I still remember the lone time I got virused, as it also was the lone time when I put a non-firewalled machine on the internet.
Basically the story is that I had managed to fry my home machine, didn't have a second computer at the time, but hey, looks like I got enough older parts for one (or a couple of them.) Stupidly enough, the firewall program (Sygate was my favourite at the time) was among the few things I had never backed up, but otherwise I could have a computer to play with in an hour or so.
Now I could have, of course, went and bought some security program, or could have downloaded it at work and burned it on a CD, or whatever. I chose to just do a sacrificial install instead. As in, you know, install Windows, go online unprotected long enough to download a firewall, reformat, reinstall Windows. I fully expected the first install to get virused, but that's ok, since it would get reformatted a few minutes later.
It also was Windows 2000, not XP, so no activation hassle.
Well... let's just say that what I didn't expect was how fast the thing got virused. I expected it to get virused eventually, yes, but it got owned within a couple of minutes. Scary.
Also think of the manpower you can buy with that money. Because a lot of that money goes not just into hardware, but also admins, training, support staff, programmers, etc.
In China an average salary is IIRC around 1000$ per year. In Australia, a quick googling says that in 2000-2001 it was $34,745. It's probably risen quite a bit more since then, but let's say a very conservative estimate of $35,000 a year.
I don't know how much more than the average computer-related jobs in both countries are paid, but let's assume the proportion is the same. (I.e., that if a job was paid $70,000 a year in Australia, the equivalent job would be paid $2000 in China.)
I.e., here's the kick: for the same money, China can hire 35 times more people than Australia. Or conversely, doing the same custom software project in China will cost 35 times less than in Australia.
Let's say your custom government database program needs X programmers, Y managers, Z DBAs, and assorted other personel. The thing is, assuming equally educated people are available to both, then the same number of people will be needed in Australia or in China. But in China those will cost 35 times less. If the whole project costs 35 million dollars in Australia, it will cost only 1 million in China.
I.e., what I'm getting at is that even while China "only" spends 1.3 billion compared to Australias 4 billion, China may well be able to get _more_ stuff for its money than Australia does.
Sometimes comparing everything in pure dollars, or worse yet in dollars-per-capita, can miss the whole point. The point isn't to be at the top of some Top 10 Spenders list, the point is to get some job done. No more, no less. If China can get the same job done cheaper, anything else is plain old irrelevant.
Reminds me of a joke that went somewhat like this:
A businessman was teaching his son about ethics and the ethical dillemas in busines, "Let me give you a practical example, son. See, there's this old friend and business associate of mine, whom I loaned some money to last year. So yesterday he came around and gave me my money back. When I counted the money, I noticed that two banknotes were stuck together, and he had given me a hundred dollars more than he owed me. Which, of course, raised the ethical problem: should I tell your mom too about the extra money, or not?"
Actually, nope, the AL2032W fuck-up happens under Windows just as well. And, again, you _can't_ tell the catalyst control center to mind its own business if you're on DVI. On VGA you can. On DVI it just picks the highest resolution supported by the monitor and sticks to that, no matter what.
Just as one more detail as to how far that trust went. Mom apparently trusted me enough to tell me all her secrets. Other people go to church to confess, mom used me for that. I'd say that's pretty trusting.
What she couldn't do, really, was _delegate_. It's a pretty common symptom in OCPD, actually. Basically it's not as much about whether you believe someone is "trustworthy" as such, but whether you believe that they'll get something done to your unrealistic standards.
For example she just couldn't "delegate" that I just pack my own flipping suitcase for a summer camp. It's not as much a matter of "trust" or "trustworthy." It's a matter of "trust" when you suspect that the little evil bastard would, say, smuggle a bottle of booze (or drug or porn or whatever) into the suitcase. It's a matter of "delegating" when you do it because you just know that he, honest and trustworthy as he may be, wouldn't pack the _right_ sweater or exactly the right amount of clean socks.
Have you seen a suitcase packed by an OCPD case? It has to contain the _perfect_ mix that covers any possible situation, including two weeks worth of snowstorm in July. It also weighs half a ton. (Or it seems that way when you have to drag it around as a kid.)
Ironically enough, she was probably right there, in a sick and twisted way. Since I had never been allowed to do it, I would have probably botched it. It's a bit of a vicious circle, you know?
Ah, trust... that's a funny concept. See, the funny thing is that at least mom actually trusted me and my brother. Or claimed to. I think we were pretty trustworthy kids, too, since basically (A) we didn't get enough time on our own to do anything bad anyway, and (B) for all other faults our education might have had, it was almost caricaturally Lawful Good.
Mom and dad were, and largely still are, complete nerds, and nerds often end up fond of distorted caricatures utopic ideals. Mom would have made a perfect D&D Paladin. Lawful Good to the bone, and willing to fight to death for the Right Thing. Regular knight in shiny armour, sworn to do her duty, and all that.
So we too got educated to honesty believe that kind of a distorted utopia. Don't lie, don't do anything bad, the good guys always win, etc. I _still_ have problems even playing an evil character in a video game like Knights Of The Old Republic, so I have trouble imagining that I would have been an evil backstabbing SOB as a kid.
Unfortunately if you've ever read about Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder, by now you also see the problem there. There's a name for that black-and-white good-vs-evil view of the world, and it's OCPD. OCPD people see very few shades of grey, if any. They live by the rules, do The Right Thing (TM), and anything less than a _perfectly_ done job is crap.
And so it came to apply to being a parent too. In mom's knight-in-shiny-armour view of the world, there were (and still are) no shades of grey between being completely uninvolved and smothering the living sanity out of us. Anything short of being 100% involved in 100% of what we ever do, would have counted as having failed her duty.
The same, incidentally, applied to everything we did too. Even a misplaced comma counted as a badly done homework in mom's view of the world. Hence the neverending negative feedback, and occasionally even more annoying consequences. She tried to turn us into, well, something that fit her black-and-white view of the world, and clearly in the white category at that.
I guess her being an Asperger's case there doesn't help either.
At any rate, rest assured that it wasn't lack of trust that basically cost me and my brother some 24 years each out of our lives. On the contrary. We were the most trusted prisoners ever. But, nevertheless, had a childhood and teenage life that is best compared to life in a federal prison.
Next... I noticed that text on my LG LCD monitor (20 in widescreen) was of really poor quality. I even installed ClearType from Microsoft, didn't help much. Started thinking it was my monitor, but then hooked it up to my laptop that has NVidia. Wow! WHat a difference! Even without ClearType, the text was so much better.
I can tell you exactly what happens there, because I've put some time into diagnosing the exact same problem on my Acer AL2032W monitor. And it still pisses me off that the problem _still_ isn't fixed, in spite of being known for ages.
The problem starts like this: some cretin at ATI decided that, if it detects a DVI cable, it should automatically trust the highest resolution reported by the monitor, and, here's the idiotic part, never allow the user or the monitor drivers to override it. So if it reads 1600x1200 as the highest supported resolution, any other resolutions you choose will automatically be either scaled to 1600x1200 or centered in an 1600x1200 image. It has no choice that lets me say, basically, "fuck off and just send the image as it is to the monitor."
Why is that an idiotic idea? Well, here's why: because some monitors support resolutions higher than their native one. E.g., there are a ton of 1280x1024 monitors which report that they also support 1600x1200. Or the AL2032W has an 1680x1050 native resolution, but _also_ supports 1600x1200. They just then down-scale that to their native resolution.
So think of the following scenario: let's say your monitor is an 1280x1024, but affected by the abovementioned quirk. And you set your desktop resolution to 1280x1024. It should be crystal clear, right? Well, on an Nvidia card it would be, but for ATI it's wrong.
What ATI will do there is scale your 1280x1024 image to 1600x1200 first, before sending it to the monitor. Which makes it all fuzzy already. But then your monitor has received an image which doesn't fit its native resolution. So it will rescale this 1600x1200 image back to 1280x1024. This doesn't re-create the original crystal-clear image, but adds _more_ fuzziness to it.
Yes, I know what you mean by "really poor quality" there, and even that is mildly put. It's piss-poor quality. It was so fuzzy on my monitor that it gave me headaches in less than an hour.
And the really idiotic and annoying part is that it doesn't even allow you to override that. Once it's decided 1600x1200, that's it. Whoever designed it had the arrogance to decide that surely the user is too stupid to know such technical details, so let's not trust the user with the power to set something else. I find that not only utterly idiotic (since we just saw that it can guess wrong), but outright offensive.
Anyway, there are two solutions to this:
1. Download the Omega drivers. Strangely enough those are smart enough to read the native resolution, not the maximum supported one.
2. Use a VGA cable. On VGA it does allow you to set your maximum resolution and frequency yourself.
(This also goes in case someone wants to jump in with the usual "just set the resolution in the control centre" advice. Trust me, it doesn't work over a DVI cable. Over a VGA cable it works. Through DVI it doesn't.)
Personally I find both solutions pretty annoying. Number 1 involves installing some non-official non-supported driver. (And if you know about how drivers run in kernel mode in Windows, you'll understand what's scary about running non-official drivers just downloaded off some web site.) Number 2 basically involved throwing the whole "digital" part out the window, and using an LCD monitor as a glorified analog CRT with larger pixels.
I'm not sure for what kind of behaviour would that count as "deserved". My whole life until finishing university was basically a prison sentence. And, no, I'm not exaggerating. I don't feel like going into all the details -- and it would end up a tome-sized message if I did -- but let's just say I'm not exaggerating.
So what evil deed wouly you count as "deserving" something like that? Because we let murderers and rapists get away with lighter sentences. So what _can_ a kid do that's worse than that?
I'm pretty sure I didn't beat anyone up, didn't steal, etc. Not that I'd have had an opportunity to. But again, even for those we let people get away with lighter sentences.
Oh, I did go out of guidance as soon as I was out of surveillance range, out of sheer lack of clue. I almost never had to function without a parent telling me _exactly_ what to do, when and how. (And then telling me how horrible shitty job I had done. They didn't really believe in positive feedback.) So, yes, I did all sorts of stupid things on the rare occasions when I was outside my parents' "remote control" range.
Does that "deserve" even more surveillance there? How does that solve the problem? Because from where I stand, it looks like that's what caused the problem in the first place.
That's what I was thinking. My parents were such control freaks, that I had one of them or grandma on my back pretty much the whole time. Even in about half the summer camps or such, one would actually take a vacation to come keep an eye on me. I have no doubt that if such a device had existed, they'd have set the speed limit to 1 mph just for tracking sake.
If people could switch their brains to perceive anything at all as the happy button, how many do you think would go "kewl, let's make myself happy to learn quantum physics?" I mean, what for? So you can have a better job and be happier in the future? Not much of an incentive if you can just make yourself arbitrarily happy right now. "Yay, I'm living in a dumpster!" Works just as well, and is an immediate reward.
Basically what you propose is somewhat equivalent to giving yourself a pot joint as a reward. (It mimmicks the brains happy signals very very well.) How many people do you think use those as "ok, if I learn this chapter, I'll smoke one as a reward"? I'd guess extremely few, if any.
Less loss of work time and more productivity. What else is there to strive for?
It may actually work the other way around.
See, the brain (and not only in humans) is nicely tuned to keep needing the next thing to be happy about. Whenever you have some achievement (even small ones, like getting food when you're hungry) the brain gives itself a "yay, I'm happy" chemical signal, but that's followed immediately by releasing the "antidote" to that signal, to get back to the baseline. So you'll need the next achievement for your next moment of joy.
It's what keeps humans and all animals active. It's why your cat plays and thus trains its reflexes daily, instead of vegetating in a corner, still happy that it played last month.
In human society it's also a very important factor in why, for example, consumerism is alive and kicking, and keeping the capitalist economy going well past the point where just the needs are covered. People keep having these illusions like "man, I would be soo happy if I had that one more gadget/shirt/etc", and they do get happy about it... for a very brief time. Then they need their next achievement. And in turn, getting caught in the consumerism race also keeps them in the rat race at work, and taking shit they otherwise wouldn't put up with.
You can see in "video game addiction" cases what happens when people can stay continuously happy. It's not really physiological addiction, but good games give people small rewards often, which triggers the "yay, I'm happy" signal in the brain. There's always one more quest you finished, one more recipe you learned, one more item that you sold at the auction house (or IRL on eBay), one more boss you defeated, one more equipment piece you found, etc. So some people, which are kept happy enough by that, end up not doing anything else. You can see cases going all the way to playing for a month and then dropping dead.
So my take is that if someone actually produced genetically-engineered humans which are permanently happy, those humans would be even worse. They wouldn't even need video games to stay happy, so they probably wouldn't bother even with that. If you can be perfectly happy sitting on the couch watching the wall, you don't need to do anything else. You don't even need to buy a TV. Nor take shit from a PHB and do overtime to afford a huge plasma TV and a fashionable house in the suburbs. You get the idea.
No, actually they hoped for even more money this way.
See, just selling email addresses to the spammers doesn't actually bring _that_ much money. See the AOL idiot who exported the database and sold it to spammers. He's got, I think, some tens of thousands of dollars. That's small change for a corporation.
Even if they sold it together with the search keywords, how much do you think they'd get? Hundreds of thousands? Let's even be generous and say a couple of millions? Those guys have to think of their own profit, so don't think you'll get all their advertising money for the next decade. That's hardly worth the effort.
No, if you want to maximize your income, the way to go is to do the keyword matching _yourself_. See: Google.
So excuse me if I don't think that AOL did some noble altruistic act, out of sheer generosity towards the academia. It was a desperate "someone please please please kill Google for us" act, and they stand to gain a _lot_ more if it actually works. Maybe they packed it in some PR double-speak to sound like some kind act, so they'd get their public image polished too in the process, but rest assured that even that wasn't the primary motivation. It was about long term money, plain and simple.
And to that end, they had no qualms with raping their users' privacy. If it hadn't been so hare-brained and hadn't backfired, rest assured that the same CTO would now be getting a big fat bonus as a reward.
So I went to the shop yesterday to buy a couple of PSP games. So I pull out my plastic debit card to pay with it. They have these numeric pads with a slot for the card and a small LCD display around here in a lot of shops. (The super-markets and such just ask you for a signature, but almost everyone else has a PIN pad.)
"Oh," says the clerk, "the connection's been down the whole afternoon."
It's not even the first time something like that happens. It's not often, but it does happen.
So for purchasing games or groceries, ok, I can just pull some banknotes out of the wallet. But it kinda scares me that I'd have to depend on something like that at an airport.
So what's new then? All along the whole case for "dark matter" was that galaxies -- _all_ galaxies -- rotate strangely like a rigid body, except right near the centre. According to newtonian mechanics the stars in a galaxy should behave basically like the planets in our solar system: the farther from the centre you get, the slower they move. But in a galaxy stuff moves like that only near the centre, and then it's like gravity changed gradually from 1/(R*R) to 1/R, and the stars rotate at an almost constant angular velocity around the centre.
So from there it's that either:
1. there's a metric buttload of matter we can't observe other than through gravity, in some weird distribution all through the galaxy's disc, or 2
2. we accept that gravity isn't working like we think it does
(Or my favourite: 3. galaxies are just a rotating texture there, so _of_ _course_ they rotate like a rigid. Noone would be dumb enough to simulate the individual stars just to give us a pretty sky in this MMO we call RL;)
And somehow the favourite is 1, for no obvious reason than that noone wants to modify gravity theories. It's as if Galileo, upon discovering that a stone dropped from the mast doesn't lag behind the ship, would then proceed to invent some "dark wind" that pushes the stone along with the ship. Since existing wind obviously isn't strong enough to push the stone that hard, it's got to be some dark wind in there too. Just, you know, for the sake of not contradicting the existing Aristotelian system.
Anyway, all along we knew that it can't be conventional matter, because we already had plenty of galaxies in various states of illumination and they all behave the same.
So exactly how does the new one help there? It seems to me like it still can't offer conclusive proof that 1 is true and 2 is false, because it would _still_ be equally well explained by 2. What this "solves" is at most a sub-distinction inside 1, once we're dead-set on believing 1 instead of 2. It says basically that if we already decided it's 1, then, yep, it's definitely not baryon matter (rocks, gases, protons, etc), but some weird matter that interacts only with gravity.
Most (all?) of the animals "play" as a form of training for what they naturally do, yes. So for carnivores it's play fighting, for rabbits it's running from each other, and so on.
That reminds me of another "conclusive" study that concluded that cats are colour-blind (in spite of having plenty of cones in their retina), because they seemed not to react to the colour cues they were given. Then later it turns out that cats _do_ see colours, and _can_ be taught to react to colour cues, they just don't normally assign that much importance to them. So it wasn't that the cat couldn't distinguish between "green dish" and "red dish", it's just normally it just saw it as "dish".
Now I'm not trying to discredit such studies as a whole, but we need to remember that until someone can talk to the cat, we just don't know what the cat sees or thinks there. We can see their reactions, but the rationale behind that is at best just a wild uninformed guess.
Does it recognize itself in the mirror or not? Or maybe it just isn't that interested it itself? We just don't know what the cat sees or thinks there. And when you expect it to "use that information in some intelligent fashion", it gets even less clear.
Even we humans are only interested in mirrors because we're worried about our looks and about how other humans perceive us. Noone uses a mirror just to recognize themselves. They use it to see how they'll appear to others.
Elliminate that incentive or concern completely, and chances are even humans wouldn't give a damn about mirrors any more. If you dropped someone alone on a tropical island, Robinson Crusoe-like, with the knowledge that they won't see or be seen by another human ever again, then you'd probably find their interest in their own image or in mirrors dropping very fast. After his first weeks there, it's a pretty safe bet that Robinson Crusoe wouldn't use a mirror daily, or even bother combing his hair or shaving/trimming his beard any more. What for? Maybe he'd use it occasionally for a "man, how low have I fallen, I look like a savage" round of self-pity, but even then there's that concern again with image and what others would see him like.
A cat doesn't have such sense of fashion and looks. They don't have "is my haircut right for my big date with that cute orange tomcat" concerns. They have their rituals for interacting with other cats (e.g., to be accepted on another cat's territory), but none of those have anything to do with looks. When they wash themselves it's to stay clean (and even then only because the smell could alert the prey), but not out of a concern with looking right to other cats.
So basically a cat doesn't really have much use for its own image in a mirror. Or not in the same ways that a human would treat theirs. It might use it as a sort of a toy, it might pretend that that reflection is an imaginary other cat to play with (same as they can pretend that plush toys are either prey or another cat), etc. But taken in the human "oh, look, that's me" sense, it's just useless for any animal that doesn't care about its looks.
Hence I find it a bit silly to draw a broad conclusion like "cats don't recognize their image" or "cats have no notion of 'self'" just because it doesn't fit someone's anthropomorphic illusions. Because that's what it's about. Someone anthropomorphises the cat by expecting some human-type reactions from it. And the cat (predictably) doesn't react that way, because it's really a cat, not a small furry human.
But that's in the end all we know there: the cat doesn't react like we'd expect a human to. We don't know why, though. We don't really know what it saw or thought there. And like the coloured dishes experiment proved, our guesses can be awfully wrong there.
And I'll also go ahead and say that we also don't yet know what intelligence is, other than as some vague fuzzy concept. We're taking wild guesses and extrapolations based on what humans do, but there is no real proof that every animal would benefit from the same things. I.e., we're really anthropomorphising again, and judging animals not as much on whether they're intelligent at being, you know, a cat, but on how well they fit our "
Dolphins are one of the few creatures that play games, such as playing tag with a peice of seaweed, or blowing bubble rings. This type of behaviour is often an indicator of high intelligence.
Actually, I'm not sure by what criterion would you rule that as rare, since most mammals play games of some sort or another. (With the exception of some domesticated ones, e.g., cattle, which have some millenia behind them of artifficially selecting the dumbest and most passive ones.) It's a form of training for life, and a built-in way of calibrating how "in shape" the animal must be.
E.g., cats. I've yet to see a cat for any reasonable length of time which didn't play games. And I don't just mean following a feather-onna-string moved by a human. All our cats were perfectly able to initiate playing with, say, a stuffed kitten doll or teddy bear, and practice wrestling with it. (In fact, they seemed to "anthropomorphise" it, or rather the feline equivalent of the word. I.e., treat it as a cat. The way they wrestled it resembled cat wrestling, not the quick kill attacks you can observe in cats hunting prey. And the number of wrestling sessions the teddy bear lasted indicated that they avoided using their claws and teeth too much, again, just like when play-wrestling another cat. They could have dismembered it within minutes if they had wanted to.) Or they've been known to either try fetching a toy to us as a "come play with me" signal, or try to draw the humans' attention to the toy where it was.
E.g., dogs. My parents' dog and pretty much any dog I've seen occasionally plays some game or another. E.g., they're trivial to get to play fetch. My parents' dog also occasionally do stuff like try to enact his own fetch game, by himself. He'd occasionally bump the rubber ball with his nose, for example, and then chase it. Of course that didn't go that great, since he never bumped it fast or far enough. Or he'd just bring the ball to one of us humans and try to get us to play with him and that ball.
E.g., rabbits. Yeah, lowly herbivores and not that big a brain either. Yet if you observe them in open spaces, they basically play tag with each other. Often they take turns at who's playing the aggressor coming at various angles, and who's the one running away.
So basically if playing games is signs of high intelligence, then you've classified most mammals (and a good number of birds too) as highly intelligent. It doesn't leave that many which aren't.
With patents being the sad mess they are, at least in the USA, it's not like they even have any choice. Mind you, Sony isn't exactly the "good guys" in the first place, but even if they were, they'd have no other choice at the moment.
To use your car rental example, imagine this: so you have your car rental, as in your example, and you start letting users write reviews and rate the cars they drove. I'll also assume it's in a program (e.g., an internet site where the users can book cars ahead of time, for when they arrive in your city), so it's relevant to the software patents disaster. So you're a good guy and think to yourself, "self, wth, it's just a common sense extension of what already happens with books, movies, etc, and it's not even that useful anyway" and you don't patent it.
So two years from now, when you've made a fair bit of cash and maybe even expanded into a new city, some patent troll sues you on account that it infringes on their "user-review system for car rentals" patent. (Which the patent office gladly granted, since prior art was about books, movies, etc, not about car rentals. So obviously it's a great innovation to copy it verbatim to car rentals too.)
At this point it may not even matter whether you win or lose, since patent lawsuits are the most expensive kind. You can win it and still go bankrupt because of the expenses. But chances are good that you'll not even manage to win it, since someone had clearly patented it a good year before your site went online, and you have obviously infringed on their patent.
So what what everyone is doing is hoarding patents as an aggressive defense. In that:
1. If you patent that first, you can't be sued later.
2. If they sue you for something else, you hope that they infringed on some of yours too, so you can counter-sue them into the stone age. (Of course, this doesn't work against pure patent-trolls, who never actually have a product or service of their own.)
Au contraire. Think of all the people that got identified -- some virus writers, but some ordinary joes -- thanks to Word's keeping track of who edited it. IIRC, the MAC address is a part of it, and most people didn't even know they were tracked, so they didn't even know what to spoof nor even that they needed to spoof it.
If Sony actually got the ball rolling, so every file you ever shared is for ever marked as downloaded from you, the RIAA would probably be in so much joy that they'd ejaculate in their pants. They'd just have to leech every single shared copyrighted song or movie, to have the complete history of who offered it for download, all the way to the original person who leaked it. Lawsuits, here we come.
The MPAA at least has been working hard to create just that: a means to identify who shared a preview of movie. In their case, by watermarking it. Sony's version is head and shoulders above that.
Seriously, identifying sharers is the RIAA's and MPAA's wet dream. It's the kind of wet dream where they don't just wake up to change their underwear, but the whole mattress and blanket.
And this one not only lets dolts go on record as having shared that file, but also conveniently lets them write a self-incriminating testimony in the form of that review. Want to bet that you'd see it coming back to haunt you in court, when Sony's expert comes and says "style analysis of the 500 word review says it's him who wrote it and shared our movie"? No more getting Scott-free out of court by blaming it on your 6-year old kid, no more blaming it on mysterious hackers that got into your wireless access point, no more nothing. It's not their style.
So I suspect that what Sony is trying to do here is _not_ to create a better P2P experience, but basically to coat a cyanide pill in chocolate and hope that enough dolts will swallow it. It's hoping that they can package it as such a cool feature as to get enough idiots to just stop thinking about the more sinister aspect of it.
Fucking amen! Some of you retarded teenagers should talk to older relatives that were engineers during the 60's, 70's and 80's about how cool you think IBM is. I guarantee you'll get a similar responce to if you talked about how you thought Hitler was misunderstood.
Ah, the mandatory straw man. How cute. I never said that IBM was "cool", or whatever straw man you feel like dismantling today. I just said that it supports Linux and F/OSS in general.
Sun, for better or worse, has been until _very_ recently just a sad case of corporate schizophrenia. It did a lot of smoke and mirrors shows of "we love F/OSS" and "we love Linux", followed by flipping sometimes even in the same fucking day to, basically, "Linux is teh suck! Die! Die! Die!" and "Proprietary software FTW!" Not to mention the whole deal with SCO at the apex of its anti-Linux campaign. If you look at where SCO's money came from, two companies stick out like a sore thumb: MS and Sun. If that's how they support their "we love Linux" theatre... I rest my cae.
Yes, it published some specs... same as everyone else, except maybe MS, did. Then proceeded to encumber the implementation with some "I own your ass if you even look at it" license.
But even there, let me clue you in: back in the days of Sun's "we love open specs and Unix interoperability" spiel, _everyone_ else put up the exact same "we love open specs and Unix interoperability" show. That makes Sun sooo special. Not. And everyone, Sun _and_ IBM included, actually sabotaged interoperability and deviated from those specs as far as they could, to lock in customers.
Except at some point, for better or worse, IBM started actually showing some support for actual F/OSS. You know, as in, you can actually take the sources, modify them, make something useful out of them. Plus, it's put its marketting and corporate weight behind Linux, which did a _lot_ more to get PHBs to accept it than ranting persecution-syndrom geeks did.
No, it doesn't make them "good" or "cool" across the board, but at least it did something useful in that particular domain.
Sun responded by... mainly putting up even more smoke and mirrors shows, and going even more schizophrenic. Mostly it just tried to muddy the waters about what F/OSS even means, and redefine some lame "well, you can do some free work for us, if you want to, but we'll sue your pants off if you as much as look at our sources the wrong way" offers as "open". See: Java.
No, IBM never was "cool" across the board, but from where I stand, Sun looks even worse. That's all. If you want to compare IBM with Hitler, so be it, but then it says something when Sun looks like an even bigger nutcase.
I suggest looking through the Linux kernel change histories sometime. There are a _lot_ of IBM email addresses in there.
And not just there. Have a look at most Apache projects too, for that matter.
There's a reason why SCO went after IBM. Well, ok, a second reason, beside the obvious "because SCO is on a pump and dump scheme." Like most lies, SCO's "IBM took our IP they had used in AIX and put it into making Linux enterprise-ready" is based on a small grain of truth, although in this case one irrelevant to the lawsuit. The truth is that IBM did donate that much code to Linux, and some which, indeed, is a part of why Linux is enterprise-ready OS instead of an academic toy. At any rate, a lot of that is either AIX code or it uses techniques developped for AIX.
If you read the RTFA, even there they spell it out repeatedly: "It prefers Linux and its own proprietary version of Unix, called AIX." ("It" being IBM.) Or even better: "IBM helped put Linux on the map, funding programmers to improve the operating system and offering early pledges of support that indicated it was safe for customers to use. The company has more than 600 programmers at its Linux Technology Center, but it's actively involved in many open-source projects besides Linux."
So basically IBM _does_ put a lot of money and work into a F/OSS OS. It's not AIX, but in hindsight, a lot of us actually prefer it that way. The great Unix fragmentation happened precisely because everyone wanted to make their own flavour deliberately incompatible to everyone else's, trying to lock their customers in. And that's how Unix lost back then, and why nowadays we have Windows instead on most computers. Does anyone (other than MS) want _that_ to repeat verbatim again? Not me, anyway. So thank goodness that IBM contributes to Linux this time, instead of trying to divide-and-conquer the F/OSS OS market with an OpenAIX.
I don't know exactly how "open" OpenSolaris is. Maybe it's really open, maybe it's one of Sun's usual smoke screens. No idea. I couldn't be bothered to care about it at that point.
But even OpenSolaris is a very new development. What I'm getting at is: IBM was putting its money where its mouth was, _long_ before Sun.
So excuse me if I find it outright funny to see someone claim that IBM isn't doing anything there.
Duly noted, and true, but there's a reason I've qualified that with "as in, the whole plant". When you compare the weight of the seeds to the weight of the plant, most of the biomass produced on an acre is anything but seeds. With algae, on the other hand, the whole biomass is rich in oil and usable to produce fuel. I.e., assuming (very over-simplified and probably false) that the same quantity of nutrients goes into growing a pound of either, with algae you get the whole pound to turn into oil, while with hemp you only have a fraction of it: the seeds.
The big if, though, is whether the algae production can be made cheap enough. Getting 4 times the oil at 10 times the price or more, isn't really an improvement.
"British production is mostly used as bedding for horses; other uses are under development. The largest outlet for German fibre is composite automotive panels. Companies in Canada, UK, USA and Germany among many others are processing hemp seed into a growing range of food products and cosmetics; many traditional growing countries still continue with textile grade fibre production."
So while, no, you can't get all the proteins you need from any single plant source (hence you can't really live for long only on hemp and water), your friends are partially right that it is indeed a food source too.
It also indeed _is_ used as part of composite materials, and hemp-based plastics are starting being produced too. So there too your friends are technically right, although it's really a simplified view. You can make composite materials with any kind of fibre, including glass, carbon, or thread, or whatever. They're indeed stronger than wood or, in some cases, even than steel, but that doesn't come from the hemp as such. Hemp can be a cheap source of strong fibres there, but that's just about all there is to it. It's not like it can't be done with other things just as well. Still, there is something to be said about doing it cheaper.
Motor oil, again, is technically true, but again it's not something unique to hemp. Hemp would just be one relatively cheap source of biomass to use there, but technically you could use almost anything else instead, if you have to. Turkey guts, dead cats, whatever.
Let me explain a bit more. See, contrary to the "auugh, we're all dead when Middle East oil runs out" doom-and-gloom propaganda bullshit, people have been making synthetic fuel since before WW2. Most of Germany's tank warfare happened on fuel synthetised from coal for example. It wasn't cheap at all, but it kept the panzers rolling. That knowledge wasn't lost, and in fact today we're better than ever at turning anything organic or even just carbon-based into fuel. What remains though is the price. That's really the only reason everyone prefers importing oil from the Middle East instead. At any rate, we can convert coal or almost any kind of biomass into oil. The input material counts mostly for price too. Stuff that's rich in fat, for example, needs less effort to convert into something you can put into a gas tank. Stuff that's cheap to mass produce has its advantages too.
Personally I wouldn't hold that much hope for _hemp_ as the oil source of the future, though, for the simple reason that it's not _that_ rich in fat. Genetically engineered algae for example currently are at the point of being 50% fat, and hemp (as in the whole plant) doesn't come close to that. _If_ someone figures out how to mass-produce those algae, they'd make a far better and cheaper source of oil.
Still, technically speaking your friends _are_ right. It is possible to make synthetic oil out of hemp.
If this was true then i'm not sure why that hemp isn't mass produced for this purpose. For that matter why isn't hemp mass produced for this purpose in other countries were is isn't politicly incorect?
And the simple answer to that question is: bingo. Hemp _is_ mass-produced already all over Europe (both eastern and western), and even in Canada. I don't know if anyone makes paper out of it, or not, but I do know that it is in fact mass-produced. At the moment only the USA has the weird "hemp == marijuana" attitude.
Hemp yields less per acre, after you factor in all the stoners stealing it.
Sad to break this to you, but most species of hemp contain at most traces of THC. And after the early 1900's strains of hemp have been selected which score even lower.
To give you some numbers, the legal upper limit for THC content industrial hemp in Europe is 0.3% and most strains contain actually safely less than that. By comparison, the drug varieties contain 20% to 30% THC. So think literally having to smoke 100 times (or more) as much to get the same high. You'd have to literally smoke several pounds of industrial hemp to get the same high as from a join of the drug varieties. At which point, you'd either asphixiate from the smoke, or (more likely) it would take so long as to not get a high at all. The organism would get rid of it faster than you can get it into your system.
It's a plant that's been cultivated since the stone age for its fibres. (Which contain even less THC, btw.) It's been one of humanity's main sources of material for clothes, ropes, sacks, etc, for literally tens of thousands of years. Even paper. The USA Declaration Of Independence was drafted on hemp paper, btw. Even nowadays it's cultivated in the whole world except the USA... even though it's legal to _import_ industrial hemp in the USA. How's that for a stupid hypocrisy?
At any rate, there are plenty of plantations all around the world. Not only in Europe and Asia, but even right next to you in Canada. We already know how much it yields per acre, and how much is stolen by stoners. Hint: none at all is stolen by stoners, because it's freaking useless to them.
In the USA the ban has more to do with (A) the cotton lobby, and (B) with a good dose of government hypocrisy and putting up a jolly good "war on drugs" show. You _can_ make sure which varieties people grow, and every country except the USA does that. You just require a license for growing it, and then you go and check what those people grow. It's that simple.
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I still remember the lone time I got virused, as it also was the lone time when I put a non-firewalled machine on the internet.
Basically the story is that I had managed to fry my home machine, didn't have a second computer at the time, but hey, looks like I got enough older parts for one (or a couple of them.) Stupidly enough, the firewall program (Sygate was my favourite at the time) was among the few things I had never backed up, but otherwise I could have a computer to play with in an hour or so.
Now I could have, of course, went and bought some security program, or could have downloaded it at work and burned it on a CD, or whatever. I chose to just do a sacrificial install instead. As in, you know, install Windows, go online unprotected long enough to download a firewall, reformat, reinstall Windows. I fully expected the first install to get virused, but that's ok, since it would get reformatted a few minutes later.
It also was Windows 2000, not XP, so no activation hassle.
Well... let's just say that what I didn't expect was how fast the thing got virused. I expected it to get virused eventually, yes, but it got owned within a couple of minutes. Scary.
Also think of the manpower you can buy with that money. Because a lot of that money goes not just into hardware, but also admins, training, support staff, programmers, etc.
In China an average salary is IIRC around 1000$ per year. In Australia, a quick googling says that in 2000-2001 it was $34,745. It's probably risen quite a bit more since then, but let's say a very conservative estimate of $35,000 a year.
I don't know how much more than the average computer-related jobs in both countries are paid, but let's assume the proportion is the same. (I.e., that if a job was paid $70,000 a year in Australia, the equivalent job would be paid $2000 in China.)
I.e., here's the kick: for the same money, China can hire 35 times more people than Australia. Or conversely, doing the same custom software project in China will cost 35 times less than in Australia.
Let's say your custom government database program needs X programmers, Y managers, Z DBAs, and assorted other personel. The thing is, assuming equally educated people are available to both, then the same number of people will be needed in Australia or in China. But in China those will cost 35 times less. If the whole project costs 35 million dollars in Australia, it will cost only 1 million in China.
I.e., what I'm getting at is that even while China "only" spends 1.3 billion compared to Australias 4 billion, China may well be able to get _more_ stuff for its money than Australia does.
Sometimes comparing everything in pure dollars, or worse yet in dollars-per-capita, can miss the whole point. The point isn't to be at the top of some Top 10 Spenders list, the point is to get some job done. No more, no less. If China can get the same job done cheaper, anything else is plain old irrelevant.
Reminds me of a joke that went somewhat like this:
A businessman was teaching his son about ethics and the ethical dillemas in busines, "Let me give you a practical example, son. See, there's this old friend and business associate of mine, whom I loaned some money to last year. So yesterday he came around and gave me my money back. When I counted the money, I noticed that two banknotes were stuck together, and he had given me a hundred dollars more than he owed me. Which, of course, raised the ethical problem: should I tell your mom too about the extra money, or not?"
Actually, nope, the AL2032W fuck-up happens under Windows just as well. And, again, you _can't_ tell the catalyst control center to mind its own business if you're on DVI. On VGA you can. On DVI it just picks the highest resolution supported by the monitor and sticks to that, no matter what.
Just as one more detail as to how far that trust went. Mom apparently trusted me enough to tell me all her secrets. Other people go to church to confess, mom used me for that. I'd say that's pretty trusting.
What she couldn't do, really, was _delegate_. It's a pretty common symptom in OCPD, actually. Basically it's not as much about whether you believe someone is "trustworthy" as such, but whether you believe that they'll get something done to your unrealistic standards.
For example she just couldn't "delegate" that I just pack my own flipping suitcase for a summer camp. It's not as much a matter of "trust" or "trustworthy." It's a matter of "trust" when you suspect that the little evil bastard would, say, smuggle a bottle of booze (or drug or porn or whatever) into the suitcase. It's a matter of "delegating" when you do it because you just know that he, honest and trustworthy as he may be, wouldn't pack the _right_ sweater or exactly the right amount of clean socks.
Have you seen a suitcase packed by an OCPD case? It has to contain the _perfect_ mix that covers any possible situation, including two weeks worth of snowstorm in July. It also weighs half a ton. (Or it seems that way when you have to drag it around as a kid.)
Ironically enough, she was probably right there, in a sick and twisted way. Since I had never been allowed to do it, I would have probably botched it. It's a bit of a vicious circle, you know?
Ah, trust... that's a funny concept. See, the funny thing is that at least mom actually trusted me and my brother. Or claimed to. I think we were pretty trustworthy kids, too, since basically (A) we didn't get enough time on our own to do anything bad anyway, and (B) for all other faults our education might have had, it was almost caricaturally Lawful Good.
Mom and dad were, and largely still are, complete nerds, and nerds often end up fond of distorted caricatures utopic ideals. Mom would have made a perfect D&D Paladin. Lawful Good to the bone, and willing to fight to death for the Right Thing. Regular knight in shiny armour, sworn to do her duty, and all that.
So we too got educated to honesty believe that kind of a distorted utopia. Don't lie, don't do anything bad, the good guys always win, etc. I _still_ have problems even playing an evil character in a video game like Knights Of The Old Republic, so I have trouble imagining that I would have been an evil backstabbing SOB as a kid.
Unfortunately if you've ever read about Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder, by now you also see the problem there. There's a name for that black-and-white good-vs-evil view of the world, and it's OCPD. OCPD people see very few shades of grey, if any. They live by the rules, do The Right Thing (TM), and anything less than a _perfectly_ done job is crap.
And so it came to apply to being a parent too. In mom's knight-in-shiny-armour view of the world, there were (and still are) no shades of grey between being completely uninvolved and smothering the living sanity out of us. Anything short of being 100% involved in 100% of what we ever do, would have counted as having failed her duty.
The same, incidentally, applied to everything we did too. Even a misplaced comma counted as a badly done homework in mom's view of the world. Hence the neverending negative feedback, and occasionally even more annoying consequences. She tried to turn us into, well, something that fit her black-and-white view of the world, and clearly in the white category at that.
I guess her being an Asperger's case there doesn't help either.
At any rate, rest assured that it wasn't lack of trust that basically cost me and my brother some 24 years each out of our lives. On the contrary. We were the most trusted prisoners ever. But, nevertheless, had a childhood and teenage life that is best compared to life in a federal prison.
I can tell you exactly what happens there, because I've put some time into diagnosing the exact same problem on my Acer AL2032W monitor. And it still pisses me off that the problem _still_ isn't fixed, in spite of being known for ages.
The problem starts like this: some cretin at ATI decided that, if it detects a DVI cable, it should automatically trust the highest resolution reported by the monitor, and, here's the idiotic part, never allow the user or the monitor drivers to override it. So if it reads 1600x1200 as the highest supported resolution, any other resolutions you choose will automatically be either scaled to 1600x1200 or centered in an 1600x1200 image. It has no choice that lets me say, basically, "fuck off and just send the image as it is to the monitor."
Why is that an idiotic idea? Well, here's why: because some monitors support resolutions higher than their native one. E.g., there are a ton of 1280x1024 monitors which report that they also support 1600x1200. Or the AL2032W has an 1680x1050 native resolution, but _also_ supports 1600x1200. They just then down-scale that to their native resolution.
So think of the following scenario: let's say your monitor is an 1280x1024, but affected by the abovementioned quirk. And you set your desktop resolution to 1280x1024. It should be crystal clear, right? Well, on an Nvidia card it would be, but for ATI it's wrong.
What ATI will do there is scale your 1280x1024 image to 1600x1200 first, before sending it to the monitor. Which makes it all fuzzy already. But then your monitor has received an image which doesn't fit its native resolution. So it will rescale this 1600x1200 image back to 1280x1024. This doesn't re-create the original crystal-clear image, but adds _more_ fuzziness to it.
Yes, I know what you mean by "really poor quality" there, and even that is mildly put. It's piss-poor quality. It was so fuzzy on my monitor that it gave me headaches in less than an hour.
And the really idiotic and annoying part is that it doesn't even allow you to override that. Once it's decided 1600x1200, that's it. Whoever designed it had the arrogance to decide that surely the user is too stupid to know such technical details, so let's not trust the user with the power to set something else. I find that not only utterly idiotic (since we just saw that it can guess wrong), but outright offensive.
Anyway, there are two solutions to this:
1. Download the Omega drivers. Strangely enough those are smart enough to read the native resolution, not the maximum supported one.
2. Use a VGA cable. On VGA it does allow you to set your maximum resolution and frequency yourself.
(This also goes in case someone wants to jump in with the usual "just set the resolution in the control centre" advice. Trust me, it doesn't work over a DVI cable. Over a VGA cable it works. Through DVI it doesn't.)
Personally I find both solutions pretty annoying. Number 1 involves installing some non-official non-supported driver. (And if you know about how drivers run in kernel mode in Windows, you'll understand what's scary about running non-official drivers just downloaded off some web site.) Number 2 basically involved throwing the whole "digital" part out the window, and using an LCD monitor as a glorified analog CRT with larger pixels.
I'm not sure for what kind of behaviour would that count as "deserved". My whole life until finishing university was basically a prison sentence. And, no, I'm not exaggerating. I don't feel like going into all the details -- and it would end up a tome-sized message if I did -- but let's just say I'm not exaggerating.
So what evil deed wouly you count as "deserving" something like that? Because we let murderers and rapists get away with lighter sentences. So what _can_ a kid do that's worse than that?
I'm pretty sure I didn't beat anyone up, didn't steal, etc. Not that I'd have had an opportunity to. But again, even for those we let people get away with lighter sentences.
Oh, I did go out of guidance as soon as I was out of surveillance range, out of sheer lack of clue. I almost never had to function without a parent telling me _exactly_ what to do, when and how. (And then telling me how horrible shitty job I had done. They didn't really believe in positive feedback.) So, yes, I did all sorts of stupid things on the rare occasions when I was outside my parents' "remote control" range.
Does that "deserve" even more surveillance there? How does that solve the problem? Because from where I stand, it looks like that's what caused the problem in the first place.
That's what I was thinking. My parents were such control freaks, that I had one of them or grandma on my back pretty much the whole time. Even in about half the summer camps or such, one would actually take a vacation to come keep an eye on me. I have no doubt that if such a device had existed, they'd have set the speed limit to 1 mph just for tracking sake.
If people could switch their brains to perceive anything at all as the happy button, how many do you think would go "kewl, let's make myself happy to learn quantum physics?" I mean, what for? So you can have a better job and be happier in the future? Not much of an incentive if you can just make yourself arbitrarily happy right now. "Yay, I'm living in a dumpster!" Works just as well, and is an immediate reward.
Basically what you propose is somewhat equivalent to giving yourself a pot joint as a reward. (It mimmicks the brains happy signals very very well.) How many people do you think use those as "ok, if I learn this chapter, I'll smoke one as a reward"? I'd guess extremely few, if any.
It may actually work the other way around.
See, the brain (and not only in humans) is nicely tuned to keep needing the next thing to be happy about. Whenever you have some achievement (even small ones, like getting food when you're hungry) the brain gives itself a "yay, I'm happy" chemical signal, but that's followed immediately by releasing the "antidote" to that signal, to get back to the baseline. So you'll need the next achievement for your next moment of joy.
It's what keeps humans and all animals active. It's why your cat plays and thus trains its reflexes daily, instead of vegetating in a corner, still happy that it played last month.
In human society it's also a very important factor in why, for example, consumerism is alive and kicking, and keeping the capitalist economy going well past the point where just the needs are covered. People keep having these illusions like "man, I would be soo happy if I had that one more gadget/shirt/etc", and they do get happy about it... for a very brief time. Then they need their next achievement. And in turn, getting caught in the consumerism race also keeps them in the rat race at work, and taking shit they otherwise wouldn't put up with.
You can see in "video game addiction" cases what happens when people can stay continuously happy. It's not really physiological addiction, but good games give people small rewards often, which triggers the "yay, I'm happy" signal in the brain. There's always one more quest you finished, one more recipe you learned, one more item that you sold at the auction house (or IRL on eBay), one more boss you defeated, one more equipment piece you found, etc. So some people, which are kept happy enough by that, end up not doing anything else. You can see cases going all the way to playing for a month and then dropping dead.
So my take is that if someone actually produced genetically-engineered humans which are permanently happy, those humans would be even worse. They wouldn't even need video games to stay happy, so they probably wouldn't bother even with that. If you can be perfectly happy sitting on the couch watching the wall, you don't need to do anything else. You don't even need to buy a TV. Nor take shit from a PHB and do overtime to afford a huge plasma TV and a fashionable house in the suburbs. You get the idea.
No, actually they hoped for even more money this way.
See, just selling email addresses to the spammers doesn't actually bring _that_ much money. See the AOL idiot who exported the database and sold it to spammers. He's got, I think, some tens of thousands of dollars. That's small change for a corporation.
Even if they sold it together with the search keywords, how much do you think they'd get? Hundreds of thousands? Let's even be generous and say a couple of millions? Those guys have to think of their own profit, so don't think you'll get all their advertising money for the next decade. That's hardly worth the effort.
No, if you want to maximize your income, the way to go is to do the keyword matching _yourself_. See: Google.
So excuse me if I don't think that AOL did some noble altruistic act, out of sheer generosity towards the academia. It was a desperate "someone please please please kill Google for us" act, and they stand to gain a _lot_ more if it actually works. Maybe they packed it in some PR double-speak to sound like some kind act, so they'd get their public image polished too in the process, but rest assured that even that wasn't the primary motivation. It was about long term money, plain and simple.
And to that end, they had no qualms with raping their users' privacy. If it hadn't been so hare-brained and hadn't backfired, rest assured that the same CTO would now be getting a big fat bonus as a reward.
So I went to the shop yesterday to buy a couple of PSP games. So I pull out my plastic debit card to pay with it. They have these numeric pads with a slot for the card and a small LCD display around here in a lot of shops. (The super-markets and such just ask you for a signature, but almost everyone else has a PIN pad.)
"Oh," says the clerk, "the connection's been down the whole afternoon."
It's not even the first time something like that happens. It's not often, but it does happen.
So for purchasing games or groceries, ok, I can just pull some banknotes out of the wallet. But it kinda scares me that I'd have to depend on something like that at an airport.
So what's new then? All along the whole case for "dark matter" was that galaxies -- _all_ galaxies -- rotate strangely like a rigid body, except right near the centre. According to newtonian mechanics the stars in a galaxy should behave basically like the planets in our solar system: the farther from the centre you get, the slower they move. But in a galaxy stuff moves like that only near the centre, and then it's like gravity changed gradually from 1/(R*R) to 1/R, and the stars rotate at an almost constant angular velocity around the centre.
;)
So from there it's that either:
1. there's a metric buttload of matter we can't observe other than through gravity, in some weird distribution all through the galaxy's disc, or 2
2. we accept that gravity isn't working like we think it does
(Or my favourite: 3. galaxies are just a rotating texture there, so _of_ _course_ they rotate like a rigid. Noone would be dumb enough to simulate the individual stars just to give us a pretty sky in this MMO we call RL
And somehow the favourite is 1, for no obvious reason than that noone wants to modify gravity theories. It's as if Galileo, upon discovering that a stone dropped from the mast doesn't lag behind the ship, would then proceed to invent some "dark wind" that pushes the stone along with the ship. Since existing wind obviously isn't strong enough to push the stone that hard, it's got to be some dark wind in there too. Just, you know, for the sake of not contradicting the existing Aristotelian system.
Anyway, all along we knew that it can't be conventional matter, because we already had plenty of galaxies in various states of illumination and they all behave the same.
So exactly how does the new one help there? It seems to me like it still can't offer conclusive proof that 1 is true and 2 is false, because it would _still_ be equally well explained by 2. What this "solves" is at most a sub-distinction inside 1, once we're dead-set on believing 1 instead of 2. It says basically that if we already decided it's 1, then, yep, it's definitely not baryon matter (rocks, gases, protons, etc), but some weird matter that interacts only with gravity.
Most (all?) of the animals "play" as a form of training for what they naturally do, yes. So for carnivores it's play fighting, for rabbits it's running from each other, and so on.
That reminds me of another "conclusive" study that concluded that cats are colour-blind (in spite of having plenty of cones in their retina), because they seemed not to react to the colour cues they were given. Then later it turns out that cats _do_ see colours, and _can_ be taught to react to colour cues, they just don't normally assign that much importance to them. So it wasn't that the cat couldn't distinguish between "green dish" and "red dish", it's just normally it just saw it as "dish".
Now I'm not trying to discredit such studies as a whole, but we need to remember that until someone can talk to the cat, we just don't know what the cat sees or thinks there. We can see their reactions, but the rationale behind that is at best just a wild uninformed guess.
Does it recognize itself in the mirror or not? Or maybe it just isn't that interested it itself? We just don't know what the cat sees or thinks there. And when you expect it to "use that information in some intelligent fashion", it gets even less clear.
Even we humans are only interested in mirrors because we're worried about our looks and about how other humans perceive us. Noone uses a mirror just to recognize themselves. They use it to see how they'll appear to others.
Elliminate that incentive or concern completely, and chances are even humans wouldn't give a damn about mirrors any more. If you dropped someone alone on a tropical island, Robinson Crusoe-like, with the knowledge that they won't see or be seen by another human ever again, then you'd probably find their interest in their own image or in mirrors dropping very fast. After his first weeks there, it's a pretty safe bet that Robinson Crusoe wouldn't use a mirror daily, or even bother combing his hair or shaving/trimming his beard any more. What for? Maybe he'd use it occasionally for a "man, how low have I fallen, I look like a savage" round of self-pity, but even then there's that concern again with image and what others would see him like.
A cat doesn't have such sense of fashion and looks. They don't have "is my haircut right for my big date with that cute orange tomcat" concerns. They have their rituals for interacting with other cats (e.g., to be accepted on another cat's territory), but none of those have anything to do with looks. When they wash themselves it's to stay clean (and even then only because the smell could alert the prey), but not out of a concern with looking right to other cats.
So basically a cat doesn't really have much use for its own image in a mirror. Or not in the same ways that a human would treat theirs. It might use it as a sort of a toy, it might pretend that that reflection is an imaginary other cat to play with (same as they can pretend that plush toys are either prey or another cat), etc. But taken in the human "oh, look, that's me" sense, it's just useless for any animal that doesn't care about its looks.
Hence I find it a bit silly to draw a broad conclusion like "cats don't recognize their image" or "cats have no notion of 'self'" just because it doesn't fit someone's anthropomorphic illusions. Because that's what it's about. Someone anthropomorphises the cat by expecting some human-type reactions from it. And the cat (predictably) doesn't react that way, because it's really a cat, not a small furry human.
But that's in the end all we know there: the cat doesn't react like we'd expect a human to. We don't know why, though. We don't really know what it saw or thought there. And like the coloured dishes experiment proved, our guesses can be awfully wrong there.
And I'll also go ahead and say that we also don't yet know what intelligence is, other than as some vague fuzzy concept. We're taking wild guesses and extrapolations based on what humans do, but there is no real proof that every animal would benefit from the same things. I.e., we're really anthropomorphising again, and judging animals not as much on whether they're intelligent at being, you know, a cat, but on how well they fit our "
Actually, I'm not sure by what criterion would you rule that as rare, since most mammals play games of some sort or another. (With the exception of some domesticated ones, e.g., cattle, which have some millenia behind them of artifficially selecting the dumbest and most passive ones.) It's a form of training for life, and a built-in way of calibrating how "in shape" the animal must be.
E.g., cats. I've yet to see a cat for any reasonable length of time which didn't play games. And I don't just mean following a feather-onna-string moved by a human. All our cats were perfectly able to initiate playing with, say, a stuffed kitten doll or teddy bear, and practice wrestling with it. (In fact, they seemed to "anthropomorphise" it, or rather the feline equivalent of the word. I.e., treat it as a cat. The way they wrestled it resembled cat wrestling, not the quick kill attacks you can observe in cats hunting prey. And the number of wrestling sessions the teddy bear lasted indicated that they avoided using their claws and teeth too much, again, just like when play-wrestling another cat. They could have dismembered it within minutes if they had wanted to.) Or they've been known to either try fetching a toy to us as a "come play with me" signal, or try to draw the humans' attention to the toy where it was.
E.g., dogs. My parents' dog and pretty much any dog I've seen occasionally plays some game or another. E.g., they're trivial to get to play fetch. My parents' dog also occasionally do stuff like try to enact his own fetch game, by himself. He'd occasionally bump the rubber ball with his nose, for example, and then chase it. Of course that didn't go that great, since he never bumped it fast or far enough. Or he'd just bring the ball to one of us humans and try to get us to play with him and that ball.
E.g., rabbits. Yeah, lowly herbivores and not that big a brain either. Yet if you observe them in open spaces, they basically play tag with each other. Often they take turns at who's playing the aggressor coming at various angles, and who's the one running away.
So basically if playing games is signs of high intelligence, then you've classified most mammals (and a good number of birds too) as highly intelligent. It doesn't leave that many which aren't.
With patents being the sad mess they are, at least in the USA, it's not like they even have any choice. Mind you, Sony isn't exactly the "good guys" in the first place, but even if they were, they'd have no other choice at the moment.
To use your car rental example, imagine this: so you have your car rental, as in your example, and you start letting users write reviews and rate the cars they drove. I'll also assume it's in a program (e.g., an internet site where the users can book cars ahead of time, for when they arrive in your city), so it's relevant to the software patents disaster. So you're a good guy and think to yourself, "self, wth, it's just a common sense extension of what already happens with books, movies, etc, and it's not even that useful anyway" and you don't patent it.
So two years from now, when you've made a fair bit of cash and maybe even expanded into a new city, some patent troll sues you on account that it infringes on their "user-review system for car rentals" patent. (Which the patent office gladly granted, since prior art was about books, movies, etc, not about car rentals. So obviously it's a great innovation to copy it verbatim to car rentals too.)
At this point it may not even matter whether you win or lose, since patent lawsuits are the most expensive kind. You can win it and still go bankrupt because of the expenses. But chances are good that you'll not even manage to win it, since someone had clearly patented it a good year before your site went online, and you have obviously infringed on their patent.
So what what everyone is doing is hoarding patents as an aggressive defense. In that:
1. If you patent that first, you can't be sued later.
2. If they sue you for something else, you hope that they infringed on some of yours too, so you can counter-sue them into the stone age. (Of course, this doesn't work against pure patent-trolls, who never actually have a product or service of their own.)
Au contraire. Think of all the people that got identified -- some virus writers, but some ordinary joes -- thanks to Word's keeping track of who edited it. IIRC, the MAC address is a part of it, and most people didn't even know they were tracked, so they didn't even know what to spoof nor even that they needed to spoof it.
If Sony actually got the ball rolling, so every file you ever shared is for ever marked as downloaded from you, the RIAA would probably be in so much joy that they'd ejaculate in their pants. They'd just have to leech every single shared copyrighted song or movie, to have the complete history of who offered it for download, all the way to the original person who leaked it. Lawsuits, here we come.
The MPAA at least has been working hard to create just that: a means to identify who shared a preview of movie. In their case, by watermarking it. Sony's version is head and shoulders above that.
Seriously, identifying sharers is the RIAA's and MPAA's wet dream. It's the kind of wet dream where they don't just wake up to change their underwear, but the whole mattress and blanket.
And this one not only lets dolts go on record as having shared that file, but also conveniently lets them write a self-incriminating testimony in the form of that review. Want to bet that you'd see it coming back to haunt you in court, when Sony's expert comes and says "style analysis of the 500 word review says it's him who wrote it and shared our movie"? No more getting Scott-free out of court by blaming it on your 6-year old kid, no more blaming it on mysterious hackers that got into your wireless access point, no more nothing. It's not their style.
So I suspect that what Sony is trying to do here is _not_ to create a better P2P experience, but basically to coat a cyanide pill in chocolate and hope that enough dolts will swallow it. It's hoping that they can package it as such a cool feature as to get enough idiots to just stop thinking about the more sinister aspect of it.
Ah, the mandatory straw man. How cute. I never said that IBM was "cool", or whatever straw man you feel like dismantling today. I just said that it supports Linux and F/OSS in general.
Sun, for better or worse, has been until _very_ recently just a sad case of corporate schizophrenia. It did a lot of smoke and mirrors shows of "we love F/OSS" and "we love Linux", followed by flipping sometimes even in the same fucking day to, basically, "Linux is teh suck! Die! Die! Die!" and "Proprietary software FTW!" Not to mention the whole deal with SCO at the apex of its anti-Linux campaign. If you look at where SCO's money came from, two companies stick out like a sore thumb: MS and Sun. If that's how they support their "we love Linux" theatre... I rest my cae.
Yes, it published some specs... same as everyone else, except maybe MS, did. Then proceeded to encumber the implementation with some "I own your ass if you even look at it" license.
But even there, let me clue you in: back in the days of Sun's "we love open specs and Unix interoperability" spiel, _everyone_ else put up the exact same "we love open specs and Unix interoperability" show. That makes Sun sooo special. Not. And everyone, Sun _and_ IBM included, actually sabotaged interoperability and deviated from those specs as far as they could, to lock in customers.
Except at some point, for better or worse, IBM started actually showing some support for actual F/OSS. You know, as in, you can actually take the sources, modify them, make something useful out of them. Plus, it's put its marketting and corporate weight behind Linux, which did a _lot_ more to get PHBs to accept it than ranting persecution-syndrom geeks did.
No, it doesn't make them "good" or "cool" across the board, but at least it did something useful in that particular domain.
Sun responded by... mainly putting up even more smoke and mirrors shows, and going even more schizophrenic. Mostly it just tried to muddy the waters about what F/OSS even means, and redefine some lame "well, you can do some free work for us, if you want to, but we'll sue your pants off if you as much as look at our sources the wrong way" offers as "open". See: Java.
No, IBM never was "cool" across the board, but from where I stand, Sun looks even worse. That's all. If you want to compare IBM with Hitler, so be it, but then it says something when Sun looks like an even bigger nutcase.
I suggest looking through the Linux kernel change histories sometime. There are a _lot_ of IBM email addresses in there.
And not just there. Have a look at most Apache projects too, for that matter.
There's a reason why SCO went after IBM. Well, ok, a second reason, beside the obvious "because SCO is on a pump and dump scheme." Like most lies, SCO's "IBM took our IP they had used in AIX and put it into making Linux enterprise-ready" is based on a small grain of truth, although in this case one irrelevant to the lawsuit. The truth is that IBM did donate that much code to Linux, and some which, indeed, is a part of why Linux is enterprise-ready OS instead of an academic toy. At any rate, a lot of that is either AIX code or it uses techniques developped for AIX.
If you read the RTFA, even there they spell it out repeatedly: "It prefers Linux and its own proprietary version of Unix, called AIX." ("It" being IBM.) Or even better: "IBM helped put Linux on the map, funding programmers to improve the operating system and offering early pledges of support that indicated it was safe for customers to use. The company has more than 600 programmers at its Linux Technology Center, but it's actively involved in many open-source projects besides Linux."
So basically IBM _does_ put a lot of money and work into a F/OSS OS. It's not AIX, but in hindsight, a lot of us actually prefer it that way. The great Unix fragmentation happened precisely because everyone wanted to make their own flavour deliberately incompatible to everyone else's, trying to lock their customers in. And that's how Unix lost back then, and why nowadays we have Windows instead on most computers. Does anyone (other than MS) want _that_ to repeat verbatim again? Not me, anyway. So thank goodness that IBM contributes to Linux this time, instead of trying to divide-and-conquer the F/OSS OS market with an OpenAIX.
I don't know exactly how "open" OpenSolaris is. Maybe it's really open, maybe it's one of Sun's usual smoke screens. No idea. I couldn't be bothered to care about it at that point.
But even OpenSolaris is a very new development. What I'm getting at is: IBM was putting its money where its mouth was, _long_ before Sun.
So excuse me if I find it outright funny to see someone claim that IBM isn't doing anything there.
Duly noted, and true, but there's a reason I've qualified that with "as in, the whole plant". When you compare the weight of the seeds to the weight of the plant, most of the biomass produced on an acre is anything but seeds. With algae, on the other hand, the whole biomass is rich in oil and usable to produce fuel. I.e., assuming (very over-simplified and probably false) that the same quantity of nutrients goes into growing a pound of either, with algae you get the whole pound to turn into oil, while with hemp you only have a fraction of it: the seeds.
The big if, though, is whether the algae production can be made cheap enough. Getting 4 times the oil at 10 times the price or more, isn't really an improvement.
A quick trip to Wikipedia says:
"British production is mostly used as bedding for horses; other uses are under development. The largest outlet for German fibre is composite automotive panels. Companies in Canada, UK, USA and Germany among many others are processing hemp seed into a growing range of food products and cosmetics; many traditional growing countries still continue with textile grade fibre production."
So while, no, you can't get all the proteins you need from any single plant source (hence you can't really live for long only on hemp and water), your friends are partially right that it is indeed a food source too.
It also indeed _is_ used as part of composite materials, and hemp-based plastics are starting being produced too. So there too your friends are technically right, although it's really a simplified view. You can make composite materials with any kind of fibre, including glass, carbon, or thread, or whatever. They're indeed stronger than wood or, in some cases, even than steel, but that doesn't come from the hemp as such. Hemp can be a cheap source of strong fibres there, but that's just about all there is to it. It's not like it can't be done with other things just as well. Still, there is something to be said about doing it cheaper.
Motor oil, again, is technically true, but again it's not something unique to hemp. Hemp would just be one relatively cheap source of biomass to use there, but technically you could use almost anything else instead, if you have to. Turkey guts, dead cats, whatever.
Let me explain a bit more. See, contrary to the "auugh, we're all dead when Middle East oil runs out" doom-and-gloom propaganda bullshit, people have been making synthetic fuel since before WW2. Most of Germany's tank warfare happened on fuel synthetised from coal for example. It wasn't cheap at all, but it kept the panzers rolling. That knowledge wasn't lost, and in fact today we're better than ever at turning anything organic or even just carbon-based into fuel. What remains though is the price. That's really the only reason everyone prefers importing oil from the Middle East instead. At any rate, we can convert coal or almost any kind of biomass into oil. The input material counts mostly for price too. Stuff that's rich in fat, for example, needs less effort to convert into something you can put into a gas tank. Stuff that's cheap to mass produce has its advantages too.
Personally I wouldn't hold that much hope for _hemp_ as the oil source of the future, though, for the simple reason that it's not _that_ rich in fat. Genetically engineered algae for example currently are at the point of being 50% fat, and hemp (as in the whole plant) doesn't come close to that. _If_ someone figures out how to mass-produce those algae, they'd make a far better and cheaper source of oil.
Still, technically speaking your friends _are_ right. It is possible to make synthetic oil out of hemp.
And the simple answer to that question is: bingo. Hemp _is_ mass-produced already all over Europe (both eastern and western), and even in Canada. I don't know if anyone makes paper out of it, or not, but I do know that it is in fact mass-produced. At the moment only the USA has the weird "hemp == marijuana" attitude.
Sad to break this to you, but most species of hemp contain at most traces of THC. And after the early 1900's strains of hemp have been selected which score even lower.
To give you some numbers, the legal upper limit for THC content industrial hemp in Europe is 0.3% and most strains contain actually safely less than that. By comparison, the drug varieties contain 20% to 30% THC. So think literally having to smoke 100 times (or more) as much to get the same high. You'd have to literally smoke several pounds of industrial hemp to get the same high as from a join of the drug varieties. At which point, you'd either asphixiate from the smoke, or (more likely) it would take so long as to not get a high at all. The organism would get rid of it faster than you can get it into your system.
It's a plant that's been cultivated since the stone age for its fibres. (Which contain even less THC, btw.) It's been one of humanity's main sources of material for clothes, ropes, sacks, etc, for literally tens of thousands of years. Even paper. The USA Declaration Of Independence was drafted on hemp paper, btw. Even nowadays it's cultivated in the whole world except the USA... even though it's legal to _import_ industrial hemp in the USA. How's that for a stupid hypocrisy?
At any rate, there are plenty of plantations all around the world. Not only in Europe and Asia, but even right next to you in Canada. We already know how much it yields per acre, and how much is stolen by stoners. Hint: none at all is stolen by stoners, because it's freaking useless to them.
In the USA the ban has more to do with (A) the cotton lobby, and (B) with a good dose of government hypocrisy and putting up a jolly good "war on drugs" show. You _can_ make sure which varieties people grow, and every country except the USA does that. You just require a license for growing it, and then you go and check what those people grow. It's that simple.