Well, cheer up. It might still mean that the Romulan's weapons hit some nearby console when they think they're targeting the warp core. Of course, it would be better if they didn't hit anything at all, but I'm affraid that the law that for each hit a console must explode in a shower of sparks and send some ensign flying across the room is more immutable than the laws of refraction;)
It wasn't on a computer. It was pen and paper. If it were nowadays, I'd say some kind of phone trick, as that kind of cheating is becoming the favourite kind, but we're talking a year when cell phones were rarer and bulkier and such things as tiny bluetooth headsets didn't exist. Bluetooth wasn't even invented yet, for that matter.
If there's a simple explanation, I'd love to know it, but it's not as trivial as bringing a floppy.
Well, back when I was in university they didn't use these newfangled tools, or at least didn't advertise it, but I've seen an uncanny example of that in an exam.
There were these two people who... well, what they handed in, looked _identical_. Not only the same program, but same indenting, same variable names, heck, same line breaks in their text part. Cheating in an exam doesn't come any clearer than this, right? They must have copied from each other, right? Well, the professor thought the same too. Wanted to flunk both of them.
The problem is that these two guys had sat in the diagonally opposite corners of the room. They had been as far apart from each other as you can physically get within the constraints of the given space. Took a while to convince the professor of that, and I must say, seeing the sheets of paper side by side was enough to not just make the professor's point, but almost make me question my memory too.
Unlike, say, our glorifying the cunning of Hannibal at Cannae? Last I've heard, it's still taught at all military academies, and was the ideal of such generals as Schlieffen of Schlieffen Plan fame or as Eisenhower. Or of Scipio at Zama? The unorthodox tactics of Nelson at Trafalgar? Alexander and his new tactics, plus such use of corruption as just buying the loyalties of some enemy cities? It seems to me like we worship a cunning general as much as any culture does.
Yes, probably not everyone knows exactly what was Nelson's innovation at Trafalgar, or why it worked, but then I guess a lot of Chinese don't know jack squat about Sun Tzu's tactics either.
Plus, that wasn't my main point. My main point is that you can't take feints and cunning tactics in war as proof that a culture values dishonesty and corruption during peace too. The same Greeks who were in awe of the cunning Odysseus and his Trojan Horse stratagem, would have probably executed anyone who tried the same kind of deception in a business transaction with his fellow Greeks.
I'm not sure why that's relevant to the discussion at hand. War isn't normal morals, and misinformation and acting unpredictably has been part of it in western warfare too, long before they heard of Sun Tzu.
E.g., even heard of the Trojan Horse? How's that for deceit in warfare? That's about a war from the 12'th century BC, while Sun Tzu is generally accepted to have lived in the 6'th-5'th century BC, while some place him as late as 3'rd century BC.
Where was that morality of western religions then? Or maybe using war strategies to make general points about a culture's morality is just silly. Society doesn't work by the same rules, not here and not in China.
But if you want to discuss civillian morals in the same age as Sun Tzu lived, how about The Rape Of The Sabines episode? The Romans had a shortage of women, so they invited the citizens of nearby cities (Sabines included, but not only) to a great festival in honour of Neptune. Then at a signal from Romulus himself they killed the men -- their guests! -- and took the women for themselves.
Does it sound to you like those western moral systems were that great? We're not talking about warfare feints and deceit, we're talking an atrocity against their neighbours they were at peace with. (Though not for long. It put Rome at war with three cities immediately.)
And lest you think it's just an ancient thing, the practice of "rehabilitating marriage" in which a raped woman is given to the rapist to save honour only came to a screeching halt in Italy in 1965. It used to be more like described as two teenagers having run away together, but it turns out most cases were abduction and rape by force, as a way to make a girl's family marry her to some guy she didn't want.
1. Well, during re-entry it's not entering nose-first, but belly-first, so the wings basically like air brakes more than like wings. I'm not sure if making it more aerodynamic for flight like an aircraft would actually be an impediment there. It would still have the aerodynamics of a parachute when re-entering belly-first anyway.
2. Well, "glide" is technically accurate, but maybe painting a slightly wrong image for the layman. That thing is losing altitude (falling) at 50m/s (about 110mph or 180 km/h) even in its best glide phase. And it's glide-to-drag ratio is more comparable to a parachute, and I don't mean paraglider, than to an aircraft even at touchdown, during earlier phases let's just say it's got about half as much lift/drag as a squirrel;)
The angle of descent at touchdown is actually 20 degrees, which doesn't sound like too steep, but it's about 7 times steeper than a commercial airliner landing. By comparison to just about any fixed wing aircraft, it's not akin landing an anvil or the proverbial lead duck;)
Not saying it's a bad thing, since it does have a _lot_ of altitude and speed to shed, and it's obviously doing a good job at thazt. More like just saying, for the benefit of whoever needs that kind of clarification, that it never actually acts that much like a normal glider, not even on the very last part. Or at least not like a glider you'd want to pilot for fun. All it can do is fall, and quite rapidly at that, just in a more controlled manner. It's a shape to do just one thing: fall down from 340,000m or so (about a million feet) to the ground without going *SPLAT* on touchdown. While techically there is some gliding involved, I think the best description of its role for the layman is more like "rigid parachute" than "glider."
You know, though, it occurs to me that as soon as you give people some way of communicating, it will become used for sex. As soon as humans discovered how to make a mud figurine, it ended up a mis-shapen female with disproportionate breasts. And I'd suspect that one day we'll discover that writing in Mesopotamia did not evolve out of pictures of wares on inventory tags, but out of trying to draw boobs on a clay tablet.
Gives me an idea. Forget SETI and warp drives, just make a giant drawing like this somewhere:
(.Y.)
You'll have some lonely teenager Vulcan crashing into it before it's even finished.
Well, I don't see MMO trial accounts going extinct any time soon either. Most of the time it doesn't even boil down to more than a flag on the server, as implementation effort for a trial account. And after the first expansion pack or two, it's not even like they're giving out some huge value in letting one play the first 20 levels.
So basically it seems to like EA might only manage to lose its single player division.
You know, actually that gives me an idea for a counter-hypothesis about how a first contact would go. I mean, if we're at attributing to aliens carricatures of human stereotypes...
April 5'th, 2063, 11:00 AM: The USS Phoenix, the first warp-capable Earth vessel, launches with Zephram Cochrane aboard.
April 5'th, 2063, 11:30 AM: The USS Phoenx deploys the warp generators and breaks the warp barrier.
April 5'th, 2063, 11:35 AM: The warp surge is detected by the Vulcan ship T'Plana-Hath.
April 5'th, 2063, 11:45 AM: After a brief attempt at hailing it, the Vulcans conclude that the alien craft must contain tentacled aliens intent on raping their women, as documented in the several Hentai transmissions they had intercepted.
April 5'th, 2063, 11:50 AM: The T'Plana-Hath unloads all its fore torpedo tubes into the Phoenix.
April 5'th, 2063, 11:55 AM: The T'Plana-Hath deploys several quarantine beacons beyond Jupiter's orbit to warn other ships to stay away from the newfound menace.
Or maybe, on the contrary, let's really project human motives upon them. But the real ones, instead of idiotic bullshit designed just to make headlines.
Do humans get so busy with computer games that the whole species, all 6 billions of us, forget to even mine the resources we need or trade or plough the fields? Did any country yet starve because they were too busy playing to go to the supermarket, or go open the supermarket for that reason? No? Then why should we assume that any aliens would?
Because colonization was usually driven by wanting some resources which are abbundant over there, and are in short supply over here. Even if sometimes that meant "living space". That's what drove people to put a lot of money into building a big ship and risk their own lives on the high seas. Or by extension in the void of space. If you're going to invest billions in a space freighter and risk perishing to a micrometeor impact between here and there, you'll expect some suitable ROI. That ROI is what would drive people to do that.
So if there actually was that ROI to be made in space travel and colonization... am I the only one who thinks it's idiotic to imagine that a whole civilization, down to the last member, from CEOs and presidents to the last bum on the street, would go "nah, we'll just sit and grind the epic gear, thank you very much?" How do they survive at all, if nobody is even interested in working or making some form of income?
And if they are, how come they'd reject _only_ space colonization in favour of sitting and playing games, but not the other forms of work, including making those games?
Or maybe the more mundane reality is that that ROI just isn't there. Maybe the energy to haul stuff between stars really doesn't make it economical to mine the dilithium some 20 light years away.
And if c really is the speed limit, and space being that big, maybe nobody is interested in investing now in a ship which would return with the goods in 1000 years. Just because they don't even know which resources will actually sell that far in the future. Less than 200 years ago, aluminium was more expensive than silver or even gold, so I guess if we sent a ship to establish a colony and mine the most expensive stuff we can get there, it would have been aluminium. Then almost over night a new process was invented for producing it, and price fell like a rock. Or as little as 100 years away, coal was the fuel of superpower navies, and wars and willy-waving games were waged over access to it and to coaling stations. Then it all moved to oil, and now to nuclear reactors.
Or maybe they just don't need the extra space, and hence the colonies. Everywhere on Earth where we got sanitation, antibiotics, etc, population stopped growing and in fact started to decline. People used to make a lot of kids to beat the odds, but if their survival is all but guaranteed, they stop after 1-2 kids. We already simply don't need to offload some population somewhere else. In a million years (if we don't nuke ourselves first) the whole Earth population might be in a couple of quaint villages surrounded by thousands of miles of woods. And need colonies like a fish needs a bicycle.
But, of course, those are rational reasons. Nah, let's go with a sensationalist idiocy instead, like "maybe they're playing video games." Geesh.
Well, if it stayed confined to the level of the CEO and upper management, I wouldn't even have anything about it. The problem is that the culture of meetings _does_ tend to extend downwards to the level of those guys programming the netbooks.
For a start each of those managers who get dragged to fill someone's 15-20 person meeting, in turn will fill their time with dragging other groups of 15-20 persons into meetings of their own. And then come the corporate structures often overimposed over the normal pyramid, so the same guy not only ends up telling his boss about what a Netbook can do, but also do the same in the architecture meetings, strategy meetings, controlling meetings, budget meetings, meetings to convince the Mordac The Preventer Of Information Services from the IT department why he needs XA transactions activated in the database, etc.
I've actually seen companies where basically even the guy who's technically just in charge of 3 other guys writing the GUI for some Web front-end, ends up spending half of his week in meetings.
so *ahem* 30 hours of talk and 10 hours of "work"? no wonder some companies can't get shit done.
Actually, for some people it's more like 30 hours of talk and 10 hours of organizing the next meeting, preparing the powerpoint slides, and walking between meetings. Some people simply need to fill their day with something, and they'll expand it to fill all that time they need to fill.
Dunno, it seems to me like when you look at the before and after, the sheer difference in hours wasted, would still make a difference by itself.
Before: 30 hours per week in meetings, not just for the berk calling all those meetings in a row, but for all the people dragged to them instead of having that time to manage their own projects or teams. If you add the time spent preparing the meetings, walking to/from meetings, etc, that doesn't leave many hours (if any at all) for anything else _but_ meetings.
Let's be generous and say they got... what? 2 hours per week left for actually doing whatever pays the company's bills? (Almost no company is paid just to hold meetings.) 4 hours?
After: 2 hours a week in meetings. Let's be generous and add another 2 for preparing, passing the minutes, going to/from the meetings, and it still leaves 36 hours to do actual work.
That's a 9 times increase or more.
Even if those people are just as inefficient as before, the sheer difference in hours wasted will make a huge difference.
Good grief, if they had 30 hours of meetings per week, and probably a few more hours walking to the next meeting and whatnot, when did they have time to do any actual work? I'm affraid that just hearing about spending 30 hours a week in meetings tops everything I've ever read in a Dilbert strip.
That gives me kind of a snarky idea, though. I've long been under the impression that most meetings (or a large part of the time allocated to them) falls basically into two categories:
- substitute for a social life (think: the boss just wants to talk to some people)
- responsibility avoidance (think: we all talked about it for hours, hence nobody is personally responsible for any given decision or lack thereof. Sorta like why they give firing squads blanks too.)
There are of course sub-categories and nuances (e.g., the crying on each other's shoulder instead of taking a decision kind of meeting, or the kind that's not just a substitute for social contact, but a one-sided occasion to brag too.) But I think that as top-leve categories, those two would account for more than half of the time wasting.
I wonder if the reduction in meeting hours just has to do with, well, if you give a lonely boss email and IRC and IM and all, he can get his socializing fix without preventing his subordinates from working in the process.
Well, it's inflation all right. A more literal description of what they're doing is more like 2- and 5-dollaring the players (playing a federation klingon in STO is 2.4 dollars, extra character slots are 5 dollars), but that kinda doesn't roll off the tongue as nicely. Or in the case of Sony more like 5- and 10-dollaring. I guess you pay more for brand name or something;)
Not necessarily. It seems to me like diming and quartering the users is what's winning outside of the WoW world.
There are a _lot_ of games which live by selling in-game items for RL cash these days. It has the carrot of being theoretically free to play if you don't want to pay, and you even get a lot of leaway with the quality. People are quick to point out that it's free, even when they run into problems. And you don't need all that many people who go crazy with the purchases to more than make up for those who don't. There are people who spend thousands on having the top mounts, and the top extra enhancements on their PvP gear, and if you don't get them with the PvP, you get them when they get kicked out of endgame raids for not having enough +damage on their sword or +block on their shield.
And the model is sadly expanding even to paid subscription MMOs.
E.g., last time I tried EQ2, Sony was already selling a metric buttload of stuff for real currency for it, on top of needing a full subscription, and needing the Station Access expensive subscription if you want more than 4 character slots (total, not per server!), and having to buy the extra mini-expansion packs to get your extra class powers, and so on.
E.g., STO, much as I love the game otherwise, it's starting to bother me that by now half the playable races can only be bought for "cryptic points" (read: RL money.) And so are any character slots above 3 (4 if you bought lifetime subscription) which isn't enough even to play all 3 classes on both Fed and Klingon sides. And a few more things, not all of them cosmetic. And that bonuses for buying collectors' editions and whatnot include stuff like a purple quality bridge officer, or the only point defense system in the game.
Heck, even in single player games these days, it's getting to the point where half the content is available only by paying extra, even from day one. We're no longer even talking about expansion packs developped later, but stuff that was planned from the word "go" to be removed from the actual game and sold separately for real cash. E.g., The Sims 3 launched from day zero with more content for sale for extra money on their site, than got shipped with the game. E.g., racing games which ship with hardly any tracks _or_ cars, but you can buy the actual tracks or cars for extra cash.
Sorry, it seems to me like that's the real direction that the gaming industry is taking, not the direction of spending as much money and manpower as WoW did.
I guess I can't even blame them. You could spend years polishing a game, hiring people who can do at least the elementary maths to balance it, filling it with more content than the competition... and it still may or may not be a dud. Or you can just quarter and dime the players. Hmm. I can see why the latter is more popular.
Reminds me of a Woody Allen quote, "I was watching a ballet at City Center, and I'm not a ballet fan at all, but they were doing the dying swan, and there was a rumour, that some bookmakers had drifted into town from upstate New York, and that they had fixed the ballet. Apparently there was a lot of money bet on the swan to live."
I doubt that the goal is just to subsidize whoever might be behind. For example Lineage isn't all that small, actually. Even if they meant strictly Lineage 1, it would still have almost a million players in Korea, although it never got too popular outside Korea. That one game alone would pad a lot of that difference between 79% of the market (which they claim to throttle) and 100%. And honestly, much as WoW has 11 million total, I wouldn't be surprised if in Korea alone Lineage actually has more Korean players. So why is it _not_ on the list?
It seems to me more like a simple case of taking sides, than any coherent vision of how a healthy MMO ecosystem may look like.
Well, a lot of the push isn't just to sell new products, but to sell the newer and more expensive top-tech products. If you just buy the same 20 year old technology that's by now out of patent, you'll probably pay a fraction of what the top-tech now-in-3D stuff would cost at the same resolution.
E.g., at a quick look through the prices of an online store around here (bearing in mind that I did not take the time to look for the cheapest, it's PAL, and it includes the German VAT), and let's pick the 32 inchers and LCD as a more common size for the average Joe, I see a no-name 50 Hz one at 300 Euro (ok, 299), while an 100Hz 3D-ready Sony is 700 (well, 699) and a 200 Hz LG is a hefty 800 (ok, 799).
That's really most of what drives the R&D nowadays. You don't want to just sell Joe a cheap replacement for his grandfather's TV, and barely have a profit margin at all because you're competing with everyone in that segment. (Even your average Elbonian factory can make an ancient PAL CRT TV by now.) You want to sell Joe the latest gizmo with all the cool sounding features and a mile long list of patents, for 2.5 times the price.
And really, to sell to him at all. If you convince him to buy some top end gizmo, that'll be a Sony, Samsung, LG, Toshiba or a couple of other companies total. If you're one of those, the chances it will be _you_ who sell him that new TV just went up. But if he just buys a replacement for his grandfather's TV, with none of the super-duper new features, he might as well buy a cheaper no-name thing from one of a hundred other companies.
Heck, you want to have the cool new features to advertise even if he buys from the bottom end of the models, because you can still be on his mind as that company who makes all the high-tech cutting-edge stuff. People tend to make a hash of it, and their knowing that, say, Sony makes all those cool models X and Y of TVs with all the features, might still convince them to buy a Sony even when they're actually buying the bottom-end model Z which really isn't any different from what anyone else sells in that segment. Sorta like how NVidia has to have a GTX 480 card to sell, because its trouncing ATI in the benchmarks will give people the "NVidia makes faster cards" oversimplified idea, when they're actually buying a cheap 8400 GS. Sony too wants to give people that oversimplified "Sony makes good, high-tech TVs" idea too, basically.
Well, actually, the article really is more like going the usual fanboy route of "whoever doesn't buy into the same hype I did, is in some way deffective." Yes, there are some people like you who don't see 3D. But there's a big step from there to basically extrapolating that everyone who says 3D movies are a gimmick must be deffective. It's conflating two notions that aren't equivalent at all.
But what I really wanted to say is: probably it's neither. You're not missing much, but you're probably not as "enhanced" as you think either.
_I_ can see 3D. I even have the expensive NVidia 3D glasses and 120 Hz monitor to go with them, and it doesn't take an optometrist to just put them on and see that yep, it looks different.
But it's equally trivial to just enable or disable it and see if it makes any difference. The truth is, once you get past the techno-gizmo "wow, they can do THAT nowadays?" factor, it makes very little difference.
It's not like the difference between BW and colour. With that difference, you could basically go "oh, I didn't know she had a green dress", because really there is no easy way to automatically reconstruct the colours in the scene.
But with 2D vs 3D, basically the brain is already damn good at extrapolating the depth in that scene. And we've all had decades of 2D TV, and 2D photos, and 2D video games, etc, to train at that. Making the movie 3D essentially doesn't give you much information you didn't already _have_ anyway.
Or to put it even shorter, and as the subjective impression is really all that matters: yep, to me 2D looks like the real thing too, once I stop thinking about its being 2D or 3D and just watch the damned movie or play the damned game. I can _see_ the 2D or 3D when I look for that, but when I'm immersed in the action or the plot, really, the brain extrapolates that extra axis anyway.
In the end, as someone _who_ can see 3D, I actually decided to dump that stupid 120Hz TN monitor with its washed 6 bit colours in the corner, and get a good 8 bit MVA monitor instead. The colours and saturation look grrrreat, and as I was saying the 3D isn't all that important anyway.
No offense, but I _hate_ people who stop to make conversation with a clerk while 20 people queue behind them with other problems. I remember spending an hour in line when I had an actual problem, because half the people in front of me were trying to chat up the clerk about the weather or about their kids. And half of those didn't even have any reason to clog a clerk's time instead of using the ATM in the hall.
And then there are those who'll try to chat up the cashier at a checkout line at the supermarket. Usually even I can tell that that cashier isn't interested, and is just spewing more mono-syllabic responses than the stereotypical husband, but some old lady just won't shut the fuck up with trying to start a chat anyway.
I always figured out that those must be just some lonely people, but if it's just trying to treat a corporation like real people... here's a thought for them: see those people behind you? Those are real people too. Just a thought.
But then it makes no sense to say they acquired it from bacteria.
Genes don't transfer from bacteria to mammals. Genes transfer between bacteria, via exchange of plasmids. (Which is one reason why antibiotic resistance spreads so fast.) But your cells don't have the mechansims to acquire such a plasmid, and wouldn't know what to do with it. You don't even have the regulating proteins or the ribosome to deal with a _circular_ DNA strand, and one outside the nucleus at that.
At this point someone will probably have the knee-jerk reaction to explain how viruses can account for horizontal gene transfer, 'cause they read that notion at some point and it sounded so smart. Not so fast. Viruses are quite specialized in what they attach to. They depend on very specific nucleotid sequences, which is why you can have a virus that attacks your upper respiratory tract, but can't affect your lungs, or viceversa. Viruses that prey on bacteria, the so called "phages", have very specialized capsids and mechanisms to inject themselves into a bacterium, and are even more specialized in what they can attach to. Which is why for example you can spray meat with a phage which destroys Lysteria, but won't destroy your intestinal flora. A virus that's suited to infect both a bacterium _and_ your gut lining and transfer genes from one to the other, is almost an impossibility, and at any rate to the best of my knowledge none was ever identified.
What I'm saying is more that a lot of that evolution happened because of ignorance. Certainly using the word for "legislative assembly in session" to mean an "object" wasn't the proper use of the word, and using the word for "blessed" to mean "silly" even less so.
And if you look at the evolution of languages, at least for English, French _and_ German, we have:
- wrong use of declension and conjugation (at least for those that evolved from Latin, the successive distortions in that aspect would give a Cicero or Tacitus a heart attack)
- wrong use of pronouns (let's just say, when you hear someone going, "what about them apples?", that's exactly the kind of wrong use that got you a "the" in the first place. Both old German and Latin had no such thing, and it was that exact misuse of pronouns that got us that.)
- contractions and outright moving letters to the wrong word (e.g., "an adder" was once properly "a nadder")
Etc.
And it sure must have hurt understanding at some point or another.
Basically: Let's face it, we all had a bunch of ancestors whose vocabulary sucked;)
Unfortunately there is no "anymore" there. People never cared much for using words exactly how their grandfather did. Otherwise you'd still be speaking like in Beowulf. What is nowadays the right way to read and write in modern English would have been the _awfully_ wrong way a mere couple of hundred years ago. (E.g., "knight" used to be read exactly like it's written, with a hard K, an I like in "dim", and the G and H actually pronounced. Look at the mangled way you're reading it nowadays. Tut tut.)
Any modern language in fact consists of the typos, mis-pronunciations and funky kewl-kid ways of using words, from the ages past.
Meanings change too. "Seelie" once meant holy or blessed, now it evolved into "silly". "Thing" once meant a session of a ruling assembly (think: your city council in session), and by extension the assembly itself. Then it evolved to mean by extension the agenda of that meeting, then a topic on that agenda, then the object that will be the topic of that discussion, then eventually just the modern meaning of "thing."
There's your "shame" vs "pancake" right there.
So, you know, essentially complaining about kids using words wrong compared to _your_ seelie standard, is essentially hypocritical. Unless you're also going to go, "man, look at how we mangled the beautiful language of Shakespeare. Whar is this junk I'm speaking?";)
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Well, cheer up. It might still mean that the Romulan's weapons hit some nearby console when they think they're targeting the warp core. Of course, it would be better if they didn't hit anything at all, but I'm affraid that the law that for each hit a console must explode in a shower of sparks and send some ensign flying across the room is more immutable than the laws of refraction ;)
It wasn't on a computer. It was pen and paper. If it were nowadays, I'd say some kind of phone trick, as that kind of cheating is becoming the favourite kind, but we're talking a year when cell phones were rarer and bulkier and such things as tiny bluetooth headsets didn't exist. Bluetooth wasn't even invented yet, for that matter.
If there's a simple explanation, I'd love to know it, but it's not as trivial as bringing a floppy.
Well, back when I was in university they didn't use these newfangled tools, or at least didn't advertise it, but I've seen an uncanny example of that in an exam.
There were these two people who... well, what they handed in, looked _identical_. Not only the same program, but same indenting, same variable names, heck, same line breaks in their text part. Cheating in an exam doesn't come any clearer than this, right? They must have copied from each other, right? Well, the professor thought the same too. Wanted to flunk both of them.
The problem is that these two guys had sat in the diagonally opposite corners of the room. They had been as far apart from each other as you can physically get within the constraints of the given space. Took a while to convince the professor of that, and I must say, seeing the sheets of paper side by side was enough to not just make the professor's point, but almost make me question my memory too.
Unlike, say, our glorifying the cunning of Hannibal at Cannae? Last I've heard, it's still taught at all military academies, and was the ideal of such generals as Schlieffen of Schlieffen Plan fame or as Eisenhower. Or of Scipio at Zama? The unorthodox tactics of Nelson at Trafalgar? Alexander and his new tactics, plus such use of corruption as just buying the loyalties of some enemy cities? It seems to me like we worship a cunning general as much as any culture does.
Yes, probably not everyone knows exactly what was Nelson's innovation at Trafalgar, or why it worked, but then I guess a lot of Chinese don't know jack squat about Sun Tzu's tactics either.
Plus, that wasn't my main point. My main point is that you can't take feints and cunning tactics in war as proof that a culture values dishonesty and corruption during peace too. The same Greeks who were in awe of the cunning Odysseus and his Trojan Horse stratagem, would have probably executed anyone who tried the same kind of deception in a business transaction with his fellow Greeks.
I'm not sure why that's relevant to the discussion at hand. War isn't normal morals, and misinformation and acting unpredictably has been part of it in western warfare too, long before they heard of Sun Tzu.
E.g., even heard of the Trojan Horse? How's that for deceit in warfare? That's about a war from the 12'th century BC, while Sun Tzu is generally accepted to have lived in the 6'th-5'th century BC, while some place him as late as 3'rd century BC.
Where was that morality of western religions then? Or maybe using war strategies to make general points about a culture's morality is just silly. Society doesn't work by the same rules, not here and not in China.
But if you want to discuss civillian morals in the same age as Sun Tzu lived, how about The Rape Of The Sabines episode? The Romans had a shortage of women, so they invited the citizens of nearby cities (Sabines included, but not only) to a great festival in honour of Neptune. Then at a signal from Romulus himself they killed the men -- their guests! -- and took the women for themselves.
Does it sound to you like those western moral systems were that great? We're not talking about warfare feints and deceit, we're talking an atrocity against their neighbours they were at peace with. (Though not for long. It put Rome at war with three cities immediately.)
And lest you think it's just an ancient thing, the practice of "rehabilitating marriage" in which a raped woman is given to the rapist to save honour only came to a screeching halt in Italy in 1965. It used to be more like described as two teenagers having run away together, but it turns out most cases were abduction and rape by force, as a way to make a girl's family marry her to some guy she didn't want.
Western morals and religious rules, eh?
1. Well, during re-entry it's not entering nose-first, but belly-first, so the wings basically like air brakes more than like wings. I'm not sure if making it more aerodynamic for flight like an aircraft would actually be an impediment there. It would still have the aerodynamics of a parachute when re-entering belly-first anyway.
2. Well, "glide" is technically accurate, but maybe painting a slightly wrong image for the layman. That thing is losing altitude (falling) at 50m/s (about 110mph or 180 km/h) even in its best glide phase. And it's glide-to-drag ratio is more comparable to a parachute, and I don't mean paraglider, than to an aircraft even at touchdown, during earlier phases let's just say it's got about half as much lift/drag as a squirrel ;)
The angle of descent at touchdown is actually 20 degrees, which doesn't sound like too steep, but it's about 7 times steeper than a commercial airliner landing. By comparison to just about any fixed wing aircraft, it's not akin landing an anvil or the proverbial lead duck ;)
Not saying it's a bad thing, since it does have a _lot_ of altitude and speed to shed, and it's obviously doing a good job at thazt. More like just saying, for the benefit of whoever needs that kind of clarification, that it never actually acts that much like a normal glider, not even on the very last part. Or at least not like a glider you'd want to pilot for fun. All it can do is fall, and quite rapidly at that, just in a more controlled manner. It's a shape to do just one thing: fall down from 340,000m or so (about a million feet) to the ground without going *SPLAT* on touchdown. While techically there is some gliding involved, I think the best description of its role for the layman is more like "rigid parachute" than "glider."
You know, though, it occurs to me that as soon as you give people some way of communicating, it will become used for sex. As soon as humans discovered how to make a mud figurine, it ended up a mis-shapen female with disproportionate breasts. And I'd suspect that one day we'll discover that writing in Mesopotamia did not evolve out of pictures of wares on inventory tags, but out of trying to draw boobs on a clay tablet.
Gives me an idea. Forget SETI and warp drives, just make a giant drawing like this somewhere:
(.Y.)
You'll have some lonely teenager Vulcan crashing into it before it's even finished.
Well, I don't see MMO trial accounts going extinct any time soon either. Most of the time it doesn't even boil down to more than a flag on the server, as implementation effort for a trial account. And after the first expansion pack or two, it's not even like they're giving out some huge value in letting one play the first 20 levels.
So basically it seems to like EA might only manage to lose its single player division.
You know, actually that gives me an idea for a counter-hypothesis about how a first contact would go. I mean, if we're at attributing to aliens carricatures of human stereotypes...
April 5'th, 2063, 11:00 AM: The USS Phoenix, the first warp-capable Earth vessel, launches with Zephram Cochrane aboard.
April 5'th, 2063, 11:30 AM: The USS Phoenx deploys the warp generators and breaks the warp barrier.
April 5'th, 2063, 11:35 AM: The warp surge is detected by the Vulcan ship T'Plana-Hath.
April 5'th, 2063, 11:45 AM: After a brief attempt at hailing it, the Vulcans conclude that the alien craft must contain tentacled aliens intent on raping their women, as documented in the several Hentai transmissions they had intercepted.
April 5'th, 2063, 11:50 AM: The T'Plana-Hath unloads all its fore torpedo tubes into the Phoenix.
April 5'th, 2063, 11:55 AM: The T'Plana-Hath deploys several quarantine beacons beyond Jupiter's orbit to warn other ships to stay away from the newfound menace.
Or maybe, on the contrary, let's really project human motives upon them. But the real ones, instead of idiotic bullshit designed just to make headlines.
Do humans get so busy with computer games that the whole species, all 6 billions of us, forget to even mine the resources we need or trade or plough the fields? Did any country yet starve because they were too busy playing to go to the supermarket, or go open the supermarket for that reason? No? Then why should we assume that any aliens would?
Because colonization was usually driven by wanting some resources which are abbundant over there, and are in short supply over here. Even if sometimes that meant "living space". That's what drove people to put a lot of money into building a big ship and risk their own lives on the high seas. Or by extension in the void of space. If you're going to invest billions in a space freighter and risk perishing to a micrometeor impact between here and there, you'll expect some suitable ROI. That ROI is what would drive people to do that.
So if there actually was that ROI to be made in space travel and colonization... am I the only one who thinks it's idiotic to imagine that a whole civilization, down to the last member, from CEOs and presidents to the last bum on the street, would go "nah, we'll just sit and grind the epic gear, thank you very much?" How do they survive at all, if nobody is even interested in working or making some form of income?
And if they are, how come they'd reject _only_ space colonization in favour of sitting and playing games, but not the other forms of work, including making those games?
Or maybe the more mundane reality is that that ROI just isn't there. Maybe the energy to haul stuff between stars really doesn't make it economical to mine the dilithium some 20 light years away.
And if c really is the speed limit, and space being that big, maybe nobody is interested in investing now in a ship which would return with the goods in 1000 years. Just because they don't even know which resources will actually sell that far in the future. Less than 200 years ago, aluminium was more expensive than silver or even gold, so I guess if we sent a ship to establish a colony and mine the most expensive stuff we can get there, it would have been aluminium. Then almost over night a new process was invented for producing it, and price fell like a rock. Or as little as 100 years away, coal was the fuel of superpower navies, and wars and willy-waving games were waged over access to it and to coaling stations. Then it all moved to oil, and now to nuclear reactors.
Or maybe they just don't need the extra space, and hence the colonies. Everywhere on Earth where we got sanitation, antibiotics, etc, population stopped growing and in fact started to decline. People used to make a lot of kids to beat the odds, but if their survival is all but guaranteed, they stop after 1-2 kids. We already simply don't need to offload some population somewhere else. In a million years (if we don't nuke ourselves first) the whole Earth population might be in a couple of quaint villages surrounded by thousands of miles of woods. And need colonies like a fish needs a bicycle.
But, of course, those are rational reasons. Nah, let's go with a sensationalist idiocy instead, like "maybe they're playing video games." Geesh.
Well, if it stayed confined to the level of the CEO and upper management, I wouldn't even have anything about it. The problem is that the culture of meetings _does_ tend to extend downwards to the level of those guys programming the netbooks.
For a start each of those managers who get dragged to fill someone's 15-20 person meeting, in turn will fill their time with dragging other groups of 15-20 persons into meetings of their own. And then come the corporate structures often overimposed over the normal pyramid, so the same guy not only ends up telling his boss about what a Netbook can do, but also do the same in the architecture meetings, strategy meetings, controlling meetings, budget meetings, meetings to convince the Mordac The Preventer Of Information Services from the IT department why he needs XA transactions activated in the database, etc.
I've actually seen companies where basically even the guy who's technically just in charge of 3 other guys writing the GUI for some Web front-end, ends up spending half of his week in meetings.
Actually, for some people it's more like 30 hours of talk and 10 hours of organizing the next meeting, preparing the powerpoint slides, and walking between meetings. Some people simply need to fill their day with something, and they'll expand it to fill all that time they need to fill.
Dunno, it seems to me like when you look at the before and after, the sheer difference in hours wasted, would still make a difference by itself.
Before: 30 hours per week in meetings, not just for the berk calling all those meetings in a row, but for all the people dragged to them instead of having that time to manage their own projects or teams. If you add the time spent preparing the meetings, walking to/from meetings, etc, that doesn't leave many hours (if any at all) for anything else _but_ meetings.
Let's be generous and say they got... what? 2 hours per week left for actually doing whatever pays the company's bills? (Almost no company is paid just to hold meetings.) 4 hours?
After: 2 hours a week in meetings. Let's be generous and add another 2 for preparing, passing the minutes, going to/from the meetings, and it still leaves 36 hours to do actual work.
That's a 9 times increase or more.
Even if those people are just as inefficient as before, the sheer difference in hours wasted will make a huge difference.
Good grief, if they had 30 hours of meetings per week, and probably a few more hours walking to the next meeting and whatnot, when did they have time to do any actual work? I'm affraid that just hearing about spending 30 hours a week in meetings tops everything I've ever read in a Dilbert strip.
That gives me kind of a snarky idea, though. I've long been under the impression that most meetings (or a large part of the time allocated to them) falls basically into two categories:
- substitute for a social life (think: the boss just wants to talk to some people)
- responsibility avoidance (think: we all talked about it for hours, hence nobody is personally responsible for any given decision or lack thereof. Sorta like why they give firing squads blanks too.)
There are of course sub-categories and nuances (e.g., the crying on each other's shoulder instead of taking a decision kind of meeting, or the kind that's not just a substitute for social contact, but a one-sided occasion to brag too.) But I think that as top-leve categories, those two would account for more than half of the time wasting.
I wonder if the reduction in meeting hours just has to do with, well, if you give a lonely boss email and IRC and IM and all, he can get his socializing fix without preventing his subordinates from working in the process.
Well, it's inflation all right. A more literal description of what they're doing is more like 2- and 5-dollaring the players (playing a federation klingon in STO is 2.4 dollars, extra character slots are 5 dollars), but that kinda doesn't roll off the tongue as nicely. Or in the case of Sony more like 5- and 10-dollaring. I guess you pay more for brand name or something ;)
Viking spam? I can imagine it.
"Hear ye! Hear ye! For a few gold you could have a tool the size of Odin's spear!"
Not necessarily. It seems to me like diming and quartering the users is what's winning outside of the WoW world.
There are a _lot_ of games which live by selling in-game items for RL cash these days. It has the carrot of being theoretically free to play if you don't want to pay, and you even get a lot of leaway with the quality. People are quick to point out that it's free, even when they run into problems. And you don't need all that many people who go crazy with the purchases to more than make up for those who don't. There are people who spend thousands on having the top mounts, and the top extra enhancements on their PvP gear, and if you don't get them with the PvP, you get them when they get kicked out of endgame raids for not having enough +damage on their sword or +block on their shield.
And the model is sadly expanding even to paid subscription MMOs.
E.g., last time I tried EQ2, Sony was already selling a metric buttload of stuff for real currency for it, on top of needing a full subscription, and needing the Station Access expensive subscription if you want more than 4 character slots (total, not per server!), and having to buy the extra mini-expansion packs to get your extra class powers, and so on.
E.g., STO, much as I love the game otherwise, it's starting to bother me that by now half the playable races can only be bought for "cryptic points" (read: RL money.) And so are any character slots above 3 (4 if you bought lifetime subscription) which isn't enough even to play all 3 classes on both Fed and Klingon sides. And a few more things, not all of them cosmetic. And that bonuses for buying collectors' editions and whatnot include stuff like a purple quality bridge officer, or the only point defense system in the game.
Heck, even in single player games these days, it's getting to the point where half the content is available only by paying extra, even from day one. We're no longer even talking about expansion packs developped later, but stuff that was planned from the word "go" to be removed from the actual game and sold separately for real cash. E.g., The Sims 3 launched from day zero with more content for sale for extra money on their site, than got shipped with the game. E.g., racing games which ship with hardly any tracks _or_ cars, but you can buy the actual tracks or cars for extra cash.
Sorry, it seems to me like that's the real direction that the gaming industry is taking, not the direction of spending as much money and manpower as WoW did.
I guess I can't even blame them. You could spend years polishing a game, hiring people who can do at least the elementary maths to balance it, filling it with more content than the competition... and it still may or may not be a dud. Or you can just quarter and dime the players. Hmm. I can see why the latter is more popular.
But I can't say I like it one bit.
Reminds me of a Woody Allen quote, "I was watching a ballet at City Center, and I'm not a ballet fan at all, but they were doing the dying swan, and there was a rumour, that some bookmakers had drifted into town from upstate New York, and that they had fixed the ballet. Apparently there was a lot of money bet on the swan to live."
I doubt that the goal is just to subsidize whoever might be behind. For example Lineage isn't all that small, actually. Even if they meant strictly Lineage 1, it would still have almost a million players in Korea, although it never got too popular outside Korea. That one game alone would pad a lot of that difference between 79% of the market (which they claim to throttle) and 100%. And honestly, much as WoW has 11 million total, I wouldn't be surprised if in Korea alone Lineage actually has more Korean players. So why is it _not_ on the list?
It seems to me more like a simple case of taking sides, than any coherent vision of how a healthy MMO ecosystem may look like.
Well, a lot of the push isn't just to sell new products, but to sell the newer and more expensive top-tech products. If you just buy the same 20 year old technology that's by now out of patent, you'll probably pay a fraction of what the top-tech now-in-3D stuff would cost at the same resolution.
E.g., at a quick look through the prices of an online store around here (bearing in mind that I did not take the time to look for the cheapest, it's PAL, and it includes the German VAT), and let's pick the 32 inchers and LCD as a more common size for the average Joe, I see a no-name 50 Hz one at 300 Euro (ok, 299), while an 100Hz 3D-ready Sony is 700 (well, 699) and a 200 Hz LG is a hefty 800 (ok, 799).
That's really most of what drives the R&D nowadays. You don't want to just sell Joe a cheap replacement for his grandfather's TV, and barely have a profit margin at all because you're competing with everyone in that segment. (Even your average Elbonian factory can make an ancient PAL CRT TV by now.) You want to sell Joe the latest gizmo with all the cool sounding features and a mile long list of patents, for 2.5 times the price.
And really, to sell to him at all. If you convince him to buy some top end gizmo, that'll be a Sony, Samsung, LG, Toshiba or a couple of other companies total. If you're one of those, the chances it will be _you_ who sell him that new TV just went up. But if he just buys a replacement for his grandfather's TV, with none of the super-duper new features, he might as well buy a cheaper no-name thing from one of a hundred other companies.
Heck, you want to have the cool new features to advertise even if he buys from the bottom end of the models, because you can still be on his mind as that company who makes all the high-tech cutting-edge stuff. People tend to make a hash of it, and their knowing that, say, Sony makes all those cool models X and Y of TVs with all the features, might still convince them to buy a Sony even when they're actually buying the bottom-end model Z which really isn't any different from what anyone else sells in that segment. Sorta like how NVidia has to have a GTX 480 card to sell, because its trouncing ATI in the benchmarks will give people the "NVidia makes faster cards" oversimplified idea, when they're actually buying a cheap 8400 GS. Sony too wants to give people that oversimplified "Sony makes good, high-tech TVs" idea too, basically.
Well, actually, the article really is more like going the usual fanboy route of "whoever doesn't buy into the same hype I did, is in some way deffective." Yes, there are some people like you who don't see 3D. But there's a big step from there to basically extrapolating that everyone who says 3D movies are a gimmick must be deffective. It's conflating two notions that aren't equivalent at all.
But what I really wanted to say is: probably it's neither. You're not missing much, but you're probably not as "enhanced" as you think either.
_I_ can see 3D. I even have the expensive NVidia 3D glasses and 120 Hz monitor to go with them, and it doesn't take an optometrist to just put them on and see that yep, it looks different.
But it's equally trivial to just enable or disable it and see if it makes any difference. The truth is, once you get past the techno-gizmo "wow, they can do THAT nowadays?" factor, it makes very little difference.
It's not like the difference between BW and colour. With that difference, you could basically go "oh, I didn't know she had a green dress", because really there is no easy way to automatically reconstruct the colours in the scene.
But with 2D vs 3D, basically the brain is already damn good at extrapolating the depth in that scene. And we've all had decades of 2D TV, and 2D photos, and 2D video games, etc, to train at that. Making the movie 3D essentially doesn't give you much information you didn't already _have_ anyway.
Or to put it even shorter, and as the subjective impression is really all that matters: yep, to me 2D looks like the real thing too, once I stop thinking about its being 2D or 3D and just watch the damned movie or play the damned game. I can _see_ the 2D or 3D when I look for that, but when I'm immersed in the action or the plot, really, the brain extrapolates that extra axis anyway.
In the end, as someone _who_ can see 3D, I actually decided to dump that stupid 120Hz TN monitor with its washed 6 bit colours in the corner, and get a good 8 bit MVA monitor instead. The colours and saturation look grrrreat, and as I was saying the 3D isn't all that important anyway.
No offense, but I _hate_ people who stop to make conversation with a clerk while 20 people queue behind them with other problems. I remember spending an hour in line when I had an actual problem, because half the people in front of me were trying to chat up the clerk about the weather or about their kids. And half of those didn't even have any reason to clog a clerk's time instead of using the ATM in the hall.
And then there are those who'll try to chat up the cashier at a checkout line at the supermarket. Usually even I can tell that that cashier isn't interested, and is just spewing more mono-syllabic responses than the stereotypical husband, but some old lady just won't shut the fuck up with trying to start a chat anyway.
I always figured out that those must be just some lonely people, but if it's just trying to treat a corporation like real people... here's a thought for them: see those people behind you? Those are real people too. Just a thought.
But then it makes no sense to say they acquired it from bacteria.
Genes don't transfer from bacteria to mammals. Genes transfer between bacteria, via exchange of plasmids. (Which is one reason why antibiotic resistance spreads so fast.) But your cells don't have the mechansims to acquire such a plasmid, and wouldn't know what to do with it. You don't even have the regulating proteins or the ribosome to deal with a _circular_ DNA strand, and one outside the nucleus at that.
At this point someone will probably have the knee-jerk reaction to explain how viruses can account for horizontal gene transfer, 'cause they read that notion at some point and it sounded so smart. Not so fast. Viruses are quite specialized in what they attach to. They depend on very specific nucleotid sequences, which is why you can have a virus that attacks your upper respiratory tract, but can't affect your lungs, or viceversa. Viruses that prey on bacteria, the so called "phages", have very specialized capsids and mechanisms to inject themselves into a bacterium, and are even more specialized in what they can attach to. Which is why for example you can spray meat with a phage which destroys Lysteria, but won't destroy your intestinal flora. A virus that's suited to infect both a bacterium _and_ your gut lining and transfer genes from one to the other, is almost an impossibility, and at any rate to the best of my knowledge none was ever identified.
What I'm saying is more that a lot of that evolution happened because of ignorance. Certainly using the word for "legislative assembly in session" to mean an "object" wasn't the proper use of the word, and using the word for "blessed" to mean "silly" even less so.
And if you look at the evolution of languages, at least for English, French _and_ German, we have:
- wrong use of declension and conjugation (at least for those that evolved from Latin, the successive distortions in that aspect would give a Cicero or Tacitus a heart attack)
- wrong use of pronouns (let's just say, when you hear someone going, "what about them apples?", that's exactly the kind of wrong use that got you a "the" in the first place. Both old German and Latin had no such thing, and it was that exact misuse of pronouns that got us that.)
- contractions and outright moving letters to the wrong word (e.g., "an adder" was once properly "a nadder")
Etc.
And it sure must have hurt understanding at some point or another.
Basically: Let's face it, we all had a bunch of ancestors whose vocabulary sucked ;)
Unfortunately there is no "anymore" there. People never cared much for using words exactly how their grandfather did. Otherwise you'd still be speaking like in Beowulf. What is nowadays the right way to read and write in modern English would have been the _awfully_ wrong way a mere couple of hundred years ago. (E.g., "knight" used to be read exactly like it's written, with a hard K, an I like in "dim", and the G and H actually pronounced. Look at the mangled way you're reading it nowadays. Tut tut.)
Any modern language in fact consists of the typos, mis-pronunciations and funky kewl-kid ways of using words, from the ages past.
Meanings change too. "Seelie" once meant holy or blessed, now it evolved into "silly". "Thing" once meant a session of a ruling assembly (think: your city council in session), and by extension the assembly itself. Then it evolved to mean by extension the agenda of that meeting, then a topic on that agenda, then the object that will be the topic of that discussion, then eventually just the modern meaning of "thing."
There's your "shame" vs "pancake" right there.
So, you know, essentially complaining about kids using words wrong compared to _your_ seelie standard, is essentially hypocritical. Unless you're also going to go, "man, look at how we mangled the beautiful language of Shakespeare. Whar is this junk I'm speaking?" ;)