Well, yes, but over a year or so it should vary statistically both ways. Some times you'll buy those 5000 gallons on a warm day, and sell on a colder day, sometimes the other way around. So if someone consistently sells more gas than they buy, you might as well start wondering.
You're making the usual fallacy of putting equals between software patents and silly patents. Which doesn't even hold true in either direction.
1. There are plenty of silly patents which don't have anything to do with software. You can find plenty such barrels of laughs as a van with a horse on a treadmill instead of an engine. (Yes, believe it or not, someone patented something as impossible as that.)
2. There are plenty of software patents which are _not_ trivial.
E.g., ever since the GIF patent I keep hearing about how compression algorithms are something trivial and obvious. Well you invent a good new compression algorithm if it's that trivial. _Then_ you can say it's trivial. No, really. Try it.
E.g., I keep hearing the same about various movie and sound codecs. (A la "waah! MP3 shouldn't have been patentable!") You know what? _You_ come up quickly with a good codec, if that's trivial. I'll tell you a secret: back in the early 90s I actually tried coming up with my own algorithm to compress game movies. Turns out I had no bloody clue where to even start.
E.g., I keep hearing about how cryptographic algorithms are no-brainers and shouldn't be patentable. No shit, Sherlock? You try coming up with a new secure algorithm over the weekend, and only then you'll have earned the right to say it's trivial. In practice what virtually every "smart" programmer comes up with is some snake oil idea, like xoring the output of the random number generator to the input stream. Ask a real cryptographer why that's easier to crack than a brown paper bag.
Etc.
To cut it short: It only seems trivial because someone explained an existing algorithm to you already. But try actually inventing a new one. You'll quickly discover why such things are discovered by mathematicians not code monkeys.
In practice some people had to sit and _work_ to come up with that stuff. Sometimes for years. It also took a lot of testing. And someone had to pay for that research work. It's no less research work than, say, a pharmaceuticals company researching and testing a new drug.
Now I do understand that it's fashionable on/. to bitch and moan about how you should be allowed to steal everyone's work. Whether it's copy-and-pasting someone's algorithm, or downloading every new movie on P2P, or whatever, the ISO-standard/. freeloader should never have to pay for anything.
However, here's a new idea for all those complaining about patents: if you really want to convince me of your moral high ground, why don't you do the exact opposite? Why don't _you_ give a new algorithm away, instead of asking that others give you stuff for free? Go, actually _invent_ something new, and put it in the public domain.
"Try it and see" with _commercial_ games? Yeah, that's got to be a great plan. Might as well spare 100$ for Windows, even if at the expense of blowing 40$ for each game which doesn't work. Or doesn't work well. Or seems to work, but after 10 hours you hit a brick wall compatibility-wise. Or works only until you update some library.
Why, with only 5 such games you've already paid $200 to save $100. We really need more such financial plans;)
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against WineX or anything. Au contraire.
I'm just against the idea that "try and see" even starts to cut it when we're talking commercial programs. (Except for those who pirate games on p2p networks, in which case "trying" yet another game costed nothing. I wish they died a very slow and very painful death.)
The thing about SimCity is IMHO that, basically, it's a bunch of gameplay decisions to balance, rather than bias. You can view it as either "it proves that low taxes are good" or as "it proves that you need high taxes, or you can't evolve" or anything in between.
But in the end it's your bias you're projecting, rather than the game's. I could very well play without mass transit, for example.
Most of the positives and negatives of any action exist realistically, rather than necessarily trying to hammer some political point.
E.g., overpopulation, no highways and low funds, you can see the effects in some of the urban concentrations in Eastern Europe: some of those cities ended up with their streets looking like after a level bombing in barely a few years. Very literally. Extremely high traffic and not enough maintenance does that.
Industrial polution? You can see that very well in Eastern Europe too. Some mining towns for example were literally covered in black dust. And for an example of mis-placing industry, some of those ended up with silly stuff like cement factories without filters _in_ the city. Not only were the buildings covered in dust, but just passing through the area would get your face covered in dust. It didn't take years, it took less than an hour to covere everyone in pollution.
The reason you don't see it that bad in most western towns are precisely those regulations and ordinances.
I.e., all those problems are hardly something left-wing or right-wing or whatever. They exist IRL.
There are plenty of games whose designers just can't seem to refrain from preaching, so no point in singling out any one of them. Even some arcade-style 3D shooters can't refrain from basing the whole story on stuff like showing you the consequences of some government policy or failure to address the designer's pet peeve.
The usual "problem" with many of these games, though, is that they usually start from the conclusion, rather than gently leading you to it. Unless you're already of the right ideology, most are too unsubtle to even reach for the goal of good propaganda: not even looking like propaganda.
In fact, I'd even say that the ones you remember as propaganda are the ones who failed at being good propaganda.
The game medium can be used much better than that, IMHO. The very structure of a story-based game revolves around suspension of disbelief, and gradually getting you to accept bigger and bigger impossibilities and absurdities as reality.
A good RPG campaign for example (either PnP or computer-based) might start with the party or hero in an inn. Or doing some other thing which can be immediately believed, because it's not abnormal in any way. And gradually guide you through more and more bewildering situations, ramping it up slowly enough so you don't suddenly lose suspension of disbelief.
It just begs to be mis-used into goading the player into suspending disbelief in an ideology, rather than in battling dragons or whatnot.
But basically, yeah, I'm not really saying anything new. I'm basically, yeah, saying that a political party might as well start paying for that kind of a work. And maybe also get a good writer to come up with the story, for a change. (Most game plots are basically more like written by programmers turned game designers, than by really persuasive novelists.)
There's a differemce between having a teme, and having a political message or ideology to force-feed you.
You can have a theme while mostly avoiding politics.
E.g., probably the most obvious example is SimCity. Even though you're playing a political figure (a mayor), the game is actually not about politics, and doesn't try to convince you that one political side is better than the other. You're not playing a Republican mayor, nor a Democrat mayor, you're just playing A mayor trying to plan your city.
E.g., take the games "Capitalism" and "Capitalism 2". Regardless of what you might infer from the title, the game actually refrains from any political comment. It doesn't tell you stuff like "bleedin' heart liberals are costing the economy a fortune", nor "greedy right-wing powermongers are pushing everyone into poverty." It doesn't even try to show you any long term effects and lessons from your paying bigger salaries, or raising the prices, or whatever.
Heck, it doesn't even try to convince you that that capitalism is the best thing. It just is the premise of the game. You're an ideal capitalist, in an ideal capitalist market. (Something as inexistant IRL as ideal communism.) The game doesn't even try to model the RL or its events, but sticks to a theoretical capitalistic world, where there everything is a commodity, there are plenty of suppliers directly competing with each other, and entry barriers in any industry are low. (E.g., quite literally in the game it costs exactly as much to research and produce CPUs or TFT displays as to research and produce roller skates or biscuits.) The world just _is_ that way, there is no greater ideological enlightenment in it, now go make some money in it.
E.g., Steel Panthers. It's probably the most detailed WW2 strategy/tactics game. The theme is WW2. Yes, we all know what happened back then, we all know who were the evil guys, etc. But the game refrains from making any comment outside the scope of military combat. Whether you want to lead a battallion of German Tigers, or one of Soviet JS-2 tanks, or American Shermans, is up to you. The game keeps track of their armour slope, not of their ideology.
And so on.
Basically, again, it _is_ possible to have a theme without turning it into a lame lecture in "my ideology is better than yours." And I wish more people refrained from preaching when they design a game.
No, I don't want games to lecture me in global warming. No, I don't really need a lecture in whether corporations are good or bad, and which kind of party would best defend me from them. Etc.
I see all this pining for the "way the internet was". And I don't get it.
All the problems we're having are precisely _because_ of the open and unregulated way the Internet was. The Internet was designed on the assumption that everyone will be nice, stick to the RFCs religiously, etc. Noone put much thought into the "well, what if they don't?" part. That's the worst design anti-pattern possible and the nemesis of security.
And unsurprisingly that shiny-happy-optimistic approach has failed again and again. E.g., it didn't even take _that_ long for someone to figure out that by intentionally not conforming to the RFCs they can syn-flood and crash a machine.
It's like preaching the ideal society where there are no laws, rules or authorities, and everyone can do whatever they please. It will be such an awesomely nice place, as long as everyone will be nice to each other. But they surely will, right?
This is probably off-topic, but IMHO you're applying the lessons from the dot-com boom in the wrong context.
It's a different goal here.
What dot-coms had as a goal, and where they failed, was making money. That was their failure.
They (or enough of them) did not fail at getting readers on their site. All those forums and chatrooms and flash games actually worked monumentally well to get people to visit the site often.
The dot-com problem was that noone had a plan to make those people pay. You had a horde of people trolling your forums, reading your articles and clicking on your site all right. In some cases enough of them that the bandwidth costs alone piled up like crazy. You just didn't have them reaching for the wallet.
In this case, however, the goals are a bit different. You don't want necessarily people to pay a monthly fee to access the site. You want them to at least come back and read the candidate's boring "news alerts".
And I'd say that to that end some of those dot-com tactics weren't _that_ bad.
You are partially right. Yes, a lot of companies are just focused on milking as much money as possible out of their customers.
(Been there. Had the boss royally pissed off at me when I told the customer that, no, they don't need an uber-sophisticated custom solution to solve their problem. "Are you nuts?!! Are you out of your mind?!! We're trying to take their money, not tell them that they could solve that cheaper!!" On the bright side, after that he never took me to those 6 hours meetings any more.)
On the other hand, I'd disaggree that it is a waste of time. Games can be a very immersive experience, and can get a subtle message accross _very_ efficiently.
Now I'm not talking about ham-fisted smacking someone over the head with your political message. "Shoot money with president bush's head" is too unsubtle IMHO to actually do anything.
As another poster wrote, "Propaganda's greater achievement was convincing the world that it doesn't exist." I.e., the ideal propaganda (game or not) is one which doesn't look like propaganda at all. Failing that, you'll want one that can pass for non-propaganda.
The way I'd design a political game, if I had to, would be pretty much following the structure of a political speech. I also assume a big-ish budget game.
1. Start with some truths. Not necessarily good for you. Neutral stuff is good. Gets people in a mood to nod to the rest of the stuff too.
E.g., it's a fact that there's been a war in Iraq. Or it's a fact that there are homeless people. Or that there are gang wars. Etc.
Start the game with that. Don't even try to colour it it politically, unless it comes very naturally.
2. Continue with some truisms. Stuff which is technically true, but not necessarily even relevant for your message or in other ways supporting your conclusion.
By this time you start colouring stuff your way.
3. Feed them the conclusion. If you did a good job of convincing them to nod through 1 and 2, they'll swallow it too.
Remember it's about being subtle. People are more eager to believe what they think is their own conclusion, than yours. And it still has to seem a game.
Don't give them directly something like "vote for us because we'll protect you from evil offshoring corporations." Give them something which might fit the game. E.g., protecting a candidate from an assassin, sent because said candidate is opposing international corporations.
Don't give them something like "Vote for us, because we'll stop pollution." Give them a game set in a world, which, absolutely incidentally, is destroyed by polution and plunging into anarchy.
Also remember that games are rather long affairs and played in episodes. I don't think many people sat and played, say, KOTOR for 30 hours straight, from beginning to end. So you don't necessarily want a linear snowing the audience, stretched over the whole game. Several snow-jobs, following the same truths-truisms-conclusions paths, might work better. E.g., one per game level or episode.
Just an idea:) Of course, it probably wouldn't get past the beancounters and marketeers, who'll likely instead want something which just screams "VOTE FOR X!!!" in your face. But still, just showing that a subtle and relatively effective politically tainted game would be possible. At least theoretically.
Well, yes, but the innovative part is the whole monitoring and calculations that happens there. XML is nothing more than one of the many possible data formats used, and only for a tiny little part of the system. It's just one of the many possible "glues" between the systems which do the actual work. Maybe a cleverly selected glue, but nothing more nevertheless.
Basically: saying that XML is the important part there, is like saying that tin is the most important part in your computer. I mean, hey, it's what keeps those components on the motherboard. It's got to be the most important part, right? If we used more tin, we'd have a much faster computer. (Just in case anyone doesn't get the joke, no, it's other parts made of silicon that are far more important there.)
Same with this. Whether the system works well or not, and its advantages are because of the whole idea and design behind it, not just because of the XML buzzword. If you just slapped an XML-based server on a building, it would do exactly _nothing_ by itself. It's the rest of the system that actually accounts for any power savings.
And IMHO the sooner we get past this mindless fetish about buzzwords, the better we'll all be in the long run. "Woo! It has XML, XSLT, EJB, DRM, JMS, and a dozen other buzzwords! It must be great! Dunno what it does, but all those buzzwords _must_ make it work great!"
Makes me think of the stereotypical horde of lemmings jumping off a cliff. Everyone else does it, so it _must_ be great. Jumping off cliffs is the way of tomorrow!
Well, no. If it works well, it's because someone actually did some real analysis and design. If they actually studied the problem and decided which technologies to use, but much more importantly: which _not_ to use.
Lemmings which can just make a list of all the fashionable buzzwords... and then need man-decades to make a dysfunctional product that wastes 6 seconds per request just parsing XML data again and again, those are a dime a dozen. (BTW, that's not a joke. I actually benchmarked 6 seconds of pure CPU time just in XML parsing per request in an application here.) It's those who know when _not_ to use a fashionable buzzword that are the real architects.
And the next thing you know, you also have to answer stuff like:
- Look, that nifty web-based backgammon game no longer works since you installed that Mozilla crap. (It used ActiveX, so no wonder.)
- Look, the site I uploaded my digital photos to no longer works. (It used client-side VB Script.)
- Look, the forum I was talking to my friends on shows awfully wrong, and some bits are even missing. (It was designed for IE only.)
- Look, that other little game on a site doesn't work any more either. (It was an applet written for MS's quirky Java implementation.)
- Look, my browser just crashes on that other site I used to visit. (Both Opera and Mozilla do occasionally crash. Much as if you listen to the/. crowd it's only MS that writes buggy crap ever.)
- Look, I can't even do online banking any more. (Another site made just for IE.)
- Look, this other site is completely broken and no longer reacts to my clicking on links. (At least the Firefox 0.8 I use at work is idiotic enough to think that some popups I've clicked a link for, are still "unwanted".)
And so on. Basically giving someone Mozilla or Opera as a 100% replacement for IE, is like giving them a truck as a 100% replacement for their auto. It just isn't that.
We geeks love to put up with crappy browsers, software/hardware incompatibilities, and recompiling 10 libraries just to make something work. Feels macho.
Joe Average doesn't. He doesn't really care about "MS is evil" or technicalities "look, Opera has these 10 annoying features that you'll probably disable anyway, so it's technically better than IE." (E.g., gestures.) The browser is for him like the TV set: just a window to see the web through. If the new "superior" TV set can't show the stations Joe wants to see, Joe will go back to the old "inferior" one. Same for IE.
Just in case you folks were wondering why do those "idiot" users go back to IE. Maybe because they're not the idiots there. Maybe because it actually works. Just some wild ideas for when you're bored, I guess.
"Now instead of saving one life, how about an entire platoon of young soldiers? How about a third-grade class? One-hundred innocents? A thousand?"
What I'm even more concerned with is: if it's acceptable, how long until it's used to fabricate imaginary threats that we're all saved from?
How long until it's not just used to find a nuke, but to get someone to "confess" that they were planning to build a nuke and blow up Washington DC? Stuff like, "hey, he's a loner, his parents were arabs, he's opposed the Gulf war and he's a bit too active in a newsgroup about nuclear physics. We _know_ he must be up to no good, now to just torture him and find the details."
You mention saving a school class. Remember the witch hunts after some school shootings? There were a ton of nerdy students who were persecuted just because they weren't social or were wearing a black coat. People who never harmed a fly or threatened anyone (au contraire, they were the ones getting bullied), but somehow everyone just _knew_ that they're the next shooter. Just because they wore a black coat.
Now let's bring torture in that scenario. Can you see how easy it would be to fabricate evidence of some non-existant plot to slaughter the whole school? Just torture them until they sign a confession that they already had an exact kind of shotgun in mind and were planning to do it next tuesday.
Whoppee! We're heroes! Our torture saved a whole class, in the nick of time. Not. In practice that's just one innocent whose life was destroyed, and that class never was in danger to start with.
Again, that's not even phantasy. Stuff like that actually happened.
The Eastern European countries and Soviets let their police torture as much as it pleased to "solve" their cases. And unsurprisingly they'd _always_ solve a case. They'd just grab a suspect, and tortured him until he/she confessed.
Since you speak of psychological torture: One case I've heard about and which truly revolted me was that of some poor bastard accused of a crime he supposedly commited while he wasn't even there. The communist police eventually threatened to bring his old grandma into custody and beat her up too, because she was in the area at the time and as such a potential accomplice. The guy caved in and signed the confession. Another case solved with speed and efficiency, eh?
And again, look at the "holy" Inquisition. Millions of averted satanic conspiracies, all confessed and signed. Whop-de-do. The Inquisition were real heroes to save us from all those plans to summon demons and plagues. All those evil summoners could have wiped out most of Europe and plunged the rest into anarchy, if they hadn't been thwarted in time, eh?;)
_That_ is the danger I'm concerned about. At which point the government becomes more dangerous than any terrorists? Speaking of your sliding scales, at which point saving few lives lives is worth letting the government torture and unjustly imprison/deport _millions_? (Stalin in the USSR did just that.) Ten? A hundred? A thousand? How about "never"?
History is a funny thing. The same Europe, circa 1930, shows what happens when you're willing to bend over and waive your rights in exchange for immediate short-term benefits.
E.g., to some Germans it must have looked like a great trade to support a dictator, in exchange for stabilizing the economy. Next thing you knew, millions of Germans were marching to death camps, or were tortured by the Gestapo. Not just German citizens of other nationalities, which already was evil. If you look at some pictures from those camps, a _lot_ looked like the nazis' retarded "super-human" ideal, but ended behind barbed wire anyway.
That's the problem with giving a retard a blank cheque to do whatever he pleases. Soon he might well please to get rid of you.
That's why the consititutional rights and liberties keep governments in check. Because a government can be a good thing, or can be worse than all terror groups put together. Look at nazi Germany or Soviet Russia: the many millions of their citizens they killed and the terror they maintained among their own citizens far surpass what all terror groups put together did.
Yeah, that would be the ideal situation. If any game actually ran two reviews for any game, a regular shiny happy one and a "bitter gamer" column telling me in how many ways it sucks... well, I'd send the money for a lifetime subscription right now.
Here's some free clue for you: so instead of maybe hundreds attacked by terrorists in a year, you have thousands tortured by your own government? Well, gee, that has got to be an improvement;)
And if you think that Bush & Co acting like panicked idiots and harrassing innocent citizens is what kept you safe, let me give you another theory: there is no further need to terrorize the Americans, since they are pretty good at staying terrorized anyway ever since.
Given that the main tool and purpose of any terror group is by definition spreading terror among the civilian population, in the USA I'd say the terrorists have already won. Big time. They've managed in one attack what they haven't managed anywhere else in the world: keeping a whole country in fear for _years_. Gee, Bin Laden must be so proud.
Furthermore:
- the USA has managed to piss off most of its allies
- the USA seems to be determined to give up more and more freedoms each day, and turn into more of a joke than a symbol of freedom
- the USA helped remove the _secular_ government of Iraq (Osama and Saddam were practically enemies) and now Iraq is well on the way to become yet another fundamentalist nation. Just the way Osama wanted it to be, all along.
And so on. You know what? I'll take passive and appeasing over that any day.
European countries already have to deal with terrorist attacks every year. E.g., see the bombing in Spain. I'm sure I've seen mentions of it even on tech sites.
But you know what? We still didn't devolve into a scared mob led by aggressive retards. We also didn't use it an excuse to either torture people or invade muslim countries for oil. We didn't burn mosques down, nor deport random arab-looking people each time someone detonated a bomb.
So get over it. The whole "oooh, scary terrorists, let's let the government fuck us 7 ways to sunday" scare in the USA just make me laugh. And the funny coloured alert level codes each time someone thought the neighbour's cat acts funny, really give me the fits of laughter.
You haven't even seen a fraction of the terror attacks the rest of the world has seen. You know how many terror attacks you've had in the USA last year? Exactly _zero_. Nil. Nada. Zilch. Nix.
And you still use that piss-poor excuse to justify torture or giving totalitarian powers to an illiterate retard. (Bush Jr.) You want to torture innocents for what? For a terror threat you _don't_ _even_ _have_? Geeze...
Here's an idea: those constitutional rights are there to protect _you_. If you let a retard take that away from you, in the name of a bogus terrorist scare, it is _you_ who'll have a problem, not the terrorists.
Here's another idea: How about taking a hint from the rest of the world already? You're the mightiest nation on Earth, for fuck's sake. Might as well finally start acting that way, instead of screaming in terror each time Bush Jr scared himself by thinking about the bogeyman under his bed.
I've read that theory too, and it's a bloody stupid idea on several counts.
For starters it would mean that there were _no_ predators over a certain size. (They all look like they're made to walk, rather than run.) Now in and by itself, that would be unusual, but not necessarily impossible. There aren't any predators the size of an elephant nowadays.
What it wouldn't exmplain though, is why did several of the herbivore evolve defenses. Why did the triceratops, for example, need those horns and a massive bone shield, if not for defense? Why did other species grow basically armour plates? What was the evolutionary advantage of that, in the absence of predators?
Nature doesn't create useless stuff like that. If you want a reasonable approximation of the triceratops, take the boar. It can gore something in front with the tusks (whereas the triceratops had horns, but same idea). And while the boar doesn't have a bone shield, it rubs its shoulders to resin producing trees. The resulting hair and resin mixture is basically the same kind of material as your motherboard. It's a sort of armour. I.e., again, you have a smaller and faster equivalent of the triceratops.
Why did it need to evolve that way? Well, for defense. The forward shield and tusks allow it to gore a wolf or two.
The observation that "the T-Rex couldn't run, therefore it couldn't hunt" is also stupid because it only considers half the equation. Yes, the T-Rex couldn't run. Not just because of the small arms, but the bone sizes are all wrong for running. But here's the fun part: neither could its prey.
You don't necessarily need to _run_ to be a predator. You just need to move (in whatever way) faster than your prey. Even if it's walking, or flying, or swimming, or rolling on wheels, or whatever else. What counts is whether you can catch a prey, not whether your kind of locomotion looks like what we'd call running.
Basically the T-Rex only needed to walk faster than its intended prey. Bear in mind that we're talking a 40 ft beast. Assuming that a reasonable amount of its body mass was in leg muscles, it could likely pull up to 11 mph walking speed. As long as its big bulky victims (which again, couldn't run either) walked slower than that, the T-Rex could find a meal.
To understand the tiny arms, you also have to understand the context of walking at that size. Body weight increases with the cube of the weight. Muscle strength increases only quadratically with their diameter. I.e., the bigger you grow, the more you have trouble moving fast.
It's very likely that to maintain a quick stride, the T-Rex needed a _much_ higher percentage of its body mass to be concentrated in its leg muscles, than, say, a chicken would have. The body itself had to be as lightweight as possible, and the legs were massively muscular to move it. Any useless weight, such as the arms, was a _disadvantage_, so the evolutionary pressure was for them to grow smaller.
You can have a userfriendly program which is also designed, coded and reviewed with security in mind, you know. Or you can have a totally unusable mess which also is buggy and exploitable.
It's only good for one thing: getting some innocent bugger to "confes" anything you want to hear, so you can then hold a fake trial and execute them. That's why it's been used so much for the last 10 millenia or so, and is still loved by dictators.
Think just of the _millions_ (literally, and we even have the records) who confessed to flying on broomsticks, having sex with the devil, summoning vile demons and plagues, signing pacts in blood with Satan, etc, at the hands of the Inquisition. Stuff that isn't even physically _possible_, but enough torture got that crap "confessed" anyway. That's the kind of bullshit that torture produces.
You get a fellow snug on a rack and torture them enough, they'll tell you any _lie_ you want to hear, just to make it stop. You just have to bring them to the point where even death looks like a nicer alternative.
But for actually obtaining _intelligence_ it's fucking useless. What you get is whatever _you_ had already decided you want to hear, not trze information you didn't know. I.e., you could just as well just act on your mis-conceptions and prejudice, and spare the torture part, since you'll get exactly there anyway.
So you know what will actually happen in your "terrorist with a nuke" scenario? You'll torture some innocent arab who probably didn't even like the fundamentalists at all in the first place. And you'll keep torturing him until he tells you whatever false "confession" you wanted to hear, just to make the pain stop.
Will you find your nuke? No fucking way. But now you have a "confession" so you can execute or deport an innocent.
Well gee... if that's what the "land of the free" is supposed to mean...
Sorry, there is no silver bullet that will make it impossible to write insecure code. There will never be. Much as it's every PHBs pipe dream to buy some magical +5 Cloak of Security that will allow them to make secure programs with clueless monkeys instead of programmers, it's just that: a pipe dream.
You know why? Because the compiler can't know what you're trying to do with that data.
No, I'm not only talking about array index bounds checking, and other easy stuff. That's the easy part. If that's what your +5 Magical Cloak of Security solves, no offense, but you don't even _start_ to have an idea about security.
Most real security decisions have to do with _what_ kind of data you're handling. (No, not just data type, but for example is it a user ID? A password? Etc.) And _how_ could that be mis-used or attacked, in the very speciffic context of your program? (E.g., can I just edit my ID to that of another user, without knowing their password?)
E.g., a mistake I've seen here involved just passing the (sequentially generated) user ID around in the URL after login. The result? Anyone could edit that ID and pretend to be another user. User 0 was predictably the super-user, so anyone editting their ID to that would have absolute power over that site.
E.g., in the same program each user should have only been able to see the records they "own". (Like in a web-email program you should only see your own emails, either received or sent, but not those from other users' inboxes.) What did those morons do? They checked ownership only when generating the list of links to the records. But not when displaying or editting the actual data. So if you editted the URL instead of only clicking on the supplied links, you could see and edit _any_ user's data. (Including the super-user's password, among other things, as if impersonating him via the ID wasn't enough.)
E.g., a more insidious mistake was failing to even think about accountability and non-repudiation. A user cancelling their account would cause a cascaded delete of any records related to them in any way. A user could do any crap, delete their account, and... he had never existed, according to the system. Every single trace of them had been erased.
Etc. I could go on and fill a tome with such mistakes that had nothing to do with buffer overflows or pointers. They're _conceptual_ problems. They're a problem of the very _design_.
Those are things no compiler or other tool will ever automatically solve for you. Again, because no compiler will ever know the _semantics_ of that data. What does it mean, in which ways is it used, what are the risks associated with it? No compiler can answer that for you.
There is no buying magical talisman and getting an easy way out. The _only_ real way out is to stop hiring only the cheapest monkeys, and actually bring someone who has a clue. It may not fit your ideal of practicality, but it's the _only_ way out nevertheless.
Well, that reminds me: you know what I'd _really_ want to see? The Bitter Gamer Magazine that Gamespy's Fargo came up with in a humour column.
I mean, forget positivism. It's not that I hate games or anything, but there are thousands of sites and magazines already who focus on telling me why I should love a game. I'd like just one who tells me all the bad, ugly, or unfinished aspects. Really tell me all that the reviewer didn't like about it.
Just so I can pair it with one of those all positive reviews, and actually make a more informed decision. I'd like to actually know both the good and the bad parts.
'Cause it sure as heck doesn't look like a honest reviewing process to me.
At the very least it's dishonesty. They're lying to their readers (in the case of their sites) and to their customers (in the case of Atari.)
It also goes contrary to all that a review was supposed to mean. At that point, it's no longer a review, it's a paid _ad_. Just when I thought that the lame-ass ads disguised as reviews (some with ludicrious scores like 110%) of lame ragazines of the past were finally dead and burried, here comes an even lamer variant. One that even in the fine print isn't actually marked as an ad.
Lame. Real real lame.
Personally I'd like to see a list with sites which do this kind of crap, just so I know never to read them again.
E.g., the fact that electricity is cheaper at night didn't go as unnoticed as you'd think. At least here there _are_ flats with heaters that store heat at night, and release it as needed during the day. I've lived for 2.5 years in a flat heated like that.
It worked basically like this: it was a large box with a fan. It would heat something up inside at night, starting at midnight, or 1AM during DST. (I could tell by the loud noise of the relay switching on for all those in the house.) Then if it needed to heat up your room, it would start a fan, blowing air through it, thus blowing warm air into the room. If not, not.
The problem was that it sucked, if you'll pardon my being blunt.
For starters, since there was no way of knowing in advance whether you'll need heating the next day, you'd leave it on all time anyway. I.e., it would store heat (and add to your electricity bill) even in July. Just in case tomorrow it'll be cold.
Second, even if it didn't need to start the fan, it still was a big hot metal box in the room all day long. Even in July.
That was one solution. It's cheap, but it doesn't work that well, nor really reduce the energy use. (I can imagine other people turning on the air conditioning during the day in summer, just to offset the poorly thought out heating.)
Another solution would be a huge pack of batteries in the basement. It's very efficient, but it's not cheap. Think an UPS, except we're talking something so big that it can supply your whole house with electricity for 16 hours straight. Including computer, TV, air conditioner, fridge, oven, washing machine, etc. Nope, that's not cheap at all. Even with whatever you save on electricity at night, it'll be half an eternity before it pays for itself.
Basically that's generally the problem with all these obvious solutions. Not that noone thought of them before you, but that actually they're not that good a solution. That's really why they're not used by everyone.
And making laws to mandate doing something awfully expensive and/or inconvenient, is going to help... how? Now I'm all for new laws when they're justified, but here all it would do is force society as a whole to expend trillions on one collection of inefficient things, instead of more useful things to do with that money.
I still say it's better to just let economics run their course in this case. When the electric car with a trailer, which you mention, will be a cheaper or more convenient solution than a gas car, people will start buying those. And when there'll be good money in selling them, someone _will_ sell them. It may not be GM, but there'll be _someone_ who wants those people's money.
To clarify it some more: a lot (if not most) of human progress was made on loans. Loans of resources from the colonies. Loans of, yes, polution. (The industrial revolution was not a pretty sight. Dumping black smoke into the atmosphere and poison into rivers was the norm.) Loans of free space to build houses and farms on. (E.g., USA's expansion to the west.) Etc.
Heck, you could argue that the very invention of the human state and the start of civilization was made on a loan. In Messopotamia "inventing" the state was possible because a few people controlled the water supply for irigations, giving them an unprecedented power over others. However, it was a loan. They destroyed even the little fertility of those lands in the process, and eventually even irigation didn't work that well any more. Basically it was a loan of fertility.
The advanced civilization of the ancient Egyptians was also built upon a loan: a loan of time. Being shielded from both sides by the desert saved them from needing a too large military to defend themselves. With the invention of the war charriot, however, that changed. They were no longer safe from the outside world, and they got conquered. Later it also meant that the outside world was no longer safe by them. (They learned very fast how to build their own chariots.)
Etc.
So basically I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with loans. If we all had waited for the perfect technology to appear, and hadn't accepted the loan from the devil in the guise of a less perfect technology, we'd still live in caves and wear stylish leopard skin loinclothes. Even the state would have never appeared, because the Messopotamians would still be waiting for the perfect agricultural technology instead of starting irrigating.
You're right, and if I hadn't posted here already, I'd mod you "Insightful". But, to some extent, that _is_ economics and capitalism.
Can it be cheaper to plunder non-renewable resources? Well, actually it is. In the short time anyway.
Can it be cheaper in the long run? Actually, as you noted it boils down to taking a loan. Sometimes it's better to take a loan to get a factory started, than to wait 200 years for the perfect technology to arrive.
And, well, it actually already was more efficient. If we hadn't started with coal engines and then gas engines, and just waited for the perfect technology, we'd probably still be in the late middle ages.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, yes, but over a year or so it should vary statistically both ways. Some times you'll buy those 5000 gallons on a warm day, and sell on a colder day, sometimes the other way around. So if someone consistently sells more gas than they buy, you might as well start wondering.
You're making the usual fallacy of putting equals between software patents and silly patents. Which doesn't even hold true in either direction.
/. to bitch and moan about how you should be allowed to steal everyone's work. Whether it's copy-and-pasting someone's algorithm, or downloading every new movie on P2P, or whatever, the ISO-standard /. freeloader should never have to pay for anything.
1. There are plenty of silly patents which don't have anything to do with software. You can find plenty such barrels of laughs as a van with a horse on a treadmill instead of an engine. (Yes, believe it or not, someone patented something as impossible as that.)
2. There are plenty of software patents which are _not_ trivial.
E.g., ever since the GIF patent I keep hearing about how compression algorithms are something trivial and obvious. Well you invent a good new compression algorithm if it's that trivial. _Then_ you can say it's trivial. No, really. Try it.
E.g., I keep hearing the same about various movie and sound codecs. (A la "waah! MP3 shouldn't have been patentable!") You know what? _You_ come up quickly with a good codec, if that's trivial. I'll tell you a secret: back in the early 90s I actually tried coming up with my own algorithm to compress game movies. Turns out I had no bloody clue where to even start.
E.g., I keep hearing about how cryptographic algorithms are no-brainers and shouldn't be patentable. No shit, Sherlock? You try coming up with a new secure algorithm over the weekend, and only then you'll have earned the right to say it's trivial. In practice what virtually every "smart" programmer comes up with is some snake oil idea, like xoring the output of the random number generator to the input stream. Ask a real cryptographer why that's easier to crack than a brown paper bag.
Etc.
To cut it short: It only seems trivial because someone explained an existing algorithm to you already. But try actually inventing a new one. You'll quickly discover why such things are discovered by mathematicians not code monkeys.
In practice some people had to sit and _work_ to come up with that stuff. Sometimes for years. It also took a lot of testing. And someone had to pay for that research work. It's no less research work than, say, a pharmaceuticals company researching and testing a new drug.
Now I do understand that it's fashionable on
However, here's a new idea for all those complaining about patents: if you really want to convince me of your moral high ground, why don't you do the exact opposite? Why don't _you_ give a new algorithm away, instead of asking that others give you stuff for free? Go, actually _invent_ something new, and put it in the public domain.
"Try it and see" with _commercial_ games? Yeah, that's got to be a great plan. Might as well spare 100$ for Windows, even if at the expense of blowing 40$ for each game which doesn't work. Or doesn't work well. Or seems to work, but after 10 hours you hit a brick wall compatibility-wise. Or works only until you update some library.
;)
Why, with only 5 such games you've already paid $200 to save $100. We really need more such financial plans
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against WineX or anything. Au contraire.
I'm just against the idea that "try and see" even starts to cut it when we're talking commercial programs. (Except for those who pirate games on p2p networks, in which case "trying" yet another game costed nothing. I wish they died a very slow and very painful death.)
The thing about SimCity is IMHO that, basically, it's a bunch of gameplay decisions to balance, rather than bias. You can view it as either "it proves that low taxes are good" or as "it proves that you need high taxes, or you can't evolve" or anything in between.
But in the end it's your bias you're projecting, rather than the game's. I could very well play without mass transit, for example.
Most of the positives and negatives of any action exist realistically, rather than necessarily trying to hammer some political point.
E.g., overpopulation, no highways and low funds, you can see the effects in some of the urban concentrations in Eastern Europe: some of those cities ended up with their streets looking like after a level bombing in barely a few years. Very literally. Extremely high traffic and not enough maintenance does that.
Industrial polution? You can see that very well in Eastern Europe too. Some mining towns for example were literally covered in black dust. And for an example of mis-placing industry, some of those ended up with silly stuff like cement factories without filters _in_ the city. Not only were the buildings covered in dust, but just passing through the area would get your face covered in dust. It didn't take years, it took less than an hour to covere everyone in pollution.
The reason you don't see it that bad in most western towns are precisely those regulations and ordinances.
I.e., all those problems are hardly something left-wing or right-wing or whatever. They exist IRL.
There are plenty of games whose designers just can't seem to refrain from preaching, so no point in singling out any one of them. Even some arcade-style 3D shooters can't refrain from basing the whole story on stuff like showing you the consequences of some government policy or failure to address the designer's pet peeve.
The usual "problem" with many of these games, though, is that they usually start from the conclusion, rather than gently leading you to it. Unless you're already of the right ideology, most are too unsubtle to even reach for the goal of good propaganda: not even looking like propaganda.
In fact, I'd even say that the ones you remember as propaganda are the ones who failed at being good propaganda.
The game medium can be used much better than that, IMHO. The very structure of a story-based game revolves around suspension of disbelief, and gradually getting you to accept bigger and bigger impossibilities and absurdities as reality.
A good RPG campaign for example (either PnP or computer-based) might start with the party or hero in an inn. Or doing some other thing which can be immediately believed, because it's not abnormal in any way. And gradually guide you through more and more bewildering situations, ramping it up slowly enough so you don't suddenly lose suspension of disbelief.
It just begs to be mis-used into goading the player into suspending disbelief in an ideology, rather than in battling dragons or whatnot.
But basically, yeah, I'm not really saying anything new. I'm basically, yeah, saying that a political party might as well start paying for that kind of a work. And maybe also get a good writer to come up with the story, for a change. (Most game plots are basically more like written by programmers turned game designers, than by really persuasive novelists.)
There's a differemce between having a teme, and having a political message or ideology to force-feed you.
You can have a theme while mostly avoiding politics.
E.g., probably the most obvious example is SimCity. Even though you're playing a political figure (a mayor), the game is actually not about politics, and doesn't try to convince you that one political side is better than the other. You're not playing a Republican mayor, nor a Democrat mayor, you're just playing A mayor trying to plan your city.
E.g., take the games "Capitalism" and "Capitalism 2". Regardless of what you might infer from the title, the game actually refrains from any political comment. It doesn't tell you stuff like "bleedin' heart liberals are costing the economy a fortune", nor "greedy right-wing powermongers are pushing everyone into poverty." It doesn't even try to show you any long term effects and lessons from your paying bigger salaries, or raising the prices, or whatever.
Heck, it doesn't even try to convince you that that capitalism is the best thing. It just is the premise of the game. You're an ideal capitalist, in an ideal capitalist market. (Something as inexistant IRL as ideal communism.) The game doesn't even try to model the RL or its events, but sticks to a theoretical capitalistic world, where there everything is a commodity, there are plenty of suppliers directly competing with each other, and entry barriers in any industry are low. (E.g., quite literally in the game it costs exactly as much to research and produce CPUs or TFT displays as to research and produce roller skates or biscuits.) The world just _is_ that way, there is no greater ideological enlightenment in it, now go make some money in it.
E.g., Steel Panthers. It's probably the most detailed WW2 strategy/tactics game. The theme is WW2. Yes, we all know what happened back then, we all know who were the evil guys, etc. But the game refrains from making any comment outside the scope of military combat. Whether you want to lead a battallion of German Tigers, or one of Soviet JS-2 tanks, or American Shermans, is up to you. The game keeps track of their armour slope, not of their ideology.
And so on.
Basically, again, it _is_ possible to have a theme without turning it into a lame lecture in "my ideology is better than yours." And I wish more people refrained from preaching when they design a game.
No, I don't want games to lecture me in global warming. No, I don't really need a lecture in whether corporations are good or bad, and which kind of party would best defend me from them. Etc.
I see all this pining for the "way the internet was". And I don't get it.
All the problems we're having are precisely _because_ of the open and unregulated way the Internet was. The Internet was designed on the assumption that everyone will be nice, stick to the RFCs religiously, etc. Noone put much thought into the "well, what if they don't?" part. That's the worst design anti-pattern possible and the nemesis of security.
And unsurprisingly that shiny-happy-optimistic approach has failed again and again. E.g., it didn't even take _that_ long for someone to figure out that by intentionally not conforming to the RFCs they can syn-flood and crash a machine.
It's like preaching the ideal society where there are no laws, rules or authorities, and everyone can do whatever they please. It will be such an awesomely nice place, as long as everyone will be nice to each other. But they surely will, right?
Except it's not a realistic scenario.
This is probably off-topic, but IMHO you're applying the lessons from the dot-com boom in the wrong context.
It's a different goal here.
What dot-coms had as a goal, and where they failed, was making money. That was their failure.
They (or enough of them) did not fail at getting readers on their site. All those forums and chatrooms and flash games actually worked monumentally well to get people to visit the site often.
The dot-com problem was that noone had a plan to make those people pay. You had a horde of people trolling your forums, reading your articles and clicking on your site all right. In some cases enough of them that the bandwidth costs alone piled up like crazy. You just didn't have them reaching for the wallet.
In this case, however, the goals are a bit different. You don't want necessarily people to pay a monthly fee to access the site. You want them to at least come back and read the candidate's boring "news alerts".
And I'd say that to that end some of those dot-com tactics weren't _that_ bad.
You are partially right. Yes, a lot of companies are just focused on milking as much money as possible out of their customers.
:) Of course, it probably wouldn't get past the beancounters and marketeers, who'll likely instead want something which just screams "VOTE FOR X!!!" in your face. But still, just showing that a subtle and relatively effective politically tainted game would be possible. At least theoretically.
(Been there. Had the boss royally pissed off at me when I told the customer that, no, they don't need an uber-sophisticated custom solution to solve their problem. "Are you nuts?!! Are you out of your mind?!! We're trying to take their money, not tell them that they could solve that cheaper!!" On the bright side, after that he never took me to those 6 hours meetings any more.)
On the other hand, I'd disaggree that it is a waste of time. Games can be a very immersive experience, and can get a subtle message accross _very_ efficiently.
Now I'm not talking about ham-fisted smacking someone over the head with your political message. "Shoot money with president bush's head" is too unsubtle IMHO to actually do anything.
As another poster wrote, "Propaganda's greater achievement was convincing the world that it doesn't exist." I.e., the ideal propaganda (game or not) is one which doesn't look like propaganda at all. Failing that, you'll want one that can pass for non-propaganda.
The way I'd design a political game, if I had to, would be pretty much following the structure of a political speech. I also assume a big-ish budget game.
1. Start with some truths. Not necessarily good for you. Neutral stuff is good. Gets people in a mood to nod to the rest of the stuff too.
E.g., it's a fact that there's been a war in Iraq. Or it's a fact that there are homeless people. Or that there are gang wars. Etc.
Start the game with that. Don't even try to colour it it politically, unless it comes very naturally.
2. Continue with some truisms. Stuff which is technically true, but not necessarily even relevant for your message or in other ways supporting your conclusion.
By this time you start colouring stuff your way.
3. Feed them the conclusion. If you did a good job of convincing them to nod through 1 and 2, they'll swallow it too.
Remember it's about being subtle. People are more eager to believe what they think is their own conclusion, than yours. And it still has to seem a game.
Don't give them directly something like "vote for us because we'll protect you from evil offshoring corporations." Give them something which might fit the game. E.g., protecting a candidate from an assassin, sent because said candidate is opposing international corporations.
Don't give them something like "Vote for us, because we'll stop pollution." Give them a game set in a world, which, absolutely incidentally, is destroyed by polution and plunging into anarchy.
Also remember that games are rather long affairs and played in episodes. I don't think many people sat and played, say, KOTOR for 30 hours straight, from beginning to end. So you don't necessarily want a linear snowing the audience, stretched over the whole game. Several snow-jobs, following the same truths-truisms-conclusions paths, might work better. E.g., one per game level or episode.
Just an idea
Well, yes, but the innovative part is the whole monitoring and calculations that happens there. XML is nothing more than one of the many possible data formats used, and only for a tiny little part of the system. It's just one of the many possible "glues" between the systems which do the actual work. Maybe a cleverly selected glue, but nothing more nevertheless.
Basically: saying that XML is the important part there, is like saying that tin is the most important part in your computer. I mean, hey, it's what keeps those components on the motherboard. It's got to be the most important part, right? If we used more tin, we'd have a much faster computer. (Just in case anyone doesn't get the joke, no, it's other parts made of silicon that are far more important there.)
Same with this. Whether the system works well or not, and its advantages are because of the whole idea and design behind it, not just because of the XML buzzword. If you just slapped an XML-based server on a building, it would do exactly _nothing_ by itself. It's the rest of the system that actually accounts for any power savings.
And IMHO the sooner we get past this mindless fetish about buzzwords, the better we'll all be in the long run. "Woo! It has XML, XSLT, EJB, DRM, JMS, and a dozen other buzzwords! It must be great! Dunno what it does, but all those buzzwords _must_ make it work great!"
Makes me think of the stereotypical horde of lemmings jumping off a cliff. Everyone else does it, so it _must_ be great. Jumping off cliffs is the way of tomorrow!
Well, no. If it works well, it's because someone actually did some real analysis and design. If they actually studied the problem and decided which technologies to use, but much more importantly: which _not_ to use.
Lemmings which can just make a list of all the fashionable buzzwords... and then need man-decades to make a dysfunctional product that wastes 6 seconds per request just parsing XML data again and again, those are a dime a dozen. (BTW, that's not a joke. I actually benchmarked 6 seconds of pure CPU time just in XML parsing per request in an application here.) It's those who know when _not_ to use a fashionable buzzword that are the real architects.
And the next thing you know, you also have to answer stuff like:
/. crowd it's only MS that writes buggy crap ever.)
- Look, that nifty web-based backgammon game no longer works since you installed that Mozilla crap. (It used ActiveX, so no wonder.)
- Look, the site I uploaded my digital photos to no longer works. (It used client-side VB Script.)
- Look, the forum I was talking to my friends on shows awfully wrong, and some bits are even missing. (It was designed for IE only.)
- Look, that other little game on a site doesn't work any more either. (It was an applet written for MS's quirky Java implementation.)
- Look, my browser just crashes on that other site I used to visit. (Both Opera and Mozilla do occasionally crash. Much as if you listen to the
- Look, I can't even do online banking any more. (Another site made just for IE.)
- Look, this other site is completely broken and no longer reacts to my clicking on links. (At least the Firefox 0.8 I use at work is idiotic enough to think that some popups I've clicked a link for, are still "unwanted".)
And so on. Basically giving someone Mozilla or Opera as a 100% replacement for IE, is like giving them a truck as a 100% replacement for their auto. It just isn't that.
We geeks love to put up with crappy browsers, software/hardware incompatibilities, and recompiling 10 libraries just to make something work. Feels macho.
Joe Average doesn't. He doesn't really care about "MS is evil" or technicalities "look, Opera has these 10 annoying features that you'll probably disable anyway, so it's technically better than IE." (E.g., gestures.) The browser is for him like the TV set: just a window to see the web through. If the new "superior" TV set can't show the stations Joe wants to see, Joe will go back to the old "inferior" one. Same for IE.
Just in case you folks were wondering why do those "idiot" users go back to IE. Maybe because they're not the idiots there. Maybe because it actually works. Just some wild ideas for when you're bored, I guess.
"Now instead of saving one life, how about an entire platoon of young soldiers? How about a third-grade class? One-hundred innocents? A thousand?"
;)
What I'm even more concerned with is: if it's acceptable, how long until it's used to fabricate imaginary threats that we're all saved from?
How long until it's not just used to find a nuke, but to get someone to "confess" that they were planning to build a nuke and blow up Washington DC? Stuff like, "hey, he's a loner, his parents were arabs, he's opposed the Gulf war and he's a bit too active in a newsgroup about nuclear physics. We _know_ he must be up to no good, now to just torture him and find the details."
You mention saving a school class. Remember the witch hunts after some school shootings? There were a ton of nerdy students who were persecuted just because they weren't social or were wearing a black coat. People who never harmed a fly or threatened anyone (au contraire, they were the ones getting bullied), but somehow everyone just _knew_ that they're the next shooter. Just because they wore a black coat.
Now let's bring torture in that scenario. Can you see how easy it would be to fabricate evidence of some non-existant plot to slaughter the whole school? Just torture them until they sign a confession that they already had an exact kind of shotgun in mind and were planning to do it next tuesday.
Whoppee! We're heroes! Our torture saved a whole class, in the nick of time. Not. In practice that's just one innocent whose life was destroyed, and that class never was in danger to start with.
Again, that's not even phantasy. Stuff like that actually happened.
The Eastern European countries and Soviets let their police torture as much as it pleased to "solve" their cases. And unsurprisingly they'd _always_ solve a case. They'd just grab a suspect, and tortured him until he/she confessed.
Since you speak of psychological torture: One case I've heard about and which truly revolted me was that of some poor bastard accused of a crime he supposedly commited while he wasn't even there. The communist police eventually threatened to bring his old grandma into custody and beat her up too, because she was in the area at the time and as such a potential accomplice. The guy caved in and signed the confession. Another case solved with speed and efficiency, eh?
And again, look at the "holy" Inquisition. Millions of averted satanic conspiracies, all confessed and signed. Whop-de-do. The Inquisition were real heroes to save us from all those plans to summon demons and plagues. All those evil summoners could have wiped out most of Europe and plunged the rest into anarchy, if they hadn't been thwarted in time, eh?
_That_ is the danger I'm concerned about. At which point the government becomes more dangerous than any terrorists? Speaking of your sliding scales, at which point saving few lives lives is worth letting the government torture and unjustly imprison/deport _millions_? (Stalin in the USSR did just that.) Ten? A hundred? A thousand? How about "never"?
History is a funny thing. The same Europe, circa 1930, shows what happens when you're willing to bend over and waive your rights in exchange for immediate short-term benefits.
E.g., to some Germans it must have looked like a great trade to support a dictator, in exchange for stabilizing the economy. Next thing you knew, millions of Germans were marching to death camps, or were tortured by the Gestapo. Not just German citizens of other nationalities, which already was evil. If you look at some pictures from those camps, a _lot_ looked like the nazis' retarded "super-human" ideal, but ended behind barbed wire anyway.
That's the problem with giving a retard a blank cheque to do whatever he pleases. Soon he might well please to get rid of you.
That's why the consititutional rights and liberties keep governments in check. Because a government can be a good thing, or can be worse than all terror groups put together. Look at nazi Germany or Soviet Russia: the many millions of their citizens they killed and the terror they maintained among their own citizens far surpass what all terror groups put together did.
Yeah, that would be the ideal situation. If any game actually ran two reviews for any game, a regular shiny happy one and a "bitter gamer" column telling me in how many ways it sucks... well, I'd send the money for a lifetime subscription right now.
Here's some free clue for you: so instead of maybe hundreds attacked by terrorists in a year, you have thousands tortured by your own government? Well, gee, that has got to be an improvement ;)
And if you think that Bush & Co acting like panicked idiots and harrassing innocent citizens is what kept you safe, let me give you another theory: there is no further need to terrorize the Americans, since they are pretty good at staying terrorized anyway ever since.
Given that the main tool and purpose of any terror group is by definition spreading terror among the civilian population, in the USA I'd say the terrorists have already won. Big time. They've managed in one attack what they haven't managed anywhere else in the world: keeping a whole country in fear for _years_. Gee, Bin Laden must be so proud.
Furthermore:
- the USA has managed to piss off most of its allies
- the USA seems to be determined to give up more and more freedoms each day, and turn into more of a joke than a symbol of freedom
- the USA helped remove the _secular_ government of Iraq (Osama and Saddam were practically enemies) and now Iraq is well on the way to become yet another fundamentalist nation. Just the way Osama wanted it to be, all along.
And so on. You know what? I'll take passive and appeasing over that any day.
European countries already have to deal with terrorist attacks every year. E.g., see the bombing in Spain. I'm sure I've seen mentions of it even on tech sites.
But you know what? We still didn't devolve into a scared mob led by aggressive retards. We also didn't use it an excuse to either torture people or invade muslim countries for oil. We didn't burn mosques down, nor deport random arab-looking people each time someone detonated a bomb.
So get over it. The whole "oooh, scary terrorists, let's let the government fuck us 7 ways to sunday" scare in the USA just make me laugh. And the funny coloured alert level codes each time someone thought the neighbour's cat acts funny, really give me the fits of laughter.
You haven't even seen a fraction of the terror attacks the rest of the world has seen. You know how many terror attacks you've had in the USA last year? Exactly _zero_. Nil. Nada. Zilch. Nix.
And you still use that piss-poor excuse to justify torture or giving totalitarian powers to an illiterate retard. (Bush Jr.) You want to torture innocents for what? For a terror threat you _don't_ _even_ _have_? Geeze...
Here's an idea: those constitutional rights are there to protect _you_. If you let a retard take that away from you, in the name of a bogus terrorist scare, it is _you_ who'll have a problem, not the terrorists.
Here's another idea: How about taking a hint from the rest of the world already? You're the mightiest nation on Earth, for fuck's sake. Might as well finally start acting that way, instead of screaming in terror each time Bush Jr scared himself by thinking about the bogeyman under his bed.
I've read that theory too, and it's a bloody stupid idea on several counts.
For starters it would mean that there were _no_ predators over a certain size. (They all look like they're made to walk, rather than run.) Now in and by itself, that would be unusual, but not necessarily impossible. There aren't any predators the size of an elephant nowadays.
What it wouldn't exmplain though, is why did several of the herbivore evolve defenses. Why did the triceratops, for example, need those horns and a massive bone shield, if not for defense? Why did other species grow basically armour plates? What was the evolutionary advantage of that, in the absence of predators?
Nature doesn't create useless stuff like that. If you want a reasonable approximation of the triceratops, take the boar. It can gore something in front with the tusks (whereas the triceratops had horns, but same idea). And while the boar doesn't have a bone shield, it rubs its shoulders to resin producing trees. The resulting hair and resin mixture is basically the same kind of material as your motherboard. It's a sort of armour. I.e., again, you have a smaller and faster equivalent of the triceratops.
Why did it need to evolve that way? Well, for defense. The forward shield and tusks allow it to gore a wolf or two.
The observation that "the T-Rex couldn't run, therefore it couldn't hunt" is also stupid because it only considers half the equation. Yes, the T-Rex couldn't run. Not just because of the small arms, but the bone sizes are all wrong for running. But here's the fun part: neither could its prey.
You don't necessarily need to _run_ to be a predator. You just need to move (in whatever way) faster than your prey. Even if it's walking, or flying, or swimming, or rolling on wheels, or whatever else. What counts is whether you can catch a prey, not whether your kind of locomotion looks like what we'd call running.
Basically the T-Rex only needed to walk faster than its intended prey. Bear in mind that we're talking a 40 ft beast. Assuming that a reasonable amount of its body mass was in leg muscles, it could likely pull up to 11 mph walking speed. As long as its big bulky victims (which again, couldn't run either) walked slower than that, the T-Rex could find a meal.
To understand the tiny arms, you also have to understand the context of walking at that size. Body weight increases with the cube of the weight. Muscle strength increases only quadratically with their diameter. I.e., the bigger you grow, the more you have trouble moving fast.
It's very likely that to maintain a quick stride, the T-Rex needed a _much_ higher percentage of its body mass to be concentrated in its leg muscles, than, say, a chicken would have. The body itself had to be as lightweight as possible, and the legs were massively muscular to move it. Any useless weight, such as the arms, was a _disadvantage_, so the evolutionary pressure was for them to grow smaller.
You can have a userfriendly program which is also designed, coded and reviewed with security in mind, you know. Or you can have a totally unusable mess which also is buggy and exploitable.
Let me tell you something about torture.
It's only good for one thing: getting some innocent bugger to "confes" anything you want to hear, so you can then hold a fake trial and execute them. That's why it's been used so much for the last 10 millenia or so, and is still loved by dictators.
Think just of the _millions_ (literally, and we even have the records) who confessed to flying on broomsticks, having sex with the devil, summoning vile demons and plagues, signing pacts in blood with Satan, etc, at the hands of the Inquisition. Stuff that isn't even physically _possible_, but enough torture got that crap "confessed" anyway. That's the kind of bullshit that torture produces.
You get a fellow snug on a rack and torture them enough, they'll tell you any _lie_ you want to hear, just to make it stop. You just have to bring them to the point where even death looks like a nicer alternative.
But for actually obtaining _intelligence_ it's fucking useless. What you get is whatever _you_ had already decided you want to hear, not trze information you didn't know. I.e., you could just as well just act on your mis-conceptions and prejudice, and spare the torture part, since you'll get exactly there anyway.
So you know what will actually happen in your "terrorist with a nuke" scenario? You'll torture some innocent arab who probably didn't even like the fundamentalists at all in the first place. And you'll keep torturing him until he tells you whatever false "confession" you wanted to hear, just to make the pain stop.
Will you find your nuke? No fucking way. But now you have a "confession" so you can execute or deport an innocent.
Well gee... if that's what the "land of the free" is supposed to mean...
Sorry, there is no silver bullet that will make it impossible to write insecure code. There will never be. Much as it's every PHBs pipe dream to buy some magical +5 Cloak of Security that will allow them to make secure programs with clueless monkeys instead of programmers, it's just that: a pipe dream.
You know why? Because the compiler can't know what you're trying to do with that data.
No, I'm not only talking about array index bounds checking, and other easy stuff. That's the easy part. If that's what your +5 Magical Cloak of Security solves, no offense, but you don't even _start_ to have an idea about security.
Most real security decisions have to do with _what_ kind of data you're handling. (No, not just data type, but for example is it a user ID? A password? Etc.) And _how_ could that be mis-used or attacked, in the very speciffic context of your program? (E.g., can I just edit my ID to that of another user, without knowing their password?)
E.g., a mistake I've seen here involved just passing the (sequentially generated) user ID around in the URL after login. The result? Anyone could edit that ID and pretend to be another user. User 0 was predictably the super-user, so anyone editting their ID to that would have absolute power over that site.
E.g., in the same program each user should have only been able to see the records they "own". (Like in a web-email program you should only see your own emails, either received or sent, but not those from other users' inboxes.) What did those morons do? They checked ownership only when generating the list of links to the records. But not when displaying or editting the actual data. So if you editted the URL instead of only clicking on the supplied links, you could see and edit _any_ user's data. (Including the super-user's password, among other things, as if impersonating him via the ID wasn't enough.)
E.g., a more insidious mistake was failing to even think about accountability and non-repudiation. A user cancelling their account would cause a cascaded delete of any records related to them in any way. A user could do any crap, delete their account, and... he had never existed, according to the system. Every single trace of them had been erased.
Etc. I could go on and fill a tome with such mistakes that had nothing to do with buffer overflows or pointers. They're _conceptual_ problems. They're a problem of the very _design_.
Those are things no compiler or other tool will ever automatically solve for you. Again, because no compiler will ever know the _semantics_ of that data. What does it mean, in which ways is it used, what are the risks associated with it? No compiler can answer that for you.
There is no buying magical talisman and getting an easy way out. The _only_ real way out is to stop hiring only the cheapest monkeys, and actually bring someone who has a clue. It may not fit your ideal of practicality, but it's the _only_ way out nevertheless.
Well, that reminds me: you know what I'd _really_ want to see? The Bitter Gamer Magazine that Gamespy's Fargo came up with in a humour column.
I mean, forget positivism. It's not that I hate games or anything, but there are thousands of sites and magazines already who focus on telling me why I should love a game. I'd like just one who tells me all the bad, ugly, or unfinished aspects. Really tell me all that the reviewer didn't like about it.
Just so I can pair it with one of those all positive reviews, and actually make a more informed decision. I'd like to actually know both the good and the bad parts.
'Cause it sure as heck doesn't look like a honest reviewing process to me.
At the very least it's dishonesty. They're lying to their readers (in the case of their sites) and to their customers (in the case of Atari.)
It also goes contrary to all that a review was supposed to mean. At that point, it's no longer a review, it's a paid _ad_. Just when I thought that the lame-ass ads disguised as reviews (some with ludicrious scores like 110%) of lame ragazines of the past were finally dead and burried, here comes an even lamer variant. One that even in the fine print isn't actually marked as an ad.
Lame. Real real lame.
Personally I'd like to see a list with sites which do this kind of crap, just so I know never to read them again.
Unfortunately, it still boils down to economics.
E.g., the fact that electricity is cheaper at night didn't go as unnoticed as you'd think. At least here there _are_ flats with heaters that store heat at night, and release it as needed during the day. I've lived for 2.5 years in a flat heated like that.
It worked basically like this: it was a large box with a fan. It would heat something up inside at night, starting at midnight, or 1AM during DST. (I could tell by the loud noise of the relay switching on for all those in the house.) Then if it needed to heat up your room, it would start a fan, blowing air through it, thus blowing warm air into the room. If not, not.
The problem was that it sucked, if you'll pardon my being blunt.
For starters, since there was no way of knowing in advance whether you'll need heating the next day, you'd leave it on all time anyway. I.e., it would store heat (and add to your electricity bill) even in July. Just in case tomorrow it'll be cold.
Second, even if it didn't need to start the fan, it still was a big hot metal box in the room all day long. Even in July.
That was one solution. It's cheap, but it doesn't work that well, nor really reduce the energy use. (I can imagine other people turning on the air conditioning during the day in summer, just to offset the poorly thought out heating.)
Another solution would be a huge pack of batteries in the basement. It's very efficient, but it's not cheap. Think an UPS, except we're talking something so big that it can supply your whole house with electricity for 16 hours straight. Including computer, TV, air conditioner, fridge, oven, washing machine, etc. Nope, that's not cheap at all. Even with whatever you save on electricity at night, it'll be half an eternity before it pays for itself.
Basically that's generally the problem with all these obvious solutions. Not that noone thought of them before you, but that actually they're not that good a solution. That's really why they're not used by everyone.
And making laws to mandate doing something awfully expensive and/or inconvenient, is going to help... how? Now I'm all for new laws when they're justified, but here all it would do is force society as a whole to expend trillions on one collection of inefficient things, instead of more useful things to do with that money.
I still say it's better to just let economics run their course in this case. When the electric car with a trailer, which you mention, will be a cheaper or more convenient solution than a gas car, people will start buying those. And when there'll be good money in selling them, someone _will_ sell them. It may not be GM, but there'll be _someone_ who wants those people's money.
All of thise, of course, is just IMHO.
To clarify it some more: a lot (if not most) of human progress was made on loans. Loans of resources from the colonies. Loans of, yes, polution. (The industrial revolution was not a pretty sight. Dumping black smoke into the atmosphere and poison into rivers was the norm.) Loans of free space to build houses and farms on. (E.g., USA's expansion to the west.) Etc.
Heck, you could argue that the very invention of the human state and the start of civilization was made on a loan. In Messopotamia "inventing" the state was possible because a few people controlled the water supply for irigations, giving them an unprecedented power over others. However, it was a loan. They destroyed even the little fertility of those lands in the process, and eventually even irigation didn't work that well any more. Basically it was a loan of fertility.
The advanced civilization of the ancient Egyptians was also built upon a loan: a loan of time. Being shielded from both sides by the desert saved them from needing a too large military to defend themselves. With the invention of the war charriot, however, that changed. They were no longer safe from the outside world, and they got conquered. Later it also meant that the outside world was no longer safe by them. (They learned very fast how to build their own chariots.)
Etc.
So basically I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with loans. If we all had waited for the perfect technology to appear, and hadn't accepted the loan from the devil in the guise of a less perfect technology, we'd still live in caves and wear stylish leopard skin loinclothes. Even the state would have never appeared, because the Messopotamians would still be waiting for the perfect agricultural technology instead of starting irrigating.
You're right, and if I hadn't posted here already, I'd mod you "Insightful". But, to some extent, that _is_ economics and capitalism.
Can it be cheaper to plunder non-renewable resources? Well, actually it is. In the short time anyway.
Can it be cheaper in the long run? Actually, as you noted it boils down to taking a loan. Sometimes it's better to take a loan to get a factory started, than to wait 200 years for the perfect technology to arrive.
And, well, it actually already was more efficient. If we hadn't started with coal engines and then gas engines, and just waited for the perfect technology, we'd probably still be in the late middle ages.