, a 4000+ Athlon with a X1900XTX and 2GB RAM, you don't need a huge statistical sample to figure out how it would work on another 4000+ Athlon with a X1900XTX and 2GB RAM.
And it's possible to take a very informed guess from there. For example, it's not much of a guess that if a set of settings give a poor frame rate on that, it would very probably be even lower on a more mainstream X1550. And conversely if something runs well enough on a laptop with 512 MB and an integrated chipset, by someone who's on ICQ _and_ Teamspeak at the time, then it's a very safe bet that it can't run any worse on your high end gaming rig.
It's also pretty easy to figure out other details, too, like that the load times in COV depend primarily on how much RAM you have. Ranging from a couple of seconds at 1GB and over, to something really painful if you have 256 MB and other programs active.
And finally, in a lot of cases you don't even need to take samples and guess. Sony's own tooltip to not try the max settings in EQ2 unless you have a 512 MB graphics card (which didn't even exist when the game was launched) take a lot of guesswork out of that.
So basically, sometimes anecdotes are plenty enough. They're wrong when you can expect a huge unpredictable variation: then you need to take a big sample and do statistics. But computer hardware configurations are a lot less unpredictable than that.
While some variations exist, you can pick an example far enough from the centre to illustrate the point anyway. If you pick a machine that's considerably more underpowered than most people's gaming rigs (to illustrate that something runs well enough even on that) or conversely far enough above the minimum and indeed recommended configurations printed on the box (to illustrate that it performs poorly even there), you're essentially giving yourself a wide enough margin for error. It should be plenty enough to cover such variations as "but exactly which driver version are you using" or such, without doing a comprehensive sampling and plotting a very spike-like gauss curve.
Or to put it otherwise, it's a message, not a scientific paper. Sometimes it's implied and expected that people are capable of figuring out bits of implied logic without having it spelled out in painstaking detail for them.
Ahem... wouldn't it be more productive to wait and see what hardware it needs when released, before making that kind of decision and bitching?
And you do that, based on... what? Command and Conquer 3. It's not even the same bloody company. C&C is by Westwood, Starcraft is by Blizzard. It's like saying you'll avoid Ford cars because you had problems with a Toyota.
Blizzard games, for all their other faults they may have had, were always quite forgiving on the hardware front. Diablo 1 and 2 were still 2D games in an age when everyone was going 3D, Warcraft 3 wasn't that horribly hardware intensive either by comparison to similar games, and World Of Warcraft... let's just say I know people who've played it perfectly well on an underpowered laptop with integrated graphics. By comparison to, say, Everquest 2 which needed the graphics severely turned down even on top-end graphics cards available at the time, or City Of Villains which also needed a lot of graphics power even in the newbie villain area, WoW actually ran ok on pretty underpowered machines. As an anecdotal comparison, one of the guys with laptops had no problem in WoW except in the massively over-populated Ironforge auction house area (which at the time was the only alliance auction house, so there were _hundreds_ of players and tens of pets there), while the same laptop just choked on COV.
Mind you, I'm not saying that you should buy Starcraft 2. But it seems a bit ridiculous to dismiss it in advance, based on what _another_ company has done.
Actually, from my experience a lot of nerds are really Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder cases, meaning that they just can't see shades of grey. Their world has exactly one "perfect" solution, and everything else is crap. Aiming at any other point than that "perfect" solution is a sign of being a sheep, brainwashed, a lazy under-achiever, or an idiot with lax standards too.
I put "perfect" between quote signs, because an OCPD solution typically is more crap than anything else. Given the a problem with several variables and constraints (as RL problems usually are), a die-hard OCPD case will typically max one variable and proclaim the rest to be fluff only idiots care about. (Or have been brainwashed to care about.) Because they simply can't aim at anything except the extreme values, so they have to modify the problem for that to work. You know you got an OCPD solution when the problem is something like "find the X and Y where X + Y = 10 and X * Y is the maximum", and you get a solution saying, basically, "the One True Solution is X = 10, and Y is fluff for idiots. You've been brainwashed if you even put Y in those equations."
Well, not like that for a maths problem, because nerds tend to be good at maths. But take any other problem where it's more debatable what the variables and constraints are, and you'll get that kind of trying to handwave some of them out of the problem, to be able to maximize something else.
E.g., that's the kind of mentality that gets one to spend a month optimizing the last microsecond out of a background batch job, at the cost of causing the whole project to go over the deadline and become unmaintainable. Because that one variable, in this case speed, must be maximized, no matter what the effects on the other variables (e.g., budget) it has.
Why I've taken that long and boring detour is to explain why the same applies to space travel economics. Some people are genuinely incapable of seeing working shades of grey betweem, say, a mockery of 19'th century unrestricted capitalism (which didn't work like that even then, actually, and died in the Great Depression) and 100% Soviet-style communism. Anything else than the extreme they picked as "perfect" is deemed either as being the other extreme, or a fast slippery slope to the other extreme. And that applies to anything which needs any funding, including (but not limited to) space flight.
And there will be a bunch of them crusading for their perfect utopia. Luckily none are in a position to actually matter, but they exist.
So what I'm left scratching my head is, more or less, what's the point of an article explaining that they can coexist. Whoever is an OCPD case can't possibly accept that, other than as some inevitable evil that they can't personally prevent. And whoever isn't, didn't have a problem in the first place.
Oh please. It's not like "not reporting a beating", it's more like hitting someone's car and driving away hoping that noone knows. We're not talking prosecuting people who just were nearby and watched the ATM being ripped off, but those who actively ripped it off.
Often went back to get more money until they maxxed their daily limit, and told their friends too to go there and withdraw money from that ATM. In which case it's premeditated too.
How about this simple concept: if you harmed someone, even unintentionally, you try to rectify the situation. If you bumped someone's car, you try to contact them and pay for the repairs. If you were playing baseball with your son in the backyard and broke a neighbour's window, you call the neighbour and offer to buy him a new glass pane. And if ripped someone off of some money, you give it back. If you don't, at the very least you're an asshole.
Additionally, I dunno about the USA, but here in Europe we have this legal and moral concept that gains made by someone's error aren't yours to keep. If you transferred too much money to someone's account, or to the wrong account, they have to give it back. If you gave a cashier two banknotes stuck together instead of one, she's expected to give you the right change nevertheless if she notices, not just hope you didn't notice. You'd expect no less if it were your money down the drain, wouldn't you?
So at least here, there would be no shadow of a doubt that the extra money _aren't_ legally yours to keep.
Bank or not, WTH is so difficult a concept there? It's not money falling from of the heavens or winning the lottery, and much less some infraction you just happened to notice as a bystander. It's money coming from someone else. If it was someone else getting your money by your mistake, you'd expect them to give you your money back, not come back to rip you off more. How is it screwed or lopsided if the same applies to banks?
Even in the relationship with banks you'd expect no less if the situation were reversed. If you (e.g., after a yard sale, or let's say you have a small shop) gave the bank more money than you thought (e.g., said you were depositing a 1000, but gave them 1100), you'd expect them to count the money and tell you you were wrong. You wouldn't expect the cashier to just silently pocket the extra money.
Why is it so lopsided to expect the same courtesy when the roles are reversed? If you got too much of their money, they too expect you to do the nice thing and give it back?
While I sympathise with your predicament, my experience is that the situation isn't that lopsided.
First of all, IANAL, so take this just as someone searching Wikipedia for you, with the usual caveats that means. I say that because I'll take a bit of a legal definitions detour, but that's not really that necessary to illustrate the _moral_ point I'm making, so feel free to skip it if you want to.
The key element in any conviction in the western law system is the "Mens Rea", or "evil intent". (Well, literally "evil mind".) There are various degrees of it, ranging from premeditation (you actually planned ahead to do harm) to negligence (a reasonable person of average intelligence should have seen how an otherwise well meant plan could go wrong and harm someone.) "Criminal negligence" is somewhat a misnomer, in that it's usually not criminally punished, unless it was "gross negligence", meaning it involved "wanton disregard for human life". I.e., unless an ATM was dangling from the ceiling and fell on you, it won't qualify as such.
You'll probably have no case at all, even civil, unless it's the previous degree, namely "Willful blindness". I.e., someone had more than ample warnings that something can go bad, or it was blindingly obvious that it will cause harm, but they choose to pretend the problem doesn't exist.
Why I took that legal definitions detour is because it codifies the basic underlying moral idea: was it deliberate? Did that person _intend_ to do something wrong? Did they _know_ they did something wrong? Did they do anything to rectify the problem _if_ they became aware of it?
(Also, I don't know about the USA, but in Europe we have this clause that you can't keep an undeserved gain, even if it was an error. E.g., if you transferred some money to the wrong account by mistake, even if the recipient didn't know about it, they still have to give you your money back. That's another codifying a basic moral idea: money gotten by someone's error aren't yours to keep.)
And in that aspect, the bank doesn't seem guilty at all to me, and the situation isn't as equivalent as you paint it. Sorry.
1. The bank certainly didn't intend to rip you off there, and they _do_ correct it when they become aware of the problem.
1.a. I can assure you (well, second hand, because I have friends who worked for banks) that banking software is among the most tested and reviewed software ever made, ranking up there with the stuff they run in airplane control systems. Banks not only are more carefully monitored by the government, but also live by their reputation and face bigger money problems. Noone wants software who makes gross mistakes. And not just for little fish like you and me, but they also deal with massive corporate funds. Software which gets a brain-fart for a $100 transaction, well, you can see the problems it could cause when it does a $100,000,000 transfer for a takeover.
Most of the problems involving banks are human errors, like an absent-minded dolt putting a pack of $100 notes in the $10 tray of the ATM. And even those are very rare, actually.
1.b. At any rate, they _do_ fix the problem when they aware of it, and even offer assistance for your own problems, like when you entered the wrong sum or destination account. (As a personal anecdote, they sure have been nice and helpful when I typoed the sum I transferred to my insurance... by omitting the decimal point.)
And to get back to that moral point, you can't fault them for not automatically fixing something they don't even know about. So until you go tell them about it, wtf do you expect? Telepathy? By your own tale, you needed exactly _one_ trip to the bank to solve it, which doesn't seem that tragic.
2. By comparison the folks ripping off an ATMs and the like are not in the same category at all. You do count the money you get from the ATM, don't you? So you'd _know_ something went wrong. Plus there are cases where it's been deliberate by any reckoning. There are people who went back and took
Well, here's another thing I don't get: brainless retards polluting
Sorry to break your delusions, my dear Neanderthal, but that's at best _religion_. In fact, it's fucking stupid even by most religion's standards, as even the most die hard Christians (e.g., the Jesuits) ended up transcribing manuscripts, operating schools or doing research.
At any rate, that's not how _science_ works. Science means that everything could be inaccurate, nothing is to be taken as absolute proof, and no figure of authority is beyond questioning. Even if Einstein came back from the dead with a great new theory, you're _supposed_ to be skeptical and try to find a hole in it. Going "noo, don't question it because he's smarter than you" is exactly the _opposite_ of science.
So why post such crap in the first place? Do you need the ego-masturbation boost of dragging everyone down to your non-thinking potted-plant level? Or what?
You know, Aristotle thought that the brains are just a big heatsink to keep the blood cool. Think water cooling for the body, if you will. And seeing the above kind of "nooo, don't dare think on your own, you're not worthy of questioning those guys" posts... I swear he must have been right about some people.
You have my compassion, little retard.
I still don't buy it. Maybe it's a cultural thing that only works like that in America and not here, or maybe I just live in some weird statistical-fluke place, but I just don't see that kind of thing happening around me. I've been in mixed fat/skinny/average groups for as long as I remember, and I haven't yet seen anyone going obese just because someone else in the group was obese. In the current group, for example, two people just joined the gym this year, instead of taking a hint from the round guys.
So peer reviewed or not, excuse me if I find that a bit hard to believe.
Additionally, I just don't like that kind of "Having Fat Friends Makes You Fat" wording. It makes it sound like some inescapable cause->effect relationship, like gravity or newtonian mechanics, when at best it can be some statistical maybe-or-maybe-not thing. Hanging around fat people _might_ make you more inclined to feel it's ok to be fat, or it might do nothing whatsoever, or it might even cause a "geesh, I don't want to end up looking like _this_ guy" reaction. Even _if_ on the whole it ends up favouring the first (I'm still not convinced, but let's assume that anyway), it's an overall influence, not some inescapable fate.
Basically the whole sounds like a rehash of the old judging someone by the company they keep prejudice, which is nothing more than a society's way to enforcing unofficial ostracisms. Basically, "stay away from the guys we don't like, or we'll start avoiding you too." And the problem with that is that, as the quote goes, "A free society is a place where it's safe to be unpopular." The more such prejudices are enforced, the more essentially any kind of having one's own opinion dies.
And peer reviewed or not, I'm automatically suspicious of any research that just "happens" to neatly confirm a prejudice. There has been entirely too much money and time dumped into pseudo-science whose only merit was "confirming" prejudices, and "peer review" occasionally means jack squat when the peers are similarly biased. The English used to build a whole pseudo-science to "prove" that the Irish are too innately retarded to be human, the white supremacists did the same for anyone who isn't caucasian, etc. Ok, this one is more subtle than that, but at the same time more perverse for it.
_Especially_ when it ends up worded like a blanket generalization that applies universally and inescapably to everyone, when reality tends to be more of a statistics and gauss curves thing.
So I don't know if this is bad science or the guy actually has a point, but the potential for skewing research just to confirm a personal bias is there. And if it is impartial research, it sure ends up giving all the wrong signals there.
And since everyone seems to have taken the "but it's peer-reviewed!" appeal to authority as a battle cry once again: none of the above mentioned prejudice-confirming pseudo-science was thrown out the window by similar-minded peers at the time, btw. Science isn't always infallible, sometimes it just takes some time to correct itself. In fact, the whole scientific process is about trying to correct itself, and that starts with keeping an open mind that something might not be entirely correct even if it's peer-reviewed. Alchemy was very peer-reviewed, for example, and so was the raisin pie atom model. Doesn't mean they didn't turn up to be all wrong.
It's not confusing at all. You assume that anyone except the die-hard nerds even has such broad and inflexible terms as "anti-terrorism is always bad".
For starters, I doubt that anyone would seriously define themselves as a "terrorist". (This isn't D&D and people cheerfully proclaiming themselves -- or their whole race -- to be chaotic evil.) The terrorists consider themselves more along the lines of "freedom fighters". You don't go blow yourself up just for the sake of making others panic a little. You need to believe in a much nobler goal for that. And more importantly the terrorist stuff isn't the goal, it's a means to an end. They want to achieve their own goals. I'm not saying they're necessarily sane or good goals, but they're nevertheless goals, and blowing shit up is just the means.
So if, for example, the goal is spreading the Islam or instituting a fundamentalist sharia regime or just showing the "evil" western world the middle finger, there's nothing confusing there. Laws forbidding people to speak against the Islam, are, essentially, just defending the territory they gain by the terrorist actions.
Note that I'm not accusing Malaysia of condoning terrorism. I'm just saying that from a terrorist's point of view, there'll be nothing confusing there. It'll be just a case of "Malayisia == good muslim state, more should follow that example, <insert secular state aligned with the west> == bad state, we should bomb them until they see the light and become like Malayisia."
Second, from another point of view, both the fundamentalist islamists and the fundamentalist christians just think whatever the imam or respectively preacher tells them to think. And we already know that A) the leaders of both are perfectly capable of being hypocritical, and B) they have no problem with presenting vague and hypocritical point of view to their followers. So basically they won't think in terms of "is terrorism good or bad?", they'll just think in terms of, "whatever serves _my_ cause or point of view is good, whatever serves an oposing point of view is bad".
The far right will have no problem taking a stance along the lines of "bombing the arabs just because they're muslims is damn good, and someone should get to it already, arabs bombing stuff for religion is bad and should be stopped", much as it both condones _and_ condemns religious terrorism in the same sentence. It's good when we do it, it's bad when our enemies do it. Duh.
In this particular example, my guess is that they can pick either side, and noone will find it confusing. You can always present it as just half, and deny the other half. E.g., either (A) phbt, that's not an anti-terror law, that's just evil muslim stuff to keep their people from seeing the light, or (B) yay, our good friends the malayisians are on our side in the war against terror, and of course they'll _never_ use such a vaguely defined and unchecked law against dissidents.
Which of them, might well depend on the interests in the area. If the good people of Malaysia are doing cheap work for the american corporations, or have any resources they're selling to the USA cheaply, it will be B. If not at all, it will be A.
And on yet another hand, when most people think of Malaysia, they think "asians" not "arabs". I don't think the extreme right has figured out what stance it needs to take about asians and their religions, and it doesn't seem to be in much of a hurry to. And, frankly, you only need one enemy to keep people scared and rallied around a (bogus) battle banner. There's no real need to manufacture a _second_ bogeyman. Which is what the muslim arabs really are to the bible-thumping right: the bogeyman to keep the congregation scared and together with.
So the religious far right, even if it picks one or the other point of view, probably won't be _too_ vocal about it. It will at most issue the occasional protest or fiery sermon, then go back to playing the "auugh, scary muslim arabs" card.
Again, please don't read all the ab
1. Even if it were so, I'd bet that showing an imperfect prototype would have done a hell of a lot more good than bitching about Englishmen.
Let's say it would have been useless past, dunno, 2 decimals. It would still have been proof of concept.
John Harrison didn't get his nautical watch right in the first try either. There's a reason why the first used version was called "H4". Because H1 to H3 weren't yet accurate enough. And H1 didn't properly compensate for the ship's movement either. But he had _something_ to show to the admiralty, as proof of concept and as proof that indeed it is at least a little more accurate than the average pocket watch one could buy at the nearest watchmaker. It worked wonders to secure more funding for the next version. Although the project was had already overrun the initial money offer and deadline, it showed that _something_ is happening there.
Basically think in terms of iterative software development. It's easier to keep the client happy if he gets _something_ usable often, or at least sees that some progress is made, than if he has to wait for the deus-ex-machina miracle where everything is just perfect at the end of a very very long time. What Babbage did was, more or less, equivalent to not only keeping the client waiting for the first version, but scrapping the design and starting from scratch, again and again and again, to the point where nothing whatsoever was ever ready or usable or even in a demo state.
Well, that sounded maybe too harsh. I'm not (primarily) trying to damn Babbage, but to say _why_ those Englismen that he damns were so skeptical. For all his claims, he worked on it from 1822, when he first presented his proposal and got funding, to his death in 1871 without ever having a version that works even as a crude tech demo. That's a whopping 49 years. You can't really blame anyone for being skeptical if your project was _half_ of that time overdue and still had nothing to show.
Even nowadays most clients would just pull the plug on a project if it was just one year past the deadline, or often less than that. And noone would blame them for it. Even if you had a project of your own funding, you'd be ridiculed long before 49 years passed if it was still going nowhere. We made fun of Duke Nukem Forever when it was overdue a tenth of that time, and also in a tenth of that time Daikatana's hype generated a _very_ nasty backlash. Just, you know, to put things in perspective.
So what I'm saying is: don't take Babbage's bitching as some great insight into the Victorian era England or into the human species as a whole. Babbage's problem wasn't that the English were blockheaded, but simply that he kept hyping a concept and asking for funding without anything to show even as a proof of concept. With or without technical problems, _of_ _course_ the English were skeptical after all that time. That's all.
2. At the risk of repeating myself, the machine built in IIRC 1991 after Babbage's schematics was deliberately built using the tolerances and precision that would have realistically been available in the 19'th century. It worked, and calculated PI with 31 decimals.
Wrong, actually. The machine that was built at the end of the 20'th century was built with the precision and tolerances of the 19'th century. Deliberately, to show that it was possible.
The precision argument is even more obviously false, when you look at the fact that very precise watches had existed for a long time. That's how they measured longitude before GPS. I use watches as an example, because they're cog-based machines too, and they required even higher precision. By the middle of the _18'th_ century (i.e., a century earlier than Babbage) even a pocket watch would already not deviate more than a minute per day, and the second hand gradually became common. (Previously they tended to have only hours and minutes hands.)
The first practical nautical clock, John Harrison's H4 was first used aboard the ship Deptford which set sail for Jamaica on 18 November 1761 and actually arrived there on 19 January 1762. That's two months and a day at sea. After all that time, it was only off by 5.1 seconds.
_That_ is the kind of accuracy that was already available a century before Babbage.
Babbage's design didn't even need that kind of accuracy, since it was essentially a digital device. All that mattered was how many teeth of the cog had moved, not also to do it within a very exact time interval. Half the sources of inaccuracy of a watch, didn't even apply there.
So, no, Babbage had no excuse. The production capabilities were there, the precision was enough, and standardization wasn't even necessary for a prototype. He just couldn't be arsed to actually deliver what he promised. Full stop.
1. Funny that you should mention that, given that Babbage, get this: never actually finished his machine, so he never actually delivered any value for the ample funding money he received. Other people get into the v2.0 syndrome after they completed one successful project. Babbage couldn't be even arsed to finish the first one (although, again, he did receive more than enough funding for it) before he started designing the second version. Then the third. Then the fourth. What is now known collectively as the Analytical Engine is actually a whole series of different machines: he could never be arsed to actually finish building one before he got distracted and started the next one. He kept at it until his death.
His machines _would_ have worked, if they had actually been completed. But he could never be arsed to. Whenever he got funding for one, he'd deliver exactly nothing for that money.
So, you know, maybe _that_ is why Babbage found the Englishmen somewhat reluctant to invest in his designs. Had he actually finished the Differential Engine, maybe people would have been more receptive to his next ideas. Maybe instead of bitching about his fellow Englishmen, it would have been easier to just deliver what he had promised. Just a thought.
And maybe we would have had programmable computers a lot earlier. But as it is, it took people like Konrad Zuse in Germany or Alan Turing and the other folks who built the Colossus computer in the UK, to get it started. Because they actually delivered something that worked. Bloody huge difference there.
2. The complaint about "slicing pineapple" is actually invalid too. Like many nerds today, Babbage was in it just for the fun of researching something new, and apparently thought that people should give him a lot of money just so he can have some nerdy fun.
Capitalism, even the 19'th century kind -- actually, _especially_ the 19'th century kind -- doesn't work that way. To get some funding, the question you must answer is, basically, "which of _my_ problems does this solve?" If that company is in the business of slicing pineapple, then, yes, a machine which peels potatoes is completely useless to them.
Governments too, while they do fund some fundamental research too, have a fiscal responsibility to the citizens they tax for that money. Especially in the 19'th century laissez-faire ideology, when the government was lean, mean, and barely funded to maintain the army. You can't seriously propose a tax hike just so Mr Babbage can play with something cool and high tech. So basically they too have to ask, "ok, so what do _I_ gain from this? Does it compute ballistics for our battleships? Total the census? Or what?"
You'll notice that the working examples that did get computing started, had a satisfactory answer to exactly that. The Colossus computer broke enemy codes for the UK army, and Zuse's machines did aerodynamics calculations for the German airforce. E.g., the Z2 was used to design glide bombs.
Heh... reminds me of the high school days, when I'd occasionally be bored enough to imagine a whole touching story about such games and characters as Chucky Egg.
Admittedly, the whole was more or less part of reverse-engineering how to write a school essay. I could eventually write an essay on anything whatsoever, and put any spin whatsoever on it. (IIRC the Chucky Egg one was about the struggle of the working class against the corporate chickens. I'm not kidding.) I was all about that kind of finding the rules that work and (ab)using them.
I think I did one about Pac Man too, but I can't quite remember what it was about.
Still, there you go, even if for the somewhat disturbed reasons, someone did care about Chucky's or PacMan's life, motivations, needs, etc.
I don't think I'm the only one, though. You should see the kind of complex stories within stories that people imagine around such abstract games as Europa Universalis or Hearts Of Iron. And they're ultra-abstracted grand strategy games. You don't even command anything smaller than an army, and you don't even have access to the tactical details of a battle. It's actually more abstract than your average hex-based strategy game.
Yet people write whole stories about _why_ something happened. They don't just write "Army Group North pushed towards Berlin", they write a whole story about how that decision was taken, what the reactions were at the HQ meeting, and occasionally what happened to the ordinary soldiers in that battle. (Again, the ordinary soldiers exist only as an abstract number in the actual game.)
So what I'm getting at is: maybe it's not just blamable on "realism". I think many of us actually have a need for such stories. We can't be truly satisfied with "Knight takes Pawn at E4, check". We actually have to really know that Knight's personality, background, aspirations. What went through his head as he charged through the pikemen at E4 (a pawn) to try to capture the enemy King? Was he affraid? Did he do it for honour? For his own king and country? For some beautiful lady? (Quite a common thing in the middle ages.) Did he charge with a sword or with a lance? Etc. We have to really know that guy's story, you know?
While that is to some extent true, and insightful too, I'd say mods at least prove that it's more complex than that. E.g.,
1. There are people who actually enjoy being creative in their own right, and taking the story in their own direction
2. There are people who have strong feelings about what kind of characters they want or don't want to play. Since a game essentially requires you to be the lead actor in that story. And it has happened to me before (and to countless others) that a character was a major turn-off because that's not the kind of person or role I want to play.
And even before computers, that kind of thing has happened before too.
E.g., Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy's "The Gold Key, or Adventures of Buratino" is, by and large, the novel version of a "mod" of "Pinocchio".
E.g., the famous sixtine chapel ceiling was later "modded" by, basically, painting breeches on the originally nude characters. I'd say that's _exactly_ like buying a Picasso and then changing the colours. Except in this case it's a whole chapel painted by Michelangelo.
E.g., in theatre or opera or movies, the director (and sometimes actors) have a lot of room to subtly alter the story, and emphasize or de-emphasize various aspects regardless of what the author had in mind. Especially adaptations from novel to movie, or to opera or theatre long before such technology, things are often changed massively.
E.g., as an example of #2, in movies actors often play a major role in modifying the script. Harrison Ford, for example, is known to have had quire a bit of input in what Han Solo ended up like, or he's the reason for that famous Indiana Jones scene where Indy just draws a revolver and shoots the guy with the big sword. (The original script called for a lot of using the whip and stuff.) Plus actors routinely refuse roles they don't want to be associated with.
So, yes, in a sense he's right: technology doesn't add anything new. On the other hand he's wrong: people routinely made changes to someone else's vision, long before computers or movies.
Well, yes and no.
1. Densities per whole state can be a bit misleading, because the USA has a ton of farmland or just empty space. The communities you need to connect (first) tend to be a bit more concentrated. Even if you take Montana as an example, I'm willing to bet that even the villages there have a bit more than 2.39 people per square kilometer. (Unless they're all hermits.)
By comparison, western Europe simply has less empty space to screw up the maths. For example, North Rhine-Westphalia (the heavily industrialized county in the NW of Germany) is almost one contiguous megalopolis spread across a whole state. Not exactly, but almost. You only know that, say, Düsseldorf (land capital city) ended and Duisburg ('nother city next to it) started only because the shields on the highway say so. There's just not that much empty space to screw up the maths.
2. If population spread was the real problem, then in the USA the major cities should all be on Ethernet, which AFAIK isn't the case. I mean, high population density = good for broadband, right?
Cities are a lot less dense down here in Germany, and while there isn't as much suburb sprawl (for lack of space and a different culture), houses are rarely higher than 3-4 floors (including ground floor) even in a densely populated area like NRW. The NRW has 18 million inhabitants spread over 34,083 square kilometres, which means some 528 people per square kilometre. Of course it's not uniform, but take it as a rough ballpark figure.
Düsseldorf itself ends up at 2681 people per square kilometre, according to Wikipedia, and that's a major German city.
By comparison, New York City packs 8.2 million people within 830 square kilometres, which means around 10,000 people per square kilometre, or about 4 times the density of Düsseldorf, 20 times the density of the NRW or 40 times the density of Germany. They should have some _awesome_ network access then, right? The New York City metropolitan area packs 18.8 million inhabitants in 8680 square kilometres, so the density is around 10 times that of Germany, 4 times that of the NRW and slightly less than Düsseldorf. (But the last one is slightly misleading since it's comparing the whole sprawl including suburbs and satellite towns to just the main city area of Düsseldorf. The comparison to the whole NRW is a lot more accurate.)
3. But that all becomes a lot less relevant when you notice that density doesn't correlate to net access that well in Europe either. E.g.:
A. Actually the best places for net access aren't in such dense industrial areas of Germany, but actually in many rural areas. Somehow the Telekom ended up upgrading the net access to some villages and small-ish towns before the larger and denser cities.
B. Among countries, the best access is in countries like... Sweden. According to the link you posted, it ends up at 20 inhabitants per square kilometre, which is considerably lower than the USA.
Ok, so there the frozen north is mostly empty space, so let's look up Stockholm on Wikipedia. Stockholm itself is pretty packed, at 4,136 people per square kilometre, but then that's still peanuts compared to, say, New York City. If you take it together with its suburbs, i.e., the whole metropolitan area, it's a meager 499 people per square kilometre. Compared to the NYC metropolitan area, it's outright sparse. Some of the suburbs have as low as 80 people per square kilometre.
Basically, to wrap this long rant up, population density doesn't seem to correlate to net access _that_ well. Sure, noone drags optical fibre to some lone hut on the top of a mountain, but you don't need ultra-packed communities to get broadband either. And in between those extremes, the correlation is at best imperfect, and at worst non-existant.
It's not that simple, cowboy. Read a bit about Keynesian economics and how it explains the Great Depression, among other things. Also, about the multiplier effect in economics.
It's sorta like this: everyone can produce entirely too much of everything. The laissez faire capitalism of the 19'th century (that so many nerds long for a bullshit idealized version of):
A) only worked in an economy of scarcity, and
B) it wasn't a paradise, either. It produced cycles of bankruptcies, and a drive to cut the wages and demand more work hours after each hit.
Trying to undercut each other's prices always presented the easy option of cutting the wages some more. Unfortunately that had the side effect of reducing how much those people can buy. But the thing is, the wages aren't the only component there. Reducing salaries to half, doesn't also reduce the price of the end product by half, because there are other costs in there too. So essentially it's a losing spiral.
And the culmination of this was the Great Depression, when basically aggregate supply vastly outstripped aggregate demand. If you ploted units-produced vs production costs, and units-sold vs the at which price the market would buy that many, the two curves became parallel. There was no point at which you can sell all that stuff and break even, much less make a profit.
There were some other factors too, but essentially it was inevitable. That was where that downwards spiral was leading, sooner or later.
Where I'm getting at is that since the great depression, most governments _had_ to produce some extra demand. This means essentially requisitioning some of the production capacity to make something else, and create jobs in the process. But since we're not under communism, they can't outright do that, so the way it works is taking some money in taxes or as deficit spending and:
1. directly spending it on stuff
2. giving it to some people who otherwise would have not much to spend. E.g., unemployment benefits, tax breaks for people with kids, whatever. Just as long as someone goes and buys more stuff.
Especially during recession times, deficit spending is crucial to keep it going.
The multiplier effect means that 1$ spent by the government doesn't just create 1$ in employment. If the government gives a big chunk to someone producing tanks, then that factory goes and gives some money to someone producing trucks, and its employees buy cars and food. The company producing the cars and trucks then goes and buys something else with the money. That money circulates and produces more jobs and more money spent at other companies down the line.
Of course, you don't want _too_ high taxes either, because that reduces the multiplier. But basically neither extreme is some kind of ideal paradise. No taxes means no government spending, so with any multiplier imaginable, zero times that multiplier still equals zero effect.
You can see it worked too, because:
I. Look at who got out of the Great Depression when. The countries whose government overspent (e.g., USA with the New Deal, or Germany with its military spending) got out of the crisis fast, those who stuck to "nooo, the government should stay lean and cheap" ideas (e.g., Canada) got to enjoy a jolly good depression until the 40's (when they got dragged into the war anyway.)
II. Ever since we didn't have the bankruptcy cycles that plagued the previous laissez faire economy. Better yet, we've had inflation and unemployment where we want them ever since.
(That's one dirty little secret the politicians don't tell you: the Philips curve. Inflation and unemployment depend on each other, and pushing one down pushes the other up. The best you can do is pick your favourite point on that curve. So
Wrong, actually. Not in an interesting way either, since you rehash the same canned ID stuff we've all heard before. Let's just say that just because you don't know, or refuse to acknowledge, what we base those theories on, doesn't make them religion. Just because you refuse to acknowledge the long string of fossils that _do_ illustrate all the intermediate steps from worm to fish to lizard to bird, doesn't mean that that evidence doesn't exist.
ID as a whole is essentially an Argument From Ignorance fallacy. They don't know, or refuse to acknowledge, the existing evidence to the contrary, therefore their doctrine must be true. Pretty sad, and an indication of intellectual dishonesty too, but otherwise worthless. Like all fallacies, it fails to actually prove anything.
If anything, it makes it somewhat funny to see someone accusing science of being dogma, when their own whole theory is based on block-headed outright refusing to acknowledge any evidence that doesn't support their theory. No, science isn't the dogma there. Science, for better or worse, accepts proofs to the contrary. A lot of classifications were cheerfully changed when evidence to the contrary became available. Wake me up when ID can say at least the same. _Then_ it will have earned the right to call others dogmatic.
Anyway...
1. That the physics parameters had to be just right, well, that much is obvious. If carbon didn't have an excited state at exactly the right energy, no star would be able to produce anything above helium, for example.
Essentially we don't know why the universe's constants are what they are. That much is true.
That doesn't imply that life was designed though. _If_ there's a God, we don't need him to explain anything past setting those constants. Did some God set those constants just right? Maybe. But that doesn't automatically make him the designer of life too. Life is perfectly possible and capable to evolve on its own, given those constants.
There's just nothing to imply that _if_ a God exists, he _must_ be like the Bible God, carefully designing all forms of life himself. It could be just a physicist God who set the basic constants so chains of Carbon can form, and watched what happens from there. Or maybe trillions of trillions of universes exist (created or not), and ours just happened to be the one with the right constants. Maybe the whole exercise is God's college assignment to calculate the right constants for a universe where life can evolve, but doesn't involve actually designing any life form personally. Or a number of other imaginable deities.
So, so far, this actually fails to be an argument for ID _of_ _life_.
2. As I was saying, just because you refuse to acknowledge the evidence, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. We have the fossils, and in some cases living fossils, for the intermediate steps of just that: a worm evolved into a fish, a fish evolved into a lizard, the lizard evolved into a two legged dinosaur, and that one evolved into a bird.
There is no guess work involved, and no religion. All the steps from fish to dinosaur are very much available for all to see. Some fish still live which are adapted to survive out of water, or even to move (crudely) across land. The evolution to lizard is also there. The adaptation to have the legs under the body instead of sideways like the crocodiles is also very well illustrated in the fossil record. Raising itself on two legs is just a minor adaptation (hence, I'm under the impression it would be acceptable even by you.) From there we have Velociraptors and a bunch of other dinosaur which are almost identical to large chicken in their skeleton structure. And there are pressed fossils of some which show feathers.
So basically exactly what you dismiss as impossible, is what we have plenty of intermediate steps to prove that just that happened. The worm evolved into a bird.
Incidentally the same applies to cats and dogs. Although
Duly noted, theoretically speaking it is an imaginable mode of failure. That much I'll aggree. It's not one I'd worry that much, though. And here's why:
1. It would have to be a particularly _dumb_ government that resorts to that. As I was saying in the other post, we already know much better ways to organize a repression than that.
And as a lot of modern oppressive governments discovered in the 20'th century, FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) works _much_ better and cheaper than outright repression. E.g., the USSR post-Stalin didn't as much rely on outright oppression, as making people unsure who's an agent provocateur and what will be used against them if they say it. Basically it's better and cheaper to get the people too insecure to organize, than to do mass repression.
So, well, I'll reserve my fears for the future for smart governments, not to comic super-villain types that re-enact ancient societies (and presumably dress their legions of doom like Roman legionaires.)
2. Water despotism didn't even work that well as repression. It had to be backed by military threat anyway, or preople would just take control of the sluices and free themselves. And if the troubled history of Mesopotamia is anything to go by, it didn't exactly create long-lasted stability. Quite on the contrary. Empires went up and down like a yoyo, and it was one of the areas extremely hard hit by the catastrophe at the end of the bronze age. A lot of cities were razed and abandoned.
3. Water despotism was so successful back then, not as much because it's such a fearsome form of repression, but also because it was the only known way to organize a state. We're talking a very _primitive_ point in history. Humanity was just discovering how to work on bigger scales than a tribe, how to get people to pay their taxes instead of buggering off, or how to even know how many citizens you have and how much grain you're owed in taxes. The whole bureucratic mechanism didn't even exist yet, laws had yet to be invented (Hammurabi's code comes much later), it was some _millenia_ before nationalism as a way to keep people together, and even something as basic as a census or a map didn't yet exist.
Hydraulic despotism was, basically, one way to make it all work. Instead of bothering with all the organization, you'd just sell water for agriculture. That was your taxation, land measurement (instead of sending unpopular agents to assess how much land a peasant had, he'd come to you and say how many acres he wants flooded by you), incentive for the people to stay there, etc. It was a very primitive way to organize a state, more than anything else. The repression possibilities were just a side-effect. Admittedly, a nice side-effect, but a side-effect nevertheless.
In a nutshell, it was "successful" only in that it was the only competitor.
Basically, given that even the classical ancient empires were better organized than that, is another thing I base my assertion that it would have to be a particularly dumb government that tries to re-enact that. We already know to organize a state and collect taxes without basing it on selling that one vital resource.
I could go on about it some more, but it's already too late, and it's a huge message already. Basically I'm just trying to say that novels paint a very warped image of it. Historically it was a pretty complex thing, and there mostly as an early crappy solution, rather than as the ultimate scary government.
Still won't work. Insulin is well out of patent, and its production is well understood and widespread. Water back then was something you couldn't just manufacture, and couldn't "smuggle". Insulin is nothing even remotely like that. So the only thing that government could do is, basically, spend a lot of manpower to try to suppress it by force, and create massive dissent in the process. It's just begging for a revolt.
And if it would even work... well, just look at the prohibition era, for how well _that_ worked. If it's too bad a demand, someone _will_ offer a supply. And in that case it was alcohol, which is at best a luxury and even carried some pre-existing stigma. Something that's life and death? Heh. An Al Capone smuggling insulin in that scenario, would get voted mayor and be the hero of the people. He'd have entire divisions deserting to his side, if he wanted to fight that government.
It's easier and cheaper to just shoot your opponents than try something like that.
Plus a lot of other social and economic conditions are entirely different. What worked back then, only worked because of the conditions were like that. It was a primitive economy, and more importantly an economy of severe scarcity. It was also a different era and culture, where people took for granted that the ones at the top have a right of life and death over their subjects. There was a severe lack of information, population mobility was extremely limited, trade was very limited and unable to overcome that kind of control, etc, etc, etc.
That's, in a nutshell, the stumbling block of all proposed "hydraulic despotism" scenarios. If you want a city dead, it's easier to just nuke it nowadays. If you tried to eliminate it by "hydraulic despotism" methods, you'd first have to pretty much blockade it with the army until it starves off, or people will bugger off somewhere else or smuggle stuff from somewhere else. At which point, why not just fire bomb it, then march your divisions right in and shoot everyone? It's going to boil down to a lot of shooting anyway, so you might as well get it done from the start.
Or you can do even better, and cause even less unrest, without any medicine conspiracy. You only need to look at the 20'th century for very conventional massacres which were kept reasonably secret and caused a lot less resistance and unrest. We have such conventional mass-murderers as;
- Pol Pot: just told people that they were evacuated because an American air raid was expected. (And the fact that that area had gotten more bombs per square mile than Germany in WW2 sure as heck helped make that lie believable.) So they peacefully got into the trucks, and were transported to the extermination camps.
- WW2 Germany... well, let's avoid that discussion for the sake of Goodwin's Law
- The Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks in the last years of the Ottoman Empire: they just told those people they're getting relocated somewhere else. Sure, noone's happy to get deported, but it creates a lot less resistance than "omg, the government is trying to kill us." So until it's way too late, a lot of people are going to just comply.
Etc.
In a nutshell, we're already damn good at exterminating each other without "hydraulic despotism" methods. The "hydraulic despotism" scenarios add an unnecessary and inefficient level of complexity. Why would anyone realistically bother with that?
I like a good hyperbole as much as the next guy, but in this case "hydraulic despotism" is so over the top it's no longer funny.
Let's recap what it used to mean historically. It meant that your government can basically cut your only means of subsistence (as in, you _die_) if you disobey. Typically it was applied to water used for agriculture. E.g.,
- in Mesopotamia whoever controlled the sluices had, basically, the life and death of everyone else in their hand. That area was only able to produce enough food by irigation, so basically you obeyed or they could hurt you badly.
- in ancient Egypt, knowledge of the calendar was very important, since their whole agriculture depended on the Nile's yearly floods. So the priestly caste, who knew how to count days and calculate that kind of thing, accumulated disproportionate power. (Plus, used people's superstition to claim power over the river itself. You know, if you don't pay the priests well, Osiris will be angry and give you a crappy flood.)
Note that in both cases the punishment meant literally almost-guaranteed death, not just inconvenience or lack of privileges. As late as the late middle ages agriculture output was as low as 2 to 7 grains harvested per grain planted. So you'd have to work a large surface just to subsist and pay your taxes. Having your crop halved or quarterd because you were denied irrigation, would hit you _hard_. Chances are you didn't even have extra land or work power to compensate for that. And in early barter-based societies, that crop would also be your money, so you couldn't even buy much when something like that happened.
I'm sorry, but no resource imaginable nowadays comes even _close_ to that kind of life-and-death importance. And some of the examples used in SF stories (e.g., orbital rights) are outright laughable.
Also note that historically even this kind of despotism didn't work as well as SF authors like to pretend. Even with that kind of control, you can only push people so far before they revolt. The history of Mesopotamia and Egypt is full of revolts, invasions, usurpers, assassinations and other violent mishaps. The hydraulic empire didn't quite work half as well IRL as in, say, Dune.
Nowadays? Oooer. People might be complacent when it comes to minor deviations from the constitution, but I doubt that any (western) empire would have an easy time justifying to its citizens why it deliberately starved a city to death. I mean, look at the scandal around the government merely responding too late and too inefficient to the Katrina devastation. Now picture the government deliberately blockading a city and letting it starve. And flaunting it at that, because hydraulic despotism doesn't even work unless everyone knows you're willing to use that power. I doubt that even China could get away with it that easily.
So basically while it's a scary concept and makes for good novels... well, let's just say that so do Vampires, but you don't carry stakes with you IRL, do you?
I already said that life had to hit an incredibly improbable jackpot to appear, in the second half of the message, so I'm not sure who you're arguing with. Admittedly, it was a very long message, so I can't fault anyone for giving up.
That said,
1. While chlorophyll does match that spectrum well, the original photosynthesis was done by cyanobacteria, which _don't_ match that spectrum too well. So there you go, a less perfect solution was perfectly viable too, and the better solution appeared later.
So give me a break with the "too many things had to be just perfect" ID speech. Non-perfect partial solutions exist everywhere. Cyanobacteria themselves didn't disappear even after better tuned plants appeared, and are still around. They still exist and even specialized fungi exist which form lichen with the less efficient photosynthesizing bacteria. So you don't even have to guess or look at fossils there. The partial solution and intermediary step still exists.
2. I'm not sure if perfectly adapted to an atmosphere of oxygen, which is what we have now, is the same as perfectly adapted to an atmosphere of methane, which is what life started with. The argument that everything had to be designed just perfect isn't very believable, when you look at the fact that conditions were different in the first place, and changed _massively_ in the meantime.
3. "Astronomically small" chances happen eventually, if you have astronomically high populations and astronomically high time. When you have populations of trillions of trillions of bacteria, suffering mutations all the time, over a billion years, eventually one _will_ hit jackpot. Especially RNA based bacteria suffered a hideously high rate of mutations, and diverged very very fast in all directions.
As they say, "if you're one in a million, there are six thousand just like you". _That_ is how large populations and small chances work.
Let me give you an even more improbable example. Rolling 20 dice and rolling all sixes is incredibly improbable, in fact, 1 chance in 3,656,158,440,062,976. But if you had a billion people rolling dice once a second, it would only take on the average 3.6 million seconds or 1000 hours for that to happen. That's a little over a month. And when dealing with bacteria, a billion of them is actually an incredibly low population.
Yes, and that ancestor is a very simple RNA-based bacterium. And this evolved into DNA-based simple bacteria. Then bacteria which included other simple and ultra-specialized bacteria (cloroplasts and mitochondria). Which evolved into simple multi-celular life forms like sponges and extremely simple worms (hardly more than essentially an elongated torus whose surface was a bacterial film.) Which further evolved into more and more complex stuff.
And some figured out how to eat the others. E.g., fungi evolved to take another cell apart for food. And then some of those managed to, well, more or less do agriculture with other bacteria: the lichen are more or less a combination of a fungus and a bacteria, where the fungus traps the bacteria and helps fixate water and minerals for it, then scoop the food the bacteria produced. Or sometimes just destroy and eat those bacteria for food.
So there you already see the early split between plants and animals: one branch of the fork relied on photosynthesis to produce its own food and energy, using solar energy for it, and the other branch of the fork evolved to be basically parasites on the first one. Whether literally parasites eating the live plants (mostly plankton and algae at that point), or eating the corpses.
But before that fork, they evolved from the same ancestor, hence why they're still similar inside.
And from there it was often a race between species, driven by natural selection. E.g., the lignin based plants of the carboniferous era had a major temporary advantage, in that bacteria and fungi didn't yet exist which could digest this adaptation. However, that also applied to dead plants, which is why there's so much coal left from that age (and gave the age its name.) There simply was noone around which could eat a dead plant. But then bacteria evolved that could take apart lignin and celulosis. And then some animals evolved compartmented stomachs where they could store such bacteria so they could eat plants. (Don't think just literally animals. Some insects, e.g., termites, do exactly the same.)
And so on, an so forth, branching wildly ever since, and punctuated by some extinctions that trimmed the tree.
But, yes, once you trace all the branches back, it all leads to that first primitive bacterium. That's why it's all so similar at a chemistry level. Each step was a tweak of what already existed. Each step evolved more complex proteins, or just different proteins, and more specialized roles, but it was still based on the same reactions that worked before.
E.g., it still had enzymes which copied a strand of RNA, between a "START" and an "END" marker, to a protein. Even in DNA based cells, it's still not that horribly different: there's just an extra step of transcribing the DNA to RNA, so then you can transcribe the RNA to a protein. (As to why that more complicated mechanism evolved by natural selection: because breaking a single strand of DNA, for example by radiation or some chemicals, can still be fixed, while the same break in RNA means cell death. So the DNA based mutants were hideously more survivable than their RNA based ancestors.) Anyway, we essentially we still use the same mechanism of producing the proteins as that original proto-bacterium ancestor.
Where did that original bacterium come from? Well, probably from something even simpler. A bacterium is nothing more than a drop of sea water with a membrane. It makes it easier to keep the contents isolated from the rest of the world, much like a test tube does. But ultimately you just have some reactions in liquid water inside. So probably some chemica