I hate to break it to you, but there are a ton of stories out there dealing with morbid topics. Either seriously (e.g., horror stories, a la Lovecraft or Edgar Alan Poe) or as a sort of dark/macabre humour.
And especially pay attention to the last alternative: there are a lot of stories and sites that are just supposed to be obviously humorous, not actually to be a DYI guide to the subject in their title. E.g., I think there was a humorous site somewhere titled something like "how to pick up underage girls", or something to that effect, and it wasn't actually a paedophile's field guide. E.g., take sites like the Evil Overlord's List, which are just a parody of common movie cliches, not actually a guide to be followed by someone. (Unless they're writing a story involving a stereotypical Evil Overlord.)
So how do you know if that guy didn't google for the title of such a story? Or for some random phrase he remembered from one?
E.g., I remember reading an absurdist play by Eugen Ionesco about some murderer who tempted people to come see the colonel's photo, and then pushed them into some lake. What if I googled for that? Remember, I don't know the title of the play any more, so I can't just google for that. Not that it would make it any better, because the title IIRC was something about an unpaid assassin.
The whole thing didn't even make much sense, other than maybe as a metaphor for something or another. It's an absurdist play, so don't ask me for what it was a metaphor. It contained such gems as the everyman hero asking a police officer something to the effect of "and didn't you send cops to get him?" and getting an answer like "yeah, but they too wanted to see the colonel's photo." Nowhere does it say what colonel or what's special about that photo. I guess it wouldn't be absurdist if it did.
So if I tried googling for that play on the net, would you use your amazing deductive powers to conclude that I'm looking for a hitmal willing to do some pro-bono work? Maybe to whack-off some colonel?
Think of all the stalkers googling the guy/gal they have a crush on, ex-girlfriends/ex-boyfriends obsessively googling for any evidence that their ex might have a life or (god forbid) a good time, or obsessive over-protecting parents googling their offspring daily. (Even when said offspring is in his mid-30's and living half a continent away.)
E.g., if someone assumed that the most googled name is their own, it would follow logically that mom's searches are mine. Since she's the stalker kind of parent who still doesn't want to let go. I _assume_ it would only link me to her interest in taking photos of squirrels, but, in the end, I just have to wonder what else. Does mom have some fetish I don't (want to) know about? Would it bite me in the ass at some job interview with some HR droid taking it out of context? E.g., if (just as a wild supposition) mom had also googled for sexy male actors, would some HR drone somewhere go "eew, he's gay, we don't want one of those in our team"?
For that matter how do you go about people obsessively tracking their signifficant other? God knows every other guy I know seems to love torturing himself with mental images of his wife/gf/secret-love-interest/whatever having wild gangbangs when he's not around. So how do you know if it's the wife googling for herself or the husband doing the google equivalent of prodding an aching tooth? Repeatedly.
And once you've done the connection, then what? There's a lot of stuff someone may google just for research or as a one-time morbid curiosity.
E.g., I know that at the peak of the COH inflation, where you could get a million just for taking part in a costume contest or just asking nicely or whatever, I just had to google for buying COH currency. Not because I needed any, but because it seemed like an incredibly stupid thing to do in an economy where money is _that_ abbundant. When someone told me that it happens, contrary to all common sense, I just had to check it out for myself. Yep, apparently some people were stupid enough to pay RL cash for it.
There's also stuff that that's basically one of those "you had to be there" thing, because it was a phrase taken out of context.
E.g., if I was googling for one of O Henry's stories, I might google for some random phrase I remember relating to scamming someone. (A good number of his stories are about that.) Would someone take that as indication that I intend to actually use such a scam?
So as I was saying, now what? Pass some judgment based on that association?
You'd be surprised what you _can_ find if you do your research instead of complaining about youth these days. And that's coming from a mid-30's guy, so don't rush back on the "you young whippersnappers" bandwagon yet.
E.g., "real time strategy" doesn't only include C&C clones. It also includes Paradox's games which span continents or even the globe, and are thus truly at strategic level. You don't have to select companies or order aim artillery strikes in real time, because such things are abstracted by brigades and doctrines. Plus you can do such things as setting divisions or indeed army corps to auto-reinforce any of its neighbours that are under attack, so you don't have to respond in real time to everything.
Plus, at least in single player you can always pause the game and take your time thinking up a strategy. So why the huge fuss about lightning reflexes and the like? (And trust me, you'll need to think pincer maneuvers, envelopment and cutting off supply to win a Paradox game. Try just grouping everyone and sending them that-a-way lightning fast, and you'll have the honour of seeing your Wehrmacht thoroughly thrashed by Poland. How's that for strategy?)
And you can even find the occasional turn based game published in the last few years. I know I even have one on the PS2, and there are several on the handhelds. And I can think of two for the PC too, just off the top of my head. So you can pick your poison.
And then there are games like Civ 3 and 4 which are technically empire building, but are turn based all right. Heck, even Rome Total War can be played as a Civ game if you leave the battles on auto. It worked for me, anyway.
And that's just in the commercial arena. If you move on to F/OSS games, you can find stuff like, for example, MegaMek. It's an excellent implementation of BattleTek. Turn- and hex-based, like in the good old days.
Puzzles? Get an adventure game, since they're making a spectacular comeback. It may not be an exact clone of whatever puzzles you have in mind, but there are plenty who'll exercise the little grey cells. E.g., the latest Sherlock Holmes game.
Well, I'll tell you why the whole economics lecture. Because judging by the invariable doom-and-gloom posts, I'm left with the impression that the whole inclination to act like it's some major irreversible tragedy, is precisely based on not understanding economics. People act as if 5000 people out of job is some permanent thing, akin to 5000 getting buried alive in a landslide, or at least 5000 that'll be for ever unemployed.
What that whole economics lecture is telling you is: "Not so, grasshopper. For every 5000 who lost their job, there'll be (approximately) 5000 who'll get a new job. A lot of them will be the same people too." In other words, hey, show some empathy and cheer for those, will you?
And, perhaps a lesser point, but it has to be said anyway: because lamenting the practices of capitalism (e.g., layoffs) while reaping its rewards, is akin to mourning the turkey while eating it at the Thanksgiving dinner. A bit hypocritical.
At the risk of sounding like a libertarian (which I'm not), that's how capitalism works. A crappy company goes under, and in the process some people lose their jobs. Then some other company rises and those people get another job.
Note that there's no need to get doom and gloom about it. I know that for the average citizen unemployment and inflation are signs of the apocalypse, and politicians use them as such in campaigns... then proceed to forget that they promised solving both. That's because they're not. Read something about keynesian economics, which is how the economy works nowadays, and especially about the Phillips curve.
In a nutshell, there's a corelation between the two, and if you push one down, the other one goes up. And what governments can do is pick a point on the curve and try to keep the economy around that point.
What does this have to do with this? Well, it's darn simple: for the last 60-70 years (depending on the country) everyone had the unemployment basically where they wanted it. In spite of the constant "waah, another company lays off 5000 workers, our country is doomed" scares, that's never actually been a long term problem. So some other company or several smaller companies will figure out "hey, look at all the workers we could hire in city X" and proceed to do so.
Incidentally that kind of a correlation isn't even just an effect of the last century, but you can see effects as far back as, say, the 1300s and 1400s. The plagues and resulting utter lack of unemployment for, say, peasants, caused a massive inflation and were in the end the cause of the Renaissance.
And you can see the same economics at work on a smaller scale in the limited domain of IT in the dot-com bubble, where lack of enough workforce caused the salaries to spiral up out of hand, and the cost of any resulting program reflected it. There the impact was absorbed by the rest of the society, but imagine the same economy-wide. If for every job there wasn't a pool of unemployed workforce, and companies had to pay a premium even to get receptionist, you'd see the prices rising accordingly.
It may seem calous and lacking empathy to say that someone has to be unemployed for the economy to work, and it partially is, but that's how it works. Rebelling against it is like rebelling against gravity: not very productive. We have to work with what works, not with what would be an idealist utopia. All we can do to make it more palatable is to offer some unemployment benefits and some government demand for work and move on.
And at the risk of going off topic, that's another reality that we have to live with: that governments actually have to do that kind of thing. In spite of bullshit pseudo-economic theories idealizing lean governments and some idealized image of unrestricted 19'th century capitalism, it stopped working that way in the Great Depression. That's when the economy of scarcity ended. The countries that got out of the crisis fast were the ones whose government overspent: be it FDR's New Deal, or Germany's and Italy's spending on armament. The countries which didn't, got to enjoy a jolly good depression until WW2: e.g., Canada.
Funny what things you get to learn when you take your economic theories from real economists, instead of from novelists. (*cough* Ayn Rand *cough*) But that's another discussion for another time.
Step 1: Figure out how to clone Passport Step 2: Figure out how to alter clone Step 3: ??? Step 4: Profit!
Let's just say that the same applies then to forging a digitally signed document:
1. copy the document 2. figure out how to change it while hashing to the same digital signature 3. ??? 4. profit
Yes, but see, step 1 is a non-achievement there. Step 2 is the real issue. _That_ what digital signatures really prevent. Seeing some idiot come up and say "ha ha, digital signatures are useless, because I just copied a CD that had a digitally signed file on it" would just tell me that the poor idiot is completely clueless and doesn't even know what he's talking about. It wasn't step 1 that was supposed to be made harder by those signatures, it was step 2 all along. Wake me up when you achieve that.
Same applies here.
Copying a RFID chip verbatim is a non-issue and non-achievement. It's like copying a floppy or a CD. _Of_ _course_ it can be copied, and only a complete ignoramus would make that their grand achievement.
Wake me up when you can actually change the data. And for that matter when the plan is less retarded than hoping that noone will look in the pass _and_ that they'll let you scan a building pass together with / instead of the passport. It's such a "cunning" plan that only Baldrick of Black Adder fame could honestly think it "cunning".
So he cloned a passport. As in, a verbatim copy with the same name, date of birth, etc. He explicitly says that he _can't_ (at the moment) change his name, date of birth, etc, because of the hashes.
So his grand achievement is... what? That that a fellow called John Smith could thus make a fake passport that still says John Smith?
Ah yes, so he could clone someone else's chip, if he can steal their passport, and place it on his own passport. Except now he has a passport that says John Smith and a chip that says Jane Doe. As he himself acknowledges it, it will work only if someone at the border/airport/whatever would just swipe the thing over a reader, but not bother actually reading it. And, oh, if also their scanner is broken and doesn't also read the "John Smith" printed in OCR letters on the real pass.
It sounds like some clever hack, but frankly, then what's the improvement over just stealing a passport and using it as it is? If the condition of passing for Jane Doe instead of John Smith is hoping that they'll just swipe it over the reader and not actually look at it, then simply a stolen passport would work just as well and with far less of a hassle.
So, basically, this is just someone's verbal masturbation, rather than some clever hack.
Exactly what kind of popularity are we talking about? It's a format that rose to prominence just on the back of some deals with porn sites, and which in the last years has steadily been dumped by everyone _including_ those porn sites. Other than a couple of minor older sites, have you even _seen_ a.rm file on the net lately? Almost everything these days is WMV, DivX and QT.
So, really, what popularity? I'll call a format or player popular when it's the format you run into on every other site. When youtube, google, and even a neighbour's vacation videos are.rm files. Not when it's a fringe heading steadily towards extinction.
Or, oh, you mean the "2 million downloads a day" boast? Note that they don't say 2 million _RealPlayer_ downloads a day. They most likely include everything else downloaded from their servers, including music from their subscription service, short video clips that noone wants and everyone makes their player download automatically at startup, patches, updates, programs like Firefox, etc. I'd be thoroughly surprised if even 1/10 of those were actually RealPlayer downloads.
"Techie" is a broad term. Just because I'm an EE and work as a programmer, it doesn't mean that I continuously track the changes in each revision of every single shitty program on the planet.
And RealPlayer in particular is one thing I don't give a fuck about anymore anyway. It's not only that it's annoyed me too much with their shitty spyware back then, it's that I don't really have an incentive to bother with it anymore anyway. Did it change its ways? I dunno. Do I give enough of a fuck to check out? Nope. The vast majority of the media files on the net these days are in DivX, WMV and QuickTime format. In that order.
Well, that's because as anyone who's read Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy could tell you, they're doing it wrong. You don't need to turn something invisible, which is a horribly complicated thing and needs lots of energy. You just have to turn it into Somebody Else's Problem, in which case the human brain will just filter it out.
Seriously people, this is computer software we're talking about, not Israel and Hezbollah.
You're kidding, right? This is computer software, the battleground of OCPD personalities, where one aspect is taken out of context and used to judge something into "perfect" and "complete evil" categories, with no middle ground. And then proceed to try to raise a crusade to death against the complete evil ones. It's the place where vi vs emacs, KDE vs Gnome, Java vs C++, Intel vs AMD, goto vs for/while loops, and of course OSS vs anything else isn't just worth a debate, but become religious wars and things to fight to death for or against.
I bet that when your stereotypical ultra-militant extremist-Islamist organization's meetings go out of hands, someone could interject "stop it guys, you're starting to sound like on the OpenBSD mailing lists." And, assuming they've even heard of OpenBSD, the previously screaming and fist-shaking speakers would blush and start staring at their own shoes in silence.
In fact, if the Hesbolah vs Israel _were_ like the software holy wars, God help us, because there's be no possibility of peace ever. I could just see a peace talks turning into "ok, you may have aggreed to free Palestine, pay reparations, change your language to Arabic, convert to Islamic faith, recognize the Ayatolah's authority and everything... but... YOU RUN YOUR SERVERS ON WINDOWS! DIE INFIDEL!!!"
Just have a read around some boards, and if you can tell me that stuff like for example "would of" / "could of" / "should of" is correct English grammar, think a bit more about it. And that's just one of the aberrations out there. There are plenty of native English speakers who butcher their own language's grammar to something that doesn't even make any sense. I don't know of any language which uses a preposition for a verb's tense.
And it's not just that some pundits like making arbitrary rules. (Well, ok, at least in the case of German someone must have loved rules. But even there they're not arbitrary.) Much as we all love a "the Man keeping you down" bullshit theory, that's not really what grammar is for.
It's that at some point you have to communicate with more people than whatever village or l33t clan you're in. If everyone butchers the language in his own way, then effectively you have to reverse engineer each such improvised dialect to understand each other. I know I've had to deal with people in MMOs that almost gave me a headache just trying to understand WTF they were saying. _That_ is the point of trying to have a common language, with the same words and rules for everyone, instead of letting any community, clique and gang split into their own dialect that. Everyone's time is better spent doing more productive stuff than trying to decrypt the personal dialect of every teenager who thinks he's hip and cool if he butchers the language in his own personal dialect.
It's not just that languages evolve. It's that if left to their own devices, languages tend to diverge a lot over time, as each village and region comes up with its own "evolution". There are for example German dialects which could barely communicate with each other if each one only knew his own dialect. And then there are languages which have split from a common root, but are as far from each other as, say, Swedish and German. It was ok to let them diverge like that in times when most people only had to deal with the other villagers in the same village, but that's no longer the case. At some point to function as a modern nation you need a _common_ language, that any two citizens can use and easily understand each other. Hence formalizing a lexicon and a set of rules of that common language.
Well, taking a very wild guess about the motivations:
1. Because of protective instincts of the parents and not knowing when to give up. As I was saying in another message, mom still tries to control me, and I'm at an age when in the Old Kingdom times chances I might be already dead, embalmed and burried. Or having grandkids and telling them "back in my days" stories. So basically parents get attached to treating someone like a baby, and eventually if there's enough of them, society gets it that way.
2. Because society needed increasingly high numbers of educated people, and there's only so much education you can cram into someone until the age of 14. So a lot of people need at the very least high school too. So it makes sense in a way to extend the limit until their parents have to take care of them to include at least that, even if they're really past the biological maturity date. Unfortunately, as I was saying some people don't realize that they're supporting an adult, and are still stuck with the mentality that they have a really big 6-year-old.
(E.g., true story, the last time I got a "Moraelin, have you said 'hello' to the nice lady?" from mom was at the age of 30. The only reason it stopped there was the resulting conflict.)
3. Because the ensuing "teenagge crisis" has become not just something considered normal or, paradoxically, a sign of immaturity, but something that the whole western culture _depends_ on. The conflict and rebellion against an arbitrary authority and against being officially little more than another adult's slave, is followed by eventually just accepting it. So society gets most of its new members already "housebroken" and used to obeying someone else. It was probably more of a nice side-effect than parents collectively thinking "damn, I want my son to be an obedient sheep to anyone claiming any authority", but it's a nice effect anyway. So I just don't see anyone giving that up.
1. Point well taken about the full responsibility of being an adult. But noone is really proposing to give a teenager old the full responsibilities of a modern-day adult. I'm just saying they shouldn't be treated like a complete idiot either. At the very least they deserve a mature-level explanation why, instead of an electronic gizmo just saying "not that one." They may still lack all the data and context that an adult has, but at least the mental capacity is already there.
(Although Alexander The Great _did_ get left to rule a kingdom as regent at the age of 16, while his father was at war. I believe that that's at least comparable complexity with what most adults have to deal with nowadays. There too were finances, credit, diplomacy, propaganda, and more persuasive sophistry than in an ad on TV nowadays, etc. But OK.)
2. Speaking of learning how to be an adult, how about then teaching them to deal with that propaganda. If the focus is on using that extra time to learn some stuff about this complex new world, then by all means, it seems to me that the focus should be on learning. Seemingly arbitrary restrictions aren't learning. It's just sweeping the problem under a rug until later they're 18 or 21 or whatever, and they're still just as unprepared to deal with that propaganda machine or anything else.
It's, if you will, like the difference between teaching someone to swim and just building a fence around the swimming pool. Then at 18 or 21 years old you just give the kid a key to the gate, except he still can't swim.
3. That "reprehensible little barb" and "dragging down civilized dialogue" happened in response to a poster which had no trouble labelling its opponent's post as "utter bull" or as "is so utterly retarded I don't know where to begin." Sorry, that doesn't look like civilized dialogue in the first place. I don't believe that my using a "retarded" of my own dragged it much lower than it already was. So let's move on.
On another note, people on Slashdot whinge constantly about parents not doing a good job of raising their children. This looks like an example of parents trying to do something about raising their children, yet the reaction is largely negative?! Yay for groupthink.
And that's just an example of the "if you're for X, then you must be automatically, unthinking pro any X-related solution" fallacy. It's like saying "if you like water, then you shouldn't mind having your house flooded." Or "if you were saying that the government should do something about unemployment, then you shouldn't mind an euthanasia program to get rid of those." Or "if you're not for terrorism, you must support the war in Iraq and the PATRIOT act." That bogus. Just seeing that a problem X exists, doesn't mean any wrong solution is automatically worthy of unconditional support.
It has nothing to do with group think. Sometimes a solution is just snake oil, and bad snake oil at that. That's all. Even if it proposes to address the right problem, it may be the kind that doesn't really solve anything, or even makes it worse. It can be of the calibre of using mercury to treat syphilis in the past: it didn't actually cure the disease, and only added mercury poisoning to the list of problems.
It's not just that it'll make a few kids life even more nightmarish than it already is (e.g., see again the girl berated by her mom for buying 3 ounces of juice.) It's that even as solutions go, it's the kind of crap "solution" that tries to suppress the symptoms rather than fix the problem.
The problem is that kids, just like adults, take decisions based on the pre-existing data and habits they have. They're doing what they've learned from their parents, and by that I also mean immitating what they see daddy doing. They're pretty much pre-programmed to. (Hence, "do as I say, not as I do" doesn't really work.) Or if mommy and daddy weren't available for that, what they've seen Tom, Dick and Harry down the road doing.
The correct solution is to give them enough data and personal example to make a good decision, not to just build more barriers against the symptoms. If a kid's only knowledge about food, for example, is along the lines of "if I try to buy something bad the alarm rings", what do you do when they grow up and no longer have that artifficial surveillance? Or is it ok to go obese and diabetic in the 20's, just because it's not your responsibility any more? Or what do you do about them trading lunches to get past such restrictions? Is it ok just because now you have an online checklist as a conscience lullaby?
Solutions that just suppress the symptoms are often worse than no solution at all. They just maintain a false facade of everything being all right, when everything really isn't. They allow a bad parent to seemingly see results out of crap "explanations" like "because I said so" or "as long as you're in my house, you'll do as I say and stop asking why", and get back to watching the football game. But the problem is still there. As soon as that kid gets out of surveillance range (summer camp, college, growing up, whatever), he still doesn't know what not to do and _why_ not to do them.
If the only thing bad about a certain act or food is that "daddy say so", guess what will happen when daddy isn't around to say so? If the only rule they know about something is that is tied to living in your house, guess what follows logically when they're _not_ in your house? Etc.
In a nutshell, that's why: because it's the wrong solution.
Ok, point duly taken and thanks for the correction, but then "life expectancy" was the wrong word. Yes, I literally mean that even excluding infant mortality, most people of ancient Egypt, at least in the Old Kingdom times, did drop dead before they reached the 40's.
What I mean is like this. We have a ton of records, including tombs, mummies, tablets, etc, which are sorta our sample for determining that kinda thing. So now let's imagine we group them into a "how many died at each age" curve. You know, with the X being the age when they died, and the Y being how many records we have of people dead at that age. That graph had not only a spike in the low ages, but also the peak of the gauss curve would be somewhere in the 30-39 years old range. Even ignoring those early infant deaths, getting past 40 years old wasn't very common.
That's basically what I meant there: where the peak of that gauss curve was, rather than the correct meaning of the term.
Yes, some people lived until their 60's, 70's or beyond, especially among the rich classes, but at that point it was the trailing end of the gauss curve, rather than something you can count on. And that was "balanced" by other people whose death happened in their teens and twenties.
If you want the "average life expectancy at birth" in the (correct) meaning that you use it, _including_ the infant mortality, we know for example from the Roman census data in the area that for example for women it was 22-25 years. Scary, but, as you've said, distorted by the high infant mortality.
At any rate, to get back to the real topic of how long it took to "produce" an adult, in ancient Egypt the age of marriage at least was 15 years old for males and 12 years old for females. It's not just "probably", those are the historical ages. At that age you'd be expected to be mature enough to have your own family and your own children. I.e., for example as a girl of 12, not only you wouldn't get mom packing your food, but you'd be expected to cook for and feed your husband and maybe children.
It's not even the lowest ages. I'm pretty sure that in the middle ages men would be considered mature at 14 or even 13 years old, but I'm too lazy and it's a too long message already:)
If you think that the human species was always based on babysitting your kid until the age of 21, sad to say, you're the one on the "utter bull" side.
For starters, for a large portion of the human history (in fact, for _the_ largest portion), the average life expectancy was in the 30 to 40 years range. Yes, literally. The life expectancy in ancient Egypt for example was in the low 30's. In the European middle ages and renaissance it wasn't much better, since they had very high mortality. In fact, all medieval cities had such high mortality (because of being filthy disease-ridden places) that they needed a constant influx of peasants moving in just to maintain their size. So, again, the average person would have a really really shitty life expectancy.
So pay attention: you wouln't have _time_ to babysit them until 21. If you got married at 21, took a year to get your first kid, and then babysat him to 21, that's a total of 43 years. Add a few tries, because of the extremely high infant mortality, and you'd end up needing some 50 years for such a bullshit babysitting utopia. It's more than 50% more than the actual life expectancy you'd have.
So for most of the human history, at 12 to 14 years old you'd be considered _adults_. At that age you'd be expected to get married, run a business, fight in a war, or, yes, maybe command a ship or an army. There were a lot of kings, nobles, generals, etc, who ruled a country or led its troops in battle at that age. There were decisions which changed history, at least on a local level, taken at that age.
Thinking that they always had mommy pack their lunch and check if they wear a sweater at that age... heh... to quote your own words: "is so utterly retarded I don't know where to begin."
So, yes, if you're trying to tell me that a modern 14 year old can't can't even decide what to buy without mommy deciding for them, then, yes, there must be something awfully wrong with the current crop of kids. Because "kids" of that age are what throughout most of human history were the _adults_, and perfectly capable of functioning as adults.
Or maybe, just maybe, it's not the kids, but their parents who are retarded. Just a thought. Maybe the kid would be perfectly capable of taking a mature and responsible decision, if mommy and daddy had taken the time to give him the data and the opportunity for those decisions, instead of just controlling what the kid does.
You, on the other hand, have too much confidence that the parents won't be control freaks. "Over-protective" doesn't sound that bad until you end up basically in a straitjacket of motherly love that crushes the life and sanity out of you. Don't underestimate how much "over" there can be in "overprotective."
The last time such a system was discussed on/. it contained such gems as one mother getting horrified and confronting her daughter because... said daughter had bought 3 ounces of juice to wash down the food with. "Noooo! Think of all the calories in 3 ounces of juice!" Not an exact quote, but the same idea.
To start with the _lesser_ problem, she was trying to raise her daughter as... what? An Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder case? Yes, obesity is bad, but if you're at the point where you count the few calories in a quarter of a cup of juice, do yourself a favour and kill yourself. We're not talking buying a big bottle of Coke, we're not talking even a can, we're talking 3 ounces. Of juice.
Moving a bit upwards on the scale, such a remotely-controlled kid will grow to be completely unprepared for life. They never were trusted with making a decision of their own, and seeing the results, so they (A) just don't know what to do when mommy isn't around to remote-control them, and (B) completely lack the data to base a decision on. Playing and exploration in childhood are learning. Someone who has grown up with mommy taking all their decisions for them, hasn't learned anything.
I know I basically went off guidance as every time I was out of reach of my control-freak parents. I ended up in an alcoholic coma in one of the few summer camps where they didn't tag along, as well as doing a thousand other stupid things. Partially because it was one occasion to vent all that built-up frustration of being little more than a remote-controlled puppet to my parents the rest of the time. But in retrospect the largest part was the aspect that I just had no freaking clue how to function without them remote-controlling me.
Even after finishing college and moving away, it was like running into a brick wall as learning curves go. Without mom telling me what to do and when to do it, I suddenly had no flipping clue what _am_ I supposed to do and when. It took some rediscovering from scratch how to even function as an adult. (In all fairness, mom still tries to remote-control me. She'd be more than happy to still tell me exactly what and when to do, but at that point I had decided to at least try functioning as myself for a change.)
But maybe more important is the psychological damage. Kids like adults (and like most animals, including your dog and cat) need some breathing space. Even the most affectionate lap cat needs its moments of being alone or doing its own thing, or it will go neurotic.
E.g., I only have to look at my brother who at one point had a fit of anorexia over my parents complete control over his food. At one point as a kid he just stopped eating, and eventually ended up in hospital. They even ran all sorts of medical tests on him, because they suspected cancer the way he was losing weight. He was basically deflating as fast as, well, someone who doesn't eat at all any more. I can easily see that possibility in the future of such kid as the girl with her 3 ounces of juice.
I managed to do somewhat better (or at least not swing to such extremes), partially by finding refuge in programming, partially by cherishing the moments I was finally out of my family's reach. I certainly didn't hate school too much. I actually had more freedom there than at home. Still, I ended up with some long term damage of my own anyway.
E.g., I basically have to roll for willpower (if I'm allowed the D&D metaphor) to do anything, because some circuit in the back of the brain says "you know, mom would disapprove of me doing that. Or doing it that way." And I don't mean doing bad stuff, but even stuff like taking the trash out. Mom would certainly find something to complain
What if my Post Traumatic Stress was caused by video games?
Heh. I'm used to exaggeration and hype, but this has got to take the crown. I really don't think you really mean that.
Post Traumatic Stress isn't just about "oh, I'm so stressed that my penis size... err... level isn't the highest in the game." It's about intense psychological trauma caused by a believable threat of imminent death, severe physical injury, or something of that order of magnitude. We're taking the kind of stress that happens when the enemy is shelling your position with artillery or MRLS, or a tank is coming at you and the heaviest weapon you have is a SAW, or you see someone's brains blown out before your very eyes, or you get to storm a house and see what a grenade can do in a closed room (there are WW2 veterans who still break down into tears if you ask them about that), or whatever similarly serious.
Again, we're not talking just "stress", but the "OMG, I'm DEAD one way or another" kind of being scared shitless for your very life and limb. We're talking intense _terror_ where you see no way out. That kind of thing.
If you get that kind of pure mind-paralyzing terror out of a MUD, and for such a mundane reason as xp and levels... please don't take it as an insult, but as friendly advice: see a good psychiatrist ASAP. If just comparing your score or level to someone else's can trigger such a massively disproportionate reaction, you have major problems. Seriously.
That or keep your hyperboles less over-the-top if it was just a hyperbole.
Pretending that there's no dichotomy and you can do everything at the same time is actually the wrong premise, because it assumes that those countries have infinite funds. In practice, they don't. _That'_ where that dichotomy comes from.
The OLPC project expected India to fork over some billions of dollars for those laptops. That's where that dichotomy comes from.
Sure, in an ideal world, India would have infinite funds and could do that and everything else at the same time, and there would be no either-or choice ever. But in the Real World (TM) India has finite funds. Those billions for this would be translated 1-to-1 into less money for something else. To fork over that kind of money, India would have to provide less of something else to its population. Medical aid, infrastructure repairs, whatever. But something would have to be reduced by an equal sum.
Do you understand now? _That_ is where the exclusive choice comes from. That's what causes dichotomies. It's a "do we spend billions on X, or do we spend those billions on Y, because we don't have the money for both" kinda choice. So at some point you have to put on your thinking cap and decide "do I need X more than Y, or is it the other way around?"
And if you've RTFA, you've seen that that's just the kind of comparison and decision they've done. They looked at what they can do with the same money, and the conclusion was that even in education they can use it better than on importing laptops. They can build schools, educate more teachers, etc. And a good teacher will help kids more _and_ help more kids than a dumb laptop will.
Sure, we're nerds and probably a few thousands will jump in with their testimonies as to how a computer made them smart and taught them programming. It worked for me too. But look around you. Do you honestly believe that every little Tom, Dick and Harry will use it to that end? How many of your classmates had computers and never used them for anything more than games and surfing for porn when mommy isn't at home. A computer is just a tool, even if a powerful one. Just giving someone a computer won't auto-magically motivate them to learn programming or google for information. Just like giving someone a brush won't auto-magically make them the next Michelangelo, or giving them a typewriter won't auto-magically make them a novelist or playwright.
Yes, it could decide to be a grand scale social experiment and provide the feedback for others. But it would be a completely idiotic and irresponsible waste of its taxpayers' money. Such experiments are better done at a small scale, not nation-wide and involving a huge chunk of the government's budget. I mean, yes, what if it _is_ a clueless project?
The system is a lot less set in stone than it was 200 years ago. E.g., in Germany alone there have been pretty significant changes to stuff like healthcare or social protection in the last couple of years alone.
But, again, it boils down to safeguards and, in the end, democracy. If you have a government that would rather do things in its own "efficient" way that everyone else considers inadequate (e.g., outdated) or unfair, then you've just told me that democracy over there doesn't quite work as it should. Or at least that it's the same black-and-white view I was talking of: either a government doesn't have jurisdiction at all, or it _must_ inherently end up doing it badly and to everyone else's detriment.
In a democracy, i.e., "rule of the people", the people should have the means to get it their way, not the way some government bureaucrat finds "efficient." E.g., if enough people want the distributor to pay for the return shipping, they can eventually get it their way and get that made into a law. And if methods a, b and c no longer are adequate, in a multi-party proportional-representation system, there _will_ eventually be someone who uses it as political capital to get elected. It's not like there's a shortage of people who can smell political capital like sharks can smell blood, and in a proportional representation system the barriers are very low so they can go against established parties very easily with that capital.
See for example even such "crazy" ideas like the Pirate Party in Sweden. If they thought there's something wrong with copyright, they went and made a party. And in a proportional representation system, if enough people consider that to be their dominant issue, even such a minority party can and routinely does get some seats in the parliament to raise the issue.
But, anyway, that's in the end what democracy means. People can vote to for something inefficient, unfair, or even outright stupid. (E.g., while contrary to popular myth it wasn't a majority, some people did vote for Hitler. E.g., ancient Athens did vote democratically to declare war on Sparta... then discovered that Athens' power was naval and Sparta was landlocked on a mountain. Let's just say Athens never recovered from that mistake.) But that's what democracy means.
And I see no inherent problem with that. Between (A) the majority having the means to vote for something even unfair to the small businesses, and (B) the majority having to feed an army of lawyers to harrass those businesses over the same issues... I dunno, I find A both more democratic, and in the end more efficient. At least then it's just a handful of bureaucrats instead of an army of lawyers putting a drain on the economy.
Look at every generation and its parent generation. In every generation, most of the people in it are mundane Joes. Scientific superheroes can come from any background; it is up to the individual to decide what he will do with his life.
Look at every generation, and its parent generation and... you'll see that not generations were equal, as scientific progress goes. It goes up and down like a yoyo, and it did so since the beginning of time.
E.g., ancient Egypt must have started with some really bright minds, since they discovered a lot of things. And I mean including a ton of medical and other stuff, not just how to pile stones in a pyramid. Yet right before the macedonian invasion it was already at a stage where nothing much was invented any more. Medicine for example had been solidified into something that was religion, law and malpractice insurance rolled into one, and everyone just followed the same official texts literally, and never tried anything new. For _millenia_.
E.g., in Europe the golden ages of Greece and Rome were followed by what we call the "Dark Ages". It's not just that they discovered fewer things, it's that actually a lot of information has been _lost_ in that time.
E.g., take China. It was at one point one of the most technologically advanced places. They have a long list of inventions, including stuff from paper to gunpowder to trebuchets to crossbows (including the repeating kind) to the compass to god knows what else that they invented more than a millenium before the Europeans. They were _that_ advanced. Even their less glamorous stuff, e.g., the composite bow, might get less hype, but you can see its efficiency against European equipment and tactics when it was brought over by the Huns.
Yet then came an age of decline and it ended up with the Manchu Qing dynasty, where literacy actually decreased and the government was literally more concerned with enforcing a uniform haircut (yes, I'm not joking) than with any kind of science or technology pursuit. The Chinese army actually regressed from having _some_ guns during the Ming dynasty, to all spears, swords and bows during the Qing dynasty. That sad.
Or take Japan. Yes, now they're doing damn good technologically and have been even more impressive as progress goes during the Meiji Restoration. But before that they had periods when it stagnated or even regressed. E.g., the Heian period, also remembered for the rise of the Samurai caste, is also considered by some a time of stagnation and even regress.
So, yes, times can change. Sometimes for the better, but sometimes for the worse. Some societies fail to give those "mundane Joes" incentive to go and learn or research something. Yes, each individual can decide what to do with his life, but if on the whole it's a smarter or more popular choice to aim low intellectually, people may well do just that. And then stagnation and even regress follow.
Trust me, noone is asking for the government to come over and take our rights away or anything. But you illustrate exactly the kind of a attitude that I was talking about.
The element you seem to be missing in your all-or-nothing argument is: control. Noone proposes to give the government _unchecked_ power. In fact, it's not even as much giving it power, it's making it do its duty: to serve the citizens that elected it.
The jaded American idea seems to be that that any government power is some kind of a toggle with only two possible (final) states: (A) complete unchecked self-serving power, or (B) not having the government involved at all. And that any good citizen should fight to keep anything into category (B). But at any rate, that there are inherently no shades of grey between the two.
The European idea is that the government is there to _serve_ us. Yes, we know that politicians have no morals, are easily corrupted, etc, and generally that governments are very dangerous things. It just means we have to be more careful about it, not that we should avoid involving it altogether.
If you will, let's use the metaphor of a big and dangerous pitbull for the government. The difference is basically like this: the American notion seems to be that you have a big dangerous pitbull in your back yard, and it could get rabies any day now, and your duty is to fight it off and keep it away from you and your family. The European notion is that since it _is_ your dog and you're feeding it anyway, you might as well get some use out of it. Get it trained to do _your_ bidding instead of fighting it off. And better be a responsible owner and make sure it doesn't get rabies in the first place.
In a nutshell, that's what gets some of us, you know, _wondering_ about _some_ Americans. (I do realize that blanket generalizations tend to be false, so I'm not extrapolating over everyone.) That black-and-white view, completely missing any shades of grey in between. E.g., missing the intermediate shade of a government that is under enough control so it _can't_ just bend over to the highest corporate bidder.
The view that the any government is, unavoidably, destined to be corrupt and whore itself to whoever pays the biggest bribe, is in fact something I consider _dangerous_. It's the kind of thing that, in a perverse way, _legitimizes_ it when it goes and does just that. It just gets people to shrug and go "well, what did you expect?" instead of doing something to stop it. Seeing some of the overt cattering to corporate/cartel interests instead of the interests of their own voters that seems to be the norm in the US Congress... I just have to wonder, basically, how much of that overt corruption (not to mention perversion of what "democracy" was supposed to mean) is the result of the mindset that it's normal and inevitable for a government to do that.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far aw... err... a few years back, when Germany's currency was still the DM, I remember using a vending machine in a railways station. And getting a Polish 10 Zloti coin instead of a 1 DM as part of the change. The coin was remarkably similar to 1 DM in size and weight.
The difference between the two was bigger than between the yen and cent, though. A DM was (later) worth half an euro, while the 10 Zloti... well, let's just say that the difference between 1 DM and 10 Zloti was 1 DM:P
I'm guessing whoever it was did it more than with that one coin, since pretty soon all vending machines in town had been tweaked to the point where they routinely rejected genuine 1 DM coins too. They swallowed any other coinage just fine, but 1 DM required several tries and some of the 1 DM coins just didn't work at all any more.
Now I don't know what actually happened there, but my favourite wild uninformed guess (or conspiracy theory, if you will) is that it was done so they'd reject the 10 Zloti coins. Unfortunately the difference between them was so small that it also rejected some of the real coins.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to break it to you, but there are a ton of stories out there dealing with morbid topics. Either seriously (e.g., horror stories, a la Lovecraft or Edgar Alan Poe) or as a sort of dark/macabre humour.
And especially pay attention to the last alternative: there are a lot of stories and sites that are just supposed to be obviously humorous, not actually to be a DYI guide to the subject in their title. E.g., I think there was a humorous site somewhere titled something like "how to pick up underage girls", or something to that effect, and it wasn't actually a paedophile's field guide. E.g., take sites like the Evil Overlord's List, which are just a parody of common movie cliches, not actually a guide to be followed by someone. (Unless they're writing a story involving a stereotypical Evil Overlord.)
So how do you know if that guy didn't google for the title of such a story? Or for some random phrase he remembered from one?
E.g., I remember reading an absurdist play by Eugen Ionesco about some murderer who tempted people to come see the colonel's photo, and then pushed them into some lake. What if I googled for that? Remember, I don't know the title of the play any more, so I can't just google for that. Not that it would make it any better, because the title IIRC was something about an unpaid assassin.
The whole thing didn't even make much sense, other than maybe as a metaphor for something or another. It's an absurdist play, so don't ask me for what it was a metaphor. It contained such gems as the everyman hero asking a police officer something to the effect of "and didn't you send cops to get him?" and getting an answer like "yeah, but they too wanted to see the colonel's photo." Nowhere does it say what colonel or what's special about that photo. I guess it wouldn't be absurdist if it did.
So if I tried googling for that play on the net, would you use your amazing deductive powers to conclude that I'm looking for a hitmal willing to do some pro-bono work? Maybe to whack-off some colonel?
Think of all the stalkers googling the guy/gal they have a crush on, ex-girlfriends/ex-boyfriends obsessively googling for any evidence that their ex might have a life or (god forbid) a good time, or obsessive over-protecting parents googling their offspring daily. (Even when said offspring is in his mid-30's and living half a continent away.)
E.g., if someone assumed that the most googled name is their own, it would follow logically that mom's searches are mine. Since she's the stalker kind of parent who still doesn't want to let go. I _assume_ it would only link me to her interest in taking photos of squirrels, but, in the end, I just have to wonder what else. Does mom have some fetish I don't (want to) know about? Would it bite me in the ass at some job interview with some HR droid taking it out of context? E.g., if (just as a wild supposition) mom had also googled for sexy male actors, would some HR drone somewhere go "eew, he's gay, we don't want one of those in our team"?
For that matter how do you go about people obsessively tracking their signifficant other? God knows every other guy I know seems to love torturing himself with mental images of his wife/gf/secret-love-interest/whatever having wild gangbangs when he's not around. So how do you know if it's the wife googling for herself or the husband doing the google equivalent of prodding an aching tooth? Repeatedly.
And once you've done the connection, then what? There's a lot of stuff someone may google just for research or as a one-time morbid curiosity.
E.g., I know that at the peak of the COH inflation, where you could get a million just for taking part in a costume contest or just asking nicely or whatever, I just had to google for buying COH currency. Not because I needed any, but because it seemed like an incredibly stupid thing to do in an economy where money is _that_ abbundant. When someone told me that it happens, contrary to all common sense, I just had to check it out for myself. Yep, apparently some people were stupid enough to pay RL cash for it.
There's also stuff that that's basically one of those "you had to be there" thing, because it was a phrase taken out of context.
E.g., if I was googling for one of O Henry's stories, I might google for some random phrase I remember relating to scamming someone. (A good number of his stories are about that.) Would someone take that as indication that I intend to actually use such a scam?
So as I was saying, now what? Pass some judgment based on that association?
You'd be surprised what you _can_ find if you do your research instead of complaining about youth these days. And that's coming from a mid-30's guy, so don't rush back on the "you young whippersnappers" bandwagon yet.
E.g., "real time strategy" doesn't only include C&C clones. It also includes Paradox's games which span continents or even the globe, and are thus truly at strategic level. You don't have to select companies or order aim artillery strikes in real time, because such things are abstracted by brigades and doctrines. Plus you can do such things as setting divisions or indeed army corps to auto-reinforce any of its neighbours that are under attack, so you don't have to respond in real time to everything.
Plus, at least in single player you can always pause the game and take your time thinking up a strategy. So why the huge fuss about lightning reflexes and the like? (And trust me, you'll need to think pincer maneuvers, envelopment and cutting off supply to win a Paradox game. Try just grouping everyone and sending them that-a-way lightning fast, and you'll have the honour of seeing your Wehrmacht thoroughly thrashed by Poland. How's that for strategy?)
And you can even find the occasional turn based game published in the last few years. I know I even have one on the PS2, and there are several on the handhelds. And I can think of two for the PC too, just off the top of my head. So you can pick your poison.
And then there are games like Civ 3 and 4 which are technically empire building, but are turn based all right. Heck, even Rome Total War can be played as a Civ game if you leave the battles on auto. It worked for me, anyway.
And that's just in the commercial arena. If you move on to F/OSS games, you can find stuff like, for example, MegaMek. It's an excellent implementation of BattleTek. Turn- and hex-based, like in the good old days.
Puzzles? Get an adventure game, since they're making a spectacular comeback. It may not be an exact clone of whatever puzzles you have in mind, but there are plenty who'll exercise the little grey cells. E.g., the latest Sherlock Holmes game.
Well, I'll tell you why the whole economics lecture. Because judging by the invariable doom-and-gloom posts, I'm left with the impression that the whole inclination to act like it's some major irreversible tragedy, is precisely based on not understanding economics. People act as if 5000 people out of job is some permanent thing, akin to 5000 getting buried alive in a landslide, or at least 5000 that'll be for ever unemployed.
What that whole economics lecture is telling you is: "Not so, grasshopper. For every 5000 who lost their job, there'll be (approximately) 5000 who'll get a new job. A lot of them will be the same people too." In other words, hey, show some empathy and cheer for those, will you?
And, perhaps a lesser point, but it has to be said anyway: because lamenting the practices of capitalism (e.g., layoffs) while reaping its rewards, is akin to mourning the turkey while eating it at the Thanksgiving dinner. A bit hypocritical.
At the risk of sounding like a libertarian (which I'm not), that's how capitalism works. A crappy company goes under, and in the process some people lose their jobs. Then some other company rises and those people get another job.
Note that there's no need to get doom and gloom about it. I know that for the average citizen unemployment and inflation are signs of the apocalypse, and politicians use them as such in campaigns... then proceed to forget that they promised solving both. That's because they're not. Read something about keynesian economics, which is how the economy works nowadays, and especially about the Phillips curve.
In a nutshell, there's a corelation between the two, and if you push one down, the other one goes up. And what governments can do is pick a point on the curve and try to keep the economy around that point.
What does this have to do with this? Well, it's darn simple: for the last 60-70 years (depending on the country) everyone had the unemployment basically where they wanted it. In spite of the constant "waah, another company lays off 5000 workers, our country is doomed" scares, that's never actually been a long term problem. So some other company or several smaller companies will figure out "hey, look at all the workers we could hire in city X" and proceed to do so.
Incidentally that kind of a correlation isn't even just an effect of the last century, but you can see effects as far back as, say, the 1300s and 1400s. The plagues and resulting utter lack of unemployment for, say, peasants, caused a massive inflation and were in the end the cause of the Renaissance.
And you can see the same economics at work on a smaller scale in the limited domain of IT in the dot-com bubble, where lack of enough workforce caused the salaries to spiral up out of hand, and the cost of any resulting program reflected it. There the impact was absorbed by the rest of the society, but imagine the same economy-wide. If for every job there wasn't a pool of unemployed workforce, and companies had to pay a premium even to get receptionist, you'd see the prices rising accordingly.
It may seem calous and lacking empathy to say that someone has to be unemployed for the economy to work, and it partially is, but that's how it works. Rebelling against it is like rebelling against gravity: not very productive. We have to work with what works, not with what would be an idealist utopia. All we can do to make it more palatable is to offer some unemployment benefits and some government demand for work and move on.
And at the risk of going off topic, that's another reality that we have to live with: that governments actually have to do that kind of thing. In spite of bullshit pseudo-economic theories idealizing lean governments and some idealized image of unrestricted 19'th century capitalism, it stopped working that way in the Great Depression. That's when the economy of scarcity ended. The countries that got out of the crisis fast were the ones whose government overspent: be it FDR's New Deal, or Germany's and Italy's spending on armament. The countries which didn't, got to enjoy a jolly good depression until WW2: e.g., Canada.
Funny what things you get to learn when you take your economic theories from real economists, instead of from novelists. (*cough* Ayn Rand *cough*) But that's another discussion for another time.
Let's just say that the same applies then to forging a digitally signed document:
1. copy the document
2. figure out how to change it while hashing to the same digital signature
3. ???
4. profit
Yes, but see, step 1 is a non-achievement there. Step 2 is the real issue. _That_ what digital signatures really prevent. Seeing some idiot come up and say "ha ha, digital signatures are useless, because I just copied a CD that had a digitally signed file on it" would just tell me that the poor idiot is completely clueless and doesn't even know what he's talking about. It wasn't step 1 that was supposed to be made harder by those signatures, it was step 2 all along. Wake me up when you achieve that.
Same applies here.
Copying a RFID chip verbatim is a non-issue and non-achievement. It's like copying a floppy or a CD. _Of_ _course_ it can be copied, and only a complete ignoramus would make that their grand achievement.
Wake me up when you can actually change the data. And for that matter when the plan is less retarded than hoping that noone will look in the pass _and_ that they'll let you scan a building pass together with / instead of the passport. It's such a "cunning" plan that only Baldrick of Black Adder fame could honestly think it "cunning".
So he cloned a passport. As in, a verbatim copy with the same name, date of birth, etc. He explicitly says that he _can't_ (at the moment) change his name, date of birth, etc, because of the hashes.
So his grand achievement is... what? That that a fellow called John Smith could thus make a fake passport that still says John Smith?
Ah yes, so he could clone someone else's chip, if he can steal their passport, and place it on his own passport. Except now he has a passport that says John Smith and a chip that says Jane Doe. As he himself acknowledges it, it will work only if someone at the border/airport/whatever would just swipe the thing over a reader, but not bother actually reading it. And, oh, if also their scanner is broken and doesn't also read the "John Smith" printed in OCR letters on the real pass.
It sounds like some clever hack, but frankly, then what's the improvement over just stealing a passport and using it as it is? If the condition of passing for Jane Doe instead of John Smith is hoping that they'll just swipe it over the reader and not actually look at it, then simply a stolen passport would work just as well and with far less of a hassle.
So, basically, this is just someone's verbal masturbation, rather than some clever hack.
Exactly what kind of popularity are we talking about? It's a format that rose to prominence just on the back of some deals with porn sites, and which in the last years has steadily been dumped by everyone _including_ those porn sites. Other than a couple of minor older sites, have you even _seen_ a .rm file on the net lately? Almost everything these days is WMV, DivX and QT.
.rm files. Not when it's a fringe heading steadily towards extinction.
So, really, what popularity? I'll call a format or player popular when it's the format you run into on every other site. When youtube, google, and even a neighbour's vacation videos are
Or, oh, you mean the "2 million downloads a day" boast? Note that they don't say 2 million _RealPlayer_ downloads a day. They most likely include everything else downloaded from their servers, including music from their subscription service, short video clips that noone wants and everyone makes their player download automatically at startup, patches, updates, programs like Firefox, etc. I'd be thoroughly surprised if even 1/10 of those were actually RealPlayer downloads.
"Techie" is a broad term. Just because I'm an EE and work as a programmer, it doesn't mean that I continuously track the changes in each revision of every single shitty program on the planet.
And RealPlayer in particular is one thing I don't give a fuck about anymore anyway. It's not only that it's annoyed me too much with their shitty spyware back then, it's that I don't really have an incentive to bother with it anymore anyway. Did it change its ways? I dunno. Do I give enough of a fuck to check out? Nope. The vast majority of the media files on the net these days are in DivX, WMV and QuickTime format. In that order.
Well, that's because as anyone who's read Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy could tell you, they're doing it wrong. You don't need to turn something invisible, which is a horribly complicated thing and needs lots of energy. You just have to turn it into Somebody Else's Problem, in which case the human brain will just filter it out.
You're kidding, right? This is computer software, the battleground of OCPD personalities, where one aspect is taken out of context and used to judge something into "perfect" and "complete evil" categories, with no middle ground. And then proceed to try to raise a crusade to death against the complete evil ones. It's the place where vi vs emacs, KDE vs Gnome, Java vs C++, Intel vs AMD, goto vs for/while loops, and of course OSS vs anything else isn't just worth a debate, but become religious wars and things to fight to death for or against.
I bet that when your stereotypical ultra-militant extremist-Islamist organization's meetings go out of hands, someone could interject "stop it guys, you're starting to sound like on the OpenBSD mailing lists." And, assuming they've even heard of OpenBSD, the previously screaming and fist-shaking speakers would blush and start staring at their own shoes in silence.
In fact, if the Hesbolah vs Israel _were_ like the software holy wars, God help us, because there's be no possibility of peace ever. I could just see a peace talks turning into "ok, you may have aggreed to free Palestine, pay reparations, change your language to Arabic, convert to Islamic faith, recognize the Ayatolah's authority and everything... but... YOU RUN YOUR SERVERS ON WINDOWS! DIE INFIDEL!!!"
Darn. Now I'll have to respec my Rogue to use maces instead of daggers.
Just have a read around some boards, and if you can tell me that stuff like for example "would of" / "could of" / "should of" is correct English grammar, think a bit more about it. And that's just one of the aberrations out there. There are plenty of native English speakers who butcher their own language's grammar to something that doesn't even make any sense. I don't know of any language which uses a preposition for a verb's tense.
And it's not just that some pundits like making arbitrary rules. (Well, ok, at least in the case of German someone must have loved rules. But even there they're not arbitrary.) Much as we all love a "the Man keeping you down" bullshit theory, that's not really what grammar is for.
It's that at some point you have to communicate with more people than whatever village or l33t clan you're in. If everyone butchers the language in his own way, then effectively you have to reverse engineer each such improvised dialect to understand each other. I know I've had to deal with people in MMOs that almost gave me a headache just trying to understand WTF they were saying. _That_ is the point of trying to have a common language, with the same words and rules for everyone, instead of letting any community, clique and gang split into their own dialect that. Everyone's time is better spent doing more productive stuff than trying to decrypt the personal dialect of every teenager who thinks he's hip and cool if he butchers the language in his own personal dialect.
It's not just that languages evolve. It's that if left to their own devices, languages tend to diverge a lot over time, as each village and region comes up with its own "evolution". There are for example German dialects which could barely communicate with each other if each one only knew his own dialect. And then there are languages which have split from a common root, but are as far from each other as, say, Swedish and German. It was ok to let them diverge like that in times when most people only had to deal with the other villagers in the same village, but that's no longer the case. At some point to function as a modern nation you need a _common_ language, that any two citizens can use and easily understand each other. Hence formalizing a lexicon and a set of rules of that common language.
Well, taking a very wild guess about the motivations:
1. Because of protective instincts of the parents and not knowing when to give up. As I was saying in another message, mom still tries to control me, and I'm at an age when in the Old Kingdom times chances I might be already dead, embalmed and burried. Or having grandkids and telling them "back in my days" stories. So basically parents get attached to treating someone like a baby, and eventually if there's enough of them, society gets it that way.
2. Because society needed increasingly high numbers of educated people, and there's only so much education you can cram into someone until the age of 14. So a lot of people need at the very least high school too. So it makes sense in a way to extend the limit until their parents have to take care of them to include at least that, even if they're really past the biological maturity date. Unfortunately, as I was saying some people don't realize that they're supporting an adult, and are still stuck with the mentality that they have a really big 6-year-old.
(E.g., true story, the last time I got a "Moraelin, have you said 'hello' to the nice lady?" from mom was at the age of 30. The only reason it stopped there was the resulting conflict.)
3. Because the ensuing "teenagge crisis" has become not just something considered normal or, paradoxically, a sign of immaturity, but something that the whole western culture _depends_ on. The conflict and rebellion against an arbitrary authority and against being officially little more than another adult's slave, is followed by eventually just accepting it. So society gets most of its new members already "housebroken" and used to obeying someone else. It was probably more of a nice side-effect than parents collectively thinking "damn, I want my son to be an obedient sheep to anyone claiming any authority", but it's a nice effect anyway. So I just don't see anyone giving that up.
1. Point well taken about the full responsibility of being an adult. But noone is really proposing to give a teenager old the full responsibilities of a modern-day adult. I'm just saying they shouldn't be treated like a complete idiot either. At the very least they deserve a mature-level explanation why, instead of an electronic gizmo just saying "not that one." They may still lack all the data and context that an adult has, but at least the mental capacity is already there.
(Although Alexander The Great _did_ get left to rule a kingdom as regent at the age of 16, while his father was at war. I believe that that's at least comparable complexity with what most adults have to deal with nowadays. There too were finances, credit, diplomacy, propaganda, and more persuasive sophistry than in an ad on TV nowadays, etc. But OK.)
2. Speaking of learning how to be an adult, how about then teaching them to deal with that propaganda. If the focus is on using that extra time to learn some stuff about this complex new world, then by all means, it seems to me that the focus should be on learning. Seemingly arbitrary restrictions aren't learning. It's just sweeping the problem under a rug until later they're 18 or 21 or whatever, and they're still just as unprepared to deal with that propaganda machine or anything else.
It's, if you will, like the difference between teaching someone to swim and just building a fence around the swimming pool. Then at 18 or 21 years old you just give the kid a key to the gate, except he still can't swim.
3. That "reprehensible little barb" and "dragging down civilized dialogue" happened in response to a poster which had no trouble labelling its opponent's post as "utter bull" or as "is so utterly retarded I don't know where to begin." Sorry, that doesn't look like civilized dialogue in the first place. I don't believe that my using a "retarded" of my own dragged it much lower than it already was. So let's move on.
And that's just an example of the "if you're for X, then you must be automatically, unthinking pro any X-related solution" fallacy. It's like saying "if you like water, then you shouldn't mind having your house flooded." Or "if you were saying that the government should do something about unemployment, then you shouldn't mind an euthanasia program to get rid of those." Or "if you're not for terrorism, you must support the war in Iraq and the PATRIOT act." That bogus. Just seeing that a problem X exists, doesn't mean any wrong solution is automatically worthy of unconditional support.
It has nothing to do with group think. Sometimes a solution is just snake oil, and bad snake oil at that. That's all. Even if it proposes to address the right problem, it may be the kind that doesn't really solve anything, or even makes it worse. It can be of the calibre of using mercury to treat syphilis in the past: it didn't actually cure the disease, and only added mercury poisoning to the list of problems.
It's not just that it'll make a few kids life even more nightmarish than it already is (e.g., see again the girl berated by her mom for buying 3 ounces of juice.) It's that even as solutions go, it's the kind of crap "solution" that tries to suppress the symptoms rather than fix the problem.
The problem is that kids, just like adults, take decisions based on the pre-existing data and habits they have. They're doing what they've learned from their parents, and by that I also mean immitating what they see daddy doing. They're pretty much pre-programmed to. (Hence, "do as I say, not as I do" doesn't really work.) Or if mommy and daddy weren't available for that, what they've seen Tom, Dick and Harry down the road doing.
The correct solution is to give them enough data and personal example to make a good decision, not to just build more barriers against the symptoms. If a kid's only knowledge about food, for example, is along the lines of "if I try to buy something bad the alarm rings", what do you do when they grow up and no longer have that artifficial surveillance? Or is it ok to go obese and diabetic in the 20's, just because it's not your responsibility any more? Or what do you do about them trading lunches to get past such restrictions? Is it ok just because now you have an online checklist as a conscience lullaby?
Solutions that just suppress the symptoms are often worse than no solution at all. They just maintain a false facade of everything being all right, when everything really isn't. They allow a bad parent to seemingly see results out of crap "explanations" like "because I said so" or "as long as you're in my house, you'll do as I say and stop asking why", and get back to watching the football game. But the problem is still there. As soon as that kid gets out of surveillance range (summer camp, college, growing up, whatever), he still doesn't know what not to do and _why_ not to do them.
If the only thing bad about a certain act or food is that "daddy say so", guess what will happen when daddy isn't around to say so? If the only rule they know about something is that is tied to living in your house, guess what follows logically when they're _not_ in your house? Etc.
In a nutshell, that's why: because it's the wrong solution.
Ok, point duly taken and thanks for the correction, but then "life expectancy" was the wrong word. Yes, I literally mean that even excluding infant mortality, most people of ancient Egypt, at least in the Old Kingdom times, did drop dead before they reached the 40's.
:)
What I mean is like this. We have a ton of records, including tombs, mummies, tablets, etc, which are sorta our sample for determining that kinda thing. So now let's imagine we group them into a "how many died at each age" curve. You know, with the X being the age when they died, and the Y being how many records we have of people dead at that age. That graph had not only a spike in the low ages, but also the peak of the gauss curve would be somewhere in the 30-39 years old range. Even ignoring those early infant deaths, getting past 40 years old wasn't very common.
That's basically what I meant there: where the peak of that gauss curve was, rather than the correct meaning of the term.
Yes, some people lived until their 60's, 70's or beyond, especially among the rich classes, but at that point it was the trailing end of the gauss curve, rather than something you can count on. And that was "balanced" by other people whose death happened in their teens and twenties.
If you want the "average life expectancy at birth" in the (correct) meaning that you use it, _including_ the infant mortality, we know for example from the Roman census data in the area that for example for women it was 22-25 years. Scary, but, as you've said, distorted by the high infant mortality.
At any rate, to get back to the real topic of how long it took to "produce" an adult, in ancient Egypt the age of marriage at least was 15 years old for males and 12 years old for females. It's not just "probably", those are the historical ages. At that age you'd be expected to be mature enough to have your own family and your own children. I.e., for example as a girl of 12, not only you wouldn't get mom packing your food, but you'd be expected to cook for and feed your husband and maybe children.
It's not even the lowest ages. I'm pretty sure that in the middle ages men would be considered mature at 14 or even 13 years old, but I'm too lazy and it's a too long message already
If you think that the human species was always based on babysitting your kid until the age of 21, sad to say, you're the one on the "utter bull" side.
For starters, for a large portion of the human history (in fact, for _the_ largest portion), the average life expectancy was in the 30 to 40 years range. Yes, literally. The life expectancy in ancient Egypt for example was in the low 30's. In the European middle ages and renaissance it wasn't much better, since they had very high mortality. In fact, all medieval cities had such high mortality (because of being filthy disease-ridden places) that they needed a constant influx of peasants moving in just to maintain their size. So, again, the average person would have a really really shitty life expectancy.
So pay attention: you wouln't have _time_ to babysit them until 21. If you got married at 21, took a year to get your first kid, and then babysat him to 21, that's a total of 43 years. Add a few tries, because of the extremely high infant mortality, and you'd end up needing some 50 years for such a bullshit babysitting utopia. It's more than 50% more than the actual life expectancy you'd have.
So for most of the human history, at 12 to 14 years old you'd be considered _adults_. At that age you'd be expected to get married, run a business, fight in a war, or, yes, maybe command a ship or an army. There were a lot of kings, nobles, generals, etc, who ruled a country or led its troops in battle at that age. There were decisions which changed history, at least on a local level, taken at that age.
Thinking that they always had mommy pack their lunch and check if they wear a sweater at that age... heh... to quote your own words: "is so utterly retarded I don't know where to begin."
So, yes, if you're trying to tell me that a modern 14 year old can't can't even decide what to buy without mommy deciding for them, then, yes, there must be something awfully wrong with the current crop of kids. Because "kids" of that age are what throughout most of human history were the _adults_, and perfectly capable of functioning as adults.
Or maybe, just maybe, it's not the kids, but their parents who are retarded. Just a thought. Maybe the kid would be perfectly capable of taking a mature and responsible decision, if mommy and daddy had taken the time to give him the data and the opportunity for those decisions, instead of just controlling what the kid does.
You, on the other hand, have too much confidence that the parents won't be control freaks. "Over-protective" doesn't sound that bad until you end up basically in a straitjacket of motherly love that crushes the life and sanity out of you. Don't underestimate how much "over" there can be in "overprotective."
/. it contained such gems as one mother getting horrified and confronting her daughter because... said daughter had bought 3 ounces of juice to wash down the food with. "Noooo! Think of all the calories in 3 ounces of juice!" Not an exact quote, but the same idea.
The last time such a system was discussed on
To start with the _lesser_ problem, she was trying to raise her daughter as... what? An Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder case? Yes, obesity is bad, but if you're at the point where you count the few calories in a quarter of a cup of juice, do yourself a favour and kill yourself. We're not talking buying a big bottle of Coke, we're not talking even a can, we're talking 3 ounces. Of juice.
Moving a bit upwards on the scale, such a remotely-controlled kid will grow to be completely unprepared for life. They never were trusted with making a decision of their own, and seeing the results, so they (A) just don't know what to do when mommy isn't around to remote-control them, and (B) completely lack the data to base a decision on. Playing and exploration in childhood are learning. Someone who has grown up with mommy taking all their decisions for them, hasn't learned anything.
I know I basically went off guidance as every time I was out of reach of my control-freak parents. I ended up in an alcoholic coma in one of the few summer camps where they didn't tag along, as well as doing a thousand other stupid things. Partially because it was one occasion to vent all that built-up frustration of being little more than a remote-controlled puppet to my parents the rest of the time. But in retrospect the largest part was the aspect that I just had no freaking clue how to function without them remote-controlling me.
Even after finishing college and moving away, it was like running into a brick wall as learning curves go. Without mom telling me what to do and when to do it, I suddenly had no flipping clue what _am_ I supposed to do and when. It took some rediscovering from scratch how to even function as an adult. (In all fairness, mom still tries to remote-control me. She'd be more than happy to still tell me exactly what and when to do, but at that point I had decided to at least try functioning as myself for a change.)
But maybe more important is the psychological damage. Kids like adults (and like most animals, including your dog and cat) need some breathing space. Even the most affectionate lap cat needs its moments of being alone or doing its own thing, or it will go neurotic.
E.g., I only have to look at my brother who at one point had a fit of anorexia over my parents complete control over his food. At one point as a kid he just stopped eating, and eventually ended up in hospital. They even ran all sorts of medical tests on him, because they suspected cancer the way he was losing weight. He was basically deflating as fast as, well, someone who doesn't eat at all any more. I can easily see that possibility in the future of such kid as the girl with her 3 ounces of juice.
I managed to do somewhat better (or at least not swing to such extremes), partially by finding refuge in programming, partially by cherishing the moments I was finally out of my family's reach. I certainly didn't hate school too much. I actually had more freedom there than at home. Still, I ended up with some long term damage of my own anyway.
E.g., I basically have to roll for willpower (if I'm allowed the D&D metaphor) to do anything, because some circuit in the back of the brain says "you know, mom would disapprove of me doing that. Or doing it that way." And I don't mean doing bad stuff, but even stuff like taking the trash out. Mom would certainly find something to complain
Heh. I'm used to exaggeration and hype, but this has got to take the crown. I really don't think you really mean that.
Post Traumatic Stress isn't just about "oh, I'm so stressed that my penis size... err... level isn't the highest in the game." It's about intense psychological trauma caused by a believable threat of imminent death, severe physical injury, or something of that order of magnitude. We're taking the kind of stress that happens when the enemy is shelling your position with artillery or MRLS, or a tank is coming at you and the heaviest weapon you have is a SAW, or you see someone's brains blown out before your very eyes, or you get to storm a house and see what a grenade can do in a closed room (there are WW2 veterans who still break down into tears if you ask them about that), or whatever similarly serious.
Again, we're not talking just "stress", but the "OMG, I'm DEAD one way or another" kind of being scared shitless for your very life and limb. We're talking intense _terror_ where you see no way out. That kind of thing.
If you get that kind of pure mind-paralyzing terror out of a MUD, and for such a mundane reason as xp and levels... please don't take it as an insult, but as friendly advice: see a good psychiatrist ASAP. If just comparing your score or level to someone else's can trigger such a massively disproportionate reaction, you have major problems. Seriously.
That or keep your hyperboles less over-the-top if it was just a hyperbole.
Pretending that there's no dichotomy and you can do everything at the same time is actually the wrong premise, because it assumes that those countries have infinite funds. In practice, they don't. _That'_ where that dichotomy comes from.
The OLPC project expected India to fork over some billions of dollars for those laptops. That's where that dichotomy comes from.
Sure, in an ideal world, India would have infinite funds and could do that and everything else at the same time, and there would be no either-or choice ever. But in the Real World (TM) India has finite funds. Those billions for this would be translated 1-to-1 into less money for something else. To fork over that kind of money, India would have to provide less of something else to its population. Medical aid, infrastructure repairs, whatever. But something would have to be reduced by an equal sum.
Do you understand now? _That_ is where the exclusive choice comes from. That's what causes dichotomies. It's a "do we spend billions on X, or do we spend those billions on Y, because we don't have the money for both" kinda choice. So at some point you have to put on your thinking cap and decide "do I need X more than Y, or is it the other way around?"
And if you've RTFA, you've seen that that's just the kind of comparison and decision they've done. They looked at what they can do with the same money, and the conclusion was that even in education they can use it better than on importing laptops. They can build schools, educate more teachers, etc. And a good teacher will help kids more _and_ help more kids than a dumb laptop will.
Sure, we're nerds and probably a few thousands will jump in with their testimonies as to how a computer made them smart and taught them programming. It worked for me too. But look around you. Do you honestly believe that every little Tom, Dick and Harry will use it to that end? How many of your classmates had computers and never used them for anything more than games and surfing for porn when mommy isn't at home. A computer is just a tool, even if a powerful one. Just giving someone a computer won't auto-magically motivate them to learn programming or google for information. Just like giving someone a brush won't auto-magically make them the next Michelangelo, or giving them a typewriter won't auto-magically make them a novelist or playwright.
Yes, it could decide to be a grand scale social experiment and provide the feedback for others. But it would be a completely idiotic and irresponsible waste of its taxpayers' money. Such experiments are better done at a small scale, not nation-wide and involving a huge chunk of the government's budget. I mean, yes, what if it _is_ a clueless project?
The system is a lot less set in stone than it was 200 years ago. E.g., in Germany alone there have been pretty significant changes to stuff like healthcare or social protection in the last couple of years alone.
But, again, it boils down to safeguards and, in the end, democracy. If you have a government that would rather do things in its own "efficient" way that everyone else considers inadequate (e.g., outdated) or unfair, then you've just told me that democracy over there doesn't quite work as it should. Or at least that it's the same black-and-white view I was talking of: either a government doesn't have jurisdiction at all, or it _must_ inherently end up doing it badly and to everyone else's detriment.
In a democracy, i.e., "rule of the people", the people should have the means to get it their way, not the way some government bureaucrat finds "efficient." E.g., if enough people want the distributor to pay for the return shipping, they can eventually get it their way and get that made into a law. And if methods a, b and c no longer are adequate, in a multi-party proportional-representation system, there _will_ eventually be someone who uses it as political capital to get elected. It's not like there's a shortage of people who can smell political capital like sharks can smell blood, and in a proportional representation system the barriers are very low so they can go against established parties very easily with that capital.
See for example even such "crazy" ideas like the Pirate Party in Sweden. If they thought there's something wrong with copyright, they went and made a party. And in a proportional representation system, if enough people consider that to be their dominant issue, even such a minority party can and routinely does get some seats in the parliament to raise the issue.
But, anyway, that's in the end what democracy means. People can vote to for something inefficient, unfair, or even outright stupid. (E.g., while contrary to popular myth it wasn't a majority, some people did vote for Hitler. E.g., ancient Athens did vote democratically to declare war on Sparta... then discovered that Athens' power was naval and Sparta was landlocked on a mountain. Let's just say Athens never recovered from that mistake.) But that's what democracy means.
And I see no inherent problem with that. Between (A) the majority having the means to vote for something even unfair to the small businesses, and (B) the majority having to feed an army of lawyers to harrass those businesses over the same issues... I dunno, I find A both more democratic, and in the end more efficient. At least then it's just a handful of bureaucrats instead of an army of lawyers putting a drain on the economy.
Look at every generation, and its parent generation and... you'll see that not generations were equal, as scientific progress goes. It goes up and down like a yoyo, and it did so since the beginning of time.
E.g., ancient Egypt must have started with some really bright minds, since they discovered a lot of things. And I mean including a ton of medical and other stuff, not just how to pile stones in a pyramid. Yet right before the macedonian invasion it was already at a stage where nothing much was invented any more. Medicine for example had been solidified into something that was religion, law and malpractice insurance rolled into one, and everyone just followed the same official texts literally, and never tried anything new. For _millenia_.
E.g., in Europe the golden ages of Greece and Rome were followed by what we call the "Dark Ages". It's not just that they discovered fewer things, it's that actually a lot of information has been _lost_ in that time.
E.g., take China. It was at one point one of the most technologically advanced places. They have a long list of inventions, including stuff from paper to gunpowder to trebuchets to crossbows (including the repeating kind) to the compass to god knows what else that they invented more than a millenium before the Europeans. They were _that_ advanced. Even their less glamorous stuff, e.g., the composite bow, might get less hype, but you can see its efficiency against European equipment and tactics when it was brought over by the Huns.
Yet then came an age of decline and it ended up with the Manchu Qing dynasty, where literacy actually decreased and the government was literally more concerned with enforcing a uniform haircut (yes, I'm not joking) than with any kind of science or technology pursuit. The Chinese army actually regressed from having _some_ guns during the Ming dynasty, to all spears, swords and bows during the Qing dynasty. That sad.
Or take Japan. Yes, now they're doing damn good technologically and have been even more impressive as progress goes during the Meiji Restoration. But before that they had periods when it stagnated or even regressed. E.g., the Heian period, also remembered for the rise of the Samurai caste, is also considered by some a time of stagnation and even regress.
So, yes, times can change. Sometimes for the better, but sometimes for the worse. Some societies fail to give those "mundane Joes" incentive to go and learn or research something. Yes, each individual can decide what to do with his life, but if on the whole it's a smarter or more popular choice to aim low intellectually, people may well do just that. And then stagnation and even regress follow.
Trust me, noone is asking for the government to come over and take our rights away or anything. But you illustrate exactly the kind of a attitude that I was talking about.
The element you seem to be missing in your all-or-nothing argument is: control. Noone proposes to give the government _unchecked_ power. In fact, it's not even as much giving it power, it's making it do its duty: to serve the citizens that elected it.
The jaded American idea seems to be that that any government power is some kind of a toggle with only two possible (final) states: (A) complete unchecked self-serving power, or (B) not having the government involved at all. And that any good citizen should fight to keep anything into category (B). But at any rate, that there are inherently no shades of grey between the two.
The European idea is that the government is there to _serve_ us. Yes, we know that politicians have no morals, are easily corrupted, etc, and generally that governments are very dangerous things. It just means we have to be more careful about it, not that we should avoid involving it altogether.
If you will, let's use the metaphor of a big and dangerous pitbull for the government. The difference is basically like this: the American notion seems to be that you have a big dangerous pitbull in your back yard, and it could get rabies any day now, and your duty is to fight it off and keep it away from you and your family. The European notion is that since it _is_ your dog and you're feeding it anyway, you might as well get some use out of it. Get it trained to do _your_ bidding instead of fighting it off. And better be a responsible owner and make sure it doesn't get rabies in the first place.
In a nutshell, that's what gets some of us, you know, _wondering_ about _some_ Americans. (I do realize that blanket generalizations tend to be false, so I'm not extrapolating over everyone.) That black-and-white view, completely missing any shades of grey in between. E.g., missing the intermediate shade of a government that is under enough control so it _can't_ just bend over to the highest corporate bidder.
The view that the any government is, unavoidably, destined to be corrupt and whore itself to whoever pays the biggest bribe, is in fact something I consider _dangerous_. It's the kind of thing that, in a perverse way, _legitimizes_ it when it goes and does just that. It just gets people to shrug and go "well, what did you expect?" instead of doing something to stop it. Seeing some of the overt cattering to corporate/cartel interests instead of the interests of their own voters that seems to be the norm in the US Congress... I just have to wonder, basically, how much of that overt corruption (not to mention perversion of what "democracy" was supposed to mean) is the result of the mindset that it's normal and inevitable for a government to do that.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far aw... err... a few years back, when Germany's currency was still the DM, I remember using a vending machine in a railways station. And getting a Polish 10 Zloti coin instead of a 1 DM as part of the change. The coin was remarkably similar to 1 DM in size and weight.
:P
The difference between the two was bigger than between the yen and cent, though. A DM was (later) worth half an euro, while the 10 Zloti... well, let's just say that the difference between 1 DM and 10 Zloti was 1 DM
I'm guessing whoever it was did it more than with that one coin, since pretty soon all vending machines in town had been tweaked to the point where they routinely rejected genuine 1 DM coins too. They swallowed any other coinage just fine, but 1 DM required several tries and some of the 1 DM coins just didn't work at all any more.
Now I don't know what actually happened there, but my favourite wild uninformed guess (or conspiracy theory, if you will) is that it was done so they'd reject the 10 Zloti coins. Unfortunately the difference between them was so small that it also rejected some of the real coins.