A bug? Using some third party library which talks to itself over the external IP address? Sheer incompetence?
Don't underestimate the sheer amount of bloody stupidity in the industry.
Note that it doesn't even have to actually stuff the pipe all the time. It just needs to ping something once a minute. It's an easier task to achieve by sheer idiotic mistake than you'd think.
Well, even with a flat 18 cents a minute, if I write an app that uses that connection all the time, it's going to cost you 24*60*0.18=259.2 dollars per _day_.
From my experience with some corporations, the way it works is more like:
1. The left hand doesn't know, and doesn't want to know what the right is doing. If your department can save $10 bucks, but it costs everyone else 10 million in workarounds and lost productivity, who cares? You're the greatest anyway.
2. Any attempts to rein in waste and such effects, just introduces one more layer who'll get their bonus for making you buy a tool that costs $10 less, but where you spend 100,000 more in salaries to do the same job. Occasionally it introduces a masked form of corruption too: they get more bonus for buying a $1000 pencil at 50% discount, than a normal one at 5% discount. In the former case they "saved" $500 per pencil. They're that great.
3. Don't underestimate interdepartment power games. Making you curse and waste more effort for implementing my hare-brained cost-cutting schemes, is the gretest achievement some people can get. It's me having power over you. For some people it's a powerful drug.
4. Theatre. Being seen as doing something beats doing the right thing. You can see that at all levels and in all domains: security theatre, cost-saving theatre, etc. Being seen as being teh great green saviour can beat actually saving money.
5. In that vein, beware the new boss who just has to piss on everything to mark his new territory. The higher level, the more dangerous. These guys _have_ to show that they changed something. It shows vision, leadership, etc. So he'll cheerfully make an actual loss, just so he can put a good leadership and vision theatre.
6. There's a whole caste of people across the pyramid whose goal in life is to not rock the boat and not be responsible for anything. It's better to comply with a dumb rule (even one that wasn't supposed to apply to your situation or domain) than to have anything be your personal decision, and responsibility if it fails. Applying someone else's rule is like having a papal indulgence: whatever goes wrong, you're not the one who'll be punished for it. These fine guys and gals would mindlessly enforce even turning off the computers _during_ work hours, if that's what the rules say.
7. Don't underestimate the effect of rewarding failure. E.g., see the thing about "saving" money by buying a disproportionately _more_ expensive thing. E.g., in some places, keeping the people under you from doing their job can mean needing to hire more people, and if you get enough of them you get a promotion. E.g., being the guy who dumbly applies rules without thinking, cam actually get one a promotion or at the very least it's often enough to not get demoted or phased out.
So, yes, I've seen places where they paid consultants in the range of thousands per hour, but would rather pay those to twiddle their thumbs for a quarter of an hour while a baroque configuration starts, than "waste" cents on leaving that computer idle over night.
Yes, but does it actually work that way? All attempts so far to make a computer have the aspect of real world, only ended up introducing more limitations and no advantages. And didn't really ease up anyone's anxiety either.
All the way back to MS Bob, which was already mentioned.
All the metaphors and interfaces that actually worked are actually the abstract ones. E.g., the mouse. It's the most useful and easily comprehended way to use a computer (I even got my 80 year old grandma using one pretty quickly), but it has no RL equivalent. E.g., the menus. They look nothing like a restaurant's menus or anything RL, but it's the one way to give commands to a computer that worked best so far.
Heck, don't even look at just the computer. Cars use a steering wheels and pedals, _not_ trying to simulate the experience of an old horse- or ox-drawn cart. Nobody had a problem adjusting to that. Radios had knobs, not trying to simulate paying the local minstrel to sing something for you. Modern telephones don't try to simulate the disk dial of old ones, nor the asking an operator to connect you to John Doe in Smallville.
If an interface is good for the device at hand, there is no need to gimp it by imitating some RL equivalent badly.
What does imitating RL bring there anyway? Let's say Amazon was organized like a book store and I wanted to find a SF book. How many books do they carry? Tens of thousands? Do you want me to walk _miles_ in a virtual store, reading the spines, until I find the one I want? What if it's larger goods, like, say, their electronics section. They take more space individually. Let's say... a mile worth of TV aisles alone?
The whole point of virtual stores is that they can carry a lot more choices -- including the stuff they don't actually have in stock at the moment, but can order for you -- than a local bricks-and-mortar store. Whereas a local bookstore would have some thousands of books, and a local computer shop might have dozens of mainboards, a virtual one can easily carry 10 to 100 times more. It's not like they pay rent by the square ft for it. Arrange that in 3D in a replica of a real shop, and you now have whole squares of kilometres for that person to virtually walk through. Why? How does it make it less intimidating to suddenly be lost in a store the size of Washington DC?
What if I don't know where their SF aisles are? Do I have to hunt down a virtual employee and ask him for directions? Then actually walk according to those directions? Or will he just beam me there, and now I'm lost and don't know which way to the cashier? What happened to just clicking on a menu?
It seems to me that the secret of Amazon was precisely that it _didn't_ try to copy RL. They tried to make it as easy and quick as possible to blow your money on something. They'll even offer some (hare brained) recommendations, so you can just click them and buy them quickly. You know, so you don't even have to do the 2-3 clicks to the section where those normally are.
Trying to make the user navigate a virtual maze of aisles seems to be a step in the exact opposite direction.
1. Bad and vague laws are just that: bad laws. If something's vague enough to cover a distorted cartoon, what else does it (perhaps unintentionally) cover? Bart is clearly depicted as a kid, but what about some hentai drawings? Do they _look_ definitely over 18 or could it look to a judge like one of them could be 15?
In fact, most cartoons as a whole have the proportions of children. Adults have a torso of about 3x the head size, kids have a larger head than that in proportion to their body. Almost any cartoon has a head 1/2 the size of the torso or more, to make room for facial features. So if you have any cartoon, animation film, or game where a character is shown undressed or in lingerie or a few other situations, you could be a paedophile because they have the proportions of a child.
What about the gnomes in WoW, which have the proportions of 2 year olds? If someone has a bank character running around in their underwear (it's not like they actually need more), is it paedophilia? Well, that character certainly looks like a 2 year old in a binkini. Seems suspicious to me.
2. The increasingly used excuse that they'll surely know when and against whom to apply it, and surely will refrain from prosecuting those who just saw a naked gnome, worries me even more.
That's not how the rule of the law was supposed to work. The rule of the law, ideally, means that you can know exactly what you're allowed to do and exactly what not, and that justice is applied the same to everyone. We already had thousands of years where the king applied arbitrary justice, and laws applied to some people but not to others. It wasn't that great. People died (literally) to get the ruling classes to accept the rule of the law.
Laws which are vague enough to apply to half the population, but probably they'll be wise enough to see that they don't apply to _you_, that's a return to the bad old days of arbitrary justice. You have a law which they can use against anyone they don't like.
Well, dunno about Australia, but it _might_ be in the UK which beat them to the finishing line when it comes to criminalizing stuff that might look like the real thing. To be fair, though, they didn't stop at child porn. You can also go to jail for "extreme porn", if I understand that right.
Still, you bring exactly the kind of example that I had in mind. And it's not just a matter of portrayal, I guess.
I had a classmate through high school and college which looked a _lot_ younger than she was, and the diminutive size probably didn't help that distinction either. By the time she finished college and got married, she looked like she was just hitting puberty.
So, obviously she was old enough to marry and have sex (unless a big star appeared in the east when she got pregnant;) But I'm getting the idea that in a few places around the world her husband could probably get in trouble if he has a picture of her naked on his hard drive. And may the elder gods help him if he filmed himself having sex with her. Because she _looks_ like a child.
Where does one draw the line when it comes to what it _looks_ like, anyway?
Because it happens in the other direction too. Some girls look older than they are. E.g., Tracy Lords obviously didn't trip anyone's suspicions when she claimed to be 18 and starred in a porn movie... at the actual age of 15.
So let's say you have a picture of an 18 year old on your hard drive and fly to Melbourne or London. Well, it could also _look_ like a very precocious 15 year old. I mean, she could be 15 and just look like 18. Maybe you're pretending she's 15 in your head. (Well, _you_ probably aren't, but just making a point about such confused laws.) How do they know you aren't? If the purpose of the law is to prevent demand for underage porn, how do they know if after pretending some 18 year olds in pornos are 15 and precocious, you won't progress to actual pictures of 15 year olds? It's at least a theoretical possibility.
Criminalizing what something _looks_ like, seems to me like a really slippery slope, when there's so wide a range between what someone is and what they look like.
There's this thing about the future: nobody knows it. All you can say is, basically: something will happen, but heck if I know what, when or by how much.
But that doesn't make for much of an article, and sure doesn't make one a well paid "analyst". So essentially you have to do the old trick: tell them an event (e.g., that the indies are going to eat EA's lunch) or a date, but never both. Notice how here he didn't give you a time frame of when will the indies beat EA, nor a quantitative estimate. There is no deadline when you can say, "hah, the date came and went and your prophecy didn't happen." Even in one year, or ten years or a hundred years, you could still nod through the rationale and wait for it to happen any day now.
Now pack it with a few profound sounding truisms (you can at least nod through the idea that better tools and broadband should make some kind of a difference in some way), and you too can be a pundit or analyst.
And as an example: it's been proven before that all the analysts in the world can't, for example, pick stocks better than throwing darts at a list of them. For all that handwaving and sounding smart and in the know, they don't know what will happen. But there the big broker names have the advantage of being able to pull self-fulfilling prophecies: if Merril-Lynch tells you to buy Pets.com stock, they must know something, so a lot of people do. Price goes up, yay, they were so smart. The best illustration of this was during the dot-con crash when they told people to buy stock they internally rated as crap and were selling as fast as possible. But they still influenced the market enough to make money even out of companies which were in free fall.
But in the game industry they just don't have this kind of influence. Just because pundit X and analyst Y say that indies must overtake EA due to better tools and broadband, it doesn't mean that anyone will go and write those better tools overnight.
So we're back to that thing about the future: they have no flipping clue. But they sound smart, people read the article, and they get advertising revenue for it.
The Neanderthals were in fact shorter, bulkier and quite literally pear shaped. As in the ribcage is actually visibly wider at the lower end.
Mind you, people in worse physical shape get laid, and Ron Jeremy even stars in porn movies. Who's to say that a genuine Neanderthal couldn't fulfill the same role?;)
Well, the one thing which is a decent guess, is based on the fact that they never seem to have built or used any missile or thrown weapons. So there is a hypothesis that their brains couldn't do ballistics well enough, or maybe fast enough, for hunting. So our Neanderthal would probably suck at baseball or almost any ball game.
Well, we could debate who started what, and there are good points to be made for more than one view of that era. But that's actually not necessary for the point I'm trying to make.
1. The point is that, even if I'm to subscribe to the "cargo cult" idea, that they had at least enough brain power to create a cargo cult. Actual historical cargo cults are actually sophisticated pieces of human thinking, even if starting from wrong premises. They usually build a whole mystical explanation for the whole thing. If the Neanderthals were capable of that, then they were most definitely _way_ above animal level.
But even learning from the H. Sapiens by imitation, well, means they were at least capable to learn that kind of thing. Even if, say, they just noticed the human chieftains wearing jewellery. Why would you imitate them? You need some concept or understanding that it's tied to power, prestige, social status, magic powers, or whatever. All are more abstract concepts than they seem. Arts, music, etc. Why? What are you trying to achieve with them? Even if the answer is "so the spirits would grant us good hunt, like they grant to those tall slim guys", that's already mysticism.
On the other hand, some things they never copied. E.g., they never built or used any missile weapons. It is even speculated that maybe their brain had some quirk that made them incapable of doing ballistics (well enough or fast enough for a missile weapon to be of use.) So they didn't blindly copy all they saw. If a bow didn't work for them, they didn't copy bows. Makes me at least give some more serious thought to the things they did copy. They must have seen _some_ use in copying those things from Homo Sapiens, not just monkey-like immitation.
2. Most of that stuff I mentioned actually existed long before contact with humans, or before the first Homo Sapiens even existed. Maybe not as sophisticated as after that point you describe. But they still had (crude) tools to make other (crude) tools with, they still built a crude flute, etc. That's quite above chimp level.
3. And the only reason I'm mention it is: Maybe they were not be "very smart", or not as smart as humans, on the average, or maybe they just weren't very inventive. But it's smart enough to seriously pose the question as to what rights should a reconstructed Neanderthal have in the modern day. Can you experiment on them, or keep an innocent caged in a zoo (worse than even many prisons,) if they're clearly sentient?
I mean, we grant legal protection to guys like that IQ 70 civil servant whose brain was nearly completely destroyed. Can you deny all rights to a Neanderthal if they're at about Forest Gump level?
What if they actually were pretty smart, but just not very inventive? Maybe they were fully capable of learning and using human tools or rituals, but for some reason not particularly inclined to come up with radical new stuff on their own. Or maybe they just had an ultra-conservative culture which stuck to what is already tried and tested. Just as a possibility. What do you do with that guy then? We have lots of people -- in fact, probably the majority -- who never even try anything new in their whole life, and never came up with anything new, but you couldn't stick them in a zoo anyway.
Cats bury their turds though. What makes you think humans and neanderthals didn't start burying their dead for the same reasons.
A reasonable question, to be sure. I'd say because you don't do it the same way: the cat doesn't give its turds a few grave goods for the afterlife, nor mark the grave, nor bother making sure that each of them are placed in the same prescribed position in the grave. E.g., you (or the cat) don't make sure that the turd is laid (or crouched, or whatever a particular culture favoured) in a certain way in its "grave", nor that it's aligned in a the exact same way as your other turds, etc. When you have signs that there was something ritualistic or prescribed about a burial, there must be something more about it than about hiding a turd.
Actually, look at the evidence we have for Neanderthals. They
- built tools to build other tools with. Chimps build improvised tools for the moment, then discard them. Building a hammer, so you can build an axe with it, is a human trait and implies quite a bit of intelligence.
- apparently had at least some level of work specialization and that would imply some form of commerce. At least as in, "me give you dead antelope, if you make me big strong stone spear." Again, that's not something chimps do. (Though Bonobos seem to have figured out stuff like "I'll give you two bananas for sex.")
- they built crude musical instruments (but then it took H. Sapiens a long time to make any better ones too.)
- they seem to have had (primitive) ceremonial burial, which in turn implies _some_ concept of afterlife or at least remorse. That's a bit of abstract concept there. You don't see a cat giving her dead kitten an elaborate burial.
- they decorated themselves with crude "jewellery" and paints (i.e., basically cosmetics). Again, it seems to suggest some kind of society and the brain power where that kind of thing matters. E.g., the concept of a social status. You don't even bother carrying, say, a necklace of sabertooth teeth unless that tells the others something about you martial prowess and that matters somehow. Or maybe if you have some kind of a mythology where that invokes the power of that tiger, but that's even more complex thinking.
- they skinned animals and made primitive clothes and shelters. (Well, primitive by our standards, but quite ahead of just digging a burrow like an animal.)
- apparently some figured out how to use coal, where it was easily accessible. (Homo Sapiens never really bothered too much with it until the industrial age.)
Etc.
I'd say that's clearly ahead of animal level. I'd say it's at the very least Forest Gump level.
In other words, to summarize: high ranking lobby group leader (i.e., practically a politician) tries to please both sides of the fence, and does an 180 degree turn when his comment turns out hideously unpopular. Of course, he'll still try to sell the original story to the politicians.
If you count something as "wasted" just because it was a part of something that failed many years later, then virtually all of humanity's efforts are wasted in the long run.
E.g., what was the point of building cities and inventing civilization in Mesopotamia, since millenia later it fell to the semitic populations, then to the iranians (indo-europeans), and finally to the arabs? Even Sumerian, the language of the first human civilization, soon was a dead language kept just for religious services and texts. (Much like what millenia later would happen to Latin.) Was Hammurabi's life wasted on working on that law code and construction and whatnot, since he worked for Babylon which later got conquered by Assyria and today is just a bunch of ruins?
Was the life of every Roman that ever lived wasted, because their country would eventually implode and be conquered by a tribe as primitive as the Longobards?
Was Egipt all a big waste for that same reason?
Sometimes it makes sense to live in the present. It matters what you do now, not what will become of it in 10 years. What may make a difference in the long run is that you were one of the guys who tried and contributed a bit to the advancement of technology/culture/whatever, not whether you left some monumental legacy that will for ever be intact. Because if you're aiming for the latter, you might as well give up now, 'cause in the long run everything turns to dust.
Even the the Great Lighthouse, or the Colosus of Rhodes, or whatever, eventually turned to little more than ruins or disappeared altogether. Was it a waste of someone's years to build them? Well, no, they served their purpose while they existed, _and_ more importantly humanity learned something new in the process. Even if it's how to stack a lot of bricks to build a f-ing huge lighthouse. The road to the mighty gothic cathedrals of later, or to the Hagia Sophia, goes through such earlier achievements. Even if the grand monumental testament to someone's work is gone, their contribution to the species' knowledge lived on and accumulated.
Plus, in this case we're not even talking about some personal failure, but the failure of one company he worked for. Well, gee.
Yeah, but if they're made in China, then we'll discover they're put together with cheaper psychoactive glue, painted with lead paints, and some of them randomly catch fire, and we'll have to issue a recall. Bad idea;)
Tell that to the american indians. They had a pretty harmonious culture. Or the Japanese before we nuked them... or hell, there've been many civilizations that had harmony with nature as a central tenet and had stable populations.
American Indian "harmony with nature" involved causing a stampede of a whole bloody herd of buffaloes off a cliff, and eating the resulting mess. Except we're talking an age long before refrigeration, and I don't recall them having massive salt mines either, nor having invented making sausages... so most of that meat was left to spoil. They killed a (good portion of) a herd of buffaloes, when the tribe could eat maybe one or two before it all went rotten.
I'm sorry, but that's _not_ harmony with nature. And that generally applies to most tribes, when you look at their actual culture, and not just at superficial bullshit like "well, they worshipped bear spirits, how bad can they be?"
The average animist tribe's view of the world is that the world is there to provide that tribe with everything it needs. The role of, say, a bear spirit or buffalo spirit was basically to make sure that bears or buffaloes come to be hunted by the humans. Balance mostly meant appeasing the spirit so it will send more animals to the slaughter. The spirits gave them buffaloes, they give the spirits a token offering and some thanks, so it's balanced.
Roll that around in your head some more: they gave _nothing_ back to nature itself, and didn't actually care for that nature in any form or shape. They gave something back to the _spirits_.
It's no different than, say, a modern hunter praying to god for a deer to shoot, and giving thanks to god afterwards if he actually shot a deer.
But a modern hunter would still have some idea about nature preservation, and stuff like why you don't shoot them in certain seasons. Because you don't want to exterminate them. You still want to find some deer there next year too. An animist tribesman would expect that that's what those nature spirits _do_. That's their job. They're there to give you all the buffaloes you need. And if you could hunt a buffalo, well, that's because the spirits wanted you to, so no need to think about any kind of nature presevation any more. Except, of course, to give ample thanks. That's it. Balance is now preserved. And if next year you find no more buffaloes, well, it can't possibly be because you over-hunted them. It must be that you didn't give enough thanks to the spirits, or angered them in some other way.
Well, here's a funny thought about Neanderthals. They existed for far longer than Homo Sapiens, and they seemed to never have discovered warfare. Even in times of extreme famine and/or overpopulation (and we have evidence of famine in, say, the development of their children's teeth), they just starved, but never managed to produce skeletons that look like they've been murdered with a weapon.
So I don't know how well they'd adapt to _our_ world.
How excited is a h. sapiens male going to get over an insanely massive woman (and not necessarily short) who could crush him like a bird with one hand?
I hope you do realize that:
1. There are people even in these days who have a fetish about that, and pay sites catering to them.
2. There are even people who get a hardon about fucking goats and sheep.
3. They had a chronic shortage of women during tribal and ancient times, due to disproportionate mortality rates. A big reason for tribal warfare and even ancient era warfare was, basically, going and killing those guys and taking their women. Although that was later than the extinction of the Neanderthals, so there just were a lot of still young and horny men whose wife had just died in childbirth or from complications.
If you think human women preferred Neanderthal men, well, then that would leave an even bigger shortage of women for the human males.
So the question is whether you'd prefer a muscular woman who's available and willing, or masturbation for the rest of your life. And they didn't have Internet to help with the masturbation part either.
I don't know about you, but I'd get over the looks and fuck a Neanderthal girl, if that were the choice. I'd be thoroughly surprised if I'm the only one. Again, you only have to look at modern times. Worse looking girls get married anyway.
Ah, pish-posh. I learned a lot about functioning in society from games. E.g.,
- always roll "greed" on loot, unless you're going to equip it
- keep your pet on passive in instances if you're a warlock or hunter
- don't shoot if you're a priest,
- whining and drama about epic loot are perfectly acceptable as smalltalk or to pass the time on an uneventful evening,
- if your team wipes, it's _always_ the tank's fault, with the healer as a second best choice (if you're the tank,)
- your level and/or tier of epic gear are an accurate measurement of human worth and penis size, so you'll want to print them on your business card. Unless, of course, you're less than the maximum level, in which case you'll want to claim "I have 5 level 80's" instead.
- as a corolary, anything that gets between you and that epic gear is a bad thing, and should not be tolerated. (Lest people start thinking you're an underachiever or even gay.) Upon reaching the max level in some friendly guild that helped you since level 1, you should immediately (A) demand it kicks out everyone lower level and transforms into a raiding guild, or failing that (B) immediately leave the guild and start looking for a raiding guild,
- especially on RP server, you should keep in character and use the same language fitting the game's setting that everyone else uses. Examples include, "LOL, l2p n00b!!!", "asl???", "r u a grl???" and "soz m8 g2g, gt skewl 2moz" (I swear I've actually heard that one on COH.)
- especially in a RP guild and on the guild's channels, all stuff that doesn't belong in the game world should be placed between double brackets, like this, "(( ur computer suks ))". In _heavy_ RP guilds, doubly so. If in doubt, you can tell you're in a heavy RP guild or group if everything is in double brackets, and the last time you remember seeing something said without brackets was last July.
- all social situations worth role-playing through involve beating up someone weaker, or public foreplay,
- your name is the first thing anyone will see or hear about you, and your first chance to make an impression. Good, in-character names include, "l0rDn00bKilla", "Backdoor Girl" or "Faemale Shaemale". (All real names off MMOs, although some of them really short lived.) If your parents were foolish enough to give you a more archaic name like "John" or "Richard", have your name changed.
Well, think positively: if someone abducts your child in an online game and takes them into the depths of some dungeon, chances are your kid will only need to use his hearthstone to teleport back to the inn;)
Plus, if it's a raid dungeon, they'll probably argue about loot and split up sooner or later anyway;)
Actually that's the fun part: a FPS back then was _much_ cheaper to make than an adventure. You just needed to license a 3D engine, model a couple of enemies and weapon, have a guy make half a dozen maps, and you had your working FPS for a fraction of what it cost to make an adventure.
That's really what nearly killed adventures. FPS quite often sold less copies than the old adventures (not every FPS was Doom), but cost even less to make, so the chances of ending up with a profit were better.
It was only post-HL that we started expecting scripts and story, and interesting maps, and enemies that behave naturally, etc. That's the service I was claiming that HL did to us all.
And when costs to make a FPS rose too, well, you'll notice that people are making adventure games again these days:P
That's insightful in its own right, but rather orthogonal to my point. It doesn't have that much to do with being venomous. Spiders use their venom to paralyze their prey, but a very different enzyme cocktail to turn its flesh into a liquid lunch.
Actually, apparently there is exactly 0% Neanderthal in us, if you look at the DNA. You can see the differences between Neanderthals and the common ancestor (since that's what made them Neanderthals), and you can see the differences between humans and the common ancestor (since that's what makes us humans.) The two sets just don't overlap. All the genes that made Neanderthals be Neanderthals are not present in us.
The easiest to look at is the mitochondrial DNA, since it's pretty small, and it's been mapped to death for both species. We just don't have any humans which show the unique Neanderthal mutations there. So at least there was no _female_ neanderthal in anyone's ancestry.
Now I'd be surprised if they didn't at least try to have sex with each other, given that in some places they lived in the same cave for tens of thousands of years. I mean, so it was short and stout women with sloped foreheads. Some people would still try to screw one, if one was available. And viceversa.
The more probable explanation is that, like any other combination of different species, the offspring was either non-viable (if the species are not that related) or sterile (if they're closely related.) E.g., see mules, or either combination of lion and tiger.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, this is Slashdot. If that were true, the majority of us would be women by now ;)
A bug? Using some third party library which talks to itself over the external IP address? Sheer incompetence?
Don't underestimate the sheer amount of bloody stupidity in the industry.
Note that it doesn't even have to actually stuff the pipe all the time. It just needs to ping something once a minute. It's an easier task to achieve by sheer idiotic mistake than you'd think.
Well, even with a flat 18 cents a minute, if I write an app that uses that connection all the time, it's going to cost you 24*60*0.18=259.2 dollars per _day_.
From my experience with some corporations, the way it works is more like:
1. The left hand doesn't know, and doesn't want to know what the right is doing. If your department can save $10 bucks, but it costs everyone else 10 million in workarounds and lost productivity, who cares? You're the greatest anyway.
2. Any attempts to rein in waste and such effects, just introduces one more layer who'll get their bonus for making you buy a tool that costs $10 less, but where you spend 100,000 more in salaries to do the same job. Occasionally it introduces a masked form of corruption too: they get more bonus for buying a $1000 pencil at 50% discount, than a normal one at 5% discount. In the former case they "saved" $500 per pencil. They're that great.
3. Don't underestimate interdepartment power games. Making you curse and waste more effort for implementing my hare-brained cost-cutting schemes, is the gretest achievement some people can get. It's me having power over you. For some people it's a powerful drug.
4. Theatre. Being seen as doing something beats doing the right thing. You can see that at all levels and in all domains: security theatre, cost-saving theatre, etc. Being seen as being teh great green saviour can beat actually saving money.
5. In that vein, beware the new boss who just has to piss on everything to mark his new territory. The higher level, the more dangerous. These guys _have_ to show that they changed something. It shows vision, leadership, etc. So he'll cheerfully make an actual loss, just so he can put a good leadership and vision theatre.
6. There's a whole caste of people across the pyramid whose goal in life is to not rock the boat and not be responsible for anything. It's better to comply with a dumb rule (even one that wasn't supposed to apply to your situation or domain) than to have anything be your personal decision, and responsibility if it fails. Applying someone else's rule is like having a papal indulgence: whatever goes wrong, you're not the one who'll be punished for it. These fine guys and gals would mindlessly enforce even turning off the computers _during_ work hours, if that's what the rules say.
7. Don't underestimate the effect of rewarding failure. E.g., see the thing about "saving" money by buying a disproportionately _more_ expensive thing. E.g., in some places, keeping the people under you from doing their job can mean needing to hire more people, and if you get enough of them you get a promotion. E.g., being the guy who dumbly applies rules without thinking, cam actually get one a promotion or at the very least it's often enough to not get demoted or phased out.
So, yes, I've seen places where they paid consultants in the range of thousands per hour, but would rather pay those to twiddle their thumbs for a quarter of an hour while a baroque configuration starts, than "waste" cents on leaving that computer idle over night.
Yes, but does it actually work that way? All attempts so far to make a computer have the aspect of real world, only ended up introducing more limitations and no advantages. And didn't really ease up anyone's anxiety either.
All the way back to MS Bob, which was already mentioned.
All the metaphors and interfaces that actually worked are actually the abstract ones. E.g., the mouse. It's the most useful and easily comprehended way to use a computer (I even got my 80 year old grandma using one pretty quickly), but it has no RL equivalent. E.g., the menus. They look nothing like a restaurant's menus or anything RL, but it's the one way to give commands to a computer that worked best so far.
Heck, don't even look at just the computer. Cars use a steering wheels and pedals, _not_ trying to simulate the experience of an old horse- or ox-drawn cart. Nobody had a problem adjusting to that. Radios had knobs, not trying to simulate paying the local minstrel to sing something for you. Modern telephones don't try to simulate the disk dial of old ones, nor the asking an operator to connect you to John Doe in Smallville.
If an interface is good for the device at hand, there is no need to gimp it by imitating some RL equivalent badly.
What does imitating RL bring there anyway? Let's say Amazon was organized like a book store and I wanted to find a SF book. How many books do they carry? Tens of thousands? Do you want me to walk _miles_ in a virtual store, reading the spines, until I find the one I want? What if it's larger goods, like, say, their electronics section. They take more space individually. Let's say... a mile worth of TV aisles alone?
The whole point of virtual stores is that they can carry a lot more choices -- including the stuff they don't actually have in stock at the moment, but can order for you -- than a local bricks-and-mortar store. Whereas a local bookstore would have some thousands of books, and a local computer shop might have dozens of mainboards, a virtual one can easily carry 10 to 100 times more. It's not like they pay rent by the square ft for it. Arrange that in 3D in a replica of a real shop, and you now have whole squares of kilometres for that person to virtually walk through. Why? How does it make it less intimidating to suddenly be lost in a store the size of Washington DC?
What if I don't know where their SF aisles are? Do I have to hunt down a virtual employee and ask him for directions? Then actually walk according to those directions? Or will he just beam me there, and now I'm lost and don't know which way to the cashier? What happened to just clicking on a menu?
It seems to me that the secret of Amazon was precisely that it _didn't_ try to copy RL. They tried to make it as easy and quick as possible to blow your money on something. They'll even offer some (hare brained) recommendations, so you can just click them and buy them quickly. You know, so you don't even have to do the 2-3 clicks to the section where those normally are.
Trying to make the user navigate a virtual maze of aisles seems to be a step in the exact opposite direction.
Oh, that they are, but I think that:
1. Bad and vague laws are just that: bad laws. If something's vague enough to cover a distorted cartoon, what else does it (perhaps unintentionally) cover? Bart is clearly depicted as a kid, but what about some hentai drawings? Do they _look_ definitely over 18 or could it look to a judge like one of them could be 15?
In fact, most cartoons as a whole have the proportions of children. Adults have a torso of about 3x the head size, kids have a larger head than that in proportion to their body. Almost any cartoon has a head 1/2 the size of the torso or more, to make room for facial features. So if you have any cartoon, animation film, or game where a character is shown undressed or in lingerie or a few other situations, you could be a paedophile because they have the proportions of a child.
What about the gnomes in WoW, which have the proportions of 2 year olds? If someone has a bank character running around in their underwear (it's not like they actually need more), is it paedophilia? Well, that character certainly looks like a 2 year old in a binkini. Seems suspicious to me.
2. The increasingly used excuse that they'll surely know when and against whom to apply it, and surely will refrain from prosecuting those who just saw a naked gnome, worries me even more.
That's not how the rule of the law was supposed to work. The rule of the law, ideally, means that you can know exactly what you're allowed to do and exactly what not, and that justice is applied the same to everyone. We already had thousands of years where the king applied arbitrary justice, and laws applied to some people but not to others. It wasn't that great. People died (literally) to get the ruling classes to accept the rule of the law.
Laws which are vague enough to apply to half the population, but probably they'll be wise enough to see that they don't apply to _you_, that's a return to the bad old days of arbitrary justice. You have a law which they can use against anyone they don't like.
Well, dunno about Australia, but it _might_ be in the UK which beat them to the finishing line when it comes to criminalizing stuff that might look like the real thing. To be fair, though, they didn't stop at child porn. You can also go to jail for "extreme porn", if I understand that right.
Still, you bring exactly the kind of example that I had in mind. And it's not just a matter of portrayal, I guess.
I had a classmate through high school and college which looked a _lot_ younger than she was, and the diminutive size probably didn't help that distinction either. By the time she finished college and got married, she looked like she was just hitting puberty.
So, obviously she was old enough to marry and have sex (unless a big star appeared in the east when she got pregnant;) But I'm getting the idea that in a few places around the world her husband could probably get in trouble if he has a picture of her naked on his hard drive. And may the elder gods help him if he filmed himself having sex with her. Because she _looks_ like a child.
Where does one draw the line when it comes to what it _looks_ like, anyway?
Because it happens in the other direction too. Some girls look older than they are. E.g., Tracy Lords obviously didn't trip anyone's suspicions when she claimed to be 18 and starred in a porn movie... at the actual age of 15.
So let's say you have a picture of an 18 year old on your hard drive and fly to Melbourne or London. Well, it could also _look_ like a very precocious 15 year old. I mean, she could be 15 and just look like 18. Maybe you're pretending she's 15 in your head. (Well, _you_ probably aren't, but just making a point about such confused laws.) How do they know you aren't? If the purpose of the law is to prevent demand for underage porn, how do they know if after pretending some 18 year olds in pornos are 15 and precocious, you won't progress to actual pictures of 15 year olds? It's at least a theoretical possibility.
Criminalizing what something _looks_ like, seems to me like a really slippery slope, when there's so wide a range between what someone is and what they look like.
Well, he's just trying to sound smart, basically.
There's this thing about the future: nobody knows it. All you can say is, basically: something will happen, but heck if I know what, when or by how much.
But that doesn't make for much of an article, and sure doesn't make one a well paid "analyst". So essentially you have to do the old trick: tell them an event (e.g., that the indies are going to eat EA's lunch) or a date, but never both. Notice how here he didn't give you a time frame of when will the indies beat EA, nor a quantitative estimate. There is no deadline when you can say, "hah, the date came and went and your prophecy didn't happen." Even in one year, or ten years or a hundred years, you could still nod through the rationale and wait for it to happen any day now.
Now pack it with a few profound sounding truisms (you can at least nod through the idea that better tools and broadband should make some kind of a difference in some way), and you too can be a pundit or analyst.
And as an example: it's been proven before that all the analysts in the world can't, for example, pick stocks better than throwing darts at a list of them. For all that handwaving and sounding smart and in the know, they don't know what will happen. But there the big broker names have the advantage of being able to pull self-fulfilling prophecies: if Merril-Lynch tells you to buy Pets.com stock, they must know something, so a lot of people do. Price goes up, yay, they were so smart. The best illustration of this was during the dot-con crash when they told people to buy stock they internally rated as crap and were selling as fast as possible. But they still influenced the market enough to make money even out of companies which were in free fall.
But in the game industry they just don't have this kind of influence. Just because pundit X and analyst Y say that indies must overtake EA due to better tools and broadband, it doesn't mean that anyone will go and write those better tools overnight.
So we're back to that thing about the future: they have no flipping clue. But they sound smart, people read the article, and they get advertising revenue for it.
The Neanderthals were in fact shorter, bulkier and quite literally pear shaped. As in the ribcage is actually visibly wider at the lower end.
Mind you, people in worse physical shape get laid, and Ron Jeremy even stars in porn movies. Who's to say that a genuine Neanderthal couldn't fulfill the same role? ;)
Well, the one thing which is a decent guess, is based on the fact that they never seem to have built or used any missile or thrown weapons. So there is a hypothesis that their brains couldn't do ballistics well enough, or maybe fast enough, for hunting. So our Neanderthal would probably suck at baseball or almost any ball game.
Well, we could debate who started what, and there are good points to be made for more than one view of that era. But that's actually not necessary for the point I'm trying to make.
1. The point is that, even if I'm to subscribe to the "cargo cult" idea, that they had at least enough brain power to create a cargo cult. Actual historical cargo cults are actually sophisticated pieces of human thinking, even if starting from wrong premises. They usually build a whole mystical explanation for the whole thing. If the Neanderthals were capable of that, then they were most definitely _way_ above animal level.
But even learning from the H. Sapiens by imitation, well, means they were at least capable to learn that kind of thing. Even if, say, they just noticed the human chieftains wearing jewellery. Why would you imitate them? You need some concept or understanding that it's tied to power, prestige, social status, magic powers, or whatever. All are more abstract concepts than they seem. Arts, music, etc. Why? What are you trying to achieve with them? Even if the answer is "so the spirits would grant us good hunt, like they grant to those tall slim guys", that's already mysticism.
On the other hand, some things they never copied. E.g., they never built or used any missile weapons. It is even speculated that maybe their brain had some quirk that made them incapable of doing ballistics (well enough or fast enough for a missile weapon to be of use.) So they didn't blindly copy all they saw. If a bow didn't work for them, they didn't copy bows. Makes me at least give some more serious thought to the things they did copy. They must have seen _some_ use in copying those things from Homo Sapiens, not just monkey-like immitation.
2. Most of that stuff I mentioned actually existed long before contact with humans, or before the first Homo Sapiens even existed. Maybe not as sophisticated as after that point you describe. But they still had (crude) tools to make other (crude) tools with, they still built a crude flute, etc. That's quite above chimp level.
3. And the only reason I'm mention it is: Maybe they were not be "very smart", or not as smart as humans, on the average, or maybe they just weren't very inventive. But it's smart enough to seriously pose the question as to what rights should a reconstructed Neanderthal have in the modern day. Can you experiment on them, or keep an innocent caged in a zoo (worse than even many prisons,) if they're clearly sentient?
I mean, we grant legal protection to guys like that IQ 70 civil servant whose brain was nearly completely destroyed. Can you deny all rights to a Neanderthal if they're at about Forest Gump level?
What if they actually were pretty smart, but just not very inventive? Maybe they were fully capable of learning and using human tools or rituals, but for some reason not particularly inclined to come up with radical new stuff on their own. Or maybe they just had an ultra-conservative culture which stuck to what is already tried and tested. Just as a possibility. What do you do with that guy then? We have lots of people -- in fact, probably the majority -- who never even try anything new in their whole life, and never came up with anything new, but you couldn't stick them in a zoo anyway.
That's really all I was getting at.
A reasonable question, to be sure. I'd say because you don't do it the same way: the cat doesn't give its turds a few grave goods for the afterlife, nor mark the grave, nor bother making sure that each of them are placed in the same prescribed position in the grave. E.g., you (or the cat) don't make sure that the turd is laid (or crouched, or whatever a particular culture favoured) in a certain way in its "grave", nor that it's aligned in a the exact same way as your other turds, etc. When you have signs that there was something ritualistic or prescribed about a burial, there must be something more about it than about hiding a turd.
Actually, look at the evidence we have for Neanderthals. They
- built tools to build other tools with. Chimps build improvised tools for the moment, then discard them. Building a hammer, so you can build an axe with it, is a human trait and implies quite a bit of intelligence.
- apparently had at least some level of work specialization and that would imply some form of commerce. At least as in, "me give you dead antelope, if you make me big strong stone spear." Again, that's not something chimps do. (Though Bonobos seem to have figured out stuff like "I'll give you two bananas for sex.")
- they built crude musical instruments (but then it took H. Sapiens a long time to make any better ones too.)
- they seem to have had (primitive) ceremonial burial, which in turn implies _some_ concept of afterlife or at least remorse. That's a bit of abstract concept there. You don't see a cat giving her dead kitten an elaborate burial.
- they decorated themselves with crude "jewellery" and paints (i.e., basically cosmetics). Again, it seems to suggest some kind of society and the brain power where that kind of thing matters. E.g., the concept of a social status. You don't even bother carrying, say, a necklace of sabertooth teeth unless that tells the others something about you martial prowess and that matters somehow. Or maybe if you have some kind of a mythology where that invokes the power of that tiger, but that's even more complex thinking.
- they skinned animals and made primitive clothes and shelters. (Well, primitive by our standards, but quite ahead of just digging a burrow like an animal.)
- apparently some figured out how to use coal, where it was easily accessible. (Homo Sapiens never really bothered too much with it until the industrial age.)
Etc.
I'd say that's clearly ahead of animal level. I'd say it's at the very least Forest Gump level.
In other words, to summarize: high ranking lobby group leader (i.e., practically a politician) tries to please both sides of the fence, and does an 180 degree turn when his comment turns out hideously unpopular. Of course, he'll still try to sell the original story to the politicians.
If you count something as "wasted" just because it was a part of something that failed many years later, then virtually all of humanity's efforts are wasted in the long run.
E.g., what was the point of building cities and inventing civilization in Mesopotamia, since millenia later it fell to the semitic populations, then to the iranians (indo-europeans), and finally to the arabs? Even Sumerian, the language of the first human civilization, soon was a dead language kept just for religious services and texts. (Much like what millenia later would happen to Latin.) Was Hammurabi's life wasted on working on that law code and construction and whatnot, since he worked for Babylon which later got conquered by Assyria and today is just a bunch of ruins?
Was the life of every Roman that ever lived wasted, because their country would eventually implode and be conquered by a tribe as primitive as the Longobards?
Was Egipt all a big waste for that same reason?
Sometimes it makes sense to live in the present. It matters what you do now, not what will become of it in 10 years. What may make a difference in the long run is that you were one of the guys who tried and contributed a bit to the advancement of technology/culture/whatever, not whether you left some monumental legacy that will for ever be intact. Because if you're aiming for the latter, you might as well give up now, 'cause in the long run everything turns to dust.
Even the the Great Lighthouse, or the Colosus of Rhodes, or whatever, eventually turned to little more than ruins or disappeared altogether. Was it a waste of someone's years to build them? Well, no, they served their purpose while they existed, _and_ more importantly humanity learned something new in the process. Even if it's how to stack a lot of bricks to build a f-ing huge lighthouse. The road to the mighty gothic cathedrals of later, or to the Hagia Sophia, goes through such earlier achievements. Even if the grand monumental testament to someone's work is gone, their contribution to the species' knowledge lived on and accumulated.
Plus, in this case we're not even talking about some personal failure, but the failure of one company he worked for. Well, gee.
Yeah, but if they're made in China, then we'll discover they're put together with cheaper psychoactive glue, painted with lead paints, and some of them randomly catch fire, and we'll have to issue a recall. Bad idea ;)
Ever heard of a buffalo jump?
American Indian "harmony with nature" involved causing a stampede of a whole bloody herd of buffaloes off a cliff, and eating the resulting mess. Except we're talking an age long before refrigeration, and I don't recall them having massive salt mines either, nor having invented making sausages... so most of that meat was left to spoil. They killed a (good portion of) a herd of buffaloes, when the tribe could eat maybe one or two before it all went rotten.
I'm sorry, but that's _not_ harmony with nature. And that generally applies to most tribes, when you look at their actual culture, and not just at superficial bullshit like "well, they worshipped bear spirits, how bad can they be?"
The average animist tribe's view of the world is that the world is there to provide that tribe with everything it needs. The role of, say, a bear spirit or buffalo spirit was basically to make sure that bears or buffaloes come to be hunted by the humans. Balance mostly meant appeasing the spirit so it will send more animals to the slaughter. The spirits gave them buffaloes, they give the spirits a token offering and some thanks, so it's balanced.
Roll that around in your head some more: they gave _nothing_ back to nature itself, and didn't actually care for that nature in any form or shape. They gave something back to the _spirits_.
It's no different than, say, a modern hunter praying to god for a deer to shoot, and giving thanks to god afterwards if he actually shot a deer.
But a modern hunter would still have some idea about nature preservation, and stuff like why you don't shoot them in certain seasons. Because you don't want to exterminate them. You still want to find some deer there next year too. An animist tribesman would expect that that's what those nature spirits _do_. That's their job. They're there to give you all the buffaloes you need. And if you could hunt a buffalo, well, that's because the spirits wanted you to, so no need to think about any kind of nature presevation any more. Except, of course, to give ample thanks. That's it. Balance is now preserved. And if next year you find no more buffaloes, well, it can't possibly be because you over-hunted them. It must be that you didn't give enough thanks to the spirits, or angered them in some other way.
Very much so. Apart from the stinger (spiders actually use their fangs to inject the venom) that spider in the movie acted much like a Black Widow.
Well, here's a funny thought about Neanderthals. They existed for far longer than Homo Sapiens, and they seemed to never have discovered warfare. Even in times of extreme famine and/or overpopulation (and we have evidence of famine in, say, the development of their children's teeth), they just starved, but never managed to produce skeletons that look like they've been murdered with a weapon.
So I don't know how well they'd adapt to _our_ world.
I hope you do realize that:
1. There are people even in these days who have a fetish about that, and pay sites catering to them.
2. There are even people who get a hardon about fucking goats and sheep.
3. They had a chronic shortage of women during tribal and ancient times, due to disproportionate mortality rates. A big reason for tribal warfare and even ancient era warfare was, basically, going and killing those guys and taking their women. Although that was later than the extinction of the Neanderthals, so there just were a lot of still young and horny men whose wife had just died in childbirth or from complications.
If you think human women preferred Neanderthal men, well, then that would leave an even bigger shortage of women for the human males.
So the question is whether you'd prefer a muscular woman who's available and willing, or masturbation for the rest of your life. And they didn't have Internet to help with the masturbation part either.
I don't know about you, but I'd get over the looks and fuck a Neanderthal girl, if that were the choice. I'd be thoroughly surprised if I'm the only one. Again, you only have to look at modern times. Worse looking girls get married anyway.
Ah, pish-posh. I learned a lot about functioning in society from games. E.g.,
- always roll "greed" on loot, unless you're going to equip it
- keep your pet on passive in instances if you're a warlock or hunter
- don't shoot if you're a priest,
- whining and drama about epic loot are perfectly acceptable as smalltalk or to pass the time on an uneventful evening,
- if your team wipes, it's _always_ the tank's fault, with the healer as a second best choice (if you're the tank,)
- your level and/or tier of epic gear are an accurate measurement of human worth and penis size, so you'll want to print them on your business card. Unless, of course, you're less than the maximum level, in which case you'll want to claim "I have 5 level 80's" instead.
- as a corolary, anything that gets between you and that epic gear is a bad thing, and should not be tolerated. (Lest people start thinking you're an underachiever or even gay.) Upon reaching the max level in some friendly guild that helped you since level 1, you should immediately (A) demand it kicks out everyone lower level and transforms into a raiding guild, or failing that (B) immediately leave the guild and start looking for a raiding guild,
- especially on RP server, you should keep in character and use the same language fitting the game's setting that everyone else uses. Examples include, "LOL, l2p n00b!!!", "asl???", "r u a grl???" and "soz m8 g2g, gt skewl 2moz" (I swear I've actually heard that one on COH.)
- especially in a RP guild and on the guild's channels, all stuff that doesn't belong in the game world should be placed between double brackets, like this, "(( ur computer suks ))". In _heavy_ RP guilds, doubly so. If in doubt, you can tell you're in a heavy RP guild or group if everything is in double brackets, and the last time you remember seeing something said without brackets was last July.
- all social situations worth role-playing through involve beating up someone weaker, or public foreplay,
- your name is the first thing anyone will see or hear about you, and your first chance to make an impression. Good, in-character names include, "l0rDn00bKilla", "Backdoor Girl" or "Faemale Shaemale". (All real names off MMOs, although some of them really short lived.) If your parents were foolish enough to give you a more archaic name like "John" or "Richard", have your name changed.
Well, think positively: if someone abducts your child in an online game and takes them into the depths of some dungeon, chances are your kid will only need to use his hearthstone to teleport back to the inn ;)
Plus, if it's a raid dungeon, they'll probably argue about loot and split up sooner or later anyway ;)
Actually that's the fun part: a FPS back then was _much_ cheaper to make than an adventure. You just needed to license a 3D engine, model a couple of enemies and weapon, have a guy make half a dozen maps, and you had your working FPS for a fraction of what it cost to make an adventure.
That's really what nearly killed adventures. FPS quite often sold less copies than the old adventures (not every FPS was Doom), but cost even less to make, so the chances of ending up with a profit were better.
It was only post-HL that we started expecting scripts and story, and interesting maps, and enemies that behave naturally, etc. That's the service I was claiming that HL did to us all.
And when costs to make a FPS rose too, well, you'll notice that people are making adventure games again these days :P
That's insightful in its own right, but rather orthogonal to my point. It doesn't have that much to do with being venomous. Spiders use their venom to paralyze their prey, but a very different enzyme cocktail to turn its flesh into a liquid lunch.
Actually, apparently there is exactly 0% Neanderthal in us, if you look at the DNA. You can see the differences between Neanderthals and the common ancestor (since that's what made them Neanderthals), and you can see the differences between humans and the common ancestor (since that's what makes us humans.) The two sets just don't overlap. All the genes that made Neanderthals be Neanderthals are not present in us.
The easiest to look at is the mitochondrial DNA, since it's pretty small, and it's been mapped to death for both species. We just don't have any humans which show the unique Neanderthal mutations there. So at least there was no _female_ neanderthal in anyone's ancestry.
Now I'd be surprised if they didn't at least try to have sex with each other, given that in some places they lived in the same cave for tens of thousands of years. I mean, so it was short and stout women with sloped foreheads. Some people would still try to screw one, if one was available. And viceversa.
The more probable explanation is that, like any other combination of different species, the offspring was either non-viable (if the species are not that related) or sterile (if they're closely related.) E.g., see mules, or either combination of lion and tiger.