That they're treating civilians as targets is clear, but where do they say it's like in a game?
It seems to me like there are more effective ways to dehumanize opponents and convince someone that the only good arabs are dead arabs, without video games. You just need half the country and their idiot ministers bleating about how Islam is the work of the devil, they're all terrorists, they're all hell-bent on destroying Christianity and the West, they all hate us for our freedoms, they all want Sharia courts in Washington DC, they're all child rapists like <insert isolated tribal incident<, they all want to be suicide bombers when they grow up, etc. And attribute to them some ways of thinking born out of the pure ignorance of the idiot minister or fundie banner-waver ascribing it to them. (E.g., if I see one more rationale which basically takes it as a fact that Muhammad is like Jesus for the Muslims, I might barf.) And how you might be letting some good people burn in Hell if you let the Islam spread.
And then give them guns with references to bible verses inscribed on their optics. (It actually happened.) And have idiot fundie sergeants introduce it as "the Jesus gun" in training.
With a sizable chunk of America being in that state of mind, where every single Muslim is a dangerous enemy, not by virtue of actually shooting at anyone or even having a gun or anything, but just by virtue of being Muslim... do we really need video games to explain why it was inevitable that someone just lets it rip on full auto and lets God sort them?
And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying _all_ America is like that. I know that a lot are very embarassed by their bleating fundie brethren. But when you have some tens of thousands of soldiers over there, if even one in ten is fighting a Crusade in his own mind, and is more concerned about his being elligible for the Rapture that'll come any day now than about peace in a few years, this kind of thing is pretty much doomed to happen.
It's sorta like for a high score all right, but not the video game kinda high score. More like about the kind that'll get some idiot in the top scores list in Heaven.
I'd say that even "democracy slows down progress" isn't necessarily true.
From a historical point of view, progress was all but halted when Europe was plunged into the absolute dictatorship of petty kings in the Middle Ages. And it's probably symptomatic that Renaissance was intertwined with putting various checks on that power. Be it the Magna Carta, or the weakening of the HRE, or the rise of the communes (cities whose citizens swore to stand together for their independence from the arbitrary rule of the local earl), or whatever equivalent. Progress happened when basically the king was in less of a position to tell the merchants and craftsmen and artists what to do.
The roots of what would later become the industrial revolution happened when the King and Church were no longer in a position to tell the merchants what price is right for the wares, what clothes they must wear, or how they must work the land, and so on. It's not even metaphor, those were things which were enforced, and breaking which was considered a capital sin (e.g., buying clothes above one's station was the mortal sin of vainglory). All in the name of forcing the society to work according to some idea of how it _should_ work.
All that iron-fisted guidance of how it all worked didn't exactly accelerate progress. And removing those brakes is what caused progress.
From a more "why it happened" point of view, well, there is no guarantee that the one guy (or one clique) with the power is actually more competent. And in some cases even interested in a progress, instead of preserving a status quo that favours them.
But even if they want to progress, it's all too easy to do the wrong things. Being able to sprint in any direction you wish without waiting for a committee to say "go", doesn't mean you can't run in the wrong direction entirely. E.g., witness the Qing dynasty's turning China from a country with cannons and flamethrowers and every bit on par with the west, to a mess of a place that had actually devolved technologically to polearms by the time they faced the British. Sure, they had the unchecked power to enforce anything they could without waiting for a committee -- and they actually went to such extremes as enforcing a mandatory haircut -- but did they enforce the right things? And was it progress? No, it was an era of steady regress.
And sometimes it's faster because they can make other people pay a price that we wouldn't otherwise find acceptable. E.g., sure, Stalin could industrialize the USSR very fast, but it was by literally starving millions of peasants to death so he could export their grain in exchange for technology and industrial equipment. Ask a Ukrainian about that era, if you want to be cruel. They might actually have some relative which literally died of starvation, or was summarily executed by the NKVD for still having enough to eat. Sure, it might be slower to do that in a democracy (except looking at what other countries did in the same era, not really), but that's also for a good reason.
Well, yes, but the difference between republic and democracy is just two turns of anarchy. 'Course, you just have to choose the right time, 'cause you just know someone out there has an army of anti-tank spearmen with your name on it the moment you're with your pants down;)
Actually, in a way, I can see the point. Seeing a health bar on the screen painted differently wouldn't cause anyone to think that they experienced a realistic simulation of being shot (*), and no dev claimed so. Whereas the whole thrust of this vest seems to be that if they vibrate a bit over that spot, it's teh real deal. That kind of a claim _is_ kinda trivializing it.
(*)Well, nobody except the politicians, of course. Those seem to think bunny-hopping along a corridor and clicking a mouse are going to train someone to be a super-killer and do just as well in practice. God knows it wouldn't be much farther off to think that a health bar is an accurate simulation of pain, and prepares people to keep shooting at the cops even after taking a few 9mm rounds. I eagerly expect to hear someone making that claim any time soon.
You're the fucking moron. Stress testing is not the same as what the author of that piece is talking about. Stress testing does not guarantee anything in a non-deterministic, non-reactive software model.
Ah, right, I guess all these years we've been using a model that was just randomly doing stuff with no cause or reason. Someone better hold a seance to tell Turing about that fundamental flaw in his machine. Oh, wait, he's one of those academics who should kiss your ass, right?;)
You seem to misunderstand my point. Yes, you'll never have a perfect system. But if you aim for anything less, you'll hit even lower.
And experience... well, I admire your optimism, but it was some pretty experienced teams that produced some of the worst bugs and vulnerabilities in history. The OS/2 Warp install bug which produced a non-bootable system when upgrading, for example, that was a major killer for IBM's hopes of market share. It wasn't done by some newbie inexperienced company.
Or as a more tame example, I've spent saturday night on Star Trek Online trapped on the Sol spacestation, because there wasn't a universe any more outside the space station. Eerily reminiscent of the "Remember Me" episode of The Next Generation, but I don't really think the devs were aiming to recreate that experience in STO. The servers for everything else than the space stations had crashed. They had been unstable all day too. There weren't many happy customers on Saturday, and it might just have lost them a chunk of subscriptions. It doesn't take too many of those to negate any savings from not testing thoroughly and generally from not fretting too much about finding and fixing everything.
That wasn't an inexperienced team. We're talking about a company who's made 3 MMOs so far. But they judged wrong. Or rather, as good as any wild uninformed guess about the unknown. Plus, again, they had aimed low (as Cryptic usually does) and unsurprisingly they hit even lower.
I don't believe there is any relevant experience which will prepare you for categorizing the bugs you didn't find.
Ask Toyota. But there is no need to despair. Toyota software researchers or anybody else who writes safety-critical applications should read this: How to Construct 100% Bug-Free Software. It can be done but we will need to change to a synchronous and reactive software model.
Ahh, the joys of the Dunning-Kruger effect: being too unqualified to realize one is unqualified.
The author of that blog post basically reinvented Stress testing (yes, software which can replay input sequences and even variations thereof, and compare the results to expectations, already exists and is used), but is too ignorant to understand that it exists, or why it's not a complete silver bullet. Hence he thinks he invented how to write 100% perfect software.
Well, so far that would be just ignorance at work. Too ignorant to realize ignorance.
But when he's sufficiently full of it to post stuff along the lines of "Academics can kiss my ass" when they disagree, now _that_ moves it to the realm of plain old stonking stupidity.
My question, though, would be how do you know which is which?
And before I even start, a thing I learned pretty early is that if you aim low, you'll hit even lower. If you aim for a B or C in school, 'cause, well, no point in fretting over not being exactly perfect, you start getting D's and lower. I should know, I actually tried that philosophy for half a year or so, before realizing that lesson. Partially because life doesn't throw you exactly the curve you were expecting, and partially because once you started making excuses and rationalizations, well, stretching the excuse just a little more or rationalizing a little further kinda comes naturally.
Same here.
But really, how do you know what you've _missed_? Because half the trouble with bugs is finding them in the first place. Something you didn't find (because finding the last little bug isn't worth it, right?) how do you know if it's a big one or a small one?
And if you found it and decided to ignore it, how do you know if that small bug isn't a symptom of something bigger? How do you know if that spurious failure to save the settings on the third page of a dialog buried 6 ft deep in menus, isn't symptomatic of a problem in a library function that is also called somewhere else too? How do you know if the same clever function -- or a version of the same clever hack from the same programmer -- isn't also used, say, when saving that 30 page form that the user has been editing? That's a big bug, especially when you deal with contracts worth hundreds of millions.
I mean, after all, the whole point is that you don't know exactly what line or method is causing it, or you'd have fixed it. So how do you know in which category to file the _unknown_?
You know, if 20 year olds were really that irresponsible and didn't even think about the implications of what they're doing, that would be a pretty scary world. In a lot of the world we trust people with a lot of stuff at 18 years old, which is even lower than 20. We trust them to vote for a start. We trust them enough to give them a loaded weapon and let them into the army. Etc.
The thought that we could have millions of 18 year olds with a loaded assault rifle in some guard tower, and unable to even think about the consequences of their actions, is pretty scary thought.
You know, I remember I was about 18 when I wrote a virus just for curiosity sake. (Yeah, I know, slow learner;)) Just for the reference, back then it meant the kind that copies itself at the end of executables (or for other viruses into the boot sector), rather than the modern day Internet worms.
It probably wasn't the most advanced virus out there, but it was a neat piece of assembly by _my_ standards, and I was pretty proud of it.
I actually considered releasing it into the wild, but basically... I dunno, something seemed _wrong_ with doing so. There was no way I could justify to myself doing something destructive to a lot of perfect strangers that had done me no wrong.
I didn't think of it as some formalized ethics system, or anything. Heck, I was almost allergic to even the idea of philosophy in any form. It seemed a pointless waste of time to sit and think about abstract artificial dilemmas, instead of doing something actually productive. Like code something. And I was quick to denounce anything that even remotely looked like artifficial and arbitrary social rules and conventions. But it just seemed wrong to do that anyway. Not because it conflicted with some abstract code or philosophy, but just it seemed wrong to do that.
I think in the end that that _is_ ethics.
So it seems hard for me to swallow a justification like in the summary along the lines of, "hey, at 20 you don't think about ethics." On the contrary, I would expect anyone who got to 20 to be perfectly capable of asking themselves "is it right to do this?"
Reminds me of a quote by Gene Fowler, "Keep the company of bums and you will become a bum. But hang around.with rich people and you will end up by picking up the tab and dying broke".
Especially given this kind of survival of the assholiest when it comes to who gets to be a CEO in the first place: Is Your Boss a Psychopath?
Don't assume that these guys care about you just because you married their daughter. Not about that daughter in the first place. Or about anyone else than themselves, really. If they did, they wouldn't qualify as psychopaths in the first place.
Though it might be a start if you just want to be their pet sycophant. But then again, if you wanted to be someone's sycophant and were any good at it, you wouldn't need that daughter to rise through the ranks. And you'd have probably become an MBA not a math nerd or a programming geek.
The term Caucasian came about became some German thought the prettiest white people came from the Caucasus region in Eastern Europe.
Considering how nationalistic Germans are, that guy must have felt quite strongly about it to pick some foreign group to be the role models of physical beauty.
The Internet has confirmed his wisdom... all the beautiful big boobed babes with charming accents come from the Slavic countries. Search for yourself and see.
Based on my extensive... erm... research in Internet porn, I have to wonder, if Johann Friedrich Blumenbach were alive today, would we end up calling it the Bohemian race? I mean, Silvia Saint, Angelina Crow, etc.
Pretty much because, yes, his opinion of races seems to have had mostly to do with how pretty he found their women. E.g., he started with the blacks being pretty much sub-human and justified it then by cherry-picking skulls and a good dose of phrenology (an opinion that would influence pseudo-scientific racism to this day.) Then he made an 180 degree turns when he met a black woman beautiful enough to fall in love with (in his own words.) He then proceeded to "prove" by the same anatomical analysis methods as before that verily they're every bit as smart and talented and everything as the Caucasians.
Could be worse, though. We could have a classification made by a gay dude with a foot fetish, for example:p
You know, I'm thinking one could do far more than just a table for $8500. I mean, ffs, get a plexiglas sheet with a matte side (or a white matte foil), a PC and a projector under the table, and you have exactly the setup with which they created the LCARS consoles in ST:TNG. Heck, get a graphics card with 4 outputs (e.g., from Matrox) and 4 projectors, and with a bit of tinkering so that the projected areas exactly touch each other, you can have quadruple resolution and cover a pretty wide table.
Now I'm not saying actually build a Star Trek console (although now I'm tempted to make just that:)) but the principle of the matter. What you have at the end of it is a large horizontal display on which you can project anything you wish, including maps, tables, enemies, whatever. Heck, add a couple of buttons for each player, and you can even have it rolling dice for you or whatever else.
And at any rate, at the end of the day, for that money or less you'll have not just a fancy table with drawers but a high-tech gizmo that's truly worthy of an alpha-nerd.
(Caveat: unlike in most packs in the animal kingdom where the alpha gets first mating rights, the alpha-nerd is the last to mate, if ever;))
Well, I guess that's what you get when people think with their gonads.
Plus, we're talking the 90's. A good scanner cost more than now and would have a lot worse resolution anyway. Digital cameras certainly were not what you'd expect everyone to have, so you could jolly well expect something scanned instead. A lot of computers still could do either just 16 colours or pitiful resolution. Dithering was almost the norm. Analog modems were still the norm even in the USA, which further put harsh limits on picture quality and size. Etc. I'm guessing people would be a lot more likely to swallow an image that looked like run through a fax.
And if you're offended by us joking about this, you may want to completely avoid the likes of George Carlin (joking about rape for example) or Jimmy Carr (joking about such topics as kids with leukemia) and really most comedians out there.
Dude, you haven't been paying attention. I don't want a human female. I want an orc female. Or a klingon one. Mmmm. Betazoid is borderline ok too, though;)
Hmm, ok, I guess that's what I get for not reading TFA. A dollar a minute _is_ a bit steep when I can get a couple of newbies as living shields for nothing:P
Heh. I thought it was common knowledge by now, especially by the tech-savvy Slashdot users, but I guess humanity surprises me again.
Plus, if you think software was the biggest problem, consider this: the larynx actually changes for boys at puberty, under the influence of testosterone. (Which is why they used guys castrated early for some roles in opera and such.) What sounds like a flirty girl on your headset can well be a 13 year old boy. Or a 10 year old girl, for that matter. Considering the pedo hysteria lately, I wouldn't rush to talk too indecently to someone you don't really know, based on just what they sound like. Just something to think about.
Eh, I seem to have actually acquired a couple of newbies who want to be with me all the time, even without doing anything special. Plus, really, if you've played an MMO you know you don't even need to do anything special to get into a guild. You just have to click "Yes" in the wrong dialogue.
It was mostly half joke.
I still find the idea most intriguing, though, so it's not entirely joke. I might actually give it a try. I mean, other than a few bucks, what do I have to lose? It's not like I'm getting married to her or anything similarly scary;)
Plus, I'd hope that anyone who wants to be paid to play with someone would at least have the skills and the equipment, right? I mean, right?:P
And we all know that girls really only come in two varieties. Dirty or Flirty... sigh... as a father of many daughters, this just pisses me off... then again, videogame females have always been little more than balloon animals...
Yeah, no kidding, plus it leaves out more important aspects. I mean, who cares if she's dirty or flirty, the question is: can she keep aggro and what tier of epic gear does she have?:P
Actually, it reminds me of a case I read about in the late 90's.
So one guy meets this nice girl online, they chat a bit, get along just fine, she even sends him a photo. Looked like a relatively pretty girl in her twenties. So he buys a plane ticket and flies to the USA to meet her.
I know what some of y'all are thinking. Nah, the photo was _not_ photoshopped. It was hers too.
Well, think of it this way: if I wanted to pay hooker rates to _screw_ someone, brothels are very much legal around here. No point dicking around with a fancy in-game dating service and keeping my fingers crossed that it works, if that were the purpose. The logical course of action is to go with the service that explicitly delivers just that.
But paying to play a game with someone... well, don't get me wrong, I don't _need_ to, but then I didn't _need_ dessert with the lunch either and I still bought that. But mostly, as Mr Data would say, I find that idea intriguing. I might actually give it a try.
You never know if you like it until you try. As Socrates must have told himself when they brought him the cup;)
Slashdot Mirror
That they're treating civilians as targets is clear, but where do they say it's like in a game?
It seems to me like there are more effective ways to dehumanize opponents and convince someone that the only good arabs are dead arabs, without video games. You just need half the country and their idiot ministers bleating about how Islam is the work of the devil, they're all terrorists, they're all hell-bent on destroying Christianity and the West, they all hate us for our freedoms, they all want Sharia courts in Washington DC, they're all child rapists like <insert isolated tribal incident<, they all want to be suicide bombers when they grow up, etc. And attribute to them some ways of thinking born out of the pure ignorance of the idiot minister or fundie banner-waver ascribing it to them. (E.g., if I see one more rationale which basically takes it as a fact that Muhammad is like Jesus for the Muslims, I might barf.) And how you might be letting some good people burn in Hell if you let the Islam spread.
And then give them guns with references to bible verses inscribed on their optics. (It actually happened.) And have idiot fundie sergeants introduce it as "the Jesus gun" in training.
With a sizable chunk of America being in that state of mind, where every single Muslim is a dangerous enemy, not by virtue of actually shooting at anyone or even having a gun or anything, but just by virtue of being Muslim... do we really need video games to explain why it was inevitable that someone just lets it rip on full auto and lets God sort them?
And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying _all_ America is like that. I know that a lot are very embarassed by their bleating fundie brethren. But when you have some tens of thousands of soldiers over there, if even one in ten is fighting a Crusade in his own mind, and is more concerned about his being elligible for the Rapture that'll come any day now than about peace in a few years, this kind of thing is pretty much doomed to happen.
It's sorta like for a high score all right, but not the video game kinda high score. More like about the kind that'll get some idiot in the top scores list in Heaven.
I'd say that even "democracy slows down progress" isn't necessarily true.
From a historical point of view, progress was all but halted when Europe was plunged into the absolute dictatorship of petty kings in the Middle Ages. And it's probably symptomatic that Renaissance was intertwined with putting various checks on that power. Be it the Magna Carta, or the weakening of the HRE, or the rise of the communes (cities whose citizens swore to stand together for their independence from the arbitrary rule of the local earl), or whatever equivalent. Progress happened when basically the king was in less of a position to tell the merchants and craftsmen and artists what to do.
The roots of what would later become the industrial revolution happened when the King and Church were no longer in a position to tell the merchants what price is right for the wares, what clothes they must wear, or how they must work the land, and so on. It's not even metaphor, those were things which were enforced, and breaking which was considered a capital sin (e.g., buying clothes above one's station was the mortal sin of vainglory). All in the name of forcing the society to work according to some idea of how it _should_ work.
All that iron-fisted guidance of how it all worked didn't exactly accelerate progress. And removing those brakes is what caused progress.
From a more "why it happened" point of view, well, there is no guarantee that the one guy (or one clique) with the power is actually more competent. And in some cases even interested in a progress, instead of preserving a status quo that favours them.
But even if they want to progress, it's all too easy to do the wrong things. Being able to sprint in any direction you wish without waiting for a committee to say "go", doesn't mean you can't run in the wrong direction entirely. E.g., witness the Qing dynasty's turning China from a country with cannons and flamethrowers and every bit on par with the west, to a mess of a place that had actually devolved technologically to polearms by the time they faced the British. Sure, they had the unchecked power to enforce anything they could without waiting for a committee -- and they actually went to such extremes as enforcing a mandatory haircut -- but did they enforce the right things? And was it progress? No, it was an era of steady regress.
And sometimes it's faster because they can make other people pay a price that we wouldn't otherwise find acceptable. E.g., sure, Stalin could industrialize the USSR very fast, but it was by literally starving millions of peasants to death so he could export their grain in exchange for technology and industrial equipment. Ask a Ukrainian about that era, if you want to be cruel. They might actually have some relative which literally died of starvation, or was summarily executed by the NKVD for still having enough to eat. Sure, it might be slower to do that in a democracy (except looking at what other countries did in the same era, not really), but that's also for a good reason.
Well, yes, but the difference between republic and democracy is just two turns of anarchy. 'Course, you just have to choose the right time, 'cause you just know someone out there has an army of anti-tank spearmen with your name on it the moment you're with your pants down ;)
Actually, in a way, I can see the point. Seeing a health bar on the screen painted differently wouldn't cause anyone to think that they experienced a realistic simulation of being shot (*), and no dev claimed so. Whereas the whole thrust of this vest seems to be that if they vibrate a bit over that spot, it's teh real deal. That kind of a claim _is_ kinda trivializing it.
(*)Well, nobody except the politicians, of course. Those seem to think bunny-hopping along a corridor and clicking a mouse are going to train someone to be a super-killer and do just as well in practice. God knows it wouldn't be much farther off to think that a health bar is an accurate simulation of pain, and prepares people to keep shooting at the cops even after taking a few 9mm rounds. I eagerly expect to hear someone making that claim any time soon.
Actually, if I were to guess what next, it would be "Lord British accuses cabbages of conspiring to invade his lunar domain." ;)
Ah, right, I guess all these years we've been using a model that was just randomly doing stuff with no cause or reason. Someone better hold a seance to tell Turing about that fundamental flaw in his machine. Oh, wait, he's one of those academics who should kiss your ass, right? ;)
You seem to misunderstand my point. Yes, you'll never have a perfect system. But if you aim for anything less, you'll hit even lower.
And experience... well, I admire your optimism, but it was some pretty experienced teams that produced some of the worst bugs and vulnerabilities in history. The OS/2 Warp install bug which produced a non-bootable system when upgrading, for example, that was a major killer for IBM's hopes of market share. It wasn't done by some newbie inexperienced company.
Or as a more tame example, I've spent saturday night on Star Trek Online trapped on the Sol spacestation, because there wasn't a universe any more outside the space station. Eerily reminiscent of the "Remember Me" episode of The Next Generation, but I don't really think the devs were aiming to recreate that experience in STO. The servers for everything else than the space stations had crashed. They had been unstable all day too. There weren't many happy customers on Saturday, and it might just have lost them a chunk of subscriptions. It doesn't take too many of those to negate any savings from not testing thoroughly and generally from not fretting too much about finding and fixing everything.
That wasn't an inexperienced team. We're talking about a company who's made 3 MMOs so far. But they judged wrong. Or rather, as good as any wild uninformed guess about the unknown. Plus, again, they had aimed low (as Cryptic usually does) and unsurprisingly they hit even lower.
I don't believe there is any relevant experience which will prepare you for categorizing the bugs you didn't find.
Ahh, the joys of the Dunning-Kruger effect: being too unqualified to realize one is unqualified.
The author of that blog post basically reinvented Stress testing (yes, software which can replay input sequences and even variations thereof, and compare the results to expectations, already exists and is used), but is too ignorant to understand that it exists, or why it's not a complete silver bullet. Hence he thinks he invented how to write 100% perfect software.
Well, so far that would be just ignorance at work. Too ignorant to realize ignorance.
But when he's sufficiently full of it to post stuff along the lines of "Academics can kiss my ass" when they disagree, now _that_ moves it to the realm of plain old stonking stupidity.
My question, though, would be how do you know which is which?
And before I even start, a thing I learned pretty early is that if you aim low, you'll hit even lower. If you aim for a B or C in school, 'cause, well, no point in fretting over not being exactly perfect, you start getting D's and lower. I should know, I actually tried that philosophy for half a year or so, before realizing that lesson. Partially because life doesn't throw you exactly the curve you were expecting, and partially because once you started making excuses and rationalizations, well, stretching the excuse just a little more or rationalizing a little further kinda comes naturally.
Same here.
But really, how do you know what you've _missed_? Because half the trouble with bugs is finding them in the first place. Something you didn't find (because finding the last little bug isn't worth it, right?) how do you know if it's a big one or a small one?
And if you found it and decided to ignore it, how do you know if that small bug isn't a symptom of something bigger? How do you know if that spurious failure to save the settings on the third page of a dialog buried 6 ft deep in menus, isn't symptomatic of a problem in a library function that is also called somewhere else too? How do you know if the same clever function -- or a version of the same clever hack from the same programmer -- isn't also used, say, when saving that 30 page form that the user has been editing? That's a big bug, especially when you deal with contracts worth hundreds of millions.
I mean, after all, the whole point is that you don't know exactly what line or method is causing it, or you'd have fixed it. So how do you know in which category to file the _unknown_?
You know, if 20 year olds were really that irresponsible and didn't even think about the implications of what they're doing, that would be a pretty scary world. In a lot of the world we trust people with a lot of stuff at 18 years old, which is even lower than 20. We trust them to vote for a start. We trust them enough to give them a loaded weapon and let them into the army. Etc.
The thought that we could have millions of 18 year olds with a loaded assault rifle in some guard tower, and unable to even think about the consequences of their actions, is pretty scary thought.
But I doubt that it's like that.
You know, I remember I was about 18 when I wrote a virus just for curiosity sake. (Yeah, I know, slow learner;)) Just for the reference, back then it meant the kind that copies itself at the end of executables (or for other viruses into the boot sector), rather than the modern day Internet worms.
It probably wasn't the most advanced virus out there, but it was a neat piece of assembly by _my_ standards, and I was pretty proud of it.
I actually considered releasing it into the wild, but basically... I dunno, something seemed _wrong_ with doing so. There was no way I could justify to myself doing something destructive to a lot of perfect strangers that had done me no wrong.
I didn't think of it as some formalized ethics system, or anything. Heck, I was almost allergic to even the idea of philosophy in any form. It seemed a pointless waste of time to sit and think about abstract artificial dilemmas, instead of doing something actually productive. Like code something. And I was quick to denounce anything that even remotely looked like artifficial and arbitrary social rules and conventions. But it just seemed wrong to do that anyway. Not because it conflicted with some abstract code or philosophy, but just it seemed wrong to do that.
I think in the end that that _is_ ethics.
So it seems hard for me to swallow a justification like in the summary along the lines of, "hey, at 20 you don't think about ethics." On the contrary, I would expect anyone who got to 20 to be perfectly capable of asking themselves "is it right to do this?"
Reminds me of a quote by Gene Fowler, "Keep the company of bums and you will become a bum. But hang around .with rich people and you will end up by picking up the tab and dying broke".
Especially given this kind of survival of the assholiest when it comes to who gets to be a CEO in the first place: Is Your Boss a Psychopath?
Don't assume that these guys care about you just because you married their daughter. Not about that daughter in the first place. Or about anyone else than themselves, really. If they did, they wouldn't qualify as psychopaths in the first place.
Though it might be a start if you just want to be their pet sycophant. But then again, if you wanted to be someone's sycophant and were any good at it, you wouldn't need that daughter to rise through the ranks. And you'd have probably become an MBA not a math nerd or a programming geek.
Based on my extensive... erm... research in Internet porn, I have to wonder, if Johann Friedrich Blumenbach were alive today, would we end up calling it the Bohemian race? I mean, Silvia Saint, Angelina Crow, etc.
Pretty much because, yes, his opinion of races seems to have had mostly to do with how pretty he found their women. E.g., he started with the blacks being pretty much sub-human and justified it then by cherry-picking skulls and a good dose of phrenology (an opinion that would influence pseudo-scientific racism to this day.) Then he made an 180 degree turns when he met a black woman beautiful enough to fall in love with (in his own words.) He then proceeded to "prove" by the same anatomical analysis methods as before that verily they're every bit as smart and talented and everything as the Caucasians.
Could be worse, though. We could have a classification made by a gay dude with a foot fetish, for example :p
You know, I'm thinking one could do far more than just a table for $8500. I mean, ffs, get a plexiglas sheet with a matte side (or a white matte foil), a PC and a projector under the table, and you have exactly the setup with which they created the LCARS consoles in ST:TNG. Heck, get a graphics card with 4 outputs (e.g., from Matrox) and 4 projectors, and with a bit of tinkering so that the projected areas exactly touch each other, you can have quadruple resolution and cover a pretty wide table.
Now I'm not saying actually build a Star Trek console (although now I'm tempted to make just that:)) but the principle of the matter. What you have at the end of it is a large horizontal display on which you can project anything you wish, including maps, tables, enemies, whatever. Heck, add a couple of buttons for each player, and you can even have it rolling dice for you or whatever else.
And at any rate, at the end of the day, for that money or less you'll have not just a fancy table with drawers but a high-tech gizmo that's truly worthy of an alpha-nerd.
(Caveat: unlike in most packs in the animal kingdom where the alpha gets first mating rights, the alpha-nerd is the last to mate, if ever;))
Well, I guess that's what you get when people think with their gonads.
Plus, we're talking the 90's. A good scanner cost more than now and would have a lot worse resolution anyway. Digital cameras certainly were not what you'd expect everyone to have, so you could jolly well expect something scanned instead. A lot of computers still could do either just 16 colours or pitiful resolution. Dithering was almost the norm. Analog modems were still the norm even in the USA, which further put harsh limits on picture quality and size. Etc. I'm guessing people would be a lot more likely to swallow an image that looked like run through a fax.
Huh? What's wrong with joking about it anyway?
And if you're offended by us joking about this, you may want to completely avoid the likes of George Carlin (joking about rape for example) or Jimmy Carr (joking about such topics as kids with leukemia) and really most comedians out there.
Dude, you haven't been paying attention. I don't want a human female. I want an orc female. Or a klingon one. Mmmm. Betazoid is borderline ok too, though ;)
Hmm, ok, I guess that's what I get for not reading TFA. A dollar a minute _is_ a bit steep when I can get a couple of newbies as living shields for nothing :P
Heh. I thought it was common knowledge by now, especially by the tech-savvy Slashdot users, but I guess humanity surprises me again.
Plus, if you think software was the biggest problem, consider this: the larynx actually changes for boys at puberty, under the influence of testosterone. (Which is why they used guys castrated early for some roles in opera and such.) What sounds like a flirty girl on your headset can well be a 13 year old boy. Or a 10 year old girl, for that matter. Considering the pedo hysteria lately, I wouldn't rush to talk too indecently to someone you don't really know, based on just what they sound like. Just something to think about.
Eh, I seem to have actually acquired a couple of newbies who want to be with me all the time, even without doing anything special. Plus, really, if you've played an MMO you know you don't even need to do anything special to get into a guild. You just have to click "Yes" in the wrong dialogue.
It was mostly half joke.
I still find the idea most intriguing, though, so it's not entirely joke. I might actually give it a try. I mean, other than a few bucks, what do I have to lose? It's not like I'm getting married to her or anything similarly scary ;)
Plus, I'd hope that anyone who wants to be paid to play with someone would at least have the skills and the equipment, right? I mean, right? :P
Yeah, no kidding, plus it leaves out more important aspects. I mean, who cares if she's dirty or flirty, the question is: can she keep aggro and what tier of epic gear does she have? :P
Actually, it reminds me of a case I read about in the late 90's.
So one guy meets this nice girl online, they chat a bit, get along just fine, she even sends him a photo. Looked like a relatively pretty girl in her twenties. So he buys a plane ticket and flies to the USA to meet her.
I know what some of y'all are thinking. Nah, the photo was _not_ photoshopped. It was hers too.
It just had been taken 60 years earlier.
Voice modulation software
Well, think of it this way: if I wanted to pay hooker rates to _screw_ someone, brothels are very much legal around here. No point dicking around with a fancy in-game dating service and keeping my fingers crossed that it works, if that were the purpose. The logical course of action is to go with the service that explicitly delivers just that.
But paying to play a game with someone... well, don't get me wrong, I don't _need_ to, but then I didn't _need_ dessert with the lunch either and I still bought that. But mostly, as Mr Data would say, I find that idea intriguing. I might actually give it a try.
You never know if you like it until you try. As Socrates must have told himself when they brought him the cup ;)
Eh, I get to be seen around Orgrimar with a hot Orc chick, or in my case around Sol space station with a hot Betazoid ;)