1. Carbon isn't one of the isotopes that are affected by this.
2. The fluctuations have a period of about year, so they average out when you measure something over millenia.
3. The fluctuations are very very tiny, waay below one percent even. So basically even if you happened to take one extreme as your value, and in reality it was the opposite extreme, and even with "compound interest" so to speak... worst that could happen is that a 100,000 year old bone turns out to be "only" a bit over 99,000 year old. The creationists still aren't going to like it.
4. The variability in C14 production and distribution are much bigger than this fluctuation, and we learned to deal with those perfectly well. (C14 is constantly produced as neutrons from solar radiation knock off and replace a proton from an N14 atom, turning it into a C14 atom.)
5. The way we deal with those is by calibrating that dating. There's stuff that we already know when it happened, by other means (chronicles, geologic events, etc), and we can see how much C14 is left in stuff from that year. That lets you calibrate your C14 dating pretty damn well.
The last one also tells you why actually #2 is the only one that matters: we already calibrated for long intervals, and such fluctuations were already averaged into the calibration. This new discovery won't affect C14 dating at all. The effect is exactly zero. Null. Nada. Nix.
Of course, that won't stop young-Earth creationists from coming out of the woodwork, and waving yet another thing they don't understand as "proof" that science is wrong and their bible is the literal history of Earth. What else is new? No, seriously.
I figure everyone and everything has their place and role, though. The young-earth creationists' is simply to make everyone else look smart. It's a tough job, but someone has to do it;)
How does copyright interact with public information? Who knows what the deal in Venezuela is with public records, but if I requests e-mails from a state agency in the U.S. under a public information act, would I be allowed to distribute them, even though they are copyrighted? (This is actually kind of personally important, because I have a bunch of documents requested under a public information act that are on a public web server)
If I read IIRC paragraph 3 right, laws, government acts and the like are not eligible for copyright there. It does not seem to imply however, that private correspondence of official persons gets the same exemption.
Second, those e-mails would be copyrighted under Venezuelan law, not U.S. law... but because of the U.S's international agreements, could Wikileaks still get in legal trouble for violating foreign copyrights?
AFAIK that's the whole _point_ of that treaty: each country recognizes the IP of people in other countries that signed it. You can get sued even if you're in the UK and pirate an US movie. Because that US company's copyright is still recognized as valid copyright in the UK. You can (at least theoretically) get sued in Venezuela for pirating an EA games or Microsoft Office. (EA = USA company.) So it seems only _fair_ (not to mention, again, that's what that treaty says) that the USA also recognizes the IP of someone in Venezuella as valid, legally-protected IP.
I understand what you're saying, but you're not exactly a typical gamer. I'm not saying that in a bad way, btw. The vast majority of people will not play _any_ game, Nethack included, for a decade.
So basically you're already atypical _and_ it applies to only _one_ game. It's one game, not even a genre or anything, which matches your taste that well. It's not even enough to make a statistic.
For a few other people, their one game is WoW. Or EQ or UO or whatever. Some people did play UO for a decade, btw. They're atypical too, but happen to have different tastes.
As I was saying in another message, you can't really proclaim your own peculiar tastes and gaming habits to be some kind of platinum standard for all humanity. Again, I'm not implying anything bad about your tastes in games, far from it. I'm just saying you can't about other people's either. So you're the kind which values a particular kind of mechanics that much. Well, I'm happy that you figured out your niche. But other people value some kind of plot and quests more. Some value graphics above all else. (I can't say I understand them, but then they probably don't understand me either.) Some like entirely other kinds of mechanics than you do. Etc.
Your argument is based on false assumptions. First of all, you say 1% of citizens (residents) are in jail as if that somehow disqualifies "most".
No, I'm saying they just qualify as "exist". I'm saying that in security you don't get to go "bah, most people won't do it," but should worry about the minority that will.
Same as physical security, law, etc, really. You don't give murder or theft laws for the majority of people who won't do that, and it's not for those that you install locks or pay cops. It's that 1% which bothers us.
As for "statistically insignificant", well, I suggest you start understanding big words before using them. We're not talking an accuracy figure or anything.
But it's irrelevant. The point is, if you have 1000 people working in a corporation's call centres and IT, chances are 6 of them are schizophrenic. (Give or take a few, because that's how statistics work.) About 30 are sociopaths. Etc. A bunch more will be irresponsible enough to do other stuff, like copy databases onto laptops and USB sticks, if they can and can get away with it. Etc.
They're not insignificant numbers at all.
But all it takes is one guy to export the customer database and sell it to spammers (like the AOL guy), or post it on the web (like that rent-a-coder), or lose it on a laptop (seems to be one a week these days), or whatever. At that point you don't really care how likely it was, statistically. Even if you're hit by a hell of an improbable fluke, you still got hit. Security's job is to make it hard for that one improbable guy.
But I guess you can't change that some people just don't want to think about security and threats. And, hey, far from me to pull someone's head from the sand by force. Nor from their arse.
Well, I'm not saying that WAR will necessarily fail, or anything. Just that I see why the Blizzard guy was saying that. When you've heard people crying "Wolf!" half a dozen times, and there was no wolf after all, you tend to be skeptical when it happens yet again. That's all, really.
Quoting from the English version of that Venezualan copyright law, that you linked to:
5- The author of an intellectual work shall have, by virtue of the mere fact of his creative act, a right to the work which shall itself include rights of moral and economic character as specified in this Law.
The rights of moral character shall be inalienable, unattachable, unrenounceable and imprescriptible.
Which part of "by the mere fact of his creative act" is confusing you? By the very act of creating something, you already have copyright on it in Venezuella too.:P
I also quoted the next line because it also pretty much spells it out that even though he's a public figure and all, he still isn't losing that copyright.
Also, before that:
1. The provisions of this Law shall protect the rights of authors in all creative intellectual works, whether literary, scientific or artistic in character and whatever their nature, form of expression, merit or purpose.
The rights recognized by this Law shall be independent of the ownership of the physical medium in which the work is embodied, and shall not be subject to compliance with any formality.
It's plain english, not even legalese. But if someoneone needs a translation: no, he doesn't have to register copyright anywhere, and there is explicitly no requirement of merit or purpose for it to apply. Still not clear? Well, let's read on:
2. The following in particular shall be considered included among the intellectual works referred to in the foregoing Article: books, pamphlets and other literary, artistic and scientific writings, including computer programs and the associated technical literature and users' manuals; lectures, addresses, sermons and other works of the same nature; dramatic or dramatico-musical works, choreographic and mimed works the stage movements for which have been set down in writing or otherwise; musical compositions with or without words; cinematographic works and other audiovisual works expressed by any process; works of drawing, painting, architecture, engraving or lithography; works of applied art that are not mere industrial designs; geographical illustrations and maps; plans, three-dimensional works and sketches relating to geography, topography, architecture or science; and, finally, any literary, scientific or artistic product susceptible of disclosure or publication by any means or process.
It seems to me like if they're worthy of being disclosed or published by Wikileaks, they just met this requirement.
Sorry to give you a hard time about it, but I think it's very important for people to realize that copyright law is not the same throughout the entire world.
That is a valuable idea indeed, but it still doesn't quite justify a knee-jerk posting that even where it doesn't apply at all. The relevant paragraphs aren't different in its provision or spirit from US copyright law at all. Maybe post that remark where it actually applies? Just a thought;)
Yes, you'd think that most people are smart enough to not do stuff where they could end up in jail, but about 1% of the population of the USA _is_ currently in jail. You'd think that most people are sane enough, but 0.4 to 0.6 of the population are schizophrenic. You'd think that most people are nice enough to their fellow human, but about 1 in 30 qualifies as sociopath, and 1 in 100 as outright complete psychopath.
You don't take those precautions against most of those call centre employees which are honest, sane, smart and nice, like you were. You take them against the schizophrenic dude who'll sell that data because the ghosts threatened to suck his soul through his nose if he doesn't. You take them against the disgruntled sociopathic admin who wants to go out with a bang. (See for example the recent news about the guy who locked a city administration out of their computers.) You take them against the idiot who'll sell an old computer on EBay without first erasing the database files or backups off it. (See the recent story.) You take them against the irresponsible (if well meaning) insurance/investment/etc salesman, who'll copy the whole damn customer database on his laptop so he can show a snappy chart to a potential customer. You take them against the idiot rent-a-coder who'll zip your whole database and post it on the web, when asking for help with some trivial formatting problem. (Yes, one dude did exactly that. Twice.) You take them against the irresponsible boss who'll copy that whole damn database on an USB stick, and give it to some programming contractor so he doesn't have to work on-site. And then said contractor loses the stick. (See the recent leak in the UK.) You take them against the irresponsible "tech savvy" guy, who'll open an insecure tunnel right through your firewall, so he can work from home, and thinks that nobody will guess the port. Etc.
It's not just you call centre guys who can see those plaintext passwords, you know. There's a whole lot of people who might end up seeing that data, some of which you'd never even think about off the top of your head. E.g., that eastern european janitor who was emptying the dustbins while you were looking up someone's plaintext password.
Security is about trying to prevent as many of those as you realistically can. Just because you call-centre guys get to hear the password as plaintext, is no reason why everyone in IT or with enough clue to run an SQL query should also be able to get to them.
They don't feel like spending the resources to determine what is or is not incriminating. From a forensic point of view, even seemingly banal and innocuous e-mails can be massively condemning. You expect them to go though 3 years worth of e-mail looking for inconsistencies and Freudian slips that give incite into the actual motivations behind actions? To cross reference times, dates, contacts and content with all manner contracts and other actions by his government?
Then they should do the morally right thing and assume the guy innocent until proven guilty. If you don't know and can't be bothered to find out whether there's something wrong about someone's private life, then respect their privacy. Don't just sell the right to someone else to go on a fishing expedition through the guy's private life.
E.g., I don't know if you do anything illegal in your bedroom. For all I know, you could be conducting drug deals in there. But then I don't go place a web-cam in there and sell its IP to the highest bidder.
Ethically? ehh... Well, he is a public figure, and they don't really have an expectation of privacy.
Sorta. _If_ they can find proof of any wrongdoing in there, and publish _only_ the relevant emails, fine. But wholesale sale of his private correspondence seems wrong to me, no matter how I want to see it.
Basically I don't think that being a public figure suddenly stripped him of all human rights and dignity. You wouldn't go stick a webcam in his bathroom, for example, would you? The things which are relevant to his voters, fine, maybe he lost some control over those. But I still think that his private life is still his bloody private life.
Basically the quote that comes to mind is from Dave Barry: "A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person." It sums ethics up very nicely. Someone who's mean or unethical the instant he thinks he can get away with it, wasn't nice or ethical to start with. Somebody who thinks it's ok to rape someone's basic privacy just because they think they have a palatable excuse, wouldn't respect _your_ privacy either, the instant they think they can get away with it.
It certainly seems like it is in poor taste at the very least, and does not seem like it is in keeping with what I understood their ethos to be.
Well, exactly. I don't know if it's legal or not, but it's certainly unethical and in poor taste. That's what I've been trying to say.
Well, that's what bothers me the most: that it's essentially an invitation for anyone, the less reputable and scrupled the better, to use those for a fishing expedition.
Now I'm all for leaks which actually prove _some_ kind of breech of law, contract, or such. You know, take one or two emails out of there that prove Chavez has done anything illegal, and publish or sell only those.
Basically sorta how using a quote from a book to make a point is fair use, but "quoting" the whole book is breech of copyright law.
(And if you think that that's a bad analogy, no, it's not even just an analogy: everything you write, even emails, is automatically copyrighted by you. So essentially they're selling something wholesale, on which that guy and everyone who's ever sent him an email, has a copyright.)
But here you don't even know if there's any incriminating stuff at all in those emails. It's just an invitation to buy them and see if you can find something you can mis-use. Or to put it even better: it's not even selling some newsworthy story, it's just selling someone else's privacy. No more, no less. Maybe incidentally you can find some story material by trawling through his private correspondence, or maybe not, but at the end of the day what remains is that you paid to rape someone's privacy.
And, yeah, it doesn't matter if you're even a reputable news outlet or a news outlet at all. Conceivably even some spammer could buy them to harvest all email addresses in there. Or someone could buy them and see if they can find any blackmail material in there. Maybe not even as much against Chavez, as against some random politician who's mentioned taking a vacation for some medical condition in an email to Chavez. Or anything else.
I don't know... it seems an absolute low. It seems like the kind of thing only a complete scumbag would even think about doing.
Well, I hope you realize that we've heard the same "doom-and-gloom as soon as NEXT-GAME launches" predictions half a dozen times before, and nothing spectacular happened.
"As soon as LOTRO launches, I'm cancelling my WoW account for good! And so does everyone I know! That'll make Blizzard think twice!" Sounds familiar? There was about a month or two of that talk non-stop in my guild on WoW before LOTRO launched. Turns out that it didn't do jack squat for WoW subscriptions.
And before that it was various other games. Dungeons and Dragons Online, for example. Now that was supposed to finally bring all the tabletop goodness to the online folks, and finally nail WoW's coffin. Heh. Now that's a game which failed to deliver.
Or Vanguard. "OMG, it's going to be the opposite of everything that sucked about WoW!" Actually, it was the opposite of everything that kept people playing WoW. I guess that's what happens when you listen to people who've played WoW for 2-3 years and finally didn't conclude "ok, I'm getting bored of it, no hard feelings, I just wasn't built to play the same thing for ever", but rather, "OMG, everything about WoW sucks and only idiots like it." So they presented everything that they previously liked and had previously kept them there, as some abominable crime against humanity, and something that sucks more ass than the vacuum toilets on the Soyuz. And the devs of Vanguard listened. Heh. Boy, I'm sure they're proud of their choice of people to listen to.
And afterwards it was AOC. We've had people bleating for a year about how AOC is going to be TEH GRATEST THING EVAR, and eat Blizzard's lunch. I don't think Blizzard even noticed a dip in their subscriptions there. Most of those who had cancelled their account to play AOC, went back and reactivated it before it was even really deactivated.
Or Tabula Rasa. "OMG, it's Lord British, and he's like sooo smart and creative, and he's making this totally different game, without grind, and which will please both MMORPG-ers and FPS-ers and strategists, and will hand Blizzard their arse to them!" Heh. Nope, didn't come anywhere near Blizzard's collective arse.
So I'd take all these predictions with a grain of salt. _Maybe_ WAR will be all that. _Probably_ it won't. We'll just have to wait and see.
As for bulk of subscriptions, last I've seen some numbers, almost half the WoW subscriptions are from the western world. Sure, technically more than half are from Asia, but it's not like it's exactly a niche in the west either. And I don't think that that western part of their subscriptions has taken a dip because of some other game launch yet either.
You know, it might sound crazy, but why doesn't she try joining him? Best case scenario, they discover a common topic and interest, and they live happily ever after. Worst case, well, he discovers that he can't escape her even in WoW, gives up WoW.
As a personal anecdote, I present my parents: they're both complete nerds, but otherwise they're as close to polar opposite personalities as you can get together without causing a paradox. They weren't happy together. In fact, as far as I can tell, they only stayed together so they can make each other miserable and repay old perceived injustices.
Then in their old-ish age, I managed to get them both addicted to WoW. It was an uphill battle to convince them to even try it, but from there they both went addicted scarily quickly.
Well, what do you know? They have a common topic for the first time since they debated naming my brother. They talk about quests, raids, the best zone to farm for some enchanting reagent, best tactics against some boss, whether dad's hunter's new cat is better than a ravager (well, it looks better), or whether mom's new mage should spec for ice or for arcane to level up. It's heartwarming, lemme tell you.
They _do_ stuff together. E.g., boost each other's alts and whatnot, or help each other farm for some recipe drop that's only found on some elite.
Oh, they still bicker all the time, because their personalities and play styles are still almost polar opposites in-game too. But funnily enough, this time they don't take it seriously, because it's just a game. Whereas IRL silly things like "that time your father did X" or "that time your mom didn't let me do Y" would sometimes strain their relationship some more for a year or two, here "your mom aggroed the whole bloody room" or "your dad always sits and drinks after each fight, while my fury bar goes down" is mentioned once and then promptly forgotten.
So basically every single operator they've ever employed, can find or just remember your username _and_ password if they want to. And who's to stop them from calling after hours and pretending to be you?
And you don't see the problem yet?
How about: when you tell that guy your password, he types it on the computer, which compares it to a hashed (and salted, please!) value in the database. There we go. It wasn't that hard, was it?
Of course, now when you talk to an operator, you tell them your password. So now we're back to problem 1, albeit with less people having access to it.
So, better yet, how about making you type it on the phone pad? Then their PBX can extract any such keypresses and send them directly to the computer. There is no need for the human operator to ever hear or read that sequence.
So basically, you can jolly well stop pretending that crap security is anything else. Yes, it may require some 5 minutes of thinking to solve those problems, but they _are_ solvable.
This kind of thinking inside the box (basically, "it's been done so before, so I guess we'll have to do the same"), and throwing your hands up in defeat each time it requires more thought than applying verbatim what you already know, is the real problem with security nowadays. Most people don't even bother trying to think about what could go wrong, and how (if at all) it's preventable.
ESPECIALLY with these new MMORPGs coming out that require you to be level 70--or god forbid, level 80--just to begin playing the game, I find it pretty easy to understand that people can invest tons of time into the game before realizing that it's not all that fun.
Err... what? I'm pretty sure I began playing WoW (and EQ, LOTRO, COH, etc) right at level 1.
In fact, that's the bulk of the game: the levels 1 to 69. (Or 1 to 49 in COH, 1 to 79 in EQ2, etc.) Some 99% of the actual game content is in those levels. And you're perfectly equipped to play that game at any level along the way.
Some people don't play the game for the content; they play for competition. In the only MMORPG I ever played, I rushed as fast as I could through the cheesy, stupid world so that I could get to end-game player versus player, which I spent months studying: watching videos of successful players, reading about tactics, etc.. That's what interests me. Unfortunately, when I got there, it only took 3 or 4 weeks to realize that the game really didn't work like I thought it did, and so I quit.
Yes, that seems to be a popular mis-conception, that it's somehow a competition to the top. So people try to skip the actual content, just so they can willy-wave about having a level 70 and get stuck in the endgame grind. Some even use a bot or pay for power-leveling so they don't even have to see the actual game they're skipping.
Unfortunately that's every bit like paying someone to watch the LOTR trilogy for you, just so you can come back and see the ending scene. Over and over again. And imagine that it was some kind of achievement to be there.
Levels and loot are actually the props there. With the level also serving the additional roles of (A) gently guiding you about in which order you're supposed to go through the story, and (B) giving your spells and abilities one by one, and giving you some time to experiment with them and let it sink in. You know, as opposed to just giving you 60 icons and dumping you at the end boss from day 1.
I didn't quit smoking, I didn't stop a heroin addiction, I just literally realized that the game wasn't about competition of skill, it was about who had grinded out the best gear and random die rolls. The second I realized that, the game no longer had any allure.
So, basically, you played a game only because you thought it's a completely different kind of game, quit when it turned out that it wasn't what you _imagined_ after all.
It's not even a WoW thing. All MMOs are about the same things: getting XP and gear. And it's not some competition with a finishing line and a gold medal for whoever finishes it first. Everyone can get there eventually. The game in any MMO is the road, not the finish line. The guy who finished it first, well, is simply the first guy who has no more actual game to play.
Well, that's fine too. Not everyone likes the same things, so it stands to reason that some people would be into entirely different genres.
But surely you realize that all that happened there is that you shafted yourself. You took an assumption that just wasn't true, and it was just your own assumption. The game didn't tell you to do that. And then inflicted some grind upon yourself based on just that assumption. It's not very different from, say, being the guy who thinks aids is already curable and fucks around without a condom, then has an unpleasant surprise eventually. It wasn't the game that failed you, it was your own wrong assumptions that did.
Mind you, you do have some sympathy for that ordeal, but nevertheless you shafted your own self with that basing a multi-month action on nothing more than a wild incorrect assumption.
Not everyone cares about "content". Sometimes you need to experience how the game really works at the top of the food chain to see that you don't like it. It's true. It happens. And yes,
You find it contradictory that people who played game for 2 years would say it is boring, but than again people who played for 2 days you would say that they havent played enough to make a judgment.
Now that's another funny category: the people who feel that their own tastes are the gold standard, and are qualified to tell everyone else what they should like.
Some people like Pepsi, some people like Coke, and some people don't like either. Would you presume to tell them what their taste should be like? Some people like chinese food, some don't. Some people like things very spicy (a couple of coleague are real big fans of extra-hot chili sauce), some of us like it milder. Most people around here seem to be into dry wines, me, I like my wine sweet. Would you presume to tell me that there's something wrong with my tongue? And then there's stuff like favourite colours or clothes. Now there's some variability. Etc.
Then, pray tell, what kind of confusion of mind would drive someone to a conclusion like, basically, "if 10 million people love WoW, and I don't, then I'm right and they're all idiots and need to be enlightened about how boring their favourite game is"?
Again, maybe it isn't WoW, it's "you". It doesn't match _your_ subjective taste. Maybe you're not much into MMOs. Maybe there's something else about it you don't like. But realize that it doesn't say much about anyone else. It's ok. It's not some personal failure or anything. You don't have to fit in with some group or anything. But the same applies viceversa too.
But again, it might be... _polite_ to lose the preaching. You're not the golden standard in game tastes, nor the yardstick by which humanity is measured. It's entirely possible that someone else loves what you hated, and don't need your enlightenment at all.
You know, if there's one category of people I find mildly amusing, it's the "meh, I played Game X for two years, and thus I have enough experience to say exactly how utterly boring and pointless it is." In fact, only slightly less amusing than the "I played Game X for two years, and then decided it sucks, it's horrible, and only idiots like it." (Admittedly, the OP isn't in the latter category, but you can find plenty of those around.)
Including, yes, such "commentary" as that on Sluggy Freelance.
Here's a thought: If a game held your attention past the, say, 10 to 50 hours an offline game would (with PC ones tending to be the former, and console RPGs... well, at least _used_ to me more toward the latter), then maybe there's _some_ merit in it. If it even kept you there for the "free" month, even playing it at a casual pace, you already saw more content than in 2-3 full price CRPGs nowadays.
There must be _something_ that you must have found interesting or enjoyable there, unless you're trying to tell me that you (and him) are self-hating idiots who punished yourselves for months by doing stuff that was repetitive and boring all along. Obviously not because you were enjoying it, but just, you know, to feel miserable one more month and pay for the privilege.
You're not retarded, are you? I'm guessing you aren't.
Or maybe it's that you'd eventually get bored of anything else, and any other game. Nobody has infinite content, at least until someone invents an AI GM who can pass the Turing test. And nobody has an infinite team of developers, with an infinite total imagination, so each quest and each monster is truly unique. Even then, debatably it's not possible, since there's a finite number of actions and story types that make any sense.
It applies to any other game too. Eventually if you play enough Starcraft or CounterStrike or Oblivion or whatever, guess what? It's starting to repeat itself. Eventually you've seen all maps (or map pieces for games with randomly generated maps), used all weapons, tried all spells, done all quests (if applicable), and that's it. End of the line. It gets repetitive from there. Even before that, exactly in how many ways can you headshot someone in CS or swing a sword at a monster in Oblivion, before it's doing the same things again? Even with a different skin and model on that monster, you're still swinging the same damned sword in the exact same arc, and doing the same block-then-counterattack sequence again. How many times you can zerg rush someone in Starcraft before it's essentially like being an automaton executing the same script over and over again?
At some point it's just time to give up and move on. For some people it's sooner, for others later. But when it stops being entertaining, just move on.
But realize that it's not the game that suddenly qualifies as being sucky, it's just "you". And I'm not saying that in a bad way. It's "you", in as much as you've seen it all, got bored, are no longer interested in it. Fine. Move on.
You didn't suddenly get a revelation about how bad the game is, you just got a revelation about where _your_ limits are. Congrats.
And please lose the preaching. It may look like you just discovered how boring and pointless the game is, and maybe that it's your duty to enlighten others about it. But you only discovered that it just became boring to _you_. I.e., that you're got a human after all. It's not much of an enlightenment to bestow upon anyone else. We were already suspecting that you were human.
Interesting that half your reply revolves around about 3 applications; WoW, mIRC, and McAffee.
Interesting that the point went a mile over your head. Sorry.
The point is that the same could happen with any other application. E.g., you could put the string "STARTLOGGER" in a web page and the retarded AV would then block the browser from accessing the network. You could have a hardware random number generator attached to a PC, and the AV would disconnect you if the sequence of bytes received resembled anything on its flawed signatures.
Also, the issue of deleting Windows DLL's didn't happen in conjunction with either WoW or mIRC, it just nuked Windows. A retarded signature file update made a couple of Windows DLL's look like they have viruses. And that's a big failure. Lesser visible ones included hundreds of cases of some innocent installer, or some third party program, or once even one of my own programs written in C was mistaken for a virus and promptly destroyed.
There is absolutely nothing that's WoW or mIRC only about that mode of failure.
Or in other words, today's free clue is: sometimes an example is just an example, not the whole set. If I say "for example, that dog has rabies", it doesn't mean that _only_ that dog has rabies and no other dog could possibly ever have that.
First off I'm pretty positive WoW is not going to be installed anytime soon on the ISS nor on anything relating to the Space Shuttle's computer systems.
Again, the point is that the same could happen with any other application.
Secondly I highly doubt that the ISS team is going to be downloading pr0n, mp3s, etc or creating the newest BASH funnies while on the station (eg: they're not going to use IRC while on the station).
But apparently they did bring a trojan on an USB stick. And it wasn't the first time.
Regardless, the issues I've described could happen over any data stream, no matter which.
hirdly, I very much doubt that NASA would use Norton, McAffee or any iteration of a consumer based AV software. Hell, they have enough decent programmers to code their own software to rely on something that for the most part probably would not work.
Right, because they so have the manpower to do a clean room reverse-engineering of all viruses, within hours of their release. Not.
Writing AV software doesn't mean just writing the engine. It also means coming up with all those virus signatures. That's the hard part.
Actually, I'd rate that informative, rather than funny. I've actually tried a couple of such programs back then, and invariably it was just a fancy way to slow your computer down. (Mildly.)
Basically, the way it worked was:
1. Report more RAM to the OS. That's actually what your swap file does too. Virtually any modern processor has _some_ way to pretend it has more memory than physically present, with the extra bytes being in a swap file.
2. Set aside half the memory as a kind of compressed, virtual (in memory) swap file.
So at this point, let's say your computer had 4 MB RAM (hey, back then we didn't measure RAM in Gigabytes). So now you'd only have 2 MB of it free as physical memory for your programs, and 2 MB set up as a compressed swap file. But your OS thought you have 8 MB, with 2 MB being the free RAM left and 6 MB of it being swap space.
3. However, you typically still wanted some actual swap space, because you don't know, and can't guarantee, how well that swap space compresses. If you swap out, say, a table of random numbers, you may not be able to compress at all. Funky things can happen when the OS thinks it has room to swap a page out, but it turns out that it doesn't fit there. The actual HDD swap file would be, at the very least, the safety net to catch whatever doesn't fit into that RAM buffer.
Now the thing is:
A. That virtual compressed swap space was typically faster than HDD (we didn't have 15,000 RPM drives with huge caches, back then), but, here's the important part, _much_ slower than just plain old free RAM. ("Free" as in "available to the OS as it is.") Even the page fault itself, never mind the compression, was _much_ slower than the few cycles required to just read a memory page.
Compression didn't make it much better. Almost any decent compression algorithm is fast when deconpressing, but slow when compressing. When handling a page fault in that context, you had to do both. Compress the page you want swapped out, and decompress the page you want swapped in. Not only that took time, but it was CPU time. Unlike IO time, which happens on DMA in an ideal world, and lets your CPU schedule some other task in that time.
B. However, now you had less free RAM _and_ were encouraged to load more into it. If you had 5 MB of memory in use on the above described computer, without RamDoubling scams, you'd have 4 MB of physical memory in use and 1 MB swapped to disk. With such a RamDoubling scheme, you had 2 MB in actual normal RAM, and 3 MB swapped out.
In almost all cases, the "ram doubling" inherently increased the number of pages swapped in and out per second. In some cases, dramatically. (E.g., Java's GC didn't play nice at all with swapping anyway. It already tended to push everything else out. Play with it in even less space, and things could get funny.)
So a lot of the time, sometimes even most of the time, all you'd get for your efforts was slowing your computer down. And a useless number telling you "now you have 8 MB RAM!!!!11oneeleventeen", but not what the cost there is, or even what it really means.
So, on some computers which (A) have been there for years, and (B) have no network connection over which to download virus signature updates, somehow miraculously that AV software would be up to date and able to recognize the newest trojans. I don't know what AV software that is, but I want it too;)
Or, I know, let's send Mordac up there with each Shuttle or rocket trip, to install those updates.
Oh yeah, and you so want to be up there on your own, when the retarded AV software after a buggy update decides one or more of the following:
- some critical Windows file looks suspicious and deletes it. It happened more than once IRL.
- some piece of binary data transmitted by or to your computer looks suspiciously like an obscure, outdated SQL-Server exploit, and shuts the program down and cuts off the network connection. I can personally testify that it happened to me in WoW, never mind that it wasn't on the right port, I had no version of SQL-Server installed, and it was on a connection to WoW that was on for 2 hours now and thus unlikely to be what a virus does. Or see the infamous "STARTLOGGER"/"STOPLOGGER" idiocy that made it possible for a while to disconnect anyone from IRC (and God knows what else) if they have Norton AV installed. Yeah, you so want that on a space station's computers.
- introduces a bigger vulnerability of its own than Windows has. At least one RL mass-pwnage, and of the format-your-hdd sort at that, happened over a buffer overflow vulnerability in IIRC McAffee's firewall. Or if you look in the history of Norton's patch notes, a _lot_ of them were patching old buffer overflow vulnerabilities in their AV software.
- suddenly decides that an otherwise legitimate piece of software is too dangerous, and just deletes it. It happened to me with one AV which decided that IRC is too dangerous a place and just removed my mIRC executable. Not because of some malicious code, or even vulnerability, in that version of mIRC, but just because apparently they considered it dangerous anyway. You so want to be up on a space station when such a piece of crap decides that your, say, telnet is too dangerous and must be stopped.
- loads itself in memory twice and slows everything down to a crawl. Happened to me, with an older version of McAffee's AV. Oh, and trying to stop or uninstall it, only stopped one of the copies.
- goes paranoid about protecting the user's "privacy", and prevents legitimate logins. Again, McAffee did that for me. Half the sites were so confused by whatever it did, that they simultaneously thought I'm logged in _and_ not logged in. I was starting to develop a deep empathy for Schroedinger's cat. You surely want that kind of thing randomly happening when you're trying to log into some more important thing up there.
You know, it's kinda funny. Neanderthals stagnated for hundreds of thousands of years, then gradually went extinct. Homo Sapiens stagnated for some 150,000 years, then nearly went extinct. Kinda makes you wonder what happens there. Sure, you can blame it on volcanoes and climate change, but I wonder if they didn't happen to discover management back then. I mean, I can imagine it:
ACT 1
Zog enters stage left, limping and with a bandaged foot. Urg: Zog, what happened? Zog: Gah. We went hunting mamoth with that idiot Hrgh again, and the retard still doesn't know which end of the spear goes forward. Put it right through my damned foot. Urg: I thought we decided to send him to gather berries and mushrooms with the women. Zog: Yeah, well, have you seen what he was trying to dump in the pot yesterday? The idiot had gathered poisonous mushrooms and goat droppings. Good thing Lana stopped him. Urg: Damn. Sounds like him, though. I swear he's too stupid to piss holes in the snow. Zog: I'm getting an idea, though. How about we make him chief? That way he stays in the cave and we can hunt safely. Urg: Dude, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Surely we're not going to reward incompetence. Zog: Then you go hunting mammoth with him tomorrow. Urg: By the great spirits... ok, I see your point. I'll go convince the others.
ACT 2
The tribesmen are gathered around a fire, with chief Hrgh showing them some stick-figure paintings on the cave walls. Hrgh: Week before I chief, tribe hunt 1 mammoth. See in this slide: 1 mammoth. Points at a crude drawing of a few stick-figures with spears against a mammoth. Zog: Chief, the good berries are ripe and the antelope migration started. Shouldn't we be out there hunting and gathering? Hrgh: Me no like your attitude, Zog. You no good team member. Zog: Right. Carry on. Hrgh: Yes. Week after I chief, tribe hunt 2 mammoth. See slide 2: 2 mammoth. Points at another crude drawing with more stick figures and 2 mammoths. Zog: Yes, well, and two weeks before you were chief we hunted 3. Luck comes and goes. Urg elbows Zog in the ribs. Urg (under his breath): Dude, shut up. You want to go hunting with him again? Hrgh: Silence! Me say at this rate, by next year tribe hunt big heap of mammoths each week. Because me great chief. A few tribesmen clap politely. A few in the back shake their heads. Hrgh: From now on, me not just Chief, me Chief Executive Officer. That how great chief Hrgh is.
ACT 3
Urg and Zog sit on a log, talking. Urg: You know, that idea of yours seemed to work well. Sure, we have the least stored for winter in many years, but also no more accidents. Zog: Told ya. Lana enters from the right. Lana: Guys, do you figure we could make Grarg some kind of chief too? Zog: Oh, that retard. What's he done this time? Lana: Fell into his own trap again, and scared the hunt too. But mostly I just don't have the heart to see him injured every other day. Urg: Heh, well, as long as he only hurts himself... Lana: Yes, well, last week he drew some sabertooth tigers to where Hrug was hiding. Zog: Hmm, ok, but we can't have two chiefs. Urg: Let's make him Chief Information Officer. Lana: What the hell would that do? Urg: Be in charge of paints and cave walls for Hrgh's presentations. Zog: Heh. I like the way you think. Ok, let's go convince the guys. Lana, you talk to the women.
ACT 4
Hrgh: Dis time we hold meeting in new cave. Zog: Not as much a cave as an indentation. Well, at least the light is better. Hrgh: Yes. CIO tell me we need new cave, me buy dis one from Black Feet tribe. Urg: Wait, wait... you _bought_ this... little place under an overhang? Hrgh: I let CIO explain. Urg (under his breath): This better be good. Lana: Hush, guys. Grarg: Well, see, the old cave was old technology. Painting on walls there was too slow and needed highly skilled people. Zog: Heh. So basically you bought a new cave because you're bad at drawing?
Chimps fight each other all right, and so do most animals. Cats or dogs fight too, don't they? Probably so did primitive humans.
All animals though, including chimps, usually stop short of killing each other. Considering, for example, the claws and teeth of a cat, they're perfectly equipped to take each other apart in a fight. But they don't use them to kill each other. And once one yields, the fight is immediately over.
There _are_ artificial situations where you can force it to eventually escalate to a kill, typically by forcing one to be on the territory of the other and giving the loser no way to retreat out of it. But those happen only by human intervention and it takes a long time to escalate all the way to that. And _probably_ not even then as premeditated murder, as just putting increasingly more force into making the point, until it happens to be fatal.
I find it very likely that the same applied to primitive humans. We probably punched each other around, but not to kill. And apparently we didn't take a stone spear or axe to another human. Or at least we have no bones that show any sign of that before the age of bows.
Again, we _still_ have that reflex against killing another human, and killing another human in melee is extreme mental trauma even for trained and drilled soldiers.
Warfare is one step above that. Warfare is, pretty much, premeditated mass murder. You _plan_ to go and kill as many of the other tribe as stand in your way. It's not a natural thing. I don't know of any animals who do that, chimps included, and it took an awfully long time for humans to evolve a culture that enables that.
Actually we don't know that Homo Sapiens hunted down Neanderthals either.
Warfare only appeared in Homo Sapiens around the time we discovered bows and arrows, about 20,000 years ago, in Africa. It's hard to tell if that was cause or effect or just a spurious correlation, but suddenly we get mass graves of people with arrow heads embedded in their bones and cave paintings of groups of archers shooting at each other.
At any rate:
1. There is no evidence of warfare before that. Neither in Homo Sapiens, nor in Neanderthals.
2. By the time missile weapons arrived in Europe, the Neanderthals were going extinct on their own. The long decline in numbers and area had happened before that.
Vengeful we may be, but killing someone in melee is actually an extremely traumatic thing. Unless you're a sociopath, you're still wired like an animal to not kill members of the same species. Overcoming that is very traumatic. The Romans for example recognized that and rotated the rows of a legion, so the soldiers would get some time to recover in the middle of a fight. Ranged killing seems to actually be easier, and it puts a wall of plausible deniability between you and the victim. Maybe it wasn't your arrow that killed that guy, after all.
From there we learned to manipulate people and use group-think to make them kill each other even in melee. But it took an awfully long time to get there, and the Neanderthals were already extinct by then.
Furthermore, Neanderthals were, if you'll pardon the bad WoW metaphors, all survival-spec hunters. Melee hunters. _Everyone_ hunted with spears, including the women. And they seemed pretty capable to cooperate in a group. Plus, see that thing about using the women too. If someone actually managed to start a war back then between a tribe of Homo Sapiens and one of Neanderthals, I wouldn't be surprised if the latter would have had the upper hand.
Exactly why they went extinct... now that's still a good question.
One theory was that they were strictly carnivore and their prey was going extinct due to both climate change _and_ over-hunting. Another one is that they just couldn't compete with us. The Homo Sapiens were hunters _and_ gatherers, and could survive and continue hunting a species into extinction even past the point where predator-prey balance would normally allow the prey to rebound. The Neanderthals relying only on that prey, would have been royally shafted.
Me, I'm wonder if we didn't kill them sexually, so to speak. Consider the following:
A. See, one way to get a species of, say, insects extinct, is to release lots and lots of sterile males. If enough females of that species mate with those, the population drops very fast.
B. There seem to be _no_ genes we inherited from Neanderthals. Considering that the areas for us and them overlapped for thousands of years, I find it unlikely that _no_ horny male of one species wouldn't find a female of the other species attractive enough, or viceversa. I mean, so they were short and stout lasses with sloped foreheads. A lot of people screw worse looking women nowadays. And conversely going to the pub and getting laid by a neanderthal is still a tradition for some girls;)
It is very likely that the offspring of Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals were either sterile or non-viable. Plenty of closely related species produce sterile offspring when crossed. E.g., lion and tiger, horse and donkey, etc.
C. The sterile case is actually the funniest, because it may not be immediately obvious that it's a dead end. And in a lot of species such hybrids are bigger and stronger (a liger is twice the weight of a tiger, for example), so for a primitive sentient species it may even look like giving your children more chances of survival that way.
D. Both species had a chronic shortage of women, due to a life expectancy disparity. Death in birth or from resulting complications took a heavy toll.
So _if_ they were desirable enough (e.g., because Homo Sapiens tribes
No kidding. The whole "frictionless tube" thing is just thinking too hard about it. Yes, instead of simply repositioning an object from point A to point B, you also take the normal of both holes and change the direction of the velocity. That's it. It solves the same problem and produces the exact same result without doing physics for a frictionless tube.
Please try not to picture a fat sweaty nerd in a loincloth defending the entrance to his parent's basement from all comers.
Well, first of all, some of us have better taste than to wear a loincloth. A robe and wizard hat, for example, is much more stylish and comfortable for the aspiring sorcerer or warlock. A toga picta works too, for the aspiring Emperor. Well, at least until mom catches wind that you dyed one of her bedsheets purple;)
But a loincloth? Ugh. We're civilized people, not some barbarians.
Second, some of us have our own basement to defend, thank you very much. I mean, have you tried taking over the world from your mom's basement? Ooer, talk about frustrating. It would go sorta like this.
Me: "Now we open the prayer books to the dark invocation psalm and..." Mom (poking her head in): "Anyone want milk and cookies?" Cultist 1: "I'll have some, please." Cultist 2: "Me too." Me: "Mooom!!" Mom: "Oh, hush. Nice dress, by the way." Me: "Mom, it's a robe." Mom: "Sure it is. I just want you to know me and dad support your lifestyle choices." Cultist 3: "Told you it looks gay." Cultist 1: "Yeah." Me: "Mom, you're interrupting our invocation!" Mom: "Oh, hush, I'm your mom, I'm allowed to. What are you guys playing anyway? Dungeons and Dragons?" Me: "No, it's serious. And you can start calling me High Overlord Moraelin the First." Mom: "High, huh? Well, you know me and dad don't approve of _that_, but I guess it would explain a few things." Cultist 4: "Heh!" Me: "*sigh* Where are the sacrificial dagger and the sacred chalice anyway?" Mom: "You mean our kitchen knife? I put it in the dishwasher, together with that plastic cup you had there. They were getting ridiculously dirty, and it's just not healthy." Cultist 3: "Told ya."
A trip to the kitchen later:
Group chanting: "Nigrae legiones, ferus imperator, sinus occultus, fatum terminatum" Mom (poking nose in again): "By the way, I'm going to sleep. Try to keep the noise down, please." Me: "Ok, mom." Mom: "By the way is that the chorus from Das Omen?" Me: "No, it's an ancient and sacred invocation.." Cultist 2: "Nah, I googled it, it's E Nomine." Cultist 1: "Owned." Cultist 4: "I thought you said you only listened to metal?" Me: "Gah! Fine by me, chant Dies Irae if it makes you feel any better." Cultist 3: "Why do we have to chant in Latin anyway?" Me: "Because we're summoning an arsehole of a demon, and he wants it that way." Mom: "Anyway, keep it down and turn off the lights when you're done, ok?" Me: "Ok, mom. Now where were we?" Cultist 3: "You know, screw this. Let's skip the henchman and work for the real overlord. Do you happen to need some accolytes, Mrs?" Cultist 1: "Seconded." Cultist 2: "No kidding." Cultist 4: "Actually, I'm out of here. I promised mom I'll be home by eleven anyway."
Slashdot Mirror
Short answer: no.
Longer answer: nope.
Even longer answer:
1. Carbon isn't one of the isotopes that are affected by this.
2. The fluctuations have a period of about year, so they average out when you measure something over millenia.
3. The fluctuations are very very tiny, waay below one percent even. So basically even if you happened to take one extreme as your value, and in reality it was the opposite extreme, and even with "compound interest" so to speak... worst that could happen is that a 100,000 year old bone turns out to be "only" a bit over 99,000 year old. The creationists still aren't going to like it.
4. The variability in C14 production and distribution are much bigger than this fluctuation, and we learned to deal with those perfectly well. (C14 is constantly produced as neutrons from solar radiation knock off and replace a proton from an N14 atom, turning it into a C14 atom.)
5. The way we deal with those is by calibrating that dating. There's stuff that we already know when it happened, by other means (chronicles, geologic events, etc), and we can see how much C14 is left in stuff from that year. That lets you calibrate your C14 dating pretty damn well.
The last one also tells you why actually #2 is the only one that matters: we already calibrated for long intervals, and such fluctuations were already averaged into the calibration. This new discovery won't affect C14 dating at all. The effect is exactly zero. Null. Nada. Nix.
Of course, that won't stop young-Earth creationists from coming out of the woodwork, and waving yet another thing they don't understand as "proof" that science is wrong and their bible is the literal history of Earth. What else is new? No, seriously.
I figure everyone and everything has their place and role, though. The young-earth creationists' is simply to make everyone else look smart. It's a tough job, but someone has to do it ;)
And I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for you pesky kids ;)
Now seriously, though, Sweden is a member of WIPO too.
If I read IIRC paragraph 3 right, laws, government acts and the like are not eligible for copyright there. It does not seem to imply however, that private correspondence of official persons gets the same exemption.
AFAIK that's the whole _point_ of that treaty: each country recognizes the IP of people in other countries that signed it. You can get sued even if you're in the UK and pirate an US movie. Because that US company's copyright is still recognized as valid copyright in the UK. You can (at least theoretically) get sued in Venezuela for pirating an EA games or Microsoft Office. (EA = USA company.) So it seems only _fair_ (not to mention, again, that's what that treaty says) that the USA also recognizes the IP of someone in Venezuella as valid, legally-protected IP.
I understand what you're saying, but you're not exactly a typical gamer. I'm not saying that in a bad way, btw. The vast majority of people will not play _any_ game, Nethack included, for a decade.
So basically you're already atypical _and_ it applies to only _one_ game. It's one game, not even a genre or anything, which matches your taste that well. It's not even enough to make a statistic.
For a few other people, their one game is WoW. Or EQ or UO or whatever. Some people did play UO for a decade, btw. They're atypical too, but happen to have different tastes.
As I was saying in another message, you can't really proclaim your own peculiar tastes and gaming habits to be some kind of platinum standard for all humanity. Again, I'm not implying anything bad about your tastes in games, far from it. I'm just saying you can't about other people's either. So you're the kind which values a particular kind of mechanics that much. Well, I'm happy that you figured out your niche. But other people value some kind of plot and quests more. Some value graphics above all else. (I can't say I understand them, but then they probably don't understand me either.) Some like entirely other kinds of mechanics than you do. Etc.
No, I'm saying they just qualify as "exist". I'm saying that in security you don't get to go "bah, most people won't do it," but should worry about the minority that will.
Same as physical security, law, etc, really. You don't give murder or theft laws for the majority of people who won't do that, and it's not for those that you install locks or pay cops. It's that 1% which bothers us.
As for "statistically insignificant", well, I suggest you start understanding big words before using them. We're not talking an accuracy figure or anything.
But it's irrelevant. The point is, if you have 1000 people working in a corporation's call centres and IT, chances are 6 of them are schizophrenic. (Give or take a few, because that's how statistics work.) About 30 are sociopaths. Etc. A bunch more will be irresponsible enough to do other stuff, like copy databases onto laptops and USB sticks, if they can and can get away with it. Etc.
They're not insignificant numbers at all.
But all it takes is one guy to export the customer database and sell it to spammers (like the AOL guy), or post it on the web (like that rent-a-coder), or lose it on a laptop (seems to be one a week these days), or whatever. At that point you don't really care how likely it was, statistically. Even if you're hit by a hell of an improbable fluke, you still got hit. Security's job is to make it hard for that one improbable guy.
But I guess you can't change that some people just don't want to think about security and threats. And, hey, far from me to pull someone's head from the sand by force. Nor from their arse.
Well, I'm not saying that WAR will necessarily fail, or anything. Just that I see why the Blizzard guy was saying that. When you've heard people crying "Wolf!" half a dozen times, and there was no wolf after all, you tend to be skeptical when it happens yet again. That's all, really.
Err... read your own link, dude.
Quoting from the English version of that Venezualan copyright law, that you linked to:
Which part of "by the mere fact of his creative act" is confusing you? By the very act of creating something, you already have copyright on it in Venezuella too. :P
I also quoted the next line because it also pretty much spells it out that even though he's a public figure and all, he still isn't losing that copyright.
Also, before that:
It's plain english, not even legalese. But if someoneone needs a translation: no, he doesn't have to register copyright anywhere, and there is explicitly no requirement of merit or purpose for it to apply. Still not clear? Well, let's read on:
It seems to me like if they're worthy of being disclosed or published by Wikileaks, they just met this requirement.
That is a valuable idea indeed, but it still doesn't quite justify a knee-jerk posting that even where it doesn't apply at all. The relevant paragraphs aren't different in its provision or spirit from US copyright law at all. Maybe post that remark where it actually applies? Just a thought ;)
That seems to me like a very fragile assumption.
Yes, you'd think that most people are smart enough to not do stuff where they could end up in jail, but about 1% of the population of the USA _is_ currently in jail. You'd think that most people are sane enough, but 0.4 to 0.6 of the population are schizophrenic. You'd think that most people are nice enough to their fellow human, but about 1 in 30 qualifies as sociopath, and 1 in 100 as outright complete psychopath.
You don't take those precautions against most of those call centre employees which are honest, sane, smart and nice, like you were. You take them against the schizophrenic dude who'll sell that data because the ghosts threatened to suck his soul through his nose if he doesn't. You take them against the disgruntled sociopathic admin who wants to go out with a bang. (See for example the recent news about the guy who locked a city administration out of their computers.) You take them against the idiot who'll sell an old computer on EBay without first erasing the database files or backups off it. (See the recent story.) You take them against the irresponsible (if well meaning) insurance/investment/etc salesman, who'll copy the whole damn customer database on his laptop so he can show a snappy chart to a potential customer. You take them against the idiot rent-a-coder who'll zip your whole database and post it on the web, when asking for help with some trivial formatting problem. (Yes, one dude did exactly that. Twice.) You take them against the irresponsible boss who'll copy that whole damn database on an USB stick, and give it to some programming contractor so he doesn't have to work on-site. And then said contractor loses the stick. (See the recent leak in the UK.) You take them against the irresponsible "tech savvy" guy, who'll open an insecure tunnel right through your firewall, so he can work from home, and thinks that nobody will guess the port. Etc.
It's not just you call centre guys who can see those plaintext passwords, you know. There's a whole lot of people who might end up seeing that data, some of which you'd never even think about off the top of your head. E.g., that eastern european janitor who was emptying the dustbins while you were looking up someone's plaintext password.
Security is about trying to prevent as many of those as you realistically can. Just because you call-centre guys get to hear the password as plaintext, is no reason why everyone in IT or with enough clue to run an SQL query should also be able to get to them.
Then they should do the morally right thing and assume the guy innocent until proven guilty. If you don't know and can't be bothered to find out whether there's something wrong about someone's private life, then respect their privacy. Don't just sell the right to someone else to go on a fishing expedition through the guy's private life.
E.g., I don't know if you do anything illegal in your bedroom. For all I know, you could be conducting drug deals in there. But then I don't go place a web-cam in there and sell its IP to the highest bidder.
Sorta. _If_ they can find proof of any wrongdoing in there, and publish _only_ the relevant emails, fine. But wholesale sale of his private correspondence seems wrong to me, no matter how I want to see it.
Basically I don't think that being a public figure suddenly stripped him of all human rights and dignity. You wouldn't go stick a webcam in his bathroom, for example, would you? The things which are relevant to his voters, fine, maybe he lost some control over those. But I still think that his private life is still his bloody private life.
Basically the quote that comes to mind is from Dave Barry: "A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person." It sums ethics up very nicely. Someone who's mean or unethical the instant he thinks he can get away with it, wasn't nice or ethical to start with. Somebody who thinks it's ok to rape someone's basic privacy just because they think they have a palatable excuse, wouldn't respect _your_ privacy either, the instant they think they can get away with it.
Well, exactly. I don't know if it's legal or not, but it's certainly unethical and in poor taste. That's what I've been trying to say.
Well, that's what bothers me the most: that it's essentially an invitation for anyone, the less reputable and scrupled the better, to use those for a fishing expedition.
Now I'm all for leaks which actually prove _some_ kind of breech of law, contract, or such. You know, take one or two emails out of there that prove Chavez has done anything illegal, and publish or sell only those.
Basically sorta how using a quote from a book to make a point is fair use, but "quoting" the whole book is breech of copyright law.
(And if you think that that's a bad analogy, no, it's not even just an analogy: everything you write, even emails, is automatically copyrighted by you. So essentially they're selling something wholesale, on which that guy and everyone who's ever sent him an email, has a copyright.)
But here you don't even know if there's any incriminating stuff at all in those emails. It's just an invitation to buy them and see if you can find something you can mis-use. Or to put it even better: it's not even selling some newsworthy story, it's just selling someone else's privacy. No more, no less. Maybe incidentally you can find some story material by trawling through his private correspondence, or maybe not, but at the end of the day what remains is that you paid to rape someone's privacy.
And, yeah, it doesn't matter if you're even a reputable news outlet or a news outlet at all. Conceivably even some spammer could buy them to harvest all email addresses in there. Or someone could buy them and see if they can find any blackmail material in there. Maybe not even as much against Chavez, as against some random politician who's mentioned taking a vacation for some medical condition in an email to Chavez. Or anything else.
I don't know... it seems an absolute low. It seems like the kind of thing only a complete scumbag would even think about doing.
Well, I hope you realize that we've heard the same "doom-and-gloom as soon as NEXT-GAME launches" predictions half a dozen times before, and nothing spectacular happened.
"As soon as LOTRO launches, I'm cancelling my WoW account for good! And so does everyone I know! That'll make Blizzard think twice!" Sounds familiar? There was about a month or two of that talk non-stop in my guild on WoW before LOTRO launched. Turns out that it didn't do jack squat for WoW subscriptions.
And before that it was various other games. Dungeons and Dragons Online, for example. Now that was supposed to finally bring all the tabletop goodness to the online folks, and finally nail WoW's coffin. Heh. Now that's a game which failed to deliver.
Or Vanguard. "OMG, it's going to be the opposite of everything that sucked about WoW!" Actually, it was the opposite of everything that kept people playing WoW. I guess that's what happens when you listen to people who've played WoW for 2-3 years and finally didn't conclude "ok, I'm getting bored of it, no hard feelings, I just wasn't built to play the same thing for ever", but rather, "OMG, everything about WoW sucks and only idiots like it." So they presented everything that they previously liked and had previously kept them there, as some abominable crime against humanity, and something that sucks more ass than the vacuum toilets on the Soyuz. And the devs of Vanguard listened. Heh. Boy, I'm sure they're proud of their choice of people to listen to.
And afterwards it was AOC. We've had people bleating for a year about how AOC is going to be TEH GRATEST THING EVAR, and eat Blizzard's lunch. I don't think Blizzard even noticed a dip in their subscriptions there. Most of those who had cancelled their account to play AOC, went back and reactivated it before it was even really deactivated.
Or Tabula Rasa. "OMG, it's Lord British, and he's like sooo smart and creative, and he's making this totally different game, without grind, and which will please both MMORPG-ers and FPS-ers and strategists, and will hand Blizzard their arse to them!" Heh. Nope, didn't come anywhere near Blizzard's collective arse.
So I'd take all these predictions with a grain of salt. _Maybe_ WAR will be all that. _Probably_ it won't. We'll just have to wait and see.
As for bulk of subscriptions, last I've seen some numbers, almost half the WoW subscriptions are from the western world. Sure, technically more than half are from Asia, but it's not like it's exactly a niche in the west either. And I don't think that that western part of their subscriptions has taken a dip because of some other game launch yet either.
You know, it might sound crazy, but why doesn't she try joining him? Best case scenario, they discover a common topic and interest, and they live happily ever after. Worst case, well, he discovers that he can't escape her even in WoW, gives up WoW.
As a personal anecdote, I present my parents: they're both complete nerds, but otherwise they're as close to polar opposite personalities as you can get together without causing a paradox. They weren't happy together. In fact, as far as I can tell, they only stayed together so they can make each other miserable and repay old perceived injustices.
Then in their old-ish age, I managed to get them both addicted to WoW. It was an uphill battle to convince them to even try it, but from there they both went addicted scarily quickly.
Well, what do you know? They have a common topic for the first time since they debated naming my brother. They talk about quests, raids, the best zone to farm for some enchanting reagent, best tactics against some boss, whether dad's hunter's new cat is better than a ravager (well, it looks better), or whether mom's new mage should spec for ice or for arcane to level up. It's heartwarming, lemme tell you.
They _do_ stuff together. E.g., boost each other's alts and whatnot, or help each other farm for some recipe drop that's only found on some elite.
Oh, they still bicker all the time, because their personalities and play styles are still almost polar opposites in-game too. But funnily enough, this time they don't take it seriously, because it's just a game. Whereas IRL silly things like "that time your father did X" or "that time your mom didn't let me do Y" would sometimes strain their relationship some more for a year or two, here "your mom aggroed the whole bloody room" or "your dad always sits and drinks after each fight, while my fury bar goes down" is mentioned once and then promptly forgotten.
So basically every single operator they've ever employed, can find or just remember your username _and_ password if they want to. And who's to stop them from calling after hours and pretending to be you?
And you don't see the problem yet?
How about: when you tell that guy your password, he types it on the computer, which compares it to a hashed (and salted, please!) value in the database. There we go. It wasn't that hard, was it?
Of course, now when you talk to an operator, you tell them your password. So now we're back to problem 1, albeit with less people having access to it.
So, better yet, how about making you type it on the phone pad? Then their PBX can extract any such keypresses and send them directly to the computer. There is no need for the human operator to ever hear or read that sequence.
So basically, you can jolly well stop pretending that crap security is anything else. Yes, it may require some 5 minutes of thinking to solve those problems, but they _are_ solvable.
This kind of thinking inside the box (basically, "it's been done so before, so I guess we'll have to do the same"), and throwing your hands up in defeat each time it requires more thought than applying verbatim what you already know, is the real problem with security nowadays. Most people don't even bother trying to think about what could go wrong, and how (if at all) it's preventable.
Err... what? I'm pretty sure I began playing WoW (and EQ, LOTRO, COH, etc) right at level 1.
In fact, that's the bulk of the game: the levels 1 to 69. (Or 1 to 49 in COH, 1 to 79 in EQ2, etc.) Some 99% of the actual game content is in those levels. And you're perfectly equipped to play that game at any level along the way.
Yes, that seems to be a popular mis-conception, that it's somehow a competition to the top. So people try to skip the actual content, just so they can willy-wave about having a level 70 and get stuck in the endgame grind. Some even use a bot or pay for power-leveling so they don't even have to see the actual game they're skipping.
Unfortunately that's every bit like paying someone to watch the LOTR trilogy for you, just so you can come back and see the ending scene. Over and over again. And imagine that it was some kind of achievement to be there.
Levels and loot are actually the props there. With the level also serving the additional roles of (A) gently guiding you about in which order you're supposed to go through the story, and (B) giving your spells and abilities one by one, and giving you some time to experiment with them and let it sink in. You know, as opposed to just giving you 60 icons and dumping you at the end boss from day 1.
So, basically, you played a game only because you thought it's a completely different kind of game, quit when it turned out that it wasn't what you _imagined_ after all.
It's not even a WoW thing. All MMOs are about the same things: getting XP and gear. And it's not some competition with a finishing line and a gold medal for whoever finishes it first. Everyone can get there eventually. The game in any MMO is the road, not the finish line. The guy who finished it first, well, is simply the first guy who has no more actual game to play.
Well, that's fine too. Not everyone likes the same things, so it stands to reason that some people would be into entirely different genres.
But surely you realize that all that happened there is that you shafted yourself. You took an assumption that just wasn't true, and it was just your own assumption. The game didn't tell you to do that. And then inflicted some grind upon yourself based on just that assumption. It's not very different from, say, being the guy who thinks aids is already curable and fucks around without a condom, then has an unpleasant surprise eventually. It wasn't the game that failed you, it was your own wrong assumptions that did.
Mind you, you do have some sympathy for that ordeal, but nevertheless you shafted your own self with that basing a multi-month action on nothing more than a wild incorrect assumption.
Now that's another funny category: the people who feel that their own tastes are the gold standard, and are qualified to tell everyone else what they should like.
Some people like Pepsi, some people like Coke, and some people don't like either. Would you presume to tell them what their taste should be like? Some people like chinese food, some don't. Some people like things very spicy (a couple of coleague are real big fans of extra-hot chili sauce), some of us like it milder. Most people around here seem to be into dry wines, me, I like my wine sweet. Would you presume to tell me that there's something wrong with my tongue? And then there's stuff like favourite colours or clothes. Now there's some variability. Etc.
Then, pray tell, what kind of confusion of mind would drive someone to a conclusion like, basically, "if 10 million people love WoW, and I don't, then I'm right and they're all idiots and need to be enlightened about how boring their favourite game is"?
Again, maybe it isn't WoW, it's "you". It doesn't match _your_ subjective taste. Maybe you're not much into MMOs. Maybe there's something else about it you don't like. But realize that it doesn't say much about anyone else. It's ok. It's not some personal failure or anything. You don't have to fit in with some group or anything. But the same applies viceversa too.
But again, it might be... _polite_ to lose the preaching. You're not the golden standard in game tastes, nor the yardstick by which humanity is measured. It's entirely possible that someone else loves what you hated, and don't need your enlightenment at all.
You know, if there's one category of people I find mildly amusing, it's the "meh, I played Game X for two years, and thus I have enough experience to say exactly how utterly boring and pointless it is." In fact, only slightly less amusing than the "I played Game X for two years, and then decided it sucks, it's horrible, and only idiots like it." (Admittedly, the OP isn't in the latter category, but you can find plenty of those around.)
Including, yes, such "commentary" as that on Sluggy Freelance.
Here's a thought: If a game held your attention past the, say, 10 to 50 hours an offline game would (with PC ones tending to be the former, and console RPGs... well, at least _used_ to me more toward the latter), then maybe there's _some_ merit in it. If it even kept you there for the "free" month, even playing it at a casual pace, you already saw more content than in 2-3 full price CRPGs nowadays.
There must be _something_ that you must have found interesting or enjoyable there, unless you're trying to tell me that you (and him) are self-hating idiots who punished yourselves for months by doing stuff that was repetitive and boring all along. Obviously not because you were enjoying it, but just, you know, to feel miserable one more month and pay for the privilege.
You're not retarded, are you? I'm guessing you aren't.
Or maybe it's that you'd eventually get bored of anything else, and any other game. Nobody has infinite content, at least until someone invents an AI GM who can pass the Turing test. And nobody has an infinite team of developers, with an infinite total imagination, so each quest and each monster is truly unique. Even then, debatably it's not possible, since there's a finite number of actions and story types that make any sense.
It applies to any other game too. Eventually if you play enough Starcraft or CounterStrike or Oblivion or whatever, guess what? It's starting to repeat itself. Eventually you've seen all maps (or map pieces for games with randomly generated maps), used all weapons, tried all spells, done all quests (if applicable), and that's it. End of the line. It gets repetitive from there. Even before that, exactly in how many ways can you headshot someone in CS or swing a sword at a monster in Oblivion, before it's doing the same things again? Even with a different skin and model on that monster, you're still swinging the same damned sword in the exact same arc, and doing the same block-then-counterattack sequence again. How many times you can zerg rush someone in Starcraft before it's essentially like being an automaton executing the same script over and over again?
At some point it's just time to give up and move on. For some people it's sooner, for others later. But when it stops being entertaining, just move on.
But realize that it's not the game that suddenly qualifies as being sucky, it's just "you". And I'm not saying that in a bad way. It's "you", in as much as you've seen it all, got bored, are no longer interested in it. Fine. Move on.
You didn't suddenly get a revelation about how bad the game is, you just got a revelation about where _your_ limits are. Congrats.
And please lose the preaching. It may look like you just discovered how boring and pointless the game is, and maybe that it's your duty to enlighten others about it. But you only discovered that it just became boring to _you_. I.e., that you're got a human after all. It's not much of an enlightenment to bestow upon anyone else. We were already suspecting that you were human.
Interesting that the point went a mile over your head. Sorry.
The point is that the same could happen with any other application. E.g., you could put the string "STARTLOGGER" in a web page and the retarded AV would then block the browser from accessing the network. You could have a hardware random number generator attached to a PC, and the AV would disconnect you if the sequence of bytes received resembled anything on its flawed signatures.
Also, the issue of deleting Windows DLL's didn't happen in conjunction with either WoW or mIRC, it just nuked Windows. A retarded signature file update made a couple of Windows DLL's look like they have viruses. And that's a big failure. Lesser visible ones included hundreds of cases of some innocent installer, or some third party program, or once even one of my own programs written in C was mistaken for a virus and promptly destroyed.
There is absolutely nothing that's WoW or mIRC only about that mode of failure.
Or in other words, today's free clue is: sometimes an example is just an example, not the whole set. If I say "for example, that dog has rabies", it doesn't mean that _only_ that dog has rabies and no other dog could possibly ever have that.
Again, the point is that the same could happen with any other application.
But apparently they did bring a trojan on an USB stick. And it wasn't the first time.
Regardless, the issues I've described could happen over any data stream, no matter which.
Right, because they so have the manpower to do a clean room reverse-engineering of all viruses, within hours of their release. Not.
Writing AV software doesn't mean just writing the engine. It also means coming up with all those virus signatures. That's the hard part.
Actually, I'd rate that informative, rather than funny. I've actually tried a couple of such programs back then, and invariably it was just a fancy way to slow your computer down. (Mildly.)
Basically, the way it worked was:
1. Report more RAM to the OS. That's actually what your swap file does too. Virtually any modern processor has _some_ way to pretend it has more memory than physically present, with the extra bytes being in a swap file.
2. Set aside half the memory as a kind of compressed, virtual (in memory) swap file.
So at this point, let's say your computer had 4 MB RAM (hey, back then we didn't measure RAM in Gigabytes). So now you'd only have 2 MB of it free as physical memory for your programs, and 2 MB set up as a compressed swap file. But your OS thought you have 8 MB, with 2 MB being the free RAM left and 6 MB of it being swap space.
3. However, you typically still wanted some actual swap space, because you don't know, and can't guarantee, how well that swap space compresses. If you swap out, say, a table of random numbers, you may not be able to compress at all. Funky things can happen when the OS thinks it has room to swap a page out, but it turns out that it doesn't fit there. The actual HDD swap file would be, at the very least, the safety net to catch whatever doesn't fit into that RAM buffer.
Now the thing is:
A. That virtual compressed swap space was typically faster than HDD (we didn't have 15,000 RPM drives with huge caches, back then), but, here's the important part, _much_ slower than just plain old free RAM. ("Free" as in "available to the OS as it is.") Even the page fault itself, never mind the compression, was _much_ slower than the few cycles required to just read a memory page.
Compression didn't make it much better. Almost any decent compression algorithm is fast when deconpressing, but slow when compressing. When handling a page fault in that context, you had to do both. Compress the page you want swapped out, and decompress the page you want swapped in. Not only that took time, but it was CPU time. Unlike IO time, which happens on DMA in an ideal world, and lets your CPU schedule some other task in that time.
B. However, now you had less free RAM _and_ were encouraged to load more into it. If you had 5 MB of memory in use on the above described computer, without RamDoubling scams, you'd have 4 MB of physical memory in use and 1 MB swapped to disk. With such a RamDoubling scheme, you had 2 MB in actual normal RAM, and 3 MB swapped out.
In almost all cases, the "ram doubling" inherently increased the number of pages swapped in and out per second. In some cases, dramatically. (E.g., Java's GC didn't play nice at all with swapping anyway. It already tended to push everything else out. Play with it in even less space, and things could get funny.)
So a lot of the time, sometimes even most of the time, all you'd get for your efforts was slowing your computer down. And a useless number telling you "now you have 8 MB RAM!!!!11oneeleventeen", but not what the cost there is, or even what it really means.
So, on some computers which (A) have been there for years, and (B) have no network connection over which to download virus signature updates, somehow miraculously that AV software would be up to date and able to recognize the newest trojans. I don't know what AV software that is, but I want it too ;)
Or, I know, let's send Mordac up there with each Shuttle or rocket trip, to install those updates.
Oh yeah, and you so want to be up there on your own, when the retarded AV software after a buggy update decides one or more of the following:
- some critical Windows file looks suspicious and deletes it. It happened more than once IRL.
- some piece of binary data transmitted by or to your computer looks suspiciously like an obscure, outdated SQL-Server exploit, and shuts the program down and cuts off the network connection. I can personally testify that it happened to me in WoW, never mind that it wasn't on the right port, I had no version of SQL-Server installed, and it was on a connection to WoW that was on for 2 hours now and thus unlikely to be what a virus does. Or see the infamous "STARTLOGGER"/"STOPLOGGER" idiocy that made it possible for a while to disconnect anyone from IRC (and God knows what else) if they have Norton AV installed. Yeah, you so want that on a space station's computers.
- introduces a bigger vulnerability of its own than Windows has. At least one RL mass-pwnage, and of the format-your-hdd sort at that, happened over a buffer overflow vulnerability in IIRC McAffee's firewall. Or if you look in the history of Norton's patch notes, a _lot_ of them were patching old buffer overflow vulnerabilities in their AV software.
- suddenly decides that an otherwise legitimate piece of software is too dangerous, and just deletes it. It happened to me with one AV which decided that IRC is too dangerous a place and just removed my mIRC executable. Not because of some malicious code, or even vulnerability, in that version of mIRC, but just because apparently they considered it dangerous anyway. You so want to be up on a space station when such a piece of crap decides that your, say, telnet is too dangerous and must be stopped.
- loads itself in memory twice and slows everything down to a crawl. Happened to me, with an older version of McAffee's AV. Oh, and trying to stop or uninstall it, only stopped one of the copies.
- goes paranoid about protecting the user's "privacy", and prevents legitimate logins. Again, McAffee did that for me. Half the sites were so confused by whatever it did, that they simultaneously thought I'm logged in _and_ not logged in. I was starting to develop a deep empathy for Schroedinger's cat. You surely want that kind of thing randomly happening when you're trying to log into some more important thing up there.
Heh ;)
You know, it's kinda funny. Neanderthals stagnated for hundreds of thousands of years, then gradually went extinct. Homo Sapiens stagnated for some 150,000 years, then nearly went extinct. Kinda makes you wonder what happens there. Sure, you can blame it on volcanoes and climate change, but I wonder if they didn't happen to discover management back then. I mean, I can imagine it:
ACT 1
Zog enters stage left, limping and with a bandaged foot.
Urg: Zog, what happened?
Zog: Gah. We went hunting mamoth with that idiot Hrgh again, and the retard still doesn't know which end of the spear goes forward. Put it right through my damned foot.
Urg: I thought we decided to send him to gather berries and mushrooms with the women.
Zog: Yeah, well, have you seen what he was trying to dump in the pot yesterday? The idiot had gathered poisonous mushrooms and goat droppings. Good thing Lana stopped him.
Urg: Damn. Sounds like him, though. I swear he's too stupid to piss holes in the snow.
Zog: I'm getting an idea, though. How about we make him chief? That way he stays in the cave and we can hunt safely.
Urg: Dude, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Surely we're not going to reward incompetence.
Zog: Then you go hunting mammoth with him tomorrow.
Urg: By the great spirits... ok, I see your point. I'll go convince the others.
ACT 2
The tribesmen are gathered around a fire, with chief Hrgh showing them some stick-figure paintings on the cave walls.
Hrgh: Week before I chief, tribe hunt 1 mammoth. See in this slide: 1 mammoth.
Points at a crude drawing of a few stick-figures with spears against a mammoth.
Zog: Chief, the good berries are ripe and the antelope migration started. Shouldn't we be out there hunting and gathering?
Hrgh: Me no like your attitude, Zog. You no good team member.
Zog: Right. Carry on.
Hrgh: Yes. Week after I chief, tribe hunt 2 mammoth. See slide 2: 2 mammoth.
Points at another crude drawing with more stick figures and 2 mammoths.
Zog: Yes, well, and two weeks before you were chief we hunted 3. Luck comes and goes.
Urg elbows Zog in the ribs.
Urg (under his breath): Dude, shut up. You want to go hunting with him again?
Hrgh: Silence! Me say at this rate, by next year tribe hunt big heap of mammoths each week. Because me great chief.
A few tribesmen clap politely. A few in the back shake their heads.
Hrgh: From now on, me not just Chief, me Chief Executive Officer. That how great chief Hrgh is.
ACT 3
Urg and Zog sit on a log, talking.
Urg: You know, that idea of yours seemed to work well. Sure, we have the least stored for winter in many years, but also no more accidents.
Zog: Told ya.
Lana enters from the right.
Lana: Guys, do you figure we could make Grarg some kind of chief too?
Zog: Oh, that retard. What's he done this time?
Lana: Fell into his own trap again, and scared the hunt too. But mostly I just don't have the heart to see him injured every other day.
Urg: Heh, well, as long as he only hurts himself...
Lana: Yes, well, last week he drew some sabertooth tigers to where Hrug was hiding.
Zog: Hmm, ok, but we can't have two chiefs.
Urg: Let's make him Chief Information Officer.
Lana: What the hell would that do?
Urg: Be in charge of paints and cave walls for Hrgh's presentations.
Zog: Heh. I like the way you think. Ok, let's go convince the guys. Lana, you talk to the women.
ACT 4
Hrgh: Dis time we hold meeting in new cave.
Zog: Not as much a cave as an indentation. Well, at least the light is better.
Hrgh: Yes. CIO tell me we need new cave, me buy dis one from Black Feet tribe.
Urg: Wait, wait... you _bought_ this... little place under an overhang?
Hrgh: I let CIO explain.
Urg (under his breath): This better be good.
Lana: Hush, guys.
Grarg: Well, see, the old cave was old technology. Painting on walls there was too slow and needed highly skilled people.
Zog: Heh. So basically you bought a new cave because you're bad at drawing?
Chimps fight each other all right, and so do most animals. Cats or dogs fight too, don't they? Probably so did primitive humans.
All animals though, including chimps, usually stop short of killing each other. Considering, for example, the claws and teeth of a cat, they're perfectly equipped to take each other apart in a fight. But they don't use them to kill each other. And once one yields, the fight is immediately over.
There _are_ artificial situations where you can force it to eventually escalate to a kill, typically by forcing one to be on the territory of the other and giving the loser no way to retreat out of it. But those happen only by human intervention and it takes a long time to escalate all the way to that. And _probably_ not even then as premeditated murder, as just putting increasingly more force into making the point, until it happens to be fatal.
I find it very likely that the same applied to primitive humans. We probably punched each other around, but not to kill. And apparently we didn't take a stone spear or axe to another human. Or at least we have no bones that show any sign of that before the age of bows.
Again, we _still_ have that reflex against killing another human, and killing another human in melee is extreme mental trauma even for trained and drilled soldiers.
Warfare is one step above that. Warfare is, pretty much, premeditated mass murder. You _plan_ to go and kill as many of the other tribe as stand in your way. It's not a natural thing. I don't know of any animals who do that, chimps included, and it took an awfully long time for humans to evolve a culture that enables that.
Actually we don't know that Homo Sapiens hunted down Neanderthals either.
Warfare only appeared in Homo Sapiens around the time we discovered bows and arrows, about 20,000 years ago, in Africa. It's hard to tell if that was cause or effect or just a spurious correlation, but suddenly we get mass graves of people with arrow heads embedded in their bones and cave paintings of groups of archers shooting at each other.
At any rate:
1. There is no evidence of warfare before that. Neither in Homo Sapiens, nor in Neanderthals.
2. By the time missile weapons arrived in Europe, the Neanderthals were going extinct on their own. The long decline in numbers and area had happened before that.
Vengeful we may be, but killing someone in melee is actually an extremely traumatic thing. Unless you're a sociopath, you're still wired like an animal to not kill members of the same species. Overcoming that is very traumatic. The Romans for example recognized that and rotated the rows of a legion, so the soldiers would get some time to recover in the middle of a fight. Ranged killing seems to actually be easier, and it puts a wall of plausible deniability between you and the victim. Maybe it wasn't your arrow that killed that guy, after all.
From there we learned to manipulate people and use group-think to make them kill each other even in melee. But it took an awfully long time to get there, and the Neanderthals were already extinct by then.
Furthermore, Neanderthals were, if you'll pardon the bad WoW metaphors, all survival-spec hunters. Melee hunters. _Everyone_ hunted with spears, including the women. And they seemed pretty capable to cooperate in a group. Plus, see that thing about using the women too. If someone actually managed to start a war back then between a tribe of Homo Sapiens and one of Neanderthals, I wouldn't be surprised if the latter would have had the upper hand.
Exactly why they went extinct... now that's still a good question.
One theory was that they were strictly carnivore and their prey was going extinct due to both climate change _and_ over-hunting. Another one is that they just couldn't compete with us. The Homo Sapiens were hunters _and_ gatherers, and could survive and continue hunting a species into extinction even past the point where predator-prey balance would normally allow the prey to rebound. The Neanderthals relying only on that prey, would have been royally shafted.
Me, I'm wonder if we didn't kill them sexually, so to speak. Consider the following:
A. See, one way to get a species of, say, insects extinct, is to release lots and lots of sterile males. If enough females of that species mate with those, the population drops very fast.
B. There seem to be _no_ genes we inherited from Neanderthals. Considering that the areas for us and them overlapped for thousands of years, I find it unlikely that _no_ horny male of one species wouldn't find a female of the other species attractive enough, or viceversa. I mean, so they were short and stout lasses with sloped foreheads. A lot of people screw worse looking women nowadays. And conversely going to the pub and getting laid by a neanderthal is still a tradition for some girls ;)
It is very likely that the offspring of Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals were either sterile or non-viable. Plenty of closely related species produce sterile offspring when crossed. E.g., lion and tiger, horse and donkey, etc.
C. The sterile case is actually the funniest, because it may not be immediately obvious that it's a dead end. And in a lot of species such hybrids are bigger and stronger (a liger is twice the weight of a tiger, for example), so for a primitive sentient species it may even look like giving your children more chances of survival that way.
D. Both species had a chronic shortage of women, due to a life expectancy disparity. Death in birth or from resulting complications took a heavy toll.
So _if_ they were desirable enough (e.g., because Homo Sapiens tribes
No kidding. The whole "frictionless tube" thing is just thinking too hard about it. Yes, instead of simply repositioning an object from point A to point B, you also take the normal of both holes and change the direction of the velocity. That's it. It solves the same problem and produces the exact same result without doing physics for a frictionless tube.
Well, first of all, some of us have better taste than to wear a loincloth. A robe and wizard hat, for example, is much more stylish and comfortable for the aspiring sorcerer or warlock. A toga picta works too, for the aspiring Emperor. Well, at least until mom catches wind that you dyed one of her bedsheets purple ;)
But a loincloth? Ugh. We're civilized people, not some barbarians.
Second, some of us have our own basement to defend, thank you very much. I mean, have you tried taking over the world from your mom's basement? Ooer, talk about frustrating. It would go sorta like this.
Me: "Now we open the prayer books to the dark invocation psalm and..."
Mom (poking her head in): "Anyone want milk and cookies?"
Cultist 1: "I'll have some, please."
Cultist 2: "Me too."
Me: "Mooom!!"
Mom: "Oh, hush. Nice dress, by the way."
Me: "Mom, it's a robe."
Mom: "Sure it is. I just want you to know me and dad support your lifestyle choices."
Cultist 3: "Told you it looks gay."
Cultist 1: "Yeah."
Me: "Mom, you're interrupting our invocation!"
Mom: "Oh, hush, I'm your mom, I'm allowed to. What are you guys playing anyway? Dungeons and Dragons?"
Me: "No, it's serious. And you can start calling me High Overlord Moraelin the First."
Mom: "High, huh? Well, you know me and dad don't approve of _that_, but I guess it would explain a few things."
Cultist 4: "Heh!"
Me: "*sigh* Where are the sacrificial dagger and the sacred chalice anyway?"
Mom: "You mean our kitchen knife? I put it in the dishwasher, together with that plastic cup you had there. They were getting ridiculously dirty, and it's just not healthy."
Cultist 3: "Told ya."
A trip to the kitchen later:
Group chanting: "Nigrae legiones, ferus imperator, sinus occultus, fatum terminatum"
Mom (poking nose in again): "By the way, I'm going to sleep. Try to keep the noise down, please."
Me: "Ok, mom."
Mom: "By the way is that the chorus from Das Omen?"
Me: "No, it's an ancient and sacred invocation.."
Cultist 2: "Nah, I googled it, it's E Nomine."
Cultist 1: "Owned."
Cultist 4: "I thought you said you only listened to metal?"
Me: "Gah! Fine by me, chant Dies Irae if it makes you feel any better."
Cultist 3: "Why do we have to chant in Latin anyway?"
Me: "Because we're summoning an arsehole of a demon, and he wants it that way."
Mom: "Anyway, keep it down and turn off the lights when you're done, ok?"
Me: "Ok, mom. Now where were we?"
Cultist 3: "You know, screw this. Let's skip the henchman and work for the real overlord. Do you happen to need some accolytes, Mrs?"
Cultist 1: "Seconded."
Cultist 2: "No kidding."
Cultist 4: "Actually, I'm out of here. I promised mom I'll be home by eleven anyway."
(Disclaimer: it's fiction.)
Pfft, some of us own or rent our own basements. In fact, there's a free basement above me at the moment, in case you want to rent it.