Lack of choices, though
on
Designer Babies
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· Score: 4, Informative
You seem to assume that you can just produce all combinations there. You can't.
E.g., out of two black haired Japanese parents you can't feasibly produce a redhead, because (A) neither of them has the gene, and (B) it's recessive, so the baby would need TWO such genes, one from each parent, to actually get red hair. The probability that _both_ the egg _and_ the sperm have that mutation out of nowhere, is pretty much nil.
It might work if both parents had the gene as recessive, but that's not a given. And then you can't want your second child to be a blonde.
The same problem hapens if you want, say, blue eyes for the kid. There is exactly one version of that gene that actually produces blue eyes. If the parents don't have it, that's that.
Of course, I suppose the wife could get some help from the milkman or whatnot;)
Well, I'm not a historian, just some guy who likes history, so take it with a grain of salt. Don't think me as some kind of authority by any kind of reckoning.
That said, probably you can just start with their own authors, for example some are on Project Gutenberg. (It's all out of copyright by now;)
Polybius is a good source for the punic wars. It doesn't seem to be on Gutenberg, but you can find it and a bunch of other stuff for example on Livius.org.
Far the actual imperial era, hmm, Ammianus Marcellinus is a good start, though half the books have been lost. A quick googling yields this: http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/ as the first one which isn't in latin.
And so on.
You have to bear in mind that more modern authors start from the ancient historians too, although some do add actual research into, say, exactly what was the geography of the terrain in a certain battle and where the heck _did_ that Goth cavalry come from. Still, you can't go _too_ wrong with starting at the source, IMHO.
Narmer's palette, from around 3000 BC, shows a siege of a walled city (lower obverse side). For all we know, Narmer unified Egypt's north and south, so this reflects the realities of the cities within Egypt during his time.
I probably wasn't clear enough about Egypt. I was thinking mostly of the time after Egypt's unification by Narmer. Before unification, yes, they had warfare among themselves. It's between Narmer's death and the Hyskos invasion that Egypt has mostly been spared from any noteworthy military threats. (And thus also the need for fortifications.)
My point is mainly that a long peace didn't make them stagnate or anything. There's this popular view that everything, any invention or innovation or spread of either, is always made for some army/warlord, primarily for warfare, and only incidentally it then trickles into civillian use. And I'm just saying that Egypt still progressed even without that.
Rome was a mercantile expansionist empire. The armies served the trade interests, and put down any threat to its economic dominance of the Mediterranean.
While the general idea is true, we could probably debate the details for half an eternity. And, as they say, the devil is in the details.
But even in that form, it will serve the basic point I'm trying to make: the army served the economic interests, not the other way around. And it wasn't the only tool. There were plenty of discoveries and advances that didn't happen or spread for the army, but because some of that mercantile class saw a potential to make money with them.
It's not that clear cut, I'm affraid. While certainly some roads were built for military purposes, you can find a lot more roads around the world built for trade. Because regardless of whether you're a pacifist or an aggressor, you need money and trade brings in the money.
E.g., probably the most famous "road" (or route) in history is the "Silk Road". There was a lot of effort involved in maintaining and policing that route, not because of troop movements, but because it was a major trade route.
Oh, you meant in Rome? Well, they had roads like Via Salaria, literally "salt road". Because that's what they traded along it.
Given current affairs it is relevant to wonder whether they actually were attacked, just claimed they were attacked to justify conquest, or even faked an attack in order to justify an invasion.
Well, certainly everything is possible, and it did happen at least once off the top of my head. But I think that _most_ of the time they didn't actually need to fake anything, and it would have been hard to fake it anyway.
For example the Daci had raided into Roman lands across the Danube since the times of Caesar (i.e., for more than 150 years) by the time Trajan had enough and finally conquered them. It's easy to fake one attack, but it's hard to fake 150 years of your settlers being attacked and your settlements sacked.
For example at the other end, did they really need to fake, say, the attacks of the Picti in Britannia? Britain ended up needing 3 legions and IIRC a whopping 20% of the auxilia in the Empire just to keep the picts from raiding south. Not only were these a financial burden, but it was a source of civil wars too, as whoever commanded 3 legions and that many auxiliary regiments soon got the idea that he can march with them upon Rome.
I.e., if that was done to fake a need to push the border farther north of Hadrian's wall, it would have been the most piss-poor and expensive fake in history. The area between Hadrian's Wall and the Antonine Wall just wasn't worth the cost of such a "faking". So, no, I don't believe that was faked.
For example, going back in time a bit, to the time of the Gallic Wars, the Helvetii had attacked the Romans and their allies before. (And indeed used that pre-existing history as a bargaining chip to try to get Caesar to back off.) Do we need some elaborate conspiracy theory there? I'll apply Occam's Razor and say there probably was a genuine attack there.
The gaul wars were a mixed bag and Caesar was going to be investigated by the Senate for it, when he decided to attack Rome instead.
But even there, it all started when the Helvetii attacked some gallic tribes which were allies and clients of Rome. The next two major interventions there followed the same pattern: someone attacks the allies of Rome, Rome smacks back hard.
It has nothing to do with crying "the Gaul have weapons of mass destruction", and everything to do with your allies being actually attacked first. Big difference.
Interesting, I never new Rome sprung into existence owning everything from the Tyne to the Danube. Did Romulus & Remus inherit it from a rich uncle? Reply to This
Interesting. If you had actually bothered to read to the end of the paragraph, you'd see I did address that issue: they conquered almost all that territory in counter-attacks, after being the ones attacked. Or were you that much in a hurry to jump to a snarky uninformed wisecrack? Learn to read, lemming.
Indirectly, it causes your population to rise. Bigger population = overcrowding. Conveniently it means a bigger army to go over and finally sort out those assholes in the next valley who worship the wrong god.
And "indirectly" is the whole point. It's stuff that didn't result by being paid for by a warlord, but civillian tech which then incidentally also benefitted an overlord. I.e., far from being a case where everything was invented because of wars and army, it's mostly the other way around.
Actually, the funny thing is: only because our history textbooks are still fascinated with conquerors, ignore civillian progress almost entirely, and kings which built up the economy instead of going to war are presented as weak kings. So yeah, you only get to hear about the stuff used in war.
But if you look as far back as the dawn of civilization, the advances which made those armies and empires possible in the first place were almost invariably civillian technology. E.g., you wouldn't have had those empires rising and falling in Mesopotamia without irrigation and timekeeping and a bunch of other things. I'm hard pressed to see how irrigation might have been developed for warfare.
Or if you look at ancient Egypt, their greatest advances were made before the Hyskos invasion, while Egypt was still shielded by the desert from any noteworthy warfare. Their only concerns were minor border fights against raiders and nubian tribes, and they didn't waste much of their GDP on the army or even on fortifying their cities. In fact, none of their cities had a wall at all. And yet in this age they developed construction, medicine, etc, to an extent far beyond their warring neighbours.
Romans, if you look at them, were actually a remarkably peaceful civilization. With some few exceptions, like the last war against Carthage, Rome almost never started a war of aggression. They just defended what was theirs and honoured their alliances to the letter. But when attacked, they hit back _hard_. Among other things because they hadn't ruined their economy and manpower with pointless wars before that. The vast majority of their conquests were actually done in counter-attacks.
But anyway, while everyone drools about the Roman legions, few people give thought to the economy that could afford them in the first place. There were advances in engineering, administration, construction, etc. There was stuff like the aqueducts that allowed Rome to have that monstruous manpower to throw at an enemy. Most of that stuff was civillian tech. Nobody built an aqueduct as an offensive thing.
That's their job, though. They're supposed to make the most money they can for their shareholders, not run a charity. If they think they can sell something for more money, well, they're _supposed_ to ask for more money.
Now whether they're smart about it, is a whole other question. (E.g., too often I see companies shooting themselves in the foot for millions so some department can save cents or so the CEO's shares rise 2 cents in the very short term.) Whether their means are acceptable is another good question. (E.g., the RIAA lawsuit carpet bombing) But acting as if wanting money was a by itself a capital sin is kinda missing the point.
Actually, it's not the only way. Unfortunately, though, the others are a lot more... limited.
1. For a start, there are the two Zalman 3D monitors which use simple polarizer glasses and don't need any particular frequency. Simply: odd rows are polarized in one direction, even rows in the perpendicular direction, so each eye sees only half of them.
Upsides: Every single frame is split into two like that, so 60Hz is enough. It works right out of the box with the Nvidia Vista drivers. No flickering because it's not shutter-glasses.
Downsides: needs Vista. Or the iz3d drivers in XP which honestly aren't that mature yet, and it's a pain in most games to get a neat 3D both afar and in the weapon you have in your hands. You get half the resolution either way. Any text which isn't in a huge font, _will_ be broken by seeing only every other line of it. But the worst is that the 3D effect only works in a vertical angle of +/- 8 degrees. You only need to slide in your chair a little or even move your head a bit if you're close to the screen, to just start seeing double instead of 3D.
2. The iz3d stacked tft monitor. Basically it's two monitors in one, and again it uses polarizer glasses to separate them.
Upside: works in XP too. No resolution loss. Angle is much less of a problem. No flickering because it's not shutter-glasses.
Downside: well, it's the iz3d drivers again. It takes a lot of fiddling for the 3D effect to work, and even then it doesn't seem to have the depth that the NVidia drivers manage out of the box. Trying to go any higher will just cause you to see double, as the brain just gives up. Again it's a big problem to have both good depth illusion _and_ not see your weapon doubled in a FPS. (E.g., in Hellgate London literally there's almost no setting except flat where the gun doesn't double in first person.)
Also see what Tom's Hardware had to say about it.
3. The eDimensional glasses and drivers.
Upside: they work in XP (and _only_ in XP.) They work with non-Nvidia cards. And eDimensional claims that they work with TFTs too. No refresh rate restriction: if you don't mind a _lot_ of flickering, you can even run their drivers on a 60Hz screen, effectively getting only 30Hz to each eye. It's much cheaper than the nVidia glasses it will work with the Nvidia drivers too, if you have Vista and an 120Hz display.
Downside: it will only work as well as the nVidia drivers if you actually get the nVidia drivers to use it. I.e., you're back to needing 120Hz and Vista.
Downside: The eDimensional drivers, to put it mildly, suck. First of all there's the issue that it makes the image interlaced if you use them instead of nVidia, and probably only Loki knows why they needed that on a CRT. Worse yet, it stays interlaced even on the desktop once it went interlaced. So it's all the disadvantages of a Zalman display, but it flickers and it has a bunch of other own disadvantages. Like that they've crashed more than once on me. Or that a lot of the time they just make the image interlaced, but not actually 3D. E.g., WoW, the porster child of the "we support 3D glasses" generation, just goes interlaced and starts flickering the glasses, but is otherwise just as flat as ever.
Upside: if you have a CRT, you can use a combination of the iz3d drivers and an eDimensional utility which just activates the glasses. The iz3d drivers don't know how to use the pin that controlls the shutter-glasses, but will happily render alternate frames for them if you activate the glasses otherwise. This actually doesn't have the interlaced effect, and actually works with more games.
Downside: the iz3d drivers still have the same downsides as before in rendering 3D. With an extra nasty twist I found out the hard way. If your fps drops below a limit (about 40 fps), the image starts just jumping between left eye and right eye, for no obvious reason, making the game unplayable. So basically you have to give up virtually eye candy in any game to have enough of the reserve so that doesn't
This is/., where some people don't even read the summary, and you expect us to read your comment?
Heh. Whatever kind of confusion of mind gave you the idea that anyone _cares_ whether your highness has read or not read a particular message? Did I ask you to read it in the first place?
What was the exact information and insight that you were trying to impart there? That you don't have the attention span to read, but are here to skip directly to the trolling? Or what? Should I send you some ADHD medicine? Should I care at all? Give me one good reason why. I'm curious.
Well, I'm certainly not going to lose sleep over something like that. But that something like that happened, even if for the reasons you wrote, certainly helped lower my expectations about the lower end of
A) the intelligence, and
B) the honesty
of the human species.
The intelligence part you've already covered extremely well. It's exactly that kind of idiotic decisions taken by people who don't understand what they manage, that makes Dilbert seem like a documentary.
The honesty part is actually what bothered me more. Yes, as many people will tell you, there were _some_ real problems out there that had to be fixed for the Y2K, and some people who put real honest work into that. But that's all dwarfed by the amount of lying con-men that crawled out of the woodwork for that event. There was so much snake-oil sold, and so much scare-mongering about doomsday scenarios which _couldn't_ have possibly happened, that it left a very bitter aftertaste in my mouth.
Basically if management ended up taking those retarded inflexible decisions, it's also because they were bombarded with disinformation by the various self-serving con-artists and scaremongers. They had everything from consulticks to lying sales-weasels to IT ragazines trying to milk some money out of them with scary outlandish stories of the utter apocalypse that awaits them if as little as the doormat isn't certified Y2K compliant. I can even sorta excuse the sales-weasels paid by commission, but the consulticks and IT ragazine pundits were the ones trusted to provide the needed information and sane advice there. That they too chose to lie to milk some more money out of any gullible manager...
Mind you, it still doesn't excuse the idiocy of those who did blow a company's money on idiotic unneeded upgrades of the speakers and network cables. But it's not a zero-sum game. I can despise the con-men without having to lose any contempt for the gullible idiots.
While I see your point, I've also seen and touched computer speakers labeled as "Y2K compliant" back in 1999. And even that wasn't the most ludicrious thing. IIRC _the_ most ludicrious thing was a network cable sold as Y2K compliant.
I'm not even sure how a cable or speakers could _possibly_ have had a Y2K problem, seeing that neither even had a CPU, much less anything capable of knowing the date or depending on it.
The only sane explanation was that some marketer figured out they'd sell more of them with that extra claim.
And it wouldn't surprise me one bit if the Vista thing created similar effects.
Well, maybe, but exactly what idea or notion are they trying to get the people interested in? They can basically,
1. Actually show what life in such a colony would be like. Which is probably going to be as boring as paint dry.
It won't even be some kind of a wild-west lone-frontierman scenario. It won't even be a WoW-crafting-only scenario. Most likely you'll just be an employee doing a job there. Maybe an employee of NASA or maybe an employee of whichever corporation thinks they can make a fortune mining that Helium 3, but an employee nevertheless.
You're not going to make a living swinging a pickaxe by yourself, and/or filtering nuggets in a sieve like the wild-west gold-rushers. That wouldn't even pay for the cost of the rocket trip there. It'll going to be some large scale mining operation to make any economic sense. Someone will have to pay for all the machinery and surveying there, and that will be something worth millions or even billions of dollars. It'll be either some major corporation or NASA itself, and if you want to take any part in it, you'll be their employee. You'll work 8 hours a day operating some machinery, then go to your dorm and watch TV and hope you get paid at the month's end.
And I just don't think a work simulator will get many people interested in the MMO or the idea it sells. I know normal MMOs were called "work simulators" before, but this is the real thing, and orders of magnitude less interesting.
2. Let's say they give it some gameplay twists, like, say, make it a sorta WoW crafting and social scenario, but without the rest of WoW. So you go there on your trusty mount (maybe a rover?) look on the minimap for He3 ore veins, then go hit them with a pickaxe and rush to the auction house with the results. You know, more immediate gratification.
The first problem is that it's already deviating from the truth. It's selling an idealized frontierman colonist idea that just won't happen that way. As selling itself goes, selling based on false and deliberately misleading falsehoods and mis-representations has a name: fraud. Oh, they'll probably avoid liability in the court someway or another, but at the heart of it it remains fraud.
The second problem is that one-trick MMOs tend to still be really unpopular. Even ones which let you completely avoid most of the game (e.g., mining in safe locations in EQ2 and then spending the rest of the day in the crafting "instance") essentially just let people shoot themselves in the foot and get bored faster. You get to do the same thing over and over again, it gets boring, you leave.
The runaway success of WoW is at least partially due to there always being more than one thing to do.
Plus the rest of the game gives a meaning and purpose to that crafting exercise. You bother with it because you can make something better for yourself, or for someone else who'll then go and beat up some NPCs with it. Or if you just mine/skin and sell, you do it because someone else wants to do that. It's an activity which isn't there for itself, but because it fits the bigger picture. Cutting one activity out of context is like taking just the fingers out of the Sistine Chapel and thinking it still should make a good painting.
Basically the verdict is: it'll probably be as popular as The Sims Online, which unfortunately flopped. It won't get that many more people sold on the idea of colonization than version #1.
3. Go the full monte and make it a full MMO with lots of combat (space _and_ ground combat), hunting alien spiders for epic world drops, PvP (maybe one faction gets to play the aliens), and tiered endgame grind.
Well, I for one would welcome _that_ overlord, because there's a severe lack of good traditional (character-based as opposed to ship-based) SF-themed MMOs.
But at that point you just give up any pretense of getting people interested in what NASA actually does and in what moon colonization will be like, and sell them just a game. And any interest "buying" NASA's space-programmes based f
Totally orthogonal to the original topic, personally I'm a fan of voice chat for pretty much the same reason. It doesn't need sitting and typing, and an "ok, let's go across the bridge and do quest X" is 2-3 seconds worth of speech.
1. Well, I didn't say that those laws are perfect, nor that they _solve_ the problem. I'm just saying they try to _contain_ it.
2. Well, when the friendly neighbour, the mafia thug drops by, he isn't actually threatening you with wrecking your shop. He's just, you know, offering an incentive to pay him so he prevents any threats to your shop:P
The human mind is actually funny. We all think we can juggle multiple variables, and only look at the important, but the cruel (and proven by studies) reality is that everything gets dragged towards the value of "how much I like or dislike that guy on the whole." That overall opinion isn't an average of the individual and independently-evaluated values, but rather the other way around, a value that gets averaged into all the others.
It works equally well for:
- humans. If person X really likes person Z, the same personality traits will be given a big positive delta. "Yeah, he's outspoken, but we need people who call things as they are. And yeah, he finishes his projects later than other people, but he's a perfectionist and you can't rush quality. And maybe some bugs slip past his tests, but it's inevitable in this line of work." If person Y really hates Z, the same things get a big negative delta in their perception. "He's rude and lazy, and his programs are so buggy you have to wonder if he even tried starting them before committing in CVS." Which is why being the boss's best buddy actually works.
- companies and products. Fanboy flamewars are probably the best illustration of it at work. You see extreme deltas applied in their perception, so the same thing (which is probably not even important for anyone else) becomes pure perfection and even God couldn't have done it better to one camp, and the work of Satan to the other camp.
- games. E.g., see all the people who swore that everything about WoW is perfection when they liked it, and flipped to swearing that every single aspect or design decision is pure evil and only deluded idiots like it, when they eventually got bored of the game.
Etc.
Or to put it otherwise, there's a reason why everyone from Bill Gates to some obscure singer tries to whitewash their PR image, by means varying from posing as the great philanthropist (e.g., Bill Gates) to milking some compassion (e.g., Michael Jackson.) Because while we _should_ be evaluating the products based on their individual merits, liking the guy actually makes you like his products too, and hating him makes you find more faults in his products.
What I'm trying to get to is: judges and _especially_ juries should judge the facts independent of any other factors, but they're still humans like the rest of us. Many a case (again, especially when it involved a jury) ended up actually being judged by how well one likes the defendant, or by which lawyer is more charismatic.
So it's probably a good idea to avoid being perceived in some unsympathetic light, e.g., as "one of those evil hackers."
1. That some businesses would want to slander (or libel) the competition, yeah, that probably goes all the way back to the dawn of time. Which is why most countries have various numbers of laws to contain the phenomenon.
2. There's still something distasteful about being the guy who tries to cash in on that with a "if you don't pay 300 a month, we'll show bad reviews of you at the top." That's no longer even about competition, it's a plain old protection racket. It's not just a betrayal of the public's trust, it's really trying to blackmail someone with a threat to their public image and reputation.
We're in an age where someone's reputation is probably the most important asset of their business. I wouldn't be surprised if some restaurants would lose less money if you threw a molotov through their windows, than if you convince half the town to not even give them a try. Doubly so since you can insure agains the former, but there's no insurance I know of against just not getting customers. So basically I see no fundamental moral difference between, basically:
- "Nice restaurant you have there. It would be a shame if anything happened to it. It's a rough neighbourhood, you know? Lots of evil people out there. Some vandals could tear the place down one night. But we're nice people. If you pay us 300$ a month for our efforts, we could keep an eye out that it doesn't happen."
- "Nice reputation your restaurant has. It would be a shame if anything happened to it. It's a tough world, you know? Lots of evil people out there. Some bastards could plaster the reviews page with really nasty stuff. But we're nice people. If you pay us 300$ a month for our efforts, we could keep an eye out that it doesn't happen."
Both essentially threaten you with a bigger loss unless you pay the protection fee.
even if it is, a first time wow player probably wouldn't know about add-ons until weeks or months into the game.
Somehow my parents heard about it from a guild-mate before either of them had even hit level 20.
plus, if you think QH killed the game for you, why did you bother looking for it and keeping it?
I had no way to know in advance that it would kill the game for me. I mean, if I knew the future... forget WoW, I'd contact Randi about it and get a cool million dollars;)
Since when did WoW use any brain power for any of it? I'm lost...
I'm not saying that WoW is some brain-gym kind of game. Far from it.
But you still have to exercise at least _some_ (minimal) brain cells, e.g., to read the quest descriptions, use the map, and figure out stuff like "oh, it said go south at the crossroads" or "wait, these are not the kinds of satyrs the quest wanted." Not IQ-test grade by any means, but there's _some_ brain activity involved.
With QH, I find that I hardly need any brain activity at all. You don't even need to read the name of the NPCs, ffs, because QH will already tell you if you need to kill any of those for your quests or not.
Basically think this (bad) analogy: WoW without QH is like walking to the kitchen or toilet and back. Not exactly a work-out by any reckoning, but it might be just enough to not get a thrombosis. WoW with QH is like being in an electric-motor wheelchair all the time. You get buggerall use out of your own leg muscles, even if you spent the whole day running between the computer, the kitchen and the bathroom. Both don't qualify as sports, but the latter is even less activity than the former.
Actually, I find that trying Questhelper has pretty much killed all my interest in WoW.
Now I do appreciate having Thottbot or such, for when I got lost or couldn't figure out the directions after trying for half an hour. But just following the cube makes me feel like a bot could do the same thing, and probably better. There is no need for any more complex thought above "click on that guy because Questhelper says so" or "head that way because Questhelper says so." There's nothing left to discover (technically QH discovered it already for you), nothing worth remembering (QH already tells you whether you need to go east or west, so no point in even trying to remember where the quest told you to go), you don't even need to look at the major landmarks (if it's behind that hill, QH will tell you so.)
And you can tell. I know people who play exclusively by Questhelper (heck, mom does) and frankly, they don't seem to actually use any brainpower in playing the game. Often they won't even remember what they just did or where some major landmark is, because really there was no more thought involved than obediently doing what the bot told them to. They've run along some road a dozen times, but ask them to show you where it is, and you find that they couldn't find their own arse with a map and a compass, but without QH. Or you see them forgetting they had to use some unique item, and some whole group trying to take down some elite boss the hard way instead, because none of them bothered even reading the quest text and QH doesn't tell them, "dude, use the shreder".
Now if that still keeps you entertained, good for you, and I'm not going to try to convince you otherwise. But it's just not for me. For me it makes the whole thing boring as heck, and takes away any kind of sense of achievement too.
1. NVidia sells integrated GPUs too, and they too count crappy integrated GPUs as GPUs sold. And yes, even if you later go and buy an ATI 4870, Nvidia still counts it as a GPU sold.
So it seems to me like the GPs basic point still stands: Intel sells more GPUs than Nvidia. By a metric Nvidia too uses when they willy-wave about their market share being larger than ATI's.
2. You seem to assume that it's some inescapable misfortune for the users, or that that's somehow not included in the choice to buy this computer vs the other computer.
Newsflash: most people don't actually care about the GPU itself. They want a computer. And if they wanted a gaming rig that tops all benchmarks, there are enough companies selling them one. It's not like when they go to Dell's site there isn't a gaming computer category.
So, yes, the decision was made at some point to buy a computer which barely runs Aero well. Because they decided that they don't need more. And if an Intel integrated GPU was the cheapest there, I fail to see what's the problem.
Basically (for the mandatory bad car analogy) it's like when you buy a car, you don't actually give a flying fuck about the exact model of the gearbox under the hood. You might care about miles per gallon, price, whether your family fits in it, speed and acceleration maybe, insurance price, and/or the status-symbol value of that car brand. But if it's a Ford transmission or bought/licensed from Toyota, who cares? If they can save you some money by using transmission X instead of transmission Y, and the car still fits your criteria, why would you feel shafted? And if that saving came by getting it bundled with, say, the suspensions, again who cares?
Same here. If mom wanted a computer which runs Windows, does email and is good enough for her photoshopping photos taken with her digital camera, why would she care whether it's a discrete higjh-end GPU or an integrated solution from any of the manufacturers? The whole computer still does what she needs to do, and the latter costs less than the former. And if the one with Intel integrated chipset cost less than the one with Nvidia integrated chipset, so be it, that's the one she's going to buy.
1. What makes you think it would do much? If a student is _that_ disruptive, to the point of flat out refusing to cooperate or obey in any form or shape, not to mention the attitude to the cops bit, I'd say the parents aren't too involved in her education, one way or another.
Best case scenario: it's some single mom who threw in the towel long ago. You might make the mom unhappy a bit, she'll sob on some friends' shoulder, but she's not going to even know where to start to discipline her daughter.
Second worst: the parents don't really give a flying fuck in the first place. They just hope that their daughter grows up without much attention, like the tree in the back yard. Or that if someone has to do things right, it's the teacher, society, whoever other than them.
Absolute worst: the parents actually are proud of that antisocial behaviour and encourage it. Behind many a sociopathic school bully is a parent who's proud that his son/daughter looks out for number one and puts those losers in their place. Behind many, "bah, learning is for loser nerds. Who needs it?" attitudes is some parent who slipped through school on the exact same attitude, and still rationalizes it as the right thing.
2. If she refuses to leave class or stop, what are you going to do? Let her sit there and keep making a point of being a git until the parents get there? Even if the parent immediately drops everything and comes over, you're realistically looking at another hour fucked up before they actually get there.
I know people, heck, work with people where the dad commutes half way across the country, the mom commutes two cities away, and either of them can't get home in less than two hours even if they wanted to.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to assume that you can just produce all combinations there. You can't.
E.g., out of two black haired Japanese parents you can't feasibly produce a redhead, because (A) neither of them has the gene, and (B) it's recessive, so the baby would need TWO such genes, one from each parent, to actually get red hair. The probability that _both_ the egg _and_ the sperm have that mutation out of nowhere, is pretty much nil.
It might work if both parents had the gene as recessive, but that's not a given. And then you can't want your second child to be a blonde.
The same problem hapens if you want, say, blue eyes for the kid. There is exactly one version of that gene that actually produces blue eyes. If the parents don't have it, that's that.
Of course, I suppose the wife could get some help from the milkman or whatnot ;)
Well, I'm not a historian, just some guy who likes history, so take it with a grain of salt. Don't think me as some kind of authority by any kind of reckoning.
That said, probably you can just start with their own authors, for example some are on Project Gutenberg. (It's all out of copyright by now ;)
E.g., since the gallic wars have popped up in this thread, Caesar's "De Bello Gallico" is in there, so you can hear it from the man himself how that went. (They have the latin version too, if you're crazy enough.)
Polybius is a good source for the punic wars. It doesn't seem to be on Gutenberg, but you can find it and a bunch of other stuff for example on Livius.org.
Far the actual imperial era, hmm, Ammianus Marcellinus is a good start, though half the books have been lost. A quick googling yields this: http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/ as the first one which isn't in latin.
And so on.
You have to bear in mind that more modern authors start from the ancient historians too, although some do add actual research into, say, exactly what was the geography of the terrain in a certain battle and where the heck _did_ that Goth cavalry come from. Still, you can't go _too_ wrong with starting at the source, IMHO.
I probably wasn't clear enough about Egypt. I was thinking mostly of the time after Egypt's unification by Narmer. Before unification, yes, they had warfare among themselves. It's between Narmer's death and the Hyskos invasion that Egypt has mostly been spared from any noteworthy military threats. (And thus also the need for fortifications.)
My point is mainly that a long peace didn't make them stagnate or anything. There's this popular view that everything, any invention or innovation or spread of either, is always made for some army/warlord, primarily for warfare, and only incidentally it then trickles into civillian use. And I'm just saying that Egypt still progressed even without that.
While the general idea is true, we could probably debate the details for half an eternity. And, as they say, the devil is in the details.
But even in that form, it will serve the basic point I'm trying to make: the army served the economic interests, not the other way around. And it wasn't the only tool. There were plenty of discoveries and advances that didn't happen or spread for the army, but because some of that mercantile class saw a potential to make money with them.
It's not that clear cut, I'm affraid. While certainly some roads were built for military purposes, you can find a lot more roads around the world built for trade. Because regardless of whether you're a pacifist or an aggressor, you need money and trade brings in the money.
E.g., probably the most famous "road" (or route) in history is the "Silk Road". There was a lot of effort involved in maintaining and policing that route, not because of troop movements, but because it was a major trade route.
Oh, you meant in Rome? Well, they had roads like Via Salaria, literally "salt road". Because that's what they traded along it.
Well, certainly everything is possible, and it did happen at least once off the top of my head. But I think that _most_ of the time they didn't actually need to fake anything, and it would have been hard to fake it anyway.
For example the Daci had raided into Roman lands across the Danube since the times of Caesar (i.e., for more than 150 years) by the time Trajan had enough and finally conquered them. It's easy to fake one attack, but it's hard to fake 150 years of your settlers being attacked and your settlements sacked.
For example at the other end, did they really need to fake, say, the attacks of the Picti in Britannia? Britain ended up needing 3 legions and IIRC a whopping 20% of the auxilia in the Empire just to keep the picts from raiding south. Not only were these a financial burden, but it was a source of civil wars too, as whoever commanded 3 legions and that many auxiliary regiments soon got the idea that he can march with them upon Rome.
I.e., if that was done to fake a need to push the border farther north of Hadrian's wall, it would have been the most piss-poor and expensive fake in history. The area between Hadrian's Wall and the Antonine Wall just wasn't worth the cost of such a "faking". So, no, I don't believe that was faked.
For example, going back in time a bit, to the time of the Gallic Wars, the Helvetii had attacked the Romans and their allies before. (And indeed used that pre-existing history as a bargaining chip to try to get Caesar to back off.) Do we need some elaborate conspiracy theory there? I'll apply Occam's Razor and say there probably was a genuine attack there.
The gaul wars were a mixed bag and Caesar was going to be investigated by the Senate for it, when he decided to attack Rome instead.
But even there, it all started when the Helvetii attacked some gallic tribes which were allies and clients of Rome. The next two major interventions there followed the same pattern: someone attacks the allies of Rome, Rome smacks back hard.
It has nothing to do with crying "the Gaul have weapons of mass destruction", and everything to do with your allies being actually attacked first. Big difference.
Interesting. If you had actually bothered to read to the end of the paragraph, you'd see I did address that issue: they conquered almost all that territory in counter-attacks, after being the ones attacked. Or were you that much in a hurry to jump to a snarky uninformed wisecrack? Learn to read, lemming.
And "indirectly" is the whole point. It's stuff that didn't result by being paid for by a warlord, but civillian tech which then incidentally also benefitted an overlord. I.e., far from being a case where everything was invented because of wars and army, it's mostly the other way around.
Actually, the funny thing is: only because our history textbooks are still fascinated with conquerors, ignore civillian progress almost entirely, and kings which built up the economy instead of going to war are presented as weak kings. So yeah, you only get to hear about the stuff used in war.
But if you look as far back as the dawn of civilization, the advances which made those armies and empires possible in the first place were almost invariably civillian technology. E.g., you wouldn't have had those empires rising and falling in Mesopotamia without irrigation and timekeeping and a bunch of other things. I'm hard pressed to see how irrigation might have been developed for warfare.
Or if you look at ancient Egypt, their greatest advances were made before the Hyskos invasion, while Egypt was still shielded by the desert from any noteworthy warfare. Their only concerns were minor border fights against raiders and nubian tribes, and they didn't waste much of their GDP on the army or even on fortifying their cities. In fact, none of their cities had a wall at all. And yet in this age they developed construction, medicine, etc, to an extent far beyond their warring neighbours.
Romans, if you look at them, were actually a remarkably peaceful civilization. With some few exceptions, like the last war against Carthage, Rome almost never started a war of aggression. They just defended what was theirs and honoured their alliances to the letter. But when attacked, they hit back _hard_. Among other things because they hadn't ruined their economy and manpower with pointless wars before that. The vast majority of their conquests were actually done in counter-attacks.
But anyway, while everyone drools about the Roman legions, few people give thought to the economy that could afford them in the first place. There were advances in engineering, administration, construction, etc. There was stuff like the aqueducts that allowed Rome to have that monstruous manpower to throw at an enemy. Most of that stuff was civillian tech. Nobody built an aqueduct as an offensive thing.
That's their job, though. They're supposed to make the most money they can for their shareholders, not run a charity. If they think they can sell something for more money, well, they're _supposed_ to ask for more money.
Now whether they're smart about it, is a whole other question. (E.g., too often I see companies shooting themselves in the foot for millions so some department can save cents or so the CEO's shares rise 2 cents in the very short term.) Whether their means are acceptable is another good question. (E.g., the RIAA lawsuit carpet bombing) But acting as if wanting money was a by itself a capital sin is kinda missing the point.
Actually, it's not the only way. Unfortunately, though, the others are a lot more... limited.
1. For a start, there are the two Zalman 3D monitors which use simple polarizer glasses and don't need any particular frequency. Simply: odd rows are polarized in one direction, even rows in the perpendicular direction, so each eye sees only half of them.
Upsides: Every single frame is split into two like that, so 60Hz is enough. It works right out of the box with the Nvidia Vista drivers. No flickering because it's not shutter-glasses.
Downsides: needs Vista. Or the iz3d drivers in XP which honestly aren't that mature yet, and it's a pain in most games to get a neat 3D both afar and in the weapon you have in your hands. You get half the resolution either way. Any text which isn't in a huge font, _will_ be broken by seeing only every other line of it. But the worst is that the 3D effect only works in a vertical angle of +/- 8 degrees. You only need to slide in your chair a little or even move your head a bit if you're close to the screen, to just start seeing double instead of 3D.
2. The iz3d stacked tft monitor. Basically it's two monitors in one, and again it uses polarizer glasses to separate them.
Upside: works in XP too. No resolution loss. Angle is much less of a problem. No flickering because it's not shutter-glasses.
Downside: well, it's the iz3d drivers again. It takes a lot of fiddling for the 3D effect to work, and even then it doesn't seem to have the depth that the NVidia drivers manage out of the box. Trying to go any higher will just cause you to see double, as the brain just gives up. Again it's a big problem to have both good depth illusion _and_ not see your weapon doubled in a FPS. (E.g., in Hellgate London literally there's almost no setting except flat where the gun doesn't double in first person.)
Also see what Tom's Hardware had to say about it.
3. The eDimensional glasses and drivers.
Upside: they work in XP (and _only_ in XP.) They work with non-Nvidia cards. And eDimensional claims that they work with TFTs too. No refresh rate restriction: if you don't mind a _lot_ of flickering, you can even run their drivers on a 60Hz screen, effectively getting only 30Hz to each eye. It's much cheaper than the nVidia glasses it will work with the Nvidia drivers too, if you have Vista and an 120Hz display.
Downside: it will only work as well as the nVidia drivers if you actually get the nVidia drivers to use it. I.e., you're back to needing 120Hz and Vista.
Downside: The eDimensional drivers, to put it mildly, suck. First of all there's the issue that it makes the image interlaced if you use them instead of nVidia, and probably only Loki knows why they needed that on a CRT. Worse yet, it stays interlaced even on the desktop once it went interlaced. So it's all the disadvantages of a Zalman display, but it flickers and it has a bunch of other own disadvantages. Like that they've crashed more than once on me. Or that a lot of the time they just make the image interlaced, but not actually 3D. E.g., WoW, the porster child of the "we support 3D glasses" generation, just goes interlaced and starts flickering the glasses, but is otherwise just as flat as ever.
Upside: if you have a CRT, you can use a combination of the iz3d drivers and an eDimensional utility which just activates the glasses. The iz3d drivers don't know how to use the pin that controlls the shutter-glasses, but will happily render alternate frames for them if you activate the glasses otherwise. This actually doesn't have the interlaced effect, and actually works with more games.
Downside: the iz3d drivers still have the same downsides as before in rendering 3D. With an extra nasty twist I found out the hard way. If your fps drops below a limit (about 40 fps), the image starts just jumping between left eye and right eye, for no obvious reason, making the game unplayable. So basically you have to give up virtually eye candy in any game to have enough of the reserve so that doesn't
Heh. Whatever kind of confusion of mind gave you the idea that anyone _cares_ whether your highness has read or not read a particular message? Did I ask you to read it in the first place?
What was the exact information and insight that you were trying to impart there? That you don't have the attention span to read, but are here to skip directly to the trolling? Or what? Should I send you some ADHD medicine? Should I care at all? Give me one good reason why. I'm curious.
Well, I'm certainly not going to lose sleep over something like that. But that something like that happened, even if for the reasons you wrote, certainly helped lower my expectations about the lower end of
A) the intelligence, and
B) the honesty
of the human species.
The intelligence part you've already covered extremely well. It's exactly that kind of idiotic decisions taken by people who don't understand what they manage, that makes Dilbert seem like a documentary.
The honesty part is actually what bothered me more. Yes, as many people will tell you, there were _some_ real problems out there that had to be fixed for the Y2K, and some people who put real honest work into that. But that's all dwarfed by the amount of lying con-men that crawled out of the woodwork for that event. There was so much snake-oil sold, and so much scare-mongering about doomsday scenarios which _couldn't_ have possibly happened, that it left a very bitter aftertaste in my mouth.
Basically if management ended up taking those retarded inflexible decisions, it's also because they were bombarded with disinformation by the various self-serving con-artists and scaremongers. They had everything from consulticks to lying sales-weasels to IT ragazines trying to milk some money out of them with scary outlandish stories of the utter apocalypse that awaits them if as little as the doormat isn't certified Y2K compliant. I can even sorta excuse the sales-weasels paid by commission, but the consulticks and IT ragazine pundits were the ones trusted to provide the needed information and sane advice there. That they too chose to lie to milk some more money out of any gullible manager...
Mind you, it still doesn't excuse the idiocy of those who did blow a company's money on idiotic unneeded upgrades of the speakers and network cables. But it's not a zero-sum game. I can despise the con-men without having to lose any contempt for the gullible idiots.
While I see your point, I've also seen and touched computer speakers labeled as "Y2K compliant" back in 1999. And even that wasn't the most ludicrious thing. IIRC _the_ most ludicrious thing was a network cable sold as Y2K compliant.
I'm not even sure how a cable or speakers could _possibly_ have had a Y2K problem, seeing that neither even had a CPU, much less anything capable of knowing the date or depending on it.
The only sane explanation was that some marketer figured out they'd sell more of them with that extra claim.
And it wouldn't surprise me one bit if the Vista thing created similar effects.
Well, maybe, but exactly what idea or notion are they trying to get the people interested in? They can basically,
1. Actually show what life in such a colony would be like. Which is probably going to be as boring as paint dry.
It won't even be some kind of a wild-west lone-frontierman scenario. It won't even be a WoW-crafting-only scenario. Most likely you'll just be an employee doing a job there. Maybe an employee of NASA or maybe an employee of whichever corporation thinks they can make a fortune mining that Helium 3, but an employee nevertheless.
You're not going to make a living swinging a pickaxe by yourself, and/or filtering nuggets in a sieve like the wild-west gold-rushers. That wouldn't even pay for the cost of the rocket trip there. It'll going to be some large scale mining operation to make any economic sense. Someone will have to pay for all the machinery and surveying there, and that will be something worth millions or even billions of dollars. It'll be either some major corporation or NASA itself, and if you want to take any part in it, you'll be their employee. You'll work 8 hours a day operating some machinery, then go to your dorm and watch TV and hope you get paid at the month's end.
And I just don't think a work simulator will get many people interested in the MMO or the idea it sells. I know normal MMOs were called "work simulators" before, but this is the real thing, and orders of magnitude less interesting.
2. Let's say they give it some gameplay twists, like, say, make it a sorta WoW crafting and social scenario, but without the rest of WoW. So you go there on your trusty mount (maybe a rover?) look on the minimap for He3 ore veins, then go hit them with a pickaxe and rush to the auction house with the results. You know, more immediate gratification.
The first problem is that it's already deviating from the truth. It's selling an idealized frontierman colonist idea that just won't happen that way. As selling itself goes, selling based on false and deliberately misleading falsehoods and mis-representations has a name: fraud. Oh, they'll probably avoid liability in the court someway or another, but at the heart of it it remains fraud.
The second problem is that one-trick MMOs tend to still be really unpopular. Even ones which let you completely avoid most of the game (e.g., mining in safe locations in EQ2 and then spending the rest of the day in the crafting "instance") essentially just let people shoot themselves in the foot and get bored faster. You get to do the same thing over and over again, it gets boring, you leave.
The runaway success of WoW is at least partially due to there always being more than one thing to do.
Plus the rest of the game gives a meaning and purpose to that crafting exercise. You bother with it because you can make something better for yourself, or for someone else who'll then go and beat up some NPCs with it. Or if you just mine/skin and sell, you do it because someone else wants to do that. It's an activity which isn't there for itself, but because it fits the bigger picture. Cutting one activity out of context is like taking just the fingers out of the Sistine Chapel and thinking it still should make a good painting.
Basically the verdict is: it'll probably be as popular as The Sims Online, which unfortunately flopped. It won't get that many more people sold on the idea of colonization than version #1.
3. Go the full monte and make it a full MMO with lots of combat (space _and_ ground combat), hunting alien spiders for epic world drops, PvP (maybe one faction gets to play the aliens), and tiered endgame grind.
Well, I for one would welcome _that_ overlord, because there's a severe lack of good traditional (character-based as opposed to ship-based) SF-themed MMOs.
But at that point you just give up any pretense of getting people interested in what NASA actually does and in what moon colonization will be like, and sell them just a game. And any interest "buying" NASA's space-programmes based f
Totally orthogonal to the original topic, personally I'm a fan of voice chat for pretty much the same reason. It doesn't need sitting and typing, and an "ok, let's go across the bridge and do quest X" is 2-3 seconds worth of speech.
1. Well, I didn't say that those laws are perfect, nor that they _solve_ the problem. I'm just saying they try to _contain_ it.
2. Well, when the friendly neighbour, the mafia thug drops by, he isn't actually threatening you with wrecking your shop. He's just, you know, offering an incentive to pay him so he prevents any threats to your shop :P
The human mind is actually funny. We all think we can juggle multiple variables, and only look at the important, but the cruel (and proven by studies) reality is that everything gets dragged towards the value of "how much I like or dislike that guy on the whole." That overall opinion isn't an average of the individual and independently-evaluated values, but rather the other way around, a value that gets averaged into all the others.
It works equally well for:
- humans. If person X really likes person Z, the same personality traits will be given a big positive delta. "Yeah, he's outspoken, but we need people who call things as they are. And yeah, he finishes his projects later than other people, but he's a perfectionist and you can't rush quality. And maybe some bugs slip past his tests, but it's inevitable in this line of work." If person Y really hates Z, the same things get a big negative delta in their perception. "He's rude and lazy, and his programs are so buggy you have to wonder if he even tried starting them before committing in CVS." Which is why being the boss's best buddy actually works.
- companies and products. Fanboy flamewars are probably the best illustration of it at work. You see extreme deltas applied in their perception, so the same thing (which is probably not even important for anyone else) becomes pure perfection and even God couldn't have done it better to one camp, and the work of Satan to the other camp.
- games. E.g., see all the people who swore that everything about WoW is perfection when they liked it, and flipped to swearing that every single aspect or design decision is pure evil and only deluded idiots like it, when they eventually got bored of the game.
Etc.
Or to put it otherwise, there's a reason why everyone from Bill Gates to some obscure singer tries to whitewash their PR image, by means varying from posing as the great philanthropist (e.g., Bill Gates) to milking some compassion (e.g., Michael Jackson.) Because while we _should_ be evaluating the products based on their individual merits, liking the guy actually makes you like his products too, and hating him makes you find more faults in his products.
What I'm trying to get to is: judges and _especially_ juries should judge the facts independent of any other factors, but they're still humans like the rest of us. Many a case (again, especially when it involved a jury) ended up actually being judged by how well one likes the defendant, or by which lawyer is more charismatic.
So it's probably a good idea to avoid being perceived in some unsympathetic light, e.g., as "one of those evil hackers."
Well, yes and no.
1. That some businesses would want to slander (or libel) the competition, yeah, that probably goes all the way back to the dawn of time. Which is why most countries have various numbers of laws to contain the phenomenon.
2. There's still something distasteful about being the guy who tries to cash in on that with a "if you don't pay 300 a month, we'll show bad reviews of you at the top." That's no longer even about competition, it's a plain old protection racket. It's not just a betrayal of the public's trust, it's really trying to blackmail someone with a threat to their public image and reputation.
We're in an age where someone's reputation is probably the most important asset of their business. I wouldn't be surprised if some restaurants would lose less money if you threw a molotov through their windows, than if you convince half the town to not even give them a try. Doubly so since you can insure agains the former, but there's no insurance I know of against just not getting customers. So basically I see no fundamental moral difference between, basically:
- "Nice restaurant you have there. It would be a shame if anything happened to it. It's a rough neighbourhood, you know? Lots of evil people out there. Some vandals could tear the place down one night. But we're nice people. If you pay us 300$ a month for our efforts, we could keep an eye out that it doesn't happen."
- "Nice reputation your restaurant has. It would be a shame if anything happened to it. It's a tough world, you know? Lots of evil people out there. Some bastards could plaster the reviews page with really nasty stuff. But we're nice people. If you pay us 300$ a month for our efforts, we could keep an eye out that it doesn't happen."
Both essentially threaten you with a bigger loss unless you pay the protection fee.
Somehow my parents heard about it from a guild-mate before either of them had even hit level 20.
I had no way to know in advance that it would kill the game for me. I mean, if I knew the future... forget WoW, I'd contact Randi about it and get a cool million dollars ;)
Unfortunately, too many do use it from their first character, though.
I'm not saying that WoW is some brain-gym kind of game. Far from it.
But you still have to exercise at least _some_ (minimal) brain cells, e.g., to read the quest descriptions, use the map, and figure out stuff like "oh, it said go south at the crossroads" or "wait, these are not the kinds of satyrs the quest wanted." Not IQ-test grade by any means, but there's _some_ brain activity involved.
With QH, I find that I hardly need any brain activity at all. You don't even need to read the name of the NPCs, ffs, because QH will already tell you if you need to kill any of those for your quests or not.
Basically think this (bad) analogy: WoW without QH is like walking to the kitchen or toilet and back. Not exactly a work-out by any reckoning, but it might be just enough to not get a thrombosis. WoW with QH is like being in an electric-motor wheelchair all the time. You get buggerall use out of your own leg muscles, even if you spent the whole day running between the computer, the kitchen and the bathroom. Both don't qualify as sports, but the latter is even less activity than the former.
Actually, I find that trying Questhelper has pretty much killed all my interest in WoW.
Now I do appreciate having Thottbot or such, for when I got lost or couldn't figure out the directions after trying for half an hour. But just following the cube makes me feel like a bot could do the same thing, and probably better. There is no need for any more complex thought above "click on that guy because Questhelper says so" or "head that way because Questhelper says so." There's nothing left to discover (technically QH discovered it already for you), nothing worth remembering (QH already tells you whether you need to go east or west, so no point in even trying to remember where the quest told you to go), you don't even need to look at the major landmarks (if it's behind that hill, QH will tell you so.)
And you can tell. I know people who play exclusively by Questhelper (heck, mom does) and frankly, they don't seem to actually use any brainpower in playing the game. Often they won't even remember what they just did or where some major landmark is, because really there was no more thought involved than obediently doing what the bot told them to. They've run along some road a dozen times, but ask them to show you where it is, and you find that they couldn't find their own arse with a map and a compass, but without QH. Or you see them forgetting they had to use some unique item, and some whole group trying to take down some elite boss the hard way instead, because none of them bothered even reading the quest text and QH doesn't tell them, "dude, use the shreder".
Now if that still keeps you entertained, good for you, and I'm not going to try to convince you otherwise. But it's just not for me. For me it makes the whole thing boring as heck, and takes away any kind of sense of achievement too.
1. NVidia sells integrated GPUs too, and they too count crappy integrated GPUs as GPUs sold. And yes, even if you later go and buy an ATI 4870, Nvidia still counts it as a GPU sold.
So it seems to me like the GPs basic point still stands: Intel sells more GPUs than Nvidia. By a metric Nvidia too uses when they willy-wave about their market share being larger than ATI's.
2. You seem to assume that it's some inescapable misfortune for the users, or that that's somehow not included in the choice to buy this computer vs the other computer.
Newsflash: most people don't actually care about the GPU itself. They want a computer. And if they wanted a gaming rig that tops all benchmarks, there are enough companies selling them one. It's not like when they go to Dell's site there isn't a gaming computer category.
So, yes, the decision was made at some point to buy a computer which barely runs Aero well. Because they decided that they don't need more. And if an Intel integrated GPU was the cheapest there, I fail to see what's the problem.
Basically (for the mandatory bad car analogy) it's like when you buy a car, you don't actually give a flying fuck about the exact model of the gearbox under the hood. You might care about miles per gallon, price, whether your family fits in it, speed and acceleration maybe, insurance price, and/or the status-symbol value of that car brand. But if it's a Ford transmission or bought/licensed from Toyota, who cares? If they can save you some money by using transmission X instead of transmission Y, and the car still fits your criteria, why would you feel shafted? And if that saving came by getting it bundled with, say, the suspensions, again who cares?
Same here. If mom wanted a computer which runs Windows, does email and is good enough for her photoshopping photos taken with her digital camera, why would she care whether it's a discrete higjh-end GPU or an integrated solution from any of the manufacturers? The whole computer still does what she needs to do, and the latter costs less than the former. And if the one with Intel integrated chipset cost less than the one with Nvidia integrated chipset, so be it, that's the one she's going to buy.
1. What makes you think it would do much? If a student is _that_ disruptive, to the point of flat out refusing to cooperate or obey in any form or shape, not to mention the attitude to the cops bit, I'd say the parents aren't too involved in her education, one way or another.
Best case scenario: it's some single mom who threw in the towel long ago. You might make the mom unhappy a bit, she'll sob on some friends' shoulder, but she's not going to even know where to start to discipline her daughter.
Second worst: the parents don't really give a flying fuck in the first place. They just hope that their daughter grows up without much attention, like the tree in the back yard. Or that if someone has to do things right, it's the teacher, society, whoever other than them.
Absolute worst: the parents actually are proud of that antisocial behaviour and encourage it. Behind many a sociopathic school bully is a parent who's proud that his son/daughter looks out for number one and puts those losers in their place. Behind many, "bah, learning is for loser nerds. Who needs it?" attitudes is some parent who slipped through school on the exact same attitude, and still rationalizes it as the right thing.
2. If she refuses to leave class or stop, what are you going to do? Let her sit there and keep making a point of being a git until the parents get there? Even if the parent immediately drops everything and comes over, you're realistically looking at another hour fucked up before they actually get there.
I know people, heck, work with people where the dad commutes half way across the country, the mom commutes two cities away, and either of them can't get home in less than two hours even if they wanted to.
The real question is, was it set to vibrate? Inquisitive minds want to know.