Heh. That's not even freaking close to "A HUGE FRAKKIN' PINHOLE CAMERA."
It's actually closer to Fresnel lens, sorta. Well, not really, but just to get the idea started that you can use something very thin to the same effect as a bulky normal lens or telescope. This one actually a Fresnel zone plate It uses light Interference to act more like a lens, although it is really just a special pattern of lots and lots of pinholes.
If you will, it's closer to the double-slit experiment in light interference that surely you must still remember from school. Behind the panel with the slits, light gets to act funny: you get zones that get more light, and zones which gets less. Photons bend their paths in certain (statistically) predictable ways.
It turns out that if you use some carefully calculated concentric circles as slits, you can actually get the light interfering in such a way, that it's actually focused like with a lens. Essentially those dark and bright bands turn into just one bright dot at the right distance. Well, having concentric holes in a thin foil is kinda hard, but these guys figured out that you can use lots and lots and lots of pinholes instead.
Anyway, even the most summary read of TFA or even the summary would have provided the hint that it's about lots of holes and interference. Which should have been plenty of hint that it's nothing like a pinhole camera. Unless, of course, you actually built a camera with sieve-like Fresnel zone plates before and mistakenly called it a pinhole camera. But I'm fairly sure that you didn't;)
Well, _if_ it got implemented, I'd bet it would be in an instant. I'm not sure it will see the light of day.
See, the first time I saw this idea was in the late 90's, almost a decade ago. That time as a computer peripheral and IIRC also mentioned games as applications Turns out that almost noone was looking forward to buying it. Complete with comments along the lines of yours. Plus along the lines of, "egads, I'm not going in the sewers in RPGs any more, then." Or, "I guess it's time to give up on fishing games." Etc.
Since then, it pops up every freakin' two years again, or occasionally even more often. It's one of those bad ideas that just refuse to die. Just when you think you've buried it at crossroads, with a stake through its chest, and a comprehensive list of the 1001 reasons it's a bad idea... along comes another clueless startup and resurrects it. And gets money from yet another clueless VC.
The thing is, it's not _hard_ to synthesise smells. The nose just has a finite number of receptors, each binding to a specific group of atoms. Each essentially has a protein which binds to such a specific piece (that's what proteins _do_), and fires up a signal when that happens. A given type of molecule can bind to one or more of those, and the "smell" is the weighted sum of what proteins bind to it. So it's not that hard to have a number of simple substances, each triggering exactly one receptor, and synthesize variable numbers of other smells from those.
So expect to see it rising from the grave again and again, as yet another dumbass stumbles upon that realization, sees that there are none on the market, and thinks that he's such a genius that he's the first man ever to figure it out.
Then it gets shot down again, spends a year or two dead, and then the cycle repeats.
The thing is, the rate of new star formation is decreasing over time.
While technically there still is plenty of hydrogen left, the quantity of _free_ hydrogen (available for a new star) is becoming gradually more rare. More and more is locked inside old dead stars. Even a supernova doesn't eject all the matter in the star. A red giant only sheds the outer layer, or to put it other wise, does about as much to recycle the star as shedding does to recycle your dog;)
So basically if we're talking 100 billion years in the future -- which was the last number I heard for a universe where nothing is visible outside the galaxy -- there may be a rather extreme shortage of stars like the sun, and of civilizations trying to make contact with each other.
1. India has nukes. (It also sits on huge reserves of Thorium and has breeder reactors, so it can transform them to uranium or eventually plutonium, as needed.)
2. If you can put an object in orbit, you can make it come down wherever you want it to come down. Or use a smaller rocket and/or a heavier load to make them go ballistic instead of orbitting at all. (For reference, the USSR's space program started the other way around. Someone realized that they had build a rocket so powerful to haul nukes, that it could put a small-ish object in orbit.) Rockets are that interchangeable purpose.
3. Inclined/polar orbits? Always good to have for a nuke, if nothing else, to hit a location that's not near the equator. Plus you might want to go extremely inclined to minimize flight time and thus warning time (I think both the USA and the USSR had most of their nukes aimed at each other over the arctic), or to lob them over international waters and avoid pissing off everyone else in their path.
As a bonus: once you can do polar orbits and big payloads, you can use spy sats.
Now I'm not saying India is necessarily aiming to become an ICBM power. Maybe, maybe not. And they're probably not yet ready to willy-wave internationally about it, in any case. But I'm saying I wouldn't be the least surprised if that was at least one factor in funding that space program.
I still remember seeing the news on TV when they had built their first nuke, and the general euphoria. It was waay back, while they were even poorer than today. Arguably that money could have been better invested in industrializing a little faster. But there were people cheering in the streets that they now have a big destructive weapon. I can see a lot of political capital in the implicit "and now we can lob it at anyone too!" message.
Now I'm not singling India out there. I think they're just... humans, like everyone else. And it's a sad thing that we'd rather have a big stick to threaten the neighbours with, than an extra slice of bread.
1. As others already pointed out, you _can't_ do mental work for 16 hours a day and still be top-productivity. And the GP's post isn't just "possible", it's actually proven.
I remember at least one study where some students were asked to solve some complicated maths problems. Some were told to take a break, get a good night's sleep, etc. Some were told to forge ahead, keep at it all day, and generally do the kind of 16 hours a day mental work that TFA implicitly assumes possible. (You know, the whole assumption being that you could work on Wikipedia if you weren't watching TV.) The guys who had a more humane schedule actually finished faster.
You can see this in places where massive overtime is constantly demanded too. (E.g., most of the computer games industry.) In the long term people just get tired, make more mistakes, and eventually burn out.
The brain does tire, same as everything else. You can cheat a bit by using different parts of it. E.g., if you write programs at work, you write about physics on Wikipedia or do some creative stuff at home. But even that only goes so far.
We also know by now, that the brain has finite buffers. And overflow just causes E.g., the first (short-term) buffer is only 8 seconds. If you don't take a short break (just watch the ceiling for 10 seconds, or do 10 steps around the room) to let it flush when you overload it, data starts being discarded. The next one we know about is about 3 days worth, and apparently data from it is only "persisted" to permanent memory during REM sleep. Again, ploughing through a lot of information too fast, and/or skipping enough sleep, can cause data to be lost. (Essentially doing 2 all-nighters before an exam in college guarantees that you'll know that stuff for the exam, but forget it immediately afterwards.)
So, yes, it is not only possible, but known and proved that people can only do so much mental work per day and still be productive.
2. It's also a matter of interests. You're the most productive for the things that keep you at least a bit interested and maybe even entertained. E.g., if you're fascinated by, say, history but hate geography, you could maintain some history pages on Wikipedia, but basically trying to maintain geography pages would be a chore.
What I'm getting at here, though, is that only a narrow minority of the population, the "nerds", develop some sort of obsession with a narrow domain. (It's one of the invariant symptoms in Asperger's, for example.) Or enough of it to do it in their free time.
Most of the people just don't develop enough of an interest in anything to really further human knowledge. Even if you could un-invent TV overnight, they'd go to the pub instead, not start studying some science. And if you forced them at gun-point to do science in their free time, they'd take it as a chore and do a half-arsed job that doesn't really benefit anyone.
3. Singling out TV is freaking stupid. For as long as we have a recorded history, and even from the primitive tribes we found, people have _some_ time where they just relax and/or are entertained.
They go to the pub, or sit around the fire and gossip, or have a tribal dance in the village centre, or whatever appropriate for the time and place. Long before TV and computer games, people played cards, dice, or whatever other unproductive passtime. Chess was invented as a 4 player wargame, actually modeling the units used at the time. It was the primitive version of Command And Conquer, not t3h uber-intellectual challenge for nerds. (Then they figured out that, many centuries before the Internet, it's a pain to find 4 players at the same time. So they made it for 2 players, each taking command of 2 armies. That's why you have 2 of each piece. And one King became Grand Vizier, and the most powerful piece in the game. It's what now we call a Queen.) Etc.
Or if we're at "TV", people used to go to a theatre for exactly the same purpose as watching a movie on TV. Pretty much any
Actually, that's what makes me wonder more: the fungus can't live without the bacteria. The bacteria can live perfectly well without the fungus. Maybe not in the same places, but they can.
Well, by that token, the >insert any modern car manufacturer< is no Karl Benz! Did you notice how much they ripped off from the 1885 Benz Patent Motorwagen? Including the very idea of a wheeled car with an internal combustion engine, fer crying out loud. And steering by turning the front wheel(s) left or right? How much more blatant can a rip-off get? Heck, the Porsche Carrera (and a few others) even blatantly ripped off the idea of a rear-engine rear-drive configuration.
Ahem. Being the first certainly earns a big kudos and recognition for both Karl Benz and Tolkien. But that doesn't mean that the 1885 Benz Patent Motorwagen still is the best car. Yes, it's amazing that someone made that back then, but in the meantime it's been done better. The latest car from your favourite manufacturer may not be as amazingly innovative as Benz's 1885 creation, but I'd still drive the newer one, all things being equal.
And to get back on topic, Feist certainly isn't an innovator anywhere near Tolkien's calibre, but he's got a heck of a lot of talent anyway. His books are great and captivating anyway, and, all else being equal, I enjoyed reading them a lot more than my aborted attempt at reading Tolkien's trilogy.
Yes, well, I know the term "symbiont", I'm just sorta weary of applying it to that kind of an arrangement.
It's just about akin to our relationship with Broiler chicken: we breed them by the millions in cramped dark spaces, slaughter them wholesale, eat them, and keep just enough of them around to lay enough eggs for the next batch of chickens. Repeat every couple of weeks, because we selected the ones which grow that incredibly fast. (Let's just say that most of what goes into a McChicken still has blue eyes and talks in peeps, because it really never got out of the chick phase by the time it grew big enough to be slaughtered.)
I'm not an animal rights activist, but I wouldn't exactly call that a mutually benefficial symbiosis. Yes, technically the chicks get fed without any effort on their part, more numbers of them exist at any given time than would survive in the wild by themselves even in ideal conditions, etc. _Technically_ we're doing something for them too, as our part of the deal. But, make no mistake, we're still the predator and they're still the prey.
Or to put it otherwise, in the Hansel And Grettel story (you know, the one with the gingerbread house), there is no symbiosis between those two kids and the witch who tries to fatten them to eat them. You could say that technically the witch feeds them, and they're expected to provide a meal for her in return, so it's all fair and a perfect symbiosis. Dunno, I see it as rather less fair and mutually-benefficial.
Pretty much that's what goes on between the fungus and the bacteria in a lichen.
Technically it is a symbiosis. But equally technically seen, the fungus doesn't act that horribly different from any other kind of a parasitic fungus, when it pokes the cell and eats its contents.
Not a flamebait, but a honest opinion (albeit one which will probably be very unpopular around here): Well, I don't know about him, but I honestly tried hard to like Tolkien's trilogy, but was too bored out of my skull to continue after a few chapters.
It didn't even feel as much like a novel, but like, I don't know, one of those travel memoirs. It has to stop and describe every single twig, leaf, tree, bend in the road, etc. And sometimes they sing about it, like they're retards on the short bus to school. I get it already. It's a freaking bend in the road. I don't know why's some character or another bored enough to sing about it, and I'm not very interested in what kind of deranged train of thought brought him to it. Maybe they're just bored on that road and need to sing to pass the time away. There's no need to make me equally bored. Skip to where something happens.
Now I don't expect everything to be all action, and I'm not opposed to a bit of exposition or explaining the setting. It's ok if it's not overdone. Just give me the short version and let my own imagination fill in the blanks. Or if you must keep on describing a road through the woods, throw in something interesting happening now and then, to keep me interested.
To take an intentionally not-apples-to-apples example (so we don't get sidetracked in who's greater than whom and by whose personal preferences), take Terry Pratchett's Discworld. You have been warned that it's not apples to apples. In a sense it too has the structure of 3/4 of the book being just setting the stage for what's going to happen in the end. If you look at it as monomyth, it's an unusually squashed one, with a long trailing edge which does very little to build up tension towards the climax, and then the curve pretty much goes up and down in a hurry in the last chapter or two. But that long trailing edge has almost all the gags in the book. Characters and locations aren't just introduced by describing every freaking freckle and respectively cobblestone on them, and having a merry band of retards sing endless songs about them. They're introduced by what funny stuff they do (the characters) and respectively what happens there (the locations). If he needs to remind you who Vimes or the Patrician are, or what Ankh-Morpork looks like, or who rules the Kingdom of Lancre, or what makes Cohen The Barbarian so great, he doesn't go and describe it at length. He builds an interesting and funny mini-sketch that illustrates his point.
Now I'm certainly not saying that all fantasy needs to be a parody like Discworld, far from it. But the technique can be used just the same in a serious form too. If you need to tell me about the Valley Of Despair, beyond the Mountains Of Doom, where the Dragons Of Fate guard the gate to King Moraelin's evil kingdom, don't go into a dozen pages worth of description and songs. Just make something happen there, and make half the description part of it. And I mean something more interesting than just some guys walking along a trail through that valley.
Now I _am_ a fantasy fan, so I'll give him proper respect for inventing the genre and getting the ball rolling. Kudos all around for that. But, eh, it's been done better since then.
Basically same as I'll give Watt credit for inventing the first useful steam engine, but that doesn't mean I need to pretend that it's still a high-tech marvel. Same here. An amazing relic from the history of that genre, yes. Still an awesome story? Nope. Not for me, anyway.
Cyanobacter are routinely part of lichens, which are a very weird mix of fungi and bacteria capable of photosynthesis. The fungi form a matrix in which the bacteria are trapped, and help collect minerals and moisture for the trapped bacteria.
The arrangement isn't entirely mutually beneficial, from the point of view of the individual bacteria, but from a propagating-the-genes point of view (which in evolution is the only one that matters at all) it does allow the bacteria to live and multiply in some places where it otherwise could not.
And the fungi aren't doing it as some kind of act of kindness, either: fungi can't do photosynthesis on their own, so those lichens growing on rocks and whatnot, well, would die if noone in that arrangement provided food for the fungi too. That's the bacteria's contribution there: those sugars.
At any rate, it's sorta like being inside a living test tube full of nutrients and water. If you don't produce an excess of sugars, the test tube dies. Clearly there's a survival advantage in avoiding that.
From another point of view, fungi are nasty critters, which can only live on organic matter produced by someone else. It may be parasitic (they take other cells apart and eat them) or they can live on dead matter, but nevertheless they absolutely need someone else to manufacture those nutrients for them. Most of those in lichens are a highly specialized and adapted form of parasite. They don't just live off the nutrients that the bacteria excrete, but actually poke the bacteria with tiny filaments and suck the nutrients right out of the living cell. The trapped bacteria are routinely killed in the process, but the colony survives by just allowing them to multiply faster than they're killed.
Again, it's a survival advantage to be able to produce enough of an excess of nutrients, so you can survive (and make enough of a reserve to divide too) even with 3-4 fungal cells around you, all living off you.
Not only the CEO. I lived to see even a hardline IT guy (admittedly, one whose goal in life seems to be to be against whatever you want, and to avoid doing any extra work... actually, make that just: any work) argue along the lines of "nooo, you can't have the servers only 60% loaded! It's a waste of valuable hardware! Why, back in my day (of batch jobs on punched cards, presumably) we had the mainframe used at least an average of 95% before asking for an extra server!"
It always irks me to see people just not understand concepts like "peak" vs "average", or "failing over".
- A cluster of, say, 4 machines (small application, really) which are loaded to 90% of capacity, if one dies, the other 3 are now at 120% of capacity each. If you're lucky, it just crawls, if you're unlucky, Java clutches its chest and keels over with an "OutOfMemoryError" or such.
- if you're at 90% most of the time, then fear Monday 9:00 AM, when every single business partner on that B2B application comes to work and opens his browser. Or fear the massive year-end batch jobs, when that machine/cluster sized barely enough to be ready with the normal midnight jobs by 9 AM, so those users can see their new offers and orders in their browsers, now has to do 20 times as much in a burst.
Basically it amazes me how many people just don't seem to get that simple rule of thumb of clusters: you're either getting nearly 100% uptime and nearly guaranteed response times, _or_ you're getting that extra hardware fully used to support a bigger load. Not both. Or not until that cluster is so large that 1-2 servers failing add negligible load to the remaining machines.
Actually, I think it's even worse. You can't really make even the Pine of MMOs for 3 million any more. Actually, I'll guess you never could.
You could make the Pine of single player RPGs, maybe.
Now take the costs for designing quests, landscapes, dungeons, etc, for that and multiply them by at least 10.
No, seriously. SP RPGs are aiming for anywhere between 10 and 100 hours of gameplay, with the curve actually peaking near the lower end of that. A MMO, I don't know the latest WoW figures, but back in the day of Everquest Sony had figured that the average player stays subscribed for 6 months. (Of course, like with any averages, not everyone is the same. Some quit after the free month, some stay for 4 years, but the average was half a year.)
You actually have to provide some content for them for 6 months. They have to actually keep finding stuff to do for that that long. Way past the point where a SP RPG player popped the DVD out and moved on to something else.
Six months is about 180 days. Let's say only 150 until he finished everything and got stuck in the endgame raid grind. (You don't want that to happen _too_ early, because a lot of people give up.) Let's also say we're not even aiming for 150 days of an unemployed obsessive gamer who puts in 16 hours daily. We're aiming for it to last 150 days for a borderline casual guy averaging 4 hours a day. (Which can also mean less than that on weekdays and a bit longer on Saturday and Sunday, so it's not as obsessive as it looks.) The 16 hours-a-day maniacs will, of course, then finish the game in a little over a month, but, oh well. So, anyway, we're up to 600 hours of gameplay already.
Even if you do go heavier on the time sinks than in a SP RPG, there's only so much time sink percentage you can have before most people find it non-fun. Taking a wild guess based on WoW's design, at the lower levels you want almost no time sinks, while later it gradually increases. But even that boiling-the-frog model lets you rise the bar only so far. So let's be generous and assume you managed to make a whole 50% of your game be time-sinks, and somehow you din't lose 99% of the players because of that.
That's still enough content for a 300 hour SP RPG you need to have there. It's more work than it sounds.
Actually, IMHO most prophecies are wrong, or too uninteresting to make good SF. The real future doesn't just exceed the expectations of SF, it leapfrogs and changes the very premises for it. The future doesn't just turn out to be beyond your wildest dreams, it turns out to be fundamentally incompatible with your dreams, because you base those dreams on the present.
Pretty much, think all the myths about angels (or similar creatures) with swords. Maybe flaming magical swords, but swords nevertheless. Roll that around in your head: flying units with melee weapons. Way to get aerial combat all wrong. They just based it on their own present-day where the sword was a weapon of the nobles and elites, so it made sense that uber-elite angels would get such elite weapons.
What I'm saying is that reality didn't just overshoot their prediction. That prediction was just wrong and based on a flawed premise.
Or think of it this way: think you're in the year 8 AD, arguably near the apex of Roman power, and with the society being what it was. Now think you're writing SF.
Would those romans even be interested at all in an accurate depiction of life in the 20'th or 21'st century? E.g.,
- Would they be interested in something like the issues around minority emancipation, and, say, the fact that some people are treated badly just because of where or who they were born? Heh. Those guys practiced chattel slavery. The slaves in Rome often had easier jobs as, pretty much, janitors and servants and such, but even there they saw nothing wrong with making them fight to death in the Colosseum. Outside Rome, ooer, it often made the Nazi slave labour camps look tame and humane. In the cereal-rich Sicily, a slave revolt was based on the fact that the owners starved the slaves, so they can export more grain to Rome. Or things like mining or processing asbestos were known to be a slow death sentence, and pretty much the cost of keeping buying new slaves was factored into the cost of business.
- Would they see a point in our whining about attacking Iraq on trumped charges? Those guys didn't even need that to start a war. They started a war just because they could. They considered themselves the Sons Of Mars. Their whole history and origin was traced to a fratricide (Romulus killed Remus), the Rape Of The Sabines, and razing Carthage after using, yes, trumped charges to break the peace treaty and attack Carthage again. They were _proud_ of doing that kind of thing. The legions killed at least one emperor, off the top of my head, for trying to make peace with the Germans instead of attacking them. That was seen as being weak and thus unfit to rule.
- Issues surrounding religious intolerance, separation of the church and the state, etc? Now generally they were more religiously tolerant than the Christians that followed them, but they still threw you to the lions if you denied the official gods. That's what they killed Jews and later Christians for: those guys came and said, "your gods are false." Would they think twice about killing Muslims just because they're Muslims, for example? Nope.
Etc.
Now don't take that as an apology of their ways, it's not. I'm just saying that if they wrote some SF play that happens 2000 years in the future (starting at their time, so around present day), they'd get everything wrong. They wouldn't foresee life and technology as it is today, they'd just put their own society and their own legions and triremes in the year 2008, with some props that are probably wrong too. _Maybe_ they'd be flying triremes with wings, but they'd probably still try to ram each other in the air, and/or they'd each have a cohort of marines with swords trying to board and capture the enemy flying trireme.
Arthur C Clarke's prophecies are feasible _because_ they are conservative and were almost feasible when he made them. Sorta like Jules Verne's prophecy of guns using guncotton, which was already possible when he made it. Not practical until someone stabilized the guncotton so it wouldn't auto-ignite, to be sure, but otherwise didn't need much of a technological leap.
But when you try to predict too far ahead, it often turns out that you're not just undershooting, but shoot in the completely wrong direction too.
Heh... while generally I might even join in that chorus, what everyone seems to forget is: there's a whole freakin' PLANET out there, not just the USA. That's a problem which captcha makers seem to blissfully ignore. You don't need to be a moron to have problems with certain words, you just need to be a foreigner.
E.g., let's even say that we're generous and provide a.WAV or.MP3 for our captchas. Cool, so pretty much anyone accessing your site from work, probably has those blocked by the corporate proxy, due to scared about RIAA lawsuits and lost productivity.
But ok, let's say that the user is at home. Today's word sounds like "booblz". Now write it in that text box. Of course, if you're a native English speaker or really good at English, you're typing "baubles" there. If not, you may be left wondering wth you just heard there. Or how you write it, since English is a very funky language when it comes to how you write a word versus how it's pronounced.
Note that I'm not talking about people who are completely unable to use English, so please don't give me a wisecrack like "then they shouldn't be on an English site". One can be reasonably proficient in a language by knowing just a few hundred words. Or to use some free email site, you just need to understand the menus and buttons, basically, and send-receive emails in your own mother tongue otherwise. Asking them to guess at some word they never needed before, isn't exactly going to prove anything about their IQ.
And I'm now getting back to why I said "not just the USA": because even in UK's Commonwealth, words can be pronounced very differently than you'd assume. If you want to see what I'm talking about, try listening to anything spoken in a Glasgow accent if you're not from there. Youtube has a few clips in that accent, for example. You're damn good if you can understand half the words.
"Semantic" stuff has the same problem. E.g., ok, to prove you're a human, pick the goatee from the image list and add it to Mr Potato Head. Or bisect the acute angle in that triangle, if we're talking geometry. If you're not a native English speaker, you may be left wondering wtf is a goatee or an acute angle. It's not like they're words you'd need every day or which would be essential to use the site otherwise.
Again, you haven't just discriminated against the retarded, you've _also_ discriminated against reasonably intelligent people who just happen to speak a different language.
So basically even if you were ok with discriminating against the stupid, it _also_ ends up being xenophobic. Whether you're ok with that too, well, that's up to you to decide.
Actually, without going too much into details, some things make so much and evolved independently so many times on Earth, that they make sense when you think of it.
Or even better explained: they make sense when you
A) want an alien at least evolved enough to hold a conversation with. Bacteria are exciting for biologists, but an alien you can actually make contact with, has damn good reasons to indeed look kinda like us.
B) take evolution and RL constraints into consideration. It's easy to imagine giant amoeba creatures, or sacs of gas floating on Jupiter, but those tend to either (I) have blatant disadvantages that natural selection would discriminate against, or (II) they're bloody impossible. E.g., a cell is really just a drop of sea water in a lipid membrane, and evolved from some aminoacid chains which originally started replicating in plain sea water without a membrane. And from there it's been baby steps towards any complex organisms. It was first just bacterial films, then some "worms" which were just a toroidal bacterial film and "sponges" which were just a bacterial colony with holes in it, and so on. Most fantasy extraterestrial forms proposed, like those giant gas sacks, it's not clear how they'd evolve in the first place.
But anyway, that in mind, I'll say that, for example:
- to start with the easy part, any creature of any complexity above "bacterial colony" will have specialized cells for specialized tasks. Simply because it's a huge advantage to. Cells on your skin need to largely insulate you from the uncontrolled outside world, while cells inside need to allow a freer flow of nutrients, for example. As an added bonus, specialization also means that each cell only needs a smaller set of proteins and reactions to do its job, which reduces its energy and nutrient needs and also the number of things that can go wrong.
So basically this rules out any ideas some may have about sentient amorphous blobs.
- almost any creature has either bilateral or radial symmetry, simply because it saves on DNA. Your left side is largely a mirrored copy of your right side. It also has advantages like that it's easier to swim or walk when your left and right legs/fins/tentacles are the same length. And having redundant organs is an advantage by itself too.
- any complex creature will have _some_ sensory organs, because again it's a great advantage to. Even some of the most primitive cells can detect changes in the environment, and react to them in one way or another. Some unicelular organisms already have light sensors. Over time some stuff will remain rather distributed, but high-bandwidth stuff like eyes, it makes sense to have a small number and complex/high-res, rather than photosensitivity all over your body. Other stuff tends to work _because_ it's a single structure instead of a widely distributed array, e.g., hearing. Etc. Basically given enough time and evolution, see the previous stuff about specialization: a lot of things will get concentrated and specialized.
- almost any complex creature will have a mouth at one end and an arse at the other end, simply because it all evolved out of some ultra-primitive worms which were just a thin tube that pushed water from one end to the other. And evolution works in baby steps, small changes to what already existed. Even the exceptions tend to be actually really built the same way. E.g., gasteropods have a funkier configuration, but start as the above described tube anyway: later a diagonal muscle twists them into an different configuration.
- neurons (or whatever the alien equivalent is), are inherently slow, compared to transistors. They're chemical things, just because they evolved out of other cells, and that's how cells work. They don't have to just transmit the signal, they actually have to produce chemicals to excite the next neuron's receptors, and then neutralize those so the next one doesn't keep firing for ever. Again, _because_ they evolved from other cells, which are just a complex chemistry run
Well, it's all in the wording and who's interested in what, I guess. I mean, if you think it's bad that they don't give you money to use their brand, think this: for some other brands you have to _pay_ the owner to use their brand.
E.g., AFAIK, racing games get to pay use actual RL cars in their games. You may think, "wtf, I'm actually advertising their cars, they should pay me", but it's usually seen the other way around: you get to use their cars and the mind-share that their marketing department built, to sell your game.
And might get other restrictions placed on them too. E.g., the persistent rumour is that some games don't have car damage, simply because some car company or another said, basically, "thou shalt not show our cars all banged up and crumpled."
So, well, NASA could put it as "we'll allow one developer to use our brand for free, exclusively, and make money out of it." You know, it's the same zero dollars budget, but "we're not charging" you sounds generous, while "we're not paying you" sounds petty.
Now if any devs and publisher want to take that deal, well, that's a whole other question.
Most MMOs cost a lot more to make then they used to. The behemoth called WoW raised the bar in a lot of aspects, simply by being there. It's not just that it _is_ more polished in virtually all aspects than any other publisher could be arsed to fund before they shove it out the door. It's that at this size it (A) is the place where all your friends are, so you have to be given a good reason to play something else, and (B) it's become a brand name by itself. Everyone has at least heard of World Of Warcraft by now.
So there's a lot of effort and a lot of cost to go against that. And you have to wonder if you'll get those money back.
Would that many people join your game because of the NASA brand name?
Worse yet, can you figure the setting and gameplay to keep them, once the first brave pioneers try it? I mean, The Sims was a bigger brand name and had more devout followers than all Blizzard games put together, but it flopped anyway. If the gameplay isn't what people expect, they leave, and tell all their friends to not bother.
Honestly, I can't even imagine how could you turn NASA's missions into a good MMO. You could make a 30'th century SF MMO with a fictional future NASA, no doubt. But the existing missions and a cramped space station, well, just aren't much of a MMO world.
Make it Edutainment too? Oooer. That adds a new layer of challenge by itself. People play games to be entertained, not to be lectured. So every piece of educational info you want to cram in, is a challenge by itself to either (A) try to make it entertaining too, against all odds, or (B) compensate for it with enough other entertaining stuff.
So they do have quite the challenge ahead to convince a publisher that the NASA brand is worth all that headache.
But, still, just saying, you'd be surprised how PR can spin it into an act of generosity anyway:P
IANAL, but I think that "as part of his job" or "in their official capacity" don't actually mean "DMV clerk who managed to install BitTorrent on his work PC and downloaded/redistributed every single new movie". I can't even imagine what kind of an official job would involve breaking copyright law, as part of the job description. Maybe a cop investigating a counterfeit DVD operation, but that's just about it.
At any rate, it seems to me that whether they fire you or not is kinda irrelevant. They can't sue you if your job description or assignment was to break copyright law, and they can't sue the state in any case, but that's about it. You can still be sued as a private person, if you broke the law on your own.
Same as, for example, you can't sue the state if a state employee downloads kiddie porn at work, but that employee can still be tried and sent to PMITA prison.
Now they will probably fire the bugger anyway, but that's sorta just the icing on the cake. Even if he kept the state-employed clerk job or whatever, the RIAA can still sue his arse off.
Anyway, on the whole I'm not sure what's to celebrate except as a clarification of the constitution. I suspect that the actual impact of it will range between insignificant to non-existent. As I was saying, there aren't that many jobs which involve unauthorized copying and distribution of copyrighted works. I would assume that any state or federal agencies which do need to copy or distribute (Library Of Congress, maybe?), already have very explicit legal exemptions.
Actually, Eve for this guy was the event received from another component. Seriously, I understand what you're trying to say, there may be situations like what you describe, etc. But trust me, in this case it had nothing to do with cryptography or with any protocol described like that.
Plus, heck, the guy was at _this_ competence level:
And was genuinely surprised that it still prints "test". He debugged that for a couple of days and tried a few... innovative variations, before coming over and asking.
Another incident involving him, was his going, "Arrgh! Java's Hashtable is broken! I added a new value with a different key and it replaced the old one!" I go over and look, he's looking at the bucket array of the Hashtable with the debugger. "Look," he goes, "my old value was here, and now it's the other value."
"Ah, we had that bug too in a program at the previous company I worked for!" chimes in Wally #2 from the next desk. "We had to manually set the capacity to avoid it!"
I try hard not to scream.
"Ok," I say, "expand that 'next' element please. I want to see what's in it."
"Oh... there it is..." goes Wally.
"Well, set the capacity anyway," Wally #2 doesn't give up, "at the old company it really replaced the old value."
What had happened? Ok, you know already, but for the benefit of other Wallies reading this: it's a linked list. The new element with a different key didn't replace the old one, it was simply added to the front of the list for that bucket.
(And if you think that's bad, another team actually went and implemented a new key class with a surrealistically-inefficient custom hashCode(), to avoid the same "bug in Java." They went and changed the whole program, from one end to another, with that stupidity. Kinda funny because it was provable that it didn't really "solve" anything. There's mathematically no way to hash a long string into a 32 bit number, and then pack it into only 31 buckets or whatever, without the possibility of collisions.)
Anyway, I'm just saying, don't think that that guy was some crypto-guru who had memorized all the little sketches with Alice and Bob. He didn't know how calling by value works, nor what a linked list is, so advanced stuff like crypto was sadly way out of his grasp anyway.
As for the DBA, well, the more complete way to explain it was: he argued that it's not his job to tune the database, it's the team that should change their SQL statements to work well on an untuned database. Or hey, the team can tune the database too, if they want to. Mind boggles.
2. I don't know of any protocol described with the participants being called Pete, Eve and Steve.
3. IMHO even stuff like Alice and Bob would be very tricky to use meaningfully as variable names. Plus, what's wrong with calling them, say, "sender" and "receiver"? That would be instantly descriptive to a maintenance guy who maybe hasn't read the exact book you did.
Actually, in a lot of places the office life is much the same. And, trust me, not only in the USA.
As a consultant, I can tell you that some of the projects I'm dragged into, the things I see, and the things I piece together, often make Dilbert look tame. At any rate, I see everything from Dilbert:
- Wally clones? Check. Armies of them.
One managed to work for 3 years to make a trivial module, that later someone else rewrote in 6 hours from scratch. The rewrite was also 40 times faster, when benchmarked on a large-ish data set. And that's just one of them. He also heavily obfuscated his code, with over half the techniques from "How To Write Unmaintainable Code." (If you can believe that variable names like Pete, Eve and Steve are anything else, I have a bridge in Sahara to sell. And that's just one of the dozens of sins of that code.)
I've also seen people whose day consists at least half, of doing the grand tour of all floors where they know someone, to find people to talk to. Probably the saddest case was one whose morning, from 9 to 12 consisted of making a list of what pizza each team member wants to order for noon. Now you're probably going, "wtf, that doesn't take 3 hours even for 100 people." Well, let me explain: not just going around and quickly noting what they want. He went and started a whole debate on the pros and contras of ordering a Calzone, or maybe a Quatro Stagioni this time. And, hey, did you see that today they have a special price for Pizza Margarita? With each and every person individually.
- Evil secretaries? Check. E.g., in one project they lost their best programmer, a contractor, when the secretary at the company that supplied him, cancelled his medical insurance just before his wife went into labour. Apparently, for no reason whatsoever, she just called the insurance company and said that he's getting a private insurance somewhere else. The guy understandably went "fuck you very much" and quit.
From what I hear, it was also quite the uphill battle to get her to do anything, including actually get the overtime paid that the client had already paid for.
Last I've heard, she got a promotion.
- Mordac The Preventer Of IT Services? Check. At times it feels like one in 3 guys in IT make it their goal in life to prevent everyone else from getting their job done.
A particular one, well, wasn't even consistent about what he wanted, except that it's the opposite of what you want. To one team and project it was "you're not getting queues unless they're all on the same queue manager", to another one in the same time interval it was "you're not getting queues unless they're on different queue managers". To one it was "you're not getting anything if you work with message timeouts, because it defeats the whole idea behind reliable messaging!", while to another one it was "you're not getting queues from me unless you set timeouts on the messages! I don't want you to fill the whole partition with old messages!" Etc.
One DBA argued that it's not his job to tune the production database.
And it doesn't seem to be entirely unheard of, that some company's internal IT department sets such outrageous prices for any service, that it would be cheaper to burn a large file on a CD and send it by _taxi_ to the other end of the country, than to use their network and their servers. In one place management was actually proud that their IT department is the most productive department in the company and makes the biggest profits. As if that's something positive, and not an undue burden on the other departments.
- Incompetent managers and incompetent management decisions? Oooer. I could fill a tome with those alone. But let's just say: some managers were keeping the above parasites employed. It's not even the biggest management sin I've seen, but it's enough to make me wonder, you know?
Etc, etc, etc.
Basically I'm talking a guess that all that changed there is that you got a new job sometime in the 90's, where that doesn't happen any more.
Nevertheless, no matter if he is astroturfing or not, what matters is if he has a point, rather than what his motives are.
1. The thing is, going on about uncensored speech is good and fine, if they were to make that in China. The west is actually pretty easy going about what you can say, as long as it it doesn't break the laws. Which, at least in continental Europe, tend to be there for a reason, namely that the people actually liked that idea. Politicians over here tend to have to be very covert about bribes and serving some corporate masters, because it's a _very_ unpopular thing and it can cost one the elections. Populism is a much easier way to power, so it's more the norm than the exception that they'd actually do the stuff that the population wants or can be convinced to want.
In a nutshell, there is no oppressive thought police that they have to fight or circumvent. It's not like anyone will come after you because you wrote "Bush sucks" or "Angela Merkel sucks" or "law X sucks and it should be changed." Note that even the Pirate Bay, well, there was no secret police coming to their homes and taking them to Siberia because they're vocally anti-copyright.
Even hate-speech has to be rather extreme to actually get you censored. You can still jolly well be against immigrants (Nicolas Sarkozy actually got elected in France on not much more as a platform), or Muslims (you'll notice that it was various Islamic groups that produced threats in the recent anti-Islam movie, not the government, and a pretty offensive movie it was too), or pretty much whatever group of your choice. Depending on the country, you won't be very popular as a bigotted racist, but you have to take it pretty damn far before the government gets into the act.
They might, however, have a problem if you're using the net for libel. Cyber-bullying is pretty-much a fact of life by now, for example, and there seems to be a whole class of people whose claim to glory is, pretty much, "yeah, well, I bet I can make you miserable."
So I'm genuinely wondering how many people will use such a service because of some genuine need to effect a political change in their country. You know, the kind of free speech that's actually productive and useful for society. And how many will take it as just an opportunity to spread libel about their ex-GF, teacher, unpopular neighbour, etc? How many will try to intimidate said ex-GF, teacher, etc, via some anonymous site?
Now I'm not proposing to censor them a priori, but I genuinely wonder anyway.
2. I have to wonder exactly how can they make a promise to, essentially, break the law. If a court order comes and says, basically, "you are hereby ordered to tell us who Moraelin is", how _can_ they guarantee that they'll disobey the law? Being a rebellious anarchist is good and fine in some situations, but try it before a judge, and it tends to count as holding the court in contempt. So I wouldn't exactly bet that, if it comes to that, their whole attitude will last more than 5 minutes before their lawyer explains exactly what the prison sentences are for refusing to comply.
Well, I don't use these sites, so maybe I'm talking out the arse. But the way I see it, the root of all evil isn't that they're social networking sites. It's that they're run by evil fucks who have no qualms about raping your privacy for a quick buck. And have found equally evil fucks (e.g., Blockbuster) who cheerfully ignore not just your privacy, but also the law, in their race for more effective advertising. I.e., again for a buck.
There's nothing to say that other sites couldn't do the same, other than personal scruples. (Including not asking for that much private data to start with.)
E.g., Slashdot could share the data the same way. E.g., if you seem to aggree with user John Doe (e.g., you added him to friends, or modded him up more than once), then it may interest you that he rented "Dilbert Does Detroit" and "Gay Blowjobs volume 13." You know, maybe you'd take that as a movie recommendation;)
E.g., AOL essentially already did that kind of a privacy violation when they released those people's search strings. Not as marketing, sure, but part of an "omg, someone code a better search engine than Google, please, they're eating our lunch money" fit.
There's nothing to say they, or a similar company couldn't do the same. E.g., if you use AIM or pretty much any major IM program, they have your data and your contacts list. Maybe if you're good enough a friend with John Doe to have it on your contacts list, well, see above, you might be interested in those movies too. (Or, of course, maybe he's your co-worker, or boss, or the pastor in your bible study group. In which case I guess it will be even more interesting to know that;)
E.g., GMail has not only your address book and mail traffic history to data-mine if they wanted to, but also who sent a GMail ivitation to whom in those marketing stunt days. It's a fairly safe assumption that people sent the first invites to their friends and family, and only moved on to perfect strangers if they still had any left. Maybe if you sent your first GMail invitation to John Doe, you like him enough to take his history of movie rentals as a recommendation.
E.g., almost any MMO makes you enter a ton of personal data and is used by a lot of people as, basically, a social site in 3D. It's fairly trivial to look who's on your friends list, who you're grouping with a lot or talking to a lot, who else is in your guild, who you've brought to the game (e.g., via those "invite a friend, get a free week!" incentives), etc, and start showing them what else you rented or bought.
Etc.
And there's nothing to say that such data can't be equally accessible to a potential employer. (There are already people who go "I led a guild on WoW" when they apply for a management position.) Or outright sold to any potential employer who wants to pay a few bucks for it.
Basically what I'm trying to say is that it's not just social sites: You already give a lot of data about yourself to a lot of people. And at the moment in a lot of places there's nothing except wishful thinking to reassure you that they won't use it. _Probably_ most of them would rather not lose your business by posting your private stuff on a billboard. But as we see here, Blockbuster didn't think twice, and Facebook had nothing to lose anyway.
Sure, you can be paranoid and avoid giving any personally identifiable data, but if the problem gets too widespread, it can be just as much a problem if you're the only guy who is an information black hole. Sorta how the early stealth ships were actually too good at absorbing radar, so they were actually quite visible to radar as a hole in the ocean. If you're the only guy for whom an employer can't find any trace on the net, well, maybe you have some dark secret to hide.
Methinks it would be high time to swing the law bat at that kind of problem.
Well, IMHO the worst analogy is even in the summmary. Basically: (A) businesses lose money to fraud, which supposedly is like (B) the government paying tribute to the pirates.
I mean... Umm, excuse me? They don't look at all similar to me. Just because they share one element, it doesn't automatically make two things similar.
If it automatically did, we'd have a hell of a lot of ridiculous "similarities" all over the place. E.g., (A) the government still can't stop cars from killing innocent people, (B) Stalin and Pol Pot killed innocent people too. Ergo, any western government is no better than those murderous regimes. E.g., (A) the fire departments often can't save everyone from a fire, (B) the Spanish Inquisition burned a lot of people alive. Etc.
But to get back on topic: Similar to the losses to pirates, ok, I can swallow. Similar to the government paying off pireates, no, just now. It'll be similar when the government tries to pay off cyber-crooks or something.
Basically (A) is a case of maybe the government not doing enough, while (B) is a case of the government actively doing the wrong (and arguably bloody stupid thing.) Other than as a melodramatic hyperbole, they're not the same thing at all.
And if we're to go even deeper into it, it gets even more lame than that. The barbary piracy resulted in not just a _hell_ of a loss of money (the tribute demanded alone was 1/10 of the federal government's yearly income), and a rather serious disruption of trade, but also loss of lives, and a bunch of people taken into slavery. One of the explicit conditions at the end of the Second Barbary war was that they stop the practice of taking Christian slaves.
It takes a really disturbed mind to see, basically, "yeah, well, I'm not getting as much interest as I could on my bank account" as similar to someone else being taken into slavery.
Possibly US could be there IF both parties are dissolved and all their leaders prohibited for life from politics, and laws are passed preventing corporate ownership of news media, and NO consolidation/monopoly media.
Actually, that would probably borrow some time for you, but still be the long and embarassing road back to square one.
Duverger's law basically says that no matter from where you start, a simple plurality voting system devolves into a two-party system, given enough time.
So pretty much unless you change the voting system, you'll be back to two parties in no time. You could outlaw both existing parties, do what you will to media, etc, eventually two parties would again consolidate to the point of "yeah, but if you vote for the third guy, you're throwing your vote away."
Slashdot Mirror
Heh. That's not even freaking close to "A HUGE FRAKKIN' PINHOLE CAMERA."
;)
It's actually closer to Fresnel lens, sorta. Well, not really, but just to get the idea started that you can use something very thin to the same effect as a bulky normal lens or telescope. This one actually a Fresnel zone plate It uses light Interference to act more like a lens, although it is really just a special pattern of lots and lots of pinholes.
If you will, it's closer to the double-slit experiment in light interference that surely you must still remember from school. Behind the panel with the slits, light gets to act funny: you get zones that get more light, and zones which gets less. Photons bend their paths in certain (statistically) predictable ways.
It turns out that if you use some carefully calculated concentric circles as slits, you can actually get the light interfering in such a way, that it's actually focused like with a lens. Essentially those dark and bright bands turn into just one bright dot at the right distance. Well, having concentric holes in a thin foil is kinda hard, but these guys figured out that you can use lots and lots and lots of pinholes instead.
Anyway, even the most summary read of TFA or even the summary would have provided the hint that it's about lots of holes and interference. Which should have been plenty of hint that it's nothing like a pinhole camera. Unless, of course, you actually built a camera with sieve-like Fresnel zone plates before and mistakenly called it a pinhole camera. But I'm fairly sure that you didn't
Well, _if_ it got implemented, I'd bet it would be in an instant. I'm not sure it will see the light of day.
See, the first time I saw this idea was in the late 90's, almost a decade ago. That time as a computer peripheral and IIRC also mentioned games as applications Turns out that almost noone was looking forward to buying it. Complete with comments along the lines of yours. Plus along the lines of, "egads, I'm not going in the sewers in RPGs any more, then." Or, "I guess it's time to give up on fishing games." Etc.
Since then, it pops up every freakin' two years again, or occasionally even more often. It's one of those bad ideas that just refuse to die. Just when you think you've buried it at crossroads, with a stake through its chest, and a comprehensive list of the 1001 reasons it's a bad idea... along comes another clueless startup and resurrects it. And gets money from yet another clueless VC.
The thing is, it's not _hard_ to synthesise smells. The nose just has a finite number of receptors, each binding to a specific group of atoms. Each essentially has a protein which binds to such a specific piece (that's what proteins _do_), and fires up a signal when that happens. A given type of molecule can bind to one or more of those, and the "smell" is the weighted sum of what proteins bind to it. So it's not that hard to have a number of simple substances, each triggering exactly one receptor, and synthesize variable numbers of other smells from those.
So expect to see it rising from the grave again and again, as yet another dumbass stumbles upon that realization, sees that there are none on the market, and thinks that he's such a genius that he's the first man ever to figure it out.
Then it gets shot down again, spends a year or two dead, and then the cycle repeats.
Ah well...
The thing is, the rate of new star formation is decreasing over time.
;)
While technically there still is plenty of hydrogen left, the quantity of _free_ hydrogen (available for a new star) is becoming gradually more rare. More and more is locked inside old dead stars. Even a supernova doesn't eject all the matter in the star. A red giant only sheds the outer layer, or to put it other wise, does about as much to recycle the star as shedding does to recycle your dog
So basically if we're talking 100 billion years in the future -- which was the last number I heard for a universe where nothing is visible outside the galaxy -- there may be a rather extreme shortage of stars like the sun, and of civilizations trying to make contact with each other.
Here's a funny thought:
1. India has nukes. (It also sits on huge reserves of Thorium and has breeder reactors, so it can transform them to uranium or eventually plutonium, as needed.)
2. If you can put an object in orbit, you can make it come down wherever you want it to come down. Or use a smaller rocket and/or a heavier load to make them go ballistic instead of orbitting at all. (For reference, the USSR's space program started the other way around. Someone realized that they had build a rocket so powerful to haul nukes, that it could put a small-ish object in orbit.) Rockets are that interchangeable purpose.
3. Inclined/polar orbits? Always good to have for a nuke, if nothing else, to hit a location that's not near the equator. Plus you might want to go extremely inclined to minimize flight time and thus warning time (I think both the USA and the USSR had most of their nukes aimed at each other over the arctic), or to lob them over international waters and avoid pissing off everyone else in their path.
As a bonus: once you can do polar orbits and big payloads, you can use spy sats.
Now I'm not saying India is necessarily aiming to become an ICBM power. Maybe, maybe not. And they're probably not yet ready to willy-wave internationally about it, in any case. But I'm saying I wouldn't be the least surprised if that was at least one factor in funding that space program.
I still remember seeing the news on TV when they had built their first nuke, and the general euphoria. It was waay back, while they were even poorer than today. Arguably that money could have been better invested in industrializing a little faster. But there were people cheering in the streets that they now have a big destructive weapon. I can see a lot of political capital in the implicit "and now we can lob it at anyone too!" message.
Now I'm not singling India out there. I think they're just... humans, like everyone else. And it's a sad thing that we'd rather have a big stick to threaten the neighbours with, than an extra slice of bread.
TFA is still full of it, IMHO.
1. As others already pointed out, you _can't_ do mental work for 16 hours a day and still be top-productivity. And the GP's post isn't just "possible", it's actually proven.
I remember at least one study where some students were asked to solve some complicated maths problems. Some were told to take a break, get a good night's sleep, etc. Some were told to forge ahead, keep at it all day, and generally do the kind of 16 hours a day mental work that TFA implicitly assumes possible. (You know, the whole assumption being that you could work on Wikipedia if you weren't watching TV.) The guys who had a more humane schedule actually finished faster.
You can see this in places where massive overtime is constantly demanded too. (E.g., most of the computer games industry.) In the long term people just get tired, make more mistakes, and eventually burn out.
The brain does tire, same as everything else. You can cheat a bit by using different parts of it. E.g., if you write programs at work, you write about physics on Wikipedia or do some creative stuff at home. But even that only goes so far.
We also know by now, that the brain has finite buffers. And overflow just causes E.g., the first (short-term) buffer is only 8 seconds. If you don't take a short break (just watch the ceiling for 10 seconds, or do 10 steps around the room) to let it flush when you overload it, data starts being discarded. The next one we know about is about 3 days worth, and apparently data from it is only "persisted" to permanent memory during REM sleep. Again, ploughing through a lot of information too fast, and/or skipping enough sleep, can cause data to be lost. (Essentially doing 2 all-nighters before an exam in college guarantees that you'll know that stuff for the exam, but forget it immediately afterwards.)
So, yes, it is not only possible, but known and proved that people can only do so much mental work per day and still be productive.
2. It's also a matter of interests. You're the most productive for the things that keep you at least a bit interested and maybe even entertained. E.g., if you're fascinated by, say, history but hate geography, you could maintain some history pages on Wikipedia, but basically trying to maintain geography pages would be a chore.
What I'm getting at here, though, is that only a narrow minority of the population, the "nerds", develop some sort of obsession with a narrow domain. (It's one of the invariant symptoms in Asperger's, for example.) Or enough of it to do it in their free time.
Most of the people just don't develop enough of an interest in anything to really further human knowledge. Even if you could un-invent TV overnight, they'd go to the pub instead, not start studying some science. And if you forced them at gun-point to do science in their free time, they'd take it as a chore and do a half-arsed job that doesn't really benefit anyone.
3. Singling out TV is freaking stupid. For as long as we have a recorded history, and even from the primitive tribes we found, people have _some_ time where they just relax and/or are entertained.
They go to the pub, or sit around the fire and gossip, or have a tribal dance in the village centre, or whatever appropriate for the time and place. Long before TV and computer games, people played cards, dice, or whatever other unproductive passtime. Chess was invented as a 4 player wargame, actually modeling the units used at the time. It was the primitive version of Command And Conquer, not t3h uber-intellectual challenge for nerds. (Then they figured out that, many centuries before the Internet, it's a pain to find 4 players at the same time. So they made it for 2 players, each taking command of 2 armies. That's why you have 2 of each piece. And one King became Grand Vizier, and the most powerful piece in the game. It's what now we call a Queen.) Etc.
Or if we're at "TV", people used to go to a theatre for exactly the same purpose as watching a movie on TV. Pretty much any
Actually, that's what makes me wonder more: the fungus can't live without the bacteria. The bacteria can live perfectly well without the fungus. Maybe not in the same places, but they can.
Well, by that token, the >insert any modern car manufacturer< is no Karl Benz! Did you notice how much they ripped off from the 1885 Benz Patent Motorwagen? Including the very idea of a wheeled car with an internal combustion engine, fer crying out loud. And steering by turning the front wheel(s) left or right? How much more blatant can a rip-off get? Heck, the Porsche Carrera (and a few others) even blatantly ripped off the idea of a rear-engine rear-drive configuration.
Ahem. Being the first certainly earns a big kudos and recognition for both Karl Benz and Tolkien. But that doesn't mean that the 1885 Benz Patent Motorwagen still is the best car. Yes, it's amazing that someone made that back then, but in the meantime it's been done better. The latest car from your favourite manufacturer may not be as amazingly innovative as Benz's 1885 creation, but I'd still drive the newer one, all things being equal.
And to get back on topic, Feist certainly isn't an innovator anywhere near Tolkien's calibre, but he's got a heck of a lot of talent anyway. His books are great and captivating anyway, and, all else being equal, I enjoyed reading them a lot more than my aborted attempt at reading Tolkien's trilogy.
Yes, well, I know the term "symbiont", I'm just sorta weary of applying it to that kind of an arrangement.
It's just about akin to our relationship with Broiler chicken: we breed them by the millions in cramped dark spaces, slaughter them wholesale, eat them, and keep just enough of them around to lay enough eggs for the next batch of chickens. Repeat every couple of weeks, because we selected the ones which grow that incredibly fast. (Let's just say that most of what goes into a McChicken still has blue eyes and talks in peeps, because it really never got out of the chick phase by the time it grew big enough to be slaughtered.)
I'm not an animal rights activist, but I wouldn't exactly call that a mutually benefficial symbiosis. Yes, technically the chicks get fed without any effort on their part, more numbers of them exist at any given time than would survive in the wild by themselves even in ideal conditions, etc. _Technically_ we're doing something for them too, as our part of the deal. But, make no mistake, we're still the predator and they're still the prey.
Or to put it otherwise, in the Hansel And Grettel story (you know, the one with the gingerbread house), there is no symbiosis between those two kids and the witch who tries to fatten them to eat them. You could say that technically the witch feeds them, and they're expected to provide a meal for her in return, so it's all fair and a perfect symbiosis. Dunno, I see it as rather less fair and mutually-benefficial.
Pretty much that's what goes on between the fungus and the bacteria in a lichen.
Technically it is a symbiosis. But equally technically seen, the fungus doesn't act that horribly different from any other kind of a parasitic fungus, when it pokes the cell and eats its contents.
Not a flamebait, but a honest opinion (albeit one which will probably be very unpopular around here): Well, I don't know about him, but I honestly tried hard to like Tolkien's trilogy, but was too bored out of my skull to continue after a few chapters.
It didn't even feel as much like a novel, but like, I don't know, one of those travel memoirs. It has to stop and describe every single twig, leaf, tree, bend in the road, etc. And sometimes they sing about it, like they're retards on the short bus to school. I get it already. It's a freaking bend in the road. I don't know why's some character or another bored enough to sing about it, and I'm not very interested in what kind of deranged train of thought brought him to it. Maybe they're just bored on that road and need to sing to pass the time away. There's no need to make me equally bored. Skip to where something happens.
Now I don't expect everything to be all action, and I'm not opposed to a bit of exposition or explaining the setting. It's ok if it's not overdone. Just give me the short version and let my own imagination fill in the blanks. Or if you must keep on describing a road through the woods, throw in something interesting happening now and then, to keep me interested.
To take an intentionally not-apples-to-apples example (so we don't get sidetracked in who's greater than whom and by whose personal preferences), take Terry Pratchett's Discworld. You have been warned that it's not apples to apples. In a sense it too has the structure of 3/4 of the book being just setting the stage for what's going to happen in the end. If you look at it as monomyth, it's an unusually squashed one, with a long trailing edge which does very little to build up tension towards the climax, and then the curve pretty much goes up and down in a hurry in the last chapter or two. But that long trailing edge has almost all the gags in the book. Characters and locations aren't just introduced by describing every freaking freckle and respectively cobblestone on them, and having a merry band of retards sing endless songs about them. They're introduced by what funny stuff they do (the characters) and respectively what happens there (the locations). If he needs to remind you who Vimes or the Patrician are, or what Ankh-Morpork looks like, or who rules the Kingdom of Lancre, or what makes Cohen The Barbarian so great, he doesn't go and describe it at length. He builds an interesting and funny mini-sketch that illustrates his point.
Now I'm certainly not saying that all fantasy needs to be a parody like Discworld, far from it. But the technique can be used just the same in a serious form too. If you need to tell me about the Valley Of Despair, beyond the Mountains Of Doom, where the Dragons Of Fate guard the gate to King Moraelin's evil kingdom, don't go into a dozen pages worth of description and songs. Just make something happen there, and make half the description part of it. And I mean something more interesting than just some guys walking along a trail through that valley.
Now I _am_ a fantasy fan, so I'll give him proper respect for inventing the genre and getting the ball rolling. Kudos all around for that. But, eh, it's been done better since then.
Basically same as I'll give Watt credit for inventing the first useful steam engine, but that doesn't mean I need to pretend that it's still a high-tech marvel. Same here. An amazing relic from the history of that genre, yes. Still an awesome story? Nope. Not for me, anyway.
It's not necessarily suicidal.
Cyanobacter are routinely part of lichens, which are a very weird mix of fungi and bacteria capable of photosynthesis. The fungi form a matrix in which the bacteria are trapped, and help collect minerals and moisture for the trapped bacteria.
The arrangement isn't entirely mutually beneficial, from the point of view of the individual bacteria, but from a propagating-the-genes point of view (which in evolution is the only one that matters at all) it does allow the bacteria to live and multiply in some places where it otherwise could not.
And the fungi aren't doing it as some kind of act of kindness, either: fungi can't do photosynthesis on their own, so those lichens growing on rocks and whatnot, well, would die if noone in that arrangement provided food for the fungi too. That's the bacteria's contribution there: those sugars.
At any rate, it's sorta like being inside a living test tube full of nutrients and water. If you don't produce an excess of sugars, the test tube dies. Clearly there's a survival advantage in avoiding that.
From another point of view, fungi are nasty critters, which can only live on organic matter produced by someone else. It may be parasitic (they take other cells apart and eat them) or they can live on dead matter, but nevertheless they absolutely need someone else to manufacture those nutrients for them. Most of those in lichens are a highly specialized and adapted form of parasite. They don't just live off the nutrients that the bacteria excrete, but actually poke the bacteria with tiny filaments and suck the nutrients right out of the living cell. The trapped bacteria are routinely killed in the process, but the colony survives by just allowing them to multiply faster than they're killed.
Again, it's a survival advantage to be able to produce enough of an excess of nutrients, so you can survive (and make enough of a reserve to divide too) even with 3-4 fungal cells around you, all living off you.
Not only the CEO. I lived to see even a hardline IT guy (admittedly, one whose goal in life seems to be to be against whatever you want, and to avoid doing any extra work... actually, make that just: any work) argue along the lines of "nooo, you can't have the servers only 60% loaded! It's a waste of valuable hardware! Why, back in my day (of batch jobs on punched cards, presumably) we had the mainframe used at least an average of 95% before asking for an extra server!"
It always irks me to see people just not understand concepts like "peak" vs "average", or "failing over".
- A cluster of, say, 4 machines (small application, really) which are loaded to 90% of capacity, if one dies, the other 3 are now at 120% of capacity each. If you're lucky, it just crawls, if you're unlucky, Java clutches its chest and keels over with an "OutOfMemoryError" or such.
- if you're at 90% most of the time, then fear Monday 9:00 AM, when every single business partner on that B2B application comes to work and opens his browser. Or fear the massive year-end batch jobs, when that machine/cluster sized barely enough to be ready with the normal midnight jobs by 9 AM, so those users can see their new offers and orders in their browsers, now has to do 20 times as much in a burst.
Basically it amazes me how many people just don't seem to get that simple rule of thumb of clusters: you're either getting nearly 100% uptime and nearly guaranteed response times, _or_ you're getting that extra hardware fully used to support a bigger load. Not both. Or not until that cluster is so large that 1-2 servers failing add negligible load to the remaining machines.
Actually, I think it's even worse. You can't really make even the Pine of MMOs for 3 million any more. Actually, I'll guess you never could.
You could make the Pine of single player RPGs, maybe.
Now take the costs for designing quests, landscapes, dungeons, etc, for that and multiply them by at least 10.
No, seriously. SP RPGs are aiming for anywhere between 10 and 100 hours of gameplay, with the curve actually peaking near the lower end of that. A MMO, I don't know the latest WoW figures, but back in the day of Everquest Sony had figured that the average player stays subscribed for 6 months. (Of course, like with any averages, not everyone is the same. Some quit after the free month, some stay for 4 years, but the average was half a year.)
You actually have to provide some content for them for 6 months. They have to actually keep finding stuff to do for that that long. Way past the point where a SP RPG player popped the DVD out and moved on to something else.
Six months is about 180 days. Let's say only 150 until he finished everything and got stuck in the endgame raid grind. (You don't want that to happen _too_ early, because a lot of people give up.) Let's also say we're not even aiming for 150 days of an unemployed obsessive gamer who puts in 16 hours daily. We're aiming for it to last 150 days for a borderline casual guy averaging 4 hours a day. (Which can also mean less than that on weekdays and a bit longer on Saturday and Sunday, so it's not as obsessive as it looks.) The 16 hours-a-day maniacs will, of course, then finish the game in a little over a month, but, oh well. So, anyway, we're up to 600 hours of gameplay already.
Even if you do go heavier on the time sinks than in a SP RPG, there's only so much time sink percentage you can have before most people find it non-fun. Taking a wild guess based on WoW's design, at the lower levels you want almost no time sinks, while later it gradually increases. But even that boiling-the-frog model lets you rise the bar only so far. So let's be generous and assume you managed to make a whole 50% of your game be time-sinks, and somehow you din't lose 99% of the players because of that.
That's still enough content for a 300 hour SP RPG you need to have there. It's more work than it sounds.
Actually, IMHO most prophecies are wrong, or too uninteresting to make good SF. The real future doesn't just exceed the expectations of SF, it leapfrogs and changes the very premises for it. The future doesn't just turn out to be beyond your wildest dreams, it turns out to be fundamentally incompatible with your dreams, because you base those dreams on the present.
Pretty much, think all the myths about angels (or similar creatures) with swords. Maybe flaming magical swords, but swords nevertheless. Roll that around in your head: flying units with melee weapons. Way to get aerial combat all wrong. They just based it on their own present-day where the sword was a weapon of the nobles and elites, so it made sense that uber-elite angels would get such elite weapons.
What I'm saying is that reality didn't just overshoot their prediction. That prediction was just wrong and based on a flawed premise.
Or think of it this way: think you're in the year 8 AD, arguably near the apex of Roman power, and with the society being what it was. Now think you're writing SF.
Would those romans even be interested at all in an accurate depiction of life in the 20'th or 21'st century? E.g.,
- Would they be interested in something like the issues around minority emancipation, and, say, the fact that some people are treated badly just because of where or who they were born? Heh. Those guys practiced chattel slavery. The slaves in Rome often had easier jobs as, pretty much, janitors and servants and such, but even there they saw nothing wrong with making them fight to death in the Colosseum. Outside Rome, ooer, it often made the Nazi slave labour camps look tame and humane. In the cereal-rich Sicily, a slave revolt was based on the fact that the owners starved the slaves, so they can export more grain to Rome. Or things like mining or processing asbestos were known to be a slow death sentence, and pretty much the cost of keeping buying new slaves was factored into the cost of business.
- Would they see a point in our whining about attacking Iraq on trumped charges? Those guys didn't even need that to start a war. They started a war just because they could. They considered themselves the Sons Of Mars. Their whole history and origin was traced to a fratricide (Romulus killed Remus), the Rape Of The Sabines, and razing Carthage after using, yes, trumped charges to break the peace treaty and attack Carthage again. They were _proud_ of doing that kind of thing. The legions killed at least one emperor, off the top of my head, for trying to make peace with the Germans instead of attacking them. That was seen as being weak and thus unfit to rule.
- Issues surrounding religious intolerance, separation of the church and the state, etc? Now generally they were more religiously tolerant than the Christians that followed them, but they still threw you to the lions if you denied the official gods. That's what they killed Jews and later Christians for: those guys came and said, "your gods are false." Would they think twice about killing Muslims just because they're Muslims, for example? Nope.
Etc.
Now don't take that as an apology of their ways, it's not. I'm just saying that if they wrote some SF play that happens 2000 years in the future (starting at their time, so around present day), they'd get everything wrong. They wouldn't foresee life and technology as it is today, they'd just put their own society and their own legions and triremes in the year 2008, with some props that are probably wrong too. _Maybe_ they'd be flying triremes with wings, but they'd probably still try to ram each other in the air, and/or they'd each have a cohort of marines with swords trying to board and capture the enemy flying trireme.
Arthur C Clarke's prophecies are feasible _because_ they are conservative and were almost feasible when he made them. Sorta like Jules Verne's prophecy of guns using guncotton, which was already possible when he made it. Not practical until someone stabilized the guncotton so it wouldn't auto-ignite, to be sure, but otherwise didn't need much of a technological leap.
But when you try to predict too far ahead, it often turns out that you're not just undershooting, but shoot in the completely wrong direction too.
Heh... while generally I might even join in that chorus, what everyone seems to forget is: there's a whole freakin' PLANET out there, not just the USA. That's a problem which captcha makers seem to blissfully ignore. You don't need to be a moron to have problems with certain words, you just need to be a foreigner.
.WAV or .MP3 for our captchas. Cool, so pretty much anyone accessing your site from work, probably has those blocked by the corporate proxy, due to scared about RIAA lawsuits and lost productivity.
E.g., let's even say that we're generous and provide a
But ok, let's say that the user is at home. Today's word sounds like "booblz". Now write it in that text box. Of course, if you're a native English speaker or really good at English, you're typing "baubles" there. If not, you may be left wondering wth you just heard there. Or how you write it, since English is a very funky language when it comes to how you write a word versus how it's pronounced.
Note that I'm not talking about people who are completely unable to use English, so please don't give me a wisecrack like "then they shouldn't be on an English site". One can be reasonably proficient in a language by knowing just a few hundred words. Or to use some free email site, you just need to understand the menus and buttons, basically, and send-receive emails in your own mother tongue otherwise. Asking them to guess at some word they never needed before, isn't exactly going to prove anything about their IQ.
And I'm now getting back to why I said "not just the USA": because even in UK's Commonwealth, words can be pronounced very differently than you'd assume. If you want to see what I'm talking about, try listening to anything spoken in a Glasgow accent if you're not from there. Youtube has a few clips in that accent, for example. You're damn good if you can understand half the words.
"Semantic" stuff has the same problem. E.g., ok, to prove you're a human, pick the goatee from the image list and add it to Mr Potato Head. Or bisect the acute angle in that triangle, if we're talking geometry. If you're not a native English speaker, you may be left wondering wtf is a goatee or an acute angle. It's not like they're words you'd need every day or which would be essential to use the site otherwise.
Again, you haven't just discriminated against the retarded, you've _also_ discriminated against reasonably intelligent people who just happen to speak a different language.
So basically even if you were ok with discriminating against the stupid, it _also_ ends up being xenophobic. Whether you're ok with that too, well, that's up to you to decide.
Actually, without going too much into details, some things make so much and evolved independently so many times on Earth, that they make sense when you think of it.
Or even better explained: they make sense when you
A) want an alien at least evolved enough to hold a conversation with. Bacteria are exciting for biologists, but an alien you can actually make contact with, has damn good reasons to indeed look kinda like us.
B) take evolution and RL constraints into consideration. It's easy to imagine giant amoeba creatures, or sacs of gas floating on Jupiter, but those tend to either (I) have blatant disadvantages that natural selection would discriminate against, or (II) they're bloody impossible. E.g., a cell is really just a drop of sea water in a lipid membrane, and evolved from some aminoacid chains which originally started replicating in plain sea water without a membrane. And from there it's been baby steps towards any complex organisms. It was first just bacterial films, then some "worms" which were just a toroidal bacterial film and "sponges" which were just a bacterial colony with holes in it, and so on. Most fantasy extraterestrial forms proposed, like those giant gas sacks, it's not clear how they'd evolve in the first place.
But anyway, that in mind, I'll say that, for example:
- to start with the easy part, any creature of any complexity above "bacterial colony" will have specialized cells for specialized tasks. Simply because it's a huge advantage to. Cells on your skin need to largely insulate you from the uncontrolled outside world, while cells inside need to allow a freer flow of nutrients, for example. As an added bonus, specialization also means that each cell only needs a smaller set of proteins and reactions to do its job, which reduces its energy and nutrient needs and also the number of things that can go wrong.
So basically this rules out any ideas some may have about sentient amorphous blobs.
- almost any creature has either bilateral or radial symmetry, simply because it saves on DNA. Your left side is largely a mirrored copy of your right side. It also has advantages like that it's easier to swim or walk when your left and right legs/fins/tentacles are the same length. And having redundant organs is an advantage by itself too.
- any complex creature will have _some_ sensory organs, because again it's a great advantage to. Even some of the most primitive cells can detect changes in the environment, and react to them in one way or another. Some unicelular organisms already have light sensors. Over time some stuff will remain rather distributed, but high-bandwidth stuff like eyes, it makes sense to have a small number and complex/high-res, rather than photosensitivity all over your body. Other stuff tends to work _because_ it's a single structure instead of a widely distributed array, e.g., hearing. Etc. Basically given enough time and evolution, see the previous stuff about specialization: a lot of things will get concentrated and specialized.
- almost any complex creature will have a mouth at one end and an arse at the other end, simply because it all evolved out of some ultra-primitive worms which were just a thin tube that pushed water from one end to the other. And evolution works in baby steps, small changes to what already existed. Even the exceptions tend to be actually really built the same way. E.g., gasteropods have a funkier configuration, but start as the above described tube anyway: later a diagonal muscle twists them into an different configuration.
- neurons (or whatever the alien equivalent is), are inherently slow, compared to transistors. They're chemical things, just because they evolved out of other cells, and that's how cells work. They don't have to just transmit the signal, they actually have to produce chemicals to excite the next neuron's receptors, and then neutralize those so the next one doesn't keep firing for ever. Again, _because_ they evolved from other cells, which are just a complex chemistry run
Well, it's all in the wording and who's interested in what, I guess. I mean, if you think it's bad that they don't give you money to use their brand, think this: for some other brands you have to _pay_ the owner to use their brand.
:P
E.g., AFAIK, racing games get to pay use actual RL cars in their games. You may think, "wtf, I'm actually advertising their cars, they should pay me", but it's usually seen the other way around: you get to use their cars and the mind-share that their marketing department built, to sell your game.
And might get other restrictions placed on them too. E.g., the persistent rumour is that some games don't have car damage, simply because some car company or another said, basically, "thou shalt not show our cars all banged up and crumpled."
So, well, NASA could put it as "we'll allow one developer to use our brand for free, exclusively, and make money out of it." You know, it's the same zero dollars budget, but "we're not charging" you sounds generous, while "we're not paying you" sounds petty.
Now if any devs and publisher want to take that deal, well, that's a whole other question.
Most MMOs cost a lot more to make then they used to. The behemoth called WoW raised the bar in a lot of aspects, simply by being there. It's not just that it _is_ more polished in virtually all aspects than any other publisher could be arsed to fund before they shove it out the door. It's that at this size it (A) is the place where all your friends are, so you have to be given a good reason to play something else, and (B) it's become a brand name by itself. Everyone has at least heard of World Of Warcraft by now.
So there's a lot of effort and a lot of cost to go against that. And you have to wonder if you'll get those money back.
Would that many people join your game because of the NASA brand name?
Worse yet, can you figure the setting and gameplay to keep them, once the first brave pioneers try it? I mean, The Sims was a bigger brand name and had more devout followers than all Blizzard games put together, but it flopped anyway. If the gameplay isn't what people expect, they leave, and tell all their friends to not bother.
Honestly, I can't even imagine how could you turn NASA's missions into a good MMO. You could make a 30'th century SF MMO with a fictional future NASA, no doubt. But the existing missions and a cramped space station, well, just aren't much of a MMO world.
Make it Edutainment too? Oooer. That adds a new layer of challenge by itself. People play games to be entertained, not to be lectured. So every piece of educational info you want to cram in, is a challenge by itself to either (A) try to make it entertaining too, against all odds, or (B) compensate for it with enough other entertaining stuff.
So they do have quite the challenge ahead to convince a publisher that the NASA brand is worth all that headache.
But, still, just saying, you'd be surprised how PR can spin it into an act of generosity anyway
IANAL, but I think that "as part of his job" or "in their official capacity" don't actually mean "DMV clerk who managed to install BitTorrent on his work PC and downloaded/redistributed every single new movie". I can't even imagine what kind of an official job would involve breaking copyright law, as part of the job description. Maybe a cop investigating a counterfeit DVD operation, but that's just about it.
At any rate, it seems to me that whether they fire you or not is kinda irrelevant. They can't sue you if your job description or assignment was to break copyright law, and they can't sue the state in any case, but that's about it. You can still be sued as a private person, if you broke the law on your own.
Same as, for example, you can't sue the state if a state employee downloads kiddie porn at work, but that employee can still be tried and sent to PMITA prison.
Now they will probably fire the bugger anyway, but that's sorta just the icing on the cake. Even if he kept the state-employed clerk job or whatever, the RIAA can still sue his arse off.
Anyway, on the whole I'm not sure what's to celebrate except as a clarification of the constitution. I suspect that the actual impact of it will range between insignificant to non-existent. As I was saying, there aren't that many jobs which involve unauthorized copying and distribution of copyrighted works. I would assume that any state or federal agencies which do need to copy or distribute (Library Of Congress, maybe?), already have very explicit legal exemptions.
Plus, heck, the guy was at _this_ competence level:
He wrote a method And called it like this: And was genuinely surprised that it still prints "test". He debugged that for a couple of days and tried a few... innovative variations, before coming over and asking.
Another incident involving him, was his going, "Arrgh! Java's Hashtable is broken! I added a new value with a different key and it replaced the old one!" I go over and look, he's looking at the bucket array of the Hashtable with the debugger. "Look," he goes, "my old value was here, and now it's the other value."
"Ah, we had that bug too in a program at the previous company I worked for!" chimes in Wally #2 from the next desk. "We had to manually set the capacity to avoid it!"
I try hard not to scream.
"Ok," I say, "expand that 'next' element please. I want to see what's in it."
"Oh... there it is..." goes Wally.
"Well, set the capacity anyway," Wally #2 doesn't give up, "at the old company it really replaced the old value."
What had happened? Ok, you know already, but for the benefit of other Wallies reading this: it's a linked list. The new element with a different key didn't replace the old one, it was simply added to the front of the list for that bucket.
(And if you think that's bad, another team actually went and implemented a new key class with a surrealistically-inefficient custom hashCode(), to avoid the same "bug in Java." They went and changed the whole program, from one end to another, with that stupidity. Kinda funny because it was provable that it didn't really "solve" anything. There's mathematically no way to hash a long string into a 32 bit number, and then pack it into only 31 buckets or whatever, without the possibility of collisions.)
Anyway, I'm just saying, don't think that that guy was some crypto-guru who had memorized all the little sketches with Alice and Bob. He didn't know how calling by value works, nor what a linked list is, so advanced stuff like crypto was sadly way out of his grasp anyway.
As for the DBA, well, the more complete way to explain it was: he argued that it's not his job to tune the database, it's the team that should change their SQL statements to work well on an untuned database. Or hey, the team can tune the database too, if they want to. Mind boggles.
Duly noted, but:
1. It wasn't a cryptography protocol.
2. I don't know of any protocol described with the participants being called Pete, Eve and Steve.
3. IMHO even stuff like Alice and Bob would be very tricky to use meaningfully as variable names. Plus, what's wrong with calling them, say, "sender" and "receiver"? That would be instantly descriptive to a maintenance guy who maybe hasn't read the exact book you did.
Actually, in a lot of places the office life is much the same. And, trust me, not only in the USA.
As a consultant, I can tell you that some of the projects I'm dragged into, the things I see, and the things I piece together, often make Dilbert look tame. At any rate, I see everything from Dilbert:
- Wally clones? Check. Armies of them.
One managed to work for 3 years to make a trivial module, that later someone else rewrote in 6 hours from scratch. The rewrite was also 40 times faster, when benchmarked on a large-ish data set. And that's just one of them. He also heavily obfuscated his code, with over half the techniques from "How To Write Unmaintainable Code." (If you can believe that variable names like Pete, Eve and Steve are anything else, I have a bridge in Sahara to sell. And that's just one of the dozens of sins of that code.)
I've also seen people whose day consists at least half, of doing the grand tour of all floors where they know someone, to find people to talk to. Probably the saddest case was one whose morning, from 9 to 12 consisted of making a list of what pizza each team member wants to order for noon. Now you're probably going, "wtf, that doesn't take 3 hours even for 100 people." Well, let me explain: not just going around and quickly noting what they want. He went and started a whole debate on the pros and contras of ordering a Calzone, or maybe a Quatro Stagioni this time. And, hey, did you see that today they have a special price for Pizza Margarita? With each and every person individually.
- Evil secretaries? Check. E.g., in one project they lost their best programmer, a contractor, when the secretary at the company that supplied him, cancelled his medical insurance just before his wife went into labour. Apparently, for no reason whatsoever, she just called the insurance company and said that he's getting a private insurance somewhere else. The guy understandably went "fuck you very much" and quit.
From what I hear, it was also quite the uphill battle to get her to do anything, including actually get the overtime paid that the client had already paid for.
Last I've heard, she got a promotion.
- Mordac The Preventer Of IT Services? Check. At times it feels like one in 3 guys in IT make it their goal in life to prevent everyone else from getting their job done.
A particular one, well, wasn't even consistent about what he wanted, except that it's the opposite of what you want. To one team and project it was "you're not getting queues unless they're all on the same queue manager", to another one in the same time interval it was "you're not getting queues unless they're on different queue managers". To one it was "you're not getting anything if you work with message timeouts, because it defeats the whole idea behind reliable messaging!", while to another one it was "you're not getting queues from me unless you set timeouts on the messages! I don't want you to fill the whole partition with old messages!" Etc.
One DBA argued that it's not his job to tune the production database.
And it doesn't seem to be entirely unheard of, that some company's internal IT department sets such outrageous prices for any service, that it would be cheaper to burn a large file on a CD and send it by _taxi_ to the other end of the country, than to use their network and their servers. In one place management was actually proud that their IT department is the most productive department in the company and makes the biggest profits. As if that's something positive, and not an undue burden on the other departments.
- Incompetent managers and incompetent management decisions? Oooer. I could fill a tome with those alone. But let's just say: some managers were keeping the above parasites employed. It's not even the biggest management sin I've seen, but it's enough to make me wonder, you know?
Etc, etc, etc.
Basically I'm talking a guess that all that changed there is that you got a new job sometime in the 90's, where that doesn't happen any more.
Nevertheless, no matter if he is astroturfing or not, what matters is if he has a point, rather than what his motives are.
1. The thing is, going on about uncensored speech is good and fine, if they were to make that in China. The west is actually pretty easy going about what you can say, as long as it it doesn't break the laws. Which, at least in continental Europe, tend to be there for a reason, namely that the people actually liked that idea. Politicians over here tend to have to be very covert about bribes and serving some corporate masters, because it's a _very_ unpopular thing and it can cost one the elections. Populism is a much easier way to power, so it's more the norm than the exception that they'd actually do the stuff that the population wants or can be convinced to want.
In a nutshell, there is no oppressive thought police that they have to fight or circumvent. It's not like anyone will come after you because you wrote "Bush sucks" or "Angela Merkel sucks" or "law X sucks and it should be changed." Note that even the Pirate Bay, well, there was no secret police coming to their homes and taking them to Siberia because they're vocally anti-copyright.
Even hate-speech has to be rather extreme to actually get you censored. You can still jolly well be against immigrants (Nicolas Sarkozy actually got elected in France on not much more as a platform), or Muslims (you'll notice that it was various Islamic groups that produced threats in the recent anti-Islam movie, not the government, and a pretty offensive movie it was too), or pretty much whatever group of your choice. Depending on the country, you won't be very popular as a bigotted racist, but you have to take it pretty damn far before the government gets into the act.
They might, however, have a problem if you're using the net for libel. Cyber-bullying is pretty-much a fact of life by now, for example, and there seems to be a whole class of people whose claim to glory is, pretty much, "yeah, well, I bet I can make you miserable."
So I'm genuinely wondering how many people will use such a service because of some genuine need to effect a political change in their country. You know, the kind of free speech that's actually productive and useful for society. And how many will take it as just an opportunity to spread libel about their ex-GF, teacher, unpopular neighbour, etc? How many will try to intimidate said ex-GF, teacher, etc, via some anonymous site?
Now I'm not proposing to censor them a priori, but I genuinely wonder anyway.
2. I have to wonder exactly how can they make a promise to, essentially, break the law. If a court order comes and says, basically, "you are hereby ordered to tell us who Moraelin is", how _can_ they guarantee that they'll disobey the law? Being a rebellious anarchist is good and fine in some situations, but try it before a judge, and it tends to count as holding the court in contempt. So I wouldn't exactly bet that, if it comes to that, their whole attitude will last more than 5 minutes before their lawyer explains exactly what the prison sentences are for refusing to comply.
Well, I don't use these sites, so maybe I'm talking out the arse. But the way I see it, the root of all evil isn't that they're social networking sites. It's that they're run by evil fucks who have no qualms about raping your privacy for a quick buck. And have found equally evil fucks (e.g., Blockbuster) who cheerfully ignore not just your privacy, but also the law, in their race for more effective advertising. I.e., again for a buck.
;)
There's nothing to say that other sites couldn't do the same, other than personal scruples. (Including not asking for that much private data to start with.)
E.g., Slashdot could share the data the same way. E.g., if you seem to aggree with user John Doe (e.g., you added him to friends, or modded him up more than once), then it may interest you that he rented "Dilbert Does Detroit" and "Gay Blowjobs volume 13." You know, maybe you'd take that as a movie recommendation
E.g., AOL essentially already did that kind of a privacy violation when they released those people's search strings. Not as marketing, sure, but part of an "omg, someone code a better search engine than Google, please, they're eating our lunch money" fit.
There's nothing to say they, or a similar company couldn't do the same. E.g., if you use AIM or pretty much any major IM program, they have your data and your contacts list. Maybe if you're good enough a friend with John Doe to have it on your contacts list, well, see above, you might be interested in those movies too. (Or, of course, maybe he's your co-worker, or boss, or the pastor in your bible study group. In which case I guess it will be even more interesting to know that;)
E.g., GMail has not only your address book and mail traffic history to data-mine if they wanted to, but also who sent a GMail ivitation to whom in those marketing stunt days. It's a fairly safe assumption that people sent the first invites to their friends and family, and only moved on to perfect strangers if they still had any left. Maybe if you sent your first GMail invitation to John Doe, you like him enough to take his history of movie rentals as a recommendation.
E.g., almost any MMO makes you enter a ton of personal data and is used by a lot of people as, basically, a social site in 3D. It's fairly trivial to look who's on your friends list, who you're grouping with a lot or talking to a lot, who else is in your guild, who you've brought to the game (e.g., via those "invite a friend, get a free week!" incentives), etc, and start showing them what else you rented or bought.
Etc.
And there's nothing to say that such data can't be equally accessible to a potential employer. (There are already people who go "I led a guild on WoW" when they apply for a management position.) Or outright sold to any potential employer who wants to pay a few bucks for it.
Basically what I'm trying to say is that it's not just social sites: You already give a lot of data about yourself to a lot of people. And at the moment in a lot of places there's nothing except wishful thinking to reassure you that they won't use it. _Probably_ most of them would rather not lose your business by posting your private stuff on a billboard. But as we see here, Blockbuster didn't think twice, and Facebook had nothing to lose anyway.
Sure, you can be paranoid and avoid giving any personally identifiable data, but if the problem gets too widespread, it can be just as much a problem if you're the only guy who is an information black hole. Sorta how the early stealth ships were actually too good at absorbing radar, so they were actually quite visible to radar as a hole in the ocean. If you're the only guy for whom an employer can't find any trace on the net, well, maybe you have some dark secret to hide.
Methinks it would be high time to swing the law bat at that kind of problem.
Well, IMHO the worst analogy is even in the summmary. Basically: (A) businesses lose money to fraud, which supposedly is like (B) the government paying tribute to the pirates.
I mean... Umm, excuse me? They don't look at all similar to me. Just because they share one element, it doesn't automatically make two things similar.
If it automatically did, we'd have a hell of a lot of ridiculous "similarities" all over the place. E.g., (A) the government still can't stop cars from killing innocent people, (B) Stalin and Pol Pot killed innocent people too. Ergo, any western government is no better than those murderous regimes. E.g., (A) the fire departments often can't save everyone from a fire, (B) the Spanish Inquisition burned a lot of people alive. Etc.
But to get back on topic: Similar to the losses to pirates, ok, I can swallow. Similar to the government paying off pireates, no, just now. It'll be similar when the government tries to pay off cyber-crooks or something.
Basically (A) is a case of maybe the government not doing enough, while (B) is a case of the government actively doing the wrong (and arguably bloody stupid thing.) Other than as a melodramatic hyperbole, they're not the same thing at all.
And if we're to go even deeper into it, it gets even more lame than that. The barbary piracy resulted in not just a _hell_ of a loss of money (the tribute demanded alone was 1/10 of the federal government's yearly income), and a rather serious disruption of trade, but also loss of lives, and a bunch of people taken into slavery. One of the explicit conditions at the end of the Second Barbary war was that they stop the practice of taking Christian slaves.
It takes a really disturbed mind to see, basically, "yeah, well, I'm not getting as much interest as I could on my bank account" as similar to someone else being taken into slavery.
Actually, that would probably borrow some time for you, but still be the long and embarassing road back to square one.
Duverger's law basically says that no matter from where you start, a simple plurality voting system devolves into a two-party system, given enough time.
So pretty much unless you change the voting system, you'll be back to two parties in no time. You could outlaw both existing parties, do what you will to media, etc, eventually two parties would again consolidate to the point of "yeah, but if you vote for the third guy, you're throwing your vote away."