The argument is that some giant corporation might convince or coerce somebody to bundle one of its products, creating a de facto monopoly.
And just to show that it's not just a theoretical concern: IIRC that's exactly what MS did at some point in the past. It negotiated a license with the OEMs where they paid the MS tax per computer sold, whether or not it actually had Windows on it.
The way it goes is sorta like this: let's say I make Product X that's shipped on 90% of your computers anyway. Then I come and offer you a, say, 20% discount if you pay it for all computers shipped, instead of actually counting licenses. Now there are basically two ways to think about it,
A) "well, hmm, that's not too bad. I'll keep offering the choice and at those numbers I still get a neat discount as a whole."
B) "wth, if I stop offering a choice, or severely discourage people from getting anything other than Product X, I'll get to make the most money out of that deal."
Chances are that even _if_ you started with version A, sooner or later B will dawn upon you. Historically it didn't take long for virtually all OEMs to be in camp B.
There are many variants of that scam. Another is to just flat out offer a bigger discount, the higher a percentage of your computers are shipped with product X. Or threaten to pull your discount altogether, if you try to push alternatives to my product X. Etc.
That's again not hypothetical, that's the threat MS used against IBM's OS/2: If you keep trying to push OS/2, you'll pay more for Windows, and lose the competitive edge on the computers you ship with Windows. IBM pretty much surrendered. Oh, they continued a half-arsed OS/2 effort to save face, but didn't even try to sell computers with OS/2 preinstalled any more.
Now you do need to have a certain market share to pull a stunt like that. But it's been done before, and not only by MS, so the concern is very real and pragmatic.
That's one thing that always made me wonder: to what length other games go to not let you just freaking (save and) quit when you want to.
E.g., the biggest madness in console gaming that I've personally experienced was a game where I didn't find a save point for 10 hours straight. Luckily it was on a Sunday, but I can tell you that by the end of it I had almost lost even the will to live, not just to play that stupid game any more.
Other games prey on people's social instincts, and essentially create situations along the lines of, "see, if you quit 39 of your guild mates will be boned, and might get really annoyed at you. It's not nice to let your guild mates down like that."
See the bloody 40-man raids of pre-BC WoW. I wouldn't know how the new endgame grind is, I have no desire to even try any endgame grind again.
Or see the "taskforces" of COH and "strikeforces" of COV, where if you quit, they can't even invite another player to replace you, so the group is really boned. It's as heavy handed as it can possibly get.
And to make it even more blatantly heavy handed, at least one of them (wossname, the Clockwork King one) contains 3 missions which are identical. In a row. It's 3 instances of the exact same mission, with the exact same maps and opponents, one after the other. For no obvious reason than to prolong the agony of that TF to a whole 12 to 14 hours. In which you can't quit without shafting the other 7 players.
E.g., even in PC games the idiocy still exists of either
A) making one replay the whole level when reloading or failing. Apparently just so that the publisher can claim X hours gameplay, on an otherwise ridiculously small game. Or
B) limited saves, so better not waste that precious save token on a quick 10 minutes gaming session.
Etc. I could give more examples, but you get the idea already.
And it just makes me wonder what do some game designers think they're gaining there.
Incidentally, I'm still convinced that this is a major factor in, well, creating conflicts and the gamer scare in some people. E.g., the parents see "OMG, he's addicted! I told him to come to dinner 10 minutes ago, and he's still glued to that damn console!" When probably the poor kid is just looking for a save point.
And, while I'm at it, when _did_ it become perfectly normal to prey on people's niceness and social instincts for a quick extra 13 Euro? (I.e., an extra month of that subscription.) Isn't that what we'd call "sociopathy" if someone did that in real life, face to face? Forget Milgram, maybe we have MMO design as a better example of how people can be turned into sociopaths.
Having played more than one MMO in my time, I disaggree.
1. EQ2 already tried the blatant commercialism route, where even single instances get sold as "adventure packs" if they aren't big enough for an expansion pack.
Heck, most of their expansion packs are the kind of micro-transactions that you seem to favour, only priced too much. Their _largest_ expansion pack, Echoes of Faydweyr, introduced... two races, their newbie-ish areas and capital cities. I.e., it was pretty much comparable in size to the Draenei and Blood Elves of Burning Crusade, including their two zones each. But without the whole Outlands, which made the meat of Burning Crusade. I.e., it was pathetically small compared to Blizzard's one EP.
I don't think it did much to bring new players. It did, however, leave a lot of people with a bad sensation of being fleeced, quartered and dimed by Sony.
2. More classes just create more confusion, and a bigger chaos trying to balance them all. Plus, since there are only so many types of actions that even make sense in a game, you either
A) end up with classes which are almost identical, and add nothing new except confusion. (Did we really need 6 f-ing kinds of priests, among which two almost identical druids, in EQ2? One is slightly better at healing, unless you put your talents in offense, and one is slightly better at offensive magic, unless you put your talents in healing. Or did we really need Brigand, Swashbuckler and Assassin as different _classes_ instead of Rogue specs? Seriously, wtf? One class and 3 talent trees would do the same job just fine.)
B) have to restrict what other classes can do, so they don't overlap. (E.g., to have a class whose specialty is healing over time, you have to not give others such spells, or a severely gimped choice of them. Or to make a sub-class of mage recognizable by its AOEs, you have to have a different one that's got none or very few/weak. See EQ2 again. Or better yet, see COH.) Unfortunately that also makes the class less interesting to play. One of the attraction points of WoW is that there's so much different stuff you can do, and combine in interesting ways. A class which mostly just does the same thing over and over again, is repetitive and ultimately boring. And that's what you get if you try too hard to slice classes too thin.
Even in miniature games, you have more than one kind of unit in your army, and can alternate what you take in your army. So you can have narrow-focus "classes", because the player can then just make a mix of several of them.
In a MMO you play exactly one character (at a time.) If that one character is pushed into a very narrow role, and just pushes the same few buttons over and over again, it becomes boring fast.
3. Unused instances don't require any CPU cycles, because they're, you know, not instanced. And it's fairly trivial to not update some NPCs if noone is within range. I don't know how Blizzard coded it, but I wouldn't be too surprised if they're not wasting much.
4. As someone who still plays lower level alts too, I can tell you that virtually no outdoors zones became baren Wastelands.
You can't do much in the Outlands until level 58. Technically you can get a portal there earlier (I had Shattrath as my home on one char as early as level 11), but it's not like you can even take any quests or do much there. So you'll still have to level up from 1 to 58 the old fashioned way. Other than a couple of level 55+ zones like Silithus or EPL, nothing was hit too hard by the expansion pack.
The former grind instances are pretty much the only ones which became wastelands. But let's be honest: that grind sucked to start with. That's why people dropped them as soon as they had half a choice.
5. The "boosting" market isn't that horrible a phenomenon. Sure, half the people do their low level instances by following a level 70, but you still can find others which do their instances the old fashioned way.
If anything, it's more of a problem of class than an
No offense, but as it's been said earlier, Einstein was an authority on this specific subject. He knew a lot about our universe and how it works, and advanced us in huge leaps and bounds in his short life. I doubt this is neither ad hominem nor appeal to authority. I would recognize Einstein as a clear authority on the matter.
No one, not even Einstein, knows enough yet about how the world works, to make a definitive judgment about whether God exists or not. We're all still discovering the details. If anyone knew exactly all the details -- which is what's needed to make such a definitive, unquestionable judgment -- then physicists everywhere could just pack their bags and go do something else.
It's like looking at the image on your screen in WoW and deciding that since I don't see a CPU in there, nor this mysterious entity called Blizzard, then it's a real world and noone created it. It's that freaking stupid to take any pronouncement, whether it's "god exists" or "god doesn't exist", as absolute truth, while we're still scratching the surface of how it works.
Einstein in particular was also wrong about a lot of other details of the universe. E.g., I already mentioned quantum mechanics. E.g., he was wrong about the Cosmological constant, by which he postulated a stationary universe without a beginning or end.
Do you understand even the implication of the last part? He based his whole views on the false notion of a universe which didn't have a beginning, thus logically also didn't need a creator. How much more "false authority" or "speaking out of ignorance" do you need there?
What would you suggest is the domain in question? Religiosity? Do you have to be a clergyman to have an opinion on God? That seems to be rather short sighted, especially since religion is an everyman's game. Just because you don't believe a God in the personal sense doesn't make your opinion any less valid.
I would suggest that:
1. The domain in question is, ultimately, physics. He didn't know enough outside his narrow domain of relativity to make that kind of pronouncement, and we already have plenty of examples of things outside his domain where he was wrong. And we still don't know enough. Essentially, _noone_ is enough of an authority there. Not him, nor the Pope, nor the Dalai Lama, nor Reverend Gimmecash from the bible belt, and certainly not the troll kiddies doing it to get attention.
2. Even if you want to also go into the religious/philosophical aspect of it, there are more qualified sources than either he or a clergyman. You know, people who studied both, before making a pronouncement about how they fit each other.
3. I never said you had to be a clergyman. In fact, the most prominent historians and/or philosophers from point #2 were either atheist or agnostic. But it helps to at least know what you reject, ya know?
4. Saying that "it's everyman's game", no offense, doesn't say that anyone knows what they're talking about. Phrenology and astrology were everyone's game too, once, but guess what? They were all wrong. Just because everyone is allowed to an opinion, doesn't mean one of them is an unchallengeable absolute truth.
That's what religion is! How the hell are we supposed to disprove something that is deeply personal and unprovable?
Then maybe the only intellectually-honest thing to do is admit that you _can't_ either prove or disprove it, instead of doing fallacies along the lines of "it's X, because Einstein said X." And that goes for both atheists waving their "religion is false, because Einstein didn't believe in God" battle banner, and theists rallying behind the "God exists because Einstein used the word God once, so he must have believed in God." Both are equally a fallacy.
That's not to say that you should pick a religion anyway, quite the contrary in fact. Feel free to ignore it until it's proven.
But the honest thing to do is basically to say, "I don't know." It's called agnosticism.
Actually, that "reverse ad hominem" has a name: appeal to false authority. You know, X is accepted as a smart and authoritative guy on his domain, X said Y, therefore Y must be true.
It's used all the time, sadly. Franklin sad this, Churchill said that, Einstein said that other thing, etc. Often raising somethig that's little more than a wisecrack or thinly veiled jab at one's opponents (Churchill for one was quite the wisecracker) to the rank of absolute truth, beyond all questioning. Just because the great man said it, and obviously someone that great can't be wrong about something outside the domain of his expertise. And very few people seem to be aware that it's a fallacy.
In reality, even _within_ one's domain of expertise, one can be wrong all right. Einstein was against quantum mechanics. Tesla didn't believe in relativity. (And in quite the fighting words: "[a] magnificent mathematical garb which fascinates, dazzles and makes people blind to the underlying errors. The theory is like a beggar clothed in purple whom ignorant people take for a king") Lorentz was _rabidly_ against Einstein's relativity, and even denounced it as bolshevism, although it was based on his own equations. Go figure.
There's a reason why the scientific method assumes that anything is falsifiable, and nothing is above questioning, no matter how big a genius said it. (Although, you're still supposed to present your evidence if you want to challenge it. Just personal disbelief or contradicting one's pet dogma aren't enough.)
Move outside what one really knows, and the association with some authority figure becomes fully irrelevant.
It may come as a shock, but people use metaphors or analogies or funny quotes all the time, without actually believing in the thing used as a metaphor.
E.g., we may spew or quote stuff like "Mother Nature always sides with the hidden flaw" or "Mother Nature is a bitch", without actually believing that there is such a sentient entity. Or when Stalin said that "artillery is the god of war", chances are he didn't mean it literally.
E.g., you may have noticed quotes from Futurama's characters before on Slashdot. I'll take a wild guess that most of those people don't actually believe that Bender or Dr Zoidberg are real.
More importantly, look at the context in which he said that. There was _nothing_ theistic about it. Einstein's view of the world was based on the evidenced-based large-scale physics, where stuff is very deterministic. More importantly, there seemed to be no obvious way to reconcile relativity with quantum physics, so one or the other had to be false. Einstein obviously favoured his own relativity, and had plenty of experimental confirmation (at macro level) that it's correct.
If anything, it just shows that even really really smart people can be occasionally wrong, when talking about stuff outside their expertise domain.
But the crucial thing is that it was based on falsifiable evidence, not on some belief in a deity whose will is absolute and whose habits can be guessed. There was nothing inherently theistic about that belief.
Yes, he used the word "god". It was just a metaphor/anthropomorphisation of the universe. He could have just as well used "mother nature" or just personified the universe itself. It was just supposed to get the point across, not be some declaration of faith in a god.
So from a pragmatic point of view, I'm left wondering why would they want to buy it from the USA when they can make one themselves.
At a wild and uninformed guess, I'm more like guessing that some US company got one of those bogus blanket patents that we all love to hate. You know, something along the lines of "using a sonic device as a non-lethal weapon".
China on the whole still doesn't seem that fond of IP as a whole, but they also don't seem ready to break all international treaties over it. See for example their investing in designing their own protocols and codecs, when they don't want to pay royalties, as opposed to just calling the whole thing bogus. But I'm guessing that if something is blanket enough, there may not be a way to reinvent your own without infringing anyway.
Well, the thing is: people are more than happy to jump to conclusions, without having any context for that photo.
E.g., I've waited for a taxi at a street corner before. Admittedly, I'm a guy, but I don't remember any law or moral code that forbids women to use taxis either. So it doesn't take too much of a stretch of imagination to allow for the possibility that those two girls too were just waiting for their ride. Or maybe they went shopping and are waiting for the BF of one of them to come give them a ride home. Or various other possibilities.
We don't actually have enough data to make a judgment there. If they're on the same corner for several hours straight, daily, yes, then they're probably working there. But we don't know that. We have just a snapshot that doesn't really say anything by itself.
But people are more than happy to jump to a conclusion anyway.
The same applies to a lot of other situations.
E.g., it's trivial to take someone's photo that looks like he's walking towards a brothel, when he's just really walking past it.
E.g., the most heinous case of "it's not what it looks" involved a UK chav filming himself pissing on what looked to him like a dead-drunk woman passed out on the side-walk. Turns out that she wasn't drunk, she was just dying of liver failure. (And before you jump to conclusions again, there _are_ ways to get that without being an alcoholic.) So instead of calling an ambulance, the retard filmed himself pissing on her while she was dying, and posted the movie.
No, not really. QC only works over dedicated, point-to-point fibre optic lines.
Do you understand that one crucial aspect? If I want to talk to you completely securely, with quantum handshake, and able to detect eavesdroppers, I would need one uninterrupted strand of fibre from Germany to wherever you are. Screw 50kms, we're talking potentially tens of thousands of kilometres.
Or a chain of routers along the way that we both trust blindly to not be compromised, because each breaks that quantum handshake, and each is a point where someone could eavesdrop. You can't tunnel QC over such a hop, so it's a bit like having SSL only from your computer to your ISP, then have it decrypted there and re-encrypted to the next hop, and so on.
It's also pretty much against the whole idea of a network like the Internet. Since again, it needs dedicated uninterrupted point-to-point connections, not a loose mesh of routing machines. (You _could_ transmit the rest over the internet once you negotiated a key over QC, but: 1. you still need a dedicated connection for that handshake, and 2. you still need normal cryptography for the actual transmission then.)
For two John Does like us it's already pretty infeasible to go QC all the way.
Even for someone like the US Army:
1. Good luck having an all-QC connection from Washington to Baghdad. Even in 50 km segments, you need a lot of basically routers every 50 km on the ocean floor, each of them being a potential eavesdropping point. So if you ditch normal cryptography, you'd need to do... what? Park a couple of submarines near each of them to make damn sure the Russkies and Chinese don't tamper with them? Have permanent manned bases on the ocean floor every 50 km, with a company of soldiers watching each router, and watching each other so none of them can be a double agent and tamper with it?
2. And what do you do if someone drops a depth charge on one of those? You sure you don't want some regular crypto as backup?
3. That still doesn't help your communication to your airplanes, tanks, cruise missiles, etc, there. You can't tie a cable from each of them to Washington.
Etc.
So basically... well, let me put it mildly: I don't know what book you've read, or by what author, but I'd bet it wasn't written by someone who knows much about cryptography. It sounds more like the kind of predictions made by self-styled "pundits" like Cringely or Dvorak. Or, of course, any other of the many like them.
Eh, let's get one thing straight about Eichmann, since his name pops up in a lot of talks about what people do when ordered, including the "yot too are no better than Eichmann" Milgram bullshit spin.
From the same Wikipedia page:
By 1945, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler had ordered Jewish extermination halted and evidence of the Final Solution destroyed. Eichmann was appalled by Himmler's turnabout, and continued his work in Hungary against official orders. Eichmann was also working to avoid being called up in the last ditch German military effort, since a year before he had been commissioned as a Reserve Untersturmführer in the Waffen-SS and was now being ordered to active combat duty.
Eichmann actively disobeyed direct orders, and kept hunting Jews after he was explicitly ordered to stop. He kept rounding them up and sending them to some camps which were being dismantled or didn't exist any more, and generally didn't want the fruit of his work any more.
Refusing to show up when called to his division to go to the front, actually makes him a deserter too.
He pretended to have an official job that he didn't actually have any more, and commandeered troops and resources that just weren't his any more. Just because he wanted to hunt more Jews. And obviously he wasn't too afraid of the consequences for _that_.
He was _appalled_ at the decision to stop exterminating Jews.
So let's put to rest the idea that he was just following orders, like everyone else. That guy didn't just continue his work when no longer asked to, he actually continued it _againt_ direct orders to stop. He also had no trouble deserting when he no longer liked the orders he was given. So, you know, why didn't he do it before, then?
There's a _world_ of difference between (A) doing what you're ordered and coaxed, like in Milgram's experiment, or out of fear of a court-martial, like many soldiers do, and (B) what Adolf Eichmann did. Past a point, he actually acted against the orders and laws, and was no more than a common (mass) murderer.
Well, competing on the free market was supposed to bring the prices down, _but_ only as long as certain preconditions are met. The whole free-market theory is based on the assumption that the market situation has:
1. well informed buyers making the choices, from
2. a choice of perfectly interchangeable products, from
3. many suppliers for each product
Basically it's like the market for, I don't know, almost anything in the 18'th and most of 19 century. Or like the market for sliced bread or orange juice nowadays.
Unfortunately, much as the some try to pretend that if they ignore reality it will go away, all three are trivially easy to subvert by a monopoly nowadays. E.g., by making products depend on each other, it's trivial for a monopolist to subvert point 2, and thus raise the entry barriers to the point where point 3 collapses too. Add a helping of FUD, and you've subverted point 1 too. That was Microsoft's recipe for example.
The recipe used by ISPs may differ in the details, but it's still at best a mockery of what "free market" was supposed to mean. E.g., to take point 1 alone, when was the last time you knew exactly what you're getting for your money from your ISP? They fight tooth and nail even against telling you what the usage caps are, and it took a massive effort to even find out that they're throttling stuff. They simply refuse to say what they sold you, even after you bought it. Any pretense that the customers can make an informed comparison dies right there. E.g., point 3, doesn't seem to be the case in most of America.
So, unsurprisingly, a sad mockery of the free market doesn't produce the same results as the real thing. Same as if I were to run around with my arms stretched pretending I'm an airplane, I wouldn't actually fly.
So, well, it was kinda predictable in this time and age. A market abstraction which actually worked like that two centuries ago, now needs government intervention to stay anyhere near the status where those self-balancing mechanisms work at all. Otherwise, if you let corporations have it their way, eventually they'll find a way to subvert and pervert the whole thing into a non-functional carricature of its former self.
But there are certain problems that are easy for a person because humans can visualize and imagine a structure, something a computer simply cannot.
Humans can imagine and visualize _simple_ structures, yes. More complex stuff, well, I posted a link to a picture of Hexokinase. You try visualising and imagining that. If you can, well, you have a better imagination than I do:P
Well, another quote comes to mind: "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material [under discussion] . . . but I know it when I see it." -- Supreme Court Associate Justice Potter Stewart, after failing to define what counts as obscene.
In this case, it's the program which knows it when it sees it. If the atoms can stay in that configuration, it's a solution. It's not known in advance, but it can be known if you reached a solution anyway.
On a more pragmatic note, though, well, the problem is that a human dragging atoms around is massively _slow_ compared to a computer. A puzzle you could realistically complete in a couple of days (i.e., before Joe Average completely loses interest, for lack of any visible progress or achievement or reward), the computer runs through them in seconds or minutes.
So basically simple proteins that you can realistically visualize and toy with as a puzzle, have been solved already anyway. Even if you managed to find a simple one that we don't already know how it folds, Folding@Home would run through it in seconds or minutes.
The problem are the big and complex ones. And I'd _really_ like to see anyone folding a beast like Hexokinase by hand.
Or to give you an analogy, think of the game Atomino. Now think Atomino with several thousand atoms. It's not as much a puzzle, it's something straight from Call Of Chtulhu. If you even managed to wrap your mind around it all, well, it'll probably stay bent;)
Speak for yourself. Some of us are more pragmatic than fighting ideologiocal fights, just for some noble ideal sake. _I_ for example am not a paladin, and I'm not on an anti-DRM crusade just for the common good and freedom. I still think copy protection sucks, from a very pragmatic point of view.
1. To start with the least evil, I have whole bookcases full of games. I'm also not an OCD case, so I don't usually feel a need to sort pencils by length or CDs alphabetically. It sucks to have a game on the HDD and have to freaking search for the CD to be allowed to actually play it.
2. It _has_ happened to me before that a CD or DVD gets scratched, and then I'm suddenly locked out of a game that I bought fair and square.
3. I've also had more annoying mis-fortunes due to piss-poorly programmed copy-protection schemes, which suddenly decide that I'm a pirate when the original CD or DVD is right there in the drive.
E.g., the old Gangsters was launched with a nasty bug: they assumed that noone will ever have more than one partition (WTF?) or more than one CD drive, ergo, the only legit place for a CD drive is "D:". If yours was, say, drive "E:", it would automatically assume that you're a pirate. But here it gets interesting: if it thought you're a pirate, it wouldn't even say so. It would just raise the difficulty through the roof, to the point where nothing you did ever succeeded, and all your gangsters were thrown in jail within 1-2 days. You wouldn't even know that you have a bug, or that you've been mistakenly flagged as a pirate, or anything. The game devs just took it upon themselves to virtually kick you in the nuts as righteous punishment.
E.g., the Die Gilde ("1400 The Guild" for you 'merkins) used to have a massive CTD (crash to desktop) problem. The game would just close for no reason, when you expected it the least, without any error message or anything. The a dev comes and posts something along the lines of, "maybe the copy protection thinks you're running a CD emulator on that machine. It's supposed to do that, if it detects one." Now I didn't even have anything like that on my computer, but I'm left wondering. Was it a different bug in the game itself, or they had shot themselves in the foot with a buggy copy-protection?
Incidentally, that opens another, very pragmatic, concern: who the heck gave them permission to decide what I'm allowed to run on that machine? The copy-protection didn't even check if you actually run the game from a CD emulator, just whether it finds one on your hard drive. While the former may be even hand-waved through as protecting their own investment, the latter is simply unbelievable. They decided unilaterally what other software I'm allowed to run on _my_ computer. Mind boggles. I don't use CD emulators, yes, but the precedent is set. What else can they try to forbid me to run? Games from a competing publisher, maybe? I mean, seriously, wtf?
Etc. The practice of altering gameplay in some way or another if they think you're a pirate, is actually more widespread than you'd think.
4. I have had once the mis-fortune of being left without a connection for a whole month and a half, by the retarded ISP and the lying retards at their tech support. (I could go into a whole whine, but let's just say that they _lied_ to me again and again for a whole month and a half.) So the prospect of games which need to phone home every 10 days kinda rubs me the wrong way. Can an ISP glitch leave me not just offline, but also unable to play single player games? I consider that to be a very pragmatic concern.
It's also paying someone else's share sometimes, and those times outweigh the times someone is paying for them.
Yes, you use someone else's share at peak time (i.e., at the time when it matters), and give it back to them at night, when they don't need it. (And, depending on the place and applicable laws, probably even making them pay for energy they don't need. Because a power company usually _has_ to buy energy that individual users pump back, whether they want it or not.)
In lay man's terms it's like me using your space heater during winter, and in exchange letting you use mine during summer. Or using your umbrella when it rains, but, hey, you're free to have mine too when it doesn't. I'm sure you'll see that trade as perfectly fair, right?
It's not hard to understand, so why is it hard for you to understand?
I'm going to ask the exact same: It's not hard to understand, so why is it hard for you to understand?
Well, while that's true, there's a difference: back then it didn't have a real competitor.
The Internet grew to fill, basically, a void that had existed there for ever. Yes, there were alternatives like snail mail, and later some proprietary closed networks, but none of them offered quite the same things.
By contrast, now Internet 2 would come to compete head to head with Internet 1. Which already gives most people what they want.
Even the incentive to do some work to bring it down to the masses, well, it was there for Internet 1, it's just not there for Internet 2. There were a lot of people (some academia, some enthusiasts, some companies, etc) working to figure out what else they can use these newfangled packet-switched networks for, and how they can make that service accessible for more people. (E.g., to be able to sell it to more people.) And not just because they liked tinkering with high-tech toys, but because there was a genuine opportunity to do something which hasn't been done before. Is there a similar itch to scratch in the case of Internet 2? Is there something we all need and which can't be done with the Internet 1?
There's a reason it always comes up, and namely because it actually matters.
Yes, they _could_ use peak storage, but they don't. They're on the grid. It does matter.
So they produce 5 MW all the time (wind non-stop). If yearly production is barely above their yearly usage, let's say they use, say, 8 MW peak and buggerall at night. So someone else has to build the extra capacity to produce the extra 3 MW for them.
But wait, they may have a calm day, or a _storm_. During storms you don't make more power, you align the blades so the turbine doesn't spin. So someone else has to have the capacity to produce an extra 8 MW for them, for those cases.
The point is that someone still has to be able to cover the peak power, so just as many power plants have to be built as before. Only now you have to keep some of them idle at peak time, so you don't recoup your investment as quickly.
The total power produced maths are also a bit mis-leading. They use more power at peak, they give some power back when noone needs it. The problem isn't producing enough energy at 1 AM, the problem is producing enough energy at peak times. That's when those brownouts some years ago happened. The rush to build more power plants, and dealing with NIMBY syndrome, is to be able to supply the whole use at peak hours, not at night.
Because wind can and will occasionally fail you, someone has to build the same capacity again as some other kind of power. Only, again, keep it idle a bunch of the time so they won't get their money back as fast.
Essentially, they just passed someone else the cost of building the peak storage for them. They get their peak storage (and more importantly: backup power) all right, only now "Town B" from your example is the one who gets the bill for it.
Now I'm not saying it should be a hanging offense or anything, but it _is_ a problem worth mentioning. If you want to willy-wave about being all green, then actually be all green on your own money.
Otherwise it's a bit like Liechtenstein not having an army or military budget, because their big neighbours get to deal with defending it. Or about how they do great with a lean government and low taxes... by being a tax heaven for guys who made their riches in other countries' economies. It's just passing the bill to someone else, not being the perfect example of a smart conservative government.
Well, I have friends, we share our lives with each other, and would much prefer we look out for each other than live our lives in fear and have to hide from each other. Maybe we're just unique like that.
Well, that's a bit of a false dichotomy there. There are about 6 billion shades of grey between 100% social, sharing every single moment with everyone, and 100% paranoid, affraid of everything that moves.
And even for a given person there are nuances in how much you trust them. It doesn't have to be all or nothing, either you broadcast every waking moment and detail of your life to them, or you fear them and hide from them.
E.g., I trust mom, but I wouldn't tell her my passwords. I don't "hide" from her, I don't "fear" her, and I certainly don't have any "delusions of grandeur", but it's just something that she doesn't need to know and accidentally end up telling everyone she knows. (For all her good intentions, she _is_ a terminal chatterbox and sometimes her mouth gets a whole lap ahead of her judgment.)
E.g., I trust grandma, but I wouldn't necessarily tell her each time I took a taxi to the railway station. She's seen a great depression as a child, and then a war, and still has certain... immutable ideas about money management, which would make the stereotypical Scotsman look positively spendthrift. So I'm just avoiding an unnecessary talk about how not only it's an abomination to blow a few euros on the taxi.
And from there it's even more shades of grey when it comes to who is entitled to know what. If you get far enough from there, some people don't need to know anything about me. A few people _are_ to be avoided.
And the implication is starting to somewhat bother me that, basically, if you want any privacy at all, then you're one of those guys that "live our lives in fear and have to hide from each other." It's just called being realistic enough, not being a paranoid hermit.
So let's lay that fallacy to rest already. So you have friends and talk to them. Even on the phone. Big deal. We all do. So you look out for each other. Big deal. Again, we all do. It still doesn't automatically overrule all and every privacy concerns. You don't need to be paranoid and afraid to not broadcast every moment of your life, you just need to be realistic enough.
Dude, how stupid _are_ you? Even the police statement said they tased him because he went limp when they were escorting him out, _not_ your made-up "Yes, he attempted to walk away when the police questioned him"
Capisce? Even the cops _didn't_ say that he was walking away. If you're that fond of shouting "lies", heh, then maybe you should stop lying that much.
I don't know what little crusade you're on, little cretin, but you're starting to amuse me.
Population of Switzerland: 7.5 million-ish Population of United States: 300 million-ish
No brainer huh? Why don't you look at those numbers then go and think about it for a bit.
Any transition to any sort of smart power meter is going to take a long time in the U.S.
By that logic, the USA should have also lagged behind in computers, cars, TVs, services, housing, etc. No brainer, huh? Building cars for 300 million people has got to take 40 times longer than building cars for 7.5 million, right? I guess it would explain the Amish buggies. Heck, you're probably even starving because harvesting enough grain for 300 million people must take longer than for 7.5 million;)
The short answer is that it doesn't scale that way. If you have 40 times more population, here's the important part, you also can produce 40 times more with them, at the same technology level and access to resources. So it evens out.
Basically it's no harder to build smart meters for 300 million people than for 7.5 million or, indeed, for the 35,365 people in Liechtenstein. If the demand is there, having more people just gives you more people to produce them with.
Now there are other considerations which are valid, for special cases, e.g., distances for infrastructure. But the "well, it's ok to be behind because there's more of us" argument that keep popping up again and again, is almost invariably bunk.
The Taser is supposed to be an alternative to the baton and other physical attempts to subdue an individual.
I don't know... it seems to me like it lowered the bar even in that aspect.
I mean, think about the small sample of cases I've listed. I can't think of many of them which would have warranted even the use of the baton. I mean, just replace "tased" with "beaten with a nightstick" in any of them, and in most cases you'd probably be outraged.
E.g., "Cops beat up a sick guy who had called an ambulance." Nope, doesn't sound justifiable. "Cop hits 12 year old schoolgirl with the baton for skipping school." Egads, he'd have the children rights groups all over him like a sack of bricks. And most of the rest of us would want to at _least_ see him out of that job, permanently. "Cop beats up 75 year old grandma for insisting to see her old friend in another nursing home." Erk. Doesn't sound palatable either. "Guy is kept for 12 hours in an airport without food or water or his medication, cops beat him to death when he gets agitated as a result. 'Cause they didn't understand what he was saying, so a sound beating sounded like a reasonable alternative." I'm betting they wouldn't get as easily out of beating someone to death as out of tasing him to death. Etc.
So, sad to say, it looks to me like it lowered the bar even in that aspect. People get tased in situations where even using the baton would have been considered inappropriate.
However, police and politicians repeatedly use the "instead of a gun" argument to justify to the public the need for Tasers. They repeatedly say that there will be less shootings thanks to Tasers, even though they know -- and statistics show -- that this is not the case. Now that Tasers are being linked with a number of deaths, police and politicians are continuing to use this as a defense of Taser use.
1. So, then, it seems to me that the sooner we debunk that lie, the better. Regardless of whether you're pro or against the way the police uses them, let's get that lie out of the way. Then maybe we'll be able to have a rational dialogue with those politicians.
At any rate, that's my biggest problem: that lie.
2. Well, the fact that they need to lie to get things their way, already seems to me like a dangerous road to travel.
That's not how a democracy was supposed to work. The politicians are there to serve the population, not the other way around. _If_ the majority of an informed population is against it, that's it.
Basically I don't believe in enlightened despotism. Someone at the top being so smart that they know what's really good for the population, whether the unwashed masses understand it or not... well, we've tried that before. It didn't work too well.
And again, make no mistake, it's not democracy. Democracy means that if the people want X, they should be able to get X. Even if it's something bloody stupid. (Back in the days of everyone-votes classical democracy, Athens actually voted to go to war with Sparta, and never recovered from _that_ mistake.) The politicians may -- and should -- try to make their case as to why X is a good or a bad idea, but ultimately it should be up to the citizens to look at the facts and decide if they want X or not.
Now I'm not idealistic enough to believe that lies aren't already 90% of politics. I know that. But I do believe that they're a perversion of the whole process, and a thing to be fought off, not shrugged off.
Heh. Dude, are you that convinced that you can change reality by just refusing to believe it? Do you think it just takes some more claiming it's all lies, to change reality? Or what?
According to the campus's own Daily Bruin: "By this time the student had begun to walk toward the door with his backpack when an officer approached him and grabbed his arm, at which point the student told the officer to let him go."
He was already walking towards the door. How more clear does it have to be before your brain can comprehend it?
Also, ""It was at this point that the officers shot the student with a Taser for the first time, causing him to fall to the floor and cry out in pain. The student also told the officers he had a medical condition." [...] Shortly thereafter, the cops tasered him a second time for his trouble."
So let's get this straight: (1) They have a glorified cattle-prod which is known to be potentially lethal to people with heart problems, or if used repeatedly. (2) He tells them he has a medical problem... so (3) They zap him again.
Well, gee, that's some human empathy in action for ya.
Also, catch this, from the The Register summary:
Students who protested at the treatment were themselves threatened to keep their distance or cop a tasering. Laila Gordy, "a fourth-year economics student who was present in the library during the incident", claimed officers threatened to zap her "when she asked an officer for his name and his badge number".
Exactly how is _that_ justified? It doesn't sound to me like "to serve and protect", to say the least. It sounds like a sociopathic prick who's been given a way to hurt people and a badge to hide behind.
Well, since this one is a total lie, it kinda casts doubt on the rest of your scenarios too. I pretty much stopped reading there.
Heh. Dude, just because you don't know about it, doesn't make it a lie, ya know? I hate to break the illusion that the world revolves around you, and that truth or falsehood get judged by your whims or wishes. Sorry. Want a link?
So basically, just because you're uninformed, doesn't make it a lie. The fact that you wrote the above idiocy without even bothering to google first, though... now _that_ speaks volumes. Heh.
But I assume again you won't have the literacy skills to make it this far, so never mind;)
Yes, the theory is that the taser is used instead of a gun, in the situations where otherwise they'd have to shoot. Too bad it doesn't seem to work that way. It seems to work more like: when they would have used a gun, they'll still use a gun, but now have the taser for the rest of the time.
Off the top of my head, I remember such gems as:
- guy with a medical emergency calls 911, cops show up first and tase him in his bed. Apparently they thought he lunged at them. While lying on a bed across the room.
- student doesn't have his library card at the library, and is already leaving (so wtf of a danger did he pose?), campus security guards tase him repeatedly.
- some idiot decides to streak naked, gets tased. I can think of at least two of these.
- schoolkid threatens to cut himself with a piece of broken glass, gets tased.
- 12 year old schoolgirl is found skipping school, gets tased.
- 75 year old grandma insists too much to visit an old friend in another nursing home, a cop gets called and tases her.
- guy gets agitated after being kept IIRC for 12 hours without access to food, water or his medicine in an airport, cops tase him to death. Literally: tased repeatedly, until he dies of heart attack.
Etc, etc, etc.
Here's my question for all the "well, it's better than being shot" gang: exactly which of those would have warranted a bullet instead? No, seriously, I'm curious.
AFAIK not even in Stalin's USSR or Mao's China would they shoot a sick guy for just calling an ambulance. And no country in the world takes school _that_ seriously as to shoot a 12 year old for skipping school.
No, it's already used in _addition_ to the gun, not instead of.
And here's a funnier thought: we already have plenty of evidence that it's used repeatedly. Some even on camera. In some cases it seems to be police stupidity: they see a guy spasming after the jolt, and they think it's some kind of resisting arest, so they do it again. In some cases it seems genuine torture. They've been given free hand to use the taser, so they'll cause you some more pain just because they don't like you.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged tech demo.
I'd be a lot more enthusiastic about the Asimo if you could actually buy one and see it execute _your_ program, or take your direction. As it is, it's essentially a black box. With all that implies. For all we know, somewhere behind the stage some real guy with a wiimote could do the conducting, and the robot could be just a remotely controlled box.
We've never seen it do anything except in controlled, pre-prepared settings.
E.g., ok, it can walk around corners and up stairs. Can it still do it if we move the corners or the stairs? What about if I bring my own stairs? E.g., so one can move a cart and the other can take a cup from the cart. Does it still work if I come as a human and move the cart 3ft to the side from where the first robot left it? What if I move the tables around? Turning around, bowing and walking off the stage isn't much different. Can it still do it, if you rearrange that setup at all?
There are so many ways one could cheat those demos, it's not even funny. E.g., for all we know, it could just be programmed exactly where to put each foot, in X, Y, Z coordinates, and fly off the handle if the stairs don't match those. Or it could have an RFID chip in each place where it must place the foot, and essentially just home in on those with each foot. Etc.
Essentially we don't really _know_ what it does, except for being a high-tech publicity stunt for Honda. It could be the most advanced robot in the world, or it could be the hoax of the century, or something in between. We don't know.
So basically I'll wait until I see one perform in an uncontrolled environment, before getting all "OMG! Asimo!" fanboy. Until then, heck, the Roomba is more exciting. At least you can see for yourself what it does when you stand in its way.
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And just to show that it's not just a theoretical concern: IIRC that's exactly what MS did at some point in the past. It negotiated a license with the OEMs where they paid the MS tax per computer sold, whether or not it actually had Windows on it.
The way it goes is sorta like this: let's say I make Product X that's shipped on 90% of your computers anyway. Then I come and offer you a, say, 20% discount if you pay it for all computers shipped, instead of actually counting licenses. Now there are basically two ways to think about it,
A) "well, hmm, that's not too bad. I'll keep offering the choice and at those numbers I still get a neat discount as a whole."
B) "wth, if I stop offering a choice, or severely discourage people from getting anything other than Product X, I'll get to make the most money out of that deal."
Chances are that even _if_ you started with version A, sooner or later B will dawn upon you. Historically it didn't take long for virtually all OEMs to be in camp B.
There are many variants of that scam. Another is to just flat out offer a bigger discount, the higher a percentage of your computers are shipped with product X. Or threaten to pull your discount altogether, if you try to push alternatives to my product X. Etc.
That's again not hypothetical, that's the threat MS used against IBM's OS/2: If you keep trying to push OS/2, you'll pay more for Windows, and lose the competitive edge on the computers you ship with Windows. IBM pretty much surrendered. Oh, they continued a half-arsed OS/2 effort to save face, but didn't even try to sell computers with OS/2 preinstalled any more.
Now you do need to have a certain market share to pull a stunt like that. But it's been done before, and not only by MS, so the concern is very real and pragmatic.
That's one thing that always made me wonder: to what length other games go to not let you just freaking (save and) quit when you want to.
E.g., the biggest madness in console gaming that I've personally experienced was a game where I didn't find a save point for 10 hours straight. Luckily it was on a Sunday, but I can tell you that by the end of it I had almost lost even the will to live, not just to play that stupid game any more.
Other games prey on people's social instincts, and essentially create situations along the lines of, "see, if you quit 39 of your guild mates will be boned, and might get really annoyed at you. It's not nice to let your guild mates down like that."
See the bloody 40-man raids of pre-BC WoW. I wouldn't know how the new endgame grind is, I have no desire to even try any endgame grind again.
Or see the "taskforces" of COH and "strikeforces" of COV, where if you quit, they can't even invite another player to replace you, so the group is really boned. It's as heavy handed as it can possibly get.
And to make it even more blatantly heavy handed, at least one of them (wossname, the Clockwork King one) contains 3 missions which are identical. In a row. It's 3 instances of the exact same mission, with the exact same maps and opponents, one after the other. For no obvious reason than to prolong the agony of that TF to a whole 12 to 14 hours. In which you can't quit without shafting the other 7 players.
E.g., even in PC games the idiocy still exists of either
A) making one replay the whole level when reloading or failing. Apparently just so that the publisher can claim X hours gameplay, on an otherwise ridiculously small game. Or
B) limited saves, so better not waste that precious save token on a quick 10 minutes gaming session.
Etc. I could give more examples, but you get the idea already.
And it just makes me wonder what do some game designers think they're gaining there.
Incidentally, I'm still convinced that this is a major factor in, well, creating conflicts and the gamer scare in some people. E.g., the parents see "OMG, he's addicted! I told him to come to dinner 10 minutes ago, and he's still glued to that damn console!" When probably the poor kid is just looking for a save point.
And, while I'm at it, when _did_ it become perfectly normal to prey on people's niceness and social instincts for a quick extra 13 Euro? (I.e., an extra month of that subscription.) Isn't that what we'd call "sociopathy" if someone did that in real life, face to face? Forget Milgram, maybe we have MMO design as a better example of how people can be turned into sociopaths.
Having played more than one MMO in my time, I disaggree.
1. EQ2 already tried the blatant commercialism route, where even single instances get sold as "adventure packs" if they aren't big enough for an expansion pack.
Heck, most of their expansion packs are the kind of micro-transactions that you seem to favour, only priced too much. Their _largest_ expansion pack, Echoes of Faydweyr, introduced... two races, their newbie-ish areas and capital cities. I.e., it was pretty much comparable in size to the Draenei and Blood Elves of Burning Crusade, including their two zones each. But without the whole Outlands, which made the meat of Burning Crusade. I.e., it was pathetically small compared to Blizzard's one EP.
I don't think it did much to bring new players. It did, however, leave a lot of people with a bad sensation of being fleeced, quartered and dimed by Sony.
2. More classes just create more confusion, and a bigger chaos trying to balance them all. Plus, since there are only so many types of actions that even make sense in a game, you either
A) end up with classes which are almost identical, and add nothing new except confusion. (Did we really need 6 f-ing kinds of priests, among which two almost identical druids, in EQ2? One is slightly better at healing, unless you put your talents in offense, and one is slightly better at offensive magic, unless you put your talents in healing. Or did we really need Brigand, Swashbuckler and Assassin as different _classes_ instead of Rogue specs? Seriously, wtf? One class and 3 talent trees would do the same job just fine.)
B) have to restrict what other classes can do, so they don't overlap. (E.g., to have a class whose specialty is healing over time, you have to not give others such spells, or a severely gimped choice of them. Or to make a sub-class of mage recognizable by its AOEs, you have to have a different one that's got none or very few/weak. See EQ2 again. Or better yet, see COH.) Unfortunately that also makes the class less interesting to play. One of the attraction points of WoW is that there's so much different stuff you can do, and combine in interesting ways. A class which mostly just does the same thing over and over again, is repetitive and ultimately boring. And that's what you get if you try too hard to slice classes too thin.
Even in miniature games, you have more than one kind of unit in your army, and can alternate what you take in your army. So you can have narrow-focus "classes", because the player can then just make a mix of several of them.
In a MMO you play exactly one character (at a time.) If that one character is pushed into a very narrow role, and just pushes the same few buttons over and over again, it becomes boring fast.
3. Unused instances don't require any CPU cycles, because they're, you know, not instanced. And it's fairly trivial to not update some NPCs if noone is within range. I don't know how Blizzard coded it, but I wouldn't be too surprised if they're not wasting much.
4. As someone who still plays lower level alts too, I can tell you that virtually no outdoors zones became baren Wastelands.
You can't do much in the Outlands until level 58. Technically you can get a portal there earlier (I had Shattrath as my home on one char as early as level 11), but it's not like you can even take any quests or do much there. So you'll still have to level up from 1 to 58 the old fashioned way. Other than a couple of level 55+ zones like Silithus or EPL, nothing was hit too hard by the expansion pack.
The former grind instances are pretty much the only ones which became wastelands. But let's be honest: that grind sucked to start with. That's why people dropped them as soon as they had half a choice.
5. The "boosting" market isn't that horrible a phenomenon. Sure, half the people do their low level instances by following a level 70, but you still can find others which do their instances the old fashioned way.
If anything, it's more of a problem of class than an
No one, not even Einstein, knows enough yet about how the world works, to make a definitive judgment about whether God exists or not. We're all still discovering the details. If anyone knew exactly all the details -- which is what's needed to make such a definitive, unquestionable judgment -- then physicists everywhere could just pack their bags and go do something else.
It's like looking at the image on your screen in WoW and deciding that since I don't see a CPU in there, nor this mysterious entity called Blizzard, then it's a real world and noone created it. It's that freaking stupid to take any pronouncement, whether it's "god exists" or "god doesn't exist", as absolute truth, while we're still scratching the surface of how it works.
Einstein in particular was also wrong about a lot of other details of the universe. E.g., I already mentioned quantum mechanics. E.g., he was wrong about the Cosmological constant, by which he postulated a stationary universe without a beginning or end.
Do you understand even the implication of the last part? He based his whole views on the false notion of a universe which didn't have a beginning, thus logically also didn't need a creator. How much more "false authority" or "speaking out of ignorance" do you need there?
I would suggest that:
1. The domain in question is, ultimately, physics. He didn't know enough outside his narrow domain of relativity to make that kind of pronouncement, and we already have plenty of examples of things outside his domain where he was wrong. And we still don't know enough. Essentially, _noone_ is enough of an authority there. Not him, nor the Pope, nor the Dalai Lama, nor Reverend Gimmecash from the bible belt, and certainly not the troll kiddies doing it to get attention.
2. Even if you want to also go into the religious/philosophical aspect of it, there are more qualified sources than either he or a clergyman. You know, people who studied both, before making a pronouncement about how they fit each other.
3. I never said you had to be a clergyman. In fact, the most prominent historians and/or philosophers from point #2 were either atheist or agnostic. But it helps to at least know what you reject, ya know?
4. Saying that "it's everyman's game", no offense, doesn't say that anyone knows what they're talking about. Phrenology and astrology were everyone's game too, once, but guess what? They were all wrong. Just because everyone is allowed to an opinion, doesn't mean one of them is an unchallengeable absolute truth.
Then maybe the only intellectually-honest thing to do is admit that you _can't_ either prove or disprove it, instead of doing fallacies along the lines of "it's X, because Einstein said X." And that goes for both atheists waving their "religion is false, because Einstein didn't believe in God" battle banner, and theists rallying behind the "God exists because Einstein used the word God once, so he must have believed in God." Both are equally a fallacy.
That's not to say that you should pick a religion anyway, quite the contrary in fact. Feel free to ignore it until it's proven.
But the honest thing to do is basically to say, "I don't know." It's called agnosticism.
Actually, that "reverse ad hominem" has a name: appeal to false authority. You know, X is accepted as a smart and authoritative guy on his domain, X said Y, therefore Y must be true. It's used all the time, sadly. Franklin sad this, Churchill said that, Einstein said that other thing, etc. Often raising somethig that's little more than a wisecrack or thinly veiled jab at one's opponents (Churchill for one was quite the wisecracker) to the rank of absolute truth, beyond all questioning. Just because the great man said it, and obviously someone that great can't be wrong about something outside the domain of his expertise. And very few people seem to be aware that it's a fallacy. In reality, even _within_ one's domain of expertise, one can be wrong all right. Einstein was against quantum mechanics. Tesla didn't believe in relativity. (And in quite the fighting words: "[a] magnificent mathematical garb which fascinates, dazzles and makes people blind to the underlying errors. The theory is like a beggar clothed in purple whom ignorant people take for a king") Lorentz was _rabidly_ against Einstein's relativity, and even denounced it as bolshevism, although it was based on his own equations. Go figure. There's a reason why the scientific method assumes that anything is falsifiable, and nothing is above questioning, no matter how big a genius said it. (Although, you're still supposed to present your evidence if you want to challenge it. Just personal disbelief or contradicting one's pet dogma aren't enough.) Move outside what one really knows, and the association with some authority figure becomes fully irrelevant.
It may come as a shock, but people use metaphors or analogies or funny quotes all the time, without actually believing in the thing used as a metaphor.
E.g., we may spew or quote stuff like "Mother Nature always sides with the hidden flaw" or "Mother Nature is a bitch", without actually believing that there is such a sentient entity. Or when Stalin said that "artillery is the god of war", chances are he didn't mean it literally.
E.g., you may have noticed quotes from Futurama's characters before on Slashdot. I'll take a wild guess that most of those people don't actually believe that Bender or Dr Zoidberg are real.
More importantly, look at the context in which he said that. There was _nothing_ theistic about it. Einstein's view of the world was based on the evidenced-based large-scale physics, where stuff is very deterministic. More importantly, there seemed to be no obvious way to reconcile relativity with quantum physics, so one or the other had to be false. Einstein obviously favoured his own relativity, and had plenty of experimental confirmation (at macro level) that it's correct.
If anything, it just shows that even really really smart people can be occasionally wrong, when talking about stuff outside their expertise domain.
But the crucial thing is that it was based on falsifiable evidence, not on some belief in a deity whose will is absolute and whose habits can be guessed. There was nothing inherently theistic about that belief.
Yes, he used the word "god". It was just a metaphor/anthropomorphisation of the universe. He could have just as well used "mother nature" or just personified the universe itself. It was just supposed to get the point across, not be some declaration of faith in a god.
Producing incredibly powerful sounds isn't that hard or new, and I'd bet the Chinese already have louder things. E.g., a pneumatic siren can be made as loud as you want it to, e.g., by using higher pressure air.
So from a pragmatic point of view, I'm left wondering why would they want to buy it from the USA when they can make one themselves.
At a wild and uninformed guess, I'm more like guessing that some US company got one of those bogus blanket patents that we all love to hate. You know, something along the lines of "using a sonic device as a non-lethal weapon".
China on the whole still doesn't seem that fond of IP as a whole, but they also don't seem ready to break all international treaties over it. See for example their investing in designing their own protocols and codecs, when they don't want to pay royalties, as opposed to just calling the whole thing bogus. But I'm guessing that if something is blanket enough, there may not be a way to reinvent your own without infringing anyway.
Well, the thing is: people are more than happy to jump to conclusions, without having any context for that photo.
E.g., I've waited for a taxi at a street corner before. Admittedly, I'm a guy, but I don't remember any law or moral code that forbids women to use taxis either. So it doesn't take too much of a stretch of imagination to allow for the possibility that those two girls too were just waiting for their ride. Or maybe they went shopping and are waiting for the BF of one of them to come give them a ride home. Or various other possibilities.
We don't actually have enough data to make a judgment there. If they're on the same corner for several hours straight, daily, yes, then they're probably working there. But we don't know that. We have just a snapshot that doesn't really say anything by itself.
But people are more than happy to jump to a conclusion anyway.
The same applies to a lot of other situations.
E.g., it's trivial to take someone's photo that looks like he's walking towards a brothel, when he's just really walking past it.
E.g., the most heinous case of "it's not what it looks" involved a UK chav filming himself pissing on what looked to him like a dead-drunk woman passed out on the side-walk. Turns out that she wasn't drunk, she was just dying of liver failure. (And before you jump to conclusions again, there _are_ ways to get that without being an alcoholic.) So instead of calling an ambulance, the retard filmed himself pissing on her while she was dying, and posted the movie.
No, not really. QC only works over dedicated, point-to-point fibre optic lines.
Do you understand that one crucial aspect? If I want to talk to you completely securely, with quantum handshake, and able to detect eavesdroppers, I would need one uninterrupted strand of fibre from Germany to wherever you are. Screw 50kms, we're talking potentially tens of thousands of kilometres.
Or a chain of routers along the way that we both trust blindly to not be compromised, because each breaks that quantum handshake, and each is a point where someone could eavesdrop. You can't tunnel QC over such a hop, so it's a bit like having SSL only from your computer to your ISP, then have it decrypted there and re-encrypted to the next hop, and so on.
It's also pretty much against the whole idea of a network like the Internet. Since again, it needs dedicated uninterrupted point-to-point connections, not a loose mesh of routing machines. (You _could_ transmit the rest over the internet once you negotiated a key over QC, but: 1. you still need a dedicated connection for that handshake, and 2. you still need normal cryptography for the actual transmission then.)
For two John Does like us it's already pretty infeasible to go QC all the way.
Even for someone like the US Army:
1. Good luck having an all-QC connection from Washington to Baghdad. Even in 50 km segments, you need a lot of basically routers every 50 km on the ocean floor, each of them being a potential eavesdropping point. So if you ditch normal cryptography, you'd need to do... what? Park a couple of submarines near each of them to make damn sure the Russkies and Chinese don't tamper with them? Have permanent manned bases on the ocean floor every 50 km, with a company of soldiers watching each router, and watching each other so none of them can be a double agent and tamper with it?
2. And what do you do if someone drops a depth charge on one of those? You sure you don't want some regular crypto as backup?
3. That still doesn't help your communication to your airplanes, tanks, cruise missiles, etc, there. You can't tie a cable from each of them to Washington.
Etc.
So basically... well, let me put it mildly: I don't know what book you've read, or by what author, but I'd bet it wasn't written by someone who knows much about cryptography. It sounds more like the kind of predictions made by self-styled "pundits" like Cringely or Dvorak. Or, of course, any other of the many like them.
From the same Wikipedia page:
Eichmann actively disobeyed direct orders, and kept hunting Jews after he was explicitly ordered to stop. He kept rounding them up and sending them to some camps which were being dismantled or didn't exist any more, and generally didn't want the fruit of his work any more.
Refusing to show up when called to his division to go to the front, actually makes him a deserter too.
He pretended to have an official job that he didn't actually have any more, and commandeered troops and resources that just weren't his any more. Just because he wanted to hunt more Jews. And obviously he wasn't too afraid of the consequences for _that_.
He was _appalled_ at the decision to stop exterminating Jews.
So let's put to rest the idea that he was just following orders, like everyone else. That guy didn't just continue his work when no longer asked to, he actually continued it _againt_ direct orders to stop. He also had no trouble deserting when he no longer liked the orders he was given. So, you know, why didn't he do it before, then?
There's a _world_ of difference between (A) doing what you're ordered and coaxed, like in Milgram's experiment, or out of fear of a court-martial, like many soldiers do, and (B) what Adolf Eichmann did. Past a point, he actually acted against the orders and laws, and was no more than a common (mass) murderer.
Well, competing on the free market was supposed to bring the prices down, _but_ only as long as certain preconditions are met. The whole free-market theory is based on the assumption that the market situation has:
1. well informed buyers making the choices, from
2. a choice of perfectly interchangeable products, from
3. many suppliers for each product
Basically it's like the market for, I don't know, almost anything in the 18'th and most of 19 century. Or like the market for sliced bread or orange juice nowadays.
Unfortunately, much as the some try to pretend that if they ignore reality it will go away, all three are trivially easy to subvert by a monopoly nowadays. E.g., by making products depend on each other, it's trivial for a monopolist to subvert point 2, and thus raise the entry barriers to the point where point 3 collapses too. Add a helping of FUD, and you've subverted point 1 too. That was Microsoft's recipe for example.
The recipe used by ISPs may differ in the details, but it's still at best a mockery of what "free market" was supposed to mean. E.g., to take point 1 alone, when was the last time you knew exactly what you're getting for your money from your ISP? They fight tooth and nail even against telling you what the usage caps are, and it took a massive effort to even find out that they're throttling stuff. They simply refuse to say what they sold you, even after you bought it. Any pretense that the customers can make an informed comparison dies right there. E.g., point 3, doesn't seem to be the case in most of America.
So, unsurprisingly, a sad mockery of the free market doesn't produce the same results as the real thing. Same as if I were to run around with my arms stretched pretending I'm an airplane, I wouldn't actually fly.
So, well, it was kinda predictable in this time and age. A market abstraction which actually worked like that two centuries ago, now needs government intervention to stay anyhere near the status where those self-balancing mechanisms work at all. Otherwise, if you let corporations have it their way, eventually they'll find a way to subvert and pervert the whole thing into a non-functional carricature of its former self.
Humans can imagine and visualize _simple_ structures, yes. More complex stuff, well, I posted a link to a picture of Hexokinase. You try visualising and imagining that. If you can, well, you have a better imagination than I do
Well, another quote comes to mind: "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material [under discussion] . . . but I know it when I see it." -- Supreme Court Associate Justice Potter Stewart, after failing to define what counts as obscene.
;)
In this case, it's the program which knows it when it sees it. If the atoms can stay in that configuration, it's a solution. It's not known in advance, but it can be known if you reached a solution anyway.
On a more pragmatic note, though, well, the problem is that a human dragging atoms around is massively _slow_ compared to a computer. A puzzle you could realistically complete in a couple of days (i.e., before Joe Average completely loses interest, for lack of any visible progress or achievement or reward), the computer runs through them in seconds or minutes.
So basically simple proteins that you can realistically visualize and toy with as a puzzle, have been solved already anyway. Even if you managed to find a simple one that we don't already know how it folds, Folding@Home would run through it in seconds or minutes.
The problem are the big and complex ones. And I'd _really_ like to see anyone folding a beast like Hexokinase by hand.
Or to give you an analogy, think of the game Atomino. Now think Atomino with several thousand atoms. It's not as much a puzzle, it's something straight from Call Of Chtulhu. If you even managed to wrap your mind around it all, well, it'll probably stay bent
Speak for yourself. Some of us are more pragmatic than fighting ideologiocal fights, just for some noble ideal sake. _I_ for example am not a paladin, and I'm not on an anti-DRM crusade just for the common good and freedom. I still think copy protection sucks, from a very pragmatic point of view.
1. To start with the least evil, I have whole bookcases full of games. I'm also not an OCD case, so I don't usually feel a need to sort pencils by length or CDs alphabetically. It sucks to have a game on the HDD and have to freaking search for the CD to be allowed to actually play it.
2. It _has_ happened to me before that a CD or DVD gets scratched, and then I'm suddenly locked out of a game that I bought fair and square.
3. I've also had more annoying mis-fortunes due to piss-poorly programmed copy-protection schemes, which suddenly decide that I'm a pirate when the original CD or DVD is right there in the drive.
E.g., the old Gangsters was launched with a nasty bug: they assumed that noone will ever have more than one partition (WTF?) or more than one CD drive, ergo, the only legit place for a CD drive is "D:". If yours was, say, drive "E:", it would automatically assume that you're a pirate. But here it gets interesting: if it thought you're a pirate, it wouldn't even say so. It would just raise the difficulty through the roof, to the point where nothing you did ever succeeded, and all your gangsters were thrown in jail within 1-2 days. You wouldn't even know that you have a bug, or that you've been mistakenly flagged as a pirate, or anything. The game devs just took it upon themselves to virtually kick you in the nuts as righteous punishment.
E.g., the Die Gilde ("1400 The Guild" for you 'merkins) used to have a massive CTD (crash to desktop) problem. The game would just close for no reason, when you expected it the least, without any error message or anything. The a dev comes and posts something along the lines of, "maybe the copy protection thinks you're running a CD emulator on that machine. It's supposed to do that, if it detects one." Now I didn't even have anything like that on my computer, but I'm left wondering. Was it a different bug in the game itself, or they had shot themselves in the foot with a buggy copy-protection?
Incidentally, that opens another, very pragmatic, concern: who the heck gave them permission to decide what I'm allowed to run on that machine? The copy-protection didn't even check if you actually run the game from a CD emulator, just whether it finds one on your hard drive. While the former may be even hand-waved through as protecting their own investment, the latter is simply unbelievable. They decided unilaterally what other software I'm allowed to run on _my_ computer. Mind boggles. I don't use CD emulators, yes, but the precedent is set. What else can they try to forbid me to run? Games from a competing publisher, maybe? I mean, seriously, wtf?
Etc. The practice of altering gameplay in some way or another if they think you're a pirate, is actually more widespread than you'd think.
4. I have had once the mis-fortune of being left without a connection for a whole month and a half, by the retarded ISP and the lying retards at their tech support. (I could go into a whole whine, but let's just say that they _lied_ to me again and again for a whole month and a half.) So the prospect of games which need to phone home every 10 days kinda rubs me the wrong way. Can an ISP glitch leave me not just offline, but also unable to play single player games? I consider that to be a very pragmatic concern.
Yes, you use someone else's share at peak time (i.e., at the time when it matters), and give it back to them at night, when they don't need it. (And, depending on the place and applicable laws, probably even making them pay for energy they don't need. Because a power company usually _has_ to buy energy that individual users pump back, whether they want it or not.)
In lay man's terms it's like me using your space heater during winter, and in exchange letting you use mine during summer. Or using your umbrella when it rains, but, hey, you're free to have mine too when it doesn't. I'm sure you'll see that trade as perfectly fair, right?
I'm going to ask the exact same: It's not hard to understand, so why is it hard for you to understand?
Well, while that's true, there's a difference: back then it didn't have a real competitor.
The Internet grew to fill, basically, a void that had existed there for ever. Yes, there were alternatives like snail mail, and later some proprietary closed networks, but none of them offered quite the same things.
By contrast, now Internet 2 would come to compete head to head with Internet 1. Which already gives most people what they want.
Even the incentive to do some work to bring it down to the masses, well, it was there for Internet 1, it's just not there for Internet 2. There were a lot of people (some academia, some enthusiasts, some companies, etc) working to figure out what else they can use these newfangled packet-switched networks for, and how they can make that service accessible for more people. (E.g., to be able to sell it to more people.) And not just because they liked tinkering with high-tech toys, but because there was a genuine opportunity to do something which hasn't been done before. Is there a similar itch to scratch in the case of Internet 2? Is there something we all need and which can't be done with the Internet 1?
There's a reason it always comes up, and namely because it actually matters.
Yes, they _could_ use peak storage, but they don't. They're on the grid. It does matter.
So they produce 5 MW all the time (wind non-stop). If yearly production is barely above their yearly usage, let's say they use, say, 8 MW peak and buggerall at night. So someone else has to build the extra capacity to produce the extra 3 MW for them.
But wait, they may have a calm day, or a _storm_. During storms you don't make more power, you align the blades so the turbine doesn't spin. So someone else has to have the capacity to produce an extra 8 MW for them, for those cases.
The point is that someone still has to be able to cover the peak power, so just as many power plants have to be built as before. Only now you have to keep some of them idle at peak time, so you don't recoup your investment as quickly.
The total power produced maths are also a bit mis-leading. They use more power at peak, they give some power back when noone needs it. The problem isn't producing enough energy at 1 AM, the problem is producing enough energy at peak times. That's when those brownouts some years ago happened. The rush to build more power plants, and dealing with NIMBY syndrome, is to be able to supply the whole use at peak hours, not at night.
Because wind can and will occasionally fail you, someone has to build the same capacity again as some other kind of power. Only, again, keep it idle a bunch of the time so they won't get their money back as fast.
Essentially, they just passed someone else the cost of building the peak storage for them. They get their peak storage (and more importantly: backup power) all right, only now "Town B" from your example is the one who gets the bill for it.
Now I'm not saying it should be a hanging offense or anything, but it _is_ a problem worth mentioning. If you want to willy-wave about being all green, then actually be all green on your own money.
Otherwise it's a bit like Liechtenstein not having an army or military budget, because their big neighbours get to deal with defending it. Or about how they do great with a lean government and low taxes... by being a tax heaven for guys who made their riches in other countries' economies. It's just passing the bill to someone else, not being the perfect example of a smart conservative government.
Well, that's a bit of a false dichotomy there. There are about 6 billion shades of grey between 100% social, sharing every single moment with everyone, and 100% paranoid, affraid of everything that moves.
And even for a given person there are nuances in how much you trust them. It doesn't have to be all or nothing, either you broadcast every waking moment and detail of your life to them, or you fear them and hide from them.
E.g., I trust mom, but I wouldn't tell her my passwords. I don't "hide" from her, I don't "fear" her, and I certainly don't have any "delusions of grandeur", but it's just something that she doesn't need to know and accidentally end up telling everyone she knows. (For all her good intentions, she _is_ a terminal chatterbox and sometimes her mouth gets a whole lap ahead of her judgment.)
E.g., I trust grandma, but I wouldn't necessarily tell her each time I took a taxi to the railway station. She's seen a great depression as a child, and then a war, and still has certain... immutable ideas about money management, which would make the stereotypical Scotsman look positively spendthrift. So I'm just avoiding an unnecessary talk about how not only it's an abomination to blow a few euros on the taxi.
And from there it's even more shades of grey when it comes to who is entitled to know what. If you get far enough from there, some people don't need to know anything about me. A few people _are_ to be avoided.
And the implication is starting to somewhat bother me that, basically, if you want any privacy at all, then you're one of those guys that "live our lives in fear and have to hide from each other." It's just called being realistic enough, not being a paranoid hermit.
So let's lay that fallacy to rest already. So you have friends and talk to them. Even on the phone. Big deal. We all do. So you look out for each other. Big deal. Again, we all do. It still doesn't automatically overrule all and every privacy concerns. You don't need to be paranoid and afraid to not broadcast every moment of your life, you just need to be realistic enough.
Dude, how stupid _are_ you? Even the police statement said they tased him because he went limp when they were escorting him out, _not_ your made-up "Yes, he attempted to walk away when the police questioned him"
Capisce? Even the cops _didn't_ say that he was walking away. If you're that fond of shouting "lies", heh, then maybe you should stop lying that much.
I don't know what little crusade you're on, little cretin, but you're starting to amuse me.
By that logic, the USA should have also lagged behind in computers, cars, TVs, services, housing, etc. No brainer, huh? Building cars for 300 million people has got to take 40 times longer than building cars for 7.5 million, right? I guess it would explain the Amish buggies. Heck, you're probably even starving because harvesting enough grain for 300 million people must take longer than for 7.5 million
The short answer is that it doesn't scale that way. If you have 40 times more population, here's the important part, you also can produce 40 times more with them, at the same technology level and access to resources. So it evens out.
Basically it's no harder to build smart meters for 300 million people than for 7.5 million or, indeed, for the 35,365 people in Liechtenstein. If the demand is there, having more people just gives you more people to produce them with.
Now there are other considerations which are valid, for special cases, e.g., distances for infrastructure. But the "well, it's ok to be behind because there's more of us" argument that keep popping up again and again, is almost invariably bunk.
I don't know... it seems to me like it lowered the bar even in that aspect.
I mean, think about the small sample of cases I've listed. I can't think of many of them which would have warranted even the use of the baton. I mean, just replace "tased" with "beaten with a nightstick" in any of them, and in most cases you'd probably be outraged.
E.g., "Cops beat up a sick guy who had called an ambulance." Nope, doesn't sound justifiable. "Cop hits 12 year old schoolgirl with the baton for skipping school." Egads, he'd have the children rights groups all over him like a sack of bricks. And most of the rest of us would want to at _least_ see him out of that job, permanently. "Cop beats up 75 year old grandma for insisting to see her old friend in another nursing home." Erk. Doesn't sound palatable either. "Guy is kept for 12 hours in an airport without food or water or his medication, cops beat him to death when he gets agitated as a result. 'Cause they didn't understand what he was saying, so a sound beating sounded like a reasonable alternative." I'm betting they wouldn't get as easily out of beating someone to death as out of tasing him to death. Etc.
So, sad to say, it looks to me like it lowered the bar even in that aspect. People get tased in situations where even using the baton would have been considered inappropriate.
1. So, then, it seems to me that the sooner we debunk that lie, the better. Regardless of whether you're pro or against the way the police uses them, let's get that lie out of the way. Then maybe we'll be able to have a rational dialogue with those politicians.
At any rate, that's my biggest problem: that lie.
2. Well, the fact that they need to lie to get things their way, already seems to me like a dangerous road to travel.
That's not how a democracy was supposed to work. The politicians are there to serve the population, not the other way around. _If_ the majority of an informed population is against it, that's it.
Basically I don't believe in enlightened despotism. Someone at the top being so smart that they know what's really good for the population, whether the unwashed masses understand it or not... well, we've tried that before. It didn't work too well.
And again, make no mistake, it's not democracy. Democracy means that if the people want X, they should be able to get X. Even if it's something bloody stupid. (Back in the days of everyone-votes classical democracy, Athens actually voted to go to war with Sparta, and never recovered from _that_ mistake.) The politicians may -- and should -- try to make their case as to why X is a good or a bad idea, but ultimately it should be up to the citizens to look at the facts and decide if they want X or not.
Now I'm not idealistic enough to believe that lies aren't already 90% of politics. I know that. But I do believe that they're a perversion of the whole process, and a thing to be fought off, not shrugged off.
According to the campus's own Daily Bruin: "By this time the student had begun to walk toward the door with his backpack when an officer approached him and grabbed his arm, at which point the student told the officer to let him go."
He was already walking towards the door. How more clear does it have to be before your brain can comprehend it?
Also, ""It was at this point that the officers shot the student with a Taser for the first time, causing him to fall to the floor and cry out in pain. The student also told the officers he had a medical condition." [...] Shortly thereafter, the cops tasered him a second time for his trouble."
So let's get this straight: (1) They have a glorified cattle-prod which is known to be potentially lethal to people with heart problems, or if used repeatedly. (2) He tells them he has a medical problem... so (3) They zap him again.
Well, gee, that's some human empathy in action for ya.
Also, catch this, from the The Register summary:
Exactly how is _that_ justified? It doesn't sound to me like "to serve and protect", to say the least. It sounds like a sociopathic prick who's been given a way to hurt people and a badge to hide behind.
Heh. Dude, just because you don't know about it, doesn't make it a lie, ya know? I hate to break the illusion that the world revolves around you, and that truth or falsehood get judged by your whims or wishes. Sorry. Want a link?
- UCLA cops taser ID-less student
- UCLA Taser victim sues university
Have more links. Off The Register alone, since I can't be arsed to do even more searching for you:
- Texas cops taser diabetic seizure man
- School tasers naked, oil-smeared student
- Taser-happy cops floor suicidal six-year-old (It also mentions the 12 year old girl.)
- US cops taser battling granny
Etc.
So basically, just because you're uninformed, doesn't make it a lie. The fact that you wrote the above idiocy without even bothering to google first, though... now _that_ speaks volumes. Heh.
But I assume again you won't have the literacy skills to make it this far, so never mind
Yes, the theory is that the taser is used instead of a gun, in the situations where otherwise they'd have to shoot. Too bad it doesn't seem to work that way. It seems to work more like: when they would have used a gun, they'll still use a gun, but now have the taser for the rest of the time.
Off the top of my head, I remember such gems as:
- guy with a medical emergency calls 911, cops show up first and tase him in his bed. Apparently they thought he lunged at them. While lying on a bed across the room.
- student doesn't have his library card at the library, and is already leaving (so wtf of a danger did he pose?), campus security guards tase him repeatedly.
- some idiot decides to streak naked, gets tased. I can think of at least two of these.
- schoolkid threatens to cut himself with a piece of broken glass, gets tased.
- 12 year old schoolgirl is found skipping school, gets tased.
- 75 year old grandma insists too much to visit an old friend in another nursing home, a cop gets called and tases her.
- guy gets agitated after being kept IIRC for 12 hours without access to food, water or his medicine in an airport, cops tase him to death. Literally: tased repeatedly, until he dies of heart attack.
Etc, etc, etc.
Here's my question for all the "well, it's better than being shot" gang: exactly which of those would have warranted a bullet instead? No, seriously, I'm curious.
AFAIK not even in Stalin's USSR or Mao's China would they shoot a sick guy for just calling an ambulance. And no country in the world takes school _that_ seriously as to shoot a 12 year old for skipping school.
No, it's already used in _addition_ to the gun, not instead of.
And here's a funnier thought: we already have plenty of evidence that it's used repeatedly. Some even on camera. In some cases it seems to be police stupidity: they see a guy spasming after the jolt, and they think it's some kind of resisting arest, so they do it again. In some cases it seems genuine torture. They've been given free hand to use the taser, so they'll cause you some more pain just because they don't like you.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged tech demo.
I'd be a lot more enthusiastic about the Asimo if you could actually buy one and see it execute _your_ program, or take your direction. As it is, it's essentially a black box. With all that implies. For all we know, somewhere behind the stage some real guy with a wiimote could do the conducting, and the robot could be just a remotely controlled box.
We've never seen it do anything except in controlled, pre-prepared settings.
E.g., ok, it can walk around corners and up stairs. Can it still do it if we move the corners or the stairs? What about if I bring my own stairs? E.g., so one can move a cart and the other can take a cup from the cart. Does it still work if I come as a human and move the cart 3ft to the side from where the first robot left it? What if I move the tables around? Turning around, bowing and walking off the stage isn't much different. Can it still do it, if you rearrange that setup at all?
There are so many ways one could cheat those demos, it's not even funny. E.g., for all we know, it could just be programmed exactly where to put each foot, in X, Y, Z coordinates, and fly off the handle if the stairs don't match those. Or it could have an RFID chip in each place where it must place the foot, and essentially just home in on those with each foot. Etc.
Essentially we don't really _know_ what it does, except for being a high-tech publicity stunt for Honda. It could be the most advanced robot in the world, or it could be the hoax of the century, or something in between. We don't know.
So basically I'll wait until I see one perform in an uncontrolled environment, before getting all "OMG! Asimo!" fanboy. Until then, heck, the Roomba is more exciting. At least you can see for yourself what it does when you stand in its way.
So until I see it do stuff outside