In the UK we have one case of an aristocrat blatantly causing criminal damage by trampling genetically modified crops, as he believes it could contaminate nearby farms. He believes he has a higher moral standing, despite doing vandalism and breaking the law. Presuming you are in the USA, you only have to look at the opinions and laws for abortion to see things are never quite black and white. In my book common sense trumps law and you have to look at the overall damage or benefits to society.
Actually, you just illustrate why I'm against people taking the law into their own hands. Yes, he _believes_ he's doing all that great stuff and saving the world. I'd rather he fucked off and left it to the law and democracy to decide that kind of thing. Those guys shooting abortion doctors too believe that their own moral system that they feel they have to impose on anyone else. I think we can agree pretty quickly that they're actually deluded idiots, and doing more harm than good.
Exactly that mentality that "common sense trumps law" is what causes a problem.
Look, the laws are just what the majority agreed upon. With what right can one person decide that he's so enlightened as to decide for everyone else? No, seriously. I'm not willing to give that right to a dictator, and I'm surely not willing to give it to Joe Sixpack.
Additionally, you'll notice that the legal system is all about safeguards against abuse, and about hearing the other side of the story too. Because nobody is omniscient. We all know half the story, or less.
E.g., what if one particular GM crop doesn't actually do whatever evils that guy imagines them to do? Do you think he's done extensive testing of exactly what crops are used there, and what the extra genes do?
Vigilantes taking the law in their own hands, don't have room for all those safeguards, hearing witnesses and experts first, and much less for the other guy's half of the story. It's bypasses the whole idea that we built society and justice upon.
The guy isn't a real-life Charles Bronson, it's some stupid kid that ran a computer program. I think fundamentally we both agree that what he did was silly. I just do not agree with your hardcore line that if you let your hard lines of law slip an inch then society will degenerate into anarchy, and that if any random transgressors are picked up they should be crucified as an example.
If a kid gets behind the wheel of a car drunk and runs down a child then I could understand your passion. I think that in this case with all the attention he has already probably had the fright of his life and the road to rehabilitation is probably short.
No, I'm actually pretty dispassionate about what happens to this one dolt. And I'm certainly not proposing to crucify him.
But there _is_ a law, he knew the risks, so I don't have any problem with seeing it applied either.
What I am passionate about is more the idea, than the actual person. I don't think that going vigilante is the right course of action, regardless of for what cause. And above all I don't think asshats are what any righteous cause needs.
To use your example, I don't know whether GM crops are good or bad, but asshats like the one you describe don't do that cause any good. _If_ you're going to fight against GM crops, you don't want to become known as "those crazy guys destroying other people's crops." It doesn't take too many people like that to put the whole cause in a bad light, _and_ to paint your opponents in the sympathetic light of being the innocent victims of a few crazies. If you want to win that fight, you want to be the guys with the good PR image and the scientific facts to back up your position.
Note that I'm neither opposing GM crops, nor saying you do. I'm just using a random example. If you believe cause X is right, whichever that X might be, going vigilante about it is actually bad for that cause X. That's all I'm trying to say. In too many words.
Bad analogy as Anon does not have a designated leader whereas Mao can be said to speak for the entire regime.
Maybe, but my point was about individual asshats, rather than about whether or not he can speak for a whole group. If that bothers you, you could replace "Jack The Ripper" or the Taliban instead of "Mao" there, and the point still stands.
I am sure you would like this supposed gift of a moral high-ground, but Moraelin where were you when he and the others kicked off this mini-revolution? Playing Warcraft?
Let's just say that between person X playing Warcraft and person Y doing vandalism and thus breaking the law... in my book X has the higher moral standing. Or Y has the lower one.
And there are worse crimes than minor vandalism befitting "an evil act".
Well, no doubt there, but just because there are worse crimes, it doesn't excuse this one. And I'm sure that the "there are worse crimes" factor _has_ been taken into account when they gave him 1 to 1.5 years, instead of, say, 20 to life.
It's an 18-year old kid causing mischief against a criminal organisation nobody likes.
Just a thought: "A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular." -- Adlai Stevenson.
We came a long way since the days when you could be run out of town, or outright killed, for being the unpopular guy. Back then, it just created group think, and the tyranny of those who could raise the mob against you. Pretty much all the freedoms you have, not to mention a good chunk of the economic growth, have come to be just because someone wasn't too affraid to say what they think. Even if it was the safety of being in a like-minded group. Now we let people be even more open about it, and I think that we all benefit from that.
So let's not throw that away.
And we've had arbitrary justice before, and there have been some bloody revolts to get the rule of the law instead. Vigilante justice is a huge step back in that aspect too.
Yes, unfortunately the system does get gamed by asshats like the CoS, but vigilante justice is still not the answer.
Plus, where would you stop? Where is the unpopularity threshold where it's ok to take the law in your own hands? E.g., if you drive your sports car in a very poor neighbourhood, is it ok for them to key it because the whole neighbourhood feels offended? What about if you're an atheist in a bible-thumping town? Or the nerd in a yuppie school? Is it ok to beat you up because 90% of the high school population doesn't like your kind?
I really don't think we ought to open that can of worms. There are more reasons to be unpopular when you're, in fact, right, than it is to be when you're a criminal organization. (Al Capone was insanely popular, for example.)
You obviously don't care about him, and probably not many people do.
Guilty as charged. I don't feel much sympathy there.
His life is ruined,
He brought it upon himself.
and that's the end of the story for this case. Life goes on.
Actually, I doubt that any campaign needs this kind of an asshat in the first place. It just creates the image of Scientology being the innocent victims, and their opponents being a bunch of criminals. We can do without that kind of making martyrs.
E.g., no offense, but you seem to do that generalization yourself when you paint the whole campaign as needing to try to not get caught. I'm not saying that to pick on you, but just to illustrate the kind of association that gets made. If even you, presumably a smart guy, fall for that kind of guilt by association, imagine how much easier that is for someone who understands computers and scientology even less.
Seriously, read any advocacy FAQ (e.g., start with the Linux one) and you'll see that all progress is actually made by the people who keep a professional and helpful attitude about it. Rabid zealots and asshat script kiddies are the kind you _don't_ want your movement to be associated with, because it ruins your whole credibility. That kind of "friends" are literally worse than your enemies.
And in this case it also ruins the whole moral high ground aspect. This guy infected (or help create a market for infecting) a bunch of innocent people's computers, and stuffed their internet connection to do his DDOS attack. That's actual harm done to innocents. It's an evil act. Once you show that kind of lack of morals or of respect for your fellow human, you just don't have a high ground from which to look down upon scientology.
If you will, it's a bit like reading about Mao denouncing the Soviet Union leaders. You're not inclined to rally on his side, because he's an evil fuck himself. Sometimes the enemy of my enemy is still a sociopathic prick.
For a long time I wished that MMOs didn't have that pesky "other person" aspect too!, it's a good thing I found diablo
"Other person" doesn't necessarily mean PvP. There _are_ plenty of _cooperative_ things to do. So if you can conceive any other interaction with people than hitting them upside the head, well, that's your shortcoming, not mine.
You suck so hard for authoritatively talking about "needing to PvP" in War, and then you go through the rest of the post professing how you really know nothing about it, and it's probably like "all those other" MMOs.
I've played enough of WAR to form my own impression. I don't like it. I know all I need there, I would say. First hand too. And by my tastes, it seems to me like, yes, yet another of the half-arsed, unfinished, me-too efforts I've named there. A replacement for WoW it ain't.
And so far the only excuses for it I've heard, in all the slashvertisments we get about it (do they at least pay Slasdhot for it?,) is, basically, "yeah, well, but I like its PvP more than in WoW."
So I'm willing to allow for the possibility that some people at least like the PvP part. I'm not going to tell them what they should like. Do you have a problem with that? Or wtf is your problem?
Did you name any products by Mythic? Oh.
It seems to me like a non-sequitur. Whatever merits or faults DAOC might have had, it is irrelevant, because, get this: WAR is not DAOC. It will have to live or die by its own merits.
Plus, I'm not sure what your point is anyway. DAOC didn't dethrone EQ back then, it didn't enlarge the genre, and it was a one-trick pony too. It had... RvR. That's it. I can't think of any other merits or unique features. According to MMOG Charts, most likely it just recycled some players from other games. Most likely, those which really wanted realm-based PvP.
Or maybe you want to compare it to their other games? Catch: Silent Death Online, Magestorm Millennium, Darkness Falls: The Crusade, ID4 Online, Spellbinder: The Nexus Conflict, and Splatterball. Let me see...
- Silent Death Online: buggy, full of exploits, got subsidized by AOL for a while, then got shut down by EA after living less than 2 years
- Magestorm Millenium: a forgettable Hexen clone. 'Nuff said.
- Darkness Falls: The Crusade: yet another MUD, in a market already saturated with MUDs at the time
- ID4 Online: a flop based on a movie franchise. Let's move on.
Etc.
Or do you mean their failed and cancelled project Imperator Online?
At any rate, how are those relevant to WAR? I'm only bringing them up because apparently you're so upset by my not mentioning other Mythic games. Ok, now you have a long list of Mythic flops. Feel any better?:P
1. Actually, I don't know if they really need a cell.
Even from the viewpoint of life evolution on Earth, it all started with some self-replicating ribosyme that "lived" perfectly well in the soup of aminoacids and nucleotides around it. The cell was just an increasingly complex test tube around that reaction, complete with increasingly complex ways of regulating the exact composition of the contained drop of sea water.
I can see how that was an advantage to evolve, in a primordial soup that was hit and miss anyway and probably (very slowly) degrading in quality over time. But in a lab, we can do that regulating artifficially. Admittedly, using a cell might be cheaper, but we can do without it too.
And indeed there is plenty of organic stuff we already do without a cell. E.g., detecting certain DNA sequences is done via enzymes which bind exactly to one sequence, and start replicating it until it's enough to be detected. We don't really build specialized cells for that.
2. Actually, to me another aspect is more interesting there: the fact that it's all done with RNA.
Proteins already _do_ exactly what these guys seem to do: bind only to certain mollecule configurations, but not to others. You can see it as logic operations and whatnot, but really it's all chemistry and that's all it does: bind only to certain mollecules, but not to others. It's a bit like saying that a keyring with two keys is a mechanical OR gate: it unlocks a lock that matches either key 1 or key 2. It's simultaneously technically true, and a bit misleading.
But there's a more interesting aspect to it: your body usually uses proteins for that, and DNA/RNA is just a way to encode a protein which will actually do the matching. E.g., those enzymes I mentioned, are proteins. They do all the heavy duty chemistry, from processing the cell's "food", to regulating what goes in or out, to destroying all chemicals which are non-polar and pass right through the cell wall instead of being regulated by the protein valves on the wall, to movement, to DNA repairs, to regulating what other proteins are built and where do they go.
As long as that's all the model we know, that needs a rather complex initial configuration for the start of life. You need something that's capable not only of replicating itself, but also of encoding proteins. It's already a bit too big an incredible machine, and appearing out of nowhere, even after billions of years and trillions of tries per second, still is a damn improbable event.
But that everything can be done via RNA only, that opens a whole new possibility. We already know that RNA can replicate itself. If it can also take the functions of a protein, offers a much simpler initial configuration for life. It's entirely possible that assembling proteins came later, as a better replacement, much like DNA later replaced RNA as the encoding of choice. The first cells could have been RNA-only, but could still have a metabolism and be able to regulate themselves well enough.
Actually, I can tell you what kind of "deal" the woman and her father got out of the "the rapist must marry her" mentality, because in some places (e.g., Eastern Europe) some places still worked like that as late as the 19'th and early 20'th century. Even if not legally, but the mentality that a raped woman is dishonoured and can't be married otherwise, still created that kind of situations.
Well, let's say you're rich and have a daughter. Whoppee! Now I can rape her and you must marry her to me. It creates _incentive_ for rape. It's a perfectly good way to marry into a richer family. Probably tens of thousand of young women, got raped by the village bum who wanted to climb the social ladder that way.
Something which would have been at most a social matter between said village bum and the rich father, gets taken out on a girl who doesn't have any fault in either.
You also have to put it into context that the ancient times had a chronic shortage of women. Other people went to _war_ to get a wife as spoils of war. (Abominable too, mind you.) But now, with the Lord's blessing, you have a guaranteed way to just pick an unmarried girl and she's forced to be your wife. Just go rape her. If that's not incentive for rape, I don't know what is.
And, hey, not only she got raped, but now she's also mandatorily saddled with a psychopathic husband who thought low enough of her and of his fellow human to see rape as just another tool in his arsenal. Yeah, that'll be a happy marriage.
It's as crap a deal as saying that, hey, if I kick you in the balls, I also get to fuck you up the arse. That should soothe your pain, right?
And the fact that the Bible sanctions that kind of a crap deal, doesn't make it some kind of mercy for someone who would have been raped anyway, it makes it yet another evil text that encouraged that rape in the first place.
1.Well, first of all, you have to realize that everyone has different tastes. So what someone likes, someone else might hate, and viceversa.
So for some people it apparently was all that, especially, I gather, those whose online life revolved around PvP. For me it most certainly didn't. I don't find it to be a horrible game, mind you, but it did feel unfinished and... well, it _is_ a PvP game, no matter how much the devs and publisher insist that PvP is purely optional. _Technically_ it is, but it's about on par saying that distributing your talent points is optional on WoW. If you're content with being a second class citizen, they are.
_I_ have no interest whatsoever in PvP, so my interest in WAR is also diminished. Being interested in only their PvE game, I found it smaller and relatively less interesting than WoW, plus marred by the fact that you _will_ be a second class citizen without PvP. (They even have the equivalent of talents earned with PvP.) On the other hand, I guess someone whose whole life revolves around PvP, might appreciate having less filler around the PvP part.
I don't even see it as necessarily a bad thing. PvP and PvE _are_ largely different games, so it stands to reason that they could be better catered for by different MMOs. Maybe Blizzard can start caring less about pleasing the PvP-ers if they fuck off to WAR, and stop messing with the PvE balance to PvP ends, for example.
2. If you want a bigger picture, I'm affraid it's too early to say. Bear in mind that it takes time for the flux of players back and forth to stabilize. And we didn't even have one month since WAR's release yet, to see how many remain after the free month expires.
People have been saying the exact same about Dungeons And Dragons Online, Lord Of The Rings Online, Age Of Conan, and even Tabula Rasa. Each time we had doom prophets heralding the coming of the WoW-slayer, and swearing that as soomn as <NEXT GAME> comes out everyone and their dog is swearing off WoW for good. You don't even have to scroll too far back through the Slashdot archive to still find the masses of disgruntled WoW-ers swearing that AOC is all that, and then some. It hasn't quite happened so far.
Maybe WAR _is_ all that, maybe it isn't, and I'm not going to be the one who proclaims either. I'm just saying that it's too early to tell.
3. And in the end, unless you have shares in either Mythic or Blizzard, does it matter? As I was saying, tastes are subjective. Whether a million people liked their game or whether everyone hated it, is no guarantee that _you_ will do the same. Wait until they offer a 7 day trial or something, and decide for yourself.
There are plenty of more general ones, or which had been interpreted as still applying.
E.g., Joan d'Arc was burned at the stake for the heresy of... wearing men's clothes. So that's one commandment which wasn't interpreted as only applying to a certain point in time. The various bits of mysoginism in the bible were not only still applied as late as the 20'th century in some parts, but some bible-belt fundies still cling to them as an argument for male supremacy.
E.g., "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" was still applied jolly well in the renaissance, and in some places as late as the 1800's. As in, really, the last documented case we have is from 1811. Heck, in the USA the witch trials were in 1692 to 1693. We're talking _almost_ 1700's, FFS.
Nobody took it as, basically, "ah, well, it only applied to the times in the Exodus."
E.g., all those commanded massacres actually pain a rather consistent image: for spreading heresy or rather religion among the Lord's folks, the punishment is complete genocide. It's not a big extrapolation to make that that's generally what the Lord wishes, since every single time that's what he commanded. And it's not just my interpretation, but Moses's too: in Numbers he acts surprised that the soldiers didn't kill those women and children in the first place. I mean, duh, it should have been obvious. He doesn't go, "ok, you did well to wait and see if the Lord commands mass-murder in this speciffic case", but as if it should have been obvious that that's what's expected.
Etc.
Now you may point out that we decided to be civilized and no longer apply that crap. Guess what? Most modern muslims aren't islamists either.
But at any rate, it's stuff that _we_ decided to no longer apply. In the "good book", it's still there.
Actually, as far as I can tell, he has too many for a raid. All the 40 man raids I remember offhand are level 60 raids from before the expansion.
However, you have to also keep in mind that:
1. The loot you get in MC or AQ40 is less than what you get for random FedEx quests in the Hellfire Peninsula at level 58 after the expansion pack. So there's no need whatsoever to actually make them at level 60 with a 40 man group.
2. If you're going to do them just for nostalgia or curiosity sake, you can just leave it for when you're level 70 and well equipped. IIRC a well equipped 5-man level-70 group can down Onyxia, and a 7 man group can do MC. I haven't tried it after the latest patch, but that used to be the case at least.
So, really, I can't think of any situations where he'd actually need 40 characters nowadays. He can do just about anything imaginable with 25.
So, well, my question would be from the exact opposite direction: why a whole 36? Why not stop at 25?
He's too old to become a player in it, and maybe not even smart enough. Time for retirement Bruce.
I hope you realize that you've just pulled the shortest summary of the Emperor's New Clothes story.
The slightly longer version is this: an Emperor hired two... well, what today we'd call consultants or contractors, to weave him the most fabulous clothes ever made. So the guys just wasted the time and lived the good life on the Emperor's money, and not only they were nowhere near getting read, they hadn't even _started_. (Or maybe they were still painting UML sketches to seem like they're doing something;) So at one point, when the project was waaay overdue already, the Emperor started to want to see some results. So the two guys tell him that their cloth is so special that only very smart people see it, and stupid people can't see it at all. And they pretend to show him some empty air. Fearing that people will catch on that he's stupid, the emperor pretends to see the cloth. Then the same charade is repeated with the nobles and advisors, who too pretend to see the fabulous cloth. And when they have to pretend to be ready, they "dress" the emperor in the new "clothes" and parrade him naked through town, where the townspeople too pretend to see the clothes, lest someone catches wind that they're stupid.
In the original story, a kid shouting "the emperor is naked" is all it takes to unralvel the whole charade. IRL, most likely the people would have patted each other on the back and congratulated each other for not being as stupid as that simpleton child.
And I find that the story is an almost literal example of the burgeoning snake-oil business in IT nowadays. The exact same excuse is used: "if you can't see the fabulous benefits of our snake oil, it's only because you're stupid, ignorant, a has-been, a dinosaur, etc." You could rewrite the same story with "security/programming/IT consultants" as the two con artists, "reduced TCO" or "synergy" or "security" or "scalability" or any other buzzword-du-jour for the non-existent clothes, and cast a CIO and his yes-men as the emperor and his court... and the story wouldn't even be a fable. It would be a documentary of something that literally happens every day, exactly like that.
Well, except that they'd fire the guy shouting "the emperor is naked", congratulate each other for getting rid of that incompetent has-been, and pay for the rest of their lives to keep that crap snake-oil running. In our days, the two con artists get a fat maintenance contract to keep the Emperor's new clothes in best shape.
Now I don't know if Bruce is right or wrong, but you haven't addressed that either. You just decided that he's too stupid if he doesn't drink the Kool Aid. It's the Emperor's New Clothes all over again.
Not everyone is in Denmark and not all of Google's servers are in the Silicon Valley, ya know? Equally, now some of those chips which need less cooling will go to some Google server in Ireland (check it out, they're about as high up as you are on the map), and some which need more cooling will go to some poor sods in Mexico or Saudi Arabia or Israel or God knows which other hot place.
Intel isn't arbitrarily going, "man, we could make chips that run ok 5 degrees hotter, but we're gonna piss everyone off by demanding more cooling. Just because we can." Most likely Intel is already doing the best it can, and getting a bunch of chips which vary in how good they are. And they're getting the same bunch of chips regardless of whether Google demands higher temps or not.
Google just gets a cherry-picked bunch, but the average over Intel's production is still the same. Hence everyone else is getting a worse selection. They what remains after Google took the best.
It's a zero-sum game. The total load on the planet is the same. The same total bunch of chips exits Intel's fabs. On the total, no energy was conserved.
So Google's "going green" is at the cost of making everyone else less "green". They can willy-wave about how energy efficient they are, by simply dumping the difference on someone else.
That's not "going green", that's a predatory approach. Your computers could require on the average an extra 0.5W in cooling, so Google can willy-wave that theirs uses 1W less. They just dumped their costs and their "eco burden" to someone else.
It's akin to me willy-waving that I'm so green and produce less garbage than you... by dumping some of my garbage in random other people's garbage bins across the town. Yay, I'm so green now, you all can start worshipping me. Well, no, on the total the same amount of garbage being produced, I just dumped it and the related costs on other people. That's not going green, that's being a predator.
I can see why a business might want to cut their own costs, and not care about yours. That's, after all, the whole "invisible hand" theory. But let me repeat it: on the whole no energy was conserved. They just passed off some of their cooling costs (energy _and_ money) to someone else.
While I'll aggree with your main point, actually, it doesn't sound to me like he was having a lecture kind of meeting. A lecture at least involves someone, essentially, telling you, "I know how it's done, I decided it's done this way, I'll tell you in detail how." YMMV, but that's the basic idea. The meetings he's talking about, if I understood him right, are more the kind where someone doesn't want to be personally responsible for taking any decision. Quite the opposite. If he can't back out in dumbly applying some semi-irrelevant regulation or rule, he'll back out into, basically, "we all talked about it until everyone was too bored to give a shit any more, therefore we _all_ took that decision, therefore _I_ am not to blame." That is, if a decision is taken at all. Some end without anything being achieved whatsoever.
Can you imagine people suing Blizzard for devaluing their online property because Blizzard nerfed a certain set piece, or introduced better items?
Actually, sadly enough, I can easily imagine that. One constant in my MUD days was that there'd _always_ be at least one idiot threatening to sue over some imaginary rights that he either made up or grossly misunderstood. We even had a stereotype of the "my dad is a lawyer and I'm gonna sue you" kid.
Favourite imaginary or mis-understood rights to sue over were:
- First amendment. If he can't shout insults and obscenities at everyone, you're censoring his free speech, ya know. He'll take you all the way to the ninth circle over it. That he doesn't even understand that it's a private server, and freedom of the press actually applies to whoever _owns_ the press (or the forum, as a digital age equivalent), seems to be the norm.
- freedom to act like a fucktard. If you don't let him be a griefer, you're
A) making role-play impossible at all (and here I was thinking there were a gazillion roles to play that don't involve screaming "I FUK UR MOM, NOOB! LEARN TO PLAY TEH GAME!" as you bury their equipment), and apparently role-playing an out-of-character fucktard is a basic human right.
B) some form of slavery. Why, having to play nice or abide by your common courtesy rules while on your property, is nothing short of a nazi dictatorship and denying him his basic dignity as a human.
The fact that nobody's forcing him to be there, if he doesn't like the rules, or that being on someone's private property is a privilege not a right, are beyond his comprehension skills.
- property rights. If his treasured Sword Of Ganking +5 got broken for lack of repairs, or worse yet _nerfed_, why, you messed with his private property. He'll see you in court for it.
Etc.
And while most didn't actually follow through, I remember offhand someone who _did_ sue Second Life because, get this: his business plan was abusing a bug in the program to buy virtual plots of land for a dollar, and resell them closer to their real value. And apparetly he thought he had some kind of basic human right to do that. And if Linden Labs banned his account for it, why, they're cutting off his money making scheme. And by Jove he has a right to make money. Heh.
China still has a long way to go before being a developed nation aside from their major cities. Anytime you have a nation that large, it really needs to be broken up into "States" or "Provinces" that democratically represents the local population much like in the US or EU. Trying to run a large country at the Federal level is efficient, but also very sloppy (not recommended).
I hope you realize that China and the USA are in a willy-waving contest as to which has the larger surface. They're just about equal. And, oh, look, Canada is bigger than both.
So, do you propose to split the USA and Canada up? After al, you just told me that running a country that big as a Federation is slopply and not recommended.:P
That's a bullshit analogy, because that pub is not an economy. In that pub, those men bring some money from the outside, and the pub is just a sink for it.
In a real economy, it doesn't work that way. That tenth guy, for example, isn't someone who shits his own gold coins and injects them in the economy, but someone who got a disproportionately large slice of the pie we're all producing. He isn't _producing_ $59 out of nowhere. The money is just an IOU for how much of the pie you're allowed to take. And somehow he's entitled to take more for per hour he put in.
If you want a more apt analogy, think not a pub and someone producing money out of nowhere to pay your beer. Think, say, a semi-closed medieval economy, and chipping in to maintain the roads they trade along:
- the first four men are the serfs. They do most of the actual work, and it's their grain that gets exported along those roads. In fact, they actually build the road too during the few months when they're not working the fields. They barely get a subsistence meal (and the 10th and 9th guy would have a fit if these could afford a beer), but don't get asked to pay any extra money. They paid their due in producing that crop that the others apropriated and sold.
- the fifth guy is the village guard, tax man and toll collector rolled in one, and doubles as the master's footman in case of a war too. He gets paid a pittance for his work, but gets taxed 1 florin (to use an apropriate medieval currency) for it, for road maintenance.
- the sixth guy is the miller. He actually gets to keep a share of the grain milled at his mill, but gets taxed 3 florins. He still makes a good living out of that arrangement.
- the seventh guy is the smith. He makes everything from horseshoes to ploughshares to the tenth guy's armour. He doesn't own his work either, 'cause the baron owns his smithy and gets the lion's share. But he gets a fair pay for it, even if he has to pay 7 florins right back as taxes. Still, his ore and coal come along that road, so he can understand paying to maintain that infrastructure.
- the eigth guy is the baron's scribe and clerk. He commands a high price because he's so smart. He gets paid a heck of a lot more than those serfs, and can even afford some minor luxuries. But, he also gets taxed 12 florins, or about a third of his nominal wage. He complains about it a lot, even though he's still left with more than the smith had before taxes. He thinks that a fair tax would be if everyone paid 10 florins, including the serfs who are already kept at at subsistence level and don't make that much in the first place.
- the ninth guy is the merchant who goes off to sell the grain and some of the smith's product once a year, to the nearest trade centre. He not only makes a fortune, but since he controls the baron's money supply, he can get almost any laws and concessions to swing his way. He gets to pay 18 florins for his income, and that annoys him no end. Why, he's the guy who makes money, while those serfs only get paid. They should pay him, not tax him, is what he keeps saying.
- the tenth guy is the baron. He gets the lion's share, regardless of whether that little village actually makes a profit or not. (A recent story on The Register comes to mind, about a CEO getting paid 74 million when the company _lost_ billions.) Due to imperial regulations, he has to pay 59 florins imperial tax for road maintenance and policing. He likes to act as if he produced that money by shitting gold, and someone is robbing him at gun point if he has to pay for the infrastructure that made him money. He pays astroturfers like David R. Kamerschen to spin him as if he were minting his own money and injecting money in the system, instead of as the guy who gets to plunder it the hardest.
And when the emperor decides to reduce that tax to 80 florins? Well, everyone is still working the same. Those serfs are still the ones actually feeding everyone else and doing most of the hard work, but they get nothing out of it. They're
1. First and foremost, that still doesn't justify the need for an "everyone else is doing X" story, except for sheeple. Everyone else just needs info that it's possible, a list of pros and cons to consider, and maybe some idea of what's been done with it before. (E.g., how many users does it support.) That's it. From there they can use their own head.
In other words an an appeal to numbers is still a fallacy. A solution can be right even if nobody else is using it (because their problem doesn't equal your problem), and it can be wrong for you even if it worked for a billion people who had a different problem. Probably a billion people prayed to Osiris for good crops, across the millenia of Egyptian history, but that doesn't make it the right solution.
Heck, even the "use thin clients" idea is based on just that: what works for a billion people at home, isn't necessarily the same as what you need at work. Different problem, different solution.
So anyone who needs the safety of a herd to take a decision like that, either of them, is sheeple in my book. Plain and simple. They haven't done the analysis, they just feel safe following a herd and not taking any decisions of their own.
2. For that matter, I doubt that there even exists a "one size fits all" solution. What works for a research lab (where you have most people interacting with the terrabytes of data on the server anyway,) doesn't work for a marketing company (where everyone needs a laptop and enough data for a presentation in the field anyway.) Different problems have vastly different solutions.
So anyone who's trying to sell you a solution before even knowing what your problem is, is selling you snake oil, dogma or wishful thinking. Telling a company up front what to do, before you even know what happens there, is like me telling you to take Tetracyclin before even knowing if you have a cough.
3. The problem in the end is what you've hinted at: there's a _need_ for real information, but the incentive is to _offer_ thinly veiled marketing. Supply and demand aren't just mis-matched, they're of different things entirely.
There's not much incentive for anyone to essentially do a free analysis of your problem (or of enough problems that yours is easily found as one of his categories) and give you the right solution. That's consulting work, and it's expensive work. Hard work too. To give it to you for free, or for the price of a magazine subscription, essentially someone else would have to pony up the cost difference.
There is however a ton of incentive to try to give you a "solution" which incidentally involves the product they (or their sponsor) sells. Whether it fits your real problem or not.
Heh. Nobody is arguing that, but that's exactly the crap artifficial system that other countries are forced to adhere to... even when it's against their interests.
The thing is, money is just an abstraction to make the system work smoother. Go back to reading even, say, Adam Smith: the "wealth" of a nation is measured by how well the goods it gets match the needs and desires of its citizens. That's why you live better in the USA than they do in China. You get some of China's goods too, to match _your_ needs.
That system actually does very little for China, though. They get to export some goods to match _your_ needs instead of using them to match their own citizens' needs, i.e., instead of raising their own standard of living.
Even then, it would be a fair trade if they used the dollars they get, to buy things they need more. But the whole trade defficit scheme means they don't. In that relationship, the USA gets more and China gets some IOUs. As in, "I Owe You goods worth this many dollars." If the rest of the world actually tried to cash in those trillions of dollars, the value of the dollar would go down by an order of magnitude or more. Because you just don't produce the goods they could buy with them.
But in the mean time, that market doesn't work like Adam Smith and the free market apologists thought. Instead of being a mechanism by which China gives away stuff its citizens don't need more, and gets stuff they actually need, it's a mechanism by which China gets some IOUs instead of matching its own citizens' needs. As the wealth of nations go, China gets impoverished by that system.
And if, as the GGP was getting at, the USA decided it can ignore the IOUs because its dogs are bigger than the tax collectors', essentially you'd tell the whole world that USA's IOUs are worth nothing. They'd be a lot less inclined to sell you for more worthless IOUs in the future.
But even that lopsided trade is already based on some artifficial conventions that we, the western world, imposed upon those countries. In a lot of cases the goods they "import" to give those dollars back, are produced locally in China. But they must pay a foreign corporation a "tax" on goods produced in China and sold in China. We created an artifficial situation which _causes_ the western markets to be artifficially wealthier. We decided that the goods China has are low worth, ours are high worth, and China can't produce ours unless it's for one of our corporations. Then they can import their own product and pay us a tax for it.
To use a more classic economics example, the whole trade and market theory is based on the following idea: if England is better for producing wool, and France is better for producing wine, then the sane thing to do is raise sheep in England and grapes in France, then trade them. And the money and merchants' greed would be a mechanism for figuring out the exchange rate and making sure each country gets something closer to what its citizens want.
But now imagine a system where we artifficially decided that wine is cheap, wool is expensive, and France is outright forbidden to raise sheep except if it's for an English lord. 'Cause England patented sheep. Well, _of_ _course_ then the English market would be wealthier than the French one. But it's only due to an artifficial system which pumps resources out of France and makes them pay even for sheep their own shepherds raise.
It's a hypothetical example, France would have never bowed to that kind of conditions, but it's not entirely hypothetical for other goods and countries: That's exactly the thing that, say, IP conventions _do_ to poorer countries. They can only produce raw materials, they have to import computers from us. Even if they know how to make a computer, even if the fabs are on their land and staffed by local workers, and even if the damned design team who designed the CPU or chipset are their own people in their own countries. But they can't actually produce it for themselves. They have to beg, say, _Intel_ to build tha
1. Actually, regardless of whether they are making a comeback or not, or what their advantages and disadvantages may be, this is probably just a PR story. Just like the "The Suit Is Back!" that got traced back to a PR agency a couple of years ago.
PR loves to masquerade as news because it bypasses your BS filter. An ad for Men's Warehouse suits gets looked over, a piece of news that you won't get hired unless you wear a suit, tries to replace your premises with theirs and let you take a leap to the "I must buy a suit" conclusion. Or better yet, to the even better conclusion, "I must only hire people in suits 'cause everyone else is doing it." There are a lot of sheeple out there who only need a "The Herd Is That Way -->" sign to willingly enter someone's pen and be sheared like "everyone else".
For anyone who's not sheeple, this is a non-story. Whether _you_ need a server instead of PCs or not, depends on what _your_ needs are and what _your_ employees are doing. Use your own head.
The only ones who need an "everyone else is doing X" story are those who have to follow a herd to feel secure.
Hence, the love PR has for this kind of story.
2. Over-simplifications like "all they need is internet, database access, and word processing" were false when arguing why grandma should only need an old 486, and tend to be just as false for a company. So you'll have to do some analysis if for a particular company that is indeed true, or just glossing over what's really going on. (Or even wishful thinking by some IT guy who feels his job would sound more important if he was overseeing a server.)
E.g., a lot of companies have salesmen who go with a laptop to various customers to give a presentation and try to win a contract. Are you ready for the case when that guy you're trying to sell insurance doesn't have internet to connect to your server via VPN? Are you sure that those server side apps' files can be converted flawlessly to MS Office or whatever those sales guys have on their laptop?
It's just one example where goimng, "bah, they only use database apps and word processing" is glossing over a more complex problem.
3. The argument for saving costs is a good one, and far from me to advise wasting money. But you have to be sure that you're actually _saving_ money across the organisation, not just saving $1000 in the narrow slice you see, at the cost of causing $1,000,000 to be lost in workarounds and lost productivity somewhere else. Entirely too much "cost cutting" lately is the latter kind of bullshit theatre.
E.g., if someone costs you $100,000 per year -- and I don't mean just wage, but also electricity costs, building rent, etc -- saving $1000 is nullified if it drops their productivity by as little as 1%. Saving a few hours per year of an IT guy's work can be a very bad trade off, if it costs that guy as little as 5 minutes total per 8h work day to put up with the quirks and delays of the centralized system. (480 minutes a day, times 1% is 4.8 minutes.) It can add up very easily to that. It only takes wasting 1 second per form through some web-app instead of letting that guy massage the data locally in Excel or Access(*), to add up to more than that in a day. A close enough approximation can very easily be approximative enough to actually turn the whole thing into a loss.
(*)... or whatever F/OSS equivalents you prefer. This is not MS advocacy, so fill in the blanks with whatever you prefer.
And as you move higher up the totem pole, things get even funkier. If a salesman is doing contracts worth millions of dollars with those presentation, I hope you better save a _lot_ with that centralized solution, because it only takes one lost contract (e.g., because he couldn't connect) to put a big minus in the equation. E.g., if you're going to pay a CEO tens of millions per year, and actually believe that his work is worth every cent (heh, I know, but let's keep pretending,) then... again, you better be damned sure that you don't drop _his_
1. For a start, it would work that way if the USA were the only market in the world. I do believe that China can also sell to Europe, or to its own damn citizens. I don't think the Chinese would revolt if they could buy good computers instead of exporting them.
The USA survived pretty well by selling its best stuff locally instead of exporting it all, didn't it?
Anyway, the USA has, what, 5% of the world's population? There's a whole other 95% who could buy that stuff.
2. Whatever advantage there may be in selling to the USA, would disappear overnight if the USA decided not to pay, which is (I believe) what the GP was getting at. The whole deficit scheme is, basically, borrowing money from those countries in exchange for their products. If the USA decided to just pocket some trillions of dollars overnight, on the justification that, basically, "our dogs are bigger than the tax collectors'", it would find itself a much less attractive market. Equally overnight.
3. The whole lopsided market situation exists because countries are made to export their raw materials for cents and have to buy high-tech stuff for thousands of dollars. Or, ridiculously enough, lately manufacture that high-tech stuff themselves in their own sweatshops, sell it to themselves, and send the profits to some overseas corporation.
Basically think: you want new shoes. So I send you my permit to raise your own pig, slaughter it yourself, tan its skin, and make your own gloves. Only now you have to pay me for the gloves. I'll even pay you back a few cents for the leather, 'cause that's raw materials and dirt cheap, and charge you lots for the gloves.
And you can't just say "fuck you, buddy" because there are some international treaties and that forbid you from using my patented design and my "Le Moraelin Haute Couture" label. Oh, and to add insult to injury, you designed that design for me too, but I patented it, 'cause I'm the big international corporation with teh moneyz.
And while for gloves that's just a matter of being a fashion victim, for a lot of other stuff it's less black and white.
That's the shit end of the imperialism stick, that those countries get. Mostly because we, the western world, promise to give them a black eye one way or another, if they don't abide by that kind of an arrangement.
Far from being some kind of great help that China would be foolish to cut off, it's a very disadvantageous system for China and a lot of other countries. If they threw it off, their economy wouldn't implode, and their standard of living would go up overnight. Again, they have a billion of their own people to sell that stuff to, instead of selling it to 300 million foreigners. Other than an artifficial financial and trade system imposed on them saying that it's better to sell to an American than to 4 Chinese, there is no real reason why that is so.
_If_ the western world decided to just plunder the existing debts, that might just be the excuse they're waiting for, to get out of that system.
1. Actually, I have to wonder how much of it is simply the old game of passing the blame.
See, those computers didn't program themselves, and evem those brilliant geeks coding them probably weren't also Ph.Ds in economics. They also probably weren't the ones who gathered the wrong data, that then got fed into the machine. They weren't the guys who decided the business process they were asked to implement or rate.
The computer does exactly what it's told, and based on the exact data you feed into it. It doesn't have gut feelings. It doesn't do "but what if the bubble bursts?" scenarios unless you explicitly ask it to... and even then, only within the parameters you set for that "what if" scenario.
The computer can jolly well nod a bubble, if that's what it's been programmed to do. E.g., if you ask it to only judge a mortgage based on X% interest, Y% default rate, and the house price rises Z% per year, you can get it's blessing quite easily. If Z > X, it can even end up that defaults are the _ideal_ case, and you make more money out of a default than out of a paid back loan. The "what if Z drops below X again?" scenario won't be evaluated unless you explicitly ask it to run it.
And I suspect that this is exactly what happened there. Those computers and those geeky "quants" calculated exactly what those higher up the pyramid told them to calculate. There was someone higher up who decided to go with those parameters. And now they're trying to pass the blame to the peons which implemented it.
Even the bit you quoted, is surrealistic: "As we now know, they were using the wrong data. They looked at the recent history of mortgages and saw that foreclosure rate is generally below 2 percent. So they figured, absolute worst-case scenario, the foreclosure rate may go to 8 or 10 or 12 percent." Essentially they _made_ _up_ a piece of data (that worst case scenario rate) from little more than a wild guess, _garbage_ data therefore, and fed it into the computer. And somehow expected that GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) wouldn't apply?
Even if I'm to believe that that was all that tripped them, the blame lies not with the computer or with the nerds who coded it, but with whoever came up with that number out of thin air, and decided it's ok to bet the farm on it. Or on an analysis based on it. _That_ made up number and basing decisions on it, was the flawed decision there, from which everything else is just consequence. Whether by computer or by pen and paper, the rest is inconsequent. Someone made up a number and based a business decision on it. That person is to blame. The computers and the "quants" were just props in the play that unfoldd from there on, and trying to pass them the blame is stupid.
2. How did that number come to be anyway? By what maths did they come up with it? Why is that the "worst case scenario" number, instead of the more obvuious, "if you give money to people with no income and no assets, worst case scenario is that none can pay it back." Note that they didn't say "most likely scenario", but "worst case scenario."
Is it possible that it was the "worst case scenario" where the computer still gave the OK? I.e., that it's essentially reverse-engineering the system to come up with a lie that it still accepts? In that case, it's not the program which is to blame, but the person who deliberately tried to game it.
3. Or maybe they're genuinely _that_ stupid? A quote from Charles Babbage comes to mind:
On two occasions I have been asked, "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
That was: asked by members of the Parliament, btw.
One could probably even find it funny that before a computer even _existed_ (Charles Babbage was inventing one, but it hadn't been built yet) some people were actually hoping it would be a magical device where you can just d
Well, it seems to me that it's just a matter of perspective. We don't really see absolute values, we see deltas, and the baseline is the present.
Think of, say, dollars. Just saying "in year X you'll earn Y dollars a month" is only saying anything as a comparison. Whether it's in absolute dollar values, or "how much can I buy with it", the comparison only says much compared to your current lot in life. A 1960 standard of living would be luxury for someone from 1912 (think even just having antibiotics for a change), but would be a step back for you from 2008.
Or think of CPU MHz / Gigaflops / Gigabytes / whatever computer metric. "You'll have a computer with a 4 MHz CPU and 48 kilobytes RAM and a CRT" would have sounded like an awesome supercomputer in 1960 (they eventually landed on the moon with a weaker computer than that!) Have it in your home, all yours? Man, that would have sounded so unbelievably cool. Just think of what you'd do with all that raw computer power. But few people would even consider it a usable computer nowadays in 2008.
And I will postulate a _hypothesis_ that there must be a psychological "X times better than today" threshold, which drives those predictions. I don't know what that X might be. But there's a point where the "meh, who cares" factor of, say, predicting something 10% better next month, starts being the "that's awesome" of, say, predicting something 10 times better in 5 years.
E.g., think back when Moore's Law still worked that way, and you had, say, a 100 MHz Pentium. Predicting that you'll have 133 MHz in a few months, is uninteresting. Predicting you'll have a whole 1 GHz of CPU power in 5 years, now that would have gotten your attention.
So depending on which curve you are, and assuming it looks like infinite exponential growth ahead, the future (worth predicting) will always be Y years ahead. As in, "in Y years it'll be X times better than today." If you have the same X you aim for, the future will always be Y years ahead.
1. Even leaving squirrels out, even for humans it never worked that way.
E.g., during Old Kingdom era in ancient egypt, if you passed the peak of infant mortality, the 50-50 point of deaths was in the low 30's for human males and low _20's_ for human females. They married and started making kids at _14_ years old for males, and _12_ years old for females. When you had puberty, that's it, you were good to reproduce.
So even for humans, you can't say that the age for making kids dropped. Compared to some 99% of the existence of humanity, we're now starting making kids at around _twice_ the age they did. Why would that stop evolution _now_ when it didn't before?
And, yes, it didn't stop evolution before. By the genetic data we have, aleles relating to, say, intelligence actually underwent a period of accelerated evolution in humans in the last few thousand years.
So making kids at 12 was plenty of chance for mutations, as little as some hundreds of years ago. Why is making kids at 24 not enough nowadays? Something doesn't add up, IMHO.
2. The length of DNA is also not that dramatically different between humans and some other species. E.g., chimps and generally apes have about the same number of nucleotid pairs as the humans. Yet they have a lot shorter life, and become fertile at a much earlier age.
So if it was true that you must make kids at 40 years old for humans, or evolution stops... then wouldn't the same apply to apes? Yet the chimp, which is pretty much a cousin to humans, rarely lives more than 40 years in the wild, with the median being much lower. Most of the chimp cubs are born at a much lower age of their parents. Chimps reach puberty at the age of _9_ and start reproducing relatively soon afterwards.
A) As I was saying, if that stopped evolution, we wouldn't be here in the first place. There is no indication that the common ancestor of human and chimps waited until old age to reproduce.
B) The chimp did evolve. The split between normal chimps and Bonobos is as recent as 1.5-2 million years ago, and they jolly well evolved into different species. And (highly) debatably the Bonobo just reached sentience.
I mean, cats on the average live 14 to 20 years if kept indoors and well taken care of, or a _lot_ less out in the wild. Most humans don't have children at the age at which cats die. I don't think it stopped cat evolution.
Squirrels have a life expectancy of a couple of years. Humans would still be a toddler by the age when a squirrel dies, and thus stops reproducing. I don't think that was a big problem for evolution.
Mayflies live between 30 minutes and a whole day as an adult, though, to be fair, we must add 1 year worth of larva and nymph stage to that. Does that prevent mutations and natural selection. I don't think so.
Basically _most_ species out there have a life expectancy lower than the age at which humans reproduce. If that stopped evolution, then we wouldn't be here in the first place.
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Actually, you just illustrate why I'm against people taking the law into their own hands. Yes, he _believes_ he's doing all that great stuff and saving the world. I'd rather he fucked off and left it to the law and democracy to decide that kind of thing. Those guys shooting abortion doctors too believe that their own moral system that they feel they have to impose on anyone else. I think we can agree pretty quickly that they're actually deluded idiots, and doing more harm than good.
Exactly that mentality that "common sense trumps law" is what causes a problem.
Look, the laws are just what the majority agreed upon. With what right can one person decide that he's so enlightened as to decide for everyone else? No, seriously. I'm not willing to give that right to a dictator, and I'm surely not willing to give it to Joe Sixpack.
Additionally, you'll notice that the legal system is all about safeguards against abuse, and about hearing the other side of the story too. Because nobody is omniscient. We all know half the story, or less.
E.g., what if one particular GM crop doesn't actually do whatever evils that guy imagines them to do? Do you think he's done extensive testing of exactly what crops are used there, and what the extra genes do?
Vigilantes taking the law in their own hands, don't have room for all those safeguards, hearing witnesses and experts first, and much less for the other guy's half of the story. It's bypasses the whole idea that we built society and justice upon.
No, I'm actually pretty dispassionate about what happens to this one dolt. And I'm certainly not proposing to crucify him.
But there _is_ a law, he knew the risks, so I don't have any problem with seeing it applied either.
What I am passionate about is more the idea, than the actual person. I don't think that going vigilante is the right course of action, regardless of for what cause. And above all I don't think asshats are what any righteous cause needs.
To use your example, I don't know whether GM crops are good or bad, but asshats like the one you describe don't do that cause any good. _If_ you're going to fight against GM crops, you don't want to become known as "those crazy guys destroying other people's crops." It doesn't take too many people like that to put the whole cause in a bad light, _and_ to paint your opponents in the sympathetic light of being the innocent victims of a few crazies. If you want to win that fight, you want to be the guys with the good PR image and the scientific facts to back up your position.
Note that I'm neither opposing GM crops, nor saying you do. I'm just using a random example. If you believe cause X is right, whichever that X might be, going vigilante about it is actually bad for that cause X. That's all I'm trying to say. In too many words.
Maybe, but my point was about individual asshats, rather than about whether or not he can speak for a whole group. If that bothers you, you could replace "Jack The Ripper" or the Taliban instead of "Mao" there, and the point still stands.
Let's just say that between person X playing Warcraft and person Y doing vandalism and thus breaking the law... in my book X has the higher moral standing. Or Y has the lower one.
Well, no doubt there, but just because there are worse crimes, it doesn't excuse this one. And I'm sure that the "there are worse crimes" factor _has_ been taken into account when they gave him 1 to 1.5 years, instead of, say, 20 to life.
Just a thought: "A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular." -- Adlai Stevenson.
We came a long way since the days when you could be run out of town, or outright killed, for being the unpopular guy. Back then, it just created group think, and the tyranny of those who could raise the mob against you. Pretty much all the freedoms you have, not to mention a good chunk of the economic growth, have come to be just because someone wasn't too affraid to say what they think. Even if it was the safety of being in a like-minded group. Now we let people be even more open about it, and I think that we all benefit from that.
So let's not throw that away.
And we've had arbitrary justice before, and there have been some bloody revolts to get the rule of the law instead. Vigilante justice is a huge step back in that aspect too.
Yes, unfortunately the system does get gamed by asshats like the CoS, but vigilante justice is still not the answer.
Plus, where would you stop? Where is the unpopularity threshold where it's ok to take the law in your own hands? E.g., if you drive your sports car in a very poor neighbourhood, is it ok for them to key it because the whole neighbourhood feels offended? What about if you're an atheist in a bible-thumping town? Or the nerd in a yuppie school? Is it ok to beat you up because 90% of the high school population doesn't like your kind?
I really don't think we ought to open that can of worms. There are more reasons to be unpopular when you're, in fact, right, than it is to be when you're a criminal organization. (Al Capone was insanely popular, for example.)
Guilty as charged. I don't feel much sympathy there.
He brought it upon himself.
Obviously.
Actually, I doubt that any campaign needs this kind of an asshat in the first place. It just creates the image of Scientology being the innocent victims, and their opponents being a bunch of criminals. We can do without that kind of making martyrs.
E.g., no offense, but you seem to do that generalization yourself when you paint the whole campaign as needing to try to not get caught. I'm not saying that to pick on you, but just to illustrate the kind of association that gets made. If even you, presumably a smart guy, fall for that kind of guilt by association, imagine how much easier that is for someone who understands computers and scientology even less.
Seriously, read any advocacy FAQ (e.g., start with the Linux one) and you'll see that all progress is actually made by the people who keep a professional and helpful attitude about it. Rabid zealots and asshat script kiddies are the kind you _don't_ want your movement to be associated with, because it ruins your whole credibility. That kind of "friends" are literally worse than your enemies.
And in this case it also ruins the whole moral high ground aspect. This guy infected (or help create a market for infecting) a bunch of innocent people's computers, and stuffed their internet connection to do his DDOS attack. That's actual harm done to innocents. It's an evil act. Once you show that kind of lack of morals or of respect for your fellow human, you just don't have a high ground from which to look down upon scientology.
If you will, it's a bit like reading about Mao denouncing the Soviet Union leaders. You're not inclined to rally on his side, because he's an evil fuck himself. Sometimes the enemy of my enemy is still a sociopathic prick.
"Other person" doesn't necessarily mean PvP. There _are_ plenty of _cooperative_ things to do. So if you can conceive any other interaction with people than hitting them upside the head, well, that's your shortcoming, not mine.
I've played enough of WAR to form my own impression. I don't like it. I know all I need there, I would say. First hand too. And by my tastes, it seems to me like, yes, yet another of the half-arsed, unfinished, me-too efforts I've named there. A replacement for WoW it ain't.
And so far the only excuses for it I've heard, in all the slashvertisments we get about it (do they at least pay Slasdhot for it?,) is, basically, "yeah, well, but I like its PvP more than in WoW."
So I'm willing to allow for the possibility that some people at least like the PvP part. I'm not going to tell them what they should like. Do you have a problem with that? Or wtf is your problem?
It seems to me like a non-sequitur. Whatever merits or faults DAOC might have had, it is irrelevant, because, get this: WAR is not DAOC. It will have to live or die by its own merits.
Plus, I'm not sure what your point is anyway. DAOC didn't dethrone EQ back then, it didn't enlarge the genre, and it was a one-trick pony too. It had... RvR. That's it. I can't think of any other merits or unique features. According to MMOG Charts, most likely it just recycled some players from other games. Most likely, those which really wanted realm-based PvP.
Or maybe you want to compare it to their other games? Catch: Silent Death Online, Magestorm Millennium, Darkness Falls: The Crusade, ID4 Online, Spellbinder: The Nexus Conflict, and Splatterball. Let me see...
- Silent Death Online: buggy, full of exploits, got subsidized by AOL for a while, then got shut down by EA after living less than 2 years
- Magestorm Millenium: a forgettable Hexen clone. 'Nuff said.
- Darkness Falls: The Crusade: yet another MUD, in a market already saturated with MUDs at the time
- ID4 Online: a flop based on a movie franchise. Let's move on.
Etc.
Or do you mean their failed and cancelled project Imperator Online?
At any rate, how are those relevant to WAR? I'm only bringing them up because apparently you're so upset by my not mentioning other Mythic games. Ok, now you have a long list of Mythic flops. Feel any better? :P
1. Actually, I don't know if they really need a cell.
Even from the viewpoint of life evolution on Earth, it all started with some self-replicating ribosyme that "lived" perfectly well in the soup of aminoacids and nucleotides around it. The cell was just an increasingly complex test tube around that reaction, complete with increasingly complex ways of regulating the exact composition of the contained drop of sea water.
I can see how that was an advantage to evolve, in a primordial soup that was hit and miss anyway and probably (very slowly) degrading in quality over time. But in a lab, we can do that regulating artifficially. Admittedly, using a cell might be cheaper, but we can do without it too.
And indeed there is plenty of organic stuff we already do without a cell. E.g., detecting certain DNA sequences is done via enzymes which bind exactly to one sequence, and start replicating it until it's enough to be detected. We don't really build specialized cells for that.
2. Actually, to me another aspect is more interesting there: the fact that it's all done with RNA.
Proteins already _do_ exactly what these guys seem to do: bind only to certain mollecule configurations, but not to others. You can see it as logic operations and whatnot, but really it's all chemistry and that's all it does: bind only to certain mollecules, but not to others. It's a bit like saying that a keyring with two keys is a mechanical OR gate: it unlocks a lock that matches either key 1 or key 2. It's simultaneously technically true, and a bit misleading.
But there's a more interesting aspect to it: your body usually uses proteins for that, and DNA/RNA is just a way to encode a protein which will actually do the matching. E.g., those enzymes I mentioned, are proteins. They do all the heavy duty chemistry, from processing the cell's "food", to regulating what goes in or out, to destroying all chemicals which are non-polar and pass right through the cell wall instead of being regulated by the protein valves on the wall, to movement, to DNA repairs, to regulating what other proteins are built and where do they go.
As long as that's all the model we know, that needs a rather complex initial configuration for the start of life. You need something that's capable not only of replicating itself, but also of encoding proteins. It's already a bit too big an incredible machine, and appearing out of nowhere, even after billions of years and trillions of tries per second, still is a damn improbable event.
But that everything can be done via RNA only, that opens a whole new possibility. We already know that RNA can replicate itself. If it can also take the functions of a protein, offers a much simpler initial configuration for life. It's entirely possible that assembling proteins came later, as a better replacement, much like DNA later replaced RNA as the encoding of choice. The first cells could have been RNA-only, but could still have a metabolism and be able to regulate themselves well enough.
I find that fascinating.
Actually, I can tell you what kind of "deal" the woman and her father got out of the "the rapist must marry her" mentality, because in some places (e.g., Eastern Europe) some places still worked like that as late as the 19'th and early 20'th century. Even if not legally, but the mentality that a raped woman is dishonoured and can't be married otherwise, still created that kind of situations.
Well, let's say you're rich and have a daughter. Whoppee! Now I can rape her and you must marry her to me. It creates _incentive_ for rape. It's a perfectly good way to marry into a richer family. Probably tens of thousand of young women, got raped by the village bum who wanted to climb the social ladder that way.
Something which would have been at most a social matter between said village bum and the rich father, gets taken out on a girl who doesn't have any fault in either.
You also have to put it into context that the ancient times had a chronic shortage of women. Other people went to _war_ to get a wife as spoils of war. (Abominable too, mind you.) But now, with the Lord's blessing, you have a guaranteed way to just pick an unmarried girl and she's forced to be your wife. Just go rape her. If that's not incentive for rape, I don't know what is.
And, hey, not only she got raped, but now she's also mandatorily saddled with a psychopathic husband who thought low enough of her and of his fellow human to see rape as just another tool in his arsenal. Yeah, that'll be a happy marriage.
It's as crap a deal as saying that, hey, if I kick you in the balls, I also get to fuck you up the arse. That should soothe your pain, right?
And the fact that the Bible sanctions that kind of a crap deal, doesn't make it some kind of mercy for someone who would have been raped anyway, it makes it yet another evil text that encouraged that rape in the first place.
1.Well, first of all, you have to realize that everyone has different tastes. So what someone likes, someone else might hate, and viceversa.
So for some people it apparently was all that, especially, I gather, those whose online life revolved around PvP. For me it most certainly didn't. I don't find it to be a horrible game, mind you, but it did feel unfinished and... well, it _is_ a PvP game, no matter how much the devs and publisher insist that PvP is purely optional. _Technically_ it is, but it's about on par saying that distributing your talent points is optional on WoW. If you're content with being a second class citizen, they are.
_I_ have no interest whatsoever in PvP, so my interest in WAR is also diminished. Being interested in only their PvE game, I found it smaller and relatively less interesting than WoW, plus marred by the fact that you _will_ be a second class citizen without PvP. (They even have the equivalent of talents earned with PvP.) On the other hand, I guess someone whose whole life revolves around PvP, might appreciate having less filler around the PvP part.
I don't even see it as necessarily a bad thing. PvP and PvE _are_ largely different games, so it stands to reason that they could be better catered for by different MMOs. Maybe Blizzard can start caring less about pleasing the PvP-ers if they fuck off to WAR, and stop messing with the PvE balance to PvP ends, for example.
2. If you want a bigger picture, I'm affraid it's too early to say. Bear in mind that it takes time for the flux of players back and forth to stabilize. And we didn't even have one month since WAR's release yet, to see how many remain after the free month expires.
People have been saying the exact same about Dungeons And Dragons Online, Lord Of The Rings Online, Age Of Conan, and even Tabula Rasa. Each time we had doom prophets heralding the coming of the WoW-slayer, and swearing that as soomn as <NEXT GAME> comes out everyone and their dog is swearing off WoW for good. You don't even have to scroll too far back through the Slashdot archive to still find the masses of disgruntled WoW-ers swearing that AOC is all that, and then some. It hasn't quite happened so far.
Maybe WAR _is_ all that, maybe it isn't, and I'm not going to be the one who proclaims either. I'm just saying that it's too early to tell.
3. And in the end, unless you have shares in either Mythic or Blizzard, does it matter? As I was saying, tastes are subjective. Whether a million people liked their game or whether everyone hated it, is no guarantee that _you_ will do the same. Wait until they offer a 7 day trial or something, and decide for yourself.
There are plenty of more general ones, or which had been interpreted as still applying.
E.g., Joan d'Arc was burned at the stake for the heresy of... wearing men's clothes. So that's one commandment which wasn't interpreted as only applying to a certain point in time. The various bits of mysoginism in the bible were not only still applied as late as the 20'th century in some parts, but some bible-belt fundies still cling to them as an argument for male supremacy.
E.g., "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" was still applied jolly well in the renaissance, and in some places as late as the 1800's. As in, really, the last documented case we have is from 1811. Heck, in the USA the witch trials were in 1692 to 1693. We're talking _almost_ 1700's, FFS.
Nobody took it as, basically, "ah, well, it only applied to the times in the Exodus."
E.g., all those commanded massacres actually pain a rather consistent image: for spreading heresy or rather religion among the Lord's folks, the punishment is complete genocide. It's not a big extrapolation to make that that's generally what the Lord wishes, since every single time that's what he commanded. And it's not just my interpretation, but Moses's too: in Numbers he acts surprised that the soldiers didn't kill those women and children in the first place. I mean, duh, it should have been obvious. He doesn't go, "ok, you did well to wait and see if the Lord commands mass-murder in this speciffic case", but as if it should have been obvious that that's what's expected.
Etc.
Now you may point out that we decided to be civilized and no longer apply that crap. Guess what? Most modern muslims aren't islamists either.
But at any rate, it's stuff that _we_ decided to no longer apply. In the "good book", it's still there.
Actually, as far as I can tell, he has too many for a raid. All the 40 man raids I remember offhand are level 60 raids from before the expansion.
However, you have to also keep in mind that:
1. The loot you get in MC or AQ40 is less than what you get for random FedEx quests in the Hellfire Peninsula at level 58 after the expansion pack. So there's no need whatsoever to actually make them at level 60 with a 40 man group.
2. If you're going to do them just for nostalgia or curiosity sake, you can just leave it for when you're level 70 and well equipped. IIRC a well equipped 5-man level-70 group can down Onyxia, and a 7 man group can do MC. I haven't tried it after the latest patch, but that used to be the case at least.
So, really, I can't think of any situations where he'd actually need 40 characters nowadays. He can do just about anything imaginable with 25.
So, well, my question would be from the exact opposite direction: why a whole 36? Why not stop at 25?
I hope you realize that you've just pulled the shortest summary of the Emperor's New Clothes story.
The slightly longer version is this: an Emperor hired two... well, what today we'd call consultants or contractors, to weave him the most fabulous clothes ever made. So the guys just wasted the time and lived the good life on the Emperor's money, and not only they were nowhere near getting read, they hadn't even _started_. (Or maybe they were still painting UML sketches to seem like they're doing something;) So at one point, when the project was waaay overdue already, the Emperor started to want to see some results. So the two guys tell him that their cloth is so special that only very smart people see it, and stupid people can't see it at all. And they pretend to show him some empty air. Fearing that people will catch on that he's stupid, the emperor pretends to see the cloth. Then the same charade is repeated with the nobles and advisors, who too pretend to see the fabulous cloth. And when they have to pretend to be ready, they "dress" the emperor in the new "clothes" and parrade him naked through town, where the townspeople too pretend to see the clothes, lest someone catches wind that they're stupid.
In the original story, a kid shouting "the emperor is naked" is all it takes to unralvel the whole charade. IRL, most likely the people would have patted each other on the back and congratulated each other for not being as stupid as that simpleton child.
And I find that the story is an almost literal example of the burgeoning snake-oil business in IT nowadays. The exact same excuse is used: "if you can't see the fabulous benefits of our snake oil, it's only because you're stupid, ignorant, a has-been, a dinosaur, etc." You could rewrite the same story with "security/programming/IT consultants" as the two con artists, "reduced TCO" or "synergy" or "security" or "scalability" or any other buzzword-du-jour for the non-existent clothes, and cast a CIO and his yes-men as the emperor and his court... and the story wouldn't even be a fable. It would be a documentary of something that literally happens every day, exactly like that.
Well, except that they'd fire the guy shouting "the emperor is naked", congratulate each other for getting rid of that incompetent has-been, and pay for the rest of their lives to keep that crap snake-oil running. In our days, the two con artists get a fat maintenance contract to keep the Emperor's new clothes in best shape.
Now I don't know if Bruce is right or wrong, but you haven't addressed that either. You just decided that he's too stupid if he doesn't drink the Kool Aid. It's the Emperor's New Clothes all over again.
Not everyone is in Denmark and not all of Google's servers are in the Silicon Valley, ya know? Equally, now some of those chips which need less cooling will go to some Google server in Ireland (check it out, they're about as high up as you are on the map), and some which need more cooling will go to some poor sods in Mexico or Saudi Arabia or Israel or God knows which other hot place.
Yes, but way I see this is:
Intel isn't arbitrarily going, "man, we could make chips that run ok 5 degrees hotter, but we're gonna piss everyone off by demanding more cooling. Just because we can." Most likely Intel is already doing the best it can, and getting a bunch of chips which vary in how good they are. And they're getting the same bunch of chips regardless of whether Google demands higher temps or not.
Google just gets a cherry-picked bunch, but the average over Intel's production is still the same. Hence everyone else is getting a worse selection. They what remains after Google took the best.
It's a zero-sum game. The total load on the planet is the same. The same total bunch of chips exits Intel's fabs. On the total, no energy was conserved.
So Google's "going green" is at the cost of making everyone else less "green". They can willy-wave about how energy efficient they are, by simply dumping the difference on someone else.
That's not "going green", that's a predatory approach. Your computers could require on the average an extra 0.5W in cooling, so Google can willy-wave that theirs uses 1W less. They just dumped their costs and their "eco burden" to someone else.
It's akin to me willy-waving that I'm so green and produce less garbage than you... by dumping some of my garbage in random other people's garbage bins across the town. Yay, I'm so green now, you all can start worshipping me. Well, no, on the total the same amount of garbage being produced, I just dumped it and the related costs on other people. That's not going green, that's being a predator.
I can see why a business might want to cut their own costs, and not care about yours. That's, after all, the whole "invisible hand" theory. But let me repeat it: on the whole no energy was conserved. They just passed off some of their cooling costs (energy _and_ money) to someone else.
While I'll aggree with your main point, actually, it doesn't sound to me like he was having a lecture kind of meeting. A lecture at least involves someone, essentially, telling you, "I know how it's done, I decided it's done this way, I'll tell you in detail how." YMMV, but that's the basic idea. The meetings he's talking about, if I understood him right, are more the kind where someone doesn't want to be personally responsible for taking any decision. Quite the opposite. If he can't back out in dumbly applying some semi-irrelevant regulation or rule, he'll back out into, basically, "we all talked about it until everyone was too bored to give a shit any more, therefore we _all_ took that decision, therefore _I_ am not to blame." That is, if a decision is taken at all. Some end without anything being achieved whatsoever.
Actually, sadly enough, I can easily imagine that. One constant in my MUD days was that there'd _always_ be at least one idiot threatening to sue over some imaginary rights that he either made up or grossly misunderstood. We even had a stereotype of the "my dad is a lawyer and I'm gonna sue you" kid.
Favourite imaginary or mis-understood rights to sue over were:
- First amendment. If he can't shout insults and obscenities at everyone, you're censoring his free speech, ya know. He'll take you all the way to the ninth circle over it. That he doesn't even understand that it's a private server, and freedom of the press actually applies to whoever _owns_ the press (or the forum, as a digital age equivalent), seems to be the norm.
- freedom to act like a fucktard. If you don't let him be a griefer, you're
A) making role-play impossible at all (and here I was thinking there were a gazillion roles to play that don't involve screaming "I FUK UR MOM, NOOB! LEARN TO PLAY TEH GAME!" as you bury their equipment), and apparently role-playing an out-of-character fucktard is a basic human right.
B) some form of slavery. Why, having to play nice or abide by your common courtesy rules while on your property, is nothing short of a nazi dictatorship and denying him his basic dignity as a human.
The fact that nobody's forcing him to be there, if he doesn't like the rules, or that being on someone's private property is a privilege not a right, are beyond his comprehension skills.
- property rights. If his treasured Sword Of Ganking +5 got broken for lack of repairs, or worse yet _nerfed_, why, you messed with his private property. He'll see you in court for it.
Etc.
And while most didn't actually follow through, I remember offhand someone who _did_ sue Second Life because, get this: his business plan was abusing a bug in the program to buy virtual plots of land for a dollar, and resell them closer to their real value. And apparetly he thought he had some kind of basic human right to do that. And if Linden Labs banned his account for it, why, they're cutting off his money making scheme. And by Jove he has a right to make money. Heh.
I hope you realize that China and the USA are in a willy-waving contest as to which has the larger surface. They're just about equal. And, oh, look, Canada is bigger than both.
So, do you propose to split the USA and Canada up? After al, you just told me that running a country that big as a Federation is slopply and not recommended. :P
That's a bullshit analogy, because that pub is not an economy. In that pub, those men bring some money from the outside, and the pub is just a sink for it.
In a real economy, it doesn't work that way. That tenth guy, for example, isn't someone who shits his own gold coins and injects them in the economy, but someone who got a disproportionately large slice of the pie we're all producing. He isn't _producing_ $59 out of nowhere. The money is just an IOU for how much of the pie you're allowed to take. And somehow he's entitled to take more for per hour he put in.
If you want a more apt analogy, think not a pub and someone producing money out of nowhere to pay your beer. Think, say, a semi-closed medieval economy, and chipping in to maintain the roads they trade along:
- the first four men are the serfs. They do most of the actual work, and it's their grain that gets exported along those roads. In fact, they actually build the road too during the few months when they're not working the fields. They barely get a subsistence meal (and the 10th and 9th guy would have a fit if these could afford a beer), but don't get asked to pay any extra money. They paid their due in producing that crop that the others apropriated and sold.
- the fifth guy is the village guard, tax man and toll collector rolled in one, and doubles as the master's footman in case of a war too. He gets paid a pittance for his work, but gets taxed 1 florin (to use an apropriate medieval currency) for it, for road maintenance.
- the sixth guy is the miller. He actually gets to keep a share of the grain milled at his mill, but gets taxed 3 florins. He still makes a good living out of that arrangement.
- the seventh guy is the smith. He makes everything from horseshoes to ploughshares to the tenth guy's armour. He doesn't own his work either, 'cause the baron owns his smithy and gets the lion's share. But he gets a fair pay for it, even if he has to pay 7 florins right back as taxes. Still, his ore and coal come along that road, so he can understand paying to maintain that infrastructure.
- the eigth guy is the baron's scribe and clerk. He commands a high price because he's so smart. He gets paid a heck of a lot more than those serfs, and can even afford some minor luxuries. But, he also gets taxed 12 florins, or about a third of his nominal wage. He complains about it a lot, even though he's still left with more than the smith had before taxes. He thinks that a fair tax would be if everyone paid 10 florins, including the serfs who are already kept at at subsistence level and don't make that much in the first place.
- the ninth guy is the merchant who goes off to sell the grain and some of the smith's product once a year, to the nearest trade centre. He not only makes a fortune, but since he controls the baron's money supply, he can get almost any laws and concessions to swing his way. He gets to pay 18 florins for his income, and that annoys him no end. Why, he's the guy who makes money, while those serfs only get paid. They should pay him, not tax him, is what he keeps saying.
- the tenth guy is the baron. He gets the lion's share, regardless of whether that little village actually makes a profit or not. (A recent story on The Register comes to mind, about a CEO getting paid 74 million when the company _lost_ billions.) Due to imperial regulations, he has to pay 59 florins imperial tax for road maintenance and policing. He likes to act as if he produced that money by shitting gold, and someone is robbing him at gun point if he has to pay for the infrastructure that made him money. He pays astroturfers like David R. Kamerschen to spin him as if he were minting his own money and injecting money in the system, instead of as the guy who gets to plunder it the hardest.
And when the emperor decides to reduce that tax to 80 florins? Well, everyone is still working the same. Those serfs are still the ones actually feeding everyone else and doing most of the hard work, but they get nothing out of it. They're
I understand what you're trying to say too, but:
1. First and foremost, that still doesn't justify the need for an "everyone else is doing X" story, except for sheeple. Everyone else just needs info that it's possible, a list of pros and cons to consider, and maybe some idea of what's been done with it before. (E.g., how many users does it support.) That's it. From there they can use their own head.
In other words an an appeal to numbers is still a fallacy. A solution can be right even if nobody else is using it (because their problem doesn't equal your problem), and it can be wrong for you even if it worked for a billion people who had a different problem. Probably a billion people prayed to Osiris for good crops, across the millenia of Egyptian history, but that doesn't make it the right solution.
Heck, even the "use thin clients" idea is based on just that: what works for a billion people at home, isn't necessarily the same as what you need at work. Different problem, different solution.
So anyone who needs the safety of a herd to take a decision like that, either of them, is sheeple in my book. Plain and simple. They haven't done the analysis, they just feel safe following a herd and not taking any decisions of their own.
2. For that matter, I doubt that there even exists a "one size fits all" solution. What works for a research lab (where you have most people interacting with the terrabytes of data on the server anyway,) doesn't work for a marketing company (where everyone needs a laptop and enough data for a presentation in the field anyway.) Different problems have vastly different solutions.
So anyone who's trying to sell you a solution before even knowing what your problem is, is selling you snake oil, dogma or wishful thinking. Telling a company up front what to do, before you even know what happens there, is like me telling you to take Tetracyclin before even knowing if you have a cough.
3. The problem in the end is what you've hinted at: there's a _need_ for real information, but the incentive is to _offer_ thinly veiled marketing. Supply and demand aren't just mis-matched, they're of different things entirely.
There's not much incentive for anyone to essentially do a free analysis of your problem (or of enough problems that yours is easily found as one of his categories) and give you the right solution. That's consulting work, and it's expensive work. Hard work too. To give it to you for free, or for the price of a magazine subscription, essentially someone else would have to pony up the cost difference.
There is however a ton of incentive to try to give you a "solution" which incidentally involves the product they (or their sponsor) sells. Whether it fits your real problem or not.
... and at Agincourt they were getting a thousand of them per second. Quite the bargain, eh? ;)
Heh. Nobody is arguing that, but that's exactly the crap artifficial system that other countries are forced to adhere to... even when it's against their interests.
The thing is, money is just an abstraction to make the system work smoother. Go back to reading even, say, Adam Smith: the "wealth" of a nation is measured by how well the goods it gets match the needs and desires of its citizens. That's why you live better in the USA than they do in China. You get some of China's goods too, to match _your_ needs.
That system actually does very little for China, though. They get to export some goods to match _your_ needs instead of using them to match their own citizens' needs, i.e., instead of raising their own standard of living.
Even then, it would be a fair trade if they used the dollars they get, to buy things they need more. But the whole trade defficit scheme means they don't. In that relationship, the USA gets more and China gets some IOUs. As in, "I Owe You goods worth this many dollars." If the rest of the world actually tried to cash in those trillions of dollars, the value of the dollar would go down by an order of magnitude or more. Because you just don't produce the goods they could buy with them.
But in the mean time, that market doesn't work like Adam Smith and the free market apologists thought. Instead of being a mechanism by which China gives away stuff its citizens don't need more, and gets stuff they actually need, it's a mechanism by which China gets some IOUs instead of matching its own citizens' needs. As the wealth of nations go, China gets impoverished by that system.
And if, as the GGP was getting at, the USA decided it can ignore the IOUs because its dogs are bigger than the tax collectors', essentially you'd tell the whole world that USA's IOUs are worth nothing. They'd be a lot less inclined to sell you for more worthless IOUs in the future.
But even that lopsided trade is already based on some artifficial conventions that we, the western world, imposed upon those countries. In a lot of cases the goods they "import" to give those dollars back, are produced locally in China. But they must pay a foreign corporation a "tax" on goods produced in China and sold in China. We created an artifficial situation which _causes_ the western markets to be artifficially wealthier. We decided that the goods China has are low worth, ours are high worth, and China can't produce ours unless it's for one of our corporations. Then they can import their own product and pay us a tax for it.
To use a more classic economics example, the whole trade and market theory is based on the following idea: if England is better for producing wool, and France is better for producing wine, then the sane thing to do is raise sheep in England and grapes in France, then trade them. And the money and merchants' greed would be a mechanism for figuring out the exchange rate and making sure each country gets something closer to what its citizens want.
But now imagine a system where we artifficially decided that wine is cheap, wool is expensive, and France is outright forbidden to raise sheep except if it's for an English lord. 'Cause England patented sheep. Well, _of_ _course_ then the English market would be wealthier than the French one. But it's only due to an artifficial system which pumps resources out of France and makes them pay even for sheep their own shepherds raise.
It's a hypothetical example, France would have never bowed to that kind of conditions, but it's not entirely hypothetical for other goods and countries: That's exactly the thing that, say, IP conventions _do_ to poorer countries. They can only produce raw materials, they have to import computers from us. Even if they know how to make a computer, even if the fabs are on their land and staffed by local workers, and even if the damned design team who designed the CPU or chipset are their own people in their own countries. But they can't actually produce it for themselves. They have to beg, say, _Intel_ to build tha
1. Actually, regardless of whether they are making a comeback or not, or what their advantages and disadvantages may be, this is probably just a PR story. Just like the "The Suit Is Back!" that got traced back to a PR agency a couple of years ago.
PR loves to masquerade as news because it bypasses your BS filter. An ad for Men's Warehouse suits gets looked over, a piece of news that you won't get hired unless you wear a suit, tries to replace your premises with theirs and let you take a leap to the "I must buy a suit" conclusion. Or better yet, to the even better conclusion, "I must only hire people in suits 'cause everyone else is doing it." There are a lot of sheeple out there who only need a "The Herd Is That Way -->" sign to willingly enter someone's pen and be sheared like "everyone else".
For anyone who's not sheeple, this is a non-story. Whether _you_ need a server instead of PCs or not, depends on what _your_ needs are and what _your_ employees are doing. Use your own head.
The only ones who need an "everyone else is doing X" story are those who have to follow a herd to feel secure.
Hence, the love PR has for this kind of story.
2. Over-simplifications like "all they need is internet, database access, and word processing" were false when arguing why grandma should only need an old 486, and tend to be just as false for a company. So you'll have to do some analysis if for a particular company that is indeed true, or just glossing over what's really going on. (Or even wishful thinking by some IT guy who feels his job would sound more important if he was overseeing a server.)
E.g., a lot of companies have salesmen who go with a laptop to various customers to give a presentation and try to win a contract. Are you ready for the case when that guy you're trying to sell insurance doesn't have internet to connect to your server via VPN? Are you sure that those server side apps' files can be converted flawlessly to MS Office or whatever those sales guys have on their laptop?
It's just one example where goimng, "bah, they only use database apps and word processing" is glossing over a more complex problem.
3. The argument for saving costs is a good one, and far from me to advise wasting money. But you have to be sure that you're actually _saving_ money across the organisation, not just saving $1000 in the narrow slice you see, at the cost of causing $1,000,000 to be lost in workarounds and lost productivity somewhere else. Entirely too much "cost cutting" lately is the latter kind of bullshit theatre.
E.g., if someone costs you $100,000 per year -- and I don't mean just wage, but also electricity costs, building rent, etc -- saving $1000 is nullified if it drops their productivity by as little as 1%. Saving a few hours per year of an IT guy's work can be a very bad trade off, if it costs that guy as little as 5 minutes total per 8h work day to put up with the quirks and delays of the centralized system. (480 minutes a day, times 1% is 4.8 minutes.) It can add up very easily to that. It only takes wasting 1 second per form through some web-app instead of letting that guy massage the data locally in Excel or Access(*), to add up to more than that in a day. A close enough approximation can very easily be approximative enough to actually turn the whole thing into a loss.
(*) ... or whatever F/OSS equivalents you prefer. This is not MS advocacy, so fill in the blanks with whatever you prefer.
And as you move higher up the totem pole, things get even funkier. If a salesman is doing contracts worth millions of dollars with those presentation, I hope you better save a _lot_ with that centralized solution, because it only takes one lost contract (e.g., because he couldn't connect) to put a big minus in the equation. E.g., if you're going to pay a CEO tens of millions per year, and actually believe that his work is worth every cent (heh, I know, but let's keep pretending,) then... again, you better be damned sure that you don't drop _his_
It's not that simple.
1. For a start, it would work that way if the USA were the only market in the world. I do believe that China can also sell to Europe, or to its own damn citizens. I don't think the Chinese would revolt if they could buy good computers instead of exporting them.
The USA survived pretty well by selling its best stuff locally instead of exporting it all, didn't it?
Anyway, the USA has, what, 5% of the world's population? There's a whole other 95% who could buy that stuff.
2. Whatever advantage there may be in selling to the USA, would disappear overnight if the USA decided not to pay, which is (I believe) what the GP was getting at. The whole deficit scheme is, basically, borrowing money from those countries in exchange for their products. If the USA decided to just pocket some trillions of dollars overnight, on the justification that, basically, "our dogs are bigger than the tax collectors'", it would find itself a much less attractive market. Equally overnight.
3. The whole lopsided market situation exists because countries are made to export their raw materials for cents and have to buy high-tech stuff for thousands of dollars. Or, ridiculously enough, lately manufacture that high-tech stuff themselves in their own sweatshops, sell it to themselves, and send the profits to some overseas corporation.
Basically think: you want new shoes. So I send you my permit to raise your own pig, slaughter it yourself, tan its skin, and make your own gloves. Only now you have to pay me for the gloves. I'll even pay you back a few cents for the leather, 'cause that's raw materials and dirt cheap, and charge you lots for the gloves.
And you can't just say "fuck you, buddy" because there are some international treaties and that forbid you from using my patented design and my "Le Moraelin Haute Couture" label. Oh, and to add insult to injury, you designed that design for me too, but I patented it, 'cause I'm the big international corporation with teh moneyz.
And while for gloves that's just a matter of being a fashion victim, for a lot of other stuff it's less black and white.
That's the shit end of the imperialism stick, that those countries get. Mostly because we, the western world, promise to give them a black eye one way or another, if they don't abide by that kind of an arrangement.
Far from being some kind of great help that China would be foolish to cut off, it's a very disadvantageous system for China and a lot of other countries. If they threw it off, their economy wouldn't implode, and their standard of living would go up overnight. Again, they have a billion of their own people to sell that stuff to, instead of selling it to 300 million foreigners. Other than an artifficial financial and trade system imposed on them saying that it's better to sell to an American than to 4 Chinese, there is no real reason why that is so.
_If_ the western world decided to just plunder the existing debts, that might just be the excuse they're waiting for, to get out of that system.
1. Actually, I have to wonder how much of it is simply the old game of passing the blame.
See, those computers didn't program themselves, and evem those brilliant geeks coding them probably weren't also Ph.Ds in economics. They also probably weren't the ones who gathered the wrong data, that then got fed into the machine. They weren't the guys who decided the business process they were asked to implement or rate.
The computer does exactly what it's told, and based on the exact data you feed into it. It doesn't have gut feelings. It doesn't do "but what if the bubble bursts?" scenarios unless you explicitly ask it to... and even then, only within the parameters you set for that "what if" scenario.
The computer can jolly well nod a bubble, if that's what it's been programmed to do. E.g., if you ask it to only judge a mortgage based on X% interest, Y% default rate, and the house price rises Z% per year, you can get it's blessing quite easily. If Z > X, it can even end up that defaults are the _ideal_ case, and you make more money out of a default than out of a paid back loan. The "what if Z drops below X again?" scenario won't be evaluated unless you explicitly ask it to run it.
And I suspect that this is exactly what happened there. Those computers and those geeky "quants" calculated exactly what those higher up the pyramid told them to calculate. There was someone higher up who decided to go with those parameters. And now they're trying to pass the blame to the peons which implemented it.
Even the bit you quoted, is surrealistic: "As we now know, they were using the wrong data. They looked at the recent history of mortgages and saw that foreclosure rate is generally below 2 percent. So they figured, absolute worst-case scenario, the foreclosure rate may go to 8 or 10 or 12 percent." Essentially they _made_ _up_ a piece of data (that worst case scenario rate) from little more than a wild guess, _garbage_ data therefore, and fed it into the computer. And somehow expected that GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) wouldn't apply?
Even if I'm to believe that that was all that tripped them, the blame lies not with the computer or with the nerds who coded it, but with whoever came up with that number out of thin air, and decided it's ok to bet the farm on it. Or on an analysis based on it. _That_ made up number and basing decisions on it, was the flawed decision there, from which everything else is just consequence. Whether by computer or by pen and paper, the rest is inconsequent. Someone made up a number and based a business decision on it. That person is to blame. The computers and the "quants" were just props in the play that unfoldd from there on, and trying to pass them the blame is stupid.
2. How did that number come to be anyway? By what maths did they come up with it? Why is that the "worst case scenario" number, instead of the more obvuious, "if you give money to people with no income and no assets, worst case scenario is that none can pay it back." Note that they didn't say "most likely scenario", but "worst case scenario."
Is it possible that it was the "worst case scenario" where the computer still gave the OK? I.e., that it's essentially reverse-engineering the system to come up with a lie that it still accepts? In that case, it's not the program which is to blame, but the person who deliberately tried to game it.
3. Or maybe they're genuinely _that_ stupid? A quote from Charles Babbage comes to mind:
That was: asked by members of the Parliament, btw.
One could probably even find it funny that before a computer even _existed_ (Charles Babbage was inventing one, but it hadn't been built yet) some people were actually hoping it would be a magical device where you can just d
Well, it seems to me that it's just a matter of perspective. We don't really see absolute values, we see deltas, and the baseline is the present.
Think of, say, dollars. Just saying "in year X you'll earn Y dollars a month" is only saying anything as a comparison. Whether it's in absolute dollar values, or "how much can I buy with it", the comparison only says much compared to your current lot in life. A 1960 standard of living would be luxury for someone from 1912 (think even just having antibiotics for a change), but would be a step back for you from 2008.
Or think of CPU MHz / Gigaflops / Gigabytes / whatever computer metric. "You'll have a computer with a 4 MHz CPU and 48 kilobytes RAM and a CRT" would have sounded like an awesome supercomputer in 1960 (they eventually landed on the moon with a weaker computer than that!) Have it in your home, all yours? Man, that would have sounded so unbelievably cool. Just think of what you'd do with all that raw computer power. But few people would even consider it a usable computer nowadays in 2008.
And I will postulate a _hypothesis_ that there must be a psychological "X times better than today" threshold, which drives those predictions. I don't know what that X might be. But there's a point where the "meh, who cares" factor of, say, predicting something 10% better next month, starts being the "that's awesome" of, say, predicting something 10 times better in 5 years.
E.g., think back when Moore's Law still worked that way, and you had, say, a 100 MHz Pentium. Predicting that you'll have 133 MHz in a few months, is uninteresting. Predicting you'll have a whole 1 GHz of CPU power in 5 years, now that would have gotten your attention.
So depending on which curve you are, and assuming it looks like infinite exponential growth ahead, the future (worth predicting) will always be Y years ahead. As in, "in Y years it'll be X times better than today." If you have the same X you aim for, the future will always be Y years ahead.
Well, I still have to wonder.
1. Even leaving squirrels out, even for humans it never worked that way.
E.g., during Old Kingdom era in ancient egypt, if you passed the peak of infant mortality, the 50-50 point of deaths was in the low 30's for human males and low _20's_ for human females. They married and started making kids at _14_ years old for males, and _12_ years old for females. When you had puberty, that's it, you were good to reproduce.
So even for humans, you can't say that the age for making kids dropped. Compared to some 99% of the existence of humanity, we're now starting making kids at around _twice_ the age they did. Why would that stop evolution _now_ when it didn't before?
And, yes, it didn't stop evolution before. By the genetic data we have, aleles relating to, say, intelligence actually underwent a period of accelerated evolution in humans in the last few thousand years.
So making kids at 12 was plenty of chance for mutations, as little as some hundreds of years ago. Why is making kids at 24 not enough nowadays? Something doesn't add up, IMHO.
2. The length of DNA is also not that dramatically different between humans and some other species. E.g., chimps and generally apes have about the same number of nucleotid pairs as the humans. Yet they have a lot shorter life, and become fertile at a much earlier age.
So if it was true that you must make kids at 40 years old for humans, or evolution stops... then wouldn't the same apply to apes? Yet the chimp, which is pretty much a cousin to humans, rarely lives more than 40 years in the wild, with the median being much lower. Most of the chimp cubs are born at a much lower age of their parents. Chimps reach puberty at the age of _9_ and start reproducing relatively soon afterwards.
A) As I was saying, if that stopped evolution, we wouldn't be here in the first place. There is no indication that the common ancestor of human and chimps waited until old age to reproduce.
B) The chimp did evolve. The split between normal chimps and Bonobos is as recent as 1.5-2 million years ago, and they jolly well evolved into different species. And (highly) debatably the Bonobo just reached sentience.
Well, I just have to wonder, though.
I mean, cats on the average live 14 to 20 years if kept indoors and well taken care of, or a _lot_ less out in the wild. Most humans don't have children at the age at which cats die. I don't think it stopped cat evolution.
Squirrels have a life expectancy of a couple of years. Humans would still be a toddler by the age when a squirrel dies, and thus stops reproducing. I don't think that was a big problem for evolution.
Mayflies live between 30 minutes and a whole day as an adult, though, to be fair, we must add 1 year worth of larva and nymph stage to that. Does that prevent mutations and natural selection. I don't think so.
Basically _most_ species out there have a life expectancy lower than the age at which humans reproduce. If that stopped evolution, then we wouldn't be here in the first place.