"Sucking" can come from a variety of factors, ranging from plain old incompetence, to letting the marketers and PHBs run the show. In a sense, "sucking" is just the default state. You have to make a competent effort not to. Most companies fall a bit short.
Well, sad to disappoint some people, but the whole history of humanity is filled with using the thing that was only 80% as good, but cost a tenth as much as the best-of-the-best.
E.g., in WW2 it meant losing IIRC 4 Shermans to kill a Tiger... but here's the funny stuff: it cost the USA less to replace the 4 Shermans than it cost the Germans to replace the Tiger. Guess who won that war?
E.g., other than the English virtually nobody used the superior longbow. Why? Because longbowmen had to be well trained, they cost a lot to hire, they cost a lot to replace, and they needed better pay and rations. Meanwhile every freshly-drafted peasant could point and click a crossbow or later musket. Sure, it had a crap rate of fire. But you could hire a lot more crossbowmen for the same money. And so the longbow was pretty much doomed to the garbage bin of history.
E.g., going even further back in time, the big expensive quinquereme were put out of business by cheap liburnians. The latter was the kind of ships that Augustus used to rout Marcus Antonius's and Cleopatra's state-of-the-art fleet.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying to use outright crap. (Ask the Chinese how well their dadaos -- big swords -- fared against Japanese machineguns and tanks.) But the cost rises exponentially when you approach the best-of-the-best grade of equipment. "Good enough" is often "good enough" because you can buy several of it for the same price as one state of the art whatever-you're-buying.
Even in computers, it's nothing new. Minis won against big iron, because you could afford several "good enough" minis, for the price of one state-of-the-art big iron machines. Then minis got spanked by micros for the same reason: you can put a full PC on several people's desks for actually less money than a mini with that number of terminals.
And somewhere in between, UNIX became the next big thing because... it was a simple unsophisticated OS that could run on (and had been developped for) a cheap mini with 4k RAM, that was originally sold as a coprocessor for a bigger machine. You could actually do real work in UNIX with a cheap little machine that cost a fraction of the cost of the state-of-the-art stuff. You could do a lot less with it, mind you, and it lacked most features of the "real" OS's of the day. But you could get several of those crap little machines with UNIX on it, for the same price as one big serious machine with a big serious OS and tools. It was, you guessed, "good enough."
Well, see, that's just the thing... The tendency to divide the world into us-vs-them, and then tilt at the imaginary foes, that was -- and to a smaller extent still is -- the problem.
In reality, I wasn't saying it makes MS good. I'm using it as an example of stuff that's at best neutral. It has no real reason to generate more than a "meh, I have better tools on Linux" or "meh, too little, too late" response. But for some people it just had to be some kind of comic-book super-villain evil master-plan, just because anything from Microsoft had to be one apparently.
Well, if the median age _dropping_ has caused more professionalism and less butthurt fanboy acts, I guess that's a heck of a vindication of teenagers. You know, since the stereotype about 14 year olds is the other way around:P
Take a chill pill, fanboy. Yes, I get it. In your little world, everyone who isn't at Microsoft's throat, must be some kind of "Microsoft drone" and "acting like victimized kittens".
Meanwhile, the rest of us have better things to attach our self-esteem to, than to either corporation. You know, actual personal achievements, not "I barked for my corporate master like a good doggy today." I swear some people should have been four-legged.
Briefly: rest assured that some of us are merely amused at the whole butthurt fanboy act, rather than being pro-Microsoft. But, then again, if you had enough brain to understand that, you wouldn't be a fanboy in the first place.
But, yes, thanks for amply illustrating my point. It's exactly that kind of idiotic fanboy foaming at the mouth act that I was referring to.
Actually, you know, I'm kinda getting nostalgic. In ye goode olde days, even just a "Microsoft exists" would generate a flurry of pure hate, and let's not even get into news of such obviously evil behaviour as offering a free CLI version of their compiler. Now as of the time I've hit "Reply To This" were only 5 replies, and mostly moderate stuff. It hardly looks like the proper "screw Microsoft and the horse they rode in on" parties we used to hold:P
I believe his primary function is a flight droid so they were built to interface with ships. Not a lot else. John Scalzi seems to suffer from the "must have everything" school of thought and doesn't think the future will focus on minimalism and getting one thing right. Thank god he's not writing software and just another hot air blogger. I reject Episodes I, II & III so I don't know what he's talking about with the oil slick and jets.
Except he seemed to interface with people too all the time, and that annoying beep has no other function than interfacing with humans. (Interfacing with ships is done much better by faster protocols.) So essentially he already _has_ that module, but it's a half-arsed dysfunctional thing. So, yes, it has no excuse. If he lacked any voice output entirely, then I'd see your point. But that's not the case.
Again, you're overlooking his primary function. C-3PO is a protocol droid designed to serve humans, and boasts that he is fluent "in over six million forms of communication." So he's got arthritis, well, you didn't build him to be flexible or fight. You built him to look pretty and translate. Everything else is bells and whistles. I think he was meant to stand in a corner for some rich merchant or politician and translate any language imaginable. Are you going to tell me that my car is flawed because I couldn't afford a $20 toaster to put in the dash?
Except have you looked at what an executive limo has, since you brought up a car metaphor? C3PO is the equivalent of making one, but then skipping on suspension and sound-dampening. It's that freaking retarded.
The whole point is that he's a robot for the rich and powerful. (Your average nerf herder probably couldn't afford one, nor need to translate from and to six million languages.) Yet he looks like an unfinished contraption thrown together in someone's tool shed.
Does it look to you like something you'd see a non-techie CEO walking around with, at a meeting with other billionaires? Really?
Plus, IRL talks and negotiations happen in all sorts of settings, not just in meeting rooms. Probably more deals are really done on the golf course, or at some social event, or at some trade show, than in meeting rooms. Does a noisy and clumsy metal contraption really sound to you like just the kind of thing you'd want whirring and clunking around while you're trying to network with the rich and powerful at, say, a ball of some planetary royal family? You're sooo going to seamlessly mingle with that think following you around.
From TFA: "Each volunteer was then asked to write a description of their neighbourhood in a way that masked their personal style, before writing a further passage in the style of novelist and playwright Cormac McCarthy." [...] "the techniques consistently identified Cormac McCarthy as the author of the imitations of his work."
So, yes, the whole bloody experiment was precisely about disguising your style as someone else, and no, it did not give the tests any reasonable doubt. People trying to imitate Cormac McCarthy were consistently identified as Cormac McCarthy by the stylistic analysis techniques. It doesn't get more clear cut than this, really.
So, yes, it is very possible for an average Joe Sixpack to incriminate someone else, if they so choose.
I guess that's one way to look at it. I guess more likely just the "if I don't loose weight I'll die earlier" message hit home a lot more convincingly when it came based on data from a medical insurance company.
1. It's not just that it's possible to fake not being myself, it's also that I can pretty much frame someone else. E.g., given enough messages written by KibibyteBrain (which just clicking on the user name or id will give me a list of), it's trivial to do a stylistical analysis on those and not just get an idea of how to write in the same style, but run the same analysis on the result and refine it until the match is outstanding.
2. From what I understand, the people in this test fooled it by merely being told to write in the style of someone else, without the help of any analysis tools, and still fooled it majorly. That's some pretty damn fragile "evidence" if anyone asks me. It's something Joe Sixpack can do by himself. Add some tools and it can only get crappier.
Even such idioms as you mention, are trivial to notice even without any tools. E.g., with only a little correspondence with another team here and reading some of their docs, I can tell that they use "solution" instead of "application".
3. While it can be handwaved as "eh, nobody said it's perfect", some people do seem to take it as less fallible than it really is. Even you just called it "This is reasonable *evidence* of authorship, where of course evidence != proof." And that's the whole point. Something that can be fooled by almost any Joe Sixpack without any tools or much effort, isn't reasonable evidence at all.
We allow evidence like handwriting, signatures, fingerprints, or DNA because they're supposedly very very hard to fake well. Ok, so DNA turned fakable as well, but you need a fair bit of expensive lab equipment and knowledge. It's something a biology prof at a medical college could probably do, but not something Joey Three-fingers the small time smuggler would even know where to start if he wants to plant someone else's fake blood at his latest shootout scene. Or fingerprints turned out easy to fake for the purpose of fooling a fingerprint reader, but it's still very very hard to transfer to an object in a way that looks genuine.
But here we have something that untrained people fooled by just being told to try. I'm sorry, but for me then it shouldn't be evidence at all.
While I see your point and it's a valid one... I'd divide it roughly like this:
- do you spend that time primarily because you like playing that game? I.e., from the angle of "I have another hour to try to finish this level"? Then it's passing the time, and only incidentally it happens to have some utility value too.
- do you spend that time primarily because you try to figure a game mechanic out, even if that game wouldn't be exactly at the top of what you want to play? I.e., from the angle of "I have another hour to try to figure out why people like this thing?" Then it's work, and only incidentally it happens to have some fun value too.
Of course, it's not that clear cut, but I think you get the idea.
Well, for example how about the fact that the obesity percentages are not the same across the globe.
In the USA, US, as of 2007, 33% of men and 35% of women are obese. (And another third are "only" overweight.) In the EU, where I'm looking at my gamer friends I described in that message, (depending on the country) you're getting between a third and a half that many obese people. E.g., to pick a comparable year, in 2006 in the Netherlands there were only about 12% obese men and about 10% obese women. Germany actually is the heavy-weight of Europe (pun intended) and slightly out-edges even the USA in percentage of "overweight" males, but at a quick googling seems to be at only 13% outright "obese", again as of 2007.
So there you go. It seems to me like all their study found was that the average gamer is the average person in that place. They look at the gamers over there and see a lot of fat ones, I look at the gamers over here and see a lot of people anywhere between fit and a bit overweight.
Actually, sad to break this to you, but just about everything you do in your free time is simply "passing time." Whether it's watching TV, playing a game, chatting at the pub, going mountaineering, tuning your car, reading a book, going to the theatre, or whatever else. There's a reason it's called a "passtime". Get it? "Pass" and "time"? Ring a bell yet?
So, yes, unless you spend every waking moment _working_ on something, then yes, you too are just "passing time" a lot.
And by "work", I mean as in you actually expect to sell it or otherwise get a tangible return on investment, and primarily for that return on investment. If it's just one of the intangible and impossible to measure benefits used as excuses for why your hobby is better than his, sad to break it to you, but it's still just a hobby. You're still doing it to pass the time.
So get off the high horse, drop the snotty self-importance, and realize that yes you too pass the time. Waiting to die or something? Then why do you try to project that idiocy on others?
Well, that _some_ people will play it as some great escape from a shitty reality, is I suppose true of anything else. Equally I know someone who' a workaholic to escape the rest of reality, and pretty much because work is the only place where he's appreciated. Other people go fishing to escape reality, or spend hours tuning their car, or whatever else.
On the other hand, I only need to look at my parents who took to WoW like to cocaine. And, you know, they're a lot over 35 and not exactly the stereotypical image of the lonely gamer or slashdotter either. You know, what with one of them being a woman, and both of them having gotten laid before (or I wouldn't be here.)
The other die-hard gamers I know, most are married, the majority are of average weight, and one is pencil-thin. Only one was obese, but the key word is "was." (Suspiciously, he started exercising after someone sent around a link to a study saying that the obese and smokers cost the health insurance less because they die a lot earlier;)
So I just have to wonder. Maybe they just saw that the average gamer was fat and depressed because the average person wherever the study was done was fat and depressed?
So basically the same as nicotine, then? Because that's how nicotine addiction works: it makes you feel a little happier when you get your hit, but the body compensates by moving the baseline, so it's followed by feeling worse when the effect goes away. Soon you're getting your regular nicotine hits just to get back to where you'd be if you hadn't smoked in the first place.
And more dangerous than alcohol? Alcohol withdrawal can and does _kill_ people.
As a nicotine addict, I say take _that_ Coke-heads. My drug has a lower LD50 (for nicotine it's only 3 times that of strichnine and about 8 times that of sodium cyanide), is instantly addictive, it has a withdrawal so nasty it's been actually used as a mild torture, it's so addictive it even occasionally makes people betray their friends and country for a smoke (no, seriously, it's been used to make prisoners break down and start talking), via vasoconstriction it causes strokes and gangrene and amputated limbs, it weakens the bones, it causes lung cancer... and it's not just legal, it's advertised everywhere.
(And yes, you've read that right. The LD50 for nicotine is actually lower. Which means you'd need a lot less of it to end up dead.)
Also... insanely addictive? Have you looked at some of the antidepressants and concentration aides and stuff that pharma is pushing on kids these days? Some of them make you happy for a while, but then move the baseline more than if you took cocaine and nicotine combined. The withdrawal won't just make you unhappier, it will make you _miserable_. Or the withdrawal for Valium/Diazepam is pretty much the same as _alcohol_ withdrawal, see above.
We're not just talking the popular meaning of "addiction" as generally anything you like to do again. That shit they're pushing is causing _physiological_ addiction. Actual long term changes to brain chemistry.
And again, it's perfectly legal.
So, really, I kinda feel sympathy for coke. Compared to this stuff that I smoke every day, or which millions of children are prescribed daily, Coke is the wimp on the block. It's like the kid that everyone else mugs out of his lunch money. Heck, the kind of kid that nerds mug out of his lunch money. And when it comes to the law, guess who is painted as the great monster? Right. You have to feel a bit of pity there;)
I'm entirely unsurprised that it happened, though. It seems that for 99.9% of this generation, the Computer is some kind of mystical oracle that gets trusted even against common sense.
I still remember interviews when the current subprime loans bubble burst, which basically all boiled down to the same dumb thing: "well, my gut feeling said 'OMG, this can't be right, there's no way this guy can pay it back', but the computer said it's ok, so we did what the computer said." Bonus points to those who, in the same interview, explain how they didn't have actual statistics for such loans, so the computer was fed bogus numbers pulled out of someone's arse. But they trusted the result anyway.
I swear it's like it turns some people into NPCs. The idea that there's still a human in the loop _because_ we all know the computer isn't perfect, seems to be lost on them. Nah, they turn into some sort of dumb peripheral for the computer. If the computer says X, they dutifully do X, because the computer can't be wrong.
It's like watching a continent-scale Milgram experiment with computers. In fact, you could probably do an even scarier Milgram these days with computers. Shock that guy? Well, if the computer says so, it can't be wrong. Shoot him? Must be safe if the computer says so. Shove a porcupine up my ass? KK, the computer knows best, gimme that porcupine then.
Well, that much I can understand. But just saying that I can be spared the "they were acquitted, so they're innocent people" kinda messages in this thread. Yes, legally they got acquitted, because it was "only" assault and manslaughter and a dumb prosecutor pushed for murder. But for me, by their own depositions, they're guilty of manslaughter or at the very least assault. It's not based on hearsay, or preconceptions, or anything. It's by their own arguments that got them cleared of murder. I don't need to do more than the gullible thing and believe every word they said in their defense... to conclud that they're scumbags and they should rot in prison if there were any justice in the world.
The theory of evolution says no such thing. That's a strawman invented by the creationists themselves.
Yes, there is a "social darwinism" piece of bullshit, but it has about as much to do with the real darwinism, as JavaScript has to do with Java. I.e., except for piggy-backing on its name, not much whatsoever.
And, anyway, the real darwinism doesn't actually say "only the strong survive", and it certainly doesn't say "if you are too weak to survive we shouldn't help you."
Social species and social adaptations are in fact cases where a species survives precisely _because_ individual members who are too weak to survive on their own, are helped by other members. Ants or bees are cases where no individual member could survive and reproduce on their own at all. The workers are asexuate, and the queen pretty much can't forrage and feed on its own. The species survives precisely _because_ there is a high degree of cooperation between the individual members.
Heck, even wolves or lions (predators seem to be a favourite of proponents of "might makes right") actually have a group hunting and group survival strategy built in. Wolves couldn't reliably bag the kind of bigger game they normally feed upon, if they didn't act as a group. So, yes, a weaker member which might not survive on his own, nevertheless can survive in a group that cooperates.
Sexual selection and sexual dimorphism are also cases where evolution favours cooperation and specialization. E.g., the male lion is too big and heavy to be a good hunter on his own, while the females aren't as adapted to fight other predators. (That mane is battle armour, for example. A predator going for the male lion's neck will most often just get a mouthful of hair.) A pride survives by the _combination_ of the two specializations. And sometimes they even find more innovative ways to use that dimorphism: e.g., against bigger game, the male lion lies in ambush while the females chase the prey towards him, effectively allowing him to use his greater mass and strength without the handicap of his poorer sprint performance.
Nature and evolution are full of stuff like that. Resemblance to the "if you are too weak to survive we shouldn't help you" canard: zero.
Second, darwinism doesn't judge "fit" as "strong" or anything else. The only criterion that matters is: fit to make more offspring. Period.
For different species that can mean radically different things. For example for rabbits, the criterion isn't strength, it's just being fast and affraid enough to run away fast enough, and making lots of baby rabbits faster than the foxes can eat them.
But even that doesn't even scratch the surface of how many things can mean "the fittest." E.g., being bitter and bright coloured works just fine for ladybugs. (See, aposematism) There is no strength or speed or anything else involved. You just have to be bitter so the first bird that tries to eat you spits you back, and recognizably coloured so it learns not to try again in the future.
For some species, they don't even go the whole way with that. They don't actually have any defense of their own against a predator, but just mimick the colours of a species that does. The "being fitter" there just means the most resemblance to the real aposematic species you're immitating. That's it. That's the whole survival of the fittest in that aspect.
- were videotaped punching and kicking a 14 year old, who died soon afterwards
- they did not deny it. In fact, they said it was normal boot-camp procedure. You don't get a much clearer admission than that.
I'm sorry, but I don't need media hype to think that those assholes should be in jail. If not for murder, then for the assault that they're not even denying. It's hard for me to imagine them as innocent of at least that savage beating, when even they admit it. In fact, that it was common procedure and they did it to lots of other children.
We're not even talking about a belting or spanking (much as I'm against those too, but, ok, let's skip that part for now.) We're talking a group of adults punching and kicking a 14 year old child.
To add insult to injury: it wasn't even because said child had actually done anything bad. They were beating him because they thought he was simulating an illness. Except it turns out that the illness was real, and in fact they argued in court (and that was why they were acquitted) that the kid died of the disease not of the punching and kicking received. Again, it's stuff they themselves argued in court, so I'm not doing more than taking their own word for it.
Roll that around in your head a bit: a child received that savage beating (whether lethal or not), just because he was genuinely ill. No other guilt, infraction, misdeed, or anything else involved. Get sick, get beaten. Does that sound right to you?
I mean, FFS, even the advocates of corporal punishments argue that it's to correct some antisocial behaviours. Whereas in this case a child was savagely beaten just for being ill. Instead of being taken to a doctor, he was punched and kicked by a bunch of adults. I can't imagine any scenario, no matter how convoluted, where that can possibly be morally right.
But at any rate, murder or not, by their own confessions they are at the very least guilty of assault. And for that, they earn my heartfelt contempt. Bunch of scumbags.
1. Yeah, the course _could_ require them to make thoughtful posts and defend them with good logic. And equally monkeys could fly out of my butt. You know it won't happen.
What standards would you apply anyway? The whole of ID isn't even particularly logical, and doesn't do much more than postulate stuff without any evidence. The best it can do is try to pick false holes in "Darwinism", because it doesn't make any testable predictions of its own. Try asking an ID-er to define their "science" without making any references to "evolution" or "Darwin" or the bible (after all, they pretend that the designer doesn't necessarily have to be God) and see how far they'll get.
So exactly what standards would _you_ apply to something which boils down to postulating "Goddidit" and "Darwinism is wrong"? No, seriously.
2. That still doesn't excuse the fact that they're sent out to train on unwilling people out there. Those "hostile" sites are only "hostile" by virtue of the posters there being hostile to that crap. (E.g., because of having already been trolled half to death by fundies, and having had enough of it.) How's sending someone to troll them some more morally right or justified in any form or shape?
Do you understand that crucial aspect? Regardless of how it's done, it's trolling, and that's wrong by itself.
Basically: How would you (or the majority of Slashdotters here) feel if, say, marketing graduates were sent to try to convince people to buy a copy of Windows on Linux and Mac boards and mailing lists? Or viceversa. 'Cause I for one would see it as worsening the signal-to-noise ratio, regardless of how it's done.
Well, I dunno about at home or at a hotel, but from my experience with corporations, a lot of people seem to intentionally shut off their brains at work. If you just apply the rules, no matter how dumb, usually the worst that can happen is that you're skipped for promotion. If you do something original, you're to blame if it goes wrong. And often you're to blame if it goes right and makes the PHB who ordered otherwise look bad. Plus, if you think too much about all the stupid decisions and rules and stuff, you (A) end up very unhappy, and (B) you might pipe up and be seen as the malcontent who rocks the boat.
There's a whole class of managers whose whole job is to avoid taking any decision, and not rock the boat until pension. You know, the kind that'll count the pixels and complain that the kerning of "lore ipsum" on the site viewed in IE is different from the concept art done in Photoshop, just because that's just about the only thing they can do without showing any personal initiative or get into technical details that would require a personal decision. Or the kind who'll ship an extra manual for a printer in a box the size of the whole printer, just because some rule said "use box type 14 for that printer model." Etc.
Honestly, in some places I've seen, if a phone call came from the management requiring one to break the windows or destroy a monitor or whatnot... it wouldn't even be too far off from the normal idiocy coming from above.
I mean, think about it. I've been in an "urgent" project in December before, which got promptly cancelled on the 2nd of January, just because a department had some money to burn at the end of the year and they'd get their budget for next year cut if they didn't burn the last cent of it. So they deliberately blew their remaining budget on something they knew in advance that they don't need or want. Planned waste. Or there have been places where after a mild winter, people have been instructed to leave the heating and lights on overnight, because if they don't use their heating budget in full this year, you guessed, they'll get said budget cut next year when there might be a real winter. Etc.
If you were one of the people working in one of those places, and had just spent the spring turning heating _up_ when you leave and turning it back off in the morning, just because your department needs to waste some money... would you be particularly inclined to think twice, if someone called and asked that you break a window so they can use that bit of budget? Heck, would you be inclined to think twice about any other stupidity? Or, like everyone else, would you back up into a more comfortable, "not my business to worry about that kind of thing" attitude?
Even if they were only pranks putting them on slashdot front page is an ego boost they didn't really need. Let's stick to stuff that matters.
Are you kidding? So far the majority of stories involving someone acting like a sociopathic prick online, have attracted a number of wannabe sociopathic pricks that lionized the perp on one or more of the following grounds:
- muahahaha, now we're the ones with the power. Phear us! Payback time for the former school bully... and the cheerleader who didn't want to be my GF... and the jock who got her as a GF... and that geography teacher who got me bored to death... (Basically as if having been a victim once is all the reason and rationalization needed for victimizing others in turn. Newsflash: if anyone wasn't a bully just because they lacked the power and/or balls, but turns into one as soon as they can, they never had a moral high ground to start with.)
- OMG, if they were too stupid to defend themselves, they deserved it. (A.k.a., "might makes right.")
- more generally, if it's high tech and not everyone can do it, then it's right to do it if you can. (A.k.a., "might makes right.")
- It's just bits and bytes, and information wants to be free!! (Especially when said information is someone else's credit card number;))
- if it slips through some loophole of an existing law, despite being blatantly against its spirit, then it's morally right. The proposed new amendment against it is blatantly an attempt to control more people by criminalizing something as benign as terrorizing others. Cue quotes out of context from Richelieu and Ayn Rand.
- if it's already illegal, that law is blatantly an attempt to control more people by criminalizing something as benign as terrorizing others. Cue quotes out of context from Richelieu and Ayn Rand.
Etc.
In fact, my best guess is that now the majority opinion is against it only because it was _social_ engineering, and we don't relate that well to that. It involves talking to people and... eew;) If it were about slipping someone a trojan to terrorize them via their computer, you'd see 200+ posts just defending the perp and blaming the victims.
So maybe it is stuff that matters. Reminding more wannabe sociopaths that doing it over the internet is no shield, is a good thing.
Well, all I'm saying is: let then try. If they think they can make a less addictive one that binds to the right receptors, let them try. Worst case scenario: we're back to nicotine.
The point about opioids was basically just that we don't have any other alternative, so we give them opioids. _If_ a better alternative was available, then people would get that.
In this case, someone thinks they can create a better alternative to nicotine. _If_ they succeed (and that's a big if), then I see no point in using the old toxic one. There is no point in causing more harm than necessary, just as some kind of act of resistance against big pharma. (Which wasn't your point, but how this talk started.)
Except that lobby can't really kill it, short of forbidding tobacco, can they? And we both know that outright forbidding nicotine won't happen any time soon.
So realistically, whoever objects to the patented cure, will always still have the option to light a cigarette instead. Or just to get a nicotine patch. I mean, it's not like an anti-smoking lobby will be that easy to use to forbid patches marketed as means to stop smoking.
I would imagine that would put an upper limit on the patented version's cost. Precisely because there'll always be the real nicotine as competition out there.
But even if it doesn't cap the price, the important fact still remains: the real nicotine isn't going anywhere.
Ditto for the "available now" part. It's not like anyone's stopping you from going to the pharmacy and getting a box of nicotine patches, or nicotine chewing gum, or whatever, if you want to self-medicate right away.
The only thing that's going to happen is that someone will research an alternative that does less harm. Maybe they'll succeed and make a profit. Maybe not. But it's not going to mean the end of life as we know it or anything.
Really, I don't see a "big evil pharma is going to kill nicotine" threat there. That jack is already out of the box. They're going to research an alternative. And if you don't like their alternative, you'll still be able to medicate yourself the old fashioned way until you lose a leg or a lung or whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
"Sucking" can come from a variety of factors, ranging from plain old incompetence, to letting the marketers and PHBs run the show. In a sense, "sucking" is just the default state. You have to make a competent effort not to. Most companies fall a bit short.
Well, sad to disappoint some people, but the whole history of humanity is filled with using the thing that was only 80% as good, but cost a tenth as much as the best-of-the-best.
E.g., in WW2 it meant losing IIRC 4 Shermans to kill a Tiger... but here's the funny stuff: it cost the USA less to replace the 4 Shermans than it cost the Germans to replace the Tiger. Guess who won that war?
E.g., other than the English virtually nobody used the superior longbow. Why? Because longbowmen had to be well trained, they cost a lot to hire, they cost a lot to replace, and they needed better pay and rations. Meanwhile every freshly-drafted peasant could point and click a crossbow or later musket. Sure, it had a crap rate of fire. But you could hire a lot more crossbowmen for the same money. And so the longbow was pretty much doomed to the garbage bin of history.
E.g., going even further back in time, the big expensive quinquereme were put out of business by cheap liburnians. The latter was the kind of ships that Augustus used to rout Marcus Antonius's and Cleopatra's state-of-the-art fleet.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying to use outright crap. (Ask the Chinese how well their dadaos -- big swords -- fared against Japanese machineguns and tanks.) But the cost rises exponentially when you approach the best-of-the-best grade of equipment. "Good enough" is often "good enough" because you can buy several of it for the same price as one state of the art whatever-you're-buying.
Even in computers, it's nothing new. Minis won against big iron, because you could afford several "good enough" minis, for the price of one state-of-the-art big iron machines. Then minis got spanked by micros for the same reason: you can put a full PC on several people's desks for actually less money than a mini with that number of terminals.
And somewhere in between, UNIX became the next big thing because... it was a simple unsophisticated OS that could run on (and had been developped for) a cheap mini with 4k RAM, that was originally sold as a coprocessor for a bigger machine. You could actually do real work in UNIX with a cheap little machine that cost a fraction of the cost of the state-of-the-art stuff. You could do a lot less with it, mind you, and it lacked most features of the "real" OS's of the day. But you could get several of those crap little machines with UNIX on it, for the same price as one big serious machine with a big serious OS and tools. It was, you guessed, "good enough."
Well, see, that's just the thing... The tendency to divide the world into us-vs-them, and then tilt at the imaginary foes, that was -- and to a smaller extent still is -- the problem.
In reality, I wasn't saying it makes MS good. I'm using it as an example of stuff that's at best neutral. It has no real reason to generate more than a "meh, I have better tools on Linux" or "meh, too little, too late" response. But for some people it just had to be some kind of comic-book super-villain evil master-plan, just because anything from Microsoft had to be one apparently.
Well, if the median age _dropping_ has caused more professionalism and less butthurt fanboy acts, I guess that's a heck of a vindication of teenagers. You know, since the stereotype about 14 year olds is the other way around :P
Take a chill pill, fanboy. Yes, I get it. In your little world, everyone who isn't at Microsoft's throat, must be some kind of "Microsoft drone" and "acting like victimized kittens".
Meanwhile, the rest of us have better things to attach our self-esteem to, than to either corporation. You know, actual personal achievements, not "I barked for my corporate master like a good doggy today." I swear some people should have been four-legged.
Briefly: rest assured that some of us are merely amused at the whole butthurt fanboy act, rather than being pro-Microsoft. But, then again, if you had enough brain to understand that, you wouldn't be a fanboy in the first place.
But, yes, thanks for amply illustrating my point. It's exactly that kind of idiotic fanboy foaming at the mouth act that I was referring to.
Actually, you know, I'm kinda getting nostalgic. In ye goode olde days, even just a "Microsoft exists" would generate a flurry of pure hate, and let's not even get into news of such obviously evil behaviour as offering a free CLI version of their compiler. Now as of the time I've hit "Reply To This" were only 5 replies, and mostly moderate stuff. It hardly looks like the proper "screw Microsoft and the horse they rode in on" parties we used to hold :P
Except he seemed to interface with people too all the time, and that annoying beep has no other function than interfacing with humans. (Interfacing with ships is done much better by faster protocols.) So essentially he already _has_ that module, but it's a half-arsed dysfunctional thing. So, yes, it has no excuse. If he lacked any voice output entirely, then I'd see your point. But that's not the case.
Except have you looked at what an executive limo has, since you brought up a car metaphor? C3PO is the equivalent of making one, but then skipping on suspension and sound-dampening. It's that freaking retarded.
The whole point is that he's a robot for the rich and powerful. (Your average nerf herder probably couldn't afford one, nor need to translate from and to six million languages.) Yet he looks like an unfinished contraption thrown together in someone's tool shed.
Does it look to you like something you'd see a non-techie CEO walking around with, at a meeting with other billionaires? Really?
Plus, IRL talks and negotiations happen in all sorts of settings, not just in meeting rooms. Probably more deals are really done on the golf course, or at some social event, or at some trade show, than in meeting rooms. Does a noisy and clumsy metal contraption really sound to you like just the kind of thing you'd want whirring and clunking around while you're trying to network with the rich and powerful at, say, a ball of some planetary royal family? You're sooo going to seamlessly mingle with that think following you around.
From TFA: "Each volunteer was then asked to write a description of their neighbourhood in a way that masked their personal style, before writing a further passage in the style of novelist and playwright Cormac McCarthy." [...] "the techniques consistently identified Cormac McCarthy as the author of the imitations of his work."
So, yes, the whole bloody experiment was precisely about disguising your style as someone else, and no, it did not give the tests any reasonable doubt. People trying to imitate Cormac McCarthy were consistently identified as Cormac McCarthy by the stylistic analysis techniques. It doesn't get more clear cut than this, really.
So, yes, it is very possible for an average Joe Sixpack to incriminate someone else, if they so choose.
I guess that's one way to look at it. I guess more likely just the "if I don't loose weight I'll die earlier" message hit home a lot more convincingly when it came based on data from a medical insurance company.
Yes, but the problem is this:
1. It's not just that it's possible to fake not being myself, it's also that I can pretty much frame someone else. E.g., given enough messages written by KibibyteBrain (which just clicking on the user name or id will give me a list of), it's trivial to do a stylistical analysis on those and not just get an idea of how to write in the same style, but run the same analysis on the result and refine it until the match is outstanding.
2. From what I understand, the people in this test fooled it by merely being told to write in the style of someone else, without the help of any analysis tools, and still fooled it majorly. That's some pretty damn fragile "evidence" if anyone asks me. It's something Joe Sixpack can do by himself. Add some tools and it can only get crappier.
Even such idioms as you mention, are trivial to notice even without any tools. E.g., with only a little correspondence with another team here and reading some of their docs, I can tell that they use "solution" instead of "application".
3. While it can be handwaved as "eh, nobody said it's perfect", some people do seem to take it as less fallible than it really is. Even you just called it "This is reasonable *evidence* of authorship, where of course evidence != proof." And that's the whole point. Something that can be fooled by almost any Joe Sixpack without any tools or much effort, isn't reasonable evidence at all.
We allow evidence like handwriting, signatures, fingerprints, or DNA because they're supposedly very very hard to fake well. Ok, so DNA turned fakable as well, but you need a fair bit of expensive lab equipment and knowledge. It's something a biology prof at a medical college could probably do, but not something Joey Three-fingers the small time smuggler would even know where to start if he wants to plant someone else's fake blood at his latest shootout scene. Or fingerprints turned out easy to fake for the purpose of fooling a fingerprint reader, but it's still very very hard to transfer to an object in a way that looks genuine.
But here we have something that untrained people fooled by just being told to try. I'm sorry, but for me then it shouldn't be evidence at all.
While I see your point and it's a valid one... I'd divide it roughly like this:
- do you spend that time primarily because you like playing that game? I.e., from the angle of "I have another hour to try to finish this level"? Then it's passing the time, and only incidentally it happens to have some utility value too.
- do you spend that time primarily because you try to figure a game mechanic out, even if that game wouldn't be exactly at the top of what you want to play? I.e., from the angle of "I have another hour to try to figure out why people like this thing?" Then it's work, and only incidentally it happens to have some fun value too.
Of course, it's not that clear cut, but I think you get the idea.
Well, for example how about the fact that the obesity percentages are not the same across the globe.
In the USA, US, as of 2007, 33% of men and 35% of women are obese. (And another third are "only" overweight.) In the EU, where I'm looking at my gamer friends I described in that message, (depending on the country) you're getting between a third and a half that many obese people. E.g., to pick a comparable year, in 2006 in the Netherlands there were only about 12% obese men and about 10% obese women. Germany actually is the heavy-weight of Europe (pun intended) and slightly out-edges even the USA in percentage of "overweight" males, but at a quick googling seems to be at only 13% outright "obese", again as of 2007.
So there you go. It seems to me like all their study found was that the average gamer is the average person in that place. They look at the gamers over there and see a lot of fat ones, I look at the gamers over here and see a lot of people anywhere between fit and a bit overweight.
Actually, sad to break this to you, but just about everything you do in your free time is simply "passing time." Whether it's watching TV, playing a game, chatting at the pub, going mountaineering, tuning your car, reading a book, going to the theatre, or whatever else. There's a reason it's called a "passtime". Get it? "Pass" and "time"? Ring a bell yet?
So, yes, unless you spend every waking moment _working_ on something, then yes, you too are just "passing time" a lot.
And by "work", I mean as in you actually expect to sell it or otherwise get a tangible return on investment, and primarily for that return on investment. If it's just one of the intangible and impossible to measure benefits used as excuses for why your hobby is better than his, sad to break it to you, but it's still just a hobby. You're still doing it to pass the time.
So get off the high horse, drop the snotty self-importance, and realize that yes you too pass the time. Waiting to die or something? Then why do you try to project that idiocy on others?
Well, that _some_ people will play it as some great escape from a shitty reality, is I suppose true of anything else. Equally I know someone who' a workaholic to escape the rest of reality, and pretty much because work is the only place where he's appreciated. Other people go fishing to escape reality, or spend hours tuning their car, or whatever else.
On the other hand, I only need to look at my parents who took to WoW like to cocaine. And, you know, they're a lot over 35 and not exactly the stereotypical image of the lonely gamer or slashdotter either. You know, what with one of them being a woman, and both of them having gotten laid before (or I wouldn't be here.)
The other die-hard gamers I know, most are married, the majority are of average weight, and one is pencil-thin. Only one was obese, but the key word is "was." (Suspiciously, he started exercising after someone sent around a link to a study saying that the obese and smokers cost the health insurance less because they die a lot earlier;)
So I just have to wonder. Maybe they just saw that the average gamer was fat and depressed because the average person wherever the study was done was fat and depressed?
So basically the same as nicotine, then? Because that's how nicotine addiction works: it makes you feel a little happier when you get your hit, but the body compensates by moving the baseline, so it's followed by feeling worse when the effect goes away. Soon you're getting your regular nicotine hits just to get back to where you'd be if you hadn't smoked in the first place.
And more dangerous than alcohol? Alcohol withdrawal can and does _kill_ people.
As a nicotine addict, I say take _that_ Coke-heads. My drug has a lower LD50 (for nicotine it's only 3 times that of strichnine and about 8 times that of sodium cyanide), is instantly addictive, it has a withdrawal so nasty it's been actually used as a mild torture, it's so addictive it even occasionally makes people betray their friends and country for a smoke (no, seriously, it's been used to make prisoners break down and start talking), via vasoconstriction it causes strokes and gangrene and amputated limbs, it weakens the bones, it causes lung cancer... and it's not just legal, it's advertised everywhere.
(And yes, you've read that right. The LD50 for nicotine is actually lower. Which means you'd need a lot less of it to end up dead.)
Also... insanely addictive? Have you looked at some of the antidepressants and concentration aides and stuff that pharma is pushing on kids these days? Some of them make you happy for a while, but then move the baseline more than if you took cocaine and nicotine combined. The withdrawal won't just make you unhappier, it will make you _miserable_. Or the withdrawal for Valium/Diazepam is pretty much the same as _alcohol_ withdrawal, see above.
We're not just talking the popular meaning of "addiction" as generally anything you like to do again. That shit they're pushing is causing _physiological_ addiction. Actual long term changes to brain chemistry.
And again, it's perfectly legal.
So, really, I kinda feel sympathy for coke. Compared to this stuff that I smoke every day, or which millions of children are prescribed daily, Coke is the wimp on the block. It's like the kid that everyone else mugs out of his lunch money. Heck, the kind of kid that nerds mug out of his lunch money. And when it comes to the law, guess who is painted as the great monster? Right. You have to feel a bit of pity there ;)
I'm entirely unsurprised that it happened, though. It seems that for 99.9% of this generation, the Computer is some kind of mystical oracle that gets trusted even against common sense.
I still remember interviews when the current subprime loans bubble burst, which basically all boiled down to the same dumb thing: "well, my gut feeling said 'OMG, this can't be right, there's no way this guy can pay it back', but the computer said it's ok, so we did what the computer said." Bonus points to those who, in the same interview, explain how they didn't have actual statistics for such loans, so the computer was fed bogus numbers pulled out of someone's arse. But they trusted the result anyway.
I swear it's like it turns some people into NPCs. The idea that there's still a human in the loop _because_ we all know the computer isn't perfect, seems to be lost on them. Nah, they turn into some sort of dumb peripheral for the computer. If the computer says X, they dutifully do X, because the computer can't be wrong.
It's like watching a continent-scale Milgram experiment with computers. In fact, you could probably do an even scarier Milgram these days with computers. Shock that guy? Well, if the computer says so, it can't be wrong. Shoot him? Must be safe if the computer says so. Shove a porcupine up my ass? KK, the computer knows best, gimme that porcupine then.
Well, that much I can understand. But just saying that I can be spared the "they were acquitted, so they're innocent people" kinda messages in this thread. Yes, legally they got acquitted, because it was "only" assault and manslaughter and a dumb prosecutor pushed for murder. But for me, by their own depositions, they're guilty of manslaughter or at the very least assault. It's not based on hearsay, or preconceptions, or anything. It's by their own arguments that got them cleared of murder. I don't need to do more than the gullible thing and believe every word they said in their defense... to conclud that they're scumbags and they should rot in prison if there were any justice in the world.
Bullshit.
The theory of evolution says no such thing. That's a strawman invented by the creationists themselves.
Yes, there is a "social darwinism" piece of bullshit, but it has about as much to do with the real darwinism, as JavaScript has to do with Java. I.e., except for piggy-backing on its name, not much whatsoever.
And, anyway, the real darwinism doesn't actually say "only the strong survive", and it certainly doesn't say "if you are too weak to survive we shouldn't help you."
Social species and social adaptations are in fact cases where a species survives precisely _because_ individual members who are too weak to survive on their own, are helped by other members. Ants or bees are cases where no individual member could survive and reproduce on their own at all. The workers are asexuate, and the queen pretty much can't forrage and feed on its own. The species survives precisely _because_ there is a high degree of cooperation between the individual members.
Heck, even wolves or lions (predators seem to be a favourite of proponents of "might makes right") actually have a group hunting and group survival strategy built in. Wolves couldn't reliably bag the kind of bigger game they normally feed upon, if they didn't act as a group. So, yes, a weaker member which might not survive on his own, nevertheless can survive in a group that cooperates.
Sexual selection and sexual dimorphism are also cases where evolution favours cooperation and specialization. E.g., the male lion is too big and heavy to be a good hunter on his own, while the females aren't as adapted to fight other predators. (That mane is battle armour, for example. A predator going for the male lion's neck will most often just get a mouthful of hair.) A pride survives by the _combination_ of the two specializations. And sometimes they even find more innovative ways to use that dimorphism: e.g., against bigger game, the male lion lies in ambush while the females chase the prey towards him, effectively allowing him to use his greater mass and strength without the handicap of his poorer sprint performance.
Nature and evolution are full of stuff like that. Resemblance to the "if you are too weak to survive we shouldn't help you" canard: zero.
Second, darwinism doesn't judge "fit" as "strong" or anything else. The only criterion that matters is: fit to make more offspring. Period.
For different species that can mean radically different things. For example for rabbits, the criterion isn't strength, it's just being fast and affraid enough to run away fast enough, and making lots of baby rabbits faster than the foxes can eat them.
But even that doesn't even scratch the surface of how many things can mean "the fittest." E.g., being bitter and bright coloured works just fine for ladybugs. (See, aposematism) There is no strength or speed or anything else involved. You just have to be bitter so the first bird that tries to eat you spits you back, and recognizably coloured so it learns not to try again in the future.
For some species, they don't even go the whole way with that. They don't actually have any defense of their own against a predator, but just mimick the colours of a species that does. The "being fitter" there just means the most resemblance to the real aposematic species you're immitating. That's it. That's the whole survival of the fittest in that aspect.
Let's recap: in that case the guards
- were videotaped punching and kicking a 14 year old, who died soon afterwards
- they did not deny it. In fact, they said it was normal boot-camp procedure. You don't get a much clearer admission than that.
I'm sorry, but I don't need media hype to think that those assholes should be in jail. If not for murder, then for the assault that they're not even denying. It's hard for me to imagine them as innocent of at least that savage beating, when even they admit it. In fact, that it was common procedure and they did it to lots of other children.
We're not even talking about a belting or spanking (much as I'm against those too, but, ok, let's skip that part for now.) We're talking a group of adults punching and kicking a 14 year old child.
To add insult to injury: it wasn't even because said child had actually done anything bad. They were beating him because they thought he was simulating an illness. Except it turns out that the illness was real, and in fact they argued in court (and that was why they were acquitted) that the kid died of the disease not of the punching and kicking received. Again, it's stuff they themselves argued in court, so I'm not doing more than taking their own word for it.
Roll that around in your head a bit: a child received that savage beating (whether lethal or not), just because he was genuinely ill. No other guilt, infraction, misdeed, or anything else involved. Get sick, get beaten. Does that sound right to you?
I mean, FFS, even the advocates of corporal punishments argue that it's to correct some antisocial behaviours. Whereas in this case a child was savagely beaten just for being ill. Instead of being taken to a doctor, he was punched and kicked by a bunch of adults. I can't imagine any scenario, no matter how convoluted, where that can possibly be morally right.
But at any rate, murder or not, by their own confessions they are at the very least guilty of assault. And for that, they earn my heartfelt contempt. Bunch of scumbags.
1. Yeah, the course _could_ require them to make thoughtful posts and defend them with good logic. And equally monkeys could fly out of my butt. You know it won't happen.
What standards would you apply anyway? The whole of ID isn't even particularly logical, and doesn't do much more than postulate stuff without any evidence. The best it can do is try to pick false holes in "Darwinism", because it doesn't make any testable predictions of its own. Try asking an ID-er to define their "science" without making any references to "evolution" or "Darwin" or the bible (after all, they pretend that the designer doesn't necessarily have to be God) and see how far they'll get.
So exactly what standards would _you_ apply to something which boils down to postulating "Goddidit" and "Darwinism is wrong"? No, seriously.
2. That still doesn't excuse the fact that they're sent out to train on unwilling people out there. Those "hostile" sites are only "hostile" by virtue of the posters there being hostile to that crap. (E.g., because of having already been trolled half to death by fundies, and having had enough of it.) How's sending someone to troll them some more morally right or justified in any form or shape?
Do you understand that crucial aspect? Regardless of how it's done, it's trolling, and that's wrong by itself.
Basically: How would you (or the majority of Slashdotters here) feel if, say, marketing graduates were sent to try to convince people to buy a copy of Windows on Linux and Mac boards and mailing lists? Or viceversa. 'Cause I for one would see it as worsening the signal-to-noise ratio, regardless of how it's done.
Well, I dunno about at home or at a hotel, but from my experience with corporations, a lot of people seem to intentionally shut off their brains at work. If you just apply the rules, no matter how dumb, usually the worst that can happen is that you're skipped for promotion. If you do something original, you're to blame if it goes wrong. And often you're to blame if it goes right and makes the PHB who ordered otherwise look bad. Plus, if you think too much about all the stupid decisions and rules and stuff, you (A) end up very unhappy, and (B) you might pipe up and be seen as the malcontent who rocks the boat.
There's a whole class of managers whose whole job is to avoid taking any decision, and not rock the boat until pension. You know, the kind that'll count the pixels and complain that the kerning of "lore ipsum" on the site viewed in IE is different from the concept art done in Photoshop, just because that's just about the only thing they can do without showing any personal initiative or get into technical details that would require a personal decision. Or the kind who'll ship an extra manual for a printer in a box the size of the whole printer, just because some rule said "use box type 14 for that printer model." Etc.
Honestly, in some places I've seen, if a phone call came from the management requiring one to break the windows or destroy a monitor or whatnot... it wouldn't even be too far off from the normal idiocy coming from above.
I mean, think about it. I've been in an "urgent" project in December before, which got promptly cancelled on the 2nd of January, just because a department had some money to burn at the end of the year and they'd get their budget for next year cut if they didn't burn the last cent of it. So they deliberately blew their remaining budget on something they knew in advance that they don't need or want. Planned waste. Or there have been places where after a mild winter, people have been instructed to leave the heating and lights on overnight, because if they don't use their heating budget in full this year, you guessed, they'll get said budget cut next year when there might be a real winter. Etc.
If you were one of the people working in one of those places, and had just spent the spring turning heating _up_ when you leave and turning it back off in the morning, just because your department needs to waste some money... would you be particularly inclined to think twice, if someone called and asked that you break a window so they can use that bit of budget? Heck, would you be inclined to think twice about any other stupidity? Or, like everyone else, would you back up into a more comfortable, "not my business to worry about that kind of thing" attitude?
Are you kidding? So far the majority of stories involving someone acting like a sociopathic prick online, have attracted a number of wannabe sociopathic pricks that lionized the perp on one or more of the following grounds:
- muahahaha, now we're the ones with the power. Phear us! Payback time for the former school bully... and the cheerleader who didn't want to be my GF... and the jock who got her as a GF... and that geography teacher who got me bored to death... (Basically as if having been a victim once is all the reason and rationalization needed for victimizing others in turn. Newsflash: if anyone wasn't a bully just because they lacked the power and/or balls, but turns into one as soon as they can, they never had a moral high ground to start with.)
- OMG, if they were too stupid to defend themselves, they deserved it. (A.k.a., "might makes right.")
- more generally, if it's high tech and not everyone can do it, then it's right to do it if you can. (A.k.a., "might makes right.")
- It's just bits and bytes, and information wants to be free!! (Especially when said information is someone else's credit card number;))
- if it slips through some loophole of an existing law, despite being blatantly against its spirit, then it's morally right. The proposed new amendment against it is blatantly an attempt to control more people by criminalizing something as benign as terrorizing others. Cue quotes out of context from Richelieu and Ayn Rand.
- if it's already illegal, that law is blatantly an attempt to control more people by criminalizing something as benign as terrorizing others. Cue quotes out of context from Richelieu and Ayn Rand.
Etc.
In fact, my best guess is that now the majority opinion is against it only because it was _social_ engineering, and we don't relate that well to that. It involves talking to people and... eew ;) If it were about slipping someone a trojan to terrorize them via their computer, you'd see 200+ posts just defending the perp and blaming the victims.
So maybe it is stuff that matters. Reminding more wannabe sociopaths that doing it over the internet is no shield, is a good thing.
Well, all I'm saying is: let then try. If they think they can make a less addictive one that binds to the right receptors, let them try. Worst case scenario: we're back to nicotine.
The point about opioids was basically just that we don't have any other alternative, so we give them opioids. _If_ a better alternative was available, then people would get that.
In this case, someone thinks they can create a better alternative to nicotine. _If_ they succeed (and that's a big if), then I see no point in using the old toxic one. There is no point in causing more harm than necessary, just as some kind of act of resistance against big pharma. (Which wasn't your point, but how this talk started.)
Except that lobby can't really kill it, short of forbidding tobacco, can they? And we both know that outright forbidding nicotine won't happen any time soon.
So realistically, whoever objects to the patented cure, will always still have the option to light a cigarette instead. Or just to get a nicotine patch. I mean, it's not like an anti-smoking lobby will be that easy to use to forbid patches marketed as means to stop smoking.
I would imagine that would put an upper limit on the patented version's cost. Precisely because there'll always be the real nicotine as competition out there.
But even if it doesn't cap the price, the important fact still remains: the real nicotine isn't going anywhere.
Ditto for the "available now" part. It's not like anyone's stopping you from going to the pharmacy and getting a box of nicotine patches, or nicotine chewing gum, or whatever, if you want to self-medicate right away.
The only thing that's going to happen is that someone will research an alternative that does less harm. Maybe they'll succeed and make a profit. Maybe not. But it's not going to mean the end of life as we know it or anything.
Really, I don't see a "big evil pharma is going to kill nicotine" threat there. That jack is already out of the box. They're going to research an alternative. And if you don't like their alternative, you'll still be able to medicate yourself the old fashioned way until you lose a leg or a lung or whatever.
Nevertheless, if they think they can manufacture a synthetic substitute which is less toxic or addictive, I see no problem with it. Do you?