Then if you're willing to make a mockery of science by defining things by where culture put them, why stop there? Why bother having a science at all, for that matter? E.g.,
- at one point it was in the culture and literature, and all educated people knew, that the sun revolves around the earth, that there are no satellites except the moon, and that a cannonball twice as heavy falls twice as fast. That is, until that Galileo guy came and made a telescope, or actually dropped two cannonballs from a tower. So we should do... what? What do you propose? That for example Jupiter should have been honorarily proclaimed a planet without satellites, just to honour the tradition? That the heavier cannonball be honorarily proclaimed to fall faster, experimental values be damned?
- at one point it was in the culture and literature, and all educated people knew, that the earth is flat. Then came such people as Magellan who actually sailed around it. So what do you do there? Proclaim the Earth a honorary disc, just because that was the established mis-conception?
- at one point it was in the culture and literature, and all educated people knew, that everything is made out of 4 elements and the only thing that separates lead from gold is the proportion of those. I.e., that you could transform anything into anything else -- including the infamous lead-into-gold -- by just finding the right thing to mix it with, as to get the proportions just right for the target element. So we should have done... what, all along? Warped chemistry around that bogus notion, just to avoid upsetting the existing falsehoods? That instead of Mendeleev's table we should have a table with the proportions of the 4 elements for everything?
Etc.
Sad to break your illusions, but science is precisely about proving the existing theories false. That's _all_ that science is about: having nothing sacred or set in stone, and trying to prove the existing explanations false. It's _exactly_ about a "I don't care how many people already learned Newtonian mechanics in school, I don't care how much it would upset tradition to disprove Newton, I have a better theory and the data to support it" attitude. That's how every single discovery or progress have been made: someone had a better theory than the previous one.
The moment you start setting things in stone just because that's the pre-existing mis-conception, or caring more about winning popularity contests ("The alternative is for astronomers to be labeled a bunch of squabbling nuts"), that moment you're not doing science any more. Plain and simple.
It's never been about how many planets are enough, and it's not just about Pluto. It's about how you define a planet.
It's, in a nutshell, about science: attempting to actually classify and understand the universe. Just proclaiming "ok, I hereby do dub Pluto a planet" is ok for everyday life, but a bit too vague for science. It's like you can talk generically about "radiation" in casual conversation or in super-hero comics, but to a scientist that's uselessly vague. A scientist will be more interested in what _kind_ of radiation (i.e., the exact particle), at what energies, etc.
The same happens in astrophysics. You can't just say "ooh, that's a pretty star", because that doesn't give you much to work with. Is it a planet? An asteroid? A comet? A star? A nova? A white dwarf? What? There are very good reasons to split hairs there, because out of such splitting hairs comes the understanding of what they are and how they work.
E.g., from the splitting of hairs as to how we classify stars came such categories as "white dwarf." In turn, that let us wonder about how big a white dwarf can be, which gave us the Chandrasekhar limit. In turn that told us that when a star goes over (actually it later it turned out that when it's just right under) that limit, it goes *KABOOM* in a spectacular Type Ia supernova. Since it happens at the exact same point, it tells us that every Type Ia supernova is exactly the same as any other one. Which in turn lets us use them to measure distances and velocities in distant galaxies. And from those came a bunch of other astrophysics stuff.
_That_ is why for science it's important to worry about such distinction. Sure, you can get through your everyday life without ever worrying about the difference between Pluto and an asteroid, or between a Type Ia and a Type 1b supernova. But for scientists, it's an entirely different situation.
The informal proclaiming which is what also doesn't scale. When you deal with a whole universe worth of stuff, you have a continuum of things, ranging from individual nuclei all the way to the super-massive black holes in the centre of galaxies. And there are trillions of trillions of them. You can't just go proclaiming for each and every single one of them if it's a planet, an asteroid, or what. You need some rule you can apply there.
There's yet another factor remaining, so I'm going to just wait and see. Maybe Youtube will do just fine without any further incentives.
The factor is: most me-too clones suck. There are a lot of PHBs... err... MBAs out there who seem to think that jumping on a bandwagon means doing the absolute crappiest job, with the cheapest unskilled monkeys off the street. And that you can just make up for that by adding some "features" that are just a PHBs ego trip, as opposed to even trying to understand what the market wants. (Think of all those dot-com era "features" like adding blinking text, or bright blue text on a green background.)
It's not just Google or Ebay. Look at the iPod or iTunes too, at that. (And disclaimer, I'm not even an iPod or Apple fan, but I can still be disgusted with _stupid_ imitation when I see it.)
E.g., you'd think that making yet another HDD based media player would be an easy enough proposition, no? Yet it took half a decade for people to even begin getting their act straight. Some were as big as a freaking brick (I still remember an Archos which was _literally_ as big as a 5" HDD), some had a nightmarish user interface (I'm looking at you, Creative), some insisted on ruining a perfectly good MP3 by re-converting it to their own proprieatry lossy compression in 64kbps (Sony, you suck), etc. And yet paradoxically a lot of them were actually more expensive than a similar capacity iPod. And when they tried adding a feature of their own, even one which might be useful in its own right, like video playback, it came at the expense of being badly implemented _and_ ending up costing more than a good laptop.
Ditto for iTunes. It never ceases to amaze me how many bad ideas people try to cram into copying that... badly. Ranging from the functionality of their program or web site, to the music selection, to some hare-brained ideas like, basically, "I know! People would love to pay for the privilege of indentured servitude to us! I bet everyone just dreams of a service where we hold their whole music collection hostage, and can remotely render it useless if they even think of stopping paying monthly." I mean, seriously, wtf? Who there thought that blatant extortion is a feature?
Those are just two random examples. I could give more, but it's already too long a rant anyway.
The moral is: don't underestimate how crappy a job some people can do when they try to copy something they don't even understand. I wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of PHBs out there managed to get even copying Youtube wrong. It may seem like a clear and straightforward idea, that noone can possibly get wrong, but then the same could have been said about everything else which did get copied all wrong.
That's just the thing: they never started as "regular" people.
About 1% of the population are psychopaths. They have no empathy to start with (or rather, they _do_ read your body language very well... but then at most use it to shaft you).
They're essentially living in a single-player game, surrounded by NPCs which are expendable and don't matter. Think of the last time you've played a game. Did you care about the NPCs? Did you care if the hooker you've brained in GTA maybe has children, or maybe is only doing that to pay for her father's surgery, or whatever? Did you care about her feelings, goals in life, etc? Or were you in a frame of mind that NPCs by definition don't matter, and any lies, deceit, even murder, are ok as long as they keep you entertained? It's just a game, and the smart player does whatever works to get ahead, right?
Well, think of people whose approach to RL is just that. Everyone else doesn't matter. Causing any harm is just fair game, if it keeps them entertained. (And indeed a lot of them aren't even motivated by monetary gains, and do outright counter-productive stuff just because they find it entertaining to shaft someone hard.) Most of them are also nigh impossible to threaten, presumably as an effect. At any rate, for them you don't matter. They can tell you to jump off a building with a straight face, if they think you might buy that, and be perfectly able to look themselves in the mirror the next day.
The dumb ones become robbers, gangsters and serial killers, and society eventually puts them behind bars. The smart ones become CEOs and politicians, and get worshipped by Wall Street.
Most of them had no life-shattering trauma to blame it on. Most of the white collar psychopaths come from rich or middle class families, led good lives, had the best education, etc. The only trauma in their life was the one they've inflicted on others.
Some of them will _invent_ some rags-to-riches story, to gain sympathy. It makes people easier to manipulate. But almost invariably those stories aren't actually true.
And from an outside perspective, 15 less players isn't that big of a deal, but thats just me.
Even from an outside perspective, elementary arithmetics says 25 instead of 40 is 62.5%. So, yes, it's a lot less.
From the perspective of getting that 40 player group together, it was just nuts for all but the largest guilds. Unless you were in one of the guilds with 300 level 60's, you could look forward to up to 3 hours just getting the last 2-3 people. By the time you got the last people who said they'd come, but were late, the first ones would (understandably) get bored or get their mom screaming at them to go to bed already, and start leaving.
Think of getting 40 people at the office to come with you at a movie. In fact, imagine that you can't even see the movie without exactly 40 people. You could probably easily get 5 people (a "group") to come with you, but getting 40 to do anything meaningful together starts involving meetings just to plan it, coaxing, and then waiting for the guy who comes 2 hours too late because something else got in the way. (And again, you can't go without him.) And then someone calls in sick that day and you get to harrass people on the street to join your movie raid. That's a pretty literal RL analogy of how that went on WoW.
It's boring, it's work, and it has nothing to do with playing the game.
From a human interactions perspective, 40 player raids are just nuts. The chances that someone will have to go afk, or have their mom send them to sleep in the middle of it, or do something stupid (ranging from aggroing the wrong NPC, to mis-click "need" instead of "greed" on a loot roll, to god knows what else), rise to insane values. It's just a source of frictions and people getting pissed off at each other.
It doesn't help that a lot of the others are already irritated by it all, and a lot less willing to forgive and forget. When you're already at the point of having waited for 3 hours for a group, past your bed time, postponing a badly needed snack just so you don't make 39 people wait for you, and only there in the first place because your guild-mates harrassed you into doing the same instance again the 100'th time... you won't be in a great mood to start with. You'll get a lot more irritated when they do stupid things and thus prolong your agony. Heck, chances are even the invariable guy playing a flirty female elf, and doing a non-stop impression of what a male mouth-breather geek thinks female flirting means (usually just one step short of "mmm, please fuck me now, big guy"), will seem a hell of a lot less funny under the circumstances.
From a gameplay and tactics perspective, it's even more nuts. Those people aren't trained soldiers, so even the most elementary group tactics _will_ go wrong when you depend on 40 casual players doing the right thing at the right time. Plus, 40 players on one enemy means a lot of the time you don't even really see what's happening there. The only way anything like that was manageable even on Team Speak was that it had been dumbed down to not needing any tactics or thinking. Everyone just spams the same small number of spells/attacks/whatever, and the keywords there are: small number. Very small number. As a priest for example you'll spam one icon again and again most of the time.
From a rewards/achievements perspective it gets even worse, as out of 40 people, maybe 10 actually need whatever loot that boss dropped. _If_ he even dropped what you were after. If it wasn't enough that that armour piece or whatever is dropped 1% of the time, divide it by 10 people who want it, and now you have a 0.1% chance. So even if you go by a "whoever needs it, roll for it" scheme, chances are you _won't_ get your reward for that raid. And at level 60 you don't get XP out of it either, so it was just a big waste of time.
But even the "whoever needs it, roll for it" scheme went out of fashion sometime last year, as guilds started implementing a "contribution points" scheme. So basica
Unfortunately, it cuts both ways. A lot of people just got _more_ harrassment around that time (except this time by the principal and teachers), just because they were wearing black or were introverted, and they suddenly got labelled as the next guy who'll shoot up the school. A lot found themselves a lot more ostracized than even before. And there are some who had to move out of town sooner or later, because once they had been labelled as the psycho who'll eventually shoot up the school or company, they had trouble getting even a lousy job at the gas station.
Now maybe in your case your hell was deep enough so even that was an improvement. For a lot it wasn't. Some weren't in all-out-war with the whole school to start with. Being labelled as the next mass-murderer just added an extra layer of ostracizing on top of what they already had.
So excuse me if I'm not cheering for the resulting overreaction anyway.
If you're going to use that AI as a tool, yes, ok. But the post I was answering to was the usual "I, for one, welcome our overlords."
And trust me, you _don't_ want an overlord that's inhumanly logical about it. It's that kind of thing that led to such logical solutions as "let's extermine the population of Poland until 1970 to make room for German settlers." Or such logical solutions as communism. Sure, on paper it's perfectly sound and logical, if you assume that you can change humans overnight. Maybe sometimes being able to understand humans actually helps, eh?
That said, most of the stellar job performance that OCPD cases claim exists only in their own mind.
They tend to never get a job done because it's not yet perfect, for example. I have one two rooms from me at the office, who's taken three fucking years just to get a build script done because everything wasn't perfect enough for him. No exaggeration. Literally. Well, in parallel with building a convoluted unit testing environment, because the existing one didn't satisfy his purist view of the matter. (The old tests had some functional testing too. So his perfect version actually tests less, but is _pure_ unit testing, by his own definitions of it.) Of course, he's convinced that he's done a stellar, uncompromising job, but for everyone else he's just wasted some time and didn't even achieve more than what we already had.
Do I really want that even in a computer? Nope, not really. _The_ problem with most programs nowadays is just that: that they're OCPD nutcases. Workflows that were a lot more flexible (even if not as fast) with a pen and paper, get shoehorned into some lobotomized set of rules that allows no exceptions. The problem is that most often the rules aren't actually what the user wants to do: e.g., you end up unable to save a new client's data until you know their fax number, whereas with a paper form you'd fill in the data you have and leave the rest for later. Often it's more annoyance for the users and more work in workarounds, than doing it without a computer in the first place. (Of course, the equally OCPD-ridden creator will then bitch and moan about "idiot lusers" and how everyone should change to fit his perfect tool, instead of his tool changing to do what the user actually needs done.)
No real qualms with autism on its own, though. They tend to be very good with a computer, or any kind of abstract problem for that matter. (If sometimes difficult to deal with in a team.)
Combine it with OCPD, though, and... well, let's just say that they mix like Ammonium Nitrate and Fuel Oil. You get some of the most obnoxious personalities that way, and it's no fun for anyone involved, not even the geek. The poor bugger can't even tell that he's the one who offended the whole room, and proceeds to imagine that he's the victim of unwarranted cruelty.
While you're at the self-centered "let's tell people what to do, because I don't want to pay for their problems" (but supposedly still expect them to pay for _yours_), why stop there? Lemme see what else we should make illegal...
- fucking without a condom. Well, hey, if they're going to be assholes about paying for the medical care for smokers (that's just about all the damage that pot smoking does too), then I don't want to pay for their AIDS/syphilish/etc bill when they go fucking around.
- going in the woods for a picknick or camping. They could get bitten by a bear, or poisoned by a snake, or stung by a bee and discover that they're allergic, or break a leg while climbing on god knows what rock. Why should I pay for the subsequent medical care? Shouldn't they take full responsibility when they decided to go camping? Make that illegal, I say.
- ditto for jogging, come to think of it. If they're going to exercise, they can do that in a safe enclosed place. I'm not gonna pay for their medical care if they insist on running outside where they can be run over by a car.
- for that matter going anywhere out of the house without an umbrella and without a backpack full of warm clothes. What if you get caught in a rain? What if it snows? (Yes, it occasionally does even in August.) Why should it be me who pays for the medicine to treat your pneumonia then? If you're going to go out with just a t-shirt and jeans, you should take full responsibility for whatever happens because of it.
- getting old. Have you see how often those old people get sick and need medical care? And don't even get me started about my paying for their pensions. They should just make suicide mandatory at 65 years old or so.
- using any kind of cell phone, walkman, ipod, or any other personal entertainment device. They can sprain an ankle because of paying more attention to that ipod than to where they step! Or even, don't laugh, back problems as stepping wrong can cause shocks in the spine. Ban any electronics lighter than 40 pounds, I say. Let's see them use _those_ while jogging.
- driving any kind of car, especially anything looking like a sports car. Me, I live close enough to work to get there in less than 10 minutes with the bus, so I use the bus. So why should I pay for your medical care when you get in a car accident? Where's the justice in that? If you insist on driving a car, you should take full responsibility for whatever happens as a result. Some drunk redneck in a pickup truck smashed into the side of your car? Too bad, sucker. It wouldn't have happened if you were in a bus, so don't expect sympathy or medical care money from _me_.
- travelling abroad. God knows what exotic diseases they have in those forn places. And then you go do your vacation or business there, get it and expect the rest of us to pay for your medicine. Worse yet, bring that disease back home and cause even more people to need medical care. It should be illegal, that's what I say. If closed city-state economies were good in the middle ages, they're good enough today too.
- parents. Yes, you've read that right. God knows how many shrinks make a living just out of people whose mom didn't buy them a lollypop, or whose dad never had enough time for them. Or worse yet, think of all the children that get molested or beat up by their parents, and then end up needing a decade of therapy for it. If we made parents illegal, think of how much money society as a whole would save. Each city should have one big orphanage (or several, if it's a really big city) where all kids are raised, far from their parents.
Etc. </sarcasm>
Or you could stop being a self-centered judgmental asshole, and stop pretending that only the things _you_ do should be subsidized by everyone else. Life in society is a give-and-take thing. Yes, you pay for some smoker's medical bills, but then he/she pays for something else you may need. That's how it works.
Don't be alarmed, Arthur Dent. Be very, very frightened.
Human thought is a rather complex thing, that don't always appear to follow logical patterns or rules. Or not the simple "if I want X, I must do Y" clear-cut rules that nerds everywhere expect. Human thought is a complex attempt at balancing the priority of not only "I want X", but also stuff like "but it would be socially bad to be seen doing Y", and "I could do Y1 instead, but that's way more effort than I can be arsed to do today", and "it would be nice to have time left to do Z too today, or the missus will blow a gasket", and quite often "actually I don't really want X, I want Z, but it would be uncool to admit that." It's not just following rules and logic, it's trying to fit it all in a complex scheme of priorities, social rituals, and whatnot, and most often boiling down to finding the least crappy compromise in that space.
In other words, whenever you find yourself thinking, "meh, people/men/women/engineers/PHBs/whatever are so stupid/illogical/whatever. If they want X, they should just do Y", chances are it's not them who are illogical. It's you who don't understand their personal version of that maze of priorities and rituals. Or what is the real Z they're after, when they say they want X.
Most of those things aren't even at a conscious level. Even if you poll people along the lines of "if you wanted X, would you do Y?", you'll get an answer that's most often useless. For starters it will be heavily skewed towards what they'd like to think of themselves, not what they'd actually do. Second, without providing a _lot_ of context, it will bypass most of those priorities and rituals that might override that in practice.
What's the point of this whole rant? That the first AIs trained by humans will inherently be a dud.
If you make an AI that functions by precise, inflexible rules, congratulations, you've just programmed OCPD. Literally.
Add a lack of perceptions of human reactions, feelings, body language, etc, and you've given it Autism too. Again, pretty literally.
I.e., I'd expect the first few AIs, or even generations of AIs to be... well, don't think the lovable R2D2 or the essentially human C3-PO, but an electronic equivalent of the most obnoxious socially-dysfunctional kind of geek.
If you want that as an overlord... I don't know, I hope I'm not around at least.
Well, see, the civilized world in the meantime has conventions against the use of cruel or unusual punishments. Just because some assholes have been shooting rockets at each other's civilian population, doesn't mean you can go and subject them to Clippy (the modern Chinese Water Torture) until their mind snaps.
Plus, hey, think of your own good first. There's no shame in that. Them bombing each other is one thing, but if you make them fly airplanes into the Microsoft buildings, you could be stuck with Dubya for ever.
Think about it this way: If some people make a living out of just crying wolf... guess what they'll do? Cry wolf. Lots. Invent gazillions of wolves to scare their customers with. Tell them that 250% of the North American wolves are in their backyard.
So, yes, basically that's what they claimed in that case: that 150% of the clicks were fraudulent. Literally.
Are you surprised?
All these "click fraud consultants" are people making their money by crying wolf. Unlike any other kind of consultant, they don't even have to fix the problem or anything. (Which, in other kinds of consulting is a clear test of whether the problem is real or bogus. If, say a DB consultant tells you that your querries are too complex, there's a very simple test there: then you write faster ones, please. If the app runs faster afterwards, ok, he was right. If not, well, the problem was bogus.)
but for this flavour it's a job that has actually less reality checks than an astrologer. As long as you say what the hapless customer wants to hear, in the form that he wants to hear it, that's all the "data" you need. And you already know from the start what the customer wants to hear. How convenient is that? You get called by someone who already strongly suspects click fraud (or he wouldn't bother paying a consultant), and has no clue how to check it (ditto.) You only need to do the sacred hocus-pocus and cast the holy runes (or the modern equivalents, involving spreadsheets and powerpoint graphs) and finally tell him "wow, you were right."
Plus, think long term. If you tell someone "well, there's a couple of dubious clicks in there, but nothing that would really tilt the statistics by much", that's the end of that relationship right there and then. If you tell him that your secret voodoo found 150% fraud, he'll call you next week too, to see if it gets better or worse.
I'll take a materialist over an emotionalist any day. I mean fuck, get over your goddamn self (the author of the article)! You may have lost most of your material possessions, but apparently those were the least of your attachments.
(yes, I encounter too many people who go on and fucking on about some trivial event)
Aaand we have a winner. The Mr Insensitive prize goes to noidentity (188756).
Now on a more serious note... Dude, do you even have a fucking clue what you're talking about or asking for there? Some people got psychologically scarred for life with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. You think you can just tell someone "fuck, get over your goddamn self" and their psychological trauma will heal just like that? What else? Go tell people in a wheelchair, "fuck, get on your goddamn feet" and see them miraculously healed? Are you Jesus, or what?
PTSD is an actual brain dysfunction, complete with a change in hormone and mediator balance. It's not something someone chose as a lifestyle. It's a primal instinct of desperately trying to learn how you could have avoided a situation where you barely escaped with your life. Except there's nothing to learn, so it goes on for ever. How the fuck do you expect someone to just heal an actual dysfunction of their body? No, seriously, I'm curious. Please enlighten me. How is that supposed to work?
No, seriously, it cracks me up seeing people thinking you can just tell someone to heal, just because it's a psychological problem. As if someone had consciously decided to have a hell life with PTSD, and they only need your superior logic to see the flaw in that. In most cases they know they have a problem, and they alread know it's not logical, so pointing it out -- especially that distastefully -- achieves nothing more than being a slap in the face. In the worst case, it actually makes the problem worse: someone with depression will just get more depressed, someone with PTSD will get more stress than they already had, etc.
In a nutshell, the idiotic notion that you can just give someone a mental slap to get them out of PTSD or depression, is as stupid as thinking you can poke a finger into someone's wound to convince them to just heal. That stupid.
Plus, I don't know what Mr Tough facade you're going for, but something like that isn't "some trivial event". If seeing your whole life destroyed before your very eyes and going through a hell time of just staying alive for the next weeks counts as "some trivial event" for you, then who the fuck are you? Rambo? Do you get that happening to you every day? Do you routinely fend off psychos in a lawless city and dive into flooded ruins just to get something to eat or clean water, to the point where it's become trivial and normal? Or what?
Or lemme guess... you're just a self-centered idiot, sitting comfortably in your middle-class home, and decreeing someone else's tragedy as trivial just because it's not yours. As long as _you_ still have _your_ fridge full of fresh food and bottled water, it's "trivial" if someone _else_ had to drink mud.
First the disclaimer: I'm not an American, I'm not in the USA, I don't even have relatives there or anything. And I'll be the first to bitch and moan about contemporary American politics and about the occasional chest-thumping redneck. But this... you, sir, are a fucking lunatic and it's people like you that are the problem with the world today. Seriously.
For starters even if you make everyone who voted for Bush personally responsible for all of Bush's idiocies, only slightly less than half the votes went to Bush. So what's your problem with the other half, then? You're willing to dance on someone's grave just because they were born in the USA, or what? How fucked up is that?
And at that point, how does it make you any better? If you're willing to cheer for destruction and suffering inflicted upon civilians, just because they're in the USA, then how does that make you better than those who wish the same on people just because they're born in Iraq? No, seriously. What moral high ground can you claim, from which to look down on them, when you're as big an idiot as the most retarded bible-thumping rednecks they have?
And I'm serious about the "people like you" part. The whole vicious circle of inflicting nasty stuff upon each other is based on people taking the whole Us-Vs-Them thing too seriously. People willing to wish you a flaming death just because of where you were born or who your grandparents were. It's _precisely_ such people who thought it would be a great idea to fly an airplane full of innocent civilians into a building full of innocent civilians, or anything of that calibre. All the way back into ancient history, when an army entered a city and proceeded to rape, kill and enslave just to show them who's the new boss, it was just that mentality that was the problem. That it's "Us" vs "Them". That if you happen to be born in Carthage, you're personally to blame for what Hannibal did to Rome. Or that if you were living in Jerusalem, you're personally responsible for the Muslims' being in command there. (See the Crusaders slaughtering a ridiculous number of the very Christians they were supposedly trying to save.)
And you're willing to cheer for... what? For Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, i.e., for permanent psychological damage? Because under the whole bullshit philosophy angle in the summary, that's the cruel reality. It's not that those people had a flash of Nirvana-like enlightenment that material possessions are worthless. It's that those people had the trauma of seeing everything they owned turned into junk or washed away, and went through some hell just keeping onto their very life. A lot of them are probably _affraid_ to get attached to any item any more, and are looking forward to a life spent in fight-or-flight mode, and of waking up in cold sweat after a nightmare about it.
PTSD is a bitch. Your brain gets switched into a semi-permanent mode of trying to learn how you should have dealt with the horror where you actually had no control and no way out. There is nothing to learn, but that's the only thing that would naturally end it. So you're stuck re-living it over and over again. And yet avoiding anything that reminds you of it. So, yes, a lot of them will be stuck fearing the very notion of ever getting attached to something or someone ever again. It's not just their gaming life that's taken a change, it's that their whole _Real_ _Life_ is fucked up now. Including any hope of a meaningful family life, social life, etc.
Yes, it's not fun for the people who got it in Iraq. (Both American soldiers and Iraqis.) But it's not fun for the poor buggers that got it from Katrina.
And frankly, I find it distasteful to use someone's hell to make some personal political point with. That goes for both you, and the pseudo-philosophy in TFA. Those people didn't reach some Zen enlightenment, they were scarred for life. And if all someone can think about is how it affects the gaming habbits, that someone is either a prick or completely out of touch with reality.
Again, I won't argue too much there. This being the real world, there are few clear-cut "good guys". I don't know if the devs were knights in shiny armour. Probably not. You don't see many of those these days, and you see even fewer getting big contracts. I am, however, saying that the municipality acted like complete idiots there.
It sounds like the software stopped working because of an intentional hook in the code that says you have to keep paying. If Hoboken agreed fine. However, my point is that people want to BUY stuff now. Hoboken should not have been renting the software while paying for the hardware.
No fundamental arguments there. In an ideal world, Hoboken _should_ have just bought the software, but the fact is that they were renting it. They even knew very well that they're renting it, since they had switched to a monthly payment plan by the end of 2005. You don't go tell someone "hey, I want to pay you monthly for it" if you think you bought the software. Noone gets sudden ideas like "Hey, I want to pay monthly for this thing I've already bought."
Paying for support when something BREAKS is one thing. Paying to keep using it for an arbitrary reason of "lets pay the developers more" doesn't seem right either.
It doesn't seem right to get fleeced on the monthly plan for a mobile phone, instead of paying for it up front, either, yet people do that all the time. Don't ask me why. Between (A) paying a couple hundred bucks up front for the mobile phone, or (B) getting the phone for almost nothing, but getting fleeced a lot more on the contract, you already know what most people do. Cue similar examples about HP printers and getting fleeced on ink for them, or Gilette razors and paying a (minor) king's ransom on blades, etc. People do that kind of contracts. It's not necessarily logical, but it happens all the time.
And anything that involves elected politicians also has the issue of shifting some of the costs onto someone else, or trying to look good on election years even at the cost of getting a worse deal in the long run. I can very easily imagine a scenario where a politician thought it looks better to pay 5500$ per month in the election year, than pay, say, $100,000 up front and be done with it. The first one looks cheaper on the budget, and your average voter won't go through the contracts to see at what long term price that came.
Where did you get those ideas. I've RTFA twice, and:
1. I see no mention of the developpers trying to raise the price unilaterally. The only mention is that they switched from renting in bigger chunks to paying monthly, which, frankly doesn't strike me as some unilateral developper action or as something extraordinary or unreasonable. Then at the end of July they refused to pay at all any more and, surprise, they got locked out.
2. The "changing the locks" part doesn't strike me as unreasonable, since the municipality is the entity that tried to play hardball in the first place. I'd appeal to the devs humanity and all, if it was them that just locked down the system and walked away. But after being escorted out by the police, sued, and basically given one big "fuck you, then we'll run your software without a license"... frankly, I can't blame them. In that situation, I too would say, "no, fuck you, you deal with it then. You should have thought of getting the cars out before kicking us out."
I mean, seriously: X tries to shaft Y from a position of power, and X unknowingly shafts himself instead. Hard. I don't know about you, but I'll say "serves the idiot right." It's like watching Will E Coyote try to drop a boulder on the Roadrunner, and getting squashed himself instead. Serves the idiot right.
Plus, the analogy isn't exactly accurate, since the developpers didn't exactly "change the locks" after the contract expired. A more accurate analogy would be that Joe's locks were set to expire if he doesn't pay the rent, and it was in Joe's contract all the time. (Dunno how. Maybe a building which uses RFID locks could do just that.) Normally you _would_ expect the landlord to at least let you get your furniture back, yes. But in this case Joe decided to play hardball with the landlord, kicked him out, and had a "ha ha, I'm already in, I can stop paying and there's nothing you can do about it" attitude. Then discovers that the locks expired and he's just locked himself out. And he _still_ doesn't want to pay, but tries to sue the landlord. Would _you_ still expect humanity out of the landlord in that case? I don't know. I'd just have a hearty laugh in Joe's face there.
3. Speaking of slimeball hardball, if you've RTFA, one lawsuit against the municipality is that they brought another company in and tried to crack the software into working without a license. Sorry, that's just as distasteful as it gets.
If you still want to go by Joe's rent analogy, picture bringing a locksmith to just let yourself back in, after the landlord kicked you out. Sorry, it's the kind of thing that makes you think, "WTF were they _smoking_?"
Well, more like saying that while your post is insightful and all, it's not really relevant to what happened there. True, when writing completely custom programs, the development methods will be the same anyway, but... in this case it's not the development methods that are to blame.
This is _not_ about software malfunctioning, nor about development methods.
It's simply about some sociopathic municipality official trying to play hardball with the developpers. Maybe he thought he can run the software without a license, just because he's high and mighty. Or maybe he thought that he can negotiate from such a position of power (e.g., by such shows of power as calling the cops to drag the developpers out) as to get them to beg for any lousy settlement instead of the nominal price. I don't know. Then the software worked as intended, i.e., it just stopped working when the license file expired. That's all.
I've met such nutcases before. People who aren't in it even for economic incentives, but because they get a boner out of being in a position of power and shafting the little guys. Try to own or represent a small company in the relationship with a big entity, and it's nigh impossible to _not_ meet such people. Chances are at least every other meeting or negotiation with said big entity will be them trying to shaft you so hard that you'll walk funny for a week. It goes beyond just trying to get the best price. It's stuff that's trying to outright shaft you, and doing any illegal trick in the book (like witholding the payment for the last contract until they hopefully starve you into accepting a suicidal next one) just on the assumption that you can't afford to sue them. But I digress.
At any rate, it's not about a software bug, it's not about development methods, etc. That's all I'm saying.
Even the F/OSS license is mentioned there more as a "I bet they'd be easier to shaft if they had an OSS license. Then we could just take their sources and stop paying rent anyway." It's sorta like Joe in my analogy wishing, "I wish this house had no locks, so the landlord can't keep me out if I stop paying the rent." It's technically true, but it's used in such an unethical context that it makes me sick. But I digress again.
1. The techno-fetishism part. Look at the post I was answering to. It was literally dividing the world into (A) the ones with the HDTV, PVR, etc, as the "technologically informed" and (B) the rest of the world. I mean, literally, based on ownership, either you have all the gizmos, or you're too uninformed to know that they exist.
Which, sorry, strikes me as fetishism. If anyone can see a PVR as _that_ necessary, to the point where the only way to not have one is to be "technologically uninformed"... I don't know, that's already even past the usual snotty elitism level. That's already in the bizarre fetish territory. Any normal human would have a long list of other stuff they need more than a PVR or HDTV, and only get to the PVR or HDTV if they still have money left after all that stuff.
I'm not saying that HDTV isn't better, I'm basically saying that for the average person it's more in the optional luxuries range than in the necessities range. Sure, it's better, but there are a lot of things that most people would do with their money before they get to needing one, especially if they only watch TV for only a few hours a week. I dunno, getting a better house, a car, whatever, or just saving a little money for the next time they have to look for a job. (It really helps if you can afford to look for a good job, as opposed to getting the first crap one out of sheer lack of options.) Placing a stupid PVR above and beyond all that, to the point where the only way for someone to _not_ have one is to be uninformed... well, that's what I was filing under bizarre fetish.
Whether you fit that definition or not, I couldn't tell, but it seems to me you're more logical than thinking you absolutely need a computer attached to the TV, just because it's a computer. The "knowing there are better channels of information than TV" part hints at some rational thought behind it. No idea, though.
2. About the conspicuous consumption. Well, 19" probably isn't conspicuous consumption, or not too bad as conspicuous consumption goes. They're getting pretty mainstream nowadays. Still, there _are_ people who use their gadgets as status symbols.
3. About the "sour grapes" part... Not sure in what way you mean it. If you mean as in the usual "I bet you wish you could afford one"... I've already said I'm a programmer, and let's just say my business card says "senior consultant". Sure, it's not a CEO salary by a very wide margin, but trust me, I _can_ afford a TV or a computer (in PVR form or not). The economy isn't _that_ bad yet:P
It doesn't mean I can't sneer at conspicuous consumption, though. Just because I can afford to blow money on stuff I don't need, doesn't mean I _have_ to.
I see people digging themselves into debt every day trying to keep up with the proverbial Joneses, and to preferrably out-spend the Joneses. Unfortunately consumerism is a never-ending race. People think "wow, how happy I would be if I had just that one extra piece of merchandise." And they actually are... for a whole couple of days. Then, due to how the human brain works, it becomes the new baseline. And they need to one-up it to get their next temporary high. And then the Joneses buy an even bigger gizmo, and now they have to one-up _that_. It never ends, and it never actually works like people hope. It's a neverending carrot on a stick that people hold in front of their own eyes. Surely the _next_ purchase will be the one that keeps you happy for ever. Oops. It still didn't.
Let me give you a practical metaphor for it all. Let's say that Joe Average is fresh out of college, got his new job, and needs a home. So his options are buy a home, or rent a home. Buying it costs waay too much, but Joe can rent a decent home for, say, $1000 per month. So he rents it, pays his $1000 for the first month, and moves in. The first month goes by and Joe decides "wth, I already have the house, why should I keep paying for it?" So he refuses to pay for the next month. He even calls the cops to escort the landlord out, when said landlord tries to negotiate getting his money, and proceeds to sue the landlord and paint him as a monster to the media. Only a monster could extort another $1000 out of Joe, under such threats as kicking him out of his home, obviously.
Do you get the idea that Joe is a complete cretin by now? Does it invoke thoughts along the lines of, "nobody can be _that_ stupid, dude. Everyone would know it doesn't work that way," perchance?
Because that's a literal analogy for what those guys tried to do with the robotics software. What Joe in my example does with the house, the municipality official did with the software. Literally.
The municipality basically _could_ have paid to develop the software and the garage from scratch (F/OSS or not), but I'd bet that it would have been a lot more expensive, took longer, and ran a non-zero risk of ending up over-budget and dragging for years past the deadline, leaving you with a garage that doesn't work. And I really mean a _lot_ longer, because you also have to thoroughly test it, review the code, etc, to be sure it doesn't do something extremely stupid. (E.g., you don't want it to malfunction and move an elevator while a car is only half-way in it, destroying the car in the process.) At that point, you can probably have it GPL'ed or whatever, since you paid for it from scratch.
Or you could do what they did, and buy an _almost_ off-the-shelf solution for a fraction of the price. (Yes, it's not "off the shelf" in the sense of buying it at Wal Mart like you could buy a copy of Office, but still, an existing solution. Or at least something that only needs some small changes, as opposed to starting from scratch.) At which point, you get to take whatever the heck license you can get for those money.
Furthermore, presumably to save some money, they only rented that software for X years. Then when the deadline went, the municipality basically thought "muahahaha, why pay some more when we already have the software? Look at all the money we could save by running the software without a license. Let's shaft the developpers instead." And they even literally call the cops to kick the developper's employees off the premises.
Which, sorry, is just unethical and stupid. I can't feel any empathy for them in that kind of situation.
Furthermore, then when the software stopped working without a valid license, they tried to villify the developpers in the media, as well as drag them to court. As if they had some sacred/constitutional right to run a garage with stolen software, and the developpers were such monsters to deny them this opportunity.
Does it sound like complete slimeballs by now? Because it sure as heck does to me. Imagine that someone ignores your license (GPL or whatever floats your boat), and then they sue _you_, and try to paint _you_ as some monster to the media for trying to enforce your license. That kind of complete sleazeballs.
OTOH, an appropriately small, low-powered, silent computer by the TV, with a noisy file server in the closet, makes a fantastically nice movie jukebox.
At which point you've invested what for most people is a metric buttload of money into two computers, to do very little more than what a DVD player already does. (Most of the population isn't exactly on a six digit salary.)
Especially to get a truly silent computer you end up needing a special ribbed case that acts like a heatsink. E.g., the Zalman TNN ones. Because, again, I don't want whirring fans when I'm watching a movie. Except the TNN costs about 500 Euro and looks like crap in the living room, because it's one big weird tower.
Or, if you're truly nerdy, you can spend a month or two researching ways to silence and soundproof a PC made out of run-of-the-mill off-the-shelf components. It costs money, and it costs time. And you'll be spending a lot of that time sorting the good information on the net from astroturfing, and from posts by people who must be deaf to think that a big 3000-4000 RPM fan is anywhere _near_ silent. It's something that only a true nerd can consider anywhere near entertaining. And sad to say, the end result at least in my case _still_ isn't anywhere near as silent as a dedicated DVD player. Buggerit...
Or you end up ordering something like a Hush PC. Silent, sexy and all, except anything even moderately powerful starts at around 1600 Euro and goes all the way to 3000 Euro. Teh oops. Even their Via C3 ones start at about 600 Euro.
Which all brings us to the real issue:
So, actually, there is something to the argument that people don't want one because they're technically uninformed. That's only part of it, because when people I know actually look into getting one for themselves, they get put off by the cost and complexity.
Ah-ha. Yep, that's the real problem: the cost. (You'll see I mentioned the same for HDTV in my previous post.)
Noone says that there wouldn't be some advantages from going HDTV or PVR, and noone would refuse one if it was for free. (Heck, I probably wouldn't refuse even the fridge with a web server, if it was for free.) The question in the real world is: is that improvement worth the money and time investment? Is it the best thing I can get for that money? Or is it paying a lot of money for a tiny little improvement in convenience? You don't have to be uninformed to choose something else for that money.
That's basically the difference I had in mind between techno-fetishists and the reality-based people. The techno-fetishist seems to start from the axiom that you absolutely need the latest computer-based gizmo or gimmick if you know about it. That there's no way you could end up not buying it, unless you're technologically uninformed/illiterate/whatever.
Look, I'm not saying that it adds absolutely nothing whatsoever. I'm saying that it doesn't add enough to warrant the GGP post's dividing people into (A) those who have all the latest digital gizmos, and (B) the technologically uninformed/illiterate/elitist-euphemism-of-the-mon th. There _are_ plenty of reasons to decide you don't want one, or rather that you could get more use out of using the same money something else.
I know people who've preferred to buy a house, or a car, or god knows what else. Or maybe just save some money for when/if the shit hits the fan and they need to spend a few months looking for a new job. (It helps a lot if you know you can survive for extended periods that way, so you don't get desperate enough to _need_ to take the first crap job that's available.) Not because they're technology-challenged or luddites, but because they needed/wanted/fancied the other thing more.
That's all I'm saying. You _can_ be informed and still feel no need to have the absolutely latest fad or gizmo.
And I'm saying that at the point where one sees such gizmos as absolutely essential -- to the point of calling people "technologically uninformed/illiterate/etc" if they don't run buy the latest fad or gizmo _now_ -- then that's already a fetish, rather than anything resembling rational adult behaviour.
When it all comes down to it, whether a game is 14+ or 15+ or 14.75+ will not matter, only what the parent thinks at the time of the purchase.
Well, bingo, which is why most such ratings, ESRB included, also tell you what to expect in the game. That's why you see not only a "T" rating, but also stuff like "violence" or "sexual themese" on the box. So the parent can form his/her own idea whether it's ok for his/her 12 year old or not. Maybe some don't mind the violence in some contexts. (E.g., my parents thought it was ok for me to watch wild west movies, with lynchings and all, from a very early age, on account that there the good guys always win. And that to them was a more important lesson to teach me.) But maybe they don't want to buy a softcore porn game for said 12 year old. (E.g., "The Singles.")
And to that end the ESRB ratings as they are, are just short of useless. When they're not undershooting, they're overshooting. You see something like "violence" slapped indiscriminately even on "The Sims" where the most violence you could see was a limp-wristed slap or a cartoonish dust cloud. Or you see "suggestive sexual themes" slapped on, again, "The Sims" where a kiss was most that you could see. Not even some tongue-sucking both-hands-up-her-blouse kind of kiss.
So, yes, it would be nice if they played the games before rating them.
There really is a fundamental disconnect between most of America (world) and the technologically informed.
No, the fundamental disconnect is between techno-fetishist nerds and those still anchored in reality.
The mistake that techno-fetishists make is assuming that "technologically informed" inherently equals being some techno-fetishist nerd. You know the kind. The kind that thinks that a computer automatically makes everything better, for no other reason than being a computer. And thus actually thinks that it's a good idea to have a web server on his fridge, so he can check the temperature in it from work. Or than it's a good, nay, a _great_ idea to slap a browser and an LCD display on a microwave oven so you can surf on it (supposedly for recipes) while you heat your TV dinner in it. (Don't laugh. Some company came up with just that product. Literally.)
But mostly just because. Because in their mind the computer is a purpose in and by itself, and everything else is just a means and an excuse to interact with the oh-so-cool computer.
It doesn't equal. There are plenty of us for whom the computer is just a tool, like any other tool. And just as you don't need a hammer to cook your dinner, you don't need a web browser for it either.
There are plenty of cheaper gadgets which do one job well, and which don't really need a pimped-up gaming rig to do.
E.g., a fridge is just a fridge. All it needs is a thermostat. I don't need to check its temperature over the internet every hour. I just need the confidence that it has a simple and robust thermostat that will work for years or decades without any need to babysit it. The simpler and lower tech, the better.
E.g., a microwave oven is just a microwave oven. I don't want to browse for recipes on it. Any recipes I might have in mind have been (A) researched _before_ even buying the ingredients, and it's by definition too late for that at the time of cooking them, and (B) cooked in the normal oven, if it's a recipe worth researching and not just a TV dinner. It doesn't need a web browser and LCD display driving the price up. All I want from it is the peace of mind that if I set it to 15 minutes, it will stop after roughly 15 minutes. It doesn't have to be synchronized to NTP and it doesn't need micro-second accuracy either. As long as it stops somewhere between 14 and 16 minutes, it's ok.
And so is it with "media" computers or "home theathre" computers too. It's not that people are somehow not "technologically informed", it's that it's such a techno-fetishist use of technology. To record a show, even an ancient VCR is enough. (Though you might go for a DVD recorder nowadays.) To watch a rented DVD with your family, you only need a DVD player. (If you got a DVD recorder at the previous step, it will have that included.) To have some music in your living room, you just need a CD player. (And again, the DVD player or recorder from the previous step, it might have that included.) You don't need an expensive renamed gaming rig to do those, and you don't need the whirring of its fans and hard drives while you watch a movie.
Even with TVs, it's not that anyone is "technologically uninformed" and doesn't know about HDTV. Trust me, everyone has at least heard that they exist. It's that normal people have other priorities to spend their money on. Sure, a big LCD HDTV screen is nice, _but_ you could use that money on something else instead. That's where those nice big TVs fail for the majority of the population. The improvement exists, but it just isn't worth the cost, or more precisely giving up something else you could use that money on. You can spend the evening in front of an old-fashioned 60 Hz interlaced idiot-box just as well, for a fraction of the cost, and from 10 ft distance it won't look that much worse.
They're currently just a conspicuous-consumption status-symbol thing. They're like gold watches or pimped-up sports cars at mid-life crisis: something you buy just to show everyo
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Then if you're willing to make a mockery of science by defining things by where culture put them, why stop there? Why bother having a science at all, for that matter? E.g.,
- at one point it was in the culture and literature, and all educated people knew, that the sun revolves around the earth, that there are no satellites except the moon, and that a cannonball twice as heavy falls twice as fast. That is, until that Galileo guy came and made a telescope, or actually dropped two cannonballs from a tower. So we should do... what? What do you propose? That for example Jupiter should have been honorarily proclaimed a planet without satellites, just to honour the tradition? That the heavier cannonball be honorarily proclaimed to fall faster, experimental values be damned?
- at one point it was in the culture and literature, and all educated people knew, that the earth is flat. Then came such people as Magellan who actually sailed around it. So what do you do there? Proclaim the Earth a honorary disc, just because that was the established mis-conception?
- at one point it was in the culture and literature, and all educated people knew, that everything is made out of 4 elements and the only thing that separates lead from gold is the proportion of those. I.e., that you could transform anything into anything else -- including the infamous lead-into-gold -- by just finding the right thing to mix it with, as to get the proportions just right for the target element. So we should have done... what, all along? Warped chemistry around that bogus notion, just to avoid upsetting the existing falsehoods? That instead of Mendeleev's table we should have a table with the proportions of the 4 elements for everything?
Etc.
Sad to break your illusions, but science is precisely about proving the existing theories false. That's _all_ that science is about: having nothing sacred or set in stone, and trying to prove the existing explanations false. It's _exactly_ about a "I don't care how many people already learned Newtonian mechanics in school, I don't care how much it would upset tradition to disprove Newton, I have a better theory and the data to support it" attitude. That's how every single discovery or progress have been made: someone had a better theory than the previous one.
The moment you start setting things in stone just because that's the pre-existing mis-conception, or caring more about winning popularity contests ("The alternative is for astronomers to be labeled a bunch of squabbling nuts"), that moment you're not doing science any more. Plain and simple.
It's never been about how many planets are enough, and it's not just about Pluto. It's about how you define a planet.
It's, in a nutshell, about science: attempting to actually classify and understand the universe. Just proclaiming "ok, I hereby do dub Pluto a planet" is ok for everyday life, but a bit too vague for science. It's like you can talk generically about "radiation" in casual conversation or in super-hero comics, but to a scientist that's uselessly vague. A scientist will be more interested in what _kind_ of radiation (i.e., the exact particle), at what energies, etc.
The same happens in astrophysics. You can't just say "ooh, that's a pretty star", because that doesn't give you much to work with. Is it a planet? An asteroid? A comet? A star? A nova? A white dwarf? What? There are very good reasons to split hairs there, because out of such splitting hairs comes the understanding of what they are and how they work.
E.g., from the splitting of hairs as to how we classify stars came such categories as "white dwarf." In turn, that let us wonder about how big a white dwarf can be, which gave us the Chandrasekhar limit. In turn that told us that when a star goes over (actually it later it turned out that when it's just right under) that limit, it goes *KABOOM* in a spectacular Type Ia supernova. Since it happens at the exact same point, it tells us that every Type Ia supernova is exactly the same as any other one. Which in turn lets us use them to measure distances and velocities in distant galaxies. And from those came a bunch of other astrophysics stuff.
_That_ is why for science it's important to worry about such distinction. Sure, you can get through your everyday life without ever worrying about the difference between Pluto and an asteroid, or between a Type Ia and a Type 1b supernova. But for scientists, it's an entirely different situation.
The informal proclaiming which is what also doesn't scale. When you deal with a whole universe worth of stuff, you have a continuum of things, ranging from individual nuclei all the way to the super-massive black holes in the centre of galaxies. And there are trillions of trillions of them. You can't just go proclaiming for each and every single one of them if it's a planet, an asteroid, or what. You need some rule you can apply there.
There's yet another factor remaining, so I'm going to just wait and see. Maybe Youtube will do just fine without any further incentives.
The factor is: most me-too clones suck. There are a lot of PHBs... err... MBAs out there who seem to think that jumping on a bandwagon means doing the absolute crappiest job, with the cheapest unskilled monkeys off the street. And that you can just make up for that by adding some "features" that are just a PHBs ego trip, as opposed to even trying to understand what the market wants. (Think of all those dot-com era "features" like adding blinking text, or bright blue text on a green background.)
It's not just Google or Ebay. Look at the iPod or iTunes too, at that. (And disclaimer, I'm not even an iPod or Apple fan, but I can still be disgusted with _stupid_ imitation when I see it.)
E.g., you'd think that making yet another HDD based media player would be an easy enough proposition, no? Yet it took half a decade for people to even begin getting their act straight. Some were as big as a freaking brick (I still remember an Archos which was _literally_ as big as a 5" HDD), some had a nightmarish user interface (I'm looking at you, Creative), some insisted on ruining a perfectly good MP3 by re-converting it to their own proprieatry lossy compression in 64kbps (Sony, you suck), etc. And yet paradoxically a lot of them were actually more expensive than a similar capacity iPod. And when they tried adding a feature of their own, even one which might be useful in its own right, like video playback, it came at the expense of being badly implemented _and_ ending up costing more than a good laptop.
Ditto for iTunes. It never ceases to amaze me how many bad ideas people try to cram into copying that... badly. Ranging from the functionality of their program or web site, to the music selection, to some hare-brained ideas like, basically, "I know! People would love to pay for the privilege of indentured servitude to us! I bet everyone just dreams of a service where we hold their whole music collection hostage, and can remotely render it useless if they even think of stopping paying monthly." I mean, seriously, wtf? Who there thought that blatant extortion is a feature?
Those are just two random examples. I could give more, but it's already too long a rant anyway.
The moral is: don't underestimate how crappy a job some people can do when they try to copy something they don't even understand. I wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of PHBs out there managed to get even copying Youtube wrong. It may seem like a clear and straightforward idea, that noone can possibly get wrong, but then the same could have been said about everything else which did get copied all wrong.
I can just see it. Next thing you know, the RIAA hires hitmen instead of lawyers.
That's just the thing: they never started as "regular" people.
About 1% of the population are psychopaths. They have no empathy to start with (or rather, they _do_ read your body language very well... but then at most use it to shaft you).
They're essentially living in a single-player game, surrounded by NPCs which are expendable and don't matter. Think of the last time you've played a game. Did you care about the NPCs? Did you care if the hooker you've brained in GTA maybe has children, or maybe is only doing that to pay for her father's surgery, or whatever? Did you care about her feelings, goals in life, etc? Or were you in a frame of mind that NPCs by definition don't matter, and any lies, deceit, even murder, are ok as long as they keep you entertained? It's just a game, and the smart player does whatever works to get ahead, right?
Well, think of people whose approach to RL is just that. Everyone else doesn't matter. Causing any harm is just fair game, if it keeps them entertained. (And indeed a lot of them aren't even motivated by monetary gains, and do outright counter-productive stuff just because they find it entertaining to shaft someone hard.) Most of them are also nigh impossible to threaten, presumably as an effect. At any rate, for them you don't matter. They can tell you to jump off a building with a straight face, if they think you might buy that, and be perfectly able to look themselves in the mirror the next day.
The dumb ones become robbers, gangsters and serial killers, and society eventually puts them behind bars. The smart ones become CEOs and politicians, and get worshipped by Wall Street.
Most of them had no life-shattering trauma to blame it on. Most of the white collar psychopaths come from rich or middle class families, led good lives, had the best education, etc. The only trauma in their life was the one they've inflicted on others.
Some of them will _invent_ some rags-to-riches story, to gain sympathy. It makes people easier to manipulate. But almost invariably those stories aren't actually true.
Well, I'm long past giving a damn about WoW too, but I'm just trying to explain what was the big deal about those 40 player groups.
Even from an outside perspective, elementary arithmetics says 25 instead of 40 is 62.5%. So, yes, it's a lot less.
From the perspective of getting that 40 player group together, it was just nuts for all but the largest guilds. Unless you were in one of the guilds with 300 level 60's, you could look forward to up to 3 hours just getting the last 2-3 people. By the time you got the last people who said they'd come, but were late, the first ones would (understandably) get bored or get their mom screaming at them to go to bed already, and start leaving.
Think of getting 40 people at the office to come with you at a movie. In fact, imagine that you can't even see the movie without exactly 40 people. You could probably easily get 5 people (a "group") to come with you, but getting 40 to do anything meaningful together starts involving meetings just to plan it, coaxing, and then waiting for the guy who comes 2 hours too late because something else got in the way. (And again, you can't go without him.) And then someone calls in sick that day and you get to harrass people on the street to join your movie raid. That's a pretty literal RL analogy of how that went on WoW.
It's boring, it's work, and it has nothing to do with playing the game.
From a human interactions perspective, 40 player raids are just nuts. The chances that someone will have to go afk, or have their mom send them to sleep in the middle of it, or do something stupid (ranging from aggroing the wrong NPC, to mis-click "need" instead of "greed" on a loot roll, to god knows what else), rise to insane values. It's just a source of frictions and people getting pissed off at each other.
It doesn't help that a lot of the others are already irritated by it all, and a lot less willing to forgive and forget. When you're already at the point of having waited for 3 hours for a group, past your bed time, postponing a badly needed snack just so you don't make 39 people wait for you, and only there in the first place because your guild-mates harrassed you into doing the same instance again the 100'th time... you won't be in a great mood to start with. You'll get a lot more irritated when they do stupid things and thus prolong your agony. Heck, chances are even the invariable guy playing a flirty female elf, and doing a non-stop impression of what a male mouth-breather geek thinks female flirting means (usually just one step short of "mmm, please fuck me now, big guy"), will seem a hell of a lot less funny under the circumstances.
From a gameplay and tactics perspective, it's even more nuts. Those people aren't trained soldiers, so even the most elementary group tactics _will_ go wrong when you depend on 40 casual players doing the right thing at the right time. Plus, 40 players on one enemy means a lot of the time you don't even really see what's happening there. The only way anything like that was manageable even on Team Speak was that it had been dumbed down to not needing any tactics or thinking. Everyone just spams the same small number of spells/attacks/whatever, and the keywords there are: small number. Very small number. As a priest for example you'll spam one icon again and again most of the time.
From a rewards/achievements perspective it gets even worse, as out of 40 people, maybe 10 actually need whatever loot that boss dropped. _If_ he even dropped what you were after. If it wasn't enough that that armour piece or whatever is dropped 1% of the time, divide it by 10 people who want it, and now you have a 0.1% chance. So even if you go by a "whoever needs it, roll for it" scheme, chances are you _won't_ get your reward for that raid. And at level 60 you don't get XP out of it either, so it was just a big waste of time.
But even the "whoever needs it, roll for it" scheme went out of fashion sometime last year, as guilds started implementing a "contribution points" scheme. So basica
Unfortunately, it cuts both ways. A lot of people just got _more_ harrassment around that time (except this time by the principal and teachers), just because they were wearing black or were introverted, and they suddenly got labelled as the next guy who'll shoot up the school. A lot found themselves a lot more ostracized than even before. And there are some who had to move out of town sooner or later, because once they had been labelled as the psycho who'll eventually shoot up the school or company, they had trouble getting even a lousy job at the gas station.
Now maybe in your case your hell was deep enough so even that was an improvement. For a lot it wasn't. Some weren't in all-out-war with the whole school to start with. Being labelled as the next mass-murderer just added an extra layer of ostracizing on top of what they already had.
So excuse me if I'm not cheering for the resulting overreaction anyway.
If you're going to use that AI as a tool, yes, ok. But the post I was answering to was the usual "I, for one, welcome our overlords."
And trust me, you _don't_ want an overlord that's inhumanly logical about it. It's that kind of thing that led to such logical solutions as "let's extermine the population of Poland until 1970 to make room for German settlers." Or such logical solutions as communism. Sure, on paper it's perfectly sound and logical, if you assume that you can change humans overnight. Maybe sometimes being able to understand humans actually helps, eh?
That said, most of the stellar job performance that OCPD cases claim exists only in their own mind.
They tend to never get a job done because it's not yet perfect, for example. I have one two rooms from me at the office, who's taken three fucking years just to get a build script done because everything wasn't perfect enough for him. No exaggeration. Literally. Well, in parallel with building a convoluted unit testing environment, because the existing one didn't satisfy his purist view of the matter. (The old tests had some functional testing too. So his perfect version actually tests less, but is _pure_ unit testing, by his own definitions of it.) Of course, he's convinced that he's done a stellar, uncompromising job, but for everyone else he's just wasted some time and didn't even achieve more than what we already had.
Do I really want that even in a computer? Nope, not really. _The_ problem with most programs nowadays is just that: that they're OCPD nutcases. Workflows that were a lot more flexible (even if not as fast) with a pen and paper, get shoehorned into some lobotomized set of rules that allows no exceptions. The problem is that most often the rules aren't actually what the user wants to do: e.g., you end up unable to save a new client's data until you know their fax number, whereas with a paper form you'd fill in the data you have and leave the rest for later. Often it's more annoyance for the users and more work in workarounds, than doing it without a computer in the first place. (Of course, the equally OCPD-ridden creator will then bitch and moan about "idiot lusers" and how everyone should change to fit his perfect tool, instead of his tool changing to do what the user actually needs done.)
No real qualms with autism on its own, though. They tend to be very good with a computer, or any kind of abstract problem for that matter. (If sometimes difficult to deal with in a team.)
Combine it with OCPD, though, and... well, let's just say that they mix like Ammonium Nitrate and Fuel Oil. You get some of the most obnoxious personalities that way, and it's no fun for anyone involved, not even the geek. The poor bugger can't even tell that he's the one who offended the whole room, and proceeds to imagine that he's the victim of unwarranted cruelty.
While you're at the self-centered "let's tell people what to do, because I don't want to pay for their problems" (but supposedly still expect them to pay for _yours_), why stop there? Lemme see what else we should make illegal...
- fucking without a condom. Well, hey, if they're going to be assholes about paying for the medical care for smokers (that's just about all the damage that pot smoking does too), then I don't want to pay for their AIDS/syphilish/etc bill when they go fucking around.
- going in the woods for a picknick or camping. They could get bitten by a bear, or poisoned by a snake, or stung by a bee and discover that they're allergic, or break a leg while climbing on god knows what rock. Why should I pay for the subsequent medical care? Shouldn't they take full responsibility when they decided to go camping? Make that illegal, I say.
- ditto for jogging, come to think of it. If they're going to exercise, they can do that in a safe enclosed place. I'm not gonna pay for their medical care if they insist on running outside where they can be run over by a car.
- for that matter going anywhere out of the house without an umbrella and without a backpack full of warm clothes. What if you get caught in a rain? What if it snows? (Yes, it occasionally does even in August.) Why should it be me who pays for the medicine to treat your pneumonia then? If you're going to go out with just a t-shirt and jeans, you should take full responsibility for whatever happens because of it.
- getting old. Have you see how often those old people get sick and need medical care? And don't even get me started about my paying for their pensions. They should just make suicide mandatory at 65 years old or so.
- using any kind of cell phone, walkman, ipod, or any other personal entertainment device. They can sprain an ankle because of paying more attention to that ipod than to where they step! Or even, don't laugh, back problems as stepping wrong can cause shocks in the spine. Ban any electronics lighter than 40 pounds, I say. Let's see them use _those_ while jogging.
- driving any kind of car, especially anything looking like a sports car. Me, I live close enough to work to get there in less than 10 minutes with the bus, so I use the bus. So why should I pay for your medical care when you get in a car accident? Where's the justice in that? If you insist on driving a car, you should take full responsibility for whatever happens as a result. Some drunk redneck in a pickup truck smashed into the side of your car? Too bad, sucker. It wouldn't have happened if you were in a bus, so don't expect sympathy or medical care money from _me_.
- travelling abroad. God knows what exotic diseases they have in those forn places. And then you go do your vacation or business there, get it and expect the rest of us to pay for your medicine. Worse yet, bring that disease back home and cause even more people to need medical care. It should be illegal, that's what I say. If closed city-state economies were good in the middle ages, they're good enough today too.
- parents. Yes, you've read that right. God knows how many shrinks make a living just out of people whose mom didn't buy them a lollypop, or whose dad never had enough time for them. Or worse yet, think of all the children that get molested or beat up by their parents, and then end up needing a decade of therapy for it. If we made parents illegal, think of how much money society as a whole would save. Each city should have one big orphanage (or several, if it's a really big city) where all kids are raised, far from their parents.
Etc.
</sarcasm>
Or you could stop being a self-centered judgmental asshole, and stop pretending that only the things _you_ do should be subsidized by everyone else. Life in society is a give-and-take thing. Yes, you pay for some smoker's medical bills, but then he/she pays for something else you may need. That's how it works.
Don't be alarmed, Arthur Dent. Be very, very frightened.
Human thought is a rather complex thing, that don't always appear to follow logical patterns or rules. Or not the simple "if I want X, I must do Y" clear-cut rules that nerds everywhere expect. Human thought is a complex attempt at balancing the priority of not only "I want X", but also stuff like "but it would be socially bad to be seen doing Y", and "I could do Y1 instead, but that's way more effort than I can be arsed to do today", and "it would be nice to have time left to do Z too today, or the missus will blow a gasket", and quite often "actually I don't really want X, I want Z, but it would be uncool to admit that." It's not just following rules and logic, it's trying to fit it all in a complex scheme of priorities, social rituals, and whatnot, and most often boiling down to finding the least crappy compromise in that space.
In other words, whenever you find yourself thinking, "meh, people/men/women/engineers/PHBs/whatever are so stupid/illogical/whatever. If they want X, they should just do Y", chances are it's not them who are illogical. It's you who don't understand their personal version of that maze of priorities and rituals. Or what is the real Z they're after, when they say they want X.
Most of those things aren't even at a conscious level. Even if you poll people along the lines of "if you wanted X, would you do Y?", you'll get an answer that's most often useless. For starters it will be heavily skewed towards what they'd like to think of themselves, not what they'd actually do. Second, without providing a _lot_ of context, it will bypass most of those priorities and rituals that might override that in practice.
What's the point of this whole rant? That the first AIs trained by humans will inherently be a dud.
If you make an AI that functions by precise, inflexible rules, congratulations, you've just programmed OCPD. Literally.
Add a lack of perceptions of human reactions, feelings, body language, etc, and you've given it Autism too. Again, pretty literally.
I.e., I'd expect the first few AIs, or even generations of AIs to be... well, don't think the lovable R2D2 or the essentially human C3-PO, but an electronic equivalent of the most obnoxious socially-dysfunctional kind of geek.
If you want that as an overlord... I don't know, I hope I'm not around at least.
Well, see, the civilized world in the meantime has conventions against the use of cruel or unusual punishments. Just because some assholes have been shooting rockets at each other's civilian population, doesn't mean you can go and subject them to Clippy (the modern Chinese Water Torture) until their mind snaps.
Plus, hey, think of your own good first. There's no shame in that. Them bombing each other is one thing, but if you make them fly airplanes into the Microsoft buildings, you could be stuck with Dubya for ever.
Think about it this way: If some people make a living out of just crying wolf... guess what they'll do? Cry wolf. Lots. Invent gazillions of wolves to scare their customers with. Tell them that 250% of the North American wolves are in their backyard.
So, yes, basically that's what they claimed in that case: that 150% of the clicks were fraudulent. Literally.
Are you surprised?
All these "click fraud consultants" are people making their money by crying wolf. Unlike any other kind of consultant, they don't even have to fix the problem or anything. (Which, in other kinds of consulting is a clear test of whether the problem is real or bogus. If, say a DB consultant tells you that your querries are too complex, there's a very simple test there: then you write faster ones, please. If the app runs faster afterwards, ok, he was right. If not, well, the problem was bogus.)
but for this flavour it's a job that has actually less reality checks than an astrologer. As long as you say what the hapless customer wants to hear, in the form that he wants to hear it, that's all the "data" you need. And you already know from the start what the customer wants to hear. How convenient is that? You get called by someone who already strongly suspects click fraud (or he wouldn't bother paying a consultant), and has no clue how to check it (ditto.) You only need to do the sacred hocus-pocus and cast the holy runes (or the modern equivalents, involving spreadsheets and powerpoint graphs) and finally tell him "wow, you were right."
Plus, think long term. If you tell someone "well, there's a couple of dubious clicks in there, but nothing that would really tilt the statistics by much", that's the end of that relationship right there and then. If you tell him that your secret voodoo found 150% fraud, he'll call you next week too, to see if it gets better or worse.
Aaand we have a winner. The Mr Insensitive prize goes to noidentity (188756).
Now on a more serious note... Dude, do you even have a fucking clue what you're talking about or asking for there? Some people got psychologically scarred for life with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. You think you can just tell someone "fuck, get over your goddamn self" and their psychological trauma will heal just like that? What else? Go tell people in a wheelchair, "fuck, get on your goddamn feet" and see them miraculously healed? Are you Jesus, or what?
PTSD is an actual brain dysfunction, complete with a change in hormone and mediator balance. It's not something someone chose as a lifestyle. It's a primal instinct of desperately trying to learn how you could have avoided a situation where you barely escaped with your life. Except there's nothing to learn, so it goes on for ever. How the fuck do you expect someone to just heal an actual dysfunction of their body? No, seriously, I'm curious. Please enlighten me. How is that supposed to work?
No, seriously, it cracks me up seeing people thinking you can just tell someone to heal, just because it's a psychological problem. As if someone had consciously decided to have a hell life with PTSD, and they only need your superior logic to see the flaw in that. In most cases they know they have a problem, and they alread know it's not logical, so pointing it out -- especially that distastefully -- achieves nothing more than being a slap in the face. In the worst case, it actually makes the problem worse: someone with depression will just get more depressed, someone with PTSD will get more stress than they already had, etc.
In a nutshell, the idiotic notion that you can just give someone a mental slap to get them out of PTSD or depression, is as stupid as thinking you can poke a finger into someone's wound to convince them to just heal. That stupid.
Plus, I don't know what Mr Tough facade you're going for, but something like that isn't "some trivial event". If seeing your whole life destroyed before your very eyes and going through a hell time of just staying alive for the next weeks counts as "some trivial event" for you, then who the fuck are you? Rambo? Do you get that happening to you every day? Do you routinely fend off psychos in a lawless city and dive into flooded ruins just to get something to eat or clean water, to the point where it's become trivial and normal? Or what?
Or lemme guess... you're just a self-centered idiot, sitting comfortably in your middle-class home, and decreeing someone else's tragedy as trivial just because it's not yours. As long as _you_ still have _your_ fridge full of fresh food and bottled water, it's "trivial" if someone _else_ had to drink mud.
First the disclaimer: I'm not an American, I'm not in the USA, I don't even have relatives there or anything. And I'll be the first to bitch and moan about contemporary American politics and about the occasional chest-thumping redneck. But this... you, sir, are a fucking lunatic and it's people like you that are the problem with the world today. Seriously.
For starters even if you make everyone who voted for Bush personally responsible for all of Bush's idiocies, only slightly less than half the votes went to Bush. So what's your problem with the other half, then? You're willing to dance on someone's grave just because they were born in the USA, or what? How fucked up is that?
And at that point, how does it make you any better? If you're willing to cheer for destruction and suffering inflicted upon civilians, just because they're in the USA, then how does that make you better than those who wish the same on people just because they're born in Iraq? No, seriously. What moral high ground can you claim, from which to look down on them, when you're as big an idiot as the most retarded bible-thumping rednecks they have?
And I'm serious about the "people like you" part. The whole vicious circle of inflicting nasty stuff upon each other is based on people taking the whole Us-Vs-Them thing too seriously. People willing to wish you a flaming death just because of where you were born or who your grandparents were. It's _precisely_ such people who thought it would be a great idea to fly an airplane full of innocent civilians into a building full of innocent civilians, or anything of that calibre. All the way back into ancient history, when an army entered a city and proceeded to rape, kill and enslave just to show them who's the new boss, it was just that mentality that was the problem. That it's "Us" vs "Them". That if you happen to be born in Carthage, you're personally to blame for what Hannibal did to Rome. Or that if you were living in Jerusalem, you're personally responsible for the Muslims' being in command there. (See the Crusaders slaughtering a ridiculous number of the very Christians they were supposedly trying to save.)
And you're willing to cheer for... what? For Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, i.e., for permanent psychological damage? Because under the whole bullshit philosophy angle in the summary, that's the cruel reality. It's not that those people had a flash of Nirvana-like enlightenment that material possessions are worthless. It's that those people had the trauma of seeing everything they owned turned into junk or washed away, and went through some hell just keeping onto their very life. A lot of them are probably _affraid_ to get attached to any item any more, and are looking forward to a life spent in fight-or-flight mode, and of waking up in cold sweat after a nightmare about it.
PTSD is a bitch. Your brain gets switched into a semi-permanent mode of trying to learn how you should have dealt with the horror where you actually had no control and no way out. There is nothing to learn, but that's the only thing that would naturally end it. So you're stuck re-living it over and over again. And yet avoiding anything that reminds you of it. So, yes, a lot of them will be stuck fearing the very notion of ever getting attached to something or someone ever again. It's not just their gaming life that's taken a change, it's that their whole _Real_ _Life_ is fucked up now. Including any hope of a meaningful family life, social life, etc.
Yes, it's not fun for the people who got it in Iraq. (Both American soldiers and Iraqis.) But it's not fun for the poor buggers that got it from Katrina.
And frankly, I find it distasteful to use someone's hell to make some personal political point with. That goes for both you, and the pseudo-philosophy in TFA. Those people didn't reach some Zen enlightenment, they were scarred for life. And if all someone can think about is how it affects the gaming habbits, that someone is either a prick or completely out of touch with reality.
Again, I won't argue too much there. This being the real world, there are few clear-cut "good guys". I don't know if the devs were knights in shiny armour. Probably not. You don't see many of those these days, and you see even fewer getting big contracts. I am, however, saying that the municipality acted like complete idiots there.
No fundamental arguments there. In an ideal world, Hoboken _should_ have just bought the software, but the fact is that they were renting it. They even knew very well that they're renting it, since they had switched to a monthly payment plan by the end of 2005. You don't go tell someone "hey, I want to pay you monthly for it" if you think you bought the software. Noone gets sudden ideas like "Hey, I want to pay monthly for this thing I've already bought."
It doesn't seem right to get fleeced on the monthly plan for a mobile phone, instead of paying for it up front, either, yet people do that all the time. Don't ask me why. Between (A) paying a couple hundred bucks up front for the mobile phone, or (B) getting the phone for almost nothing, but getting fleeced a lot more on the contract, you already know what most people do. Cue similar examples about HP printers and getting fleeced on ink for them, or Gilette razors and paying a (minor) king's ransom on blades, etc. People do that kind of contracts. It's not necessarily logical, but it happens all the time.
And anything that involves elected politicians also has the issue of shifting some of the costs onto someone else, or trying to look good on election years even at the cost of getting a worse deal in the long run. I can very easily imagine a scenario where a politician thought it looks better to pay 5500$ per month in the election year, than pay, say, $100,000 up front and be done with it. The first one looks cheaper on the budget, and your average voter won't go through the contracts to see at what long term price that came.
Where did you get those ideas. I've RTFA twice, and:
1. I see no mention of the developpers trying to raise the price unilaterally. The only mention is that they switched from renting in bigger chunks to paying monthly, which, frankly doesn't strike me as some unilateral developper action or as something extraordinary or unreasonable. Then at the end of July they refused to pay at all any more and, surprise, they got locked out.
2. The "changing the locks" part doesn't strike me as unreasonable, since the municipality is the entity that tried to play hardball in the first place. I'd appeal to the devs humanity and all, if it was them that just locked down the system and walked away. But after being escorted out by the police, sued, and basically given one big "fuck you, then we'll run your software without a license"... frankly, I can't blame them. In that situation, I too would say, "no, fuck you, you deal with it then. You should have thought of getting the cars out before kicking us out."
I mean, seriously: X tries to shaft Y from a position of power, and X unknowingly shafts himself instead. Hard. I don't know about you, but I'll say "serves the idiot right." It's like watching Will E Coyote try to drop a boulder on the Roadrunner, and getting squashed himself instead. Serves the idiot right.
Plus, the analogy isn't exactly accurate, since the developpers didn't exactly "change the locks" after the contract expired. A more accurate analogy would be that Joe's locks were set to expire if he doesn't pay the rent, and it was in Joe's contract all the time. (Dunno how. Maybe a building which uses RFID locks could do just that.) Normally you _would_ expect the landlord to at least let you get your furniture back, yes. But in this case Joe decided to play hardball with the landlord, kicked him out, and had a "ha ha, I'm already in, I can stop paying and there's nothing you can do about it" attitude. Then discovers that the locks expired and he's just locked himself out. And he _still_ doesn't want to pay, but tries to sue the landlord. Would _you_ still expect humanity out of the landlord in that case? I don't know. I'd just have a hearty laugh in Joe's face there.
3. Speaking of slimeball hardball, if you've RTFA, one lawsuit against the municipality is that they brought another company in and tried to crack the software into working without a license. Sorry, that's just as distasteful as it gets.
If you still want to go by Joe's rent analogy, picture bringing a locksmith to just let yourself back in, after the landlord kicked you out. Sorry, it's the kind of thing that makes you think, "WTF were they _smoking_?"
Well, more like saying that while your post is insightful and all, it's not really relevant to what happened there. True, when writing completely custom programs, the development methods will be the same anyway, but... in this case it's not the development methods that are to blame.
This is _not_ about software malfunctioning, nor about development methods.
It's simply about some sociopathic municipality official trying to play hardball with the developpers. Maybe he thought he can run the software without a license, just because he's high and mighty. Or maybe he thought that he can negotiate from such a position of power (e.g., by such shows of power as calling the cops to drag the developpers out) as to get them to beg for any lousy settlement instead of the nominal price. I don't know. Then the software worked as intended, i.e., it just stopped working when the license file expired. That's all.
I've met such nutcases before. People who aren't in it even for economic incentives, but because they get a boner out of being in a position of power and shafting the little guys. Try to own or represent a small company in the relationship with a big entity, and it's nigh impossible to _not_ meet such people. Chances are at least every other meeting or negotiation with said big entity will be them trying to shaft you so hard that you'll walk funny for a week. It goes beyond just trying to get the best price. It's stuff that's trying to outright shaft you, and doing any illegal trick in the book (like witholding the payment for the last contract until they hopefully starve you into accepting a suicidal next one) just on the assumption that you can't afford to sue them. But I digress.
At any rate, it's not about a software bug, it's not about development methods, etc. That's all I'm saying.
Even the F/OSS license is mentioned there more as a "I bet they'd be easier to shaft if they had an OSS license. Then we could just take their sources and stop paying rent anyway." It's sorta like Joe in my analogy wishing, "I wish this house had no locks, so the landlord can't keep me out if I stop paying the rent." It's technically true, but it's used in such an unethical context that it makes me sick. But I digress again.
Then I haven't explained it well enough.
:P
1. The techno-fetishism part. Look at the post I was answering to. It was literally dividing the world into (A) the ones with the HDTV, PVR, etc, as the "technologically informed" and (B) the rest of the world. I mean, literally, based on ownership, either you have all the gizmos, or you're too uninformed to know that they exist.
Which, sorry, strikes me as fetishism. If anyone can see a PVR as _that_ necessary, to the point where the only way to not have one is to be "technologically uninformed"... I don't know, that's already even past the usual snotty elitism level. That's already in the bizarre fetish territory. Any normal human would have a long list of other stuff they need more than a PVR or HDTV, and only get to the PVR or HDTV if they still have money left after all that stuff.
I'm not saying that HDTV isn't better, I'm basically saying that for the average person it's more in the optional luxuries range than in the necessities range. Sure, it's better, but there are a lot of things that most people would do with their money before they get to needing one, especially if they only watch TV for only a few hours a week. I dunno, getting a better house, a car, whatever, or just saving a little money for the next time they have to look for a job. (It really helps if you can afford to look for a good job, as opposed to getting the first crap one out of sheer lack of options.) Placing a stupid PVR above and beyond all that, to the point where the only way for someone to _not_ have one is to be uninformed... well, that's what I was filing under bizarre fetish.
Whether you fit that definition or not, I couldn't tell, but it seems to me you're more logical than thinking you absolutely need a computer attached to the TV, just because it's a computer. The "knowing there are better channels of information than TV" part hints at some rational thought behind it. No idea, though.
2. About the conspicuous consumption. Well, 19" probably isn't conspicuous consumption, or not too bad as conspicuous consumption goes. They're getting pretty mainstream nowadays. Still, there _are_ people who use their gadgets as status symbols.
3. About the "sour grapes" part... Not sure in what way you mean it. If you mean as in the usual "I bet you wish you could afford one"... I've already said I'm a programmer, and let's just say my business card says "senior consultant". Sure, it's not a CEO salary by a very wide margin, but trust me, I _can_ afford a TV or a computer (in PVR form or not). The economy isn't _that_ bad yet
It doesn't mean I can't sneer at conspicuous consumption, though. Just because I can afford to blow money on stuff I don't need, doesn't mean I _have_ to.
I see people digging themselves into debt every day trying to keep up with the proverbial Joneses, and to preferrably out-spend the Joneses. Unfortunately consumerism is a never-ending race. People think "wow, how happy I would be if I had just that one extra piece of merchandise." And they actually are... for a whole couple of days. Then, due to how the human brain works, it becomes the new baseline. And they need to one-up it to get their next temporary high. And then the Joneses buy an even bigger gizmo, and now they have to one-up _that_. It never ends, and it never actually works like people hope. It's a neverending carrot on a stick that people hold in front of their own eyes. Surely the _next_ purchase will be the one that keeps you happy for ever. Oops. It still didn't.
So there you go. Make what you will out of that.
Let me give you a practical metaphor for it all. Let's say that Joe Average is fresh out of college, got his new job, and needs a home. So his options are buy a home, or rent a home. Buying it costs waay too much, but Joe can rent a decent home for, say, $1000 per month. So he rents it, pays his $1000 for the first month, and moves in. The first month goes by and Joe decides "wth, I already have the house, why should I keep paying for it?" So he refuses to pay for the next month. He even calls the cops to escort the landlord out, when said landlord tries to negotiate getting his money, and proceeds to sue the landlord and paint him as a monster to the media. Only a monster could extort another $1000 out of Joe, under such threats as kicking him out of his home, obviously.
Do you get the idea that Joe is a complete cretin by now? Does it invoke thoughts along the lines of, "nobody can be _that_ stupid, dude. Everyone would know it doesn't work that way," perchance?
Because that's a literal analogy for what those guys tried to do with the robotics software. What Joe in my example does with the house, the municipality official did with the software. Literally.
The municipality basically _could_ have paid to develop the software and the garage from scratch (F/OSS or not), but I'd bet that it would have been a lot more expensive, took longer, and ran a non-zero risk of ending up over-budget and dragging for years past the deadline, leaving you with a garage that doesn't work. And I really mean a _lot_ longer, because you also have to thoroughly test it, review the code, etc, to be sure it doesn't do something extremely stupid. (E.g., you don't want it to malfunction and move an elevator while a car is only half-way in it, destroying the car in the process.) At that point, you can probably have it GPL'ed or whatever, since you paid for it from scratch.
Or you could do what they did, and buy an _almost_ off-the-shelf solution for a fraction of the price. (Yes, it's not "off the shelf" in the sense of buying it at Wal Mart like you could buy a copy of Office, but still, an existing solution. Or at least something that only needs some small changes, as opposed to starting from scratch.) At which point, you get to take whatever the heck license you can get for those money.
Furthermore, presumably to save some money, they only rented that software for X years. Then when the deadline went, the municipality basically thought "muahahaha, why pay some more when we already have the software? Look at all the money we could save by running the software without a license. Let's shaft the developpers instead." And they even literally call the cops to kick the developper's employees off the premises.
Which, sorry, is just unethical and stupid. I can't feel any empathy for them in that kind of situation.
Furthermore, then when the software stopped working without a valid license, they tried to villify the developpers in the media, as well as drag them to court. As if they had some sacred/constitutional right to run a garage with stolen software, and the developpers were such monsters to deny them this opportunity.
Does it sound like complete slimeballs by now? Because it sure as heck does to me. Imagine that someone ignores your license (GPL or whatever floats your boat), and then they sue _you_, and try to paint _you_ as some monster to the media for trying to enforce your license. That kind of complete sleazeballs.
At which point you've invested what for most people is a metric buttload of money into two computers, to do very little more than what a DVD player already does. (Most of the population isn't exactly on a six digit salary.)
Especially to get a truly silent computer you end up needing a special ribbed case that acts like a heatsink. E.g., the Zalman TNN ones. Because, again, I don't want whirring fans when I'm watching a movie. Except the TNN costs about 500 Euro and looks like crap in the living room, because it's one big weird tower.
Or, if you're truly nerdy, you can spend a month or two researching ways to silence and soundproof a PC made out of run-of-the-mill off-the-shelf components. It costs money, and it costs time. And you'll be spending a lot of that time sorting the good information on the net from astroturfing, and from posts by people who must be deaf to think that a big 3000-4000 RPM fan is anywhere _near_ silent. It's something that only a true nerd can consider anywhere near entertaining. And sad to say, the end result at least in my case _still_ isn't anywhere near as silent as a dedicated DVD player. Buggerit...
Or you end up ordering something like a Hush PC. Silent, sexy and all, except anything even moderately powerful starts at around 1600 Euro and goes all the way to 3000 Euro. Teh oops. Even their Via C3 ones start at about 600 Euro.
Which all brings us to the real issue:
Ah-ha. Yep, that's the real problem: the cost. (You'll see I mentioned the same for HDTV in my previous post.)
Noone says that there wouldn't be some advantages from going HDTV or PVR, and noone would refuse one if it was for free. (Heck, I probably wouldn't refuse even the fridge with a web server, if it was for free.) The question in the real world is: is that improvement worth the money and time investment? Is it the best thing I can get for that money? Or is it paying a lot of money for a tiny little improvement in convenience? You don't have to be uninformed to choose something else for that money.
That's basically the difference I had in mind between techno-fetishists and the reality-based people. The techno-fetishist seems to start from the axiom that you absolutely need the latest computer-based gizmo or gimmick if you know about it. That there's no way you could end up not buying it, unless you're technologically uninformed/illiterate/whatever.
Look, I'm not saying that it adds absolutely nothing whatsoever. I'm saying that it doesn't add enough to warrant the GGP post's dividing people into (A) those who have all the latest digital gizmos, and (B) the technologically uninformed/illiterate/elitist-euphemism-of-the-mon th. There _are_ plenty of reasons to decide you don't want one, or rather that you could get more use out of using the same money something else.
I know people who've preferred to buy a house, or a car, or god knows what else. Or maybe just save some money for when/if the shit hits the fan and they need to spend a few months looking for a new job. (It helps a lot if you know you can survive for extended periods that way, so you don't get desperate enough to _need_ to take the first crap job that's available.) Not because they're technology-challenged or luddites, but because they needed/wanted/fancied the other thing more.
That's all I'm saying. You _can_ be informed and still feel no need to have the absolutely latest fad or gizmo.
And I'm saying that at the point where one sees such gizmos as absolutely essential -- to the point of calling people "technologically uninformed/illiterate/etc" if they don't run buy the latest fad or gizmo _now_ -- then that's already a fetish, rather than anything resembling rational adult behaviour.
Well, bingo, which is why most such ratings, ESRB included, also tell you what to expect in the game. That's why you see not only a "T" rating, but also stuff like "violence" or "sexual themese" on the box. So the parent can form his/her own idea whether it's ok for his/her 12 year old or not. Maybe some don't mind the violence in some contexts. (E.g., my parents thought it was ok for me to watch wild west movies, with lynchings and all, from a very early age, on account that there the good guys always win. And that to them was a more important lesson to teach me.) But maybe they don't want to buy a softcore porn game for said 12 year old. (E.g., "The Singles.")
And to that end the ESRB ratings as they are, are just short of useless. When they're not undershooting, they're overshooting. You see something like "violence" slapped indiscriminately even on "The Sims" where the most violence you could see was a limp-wristed slap or a cartoonish dust cloud. Or you see "suggestive sexual themes" slapped on, again, "The Sims" where a kiss was most that you could see. Not even some tongue-sucking both-hands-up-her-blouse kind of kiss.
So, yes, it would be nice if they played the games before rating them.
No, the fundamental disconnect is between techno-fetishist nerds and those still anchored in reality.
The mistake that techno-fetishists make is assuming that "technologically informed" inherently equals being some techno-fetishist nerd. You know the kind. The kind that thinks that a computer automatically makes everything better, for no other reason than being a computer. And thus actually thinks that it's a good idea to have a web server on his fridge, so he can check the temperature in it from work. Or than it's a good, nay, a _great_ idea to slap a browser and an LCD display on a microwave oven so you can surf on it (supposedly for recipes) while you heat your TV dinner in it. (Don't laugh. Some company came up with just that product. Literally.)
But mostly just because. Because in their mind the computer is a purpose in and by itself, and everything else is just a means and an excuse to interact with the oh-so-cool computer.
It doesn't equal. There are plenty of us for whom the computer is just a tool, like any other tool. And just as you don't need a hammer to cook your dinner, you don't need a web browser for it either.
There are plenty of cheaper gadgets which do one job well, and which don't really need a pimped-up gaming rig to do.
E.g., a fridge is just a fridge. All it needs is a thermostat. I don't need to check its temperature over the internet every hour. I just need the confidence that it has a simple and robust thermostat that will work for years or decades without any need to babysit it. The simpler and lower tech, the better.
E.g., a microwave oven is just a microwave oven. I don't want to browse for recipes on it. Any recipes I might have in mind have been (A) researched _before_ even buying the ingredients, and it's by definition too late for that at the time of cooking them, and (B) cooked in the normal oven, if it's a recipe worth researching and not just a TV dinner. It doesn't need a web browser and LCD display driving the price up. All I want from it is the peace of mind that if I set it to 15 minutes, it will stop after roughly 15 minutes. It doesn't have to be synchronized to NTP and it doesn't need micro-second accuracy either. As long as it stops somewhere between 14 and 16 minutes, it's ok.
And so is it with "media" computers or "home theathre" computers too. It's not that people are somehow not "technologically informed", it's that it's such a techno-fetishist use of technology. To record a show, even an ancient VCR is enough. (Though you might go for a DVD recorder nowadays.) To watch a rented DVD with your family, you only need a DVD player. (If you got a DVD recorder at the previous step, it will have that included.) To have some music in your living room, you just need a CD player. (And again, the DVD player or recorder from the previous step, it might have that included.) You don't need an expensive renamed gaming rig to do those, and you don't need the whirring of its fans and hard drives while you watch a movie.
Even with TVs, it's not that anyone is "technologically uninformed" and doesn't know about HDTV. Trust me, everyone has at least heard that they exist. It's that normal people have other priorities to spend their money on. Sure, a big LCD HDTV screen is nice, _but_ you could use that money on something else instead. That's where those nice big TVs fail for the majority of the population. The improvement exists, but it just isn't worth the cost, or more precisely giving up something else you could use that money on. You can spend the evening in front of an old-fashioned 60 Hz interlaced idiot-box just as well, for a fraction of the cost, and from 10 ft distance it won't look that much worse.
They're currently just a conspicuous-consumption status-symbol thing. They're like gold watches or pimped-up sports cars at mid-life crisis: something you buy just to show everyo