Actually, I'm getting the idea that for some people the goal isn't even to point fingers at something, but to point fingers at someone. Subtle but important difference.
Actually, even that is the superficial version. The longer one is that a bunch of people need not just to feel superior to you all, but to be a part of some grand cause that's never done or achievable. The last part is the more important one. It's what makes such grandiose tactually an _easy_ way out.
The quote which comes to mind, and kinda sums it all up, is, "It is easier to be a "humanitarian" than to render your own country its proper due; it is easier to be a "patriot" than to make your community a better place to live in; it is easier to be a "civic leader" than to treat your own family with loving understanding; for the smaller the focus of attention, the harder the task."
So people seek some grandiose cause to fight for, so they don't have to acknowledge that they don't achieve the small ones.
And again, it better be something so grand that nobody actually expects any given individual to achieve anything tangible. In a "small" task, like, say, "I want to finally get out of debt", or "I'll take some lessons and try to find a better job", or "I'll finally have a talk to my son about starting fights at school", there are very clear criteria as to whether you achieved anything or not. And at some point you have to admit that you didn't. It's not a very motivating thought. Worse yet, it might involve some personal effort and change. Good grief.
On the other hand, "saving the world" (from whatever global threat, from MS to global warming to God's wrath) is _easy_. It's a task nobody really expects you to achieve. So you can just moan and bitch a little about how the _other_ people should change, then be smug that you did your part. If it didn't achieve anything, it's because everyone _else_ didn't immediately drop everything and do as you said. Or even if they did, and it didn't actually work, hey, it's still their fault not yours: they didn't do enough, or didn't really understand you.
Big surprise that people choose the latter, eh? They're easy.
And it's not even something new. Since the dawn of time people have got into such grandiose fights to save others from whatever. For a long time, mostly from worshiping the wrong gods, or from worshiping them all wrong, or from some moral/philosophical detail that will doom us all. Mostly because they didn't have some scientific doomsday scenario, so God's Wrath was the best threat they had. Now they can do better.
The talent builds are certainly as viable at level 10 as they are at level 70, because the game is tuned at every step for how many talent points can you have. Plus, they were viable enough pre-BC. I don't think anyone who was grinding MC or AQ at level 60 before went, "man, this character is so non-viable without another 10 talents!"
Ditto for gear. Most of the game is doable even with whites and _greys_. Challenging, but viable nevertheless.
To quote from Cranius's Big Blue Dress:
Well just remember this: when next you look to kill That a man who's truly skilled can look quite good in twill
The quote is from a guy who, as far as I understand, was kicking a reasonable amount of ass in PvP too. In _twill_.
So, sorry, I'll even accept other arguments. But, "The complete class talent builds and the gear that make them viable aren't available until you hit max level." (my emphasis) is just flat out not true. They're perfectly viable for the level they are.
Well, I suppose I'm not going to tell you what you like in a game. If that's how you play it, fair enough.
It still doesn't really answer my main question: why would anyone want to skip those training stages, then?
Using your analogy (not that I see it that way, but ok, I can work with that) it's like wanting to be directly in the championship, without first doing those fundamentals training. If the goal is helping the team achieve that "cup", it makes no sense. Add one complete newbie to a basketball team, and they'll lose the cup. Guaranteed.
It makes some sense if it's about personal glory, as I was saying. You know, for that "I was in the basketball finals" or "I have a level 70 in epic gear!" bragging rights. But for team work and helping the team? I'm just as unconvinced as before. See my examples in the original message, about how well some of those people actually perform in a team.
Training the player isn't even remotely the same thing as training his/her character. A guy that skipped through the game at triple speed, or in some cases was outright power-leveled, is still essentially a newbie in a veteran costume. You can take a guy off the street and put him into a <insert famous basketball team< outfit, and that doesn't really make him fit to play with them.
Ah, but maybe he has experience with another class, which he had played to level 70? Fair enough, but that's like skipping to the football/soccer cup, just because you were once in the winning basketball team. It's barely a notch above the newbie in the previous paragraph.
Plus, even a real pro sports team doesn't play only in the finals. If someone doesn't like playing the pre-season plays too, and training in between plays too, why are they in that sport in the first place?
So on the whole, I'm still quite as unenlightened as before when it comes to the race to skip levels.
hink the interest is along the same lines of: Why Actors Go Indie Films
Err... not quite... let's go through those one by one:
How could anybody abandon the multi-million dollar paychecks,
Heh. Some people are under the impression that game programmers end up millionaires, like John Carmack, but the vast majority are actually paid a piss poor wage. And it becomes even less tempting once you do a total of the time worked, including unpaid overtime (some companies don't even just do it for the final crunch, but most of the time), and divide your wage by it.
The inside joke is that they haven't offshored games to India and China yet, because those guys don't work for _that_ little.
So trying for indie, I dunno, seems a lot less of a loss. You don't even need to sell many copies to make the same wage as before.
access to the best directors and writers,
1. Not everyone works with a Sid Meier or Will Wright. There are a lot of game programmers working for a lot less talented designers. In fact, your average entry job probably will be for some no-name company making a flop, and with a designer who makes up for less skill by having a bigger ego.
2. The movie will show _you_ and get you a bunch of fans, if you're a talented actor. Those best directors and writers will make _you_ shine. If you're a talented game programmer, the best you can hope for is that you'll be a name by the half of the credits, and the designer is treated by the press and fanboys as the only one who mattered. It's more akin to being the third cameraman on the credits of a movie. So it's a bit easier to break away as a game programmer, because the ego factor to keep you in line just isn't the same.
3. Those actors are often allowed a lot more creative input, to those directors and writers. Harrison Ford is the perfect example with his changes. Probably the best known being the scene where Indy shoots the swordsman. As a game programmer, probably nobody will give a shit about _your_ vision. The testers have more of a chance to change anything than you do, and God knows that for a bunch of companies the testers are ignored.
4. Up to what age do actors get to play and be worshipped? The average game programmer is chewed up and shit out by the games industry, as a burned out husk, before reaching 30. A lot of them even earlier. Sometimes having celebrities shit on you, still is just being shit upon.
large teams of skilled colleagues
While the games industry does have a couple of very skilled people, the average programmer there is there only because he wanted very little money and generally didn't mind the overtime and being treated badly. And again, will make up for lack of actual skill, by being legends in their own minds.
and the glory of working on one of next holiday season's blockbusters
Most games won't even break even, and end up subsidized from the profits of EA's sports games and the like.
Plus, there's a lot to be said about the "glory" of being one of the guys whose code was launched buggy and untested, and had reviewers and players ranting about poor quality;)
And again, most of the glory will go to the game designer, while you'll be lost in the credits.
So to sum it all up, being a game programmer is very very unlike being a super-star actor. The whole ego thing that works for actors... well, as a game programmer you're probably more motivated by either (A) a misguided sense of altruism, as in, "ah well, at least I'm doing something useful and making it possible for other people to have fun," or (B) being unrealistic enough or in outright denial about your position and chances for something better. Or often both.
Maybe it's just me, but I still don't get the "race to level 70" mentality.
1. Essentially the levels 1 to 69 are the actual game content. (Well, ok, plus a couple of things you do at level 70.) That's the actual quests, story, exploration, etc, to be done.
After that, the game is over and you're essentially stuck into an endless tarpit of an endgame grind. There's nothing more to do that repeat the same few things over and over and over again, just to keep you busy until the next expansion pack is released. Not even particularly smart or diverse things. Some classes can get through months of it without pressing more than one button, or maybe two.
And whatever you get from it, is fully useless in the rest of the game, since everything else was designed to be done (and any non-instance stuff: soloed) by someone with green gear. So any "OMG, EPIC STUFF!" you get in a grind instance, isn't needed for anything except more grinding.
But at any rate, that's what happens after you played and finished the actual game. And it's not even much fun. And it makes a whole lot of people depressed and unhappy, who were perfectly content before getting stuck in it. (Just listen the drama in any raiding guild, and then you tell me if that sounds happy.)
Yet some people are apparently in a hurry to skip the actual game levels, only to get stuck in that endgame grind? And some are even willing to pay for it or risk banishment? (By buing Glider, multiple accounts, buying power-levelling from some Chinese guy, etc.) WTH? It's on par with paying someone to watch a movie for you, just so you can come back and watch the last battle in a loop, for a year. As I was saying: WTH?
So, yay, now they can compress the actual game to 24 hours. Heh.
2. The game is already fast to level, even when soloing and not being particularly good at it. You can (and God knows enough people do) get to level 70 without having every had to function in a group, or do your job in an instance. You see "healers" who never fully understood that they aren't mages. You see warriors who still think that their e-penis size depends on attacking a different mob from the rest of the group, to show how tough they are. You see hunters who still think that when the going gets tough, they're supposed to set the fucking pet on aggressive, I quote, "so it can protect the other members of the group too." Etc.
More importantly, you see people who haven't yet figured out how the game really works, and are still operating on wild mis-understandings or basing decisions on strategies on their own "what kind of things would make sense" fantasies, instead of how the game actually works. You see people who haven't yet figured out what all those icons do, and how to combine them.
I swear to god, one hunter still thought that he can walk backwards to keep a mob at a range and use his ranged attack, like with the ultra-slow mobs at levels 1 to 9. _There_ it works to take a step backwards and shoot the mob again before he reaches you. At level 70, it doesn't work. So the retard would run backwards through two extra groups, and actually be proud of his "footwork". The idea of disengaging, feigning death and letting the tank do his job (or not ending up needing that in the first place) never occured to him.
I used to even think that such people must have been power-levelled, but in the meantime I know a couple who got to level 70 fair and square, without learning anything.
Do we really need more of those, and worse at that? Someone getting to level 70 in 24 hours, probably hasn't even had the time to assimilate what all those icons do, or wth is happening around them. Assimilate it all for 2-3 character? Heh.
So ok, let's even believe that they're eager to get into the group action at the end. (Yeah, right. Most people who were swearing that grinding MC is the meat of the game, went back to soloing instantly after BC got launched.) Ok, let's believe that. What do they hope to bring to a group at that level? How do they expect t
The last message Lori sent to Megan, was, literally, "Everybody in O'Fallon knows how you are. You are a bad person and everybody hates you. Have a shitty rest of your life. The world would be a better place without you."
Even skipping past the rest of the campaign, which seems ridiculously calculated cause the maximum possible stress in a short time, read that statement again. It's almost... perfection, in an evil way. It's like a depleted uranium penetrator: calculated to do the maximum possible damage in the most compact shape. Every single sentence in there is the most evil thing you can say to someone who's depressed anyway and had been through that stress. In fact, whom Lori Drew herself put through all that stress. It's playing on the very fears and discomfort that that very online campaign had created. And the final "The world would be a better place without you"... I don't know, it almost spells out "go kill yourself now". It's as if she wanted to be _sure_ that the girl gets the idea to remove herself from the world. Especially after coming after something as callous as, "Have a shitty rest of your life."
I mean the whole thing is pretty damn equivalent to "You have nothing more to live for anyway. You should kill yourself now. It'll be even worse if you don't." Only packed in a more cruel form.
So I really wouldn't say "Maybe she didn't draw a direct correlation to possible suicide". That last message very much incites to suicide, in case the rest of the stress didn't do the job of pushing her over the edge.
Suicide is not a natural response to bullying, especially when that's not even face-to-face, which is what we experienced.
1. At a quick googlin, 16.3% of the deaths in males aged between 15-24 is suicide. Way ahead of, say, cancer at 6.8% or heart disease at 3.9%. That was a statistic for 1998, but I don't expect things to have changed too dramatically. Apparently in Australia in 2005, two thirds of the deaths between 12 and 24 years old were suicides. Two thirds. That's immense.
So it's not an entirely unnatural response to stress and depression, either. It happens.
Either the girl had other problems which lead to her suicide (likely) or she was simply mentally unstable.
2. Well, yes. And the perpetrator deliberately used that.
Yes, some people are more fragile than others. That doesn't excuse preying on them.
To give some analogies, just because some old lady barely walks to a walking stick, it may make it easier to snatch her purse and run away, but it doesn't make it more morally justifiable. Just because someone is in a wheelchair, it may make it easier to mug him (I mean, it's not like he's gonna dodge or run away too fast), but again it's not more morally justifiable. Etc.
If anything, from where I stand, it just makes the perpetrator more heartless and worthy of contempt.
In this case the lady _knew_ that the neighbour's girl is depressed and suicidal. She had already talked about suicide in third grade, and was seeing a therapist about it ever since. And she just took it as an invitation to try to actually drive her to suicide. I'm sorry, I can't really see her as anything else than a monster.
3. We're not talking just a random forum flame war, or one mean message or two. Lori Drew spent a whole fucking year first gaining the girl's trust, and then mounting a _massive_ online campaign against her. She not only posted all the girl's secrets, but also produced a storm of messages about how Megan is fat and a _slut_.
More importantly, this is the final message that pushed the girl to suicide: "Everybody in O'Fallon knows how you are. You are a bad person and everybody hates you. Have a shitty rest of your life. The world would be a better place without you."
I'm sorry, but telling someone who's already massively depressed and suicidal that the world would be better without her...
It's not just callous or insensitive. The whole thing reeks of deliberately creating the setup and then as much stress as possible, to make sure she breaks down. And spending a year for that. A whole year dedicated to killing the neigbour's daughter.
I don't know about you, but in my book that's premeditated murder. The whole sequence of events served only one purpose and achieved it.
4. You _could_ say that the girl could/should have been tough and ignored it, but that still doesn't excuse the perpetrator.
I mean, seriously, if I were to knife you and take your wallet, equally it could be argued that you could/should have been spry and dodged the knife. You could/should have taken some martial arts lessons and disarmed the attacker. It still doesn't excuse the criminal, either way.
Plus, again, she chose a victim who was already known as an easy target for that.
In either of those cases the medium through which the straw that broke the camels back travelled is not relevant.
Pretty much. Regardless of the medium involved, it's still a convoluted case of premeditated murder.
I think they mean something more along the lines of "between MMOs designed in the West and those designed in the East", rather than what people play there.
Probably the players are still... players, in all corners of the world. But there seem to be certain assumptions that some major designers make, which are culture related. And are as often wrong in the East as they are in the West.
Classic forum troll behavior when they get in trouble they are surprised and inset that they were actually helping. He does point out an uncomfortable truth though, there will always be forum trolls to annoy and confound the masses with their stupidity and ill-logic.
Actually, no, that's (as in many other cases) just a thin veil for another time-honoured troll technique: adding (more) insult to injury by blaming their victim.
E.g., the "it's your fault if you can be insulted in the first place" idea was even featured in a recent NYT article, linked to on/. too. See, suddenly it's not him who's being a troll by calling the journalist incompetent, it's the journalist's fault and revealing that he got "defensive" by asking, "why? what did I do?" In reality, the trolls themselves are very quick to get insulted too. The pointing out that "shortcoming" is really just a way to heap extra insult on the victim.
E.g., in this case, it seems to me like the same applies. The whole "raising awareness" is just a thinly veiled way of saying "it's you who's gullible." It just adds that extra jab.
I mean, if you think about it, it doesn't even try to look at all helpful or believable in that role. The excuse boils down to, basically, "I'm an arsehole and doing X just to show that arseholes exist and can do X." Where X was actually pretty obvious to everyone in the first place.
If he thinks that that kind of behaviour is actually helpful, then I offer to raise his awareness to the fact that he can have his head bashed in with a brick in a sock, by demonstrating it on you. Hey, I'm just being equally helpful. It's just teaching him to watch his back;)
If it's not an extra jab at the victim, then I'm seriously curious what kind of a deranged mind would think that that's being helpful.
It's not even some online phenomenon. People do things on trust every day IRL too. E.g.,
- if you ever had a photo of your girlfriedn naked, or conversely she had one of you, then one of you trusted that the other won't use it in some humiliating way
- you leave your home unguarded, on the implicit assumption that the neighbours won't then bash your door in and steal all you have
- you pay with a credit card at a restaurant, basically trusting the waiter to not copy the data and make other purchases with your money
- you hop in a taxi and, essentially, trust the guy or gal that he won't kill you and dump your corpse at the first oportunity to do it unseen (more than one girl guessed wrong there, and got raped before being killed too.)
- you give a 50 euro bill to a taxi driver for a 11 Euro trip, and trust him that he'll give you 39 Euro back. He _could_ just say, "what? you gave me nothing" and even call the cops, and it's your word against his.
- when you open your front door for the mailman or some utilities guys, you trust them to not mug you and rob you instead. (Again, some people guessed wrong there.)
Etc.
We _are_ "gullible" like that, because nobody can live in a bunker and guard their back 100% of the time. So we have some laws against those kind of things, _and_ we essentially trust people at least to not be the stupid kind of predators. You know, the kind which gains disproportionately little compared to the harm and penalties, or even makes a personal loss in the process too.
You trust, for example the taxi driver to not shaft you out of 50 Euros, because, frankly it's not worth it. He can only do that a couple of times, before he makes a much bigger loss than that.
And some people trusted a perfect stranger with their photos, because it wasn't obvious what he'd have to gain by using them.
And he's raising awareness to what? That he's a prime example of an arsehole who does it just for damage sake? I don't need anyone was that blissfully ignorant to that possibility.
So, again, it seems to me that the whole thing was just one last jab at the victims.
They cut four character classes and are still shipping with 20 classes. How many character classes does WoW have right now? 20 classes is a lot to ship an MMO with in the beginning. They felt that those four classes that were cut were just not up to par with their expectations, and they may never see the light.
Actually, IMHO 20 classes are entirely too much. I don't know about WAR, but I can compare WoW to EQ2's 24 class bonanza, and actually WoW is the more fun one there.
In WoW, the classes are distinct _and_ have a decent amount of flexibility, allowing them to be more than one-trick ponies. Except in end-game raids, I guess.
By comparison, EQ2's classes are confusing _and_ 1-2 trick ponies all the time. When you spread things that thin, either you have massive overlap, or have to slice abilities too thin to keep them unique. And thus end up with linear, non-interesting classes. Or, if you're bad at it, the worst of both worlds.
E.g., did we need _two_ druid classes in EQ2? One is better at offense, but can put it's talents into becoming a good healer too. The other one starts better at healing, but ends up sucking at both. Well, I guess at least you have a choice;)
For that matter, why do we even need the druids as yet another healer class too? At least in WoW each druid shape has its unique gamplay, and the class is a unique jack-of-all-trades. In EQ2 they sliced classes too thin, that essentially they have 6 healer classes which differ only in whether they got healing, _or_ healing-over-time, _or_ preventing damage as their primary focus. Or one flavour is actually bad at all 3. The druid's animal shapes are just minor self-buffs. (And in a typical Sony stupidity, you can have two polymorphs, like, say, be a Wolf _and_ a Lion at the same time. But let's not go there.) It just illustrates what I'm talking about. All those classes just mean that each of them gets a small, uninteresting mix of tricks, because they had to slice it too thin.
Or did it need Assassin, Swashbuckler _and_ Brigand as rogues? Wth is wrong with one class and having the Assassin, Combat and Subtlety specs as talent trees, like in WoW? And again, all that slicing classes thin, pegs you into one narrow role from start to finish. Each gets less tricks up your sleeve than a WoW Rogue, which makes for rather less interesting gameplay.
Did the mages really need to be split the hard way into single-target mages and AOE mages? WTF?
Did we really need two Bard classes, where one buffs melee types and one buffs mages? WTF?
Etc.
And worse yet, it makes you choose something from the start, when you don't even know or understand the subtle differences between them all. Which healer class suits your play style better, if you want to be a healer in EQ2? Do you even understand what you forsake by picking Warden instead of Templar, on your very first day when you bought the game? Fuck if I knew, myself.
So, basically, I'm not impressed that it has more classes. More isn't necessarily better, as I've illustrated with EQ2. Now if you were to tell me that WAR has some unique classes that can do things a WoW class never dreamt of, I'd listen and be interested. But just splitting the same abilities among more slices, doesn't make a game better.
The capital city cuts were pretty bad, but it would have been worse had they shipped with six half-assed cities. They did discuss the fact that those cut cities will be reinserted into the game and will not charge for it.
Still sounds like a half arse launch to me, either way.
Speak for yourself - not all people are content with WoW. If you read through some of the Warhammer Online forums, you'll see plenty of people who are getting sick of WoW and cannot stand the daily grind and the static classes. I am quitting WoW as soon as WAR is released. Even if WAR sucks, I'm not going back to WoW.
Actually, I have no idea about vacations. I'd assume you had a bloody huge vacation between harvest and planting, if you wanted one. Well, at least the peasants had.
I know they had the concept of a sick day off, for the paid workers, if a priest gave you a scroll saying you were sick. I don't know if you could also take a vacation whenever you wanted to. Maybe a real historian could enlighten us both there.
(I read a lot of ancient to medieval history, but it's still a half-time half-arsed hobby, and I've been wrong before, btw. Don't take me too seriously.)
If you're talking about the guys at the pyramids, most of that actually seemed to have been not as much a full time job, as... welfare. Seriously, whoever wanted to pull huge stones for some pay, could join, or conversely leave whenever they didn't find it funny any more. Some people did that full time, but we also have records of some peasants joining in during the flood (which normally would have been that huge vacation I've mentioned) for some extra pay, or just to make ends meet if the flood had been poor. Then when planting time came, they buggered off to work their own fields again.
Actually, there is no free meal there. If you exert a force F on the asteroid, you get -F exerted upon the tractor. (Imagine a cute little vector mark above the F, to be completely true.) There is no known way to escape that.
If you always stay X metres in front of the asteroid, then effectively you can treat the whole system as one body. You're not just accelerating the asteroid (with mass m1), you're also equally accelerating the tractor (let's call its mass m2) with the same acceleration, or they'll collide or drift apart. So effectively you're accelerating the sum of their masses, m=m1+m2.
The force to do that is still F=m*a, or F=(m1+m2)*a. There is no free lunch. You're still accelerating the same m1+m2, and if done at the same a, you must apply the same force F. I.e., if the same rocket engine is used, you get to burn the same amount of fuel, regardless of whether they're physically in contact or weakly pulled by gravity. Using gravity there just puts a (very low) upper bound on F.
But wait, that was assuming the ideal case, where you magically apply _exactly_ the amount of force to stay always at X metres drom the asteroid. Reality is much less ideal. Such a tractor would probably have to fire rocket engines back and forth, just to stay anywhere near the prescribed distance. I.e., it would use extra fuel for positioning and maneuvering, whereas a lander with a big jet pointed "upwards" would have no such worries.
Just about the only reason I see there, is if you have to essentially rotate the system, to execute some complex maneuver with the asteroids (over aeons, mind you.) Then it's probably less waste to just move the tractor around the asteroid, than to rotate the asteroid with your thruster embedded in it.
Still, I'm kind of at a loss as to when or why you'd need that, or have the luxury of enough time for such infinitesimal accelerations to do the job. More realistically, you'd just want the asteroid's orbit changed enough that it doesn't collide with Earth. And you'll likely not have that awfully much time. So you just want to push it out of the way, hard enough to make a difference, but not hard enough for it to shatter into a MIRV of death and destruction. Probably the safest bet being to push it upwards or downwards, in regard to Earth's orbit, so it becomes a lot more inclined than the orbit which threatened to collide. You have a lot more margin for error in the calculation there. You don't need to rotate and maneuver it accurately, you just want it out of the way.
So basically while I'll agree that their method could work, I'm kinda at a loss as to why would you want to do it that way.
Well, the Medes and then Persians were Indo-European people, somewhat related to the Scythians (and occasionally allied with them), who overran the by-then semitic Neo-Assyrian empire and generally Messopotamia.
So, you know, the semitic arabs were there first. In a way, the Muslim conquest was just taking back a place that was theirs in the first place.
Or was it? Wait, even those weren't the first ones there. The original Sumerian people and language of Messopotamia weren't semitic at all, but something quite different, and were there some thousands of years before Aramaic took over. Yep, that's right. Fast-forward a millennium or two, and suddenly the whole damned place speaks Aramaic, a semitic language, although they keep Sumerian as a church and literary language. (The same as the Catholic Church would do with Latin much later.) But otherwise, by now Sumerian was a dead language. Pining for the fjords, and all that. The oldest civilization on Earth had been displaced by something else.
So I guess someone should call themselves the descendants of Sumerians and sue for a couple of millenia worth of compound interest, for their lost lands and whatnot;)
Oh, they were paid all right. Typically in food. (Some of which they could then barter for something else.)
Just because an economy is barter-based as opposed to coin-based, it doesn't mean unpaid slavery. It just means they don't use coins there. Not much more.
You're suggestions are not likely to be all that good for fixing the design problems. A non-chemist can tell you that the floor cleaning solution doesn't work for them - and that may mean the solution sucks - and they can say "It should be able to do this" - but they can't tell you the way to solve the problem, they may be wrong as to what the problem is, and they may just be, period - wrong. Is that elitist?
If any chemist had the attitude of some of us software nerds, he'd most certainly be counted as an elitist dick.
Yes, a non-chemist can tell you that the floor cleaning solution doesn't do this or that. It's then your job to see exactly how it fails there, and if you can improve the formula, and if it's worth improving it. E.g., if it doesn't kill some germs, it's useless in a hospital. If it actually ends up a nutrient for a bunch of harmful germs, then you have an even bigger problem. If it's highly toxic or caustic, well, you've reduced its usefulness for a lot of situations. Etc.
If you end up dismissing it as "unless you can tell me exactly what formula to use, and the exact manufacturing process for it, STFU" -- which, again, is an attitude quite common in software -- then you are an unhelpful and unprofessional dick.
Ditto for any other industry. When MRSA appeared, the antibiotics industry set to try to find an antibiotic that kills them. They didn't go "if you can't make a better antibiotic yourself, STFU." Yes, probably the users didn't know _why_ Methicillin doesn't kill this strain of Staphylococcus Aureus, or how to fix it. Which is why they reported the problem and let the experts fix it. Otherwise they'd have just made their own medicine in the first place. And from there it's the expert's job to figure out the exact details and how to fix it.
Your job is to take that, essentially, bug-report or change-request, and see what can be done about that. Sometimes nothing at all. Sometimes it's not a bug. But nevertheless, it's a piss-poor defense to expect that the user fixes _your_ bugs, and that only people who can fix it are allowed to offer feedback.
And, look, I'm not saying that you shouldn't take pride in your work or skills. But more people need to realize that a bug report isn't an evil personal attack, nor trying to make you look bad, or anything. You don't need to get into an "well, _you_ can't even code that much, so STFU" counter-attack. Yes, you know more about programming than the user who filed that bug report. The knows it too. Otherwise he wouldn't need your tool or your help in the first place. Being helpful isn't some kind of loss of face, that's all I'm saying.
1. Because it _is_ R&D. Manufacturing is where you already have a detailed blueprint of what cog/transistor/thingamabob goes where, and you just have to take it from bin A and stick it into hole B. And move on to do the same thing verbatim again. And again.
In programming, the equivalent would be, I don't know, copying someone else's program by hand. It makes no sense. If you have to make the same program again, you just make a copy it, you don't go through the assembly line to make an identical one from scratch. Even bits and pieces, whatever you need again, you don't program verbatim again. You move it to some library class and call it from there. Or it's already included in the compiler or standard library.
Programming isn't manufacturing and it makes no sense for it to work like manufacturing does. There is no mechanical taking a cog from here and placing it there, and knowing in advance exactly which cog, where, and how much time it takes. The whole exercise is, every single time, designing the whole mechanism in the first place.
Just because the manufacturing step is missing, or trivial (e.g., just pressing the CDs), it doesn't mean you can move back one step and proclaim the development stage to be manufacturing. It's just about as silly as, if a river has no delta, moving back a step and proclaiming the whole actual river to be a delta.
But that's what some incompetents do. They learned how to manage an assembly line, and then they re-christen a whole different thing an assembly line if they don't have one. Sorta, when your only tool is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.
2. It's not even the only one. There have been plenty of other cases where only one piece of something was built, and it was basically the prototype at the end of R&D. It may have been an actual manufactured product, but nevertheless the manufacturing step has been missing or never done, and the "product" was the prototype built by R&D.
As an infamous case, and a botched project at that, take the Vasa. The design had been experimented with and tweaked right until it was put to sea. (And it sank.) If it were a software project, it would have been pulled out of the sea and "debugged" until it works. And it still would have been an R&D stage, rather than mechanical repetitive manufacturing.
Or take the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. There was no assembly line, and (unlike the Nagasaki one) not even testing. It was a prototype right out of R&D. The fact that it was actually used, doesn't make the whole process any less R&D.
So basically again, it seems to me like just a case of some people not wrapping their heads around a different beast. They learned in school that if you have a product at the end it's manufacturing, and if that step is missing, they'll re-christen something else as manufacturing. Just so it fits their mental model.
3. Well, that's still no excuse for incompetence. If an industry works differently enough from others, managing it must fit the reality of the industry, not try to warp the industry to fit the pre-existing mind-set.
Basically, imagine if I came from agriculture, and started managing a car production plant. And went, "no, no, no, see you have to plough the land outside the factory and bury some cars as seeds." Wouldn't you think I'm retardedly incompetent and have no business managing a factory like it's a farm? Well, I'm thinking the same about those who manage R&D as if it were an assembly line.
Well, if you don't see any of it in products, I'm curious what you call R&D? 'Cause unless I'm mistaken, it means exactly that: Research and Development. It's the first step in the chain that then goes through Manufacturing and later Marketing.
So normally even stuff like developing a new product (say, the XBox 360) does count as R&D. When Ford comes up with a new car, even if it's not revolutionary in any way or aspect? That's R&D. When NEC or Samsung come up with a new TFT, only this time with LED backlight? That's R&D. When Seagate announces a new line of HDDs, only this time with higher density (i.e., pretty much a smaller head and more precise mechanics)? That's R&D too.
Technically even writing a program, any program, is R&D. (That's a mistake many PHB's do: thinking that programming is manufacturing and can be treated and measured like assembly line work.) Manufacturing is when you press the CDs and print the manuals and box it, later. So if none of MS's R&D made it into a product, they pretty much wouldn't have a product.
So, yes, MS does invest in R&D. Now if you're trying to say that they never made some major scientific breakthrough, we can agree on that. But then most other companies don't, either. And I don't remember many fundamental breakthroughs from the F/OSS camp either. They too just tweak a little here and there and occasionally put lipstick on a pig... err... skins and transparencies on the same old program. Not condemning it in any way, but let's not pretend that the latest release of KDE or Firefox are comparable to discovering Penicilin or Quantum Mechanics. It's R&D anyway. And it's still R&D when MS does it.
And yes, occasionally R&D does produce a dud like Vista. Well, that's the inherent risk of it. It happens to other companies too.
Imagine that! A stubborn people, ruled in tyranny by an emperor who is also a religious figure, continue to do things the old fashioned way instead of changing with the times. You NEVER see that happen!:)
Way I see it,
1. The "tyranny" argument is kinda fuzzy when applied to ancient times.
Even for the Greek states, the larger mass of the citizens were usually (though not always) better off under a tyranny than under the democracy of rich slave-owners. Plus, it was democratic voting which led to excesses like executing otherwise capable officers who lost _one_ battle, or to antagonizing Sparta (an ally at the time) all the way to a disastrous war from which Athens never recovered.
Or people see movies like 300 or read ancient greek texts and get ideas like Greece = teh uber-defenders of democracy, vs Persia = teh uber-oppressive tyranny. Well, here's a funny thought. Greece was based on chattel slavery, and at the apex of it in Athens even the word for "craftsman" was a synonim/euphemism for slave. Sparta's rite of passage to adult involved going out and terrorizing the Hellots to keep them in line. By contrast in Persia despots like Darius or Xerxes were vehemently against slavery, and only used paid workers. Probably also because Zoroastrism forbade slavery. So some 90% of the population were actually more free in "despotic" Persia than in "democratic" Greece.
In Egypt, technically the Pharaoh was a supreme despot, but in practice they seem to have treated their citizens pretty well. Their standard of living actually went down a lot under the Romans, although that doesn't necessarily say much, as Rome was gradually switching towards an Empire at the time.
Mind you, I'm not saying "democracy is bad", but mostly "democracy back then differed in several significant aspects from what we call democracy today." By the standards of _that_ time, the difference between democracy and tyrany were sometimes more subtle and sometimes in the other direction than you'd imagine.
2. In a way, a theocracy is actually a very vulnerable system, and a God-Emperor actually has a lot less room for doing evil stuff than a plain old one. The slightest sign of things going downhill or breaking the sacred ideas of balance and justice (Ma'at) can be taken as a sign of losing that divine power, or, as the case may be, mandate. Both Egypt and China (another empire by divine mandate) lost more than one dynasty that way.
And again, their ideas of Ma'at actually set limits on what central power can do too. E.g., apparently you couldn't tax your peasants as much as you wanted, you had to go by the sacred calculations depending on the inundation level. (I.e., on how much a peasant could actually produce in that year.) E.g., you couldn't just put the squeeze on your workers, you had to go by the sacred rules saying how much they can work per day and what rations they should receive. Etc. Those were sacred rules handed over by the gods themselves on sacred scrolls (e.g., most of them from Thoth), and even a Pharaoh could only deviate so far before people started wondering if he really is one of those Gods as he claims. It didn't always work (e.g., we have mentions of over-taxing in, say, the chaos of the first intermediate period), but mostly it seemed to do decently well for that time and age.
In a way, it was more like a semi-constitutional monarcy (even if in a weird religious way) than what some people imagine as God-Emperor.
3. _Why_ they didn't change the economy is a good topic by itself. (Short story: yeah, mostly religion and being stubborn.) The more interesting fact, though, is that it worked well nevertheless. It included more crafts and trading than a lot of other economies based on coins.
If you think about it, when your food is your "currency" the effect is somewhat like that of inflation in modern times. There's a strong incentive to invest and spend that "money" instead of keeping them hidden somewhere. It also produ
Speaking of ancient Egypt and writing, it's kinda funny... they actually invented a phonetic writing (hieratic) _before_ hieroglyphics, but preferred hieroglyphics anyway.
It's kinda funny how many things about Egypt are contrary to what we take for granted, and what stuff like Civilizations teach us. We tend to think that inventing an alphabet was oh-so-vital and a major improvement over hieroglyphics, but Egypt invented them the other way around. And for a long time it was, along with Mesopotamia (where cuneiform was also hieroglyphic), at the forefront of science and technology.
(Another anomaly about them was that they knew about coins all right, but preferred barter anyway. They first minted coins to pay some Greek mercenaries, and then continued to do so for external trade with the Greeks and Phoenicians. But internally they used barter until the Romans conquered them and forced them to. They were an economic powerhouse anyway.)
So, well, maybe there is something to the idea that a picture is worth more. The Egyptians sure thought so:P
Apparently some people intentionally buy and wear stuff like that. As anecdote I present the Baka Gainjin (Stupid Foreigner) t-shirt. I don't know how many they sold, but since after all these years they still sell it...:P
Well, I wish somebody would explain it to me. I presume the answer has something to do with piracy, but I don't see how that has a damn thing to do with access to the graphics chip under Linux. I mean, if they want to prevent you booting disks that haven't been officially signed, then that's fair enough (just about), but what does limiting the access to the GPU achieve?
Well, it's not quite about piracy. It's about the fact that their whole business model is, well, sorta like the Gillette model: give the razor for almost free, make them pay through the nose for blades. Or, in Sony's case: massively subsidize the console itself, but control the games publishing and make them pay extra for the games.
It's not just Sony that has this model, btw. HP does the same with printers and ink, to the extent that for some it's cheaper to just chuck the old printer in the bin and buy a new one (which includes ink), than to buy a new ink cartridge. It's done by telcos, who give you a phone for 1 Euro, but saddle you with a long term contract as their real revenue. Etc, etc, etc.
So the last thing Sony wants is that someone bypasses them and publishes their own games for the PS3, say, as Linux games. And don't think as much "homebrew" (they probably couldn't care less if you make your own buggy tetris clone for it), think some big publisher getting that idea. Like, say, EA realizing that they can bypass and undercut Sony for their sports games.
And it's easier to play the piracy card there and forbid it completely from the start, than to go to court later and claim "but they need our permission to make games for our machine!" There are already precedents that you can't outright forbid that. Starting with the famous IBM case which created the software industry in the first place. Turned out that IBM couldn't forbid you to make software for their machines. Atari tried the same stunt and lost too. In fact, nobody won that kind of a case yet, and I'm not sure Sony wants to try to be the first.
This whole business of running Linux is basically just a tax dodge anyhow - because, if it didn't run Linux, the EU would have classified it as a game, rather than a computer, and slapped a higher import duty on it.
AFAIK, that tax loophole was removed _years_ ago. So, nope.
The EU should have stood firm and said "if you want to claim it's a computer, then users should be able to program the facilities of the *whole* computer".
AFAIK, they did, back in the PS2 times. Sorta. They essentially ruled that it's a game console anyway.
How happy would you be if you bought a new PC, only to find out that, no, you can't access the GPU, etc from your own programs?
Well, just to play the devil's advocate, then fucking buy a computer. Of course, then you won't have Sony subsidizing half the cost of it, and they can't impose any restriction on you.
Same as with cell phones, printers, etc. If you don't want to be bound by some long term contract, buy your own phone. If you don't want to be gouged for ink, buy a Cannon. Etc. It's that simple. If you decided to take the subsidy, then have the decency to also accept your own part of the contract too.
It's kinda silly to essentially demand that a company subsidizes anything for you, but is forbidden to get anything in return. If they don't get anything out of that deal, why would they? No, you don't have some sacred right that someone else buys you a lollipop.
Only an idiot would compare the "art" of trolling to Socrates. Asking serious and uncomfortable questions is not the same as trolling. Socrates intended to provoke discussion to learn and educate. Trolls intend to simply get a reaction, attention, not to educate -- or if they do, they're doing it in a way that is unconstructive.
Well, yes, very much so, but nobody is claiming that Socrates really trolled.
What Socrates's execution illustrates is a mode of failure of human judgment. _That_ is the point. That when confronted with some serious and uncomfortable question too many will just back into some form of "OMG, he's an evil man" mode, instead of actually thinking. It's an easy escape hatch, and too many use it.
Yes, the two are not equal. Nobody said they are. But when confronted with someone who challenges your judgment and status quo, would _you_ show the level-headedness and judgment to distinguish between the two? Or would you too slip into the comfortable assumption that he's probably a troll, and you don't need to need twice about what you do? _That_ is the point.
And, no offense, with that "only an idiot" wisecrack and strawman, you don't seem to. You have already decided that only an idiot would disagree with your point of view, before even hearing in which way they disagree. _That_ is the problem. That is what those guys did too, when they executed Socrates. It was easier to assume that he must be some evil guy if he questions their ways, than to actually think whether he's right.
And as you illustrate it, it's not a problem that started and ended with Socrates. Entirely too many on the Internet, and off-line too, reach for the same simple ad-hominem instead of thinking. The "if you disagree with me, or if you question my judgment, you must be an idiot/shill/troll/traitor/terrorist/evil-dude" mentality is just as alive and kicking as in Socrates's time. _That_ is the problem.
But, yes, some people genuinely are trolls. Some are not. The whole point is to be able to distinguish between the two. Socrates's case is just an example where a bunch of people couldn't.
It's easy to write theoretical distinctions like "they're doing it in a way that is unconstructive", but it seems to be hard to actually apply them in practice. They too, for example, thought that Socrates's way of doing it wasn't constructive at all. In fact, that it was outright destructive and dangerous. It's easy to look back in retrospect and see that they were wrong. But when you'll be in their place, and someone questions your judgment, will you do any better? Will you actually try to distinguish the nuances there at all, before reaching for the easy way out? Maybe. Maybe not. I guess neither of us will know until such a situation actually presents itself.
Well, you have to realize that everything in your body is chemistry. No more, no less. All the feedback loops in your body, including "oi, we're doing lots of contracting here, we need more muscle fibers!" or "oi, we're suffocating here, let's have some more blood vessels!" are based on chemical signals. Some chemicals are produced, whether solely as a dedicated hormone/signal, or as a by-product of the cell's normal functions (e.g., CO2.) Some protein binds to them, and does something else. A lot of them regulate the expression of some genes to produce more or less of some other protein, or trigger cell division.
So, yes, if you just force a bunch of cells to divide, you'll get what you wrote.
On the other hand, if you fake the signal which says, basically, "oi, we're doing lots of contracting here, we need more muscle fibers!", you'll get just that. The body doesn't and can't distinguish between the real thing and a faked substance which binds with the same proteins. (Which is why tobacco, marijuana, etc, work, for example. They too bind to some proteins which were meant for something else, but the body can't differentiate between its own canabinoid signals and the THC from hemp.)
Mind you, it doesn't need to be perfect. If the other signals aren't perturbed, the body will still use its other feedback loops for stuff like building blood vessels there or for how many mitochondria it needs there. So you may have some thick muscles, but without the thick veins of real body builders, since they only have to feed those muscles in an unused state. Which isn't a problem, since, well, they do get as much oxygen there as they actually need. You might get faster tired than a real athlete, as a result, though.
But anyway, to cut this rant short and actually answer your question: yes. It would very much help with that.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I'm getting the idea that for some people the goal isn't even to point fingers at something, but to point fingers at someone. Subtle but important difference.
Actually, even that is the superficial version. The longer one is that a bunch of people need not just to feel superior to you all, but to be a part of some grand cause that's never done or achievable. The last part is the more important one. It's what makes such grandiose tactually an _easy_ way out.
The quote which comes to mind, and kinda sums it all up, is, "It is easier to be a "humanitarian" than to render your own country its proper due; it is easier to be a "patriot" than to make your community a better place to live in; it is easier to be a "civic leader" than to treat your own family with loving understanding; for the smaller the focus of attention, the harder the task."
So people seek some grandiose cause to fight for, so they don't have to acknowledge that they don't achieve the small ones.
And again, it better be something so grand that nobody actually expects any given individual to achieve anything tangible. In a "small" task, like, say, "I want to finally get out of debt", or "I'll take some lessons and try to find a better job", or "I'll finally have a talk to my son about starting fights at school", there are very clear criteria as to whether you achieved anything or not. And at some point you have to admit that you didn't. It's not a very motivating thought. Worse yet, it might involve some personal effort and change. Good grief.
On the other hand, "saving the world" (from whatever global threat, from MS to global warming to God's wrath) is _easy_. It's a task nobody really expects you to achieve. So you can just moan and bitch a little about how the _other_ people should change, then be smug that you did your part. If it didn't achieve anything, it's because everyone _else_ didn't immediately drop everything and do as you said. Or even if they did, and it didn't actually work, hey, it's still their fault not yours: they didn't do enough, or didn't really understand you.
Big surprise that people choose the latter, eh? They're easy.
And it's not even something new. Since the dawn of time people have got into such grandiose fights to save others from whatever. For a long time, mostly from worshiping the wrong gods, or from worshiping them all wrong, or from some moral/philosophical detail that will doom us all. Mostly because they didn't have some scientific doomsday scenario, so God's Wrath was the best threat they had. Now they can do better.
The talent builds are certainly as viable at level 10 as they are at level 70, because the game is tuned at every step for how many talent points can you have. Plus, they were viable enough pre-BC. I don't think anyone who was grinding MC or AQ at level 60 before went, "man, this character is so non-viable without another 10 talents!"
Ditto for gear. Most of the game is doable even with whites and _greys_. Challenging, but viable nevertheless.
To quote from Cranius's Big Blue Dress:
The quote is from a guy who, as far as I understand, was kicking a reasonable amount of ass in PvP too. In _twill_.
So, sorry, I'll even accept other arguments. But, "The complete class talent builds and the gear that make them viable aren't available until you hit max level." (my emphasis) is just flat out not true. They're perfectly viable for the level they are.
Well, I suppose I'm not going to tell you what you like in a game. If that's how you play it, fair enough.
It still doesn't really answer my main question: why would anyone want to skip those training stages, then?
Using your analogy (not that I see it that way, but ok, I can work with that) it's like wanting to be directly in the championship, without first doing those fundamentals training. If the goal is helping the team achieve that "cup", it makes no sense. Add one complete newbie to a basketball team, and they'll lose the cup. Guaranteed.
It makes some sense if it's about personal glory, as I was saying. You know, for that "I was in the basketball finals" or "I have a level 70 in epic gear!" bragging rights. But for team work and helping the team? I'm just as unconvinced as before. See my examples in the original message, about how well some of those people actually perform in a team.
Training the player isn't even remotely the same thing as training his/her character. A guy that skipped through the game at triple speed, or in some cases was outright power-leveled, is still essentially a newbie in a veteran costume. You can take a guy off the street and put him into a <insert famous basketball team< outfit, and that doesn't really make him fit to play with them.
Ah, but maybe he has experience with another class, which he had played to level 70? Fair enough, but that's like skipping to the football/soccer cup, just because you were once in the winning basketball team. It's barely a notch above the newbie in the previous paragraph.
Plus, even a real pro sports team doesn't play only in the finals. If someone doesn't like playing the pre-season plays too, and training in between plays too, why are they in that sport in the first place?
So on the whole, I'm still quite as unenlightened as before when it comes to the race to skip levels.
Err... not quite... let's go through those one by one:
Heh. Some people are under the impression that game programmers end up millionaires, like John Carmack, but the vast majority are actually paid a piss poor wage. And it becomes even less tempting once you do a total of the time worked, including unpaid overtime (some companies don't even just do it for the final crunch, but most of the time), and divide your wage by it.
The inside joke is that they haven't offshored games to India and China yet, because those guys don't work for _that_ little.
So trying for indie, I dunno, seems a lot less of a loss. You don't even need to sell many copies to make the same wage as before.
1. Not everyone works with a Sid Meier or Will Wright. There are a lot of game programmers working for a lot less talented designers. In fact, your average entry job probably will be for some no-name company making a flop, and with a designer who makes up for less skill by having a bigger ego.
2. The movie will show _you_ and get you a bunch of fans, if you're a talented actor. Those best directors and writers will make _you_ shine. If you're a talented game programmer, the best you can hope for is that you'll be a name by the half of the credits, and the designer is treated by the press and fanboys as the only one who mattered. It's more akin to being the third cameraman on the credits of a movie. So it's a bit easier to break away as a game programmer, because the ego factor to keep you in line just isn't the same.
3. Those actors are often allowed a lot more creative input, to those directors and writers. Harrison Ford is the perfect example with his changes. Probably the best known being the scene where Indy shoots the swordsman. As a game programmer, probably nobody will give a shit about _your_ vision. The testers have more of a chance to change anything than you do, and God knows that for a bunch of companies the testers are ignored.
4. Up to what age do actors get to play and be worshipped? The average game programmer is chewed up and shit out by the games industry, as a burned out husk, before reaching 30. A lot of them even earlier. Sometimes having celebrities shit on you, still is just being shit upon.
While the games industry does have a couple of very skilled people, the average programmer there is there only because he wanted very little money and generally didn't mind the overtime and being treated badly. And again, will make up for lack of actual skill, by being legends in their own minds.
Most games won't even break even, and end up subsidized from the profits of EA's sports games and the like.
Plus, there's a lot to be said about the "glory" of being one of the guys whose code was launched buggy and untested, and had reviewers and players ranting about poor quality ;)
And again, most of the glory will go to the game designer, while you'll be lost in the credits.
So to sum it all up, being a game programmer is very very unlike being a super-star actor. The whole ego thing that works for actors... well, as a game programmer you're probably more motivated by either (A) a misguided sense of altruism, as in, "ah well, at least I'm doing something useful and making it possible for other people to have fun," or (B) being unrealistic enough or in outright denial about your position and chances for something better. Or often both.
Maybe it's just me, but I still don't get the "race to level 70" mentality.
1. Essentially the levels 1 to 69 are the actual game content. (Well, ok, plus a couple of things you do at level 70.) That's the actual quests, story, exploration, etc, to be done.
After that, the game is over and you're essentially stuck into an endless tarpit of an endgame grind. There's nothing more to do that repeat the same few things over and over and over again, just to keep you busy until the next expansion pack is released. Not even particularly smart or diverse things. Some classes can get through months of it without pressing more than one button, or maybe two.
And whatever you get from it, is fully useless in the rest of the game, since everything else was designed to be done (and any non-instance stuff: soloed) by someone with green gear. So any "OMG, EPIC STUFF!" you get in a grind instance, isn't needed for anything except more grinding.
But at any rate, that's what happens after you played and finished the actual game. And it's not even much fun. And it makes a whole lot of people depressed and unhappy, who were perfectly content before getting stuck in it. (Just listen the drama in any raiding guild, and then you tell me if that sounds happy.)
Yet some people are apparently in a hurry to skip the actual game levels, only to get stuck in that endgame grind? And some are even willing to pay for it or risk banishment? (By buing Glider, multiple accounts, buying power-levelling from some Chinese guy, etc.) WTH? It's on par with paying someone to watch a movie for you, just so you can come back and watch the last battle in a loop, for a year. As I was saying: WTH?
So, yay, now they can compress the actual game to 24 hours. Heh.
2. The game is already fast to level, even when soloing and not being particularly good at it. You can (and God knows enough people do) get to level 70 without having every had to function in a group, or do your job in an instance. You see "healers" who never fully understood that they aren't mages. You see warriors who still think that their e-penis size depends on attacking a different mob from the rest of the group, to show how tough they are. You see hunters who still think that when the going gets tough, they're supposed to set the fucking pet on aggressive, I quote, "so it can protect the other members of the group too." Etc.
More importantly, you see people who haven't yet figured out how the game really works, and are still operating on wild mis-understandings or basing decisions on strategies on their own "what kind of things would make sense" fantasies, instead of how the game actually works. You see people who haven't yet figured out what all those icons do, and how to combine them.
I swear to god, one hunter still thought that he can walk backwards to keep a mob at a range and use his ranged attack, like with the ultra-slow mobs at levels 1 to 9. _There_ it works to take a step backwards and shoot the mob again before he reaches you. At level 70, it doesn't work. So the retard would run backwards through two extra groups, and actually be proud of his "footwork". The idea of disengaging, feigning death and letting the tank do his job (or not ending up needing that in the first place) never occured to him.
I used to even think that such people must have been power-levelled, but in the meantime I know a couple who got to level 70 fair and square, without learning anything.
Do we really need more of those, and worse at that? Someone getting to level 70 in 24 hours, probably hasn't even had the time to assimilate what all those icons do, or wth is happening around them. Assimilate it all for 2-3 character? Heh.
So ok, let's even believe that they're eager to get into the group action at the end. (Yeah, right. Most people who were swearing that grinding MC is the meat of the game, went back to soloing instantly after BC got launched.) Ok, let's believe that. What do they hope to bring to a group at that level? How do they expect t
The last message Lori sent to Megan, was, literally, "Everybody in O'Fallon knows how you are. You are a bad person and everybody hates you. Have a shitty rest of your life. The world would be a better place without you."
Even skipping past the rest of the campaign, which seems ridiculously calculated cause the maximum possible stress in a short time, read that statement again. It's almost... perfection, in an evil way. It's like a depleted uranium penetrator: calculated to do the maximum possible damage in the most compact shape. Every single sentence in there is the most evil thing you can say to someone who's depressed anyway and had been through that stress. In fact, whom Lori Drew herself put through all that stress. It's playing on the very fears and discomfort that that very online campaign had created. And the final "The world would be a better place without you"... I don't know, it almost spells out "go kill yourself now". It's as if she wanted to be _sure_ that the girl gets the idea to remove herself from the world. Especially after coming after something as callous as, "Have a shitty rest of your life."
I mean the whole thing is pretty damn equivalent to "You have nothing more to live for anyway. You should kill yourself now. It'll be even worse if you don't." Only packed in a more cruel form.
So I really wouldn't say "Maybe she didn't draw a direct correlation to possible suicide". That last message very much incites to suicide, in case the rest of the stress didn't do the job of pushing her over the edge.
1. At a quick googlin, 16.3% of the deaths in males aged between 15-24 is suicide. Way ahead of, say, cancer at 6.8% or heart disease at 3.9%. That was a statistic for 1998, but I don't expect things to have changed too dramatically. Apparently in Australia in 2005, two thirds of the deaths between 12 and 24 years old were suicides. Two thirds. That's immense.
So it's not an entirely unnatural response to stress and depression, either. It happens.
2. Well, yes. And the perpetrator deliberately used that.
Yes, some people are more fragile than others. That doesn't excuse preying on them.
To give some analogies, just because some old lady barely walks to a walking stick, it may make it easier to snatch her purse and run away, but it doesn't make it more morally justifiable. Just because someone is in a wheelchair, it may make it easier to mug him (I mean, it's not like he's gonna dodge or run away too fast), but again it's not more morally justifiable. Etc.
If anything, from where I stand, it just makes the perpetrator more heartless and worthy of contempt.
In this case the lady _knew_ that the neighbour's girl is depressed and suicidal. She had already talked about suicide in third grade, and was seeing a therapist about it ever since. And she just took it as an invitation to try to actually drive her to suicide. I'm sorry, I can't really see her as anything else than a monster.
3. We're not talking just a random forum flame war, or one mean message or two. Lori Drew spent a whole fucking year first gaining the girl's trust, and then mounting a _massive_ online campaign against her. She not only posted all the girl's secrets, but also produced a storm of messages about how Megan is fat and a _slut_.
More importantly, this is the final message that pushed the girl to suicide: "Everybody in O'Fallon knows how you are. You are a bad person and everybody hates you. Have a shitty rest of your life. The world would be a better place without you."
I'm sorry, but telling someone who's already massively depressed and suicidal that the world would be better without her...
It's not just callous or insensitive. The whole thing reeks of deliberately creating the setup and then as much stress as possible, to make sure she breaks down. And spending a year for that. A whole year dedicated to killing the neigbour's daughter.
I don't know about you, but in my book that's premeditated murder. The whole sequence of events served only one purpose and achieved it.
4. You _could_ say that the girl could/should have been tough and ignored it, but that still doesn't excuse the perpetrator.
I mean, seriously, if I were to knife you and take your wallet, equally it could be argued that you could/should have been spry and dodged the knife. You could/should have taken some martial arts lessons and disarmed the attacker. It still doesn't excuse the criminal, either way.
Plus, again, she chose a victim who was already known as an easy target for that.
Pretty much. Regardless of the medium involved, it's still a convoluted case of premeditated murder.
I think they mean something more along the lines of "between MMOs designed in the West and those designed in the East", rather than what people play there.
Probably the players are still... players, in all corners of the world. But there seem to be certain assumptions that some major designers make, which are culture related. And are as often wrong in the East as they are in the West.
Actually, no, that's (as in many other cases) just a thin veil for another time-honoured troll technique: adding (more) insult to injury by blaming their victim.
E.g., the "it's your fault if you can be insulted in the first place" idea was even featured in a recent NYT article, linked to on /. too. See, suddenly it's not him who's being a troll by calling the journalist incompetent, it's the journalist's fault and revealing that he got "defensive" by asking, "why? what did I do?" In reality, the trolls themselves are very quick to get insulted too. The pointing out that "shortcoming" is really just a way to heap extra insult on the victim.
E.g., in this case, it seems to me like the same applies. The whole "raising awareness" is just a thinly veiled way of saying "it's you who's gullible." It just adds that extra jab.
I mean, if you think about it, it doesn't even try to look at all helpful or believable in that role. The excuse boils down to, basically, "I'm an arsehole and doing X just to show that arseholes exist and can do X." Where X was actually pretty obvious to everyone in the first place.
If he thinks that that kind of behaviour is actually helpful, then I offer to raise his awareness to the fact that he can have his head bashed in with a brick in a sock, by demonstrating it on you. Hey, I'm just being equally helpful. It's just teaching him to watch his back ;)
If it's not an extra jab at the victim, then I'm seriously curious what kind of a deranged mind would think that that's being helpful.
It's not even some online phenomenon. People do things on trust every day IRL too. E.g.,
- if you ever had a photo of your girlfriedn naked, or conversely she had one of you, then one of you trusted that the other won't use it in some humiliating way
- you leave your home unguarded, on the implicit assumption that the neighbours won't then bash your door in and steal all you have
- you pay with a credit card at a restaurant, basically trusting the waiter to not copy the data and make other purchases with your money
- you hop in a taxi and, essentially, trust the guy or gal that he won't kill you and dump your corpse at the first oportunity to do it unseen (more than one girl guessed wrong there, and got raped before being killed too.)
- you give a 50 euro bill to a taxi driver for a 11 Euro trip, and trust him that he'll give you 39 Euro back. He _could_ just say, "what? you gave me nothing" and even call the cops, and it's your word against his.
- when you open your front door for the mailman or some utilities guys, you trust them to not mug you and rob you instead. (Again, some people guessed wrong there.)
Etc.
We _are_ "gullible" like that, because nobody can live in a bunker and guard their back 100% of the time. So we have some laws against those kind of things, _and_ we essentially trust people at least to not be the stupid kind of predators. You know, the kind which gains disproportionately little compared to the harm and penalties, or even makes a personal loss in the process too.
You trust, for example the taxi driver to not shaft you out of 50 Euros, because, frankly it's not worth it. He can only do that a couple of times, before he makes a much bigger loss than that.
And some people trusted a perfect stranger with their photos, because it wasn't obvious what he'd have to gain by using them.
And he's raising awareness to what? That he's a prime example of an arsehole who does it just for damage sake? I don't need anyone was that blissfully ignorant to that possibility.
So, again, it seems to me that the whole thing was just one last jab at the victims.
Actually, IMHO 20 classes are entirely too much. I don't know about WAR, but I can compare WoW to EQ2's 24 class bonanza, and actually WoW is the more fun one there.
In WoW, the classes are distinct _and_ have a decent amount of flexibility, allowing them to be more than one-trick ponies. Except in end-game raids, I guess.
By comparison, EQ2's classes are confusing _and_ 1-2 trick ponies all the time. When you spread things that thin, either you have massive overlap, or have to slice abilities too thin to keep them unique. And thus end up with linear, non-interesting classes. Or, if you're bad at it, the worst of both worlds.
E.g., did we need _two_ druid classes in EQ2? One is better at offense, but can put it's talents into becoming a good healer too. The other one starts better at healing, but ends up sucking at both. Well, I guess at least you have a choice ;)
For that matter, why do we even need the druids as yet another healer class too? At least in WoW each druid shape has its unique gamplay, and the class is a unique jack-of-all-trades. In EQ2 they sliced classes too thin, that essentially they have 6 healer classes which differ only in whether they got healing, _or_ healing-over-time, _or_ preventing damage as their primary focus. Or one flavour is actually bad at all 3. The druid's animal shapes are just minor self-buffs. (And in a typical Sony stupidity, you can have two polymorphs, like, say, be a Wolf _and_ a Lion at the same time. But let's not go there.) It just illustrates what I'm talking about. All those classes just mean that each of them gets a small, uninteresting mix of tricks, because they had to slice it too thin.
Or did it need Assassin, Swashbuckler _and_ Brigand as rogues? Wth is wrong with one class and having the Assassin, Combat and Subtlety specs as talent trees, like in WoW? And again, all that slicing classes thin, pegs you into one narrow role from start to finish. Each gets less tricks up your sleeve than a WoW Rogue, which makes for rather less interesting gameplay.
Did the mages really need to be split the hard way into single-target mages and AOE mages? WTF?
Did we really need two Bard classes, where one buffs melee types and one buffs mages? WTF?
Etc.
And worse yet, it makes you choose something from the start, when you don't even know or understand the subtle differences between them all. Which healer class suits your play style better, if you want to be a healer in EQ2? Do you even understand what you forsake by picking Warden instead of Templar, on your very first day when you bought the game? Fuck if I knew, myself.
So, basically, I'm not impressed that it has more classes. More isn't necessarily better, as I've illustrated with EQ2. Now if you were to tell me that WAR has some unique classes that can do things a WoW class never dreamt of, I'd listen and be interested. But just splitting the same abilities among more slices, doesn't make a game better.
Still sounds like a half arse launch to me, either way.
Ah, yes, that cate
Actually, I have no idea about vacations. I'd assume you had a bloody huge vacation between harvest and planting, if you wanted one. Well, at least the peasants had.
I know they had the concept of a sick day off, for the paid workers, if a priest gave you a scroll saying you were sick. I don't know if you could also take a vacation whenever you wanted to. Maybe a real historian could enlighten us both there.
(I read a lot of ancient to medieval history, but it's still a half-time half-arsed hobby, and I've been wrong before, btw. Don't take me too seriously.)
If you're talking about the guys at the pyramids, most of that actually seemed to have been not as much a full time job, as... welfare. Seriously, whoever wanted to pull huge stones for some pay, could join, or conversely leave whenever they didn't find it funny any more. Some people did that full time, but we also have records of some peasants joining in during the flood (which normally would have been that huge vacation I've mentioned) for some extra pay, or just to make ends meet if the flood had been poor. Then when planting time came, they buggered off to work their own fields again.
Actually, there is no free meal there. If you exert a force F on the asteroid, you get -F exerted upon the tractor. (Imagine a cute little vector mark above the F, to be completely true.) There is no known way to escape that.
If you always stay X metres in front of the asteroid, then effectively you can treat the whole system as one body. You're not just accelerating the asteroid (with mass m1), you're also equally accelerating the tractor (let's call its mass m2) with the same acceleration, or they'll collide or drift apart. So effectively you're accelerating the sum of their masses, m=m1+m2.
The force to do that is still F=m*a, or F=(m1+m2)*a. There is no free lunch. You're still accelerating the same m1+m2, and if done at the same a, you must apply the same force F. I.e., if the same rocket engine is used, you get to burn the same amount of fuel, regardless of whether they're physically in contact or weakly pulled by gravity. Using gravity there just puts a (very low) upper bound on F.
But wait, that was assuming the ideal case, where you magically apply _exactly_ the amount of force to stay always at X metres drom the asteroid. Reality is much less ideal. Such a tractor would probably have to fire rocket engines back and forth, just to stay anywhere near the prescribed distance. I.e., it would use extra fuel for positioning and maneuvering, whereas a lander with a big jet pointed "upwards" would have no such worries.
Just about the only reason I see there, is if you have to essentially rotate the system, to execute some complex maneuver with the asteroids (over aeons, mind you.) Then it's probably less waste to just move the tractor around the asteroid, than to rotate the asteroid with your thruster embedded in it.
Still, I'm kind of at a loss as to when or why you'd need that, or have the luxury of enough time for such infinitesimal accelerations to do the job. More realistically, you'd just want the asteroid's orbit changed enough that it doesn't collide with Earth. And you'll likely not have that awfully much time. So you just want to push it out of the way, hard enough to make a difference, but not hard enough for it to shatter into a MIRV of death and destruction. Probably the safest bet being to push it upwards or downwards, in regard to Earth's orbit, so it becomes a lot more inclined than the orbit which threatened to collide. You have a lot more margin for error in the calculation there. You don't need to rotate and maneuver it accurately, you just want it out of the way.
So basically while I'll agree that their method could work, I'm kinda at a loss as to why would you want to do it that way.
Well, the Medes and then Persians were Indo-European people, somewhat related to the Scythians (and occasionally allied with them), who overran the by-then semitic Neo-Assyrian empire and generally Messopotamia.
So, you know, the semitic arabs were there first. In a way, the Muslim conquest was just taking back a place that was theirs in the first place.
Or was it? Wait, even those weren't the first ones there. The original Sumerian people and language of Messopotamia weren't semitic at all, but something quite different, and were there some thousands of years before Aramaic took over. Yep, that's right. Fast-forward a millennium or two, and suddenly the whole damned place speaks Aramaic, a semitic language, although they keep Sumerian as a church and literary language. (The same as the Catholic Church would do with Latin much later.) But otherwise, by now Sumerian was a dead language. Pining for the fjords, and all that. The oldest civilization on Earth had been displaced by something else.
So I guess someone should call themselves the descendants of Sumerians and sue for a couple of millenia worth of compound interest, for their lost lands and whatnot ;)
Oh, they were paid all right. Typically in food. (Some of which they could then barter for something else.)
Just because an economy is barter-based as opposed to coin-based, it doesn't mean unpaid slavery. It just means they don't use coins there. Not much more.
If any chemist had the attitude of some of us software nerds, he'd most certainly be counted as an elitist dick.
Yes, a non-chemist can tell you that the floor cleaning solution doesn't do this or that. It's then your job to see exactly how it fails there, and if you can improve the formula, and if it's worth improving it. E.g., if it doesn't kill some germs, it's useless in a hospital. If it actually ends up a nutrient for a bunch of harmful germs, then you have an even bigger problem. If it's highly toxic or caustic, well, you've reduced its usefulness for a lot of situations. Etc.
If you end up dismissing it as "unless you can tell me exactly what formula to use, and the exact manufacturing process for it, STFU" -- which, again, is an attitude quite common in software -- then you are an unhelpful and unprofessional dick.
Ditto for any other industry. When MRSA appeared, the antibiotics industry set to try to find an antibiotic that kills them. They didn't go "if you can't make a better antibiotic yourself, STFU." Yes, probably the users didn't know _why_ Methicillin doesn't kill this strain of Staphylococcus Aureus, or how to fix it. Which is why they reported the problem and let the experts fix it. Otherwise they'd have just made their own medicine in the first place. And from there it's the expert's job to figure out the exact details and how to fix it.
Your job is to take that, essentially, bug-report or change-request, and see what can be done about that. Sometimes nothing at all. Sometimes it's not a bug. But nevertheless, it's a piss-poor defense to expect that the user fixes _your_ bugs, and that only people who can fix it are allowed to offer feedback.
And, look, I'm not saying that you shouldn't take pride in your work or skills. But more people need to realize that a bug report isn't an evil personal attack, nor trying to make you look bad, or anything. You don't need to get into an "well, _you_ can't even code that much, so STFU" counter-attack. Yes, you know more about programming than the user who filed that bug report. The knows it too. Otherwise he wouldn't need your tool or your help in the first place. Being helpful isn't some kind of loss of face, that's all I'm saying.
1. Because it _is_ R&D. Manufacturing is where you already have a detailed blueprint of what cog/transistor/thingamabob goes where, and you just have to take it from bin A and stick it into hole B. And move on to do the same thing verbatim again. And again.
In programming, the equivalent would be, I don't know, copying someone else's program by hand. It makes no sense. If you have to make the same program again, you just make a copy it, you don't go through the assembly line to make an identical one from scratch. Even bits and pieces, whatever you need again, you don't program verbatim again. You move it to some library class and call it from there. Or it's already included in the compiler or standard library.
Programming isn't manufacturing and it makes no sense for it to work like manufacturing does. There is no mechanical taking a cog from here and placing it there, and knowing in advance exactly which cog, where, and how much time it takes. The whole exercise is, every single time, designing the whole mechanism in the first place.
Just because the manufacturing step is missing, or trivial (e.g., just pressing the CDs), it doesn't mean you can move back one step and proclaim the development stage to be manufacturing. It's just about as silly as, if a river has no delta, moving back a step and proclaiming the whole actual river to be a delta.
But that's what some incompetents do. They learned how to manage an assembly line, and then they re-christen a whole different thing an assembly line if they don't have one. Sorta, when your only tool is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.
2. It's not even the only one. There have been plenty of other cases where only one piece of something was built, and it was basically the prototype at the end of R&D. It may have been an actual manufactured product, but nevertheless the manufacturing step has been missing or never done, and the "product" was the prototype built by R&D.
As an infamous case, and a botched project at that, take the Vasa. The design had been experimented with and tweaked right until it was put to sea. (And it sank.) If it were a software project, it would have been pulled out of the sea and "debugged" until it works. And it still would have been an R&D stage, rather than mechanical repetitive manufacturing.
Or take the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. There was no assembly line, and (unlike the Nagasaki one) not even testing. It was a prototype right out of R&D. The fact that it was actually used, doesn't make the whole process any less R&D.
So basically again, it seems to me like just a case of some people not wrapping their heads around a different beast. They learned in school that if you have a product at the end it's manufacturing, and if that step is missing, they'll re-christen something else as manufacturing. Just so it fits their mental model.
3. Well, that's still no excuse for incompetence. If an industry works differently enough from others, managing it must fit the reality of the industry, not try to warp the industry to fit the pre-existing mind-set.
Basically, imagine if I came from agriculture, and started managing a car production plant. And went, "no, no, no, see you have to plough the land outside the factory and bury some cars as seeds." Wouldn't you think I'm retardedly incompetent and have no business managing a factory like it's a farm? Well, I'm thinking the same about those who manage R&D as if it were an assembly line.
Well, if you don't see any of it in products, I'm curious what you call R&D? 'Cause unless I'm mistaken, it means exactly that: Research and Development. It's the first step in the chain that then goes through Manufacturing and later Marketing.
So normally even stuff like developing a new product (say, the XBox 360) does count as R&D. When Ford comes up with a new car, even if it's not revolutionary in any way or aspect? That's R&D. When NEC or Samsung come up with a new TFT, only this time with LED backlight? That's R&D. When Seagate announces a new line of HDDs, only this time with higher density (i.e., pretty much a smaller head and more precise mechanics)? That's R&D too.
Technically even writing a program, any program, is R&D. (That's a mistake many PHB's do: thinking that programming is manufacturing and can be treated and measured like assembly line work.) Manufacturing is when you press the CDs and print the manuals and box it, later. So if none of MS's R&D made it into a product, they pretty much wouldn't have a product.
So, yes, MS does invest in R&D. Now if you're trying to say that they never made some major scientific breakthrough, we can agree on that. But then most other companies don't, either. And I don't remember many fundamental breakthroughs from the F/OSS camp either. They too just tweak a little here and there and occasionally put lipstick on a pig... err... skins and transparencies on the same old program. Not condemning it in any way, but let's not pretend that the latest release of KDE or Firefox are comparable to discovering Penicilin or Quantum Mechanics. It's R&D anyway. And it's still R&D when MS does it.
And yes, occasionally R&D does produce a dud like Vista. Well, that's the inherent risk of it. It happens to other companies too.
Partially. They included phonetic signs, for stuff like suffixes and the like. Most of them were whole words or, rather, morphemes.
Sorta like Chinese or Japanese.
Way I see it,
1. The "tyranny" argument is kinda fuzzy when applied to ancient times.
Even for the Greek states, the larger mass of the citizens were usually (though not always) better off under a tyranny than under the democracy of rich slave-owners. Plus, it was democratic voting which led to excesses like executing otherwise capable officers who lost _one_ battle, or to antagonizing Sparta (an ally at the time) all the way to a disastrous war from which Athens never recovered.
Or people see movies like 300 or read ancient greek texts and get ideas like Greece = teh uber-defenders of democracy, vs Persia = teh uber-oppressive tyranny. Well, here's a funny thought. Greece was based on chattel slavery, and at the apex of it in Athens even the word for "craftsman" was a synonim/euphemism for slave. Sparta's rite of passage to adult involved going out and terrorizing the Hellots to keep them in line. By contrast in Persia despots like Darius or Xerxes were vehemently against slavery, and only used paid workers. Probably also because Zoroastrism forbade slavery. So some 90% of the population were actually more free in "despotic" Persia than in "democratic" Greece.
In Egypt, technically the Pharaoh was a supreme despot, but in practice they seem to have treated their citizens pretty well. Their standard of living actually went down a lot under the Romans, although that doesn't necessarily say much, as Rome was gradually switching towards an Empire at the time.
Mind you, I'm not saying "democracy is bad", but mostly "democracy back then differed in several significant aspects from what we call democracy today." By the standards of _that_ time, the difference between democracy and tyrany were sometimes more subtle and sometimes in the other direction than you'd imagine.
2. In a way, a theocracy is actually a very vulnerable system, and a God-Emperor actually has a lot less room for doing evil stuff than a plain old one. The slightest sign of things going downhill or breaking the sacred ideas of balance and justice (Ma'at) can be taken as a sign of losing that divine power, or, as the case may be, mandate. Both Egypt and China (another empire by divine mandate) lost more than one dynasty that way.
And again, their ideas of Ma'at actually set limits on what central power can do too. E.g., apparently you couldn't tax your peasants as much as you wanted, you had to go by the sacred calculations depending on the inundation level. (I.e., on how much a peasant could actually produce in that year.) E.g., you couldn't just put the squeeze on your workers, you had to go by the sacred rules saying how much they can work per day and what rations they should receive. Etc. Those were sacred rules handed over by the gods themselves on sacred scrolls (e.g., most of them from Thoth), and even a Pharaoh could only deviate so far before people started wondering if he really is one of those Gods as he claims. It didn't always work (e.g., we have mentions of over-taxing in, say, the chaos of the first intermediate period), but mostly it seemed to do decently well for that time and age.
In a way, it was more like a semi-constitutional monarcy (even if in a weird religious way) than what some people imagine as God-Emperor.
3. _Why_ they didn't change the economy is a good topic by itself. (Short story: yeah, mostly religion and being stubborn.) The more interesting fact, though, is that it worked well nevertheless. It included more crafts and trading than a lot of other economies based on coins.
If you think about it, when your food is your "currency" the effect is somewhat like that of inflation in modern times. There's a strong incentive to invest and spend that "money" instead of keeping them hidden somewhere. It also produ
Speaking of ancient Egypt and writing, it's kinda funny... they actually invented a phonetic writing (hieratic) _before_ hieroglyphics, but preferred hieroglyphics anyway.
It's kinda funny how many things about Egypt are contrary to what we take for granted, and what stuff like Civilizations teach us. We tend to think that inventing an alphabet was oh-so-vital and a major improvement over hieroglyphics, but Egypt invented them the other way around. And for a long time it was, along with Mesopotamia (where cuneiform was also hieroglyphic), at the forefront of science and technology.
(Another anomaly about them was that they knew about coins all right, but preferred barter anyway. They first minted coins to pay some Greek mercenaries, and then continued to do so for external trade with the Greeks and Phoenicians. But internally they used barter until the Romans conquered them and forced them to. They were an economic powerhouse anyway.)
So, well, maybe there is something to the idea that a picture is worth more. The Egyptians sure thought so :P
Apparently some people intentionally buy and wear stuff like that. As anecdote I present the Baka Gainjin (Stupid Foreigner) t-shirt. I don't know how many they sold, but since after all these years they still sell it... :P
Well, it's not quite about piracy. It's about the fact that their whole business model is, well, sorta like the Gillette model: give the razor for almost free, make them pay through the nose for blades. Or, in Sony's case: massively subsidize the console itself, but control the games publishing and make them pay extra for the games.
It's not just Sony that has this model, btw. HP does the same with printers and ink, to the extent that for some it's cheaper to just chuck the old printer in the bin and buy a new one (which includes ink), than to buy a new ink cartridge. It's done by telcos, who give you a phone for 1 Euro, but saddle you with a long term contract as their real revenue. Etc, etc, etc.
So the last thing Sony wants is that someone bypasses them and publishes their own games for the PS3, say, as Linux games. And don't think as much "homebrew" (they probably couldn't care less if you make your own buggy tetris clone for it), think some big publisher getting that idea. Like, say, EA realizing that they can bypass and undercut Sony for their sports games.
And it's easier to play the piracy card there and forbid it completely from the start, than to go to court later and claim "but they need our permission to make games for our machine!" There are already precedents that you can't outright forbid that. Starting with the famous IBM case which created the software industry in the first place. Turned out that IBM couldn't forbid you to make software for their machines. Atari tried the same stunt and lost too. In fact, nobody won that kind of a case yet, and I'm not sure Sony wants to try to be the first.
AFAIK, that tax loophole was removed _years_ ago. So, nope.
AFAIK, they did, back in the PS2 times. Sorta. They essentially ruled that it's a game console anyway.
Well, just to play the devil's advocate, then fucking buy a computer. Of course, then you won't have Sony subsidizing half the cost of it, and they can't impose any restriction on you.
Same as with cell phones, printers, etc. If you don't want to be bound by some long term contract, buy your own phone. If you don't want to be gouged for ink, buy a Cannon. Etc. It's that simple. If you decided to take the subsidy, then have the decency to also accept your own part of the contract too.
It's kinda silly to essentially demand that a company subsidizes anything for you, but is forbidden to get anything in return. If they don't get anything out of that deal, why would they? No, you don't have some sacred right that someone else buys you a lollipop.
Heh. Seeing that worse people have been lionized or even sanctified later, it's a possibility, yeah :P
Well, yes, very much so, but nobody is claiming that Socrates really trolled.
What Socrates's execution illustrates is a mode of failure of human judgment. _That_ is the point. That when confronted with some serious and uncomfortable question too many will just back into some form of "OMG, he's an evil man" mode, instead of actually thinking. It's an easy escape hatch, and too many use it.
Yes, the two are not equal. Nobody said they are. But when confronted with someone who challenges your judgment and status quo, would _you_ show the level-headedness and judgment to distinguish between the two? Or would you too slip into the comfortable assumption that he's probably a troll, and you don't need to need twice about what you do? _That_ is the point.
And, no offense, with that "only an idiot" wisecrack and strawman, you don't seem to. You have already decided that only an idiot would disagree with your point of view, before even hearing in which way they disagree. _That_ is the problem. That is what those guys did too, when they executed Socrates. It was easier to assume that he must be some evil guy if he questions their ways, than to actually think whether he's right.
And as you illustrate it, it's not a problem that started and ended with Socrates. Entirely too many on the Internet, and off-line too, reach for the same simple ad-hominem instead of thinking. The "if you disagree with me, or if you question my judgment, you must be an idiot/shill/troll/traitor/terrorist/evil-dude" mentality is just as alive and kicking as in Socrates's time. _That_ is the problem.
But, yes, some people genuinely are trolls. Some are not. The whole point is to be able to distinguish between the two. Socrates's case is just an example where a bunch of people couldn't.
It's easy to write theoretical distinctions like "they're doing it in a way that is unconstructive", but it seems to be hard to actually apply them in practice. They too, for example, thought that Socrates's way of doing it wasn't constructive at all. In fact, that it was outright destructive and dangerous. It's easy to look back in retrospect and see that they were wrong. But when you'll be in their place, and someone questions your judgment, will you do any better? Will you actually try to distinguish the nuances there at all, before reaching for the easy way out? Maybe. Maybe not. I guess neither of us will know until such a situation actually presents itself.
Well, you have to realize that everything in your body is chemistry. No more, no less. All the feedback loops in your body, including "oi, we're doing lots of contracting here, we need more muscle fibers!" or "oi, we're suffocating here, let's have some more blood vessels!" are based on chemical signals. Some chemicals are produced, whether solely as a dedicated hormone/signal, or as a by-product of the cell's normal functions (e.g., CO2.) Some protein binds to them, and does something else. A lot of them regulate the expression of some genes to produce more or less of some other protein, or trigger cell division.
So, yes, if you just force a bunch of cells to divide, you'll get what you wrote.
On the other hand, if you fake the signal which says, basically, "oi, we're doing lots of contracting here, we need more muscle fibers!", you'll get just that. The body doesn't and can't distinguish between the real thing and a faked substance which binds with the same proteins. (Which is why tobacco, marijuana, etc, work, for example. They too bind to some proteins which were meant for something else, but the body can't differentiate between its own canabinoid signals and the THC from hemp.)
Mind you, it doesn't need to be perfect. If the other signals aren't perturbed, the body will still use its other feedback loops for stuff like building blood vessels there or for how many mitochondria it needs there. So you may have some thick muscles, but without the thick veins of real body builders, since they only have to feed those muscles in an unused state. Which isn't a problem, since, well, they do get as much oxygen there as they actually need. You might get faster tired than a real athlete, as a result, though.
But anyway, to cut this rant short and actually answer your question: yes. It would very much help with that.