I'm not sure it's gender. Admittedly, anecdote is not data, and my family of complete nerds is anything except typical. Still, I humbly present the following anecdote:
Mom is always doing what the article say and what you present as a "male" thing. She always has to come up with a solution for anything I tell her about. Let's say I say something like, "Heh, I had a 2 Euro coin in the washing machine. Money laundering for the win!" That just prompts her to show off that she knows better than me what I should have done before chucking the pants into the washing machine. Or I mention that I'm getting annoyed at paying the TV tax when I at most use that TV as a monitor for the consoles. Wouldn't you know it, she just has to go into a whole speech about how to dispose of the TV and where to take it.
To me, it feels like she's just showing off that she knows better. Shut the fuck up, I'm not looking for advice, I too just want someone to nod and listen at least once in a while. I guess I'd qualify as "female" in your view of the world. Bearded lady ftw, eh?;)
My brother doesn't seem to appreciate it either, btw, so at least I'm not alone in being weird like that. And I gather that dad isn't all that happy about it either, just more stoic about it.
Personally I'm more inclined to think it's not as gender-related as you think. Try doing the above-described mom thing on any of your male coleagues, and see if any of them will appreciate it. I'm guessing you won't have many friends after a while, if you try to solve anything and everything they mention.
Men too usually just need someone to nod, agree and be sympathetic.
Trying to solve someone's problems is a "male" thing IMHO only in as much as males seem to think it's their duty and a penis-size thing to do it to someone else. E.g., to their spouse, leading to views like yours about male vs female things. It makes us feel all smart, and powerful and in control, if we can solve anything like that. I.e., fitting the gender-role assigned to us. It doesn't mean we like being on the _receiving_ end of it.
Yes, sometimes we'll ask for advice. But 90% of the time we just ventilate our tonsils, as a way to pass the time. We too say stuff all the time, for which we don't need or want a solution. E.g., we say stuff like, "boah, I'm so tired, we had this LUG meeting at the pub yesterday until 2 AM" (or WoW raid, or anything) and we just expect a "big party, eh?" or a "yeah, I know how that feels." _Not_ a brainstorming session about how to end pub meetings earlier and how to have the discipline to go to bed on time. And if the conversation partner does the male thing and has to start brainstorming and offering solutions to anything and everything you say, you'll dislike him/her very very fast.
So to get back on topic (or anywhere near it), I doubt that such a system would really cater for anyone at all. Males and females alike. Regardless of whether you're male or female, by the 10'th time you went to the robo-counsellor because you're bored, lonely and depressed, and get a brainstorming session on how to solve your problems... you'll hate the damned thing very very much.
Or to put it more briefly: there's a reason why nobody thought Clippy was fulfilling their need for social interaction.
At the same time, there has to be an understanding that even the best technologies available and best practices may not prevent all personal information theft so a company should not face harsh consequences if they took the necessary steps to protect people's information.
Agreed, but... well, did they? Invariably every single of these cases I hear about, involves some variant of
- idiot marketer or salesman is given a copy of the whole fucking customer database on a laptop, he loses the laptop
- idiot boss gives some contractor a copy of the customer database (or recently in the UK, the prison population database) on an USB stick, he loses it
- idiot puts a copy of the whole customer database on an unsecured web server so he can download it from home, thinks that it being in a "secret" directory is actually security (especially in the dot-com days this was the #1 failure mode, but it's not entirely dead yet)
- the infamous AOL failure mode, "OMG, Google is eating our lunch, someone plz code a Google killer. Here's our customers' search strings as RL data to work with."
Etc.
I'm sorry, but that does _not_ qualify as taking the necessary steps. Not even as trying.
What I see is some idiots trying to circumvent security for the sake of a few extra bucks ('cause that salesman might impress a customer with a sharply drawn chart) or to save a few bucks in costs (e.g., so they don't have to get an extra desk for that contractor.) It's plain old greed.
And I still think that we see a variant of the old, "bad money pushes good money off the market". Only this time with companies. The pricks which save a few bucks or earn an extra few bucks by being cavalier with your data, get to undercut and push those off the market who do the right thing. Until we slap some penalties on them that actually reverse that situation, it _will_ keep happening.
1. Actually, no, Galileo only got house arrest, and not as much for "proving some overbearing theology wrong" as for flaming an absolute monarch. There had been closed minded popes and cardinals, but Pope Urban VIII was not one of them. Before becoming a pope, he had actually defended Galileo and opposed other church officials like Bellarmine. And as a pope he actually encouraged Galileo to write his book, and only asked that he presents both models, both his new and his old one, and shows what his model explains that the other didn't.
What Galileo did... was a lot more like flaming. He took the Pope's words, distorted them, and put him in the mouth of a bumbling idiot of a character called, basically, The Stupid. That was the defender of the old model.
The pope didn't take lightly to public ridicule, and did a bit of an abuse of justice to show Galileo who's boss. He suddenly made the helliocentric model the official church position (where he had been very neutral before) just so he could prosecute Galileo and put the offending book on the index of forbidden books. But make no mistake, it wasn't about science vs religion, it was just a troll personally flaming an absolute monarch and getting smacked upside the head for it.
At any rate, Galileo got just a house arrest at his own mansion for his efforts. Hardly the worst possible fate. Other people routinely got executed for lesser offenses against secular monarchs.
2. I think the one you're talking about is Giordano Bruno. That one got burned at the stake all right. However, even there the waters are muddier.
For a start, Giordano Bruno had a _lot_ of accusations of heresy against him, with heliocentrism being by far the least important. Other stuff like preaching that Mary wasn't a virgin, or eastern-style reincarnation (including into animals), plus a few assorted things about Mass, Jesus and the Trinity. The Church couldn't care much less about heliocentrism, but when you start preaching that everything in the new testament is a lie, they started to care. A lot.
Furthermore, Giordano Bruno was a monk. The Church took policing its internal ranks very seriously. (And honestly, it had all the reasons to, since any excesses of one of its members got used as examples of what's wrong with the church as a whole.) Things you could have gotten away with as some lay person, became very serious offenses as a member of the clergy.
Not saying that it makes it "right". Just saying that there's more to it that "science vs religion." I don't think that Giordano's views on reincarnation qualified as "science", for example. Whatever "science" was in his position, seemed to have been more incidental than the fundament of it all. He was tried and executed for plain old heresy.
Again, I'm not saying that the power to try people for heresy is good or right. But let's treat it as the excess of totalitarian power that it was, rather than some grand science-vs-religion battle.
It just occured to me that there's an even better example of what I'm talking about. Think of some of the "audiophiles". The kind that actually hears the sound difference in an MP3 played over an audiophile-grade Ethernet cable.
Pretty much, the cognitive dissonance at work is between, X="I'm one of the elite guys with a superior hearing", Y="that kind of people hear such differences", and Z="I don't hear a damn thing differently with this cable." (Sometimes with an extra jab of, X1="I'm a smart, savvy customer", Y1="Only gullible people buy snake oil" and Z1="this cable I paid $500 for is snake oil.") Something there has to give. If you really believe Y and X is too important to give up, then Z has to be false. So they actually convince themselves that they hear a much nicer and clearer sound when they use that cable.
I don't think pretending to be happy actually works, either. But you _can_ basically bullshit yourself to see other elements of the equation differently, and people do it all the time.
I should probably have explained it better: I don't think that it's the pretending to be unhappy as such, that can cause someone to become unhappy. But sooner or later you have to put into words exactly what you don't like about your life or job. And you start saying stuff like, say, "all the users are idiots." Say it, or better yet write it, often enough, and you start believing it more and more. Just because the alternative would be to think that you've lied to milk some sympathy.
As for those pyramid jobs, they're a different beast entirely. Cognitive dissonance, as the name says, happens when your mental model just isn't consistent any more and something has to be patched to make it whole again. And if some notion is too important for you to let go, then something else will have to give.
E.g., if you can get person X to shaft person Y (the classic experiment was getting X to convince Y that some mind-numbingly boring job is a great job to take), and X thinks that he's otherwise an honest person, that model just sprung a dissonance. If the self-image of an honest person is too important to let go, something else will have to give. So X gradually starts believing that he didn't shaft Y after all. (E.g., in that experiment, that it actually _is_ a great job.)
But you can't just read in a book something like "you should be happy", and start being happy. Nor even something like "Homer Simpson's job of pushing one button all day is a great and mentally stimulating job." That's the kind of thing that's easier patched by concluding something like, "this book is a scam and the author is full of shit." There's no loss for you to conclude that, and you didn't even have to change your mental model for it.
On the other hand, if I manage send you to convince someone to take that job, you might get a proper dissonance.
In the cases where such books or brainwashing work, it's not as much because of what it says in the book, as because a few people actually manage to create their own dissonance. E.g., along the lines of having to choose between "I'm a gullible idiot, and everyone will laugh at me for buying it" and "this book actually works, and everyone who laughed at me for it is the loser." A few people find the former actually less palatable than the latter, so the latter has to be true. That's cognitive dissonance at work.
Some brainwashing cults even raise the stakes by making their adepts do all sorts of stuff that's a combination of stupid, humiliating and/or self-destructive. Give them a choice basically between "I'm a complete cretin and worthy of derision for having even tried this" and "this stuff works, and the Guru is God's Avatar." The latter becomes a lot more palatable for enough people.
Is there a correlation? Maybe, but all I've seen is anecdotal evidence.
Actually, there was this study linked on Slashdot a few years ago, where average happiness in IT was below that of, say, workers on garbage trucks. I'm too lazy to google it atm, though.
So apparently there _is_ at least some correlation.
If there is a correlation, is there a causation? Again, maybe.
There are plenty of personal anecdotes of people who were unhappy in IT jobs and got a lot happier when they resigned and did something else. I don't know if that's enough to "prove" a causation, but it at least makes one wonder.
If there is a causation, in what direction? It could well be that paranoid misanthropes are more drawn to security work, or become better at it.
Of course, it could also be that the people who are drawn to IT work are the ones who are totally unfit for that kind of a job, and who'll hate it. At least theoretically, it's a possibility.
On the other hand, it would be a first for any job.
On yet another hand, about half the people who end up in IT or programming jobs, loved working with a computer before choosing that career. In fact, that's why they chose it. A lot still love working with computers in their free time.
So whatever the cause and direction there is, at least it surely can't be that it draws people who hate computers.
At the very least, something is wrong there either way that causation goes. In the end, regardless of which way it goes, if you're unhappy with a job, you're just unhappy and that's that.
Does your attitude at work necessarily reflect itself as attitude outside work? That, I would think, is highly individual. Some may not be able to switch personalities with ease, and some may not desire to do so.
I have to wonder how much you can keep those attitudes separate.
There was a study some time ago, where merely being asked to write an apology of a position contrary to your own, fully knowing that it's just a silly exercise and it's not even supposed to be taken seriously, after a while causes your actual position to shift towards what you wrote. E.g., if you're a Democrat and have to write an essay about how right Bush is, after a while you'll actually start seeing him in a somewhat better light.
It's called cognitive dissonance. The brain basically has a model dissonance with "I'm a honest person" and "I just wrote a lie", and basically resolves it by changing the latter to "well, it wasn't really a lie. Maybe at most a bit of an exaggeration."
So a mask you wear every day, eventually becomes _you_. If you pose as a Linux/BSD/Mac/Windows fanboy to fit a certain crowd even just for a couple of hours a week, eventually you become more and more of an actual fanboy. And if you have to put on a thoroughly unhappy face every day for 8 hours, eventually you _will_ convince yourself that you _are_ unhappy with your situation.
At any rate, you can't really keep two completely opposite mental models, unless maybe if you're schizophrenic. And those attitudes are based on your model, after all: being, say, a misanthrope is based on your model having a pretty bad opinion of your fellow humans. You can't really switch between "humans are evil idiots, and they should have stayed in the trees for another million years until they're ripe" and "humans are nice and friendly, and I enjoy their company" at the drop of a hat. Your brain is wired to keep _one_ big model of everything consistent, not to have several models and switch between them as needed. If it worked with several models, it would avoid cognitive dissonance very easily. In practice, it doesn't.
So any model changes that cause a different attitude at work, _will_ still be there in your model when you're at home or at the pub with your friends. You may build an artificial "us" group (as in, "us vs them") of people who ar
Well, then fix copyright, I guess. There's nothing particularly wrong about this case, as far as the law is concerned. If Disney gets copyright extension after copyright extension, just so it can keep some old films hidden for PR reasons, then I guess Nintendo gets the same rules.
I mean, if we all decided (you're a democracy, right? If not, fix _that_ first) that we're ok with people making money for 50 year old works, then it seems to me it's only fair that Nintendo gets to make money with stuff that can't be older than 25 years. (The NES launched in 1983, so games for it can't be older.) What's sauce for the goose, and all that.
Honestly, the Disney case rubs me the wrong way a lot more than this. There it's used to effectively take some works out of the culture pool, which is the exact opposite of what copyright was supposed to _do_. It was supposed to offer an (indirect) monetary incentive to encourage people to publish their works, _not_ to be a way to make already published work disappear.
Nintendo, by contrast, seems to actually use copyright as it was intended. AFAIK a lot of those games are available emulated for some of their other consoles. That copyright extension effectively encouraged them to put some work into keeping some of those games available for more people. That's what copyright was supposed to _do_.
And before you go, "OMG, but you could just download an emulator from somewhere else"... well, that may be true for the NES and SNES, but look at how it takes longer and longer to emulate newer consoles. We've already had the PS3 for a while, and emulating the PS2 is still iffy. It's one thing to emulate an 8 bit CPU with just about enough instructions to count them on your fingers, and a graphics chip which barely scans the RAM as it is, and it's getting to be quite another to emulate the newer ones. For the graphics chips we don't even know the details of the architecture and the opcodes. At any rate, it's getting to be more and more to emulate them, and it's taking longer and longer. We may well soon get to appreciate it, if the vendor writes an emulator himself.
But, at any rate, it's what copyright was supposed to do.
Duly noted, they make more money in the process. Well, that's how copyright was supposed to work.
1. At the very least the cost, or "danger", in acting rashly upon a fairy tale to please some cultists is to not do something that would actually work. At worst it's doing something outright unproductive, that compounds the problem in the long run or creates a bigger problem.
As the stereotypical example, take Easter Island. Instead of doing what would have worked (start replanting trees) they did what the priests told them (cut more trees to build and haul more statues to the gods, 'cause the gods would surely take care of all problems.) Eventually the problem got so bad that they couldn't even make enough fishing vessels any more. Maybe stopping and thinking before acting couldn't have been worse.
I find that to be, ironically, a decent metaphor for _both_ extremes of the climate debate. Both have their a priori "truth" set in stone, both don't actually do real science (in real science, no truth is set in stone, and everything is falsifiable), and both would rather act now, goddammit, instead of at least trying to understand the big model. I can almost imagine a bunch of Easter Island tribesmen doing the same, waving fists and shouting slogans to act now to please the gods, and calling anyone names if he even tries debating the already decided orthodoxy.
2. To also answer the question what is the danger: the economy is already in a precarious position in most western countries, having worked on, essentially, over-spending ever since the Great Depression. We don't really have a better model to replace it with.
The old laissez-faire model essentially died in the Great Depression. Not that it was that great a model to start with. It produced increasingly erratic swings between boom and crash, with each boom setting the stage for the following crash. Increasingly more money and resources were going not into satisfying people's needs (which, may I remind, was how the Wealth Of Nations was supposed to be measured), but into rebuilding the industry after the last crash. The actual standard of living for workers decline through the 19'th and early 20'th century, with the general theme being demanding more hours work for less pay.
(And it's funny to see Libertarians pining for _that_ model. But I digress.)
Even if some claim (rather unproven, but ok) that it was the corrective measures that finally caused the big crash, it still just wasn't a that great model anyway. The swings were getting bigger and bigger, and the whole situation shittier and shittier. Even _if_ it would have bombed a bit later without the corrective actions, bomb it would have. And it wasn't much fun to be an employee in that model even before it bombing.
Some also tried other stunts in the meantime, like supply-side economics, but even those failed to work better than the current model.
Or, of course, we could actually be Keynesian as Keynes actually intended it to work: overspend in times of crisis, yes, but cut back and pay the debts in times of boom. No government yet managed to do that, and it could be argued that it would make for a very unpopular government to cut back, say, welfare, _because_ the economy is doing great. Plus other problems.
But, of course, adding yet another permanent burden to it, really doesn't help there.
Basically most first world economies are in a bigger trouble than they seem. We all _seem_ to do great, but we're steadily heading towards the end of the model that makes it work. At some point, the debt gets so big that you can't go on like that any more. And all we've been doing is postpone the next crash. Quite successfully and for a remarkably long time, duly noted, but that's what we've been doing. And each averted crisis added even more debt. Not just in the USA, but everywhere.
Fear what will happen when we all no longer have the reserves to avert the next one, because it won't be pretty. Unless you're at least, say, 90 years old, you have only seen minor crises, held small by having the money to throw at them. To
Actually, I don't know if there's necessarily a difference of scale. It might be, but it's not really necessary.
See, I don't know much about China, but at least in the USSR the age of mass deportations and millions of people in Gulag ended with Stalin. Then it evolved in something cheaper, more subtle and more efficient: the idea that anything you say _might_ be recorded somewhere and _might_ be used against you. Not even necessarily by a visit of the secret police. Sure, it _could_ be the secret police too, but maybe it'll be something else. Maybe you'll never fly out of the USSR ever again, because you can't be trusted to come back. Maybe you'll never get a job past a certain level. Maybe it'll bite you in the arse in some other way. Or maybe noone wrote that in your dossier after all. But you don't know.
And you don't know who's spying and reporting on you. Maybe comrade Piotr is really rabidly against the government and you could start building a resistance together. But maybe he's an agent provocateur.
They actually had very few political prisoners past a point. The people held themselves in line admirably, given that Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.
I wouldn't be surprised if they actually had less political prisoners than the USA has in gitmo. The actual gulag was more kept as a reminder of what _could_ happen if you really cross the line too far, than as something to be used immediately and lots. Sorta like how the nukes are more for threat value, than actually used in wars.
And I find that the USA had been taking an eerily similar direction during the Bush years. The whole surveillance mania, and the repeated leaks about what else they monitor and try to connect (including laughable stuff like data-mining the grocery purchases for people who buy arab food), it's like they actually _wanted_ people to get the idea that someone's watching and they better behave. Even some of the few terrorism trials, it's like they chose the most laughable and/or most suspiciously looking like entrapment. It almost begs thinking that the moral is, beware of who's asking you dubious stuff, he might be an agent provocateur.
Now I'm not saying it's some deliberate conspiracy to leak them. Probably more like not caring what gets leaked. Give enough minions orders to spy left and right, and you can pretty much count on it that some of them will botch it or run to the press. Which can actually be good if that's the message you actually want to give to your population: watch it, we've got our eyes on all y'all.
Look at the other details about the USSR in that list. Flight restrictions for people they don't like? Check. Done in the USA too. Your pool of available jobs might depend on how much of an politically loyal you make yourself seen as? Check. The Bushies politicized half the government departments. Etc.
Gitmo and torture kept as the ultimate stick, where you probably won't land, but you _might_ if you're really undesirable? Check. Same role as the Gulag had post-Stalin.
Not saying that the USA is a perfect equivalent to the USSR dictatorship... yet. But it looks to me like they've been working real hard to push it in that direction. If given more time, I don't doubt that it would have got a lot worse eventually.
Or it could be that humans are smart enough to notice things and connect the dots, even if they don't fully understand the subtleties of what they're connecting. They notice that smashing two flintstones together makes sparks, and sparks can light a fire, and all of a sudden the whole tribe has fire. Even if they don't fully understand what fire is or why those stones create sparks. Or they put their finger in the candle flame once, it hurts, they don't do it again. Or maybe if they want to be really sure and scientific about it, they put their finger in it a couple more times. It hurt again, so they stop doing it. They don't wonder exactly what happened there and what nerve endings fired that signal, but they stop doing it anyway.
In this case, the summary already tells you what you need to know: " I don't deny at all that this company (like many others) has a large amount of badly written and hard-to-maintain Perl code."
Ah-ha. Maybe _that_ is why management is trying to steer off it? My understanding of Occam's Razor say it might just be the right explanation.
And in the end that's what they're supposed to do. If all those many projects and departments (again, TFA spells it out), and indeed many other companies too, produced unmaintainable code in Perl, maybe it's time to try something else than Perl. It's that simple. And if you can hire 3 new kids fresh off university who are already good in Java and/or Python instead of 1 mythical uber-coder who can user Perl right, then it's even more of a no-brainer. That's the kind of thing management is supposed to do.
You _could_ say that it's not Perl's fault, it's the humans who don't use it right. But then they said the same thing about Communism in the USSR. Let's face it, the smart way to do anything is to figure out how to use the resources you actually have, not to try to pretend they're something else. We have plenty of examples of people who tried to idealize humans as having to be anything but what they actually had, and lost. The USSR is one example. Napoleon III and the silly French notion that they should just have "elan" and overcome any odds or equipment disadvantages, is another. I'm sure that while he was capitulating at Sedan he had time to think about it.
The same applies here. If the humans you have (H1Bers or anything else) are bad at Perl, then maybe it's time to try something else.
And while you may laugh at "pointy-clicky" tools and trying to use cheap incompetents, well, that's the history of human civilization. That's why we built tools in the first place. So some ape who's too much of a wimp to bite a gazelle's neck off, can still hunt as well as the lions. Then so some wimp who can barely lift 20 kilos of rocks, can use ropes and inclines to move 20 ton blocks up a pyramid. Then so some half-educated merchant who can barely do maths up to 20, can use an abacus to do maths up to tens of thousands. Etc.
There's no failure, management or otherwise, to try to use better tools. Even if it's instead of wishing for that uber-guru who can do the same job without tools, at only 10x the price. If we waited for the uber-workers who can lift 20 ton stones, we wouldn't have pyramids yet. And if in the process you enlarge the potential pool of workers a bit, well, even better. Society on the whole then can use more of them and achieve more.
Yes, maybe you can program without "pointy-clicky" tools. And some people still can weave without mechanized looms. Guess what? The industrial revolution happened when we figured out a tool (that mechanized loom) which let masses of drooling retards weave just as well as those l33t weaving gurus did without tools. And even faster at that. And guess what? We all ended up better off for it.
Well, ok. Maybe. Still, even without that, the point can still be made with other examples.
I mean, for some you don't even need two anchor points. It's enough to start with something on the left and move even more left, or stuff like that. The curve being what it is, it's still possible to make a prediction and test it.
E.g., a zombie still doesn't move out of the valley if you make it even less human, as I was describing.
E.g., ok, so they say that cartoon characters are appealing and create empathy because they're on the peak on the left side. Fair enough. So moving it farther to the left (i.e., towards even less human), should at best make them even more attractive, and at worst still remain above zero. Because there is no other dip below zero to the left on that graph.
So... let's start from a talking bunny like Buggs Bunny. Hmmm? A zombie, maggot-infested, rotten-corpse-eating, talking bunny, stretching his arse like the goatse guy? I think it just got pretty disgusting.
1. As the summary says, they were counting on lots of monthly subscriptions to keep development going. It was pretty much the MMO model, but...
2. in a game which, honestly, did't offer much reason to fork over cash monthly.
And I say that as a guy who's currently paying 3 subscriptions to 3 different MMOs. I don't have a problem with paying monthly, in a game where I feel I'm getting the content or gaming experience worth that money. Hellgate just offered no good reason. Pay just so I can play a shoot-em-up online? Why? To it,
A) they promised extra content for the people who subscribe. That content evolved from being literally non-existent to being ridiculously little.
B) usually the motivation for going online is to play with other people. But the vicious circle was that their subscription had kept most people from even trying it online. (And again, the subscriber content that might have defused it, was just not there.)
C) the bugs also didn't help. There was a limited player base to start with, and the subscription culled off most of those.
So it's not as much just the bugs, as such. For a SP game, it wasn't too horrible. It was just mediocre.
It's that they based their whole model on getting a money money-printing license, like WoW or Everquest back in the day. But they apparently thought it would just happen by itself.
The missing content was the annoying part to it, but you couldn't really find out about that until you bought it.
Unless you're the kind who preorders or camp the store on release day, just because the hype sounds good, yes, you _could_ find out. The fact that there's no actual content for your subscription money, for example, was common knowledge within days.
Honestly, I wish that the meme that buyers are a bunch of isolated, gullible dolts, would just die already. Even the MPAA and RIAA discovered recently that, what do you know? People call or text each other to tell their friends stuff like, "man, this movie sucked, stay away from it" or "dude, it was great, you should really see it too."
I don't know exactly why would it be less true for games. And there's plenty of empyrical evidence that points at the fact that, say, more polished games sell more copies. Plenty of times contrary to what those review magazines were telling people. I still have a game on the shelf there which got good reviews and sold 800 copies IIRC. (That's a homeopathic quantity in that industry, btw.) Nobody knows why.
I mean, seriously, humans had a society and were telling each other things like "ugh, heap plenty antelopes that way" 100,000 years ago. We had whole spreads of technologies and civilization based on the fact that people were even taking the time to write a letter on a papyrus to cousin Bubba-ho-tep in Thebes to tell him about this new thing they tried. We're like the bees in that aspect.
Did anyone really expect that a few millions of years of evolution would just go away just because Mr Marketer snapped his fingers?
Now I'm not saying that marketing doesn't work at all. It does. But it's a lot less alpha and omega than those people sell themselves as.
And zombies are not related to the valley at all. If there are actual people walking around in makeup, those are actual people. They might look horrible, but they sure as hell look like 'real people'. [...] Nothing that is actually human can ever be in the valley.
I don't know... I'm pretty sure it had some points in the original paper in the valley that were humans in various disguises, or a prosthetic hand on a human. A handicapped human is the right edge of the valley in one of Mori's graphs.
Also, no one said the other side of the valley is 'cute' and I have no idea where you got that. The other side just doesn't look real at all, it looks like a cartoon, and thus we have no problem with it.
Wrong. The Y axis is the "emotional response" to it, or in other words it largely measures how attractive or repulsive people find something.
It also argues that the peak on the left side of the valley is, basically, the point where non-human things are the most appealing, attractive or able to create empathy. That there's a reason why cartoons and fables use talking animals: that those fall on that peak on the left side.
So maybe "cute" isn't the word, but it sure as heck claims more than "we have no problem with it."
"Uncanny valley" is the term given to an observed phenomenon - the tendency of human beings to feel uneasy when encountering almost, but not completely, realistic depictions of human beings. As such, it is not a hypothesis, but an observation (which, of course, might still be incorrect); the attempts to explain it are.
Actually, it's a term coming from a paper, the same one trying to pass off that curve as the explanation and graph of it. It's also the name used for the hypothesis in the paper. So it's a bit hard to dissociate them like that. It's not some vaguely-defined meme, really a very precise term, for exactly one hypothesis.
But ok, I have no problem with the observation that some things look disturbingly unnatural. (I've had the exact same sensation in EQ2, as I was saying, so I'm not going to argue that something I've seen doesn't exist;) I have a problem with the pseudo-science explanation tacked on it.
Personally, I'd go with the "things which try to kill and eat you are scary" theory;).
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They don't look gross because they're in the Uncanny Valley, they look gross because they have lots of blood and gore on them and chunks of flesh missing or rotting. But I'd say that one reason why zombies are often depicted with stiff, "zombie-like" walk is that humans don't walk that way, so it looks creepy, despite it logically making the zombie slower and thus less dangerous.
So basically you've disagreed with that paper right there and then.
Zombies and corpses are not something I imagined on the moment, they're actually points on their graph and used as "data points" in the paper. And yes, it claims that Zombies are right at the bottom of that valley, and corpses are more like at the entrance of it. It claims that zombies are repulsive _because_ they're smack-dab in the worst possible point as the close-enough-to-human metric goes.
Except, of course, the uncanny valley is not the solution, it is the problem.
Except, of course, what the paper called "uncanny valley" was the explanation. And since that's when that term was used for the same time, invented/coined if you will, I figure it can mean exactly what the author wants it to mean:P
Never played an MMO myself, but I have been around enough Evercrack addicts (my brother for one) to have seen enough of the ingame graphics to be able to say this: If you have ever been confused between those graphics and the real world you should shutdown your computer and get the hell out of the house for a few hours.
Well, I hope that bit of "hur, hur, I'm smarter than those people confusing RL and MMOs" bit of ego masturbation made you at least feel better about yourself. You needed that, right? Atta boy.
1. I'm talking about Evercrack 2, not Evercrack. _Very_ different graphics. Not only decades ahead of Evercrack 1 graphics, they were half a decade ahead (on max details) of what any computer or graphics card could do at the moment. (Other than as a slide show.) To even run at full graphics details without swapping, you needed 512 MB of video RAM, which didn't even exist yet as a consumer card. Only some ultra-expensive professional OpenGL cards had that much.
So, well, at least if you want to construct an insult around that notion, it helps if you have any clue what you're talking about. Otherwise it's like talking about an F-16 based on that P-47 you saw in WW2 movies.
2. Nobody said anything about confusing RL and MMOs or their graphics. That's just a cheap insult, not something that actually happens to anyone. Just like nobody who saw the FF movie ever really forgot that it's just a movie. Sorry. You can get down from that high horse now.
We're not talking about forgetting it's a MMO, or anything equally stupid. Nor about taking it for real when you really look at it up close. I'm talking about the fact that most of the virtual worlds become... a background thing, if you will. When you're running from point A to point B, or slaughtering bear cubs for a quest, you soon start thinking about the task at hand or whatever else. You don't actively think about whether this really looks like a tree, or that really looks like a cat. It's not confusing them, it's merely suspension of disbelief. You just take the world for granted and stop thinking about it.
It works in most games, even if they're nowhere near confusable with RL. E.g., nobody will say that a cartoonish WoW tree or house or crocodile is exactly like a RL one. (The crocs have 6 legs, ffs.) But you start basically ignoring it. Your brain just records "ah, a tree, I must run around it" and doesn't bother analyzing the details. Because the human brain works at a concept level, and even the written word "tree" is enough to fire the "tree" signal up there. You don't go, "wtf, the word TREE looks nothing like a tree." WoW's cartoonish graphics work as just that: tokens good enough to tell you that that's a tree, without thinking twice about it.
Something about EQ2's world and faulty shaders, however, actually produced a nagging sensation that that's so not a tree.
The issue with FF was that some scenes looked real enough you forgot you were watching animation... and then something (many people couldn't even say what exactly) would act 'wrong' and snap you back to the realization it was just a cartoon. It was the back and forth between real and unreal that creeped people out. One or the other is not a problem.
3. Well, blimey, that was exactly the sensation most people had in EQ2 if they turned the graphics high enough. Maybe less so for humans, but the trees and rocks were using very high resolution, scanned textures and lots and polygons. They were _almost_ believable enough to fool the brain. Then something in the back of the head would go, basically, "WTF, that's so _not_ a tree!"
And not just "oh, it's a cartoon", but there was something disturbingly wrong about the world of EQ2. Many words like "sterile" or "artificial" were used to try to put in words what's wrong about it. That world (and as I was saying, the hideously wrong bloom they used) created the sensation of being in a place that's just... wrong. It tripped the suspension of disbelief big time.
Well, a better question is if the uncanny valley really exists. Or rather, if it's really as simple as that valley, or we're actually looking at a more complex and multi-dimensional phenomenon.
And I'll attempt to build a framework to falsify it. It's a bit roundabout and I'll start by explaining the what and why of that framework, before all else. Bear with me, please.
First of all, before someone jumps in with the ever popular, "OMG, you're not worthy to question the high priests!" (err... "scientists"), the uncanny valley is just a hypothesis. A very compelling and well argued one, no doubt, but hardly a proven fact.
Second, before I get into the meat of the argument, the points chosen to represent it are highly debatable. E.g., is a zombie scary because of being close enough to the real thing to fall in the "uncanny valley", or because of the whole cultural meaning of death, undeath, corpses, etc?
When you look at each point individually, you can handwave and argue it to be wherever you want it, to support your hypothesis. It's called the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, after the fable of the sharpshooter who shot first and then painted a bullseye around the hole. You can "prove" anything in (pseudo-)science if you can do just that to the data: take a fuzzy and ill defined points and argue where they belong on your curve.
The "uncanny valley" paper does just that. We don't know the exact X coordinate on that graph for a zombie or a robot. It could be way right or way left, or whatever. So what really follows is that Mori decided a priori where they belong on that curve, and then places them at a point based on that. It's a textbook application of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.
So what I'm going to do is an ad absurdum reduction of his curve.
I don't know the exact coordinates of any of my examples either, but, here's the important part: I don't need to pretend to. I'll just peg them between two other values, which, assuming the curve is correct, both fall in the valley or outside it, or some other position. Based on the reaction they caused, and, again, assuming that the curve were correct.
And due to the shape of the curve, if two points are in the valley, then everything between them is in the valley too. If two points are, say, both to the left of the valley, then a point between them should be on the left of the valley too. That is the important part.
So, let's build a counter-example: the FF movie was called a clear example of the Uncanny Valley. It's in the valley. Sony's Everquest 2 (particularly with the unnatural ambient bloom enabled) caused a similar reaction, and many euphemisms were used to describe just that: that that world looked disturbingly unnatural, especially if you pushed the graphics settings high enough. Classic example of entering the uncanny valley from the left, eh? So it's point 2 in that valley.
A point between them should, obviously, also be in the valley. That curve only has one dip, right?
Well, point #3 could be Oblivion. The graphics are better and more detailed than Sony's graphics in EQ, but don't even come close to the insane polygon counts and animations of the FF movies. It's between the two points. It should also be in the valley. It isn't. Nobody was repulsed by Oblivion's graphics. Or pick Crysis, or whatever newer high-end game, and you get the same curious behaviour. It ought to be in the valley, but it isn't.
Let's build another counter-example: so we're told that zombies are only repulsive because they're so close to humans as to fall in the uncanny valley. So logically, if you start with a zombie and move farther and farther away from human-like with it, eventually it exits the valley. Right? In fact, past a point it becomes outright _cute_ and appealing. Or ought to. I mean, that's the shape of that curve.
You probably realize already how absurd that statement is, but let's actually imagine it. Let's say we start with that corpse an
Yeah, the online gaming industry needs to get a life. All those damn CEOs with all that money, probably a new hooker every other weekend. They're such losers.
Actually that's just the thing: those stereotypical EA and Sony CEOs probably care more about the money, than about each time M33tm1ss1le ganked PigBenis in their game.
Even for a game designer, you're just a statistic. Even the guy scratching his head about balancing priests in the next patch, probably cares more about the percentage of times a priest won against a rogue. Not about the individual events.
Heck, even looking at RL history, we're only really interested in the big picture. We may be interested in the fact that Brennus's Gaul army crushed the Roman army by totally pwning the newbs on the wings and then enveloping the centre. But nobody gives a fuck about exactly which Celtic warrior killed exactly which roman, and viceversa.
The saying that comes to mind is: not seeing the forest for the trees. That's the problem with looking at the details of billions of data points, as opposed to the big statistic.
So basically even if it were RL events, nobody would want to know it in the detail that the summary implies. For online games? Heh. In UT alone there were many millions of deaths per week after launch, or more death per second than at Kursk or the famous wipe at Cannae or Teutoburg. Nobody sane is interested in _that_ kind of level of detail.
At best, a few people will be deluded enough to think that someone else gives a flying fuck about how many times they pwned who. As the summary seems to imply. You know, that all will bow before the mighty PigBenis because of his score.
So, yeah, it's a shame that the OP will probably get modded down, because that's exactly what it is: anyone thinking that humanity is interested in knowing the how many times PigBenis won against M33tm1ss1le, needs to get a life. Not because it's a game, but because it's that fucking stupid even from the perspective of a games addict. Again, nobody is interested in that kind of detail even for RL battles that (arguably) changed the course of history. And that goes double for anyone who thinks that _he_ personally is that important and worthy of having his online exploits documented for all to gasp in awe.
No one thinks that the government will ever have the power to do change history without everyone knowing and agreeing to it.
Except it did so already several times. Admittedly, not during the lifetimes of those involved, but 2000 years later you get a list of Pharaohs where Horemheb follows directly after Amenhotep III. (Hint: there's more than one missing there.) And you take it seriously. Heck, it doesn't even take that long. A mere couple hundred years after the fact, Egyptian historians themselves were compiling lists of Pharaohs with the same missing names and not noticing anything funny about them. I doubt that it was pure conspiracy and with everyone knowing that they're faking history.
Plus, I think that Orwell's point wasn't that you can get people to suddenly forget, but that you can get everyone to play along and shut up. And that they could and did before. Even if you're sure you saw Comrade Yezhov together with Comrad Stalin (to use a real historical example), you keep your mouth shut because you don't fancy a visit from the NKVD. A generation later, already kids are learning a history without Yezhov, and nobody bothers telling them otherwise. The Damnatio Memoria is now complete. Or conversely more than one dictator manufactured a revolutionary history for himself, and placed himself in photos of fights and protests he wasn't actually present at. A generation later, and maybe a purge or two of those who are actually in a position to say he wasn't there, and that has just become history.
Most history books are censored to put their nation in a good light. Some times its only a slight bias; sometimes its not anything we'd ever recognize as history. In all cases, you can make sure that the writers, publishers, and school districts all know about the hidden bias and wouldn't even think of switching out a history book from a different culture/region into another's. It just wouldn't sell well.
Actually, I doubt that many people realize it as clear as you claim. Most people, especially from cultures which heavily faked history, just think that their version is right and everyone _else_ is biased or lying.
Look no further than the Eastern Bloc, where ancient border disputes were exaggerated and occasionally even fictionalized, to keep people's attention focused on those instead of on the present-day internal problems. You know, keep them thinking "OMG, country X is teh enemy because they took one of our provinces 1000 years ago!" instead of looking at who's having a more immediate and substantial impact upon their standard of living. _Especially_ countries which, honestly, had just gotten some province as reward after WW1 or WW2, invented elaborate layers of rationales as to why it was always theirs anyway.
I don't think most of those, even history teachers, actually knew that they're teaching a faked or biased history. Nor that they'd think, basically, "I wouldn't use a history book from country X because their bias is different from ours and it wouldn't sell." They thought more along the lines of "OMG, the people from country X are a bunch of evil liars! They still teach that province Y was originally theirs! They even print historical maps where it's painted as theirs!" (Never mind that at that point in history it actually was "theirs".)
Or as other examples, look at how the Crusades are perceived differently by different people. Or how Napoleon is a national hero to the French and almost an archvillain for some other people. Etc.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that the whole point about having a bias is that you're unaware of it. You don't think "man, I'm from country X, I guess I have no choice but to be biased against country Y. Let's see which history books fit my bias." If you can think in those terms, you're already unbiased and rational about it. Being biased is more like already knowing something to be true, and looking for the sources that fit that pre-defined truth.
Well, true, but sometimes it wasn't even just a desire to look good. E.g., in ancient Egypt the paintings and sculptures were
1. invariably religious in nature. A painting or sculpture could actually house the Ka (part of the soul that actually has a shape) of the deceased, in case his mummy gets damaged or he's too poor to get one. (Seriously, a reward you could bestow upon your poorer servants would be to paint them on your tomb walls, or be buried with some little statues of them.)
They didn't even paint and sculpt the person, they painted and sculpted his/her Ka. So the Pharaoh was always painted or sculpted bigger than life and perfectly proportioned, because his Ka was that of a God.The Pharaoh being the living incarnation of Horus. Lower class people were painted smaller than they were. With nobles and officials being the middle ground. This rule took precedence, for example, over perspective. Even if the Pharaoh was in the back and the peasants in the front, the Pharaoh's image would nevertheless be larger than any of them.
2. a matter of sacred rules and traditions, some of them even handed down by the Gods themselves on sacred papirus scrolls.
E.g., everyone would be painted looking to the side, even if otherwise their body is facing the "camera". Always. It doesn't matter if you think you'd look better from the front, your head will be painted from the side anyway. E.g., the tone of the skin was a function of nationality and gender, rather than offering any insight into what they actually looked like. (They were painting the Ka, not the mortal body anyway.) So we have the Egyptian males painted a reddish brown tan, but women are painted with a rather unnatural yellow skin. Other nationalities they knew about were, pretty much, colour coded with their own hues.
And for a bit of final fun, it's worth noting though that some people seem to have been honest with their appearance, though. Akhenaten for example always appears not with the Pharaoh proportions, but as a guy as big as anyone else, pear-shaped, with man-boobs and some thin legs and arms:P
Look up Damnatio Memoriae sometime. They erased people from public records thousands of years ago, for a range of reasons that included:
- betrayal
- so others wouldn't be tempted to do something heinous just to get popularity (e.g., Herostratus)
- being really hated as an Emperor (e.g., Domitian. Though Caligula and Nero came this close to getting one too.)
- someone not liking the role you've played or the model you'd be for others (E.g., Hatshpsut was almost erased from history as a Pharaoh by her son, but he left her name and images alone where she was depicted/named as anything else than a Pharaoh. E.g., Akhenaten got his name defaced off most monuments after death.)
- some reasons ranging all the way to outright silly (E.g., the abovementioned Akhenaten, the pharaoh formerly known as Amenhotep IV, managed to almost erase his father Amenhotep III from history for the sole reason that the name contained the name of the God Amen/Amon/Amun/whatever-you-call-him. And Akhenaten had just gone rabidly monotheistic, even renaming himself the Servant Of Aten.)
Of course, nobody managed to really erase a Roman Emperor from history, because nobody had the resources for such a herculean task. It didn't stop the Senate from at least trying. And IIRC Hatshepsut was pretty much erased until very recently. It took a while to piece together that she's the missing piece in that chronology.
Actually, I think that the biggest problem with animated porn isn't texturing-vs-raytracing, but the models and animations. Last time I ran into some adult Poser-fu, it looked all wrong in a massively uncanny-valley way, and not because of the texturing.
And with the animations, well, I'd assume it's actually easier and cheaper to find a gal who'll bounce on a cock for half an hour for a few (thousand) bucks, than a highly skilled artist and animator who'll make that look natural.
Plus, raytracing is IMHO entirely the wrong secret sauce there. Ray tracing works best for sharp, metallic/mirror reflections. Because then you can take each ray and reflect it as one ray. If you want to go diffuse, that's a lot more expensive with ray-tracing. Then you need to split each ray into sub-rays that reflect into slightly different directions from there. Same as anti-aliasing is done by calculating sub-pixels, basically.
I.e., ray tracing looks grrreat and is the cheapest for shiny cars, crystal cups, and the like. Which is why everyone ray-traces cars and the like. It sucks for something like human skin, unless, of course, you want to make those humans look like polished shiny plastic dolls.
So, well, I can't imagine that much need for it in porn at the moment. Unless, of course, you want to make a Transformers sex movie. Or maybe one with liquid- metal Terminators fucking. (Hey, they must have made some female versions too, right?;)
They're more afraid of little Jimmy going to his friend Steve's to play it. That little Steve is such a horrible influence.
Well, I fail to see how that's any different from going over to Steve to play an ultra-violent PC game. Or to watch a splatter movie on dad's VHS. Or going over to Steve, which got someone to buy him a bottle of whiskey, bypassing age restrictions. Or Steve discovering his dad's porn stash and, well, I guess caring _is_ sharing;)
I don't think the Wii brings anything new to that equation. _That_ cat is already out of the bag.
And arguably it never was in the bag (or anywhere _near_ a bag) in the first place. If you went back to AD 200 or so, you'd probably find little Julius going over to his pal Severus to read the Bible, much to his respectable parents' annoyance. And if you went to 400 BC, you'd find little Iolaos going over to his pal Strachys to read a bit from Socrates. And Zeus knows no respectable citizen of Athens would want his son's impressionable young mind polluted by that kind of subversive crap. Etc.
If a kid's only defense against being corrupted is not having access to stuff, well, that's not much of a defense. Because there'll always be some Steve to help him bypass that.
AFAIK, there's already a Happy Tree Friends game. I think it's from Sega too? Watch a few episodes on YouTube if you don't know what the Happy Tree Friends are:P
Here's a crazy idea: so then they don't have to buy it.
I mean, it's not like they were tricked by some game presented as "Princess Peach Pony Adventures" rated E and discovered a secret level which involved skinning people alive. They know from the start it's a violent game, Sega makes no secret about it, and if their console is really for "family fun" and they have kids... don't buy it.
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I'm not sure it's gender. Admittedly, anecdote is not data, and my family of complete nerds is anything except typical. Still, I humbly present the following anecdote:
Mom is always doing what the article say and what you present as a "male" thing. She always has to come up with a solution for anything I tell her about. Let's say I say something like, "Heh, I had a 2 Euro coin in the washing machine. Money laundering for the win!" That just prompts her to show off that she knows better than me what I should have done before chucking the pants into the washing machine. Or I mention that I'm getting annoyed at paying the TV tax when I at most use that TV as a monitor for the consoles. Wouldn't you know it, she just has to go into a whole speech about how to dispose of the TV and where to take it.
To me, it feels like she's just showing off that she knows better. Shut the fuck up, I'm not looking for advice, I too just want someone to nod and listen at least once in a while. I guess I'd qualify as "female" in your view of the world. Bearded lady ftw, eh? ;)
My brother doesn't seem to appreciate it either, btw, so at least I'm not alone in being weird like that. And I gather that dad isn't all that happy about it either, just more stoic about it.
Personally I'm more inclined to think it's not as gender-related as you think. Try doing the above-described mom thing on any of your male coleagues, and see if any of them will appreciate it. I'm guessing you won't have many friends after a while, if you try to solve anything and everything they mention.
Men too usually just need someone to nod, agree and be sympathetic.
Trying to solve someone's problems is a "male" thing IMHO only in as much as males seem to think it's their duty and a penis-size thing to do it to someone else. E.g., to their spouse, leading to views like yours about male vs female things. It makes us feel all smart, and powerful and in control, if we can solve anything like that. I.e., fitting the gender-role assigned to us. It doesn't mean we like being on the _receiving_ end of it.
Yes, sometimes we'll ask for advice. But 90% of the time we just ventilate our tonsils, as a way to pass the time. We too say stuff all the time, for which we don't need or want a solution. E.g., we say stuff like, "boah, I'm so tired, we had this LUG meeting at the pub yesterday until 2 AM" (or WoW raid, or anything) and we just expect a "big party, eh?" or a "yeah, I know how that feels." _Not_ a brainstorming session about how to end pub meetings earlier and how to have the discipline to go to bed on time. And if the conversation partner does the male thing and has to start brainstorming and offering solutions to anything and everything you say, you'll dislike him/her very very fast.
So to get back on topic (or anywhere near it), I doubt that such a system would really cater for anyone at all. Males and females alike. Regardless of whether you're male or female, by the 10'th time you went to the robo-counsellor because you're bored, lonely and depressed, and get a brainstorming session on how to solve your problems... you'll hate the damned thing very very much.
Or to put it more briefly: there's a reason why nobody thought Clippy was fulfilling their need for social interaction.
Agreed, but... well, did they? Invariably every single of these cases I hear about, involves some variant of
- idiot marketer or salesman is given a copy of the whole fucking customer database on a laptop, he loses the laptop
- idiot boss gives some contractor a copy of the customer database (or recently in the UK, the prison population database) on an USB stick, he loses it
- idiot puts a copy of the whole customer database on an unsecured web server so he can download it from home, thinks that it being in a "secret" directory is actually security (especially in the dot-com days this was the #1 failure mode, but it's not entirely dead yet)
- the infamous AOL failure mode, "OMG, Google is eating our lunch, someone plz code a Google killer. Here's our customers' search strings as RL data to work with."
Etc.
I'm sorry, but that does _not_ qualify as taking the necessary steps. Not even as trying.
What I see is some idiots trying to circumvent security for the sake of a few extra bucks ('cause that salesman might impress a customer with a sharply drawn chart) or to save a few bucks in costs (e.g., so they don't have to get an extra desk for that contractor.) It's plain old greed.
And I still think that we see a variant of the old, "bad money pushes good money off the market". Only this time with companies. The pricks which save a few bucks or earn an extra few bucks by being cavalier with your data, get to undercut and push those off the market who do the right thing. Until we slap some penalties on them that actually reverse that situation, it _will_ keep happening.
1. Actually, no, Galileo only got house arrest, and not as much for "proving some overbearing theology wrong" as for flaming an absolute monarch. There had been closed minded popes and cardinals, but Pope Urban VIII was not one of them. Before becoming a pope, he had actually defended Galileo and opposed other church officials like Bellarmine. And as a pope he actually encouraged Galileo to write his book, and only asked that he presents both models, both his new and his old one, and shows what his model explains that the other didn't.
What Galileo did... was a lot more like flaming. He took the Pope's words, distorted them, and put him in the mouth of a bumbling idiot of a character called, basically, The Stupid. That was the defender of the old model.
The pope didn't take lightly to public ridicule, and did a bit of an abuse of justice to show Galileo who's boss. He suddenly made the helliocentric model the official church position (where he had been very neutral before) just so he could prosecute Galileo and put the offending book on the index of forbidden books. But make no mistake, it wasn't about science vs religion, it was just a troll personally flaming an absolute monarch and getting smacked upside the head for it.
At any rate, Galileo got just a house arrest at his own mansion for his efforts. Hardly the worst possible fate. Other people routinely got executed for lesser offenses against secular monarchs.
2. I think the one you're talking about is Giordano Bruno. That one got burned at the stake all right. However, even there the waters are muddier.
For a start, Giordano Bruno had a _lot_ of accusations of heresy against him, with heliocentrism being by far the least important. Other stuff like preaching that Mary wasn't a virgin, or eastern-style reincarnation (including into animals), plus a few assorted things about Mass, Jesus and the Trinity. The Church couldn't care much less about heliocentrism, but when you start preaching that everything in the new testament is a lie, they started to care. A lot.
Furthermore, Giordano Bruno was a monk. The Church took policing its internal ranks very seriously. (And honestly, it had all the reasons to, since any excesses of one of its members got used as examples of what's wrong with the church as a whole.) Things you could have gotten away with as some lay person, became very serious offenses as a member of the clergy.
Not saying that it makes it "right". Just saying that there's more to it that "science vs religion." I don't think that Giordano's views on reincarnation qualified as "science", for example. Whatever "science" was in his position, seemed to have been more incidental than the fundament of it all. He was tried and executed for plain old heresy.
Again, I'm not saying that the power to try people for heresy is good or right. But let's treat it as the excess of totalitarian power that it was, rather than some grand science-vs-religion battle.
It just occured to me that there's an even better example of what I'm talking about. Think of some of the "audiophiles". The kind that actually hears the sound difference in an MP3 played over an audiophile-grade Ethernet cable.
Pretty much, the cognitive dissonance at work is between, X="I'm one of the elite guys with a superior hearing", Y="that kind of people hear such differences", and Z="I don't hear a damn thing differently with this cable." (Sometimes with an extra jab of, X1="I'm a smart, savvy customer", Y1="Only gullible people buy snake oil" and Z1="this cable I paid $500 for is snake oil.") Something there has to give. If you really believe Y and X is too important to give up, then Z has to be false. So they actually convince themselves that they hear a much nicer and clearer sound when they use that cable.
I don't think pretending to be happy actually works, either. But you _can_ basically bullshit yourself to see other elements of the equation differently, and people do it all the time.
I should probably have explained it better: I don't think that it's the pretending to be unhappy as such, that can cause someone to become unhappy. But sooner or later you have to put into words exactly what you don't like about your life or job. And you start saying stuff like, say, "all the users are idiots." Say it, or better yet write it, often enough, and you start believing it more and more. Just because the alternative would be to think that you've lied to milk some sympathy.
As for those pyramid jobs, they're a different beast entirely. Cognitive dissonance, as the name says, happens when your mental model just isn't consistent any more and something has to be patched to make it whole again. And if some notion is too important for you to let go, then something else will have to give.
E.g., if you can get person X to shaft person Y (the classic experiment was getting X to convince Y that some mind-numbingly boring job is a great job to take), and X thinks that he's otherwise an honest person, that model just sprung a dissonance. If the self-image of an honest person is too important to let go, something else will have to give. So X gradually starts believing that he didn't shaft Y after all. (E.g., in that experiment, that it actually _is_ a great job.)
But you can't just read in a book something like "you should be happy", and start being happy. Nor even something like "Homer Simpson's job of pushing one button all day is a great and mentally stimulating job." That's the kind of thing that's easier patched by concluding something like, "this book is a scam and the author is full of shit." There's no loss for you to conclude that, and you didn't even have to change your mental model for it.
On the other hand, if I manage send you to convince someone to take that job, you might get a proper dissonance.
In the cases where such books or brainwashing work, it's not as much because of what it says in the book, as because a few people actually manage to create their own dissonance. E.g., along the lines of having to choose between "I'm a gullible idiot, and everyone will laugh at me for buying it" and "this book actually works, and everyone who laughed at me for it is the loser." A few people find the former actually less palatable than the latter, so the latter has to be true. That's cognitive dissonance at work.
Some brainwashing cults even raise the stakes by making their adepts do all sorts of stuff that's a combination of stupid, humiliating and/or self-destructive. Give them a choice basically between "I'm a complete cretin and worthy of derision for having even tried this" and "this stuff works, and the Guru is God's Avatar." The latter becomes a lot more palatable for enough people.
Actually, there was this study linked on Slashdot a few years ago, where average happiness in IT was below that of, say, workers on garbage trucks. I'm too lazy to google it atm, though.
So apparently there _is_ at least some correlation.
There are plenty of personal anecdotes of people who were unhappy in IT jobs and got a lot happier when they resigned and did something else. I don't know if that's enough to "prove" a causation, but it at least makes one wonder.
Of course, it could also be that the people who are drawn to IT work are the ones who are totally unfit for that kind of a job, and who'll hate it. At least theoretically, it's a possibility.
On the other hand, it would be a first for any job.
On yet another hand, about half the people who end up in IT or programming jobs, loved working with a computer before choosing that career. In fact, that's why they chose it. A lot still love working with computers in their free time.
So whatever the cause and direction there is, at least it surely can't be that it draws people who hate computers.
At the very least, something is wrong there either way that causation goes. In the end, regardless of which way it goes, if you're unhappy with a job, you're just unhappy and that's that.
I have to wonder how much you can keep those attitudes separate.
There was a study some time ago, where merely being asked to write an apology of a position contrary to your own, fully knowing that it's just a silly exercise and it's not even supposed to be taken seriously, after a while causes your actual position to shift towards what you wrote. E.g., if you're a Democrat and have to write an essay about how right Bush is, after a while you'll actually start seeing him in a somewhat better light.
It's called cognitive dissonance. The brain basically has a model dissonance with "I'm a honest person" and "I just wrote a lie", and basically resolves it by changing the latter to "well, it wasn't really a lie. Maybe at most a bit of an exaggeration."
So a mask you wear every day, eventually becomes _you_. If you pose as a Linux/BSD/Mac/Windows fanboy to fit a certain crowd even just for a couple of hours a week, eventually you become more and more of an actual fanboy. And if you have to put on a thoroughly unhappy face every day for 8 hours, eventually you _will_ convince yourself that you _are_ unhappy with your situation.
At any rate, you can't really keep two completely opposite mental models, unless maybe if you're schizophrenic. And those attitudes are based on your model, after all: being, say, a misanthrope is based on your model having a pretty bad opinion of your fellow humans. You can't really switch between "humans are evil idiots, and they should have stayed in the trees for another million years until they're ripe" and "humans are nice and friendly, and I enjoy their company" at the drop of a hat. Your brain is wired to keep _one_ big model of everything consistent, not to have several models and switch between them as needed. If it worked with several models, it would avoid cognitive dissonance very easily. In practice, it doesn't.
So any model changes that cause a different attitude at work, _will_ still be there in your model when you're at home or at the pub with your friends. You may build an artificial "us" group (as in, "us vs them") of people who ar
Well, then fix copyright, I guess. There's nothing particularly wrong about this case, as far as the law is concerned. If Disney gets copyright extension after copyright extension, just so it can keep some old films hidden for PR reasons, then I guess Nintendo gets the same rules.
I mean, if we all decided (you're a democracy, right? If not, fix _that_ first) that we're ok with people making money for 50 year old works, then it seems to me it's only fair that Nintendo gets to make money with stuff that can't be older than 25 years. (The NES launched in 1983, so games for it can't be older.) What's sauce for the goose, and all that.
Honestly, the Disney case rubs me the wrong way a lot more than this. There it's used to effectively take some works out of the culture pool, which is the exact opposite of what copyright was supposed to _do_. It was supposed to offer an (indirect) monetary incentive to encourage people to publish their works, _not_ to be a way to make already published work disappear.
Nintendo, by contrast, seems to actually use copyright as it was intended. AFAIK a lot of those games are available emulated for some of their other consoles. That copyright extension effectively encouraged them to put some work into keeping some of those games available for more people. That's what copyright was supposed to _do_.
And before you go, "OMG, but you could just download an emulator from somewhere else"... well, that may be true for the NES and SNES, but look at how it takes longer and longer to emulate newer consoles. We've already had the PS3 for a while, and emulating the PS2 is still iffy. It's one thing to emulate an 8 bit CPU with just about enough instructions to count them on your fingers, and a graphics chip which barely scans the RAM as it is, and it's getting to be quite another to emulate the newer ones. For the graphics chips we don't even know the details of the architecture and the opcodes. At any rate, it's getting to be more and more to emulate them, and it's taking longer and longer. We may well soon get to appreciate it, if the vendor writes an emulator himself.
But, at any rate, it's what copyright was supposed to do.
Duly noted, they make more money in the process. Well, that's how copyright was supposed to work.
I'd rather fix the Disney loophole first.
It's not that simple, I'm affraid.
1. At the very least the cost, or "danger", in acting rashly upon a fairy tale to please some cultists is to not do something that would actually work. At worst it's doing something outright unproductive, that compounds the problem in the long run or creates a bigger problem.
As the stereotypical example, take Easter Island. Instead of doing what would have worked (start replanting trees) they did what the priests told them (cut more trees to build and haul more statues to the gods, 'cause the gods would surely take care of all problems.) Eventually the problem got so bad that they couldn't even make enough fishing vessels any more. Maybe stopping and thinking before acting couldn't have been worse.
I find that to be, ironically, a decent metaphor for _both_ extremes of the climate debate. Both have their a priori "truth" set in stone, both don't actually do real science (in real science, no truth is set in stone, and everything is falsifiable), and both would rather act now, goddammit, instead of at least trying to understand the big model. I can almost imagine a bunch of Easter Island tribesmen doing the same, waving fists and shouting slogans to act now to please the gods, and calling anyone names if he even tries debating the already decided orthodoxy.
2. To also answer the question what is the danger: the economy is already in a precarious position in most western countries, having worked on, essentially, over-spending ever since the Great Depression. We don't really have a better model to replace it with.
The old laissez-faire model essentially died in the Great Depression. Not that it was that great a model to start with. It produced increasingly erratic swings between boom and crash, with each boom setting the stage for the following crash. Increasingly more money and resources were going not into satisfying people's needs (which, may I remind, was how the Wealth Of Nations was supposed to be measured), but into rebuilding the industry after the last crash. The actual standard of living for workers decline through the 19'th and early 20'th century, with the general theme being demanding more hours work for less pay.
(And it's funny to see Libertarians pining for _that_ model. But I digress.)
Even if some claim (rather unproven, but ok) that it was the corrective measures that finally caused the big crash, it still just wasn't a that great model anyway. The swings were getting bigger and bigger, and the whole situation shittier and shittier. Even _if_ it would have bombed a bit later without the corrective actions, bomb it would have. And it wasn't much fun to be an employee in that model even before it bombing.
Some also tried other stunts in the meantime, like supply-side economics, but even those failed to work better than the current model.
Or, of course, we could actually be Keynesian as Keynes actually intended it to work: overspend in times of crisis, yes, but cut back and pay the debts in times of boom. No government yet managed to do that, and it could be argued that it would make for a very unpopular government to cut back, say, welfare, _because_ the economy is doing great. Plus other problems.
But, of course, adding yet another permanent burden to it, really doesn't help there.
Basically most first world economies are in a bigger trouble than they seem. We all _seem_ to do great, but we're steadily heading towards the end of the model that makes it work. At some point, the debt gets so big that you can't go on like that any more. And all we've been doing is postpone the next crash. Quite successfully and for a remarkably long time, duly noted, but that's what we've been doing. And each averted crisis added even more debt. Not just in the USA, but everywhere.
Fear what will happen when we all no longer have the reserves to avert the next one, because it won't be pretty. Unless you're at least, say, 90 years old, you have only seen minor crises, held small by having the money to throw at them. To
Actually, I don't know if there's necessarily a difference of scale. It might be, but it's not really necessary.
See, I don't know much about China, but at least in the USSR the age of mass deportations and millions of people in Gulag ended with Stalin. Then it evolved in something cheaper, more subtle and more efficient: the idea that anything you say _might_ be recorded somewhere and _might_ be used against you. Not even necessarily by a visit of the secret police. Sure, it _could_ be the secret police too, but maybe it'll be something else. Maybe you'll never fly out of the USSR ever again, because you can't be trusted to come back. Maybe you'll never get a job past a certain level. Maybe it'll bite you in the arse in some other way. Or maybe noone wrote that in your dossier after all. But you don't know.
And you don't know who's spying and reporting on you. Maybe comrade Piotr is really rabidly against the government and you could start building a resistance together. But maybe he's an agent provocateur.
They actually had very few political prisoners past a point. The people held themselves in line admirably, given that Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.
I wouldn't be surprised if they actually had less political prisoners than the USA has in gitmo. The actual gulag was more kept as a reminder of what _could_ happen if you really cross the line too far, than as something to be used immediately and lots. Sorta like how the nukes are more for threat value, than actually used in wars.
And I find that the USA had been taking an eerily similar direction during the Bush years. The whole surveillance mania, and the repeated leaks about what else they monitor and try to connect (including laughable stuff like data-mining the grocery purchases for people who buy arab food), it's like they actually _wanted_ people to get the idea that someone's watching and they better behave. Even some of the few terrorism trials, it's like they chose the most laughable and/or most suspiciously looking like entrapment. It almost begs thinking that the moral is, beware of who's asking you dubious stuff, he might be an agent provocateur.
Now I'm not saying it's some deliberate conspiracy to leak them. Probably more like not caring what gets leaked. Give enough minions orders to spy left and right, and you can pretty much count on it that some of them will botch it or run to the press. Which can actually be good if that's the message you actually want to give to your population: watch it, we've got our eyes on all y'all.
Look at the other details about the USSR in that list. Flight restrictions for people they don't like? Check. Done in the USA too. Your pool of available jobs might depend on how much of an politically loyal you make yourself seen as? Check. The Bushies politicized half the government departments. Etc.
Gitmo and torture kept as the ultimate stick, where you probably won't land, but you _might_ if you're really undesirable? Check. Same role as the Gulag had post-Stalin.
Not saying that the USA is a perfect equivalent to the USSR dictatorship... yet. But it looks to me like they've been working real hard to push it in that direction. If given more time, I don't doubt that it would have got a lot worse eventually.
Or it could be that humans are smart enough to notice things and connect the dots, even if they don't fully understand the subtleties of what they're connecting. They notice that smashing two flintstones together makes sparks, and sparks can light a fire, and all of a sudden the whole tribe has fire. Even if they don't fully understand what fire is or why those stones create sparks. Or they put their finger in the candle flame once, it hurts, they don't do it again. Or maybe if they want to be really sure and scientific about it, they put their finger in it a couple more times. It hurt again, so they stop doing it. They don't wonder exactly what happened there and what nerve endings fired that signal, but they stop doing it anyway.
In this case, the summary already tells you what you need to know: " I don't deny at all that this company (like many others) has a large amount of badly written and hard-to-maintain Perl code."
Ah-ha. Maybe _that_ is why management is trying to steer off it? My understanding of Occam's Razor say it might just be the right explanation.
And in the end that's what they're supposed to do. If all those many projects and departments (again, TFA spells it out), and indeed many other companies too, produced unmaintainable code in Perl, maybe it's time to try something else than Perl. It's that simple. And if you can hire 3 new kids fresh off university who are already good in Java and/or Python instead of 1 mythical uber-coder who can user Perl right, then it's even more of a no-brainer. That's the kind of thing management is supposed to do.
You _could_ say that it's not Perl's fault, it's the humans who don't use it right. But then they said the same thing about Communism in the USSR. Let's face it, the smart way to do anything is to figure out how to use the resources you actually have, not to try to pretend they're something else. We have plenty of examples of people who tried to idealize humans as having to be anything but what they actually had, and lost. The USSR is one example. Napoleon III and the silly French notion that they should just have "elan" and overcome any odds or equipment disadvantages, is another. I'm sure that while he was capitulating at Sedan he had time to think about it.
The same applies here. If the humans you have (H1Bers or anything else) are bad at Perl, then maybe it's time to try something else.
And while you may laugh at "pointy-clicky" tools and trying to use cheap incompetents, well, that's the history of human civilization. That's why we built tools in the first place. So some ape who's too much of a wimp to bite a gazelle's neck off, can still hunt as well as the lions. Then so some wimp who can barely lift 20 kilos of rocks, can use ropes and inclines to move 20 ton blocks up a pyramid. Then so some half-educated merchant who can barely do maths up to 20, can use an abacus to do maths up to tens of thousands. Etc.
There's no failure, management or otherwise, to try to use better tools. Even if it's instead of wishing for that uber-guru who can do the same job without tools, at only 10x the price. If we waited for the uber-workers who can lift 20 ton stones, we wouldn't have pyramids yet. And if in the process you enlarge the potential pool of workers a bit, well, even better. Society on the whole then can use more of them and achieve more.
Yes, maybe you can program without "pointy-clicky" tools. And some people still can weave without mechanized looms. Guess what? The industrial revolution happened when we figured out a tool (that mechanized loom) which let masses of drooling retards weave just as well as those l33t weaving gurus did without tools. And even faster at that. And guess what? We all ended up better off for it.
Well, ok. Maybe. Still, even without that, the point can still be made with other examples.
I mean, for some you don't even need two anchor points. It's enough to start with something on the left and move even more left, or stuff like that. The curve being what it is, it's still possible to make a prediction and test it.
E.g., a zombie still doesn't move out of the valley if you make it even less human, as I was describing.
E.g., ok, so they say that cartoon characters are appealing and create empathy because they're on the peak on the left side. Fair enough. So moving it farther to the left (i.e., towards even less human), should at best make them even more attractive, and at worst still remain above zero. Because there is no other dip below zero to the left on that graph.
So... let's start from a talking bunny like Buggs Bunny. Hmmm? A zombie, maggot-infested, rotten-corpse-eating, talking bunny, stretching his arse like the goatse guy? I think it just got pretty disgusting.
Well, actually it's even funnier than that.
1. As the summary says, they were counting on lots of monthly subscriptions to keep development going. It was pretty much the MMO model, but...
2. in a game which, honestly, did't offer much reason to fork over cash monthly.
And I say that as a guy who's currently paying 3 subscriptions to 3 different MMOs. I don't have a problem with paying monthly, in a game where I feel I'm getting the content or gaming experience worth that money. Hellgate just offered no good reason. Pay just so I can play a shoot-em-up online? Why? To it,
A) they promised extra content for the people who subscribe. That content evolved from being literally non-existent to being ridiculously little.
B) usually the motivation for going online is to play with other people. But the vicious circle was that their subscription had kept most people from even trying it online. (And again, the subscriber content that might have defused it, was just not there.)
C) the bugs also didn't help. There was a limited player base to start with, and the subscription culled off most of those.
So it's not as much just the bugs, as such. For a SP game, it wasn't too horrible. It was just mediocre.
It's that they based their whole model on getting a money money-printing license, like WoW or Everquest back in the day. But they apparently thought it would just happen by itself.
Unless you're the kind who preorders or camp the store on release day, just because the hype sounds good, yes, you _could_ find out. The fact that there's no actual content for your subscription money, for example, was common knowledge within days.
Honestly, I wish that the meme that buyers are a bunch of isolated, gullible dolts, would just die already. Even the MPAA and RIAA discovered recently that, what do you know? People call or text each other to tell their friends stuff like, "man, this movie sucked, stay away from it" or "dude, it was great, you should really see it too."
I don't know exactly why would it be less true for games. And there's plenty of empyrical evidence that points at the fact that, say, more polished games sell more copies. Plenty of times contrary to what those review magazines were telling people. I still have a game on the shelf there which got good reviews and sold 800 copies IIRC. (That's a homeopathic quantity in that industry, btw.) Nobody knows why.
I mean, seriously, humans had a society and were telling each other things like "ugh, heap plenty antelopes that way" 100,000 years ago. We had whole spreads of technologies and civilization based on the fact that people were even taking the time to write a letter on a papyrus to cousin Bubba-ho-tep in Thebes to tell him about this new thing they tried. We're like the bees in that aspect.
Did anyone really expect that a few millions of years of evolution would just go away just because Mr Marketer snapped his fingers?
Now I'm not saying that marketing doesn't work at all. It does. But it's a lot less alpha and omega than those people sell themselves as.
I don't know... I'm pretty sure it had some points in the original paper in the valley that were humans in various disguises, or a prosthetic hand on a human. A handicapped human is the right edge of the valley in one of Mori's graphs.
Wrong. The Y axis is the "emotional response" to it, or in other words it largely measures how attractive or repulsive people find something.
It also argues that the peak on the left side of the valley is, basically, the point where non-human things are the most appealing, attractive or able to create empathy. That there's a reason why cartoons and fables use talking animals: that those fall on that peak on the left side.
So maybe "cute" isn't the word, but it sure as heck claims more than "we have no problem with it."
Actually, it's a term coming from a paper, the same one trying to pass off that curve as the explanation and graph of it. It's also the name used for the hypothesis in the paper. So it's a bit hard to dissociate them like that. It's not some vaguely-defined meme, really a very precise term, for exactly one hypothesis.
But ok, I have no problem with the observation that some things look disturbingly unnatural. (I've had the exact same sensation in EQ2, as I was saying, so I'm not going to argue that something I've seen doesn't exist;) I have a problem with the pseudo-science explanation tacked on it.
So basically you've disagreed with that paper right there and then.
Zombies and corpses are not something I imagined on the moment, they're actually points on their graph and used as "data points" in the paper. And yes, it claims that Zombies are right at the bottom of that valley, and corpses are more like at the entrance of it. It claims that zombies are repulsive _because_ they're smack-dab in the worst possible point as the close-enough-to-human metric goes.
Except, of course, what the paper called "uncanny valley" was the explanation. And since that's when that term was used for the same time, invented/coined if you will, I figure it can mean exactly what the author wants it to mean :P
Well, I hope that bit of "hur, hur, I'm smarter than those people confusing RL and MMOs" bit of ego masturbation made you at least feel better about yourself. You needed that, right? Atta boy.
1. I'm talking about Evercrack 2, not Evercrack. _Very_ different graphics. Not only decades ahead of Evercrack 1 graphics, they were half a decade ahead (on max details) of what any computer or graphics card could do at the moment. (Other than as a slide show.) To even run at full graphics details without swapping, you needed 512 MB of video RAM, which didn't even exist yet as a consumer card. Only some ultra-expensive professional OpenGL cards had that much.
So, well, at least if you want to construct an insult around that notion, it helps if you have any clue what you're talking about. Otherwise it's like talking about an F-16 based on that P-47 you saw in WW2 movies.
2. Nobody said anything about confusing RL and MMOs or their graphics. That's just a cheap insult, not something that actually happens to anyone. Just like nobody who saw the FF movie ever really forgot that it's just a movie. Sorry. You can get down from that high horse now.
We're not talking about forgetting it's a MMO, or anything equally stupid. Nor about taking it for real when you really look at it up close. I'm talking about the fact that most of the virtual worlds become... a background thing, if you will. When you're running from point A to point B, or slaughtering bear cubs for a quest, you soon start thinking about the task at hand or whatever else. You don't actively think about whether this really looks like a tree, or that really looks like a cat. It's not confusing them, it's merely suspension of disbelief. You just take the world for granted and stop thinking about it.
It works in most games, even if they're nowhere near confusable with RL. E.g., nobody will say that a cartoonish WoW tree or house or crocodile is exactly like a RL one. (The crocs have 6 legs, ffs.) But you start basically ignoring it. Your brain just records "ah, a tree, I must run around it" and doesn't bother analyzing the details. Because the human brain works at a concept level, and even the written word "tree" is enough to fire the "tree" signal up there. You don't go, "wtf, the word TREE looks nothing like a tree." WoW's cartoonish graphics work as just that: tokens good enough to tell you that that's a tree, without thinking twice about it.
Something about EQ2's world and faulty shaders, however, actually produced a nagging sensation that that's so not a tree.
3. Well, blimey, that was exactly the sensation most people had in EQ2 if they turned the graphics high enough. Maybe less so for humans, but the trees and rocks were using very high resolution, scanned textures and lots and polygons. They were _almost_ believable enough to fool the brain. Then something in the back of the head would go, basically, "WTF, that's so _not_ a tree!"
And not just "oh, it's a cartoon", but there was something disturbingly wrong about the world of EQ2. Many words like "sterile" or "artificial" were used to try to put in words what's wrong about it. That world (and as I was saying, the hideously wrong bloom they used) created the sensation of being in a place that's just... wrong. It tripped the suspension of disbelief big time.
Well, a better question is if the uncanny valley really exists. Or rather, if it's really as simple as that valley, or we're actually looking at a more complex and multi-dimensional phenomenon.
And I'll attempt to build a framework to falsify it. It's a bit roundabout and I'll start by explaining the what and why of that framework, before all else. Bear with me, please.
First of all, before someone jumps in with the ever popular, "OMG, you're not worthy to question the high priests!" (err... "scientists"), the uncanny valley is just a hypothesis. A very compelling and well argued one, no doubt, but hardly a proven fact.
Second, before I get into the meat of the argument, the points chosen to represent it are highly debatable. E.g., is a zombie scary because of being close enough to the real thing to fall in the "uncanny valley", or because of the whole cultural meaning of death, undeath, corpses, etc?
When you look at each point individually, you can handwave and argue it to be wherever you want it, to support your hypothesis. It's called the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, after the fable of the sharpshooter who shot first and then painted a bullseye around the hole. You can "prove" anything in (pseudo-)science if you can do just that to the data: take a fuzzy and ill defined points and argue where they belong on your curve.
The "uncanny valley" paper does just that. We don't know the exact X coordinate on that graph for a zombie or a robot. It could be way right or way left, or whatever. So what really follows is that Mori decided a priori where they belong on that curve, and then places them at a point based on that. It's a textbook application of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.
So what I'm going to do is an ad absurdum reduction of his curve.
I don't know the exact coordinates of any of my examples either, but, here's the important part: I don't need to pretend to. I'll just peg them between two other values, which, assuming the curve is correct, both fall in the valley or outside it, or some other position. Based on the reaction they caused, and, again, assuming that the curve were correct.
And due to the shape of the curve, if two points are in the valley, then everything between them is in the valley too. If two points are, say, both to the left of the valley, then a point between them should be on the left of the valley too. That is the important part.
So, let's build a counter-example: the FF movie was called a clear example of the Uncanny Valley. It's in the valley. Sony's Everquest 2 (particularly with the unnatural ambient bloom enabled) caused a similar reaction, and many euphemisms were used to describe just that: that that world looked disturbingly unnatural, especially if you pushed the graphics settings high enough. Classic example of entering the uncanny valley from the left, eh? So it's point 2 in that valley.
A point between them should, obviously, also be in the valley. That curve only has one dip, right?
Well, point #3 could be Oblivion. The graphics are better and more detailed than Sony's graphics in EQ, but don't even come close to the insane polygon counts and animations of the FF movies. It's between the two points. It should also be in the valley. It isn't. Nobody was repulsed by Oblivion's graphics. Or pick Crysis, or whatever newer high-end game, and you get the same curious behaviour. It ought to be in the valley, but it isn't.
Let's build another counter-example: so we're told that zombies are only repulsive because they're so close to humans as to fall in the uncanny valley. So logically, if you start with a zombie and move farther and farther away from human-like with it, eventually it exits the valley. Right? In fact, past a point it becomes outright _cute_ and appealing. Or ought to. I mean, that's the shape of that curve.
You probably realize already how absurd that statement is, but let's actually imagine it. Let's say we start with that corpse an
Actually that's just the thing: those stereotypical EA and Sony CEOs probably care more about the money, than about each time M33tm1ss1le ganked PigBenis in their game.
Even for a game designer, you're just a statistic. Even the guy scratching his head about balancing priests in the next patch, probably cares more about the percentage of times a priest won against a rogue. Not about the individual events.
Heck, even looking at RL history, we're only really interested in the big picture. We may be interested in the fact that Brennus's Gaul army crushed the Roman army by totally pwning the newbs on the wings and then enveloping the centre. But nobody gives a fuck about exactly which Celtic warrior killed exactly which roman, and viceversa.
The saying that comes to mind is: not seeing the forest for the trees. That's the problem with looking at the details of billions of data points, as opposed to the big statistic.
So basically even if it were RL events, nobody would want to know it in the detail that the summary implies. For online games? Heh. In UT alone there were many millions of deaths per week after launch, or more death per second than at Kursk or the famous wipe at Cannae or Teutoburg. Nobody sane is interested in _that_ kind of level of detail.
At best, a few people will be deluded enough to think that someone else gives a flying fuck about how many times they pwned who. As the summary seems to imply. You know, that all will bow before the mighty PigBenis because of his score.
So, yeah, it's a shame that the OP will probably get modded down, because that's exactly what it is: anyone thinking that humanity is interested in knowing the how many times PigBenis won against M33tm1ss1le, needs to get a life. Not because it's a game, but because it's that fucking stupid even from the perspective of a games addict. Again, nobody is interested in that kind of detail even for RL battles that (arguably) changed the course of history. And that goes double for anyone who thinks that _he_ personally is that important and worthy of having his online exploits documented for all to gasp in awe.
Except it did so already several times. Admittedly, not during the lifetimes of those involved, but 2000 years later you get a list of Pharaohs where Horemheb follows directly after Amenhotep III. (Hint: there's more than one missing there.) And you take it seriously. Heck, it doesn't even take that long. A mere couple hundred years after the fact, Egyptian historians themselves were compiling lists of Pharaohs with the same missing names and not noticing anything funny about them. I doubt that it was pure conspiracy and with everyone knowing that they're faking history.
Plus, I think that Orwell's point wasn't that you can get people to suddenly forget, but that you can get everyone to play along and shut up. And that they could and did before. Even if you're sure you saw Comrade Yezhov together with Comrad Stalin (to use a real historical example), you keep your mouth shut because you don't fancy a visit from the NKVD. A generation later, already kids are learning a history without Yezhov, and nobody bothers telling them otherwise. The Damnatio Memoria is now complete. Or conversely more than one dictator manufactured a revolutionary history for himself, and placed himself in photos of fights and protests he wasn't actually present at. A generation later, and maybe a purge or two of those who are actually in a position to say he wasn't there, and that has just become history.
Actually, I doubt that many people realize it as clear as you claim. Most people, especially from cultures which heavily faked history, just think that their version is right and everyone _else_ is biased or lying.
Look no further than the Eastern Bloc, where ancient border disputes were exaggerated and occasionally even fictionalized, to keep people's attention focused on those instead of on the present-day internal problems. You know, keep them thinking "OMG, country X is teh enemy because they took one of our provinces 1000 years ago!" instead of looking at who's having a more immediate and substantial impact upon their standard of living. _Especially_ countries which, honestly, had just gotten some province as reward after WW1 or WW2, invented elaborate layers of rationales as to why it was always theirs anyway.
I don't think most of those, even history teachers, actually knew that they're teaching a faked or biased history. Nor that they'd think, basically, "I wouldn't use a history book from country X because their bias is different from ours and it wouldn't sell." They thought more along the lines of "OMG, the people from country X are a bunch of evil liars! They still teach that province Y was originally theirs! They even print historical maps where it's painted as theirs!" (Never mind that at that point in history it actually was "theirs".)
Or as other examples, look at how the Crusades are perceived differently by different people. Or how Napoleon is a national hero to the French and almost an archvillain for some other people. Etc.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that the whole point about having a bias is that you're unaware of it. You don't think "man, I'm from country X, I guess I have no choice but to be biased against country Y. Let's see which history books fit my bias." If you can think in those terms, you're already unbiased and rational about it. Being biased is more like already knowing something to be true, and looking for the sources that fit that pre-defined truth.
Well, true, but sometimes it wasn't even just a desire to look good. E.g., in ancient Egypt the paintings and sculptures were
1. invariably religious in nature. A painting or sculpture could actually house the Ka (part of the soul that actually has a shape) of the deceased, in case his mummy gets damaged or he's too poor to get one. (Seriously, a reward you could bestow upon your poorer servants would be to paint them on your tomb walls, or be buried with some little statues of them.)
They didn't even paint and sculpt the person, they painted and sculpted his/her Ka. So the Pharaoh was always painted or sculpted bigger than life and perfectly proportioned, because his Ka was that of a God.The Pharaoh being the living incarnation of Horus. Lower class people were painted smaller than they were. With nobles and officials being the middle ground. This rule took precedence, for example, over perspective. Even if the Pharaoh was in the back and the peasants in the front, the Pharaoh's image would nevertheless be larger than any of them.
2. a matter of sacred rules and traditions, some of them even handed down by the Gods themselves on sacred papirus scrolls.
E.g., everyone would be painted looking to the side, even if otherwise their body is facing the "camera". Always. It doesn't matter if you think you'd look better from the front, your head will be painted from the side anyway. E.g., the tone of the skin was a function of nationality and gender, rather than offering any insight into what they actually looked like. (They were painting the Ka, not the mortal body anyway.) So we have the Egyptian males painted a reddish brown tan, but women are painted with a rather unnatural yellow skin. Other nationalities they knew about were, pretty much, colour coded with their own hues.
And for a bit of final fun, it's worth noting though that some people seem to have been honest with their appearance, though. Akhenaten for example always appears not with the Pharaoh proportions, but as a guy as big as anyone else, pear-shaped, with man-boobs and some thin legs and arms :P
Look up Damnatio Memoriae sometime. They erased people from public records thousands of years ago, for a range of reasons that included:
- betrayal
- so others wouldn't be tempted to do something heinous just to get popularity (e.g., Herostratus)
- being really hated as an Emperor (e.g., Domitian. Though Caligula and Nero came this close to getting one too.)
- someone not liking the role you've played or the model you'd be for others (E.g., Hatshpsut was almost erased from history as a Pharaoh by her son, but he left her name and images alone where she was depicted/named as anything else than a Pharaoh. E.g., Akhenaten got his name defaced off most monuments after death.)
- some reasons ranging all the way to outright silly (E.g., the abovementioned Akhenaten, the pharaoh formerly known as Amenhotep IV, managed to almost erase his father Amenhotep III from history for the sole reason that the name contained the name of the God Amen/Amon/Amun/whatever-you-call-him. And Akhenaten had just gone rabidly monotheistic, even renaming himself the Servant Of Aten.)
Of course, nobody managed to really erase a Roman Emperor from history, because nobody had the resources for such a herculean task. It didn't stop the Senate from at least trying. And IIRC Hatshepsut was pretty much erased until very recently. It took a while to piece together that she's the missing piece in that chronology.
Actually, I think that the biggest problem with animated porn isn't texturing-vs-raytracing, but the models and animations. Last time I ran into some adult Poser-fu, it looked all wrong in a massively uncanny-valley way, and not because of the texturing.
And with the animations, well, I'd assume it's actually easier and cheaper to find a gal who'll bounce on a cock for half an hour for a few (thousand) bucks, than a highly skilled artist and animator who'll make that look natural.
Plus, raytracing is IMHO entirely the wrong secret sauce there. Ray tracing works best for sharp, metallic/mirror reflections. Because then you can take each ray and reflect it as one ray. If you want to go diffuse, that's a lot more expensive with ray-tracing. Then you need to split each ray into sub-rays that reflect into slightly different directions from there. Same as anti-aliasing is done by calculating sub-pixels, basically.
I.e., ray tracing looks grrreat and is the cheapest for shiny cars, crystal cups, and the like. Which is why everyone ray-traces cars and the like. It sucks for something like human skin, unless, of course, you want to make those humans look like polished shiny plastic dolls.
So, well, I can't imagine that much need for it in porn at the moment. Unless, of course, you want to make a Transformers sex movie. Or maybe one with liquid- metal Terminators fucking. (Hey, they must have made some female versions too, right?;)
Well, I fail to see how that's any different from going over to Steve to play an ultra-violent PC game. Or to watch a splatter movie on dad's VHS. Or going over to Steve, which got someone to buy him a bottle of whiskey, bypassing age restrictions. Or Steve discovering his dad's porn stash and, well, I guess caring _is_ sharing ;)
I don't think the Wii brings anything new to that equation. _That_ cat is already out of the bag.
And arguably it never was in the bag (or anywhere _near_ a bag) in the first place. If you went back to AD 200 or so, you'd probably find little Julius going over to his pal Severus to read the Bible, much to his respectable parents' annoyance. And if you went to 400 BC, you'd find little Iolaos going over to his pal Strachys to read a bit from Socrates. And Zeus knows no respectable citizen of Athens would want his son's impressionable young mind polluted by that kind of subversive crap. Etc.
If a kid's only defense against being corrupted is not having access to stuff, well, that's not much of a defense. Because there'll always be some Steve to help him bypass that.
AFAIK, there's already a Happy Tree Friends game. I think it's from Sega too? Watch a few episodes on YouTube if you don't know what the Happy Tree Friends are :P
Here's a crazy idea: so then they don't have to buy it.
I mean, it's not like they were tricked by some game presented as "Princess Peach Pony Adventures" rated E and discovered a secret level which involved skinning people alive. They know from the start it's a violent game, Sega makes no secret about it, and if their console is really for "family fun" and they have kids... don't buy it.
Crazy talk, I know.