I'm not even against the monomyth per se, as an idea or study in constructing a story. What does bother me is the formulaic thing that Hollywood turned it into. It's not even just it being monomyth, it's that it's become one script that everyone reuses, and a total number of allowed variations that you can count on your fingers. You get scenario template #3, fill in some props and paraphrase the standard lines in your own words, and you have a movie script. But everything happens in the same order and in the same minute as for everyone else who picked template number 3.
I haven't seen Fight Club so I can't comment about that one in particular. But 90%+ of the (other) movies coming out of Hollywood are really the same script with different actors and props. Since you mention Star Wars, once you've figured out that Darth Vader fills the sacred prescribed role of Contagonist, you _know_ what he'll do and even when. Whether it's "I'm your father" or some other form of temptation, nevertheless that's what he does for a living, so to speak. He's the guy trying to tempt the hero off the good path.
It was fun when I saw it in Star Wars, but in the meantime there are literally thousands of movies which essentially are a rehash of Episode 5 with different props. Once the thousandth guy is tempting the hero off the good path, and in roughly the same spot in the movie... well, it stopped really telling me a new story. I'm seeing a bad plagiarism of the same movie again (and it isn't even a plagiarism of Episode 5, because Lucas didn't invent that idea.) That feeling of "ok, standard plot twist #5 X should happen... now" kills the whole mood for me.
And it's even more disturbing when I see essentially the same Episode 5 plot disguised as a romance chick-flick, or psychological drama, or whatever unrelated genre. This time it's a rival chick trying to manipulate the heroine (if it's a chick flick), but it's the same "ah, she's the contagonist, she'll make her move in 5 to 10 minutes from now." Because Hollywood has become that rigid and formulaic in applying the few standard monomyth scripts.
And it's not just a result of having read about the monomyth in the meantime. I had the sensation of seeing the same movie the thousandth time long before I even knew the name for that standard script. But the bad sensation of having seen it before with different props was there. Reading about the monomyth just finally explained why. And put a name on it.
Well, while I see how that might have made you think harder, but
1. If it's possible to see it coming, then it's possible to see it coming. You could have started using the little grey cells (to paraphrase Hercules Poirot) for any other reason, or for just happening to be the kind of guy who thinks ahead.
2. Did you really need that nudge? I mean, _the_ major spoiler of the century is everyone adhering to the same script called the Monomyth, a.k.a., the Hero's Journey.
And I don't mean just the vague general idea of it. The movie industrie actually standardized exactly in which minute of the movie (well, actually as percentage of the movie length) should which element of the monomyth happen. Seriously, there are courses, consultants, etc, to teach you in exactly which minute should the hero meet the mentor, for example, or how much time you have at the start to make the case that he's an everyman John Doe.
And if you did't obey and somehow sold the rights anyway anyway, a director who did learn that lesson, will take your original and highly innovative story and basically do this to it. He'll cut out everything that deviates from the prescribed mould, change what can be changed to fit it, and add the parts of the Monomyth that were missing. Because there's no way Hollywood would publish anything else.
So once you've seen enough movies in a genre to know the approved timings and twists for that genre, don't tell me you can't already predict most of a movie after 15 minutes. E.g., once it's clear that Jane Doe is the hero's love interest and it's an action movie, you can know not only that something will happen to her to push a Joe Everyman into the hero role, but even in which minute of the movie it'll happen.
The same applies to any other genre. E.g., having had to sit through a couple of romance movies for women, I can tell you that they follow the same script with different props too. E.g., once they revealed who'll be the guy supposed to fall in love with the heroine, you can tell in exactly which minute he'll disappoint her (e.g., by coming late because he's a heart surgeon and was in a fucking operation, instead of rushing home to fawn over her) and in exactly which minute he'll come crawling back to her and beg for forgiveness.
Well, I guess now I've just spoiled 99% of the movies for you. Sorry:P
IMHO it's more complex than "don't write about plot twists", and as the summary notes, some games have gotten a free pass with some really bad ones just so the reviewer doesn't spoil it. Basically I'd propose the following distinction, and IMHO it's a major one:
A) Telling me _what_ the plot twist is. Bad.
B) Telling me about the quality of plot twists and their implementation. Good.
Basically I don't want to know stuff like "it turns out you're the feared Sith Lord", but I do want to know if, say, the plot twists are cliches that you can see coming a whole disk before they actually happen.
Also, I don't really mind examples if:
A) They happen in the first half an hour of the game anyway, so it's not like it's such a major loss. The rest of a game _should_ still be enjoyable even if I know what happens in the tutorial. Or,
B) Even the most cursory read of the manual would reveal the same information. I mean, seriously, e.g., in Persona 2 Eternal Punishment you only needed to have played the previous game or read the manual to know what's with Maia or the mysterious boy. But in game for your characters that comes very very late. So basically the manual itself spoils a major element of the plot. Obviously the designers didn't mind you knowing that.
Should a reviewer really avoid it for those who can't be bothered to read the first 3 pages of the manual? (Then again, I doubt that _some_ people can read more than a paragraph;)
It sounds to me like the whole problem, or the way it's summarized in the summary, is akin to:
1. Let's say I sell gadget that almost nobody wants.
2. Hence not many of them sell.
3. Hence I'm not producing many. (What for? Just to spend more on manufacturing and materials, and rake up storage costs too?)
4. I or some other dolt concludes, "Wow, good thing not many people buy these, because there wouldn't be enough of them for everyone!"
In reality, there aren't enough produced _because_ there isn't much supply, not the other way around.
It seems to me like the same applies here. _If_ there was a huge interest in DTV, you wouldn't need an enforced deadline to convert people to it. (I don't remember any law and deadline to switch from horse-drawn carts to cars, for example, nor from analogue telephones to digital ones, nor from ball mice to optical mice, and the list could continue.) And there'd be the companies out there who figure out, "hey, all these people want to buy DTV stuff. Let's make some." There's no reason for such a shortage to exist, and in fact there is no actual shortage: the supply is probably a little higher than the demand. (As probably a bunch of companies produced and a bunch of retailers stocked these, keeping the fingers crossed that people will actually buy them as the deadline draws near.)
Putting it as "well, just as well that not everyone is buying them, because there aren't enough for everyone anyway" is missing the existing relationship between the X and Y there.
I suppose it could make an argument for convincing the government to postpone it some more, but even there it seems to me like "the people don't actually want it" _ought_ to be enough of a reason by itself. Well, in an ideal world, anyway. I know, I know...
It's not just perception or resolution. On behardware.com they actually put them next to a CRT, both are showing the output of the same GPU, and film them with a very high speed camera. You can see that on most TFTs an enemy is already in the middle of a corridor shooting at you, while on the TFT sometimes he's not even on the screen yet.
So, no, its not just bull. The review you read was just retarded, and apparently too eager to rationalize with bullshit instead of actually measuring.
I've got a LCD panel with 5 ms latency and I don't notice problems when gaming. If you're quick enough to say anything over 1 ms is too slow, you're a pretty hardcore (and quick) gamer. And if you're that good, you're probably best served by a pro setup anyway, not low-level consumer grade shit. But I'm not as twitch quick as I used to be, and my gamertag certainly isn't "Fatal1ty," so 5 ms seems fine to me.
1. You seem to assume that there actually is some kind of pro gamer gear. All the pro LCDs are actually as in graphics artist pro, and usually actually have the slowest response times of them all. It's "pro" as in "it'll look like that when printed too" (and maybe we'll throw calibration hardware and software in too, 10bit per colour component instead of 8 if it's a several thousand dollar model, led backlight, etc), not as in "it'll display the image in 1ms". It's mostly static images that'll get displayed on those.
The very panel that goes into one already works against you. The fastest ones are TN+Film, but those tend to be in 6 bit per component and dithering instead of 8, have shitty viewing angles (often to the extent that you can see a slight difference between the centre and the corners just because the line from the pixel to your eye falls differently), and at least according to behardware.com the "+Film" part creates more non-homogenity too. The most accurate ones are VA ones (as in, MVA or PVA), but those are also the slowest by far. Guess which goes into a "pro" level display for graphics professionals? Right.
2. If you have that fast reflexes and actually live or die by shooting 1ms earlier, most TFT's have an extra problem: most first buffer the whole image, then scale/display it, because it's the easiest way to deal with scaling an image of a different resolution. Unfortunately they do it even when you use their native resolution.
I.e., what you see on the screen is actually what they received 1 to 3 frames in the past. At, say, 60 fps, on some models you can actualy see the image as it was received 50ms ago. I.e., the difference between 1ms and 5ms latency of the panel is entirely the wrong bottleneck to optimize there.
(Since you mentioned Fatal1ty, last I've heard he used a CRT, btw.)
Better models in this aspect are starting to appear, but it took a while and they're still few and far in between. Mostly because it's not one of the numbers dangled in front of the fashion victims, so there was very little incentive to do anything at all about it.
3. The numbers you get told are by and large... well, not lies, but the standard was written by the vendors for their benefit not yours. E.g., a 5ms display if it's measured black-to-white-to-black can be actually faster than a 1ms grey-to-grey with massive overdrive, and produce less ghosting.
The short and skinny was that the black-to-white-to-black standard was already a lie by itself, and only used because it was the smallest number you can measure without overdrive. The standard as defined by the vendors lets them ignore the first and last 10% of the moving from colour A to colour B. Even that ought to give you cause for thought: that number didn't say "it will reach colour B in time X" but merely "it will get within 10% of colour B within time X". A 10% error is piss-poor on the logarithmic scale of the eye. And it lets them ignore the long asymptotic rest of the curve. But in a transition from black to white or back they can ignore more of the long tail than in a grey to grey transition, according to their own bogus standard, so that's why everyone quoted that.
This all changed when someone invented overdrive. The idea here basically is that you can accelerate faster and overshoot the finishing line if you want to. The measured time still is "in how much time you can get within 10% of the finishing line." It doesn't matter that then you overshoot by 50% and spend even more time coming back asymptotically from the _other_ side. But you can't do much overdrive o
Like Frigga's Ring, I did play WoW 1.0, I don't remember it being anywhere near as poor quality as WAR. Yes, it had its issues, but by and large it worked and was fun to play. And the quests were largely the same as today in the pre-BC areas so I'm not sure wtf you've been smoking if you think only recently they added anything more than "kill X" and "collect Y". Repeat after me: other than a few moved NPCs, and very few Draenei and Blood Elves added which give 1-2 quests each, the quests in the "old world" of WoW are the same now as they were in 1.0. You can go through any area of your choice and over 90% of the quests there will be the same that existed since day 1.
Warhammer's problem is that it has to compete with today's WoW without ever having had the revenue that comes from 10million people paying about 10 bucks a month.
Guess what? WoW didn't start with 11 million players either. In fact, they expected few enough to fit on a couple of servers (hence the resulting queues when 100 times more people wanted to play the game.) They started from zero too, and nevertheless delivered an 1.0 game which blew all expectations and records.
Actually, I think it would be tamer. _All_ that a guild on WoW has is a few items in the guild banks. There is no equivalent of "sovereignty" or any holdings, etc.
I've actually been in 2 WoW guilds which split, exploded or imploded when half a dozen characters reached level 60 (it was the top back then), and greed kicked in. As in, "OMG, my preciouss epic stuff is all that matters, let's kick out everyone who doesn't/can't grind me my preciouss epic gear." People who had founded that guild got kicked out because they couldn't grind some instance every fucking day.
(Sometimes I wonder if games actually help make people psychopaths after all, or they were psychopaths to start with. Because that level of lack of empathy and judging other people only by how they fit towards gaining your personal status symbols is either psychopathy or an amazing virtual-world simulation thereof. If the impersonality of being behind a screen that makes some people give that little a shit about others, or it's just the medium where they can drop the mask and act as they really are? But I digress.)
Big fucking deal. Most of the affected people just formed another guild which was aimed at casual play and where "epic" was officially a forbidden word. Life went on like before.
Adding guild vaults didn't have changed all that much, I think. Most of the equipment there is at most blue quality (_very_ few people donate purple stuff), the funds can be recovered in a couple of days of grinding daily quests, and... um, actually there's nothing else. There is no estate to lose or anything.
The summary makes it at least sound like it's a much bigger problem for BoB on Eve.
They _all_ gave the message that they're running away, but just stood there. (Unless you managed to get them from above that threshold directly to zero in one hit, I suppose.) I'll assume you mean that maybe 5 mobs actually managed to make it to the stage where they actually healed themselves. (It did have to be pretty tough to survive that far with some people beating up on it.) But if you looked at the logs, every single one of them spewed the message and failed to run.
Let me repeat the bug: "f you kept beating on an NPC, at some point it said it runs away in fear. Except it didn't, it stood there like an idiot doing nothing. Then if he survived a few seconds in that state (quite easy for major bosses) it would suddenly heal back to full helt."
I don't mean if it's stuck or inaccessible. I mean every single fucking enemy, in every single fucking fight, even if you're in melee with it and it had no problems fighting back until then.
I'm sorry, but WoW's occasional stuck enemy being unreachable isn't even vaguely similar to this epic fuck-up.
I can think of several things, but as random blatant examples, as launched:
- if you kept beating on an NPC, at some point it said it runs away in fear. Except it didn't, it stood there like an idiot doing nothing. Then if he survived a few seconds in that state (quite easy for major bosses) it would suddenly heal back to full helt. How _that_ got through QA, I can't even imagine.
- enemies stuck in terrain, e.g., in the cave with the squigs in the greenskin starting quests.
- retarded pet AI. In WoW if your pet can't reach an enemy, it stays with you. In WAR it ran in some retarded direction and down some corridor, and only eventually it would figure out to come back to you.
And so on and so forth.
Most importantly, as far as MMOs go it was actually fun unlike many others, but the reason I quit is because MMOs aren't exactly high on the fun scale anyway. I'd rather play non-MMO games because I feel I'm getting more enjoyment for the time put in to them.
It was fun if you were one-track-minded about PvP. It was a one-trick pony with that being its only trick. Everything else was a half-arsed affair, if present at all. There was not much exploring to do. (What with the areas being so squashed that sometimes you didn't even have to move from the quest giver to shoot the critters you had to kill. E.g., in the elf starting area.) Crafting was a sad joke. Quests were a boring monotonous affair, where everything was a rehash of the same "go there and kill everyone" thing. Etc.
If you look at WoW or any other game, they allow for a variety of playstyles and whenever you're not in the mood for doing X, there are things Y and Z to do instead. That fact seems to have gone right over Mythic's head.
And again that applies to quests too. While Mythic and their retarded fanboys bleated about how they don't need no stinking "kill rabbits" quests, the truth is that those quests created variety in WoW. There were more activities and more bits of story in your daily routine than "it's a big war, now go kill someone again." There was a whole (uber-simplified) economy to discover, the (uber-simplified carricature of) the NPCs daily lives, there were areas to explore, etc. It doesn't sound heroic and it wasn't heroic, but it was more interesting than doing the same damned thing over and over again.
I love people like you. You have no clue about the development process at all, and you make far to many assumptions. If a game was released in a shitty state could be because of a bad QA yes, but at the same time they could have found 90% of the issues but due to a set release date or any other sort of pressure from production/development they were punted by programmers/producers to be fixed later. Either way you are too quick to blame one singular entity of the process instead of the whole based purely on what you assume.
And I love people like you, who are so eager to blame the producer (or anyone else) for not giving a team infinite funds and time.
The facts are:
1. The producer isn't some mysterious bogeyman who does nothing but set arbitrary deadlines and stop you from finishing QA. The producer is the guy who pays for the whole development _and_ QA, and each extra month is a month he'll be paying for.
2. I don't know how you imagine things to be, but any project involves some negotiations. Basically those devs said at some point, "yes, we can do it before date X and with Y million dollars." I'm not aware of any game which was pushed out before the date the devs agreed on. In fact, most blow the deadline and the budget. Some outright lie to get the contract, or are apparently unable to learn from past bad estimates.
Warhammer Online has been in development longer than WoW IIRC, and it looked so often that it was going nowhere that it was cancelled and then continued after all a couple of times. The first cancelling I remember was in _2004_ FFS. And that's not the _start_ date, it's one of the dates when it wasn't going anwhere.
And while I have no clue about how it went with the deadlines and budget in the final round, but at the very least, the team delivered less than they promised. See all that cut out content. That's stuff they hadn't just promised their fans, it's stuff they had promised the publisher for that money too. They effectively delivered maybe half the game they had been paid for, or maybe even less.
3. Most games actually don't even break even as it is. E.g., EA actually subsidizes a heck of a lot of games out of the profits of their sports games and such. I.e., statistically the expectation for any of those games is that it will be yet another hole to throw money down. And digging a bigger hole isn't exactly going to help.
So, yes, from where I stand it looks to me entirely fair to blame the devs. What do _you_ propose? That the publisher keeps throwing money down a rat hole until the end of times?
It's based on the rhino in the same way you're based on a monkey. It doesn't mean it's the same animal. It's a super-massive giraffe which evolved out of a rhino ancestor.
The muscle to weight ratio won't be the same as for a rhino, hence expect acceleration and speed to be different. The very long neck also probably doesn't help with either acceleration or turning (still acceleration), because of _torque_. You accelerate too fast in either direction and all that mass and size combine to something bone-snapping. Basically it could probably trot menacingly your way at best, but nothing you couldn't outsprint or outturn.
But even that's not the main point. The main point is: herbivore. Unless you manage to make it feel majorly threatened, it'll leave you alone. And at that size, I'd say you won't register as a major threat. Same as giraffes don't go hunting rats to pass the time. So you'd have the darned thing peacefully munching leaves while ignoring you. Not quite the most thrilling scenario for a horror movie, that's all I'm saying;)
- A T-Rex by modern estimates can be as low as 5m/s (11 mph) and by other estimates a sprint of over 10m/s would produce fatal forces in its bones. It only had to chase down animals his own size, which also waddled slowly.
- the Indricotherium Transsouralicum that you mention was basically an overly massive giraffe. Ok, technically a rhino which had evolved to fill the same niche as a giraffe. It was a herbivore which ate leaves off trees. Also you probably could outrun him too.
- you'd probably be as impractical a prey for a Megalodon as it would be for a normal shark to hunt sardines. Marine animals which feed on stuff as disproportionately small compared to their own size, do so by filtering them out of the water (see the whale, for example), not by chasing them individually and chewing them to bits. So for a Megalodon you'd probably not even register as an interesting prey. It fed on similarly overgrown things.
A lot of the things nature produced just aren't as scary as you seem think. A movie about a battleship-sized shark that completely ignores the hero, or about a T-Rex that can be outrun even at a jogging or marathon pace, well, just wouldn't be much of a horror. A herd of small fast velociraptors is actually scarier by far.
Actually, while I don't know the exact situation for Romania at the moment, most places where political corruption and injustice run amok have another fun twist: making an example of some random bugger to prove that the system works. So if I were to take an uninformed bet, I'd say you're also at risk of:
- some competitor being owned by a corrupt politician or his best buddy (or just someone with money for bribes), wanting to get rid of you
- WTO or whoever leans too hard on the government, so a few guys get rounded up and hung up to dry, just to show the world that your country takes IP seriously after all
- some official is gunning for a promotion or reelection, so a few guys get rounded up and made an example of, just so he can come across as the great crime fighter
Etc.
Basically my take is that living in a corrupt system is a risk, rather than some blanket insurance against prosecution.
I've actually had the misfortune of consulting for a company whose servers' primary DNS names were something like rbp. Or something to that effect.
And we're talking a J2EE bonanza where a simple call created a storm of calls to a random server from the next tier. Load balanced cluster(fuck), see. So you'd see in the logs that you got called by machine asdfghjkr05b09p03 with some highly erroneous parameters. Now take a fucking guess which actual machine that is.
The naming scheme was obviously excellent for Mordac The Preventer Of IT Services... er... I mean for the IT department which had to service those blades, but a nightmare for everyone else.
Of course, they tried to do something for the users to, so they got aliased... to something equally non-mnemonic.
Making the "copy" in computer memory is the primary intended use of the software's distribution media. To say you can't make that copy means the product is "unmerchantable" and "unfit for its intended purpose".
Bingo. That's _exactly_ why I said, "and if any vendor had actually tried to use it that way it would have put them out of the market right there and then". Any vendor going to court arguing that you bought a copy but it can't copy it to RAM, would have effectively made the case that the goods they sold cannot be used for the intended (and explicitly stated) purpose.
But originally the licenses were pretty benign. It was little more than a clarification that yes, you may make that copy, and nobody bothered going to court to make a case like "we didn't need that clarification anyway." Remember that in the beginning it was only corporations and government institutions which could even afford a computer at all. These tend to not waste lawyer money to clarify ideological points. If they get a piece of paper saying basically, "no, we're not going to sue you for using the software you bought", that tends to be enough. It's an absurd piece of paper, but meh, who cares?
Unfortunately that's been the start of a slippery slope. Once people got used to the idea of "licensing software", it went downhill. But again, even if someone in the beginning would have foreseen such a slope, it was people who don't fight legal battles for the future common good.
Actually, it's even funnier. IIRC in India they actually tax licenses. So if you have an actual license, say, to make a movie based on someone's book, the government wants its share of that deal.
So they took this to the logical conclusion: if Microsoft's software is licensed, not sold, the license tax should apply.
Microsoft actually tried to prove to the court that it's a sale not a license.
Even that text you linked to is too complicately put and somewhat inexact.
The fact is:
1. Developers didn't _need_ any extra protections against unlawful redistribution, since a copyright law had existed in the UK since 1710 and in the USA since 1787. The Berne Convention was signed in 1886.
Why does software need special protections? A book or newspaper for example is pretty clearly protected by copyright: you may not unlawfully distribute copies. You don't need EULAs for books or newspapers, so why do we need them for software?
2. The EULA -- in its generic "software license" form -- is actually as old as the first software ever sold, and was based on a loophole in copyright law: it mentioned being copied generically, but computers needed to copy a program from punched cards (later tape, later disk) to memory to actually run it. So some wise guy figured out: ah-ha, to make a copy they need a license, so we can dictate our terms to them.
That's how the idiotic concept of "licenses" for software was born.
Note that it wasn't some loophole that allowed unlawful redistribution. You still couldn't use it to copy IBM's software to another deck of cards and sell it, since that would already be forbidden by normal copyright.
It was a loophole that allowed a plain old power grab. There was this literal-minded interpretation of the law which could be mis-construed to mean: you can't use this software at all unless we grant you a license to copy it to memory. No court would have taken it that way, and if any vendor had actually tried to use it that way it would have put them out of the market right there and then. But it was enough to make people accept the notion, rather than go to court to have it clarified.
Which then got used to weasel in more and more onerous restrictions on the user. Because, hey, if it's a license, we can set the terms of that license.
But it never was any kind of protection against actual unlawful acts of the consumer or anyone else. It was just a way to bypass the normal consumer laws and restrict your existing liberties.
3. The loophole has actually long been fixed, but the idiocy of a license for software has perpetuated. Just because everyone was already used to that notion.
And the conditions continued to grow more and more absurd. Not only it generally bypasses consumer laws entirely (e.g., first sale right), it's grown to include such bullshit clauses as "you can't give it a bad review", or "you may not use it together with our competitors' software" (right up to "and we can disable it if you do"), or "we may spy on your in any way imaginable", or essentially "we can unilaterally and retroactively change the terms you 'agreed' to retroactively, in a patch you can't refuse."
(MMOs for example love to change terms and conditions like that, and refusing it essentially disables the software you've paid for. No fallback to using the old version with the old conditions or anything. At least theoretically you can refuse to install even a Windows security patch if it tries to retrofit the EULA, but you can't refuse a WoW patch without essentially disabling your software and forfeiting your remaining paid time.)
4. And since that loophole no longer exists, we hear more and more idiotic strawmen used to justify it.
E.g., that otherwise you might imagine that you bought the rights to MS Word itself instead of just a copy of it. Excuse me? When was the last time anyone went on court record as thinking he bought the whole rights to War And Peace because he bought the book from Amazon? The concept of buying a copy is and was already very clear to everyone, and already defined by copyright laws. Books don't need the extra EULA to clarify that, music doesn't, DVDs don't, etc. Why the f-word is software so special that people couldn't possibly understand the same distinction there?
5. Basically what I'd like to see clarified once and for all (by the FTC or anyone with the legal power) is to declare the whole idiocy illegal
Your agenda is apparently to involve kids somehow in either the production of software or things that go with the software (or as you say, give them this opportunity). Being broad-minded about this, you don't prescribe any kind of F/OSS at all. Nevertheless, it's still an agenda and has some influence.
Let's just say: I certainly _would_, if I submitted an article like "involving kids in OSS". Because, again, without at least understanding (or having a chance to try out) the sharing part, it's got nothing to do with OSS. They're just using a program, which might as well be closed-source or open-source, but that has zero impact on that session.
How does acknowledging that there may be other applications of this approach negate a link to F/OSS?
Because if there would be no difference at all between this and a session centered around a non-OSS product, then it's not "involving them in OSS" in any form or shape.
The link is that I have *done* this in F/OSS communities and experienced success! It is perhaps a non-obvious way that kids *can* get involved because so much of the world is focused only on "educational outcomes" and not at all on this kind of interaction.
That's a link as weak as saying that using the ReiserFS gets you involved in murder. The facts A="the kids are using those programs" and B="it's got something to do with OSS" are linked just by the utterly irrelevant fact that a third person (you) was involved in both. Maybe, but it's not involving _them_. It's exactly the same link as between the guy using that workstation over there with ReiserFS and Hans Reiser having killed his wife. I.e., hardly any at all.
If you don't care about educational outcomes (and I'm not even saying you should) then at least have the decency to not come up with a "involving them in OSS" claim.
F/OSS has two sides: technical and social. Children can be involved in the social side long before they have a full appreciation of the technical side. Both sides are equally valuable. No code is written in a social vacuum. To dismiss non-coding activities around F/OSS as being unimportant while exalting contact with the source as being the only way to legtimize the activities as being "F/OSS related" is incredibly short-sighted.
Except:
A) That social participation is worthless without even understanding what OSS means. And I don't mean getting a lecture in RMS's beliefs, but that experiencing first hand an, "am I ok with people changing a ladder on my map and releasing it as their own?" (Or two letters in my walkthrough, or whatever.) If it's based just on a vague "I get to use stuff for free" (as in beer, or let's say candy for kids), it's at best just producing another generation of freetards who think that downloading a beta of Windows 7 for free or getting a free 7 day demo of WoW is after all the same thing.
It doesn't even have to be code. It could be a picture released under the Creative Commons license, or whatever. There have been people who've uploaded their family photos as a basically "do whatever you wish with it" license, and then got upset when a company used their daughter's photo for a "ditch your girlfriend by SMS" ad campaign. And then went on record asking all over the place how to un-CC those photos. Tasteless campaign, no doubt, but that's the kind of thing where you discover if you really like such a licence or you've been just following the wrong crowd for your personality.
B) Again, you could do the exact session and "social" claim about a proprietary software too. WoW doesn't exist in a vacuum either. Neither does the MSDN. Etc.
Again, I'm not saying you _should_ teach them anything, if that's not your goal, but at least then please refrain from misleading claims.
Oh, good grief. Read the whole article! At times, I have my kids directly talking with developers. At others, we jus
1. I'm not proposing to _push_ any agenda on anyone. I'm just proposing to let them discover if they're interested in that or not. These are the tools, this is what you can do with them, feel free to experiment or not.
Note for example that nowhere did I say I'm going to push any flavour of F/OSS on them. One of the possible outcomes I described was also discovering that they're the "mine! all mine!" kind after all. I'd call that a valuable experience too.
(Entirely too many people are paying lip service to F/OSS, but get their panties in a knot when it comes to sharing their work too. I briefly worked as a dev on a MUD where they paid _incredible_ lip service to Linux and OSS, but upon joining I discovered that they were actually paranoid to the extreme about anyone copying anything of theirs. They locked it behind byzantine access restrictions, and I had to whine at someone just to get access to the files I need to change to do my job. And that their preciousss code included the work of developers like me: it suddenly was their code, to lock behind such permissions and get paranoid about it being even seen by the wrong people. Left me with a bad aftertaste. I'm not just talking about it conflicting with _my_ ideology, it conflicted with the ideology they themselves professed so loudly.)
But anyway, I think it's an important lesson to learn early. Not even "learn" as in "get to _my_ conclusion", but decide for yourself if that's what you want to do. If you've scripted an NPC, or modelled an AK47, or textured some beautiful armour, or whatever other work... are you ok with people recolouring it pink via a simple colour swap, and releasing it as their own mod? It will tell you right there and then how you really stand on F/OSS.
But I digress. I certainly don't propose to force anyone in any direction, much less any of the emotional stuff you write. I just propose to give them a chance to discover it for themselves, if they feel inclined their way. I'm equally prepared to accept that they're more interested in 3D modelling, or map editing, or creative prose for the quests and dialogues, or composing a music track, or nothing at all. Those games I've mentioned allow one to experience any of those first hand.
2. I fail to see how crippling a tool makes it any better in any of the aspects you've mentioned. My approach includes the possibility of coding, if anyone feels so inclined. Yours doesn't. Why is the latter better?
3. What on Earth does it have to do with involvement in Open Source, then, if there is no source involved, and no chance to see for themselves if they actually want to share theirs? If you're going to just use them as a focus group for some simple game, how's that any different from getting them in a focus group for the next closed-source Nintendo game?
The whole sharing my world and all the fancy wording could apply verbatim to anything else. I could play WoW with them. (Hey, that's a part of _my_ world.) I could show them the meshes I made for a couple of simple Fallout 3 mods. Etc. None of those are F/OSS, but the exercise you describe could be identical.
Once you exclude the actual "Open" and "Source" even from the possibilities of that exercise, then the link to F/OSS becomes weak at best. (And trolling for page hits at worst.) It's like saying I'm involving anyone in geology, because I took them for a ride in my car, and some geologists found the ore it was made of and the oil it runs on. The fact that geology or F/OSS were involved several steps back, doesn't make the exercise itself have anything to do with geology or F/OSS.
It might get them interested in modding, I guess, and then they'll move on to something which actually allow them to write some code too. E.g., see the Oblivion or Fallout 3 or NWN2 scripting.
Most of the basic concepts involved in programming are just as applicable to and learnable from scripting, as from C++ or whatever else. E.g., according to a recent article, apparently one hurdle that half the population can't get over, is the humble "a = b" assignment. If a kid managed to get over it in a script to make their +5 Sword Of Ganking available in a game via a simple quest, or to put in a new uber-spell in NWN2, it's something they can apply later in a real programming job.
And to some extent most such mods involve starting from _some_ sources, and sharing your own source. It's not really F/OSS that would please RMS, but it can serve to drive a point home. Especially when they run into stuff like that they can't import their favourite companion or weapon from Oblivion into Fallout 3, because it's copyrighted by Bethesda and most mod sites have stern worded restrictions on that kind of thing. And they can also see what it's like to be on the other side of the fence, when someone else takes your sources and models, with or without permission, and makes his own mod out of them. It seems to me like you then can make your own informed choice between such stances as "meh, I couldn't care less" (Public Domain), "... as long as he gives credit" (BSD) or "... as long as he shares his changes too" (GPL) or a few others. (Over-simplified view of those licenses, to be sure, but you get the idea.)
Or maybe decide that "mine! all mine!" is what fits their personality the best, I guess.
On the other hand, I see no reason not to start directly from one of those games in the first place. If I were trying to get a kid interested in coding, I'd probably rather start from something like that.
Sad to break this to you, but humans usually _organize_ for this kind of thing, so it doesn't become a matter of individual people helping individual people. There are a lot of things which just don't scale if done that way.
E.g.,
- It's more efficient and a better use of everyone's resources to have a tiny fraction of the population as cops, than to have each person stand guard with a shotgun on their own property 27/7. The former lets you actually, say, go to work and leave that home unattended.
- It's more efficient to have a few doctors, than have everyone learn to treat their own wounds and illnesses,
- It's more efficient to have an insurance spread the risk and cost, than have everyone save for the freak case that an airplane falls on their roof, they run their car into a tree, _and_ get a MRSA infection in the resulting fractures
- It's more efficient to have some consumer laws and organizations, than have everyone spend countless hours and effort running the EULA for every single pencil, second-hand car, and party hat by a lawyer to be sure they haven't sold their firstborn into slavery in clause 255 on page 100 of the small print,
Etc.
Just like making shoes for a hundred million people ends up cheaper and more efficient that each of those people each raising their own pig/cow/whatever, personally tanning its hide, and sewing their own shoes.
People organize so a centralized group can do some things cheaper and more efficient than in an every-man-for-himself world. _That's why we have governments (local, federal, whatever), agencies like the FEMA, etc. That's their job.
And the fact that you're so quick to dismiss their responsibility and blame it on the victims... well, maybe _that_ idiocy is proof of what's wrong with education.
It seems to me that we can apply a criterion that's already applied in criminal law everywhere: mens rea. ("Evil mind", or rather meaning "evil intent.")
See, let's say a shingle falls off my house and brains a passerby. At least theoretically the law has to determine the degree of mens rea behind it, ranging from premeditation (I actually rigged the roof in advance to kill that guy) to criminal negligence (I had no clue that the roof is in bad condition, though maybe I should have) to none whatsoever (it was freshly inspected, nobody could know it was gonna fall.) Note that "criminal negligence" is actually somewhat as a misnomer, in that it's actually not a criminal offense in most cases. It really means more like "negligence in the criminal law definition" than "criminally-punishable negligence." You usually have to rank up to at least "recklessness" (I knew or had plenty of indication that the roof is dangerously unsafe and can injure someone, e.g., shingles had fallen before or an inspection warned me before of the possibility, and obviously didn't give a flying fuck) to actually be liable.
It seems to me that the same can be applied here. Did that politician just choose an unfortunate wording, or did he _intend_ to mislead? Very important distinction to make, IMHO.
If it's intentional wording to mislead, then it seems to me that the GP poster is correct: that's a fucking deliberate lie. And its being worded to leave a way out just proves the premeditation some more.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not even against the monomyth per se, as an idea or study in constructing a story. What does bother me is the formulaic thing that Hollywood turned it into. It's not even just it being monomyth, it's that it's become one script that everyone reuses, and a total number of allowed variations that you can count on your fingers. You get scenario template #3, fill in some props and paraphrase the standard lines in your own words, and you have a movie script. But everything happens in the same order and in the same minute as for everyone else who picked template number 3.
I haven't seen Fight Club so I can't comment about that one in particular. But 90%+ of the (other) movies coming out of Hollywood are really the same script with different actors and props. Since you mention Star Wars, once you've figured out that Darth Vader fills the sacred prescribed role of Contagonist, you _know_ what he'll do and even when. Whether it's "I'm your father" or some other form of temptation, nevertheless that's what he does for a living, so to speak. He's the guy trying to tempt the hero off the good path.
It was fun when I saw it in Star Wars, but in the meantime there are literally thousands of movies which essentially are a rehash of Episode 5 with different props. Once the thousandth guy is tempting the hero off the good path, and in roughly the same spot in the movie... well, it stopped really telling me a new story. I'm seeing a bad plagiarism of the same movie again (and it isn't even a plagiarism of Episode 5, because Lucas didn't invent that idea.) That feeling of "ok, standard plot twist #5 X should happen... now" kills the whole mood for me.
And it's even more disturbing when I see essentially the same Episode 5 plot disguised as a romance chick-flick, or psychological drama, or whatever unrelated genre. This time it's a rival chick trying to manipulate the heroine (if it's a chick flick), but it's the same "ah, she's the contagonist, she'll make her move in 5 to 10 minutes from now." Because Hollywood has become that rigid and formulaic in applying the few standard monomyth scripts.
And it's not just a result of having read about the monomyth in the meantime. I had the sensation of seeing the same movie the thousandth time long before I even knew the name for that standard script. But the bad sensation of having seen it before with different props was there. Reading about the monomyth just finally explained why. And put a name on it.
Well, while I see how that might have made you think harder, but
1. If it's possible to see it coming, then it's possible to see it coming. You could have started using the little grey cells (to paraphrase Hercules Poirot) for any other reason, or for just happening to be the kind of guy who thinks ahead.
2. Did you really need that nudge? I mean, _the_ major spoiler of the century is everyone adhering to the same script called the Monomyth, a.k.a., the Hero's Journey.
And I don't mean just the vague general idea of it. The movie industrie actually standardized exactly in which minute of the movie (well, actually as percentage of the movie length) should which element of the monomyth happen. Seriously, there are courses, consultants, etc, to teach you in exactly which minute should the hero meet the mentor, for example, or how much time you have at the start to make the case that he's an everyman John Doe.
And if you did't obey and somehow sold the rights anyway anyway, a director who did learn that lesson, will take your original and highly innovative story and basically do this to it. He'll cut out everything that deviates from the prescribed mould, change what can be changed to fit it, and add the parts of the Monomyth that were missing. Because there's no way Hollywood would publish anything else.
So once you've seen enough movies in a genre to know the approved timings and twists for that genre, don't tell me you can't already predict most of a movie after 15 minutes. E.g., once it's clear that Jane Doe is the hero's love interest and it's an action movie, you can know not only that something will happen to her to push a Joe Everyman into the hero role, but even in which minute of the movie it'll happen.
The same applies to any other genre. E.g., having had to sit through a couple of romance movies for women, I can tell you that they follow the same script with different props too. E.g., once they revealed who'll be the guy supposed to fall in love with the heroine, you can tell in exactly which minute he'll disappoint her (e.g., by coming late because he's a heart surgeon and was in a fucking operation, instead of rushing home to fawn over her) and in exactly which minute he'll come crawling back to her and beg for forgiveness.
Well, I guess now I've just spoiled 99% of the movies for you. Sorry :P
IMHO it's more complex than "don't write about plot twists", and as the summary notes, some games have gotten a free pass with some really bad ones just so the reviewer doesn't spoil it. Basically I'd propose the following distinction, and IMHO it's a major one:
A) Telling me _what_ the plot twist is. Bad.
B) Telling me about the quality of plot twists and their implementation. Good.
Basically I don't want to know stuff like "it turns out you're the feared Sith Lord", but I do want to know if, say, the plot twists are cliches that you can see coming a whole disk before they actually happen.
Also, I don't really mind examples if:
A) They happen in the first half an hour of the game anyway, so it's not like it's such a major loss. The rest of a game _should_ still be enjoyable even if I know what happens in the tutorial. Or,
B) Even the most cursory read of the manual would reveal the same information. I mean, seriously, e.g., in Persona 2 Eternal Punishment you only needed to have played the previous game or read the manual to know what's with Maia or the mysterious boy. But in game for your characters that comes very very late. So basically the manual itself spoils a major element of the plot. Obviously the designers didn't mind you knowing that.
Should a reviewer really avoid it for those who can't be bothered to read the first 3 pages of the manual? (Then again, I doubt that _some_ people can read more than a paragraph;)
It sounds to me like the whole problem, or the way it's summarized in the summary, is akin to:
1. Let's say I sell gadget that almost nobody wants.
2. Hence not many of them sell.
3. Hence I'm not producing many. (What for? Just to spend more on manufacturing and materials, and rake up storage costs too?)
4. I or some other dolt concludes, "Wow, good thing not many people buy these, because there wouldn't be enough of them for everyone!"
In reality, there aren't enough produced _because_ there isn't much supply, not the other way around.
It seems to me like the same applies here. _If_ there was a huge interest in DTV, you wouldn't need an enforced deadline to convert people to it. (I don't remember any law and deadline to switch from horse-drawn carts to cars, for example, nor from analogue telephones to digital ones, nor from ball mice to optical mice, and the list could continue.) And there'd be the companies out there who figure out, "hey, all these people want to buy DTV stuff. Let's make some." There's no reason for such a shortage to exist, and in fact there is no actual shortage: the supply is probably a little higher than the demand. (As probably a bunch of companies produced and a bunch of retailers stocked these, keeping the fingers crossed that people will actually buy them as the deadline draws near.)
Putting it as "well, just as well that not everyone is buying them, because there aren't enough for everyone anyway" is missing the existing relationship between the X and Y there.
I suppose it could make an argument for convincing the government to postpone it some more, but even there it seems to me like "the people don't actually want it" _ought_ to be enough of a reason by itself. Well, in an ideal world, anyway. I know, I know...
It's not just perception or resolution. On behardware.com they actually put them next to a CRT, both are showing the output of the same GPU, and film them with a very high speed camera. You can see that on most TFTs an enemy is already in the middle of a corridor shooting at you, while on the TFT sometimes he's not even on the screen yet.
So, no, its not just bull. The review you read was just retarded, and apparently too eager to rationalize with bullshit instead of actually measuring.
1. You seem to assume that there actually is some kind of pro gamer gear. All the pro LCDs are actually as in graphics artist pro, and usually actually have the slowest response times of them all. It's "pro" as in "it'll look like that when printed too" (and maybe we'll throw calibration hardware and software in too, 10bit per colour component instead of 8 if it's a several thousand dollar model, led backlight, etc), not as in "it'll display the image in 1ms". It's mostly static images that'll get displayed on those.
The very panel that goes into one already works against you. The fastest ones are TN+Film, but those tend to be in 6 bit per component and dithering instead of 8, have shitty viewing angles (often to the extent that you can see a slight difference between the centre and the corners just because the line from the pixel to your eye falls differently), and at least according to behardware.com the "+Film" part creates more non-homogenity too. The most accurate ones are VA ones (as in, MVA or PVA), but those are also the slowest by far. Guess which goes into a "pro" level display for graphics professionals? Right.
2. If you have that fast reflexes and actually live or die by shooting 1ms earlier, most TFT's have an extra problem: most first buffer the whole image, then scale/display it, because it's the easiest way to deal with scaling an image of a different resolution. Unfortunately they do it even when you use their native resolution.
I.e., what you see on the screen is actually what they received 1 to 3 frames in the past. At, say, 60 fps, on some models you can actualy see the image as it was received 50ms ago. I.e., the difference between 1ms and 5ms latency of the panel is entirely the wrong bottleneck to optimize there.
(Since you mentioned Fatal1ty, last I've heard he used a CRT, btw.)
Better models in this aspect are starting to appear, but it took a while and they're still few and far in between. Mostly because it's not one of the numbers dangled in front of the fashion victims, so there was very little incentive to do anything at all about it.
3. The numbers you get told are by and large... well, not lies, but the standard was written by the vendors for their benefit not yours. E.g., a 5ms display if it's measured black-to-white-to-black can be actually faster than a 1ms grey-to-grey with massive overdrive, and produce less ghosting.
The short and skinny was that the black-to-white-to-black standard was already a lie by itself, and only used because it was the smallest number you can measure without overdrive. The standard as defined by the vendors lets them ignore the first and last 10% of the moving from colour A to colour B. Even that ought to give you cause for thought: that number didn't say "it will reach colour B in time X" but merely "it will get within 10% of colour B within time X". A 10% error is piss-poor on the logarithmic scale of the eye. And it lets them ignore the long asymptotic rest of the curve. But in a transition from black to white or back they can ignore more of the long tail than in a grey to grey transition, according to their own bogus standard, so that's why everyone quoted that.
This all changed when someone invented overdrive. The idea here basically is that you can accelerate faster and overshoot the finishing line if you want to. The measured time still is "in how much time you can get within 10% of the finishing line." It doesn't matter that then you overshoot by 50% and spend even more time coming back asymptotically from the _other_ side. But you can't do much overdrive o
Like Frigga's Ring, I did play WoW 1.0, I don't remember it being anywhere near as poor quality as WAR. Yes, it had its issues, but by and large it worked and was fun to play. And the quests were largely the same as today in the pre-BC areas so I'm not sure wtf you've been smoking if you think only recently they added anything more than "kill X" and "collect Y". Repeat after me: other than a few moved NPCs, and very few Draenei and Blood Elves added which give 1-2 quests each, the quests in the "old world" of WoW are the same now as they were in 1.0. You can go through any area of your choice and over 90% of the quests there will be the same that existed since day 1.
Guess what? WoW didn't start with 11 million players either. In fact, they expected few enough to fit on a couple of servers (hence the resulting queues when 100 times more people wanted to play the game.) They started from zero too, and nevertheless delivered an 1.0 game which blew all expectations and records.
Actually, I think it would be tamer. _All_ that a guild on WoW has is a few items in the guild banks. There is no equivalent of "sovereignty" or any holdings, etc.
I've actually been in 2 WoW guilds which split, exploded or imploded when half a dozen characters reached level 60 (it was the top back then), and greed kicked in. As in, "OMG, my preciouss epic stuff is all that matters, let's kick out everyone who doesn't/can't grind me my preciouss epic gear." People who had founded that guild got kicked out because they couldn't grind some instance every fucking day.
(Sometimes I wonder if games actually help make people psychopaths after all, or they were psychopaths to start with. Because that level of lack of empathy and judging other people only by how they fit towards gaining your personal status symbols is either psychopathy or an amazing virtual-world simulation thereof. If the impersonality of being behind a screen that makes some people give that little a shit about others, or it's just the medium where they can drop the mask and act as they really are? But I digress.)
Big fucking deal. Most of the affected people just formed another guild which was aimed at casual play and where "epic" was officially a forbidden word. Life went on like before.
Adding guild vaults didn't have changed all that much, I think. Most of the equipment there is at most blue quality (_very_ few people donate purple stuff), the funds can be recovered in a couple of days of grinding daily quests, and... um, actually there's nothing else. There is no estate to lose or anything.
The summary makes it at least sound like it's a much bigger problem for BoB on Eve.
They _all_ gave the message that they're running away, but just stood there. (Unless you managed to get them from above that threshold directly to zero in one hit, I suppose.) I'll assume you mean that maybe 5 mobs actually managed to make it to the stage where they actually healed themselves. (It did have to be pretty tough to survive that far with some people beating up on it.) But if you looked at the logs, every single one of them spewed the message and failed to run.
Let me repeat the bug: "f you kept beating on an NPC, at some point it said it runs away in fear. Except it didn't, it stood there like an idiot doing nothing. Then if he survived a few seconds in that state (quite easy for major bosses) it would suddenly heal back to full helt."
I don't mean if it's stuck or inaccessible. I mean every single fucking enemy, in every single fucking fight, even if you're in melee with it and it had no problems fighting back until then.
I'm sorry, but WoW's occasional stuck enemy being unreachable isn't even vaguely similar to this epic fuck-up.
I can think of several things, but as random blatant examples, as launched:
- if you kept beating on an NPC, at some point it said it runs away in fear. Except it didn't, it stood there like an idiot doing nothing. Then if he survived a few seconds in that state (quite easy for major bosses) it would suddenly heal back to full helt. How _that_ got through QA, I can't even imagine.
- enemies stuck in terrain, e.g., in the cave with the squigs in the greenskin starting quests.
- retarded pet AI. In WoW if your pet can't reach an enemy, it stays with you. In WAR it ran in some retarded direction and down some corridor, and only eventually it would figure out to come back to you.
And so on and so forth.
It was fun if you were one-track-minded about PvP. It was a one-trick pony with that being its only trick. Everything else was a half-arsed affair, if present at all. There was not much exploring to do. (What with the areas being so squashed that sometimes you didn't even have to move from the quest giver to shoot the critters you had to kill. E.g., in the elf starting area.) Crafting was a sad joke. Quests were a boring monotonous affair, where everything was a rehash of the same "go there and kill everyone" thing. Etc.
If you look at WoW or any other game, they allow for a variety of playstyles and whenever you're not in the mood for doing X, there are things Y and Z to do instead. That fact seems to have gone right over Mythic's head.
And again that applies to quests too. While Mythic and their retarded fanboys bleated about how they don't need no stinking "kill rabbits" quests, the truth is that those quests created variety in WoW. There were more activities and more bits of story in your daily routine than "it's a big war, now go kill someone again." There was a whole (uber-simplified) economy to discover, the (uber-simplified carricature of) the NPCs daily lives, there were areas to explore, etc. It doesn't sound heroic and it wasn't heroic, but it was more interesting than doing the same damned thing over and over again.
And I love people like you, who are so eager to blame the producer (or anyone else) for not giving a team infinite funds and time.
The facts are:
1. The producer isn't some mysterious bogeyman who does nothing but set arbitrary deadlines and stop you from finishing QA. The producer is the guy who pays for the whole development _and_ QA, and each extra month is a month he'll be paying for.
2. I don't know how you imagine things to be, but any project involves some negotiations. Basically those devs said at some point, "yes, we can do it before date X and with Y million dollars." I'm not aware of any game which was pushed out before the date the devs agreed on. In fact, most blow the deadline and the budget. Some outright lie to get the contract, or are apparently unable to learn from past bad estimates.
Warhammer Online has been in development longer than WoW IIRC, and it looked so often that it was going nowhere that it was cancelled and then continued after all a couple of times. The first cancelling I remember was in _2004_ FFS. And that's not the _start_ date, it's one of the dates when it wasn't going anwhere.
And while I have no clue about how it went with the deadlines and budget in the final round, but at the very least, the team delivered less than they promised. See all that cut out content. That's stuff they hadn't just promised their fans, it's stuff they had promised the publisher for that money too. They effectively delivered maybe half the game they had been paid for, or maybe even less.
3. Most games actually don't even break even as it is. E.g., EA actually subsidizes a heck of a lot of games out of the profits of their sports games and such. I.e., statistically the expectation for any of those games is that it will be yet another hole to throw money down. And digging a bigger hole isn't exactly going to help.
So, yes, from where I stand it looks to me entirely fair to blame the devs. What do _you_ propose? That the publisher keeps throwing money down a rat hole until the end of times?
It's based on the rhino in the same way you're based on a monkey. It doesn't mean it's the same animal. It's a super-massive giraffe which evolved out of a rhino ancestor.
The muscle to weight ratio won't be the same as for a rhino, hence expect acceleration and speed to be different. The very long neck also probably doesn't help with either acceleration or turning (still acceleration), because of _torque_. You accelerate too fast in either direction and all that mass and size combine to something bone-snapping. Basically it could probably trot menacingly your way at best, but nothing you couldn't outsprint or outturn.
But even that's not the main point. The main point is: herbivore. Unless you manage to make it feel majorly threatened, it'll leave you alone. And at that size, I'd say you won't register as a major threat. Same as giraffes don't go hunting rats to pass the time. So you'd have the darned thing peacefully munching leaves while ignoring you. Not quite the most thrilling scenario for a horror movie, that's all I'm saying ;)
Well, if you consider that:
- A T-Rex by modern estimates can be as low as 5m/s (11 mph) and by other estimates a sprint of over 10m/s would produce fatal forces in its bones. It only had to chase down animals his own size, which also waddled slowly.
- the Indricotherium Transsouralicum that you mention was basically an overly massive giraffe. Ok, technically a rhino which had evolved to fill the same niche as a giraffe. It was a herbivore which ate leaves off trees. Also you probably could outrun him too.
- you'd probably be as impractical a prey for a Megalodon as it would be for a normal shark to hunt sardines. Marine animals which feed on stuff as disproportionately small compared to their own size, do so by filtering them out of the water (see the whale, for example), not by chasing them individually and chewing them to bits. So for a Megalodon you'd probably not even register as an interesting prey. It fed on similarly overgrown things.
A lot of the things nature produced just aren't as scary as you seem think. A movie about a battleship-sized shark that completely ignores the hero, or about a T-Rex that can be outrun even at a jogging or marathon pace, well, just wouldn't be much of a horror. A herd of small fast velociraptors is actually scarier by far.
Actually, while I don't know the exact situation for Romania at the moment, most places where political corruption and injustice run amok have another fun twist: making an example of some random bugger to prove that the system works. So if I were to take an uninformed bet, I'd say you're also at risk of:
- some competitor being owned by a corrupt politician or his best buddy (or just someone with money for bribes), wanting to get rid of you
- WTO or whoever leans too hard on the government, so a few guys get rounded up and hung up to dry, just to show the world that your country takes IP seriously after all
- some official is gunning for a promotion or reelection, so a few guys get rounded up and made an example of, just so he can come across as the great crime fighter
Etc.
Basically my take is that living in a corrupt system is a risk, rather than some blanket insurance against prosecution.
Ok, let's try again. The naming scheme was <long_non_mnemonic_string>r<rack_number>b<blade_number>p<partition_number>
Geesh, I swear it's the only forum as retarded as not to quote angular brackets when posting as Plain Old Text
. I mean, Jesus F. Christ, if I wanted my text interpreted as HTML, I could have chosen that option from the combo box.
I've actually had the misfortune of consulting for a company whose servers' primary DNS names were something like rbp. Or something to that effect.
And we're talking a J2EE bonanza where a simple call created a storm of calls to a random server from the next tier. Load balanced cluster(fuck), see. So you'd see in the logs that you got called by machine asdfghjkr05b09p03 with some highly erroneous parameters. Now take a fucking guess which actual machine that is.
The naming scheme was obviously excellent for Mordac The Preventer Of IT Services... er... I mean for the IT department which had to service those blades, but a nightmare for everyone else.
Of course, they tried to do something for the users to, so they got aliased... to something equally non-mnemonic.
Give me cutesy names instead any day.
Bingo. That's _exactly_ why I said, "and if any vendor had actually tried to use it that way it would have put them out of the market right there and then". Any vendor going to court arguing that you bought a copy but it can't copy it to RAM, would have effectively made the case that the goods they sold cannot be used for the intended (and explicitly stated) purpose.
But originally the licenses were pretty benign. It was little more than a clarification that yes, you may make that copy, and nobody bothered going to court to make a case like "we didn't need that clarification anyway." Remember that in the beginning it was only corporations and government institutions which could even afford a computer at all. These tend to not waste lawyer money to clarify ideological points. If they get a piece of paper saying basically, "no, we're not going to sue you for using the software you bought", that tends to be enough. It's an absurd piece of paper, but meh, who cares?
Unfortunately that's been the start of a slippery slope. Once people got used to the idea of "licensing software", it went downhill. But again, even if someone in the beginning would have foreseen such a slope, it was people who don't fight legal battles for the future common good.
Actually, it's even funnier. IIRC in India they actually tax licenses. So if you have an actual license, say, to make a movie based on someone's book, the government wants its share of that deal.
So they took this to the logical conclusion: if Microsoft's software is licensed, not sold, the license tax should apply.
Microsoft actually tried to prove to the court that it's a sale not a license.
Funny stuff.
Even that text you linked to is too complicately put and somewhat inexact.
The fact is:
1. Developers didn't _need_ any extra protections against unlawful redistribution, since a copyright law had existed in the UK since 1710 and in the USA since 1787. The Berne Convention was signed in 1886.
Why does software need special protections? A book or newspaper for example is pretty clearly protected by copyright: you may not unlawfully distribute copies. You don't need EULAs for books or newspapers, so why do we need them for software?
2. The EULA -- in its generic "software license" form -- is actually as old as the first software ever sold, and was based on a loophole in copyright law: it mentioned being copied generically, but computers needed to copy a program from punched cards (later tape, later disk) to memory to actually run it. So some wise guy figured out: ah-ha, to make a copy they need a license, so we can dictate our terms to them.
That's how the idiotic concept of "licenses" for software was born.
Note that it wasn't some loophole that allowed unlawful redistribution. You still couldn't use it to copy IBM's software to another deck of cards and sell it, since that would already be forbidden by normal copyright.
It was a loophole that allowed a plain old power grab. There was this literal-minded interpretation of the law which could be mis-construed to mean: you can't use this software at all unless we grant you a license to copy it to memory. No court would have taken it that way, and if any vendor had actually tried to use it that way it would have put them out of the market right there and then. But it was enough to make people accept the notion, rather than go to court to have it clarified.
Which then got used to weasel in more and more onerous restrictions on the user. Because, hey, if it's a license, we can set the terms of that license.
But it never was any kind of protection against actual unlawful acts of the consumer or anyone else. It was just a way to bypass the normal consumer laws and restrict your existing liberties.
3. The loophole has actually long been fixed, but the idiocy of a license for software has perpetuated. Just because everyone was already used to that notion.
And the conditions continued to grow more and more absurd. Not only it generally bypasses consumer laws entirely (e.g., first sale right), it's grown to include such bullshit clauses as "you can't give it a bad review", or "you may not use it together with our competitors' software" (right up to "and we can disable it if you do"), or "we may spy on your in any way imaginable", or essentially "we can unilaterally and retroactively change the terms you 'agreed' to retroactively, in a patch you can't refuse."
(MMOs for example love to change terms and conditions like that, and refusing it essentially disables the software you've paid for. No fallback to using the old version with the old conditions or anything. At least theoretically you can refuse to install even a Windows security patch if it tries to retrofit the EULA, but you can't refuse a WoW patch without essentially disabling your software and forfeiting your remaining paid time.)
4. And since that loophole no longer exists, we hear more and more idiotic strawmen used to justify it.
E.g., that otherwise you might imagine that you bought the rights to MS Word itself instead of just a copy of it. Excuse me? When was the last time anyone went on court record as thinking he bought the whole rights to War And Peace because he bought the book from Amazon? The concept of buying a copy is and was already very clear to everyone, and already defined by copyright laws. Books don't need the extra EULA to clarify that, music doesn't, DVDs don't, etc. Why the f-word is software so special that people couldn't possibly understand the same distinction there?
5. Basically what I'd like to see clarified once and for all (by the FTC or anyone with the legal power) is to declare the whole idiocy illegal
Let's just say: I certainly _would_, if I submitted an article like "involving kids in OSS". Because, again, without at least understanding (or having a chance to try out) the sharing part, it's got nothing to do with OSS. They're just using a program, which might as well be closed-source or open-source, but that has zero impact on that session.
Because if there would be no difference at all between this and a session centered around a non-OSS product, then it's not "involving them in OSS" in any form or shape.
That's a link as weak as saying that using the ReiserFS gets you involved in murder. The facts A="the kids are using those programs" and B="it's got something to do with OSS" are linked just by the utterly irrelevant fact that a third person (you) was involved in both. Maybe, but it's not involving _them_. It's exactly the same link as between the guy using that workstation over there with ReiserFS and Hans Reiser having killed his wife. I.e., hardly any at all.
If you don't care about educational outcomes (and I'm not even saying you should) then at least have the decency to not come up with a "involving them in OSS" claim.
Except:
A) That social participation is worthless without even understanding what OSS means. And I don't mean getting a lecture in RMS's beliefs, but that experiencing first hand an, "am I ok with people changing a ladder on my map and releasing it as their own?" (Or two letters in my walkthrough, or whatever.) If it's based just on a vague "I get to use stuff for free" (as in beer, or let's say candy for kids), it's at best just producing another generation of freetards who think that downloading a beta of Windows 7 for free or getting a free 7 day demo of WoW is after all the same thing.
It doesn't even have to be code. It could be a picture released under the Creative Commons license, or whatever. There have been people who've uploaded their family photos as a basically "do whatever you wish with it" license, and then got upset when a company used their daughter's photo for a "ditch your girlfriend by SMS" ad campaign. And then went on record asking all over the place how to un-CC those photos. Tasteless campaign, no doubt, but that's the kind of thing where you discover if you really like such a licence or you've been just following the wrong crowd for your personality.
B) Again, you could do the exact session and "social" claim about a proprietary software too. WoW doesn't exist in a vacuum either. Neither does the MSDN. Etc.
Again, I'm not saying you _should_ teach them anything, if that's not your goal, but at least then please refrain from misleading claims.
1. I'm not proposing to _push_ any agenda on anyone. I'm just proposing to let them discover if they're interested in that or not. These are the tools, this is what you can do with them, feel free to experiment or not.
Note for example that nowhere did I say I'm going to push any flavour of F/OSS on them. One of the possible outcomes I described was also discovering that they're the "mine! all mine!" kind after all. I'd call that a valuable experience too.
(Entirely too many people are paying lip service to F/OSS, but get their panties in a knot when it comes to sharing their work too. I briefly worked as a dev on a MUD where they paid _incredible_ lip service to Linux and OSS, but upon joining I discovered that they were actually paranoid to the extreme about anyone copying anything of theirs. They locked it behind byzantine access restrictions, and I had to whine at someone just to get access to the files I need to change to do my job. And that their preciousss code included the work of developers like me: it suddenly was their code, to lock behind such permissions and get paranoid about it being even seen by the wrong people. Left me with a bad aftertaste. I'm not just talking about it conflicting with _my_ ideology, it conflicted with the ideology they themselves professed so loudly.)
But anyway, I think it's an important lesson to learn early. Not even "learn" as in "get to _my_ conclusion", but decide for yourself if that's what you want to do. If you've scripted an NPC, or modelled an AK47, or textured some beautiful armour, or whatever other work... are you ok with people recolouring it pink via a simple colour swap, and releasing it as their own mod? It will tell you right there and then how you really stand on F/OSS.
But I digress. I certainly don't propose to force anyone in any direction, much less any of the emotional stuff you write. I just propose to give them a chance to discover it for themselves, if they feel inclined their way. I'm equally prepared to accept that they're more interested in 3D modelling, or map editing, or creative prose for the quests and dialogues, or composing a music track, or nothing at all. Those games I've mentioned allow one to experience any of those first hand.
2. I fail to see how crippling a tool makes it any better in any of the aspects you've mentioned. My approach includes the possibility of coding, if anyone feels so inclined. Yours doesn't. Why is the latter better?
3. What on Earth does it have to do with involvement in Open Source, then, if there is no source involved, and no chance to see for themselves if they actually want to share theirs? If you're going to just use them as a focus group for some simple game, how's that any different from getting them in a focus group for the next closed-source Nintendo game?
The whole sharing my world and all the fancy wording could apply verbatim to anything else. I could play WoW with them. (Hey, that's a part of _my_ world.) I could show them the meshes I made for a couple of simple Fallout 3 mods. Etc. None of those are F/OSS, but the exercise you describe could be identical.
Once you exclude the actual "Open" and "Source" even from the possibilities of that exercise, then the link to F/OSS becomes weak at best. (And trolling for page hits at worst.) It's like saying I'm involving anyone in geology, because I took them for a ride in my car, and some geologists found the ore it was made of and the oil it runs on. The fact that geology or F/OSS were involved several steps back, doesn't make the exercise itself have anything to do with geology or F/OSS.
It might get them interested in modding, I guess, and then they'll move on to something which actually allow them to write some code too. E.g., see the Oblivion or Fallout 3 or NWN2 scripting.
Most of the basic concepts involved in programming are just as applicable to and learnable from scripting, as from C++ or whatever else. E.g., according to a recent article, apparently one hurdle that half the population can't get over, is the humble "a = b" assignment. If a kid managed to get over it in a script to make their +5 Sword Of Ganking available in a game via a simple quest, or to put in a new uber-spell in NWN2, it's something they can apply later in a real programming job.
And to some extent most such mods involve starting from _some_ sources, and sharing your own source. It's not really F/OSS that would please RMS, but it can serve to drive a point home. Especially when they run into stuff like that they can't import their favourite companion or weapon from Oblivion into Fallout 3, because it's copyrighted by Bethesda and most mod sites have stern worded restrictions on that kind of thing. And they can also see what it's like to be on the other side of the fence, when someone else takes your sources and models, with or without permission, and makes his own mod out of them. It seems to me like you then can make your own informed choice between such stances as "meh, I couldn't care less" (Public Domain), "... as long as he gives credit" (BSD) or "... as long as he shares his changes too" (GPL) or a few others. (Over-simplified view of those licenses, to be sure, but you get the idea.)
Or maybe decide that "mine! all mine!" is what fits their personality the best, I guess.
On the other hand, I see no reason not to start directly from one of those games in the first place. If I were trying to get a kid interested in coding, I'd probably rather start from something like that.
Sad to break this to you, but humans usually _organize_ for this kind of thing, so it doesn't become a matter of individual people helping individual people. There are a lot of things which just don't scale if done that way.
E.g.,
- It's more efficient and a better use of everyone's resources to have a tiny fraction of the population as cops, than to have each person stand guard with a shotgun on their own property 27/7. The former lets you actually, say, go to work and leave that home unattended.
- It's more efficient to have a few doctors, than have everyone learn to treat their own wounds and illnesses,
- It's more efficient to have an insurance spread the risk and cost, than have everyone save for the freak case that an airplane falls on their roof, they run their car into a tree, _and_ get a MRSA infection in the resulting fractures
- It's more efficient to have some consumer laws and organizations, than have everyone spend countless hours and effort running the EULA for every single pencil, second-hand car, and party hat by a lawyer to be sure they haven't sold their firstborn into slavery in clause 255 on page 100 of the small print,
Etc.
Just like making shoes for a hundred million people ends up cheaper and more efficient that each of those people each raising their own pig/cow/whatever, personally tanning its hide, and sewing their own shoes.
People organize so a centralized group can do some things cheaper and more efficient than in an every-man-for-himself world. _That's why we have governments (local, federal, whatever), agencies like the FEMA, etc. That's their job.
And the fact that you're so quick to dismiss their responsibility and blame it on the victims... well, maybe _that_ idiocy is proof of what's wrong with education.
It seems to me that we can apply a criterion that's already applied in criminal law everywhere: mens rea. ("Evil mind", or rather meaning "evil intent.")
See, let's say a shingle falls off my house and brains a passerby. At least theoretically the law has to determine the degree of mens rea behind it, ranging from premeditation (I actually rigged the roof in advance to kill that guy) to criminal negligence (I had no clue that the roof is in bad condition, though maybe I should have) to none whatsoever (it was freshly inspected, nobody could know it was gonna fall.) Note that "criminal negligence" is actually somewhat as a misnomer, in that it's actually not a criminal offense in most cases. It really means more like "negligence in the criminal law definition" than "criminally-punishable negligence." You usually have to rank up to at least "recklessness" (I knew or had plenty of indication that the roof is dangerously unsafe and can injure someone, e.g., shingles had fallen before or an inspection warned me before of the possibility, and obviously didn't give a flying fuck) to actually be liable.
It seems to me that the same can be applied here. Did that politician just choose an unfortunate wording, or did he _intend_ to mislead? Very important distinction to make, IMHO.
If it's intentional wording to mislead, then it seems to me that the GP poster is correct: that's a fucking deliberate lie. And its being worded to leave a way out just proves the premeditation some more.