Especially in regards to the ISO 9000 series, especially as applied to software companies/departments who want that rubber stamp, you could be 100% compliant even if you work towards the wrong goals and achieve the wrong results. Essentially anyone with the money to blow on a byzantine bureaucracy where you have to document every bleeding obvious step, and document compliance with some brain dead rule, can get that certification. No need to even pay those money to ISO. You'll lose them the old fashioned way.
E.g., I know at least one company where they institutionalized the worst imaginable caricature of the waterfall model. And I don't mean the sane waterfall model, but the distorted caricature that sometimes is used under that name. In fact, a distorted caricature of even that. Everything must start with writing a cubic metre of use-cases and collect the signatures of a few dozen people on it. (Note that their model doesn't include at this step any kind of mockup or proof of concept to show them. You must just have faith that if you nag them enough they'll tell you _all_ their requirements in detail, and you'll write them down.) Then you work for some months on the implementation. _Then_ you have a couple of months for tests and fixing at the end. Then the customer finally sees anything, and _of_ _course_ it'll be exactly what he had in mind. And if more needs to be done, loop from the start now.
It's counter-productive, but if you could be arsed to document how you adhered to every step of it religiously, and can answer with a straight face things like, basically, "did you do what the rules said you should be doing?" you could be ISO 9000 certified for that crap process.
E.g., I had the mis-fortune of working with someone who wanted to have documented quality targets in advance, as per ISO 9001. Sounds good. Except he wanted to measure the entirely wrong things. He had only one tool he knew how to use, that is, a tool for benchmarking web applications. We, however, had made a framework. So instead of figuring out how he can benchmark the actual calls to the framework methods and classes, he wanted to benchmark the HTTPUnit unit tests. So basically he could write there as a quality goal, stuff like "the unit tests for the SomeComplexEJB module finish in less than 5 seconds." Woe if two iterations later, and having included test cases for any bugs reported and fixed, you end up taking more than 5 seconds.
Yep, if you're stupid enough, you can get _that_ sanctified as compliance with ISO 9001.
It doesn't say you should be doing the right thing or the effective thing. It just says you must have a type of process and can produce the relevant documentation if audited.
I'd say that bribing ISO to get that rubber stamp, might actually be an improvement in some places, compared to actually complying with a bad process thought up by a non-techie. At least if you bribe ISO, hey, at least you don't ruin everyone's productivity too. And the losses are basically limited to that bribe, which limit you don't get if you actually comply.
Yes, but GSM is a different standard. ISO 216 doesn't say anything about that. As far as ISO 216 is concerned, I could make a sheet that's 210mm × 297mm x 3000mm, in effect a _pillar_ with an A4 cross-section, and it would still count as ISO/DIN A4.
As for C99, exactly who implemented a C99 compiler faithfully or at all?
- Visual C++ at least as of 2005 did _not_ support C99. Some 6 years after the standard had been passed. A quick search on MSDN leads me to believe that VS 2008 doesn't either.
- Borland AFAIK never did.
- a quick googling on Sun's site leads me to believe that their implementation is also not quite complete and compliant
- a quick googling on IBM's site, produced "Not all run-time functions and facilities required by the ISO/IEC 9899:1999 International Standard are supported on all the operating system levels that can run this version of the compiler." in the relevant section of IBM C for AIX v6.0. I wouldn't know if newer versions even exist, or how that was updated.
Sorry, if I don't have the time for the full research that this deserves. But so far it looks like, basically, if I could be arsed to, I could probably write some standard-compliant C99 code which doesn't even compile on _any_ major C compiler. Does that sound like the OOXML situation yet?:P
I might even have more sympathy for the techie, if not for the following detail: she actually opened the door for him, when he said he needed some CD from the van, and propped it open for when he returns. (Only to see him run off and drive off to the cops.)
I'm sorry, but is there any realistic and sane way to mistake that for a genuine hostage situation? I mean, hello? Isn't that the polar opposite of _preventing_ someone from leaving?
How would that even work, if it were a genuine hostage situation? "KK, you can go now, but please return later 'cuz you're my hostage. I'll let the door propped open for you. KTHXBYE." Or what?:P
Surely it would count as the most incompetent kidnapping in known history.
Look, that maybe he was close to the breaking point himself and he left an impolite customer, ok. I can live with that. Maybe the company even has a policy of leaving at the slightest perceived threat, even as a joke, as someone else suggested. Fine. Leave if you must.
But going to the police and filing criminal charges? Nope, sorry, my sympathy for him automatically ends there. He's an arsehole who thought he can abuse the system to teach someone else a lesson. And I have no sympathy for that.
Well, either that, or he is genuinely schizophrenic and thought that opening the door for him equals preventing him to leave. And in that case, someone put him in a nut house and on neuroleptics. Because God knows what else he might mis-interpret in surrealistic ways, and how he'll react then. Maybe at the next customer he'll think that offering him a glass of water means trying to set him on fire, or whatever. Maybe he'll end up injuring someone or himself, thinking he's fighting for his very life.
A) some kind of guarantee that it'll be implemented 100% accurately and compatibly by everyone, and there is absolutely no room for wiggling in incompatible details, and
B) it's the first time this happens.
Hello? Both are false.
As a trivial example, C is an ISO standard. ISO/IEC 9899, to be precise. When was the last one you saw two C compiler implementations, from two different vendors and preferrably on different architectures, that were 100% compatible with each other or the standard? It's trivial to produce code that produces wildly different results, and offten incorrect results, based on unspecified details like endianness or word size.
Or take paper sizes. The ISO 216 defines paper sizes like A4, and multiples. Has that stopped anyone from selling "letter" sized paper instead? Or it's trivial to produce paper which is technically A4, but will jam your printer anyway, e.g., because it's much thicker than normal and the standard says nothing about that third dimension.
Most of the ISO standards are just guidelines, nothing more.
Involving the police in a petty retaliation game is already an abuse. Filing criminal chages against someone as a petty retaliation? Oooer.
All in all, I hope the retard goes to PMITA jail for it, _if_ that is the case. Abusing the police and justice system as one's private goon squad to terrorize/punish people one doesn't like, isn't exactly something I'd want to see repeated.
if you want to see an interesting application of this... say "bomb" on an airplane....
I did. Me, a friend and mom were travelling by plane at one point in the 80's. Much to mom's annoyance (and probably because it annoyed her), I spent the whole time at both airports and on the plane telling jokes about airplane hijacks and bombings.
Admittedly, we did get a few cops around us on the airport listening to my jokes.
But you know what? That was it. They didn't even butt into the talk, or try to be menacing or anything. I'm still guessing that probably they were bored enough and the jokes made their day.
The post 9/11 histeria there wasn't normal at any time before. And in a lot of countries it still isn't.
Now threatening to blow up the plane, or falsely reporting a bomb, those are serious crimes. Even as a joke. Because they cause quite the disruption.
But just saying the word "bomb" or telling an obvious joke about a bomb? Geeze. If you can't do that, ask yourself what went wrong and when.
1. _Again_, the idea was that a lot use the "there's something wrong with your computer" line even when there is _nothing_ wrong with that computer.
2. Just because the line is fine, it doesn't automatically transfer the problem to her computer. As a trivial example: it's happened to me before that my line _and_ computer were perfectly fine, but one of their routers was down. Or whatever login server they used was down.
I.e., I do expect whoever is in that support job to at least try to see where the problem is, before using the "it's your computer" line. Maybe, just maybe, it isn't my computer after all.
3. If they sent a sparky to fix a line which wasn't deffective, then it sounds like massive incompetence on the part of that company anyway. Over here they can check the line and ping the modem, without sending anyone over.
Furthermore, it sounds like it wasn't the first time they had sent one, and solved nothing. If the first guy plugged in the modem and the line was fine, why was the second (and presumably third and so on) sparky sent to fix the same line?
4. Yes, it's not the sparky's job to diagnose her computer, but why didn't tech support do that first? I mean, hello? Most ISP's make you go through that "is the cable connected?" list even if you tell them that the modem just caught fire.
Did these guys really send someone over, i.e., the expensive thing, before making sure it can't be solved the cheap way?
5. You don't need to send someone over, if a virus had disabled her net access. You just ping the modem from the ISP end.
Frankly it makes me wonder if there wasn't something wrong with the line after all.
6. That is actually a pretty poor SF scenario, btw. Viruses would rather use that connection to send more copies of themselves or act as a zombie army, undetected. And if you're going to make yourself obvious and obnoxious big time, just formatting the HDD works better than disabling the network.
Combinations of 2 and 3 shoulder buttons and/or essentially morse codes of taps, and that's before you also add 1 button for the actual command... sounds like a usability nightmare, though. Sorry. I'm sure there are people who'll remember that healing their pet is shoulders 1 and 3, and double-tap X. They're hardly an MMO's primary market segment. These things are more casual players.
And just to stress one aspect of usability: you don't want only to make lots of commands _possible_, but first and foeremost _discoverable_ and preferably fast if it's a realtime game. If I forgot where my "track giants" or "freeze trap" icon is, I can hover the mouse over the bars and see what the tooltip says. Doing the same by cycling through shoulder combinations and whatnot, sounds like too slow to be of any use in combat.
I've had, though over the phone, not in person. Sadly, tempting as it is, you can't really hold someone hostage over the phone;)
ACT 1
It went like this: so at some point I activate my email at T-Online. They had a handy-dandy page that allows one to change their _email_ password, and I use it.
Suddenly I can't log in to the ISP any more. I figure, hmm, I bet the damned thing changed my ISP password too. I try the new one, it doesn't work either.
I'm pretty sure I didn't forget the new password, since it was one I had used before. But ok, it could happen. I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.
So I call the ISP's tech support, he makes me try both the new and old password, neither works, ok, he says he'll send me a new one by post. But first he wants to know my invoice number, to be sure he's sending it to the right guy. I read the one from my phone bill to him. Says it's ok, all clear, he'll send me a new password.
A week goes by, I have no new password. I call again, different employee, makes me read him the invoice number again, assures me all is well and he'll send me the new password. Nothing happens.
The spiel continues for one and a half fucking months, in increasinly short intervals as my patience wears thin. Then I lose my patience entirely and escalate it to hell and back.
Turns out that when I moved, both the ISP and the parent telco gave me a new invoice number. Each. Different ones. But on the bill there was only the telco one. So the retards from support saw that the numbers don't match and _lied_ to me.
They fucking lied to me for a month and a half. They didn't even bother telling me what's wrong, or finding a simple solution like "ok, come to one of our stores to prove it's you." Nah, the bloody retards lied to me.
(At this point it's worth noting that (A) DSL connections are point-to-point anyway, (B) they can know it's me or at least calling from my phone number since it's a subsidiary of my telco, but most importantly (C) they're sending it by post to my address. What more confirmation do they want?)
ACT 2
My brother buys a new house informs the same telco and isp, is assured he'll get dsl in a couple of days.
It's worth noting that somehow he was flagged as VIP customer. Dunno why. Maybe because he and his wife are addicted to their cell phones, and get a phone bill comparable to some small companies. But anyway, he's a VIP customer and for that they assure him that it won't take more than a day or two to switch his account to the new address.
Short story: the same spiel as in my case happens. He's repeatedly assured that, yeah, verily, someone will take care of it by tomorrow. And nothing happens. Again and again.
What had happened? The drone who entered his new address made a typo. Let's say his new house number was 42 A (not the real one, for the obvious reasons), and the drone entered it as 42 S. Which didn't exist.
Ok, typos happen.
But again, they just lied to him again and again. If they do that even to "VIP customers", I rest my case.
ACT 3
After the previous incident, I was weary of doing anything to my connection any more. But eventually I'm dumb enough to say yes, when some salesman offers me (again) to upgrade my connection to 6000 MB/s instead 1000.
Life goes on for a month or so, in which time nothing happens to my connection, good or bad. As in, I'm still on 1000. Well, ok, I'm fine with that. At least I still have it.
Then suddenly I can't log in any more.
The call this time was a surrealistic carousel affair, where I'm passed around between 6 different departments. Each sees only his slice of the problem, so as soon as it even touches any other domain or aspect, he gives me a new phone number to call. And, as we'll see, didn't even see his own slice well enough.
It took me a whole weekend, albeit with large breaks to recharge my phone's batteries, of going round robin like that.
Spoken like someone with an average or above-average penis size.
I have a small penis. (Posting AC for obvious reasons.) When you have seen a woman's disappointed face upon seeing the small size of your penis; or worse, heard "Is it in yet?", it's a huge blow to your self esteem.
I know that Enzyte is a scam, but I was still tempted anyway by the one in a trillion chance it could have even a small effect.
You yourself say that women find over 7-8 inches uncomfortable, so it's better to be average. Well, try being 3-4 inches with narrow girth. When you are significantly smaller than a women is used to, it's just a disappointing experience all around.
Well, you have my sympathy there. I wasn't talking about people like you. In that case, I see the point in wanting to be normal.
The ones that I'm ranting about are those who _are_ average (the gauss curve is pretty narrow for the humans), but are insecure about having less than a foot.
Quoting from Wikipedia, because I'm too lazy tolook up more authoritative sources:
While results vary across studies, the consensus is that the average erect human penis is approximately 12.9-15cm (5.1-5.9 in) in length with a 95% confidence interval of (10.7 cm, 19.1 cm) (or, equivalently, (4.23 in, 7.53 in))[11][12][13]. The typical girth or circumference is approximately 12.3 cm (4.85 in) when fully erect. The average penis size is slightly larger than the median size (or, put another way, most penises are below average in size).
So basically anyone with 6 inches is already (marginally) _above_ both the average _and_ median for the species. They have a dick that's longer than what more than 50% of the population has. It's freaking stupid to be insecure about that.
1. I think you're thinking more along the lines of canabinoids and dopamine. Endorphins are more like natural anesthetics than anything released as reward. It's released when you're in pain, or over-exert yourself physically, or the like. With the sole (known) strange exception being the orgasm.
People _can_ artificially produce their own endorphin high, e.g., in BDSM or by doing lots of physical exercise. Capsacin (as in, chili) also stimulates it. Acupuncture also seems to produce endorphins, because when you stab a needle in certain points, the body wants to anesthetise the point. Unfortunately, it has no way to release endorphins only there.
There is no data that links endorphins to gaming.
If _you_ get endorphins from a computer game, I want to know what you're playing. Do you have a device that kicks you in the nuts when you lose, or what?;) Or is it via the orgasm route? Do you steer the game with your dick, or what?;) Ok, ok, just kidding. Sorry.
2. Even there, it seems to me like a double standard.
- If someone pushes weights or trains for the marathon, we don't think, "OMG, endorphin addict" (which a lot probably are), we idolize those guys
- If someone is into extremely spicy food (a couple of co-workers are), we don't think "OMG, endorphin addict", we think more like, "de gustibus non est disputandum."
- If someone is into acupuncture, you don't think "OMG, endorphin addict", you might consider him even some enlightened guy/gal who takes good care of his/her body.
- but woe that you enjoy a game for an hour or two, _then_ it's "OMG, endorphin addict". Although, again, there is no endorphin released.
How come nobody worries about the actual endorphin junkie who just ordered extra spicy oriental food at the office and dumped a generous extra portion of chili sauce into it? Or about the actual endorphin junkie who's the basketball star in high school? _Those_ are higher than a kite for a (short) while, but, nah, if it's via those, suddenly addiction and drugs aren't dangerous after all. Those are guys to be emulated, not avoided.
3. In the same vein, I wonder about half the addiction histeria and the war on drugs itself. If we're not worried about a guy getting an endorphin high right in the middle of the day at the office, remind me, why do we care that much about whether he smokes a joint at home? Or we have these oriental/new-age wellness centres where they have a whole bunch of guys full of needles and endorphins. If we don't worry about _those_ doing something stupid, why do we worry about some guy who's probably too stoned on pot to do more than munch a Mars bar?
Now sadly I don't have any first hand experience myself, but I've worked with guys who were pot-heads. Two admins for a start. They didn't exactly strike me as violent, delusional types.
4. Ok, let's assume you mean dopamine and canabinoids. Well... you're pre-"addicted" to that. It's built right into your brain and your DNA code. You were "addicted" to those since you were born. Actually, a few months before that. They're the pre-wired rewards of the brain, and yes, you're pre-wired to enjoy them and try to get more.
And you get them for lots of stuff. When you're proud of yourself for writting a witty resort on Slashdot? You just got a shot of those. When you're all proud that your coded some clever piece of code? Yep, you just got a shot. When the village gossip finds someone who listens to her rant about evil games? She got a shot too. Etc. That's how it works. They're how nature kept you from being a vegetable: by giving you rewards when you do something (you rate as) good.
You're pre-programmed to be a hedonist, so to speak. You're _supposed_ to seek fun and pleasure. All animals are. And games are fun. That's really all. But, of course, "games are fun" is much less of a story than "OMG, spooky brain chemicals" scares for the press.
But I fail to see why would we vilify them. Again, it's just how the brain works.
Well, the whole point was how arbitrarily that distinction is made. Usually people having made up their mind in advance that if it's WoW, then it's addiction. And then working backwards to "yeah, well, but I hear someone even lost their job because of it" justifications like yours, to support their pre-defined conclusion.
The exact same behaviour I've described for that casual history hobby _is_ classified by many people as "OMG, he plays 2 hours a day, he's addicted." I don't think many people wait until you're living in a cardboard box under a bridge to tell you you're addicted.
But ok, let's look at your version. So it's only addiction at the point where I call in sick because of it and don't do anything else but think of it at work? Did I read that right?
Funny. I could have sworn that there are half a dozen smokers just on the same floor at work, and they don't call in sick to sit at home and smoke. Didn't get fired because of it either. Did't lose their wife because of it. I guess they're not addicted then? Funny how medicine says they are, and there are physiological modifications to the brain to prove it.
Or maybe it's just time to stop redefining words. Addiction means something very specific. It's not just a blanket term for "someone enjoys something else than I do."
And the sooner we all understand that, the sooner maybe we understand that we should all mind our own business instead of trying to prevent others from having fun. Entirely too many people these days seem to have exactly that as their hobby: trying to keep someone else from having fun. If you're having fun in any way instead of executing your assigned role and script like a robot, then it's surely
A) a dangerous addiction and menace to society
B) immoral, or should be
C) illegal, or we should make it so
D) probably unhealthy, and thus a dangerous example for others
E) a sign or cause of the impending apocalypse
F) all the above.
And I'm getting tired of it. There are things which actually cause addiction, and there are things which are merely one of the many interchangeable ways to have fun. I see no reason to blur the lines. And doubly so if it's just so some busybodies should get to reinforce everyone else's role and things to do.
Well, here's the thing: my current narrow focus of attention is history. Hardly a day passes by without me reading some interesting stuff about the Romans or Messopotamia or Egypt or the like. That's the kind of thing that counts as fun for me. And I do it lots. Do I qualify as an addict yet?
Let's think about it for a second.
1.a. If I told someone that I play 2 hours of WoW a day with my parents, and often as much as 8 hours a day on weekends, they'd label me a WoW addict and try to "save" me. 1.b. But if I told someone that I spent a whole weekend reading Polybius instead, I'd at most qualify as a geek.
2.a. If I even mention WoW in casual conversation, even as some (admittedly failed) joke, everyone gets worried. 'Cause it's that addictive game, you know. 2.b. If I joke about the Roman diplomat killing Brennus's diplomat instead of negotiating a peace, as a RL example of rolling a natural 1, they laugh. Might think I'm a complete nerd, but not worry much about it. 'Cause, be serious, nobody got to lose their job and family by being addicted to history. No need to worry.
3.a. If I even mention that I'm can hardly wait to get home and raid, now that's where everyone already starts looking at me like I have needle marks on my arms or something. 3.b. If I mention that I can hardly wait to get home and read more from the new book about Pharaohs, they nod politely and promptly forget about it.
4.a. If I mention, again, that I spend 2 hours a day and more on weekends playing WoW, they start telling me about how I'll go fat and get to die of trombosis. 4.b. But nobody worries about the same lack of exercise if I mention history books. 4.c. Nor realizes that my day job involve sitting in front of the computer too.
Etc, etc, etc.
So why can't my history hobby qualify as an addiction, then? I want to be an addict too, goddammit, same as everyone else. Since we're at labelling everything that's fun or relaxing as an addiction. I don't want to be left out like that;)
Yes I've played Phantasy Star Online, and nowadays its successor, Phantasy Star Universe. It did that. It also had about as much depth as a mud puddle. It was just a glorified button masher.
Managing all those abilities and possibilities and synergies between them, is half the fun of WoW. It's basically like a puzzle game. You have all these pieces, and your team mates have some more, and you have to see what cool things you can build out of them. In real time.
PSO had two lists of 3 buttons each. One normal block of 3 (the fourth button was for a substitute limit break) and a shifted one. Considering that two of those are your normal attacks, it leaves very little room for depth in your abilities. It's also a mere half a WoW action bar.
But let's say you use both shoulder buttons as shifts, and all 4 buttons. That's 12 different icons, or the equivalent of one WoW action bar.
It might be enough for an over-simplified straight-up damage class like rogue or maybe warrior. A mage is already getting squeezed in there. But it would make hybrids utterly impossible. You can't play, say, a druid where the whole _point_ is that you get the skills of 3-4 other classes (if weaker than the pure classes equivalents of those powers), with barely enough buttons for _one_ such class.
Now I'm not going to try and pretend I have a huge member, but have you every listened to a woman who has had sex with many men? Most of them will prefer a larger penis over a smaller one. This is what is reported both in real life and in marketed culture.
Actually, I've mostly heard that in spam, rather than from any actual woman.
I'd warn against trusting marketing and PR "testimonials" too much. Especially when they tell you what someone else wants.
As a non-penis-size (well, or rather indirectly;) thing, take diamonds. Nobody gave much of a damn about them until the PR campaign to convince men that every woman wants a diamond. What actually happened there is that they actually asked some women, and were expecting to hear them confirm that they want jewellery. To their surprise, most said that they'd rather have the guy invest that money into something useful for both, like getting a home after they get married.
The whole point of that campaign became to convince you to _not_ ask a woman. Trust _us_, not her. We know better that she really wants a diamond. Just buy one already.
Well, it's that "a lot worse" that makes the big difference, really.
And basically there _is_ a dichotomy, in that one implies physiological modifications, the other doesn't. It's pretty binary. I'm not setting up a dichotomy between light grey and dark grey, but between something which either exists or it doesn't.
There's a difference between, basically:
A) I'd rather be doing something more fun, and it so happens that this virtual world is more fun than bickering with my spouse some more, and
B) I'm getting (physiologically and medically) depressed and nervous unless I light another cigarette.
In case A you're merely back to baseline if you don't, in case B you're genuinely a lot below baseline if you don't. That "going cold turkey from a hard drug is a lot worse" factor.
Case A is merely how the brain is wired to work. Your brain is wired to give you a "man, I'm bored" signal when nothing interesting happens, and a dopamine/serotonin/canbinoid/whatever-apropriate-signa shot when you do something fun. You're pre-programmed to seek pleasure and fun. If that's "addiction", we're all born addicts.
Your cat or dog is like that too. That's why you see the dog occasionally chasing his tail or begging to play fetch, or the cat pouncing on a stuffed toy. Because again there's that natural signal in the brain that says "go do something fun already."
The difference is that we humans built layers upon layers of culture, pre-conceptions and mis-conceptions about what you should be doing instead of that. And a society where you're supposed to, and have to, do something else to even survive. A cat just goes and hunts when it's hungry, and is free to sleep or play the rest of the time. You, by contrast have to go to work now so you can have something to eat next month. But you're not wired for that, you're still wired like the cat. That's where will power comes in. You must move your arse and do what you know you should be doing, instead of what your animal brain tells you to do.
And even before games, there still were people who ignored what they _should_ be doing and did what their brain signals told them instead. The village drunk or the bum living off begging are the same. They chose to go with the short term satisfaction (as in, "meh, it's better than ploughing") instead of long term planning ("but if I go plough, I'll have bread next year.")
Heck, over half the people out there are in their current job because of that. At some point they chose something like, "meh, playing prom queen / basketball jock is more immediately rewarding than learning maths", and now they flip burgers or man the gas pump instead of having a better paying job. Essentially they too did the same choice between (I) something immediately rewarding, and (II) something boring right now, but which pays off later. Or you see millions of fat people around you, because they chose the more fun activities (e.g., eating and sitting on the couch), instead of the boring and physically exerting ones (exercising and dieting.) There's no fundamental difference between that and the choice of a WoW "addict". They all essentially choose to go with the short-term rewarding things, i.e., with following the signals of that animal brain, instead of having the will power to do what they know they should be doing.
It's not a new factor. We're _wired_ like that, and have had people following their wiring for the past 200,000 years straight. All that's new is the hysteria of singling out games.
And at the end of the day, it doesn't change the fact that it's just some normal chemical reaction in the brains. Labeling it as the same thing as drug abuse only serves to obfuscate the real mechanisms and problems there.
Actually, that's not how (real) addiction works. Addiction to a substance happens when your brain chemistry starts adjusting in the other direction. Biology is largely about self-tuning feedback loops like that. If you have too little oxygen in your arm, e.g., because you do a lot of physical effort, your body grows more blood vessels. And if the brain has to work while disrupted by alcohol, it compensates its chemistry in the other direction.
Addiction is that compensation in the other direction. And when you are properly addicted, it's not as much that your drug is fun, as that life without it is not much fun.
E.g., Nicotine inhibits MAO-B, which breaks down Dopamine and Phenethylamine. It's part of a chemical equilibrium in the brain. When you're happy about something, you get a shot of dopamine, but almost immediately MAO-B is released to make that signal decay back to baseline. Nicotine perturbs that mechanism, so it originally makes you feel better. But soon your body adjusts its equilibrium in the other direction, so now you feel shitty without a cigarette. Eventually those cigarettes do nothing except bring you briefly to the point where a non-smoker is naturally all the time. That's addiction.
E.g., Alcohol is a central nervous system depressant, which doesn't actually mean it makes you depressed, just that it makes certain individual synapses and pathways less responsive. But again, the body immediately starts to compensate in the other direction, and those synapses gradually become hyperexcitable. If you keep doing that, essentially to the point where they fire erratically on their own. See, delirium tremens. So essentially after a while you notice that without alcohol you're nervous, have less motor coordination, have hearth rhythm problems, and the like. Essentially your body just started telling you, "man, I really could use a drink." And again, gradually you need more and more of it, and eventually the first sixpack just gets you back to the normal "sober" point. (Alcohol tolerance really is just the road to delirium tremens, sadly.)
Addiction to something fun isn't an addiction at all. There is no external chemicals perturbing the brain balance. It's just the normal way the brain works. There is no, say, nicotine inhibiting MAO-B so you get artificially elevated doses of dopamine, and forcing the brain to adjust. It's just the normal "this is fun" signal in your brain.
So at best it's just lack of willpower, but not an addiction.
And people get pseudo-"addicted" like that all the time. The village gossip who goes around bad-mouthing the local WoW "addict", is, funnily enough, herself "addicted" to her own "hobby". She gets her brain signals out of that social interaction, to the point where she has to even poke into someone else's life to have a topic. The guy who obsessively watches football or soccer or baseball, to have something to talk about to his group of friends, essentially is again just doing something to feed a similar addiction. It's his way of getting his daily shot of "I'm happy and appreciated" brain mediator. The guy who's doing overtime all week and goes fishing every weekend, ok, he's probably more like keeping himself away from getting an "I'm unhappy" signal at home, but nevertheless that's the same pseudo-addiction. Etc.
There's really nothing special about WoW. If your wife was out gossiping with the neighbours 18 hours a day, well, you'd probably just think some stereotype about women instead. But it would be the same thing, essentially.
At any rate, addiction it ain't.
Not a lot you can do about it, except wait for the victim to get their act together and come out of it.
Except if it were real physiological addiction, that wouldn't happen.
Well, that is partially true, but a lot of those are borderline scams too. Or, as marketing likes to call it, "creative puffering."
What I don't understand, though, is the insecurity about being within the normal parameters for your species. Let's face it, the human species just doesn't have the DNA for huge penises, nor a vagina design which would require one. Unless you were planning to fuck a mare, I guess. Last I've heard most women find over 7-8 inches outright uncomfortable. And most of the nerve endings are on the outside and first third of the vagina, so basically, if there was a modification to keep her happier, it would be girth, rather than length.
Even most of the male porn stars with huge "tools", had surgery to that end.
So, seriously, it seems to me just about as stupid as if, I dunno, I were to get upset because I don't have feet as big as the clowns. It wouldn't be an improvement to walk, but, boy, I wanna be above average. I wanna be like those clowns too. 'Cause you know what they say about men with big feet. (They need big shoes;)
I mean, seriously, when and how did the penis size obsession get started anyway? (Including all the stupidities that serve as substitute penis size symbols.) Did marketing just manage to make half the male population insecure and unhappy about being normal human beings? And we still think that marketing is a _good_ thing then?
That said, I find it ironic, but nevertheless a good lesson in that this company required a doctor's affidavit that you have a small penis, to get your money back. Because unless someone was well below the normal size for a human, they didn't need to have it extended in the first place. I would have required a notarized declaration along the lines of "yes, I'm an idiot and insecure about being a normal human", but I guess their version is good too.
Not necessarily. Trees only grow by, well,growing new layers, outwards. That's why you can count the rings and all that. The old wood doesn't change shape or anything. (Though it might rot.) A lot of it in the centre is even dead already.
It's basically like living in a brick house where periodically you add a new layer of bricks to the outside walls. It eventually gets to be on hell of a bunker, but the rooms haven't changed at all.
If you prevent the inner surface from rotting, the rooms in the tree wouldn't grow too. Your walls would just get a little thicker each year.
Or I guess you could periodically shave a thin layer of wood from the inside, keeping the walls at a constant thickness, but having your rooms grow together with the tree. Frankly it isn't an unsolvable problem even then. Just put anything which needs pipes (kitchen sink, bathroom, etc) or wires (AC sockets, TV cable, etc) in the centre, so they don't need to be moved when you enlarge the rooms by 1mm.
But even that is probably over-thinking it, since it assumes an actual house in a tree. All these guys have done, is mould some soft roots into park benches and the like. And their houses, from what I understand, would basically be a layer of roots bent around some panels done out of something else.
Frankly, it's not that huge a progress. We've already known how to bend wood in any imaginable shape. See the curved Roman shield (scutum) for an example that's over 2000 years old.
I don't see many fundamental advantages in doing the same thing out of roots, as opposed to bending planks of wood. Especially since we're talking soft roots, as opposed to wooden ones. It's, almost by definition, a softer and less resistent material than wood.
The horrible number of casualties were the result of
A) First and foremost, failure to adapt fast enough to new weaponry and tactics. E.g., took an awfully long time to sink in that a rifled gun shoots accurately to IIRC 300m, while against muskets it was reasonably safe to march to 100m and stand tall. (Oh, you could get hit by musket fire too, but, as an officer in the age of muskets put it, only if it was aimed at someone else;) There were years of horrible massacres, where thousands of soldiers were marched in formation to 100m, and then they shot essentially point blank at each other, standing tall and taking the volley.
B) Incompetent charges that ignored the officers' advice and marched some soldiers to slaughter. E.g., Picket's Charge.
C) Essentially, the first attempt in history at having a broad front war. Previously war had been historically a set-piece affair, where two armies would meet, fight, and that was it. E.g., when the Gauls invaded Rome, or Rome smacked Carthage, or whatever other historical war, don't think that they had a front across Italy. It was basically the army of one side vs the army of the other in _one_ point, and that decided the fate of the war. They might leave a detachment behind to besiege some city or whatever, but there was no coordinated effort by multiple armies. The American Civil War was arguably the first where that was even attempted, and it resulted in hideous casualties as essentially there were more battles all over the place and more generals trying to win some glory by breaking the opposite line in some God-forsaken place.
D) Railroads. Unlike previous times in history, it was now trivial to keep reinforcing and resupplying a lot of army. Where previously you'd admit defeat or fortify and wait for reinforcements for a year (see Hannibal), here it became a case where it was possible to throw more soldiers at anything. And they did. With the logical results.
E) Lack of modern medical care. Wars had always been a crappy affair in that aspect. The Minnie ball caused horrible wounds, and there were no antibiotics or even anesthetics.
Additionally:
1. Focusing on _US_ casualties in WW1 and WW2 is rather misleading. The USA took only a minor part in the trench battles of WW1, for example. The finance and industry of the USA played a bigger role in both world wars, than the actual soldiers in the trenches.
For the countries which actually held the line in those wars, the casualties were a lot more horrible. The USSR in WW2, for example, lost ten _million_ soldier and some thirteen _million_ civillians in WW2. Let that sink in a bit, next time the "we won WW2" willy-waving contest comes by. China lost some 4 million soldiers and 16 million civillians, and their contribution to the attrition and over-extending lines of the Japanese should not be overlooked in the Pacific War. On the Axis side, Germany lost 5.5 million soldiers, and almost two million civilians. You don't think you were that good that you fought Germany single-handedly and caused 10 times more casualties than you took, do you? But at any rate, that's what WW2 was really like, for those in the middle of it. There's an estimated 72 million people who died in that war.
In WW1, the Brits took almost 60,000 casualites just in the first day of the Battle of Somme. Almost half of what you took in the whole war. And while I'm too lazy to look up numbers, France almost depleted their manpower to the point where they were out of conscripts for many years after the war. There's a reason for the pacifism and (in the USA isolationism) after the war. Humanity had never seen such carnage before, and was thoroughly shocked.
So writing only the USA casualties for both wars is IMHO highly misleading.
2. Again, the fact that something has happened before, doesn't excuse the present.
The general history of humanity started from ritualized mass-murder and slavery, and we had a long way to gradually become more... civilized. And I don't mean just having TV and Sla
Let's put this in perspective. WoW was missing some features, but the ones in the game worked pretty damned well. AO, by contrast, off the top of my head had:
- massive graphics glitches. E.g., more often than not doors would turn into a swirly graphical glitch, so you can't see what awaits you on the other side. (And virtually any mission in the game consisted of lots of rooms connected by lots of doors.)
- collision code problems where you'd suddenly fall through and start swimming in the ground. Or would run on a flat road, and suddenly you're falling from the sky. Or a few other such.
- NPCs could punch you through walls, from the next room, and you couldn't even see who or in which direction to run to find that NPC and kill it before it kills you. Running _away_ didn't work, btw. Once an NPC started punching you, putting more distance and more walls between you and it, did nothing. See the next point.
- NPCs could punch you from any distance, negating the usefulness of any kind of ranged combat, including their reason to exist of their ranged combat class. Yes, a fist had the same range as a sniper rifle. Not to mention how badly that tripped suspension of disbelief.
- massively broken class balance. And I'm not talking the "OMG, rogues are too tough" or "OMG, shamans can't be killed" arguments on WoW. Some classes, say, a healer or buffer couldn't solo at all, while a couple of other classes didn't even need a healer or buffer to do any mission. So if on WoW your only complaint is that your Priest doesn't solo as fast as a Rogue, count your blessings.
- broken faction balance. And not as in the "horde vs alliance" bickering on WoW, but as a matter of design. One faction got better money and equipment, one faction got shafted, and one faction didn't even have shops past the newbie level. You can recognize an incompetent designer by his rationalizing why an imbalance is ok to exist (e.g., "well, they're corporates, of course they should get better money and equipment",) instead of fixing it.
- boring, randomly generated missions, with no more story than "go steal the generic round item on the floor."
-... and some of them were broken too, or their map was broken. (E.g., it wouldn't be that unusual to fall into some 6 ft deep hole in the ground and have no way to get out of it and continue the mission.)
- Not much variety there either. E.g., the stupidity that you'd be given a "stealth" or "infiltration" mission, but wouldn't get the mission token unless you killed everyone on the map.
Etc, etc, etc.
But, hey, they had painted photo-realistic anatomically-correct mooning, and the best animation of giving or receiving a blow job. And stuff like female "armour" which consisted of only 2 strips of kevlar on the sides of the body. I guess someone had taken the "sex sells" dictum to heart.
At any rate, yes, WoW may not have been 100% finished, but you can't really put an equals sign between the AO launch and the WoW launch.
Ahem. It was IIRC the first major MMO where they just went ad-supported and otherwise let most people pay for free. Because the player base which was willing to pay for their game, had started small and was imploding.
(And if anyone wonders why, read the two reviews on Something Awful. I can personally vouch that every single problem in there was true, and a lot more. And yes, that was after the devs had proclaimed it 110% fixed and working as intended.)
According to MMO Charts, it peaked at a mere 60,000 subscribers. Then AO subscribers hit an all time low of 20,000 (yes, I'm not missing a zero or anything), and after some major rework, it peaked again at 40,000. And went downhill again. Currently the _paying_ subscribers are around 12,000.
Not exactly a sign of a great success, if anyone asks me. In fact, that's piss-poor. The pile of turd that is post-NGE SWG still does about 10 times better. _Vanguard_ does 3-4 times better, and God alone knows why would anyone want to play that one. Heck, I haven't even heard of anyone who liked Tabula Rasa, but apparently some 7 times more people are willing to pay for that, than for AO.
Yes, apparently they have some more free accounts. I wonder how many are (A) actually played, since there is no disincentive to just let your accound active for free instead of bothering to deactivate it, and (B) how many of those are there only because it's free. I.e., as a prime illustration that you get what you pay for.
So basically, heh, let's stop waving around "very successful" and "large player base". It doesn't qualify as that by any sane reckoning. There are probably MUD's out there with a larger population base.
Ahh, but just being skeptical about some topics and saying that your waiting for more evidence to make any decisions often times leads into personal attacks.
Because that's not how science works. The current theory at any given time is simply the current best at explaining the data we have. Nothing more, nothing less.
Still waiting for more evidence if it didn't reach their pre-conceived "solution" isn't any useful kind of skepticism and it isn't science. It's just a way of clinging to a fairy tale which has even _less_ evidence to support it.
which refutes that and your #2 (since if the period is longer then a year, you would need more then 1 year to calibrate)
Well, that's perfectly ok then, because we calibrate for thousands of years, nor for one year. And it's calibrated against stuff which is already known to have happened at a given time.
E.g., yeah, you _could_ imagine a scenario where carbon decay was 1,000,000 times faster until very recently. (To account for the difference between billions of years and the thousands of years of new-Earth creationists.) But then in that scenario, Rameses II's boat would be mere days old. We already _know_ that that's not the case. Our measurement is already calibrated for the interval we're measuring, and shows _no_ sign whatsoever of any major deviation like that.
At any rate, see that 1,000,000 times difference required to support a young Earth. It's pretty damn hard to massage a 0.15% periodic difference into accounting for six bloody orders of magnitude.
Not that it will stop fundies from pretending that it's still some controversy.
Not to mention that the sun is the cause for this study, but isn't required to generate the effects. The field or neutrino flux could come from another possibly stronger source that may only come every 32 million years??? What if it were tied to something like this or the binary star reference in here
Well, it _could_ be the case, but see again:
1. we're talking about explaining a difference of 6 freaking orders of magnitude. Requiring an effect almost 10,000,000 times stronger than the Sun produces. It's not a minor fluctuation, it's something which would have _massive_ effects on almost everything on Earth.
Life, for example, would experience almost instant multiple-DNA breaks where C14 instantly decays, and pretty much just instantly die. We're talking C14 everywhere getting a half-life of 0.005 years, or less than two days. It would be an _extremely_ radioactive isotope in those conditions. E.g, a helluva lot more radioactive than the Caesium isotopes used for radiotherapy, or about 100 times more radioactive than the most active isotope of Polonium. Most C14 atoms in your DNA or proteins, would decay and break that DNA or protein, before the cell has any chance to repair the previous breaks. That effect alone is comparable to a massive ionizing radiation dose. But those breaks at that rate would cause additional ionization inside the cells, so it would be pretty damned deadly.
Other radioactive materials would experience an even more dramatic effect. Uranium ores everywhere would just freaking blow up. You don't even need a chain reaction there: merely shortening the half-life like that, would cause a lot of it to split, releasing tremendous amounts of energy. For that matter, since the Earth's magma gets its energy from fission, the freaking inner side of the planet would suddenly get 10,000,000 times more energy and probably blow up the planet. But at the very least, it would melt the surface and vapourize all life.
So if something like that had ever happened, at the scale needed to keep young-Earth creationists here, we wouldn't be here. We already have a pretty damn good indication that it didn't happen, and it couldn't have happened.
2. Our estimate of the Earth's universe is based on more than C14 decay. Sorry. So it would take a lot more th
Speaking as a religious person myself, I always find it funny when scientists are forced into these "oops, we didn't think of that" moments.
Why is it funny? That's how science _works_. The whole framework is geared towards, basically, fixing past mistakes or refining what wasn't quite right.
They spend all their time asserting conclusions that then turn out to be - if not exactly wrong - not quite there yet.
No real scientist can ever assert something as the final word, the immutable absolute truth, the thing beyond challenging. That's not how science works. You can only assert that, given the data you have, this theory is the simplest thing that explains that data. And here's the reasoning and the data, please _do_ try to poke holes in it and find cases that I've missed.
Science isn't about a set of edicts to learn by heart. It's a process. A method. It's the way to refine the current knowledge towards something more accurate, and to find and discard knowledge that turned out to be wrong after all.
Science doesn't have absolute truths. It only has falsifiable theories. Some of them actually getting proven wrong, or in your words "if not exactly wrong - not quite there yet" is not just normal, but the way progress happens.
In other words, it's a good thing, not a bad thing. And any scientist worth anything already knows that.
While I don't want to be seen as a fundamentalist "science sceptic" (because I'm not), I can't help wondering what else scientists have missed.
_Hopefully_ a lot, because that's how progress happens. If there were nothing more to discover, and the theories we have were the whole and exact truth, well, then we'd be stuck at the current tech level for ever. Which isn't necessarily a good thing.
Also, scepticism is a good thing in science. By all means, please be a sceptic. There is however a difference between scepticism as in "show me the data before I believe that" and block-headed counter-enlightenment as in "I already decided my immovable truth, and if any data contradicts it, then your data is wrong and the work of Satan." The latter isn't scepticism, it's just being a dumbass. And the fundies don't fail by being sceptical, they fail in the latter way.
Ah, well. That's why I read science books.
At the risk of sounding a bit like a personal attack, and I apologize in advance for it: try understanding the scientific method first. Because if I'm to take a guess based on what you wrote above, you don't really seem to understand what science _is_. Just reading some books and taking those predictions as some kind of religious truths, asserted by the High Priests, and as some failure of those if they turn out to be wrong... well, that's actually how religion works, not science.
But then it's entirely possible that you've just not explained your position well enough, or that I've misunderstood it completely.
Slashdot Mirror
Again, what else is new?
Especially in regards to the ISO 9000 series, especially as applied to software companies/departments who want that rubber stamp, you could be 100% compliant even if you work towards the wrong goals and achieve the wrong results. Essentially anyone with the money to blow on a byzantine bureaucracy where you have to document every bleeding obvious step, and document compliance with some brain dead rule, can get that certification. No need to even pay those money to ISO. You'll lose them the old fashioned way.
E.g., I know at least one company where they institutionalized the worst imaginable caricature of the waterfall model. And I don't mean the sane waterfall model, but the distorted caricature that sometimes is used under that name. In fact, a distorted caricature of even that. Everything must start with writing a cubic metre of use-cases and collect the signatures of a few dozen people on it. (Note that their model doesn't include at this step any kind of mockup or proof of concept to show them. You must just have faith that if you nag them enough they'll tell you _all_ their requirements in detail, and you'll write them down.) Then you work for some months on the implementation. _Then_ you have a couple of months for tests and fixing at the end. Then the customer finally sees anything, and _of_ _course_ it'll be exactly what he had in mind. And if more needs to be done, loop from the start now.
It's counter-productive, but if you could be arsed to document how you adhered to every step of it religiously, and can answer with a straight face things like, basically, "did you do what the rules said you should be doing?" you could be ISO 9000 certified for that crap process.
E.g., I had the mis-fortune of working with someone who wanted to have documented quality targets in advance, as per ISO 9001. Sounds good. Except he wanted to measure the entirely wrong things. He had only one tool he knew how to use, that is, a tool for benchmarking web applications. We, however, had made a framework. So instead of figuring out how he can benchmark the actual calls to the framework methods and classes, he wanted to benchmark the HTTPUnit unit tests. So basically he could write there as a quality goal, stuff like "the unit tests for the SomeComplexEJB module finish in less than 5 seconds." Woe if two iterations later, and having included test cases for any bugs reported and fixed, you end up taking more than 5 seconds.
Yep, if you're stupid enough, you can get _that_ sanctified as compliance with ISO 9001.
It doesn't say you should be doing the right thing or the effective thing. It just says you must have a type of process and can produce the relevant documentation if audited.
I'd say that bribing ISO to get that rubber stamp, might actually be an improvement in some places, compared to actually complying with a bad process thought up by a non-techie. At least if you bribe ISO, hey, at least you don't ruin everyone's productivity too. And the losses are basically limited to that bribe, which limit you don't get if you actually comply.
Yes, but GSM is a different standard. ISO 216 doesn't say anything about that. As far as ISO 216 is concerned, I could make a sheet that's 210mm × 297mm x 3000mm, in effect a _pillar_ with an A4 cross-section, and it would still count as ISO/DIN A4.
As for C99, exactly who implemented a C99 compiler faithfully or at all?
- GCC's own Status of C99 features in GCC page lists a _lot_ of C99 features as missing or broken.
- Visual C++ at least as of 2005 did _not_ support C99. Some 6 years after the standard had been passed. A quick search on MSDN leads me to believe that VS 2008 doesn't either.
- Borland AFAIK never did.
- a quick googling on Sun's site leads me to believe that their implementation is also not quite complete and compliant
- a quick googling on IBM's site, produced "Not all run-time functions and facilities required by the ISO/IEC 9899:1999 International Standard are supported on all the operating system levels that can run this version of the compiler." in the relevant section of IBM C for AIX v6.0. I wouldn't know if newer versions even exist, or how that was updated.
Sorry, if I don't have the time for the full research that this deserves. But so far it looks like, basically, if I could be arsed to, I could probably write some standard-compliant C99 code which doesn't even compile on _any_ major C compiler. Does that sound like the OOXML situation yet? :P
I might even have more sympathy for the techie, if not for the following detail: she actually opened the door for him, when he said he needed some CD from the van, and propped it open for when he returns. (Only to see him run off and drive off to the cops.)
I'm sorry, but is there any realistic and sane way to mistake that for a genuine hostage situation? I mean, hello? Isn't that the polar opposite of _preventing_ someone from leaving?
How would that even work, if it were a genuine hostage situation? "KK, you can go now, but please return later 'cuz you're my hostage. I'll let the door propped open for you. KTHXBYE." Or what? :P
Surely it would count as the most incompetent kidnapping in known history.
Look, that maybe he was close to the breaking point himself and he left an impolite customer, ok. I can live with that. Maybe the company even has a policy of leaving at the slightest perceived threat, even as a joke, as someone else suggested. Fine. Leave if you must.
But going to the police and filing criminal charges? Nope, sorry, my sympathy for him automatically ends there. He's an arsehole who thought he can abuse the system to teach someone else a lesson. And I have no sympathy for that.
Well, either that, or he is genuinely schizophrenic and thought that opening the door for him equals preventing him to leave. And in that case, someone put him in a nut house and on neuroleptics. Because God knows what else he might mis-interpret in surrealistic ways, and how he'll react then. Maybe at the next customer he'll think that offering him a glass of water means trying to set him on fire, or whatever. Maybe he'll end up injuring someone or himself, thinking he's fighting for his very life.
A lot of people act as if ISO was
A) some kind of guarantee that it'll be implemented 100% accurately and compatibly by everyone, and there is absolutely no room for wiggling in incompatible details, and
B) it's the first time this happens.
Hello? Both are false.
As a trivial example, C is an ISO standard. ISO/IEC 9899, to be precise. When was the last one you saw two C compiler implementations, from two different vendors and preferrably on different architectures, that were 100% compatible with each other or the standard? It's trivial to produce code that produces wildly different results, and offten incorrect results, based on unspecified details like endianness or word size.
Or take paper sizes. The ISO 216 defines paper sizes like A4, and multiples. Has that stopped anyone from selling "letter" sized paper instead? Or it's trivial to produce paper which is technically A4, but will jam your printer anyway, e.g., because it's much thicker than normal and the standard says nothing about that third dimension.
Most of the ISO standards are just guidelines, nothing more.
And TFA says that the police found no weapon at all in her house.
Well, then he's an even bigger fucktard.
Involving the police in a petty retaliation game is already an abuse. Filing criminal chages against someone as a petty retaliation? Oooer.
All in all, I hope the retard goes to PMITA jail for it, _if_ that is the case. Abusing the police and justice system as one's private goon squad to terrorize/punish people one doesn't like, isn't exactly something I'd want to see repeated.
I did. Me, a friend and mom were travelling by plane at one point in the 80's. Much to mom's annoyance (and probably because it annoyed her), I spent the whole time at both airports and on the plane telling jokes about airplane hijacks and bombings.
Admittedly, we did get a few cops around us on the airport listening to my jokes.
But you know what? That was it. They didn't even butt into the talk, or try to be menacing or anything. I'm still guessing that probably they were bored enough and the jokes made their day.
The post 9/11 histeria there wasn't normal at any time before. And in a lot of countries it still isn't.
Now threatening to blow up the plane, or falsely reporting a bomb, those are serious crimes. Even as a joke. Because they cause quite the disruption.
But just saying the word "bomb" or telling an obvious joke about a bomb? Geeze. If you can't do that, ask yourself what went wrong and when.
Let's cut this bullshit.
1. _Again_, the idea was that a lot use the "there's something wrong with your computer" line even when there is _nothing_ wrong with that computer.
2. Just because the line is fine, it doesn't automatically transfer the problem to her computer. As a trivial example: it's happened to me before that my line _and_ computer were perfectly fine, but one of their routers was down. Or whatever login server they used was down.
I.e., I do expect whoever is in that support job to at least try to see where the problem is, before using the "it's your computer" line. Maybe, just maybe, it isn't my computer after all.
3. If they sent a sparky to fix a line which wasn't deffective, then it sounds like massive incompetence on the part of that company anyway. Over here they can check the line and ping the modem, without sending anyone over.
Furthermore, it sounds like it wasn't the first time they had sent one, and solved nothing. If the first guy plugged in the modem and the line was fine, why was the second (and presumably third and so on) sparky sent to fix the same line?
4. Yes, it's not the sparky's job to diagnose her computer, but why didn't tech support do that first? I mean, hello? Most ISP's make you go through that "is the cable connected?" list even if you tell them that the modem just caught fire.
Did these guys really send someone over, i.e., the expensive thing, before making sure it can't be solved the cheap way?
5. You don't need to send someone over, if a virus had disabled her net access. You just ping the modem from the ISP end.
Frankly it makes me wonder if there wasn't something wrong with the line after all.
6. That is actually a pretty poor SF scenario, btw. Viruses would rather use that connection to send more copies of themselves or act as a zombie army, undetected. And if you're going to make yourself obvious and obnoxious big time, just formatting the HDD works better than disabling the network.
Well, the keyboard pad would probably work.
Combinations of 2 and 3 shoulder buttons and/or essentially morse codes of taps, and that's before you also add 1 button for the actual command... sounds like a usability nightmare, though. Sorry. I'm sure there are people who'll remember that healing their pet is shoulders 1 and 3, and double-tap X. They're hardly an MMO's primary market segment. These things are more casual players.
And just to stress one aspect of usability: you don't want only to make lots of commands _possible_, but first and foeremost _discoverable_ and preferably fast if it's a realtime game. If I forgot where my "track giants" or "freeze trap" icon is, I can hover the mouse over the bars and see what the tooltip says. Doing the same by cycling through shoulder combinations and whatnot, sounds like too slow to be of any use in combat.
I've had, though over the phone, not in person. Sadly, tempting as it is, you can't really hold someone hostage over the phone ;)
ACT 1
It went like this: so at some point I activate my email at T-Online. They had a handy-dandy page that allows one to change their _email_ password, and I use it.
Suddenly I can't log in to the ISP any more. I figure, hmm, I bet the damned thing changed my ISP password too. I try the new one, it doesn't work either.
I'm pretty sure I didn't forget the new password, since it was one I had used before. But ok, it could happen. I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.
So I call the ISP's tech support, he makes me try both the new and old password, neither works, ok, he says he'll send me a new one by post. But first he wants to know my invoice number, to be sure he's sending it to the right guy. I read the one from my phone bill to him. Says it's ok, all clear, he'll send me a new password.
A week goes by, I have no new password. I call again, different employee, makes me read him the invoice number again, assures me all is well and he'll send me the new password. Nothing happens.
The spiel continues for one and a half fucking months, in increasinly short intervals as my patience wears thin. Then I lose my patience entirely and escalate it to hell and back.
Turns out that when I moved, both the ISP and the parent telco gave me a new invoice number. Each. Different ones. But on the bill there was only the telco one. So the retards from support saw that the numbers don't match and _lied_ to me.
They fucking lied to me for a month and a half. They didn't even bother telling me what's wrong, or finding a simple solution like "ok, come to one of our stores to prove it's you." Nah, the bloody retards lied to me.
(At this point it's worth noting that (A) DSL connections are point-to-point anyway, (B) they can know it's me or at least calling from my phone number since it's a subsidiary of my telco, but most importantly (C) they're sending it by post to my address. What more confirmation do they want?)
ACT 2
My brother buys a new house informs the same telco and isp, is assured he'll get dsl in a couple of days.
It's worth noting that somehow he was flagged as VIP customer. Dunno why. Maybe because he and his wife are addicted to their cell phones, and get a phone bill comparable to some small companies. But anyway, he's a VIP customer and for that they assure him that it won't take more than a day or two to switch his account to the new address.
Short story: the same spiel as in my case happens. He's repeatedly assured that, yeah, verily, someone will take care of it by tomorrow. And nothing happens. Again and again.
What had happened? The drone who entered his new address made a typo. Let's say his new house number was 42 A (not the real one, for the obvious reasons), and the drone entered it as 42 S. Which didn't exist.
Ok, typos happen.
But again, they just lied to him again and again. If they do that even to "VIP customers", I rest my case.
ACT 3
After the previous incident, I was weary of doing anything to my connection any more. But eventually I'm dumb enough to say yes, when some salesman offers me (again) to upgrade my connection to 6000 MB/s instead 1000.
Life goes on for a month or so, in which time nothing happens to my connection, good or bad. As in, I'm still on 1000. Well, ok, I'm fine with that. At least I still have it.
Then suddenly I can't log in any more.
The call this time was a surrealistic carousel affair, where I'm passed around between 6 different departments. Each sees only his slice of the problem, so as soon as it even touches any other domain or aspect, he gives me a new phone number to call. And, as we'll see, didn't even see his own slice well enough.
It took me a whole weekend, albeit with large breaks to recharge my phone's batteries, of going round robin like that.
In that time, I'm
Well, you have my sympathy there. I wasn't talking about people like you. In that case, I see the point in wanting to be normal.
The ones that I'm ranting about are those who _are_ average (the gauss curve is pretty narrow for the humans), but are insecure about having less than a foot.
Quoting from Wikipedia, because I'm too lazy tolook up more authoritative sources:
So basically anyone with 6 inches is already (marginally) _above_ both the average _and_ median for the species. They have a dick that's longer than what more than 50% of the population has. It's freaking stupid to be insecure about that.
1. I think you're thinking more along the lines of canabinoids and dopamine. Endorphins are more like natural anesthetics than anything released as reward. It's released when you're in pain, or over-exert yourself physically, or the like. With the sole (known) strange exception being the orgasm.
People _can_ artificially produce their own endorphin high, e.g., in BDSM or by doing lots of physical exercise. Capsacin (as in, chili) also stimulates it. Acupuncture also seems to produce endorphins, because when you stab a needle in certain points, the body wants to anesthetise the point. Unfortunately, it has no way to release endorphins only there.
There is no data that links endorphins to gaming.
If _you_ get endorphins from a computer game, I want to know what you're playing. Do you have a device that kicks you in the nuts when you lose, or what? ;) Or is it via the orgasm route? Do you steer the game with your dick, or what? ;) Ok, ok, just kidding. Sorry.
2. Even there, it seems to me like a double standard.
- If someone pushes weights or trains for the marathon, we don't think, "OMG, endorphin addict" (which a lot probably are), we idolize those guys
- If someone is into extremely spicy food (a couple of co-workers are), we don't think "OMG, endorphin addict", we think more like, "de gustibus non est disputandum."
- If someone is into acupuncture, you don't think "OMG, endorphin addict", you might consider him even some enlightened guy/gal who takes good care of his/her body.
- but woe that you enjoy a game for an hour or two, _then_ it's "OMG, endorphin addict". Although, again, there is no endorphin released.
How come nobody worries about the actual endorphin junkie who just ordered extra spicy oriental food at the office and dumped a generous extra portion of chili sauce into it? Or about the actual endorphin junkie who's the basketball star in high school? _Those_ are higher than a kite for a (short) while, but, nah, if it's via those, suddenly addiction and drugs aren't dangerous after all. Those are guys to be emulated, not avoided.
3. In the same vein, I wonder about half the addiction histeria and the war on drugs itself. If we're not worried about a guy getting an endorphin high right in the middle of the day at the office, remind me, why do we care that much about whether he smokes a joint at home? Or we have these oriental/new-age wellness centres where they have a whole bunch of guys full of needles and endorphins. If we don't worry about _those_ doing something stupid, why do we worry about some guy who's probably too stoned on pot to do more than munch a Mars bar?
Now sadly I don't have any first hand experience myself, but I've worked with guys who were pot-heads. Two admins for a start. They didn't exactly strike me as violent, delusional types.
4. Ok, let's assume you mean dopamine and canabinoids. Well... you're pre-"addicted" to that. It's built right into your brain and your DNA code. You were "addicted" to those since you were born. Actually, a few months before that. They're the pre-wired rewards of the brain, and yes, you're pre-wired to enjoy them and try to get more.
And you get them for lots of stuff. When you're proud of yourself for writting a witty resort on Slashdot? You just got a shot of those. When you're all proud that your coded some clever piece of code? Yep, you just got a shot. When the village gossip finds someone who listens to her rant about evil games? She got a shot too. Etc. That's how it works. They're how nature kept you from being a vegetable: by giving you rewards when you do something (you rate as) good.
You're pre-programmed to be a hedonist, so to speak. You're _supposed_ to seek fun and pleasure. All animals are. And games are fun. That's really all. But, of course, "games are fun" is much less of a story than "OMG, spooky brain chemicals" scares for the press.
But I fail to see why would we vilify them. Again, it's just how the brain works.
Well, the whole point was how arbitrarily that distinction is made. Usually people having made up their mind in advance that if it's WoW, then it's addiction. And then working backwards to "yeah, well, but I hear someone even lost their job because of it" justifications like yours, to support their pre-defined conclusion.
The exact same behaviour I've described for that casual history hobby _is_ classified by many people as "OMG, he plays 2 hours a day, he's addicted." I don't think many people wait until you're living in a cardboard box under a bridge to tell you you're addicted.
But ok, let's look at your version. So it's only addiction at the point where I call in sick because of it and don't do anything else but think of it at work? Did I read that right?
Funny. I could have sworn that there are half a dozen smokers just on the same floor at work, and they don't call in sick to sit at home and smoke. Didn't get fired because of it either. Did't lose their wife because of it. I guess they're not addicted then? Funny how medicine says they are, and there are physiological modifications to the brain to prove it.
Or maybe it's just time to stop redefining words. Addiction means something very specific. It's not just a blanket term for "someone enjoys something else than I do."
And the sooner we all understand that, the sooner maybe we understand that we should all mind our own business instead of trying to prevent others from having fun. Entirely too many people these days seem to have exactly that as their hobby: trying to keep someone else from having fun. If you're having fun in any way instead of executing your assigned role and script like a robot, then it's surely
A) a dangerous addiction and menace to society
B) immoral, or should be
C) illegal, or we should make it so
D) probably unhealthy, and thus a dangerous example for others
E) a sign or cause of the impending apocalypse
F) all the above.
And I'm getting tired of it. There are things which actually cause addiction, and there are things which are merely one of the many interchangeable ways to have fun. I see no reason to blur the lines. And doubly so if it's just so some busybodies should get to reinforce everyone else's role and things to do.
Well, here's the thing: my current narrow focus of attention is history. Hardly a day passes by without me reading some interesting stuff about the Romans or Messopotamia or Egypt or the like. That's the kind of thing that counts as fun for me. And I do it lots. Do I qualify as an addict yet?
Let's think about it for a second.
1.a. If I told someone that I play 2 hours of WoW a day with my parents, and often as much as 8 hours a day on weekends, they'd label me a WoW addict and try to "save" me.
1.b. But if I told someone that I spent a whole weekend reading Polybius instead, I'd at most qualify as a geek.
2.a. If I even mention WoW in casual conversation, even as some (admittedly failed) joke, everyone gets worried. 'Cause it's that addictive game, you know.
2.b. If I joke about the Roman diplomat killing Brennus's diplomat instead of negotiating a peace, as a RL example of rolling a natural 1, they laugh. Might think I'm a complete nerd, but not worry much about it. 'Cause, be serious, nobody got to lose their job and family by being addicted to history. No need to worry.
3.a. If I even mention that I'm can hardly wait to get home and raid, now that's where everyone already starts looking at me like I have needle marks on my arms or something.
3.b. If I mention that I can hardly wait to get home and read more from the new book about Pharaohs, they nod politely and promptly forget about it.
4.a. If I mention, again, that I spend 2 hours a day and more on weekends playing WoW, they start telling me about how I'll go fat and get to die of trombosis.
4.b. But nobody worries about the same lack of exercise if I mention history books.
4.c. Nor realizes that my day job involve sitting in front of the computer too.
Etc, etc, etc.
So why can't my history hobby qualify as an addiction, then? I want to be an addict too, goddammit, same as everyone else. Since we're at labelling everything that's fun or relaxing as an addiction. I don't want to be left out like that ;)
Yes I've played Phantasy Star Online, and nowadays its successor, Phantasy Star Universe. It did that. It also had about as much depth as a mud puddle. It was just a glorified button masher.
Managing all those abilities and possibilities and synergies between them, is half the fun of WoW. It's basically like a puzzle game. You have all these pieces, and your team mates have some more, and you have to see what cool things you can build out of them. In real time.
PSO had two lists of 3 buttons each. One normal block of 3 (the fourth button was for a substitute limit break) and a shifted one. Considering that two of those are your normal attacks, it leaves very little room for depth in your abilities. It's also a mere half a WoW action bar.
But let's say you use both shoulder buttons as shifts, and all 4 buttons. That's 12 different icons, or the equivalent of one WoW action bar.
It might be enough for an over-simplified straight-up damage class like rogue or maybe warrior. A mage is already getting squeezed in there. But it would make hybrids utterly impossible. You can't play, say, a druid where the whole _point_ is that you get the skills of 3-4 other classes (if weaker than the pure classes equivalents of those powers), with barely enough buttons for _one_ such class.
Actually, I've mostly heard that in spam, rather than from any actual woman.
I'd warn against trusting marketing and PR "testimonials" too much. Especially when they tell you what someone else wants.
As a non-penis-size (well, or rather indirectly;) thing, take diamonds. Nobody gave much of a damn about them until the PR campaign to convince men that every woman wants a diamond. What actually happened there is that they actually asked some women, and were expecting to hear them confirm that they want jewellery. To their surprise, most said that they'd rather have the guy invest that money into something useful for both, like getting a home after they get married.
The whole point of that campaign became to convince you to _not_ ask a woman. Trust _us_, not her. We know better that she really wants a diamond. Just buy one already.
Well, it's that "a lot worse" that makes the big difference, really.
And basically there _is_ a dichotomy, in that one implies physiological modifications, the other doesn't. It's pretty binary. I'm not setting up a dichotomy between light grey and dark grey, but between something which either exists or it doesn't.
There's a difference between, basically:
A) I'd rather be doing something more fun, and it so happens that this virtual world is more fun than bickering with my spouse some more, and
B) I'm getting (physiologically and medically) depressed and nervous unless I light another cigarette.
In case A you're merely back to baseline if you don't, in case B you're genuinely a lot below baseline if you don't. That "going cold turkey from a hard drug is a lot worse" factor.
Case A is merely how the brain is wired to work. Your brain is wired to give you a "man, I'm bored" signal when nothing interesting happens, and a dopamine/serotonin/canbinoid/whatever-apropriate-signa shot when you do something fun. You're pre-programmed to seek pleasure and fun. If that's "addiction", we're all born addicts.
Your cat or dog is like that too. That's why you see the dog occasionally chasing his tail or begging to play fetch, or the cat pouncing on a stuffed toy. Because again there's that natural signal in the brain that says "go do something fun already."
The difference is that we humans built layers upon layers of culture, pre-conceptions and mis-conceptions about what you should be doing instead of that. And a society where you're supposed to, and have to, do something else to even survive. A cat just goes and hunts when it's hungry, and is free to sleep or play the rest of the time. You, by contrast have to go to work now so you can have something to eat next month. But you're not wired for that, you're still wired like the cat. That's where will power comes in. You must move your arse and do what you know you should be doing, instead of what your animal brain tells you to do.
And even before games, there still were people who ignored what they _should_ be doing and did what their brain signals told them instead. The village drunk or the bum living off begging are the same. They chose to go with the short term satisfaction (as in, "meh, it's better than ploughing") instead of long term planning ("but if I go plough, I'll have bread next year.")
Heck, over half the people out there are in their current job because of that. At some point they chose something like, "meh, playing prom queen / basketball jock is more immediately rewarding than learning maths", and now they flip burgers or man the gas pump instead of having a better paying job. Essentially they too did the same choice between (I) something immediately rewarding, and (II) something boring right now, but which pays off later. Or you see millions of fat people around you, because they chose the more fun activities (e.g., eating and sitting on the couch), instead of the boring and physically exerting ones (exercising and dieting.) There's no fundamental difference between that and the choice of a WoW "addict". They all essentially choose to go with the short-term rewarding things, i.e., with following the signals of that animal brain, instead of having the will power to do what they know they should be doing.
It's not a new factor. We're _wired_ like that, and have had people following their wiring for the past 200,000 years straight. All that's new is the hysteria of singling out games.
And at the end of the day, it doesn't change the fact that it's just some normal chemical reaction in the brains. Labeling it as the same thing as drug abuse only serves to obfuscate the real mechanisms and problems there.
Actually, that's not how (real) addiction works. Addiction to a substance happens when your brain chemistry starts adjusting in the other direction. Biology is largely about self-tuning feedback loops like that. If you have too little oxygen in your arm, e.g., because you do a lot of physical effort, your body grows more blood vessels. And if the brain has to work while disrupted by alcohol, it compensates its chemistry in the other direction.
Addiction is that compensation in the other direction. And when you are properly addicted, it's not as much that your drug is fun, as that life without it is not much fun.
E.g., Nicotine inhibits MAO-B, which breaks down Dopamine and Phenethylamine. It's part of a chemical equilibrium in the brain. When you're happy about something, you get a shot of dopamine, but almost immediately MAO-B is released to make that signal decay back to baseline. Nicotine perturbs that mechanism, so it originally makes you feel better. But soon your body adjusts its equilibrium in the other direction, so now you feel shitty without a cigarette. Eventually those cigarettes do nothing except bring you briefly to the point where a non-smoker is naturally all the time. That's addiction.
E.g., Alcohol is a central nervous system depressant, which doesn't actually mean it makes you depressed, just that it makes certain individual synapses and pathways less responsive. But again, the body immediately starts to compensate in the other direction, and those synapses gradually become hyperexcitable. If you keep doing that, essentially to the point where they fire erratically on their own. See, delirium tremens. So essentially after a while you notice that without alcohol you're nervous, have less motor coordination, have hearth rhythm problems, and the like. Essentially your body just started telling you, "man, I really could use a drink." And again, gradually you need more and more of it, and eventually the first sixpack just gets you back to the normal "sober" point. (Alcohol tolerance really is just the road to delirium tremens, sadly.)
Addiction to something fun isn't an addiction at all. There is no external chemicals perturbing the brain balance. It's just the normal way the brain works. There is no, say, nicotine inhibiting MAO-B so you get artificially elevated doses of dopamine, and forcing the brain to adjust. It's just the normal "this is fun" signal in your brain.
So at best it's just lack of willpower, but not an addiction.
And people get pseudo-"addicted" like that all the time. The village gossip who goes around bad-mouthing the local WoW "addict", is, funnily enough, herself "addicted" to her own "hobby". She gets her brain signals out of that social interaction, to the point where she has to even poke into someone else's life to have a topic. The guy who obsessively watches football or soccer or baseball, to have something to talk about to his group of friends, essentially is again just doing something to feed a similar addiction. It's his way of getting his daily shot of "I'm happy and appreciated" brain mediator. The guy who's doing overtime all week and goes fishing every weekend, ok, he's probably more like keeping himself away from getting an "I'm unhappy" signal at home, but nevertheless that's the same pseudo-addiction. Etc.
There's really nothing special about WoW. If your wife was out gossiping with the neighbours 18 hours a day, well, you'd probably just think some stereotype about women instead. But it would be the same thing, essentially.
At any rate, addiction it ain't.
Except if it were real physiological addiction, that wouldn't happen.
Well, that is partially true, but a lot of those are borderline scams too. Or, as marketing likes to call it, "creative puffering."
What I don't understand, though, is the insecurity about being within the normal parameters for your species. Let's face it, the human species just doesn't have the DNA for huge penises, nor a vagina design which would require one. Unless you were planning to fuck a mare, I guess. Last I've heard most women find over 7-8 inches outright uncomfortable. And most of the nerve endings are on the outside and first third of the vagina, so basically, if there was a modification to keep her happier, it would be girth, rather than length.
Even most of the male porn stars with huge "tools", had surgery to that end.
So, seriously, it seems to me just about as stupid as if, I dunno, I were to get upset because I don't have feet as big as the clowns. It wouldn't be an improvement to walk, but, boy, I wanna be above average. I wanna be like those clowns too. 'Cause you know what they say about men with big feet. (They need big shoes ;)
I mean, seriously, when and how did the penis size obsession get started anyway? (Including all the stupidities that serve as substitute penis size symbols.) Did marketing just manage to make half the male population insecure and unhappy about being normal human beings? And we still think that marketing is a _good_ thing then?
That said, I find it ironic, but nevertheless a good lesson in that this company required a doctor's affidavit that you have a small penis, to get your money back. Because unless someone was well below the normal size for a human, they didn't need to have it extended in the first place. I would have required a notarized declaration along the lines of "yes, I'm an idiot and insecure about being a normal human", but I guess their version is good too.
Not necessarily. Trees only grow by, well,growing new layers, outwards. That's why you can count the rings and all that. The old wood doesn't change shape or anything. (Though it might rot.) A lot of it in the centre is even dead already.
It's basically like living in a brick house where periodically you add a new layer of bricks to the outside walls. It eventually gets to be on hell of a bunker, but the rooms haven't changed at all.
If you prevent the inner surface from rotting, the rooms in the tree wouldn't grow too. Your walls would just get a little thicker each year.
Or I guess you could periodically shave a thin layer of wood from the inside, keeping the walls at a constant thickness, but having your rooms grow together with the tree. Frankly it isn't an unsolvable problem even then. Just put anything which needs pipes (kitchen sink, bathroom, etc) or wires (AC sockets, TV cable, etc) in the centre, so they don't need to be moved when you enlarge the rooms by 1mm.
But even that is probably over-thinking it, since it assumes an actual house in a tree. All these guys have done, is mould some soft roots into park benches and the like. And their houses, from what I understand, would basically be a layer of roots bent around some panels done out of something else.
Frankly, it's not that huge a progress. We've already known how to bend wood in any imaginable shape. See the curved Roman shield (scutum) for an example that's over 2000 years old.
I don't see many fundamental advantages in doing the same thing out of roots, as opposed to bending planks of wood. Especially since we're talking soft roots, as opposed to wooden ones. It's, almost by definition, a softer and less resistent material than wood.
The horrible number of casualties were the result of
A) First and foremost, failure to adapt fast enough to new weaponry and tactics. E.g., took an awfully long time to sink in that a rifled gun shoots accurately to IIRC 300m, while against muskets it was reasonably safe to march to 100m and stand tall. (Oh, you could get hit by musket fire too, but, as an officer in the age of muskets put it, only if it was aimed at someone else;) There were years of horrible massacres, where thousands of soldiers were marched in formation to 100m, and then they shot essentially point blank at each other, standing tall and taking the volley.
B) Incompetent charges that ignored the officers' advice and marched some soldiers to slaughter. E.g., Picket's Charge.
C) Essentially, the first attempt in history at having a broad front war. Previously war had been historically a set-piece affair, where two armies would meet, fight, and that was it. E.g., when the Gauls invaded Rome, or Rome smacked Carthage, or whatever other historical war, don't think that they had a front across Italy. It was basically the army of one side vs the army of the other in _one_ point, and that decided the fate of the war. They might leave a detachment behind to besiege some city or whatever, but there was no coordinated effort by multiple armies. The American Civil War was arguably the first where that was even attempted, and it resulted in hideous casualties as essentially there were more battles all over the place and more generals trying to win some glory by breaking the opposite line in some God-forsaken place.
D) Railroads. Unlike previous times in history, it was now trivial to keep reinforcing and resupplying a lot of army. Where previously you'd admit defeat or fortify and wait for reinforcements for a year (see Hannibal), here it became a case where it was possible to throw more soldiers at anything. And they did. With the logical results.
E) Lack of modern medical care. Wars had always been a crappy affair in that aspect. The Minnie ball caused horrible wounds, and there were no antibiotics or even anesthetics.
Additionally:
1. Focusing on _US_ casualties in WW1 and WW2 is rather misleading. The USA took only a minor part in the trench battles of WW1, for example. The finance and industry of the USA played a bigger role in both world wars, than the actual soldiers in the trenches.
For the countries which actually held the line in those wars, the casualties were a lot more horrible. The USSR in WW2, for example, lost ten _million_ soldier and some thirteen _million_ civillians in WW2. Let that sink in a bit, next time the "we won WW2" willy-waving contest comes by. China lost some 4 million soldiers and 16 million civillians, and their contribution to the attrition and over-extending lines of the Japanese should not be overlooked in the Pacific War. On the Axis side, Germany lost 5.5 million soldiers, and almost two million civilians. You don't think you were that good that you fought Germany single-handedly and caused 10 times more casualties than you took, do you? But at any rate, that's what WW2 was really like, for those in the middle of it. There's an estimated 72 million people who died in that war.
In WW1, the Brits took almost 60,000 casualites just in the first day of the Battle of Somme. Almost half of what you took in the whole war. And while I'm too lazy to look up numbers, France almost depleted their manpower to the point where they were out of conscripts for many years after the war. There's a reason for the pacifism and (in the USA isolationism) after the war. Humanity had never seen such carnage before, and was thoroughly shocked.
So writing only the USA casualties for both wars is IMHO highly misleading.
2. Again, the fact that something has happened before, doesn't excuse the present.
The general history of humanity started from ritualized mass-murder and slavery, and we had a long way to gradually become more... civilized. And I don't mean just having TV and Sla
Let's put this in perspective. WoW was missing some features, but the ones in the game worked pretty damned well. AO, by contrast, off the top of my head had:
- massive graphics glitches. E.g., more often than not doors would turn into a swirly graphical glitch, so you can't see what awaits you on the other side. (And virtually any mission in the game consisted of lots of rooms connected by lots of doors.)
- collision code problems where you'd suddenly fall through and start swimming in the ground. Or would run on a flat road, and suddenly you're falling from the sky. Or a few other such.
- NPCs could punch you through walls, from the next room, and you couldn't even see who or in which direction to run to find that NPC and kill it before it kills you. Running _away_ didn't work, btw. Once an NPC started punching you, putting more distance and more walls between you and it, did nothing. See the next point.
- NPCs could punch you from any distance, negating the usefulness of any kind of ranged combat, including their reason to exist of their ranged combat class. Yes, a fist had the same range as a sniper rifle. Not to mention how badly that tripped suspension of disbelief.
- massively broken class balance. And I'm not talking the "OMG, rogues are too tough" or "OMG, shamans can't be killed" arguments on WoW. Some classes, say, a healer or buffer couldn't solo at all, while a couple of other classes didn't even need a healer or buffer to do any mission. So if on WoW your only complaint is that your Priest doesn't solo as fast as a Rogue, count your blessings.
- broken faction balance. And not as in the "horde vs alliance" bickering on WoW, but as a matter of design. One faction got better money and equipment, one faction got shafted, and one faction didn't even have shops past the newbie level. You can recognize an incompetent designer by his rationalizing why an imbalance is ok to exist (e.g., "well, they're corporates, of course they should get better money and equipment",) instead of fixing it.
- boring, randomly generated missions, with no more story than "go steal the generic round item on the floor."
- ... and some of them were broken too, or their map was broken. (E.g., it wouldn't be that unusual to fall into some 6 ft deep hole in the ground and have no way to get out of it and continue the mission.)
- Not much variety there either. E.g., the stupidity that you'd be given a "stealth" or "infiltration" mission, but wouldn't get the mission token unless you killed everyone on the map.
Etc, etc, etc.
But, hey, they had painted photo-realistic anatomically-correct mooning, and the best animation of giving or receiving a blow job. And stuff like female "armour" which consisted of only 2 strips of kevlar on the sides of the body. I guess someone had taken the "sex sells" dictum to heart.
At any rate, yes, WoW may not have been 100% finished, but you can't really put an equals sign between the AO launch and the WoW launch.
Ahem. It was IIRC the first major MMO where they just went ad-supported and otherwise let most people pay for free. Because the player base which was willing to pay for their game, had started small and was imploding.
(And if anyone wonders why, read the two reviews on Something Awful. I can personally vouch that every single problem in there was true, and a lot more. And yes, that was after the devs had proclaimed it 110% fixed and working as intended.)
According to MMO Charts, it peaked at a mere 60,000 subscribers. Then AO subscribers hit an all time low of 20,000 (yes, I'm not missing a zero or anything), and after some major rework, it peaked again at 40,000. And went downhill again. Currently the _paying_ subscribers are around 12,000.
Not exactly a sign of a great success, if anyone asks me. In fact, that's piss-poor. The pile of turd that is post-NGE SWG still does about 10 times better. _Vanguard_ does 3-4 times better, and God alone knows why would anyone want to play that one. Heck, I haven't even heard of anyone who liked Tabula Rasa, but apparently some 7 times more people are willing to pay for that, than for AO.
Yes, apparently they have some more free accounts. I wonder how many are (A) actually played, since there is no disincentive to just let your accound active for free instead of bothering to deactivate it, and (B) how many of those are there only because it's free. I.e., as a prime illustration that you get what you pay for.
So basically, heh, let's stop waving around "very successful" and "large player base". It doesn't qualify as that by any sane reckoning. There are probably MUD's out there with a larger population base.
Because that's not how science works. The current theory at any given time is simply the current best at explaining the data we have. Nothing more, nothing less.
Still waiting for more evidence if it didn't reach their pre-conceived "solution" isn't any useful kind of skepticism and it isn't science. It's just a way of clinging to a fairy tale which has even _less_ evidence to support it.
Well, that's perfectly ok then, because we calibrate for thousands of years, nor for one year. And it's calibrated against stuff which is already known to have happened at a given time.
E.g., yeah, you _could_ imagine a scenario where carbon decay was 1,000,000 times faster until very recently. (To account for the difference between billions of years and the thousands of years of new-Earth creationists.) But then in that scenario, Rameses II's boat would be mere days old. We already _know_ that that's not the case. Our measurement is already calibrated for the interval we're measuring, and shows _no_ sign whatsoever of any major deviation like that.
At any rate, see that 1,000,000 times difference required to support a young Earth. It's pretty damn hard to massage a 0.15% periodic difference into accounting for six bloody orders of magnitude.
Not that it will stop fundies from pretending that it's still some controversy.
Well, it _could_ be the case, but see again:
1. we're talking about explaining a difference of 6 freaking orders of magnitude. Requiring an effect almost 10,000,000 times stronger than the Sun produces. It's not a minor fluctuation, it's something which would have _massive_ effects on almost everything on Earth.
Life, for example, would experience almost instant multiple-DNA breaks where C14 instantly decays, and pretty much just instantly die. We're talking C14 everywhere getting a half-life of 0.005 years, or less than two days. It would be an _extremely_ radioactive isotope in those conditions. E.g, a helluva lot more radioactive than the Caesium isotopes used for radiotherapy, or about 100 times more radioactive than the most active isotope of Polonium. Most C14 atoms in your DNA or proteins, would decay and break that DNA or protein, before the cell has any chance to repair the previous breaks. That effect alone is comparable to a massive ionizing radiation dose. But those breaks at that rate would cause additional ionization inside the cells, so it would be pretty damned deadly.
Other radioactive materials would experience an even more dramatic effect. Uranium ores everywhere would just freaking blow up. You don't even need a chain reaction there: merely shortening the half-life like that, would cause a lot of it to split, releasing tremendous amounts of energy. For that matter, since the Earth's magma gets its energy from fission, the freaking inner side of the planet would suddenly get 10,000,000 times more energy and probably blow up the planet. But at the very least, it would melt the surface and vapourize all life.
So if something like that had ever happened, at the scale needed to keep young-Earth creationists here, we wouldn't be here. We already have a pretty damn good indication that it didn't happen, and it couldn't have happened.
2. Our estimate of the Earth's universe is based on more than C14 decay. Sorry. So it would take a lot more th
Why is it funny? That's how science _works_. The whole framework is geared towards, basically, fixing past mistakes or refining what wasn't quite right.
No real scientist can ever assert something as the final word, the immutable absolute truth, the thing beyond challenging. That's not how science works. You can only assert that, given the data you have, this theory is the simplest thing that explains that data. And here's the reasoning and the data, please _do_ try to poke holes in it and find cases that I've missed.
Science isn't about a set of edicts to learn by heart. It's a process. A method. It's the way to refine the current knowledge towards something more accurate, and to find and discard knowledge that turned out to be wrong after all.
Science doesn't have absolute truths. It only has falsifiable theories. Some of them actually getting proven wrong, or in your words "if not exactly wrong - not quite there yet" is not just normal, but the way progress happens.
In other words, it's a good thing, not a bad thing. And any scientist worth anything already knows that.
_Hopefully_ a lot, because that's how progress happens. If there were nothing more to discover, and the theories we have were the whole and exact truth, well, then we'd be stuck at the current tech level for ever. Which isn't necessarily a good thing.
Also, scepticism is a good thing in science. By all means, please be a sceptic. There is however a difference between scepticism as in "show me the data before I believe that" and block-headed counter-enlightenment as in "I already decided my immovable truth, and if any data contradicts it, then your data is wrong and the work of Satan." The latter isn't scepticism, it's just being a dumbass. And the fundies don't fail by being sceptical, they fail in the latter way.
At the risk of sounding a bit like a personal attack, and I apologize in advance for it: try understanding the scientific method first. Because if I'm to take a guess based on what you wrote above, you don't really seem to understand what science _is_. Just reading some books and taking those predictions as some kind of religious truths, asserted by the High Priests, and as some failure of those if they turn out to be wrong... well, that's actually how religion works, not science.
But then it's entirely possible that you've just not explained your position well enough, or that I've misunderstood it completely.