Actually, this doesn't even say as much as you think.
For starters, heh... why is it any surprise that water exists? We already know that hydrogen is pretty much everywhere. (Just look at all those main sequence stars.)
And we already know that oxygen forms everywhere. Just look at the CNO cycle, again, pretty typical of main-sequence hydrogen-fusing stars. A percentage of it ends up staying oxygen -- or for that matter C, N or F, and occasionally all the way to iron and nickel -- so even a helium flash in a red giant will eject plenty of all those. You may need a super-nova to get higher than Fe, but C, N and O are produced everywhere.
And we already know that nebulas and clouds have those, so, you know, it only stands to reason that planets would end up having those too. Because they formed out of that darned cloud.
We also know that a planet could lose most of its hydrogen, if it's too small (e.g., Mars) or has a negligible magnetic field to protect it from solar winds (e.g., Venus.) But for a gas giant kind of planet, it would really not apply. So whop-de-do, a Jupiter-type planet contains water. Unlike, say, Uranus and Neptune which also contain water.
What this discovery _doesn't_ tell us, is to actually expect life there. In fact, it tells us not to, since the planet is heated to a temperature which would melt stone into fluid magma. Life may be adaptable, but not _that_ adaptable. At any rate, unless there's liquid water, you can't actually expect water-based life, so the discovery of water is kinda mis-leading there. The critical point in water is at 647 K (374 C or 705 F), so above that you're just not getting a liquid phase, no matter how hard you compress it, or not the same kind of liquid that you see when you get a glass of water. So at magma temperatures, bye-bye life.
So to recap, it just tells us that oxygen and hydrogen are found outside the solar system... just as we knew they would. Now that's a breakthrough.
They obviously had the time to first try to "fix" it by removing the original developpers' names, and now to pull the weird "we're just leveraging non-Google assets" statement. It seems to me like it would have taken exactly the same time to do a less irritating statement.
Let me also say that I seriously doubt that they could replace such a database in-house within a week. There's a _lot_ of work involved in such a thing. Even if you have the most l33t code ever, the research involved isn't something you'd get done in a couple of days. So I'm guessing they're just continuing to show a "so who cares about other people's IP, as long as they don't know we use it" attitude.
Sadly, it's not that simple. We all like to pretend that surely only kids do this and that, and grown ups are all responsible and polite and whatnot. Dream on.
Point in case, I actually know a mid-40's mid-level manager who speaks l33t in MMOs. Shocked the heck out of me to hear (ok, read) him online chatting in what I imagined to be typical loser-kid speak. The poor sap probably imagines that adopting that lingo makes him all cool and hip online.
I know a guy in his 50's whose online life consists pretty much of being a die-hard ganker. That's how he gets his jollies. Ganking newbies.
Also, let's just say there must be a reason why the stereotype about all the "horny naked teenage female" characters online is to assume it must be a fat 40-year-old guy, and not, say, that it must be a 14 year old guy. 'Nuff said.
Conversely, I've been grouped with more than enough 14 year olds and even (according to himself) a 11 year old, that could actually play the game pretty darn well and functioned perfectly well in a group.
Now I'm not saying that either covers 100% of the group. ("All generalizations are false, including this one.") Just that you can't take it for granted that kids = "leetspeek, ninja looters, griefers & beggars", and adults = cool.
As for the nanny-state part, actually I hope that it's _not_ possible to bank hours. The chinese have my sympathy, but from a selfish bastard point of view: maybe having to deal with the chinese market will finally hammer it into everyone's head that 40-man 8-hour raids are _not_ fun. If it's not possible to do it in 3 hours, including getting the group, that should be anyone's hint that it's probably not that much fun. If you end up having some sort of _duty_ to the guild to be there daily at hour X, because 39 others depend on you, it's not fun. Time sinks are ok only when done in moderation, not when you need to quit your job or give up sleep to even be able to join.
Again, I'm aware that it's a very selfish and nasty thing to say, cheering at someone else's problems. So don't take it too seriously. But, still, if it's happening anyway, it might as well give some designers some clue.
Oh please. I've yet to see any level range or class on WoW that _needs_ to grind at any point. (Outside what used to be the level 60 end-game grind. More about that one later.) Invariably there's some "but I really wanna have everything" type that's creating an imaginary grind trap for himself.
Grind... what? XP? Take it from first hand experience, there are plenty of quests and instances to get you from level 1 to 70. I can't say any of my characters ever had to start mindlessly grinding NPCs for XP.
The ones who grind there, are simply grinding because of their own "I _must_ get to level 70 _fast_" delusions. A lot of people seem to have this crazy idea that the game starts at level 70 (or previously 60), and that everything before it must be skipped as fast as possible. Guess what? That's wrong. Levels 1 to 69 are the actual game. Level 70 is where the game _ends_. That's it. You finished it. You've seen all the content. Go out, do something else, or start a new char.
So all these people who try to skip levels 1 to 69 are really skipping the whole goddamn game and content they've bought. Whether by getting power-levelled or by spending hundreds of hours mindlessly slaughtering wolves and boars, that's what it is: skipping the actual story, quests, everything that was the actual game on that DVD.
That's all that such bots do: allow you to skip the actual game. Congrats. You're now level 70, you skipped the "grind", except there's no more game for you to actually play at that point. That "grind" was the actual game, or rather a piss-poor substitute for it. You just bought a game for your bot to play. I hope you liked that bot a lot, at least, because it had the fun you were supposed to have.
And blaming it on Blizzard just takes brain-damage to whole new levels. Blizzard sure as heck didn't force them to skip 99% of the content in the game.
Grinding for money or equipment? Again, sure as heck noone forced them to. It _is_ possible to play the game without buying a new set of blue-quality equipment every 2 levels. Replacing a sword with one that does 1 DPS more won't really make you T3H UB3R-W4RR10R. Replacing a +10 int robe with a +11 int one won't make you the uber-mage.
Stick with that equipment until the upgrade is really worth the cost. Don't think in terms of "is a +11 int robe worth 10 gold." Think in terms of "do I want to pay 10 gold for a 1 point increase over what I already have?" You'll find your expenses might actually go down a helluva lot.
In fact, if you really want to, you can get to level 70 without using anything more than drops and quest rewards.
Again, people just create that illusionary trap in their own mind, and get stuck in it. They end up enacting a bad case of consumerism in an online world. They think there's some _duty_ to keep up with the Joneses, when most of the time noone will give a damn about whether your robe is 1 point weaker than the Joneses' robes. Cue farming for gold, or buying gold, just to blow it at the AH on stuff they don't even really need.
Again: not because Blizzard somehow forced them to grind, but because of something that exists only in their own head.
The exception to both, as I was saying, was the crap level 60 endgame grind. Guess what? That was after the game had actually ended. It wasn't the meat of the game, it was one last dry bone for people who didn't know when to quit. The actual game had pretty much ended, the content was over, you had already done the quests and seen the zones. All that remained was doing the same pointless raid again and again, just so you can pay Blizzard for another month.
Skipping (by grind, PL, or bot) the levels 1 to 59 just to get stuck into the MC grind was one of the most idiotic things one could do. It was akin to having a bot finish Oblivion for you, just so you can view the endgame credits again and again for 6 months straight. That stupid.
Actually, methinks both are blinded by their own "I'm so great because I have a blog" ego trip.
E.g., Jarvis seems to think it's some media agenda or conspiracy to judge all blogs by the worst examples. Guess what? So is everyone else that can be squeezed in one category. Big surprise that it applies to blogs too.
E.g., one thing I remember being told in the army was that, basically, when you're in uniform, pay attention what you're doing, because people won't go "oh, Moraelin is drunk again and making a nuissance of himself", they'll go "oh, great, so that's what the _army_ is doing." Every single soldier or cop will be judged by the actions of the worst soldier or cop.
Same here. Once you fought to be seen as some monolythic "blogosphere" that challenges all the traditional sources of information in some virtual two-front Schlieffen Plan... Guess what? You _are_ seen as a monolythic entity and judged by the worst examples. Whop-de-fucking-do. Big surprise there.
The traditional media faces the same problem, which is why they all try hard to maintain a facade of impartiality or of only reporting. Yes, I'm sure someone can jump in with a "hah, the media and impartial, that's rich. Well, I remember <insert anecdote when they weren't impartial>," Well, that's the whole point. The worst fuck-ups are taken as representative of the media as a whole.
And _especially_ die-hard self-proclaimed advocates of the blogosphere are quick to latch on every single media fuck-up and fashion a battle banner out of it. Well, then don't be surprised if it's a two way street, then.
From there, both are equally deluded in some utopian view of it, if in different directions. Basically:
- O'Reilly: guys, we need to police ourselves and become some kind of utopia where everyone plays nice, is responsible, etc. (Yeah, right.)
- Jarvis and the like: nooo, people are smart enough to see who's right and wrong on their own, check the credentials of every blog page they read, know who put their real name behind their opinions, etc. (Yeah, right. As if I have the time to check if, say, Jarvis himself exists or is his real name.) And the unspoken rules that exist for a real community, surely work flawlessly for an anonymous online group. No, really, they'll start working any day now. (Equally: yeah, right.)
The former is bogus because it obviously can't work, the latter... for the exact same reason. I'll point out at what Penny Arcade called The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. There'll always be someone who thinks that "anonymity + an audience = an oportunity, nay, a _duty_ to be a complete fuckwad."
One fact that all the "it'll work like a real community" utopians miss is that, medically speaking, about 1 in 30 people are sociopaths. (Well, in the USA at least. I don't know what the statistics are for other countries.) Most are kept in check IRL because, while they might completely lack empathy and consideration for their fellow man, they do realize that there are consequences for their actions. There is a name and a face on each such action, and that might come back to bite them in the ass. So they proceed to be normal members of society, for lack of a choice. Take away the "action => consequence" feedback, and they revert to being the assholes they always wanted to be. Even if you got them to maintain a name and a face attached to their blogs, they'll use sock puppets and astroturfing for their trolling.
So neither of the two extreme point of views even work, or have anything even vaguely resembling the world-saving qualities that their advocates claim.
So choosing between the two is like having to choose between an enlightened dictatorship utopia, and an anarchist utopia. Those too have had their own share of apologists, and whole tomes written about how and why they'd work better than the current society models. Too bad they don't work in practice. Well, now we see basically the same extremes appli
Oh please... if Google wanted to distance itself from it, they could have done so long ago. "Sorry, mates, some of our employees fucked up, they've been fired and the offending code/product/database is now being pulled off the market until we build our own replacement."
The whole bullshit, including trying to get away with just deleting the original developpers' names, and press releases about "leveraging non-Google assets" is what's damning Google. It's not just that the original incident happened, it's that from there Google seemed to not even understand why it's bad and why the heck should they give a damn. The original incident may have been an individual developper's fuck-up, but from there it's Google and their corporate policies deciding how to deal with it. And how they _did_ chose to deal with it, frankly, stinks.
Yes, noone expects total mind control, but if _also_ the legal team is out of control and answers it in a way unrepresentative of Google, and _also_ the PR team is out of control and pulls a damning "we were just leveraging someone else's resources" statement on their own, etc, then, ffs, they have a problem. At some point you have to assume some responsibility and control, and not just hide behind not knowing what everyone else is doing. If you don't even know what your legal and PR teams are doing at all, even in a public incident, then you better assert some control real fast.
Additionally "do no evil" does imply a dose of responsibility there. You can't say, basically, "oh, the Mafia does no evil, it's just some of our members that we don't really mind-control, that are shooting people or fitting them with cement shoes." If the individual members are free to do evil, and get the company's full backing in some "we were only leveraging other people's resources" statement, then on what do you base that "do no evil" slogan any more?
RL "evil" isn't some "Black And White" game notion, involving actively hating all humanity and actively seeking to do harm, including self-harm, just for harm's sake. And no company does that overtly anyway, so if that's what Google is distancing itself from, then it doesn't say much.
RL "evil", including corporate evil, is more along the lines of not giving a damn about who gets hurt, if it helps you forward your own interests. It's not actively trying to poison a river just for the chuckle of seeing some people get sick, it's not caring who gets sick as long as you saved some money by just dumping your waste in the river. It's not actively trying to get some excuse to shoot some people as a Mafia don, it's about not giving a damn if it takes some corpses to forward your own interests in an area. If shooting some people to make an example is what works, so be it, it's as good a means to an end as any. Etc.
Or to get back to corporations, Enron too didn't make defrauding investors its whole purpose, it just didn't give a damn who gets hurt by their lies. It had no qualms even with advising its own employees to buy stock at a time when management was selling theirs. Again, not because some super-villain at the top had a chuckle at hurting employees, but because they didn't give a damn.
Basically it's not about having some principles to create as much suffering and destruction as possible, it's about lacking the principles and empathy to avoid doing it. That's what corporate evil is: simple sociopathic behaviour.
And if an organization doesn't give a damn at all about what its employees are doing, and who they're hurting, as long as they get the product out the door, then, congrats, it just lost all credibility for some "do no evil" claim. It just showed as much sociopathic tendencies as any other corporation, only maybe in a more decentralized fashion. You know, why have one sociopath at the top coming up with all evil schemes, when you can have a thousand sociopaths in lower positions encouraged to feel free to come up with their own heists.
What most of the 'global warming' controversy is centers on "are humans contributing?"
the answer is absolutely undeniably: Yes
it's never been stated that we're the only cause.
Real life is rarely about "yes" or "no" questions, unless you happen to suffer from OCPD. The _real_ question in this case isn't "are humans contributing at all?" (yes, we do, even by breathing), but "how much are we contributing?" _That_ is the real question.
Because given the magnitude of the phenomenon over more than a hundred years (absolute temperature rose by about half a percent), there's a _massive_ difference between contributing 99% of it, and contributing 1% of it. The former is a case of "ouch, we gotta do something", the latter is "meh, we can continue like it for another thousand years before our contribution is even noticeable."
You also know that undeniably the answer is "yes" to "can an airplane fall on my house?", but that's no reason to build a bunker. If the probability is small enough, then it just doesn't justify the investment or bother. You also know that walking on the side-walk adds a little wear and tear, but that's no reason to never leave the house. The question is "how much?", not "is it contributing anything?" If it's adding a helluva lot (e.g., you're riding a jackhammer as a pogo stick on that sidewalk), then better stop, if not, heck, it's just business as usual.
Real world is like that: it's not about boolean "yes"/"no" logic. Just because you've trained to program a computer, doesn't mean you have to become one. And it's certainly not about, basically, "if the answer is yes to <insert strawman question> then we must act _now_." Real world problems are more like min-max problems with lots of variables and lots of constraints, than one-question boolean situations. Most of the time, any given variable X is a number with lots of decimals, not a boolean. Most of the time, the questions are "how big is X" (not "is it true or false"), what is its effect on the other variables and viceversa, what does it mean in the context of the available constraints (e.g., you have a finite total budget), and whether it's even productive to focus your efforts on X when maybe changing Y would be a better solution.
Basically whenever I hear someone trying to reduce a whole complex problem to "is X true or false", that just tells me they don't even understand the real problem. OCPD cases (or political parties trying to prey on the sheep: "it's a really complex problem" isn't as good a slogan as "act now to maximize/minimize X") tend to think about themselves that they're uncompromising and doing everything nothing short of perfect, but actually 99% of the time they solve the wrong problem, and come up with something that's actually a crap solution to the _real_ problem. They realize instinctively that they can't maximize all variables at the same time, so they end up taking just one variable as the One True Criterion Of Perfection, and summarily hand-waving all other variables as unimportant. So they proceed to maximize one variable and have their perfect solution... that usually is outside the real problem's constraints completely.
But to return to global warming, as I was saying, the _real_ question isn't "are we?" but "how much?" The latter also has a massive impact on _when_ we need to do something at all. If we won't contribute enough for a thousand years, then maybe we don't need to do anything _now_.
Yeah, it may seem like just delaying the inevitable, but the whole human history is actually based on borrowed time and doing what works now instead of what's ideal in the long run. If we tried to do the _perfect_ thing from the start, we wouldn't even have had an industrial revolution (noone could afford emissions controls with that age's technology), or cars, or for that matter we'd probably still be living in caves.
Sometimes you have to make a cheap, crap (by 2007 standards) Ford Model T in 1908 because that's what
Again, REALLY? I don't know where you even found that definition.
That's certainly not the definition they use in the Bible, for example. I don't recall them saying anywhere that God would stop existing if you stop believing. In fact, au contraire, God is perfectly able to be an ominpotent god:
- without _any_ worshippers during Genesis, before making Adam. And even afterwards, he doesn't seem to have any problem because he had only 2, and even those didn't seem to have _that_ much faith. It sure didn't stop them from going and listening to the snake instead.
- during the flood, when again the world population was reduced to almost nothing
- IIRC during the Apocalypse, when most of the people will follow the antichrist not God, but God is supposed to have no problem winning that fight anyway
Neither did any other religion I can think of. E.g., yeah, the Norse believed that Odin will die, but not for lack of worshippers, but in battle during Ragnarok.
E.g., for a lot of other religions such an idea doesn't even make any _sense_. Most early religions didn't even have anthropomorphic gods. For the early Romans, for example, before they got taken over by the Greek gods, Vesta wasn't an anthropomorphic goddes of fire, she actually was _the_ fire. You know, not human shaped, but flame shaped. The element itself. Others worshipped the sun, the desert, whatever. It doesn't even make any sense to believe that those would stop existing if you stop worshipping them.
The very recent idea that maybe God needs your faith points makes for some good novels, but that's not the God described in the bible or anywhere else.
More importantly: that's not the God that a real christian believes in. So if you're going to argue "your God is stupid" with creationists, then please argue about the God they actually believe in, not about some completely different idea of God. Basing your "what would make sense for God to do" on some 20'th century novels kind of god instead of the bible God, is as silly as basing it on what would make sense for Zeus or Odin. Well, they don't believe in that one, so who cares if it wouldn't make sense for that one?
Hmm, it would sure explain a few things. Thanks for that insight.
Still, it's not the first "<insert number> worst <insert category>" list I see that sounds, well, like you said, like it's written by 7 year olds. So I had assumed it had something to do with writing that kind of a list.
Still, you do make me wonder which is cause and which is effect there. Maybe it's just that the same kind of people who sound like that, also feel compelled to write that kind of trolling lists.
You then liken the scenario to a SimCity. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but Black&White would be a better comparison. In B&W (or the one I'm thinking of, if I have the title wrong) your status in the game is dependent on what the people in the simulation think of you. Perhaps this video game-playing god needs the Faith Points to level up so he has access to better stuff. Perhaps the people in the simulation need to be leveled-up in order to beat the player's friend's Peoplemon.
The black and white idea is pretty new kind of a, "yeah, well, god needs us too" reaction. It's certainly not how any civilization I know of imagined their gods. And it isn't quite the way an omniscient and omnipotent god would work. Omnipotent != limited by faith points;)
But in the end, all I wrote was just one example of one possible kind of deity would not give a darn if anyone worships Him/Her or not, and would have nothing to lose by misleading His/Her creations. Sort of a counter-example to the idea that a god _must_ want worshippers, or that it's his job. Well, that's one kind of god who wouldn't.
But, yeah, it's not the only kind of God that can be imagined, that much is obvious. For all I (don't) know, it could just as well be the B&W kind, or something completely different, or nothing at all. I don't pretend to know what's up there.
For the purpose of that discussion, though, and of questioning the assumption that god _must_ need worshippers, it's the kind of example that serves my point. Hence using that one instead of the B&W one.
You started out saying that a god doesn't think the same way we do. That would also mean what's logical for us isn't the same as what would be logical for such a being.
Very much so. We don't even know what's up there, much less what their motives or logic would be. Even if their logic as such was the same as ours, logic in the end is a tool towards an end. It's used for example in figuring out a way to a goal, with the available tools/facts/whatever, and within some given constraints. E.g., I want warmth, I use logic to find a solution to that, like turning up the temperature on the heater's thermostat. So as long as we don't know what a deity's goals for that simulation are (worshippers? a power trip? an interesting empire building game because he's bored? something else?) we can't really talk about what would be logical for that deity to do.
However, after spending countless hours/days building your SimCity model, wouldn't you be a tad upset if the people in your game suddenly said: "Fuck this, I wanna run through the streets going 'wokka-wokka-wokka'..."
Personally I'd probably be a little amused. And, if I'm the one who wrote that simulation, it's just a signal that I need to debug it some more. But what would someone else do, much less a deity, yeah, I can't possibly know.
Disclaimer: I'm not particularly religious (in fact, like the joke goes, more like apathic agnostic: I don't know if there's a god, and don't really give a damn), so probably not really qualified to play the devil's advocate there. Still, it seems to me like you're taking some axioms for granted which are actually very debatable.
If God creates such things, he might be omnipotent but very stupid.
Or maybe he just doesn't think the way you do?
Imagine you're God.
Yes, please do think you're _God_. Not a king, not an emperor, but something truly omnipotent, at least in regards to the universe you created.
Ok, probably it's hard to imagine something like that, so let's simplify it some more. Think you're a hacker running such a universe as a simulation on your computer. You're as close to omnipotent as it gets in that simulated world you created. You can raise a mountain or boil the seas with just a click-and-drag of the mouse. Rearrange the continents if you want to. Make the planet spin backwards. Plunge it into the sun, if you want to. Raise the ocean level until only a mountain top sticks out, like in the biblical legend. Etc.
Or you can end the whole simulation with an ALT-F4 if you so wish, truly turning a whole universe into _nothing_. Not even ruins or asteroid debris or radioactive fallout, but truly into _nothing_. As if it never even existed. How's that for truly godly power, by the standards of those simulated people?
Now also realize the gap between you and them. You're God, they're bunch of simulated people and animals in the virtual world of your creation. They're not your peers, they're a bunch of created NPCs, and they're allowed to exist only because it keeps you interested or entertained. Maybe you're curious what will happen in the long term with that simulation, or maybe you're just bored, or maybe you just had an unused old computer and no better idea what to leave running on it.
And of course, you want people to believe in you 'cause... well, you're God, that's your job.
Really? Why? Think at the above scenario again. What difference would it make to you whether those created people believe in you or not? Why would it matter at all?
For more power? You already have _absolute_ power over that virtual world. There's no way to go upwards from there. Whether those people believe in you or not, you still can do the same things to their world. You can still keep it running or reformat the drive, whether they're all true believers or all heretics or somewhere in between.
For popularity? Among whom? They're not your peers, they're just some NPCs you created. Who cares if you're popular among them?
Because "it's your job"... heh... _JOB_? Really? You're _God_ there. You don't have any job or duty towards those NPCs. They're in no position to actually expect you to do a _job_. How would they pay you for a "job" anyway? If you do anything for them, it's at most a _favour_, not some "job". Or you might as well ignore them and leave the simulation running on a server in the basement until something interesting happens. (E.g., they nuke themselves.)
No, seriously, think playing SimCity. You might feel benevolent towards those little simulated people, you might even want to make their lives easy, but... "job"? I don't think anyone would consider it a job or duty.
Why would I create stuff to make people doubt my existance?
Why wouldn't you? I can think of plenty of reasons why I would do just that if I was running that simulation.
E.g., because it's a damn boring simulation if they all are stuck at the emotional level of children obeying the will of an omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent parent. Because likely that's what it would degenerate into, if I made myself an active and undeniable God in that simulated world. Think 1984 on steroids: they _know_ Big Brother
The shameless Y2K hype wasn't a flop, it was a major success. Yes, there were some problems too, but the hype machine went into overdrive and a whole horde of snake oil vendors used it to _invent_ extra dangers, and line their pockets at the expense of gullible idiots. I've seen such snake oil ranging from comically absurd (power cables or speakers sold as Y2K ready) to outright dangerous (miracle cure cards that would automagically make all your programs Y2K ready... never mind that the field in the database is still only 2 digits). And then there were the consultants, who happily invented dangers only they saw, and only they could protect you from, much like the shamans of old protecting the tribe from invisible evil spirits.
Let's also say another thing: the Y2K problem was fairly trivial to diagnose way before 2000 anyway. Just turn your date forwards and there you go, you can know whether your computer has a problem. Also most companies which stored dates at all, had to generate some kind of projections for the whole year, or store info about loans in their database, or whatever. E.g., everyone who took or gave a 5 year loan in 1995 already knew whether or not they have a Y2K problem there.
Most had patched it already, but then the idiot PHB went and bought some snake-oil from the nice salesman or consultant anyway. Just because the whole horde of con artists, and the media too, were relentlessly spewing absurd doomsday scenarios in which the sky is falling and even your power cable will stop working if you don't buy the magical snake oil.
Basically tons of money went on replacing perfectly good computers and perfectly good programs, not because they actually had a problem, but because some lying marketroid fed some doomsday story to an idiot CEO. Yes, there were some problems, no doubt, but what I'm saying is that a helluva lot of spending was on stuff that _didn't_.
The whole thing had an effect on the whole industry -- other than the snake oil vendors themselves, of course -- comparable to the Hiroshima bomb or the Great Depression. It siphoned so much money from companies, some which didn't even _have_ a problem, that it created the post-2000 IT spending crash and basically a destructive deflation. The fact that 7 years later we still have a scramble to move to the cheapest untrained monkeys, offshore if possible, and that "reducing costs" is the battle cry du jour even if it means shooting yourself in the foot to save on shoe costs, is just a continuation of that spending crash.
Even omitting the effects of the overspending in '99 itself (which a lot of companies couldn't really afford), the magic of basing each year's budget on the previous year's spending means we're _still_ seeing the ripples. Suddenly in 2000 there were no more computers to buy, no programs to upgrade, etc. That alone was the kiss of death for many honest vendors. (The con artists had already lined their pockets in '99 and moved to some other con scheme.) But then 2001 came along, and its budget was based on the "nothing more to buy" spending of 2000. Suddenly you had a budget of two beans and a peanut for 2001. And the budget of 2002 was based on that. And so on. Many are still struggling to get out of _that_ trap.
But, yeah, for the snake oil vendors and con artists, I must say, Y2K was a major success. Never before has a hype campaign sold so much useless and unneeded snake oil. Hats off, and all respect.
Ah, lions are lions. I must admit it's my fault for using the language so imprecisely, but I really meant an ordinary house cat (Felis Silvestris) when I was proposing citizenship for my cat. I know the word cat is often used to mean the whole Felidae family, including "the big cats", though, so, as I was saying, I should have been more precise.
I didn't say that Mozilla _had_ to write its own widgets. Au contraire, I consider it to be the prime example of why a team needs leadership: they went in dada land for _years_ writing cool frameworks and widget sets, when Netscape really needed a working browser.
At any rate, I didn't say they _had_ to. There are plenty of existing widget sets. They could have used any of those if they didn't want to write cool frameworks.
Also, the "haven't had a problem" meant: the users don't really have a huge problem with it. I didn't say whether or not it's a pain for the developpers. (Though even there I like to think they must have had fun with it, because sure as heck noone asked them to. Again, what Netscape wanted was a working browser, not to spend years building cool widget frameworks while IE nails Netscape's coffin.) I only said that most users couldn't care less whether an app has KDE's buttons or Gnome's buttons or something else.
Yes and no, on the whole. Basically it wasn't really supposed to be taken literally.
That said, IMHO mostly no when it comes to similarities between cats and lions.
Lions have a group survival strategy, just like wolves do (obviously, a different one, though), cats (as in, Felis Silvestris) simply don't. They evolved and live on prey that just wouldn't work any better, or at all, for a group hunt. They're a lot closer, if you will, to a smaller, and more tolerant of each other, kind of tiger, than to lions. And as a result, group behaviour and dynamics are also a lot more different.
Colonies of feral cats are closer to a group of individuals that tolerates each other, than to anything really resembling a group of lions. And being the "alpha" means a heck of a lot less. Leading the group to war, for a start, is something that wouldn't even work, because the other group members don't have the instinct to hunt as a group, or to follow a leader to hunt.
Being the alpha male also doesn't involve being the one that impregnates all females. Or at least I can't find that documented anywhere. What I do find documented is quite the contrary: that female cats often mate with more than one male when they're in heat, and it's not that uncommon for different kittens in the same litter to have different fathers. It sure doesn't sound like a lion pride situation to me.
Also note the reference to alpha male, rather than the one male and a harem scheme used by lion prides. Feral cat colonies usually include more than one male, and the cat females aren't as "submissive" as lionesses are. Hence, as I was saying, you'd be surprised how much those group dynamics can differ from a pride of lions.
Even, since you mention kittens, the defense of kittens is most usually _not_ entrusted to a lone male, and certainly it wouldn't be the only male in a colony. The females have a far more active role in caring for the kittens, than would be the case with lions. So even _if_ anyone killed _a_ male, they wouldn't end up in a position to kill all kittens with impunity.
Killing kittens... again, you can't really simplify it as being the same as in lions. What we do know is that (A) _some_ cats kill kittens, (B) most actually don't, so it's not a general trait of the species, and (C) actually more killed kittens are killed by females, often their own mother, than by males. I've yet to see any claim that anyone solved that mystery yet. Yes, there is one hypothesis that maybe tomcats act like male lions, but there are other hypothes too. For example, another one is that some cats simply have their hunting instincts tripped by the small squeaky kittens.
We don't really know yet, and there are questions either way. For example the generalization that male cats just acts like male lions misses the crucial point that most actually don't. Or it misses the case of kittens killed by a female, which doesn't really have a parallel in lion prides.
First of all, bear in mind that the whole thing started more as a metaphor than anything really arguing cat morality vs human morality. The subtle point of the whole fable was more along the lines whining about humans, than actually believing that cats could really rule a nation. Plus, to be honest, a bit of hoping for a "+1 Funny" (see the part about cats being nerds because they like keyboards), but some people decided I was insightful instead. Oh well... Anyway, debating it too literally is a bit like explaining a joke: don't expect everything to literally, 100% make sense, or to still be funny after it's debated to death;)
That said,
Mind you, I have very little patience for the Shia/Sunni nonsense. However: you seem to be missing the point. Neither side HAS "given up." Germany gave up. Japan gave up. Iran hasn't, for example, given up on whatever it's trying to accomplish by providing money, training, and weapons for the conflict they're helping to perpetuate in Iraq. It's still a conflict because it's still a conflict that someone wants to keep going. It's not done, with one party just hurting innocents to make a point... the hurting of innocents is the point that the aggressive parties are pursuing.
Very much so, but that was sorta the whole point: a cat wouldn't come up with such a plan where hurting the innocents is the whole point. (It's just not wired for that or "smart" enough for that.)
To wit, just like a cat doesn't have any moral qualms about torturing and (possibly) killing a mouse because that just seems like the natural state of things, one sect of Islam that considers the others (to say nothing of westerners!) to be sub-human (like a mouse is sub-cat) is just doing what their world view asks of them when they slaughter apostates, blah blah blah.
Again, very much so, very insightful, but good luck getting a cat to make that mental substitution. You can't convince a cat that another cat is really a mouse, not a cat.
Your cat does NOT kill mice because it's hungry. It kills because it can, and because it likes to stay in practice. Mice DO "give up" in front of a cat, and then get tortured and killed anyway. I've seen it with my own eyes, plenty of times.
This time we're more in "yes and no" territory. To you, it may look like the mouse gave up, but to a cat it matters if it gives the correct _cat_ signals or not. It's not as much based on careful reasoning and introspection, nor on philosophical considerations about the mouse's predicament. It's really some signals that are as good as hard-coded. You either give the right "I give up, leave me alone" signal, or you don't.
Basically, when the mouse learns to purr, then it will have a chance. Maybe.
Anyway, to get back to the point, the point is: sure, a cat plays with a _mouse_, but it doesn't play "let's bleed you to death" with another cat. Which is more than I can say about humans.
Your mistake, in your analogy, is presuming that cat-to-cat dominance fights are the same as people-to-people dominance fights.
That was sorta the whole point, actually: that cats don't engage in some of the silly human games.
most religious wars include the very specific pronounciation of the enemy as being not equals or deserving of any human-grade respect. See the militant extremists who cite the very act of voting in a democratic election as signing your own death warrant (because it's un-Islamic, and you've become one with the baser, western animals, yadda yadda yadda). Dehumanizing your enemy (making them into the mice you're happy to toy with and kill, if you're a cat) is the oldest trick in the book. And it is the oldest trick in the book because by assigning non-humanity to your opponents, the more primitive (cat-like) tools in your toolbox become available to you.
Duly noted, but still... the fundamental difference is that the mouse is another species.
The humans boil molusks alive (plus other fun ways of killing other kinds of food), the cat plays with a mouse to death. So far both do nasty things to their prey.
The humans torture and kill other humans, the cat doesn't do the same to its own species. That's what I'm talking about.
Electing a cat as president won't change this one bit. While in a metaphorical/fable sense you can say USA = cat, Iraq = mouse, in practice a cat won't think in those terms.
And it would still have to convince its cat-soldiers to go there and actually do that. Because that's basically what it's going to take. For the theoretical cat super-power state to do that to the little state, some cat-infantry would have to go down there and actually kill the population. I'm not sure how they'd get around the interlock they have in the brain against killing each other.
But mostly that's already taking it too seriously. My point was more of a "man, we're worse to each other than wolves are to each other" kind of lament, only in this case with cats. Dissecting into detail exactly what _would_ a cat realistically do in Iraq, well, reading all I wrote above, it seems just about as bad as explaining a joke:P
Google is ignoring Linux again. You might argue that OS X has more users than Linux, which I think is debatable. However then you have to think which desktop on Linux do you target? GNOME? KDE? minimal X (and then accept that your app looks like crap on things like SuSe or Ubuntu)? The biggest problem is that "Linux" may be a good platform to target, because the desktop is separated from the OS, you CAN'T target the "Linux Desktop"...and we see why Linux is a great server platform, but a lousy desktop platform because it's not standardized in the same way.
That's not as big a problem as you'd think.
1. Other apps haven't had a problem because of this. Both Mozilla and OpenOffice, for example, insisted on writing their very own framework and widgets, so basically they're _neither_ Gnome nor KDE. Your line of thinking seems to be that that would make them shunned by both KDE and Gnome users, yet that's not really the case. And then there's stuff like XMMS, which doesn't even try to look even remotely like the desktop, and had no problem either.
2. In the meantime both KDE and Gnome can use each other's themes. So you can just write your app with either set of widgets and it won't look out of place on the other desktop.
3. I'd buy your argument if it were some really complex app, with lots of forms and controls. Essentially all you really need there is a freakin' web-page-like page, in a frame. As long as you can draw a white background with a rectangle for the input and a button, you're actually good to go for a simple search app. (The borders and title bar of the frame will be drawn by the window manager anyway, so you don't have to worry about those.)
4. And you don't even have to do that, if your goal is to look like Google. I.e., like a web page. Think about it. You can just serve HTTP on the port of your choice, restrict it to localhost so it's not abusable from outside, your "application" icon just starts a browser on that port. There you go: now the user can use whatever browser they prefer, and have it look like any other page in that browser. They can use Mozilla, Opera, Konqueror if they absolutely have to have a KDE-only environment, or whatever.
Basically, let's lay _that_ tired argument to rest at least in this case. Linux has some problems with mass adoption, yes, but constantly claiming that you can't write apps because there are 2 desktops... is just false, and it's getting repetitive and boring by now.
Do you really own a cat? This is -common- cat behavior. If they cat doesn't submit, they actually physically fight until one does.
I meant crap like: person A humiliates/tortures/kills/whatever person B, just to make a point to persons X, Y and Z. Innocents get made an example of, just to remind everyone else what their place is, and what can happen if they get ideas above their station.
I can honestly say that I've never seen anything even remotely similar in cats. And, trust me, I grew up with cats around since I was a baby. If cat A has a problem with cat X, it takes it on cat X directly, not on some bystander to make a point.
You say that most cat fights are human-made... But that totally doesn't explain alley-cat fights, or jungle-panther fights. They fight for supremacy. The only thing keeping them from being more war-like than us is lack of cooperation and opposable thumbs. Seriously.
Oh, they'll make a show of power all right, but then one gives up and that's it. I can't even remember hearing about a cat fight that ended up lethal for one of the combatants.
And I don't think lack of opposable thumbs is what's lacking there to make them lethal. The same cats are perfectly able to tear a larger animal apart. E.g., I've seen cats hunt rabbits or rats larger than their own size. The teeth and claws are perfectly enough to do a _lot_ of damage to another cats, if they wanted to kill each other.
Compare that to some of the genocides the humans did, and I can't help liking cats a lot more. There's stuff we humans do which isn't even about power or territory, but just killing someone else because they're from a different country, race, religion or voted for the opposite party. (See, civil wars.)
Basically: when a cat signals "I give up", that's it, the fighting stops. When a human comes up with his hands up, on the other hand, the others just want to kill and torture him. And then there are the countless cases where people took out their frustration upon non-combatants who didn't fight in the first place. It took millenia and several international conventions and harsh laws to tell everyone to freakin' let go... and as we see in the recent cases in Iraq, they still don't.
Oh freakin' please... it's that kind of "we're the only important ones" verbal masturbation, followed by nothing more than fallacies and handwaving as "proof", that gets some of us disgusted at a lot of humanities students.
For starters, it takes some truly brain-dead hand-waving to pick out of a continuous stream of both, only the convenient instances where A came before B, but thoroughly pretend that no cases exist where B came before A, or both were working on it before either went publich with their results. If you plot both inventions and literary milestones along time, you get something more like a random sequence of both intermingled. It's something like B, A, A, B, A, B, B, B, A, B, A, A,... and so forth.
Sure, you can handpick cases where an A came before a B, no matter how unrelated, and proceed to apply the post hoc, ergo propter hoc _fallacy_ to it. I.e., to assume that just because two things happened in a sequence, surely the first _must_ be the cause for the second.
But equally for every A you could pick a B that happened before it, and the same fallacy now says that all artistic progress was caused by scientific breakthroughs that preceded it.
Plus you can see whole cultures and eras where plenty of As happened without any B coming as a result, or viceversa.
In reality, that fallacy doesn't actually prove anything. That's why it's called a fallacy. To actually prove causality, you'll need far more than "well, A happened before B, hence it must be the cause." So that alone would be enough to invalidate the whole bullshit. But it's doubly so when not only it's a fallacy, but it's _also_ based on bogus handpicked data where only the supporting "evidence" is used, and everything else is cheerfully ignored.
In practice, you can see some correlation, in that areas which encouraged being different and thinking for oneself, produced both scientists and artists. Who would have imagined that? But again, you can also see cultures which encouraged only arts or only science, and mostly got only one of the two.
But again, correlation doesn't mean causation. Just because an area had both scientists and artists, it takes some extreme andwaving to say that the scientists appeared because of the artists. Mere correlation doesn't tell you which is the cause of which. It can also be the other way around, or a third factor can be the real cause of both. E.g., as I was saying, a culture which encourages thinking for oneself and thinking outside the box, will, unsurprisingly, produce both.
Or the most exotic thing you have seen in the world is your cat ?
Come to think of it, you have a point there, my cat certainly deserves citizenship.
After all, the fuzzy things managed to tame humans, so it kinda says something about where they are in a sorted list by IQ. Plus, you've seen how they're attracted to books you're reading, or to your keyboard. They're natural nerds, I tell you;)
Second, but probably more important, giving cats a right to vote can't _possibly_ make it any worse. When was the last time you saw a cat torturing another cat for fun, or to scare the other cats into submission? When was the last time you saw a cat go to war? For that matter, when was the last time you saw a cat kill another?
I mean, sure, they fight, but with the natural weapons they have they'd be perfectly capable of taking each other apart if they wanted to. The species however has clear rules of engagement and of signalling "I surrender" or "I'm not a threat, don't attack me". Plus, most of the fights you get to see are either (A) actually playing/training, or (B) because humans force them into situations where the normal conflict resolution mechanisms don't work. E.g., bringing another cat on the territory of another without all the "rituals" (so to speak) normally associated with joining another group, and without the possibility to just go away.
Plus, they have built in mechanisms to avoid needing a war in the first place. Most felines release a number of eggs based on how well fed the mother is. So if the cat can barely feed itself, it will at most give birth to one kitten or two. If it's doing perfectly well, it will do its part for population growth. So it's hard to end up in a situation where they'd need to start a war for resources.
So I have to wonder how much worse it could possibly be if the cats could vote on issues like the stupid war in Iraq. My take is that it couldn't be any worse than letting humans do it.
I have nothing against the engine being scalable. What I have against it is that it was advertised with some screenshots that noone could actually reproduce, on any computer, or not without turning it into a slide-show. If the game was supposed to be played with medium graphics settings at launch, then the screenshots should have been taken on medium graphics settings too.
I don't get it, this is always true unless you have dynamically recalculated procedural textures. When you get closer you can see the lack of resolution of a texture. What precisely are you complaining about?
Let me explain. The problem isn't that it was pixelated, the problem was that the only way to play the game at all (short of having a 512 MB graphics card, which didn't exist back then), was to start at the first or second mip-map where other games would have had the normal texture. Basically even if you bumped your nose into someone's armour, you wouldn't see the expanded armour texture, you'd see the first (1/2 texture size) or second (1/4 texture size) mip-map of it.
The problem there is that mip-maps invariably look like complete shit. They're an ok trade-off when rendering at a distance at which you'd have to reduce it by that factor anyway, but not when starting with them from point blank range.
A texture that's been hand-painted at, say, 512x512 pixels, generally tends to have contrast and edges where it matters. E.g., if my breastplate texture includes an articulated "skirt", the lines between the articulated plates will be crisp. It will actually look like an articulated piece.
A texture that's been painted in 1024x1024, or 2048x2048, and then rendered with all mip-maps bumped +2 (i.e., with the 2'nd mip-map at point blank, 3'rd mip-map where normally the second would be, etc) looks like crap. Now the lines between the same plates are thinner and drawn, basically, to look right in the original resolution. When basically you're first reducing the 2048x2048 texture to a 512x512 mip-map, and then render with that, the same skirt now looks like a smeared piece of crap. All those lines and shadows have been shrunk and filtered into being little more than some blurry gunk on top of a blurry texture.
In EQ2's case that was even worse. All details on armour were coded with shaders, for no obvious reason than to need more GPU power than really necessary... and look like crap on any computer with less than a _future_ graphics card. Armour textures -- and all other textures for that matter -- were some blurry mass-scanned crap to start with, even without the mip-mapping making it even worse, and the shaders pretty much added some detail on top of it. Once you disabled those, and on any machine less than absolute top-end you'd have to, all detail everywhere just disappeared.
To return to what my problem with it is/was: the game was advertised with some futuristic screenshots, featuring a lot more detail and shading than you could actually get on _any_ computer. That's, to my mind, nothing short of deception. People who bought the game based on those screenshots, couldn't _possibly_ get a similar image on their screen. People chose EQ2 over another MMO (take your pick which) based on some "woo, EQ2 screenshots look better" factor, but actually end up with _worse_ image quality than any other MMO on any realistic computer available at the time.
Now I'm not saying that people _should_ buy a game based on screenshots, quite the opposite. But some people do, screenshots sell, and this was nothing short of gaming the system.
Uh, the only 'feature' less powerful PC's won't be able to take advantage of is the eye candy...big fucking deal...I suppose they're going to go after game makers too for all the games where machines meet the recommended requirements but can't run the games with everything maxed out?
You know, now that you mention it, going after the game makers has merits.
No, I'm not saying it should run with everything _maxxed_. But I can think of games which are anywhere from completely unplayable (as in, crash), to a slideshow, to having to be downgraded to a pityful joke, on machines which meet the minimum advertised specs. Sometimes even on machines which meet the _recommended_ specs. And that I don't really find ok.
I can think of games which were launched with some advertised spec, but then some mandatory patch turned them into a graphics orgy that outright crashes the game or machine of someone who did previously meet the specs. One example is COH. When the graphics upgrade happened that put COH graphics on par with COV. I know at least one person whose (admittedly crap) laptop started to just crash to desktop when that graphics update hit. In spite of having previously been perfectly good to play COH, and still being perfectly good to play WoW. (And, you know, because it's a MMO you can't refuse to install a patch.)
I can think of games which were hyped for their supposed great graphics, except _no_ machine at the time of release could actually display the advertised graphics as more than a frame per second. (E.g., EQ2. It was launched at a time when the 9800 passed for the top end graphics card, and sorry, it wasn't anywhere near enough to play other than at a massively reduced graphics quality. And by massively reduced, I mean that even at a point blank range all detail on a piece of armour was turned into a blurred smear.) I'm sorry, I know that not all machines are created equal, but if _no_ computer exists at the time which can actually display those graphics, then don't fucking advertise it with the max quality screenshots.
Briefly, some truth in avertising would be a welcome change with the game publishers too, you know? Those specs on the box are rarely more than a joke pulled out of the ass by marketting. It has nothing to do with what computers run the game adequately, it just has to do with how big a slice of the market does the marketting department want to market to.
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Actually, this doesn't even say as much as you think.
For starters, heh... why is it any surprise that water exists? We already know that hydrogen is pretty much everywhere. (Just look at all those main sequence stars.)
And we already know that oxygen forms everywhere. Just look at the CNO cycle, again, pretty typical of main-sequence hydrogen-fusing stars. A percentage of it ends up staying oxygen -- or for that matter C, N or F, and occasionally all the way to iron and nickel -- so even a helium flash in a red giant will eject plenty of all those. You may need a super-nova to get higher than Fe, but C, N and O are produced everywhere.
And we already know that nebulas and clouds have those, so, you know, it only stands to reason that planets would end up having those too. Because they formed out of that darned cloud.
We also know that a planet could lose most of its hydrogen, if it's too small (e.g., Mars) or has a negligible magnetic field to protect it from solar winds (e.g., Venus.) But for a gas giant kind of planet, it would really not apply. So whop-de-do, a Jupiter-type planet contains water. Unlike, say, Uranus and Neptune which also contain water.
What this discovery _doesn't_ tell us, is to actually expect life there. In fact, it tells us not to, since the planet is heated to a temperature which would melt stone into fluid magma. Life may be adaptable, but not _that_ adaptable. At any rate, unless there's liquid water, you can't actually expect water-based life, so the discovery of water is kinda mis-leading there. The critical point in water is at 647 K (374 C or 705 F), so above that you're just not getting a liquid phase, no matter how hard you compress it, or not the same kind of liquid that you see when you get a glass of water. So at magma temperatures, bye-bye life.
So to recap, it just tells us that oxygen and hydrogen are found outside the solar system... just as we knew they would. Now that's a breakthrough.
They obviously had the time to first try to "fix" it by removing the original developpers' names, and now to pull the weird "we're just leveraging non-Google assets" statement. It seems to me like it would have taken exactly the same time to do a less irritating statement.
Let me also say that I seriously doubt that they could replace such a database in-house within a week. There's a _lot_ of work involved in such a thing. Even if you have the most l33t code ever, the research involved isn't something you'd get done in a couple of days. So I'm guessing they're just continuing to show a "so who cares about other people's IP, as long as they don't know we use it" attitude.
Sadly, it's not that simple. We all like to pretend that surely only kids do this and that, and grown ups are all responsible and polite and whatnot. Dream on.
Point in case, I actually know a mid-40's mid-level manager who speaks l33t in MMOs. Shocked the heck out of me to hear (ok, read) him online chatting in what I imagined to be typical loser-kid speak. The poor sap probably imagines that adopting that lingo makes him all cool and hip online.
I know a guy in his 50's whose online life consists pretty much of being a die-hard ganker. That's how he gets his jollies. Ganking newbies.
Also, let's just say there must be a reason why the stereotype about all the "horny naked teenage female" characters online is to assume it must be a fat 40-year-old guy, and not, say, that it must be a 14 year old guy. 'Nuff said.
Conversely, I've been grouped with more than enough 14 year olds and even (according to himself) a 11 year old, that could actually play the game pretty darn well and functioned perfectly well in a group.
Now I'm not saying that either covers 100% of the group. ("All generalizations are false, including this one.") Just that you can't take it for granted that kids = "leetspeek, ninja looters, griefers & beggars", and adults = cool.
As for the nanny-state part, actually I hope that it's _not_ possible to bank hours. The chinese have my sympathy, but from a selfish bastard point of view: maybe having to deal with the chinese market will finally hammer it into everyone's head that 40-man 8-hour raids are _not_ fun. If it's not possible to do it in 3 hours, including getting the group, that should be anyone's hint that it's probably not that much fun. If you end up having some sort of _duty_ to the guild to be there daily at hour X, because 39 others depend on you, it's not fun. Time sinks are ok only when done in moderation, not when you need to quit your job or give up sleep to even be able to join.
Again, I'm aware that it's a very selfish and nasty thing to say, cheering at someone else's problems. So don't take it too seriously. But, still, if it's happening anyway, it might as well give some designers some clue.
Oh please. I've yet to see any level range or class on WoW that _needs_ to grind at any point. (Outside what used to be the level 60 end-game grind. More about that one later.) Invariably there's some "but I really wanna have everything" type that's creating an imaginary grind trap for himself.
Grind... what? XP? Take it from first hand experience, there are plenty of quests and instances to get you from level 1 to 70. I can't say any of my characters ever had to start mindlessly grinding NPCs for XP.
The ones who grind there, are simply grinding because of their own "I _must_ get to level 70 _fast_" delusions. A lot of people seem to have this crazy idea that the game starts at level 70 (or previously 60), and that everything before it must be skipped as fast as possible. Guess what? That's wrong. Levels 1 to 69 are the actual game. Level 70 is where the game _ends_. That's it. You finished it. You've seen all the content. Go out, do something else, or start a new char.
So all these people who try to skip levels 1 to 69 are really skipping the whole goddamn game and content they've bought. Whether by getting power-levelled or by spending hundreds of hours mindlessly slaughtering wolves and boars, that's what it is: skipping the actual story, quests, everything that was the actual game on that DVD.
That's all that such bots do: allow you to skip the actual game. Congrats. You're now level 70, you skipped the "grind", except there's no more game for you to actually play at that point. That "grind" was the actual game, or rather a piss-poor substitute for it. You just bought a game for your bot to play. I hope you liked that bot a lot, at least, because it had the fun you were supposed to have.
And blaming it on Blizzard just takes brain-damage to whole new levels. Blizzard sure as heck didn't force them to skip 99% of the content in the game.
Grinding for money or equipment? Again, sure as heck noone forced them to. It _is_ possible to play the game without buying a new set of blue-quality equipment every 2 levels. Replacing a sword with one that does 1 DPS more won't really make you T3H UB3R-W4RR10R. Replacing a +10 int robe with a +11 int one won't make you the uber-mage.
Stick with that equipment until the upgrade is really worth the cost. Don't think in terms of "is a +11 int robe worth 10 gold." Think in terms of "do I want to pay 10 gold for a 1 point increase over what I already have?" You'll find your expenses might actually go down a helluva lot.
In fact, if you really want to, you can get to level 70 without using anything more than drops and quest rewards.
Again, people just create that illusionary trap in their own mind, and get stuck in it. They end up enacting a bad case of consumerism in an online world. They think there's some _duty_ to keep up with the Joneses, when most of the time noone will give a damn about whether your robe is 1 point weaker than the Joneses' robes. Cue farming for gold, or buying gold, just to blow it at the AH on stuff they don't even really need.
Again: not because Blizzard somehow forced them to grind, but because of something that exists only in their own head.
The exception to both, as I was saying, was the crap level 60 endgame grind. Guess what? That was after the game had actually ended. It wasn't the meat of the game, it was one last dry bone for people who didn't know when to quit. The actual game had pretty much ended, the content was over, you had already done the quests and seen the zones. All that remained was doing the same pointless raid again and again, just so you can pay Blizzard for another month.
Skipping (by grind, PL, or bot) the levels 1 to 59 just to get stuck into the MC grind was one of the most idiotic things one could do. It was akin to having a bot finish Oblivion for you, just so you can view the endgame credits again and again for 6 months straight. That stupid.
Actually, methinks both are blinded by their own "I'm so great because I have a blog" ego trip.
E.g., Jarvis seems to think it's some media agenda or conspiracy to judge all blogs by the worst examples. Guess what? So is everyone else that can be squeezed in one category. Big surprise that it applies to blogs too.
E.g., one thing I remember being told in the army was that, basically, when you're in uniform, pay attention what you're doing, because people won't go "oh, Moraelin is drunk again and making a nuissance of himself", they'll go "oh, great, so that's what the _army_ is doing." Every single soldier or cop will be judged by the actions of the worst soldier or cop.
Same here. Once you fought to be seen as some monolythic "blogosphere" that challenges all the traditional sources of information in some virtual two-front Schlieffen Plan... Guess what? You _are_ seen as a monolythic entity and judged by the worst examples. Whop-de-fucking-do. Big surprise there.
The traditional media faces the same problem, which is why they all try hard to maintain a facade of impartiality or of only reporting. Yes, I'm sure someone can jump in with a "hah, the media and impartial, that's rich. Well, I remember <insert anecdote when they weren't impartial>," Well, that's the whole point. The worst fuck-ups are taken as representative of the media as a whole.
And _especially_ die-hard self-proclaimed advocates of the blogosphere are quick to latch on every single media fuck-up and fashion a battle banner out of it. Well, then don't be surprised if it's a two way street, then.
From there, both are equally deluded in some utopian view of it, if in different directions. Basically:
- O'Reilly: guys, we need to police ourselves and become some kind of utopia where everyone plays nice, is responsible, etc. (Yeah, right.)
- Jarvis and the like: nooo, people are smart enough to see who's right and wrong on their own, check the credentials of every blog page they read, know who put their real name behind their opinions, etc. (Yeah, right. As if I have the time to check if, say, Jarvis himself exists or is his real name.) And the unspoken rules that exist for a real community, surely work flawlessly for an anonymous online group. No, really, they'll start working any day now. (Equally: yeah, right.)
The former is bogus because it obviously can't work, the latter... for the exact same reason. I'll point out at what Penny Arcade called The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. There'll always be someone who thinks that "anonymity + an audience = an oportunity, nay, a _duty_ to be a complete fuckwad."
One fact that all the "it'll work like a real community" utopians miss is that, medically speaking, about 1 in 30 people are sociopaths. (Well, in the USA at least. I don't know what the statistics are for other countries.) Most are kept in check IRL because, while they might completely lack empathy and consideration for their fellow man, they do realize that there are consequences for their actions. There is a name and a face on each such action, and that might come back to bite them in the ass. So they proceed to be normal members of society, for lack of a choice. Take away the "action => consequence" feedback, and they revert to being the assholes they always wanted to be. Even if you got them to maintain a name and a face attached to their blogs, they'll use sock puppets and astroturfing for their trolling.
So neither of the two extreme point of views even work, or have anything even vaguely resembling the world-saving qualities that their advocates claim.
So choosing between the two is like having to choose between an enlightened dictatorship utopia, and an anarchist utopia. Those too have had their own share of apologists, and whole tomes written about how and why they'd work better than the current society models. Too bad they don't work in practice. Well, now we see basically the same extremes appli
Oh please... if Google wanted to distance itself from it, they could have done so long ago. "Sorry, mates, some of our employees fucked up, they've been fired and the offending code/product/database is now being pulled off the market until we build our own replacement."
The whole bullshit, including trying to get away with just deleting the original developpers' names, and press releases about "leveraging non-Google assets" is what's damning Google. It's not just that the original incident happened, it's that from there Google seemed to not even understand why it's bad and why the heck should they give a damn. The original incident may have been an individual developper's fuck-up, but from there it's Google and their corporate policies deciding how to deal with it. And how they _did_ chose to deal with it, frankly, stinks.
Yes, noone expects total mind control, but if _also_ the legal team is out of control and answers it in a way unrepresentative of Google, and _also_ the PR team is out of control and pulls a damning "we were just leveraging someone else's resources" statement on their own, etc, then, ffs, they have a problem. At some point you have to assume some responsibility and control, and not just hide behind not knowing what everyone else is doing. If you don't even know what your legal and PR teams are doing at all, even in a public incident, then you better assert some control real fast.
Additionally "do no evil" does imply a dose of responsibility there. You can't say, basically, "oh, the Mafia does no evil, it's just some of our members that we don't really mind-control, that are shooting people or fitting them with cement shoes." If the individual members are free to do evil, and get the company's full backing in some "we were only leveraging other people's resources" statement, then on what do you base that "do no evil" slogan any more?
RL "evil" isn't some "Black And White" game notion, involving actively hating all humanity and actively seeking to do harm, including self-harm, just for harm's sake. And no company does that overtly anyway, so if that's what Google is distancing itself from, then it doesn't say much.
RL "evil", including corporate evil, is more along the lines of not giving a damn about who gets hurt, if it helps you forward your own interests. It's not actively trying to poison a river just for the chuckle of seeing some people get sick, it's not caring who gets sick as long as you saved some money by just dumping your waste in the river. It's not actively trying to get some excuse to shoot some people as a Mafia don, it's about not giving a damn if it takes some corpses to forward your own interests in an area. If shooting some people to make an example is what works, so be it, it's as good a means to an end as any. Etc.
Or to get back to corporations, Enron too didn't make defrauding investors its whole purpose, it just didn't give a damn who gets hurt by their lies. It had no qualms even with advising its own employees to buy stock at a time when management was selling theirs. Again, not because some super-villain at the top had a chuckle at hurting employees, but because they didn't give a damn.
Basically it's not about having some principles to create as much suffering and destruction as possible, it's about lacking the principles and empathy to avoid doing it. That's what corporate evil is: simple sociopathic behaviour.
And if an organization doesn't give a damn at all about what its employees are doing, and who they're hurting, as long as they get the product out the door, then, congrats, it just lost all credibility for some "do no evil" claim. It just showed as much sociopathic tendencies as any other corporation, only maybe in a more decentralized fashion. You know, why have one sociopath at the top coming up with all evil schemes, when you can have a thousand sociopaths in lower positions encouraged to feel free to come up with their own heists.
Real life is rarely about "yes" or "no" questions, unless you happen to suffer from OCPD. The _real_ question in this case isn't "are humans contributing at all?" (yes, we do, even by breathing), but "how much are we contributing?" _That_ is the real question.
Because given the magnitude of the phenomenon over more than a hundred years (absolute temperature rose by about half a percent), there's a _massive_ difference between contributing 99% of it, and contributing 1% of it. The former is a case of "ouch, we gotta do something", the latter is "meh, we can continue like it for another thousand years before our contribution is even noticeable."
You also know that undeniably the answer is "yes" to "can an airplane fall on my house?", but that's no reason to build a bunker. If the probability is small enough, then it just doesn't justify the investment or bother. You also know that walking on the side-walk adds a little wear and tear, but that's no reason to never leave the house. The question is "how much?", not "is it contributing anything?" If it's adding a helluva lot (e.g., you're riding a jackhammer as a pogo stick on that sidewalk), then better stop, if not, heck, it's just business as usual.
Real world is like that: it's not about boolean "yes"/"no" logic. Just because you've trained to program a computer, doesn't mean you have to become one. And it's certainly not about, basically, "if the answer is yes to <insert strawman question> then we must act _now_." Real world problems are more like min-max problems with lots of variables and lots of constraints, than one-question boolean situations. Most of the time, any given variable X is a number with lots of decimals, not a boolean. Most of the time, the questions are "how big is X" (not "is it true or false"), what is its effect on the other variables and viceversa, what does it mean in the context of the available constraints (e.g., you have a finite total budget), and whether it's even productive to focus your efforts on X when maybe changing Y would be a better solution.
Basically whenever I hear someone trying to reduce a whole complex problem to "is X true or false", that just tells me they don't even understand the real problem. OCPD cases (or political parties trying to prey on the sheep: "it's a really complex problem" isn't as good a slogan as "act now to maximize/minimize X") tend to think about themselves that they're uncompromising and doing everything nothing short of perfect, but actually 99% of the time they solve the wrong problem, and come up with something that's actually a crap solution to the _real_ problem. They realize instinctively that they can't maximize all variables at the same time, so they end up taking just one variable as the One True Criterion Of Perfection, and summarily hand-waving all other variables as unimportant. So they proceed to maximize one variable and have their perfect solution... that usually is outside the real problem's constraints completely.
But to return to global warming, as I was saying, the _real_ question isn't "are we?" but "how much?" The latter also has a massive impact on _when_ we need to do something at all. If we won't contribute enough for a thousand years, then maybe we don't need to do anything _now_.
Yeah, it may seem like just delaying the inevitable, but the whole human history is actually based on borrowed time and doing what works now instead of what's ideal in the long run. If we tried to do the _perfect_ thing from the start, we wouldn't even have had an industrial revolution (noone could afford emissions controls with that age's technology), or cars, or for that matter we'd probably still be living in caves.
Sometimes you have to make a cheap, crap (by 2007 standards) Ford Model T in 1908 because that's what
Again, REALLY? I don't know where you even found that definition.
That's certainly not the definition they use in the Bible, for example. I don't recall them saying anywhere that God would stop existing if you stop believing. In fact, au contraire, God is perfectly able to be an ominpotent god:
- without _any_ worshippers during Genesis, before making Adam. And even afterwards, he doesn't seem to have any problem because he had only 2, and even those didn't seem to have _that_ much faith. It sure didn't stop them from going and listening to the snake instead.
- during the flood, when again the world population was reduced to almost nothing
- IIRC during the Apocalypse, when most of the people will follow the antichrist not God, but God is supposed to have no problem winning that fight anyway
Neither did any other religion I can think of. E.g., yeah, the Norse believed that Odin will die, but not for lack of worshippers, but in battle during Ragnarok.
E.g., for a lot of other religions such an idea doesn't even make any _sense_. Most early religions didn't even have anthropomorphic gods. For the early Romans, for example, before they got taken over by the Greek gods, Vesta wasn't an anthropomorphic goddes of fire, she actually was _the_ fire. You know, not human shaped, but flame shaped. The element itself. Others worshipped the sun, the desert, whatever. It doesn't even make any sense to believe that those would stop existing if you stop worshipping them.
The very recent idea that maybe God needs your faith points makes for some good novels, but that's not the God described in the bible or anywhere else.
More importantly: that's not the God that a real christian believes in. So if you're going to argue "your God is stupid" with creationists, then please argue about the God they actually believe in, not about some completely different idea of God. Basing your "what would make sense for God to do" on some 20'th century novels kind of god instead of the bible God, is as silly as basing it on what would make sense for Zeus or Odin. Well, they don't believe in that one, so who cares if it wouldn't make sense for that one?
Hmm, it would sure explain a few things. Thanks for that insight.
Still, it's not the first "<insert number> worst <insert category>" list I see that sounds, well, like you said, like it's written by 7 year olds. So I had assumed it had something to do with writing that kind of a list.
Still, you do make me wonder which is cause and which is effect there. Maybe it's just that the same kind of people who sound like that, also feel compelled to write that kind of trolling lists.
The black and white idea is pretty new kind of a, "yeah, well, god needs us too" reaction. It's certainly not how any civilization I know of imagined their gods. And it isn't quite the way an omniscient and omnipotent god would work. Omnipotent != limited by faith points
But in the end, all I wrote was just one example of one possible kind of deity would not give a darn if anyone worships Him/Her or not, and would have nothing to lose by misleading His/Her creations. Sort of a counter-example to the idea that a god _must_ want worshippers, or that it's his job. Well, that's one kind of god who wouldn't.
But, yeah, it's not the only kind of God that can be imagined, that much is obvious. For all I (don't) know, it could just as well be the B&W kind, or something completely different, or nothing at all. I don't pretend to know what's up there.
For the purpose of that discussion, though, and of questioning the assumption that god _must_ need worshippers, it's the kind of example that serves my point. Hence using that one instead of the B&W one.
Very much so. We don't even know what's up there, much less what their motives or logic would be. Even if their logic as such was the same as ours, logic in the end is a tool towards an end. It's used for example in figuring out a way to a goal, with the available tools/facts/whatever, and within some given constraints. E.g., I want warmth, I use logic to find a solution to that, like turning up the temperature on the heater's thermostat. So as long as we don't know what a deity's goals for that simulation are (worshippers? a power trip? an interesting empire building game because he's bored? something else?) we can't really talk about what would be logical for that deity to do.
Personally I'd probably be a little amused. And, if I'm the one who wrote that simulation, it's just a signal that I need to debug it some more. But what would someone else do, much less a deity, yeah, I can't possibly know.
Or maybe he just doesn't think the way you do?
Yes, please do think you're _God_. Not a king, not an emperor, but something truly omnipotent, at least in regards to the universe you created.
Ok, probably it's hard to imagine something like that, so let's simplify it some more. Think you're a hacker running such a universe as a simulation on your computer. You're as close to omnipotent as it gets in that simulated world you created. You can raise a mountain or boil the seas with just a click-and-drag of the mouse. Rearrange the continents if you want to. Make the planet spin backwards. Plunge it into the sun, if you want to. Raise the ocean level until only a mountain top sticks out, like in the biblical legend. Etc.
Or you can end the whole simulation with an ALT-F4 if you so wish, truly turning a whole universe into _nothing_. Not even ruins or asteroid debris or radioactive fallout, but truly into _nothing_. As if it never even existed. How's that for truly godly power, by the standards of those simulated people?
Now also realize the gap between you and them. You're God, they're bunch of simulated people and animals in the virtual world of your creation. They're not your peers, they're a bunch of created NPCs, and they're allowed to exist only because it keeps you interested or entertained. Maybe you're curious what will happen in the long term with that simulation, or maybe you're just bored, or maybe you just had an unused old computer and no better idea what to leave running on it.
Really? Why? Think at the above scenario again. What difference would it make to you whether those created people believe in you or not? Why would it matter at all?
For more power? You already have _absolute_ power over that virtual world. There's no way to go upwards from there. Whether those people believe in you or not, you still can do the same things to their world. You can still keep it running or reformat the drive, whether they're all true believers or all heretics or somewhere in between.
For popularity? Among whom? They're not your peers, they're just some NPCs you created. Who cares if you're popular among them?
Because "it's your job"... heh... _JOB_? Really? You're _God_ there. You don't have any job or duty towards those NPCs. They're in no position to actually expect you to do a _job_. How would they pay you for a "job" anyway? If you do anything for them, it's at most a _favour_, not some "job". Or you might as well ignore them and leave the simulation running on a server in the basement until something interesting happens. (E.g., they nuke themselves.)
No, seriously, think playing SimCity. You might feel benevolent towards those little simulated people, you might even want to make their lives easy, but... "job"? I don't think anyone would consider it a job or duty.
Why wouldn't you? I can think of plenty of reasons why I would do just that if I was running that simulation.
E.g., because it's a damn boring simulation if they all are stuck at the emotional level of children obeying the will of an omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent parent. Because likely that's what it would degenerate into, if I made myself an active and undeniable God in that simulated world. Think 1984 on steroids: they _know_ Big Brother
The shameless Y2K hype wasn't a flop, it was a major success. Yes, there were some problems too, but the hype machine went into overdrive and a whole horde of snake oil vendors used it to _invent_ extra dangers, and line their pockets at the expense of gullible idiots. I've seen such snake oil ranging from comically absurd (power cables or speakers sold as Y2K ready) to outright dangerous (miracle cure cards that would automagically make all your programs Y2K ready... never mind that the field in the database is still only 2 digits). And then there were the consultants, who happily invented dangers only they saw, and only they could protect you from, much like the shamans of old protecting the tribe from invisible evil spirits.
Let's also say another thing: the Y2K problem was fairly trivial to diagnose way before 2000 anyway. Just turn your date forwards and there you go, you can know whether your computer has a problem. Also most companies which stored dates at all, had to generate some kind of projections for the whole year, or store info about loans in their database, or whatever. E.g., everyone who took or gave a 5 year loan in 1995 already knew whether or not they have a Y2K problem there.
Most had patched it already, but then the idiot PHB went and bought some snake-oil from the nice salesman or consultant anyway. Just because the whole horde of con artists, and the media too, were relentlessly spewing absurd doomsday scenarios in which the sky is falling and even your power cable will stop working if you don't buy the magical snake oil.
Basically tons of money went on replacing perfectly good computers and perfectly good programs, not because they actually had a problem, but because some lying marketroid fed some doomsday story to an idiot CEO. Yes, there were some problems, no doubt, but what I'm saying is that a helluva lot of spending was on stuff that _didn't_.
The whole thing had an effect on the whole industry -- other than the snake oil vendors themselves, of course -- comparable to the Hiroshima bomb or the Great Depression. It siphoned so much money from companies, some which didn't even _have_ a problem, that it created the post-2000 IT spending crash and basically a destructive deflation. The fact that 7 years later we still have a scramble to move to the cheapest untrained monkeys, offshore if possible, and that "reducing costs" is the battle cry du jour even if it means shooting yourself in the foot to save on shoe costs, is just a continuation of that spending crash.
Even omitting the effects of the overspending in '99 itself (which a lot of companies couldn't really afford), the magic of basing each year's budget on the previous year's spending means we're _still_ seeing the ripples. Suddenly in 2000 there were no more computers to buy, no programs to upgrade, etc. That alone was the kiss of death for many honest vendors. (The con artists had already lined their pockets in '99 and moved to some other con scheme.) But then 2001 came along, and its budget was based on the "nothing more to buy" spending of 2000. Suddenly you had a budget of two beans and a peanut for 2001. And the budget of 2002 was based on that. And so on. Many are still struggling to get out of _that_ trap.
But, yeah, for the snake oil vendors and con artists, I must say, Y2K was a major success. Never before has a hype campaign sold so much useless and unneeded snake oil. Hats off, and all respect.
Ah, lions are lions. I must admit it's my fault for using the language so imprecisely, but I really meant an ordinary house cat (Felis Silvestris) when I was proposing citizenship for my cat. I know the word cat is often used to mean the whole Felidae family, including "the big cats", though, so, as I was saying, I should have been more precise.
I didn't say that Mozilla _had_ to write its own widgets. Au contraire, I consider it to be the prime example of why a team needs leadership: they went in dada land for _years_ writing cool frameworks and widget sets, when Netscape really needed a working browser.
At any rate, I didn't say they _had_ to. There are plenty of existing widget sets. They could have used any of those if they didn't want to write cool frameworks.
Also, the "haven't had a problem" meant: the users don't really have a huge problem with it. I didn't say whether or not it's a pain for the developpers. (Though even there I like to think they must have had fun with it, because sure as heck noone asked them to. Again, what Netscape wanted was a working browser, not to spend years building cool widget frameworks while IE nails Netscape's coffin.) I only said that most users couldn't care less whether an app has KDE's buttons or Gnome's buttons or something else.
Yes and no, on the whole. Basically it wasn't really supposed to be taken literally.
That said, IMHO mostly no when it comes to similarities between cats and lions.
Lions have a group survival strategy, just like wolves do (obviously, a different one, though), cats (as in, Felis Silvestris) simply don't. They evolved and live on prey that just wouldn't work any better, or at all, for a group hunt. They're a lot closer, if you will, to a smaller, and more tolerant of each other, kind of tiger, than to lions. And as a result, group behaviour and dynamics are also a lot more different.
Colonies of feral cats are closer to a group of individuals that tolerates each other, than to anything really resembling a group of lions. And being the "alpha" means a heck of a lot less. Leading the group to war, for a start, is something that wouldn't even work, because the other group members don't have the instinct to hunt as a group, or to follow a leader to hunt.
Being the alpha male also doesn't involve being the one that impregnates all females. Or at least I can't find that documented anywhere. What I do find documented is quite the contrary: that female cats often mate with more than one male when they're in heat, and it's not that uncommon for different kittens in the same litter to have different fathers. It sure doesn't sound like a lion pride situation to me.
Also note the reference to alpha male, rather than the one male and a harem scheme used by lion prides. Feral cat colonies usually include more than one male, and the cat females aren't as "submissive" as lionesses are. Hence, as I was saying, you'd be surprised how much those group dynamics can differ from a pride of lions.
Even, since you mention kittens, the defense of kittens is most usually _not_ entrusted to a lone male, and certainly it wouldn't be the only male in a colony. The females have a far more active role in caring for the kittens, than would be the case with lions. So even _if_ anyone killed _a_ male, they wouldn't end up in a position to kill all kittens with impunity.
Killing kittens... again, you can't really simplify it as being the same as in lions. What we do know is that (A) _some_ cats kill kittens, (B) most actually don't, so it's not a general trait of the species, and (C) actually more killed kittens are killed by females, often their own mother, than by males. I've yet to see any claim that anyone solved that mystery yet. Yes, there is one hypothesis that maybe tomcats act like male lions, but there are other hypothes too. For example, another one is that some cats simply have their hunting instincts tripped by the small squeaky kittens.
We don't really know yet, and there are questions either way. For example the generalization that male cats just acts like male lions misses the crucial point that most actually don't. Or it misses the case of kittens killed by a female, which doesn't really have a parallel in lion prides.
That said,
Very much so, but that was sorta the whole point: a cat wouldn't come up with such a plan where hurting the innocents is the whole point. (It's just not wired for that or "smart" enough for that.)
Again, very much so, very insightful, but good luck getting a cat to make that mental substitution. You can't convince a cat that another cat is really a mouse, not a cat.
This time we're more in "yes and no" territory. To you, it may look like the mouse gave up, but to a cat it matters if it gives the correct _cat_ signals or not. It's not as much based on careful reasoning and introspection, nor on philosophical considerations about the mouse's predicament. It's really some signals that are as good as hard-coded. You either give the right "I give up, leave me alone" signal, or you don't.
Basically, when the mouse learns to purr, then it will have a chance. Maybe.
Anyway, to get back to the point, the point is: sure, a cat plays with a _mouse_, but it doesn't play "let's bleed you to death" with another cat. Which is more than I can say about humans.
That was sorta the whole point, actually: that cats don't engage in some of the silly human games.
Presenting the enemy as not even human, i
Duly noted, but still... the fundamental difference is that the mouse is another species.
:P
The humans boil molusks alive (plus other fun ways of killing other kinds of food), the cat plays with a mouse to death. So far both do nasty things to their prey.
The humans torture and kill other humans, the cat doesn't do the same to its own species. That's what I'm talking about.
Electing a cat as president won't change this one bit. While in a metaphorical/fable sense you can say USA = cat, Iraq = mouse, in practice a cat won't think in those terms.
And it would still have to convince its cat-soldiers to go there and actually do that. Because that's basically what it's going to take. For the theoretical cat super-power state to do that to the little state, some cat-infantry would have to go down there and actually kill the population. I'm not sure how they'd get around the interlock they have in the brain against killing each other.
But mostly that's already taking it too seriously. My point was more of a "man, we're worse to each other than wolves are to each other" kind of lament, only in this case with cats. Dissecting into detail exactly what _would_ a cat realistically do in Iraq, well, reading all I wrote above, it seems just about as bad as explaining a joke
That's not as big a problem as you'd think.
1. Other apps haven't had a problem because of this. Both Mozilla and OpenOffice, for example, insisted on writing their very own framework and widgets, so basically they're _neither_ Gnome nor KDE. Your line of thinking seems to be that that would make them shunned by both KDE and Gnome users, yet that's not really the case. And then there's stuff like XMMS, which doesn't even try to look even remotely like the desktop, and had no problem either.
2. In the meantime both KDE and Gnome can use each other's themes. So you can just write your app with either set of widgets and it won't look out of place on the other desktop.
3. I'd buy your argument if it were some really complex app, with lots of forms and controls. Essentially all you really need there is a freakin' web-page-like page, in a frame. As long as you can draw a white background with a rectangle for the input and a button, you're actually good to go for a simple search app. (The borders and title bar of the frame will be drawn by the window manager anyway, so you don't have to worry about those.)
4. And you don't even have to do that, if your goal is to look like Google. I.e., like a web page. Think about it. You can just serve HTTP on the port of your choice, restrict it to localhost so it's not abusable from outside, your "application" icon just starts a browser on that port. There you go: now the user can use whatever browser they prefer, and have it look like any other page in that browser. They can use Mozilla, Opera, Konqueror if they absolutely have to have a KDE-only environment, or whatever.
Basically, let's lay _that_ tired argument to rest at least in this case. Linux has some problems with mass adoption, yes, but constantly claiming that you can't write apps because there are 2 desktops... is just false, and it's getting repetitive and boring by now.
I meant crap like: person A humiliates/tortures/kills/whatever person B, just to make a point to persons X, Y and Z. Innocents get made an example of, just to remind everyone else what their place is, and what can happen if they get ideas above their station.
I can honestly say that I've never seen anything even remotely similar in cats. And, trust me, I grew up with cats around since I was a baby. If cat A has a problem with cat X, it takes it on cat X directly, not on some bystander to make a point.
Oh, they'll make a show of power all right, but then one gives up and that's it. I can't even remember hearing about a cat fight that ended up lethal for one of the combatants.
And I don't think lack of opposable thumbs is what's lacking there to make them lethal. The same cats are perfectly able to tear a larger animal apart. E.g., I've seen cats hunt rabbits or rats larger than their own size. The teeth and claws are perfectly enough to do a _lot_ of damage to another cats, if they wanted to kill each other.
Compare that to some of the genocides the humans did, and I can't help liking cats a lot more. There's stuff we humans do which isn't even about power or territory, but just killing someone else because they're from a different country, race, religion or voted for the opposite party. (See, civil wars.)
Basically: when a cat signals "I give up", that's it, the fighting stops. When a human comes up with his hands up, on the other hand, the others just want to kill and torture him. And then there are the countless cases where people took out their frustration upon non-combatants who didn't fight in the first place. It took millenia and several international conventions and harsh laws to tell everyone to freakin' let go... and as we see in the recent cases in Iraq, they still don't.
Oh freakin' please... it's that kind of "we're the only important ones" verbal masturbation, followed by nothing more than fallacies and handwaving as "proof", that gets some of us disgusted at a lot of humanities students.
... and so forth.
For starters, it takes some truly brain-dead hand-waving to pick out of a continuous stream of both, only the convenient instances where A came before B, but thoroughly pretend that no cases exist where B came before A, or both were working on it before either went publich with their results. If you plot both inventions and literary milestones along time, you get something more like a random sequence of both intermingled. It's something like B, A, A, B, A, B, B, B, A, B, A, A,
Sure, you can handpick cases where an A came before a B, no matter how unrelated, and proceed to apply the post hoc, ergo propter hoc _fallacy_ to it. I.e., to assume that just because two things happened in a sequence, surely the first _must_ be the cause for the second.
But equally for every A you could pick a B that happened before it, and the same fallacy now says that all artistic progress was caused by scientific breakthroughs that preceded it.
Plus you can see whole cultures and eras where plenty of As happened without any B coming as a result, or viceversa.
In reality, that fallacy doesn't actually prove anything. That's why it's called a fallacy. To actually prove causality, you'll need far more than "well, A happened before B, hence it must be the cause." So that alone would be enough to invalidate the whole bullshit. But it's doubly so when not only it's a fallacy, but it's _also_ based on bogus handpicked data where only the supporting "evidence" is used, and everything else is cheerfully ignored.
In practice, you can see some correlation, in that areas which encouraged being different and thinking for oneself, produced both scientists and artists. Who would have imagined that? But again, you can also see cultures which encouraged only arts or only science, and mostly got only one of the two.
But again, correlation doesn't mean causation. Just because an area had both scientists and artists, it takes some extreme andwaving to say that the scientists appeared because of the artists. Mere correlation doesn't tell you which is the cause of which. It can also be the other way around, or a third factor can be the real cause of both. E.g., as I was saying, a culture which encourages thinking for oneself and thinking outside the box, will, unsurprisingly, produce both.
Come to think of it, you have a point there, my cat certainly deserves citizenship.
After all, the fuzzy things managed to tame humans, so it kinda says something about where they are in a sorted list by IQ. Plus, you've seen how they're attracted to books you're reading, or to your keyboard. They're natural nerds, I tell you
Second, but probably more important, giving cats a right to vote can't _possibly_ make it any worse. When was the last time you saw a cat torturing another cat for fun, or to scare the other cats into submission? When was the last time you saw a cat go to war? For that matter, when was the last time you saw a cat kill another?
I mean, sure, they fight, but with the natural weapons they have they'd be perfectly capable of taking each other apart if they wanted to. The species however has clear rules of engagement and of signalling "I surrender" or "I'm not a threat, don't attack me". Plus, most of the fights you get to see are either (A) actually playing/training, or (B) because humans force them into situations where the normal conflict resolution mechanisms don't work. E.g., bringing another cat on the territory of another without all the "rituals" (so to speak) normally associated with joining another group, and without the possibility to just go away.
Plus, they have built in mechanisms to avoid needing a war in the first place. Most felines release a number of eggs based on how well fed the mother is. So if the cat can barely feed itself, it will at most give birth to one kitten or two. If it's doing perfectly well, it will do its part for population growth. So it's hard to end up in a situation where they'd need to start a war for resources.
So I have to wonder how much worse it could possibly be if the cats could vote on issues like the stupid war in Iraq. My take is that it couldn't be any worse than letting humans do it.
I have nothing against the engine being scalable. What I have against it is that it was advertised with some screenshots that noone could actually reproduce, on any computer, or not without turning it into a slide-show. If the game was supposed to be played with medium graphics settings at launch, then the screenshots should have been taken on medium graphics settings too.
Oh, I didn't say it was a new development. It sure has been going on for more than a decade at some publishers, as you noted.
Let me explain. The problem isn't that it was pixelated, the problem was that the only way to play the game at all (short of having a 512 MB graphics card, which didn't exist back then), was to start at the first or second mip-map where other games would have had the normal texture. Basically even if you bumped your nose into someone's armour, you wouldn't see the expanded armour texture, you'd see the first (1/2 texture size) or second (1/4 texture size) mip-map of it.
The problem there is that mip-maps invariably look like complete shit. They're an ok trade-off when rendering at a distance at which you'd have to reduce it by that factor anyway, but not when starting with them from point blank range.
A texture that's been hand-painted at, say, 512x512 pixels, generally tends to have contrast and edges where it matters. E.g., if my breastplate texture includes an articulated "skirt", the lines between the articulated plates will be crisp. It will actually look like an articulated piece.
A texture that's been painted in 1024x1024, or 2048x2048, and then rendered with all mip-maps bumped +2 (i.e., with the 2'nd mip-map at point blank, 3'rd mip-map where normally the second would be, etc) looks like crap. Now the lines between the same plates are thinner and drawn, basically, to look right in the original resolution. When basically you're first reducing the 2048x2048 texture to a 512x512 mip-map, and then render with that, the same skirt now looks like a smeared piece of crap. All those lines and shadows have been shrunk and filtered into being little more than some blurry gunk on top of a blurry texture.
In EQ2's case that was even worse. All details on armour were coded with shaders, for no obvious reason than to need more GPU power than really necessary... and look like crap on any computer with less than a _future_ graphics card. Armour textures -- and all other textures for that matter -- were some blurry mass-scanned crap to start with, even without the mip-mapping making it even worse, and the shaders pretty much added some detail on top of it. Once you disabled those, and on any machine less than absolute top-end you'd have to, all detail everywhere just disappeared.
To return to what my problem with it is/was: the game was advertised with some futuristic screenshots, featuring a lot more detail and shading than you could actually get on _any_ computer. That's, to my mind, nothing short of deception. People who bought the game based on those screenshots, couldn't _possibly_ get a similar image on their screen. People chose EQ2 over another MMO (take your pick which) based on some "woo, EQ2 screenshots look better" factor, but actually end up with _worse_ image quality than any other MMO on any realistic computer available at the time.
Now I'm not saying that people _should_ buy a game based on screenshots, quite the opposite. But some people do, screenshots sell, and this was nothing short of gaming the system.
You know, now that you mention it, going after the game makers has merits.
No, I'm not saying it should run with everything _maxxed_. But I can think of games which are anywhere from completely unplayable (as in, crash), to a slideshow, to having to be downgraded to a pityful joke, on machines which meet the minimum advertised specs. Sometimes even on machines which meet the _recommended_ specs. And that I don't really find ok.
I can think of games which were launched with some advertised spec, but then some mandatory patch turned them into a graphics orgy that outright crashes the game or machine of someone who did previously meet the specs. One example is COH. When the graphics upgrade happened that put COH graphics on par with COV. I know at least one person whose (admittedly crap) laptop started to just crash to desktop when that graphics update hit. In spite of having previously been perfectly good to play COH, and still being perfectly good to play WoW. (And, you know, because it's a MMO you can't refuse to install a patch.)
I can think of games which were hyped for their supposed great graphics, except _no_ machine at the time of release could actually display the advertised graphics as more than a frame per second. (E.g., EQ2. It was launched at a time when the 9800 passed for the top end graphics card, and sorry, it wasn't anywhere near enough to play other than at a massively reduced graphics quality. And by massively reduced, I mean that even at a point blank range all detail on a piece of armour was turned into a blurred smear.) I'm sorry, I know that not all machines are created equal, but if _no_ computer exists at the time which can actually display those graphics, then don't fucking advertise it with the max quality screenshots.
Briefly, some truth in avertising would be a welcome change with the game publishers too, you know? Those specs on the box are rarely more than a joke pulled out of the ass by marketting. It has nothing to do with what computers run the game adequately, it just has to do with how big a slice of the market does the marketting department want to market to.