It's not America's fault that this guy is ignorant of their existence.
Well, look at the bulk of the messages in this thread alone. The "unless you have lawyers (or can bluff that you have them), you're screwed" theme seems to be the dominant mindset. I don't know if those consumer protection offices don't work, or people don't know they exist, or if it's just the same old mindset of distrusting the government and any of its agencies. There must be _some_ logical explanation.
But it's hard not to notice the common theme that everyone would rather call the lawyer first, and everything else is presented as barely some place to ineffectively vent some steam if you can't afford a lawyer. At least that's the impression I'm left with. By comparison, if I were to tell any of my co-workers or neighbours something like "damn, my ISP is trying to make me pay for something that wasn't in the contract", the first answer would be almost invariably "go to the consumer protection bureau."
It's a pretty strong contrast, from where I stand.
No, the across-the-board "either you're rich enough to have lawyers or are a peon" doesn't apply to every capitalist country in the world, but seems to be largely a USA issue. In a sense it's the price you pay for the culture of not trusting your own government, or for that matter for ending up with a government which you can't trust. Unfortunately, then, yes, your only recourse are lawyers, and that's why in the USA they breed like rabbits.
Down here in Europe most things aren't solved by class action lawsuits, but by having a set of laws regarding the consumers' rights, and some government agencies whose job is to enforce those. If a company tried to screw me over, believe me, I wouldn't do any of the three options you describe. Instead I'd go to a consumer rights bureau ("Verbraucherzentrale") and see what they have to say about it. Because it's their job and are backed by the government. They can have a lot more teeth than a lawyer, if it's warranted.
In a sense, it's the difference between having an organized police force and wild-west each-man-for-himself vigilante justice. The USA seems still stuck at the point where your rights and protection are determined by whether you can hire a posse to fight for them. Only now it's the more expensive lawyers with ties and briefcases, instead of desperados with sombreros and Winchester guns. Most of the rest of the world moved over to more efficient model of having a centralized "police" equivalent.
And let me stress that again: it's not just that it's more fair (I could get help even if I didn't have a dime to pay for a lawyer's advice), it's also more efficient for society as a whole. You don't have to feed armies of lawyers when a handful of government officials can do the same job _and_ serve as a better deterrent. A company can imagine they'll smoke _me_ with legalese gibberish, or bully me into submission, or just hope that I don't want to pay a lawyer. But they will know from the start that they're never going to bully the government into submission, and that there'll be someone there who reads legalese as fluently as it gets and knows if what is in there is legal or not.
If you will, it's like in the police vs everyone-with-his-own-posse analogy again. A police is more efficient than everyone hiring his own desperados to guard his ranch, because it _doesn't_ have to actually send policemen to stand guard on every ranch. Just the knowing that that police force exists is enough of a deterrent for 99% of the population.
Downside: of course, you need to trust that the government is on your side and not just ruling for the highest corporate bidder. I.e., it comes in handy to have a real multi-party system where they have to work hard for their votes.
The Xbox 360 is the first console ever to have PCs outperform it before the console has hit store shelves. In the past, consoles have had at least a year or so before PCs could touch them.
No shit, Sherlock? Lemme see:
- Dreamcast: had a PowerVR graphics chip that had been available for the PC too for a year or two. Not even the most powerful at that. It was the predecessor of the Kyro and generally a flop in the PC market. In the Dreamcast it had a whole 8 MB video RAM too, at a time when PC graphics cards were moving to 32 MB.
- XBox: basically had a predecessor of the NForce chipset, with integrated graphics. Look at some PC benchmarks for how much those suck. Hint: having half the buss width, half the memory speed, _and_ having to share that choked bandwidth with the CPU, doesn't exactly help with rendering speed.
- PS2: read some developper complaints from back then. It didn't have even half the fill rate or triangle processing rate that Sony had claimed. Trying to even replicate Sony's rigged demos was a failure as soon as you had more than one character on the screen or an even moderately complex background. It took a lot of low level work to get it to run fast enough, while on a PC even a mid-range card never needed such tricks to do its job. And even then there's a reason the vast majority of PS2 games never had more than a handful of characters on the screen at the same time.
Get this, Sherlock: what saved all 3 was that they just didn't have to render in higher res than 640x480. _That_ was their only saving grace.
And it was a saving grace in more ways than the number of pixels rendered too. Rendering in low res makes it ok to use lower resolution textures too (hence needs less memory bandwidth and uses the cache better), _and_ lets you get away with lower polygon counts. If you use the exact same models, the same triangle may be something 8x8 pixels in a console game, but 16x16 on a PC in 1280x1024. The same model may look horribly polygonal on a PC game in 1280x1024, but decently rounded in a console game in 640x480. So PC games had to compensate by using higher polycounts, and PC graphics cards had to be able to process those extra polygons.
So in a nutshell, oh please... pretending that any console from the last decade was actually faster than a high end PC, is just plain old false.
I hate to be cliche, but how about minding your own business? I'm sick and tired by now of people telling me what kind of games I should play, how should I spend my free time, and what medium I should prefer for this and that. If I like games with a story, what exactly is the problem? How exactly is it anyone else's business?
Plus, just to be nasty, I can't help noticing that the "go read a book if you want a good story" snottiness is the most thrown around by people who, in fact, _don't_ read books either. It's, in fact, become the standard excuse to be the gaming equivalent of a couch-potato. The same kind that would otherwise flop on the couch and watch football for a few hours, and get their brains completely turned off for the whole duration.
So, yes, by all means, take your own advice. Go read a novel. Watch a movie with a plot. Whatever.
I don't know, someone would IMHO need to be completely clueless for such an association to really result in distrust.
I mean, seriously. So some virus writer uses CVS. In what way does that say anything bad about CVS? It's like saying that gangsters use(d) cars for their drive-by shootings. Does that mean we should start distrusting cars or car manufacturers? And some are stereotyped as beating people up with baseball bats and/or throwing people off piers with cement shoes. Does that mean we should start distrusting baseball or cement? And the Nazis in WW2 used tanks. In fact, they're famous for it. Does that mean that, say, the US Army should get rid of their tanks because of that association? Etc.
In fact, it's even weaker than that, because here CVS isn't even directly involved in the crime. So it's more like saying that terrorists have fridges and TVs in their homes, hence you should start distrusting fridges and TVs.
Basically even as guilt-by-association goes, it seems to me like it's a very very weak one.
Ah, well, it's McAfee, so being "better" than that doesn't really say much. I'm sure there are some good OSS AV programs out there, but comparing them to McAfee really doesn't say much. It's sorta like saying that they're better than a kick in the crotch.
Honestly, the last time I used that crap "security" suite of theirs, it was far worse than your average virus.
Among _many_ samples that proved massive cluelessness was the fact that as soon as it "updated" itself, it actually couldn't cope with being installed in a different directory than what the installer proposed, and proceeded to install the update as a second copy in the default directory. Both copies running at the same time. The combined effect was slowing my computer worse than some spyware cocktails I've seen on other people's computers. Uninstalling it actually uninstalled one copy, and left the other one running. I had to edit the registry and delete files manually to get rid of it.
Yes, you've read it right. If you thought manually editing the registry applied only to getting rid of viruses and spyware, now you can add McAfee's crap to that.
Other stuff included a sort of a "privacy guard" that, effectively, ruined access to any site that used cookies. Using most forums became impossible. File Planet thought simultaneously that I'm logged in and _not_ logged in. And so on.
And, as I was saying, many many other such annoyances.
I mean, frankly, at that point their solution is worse than most viruses and trojans. A lot of viruses just sit there and silently send spam or redirect popups or whatnot. Having to reinstall half your apps used to be the mark of the nastiest and most anti-social malware. Now McAfee lets you experience that without the trouble of actually getting virused.
So, frankly, comparing anything to McAfee is going to look good. A turd on the side of the road seems better when you compare it to McAfee.
RTFA, seriously. That disclosure that they mention is _not_ the disclosure of OS code. If you RTFA, at that point they explain very well what they mean by "full disclosure" and it has _nothing_ to do with OSS any more. Their "full disclosure" is about researchers disclosing a vulnerability, together with ample instructions and proof of concept code of how it can be exploited. It has _nothing_ to do with Linux vs Windows, Closed Source vs F/OSS, etc. It's about disclosing vulnerabilities.
Basically what McAffee says is, "I wish researchers stopped telling everyone everything about this and that buffer overflow. Telling people everything about a bug only helps the evil hackers use it in a virus!!!111one1eleventeen" Not an exact quote, but that's the general idea they're peddling there.
Which is, in the nutshell, just the old "security by obscurity" argument. Which has already been debated to hell and back and is known to not work that way. And, frankly, it's weird to see McAffee preaching that attitude, because the anti-virus makers should know the best that it never worked that way.
Basically it seems to me that McAffee _isn't_ complaining about OSS, and explicitly says they don't. There are two _very_ distinct and unrelated parts of the article:
1. The open source part. Which doesn't contain any kind of anti-OSS slant. It just says that people now have a lot of F/OSS tools to manage their files and whatnot.
2. The part about full disclosure. Where they basically whine that they'd like to have what we all call "security by obscurity." Basically McAffee would like a world where researchers keep a lot more stuff secret, because supposedly being public about that helps evil hackers. Which is as stupid as it gets, yes, but it also has nothing to do with OSS at this point.
But to play devil's advocate, would you really prefer it if your kid didn't learn that other people might resent his intelligence, so when he starts work he thinks that everybody is stupid and he's clueless about why people get pissed off with him?
Yes, I think we'd all be better off and society as a whole would be better off, if so many people didn't learn early that being stupid is cool and being smart is way uncool. I shudder to think how many millions of otherwise intelligent kids learn each year that you fit better in a peer group if you're acting as a thoroughly dumb "jock" or, if you're a girl, as a stereotypical airhead. Kids who otherwise might have made a great scientist or engineer end up learning that their childhood dreams are "uncool" and that to fit in with their peers they have to barely slip through school and never set their sights higher than getting a McDonalds job.
Look at it from the opposite direction - schools might teach "don't be smart around stupid people", but they also teach "don't look down on people who aren't as smart as you".
If only. They're two very different problems and acting as if there's any correlation between them doesn't do any good:
1. "don't be smart around stupid people"
That's what I'd rate as the biggest problem there, by an order of magnitude. For every single nerd who had the problem of treating everyone else as stupid, there'll be a dozen good kids who didn't, yet nevertheless end up acting stupid because that's what the group appreciates. Or worse yet, they learn "do look down on those who show any sign of intelligence."
2. "don't look down on people who aren't as smart as you"
Yes, a ton of nerds have a personality problem and treat other people as idiots... and get treated as idiots in return. That _is_ a personality problem, but it isn't treated in school. Being bullied and ostracized for seemingly no other fault than having a brain will _not_ alleviate the problem, it will just reinforce the impression that everyone around is an idiot.
It certainly won't teach tollerance and open-mindedness when they don't get any tollerance and open-mindedness in the first place. Chances are the other kids won't even stop to analyze the _real_ problem, much less explain to the "nerd" why he's being bullied. And doubly so those who are just SFVs (Stupid Fashion Victims) and don't even have any actual reason to bully the "nerd" than that it's the popular thing to do.
Thanks for offering the prime example of why us techies laugh at humanities students. Or at least at the utterly retarded types who spew such cretinous stuff as "Research simply follows the fad of the day." or "Science is 95% opinion then facts" or "What about astrology, the most rediculious of the sciences!"
Guess what, simpleton? Noone considers astrology a science nowadays.
Basically all you've told me is that you're exactly the kind of ignoramus we loathe: the kind that isn't just content to be an ignorant, but tries to drag everyone else down to his level. The kind who isn't just content to have no fucking clue about real science, but _has_ to bandage his ego by looking down upon those who do.
Tired of elitism? Well, that starts at home. Stop acting like an elitist idiot yourself. The whole "I'm so much better than you because I don't understand science" ivory-tower is what gets us techies to reply with elitism right back. Most of us can accept that not everyone has the inclination or in some cases the IQ for science. Sure. Society needs painters and plumbers too. But seeing an idiot trying to present his ignorance and idiocy as proof of superiority _will_ get a sneer from those who do understand why your arguments only betray massive ignorance.
Why not? Back in my day, I sat all evening in front of the computer, and I learned all I need about functioning in society. Don't ninja-loot, don't let your pet aggro the whole room if you're a Warlock, get your shield from the vault before joining a raid if you're a Warrior or Paladin... err... ok, I see what you mean.
I'll assume that they'll (eventually) going to make the tip or edge or whatever out of some cristalline metal. In which case, not really.
Let's first define "sharp". No object in the world is a perfect edge ending in a clean zero-width edge. All knives, pins, etc, have a tip that, under a powerful enough microscope looks "blunt". What you'd see would be something like a pretty rounded "tip". What makes it "sharp" is that it's a very small surface.
In other words, imagine two cones, both ending up in a bit of a section of a sphere. Except one is a 0.01 inch radius and the other is a 1 inch radius. What makes the first one sharp and the other one blunt? Pressure. Pressure equals force divided by surface. The surface rises with the square of that radius. So the first one needs 10,000 times less force to produce the same pressure. You can create enough pressure with your thumb to push a tack's small tip through wood, but you'd need an industrial press if you wanted to push a 1 inch steel ball into wood.
In other words what makes something sharp is simply having a small enough tip. You need the same pressure to break through a given material. Having a smaller tip just means you can reach that pressure with less force. At some point you need very little force, and at that point we consider the object to be "very sharp".
How does that help us here? Let's say you had such a pyramid, and let's say you managed to break off the atom at the tip. So now you have a "blunt" tip that's made of a 2x2 atom square. That's still _incredibly_ sharp. It's million times smaller than the tip of a tack or pin, hence it would need accordingly less force to push through the material of your choice.
In other words, forget about breaking off an atom. You'd coukd lose _thousands_ of layers from that tip and still count as sharp.
I keep hearing the "well, they're vulnerable to blackmail" excuse, and the more I hear it, the more it sounds like just a crap excuse to discriminate against some people. It's the same bigotry and idiocy, only with a better sounding excuse than the previous "they're an abhomination in the eyes of God!" excuse.
How _do_ you blackmail someone with info they've made _public_? No, seriously. Let's say I were to write on my home page, Facebook profile, MySpace, etc, "I'm gay and into BDSM". I'm not into either, but let's assume that for example sake. How _would_ you go about blackmailing me with something that's that public? How would a blackmailing dialogue go?
"'lose' your keys this weekend or I tell your dad about that 'experimental weekend' you posted about on MySpace"
"Heh. Dude, have you met my parents? Even if I hadn't already told them, they're the kind that put TALKER in STALKER. They google me weekly and tells all their friends, relatives, and strangers on the street about it. Heck, dad not only 'accidentally' openned and read my mail when I lived with them, he used to take the train to come over and 'accidentally' open my mail when I moved to another town. So, trust me, any information you may find, dad already _knows_. And mom already emailed all her friends about it."
How do you go from there?
"I'm gonna tell your boss about it!"
"Dude, I hope you do realize that (A) it's public information, and (B) they do a background check when they hire you here, and dig up exactly this kind of stuff? Trust me, they googled for my name already. They know."
What next?
"I'm gonna publish it in a newspaper!"
"As opposed to it already being published on several sites indexed by Google? You do realize that anyone interested in me is more likely to find it via Google than in that newspaper, right? So knock yourself out."
I mean, seriously, how does one go about using _public_ information to blackmail someone? Exactly which part of "public" is so confusing? Is it the "pub" or the "lic"? How can you threaten someone with publishing something they've already published themselves?
So as I was saying, it seems to me like the whole "blackmail" excuse is just a crap excuse to continue to be a bigotted prick. The same bigotted pricks who 100 years ago would just say, "eew, you're an abhomination in the eyes of God! I'll never hire you," now discovered that they can be hit with a nasty discrimination lawsuit for that. And rightfully so. Enter the golden age of using some crap illogical excuse instead. Like the "blackmail" one.
I was just thinking lately about how each time some repressive law or action gets passed, it always seems to get packaged as some patriotic/faith/whatever act that only some horrible person or traitor would oppose. Even when such pretense is blatantly bogus.
Sorta the same as how the only countries who included things like "democratic", "people's", "ruled by workers' councils" (soviet) etc, in their name were the ones which were anything but.
It's as if it were to tell you in advance that you _will_ get to answer some uncomfortable "What, you support the enemies of the state?" questions to some Inquisition/Gestapo/etc guy and get your answers distorted for you. It's sorta like the bright spots on a poisonous mushroom.
E.g.:
- the spanish inquisition's burning people alive, often blatantly just a an excuse to confiscate someone's wealth, got called "Auto de Fe" meaning "Act of Faith". (Cue, "What, brother, you oppose acts of faith?" in the Inquisition's cellars if you dared speak against them.)
- the USSR's and China's brutal repression of dissidents got presented as hunting for foreign spies and saboteurs. Never mind that most of those people had never seen a foreigner. (Again, cue, "What, comrade, you're opposed to our protecting the motherland from American spies and saboteurs? That's not very patriotic, is it? Are you one of them, perhaps?")
- some of the most inhuman concentration camp systems, got painted in such terms as "reeducation" or "reintegration" programs for criminals
Etc.
And yeah, then there's the PATRIOT Act. Hmm.
It's kinda symptomatic that you don't see that kinda names on normal honest laws. You don't see, say, Sarbanes-Oxley (overkill as some may find it) presented as "The Great Patriotic Act For Saving The Fatherland From Economic Sabotage" or CAN-SPAM presented as "The Great Patriotic Act For Protecting The Fatherland From Electronic Terrorism." You don't need that when (A) people can already understand what the problem is, and (B) you're honestly open to a democratic discussion as to how the law should work to best solve the problem. It's only when you try to sell them some poisonous snake oil that you need such packaging as "patriotic" or "in defense of democracy" or whatnot.
You don't go to Wikipedia to learn things about actively controversial subjects. You go to Wikipedia to learn things that nobody cares to dispute. Like science, math and biology. Or even history.
What, you mean like an article about cloning didgeridoos that stayed up for more than a year on the German wikipedia? Yeah, that's gotta be impartial and correct because it's (claiming to be) biology;)
Oh wait, there comes standard Wikipedia hand-waved defense #2: "Well, if it's an obscure scientific subject that not many read, a mistake can go unnoticed for that long." Teh oops. Guess I _shouldn't_ go there to learn about quantum physics or other "obscure" scientific topics either.
Then what should I learn from it? If I'm looking for a topic I don't already know, for me it's already either "obscure" or "controversial". How am I supposed to know if it's controversial enough to be biased or obscure enough to be just an urban legend or joke that nobody else has read and corrected yet?
If there's significant controversey, it'll usually get its own section on a page.
And what if there isn't signifficant controversy yet? What if, for example, just been edited twice back and forth, then one of them gave up. How do you know if it's controversy building up, or defacement, or, pay attention, someone who's an actual expert tried to correct a bogus entry on a science topic and got overriden by an ass-clown who "corrected" it back to the urban legend version. It's happened before.
So?? I thought Vista was supposed to boot up, like, instantly!
Yeah, well, wait until the user installs some 100 pieces of spyware on it, because he still doesn't read dialog boxes before clicking "Yes". Add a few viruses, trojans and spam zombies as he still believes that all those people sending him.exe attachments actually are some long lost relative/friend/business-partner/whatever. Add a gazillion crap that insists on pre-loading itself. (Yay for making a crap program seem like it loads faster, by loading itself in memory from the start. Surely the user has _nothing_ better to do with their RAM than keeping some crap programs pre-loaded.) Etc.
Now watch that machine take 15 minutes to boot and load all that crap.
Now imagine having MRAM. Imagine just hitting the power button and _instantly_ having all that spyware up. I mean, wow, the monitor is just finishing warming up and you already have your first pop-up windows waiting to sell you "H3rb@l \/i@gr@" or penis enlargement pills or "Hundreds Of Barely Legal Teens Waiting For You!!!" In fact, one has already taken the liberty of opening your browser and redirecting it to that site already. All before even the monitor warmed up. Now _that_ is progress:P
The problem is that if such a joke can stay on Wikipedia for a year, what smaller mis-information can stay there just as well?
And see my other post again: you can only judge something as a blatant joke or not, if you have the data on which to base that judgment. Didgeridoos are easy, but are you sure you'd immediately spot the joke if it were about history or quantum physics? I'm sure I could come up with a joke involving ancient Egypt or China or Messopotamia that wouldn't look like a joke to anyone who's not very familiar with the era. The thing was written with the wording and appearance of an actual article, so there were no other clues that it's a joke.
And yes, don't take your info from casual chats with friends either. I've had the surprise in school to go on a long sorta parody on a history topic with a couple of people, and discover that one of them had taken that seriously. Cue, "Jesus Christ, that was a joke. Don't go and write that on the term paper or anything."
Go get an authoritative and peer-reviewed source instead. Don't rely on what jokes your friends may have heard and taken seriously, nor on what some joker wrote on a glorified massively-multiplayer blog like Wikipedia.
Because despite our cynicism, and contrary to our oft stated negative perception of the world, good people far outnumber bad people. By a huge margin, actually.
Yes, and that cynicism and perception is based on the amount of damage that that small number of people can do. And they can do it precisely _because_ the rest of the people are nice and believe in being nice, so you can get away with doing a _lot_ of harm before someone gets over their niceness to stop you once and for all.
It's why society works. It's why Wikipedia works. It's not because of laws or punishment or any of that.
Cute, but you're massively underestimating the kind of damage someone can do if they don't give a shit about society working. At the risk of tempting Goodwin, although in this case it's an on-topic example, look at WW2 to see what destruction a small group of psychopaths can cause if they can get in a position to. (Hitler was diagnosed a psychopath during WW1. I don't know if the others were ever diagnosed, but some, e.g., Himmler, show consistent sociopathic behaviour.)
Other smaller scale examples include stuff like the gangster mobs in the 30's, employers shooting employees on strike also back then, etc. Or in the non-violent spectrum, see the scams ranging all the way to Enron and the like. Don't underestimate the extent of damage and death a few people can cause if they end up in a position where they can expect to get away with it.
In a nutshell _that_ is why we needed laws, police, punishment, etc. Because nice people are easy prey for ruthless assholes. So at one point society decided to make a set of rules and a police force and, basically, say, "Ok, these are the rules, if you refuse to live by them, we _will_ throw you in a dungeon cell."
And to return to Wikipedia, due to its very nature, it needs to deal not only with "assholes", but also with the kind of nerd who isn't "bad" as such, but has to have the last word and be perceived as "right", no matter what. There are a ton of people who aren't into destruction and defacement as such, but built their whole self-respect on being right about _everything_. If he's read somewhere that the Aztecs conquered China (probably in a parody about Civ 4), and doubly so if he's said it once, he'll devote any disproportionate amount of energy to having the last word about that and establishing his authority on the subject. It's not that he's "bad", it's that in his mind he's by definition right, thus if you disaggree with him you must be the ignorant simpleton.
And with the fanboy or zealot on an ideological crusade to save the wold. And no means or disinformation are too much for such a "noble" goal.
And with the kind of joker who isn't inherently "bad", but thinks he's funny and you should stop taking yourself so seriously. It's the kind who'll write a whole article about cloning didgeridoos or insert a paragraph about how Bush shot Kennedy, just because he thinks he's funny. In fact, he thinks he's hillarious. The whole world should stumble upon his gems of pure comedy and laugh their arse off.
And with the paid shill or PR guy who isn't in it to be an "asshole", but to sell you a bottle of snake oil for good money. They already have no remorse in creating "news" for more traditional media. In fact, at least in America, _most_ news you read are just veiled PR campaigns. What makes you think they won't do the same pollution on Wikipedia, if it makes a buck?
As with all sources, the facts on wiki must be considered with your brain turned on.
Having a brain turned on isn't going to help you if you don't already have the data to judge that stuff as true or false. You can be the most logical person in the world, and still lack the data on which to use that logic.
E.g., if you're not a historian and I start telling you about the achievements and pyramid of the great pharaohs Tutankhbast and Bastmeses... how do you know if they even existed? Or maybe it's just me pulling your leg and telling you what happened in my last Children Of The Nile games? You may even know enough about pharaoh names to notice that they _are_ built in the same manner as some real pharaoh names you may have already heard of. One means "Living Image Of Bast" (same as Tutankhamun = Living Image Of Amun) and one is "Born of Bast" (same as Rameses = Born of Ra). But how do you know if they actually existed or I'm pulling your leg? I'll tell you in this case that it's the later. It's the cat-loving dynasty names I've used in a computer game.
See, that's the whole problem. Sometimes having a brain and having it turned on won't help you much. You'd also have to do the research and dig up the data to judge whether the stuff on Wikipedia is believable or not. At which point, frankly, why bother with Wikipedia at all?
The German Wikipedia used to sport a whole article about cloning didgeridoos. Complete with a picture of little didgeridoos in test tubes, and pseudo-science stuff like whether they live longer or shorter than natural born didgeridoos. The thing stayed up for more than a year.
It's stuff like that that put an end once and for all to my illusions about the value of Wikipedia to actually learn anything.
A) "I quit because I found a better playing job" or "I quit because I found a job in the same town where my wife works and no longer need to commute" or whatever, and
B) "this job sucks, the next product is a turd, the company is going downhill fast, time to FLEE before it really hits the fan"
Depends on how you look at it. A company that needs to work its employees until 2 AM would count as a sinking ship for me, even in the games market. Even when you factor in that the game companies do have a seemingly endless stream of young idealists willing to be overworked just because, hey, making games is cool, the worse you treat them, the faster anyone with marketable skills looks for a job somewhere else. Or discovers that programming some boring java+oracle stuff pays twice the money for half the stress.
So eventually any company with that kind of a culture ends up mostly with people whose only skill is taking lots of shit. It counts as going down in my book. It's only a matter of time until they end up with people who can't program or design a game.
Plus, let's put it like this: if it's in the kind of financial situation where it needs that to break even, it's just a matter of time until it pulls a dud and goes down like a lead duck. It may be tomorrow or it may be in a few years, but bigger names than Rockstar went down like that. (And if it's just greed, see the previous paragraph.)
No. Culture is what affects people's view of the world, and skin colour is just one indirect effect in there.
1. Even among people with the same skin colour, different cultures have different view of the world. E.g., if you took an American, a Brit, a French, a German, and a Russian, all 5 of them Caucasian, you may find their views of the world pretty different. Even if you picked them to be somewhat representative of the same category, you'd find that the culture distorts the baseline those categories are measured against.
E.g., if you compared a USA extreme nationalist to a French extreme nationalist to a German extreme nationalist, you'd find for example that the French nationalism would be about language and culture, rather than (mainly) about race or skin colour. To them a black, but French-speaking, African is more "one of us" than a white American is, because in the language and culture department the American is actually more different and more likely to offend.
E.g., the same Caucasian race for example produced an impressive number of female scientists in the Russian culture, at the same time when in the USA they flipped to pretending to be an airhead at puberty.
Heck, you can even see changes inside the same country over time, and there we're not even just talking the same race, but the same genes. We're talking people who acted like X, yet their descendants acted like Y. The communist block is the prime example, as it turned some countries' cultures into something completely different in a mere 40 years or so. But even in the USA, if you looked at the people around you, you wouldn't see the same culture and behaviour as in the people that crossed the ocean and braved the unknown some 200-300 years ago. Race influenced that... how?
How you view the world is, plain and simple, a matter of education, not of skin colour. The same Caucasian or the same Black or the same Asian can view the world massively differently if they grew up in a different culture.
2. Skin colour only affects culture and personal values indirectly. It's stuff like being discriminated against (e.g., because of skin colour) that affects people's behaviour and views, not merely being born with a certain skin colour. The same Black born in a Black country won't think as much (or at all) about his skin colour as one born in the southern USA or in South Africa.
It's also economic differences based on that discrimination that are too easy to mistake or mis-represent as cultural or racial differences. E.g., it's entirely too easy to take an inner-city black from a dirt-poor and discriminated-against family, and compare them to a white guy that grew in a fashionable middle-class home in the suburbs, and pass that off as cultural or racial differences. But it's conveniently skipping the point that it's not an apple to apple comparison. There are plenty of examples where poor whites acted no better, or viceversa.
So basically, oh please... I know culture has become the new substitute for racism, but using it outright as an excuse to be a racist prick is... stupid. And there's something extremely callous in doing it when it's racist discrimination that made those people act differentely in the first place.
This has always been the case in the US. You need a receipt of purchase to prove licensing, not a COA or the original box or the CDs. Proof of purchase only.
So let me get this straight...
I've made a point to buy all software I use, if buying a license or CD is even possible. So, yes, even the SuSE Linux 10.0 that I'm writing this on is bought and I have the CDs and manual next to me. (Hey, lip service is cheap. I prefer to vote for OSS with my wallet.) I also have bought a copy of Windows for each of my two computers, because I do play games a lot. At any rate, I have the COAs and CDs and everything. I also have these three bookcases full of games I've bought. With original case, CD, manual, whatever. I've also bought all music I'm listening to, and I can show you an original CD for any MP3 you might find on my hard drive.
So now you're telling me that someone could come and say that in the eyes of the law I'm a bigger pirate than Blackbeard? Just because I didn't keep the receipts from EBGames and whatnot? That someone could look at all those hundreds of games in their original cases and all, and count them _all_ as pirated software?
Nothing personal, and please understand that my anger isn't directed at _you_, but I find that bloody stupid and offensive. Essentially then the US is calling me a pirate and a thief, in spite of my efforts to be a honest lawful gamer, and in spite of the ample evidence to the contrary. I find it utterly insulting.
Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty, ffs? It seems to me like the current attitude is basically the exact opposite: you're by default a pirate, and from there it's your uphill battle to prove yourself innocent. And, oh, let's also make it nearly impossible to prove that. You may have the original CD, the box, the manual, the certificate of authenticity and everything else that a sane person would have guessed would be enough, but if you can't find the receipt you're a thief anyway. I mean, seriously, wtf?
And what next? Should I expect that my washing machine or TV also count as stolen, because I threw away the receipts once they got out of warranty? Should I start keeping the receipts for the groceries I buy, or be considered a thief that lived on stolen food for the last decade? WTF?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, look at the bulk of the messages in this thread alone. The "unless you have lawyers (or can bluff that you have them), you're screwed" theme seems to be the dominant mindset. I don't know if those consumer protection offices don't work, or people don't know they exist, or if it's just the same old mindset of distrusting the government and any of its agencies. There must be _some_ logical explanation.
But it's hard not to notice the common theme that everyone would rather call the lawyer first, and everything else is presented as barely some place to ineffectively vent some steam if you can't afford a lawyer. At least that's the impression I'm left with. By comparison, if I were to tell any of my co-workers or neighbours something like "damn, my ISP is trying to make me pay for something that wasn't in the contract", the first answer would be almost invariably "go to the consumer protection bureau."
It's a pretty strong contrast, from where I stand.
No, the across-the-board "either you're rich enough to have lawyers or are a peon" doesn't apply to every capitalist country in the world, but seems to be largely a USA issue. In a sense it's the price you pay for the culture of not trusting your own government, or for that matter for ending up with a government which you can't trust. Unfortunately, then, yes, your only recourse are lawyers, and that's why in the USA they breed like rabbits.
Down here in Europe most things aren't solved by class action lawsuits, but by having a set of laws regarding the consumers' rights, and some government agencies whose job is to enforce those. If a company tried to screw me over, believe me, I wouldn't do any of the three options you describe. Instead I'd go to a consumer rights bureau ("Verbraucherzentrale") and see what they have to say about it. Because it's their job and are backed by the government. They can have a lot more teeth than a lawyer, if it's warranted.
In a sense, it's the difference between having an organized police force and wild-west each-man-for-himself vigilante justice. The USA seems still stuck at the point where your rights and protection are determined by whether you can hire a posse to fight for them. Only now it's the more expensive lawyers with ties and briefcases, instead of desperados with sombreros and Winchester guns. Most of the rest of the world moved over to more efficient model of having a centralized "police" equivalent.
And let me stress that again: it's not just that it's more fair (I could get help even if I didn't have a dime to pay for a lawyer's advice), it's also more efficient for society as a whole. You don't have to feed armies of lawyers when a handful of government officials can do the same job _and_ serve as a better deterrent. A company can imagine they'll smoke _me_ with legalese gibberish, or bully me into submission, or just hope that I don't want to pay a lawyer. But they will know from the start that they're never going to bully the government into submission, and that there'll be someone there who reads legalese as fluently as it gets and knows if what is in there is legal or not.
If you will, it's like in the police vs everyone-with-his-own-posse analogy again. A police is more efficient than everyone hiring his own desperados to guard his ranch, because it _doesn't_ have to actually send policemen to stand guard on every ranch. Just the knowing that that police force exists is enough of a deterrent for 99% of the population.
Downside: of course, you need to trust that the government is on your side and not just ruling for the highest corporate bidder. I.e., it comes in handy to have a real multi-party system where they have to work hard for their votes.
No shit, Sherlock? Lemme see:
- Dreamcast: had a PowerVR graphics chip that had been available for the PC too for a year or two. Not even the most powerful at that. It was the predecessor of the Kyro and generally a flop in the PC market. In the Dreamcast it had a whole 8 MB video RAM too, at a time when PC graphics cards were moving to 32 MB.
- XBox: basically had a predecessor of the NForce chipset, with integrated graphics. Look at some PC benchmarks for how much those suck. Hint: having half the buss width, half the memory speed, _and_ having to share that choked bandwidth with the CPU, doesn't exactly help with rendering speed.
- PS2: read some developper complaints from back then. It didn't have even half the fill rate or triangle processing rate that Sony had claimed. Trying to even replicate Sony's rigged demos was a failure as soon as you had more than one character on the screen or an even moderately complex background. It took a lot of low level work to get it to run fast enough, while on a PC even a mid-range card never needed such tricks to do its job. And even then there's a reason the vast majority of PS2 games never had more than a handful of characters on the screen at the same time.
Get this, Sherlock: what saved all 3 was that they just didn't have to render in higher res than 640x480. _That_ was their only saving grace.
And it was a saving grace in more ways than the number of pixels rendered too. Rendering in low res makes it ok to use lower resolution textures too (hence needs less memory bandwidth and uses the cache better), _and_ lets you get away with lower polygon counts. If you use the exact same models, the same triangle may be something 8x8 pixels in a console game, but 16x16 on a PC in 1280x1024. The same model may look horribly polygonal on a PC game in 1280x1024, but decently rounded in a console game in 640x480. So PC games had to compensate by using higher polycounts, and PC graphics cards had to be able to process those extra polygons.
So in a nutshell, oh please... pretending that any console from the last decade was actually faster than a high end PC, is just plain old false.
I hate to be cliche, but how about minding your own business? I'm sick and tired by now of people telling me what kind of games I should play, how should I spend my free time, and what medium I should prefer for this and that. If I like games with a story, what exactly is the problem? How exactly is it anyone else's business?
Plus, just to be nasty, I can't help noticing that the "go read a book if you want a good story" snottiness is the most thrown around by people who, in fact, _don't_ read books either. It's, in fact, become the standard excuse to be the gaming equivalent of a couch-potato. The same kind that would otherwise flop on the couch and watch football for a few hours, and get their brains completely turned off for the whole duration.
So, yes, by all means, take your own advice. Go read a novel. Watch a movie with a plot. Whatever.
I don't know, someone would IMHO need to be completely clueless for such an association to really result in distrust.
I mean, seriously. So some virus writer uses CVS. In what way does that say anything bad about CVS? It's like saying that gangsters use(d) cars for their drive-by shootings. Does that mean we should start distrusting cars or car manufacturers? And some are stereotyped as beating people up with baseball bats and/or throwing people off piers with cement shoes. Does that mean we should start distrusting baseball or cement? And the Nazis in WW2 used tanks. In fact, they're famous for it. Does that mean that, say, the US Army should get rid of their tanks because of that association? Etc.
In fact, it's even weaker than that, because here CVS isn't even directly involved in the crime. So it's more like saying that terrorists have fridges and TVs in their homes, hence you should start distrusting fridges and TVs.
Basically even as guilt-by-association goes, it seems to me like it's a very very weak one.
Ah, well, it's McAfee, so being "better" than that doesn't really say much. I'm sure there are some good OSS AV programs out there, but comparing them to McAfee really doesn't say much. It's sorta like saying that they're better than a kick in the crotch.
Honestly, the last time I used that crap "security" suite of theirs, it was far worse than your average virus.
Among _many_ samples that proved massive cluelessness was the fact that as soon as it "updated" itself, it actually couldn't cope with being installed in a different directory than what the installer proposed, and proceeded to install the update as a second copy in the default directory. Both copies running at the same time. The combined effect was slowing my computer worse than some spyware cocktails I've seen on other people's computers. Uninstalling it actually uninstalled one copy, and left the other one running. I had to edit the registry and delete files manually to get rid of it.
Yes, you've read it right. If you thought manually editing the registry applied only to getting rid of viruses and spyware, now you can add McAfee's crap to that.
Other stuff included a sort of a "privacy guard" that, effectively, ruined access to any site that used cookies. Using most forums became impossible. File Planet thought simultaneously that I'm logged in and _not_ logged in. And so on.
And, as I was saying, many many other such annoyances.
But you know what takes the cake? This: on March 10, McAfee deletes system and Office files, thinking they're a virus
I mean, frankly, at that point their solution is worse than most viruses and trojans. A lot of viruses just sit there and silently send spam or redirect popups or whatnot. Having to reinstall half your apps used to be the mark of the nastiest and most anti-social malware. Now McAfee lets you experience that without the trouble of actually getting virused.
So, frankly, comparing anything to McAfee is going to look good. A turd on the side of the road seems better when you compare it to McAfee.
RTFA, seriously. That disclosure that they mention is _not_ the disclosure of OS code. If you RTFA, at that point they explain very well what they mean by "full disclosure" and it has _nothing_ to do with OSS any more. Their "full disclosure" is about researchers disclosing a vulnerability, together with ample instructions and proof of concept code of how it can be exploited. It has _nothing_ to do with Linux vs Windows, Closed Source vs F/OSS, etc. It's about disclosing vulnerabilities.
Basically what McAffee says is, "I wish researchers stopped telling everyone everything about this and that buffer overflow. Telling people everything about a bug only helps the evil hackers use it in a virus!!!111one1eleventeen" Not an exact quote, but that's the general idea they're peddling there.
Which is, in the nutshell, just the old "security by obscurity" argument. Which has already been debated to hell and back and is known to not work that way. And, frankly, it's weird to see McAffee preaching that attitude, because the anti-virus makers should know the best that it never worked that way.
Basically it seems to me that McAffee _isn't_ complaining about OSS, and explicitly says they don't. There are two _very_ distinct and unrelated parts of the article:
1. The open source part. Which doesn't contain any kind of anti-OSS slant. It just says that people now have a lot of F/OSS tools to manage their files and whatnot.
2. The part about full disclosure. Where they basically whine that they'd like to have what we all call "security by obscurity." Basically McAffee would like a world where researchers keep a lot more stuff secret, because supposedly being public about that helps evil hackers. Which is as stupid as it gets, yes, but it also has nothing to do with OSS at this point.
So why the fanboy slant in the summary?
Yes, I think we'd all be better off and society as a whole would be better off, if so many people didn't learn early that being stupid is cool and being smart is way uncool. I shudder to think how many millions of otherwise intelligent kids learn each year that you fit better in a peer group if you're acting as a thoroughly dumb "jock" or, if you're a girl, as a stereotypical airhead. Kids who otherwise might have made a great scientist or engineer end up learning that their childhood dreams are "uncool" and that to fit in with their peers they have to barely slip through school and never set their sights higher than getting a McDonalds job.
If only. They're two very different problems and acting as if there's any correlation between them doesn't do any good:
1. "don't be smart around stupid people"
That's what I'd rate as the biggest problem there, by an order of magnitude. For every single nerd who had the problem of treating everyone else as stupid, there'll be a dozen good kids who didn't, yet nevertheless end up acting stupid because that's what the group appreciates. Or worse yet, they learn "do look down on those who show any sign of intelligence."
2. "don't look down on people who aren't as smart as you"
Yes, a ton of nerds have a personality problem and treat other people as idiots... and get treated as idiots in return. That _is_ a personality problem, but it isn't treated in school. Being bullied and ostracized for seemingly no other fault than having a brain will _not_ alleviate the problem, it will just reinforce the impression that everyone around is an idiot.
It certainly won't teach tollerance and open-mindedness when they don't get any tollerance and open-mindedness in the first place. Chances are the other kids won't even stop to analyze the _real_ problem, much less explain to the "nerd" why he's being bullied. And doubly so those who are just SFVs (Stupid Fashion Victims) and don't even have any actual reason to bully the "nerd" than that it's the popular thing to do.
Relax, it was just a joke. I didn't intend it to be either pro- or anti- online schools. It's just a completely off-topic joke, nothing more.
Thanks for offering the prime example of why us techies laugh at humanities students. Or at least at the utterly retarded types who spew such cretinous stuff as "Research simply follows the fad of the day." or "Science is 95% opinion then facts" or "What about astrology, the most rediculious of the sciences!"
Guess what, simpleton? Noone considers astrology a science nowadays.
Basically all you've told me is that you're exactly the kind of ignoramus we loathe: the kind that isn't just content to be an ignorant, but tries to drag everyone else down to his level. The kind who isn't just content to have no fucking clue about real science, but _has_ to bandage his ego by looking down upon those who do.
Tired of elitism? Well, that starts at home. Stop acting like an elitist idiot yourself. The whole "I'm so much better than you because I don't understand science" ivory-tower is what gets us techies to reply with elitism right back. Most of us can accept that not everyone has the inclination or in some cases the IQ for science. Sure. Society needs painters and plumbers too. But seeing an idiot trying to present his ignorance and idiocy as proof of superiority _will_ get a sneer from those who do understand why your arguments only betray massive ignorance.
Why not? Back in my day, I sat all evening in front of the computer, and I learned all I need about functioning in society. Don't ninja-loot, don't let your pet aggro the whole room if you're a Warlock, get your shield from the vault before joining a raid if you're a Warrior or Paladin... err... ok, I see what you mean.
I'll assume that they'll (eventually) going to make the tip or edge or whatever out of some cristalline metal. In which case, not really.
Let's first define "sharp". No object in the world is a perfect edge ending in a clean zero-width edge. All knives, pins, etc, have a tip that, under a powerful enough microscope looks "blunt". What you'd see would be something like a pretty rounded "tip". What makes it "sharp" is that it's a very small surface.
In other words, imagine two cones, both ending up in a bit of a section of a sphere. Except one is a 0.01 inch radius and the other is a 1 inch radius. What makes the first one sharp and the other one blunt? Pressure. Pressure equals force divided by surface. The surface rises with the square of that radius. So the first one needs 10,000 times less force to produce the same pressure. You can create enough pressure with your thumb to push a tack's small tip through wood, but you'd need an industrial press if you wanted to push a 1 inch steel ball into wood.
In other words what makes something sharp is simply having a small enough tip. You need the same pressure to break through a given material. Having a smaller tip just means you can reach that pressure with less force. At some point you need very little force, and at that point we consider the object to be "very sharp".
How does that help us here? Let's say you had such a pyramid, and let's say you managed to break off the atom at the tip. So now you have a "blunt" tip that's made of a 2x2 atom square. That's still _incredibly_ sharp. It's million times smaller than the tip of a tack or pin, hence it would need accordingly less force to push through the material of your choice.
In other words, forget about breaking off an atom. You'd coukd lose _thousands_ of layers from that tip and still count as sharp.
I keep hearing the "well, they're vulnerable to blackmail" excuse, and the more I hear it, the more it sounds like just a crap excuse to discriminate against some people. It's the same bigotry and idiocy, only with a better sounding excuse than the previous "they're an abhomination in the eyes of God!" excuse.
How _do_ you blackmail someone with info they've made _public_? No, seriously. Let's say I were to write on my home page, Facebook profile, MySpace, etc, "I'm gay and into BDSM". I'm not into either, but let's assume that for example sake. How _would_ you go about blackmailing me with something that's that public? How would a blackmailing dialogue go?
"'lose' your keys this weekend or I tell your dad about that 'experimental weekend' you posted about on MySpace"
"Heh. Dude, have you met my parents? Even if I hadn't already told them, they're the kind that put TALKER in STALKER. They google me weekly and tells all their friends, relatives, and strangers on the street about it. Heck, dad not only 'accidentally' openned and read my mail when I lived with them, he used to take the train to come over and 'accidentally' open my mail when I moved to another town. So, trust me, any information you may find, dad already _knows_. And mom already emailed all her friends about it."
How do you go from there?
"I'm gonna tell your boss about it!"
"Dude, I hope you do realize that (A) it's public information, and (B) they do a background check when they hire you here, and dig up exactly this kind of stuff? Trust me, they googled for my name already. They know."
What next?
"I'm gonna publish it in a newspaper!"
"As opposed to it already being published on several sites indexed by Google? You do realize that anyone interested in me is more likely to find it via Google than in that newspaper, right? So knock yourself out."
I mean, seriously, how does one go about using _public_ information to blackmail someone? Exactly which part of "public" is so confusing? Is it the "pub" or the "lic"? How can you threaten someone with publishing something they've already published themselves?
So as I was saying, it seems to me like the whole "blackmail" excuse is just a crap excuse to continue to be a bigotted prick. The same bigotted pricks who 100 years ago would just say, "eew, you're an abhomination in the eyes of God! I'll never hire you," now discovered that they can be hit with a nasty discrimination lawsuit for that. And rightfully so. Enter the golden age of using some crap illogical excuse instead. Like the "blackmail" one.
I was just thinking lately about how each time some repressive law or action gets passed, it always seems to get packaged as some patriotic/faith/whatever act that only some horrible person or traitor would oppose. Even when such pretense is blatantly bogus.
Sorta the same as how the only countries who included things like "democratic", "people's", "ruled by workers' councils" (soviet) etc, in their name were the ones which were anything but.
It's as if it were to tell you in advance that you _will_ get to answer some uncomfortable "What, you support the enemies of the state?" questions to some Inquisition/Gestapo/etc guy and get your answers distorted for you. It's sorta like the bright spots on a poisonous mushroom.
E.g.:
- the spanish inquisition's burning people alive, often blatantly just a an excuse to confiscate someone's wealth, got called "Auto de Fe" meaning "Act of Faith". (Cue, "What, brother, you oppose acts of faith?" in the Inquisition's cellars if you dared speak against them.)
- the USSR's and China's brutal repression of dissidents got presented as hunting for foreign spies and saboteurs. Never mind that most of those people had never seen a foreigner. (Again, cue, "What, comrade, you're opposed to our protecting the motherland from American spies and saboteurs? That's not very patriotic, is it? Are you one of them, perhaps?")
- some of the most inhuman concentration camp systems, got painted in such terms as "reeducation" or "reintegration" programs for criminals
Etc.
And yeah, then there's the PATRIOT Act. Hmm.
It's kinda symptomatic that you don't see that kinda names on normal honest laws. You don't see, say, Sarbanes-Oxley (overkill as some may find it) presented as "The Great Patriotic Act For Saving The Fatherland From Economic Sabotage" or CAN-SPAM presented as "The Great Patriotic Act For Protecting The Fatherland From Electronic Terrorism." You don't need that when (A) people can already understand what the problem is, and (B) you're honestly open to a democratic discussion as to how the law should work to best solve the problem. It's only when you try to sell them some poisonous snake oil that you need such packaging as "patriotic" or "in defense of democracy" or whatnot.
What, you mean like an article about cloning didgeridoos that stayed up for more than a year on the German wikipedia? Yeah, that's gotta be impartial and correct because it's (claiming to be) biology
Oh wait, there comes standard Wikipedia hand-waved defense #2: "Well, if it's an obscure scientific subject that not many read, a mistake can go unnoticed for that long." Teh oops. Guess I _shouldn't_ go there to learn about quantum physics or other "obscure" scientific topics either.
Then what should I learn from it? If I'm looking for a topic I don't already know, for me it's already either "obscure" or "controversial". How am I supposed to know if it's controversial enough to be biased or obscure enough to be just an urban legend or joke that nobody else has read and corrected yet?
And what if there isn't signifficant controversy yet? What if, for example, just been edited twice back and forth, then one of them gave up. How do you know if it's controversy building up, or defacement, or, pay attention, someone who's an actual expert tried to correct a bogus entry on a science topic and got overriden by an ass-clown who "corrected" it back to the urban legend version. It's happened before.
Yeah, well, wait until the user installs some 100 pieces of spyware on it, because he still doesn't read dialog boxes before clicking "Yes". Add a few viruses, trojans and spam zombies as he still believes that all those people sending him
Now watch that machine take 15 minutes to boot and load all that crap.
Now imagine having MRAM. Imagine just hitting the power button and _instantly_ having all that spyware up. I mean, wow, the monitor is just finishing warming up and you already have your first pop-up windows waiting to sell you "H3rb@l \/i@gr@" or penis enlargement pills or "Hundreds Of Barely Legal Teens Waiting For You!!!" In fact, one has already taken the liberty of opening your browser and redirecting it to that site already. All before even the monitor warmed up. Now _that_ is progress
The problem is that if such a joke can stay on Wikipedia for a year, what smaller mis-information can stay there just as well?
And see my other post again: you can only judge something as a blatant joke or not, if you have the data on which to base that judgment. Didgeridoos are easy, but are you sure you'd immediately spot the joke if it were about history or quantum physics? I'm sure I could come up with a joke involving ancient Egypt or China or Messopotamia that wouldn't look like a joke to anyone who's not very familiar with the era. The thing was written with the wording and appearance of an actual article, so there were no other clues that it's a joke.
And yes, don't take your info from casual chats with friends either. I've had the surprise in school to go on a long sorta parody on a history topic with a couple of people, and discover that one of them had taken that seriously. Cue, "Jesus Christ, that was a joke. Don't go and write that on the term paper or anything."
Go get an authoritative and peer-reviewed source instead. Don't rely on what jokes your friends may have heard and taken seriously, nor on what some joker wrote on a glorified massively-multiplayer blog like Wikipedia.
Yes, and that cynicism and perception is based on the amount of damage that that small number of people can do. And they can do it precisely _because_ the rest of the people are nice and believe in being nice, so you can get away with doing a _lot_ of harm before someone gets over their niceness to stop you once and for all.
Cute, but you're massively underestimating the kind of damage someone can do if they don't give a shit about society working. At the risk of tempting Goodwin, although in this case it's an on-topic example, look at WW2 to see what destruction a small group of psychopaths can cause if they can get in a position to. (Hitler was diagnosed a psychopath during WW1. I don't know if the others were ever diagnosed, but some, e.g., Himmler, show consistent sociopathic behaviour.)
Other smaller scale examples include stuff like the gangster mobs in the 30's, employers shooting employees on strike also back then, etc. Or in the non-violent spectrum, see the scams ranging all the way to Enron and the like. Don't underestimate the extent of damage and death a few people can cause if they end up in a position where they can expect to get away with it.
In a nutshell _that_ is why we needed laws, police, punishment, etc. Because nice people are easy prey for ruthless assholes. So at one point society decided to make a set of rules and a police force and, basically, say, "Ok, these are the rules, if you refuse to live by them, we _will_ throw you in a dungeon cell."
And to return to Wikipedia, due to its very nature, it needs to deal not only with "assholes", but also with the kind of nerd who isn't "bad" as such, but has to have the last word and be perceived as "right", no matter what. There are a ton of people who aren't into destruction and defacement as such, but built their whole self-respect on being right about _everything_. If he's read somewhere that the Aztecs conquered China (probably in a parody about Civ 4), and doubly so if he's said it once, he'll devote any disproportionate amount of energy to having the last word about that and establishing his authority on the subject. It's not that he's "bad", it's that in his mind he's by definition right, thus if you disaggree with him you must be the ignorant simpleton.
And with the fanboy or zealot on an ideological crusade to save the wold. And no means or disinformation are too much for such a "noble" goal.
And with the kind of joker who isn't inherently "bad", but thinks he's funny and you should stop taking yourself so seriously. It's the kind who'll write a whole article about cloning didgeridoos or insert a paragraph about how Bush shot Kennedy, just because he thinks he's funny. In fact, he thinks he's hillarious. The whole world should stumble upon his gems of pure comedy and laugh their arse off.
And with the paid shill or PR guy who isn't in it to be an "asshole", but to sell you a bottle of snake oil for good money. They already have no remorse in creating "news" for more traditional media. In fact, at least in America, _most_ news you read are just veiled PR campaigns. What makes you think they won't do the same pollution on Wikipedia, if it makes a buck?
Etc, etc, etc.
Having a brain turned on isn't going to help you if you don't already have the data to judge that stuff as true or false. You can be the most logical person in the world, and still lack the data on which to use that logic.
E.g., if you're not a historian and I start telling you about the achievements and pyramid of the great pharaohs Tutankhbast and Bastmeses... how do you know if they even existed? Or maybe it's just me pulling your leg and telling you what happened in my last Children Of The Nile games? You may even know enough about pharaoh names to notice that they _are_ built in the same manner as some real pharaoh names you may have already heard of. One means "Living Image Of Bast" (same as Tutankhamun = Living Image Of Amun) and one is "Born of Bast" (same as Rameses = Born of Ra). But how do you know if they actually existed or I'm pulling your leg? I'll tell you in this case that it's the later. It's the cat-loving dynasty names I've used in a computer game.
See, that's the whole problem. Sometimes having a brain and having it turned on won't help you much. You'd also have to do the research and dig up the data to judge whether the stuff on Wikipedia is believable or not. At which point, frankly, why bother with Wikipedia at all?
The German Wikipedia used to sport a whole article about cloning didgeridoos. Complete with a picture of little didgeridoos in test tubes, and pseudo-science stuff like whether they live longer or shorter than natural born didgeridoos. The thing stayed up for more than a year.
It's stuff like that that put an end once and for all to my illusions about the value of Wikipedia to actually learn anything.
There's a subtle difference between:
A) "I quit because I found a better playing job" or "I quit because I found a job in the same town where my wife works and no longer need to commute" or whatever, and
B) "this job sucks, the next product is a turd, the company is going downhill fast, time to FLEE before it really hits the fan"
The first is "quit", the second is "flee".
Depends on how you look at it. A company that needs to work its employees until 2 AM would count as a sinking ship for me, even in the games market. Even when you factor in that the game companies do have a seemingly endless stream of young idealists willing to be overworked just because, hey, making games is cool, the worse you treat them, the faster anyone with marketable skills looks for a job somewhere else. Or discovers that programming some boring java+oracle stuff pays twice the money for half the stress.
So eventually any company with that kind of a culture ends up mostly with people whose only skill is taking lots of shit. It counts as going down in my book. It's only a matter of time until they end up with people who can't program or design a game.
Plus, let's put it like this: if it's in the kind of financial situation where it needs that to break even, it's just a matter of time until it pulls a dud and goes down like a lead duck. It may be tomorrow or it may be in a few years, but bigger names than Rockstar went down like that. (And if it's just greed, see the previous paragraph.)
No. Culture is what affects people's view of the world, and skin colour is just one indirect effect in there.
1. Even among people with the same skin colour, different cultures have different view of the world. E.g., if you took an American, a Brit, a French, a German, and a Russian, all 5 of them Caucasian, you may find their views of the world pretty different. Even if you picked them to be somewhat representative of the same category, you'd find that the culture distorts the baseline those categories are measured against.
E.g., if you compared a USA extreme nationalist to a French extreme nationalist to a German extreme nationalist, you'd find for example that the French nationalism would be about language and culture, rather than (mainly) about race or skin colour. To them a black, but French-speaking, African is more "one of us" than a white American is, because in the language and culture department the American is actually more different and more likely to offend.
E.g., the same Caucasian race for example produced an impressive number of female scientists in the Russian culture, at the same time when in the USA they flipped to pretending to be an airhead at puberty.
Heck, you can even see changes inside the same country over time, and there we're not even just talking the same race, but the same genes. We're talking people who acted like X, yet their descendants acted like Y. The communist block is the prime example, as it turned some countries' cultures into something completely different in a mere 40 years or so. But even in the USA, if you looked at the people around you, you wouldn't see the same culture and behaviour as in the people that crossed the ocean and braved the unknown some 200-300 years ago. Race influenced that... how?
How you view the world is, plain and simple, a matter of education, not of skin colour. The same Caucasian or the same Black or the same Asian can view the world massively differently if they grew up in a different culture.
2. Skin colour only affects culture and personal values indirectly. It's stuff like being discriminated against (e.g., because of skin colour) that affects people's behaviour and views, not merely being born with a certain skin colour. The same Black born in a Black country won't think as much (or at all) about his skin colour as one born in the southern USA or in South Africa.
It's also economic differences based on that discrimination that are too easy to mistake or mis-represent as cultural or racial differences. E.g., it's entirely too easy to take an inner-city black from a dirt-poor and discriminated-against family, and compare them to a white guy that grew in a fashionable middle-class home in the suburbs, and pass that off as cultural or racial differences. But it's conveniently skipping the point that it's not an apple to apple comparison. There are plenty of examples where poor whites acted no better, or viceversa.
So basically, oh please... I know culture has become the new substitute for racism, but using it outright as an excuse to be a racist prick is... stupid. And there's something extremely callous in doing it when it's racist discrimination that made those people act differentely in the first place.
So let me get this straight...
I've made a point to buy all software I use, if buying a license or CD is even possible. So, yes, even the SuSE Linux 10.0 that I'm writing this on is bought and I have the CDs and manual next to me. (Hey, lip service is cheap. I prefer to vote for OSS with my wallet.) I also have bought a copy of Windows for each of my two computers, because I do play games a lot. At any rate, I have the COAs and CDs and everything. I also have these three bookcases full of games I've bought. With original case, CD, manual, whatever. I've also bought all music I'm listening to, and I can show you an original CD for any MP3 you might find on my hard drive.
So now you're telling me that someone could come and say that in the eyes of the law I'm a bigger pirate than Blackbeard? Just because I didn't keep the receipts from EBGames and whatnot? That someone could look at all those hundreds of games in their original cases and all, and count them _all_ as pirated software?
Nothing personal, and please understand that my anger isn't directed at _you_, but I find that bloody stupid and offensive. Essentially then the US is calling me a pirate and a thief, in spite of my efforts to be a honest lawful gamer, and in spite of the ample evidence to the contrary. I find it utterly insulting.
Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty, ffs? It seems to me like the current attitude is basically the exact opposite: you're by default a pirate, and from there it's your uphill battle to prove yourself innocent. And, oh, let's also make it nearly impossible to prove that. You may have the original CD, the box, the manual, the certificate of authenticity and everything else that a sane person would have guessed would be enough, but if you can't find the receipt you're a thief anyway. I mean, seriously, wtf?
And what next? Should I expect that my washing machine or TV also count as stolen, because I threw away the receipts once they got out of warranty? Should I start keeping the receipts for the groceries I buy, or be considered a thief that lived on stolen food for the last decade? WTF?