Well, the sad thing is that some people actually do use Google as some kind of definitive proof. And often not even as in "Google found a peer-reviewed authority on the domain, who explained that X is true". More like if searching for X returned 200,000 hits and searching for !X returned 100,000, then obviously X is true.
We've even had an article recently which claimed you can know who's gonna win an election, by how many hits Google returns when you search for their name. And when it all broke down for Ron Paul, they just handwaved an and removed it from the sample, rather than wonder if their hypothesis is false.
Now I'm not saying that Google is making us stupid, but that IMHO stupid people unsurprisingly end up doing stupid things with it. So far.
On the other hand, maybe it is worth wondering what long term effects it might have. Calculators didn't make everyone stupid either, and even less so in the short run, but some half a century later we have a lot less people who can do even elementary addition or subtraction without one. And a lot of people who not only took calculators as an excuse to not learn their 1+1=2, but as an excuse to not learn any maths at all. Why bother, when some calculator or computer or cash register can do it for you anyway?
But the real harm is that maths isn't just about being able to sum your grocery bill in your head. Most of it is about long abstract operations with all sorts of funny letters, so to speak. Actually calculating a result for some particular values of those variables, is the least interesting part of it. But that's based on concepts and theorems, which are in turn based on others, and so on all the way to that 1+1=2 you start with in primary school. And the more you skip at the front, in the name of "bah, I'll just use a calculator for that", the less of a foundation for the whole edifice you'll have later.
In effect, it's not just that some people use a tool (well or badly, as the case may be), but that a lot of people effectively don't have the foundation to understand anything maths-related. I.e., they won't even know what an integral is, or when to use the funny tool to calculate one for them.
And in some countries already the maths and science education in school is gradually getting dumbed down, so they just avoid the issue altogether. So regardless of whether they're teh uber-nerdy genius, or the school jock, whole generations do end up knowing less when they finish school.
So I sorta idly wonder if, given ample time, Google and Wikipedia will have the same effect on, say, logic. Why bother learning to follow an inferrence and examine the premises, when you can probably just Google the conclusion later? Let's just hope I'm wrong.
Huh? Having actually read all the threads about him, including this one, I see:
1. That about as many people argued that he's guilty, as people argued that he's innocent.
2. People guilt-tripping themselves by association for using his filesystem. (By comparison, I don't think many people burned their copy of Naked Gun just because OJ was in it.)
3. In true nerdy tradition, the argument mostly centered around the semantics of "beyond reasonable doubt." Which some people seemed to believe means "beyond all possible doubt, no matter how unrealistic or far fetched."
I don't think even #3 it had as much to do with wanting to believe Hans was innocent, as with generally defining that term. We're nerds, we need exact definitions, not vague concepts. And it doesn't help that some (but not all) of those involved seem have a certain mind frame that reduces everything to black and white.
You can see that kind of OCPD in lots of discussions about anything else. If program X isn't perfect, then it's complete crap. If company Y isn't saintly, then it's the spawn of Satan. If business decision Z isn't the absolute best in some aspect, far from realizing it's just a debatable compromise among many other possible compromises, it's painted as utter idiocy and as taken by a bunch of drooling morons who can't even tie their own shoes in less than 3 tries. Etc.
And here we saw the same thing: _some_ (but not all) of the people were just arguing whether it's acceptable to convict _anyone_ of first degree murder with less evidence than him doing the murder in the middle of a stadium and showing the the body to everyone. And, mind you, although I probably sound critical of them, the discussion itself does have some philosophical merit. Exactly where do you draw the threshhold of "reasonable doubt"?
Some seem to have a born aversion and distrust of any kind of authority or institution of the State, including the courts of law. Hence, they'll side with anyone who's being picked on by the State.
And some of us just engaged in some idle speculations, basically to the effect of whether facts A, B and C support the conclusion D. Just because it's the kind of intellectual exercise that makes us nerdy in the first place.
So basically if you looked at all this, and all you saw was "tribal-level prejudice", then you're either seriously lacking perception or are just trolling.
_Some_ of it ends up as CO2, but a lot of it is used to produce more of those fungi and bacteria. They don't just appear by magic, you know. And a lot ends up in organic compounds in the ground that aren't that volatile. Yes, they might end up as CO2 too eventually, but it'll take a really long time. Especially when it's by now underground.
To put it otherwise, if all corpses ended up as CO2, then graves in a cemetery would pretty much end up popping open from all that CO2.
So, yes, I'm still saying that _some_ CO2 is removed in the process.
As somewhat of a socialist (the Western European kind, not the Soviet kind), I sometimes find it funny how "left" or "liberal" (which in most of Europe actually means "right") has become a blanket insult in the USA for anyone and anything who's not for giving more money and unchecked power to the corporations and billionaires. Especially how it's supposed to be some kind of monster hell-bent on destroying the industry and humanity.
The "left" is mostly about how you divide the pie, so to speak, not about trying to destroy industry. We're all Keynesians, yes, both Europe and the USA, we all live in a massive overproduction potential, and we all have our governments spend some of that excess to keep it going. Essentially any first world country can produce orders of magnitude more than it needs, and has to find a way to (A) use that surplus for something useful, and/or (B) keep some people busy doing something that doesn't produce anything. Giving corporations more money just results in B. More and more people are hired to engage in nearly zero-sum games, like marketing past a point. Yes, it stimulates consumption a bit too too, but even that (1) only goes so far, and past a point the effects are infinitesimal, and (2) is ultimately a way to waste some production capacity instead of just dumping those resources off a hill.
There's something inherently heartless to argue that someone poor should be denied healthcare, so someone else who's already rich can buy a new barbecue grill. Or that you should dump that excess into having more lawyers and marketers, instead of having a few more doctors.
And no, it hasn't destroyed the industry so far. Germany for example was doing great with a socialist economy, until it had to absorb the obsolete industry of East Germany. Now it's recovering pretty nicely from that again. All the leftist stuff like good welfare, good medical care, unions being officially a part of the corporate management, etc, haven't really resulted in anything bad so far.
But anyway, I digress. That's really what the "left" is about: how you distribute the wealth. The GINI index. The idea that someone below poverty line can use an extra buck on his wage, more than the CEO needs another ten millions on an already ridiculously high wage.
The "Greens" are something else. It's something orthogonal to it all. Yes, they too want some taxes, but then they want to spend it on their own ideas, not on (immediately) improving the lot of the poor. I'm not necessarily saying that it's good or bad, just that it's something orthogonal.
Basically what I'm trying to say is that the political spectrum consists of a hell of a lot of variables, not just one axis between left and right. The ecological agenda is just another axis in that multidimensional space, rather than something inherently leftist.
Well, yes, but at the same time those plants absorb some CO2 out of the atmosphere to grow. And then you eat them, shit it, and it's not going back into the atmosphere. Or they get turned to clothes, paper (quick-growing trees are used as crops to produce paper), etc, which end up in a landfill and again it's not quite going back into the atmosphere.
So while some CO2 _is_ produced in raising those crops, yes, including in creating their fertilizer, they also remove some CO2 from the air. So the balance isn't as doom-and-gloom as you seem to assume.
Second, we're talking fertilizers, not plastics. Most of what those plants need is nitrogen, which actually comes from the air. (Fossil fuels don't contain much nitrogen.) E.g., ammonium nitrate is nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen. There is no carbon in it at all. (And even if there were, it would go into the plant, not back into the air.)
Technically, some carbon is used there, but at least for the Haber process that's methane gas from natural gas fields. There's buggerall need to start from oil to produce it. And it's recycled back into methane by the end of the process, so it's basically used more as a catalyst than "OMG, dumping CO2 into the atmosphere." The Odda Process is even more fun, in that at least one variant of it can actually use CO2 and fix it to CaCO3.
So all that remains as a source of pollution there is that, like any factory, it needs some energy. It doesn't necessarily mean oil, though. I'm sure you can use nuclear power instead, which, for whatever other sins it may have, has exactly zero CO2 emissions.
... is the fact that the UK too used to get most games 1 year after the USA. And don't think that any actually got internationalized to UK English and voice actors with UK accents. Mostly it was the US game, 1 year later. No idea if that's still the case, but it wouldn't surprise me too much.
Even weirder was buying a US import version of Sega's PSO for the Dreamcast, over half a year IIRC before it got released in Europe. The weird thing is: the US version already had all the language options. I don't mean just that it also had Spanish, but it also had German and French. So someone from the USA could jolly well play the game in German or French, but the people in Germany or France weren't supposed to.
Exactly what they needed that delay for, I don't even know. Certainly not for translations.
And your point is, what? That without such a law, the companies wouldn't have kept that data and shared and sold it? It's happening in the USA every day.
What we still have here is: (1) a legal limit to how long they can keep it, and (2) rather restictive conditions as to exactly what you can keep, _and_ (3) they're legally forbidden to use that data without a court order. Plus (4) such stuff as that you can actually demand a copy of any data held about you, and ask to have it corrected if it's wrong.
And btw, #3 applies to the government too. What the law says is _not_ that all data on everyone is automatically given to some kind of secret police. It says that if they need the data for one particular person, they have to get a court order to access it. So it's actually a lot more tame than you're trying to make it sound.
By now it's probably quite obvious why we accepted those laws. Mostly because of the promises of #2, #3 and #4. There are some decades of everyone else living pretty well by those rules, and yes they applied to everyone else too. We're quite used by now that companies actually obey the laws. Because they tend to get spanked rather hard when they don't.
We're also a lot less scared of the government than you seem to be over there, which is probably another factor in why you're so disgusted and I'm not. Over here we actually ask the government to do a whole bunch of things, not try to hide from it and fight it off. Mostly because the democratic safeguards tend to actually work, so we don't fear the government too much. If they can convince a judge to grant them access to my data, well, they probably have quite a convincing reason why.
Now in hindsight, it was bit optimistic, I guess. As this case shows, it only takes one rogue company or even more likely one rogue employee who sends all the data to his best buddy in America. Maybe we'll have to fix those laws after all.
But since you're that disgusted at European laws, is the situation much better over there? If I had to make a bet, I'd be pretty confident your average corporation left to its own devices would get worse ideas in all 4 aspects. I'd guess that they're (1) keeping it for ever, and (2) keeping anything they can lay their hands on, and (3) can sell it to world+dog if they can make a quick buck that way, and (4) you have no way to even know what they keep until they lose your identity and have to notify you.
And if you think that your government can't subpoena all your data from all those companies that keep a dossier on you, then you're rather idealistic. In fact, I seem to remember some news that that over there they figured out ways to access it even without a court order. So how is it worse in Europe?
But, hey, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. You're the one ranting that Europe is such an Orwellian place;)
There is a law that requires them to collect the data, _but_ (1) only now it goes into effect, if it's the one I'm thinking of, and (2) it _does_ specify that they're not allowed to share or even access it without a court order. So, yes, a law was broken.
Look, let's put it like this: if you think your telcos, or any other company isn't collecting data about you anyway, you're an idealist. While actually requiring them to collect it was probably dumb, don't imagine that it wouldn't have happened in the USA and/or without such a law. Companies seem especially fond of collecting all the data they can.
What _does_ remain is that here we still have (1) a legal limit after which they have to delete any data that's not vital to their doing business with you. Even retention laws say, basically, that even if you're required to log that data, after X months without any court asking for it, you still has to delete it. (2) An interdiction to share it, which is what these merry fucktards did.
Both are head over shoulders over the situation in the USA, as far as I know it. It's not perfect, but it's still an improvement.
Google alone is enough example of a company pulling all available fallacies as to why they should keep your search data _longer_ than even these data-retention laws demand. It seems to me like these laws here still actually reduce the interval and quantity of data held about you. It's not as perfect as when they were demanding that it be deleted immediately, but it's still better than what unchecked corporations do on their own.
so, when are you voting out the people who did this?
Umm, I wasn't aware that you can "vote out" a telco. (Or we would have voted out the dimwits from the Deutsche Telekom a long time ago.) Much less that you can vote out some researcher which doesn't even live there.
There were some data retention and privacy laws that were definitely broken. Which I strongly suspect is why they put an explicit condition to not be named. And from there it's up to the police and courts to apply those laws. I don't think you can vote on _that_. And it's probably better so, because justice isn't and shouldn't be a popularity contest.
The voting in and out has to do with the fact that we got those laws in the first place. You know, instead of weasel arguments about how the 4th amendment doesn't apply (A) to the government (then to who the heck _does_ the US constitution apply?), or (B) if it wasn't literally your papers or house being searched, or (C) by conveniently defining that if it happened over some company's lines, it's in public and noone really needs a warrant to observe that, or (D) if it allows a company to earn a few more bucks, or a few other variations.
And _if_ any politician wanted to make this thing legal, or give them a free pass, _then_ we'll vote him out. But I really doubt that they will. At worst we'll see some impotent posturing, and claims that it's impossible to determine who and whether a law has actually been broken or the researcher in case has just invented the data. (Which I strongly suspect he'll claim, once the ball starts rolling.)
But seriously, I doubt that any major politician, at least in Germany, will want to be seen as officially on the side of letting any company sell your data to the highest bidder. Although the country did slide a bit to the right lately, it's by far not at the point where anyone wants to be seen as arguing that the corporations should have unchecked power over their customers. It would be a _very_ unpopular point of view, and their political opponents would use it to the max to their own advantage. Sometimes even members of their own coalition.
(Here elections usually don't get "won" by any party, but about some uneasy coalition of several parties, to total more than 51% between all of them. With the implication that if you make yourself extremely unpopular, you might not even need to wait for the next elections to be voted out: a coalition can reform the other way around over night, moving you from head of the winning coalition to the largest opposition party. It's not a usual occurrence, but it can happen.)
But anyway, we'll wait and see. So far it's hardly some orwellian government plot, it's just one company which broke the law. It happens in the USA too, without always meaning that it reflects some government stance. See, for example: Enron.
From here, it can go in a lot of possible directions, not just "it's the way the government wants it". If it goes the wrong way, we'll vote some politicians out. If not, not. It's really that simple.
I read some of the patent application. It's the standard format, but the subject matter is remarkable. I can only think that Microsoft is testing what they can get away with at the USPTO.
If I had the money, I would patent the placement of pineapple on pizza in adjacent hexagonal cells to reduce juice runoff. I would have diagrams. It is novel, non-obvious, and I doubt there is prior art. Then we'd see if the folks in the USPTO are even reading these things.
You seem to assume that if they read it, they'd send you your pizza patent back and tell you to go fly a kite. That's actually incorrect. You'd probably just get the patent anyway. Heck, you could even patent the looks of a pizza.
A patent attorney actually patented his son's way to swing in an oval shape on a swing. The patent office originally didn't want to let it through. The father argued that although there are a couple of patents on swing designs, none is about how to swing on one. He got the patent.
IIRC, someone patented a cap with an american football goalpost on top, and a little ball on a spring to bob around between the posts. It's so stupid, it makes even a propeller beanie seem decent by comparison.
Speaking of american football, there's IIRC a patent on a crochet "replica" of a helmet.
So basically not only you would probably get a patent on that pizza layout, it wouldn't even be the worst you could do with patents. By far. All legal and with them actually reading it.
Actually, think about it. What made KOTOR probably the best non-flight-sim SW game, or generally movie-based game, was the fact that Bioware chose to just move 5000 years away from the SW story and make their own epic story in that universe. It's technically the same universe, but 5000 years is enough for whole civilizations to rise and fall... repeatedly. So nobody expects it to be an exact clone or rehash of the movie.
I mean, think about, say, Jedi in SWG. They actually launched an official MMO without Jedi, 'cause OMG, Darth Vader hunted them all. (And without spaceships too, if the Jedi issue wasn't enough issue.) It's a bit like selling a racing game without _cars_. Not that Sony didn't pull that stunt too.
Then they add Jedi, but with an _unholy_ grind involved to get one. Again, 'cause, OMG, Darth Vader hunted them so we can't have whole armies of arse-clowns with lightsabers.
Yet moving as little back in time as the Clown Wars... err... Clone Wars, would have provided an official timeline where just that happened: whole armies of arse-clowns ran around with lightsabers. All canon.
The NGE added lots of Jedi, but, among the many embuggerances of it, it just turned the whole game into what we all hate about _bad_ games based on movies: it became just a bad merchandising exercise. You know, just like printing Darth Vader's mug on a t-shirt: it does nothing except use it to milk some money from fans.
Now suddenly you had Han Solo personally saving you (and every newbie for that matter), Darth Vader and his whole armada after you, Jabba The Hut personally giving you quests, etc. And while it made some sense when I started a new Jedi there, it stopped making any sense whatsoever when I went, basically, "wait, let's see what happens when I make a Twilek dancer." Turns out that the same happens. Darth Vader apparently hunts those too, not only Jedi.
And I'm not convinced that there'd be that much they can do. The events of the original trilogy basically dominate that time interval, so there's not much else of epic importance you can do without breaking compatibility with it. You can't pull, for example, a "kill Onyxia" quest without people going, "wait, something this big should have been in the movies."
Again, moving back or forth in time a bit would have provided ample oportunity to actually make a good game with a story of its own, instead of a merchandising exercise. If you look at WoW, Blizzard did the same thing: they didn't try to milk Warcraft 3 by making you run around in the same war and meet Grom and the gang, but moved a bit forward in time and made it its own game.
So basically if Lucas eventually decides to make another SW MMO, pulling a KOTOR is the only really viable way. And it makes sense too.
Plus, let's face it, the vast majority of the problems of SWG weren't because of the SW license. There is nothing inherent in SW that says a game based on it must be a "clusterfucked abomination". The problems of SWG were because basically, Raph "I wrote the book about fun" Koster is another John Romero. His claim to glory was that basically he was a peon at Origin while Lord British made UO, and eventually got in charge... at a time where EA didn't want any new content anyway, but just bug-fixes. But he wasted no time in telling everyone how great a designer that makes him. Again, much like John Romero about his time at Id. In practice, he couldn't design worth shit, and spent his time polishing his own statue and arguing why
A) he's right and the players are wrong. You don't know what you really like and dislike in a game. The Great Man Koster does.
B) anything he doesn't feel like working on (e.g., "single-player content" like quests), is a fad and will go away.
C) he's got an excuse, 'cause he's a pioneer in a new genre. (And here we thought SWG was _third_ generation MMO and had no excuse to repeat what was known to be mistakes.)
D) you should stop comparing his game to WoW, 'cause WoW isn't _that_ successful. See, it
Well, you know, it's a bit like cell phones and brain cancer: if it has a signifficant effect, where are the piles of bodies, so to speak?
Since 1984, porn has become a lot wider available. Not that it didn't exist before, but now you don't even have to drive and rent a VHS cassette. A majority of men has seen a lot more than six weeks worth of porn in their lives, and the numbers for women are rising too. (I wonder what porn causes in those, then. They start thinking rape is OK too?) Look around you at the mall, and at least half the people you see are viewing porn regularly, or did at some point.
If there were that big an influence, we'd see the effects all over the bloody place. I mean, seriously, you if you have causation you must have correlation too. Not the other way around, duly noted, but causation => correlation every single time.
Did the number of rape offenses rise signifficantly? No, I don't think so. In fact, it seems to decline with the availability of internet porn. Hmm.
Did it cause widespread mis-treating and demeaning attitudes towards women? I don't know about the USA, so feel free to fill in the blanks, but at least in the less-prudish continental western Europe I see not much of that. You see naked boobs even on billboards and on ads on busses here in Germany (no hardcore stuff, though), and brothels are all over the place, but it's also one of the most equal minded countries. IIRC, it's got one of the most equal women/men ratios in tech jobs, and in a lot of other jobs too. And I just don't see that callousness towards women all around me by now. Do you?
If it causes an appetite for more deviant, bizarre, or violent kinds of pornography, then there must be a cap to that slope. Because we haven't had any "breakthrough" in extreme porn since 1984. All those guys watching porn for all these years, should by now be at the stage of raging lunatics that don't get off on anything short of Death By A Thousand Cuts by now. And it just didn't happen. Most people barely progress a bit past missionary position in their taste for perversions. There are some more "extreme" niches, but the keyword is that they're niches.
And here we come to the meat of what that study's about:
* devalued the importance of monogamy and lacked confidence in marriage as either a viable or lasting institution
* viewed nonmonogamous relationships as normal and natural behaviorxi
Ah, heh, so that's what it's about. "Oh noes! People get as immoral as to sometimes have a mistress too! And some even have sex without marriage!!" I.e., OMFG, some people are no longer (pretending to be) models of puritan morals! The world is coming to an end! Heh. I'm sorry. You had my attention for a bit while it was about rape (a heinous crime, no doubt) and demeaning women. But if they had to pad the list with, basically, "oh noes! people are not staying monogamous!!" as teh uber-danger to humanity, it speaks volumes about the mind-set that produced it and for which audience.
And never mind that they did so before porn too. I hate to be the one who breaks your (or their) fantasy bubble, but we have a stretch of some thousands of years where people had lovers and mistresses and premarital sex, long before porn movies. We have renaissance authors writing such things as that the unmarried women of their time being saits from the front, and martyrs from the back. A reference as thinly veiled as it gets to anal sex. (I know, buggrit, and here we were enjoying a nice fantasy in which only porn causes people to get such perverted ideas;) We have stuff like Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund thanking the city of Konstanz in writing for providing some 1500 prostitutes for the Council of Constance. (You know, the famous one where they burned Jan Hus at the stake and thus started the Hussite Wars.) We have such civilizations as the ancient greeks, which were as close to amoral sexually as it gets, even by the standards of a modern hardcore addict. Etc
There's even a funny bit at the end about another guy where the police had photos with his face "swirled" to hide his identity, so the police just reversed the filter. So you could even make it more damning by doing just that with that CG photo: apply some easy to undo Photoshop or Gimp filter, so it looks more believable. (After all, someone trying to frame him, wouldn't have tried to hide his face, right?;) Heck, if done right, it could even hide the imperfections of that CG photo.
There we go. No access to his laptop is needed.
Now, admittedly, actually planting it on the computer would make it easier to prosecute all the wayx through. But then again, if you just want to make someone's life hell for a few weeks, even the purely online version will do just fine.
For a start, advertising doesn't really pay big bucks any more. We've had companies flop during the peak of advertising money in the dot-con years with that model, what makes you think it's more viable now?
A quick search says that the Cost Per Click (i.e., what the advertising companies pay) can be as low as 1 cent per click. After the ad provider takes their share, it's even less money for the site carrying the ads. And that's per _click_. So if every single person downloading your music were to actually click a banner per song downloaded (fat chance) and the ad provider gave you the full cent (fat chance), you'd need to sell some thousands of songs per month just to pay for your hosting costs. Probably more, since you use bandwidth too.
Pay per view, even less. If you go really per view, expect it to be small fractions of a cent.
Remember, you're not Penny Arcade or PvP Online as a musician. You're not going to make a new song per day, and serve an ad or two with each one.
The RIAA members also provide one valuable service: they create a scarcity via marketing. There are hundreds of thousands of girls who can sing just as well as Britney Spears, and don't look much worse. But there's only one Britney Spears. And boy band members are even more dime a dozen, and chosen mostly on how well they look (i.e. how wet would they get a 16 year old girl seeing them on stage.) Not on any skills in composing that music or expressing anything profound. There are a few tens of million of young guys who'd be not much worse than, say, Backstreet Boys, and some would probably be only better.
So while it's easy to say "OMG, musician X is only getting a pittance out of the CD sales, and gets all the money out of concerts anyway," the more cruel reality is that musician X would be yet another _nobody_ without the publisher. Maybe a thousand people would know about his music, and maybe a dozen of them could be arsed to show up at a concert.
To put it otherwise, it's an economy of massive overproduction. If left to the free market, you'd be about as able to make a money out of music as you'd make money out of your farm in 1929. When there's 10 times more produced than anyone needs, and the products are perfectly interchangeable, the price doesn't just go 10 times lower. It spirals down to the point where nobody can make a living out of it.
Now I'm not saying it's necessarily the best model for society, but that's how it works.
And the moral of the story is: well, maybe a better model can be found, but it will have to be a better one than, basically, "but I want them to work for me for a tenth of a cent in ads."
Niche porn tastes that cater to a small minority of porn watchers can be profitable. Many heterosexual internet users, especially those not seeking it out, find gaping female arseholes gross.
Goatse.cx, which featured a male (most males are hetero) and an extrememly stretched arsehole, was meant to gross out the vast majority of internet users. Is it really surprising to you that it succeeded? You must have some sick tastes (to most internet users) in porn.
Gross, that's pretty obvious. What I can't understand is the disproportionate reactions of people proclaiming their _horror_ or _shock_ at it. You know, people proclaiming their wanting to claw their eyes out, or whatnot.
Basically all I'm saying is that there are normally quite a few shades between "gross" and "horror". (And there's an even bigger gap between horror and matching one's tastes, so feel free to stop being OCPD about it any time you wish;)
You're taking high-spec Macs and comparing them to low-spec PCs and concluding that they're higher-spec. That's not even wrong. It's a tautology.
I'm saying that there is _no_ low end Mac, that's the whole point. Out of two people, who bought equal generation computers (to skip that "new" word you don't like), the PC is on the _average_ lower spec. Not because there's something wrong with the PC architecture, but because el-cheapo beige-box PCs exist at all. For everyone who buys a l33t Alienware rig, there are 10 who buy a minimum spec machine. Hence slow downs and other such problems are inherently easier to notice on all the underpowered PCs.
"A lot" is a relative term. Is $1100 a lot? $600? (It didn't used to be, for a computer, even for PC guys.) Or how about showing the flip side of this:: do PC guys have a lot of free time?
Look, I'm _not_ trying to start a "Macs are expensive" flame or anything, so I wonder why do you automaticaly get on that defense. All I'm saying is, basically, "there are a _lot_ of PCs which are lower end than anything Apple ever sold at the same generation, and it's _those_ that have a major problem with Vista." If anything, I'm saying positive stuff about Macs there. (For a change.)
If you're a parent on minimum wage, you probably shouldn't even be spending $300 for a PC. Use one for free at the library while your kids are checking out books. If you've got kids to support, your time and money should be going to them.
Well, we could debate what people _should_ do, but I'm just saying that a lot of them _do_ buy a cheap computer.
You know, I don't quite get it. I've seen bigger arseholes in upper management or on the cover of some management magazines, and noone gets a shock at seeing those;)
Well, now seriously, it was just an arse. Admittedly a rather stretched one, but I gather there must be _some_ demand for seeing that on a woman, judging by the whole category of porn and whole sites dedicated to it. I haven't heard of people reeling in shock after being exposed to almost seeing a <insert female pornstar>'s kidneys up her rear end after an anal scene. Or sometimes in the middle of it.
Seriously, it wasn't the most appealing or aesthetically pleasing picture out there, I'll grant that, but I just can't figure out the _horror_ some people claim to have experienced seeing it. It seems a rather disproportionate response. You'd figure that a simple, "hmm, how's this relevant to the topic at hand?" and hitting the back button would be enough for all practical purposes. Horror or shock? Erm, why?
Or was it just the implicit hint of homosexuality that gives the average male in some parts of the world the idea that he must seem properly outraged and horrified by it, lest someone might get the idea that he's gay too? Not trolling, just genuinely trying to figure it out.
But let's face the fact here: a lot of people on Slashdot are arguing that JT should be stopped simply because they don't agree with him.
No, not really. I for one want him stopped because he's a fucking lunatic, and I don't see why such lunatics belong in a court of law. He's still free to rant on his own time, to whoever listens to him, but I genuinely don't see how he's fit to help determine if someone's guilty or not.
It's not just about games, but about all his surrealistic antics. Seriously, read even the sample on Wikipedia, and you tell me if it doesn't sound like someone clinically insane.
Yet IF a hypothetical anti-JT was standing up for the freedom of expression in violent video games, and abusing the system of law in the exact same manner, a lot of people around these parts would be crying bloody murder if the anti-JT was facing disbarment.
Nope, sorry. In fact: good grief, no. When I have something to say, I want it said in a professional way. The last thing I want is my position to become associated with raving lunatics, idiots trolling for attention and abuses of the judicial system.
He's acting like a troll fanboy, or what we'd call one on any forum. And that's something some people don't seem to understand: annoying fanboys and zealots don't actually help get your point across. Regardless of whether it's "Linux is ready for the desktop" or "games are good for you", you want it to come across as a helpful and even-handed opinion. You don't want it to become a case of, basically, "oh, heh, it's those trolling fanboys again, blowing stuff out of proportion." Annoying people for attention is bad too, because if you've annoyed them, they're automatically inclined to _not_ listen to anything you have to say.
In Slashdot terms, you want advocacy to come across as +5 Informative or +5 Interesting, not as -1 Flamebait.
It's not even as much a personal opinion. Read any advocacy faq, and it will tell you the same. People like JT are _not_ the kind you'd want as advocates, for any domain or idea. JT is the kind of obnoxious troll that the real advocates wish would STFU already and stop polluting the channel. _Especially_ if they profess to be on your side.
Despite what they say to the contrary, most people hate dealing with change so the longer you give them to get used to something, the more aggressively they'll reject the "latest and greatest".
Well, isn't it the same thing that Microsoft FUD used against, say, Linux? Basically, "OMG, you'll need to learn a different GUI and, verily, as a company retrain everyone from CEO to janitor, if you switch from Windows."
Mind you, I use the term FUD here rather loosely, because I think that, while MS's propaganda did include a lot of exaggeration and fear-mongering, the underlying idea _is_ true. Most people don't think that learning a new OS, just for its sake, is fun. The computer is just a tool, and they want to just do their job with it with a minimum of extra effort. That includes that once they learned a skill set, they want to keep applying it all over the place. It's not even a MS invention, it's how we got the Common User Access spec from IBM. MS just adopted it (and mistreated it like the stereotypical evil stepmother;)
I'm a Mac guy and I have no beef with Vista (I somewhat prefer it to XP, not that I really care for either) and honestly think a lot of the hate just comes from the people doing the sheep thing, though HP and the like feeding it the crappiest hardware money can buy certainly doesn't help.
I see you even answered your own concerns at the end of that phrase.
If you're a Mac guy, you have a lot of disposable income to blow on hardware. Now I won't get into whether the Macs are overpriced or not debate at this point, but let's just say they don't cater to the bottom end of the market. There isn't really a new Mac that's equivalent to the 300$ boxes people buy at WalMart. Again, I'm not debating whether the hardware is worth the price, but I'm saying that it genuinely _is_ higher spec than most PCs people have at home. And than what most moms and pops on minimal wage jobs can afford, PC or Mac.
Vista _is_ a resource hog, and it crawls on most new computers. Aero alone spanks and tortures a cheap shared-memory GPU like a bad dominatrix, and once you disable it, you're left with something which, for most normal people's needs and understanding of it... still acts like a bloated and slow XP. It doesn't really offer much that Joe Average would need on his home PC, or even notice the difference, and XP didn't have.
The memory requirements alone are a problem on a cheap 512 MB RAM PC, and make stuff swap that ran perfectly well on XP... especially after half of that RAM gets filled with crapware. (And I don't mean just viruses, but also all the idiocies from RealPlayer to, yes, OOo who think it's a great idea to default to keep themselves loaded in RAM all the time to seem faster-loading. You can end up with a 500 pixel wide tray nowadays without doing anything special.)
Vista's constant indexing can make many computers crawl, especially after you install an antivirus. Which ends up basically scanning each file again and again each time the indexing accesses that file. So basically it's like running with a full antivirus scan in the background at all times. Poor or sometimes wrong IDE drivers also don't help, as they can make any version of Windows basically sit and wait for IDE transfers. Now neither of those is a MS problem as such, but the combination is deadly anyway. Vista essentially amplifies what would have been a minor problem (it's ok to wait an extra half a second when you open a file, while the antivirus scans it) into something horrible (it's not ok to have your computer busy virus-scanning all files in the background, as a result of that indexing.)
Again, that won't seem much for you, if you have a couple thousand dollars to blow on a top-of-the-line Mac, and it wouldn't seem much to anyone who can blow a comparable sum on a l33t PC either. But it can be horribly annoying to someone on a $300 beige box.
Now before I start IANAA (I Am Not An Anthropologist) but I did read a bit on the topic at one point, to try to understand how people work, so to speak.
One thing that stuck in my head was that there's a relatively large disconnect between what people say in surveys and what they actually do. What people as in surveys isn't as much deliberately lying, or even being aware that they lie, but basically describing an ideal "self" that they'd like to be or were taught to be. They describe someone who's more socially acceptable. E.g.,
- A (formerly) hunter-gatherer tribe had traditionally a martial culture glorifying brave hunters and warriors. So in a survey almost all males described themselves as hunters and warriors. The problem? They had actually gradually switched to agriculture some time ago. Most of them didn't even have a weapon, and hadn't hunted or fought in their life.
- A community prided themselves in helping each other and doing stuff together and things like that. So in a survey they said that, yeah, verily, they work the fields together and help each other build a barn, etc. Except in practice the last time either actually happened was some half a century ago.
- At one point where meat prices went up, they asked people whether they eat more or less meat. Most said, basically, "screw this, I'll eat less of that until the prices come down. That'll show 'em." Except they also looked at sales data, and actually rummaged through that town's garbage to see what packaging people throw away. Meat consumption had actually gone _up_.
It turns out that you might be better off observing them, whenever possible, than asking people to describe themselves.
What I'm getting at here is, basically, yes, the same applies to "I have nothing to hide" declarations in survey. If people are under the impression that a nice person wouldn't do stuff they need to hide from their neighbours, they'll adjust their perceptions of themselves to think they are (closer to) that ideal nice person.
Additionally, I'd say that a lot of such behaviour changing is probably subconscious anyway. Probably the 89% just didn't spend much time analyzing and second guessing their own actions and conversations, nor asked themselves "exactly why am I not calling my old pal Mohammed Abd Jihad any more?" They just don't, and don't spend time navel-gazing and wondering about it.
For some probably cognitive dissonance kicked in a long time ago, and manufactured an acceptable model and an explanation anyway.
Consider the human eye, which was long thought to be impossibly complex (and perhaps proof of creation). One thing jumps out at me about it. It's not so great
Ok, let's consider it.
The image comes through upside down and backwards
Which is basically a non-factor, since the wiring gets it back to the right orientation anyway.
and it essentially loses the ability to differentiate color in dim light
It's got a low light mode, unlike most modern cameras which become 100% useless in low light. Most cameras you can buy need a flashlight even in relatively well artificially lit rooms, and become freaking useless at the light levels where the eye becomes predominantly B/W. So, hmm, between going monochrome and going blind, it seems to me that the eye wins, hands down.
it's fragile
Only in as much as any other piece of biology is. Even so, it can withstand a lot of things which would render a cheap camera useless. And it can self-heal from most things.
and frequently does not focus correctly
But it's wired to something which can do a reasonable job even with an unfocused image. Try an OCR or, better yet, image recognition in the same conditions, and you'll see some epic fail.
But let's talk about some other advantages:
- better resolution than almost any digital camera
- saccades help increase the effective resolution even more
- some image processing and compression is built right into the retina, so it needs _far_ less bandwidth on the optic nerve than a modern camera would
- takes up less space than a camera able to focus over the same range of distances, and get similar image quality. (Hint: it doesn't need to move the lens waay forward and back to focus.)
- can deal with a wider range of brightness in the same image (most cameras need postprocessing so if the bride looks ok, the groom doesn't look like a light-sucking black hole, or viceversa)
- it can even rewire itself to deal with stuff it wasn't designed to deal with. E.g., you can get a camera-style photo-receptor as an implant against blindness, and the neurons in the eye and brain will rewire themselves to work with the fundamentally different image it gives. (That's one amazing thing about neurons: they can essentially reverse-engineer almost any kind of body, and learn to use it.)
Etc.
Now I'm not saying it's _perfect_, nor "proof of creation". But it's a lot better than you seem to assume, anyway. We're not quite at the point where we can equal it. Yet. We will be eventually, but not yet. We can do better in _some_ aspects, but often at the price of doing something else worse.
It might be less low hanging than most people think. Most predictions I've seen for, basically, "OMGWTFBBQ, computers are gonna be as intelligent as humans" are based on, basically, "OMGWTFBBQ, we'll soon have as many transistors on a chip as there are neurons in a human brain." Especially marketing depts love to hint that way now and then, but they're not the only culprits.
Unfortunately,
1. A neuron isn't a transistor. Even the inputs alone would need a lot more transistors to implement at our current technology level.
An average brain neuron takes its inputs from an _average_ of 7000 other neurons, with the max being somewhere around 10k, IIRC. The vast majority of synapses are one-way, so an input coming through input 6999 can't flow back through inputs 0 to 6998. So even just to implement that kind of insulation between inputs, you'd need an average of 7000 transistors per "silicon neuron" just for the inputs.
Let's say we build our silicon transistor to allow for 8k inputs, so we have only one modul repeated ad nauseam, instead of custom-designing different ones for each number of inputs between 5000 and 10000. Especially since, we'll see soon, that number of inputs doesn't even stay constant during the life of a neuron. It must accomodate a bit of variation. That's 2^13 transistors per neuron just for the inputs, or enough to push those optimistic predictions back by 13 whole Moore cycles. Even if you believe that they're still only 1.5 years each, that pushes back the predictions by almost 20 years. Just for the inputs.
2. Here's the fun part: neurons form new connections and give up old ones all the time. Your brain is essentially one giant FPGA, that gets rewired all the time.
Biological neurons do it by physically growing dendrites which connect to an axon terminal. A "silicon neuron" can't physically modify traces on the chip. You have to include the gates and busses that switch an input to another nearby source from thousands available outputs of another "neuron". _Somehow_. E.g., a crossbar kind of architecture. For each of those thousands of inputs.
Now granted, we'll probably figure out something smarter out, and save some transistor for that reconfiguration, but even that only goes so far.
There go a few more Moore cycles.
4. And that was before we even get to the neuron body. That thing must be able to do something with that many inputs, plus stuff like deciding by itself to rewire its inputs, or even (yep we have documented cases) one area of the brain decides to move to a whole other "module" of the brain or take over its function. It's like an ALU deciding to become a pipeline element instead in a CPU, because that element broke. In the FPGA analogy, each logic block there is complex enough to also decide by itself how it wants to rewire its inputs, and what it wants to be a part of.
There are some pretty complex proteins at work there.
So frankly even for the neuron body itself, imagining that one single transistor is enough to approximate it, is plain old dumb.
5. And that's before we even get to the waste we do with transistors nowadays. It's not like old transistor radios, where you thought twice how many you need, and what else you could use instead. Transistors on microchips are routinely used instead of resistors, capacitors, or whatever else someone needed there.
And then there are a bunch wasted because, frankly, noone ever designs a 100 million transistor chip by lovingly drawing and connecting each one by hand. We use libraries of whole blocks and software which calculates how to interconnect them.
So basically look at any chip you want, and it's not a case of 1 transistor = 1 neuron. It's more like a whole block of them would be equivalent to one neuron.
I.e., we're far from approaching a human brain in silicon. We're more like approaching the point where we could simulate the semi-autonomous ganglion of an insect's leg in silicon. Maybe.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the sad thing is that some people actually do use Google as some kind of definitive proof. And often not even as in "Google found a peer-reviewed authority on the domain, who explained that X is true". More like if searching for X returned 200,000 hits and searching for !X returned 100,000, then obviously X is true.
We've even had an article recently which claimed you can know who's gonna win an election, by how many hits Google returns when you search for their name. And when it all broke down for Ron Paul, they just handwaved an and removed it from the sample, rather than wonder if their hypothesis is false.
Now I'm not saying that Google is making us stupid, but that IMHO stupid people unsurprisingly end up doing stupid things with it. So far.
On the other hand, maybe it is worth wondering what long term effects it might have. Calculators didn't make everyone stupid either, and even less so in the short run, but some half a century later we have a lot less people who can do even elementary addition or subtraction without one. And a lot of people who not only took calculators as an excuse to not learn their 1+1=2, but as an excuse to not learn any maths at all. Why bother, when some calculator or computer or cash register can do it for you anyway?
But the real harm is that maths isn't just about being able to sum your grocery bill in your head. Most of it is about long abstract operations with all sorts of funny letters, so to speak. Actually calculating a result for some particular values of those variables, is the least interesting part of it. But that's based on concepts and theorems, which are in turn based on others, and so on all the way to that 1+1=2 you start with in primary school. And the more you skip at the front, in the name of "bah, I'll just use a calculator for that", the less of a foundation for the whole edifice you'll have later.
In effect, it's not just that some people use a tool (well or badly, as the case may be), but that a lot of people effectively don't have the foundation to understand anything maths-related. I.e., they won't even know what an integral is, or when to use the funny tool to calculate one for them.
And in some countries already the maths and science education in school is gradually getting dumbed down, so they just avoid the issue altogether. So regardless of whether they're teh uber-nerdy genius, or the school jock, whole generations do end up knowing less when they finish school.
So I sorta idly wonder if, given ample time, Google and Wikipedia will have the same effect on, say, logic. Why bother learning to follow an inferrence and examine the premises, when you can probably just Google the conclusion later? Let's just hope I'm wrong.
Huh? Having actually read all the threads about him, including this one, I see:
1. That about as many people argued that he's guilty, as people argued that he's innocent.
2. People guilt-tripping themselves by association for using his filesystem. (By comparison, I don't think many people burned their copy of Naked Gun just because OJ was in it.)
3. In true nerdy tradition, the argument mostly centered around the semantics of "beyond reasonable doubt." Which some people seemed to believe means "beyond all possible doubt, no matter how unrealistic or far fetched."
I don't think even #3 it had as much to do with wanting to believe Hans was innocent, as with generally defining that term. We're nerds, we need exact definitions, not vague concepts. And it doesn't help that some (but not all) of those involved seem have a certain mind frame that reduces everything to black and white.
You can see that kind of OCPD in lots of discussions about anything else. If program X isn't perfect, then it's complete crap. If company Y isn't saintly, then it's the spawn of Satan. If business decision Z isn't the absolute best in some aspect, far from realizing it's just a debatable compromise among many other possible compromises, it's painted as utter idiocy and as taken by a bunch of drooling morons who can't even tie their own shoes in less than 3 tries. Etc.
And here we saw the same thing: _some_ (but not all) of the people were just arguing whether it's acceptable to convict _anyone_ of first degree murder with less evidence than him doing the murder in the middle of a stadium and showing the the body to everyone. And, mind you, although I probably sound critical of them, the discussion itself does have some philosophical merit. Exactly where do you draw the threshhold of "reasonable doubt"?
Some seem to have a born aversion and distrust of any kind of authority or institution of the State, including the courts of law. Hence, they'll side with anyone who's being picked on by the State.
And some of us just engaged in some idle speculations, basically to the effect of whether facts A, B and C support the conclusion D. Just because it's the kind of intellectual exercise that makes us nerdy in the first place.
So basically if you looked at all this, and all you saw was "tribal-level prejudice", then you're either seriously lacking perception or are just trolling.
No, I mean the nitrogen in fertilizers comes from the air.
_Some_ of it ends up as CO2, but a lot of it is used to produce more of those fungi and bacteria. They don't just appear by magic, you know. And a lot ends up in organic compounds in the ground that aren't that volatile. Yes, they might end up as CO2 too eventually, but it'll take a really long time. Especially when it's by now underground.
To put it otherwise, if all corpses ended up as CO2, then graves in a cemetery would pretty much end up popping open from all that CO2.
So, yes, I'm still saying that _some_ CO2 is removed in the process.
As somewhat of a socialist (the Western European kind, not the Soviet kind), I sometimes find it funny how "left" or "liberal" (which in most of Europe actually means "right") has become a blanket insult in the USA for anyone and anything who's not for giving more money and unchecked power to the corporations and billionaires. Especially how it's supposed to be some kind of monster hell-bent on destroying the industry and humanity.
The "left" is mostly about how you divide the pie, so to speak, not about trying to destroy industry. We're all Keynesians, yes, both Europe and the USA, we all live in a massive overproduction potential, and we all have our governments spend some of that excess to keep it going. Essentially any first world country can produce orders of magnitude more than it needs, and has to find a way to (A) use that surplus for something useful, and/or (B) keep some people busy doing something that doesn't produce anything. Giving corporations more money just results in B. More and more people are hired to engage in nearly zero-sum games, like marketing past a point. Yes, it stimulates consumption a bit too too, but even that (1) only goes so far, and past a point the effects are infinitesimal, and (2) is ultimately a way to waste some production capacity instead of just dumping those resources off a hill.
There's something inherently heartless to argue that someone poor should be denied healthcare, so someone else who's already rich can buy a new barbecue grill. Or that you should dump that excess into having more lawyers and marketers, instead of having a few more doctors.
And no, it hasn't destroyed the industry so far. Germany for example was doing great with a socialist economy, until it had to absorb the obsolete industry of East Germany. Now it's recovering pretty nicely from that again. All the leftist stuff like good welfare, good medical care, unions being officially a part of the corporate management, etc, haven't really resulted in anything bad so far.
But anyway, I digress. That's really what the "left" is about: how you distribute the wealth. The GINI index. The idea that someone below poverty line can use an extra buck on his wage, more than the CEO needs another ten millions on an already ridiculously high wage.
The "Greens" are something else. It's something orthogonal to it all. Yes, they too want some taxes, but then they want to spend it on their own ideas, not on (immediately) improving the lot of the poor. I'm not necessarily saying that it's good or bad, just that it's something orthogonal.
Basically what I'm trying to say is that the political spectrum consists of a hell of a lot of variables, not just one axis between left and right. The ecological agenda is just another axis in that multidimensional space, rather than something inherently leftist.
Well, yes, but at the same time those plants absorb some CO2 out of the atmosphere to grow. And then you eat them, shit it, and it's not going back into the atmosphere. Or they get turned to clothes, paper (quick-growing trees are used as crops to produce paper), etc, which end up in a landfill and again it's not quite going back into the atmosphere.
So while some CO2 _is_ produced in raising those crops, yes, including in creating their fertilizer, they also remove some CO2 from the air. So the balance isn't as doom-and-gloom as you seem to assume.
Second, we're talking fertilizers, not plastics. Most of what those plants need is nitrogen, which actually comes from the air. (Fossil fuels don't contain much nitrogen.) E.g., ammonium nitrate is nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen. There is no carbon in it at all. (And even if there were, it would go into the plant, not back into the air.)
Technically, some carbon is used there, but at least for the Haber process that's methane gas from natural gas fields. There's buggerall need to start from oil to produce it. And it's recycled back into methane by the end of the process, so it's basically used more as a catalyst than "OMG, dumping CO2 into the atmosphere." The Odda Process is even more fun, in that at least one variant of it can actually use CO2 and fix it to CaCO3.
So all that remains as a source of pollution there is that, like any factory, it needs some energy. It doesn't necessarily mean oil, though. I'm sure you can use nuclear power instead, which, for whatever other sins it may have, has exactly zero CO2 emissions.
ROFL. 2.6 million? That's it? The _whole_ market? That's not even the budget for _one_ game on any proper gaming platform.
Sorry, I didn't know those numbers, but if that's it, now I understand why they call it lackluster.
... is the fact that the UK too used to get most games 1 year after the USA. And don't think that any actually got internationalized to UK English and voice actors with UK accents. Mostly it was the US game, 1 year later. No idea if that's still the case, but it wouldn't surprise me too much.
Even weirder was buying a US import version of Sega's PSO for the Dreamcast, over half a year IIRC before it got released in Europe. The weird thing is: the US version already had all the language options. I don't mean just that it also had Spanish, but it also had German and French. So someone from the USA could jolly well play the game in German or French, but the people in Germany or France weren't supposed to.
Exactly what they needed that delay for, I don't even know. Certainly not for translations.
And your point is, what? That without such a law, the companies wouldn't have kept that data and shared and sold it? It's happening in the USA every day.
;)
What we still have here is: (1) a legal limit to how long they can keep it, and (2) rather restictive conditions as to exactly what you can keep, _and_ (3) they're legally forbidden to use that data without a court order. Plus (4) such stuff as that you can actually demand a copy of any data held about you, and ask to have it corrected if it's wrong.
And btw, #3 applies to the government too. What the law says is _not_ that all data on everyone is automatically given to some kind of secret police. It says that if they need the data for one particular person, they have to get a court order to access it. So it's actually a lot more tame than you're trying to make it sound.
By now it's probably quite obvious why we accepted those laws. Mostly because of the promises of #2, #3 and #4. There are some decades of everyone else living pretty well by those rules, and yes they applied to everyone else too. We're quite used by now that companies actually obey the laws. Because they tend to get spanked rather hard when they don't.
We're also a lot less scared of the government than you seem to be over there, which is probably another factor in why you're so disgusted and I'm not. Over here we actually ask the government to do a whole bunch of things, not try to hide from it and fight it off. Mostly because the democratic safeguards tend to actually work, so we don't fear the government too much. If they can convince a judge to grant them access to my data, well, they probably have quite a convincing reason why.
Now in hindsight, it was bit optimistic, I guess. As this case shows, it only takes one rogue company or even more likely one rogue employee who sends all the data to his best buddy in America. Maybe we'll have to fix those laws after all.
But since you're that disgusted at European laws, is the situation much better over there? If I had to make a bet, I'd be pretty confident your average corporation left to its own devices would get worse ideas in all 4 aspects. I'd guess that they're (1) keeping it for ever, and (2) keeping anything they can lay their hands on, and (3) can sell it to world+dog if they can make a quick buck that way, and (4) you have no way to even know what they keep until they lose your identity and have to notify you.
And if you think that your government can't subpoena all your data from all those companies that keep a dossier on you, then you're rather idealistic. In fact, I seem to remember some news that that over there they figured out ways to access it even without a court order. So how is it worse in Europe?
But, hey, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. You're the one ranting that Europe is such an Orwellian place
There is a law that requires them to collect the data, _but_ (1) only now it goes into effect, if it's the one I'm thinking of, and (2) it _does_ specify that they're not allowed to share or even access it without a court order. So, yes, a law was broken.
Look, let's put it like this: if you think your telcos, or any other company isn't collecting data about you anyway, you're an idealist. While actually requiring them to collect it was probably dumb, don't imagine that it wouldn't have happened in the USA and/or without such a law. Companies seem especially fond of collecting all the data they can.
What _does_ remain is that here we still have (1) a legal limit after which they have to delete any data that's not vital to their doing business with you. Even retention laws say, basically, that even if you're required to log that data, after X months without any court asking for it, you still has to delete it. (2) An interdiction to share it, which is what these merry fucktards did.
Both are head over shoulders over the situation in the USA, as far as I know it. It's not perfect, but it's still an improvement.
Google alone is enough example of a company pulling all available fallacies as to why they should keep your search data _longer_ than even these data-retention laws demand. It seems to me like these laws here still actually reduce the interval and quantity of data held about you. It's not as perfect as when they were demanding that it be deleted immediately, but it's still better than what unchecked corporations do on their own.
Umm, I wasn't aware that you can "vote out" a telco. (Or we would have voted out the dimwits from the Deutsche Telekom a long time ago.) Much less that you can vote out some researcher which doesn't even live there.
There were some data retention and privacy laws that were definitely broken. Which I strongly suspect is why they put an explicit condition to not be named. And from there it's up to the police and courts to apply those laws. I don't think you can vote on _that_. And it's probably better so, because justice isn't and shouldn't be a popularity contest.
The voting in and out has to do with the fact that we got those laws in the first place. You know, instead of weasel arguments about how the 4th amendment doesn't apply (A) to the government (then to who the heck _does_ the US constitution apply?), or (B) if it wasn't literally your papers or house being searched, or (C) by conveniently defining that if it happened over some company's lines, it's in public and noone really needs a warrant to observe that, or (D) if it allows a company to earn a few more bucks, or a few other variations.
And _if_ any politician wanted to make this thing legal, or give them a free pass, _then_ we'll vote him out. But I really doubt that they will. At worst we'll see some impotent posturing, and claims that it's impossible to determine who and whether a law has actually been broken or the researcher in case has just invented the data. (Which I strongly suspect he'll claim, once the ball starts rolling.)
But seriously, I doubt that any major politician, at least in Germany, will want to be seen as officially on the side of letting any company sell your data to the highest bidder. Although the country did slide a bit to the right lately, it's by far not at the point where anyone wants to be seen as arguing that the corporations should have unchecked power over their customers. It would be a _very_ unpopular point of view, and their political opponents would use it to the max to their own advantage. Sometimes even members of their own coalition.
(Here elections usually don't get "won" by any party, but about some uneasy coalition of several parties, to total more than 51% between all of them. With the implication that if you make yourself extremely unpopular, you might not even need to wait for the next elections to be voted out: a coalition can reform the other way around over night, moving you from head of the winning coalition to the largest opposition party. It's not a usual occurrence, but it can happen.)
But anyway, we'll wait and see. So far it's hardly some orwellian government plot, it's just one company which broke the law. It happens in the USA too, without always meaning that it reflects some government stance. See, for example: Enron.
From here, it can go in a lot of possible directions, not just "it's the way the government wants it". If it goes the wrong way, we'll vote some politicians out. If not, not. It's really that simple.
You seem to assume that if they read it, they'd send you your pizza patent back and tell you to go fly a kite. That's actually incorrect. You'd probably just get the patent anyway. Heck, you could even patent the looks of a pizza.
A patent attorney actually patented his son's way to swing in an oval shape on a swing. The patent office originally didn't want to let it through. The father argued that although there are a couple of patents on swing designs, none is about how to swing on one. He got the patent.
IIRC, someone patented a cap with an american football goalpost on top, and a little ball on a spring to bob around between the posts. It's so stupid, it makes even a propeller beanie seem decent by comparison.
Speaking of american football, there's IIRC a patent on a crochet "replica" of a helmet.
A quick googling also produced this abomination of a hat that claims to be patented.
Etc.
So basically not only you would probably get a patent on that pizza layout, it wouldn't even be the worst you could do with patents. By far. All legal and with them actually reading it.
Actually, think about it. What made KOTOR probably the best non-flight-sim SW game, or generally movie-based game, was the fact that Bioware chose to just move 5000 years away from the SW story and make their own epic story in that universe. It's technically the same universe, but 5000 years is enough for whole civilizations to rise and fall... repeatedly. So nobody expects it to be an exact clone or rehash of the movie.
I mean, think about, say, Jedi in SWG. They actually launched an official MMO without Jedi, 'cause OMG, Darth Vader hunted them all. (And without spaceships too, if the Jedi issue wasn't enough issue.) It's a bit like selling a racing game without _cars_. Not that Sony didn't pull that stunt too.
Then they add Jedi, but with an _unholy_ grind involved to get one. Again, 'cause, OMG, Darth Vader hunted them so we can't have whole armies of arse-clowns with lightsabers.
Yet moving as little back in time as the Clown Wars... err... Clone Wars, would have provided an official timeline where just that happened: whole armies of arse-clowns ran around with lightsabers. All canon.
The NGE added lots of Jedi, but, among the many embuggerances of it, it just turned the whole game into what we all hate about _bad_ games based on movies: it became just a bad merchandising exercise. You know, just like printing Darth Vader's mug on a t-shirt: it does nothing except use it to milk some money from fans.
Now suddenly you had Han Solo personally saving you (and every newbie for that matter), Darth Vader and his whole armada after you, Jabba The Hut personally giving you quests, etc. And while it made some sense when I started a new Jedi there, it stopped making any sense whatsoever when I went, basically, "wait, let's see what happens when I make a Twilek dancer." Turns out that the same happens. Darth Vader apparently hunts those too, not only Jedi.
And I'm not convinced that there'd be that much they can do. The events of the original trilogy basically dominate that time interval, so there's not much else of epic importance you can do without breaking compatibility with it. You can't pull, for example, a "kill Onyxia" quest without people going, "wait, something this big should have been in the movies."
Again, moving back or forth in time a bit would have provided ample oportunity to actually make a good game with a story of its own, instead of a merchandising exercise. If you look at WoW, Blizzard did the same thing: they didn't try to milk Warcraft 3 by making you run around in the same war and meet Grom and the gang, but moved a bit forward in time and made it its own game.
So basically if Lucas eventually decides to make another SW MMO, pulling a KOTOR is the only really viable way. And it makes sense too.
Plus, let's face it, the vast majority of the problems of SWG weren't because of the SW license. There is nothing inherent in SW that says a game based on it must be a "clusterfucked abomination". The problems of SWG were because basically, Raph "I wrote the book about fun" Koster is another John Romero. His claim to glory was that basically he was a peon at Origin while Lord British made UO, and eventually got in charge... at a time where EA didn't want any new content anyway, but just bug-fixes. But he wasted no time in telling everyone how great a designer that makes him. Again, much like John Romero about his time at Id. In practice, he couldn't design worth shit, and spent his time polishing his own statue and arguing why
A) he's right and the players are wrong. You don't know what you really like and dislike in a game. The Great Man Koster does.
B) anything he doesn't feel like working on (e.g., "single-player content" like quests), is a fad and will go away.
C) he's got an excuse, 'cause he's a pioneer in a new genre. (And here we thought SWG was _third_ generation MMO and had no excuse to repeat what was known to be mistakes.)
D) you should stop comparing his game to WoW, 'cause WoW isn't _that_ successful. See, it
Since 1984, porn has become a lot wider available. Not that it didn't exist before, but now you don't even have to drive and rent a VHS cassette. A majority of men has seen a lot more than six weeks worth of porn in their lives, and the numbers for women are rising too. (I wonder what porn causes in those, then. They start thinking rape is OK too?) Look around you at the mall, and at least half the people you see are viewing porn regularly, or did at some point.
If there were that big an influence, we'd see the effects all over the bloody place. I mean, seriously, you if you have causation you must have correlation too. Not the other way around, duly noted, but causation => correlation every single time.
Did the number of rape offenses rise signifficantly? No, I don't think so. In fact, it seems to decline with the availability of internet porn. Hmm.
Did it cause widespread mis-treating and demeaning attitudes towards women? I don't know about the USA, so feel free to fill in the blanks, but at least in the less-prudish continental western Europe I see not much of that. You see naked boobs even on billboards and on ads on busses here in Germany (no hardcore stuff, though), and brothels are all over the place, but it's also one of the most equal minded countries. IIRC, it's got one of the most equal women/men ratios in tech jobs, and in a lot of other jobs too. And I just don't see that callousness towards women all around me by now. Do you?
If it causes an appetite for more deviant, bizarre, or violent kinds of pornography, then there must be a cap to that slope. Because we haven't had any "breakthrough" in extreme porn since 1984. All those guys watching porn for all these years, should by now be at the stage of raging lunatics that don't get off on anything short of Death By A Thousand Cuts by now. And it just didn't happen. Most people barely progress a bit past missionary position in their taste for perversions. There are some more "extreme" niches, but the keyword is that they're niches.
And here we come to the meat of what that study's about:
Ah, heh, so that's what it's about. "Oh noes! People get as immoral as to sometimes have a mistress too! And some even have sex without marriage!!" I.e., OMFG, some people are no longer (pretending to be) models of puritan morals! The world is coming to an end! Heh. I'm sorry. You had my attention for a bit while it was about rape (a heinous crime, no doubt) and demeaning women. But if they had to pad the list with, basically, "oh noes! people are not staying monogamous!!" as teh uber-danger to humanity, it speaks volumes about the mind-set that produced it and for which audience.
;) We have stuff like Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund thanking the city of Konstanz in writing for providing some 1500 prostitutes for the Council of Constance. (You know, the famous one where they burned Jan Hus at the stake and thus started the Hussite Wars.) We have such civilizations as the ancient greeks, which were as close to amoral sexually as it gets, even by the standards of a modern hardcore addict. Etc
And never mind that they did so before porn too. I hate to be the one who breaks your (or their) fantasy bubble, but we have a stretch of some thousands of years where people had lovers and mistresses and premarital sex, long before porn movies. We have renaissance authors writing such things as that the unmarried women of their time being saits from the front, and martyrs from the back. A reference as thinly veiled as it gets to anal sex. (I know, buggrit, and here we were enjoying a nice fantasy in which only porn causes people to get such perverted ideas
It's usually even easier than having to plant it on his laptop. (Not that that's hard either, given most people's security skills.)
Just post a few of those photos online, and chances are the Interpol will start wondering who's the adult child molester there. See, for example: Interpol appeal unmasks US actor as child abuse suspect.
There's even a funny bit at the end about another guy where the police had photos with his face "swirled" to hide his identity, so the police just reversed the filter. So you could even make it more damning by doing just that with that CG photo: apply some easy to undo Photoshop or Gimp filter, so it looks more believable. (After all, someone trying to frame him, wouldn't have tried to hide his face, right?;) Heck, if done right, it could even hide the imperfections of that CG photo.
There we go. No access to his laptop is needed.
Now, admittedly, actually planting it on the computer would make it easier to prosecute all the wayx through. But then again, if you just want to make someone's life hell for a few weeks, even the purely online version will do just fine.
It's not that simple.
For a start, advertising doesn't really pay big bucks any more. We've had companies flop during the peak of advertising money in the dot-con years with that model, what makes you think it's more viable now?
A quick search says that the Cost Per Click (i.e., what the advertising companies pay) can be as low as 1 cent per click. After the ad provider takes their share, it's even less money for the site carrying the ads. And that's per _click_. So if every single person downloading your music were to actually click a banner per song downloaded (fat chance) and the ad provider gave you the full cent (fat chance), you'd need to sell some thousands of songs per month just to pay for your hosting costs. Probably more, since you use bandwidth too.
Pay per view, even less. If you go really per view, expect it to be small fractions of a cent.
Remember, you're not Penny Arcade or PvP Online as a musician. You're not going to make a new song per day, and serve an ad or two with each one.
The RIAA members also provide one valuable service: they create a scarcity via marketing. There are hundreds of thousands of girls who can sing just as well as Britney Spears, and don't look much worse. But there's only one Britney Spears. And boy band members are even more dime a dozen, and chosen mostly on how well they look (i.e. how wet would they get a 16 year old girl seeing them on stage.) Not on any skills in composing that music or expressing anything profound. There are a few tens of million of young guys who'd be not much worse than, say, Backstreet Boys, and some would probably be only better.
So while it's easy to say "OMG, musician X is only getting a pittance out of the CD sales, and gets all the money out of concerts anyway," the more cruel reality is that musician X would be yet another _nobody_ without the publisher. Maybe a thousand people would know about his music, and maybe a dozen of them could be arsed to show up at a concert.
To put it otherwise, it's an economy of massive overproduction. If left to the free market, you'd be about as able to make a money out of music as you'd make money out of your farm in 1929. When there's 10 times more produced than anyone needs, and the products are perfectly interchangeable, the price doesn't just go 10 times lower. It spirals down to the point where nobody can make a living out of it.
Now I'm not saying it's necessarily the best model for society, but that's how it works.
And the moral of the story is: well, maybe a better model can be found, but it will have to be a better one than, basically, "but I want them to work for me for a tenth of a cent in ads."
Gross, that's pretty obvious. What I can't understand is the disproportionate reactions of people proclaiming their _horror_ or _shock_ at it. You know, people proclaiming their wanting to claw their eyes out, or whatnot.
Basically all I'm saying is that there are normally quite a few shades between "gross" and "horror". (And there's an even bigger gap between horror and matching one's tastes, so feel free to stop being OCPD about it any time you wish;)
I'm saying that there is _no_ low end Mac, that's the whole point. Out of two people, who bought equal generation computers (to skip that "new" word you don't like), the PC is on the _average_ lower spec. Not because there's something wrong with the PC architecture, but because el-cheapo beige-box PCs exist at all. For everyone who buys a l33t Alienware rig, there are 10 who buy a minimum spec machine. Hence slow downs and other such problems are inherently easier to notice on all the underpowered PCs.
Look, I'm _not_ trying to start a "Macs are expensive" flame or anything, so I wonder why do you automaticaly get on that defense. All I'm saying is, basically, "there are a _lot_ of PCs which are lower end than anything Apple ever sold at the same generation, and it's _those_ that have a major problem with Vista." If anything, I'm saying positive stuff about Macs there. (For a change.)
Well, we could debate what people _should_ do, but I'm just saying that a lot of them _do_ buy a cheap computer.
You know, I don't quite get it. I've seen bigger arseholes in upper management or on the cover of some management magazines, and noone gets a shock at seeing those ;)
Well, now seriously, it was just an arse. Admittedly a rather stretched one, but I gather there must be _some_ demand for seeing that on a woman, judging by the whole category of porn and whole sites dedicated to it. I haven't heard of people reeling in shock after being exposed to almost seeing a <insert female pornstar>'s kidneys up her rear end after an anal scene. Or sometimes in the middle of it.
Seriously, it wasn't the most appealing or aesthetically pleasing picture out there, I'll grant that, but I just can't figure out the _horror_ some people claim to have experienced seeing it. It seems a rather disproportionate response. You'd figure that a simple, "hmm, how's this relevant to the topic at hand?" and hitting the back button would be enough for all practical purposes. Horror or shock? Erm, why?
Or was it just the implicit hint of homosexuality that gives the average male in some parts of the world the idea that he must seem properly outraged and horrified by it, lest someone might get the idea that he's gay too? Not trolling, just genuinely trying to figure it out.
No, not really. I for one want him stopped because he's a fucking lunatic, and I don't see why such lunatics belong in a court of law. He's still free to rant on his own time, to whoever listens to him, but I genuinely don't see how he's fit to help determine if someone's guilty or not.
It's not just about games, but about all his surrealistic antics. Seriously, read even the sample on Wikipedia, and you tell me if it doesn't sound like someone clinically insane.
Nope, sorry. In fact: good grief, no. When I have something to say, I want it said in a professional way. The last thing I want is my position to become associated with raving lunatics, idiots trolling for attention and abuses of the judicial system.
He's acting like a troll fanboy, or what we'd call one on any forum. And that's something some people don't seem to understand: annoying fanboys and zealots don't actually help get your point across. Regardless of whether it's "Linux is ready for the desktop" or "games are good for you", you want it to come across as a helpful and even-handed opinion. You don't want it to become a case of, basically, "oh, heh, it's those trolling fanboys again, blowing stuff out of proportion." Annoying people for attention is bad too, because if you've annoyed them, they're automatically inclined to _not_ listen to anything you have to say.
In Slashdot terms, you want advocacy to come across as +5 Informative or +5 Interesting, not as -1 Flamebait.
It's not even as much a personal opinion. Read any advocacy faq, and it will tell you the same. People like JT are _not_ the kind you'd want as advocates, for any domain or idea. JT is the kind of obnoxious troll that the real advocates wish would STFU already and stop polluting the channel. _Especially_ if they profess to be on your side.
Well, isn't it the same thing that Microsoft FUD used against, say, Linux? Basically, "OMG, you'll need to learn a different GUI and, verily, as a company retrain everyone from CEO to janitor, if you switch from Windows."
Mind you, I use the term FUD here rather loosely, because I think that, while MS's propaganda did include a lot of exaggeration and fear-mongering, the underlying idea _is_ true. Most people don't think that learning a new OS, just for its sake, is fun. The computer is just a tool, and they want to just do their job with it with a minimum of extra effort. That includes that once they learned a skill set, they want to keep applying it all over the place. It's not even a MS invention, it's how we got the Common User Access spec from IBM. MS just adopted it (and mistreated it like the stereotypical evil stepmother;)
I see you even answered your own concerns at the end of that phrase.
If you're a Mac guy, you have a lot of disposable income to blow on hardware. Now I won't get into whether the Macs are overpriced or not debate at this point, but let's just say they don't cater to the bottom end of the market. There isn't really a new Mac that's equivalent to the 300$ boxes people buy at WalMart. Again, I'm not debating whether the hardware is worth the price, but I'm saying that it genuinely _is_ higher spec than most PCs people have at home. And than what most moms and pops on minimal wage jobs can afford, PC or Mac.
Vista _is_ a resource hog, and it crawls on most new computers. Aero alone spanks and tortures a cheap shared-memory GPU like a bad dominatrix, and once you disable it, you're left with something which, for most normal people's needs and understanding of it... still acts like a bloated and slow XP. It doesn't really offer much that Joe Average would need on his home PC, or even notice the difference, and XP didn't have.
The memory requirements alone are a problem on a cheap 512 MB RAM PC, and make stuff swap that ran perfectly well on XP... especially after half of that RAM gets filled with crapware. (And I don't mean just viruses, but also all the idiocies from RealPlayer to, yes, OOo who think it's a great idea to default to keep themselves loaded in RAM all the time to seem faster-loading. You can end up with a 500 pixel wide tray nowadays without doing anything special.)
Vista's constant indexing can make many computers crawl, especially after you install an antivirus. Which ends up basically scanning each file again and again each time the indexing accesses that file. So basically it's like running with a full antivirus scan in the background at all times. Poor or sometimes wrong IDE drivers also don't help, as they can make any version of Windows basically sit and wait for IDE transfers. Now neither of those is a MS problem as such, but the combination is deadly anyway. Vista essentially amplifies what would have been a minor problem (it's ok to wait an extra half a second when you open a file, while the antivirus scans it) into something horrible (it's not ok to have your computer busy virus-scanning all files in the background, as a result of that indexing.)
Again, that won't seem much for you, if you have a couple thousand dollars to blow on a top-of-the-line Mac, and it wouldn't seem much to anyone who can blow a comparable sum on a l33t PC either. But it can be horribly annoying to someone on a $300 beige box.
Now before I start IANAA (I Am Not An Anthropologist) but I did read a bit on the topic at one point, to try to understand how people work, so to speak.
One thing that stuck in my head was that there's a relatively large disconnect between what people say in surveys and what they actually do. What people as in surveys isn't as much deliberately lying, or even being aware that they lie, but basically describing an ideal "self" that they'd like to be or were taught to be. They describe someone who's more socially acceptable. E.g.,
- A (formerly) hunter-gatherer tribe had traditionally a martial culture glorifying brave hunters and warriors. So in a survey almost all males described themselves as hunters and warriors. The problem? They had actually gradually switched to agriculture some time ago. Most of them didn't even have a weapon, and hadn't hunted or fought in their life.
- A community prided themselves in helping each other and doing stuff together and things like that. So in a survey they said that, yeah, verily, they work the fields together and help each other build a barn, etc. Except in practice the last time either actually happened was some half a century ago.
- At one point where meat prices went up, they asked people whether they eat more or less meat. Most said, basically, "screw this, I'll eat less of that until the prices come down. That'll show 'em." Except they also looked at sales data, and actually rummaged through that town's garbage to see what packaging people throw away. Meat consumption had actually gone _up_.
It turns out that you might be better off observing them, whenever possible, than asking people to describe themselves.
What I'm getting at here is, basically, yes, the same applies to "I have nothing to hide" declarations in survey. If people are under the impression that a nice person wouldn't do stuff they need to hide from their neighbours, they'll adjust their perceptions of themselves to think they are (closer to) that ideal nice person.
Additionally, I'd say that a lot of such behaviour changing is probably subconscious anyway. Probably the 89% just didn't spend much time analyzing and second guessing their own actions and conversations, nor asked themselves "exactly why am I not calling my old pal Mohammed Abd Jihad any more?" They just don't, and don't spend time navel-gazing and wondering about it.
For some probably cognitive dissonance kicked in a long time ago, and manufactured an acceptable model and an explanation anyway.
Ok, let's consider it.
Which is basically a non-factor, since the wiring gets it back to the right orientation anyway.
And it does saccades that not only allow it to see in any direction anyway, but also greatly increase resolution.
It's got a low light mode, unlike most modern cameras which become 100% useless in low light. Most cameras you can buy need a flashlight even in relatively well artificially lit rooms, and become freaking useless at the light levels where the eye becomes predominantly B/W. So, hmm, between going monochrome and going blind, it seems to me that the eye wins, hands down.
Only in as much as any other piece of biology is. Even so, it can withstand a lot of things which would render a cheap camera useless. And it can self-heal from most things.
But it's wired to something which can do a reasonable job even with an unfocused image. Try an OCR or, better yet, image recognition in the same conditions, and you'll see some epic fail.
But let's talk about some other advantages:
- better resolution than almost any digital camera
- saccades help increase the effective resolution even more
- some image processing and compression is built right into the retina, so it needs _far_ less bandwidth on the optic nerve than a modern camera would
- takes up less space than a camera able to focus over the same range of distances, and get similar image quality. (Hint: it doesn't need to move the lens waay forward and back to focus.)
- can deal with a wider range of brightness in the same image (most cameras need postprocessing so if the bride looks ok, the groom doesn't look like a light-sucking black hole, or viceversa)
- it can even rewire itself to deal with stuff it wasn't designed to deal with. E.g., you can get a camera-style photo-receptor as an implant against blindness, and the neurons in the eye and brain will rewire themselves to work with the fundamentally different image it gives. (That's one amazing thing about neurons: they can essentially reverse-engineer almost any kind of body, and learn to use it.)
Etc.
Now I'm not saying it's _perfect_, nor "proof of creation". But it's a lot better than you seem to assume, anyway. We're not quite at the point where we can equal it. Yet. We will be eventually, but not yet. We can do better in _some_ aspects, but often at the price of doing something else worse.
It might be less low hanging than most people think. Most predictions I've seen for, basically, "OMGWTFBBQ, computers are gonna be as intelligent as humans" are based on, basically, "OMGWTFBBQ, we'll soon have as many transistors on a chip as there are neurons in a human brain." Especially marketing depts love to hint that way now and then, but they're not the only culprits.
Unfortunately,
1. A neuron isn't a transistor. Even the inputs alone would need a lot more transistors to implement at our current technology level.
An average brain neuron takes its inputs from an _average_ of 7000 other neurons, with the max being somewhere around 10k, IIRC. The vast majority of synapses are one-way, so an input coming through input 6999 can't flow back through inputs 0 to 6998. So even just to implement that kind of insulation between inputs, you'd need an average of 7000 transistors per "silicon neuron" just for the inputs.
Let's say we build our silicon transistor to allow for 8k inputs, so we have only one modul repeated ad nauseam, instead of custom-designing different ones for each number of inputs between 5000 and 10000. Especially since, we'll see soon, that number of inputs doesn't even stay constant during the life of a neuron. It must accomodate a bit of variation. That's 2^13 transistors per neuron just for the inputs, or enough to push those optimistic predictions back by 13 whole Moore cycles. Even if you believe that they're still only 1.5 years each, that pushes back the predictions by almost 20 years. Just for the inputs.
2. Here's the fun part: neurons form new connections and give up old ones all the time. Your brain is essentially one giant FPGA, that gets rewired all the time.
Biological neurons do it by physically growing dendrites which connect to an axon terminal. A "silicon neuron" can't physically modify traces on the chip. You have to include the gates and busses that switch an input to another nearby source from thousands available outputs of another "neuron". _Somehow_. E.g., a crossbar kind of architecture. For each of those thousands of inputs.
Now granted, we'll probably figure out something smarter out, and save some transistor for that reconfiguration, but even that only goes so far.
There go a few more Moore cycles.
4. And that was before we even get to the neuron body. That thing must be able to do something with that many inputs, plus stuff like deciding by itself to rewire its inputs, or even (yep we have documented cases) one area of the brain decides to move to a whole other "module" of the brain or take over its function. It's like an ALU deciding to become a pipeline element instead in a CPU, because that element broke. In the FPGA analogy, each logic block there is complex enough to also decide by itself how it wants to rewire its inputs, and what it wants to be a part of.
There are some pretty complex proteins at work there.
So frankly even for the neuron body itself, imagining that one single transistor is enough to approximate it, is plain old dumb.
5. And that's before we even get to the waste we do with transistors nowadays. It's not like old transistor radios, where you thought twice how many you need, and what else you could use instead. Transistors on microchips are routinely used instead of resistors, capacitors, or whatever else someone needed there.
And then there are a bunch wasted because, frankly, noone ever designs a 100 million transistor chip by lovingly drawing and connecting each one by hand. We use libraries of whole blocks and software which calculates how to interconnect them.
So basically look at any chip you want, and it's not a case of 1 transistor = 1 neuron. It's more like a whole block of them would be equivalent to one neuron.
I.e., we're far from approaching a human brain in silicon. We're more like approaching the point where we could simulate the semi-autonomous ganglion of an insect's leg in silicon. Maybe.
6. And that's before we get to the probl
Netflix only ships in the USA, don't they?