Today's survival skills are, same as always, being able to use your brains. The kid sitting and pushing thumbsticks is solving more mental problems per minute than the idiot grown up spending the same time watching football. The kid with the gamepad is going through such quick problems as "does this block fit here or there?", or "in which sequence _do_ I jump on these platforms?" or "what do I have to say to Darth Traya to get dark side points?" It's problem solving.
It may not solve an exact replica of a RL problem, but then doing pushups doesn't resemble any RL problem either, yet it helps your body stay fit anyway. That's what that kid is doing too: the equivalent of mental pushups.
By comparison, it seems that the prescribed way to be a proper grown up and upstanding pillar of the community is to be a sad vegetable with exactly zero brain activity when you can avoid it. Mindlessly pushing buttons on a remote control is about as mentally stimulating as watching paint dry. And any organ which isn't used much tends to become less and less fit. A proper adult whose only mental activity is some gossip at the factory, followed by some good old fashioned watching football with a beer in the hand, is just working his way towards the mental equivalent of a beer gut.
So, yes, between the football-watching channel-surfing adult kind of a button pusher, and the kid pushing the buttons on a console controller, the kid may well be more fit to be the master of the universe. Or at least to solve the everyday problems in his life.
Actually, from what I can tell, "growing up" is just a matter of enculturation. Or to put it otherwise, of pretending to be X, so you can fashionably fit in a crowd of X. Where X can be something like "rebellious teenager" (huzzah for immitating someone in the name of being an independent individual) or "responsible adult and member of the community" or whatever.
To put it even less diplomatically: SFV. Stupid Fashion Victim.
You're just told that once you've reached age Y, you suddenly aren't supposed to play any more, because that's not what an adult does. You're suddenly supposed to become over night uninterested in exploration and imagination -- which is what playing is -- and just become a slave. You're supposed to go to work from 9 to 5 and produce value for your slave driver, like a good slave should, then go pretend to like your neighbours for community standing, and then flop on the sofa and watch football. Again, not necessarily because you actually like football, but you wouldn't want to be different from your neighbours, would you? It would be sooo unfashionable to have different interests than the neighbours. God forbid that you show that by not knowing exactly who passed the ball to whom in yesterday's game.
And let me state that again: children's "playing" is running scenarios in a safe environment, exercising your natural curiosity and imagination. E.g., if you watch a small girl enacting a tea party with her dolls, it's actually running a simulation of a social situation. It's exploration and imagination at their finest hour. That's what playing is, and not only in humans. Watch kittens or rabbits play, and you'll see that they too "play" by exercising their respective survival skills. In humans it's exercising your brains, which is _the_ survival advantage that nature gave you. Yet somehow people are supposed to "grow up" and basically give all that up. Give me a break.
Want to know what makes the western world increasingly reject that idiocy? The simple fact that society is increasingly unable to enforce that uniformity.
A quote comes to mind: "A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular." That's all there is to it. It's finally become safe to risk being the unpopular one, and the effect is cascading. When person X decides to drop the SFV pretense, and persons Y and Z around him see that nothing bad happened, they too might drop that sad masquerade. People are gradually discovering that they're not surrounded by drones who'd drive them out of town if they didn't fit the "responsible pillar of the community" stereotype to the letter, but by people like them who didn't particularly like that retarded stereotype either.
In the middle ages if you were the unpopular serf that thought too much, you'd find yourself a good candidate for the next inquisition trial. Don't think for a moment that witch hunts were only for the heretics. At least half those burned at the stake were just the unpopular guys and girls that told some community leader or village gossip to fuck off. (Having some wealth that the inquisition could confiscate also helped.)
Later society had to do with just ostracizing and occasionally bullying you if you refused to fit the stereotype reserved for you.
Nowadays what we're finally at the point where you can say "fuck them, I'll continue to be an intelligent and imaginative person if that's what _I_ want to be." Even if they ostracize you, you can find a thousand people on the Internet sharing _your_ interests, instead of having to fit in some SFV community. If you'd rather talk about your cat instead of the prescribed "manly", "adult" things like cars and football, you can just drop by in some cat-lovers chat room and there you go. If you want to still maintain a healthy "child-like" imagination and curiosity, there you go, you can find a ton of places to satisfy that curiosity or to exercise your imagination and creativity. You no longer _have_ to become an unimaginative drone, whose sole interests are football and earning enough money to keep up with the Joneses, just to fit the community.
Let me tell you a joke about nostalgia. Two veterans meet at some war-ending aniversary and have a little chat:
"Ah, do you remember when they captured us and took us to a concentration camp?" "Oh yeah." "And how they wanted to take us to the gas chamber?" "Aw man, how can I forget that?" "And then there was this bombing raid, explosions everywhere and we ran through a hole in the fence? And they chased us with dogs and we hid in the swamp for a week?" "Oh yeah. Man, those were the good times."
Well, admittedly, childhood usually isn't _that_ bad, but still, everyone remembers the good parts, but never remembers the annoyances and frustrations. Or remembers some sanitized rose-tinted version of them. I suppose it must be some mechanism of the brain to stay sane.
But if I'm to really remember childhood, and without even going into the parts that were due to my parents being... well, completely unfit to be parents, it wasn't _that_ idyllic anyway.
E.g., take school alone. I could read since the age of 3. In fact, I could read and write in two foreign languages by the time I got into school. I could calculate a transformer or solve other physics problems up to that level. (I guess I must have asked something like "why is the sky blue?" and my parents, god bless their totally nerdy souls, gave me a physics book.) And yet there I was in school required to write a page of oblique lines or loops. Or to write a page worth of the letter "a". How boring is that?
And that's just one of many issues.
On the whole, I'll go and say I'm actually a _lot_ happier as an immature adult than I ever was as a child.
_Now_ I can actually do what I want. If I want a chocolate, I can go buy a chocolate. If I want to buy a doll, I can go buy a doll. (Or The Sims, which is one hell of a doll house simulator.;) If I want to stay up late playing with it, I can jolly well stay up and play with it. Back then I had a ton of people who knew better what I should be doing, what I should be thinking, what I should be saying, etc.
As for Calvin and Hobbes, or Winnie the Pooh, they're not written by a kid. They're written by an adult, and through rose-coloured nostalgia glasses _and_ from second-guessing the "enemy" at that. They see "man, this kid never listens to a word I say", or "man, he's throwing a tantrum again when I'm trying to teach him proper manners", and from there they go and paint some image of the kid being completely care-free and living in some imaginary wonderland. They don't however, see the frustrations like being treated like a brainless idiot. Or the frustration of that "teaching manners" meaning "Moraelin, say 'hello' to the nice lady?"... again... in front of 10 strangers and 2 of my friends. Or about a hundred other little issues.
In fact, I'll go and say that all that seeing the kid as a care-free brainless _idiot_ is just... selective confirmation. People start with the preconceived idea that the kid is inherently retarded and unable to ever comprehend adult logic, and from there remember every detail that confirms that, but conveniently forget the details that don't. Or acts like they're some one-in-a-million occurance that's surely just a freak accident.
And let me also say that a lot of the time, "adult logic" _isn't_. Adults are just as good as kids at rationalizing backwards from what they'd like, to some half-arsed unconvincing "facts" to justify it with. E.g., they start from some pre-conceived wish, like that they want to go camping or fishing (bonus points when it's just to fit in some group, not because they actually like it), and from there work their way backwards to some half-arsed justification, like that shivering in a tent in the rain builds character or that fishing is some kind of valuable RL skill. (How? What for? Exactly in which situation can one possibly catch enough fish with a fishing rod to support a family that way?) Even when they actually do have a point there, they're so convinced that you're an idiot and can't possibly
I don't know, the people sitting next to each other tend to be less loud, from my subjective, anecdotal experience. Most you don't even hear, or barely, if they're two seats away. On the other hand, more than half the mobile phone gang seems to make it their duty to scream, especially when (deducing by the conversation) they're getting poor signal, but for some it's the primary mode of talking on a phone.
It probably doesn't help that a lot of phones are still the type that has the mike pointed at the middle of your cheek, so if it's sensitive enough to pick up your voice, it's sensitive enough to pick up all the noises in that train car.
Plus, honestly, even if two talking face to face are loud, they tend to at least have better conversations. It's getting boring hearing the same fucking old "I'M ON A TRAIN! YES! A TRAIN! CAN YOU HEAR ME? YES, A TRAIN. YES, I'M GOING HOME! YES, HOME! YES, I JUST GOT AWAY FROM WORK! I'LL BE THERE IN TWO HOURS! WHAT? TWO HOURS!" I mean, ffs, some sound like they're retarded, talking to a complete retard, or both. It's so content-free, you have to wonder what the point is.
True enough. You're right. Still, I can imagine some circumstances where she's dragged out at a family or company picnic when her bf is unable to attend. Or a more plausible scenario: I see co-workers going out on the balcony, or previously on a wide open terrace , to talk on their mobile phone. I can just see that kinda specimen out on the balcony on the last floor, one hand holding onto to the metal railing, to squeeze in a call to her bf even during a thunderstorm.
I mean, seriously, I don't know about the US releases, but looking on amazon.de is just disheartening. There are surprisingly a couple of games that are scheduled for the end of june, which is more than last summer had, but you can also see stuff released in February that's _still_ on their short "New Releases" list. It's just bloody sad.
Not to mention that a lot of stuff is just a clone of a clone of a clone of a clone. Yet another FPS coming up, yet another RTS coming up, and (now that's a big surprise;) yet another sports team manager game coming up. Whop-de-fucking-do. That's soo worth my money. I always wanted to play yet another BF clone, except this one is based on the old Unreal engine and themed around WW2. Oh, wait, the original BF1942 was WW2 themed too. And I sooo always wanted to play yet another Dune 2 clone, except this one has different unit sprites. Not.
Seriously, the games industry just needs to realize that selling last year's game with better graphics is becoming less and less of an incentive to buy new games. Getting the same FPS with 1000 polygons/char instead of 300 was a bloody huge step in visual quality. Getting it with 3000 instead of 1000 becomes a smaller step. Getting it with 10,000 instead of 3000 becomes just a tweak already. There are already games sporting 30,000 polygon characters. E.g., The Singles. Am I that excited of the next step to 100,000 polygons per char. Well, no, not really. It already looks good enough.
Ok, it's not yet _perfect_. There's room for graphics improvements, but what I'm saying is: last year's games aren't visually offensive either. It's less and less an incentive to think, "man, last year's game looks like shit. I must get the newest one with the absolute highest polygon count." (Not that it ever was that huge an incentive, since I prefer gameplay and plot anyway, but just saying.) We're at the point where getting a 2 year old game from the bargain bin is quite a viable choice, not just on account of often having the same (or even better) gameplay, but also on account of not even looking that much worse.
At any rate, to sum it up: there's just not much stuff to buy, and even less stuff that tempts me. It's not the MMOs. The MMOs are just some filler to pass the time while waiting for the next good game. I've been known to take a break from MMOs to play, say, Heroes Of Might And Magic 5, though even that proved to be just a verbatim rehash of HOMM 1 to 4 with a nice 3D engine, and just as repetitive as those. But, seriously, there just isn't much to tempt me away from MMOs, much as I'm available and willing to be tempted.
Heh. And what happened to escaping quote signs? It's not even a new thing that only the latest JavaScript expert hackers discovered, but something that's also been known in the SQL Injection world for a long long time. (Yes, you can use prepared statements instead too, but you can also just escape the quotes and apostrophes.) And I wouldn't be surprised if it also was a part of some ancient CGI exploit.
Basically if there's an "arms race", then escaping quotes isn't much of a part of it. The problem was known long before Java Script, and the solution was known long before Java Script.
So, I don't know... Personally I'll side with the "it's just sloppy coding, by sloppy unqualified coders" camp. Seriously. It has no bloody excuse to still exist. Much less to be handwaved as some _unavoidable_ risk that's really just benign and ok to have in a web site. (As TFA was hand-waving it.) It's _not_ unavoidable, it's certainly _not_ benign, and both points have been known for at least a decade.
I mean, seriously, wtf... I knew that competence went out of fashion during the dot-com era, but seeing the massive ignorance and cluelessness of some supposed "Gurus" (read the big title at the top of TFA page) is just disheartening. It seems like these days all one needs to be a "Guru" is the arrogance to proclaim oneself a "Guru". From stuff like this, to personally seeing some self-proclaimed "Java Guru" recommend techniques that betrayed some _massive_ ignorance of the language, the VM, and the JIT, not to mention of the fact that he obviously doesn't read much on the subject if he managed to miss 5 years of that stuff being again and again proven to not just work that way. It seems like these days any ex-burger-flipper can just proclaim himself a computer guru and pass their ignorance as some "can't be done any other way, sorry" expertise.
Ahem... I _am_ an EE and have some interest in physics too, and it seems to me pretty bullshit to proclaim something a-priori as in the same league as "leprechauns", "ghosts", "lucky gum", "win an ipod by punching the monkey" or "10,000 doctors hand-waving", when you just don't have the data to make that judgment. I don't know if "flashover" exists or not. But dismissing something that vigorously without even having the data, is in the same league as dismissing the earth's curvature on account that it's not in the bible. Whatever happened to keeping an open mind as an integral part of being a scientist? (Either theoretical or the engineer kind.)
E.g., how _do_ you know that skin effect can't possibly apply? Skin effect is what happens at high frequencies. Lightning is one extremely brief pulse of electricity. Depending on the wave shape and duration it could have a metric buttload of high frequency components.
E.g., we're talking about something that's not just two electrodes attached to a human, with the human being the only possible path. We're talking about something that's already ionizing its own path through the air, _without_ needing a bag of salty water in between. The very existence of the close misses you mention is proof enough that, yes, often enough it actually prefers going through 6 ft of air than through 6 ft of human. Go figure.
So how do you absolutely know it can't possibly prefer to go through the air _around_ someone than directly through them?
And should we listen to doctors instead of EEs? Well, maybe, because those are the guys who treat the people struck by lightning. And they say for example that the lesions from lightning strikes do _not_ resemble those from industrial accidents where some worker met his doom at the hands (well, wires) of some high voltage installation.
They also say that, pay attention: there are deep burns at the entry point (where the lightning hit the bugger, typically neck, shoulder, etc) and the exit point (typically one foot), but not much else in between. Whereas by comparison industrial accidents also destroy tissue in between those two points. _That's_ what the flashover theory is based on.
Think it was all near misses? Then how do you explain the two burnt points? What kind of leprechaun produced the burn on someone's shoulder or neck, if all they got was a jolt between the two feet, as would happen in a miss? No, seriously, I'd like some better explanation there than just handwaving it that you just know that it's been really a near miss.
At any rate, again, whatever happened to a scientiffic state of mind? What happened to the idea that if the experimental data (as little and unreliable as we have) doesn't fit the theory, maybe we need a better theory? Since when did it become proper science or engineering to just hand-wave something guaranteed to be one big lie if it doesn't fit your model?
Could you imagine a typical PC user complaining that he can hear the fan running in his PC from "over three feet away". Of course not, noisy PCs are normal but audiable niose from an Apple product causes Apple user's to complain.
I'm a PC user all right, and, yes, a noisy computer annoys me too. And there's a healthy market in soundproofing kits, 3rd party GPU coolers, silent fans, watercooling kits, or computers without fans like the Hush PC or Zalman's TNN (Totally No Noise) cases, saying that I'm not the only one. Noise levels have played an increasingly important part of the PC's evolution in the last years, and spawned stuff like:
- fluid bearings for HDD's, which now have become the norm
- temperature controlled fans everywhere (again, fluid or ceramics bearing are increasingly more used)
- higher efficiency PSUs that don't need as much airflow to stay cool (and also moved to slow 120mm fans)
- cases with _much_ better airflow at lower fan RPM
- desktop motherboards that take low-voltage notebook CPUs, e.g., Pentium M
- the new Samsung Flash "HDDs"
Etc.
So basically if your image of the average PC owner is someone who's sitting next to something that sounds like a leafblower and feeling proud of his l33t turbo-cooled overclocked rig... you may wish to re-evaluate it.
And one way you keep seeing it cutting the other way is providing an endless stream of ammo for those in power to use as justification for their getting more power. Any crime or problem can be presented as a nation-sweeping epidemic, that demands immediate action, if the public is just bombarded with just enough examples of it happening.
The problem, as I've been saying before is that human brains functions sorta like that of Terry Prattchett's trolls, whose counting went something like "one, two, many, lots". People simply lose sense of proportion beyond a certain scale. A week, a month, or a year, or even ten years, you can put into an intuitive proportion. A billion years, you can't. Or 10, 100 or 1000 people you can see every day. A billion people becomes just a very large number. "Lots." You may be able to work maths with 1,000,000,000 or 10^9, but your intuition won't help you.
Hence bombarding people with stuff that happened over such huge, unintuitive areas and numbers of people can be a very dangerous thing. The fact that it was a one in a million or one in a billion case just gets lost, and all those cases are treated as if they all happened in a world barely larger than their home town.
E.g., if you heard that one gamer in your home town preferred to play EQ until he lost his job, his house and everything, you think "heh. What a loser." But when you get bombarded with thousands of examples of that happening, it suddenly becomes "whoa! It's a dangerous addiction! It's a wave sweeping the nation!" Why? Because your brain doesn't have the intuitive framework to put it in the right proportion: that it's one in a million cases. But your intuition acts as if they all happened within a mile of your home.
E.g., if you heard that someone raped a child in your home town, you're disgusted, shocked, etc, but in the end, eh, it's one insane person. But get bombarded with cases from all over the world, and evidence that it happens every day, and suddenly it starts seeming like every other adult male is getting a hard-on at pre-teens. Why? Again, because it's not put in the right proportion. It's compared to a vague "Lots" number that's just marginally larger than the male population you see in a day.
And so on.
And while, yes, on one hand it does serve to also amplify the perceived extent of the abuses of power, it also works the other way, giving those in power ammo to keep people scared and justify getting more power. Yes, some citizens might be genuinely mistaken and concerned about the extent of police abuses. But on the other hand, there'll also be a bunch of ruthless politicians understanding this phenomenon and milking it for everything its got.
Are you kidding? Some people seem to not even have a life that doesn't involve screaming into a mobile phone. Yay for sitting next to the guy who's just got to tell everyone in his phone book that he's on a train, across from the codependent chick wanting to do everything together with her boyfriend and god forbid that they're not in contact at every hour (actually, she sounded so obsessed, she sounded more like "stalker" than just "codependent"), and a few other such specimens which can't just shut up for at least 5 minutes of a 5 hour train trip.
Frankly, when I saw this Penny Arcade comic strip, I thought I had actually been around people like that.
What makes you think that that kinda people would stop talking in a thunderstorm? I can just see the same specimens under some crude picnic/fishing/bus/whatever shelter, screaming into the phone, "YES, I'M IN THE WOODS! CAN YOU HEAR ME? IN THE WOODS! WHAT WAS THAT? THERE'S A THUNDERSTORM HERE! CAN YOU HEAR ME? THUNDERSTORM!" Or I can just see the girl mentioned above shivering under some tree in the rain, but unwilling to stop being in contact with her boyfriend even then.
I must have been unclear. I'm not saying they weren't evil. Yes, they were evil.
I'm just saying that even evil people sometimes do good things. It doesn't necessarily make them less evil, but it doesn't make the act automatically evil by association either.
E.g., Al Capone on one hand ordered some brutal massacres, but on the other hand opened soup kitchens for the victims of the great depression and paid (out of that ill gotten money) for shelter and clothing for them. Was he evil? Yes. Were his soup kitchens evil? No.
That's really all I'm saying. One can't just say, "Person X is evil, action Y was done by X, hence Y is evil too." Guilt or evil aren't something transmittable by association like that.
The same applies to the Chinese government too. Is it an evil oppressive government? Yes, certainly. Does it automatically make everything they touch evil? No. It _is_ entirely possible that someone genuinely is sick and tired of spam, or of seeing their country's reputation being tainted by spam. One can't automatically assume (or "translate") that an anti-spam law is automatically just some oppression tool against dissidents.
The ones who threaten, like the posters above, are not doing it to resolve an issue. They're doing it to bully, plain and simple. That's a bullshit way to interact with people.
Indeed. But in response to what? In response to a hired goon that's deliberately harrassing them and trying to get them to throw their hands up and give up whatever they wanted to do.
At some point I stop seeing bullying right back as wrong, when someone is deliberately causing you distress. At some moment Vincent had answered enough question, made his case perfectly clear that no, he just doesn't want it any more, and the CSR was just deliberately being obtuse and annoying. I don't care if he's paid to do that or not, or if his job depends on it, he's just deliberately trying to torment Vincent into submission. And I'll be damn if I can blame someone for resorting to bullying, when they're subjected to that kind of torment.
I.e., as that bullshit goes, the company through its CSRs made the first step. They're the ones which practice, yes, an absolutely bullshit way to treat anyone, doubly so a paying customer. So the annoyed customer slings bullshit right back. I can't blame them too much.
That's how I see human interactions anyway. It's a give-and-take affair, a social contract that is only valid as long as both sides respect it. The moment one side decides it's ok to thoroughly ignore that contract, I no longer see the other side as bound to obey it.
I don't care if someone's just paid to do it. The moment they decided it's ok to treat people like shit -- for money or for any other reason -- then they should be prepared to be treated like shit right back.
May I point out that, although totalitarian regimes _do_ violate human rights and mis-use laws against dissidents, sometimes they actually have to solve an actual problem? E.g., even Stalin's USSR and Mao's China at their darkest hour, while they did have a some of the most brutal suppression of dissidents, they also had laws to deal with plain old crimes like theft, embezzlement, murder, etc. They also had plenty of civil laws too, like for example, divorces, inheritance, child support, etc.
I.e., it seems to me pretty stupid to assume that any law in China is somehow _guaranteed_ be 100% for oppression purposes, and only disguised in a more propaganda-friendly guise. Maybe someone there genuinely got fed up with spam. Maybe a bunch of bosses in the PRC just had one day too many of finding their inboxes full of "H3rb@1 \/i@gr@" emails. Or maybe it was the "Thousands of 18 year old teens waiting for you!!!" mails. China's conservative leadership tends to take a very grim view of pornography, plus they have _much_ higher age of consent.
Are those volunteers paid to either read other people's emails and to point fingers at demand? How do you know that? How do you know it's not just people paid to register email addresses and use them all over the place, and see what spam lands in those inboxes? Or maybe run honeypots to see who's actually commanding the army of spam-bots with Joe-job faked sender addresses? Or whatever? For the size of China 1000 admins and 20,000 volunteers is a spit in the ocean, if their goal was to read all emails. But to run a honeypot net or to get reliable reports of who's been spamming their inboxes, it may be just enough.
Basically the D&D mentality that some people are by definition evil, hence they can only ever give evil laws, is so fucking stupid that it's not even funny. _Noone_ defines themselves as evil, sworn enemy of all goodness, and able to only ever do evil stuff, like in retarded D&D-type settings and cheap fantasy flicks. The Real Life isn't divided neatly like that.
In RL even the most horrible dictator may really think they're only doing just what's good for their country (even if for everyone else it doesn't really count as good), and not just acting out of some Sith-like determination to extinguish all goodness. RL "evil" is more about not caring about collateral damage done than being some sworn destroyer of all that's still good and pure. And sometimes, even if by accident, their notion of "good" may actually be good.
That's all I'm saying here too. Just assuming "The Chinese government is evil, hence any Chinese law _must_ be 100% for the sole purpose of crushing freedoms and harming people" is just bullshit. We just don't know that. Assuming you can "translate" like that, is just some self-righteous bullshit, nothing more.
You don't even need to do that. Seriously. (Well, unless you enjoy paying the premium for the laptop, and then modding the desktop case, etc, anyway.)
There are desktop motherboards that take a Pentium M CPU, and have the same chipset as a laptop motherboard anyway. Plus, they have AGP or PCI-E ports in case you want to put in a more powerful graphics card, have a standard ATX power connector, etc. Or you can get one of AMD's mobile CPUs, which plug into any el-cheapo desktop motherboard just fine. And AMD mainboards don't include only ultra-hot NForce 4 cheapsets, but also SiS chipsets that run cool with a tiny fanless heatsink.
Couple it with a good silent PSU with a temperature-controlled 120mm fan, and there you go, you have a silent computer. Or if you have a mesh case (or no kids or pets, so you can just leave the case open) and don't have much more heat-producing stuff in that case, get something like an Antec Phantom PSU and not even have that noise.
Heck, you may not even have to fork the cash over for a notebook CPU, if you don't need _extreme_ silence. I used to have a brand new (and back then top-of-the-line) A64 3200+ and it could be cooled just fine by a simple K8 Silencer heatsink and a 12 dBA 80mm Papst fan. Nowadays I run a 4000+ with the same heatsink. Sure, it's all copper and with _lots_ of fins, but, you know, it's just a traditional normal sized heatsink. No fancy heatpipes, no water cooling, no giant radiators with 120mm fans, no special retention kit, no nothing. Just push it on the CPU, turn the lever, and that's it.
And since virtually all K8 mainboards support fan speed control and Cool'n'Quiet speed-trottling when you're just browsing the web, that fan almost always ran slower than even that low speed and noise level. The Asus monitor program that came with the new mobo used to make a fuss all the time for thinking that the CPU fan had stopped, so I had to disable that warning.
Or going in the other direction, you may want to have a look at Zalman's TNN (Totally No Noise) cases. They come with a fanless PSU and heatpipes to the case itself for both the CPU and the GPU. They do put a maximum temperature dissipation limit on both, but it still allow for some relatively high-end CPUs and a pretty good mid-range graphics card. Now the cases themselves _are_ expensive, but, still, it won't cost more than a laptop with the same specs and it'll actually be even more quiet.
I keep reading about people wanting a computer that is quiet, energy efficient and doesn't produce 80,000 BTU of heat. Many people see the solution to the problem as retrofitting a desktop with huge heatsinks, remote DC power supplies, special home closets for the computer with long KVM cables and installing laptop hard drives in your desktops. That's just crazy talk.
Yeah, I'll concur, that's just crazy talk. Funny how silencing my desktop involved neither. But, hey, don't let reality get in the way of a good "my laptop beats your desktop" round of crazy talk.
Folks, bit the bullet. Pay double (versus a desktop) for a laptop and docking station and be done with it.
Whoa, whoa... not so fast... why would I look forward to paying double for something that does the same bloody job? As conspicuous consumption, or what? (Conspicuous consumption == buying expensive and visible stuff like fur coats or sports cars or whatever, just to show everyone that you can afford it.) I mean, seriously, wtf? It's not like money's tight or anything, but I can think of better uses for them than just blowing them on something whose only advantage is "but it's a laptop."
I.e., the question becomes very much reversed. It's not "but do you really need a desktop?" but rather "do you need a laptop enough to justify the price difference?"
Docked, I am able to pretend it is a desktop, even using it with two monitors (a requirement in my computing book). Yet, I sip power, am quiet as a church mouse and produce next to no heat (compared to a desktop).
As opposed to getting the same in a desktop computer? Sorry to rain on your parade, but a desktop with the same Pentium M processor (yes, you can get it in a desktop too) and the same components uses exactly as much power, produces exactly as much heat, and actually produces even _less_ noise. You know why? Due to being able to use larger and slower fans, have better airflow in the case, and/or being able to have heavily soundproofed cases. (And no, you don't have to take it apart to soundproof it, although thatt's easy too. A lot of cases nowadays, e.g., Antec or Arctic cooling, are already designed with silence in mind. Go figure.)
Basically it's just absurd to pretend that there's some sort of magic that makes desktops inherently hot and noisy, and laptops inherently cool and quiet. The same CPU draws exactly as much current or power in a desktop as in a laptop, and the same applies to graphics cards, chipsets, whatever. And power supplies aren't more efficient for laptops either. Just that a quarter of the dissipated power is in a separate brick doesn't really make your rig more efficient or cooler.
And you don't even have to go that expensive to get an even more silent desktop. Get an Antec fanless PSU, an energy-efficient CPU (either AMD or Intel mobile CPUs will do just fine, but AMD are cheaper and fit in a cheap normal desktop mobo), a good passively cooled motherboard (e.g., a SiS), a good passively cooled graphics card, and a good heatsink for the CPU. (It doesn't even mean something oversized. A simple K8 Silencer and a 12 dBA Papst fan worked like a charm for me) Get a good Seagate or Samsung HDD, both are very quiet. Now all that remains is a good case. There are plenty of silent ones from Asus, Antec, or Arctic cooling, or just get one with lots of holes (e.g., a mesh case) and you don't even need fans.
There you go: a system that's every bit as cool as your laptop and actually more silent. The only fan is on the CPU, and since it's an 80mm fan on a full sized copper heatsink, it can barely rotate to keep it cool. (I'll assume that the mobo does support fan speed control, but I think all do nowadays.) The hard drive is actually more silent too.
Or if you want to one-up even that, use some of the money you saved by _not_ getting a laptop, and get one of the new 32 GB Flash "HDDs" fro
See, this fallacy isn't even new. We've had this rationalization before. And although for this case it's a bit of a hyperbole, we already have plenty of legal precedents where it was already decided that it's _not_ an excuse. E.g., war crimes and extortion. The soldiers or goons were "just executing orders" and the officer or mafia don "didn't personally do anything wrong, it's just those subordinates which decided to put a bullet through a few people's brains on their own." And at some point it's been legally decided that, nope, sorry, it doesn't work that way. You're not any less of an asshole if you're just following asshole orders, and you're not absolved of responsibility just because you've instigated some act instead of personally commiting it.
Again: it applies to _both_ the bosses and their soldiers/goons/etc there. An officer can't say "oh well, my men may have been rounding up civillians and shooting them, but _I_ was only sipping my coffee and watching them, so I'm not to blame." At some point it was decided that, no, you can be court martialled even for just that: sitting and watching instead of stopping them. If they're under your command, it's your responsibility. And conversely, callous as it may seem, a soldier can't just say "well, I may have been breaking every single law, but I was only following orders, so I'm not to blame."
And it seems to me like the same applies here. Again, to everyone involved:
- if AOL employs and even encourages asshats to harrass the customers, then the AOL bosses are asshats
- if someone takes an asshat job at AOL, then they're an asshat. It's that simple. You knew what that job involves, and if you saw nothing wrong with doing it for the money, then, congrats, you've decided to be an asshat. A professional asshat, but an asshat nevertheless.
And at the very least, if you actively took part in annoying someone with an idiotic script, then you can't really pretend that they had no right to be annoyed by it. It's that simple. Unless they're the ones who started with the insults right from the start, I fail to see how it's their fault. One or two questions are ok, but putting them through a half an hour ordeal to discourage them from leaving is already a case of (A) your company is harrassing them, and (B) you're the hired goon doing it. Yes, for money to pay rent, duly noted. You're still the goon trying to harrass them into submisssion anyway. Acting offended and as if "it was only for the money" absolves you of any fault is just surrealistic.
Plus, the comparison with the hotel is... sorta funny. If I go to a hotel and I say I want to check out, I expect them to let me check out. Period. Making me go through a whole script and borderline insults (like "let me talk to your dad" to a 30 year old in TFA) just to stop charging me for the room is fucking stupid.
As for the threat of keeping records and not letting me stay there ever again... well, let's put it like this: if any hotel harrassed me the way AOL has been treating some of its customers, I can assure you that I wouldn't want to stay there ever again. I take "voting with my wallet" pretty seriously. I'll give my money to someone who treats me nicely. I'm sure the guy in TFA won't need AOL's records to prevent him from getting an account there ever again, either: the memory of that conversation should keep him from applying ever again.
And then there's the aspect of comparing AOL to a _luxury_ hotel. Heh. Let's not go there.
Plus, I'd imagine being forced to use the crappy MS search engine would spur those engineers on to new heights of programming just to try to make the damn thing the Google Killer they want it to be.
What, you mean every single MS employee works on their search engine? Could have fooled me. Here I was living in my fantasy world, imagining that some were coding Vista, some were coding IE7, some were coding MS Office, some were in their compilers division, some were making games for the XBox 360, and so on.
And that's not even counting that a lot just aren't programmers at all. MS employs one helluva lot of usability experts, lawyers, designers (both web and industrial, see their physical products), artists, marketting people, managers, accountants, secretaries, PR staff, IT people, hardware engineers (see their physical products again), etc, etc, etc.
So you propose... what? To kick all those in the nuts so they'll leave whatever they're doing and start working on a search engine? I'm sure it's sooo productive if your lawyers can't search for some legal precedent on Google, and even more productive if they stop doing their actual job and learn programming to fix the search engine.
A tool is just a tool, and the smart boss lets people use whatever damn tools they're familiar with. If they're better at using CorelDraw or Photoshop than MS Paint to paint the toolbar images or web graphics, only the dumbest of PHBs would insist that everyone uses MS Paint. Not that it doesn't happen lots, but it's still dumb. Equally if some guy from the compiler division is more productive using Google to find more info about an optimization technique, or to find a book about it, by which metric it's good to make him eat dog food instead?
Programmers are, let's face it, completely nerdy compared to the general population.
All the secretaries, lawyers, marketters, tech writers, etc, however aren't. It's a pretty good metric if those prefer Google, since they do represent a huge chunk of the USA population.
And lately, Mythic has busied themselves copying the worst ideas from WoW instead of trying to fix their past mistakes
Just like everyone else, then? The same has happened to pretty much every single SOE game too, for example. Maybe with the exception of Planetside, where it's hard to squeeze in too many WoW ideas since it's a MMO-FPS. I mean, seriously, it's UT-2004 in a persistent world. Though I wouldn't be surprised one bit if anyone tried anyway.
And some WoW ideas aren't even bad, or at least they worked in WoW. What gets my goat is that the people copying them:
1. don't even understand those ideas or why they worked, so they'll implement a grotesque carricature of the original gameplay element. So even if it was a good idea, the copy will often be bad, and if it was bad, it will end up even worse.
2. the result often lacks any coherence. WoW may well be a collection of ideas, some good and some bad, but they're like an interlocking set of cogs forming a finely tuned and coherent-looking whole. (Yeah, you may not like it, but seeing as they milk more money than anyone else from the market, by a whole order of magnitude, it's hard to argue that it's not at least finely tuned to that end.) The copycats most often just copy some disparate elements and end up with a piss-poor heap of cogs that don't even fit together and just are a sore sight when you try to view the whole. It's like trying to make the greatest painting by stealling square-inch sized pieces from Michelangelo's Sixtine Chappel, Leonardo's Mona Lisa, etc. It just won't work that way.
3. as you illustrate, they'll just piss off the existing fan base. People have invested weeks or months in their characters, have learned what works and what didn't, and you were left with the people who actually liked (or at least tollerated) it that way. Making some broad-sweeping changes will just piss off everyone who liked it the old way. Changing it again will piss off those who liked it the new way. And eventually you even piss off people who didn't even have any particular fondness for any flavour-of-the-month along the way, but are getting irritated when their virtual persona keeps being changed by someone else.
It's just a name for what used to be called a PR drone. It's the guy putting a believable face on whatever message wants to send to the sheep. It can involve manufacturing some "news", manufacturing some "impartial studies", faking a grassroots movement, or lately... pretending to be a hip and independent blogger just like you, so you're inclined to trust him. Enter the "head blogger" role.
What I'm saying is: it's nothing new. It's the same old corporate scam under a shiny new name.
And when I say that just the name is new, I really mean it. Even the "hip, young and honest guy that you can connect to" image isn't invented there. Read a bit about the music producers and you'll find out that the music industry has been using people fitting precisely that image to wine and dine the artists and promise them the moon if they just sign this contract. (Incidentally the contract doesn't mention the moon, but this guy is _so_ just like you and looks so sincere, that you're sure he really means it that you'll get the moon.) Turns out to work waay better than having some corporate fatcat talk to them, not even speak the same language, and raise all their "this guy wants to shaft me so hard that I'll walk funny for _years_" red flags.
So now MS has done the same thing. Instead of letting Steve "Uncle Fester" Balmer do the talking to the world at large, they got someone who'll spend half the time establishing a bogus image as a hip, irreverent and _totally_ independent blogger. (MS just gave a guy a camera and a security pass and will pay his salary no matter what he writes, even if it were anti-MS, you know? If you believe that, can I interest you in a lumber mill in Sahara?) And the other half the time taking the idyllic bits of info out of context and painting them as the whole image about MS.
Or to put it otherwise, it's never been that MS is stupid enough to take "blogger" for an important job. It's that their PR department figured that that particular title has enough "street cred" that they can rape and use for their own purposes. And when that "street cred" is used up, they'll find some other thing they can exploit instead.
So, I don't know... would you feel less threatened about your kid's future if that job title just said "PR"?
These are the same idiots whose entry into the console market was taking expensive commodity pc parts and shoving it into a big ugly black box.
I'm sorry to burst your fairytale fantasy, but any other console has been a small computer in disguise too. Your beloved Nintendo or Sony or whatever don't run on magic and pixie dust either, but, guess what? Use a CPU, a graphics card, RAM, etc.
E.g., the Dreamcast had the same graphics chip that was available in PC graphics cards too, a modem that you could have bought on the PC too, off the shelf SDRAM, and generally guess what? It was just a fucking computer in an ugly white box. It even took peripherals like keyboard and/or mouse, or you could buy an ISDN or Ethernet adapter for it. All that it had different was a non-Intel CPU, that's all.
These are the same idiots who are trying to charge gamers 50 dollars a year just to play games online.
And if the people are willing to pay that, the problem is...? No, seriously. Since when was it a duty to provide everything for free? If they can put a price on something and the market actually pays it, then that's just capitalism in action.
These are the same idiots who can't even get more the a handful of games to be backwards compatible.
Oh yes, I'm sure that _you_ could single handedly emulate every single game in existance, on a different CPU and a different graphics chip and all. Emulation isn't a trivial affair buddy, and it becomes increasingly problematic because of ever increasing complexity of the system you're trying to emulate. Yes, I'm sure everyone can wave Zsnes as proof that a console can be emulated, but look further up the food chain. It took several teams about 6 years to emulate a PSX acceptably. (But any existing emu still doesn't emulate at least a quarter of the PSX titles well enough!) It took more than 6 years of trying to emulate the PS2, and _still_ noone has more than a few demos and games that make it barely past the start menu, to show for that effort.
So basically, you know, if you're going to proclaim people as idiots for not being able to emulate the XBox, how about proving that you're not exactly as big an idiot? Surely you can get at least the CPU emulated perfectly in real time and at the correct speed on a dual-G5? I mean, come on, you can find the specs for both CPUs online, there's no major secret involved.
These are the same idiots who have brought crashes and patches to console gaming.
The crashes and patches were brought by the companies who coded those games, not by MS. MS's only (debatable) fault was providing a HDD and an online connection, that made patches possible. But blaming every crash or patch on that MS decision is like blaming Boeing for the 9/11. Whatever happened to personal responsibility? If Company A thought it's perfectly ok to shaft its customers with a buggy untested game, surely only Company A is to blame? I fail to see how those providing just the connection or the medium are to blame there.
The 360 hardware is a fucking disaster even if you completely ignore the massive defect rate. It is essentially a 480p system trying to run games at 720p and ending up with jaggy and low frame rate messes.
Sad to burst your bubble, but noone is duty-bound to give you your dream gaming rig for a quarter of the price. Console games have always had to deal with lower specs. Consoles never were some $2000 gaming rig subsidized down to $300 whatever. The question is whether a game can look good enough on that hardware, not what specs you'd consider enough for a "true" 720p machine.
And from what I can tell, a helluva lot of people are actually satisfied with their frame rates in 360 games.
Yeah, well, that's the other aspect of it, and I must thank you for illustrating it: that all these intrusive questionnaires just make people lie. Which, if done for any real data mining purposes, will just taint any conclusion there.
E.g., yeah, I'm sure that if someone at EA mined my registration data, they'll conclude that Emma Ng'bendu, the widdow of the former Nigerian finance minister, is one _hell_ of a gamer in spite of her old age. (Maybe I should ask them to help me transfer 80 million out of Niger while I'm at it;)
Hmm... wonder if my kind of people are to blame for the recent rush to make games for older casual gamers...
And I'll go and say that I'm even more paranoid than that when a company starts wanting personal data without a good reason to _need_ it. Even if they tried finding me by the email, it's a bogus Yahoo account, registered with a bogus SoftHome account, registered with a bogus DejaMail account (Deja doesn't even exist any more), registered with my old AOL account (hey, I was young, stupid, had just bought a modem and all I had at 9 PM was this AOL CD;). Now a government agency would probably have no problem tracing all that back, but I like to think that your average corporation isn't that determined (or has the finances) to get to the bottom of it for every single subscriber to their forums.
Still, you know, it rubs me the wrong way that they even ask for that kind of personal info.
The vast majority of messages I see here, or at least the ones I see modded up to +5, are more along the lines of a-priori being sure that:
1) the girl alone is to blame for getting raped (as is usually the argument in this kind of a situation: a lot of guys seem to be _very_ quick to join in the chorus that there must have been something the woman said, or wore, or just being at the guy's house, or just being in a park alone, or whatever, that _clearly_ absolves the guy of any fault and makes rape entirely the woman's fault.)
2) the girl surely said "yes" and only she or her mother lied about it afterwards
3) (or maybe 2.a.) that for that matter the girl should have known that if she goes to a guy's house she's _expected_ to put out, so that is obviously "yes" enough for any guy, and obviously her fault if she acts surprised if the guy goes ahead and rapes her
4) She obviously lied about her age, probably even had a faked ID at that, and certainly any 14 year old looks just like a 19 year old. (Wonder why the paedophiles don't just go for 19 year olds, then, if they supposedly look the same as a child anyway?)
And several variations of the above. Complete with the usual blanket generalizations (e.g., surely if the guy had a car, the girl wanted to fuck him) that obviously justify the blanket conclusion that in any imaginable case one of the above applies.
Not saying that that couldn't have been the case, but the way they're passed for definitive truth before even knowing what happened there, is... strange.
And at any rate, far from being biased against the guy, I see only a lot of people who are _certain_ that it was the girl that's guilty before even making her case.
Frankly, all that's missing so far, to make the edifice of preconception complete, is the standard Slashdot blanket generalization "there are no women online, and any 14 year olds are male FBI agents." Presumably noone has yet figured how to make that fit a rape case, what with having to be present in court and go through a medical examination or whatnot. Kinda hard to fool all those that you're a 14 year old girl if you were a 40 year old guy. Still, I'm surprised that noone at least tried posting that. Kinda feels like not Slashdot without that being posted half a dozen times in a topic about people meeting online.
Slashdot Mirror
Today's survival skills are, same as always, being able to use your brains. The kid sitting and pushing thumbsticks is solving more mental problems per minute than the idiot grown up spending the same time watching football. The kid with the gamepad is going through such quick problems as "does this block fit here or there?", or "in which sequence _do_ I jump on these platforms?" or "what do I have to say to Darth Traya to get dark side points?" It's problem solving.
It may not solve an exact replica of a RL problem, but then doing pushups doesn't resemble any RL problem either, yet it helps your body stay fit anyway. That's what that kid is doing too: the equivalent of mental pushups.
By comparison, it seems that the prescribed way to be a proper grown up and upstanding pillar of the community is to be a sad vegetable with exactly zero brain activity when you can avoid it. Mindlessly pushing buttons on a remote control is about as mentally stimulating as watching paint dry. And any organ which isn't used much tends to become less and less fit. A proper adult whose only mental activity is some gossip at the factory, followed by some good old fashioned watching football with a beer in the hand, is just working his way towards the mental equivalent of a beer gut.
So, yes, between the football-watching channel-surfing adult kind of a button pusher, and the kid pushing the buttons on a console controller, the kid may well be more fit to be the master of the universe. Or at least to solve the everyday problems in his life.
Actually, from what I can tell, "growing up" is just a matter of enculturation. Or to put it otherwise, of pretending to be X, so you can fashionably fit in a crowd of X. Where X can be something like "rebellious teenager" (huzzah for immitating someone in the name of being an independent individual) or "responsible adult and member of the community" or whatever.
To put it even less diplomatically: SFV. Stupid Fashion Victim.
You're just told that once you've reached age Y, you suddenly aren't supposed to play any more, because that's not what an adult does. You're suddenly supposed to become over night uninterested in exploration and imagination -- which is what playing is -- and just become a slave. You're supposed to go to work from 9 to 5 and produce value for your slave driver, like a good slave should, then go pretend to like your neighbours for community standing, and then flop on the sofa and watch football. Again, not necessarily because you actually like football, but you wouldn't want to be different from your neighbours, would you? It would be sooo unfashionable to have different interests than the neighbours. God forbid that you show that by not knowing exactly who passed the ball to whom in yesterday's game.
And let me state that again: children's "playing" is running scenarios in a safe environment, exercising your natural curiosity and imagination. E.g., if you watch a small girl enacting a tea party with her dolls, it's actually running a simulation of a social situation. It's exploration and imagination at their finest hour. That's what playing is, and not only in humans. Watch kittens or rabbits play, and you'll see that they too "play" by exercising their respective survival skills. In humans it's exercising your brains, which is _the_ survival advantage that nature gave you. Yet somehow people are supposed to "grow up" and basically give all that up. Give me a break.
Want to know what makes the western world increasingly reject that idiocy? The simple fact that society is increasingly unable to enforce that uniformity.
A quote comes to mind: "A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular." That's all there is to it. It's finally become safe to risk being the unpopular one, and the effect is cascading. When person X decides to drop the SFV pretense, and persons Y and Z around him see that nothing bad happened, they too might drop that sad masquerade. People are gradually discovering that they're not surrounded by drones who'd drive them out of town if they didn't fit the "responsible pillar of the community" stereotype to the letter, but by people like them who didn't particularly like that retarded stereotype either.
In the middle ages if you were the unpopular serf that thought too much, you'd find yourself a good candidate for the next inquisition trial. Don't think for a moment that witch hunts were only for the heretics. At least half those burned at the stake were just the unpopular guys and girls that told some community leader or village gossip to fuck off. (Having some wealth that the inquisition could confiscate also helped.)
Later society had to do with just ostracizing and occasionally bullying you if you refused to fit the stereotype reserved for you.
Nowadays what we're finally at the point where you can say "fuck them, I'll continue to be an intelligent and imaginative person if that's what _I_ want to be." Even if they ostracize you, you can find a thousand people on the Internet sharing _your_ interests, instead of having to fit in some SFV community. If you'd rather talk about your cat instead of the prescribed "manly", "adult" things like cars and football, you can just drop by in some cat-lovers chat room and there you go. If you want to still maintain a healthy "child-like" imagination and curiosity, there you go, you can find a ton of places to satisfy that curiosity or to exercise your imagination and creativity. You no longer _have_ to become an unimaginative drone, whose sole interests are football and earning enough money to keep up with the Joneses, just to fit the community.
Let me tell you a joke about nostalgia. Two veterans meet at some war-ending aniversary and have a little chat:
"Ah, do you remember when they captured us and took us to a concentration camp?"
"Oh yeah."
"And how they wanted to take us to the gas chamber?"
"Aw man, how can I forget that?"
"And then there was this bombing raid, explosions everywhere and we ran through a hole in the fence? And they chased us with dogs and we hid in the swamp for a week?"
"Oh yeah. Man, those were the good times."
Well, admittedly, childhood usually isn't _that_ bad, but still, everyone remembers the good parts, but never remembers the annoyances and frustrations. Or remembers some sanitized rose-tinted version of them. I suppose it must be some mechanism of the brain to stay sane.
But if I'm to really remember childhood, and without even going into the parts that were due to my parents being... well, completely unfit to be parents, it wasn't _that_ idyllic anyway.
E.g., take school alone. I could read since the age of 3. In fact, I could read and write in two foreign languages by the time I got into school. I could calculate a transformer or solve other physics problems up to that level. (I guess I must have asked something like "why is the sky blue?" and my parents, god bless their totally nerdy souls, gave me a physics book.) And yet there I was in school required to write a page of oblique lines or loops. Or to write a page worth of the letter "a". How boring is that?
And that's just one of many issues.
On the whole, I'll go and say I'm actually a _lot_ happier as an immature adult than I ever was as a child.
_Now_ I can actually do what I want. If I want a chocolate, I can go buy a chocolate. If I want to buy a doll, I can go buy a doll. (Or The Sims, which is one hell of a doll house simulator.;) If I want to stay up late playing with it, I can jolly well stay up and play with it. Back then I had a ton of people who knew better what I should be doing, what I should be thinking, what I should be saying, etc.
As for Calvin and Hobbes, or Winnie the Pooh, they're not written by a kid. They're written by an adult, and through rose-coloured nostalgia glasses _and_ from second-guessing the "enemy" at that. They see "man, this kid never listens to a word I say", or "man, he's throwing a tantrum again when I'm trying to teach him proper manners", and from there they go and paint some image of the kid being completely care-free and living in some imaginary wonderland. They don't however, see the frustrations like being treated like a brainless idiot. Or the frustration of that "teaching manners" meaning "Moraelin, say 'hello' to the nice lady?"... again... in front of 10 strangers and 2 of my friends. Or about a hundred other little issues.
In fact, I'll go and say that all that seeing the kid as a care-free brainless _idiot_ is just... selective confirmation. People start with the preconceived idea that the kid is inherently retarded and unable to ever comprehend adult logic, and from there remember every detail that confirms that, but conveniently forget the details that don't. Or acts like they're some one-in-a-million occurance that's surely just a freak accident.
And let me also say that a lot of the time, "adult logic" _isn't_. Adults are just as good as kids at rationalizing backwards from what they'd like, to some half-arsed unconvincing "facts" to justify it with. E.g., they start from some pre-conceived wish, like that they want to go camping or fishing (bonus points when it's just to fit in some group, not because they actually like it), and from there work their way backwards to some half-arsed justification, like that shivering in a tent in the rain builds character or that fishing is some kind of valuable RL skill. (How? What for? Exactly in which situation can one possibly catch enough fish with a fishing rod to support a family that way?) Even when they actually do have a point there, they're so convinced that you're an idiot and can't possibly
I don't know, the people sitting next to each other tend to be less loud, from my subjective, anecdotal experience. Most you don't even hear, or barely, if they're two seats away. On the other hand, more than half the mobile phone gang seems to make it their duty to scream, especially when (deducing by the conversation) they're getting poor signal, but for some it's the primary mode of talking on a phone.
It probably doesn't help that a lot of phones are still the type that has the mike pointed at the middle of your cheek, so if it's sensitive enough to pick up your voice, it's sensitive enough to pick up all the noises in that train car.
Plus, honestly, even if two talking face to face are loud, they tend to at least have better conversations. It's getting boring hearing the same fucking old "I'M ON A TRAIN! YES! A TRAIN! CAN YOU HEAR ME? YES, A TRAIN. YES, I'M GOING HOME! YES, HOME! YES, I JUST GOT AWAY FROM WORK! I'LL BE THERE IN TWO HOURS! WHAT? TWO HOURS!" I mean, ffs, some sound like they're retarded, talking to a complete retard, or both. It's so content-free, you have to wonder what the point is.
True enough. You're right. Still, I can imagine some circumstances where she's dragged out at a family or company picnic when her bf is unable to attend. Or a more plausible scenario: I see co-workers going out on the balcony, or previously on a wide open terrace , to talk on their mobile phone. I can just see that kinda specimen out on the balcony on the last floor, one hand holding onto to the metal railing, to squeeze in a call to her bf even during a thunderstorm.
I mean, seriously, I don't know about the US releases, but looking on amazon.de is just disheartening. There are surprisingly a couple of games that are scheduled for the end of june, which is more than last summer had, but you can also see stuff released in February that's _still_ on their short "New Releases" list. It's just bloody sad.
Not to mention that a lot of stuff is just a clone of a clone of a clone of a clone. Yet another FPS coming up, yet another RTS coming up, and (now that's a big surprise;) yet another sports team manager game coming up. Whop-de-fucking-do. That's soo worth my money. I always wanted to play yet another BF clone, except this one is based on the old Unreal engine and themed around WW2. Oh, wait, the original BF1942 was WW2 themed too. And I sooo always wanted to play yet another Dune 2 clone, except this one has different unit sprites. Not.
Seriously, the games industry just needs to realize that selling last year's game with better graphics is becoming less and less of an incentive to buy new games. Getting the same FPS with 1000 polygons/char instead of 300 was a bloody huge step in visual quality. Getting it with 3000 instead of 1000 becomes a smaller step. Getting it with 10,000 instead of 3000 becomes just a tweak already. There are already games sporting 30,000 polygon characters. E.g., The Singles. Am I that excited of the next step to 100,000 polygons per char. Well, no, not really. It already looks good enough.
Ok, it's not yet _perfect_. There's room for graphics improvements, but what I'm saying is: last year's games aren't visually offensive either. It's less and less an incentive to think, "man, last year's game looks like shit. I must get the newest one with the absolute highest polygon count." (Not that it ever was that huge an incentive, since I prefer gameplay and plot anyway, but just saying.) We're at the point where getting a 2 year old game from the bargain bin is quite a viable choice, not just on account of often having the same (or even better) gameplay, but also on account of not even looking that much worse.
At any rate, to sum it up: there's just not much stuff to buy, and even less stuff that tempts me. It's not the MMOs. The MMOs are just some filler to pass the time while waiting for the next good game. I've been known to take a break from MMOs to play, say, Heroes Of Might And Magic 5, though even that proved to be just a verbatim rehash of HOMM 1 to 4 with a nice 3D engine, and just as repetitive as those. But, seriously, there just isn't much to tempt me away from MMOs, much as I'm available and willing to be tempted.
Heh. And what happened to escaping quote signs? It's not even a new thing that only the latest JavaScript expert hackers discovered, but something that's also been known in the SQL Injection world for a long long time. (Yes, you can use prepared statements instead too, but you can also just escape the quotes and apostrophes.) And I wouldn't be surprised if it also was a part of some ancient CGI exploit.
Basically if there's an "arms race", then escaping quotes isn't much of a part of it. The problem was known long before Java Script, and the solution was known long before Java Script.
So, I don't know... Personally I'll side with the "it's just sloppy coding, by sloppy unqualified coders" camp. Seriously. It has no bloody excuse to still exist. Much less to be handwaved as some _unavoidable_ risk that's really just benign and ok to have in a web site. (As TFA was hand-waving it.) It's _not_ unavoidable, it's certainly _not_ benign, and both points have been known for at least a decade.
I mean, seriously, wtf... I knew that competence went out of fashion during the dot-com era, but seeing the massive ignorance and cluelessness of some supposed "Gurus" (read the big title at the top of TFA page) is just disheartening. It seems like these days all one needs to be a "Guru" is the arrogance to proclaim oneself a "Guru". From stuff like this, to personally seeing some self-proclaimed "Java Guru" recommend techniques that betrayed some _massive_ ignorance of the language, the VM, and the JIT, not to mention of the fact that he obviously doesn't read much on the subject if he managed to miss 5 years of that stuff being again and again proven to not just work that way. It seems like these days any ex-burger-flipper can just proclaim himself a computer guru and pass their ignorance as some "can't be done any other way, sorry" expertise.
Ahem... I _am_ an EE and have some interest in physics too, and it seems to me pretty bullshit to proclaim something a-priori as in the same league as "leprechauns", "ghosts", "lucky gum", "win an ipod by punching the monkey" or "10,000 doctors hand-waving", when you just don't have the data to make that judgment. I don't know if "flashover" exists or not. But dismissing something that vigorously without even having the data, is in the same league as dismissing the earth's curvature on account that it's not in the bible. Whatever happened to keeping an open mind as an integral part of being a scientist? (Either theoretical or the engineer kind.)
E.g., how _do_ you know that skin effect can't possibly apply? Skin effect is what happens at high frequencies. Lightning is one extremely brief pulse of electricity. Depending on the wave shape and duration it could have a metric buttload of high frequency components.
E.g., we're talking about something that's not just two electrodes attached to a human, with the human being the only possible path. We're talking about something that's already ionizing its own path through the air, _without_ needing a bag of salty water in between. The very existence of the close misses you mention is proof enough that, yes, often enough it actually prefers going through 6 ft of air than through 6 ft of human. Go figure.
So how do you absolutely know it can't possibly prefer to go through the air _around_ someone than directly through them?
And should we listen to doctors instead of EEs? Well, maybe, because those are the guys who treat the people struck by lightning. And they say for example that the lesions from lightning strikes do _not_ resemble those from industrial accidents where some worker met his doom at the hands (well, wires) of some high voltage installation.
They also say that, pay attention: there are deep burns at the entry point (where the lightning hit the bugger, typically neck, shoulder, etc) and the exit point (typically one foot), but not much else in between. Whereas by comparison industrial accidents also destroy tissue in between those two points. _That's_ what the flashover theory is based on.
Think it was all near misses? Then how do you explain the two burnt points? What kind of leprechaun produced the burn on someone's shoulder or neck, if all they got was a jolt between the two feet, as would happen in a miss? No, seriously, I'd like some better explanation there than just handwaving it that you just know that it's been really a near miss.
At any rate, again, whatever happened to a scientiffic state of mind? What happened to the idea that if the experimental data (as little and unreliable as we have) doesn't fit the theory, maybe we need a better theory? Since when did it become proper science or engineering to just hand-wave something guaranteed to be one big lie if it doesn't fit your model?
I'm a PC user all right, and, yes, a noisy computer annoys me too. And there's a healthy market in soundproofing kits, 3rd party GPU coolers, silent fans, watercooling kits, or computers without fans like the Hush PC or Zalman's TNN (Totally No Noise) cases, saying that I'm not the only one. Noise levels have played an increasingly important part of the PC's evolution in the last years, and spawned stuff like:
- fluid bearings for HDD's, which now have become the norm
- temperature controlled fans everywhere (again, fluid or ceramics bearing are increasingly more used)
- higher efficiency PSUs that don't need as much airflow to stay cool (and also moved to slow 120mm fans)
- cases with _much_ better airflow at lower fan RPM
- desktop motherboards that take low-voltage notebook CPUs, e.g., Pentium M
- the new Samsung Flash "HDDs"
Etc.
So basically if your image of the average PC owner is someone who's sitting next to something that sounds like a leafblower and feeling proud of his l33t turbo-cooled overclocked rig... you may wish to re-evaluate it.
For some people I've been around, I'd say the two probabilities are almost equal.
And one way you keep seeing it cutting the other way is providing an endless stream of ammo for those in power to use as justification for their getting more power. Any crime or problem can be presented as a nation-sweeping epidemic, that demands immediate action, if the public is just bombarded with just enough examples of it happening.
The problem, as I've been saying before is that human brains functions sorta like that of Terry Prattchett's trolls, whose counting went something like "one, two, many, lots". People simply lose sense of proportion beyond a certain scale. A week, a month, or a year, or even ten years, you can put into an intuitive proportion. A billion years, you can't. Or 10, 100 or 1000 people you can see every day. A billion people becomes just a very large number. "Lots." You may be able to work maths with 1,000,000,000 or 10^9, but your intuition won't help you.
Hence bombarding people with stuff that happened over such huge, unintuitive areas and numbers of people can be a very dangerous thing. The fact that it was a one in a million or one in a billion case just gets lost, and all those cases are treated as if they all happened in a world barely larger than their home town.
E.g., if you heard that one gamer in your home town preferred to play EQ until he lost his job, his house and everything, you think "heh. What a loser." But when you get bombarded with thousands of examples of that happening, it suddenly becomes "whoa! It's a dangerous addiction! It's a wave sweeping the nation!" Why? Because your brain doesn't have the intuitive framework to put it in the right proportion: that it's one in a million cases. But your intuition acts as if they all happened within a mile of your home.
E.g., if you heard that someone raped a child in your home town, you're disgusted, shocked, etc, but in the end, eh, it's one insane person. But get bombarded with cases from all over the world, and evidence that it happens every day, and suddenly it starts seeming like every other adult male is getting a hard-on at pre-teens. Why? Again, because it's not put in the right proportion. It's compared to a vague "Lots" number that's just marginally larger than the male population you see in a day.
And so on.
And while, yes, on one hand it does serve to also amplify the perceived extent of the abuses of power, it also works the other way, giving those in power ammo to keep people scared and justify getting more power. Yes, some citizens might be genuinely mistaken and concerned about the extent of police abuses. But on the other hand, there'll also be a bunch of ruthless politicians understanding this phenomenon and milking it for everything its got.
And frankly, the latter worries me more.
Are you kidding? Some people seem to not even have a life that doesn't involve screaming into a mobile phone. Yay for sitting next to the guy who's just got to tell everyone in his phone book that he's on a train, across from the codependent chick wanting to do everything together with her boyfriend and god forbid that they're not in contact at every hour (actually, she sounded so obsessed, she sounded more like "stalker" than just "codependent"), and a few other such specimens which can't just shut up for at least 5 minutes of a 5 hour train trip.
Frankly, when I saw this Penny Arcade comic strip, I thought I had actually been around people like that.
What makes you think that that kinda people would stop talking in a thunderstorm? I can just see the same specimens under some crude picnic/fishing/bus/whatever shelter, screaming into the phone, "YES, I'M IN THE WOODS! CAN YOU HEAR ME? IN THE WOODS! WHAT WAS THAT? THERE'S A THUNDERSTORM HERE! CAN YOU HEAR ME? THUNDERSTORM!" Or I can just see the girl mentioned above shivering under some tree in the rain, but unwilling to stop being in contact with her boyfriend even then.
I must have been unclear. I'm not saying they weren't evil. Yes, they were evil.
I'm just saying that even evil people sometimes do good things. It doesn't necessarily make them less evil, but it doesn't make the act automatically evil by association either.
E.g., Al Capone on one hand ordered some brutal massacres, but on the other hand opened soup kitchens for the victims of the great depression and paid (out of that ill gotten money) for shelter and clothing for them. Was he evil? Yes. Were his soup kitchens evil? No.
That's really all I'm saying. One can't just say, "Person X is evil, action Y was done by X, hence Y is evil too." Guilt or evil aren't something transmittable by association like that.
The same applies to the Chinese government too. Is it an evil oppressive government? Yes, certainly. Does it automatically make everything they touch evil? No. It _is_ entirely possible that someone genuinely is sick and tired of spam, or of seeing their country's reputation being tainted by spam. One can't automatically assume (or "translate") that an anti-spam law is automatically just some oppression tool against dissidents.
Indeed. But in response to what? In response to a hired goon that's deliberately harrassing them and trying to get them to throw their hands up and give up whatever they wanted to do.
At some point I stop seeing bullying right back as wrong, when someone is deliberately causing you distress. At some moment Vincent had answered enough question, made his case perfectly clear that no, he just doesn't want it any more, and the CSR was just deliberately being obtuse and annoying. I don't care if he's paid to do that or not, or if his job depends on it, he's just deliberately trying to torment Vincent into submission. And I'll be damn if I can blame someone for resorting to bullying, when they're subjected to that kind of torment.
I.e., as that bullshit goes, the company through its CSRs made the first step. They're the ones which practice, yes, an absolutely bullshit way to treat anyone, doubly so a paying customer. So the annoyed customer slings bullshit right back. I can't blame them too much.
That's how I see human interactions anyway. It's a give-and-take affair, a social contract that is only valid as long as both sides respect it. The moment one side decides it's ok to thoroughly ignore that contract, I no longer see the other side as bound to obey it.
I don't care if someone's just paid to do it. The moment they decided it's ok to treat people like shit -- for money or for any other reason -- then they should be prepared to be treated like shit right back.
May I point out that, although totalitarian regimes _do_ violate human rights and mis-use laws against dissidents, sometimes they actually have to solve an actual problem? E.g., even Stalin's USSR and Mao's China at their darkest hour, while they did have a some of the most brutal suppression of dissidents, they also had laws to deal with plain old crimes like theft, embezzlement, murder, etc. They also had plenty of civil laws too, like for example, divorces, inheritance, child support, etc.
I.e., it seems to me pretty stupid to assume that any law in China is somehow _guaranteed_ be 100% for oppression purposes, and only disguised in a more propaganda-friendly guise. Maybe someone there genuinely got fed up with spam. Maybe a bunch of bosses in the PRC just had one day too many of finding their inboxes full of "H3rb@1 \/i@gr@" emails. Or maybe it was the "Thousands of 18 year old teens waiting for you!!!" mails. China's conservative leadership tends to take a very grim view of pornography, plus they have _much_ higher age of consent.
Are those volunteers paid to either read other people's emails and to point fingers at demand? How do you know that? How do you know it's not just people paid to register email addresses and use them all over the place, and see what spam lands in those inboxes? Or maybe run honeypots to see who's actually commanding the army of spam-bots with Joe-job faked sender addresses? Or whatever? For the size of China 1000 admins and 20,000 volunteers is a spit in the ocean, if their goal was to read all emails. But to run a honeypot net or to get reliable reports of who's been spamming their inboxes, it may be just enough.
Basically the D&D mentality that some people are by definition evil, hence they can only ever give evil laws, is so fucking stupid that it's not even funny. _Noone_ defines themselves as evil, sworn enemy of all goodness, and able to only ever do evil stuff, like in retarded D&D-type settings and cheap fantasy flicks. The Real Life isn't divided neatly like that.
In RL even the most horrible dictator may really think they're only doing just what's good for their country (even if for everyone else it doesn't really count as good), and not just acting out of some Sith-like determination to extinguish all goodness. RL "evil" is more about not caring about collateral damage done than being some sworn destroyer of all that's still good and pure. And sometimes, even if by accident, their notion of "good" may actually be good.
That's all I'm saying here too. Just assuming "The Chinese government is evil, hence any Chinese law _must_ be 100% for the sole purpose of crushing freedoms and harming people" is just bullshit. We just don't know that. Assuming you can "translate" like that, is just some self-righteous bullshit, nothing more.
You don't even need to do that. Seriously. (Well, unless you enjoy paying the premium for the laptop, and then modding the desktop case, etc, anyway.)
There are desktop motherboards that take a Pentium M CPU, and have the same chipset as a laptop motherboard anyway. Plus, they have AGP or PCI-E ports in case you want to put in a more powerful graphics card, have a standard ATX power connector, etc. Or you can get one of AMD's mobile CPUs, which plug into any el-cheapo desktop motherboard just fine. And AMD mainboards don't include only ultra-hot NForce 4 cheapsets, but also SiS chipsets that run cool with a tiny fanless heatsink.
Couple it with a good silent PSU with a temperature-controlled 120mm fan, and there you go, you have a silent computer. Or if you have a mesh case (or no kids or pets, so you can just leave the case open) and don't have much more heat-producing stuff in that case, get something like an Antec Phantom PSU and not even have that noise.
Heck, you may not even have to fork the cash over for a notebook CPU, if you don't need _extreme_ silence. I used to have a brand new (and back then top-of-the-line) A64 3200+ and it could be cooled just fine by a simple K8 Silencer heatsink and a 12 dBA 80mm Papst fan. Nowadays I run a 4000+ with the same heatsink. Sure, it's all copper and with _lots_ of fins, but, you know, it's just a traditional normal sized heatsink. No fancy heatpipes, no water cooling, no giant radiators with 120mm fans, no special retention kit, no nothing. Just push it on the CPU, turn the lever, and that's it.
And since virtually all K8 mainboards support fan speed control and Cool'n'Quiet speed-trottling when you're just browsing the web, that fan almost always ran slower than even that low speed and noise level. The Asus monitor program that came with the new mobo used to make a fuss all the time for thinking that the CPU fan had stopped, so I had to disable that warning.
Or going in the other direction, you may want to have a look at Zalman's TNN (Totally No Noise) cases. They come with a fanless PSU and heatpipes to the case itself for both the CPU and the GPU. They do put a maximum temperature dissipation limit on both, but it still allow for some relatively high-end CPUs and a pretty good mid-range graphics card. Now the cases themselves _are_ expensive, but, still, it won't cost more than a laptop with the same specs and it'll actually be even more quiet.
Yeah, I'll concur, that's just crazy talk. Funny how silencing my desktop involved neither. But, hey, don't let reality get in the way of a good "my laptop beats your desktop" round of crazy talk.
Whoa, whoa... not so fast... why would I look forward to paying double for something that does the same bloody job? As conspicuous consumption, or what? (Conspicuous consumption == buying expensive and visible stuff like fur coats or sports cars or whatever, just to show everyone that you can afford it.) I mean, seriously, wtf? It's not like money's tight or anything, but I can think of better uses for them than just blowing them on something whose only advantage is "but it's a laptop."
I.e., the question becomes very much reversed. It's not "but do you really need a desktop?" but rather "do you need a laptop enough to justify the price difference?"
As opposed to getting the same in a desktop computer? Sorry to rain on your parade, but a desktop with the same Pentium M processor (yes, you can get it in a desktop too) and the same components uses exactly as much power, produces exactly as much heat, and actually produces even _less_ noise. You know why? Due to being able to use larger and slower fans, have better airflow in the case, and/or being able to have heavily soundproofed cases. (And no, you don't have to take it apart to soundproof it, although thatt's easy too. A lot of cases nowadays, e.g., Antec or Arctic cooling, are already designed with silence in mind. Go figure.)
Basically it's just absurd to pretend that there's some sort of magic that makes desktops inherently hot and noisy, and laptops inherently cool and quiet. The same CPU draws exactly as much current or power in a desktop as in a laptop, and the same applies to graphics cards, chipsets, whatever. And power supplies aren't more efficient for laptops either. Just that a quarter of the dissipated power is in a separate brick doesn't really make your rig more efficient or cooler.
And you don't even have to go that expensive to get an even more silent desktop. Get an Antec fanless PSU, an energy-efficient CPU (either AMD or Intel mobile CPUs will do just fine, but AMD are cheaper and fit in a cheap normal desktop mobo), a good passively cooled motherboard (e.g., a SiS), a good passively cooled graphics card, and a good heatsink for the CPU. (It doesn't even mean something oversized. A simple K8 Silencer and a 12 dBA Papst fan worked like a charm for me) Get a good Seagate or Samsung HDD, both are very quiet. Now all that remains is a good case. There are plenty of silent ones from Asus, Antec, or Arctic cooling, or just get one with lots of holes (e.g., a mesh case) and you don't even need fans.
There you go: a system that's every bit as cool as your laptop and actually more silent. The only fan is on the CPU, and since it's an 80mm fan on a full sized copper heatsink, it can barely rotate to keep it cool. (I'll assume that the mobo does support fan speed control, but I think all do nowadays.) The hard drive is actually more silent too.
Or if you want to one-up even that, use some of the money you saved by _not_ getting a laptop, and get one of the new 32 GB Flash "HDDs" fro
See, this fallacy isn't even new. We've had this rationalization before. And although for this case it's a bit of a hyperbole, we already have plenty of legal precedents where it was already decided that it's _not_ an excuse. E.g., war crimes and extortion. The soldiers or goons were "just executing orders" and the officer or mafia don "didn't personally do anything wrong, it's just those subordinates which decided to put a bullet through a few people's brains on their own." And at some point it's been legally decided that, nope, sorry, it doesn't work that way. You're not any less of an asshole if you're just following asshole orders, and you're not absolved of responsibility just because you've instigated some act instead of personally commiting it.
Again: it applies to _both_ the bosses and their soldiers/goons/etc there. An officer can't say "oh well, my men may have been rounding up civillians and shooting them, but _I_ was only sipping my coffee and watching them, so I'm not to blame." At some point it was decided that, no, you can be court martialled even for just that: sitting and watching instead of stopping them. If they're under your command, it's your responsibility. And conversely, callous as it may seem, a soldier can't just say "well, I may have been breaking every single law, but I was only following orders, so I'm not to blame."
And it seems to me like the same applies here. Again, to everyone involved:
- if AOL employs and even encourages asshats to harrass the customers, then the AOL bosses are asshats
- if someone takes an asshat job at AOL, then they're an asshat. It's that simple. You knew what that job involves, and if you saw nothing wrong with doing it for the money, then, congrats, you've decided to be an asshat. A professional asshat, but an asshat nevertheless.
And at the very least, if you actively took part in annoying someone with an idiotic script, then you can't really pretend that they had no right to be annoyed by it. It's that simple. Unless they're the ones who started with the insults right from the start, I fail to see how it's their fault. One or two questions are ok, but putting them through a half an hour ordeal to discourage them from leaving is already a case of (A) your company is harrassing them, and (B) you're the hired goon doing it. Yes, for money to pay rent, duly noted. You're still the goon trying to harrass them into submisssion anyway. Acting offended and as if "it was only for the money" absolves you of any fault is just surrealistic.
Plus, the comparison with the hotel is... sorta funny. If I go to a hotel and I say I want to check out, I expect them to let me check out. Period. Making me go through a whole script and borderline insults (like "let me talk to your dad" to a 30 year old in TFA) just to stop charging me for the room is fucking stupid.
As for the threat of keeping records and not letting me stay there ever again... well, let's put it like this: if any hotel harrassed me the way AOL has been treating some of its customers, I can assure you that I wouldn't want to stay there ever again. I take "voting with my wallet" pretty seriously. I'll give my money to someone who treats me nicely. I'm sure the guy in TFA won't need AOL's records to prevent him from getting an account there ever again, either: the memory of that conversation should keep him from applying ever again.
And then there's the aspect of comparing AOL to a _luxury_ hotel. Heh. Let's not go there.
What, you mean every single MS employee works on their search engine? Could have fooled me. Here I was living in my fantasy world, imagining that some were coding Vista, some were coding IE7, some were coding MS Office, some were in their compilers division, some were making games for the XBox 360, and so on.
And that's not even counting that a lot just aren't programmers at all. MS employs one helluva lot of usability experts, lawyers, designers (both web and industrial, see their physical products), artists, marketting people, managers, accountants, secretaries, PR staff, IT people, hardware engineers (see their physical products again), etc, etc, etc.
So you propose... what? To kick all those in the nuts so they'll leave whatever they're doing and start working on a search engine? I'm sure it's sooo productive if your lawyers can't search for some legal precedent on Google, and even more productive if they stop doing their actual job and learn programming to fix the search engine.
A tool is just a tool, and the smart boss lets people use whatever damn tools they're familiar with. If they're better at using CorelDraw or Photoshop than MS Paint to paint the toolbar images or web graphics, only the dumbest of PHBs would insist that everyone uses MS Paint. Not that it doesn't happen lots, but it's still dumb. Equally if some guy from the compiler division is more productive using Google to find more info about an optimization technique, or to find a book about it, by which metric it's good to make him eat dog food instead?
All the secretaries, lawyers, marketters, tech writers, etc, however aren't. It's a pretty good metric if those prefer Google, since they do represent a huge chunk of the USA population.
Just like everyone else, then? The same has happened to pretty much every single SOE game too, for example. Maybe with the exception of Planetside, where it's hard to squeeze in too many WoW ideas since it's a MMO-FPS. I mean, seriously, it's UT-2004 in a persistent world. Though I wouldn't be surprised one bit if anyone tried anyway.
And some WoW ideas aren't even bad, or at least they worked in WoW. What gets my goat is that the people copying them:
1. don't even understand those ideas or why they worked, so they'll implement a grotesque carricature of the original gameplay element. So even if it was a good idea, the copy will often be bad, and if it was bad, it will end up even worse.
2. the result often lacks any coherence. WoW may well be a collection of ideas, some good and some bad, but they're like an interlocking set of cogs forming a finely tuned and coherent-looking whole. (Yeah, you may not like it, but seeing as they milk more money than anyone else from the market, by a whole order of magnitude, it's hard to argue that it's not at least finely tuned to that end.) The copycats most often just copy some disparate elements and end up with a piss-poor heap of cogs that don't even fit together and just are a sore sight when you try to view the whole. It's like trying to make the greatest painting by stealling square-inch sized pieces from Michelangelo's Sixtine Chappel, Leonardo's Mona Lisa, etc. It just won't work that way.
3. as you illustrate, they'll just piss off the existing fan base. People have invested weeks or months in their characters, have learned what works and what didn't, and you were left with the people who actually liked (or at least tollerated) it that way. Making some broad-sweeping changes will just piss off everyone who liked it the old way. Changing it again will piss off those who liked it the new way. And eventually you even piss off people who didn't even have any particular fondness for any flavour-of-the-month along the way, but are getting irritated when their virtual persona keeps being changed by someone else.
It's just a name for what used to be called a PR drone. It's the guy putting a believable face on whatever message wants to send to the sheep. It can involve manufacturing some "news", manufacturing some "impartial studies", faking a grassroots movement, or lately... pretending to be a hip and independent blogger just like you, so you're inclined to trust him. Enter the "head blogger" role.
What I'm saying is: it's nothing new. It's the same old corporate scam under a shiny new name.
And when I say that just the name is new, I really mean it. Even the "hip, young and honest guy that you can connect to" image isn't invented there. Read a bit about the music producers and you'll find out that the music industry has been using people fitting precisely that image to wine and dine the artists and promise them the moon if they just sign this contract. (Incidentally the contract doesn't mention the moon, but this guy is _so_ just like you and looks so sincere, that you're sure he really means it that you'll get the moon.) Turns out to work waay better than having some corporate fatcat talk to them, not even speak the same language, and raise all their "this guy wants to shaft me so hard that I'll walk funny for _years_" red flags.
So now MS has done the same thing. Instead of letting Steve "Uncle Fester" Balmer do the talking to the world at large, they got someone who'll spend half the time establishing a bogus image as a hip, irreverent and _totally_ independent blogger. (MS just gave a guy a camera and a security pass and will pay his salary no matter what he writes, even if it were anti-MS, you know? If you believe that, can I interest you in a lumber mill in Sahara?) And the other half the time taking the idyllic bits of info out of context and painting them as the whole image about MS.
Or to put it otherwise, it's never been that MS is stupid enough to take "blogger" for an important job. It's that their PR department figured that that particular title has enough "street cred" that they can rape and use for their own purposes. And when that "street cred" is used up, they'll find some other thing they can exploit instead.
So, I don't know... would you feel less threatened about your kid's future if that job title just said "PR"?
I'm sorry to burst your fairytale fantasy, but any other console has been a small computer in disguise too. Your beloved Nintendo or Sony or whatever don't run on magic and pixie dust either, but, guess what? Use a CPU, a graphics card, RAM, etc.
E.g., the Dreamcast had the same graphics chip that was available in PC graphics cards too, a modem that you could have bought on the PC too, off the shelf SDRAM, and generally guess what? It was just a fucking computer in an ugly white box. It even took peripherals like keyboard and/or mouse, or you could buy an ISDN or Ethernet adapter for it. All that it had different was a non-Intel CPU, that's all.
And if the people are willing to pay that, the problem is...? No, seriously. Since when was it a duty to provide everything for free? If they can put a price on something and the market actually pays it, then that's just capitalism in action.
Oh yes, I'm sure that _you_ could single handedly emulate every single game in existance, on a different CPU and a different graphics chip and all. Emulation isn't a trivial affair buddy, and it becomes increasingly problematic because of ever increasing complexity of the system you're trying to emulate. Yes, I'm sure everyone can wave Zsnes as proof that a console can be emulated, but look further up the food chain. It took several teams about 6 years to emulate a PSX acceptably. (But any existing emu still doesn't emulate at least a quarter of the PSX titles well enough!) It took more than 6 years of trying to emulate the PS2, and _still_ noone has more than a few demos and games that make it barely past the start menu, to show for that effort.
So basically, you know, if you're going to proclaim people as idiots for not being able to emulate the XBox, how about proving that you're not exactly as big an idiot? Surely you can get at least the CPU emulated perfectly in real time and at the correct speed on a dual-G5? I mean, come on, you can find the specs for both CPUs online, there's no major secret involved.
The crashes and patches were brought by the companies who coded those games, not by MS. MS's only (debatable) fault was providing a HDD and an online connection, that made patches possible. But blaming every crash or patch on that MS decision is like blaming Boeing for the 9/11. Whatever happened to personal responsibility? If Company A thought it's perfectly ok to shaft its customers with a buggy untested game, surely only Company A is to blame? I fail to see how those providing just the connection or the medium are to blame there.
The 360 hardware is a fucking disaster even if you completely ignore the massive defect rate. It is essentially a 480p system trying to run games at 720p and ending up with jaggy and low frame rate messes.
Sad to burst your bubble, but noone is duty-bound to give you your dream gaming rig for a quarter of the price. Console games have always had to deal with lower specs. Consoles never were some $2000 gaming rig subsidized down to $300 whatever. The question is whether a game can look good enough on that hardware, not what specs you'd consider enough for a "true" 720p machine.
And from what I can tell, a helluva lot of people are actually satisfied with their frame rates in 360 games.
Yeah, well, that's the other aspect of it, and I must thank you for illustrating it: that all these intrusive questionnaires just make people lie. Which, if done for any real data mining purposes, will just taint any conclusion there.
E.g., yeah, I'm sure that if someone at EA mined my registration data, they'll conclude that Emma Ng'bendu, the widdow of the former Nigerian finance minister, is one _hell_ of a gamer in spite of her old age. (Maybe I should ask them to help me transfer 80 million out of Niger while I'm at it;)
Hmm... wonder if my kind of people are to blame for the recent rush to make games for older casual gamers...
And I'll go and say that I'm even more paranoid than that when a company starts wanting personal data without a good reason to _need_ it. Even if they tried finding me by the email, it's a bogus Yahoo account, registered with a bogus SoftHome account, registered with a bogus DejaMail account (Deja doesn't even exist any more), registered with my old AOL account (hey, I was young, stupid, had just bought a modem and all I had at 9 PM was this AOL CD;). Now a government agency would probably have no problem tracing all that back, but I like to think that your average corporation isn't that determined (or has the finances) to get to the bottom of it for every single subscriber to their forums.
Still, you know, it rubs me the wrong way that they even ask for that kind of personal info.
The vast majority of messages I see here, or at least the ones I see modded up to +5, are more along the lines of a-priori being sure that:
1) the girl alone is to blame for getting raped (as is usually the argument in this kind of a situation: a lot of guys seem to be _very_ quick to join in the chorus that there must have been something the woman said, or wore, or just being at the guy's house, or just being in a park alone, or whatever, that _clearly_ absolves the guy of any fault and makes rape entirely the woman's fault.)
2) the girl surely said "yes" and only she or her mother lied about it afterwards
3) (or maybe 2.a.) that for that matter the girl should have known that if she goes to a guy's house she's _expected_ to put out, so that is obviously "yes" enough for any guy, and obviously her fault if she acts surprised if the guy goes ahead and rapes her
4) She obviously lied about her age, probably even had a faked ID at that, and certainly any 14 year old looks just like a 19 year old. (Wonder why the paedophiles don't just go for 19 year olds, then, if they supposedly look the same as a child anyway?)
And several variations of the above. Complete with the usual blanket generalizations (e.g., surely if the guy had a car, the girl wanted to fuck him) that obviously justify the blanket conclusion that in any imaginable case one of the above applies.
Not saying that that couldn't have been the case, but the way they're passed for definitive truth before even knowing what happened there, is... strange.
And at any rate, far from being biased against the guy, I see only a lot of people who are _certain_ that it was the girl that's guilty before even making her case.
Frankly, all that's missing so far, to make the edifice of preconception complete, is the standard Slashdot blanket generalization "there are no women online, and any 14 year olds are male FBI agents." Presumably noone has yet figured how to make that fit a rape case, what with having to be present in court and go through a medical examination or whatnot. Kinda hard to fool all those that you're a 14 year old girl if you were a 40 year old guy. Still, I'm surprised that noone at least tried posting that. Kinda feels like not Slashdot without that being posted half a dozen times in a topic about people meeting online.