Thanks for the correction, but the results were scary either way. In a couple of centuries, Rome went from those 1-2 million people to about 20,000 people living among acres of abandoned buildings and ruins. Pretty much a Fallout scenario.
Especially if it involves the Pope, Texas, and a midget or two.
I seriously don't see the link between the Pope and US puritan nuts. Or between the pope and the young-earth idiocy for that matter.
If you look as far as back as St Augustine Of Hippo, he wrote in no uncertain terms that only an idiot would take the Genesis literally. "It is too disgraceful and ruinous, though, and greatly to be avoided, that he [the non-Christian] should hear a Christian speaking so idiotically on these matters, and as if in accord with Christian writings, that he might say that he could scarcely keep from laughing when he saw how totally in error they are." That's pretty much a thorough flaming of that point of view. He got sanctified by the catholic church, btw.
Plus, whatever bigotry the catholics might have had against science, were gone in the counter-reformation. (They had to try to stop losing ground to the protestants _somehow_.) The Society Of Jesus for example, is pretty much a scientific order sponsored by the Vatican. Those guys operate research labs and universities. And yes, they teach evolution and the big bang.
Also let's remember that the Vatican, including the current pope, btw, has officially proclaimed Darwinism as correct. So you won't find _them_ arguing that dinosaur fossils were placed there to test your faith.
Now I'm not saying the catholics are without fault. But ffs, blame them for their real faults, not for bullshit strawmen. Lumping them together with the young-earthers just shows massive ignorance. Blaming it on the pope is like blaming the fall of Byzantium on the emperor of China. That freaking stupid.
It seems to me like some people aren't in it even for the science-vs-religion parts, but just because they're cretin trolls seeking to annoy someone, anyone for attention.
All the examples you provided were diseases that had natural origins (the smallpox was intentionally spread, but was not created or spread by scientists), which highlights something key here: if there is going to be a killer virus, it's going to be natural. If someone catches an airborn form of ebola and is infectious while in a major international airport... goodnight. Don't worry about the amateurs, the most dangerous and evil biologist is nature itself.
That's a bit irrelevant, since the capability of genetically engineering a virus was missing until very recently. Even the cold-war era research into it was basically little more than selecting and breeding existing strains.
So, yes, _of_ _course_ the Roman smallpox outbreaks weren't manufactured, because nobody in the world was capable of manufacturing it. Heck, they didn't even know exactly _what_ it is, since it would be another millennium and a half (or so) before anyone even had a microscope.
So basically saying "if there is going to be a killer virus, it's going to be natural" at this point, is a bit like being in the 40's in Japan and saying "if anything's going to destroy half a city, it's going to be a natural disaster. Don't worry, all historical examples have been earthquakes, floods and volcanoes."
You know, that gives me an idea. I'll change my name to "Marcus Ulpius Nerva Traianus", so any drones who just do a quick googling will have the first 10 pages straight saying that I was the greatest Roman Emperor, pagan but well respected even by the christians, conquered Dacia, gave the Persians a sound spanking (and beat them in the war too;), built a bridge over the Danube, built a great column and a forum, etc.
Hmm, wait a sec, also that (according to historians like Dio Cassius) Trajan was into boys. Curses, foiled again.
I don't think anyone cringes at exploring technology per se, but at doing so without much safeguards if any. The potential for mass harm is great, and while nobody proposes to outlaw it as such, it would be nice if it stayed only in proper labs and you at least had to tell someone your idea before even starting on it. You know, sorta like the XKCD idea of having your comment read out loud to you so you get a second chance to spot if it sounds bloody stupid.
Basically the same as: I'm not against electricity or nuclear power, but if the neighbour's kid managed to buy ten kilos of plutonium for his science experiment... I'd _worry_.
And here we're talking about something which has historically caused more harm than a nuke before. E.g.,
- repeated smallpox outbreaks seem to have been what weakened the Roman empire in the first centuries AD, to the point of near collapse of its economy and army. (Not to mention making everyone disillusioned with the old gods and ways.) There are outbreaks that are estimated to have killed up to 30% of the empire's total population. _Thousands_ of people died daily in Rome alone, for decades straight. (Though later Justinian's Plague killed about ten thousands a day in Constantinople.)
- ask the american indians how well smallpox worked for them later
- bubonic plague outbursts killed a majority of Europe's population back then, with mortality as high as 75% per outbreak in some cities (though not all.)
- we had a killer flu as late as after the first world war
Knowing that everyone can concoct their own cross between flu and aids with just a couple of relevant genes from the noro-virus for extra flavour, doesn't exactly make me sleep easier.
And before someone goes, "omg, but now we have antibiotics": yeah, but curing viruses is still where we suck. Royally.
And at least theoretically it would be possible to concoct even bacterias which don't respond to antibiotics that well. The easy to explain version is to just start from VISA/VRSA (think MRSA with extra resistances) and give it a gene so it multiplies faster. But for something more advanced for true gurus, why not swap out the proteins attacked by the antibiotics in the first place? E.g., give it the ribosome from an animal cell, and you just rendered a whole class of antibiotics impotent at a more fundamental level than normal bacterial resistances. Might need to recode a couple of other proteins for it to work, but that's why I've said it's for gurus only.
Or get creative. Make a bacteria or virus that can live equally well on plants _and_ animals. Now that'll be a royal pain in the arse to completely root out, and it can safely kill its hosts without making itself extinct.
Actually, the problem there is that you assume MS does it to please the RIAA. In fact, it does it just to pwn their distribution channels. Sorta like the robber baron building two towers and a chain across a major river and putting up his own taxes: it's not as much for the benefit of the merchants sailing along the river, as for the baron's own benefit.
What MS is trying to do is make its own codecs the de-facto standard, and as impossible to move to another standard (e.g., to get that file recorded back as MP3) as physically possible. That the same DRM also makes the pill easier to swallow for the RIAA is just the icing on the cake. But in reality it's more like the KY Jelly on the shaft they're about to get.
Once MS owns the codec, it pretty much owns the distribution channel. It can launch its own Zune 2, car radios, etc, it can sell the music too, and/or tax anyone else who does with the royalties.
They're not the only ones who do. That's also why Sony made a big loss on the PS3 just to push its Blu-Ray format, or why it came up with the proprietary UMD, or why it stuck with its crap 48kbps music codecs even long after it started calling its portable crap "MP3 players." (You could transfer MP3s to them only via its own proprietary application, which actually converted them to the crap Sony codec, at a brutal loss of quality.) And you can probably find a couple more examples along the same lines.
But at any rate, it's not about pleasing the RIAA, it's about pwning another market. It's monopoly business as usual. Just incidentally that market happens to be the RIAA's distribution channel. Sweetening the pill a bit for them is good because you don't want them to say "we're not releasing anything in your format", but do note that MS would want DRM anyway there. They don't want you to get that DRM'ed music and then convert it to MP3 and play it on an iPod instead of a Zune.
Actually, since patents last for only 20 years, likely all that stuff would be in the public domain by now. And we'd have an exact description of how to do it ourselves too, instead of still having to guess at it. As it is, the old fart is keeping it all a trade secret, which is just what patents were supposed to prevent.
On the other hand, I guess 7 of his days in Genesis seem to have been almost 2 billion years each (counting "let there be light" as coinciding with the big bang.) So 20 of his years for the patent to expire... ooer, maybe we don't want to wait that long after all:P
So, basically, you need to pull such BS because you don't like the free market?
Because that's really how it was supposed to work: many perfectly interchangeable products and vendors, perfectly informed customers, and they'll buy from whoever asks the least money for it.
Yes, it drives profit margins down, but that's what it's supposed to do. And it's also the way to weed out the inefficient vendors. If company X can offer the exact same product for $500 less and still make a profit, while company Y would go bankrupt with it, then probably company X is a better use of society's resources.
It's really an optimization algorithm. It matches the available resources (employees, land, ore, electricity, whatever) to who/what can produce more of what everyone needs and less of what we don't.
Seems to me like at least the kind discussed here, wants to get rid of the shopping around _and_ the part about the customers being informed. You know, what with the gag orders and all.
I'm sorry, but I don't think you have some sacred right to make a profit. If your business model doesn't work without turning the whole market model on its head, well, maybe you shouldn't be in that business in the first place. Not said as a flame or anything, but I simply fail to see the point in returning to a fancy form of feudalism.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you must bend over for a customer that's trying to push you to sell below your costs. If you can't make a profit selling to them, fine, don't. That's also part of how the model is supposed to work. But basically "we have to act like a crappy monopolist because we can't compete on price" just fails to impress me.
Copyright law requires a written transfer of ownership. How does a EULA, especially a click through EULA, supersede copyright?
In much the same way as a click-through EULA supersedes consumer rights;) I.e., probably not at all, but they hope you might be gullible enough to believe you have no rights.
Still, there's the matter of intent. The "mens rea", so to speak. At least the intent there was to supersede and void your existing legal rights. I can't help feeling utter contempt towards them for it.
I have actually RTFA, but it still seems to me a little simplified.
E.g., you yourself give the example of AFFERO GPL as a case where an extra tweak was considered needed because of the software-as-a-service phenomenon. That both are "sharing with rules" just glosses over a distinction that obviously someone thought relevant to their values. One camp basically says "I only want your sources if you distribute the software in binary form", while the other basically says, "I also want them if you run them on your servers." Over-simplified, but you get the idea.
That's just the kind of fine points that make the tastes and values of person X differ from those of person Y or from those of company Z. Even if they both can be lumped under the same "sharing with rules" pot, there's always some aspect or detail that two different people see in two different ways. Different details or distinctions can lead someone to really needing yet another license.
E.g., the LGPL you mention yourself is basically a case of wanting something in between "gift" and "sharing with rules". I don't think it's the only possible point between the two. Different people may well feel that a different point in that interval is the best for them.
Really? It seems to me that among other things you were already dismissing as "lacking the common sense God gave to a dog" were even discussing drugs or homosexuality.
Make up your mind. Either we're talking about Dark Elves cybering and other uninteresting stuff, or about topics which affect legislation and taxes.
E.g., it seems to me like debating homosexuality is how those guys got any rights in the first place. Otherwise we'd still be at the stage where it's a capital offense.
E.g., discussing drugs seems to me like an important issue, since my tax money essentially goes into sending some people to jail. I would think that destroying someone's life for having smoked pot, would merit more thought than that.
Among other things, because of this thing called "democracy". The people are supposed to decide if the majority wants those laws or not. But you can't have an informed and rational choice if one half of the debate is essentially bullied into shutting the fuck up, for fear that they'll make themselves unemployable if they take that side. That's the way towards groupthink and bad laws.
Plus, to quote Adlai E. Stevenson, "A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular." Once you've essentially made it unsafe to say anything unpopular even in a supposedly private tell or email, that society has ceased to be free.
So if you see these kinds of issues as on par with "people disguised as Dark Elves "cheating" on their wives through chat channels in a video game"... well, to put it mildly, your sense of proportions is _way_ off.
Well, there's already at least one case where apparently a photo just being released under the Creative Commons, made it legal enough for Virgin to use it in a big advertising campaign. I don't think they needed anything else there.
1. I hope you realize that exactly that was what allowed the Soviet Union to keep its citizens in check.
Yes, everyone knows about Stalin's brutal repression, but that was toned down a lot after Stalin. They discovered that you can control people easier by making them think you have a dossier on them, and they can eventually get bitten in the arse by something they said in the past. And that even something which doesn't outright warrant a one-way trip to Siberia can bite them in the arse in some other way. Like maybe they won't ever be allowed to travel abroad again, or they'll never get a promotion now, or whatever.
It actually worked better than Stalin's executions and mass deportations, surprisingly.
People learned to do exactly what you seem to advocate: don't say anything you wouldn't be comfortable explaining to the nice commissar. Don't assume anything about someone else, other than that they might get you in trouble. (E.g., by being an agent provocateur and trying to get you to say something that'll remain on your record for ever.) Distance yourself from anyone discussing those forbidden things, you wouldn't want to go on record as associating with that kind of people.
It just made them unable to organize in any form or shape. That guy talking against the Party became not a guy to rally around, but someone who'll probably get you in trouble if you join him. You don't want that attached permanently to your record.
As an example of how well it worked, think Sakharov. He was a very loud in speaking against the regime... but nobody joined him anyway. The party was feeling secure enough about it to only slap him with an "exile"... to a relatively decent job in the fourth biggest city in Russia. Not in Siberia either. And while he did get a bunch of visits from the police, none seemed to be brutal or anything. Probably more to show everyone else that Sakharov _is_ being watched, and the party will know if you associate with him. It worked like a charm. Millions of people who secretly aggreed with him, didn't want to actually have it added permanently to their dossier.
And you have to bear in mind that we're talking about the dead-tree kind of dossier in the USSR's case. They had neither the manpower to actually supervise everyone and record everything, nor the search engine to actually find anything unless you actually gave someone a good reason to read yours. It worked anyway.
The recent trend of everything being recorded and indexed on the internet, could create a chilling effect of much more epic proportions.
2. Even if you take the approach of "if you were stupid enough to say X online, then you deserve whatever's coming to you", in reality it's trivially easy for someone to say stuff about you without your having consented. There'll be tells, blog posts, etc, discussing various things you've said or done or were mis-heard of saying.
So in effect if you want to have any kind of protection, you have to not say anything debatable to anyone, never assume about any person you meet IRL that they're not going to send an online tell about it, etc. Welcome to the wonderful world of talking only about the weather, and never trusting anyone. As I was saying, that's what turned the USSR into a mass of isolated and easily bullied individuals too.
I understand your point, and it's a very valid one, but:
1. Supposedly, they also found such stuff as what the average gamer age is, that they're slightly depressive, or what their BMI is.
It doesn't exactly sound like that's strictly about the characters, sorry. (I'd think that all those dwarves and barbarians would have a higher BMI than these guys found;) As I was saying in another post, even if they then surveyed those people, the fact remains that they knew who and where to contact. I.e., at the very least that WillowCakes341 can be found for a survey under the name Random J Sixpack under the email address randy6p@example.com.
2. Plus, see the thing about AOL and their improperly anonymized data. AOL hadn't handed over the usernames too, but thanks to including the "vanity searches" for one's own name, it was pretty trivial to find out a lot of identities.
If that 60TB of data is truly raw and unfiltered, you can find lots of people telling their names and/or email addresses to each other, discussing their family issues, etc. A lot of people are simply entirely too social and naive for their own good when online. I wouldn't be too surprised if for a lot of those customers you can find everything from name to RL address to name of their spouse and children in some chat logs, just because they thought it's a private tell to a friend.
3. And, again, I would bet that a lot of that includes information not about just themselves, but about friends and family who never consented to having their lives made public. Even if I were to take the nasty attitude that, basically, "if X was stupid enough to put his life online, X deserves what's coming to him now", I fail to see why should people Y and Z suffer too just for having been acquaintances with X.
E.g., in the past mom drove me nearly neurotic with telling everyone every single freaking detail about me. I grew up with the idea that pretty much every single neighbour, teammate of mom's, acquaintance of an acquaintance, or even random strangers on the bus, would know even at which time I took a shit yesterday. I'm not exaggerating. In retrospect, probably most people didn't even actually listen, because few things are more boring than a mom talking non-stop about her kids. But if you do the same online, and that's a lot of information archived and immortalized for anyone to trawl through.
There still was this thing called copyright, though. Anything you post is by default copyrighted to yourself. You don't even need to do anything special. So, yes, people could still have your photos in their browser's cache, but weren't legally allowed to do much with them.
E.g., just because I saved your family photo on my hard drive, doesn't mean I can cut and paste your daughter's head into an ad for condoms, nor as an ad for Adult Friend Finder, nor on top of a porn-star's body and sell subscriptions to that site, nor pretty much anything else.
A TOS which grants any entity full rights to your stuff, including to license it further, means pretty much just that: you forfeit any legal rights or recourses you might have had. If they want to use it for any purpose whatsoever, they can. You just gave them that right.
I can see why Sony was happy to allow their data to be used for this.
I can see how Sony was happy, but I can't see how raping people's privacy for a buck is ethical in any form or shape. And in some parts of the world, it's probably even illegal.
Because make no mistake, it was for money. Simply put, "Let's see if these people can figure out how we can make more money in subscriptions." Apparently the prospect of a quick buck is all it takes for a corporation to sell your data.
From the biblical 30 silvers, to Sony doing it for the _hope_ of getting 15 dollars a month out of you, not much has changed. In fact, it seems to me like competition just drove the prices down;) Each individual person that Sony sold, _maybe_ they can get another subscription out of 1% of them, and even then for a month or two. Effectively Sony sold everyone for the hope of 30 cents or so a piece. Makes me respect Judas more by comparison.
Actually, it was probably a survey, but you do raise a valid issue there about privacy. Exactly how much data did Sony share?
We were outraged that AOL shared some improperly anonymized search strings, which in some cases could lead to the guy's real identity. Here, if they even knew who to survey, it means that Sony just handed over RL names on a silver platter.
What else? Chat logs? 60 TB is a hell of a lot of data. And probably a lot of things you said at one point, but didn't think them too carefully, and probably didn't mean them in the long run.
As an easy example, think of all the people who've bought gold, or played a flirty female when they're male, or flirted with one who turns out to be male. Lots of public embarrassment potential. Or what if you talked about sex to someone who, as it turns out, was 8 years old? I'm sure some people would love to jump to conclusions there.
Sent some tells about sometimes wanting to kill your classmates or co-workers? I'm sure those will be worth some hysteria when the next school shooting comes around. Talked about drugs or about homosexuality? I'm sure some future potential employers would make a fuss about that. Confessed playing or chatting from work 'cause you're the network admin and the logs don't apply to you? Well, now Sony's logs do. Etc.
And how much of the billing data is in there, anyway? Enough for someone to steal your identity? But even if it was just enough to contact those people IRL and survey them, I'm guessing at least the email address must have been in there. I'm sure some spammers and phishers would love to have it too.
Basically even if you trust that those researchers probably won't do that, the circle of people with access to someone's private data just grew. It only takes one irresponsible git or disgruntled admin, or even an insecure network which someone can break into and look around, for that circle to grow even further. How many steps until someone does do something unethical with it?
Sony already did their part in not giving a flying fuck about protecting their customers' privacy, after all. It only takes one or two more people with the exact same cavalier attitude, before it bites some people in the arse for just trusting Sony.
So, then, you're 13 years old and in the video game shop in the mall with your buds... gee, let's see, which game do I want to buy here, think the guys would be impressed by some flag-football where the most dexterous player wins, or chainsaw arena football.... hmmmm.... tough one, right?
Well, I'm sure that'll be news to EA, who has been making more money with their sports games than with any other genre. In fact, nowadays the average game doesn't even break even, and EA effectively subsidizes the duds out of their sports games income.
I'm sure it'll also be news to all the console manufacturers who've been courting EA for those games. Or to Sega who thought that they _need_ their own sports games to survive without EA sports, back in the Dreamcast days when they got in a pissing contest with EA.
So yes, "some flag-football where the most dexterous player wins", and in fact is often little more than a re-release of last year's game in higher resolution and the list of players updated, routinely outsells games mindless blood and guts.
I'm sure it'll also be news to Sony, where the Gran Turismo series and Final Fantasy helped sell more Playstations than all gory games combined.
It seems to me that:
1. Taking an arbitrary 13 year old male segment is a non-sequitur anyway, in an age where the average gamer age is in the 30's. There are more female gamers over 20 than male gamers under 18, and the numbers look even more bleak if you restrict yourself to 13 years olds. So what's really the point? That you can pick an irrelevant minority for your example?
2. Even there, don't underestimate a culture where masculinity and aggression are basically channelled into "my sports team beat your team, sucker". You could maybe make your point about some other dexterity game. But football? In half the world it's the modern gladiators and _the_ way to channel us-vs-them willy-waving. People learn early that being a mindless football drone is actually _expected_ if you're male. And aspiring to be a football superstar is actually one of the very acceptable and popular puberty aspirations for males. In this culture it's not a case of "some fag-football", but rather the opposite: people might wonder if you're gay if you _don't_ like football.
So, yes, if that 13 years old wants to not look gay to his peers, picking "some flag-football where the most dexterous player wins" is actually one of the easy ways to do so.
Jeez, are you saying that any problem that take more then 30 seconds to solve is worth the time?
I'm saying: it depends.
1. If we're talking about inventing cold fusion, yes, it's worth spending more than 30 seconds on it. But then I'd presumably be paid for that, one way or another.
If it's a game I play to relax, then no, it's not worth it.
2. A well designed game would split that in several steps that take less than 30 seconds each.
A trivial example is Mahjongg or Shisen-sho: a whole game takes much longer than 30 seconds, but spotting a pair of tiles that match takes a couple of seconds. You can make a game arbitrarily long by just having more tiles, without each individual step being longer than that. And in fact if I reached a point where for 30 seconds I can't see a matching pair, I'd probably conclude that there aren't any more and hit the "new game" button.
If a game routinely hits points for most players where they try for 30 seconds and conclude "I have no fucking clue", then that's a badly designed game in my book.
3. The fact is, it's trivial to make any game arbitrarily hard.
I'm not even going to go into FPS or RTS (making the enemies 100% accurate is actually the easiest maths there), but even for puzzle games see the XKCD strip about NP-Complete problems. There's a whole class of problems that are NP-Complete, and (thus) you can raise the difficulty exponentially by just adding more nodes. It's trivial to add a couple more apetizers to the XKCD list, for example. Or double them, and get something that will make even Mensa members go cross-eyed.
There you go. Just make each step (or the whole puzzle) such a NP-complete problem that the user must solve in his head, and it's trivially easy raise the difficulty to whatever insane levels you wish.
The hard part is making it _easy_ but still interesting. That's really what separates the good designers from the wannabes. Not how hard can you make it, but really how easy can you make it. That's the challenge. The good ones can make an immersing game that actually could be played by a drunk epileptic.
4. It's worth noting that the shortest term memory buffer in humans is only 8 seconds long. So any problem which needs more thinking, is going to require more swapping information around and/or going back and forth to seeing what the problem was again. So difficulty and effort rise disproportionately. Just as a design principle to keep in mind.
5. But that's all a bit moot. As I've said before, it doesn't matter what _I_ think, it matters what his players think. Because they're the ones paying for the damned thing.
His own market research shows that most of them give up after 30 seconds. That's his market research data. He can factor it in the design and get their money, or he can stick to his vision and lose their business. It's really that simple.
You can choose to complain about how they're all idiots and stuff, but that's really not the point. It's those idiots who are willing to pay to be entertained. And they're not paying to be educated about how they should use their head more, but to be entertained. If you want their money, you have to match their tastes. If not, not.
If you think 30 seconds is a long time to think about part of a puzzle, whether it's a placement or a move or whatever, then it's time to go back on the Ritalin.
Just as well that you don't design games, eh? Because the point isn't even what _I_ think of that, but what his players (and thus potential customers) think. By his own experimentation, after 30 seconds they give up. _That_ is the data that actually matters.
Game design isn't some kind of "let's create some reasons to sneer at the customers" contest. Your job there is basically to entertain them. That's why they pay you for.
Silly willy-waving about who should go back to ritalin is already a loser's game as it is. As a philosophy for game design, it's outright idiotic.
I don't read it as "solve the level in 30 seconds" but as "30 seconds of being stuck." There's a massive difference there.
As a partially silly example to illustrate that difference, think Tetris: a whole game usually takes a lot longer than 30 seconds, but the time you get for each piece is a heck of a lot less.
That's the case I'm trying to make: 6 times thinking 5 seconds is ok. A combined 30 seconds of looking at it and having no bloody clue what next isn't. A game or a level can be made arbitrarily long by adding more of the former, without falling into the non-fun trap of the latter.
However, when I tried beta testing such a system, almost every user would just hammer the hint button as soon as they got stuck for longer than 30 seconds, spoiling (I believe) their enjoyment of the game.
So you're telling me that almost every single user would reach several points in your puzzles where, for a whole 30 seconds they have no bloody clue what to do, and essentially have to surrender and use that button? And you think they should enjoy the frustration instead?
I'm sorry, but that's not a case of mindlessly hammering away at the "help" button. If they hit it each second, ok, I could see it that way. But if they first did try 30 seconds, that's really an "ok, I give up" gesture. It's reaching a point where it's either that button or they uninstall the stupid game.
But, at any rate, if almost every user gets stuck repeatedly in your game, I'd say that's bad design. The help button may be a band-aid fix for the symptoms, but the underlying problem remains. And forcing the players to stay stuck there, is only going to build up frustration, not fun.
It's not just about appearances. The Neanderthals:
- used tools to make other tools. Apes do make improvised tools like sharpening sticks, but only Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens would build a stone axe to use to build a stone spear, and then keep both.
- skinned animals and tanned the skins
- built elaborate shelters out of wood and skins
- used clothes (e.g., made from those skins)
- built (crude) musical instruments. And not just as in "something that makes noise", but as in, for example, a flute which can play more than one note. So they probably had music too.
- had a bit of work specialization, which would also mean a bit more complex a social structure, and possibly even some kind of commerce (at least as in, "I'll make you a strong spear if you give me a leg of antelope.")
- decorated themselves with primitive jewellery and paints (basically early cosmetics)
- had ritual burial, which would indicate some concept of afterlife or at least remorse. (You don't bother burying someone in the same position, and with his weapon, and stuff, unless you expect it to matter somehow.)
Etc.
And according to this research, they probably were as capable of speech as the humans, because they have the same gene.
Oh, and another bit of trivia: they actually had a higher average brain size than Homo Sapiens. And in a smaller body, too. So if we go by the popular brain-mass/body-mass metric, they should actually be a little smarter on the average.
So we're not talking just as in "looks like a human", but something that was definitely just as sentient and self-aware as a human. It could probably not just understand that you're experimenting on it, but understand the experiment if you bother explaining the science behind it.
And if you think that it still makes it ok, because it's still a different species... well, then I'd say your empathy is too broken to be the same as 99% of the humans. You're different. When can we start experimenting on _you_ then?
I kinda doubt it. Neanderthals went extinct so long ago, that I doubt that any stories or myths from that age would have survived as long.
We're talking long before humanity invented writing, so the only way it could have survived is if the shaman of a tribe taught his apprentice about it, and so on. For some tens of thousands of years straight. I'd think that's rather unlikely. They had more pressing concerns in the here and now than "those guys our ancestors lived in the same cave with."
Basically, how many folk stories do we have about woolly mammoths? Why would Neanderthals be remembered more?
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Thanks for the correction, but the results were scary either way. In a couple of centuries, Rome went from those 1-2 million people to about 20,000 people living among acres of abandoned buildings and ruins. Pretty much a Fallout scenario.
I seriously don't see the link between the Pope and US puritan nuts. Or between the pope and the young-earth idiocy for that matter.
If you look as far as back as St Augustine Of Hippo, he wrote in no uncertain terms that only an idiot would take the Genesis literally. "It is too disgraceful and ruinous, though, and greatly to be avoided, that he [the non-Christian] should hear a Christian speaking so idiotically on these matters, and as if in accord with Christian writings, that he might say that he could scarcely keep from laughing when he saw how totally in error they are." That's pretty much a thorough flaming of that point of view. He got sanctified by the catholic church, btw.
Plus, whatever bigotry the catholics might have had against science, were gone in the counter-reformation. (They had to try to stop losing ground to the protestants _somehow_.) The Society Of Jesus for example, is pretty much a scientific order sponsored by the Vatican. Those guys operate research labs and universities. And yes, they teach evolution and the big bang.
Also let's remember that the Vatican, including the current pope, btw, has officially proclaimed Darwinism as correct. So you won't find _them_ arguing that dinosaur fossils were placed there to test your faith.
Now I'm not saying the catholics are without fault. But ffs, blame them for their real faults, not for bullshit strawmen. Lumping them together with the young-earthers just shows massive ignorance. Blaming it on the pope is like blaming the fall of Byzantium on the emperor of China. That freaking stupid.
It seems to me like some people aren't in it even for the science-vs-religion parts, but just because they're cretin trolls seeking to annoy someone, anyone for attention.
That's a bit irrelevant, since the capability of genetically engineering a virus was missing until very recently. Even the cold-war era research into it was basically little more than selecting and breeding existing strains.
So, yes, _of_ _course_ the Roman smallpox outbreaks weren't manufactured, because nobody in the world was capable of manufacturing it. Heck, they didn't even know exactly _what_ it is, since it would be another millennium and a half (or so) before anyone even had a microscope.
So basically saying "if there is going to be a killer virus, it's going to be natural" at this point, is a bit like being in the 40's in Japan and saying "if anything's going to destroy half a city, it's going to be a natural disaster. Don't worry, all historical examples have been earthquakes, floods and volcanoes."
You know, that gives me an idea. I'll change my name to "Marcus Ulpius Nerva Traianus", so any drones who just do a quick googling will have the first 10 pages straight saying that I was the greatest Roman Emperor, pagan but well respected even by the christians, conquered Dacia, gave the Persians a sound spanking (and beat them in the war too;), built a bridge over the Danube, built a great column and a forum, etc.
Hmm, wait a sec, also that (according to historians like Dio Cassius) Trajan was into boys. Curses, foiled again.
I don't think anyone cringes at exploring technology per se, but at doing so without much safeguards if any. The potential for mass harm is great, and while nobody proposes to outlaw it as such, it would be nice if it stayed only in proper labs and you at least had to tell someone your idea before even starting on it. You know, sorta like the XKCD idea of having your comment read out loud to you so you get a second chance to spot if it sounds bloody stupid.
Basically the same as: I'm not against electricity or nuclear power, but if the neighbour's kid managed to buy ten kilos of plutonium for his science experiment... I'd _worry_.
And here we're talking about something which has historically caused more harm than a nuke before. E.g.,
- repeated smallpox outbreaks seem to have been what weakened the Roman empire in the first centuries AD, to the point of near collapse of its economy and army. (Not to mention making everyone disillusioned with the old gods and ways.) There are outbreaks that are estimated to have killed up to 30% of the empire's total population. _Thousands_ of people died daily in Rome alone, for decades straight. (Though later Justinian's Plague killed about ten thousands a day in Constantinople.)
- ask the american indians how well smallpox worked for them later
- bubonic plague outbursts killed a majority of Europe's population back then, with mortality as high as 75% per outbreak in some cities (though not all.)
- we had a killer flu as late as after the first world war
Knowing that everyone can concoct their own cross between flu and aids with just a couple of relevant genes from the noro-virus for extra flavour, doesn't exactly make me sleep easier.
And before someone goes, "omg, but now we have antibiotics": yeah, but curing viruses is still where we suck. Royally.
And at least theoretically it would be possible to concoct even bacterias which don't respond to antibiotics that well. The easy to explain version is to just start from VISA/VRSA (think MRSA with extra resistances) and give it a gene so it multiplies faster. But for something more advanced for true gurus, why not swap out the proteins attacked by the antibiotics in the first place? E.g., give it the ribosome from an animal cell, and you just rendered a whole class of antibiotics impotent at a more fundamental level than normal bacterial resistances. Might need to recode a couple of other proteins for it to work, but that's why I've said it's for gurus only.
Or get creative. Make a bacteria or virus that can live equally well on plants _and_ animals. Now that'll be a royal pain in the arse to completely root out, and it can safely kill its hosts without making itself extinct.
Actually, the problem there is that you assume MS does it to please the RIAA. In fact, it does it just to pwn their distribution channels. Sorta like the robber baron building two towers and a chain across a major river and putting up his own taxes: it's not as much for the benefit of the merchants sailing along the river, as for the baron's own benefit.
What MS is trying to do is make its own codecs the de-facto standard, and as impossible to move to another standard (e.g., to get that file recorded back as MP3) as physically possible. That the same DRM also makes the pill easier to swallow for the RIAA is just the icing on the cake. But in reality it's more like the KY Jelly on the shaft they're about to get.
Once MS owns the codec, it pretty much owns the distribution channel. It can launch its own Zune 2, car radios, etc, it can sell the music too, and/or tax anyone else who does with the royalties.
They're not the only ones who do. That's also why Sony made a big loss on the PS3 just to push its Blu-Ray format, or why it came up with the proprietary UMD, or why it stuck with its crap 48kbps music codecs even long after it started calling its portable crap "MP3 players." (You could transfer MP3s to them only via its own proprietary application, which actually converted them to the crap Sony codec, at a brutal loss of quality.) And you can probably find a couple more examples along the same lines.
But at any rate, it's not about pleasing the RIAA, it's about pwning another market. It's monopoly business as usual. Just incidentally that market happens to be the RIAA's distribution channel. Sweetening the pill a bit for them is good because you don't want them to say "we're not releasing anything in your format", but do note that MS would want DRM anyway there. They don't want you to get that DRM'ed music and then convert it to MP3 and play it on an iPod instead of a Zune.
Actually, since patents last for only 20 years, likely all that stuff would be in the public domain by now. And we'd have an exact description of how to do it ourselves too, instead of still having to guess at it. As it is, the old fart is keeping it all a trade secret, which is just what patents were supposed to prevent.
On the other hand, I guess 7 of his days in Genesis seem to have been almost 2 billion years each (counting "let there be light" as coinciding with the big bang.) So 20 of his years for the patent to expire... ooer, maybe we don't want to wait that long after all :P
So, basically, you need to pull such BS because you don't like the free market?
Because that's really how it was supposed to work: many perfectly interchangeable products and vendors, perfectly informed customers, and they'll buy from whoever asks the least money for it.
Yes, it drives profit margins down, but that's what it's supposed to do. And it's also the way to weed out the inefficient vendors. If company X can offer the exact same product for $500 less and still make a profit, while company Y would go bankrupt with it, then probably company X is a better use of society's resources.
It's really an optimization algorithm. It matches the available resources (employees, land, ore, electricity, whatever) to who/what can produce more of what everyone needs and less of what we don't.
Seems to me like at least the kind discussed here, wants to get rid of the shopping around _and_ the part about the customers being informed. You know, what with the gag orders and all.
I'm sorry, but I don't think you have some sacred right to make a profit. If your business model doesn't work without turning the whole market model on its head, well, maybe you shouldn't be in that business in the first place. Not said as a flame or anything, but I simply fail to see the point in returning to a fancy form of feudalism.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you must bend over for a customer that's trying to push you to sell below your costs. If you can't make a profit selling to them, fine, don't. That's also part of how the model is supposed to work. But basically "we have to act like a crappy monopolist because we can't compete on price" just fails to impress me.
In much the same way as a click-through EULA supersedes consumer rights ;) I.e., probably not at all, but they hope you might be gullible enough to believe you have no rights.
Still, there's the matter of intent. The "mens rea", so to speak. At least the intent there was to supersede and void your existing legal rights. I can't help feeling utter contempt towards them for it.
I have actually RTFA, but it still seems to me a little simplified.
E.g., you yourself give the example of AFFERO GPL as a case where an extra tweak was considered needed because of the software-as-a-service phenomenon. That both are "sharing with rules" just glosses over a distinction that obviously someone thought relevant to their values. One camp basically says "I only want your sources if you distribute the software in binary form", while the other basically says, "I also want them if you run them on your servers." Over-simplified, but you get the idea.
That's just the kind of fine points that make the tastes and values of person X differ from those of person Y or from those of company Z. Even if they both can be lumped under the same "sharing with rules" pot, there's always some aspect or detail that two different people see in two different ways. Different details or distinctions can lead someone to really needing yet another license.
E.g., the LGPL you mention yourself is basically a case of wanting something in between "gift" and "sharing with rules". I don't think it's the only possible point between the two. Different people may well feel that a different point in that interval is the best for them.
Really? It seems to me that among other things you were already dismissing as "lacking the common sense God gave to a dog" were even discussing drugs or homosexuality.
Make up your mind. Either we're talking about Dark Elves cybering and other uninteresting stuff, or about topics which affect legislation and taxes.
E.g., it seems to me like debating homosexuality is how those guys got any rights in the first place. Otherwise we'd still be at the stage where it's a capital offense.
E.g., discussing drugs seems to me like an important issue, since my tax money essentially goes into sending some people to jail. I would think that destroying someone's life for having smoked pot, would merit more thought than that.
Among other things, because of this thing called "democracy". The people are supposed to decide if the majority wants those laws or not. But you can't have an informed and rational choice if one half of the debate is essentially bullied into shutting the fuck up, for fear that they'll make themselves unemployable if they take that side. That's the way towards groupthink and bad laws.
Plus, to quote Adlai E. Stevenson, "A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular." Once you've essentially made it unsafe to say anything unpopular even in a supposedly private tell or email, that society has ceased to be free.
So if you see these kinds of issues as on par with "people disguised as Dark Elves "cheating" on their wives through chat channels in a video game"... well, to put it mildly, your sense of proportions is _way_ off.
Well, there's already at least one case where apparently a photo just being released under the Creative Commons, made it legal enough for Virgin to use it in a big advertising campaign. I don't think they needed anything else there.
1. I hope you realize that exactly that was what allowed the Soviet Union to keep its citizens in check.
Yes, everyone knows about Stalin's brutal repression, but that was toned down a lot after Stalin. They discovered that you can control people easier by making them think you have a dossier on them, and they can eventually get bitten in the arse by something they said in the past. And that even something which doesn't outright warrant a one-way trip to Siberia can bite them in the arse in some other way. Like maybe they won't ever be allowed to travel abroad again, or they'll never get a promotion now, or whatever.
It actually worked better than Stalin's executions and mass deportations, surprisingly.
People learned to do exactly what you seem to advocate: don't say anything you wouldn't be comfortable explaining to the nice commissar. Don't assume anything about someone else, other than that they might get you in trouble. (E.g., by being an agent provocateur and trying to get you to say something that'll remain on your record for ever.) Distance yourself from anyone discussing those forbidden things, you wouldn't want to go on record as associating with that kind of people.
It just made them unable to organize in any form or shape. That guy talking against the Party became not a guy to rally around, but someone who'll probably get you in trouble if you join him. You don't want that attached permanently to your record.
As an example of how well it worked, think Sakharov. He was a very loud in speaking against the regime... but nobody joined him anyway. The party was feeling secure enough about it to only slap him with an "exile"... to a relatively decent job in the fourth biggest city in Russia. Not in Siberia either. And while he did get a bunch of visits from the police, none seemed to be brutal or anything. Probably more to show everyone else that Sakharov _is_ being watched, and the party will know if you associate with him. It worked like a charm. Millions of people who secretly aggreed with him, didn't want to actually have it added permanently to their dossier.
And you have to bear in mind that we're talking about the dead-tree kind of dossier in the USSR's case. They had neither the manpower to actually supervise everyone and record everything, nor the search engine to actually find anything unless you actually gave someone a good reason to read yours. It worked anyway.
The recent trend of everything being recorded and indexed on the internet, could create a chilling effect of much more epic proportions.
2. Even if you take the approach of "if you were stupid enough to say X online, then you deserve whatever's coming to you", in reality it's trivially easy for someone to say stuff about you without your having consented. There'll be tells, blog posts, etc, discussing various things you've said or done or were mis-heard of saying.
So in effect if you want to have any kind of protection, you have to not say anything debatable to anyone, never assume about any person you meet IRL that they're not going to send an online tell about it, etc. Welcome to the wonderful world of talking only about the weather, and never trusting anyone. As I was saying, that's what turned the USSR into a mass of isolated and easily bullied individuals too.
I understand your point, and it's a very valid one, but:
1. Supposedly, they also found such stuff as what the average gamer age is, that they're slightly depressive, or what their BMI is.
It doesn't exactly sound like that's strictly about the characters, sorry. (I'd think that all those dwarves and barbarians would have a higher BMI than these guys found;) As I was saying in another post, even if they then surveyed those people, the fact remains that they knew who and where to contact. I.e., at the very least that WillowCakes341 can be found for a survey under the name Random J Sixpack under the email address randy6p@example.com.
2. Plus, see the thing about AOL and their improperly anonymized data. AOL hadn't handed over the usernames too, but thanks to including the "vanity searches" for one's own name, it was pretty trivial to find out a lot of identities.
If that 60TB of data is truly raw and unfiltered, you can find lots of people telling their names and/or email addresses to each other, discussing their family issues, etc. A lot of people are simply entirely too social and naive for their own good when online. I wouldn't be too surprised if for a lot of those customers you can find everything from name to RL address to name of their spouse and children in some chat logs, just because they thought it's a private tell to a friend.
3. And, again, I would bet that a lot of that includes information not about just themselves, but about friends and family who never consented to having their lives made public. Even if I were to take the nasty attitude that, basically, "if X was stupid enough to put his life online, X deserves what's coming to him now", I fail to see why should people Y and Z suffer too just for having been acquaintances with X.
E.g., in the past mom drove me nearly neurotic with telling everyone every single freaking detail about me. I grew up with the idea that pretty much every single neighbour, teammate of mom's, acquaintance of an acquaintance, or even random strangers on the bus, would know even at which time I took a shit yesterday. I'm not exaggerating. In retrospect, probably most people didn't even actually listen, because few things are more boring than a mom talking non-stop about her kids. But if you do the same online, and that's a lot of information archived and immortalized for anyone to trawl through.
There still was this thing called copyright, though. Anything you post is by default copyrighted to yourself. You don't even need to do anything special. So, yes, people could still have your photos in their browser's cache, but weren't legally allowed to do much with them.
E.g., just because I saved your family photo on my hard drive, doesn't mean I can cut and paste your daughter's head into an ad for condoms, nor as an ad for Adult Friend Finder, nor on top of a porn-star's body and sell subscriptions to that site, nor pretty much anything else.
A TOS which grants any entity full rights to your stuff, including to license it further, means pretty much just that: you forfeit any legal rights or recourses you might have had. If they want to use it for any purpose whatsoever, they can. You just gave them that right.
I can see how Sony was happy, but I can't see how raping people's privacy for a buck is ethical in any form or shape. And in some parts of the world, it's probably even illegal.
Because make no mistake, it was for money. Simply put, "Let's see if these people can figure out how we can make more money in subscriptions." Apparently the prospect of a quick buck is all it takes for a corporation to sell your data.
From the biblical 30 silvers, to Sony doing it for the _hope_ of getting 15 dollars a month out of you, not much has changed. In fact, it seems to me like competition just drove the prices down ;) Each individual person that Sony sold, _maybe_ they can get another subscription out of 1% of them, and even then for a month or two. Effectively Sony sold everyone for the hope of 30 cents or so a piece. Makes me respect Judas more by comparison.
Actually, it was probably a survey, but you do raise a valid issue there about privacy. Exactly how much data did Sony share?
We were outraged that AOL shared some improperly anonymized search strings, which in some cases could lead to the guy's real identity. Here, if they even knew who to survey, it means that Sony just handed over RL names on a silver platter.
What else? Chat logs? 60 TB is a hell of a lot of data. And probably a lot of things you said at one point, but didn't think them too carefully, and probably didn't mean them in the long run.
As an easy example, think of all the people who've bought gold, or played a flirty female when they're male, or flirted with one who turns out to be male. Lots of public embarrassment potential. Or what if you talked about sex to someone who, as it turns out, was 8 years old? I'm sure some people would love to jump to conclusions there.
Sent some tells about sometimes wanting to kill your classmates or co-workers? I'm sure those will be worth some hysteria when the next school shooting comes around. Talked about drugs or about homosexuality? I'm sure some future potential employers would make a fuss about that. Confessed playing or chatting from work 'cause you're the network admin and the logs don't apply to you? Well, now Sony's logs do. Etc.
And how much of the billing data is in there, anyway? Enough for someone to steal your identity? But even if it was just enough to contact those people IRL and survey them, I'm guessing at least the email address must have been in there. I'm sure some spammers and phishers would love to have it too.
Basically even if you trust that those researchers probably won't do that, the circle of people with access to someone's private data just grew. It only takes one irresponsible git or disgruntled admin, or even an insecure network which someone can break into and look around, for that circle to grow even further. How many steps until someone does do something unethical with it?
Sony already did their part in not giving a flying fuck about protecting their customers' privacy, after all. It only takes one or two more people with the exact same cavalier attitude, before it bites some people in the arse for just trusting Sony.
Well, I'm sure that'll be news to EA, who has been making more money with their sports games than with any other genre. In fact, nowadays the average game doesn't even break even, and EA effectively subsidizes the duds out of their sports games income.
I'm sure it'll also be news to all the console manufacturers who've been courting EA for those games. Or to Sega who thought that they _need_ their own sports games to survive without EA sports, back in the Dreamcast days when they got in a pissing contest with EA.
So yes, "some flag-football where the most dexterous player wins", and in fact is often little more than a re-release of last year's game in higher resolution and the list of players updated, routinely outsells games mindless blood and guts.
I'm sure it'll also be news to Sony, where the Gran Turismo series and Final Fantasy helped sell more Playstations than all gory games combined.
It seems to me that:
1. Taking an arbitrary 13 year old male segment is a non-sequitur anyway, in an age where the average gamer age is in the 30's. There are more female gamers over 20 than male gamers under 18, and the numbers look even more bleak if you restrict yourself to 13 years olds. So what's really the point? That you can pick an irrelevant minority for your example?
2. Even there, don't underestimate a culture where masculinity and aggression are basically channelled into "my sports team beat your team, sucker". You could maybe make your point about some other dexterity game. But football? In half the world it's the modern gladiators and _the_ way to channel us-vs-them willy-waving. People learn early that being a mindless football drone is actually _expected_ if you're male. And aspiring to be a football superstar is actually one of the very acceptable and popular puberty aspirations for males. In this culture it's not a case of "some fag-football", but rather the opposite: people might wonder if you're gay if you _don't_ like football.
So, yes, if that 13 years old wants to not look gay to his peers, picking "some flag-football where the most dexterous player wins" is actually one of the easy ways to do so.
I'm saying: it depends.
1. If we're talking about inventing cold fusion, yes, it's worth spending more than 30 seconds on it. But then I'd presumably be paid for that, one way or another.
If it's a game I play to relax, then no, it's not worth it.
2. A well designed game would split that in several steps that take less than 30 seconds each.
A trivial example is Mahjongg or Shisen-sho: a whole game takes much longer than 30 seconds, but spotting a pair of tiles that match takes a couple of seconds. You can make a game arbitrarily long by just having more tiles, without each individual step being longer than that. And in fact if I reached a point where for 30 seconds I can't see a matching pair, I'd probably conclude that there aren't any more and hit the "new game" button.
If a game routinely hits points for most players where they try for 30 seconds and conclude "I have no fucking clue", then that's a badly designed game in my book.
3. The fact is, it's trivial to make any game arbitrarily hard.
I'm not even going to go into FPS or RTS (making the enemies 100% accurate is actually the easiest maths there), but even for puzzle games see the XKCD strip about NP-Complete problems. There's a whole class of problems that are NP-Complete, and (thus) you can raise the difficulty exponentially by just adding more nodes. It's trivial to add a couple more apetizers to the XKCD list, for example. Or double them, and get something that will make even Mensa members go cross-eyed.
There you go. Just make each step (or the whole puzzle) such a NP-complete problem that the user must solve in his head, and it's trivially easy raise the difficulty to whatever insane levels you wish.
The hard part is making it _easy_ but still interesting. That's really what separates the good designers from the wannabes. Not how hard can you make it, but really how easy can you make it. That's the challenge. The good ones can make an immersing game that actually could be played by a drunk epileptic.
4. It's worth noting that the shortest term memory buffer in humans is only 8 seconds long. So any problem which needs more thinking, is going to require more swapping information around and/or going back and forth to seeing what the problem was again. So difficulty and effort rise disproportionately. Just as a design principle to keep in mind.
5. But that's all a bit moot. As I've said before, it doesn't matter what _I_ think, it matters what his players think. Because they're the ones paying for the damned thing.
His own market research shows that most of them give up after 30 seconds. That's his market research data. He can factor it in the design and get their money, or he can stick to his vision and lose their business. It's really that simple.
You can choose to complain about how they're all idiots and stuff, but that's really not the point. It's those idiots who are willing to pay to be entertained. And they're not paying to be educated about how they should use their head more, but to be entertained. If you want their money, you have to match their tastes. If not, not.
Just as well that you don't design games, eh? Because the point isn't even what _I_ think of that, but what his players (and thus potential customers) think. By his own experimentation, after 30 seconds they give up. _That_ is the data that actually matters.
Game design isn't some kind of "let's create some reasons to sneer at the customers" contest. Your job there is basically to entertain them. That's why they pay you for.
Silly willy-waving about who should go back to ritalin is already a loser's game as it is. As a philosophy for game design, it's outright idiotic.
I don't read it as "solve the level in 30 seconds" but as "30 seconds of being stuck." There's a massive difference there.
As a partially silly example to illustrate that difference, think Tetris: a whole game usually takes a lot longer than 30 seconds, but the time you get for each piece is a heck of a lot less.
That's the case I'm trying to make: 6 times thinking 5 seconds is ok. A combined 30 seconds of looking at it and having no bloody clue what next isn't. A game or a level can be made arbitrarily long by adding more of the former, without falling into the non-fun trap of the latter.
So you're telling me that almost every single user would reach several points in your puzzles where, for a whole 30 seconds they have no bloody clue what to do, and essentially have to surrender and use that button? And you think they should enjoy the frustration instead?
I'm sorry, but that's not a case of mindlessly hammering away at the "help" button. If they hit it each second, ok, I could see it that way. But if they first did try 30 seconds, that's really an "ok, I give up" gesture. It's reaching a point where it's either that button or they uninstall the stupid game.
But, at any rate, if almost every user gets stuck repeatedly in your game, I'd say that's bad design. The help button may be a band-aid fix for the symptoms, but the underlying problem remains. And forcing the players to stay stuck there, is only going to build up frustration, not fun.
It's not just about appearances. The Neanderthals:
- used tools to make other tools. Apes do make improvised tools like sharpening sticks, but only Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens would build a stone axe to use to build a stone spear, and then keep both.
- skinned animals and tanned the skins
- built elaborate shelters out of wood and skins
- used clothes (e.g., made from those skins)
- built (crude) musical instruments. And not just as in "something that makes noise", but as in, for example, a flute which can play more than one note. So they probably had music too.
- had a bit of work specialization, which would also mean a bit more complex a social structure, and possibly even some kind of commerce (at least as in, "I'll make you a strong spear if you give me a leg of antelope.")
- decorated themselves with primitive jewellery and paints (basically early cosmetics)
- had ritual burial, which would indicate some concept of afterlife or at least remorse. (You don't bother burying someone in the same position, and with his weapon, and stuff, unless you expect it to matter somehow.)
Etc.
And according to this research, they probably were as capable of speech as the humans, because they have the same gene.
Oh, and another bit of trivia: they actually had a higher average brain size than Homo Sapiens. And in a smaller body, too. So if we go by the popular brain-mass/body-mass metric, they should actually be a little smarter on the average.
So we're not talking just as in "looks like a human", but something that was definitely just as sentient and self-aware as a human. It could probably not just understand that you're experimenting on it, but understand the experiment if you bother explaining the science behind it.
And if you think that it still makes it ok, because it's still a different species... well, then I'd say your empathy is too broken to be the same as 99% of the humans. You're different. When can we start experimenting on _you_ then?
I kinda doubt it. Neanderthals went extinct so long ago, that I doubt that any stories or myths from that age would have survived as long.
We're talking long before humanity invented writing, so the only way it could have survived is if the shaman of a tribe taught his apprentice about it, and so on. For some tens of thousands of years straight. I'd think that's rather unlikely. They had more pressing concerns in the here and now than "those guys our ancestors lived in the same cave with."
Basically, how many folk stories do we have about woolly mammoths? Why would Neanderthals be remembered more?