It's an interesting point, but it doesn't work. Trust me, you're not the only one who thought of that. (Management still loves flowcharts for example.) _Lots_ of people try, the problem is noone managed to make something that actually works better.
I've actually had the experience of using, well, basically a flowchart compiler back in the 90's. The problem is that the damn thing didn't scale. Oh, it was superb for making 10 line programs or functions. It was an absolute nightmare for anything, say, 100 lines long. Things which would have fit a screen comfortably in a normal language, meant scrolling in both directions just to follow the logic there.
The more important thing: it wasn't even more useful for small functions either. At the size where you could be comfortable with it, it was not much more of a problem to understand the text version either.
Plus, so far we have a mountain of evidence that just messing with the syntax candy tends to not do any good.
For whoever has the abstract thinking capacity, C's cryptic syntax is no harder to use than the more verbose Pascal. And for whoever lacks the ability to think abstractly, no level of syntax candy or pictograms will do them any good. Once you know what "{" and "}" mean, they're no more cryptic than Pascal's "begin" and "end". And going one level higher and writing COBOL (now _that_ is verbose) doesn't bring anything more either. Writing "add X to Y giving Z" instead of "Z=X+Y" doesn't make any actual difference.
The thing is, no matter how you write or represent it, you still have to be able to think abstractly and algorithmically. You still have to take a problem like, say, "fetch me a glass of water", and split it into all the little steps taken for granted in normal conversation, _and_ think about all the things that could go wrong or not be in the expected places. If you didn't train your brain for that, no pretty graphics will do you any good.
And finally here's a funny thought for you: the usual "bah, I could be such a great programmer if someone gave me a paint program instead of making me think" argument tends to always come back to the same example: electronic circuits. The argument goes, "see, if they can design an electronic circuit with all those funny symbols for transistors and diodes, the same can apply to programs." The funny part is that even electronics only uses those for really small circuits. If you think that, say, your CPU was drawn like that, square miles of symbols, you'd actually be wrong. It's basically designed like a program, by the numbers. Go figure.
Not to mention all the other RL skill that CS taught me.
For example, before my CS days I never used to always strafe (side-step) in front of doors. CS taught me that. I don't have to tell you how useful that is, in case there's something camping with an AWP in the boss's office. My co-workers may look funny at me, but I know I'll have the last laugh when they get headshot for just walking in front of a door without looking.
Always stop and listen before going through any door. Sound is your friend. You can know whether someone's coming around a corner by their footsteps long before you actually have line of sight on them. So always, I repeat, always, stop and listen for 10 seconds or so before barging through any door or around any corner. Sure, the people behind you in the elevator or subway may get impatient, but you're really saving their non-gamer arses. Without you, they could walk right into an ambush.
Then there's crouching in dark corners. Invaluable skill that. When in doubt, you can't go wrong with crouching in some dark corner or on the roof. Sure, your neighbours and co-workers may look funny when they see you huddled between the dumpster and the hedge, but the laugh is on them if the terrorists ever decide to use your office or block as a map.
Spatial orientation. Only loser looking to be headshot use the front door. Surprise your boss today by climbing up the fire escape and through a vent. Then spend half the day jumping up and down in front of the vent, to see if some enemy's coming through it. It's a repetitive job, but someone has to do it. If noone does, the terrorists win.
Oh, and always explore and memorize all possible escape routes. Your life will depend on it later. Sometimes after the next paragraph.
Then there are the social skills. An online game is a perfect training ground for your polite interaction with fellow humans. Don't laugh, it's like a virtual party. You just mingle and call everyone a "camping faggot" or, as the case may be, a "cheater". Be sure to tell them how good their mother was in bed too. People are insecure about that kind of thing, and it's polite to put their doubts to rest about their relatives' sexual abilities. (Hey, one million CS players can't all be wrong.) And be sure to tell every woman that she's probably a 40 year old fat male wanker. Works like a charm as an ice breaker.
Creative use of hostages. Those guys aren't there just to get stuck in doors and behind fallen twigs. Did you know you can jump on a hostage's head to climb on a balcony? Erm... actually scratch that. I'm still trying to live down _that_ silly lawsuit.
Nor is it really fair to blame management for every problem. A failure of the programming leads to build a scalable technical architecture, for instance, can also be a root cause of delays/low quality.
Except that's traceable to management failures again. Lemme see:
1. First and foremost, the games industry doesn't even try to keep talent. Last I've heard, they have a burnout rate of about 5 years. They basically take the cheapest (which sometimes doesn't mean the most talented) graduates available, overwork and underpay them, then they burn out and move to other jobs, and a fresh new batch is hired.
I'm sorry, but then don't wonder why the architectures are bad, non-scalable and extremely hard to modify or maintain. Sad to say, and that's from a college graduate, college and coding small cool stuff in your free time teaches all the bad habits and none of the good practices. You come out of college having worked only on _tiny_ projects, individually or in 2-3 person teams, and with requirements that are fixed, clear and never changing.
The funny thing is: a program of 1000 lines, you can hold completely in your head. You don't even need test cases to tell you what you'll break by changing this or that, but even that's ok, because you won't have to change anything ever in an assignment. Plus, the scope is always simple enough so it either works or it doesn't, and you can manually prove one or the other in 5 minutes. (E.g., if your assignment is a heap sort, wth, you can just type in some numbers and see if they come out sorted. Why would you bother with a unit test for that?) You don't even need a good architecture or clear interfaces, because again, you'll never have to re-discover what it does or ever have to change it. It's always by definition write-only, so it's OK to write write-only code. Even 10,000 lines, if you're reasonably smart, you can do it. And that's already more code than in _any_ college assignement ever.
Move on to the real life and a 1,000,000 line project (which is actually a small one), and all the cool write-only hacks and the "it'll be manually tested at the end anyway" mentality you learned in college become a liability. You have to actually unlearn all the write-only habits that college taught you, and learn how to actually produce quality code.
Except in the game industry, by that time you've been overworked and underpaid to death, and the original enthusiams has worn off. You may have started with "woohoo, I'm coding cool stuff for the next great game, I'm so much cooler than those boring guys writing boring VB programs for a living", but in a few years you get to the point of, "fuck this shit, I could be writing one of those boring VB programs for twice the money and a tiny fraction of the unpaid overtime, if any." So you move on. And all that experience is lost to the industry, who then proceeds to hire another fresh enthusiast and watch him do "cool" unmaintainable hacks, and spend half a year introducing two new bugs for every bug fixed.
I'm sorry, but failure to retain talent and experience, _is_ a management failure. You can't just point the finger at the programmers and say "bah, it's those guys writing bad code", when that's the guys you've hired. And in fact, when you just got rid of those who had just learned how to do a better job. It's like buying an old Yugo and then complaining that it's not a race car. Well, that's the car _you_ bought.
2. I'm sorry, but if you pressure people into holding unrealistic deadlines and into working 80 hours a week, don't be surprised if they produce worse code. People (A) make more mistakes when they're tired, and (B) tend to do the quickest dirty hack when it's either that or working yet another Sunday. Writing well structured, scalable and maintainable code takes more hours than writing the quickest hack. Except usually noone gives you a deadline where you have the luxury to do the former. So if you want to do a good architecture, those hours will come o
I have no doubt that a corp would be willing so sell "slightly" toxic substances to prop up the bottom line. On the other hand, rat and human metabolisms are very similar, but they are NOT identical.
I am very much aware that rats have different metabolisms, but then it's still common sense to have it tested, including on human volunteers, before selling it. Is the difference big enough to make it safe for humans? We don't know basically. We have a whole process for testing and approving, say, medicine, so I fail to see why it wouldn't apply here.
Many strident voices seem to be saying $( Gene mod technology )== $FAVORITE_MODE_PAINFUL-DEATH. Which is too simplistic a stance to realisticaly describe the system they are talking about.
Maybe because so far
1. the _vast_ majority of GM stuff is this kind of stuff: plants bred to somehow poison pests/moulds/bacteria, or at least be more tolerant of strong pesticides. (Those pesticides end up in your food too, even if they aren't produced by the plant itself.)
2. because so far none of this stuff has been rigorously tested and proven to be safe, like a medicine would. So basically you're asked to swallow some pesticide with nothing more than the manufacturer's reassurance that it should only kill insects.
Look, even with medicines we have a long history of stuff that was supposed to only kill some organisms (e.g., bacteria), but ended up damaging humans badly. There are even cases where proper testing on humans looked ok, but several years later we discovered that, oopsie, those people are now dying or giving birth to horrible mutants. So being a little circumspect is more than warranted.
It doesn't mean we should turn into luddites, of course, but it's just common sense to thoroughly test the damn stuff. Just because a corporation says "it's good for you", it doesn't mean you should take it as gospel. Other corporations are equally saying that smoking is good for you, or whatever. There's no way one will _ever_ tell you, "my stuff is toxic, don't buy it." So let's have it properly tested, then. That's all.
Other than that, it's a classic ad-hominem fallacy. Just because some voice is strident, doesn't mean they can't possibly be right. So try to focus on what they're saying, not on why it's unfashionable to listen.
I was suddenly reminded that the organization in question is itself hardly a dispassionate seeker after the truth. No less than the agribiz corporations, Greenpeace has an agenda.
Who cares? Having that stuff tested is common sense even without Greanpeace around. So what difference does it make?
Also, your use of the word "fucking" reflects more on you than on any other party to or subject of this discussion. Do you find the reflection a pleasant one?
It just means I have no patience with fucking morons. (There, I used that word again.) I'm tollerant of common ignorance, but when one launches into whole rants based on little more than ignorance, preconceptions, ad-hominems, and other fallacies, then I won't even bother being diplomatic. If it hurts their feelings... good! Maybe it will stimulate them to actually engage the brains before throwing the mouth into gear. Maybe even, god forbid, actually read a bit first too. Well, ok, it probably won't happen, but it's still a nice dream.
Is that a pleasant reflection? Dunno, I can live with it. Quite happily.
Lemme try a bit more: fucking, fucking, fucking, fucking. Hmm... nope, I still don't feel bad about it. Sorry.
You're forgetting fan PR. These stories are spread by gaming fans who want to see their hobby legitimised. It's not a conspiracy or in any way orchestrated by Sony/MS/Nintendo/iD or whoever - it's a bunch of people on the internet fed up of hearing that their favourite leisure activity isn't appropriate for adults, causes crime, is morally equivalent to pornography etc, etc.
Maybe, maybe not. Fed up fans proceed to post a rant or make a comic strip, not to commission a whole study _and_ get it published on Reuters repeatedly. Getting a news piece on a major news agency is harder than you think. Briefly, _if_ it is PR, the probability of it just being random fan work is next to nil.
Second, I never said PR was some conspiracy. PR works more straightforwardly: Company X goes to PR Agency Y, and pays them a bunch of money to drum up point of view Z. (E.g., that you should buy a costume already.) The PR agency folks write it as a news story, or maybe an interview, make sure it meets the fucked-up criteria of "journalistic impartiality" nowadays (it's actually anything but), etc. In really fucked up cases, they disguise it as some research piece, and find someone with a Dr. or Prof. title who's willing to sign it for a bunch of money. Then submit it all over the place. That's it. A cheap agency will get you in a ton of local newspapers, a really good and expensive agency will get you on Reuters or on major TV stations.
It's not even something rare or anything. About 75% of the news you read in the USA, and about 50% in Europe, is paid PR. (Probably not because the Europeans have any more journalistic integrity, mind you. There is just more corporate money paying for it in the USA, that's all.) It's very very very common, and involves no real conspiracy. You don't have to exchange suitcases of money or know secret masonic handshakes to get it published. Newspapers actually love it, because basically they're getting some content for free, and it tends to be written to the highest standards. For most newspapers, these guys write better stories than any of their own journalists, and the whole thing skips the problem of finding a story too.
The origin of some of these studies is probably just the standard academic process - after all people research everything.
The origin of about half the academic research that actually makes headlines, is, see above: some PR hack writes a piece of pseudo-science, then finds some professor who'll sign it. Real research tends to be more obscure, and be published only in some journal that noone else reads.
Again, even that doesn't involve any conspiracies and secret masonic handshakes. They just contact two dozen guys with academic titles, until one is willing to sell his good name for some money. And eventually one does. We'd all like to think that in a perfect world the academia and scientists would all have more integrity, but in the real world eventually one signs anything for a bunch of cash. You'd be surprised the kind of _blatant_ bogus stuff, ammounting to little more than publicly mocking science as a whole, that got someone's signature anyway. Sure, for enough money, someone will cheerfully take the pie in the face, so to speak.
And _you_ did your research then? From what I understand, the _whole_ mutation in this particular strain of corn is to make it produce a sort of a natural pesticide. I.e., yes, a toxin.
Now Monsanto basically says, "yeah, but it's not toxic to mammals." Greenpeace says, "whoa, actually that data says that it's somewhat toxic to rats."
Now both positions _could_ be true. It _is_ possible for something to be toxic to insects without being lethal to humans. (See coffeine. It really evolved as a paralyzing poison against insects. See why Robusta is a hardier crop than Arabica: the Robusta plant simply produces more of it. Yet a human can drink lots of it for decades without being too harmed in the process.) On the other hand, the opposite _can_ be true too. And without proper testing how would you know?
So, pray tell, without even seeing the research, how _do_ you know which side is right and which is wrong? Or are you just motivated enough to rant against Greenpeace even when you have no fucking clue what is it about? At least, even as motivated studies go, they did at least do and publish one. You did... what? to get your info on which to base such a swift judgment.
Hand-waving about mutations happening randomly in nature is at best brain-damaged too. Equally random mutations in plants include atropine (nightshade), ricin (deadly in 0.2mg doses and no antidote), solanine, cyanide (wild almonds), etc. And that's just the short list of the most known ones. We could go into a couple hundred other fun natural stuff, including such exotic effects as immuno-suppressors in some moulds. Just because something _could_ have occured naturally doesn't make it automatically safe. All the poisons in this paragraph occured naturally, yet _aren't_ safe at all.
Plus, it often is false as such anyway. Just because something was created via genetic engineering does _not_ automatically mean it could have occured as a natural mutation any day now. There's plenty of GM stuff, like renet-producing moulds or goats whose milk contains spider silk, which would _never_ evolve on their own, not even in another billion years. There's simply no natural advantage in producing those (wake me up when any plant needs to digest fresh milk, which is what it would take to make renet an advantage), and in fact it's a serious disadvantage to waste your energy and aminoacids on producing them.
So, you know, if you're going to go into a whole rant about who's ignorant or worse, it would be nice if you at least took the time to read a bit and have at least some minimal clue what you're talking about.
It may not look like big news to you or me, but look at how many people act surprised that an adult can play video games even on Slashdot. People grew up with the notion that video games are for kids, and some just don't want to let go of that notion.
Plus, western culture -- and indeed any culture -- has certain age-roles that an upstanding member of society must fit. You're supposed to do something from age X to age Y, then something completely different between ages Y and Z, and then change your interests completely again at age Z. E.g., ou're supposed to grow up on, say, hopscotch and cowboys-and-indians, then suddenly shun them when you reach a certain age, just because you're told it would be soo unfashionable to be seen doing that as an adult. So basically it was kinda expected that video games would follow the same pattern: you'd play them until you're, say, 20 years old, then suddenly give up and pretend to be no longer interested in that kiddy stuff.
So in a sense, it _is_ news.
But probably more importantly, this is really PR.
Now PR isn't marketting. Marketting tells you stuff like "Buy Moraelin's cigarettes for the smooth taste." PR is more perverse. PR tries to masquerade as news, and undermine the very facts/preconceptions/whatever you may use in making that kind of a judgment. E.g., the PR for the same cigarettes would look more like "Scientist says that smoking is good for your health" or "Study says that 69% of the world's most successful people were smokers." Or maybe "Economist says that the new smoking tax will cause loss of jobs over the next 10 years."
Anyway, the short version is (A) it tries to masquerade as news, and (B) it tries to manipulate your opinions and brains in stealthy ways.
So what do we have here? Both MS and Sony are trying to expand the market for their consoles. Appealing to parents of little kids is good and fine, but it only takes you so far. What they want now is to have _everyone_ buy their consoles. If possible, hey, even if you have one for your kid already, please buy one for yourself too. Heck, buy a third as a DVD player.
Enter a PR bombardment telling everyone over and over again, basically, "hey, lots of adults play games. It's socially acceptable and accepted nowadays. Noone will look funny at you if you start playing video games in your 40's. Honest." It's true and logical too, as you've said, but then it will serve the PR role anyway. It doesn't have to be a lie to be good PR material, and in fact it's better if it's not an outright lie that someone can proceed to dismantle. At any rate, it will serve to erode the age-role conceptions just a little more, and maybe convince a few more people to go buy a game console already.
Mind you, I'm not saying that there's anything particularly evil or sinister about it. There are truly insidious PR jobs, but this is a benign one anyway. So I'm not saying anyone should form a mob with torches and pitchforks. Just that this is probably the reason why you're seeing this kind of story again and again and again. Just being true doesn't automatically make something be all over the news repeatedly. On the other hand, the PR agencies submitting various versions and incarnations of it again and again, might just do the trick.
Considering that a whole third of them don't have kids, I'd say it's fairly safe to say that at least in those households there must be an adult who's using the console. I mean, if you bought and own a console, and you don't have kids of your own, then it's probably not for the neighbour's kid, right? The neighbours might get a tad nervous if their kid was at an adult's house all the time;)
So it just had the same mesh and texture, but was a different species? Good to see that God takes the same shortcuts Blizzard does. Can't blame Him, though. I mean, have you seen the kind of polygon count and texture resolution these things have? Oooer. It must cost a mint to model a new one, so some reuse is kinda expected;)
Makes me wonder why He didn't just write the NPCs name above their head, though. I mean, it kinda defeats the purpose of trying to pass it off as a new species, if noone can tell.
And while I'm at it, how about an exclamation mark above quest-giver's heads, please? Talking to everyone in town works when you have 6 NPCs total in the town, like in old NES RPGs, but not when there's a million of them. Plus, they're starting to look funny at me when I ask them if they have a quest.
I don't as much have a problem with Google, at least not in this topic, as with moral relativism run amok. The notion that maybe, you know, in other parts of the world they're so different from us that they actually want to be censored and oppressed. And that it's so unfair that we try to judge them through the goggles of human rights and freedoms, when they clearly don't want those.
And all that I'm saying is that it's a load of bull. People are people everywhere. If you took an American, a German, an Indian and an Arab (starts to sound like a joke already;) and put them in the same situation, free from group-think and peer-pressure influences, you'd discover that while there _are_ cultural differences in their views of the world do exist, ultimately they tend to end up wanting the same things. That's all I'm saying.
That said, as a completely tangential point, I have trouble viewing any country as a _true_ democracy if they're not free to criticize their government or their country. I don't care if they have an electoral farce going on, if you're given only the filtered, rose-coloured-glasses half of the story, you can't possibly make an informed choice there. Democracy isn't just about going and checking a random box on a ballot, it's about, yes, the power of the people to change what they don't like about their government or country. If it's illegal to even talk about what's wrong, on what would you base such a change? How would you even know that there's any need to change anything? That is ultimately what stuff like "freedom of speech" or "freedom of press" are for. Because without those, you might as well not even even bother with the rest of the farce, because a farce and a mockery of democracy is at best what you can get.
Once you can't say "India sucks", or, like in Turkey, Allah have mercy on you if you dare "insult turkishness" or even mention that Kurds even exist, how would you expect democracy to function? How would you expect the average Turk to even know about the problems of the Kurds, if it's illegal to even mention them. So who's going to risk their neck to tell them about it? Which politician is going to put any Kurd-related problem in their electoral platform, if it means being summarily being thrown in jail at the mere mention of it? (They did throw at least one member of their parliament in jail for even mentioning Kurds, btw, so it's not a fictional scenario.) It's simply put a whole domain which has been from the start excluded from any democratic process or debate.
Nicely abusable too, because such a poorly defined limitation is vague enough to cover any kind of dissidence. You spoke against corruption in the government? Weell, now, that looks to me like insulting your country and people. Round them up, boys.
But, yeah, ok, it's up to India to deal with it. Fine by me. Just don't tell me that whole cultures actually want to be oppressed and suppressed, because that's one thing I don't buy. If Google doesn't want to actually put its money where its motto is, fine, I can deal with that. But don't tell me that somehow, see, over there probably black is white and evil is good, so they're really happy that we hand them over to the authorities. That's all I'm saying.
Because the original YouTube didn't have much of a money-making model, and certainly not one tied to the actual content played, while Google can actually match ads to it. E.g., if you search for videos about cooking, they can try to sell you a cookbook. (Well, at least in an ideal world where that keyword matching actually worked, and people actually set the right keywords.) So in a sense, now Google's income actually depends on covering the whole content spectrum. Any niche they don't have covered, is a niche they can't serve you ads for. I.e., in a sense, Google actually makes a little money out of helping share all that pirated content.
And that can make quite a bit of a difference for a lot of people. Using their IP can be anywhere between ok and an irritation for most people, but they'll turn outright hostile if you make money out of unauthorized use of their IP. E.g., chances are noone will go after you if you use someone's characters for a little fan story, but they'll turn very hostile if you proceed to print your fan stories as a book and sell it. E.g., Blizzard won't come after you if you just use WoW to make a silly music clip, but if you proceeded to use those as ads for your own products or sell DVDs with them, chances are they'd want their share.
Note that in all the above I'm not debating whether IP is right or wrong, or whether it should exist, or whatever. Just the way it works atm.
You know, I don't buy it. On one hand you have all the corporates bitching and moaning about how they don't have enough people to do the work, and how everyone should outright give citizenship to any immigrant who can use a computer. See Bill Gates's speech recently, it was linked to right here on Slashdot. Plus, they've surely created a lot of jobs in India lately. And then we have guys like this one coming out and saying "oh, we just don't need more CS people." Something doesn't add up. Either one gang is right, or the other is right, but they can't both be right at the same time.
Way I see it, reality is a lot more... perverse. Everyone still needs programmers, still needs an IT department, etc, they just don't want to pay for it.
And enrollment has just reflected this. Studying engineering or CS is hard work, and there are only a limited number of people who do it for fun. And even those can do it as a hobby at home if all else fails. For most people you have to pay well to get them to do the extra effort. If you don't pay up, they'll go do something else.
At any rate, the jobs do exist. Sure, not most of them involve researching the next great algorithm, but they exist. There are a ton of companies who need very specialized internal applications, or their own "B2B" applications, and I just don't see the off-the-shelf software who does those. Of course, most of it doesn't involve researching any new algorithms, but rather researching what the users really want. Then again, most computer-related jobs weren't exactly academic research in the past either. There were maybe more companies making compilers and new computers and what have you, but the bulk of the jobs was always in doing corporate software.
At any rate, _maybe_ if all you're seeing yourself doing after college is researching the next paradigm shift in computing, yeah, that market has somewhat shrunk. If you don't have any qualms with writing some buzzword-ladden application for some corporation, it's as strong as ever. It just doesn't pay as much as in the dot-com times any more.
Ah, the delusional people, then. Yes, I forgot to mention those. They're the ones who actually end up applying for the Randi foundation prize, while the true fraudsters just argue about why they won't bother.
Let's make one thing clear, since you mention psychology and the brain. In a sense you don't live in the outside world, not even in the world of your senses, but in the representation of it that reaches your upper consciousness level. When you see a car on the street, what your conscious brain sees isn't the raw stream of pixels from the eyes. There are several levels of buffering it, tokenizing it, pruning most of the information deemed irrelevant to the current focus of your attention (e.g., why you don't see the gorilla doing cartwheels in the background when you focus a car accident), indexing it, etc. The info you really operate on is the packed and processed result of that, not the raw data.
In a sense, at the conscious level you really operate sorta like on a MUD or old text mode adventure. What you "see" is more along the lines of a tokenized description of the information in the scene that's relevant to the focus of your attention. And you can shift that focus to go into more detail (losing more of the big picture) or less focused (losing details.) So you go, say, out of the house and see your brain gets the processed/indexed/tokenized version of, say,
"You are in your back yard. In front of you is your chicken coop. There are some chicken in it. One looks at you."
The funny thing is, sometimes these pre-processing stages malfunction and you get corrupted data at the end. E.g.,
"You are in your back yard. In front of you is your chicken coop. There are some DEVILS in it. One looks at you."
That's a true case that grandma loves to tell about. One of her neighbours at some point flipped to seeing birds as devils, and ended up in a mental hospital.
That's a simplified description of it, but it should give you a general idea. That's how delusions work. So just because someone is seeing some paranormal stuff, doesn't mean it's ESP, it can just mean that they're deffective in the head. Yes, to them it will look very real, and in fact to them it _is_ real. It doesn't make it "really real", so to speak. That's why we want some independent confirmation of some sort.
Additionally, there's one important thing there that throws a spanner in the works even when it is working right: the filtering stages. Most info in a scene is pruned basically based on what you want to see there. Committing it to memory involves even more filtering out, so basically you remember the parts _you_ want to remember. Well, the parts you deem important to see or remember, anyway. It's just a part of how the brain works, to keep the working set of data to a small size it can deal with. Otherwise it would get swamped in more data than you can deal with.
However it also produces the interesting effect called "selective confirmation." If it's important to you to notice that your pet theory is happening (e.g., that the phone rings more often when you're on the toilet), then you'll be more inclined to notice anything confirming it, and fail to notice or quickly forget anything that doesn't confirm it.
Additionally, even without a bias as such, you tend to notice more the things that are unusual or contrary to your expectations. You might not pay much attention to a dove, if there are plenty in your city, but you'd notice a gorilla or a parrot. You don't notice much when you hit in a RPG, because that's what you expect and take for granted, but you notice when you pull a string of 4 misses in a row.
Either way, some turns of events get noticed and remembered more than others, and that can royally screwed up the perceived probabilities of it all. Things which are really rare get perceived as happening to you all the time, while things which happen all the time are as good as filtered out. So it's damn easy to seem like you have some inexplicable or paranormal stuff at work t
Who sets the rules, then? Did Google do a referendum or even a poll and determine that, indeed, the vast majority of Indians vote for "we want to be censored, thank you very much"?
Now I'll admit that I have no experience with India or Indians, but I do have some first hand experience with the USSR (back when it was called that way) and eastern europe, and have co-workers from all over that area. Plus some from various arab countries. And I can tell you that so far I've yet to see major differences. People are people everywhere. Yeah, there are cultural and education differences all right, and even culture clashes when you put people from different cultures together, but at the end of the day most people want the same things.
Even the exceptions are, strangely enough, not much different from our or your exceptions. E.g., if you want to point out some of the religious fundamentalist nutcases from some area as somehow representative, I can point you to religious fundamentalist nutcases in the west (e.g., southern USA) which are strangely similar. For every Khoran-thumping "we should bomb America/Israel/whatever for Allah" nutcase, there'll be a Bible-thumping "we should nuke the Middle East for Jesus" nutcase on the other side.
Even if you want to point out some resistance to new ideas in some areas, I can point out at people ranting about the "good old days" and rejecting the new in the West too. There is the same resistance to change everywhere, some just got a head start in accepting it. But if you let them have what they want, overall all societies tend towards the same thing. E.g., for all the Party's moaning about western decadence, China tended to adopt Western consumerism and other supposed bad habits very very quickly when it had a half a choice.
Etc. As I was saying, I've yet to see any evidence that people are fundamentally different anywhere.
And more importantly, to get back to Freedom Of Speech, I've yet to see any evidence that people from any area actually cheer at the idea of having the police watching over their shoulder.
Sure, there'll be plenty who want to tell _you_ what you can and can't say. (Same as in the west.) But they'll tend to not appreciate when someone tells _them_ what they can and can't say.
And sure, group-think exists everywhere. Doubly so if you can bully them into an "if I say I disaggree, the others will think I'm a pervert/criminal/whatever and ostracize me" state of mind. You have them chest-thump and proclaim any idiocy just to seem like popular/responsible/whatever members of the community. (Again, in the west too.) But again, move them out of that environment, and they'll tend to snap out of it in no time.
In fact, the funny thing is, a lot (maybe most) cultural clashes with immigrants tend to be centered around their snapping out of it too fast and too far. People coming from areas where they have to watch out what they say or do all the time, often seem to turn to a sort of a "woohoo, here I can say and do _everything_ I want to" state of mind, and proceed to appear thoroughly impolite and disruptive to the locals. If you will, they end up appreciating the whole freedom ideas a bit too much, and not knowing where to stop exercising them.
So based on those impressions I'll go and say that the freedoms probably _are_ universal truths that all humans can appreciate.
Ok so i know this is off topic, but why are wild hypotheses like this taken so seriously when things like ESP/human mind altering random probability kind of things laughed at so widely when they actually have many different studies confirming it happens?
Heh. Well, then, just send them to the Randi foundation which still has a 1 million dollar prize for anyone who can prove anything like that. The requirements so far have been reasonable too, usually along the lines of having a scientific double-blind test. Nothing you wouldn't expect in normal science. Altering probabilities is even more straightforward, since then you just have to take a large enough sample and do some elementary statistics. So you'd think that if ESP or mind-over-matter or whatever floats your fantasy boat was that proven and working, someone would claim the prize already. But, nah, suspiciously so far what we've had were:
- bullshitters arguing about how unsound scientific testing is, and why they won't take part in it (sorry, if something is only perceived when the test subjects are told and persuaded what they should perceive, then it's probably just make-belief.)
- lame stage magician tricks
- various versions of some global conspiracy to suppress them (funny how noone suppressed them before, then. You'd think the conspiracy would then stop them from publishing books and making faked movies about it too, not just stop them from taking part in a controlled experiment.)
Etc.
Plus, Randi isn't the only one who came up empty so far. What fraudsters are quick to tell you, as if it were some proof of ESP existing, is that both the USA and the USSR were interested in it during the cold war. That much is true. Unsurprisingly, since for example transmitting a message to a submarine by a mean that's (A) not blocked by water or rock, hence receivable from any depth or hole, and (B) impossible to intercept, is any army's or navy's wet dream. What they conveniently ommit there is that both the USA and the USSR, and a few others for that matter, failed to get any results with it.
By contrast, the people with these physics hypotheses tend to actually have some verifiable/falsifiable data, and they give it to you up front. If they did just bullshitting and handwaving like the ESP gang, we wouldn't take them seriously either.
PTSD is somewhat more complex than just Pavlovian knee-jerk responses to certain stimuli. Judging by the hormones produced, for example, it seems that PTSD is basically being stuck in trying to learn how one should have dealt with an extreme situation where there was really no sane way of dealing with it. The re-living it over and over again is basically just a (screwed up) way of trying to learn how that could have been avoided, except there is nothing to learn, so it never stops.
At any rate, those noises and whatnot are not stressful as such. There is no Pavlovian connection that causes some unthinking reaction when a balloon pops. What happens is that it reminds you of that mortar round that tore your friend to pieces, and the whole "OMG, what should I have done" simulation starts all over again.
So unless you make them either forget that original memory, or somehow become desensitized to it, you haven't achieved much.
Sometimes it's just perceptions though. A lot of distros _do_ have GUI tools to configure everything, including graphics cards. E.g., SuSE, which is what I'm using, had YAST for ages. I know it had it in '99, when I discovered SuSE.
IMHO the biggest problem in the way of Linux getting mainstream support are... the Linux zealots. Most distros actually are fairly mainstream-friendly, it's the zealots who aren't, and in some cases would rather cut an arm off than be seen using anything but the command line and vi. The command line is macho, while even knowing that a GUI config tool exists is bad for your street cred. If you ask one to show you how to configure even trivial things like your internet connection (again, GUI tools for that existed since the '90s), the local nerd will reach for vi, quickly type something that might as well be runes, close it before you can even see which file and what setting that was, then tell you it's easy. That is, if you're lucky. If you aren't, you're also getting a rant about how GUI's and "point-and-drool" interfaces are for lusers.
Briefly, it's a matter of perceptions, and sad to say a lot of Linux advocates just give the wrong impression there. They make it look more command-line-based than it really is nowadays.
Well, that is done "right", or at least that's what everyone else does. See, tech support has at least two levels, and the reasons will be obvious:
1. Level 2 support. These are the guys who know their shit, are typically engineers, they know the product thoroughly, and are paid accordingly. They're expensive. From the caller's point of view, sure, you'd want to only deal with these. From the employer's point of view, as I was saying, these guys are expensive. You want to have a few of them, dealing with the truly technical issues, not an army of them dealing with the bulk of the "my coffee cup holder broke" and "where is the 'ANY' key" calls. So you also hire,
2. Level 1 support. These are the cheapest unskilled monkeys who can read a script and use a telephone. Their job is to deflect most calls and prevent them from reaching the expensive guys. If someone calls with a "I put the modem in the dish washer and now I don't have Internet" case, you want these cheap guys to handle it.
Sometimes there's a level 3 support too. These are usually the engineers/programmers who made or maintain the product, or close enogh. You _really_ don't want these guys on the phone all day.
Now whether that is "right", is another issue. From the caller's point of view, it's an irritation, because often you have to deal with guys that are even less clued than you are, and forced to go through an irrelevant script just because the helpdesk guy is _supposed_ to be too stupid to actually figure out any problem without a script. Worse yet, they often have to meet stupid criteria to keep their job, so they may have to be even more irritating than necessary. But, basically, that's how everyone is doing it nowadays.
In that aspect, whether level 1 in Bangalore or New York is rather irrelevant. As I was saying, these are _not_ supposed to be the experts, they're just supposed to be able to use a phone and read a script. If they were in New York they might not have the indian accent, but otherwise they'd still be the cheapest unskilled people money can buy.
(And yes, I know there's a whole class of "I'm teh computer genius because I work level 1 helpdesk, you're teh idiot luser" class of posters around. It saddens me to shatter their dreams, but if anyone actually is anywhere near knowledgeable about computers, then they're in the wrong job there. It's not a job for experts, it's a job for cheap disposable monkeys. I sincerely hope they find a job more suited for their qualifications, if they actually are qualified. Most aren't, though.)
Perhaps this kind of counselor ;)
on
Wednesday Is Pi Day
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Quoth Monty Python, "You know, there are many people in the country today who, through no fault of their own, are sane. Some of them were born sane. Some of them became sane later in their lives. It is up to people like you and me who are out of our tiny little minds to try and help these people overcome their sanity. You can start in small ways with ping-pong ball eyes and a funny voice and then you can paint half of your body red and the other half green and then you can jump up and down in a bowl of treacle going "squawk, squawk, squawk..." And then you can go "Neurhhh! Neurhhh!" and then you can roll around on the floor going "pting pting pting"..."
Call it lacking an open mind, if you will, but, by the sound of it, it sounds like a lot of work and a heck of a learning curve just to play a game. I thought the game designers were finally learning the idea that some of us just want to play a quick and unchallenging round of a game to relax, rather than have to spend a month just getting past the learning curve.
And the most successful interfaces and peripherals are those who don't require much practice either. Take the mouse for example. I actually made the experiment of taking my 80 year old grandma who's never touched a computer before, and trying to see how she does in a city building game. Within an hour she was using the mouse like a pro, with the sole hurdle of the left and right mouse buttons. I guess with an Apple mouse that would have been easier. Gamepads? Same thing. You can just get one and be comfortable with the thumbstick in no time. Heck, even taking non-gaming things, there's a reason why historically the crossbow was more popular than the much faster firing longbow: any peasant can point and click.
If you will, it's not entirely a matter of believing I'll fail, but a matter of what the heck would be my motivation to put some work in _that_. I can see how someone would be motivated to do that after a stroke, since you mention patients with nerve damage, because, simply put, they can't choose to "play" another RL. But in a game, between one where I have to spend months just learning to use the controls, and one where I can have fun within half an hour, I'll go for the latter every time.
Money is not just an incentive. It's a means of exchange, a store of value and a unit of account (i.e. it tells us what things are worth).
Nothing against all that, but I wasn't talking about money generally, but about the "they're out to make money" excuse. The act of making money is the incentive I'm talking about.
Corporations are valuable to us because they produce things we want - first and foremost. Secondly because they employ people and make profits for shareholders, and lots of other reasons like them doing R&D.
Nothing against that either, but:
1. That's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. That is the real goal: that they do that for the rest of society. Just making money for the CEO is not the goal. So "they're out to make money" should never be taken as an automatic excuse for anything and everything. The real criterion and end is how well they serve us, as a society. Making money is just a means to that end. It's not the end itself. If money becomes the goal itself, and it comes at the expense of acting against the interests of society, then I do believe that that shouldn't be tolerated.
2. I don't think even that excuses unethical behaviour. There are ways to make money, produce stuff, employ people, and do R&D without being destructive in the process. (I don't think Enron created more value than companies which didn't break the law, for example.)
3. I don't think it should absolve anyone of personal responsibility. Ultimately a corporation isn't some AI, but _people_ taking those decisions. Sure, we do give them some amount of shielding from such stuff as market fluctuations, bad/uninformed decisions, etc, and it's perfectly fine that way. Noone is proposing to send someone to jail or auction their house just for going bankrupt, or anything. But ultimately they do bear the responsibility of those decision. If a decision wasn't just bad or uninformed, but _malicious_, then at the very least we should be aware that it's a human there taking it. He's, at best, an asshole. It's not some nebulous corporate entity whose decisions appear out of nowhere, it's a human asshole who chose to act that way.
Same, if you will, as we don't blame the car for running someone over, we blame the human who was drunk at the wheel. Or we don't blame the army as a whole and leave it at that, if a squad decides to shoot a bunch of villagers, we actually go after the ones who did it and after the officer who should have stopped it. Being part of some big impersonal entity does not absolve one of responsibility for one's own decisions and choices.
In short, I'd say if you don't like corporations
I never said I didn't like corporations or capitalism. There are plenty who make their money without being malicious. What I don't like is simply taking the "they're just out to make money" as some blanket excuse to do anything and everything, no matter how screwed up and immoral.
don't use its products. The reason you are walking into the barrel of a gun, to use your metaphor, is because you chose to install a Microsoft product on your computer. And there are alternatives.
Cute, but it's a return to self-styled vigilante justice, and it just doesn't work. It worked like that in, oh, say the stone age, but in the meantime we discovered such concepts as "laws", "justice", etc. If someone acts against the interests of society, then I'd rather society regulated it via the modern and efficient means, rather than each member fending for himself.
I haven't watched "The Corporation", but nevertheless I too think that "they're out to make money" should _not_ be a wildcard excuse for everything. Making money is good and fine, but ultimately it's just the incentive we give some people to make them work better for the benefit of society as a whole. Briefly it's a means, not an end.
Turning that on its head and making the means sacrosanct, even at the expense of acting against the very purpose it was supposed to serve... well, is as stupid as forgetting which is means and which is end in the army's using weapons. We let them use weapons to defend us all, not as a means in and by itself. If any army started shooting random people on the street just because they think the whole purpose is to use their guns, you'd probably have no problem understanding why that's contrary to the whole purpose of that army. But when a corporation does the same swapping of means and ends, half the population seems to just assume that, sure, if it's for the purpose of making money _of_ _course_ it's normal to cheat, lie and worse.
Well, no. The short answer is that there still is no way to make the bouncy ball move faster than light, or even at the speed of light.
Just because there are some falling blocks, doesn't mean the ball will jump on the head of the next block just because it's there. You'd still need to accelerate the ball from zero velocity (in your frame of reference) to reaching the head of the next block just in time. It would take infinite energy to even reach the speed of light, and may the elder gods help you in getting above that. Doing it in the tiny space between two domino blocks, heh.
It has nothing to do with friction. Even without friction, you still need to apply a force to accelerate an object. That's why you still need thrusters to change a satellite's orbit, even though friction and drag are negligible up there. If you don't apply enough force, the object just doesn't accelerate fast enough. At this point there isn't even anything relativistic about it, it's just plain elementary Newtonian mechanics, as you may have learned it in school.
Additionally, your wave is an artifficial construct. Just because the next block is a little tilted already, doesn't make the current block also fall faster. Any particular block falls just as fast as if it were alone, with the other blocks not even existing at all, until the point of impact with the next. Just because block 2 is already tilted, doesn't mean block 1 will accelerate faster.
So the ball you've put on top of block 1 also won't accelerate any faster. Just because block 2 was already tilted, doesn't mean the ball will be forced to keep up with the wave. It will still fall at the same speed, and probably fail to transfer to the top of block 2, since block 2 will have fallen earlier and it's top will be some way ahead of the ball. So at most the ball will keep on rolling at a lower speed over the already fallen blocks.
Or think of another analogy, someone else used it already, but let's use it again here since it makes a good illustration. Think of a traffic congestion. All cars are standing still, then the first car moves, the next driver takes some time to notice he can step on it, so he starts at a tiny delay, the third car does the same, etc. Better yet, let's say they're pre-timed to start at uniformly spaced intervals, so no particular transfer of information is involved in getting them started. So basically although the cars are moving forward, viewed from above there is a wave travelling backwards. (It's an uncanny similarity with the "it appeared to exit before it entered" claim in the summary. Viewed from above, the car wave too is seen at the front of the congestion before it reaches the back of the congestion.)
It also can appear to move faster than the individual cars. If every driver only needs 0.5 seconds to notice that he can hit the gas, and the cars are stopped, say, every 3m (10 ft), the wave will move at 20 m/s or 72 km/h backwards. Although this may happen in a town where the speed limit is only 50 km/h, so the individual cars won't exceed that by much.
Now imagine you give the first car in the pack your ball filled with love letters. Will it travel backwards together with the wave? Well, nope, that particular car still travel forward at 50 km/h. Let's say you give the last car in the pack your ball. Will the ball appear to exit the congestion before the last car even started? Well, no, not really.
Basically just because you can set up one particular kind of wave doesn't mean you can actually use it to transfer information between two points. Whichever car you give your ball of letters, still moves at 50 km/h, and the "wave" is just an artifficial illusion or construct.
Or think you have some people 1 km apart, with stopwatches and really big speakers and amplifiers, and they're told to shout "geronimo!" in 1 second intervals. The "wave" is faster than the speed of sound, but it can't carry any information that way faster than sound. At the end point you don't get any information the last guy di
Isn't the multiple-window model just a particular form of MDI?
Only in the same way that having a small heap of books on the floor is just a particular form of a bookcase.
Seriously, I dunno why he got modded flamebait, but the GIMP interface _is_ horrible and every non-geek I've tried to convert to GIMP found it horrible. It's not even just the heap of disconnected windows. Just about everything in it works non-intuitively, or in some own way that breaks any reflexes and expectations you might already have.
As a quick example, look at the stupid image mode menu. Yeah, the one with RGB, grayscale and indexed options. Just about any other Windows program would use a checkmark next to the active mode, but nah, the Gimp grays it out, which normally means a disabled or non-available option. It's not just sending the wrong message to anyone used to the normal use of those visual cues, it actually manages to be less useful by making one visual cue mean two fundamentally different things. Disabled is very different from "it's already selected": disabled can mean (and is usually used to mean) something that just isn't possible in that particular situation. E.g., if for some reason that particular image simply can't be indexed. Already selected or already active, on the other hand, is pretty much the opposite: it's very much possible, and in fact it's what's currently happening.
Honestly, as it is, the Gimp just makes the case of why someone would prefer to pay money for a usable product, instead of going with the crap but free (as in either beer or freedom or whatever you wish) equivalent. It just makes a (false) "you get what you pay for" point, that then gets used against other free products. Normal people don't fight ideological crusades, they just want something that works and is easy to use, so "but the Gimp is GPLed" points are lost on them. And even "free as in beer" points tend to get lost when the freely downloadable version has a crap interface. At some point they'd rather pay some money and get a usable product instead. It's, if you will, as in buying a car vs the "free as in beer" walking to work. Most people will get a car.
Slashdot Mirror
It's an interesting point, but it doesn't work. Trust me, you're not the only one who thought of that. (Management still loves flowcharts for example.) _Lots_ of people try, the problem is noone managed to make something that actually works better.
I've actually had the experience of using, well, basically a flowchart compiler back in the 90's. The problem is that the damn thing didn't scale. Oh, it was superb for making 10 line programs or functions. It was an absolute nightmare for anything, say, 100 lines long. Things which would have fit a screen comfortably in a normal language, meant scrolling in both directions just to follow the logic there.
The more important thing: it wasn't even more useful for small functions either. At the size where you could be comfortable with it, it was not much more of a problem to understand the text version either.
Plus, so far we have a mountain of evidence that just messing with the syntax candy tends to not do any good.
For whoever has the abstract thinking capacity, C's cryptic syntax is no harder to use than the more verbose Pascal. And for whoever lacks the ability to think abstractly, no level of syntax candy or pictograms will do them any good. Once you know what "{" and "}" mean, they're no more cryptic than Pascal's "begin" and "end". And going one level higher and writing COBOL (now _that_ is verbose) doesn't bring anything more either. Writing "add X to Y giving Z" instead of "Z=X+Y" doesn't make any actual difference.
The thing is, no matter how you write or represent it, you still have to be able to think abstractly and algorithmically. You still have to take a problem like, say, "fetch me a glass of water", and split it into all the little steps taken for granted in normal conversation, _and_ think about all the things that could go wrong or not be in the expected places. If you didn't train your brain for that, no pretty graphics will do you any good.
And finally here's a funny thought for you: the usual "bah, I could be such a great programmer if someone gave me a paint program instead of making me think" argument tends to always come back to the same example: electronic circuits. The argument goes, "see, if they can design an electronic circuit with all those funny symbols for transistors and diodes, the same can apply to programs." The funny part is that even electronics only uses those for really small circuits. If you think that, say, your CPU was drawn like that, square miles of symbols, you'd actually be wrong. It's basically designed like a program, by the numbers. Go figure.
Not to mention all the other RL skill that CS taught me.
For example, before my CS days I never used to always strafe (side-step) in front of doors. CS taught me that. I don't have to tell you how useful that is, in case there's something camping with an AWP in the boss's office. My co-workers may look funny at me, but I know I'll have the last laugh when they get headshot for just walking in front of a door without looking.
Always stop and listen before going through any door. Sound is your friend. You can know whether someone's coming around a corner by their footsteps long before you actually have line of sight on them. So always, I repeat, always, stop and listen for 10 seconds or so before barging through any door or around any corner. Sure, the people behind you in the elevator or subway may get impatient, but you're really saving their non-gamer arses. Without you, they could walk right into an ambush.
Then there's crouching in dark corners. Invaluable skill that. When in doubt, you can't go wrong with crouching in some dark corner or on the roof. Sure, your neighbours and co-workers may look funny when they see you huddled between the dumpster and the hedge, but the laugh is on them if the terrorists ever decide to use your office or block as a map.
Spatial orientation. Only loser looking to be headshot use the front door. Surprise your boss today by climbing up the fire escape and through a vent. Then spend half the day jumping up and down in front of the vent, to see if some enemy's coming through it. It's a repetitive job, but someone has to do it. If noone does, the terrorists win.
Oh, and always explore and memorize all possible escape routes. Your life will depend on it later. Sometimes after the next paragraph.
Then there are the social skills. An online game is a perfect training ground for your polite interaction with fellow humans. Don't laugh, it's like a virtual party. You just mingle and call everyone a "camping faggot" or, as the case may be, a "cheater". Be sure to tell them how good their mother was in bed too. People are insecure about that kind of thing, and it's polite to put their doubts to rest about their relatives' sexual abilities. (Hey, one million CS players can't all be wrong.) And be sure to tell every woman that she's probably a 40 year old fat male wanker. Works like a charm as an ice breaker.
Creative use of hostages. Those guys aren't there just to get stuck in doors and behind fallen twigs. Did you know you can jump on a hostage's head to climb on a balcony? Erm... actually scratch that. I'm still trying to live down _that_ silly lawsuit.
Except that's traceable to management failures again. Lemme see:
1. First and foremost, the games industry doesn't even try to keep talent. Last I've heard, they have a burnout rate of about 5 years. They basically take the cheapest (which sometimes doesn't mean the most talented) graduates available, overwork and underpay them, then they burn out and move to other jobs, and a fresh new batch is hired.
I'm sorry, but then don't wonder why the architectures are bad, non-scalable and extremely hard to modify or maintain. Sad to say, and that's from a college graduate, college and coding small cool stuff in your free time teaches all the bad habits and none of the good practices. You come out of college having worked only on _tiny_ projects, individually or in 2-3 person teams, and with requirements that are fixed, clear and never changing.
The funny thing is: a program of 1000 lines, you can hold completely in your head. You don't even need test cases to tell you what you'll break by changing this or that, but even that's ok, because you won't have to change anything ever in an assignment. Plus, the scope is always simple enough so it either works or it doesn't, and you can manually prove one or the other in 5 minutes. (E.g., if your assignment is a heap sort, wth, you can just type in some numbers and see if they come out sorted. Why would you bother with a unit test for that?) You don't even need a good architecture or clear interfaces, because again, you'll never have to re-discover what it does or ever have to change it. It's always by definition write-only, so it's OK to write write-only code. Even 10,000 lines, if you're reasonably smart, you can do it. And that's already more code than in _any_ college assignement ever.
Move on to the real life and a 1,000,000 line project (which is actually a small one), and all the cool write-only hacks and the "it'll be manually tested at the end anyway" mentality you learned in college become a liability. You have to actually unlearn all the write-only habits that college taught you, and learn how to actually produce quality code.
Except in the game industry, by that time you've been overworked and underpaid to death, and the original enthusiams has worn off. You may have started with "woohoo, I'm coding cool stuff for the next great game, I'm so much cooler than those boring guys writing boring VB programs for a living", but in a few years you get to the point of, "fuck this shit, I could be writing one of those boring VB programs for twice the money and a tiny fraction of the unpaid overtime, if any." So you move on. And all that experience is lost to the industry, who then proceeds to hire another fresh enthusiast and watch him do "cool" unmaintainable hacks, and spend half a year introducing two new bugs for every bug fixed.
I'm sorry, but failure to retain talent and experience, _is_ a management failure. You can't just point the finger at the programmers and say "bah, it's those guys writing bad code", when that's the guys you've hired. And in fact, when you just got rid of those who had just learned how to do a better job. It's like buying an old Yugo and then complaining that it's not a race car. Well, that's the car _you_ bought.
2. I'm sorry, but if you pressure people into holding unrealistic deadlines and into working 80 hours a week, don't be surprised if they produce worse code. People (A) make more mistakes when they're tired, and (B) tend to do the quickest dirty hack when it's either that or working yet another Sunday. Writing well structured, scalable and maintainable code takes more hours than writing the quickest hack. Except usually noone gives you a deadline where you have the luxury to do the former. So if you want to do a good architecture, those hours will come o
I am very much aware that rats have different metabolisms, but then it's still common sense to have it tested, including on human volunteers, before selling it. Is the difference big enough to make it safe for humans? We don't know basically. We have a whole process for testing and approving, say, medicine, so I fail to see why it wouldn't apply here.
Maybe because so far
1. the _vast_ majority of GM stuff is this kind of stuff: plants bred to somehow poison pests/moulds/bacteria, or at least be more tolerant of strong pesticides. (Those pesticides end up in your food too, even if they aren't produced by the plant itself.)
2. because so far none of this stuff has been rigorously tested and proven to be safe, like a medicine would. So basically you're asked to swallow some pesticide with nothing more than the manufacturer's reassurance that it should only kill insects.
Look, even with medicines we have a long history of stuff that was supposed to only kill some organisms (e.g., bacteria), but ended up damaging humans badly. There are even cases where proper testing on humans looked ok, but several years later we discovered that, oopsie, those people are now dying or giving birth to horrible mutants. So being a little circumspect is more than warranted.
It doesn't mean we should turn into luddites, of course, but it's just common sense to thoroughly test the damn stuff. Just because a corporation says "it's good for you", it doesn't mean you should take it as gospel. Other corporations are equally saying that smoking is good for you, or whatever. There's no way one will _ever_ tell you, "my stuff is toxic, don't buy it." So let's have it properly tested, then. That's all.
Other than that, it's a classic ad-hominem fallacy. Just because some voice is strident, doesn't mean they can't possibly be right. So try to focus on what they're saying, not on why it's unfashionable to listen.
Who cares? Having that stuff tested is common sense even without Greanpeace around. So what difference does it make?
It just means I have no patience with fucking morons. (There, I used that word again.) I'm tollerant of common ignorance, but when one launches into whole rants based on little more than ignorance, preconceptions, ad-hominems, and other fallacies, then I won't even bother being diplomatic. If it hurts their feelings... good! Maybe it will stimulate them to actually engage the brains before throwing the mouth into gear. Maybe even, god forbid, actually read a bit first too. Well, ok, it probably won't happen, but it's still a nice dream.
Is that a pleasant reflection? Dunno, I can live with it. Quite happily.
Lemme try a bit more: fucking, fucking, fucking, fucking. Hmm... nope, I still don't feel bad about it. Sorry.
Maybe, maybe not. Fed up fans proceed to post a rant or make a comic strip, not to commission a whole study _and_ get it published on Reuters repeatedly. Getting a news piece on a major news agency is harder than you think. Briefly, _if_ it is PR, the probability of it just being random fan work is next to nil.
Second, I never said PR was some conspiracy. PR works more straightforwardly: Company X goes to PR Agency Y, and pays them a bunch of money to drum up point of view Z. (E.g., that you should buy a costume already.) The PR agency folks write it as a news story, or maybe an interview, make sure it meets the fucked-up criteria of "journalistic impartiality" nowadays (it's actually anything but), etc. In really fucked up cases, they disguise it as some research piece, and find someone with a Dr. or Prof. title who's willing to sign it for a bunch of money. Then submit it all over the place. That's it. A cheap agency will get you in a ton of local newspapers, a really good and expensive agency will get you on Reuters or on major TV stations.
It's not even something rare or anything. About 75% of the news you read in the USA, and about 50% in Europe, is paid PR. (Probably not because the Europeans have any more journalistic integrity, mind you. There is just more corporate money paying for it in the USA, that's all.) It's very very very common, and involves no real conspiracy. You don't have to exchange suitcases of money or know secret masonic handshakes to get it published. Newspapers actually love it, because basically they're getting some content for free, and it tends to be written to the highest standards. For most newspapers, these guys write better stories than any of their own journalists, and the whole thing skips the problem of finding a story too.
The origin of about half the academic research that actually makes headlines, is, see above: some PR hack writes a piece of pseudo-science, then finds some professor who'll sign it. Real research tends to be more obscure, and be published only in some journal that noone else reads.
Again, even that doesn't involve any conspiracies and secret masonic handshakes. They just contact two dozen guys with academic titles, until one is willing to sell his good name for some money. And eventually one does. We'd all like to think that in a perfect world the academia and scientists would all have more integrity, but in the real world eventually one signs anything for a bunch of cash. You'd be surprised the kind of _blatant_ bogus stuff, ammounting to little more than publicly mocking science as a whole, that got someone's signature anyway. Sure, for enough money, someone will cheerfully take the pie in the face, so to speak.
And _you_ did your research then? From what I understand, the _whole_ mutation in this particular strain of corn is to make it produce a sort of a natural pesticide. I.e., yes, a toxin.
Now Monsanto basically says, "yeah, but it's not toxic to mammals." Greenpeace says, "whoa, actually that data says that it's somewhat toxic to rats."
Now both positions _could_ be true. It _is_ possible for something to be toxic to insects without being lethal to humans. (See coffeine. It really evolved as a paralyzing poison against insects. See why Robusta is a hardier crop than Arabica: the Robusta plant simply produces more of it. Yet a human can drink lots of it for decades without being too harmed in the process.) On the other hand, the opposite _can_ be true too. And without proper testing how would you know?
So, pray tell, without even seeing the research, how _do_ you know which side is right and which is wrong? Or are you just motivated enough to rant against Greenpeace even when you have no fucking clue what is it about? At least, even as motivated studies go, they did at least do and publish one. You did... what? to get your info on which to base such a swift judgment.
Hand-waving about mutations happening randomly in nature is at best brain-damaged too. Equally random mutations in plants include atropine (nightshade), ricin (deadly in 0.2mg doses and no antidote), solanine, cyanide (wild almonds), etc. And that's just the short list of the most known ones. We could go into a couple hundred other fun natural stuff, including such exotic effects as immuno-suppressors in some moulds. Just because something _could_ have occured naturally doesn't make it automatically safe. All the poisons in this paragraph occured naturally, yet _aren't_ safe at all.
Plus, it often is false as such anyway. Just because something was created via genetic engineering does _not_ automatically mean it could have occured as a natural mutation any day now. There's plenty of GM stuff, like renet-producing moulds or goats whose milk contains spider silk, which would _never_ evolve on their own, not even in another billion years. There's simply no natural advantage in producing those (wake me up when any plant needs to digest fresh milk, which is what it would take to make renet an advantage), and in fact it's a serious disadvantage to waste your energy and aminoacids on producing them.
So, you know, if you're going to go into a whole rant about who's ignorant or worse, it would be nice if you at least took the time to read a bit and have at least some minimal clue what you're talking about.
It may not look like big news to you or me, but look at how many people act surprised that an adult can play video games even on Slashdot. People grew up with the notion that video games are for kids, and some just don't want to let go of that notion.
Plus, western culture -- and indeed any culture -- has certain age-roles that an upstanding member of society must fit. You're supposed to do something from age X to age Y, then something completely different between ages Y and Z, and then change your interests completely again at age Z. E.g., ou're supposed to grow up on, say, hopscotch and cowboys-and-indians, then suddenly shun them when you reach a certain age, just because you're told it would be soo unfashionable to be seen doing that as an adult. So basically it was kinda expected that video games would follow the same pattern: you'd play them until you're, say, 20 years old, then suddenly give up and pretend to be no longer interested in that kiddy stuff.
So in a sense, it _is_ news.
But probably more importantly, this is really PR.
Now PR isn't marketting. Marketting tells you stuff like "Buy Moraelin's cigarettes for the smooth taste." PR is more perverse. PR tries to masquerade as news, and undermine the very facts/preconceptions/whatever you may use in making that kind of a judgment. E.g., the PR for the same cigarettes would look more like "Scientist says that smoking is good for your health" or "Study says that 69% of the world's most successful people were smokers." Or maybe "Economist says that the new smoking tax will cause loss of jobs over the next 10 years."
Anyway, the short version is (A) it tries to masquerade as news, and (B) it tries to manipulate your opinions and brains in stealthy ways.
So what do we have here? Both MS and Sony are trying to expand the market for their consoles. Appealing to parents of little kids is good and fine, but it only takes you so far. What they want now is to have _everyone_ buy their consoles. If possible, hey, even if you have one for your kid already, please buy one for yourself too. Heck, buy a third as a DVD player.
Enter a PR bombardment telling everyone over and over again, basically, "hey, lots of adults play games. It's socially acceptable and accepted nowadays. Noone will look funny at you if you start playing video games in your 40's. Honest." It's true and logical too, as you've said, but then it will serve the PR role anyway. It doesn't have to be a lie to be good PR material, and in fact it's better if it's not an outright lie that someone can proceed to dismantle. At any rate, it will serve to erode the age-role conceptions just a little more, and maybe convince a few more people to go buy a game console already.
Mind you, I'm not saying that there's anything particularly evil or sinister about it. There are truly insidious PR jobs, but this is a benign one anyway. So I'm not saying anyone should form a mob with torches and pitchforks. Just that this is probably the reason why you're seeing this kind of story again and again and again. Just being true doesn't automatically make something be all over the news repeatedly. On the other hand, the PR agencies submitting various versions and incarnations of it again and again, might just do the trick.
Considering that a whole third of them don't have kids, I'd say it's fairly safe to say that at least in those households there must be an adult who's using the console. I mean, if you bought and own a console, and you don't have kids of your own, then it's probably not for the neighbour's kid, right? The neighbours might get a tad nervous if their kid was at an adult's house all the time ;)
So it just had the same mesh and texture, but was a different species? Good to see that God takes the same shortcuts Blizzard does. Can't blame Him, though. I mean, have you seen the kind of polygon count and texture resolution these things have? Oooer. It must cost a mint to model a new one, so some reuse is kinda expected ;)
Makes me wonder why He didn't just write the NPCs name above their head, though. I mean, it kinda defeats the purpose of trying to pass it off as a new species, if noone can tell.
And while I'm at it, how about an exclamation mark above quest-giver's heads, please? Talking to everyone in town works when you have 6 NPCs total in the town, like in old NES RPGs, but not when there's a million of them. Plus, they're starting to look funny at me when I ask them if they have a quest.
Or maybe they found Garfield. Well, it's one big cat :P
I don't as much have a problem with Google, at least not in this topic, as with moral relativism run amok. The notion that maybe, you know, in other parts of the world they're so different from us that they actually want to be censored and oppressed. And that it's so unfair that we try to judge them through the goggles of human rights and freedoms, when they clearly don't want those.
And all that I'm saying is that it's a load of bull. People are people everywhere. If you took an American, a German, an Indian and an Arab (starts to sound like a joke already;) and put them in the same situation, free from group-think and peer-pressure influences, you'd discover that while there _are_ cultural differences in their views of the world do exist, ultimately they tend to end up wanting the same things. That's all I'm saying.
That said, as a completely tangential point, I have trouble viewing any country as a _true_ democracy if they're not free to criticize their government or their country. I don't care if they have an electoral farce going on, if you're given only the filtered, rose-coloured-glasses half of the story, you can't possibly make an informed choice there. Democracy isn't just about going and checking a random box on a ballot, it's about, yes, the power of the people to change what they don't like about their government or country. If it's illegal to even talk about what's wrong, on what would you base such a change? How would you even know that there's any need to change anything? That is ultimately what stuff like "freedom of speech" or "freedom of press" are for. Because without those, you might as well not even even bother with the rest of the farce, because a farce and a mockery of democracy is at best what you can get.
Once you can't say "India sucks", or, like in Turkey, Allah have mercy on you if you dare "insult turkishness" or even mention that Kurds even exist, how would you expect democracy to function? How would you expect the average Turk to even know about the problems of the Kurds, if it's illegal to even mention them. So who's going to risk their neck to tell them about it? Which politician is going to put any Kurd-related problem in their electoral platform, if it means being summarily being thrown in jail at the mere mention of it? (They did throw at least one member of their parliament in jail for even mentioning Kurds, btw, so it's not a fictional scenario.) It's simply put a whole domain which has been from the start excluded from any democratic process or debate.
Nicely abusable too, because such a poorly defined limitation is vague enough to cover any kind of dissidence. You spoke against corruption in the government? Weell, now, that looks to me like insulting your country and people. Round them up, boys.
But, yeah, ok, it's up to India to deal with it. Fine by me. Just don't tell me that whole cultures actually want to be oppressed and suppressed, because that's one thing I don't buy. If Google doesn't want to actually put its money where its motto is, fine, I can deal with that. But don't tell me that somehow, see, over there probably black is white and evil is good, so they're really happy that we hand them over to the authorities. That's all I'm saying.
Because the original YouTube didn't have much of a money-making model, and certainly not one tied to the actual content played, while Google can actually match ads to it. E.g., if you search for videos about cooking, they can try to sell you a cookbook. (Well, at least in an ideal world where that keyword matching actually worked, and people actually set the right keywords.) So in a sense, now Google's income actually depends on covering the whole content spectrum. Any niche they don't have covered, is a niche they can't serve you ads for. I.e., in a sense, Google actually makes a little money out of helping share all that pirated content.
And that can make quite a bit of a difference for a lot of people. Using their IP can be anywhere between ok and an irritation for most people, but they'll turn outright hostile if you make money out of unauthorized use of their IP. E.g., chances are noone will go after you if you use someone's characters for a little fan story, but they'll turn very hostile if you proceed to print your fan stories as a book and sell it. E.g., Blizzard won't come after you if you just use WoW to make a silly music clip, but if you proceeded to use those as ads for your own products or sell DVDs with them, chances are they'd want their share.
Note that in all the above I'm not debating whether IP is right or wrong, or whether it should exist, or whatever. Just the way it works atm.
You know, I don't buy it. On one hand you have all the corporates bitching and moaning about how they don't have enough people to do the work, and how everyone should outright give citizenship to any immigrant who can use a computer. See Bill Gates's speech recently, it was linked to right here on Slashdot. Plus, they've surely created a lot of jobs in India lately. And then we have guys like this one coming out and saying "oh, we just don't need more CS people." Something doesn't add up. Either one gang is right, or the other is right, but they can't both be right at the same time.
Way I see it, reality is a lot more... perverse. Everyone still needs programmers, still needs an IT department, etc, they just don't want to pay for it.
And enrollment has just reflected this. Studying engineering or CS is hard work, and there are only a limited number of people who do it for fun. And even those can do it as a hobby at home if all else fails. For most people you have to pay well to get them to do the extra effort. If you don't pay up, they'll go do something else.
At any rate, the jobs do exist. Sure, not most of them involve researching the next great algorithm, but they exist. There are a ton of companies who need very specialized internal applications, or their own "B2B" applications, and I just don't see the off-the-shelf software who does those. Of course, most of it doesn't involve researching any new algorithms, but rather researching what the users really want. Then again, most computer-related jobs weren't exactly academic research in the past either. There were maybe more companies making compilers and new computers and what have you, but the bulk of the jobs was always in doing corporate software.
At any rate, _maybe_ if all you're seeing yourself doing after college is researching the next paradigm shift in computing, yeah, that market has somewhat shrunk. If you don't have any qualms with writing some buzzword-ladden application for some corporation, it's as strong as ever. It just doesn't pay as much as in the dot-com times any more.
Ah, the delusional people, then. Yes, I forgot to mention those. They're the ones who actually end up applying for the Randi foundation prize, while the true fraudsters just argue about why they won't bother.
Let's make one thing clear, since you mention psychology and the brain. In a sense you don't live in the outside world, not even in the world of your senses, but in the representation of it that reaches your upper consciousness level. When you see a car on the street, what your conscious brain sees isn't the raw stream of pixels from the eyes. There are several levels of buffering it, tokenizing it, pruning most of the information deemed irrelevant to the current focus of your attention (e.g., why you don't see the gorilla doing cartwheels in the background when you focus a car accident), indexing it, etc. The info you really operate on is the packed and processed result of that, not the raw data.
In a sense, at the conscious level you really operate sorta like on a MUD or old text mode adventure. What you "see" is more along the lines of a tokenized description of the information in the scene that's relevant to the focus of your attention. And you can shift that focus to go into more detail (losing more of the big picture) or less focused (losing details.) So you go, say, out of the house and see your brain gets the processed/indexed/tokenized version of, say,
"You are in your back yard. In front of you is your chicken coop. There are some chicken in it. One looks at you."
The funny thing is, sometimes these pre-processing stages malfunction and you get corrupted data at the end. E.g.,
"You are in your back yard. In front of you is your chicken coop. There are some DEVILS in it. One looks at you."
That's a true case that grandma loves to tell about. One of her neighbours at some point flipped to seeing birds as devils, and ended up in a mental hospital.
That's a simplified description of it, but it should give you a general idea. That's how delusions work. So just because someone is seeing some paranormal stuff, doesn't mean it's ESP, it can just mean that they're deffective in the head. Yes, to them it will look very real, and in fact to them it _is_ real. It doesn't make it "really real", so to speak. That's why we want some independent confirmation of some sort.
Additionally, there's one important thing there that throws a spanner in the works even when it is working right: the filtering stages. Most info in a scene is pruned basically based on what you want to see there. Committing it to memory involves even more filtering out, so basically you remember the parts _you_ want to remember. Well, the parts you deem important to see or remember, anyway. It's just a part of how the brain works, to keep the working set of data to a small size it can deal with. Otherwise it would get swamped in more data than you can deal with.
However it also produces the interesting effect called "selective confirmation." If it's important to you to notice that your pet theory is happening (e.g., that the phone rings more often when you're on the toilet), then you'll be more inclined to notice anything confirming it, and fail to notice or quickly forget anything that doesn't confirm it.
Additionally, even without a bias as such, you tend to notice more the things that are unusual or contrary to your expectations. You might not pay much attention to a dove, if there are plenty in your city, but you'd notice a gorilla or a parrot. You don't notice much when you hit in a RPG, because that's what you expect and take for granted, but you notice when you pull a string of 4 misses in a row.
Either way, some turns of events get noticed and remembered more than others, and that can royally screwed up the perceived probabilities of it all. Things which are really rare get perceived as happening to you all the time, while things which happen all the time are as good as filtered out. So it's damn easy to seem like you have some inexplicable or paranormal stuff at work t
Who sets the rules, then? Did Google do a referendum or even a poll and determine that, indeed, the vast majority of Indians vote for "we want to be censored, thank you very much"?
Now I'll admit that I have no experience with India or Indians, but I do have some first hand experience with the USSR (back when it was called that way) and eastern europe, and have co-workers from all over that area. Plus some from various arab countries. And I can tell you that so far I've yet to see major differences. People are people everywhere. Yeah, there are cultural and education differences all right, and even culture clashes when you put people from different cultures together, but at the end of the day most people want the same things.
Even the exceptions are, strangely enough, not much different from our or your exceptions. E.g., if you want to point out some of the religious fundamentalist nutcases from some area as somehow representative, I can point you to religious fundamentalist nutcases in the west (e.g., southern USA) which are strangely similar. For every Khoran-thumping "we should bomb America/Israel/whatever for Allah" nutcase, there'll be a Bible-thumping "we should nuke the Middle East for Jesus" nutcase on the other side.
Even if you want to point out some resistance to new ideas in some areas, I can point out at people ranting about the "good old days" and rejecting the new in the West too. There is the same resistance to change everywhere, some just got a head start in accepting it. But if you let them have what they want, overall all societies tend towards the same thing. E.g., for all the Party's moaning about western decadence, China tended to adopt Western consumerism and other supposed bad habits very very quickly when it had a half a choice.
Etc. As I was saying, I've yet to see any evidence that people are fundamentally different anywhere.
And more importantly, to get back to Freedom Of Speech, I've yet to see any evidence that people from any area actually cheer at the idea of having the police watching over their shoulder.
Sure, there'll be plenty who want to tell _you_ what you can and can't say. (Same as in the west.) But they'll tend to not appreciate when someone tells _them_ what they can and can't say.
And sure, group-think exists everywhere. Doubly so if you can bully them into an "if I say I disaggree, the others will think I'm a pervert/criminal/whatever and ostracize me" state of mind. You have them chest-thump and proclaim any idiocy just to seem like popular/responsible/whatever members of the community. (Again, in the west too.) But again, move them out of that environment, and they'll tend to snap out of it in no time.
In fact, the funny thing is, a lot (maybe most) cultural clashes with immigrants tend to be centered around their snapping out of it too fast and too far. People coming from areas where they have to watch out what they say or do all the time, often seem to turn to a sort of a "woohoo, here I can say and do _everything_ I want to" state of mind, and proceed to appear thoroughly impolite and disruptive to the locals. If you will, they end up appreciating the whole freedom ideas a bit too much, and not knowing where to stop exercising them.
So based on those impressions I'll go and say that the freedoms probably _are_ universal truths that all humans can appreciate.
Heh. Well, then, just send them to the Randi foundation which still has a 1 million dollar prize for anyone who can prove anything like that. The requirements so far have been reasonable too, usually along the lines of having a scientific double-blind test. Nothing you wouldn't expect in normal science. Altering probabilities is even more straightforward, since then you just have to take a large enough sample and do some elementary statistics. So you'd think that if ESP or mind-over-matter or whatever floats your fantasy boat was that proven and working, someone would claim the prize already. But, nah, suspiciously so far what we've had were:
- bullshitters arguing about how unsound scientific testing is, and why they won't take part in it (sorry, if something is only perceived when the test subjects are told and persuaded what they should perceive, then it's probably just make-belief.)
- lame stage magician tricks
- various versions of some global conspiracy to suppress them (funny how noone suppressed them before, then. You'd think the conspiracy would then stop them from publishing books and making faked movies about it too, not just stop them from taking part in a controlled experiment.)
Etc.
Plus, Randi isn't the only one who came up empty so far. What fraudsters are quick to tell you, as if it were some proof of ESP existing, is that both the USA and the USSR were interested in it during the cold war. That much is true. Unsurprisingly, since for example transmitting a message to a submarine by a mean that's (A) not blocked by water or rock, hence receivable from any depth or hole, and (B) impossible to intercept, is any army's or navy's wet dream. What they conveniently ommit there is that both the USA and the USSR, and a few others for that matter, failed to get any results with it.
By contrast, the people with these physics hypotheses tend to actually have some verifiable/falsifiable data, and they give it to you up front. If they did just bullshitting and handwaving like the ESP gang, we wouldn't take them seriously either.
PTSD is somewhat more complex than just Pavlovian knee-jerk responses to certain stimuli. Judging by the hormones produced, for example, it seems that PTSD is basically being stuck in trying to learn how one should have dealt with an extreme situation where there was really no sane way of dealing with it. The re-living it over and over again is basically just a (screwed up) way of trying to learn how that could have been avoided, except there is nothing to learn, so it never stops.
At any rate, those noises and whatnot are not stressful as such. There is no Pavlovian connection that causes some unthinking reaction when a balloon pops. What happens is that it reminds you of that mortar round that tore your friend to pieces, and the whole "OMG, what should I have done" simulation starts all over again.
So unless you make them either forget that original memory, or somehow become desensitized to it, you haven't achieved much.
Sometimes it's just perceptions though. A lot of distros _do_ have GUI tools to configure everything, including graphics cards. E.g., SuSE, which is what I'm using, had YAST for ages. I know it had it in '99, when I discovered SuSE.
IMHO the biggest problem in the way of Linux getting mainstream support are... the Linux zealots. Most distros actually are fairly mainstream-friendly, it's the zealots who aren't, and in some cases would rather cut an arm off than be seen using anything but the command line and vi. The command line is macho, while even knowing that a GUI config tool exists is bad for your street cred. If you ask one to show you how to configure even trivial things like your internet connection (again, GUI tools for that existed since the '90s), the local nerd will reach for vi, quickly type something that might as well be runes, close it before you can even see which file and what setting that was, then tell you it's easy. That is, if you're lucky. If you aren't, you're also getting a rant about how GUI's and "point-and-drool" interfaces are for lusers.
Briefly, it's a matter of perceptions, and sad to say a lot of Linux advocates just give the wrong impression there. They make it look more command-line-based than it really is nowadays.
Well, that is done "right", or at least that's what everyone else does. See, tech support has at least two levels, and the reasons will be obvious:
1. Level 2 support. These are the guys who know their shit, are typically engineers, they know the product thoroughly, and are paid accordingly. They're expensive. From the caller's point of view, sure, you'd want to only deal with these. From the employer's point of view, as I was saying, these guys are expensive. You want to have a few of them, dealing with the truly technical issues, not an army of them dealing with the bulk of the "my coffee cup holder broke" and "where is the 'ANY' key" calls. So you also hire,
2. Level 1 support. These are the cheapest unskilled monkeys who can read a script and use a telephone. Their job is to deflect most calls and prevent them from reaching the expensive guys. If someone calls with a "I put the modem in the dish washer and now I don't have Internet" case, you want these cheap guys to handle it.
Sometimes there's a level 3 support too. These are usually the engineers/programmers who made or maintain the product, or close enogh. You _really_ don't want these guys on the phone all day.
Now whether that is "right", is another issue. From the caller's point of view, it's an irritation, because often you have to deal with guys that are even less clued than you are, and forced to go through an irrelevant script just because the helpdesk guy is _supposed_ to be too stupid to actually figure out any problem without a script. Worse yet, they often have to meet stupid criteria to keep their job, so they may have to be even more irritating than necessary. But, basically, that's how everyone is doing it nowadays.
In that aspect, whether level 1 in Bangalore or New York is rather irrelevant. As I was saying, these are _not_ supposed to be the experts, they're just supposed to be able to use a phone and read a script. If they were in New York they might not have the indian accent, but otherwise they'd still be the cheapest unskilled people money can buy.
(And yes, I know there's a whole class of "I'm teh computer genius because I work level 1 helpdesk, you're teh idiot luser" class of posters around. It saddens me to shatter their dreams, but if anyone actually is anywhere near knowledgeable about computers, then they're in the wrong job there. It's not a job for experts, it's a job for cheap disposable monkeys. I sincerely hope they find a job more suited for their qualifications, if they actually are qualified. Most aren't, though.)
Quoth Monty Python, "You know, there are many people in the country today who, through no fault of their own, are sane. Some of them were born sane. Some of them became sane later in their lives. It is up to people like you and me who are out of our tiny little minds to try and help these people overcome their sanity. You can start in small ways with ping-pong ball eyes and a funny voice and then you can paint half of your body red and the other half green and then you can jump up and down in a bowl of treacle going "squawk, squawk, squawk..." And then you can go "Neurhhh! Neurhhh!" and then you can roll around on the floor going "pting pting pting"..."
Well, it's one kind of counselling...
Call it lacking an open mind, if you will, but, by the sound of it, it sounds like a lot of work and a heck of a learning curve just to play a game. I thought the game designers were finally learning the idea that some of us just want to play a quick and unchallenging round of a game to relax, rather than have to spend a month just getting past the learning curve.
And the most successful interfaces and peripherals are those who don't require much practice either. Take the mouse for example. I actually made the experiment of taking my 80 year old grandma who's never touched a computer before, and trying to see how she does in a city building game. Within an hour she was using the mouse like a pro, with the sole hurdle of the left and right mouse buttons. I guess with an Apple mouse that would have been easier. Gamepads? Same thing. You can just get one and be comfortable with the thumbstick in no time. Heck, even taking non-gaming things, there's a reason why historically the crossbow was more popular than the much faster firing longbow: any peasant can point and click.
If you will, it's not entirely a matter of believing I'll fail, but a matter of what the heck would be my motivation to put some work in _that_. I can see how someone would be motivated to do that after a stroke, since you mention patients with nerve damage, because, simply put, they can't choose to "play" another RL. But in a game, between one where I have to spend months just learning to use the controls, and one where I can have fun within half an hour, I'll go for the latter every time.
Nothing against all that, but I wasn't talking about money generally, but about the "they're out to make money" excuse. The act of making money is the incentive I'm talking about.
Nothing against that either, but:
1. That's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. That is the real goal: that they do that for the rest of society. Just making money for the CEO is not the goal. So "they're out to make money" should never be taken as an automatic excuse for anything and everything. The real criterion and end is how well they serve us, as a society. Making money is just a means to that end. It's not the end itself. If money becomes the goal itself, and it comes at the expense of acting against the interests of society, then I do believe that that shouldn't be tolerated.
2. I don't think even that excuses unethical behaviour. There are ways to make money, produce stuff, employ people, and do R&D without being destructive in the process. (I don't think Enron created more value than companies which didn't break the law, for example.)
3. I don't think it should absolve anyone of personal responsibility. Ultimately a corporation isn't some AI, but _people_ taking those decisions. Sure, we do give them some amount of shielding from such stuff as market fluctuations, bad/uninformed decisions, etc, and it's perfectly fine that way. Noone is proposing to send someone to jail or auction their house just for going bankrupt, or anything. But ultimately they do bear the responsibility of those decision. If a decision wasn't just bad or uninformed, but _malicious_, then at the very least we should be aware that it's a human there taking it. He's, at best, an asshole. It's not some nebulous corporate entity whose decisions appear out of nowhere, it's a human asshole who chose to act that way.
Same, if you will, as we don't blame the car for running someone over, we blame the human who was drunk at the wheel. Or we don't blame the army as a whole and leave it at that, if a squad decides to shoot a bunch of villagers, we actually go after the ones who did it and after the officer who should have stopped it. Being part of some big impersonal entity does not absolve one of responsibility for one's own decisions and choices.
I never said I didn't like corporations or capitalism. There are plenty who make their money without being malicious. What I don't like is simply taking the "they're just out to make money" as some blanket excuse to do anything and everything, no matter how screwed up and immoral.
Cute, but it's a return to self-styled vigilante justice, and it just doesn't work. It worked like that in, oh, say the stone age, but in the meantime we discovered such concepts as "laws", "justice", etc. If someone acts against the interests of society, then I'd rather society regulated it via the modern and efficient means, rather than each member fending for himself.
I haven't watched "The Corporation", but nevertheless I too think that "they're out to make money" should _not_ be a wildcard excuse for everything. Making money is good and fine, but ultimately it's just the incentive we give some people to make them work better for the benefit of society as a whole. Briefly it's a means, not an end.
Turning that on its head and making the means sacrosanct, even at the expense of acting against the very purpose it was supposed to serve... well, is as stupid as forgetting which is means and which is end in the army's using weapons. We let them use weapons to defend us all, not as a means in and by itself. If any army started shooting random people on the street just because they think the whole purpose is to use their guns, you'd probably have no problem understanding why that's contrary to the whole purpose of that army. But when a corporation does the same swapping of means and ends, half the population seems to just assume that, sure, if it's for the purpose of making money _of_ _course_ it's normal to cheat, lie and worse.
Well, no. The short answer is that there still is no way to make the bouncy ball move faster than light, or even at the speed of light.
Just because there are some falling blocks, doesn't mean the ball will jump on the head of the next block just because it's there. You'd still need to accelerate the ball from zero velocity (in your frame of reference) to reaching the head of the next block just in time. It would take infinite energy to even reach the speed of light, and may the elder gods help you in getting above that. Doing it in the tiny space between two domino blocks, heh.
It has nothing to do with friction. Even without friction, you still need to apply a force to accelerate an object. That's why you still need thrusters to change a satellite's orbit, even though friction and drag are negligible up there. If you don't apply enough force, the object just doesn't accelerate fast enough. At this point there isn't even anything relativistic about it, it's just plain elementary Newtonian mechanics, as you may have learned it in school.
Additionally, your wave is an artifficial construct. Just because the next block is a little tilted already, doesn't make the current block also fall faster. Any particular block falls just as fast as if it were alone, with the other blocks not even existing at all, until the point of impact with the next. Just because block 2 is already tilted, doesn't mean block 1 will accelerate faster.
So the ball you've put on top of block 1 also won't accelerate any faster. Just because block 2 was already tilted, doesn't mean the ball will be forced to keep up with the wave. It will still fall at the same speed, and probably fail to transfer to the top of block 2, since block 2 will have fallen earlier and it's top will be some way ahead of the ball. So at most the ball will keep on rolling at a lower speed over the already fallen blocks.
Or think of another analogy, someone else used it already, but let's use it again here since it makes a good illustration. Think of a traffic congestion. All cars are standing still, then the first car moves, the next driver takes some time to notice he can step on it, so he starts at a tiny delay, the third car does the same, etc. Better yet, let's say they're pre-timed to start at uniformly spaced intervals, so no particular transfer of information is involved in getting them started. So basically although the cars are moving forward, viewed from above there is a wave travelling backwards. (It's an uncanny similarity with the "it appeared to exit before it entered" claim in the summary. Viewed from above, the car wave too is seen at the front of the congestion before it reaches the back of the congestion.)
It also can appear to move faster than the individual cars. If every driver only needs 0.5 seconds to notice that he can hit the gas, and the cars are stopped, say, every 3m (10 ft), the wave will move at 20 m/s or 72 km/h backwards. Although this may happen in a town where the speed limit is only 50 km/h, so the individual cars won't exceed that by much.
Now imagine you give the first car in the pack your ball filled with love letters. Will it travel backwards together with the wave? Well, nope, that particular car still travel forward at 50 km/h. Let's say you give the last car in the pack your ball. Will the ball appear to exit the congestion before the last car even started? Well, no, not really.
Basically just because you can set up one particular kind of wave doesn't mean you can actually use it to transfer information between two points. Whichever car you give your ball of letters, still moves at 50 km/h, and the "wave" is just an artifficial illusion or construct.
Or think you have some people 1 km apart, with stopwatches and really big speakers and amplifiers, and they're told to shout "geronimo!" in 1 second intervals. The "wave" is faster than the speed of sound, but it can't carry any information that way faster than sound. At the end point you don't get any information the last guy di
Only in the same way that having a small heap of books on the floor is just a particular form of a bookcase.
Seriously, I dunno why he got modded flamebait, but the GIMP interface _is_ horrible and every non-geek I've tried to convert to GIMP found it horrible. It's not even just the heap of disconnected windows. Just about everything in it works non-intuitively, or in some own way that breaks any reflexes and expectations you might already have.
As a quick example, look at the stupid image mode menu. Yeah, the one with RGB, grayscale and indexed options. Just about any other Windows program would use a checkmark next to the active mode, but nah, the Gimp grays it out, which normally means a disabled or non-available option. It's not just sending the wrong message to anyone used to the normal use of those visual cues, it actually manages to be less useful by making one visual cue mean two fundamentally different things. Disabled is very different from "it's already selected": disabled can mean (and is usually used to mean) something that just isn't possible in that particular situation. E.g., if for some reason that particular image simply can't be indexed. Already selected or already active, on the other hand, is pretty much the opposite: it's very much possible, and in fact it's what's currently happening.
Honestly, as it is, the Gimp just makes the case of why someone would prefer to pay money for a usable product, instead of going with the crap but free (as in either beer or freedom or whatever you wish) equivalent. It just makes a (false) "you get what you pay for" point, that then gets used against other free products. Normal people don't fight ideological crusades, they just want something that works and is easy to use, so "but the Gimp is GPLed" points are lost on them. And even "free as in beer" points tend to get lost when the freely downloadable version has a crap interface. At some point they'd rather pay some money and get a usable product instead. It's, if you will, as in buying a car vs the "free as in beer" walking to work. Most people will get a car.