Yeah, but wasn't it pretty well accepted belief back then that you could never break the sound barrier?
Was it? I keep hearing such dismissive wisecracks, but I can't actually find any _scientist_ who said that, nor any actual law of physics from back then that said so. To the best of my knowledge, they didn't actually have any such law at any point.
There have been laymen jumping to such conclusions, and there have been _practical_ problems in getting there. E.g., you wouldn't accelerate a zeppelin (and we still don't) to such speeds because of the drag, and even by the end of WW2 we needed to redesign wings and engines for that. Yes. But that's just saying "it's very hard" or "it's not economical", not "it's impossible."
What we have here and now is that according to science as we know it, it's outright impossible to get above the speed of light, and there's a _lot_ of experimental confirmation for those principles of relativity. But we'll get to that in a jiffy.
As far as "sound scientific principles"....remember Newtons laws of motion? They were well accepted as "sound scientific principles" back then, and they held their ground for a couple of centuries. Then we started figuring out that they aren't exactly accurate in some scenarios. Who's to say that in the next century or two we won't start figuring out scenarios in which our current scientific understanding isn't exactly applicable.
Well, the thing is, Newton's laws of motion still apply within the domain they were created for. Relativity didn't come and say, "OMG, Newtonian physics don't apply any more, starting tomorrow apples fall upwards." Relativity just refines it towards one extreme (and quantum mechanics towards the other), but the pre-existing data pretty much still gives the same results with either.
If you calculate in how many seconds will an apple fall from 2m height, you'll get the same results with both, up to a ludicrious number of decimals.
As TFA noted, even at 10% of the speed of light, the relativistic corrections are noticeable, but you can still get in the rough ballpark with Newtonian mechanics. At 1% of the speed of light you could pretty much calculate it with newtonian mechanics, and it will only be off in the decimals. At 0.1% you're as good as Newtonian all the way, and that's already a hideously larger domain than what Newton ever measured.
What I'm getting at is that whatever new theory we'll discover, it will have to fit the measured results of relativity, for pretty much the whole domain we already measured. And that covers a _lot_ of the spectrum. Even if the new theory said you start to get a discount from 99% of the speed of light upwards, getting to 99% of the speed of light would still pretty much go by the existing mechanics, or close enough that the difference is well in the decimals.
Whatever new thing we discover in even more extreme cases, you first have to clear the already verified relativistic domain, before your situation is extreme enough for the future-tech refinement of it. And that's a heck of a gigantic, humongous and monumental amount of energy to get there.
Furthermore, let me throw some more cold water on your enthusiasm by saying: unfortunately a lot of the things we discovered lately was a bit more restrictive than before. E.g., newtonian mechanics said that getting to any speed is possible, then Einstein came along and said, basically, "no, you can't." E.g., in the really old days they thought it's possible to go to the moon without a spacesuit or capsule, because noone figured out that the atmosphere thins out to nothing. (See the ancient chinese guy, the name escapes me, who thought he could just go there by strapping rockets to his chair.) Now we know that there's one more problem in the way. E.g., even 50 years ago, noone thought it would be fundamentally harder to get a human to Mars than to get to the moon. Just build a bigger rocket and there you go. Now we kno
And if I answered dirname `find / -name run-mozilla.sh` whould I get any credit?
That's just the problem: you wouldn't, because it's not one of the pre-defined options.
You illustrate the problem perhaps better than I could. RL skill often means just that: knowing what command to run or what key to press or what book to check to get any obscure information you wish. But that's not what these "hard" multiple choice tests actually test. You either know the piece of useless trivia, or you don't.
In practice, for most distros you wouldn't even need to know how to use the command line to find that out. Most have a search tool right on the bloody desktop or toolbar, so, you know, even mom can find her files. But that's lost to the snake oil... err... certification vendors and such. They just have to have their trivia questions so they can say they have a "hard" test.
Let me tell you a story. When my parents bought a ZX-81 with 1K RAM back in the day, that thing didn't even have enough memory for an assembler. I learned assembly by translating it all in hex by hand. I had a big notebook with all combinations of opcodes and registers, and their hex codes. Forget writing "for" loops or even "goto", you had to actually count bytes by hand to do a jump.
Or did I tell you about the time when a PHB gave me a computer with a compiler, but literally no editor? (Not even EDLIN.) Yeah, we had to do with a disk editor until that was sorted out, because the alternative was to sit and twiddle thumbs. Even if with a damn good excuse.
So I _can_ do, and did do, without even the "crutch" of a compiler or assembler or even a text editor. Can _you_?
That said, I genuinely don't miss those days. They're not some "good old days", they're days when I wasted time on stuff that a tool would have done better. That was wasted time. There's a reason there are better tools nowadays, and that is that they genuinely make you more productive. They let you focus on the things that actually _matter_, like algorithm and design, not on the mechanical bullshit that a compiler or assembler does better or faster anyway.
_That_ is what makes a good compiler: algorithms, data structures, patterns, and knowing how to use a tool or library for the rest. Doing stuff by hand that the IDE or compiler does better, that's not a reason for pride, it's a waste of time and (employer's) money.
It's like hiring, say, a gardener and discovering that his grand reason for professional pride is that he can mow the lawn with some small scissors, instead of relying on the "crutch" of a lawn mower. Well, who cares? He's still doing a crap job and wasting more time than someone else. If the tools do that faster, freakin' use them. In fact, if a gardener actually did that, you might even suspect him of fraud: that he's deliberately wasting time so he gets paid for more hours.
The problem there is that averages are one thing, but in practice there still is a non-zero chance that he'll actually score higher than you do.
Let's say it's 20 questions, 4 possible answers each. He'll know 5 of those, has to guess 15. There's even a 1 in billion chance that he'll get all 20 right. (4^15 = 2^30 = approx 1 billion.) If you gave that test in China, by now you'd have at least one guy who pulled exactly that stunt.
There's also the issue of how well those questions fit your and his domain of knowledge. Let's say you can't possibly test _all_ the questions, because that's usually the case. You can do it for state capitals, but you can't possibly cover a whole domain like medicine or law.
There are 50 states, you know 25, the other guy knows, say 12 (rounded down), so it's not impossible that the 20 questions are all from the 25 you don't know, but include all 12 that guy knows. In fact, assuming a very very very large domain (much larger than 50, anyway), there's about 1 in a million chance that all 20 questions will be from the 50% you don't know.
Now when testing states that doesn't have a higher moral, because (at least theoretically) all states are equally important. In other domains, like medicine, law, even CS, that's not the case: stuff ranges from vital basics to pure trivia that noone gives a damn about. (Or not for the scope of the problem at hand: e.g., if I'm hiring a Java programmer, asking questions about COBOL would be just trivia.)
And a lot of "hard tests" are "hard" just by including inordinate amounts of stuff that's unimportant trivia. E.g., if I'm giving a test for a unix admin job, I can make it arbitrarily "hard" by including such trivia as "in which directory is Mozilla installed under SuSE Linux?" It's stuff that won't actually affect your ability to admin a unix box in any form or shape. The fact that SuSE does install some programs in different directories is just trivia.
(And if that sounds like an convoluted imaginary example, let's say that some "hard" certification exams ask just that: where is program X installed in distribution Y? And at least one version of Sun's Java certification asked such idiotically stupid trivia as in which package is class X, or whether class Y is final. Who cares about that trivia? It's less than half a second to get any IDE to fill in the package for you. E.g., in Eclipse it just takes a CTRL+SPACE.)
And in view of that previous point, including trivia in an exam just to make it "hard" is outright counter-productive. There is a non-null chance that you'll pass someone who memorized all the trivia, but doesn't know the basics.
Not all knowledge is created equal, and that's one point that many "hard" exams and certifications miss. If a lawyer doesn't know the intricacies of Melchett vs The Vatican, who cares? In the unlikely situation that they need it, they can google it. If they don't understand Habeas Corpus, on the other hand, they're just unfit to be a lawyer at all. Cramming trivia into an exam can get you just that kind of screwed up situation: you passed someone who happened to know that Melchett vs The Vatican is actually a gag question, and that case name appears in Stephen Fry's "The Letter", yet flunked someone with a solid grasp of the the basics and who knows how to extrapolate from there and where to get more information when he needs it.
Rewarding random guesswork is worse. Probably the most important thing one should know is what he _doesn't_ know, so he can research it instead of taking a dumb uninformed guess. Most RL problems aren't neatly organized into 4 possible answers, so it can be a monumental waste of time to just take wild guesses and see if it works. I've seen entirely too many people wasting time trying wrong guess after wrong guess, instead of just doing some research. E.g., I've actually witnessed a guy trying every single bloody combination between *, & and nothing in front of every single variable in a C function, because he never understood how poin
Well, air has to come through that nozzle, one way or another. In a turbojet, you have the turbojet's exhaust coming through it. (Which still has lots of oxygen, since if you used enough kerosene in the turbojet to use all oxygen, you'd also melt the turbine at the back.) In a ramjet, it's the simple fact that you move forward very fast and the air is rammed into the engine. But one way or another, for the afterburner to work, you have to already have a jet of air coming out the back end.
So if the front intake is shut down, you'd have to have some other way of creating a jet of air through the nozzle. (Opening extra vents around, perchance?) It would also have to be the kind of nozzle which works well for both.
At least theoretically, I'm sure someone could figure out something smart there. I'm just not sure how. I could see the reactor turned into the central intake piece for a ramjet, sorta, but not sure how it would work for a scramjet. Then again, I'm not an aerospace engineer anyway.
On the other hand, well, we have enough trouble making a scramjet that just works as it is. Having it _also_ work as a nozzle for a turbojet, is trying to solve a second problem at the same time, when we're still just experimenting with the first one. So, well, let's take it one problem at a time:)
Combinations for ramjets do exist, though, it's just that they're a combination with rocket instead of with turbojet. In some missiles, the ramjet engine first holds the fuel for the rocket engine. When that's exhausted, the ramjet kicks in. Some extra boosters may be used, but even those often are just extra combustors that use the propellant stored inside the ramjet.
At a (layman's uninformed) guess, probably that would be the easiest solution for a hypersonic aircraft, with the technology we have now. Ramjets are already well understood and work, and are already used in missiles. The combination with rocket engine is also well understood.
Whether it's actually desirable to make a Mach 5 passenger aircraft, though, that's a whole different question. For starters the noise level would be horrible, and the fuel efficiency wouldn't be too good. While a ramjet is more efficient than a turbojet above Mach 2 to 4, that doesn't really say that much. Both are considerably less efficient than just staying subsonic with a turbofan.
Actually, at least theoretically a scramjet would continue to accelerate as long as you have air and fuel. You have enough air you have of that ascent (after that you have the speed anyway), and fuel you'd carry anyway. A rocket carries its fuel too.
That's actually one thing that makes scramjets tempting: the fact that it doesn't cap lower than that orbital velocity, and it can work with rather thin atmosphere too. So if you can go upwards at all with it, and modify the trajectory to have enough air for more of the time, you can eventually get it to stay up there.
Probably the only thing that _might_ change, if your scramjet doesn't get enough acceleration, is that you shoot it closer to the horizontal than upwards. Well, normal rockets don't really go vertically either. As you've said, they have to end up with that mach 30 horizontal speed. The difference would be that the rocket starts closer to vertical, to clear the dense atmosphere as fast as possible, and bends later, while probably a scramjet would start directly oblique, to make the most of that atmosphere.
Of course, when experimenting to just get the thing sorted out at all, there's somewhat less point in aiming directly for LEO. So probably 14 seconds are enough for experimental purposes.
Also, well, while scramjets are still experimental, ordinary ramjets aren't. A heck of a lot of missiles already use ramjets. E.g., IIRC the Russians were the first to use them on anti-aircraft missiles, but in the meantime almost everyone else does.
So technically we'd already have a pretty damn fast engine to put on an aircraft. If anyone wanted to make a Mach 5 passenger aircraft, that's probably already feasible with ramjets. The reasons why we don't are completely different, and IMHO somewhat unlikely to change because of scramjets.
Scramjets need an atmosphere anyway, just like ramjets and turbojets. That's the whole idea. The air flows through it, fuel is injected into that air and ignited. Trying to operate a scramjet in a vacuum would make as much sense as trying to operate a turbojet there.
Pretty much all 3 are the same jet engine, more or less. A turbojet uses a compressor in the front to push the air into the engine. A ramjet relies on the fact that if you fly fast enough to start with, you get air pushed into the engine anyway. (Plus some clever design of the intake so the flame doesn't go in both directions.) But the air is slowed down to a subsonic speed at the point where the fuel is injected and lit. A scramjet is a ramjet where the air does flow at supersonic speed through the engine, so basically it's choked. You can add the fuel past the choke point and, since waves can't move backwards in a supersonic flow, whatever pressure you generate there by burning fuel can only go towards the back engine. The front of the engine can't "notice" the higher pressure in the back half because a pressure wave would have to travel through that air faster than sound speed, which isn't possible.
Another rough description would be that a scramjet is like a turbojet with an afterburner, only without the turbojet. (Sorta like the sound of one hand clapping, I guess;) Instead of having the turbojet push air through a nozzle and add extra fuel to it, the engine _is_ the nozzle and the airplane's existing speed is what pushes air to it. So you just add the fuel and light it. It's an afterburner without a turbojet.
Downside: a turbojet can start at zero speed, ramjets and scramjets need enough airspeed to start. Hence all these experiments involve booster rockets.
But in the end all 3 engines work by the same basic principle: air comes through the front, fuel is added, hot air comes out the back. No air, no flame, the engine stops.
The plans to use a scramjet to get to a highe enough orbit or even leave the planet, involve getting enough speed while still having enough air for the scramjet, or as boosters in addition to the normal rocket engines, or both.
Scramjets need an atmosphere anyway, just like ramjets and turbojets. That's the whole idea. The air flows through it, fuel is injected into that air and ignited. Trying to operate a scramjet in a vacuum would make as much sense as trying to operate a turbojet there.
Pretty much all 3 are the same jet engine, more or less. A turbojet uses a compressor in the front to push the air into the engine. A ramjet relies on the fact that if you fly fast enough to start with, you get air pushed into the engine anyway. (Plus some clever design of the intake so the flame doesn't go in both directions.) But the air is slowed down to a subsonic speed at the point where the fuel is injected and lit. A scramjet is a ramjet where the air does flow at supersonic speed through the engine, so basically it's choked. You can add the fuel past the choke point and, since waves can't move backwards in a supersonic flow, whatever pressure you generate there by burning fuel can only go towards the back engine. The front of the engine can't "notice" the higher pressure in the back half because a pressure wave would have to travel through that air faster than sound speed, which isn't possible.
Another rough description would be that a scramjet is like a turbojet with an afterburner, only without the turbojet. (Sorta like the sound of one hand clapping, I guess;) Instead of having the turbojet push air through a nozzle and add extra fuel to it, the engine _is_ the nozzle and the airplane's existing speed is what pushes air to it. So you just add the fuel and light it. It's an afterburner without a turbojet.
But in the end all 3 work by the same basic principle: air comes through the front, fuel is added, hot air comes out the back. No air, no flame, the engine stops.
The plans to use a scramjet to get to a highe enough orbit or even leave the planet, involve getting enough speed while still having enough air for the scramjet, or as boosters in addition to the normal rocket engines, or both.
Well, poo, there you go and ruin my fantasy. It's a nicer thought to think someone will sue the royal court of Ironforge and I get to ambush their wagons loaded with gold coins;)
The entire world would scale to match the level of your character. So as a 1st level character, you can go into the Arena and kill the reigning champion with the same amount of difficulty as you would at 20th level. Maybe even easier... if you leveled your character in non-optimal ways (especially if you didn't go through the mind-numbing process of repeating actions for 10 minutes to maximize your stat gains) your character would be less powerful at 20th than at 1st.
Often this will be the case even if you did level up optimally.
(Some spoilers may be contained past this point.)
E.g., remember the quest to save the painter from his own painting? The one with the painted trolls and the turpentine? Well, the turpentine does _massive_ damage to the trolls at level 1, compared to their HP, but a whole lot less at level 30.
The end fight? If you somehow managed to get that fight at level 1, he's a lot easier than when you're high level. Basically the more side-quests you do, the more you'll be at a disadvantage at the end.
The same applies to most quests where you have some helpers or must keep someone alive. While their stats _are_ levelled, their equipment is often the same at all levels. (E.g., while monster equipment is levelled, the city guards often have a fixed equipment at all levels.) At higher levels, the enemies wipe out the city guards, for example.
Thievery, hmm, actually having played a thief, I'd say thievery is just fucked up. There just isn't any good loot in houses at all levels. An engraved silver challice sells for... what? 2 coins at the fence? And that's pretty much _all_ that will be the difference between a great noble's house and a commoner's house: the commoner will have tin knives and ceramics glasses (worth 0g each), while the noble will have some silverware too.
And most of the "scenery" loot is the same at all levels, anyway. Chances are those nobles will still have a ceramic bowl (worth 0 coins) with some apples in it even when you're level 30+. Now if they have a weapon or such, that might (or might not) get scaled, but the stuff on their tables and shelves will still be worth crap.
Stuff in chests and drawers is scaled, but even there, it often scales the same for commoners too.
Often the thing that's actually worth anything in a house are the grain and bread and stuff, because they can be turned into potions. And with high alchemy skill, those sell for a fair bit of coin. But the thing is, it's easier and risk-free to go in the woods and get some reagents instead of burgling homes for it. And commoner homes often have more of that stuff anyway, if you absolutely must steal your reagents.
Heh. Given that, say, the in-game auction house on WoW has an instant buy option too, I wonder how long until they'll want their cut there too.
And will they take the license fee in game money, since that's all that changes virtual hands? I can just see a party of lawyers riding to Ironforge and Orgrimmar to demand their license fees.
Well, the dwarves might even pay up, but I'd worry about trying to collect from the Orcs. I doubt anyone explained to Thrall yet how the license system works. And troll tribes tend to kill each other on sight, so I'd advise the patent trolls to stay clear of the Darkspear trolls;)
1. You can't diagnose someone unless they actually go to a doctor. I know someone who literally believes in an evil global conspiracy, and, quoting losely from memory, "people so rich and powerful that you don't even find them on the top 100 richest people list!" Though he did stop talking about that very quickly when I pointed out that all his examples had gone bankrupt in the 19'th and early 20'th century. You don't have to be a doctor to see the guy is paranoid, but since (to the best of my knowledge) he never went to a psychiatrist, he never got diagnosed.
The USSR did use to round up dissidents and get them diagnosed as a form of schizophrenia characterized by delusions that capitalism is better. But since we're not in the USSR, we can't round people up and send them to a doctor.
People are very sensitive about the topic of mental illness, and the mere suggestion that they might be deluded about something is perceived as a major insult. So they don't go to a doctor, or fake their way out if they get sent there against their will. (Maybe except if they ended up in deep legal shit, and being crazy is starting to look like a better alternative than going to prison.)
And, mind you, schizophrenics actually tend to be smart people, so they can fake their way out of a diagnostic if they want to. Unless they're either delusional enough to be obviously mad, or convinced to seek treatment, well, just rounding one up and sending him to the doctor might not do much.
2. As I was saying, there's a whole continuum from sane to raving lunatic talking to the voices in his head, so it's often hard to draw the line. Schizophrenia isn't like flu, where you can just take a blood sample and have a clear result of whether they have the virus or not. The biological changes are still debated whether a common pattern even exists, and how to find them out without a sample of brain tissue. (Taking which tends to be a bad idea on a live person.) So basically you have to do a judgment call if someone is weird enough to call him a schizophrenic, or maybe he's just a little weird.
There are a _lot_ of people who are just a _little_ schizophrenic (e.g., most people over 150 IQ), but as long as it's just a little, they're generally left alone. And you can't institutionalize them all anyway, since AFAIK 0.4% to 0.6% of the population is schizophrenic. Out of 300,000,000 people in the USA, you'd have to lock up over a million if you want all schizophrenics locked up, maybe two million if you want to be on the safe side. That's a lot. Given that the vast majority of them won't actually do anything harmful, it may be saner to leave most of them be.
3. Treatment can have a bunch of nasty side-effects, the worst (but fortunately also the rarest) being the deadly neuroleptic malignant syndrome. Each time you give someone neuroleptics, there is a small but non-zero chance that you'll kill them. (And in response to something someone else said: telling someone to take their medication even if they feel worse for it, well, can mean telling them to die in a case like that.) But other, somewhat milder, problems aren't that rare at all on the whole.
So unless someone is dangerously off the track, it can actually be safer to leave them to their mild problems than to treat them.
4. I would object to your including Bipolar disorder on the list of major mental problems and something that should help prevent people from ending up in the criminal system. Bipolar means manic-depressive, not something that involves any kind of delusions or "crazy" reactions. It just means someone will swing between some rather extreme moods (e.g., actually getting worse depressions than those who are unipolar), and experience some attention span or memory problems in both extremes, but not actually get some voice of god telling them to kill the neighbour or anything. The biggest problem in bipolar disorder is the high rate of suicides (though most failed), between 10 and 20 times more than the rest of the population. Briefly, AFAIK it's more like something that would get one in ER than in a court of law.
Well, if you think that's messed up, I was reading about how upon Commodore Perry's visit to Japan in the 19'th century (you know, the event that eventually caused the Meiji Restoration), the opinion in Japan got split between a conservative and a liberal faction.
So I then read the letters that the leaders of the two factions sent the Shogun. The originals were much more verbose and a lot more polite, of course, but the rough summary is:
Conservatives: "Fuck the americans! Who do they think they are? Why would we want to sell our coal for their inferior goods?"
Liberal: "Wait, wait, let's delay a bit first, maybe even open a trade post on a remote island, while we build a powerful fleet. _Then_ fuck the americans."
I guess conservative and liberal are relative terms:P
It seems like I owe you an apology. Sorry, old chap. I must confess that I read it pretty supperficially to start with, and, not being a native English speaker or even in an English speaking country, I had no clue what a Public Defender is. My fault, really. I should have googled it instead of just going with a (wrong) assumption.
That said, I only used the MPD example as just an example of one thing non-trained people call "schizophrenia" when it's not even related. But, again, that was just a random example. I didn't say your friend's clients had that.
Yes, well, see, that's just what makes it a privacy issue. Being such a godless bunch, we wouldn't want to be caught on photo coming out of a church, would we? What would our godless friends think about that? Beats having to find some quick explanation like, "I... uhh... thought it was a kinky S&M club. You know, what with the naked guy on the cross, and all.";)
No offense, but just because your friend likes to play armchair-shrink while conducting job interviews, doesn't mean he's more qualified to diagnose schizophrenia than professional psychiatrists with years of experience.
If multiple psychiatrists saw nothing wrong with a person, and only to your miracle friend it was obvious that it's schizophrenia... well, maybe it doesn't mean that it's the psychiatrists who are wrong. I am willing to accept that maybe one professional was wrong, but that multiple professionals were all wrong and an armchair-shrink immediately puts his finger on it in 5 minutes... sorry, that's already the realm of bad fiction. Maybe your friend shold just drop the delusions of grandeur and leave psychiatry to those actually qualified to practice it.
In particular, you're telling me there that your friend knows nothing about clinical depression, if being unfocused is his grand clue that it must be schizophrenia. I also doubt that anyone would actually say "sshhh, I'm talking to the voices in my head" in a job interview (though they might say it between friends as a joke). Your friend most likely saw someone who _is_ genuinely depressed and, as the case usually is in clinical depression, overwhelmed by dark and depressing thoughts, and invented the whole "ah, he's talking to the voices in his head" explanation himself.
Schizophrenia is a complex thing, there are several flavours of it, and there's a _continuum_ between perfectly normal and raging lunatic. There is no clear line like, say, diagnosing whether someone has a flu or not.
Unlike presented by movies and armchair-shrink trolls, schizophrenia isn't a clear-cut state where someone sees green aliens and talks to 5 different voices in their head. There are whole flavours of it which don't involve delusions or halucinations at all, and conversely there are people with an over-active imagination or with a tendency for hyperfocus, which aren't schizophrenic at all.
Some of the definitions or "symptoms" popular with wannabe armchair-shrinks aren't even related to real schizophrenia. E.g., multiple personality disorder, while pretty much a synonim with schizophrenia in popular culture, isn't even related to actual schizophrenia. (And it's something that's (A) only likely to manifest under extreme stress, if at all, and (B) so rare that even among psychiatrists a lot doubt that MPD even exists at all, because they haven't met a real MPD case in a lifetime.)
And there's a reason it takes more than 5 minutes at the psychiatrist. You must actually determine whether someone is indeed delusional (for the flavours which indeed have a delusional component), _or_ if there's some other problem with them (e.g., depression, as your friend found out), _or_ if they're just a little eccentric but otherwise relatively normal. Just because someone is a little unfocused in one day, it can just mean they had a bad day.
So basically, just tell your friend to stick to whatever he's actually qualified to do.
Most of the gameplay changes aren't mandated by the law. There is a central agency which gives those ratings, and in extreme cases might even ban the game (mostly if you tried to go around them), but they can't tell you what to change in those games.
Mostly the changes happen just because the publisher wants to get a lower age rating, that's all. Most of the time it's some marketroid saying, basically, "noooo, 18+ is missing our target demographic, we need 16+ at all cost!!!" That's really what drives such uninspired changes.
And there they lose my sympathy very quick. If they had to do that to be allowed to publish the game at all, well, that would be blatant censorship and I'm against that. But if they change it just to aim at the younger market segment, well, that's a choice they took on their own, isn't it?
Censorship is bad in its own right, but on the flip side, the publishers too need to accept that some games _are_ rightfully 18+.
While I'll agree that the law probably won't do much, and a kid isn't really influenced unless there was already something awfully wrong in their education... exactly what would such a law mandate? No, step down from the "loss of rights", "censorship", "evil politicians" soapbox for a moment, please. No, it didn't propose to outright ban those games. All it would actually do is require a parent to be present when a kid buys a violent game.
Frankly, I don't see anything wrong with that. We all rant and rave about how parents should take more responsibility, blah, blah, blah, so what's fundamentally wrong with asking that a parent actually approves such purchases? If it's the parent's responsibility, then exactly what's wrong with saying, basically, "ok, then the parent must take that decision?"
Yes, education is more complex than just looking over the kid's shoulder all the time. But here's the flip side: if you can't even be arsed to go with your kid to the games/toys/whatever shop a couple of times per year, chances are you just don't spend enough time with that kid anyway. Noone mandated that you keep your finger on a fingerprint reader all the time while the kid plays that game, noone said they'll throw you in jail if your kid plays those games, nor anything similar. Just that once every couple of months you go with the kid to the shop, if you're ok with purchasing violent games for that kid.
Exactly what's so horrible about that?
Losing your rights... how?
1. I'm sorry, kids don't have most of the rights of an adult in the first place. Maybe they should, but here and now they don't. They're the parent's responsibility. So exactly what right did they lose if mommy and daddy have to see what violent games Junior purchases?
2. You didn't lose much either, as a parent. You _do_ occasionally go out with the kid, right? Well, then exactly what's the problem to also take a detour to the game store with him once in a while. Most kids don't even get more than 2-3 games per years. And excuse me if I don't think it's some horribly unreasonable waste of your time to take a detour to the game shop every 4 months to nod and hand the game to the cashier yourself?
It's not even a big detour, since Germany didn't go for the "huge mall outside the town" kind of planning. The shops tend to be all over the place, and especially in the centre of all towns. So whether you took the kid to a park, or to McDonalds, or to a movie, chances are it's a really short detour to the games shop. Exactly what's so oppressive about taking that detour, if you approve of buying violent games for the kid?
Chances are the kid won't mind it too much either, if you have the kind of relationship where it would work without that parental surveillance anyway. If you're that good a parent that the kid would have freely told you what they did and where, they probably won't mind you going to the game shop anyway. You can even talk a bit about those games while you're there. And if you're that good a parent that you taught the kid to make the right choices even without you around (which should be the case), then it won't be that oppressive to have you around either. He just won't make the kind of choices where he'd have to whine and bitch to convince you, right?
And is it really that big a change, anyway? I go to the games shops quite often, and let me tell you, I already see plenty of parents coming there with their children or even teenagers.
So basically you're just telling me that the EU works as it is? So one group might try to push an unreasonable law, the others vote it down, and that's it. Sounds to me no worse than the USA or than the parliament of any of the EU members.
E.g., take "No One Lives Forever 2". The original game tweaked the AI a lot, so the enemies would notice a fallen comrade, see if he's dead, etc. Except the German version came and replaced all corpses with backpacks.
So for a start you ended up hiding and/or disposing of backpacks instead of corpses. I mean, wth? Why would someone sound the alarm for seeing a backpack near a bed in the barracks? Don't all soldiers have one of those anyway?
But it gets better. Picture this: A patrol comes by and starts shaking the backpack and saying stuff like "Oh no! Are you still alive? Say something!"
I mean, WTF? Since when was a backpack alive in the first place?
All that clever scripting and trying to make it believable in the original game... just made it look stupid in the censored version.
Of course these people wanted Communism. Nobody disputes that. Communism was fast becoming the popular thing among poor countries. We were trying to prevent a domino effect.
1. Do you know what "democracy" means? Democracy means that the people choose whatever the f-word they want, including something stupid. Someone telling you from above "nope, we can't let you vote because we know better than you what you need" is the very opposite: that's by definition totalitarianism. Maybe dressed in an "enlightened despotism" or "paternal autocracy" guise (i.e., "it's for your own good"), as virtually every totalitarian regime ever tried to present itself, but in the end it's still the exact antonym of democracy.
Soviet communism too, since we're at comparing stuff to it, played the same propaganda card. Basically, see, we need to restrict what you can do, choose or say, for your own good." Otherwise some subversive elements might get you saddled with capitalism again, and, trust us, you don't want that. Some of you might be deluded or naive enough to think that they do, but they don't know what they're talking about. We know better what you really need.
Simply put, and as a general principle, not just related to the USA: you can't fight for democracy by totalitarian means. It's like fucking for virginity, seriously.
2. Actually, the way I see it, the "domino effect" theory was the _problem_ there. The USA still had its moral high ground and acted like a decent world citizen until they got obsessed with that retarded idea. Then suddenly it started acting worse then the Soviets. The focus was suddenly placating the Soviets at all cost, and losing focus of exactly what was wrong with the Soviets in the first place.
You just can't be the "good guy" by acting worse than the "bad guy". The moment the USA started installing dictators left and right, and training the secret police of every two-bit banana-republic generalissimo, it lost all moral high ground and credibility that they're actually fighting for democracy. "See, I'm going to give you a fascist dictator, just so you don't end up under a communist dictator" doesn't really count as being the champions of freedom and democracy.
3. For that matter, I don't think it even was a fight for democracy and freedom at all at that point any more. The right was back in the lead, and was scared shitless of the idea of a world where they don't have their privileges any more. It couldn't give a shit whether you're an oppressive dictator or not, as long as you're a right-wing dictator. The focus was on being right wing, not on democracy or anything.
At that point it wasn't any more morally right or anything, than the fight of the slave owners to stay in the lead in the 19'th century, or of the aristocracy to stay in the lead in the previous centuries. It was just a bunch of rich guys fighting to keep their privileges. Nothing more.
The "domino effect" and speeches about fighting for "freedom" and "democracy" was just the way they packed that for the masses. You can't tell people "vote for us to make sure the rich stay rich and privileged". You have to pack it to sound as something they might actually want. So it becomes, "vote for us to fight against communist totalitarianism!" (By replacing democratically elected governments with our own totalitarian regimes.)
Don't get me wrong. The average American probably actually thought their leaders were fighting for all the noble stuff, and did get outraged when the pentagon papers got published, for example. But that the guys at the top, you know, the ones in a position to send troops or CIA assassins, actually gave a fuck about democracy at all at that point... I seriously doubt that. At the top it was just a fight of the richest to stay rich and privileged, and a bunch of puppets who'd do anything to keep their bribes and campaign contributions coming.
True, obfuscating or encrypting binaries has been around for a while. When he asked about obfuscating his code, though, I thought he means "source code." Still, you're very right with that correction. Thanks.
Depends on which zone you're talking about. At home or in Europe, yeah, the USA was a little better than Stalin. (Though at least home during the McCarthy era, the keyword is: a little.)
But since we're talking about war in Vietnam, to the _Vietnamese_, the USA actually looked worse. Since you talk about, basically, "then why didn't people run to the communists?"... did you know that that's exactly why the USA didn't allow elections in Vietnam? Seriously. Estimates from 54-55 said that about 80% of the Vietnamese population would have actually voted for Ho Chi Minh, rather than be saddled with the USA-backed dictator?
Seen from the point of view of the Vietnamese, the USA had:
- given them to France as a bribe
- then saddled them with a dictator that was actually less popular than Ho Chi Minh, and actually refused to hold elections (same thing the USSR is accused of doing in its own sphere of influence, you know)
- saddled them with a CIA trained secret police, under Le Quang Tung, who never actually bothered with the Viet Cong, but terrorised dissidents in the South and occasionally buddhist monks (again, eerily similar to what Stalin's secret police was doing in their own part.)
So to the Vietnamese it really didn't look any better than the commies. In fact, it looked worse.
To Cambodia? At least in the bombed zones, they hated the USA and their puppet enough to actually start supporting the Khmer Rouge and have a jolly good communist revolution. How's that for going over to the communist side?
That's pretty much what I meant there. Regardless of what moral high grounds it might (or might not) have had in other places, in Vietnam it actually didn't have any.
Slashdot Mirror
Pretty much.
Was it? I keep hearing such dismissive wisecracks, but I can't actually find any _scientist_ who said that, nor any actual law of physics from back then that said so. To the best of my knowledge, they didn't actually have any such law at any point.
There have been laymen jumping to such conclusions, and there have been _practical_ problems in getting there. E.g., you wouldn't accelerate a zeppelin (and we still don't) to such speeds because of the drag, and even by the end of WW2 we needed to redesign wings and engines for that. Yes. But that's just saying "it's very hard" or "it's not economical", not "it's impossible."
What we have here and now is that according to science as we know it, it's outright impossible to get above the speed of light, and there's a _lot_ of experimental confirmation for those principles of relativity. But we'll get to that in a jiffy.
Well, the thing is, Newton's laws of motion still apply within the domain they were created for. Relativity didn't come and say, "OMG, Newtonian physics don't apply any more, starting tomorrow apples fall upwards." Relativity just refines it towards one extreme (and quantum mechanics towards the other), but the pre-existing data pretty much still gives the same results with either.
If you calculate in how many seconds will an apple fall from 2m height, you'll get the same results with both, up to a ludicrious number of decimals.
As TFA noted, even at 10% of the speed of light, the relativistic corrections are noticeable, but you can still get in the rough ballpark with Newtonian mechanics. At 1% of the speed of light you could pretty much calculate it with newtonian mechanics, and it will only be off in the decimals. At 0.1% you're as good as Newtonian all the way, and that's already a hideously larger domain than what Newton ever measured.
What I'm getting at is that whatever new theory we'll discover, it will have to fit the measured results of relativity, for pretty much the whole domain we already measured. And that covers a _lot_ of the spectrum. Even if the new theory said you start to get a discount from 99% of the speed of light upwards, getting to 99% of the speed of light would still pretty much go by the existing mechanics, or close enough that the difference is well in the decimals.
Whatever new thing we discover in even more extreme cases, you first have to clear the already verified relativistic domain, before your situation is extreme enough for the future-tech refinement of it. And that's a heck of a gigantic, humongous and monumental amount of energy to get there.
Furthermore, let me throw some more cold water on your enthusiasm by saying: unfortunately a lot of the things we discovered lately was a bit more restrictive than before. E.g., newtonian mechanics said that getting to any speed is possible, then Einstein came along and said, basically, "no, you can't." E.g., in the really old days they thought it's possible to go to the moon without a spacesuit or capsule, because noone figured out that the atmosphere thins out to nothing. (See the ancient chinese guy, the name escapes me, who thought he could just go there by strapping rockets to his chair.) Now we know that there's one more problem in the way. E.g., even 50 years ago, noone thought it would be fundamentally harder to get a human to Mars than to get to the moon. Just build a bigger rocket and there you go. Now we kno
That's just the problem: you wouldn't, because it's not one of the pre-defined options.
You illustrate the problem perhaps better than I could. RL skill often means just that: knowing what command to run or what key to press or what book to check to get any obscure information you wish. But that's not what these "hard" multiple choice tests actually test. You either know the piece of useless trivia, or you don't.
In practice, for most distros you wouldn't even need to know how to use the command line to find that out. Most have a search tool right on the bloody desktop or toolbar, so, you know, even mom can find her files. But that's lost to the snake oil... err... certification vendors and such. They just have to have their trivia questions so they can say they have a "hard" test.
Let me tell you a story. When my parents bought a ZX-81 with 1K RAM back in the day, that thing didn't even have enough memory for an assembler. I learned assembly by translating it all in hex by hand. I had a big notebook with all combinations of opcodes and registers, and their hex codes. Forget writing "for" loops or even "goto", you had to actually count bytes by hand to do a jump.
Or did I tell you about the time when a PHB gave me a computer with a compiler, but literally no editor? (Not even EDLIN.) Yeah, we had to do with a disk editor until that was sorted out, because the alternative was to sit and twiddle thumbs. Even if with a damn good excuse.
So I _can_ do, and did do, without even the "crutch" of a compiler or assembler or even a text editor. Can _you_?
That said, I genuinely don't miss those days. They're not some "good old days", they're days when I wasted time on stuff that a tool would have done better. That was wasted time. There's a reason there are better tools nowadays, and that is that they genuinely make you more productive. They let you focus on the things that actually _matter_, like algorithm and design, not on the mechanical bullshit that a compiler or assembler does better or faster anyway.
_That_ is what makes a good compiler: algorithms, data structures, patterns, and knowing how to use a tool or library for the rest. Doing stuff by hand that the IDE or compiler does better, that's not a reason for pride, it's a waste of time and (employer's) money.
It's like hiring, say, a gardener and discovering that his grand reason for professional pride is that he can mow the lawn with some small scissors, instead of relying on the "crutch" of a lawn mower. Well, who cares? He's still doing a crap job and wasting more time than someone else. If the tools do that faster, freakin' use them. In fact, if a gardener actually did that, you might even suspect him of fraud: that he's deliberately wasting time so he gets paid for more hours.
The problem there is that averages are one thing, but in practice there still is a non-zero chance that he'll actually score higher than you do.
Let's say it's 20 questions, 4 possible answers each. He'll know 5 of those, has to guess 15. There's even a 1 in billion chance that he'll get all 20 right. (4^15 = 2^30 = approx 1 billion.) If you gave that test in China, by now you'd have at least one guy who pulled exactly that stunt.
There's also the issue of how well those questions fit your and his domain of knowledge. Let's say you can't possibly test _all_ the questions, because that's usually the case. You can do it for state capitals, but you can't possibly cover a whole domain like medicine or law.
There are 50 states, you know 25, the other guy knows, say 12 (rounded down), so it's not impossible that the 20 questions are all from the 25 you don't know, but include all 12 that guy knows. In fact, assuming a very very very large domain (much larger than 50, anyway), there's about 1 in a million chance that all 20 questions will be from the 50% you don't know.
Now when testing states that doesn't have a higher moral, because (at least theoretically) all states are equally important. In other domains, like medicine, law, even CS, that's not the case: stuff ranges from vital basics to pure trivia that noone gives a damn about. (Or not for the scope of the problem at hand: e.g., if I'm hiring a Java programmer, asking questions about COBOL would be just trivia.)
And a lot of "hard tests" are "hard" just by including inordinate amounts of stuff that's unimportant trivia. E.g., if I'm giving a test for a unix admin job, I can make it arbitrarily "hard" by including such trivia as "in which directory is Mozilla installed under SuSE Linux?" It's stuff that won't actually affect your ability to admin a unix box in any form or shape. The fact that SuSE does install some programs in different directories is just trivia.
(And if that sounds like an convoluted imaginary example, let's say that some "hard" certification exams ask just that: where is program X installed in distribution Y? And at least one version of Sun's Java certification asked such idiotically stupid trivia as in which package is class X, or whether class Y is final. Who cares about that trivia? It's less than half a second to get any IDE to fill in the package for you. E.g., in Eclipse it just takes a CTRL+SPACE.)
And in view of that previous point, including trivia in an exam just to make it "hard" is outright counter-productive. There is a non-null chance that you'll pass someone who memorized all the trivia, but doesn't know the basics.
Not all knowledge is created equal, and that's one point that many "hard" exams and certifications miss. If a lawyer doesn't know the intricacies of Melchett vs The Vatican, who cares? In the unlikely situation that they need it, they can google it. If they don't understand Habeas Corpus, on the other hand, they're just unfit to be a lawyer at all. Cramming trivia into an exam can get you just that kind of screwed up situation: you passed someone who happened to know that Melchett vs The Vatican is actually a gag question, and that case name appears in Stephen Fry's "The Letter", yet flunked someone with a solid grasp of the the basics and who knows how to extrapolate from there and where to get more information when he needs it.
Rewarding random guesswork is worse. Probably the most important thing one should know is what he _doesn't_ know, so he can research it instead of taking a dumb uninformed guess. Most RL problems aren't neatly organized into 4 possible answers, so it can be a monumental waste of time to just take wild guesses and see if it works. I've seen entirely too many people wasting time trying wrong guess after wrong guess, instead of just doing some research. E.g., I've actually witnessed a guy trying every single bloody combination between *, & and nothing in front of every single variable in a C function, because he never understood how poin
Well, air has to come through that nozzle, one way or another. In a turbojet, you have the turbojet's exhaust coming through it. (Which still has lots of oxygen, since if you used enough kerosene in the turbojet to use all oxygen, you'd also melt the turbine at the back.) In a ramjet, it's the simple fact that you move forward very fast and the air is rammed into the engine. But one way or another, for the afterburner to work, you have to already have a jet of air coming out the back end.
:)
So if the front intake is shut down, you'd have to have some other way of creating a jet of air through the nozzle. (Opening extra vents around, perchance?) It would also have to be the kind of nozzle which works well for both.
At least theoretically, I'm sure someone could figure out something smart there. I'm just not sure how. I could see the reactor turned into the central intake piece for a ramjet, sorta, but not sure how it would work for a scramjet. Then again, I'm not an aerospace engineer anyway.
On the other hand, well, we have enough trouble making a scramjet that just works as it is. Having it _also_ work as a nozzle for a turbojet, is trying to solve a second problem at the same time, when we're still just experimenting with the first one. So, well, let's take it one problem at a time
Combinations for ramjets do exist, though, it's just that they're a combination with rocket instead of with turbojet. In some missiles, the ramjet engine first holds the fuel for the rocket engine. When that's exhausted, the ramjet kicks in. Some extra boosters may be used, but even those often are just extra combustors that use the propellant stored inside the ramjet.
At a (layman's uninformed) guess, probably that would be the easiest solution for a hypersonic aircraft, with the technology we have now. Ramjets are already well understood and work, and are already used in missiles. The combination with rocket engine is also well understood.
Whether it's actually desirable to make a Mach 5 passenger aircraft, though, that's a whole different question. For starters the noise level would be horrible, and the fuel efficiency wouldn't be too good. While a ramjet is more efficient than a turbojet above Mach 2 to 4, that doesn't really say that much. Both are considerably less efficient than just staying subsonic with a turbofan.
Actually, at least theoretically a scramjet would continue to accelerate as long as you have air and fuel. You have enough air you have of that ascent (after that you have the speed anyway), and fuel you'd carry anyway. A rocket carries its fuel too.
That's actually one thing that makes scramjets tempting: the fact that it doesn't cap lower than that orbital velocity, and it can work with rather thin atmosphere too. So if you can go upwards at all with it, and modify the trajectory to have enough air for more of the time, you can eventually get it to stay up there.
Probably the only thing that _might_ change, if your scramjet doesn't get enough acceleration, is that you shoot it closer to the horizontal than upwards. Well, normal rockets don't really go vertically either. As you've said, they have to end up with that mach 30 horizontal speed. The difference would be that the rocket starts closer to vertical, to clear the dense atmosphere as fast as possible, and bends later, while probably a scramjet would start directly oblique, to make the most of that atmosphere.
Of course, when experimenting to just get the thing sorted out at all, there's somewhat less point in aiming directly for LEO. So probably 14 seconds are enough for experimental purposes.
Also, well, while scramjets are still experimental, ordinary ramjets aren't. A heck of a lot of missiles already use ramjets. E.g., IIRC the Russians were the first to use them on anti-aircraft missiles, but in the meantime almost everyone else does.
So technically we'd already have a pretty damn fast engine to put on an aircraft. If anyone wanted to make a Mach 5 passenger aircraft, that's probably already feasible with ramjets. The reasons why we don't are completely different, and IMHO somewhat unlikely to change because of scramjets.
Heh. Trust me, I'd rather have just edited the old one, if it were possible.
Scramjets need an atmosphere anyway, just like ramjets and turbojets. That's the whole idea. The air flows through it, fuel is injected into that air and ignited. Trying to operate a scramjet in a vacuum would make as much sense as trying to operate a turbojet there.
Pretty much all 3 are the same jet engine, more or less. A turbojet uses a compressor in the front to push the air into the engine. A ramjet relies on the fact that if you fly fast enough to start with, you get air pushed into the engine anyway. (Plus some clever design of the intake so the flame doesn't go in both directions.) But the air is slowed down to a subsonic speed at the point where the fuel is injected and lit. A scramjet is a ramjet where the air does flow at supersonic speed through the engine, so basically it's choked. You can add the fuel past the choke point and, since waves can't move backwards in a supersonic flow, whatever pressure you generate there by burning fuel can only go towards the back engine. The front of the engine can't "notice" the higher pressure in the back half because a pressure wave would have to travel through that air faster than sound speed, which isn't possible.
Another rough description would be that a scramjet is like a turbojet with an afterburner, only without the turbojet. (Sorta like the sound of one hand clapping, I guess;) Instead of having the turbojet push air through a nozzle and add extra fuel to it, the engine _is_ the nozzle and the airplane's existing speed is what pushes air to it. So you just add the fuel and light it. It's an afterburner without a turbojet.
Downside: a turbojet can start at zero speed, ramjets and scramjets need enough airspeed to start. Hence all these experiments involve booster rockets.
But in the end all 3 engines work by the same basic principle: air comes through the front, fuel is added, hot air comes out the back. No air, no flame, the engine stops.
The plans to use a scramjet to get to a highe enough orbit or even leave the planet, involve getting enough speed while still having enough air for the scramjet, or as boosters in addition to the normal rocket engines, or both.
Scramjets need an atmosphere anyway, just like ramjets and turbojets. That's the whole idea. The air flows through it, fuel is injected into that air and ignited. Trying to operate a scramjet in a vacuum would make as much sense as trying to operate a turbojet there. Pretty much all 3 are the same jet engine, more or less. A turbojet uses a compressor in the front to push the air into the engine. A ramjet relies on the fact that if you fly fast enough to start with, you get air pushed into the engine anyway. (Plus some clever design of the intake so the flame doesn't go in both directions.) But the air is slowed down to a subsonic speed at the point where the fuel is injected and lit. A scramjet is a ramjet where the air does flow at supersonic speed through the engine, so basically it's choked. You can add the fuel past the choke point and, since waves can't move backwards in a supersonic flow, whatever pressure you generate there by burning fuel can only go towards the back engine. The front of the engine can't "notice" the higher pressure in the back half because a pressure wave would have to travel through that air faster than sound speed, which isn't possible. Another rough description would be that a scramjet is like a turbojet with an afterburner, only without the turbojet. (Sorta like the sound of one hand clapping, I guess;) Instead of having the turbojet push air through a nozzle and add extra fuel to it, the engine _is_ the nozzle and the airplane's existing speed is what pushes air to it. So you just add the fuel and light it. It's an afterburner without a turbojet. But in the end all 3 work by the same basic principle: air comes through the front, fuel is added, hot air comes out the back. No air, no flame, the engine stops. The plans to use a scramjet to get to a highe enough orbit or even leave the planet, involve getting enough speed while still having enough air for the scramjet, or as boosters in addition to the normal rocket engines, or both.
Well, poo, there you go and ruin my fantasy. It's a nicer thought to think someone will sue the royal court of Ironforge and I get to ambush their wagons loaded with gold coins ;)
Often this will be the case even if you did level up optimally.
(Some spoilers may be contained past this point.)
E.g., remember the quest to save the painter from his own painting? The one with the painted trolls and the turpentine? Well, the turpentine does _massive_ damage to the trolls at level 1, compared to their HP, but a whole lot less at level 30.
The end fight? If you somehow managed to get that fight at level 1, he's a lot easier than when you're high level. Basically the more side-quests you do, the more you'll be at a disadvantage at the end.
The same applies to most quests where you have some helpers or must keep someone alive. While their stats _are_ levelled, their equipment is often the same at all levels. (E.g., while monster equipment is levelled, the city guards often have a fixed equipment at all levels.) At higher levels, the enemies wipe out the city guards, for example.
Thievery, hmm, actually having played a thief, I'd say thievery is just fucked up. There just isn't any good loot in houses at all levels. An engraved silver challice sells for... what? 2 coins at the fence? And that's pretty much _all_ that will be the difference between a great noble's house and a commoner's house: the commoner will have tin knives and ceramics glasses (worth 0g each), while the noble will have some silverware too.
And most of the "scenery" loot is the same at all levels, anyway. Chances are those nobles will still have a ceramic bowl (worth 0 coins) with some apples in it even when you're level 30+. Now if they have a weapon or such, that might (or might not) get scaled, but the stuff on their tables and shelves will still be worth crap.
Stuff in chests and drawers is scaled, but even there, it often scales the same for commoners too.
Often the thing that's actually worth anything in a house are the grain and bread and stuff, because they can be turned into potions. And with high alchemy skill, those sell for a fair bit of coin. But the thing is, it's easier and risk-free to go in the woods and get some reagents instead of burgling homes for it. And commoner homes often have more of that stuff anyway, if you absolutely must steal your reagents.
Heh. Given that, say, the in-game auction house on WoW has an instant buy option too, I wonder how long until they'll want their cut there too.
;)
And will they take the license fee in game money, since that's all that changes virtual hands? I can just see a party of lawyers riding to Ironforge and Orgrimmar to demand their license fees.
Well, the dwarves might even pay up, but I'd worry about trying to collect from the Orcs. I doubt anyone explained to Thrall yet how the license system works. And troll tribes tend to kill each other on sight, so I'd advise the patent trolls to stay clear of the Darkspear trolls
Well, you have to understand, though, that:
1. You can't diagnose someone unless they actually go to a doctor. I know someone who literally believes in an evil global conspiracy, and, quoting losely from memory, "people so rich and powerful that you don't even find them on the top 100 richest people list!" Though he did stop talking about that very quickly when I pointed out that all his examples had gone bankrupt in the 19'th and early 20'th century. You don't have to be a doctor to see the guy is paranoid, but since (to the best of my knowledge) he never went to a psychiatrist, he never got diagnosed.
The USSR did use to round up dissidents and get them diagnosed as a form of schizophrenia characterized by delusions that capitalism is better. But since we're not in the USSR, we can't round people up and send them to a doctor.
People are very sensitive about the topic of mental illness, and the mere suggestion that they might be deluded about something is perceived as a major insult. So they don't go to a doctor, or fake their way out if they get sent there against their will. (Maybe except if they ended up in deep legal shit, and being crazy is starting to look like a better alternative than going to prison.)
And, mind you, schizophrenics actually tend to be smart people, so they can fake their way out of a diagnostic if they want to. Unless they're either delusional enough to be obviously mad, or convinced to seek treatment, well, just rounding one up and sending him to the doctor might not do much.
2. As I was saying, there's a whole continuum from sane to raving lunatic talking to the voices in his head, so it's often hard to draw the line. Schizophrenia isn't like flu, where you can just take a blood sample and have a clear result of whether they have the virus or not. The biological changes are still debated whether a common pattern even exists, and how to find them out without a sample of brain tissue. (Taking which tends to be a bad idea on a live person.) So basically you have to do a judgment call if someone is weird enough to call him a schizophrenic, or maybe he's just a little weird.
There are a _lot_ of people who are just a _little_ schizophrenic (e.g., most people over 150 IQ), but as long as it's just a little, they're generally left alone. And you can't institutionalize them all anyway, since AFAIK 0.4% to 0.6% of the population is schizophrenic. Out of 300,000,000 people in the USA, you'd have to lock up over a million if you want all schizophrenics locked up, maybe two million if you want to be on the safe side. That's a lot. Given that the vast majority of them won't actually do anything harmful, it may be saner to leave most of them be.
3. Treatment can have a bunch of nasty side-effects, the worst (but fortunately also the rarest) being the deadly neuroleptic malignant syndrome. Each time you give someone neuroleptics, there is a small but non-zero chance that you'll kill them. (And in response to something someone else said: telling someone to take their medication even if they feel worse for it, well, can mean telling them to die in a case like that.) But other, somewhat milder, problems aren't that rare at all on the whole.
So unless someone is dangerously off the track, it can actually be safer to leave them to their mild problems than to treat them.
4. I would object to your including Bipolar disorder on the list of major mental problems and something that should help prevent people from ending up in the criminal system. Bipolar means manic-depressive, not something that involves any kind of delusions or "crazy" reactions. It just means someone will swing between some rather extreme moods (e.g., actually getting worse depressions than those who are unipolar), and experience some attention span or memory problems in both extremes, but not actually get some voice of god telling them to kill the neighbour or anything. The biggest problem in bipolar disorder is the high rate of suicides (though most failed), between 10 and 20 times more than the rest of the population. Briefly, AFAIK it's more like something that would get one in ER than in a court of law.
Well, if you think that's messed up, I was reading about how upon Commodore Perry's visit to Japan in the 19'th century (you know, the event that eventually caused the Meiji Restoration), the opinion in Japan got split between a conservative and a liberal faction.
:P
So I then read the letters that the leaders of the two factions sent the Shogun. The originals were much more verbose and a lot more polite, of course, but the rough summary is:
Conservatives: "Fuck the americans! Who do they think they are? Why would we want to sell our coal for their inferior goods?"
Liberal: "Wait, wait, let's delay a bit first, maybe even open a trade post on a remote island, while we build a powerful fleet. _Then_ fuck the americans."
I guess conservative and liberal are relative terms
It seems like I owe you an apology. Sorry, old chap. I must confess that I read it pretty supperficially to start with, and, not being a native English speaker or even in an English speaking country, I had no clue what a Public Defender is. My fault, really. I should have googled it instead of just going with a (wrong) assumption.
That said, I only used the MPD example as just an example of one thing non-trained people call "schizophrenia" when it's not even related. But, again, that was just a random example. I didn't say your friend's clients had that.
Yes, well, see, that's just what makes it a privacy issue. Being such a godless bunch, we wouldn't want to be caught on photo coming out of a church, would we? What would our godless friends think about that? Beats having to find some quick explanation like, "I... uhh... thought it was a kinky S&M club. You know, what with the naked guy on the cross, and all." ;)
No offense, but just because your friend likes to play armchair-shrink while conducting job interviews, doesn't mean he's more qualified to diagnose schizophrenia than professional psychiatrists with years of experience.
If multiple psychiatrists saw nothing wrong with a person, and only to your miracle friend it was obvious that it's schizophrenia... well, maybe it doesn't mean that it's the psychiatrists who are wrong. I am willing to accept that maybe one professional was wrong, but that multiple professionals were all wrong and an armchair-shrink immediately puts his finger on it in 5 minutes... sorry, that's already the realm of bad fiction. Maybe your friend shold just drop the delusions of grandeur and leave psychiatry to those actually qualified to practice it.
In particular, you're telling me there that your friend knows nothing about clinical depression, if being unfocused is his grand clue that it must be schizophrenia. I also doubt that anyone would actually say "sshhh, I'm talking to the voices in my head" in a job interview (though they might say it between friends as a joke). Your friend most likely saw someone who _is_ genuinely depressed and, as the case usually is in clinical depression, overwhelmed by dark and depressing thoughts, and invented the whole "ah, he's talking to the voices in his head" explanation himself.
Schizophrenia is a complex thing, there are several flavours of it, and there's a _continuum_ between perfectly normal and raging lunatic. There is no clear line like, say, diagnosing whether someone has a flu or not.
Unlike presented by movies and armchair-shrink trolls, schizophrenia isn't a clear-cut state where someone sees green aliens and talks to 5 different voices in their head. There are whole flavours of it which don't involve delusions or halucinations at all, and conversely there are people with an over-active imagination or with a tendency for hyperfocus, which aren't schizophrenic at all.
Some of the definitions or "symptoms" popular with wannabe armchair-shrinks aren't even related to real schizophrenia. E.g., multiple personality disorder, while pretty much a synonim with schizophrenia in popular culture, isn't even related to actual schizophrenia. (And it's something that's (A) only likely to manifest under extreme stress, if at all, and (B) so rare that even among psychiatrists a lot doubt that MPD even exists at all, because they haven't met a real MPD case in a lifetime.)
And there's a reason it takes more than 5 minutes at the psychiatrist. You must actually determine whether someone is indeed delusional (for the flavours which indeed have a delusional component), _or_ if there's some other problem with them (e.g., depression, as your friend found out), _or_ if they're just a little eccentric but otherwise relatively normal. Just because someone is a little unfocused in one day, it can just mean they had a bad day.
So basically, just tell your friend to stick to whatever he's actually qualified to do.
Pretty much I'm blaming both.
Most of the gameplay changes aren't mandated by the law. There is a central agency which gives those ratings, and in extreme cases might even ban the game (mostly if you tried to go around them), but they can't tell you what to change in those games.
Mostly the changes happen just because the publisher wants to get a lower age rating, that's all. Most of the time it's some marketroid saying, basically, "noooo, 18+ is missing our target demographic, we need 16+ at all cost!!!" That's really what drives such uninspired changes.
And there they lose my sympathy very quick. If they had to do that to be allowed to publish the game at all, well, that would be blatant censorship and I'm against that. But if they change it just to aim at the younger market segment, well, that's a choice they took on their own, isn't it?
Censorship is bad in its own right, but on the flip side, the publishers too need to accept that some games _are_ rightfully 18+.
While I'll agree that the law probably won't do much, and a kid isn't really influenced unless there was already something awfully wrong in their education... exactly what would such a law mandate? No, step down from the "loss of rights", "censorship", "evil politicians" soapbox for a moment, please. No, it didn't propose to outright ban those games. All it would actually do is require a parent to be present when a kid buys a violent game.
Frankly, I don't see anything wrong with that. We all rant and rave about how parents should take more responsibility, blah, blah, blah, so what's fundamentally wrong with asking that a parent actually approves such purchases? If it's the parent's responsibility, then exactly what's wrong with saying, basically, "ok, then the parent must take that decision?"
Yes, education is more complex than just looking over the kid's shoulder all the time. But here's the flip side: if you can't even be arsed to go with your kid to the games/toys/whatever shop a couple of times per year, chances are you just don't spend enough time with that kid anyway. Noone mandated that you keep your finger on a fingerprint reader all the time while the kid plays that game, noone said they'll throw you in jail if your kid plays those games, nor anything similar. Just that once every couple of months you go with the kid to the shop, if you're ok with purchasing violent games for that kid.
Exactly what's so horrible about that?
Losing your rights... how?
1. I'm sorry, kids don't have most of the rights of an adult in the first place. Maybe they should, but here and now they don't. They're the parent's responsibility. So exactly what right did they lose if mommy and daddy have to see what violent games Junior purchases?
2. You didn't lose much either, as a parent. You _do_ occasionally go out with the kid, right? Well, then exactly what's the problem to also take a detour to the game store with him once in a while. Most kids don't even get more than 2-3 games per years. And excuse me if I don't think it's some horribly unreasonable waste of your time to take a detour to the game shop every 4 months to nod and hand the game to the cashier yourself?
It's not even a big detour, since Germany didn't go for the "huge mall outside the town" kind of planning. The shops tend to be all over the place, and especially in the centre of all towns. So whether you took the kid to a park, or to McDonalds, or to a movie, chances are it's a really short detour to the games shop. Exactly what's so oppressive about taking that detour, if you approve of buying violent games for the kid?
Chances are the kid won't mind it too much either, if you have the kind of relationship where it would work without that parental surveillance anyway. If you're that good a parent that the kid would have freely told you what they did and where, they probably won't mind you going to the game shop anyway. You can even talk a bit about those games while you're there. And if you're that good a parent that you taught the kid to make the right choices even without you around (which should be the case), then it won't be that oppressive to have you around either. He just won't make the kind of choices where he'd have to whine and bitch to convince you, right?
And is it really that big a change, anyway? I go to the games shops quite often, and let me tell you, I already see plenty of parents coming there with their children or even teenagers.
So basically you're just telling me that the EU works as it is? So one group might try to push an unreasonable law, the others vote it down, and that's it. Sounds to me no worse than the USA or than the parliament of any of the EU members.
It can get more stupid than that.
E.g., take "No One Lives Forever 2". The original game tweaked the AI a lot, so the enemies would notice a fallen comrade, see if he's dead, etc. Except the German version came and replaced all corpses with backpacks.
So for a start you ended up hiding and/or disposing of backpacks instead of corpses. I mean, wth? Why would someone sound the alarm for seeing a backpack near a bed in the barracks? Don't all soldiers have one of those anyway?
But it gets better. Picture this: A patrol comes by and starts shaking the backpack and saying stuff like "Oh no! Are you still alive? Say something!"
I mean, WTF? Since when was a backpack alive in the first place?
All that clever scripting and trying to make it believable in the original game... just made it look stupid in the censored version.
1. Do you know what "democracy" means? Democracy means that the people choose whatever the f-word they want, including something stupid. Someone telling you from above "nope, we can't let you vote because we know better than you what you need" is the very opposite: that's by definition totalitarianism. Maybe dressed in an "enlightened despotism" or "paternal autocracy" guise (i.e., "it's for your own good"), as virtually every totalitarian regime ever tried to present itself, but in the end it's still the exact antonym of democracy.
Soviet communism too, since we're at comparing stuff to it, played the same propaganda card. Basically, see, we need to restrict what you can do, choose or say, for your own good." Otherwise some subversive elements might get you saddled with capitalism again, and, trust us, you don't want that. Some of you might be deluded or naive enough to think that they do, but they don't know what they're talking about. We know better what you really need.
Simply put, and as a general principle, not just related to the USA: you can't fight for democracy by totalitarian means. It's like fucking for virginity, seriously.
2. Actually, the way I see it, the "domino effect" theory was the _problem_ there. The USA still had its moral high ground and acted like a decent world citizen until they got obsessed with that retarded idea. Then suddenly it started acting worse then the Soviets. The focus was suddenly placating the Soviets at all cost, and losing focus of exactly what was wrong with the Soviets in the first place.
You just can't be the "good guy" by acting worse than the "bad guy". The moment the USA started installing dictators left and right, and training the secret police of every two-bit banana-republic generalissimo, it lost all moral high ground and credibility that they're actually fighting for democracy. "See, I'm going to give you a fascist dictator, just so you don't end up under a communist dictator" doesn't really count as being the champions of freedom and democracy.
3. For that matter, I don't think it even was a fight for democracy and freedom at all at that point any more. The right was back in the lead, and was scared shitless of the idea of a world where they don't have their privileges any more. It couldn't give a shit whether you're an oppressive dictator or not, as long as you're a right-wing dictator. The focus was on being right wing, not on democracy or anything.
At that point it wasn't any more morally right or anything, than the fight of the slave owners to stay in the lead in the 19'th century, or of the aristocracy to stay in the lead in the previous centuries. It was just a bunch of rich guys fighting to keep their privileges. Nothing more.
The "domino effect" and speeches about fighting for "freedom" and "democracy" was just the way they packed that for the masses. You can't tell people "vote for us to make sure the rich stay rich and privileged". You have to pack it to sound as something they might actually want. So it becomes, "vote for us to fight against communist totalitarianism!" (By replacing democratically elected governments with our own totalitarian regimes.)
Don't get me wrong. The average American probably actually thought their leaders were fighting for all the noble stuff, and did get outraged when the pentagon papers got published, for example. But that the guys at the top, you know, the ones in a position to send troops or CIA assassins, actually gave a fuck about democracy at all at that point... I seriously doubt that. At the top it was just a fight of the richest to stay rich and privileged, and a bunch of puppets who'd do anything to keep their bribes and campaign contributions coming.
True, obfuscating or encrypting binaries has been around for a while. When he asked about obfuscating his code, though, I thought he means "source code." Still, you're very right with that correction. Thanks.
Depends on which zone you're talking about. At home or in Europe, yeah, the USA was a little better than Stalin. (Though at least home during the McCarthy era, the keyword is: a little.)
But since we're talking about war in Vietnam, to the _Vietnamese_, the USA actually looked worse. Since you talk about, basically, "then why didn't people run to the communists?"... did you know that that's exactly why the USA didn't allow elections in Vietnam? Seriously. Estimates from 54-55 said that about 80% of the Vietnamese population would have actually voted for Ho Chi Minh, rather than be saddled with the USA-backed dictator?
Seen from the point of view of the Vietnamese, the USA had:
- given them to France as a bribe
- then saddled them with a dictator that was actually less popular than Ho Chi Minh, and actually refused to hold elections (same thing the USSR is accused of doing in its own sphere of influence, you know)
- saddled them with a CIA trained secret police, under Le Quang Tung, who never actually bothered with the Viet Cong, but terrorised dissidents in the South and occasionally buddhist monks (again, eerily similar to what Stalin's secret police was doing in their own part.)
So to the Vietnamese it really didn't look any better than the commies. In fact, it looked worse.
To Cambodia? At least in the bombed zones, they hated the USA and their puppet enough to actually start supporting the Khmer Rouge and have a jolly good communist revolution. How's that for going over to the communist side?
That's pretty much what I meant there. Regardless of what moral high grounds it might (or might not) have had in other places, in Vietnam it actually didn't have any.