In a world without piracy, yes, some local band or software house could make a decent living by selling cheaper programs/CDs/whatever.
It doesn't even have to be a perfect substitute for, say, MS Office, it just has to do what you need without costing two months' salary. You'd be surprised how many features people can live without, if the alternative is starving for a few months.
Same as, say, with the Via C3. It's a slow CPU, and not even in MHz. It's also got lower IPC, making it basically a piss-poor alternative to either a P4 or Athlon. It also costs very little.
So when a dirt poor Chinese family wants to buy a computer, they could fork over half their yearly wage on a high end P4... or they could get a cheap C3. (Well, still expensive at Chinese salaries, but not something you blow your whole lifetime savings on.) So Via has a helluva lot of buyers in China.
What makes this work is that you can't pirate a CPU. You either buy it, or you have no computer at all.
The same _could_ work for software. If a Russian family can't pay 30$ for a computer game made in the USA, they could probably pay 3$ for a game made in Russia and with Russian programmers and Russian artists. Again, it doesn't even have to be up to Quake 3 standards, it just has to be enjoyable enough if you don't have a choice.
Except this potential market got killed by piracy before it even started. Noone will buy your home-brewn game for $4 when they can buy a pirated copy of Quake 3 for 1$.
So if you look at software development in those countries, there isn't much of it, other than stuff offshored by the USA and western Europe. The _only_ software produced, is paid for by a company (typically a western one), and never for domestic retail. _Noone_ there produces for their own domestic consumer market, because they can't compete with piracy.
That's a lot of jobs lost in Russia itself because of piracy.
And that doesn't only apply to Russia. Microsoft used to be officially happy if you pirate their software at home, at least until they got the market by the balls.
There were a lot of alternatives which _could_ have found a lucrative niche if piracy wasn't an option. If the only choices had been "do I buy MS Office for a lot of cash, or the less sophisticated ProductX for very little cash?" ProductX would have been a viable enough choice for a lot of people. But in practice, ProductX also had to compete with option 3: "or do I pirate MS Office for 0$." And there they failed.
Piracy is what in the end helped MS into being a monopoly. The fact that MS's proprietary, wantonly-changed file formats now pass for a de-facto standard, was helped a lot by piracy.
I keep getting Word and Excel forms all the time, even at home. Whenever I have to send something to the company I work for, e.g., a request for vacation, it _has_ to be in some idiotic Word or Excel. When the last company went bankrupt, even all job placement sites sent me... badly formatted Word forms.
And whenever you try to protest "but I don't fscking want to pay hundreds of bucks on MS Office just to fill your stupid forms", what's the answer you get? "Oh, geee, so copy it from somewhere already. Heck, here, I'll give you my CD."
If piracy wasn't an option, a lot more people would have been willing to tell their boss or their government where to shove those Word and Excel forms.
That's really the destructive effect of piracy. It doesn't kill the likes of Microsoft, which are actually helped by it. It kills the small companies, and in the case of Russia and China the domestic companies. And the likes of Russia and China are shooting themselves in the foot big time that way.
"The problem with IE are the cookies, the spyware that you get from simply navigating to a site, the cookies upon cookies."
Even that can not be shoved under the "lack of new features" category, which is what "stagnant" implies.
I did say out loud that IE does have a ton of problems, and I'm an Opera and Mozilla user myself. (OK, so I prefer Opera.) But "stagnant" is a whole other dish, and that's the only statement I have a problem with.
"Stagnant" sounds bad, but just as well you could describe it as "state of equilibrium", "stable" or just "already does what all should do."
Which was the whole Unix philosophy to start with. You don't see people adding features upon features every day for "cat" or "mv". They do their job, they do it well, might as well have mercy on the users and not wantonly change the program if no change is actually _needed_.
I fail to see what's wrong with a "stagnant browser"?
Now viruses, buffer overflows, bad security design, ok, IE is guilty as charged of those. But stagnant? Here I was thinking that's a damn good thing.
It reeks of the old dot-com thinking that surfing the web should be "an experience", or other such bullshit. Except while everyone wanted to _offer_ some unique experience, but noone wanted to _have_ it. Even the very same PHBs that preached about how their site will be an unique experience, you never heard them say "I visit this other site daily for the unique flashing hard-to-navigate experience."
Noone really wants a web page to be a unique life-changing experience, and noone really wants a browser that is more than a window into the web.
And in that picture, you really don't need more than the current browsers offer. They already do their job just fine, and the plethora of sites are doing a fine job with those browser features already. And whatever job they don't do directly, there are plugins for that. Time to move on already.
Everyone on/. seems to assume that coding is the alpha and the omega and nothing else matters. That if you code some clever algorithm, screw the interface, screw users and screw marketting. Only the high magic hacking matters, right.
You see that attitude reflected in 100,000 piss-poor open source projects that noone wants to use. They've got all these cool optimizations and clever hacks, and should have been the next greatest thing. Except they aren't, because noone gives a damn about them.
What makes a program or a company successful is what you do _after_ you have the cool algorithm or hack. Like user interface. Or like usability.
The same goes for CP/M. It was barely a program loader with the most minimalistic command-line interface. Even internally it was a primitive monolythic piece of code that basically it didn't even have DOS's (or Unix's) separation between directory entry and allocation table. It would have required a complete redesign just to support bigger floppies.
DOS or CP/M were but a starting point, _not_ a killer app that turned MS into a monopoly over night. Sure, the cash infusion from DOS helped a lot to get them started. But if MS had stayed happily making just DOS, they'd still be a small company noone gives a damn. In fact, less than that, since other OSs were more advanced and Moore's Law would soon make a PC good enough to use those instead of DOS.
The story of MS is far more complex than that of DOS alone. And their monopoly isn't just the OS, it's a whole lot of interlocking pieces which make the OS a must.
It includes for starters making some damn good and _affordable_ apps for it too. When you ask someone why don't they switch to Linux, what's the ISO standard answer you'll get? "Does it run Word, Excel and IE?" They jumped on any app idea that looked like their users might need badly.
It also includes caring about the developpers. Yes, laugh all you want at Uncle Fester's "developpers developpers developpers" monkey dance. But _that_ is what kept Windows having a steady stream of apps, while for other OSs you'd have a hard time just getting any dev tools at all.
Basically while all the idiots thought "noooo, you can't take my precioussss compiler! I want to be the only one who sells apps for my OS!" and left you begging for months even for a compiler, MS almost gave away everything you could possibly want to make an app.
It also includes being smart enough to realize the importance of users and of a good UI. You know why the relationship between IBM and Microsoft went sour? Because the idiots at IBM thought a GUI was a waste of money. That MS should concentrate on just making an API for geeks, and stop wasting money on stuff like a GUI.
Etc, etc, etc.
Saying that just replacing DOS with CP/M would have made another company become Microsoft, is short sighted and idiotic.
No. Then it's a virus, worm, trojan or an exploit. Or at least clearly illegal. "Spyware" is the grey area which is morally wrong, but not illegal. The stuff which falls under the "but it was in the EULA and the user clicked OK" fuck-up.
Which is basically why I too would like to see the whole EULA rape declared illegal once and for all. You give some people a blanket way to waive responsibility for _anything_, and predictably it _will_ be used for _everything_. Including spyware, dialers, phishing, etc.
If it wasn't too much trouble to come over to your house and steal your furniture, someone would have already put in an EULA that they're allowed to do that.
It's that simple and predictable. You give some people a loophole you could drive a bus through, they _will_ use it.
See how many people try to claim insanity in court. It's a loophole, they try to use it. Except in the insanity case, they actually have to prove it, and it's not easy.
In the EULA case they don't even have to prove anything. It was written there that they install Gator on your computer, so that's automatically ok. They're automatically in the right, you're automatically in the wrong. Just because it was in the EULA.
And I'm thinking that such a blanket loophole shouldn't have been allowed to exist in the first place. No other industry enjoys that kind of a "you have no rights, now bend over and grab your ankles" generic waiver.
To avoid the usual car comparison, TV makers can't just put in the fine print some version "if it's broken, ha ha, sucks to be you. It came with no warranty, and we already got your money. Oh, and we're entitled to snoop your credit card number if you ever turn to the shopping channel. And oh, we're paid big bucks by that shopping channel, so we'll just spam you with their ads and randomly switch you to that channel twice per hour. You've aggreed to this when you opened the box, so you have no right to complain. Oh yeah, and a site paid us for home videos, so hope you don't mind if any videos you play on this TV gets transmitted over and published on the internet."
Yet software makers do this all the time and it's regarded as perfectly normal. Why?
No, it's you who doesn't get the cigar. I said "Unix", but I didn't say "Open Source".
Unix, even Linux, doesn't mean exclusively open source apps. You tell me for example where we can get the sources for Oracle or WebSphere. Yet we have them here installed at work.
I'm willing to imagine an alternate reality where MS never existed and Unix won. An alternate reality where everything is OSS, on the other hand, is akin to believing in Santa Claus. Never happened, never will.
And frankly, not only for Joe User, but for _me_ too... well, I don't know how to say this nicely, so here goes the very non-nice version: I don't really give a flying fuck about the whole "Open Source" hype. In fact, I don't give a flying fuck about any idealistic ideological battles any more.
In between:
A) I buy a closed source program that does what I need, and
B) I wait for years before an OSS equivalent is available (and I'm not even saying "with good usability." Just available at all.)
I'll take A any day.
I'm not even exaggerating. Look how long it took Mozilla to actually have a browser. In the meantime, dunno about you, but I was very happy with the closed source Netscape, Opera and even IE.
In fact, I still very much prefer the closed source Opera to Mozilla. Between the two, Opera is simply the better browser. And see above: I don't really give a rat's ass about its not being F/OSS.
Or look at how many F/OSS games exist on Linux. No, really. I could play HAND and Pingus... oh wait, noone actually finished making Pingus. Hacking code is good and fine, but you don't find many people designing levels and painting graphics for free, do you?
Or I could just buy a closed source game instead.
Not that tough a choice. I'll take the closed source game, thank you very much.
So to cut a long story short: Joe Average _will_ install a closed source app, and so would I. Basing your whole defense against spyware on the idea that everyone would rather have a useless computer, than install a closed source app... well, it's just utopic.
Generally a very good post, and I aggree that the cult of the EULA should die. And that blaming the _victims_ instead of the criminals is a sick joke already. But I do have a couple of minor objections:
"The spyware is there on that disk because Microsoft security is bad, yes."
Actually, no. Yes, I know, it's slashdot. Daring say that there's something (e.g., AIDS or world hunger) which MS isn't to blame for, is bad for your karma. Blaming MS for _anything_ rakes in the big karma points on/. Sad.
Now Microsoft _does_ have plenty of faults. E.g., worms and viruses, those you can safely blame on Microsoft security. Better coding at MS could have avoided all the buffer overflow exploits, and better design could have foreseen some of the other exploits just waiting to happen.
But spyware? Gimme a break. Spyware is installed by tricking the user. It comes standard with a nice installer and an EULA.
Even on Unix, what do you tell users? Think. "Only log in as root to install programs or other admin tasks." Well, bingo, then they could install spyware just as well on Unix.
Try to picture an alternate universe where the Unix fragmentation never happened, and Microsoft never happened, so all computers run Unix. Now picture Joe Average, on his shiny new Unix home computer. Let's also imagine that enough sense has been hammered into Joe, that he doesn't run root while reading emails and chatting on IRC. (Ok, big stretch of imagination there;)
Now he's just downloaded this useful little movie ripper app, which incidentally comes bundled with Gator. It's right in the EULA too. And the install program tells Joe "sorry, you need to log in or su as root to install this program."
Take your best guess at what will Joe do next. Well, I'll tell you. He obediently switches user to root to install it. Congrats, you just got trojaned on Unix.
"It is a Trojan horse in the original sense - sooner or later, it bursts open and out pour the soldiers of the enemy, who go about merrily burning women and raping houses."
It's a Trojan in the computer sense as well.
Back in the day when BackOrifice was all the fashion, the way to get it was also bundled with some little useful app. When some script kiddie wanted to get you BOed, he'd send you or put up for download some little exe (a utility or game) wrapped in a nasty program that also installed the Trojan on your computer.
And you know, everyone called it a Trojan.
When did it become acceptable and not a Trojan? Since when do we even need euphemisms like "spyware" instead of "trojan"?
You'd be surprised what you can do with a little knowledge of physics.
Let's start designing a really good airgun. Or actually describe something which already exists.
First let's remember that you can only accelerate something via gas pressure to the speed of the gas mollecules themselves. Any faster, and the gas will literally be left behind.
So we'll want to maximize the velocity of those mollecules. The energy of one of those little buggers depends on temperature. But that's not our ticket. Our ticket is noting that at the same energy (hence temperature) the less mass you have, the more velocity is needed to achive that energy.
Hence, you'll want a very lightweight gas. Hydrogen or helium will do just nicely. So we'll build a hydrogen gas gun.
Now to compress the helium. Well, have the airgun's barrel, which is a thin tube. We'll also have a much larger tube with a piston to compress the gas.
Think: a syringe. We push the piston in the large syringe body, to shoot a tiny sting through the tubular needle. Of course, at a much larger scale.
We'll also need to push the piston really hard, to create a lot of pressure. An explosion will do that just nicely.
It's really much like a conventional gun with a twist. Instead of the (relatively) heavy gasses from the explosion directly pushing the projectile, we compress hydrogen with them and the hydrogen pushes the projectile.
It's a very large device and very much a one shot gun, because reloading it takes ages. As such fairly useless against either ground targets or aircraft. (Against aircraft you really want something which sprays a lot of bullets.)
It also accelerates a dart to miles per second velocities. Theoretically, you could shoot at a sattellite in low orbit with it, except you would need to aim very very well. However, to punch a hole through a huge stationary blimp, it's perfect.
It's also low tech. A lot lower tech than rail guns. Any third world country could build one, if they wanted to. Heck, theoretically you could build one in your back yard. (But in practice the police would want to know about all those explosives you're buying.)
Until now, well, there was no problem for which it would be a solution. Now those blimps are just the problem for it.
Free clue: it's about size and convenience
on
OQO For Sale
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Saying basically, 'but you can get a 12" laptop cheaper' is, no offense, completely missing the point.
It's like saying 'but a Walkman and carrying 100 cassettes around is much cheaper than an iPod'. That may well be, but the iPod fits in your pocket, while the cassettes would need a backpack. _That_ is why I'd rather pay extra than carry cassettes around.
Or it's like saying 'don't buy an iPod if you already have a laptop'. That stupid. Yes, you could pack your music on a laptop instead. But all things being equal I'd rather have a small MP3 player in a pocket, than be the idiot who lugs a freaking huge laptop bag around just for the music.
Same with the OQO. I don't want to freakin' lug a huge laptop around, when I can get the same thing in the size of a palmtop.
I'm very much willing to pay $2000 for something which fits in a pocket, _and_:
- has a proper keyboard
- lets me actually run normal PC programs, instead of some castrated Palm-speciffic idiocy.
- lets me actually pack Eclipse on it and do some coding on the road
- lets me actually play a modern PC game once in a while. Not Doom 3, of course. But Europa Universalis, Hearts of Iron, Crusader Kings or several others would run perfectly on it.
Etc.
Again, yes, a laptop would do all that. But I still don't want to lug a laptop around if I have even half a choice.
A) Never seem to give a low score to any game from a major publisher, and/or which was hyped and advertised beyond belief.
E.g., the wake up call for me was "Black and White", which incidentally also set a new record in relentless shameless hype.
So I read this review on "Firing Squad". Unlike other reviews which just bent over to the publisher, the guy from the "Firing Squad" did spell out everything he disliked about the game.
And that meant everything there was in the game. The reviewer pretty much demolished _everything_ about the game. He hated the physics, he hated the idiotic music streaming from CD, he hated the controlls, etc. He even went on to spell out something like "You could only like this game if this was the only game you've ever played, and you have no good games to compare it to."
Then out of nowhere, he gives it an 84% score. I mean, ffs, what for? It's not about what _I_ thought about that game. (Hint: "pile of festering shit" is actually putting it very very mildly.) But the reviewer himself had spent pages after pages detailing every single way in which the game sucks ass. _What_, then, other than pleasing the publisher, justified such a score?
Or in one "Planet Fargo" article, Gamespy's own Fargo joked about Gamespy wanting once to go to a 0 to 5 star score system. But since EA demanded that one of their games gets at least 95% score, they'll now add 95 to their star score and rate all games between 95% and 100%. (EA thus getting their desired 95% score.)
B) Dutifully skimming over the bad details.
As I've said, actually the "Firing Squad" review was one of the better ones, in that it at least did say something was wrong. The others just dutifully repeated the hype.
The same Fargo once joked about the need for a "Bitter Gamer Magazine", which focuses just on what to hate about games. Complete with stuff like "Top 10 Games we love to hate" and "Top 10 Games we hate to hate, but hate anyway."
You know what? If such a magazine existed, I'd pay good money for a lifetime subscription to it. It's not that I hate games or anything, it's just that there are 100,000 sites and mags competing to tell me what's awesome and great about each game from a major publisher. I want at least _one_ who dares tell me what's not great about them. Then I can put all that together, and I can have a more complete picture.
C) Strangely enough, the professional sites do the most piss-poor job at reviewing games. You have people writing a review after they have barely played half an hour of the game.
Believe it or not, but Joe Average posting on a forum is actually _more_ likely to mention something on the last disc of a game. If, for example, the difficulty becomes nearly unplayable at the end of a game, chances are no professional reviewer even intended to play that far before copying the publisher's hype and calling it a review.
D) You know, there is something about hearing the impressions of Joe Average, casual gamer, about the difficulty or learning curve of a game.
The big review sites are staffed with people who play FPS or RTS from dawn to dusk. People who can instinctively circle-strafe, bunny-hop, rocket-jump and double-jump even with their eyes closed. Who can pull multiple jumps in a row in a jump puzzle, even including rocket-jumps in the middle, without even trying twice.
So you know, for all of us casual gamers, it's much more useful to hear the impressions of someone who _isn't_ a pro. I'd very much like to hear what Joe Average thinks about those stupid jump puzzles, especially when the game doesn't even let you quick-save. Chances are his thoughts will be more along the lines of "this fucking sucks ass", than "whoa, cool, my super-l33t skillz win again."
The problem with astroturfing (not only in blogs, but also "I playd it, it rocks" posts on forums by paid employees) is that it's basically pollution. Not only for games, point taken.
But it's again a case of unethical companies plundering a valuable communication resource to line their pocket. Treating it like the buccanneers treated the sea lanes. And leaving it a stinky, poluted and useless mess.
I can only compare it with spam. In 1998 or so I was actually glad to receive email from strangers, and (for example) answer questions about my walkthrough. If it had an attachment (well, not an exe), I used to actually open it. Could be someone's screenshot of where they got stuck, you know.
Nowadays wading though a spammed inbox is a chore I'd rather avoid, and emails from strangers are more likely than not just deleted on sight. What was once a valuable communication resource, has now basically been polluted and destroyed by a bunch of fucks for their own profit.
That's what's wrong with this astroturfing too.
The fact that we'd all rather trust Joe Average than the big sites, is already a testimony of how their buying the reviews is backfiring. Decades of ads thinly disguised as reviews have just got me to no longer read the review sites. I'd rather trust Joe Average, who may not be a professional reviewer, and may even be a troll, but hopefully isn't paid to lie to me either.
Now all this astroturfing is basically preying on this trust and polluting that resource. What was a valuable communication resource, is being slowly turned into yet another stinky mess that's not worth touching with a 10 ft pole.
In the case of blogs, it has an even bigger potential for pollution, in that it costs buggerall to set up whole link farms and game Google. Already if you search for anything that was ever mentioned in a game, the first 20 pages (before starting excluding words and such) are just tons of retarded clan pages linking to each other.
And already if you search for anything even vaguely related to politics, you just get a gazillion retards' blogs linkin to each other. He may have a room-temperature IQ (in Celsius!), he may speak out of his butt, he may not even be able to spell "journalism", but by Jove, he's gonna shove his illiterate uninformed opinion down your throat nevertheless. If it's the last thing he does.
So when you throw blogs in the mix, it has the potential to get _scary_. An unethical company can basically _saturate_ Google with their thinly disguised ads, without actually paying a cent to Google itself.
Yet another valuable resource which is being plundered by unethical fucks, eh?
You know, there actually was this study about the effects of sugar in kids.
They gave some of the kids sugar, and some of the kids something else. And asked the parents to come back say if the kid acted hyper or anything.
However here's the twist: intentionally what they told the parents didn't match what the kids got. Half those whose kids who did get sugar, thought they didn't... and basically came back and said "nah, the kid was ok." Half of those whose kids got another sweetener, thought their kid was stuffed with sugar... and came back saying "hey, he was hyper all day long."
Basically the only correlation was _not_ how much sugar that kid had eaten, but what the parent thought. The difference was in the parents' minds.
There's this funny thing called "selective confirmation". People notice and remember anything that confirms their preconceived notions. And conveniently fail to notice or quickly forget something which just doesn't fit their model.
And I'm saying the same applies to games or whatever else. People have been fed a mental model where games are bad, so they automatically filter the bad stuff to notice.
They notice the effects they want to notice, such as "waah! Jack was in his room for four hours playing on his console! He's doomed!" You conveniently however don't notice stuff like "but it was split-screen with three friends from school."
(Whereas if Jack was playing bridge with the same friends from school, nah, that's a perfectly normal social activity. But if it's video games or AD&D, it _must_ be bad because the media told us so.)
They notice when Jack gets a bad grade in some subject he hates. I mean, hey, it surely must be because of the game and would never have gotten one otherwise;) They don't however notice when Jack starts learning more maths because he wants to make a 3D game too, like I did. Or starts reading a history book because a game like "Pharaoh" got him curious.
"it's a permanent reminder of democracy in it self not being inherently "good" and as such it can't be a moral justification for political change or a goal of militairy intervention; there is no guarantee whatsoever that a (newly installed) democracy will not turn into a dictatorship."
No, I think you got it wrong. It's not that democracy isn't inherently good. (Or rather better than the alternatives.)
It's just inherently very _unstable_.
It's like balancing a ball on a fingertip. One moment of not paying attention, and it falls. And in the case of democracy there's always someone actually having an interest in it falling.
Rights and civil liberties are like a gold bulion bar on the sidewalk. You guard them, or someone _will_ take them away from you.
Unfortunately, people eventually start taking it for granted. "Oh, surely noone would take away _our_ liberties. Surely... umm... someone else would fight against that. Just not me. And not now. We'll, uh, see what we can do at the next elections." Just eventually it's too late.
Or they see someone walking away with their rights and go thinking "oh, I'm sure he's a nice guy and will give them back." Yeah right. Some 12 years after the Reichstag, Hitler still had no intention of giving back the liberties to his people.
(Neither does Bush JR and the gang. You don't see them talking about giving back the liberties they took "just temporarily". No siree, bob. They keep inventing bogus threats to justify keeping them.)
And then democracy falls. All it takes is that: a belief that surely it can't possibly fail now.
Happens all the time, since the dawn of time. The Romans were so happy that they thwarted Caesar's plan to be King, and kept their precious republic... that they let Octavian become Emperor _and_ supreme general _and_ high priest _and_ tribune of the plebs _and_ a few other titles just in case. (FFS, a patrician as tribune of the plebs must be one of the biggest jokes in history.)
The French revolution eventually just degenerated into a tyranny darker than ever before.
And so on.
As I've said, that's the only problem with democracy: it's unstable. You take good care of it, or you lose it.
Now I'm among the first to point a finger at american presidential polls jumping sky high each time they bomb someone. And wouldn't you know it, then the government does it every time he needs a little boost or more power.
It isn't even a Bush Jr issue. When Clinton needed to deflect some attention from the fact that the president lied in court (which was the real issue, not the BJ) he went and bombed someone.
However, to be entirely fair, I don't think you can really single out the Americans for that. The whole human species is deffective like that.
I remember some years back India going all nationally happy about their nuke program. FFS, it's still a very poor country (as income per capita goes), and was even poorer back then. Yet instead of, I dunno, building more factories, they dump billions of dollars into WMD research. And the people were actually _happy_ about it.
Or I remember way back when the civil war raged in Beirut. So there was this TV reporter talking to a civilian widdow. And she shows the reporters all the destruction, including a church were civilians took refuge during an artillery barrage. Good idea until a shell flew in through a window, and gibbed every single soul inside that church.
So the distressed woman is calling for help from the western world. Now take a guess what kind of help she wanted. Maybe humanitarian relief? Stopping the war?
No. FFS, she wants more weapons so they can do the same to the other side.
It's one of those things you don't forget easily. It's such a testimony of the utter stupidity of average humans.
And just so noone discounts that as happening only in backwards countries, it happened in Europe too.
E.g., WW2 started with Germany officially just "defending" itself from a heinous attack from Poland. Just in this case, a lie. But it worked.
Hitler's gaining absolute power was also based on another heinous (and fabricated) act of terrorism. A symbolic building, the Reichstag (Parliament building) is burned down on 27 February 1933.
Just like the Americans now, the shocked Germans back then didn't see anything wrong to give up some liberties in such an extreme situation. The very next day, on the Februaray 28'th, President Hindenburg and Chancellor Hitler invoke Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, which permits the suspension of civil liberties in time of national emergency.
Where that led, we all know.
Re:Works better 5000 years before ANH
on
Star Wars TV Show
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· Score: 1
Well, I don't think the problem is whether it's 5000 years before or 5000 years after or in SW days but other corner or the galaxy.
The problem is that KOTOR, while it did have flashy fights and effects too, focused first and foremost on the story. That's what IMHO was missing from Lucas's own prequels.
Now setting it in another millenium did play some part in KOTOR. It allowed them to completely decouple it from SW, and give them free hand to write their own story where _you_ are the most important person in the galaxy. As opposed to yet another game whose only point is that you get to meet Luke, Bobba Fett and the rest of the gang.
Still, I'm not sure that being the most important person in the galaxy is that mandatory even in a game. And it's even less mandatory in a TV show.
Basically what I'm saying is that what matters the most is simply having someone who can write a good script.
"That's why we have seeing-eye cats, why cops bring cats with them on patrol, and why the Swiss have cats to help them find skiiers who get trapped in avalanches. Because dogs can't think for themselves."
Excuse my ignorance, but which of those examples of yours needs _any_ intelligence? I mean, gee, being trained to unconditionally follow an order or use its nose to sniff a trail, that so requires complex thinking and assessing a situation.
That still doesn't in any way invalidate what I've said. There _are_ things a cat does by instinct. Plenty of them. It still doesn't invalidate the fact that it can think for itself and act autonomously, without needing a "master" to tell it what to do.
It may mark you as "friendly" with its head. (Something completely different from marking someone as _territory_.) But before that, it had judged you as being indeed a friend. It doesn't run do that to every stranger, like a dog marks every tree or hydrant.
That's what I meant. If you get a cat's friendship, it means something. It means it at least had a choice, and you could have ended just as well flagged as an enemy to avoid, or as some stranger to be wary of.
Reducing it all to markings is an oversimplified view, too. If you kicked a cat in the head, it wouldn't automatically come to you because now you have its "friendly" smell on your boot.
Nor does your cat suddenly stop recognizing you, after you have taken a bath.
"And you think your cat likes you, really? After all, if it finds you non-threatening it has been hard-wired to rub its scent on you -- which is basically a means of marking its territory."
I'll just say you don't know much about cats, then.
They do mark their territory, true. That's what male cats do when they pee on stuff. If your cat peed on you, _that_ is marking territory.
Chances are it never did, though. You know why? Because no goddamn animal is so dumb as to try to mark another animal as _territory_.
There are good reasons and explanations for what a cat does, and why it does that. Some do boil down to reflexes. But, well, come talk to me about it after you actually have some idea about that.
And here's another thought for you: a cat actually has a lot less hard-coded reflexes than a dog, or than most other animals. They learn from their mother, and from each other. If you ever had a cat give birth and then spend the next month talking to its kittens day and night, now you know what that is. Data transfer. A furry modem if you will.
If the cat comes and rubs against you, or whatever else, the funny thing is, it probably isn't "hard wired" to do so. Most likely its mother taught it to.
In a sense you could say the species wasn't as much "domesticated", as it learned on its own (and transmitted the knowledge) how to live safely around humans.
It's however also very much capable of avoiding you or even running away and living on its own, if it doesn't like you. It doesn't really _need_ you, in the same sense a dog does.
If it makes any difference, I do have some idea how a wolf pack or dog pack works.
And, as fate would have it, I've also seen a dog-against-human leadership challenge that you mention. Our german shepherd against my brother. You can say it again it's not going to get pretty. Let's just say my brother got a hole through his hand like he was Jesus.
(And if it makes any difference, I think the dog was better leadership material in that "pack";)
Still, you see, it's this blind sticking to a hard-coded "The Way The World Works" that I consider dumb. It's not even tradition, it's not intelligently assessing a situation, it's not even working for food. It's a hard-coded reflex.
If you turned the world upside down tomorrow (even more than these 10,000 years of human evolution already did), the dog would still keep on doing the exact same things. Because the hard-coded program in its brains tells it to.
And that unconditional hard-wired love reflex is something that personally I have no use for. It's not love, it's not affection, it's hard-coded keeping the pack leader happy.
It bears as much semblance to real love or friendship, as the "I Love You" virus did. I.e., none whatsoever.
It makes as much sense as having a computer or PDA programmed to display "I LOVE YOU!" in big letters. It doesn't. It's just a program that does that.
Wish I hadn't posted already :)
on
Upgrade Your Dog
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· Score: 3, Insightful
This is the most insightful thing I've read today, and I wish I could mod it up.
I find it sad that people basically want to shut their kids off and never have to talk to them. The kid is something that should be put on a leash, or at least stay the fsck out of the way, while the parent is busy watching football or the 15'th soap opera for today.
And when the kid learns something awfully wrong, and the parent never was there for them to teach them otherwise, the parent promptly goes looking for a scapegoat. Nosiree, bob. It wasn't me who's to blame, guv'nor. I never taught him to do drugs and beat other kids up. (Never taught him that it's wrong to do that either, though.) It was those evil game companies and TV companies. Let's sue those.
Dunno, makes me think of Peter's Principle. Just because they have genitals, people are elligible to be "promoted" to parent. Too bad that half of them are utterly incompetent for that job.
Every single quality I like in a cat, I've yet to see in a dog. Such as being able to think for itself. (Being that I pretty much fit the stereotype of a Brujah myself.)
I don't know, maybe some people like the artifficial affection of a species altered and reprogrammed to _need_ a master. No matter how smart it may be, it's just hard-wired to come obey the MASTER.
(Though I've yet to see any dog displaying anything even vaguely resembling intelligence. I'll have to take it on faith that smart dogs exist, just like flying saucers, yeti and the loch ness monster. Other people swear they saw a smart dog, so they must exist somewhere. Just not near me, 'cause the one I've seen were just a sad case of the owner going "oh look how smart he is!" at just about every dumb reflex, like the dog sniffing his own butt or chewing a stick or being able to find his food bowl.)
Either way, I find it just sad. It's just as artifficial as getting an email inbox full of "I Love You" (the virus) back then. It's just a program running. It doesn't mean the virus actually loved you.
What you have there is a species which was originally hard-coded into hunting in groups, obeying the strongest in the group, and marking and defending its hunting territory. Until someone figured out basically "hey, we can reprogram it into thinking that the human is the pack leader and the garden is his territory to defend." So the poor beast continues doing that, no matter if it makes sense in any given situation.
It dutifully marks its territory on trees, even when it's a tree in the park and 100 other dogs are brought to re-mark it.
It tries to defend that territory, no matter how dumb it may be in any given situation. Like a tiny Pekinese barking its lungs out at a great dane, not because it's brave, but because it's still mechanically applying a hard-coded reflex from back when they were all the same size. Or like a shopkeeper's dog trying to keep the customers out of the shop, until she learned not to bring the dog in the shop any more.
And it dutifully obeys even the worst possible master, because somewhere in its tiny brains a circuit says "must obey the pack leader."
Dunno, I'll take a cat's autonomy over that any day. A cat doesn't have a master. It might see you as a friend if you're nice to it. Or merely a roommate. Or in rare cases an enemy, if you're really bad at that relationship.
And if you fit in the friend category, you can know that it's genuine, not some hardcoded obedience.
We allow teenagers to drive. Depending on country, state, whatnot, as early as 16 years old. And we basically trust them to have enough judgment to not start running people over for fun.
_Also_ most countries conscript people at 18 years old. And then trust them to stand guard with an assault rifle and live ammo. Some long hours alone at night, just you and your rifle. And some of those bases are right in the middle of cities. (A lot of Eastern Europe sports small military compounds right in the middle of cities, for example.)
And we trust them to not start shooting people with that assault rifle when they get bored. And make no mistake, standing around for 3 hours at night alone, with nothing to do and noone to talk to, is the apex of boring. It's so fucking boring that it feels like your head will explode.
We also allow teenagers in less spectacular jobs, such as fast food jobs. And you trust that they'll be smart and responsible enough to not put some poison in that food just because they're bored.
You also allow teenagers who are just discovering that they have hormones to go to school together, and trust that they won't start raping each other.
Etc.
The fact is: every day your life may well depend on the fact that 99.9999% of teenagers _are_ capable of judging consequences.
So spare me the rethoric. Those who do choose to be a criminal asshole are just that: criminals. No more, no less, no excuses.
_Again_: there is no fucking technical innovation in there at all. None. Zero. Nada. Zilch.
_All_ there is in this story is one asshole stealing property and violating someone's privacy.
It's like reading about a common thief and stalker. Not even some innovative and skillful thief, but a petty two-dime crook pocketting someone else's memory card and copyrighted photos.
_That_ is _all_ there is to that story, and that's why virtually all the posts deal with just that.
So grow up, put down the crack pipe, and spare me the idiotic guilt-trip attempts. This is _not_ about stiffling technical innovation, this is _not_ about someone being sued by Sega or IBM for patents, and there is _nothing_ technical or innovative to discuss.
_Again_: it's simply about a two-bit thief. No more, no less. That's why that's what the posts actually discuss.
There is nothing technically innovative about posting some pictures in a fucking retarded blog. _What_ is the technical innovation there?
Now maybe if he was running Linux and Apache on a Dreamcast, with an ISCSI hard drive over the DC's broadband addapter (which is basically an Ethernet card), now _that_ would be technical innovation.
But "oh look, I can post pics on the net" stopped being new and original some 20 years ago. Any kiddie can just use pre-made software they don't even understand to get some text and pics on the net. Heck, nowadays you don't even need to know HTML to do that, as the software will do that for you.
So _all_ that is left is an asshole who thought it would be cool to (A) steal someone else's property, and (B) violate their privacy using the whole Internet as an audience.
And you know what? Even _if_ there was any technical innovation in there (but there isn't), there is no ammount of it which can justify the evil act. There are better way to showcase _any_ technical solution than raping someone's privacy.
And I'm not in the USA, and I too thought I'd sue the hell out of the fucktard.
Now _I_ wouldn't necessarily want his money. I'd just want him hurt so badly, people would cringe at the mere thought of such a stunt for the next 100 years. I'd want the asshole impaled and left there to bleed and die over several hours.
But since that's not an option, I'd probably sue for such a sum that he'd never see the end of the tunnel for the rest of his life. Then donate the money to some charity. Because, as I've said, I don't want his money, I just want him in a world of hurt.
"Spyware" is stuff which masquerades as a legitimate application. And which, yes, needs the user to install it. It's basically a sub-category of "trojan".
That's the whole problem with spyware. That's why it's a grey area, and why the scumbags at Claria/Gator can send legal nastygrams to people calling their crap names.
Something installed through a buffer overflow exploit is clearly illegal and clearly not a legitimate business relationship. You can't get sued for uninstalling it, without someone coming forward and basically telling the judge "yes, we broke several criminal laws, and we're suing these guys for trying to stop us."
Spyware is what you get when it gets packed as a legitimate utility and tries hard to look like a legitimate utility that you'd actually want on your computer. (If you were brain dead, that is.) And which the user can be tricked into personally installing, of their own free will.
The BO makers claimed it was a remote administration tool, but it still wasn't something that the user would want to install on their machine as such. Do you actually _want_ your machine remotely administrated by a script kiddie? Well, no. So that's still not spyware.
Now wrap the same thing is some password remembering utility, and call it a password remembering utility. Now you can actually get enough idiots to think it's a legitimate app and install it.
And _because_ the user did have to click on "yes", you're suddenly a respectable legitimate company and have a legitimate product. Unlike a script kiddie, you suddenly have legal rights.
Better yet, you'll have a bunch of the victims on your side too, when some AV product uninstalled it. ("Waah! The bad man disabled that useful Gator thingie that remembered my passwords!") Unlike the script kiddie who'd be 100% guaranteed that the victims are against him.
That's spyware. And that's why it's a grey area.
Admittedly that involves a very warped definition of "legitimate application". If having some confusing legalese version of "we will infect your computer with Gator because they gave us money to do it" on page 50 of the EULA counts as legitimate, it's surely not the definition I usually have in mind for that word. I thought "legitimate" had other meanings than basically "we're unethical fucks who'll infect your computer for money", but maybe that's just me.
But, again, the parent post was right: spyware _does_ need the user to click on "yes".
Slashdot Mirror
In a world without piracy, yes, some local band or software house could make a decent living by selling cheaper programs/CDs/whatever.
It doesn't even have to be a perfect substitute for, say, MS Office, it just has to do what you need without costing two months' salary. You'd be surprised how many features people can live without, if the alternative is starving for a few months.
Same as, say, with the Via C3. It's a slow CPU, and not even in MHz. It's also got lower IPC, making it basically a piss-poor alternative to either a P4 or Athlon. It also costs very little.
So when a dirt poor Chinese family wants to buy a computer, they could fork over half their yearly wage on a high end P4... or they could get a cheap C3. (Well, still expensive at Chinese salaries, but not something you blow your whole lifetime savings on.) So Via has a helluva lot of buyers in China.
What makes this work is that you can't pirate a CPU. You either buy it, or you have no computer at all.
The same _could_ work for software. If a Russian family can't pay 30$ for a computer game made in the USA, they could probably pay 3$ for a game made in Russia and with Russian programmers and Russian artists. Again, it doesn't even have to be up to Quake 3 standards, it just has to be enjoyable enough if you don't have a choice.
Except this potential market got killed by piracy before it even started. Noone will buy your home-brewn game for $4 when they can buy a pirated copy of Quake 3 for 1$.
So if you look at software development in those countries, there isn't much of it, other than stuff offshored by the USA and western Europe. The _only_ software produced, is paid for by a company (typically a western one), and never for domestic retail. _Noone_ there produces for their own domestic consumer market, because they can't compete with piracy.
That's a lot of jobs lost in Russia itself because of piracy.
And that doesn't only apply to Russia. Microsoft used to be officially happy if you pirate their software at home, at least until they got the market by the balls.
There were a lot of alternatives which _could_ have found a lucrative niche if piracy wasn't an option. If the only choices had been "do I buy MS Office for a lot of cash, or the less sophisticated ProductX for very little cash?" ProductX would have been a viable enough choice for a lot of people. But in practice, ProductX also had to compete with option 3: "or do I pirate MS Office for 0$." And there they failed.
Piracy is what in the end helped MS into being a monopoly. The fact that MS's proprietary, wantonly-changed file formats now pass for a de-facto standard, was helped a lot by piracy.
I keep getting Word and Excel forms all the time, even at home. Whenever I have to send something to the company I work for, e.g., a request for vacation, it _has_ to be in some idiotic Word or Excel. When the last company went bankrupt, even all job placement sites sent me... badly formatted Word forms.
And whenever you try to protest "but I don't fscking want to pay hundreds of bucks on MS Office just to fill your stupid forms", what's the answer you get? "Oh, geee, so copy it from somewhere already. Heck, here, I'll give you my CD."
If piracy wasn't an option, a lot more people would have been willing to tell their boss or their government where to shove those Word and Excel forms.
That's really the destructive effect of piracy. It doesn't kill the likes of Microsoft, which are actually helped by it. It kills the small companies, and in the case of Russia and China the domestic companies. And the likes of Russia and China are shooting themselves in the foot big time that way.
"The problem with IE are the cookies, the spyware that you get from simply navigating to a site, the cookies upon cookies."
Even that can not be shoved under the "lack of new features" category, which is what "stagnant" implies.
I did say out loud that IE does have a ton of problems, and I'm an Opera and Mozilla user myself. (OK, so I prefer Opera.) But "stagnant" is a whole other dish, and that's the only statement I have a problem with.
"Stagnant" sounds bad, but just as well you could describe it as "state of equilibrium", "stable" or just "already does what all should do."
Which was the whole Unix philosophy to start with. You don't see people adding features upon features every day for "cat" or "mv". They do their job, they do it well, might as well have mercy on the users and not wantonly change the program if no change is actually _needed_.
I fail to see what's wrong with a "stagnant browser"?
Now viruses, buffer overflows, bad security design, ok, IE is guilty as charged of those. But stagnant? Here I was thinking that's a damn good thing.
It reeks of the old dot-com thinking that surfing the web should be "an experience", or other such bullshit. Except while everyone wanted to _offer_ some unique experience, but noone wanted to _have_ it. Even the very same PHBs that preached about how their site will be an unique experience, you never heard them say "I visit this other site daily for the unique flashing hard-to-navigate experience."
Noone really wants a web page to be a unique life-changing experience, and noone really wants a browser that is more than a window into the web.
And in that picture, you really don't need more than the current browsers offer. They already do their job just fine, and the plethora of sites are doing a fine job with those browser features already. And whatever job they don't do directly, there are plugins for that. Time to move on already.
Everyone on /. seems to assume that coding is the alpha and the omega and nothing else matters. That if you code some clever algorithm, screw the interface, screw users and screw marketting. Only the high magic hacking matters, right.
You see that attitude reflected in 100,000 piss-poor open source projects that noone wants to use. They've got all these cool optimizations and clever hacks, and should have been the next greatest thing. Except they aren't, because noone gives a damn about them.
What makes a program or a company successful is what you do _after_ you have the cool algorithm or hack. Like user interface. Or like usability.
The same goes for CP/M. It was barely a program loader with the most minimalistic command-line interface. Even internally it was a primitive monolythic piece of code that basically it didn't even have DOS's (or Unix's) separation between directory entry and allocation table. It would have required a complete redesign just to support bigger floppies.
DOS or CP/M were but a starting point, _not_ a killer app that turned MS into a monopoly over night. Sure, the cash infusion from DOS helped a lot to get them started. But if MS had stayed happily making just DOS, they'd still be a small company noone gives a damn. In fact, less than that, since other OSs were more advanced and Moore's Law would soon make a PC good enough to use those instead of DOS.
The story of MS is far more complex than that of DOS alone. And their monopoly isn't just the OS, it's a whole lot of interlocking pieces which make the OS a must.
It includes for starters making some damn good and _affordable_ apps for it too. When you ask someone why don't they switch to Linux, what's the ISO standard answer you'll get? "Does it run Word, Excel and IE?" They jumped on any app idea that looked like their users might need badly.
It also includes caring about the developpers. Yes, laugh all you want at Uncle Fester's "developpers developpers developpers" monkey dance. But _that_ is what kept Windows having a steady stream of apps, while for other OSs you'd have a hard time just getting any dev tools at all.
Basically while all the idiots thought "noooo, you can't take my precioussss compiler! I want to be the only one who sells apps for my OS!" and left you begging for months even for a compiler, MS almost gave away everything you could possibly want to make an app.
It also includes being smart enough to realize the importance of users and of a good UI. You know why the relationship between IBM and Microsoft went sour? Because the idiots at IBM thought a GUI was a waste of money. That MS should concentrate on just making an API for geeks, and stop wasting money on stuff like a GUI.
Etc, etc, etc.
Saying that just replacing DOS with CP/M would have made another company become Microsoft, is short sighted and idiotic.
No. Then it's a virus, worm, trojan or an exploit. Or at least clearly illegal. "Spyware" is the grey area which is morally wrong, but not illegal. The stuff which falls under the "but it was in the EULA and the user clicked OK" fuck-up.
Which is basically why I too would like to see the whole EULA rape declared illegal once and for all. You give some people a blanket way to waive responsibility for _anything_, and predictably it _will_ be used for _everything_. Including spyware, dialers, phishing, etc.
If it wasn't too much trouble to come over to your house and steal your furniture, someone would have already put in an EULA that they're allowed to do that.
It's that simple and predictable. You give some people a loophole you could drive a bus through, they _will_ use it.
See how many people try to claim insanity in court. It's a loophole, they try to use it. Except in the insanity case, they actually have to prove it, and it's not easy.
In the EULA case they don't even have to prove anything. It was written there that they install Gator on your computer, so that's automatically ok. They're automatically in the right, you're automatically in the wrong. Just because it was in the EULA.
And I'm thinking that such a blanket loophole shouldn't have been allowed to exist in the first place. No other industry enjoys that kind of a "you have no rights, now bend over and grab your ankles" generic waiver.
To avoid the usual car comparison, TV makers can't just put in the fine print some version "if it's broken, ha ha, sucks to be you. It came with no warranty, and we already got your money. Oh, and we're entitled to snoop your credit card number if you ever turn to the shopping channel. And oh, we're paid big bucks by that shopping channel, so we'll just spam you with their ads and randomly switch you to that channel twice per hour. You've aggreed to this when you opened the box, so you have no right to complain. Oh yeah, and a site paid us for home videos, so hope you don't mind if any videos you play on this TV gets transmitted over and published on the internet."
Yet software makers do this all the time and it's regarded as perfectly normal. Why?
No, it's you who doesn't get the cigar. I said "Unix", but I didn't say "Open Source".
Unix, even Linux, doesn't mean exclusively open source apps. You tell me for example where we can get the sources for Oracle or WebSphere. Yet we have them here installed at work.
I'm willing to imagine an alternate reality where MS never existed and Unix won. An alternate reality where everything is OSS, on the other hand, is akin to believing in Santa Claus. Never happened, never will.
And frankly, not only for Joe User, but for _me_ too... well, I don't know how to say this nicely, so here goes the very non-nice version: I don't really give a flying fuck about the whole "Open Source" hype. In fact, I don't give a flying fuck about any idealistic ideological battles any more.
In between:
A) I buy a closed source program that does what I need, and
B) I wait for years before an OSS equivalent is available (and I'm not even saying "with good usability." Just available at all.)
I'll take A any day.
I'm not even exaggerating. Look how long it took Mozilla to actually have a browser. In the meantime, dunno about you, but I was very happy with the closed source Netscape, Opera and even IE.
In fact, I still very much prefer the closed source Opera to Mozilla. Between the two, Opera is simply the better browser. And see above: I don't really give a rat's ass about its not being F/OSS.
Or look at how many F/OSS games exist on Linux. No, really. I could play HAND and Pingus... oh wait, noone actually finished making Pingus. Hacking code is good and fine, but you don't find many people designing levels and painting graphics for free, do you?
Or I could just buy a closed source game instead.
Not that tough a choice. I'll take the closed source game, thank you very much.
So to cut a long story short: Joe Average _will_ install a closed source app, and so would I. Basing your whole defense against spyware on the idea that everyone would rather have a useless computer, than install a closed source app... well, it's just utopic.
Generally a very good post, and I aggree that the cult of the EULA should die. And that blaming the _victims_ instead of the criminals is a sick joke already. But I do have a couple of minor objections:
/. Sad.
"The spyware is there on that disk because Microsoft security is bad, yes."
Actually, no. Yes, I know, it's slashdot. Daring say that there's something (e.g., AIDS or world hunger) which MS isn't to blame for, is bad for your karma. Blaming MS for _anything_ rakes in the big karma points on
Now Microsoft _does_ have plenty of faults. E.g., worms and viruses, those you can safely blame on Microsoft security. Better coding at MS could have avoided all the buffer overflow exploits, and better design could have foreseen some of the other exploits just waiting to happen.
But spyware? Gimme a break. Spyware is installed by tricking the user. It comes standard with a nice installer and an EULA.
Even on Unix, what do you tell users? Think. "Only log in as root to install programs or other admin tasks." Well, bingo, then they could install spyware just as well on Unix.
Try to picture an alternate universe where the Unix fragmentation never happened, and Microsoft never happened, so all computers run Unix. Now picture Joe Average, on his shiny new Unix home computer. Let's also imagine that enough sense has been hammered into Joe, that he doesn't run root while reading emails and chatting on IRC. (Ok, big stretch of imagination there;)
Now he's just downloaded this useful little movie ripper app, which incidentally comes bundled with Gator. It's right in the EULA too. And the install program tells Joe "sorry, you need to log in or su as root to install this program."
Take your best guess at what will Joe do next. Well, I'll tell you. He obediently switches user to root to install it. Congrats, you just got trojaned on Unix.
"It is a Trojan horse in the original sense - sooner or later, it bursts open and out pour the soldiers of the enemy, who go about merrily burning women and raping houses."
It's a Trojan in the computer sense as well.
Back in the day when BackOrifice was all the fashion, the way to get it was also bundled with some little useful app. When some script kiddie wanted to get you BOed, he'd send you or put up for download some little exe (a utility or game) wrapped in a nasty program that also installed the Trojan on your computer.
And you know, everyone called it a Trojan.
When did it become acceptable and not a Trojan? Since when do we even need euphemisms like "spyware" instead of "trojan"?
You'd be surprised what you can do with a little knowledge of physics.
Let's start designing a really good airgun. Or actually describe something which already exists.
First let's remember that you can only accelerate something via gas pressure to the speed of the gas mollecules themselves. Any faster, and the gas will literally be left behind.
So we'll want to maximize the velocity of those mollecules. The energy of one of those little buggers depends on temperature. But that's not our ticket. Our ticket is noting that at the same energy (hence temperature) the less mass you have, the more velocity is needed to achive that energy.
Hence, you'll want a very lightweight gas. Hydrogen or helium will do just nicely. So we'll build a hydrogen gas gun.
Now to compress the helium. Well, have the airgun's barrel, which is a thin tube. We'll also have a much larger tube with a piston to compress the gas.
Think: a syringe. We push the piston in the large syringe body, to shoot a tiny sting through the tubular needle. Of course, at a much larger scale.
We'll also need to push the piston really hard, to create a lot of pressure. An explosion will do that just nicely.
It's really much like a conventional gun with a twist. Instead of the (relatively) heavy gasses from the explosion directly pushing the projectile, we compress hydrogen with them and the hydrogen pushes the projectile.
It's a very large device and very much a one shot gun, because reloading it takes ages. As such fairly useless against either ground targets or aircraft. (Against aircraft you really want something which sprays a lot of bullets.)
It also accelerates a dart to miles per second velocities. Theoretically, you could shoot at a sattellite in low orbit with it, except you would need to aim very very well. However, to punch a hole through a huge stationary blimp, it's perfect.
It's also low tech. A lot lower tech than rail guns. Any third world country could build one, if they wanted to. Heck, theoretically you could build one in your back yard. (But in practice the police would want to know about all those explosives you're buying.)
Until now, well, there was no problem for which it would be a solution. Now those blimps are just the problem for it.
Saying basically, 'but you can get a 12" laptop cheaper' is, no offense, completely missing the point.
It's like saying 'but a Walkman and carrying 100 cassettes around is much cheaper than an iPod'. That may well be, but the iPod fits in your pocket, while the cassettes would need a backpack. _That_ is why I'd rather pay extra than carry cassettes around.
Or it's like saying 'don't buy an iPod if you already have a laptop'. That stupid. Yes, you could pack your music on a laptop instead. But all things being equal I'd rather have a small MP3 player in a pocket, than be the idiot who lugs a freaking huge laptop bag around just for the music.
Same with the OQO. I don't want to freakin' lug a huge laptop around, when I can get the same thing in the size of a palmtop.
I'm very much willing to pay $2000 for something which fits in a pocket, _and_:
- has a proper keyboard
- lets me actually run normal PC programs, instead of some castrated Palm-speciffic idiocy.
- lets me actually pack Eclipse on it and do some coding on the road
- lets me actually play a modern PC game once in a while. Not Doom 3, of course. But Europa Universalis, Hearts of Iron, Crusader Kings or several others would run perfectly on it.
Etc.
Again, yes, a laptop would do all that. But I still don't want to lug a laptop around if I have even half a choice.
Well, I'll tell you the exact opposite.
Most major sites:
A) Never seem to give a low score to any game from a major publisher, and/or which was hyped and advertised beyond belief.
E.g., the wake up call for me was "Black and White", which incidentally also set a new record in relentless shameless hype.
So I read this review on "Firing Squad". Unlike other reviews which just bent over to the publisher, the guy from the "Firing Squad" did spell out everything he disliked about the game.
And that meant everything there was in the game. The reviewer pretty much demolished _everything_ about the game. He hated the physics, he hated the idiotic music streaming from CD, he hated the controlls, etc. He even went on to spell out something like "You could only like this game if this was the only game you've ever played, and you have no good games to compare it to."
Then out of nowhere, he gives it an 84% score. I mean, ffs, what for? It's not about what _I_ thought about that game. (Hint: "pile of festering shit" is actually putting it very very mildly.) But the reviewer himself had spent pages after pages detailing every single way in which the game sucks ass. _What_, then, other than pleasing the publisher, justified such a score?
Or in one "Planet Fargo" article, Gamespy's own Fargo joked about Gamespy wanting once to go to a 0 to 5 star score system. But since EA demanded that one of their games gets at least 95% score, they'll now add 95 to their star score and rate all games between 95% and 100%. (EA thus getting their desired 95% score.)
B) Dutifully skimming over the bad details.
As I've said, actually the "Firing Squad" review was one of the better ones, in that it at least did say something was wrong. The others just dutifully repeated the hype.
The same Fargo once joked about the need for a "Bitter Gamer Magazine", which focuses just on what to hate about games. Complete with stuff like "Top 10 Games we love to hate" and "Top 10 Games we hate to hate, but hate anyway."
You know what? If such a magazine existed, I'd pay good money for a lifetime subscription to it. It's not that I hate games or anything, it's just that there are 100,000 sites and mags competing to tell me what's awesome and great about each game from a major publisher. I want at least _one_ who dares tell me what's not great about them. Then I can put all that together, and I can have a more complete picture.
C) Strangely enough, the professional sites do the most piss-poor job at reviewing games. You have people writing a review after they have barely played half an hour of the game.
Believe it or not, but Joe Average posting on a forum is actually _more_ likely to mention something on the last disc of a game. If, for example, the difficulty becomes nearly unplayable at the end of a game, chances are no professional reviewer even intended to play that far before copying the publisher's hype and calling it a review.
D) You know, there is something about hearing the impressions of Joe Average, casual gamer, about the difficulty or learning curve of a game.
The big review sites are staffed with people who play FPS or RTS from dawn to dusk. People who can instinctively circle-strafe, bunny-hop, rocket-jump and double-jump even with their eyes closed. Who can pull multiple jumps in a row in a jump puzzle, even including rocket-jumps in the middle, without even trying twice.
So you know, for all of us casual gamers, it's much more useful to hear the impressions of someone who _isn't_ a pro. I'd very much like to hear what Joe Average thinks about those stupid jump puzzles, especially when the game doesn't even let you quick-save. Chances are his thoughts will be more along the lines of "this fucking sucks ass", than "whoa, cool, my super-l33t skillz win again."
The problem with astroturfing (not only in blogs, but also "I playd it, it rocks" posts on forums by paid employees) is that it's basically pollution. Not only for games, point taken.
But it's again a case of unethical companies plundering a valuable communication resource to line their pocket. Treating it like the buccanneers treated the sea lanes. And leaving it a stinky, poluted and useless mess.
I can only compare it with spam. In 1998 or so I was actually glad to receive email from strangers, and (for example) answer questions about my walkthrough. If it had an attachment (well, not an exe), I used to actually open it. Could be someone's screenshot of where they got stuck, you know.
Nowadays wading though a spammed inbox is a chore I'd rather avoid, and emails from strangers are more likely than not just deleted on sight. What was once a valuable communication resource, has now basically been polluted and destroyed by a bunch of fucks for their own profit.
That's what's wrong with this astroturfing too.
The fact that we'd all rather trust Joe Average than the big sites, is already a testimony of how their buying the reviews is backfiring. Decades of ads thinly disguised as reviews have just got me to no longer read the review sites. I'd rather trust Joe Average, who may not be a professional reviewer, and may even be a troll, but hopefully isn't paid to lie to me either.
Now all this astroturfing is basically preying on this trust and polluting that resource. What was a valuable communication resource, is being slowly turned into yet another stinky mess that's not worth touching with a 10 ft pole.
In the case of blogs, it has an even bigger potential for pollution, in that it costs buggerall to set up whole link farms and game Google. Already if you search for anything that was ever mentioned in a game, the first 20 pages (before starting excluding words and such) are just tons of retarded clan pages linking to each other.
And already if you search for anything even vaguely related to politics, you just get a gazillion retards' blogs linkin to each other. He may have a room-temperature IQ (in Celsius!), he may speak out of his butt, he may not even be able to spell "journalism", but by Jove, he's gonna shove his illiterate uninformed opinion down your throat nevertheless. If it's the last thing he does.
So when you throw blogs in the mix, it has the potential to get _scary_. An unethical company can basically _saturate_ Google with their thinly disguised ads, without actually paying a cent to Google itself.
Yet another valuable resource which is being plundered by unethical fucks, eh?
You know, there actually was this study about the effects of sugar in kids.
;) They don't however notice when Jack starts learning more maths because he wants to make a 3D game too, like I did. Or starts reading a history book because a game like "Pharaoh" got him curious.
They gave some of the kids sugar, and some of the kids something else. And asked the parents to come back say if the kid acted hyper or anything.
However here's the twist: intentionally what they told the parents didn't match what the kids got. Half those whose kids who did get sugar, thought they didn't... and basically came back and said "nah, the kid was ok." Half of those whose kids got another sweetener, thought their kid was stuffed with sugar... and came back saying "hey, he was hyper all day long."
Basically the only correlation was _not_ how much sugar that kid had eaten, but what the parent thought. The difference was in the parents' minds.
There's this funny thing called "selective confirmation". People notice and remember anything that confirms their preconceived notions. And conveniently fail to notice or quickly forget something which just doesn't fit their model.
And I'm saying the same applies to games or whatever else. People have been fed a mental model where games are bad, so they automatically filter the bad stuff to notice.
They notice the effects they want to notice, such as "waah! Jack was in his room for four hours playing on his console! He's doomed!" You conveniently however don't notice stuff like "but it was split-screen with three friends from school."
(Whereas if Jack was playing bridge with the same friends from school, nah, that's a perfectly normal social activity. But if it's video games or AD&D, it _must_ be bad because the media told us so.)
They notice when Jack gets a bad grade in some subject he hates. I mean, hey, it surely must be because of the game and would never have gotten one otherwise
"it's a permanent reminder of democracy in it self not being inherently "good" and as such it can't be a moral justification for political change or a goal of militairy intervention; there is no guarantee whatsoever that a (newly installed) democracy will not turn into a dictatorship."
No, I think you got it wrong. It's not that democracy isn't inherently good. (Or rather better than the alternatives.)
It's just inherently very _unstable_.
It's like balancing a ball on a fingertip. One moment of not paying attention, and it falls. And in the case of democracy there's always someone actually having an interest in it falling.
Rights and civil liberties are like a gold bulion bar on the sidewalk. You guard them, or someone _will_ take them away from you.
Unfortunately, people eventually start taking it for granted. "Oh, surely noone would take away _our_ liberties. Surely... umm... someone else would fight against that. Just not me. And not now. We'll, uh, see what we can do at the next elections." Just eventually it's too late.
Or they see someone walking away with their rights and go thinking "oh, I'm sure he's a nice guy and will give them back." Yeah right. Some 12 years after the Reichstag, Hitler still had no intention of giving back the liberties to his people.
(Neither does Bush JR and the gang. You don't see them talking about giving back the liberties they took "just temporarily". No siree, bob. They keep inventing bogus threats to justify keeping them.)
And then democracy falls. All it takes is that: a belief that surely it can't possibly fail now.
Happens all the time, since the dawn of time. The Romans were so happy that they thwarted Caesar's plan to be King, and kept their precious republic... that they let Octavian become Emperor _and_ supreme general _and_ high priest _and_ tribune of the plebs _and_ a few other titles just in case. (FFS, a patrician as tribune of the plebs must be one of the biggest jokes in history.)
The French revolution eventually just degenerated into a tyranny darker than ever before.
And so on.
As I've said, that's the only problem with democracy: it's unstable. You take good care of it, or you lose it.
Now I'm among the first to point a finger at american presidential polls jumping sky high each time they bomb someone. And wouldn't you know it, then the government does it every time he needs a little boost or more power.
It isn't even a Bush Jr issue. When Clinton needed to deflect some attention from the fact that the president lied in court (which was the real issue, not the BJ) he went and bombed someone.
However, to be entirely fair, I don't think you can really single out the Americans for that. The whole human species is deffective like that.
I remember some years back India going all nationally happy about their nuke program. FFS, it's still a very poor country (as income per capita goes), and was even poorer back then. Yet instead of, I dunno, building more factories, they dump billions of dollars into WMD research. And the people were actually _happy_ about it.
Or I remember way back when the civil war raged in Beirut. So there was this TV reporter talking to a civilian widdow. And she shows the reporters all the destruction, including a church were civilians took refuge during an artillery barrage. Good idea until a shell flew in through a window, and gibbed every single soul inside that church.
So the distressed woman is calling for help from the western world. Now take a guess what kind of help she wanted. Maybe humanitarian relief? Stopping the war?
No. FFS, she wants more weapons so they can do the same to the other side.
It's one of those things you don't forget easily. It's such a testimony of the utter stupidity of average humans.
And just so noone discounts that as happening only in backwards countries, it happened in Europe too.
E.g., WW2 started with Germany officially just "defending" itself from a heinous attack from Poland. Just in this case, a lie. But it worked.
Hitler's gaining absolute power was also based on another heinous (and fabricated) act of terrorism. A symbolic building, the Reichstag (Parliament building) is burned down on 27 February 1933.
Just like the Americans now, the shocked Germans back then didn't see anything wrong to give up some liberties in such an extreme situation. The very next day, on the Februaray 28'th, President Hindenburg and Chancellor Hitler invoke Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, which permits the suspension of civil liberties in time of national emergency.
Where that led, we all know.
Well, I don't think the problem is whether it's 5000 years before or 5000 years after or in SW days but other corner or the galaxy.
The problem is that KOTOR, while it did have flashy fights and effects too, focused first and foremost on the story. That's what IMHO was missing from Lucas's own prequels.
Now setting it in another millenium did play some part in KOTOR. It allowed them to completely decouple it from SW, and give them free hand to write their own story where _you_ are the most important person in the galaxy. As opposed to yet another game whose only point is that you get to meet Luke, Bobba Fett and the rest of the gang.
Still, I'm not sure that being the most important person in the galaxy is that mandatory even in a game. And it's even less mandatory in a TV show.
Basically what I'm saying is that what matters the most is simply having someone who can write a good script.
"That's why we have seeing-eye cats, why cops bring cats with them on patrol, and why the Swiss have cats to help them find skiiers who get trapped in avalanches. Because dogs can't think for themselves."
Excuse my ignorance, but which of those examples of yours needs _any_ intelligence? I mean, gee, being trained to unconditionally follow an order or use its nose to sniff a trail, that so requires complex thinking and assessing a situation.
Heh.
Now I'm not saying it's not useful, though.
That still doesn't in any way invalidate what I've said. There _are_ things a cat does by instinct. Plenty of them. It still doesn't invalidate the fact that it can think for itself and act autonomously, without needing a "master" to tell it what to do.
It may mark you as "friendly" with its head. (Something completely different from marking someone as _territory_.) But before that, it had judged you as being indeed a friend. It doesn't run do that to every stranger, like a dog marks every tree or hydrant.
That's what I meant. If you get a cat's friendship, it means something. It means it at least had a choice, and you could have ended just as well flagged as an enemy to avoid, or as some stranger to be wary of.
Reducing it all to markings is an oversimplified view, too. If you kicked a cat in the head, it wouldn't automatically come to you because now you have its "friendly" smell on your boot.
Nor does your cat suddenly stop recognizing you, after you have taken a bath.
"And you think your cat likes you, really? After all, if it finds you non-threatening it has been hard-wired to rub its scent on you -- which is basically a means of marking its territory."
I'll just say you don't know much about cats, then.
They do mark their territory, true. That's what male cats do when they pee on stuff. If your cat peed on you, _that_ is marking territory.
Chances are it never did, though. You know why? Because no goddamn animal is so dumb as to try to mark another animal as _territory_.
There are good reasons and explanations for what a cat does, and why it does that. Some do boil down to reflexes. But, well, come talk to me about it after you actually have some idea about that.
And here's another thought for you: a cat actually has a lot less hard-coded reflexes than a dog, or than most other animals. They learn from their mother, and from each other. If you ever had a cat give birth and then spend the next month talking to its kittens day and night, now you know what that is. Data transfer. A furry modem if you will.
If the cat comes and rubs against you, or whatever else, the funny thing is, it probably isn't "hard wired" to do so. Most likely its mother taught it to.
In a sense you could say the species wasn't as much "domesticated", as it learned on its own (and transmitted the knowledge) how to live safely around humans.
It's however also very much capable of avoiding you or even running away and living on its own, if it doesn't like you. It doesn't really _need_ you, in the same sense a dog does.
If it makes any difference, I do have some idea how a wolf pack or dog pack works.
And, as fate would have it, I've also seen a dog-against-human leadership challenge that you mention. Our german shepherd against my brother. You can say it again it's not going to get pretty. Let's just say my brother got a hole through his hand like he was Jesus.
(And if it makes any difference, I think the dog was better leadership material in that "pack";)
Still, you see, it's this blind sticking to a hard-coded "The Way The World Works" that I consider dumb. It's not even tradition, it's not intelligently assessing a situation, it's not even working for food. It's a hard-coded reflex.
If you turned the world upside down tomorrow (even more than these 10,000 years of human evolution already did), the dog would still keep on doing the exact same things. Because the hard-coded program in its brains tells it to.
And that unconditional hard-wired love reflex is something that personally I have no use for. It's not love, it's not affection, it's hard-coded keeping the pack leader happy.
It bears as much semblance to real love or friendship, as the "I Love You" virus did. I.e., none whatsoever.
It makes as much sense as having a computer or PDA programmed to display "I LOVE YOU!" in big letters. It doesn't. It's just a program that does that.
This is the most insightful thing I've read today, and I wish I could mod it up.
I find it sad that people basically want to shut their kids off and never have to talk to them. The kid is something that should be put on a leash, or at least stay the fsck out of the way, while the parent is busy watching football or the 15'th soap opera for today.
And when the kid learns something awfully wrong, and the parent never was there for them to teach them otherwise, the parent promptly goes looking for a scapegoat. Nosiree, bob. It wasn't me who's to blame, guv'nor. I never taught him to do drugs and beat other kids up. (Never taught him that it's wrong to do that either, though.) It was those evil game companies and TV companies. Let's sue those.
Dunno, makes me think of Peter's Principle. Just because they have genitals, people are elligible to be "promoted" to parent. Too bad that half of them are utterly incompetent for that job.
Every single quality I like in a cat, I've yet to see in a dog. Such as being able to think for itself. (Being that I pretty much fit the stereotype of a Brujah myself.)
I don't know, maybe some people like the artifficial affection of a species altered and reprogrammed to _need_ a master. No matter how smart it may be, it's just hard-wired to come obey the MASTER.
(Though I've yet to see any dog displaying anything even vaguely resembling intelligence. I'll have to take it on faith that smart dogs exist, just like flying saucers, yeti and the loch ness monster. Other people swear they saw a smart dog, so they must exist somewhere. Just not near me, 'cause the one I've seen were just a sad case of the owner going "oh look how smart he is!" at just about every dumb reflex, like the dog sniffing his own butt or chewing a stick or being able to find his food bowl.)
Either way, I find it just sad. It's just as artifficial as getting an email inbox full of "I Love You" (the virus) back then. It's just a program running. It doesn't mean the virus actually loved you.
What you have there is a species which was originally hard-coded into hunting in groups, obeying the strongest in the group, and marking and defending its hunting territory. Until someone figured out basically "hey, we can reprogram it into thinking that the human is the pack leader and the garden is his territory to defend." So the poor beast continues doing that, no matter if it makes sense in any given situation.
It dutifully marks its territory on trees, even when it's a tree in the park and 100 other dogs are brought to re-mark it.
It tries to defend that territory, no matter how dumb it may be in any given situation. Like a tiny Pekinese barking its lungs out at a great dane, not because it's brave, but because it's still mechanically applying a hard-coded reflex from back when they were all the same size. Or like a shopkeeper's dog trying to keep the customers out of the shop, until she learned not to bring the dog in the shop any more.
And it dutifully obeys even the worst possible master, because somewhere in its tiny brains a circuit says "must obey the pack leader."
Dunno, I'll take a cat's autonomy over that any day. A cat doesn't have a master. It might see you as a friend if you're nice to it. Or merely a roommate. Or in rare cases an enemy, if you're really bad at that relationship.
And if you fit in the friend category, you can know that it's genuine, not some hardcoded obedience.
We allow teenagers to drive. Depending on country, state, whatnot, as early as 16 years old. And we basically trust them to have enough judgment to not start running people over for fun.
_Also_ most countries conscript people at 18 years old. And then trust them to stand guard with an assault rifle and live ammo. Some long hours alone at night, just you and your rifle. And some of those bases are right in the middle of cities. (A lot of Eastern Europe sports small military compounds right in the middle of cities, for example.)
And we trust them to not start shooting people with that assault rifle when they get bored. And make no mistake, standing around for 3 hours at night alone, with nothing to do and noone to talk to, is the apex of boring. It's so fucking boring that it feels like your head will explode.
We also allow teenagers in less spectacular jobs, such as fast food jobs. And you trust that they'll be smart and responsible enough to not put some poison in that food just because they're bored.
You also allow teenagers who are just discovering that they have hormones to go to school together, and trust that they won't start raping each other.
Etc.
The fact is: every day your life may well depend on the fact that 99.9999% of teenagers _are_ capable of judging consequences.
So spare me the rethoric. Those who do choose to be a criminal asshole are just that: criminals. No more, no less, no excuses.
_Again_: there is no fucking technical innovation in there at all. None. Zero. Nada. Zilch.
_All_ there is in this story is one asshole stealing property and violating someone's privacy.
It's like reading about a common thief and stalker. Not even some innovative and skillful thief, but a petty two-dime crook pocketting someone else's memory card and copyrighted photos.
_That_ is _all_ there is to that story, and that's why virtually all the posts deal with just that.
So grow up, put down the crack pipe, and spare me the idiotic guilt-trip attempts. This is _not_ about stiffling technical innovation, this is _not_ about someone being sued by Sega or IBM for patents, and there is _nothing_ technical or innovative to discuss.
_Again_: it's simply about a two-bit thief. No more, no less. That's why that's what the posts actually discuss.
There is nothing technically innovative about posting some pictures in a fucking retarded blog. _What_ is the technical innovation there?
Now maybe if he was running Linux and Apache on a Dreamcast, with an ISCSI hard drive over the DC's broadband addapter (which is basically an Ethernet card), now _that_ would be technical innovation.
But "oh look, I can post pics on the net" stopped being new and original some 20 years ago. Any kiddie can just use pre-made software they don't even understand to get some text and pics on the net. Heck, nowadays you don't even need to know HTML to do that, as the software will do that for you.
So _all_ that is left is an asshole who thought it would be cool to (A) steal someone else's property, and (B) violate their privacy using the whole Internet as an audience.
And you know what? Even _if_ there was any technical innovation in there (but there isn't), there is no ammount of it which can justify the evil act. There are better way to showcase _any_ technical solution than raping someone's privacy.
And I'm not in the USA, and I too thought I'd sue the hell out of the fucktard.
Now _I_ wouldn't necessarily want his money. I'd just want him hurt so badly, people would cringe at the mere thought of such a stunt for the next 100 years. I'd want the asshole impaled and left there to bleed and die over several hours.
But since that's not an option, I'd probably sue for such a sum that he'd never see the end of the tunnel for the rest of his life. Then donate the money to some charity. Because, as I've said, I don't want his money, I just want him in a world of hurt.
"I'd call that viral behaviour"
Well, bingo! Then it's a virus or an exploit.
"Spyware" is stuff which masquerades as a legitimate application. And which, yes, needs the user to install it. It's basically a sub-category of "trojan".
That's the whole problem with spyware. That's why it's a grey area, and why the scumbags at Claria/Gator can send legal nastygrams to people calling their crap names.
Something installed through a buffer overflow exploit is clearly illegal and clearly not a legitimate business relationship. You can't get sued for uninstalling it, without someone coming forward and basically telling the judge "yes, we broke several criminal laws, and we're suing these guys for trying to stop us."
Spyware is what you get when it gets packed as a legitimate utility and tries hard to look like a legitimate utility that you'd actually want on your computer. (If you were brain dead, that is.) And which the user can be tricked into personally installing, of their own free will.
The BO makers claimed it was a remote administration tool, but it still wasn't something that the user would want to install on their machine as such. Do you actually _want_ your machine remotely administrated by a script kiddie? Well, no. So that's still not spyware.
Now wrap the same thing is some password remembering utility, and call it a password remembering utility. Now you can actually get enough idiots to think it's a legitimate app and install it.
And _because_ the user did have to click on "yes", you're suddenly a respectable legitimate company and have a legitimate product. Unlike a script kiddie, you suddenly have legal rights.
Better yet, you'll have a bunch of the victims on your side too, when some AV product uninstalled it. ("Waah! The bad man disabled that useful Gator thingie that remembered my passwords!") Unlike the script kiddie who'd be 100% guaranteed that the victims are against him.
That's spyware. And that's why it's a grey area.
Admittedly that involves a very warped definition of "legitimate application". If having some confusing legalese version of "we will infect your computer with Gator because they gave us money to do it" on page 50 of the EULA counts as legitimate, it's surely not the definition I usually have in mind for that word. I thought "legitimate" had other meanings than basically "we're unethical fucks who'll infect your computer for money", but maybe that's just me.
But, again, the parent post was right: spyware _does_ need the user to click on "yes".