- Virtual lawsuits: nope, don't exist. This is a RL lawsuit, alleging that someone used a hacking tool to copy some copyrighted scripts and animations. The fact that those animations and scripts are used as, basically, a mod for a game, doesn't make it any less real.
To put things into perspective, let's say you wrote a bunch of scripts for anything else: a mod for a game, an application server, whatever. It's your product. Then I come along and not only copy it, but put my name on it and sell it as my own script pack. Why the fuck does it matter if it's for a game, or for adminning WebSphere, or configuring a Gentoo box? I took your work and put my name on it.
- Virtual taxes: nope, don't exist either. All that keeps popping up now and then is the idea that if you sell something in _real_ life, for _real_ money, then it's RL income and the government wants its cut. If you make a living selling second-hand cars, then you have to pay income tax and possibly VAT. If you make a living selling computer clip-art or fonts (also exist as only files) on your web site, the same applies. If you make a living selling virtual items on your web-site, for real money, it's just as much an income, and you're just as much supposed to pay income tax for it.
What's so horribly hard to understand there? If you make an income, regardless of what you sell or do for it, you get taxed. There's no special provision for virtual stuff, and it certainly isn't a virtual tax.
- Virtual life: nope, trust me, noone takes it too seriously. It's just a funky name for playing a game, or having a chat room with graphics. At the end of the day, noone forgets that they're in RL, playing a game. At any rate, unless you're a luddite and never played a game, exactly what's your problem?
So, indeed, reading posts like yours really makes me wonder if people are really as stupid and detached from reality as they act. You operate on some wildly false assumptions and take a leap to the "I'm so smart, all these people are stupid" ego-masturbation based on nothing more than that. Did you stop to even try to understand what really happens there before jumping to the "people are so stupid" masturbation exercise? Nah, because you're obviously soo smart that you must be right anyway. Not.
I kinda doubt it
on
Explosives Camp
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I kinda doubt that the CIA can't find better training than this. Mind you, I'm not from the US, but I thought each army has their own engineers branch which offers more in-depth knowledge about demolitions and military use of explosives than a summer camp. Including how to safely get rid of the explosives if, say, the convoy you were expected didn't pass that way. I'd think CIA would have no problems getting a trainer from the army or navy and organizing their own training.
If nothing else, reading TFA, it doesn't seem like it would make that useful training for 007-like or terrorist use of explosives. Stuff like how to safely blow up a side of quarry, or better yet, how to make a spud gun, are useful for mining or respectively entertainment, but don't translate well into how to do that much else with explosives.
Or, rather, not much that you couldn't already google. I mean, you can look up ANFO on Wikipedia, and that's the main explosive used by the mining industry. If you can buy the ammonium nitrate and wanted to make a car bomb with that, you don't really need courses in how to drill the holes and calculate the dosage to blast a rock face in a quarry.
Also, about CIA use, again, I may be wrong about America, but it seems to me that:
1. People aren't that interchangeable between mining jobs and covert ops type jobs. Just knowing how to drill a hole and prime a stick of dynamite doesn't also make you want to go abroad and blow up some Arabs. Between making a decent risk-free living at home and going and risking your life abroad for better pay, most people would choose the first.
2. And it doesn't mean you even could, probably. About 95% of the people have this interlock in the brains against being _too_ mean to other people. About 3% are sociopaths, and don't. And there are a few more in between. So, really, statistically chances are higher that you'd be in the "nice guy" category, not in the "sociopath" cathegory.
The army has had millenia of figuring out how to (A) drill people into executing some stuff mechanically against cardboard targets or with blanks, until it becomes reflex by the time they have to do it against live targets. (B) Instill an "us vs them" theme and some groupthink notions of duty, honour, patriotism, etc, to help get people pull the trigger even if they don't really want to. (C) Getting people in a situation in which, one way or the other, it's your ass if you don't cap that other guy. Now that really helps get people to pull the trigger. (D) Creating a whole organization and hierarchy for dissipating responsibility, so noone from the guy who mines pitchblende to the general who orders the strike to the pilot who drops the atom bomb on Hiroshima feels particularly responsible for it all.
And it still gets a lot of people waking up in cold sweat for the rest of their lives, a.k.a., Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Heck, even some of the war atrocities are, ironically, traceable to the fact that man wasn't designed to kill man. People either get to (A) break down not understanding why the other guys shoot at him, what's wrong with them? Are they savage animals? and/or (B) get caught in that grouphink trap, thinking everyone else around is brave and fearless and all patriotic, and do dumb things to hide the fact that personally they're scared shitless.
Anyway, a lot of those only work in a group, and only work in a situation where it's short term "it's either them or me" and no easy way out. It doesn't quite apply to a lone killers.
Briefly, it might be a lot easier easier to first select with someone without scruples and give them explosives training, than to convert a peaceful mining engineer into a commando trooper.
3. The last person you'd want in the army or some secret service is some "Explosions are cool, Beavis!" type who makes spud guns or blows stuff up when they're bored, and wears a "I [heart] explosives" t-shirt. You'd probably want someone a lot more mentally stable than that.
It's simply a matter of the extent of damage done. Yes, there are people who are less ethical, but if their whole user base is measured in hundreds or maybe thousands, well, that's a rather tiny amount of damage done. The extent of their unethical behaviour may be limited to bribing a PHB or two to buy their software, but otherwise they're just not in a position to do much harm.
MS by contrast, even managed to pull the stunt of getting the US government to bend over and give it a sentence that says, in a nutshell, "ok, if you promise to watch over yourselves, sign here to never be sued for this stuff again." After being already found in violation of the law. That's a heist of historic proportions.
The extent of MS's damage doesn't even just include their software as such, or the bribes and political lobbying, it includes twisting the market into a screwed-up state where noone can compete with one of their products without having to compete with everything else. It effectively raised entry barriers to some ridiculous levels so noone can compete with it.
It didn't get there by just making a better product and letting the market decide if they want to buy it, but destroying any competitor, by any means available, most of them illegal. Most of the time, that seems to be MS's game. They're not even as much just into defending their monopoly, but into destroying as many other companies as possible, or pushing them into a subservience position where they effectively aggree to take the crumbs in return for helping MS get another slice of the pie.
Etc.
Basically, what you're saying there is roughly like "well, there are lesser criminals who are just as unethical at heart, so why do you hate Stalin and Pol Pot more?" Well, because between a guy who killed 1-2 people and a guy who killed 10-20 million, the latter is the bigger villain. Sure, they're all despicable villains, but some did more damage and richly deserve to be more hated.
Because it's about patents, and some people have an allergy to that word as a matter of principle. You know, everyone should invest billions in research (considering that IIRC for medicine it costs over 100 million just to get it tested and approved, and for other high tech stuff research costs are even ridiculously higher) and then let everyone undercut their prices (it's easier to price your stuff cheaper when you don't any research costs to recoup.) People should just be proud to go bankrupt to further technology, obviously.
Also, patents have this nice advantage for FUD and clueless crusading: if you don't actually read it, and conveniently skip (or don't understand) around the parts that are new, everything can be made to sound like a rehash of something that already exists. Sealed hard drive _in_ liquid bag? Well, just ignore the "hard drive in liquid" part and it just sounds like a sealed gel bag. New ceramics insulation for a capacitor? Ignore the new material and manufacturing technology, and it's just a capacitor. New antibiotic? Ignore the "new" part, and the research which went into finding it, and it's just an antibiotic, those things existed for ages. Why the heck are people allowed to patent those?
(For bonus points, for medicine also add (A) the standard conspiracy theories that the Russians/Chinese/Tibetan-monks/etc discovered some wonder drug that heals everything, regardless of being gram-positive bacteria, gram-negative bacteria, virus, fungus, physical damage, allergy or mutation of one's own cells, and the evil pharma companies hide that so they can sell such new antibiotics, and (B) how they're evil if they try to recoup those research costs instead of giving the medicine for free to poor kids in Africa, and to everyone else who needs it, for that matter.)
At any rate, here's why it's about "your rights": because some people think they have a sacred right to make a living out of someone else's research. They shouldn't ever have to research anything or have a single original thought in their whole life. They should just wait until someone comes up with a new idea, then make a living copying it. If some law prevents them from doing that, it's obviously a violation of their very human rights.
I'm a bit at a loss as to the "Online" part, but I guess it's because there was no "your rights offline" category.
Well, the problem is also the very short effect. Even if (ad absurdum) you shot enough of those to get the mob sedated, it's for, what? 2-3 seconds? Then they're un-sedated again and quite as able to do something dumb as before.
Except now they had 2-3 seconds of impaired judgment and maybe slight hallucinations. Which they can now base further acts on. A dumb idea that came while you were on nitrous oxide, is hardly finished going through your head by the time you're again fit to carry it out. Even if you'd tell me it's disassociative enough to not get violent ideas (as opposed to just being unable to implement them), you might get some sound and visual distortions in that time, and you can then get violent ideas based on them after the couple of seconds are over. It might just take one guy mis-understanding something as "they're sending the army" while they're high, or thinking they saw someone with a machinegun, or "whoa, that's got to be real ammo", or whatever, to start a ruckus and maybe go berserk afterwards, when the calming effect wore off.
Honestly, when dealing with an angry mob, I'd rather not take that chance. Even if for _most_ people it won't have that effect, it sometimes only takes one tiny little bit to spark an avalanche. One guy hallucinating the wrong thing can be enough.
Historically some pretty bloody things happened over rash decisions and over-reacting, probably the most well known being the battleship Potemkin revolt. Not saying it's a 1-to-1 equivalent, but just as an example of a situation which went within a second from disgruntled to bloody.
All else being equal, I'd very much wish everyone involved was as clear headed as possible there, which already isn't clear headed at all in an angry mob.
Hmm... now I didn't RTFA, but the summary doesn't mention anything even remotely equivalent to "we wanted more money". So do you have any other information you base that on, or is it just pulled out of the ass? Especially given that I suspect they were better paid at Blizzard than at some startup company noone heard about yet, that assumption seems somewhat fragile.
The only thing which would come even close is the talk of long term contracts and compensations, but he _does_ spell out that they wanted to know how to plan their future, so it doesn't necessarily come out as greed. It doesn't say they went and demanded contracts for life, it says they went and asked for a communication channel. There's a big difference.
It may come as a surprise, but some people do actually like to know what happens next. You know, game is finished now, what happens next? Do we stick around and make an expansion pack? Extra content? A new game? Should we start sending out resumes now? Uncertainty about that can bring morale downwards quite a bit.
As for position of strength, I beg to differ. World Of Warcraft turned out to be a bigger money printing machine than anyone expected, Vivendi included. People thought the old Everquest was a money printing license, and is what got half the developpers and publisher in a frenzy to try to make yet another MMO. And most attempts to imitate it failed pretty badly. Well, WoW overtook it by a whole freakin' order of magnitude. It has some 95% of the MMO market IIRC.
Basically, as dev team achievements go, these guys pulled an _amazing_ achievement. I don't know what happened there, but that team had some incredible talent and worked surprisingly well. Design talent, programming talent (considering almost every MMO before was traditionally a _horribly_ buggy mess, and would spend eternity creating two new bugs for each one fixed... and some got into a dead end and got cancelled), etc.
It takes a pretty brain-damaged PHB to just squander such an asset over something as petty and trivial as being asked to have an official communication channel. Whatever happened to transparency and communication? Because the way I read it, that's really all they were asking for.
I know it's all the rage to treat employees as dime-a-dozen expendable, replaceable peons, but sometimes it comes out as particularly retarded. We're not talking pizza-delivery kind of expendable, but a team which was one of the legends in their field, and head over shoulders over most of the rest. They're not _that_ easily replaced. Not considering them even important enough to be informed what next, before they read the press release, seems kinda extreme, as low opinions go.
Well, there probably is a lot of that too, but I'm left scratching my head what would someone actually want to sell via _some_ of the stories. Take this one, for example. Whose marketter is trying to paint the South Korean government in a bad light, and exactly what are they selling, anyway?
The gold farmers make less than 1$ per hour, last I've read about it, so they're not quite in a position to hire a good PR firm and manufacture news.
Plus, their interests are better served by other kinds of articles, like the recently linked NYT article that painted the gold farmers in such a positive light (you know, just poor hard-working guys trying to make a living) and as being the poor victims of mean players who gank them on sight. It even managed to present a situation that was clear-cut botting unattended (i.e., blatantly breaking the TOS and one thing that's pretty justified in causing a negative reaction), _and_ it was farming quest NPCs unattended at that (so, you know, even in the short term it was hindering players who needed them for the quest and for the rep to even have access to an area)... as some case where evil self-righteous players victimized the poor Chinese gold farmer. So, anyway, if I were a gold farmer I'd submit links to more articles like that.
Anyway, I didn't say that _all_ stories were submitted by nerds. I think the more inflammatory and blatantly lopsided ones are, though. A proper PR agency should know better than that. And, frankly, if MS or Apple can't afford professional PR guys, I'd start worrying about them:P
Finally, don't underestimate genuine fanboyism. Assuming that people need to be paid, or to be part of some conspiracy, to do something stupid and/or annoying is rather false.
I don't get it... I expect stuff like this from Newspapers....but/. ? Maybe I'm missing something but are articles weighted on how may people click on them?
Actually the exact opposite is probably true. Most newspapers, at least in the western world, discovered around the start of the 20'th century that it pays to at least pretend to be impartial. Yes, they still aren't really impartial, and they still kept their opinion columns (although at least now they're more or less marked as such, and not as hard news) but they're a lot more subtle in their manipulation than that.
It's not even as much doing the morally right thing, it's just business. At some point the public as a whole was largely fed up with the hyperbole- and libel-ladden pieces of journalism and pamphlets of the 19'th century. So someone discovered, much to their surprise, that they actually have more readers if they just report the news, instead of fabricating it or outright telling people what to think about it.
Again, I'm aware it's still nowhere near perfect, and even "impartiality" means something slightly different to the media than to the rest of us. I'm not entirely naive, trust me. I'm just saying it used to be a lot worse. "Protocols of the Elders Of Zion" kinda bad, or claiming that Lincoln was at the head of some subversive African conspiracy. Inventing ridiculous super-villain-type plans of your opponents (e.g., that they're actually proposing building sewers or a subway so they can blow their own capital up from below, when their Illuminati masters order it) used to be just business as usual.
At any rate, nowadays an actual printed newspaper would be a lot less blatantly inflammatory there. Even if they wanted to manipulate you into being for or against it (which actually newspapers themselves don't often do, but is often is the case with PR pieces submitted as news), they'd work hard into making it look like they just gave you the data and you reached the "whoa, it's evil" conclusion yourself. Especially in PR there are people damn skilled at _not_ looking blatantly partisan. It would involve some interviews, some impartial study maybe, and in "journalistic impartiality" tradition it would involve two conflicting points of view, and they're not telling you which of the two to believe. (Just incidentally the one pro-taxing ends up saying the wrong things, and causing a "well, I'm not siding with _this_ guy" reaction.)
Unfortunately, (or maybe fortunately, you can choose) Slashdot stories are rarely submitted by real journalists. They're _usually_ submitted by nerds who never figured the "pretend to not tell people what to think" part, so they outright go ahead and do that. Some (though not all) even have an axe to grind, an ideological crusade to fight, and a messiah complex to save you all from the evil corporations/government/current-economic-model/wha tever. So, yeah, expect inflammatory stuff like this.
It's not like it's the first time anything like this happened, anyway.
The question is: would it even work? Or would those contractors get big bucks for possibly the dumbest idea in history?
Laughing gas not only doesn't make people actually laugh, and certainly not in the minute quantities you can fit in a rubber bullet (doubly so considering that you'll aim at the chest, not pump the gas over their nose), it gets people euphoric (a sort of high, basically), might even cause slight halucinations, and it dulls the sensation of pain.
So shoot enough of these in an angry crowd, and now you have a crowd that's (A) angrier, since you just shot at them, (B) manic enough to do dumber things than normally, and (C) a lot less sensitive to pain. Just so, you know, they won't be as deterred by further rubber bullets or tear gas or a police batton. It sounds to me like just what you need to turn some unruly demonstrators into an outright riot. Or an outright riot into hell broken loose.
Especially B scares me. Being high even on nitrous oxide might just impair people's judgment just that tiny little bit needed to do something really dumb. Like "heehee, let's throw a big rock at the cops." Or "heehee, let's get their guns and shoot a bystander." Sure, it's no LSD, but we're talking the kind of situations where it often takes just a spark to go downhill fast. You might need just one guy getting over his inhibitions or thinking he saw or heard the awfully wrong thing, to spark everyone else into going berserk.
1. how large planets they'd get. Assuming the accretion disc was on the whole only 10% as dense, well, are they going to get an Earth-sized planet out of it?
2. at that point we're talking stars which _barely_ fuse hydrogen at all, which is how 10% of the Sun's mass lasts them for a trillion years. They're very cold stars, _barely_ above the level of a brown dwarf. So, well, for all practical reasons you're back to square one, it's no better than looking for a brown dwarf, only it doesn't cool down.
Brown dwarfs are the most populous star in the universe. Saying that they'll be few and far between kind of shows the limitation of your actual knowledge.
Try to think the complete picture. You need not only a brown dwarf, but also a planet that's in the right band, _and_ has the right planet type there (being in the right band doesn't help you much if you have the mass of Mercury and can't hold an atmosphere) _and_ has the right rotation speed _and_ plate tectonics (these two doomed Venus) _and_ is new enough to not have cooled down yet (100 billions is a freaking _huge_ time.)
I stand by what I've said: those will be few and far in between.
Let me also qualify that: few and far given that (A) there seems to be no way to travel faster than light, which puts a heck of a limit on how far we can look for one to move to, and (B) as per TFA, the universe will have expanded a _lot_ by then, so, really, everything outside our galaxy will be out of reach. And I don't mean out of reach as in "too far to bother there", but as in outside the causality cone, so even with magic drives and magic ships it's not even theoretically possible to get there. That kinda "out of reach."
And point B affects point A too. The galaxy itself will probably be freakin' huge by then, as in, billions of light years across. That doesn't just mean "whoa, even at light speed, you'd need an eternity to move to the other end", it means that by the time the signal even reaches you about a possibly habitable star at the other end, chances are that star would already be dead or dying.
So that puts a heck of a lot of limit on where you can look for the next planet to move to.
Also, that just makes me realize another detail: in an universe that stretched, there's a lot more space for the hydrogen to go. If you have one solar mass worth of hydrogen in a 100 lightyear sphere, that's not going to accrete into an actual star any time soon.
Duly noted, and you are right. "Fast" or "slow" are horribly relative terms, and I should have qualified it better than that. If it's any help, I meant "for a 100 billion years deadline." It's too fast for that particular race, though, indeed, you are right, by a lot of other kinds of reckoning it's not fast at all.
Fair point, indeed, but somehow I'm not betting on it.
1. Yes, energy indeed cannot be destroyed. It does, however, get trapped in the mass of the heavier nuclei synthetised during a supernova blast (E = mc^2) or, basically, lost as photons traveling around an ever increasing universe. Especially the latter is, really, the whole point in this topic. There'll be increasingly more photons which are (A) traveling the ever increasing space between galaxies, and never getting anywhere, and (B) getting red-shifted to such ridiculous wave lengths that they will _not_ be doing anything to any nucleus they encounter.
Basically the incoming power decreases with the square of the distance, and the whole point is that the distance is increasing. Accelerating even. So even as more energy piles up, there's more and more space (and red-shift) for it to go through and never hit anything. If you pointed a flashlight upwards outside, only an infinitesimally tiny fraction (or more likely none at all) of the photons will ever hit _anything_, because there's simply an incredible amount of empty space out there.
And if it does hit another star, chances are it'll be infrared or even microwave, so don't expect it to split any nuclei.
2. Yes, technology will continue to advance, but I'm not sure what it's going to do about it. Unless it discovers a way to produce energy out of _nothing_ whatsoever, it's still stuck at the same point we are. To create a main-sequence star at that point, it would have to split trillions of tonnes of heavier elements into hydrogen. Where is it going to get the energy for that? Solar is out, fusion _and_ fission are out (most nuclei will be iron at that point, so neither yields an energy gain), fossil fuels aren't _nearly_ packing enough energy, etc. Where's that energy going to come from?
Basically to build a main-sequence star, you're looking at needing as much energy as that star will produce during its billions of years of lifetime. Where are you going to get that, in an universe that's already running out of energy? How are you going to get that in a burst? Even if we were talking about building a sun in 10 million years (which is already an ludicriously large interval: humans never stuck to a plan for 0.01% of that time), you're looking at needing 1000 times the sun's raw power output, and that's at 100% efficiency and 0% losses (a.k.a., never gonna happen.) Where are you going to get that in an universe that, really, is running out of fuel?
3. At any rate, for all we know now, there'll be noone alive at that point. If technology ever gets better, let them worry about that then, not now.
4. Finally, we're talking about a freakin' _huge_ interval. The Homo Sapiens species is only 200 million years old. Worrying about what happens in in 100 _billion_ years is just nuts. Whole empires rose and fell in a _billionth_ of that time. Whole social models or indeed whole civilizations disappeared in a tiny fraction of that, and great libraries turned to ashes in what's really just a tiny blip on that scale. Planning what to do for the next 100 billion years is just nuts.
Well, that's really the thing. 25% gone in 13.7 billion years is a _lot_, when you're talking 100 billion years.
Will usage decrease? Well, that wouldn't make it that horribly much better, because that means, in a nutshell, less main-sequence stars.
It will also mean more hydrogen which technically still exists, but is going nowhere: it's trapped in brown dwarfs that never start fusion, Jupiters, black holes, etc. Those things don't blow up, so basically short of some cataclismic event like head-on star collisions, it won't end up in a star. So expect the number of main-sequence stars to drop even faster. If the hydrogen use is, say, roughly 1/t past a point, then expect the main sequence stars to drop like 1/t^2. (Also pulled out of the arse, I don't have the time or inclination to do proper research at 1:30 AM;)
So, basically increasingly less places where life can evolve or move to. We might end up with the next inhabitable place being on the other end of the galaxy before the 100 billion years are up.
Also, going by the number in your example, 7.5% hydrogen means you're pretty much screwed. It's like getting your gasoline 7.5% in <insert inert liquid of the same density>: your engine won't work on it any more, a long time before that. A star with 7.5% hydrogen just won't produce any significant amount of hydrogen fusion. Stars die, one way or another, a long time before they get anywhere _near_ that kind of a composition.
So basically at that point, to get a main sequence star, you're betting on some _incredibly_ low odds of getting a freak fluctuation where you had a big pocket of hydrogen that somehow didn't accrete into a star earlier. We're talking odds akin to winning every single lottery on Earth on the same day. Repeatedly. There won't be many of them around.
One within close enough range to evacuate humanity to? Heh. I wouldn't bet on that.
The universe itself is 13.7 billion of years old. Our Sun is only about 5 billion years old.
In this interval, the universe already burned a heck of a lot of Hydrogen to Helium, and even a lot of Helium to Carbon and so on until iron. You can't really have a star powered by fusing anything heavier, because fusing heavier stuff actually takes energy.
(Anything higher than that is formed in a supernova blast. Basically some of the immense energy of the supernova is used to fuse some of the ejected elements into even higher density stuff.)
Hydrogen is really the low hanging fruit of star fuel. It's for stars what the coal mines were for the industrial revolution. It's damn easy to start fusing hydrogen. (Easier if you have some heavier elements as catalysts to start the reaction, but the hydrogen will be the fuel anyway.) It's damn hard to start fusing anything else.
Even helium is tricky. It requires some _immense_ pressures and temperatures, and a state that's already degenerate matter. It even starts to happen somewhere between 100 and 200 million Kelvin. It's also a bloody unstable process. The released power is proportional IIRC to the temperature raised to the _30th_ power, so it's easy for it to run away: more power released rises the temperature some more, which rises the power some more (and rather abruptly at that), which rises temperature, etc. A star the size of our sun would just blow itself up almost instantly if it was made of Helium and actually ignited Helium fusion.
Where I'm getting is that the universe has a finite budget of hydrogen and keeps using it fast. (Well, "fast" by cosmic scales.) And then some of it gets buried in black holes and the like too. So planning to have main sequence stars in 100 billion years, is sorta like planning to still be using the oil in the middle east by then: chances are it will have run horribly thin, long time before that.
In 100 billion years, probably the best you could get is a brown dwarf, a.k.a., a star that doesn't actually fuse anything, but it heated up when collapsing into a star, and will need a horribly long time to cool down. And hopefully a planet that's close enough to it, to be just warm enough.
They'll be few and far in between though, so no telling if one will be close enough to move to it.
Also, lemme say: the only chance of life there will be that someone moves to it. If you look at long time Earth history, the Sun started a lot cooler when the Earth atmosphere was made of methane, so the massive greenhouse effect just helped keep temperature in the right band for life to appear. Then as the Sun heated up, life switched atmosphere to oxygen. We've been walking a tightrope on the border between turning into Venus (if life appeared just a little later) or turning into a deep-frozen snowball that kills everything (if photosynthesis started just a little earlier.) And we actually had a damn close shave with complete extinction, the planet-sized snowball kind.
A brown dwarf just doesn't follow that pattern. It doesn't gradually warm up, it actually starts (very very slowly) cooling down as soon as it formed. But you can pretty much approximate it as constant temperature, for the purpose of this discussion. And therein lies the problem: if it's cool enough for a methane-atmosphere planet to evolve life, that will turn into a permanent deep-frozen wasteland as soon as it evolves photosynthesis. And if it would be warm enough for an oxygen-atmosphere planet, then it's way too hot early when that planet is still methane-based. That planet will turn into Venus before it has half a chance to evolve life.
So pretty much in 100 billion years we're looking at a dead or dying universe anyway. Worrying that they'll have witch hunts is kinda silly, when, you know, there won't be anyone alive there.
Here's a fun concept for you: Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy: massaging the data into looking like whatever you want it to look like. That's what Koster is doing. Just because Raph can argue a hypothesis without (A) any more proof than his own delusions of grandeur (it must be true because He said so), and (B) based on some very vague correlations and assumptions (just because it involves some learning, doesn't mean that's what triggers the "fun" signal), doesn't make it true.
Here's another fun concept for you: Correlation does not imply causation. Just because (A) you're having fun, and (B) you're learning something, doesn't mean that A causes B. B is something so intrinsic to the brain, that it's there just by virtue of being there all the time. It's like saying that the sun causes the fun signal, because hey, every time you're having fun, the sun still exists.
And in this case it's not just the taking a wild assumption, it's outright ignoring reality and the readily available counter-examples. There's a heap of counter examples where B (learning) is present, yet A (the fun) is missing. Think a boring lecture at college. Think being forced to learn a subject you don't like. FFS, think the players'/users' complaints about the learning curve. So postulating that "B => A" is just stupid. If there is at least one case (and there are plenty) where B is true, yet A is false, that implication just doesn't hold.
Here's a third fun concept for you: theory != hypothesis. What Koster does is just handwaving a _hypothesis_. It's not a theory, it's not some grand revelation, it's just an unproven hypothesis. Supported by nothing more than handwaving and ignoring everything that was already known.
As for point 4, no, au contraire. It means that there is _no_ dedicated "learning is fun" circuit up there. Those signals measure how much your situation has actually improved, not how much you learned from it. Heck, there isn't even any actual learning until you've slept a night or two on it: that's when any data is actually committed to long-term storage. Seriously, read a real biology book, if you want real info, not Koster's ego-masturbation.
Oh, wait, is that you, Koster? Well, then carry on. That's exactly the kind of thing I expected from you.
Oh, no doubt a lot of that stuff happens. And indeed, now that you mention it, it does sound like something game designers could use more.
But just saying that dumping a bunch of info on someone won't trigger an "I'm having fun" signal in their brain, no matter how you look at it. Some of SWG's biggest mistakes were based on (A) not understanding there's more than that, and (B) taking the "learning = fun" idiom way too literally.
There will be some learning involved, but for some people that's actually a turn off, not the reason they're having fun. You have to keep the game fun for _their_ personal taste, and give them enough rewards to compensate for it.
Getting new info or learning something new is only perceived as "good" or "fun" in as much as you convince each group of players that it's furthering their own cause and goals. Basically:
- explorers: most will find it fun just to find out new stuff, but even for those it has to not feel like a lecture. The game has to have _depth_, and basically be like one of those kids' chemistry sets: give you enough elements and constraints to combine and experiment with. That's really what most explorers are all about: experimenting with a heap of wires, bolts, and body parts and seeing if they can come up with a Frankenstein. These are the mad scientists of MUD's and MMOs. Knowing that is already more useful in designing a fun game even for explorers, than merely "learning = fun."
- achievers: they appreciate information in as much as it furthers their goal. They'll appreciate learning a tactic that lets them defeat the boss who drops the +5 Sword Of Awesome, but they won't appreciate learning trivia. At any rate, for them it's not the learning new stuff as such that ends up feeling like fun, but the reward or anticipation of a reward.
- killers: (Bear in mind that by "killers" Bartle didn't mean "PvP players", but what the rest of us call "griefers". The term "killers" comes from the greatest reward they can find: driving someone completely off the game, in effect permanently "killing" them off the game.) They'll appreciate any information which can be used to make someone else's day miserable, they won't appreciate trivia which doesn't. They'll over info about how to get a +5 Sword Of Ganking, but may be completely uninterested in information how to get a Sword Of Undead Slaying, if no players can be undead.
- socializers: these are pretty tough customers to satisfy by game mechanics, because their main goal isn't to actually play the game. The best you can do is give them enough social possibilities (chat channels, guilds, clubs, housing, whatever) and reach a critical mass of active players, so they have lots of people to play with. In effect, to get socializers, you must first make the game fun for everyone else, so they see lots of people around to talk to. How do you get them to learn stuff? Tough question. Maybe make it an opportunity for social interaction, like organizing a guild event to solve the problem.
That's of course, just one way to slice the players into groups, and not even the only one. It's probably the earliest and best known, though, so I figured it will make a good example.
And, yeah, someone with solid knowledge of cognitive science could do a lot more for each group. Just saying, though, that it helps if you realize you're dealing with more than one group and more than one set of priorities. The "learning = fun" over-simplification is IMHO the awfully wrong axiom to start with. It's like starting by postulating "only rabbits live in the woods" and then getting genuinely surprised when one is mangled by a bear.
You know, while games may have potential to educate, Raph Koster is... less than clued anyway:
1. Let me point out that, if he's that good at knowing what makes a game fun, why didn't he make SWG fun? It started a niche game in the first place, with plenty of unpopular ideas but tolerated by some for the sake of the franchise or because it was the only one with a non-linear advancement. And then got kicked in the balls twice with some _massively_ uninspired changes that managed to turn even most of those away, the last change managing even to take away the main reason why people stuck with it.
At any rate, if he's the expert at what _all_ people find fun, why didn't he manage to attract more than a niche of the market? That's a reality check.
2. There are studies better than Koster's anyway. If you want to have a slightly broader insight than, basically, "what Koster personally finds fun", try Bartle's original classification of MUD players. Bartle saw 4 categories there, or 4 personality components, by looking at what players actually _do_ in games: socializers, explorers, achievers and killers. Koster saw only one of them, basically: the explorers. There are at least 3 other major groups of players, which Koster at best spent some time handwaving why he knows better than them what they really want, than actually trying to understand them.
3. Here's another reality check: there are plenty of games which are very light on the learning. Take Tetris, for example, or Lumines, or the whole category of real time puzzle games that work on the same basic principle. Sure, there is quick thinking involved, but not much learning. After maybe the first hour, that's it, you won't learn any new information about Tetris. (Go ahead, try to play tetris for a few hours, and then sit and think what permanent lessons you've learned today.) Yet a lot of people found it fun.
Or take a lot of FPS players. I know someone personally who spent years on the same CS map, climbing the same ladder, crawling through the same duct, and jumping up and down in front of the same vent. Just because that got him the highest score. What was he learning there?
No, the much more obvious common denominator is: rewards. Give players their favourite rewards often. It doesn't have to be big rewards, it just has to feel like having achieved something. And keep doing it. That's what makes games fun. Whether it's a new armour piece, a new friend, or a row eliminated at Tetris.
Now what counts as a reward varies among players. Some appreciate knowledge (explorers), some like talking to people and making friends (socializers), some like getting lots of points or a big enchanted sword (achievers), and some like to humiliate/annoy/etc (killers.) It basically boils down to what each player deems important: an achievement along that axis will be felt like a bigger achievement. And as humans have more than one personality, it's pretty ridiculous to make a claim like all fun is learning, because some people will assign the least priority to that.
4. What might help understand what happens there, is a bit of neurochemistry. People's brains are wired to, basically, do a differential. Anything that improves your situation triggers a release of chemicals, like, say, dopamine, which are quite similar to drugs in a nutshell. (Well, except they're natural brain chemicals.) Conversely, everything that worsens your situation significantly makes you unhappy.
It's the natural "wiring" to keep doing what's good for you. If you do something that improves your situation (e.g., eat when you're hungry), there's an "I'm happy!" signal triggering in your brain. If you let your situation deteriorate too much, you gradually get less and less comfortable and happy. It's not just for humans, that's what keeps your cat or dog taking care of themselves too.
At any rate, you don't notice absolute values. You only notice differences. Getting a 19" TFT makes you happy if you were on a 17" before, or on a CRT, it makes you actually
Heh. So basically you can keep the kernel running, but your X programs are fucked anyway. Well, gee, that's so different from rebooting the system.
In fact, lemme get this straight. So Linux is _so_ much better because when a driver crashed, Joe Average could:
1. buy a second computer, so he can SSH into the first one. Just, you know, because it's so evil to buy a $25 firewall for your Windows box, but it's cool to buy a whole second computer for your Linux box.
2. learn a bunch of command-line stuff and other nerdy stuff, so, you know, he can actually kill the right process. Which otherwise he wouldn't have needed.
3. reload X and restart his programs. The unsaved changes are still lost anyway.
4. Maybe (or maybe not) discover that the driver did screw something else up. Like, since most drivers come with their own agpgart kernel drivers, left that one in an unstable state. So let's do that all again, with a bit of forced unloading and loading drivers back.
As opposed to that evil old Windows XP, where he restarts the computer and the program. So basically just step 3. And if you're running KDE or, to a lesser extent, Gnome, it actually takes more time to start X than it takes to boot an XP computer completely.
Heh.
Look, honestly, for Joe Average whether he restarts just X or the whole XP, is irrelevant. His programs and unsaved data are still fucked either way, and the full restart is a no-brainer. You don't even need to know what "ps" and "kill -9" are. Whether or not the kernel kept running is, at most, relevant for uptime e-penis size bragging rights, but normal people tend to not give a damn about those willy-waving contests.
Yes, I know it's good for your karma to rehash the same "Windows BSODs" crap, but I'll call bull.
1. I've had that disabled for years, and I've had exactly one instance of BSOD-ing so far. (The reason was a crappy driver. Yeah, that's so MS's fault. A Linux user would be _so_ able to continue using their KDE programs if the video drivers crashed. Not.)
2. You would still notice it if your computer was restarting all the time. So, you know, it would be exactly the same amount of tech support calls whether it's "I've got a BSOD" or "this damn computer keeps restarting".
3. It wouldn't be that well hidden anyway, because it does briefly show a BSOD before restarting.
4. And if ad-absurdum they actually managed to hide it that well that you don't even notice, then why would it matter?
So, you know, propaganda tends to work better if it doesn't amount to telling people "your Windows BSOD's all the time!... even though you've probably never seen it actually doing it." It tends to be kinda like me telling you that you have to move because there's an elephant in your bathroom, even though you probably don't see it.
The "there are only 24 hours a day for everyone" argument is a good one, but in my experience it is weakened by how fast you read and how well you remember. A fast reader covers more skills in less time than a slow reader, and if the fast reader remembers well she or he doesn't waste time on repetition, thus leaving more time to learn and practice to be a sociable person.
So basically you're telling me that someone smarter will do better than someone dumber. Well, no arguments there as such, but I hope you realize that that's not necessarily an argument for curing autism.
The problem is that you're talking about two different persons, while I'm essentially talking about the same person with or without Asperger's. Because that's what it boils down to, when discussing a cure. Would the cure also raise their IQ by 25 points or so, so they can maintain the previous level of obsessive learning unchanged _and_ have time to _also_ become a smooth socializer? I seriously doubt that.
Unless you also figure out a way to raise someone's IQ, it is zero-sum just because it's the same person. Person A devoting 16 hours a day to domain X, ends up better at it than the same person A splitting that time between domains X, Y and Z.
But let's talk even different persons.
To be among the top, curve-busting aces at even one domain already involves quite a bit of mental ability for even one domain. Devoting lots of time to it is necessary either way, but won't make one an Einstein if one's handicapped by an IQ of 80. So we're already talking people who have quite a bit of brain power.
If you want to work and absorb information signifficantly faster than them, so you're left with lots of time to master a bunch of other skills too, then you'd have to be a bloody genius.
Now complete geniuses and renaissance personalities like that do exist, but they're rare. We talk in admiration of, say, Leonardo Da Vinci because he's essentially one of a kind. If there were a million Leonardos, you wouldn't have even heard of him.
If that's your recipe for multi-talent prowess, then it's not exactly practicable for most of the population.
Heh, yes, everyone loves to say that social perception isn't the same as blind trust, but funny how it actually gets to work that way. The more someone is convinced that, basically, "nah, I'd know it if he was lying to me", the more they seem to trust that instinct instead of actually engaging the cortex. So you watch someone go and shovel so much bullshit on them that you're rolling for willpower to not burst into laughter, and they swallow it hook, line and sinker anyway.
I've actually watched demonstrations of it. First time was in the army, when our platoon pulled the guard duty. So part of it was being inspected first and asked to say what you're guarding, what you have to do, etc. One of my coleagues made a bet that he'll tell the officers the most unbelievable bullshit and get away with it. So he ends up telling a colonel (and a colonel who'd been in that unit for years, I might add) that he has to guard stuff that was in the opposite corners of the compound (thus no one guard post could _possibly_ guard all those), and some stuff that didn't even exist, and some stuff that was blatantly absurd. All while looking him right in the eyes and looking and sounding like the perfect soldier, or so everyone assured me. Not only he got away with it, he got congratulated and given as an example of how a soldier should learn his duties.
Go figure.
That said, hey, I said I was immune to _a_ form of deceit, not to all of them. I'm sure I've been lied to before, but at least someone had to at least do the minimal effort of putting together something that looks _logical_, instead of being just a well choreographed show. Sure, someone can still use made up statistics, made up studies to base their logic on, etc. At some point I'll run out of time and attention span to cross-check it all, like everyone else.
If you will, like a "bullet proof" vest still isn't proof against knives, and even as bullets go, it will only stop pistol/SMG ammo. It stops _a_ kind of attack, it doesn't make you invulnerable.
Still, you know, I can live with an imperfect protection. A lot of (maybe even most) people who seem to be skilled deceivers in person, don't seem to put the extra effort to make it too logical. They seem to be used to noone dissecting their bullshit too much, and genuinely surprised when someone does.
Unfortunately that's not been my experience, and in a very perverse way: being _perceived_ as great, does not equal actually having the skills.
So, yes, a lot of people can get a promotion or pass for the great guru, based on being socially adept at deceiving others. That much I'll admit. But when you actually get to see the code they produce, or that they spent a week debugging Java's HashMap because they don't actually have any fucking clue about how a hash table or a linked list work, you start to get the idea that maybe things do balance out.
(And no, that wasn't a made up example. I've had no less than 4 people so far come to me with "Java's HashMap is broken! It replaced my item with another that has the same hash code!" *Sigh*)
And I'll tell you one reason why it balances out: there are only 24 hours a day for everyone. Every hour you spend on popularity games, is one less hour you spend on something else, like learning to do your job. There's, if you will, some consolation in being ostracized in that you have that time available for someone else. Maybe a piss-poor consolation, but that's how it works. You have a couple of extra hours to code something or read a book, because you didn't use that time on your social skills.
Of course, the world isn't neatly divided into 100% ace or 100% incompetent, so there are a lot of people who can be _decent_ at two or more things. But when you really move towards the high end on any skill, you have to dedicate a lot of time to it. Try to do it for several unrelated skills, and you just don't have enough hours in a day for that.
Also, given that people perform the best at what they like, it would take some kind of mutant that's equally uber-interested in everything to excel at such a broad mix.
Basically I just don't believe the myth of people who are great, curve-busting even, at a several unrelated skills. It might make for a good unattainable ideal or for superhero comics, but I've yet to even hear of anyone IRL who was actually a great programmer/mathematician/physicist/whatever _and_ the life of the party _and_ a great athlete _and_ god knows what else. Unless they have a time machine and can get 48 hours in a day, it's just not going to happen.
Which brings us back to the first paragraph: so some people _fake_ it instead. They use their social skills to compensate for the lack of other skills, and basically paint an image of themselves that just isn't true. They'll compensate for their actual programming skill by putting up a careful show and taking credit for someone else's work. They'll compensate for their at best sporadic and mediocre athletic interests by spinning fabulous tales about it. Etc.
Sure, that can get them actually more appreciated, but it's not actually being curve-busting in those skills.
On the other hand it could be something like being color-blind your entire life only to wake some morning to find the whole spectrum of colors and a new wave of positive experiences.
If Asperger's is like being colour blind, well, I can say that sometimes I'm happy to not see those colours.
1. I hear or read expressions every day to the effect of "he had an honest face", "he looked sincere" or "he had a poker face" or "said it with a straight face", or the fateful step forward from there: "I'd know if he was lying to me." For me that just doesn't exist, but I'll choose to believe that the people saying that stuff actually know what they're talking about. Or maybe it's wishful thinking and make belief for them too, I wouldn't know.
Either way, then I see people falling for the most unbelievable lies, either from the local sociopath or from the the nice IBM/MS/whatever salesman, because, hey, he was "looking honest" and saying that crap "with a straight face" and generally giving the "right signals." It's typically stuff you'd think noone with half a brain would actually believe, if they only engaged their logic for a second. But they believe it anyway, because someone deliberately fed them the false body language signals.
I've known and been around people whose main skill and way to make a living was, basically, giving whatever body language signals they wanted to give. Saying the most mind-boggling lies "with a straight face" and "looking honest", "looking hurt" when they wanted to look hurt, or even getting tears in their eyes on demand. (That last one I can actually tell.) And people swallowed it all hook, line and sinker, because, hey, their instincts tell them to trust that nice person now, to try to cheer them up the next moment, and god knows what else.
Me, I don't even see that kind of stuff, I have to trust other people when they assure me that the nice salesman definitely looked sincere when he sold them that crap. My natural instinct would be to just take that series of statements for what it _is_, and see if it actually produces the conclusion I'm fed. Instead of getting stuck on taking dumb shortcuts like "it must be true, because he looks honest" or "naah, it would be mean of me to hurt him more by dissecting what he just said."
In effect, I'm naturally shielded from what, as far as I can extrapolate, seems to be a very common form of deception. I'm "colour-blind" (metaphorically speaking) in a world where it seems rather common for some people to use colours for deception, deceit, fraud. I can be thankful for that.
2. It seems a rather common trend for Asperger's Syndrome people to be, abover all else, logical, fascinated by one or more narrow scientific domains, and prone to hyper-focus when working on that domain.
It's, if you will, like distributing stat points or traits in a D&D-type game. You take some points from here, and put them in that other stat. Or like when you roll a mage instead of a warrior, you lose HP and armour class, but gain spells.
Ok, maybe not the best analogy, but you surely understand what I mean: it's not just a handicap, we got something else in return. We're the guys who were _fascinated_ by how a radio works, or by assembly language, while the other kids were playing popularity games. We're the guys who (assuming we found a willing listener) were talking about the differences between Haskel and Prolog, while the other teenagers were debating whether Jane or Amy is more fashionable. We're the guys who go into a hyper-focus trance and produce a big block of code, or the proof of a theorem, while the rest of the gang plods through changing an if here and a sign there and see if it worked. Etc.
Admittedly, it's not for everyone, and I'm not saying everyone should be like that. If your goal is to get into higher management, for example, honestly, you won't have much of a chance as an AS, and chances are you wouldn't enjoy that kind of a job anyway. On the other hand, for
Slashdot Mirror
Lemme see:
- Virtual lawsuits: nope, don't exist. This is a RL lawsuit, alleging that someone used a hacking tool to copy some copyrighted scripts and animations. The fact that those animations and scripts are used as, basically, a mod for a game, doesn't make it any less real.
To put things into perspective, let's say you wrote a bunch of scripts for anything else: a mod for a game, an application server, whatever. It's your product. Then I come along and not only copy it, but put my name on it and sell it as my own script pack. Why the fuck does it matter if it's for a game, or for adminning WebSphere, or configuring a Gentoo box? I took your work and put my name on it.
- Virtual taxes: nope, don't exist either. All that keeps popping up now and then is the idea that if you sell something in _real_ life, for _real_ money, then it's RL income and the government wants its cut. If you make a living selling second-hand cars, then you have to pay income tax and possibly VAT. If you make a living selling computer clip-art or fonts (also exist as only files) on your web site, the same applies. If you make a living selling virtual items on your web-site, for real money, it's just as much an income, and you're just as much supposed to pay income tax for it.
What's so horribly hard to understand there? If you make an income, regardless of what you sell or do for it, you get taxed. There's no special provision for virtual stuff, and it certainly isn't a virtual tax.
- Virtual life: nope, trust me, noone takes it too seriously. It's just a funky name for playing a game, or having a chat room with graphics. At the end of the day, noone forgets that they're in RL, playing a game. At any rate, unless you're a luddite and never played a game, exactly what's your problem?
So, indeed, reading posts like yours really makes me wonder if people are really as stupid and detached from reality as they act. You operate on some wildly false assumptions and take a leap to the "I'm so smart, all these people are stupid" ego-masturbation based on nothing more than that. Did you stop to even try to understand what really happens there before jumping to the "people are so stupid" masturbation exercise? Nah, because you're obviously soo smart that you must be right anyway. Not.
I kinda doubt that the CIA can't find better training than this. Mind you, I'm not from the US, but I thought each army has their own engineers branch which offers more in-depth knowledge about demolitions and military use of explosives than a summer camp. Including how to safely get rid of the explosives if, say, the convoy you were expected didn't pass that way. I'd think CIA would have no problems getting a trainer from the army or navy and organizing their own training.
If nothing else, reading TFA, it doesn't seem like it would make that useful training for 007-like or terrorist use of explosives. Stuff like how to safely blow up a side of quarry, or better yet, how to make a spud gun, are useful for mining or respectively entertainment, but don't translate well into how to do that much else with explosives.
Or, rather, not much that you couldn't already google. I mean, you can look up ANFO on Wikipedia, and that's the main explosive used by the mining industry. If you can buy the ammonium nitrate and wanted to make a car bomb with that, you don't really need courses in how to drill the holes and calculate the dosage to blast a rock face in a quarry.
Also, about CIA use, again, I may be wrong about America, but it seems to me that:
1. People aren't that interchangeable between mining jobs and covert ops type jobs. Just knowing how to drill a hole and prime a stick of dynamite doesn't also make you want to go abroad and blow up some Arabs. Between making a decent risk-free living at home and going and risking your life abroad for better pay, most people would choose the first.
2. And it doesn't mean you even could, probably. About 95% of the people have this interlock in the brains against being _too_ mean to other people. About 3% are sociopaths, and don't. And there are a few more in between. So, really, statistically chances are higher that you'd be in the "nice guy" category, not in the "sociopath" cathegory.
The army has had millenia of figuring out how to (A) drill people into executing some stuff mechanically against cardboard targets or with blanks, until it becomes reflex by the time they have to do it against live targets. (B) Instill an "us vs them" theme and some groupthink notions of duty, honour, patriotism, etc, to help get people pull the trigger even if they don't really want to. (C) Getting people in a situation in which, one way or the other, it's your ass if you don't cap that other guy. Now that really helps get people to pull the trigger. (D) Creating a whole organization and hierarchy for dissipating responsibility, so noone from the guy who mines pitchblende to the general who orders the strike to the pilot who drops the atom bomb on Hiroshima feels particularly responsible for it all.
And it still gets a lot of people waking up in cold sweat for the rest of their lives, a.k.a., Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Heck, even some of the war atrocities are, ironically, traceable to the fact that man wasn't designed to kill man. People either get to (A) break down not understanding why the other guys shoot at him, what's wrong with them? Are they savage animals? and/or (B) get caught in that grouphink trap, thinking everyone else around is brave and fearless and all patriotic, and do dumb things to hide the fact that personally they're scared shitless.
Anyway, a lot of those only work in a group, and only work in a situation where it's short term "it's either them or me" and no easy way out. It doesn't quite apply to a lone killers.
Briefly, it might be a lot easier easier to first select with someone without scruples and give them explosives training, than to convert a peaceful mining engineer into a commando trooper.
3. The last person you'd want in the army or some secret service is some "Explosions are cool, Beavis!" type who makes spud guns or blows stuff up when they're bored, and wears a "I [heart] explosives" t-shirt. You'd probably want someone a lot more mentally stable than that.
It's simply a matter of the extent of damage done. Yes, there are people who are less ethical, but if their whole user base is measured in hundreds or maybe thousands, well, that's a rather tiny amount of damage done. The extent of their unethical behaviour may be limited to bribing a PHB or two to buy their software, but otherwise they're just not in a position to do much harm.
MS by contrast, even managed to pull the stunt of getting the US government to bend over and give it a sentence that says, in a nutshell, "ok, if you promise to watch over yourselves, sign here to never be sued for this stuff again." After being already found in violation of the law. That's a heist of historic proportions.
The extent of MS's damage doesn't even just include their software as such, or the bribes and political lobbying, it includes twisting the market into a screwed-up state where noone can compete with one of their products without having to compete with everything else. It effectively raised entry barriers to some ridiculous levels so noone can compete with it.
It didn't get there by just making a better product and letting the market decide if they want to buy it, but destroying any competitor, by any means available, most of them illegal. Most of the time, that seems to be MS's game. They're not even as much just into defending their monopoly, but into destroying as many other companies as possible, or pushing them into a subservience position where they effectively aggree to take the crumbs in return for helping MS get another slice of the pie.
Etc.
Basically, what you're saying there is roughly like "well, there are lesser criminals who are just as unethical at heart, so why do you hate Stalin and Pol Pot more?" Well, because between a guy who killed 1-2 people and a guy who killed 10-20 million, the latter is the bigger villain. Sure, they're all despicable villains, but some did more damage and richly deserve to be more hated.
Because it's about patents, and some people have an allergy to that word as a matter of principle. You know, everyone should invest billions in research (considering that IIRC for medicine it costs over 100 million just to get it tested and approved, and for other high tech stuff research costs are even ridiculously higher) and then let everyone undercut their prices (it's easier to price your stuff cheaper when you don't any research costs to recoup.) People should just be proud to go bankrupt to further technology, obviously.
Also, patents have this nice advantage for FUD and clueless crusading: if you don't actually read it, and conveniently skip (or don't understand) around the parts that are new, everything can be made to sound like a rehash of something that already exists. Sealed hard drive _in_ liquid bag? Well, just ignore the "hard drive in liquid" part and it just sounds like a sealed gel bag. New ceramics insulation for a capacitor? Ignore the new material and manufacturing technology, and it's just a capacitor. New antibiotic? Ignore the "new" part, and the research which went into finding it, and it's just an antibiotic, those things existed for ages. Why the heck are people allowed to patent those?
(For bonus points, for medicine also add (A) the standard conspiracy theories that the Russians/Chinese/Tibetan-monks/etc discovered some wonder drug that heals everything, regardless of being gram-positive bacteria, gram-negative bacteria, virus, fungus, physical damage, allergy or mutation of one's own cells, and the evil pharma companies hide that so they can sell such new antibiotics, and (B) how they're evil if they try to recoup those research costs instead of giving the medicine for free to poor kids in Africa, and to everyone else who needs it, for that matter.)
At any rate, here's why it's about "your rights": because some people think they have a sacred right to make a living out of someone else's research. They shouldn't ever have to research anything or have a single original thought in their whole life. They should just wait until someone comes up with a new idea, then make a living copying it. If some law prevents them from doing that, it's obviously a violation of their very human rights.
I'm a bit at a loss as to the "Online" part, but I guess it's because there was no "your rights offline" category.
Well, the problem is also the very short effect. Even if (ad absurdum) you shot enough of those to get the mob sedated, it's for, what? 2-3 seconds? Then they're un-sedated again and quite as able to do something dumb as before.
Except now they had 2-3 seconds of impaired judgment and maybe slight hallucinations. Which they can now base further acts on. A dumb idea that came while you were on nitrous oxide, is hardly finished going through your head by the time you're again fit to carry it out. Even if you'd tell me it's disassociative enough to not get violent ideas (as opposed to just being unable to implement them), you might get some sound and visual distortions in that time, and you can then get violent ideas based on them after the couple of seconds are over. It might just take one guy mis-understanding something as "they're sending the army" while they're high, or thinking they saw someone with a machinegun, or "whoa, that's got to be real ammo", or whatever, to start a ruckus and maybe go berserk afterwards, when the calming effect wore off.
Honestly, when dealing with an angry mob, I'd rather not take that chance. Even if for _most_ people it won't have that effect, it sometimes only takes one tiny little bit to spark an avalanche. One guy hallucinating the wrong thing can be enough.
Historically some pretty bloody things happened over rash decisions and over-reacting, probably the most well known being the battleship Potemkin revolt. Not saying it's a 1-to-1 equivalent, but just as an example of a situation which went within a second from disgruntled to bloody.
All else being equal, I'd very much wish everyone involved was as clear headed as possible there, which already isn't clear headed at all in an angry mob.
Hmm... now I didn't RTFA, but the summary doesn't mention anything even remotely equivalent to "we wanted more money". So do you have any other information you base that on, or is it just pulled out of the ass? Especially given that I suspect they were better paid at Blizzard than at some startup company noone heard about yet, that assumption seems somewhat fragile.
The only thing which would come even close is the talk of long term contracts and compensations, but he _does_ spell out that they wanted to know how to plan their future, so it doesn't necessarily come out as greed. It doesn't say they went and demanded contracts for life, it says they went and asked for a communication channel. There's a big difference.
It may come as a surprise, but some people do actually like to know what happens next. You know, game is finished now, what happens next? Do we stick around and make an expansion pack? Extra content? A new game? Should we start sending out resumes now? Uncertainty about that can bring morale downwards quite a bit.
As for position of strength, I beg to differ. World Of Warcraft turned out to be a bigger money printing machine than anyone expected, Vivendi included. People thought the old Everquest was a money printing license, and is what got half the developpers and publisher in a frenzy to try to make yet another MMO. And most attempts to imitate it failed pretty badly. Well, WoW overtook it by a whole freakin' order of magnitude. It has some 95% of the MMO market IIRC.
Basically, as dev team achievements go, these guys pulled an _amazing_ achievement. I don't know what happened there, but that team had some incredible talent and worked surprisingly well. Design talent, programming talent (considering almost every MMO before was traditionally a _horribly_ buggy mess, and would spend eternity creating two new bugs for each one fixed... and some got into a dead end and got cancelled), etc.
It takes a pretty brain-damaged PHB to just squander such an asset over something as petty and trivial as being asked to have an official communication channel. Whatever happened to transparency and communication? Because the way I read it, that's really all they were asking for.
I know it's all the rage to treat employees as dime-a-dozen expendable, replaceable peons, but sometimes it comes out as particularly retarded. We're not talking pizza-delivery kind of expendable, but a team which was one of the legends in their field, and head over shoulders over most of the rest. They're not _that_ easily replaced. Not considering them even important enough to be informed what next, before they read the press release, seems kinda extreme, as low opinions go.
Well, there probably is a lot of that too, but I'm left scratching my head what would someone actually want to sell via _some_ of the stories. Take this one, for example. Whose marketter is trying to paint the South Korean government in a bad light, and exactly what are they selling, anyway?
:P
The gold farmers make less than 1$ per hour, last I've read about it, so they're not quite in a position to hire a good PR firm and manufacture news.
Plus, their interests are better served by other kinds of articles, like the recently linked NYT article that painted the gold farmers in such a positive light (you know, just poor hard-working guys trying to make a living) and as being the poor victims of mean players who gank them on sight. It even managed to present a situation that was clear-cut botting unattended (i.e., blatantly breaking the TOS and one thing that's pretty justified in causing a negative reaction), _and_ it was farming quest NPCs unattended at that (so, you know, even in the short term it was hindering players who needed them for the quest and for the rep to even have access to an area)... as some case where evil self-righteous players victimized the poor Chinese gold farmer. So, anyway, if I were a gold farmer I'd submit links to more articles like that.
Anyway, I didn't say that _all_ stories were submitted by nerds. I think the more inflammatory and blatantly lopsided ones are, though. A proper PR agency should know better than that. And, frankly, if MS or Apple can't afford professional PR guys, I'd start worrying about them
Finally, don't underestimate genuine fanboyism. Assuming that people need to be paid, or to be part of some conspiracy, to do something stupid and/or annoying is rather false.
I stand corrected. The condoms idea is even dumber.
Actually the exact opposite is probably true. Most newspapers, at least in the western world, discovered around the start of the 20'th century that it pays to at least pretend to be impartial. Yes, they still aren't really impartial, and they still kept their opinion columns (although at least now they're more or less marked as such, and not as hard news) but they're a lot more subtle in their manipulation than that.
It's not even as much doing the morally right thing, it's just business. At some point the public as a whole was largely fed up with the hyperbole- and libel-ladden pieces of journalism and pamphlets of the 19'th century. So someone discovered, much to their surprise, that they actually have more readers if they just report the news, instead of fabricating it or outright telling people what to think about it.
Again, I'm aware it's still nowhere near perfect, and even "impartiality" means something slightly different to the media than to the rest of us. I'm not entirely naive, trust me. I'm just saying it used to be a lot worse. "Protocols of the Elders Of Zion" kinda bad, or claiming that Lincoln was at the head of some subversive African conspiracy. Inventing ridiculous super-villain-type plans of your opponents (e.g., that they're actually proposing building sewers or a subway so they can blow their own capital up from below, when their Illuminati masters order it) used to be just business as usual.
At any rate, nowadays an actual printed newspaper would be a lot less blatantly inflammatory there. Even if they wanted to manipulate you into being for or against it (which actually newspapers themselves don't often do, but is often is the case with PR pieces submitted as news), they'd work hard into making it look like they just gave you the data and you reached the "whoa, it's evil" conclusion yourself. Especially in PR there are people damn skilled at _not_ looking blatantly partisan. It would involve some interviews, some impartial study maybe, and in "journalistic impartiality" tradition it would involve two conflicting points of view, and they're not telling you which of the two to believe. (Just incidentally the one pro-taxing ends up saying the wrong things, and causing a "well, I'm not siding with _this_ guy" reaction.)
Unfortunately, (or maybe fortunately, you can choose) Slashdot stories are rarely submitted by real journalists. They're _usually_ submitted by nerds who never figured the "pretend to not tell people what to think" part, so they outright go ahead and do that. Some (though not all) even have an axe to grind, an ideological crusade to fight, and a messiah complex to save you all from the evil corporations/government/current-economic-model/wh
It's not like it's the first time anything like this happened, anyway.
The question is: would it even work? Or would those contractors get big bucks for possibly the dumbest idea in history?
Laughing gas not only doesn't make people actually laugh, and certainly not in the minute quantities you can fit in a rubber bullet (doubly so considering that you'll aim at the chest, not pump the gas over their nose), it gets people euphoric (a sort of high, basically), might even cause slight halucinations, and it dulls the sensation of pain.
So shoot enough of these in an angry crowd, and now you have a crowd that's (A) angrier, since you just shot at them, (B) manic enough to do dumber things than normally, and (C) a lot less sensitive to pain. Just so, you know, they won't be as deterred by further rubber bullets or tear gas or a police batton. It sounds to me like just what you need to turn some unruly demonstrators into an outright riot. Or an outright riot into hell broken loose.
Especially B scares me. Being high even on nitrous oxide might just impair people's judgment just that tiny little bit needed to do something really dumb. Like "heehee, let's throw a big rock at the cops." Or "heehee, let's get their guns and shoot a bystander." Sure, it's no LSD, but we're talking the kind of situations where it often takes just a spark to go downhill fast. You might need just one guy getting over his inhibitions or thinking he saw or heard the awfully wrong thing, to spark everyone else into going berserk.
True, but I have to wonder:
1. how large planets they'd get. Assuming the accretion disc was on the whole only 10% as dense, well, are they going to get an Earth-sized planet out of it?
2. at that point we're talking stars which _barely_ fuse hydrogen at all, which is how 10% of the Sun's mass lasts them for a trillion years. They're very cold stars, _barely_ above the level of a brown dwarf. So, well, for all practical reasons you're back to square one, it's no better than looking for a brown dwarf, only it doesn't cool down.
Try to think the complete picture. You need not only a brown dwarf, but also a planet that's in the right band, _and_ has the right planet type there (being in the right band doesn't help you much if you have the mass of Mercury and can't hold an atmosphere) _and_ has the right rotation speed _and_ plate tectonics (these two doomed Venus) _and_ is new enough to not have cooled down yet (100 billions is a freaking _huge_ time.)
I stand by what I've said: those will be few and far in between.
Let me also qualify that: few and far given that (A) there seems to be no way to travel faster than light, which puts a heck of a limit on how far we can look for one to move to, and (B) as per TFA, the universe will have expanded a _lot_ by then, so, really, everything outside our galaxy will be out of reach. And I don't mean out of reach as in "too far to bother there", but as in outside the causality cone, so even with magic drives and magic ships it's not even theoretically possible to get there. That kinda "out of reach."
And point B affects point A too. The galaxy itself will probably be freakin' huge by then, as in, billions of light years across. That doesn't just mean "whoa, even at light speed, you'd need an eternity to move to the other end", it means that by the time the signal even reaches you about a possibly habitable star at the other end, chances are that star would already be dead or dying.
So that puts a heck of a lot of limit on where you can look for the next planet to move to.
Also, that just makes me realize another detail: in an universe that stretched, there's a lot more space for the hydrogen to go. If you have one solar mass worth of hydrogen in a 100 lightyear sphere, that's not going to accrete into an actual star any time soon.
Duly noted, and you are right. "Fast" or "slow" are horribly relative terms, and I should have qualified it better than that. If it's any help, I meant "for a 100 billion years deadline." It's too fast for that particular race, though, indeed, you are right, by a lot of other kinds of reckoning it's not fast at all.
Fair point, indeed, but somehow I'm not betting on it.
1. Yes, energy indeed cannot be destroyed. It does, however, get trapped in the mass of the heavier nuclei synthetised during a supernova blast (E = mc^2) or, basically, lost as photons traveling around an ever increasing universe. Especially the latter is, really, the whole point in this topic. There'll be increasingly more photons which are (A) traveling the ever increasing space between galaxies, and never getting anywhere, and (B) getting red-shifted to such ridiculous wave lengths that they will _not_ be doing anything to any nucleus they encounter.
Basically the incoming power decreases with the square of the distance, and the whole point is that the distance is increasing. Accelerating even. So even as more energy piles up, there's more and more space (and red-shift) for it to go through and never hit anything. If you pointed a flashlight upwards outside, only an infinitesimally tiny fraction (or more likely none at all) of the photons will ever hit _anything_, because there's simply an incredible amount of empty space out there.
And if it does hit another star, chances are it'll be infrared or even microwave, so don't expect it to split any nuclei.
2. Yes, technology will continue to advance, but I'm not sure what it's going to do about it. Unless it discovers a way to produce energy out of _nothing_ whatsoever, it's still stuck at the same point we are. To create a main-sequence star at that point, it would have to split trillions of tonnes of heavier elements into hydrogen. Where is it going to get the energy for that? Solar is out, fusion _and_ fission are out (most nuclei will be iron at that point, so neither yields an energy gain), fossil fuels aren't _nearly_ packing enough energy, etc. Where's that energy going to come from?
Basically to build a main-sequence star, you're looking at needing as much energy as that star will produce during its billions of years of lifetime. Where are you going to get that, in an universe that's already running out of energy? How are you going to get that in a burst? Even if we were talking about building a sun in 10 million years (which is already an ludicriously large interval: humans never stuck to a plan for 0.01% of that time), you're looking at needing 1000 times the sun's raw power output, and that's at 100% efficiency and 0% losses (a.k.a., never gonna happen.) Where are you going to get that in an universe that, really, is running out of fuel?
3. At any rate, for all we know now, there'll be noone alive at that point. If technology ever gets better, let them worry about that then, not now.
4. Finally, we're talking about a freakin' _huge_ interval. The Homo Sapiens species is only 200 million years old. Worrying about what happens in in 100 _billion_ years is just nuts. Whole empires rose and fell in a _billionth_ of that time. Whole social models or indeed whole civilizations disappeared in a tiny fraction of that, and great libraries turned to ashes in what's really just a tiny blip on that scale. Planning what to do for the next 100 billion years is just nuts.
Well, that's really the thing. 25% gone in 13.7 billion years is a _lot_, when you're talking 100 billion years.
;)
Will usage decrease? Well, that wouldn't make it that horribly much better, because that means, in a nutshell, less main-sequence stars.
It will also mean more hydrogen which technically still exists, but is going nowhere: it's trapped in brown dwarfs that never start fusion, Jupiters, black holes, etc. Those things don't blow up, so basically short of some cataclismic event like head-on star collisions, it won't end up in a star. So expect the number of main-sequence stars to drop even faster. If the hydrogen use is, say, roughly 1/t past a point, then expect the main sequence stars to drop like 1/t^2. (Also pulled out of the arse, I don't have the time or inclination to do proper research at 1:30 AM
So, basically increasingly less places where life can evolve or move to. We might end up with the next inhabitable place being on the other end of the galaxy before the 100 billion years are up.
Also, going by the number in your example, 7.5% hydrogen means you're pretty much screwed. It's like getting your gasoline 7.5% in <insert inert liquid of the same density>: your engine won't work on it any more, a long time before that. A star with 7.5% hydrogen just won't produce any significant amount of hydrogen fusion. Stars die, one way or another, a long time before they get anywhere _near_ that kind of a composition.
So basically at that point, to get a main sequence star, you're betting on some _incredibly_ low odds of getting a freak fluctuation where you had a big pocket of hydrogen that somehow didn't accrete into a star earlier. We're talking odds akin to winning every single lottery on Earth on the same day. Repeatedly. There won't be many of them around.
One within close enough range to evacuate humanity to? Heh. I wouldn't bet on that.
Let's put things in perspective a bit:
The universe itself is 13.7 billion of years old. Our Sun is only about 5 billion years old.
In this interval, the universe already burned a heck of a lot of Hydrogen to Helium, and even a lot of Helium to Carbon and so on until iron. You can't really have a star powered by fusing anything heavier, because fusing heavier stuff actually takes energy.
(Anything higher than that is formed in a supernova blast. Basically some of the immense energy of the supernova is used to fuse some of the ejected elements into even higher density stuff.)
Hydrogen is really the low hanging fruit of star fuel. It's for stars what the coal mines were for the industrial revolution. It's damn easy to start fusing hydrogen. (Easier if you have some heavier elements as catalysts to start the reaction, but the hydrogen will be the fuel anyway.) It's damn hard to start fusing anything else.
Even helium is tricky. It requires some _immense_ pressures and temperatures, and a state that's already degenerate matter. It even starts to happen somewhere between 100 and 200 million Kelvin. It's also a bloody unstable process. The released power is proportional IIRC to the temperature raised to the _30th_ power, so it's easy for it to run away: more power released rises the temperature some more, which rises the power some more (and rather abruptly at that), which rises temperature, etc. A star the size of our sun would just blow itself up almost instantly if it was made of Helium and actually ignited Helium fusion.
Where I'm getting is that the universe has a finite budget of hydrogen and keeps using it fast. (Well, "fast" by cosmic scales.) And then some of it gets buried in black holes and the like too. So planning to have main sequence stars in 100 billion years, is sorta like planning to still be using the oil in the middle east by then: chances are it will have run horribly thin, long time before that.
In 100 billion years, probably the best you could get is a brown dwarf, a.k.a., a star that doesn't actually fuse anything, but it heated up when collapsing into a star, and will need a horribly long time to cool down. And hopefully a planet that's close enough to it, to be just warm enough.
They'll be few and far in between though, so no telling if one will be close enough to move to it.
Also, lemme say: the only chance of life there will be that someone moves to it. If you look at long time Earth history, the Sun started a lot cooler when the Earth atmosphere was made of methane, so the massive greenhouse effect just helped keep temperature in the right band for life to appear. Then as the Sun heated up, life switched atmosphere to oxygen. We've been walking a tightrope on the border between turning into Venus (if life appeared just a little later) or turning into a deep-frozen snowball that kills everything (if photosynthesis started just a little earlier.) And we actually had a damn close shave with complete extinction, the planet-sized snowball kind.
A brown dwarf just doesn't follow that pattern. It doesn't gradually warm up, it actually starts (very very slowly) cooling down as soon as it formed. But you can pretty much approximate it as constant temperature, for the purpose of this discussion. And therein lies the problem: if it's cool enough for a methane-atmosphere planet to evolve life, that will turn into a permanent deep-frozen wasteland as soon as it evolves photosynthesis. And if it would be warm enough for an oxygen-atmosphere planet, then it's way too hot early when that planet is still methane-based. That planet will turn into Venus before it has half a chance to evolve life.
So pretty much in 100 billion years we're looking at a dead or dying universe anyway. Worrying that they'll have witch hunts is kinda silly, when, you know, there won't be anyone alive there.
Here's a fun concept for you: Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy: massaging the data into looking like whatever you want it to look like. That's what Koster is doing. Just because Raph can argue a hypothesis without (A) any more proof than his own delusions of grandeur (it must be true because He said so), and (B) based on some very vague correlations and assumptions (just because it involves some learning, doesn't mean that's what triggers the "fun" signal), doesn't make it true.
Here's another fun concept for you: Correlation does not imply causation. Just because (A) you're having fun, and (B) you're learning something, doesn't mean that A causes B. B is something so intrinsic to the brain, that it's there just by virtue of being there all the time. It's like saying that the sun causes the fun signal, because hey, every time you're having fun, the sun still exists.
And in this case it's not just the taking a wild assumption, it's outright ignoring reality and the readily available counter-examples. There's a heap of counter examples where B (learning) is present, yet A (the fun) is missing. Think a boring lecture at college. Think being forced to learn a subject you don't like. FFS, think the players'/users' complaints about the learning curve. So postulating that "B => A" is just stupid. If there is at least one case (and there are plenty) where B is true, yet A is false, that implication just doesn't hold.
Here's a third fun concept for you: theory != hypothesis. What Koster does is just handwaving a _hypothesis_. It's not a theory, it's not some grand revelation, it's just an unproven hypothesis. Supported by nothing more than handwaving and ignoring everything that was already known.
As for point 4, no, au contraire. It means that there is _no_ dedicated "learning is fun" circuit up there. Those signals measure how much your situation has actually improved, not how much you learned from it. Heck, there isn't even any actual learning until you've slept a night or two on it: that's when any data is actually committed to long-term storage. Seriously, read a real biology book, if you want real info, not Koster's ego-masturbation.
Oh, wait, is that you, Koster? Well, then carry on. That's exactly the kind of thing I expected from you.
Oh, no doubt a lot of that stuff happens. And indeed, now that you mention it, it does sound like something game designers could use more.
But just saying that dumping a bunch of info on someone won't trigger an "I'm having fun" signal in their brain, no matter how you look at it. Some of SWG's biggest mistakes were based on (A) not understanding there's more than that, and (B) taking the "learning = fun" idiom way too literally.
There will be some learning involved, but for some people that's actually a turn off, not the reason they're having fun. You have to keep the game fun for _their_ personal taste, and give them enough rewards to compensate for it.
Getting new info or learning something new is only perceived as "good" or "fun" in as much as you convince each group of players that it's furthering their own cause and goals. Basically:
- explorers: most will find it fun just to find out new stuff, but even for those it has to not feel like a lecture. The game has to have _depth_, and basically be like one of those kids' chemistry sets: give you enough elements and constraints to combine and experiment with. That's really what most explorers are all about: experimenting with a heap of wires, bolts, and body parts and seeing if they can come up with a Frankenstein. These are the mad scientists of MUD's and MMOs. Knowing that is already more useful in designing a fun game even for explorers, than merely "learning = fun."
- achievers: they appreciate information in as much as it furthers their goal. They'll appreciate learning a tactic that lets them defeat the boss who drops the +5 Sword Of Awesome, but they won't appreciate learning trivia. At any rate, for them it's not the learning new stuff as such that ends up feeling like fun, but the reward or anticipation of a reward.
- killers: (Bear in mind that by "killers" Bartle didn't mean "PvP players", but what the rest of us call "griefers". The term "killers" comes from the greatest reward they can find: driving someone completely off the game, in effect permanently "killing" them off the game.) They'll appreciate any information which can be used to make someone else's day miserable, they won't appreciate trivia which doesn't. They'll over info about how to get a +5 Sword Of Ganking, but may be completely uninterested in information how to get a Sword Of Undead Slaying, if no players can be undead.
- socializers: these are pretty tough customers to satisfy by game mechanics, because their main goal isn't to actually play the game. The best you can do is give them enough social possibilities (chat channels, guilds, clubs, housing, whatever) and reach a critical mass of active players, so they have lots of people to play with. In effect, to get socializers, you must first make the game fun for everyone else, so they see lots of people around to talk to. How do you get them to learn stuff? Tough question. Maybe make it an opportunity for social interaction, like organizing a guild event to solve the problem.
That's of course, just one way to slice the players into groups, and not even the only one. It's probably the earliest and best known, though, so I figured it will make a good example.
And, yeah, someone with solid knowledge of cognitive science could do a lot more for each group. Just saying, though, that it helps if you realize you're dealing with more than one group and more than one set of priorities. The "learning = fun" over-simplification is IMHO the awfully wrong axiom to start with. It's like starting by postulating "only rabbits live in the woods" and then getting genuinely surprised when one is mangled by a bear.
You know, while games may have potential to educate, Raph Koster is... less than clued anyway:
1. Let me point out that, if he's that good at knowing what makes a game fun, why didn't he make SWG fun? It started a niche game in the first place, with plenty of unpopular ideas but tolerated by some for the sake of the franchise or because it was the only one with a non-linear advancement. And then got kicked in the balls twice with some _massively_ uninspired changes that managed to turn even most of those away, the last change managing even to take away the main reason why people stuck with it.
At any rate, if he's the expert at what _all_ people find fun, why didn't he manage to attract more than a niche of the market? That's a reality check.
2. There are studies better than Koster's anyway. If you want to have a slightly broader insight than, basically, "what Koster personally finds fun", try Bartle's original classification of MUD players. Bartle saw 4 categories there, or 4 personality components, by looking at what players actually _do_ in games: socializers, explorers, achievers and killers. Koster saw only one of them, basically: the explorers. There are at least 3 other major groups of players, which Koster at best spent some time handwaving why he knows better than them what they really want, than actually trying to understand them.
3. Here's another reality check: there are plenty of games which are very light on the learning. Take Tetris, for example, or Lumines, or the whole category of real time puzzle games that work on the same basic principle. Sure, there is quick thinking involved, but not much learning. After maybe the first hour, that's it, you won't learn any new information about Tetris. (Go ahead, try to play tetris for a few hours, and then sit and think what permanent lessons you've learned today.) Yet a lot of people found it fun.
Or take a lot of FPS players. I know someone personally who spent years on the same CS map, climbing the same ladder, crawling through the same duct, and jumping up and down in front of the same vent. Just because that got him the highest score. What was he learning there?
No, the much more obvious common denominator is: rewards. Give players their favourite rewards often. It doesn't have to be big rewards, it just has to feel like having achieved something. And keep doing it. That's what makes games fun. Whether it's a new armour piece, a new friend, or a row eliminated at Tetris.
Now what counts as a reward varies among players. Some appreciate knowledge (explorers), some like talking to people and making friends (socializers), some like getting lots of points or a big enchanted sword (achievers), and some like to humiliate/annoy/etc (killers.) It basically boils down to what each player deems important: an achievement along that axis will be felt like a bigger achievement. And as humans have more than one personality, it's pretty ridiculous to make a claim like all fun is learning, because some people will assign the least priority to that.
4. What might help understand what happens there, is a bit of neurochemistry. People's brains are wired to, basically, do a differential. Anything that improves your situation triggers a release of chemicals, like, say, dopamine, which are quite similar to drugs in a nutshell. (Well, except they're natural brain chemicals.) Conversely, everything that worsens your situation significantly makes you unhappy.
It's the natural "wiring" to keep doing what's good for you. If you do something that improves your situation (e.g., eat when you're hungry), there's an "I'm happy!" signal triggering in your brain. If you let your situation deteriorate too much, you gradually get less and less comfortable and happy. It's not just for humans, that's what keeps your cat or dog taking care of themselves too.
At any rate, you don't notice absolute values. You only notice differences. Getting a 19" TFT makes you happy if you were on a 17" before, or on a CRT, it makes you actually
Heh. So basically you can keep the kernel running, but your X programs are fucked anyway. Well, gee, that's so different from rebooting the system.
In fact, lemme get this straight. So Linux is _so_ much better because when a driver crashed, Joe Average could:
1. buy a second computer, so he can SSH into the first one. Just, you know, because it's so evil to buy a $25 firewall for your Windows box, but it's cool to buy a whole second computer for your Linux box.
2. learn a bunch of command-line stuff and other nerdy stuff, so, you know, he can actually kill the right process. Which otherwise he wouldn't have needed.
3. reload X and restart his programs. The unsaved changes are still lost anyway.
4. Maybe (or maybe not) discover that the driver did screw something else up. Like, since most drivers come with their own agpgart kernel drivers, left that one in an unstable state. So let's do that all again, with a bit of forced unloading and loading drivers back.
As opposed to that evil old Windows XP, where he restarts the computer and the program. So basically just step 3. And if you're running KDE or, to a lesser extent, Gnome, it actually takes more time to start X than it takes to boot an XP computer completely.
Heh.
Look, honestly, for Joe Average whether he restarts just X or the whole XP, is irrelevant. His programs and unsaved data are still fucked either way, and the full restart is a no-brainer. You don't even need to know what "ps" and "kill -9" are. Whether or not the kernel kept running is, at most, relevant for uptime e-penis size bragging rights, but normal people tend to not give a damn about those willy-waving contests.
Yes, I know it's good for your karma to rehash the same "Windows BSODs" crap, but I'll call bull.
1. I've had that disabled for years, and I've had exactly one instance of BSOD-ing so far. (The reason was a crappy driver. Yeah, that's so MS's fault. A Linux user would be _so_ able to continue using their KDE programs if the video drivers crashed. Not.)
2. You would still notice it if your computer was restarting all the time. So, you know, it would be exactly the same amount of tech support calls whether it's "I've got a BSOD" or "this damn computer keeps restarting".
3. It wouldn't be that well hidden anyway, because it does briefly show a BSOD before restarting.
4. And if ad-absurdum they actually managed to hide it that well that you don't even notice, then why would it matter?
So, you know, propaganda tends to work better if it doesn't amount to telling people "your Windows BSOD's all the time!... even though you've probably never seen it actually doing it." It tends to be kinda like me telling you that you have to move because there's an elephant in your bathroom, even though you probably don't see it.
So basically you're telling me that someone smarter will do better than someone dumber. Well, no arguments there as such, but I hope you realize that that's not necessarily an argument for curing autism.
The problem is that you're talking about two different persons, while I'm essentially talking about the same person with or without Asperger's. Because that's what it boils down to, when discussing a cure. Would the cure also raise their IQ by 25 points or so, so they can maintain the previous level of obsessive learning unchanged _and_ have time to _also_ become a smooth socializer? I seriously doubt that.
Unless you also figure out a way to raise someone's IQ, it is zero-sum just because it's the same person. Person A devoting 16 hours a day to domain X, ends up better at it than the same person A splitting that time between domains X, Y and Z.
But let's talk even different persons.
To be among the top, curve-busting aces at even one domain already involves quite a bit of mental ability for even one domain. Devoting lots of time to it is necessary either way, but won't make one an Einstein if one's handicapped by an IQ of 80. So we're already talking people who have quite a bit of brain power.
If you want to work and absorb information signifficantly faster than them, so you're left with lots of time to master a bunch of other skills too, then you'd have to be a bloody genius.
Now complete geniuses and renaissance personalities like that do exist, but they're rare. We talk in admiration of, say, Leonardo Da Vinci because he's essentially one of a kind. If there were a million Leonardos, you wouldn't have even heard of him.
If that's your recipe for multi-talent prowess, then it's not exactly practicable for most of the population.
Heh, yes, everyone loves to say that social perception isn't the same as blind trust, but funny how it actually gets to work that way. The more someone is convinced that, basically, "nah, I'd know it if he was lying to me", the more they seem to trust that instinct instead of actually engaging the cortex. So you watch someone go and shovel so much bullshit on them that you're rolling for willpower to not burst into laughter, and they swallow it hook, line and sinker anyway.
I've actually watched demonstrations of it. First time was in the army, when our platoon pulled the guard duty. So part of it was being inspected first and asked to say what you're guarding, what you have to do, etc. One of my coleagues made a bet that he'll tell the officers the most unbelievable bullshit and get away with it. So he ends up telling a colonel (and a colonel who'd been in that unit for years, I might add) that he has to guard stuff that was in the opposite corners of the compound (thus no one guard post could _possibly_ guard all those), and some stuff that didn't even exist, and some stuff that was blatantly absurd. All while looking him right in the eyes and looking and sounding like the perfect soldier, or so everyone assured me. Not only he got away with it, he got congratulated and given as an example of how a soldier should learn his duties.
Go figure.
That said, hey, I said I was immune to _a_ form of deceit, not to all of them. I'm sure I've been lied to before, but at least someone had to at least do the minimal effort of putting together something that looks _logical_, instead of being just a well choreographed show. Sure, someone can still use made up statistics, made up studies to base their logic on, etc. At some point I'll run out of time and attention span to cross-check it all, like everyone else.
If you will, like a "bullet proof" vest still isn't proof against knives, and even as bullets go, it will only stop pistol/SMG ammo. It stops _a_ kind of attack, it doesn't make you invulnerable.
Still, you know, I can live with an imperfect protection. A lot of (maybe even most) people who seem to be skilled deceivers in person, don't seem to put the extra effort to make it too logical. They seem to be used to noone dissecting their bullshit too much, and genuinely surprised when someone does.
Unfortunately that's not been my experience, and in a very perverse way: being _perceived_ as great, does not equal actually having the skills.
So, yes, a lot of people can get a promotion or pass for the great guru, based on being socially adept at deceiving others. That much I'll admit. But when you actually get to see the code they produce, or that they spent a week debugging Java's HashMap because they don't actually have any fucking clue about how a hash table or a linked list work, you start to get the idea that maybe things do balance out.
(And no, that wasn't a made up example. I've had no less than 4 people so far come to me with "Java's HashMap is broken! It replaced my item with another that has the same hash code!" *Sigh*)
And I'll tell you one reason why it balances out: there are only 24 hours a day for everyone. Every hour you spend on popularity games, is one less hour you spend on something else, like learning to do your job. There's, if you will, some consolation in being ostracized in that you have that time available for someone else. Maybe a piss-poor consolation, but that's how it works. You have a couple of extra hours to code something or read a book, because you didn't use that time on your social skills.
Of course, the world isn't neatly divided into 100% ace or 100% incompetent, so there are a lot of people who can be _decent_ at two or more things. But when you really move towards the high end on any skill, you have to dedicate a lot of time to it. Try to do it for several unrelated skills, and you just don't have enough hours in a day for that.
Also, given that people perform the best at what they like, it would take some kind of mutant that's equally uber-interested in everything to excel at such a broad mix.
Basically I just don't believe the myth of people who are great, curve-busting even, at a several unrelated skills. It might make for a good unattainable ideal or for superhero comics, but I've yet to even hear of anyone IRL who was actually a great programmer/mathematician/physicist/whatever _and_ the life of the party _and_ a great athlete _and_ god knows what else. Unless they have a time machine and can get 48 hours in a day, it's just not going to happen.
Which brings us back to the first paragraph: so some people _fake_ it instead. They use their social skills to compensate for the lack of other skills, and basically paint an image of themselves that just isn't true. They'll compensate for their actual programming skill by putting up a careful show and taking credit for someone else's work. They'll compensate for their at best sporadic and mediocre athletic interests by spinning fabulous tales about it. Etc.
Sure, that can get them actually more appreciated, but it's not actually being curve-busting in those skills.
If Asperger's is like being colour blind, well, I can say that sometimes I'm happy to not see those colours.
1. I hear or read expressions every day to the effect of "he had an honest face", "he looked sincere" or "he had a poker face" or "said it with a straight face", or the fateful step forward from there: "I'd know if he was lying to me." For me that just doesn't exist, but I'll choose to believe that the people saying that stuff actually know what they're talking about. Or maybe it's wishful thinking and make belief for them too, I wouldn't know.
Either way, then I see people falling for the most unbelievable lies, either from the local sociopath or from the the nice IBM/MS/whatever salesman, because, hey, he was "looking honest" and saying that crap "with a straight face" and generally giving the "right signals." It's typically stuff you'd think noone with half a brain would actually believe, if they only engaged their logic for a second. But they believe it anyway, because someone deliberately fed them the false body language signals.
I've known and been around people whose main skill and way to make a living was, basically, giving whatever body language signals they wanted to give. Saying the most mind-boggling lies "with a straight face" and "looking honest", "looking hurt" when they wanted to look hurt, or even getting tears in their eyes on demand. (That last one I can actually tell.) And people swallowed it all hook, line and sinker, because, hey, their instincts tell them to trust that nice person now, to try to cheer them up the next moment, and god knows what else.
Me, I don't even see that kind of stuff, I have to trust other people when they assure me that the nice salesman definitely looked sincere when he sold them that crap. My natural instinct would be to just take that series of statements for what it _is_, and see if it actually produces the conclusion I'm fed. Instead of getting stuck on taking dumb shortcuts like "it must be true, because he looks honest" or "naah, it would be mean of me to hurt him more by dissecting what he just said."
In effect, I'm naturally shielded from what, as far as I can extrapolate, seems to be a very common form of deception. I'm "colour-blind" (metaphorically speaking) in a world where it seems rather common for some people to use colours for deception, deceit, fraud. I can be thankful for that.
2. It seems a rather common trend for Asperger's Syndrome people to be, abover all else, logical, fascinated by one or more narrow scientific domains, and prone to hyper-focus when working on that domain.
It's, if you will, like distributing stat points or traits in a D&D-type game. You take some points from here, and put them in that other stat. Or like when you roll a mage instead of a warrior, you lose HP and armour class, but gain spells.
Ok, maybe not the best analogy, but you surely understand what I mean: it's not just a handicap, we got something else in return. We're the guys who were _fascinated_ by how a radio works, or by assembly language, while the other kids were playing popularity games. We're the guys who (assuming we found a willing listener) were talking about the differences between Haskel and Prolog, while the other teenagers were debating whether Jane or Amy is more fashionable. We're the guys who go into a hyper-focus trance and produce a big block of code, or the proof of a theorem, while the rest of the gang plods through changing an if here and a sign there and see if it worked. Etc.
Admittedly, it's not for everyone, and I'm not saying everyone should be like that. If your goal is to get into higher management, for example, honestly, you won't have much of a chance as an AS, and chances are you wouldn't enjoy that kind of a job anyway. On the other hand, for