Do we really want to do this to a sentient and intelligent species?
For a start, the Neanderthal will be a circus freak for all his life. Whatever his other achievements or shortcomings would be, he'll still be that reconstructed Neanderthal. I doubt that he could have a normal job or relationship or interact normally with new people, without getting back to that aspect that he's the only Neanderthal in the world. Even assuming that all people he'll meet are nice and tactful, it's still that curiosity aspect. It sounds like a recipe for getting depressed later.
But the more realistic aspect is that most people just aren't that nice. There are plenty of people for which it's nearly impossible to say "black" without an "N", if you know what I mean, and for whom it's a human rights issue if you even ask them to be nice. Can you imagine what these guys would be like, to a different _species_.
I mean, whatever job he'll ever get, and for whatever personal skills or achievements, there'll _always_ be some idiot trying to make one of the following points:
- he only got it because he's a Neanderthal, or
- Earth for humans, you freaks don't belong here, or
- here's a long list of bullshit and fallacies as to why your kind is biologically too stupid for this job, and we don't want your kind around,
etc.
Can you imagine a Neanderthal going through high-school without a trauma, for that matter? High school "society" nowadays is based on _extreme_ conformism. (Even if, ironically, it usually means conforming to the image of being a non-conformist rebel.) To belong there, you must look like everyone else, listen to the same music as everyone else, say the same ideas and memes as everyone else, etc. Probably half the RIAA labels' income comes from teenagers who just have to buy the same albums as everyone else in their peer group, for example. And being different in any way, is a recipe for being at best ostracized and at worst bullied constantly. How do you think they'll behave towards our hypothetical reconstructed Neanderthal, which looks different from the rest, speaks very differently too (if recent research about their larynx and hearing system are right), maybe even has different aptitudes (Neanderthals never seem to have invented or used or made missile weapons, so maybe this guy will just not be wired to have any skill in any ball game), and possibly have the brain wired differently enough to think differently?
All spiders can only ingest liquid food, and in fact have two filters to prevent solids from getting in.
From there it gets funnier:
- most spiders simply inject the prey with enzymes that liquefy its innards, then suck the resulting liquid lunch. In this case they'd still find the empty chitin shell of the spider.
- some actually "chew" the food while flooding it with enzymes to dissolve it, but I'm guessing even in this case they'd still find legs and whatnot from the dead spider.
I guess the big question at this point is exactly what species of spider were these two.
As for traditional adventure games, they might have died not because of FPSes, but because their popularity waned, especially as 3D took over.
Wrong. The market size was actually still growing. The last King's Quest game, for example, actually sold more copies than any of its predecessors.
But the prices for all that scripting and animating in 3D were rising even faster. That same game I mentioned had cost 10 times more to make than the previous one. It sold more copies, but not 10 times more.
I _know_ the classic theory about DNA being everything, and the proteins just regulating what gets transcribed. What I'm referring to is the recent article linked to even on Slashdot: "The Gene Is Having an Identity Crisis", where they claimed that it just isn't so. They claimed exactly what I wrote there: that the same gene can be transcribed in a dozen different ways, based on what those proteins say, and that half your heredity is actually in those proteins.
Not to mention, didn't we also have this story about how the proteins affect the transcription too, and the same piece of DNA can be transcribed in a dozen different ways or not at all, depending on how those proteins regulate it? It seems to me like in that case it's like saying they decoded half of it.
You mean, the same as adventures for years
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10 Years of Half-Life
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Well, that's nice, but adventure games had told a story in game, without cut scenes for years. I don't think that, say, any of the 2d King's Quest games or old Lucas adventures stopped to give you a pre-rendered movie to advance the plot.
In 3D? Well, Ultima Underworld 1 and 2 managed to advance the plot just fine without cut-scenes, and if first person 3D.
So let's not go pretending that HL invented it all. HL just brought to FPS what every other game had already been doing for a decade.
Which is mildly ironic, because the rise of the FPS and the near-extinction of adventure games was merely because most publishers had discovered they can get away with not having much scripting in a FPS. The deluge of Doom clones wasn't because nobody had invented storytelling yet, but because they discovered they can get away with skipping that in these newangled FPS games. (Newfangled for that time, anyway.) Scripting and animating for such in-game story telling were rising, but it looked like people will buy a FPS even if you don't bothered with any of that, so publishers gave us just that then. The deluge of such plain arcade shooters was just because they were _cheap_.
HL did do us the service of (A) setting the gamers' expectations high for the new genre too, and (B) proving that you can still make money even so, but otherwise there was nothing revolutionary about it. It just brought back some things that Adventure games had had for years. Yes, some of them in 3D and/or first person.
Well, there are a lot of possibilities why. Maybe it's because it's easy to build a fence that stops melee assaults, but missiles shoot right over. Maybe because melee combat is still an extremely traumatic event for humans. (Romans rotated rows so the soldiers don't break down, and a bayonet charge is still more traumatic than MRLS bombardment.) So maybe it was harder to discover warfare that way, but once the ball got rolling with missile weapons, we discovered how to drill people to do melee combat too. Maybe indeed it was overpopulation. No idea, really.
But, anyway, we have no depictions of war, no skeletons which died by weapons, etc, until someone discovers the bow. Then all hell breaks loose. Then we suddenly get mass graves of people with arrow tips embedded in their bones, and paintings on cave walls of groups of archers led by some shaman, shooting at each other.
My point was just that early humans weren't really like chimps. Chimps have nothing against fighting each other in melee. Humans and Neanderthals lived without that for hundreds of thousands of years. _Something_ must be different there.
Or badly misspelling words like esoteric and using them in an awkward fashion, and then trying to justify it?
Considering that English isn't my mother tongue, if that's all you found to pick on, I'll take it as a compliment.
What's _your_ excuse? That you could do well in a spelling bee in your own native language? Heh.
Well, I searched, and couldn't find the joke online. You're probably just be retelling the joke badly
The original joke is in German, actually, so no wonder you didn't. If you need a link, look here: Vince Ebert bei Nightwash
But as long as it served to make a point, your contribution to the discussion is... what? That you can find an irrelevant detail to nit-pick on, completely irrelevant to the point being made?
Sorry for the swipe, but you're being a little hypocritical here.
Nah, no need to apologize, in fact thanks for sharing the above with the world.
See, the funny thing about spelling nazis is: everyone points at whatever most useful skills or achievements they have. Additionally, whoever has achievements of their own tends to brag along the lines of "look at what _I_ know" or "look at what _I_ can do" not "look, I found someone whose spelling I can pick on." If you need to drag someone down between you and the bottom of the proverbial barrel, you already know where you are in relation to that bottom. It's that simple.
If all you can contribute there is picking on the spelling of one word in the whole message, you already told me who and what you are. Your big skill and achievement is being able to spell an 8 letter word in your own native language. Well, gee, your mommy must be proud. Thanks again for sharing your complete uselessness with the world.
I see ByteSlicer already pointed you at the definition.
The point was the many esoteric movements that, yes, are all about believing in magic. Witchcraft, occultism, new age, etc. A lot of which aren't as much about blind faith that it is that way, but the other way around, that you can make it be that way by just believing in it hard enough. Or by being initiated enough in some mysteries. E.g., that you can make a beer appear in your fridge by just refusing to acknowledge its absence. (Though sometimes it's not as much about a physical thing that can be disproved, but about vaguer notions like "luck", "success", "good fortune", etc.)
I think IT and programming have too much of both (A) people acting as if they can redefine reality by PR or consensus or management memo, and (B) people trying to tell you that if you their hyped process of finding beer in a fridge and got none, it's only because you're not initiated enough in its mysteries.
The context in which Vince Ebert used it... well, he's a comedian. I think it was just supposed to be funny.
If we're at willy-waving about who's seen lesser capacity floppies, that 360k floppy looks positively huge compared to an 8" single-side single-density floppy, and I've seen an ancient mainframe that used 70-something MB 8" floppies as late as 1999.
But I figure that's irrelevant, because I was talking about the age when that 100K virus appeared.
Except, say, to the Russians repairing the ISS with improvised tools, because they lost the original tools. Or that guy Ed White, the first spacewalker, who lost a spare glove. Or Piers Sellers who lost a spatula. Or those intrepid souls in 2006 who lost a couple of bolts while connecting an addition to the ISS. Or let's hear it for Jerry L. Ross on STS-88, who managed to lose an anchor socket and a panel into space on the very first spacewalk, then a thermal blanket on the second spacewalk. Etc.
(Though, in all fairness, more fun than guys losing tools was when an Indonesian sat got hit by feces. Literally. That's when NASA stopped dumping their shit in space.)
Or on Earth, you have such fine specimens as Dr. Wesley Meyers, the dentist who managed to kill a patient by dropping a too down his throat (and into his lung.) A second time.
I see your point, but it's not just a matter of looking at it that way. There have been and are people running around making that exact claim: that XP never produces any bug, in fact it's the only _guaranteed_ way to have a bug-free product. I've occasionally had people throw that exact idiocy at me both in person and here on slashdot. And it's almost invariably based on exactly that redefinition. They can't have a bug, because their whole contract is in the client's automated tests, and the only way to have a bug would be to not pass that automated test.
Basically you sound sane enough. There are people out there who aren't:P
You haven't seen some viruses. I seem to remember, back in the dark ages of floppies, long before the internet, when 1.44 MB was all the space on a floppy and viruses were supposed to go unnoticed on one so they could spread, someone had written a 100K virus in Clipper. Or one of the similar DBase2-like databases. In an age of 512 _byte_ viruses, or where even complex and sophisticated ones were measured in single digit kilobytes, that was fucking huge. It's akin to having a 100 MB virus nowadays. In fact, it's akin to nowadays writing a virus in Java and distributing it together with a JDK.
So in all fairness, you can't generalize like that. Just because Vista is the most extreme case of a bloated and inefficient virus, doesn't mean there weren't other viruses that were only slightly less bloated and inefficient before;)
It is a common misunderstanding to think that psychopaths are raging, murderous beasts; the typical psychopath is primarily amoral and unempathic. While this may on occasion lead to extremes of violence or worse, it is more common that they are fairly petty criminals that drift from opportunity to opportunity without taking any sincere interest in anything
You'll notice I've said that the _dumb_ ones end up personally murdering anyone. The successful ones end up politicians and CEOs and convince others to do their killing for them.
As for my point about human nature, we're not disagreeing that much, I would say. Yes, humans are very vulnerable to group-think and to, basically, "you're dishonourable and have failed your country if you don't go slaughter these 'enemies'." My point is about who exploits that weakness and ends up painting some people as your enemies. Left by itself a vast majority of people probably would rather stay on their farm, rather than go murder someone and risk their own life in the process. But there's always some king, pope, chieftain, shaman, etc, exploiting that groupthink tendency and redefining some other people into enemies.
As for chimps, well, I don't find it as clear. Yes, normal chimps are far more inclined to fight, but Bonobos for example seem to have (A) just reached sentience, and (B) discovered that sex is more fun than fighting. They're total hippies. I see no reason why the same couldn't have happened to early humans.
The thing is we have _no_ skeletons that show death by weapons, until the discovery of bows and arrows. I don't know why.
While that's true, it was the same country, and I'm sure you understand what I'm talking about.
The event I'm talking about is the Battle of Aquae Sextiae of 102 BC, where the Teutones were finally defeated. The Romans demanded that 300 women be handed over to them, as wives. The women asked to be at least allowed to served in the temples instead, but the Romans really wanted wives. The women commited mass suicide.
There isn't one of them that doesn't have individuals that follow the processes blindly.
Yes, but here it's funnier, since you were supposed to trust it without any proof, and in fact in spite of proof to the contrary, from the start.
Since the topic is agile projects gone bad, you only need to look at the original Chrysler C3 project that became the poster child for XP: from Chrysler's point of view, the project was an abject failure. By the time it was _years_ overdue, it still hadn't delivered a tenth of the promises. At least one of the managers involved as client-representative in that project got stress-related health problems during it. Chrysler not only cancelled the project, but forbade XP. It's something you'd normally call "EPIC FAIL!" as projects go.
But in true CCCP fashion, a failure got redefined into a smashing success, and presented as such in the books. In fact, turned into the poster child for successful XP.
So there we have our answer already: when XP projects go bad, failure gets redefined as a smashing success.
Later studies into, well, how much better _is_ pair programming, actually showed that such a pair is somewhat better than a single programmer for inexperienced freshman year programmers, but barely marginally better than a single programmer when done with experienced programmers. Both cases delivered actually less than the two programmers working separately on different parts of the problem.
Again, it won't stop anyone from still pretending that it's the opposite.
XP also redefined what "bug" is, by pretending that only stuff caught by the client's automated tests are bugs. Hence, if your tests for my "int add(int x, int y)" method only test for x = 2 and y = 3, and the whole method is just a "return 5;", it's not buggy. If you wan it changed, that's a change request, mate.
Hence making possible the claim that XP delivers 100% bug-free code. Now, if you want to redefine what "bug" means, you could do the same for any other methodology, but XP zealots like to ignore that. (I mean, seriously, if "not caught by the acceptance tests" doesn't mean "bug", then Windows 3.0 was 100% bug free too. Dumbly enough it was only tested internally on identical Compaq computers, but it ran flawlessly on those and with the particular software mix used in the test. If it doesn't work on your computer, though, XP would call it a change request.)
So, heh, it's mildly funny to hear the same guys who did that reality redefinition complain about others doing the same.
Seriously, it reminds me of a joke by Vince Ebert, translated loosely from memory: If you think there's a beer in the fridge and go look, that's science. If you think there's a beer in the fridge but don't look, that's religion. And if you look, see there's no beer, and still think there's a beer in the fridge, that's esotheric.
That's what XP is: something that started as a religion, and ended up an esotheric cult.
This is actually where XP/Agile have a major advantage over other more formal processes - the Agile processes try not to promote rigid thinking and if applied correctly should be self-correcting or applied in more than just name only (but you would know that if you had read TFA).
I'll be the first to say that flexible thinking is great, and that XP even has some good ideas. The point where it fails is that "turning all the knobs to 10", to quote the authors.
Essentially what they do is discovering something like "hey, some salt in a soup tastes nice, and a bit of vinegar makes it even better"... and from there formalizing an ideology in which all soup is done only with salt and vinegar. In fact, by boiling a kilo of salt in 5 litres of vinegar, since that's the turning all knobs to the max point.
Actually, we're talking only 4600 years old. Codes of laws included murder in the same age, e.g., in Messopotamia or Egypt.
And even by tribal warfare standards, it sounds as an atrocity. You don't take the time to smash someone's fingers _after_ they're already stone dead. Doing that to women and children? Oooer. (Women used to be taken as spoils of war anyway, since a disproportionately shorter life expectancy gave primitive people -- and by that I mean at least as late as 100 BC Roman Empire! -- a chronic shortage of women.)
I wouldn't be surprised if someone tortured them to death to make them say where they hid their wealth, which they probably didn't even have. Of course, we'll never really know, but as I was saying, I wouldn't be too surprised. Ever since humanity discovered killing each other, suspiciously around the discovery of ranged weaponry, about 20,000 years ago, that's the kind of thing that kept happening.
I wouldn't even chalk it up to "human nature," since I don't think most people were that way. The biggest psychopaths rose to the top like shits in a septic tank, and got others to kill each other for their glory, and the dumbest psychopaths became brigands and thieves and did it personally.
Not to mention the message it will send to HP's retailers and resellers;)
Apparently one problem Asus faced with their original Linux-only Eee was that a lot of them got returned as "broken" by some dolts who tried to install MS Office and the likes on them, and concluded that the laptop is broken if they can't. The Windows XP line offered at least a way to say "well, ok, but we can offer this one instead."
Additionally, _SUSE_? I'm writing this on a SUSE machine, and while it's great for work, Novell stripped it of all useful codecs. You can't even play an MP3 or a DVD on it, without downloading and/or compiling your own libraries and media players. Kaffeine as shipped with SUSE, will just give you an error message that it can't due to IP issues, when you try to play a DVD with it.
So, yeah, imagine the joy of Joe Sixpack when he buys a SUSE-only HP computer and it doesn't play his MP3s, it doesn't play that rented DVD, it doesn't really play anything. Great home theatre platform, eh? A lot of those will really be Joe Sixpack types who don't even have a flipping clue what SourceForge or Freshmeat are. They'll see just that their new computer doesn't play DVDs or music. While the Joneses down the street have no problem playing theirs on their Dell computer, and the yuppie down the street with his Apple computer and iPod even less so.
Can you say "return"? I knew you could.
So, um, yeah, if you want to convince your retailers and resellers that your computers get disportionately more returns, by all means, start a SUSE-only line. That'll send them a message:P
Actually, I don't know if you realize it, but super-heated plasma is actually opaque to light.
The photons emited in the nuclear fusion in the sun's centre, are absorbed and re-emitted and take millions of years to reach the surface. The sun is actually very close to a black body, except, of course, it radiates so much energy of its own that you can't shine a beam at it and notice that it's actually absorbed.
A nuclear bomb's fireball, for the first couple of moments is actually opaque too, which actually helps with converting more of that energy into temperature of the fireball, thus into more rapid expansion of that air, and thus into a bigger shockwave. That's how about 50% of the energy goes into the shockwave. If it weren't for that, i.e., if that super-heated air actually let radiation pass right through, the bomb would just scorch the ground and fry anyone close enough and standing in the open, but wouldn't cause the kind of shockwave that levels concrete buildings.
So could a lightsaber cast a shadow? Well, in much as the same way as a fluorescent tube can cast one. If it's in the way of a beam of light that's brighter than the sword's own shine, it would most definitely cast a shadow. (But, ok, in some poorly lit rooms like in the movies that doesn't seem to be nearly the case.)
Now that road is another minefield for other reasons, so I'm not going to claim that lightsabers are "realistic" or "possible." But just saying that technically, yes, a blade of super-heated plasma could technically be opaque.
Oh, they are well within their rights to sue. And I should hope that the scammers get punished too.
But nevertheless, they're not mutually exclusive. If scumbag A hired scumbag B, it's not an either-or-situation. Both are scumbags. That person B is a scumbag doesn't automatically exclude person A from being a scumbag.
Basically it's like this: person A hired person B to piss in the city's water supply, so person A can sell more bottled water. Person B took the money and ran. Can you say that either of them was in the right? Person B was obviously a scammer. Person A is the one who paid to cause harm. It's not mutually exclusive. Just because B was a crook, it doesn't make A less of a low-life.
And let's say that the utility company, dumbly enough, placed their filters and pools in some place where they can't forbid you access to. Is it legal to go piss in them? Even if it were, it's still a scumbag act.
Many people do a similar thing when they hire their accountant.
So, let me get this straight: you actuall have no idea what an accountant does, but you pay him anyway? Oh, goodie. Then I'm a lurblologist, give me some money too. Don't ask what a lurblologist does, after all you didn't want to know what the accountant does either.
Oh, I'm sure there _are_ plenty of stupid people out there. I just
1. have trouble imagining that the same persons who'd cheerfull blow all their money on a 419 scam, still end up having enough money left to open a store _and_ pay some tens of thousands to a SEO.
2. At least for _some_ of the things you've listed, there is _some_ explanation of what they do. If I decide to go to, say, a fortune teller, I know what service they (pretend to) provide.
There still is an answer -- no matter how stupid or dishonest -- to the basic questions:
A) what do I get for my money? and
B) how does that work?
E.g., if I go to a medium, the answers are, respectively, A) "I get to chat with my late grand-grandmother", and B) "because the medium can invoke spirits." They're stupid, but they're some kind of explanation. If I were retarded and delusional, I could believe them. The point is that the questions were asked, and the answers were (mis)judged.
Whether it's a hot stock tip, or getting my aura read, or buying a hi-fi ethernet cable, or getting some holistic bullshit therapy, _everyone_ asks those two questions and wants an answer to them. Again, even if the answers hapen to be lies or retarded, but you want to know. That's why they bother writing all those metric buttloads of pseudo-science for all those scams: because people ask the what and the how, before parting with their money.
I have trouble imagining that many people would just give some money to a stranger, without even asking those two questions. How does that go? "Sure, go ahead and do whatever you want to do, I don't want to know, just take the money and go." Does anyone actually do that kind of thing?
So basically they hired someone, and paid some tens of thousands of dollars... but they don't know what that person will do, nor what they'll get for their money?:P I mean, how stupid is that?
Actually, now that I think about it, that's not the answer I'm interested in any more. I'm thinking more: is there a list of these suckers (e.g., the AG must mention them in the lawsuit), so I can offer them some equally undefined services for lots of money?
Ok, so that wasn't entirely serious, but it serves to illustrate a point: I have trouble imagining that such people, with a habit of giving away some money without any clue what for, would have the tens of thousands of dollars to give to a SEO in the first place. Not to mention the costs of opening that store in the first place.
I mean, ok, maybe _some_ of them are just simply fucking retarded, and genuinely just blew some money without even understanding what for.
But I have to wonder for how many it's just plausible deniability. I.e., how many understood full well that they're trying to be predators, but figured out that they can afterwards play the "oh, dearie me, you mean _that's_ what the nice young man offered to do for us?" card anyway.
Well, if you were simply the victim, yes, i'd blame the mugger. But if it was you who hired someone to do a shady thing for you, and he shafts you, heh, I'm just going to say you got what you fucking deserved.
The fact is, there are honest ways to advertise. Just buy ad-words. There, you'll be on everyone's search page, if they search for that kind of product. Heck, Google even offers the option to show your ad when someone searches for a _related_ thing. E.g., it might show your sports shoes store, when someobody searches for slippers, if you activated that option.
It's honest, it's clearly marked as an ad, and it doesn't interfere with anyone else's search results.
But nah, that's too honest, I guess. Let's hire a "SEO" to do link spam, set up link farms, and try to _poison_ everyone's searches with your crap. It's a predatory model, in which a useful resource for everyone is devalued and turned into crap, just so some snake oil peddler can make a few extra bucks.
As business models go, it's akin to pissing in the town's water supply, so you can sell a few more bottles of soda.
And if you hired someone to do that kind of a thing for you, and he shafted you... good! Serves you right. I won't stop looking down on the crook too, mind you. But when the case is that one wannabe crook hired another crook, well, I'll look down on them both.
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Do we really want to do this to a sentient and intelligent species?
For a start, the Neanderthal will be a circus freak for all his life. Whatever his other achievements or shortcomings would be, he'll still be that reconstructed Neanderthal. I doubt that he could have a normal job or relationship or interact normally with new people, without getting back to that aspect that he's the only Neanderthal in the world. Even assuming that all people he'll meet are nice and tactful, it's still that curiosity aspect. It sounds like a recipe for getting depressed later.
But the more realistic aspect is that most people just aren't that nice. There are plenty of people for which it's nearly impossible to say "black" without an "N", if you know what I mean, and for whom it's a human rights issue if you even ask them to be nice. Can you imagine what these guys would be like, to a different _species_.
I mean, whatever job he'll ever get, and for whatever personal skills or achievements, there'll _always_ be some idiot trying to make one of the following points:
- he only got it because he's a Neanderthal, or
- Earth for humans, you freaks don't belong here, or
- here's a long list of bullshit and fallacies as to why your kind is biologically too stupid for this job, and we don't want your kind around,
etc.
Can you imagine a Neanderthal going through high-school without a trauma, for that matter? High school "society" nowadays is based on _extreme_ conformism. (Even if, ironically, it usually means conforming to the image of being a non-conformist rebel.) To belong there, you must look like everyone else, listen to the same music as everyone else, say the same ideas and memes as everyone else, etc. Probably half the RIAA labels' income comes from teenagers who just have to buy the same albums as everyone else in their peer group, for example. And being different in any way, is a recipe for being at best ostracized and at worst bullied constantly. How do you think they'll behave towards our hypothetical reconstructed Neanderthal, which looks different from the rest, speaks very differently too (if recent research about their larynx and hearing system are right), maybe even has different aptitudes (Neanderthals never seem to have invented or used or made missile weapons, so maybe this guy will just not be wired to have any skill in any ball game), and possibly have the brain wired differently enough to think differently?
All spiders can only ingest liquid food, and in fact have two filters to prevent solids from getting in.
From there it gets funnier:
- most spiders simply inject the prey with enzymes that liquefy its innards, then suck the resulting liquid lunch. In this case they'd still find the empty chitin shell of the spider.
- some actually "chew" the food while flooding it with enzymes to dissolve it, but I'm guessing even in this case they'd still find legs and whatnot from the dead spider.
I guess the big question at this point is exactly what species of spider were these two.
Wrong. The market size was actually still growing. The last King's Quest game, for example, actually sold more copies than any of its predecessors.
But the prices for all that scripting and animating in 3D were rising even faster. That same game I mentioned had cost 10 times more to make than the previous one. It sold more copies, but not 10 times more.
_That_ is what nearly killed adventures.
I _know_ the classic theory about DNA being everything, and the proteins just regulating what gets transcribed. What I'm referring to is the recent article linked to even on Slashdot: "The Gene Is Having an Identity Crisis", where they claimed that it just isn't so. They claimed exactly what I wrote there: that the same gene can be transcribed in a dozen different ways, based on what those proteins say, and that half your heredity is actually in those proteins.
Not to mention, didn't we also have this story about how the proteins affect the transcription too, and the same piece of DNA can be transcribed in a dozen different ways or not at all, depending on how those proteins regulate it? It seems to me like in that case it's like saying they decoded half of it.
Well, that's nice, but adventure games had told a story in game, without cut scenes for years. I don't think that, say, any of the 2d King's Quest games or old Lucas adventures stopped to give you a pre-rendered movie to advance the plot.
In 3D? Well, Ultima Underworld 1 and 2 managed to advance the plot just fine without cut-scenes, and if first person 3D.
So let's not go pretending that HL invented it all. HL just brought to FPS what every other game had already been doing for a decade.
Which is mildly ironic, because the rise of the FPS and the near-extinction of adventure games was merely because most publishers had discovered they can get away with not having much scripting in a FPS. The deluge of Doom clones wasn't because nobody had invented storytelling yet, but because they discovered they can get away with skipping that in these newangled FPS games. (Newfangled for that time, anyway.) Scripting and animating for such in-game story telling were rising, but it looked like people will buy a FPS even if you don't bothered with any of that, so publishers gave us just that then. The deluge of such plain arcade shooters was just because they were _cheap_.
HL did do us the service of (A) setting the gamers' expectations high for the new genre too, and (B) proving that you can still make money even so, but otherwise there was nothing revolutionary about it. It just brought back some things that Adventure games had had for years. Yes, some of them in 3D and/or first person.
I meant sat as in satellite. Sorry if it wasn't clear. And if it's in a close enough orbit, it can happen.
Well, there are a lot of possibilities why. Maybe it's because it's easy to build a fence that stops melee assaults, but missiles shoot right over. Maybe because melee combat is still an extremely traumatic event for humans. (Romans rotated rows so the soldiers don't break down, and a bayonet charge is still more traumatic than MRLS bombardment.) So maybe it was harder to discover warfare that way, but once the ball got rolling with missile weapons, we discovered how to drill people to do melee combat too. Maybe indeed it was overpopulation. No idea, really.
But, anyway, we have no depictions of war, no skeletons which died by weapons, etc, until someone discovers the bow. Then all hell breaks loose. Then we suddenly get mass graves of people with arrow tips embedded in their bones, and paintings on cave walls of groups of archers led by some shaman, shooting at each other.
My point was just that early humans weren't really like chimps. Chimps have nothing against fighting each other in melee. Humans and Neanderthals lived without that for hundreds of thousands of years. _Something_ must be different there.
Considering that English isn't my mother tongue, if that's all you found to pick on, I'll take it as a compliment.
What's _your_ excuse? That you could do well in a spelling bee in your own native language? Heh.
The original joke is in German, actually, so no wonder you didn't. If you need a link, look here: Vince Ebert bei Nightwash
But as long as it served to make a point, your contribution to the discussion is... what? That you can find an irrelevant detail to nit-pick on, completely irrelevant to the point being made?
Nah, no need to apologize, in fact thanks for sharing the above with the world.
See, the funny thing about spelling nazis is: everyone points at whatever most useful skills or achievements they have. Additionally, whoever has achievements of their own tends to brag along the lines of "look at what _I_ know" or "look at what _I_ can do" not "look, I found someone whose spelling I can pick on." If you need to drag someone down between you and the bottom of the proverbial barrel, you already know where you are in relation to that bottom. It's that simple.
If all you can contribute there is picking on the spelling of one word in the whole message, you already told me who and what you are. Your big skill and achievement is being able to spell an 8 letter word in your own native language. Well, gee, your mommy must be proud. Thanks again for sharing your complete uselessness with the world.
I see ByteSlicer already pointed you at the definition.
The point was the many esoteric movements that, yes, are all about believing in magic. Witchcraft, occultism, new age, etc. A lot of which aren't as much about blind faith that it is that way, but the other way around, that you can make it be that way by just believing in it hard enough. Or by being initiated enough in some mysteries. E.g., that you can make a beer appear in your fridge by just refusing to acknowledge its absence. (Though sometimes it's not as much about a physical thing that can be disproved, but about vaguer notions like "luck", "success", "good fortune", etc.)
I think IT and programming have too much of both (A) people acting as if they can redefine reality by PR or consensus or management memo, and (B) people trying to tell you that if you their hyped process of finding beer in a fridge and got none, it's only because you're not initiated enough in its mysteries.
The context in which Vince Ebert used it... well, he's a comedian. I think it was just supposed to be funny.
If we're at willy-waving about who's seen lesser capacity floppies, that 360k floppy looks positively huge compared to an 8" single-side single-density floppy, and I've seen an ancient mainframe that used 70-something MB 8" floppies as late as 1999.
But I figure that's irrelevant, because I was talking about the age when that 100K virus appeared.
Except, say, to the Russians repairing the ISS with improvised tools, because they lost the original tools. Or that guy Ed White, the first spacewalker, who lost a spare glove. Or Piers Sellers who lost a spatula. Or those intrepid souls in 2006 who lost a couple of bolts while connecting an addition to the ISS. Or let's hear it for Jerry L. Ross on STS-88, who managed to lose an anchor socket and a panel into space on the very first spacewalk, then a thermal blanket on the second spacewalk. Etc.
(Though, in all fairness, more fun than guys losing tools was when an Indonesian sat got hit by feces. Literally. That's when NASA stopped dumping their shit in space.)
Or on Earth, you have such fine specimens as Dr. Wesley Meyers, the dentist who managed to kill a patient by dropping a too down his throat (and into his lung.) A second time.
I see your point, but it's not just a matter of looking at it that way. There have been and are people running around making that exact claim: that XP never produces any bug, in fact it's the only _guaranteed_ way to have a bug-free product. I've occasionally had people throw that exact idiocy at me both in person and here on slashdot. And it's almost invariably based on exactly that redefinition. They can't have a bug, because their whole contract is in the client's automated tests, and the only way to have a bug would be to not pass that automated test.
Basically you sound sane enough. There are people out there who aren't :P
You haven't seen some viruses. I seem to remember, back in the dark ages of floppies, long before the internet, when 1.44 MB was all the space on a floppy and viruses were supposed to go unnoticed on one so they could spread, someone had written a 100K virus in Clipper. Or one of the similar DBase2-like databases. In an age of 512 _byte_ viruses, or where even complex and sophisticated ones were measured in single digit kilobytes, that was fucking huge. It's akin to having a 100 MB virus nowadays. In fact, it's akin to nowadays writing a virus in Java and distributing it together with a JDK.
So in all fairness, you can't generalize like that. Just because Vista is the most extreme case of a bloated and inefficient virus, doesn't mean there weren't other viruses that were only slightly less bloated and inefficient before ;)
You'll notice I've said that the _dumb_ ones end up personally murdering anyone. The successful ones end up politicians and CEOs and convince others to do their killing for them.
As for my point about human nature, we're not disagreeing that much, I would say. Yes, humans are very vulnerable to group-think and to, basically, "you're dishonourable and have failed your country if you don't go slaughter these 'enemies'." My point is about who exploits that weakness and ends up painting some people as your enemies. Left by itself a vast majority of people probably would rather stay on their farm, rather than go murder someone and risk their own life in the process. But there's always some king, pope, chieftain, shaman, etc, exploiting that groupthink tendency and redefining some other people into enemies.
As for chimps, well, I don't find it as clear. Yes, normal chimps are far more inclined to fight, but Bonobos for example seem to have (A) just reached sentience, and (B) discovered that sex is more fun than fighting. They're total hippies. I see no reason why the same couldn't have happened to early humans.
The thing is we have _no_ skeletons that show death by weapons, until the discovery of bows and arrows. I don't know why.
While that's true, it was the same country, and I'm sure you understand what I'm talking about.
The event I'm talking about is the Battle of Aquae Sextiae of 102 BC, where the Teutones were finally defeated. The Romans demanded that 300 women be handed over to them, as wives. The women asked to be at least allowed to served in the temples instead, but the Romans really wanted wives. The women commited mass suicide.
Yes, but here it's funnier, since you were supposed to trust it without any proof, and in fact in spite of proof to the contrary, from the start.
Since the topic is agile projects gone bad, you only need to look at the original Chrysler C3 project that became the poster child for XP: from Chrysler's point of view, the project was an abject failure. By the time it was _years_ overdue, it still hadn't delivered a tenth of the promises. At least one of the managers involved as client-representative in that project got stress-related health problems during it. Chrysler not only cancelled the project, but forbade XP. It's something you'd normally call "EPIC FAIL!" as projects go.
But in true CCCP fashion, a failure got redefined into a smashing success, and presented as such in the books. In fact, turned into the poster child for successful XP.
So there we have our answer already: when XP projects go bad, failure gets redefined as a smashing success.
Later studies into, well, how much better _is_ pair programming, actually showed that such a pair is somewhat better than a single programmer for inexperienced freshman year programmers, but barely marginally better than a single programmer when done with experienced programmers. Both cases delivered actually less than the two programmers working separately on different parts of the problem.
Again, it won't stop anyone from still pretending that it's the opposite.
XP also redefined what "bug" is, by pretending that only stuff caught by the client's automated tests are bugs. Hence, if your tests for my "int add(int x, int y)" method only test for x = 2 and y = 3, and the whole method is just a "return 5;", it's not buggy. If you wan it changed, that's a change request, mate.
Hence making possible the claim that XP delivers 100% bug-free code. Now, if you want to redefine what "bug" means, you could do the same for any other methodology, but XP zealots like to ignore that. (I mean, seriously, if "not caught by the acceptance tests" doesn't mean "bug", then Windows 3.0 was 100% bug free too. Dumbly enough it was only tested internally on identical Compaq computers, but it ran flawlessly on those and with the particular software mix used in the test. If it doesn't work on your computer, though, XP would call it a change request.)
So, heh, it's mildly funny to hear the same guys who did that reality redefinition complain about others doing the same.
Seriously, it reminds me of a joke by Vince Ebert, translated loosely from memory: If you think there's a beer in the fridge and go look, that's science. If you think there's a beer in the fridge but don't look, that's religion. And if you look, see there's no beer, and still think there's a beer in the fridge, that's esotheric.
That's what XP is: something that started as a religion, and ended up an esotheric cult.
I'll be the first to say that flexible thinking is great, and that XP even has some good ideas. The point where it fails is that "turning all the knobs to 10", to quote the authors.
Essentially what they do is discovering something like "hey, some salt in a soup tastes nice, and a bit of vinegar makes it even better"... and from there formalizing an ideology in which all soup is done only with salt and vinegar. In fact, by boiling a kilo of salt in 5 litres of vinegar, since that's the turning all knobs to the max point.
Actually, we're talking only 4600 years old. Codes of laws included murder in the same age, e.g., in Messopotamia or Egypt.
And even by tribal warfare standards, it sounds as an atrocity. You don't take the time to smash someone's fingers _after_ they're already stone dead. Doing that to women and children? Oooer. (Women used to be taken as spoils of war anyway, since a disproportionately shorter life expectancy gave primitive people -- and by that I mean at least as late as 100 BC Roman Empire! -- a chronic shortage of women.)
I wouldn't be surprised if someone tortured them to death to make them say where they hid their wealth, which they probably didn't even have. Of course, we'll never really know, but as I was saying, I wouldn't be too surprised. Ever since humanity discovered killing each other, suspiciously around the discovery of ranged weaponry, about 20,000 years ago, that's the kind of thing that kept happening.
I wouldn't even chalk it up to "human nature," since I don't think most people were that way. The biggest psychopaths rose to the top like shits in a septic tank, and got others to kill each other for their glory, and the dumbest psychopaths became brigands and thieves and did it personally.
Not to mention the message it will send to HP's retailers and resellers ;)
Apparently one problem Asus faced with their original Linux-only Eee was that a lot of them got returned as "broken" by some dolts who tried to install MS Office and the likes on them, and concluded that the laptop is broken if they can't. The Windows XP line offered at least a way to say "well, ok, but we can offer this one instead."
Additionally, _SUSE_? I'm writing this on a SUSE machine, and while it's great for work, Novell stripped it of all useful codecs. You can't even play an MP3 or a DVD on it, without downloading and/or compiling your own libraries and media players. Kaffeine as shipped with SUSE, will just give you an error message that it can't due to IP issues, when you try to play a DVD with it.
So, yeah, imagine the joy of Joe Sixpack when he buys a SUSE-only HP computer and it doesn't play his MP3s, it doesn't play that rented DVD, it doesn't really play anything. Great home theatre platform, eh? A lot of those will really be Joe Sixpack types who don't even have a flipping clue what SourceForge or Freshmeat are. They'll see just that their new computer doesn't play DVDs or music. While the Joneses down the street have no problem playing theirs on their Dell computer, and the yuppie down the street with his Apple computer and iPod even less so.
Can you say "return"? I knew you could.
So, um, yeah, if you want to convince your retailers and resellers that your computers get disportionately more returns, by all means, start a SUSE-only line. That'll send them a message :P
Actually, I don't know if you realize it, but super-heated plasma is actually opaque to light.
The photons emited in the nuclear fusion in the sun's centre, are absorbed and re-emitted and take millions of years to reach the surface. The sun is actually very close to a black body, except, of course, it radiates so much energy of its own that you can't shine a beam at it and notice that it's actually absorbed.
A nuclear bomb's fireball, for the first couple of moments is actually opaque too, which actually helps with converting more of that energy into temperature of the fireball, thus into more rapid expansion of that air, and thus into a bigger shockwave. That's how about 50% of the energy goes into the shockwave. If it weren't for that, i.e., if that super-heated air actually let radiation pass right through, the bomb would just scorch the ground and fry anyone close enough and standing in the open, but wouldn't cause the kind of shockwave that levels concrete buildings.
So could a lightsaber cast a shadow? Well, in much as the same way as a fluorescent tube can cast one. If it's in the way of a beam of light that's brighter than the sword's own shine, it would most definitely cast a shadow. (But, ok, in some poorly lit rooms like in the movies that doesn't seem to be nearly the case.)
Now that road is another minefield for other reasons, so I'm not going to claim that lightsabers are "realistic" or "possible." But just saying that technically, yes, a blade of super-heated plasma could technically be opaque.
Oh, they are well within their rights to sue. And I should hope that the scammers get punished too.
But nevertheless, they're not mutually exclusive. If scumbag A hired scumbag B, it's not an either-or-situation. Both are scumbags. That person B is a scumbag doesn't automatically exclude person A from being a scumbag.
Basically it's like this: person A hired person B to piss in the city's water supply, so person A can sell more bottled water. Person B took the money and ran. Can you say that either of them was in the right? Person B was obviously a scammer. Person A is the one who paid to cause harm. It's not mutually exclusive. Just because B was a crook, it doesn't make A less of a low-life.
And let's say that the utility company, dumbly enough, placed their filters and pools in some place where they can't forbid you access to. Is it legal to go piss in them? Even if it were, it's still a scumbag act.
So, let me get this straight: you actuall have no idea what an accountant does, but you pay him anyway? Oh, goodie. Then I'm a lurblologist, give me some money too. Don't ask what a lurblologist does, after all you didn't want to know what the accountant does either.
Oh, I'm sure there _are_ plenty of stupid people out there. I just
1. have trouble imagining that the same persons who'd cheerfull blow all their money on a 419 scam, still end up having enough money left to open a store _and_ pay some tens of thousands to a SEO.
2. At least for _some_ of the things you've listed, there is _some_ explanation of what they do. If I decide to go to, say, a fortune teller, I know what service they (pretend to) provide.
There still is an answer -- no matter how stupid or dishonest -- to the basic questions:
A) what do I get for my money? and
B) how does that work?
E.g., if I go to a medium, the answers are, respectively, A) "I get to chat with my late grand-grandmother", and B) "because the medium can invoke spirits." They're stupid, but they're some kind of explanation. If I were retarded and delusional, I could believe them. The point is that the questions were asked, and the answers were (mis)judged.
Whether it's a hot stock tip, or getting my aura read, or buying a hi-fi ethernet cable, or getting some holistic bullshit therapy, _everyone_ asks those two questions and wants an answer to them. Again, even if the answers hapen to be lies or retarded, but you want to know. That's why they bother writing all those metric buttloads of pseudo-science for all those scams: because people ask the what and the how, before parting with their money.
I have trouble imagining that many people would just give some money to a stranger, without even asking those two questions. How does that go? "Sure, go ahead and do whatever you want to do, I don't want to know, just take the money and go." Does anyone actually do that kind of thing?
So basically they hired someone, and paid some tens of thousands of dollars... but they don't know what that person will do, nor what they'll get for their money? :P I mean, how stupid is that?
Actually, now that I think about it, that's not the answer I'm interested in any more. I'm thinking more: is there a list of these suckers (e.g., the AG must mention them in the lawsuit), so I can offer them some equally undefined services for lots of money?
Ok, so that wasn't entirely serious, but it serves to illustrate a point: I have trouble imagining that such people, with a habit of giving away some money without any clue what for, would have the tens of thousands of dollars to give to a SEO in the first place. Not to mention the costs of opening that store in the first place.
I mean, ok, maybe _some_ of them are just simply fucking retarded, and genuinely just blew some money without even understanding what for.
But I have to wonder for how many it's just plausible deniability. I.e., how many understood full well that they're trying to be predators, but figured out that they can afterwards play the "oh, dearie me, you mean _that's_ what the nice young man offered to do for us?" card anyway.
Well, if you were simply the victim, yes, i'd blame the mugger. But if it was you who hired someone to do a shady thing for you, and he shafts you, heh, I'm just going to say you got what you fucking deserved.
The fact is, there are honest ways to advertise. Just buy ad-words. There, you'll be on everyone's search page, if they search for that kind of product. Heck, Google even offers the option to show your ad when someone searches for a _related_ thing. E.g., it might show your sports shoes store, when someobody searches for slippers, if you activated that option.
It's honest, it's clearly marked as an ad, and it doesn't interfere with anyone else's search results.
But nah, that's too honest, I guess. Let's hire a "SEO" to do link spam, set up link farms, and try to _poison_ everyone's searches with your crap. It's a predatory model, in which a useful resource for everyone is devalued and turned into crap, just so some snake oil peddler can make a few extra bucks.
As business models go, it's akin to pissing in the town's water supply, so you can sell a few more bottles of soda.
And if you hired someone to do that kind of a thing for you, and he shafted you... good! Serves you right. I won't stop looking down on the crook too, mind you. But when the case is that one wannabe crook hired another crook, well, I'll look down on them both.