Well, first of all this is Japan, where they're at least supposed to be more social than that. People retreating away from society and being self-sufficient are considered a major problem and dysfunction, rather than a core demographic to market to.
In fact all through Asia you have a surprising number of people going to Internet cafes to play an MMO because apparently somehow it's not enough to play a social game if you don't also play it surrounded by other people. Sometimes to such... strange extremes as in the story we had recently about that Chinese couple who sold their kids for money to play MMOs. But while that is weird by itself, it's not what I'm talking about here. Apparently they actually used to leave their baby alone at home so they can go play their MMO from an Internet cafe. I think at that point most people would have realized that withdrawing from the crowd to take care of a baby may not be so antisocial after all, but there we go.
Second, there's an AND there about having to wear a little helmet. Having some goggles where you ONLY see the image in the game/movie/porn sounds great until you realize that you can't even see the mouse or keyboard, your mug of coffee, or the ashtray, or really where the desk is to put that mug of coffee back on it.
And while your built-in proprioception sense may help you find your mouth or, when browsing for porn, your dick, it doesn't help with anything else. Even the 3d model of your room doesn't seem to actually make it past short term memory, which means that in 8 seconds flat it's purged out of the buffer. Oh, you'll still remember what is in your room, and what's to the left of what else, but as a conceptual scene composition, not something where you can judge exact coordinates and positions. In 8 seconds you'll be at a loss whether you're putting the hot coffee cup where you want it on the table, or you're about to put it on the corner of the keyboard and make yourself the next Stella Liebeck.
And that's assuming that there is no randomness element out of your control, i.e., that you're literally alone. If you also have such randomness as having to guess whether or not the cat just curled up on the warm spot where the coffee cup used to be, well, may the FSM have mercy on you.
That's some pretty strong limitations right there.
So I'm not convinced if the/. demographic is the best to sell this to anyway. I mean, on one hand, we do have enough loners and people who must have the latest gadget, but on the other hand, I'd assume there also are a lot more people who can think deeper than "oooh, shiny" and figure out such limitations. Not to mention enough nerds who can remember whole domains worth of trivia, and remember stuff like that some other such gadgets actually caused eye damage.
Do you have to be such a sexist asshole? You can criticize Ms. McArthy without resorting to such weak-ass bullshit.
Bullshit. It's not sexist if that IS her only qualification. Seriously, Jenny McCarthy launched her career pretty much just on looking pretty naked in Playboy, and not much other qualifications. And frankly most of her career from then on revolved around being a sex symbol, including repeated working for Playboy in various roles. Her appearances in movies also have more to do with being a sex symbol than any kind of great acting talent, and it's doubtful she'd even be there at all if her husband didn't help launch her in that line of work.
But be as it may, being a sex symbol IS her only qualification. There is nothing sexist in noticing that. Nobody said that all women should stick to showing their tits, but merely that Jenny McCarthy should stick to showing her tits. Because objectively that's the only thing she ever showed any aptitude at.
Her attempt at sounding smart about anything else, from parenting to medicine have shown her to be someone surrealistically stupid and delusional. And quite dangerously so, for both her child and everyone stupid enough to listen to medical advice from someone whose only qualification is being a sex symbol.
It's not just that she picked a cause as damaging as ruining herd immunity with her anti-vaxxer idiocy, but also pushed something as irresponsible as chelation as a treatment for autism. As in, in addition to possible lasting damage, botched chelation done by "alternative medicine" scammers against autism, has actually KILLED a number of preschool children.
I don't see anything sexist to tell Jenny McCarthy to get the fuck out of giving batshit-crazy medical advice and stick to the only thing she's competent at, namely showing her tits. Not because of any kind of gender generalization, but because she's Jenny McCarty, and frankly, objectively showing her tits is the only thing she didn't manage to fuck-up. Presumably because it doesn't involve much using that crazy and stupid brain of hers. If they ever make a bra that requires any thinking to operate, yeah, she'll probably botch getting out of that too, but in the meantime it's a safe enough thing for her to do.
Well, that or everyone seems to overestimate how funny their own jokes are, and I'm obviously no exception. I guess having to explain that it was a joke is a pretty good indication that it wasn't particularly funny. Oh well, back to the drawing board...
Ha! It works the other way around too. I never was vaccinated against hepatitis B and now they tell me I have antibodies against it . Suck on that, science;)
Right, right. Because OBVIOUSLY Israel couldn't figure out something like setting up a bunch of servers and redirecting to a different server. It's not like they're designing half of what goes into those servers.
Actually, we had this story before, when they caught him. And no, there was no entrapment and whatnot. The guy is simply a flaming asshat, and he WOULD get a conviction out of me and then some.
For a start, they didn't seduce him, he actually contacted the embassy on his own proposing to sell them some "secrets" they didn't ask for and didn't need. Those guys promptly tipped off the FBI.
Second the whole "distraught father" and "patriotism" BS is just that: BS. I WOULD believe either of that if that were his primary motivation. It pretty obviously ain't.
The first thing the guy asked for was money. He tried to sell his employers' customer lists and whatnot, for plain old money. And see again: there was no social engineering, no seducing him, bla, bla, bla, he actually went to what he thought would be a buyer and HE proposed to sell that stuff.
When they told him they're not interested in paying for that, he basically asked that something bad happens to his ex. And I don't know about you, but trying to get a hit on someone isn't exactly a moral high ground any way I want to slice it.
His son only entered his equation as an after-thought, as he just asked for some photos of him. It wasn't his first or second price, and, you know, it's not like he even wanted the son back or anything, just some photos.
So, yeah, we have an asshat who actually goes looking to sell on his own, for money, and failing that, hey, maybe he can get them to whack his ex. Proving more than amply exactly what his morals are. Sorry, he's just scum, plain and simple, and more than deserves everything coming to him.
That's the "survival of the sickest" idea I mentioned in that message. And, yes, it makes perfect sense for purely parasitic bacteria. It however breaks down completely for bacteria which survive just as well in soil (e.g., Y Pestis) or for bacteria which don't want to be inside infected people in the first place (e.g., cholera kills you when those bacteria try to get OUT of your gut ASAP, not to be in people.)
I mean, if it kills its host too fast and ends up in the soil instead of infected people... yippee. It was a soil bacterium to start with. The disadvantage of that is exactly none.
It's not even that easy. The bug was not carried by dung or flies, but by fleas and rats. Even if you had a modern sewage system, rats were and still are not extinct. In fact, their populations seems to have grown with the human population.
What seems to have finally killed the plague in Europe was that the vulnerable and once dominant species of rat was also handicapped enough by it to be replaced with a better rat. (Yeah, sometimes nature makes a better mouse trap, and then makes a better mouse to defeat it;))
Sanitation, washing hands, etc, didn't have much to do with it.
Well, the actual question is: exactly how different. Yes, it's clear that some mutations are inevitable, but unless there's some clear evolutionary pressure, you may still find a bacterium that works by and large just like its ancestors.
Now it may seem that for a parasitic bacterium, not killing its host would be an advantage. And indeed in some other bacteria we can see a sort of a survival-of-the-sickest kind of selection.
But this is a soil bacterium. If it ends up in some host and kills it, worst that can happen is that it ends up back in the soil. It has nothing to lose by killing its host, and in fact everything to gain, since once the host is dead there's no more immune system killing the bacteria.
This kind of bacteria that have nothing to lose by killing the host are the most deadly and dangerous. Not just this, but see for example cholera too. That's a bacterium that not only has nothing to gain by peacefully staying inside you and not killing you, but is actually trying to get out of your body ASAP. Whether you live or die in the process, meh, it makes no difference for that one.
Additionally, for Y Pestis, the capability of clotting blood and forming colonies that plug blood vessels actually helped it spread too. The same mechanism makes it plug the stomach of fleas. The flea then will literally starve to death no matter how much blood it sucks, and driven by hunger, will go infect another host too.
So we have a bacterium for which the plasmid that kills its host:
1. isn't detrimental to the bacterium, since it can live just as well in a dead host or in soil, and
2. is actually beneficial to the bacterium, since it makes fleas spread it around.
That's one tough combo to evolve out of. There is no real survival benefit in losing those genes.
So while, yes, you would expect that bacteria can and will mutate in time, but it's not clear at all why this one would change in exactly that aspect.
Yet something seems to have changed. What and why? Those are the questions.
Actually even that description doesn't do it justice. Imagine that up to 80% of your town dies, and within weeks at that. Mortality differed from place to place and outbreak to outbreak, but generally, the tighter packed a place was, the bigger the casualties. At the larger scale of villages mortality was lower -- though even there, many villages were COMPLETELY wiped out -- but in cities, getting casualties between 50% and 75% of the total population in an outbreak wasn't unusual.
Oh, and in excruciating pain at that, as it caused the necrosis of some very sensitive spots. We have description of people listening to their town scream in agony all night, and people jumping off bridges or rooftops just to end the incredible pain. And, yeah, they didn't even have ipods to cover that constant soundtrack.
Also imagine that that happens every few years.
And that its first symptoms are something as common as sneezing. So, yeah, just being around someone with an allergy could cause you to shit your pants in terror each time they sneeze, because it COULD be the start of such a horrible epidemic.
Also imagine that you know that if you catch it, the only treatment known at the time was to board your doors and windows for two weeks and leave you to die in there, one way or another.
Not unexpected though. Modern stories are written by highly educated and knowledgeable people. Even someone with high school education and some modest interest in mythology and such (which probably they had if they ended up writing a successful mythological back-story) would be more educated even than some of the Greco-Roman elites of the ancient world. And even more so than some illiterate backwater goat-herder tribe.
I mean, according to Ehrman, by the 1st century CE, about 10% of the people in the Roman empire could read at all. (Much less could write, and much less could write eloquently.) For Palestine, which was a mostly rural backwater, only an estimated 3% could read at all. So you can imagine that much less of those also had the oportunities and leisure time to travel and study myths, plays with mythological settings, early legends, etc.
Even in Judaism, some of the best parts and at that which show any philosophical aspects and inclinations at all, come from those scribes taken into Babylon as slaves and who got to study the Babylonian religions and literature.
So, yeah, as you'd expect, most modern fictive religion are actually better thought out and make more sense than Genesis. Be it White Wolf source books, or really even Terry Pratchett's parody religions in his Discworld books, or the back-story religion of the elves in WoW.
Well, duh, haven't you read your source materials? After Caine was cursed with vampirism and driven out, he met Lilith, Adam's first wife, the Dark Mother, in the land of Nod, who helped him awaken his vampyric powers. Unfortunately, they did have a bit of a falling out and he staked her before moving on to sire the first antediluvians. And the rest you can find in the Book Of Nod.
What? It says so in the holy White Wolf scriptures.
Oh, wait, you were meaning the OTHER fairy tale? My bad;)
E.g., I've yet to meet many people who think that running back and forth for hours is AWESOME. Is there anyone out there who actually quit WoW when they gave horses earlier, because, dammit, without running on foot for half an hour the game ceased to be fun? Do you see many posts on single player game boards going, "God dammit, I thought I'd have to run 20 minutes from quest giver to the objects to fetch and 20 minutes back, like in all the good games, but this POS lets me get straight to the interesting parts and I want my money back"?:p
E.g., while cut scenes can be a matter of personal taste, I don't think anyone but the criminally insane would find it a turn off to be able to optionally skip them, especially when the last save point was before a long cut scene.
And for that matter, can those brain-dead quick-time events in cut-scenes die a horrible death already? The only thing worse than not being allowed to skip a boring cut scene, is being forced to stay there and watch it because it's an instant failure if I go take a piss during a fucking cut-scene. The only thing worse than that is a cut-scene I have to watch again and again and again until I press the right button sequence. Adding that kind of stupidity doesn't make cut-scenes more exciting and interesting, it makes the more annoying.
E.g., even for cut scenes, I can think of a couple of types that are almost universally not wanted by anyone. Take for example the dumb tech-demo interruptions in FF-X, which seem to be there just to show some character posing, so they can sell their game engine. I'm ok with cut scenes that show complex story scenes or interactions between characters, but that game interrupted me several times during a short walk between a city and a beach just so some character can pose against the sky while delivering some line. What's wrong with actually walking AND talking if it's supposed to be banter on the road from here to there? I mean, it worked well for The Witcher 2, didn't it? Why did Tidus and the other morons in the party in FF-X HAVE to stop and pause for every other line? Are they so dysfunctional and unable to multitask that even operating their mouth and feet at the same time was too much?
E.g., sure, minigames can break the monotony when they're short and awesome. But then you get games like the same FF-X where 90% of the time sunk in them was spent just running down some hall carrying some orb from here to there. I'm not particularly picking on that one game, but it was one of the first I know of which actually padded the padding. Invariably it wasn't even some great intellectual puzzle. If they just put the orbs and holes within 1 ft of each other, it would have taken seconds to solve every single such puzzle (short of being drunk, stoned AND having a seizure at the same time.) But no, something that was already padding, got padded with having to run down corridors carrying an orb from here to there. WTH?
So, yes, some things are a matter of taste, and some things are subjective, and some things are a matter of comparison. But there are things that are reviled by everyone except maybe a small lunatic fringe. If even that.
It's not just the price, though. Sure, if the choices was between 10 hours of truly awesome vs 20 hours of boring, and they both cost the same, well, ok, I might actually splurge on something that's awesome for a change. I mean, honestly, out of some games maybe a quarter of the time was actually fun, and the other parts were filler that didn't really bring anything worth my money. If I paid the same, but got only the parts that were actually worth my money, in the end I'd get the same value for my money, if not better. In fact not only I'd pay extra to have that filler removed, but I _have_ occasionally actually paid extra to be able to skip it. E.g., by buying a GameShark or the like.
But that's unfortunately just theory. Anyone want to bet that that won't happen?
I've seen games get increasingly shorter for two decades now, but I'm just not seeing that awesome stuff emerging. I'm not seeing many people actually cut out the parts that make a game boring, and leaving the juicy meat intact.
The metaphor that comes to mind is basically imagine buying a nice suit, except it has 20 pounds of lead sewn all over it, so the tailor can claim you're getting a whole 25 pounds of material for your money. It brings no extra enjoyment whatsoever, it serves no function that I'd actually want, and frankly it even detracts from my enjoyment of wearing it. Would I pay the same money to get just the suit without the lead padding? Hell yea. I'd even pay extra.
But now imagine that after hearing about how the customers don't want heavy suits, and lighter is the new way and all, you go to the same tailor, and now for the same money you get a shirt and jeans, and only 10 pounds of lead sewn to the pants. You got something lighter, but you didn't get the same for your money.
Now the next round of interviews goes by and you're reassured by everyone that THIS time they'll cut only the unwanted parts out, and you'll get only 5 pounds of suit for your money, but it will be just the awesome part. Except what you actually get this time is a T-shirt and some shorts, and 4 pounds of lead sewn to it.
That's been what's happening to games. Each time we hear them talk about how people don't want huge padded games, and how gamers would be ok with half the game, but only the awesome parts. And some of us would indeed. I would have paid the full again for some games, if I got a version with all the good stuff and without all the boring padding.
But then the next game does come along with only half the hours, but the percentage composition is largely the same as before. Now instead of an 80 hour game, out of which maybe 20 are interesting stuff, you get a 20 hours total game. Yippee, it will be just the 20 hours of fun, right? Wrong. Now you have maybe 5 hours of fun stuff and 15 hours of padding.
I'm seeing the same rhetoric happening again and again, and it looks more and more like a cheap excuse for gullible morons.
Bullshit. And frankly, the farther I see you going down this line of pulling stuff out of the ass about keyboard controls, the more comical it gets.
A bunch of us have been playing TES games just fine with a keyboard and mouse too. And there are many millions of people world-wide playing WoW and other games just fine with keyboard and mouse.
And sorry, MOVEMENT is hard for you with a keyboard? WTF were you even trying to do, that movement was such a problem? Tightrope walking? Or WTH? Especially if we move out of the realm of FPS frag-fests and into RPGs like the TES series, then we can pretty much even exclude "jump puzzles" too, and I'm drawing blanks for ANY game where accurate movement with a keyboard or anything else was ever a problem.
Was there any map in Oblivion where it even mattered if you moved half a foot more or less with the keyboard than with a gamepad? Even the extremely few places where you could take a shortcut by jumping, were actually made for a game where Acrobatics skill made a huge difference in how much you CAN jump. I.e., the maps were designed for the case that you really can't jump more than a couple of FT.
So even in your delusional world where apparently PC gamers don't have trained thumbs and presumably can't press the space bar in the same time as you push the jump button, where the fuck in Oblivion did it ever matter how precisely you move with a keyboard?
Look, I know it's usual among cretin console fanboys to just make up their delusional bullshit about PC gaming. But, really, when you have to reach for such idiotic extremes of bullshit as that
- MOVEMENT with a keyboard and mouse is a problem, or that
- everyone disagreeing with your delusions is only playing FPS frag-fests, or that
- everyone disagreeing with your delusions doesn't also play console games, and doesn't have enough training with a controller to make an informed comparison (hint to the clueless: some of us play both)
Actually, I find that whenever someone is telling you to give up your rights for your own good, it's not really safety they have in mind. Usually they're just trying to shaft you somehow, but they can't just say "bend over and squeal like a pig, I'm gonna make big money out of shafting you peons." So they have to pack it in some idiocy about how it's for your own good.
Applies to everything from 10'th century warlords promising you protection if you just put your thumbprint here and sell yourself into serfdom, to politicians, to the likes of Zuckerburg.
In his case, it's not even hard to see why. I mean, really, you could summarize the summary as "Guy who gets his money by selling your data to marketers, says your right to privacy has got to go. Reaches for the standard 'it's to protect you from other pricks' canned excuse. Film at 11." Well, whop-de-do. Big surprise that he wants that, eh?
With my ISP randomly disconnecting at random times, any offline game which proposes to boot me out several times a day just because the ISP crapped... yeah, it just told me I'll need a cracked version just to be able to enjoy the game.
In fact, it's starting to make me think about plain old piracy. I haven't pirated games since early college, but maybe I should look into it again. The idea of being counted in the success story of that DRM stupidity if I buy it and then have to have to crack it just to be able to play, is seriously unappealing.
Having a lookup table for what keys are assigned to what function is technically a little extra work, but really very little. And in fact you have to do it anyway, if you want a game written for gamepad buttons to respond to keys and mouse buttons at all.
Hard-coding key codes makes no sense and is really frakking retarded and all around an anti-pattern.
Furthermore, most game engines and frameworks ALREADY have this kind of stuff. You just need to use it.
So you're telling me... what? That a game that blew the schedule by at least months, was totally saved by not spending a day or two implementing such a trivial thing that would make it actually playable?
It's even worse. The initial assumption was that 55% of the users were female, so basically a hardcoded 'return "female";' would already guess with 55% accuracy. Bumping it to 65% is actually only a 10% bump.
But that assumption is purely based on what people declared on their account on Twitter, i.e., basically trusting that everyone who labeled themselves "female" is actually female, and everyone who labeled themselves "male" is actually male. The caveat there needs not be detailed.
Basically, they have 100,654 female users, 83,075 male users,and 53817 unspecified. Taking the known ones, there are 183,729 users of known gender. (With the caveat in the previous paragraph.) Out of that, the probability to be a female is about 55%.
BUT if they guess at individual tweets, then it's pretty much the number of tweets from each that counts. There were 2,429,621 tweets from (self-labeled) females, vs 1,672,813 tweets from (self-labeled) males, and unspecified. Total 4,102,434 tweets with "known" gender. Out of those the tweets from "known" females were a bit over 59%.
So basically an algorithm which takes one tweet and just does a hard-coded 'return "female";' would be right over 59% of the time. Bumping that to 65% is such a ridiculously marginal effect that, really, it's funny.
And actually what worries me is not as much the research grants, as the hordes of morons who don't understand the ecological fallacy (extrapolations from whole population "ecological" studies to individuals are stupid) and who'll take this as some infallible identi-kit or worse, as a scientific justification for sexism. Even the summary makes strong claims of outing males pretending to be females, or that flat-out "women use language differently than men". No they don't really. The difference is marginal, and there is massive overlap between any word's usage by males and females.
E.g., one of the "strongly male indicators" they churned is using the word http (presumably tweeting a link?) where actually any given instance of it, the probability of the user to be female is 50.6%, according to their table. So it's really a 50-50 split on the use of this word. One of the few actual strongly male words was Google, but even there it's only a 2/3 and 1/3 split between male and female. Conversely strongly female stuff like mentioning "love" was basically still a 2/3 and 1/3 split in the other direction.
But not that it will stop morons from taking it as some scientifically proven rule that women talk about love and cute stuff, and guys talk about http and Google. And that, for example, therefore we need to hire less women in IT.
Not really. Some of the Ponzi schemes in Eastern Europe in the '90's were also up front that your money comes from the next suckers. E.g., "Caritas" in Romania was candidly open about how it works and where the money comes from.
It turns out that when the marks think that your being open about it makes it totally legit, that can work too. In that case, the marks were just out of a communist regime which regulated the hell out of market, money and investments, and most really had no clue how anything else would work or not work.
I guess adding some fancy "crypto" and "mining" and other stuff like that, is also enough for at least two categories:
A) the techno-utopian nerd who'd buy into any shit as long as it's high-tech, and genuinely believes that giving a million monkey networked computers is somehow going to revolutionize anything and result in anything else than still a million monkeys shitting on the keyboard. You know, the O'Reilly of Web 2.0 fame kind of idiot who can look at Google and not see "it succeeded because it has a business plan and a source of income" but some idiotic "because it networks TEH PEOPLE!!!", and
B) the computer illiterate kind for whom its being some high-tech incomprehensible BS masks any other aspects.
Not all Ponzi schemes are up front about, basically, "pay us X dollars and we'll give you X * 110% from the next suckers." They often pretend to be legitimate investment or trading ventures. Among other things because most people get wise to up-front promises of infinitely sustainable giving guy A the money from B and C, after one or two collapse. You only get a very narrow window of opportunity to pull one off on new suckers, such as the ones that swept Eastern Europe after the collapse of communism, then people learned to avoid anything that up-front says it's a Ponzi scheme. You have to disguise it as a legitimate business investment or some legitimate service or whatever.
But, really, look at historical examples.
E.g., the Ivar Kreuger scheme didn't promise to be an up-front Ponzi Scheme at all. Kreuger owned a very profitable matches production and had a monopoly on it, owned banks, etc. By the time of his fall, he was at the head of more than 200 very profitable (or rather over-hyped as incredibly, fantastically profitable, although Kreuger was running deeper into debt) companies. On the surface lending some money to Kreuger was kinda like lending money to Microsoft. There was no way a multi-billion corporation would default on a few million they owed you with interest, right? The problem is that the whole debt added up to vastly more than actually those factories were worth, and in fact his reputation of paying back such debts and with good interest was really a Ponzi scheme where the money came from the next suckers lending him a few millions.
Other schemes gave certificates of value, shares, or a contract to get a house built for much less than the normal cost. (Which during the bubble used to be quite a lot.) Most of them are, at face value, things you can trade and which have a very visible value. E.g., you sure can trade value certificates or shares around, and there's nothing to keep you from selling a contract for a house to someone else. You can even check the current price for a house with that many rooms, and all.
Using a variable, market-driven value instead of promising some exorbitant return per week is also not that uncommon. See those house contracts for example. Sure, the lamest Ponzi schemes for idiots do promise fixed, too-good-to-be-true returns, but the more sophisticated ones avoid such blatant give-aways.
The real characteristic of a Ponzi scheme is basically that it's fiat currency without anyone actually guaranteeing its worth. Behind those Kreuger IOUs, or bonds, or value papers, or house contracts, or bit coins, there is no real tangible product or shares in some real company or anything of real value. You can get any money out of a Madoff investment only as long as someone else is willing to buy more investments, because Madoff didn't actually buy any shares or anything of actual value. The only return is basically robbing Peter to pay Paul. For a Paul to get some money out of Madoff, some Peter must be convinced to pay some money for whatever tokens or papers Madoff gives for those money.
And I honestly don't see why bit coins wouldn't qualify as such.
So "freedom of religion" for yourself and those who you agree with but not those who you don't?
No, it just means that, like many others, you're the kind of smooth-brain cretin who can't distinguish between the negative right for yourself to be whatever religion you wish, and the imaginary right -- or, shall I say, entitlement delusion -- to try to shove it down everyone's throat.
If that still confuses you, here's a useful analogy: sex is also mostly free, but that doesn't give you a right to knock on everyone's door once a week and harass them with repeated requests to accept your dick. What you do between consenting adults is one thing -- for sex or religion alike -- and we won't stop you, but if you mistake that for some "right" to harass others then you're just an antisocial idiot.
Still, maybe singling out JWs was narrowing it too much. I'd phrase it more like "if you're the kind of frakking moron who thinks that 'freedom of religion' means an entitlement to try to shove your delusions down others' throat, GET OFF MY LAWN!"
Slashdot Mirror
Well, first of all this is Japan, where they're at least supposed to be more social than that. People retreating away from society and being self-sufficient are considered a major problem and dysfunction, rather than a core demographic to market to.
In fact all through Asia you have a surprising number of people going to Internet cafes to play an MMO because apparently somehow it's not enough to play a social game if you don't also play it surrounded by other people. Sometimes to such... strange extremes as in the story we had recently about that Chinese couple who sold their kids for money to play MMOs. But while that is weird by itself, it's not what I'm talking about here. Apparently they actually used to leave their baby alone at home so they can go play their MMO from an Internet cafe. I think at that point most people would have realized that withdrawing from the crowd to take care of a baby may not be so antisocial after all, but there we go.
Second, there's an AND there about having to wear a little helmet. Having some goggles where you ONLY see the image in the game/movie/porn sounds great until you realize that you can't even see the mouse or keyboard, your mug of coffee, or the ashtray, or really where the desk is to put that mug of coffee back on it.
And while your built-in proprioception sense may help you find your mouth or, when browsing for porn, your dick, it doesn't help with anything else. Even the 3d model of your room doesn't seem to actually make it past short term memory, which means that in 8 seconds flat it's purged out of the buffer. Oh, you'll still remember what is in your room, and what's to the left of what else, but as a conceptual scene composition, not something where you can judge exact coordinates and positions. In 8 seconds you'll be at a loss whether you're putting the hot coffee cup where you want it on the table, or you're about to put it on the corner of the keyboard and make yourself the next Stella Liebeck.
And that's assuming that there is no randomness element out of your control, i.e., that you're literally alone. If you also have such randomness as having to guess whether or not the cat just curled up on the warm spot where the coffee cup used to be, well, may the FSM have mercy on you.
That's some pretty strong limitations right there.
So I'm not convinced if the /. demographic is the best to sell this to anyway. I mean, on one hand, we do have enough loners and people who must have the latest gadget, but on the other hand, I'd assume there also are a lot more people who can think deeper than "oooh, shiny" and figure out such limitations. Not to mention enough nerds who can remember whole domains worth of trivia, and remember stuff like that some other such gadgets actually caused eye damage.
Bullshit. It's not sexist if that IS her only qualification. Seriously, Jenny McCarthy launched her career pretty much just on looking pretty naked in Playboy, and not much other qualifications. And frankly most of her career from then on revolved around being a sex symbol, including repeated working for Playboy in various roles. Her appearances in movies also have more to do with being a sex symbol than any kind of great acting talent, and it's doubtful she'd even be there at all if her husband didn't help launch her in that line of work.
But be as it may, being a sex symbol IS her only qualification. There is nothing sexist in noticing that. Nobody said that all women should stick to showing their tits, but merely that Jenny McCarthy should stick to showing her tits. Because objectively that's the only thing she ever showed any aptitude at.
Her attempt at sounding smart about anything else, from parenting to medicine have shown her to be someone surrealistically stupid and delusional. And quite dangerously so, for both her child and everyone stupid enough to listen to medical advice from someone whose only qualification is being a sex symbol.
It's not just that she picked a cause as damaging as ruining herd immunity with her anti-vaxxer idiocy, but also pushed something as irresponsible as chelation as a treatment for autism. As in, in addition to possible lasting damage, botched chelation done by "alternative medicine" scammers against autism, has actually KILLED a number of preschool children.
I don't see anything sexist to tell Jenny McCarthy to get the fuck out of giving batshit-crazy medical advice and stick to the only thing she's competent at, namely showing her tits. Not because of any kind of gender generalization, but because she's Jenny McCarty, and frankly, objectively showing her tits is the only thing she didn't manage to fuck-up. Presumably because it doesn't involve much using that crazy and stupid brain of hers. If they ever make a bra that requires any thinking to operate, yeah, she'll probably botch getting out of that too, but in the meantime it's a safe enough thing for her to do.
Well, that or everyone seems to overestimate how funny their own jokes are, and I'm obviously no exception. I guess having to explain that it was a joke is a pretty good indication that it wasn't particularly funny. Oh well, back to the drawing board...
Heh. I know. That was the whole joke. You know, in case the multiple winking smilies didn't make it bleeding obvious.
Ha! It works the other way around too. I never was vaccinated against hepatitis B and now they tell me I have antibodies against it . Suck on that, science ;)
Right, right. Because OBVIOUSLY Israel couldn't figure out something like setting up a bunch of servers and redirecting to a different server. It's not like they're designing half of what goes into those servers.
Try something more like customer data.
Actually, we had this story before, when they caught him. And no, there was no entrapment and whatnot. The guy is simply a flaming asshat, and he WOULD get a conviction out of me and then some.
For a start, they didn't seduce him, he actually contacted the embassy on his own proposing to sell them some "secrets" they didn't ask for and didn't need. Those guys promptly tipped off the FBI.
Second the whole "distraught father" and "patriotism" BS is just that: BS. I WOULD believe either of that if that were his primary motivation. It pretty obviously ain't.
The first thing the guy asked for was money. He tried to sell his employers' customer lists and whatnot, for plain old money. And see again: there was no social engineering, no seducing him, bla, bla, bla, he actually went to what he thought would be a buyer and HE proposed to sell that stuff.
When they told him they're not interested in paying for that, he basically asked that something bad happens to his ex. And I don't know about you, but trying to get a hit on someone isn't exactly a moral high ground any way I want to slice it.
His son only entered his equation as an after-thought, as he just asked for some photos of him. It wasn't his first or second price, and, you know, it's not like he even wanted the son back or anything, just some photos.
So, yeah, we have an asshat who actually goes looking to sell on his own, for money, and failing that, hey, maybe he can get them to whack his ex. Proving more than amply exactly what his morals are. Sorry, he's just scum, plain and simple, and more than deserves everything coming to him.
That's the "survival of the sickest" idea I mentioned in that message. And, yes, it makes perfect sense for purely parasitic bacteria. It however breaks down completely for bacteria which survive just as well in soil (e.g., Y Pestis) or for bacteria which don't want to be inside infected people in the first place (e.g., cholera kills you when those bacteria try to get OUT of your gut ASAP, not to be in people.)
I mean, if it kills its host too fast and ends up in the soil instead of infected people... yippee. It was a soil bacterium to start with. The disadvantage of that is exactly none.
It's not even that easy. The bug was not carried by dung or flies, but by fleas and rats. Even if you had a modern sewage system, rats were and still are not extinct. In fact, their populations seems to have grown with the human population.
What seems to have finally killed the plague in Europe was that the vulnerable and once dominant species of rat was also handicapped enough by it to be replaced with a better rat. (Yeah, sometimes nature makes a better mouse trap, and then makes a better mouse to defeat it;))
Sanitation, washing hands, etc, didn't have much to do with it.
Well, the actual question is: exactly how different. Yes, it's clear that some mutations are inevitable, but unless there's some clear evolutionary pressure, you may still find a bacterium that works by and large just like its ancestors.
Now it may seem that for a parasitic bacterium, not killing its host would be an advantage. And indeed in some other bacteria we can see a sort of a survival-of-the-sickest kind of selection.
But this is a soil bacterium. If it ends up in some host and kills it, worst that can happen is that it ends up back in the soil. It has nothing to lose by killing its host, and in fact everything to gain, since once the host is dead there's no more immune system killing the bacteria.
This kind of bacteria that have nothing to lose by killing the host are the most deadly and dangerous. Not just this, but see for example cholera too. That's a bacterium that not only has nothing to gain by peacefully staying inside you and not killing you, but is actually trying to get out of your body ASAP. Whether you live or die in the process, meh, it makes no difference for that one.
Additionally, for Y Pestis, the capability of clotting blood and forming colonies that plug blood vessels actually helped it spread too. The same mechanism makes it plug the stomach of fleas. The flea then will literally starve to death no matter how much blood it sucks, and driven by hunger, will go infect another host too.
So we have a bacterium for which the plasmid that kills its host:
1. isn't detrimental to the bacterium, since it can live just as well in a dead host or in soil, and
2. is actually beneficial to the bacterium, since it makes fleas spread it around.
That's one tough combo to evolve out of. There is no real survival benefit in losing those genes.
So while, yes, you would expect that bacteria can and will mutate in time, but it's not clear at all why this one would change in exactly that aspect.
Yet something seems to have changed. What and why? Those are the questions.
Actually even that description doesn't do it justice. Imagine that up to 80% of your town dies, and within weeks at that. Mortality differed from place to place and outbreak to outbreak, but generally, the tighter packed a place was, the bigger the casualties. At the larger scale of villages mortality was lower -- though even there, many villages were COMPLETELY wiped out -- but in cities, getting casualties between 50% and 75% of the total population in an outbreak wasn't unusual.
Oh, and in excruciating pain at that, as it caused the necrosis of some very sensitive spots. We have description of people listening to their town scream in agony all night, and people jumping off bridges or rooftops just to end the incredible pain. And, yeah, they didn't even have ipods to cover that constant soundtrack.
Also imagine that that happens every few years.
And that its first symptoms are something as common as sneezing. So, yeah, just being around someone with an allergy could cause you to shit your pants in terror each time they sneeze, because it COULD be the start of such a horrible epidemic.
Also imagine that you know that if you catch it, the only treatment known at the time was to board your doors and windows for two weeks and leave you to die in there, one way or another.
Yeah, it was very nasty business.
Did they come up with a hardware implementation of the wavelet intelligent compressor? ;)
Not unexpected though. Modern stories are written by highly educated and knowledgeable people. Even someone with high school education and some modest interest in mythology and such (which probably they had if they ended up writing a successful mythological back-story) would be more educated even than some of the Greco-Roman elites of the ancient world. And even more so than some illiterate backwater goat-herder tribe.
I mean, according to Ehrman, by the 1st century CE, about 10% of the people in the Roman empire could read at all. (Much less could write, and much less could write eloquently.) For Palestine, which was a mostly rural backwater, only an estimated 3% could read at all. So you can imagine that much less of those also had the oportunities and leisure time to travel and study myths, plays with mythological settings, early legends, etc.
Even in Judaism, some of the best parts and at that which show any philosophical aspects and inclinations at all, come from those scribes taken into Babylon as slaves and who got to study the Babylonian religions and literature.
So, yeah, as you'd expect, most modern fictive religion are actually better thought out and make more sense than Genesis. Be it White Wolf source books, or really even Terry Pratchett's parody religions in his Discworld books, or the back-story religion of the elves in WoW.
Well, duh, haven't you read your source materials? After Caine was cursed with vampirism and driven out, he met Lilith, Adam's first wife, the Dark Mother, in the land of Nod, who helped him awaken his vampyric powers. Unfortunately, they did have a bit of a falling out and he staked her before moving on to sire the first antediluvians. And the rest you can find in the Book Of Nod.
What? It says so in the holy White Wolf scriptures.
Oh, wait, you were meaning the OTHER fairy tale? My bad ;)
I don't think all parts are that debatable.
E.g., I've yet to meet many people who think that running back and forth for hours is AWESOME. Is there anyone out there who actually quit WoW when they gave horses earlier, because, dammit, without running on foot for half an hour the game ceased to be fun? Do you see many posts on single player game boards going, "God dammit, I thought I'd have to run 20 minutes from quest giver to the objects to fetch and 20 minutes back, like in all the good games, but this POS lets me get straight to the interesting parts and I want my money back"? :p
E.g., while cut scenes can be a matter of personal taste, I don't think anyone but the criminally insane would find it a turn off to be able to optionally skip them, especially when the last save point was before a long cut scene.
And for that matter, can those brain-dead quick-time events in cut-scenes die a horrible death already? The only thing worse than not being allowed to skip a boring cut scene, is being forced to stay there and watch it because it's an instant failure if I go take a piss during a fucking cut-scene. The only thing worse than that is a cut-scene I have to watch again and again and again until I press the right button sequence. Adding that kind of stupidity doesn't make cut-scenes more exciting and interesting, it makes the more annoying.
E.g., even for cut scenes, I can think of a couple of types that are almost universally not wanted by anyone. Take for example the dumb tech-demo interruptions in FF-X, which seem to be there just to show some character posing, so they can sell their game engine. I'm ok with cut scenes that show complex story scenes or interactions between characters, but that game interrupted me several times during a short walk between a city and a beach just so some character can pose against the sky while delivering some line. What's wrong with actually walking AND talking if it's supposed to be banter on the road from here to there? I mean, it worked well for The Witcher 2, didn't it? Why did Tidus and the other morons in the party in FF-X HAVE to stop and pause for every other line? Are they so dysfunctional and unable to multitask that even operating their mouth and feet at the same time was too much?
E.g., sure, minigames can break the monotony when they're short and awesome. But then you get games like the same FF-X where 90% of the time sunk in them was spent just running down some hall carrying some orb from here to there. I'm not particularly picking on that one game, but it was one of the first I know of which actually padded the padding. Invariably it wasn't even some great intellectual puzzle. If they just put the orbs and holes within 1 ft of each other, it would have taken seconds to solve every single such puzzle (short of being drunk, stoned AND having a seizure at the same time.) But no, something that was already padding, got padded with having to run down corridors carrying an orb from here to there. WTH?
So, yes, some things are a matter of taste, and some things are subjective, and some things are a matter of comparison. But there are things that are reviled by everyone except maybe a small lunatic fringe. If even that.
It's not just the price, though. Sure, if the choices was between 10 hours of truly awesome vs 20 hours of boring, and they both cost the same, well, ok, I might actually splurge on something that's awesome for a change. I mean, honestly, out of some games maybe a quarter of the time was actually fun, and the other parts were filler that didn't really bring anything worth my money. If I paid the same, but got only the parts that were actually worth my money, in the end I'd get the same value for my money, if not better. In fact not only I'd pay extra to have that filler removed, but I _have_ occasionally actually paid extra to be able to skip it. E.g., by buying a GameShark or the like.
But that's unfortunately just theory. Anyone want to bet that that won't happen?
I've seen games get increasingly shorter for two decades now, but I'm just not seeing that awesome stuff emerging. I'm not seeing many people actually cut out the parts that make a game boring, and leaving the juicy meat intact.
The metaphor that comes to mind is basically imagine buying a nice suit, except it has 20 pounds of lead sewn all over it, so the tailor can claim you're getting a whole 25 pounds of material for your money. It brings no extra enjoyment whatsoever, it serves no function that I'd actually want, and frankly it even detracts from my enjoyment of wearing it. Would I pay the same money to get just the suit without the lead padding? Hell yea. I'd even pay extra.
But now imagine that after hearing about how the customers don't want heavy suits, and lighter is the new way and all, you go to the same tailor, and now for the same money you get a shirt and jeans, and only 10 pounds of lead sewn to the pants. You got something lighter, but you didn't get the same for your money.
Now the next round of interviews goes by and you're reassured by everyone that THIS time they'll cut only the unwanted parts out, and you'll get only 5 pounds of suit for your money, but it will be just the awesome part. Except what you actually get this time is a T-shirt and some shorts, and 4 pounds of lead sewn to it.
That's been what's happening to games. Each time we hear them talk about how people don't want huge padded games, and how gamers would be ok with half the game, but only the awesome parts. And some of us would indeed. I would have paid the full again for some games, if I got a version with all the good stuff and without all the boring padding.
But then the next game does come along with only half the hours, but the percentage composition is largely the same as before. Now instead of an 80 hour game, out of which maybe 20 are interesting stuff, you get a 20 hours total game. Yippee, it will be just the 20 hours of fun, right? Wrong. Now you have maybe 5 hours of fun stuff and 15 hours of padding.
I'm seeing the same rhetoric happening again and again, and it looks more and more like a cheap excuse for gullible morons.
Bullshit. And frankly, the farther I see you going down this line of pulling stuff out of the ass about keyboard controls, the more comical it gets.
A bunch of us have been playing TES games just fine with a keyboard and mouse too. And there are many millions of people world-wide playing WoW and other games just fine with keyboard and mouse.
And sorry, MOVEMENT is hard for you with a keyboard? WTF were you even trying to do, that movement was such a problem? Tightrope walking? Or WTH? Especially if we move out of the realm of FPS frag-fests and into RPGs like the TES series, then we can pretty much even exclude "jump puzzles" too, and I'm drawing blanks for ANY game where accurate movement with a keyboard or anything else was ever a problem.
Was there any map in Oblivion where it even mattered if you moved half a foot more or less with the keyboard than with a gamepad? Even the extremely few places where you could take a shortcut by jumping, were actually made for a game where Acrobatics skill made a huge difference in how much you CAN jump. I.e., the maps were designed for the case that you really can't jump more than a couple of FT.
So even in your delusional world where apparently PC gamers don't have trained thumbs and presumably can't press the space bar in the same time as you push the jump button, where the fuck in Oblivion did it ever matter how precisely you move with a keyboard?
Look, I know it's usual among cretin console fanboys to just make up their delusional bullshit about PC gaming. But, really, when you have to reach for such idiotic extremes of bullshit as that
- MOVEMENT with a keyboard and mouse is a problem, or that
- everyone disagreeing with your delusions is only playing FPS frag-fests, or that
- everyone disagreeing with your delusions doesn't also play console games, and doesn't have enough training with a controller to make an informed comparison (hint to the clueless: some of us play both)
that should give you pause for thought, really.
Actually, I find that whenever someone is telling you to give up your rights for your own good, it's not really safety they have in mind. Usually they're just trying to shaft you somehow, but they can't just say "bend over and squeal like a pig, I'm gonna make big money out of shafting you peons." So they have to pack it in some idiocy about how it's for your own good.
Applies to everything from 10'th century warlords promising you protection if you just put your thumbprint here and sell yourself into serfdom, to politicians, to the likes of Zuckerburg.
In his case, it's not even hard to see why. I mean, really, you could summarize the summary as "Guy who gets his money by selling your data to marketers, says your right to privacy has got to go. Reaches for the standard 'it's to protect you from other pricks' canned excuse. Film at 11." Well, whop-de-do. Big surprise that he wants that, eh?
With my ISP randomly disconnecting at random times, any offline game which proposes to boot me out several times a day just because the ISP crapped... yeah, it just told me I'll need a cracked version just to be able to enjoy the game.
In fact, it's starting to make me think about plain old piracy. I haven't pirated games since early college, but maybe I should look into it again. The idea of being counted in the success story of that DRM stupidity if I buy it and then have to have to crack it just to be able to play, is seriously unappealing.
Sorry, I'm unimpressed.
Having a lookup table for what keys are assigned to what function is technically a little extra work, but really very little. And in fact you have to do it anyway, if you want a game written for gamepad buttons to respond to keys and mouse buttons at all.
Hard-coding key codes makes no sense and is really frakking retarded and all around an anti-pattern.
Furthermore, most game engines and frameworks ALREADY have this kind of stuff. You just need to use it.
So you're telling me... what? That a game that blew the schedule by at least months, was totally saved by not spending a day or two implementing such a trivial thing that would make it actually playable?
It's even worse. The initial assumption was that 55% of the users were female, so basically a hardcoded 'return "female";' would already guess with 55% accuracy. Bumping it to 65% is actually only a 10% bump.
But that assumption is purely based on what people declared on their account on Twitter, i.e., basically trusting that everyone who labeled themselves "female" is actually female, and everyone who labeled themselves "male" is actually male. The caveat there needs not be detailed.
Basically, they have 100,654 female users, 83,075 male users,and 53817 unspecified. Taking the known ones, there are 183,729 users of known gender. (With the caveat in the previous paragraph.) Out of that, the probability to be a female is about 55%.
BUT if they guess at individual tweets, then it's pretty much the number of tweets from each that counts. There were 2,429,621 tweets from (self-labeled) females, vs 1,672,813 tweets from (self-labeled) males, and unspecified. Total 4,102,434 tweets with "known" gender. Out of those the tweets from "known" females were a bit over 59%.
So basically an algorithm which takes one tweet and just does a hard-coded 'return "female";' would be right over 59% of the time. Bumping that to 65% is such a ridiculously marginal effect that, really, it's funny.
And actually what worries me is not as much the research grants, as the hordes of morons who don't understand the ecological fallacy (extrapolations from whole population "ecological" studies to individuals are stupid) and who'll take this as some infallible identi-kit or worse, as a scientific justification for sexism. Even the summary makes strong claims of outing males pretending to be females, or that flat-out "women use language differently than men". No they don't really. The difference is marginal, and there is massive overlap between any word's usage by males and females.
E.g., one of the "strongly male indicators" they churned is using the word http (presumably tweeting a link?) where actually any given instance of it, the probability of the user to be female is 50.6%, according to their table. So it's really a 50-50 split on the use of this word. One of the few actual strongly male words was Google, but even there it's only a 2/3 and 1/3 split between male and female. Conversely strongly female stuff like mentioning "love" was basically still a 2/3 and 1/3 split in the other direction.
But not that it will stop morons from taking it as some scientifically proven rule that women talk about love and cute stuff, and guys talk about http and Google. And that, for example, therefore we need to hire less women in IT.
Not really. Some of the Ponzi schemes in Eastern Europe in the '90's were also up front that your money comes from the next suckers. E.g., "Caritas" in Romania was candidly open about how it works and where the money comes from.
It turns out that when the marks think that your being open about it makes it totally legit, that can work too. In that case, the marks were just out of a communist regime which regulated the hell out of market, money and investments, and most really had no clue how anything else would work or not work.
I guess adding some fancy "crypto" and "mining" and other stuff like that, is also enough for at least two categories:
A) the techno-utopian nerd who'd buy into any shit as long as it's high-tech, and genuinely believes that giving a million monkey networked computers is somehow going to revolutionize anything and result in anything else than still a million monkeys shitting on the keyboard. You know, the O'Reilly of Web 2.0 fame kind of idiot who can look at Google and not see "it succeeded because it has a business plan and a source of income" but some idiotic "because it networks TEH PEOPLE!!!", and
B) the computer illiterate kind for whom its being some high-tech incomprehensible BS masks any other aspects.
You seem to misunderstand what a Ponzi scheme is.
Not all Ponzi schemes are up front about, basically, "pay us X dollars and we'll give you X * 110% from the next suckers." They often pretend to be legitimate investment or trading ventures. Among other things because most people get wise to up-front promises of infinitely sustainable giving guy A the money from B and C, after one or two collapse. You only get a very narrow window of opportunity to pull one off on new suckers, such as the ones that swept Eastern Europe after the collapse of communism, then people learned to avoid anything that up-front says it's a Ponzi scheme. You have to disguise it as a legitimate business investment or some legitimate service or whatever.
But, really, look at historical examples.
E.g., the Ivar Kreuger scheme didn't promise to be an up-front Ponzi Scheme at all. Kreuger owned a very profitable matches production and had a monopoly on it, owned banks, etc. By the time of his fall, he was at the head of more than 200 very profitable (or rather over-hyped as incredibly, fantastically profitable, although Kreuger was running deeper into debt) companies. On the surface lending some money to Kreuger was kinda like lending money to Microsoft. There was no way a multi-billion corporation would default on a few million they owed you with interest, right? The problem is that the whole debt added up to vastly more than actually those factories were worth, and in fact his reputation of paying back such debts and with good interest was really a Ponzi scheme where the money came from the next suckers lending him a few millions.
Other schemes gave certificates of value, shares, or a contract to get a house built for much less than the normal cost. (Which during the bubble used to be quite a lot.) Most of them are, at face value, things you can trade and which have a very visible value. E.g., you sure can trade value certificates or shares around, and there's nothing to keep you from selling a contract for a house to someone else. You can even check the current price for a house with that many rooms, and all.
Using a variable, market-driven value instead of promising some exorbitant return per week is also not that uncommon. See those house contracts for example. Sure, the lamest Ponzi schemes for idiots do promise fixed, too-good-to-be-true returns, but the more sophisticated ones avoid such blatant give-aways.
The real characteristic of a Ponzi scheme is basically that it's fiat currency without anyone actually guaranteeing its worth. Behind those Kreuger IOUs, or bonds, or value papers, or house contracts, or bit coins, there is no real tangible product or shares in some real company or anything of real value. You can get any money out of a Madoff investment only as long as someone else is willing to buy more investments, because Madoff didn't actually buy any shares or anything of actual value. The only return is basically robbing Peter to pay Paul. For a Paul to get some money out of Madoff, some Peter must be convinced to pay some money for whatever tokens or papers Madoff gives for those money.
And I honestly don't see why bit coins wouldn't qualify as such.
No, it just means that, like many others, you're the kind of smooth-brain cretin who can't distinguish between the negative right for yourself to be whatever religion you wish, and the imaginary right -- or, shall I say, entitlement delusion -- to try to shove it down everyone's throat.
If that still confuses you, here's a useful analogy: sex is also mostly free, but that doesn't give you a right to knock on everyone's door once a week and harass them with repeated requests to accept your dick. What you do between consenting adults is one thing -- for sex or religion alike -- and we won't stop you, but if you mistake that for some "right" to harass others then you're just an antisocial idiot.
Still, maybe singling out JWs was narrowing it too much. I'd phrase it more like "if you're the kind of frakking moron who thinks that 'freedom of religion' means an entitlement to try to shove your delusions down others' throat, GET OFF MY LAWN!"
Granted, but I don't think they also have to pay royalties for Vanguard.