In school, I constantly saw ghetto kids slowly gain an understanding of computers (under my tutelage), then desperately hid it from their peers (to whom any form of academic achievement by one of their own had racial overtones).
You've hit a pet peeve of mine there, and I don't know if it's even racial.
The thing is, it's not only ghetto kids. A lot of white adults too seem to have jumped on some sort of a "computers are too complicated, I don't have time for that nerdy crap" bandwagon. Even as more and more jobs require at least elementary computer skills, it's become more and more unfashionable to admit having even those minimal skills.
And it's not just believing that they can't handle it, and giving up without even trying. A lot do try, see that they can, then try even harder to hide that from their peers. I've seen people who _can_ handle a computer when they're alone, turn into helpless illiterates when there's a witness there.
We scared off the normal people, if you will. It's become a thing of pride to be as far from nerdy as possible.
In fact, in some circles it's become fashionable to be stupid. Cue a downward spiral as each member tries to not end up in the upper 50% of their group.
It's kinda funny. Human culture for _millenia_ respected intelligence. If you look as far back as the ancient Egyptians, a little known fact is that they actually had a phonetic set, but it was seen as a thing of _pride_ to be smart and educated enough to use the hieroglyphs. A relatively common form of flattery was to address a letter "to your scribe", meaning, basically, "I know that you can read it yourself and are your own scribe." The Greeks and Romans took pride in being able to read, write and master such subjects as administration, law, rhetoric and philosophy. (Which back then was _the_ science.) Etc.
Even the middle ages, weren't that dark a time in that aspect. There still were plenty of people trying to do alchemy, astrology and philosophy, which back the was what science _was_. Sure, it looks like ignorant and pointless compared to the modern scientific method and the later figures of the Renaissance, but nevertheless, those people were trying to figure out how the world works. Or there were advances in technology that we don't even learn about these days. The physics of the great gothic cathedrals and their mess of buttresses, are nothing short of amazing when you consider that they didn't even have a proper notation for that. Sure, it's trivial nowadays to calculate the vectors and see why it works, but that someone came up with that back then, it's amazing.
And again, noone considered it shameful to be seen in the company of an astrologer or alchemist. It was a thing of pride, in fact, and even kings and bishops made sure to have one around.
If you look as late as the 19'th century and early 20'th, the explosion of science was partially because people actually took advantage of the increasing opportunities to get an education. We have a whole category of "absent minded scientists", which were really nerdier than most people on Slashdot nowadays, and noone thought it was a social disgrace to be seen with one.
So where did we go wrong? How did it become fashionable to be the most stupid of one's peers?
How many potentially brilliant minds are we losing to that fashion? E.g., the ghetto kids you mention, some of them could become great scientists, and one or two might even discover the next great thing. But they don't, because their peers would mock any kind of academic interest or achievement.
How much is this costing us, as a society? And how long until it bites us all in the arse?
Well, all that is very insightful and I dare say informative, but IMHO you're answering the wrong question.
If I read the GP question right, the question is what are _SETI_ scientists hoping to learn there. Since, you know, SETI = Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Those rocks probably didn't have much intelligent populations in the first place, since that tends to mean large multi-cellular organisms, not at most a few frozen bacteria in the cracks of a rock. And even if they had intelligent bacterial, it's a bit too late to learn anything while they're being vapourized at a few tens of thousands of degrees as their rock falls through the atmosphere.
Well, to be fair, I assume that a lot of the SETI people are astronomers and astrophysicists, so they can probably learn something relevant to _those_ domains. But, still, the mention of SETI in the summary seems to be a red herring at best, since anything they learn will likely be irrelevant to _SETI_.
Umm, you do know it's XML, right? Now while admittedly I don't "hate" MS as such, I'm no great fan either and this story does make me a bit disgusted. But if you're telling me you're affraid you can't get your data out of XML down the road, and out of a documented XML format at that, no offense, but I hope you're not having anything to do with programming or management.
I mean, FFS, repeat after me: it's XML. You can write an XSLT to convert it to another XML format (or to HTML or plain text.) You can pipe it through FOP to PDF/RTF/SVG/whatever. You can even do it the hardcore way: parse it through Xerces/Crimson/whatever-XML-library and get your data via a C++ or Java program out of there. Or if you're old school, you can write your own script to get the text from between the XML tags. Etc.
The reason we bash closed formats is because reverse-engineering a format that's (A) _binary_ and (B) _undocumented_ is a pain in the rear. A format that's XML and documented for an ISO standard, is trivial to get your data out of. Maybe you won't get the font just right because, as some complaints about the documentation went, it's described as "works like the Word 97 option". But you _will_ get your data out of it.
Basically, much as bashing MS is popular, and sometimes even I'll join in the chorus, methinks more people should know when to stop. If you're complaining about proprietary XML, that's documented to boot, maybe you should have hit the brakes earlier.
Well, there's also this little known effect, like that EM fields induce currents in conductors. The brain works based on electrical impulses. Can it cause induction?
I don't know whether it can or not, but I'd like to see that addressed just for once. You know, instead of the "it can't be anything but heating" handwaving. I'd like just once that someone addresses that point, even if to bury it finally, you know?
Second, exactly how do microwaves heat water. If you have one MW photon for each million mollecules of water, the way I remember quantum physics is that they _don't_ get a millionth of it each. One mollecule absorbs the whole photon, then bounces into the surrounding ones and spreads the energy around. I.e., for a really really tiny fraction of a second, you have a really high energy mollecule there, not just a bunch of slightly faster ones.
What if that one mollecule is a protein? What if it has a resonance on exactly that frequency or close enough?
What if it bounces into a protein? No, seriously, mis-folding for example is known to be a serious problem. (See mad cow disease or CVD for, admittedly, uncommonly extreme examples of what it can do.) Can it break other bonds or mollecules there? It only takes one protein matching something to fire a signal for example.
I'm curious, you know? Has anyone calculated the energies involved? Is everyone dead sure that it can't break some of the weaker bonds? We don't even really understand how all proteins are folded. (Or we'd give up on that whole branch and on Folding@Home and go do something else.)
No, I'm not one of the tinfoil hat gang, and I never attributed headaches to RF, but I like my science more exact nevertheless. If you're going to claim that it can be _nothing_ else, then I'll take that literally. I'd expect a thorough debunking of literally everything else conceivable there. Ionization is only one aspect of the problem.
I also recally one study where early adopters of cell phones did get slightly more often brain cancer. Ok, so those emitted a heck of a lot more power than cellphones nowadays, and it wasn't that horribly many people even then, so I'm not putting on the tinfoil hat any time soon. But that's one effect which, if true, can't be explained by the "but it's only a little warmth" hypothesis. _Something_ happened in there which we thought was only possible via ionizing radiation. What _is_ the explanation for that? I don't think anyone knows for sure yet.
No bank wants an employee that's a convicted fraudster. No school wants teachers who are porn stars. No police force wants an ex-con as an officer.
1. The whole idea behind law and prison sentences being finite is that there is a finite price to pay for any crime. You were maybe young and dumb, you did something stupid, you paid for it. That's it.
If society thought your crime is so heinous, and you can never be trusted again, they could have kept you in jail longer. There are life sentences too, you know.
Releasing someone but then saying that they can't ever get a decent job again, or (in some places and for some crimes) they can only live under a bridge because anything else is close to where children live and they once peed in public... is a farce. If you can't trust them to live a normal life, don't release them in the first place.
2. Here's another thought for why we don't give prison for life, or capital sentence, for everything from jaywalking to mass murder. It's because then you lose any incentive to not escalate it. If you get the same life sentence for robbing someone as for shooting them, then there's no real reason why you shouldn't just shoot the bugger and take his wallet off his corpse. At least dead he can't identify you, and the penalty is the same anyway.
3. It gets funnier when you start picking on people like porn stars, who didn't even break any laws. So basically you're already proposing to deny employment to some people just because of some groupthink pretense that we're all so puritan and chaste.
For bonus points, probably most dads and half the moms in the mob with pitchforks and torches, probably watched porn before. But yeah, let's pretend we're outraged, because the neighbours might like us less if they don't see us in the mob. It's that kind of herd instinct that sometimes makes me disgusted of the whole human species.
Here's a thought for you: "A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular." -- Adlai Stevenson
Here's another thought: if you think something is that detrimental, make a law against it. That's what rule of the law is all about. If you don't, then accept that it's _not_ in fact wrong to do that. Too lazy to look for a quote, but that's roughly been Andrei Sakharov's thrust in the USSR, where they loved to enforce a little bit more -- and occasionally something completely other -- than what the law said.
As Rob pointed out, if you don't slap them _somehow_, then it's actually profitable to run a scam. At 6000 a pop, if you sell 1000 fakes and even as high as 80% of those realize it's a scam (though it probably will be a lot less), you've still made over a million profit off the remaining 20%.
I'm sure a _lot_ of people would consider a life of crime, if the only punishment were, "if you get caught, you must give it back."
I mean, seriously, then what would be the deterrent to, say, stealing cars? If you get caught you give the car back, if not, you fence the parts. It's guaranteed profit.
There has to be _some_ punishment above and beyond giving back what you stole, or there is no deterrent.
And if you want to say, "that's not equivalent", yes, in a sense it is. If I steal your wallet (or empty your account via ID theft), get caught, and give you your wallet and your money back, what more can you want from me? You got your money back, didn't you? All's settled and fair, and I can go back on the street, right?
Well, chances are you'd want _some_ kind of punishment to both punish and deter further crime. You wouldn't want me back on the street looking for another wallet to swipe, with essentially nothing lost except a day's work.
Now for crimes like above, ok, we have jails. But for companies we can't throw the whole company in jail, and jailing the directors is stuff we keep for more serious stuff. So slapping them with a fine is thought to be an acceptable substitute. The idea is to slap them hard enough that repeating the offense doesn't even remotely look profitable. That's all.
Now the US system does look funny seen from Europe, and, I gather, seen from the USA too. It's easy to see it as "OMG, some greedy guy's trying to get rich off Christie." And it could even be the case. But, really, it's just one of the possible ways to deter companies from doing antisocial stuff. Whether it's a bunch of guys wanting big money (in punitive damages or as a settlement) or a government agency doing the same, well, the end effect is the same: the company is slapped hard enough for doing bad stuff.
In Europe we have government agencies looking out for us, and dishing out huge fines. In the USA, I gather, you couldn't trust the government as far as you could throw them, and the whole system is geared towards a more personal "lawyers at ten paces at high noon" approach. End effect, nevertheless, the company gets slapped. We could bitch about details, like that that causes lawyers in the USA to breed like rabbits, but in the end it's one way to keep companies in line. Can't see anything wrong with that underlying idea.
Search finds the right stuff, if you remember the exact wording. Now look through 1 year old emails, looking for one where you only vaguely remember even the topic. Like, "I think the boss told me to do it that way."
Let's see, a search for the program name... nope. He must have thought it's obvious what project I'm on. Let's detour through Bugzilla and look up the bug number. Some time later, ah-ha, I have the bug number. Search for that, nope. Repeat ad nauseam.
The problem is that even remembering something by a synonym, still throws simple search off. Completely. Now let's see, in how many ways can you say "bug". Well, there's "bug", but then there's "flaw", or "defect", or even "problem", etc. So did the boss say it's ok to ship with known "bug", "flaws", "defects", "problems", or what? Now have fun finding out which of the tens of hits for "bug" is really the one you're looking for. But maybe even that wasn't phrased like that at all. Maybe what he said is something like, "it's ok if the web service interface isn't ready in the pilot phase." Or a gazillion other wordings to the same effect.
Or maybe it was my favourite, some idiot took a screenshot of the log viewer and pasted it into Word as an image. Then you get an email with the actual info as a picture, and some text like "but I think that's low priority right now". Now search that.
Really, the problem is that we still index and search by words, but your memory is rarely text-file quality. You remember ideas, and (if needed) your brain interpolates the gaps.
E.g., you may think you photographically remember your wife in her blue dress on the balcony in your honeymoon, but really you don't store a pixel array like that. The actual pixel array never even leaves the eyes, there's edge detection and contrast enhancement that's built right into the retina itself, to save bandwidth on the optic nerve. Then before it even makes it past the short term buffer, that scene is pruned, tokenized, etc, and you only really got an internal representation of the scene instead of the actual image. That's already missing a lot of information, like, for a start, everything that's outside the focus of attention. (While focusing on the blonde with great tits at the wheel, you completely lose such information as the license plate or even the pink gorilla doing cartwheels across the road.) You have a SEP field built-in, so to speak.
Then over time details or links get lost, and your brain just does a best-guess filling in the gaps. So over time you might remember that the wife's dress was blue, although it was green. Or maybe she wasn't wearing a dress at all on that day, and was in a t-shirt and jeans. Etc.
That goes double for remembering text. You rarely remember the actual text, unless you do rote memorization. But I'd rather not do that with all emails. If you had to actually remember the exact text describing the scene above, even if you remember the general scene, how many ways are there to say that she was wearing jeans? "Pants" works too, for a start. The shirt gets even funnier, because you might just remember it as a "shirt" instead of "t-shirt", and from there there are even more synonyms. "Blouse" and "top" come to mind, for example.
And that's when word-based search will fail you.
What we'd need is some search that's indexed by ideas. But until computers start to really understand natural language, we're kinda screwed. And I mean, understand what it _means_, not just parse English.
Well, I'm flattered if you think it's high-quality enough to be pre-planned, but it isn't. I don't think planning ahead would even work. There's no telling which topics will come up, or when, and I'm not a clairvoyant. If I were, I'd use it to guess the lottery numbers and buy my own island, not to plan ahead threads on Slashdot:P
It's just be ad-libbing a taking the piss, really. I'd just read some post and one neuron would fire up "mmm, romance on an airplane." Another would go, "yir mummah!", a third would run around with tiny little pencils up its tiny little nose, screaming, "look! I'm an airplane!", and a fourth would drive around them in a tiny clown car blowing the horn. Then they start throwing pies at each other, and it kinda snowballs from there;)
Downside, I often realize after posting that it ended up more confusing than it needed to be, or that I went on a tangent and ended up with it being the whole message.
I love how it goes from 'fat guy' to 'young, single, horny, supermodel' with no in between.
Dude, have you even seen the seating in an airplane? The fat guy and the supermodel barely fit in their respective seats. Of course you can't fit anyone else in between;)
Well, now seriously, it's a bit of a hyperbole to illustrate a point. Sorta like "even the Pope couldn't find anything wrong about it", or "it could kill an elephant", or "not even a fly could make it through our security". It's _supposed_ to, you know, provide a "bound" for that interval that's so out of whack, as to amply illustrate the point.
It just doesn't make the same point, or not as melodramatically, if you pick points in between. "It could kill a dog pretty reliably, at point blank range and if you hit a vital organ, or if you want 100% reliability, then it could kill a mouse" doesn't convey quite the same point as "it could kill an elephant."
Same here. I'm saying, in a nutshell, "even if Miss Bloody Perfect sat next to me on a _plane_, after all that air travel ordeal, I just wouldn't be in the mood to chat even her up." It just doesn't carry the same message if you pick something in between. "If a passable woman, nothing that enough beer won't fix, and only a little overweight sat next to me, I'd be too stressed to chat her up," just doesn't have the same impact, you know.
Plus, if you're going to bitch about jokes missing points in between, how do you cope with stuff like "The Pope, Bush and Einstein are on a plane"? Do you want them phrased to something more mid-point, like "a moderately religious guy, a village mayor's deputee, and a slightly clever guy"?;)
Well, that's good for the defense too then. I can just see it. "Your honour, as you can clearly see from my list of topics and interests, I'm attracted to wooly farm animals and big sweaty guys who look like a gorilla. Miss Wossherface is, I would guess, a fine representative specimen of a human female, if you're into _that_ kind of thing, but she'd need wool and horns before I'd be _that_ interested in her. No offense, miss. I mean, seriously, does she look even remotely like anything in those photos? I can't see myself even trying too much persuasion on her, even if I were drunk out of my mind, much less something like date rape. Now if she had hooves and a tail... mmmm... where was I? Right. Plus, your honour, I would like it to be noted that I don't support rape even with animals. I like it all between consenting mammals, and I know which 'baah' means 'no.'";)
Well, now seriously, it was a joke. And if I have to explain it, I guess it already failed to be funny.
And if she did have good advice about that, how much SAN loss do you think you'd be in for?
Eh, this is mom we're talking about. It's more the other way around. I'd worry about sanity loss if she _didn't_ offer some advice on a topic. Even if she has to google it before calling.
I mean, really, you geeks can't go without porn for 3 or 4 whole hours?
Oh please, sometimes I even go without it for a whole 8 hours or more. Damn that filtering proxy at work;)
Here's a thought: close Firefox, shut the lid on the laptop, and *gasp* actually talk to the girl sitting next to you. You just might find that you'll be enjoying the real thing, rather than rubbing one out to pictures of it.
Right. On a plane.
I guess there's always the off chance that the fat guy on the right is really a beautiful woman in disguise. Or that the lady with the screaming baby behind me is really available and is carrying someone else's kid. Or maybe the fat, loud yakking couple in front of me aren't really married, and I could pick the woman up. If I didn't have any taste, that is. (And I'm not even talking about the "fat" part, as about what she's yakking loudly about.)
But ok, let's say that I pulled the proverbial jackpot, my guardian angel used the miracle quota for a small nation and a century, or the karma accountants in the Heavens decide to give me a sorta tax return for what my ancestors suffered during the black plague and a few wars. So I'm seated next to a woman who's gorgeous, smart, horny, available, etc, etc, etc.
On a plane.
Have you been on one of those lately? The seating for a start has been clearly designed for halflings, and anyone over 3 ft tall will have to fold in unnatural ways just to fit their legs in there. I've been occasionally wishing for a modified Folding@home client just to figure out how I'm supposed to fold in there. Doubly so if the guy in front decides to lean his seat back on top of you, and/or hasn't understood under which seat his bag should go.
Then we're both after the airport experience, which is designed to inconvenience you the most, so you'll know you're safe up there. And I don't mean just the coming one hour early and standing in the line for the security circus. That's just the ante. You know, the foreplay for the real shafting experience. Then you've had to put up with loud and chaotic crowds, had to find your terminal (presumably named so because by the time you're there, death doesn't look that bad an alternative) with clues that would make old adventure games look tame, had a jolly good wait because your flight is delayed, then got packed on the plane and waited another 40 minutes because some retard forgot to load the luggage too. (I swear to the elder gods, it actually happened.)
Right. Do you figure at this point either of you is in a jolly and relaxed mood, conducive to making friends and maybe a little flirt?
Well, if you are, I suggest you hurry up, because soon you might get your in-flight meal. Which isn't exactly candle-lit dinner material, to put it mildly. On the last flight I've been on, for example, they gave us some... chopped up weeds, with one thin slic of tomato and one thinner slice of Mozarella. It was slightly larger than a 2 Euro coin, btw. It was called "Insalata Caprese", apparently because "capra" in Italian means goat and you'd have to be one to actually enjoy it or get any nourishment out of it. (Hint: herbivores can extract protein from leaves and stalks by letting it ferment in their compartmented stomachs. Humans can't.)
Again, forget any ideas you might have about what Insalata Caprese is _normally_ supposed to mean. The picture on Wikipedia tends to suggest something completely different than the airline version of it. I'd say that they had gone for the minimal meeting the definition (technically it had sliced tomatoes and mozarella, because they had one slice of each), but even that would be false. I don't remember it having any oil, for example.
I don't know about you, but if you're put in a romantic mood by it, and find a woman to match... well, then may I suggest a romantic honeymoon in an authentic Spanish Inquisition dungeon, complete with top-of-the-line torture chamber?;)
BTW, if you were a closet homo, would you want you mom and dad to see that you were sharing Gay Marriage articles with your lovers?
Heh. This sounds like it could be fun, actually, and I'm not even gay. I'm almost tempted to finally get a GMail account and start sharing some gay stuff just to see if mom will try to give me advice about _that_ too.
Hmm, actually, now I'm getting even better ideas. Do they have some feeds about, dunno, bestiality or such?
The summary is massively confused, and invents the claim that it's about time here in comparison to time somewhere else at the edges of the universe.
Having actually read the linked article, it's funnier. What it seems to actually say is that the time of the whole universe runs slower now, than it ran some billion years ago. It's not "dt(here)/dt(there)", but "dt(now)/dt(back-then)". If that makes any sense.
Let's say we look at the light of a star, some 5 billion light years away. The important thing there isn't the distance. It's that light also took 5 billion years to get here. So if time went faster 5 billion years ago, we'd see it red-shifted.
So, yes, the question isn't as confused as you seem to assume.
If we at least have "here" and "there" in the equation, we'd also have space in it, essentially. So they would have essentially linked dt to distance, which is palatable. But here we have time flow changing with... time.
Well, wtf? In relation to which time? It's like saying that the metre standard is bigger 1000 miles from here, measured with itself.
If it makes any sense, it's not as simple as "dt(here)/dt(there)". It may still make some, but I'd need a smarter explanation than yours (no offense.)
I can't even think of a way to express it in terms of "cost of money", because even money you can compare to something else. E.g., even in a closed economy you could say that a yen in 1800 was more valuable or less valuable than a yen in 1600, based, say, on how much rice you could buy with one yen. So we already have a comparison to _something_ else (kilos of rice), and with a whole other variable as the X of the graph, so to speak. You plot, say, yen vs year, which is two variable.
Now think plotting time, from 2000 BC to 2000 AD. You have, uh, time vs time. I'm not sure how you _can_ plot that without ending up with X = Y all along.
Even briefer, what they say, translated to scales laymen can intuitively understand, is like saying that time goes faster this year than in 1997. How would you measure that? In relation to _what_? One second is one second, by definition, and it was a second by definition in 1997 too. It may make sense to say that "time goes slower" in a metaphorical way, or maybe in a "perceived time" way, but in maths or physics it makes no sense whatsoever.
You have to introduce some other variable there, to compare time to that. Let's call that variable R, from the rice we compared yen to.
Linking it to galaxies and their redshift doesn't change much. "They're not accelerating, time is slowing." Well, blimey, then what do you use under the fraction line there? Because if you use time, they _are_ accelerating. dX/dt is a speed, but dX/dR is something entirely different, and saying that the latter didn't accelerate isn't exactly saying the same thing.
And how does that affect more mundane Newtonian mechanics? If you say that measured in dX/dR, you no longer need energy to accelerate them, then in effect you've re-linked the whole mechanics to dR instead of dt. With all that implies.
How would that affect our galaxy or our solar system, then? The solar system alone is some 5 billion years old, so dt/dR changed a lot in that time. If the mechanics -- thus, for example the planet orbits -- were linked to dR instead of dt, and the ratio between the two changed, then you should see some funky orbit changes in time. Oops, now you need some energy from outside just to keep Earth in the beginning from not being somewhere past Pluto's current orbit.
How would it affect some other stuff? Even quantum mechanics effects, end up depending on time, one way or another. E.g., no matter how you write Heissenberg's uncertainty, you'd notice some pretty nasty changes there in 5 billion years.
You're a fucking Kraut, so you shouldn't be calling anybody out over atrocities.
I'm calling out the people who actually committed those atrocities, not their descendants. And trust me, I'll be the first to call out the various atrocities committed by Germans too, all the way to the crusades.
Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. That's all I'm saying. Learn from your ancestors' mistakes, or you might live to repeat them, and sometimes in the name of the same rationalizations.
On the other hand, I see no point in blaming anyone for what their great-great-great-[...]-great-grandfather did, 600 years ago. People are responsible for their own mistakes and decisions -- including that to fall for a pretty rationalization -- but not for what someone else did, in a whole other time and place.
So, well, the same goes for your guilt trip attempt. Nice try, but I'm sure you can do better. I'll take responsibility for what _I_ have done, or even could have prevented, not for stuff that happened before I was even an embryo.
If nothing else, if we all started shutting up for fear of bringing up what our respective nation did at various points, there would be noone left to talk about history at all. Germany is pretty obvious, but everyone has their own atrocities in their nation's history. Italians in Ethiopia, the Americans against their own natives, China has a fine history of them going all the way to antiquity, Spain in America, Turkey has the legacy of what the Ottoman Empire did to the Armenians, etc. Heck, even the now so peaceful and sociable Scandinavians gave us the Viking invasions, and later... well, look up the Swedish Drink someday, but preferably not on a full stomach. The Czechs had the Hussite wars, and let's just say that the Hussites were interested more in inflicting revenge than conquest or anything else, and quickly gained a reputation of arsonists and murderers. And so on.
So, heh, by all means, bring it all out. Learn thy history, or it might bite you or your children in the arse. Hard.
Well, if what you're trying to tell me that other cultures had different words, which meant different things, well, I can't say I'm surprised there. Even English has some thousands of different words which mean different things:P
E.g., even in English if you wanted to say "true to one's word", there are words like "honest", "truthful", and the like. Very unambiguous words, those.
That ambiguity however, is part of what the English word "honour" _is_. It's not two (or more) distinct words or meanings, which just happen to be pronounced that way. It's something which includes more meanings as an integral part of what it is. And the focus tended to always be more on the "duty" aspect, than on the "honesty" aspect.
There's not much point in debating what "honour" meant before literacy or the middle ages, because, you know, English as a language didn't exist before that point. But if we're to trace its origins through French to Latin, it never was the equivalent of "honest". The French medieval society wasn't that different from the English one later, seeing that the English culture largely evolved from what the Norman conquerors brought over.
Or if we're going to equate to "honour" any foreign word that gets (mis)translated as "honour", you end up including some pretty warped concepts too, not just "heder". You end up including, for example, the concept of female virginity as an integral part of her father's honour, and in some cultures the duty of a father to _murder_ his own daughter if she lost her virginity outside of marriage. (Even via rape.)
Or you end up trying to shoehorn such concepts as the asian concept of "face" into "honour", although the former too actually consists of two different things that get lumped together when translated as "honour" or "face". Only in that case it's more like "respect" someone gets, and "authority" he has. And it's very possible to cause someone a loss of respect, without undermining his authority, and viceversa.
More interestingly, neither of the two has anything to do with honesty. Telling a lie is, in fact, an accepted and _expected_ way to save "face" in either of the two senses. Being unable to achieve something, and admitting it, would actually cause a loss of face, but telling a lie to cover your arse does not.
So, there you go, a foreign couple of words that get translated sometimes as "honour" and really have nothing to do with being honest.
Regardless of what it came from, that's what it was warped up into. I guess, if nothing else, because if you deal in inflexible ideals and occasionally absolutes, some sociopath will manage to use them against you, aikido-style. In fact, make you use them against yourself.
Talk about "community" and whatnot, is good and fine, but it never was that much of a "collectivist" thing since... oh, the early stone age or so. It was some self-appointed leaders and there were the guys who served them. Whether as formalized as slavery or serfdom, or just tribal shamans/chieftains/etc exploiting everyone else, the difference isn't that massive.
Whether you lived or died, or whether you were a nobody, very rarely had to do with what everyone else really thought. It had to do with what said noble/chieftain/shaman told them to think.
And you rarely had a choice about pledging to such a leader. You were pledged de facto or even de jure by just being born there. You were held to notions of duty, honour, obedience to your liege (or tribal equivalent) whether you wanted it or not.
And if you wanted to move up the social pyramid at all, it invariably required some such pledge too. If you moved to (or even were born into) the warrior class, you'd have to pledge your life to the warlord. If you moved to the city, you pledged your life and sword arm to whatever demagogue weaseled his way into being "community leader" there. Etc.
I'm sorry, but in any modern interpretation, a pledge under duress would be considered null and void from the start. If your choices are between (A) pledge, and (B) die one way or another, that's blackmail. And honour was invariably twisted into just pretending to be totally devoted to whoever blackmailed you there.
And, yeah, sometimes it was disguised as duty "to the community", "to the country", "to God", and other such fine double-speak. Guess what? It invariably meant doing what that leader wanted done. It rarely had anything to do with the desires or aspirations of any other individual in that community.
So the medieval version isn't that far off from what it meant in ancient times too. In fact, it was just a continuation. In ancient Greece or Rome you'd be just as automatically pledged to be a soldier of whatever tyrant ruled your city state, and judged "honourable" or "dishonourable" by whether you bought a shield and spear and joined in their silly wars. That is, if you were born high enough to qualify as such. If not, it was your duty to stay and work the fields like a good slave.
In Rome, since you mention antiquity... well, go look the Cursus Honorum up some day. It was just a codified way to gain any political power, and started with ten years of military duty. (Although nepotism was considered normal, so a lot just followed a general relative around as an aide.) That's ancient age, you know.
Maybe you should pick up a dictionary or a thesaurus and learn that, lo and behold, you don't have to use the F-word every two sentences to get your point across. It just makes you sound like a 15-year old kid
If using the expression "fucked up" a couple of times offends you so much, I wonder... can you even manage to watch a movie, what with all that cursing and stuff?;)
Less ethnocentrism and more scholarship is what we need.
Well, yes, bingo. We need more scholarship and less... uninformed idealists trying to rewrite human history to fit their utopian ideals. The fact is, history isn't nice at all. And I don't see what's to gain by pretending that it was a rose-tinted time with honourable warriors, rosy-cheeked peasants, and prosperous healthy craftsmen, all shiny-happy collectivist and honest too.
I'm sorry, but from human emotion? Other than some quick modern redefinition, the idea of "honour" was mostly what it is on WoW. I can think of at least one time and place off the top of my head, where they actually had honour points for killing enemies. Ok, not everyone was that organized, but mostly it was about warfare and your duty to go die for your king, just because kings are so awesome and have a divine right.
So, I'm sorry, but exactly which fundamental human emotion was at work there? Do we have that fundamental an instinct to kill each other? Or what?
It and the closely related notion of "chivalry" was also warped to fit the current interests of the rich and powerful, and included such quirks as:
- while you were supposed to afford chivalry and honour to the enemy nobles and knights, because they could be ransomed for good money, it was perfectly ok to kill prisoners if they're pesants and mercenary. (Before Agincourt, for example, Henry V told his troops that while the nobles would be captured and held for ransome, everyone else damn better fight for their lives. And just to illustrate that he _was_ right, when the French managed to capture the undefended English baggage train, they did kill the unarmed attendants and page boys, mostly children.)
- same about your fucking _own_ troops, if they're of low birth. (E.g., at Crecy, the French knights rode over their own Genoese crossbowmen mercenaries, who were retreating after taking heavy losses from the English crossbowmen. Apparently precisely _because_ of such a fucked up idea of honour: the knights were apparently disgusted that the mercenary cowards wouldn't stand there and die gladly for the king.)
- but it's ok to kill the captured nobles too, if you can't hold on to them or it's otherwise too inconvenient. (E.g., Henry V at Agincourt again.)
- and those rules of chivalry only applied if you weren't outnumbered or something (See, the Black Prince.)
- and while chest-thumping about honour and chivalry in battle, it was ok to loot the peasants' grain for your troops and horses along your way. Both enemy peasants and your own.
- the same knights who'd be all chivalrous to other knights, had no problem with beating their wives _literally_ senseless. (There are "manuals" for knights who recommended exactly that. Oh, and at least one recommended breaking the wife's nose, so other guys won't find her pretty while you're away.)
Etc, etc, etc.
And just so I'm not so euro-centric, the Japanese atrocities in WW2 were almost all motivated by a fucked-up feudal idea of "honour" too.
The massacre of Nanking, for example, was because the oh-so-honourable Japanese warriors were disgusted at the idea that an enemy soldier would do something as dishonourable as throwing away their uniform and hiding among the civilians instead of surrendering. So, you know, going on a rape and massacre rampage was the proper way to punish that dishonour.
Or their atrocious treatment of prisoners was motivated, or at least rationalized, by some fucked up idea that a properly honourable warrior dies, but never surrenders. So obviously the enemies that surrendered were so dishonoured, as to not even qualify as humans any more.
To make things funny, some of those exaggerated ideas of Samurai honour and valour, stemmed from an era where Japan had no wars for hundreds of years. So they wrote a lot about being fearless and stuff, without having actually seen a battlefield in their lives, and knowing that they probably never will. And each author tried to sound even more completely fearless than the previous generation... on paper.
Etc.
So, heh, human emotion? The history of "honour" is just a codified justification for being an arsehole. It was part indoctrination so some dolts would go die for you, and part rationalization of why you're an arsehole and it's good to be one. The only good aspects of it, were the ones where you stood to make a personal gain. E.g., yeah, you were supposed to be honourable and hospitable with captured nobles, because they could be ransomed, but that didn't extend to anyone who couldn't be ransomed.
Hmm... I see your point, and I can see how further sub-classing would make sense. So please don't take what follows as _too_ much arguing your point.
Still, on the other hand, way I see it, both stem from the same fundamental desire to _know_ stuff. We explorers are the nerds of MMOs/MUDs. We're the guys who find it _fascinating_ how a transistor works, or how to get the +5 Sword Of Ganking, just because it's, you know, _knowing_ stuff. We're the guys that imagine that being able to spew the exact spawn points of the +5 Sword of Ganking, or for that matter exactly how a radio works from antenna to speaker, gets everyone in awe.
(I used to pull the latter stunt in school pretty literally, and imagine that people actually enjoy being enlightened and are in awe of my smarts. Yeah, so I'm an aspie;)
It may be knowing where Nirnroot is on the map, instead of knowing exactly which spell is the best at level 31, but they're both facets of wanting to _know_ stuff. We're both the guys who, basically, fit Raph Koster's idea of, "learning new stuff is what fun is" (not a literal quote, but that's the general gist of it.)
So, yeah, I can see your point that further subdivision may bring even more insight, but I'm saying that both are subcategories of the same basic category.
I see your point that people define their own systems of meaning, and it's true and insightful on a very profound level. But that's (partially) another way of saying that different people have different goals and motives. Ok, it's more profound than that, but you probably get my general drift. An explorer (of either kind) will still build their own particular meaning around their own drive to learn new stuff and know more than the average bear.
What I'm trying to say is: that division isn't _that_ horribly arbitrary. Sure, each player will build their own meaning around it, but it will (very roughly) fall in one of the four quadrants, depending on what their primary drive is. An explorer will figure out their own meaning along the lines of how much they learn, an achiever will build their meaning around what they can achieve and brag about, etc. Of course, each group can be further subdivided, and refined, and combine with some other axis. But as one partition of the player space, and one set of axis out of many, and essentially one starting point towards understanding it all, I don't feel that it's that horrible.
You know, the funny thing is: the body if anything above the simplest creatures is built to self-tune. The cells have the proteins, and the DNA coding them of course, to (A) give a chemical signals along the lines of, "oi! I need more X down here!", and (B) react to that signal, if apropriate.
So for example, you're not hard-coded to have X millimeter thick muscles, or a certain bone density, or exactly this pattern of capillaries. You're built to react to how much do you need. So if you regularly pull/push at heavy weights, you get to look like Rambo, and if you sit at a computer like most of us here, you get to have just enough muscle to be able to walk.
(And if you feel a need to post something like, "well, I'm a nerd and exercise daily, and look like Rambo, and fuck a super-model", then consider yourself smacked upside your head. I didn't say _everyone_ was like that, did I?;)
This is out of very pragmatical reasons too. If your particular genetic mutations or diet make you heavier, you get to survive by adapting to it. Otherwise any mutation that changed your metabolism, would be _fatal_, if it didn't come together with a mutation that changes your muscle mass. Which is a hell of a lot less probable a coincidence. A gene set that self-regulates is more robust and survivable.
Anyway, what I'm getting at, is that the same applies to capillaries. Cells that lack oxygen give a chemical signal that tells other cells, basically, "Jesus F. Christ, guys, I'm choking in here!" So some other cells' proteins will take that as a hint to fork an existing blood vessel to cater to that group of cells.
(Side-note: I'm talking about proteins because, basically, that's the active molecule in your body. Proteins are a standardized way to build molecules which interact with other molecules. You have a small number of aminoacids which can be chained to interact with whatever other molecule they have to. Or build another molecule that can. Ranging from regulating what can enter your cells, to simple enzymes like breaking fructose or maltose into glucose, to something as complex as a ribosome or DNA repairs. It's not always the most efficient way, but they can be coded in a standardized way.)
So what I'm REALLY getting at is: does this make any sense? Building a bunch of synthetic capillaries, or getting an "oxygen therapy" or whatnot, seems to be just a way to tell (other) cells, basically, "oh, we have all the oxygen we need here, kthxbye." So basically just some other capillaries won't form. Or disappear right back.
Don't get me wrong, though, I'm not flat-out saying that this is useless. I'm sure smarter people than me have figured out a practical use, and they're not posting at 2 AM or after 2 beers either. Just wondering what that use might be. And how are they going to solve the practical problems, like other capillaries not forming any more. I just want to know, that's all.
It's analysis, not exploring. The goal isn't to figure out the entire map, or find every little Easter Egg, or even to do funky things at the edge of the game. Analyzing a game means looking at the final product and trying to reconstruct A. what it is trying to do, B. how effective it is at doing it, and C. how it got to the state it is at. Then you can spin off the little mechanical issues, and art design choices.
My Bartle score is something like explorer/socializer, and let me tell you, discovering where stuff is on the map isn't exactly at the top of _my_ list. That's not to say it isn't fun, but there are more fun things than that. For me, discovering how the game works, that's the top priority and fun. Still qualifies as an explorer.
Figuring out -- or rather second guessing -- the design decisions is a part of that too. If you can figure out what kind of a design decision went into something, it already tells you something about where to look for the same effect, or what to expect ahead. (Map-wise, but also what to expect at higher levels.)
So basically, I stand by what I was saying. TFA, or at least the summary, seems to assume that only game designers play a game to reverse-engineer it, but, really, about a quarter of the gamers do that to various extents. Some just as idle curiosity on the side, but some really as their main motivation to be there in the first place.
Other than that, nothing to object to your other two paragraphs. Very insightful and informative, that.
Actually, it seems to me like it's simply about what Bartle used to call "explorers". Just to summarize it (badly) for whoever didn't read the paper, basically he looked at what players are doing in a MUD and came up with 4 categories, by what a player's main activity and drive seems to be. (Bear in mind that all people do more than one thing, though not always to the same extent.)
- socializers: their primary goal is to interact with people, make friends, chat, etc
- achievers: the folks who play it for the high score and bragging rights, basically. They work dilligently at achieving the highest level, having the top tier equipment set, having the biggest castle if the game allows that, etc.
- explorers: the folks who like to discover where everything is, and how everything works. These folks, yes, get their jollies by reverse-engineering your game.
- killers: the folks who like to harass, annoy, and hopefully drive someone completely off your game. (I.e., perma-kill them off the game, hence the name.)
That's, of course, just one way to split players into categories. You also have crafters vs adventurers, twitch gamers vs strategists, roleplayers vs munchkins, etc, etc, etc. The fun part is that most are orthogonal too, so it's really a very multi-dimensional universe.
I guess, I can see how someone could end up a game designer if they're in the explorer category.
But personally, I'd have an even bigger... well, not "advice", but "request" really, to game designers: don't assume that everyone else is a clone of yourself. E.g., if you play to reverse-engineer a game, don't assume that every single player out there is wired _exactly_ the same as you are. It may seem obvious, but smarter people have built whole theories -- or rather, hypotheses -- on the assumption that everyone else is ticking exactly the same. (Plus, it's the stuff fanboy flamewars are made of.)
Aiming to not have your game suck is a noble goal, and you have my thanks and respect for that already. But, really, "sucking" is a very subjective thing. It just means that in that multidimensional space of player goals, aspirations, personalities, play-styles, etc, your personality falls far enough from the volume covered by the game. E.g., if the game caters mostly to achievers with twitch-reflexes, and you're an explorer/strategist type, you'll think it sucks.
So one way to make it suck less -- or rather, suck for less people -- is to make sure that more than one type of players can pursue their own path and goals through it. It'll never be possible, nor often desirable, to make _everyone_ happy, but it's often possible to enlarge the space covered quite a bit.
Also, please try to avoid intersections where you should be doing unions. A game where it's possible to play as, say, a diplomat _or_ a gunner, tends to cover the tastes of more people than a game where you have to be a diplomat _and_ a gunner. The first is a union of people sets, the latter is an intersection, and much smaller than either set at that. A lot of games ended up sucking for more people because they failed to understand that: when trying to cater to more than one audience, they ended up catering to the intersection instead of the union.
Slashdot Mirror
You've hit a pet peeve of mine there, and I don't know if it's even racial.
The thing is, it's not only ghetto kids. A lot of white adults too seem to have jumped on some sort of a "computers are too complicated, I don't have time for that nerdy crap" bandwagon. Even as more and more jobs require at least elementary computer skills, it's become more and more unfashionable to admit having even those minimal skills.
And it's not just believing that they can't handle it, and giving up without even trying. A lot do try, see that they can, then try even harder to hide that from their peers. I've seen people who _can_ handle a computer when they're alone, turn into helpless illiterates when there's a witness there.
We scared off the normal people, if you will. It's become a thing of pride to be as far from nerdy as possible.
In fact, in some circles it's become fashionable to be stupid. Cue a downward spiral as each member tries to not end up in the upper 50% of their group.
It's kinda funny. Human culture for _millenia_ respected intelligence. If you look as far back as the ancient Egyptians, a little known fact is that they actually had a phonetic set, but it was seen as a thing of _pride_ to be smart and educated enough to use the hieroglyphs. A relatively common form of flattery was to address a letter "to your scribe", meaning, basically, "I know that you can read it yourself and are your own scribe." The Greeks and Romans took pride in being able to read, write and master such subjects as administration, law, rhetoric and philosophy. (Which back then was _the_ science.) Etc.
Even the middle ages, weren't that dark a time in that aspect. There still were plenty of people trying to do alchemy, astrology and philosophy, which back the was what science _was_. Sure, it looks like ignorant and pointless compared to the modern scientific method and the later figures of the Renaissance, but nevertheless, those people were trying to figure out how the world works. Or there were advances in technology that we don't even learn about these days. The physics of the great gothic cathedrals and their mess of buttresses, are nothing short of amazing when you consider that they didn't even have a proper notation for that. Sure, it's trivial nowadays to calculate the vectors and see why it works, but that someone came up with that back then, it's amazing.
And again, noone considered it shameful to be seen in the company of an astrologer or alchemist. It was a thing of pride, in fact, and even kings and bishops made sure to have one around.
If you look as late as the 19'th century and early 20'th, the explosion of science was partially because people actually took advantage of the increasing opportunities to get an education. We have a whole category of "absent minded scientists", which were really nerdier than most people on Slashdot nowadays, and noone thought it was a social disgrace to be seen with one.
So where did we go wrong? How did it become fashionable to be the most stupid of one's peers?
How many potentially brilliant minds are we losing to that fashion? E.g., the ghetto kids you mention, some of them could become great scientists, and one or two might even discover the next great thing. But they don't, because their peers would mock any kind of academic interest or achievement.
How much is this costing us, as a society? And how long until it bites us all in the arse?
Well, all that is very insightful and I dare say informative, but IMHO you're answering the wrong question.
If I read the GP question right, the question is what are _SETI_ scientists hoping to learn there. Since, you know, SETI = Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Those rocks probably didn't have much intelligent populations in the first place, since that tends to mean large multi-cellular organisms, not at most a few frozen bacteria in the cracks of a rock. And even if they had intelligent bacterial, it's a bit too late to learn anything while they're being vapourized at a few tens of thousands of degrees as their rock falls through the atmosphere.
Well, to be fair, I assume that a lot of the SETI people are astronomers and astrophysicists, so they can probably learn something relevant to _those_ domains. But, still, the mention of SETI in the summary seems to be a red herring at best, since anything they learn will likely be irrelevant to _SETI_.
Umm, you do know it's XML, right? Now while admittedly I don't "hate" MS as such, I'm no great fan either and this story does make me a bit disgusted. But if you're telling me you're affraid you can't get your data out of XML down the road, and out of a documented XML format at that, no offense, but I hope you're not having anything to do with programming or management.
I mean, FFS, repeat after me: it's XML. You can write an XSLT to convert it to another XML format (or to HTML or plain text.) You can pipe it through FOP to PDF/RTF/SVG/whatever. You can even do it the hardcore way: parse it through Xerces/Crimson/whatever-XML-library and get your data via a C++ or Java program out of there. Or if you're old school, you can write your own script to get the text from between the XML tags. Etc.
The reason we bash closed formats is because reverse-engineering a format that's (A) _binary_ and (B) _undocumented_ is a pain in the rear. A format that's XML and documented for an ISO standard, is trivial to get your data out of. Maybe you won't get the font just right because, as some complaints about the documentation went, it's described as "works like the Word 97 option". But you _will_ get your data out of it.
Basically, much as bashing MS is popular, and sometimes even I'll join in the chorus, methinks more people should know when to stop. If you're complaining about proprietary XML, that's documented to boot, maybe you should have hit the brakes earlier.
Thanks for the info. That was certainly more informative and useful than the usual "it's only heat" one-liner.
Well, there's also this little known effect, like that EM fields induce currents in conductors. The brain works based on electrical impulses. Can it cause induction?
I don't know whether it can or not, but I'd like to see that addressed just for once. You know, instead of the "it can't be anything but heating" handwaving. I'd like just once that someone addresses that point, even if to bury it finally, you know?
Second, exactly how do microwaves heat water. If you have one MW photon for each million mollecules of water, the way I remember quantum physics is that they _don't_ get a millionth of it each. One mollecule absorbs the whole photon, then bounces into the surrounding ones and spreads the energy around. I.e., for a really really tiny fraction of a second, you have a really high energy mollecule there, not just a bunch of slightly faster ones.
What if that one mollecule is a protein? What if it has a resonance on exactly that frequency or close enough?
What if it bounces into a protein? No, seriously, mis-folding for example is known to be a serious problem. (See mad cow disease or CVD for, admittedly, uncommonly extreme examples of what it can do.) Can it break other bonds or mollecules there? It only takes one protein matching something to fire a signal for example.
I'm curious, you know? Has anyone calculated the energies involved? Is everyone dead sure that it can't break some of the weaker bonds? We don't even really understand how all proteins are folded. (Or we'd give up on that whole branch and on Folding@Home and go do something else.)
No, I'm not one of the tinfoil hat gang, and I never attributed headaches to RF, but I like my science more exact nevertheless. If you're going to claim that it can be _nothing_ else, then I'll take that literally. I'd expect a thorough debunking of literally everything else conceivable there. Ionization is only one aspect of the problem.
I also recally one study where early adopters of cell phones did get slightly more often brain cancer. Ok, so those emitted a heck of a lot more power than cellphones nowadays, and it wasn't that horribly many people even then, so I'm not putting on the tinfoil hat any time soon. But that's one effect which, if true, can't be explained by the "but it's only a little warmth" hypothesis. _Something_ happened in there which we thought was only possible via ionizing radiation. What _is_ the explanation for that? I don't think anyone knows for sure yet.
1. The whole idea behind law and prison sentences being finite is that there is a finite price to pay for any crime. You were maybe young and dumb, you did something stupid, you paid for it. That's it.
If society thought your crime is so heinous, and you can never be trusted again, they could have kept you in jail longer. There are life sentences too, you know.
Releasing someone but then saying that they can't ever get a decent job again, or (in some places and for some crimes) they can only live under a bridge because anything else is close to where children live and they once peed in public... is a farce. If you can't trust them to live a normal life, don't release them in the first place.
2. Here's another thought for why we don't give prison for life, or capital sentence, for everything from jaywalking to mass murder. It's because then you lose any incentive to not escalate it. If you get the same life sentence for robbing someone as for shooting them, then there's no real reason why you shouldn't just shoot the bugger and take his wallet off his corpse. At least dead he can't identify you, and the penalty is the same anyway.
3. It gets funnier when you start picking on people like porn stars, who didn't even break any laws. So basically you're already proposing to deny employment to some people just because of some groupthink pretense that we're all so puritan and chaste.
For bonus points, probably most dads and half the moms in the mob with pitchforks and torches, probably watched porn before. But yeah, let's pretend we're outraged, because the neighbours might like us less if they don't see us in the mob. It's that kind of herd instinct that sometimes makes me disgusted of the whole human species.
Here's a thought for you: "A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular." -- Adlai Stevenson
Here's another thought: if you think something is that detrimental, make a law against it. That's what rule of the law is all about. If you don't, then accept that it's _not_ in fact wrong to do that. Too lazy to look for a quote, but that's roughly been Andrei Sakharov's thrust in the USSR, where they loved to enforce a little bit more -- and occasionally something completely other -- than what the law said.
As Rob pointed out, if you don't slap them _somehow_, then it's actually profitable to run a scam. At 6000 a pop, if you sell 1000 fakes and even as high as 80% of those realize it's a scam (though it probably will be a lot less), you've still made over a million profit off the remaining 20%.
I'm sure a _lot_ of people would consider a life of crime, if the only punishment were, "if you get caught, you must give it back."
I mean, seriously, then what would be the deterrent to, say, stealing cars? If you get caught you give the car back, if not, you fence the parts. It's guaranteed profit.
There has to be _some_ punishment above and beyond giving back what you stole, or there is no deterrent.
And if you want to say, "that's not equivalent", yes, in a sense it is. If I steal your wallet (or empty your account via ID theft), get caught, and give you your wallet and your money back, what more can you want from me? You got your money back, didn't you? All's settled and fair, and I can go back on the street, right?
Well, chances are you'd want _some_ kind of punishment to both punish and deter further crime. You wouldn't want me back on the street looking for another wallet to swipe, with essentially nothing lost except a day's work.
Now for crimes like above, ok, we have jails. But for companies we can't throw the whole company in jail, and jailing the directors is stuff we keep for more serious stuff. So slapping them with a fine is thought to be an acceptable substitute. The idea is to slap them hard enough that repeating the offense doesn't even remotely look profitable. That's all.
Now the US system does look funny seen from Europe, and, I gather, seen from the USA too. It's easy to see it as "OMG, some greedy guy's trying to get rich off Christie." And it could even be the case. But, really, it's just one of the possible ways to deter companies from doing antisocial stuff. Whether it's a bunch of guys wanting big money (in punitive damages or as a settlement) or a government agency doing the same, well, the end effect is the same: the company is slapped hard enough for doing bad stuff.
In Europe we have government agencies looking out for us, and dishing out huge fines. In the USA, I gather, you couldn't trust the government as far as you could throw them, and the whole system is geared towards a more personal "lawyers at ten paces at high noon" approach. End effect, nevertheless, the company gets slapped. We could bitch about details, like that that causes lawyers in the USA to breed like rabbits, but in the end it's one way to keep companies in line. Can't see anything wrong with that underlying idea.
Yes, who doesn't love Great Tits?
Search finds the right stuff, if you remember the exact wording. Now look through 1 year old emails, looking for one where you only vaguely remember even the topic. Like, "I think the boss told me to do it that way."
Let's see, a search for the program name... nope. He must have thought it's obvious what project I'm on. Let's detour through Bugzilla and look up the bug number. Some time later, ah-ha, I have the bug number. Search for that, nope. Repeat ad nauseam.
The problem is that even remembering something by a synonym, still throws simple search off. Completely. Now let's see, in how many ways can you say "bug". Well, there's "bug", but then there's "flaw", or "defect", or even "problem", etc. So did the boss say it's ok to ship with known "bug", "flaws", "defects", "problems", or what? Now have fun finding out which of the tens of hits for "bug" is really the one you're looking for. But maybe even that wasn't phrased like that at all. Maybe what he said is something like, "it's ok if the web service interface isn't ready in the pilot phase." Or a gazillion other wordings to the same effect.
Or maybe it was my favourite, some idiot took a screenshot of the log viewer and pasted it into Word as an image. Then you get an email with the actual info as a picture, and some text like "but I think that's low priority right now". Now search that.
Really, the problem is that we still index and search by words, but your memory is rarely text-file quality. You remember ideas, and (if needed) your brain interpolates the gaps.
E.g., you may think you photographically remember your wife in her blue dress on the balcony in your honeymoon, but really you don't store a pixel array like that. The actual pixel array never even leaves the eyes, there's edge detection and contrast enhancement that's built right into the retina itself, to save bandwidth on the optic nerve. Then before it even makes it past the short term buffer, that scene is pruned, tokenized, etc, and you only really got an internal representation of the scene instead of the actual image. That's already missing a lot of information, like, for a start, everything that's outside the focus of attention. (While focusing on the blonde with great tits at the wheel, you completely lose such information as the license plate or even the pink gorilla doing cartwheels across the road.) You have a SEP field built-in, so to speak.
Then over time details or links get lost, and your brain just does a best-guess filling in the gaps. So over time you might remember that the wife's dress was blue, although it was green. Or maybe she wasn't wearing a dress at all on that day, and was in a t-shirt and jeans. Etc.
That goes double for remembering text. You rarely remember the actual text, unless you do rote memorization. But I'd rather not do that with all emails. If you had to actually remember the exact text describing the scene above, even if you remember the general scene, how many ways are there to say that she was wearing jeans? "Pants" works too, for a start. The shirt gets even funnier, because you might just remember it as a "shirt" instead of "t-shirt", and from there there are even more synonyms. "Blouse" and "top" come to mind, for example.
And that's when word-based search will fail you.
What we'd need is some search that's indexed by ideas. But until computers start to really understand natural language, we're kinda screwed. And I mean, understand what it _means_, not just parse English.
Well, I'm flattered if you think it's high-quality enough to be pre-planned, but it isn't. I don't think planning ahead would even work. There's no telling which topics will come up, or when, and I'm not a clairvoyant. If I were, I'd use it to guess the lottery numbers and buy my own island, not to plan ahead threads on Slashdot :P
;)
It's just be ad-libbing a taking the piss, really. I'd just read some post and one neuron would fire up "mmm, romance on an airplane." Another would go, "yir mummah!", a third would run around with tiny little pencils up its tiny little nose, screaming, "look! I'm an airplane!", and a fourth would drive around them in a tiny clown car blowing the horn. Then they start throwing pies at each other, and it kinda snowballs from there
Downside, I often realize after posting that it ended up more confusing than it needed to be, or that I went on a tangent and ended up with it being the whole message.
Thanks for the kind words, anyway.
Dude, have you even seen the seating in an airplane? The fat guy and the supermodel barely fit in their respective seats. Of course you can't fit anyone else in between
Well, now seriously, it's a bit of a hyperbole to illustrate a point. Sorta like "even the Pope couldn't find anything wrong about it", or "it could kill an elephant", or "not even a fly could make it through our security". It's _supposed_ to, you know, provide a "bound" for that interval that's so out of whack, as to amply illustrate the point.
It just doesn't make the same point, or not as melodramatically, if you pick points in between. "It could kill a dog pretty reliably, at point blank range and if you hit a vital organ, or if you want 100% reliability, then it could kill a mouse" doesn't convey quite the same point as "it could kill an elephant."
Same here. I'm saying, in a nutshell, "even if Miss Bloody Perfect sat next to me on a _plane_, after all that air travel ordeal, I just wouldn't be in the mood to chat even her up." It just doesn't carry the same message if you pick something in between. "If a passable woman, nothing that enough beer won't fix, and only a little overweight sat next to me, I'd be too stressed to chat her up," just doesn't have the same impact, you know.
Plus, if you're going to bitch about jokes missing points in between, how do you cope with stuff like "The Pope, Bush and Einstein are on a plane"? Do you want them phrased to something more mid-point, like "a moderately religious guy, a village mayor's deputee, and a slightly clever guy"?
Well, that's good for the defense too then. I can just see it. "Your honour, as you can clearly see from my list of topics and interests, I'm attracted to wooly farm animals and big sweaty guys who look like a gorilla. Miss Wossherface is, I would guess, a fine representative specimen of a human female, if you're into _that_ kind of thing, but she'd need wool and horns before I'd be _that_ interested in her. No offense, miss. I mean, seriously, does she look even remotely like anything in those photos? I can't see myself even trying too much persuasion on her, even if I were drunk out of my mind, much less something like date rape. Now if she had hooves and a tail... mmmm... where was I? Right. Plus, your honour, I would like it to be noted that I don't support rape even with animals. I like it all between consenting mammals, and I know which 'baah' means 'no.'" ;)
Well, now seriously, it was a joke. And if I have to explain it, I guess it already failed to be funny.
Eh, this is mom we're talking about. It's more the other way around. I'd worry about sanity loss if she _didn't_ offer some advice on a topic. Even if she has to google it before calling.
Oh please, sometimes I even go without it for a whole 8 hours or more. Damn that filtering proxy at work
Right. On a plane.
I guess there's always the off chance that the fat guy on the right is really a beautiful woman in disguise. Or that the lady with the screaming baby behind me is really available and is carrying someone else's kid. Or maybe the fat, loud yakking couple in front of me aren't really married, and I could pick the woman up. If I didn't have any taste, that is. (And I'm not even talking about the "fat" part, as about what she's yakking loudly about.)
But ok, let's say that I pulled the proverbial jackpot, my guardian angel used the miracle quota for a small nation and a century, or the karma accountants in the Heavens decide to give me a sorta tax return for what my ancestors suffered during the black plague and a few wars. So I'm seated next to a woman who's gorgeous, smart, horny, available, etc, etc, etc.
On a plane.
Have you been on one of those lately? The seating for a start has been clearly designed for halflings, and anyone over 3 ft tall will have to fold in unnatural ways just to fit their legs in there. I've been occasionally wishing for a modified Folding@home client just to figure out how I'm supposed to fold in there. Doubly so if the guy in front decides to lean his seat back on top of you, and/or hasn't understood under which seat his bag should go.
Then we're both after the airport experience, which is designed to inconvenience you the most, so you'll know you're safe up there. And I don't mean just the coming one hour early and standing in the line for the security circus. That's just the ante. You know, the foreplay for the real shafting experience. Then you've had to put up with loud and chaotic crowds, had to find your terminal (presumably named so because by the time you're there, death doesn't look that bad an alternative) with clues that would make old adventure games look tame, had a jolly good wait because your flight is delayed, then got packed on the plane and waited another 40 minutes because some retard forgot to load the luggage too. (I swear to the elder gods, it actually happened.)
Right. Do you figure at this point either of you is in a jolly and relaxed mood, conducive to making friends and maybe a little flirt?
Well, if you are, I suggest you hurry up, because soon you might get your in-flight meal. Which isn't exactly candle-lit dinner material, to put it mildly. On the last flight I've been on, for example, they gave us some... chopped up weeds, with one thin slic of tomato and one thinner slice of Mozarella. It was slightly larger than a 2 Euro coin, btw. It was called "Insalata Caprese", apparently because "capra" in Italian means goat and you'd have to be one to actually enjoy it or get any nourishment out of it. (Hint: herbivores can extract protein from leaves and stalks by letting it ferment in their compartmented stomachs. Humans can't.)
Again, forget any ideas you might have about what Insalata Caprese is _normally_ supposed to mean. The picture on Wikipedia tends to suggest something completely different than the airline version of it. I'd say that they had gone for the minimal meeting the definition (technically it had sliced tomatoes and mozarella, because they had one slice of each), but even that would be false. I don't remember it having any oil, for example.
I don't know about you, but if you're put in a romantic mood by it, and find a woman to match... well, then may I suggest a romantic honeymoon in an authentic Spanish Inquisition dungeon, complete with top-of-the-line torture chamber?
Heh. This sounds like it could be fun, actually, and I'm not even gay. I'm almost tempted to finally get a GMail account and start sharing some gay stuff just to see if mom will try to give me advice about _that_ too.
Hmm, actually, now I'm getting even better ideas. Do they have some feeds about, dunno, bestiality or such?
The summary is massively confused, and invents the claim that it's about time here in comparison to time somewhere else at the edges of the universe.
Having actually read the linked article, it's funnier. What it seems to actually say is that the time of the whole universe runs slower now, than it ran some billion years ago. It's not "dt(here)/dt(there)", but "dt(now)/dt(back-then)". If that makes any sense.
Let's say we look at the light of a star, some 5 billion light years away. The important thing there isn't the distance. It's that light also took 5 billion years to get here. So if time went faster 5 billion years ago, we'd see it red-shifted.
So, yes, the question isn't as confused as you seem to assume.
If we at least have "here" and "there" in the equation, we'd also have space in it, essentially. So they would have essentially linked dt to distance, which is palatable. But here we have time flow changing with... time.
Well, wtf? In relation to which time? It's like saying that the metre standard is bigger 1000 miles from here, measured with itself.
If it makes any sense, it's not as simple as "dt(here)/dt(there)". It may still make some, but I'd need a smarter explanation than yours (no offense.)
I can't even think of a way to express it in terms of "cost of money", because even money you can compare to something else. E.g., even in a closed economy you could say that a yen in 1800 was more valuable or less valuable than a yen in 1600, based, say, on how much rice you could buy with one yen. So we already have a comparison to _something_ else (kilos of rice), and with a whole other variable as the X of the graph, so to speak. You plot, say, yen vs year, which is two variable.
Now think plotting time, from 2000 BC to 2000 AD. You have, uh, time vs time. I'm not sure how you _can_ plot that without ending up with X = Y all along.
Even briefer, what they say, translated to scales laymen can intuitively understand, is like saying that time goes faster this year than in 1997. How would you measure that? In relation to _what_? One second is one second, by definition, and it was a second by definition in 1997 too. It may make sense to say that "time goes slower" in a metaphorical way, or maybe in a "perceived time" way, but in maths or physics it makes no sense whatsoever.
You have to introduce some other variable there, to compare time to that. Let's call that variable R, from the rice we compared yen to.
Linking it to galaxies and their redshift doesn't change much. "They're not accelerating, time is slowing." Well, blimey, then what do you use under the fraction line there? Because if you use time, they _are_ accelerating. dX/dt is a speed, but dX/dR is something entirely different, and saying that the latter didn't accelerate isn't exactly saying the same thing.
And how does that affect more mundane Newtonian mechanics? If you say that measured in dX/dR, you no longer need energy to accelerate them, then in effect you've re-linked the whole mechanics to dR instead of dt. With all that implies.
How would that affect our galaxy or our solar system, then? The solar system alone is some 5 billion years old, so dt/dR changed a lot in that time. If the mechanics -- thus, for example the planet orbits -- were linked to dR instead of dt, and the ratio between the two changed, then you should see some funky orbit changes in time. Oops, now you need some energy from outside just to keep Earth in the beginning from not being somewhere past Pluto's current orbit.
How would it affect some other stuff? Even quantum mechanics effects, end up depending on time, one way or another. E.g., no matter how you write Heissenberg's uncertainty, you'd notice some pretty nasty changes there in 5 billion years.
I'm calling out the people who actually committed those atrocities, not their descendants. And trust me, I'll be the first to call out the various atrocities committed by Germans too, all the way to the crusades.
Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. That's all I'm saying. Learn from your ancestors' mistakes, or you might live to repeat them, and sometimes in the name of the same rationalizations.
On the other hand, I see no point in blaming anyone for what their great-great-great-[...]-great-grandfather did, 600 years ago. People are responsible for their own mistakes and decisions -- including that to fall for a pretty rationalization -- but not for what someone else did, in a whole other time and place.
So, well, the same goes for your guilt trip attempt. Nice try, but I'm sure you can do better. I'll take responsibility for what _I_ have done, or even could have prevented, not for stuff that happened before I was even an embryo.
If nothing else, if we all started shutting up for fear of bringing up what our respective nation did at various points, there would be noone left to talk about history at all. Germany is pretty obvious, but everyone has their own atrocities in their nation's history. Italians in Ethiopia, the Americans against their own natives, China has a fine history of them going all the way to antiquity, Spain in America, Turkey has the legacy of what the Ottoman Empire did to the Armenians, etc. Heck, even the now so peaceful and sociable Scandinavians gave us the Viking invasions, and later... well, look up the Swedish Drink someday, but preferably not on a full stomach. The Czechs had the Hussite wars, and let's just say that the Hussites were interested more in inflicting revenge than conquest or anything else, and quickly gained a reputation of arsonists and murderers. And so on.
So, heh, by all means, bring it all out. Learn thy history, or it might bite you or your children in the arse. Hard.
Well, if what you're trying to tell me that other cultures had different words, which meant different things, well, I can't say I'm surprised there. Even English has some thousands of different words which mean different things :P
E.g., even in English if you wanted to say "true to one's word", there are words like "honest", "truthful", and the like. Very unambiguous words, those.
That ambiguity however, is part of what the English word "honour" _is_. It's not two (or more) distinct words or meanings, which just happen to be pronounced that way. It's something which includes more meanings as an integral part of what it is. And the focus tended to always be more on the "duty" aspect, than on the "honesty" aspect.
There's not much point in debating what "honour" meant before literacy or the middle ages, because, you know, English as a language didn't exist before that point. But if we're to trace its origins through French to Latin, it never was the equivalent of "honest". The French medieval society wasn't that different from the English one later, seeing that the English culture largely evolved from what the Norman conquerors brought over.
Or if we're going to equate to "honour" any foreign word that gets (mis)translated as "honour", you end up including some pretty warped concepts too, not just "heder". You end up including, for example, the concept of female virginity as an integral part of her father's honour, and in some cultures the duty of a father to _murder_ his own daughter if she lost her virginity outside of marriage. (Even via rape.)
Or you end up trying to shoehorn such concepts as the asian concept of "face" into "honour", although the former too actually consists of two different things that get lumped together when translated as "honour" or "face". Only in that case it's more like "respect" someone gets, and "authority" he has. And it's very possible to cause someone a loss of respect, without undermining his authority, and viceversa.
More interestingly, neither of the two has anything to do with honesty. Telling a lie is, in fact, an accepted and _expected_ way to save "face" in either of the two senses. Being unable to achieve something, and admitting it, would actually cause a loss of face, but telling a lie to cover your arse does not.
So, there you go, a foreign couple of words that get translated sometimes as "honour" and really have nothing to do with being honest.
Talk about "community" and whatnot, is good and fine, but it never was that much of a "collectivist" thing since... oh, the early stone age or so. It was some self-appointed leaders and there were the guys who served them. Whether as formalized as slavery or serfdom, or just tribal shamans/chieftains/etc exploiting everyone else, the difference isn't that massive.
Whether you lived or died, or whether you were a nobody, very rarely had to do with what everyone else really thought. It had to do with what said noble/chieftain/shaman told them to think.
And you rarely had a choice about pledging to such a leader. You were pledged de facto or even de jure by just being born there. You were held to notions of duty, honour, obedience to your liege (or tribal equivalent) whether you wanted it or not.
And if you wanted to move up the social pyramid at all, it invariably required some such pledge too. If you moved to (or even were born into) the warrior class, you'd have to pledge your life to the warlord. If you moved to the city, you pledged your life and sword arm to whatever demagogue weaseled his way into being "community leader" there. Etc.
I'm sorry, but in any modern interpretation, a pledge under duress would be considered null and void from the start. If your choices are between (A) pledge, and (B) die one way or another, that's blackmail. And honour was invariably twisted into just pretending to be totally devoted to whoever blackmailed you there.
And, yeah, sometimes it was disguised as duty "to the community", "to the country", "to God", and other such fine double-speak. Guess what? It invariably meant doing what that leader wanted done. It rarely had anything to do with the desires or aspirations of any other individual in that community.
So the medieval version isn't that far off from what it meant in ancient times too. In fact, it was just a continuation. In ancient Greece or Rome you'd be just as automatically pledged to be a soldier of whatever tyrant ruled your city state, and judged "honourable" or "dishonourable" by whether you bought a shield and spear and joined in their silly wars. That is, if you were born high enough to qualify as such. If not, it was your duty to stay and work the fields like a good slave.
In Rome, since you mention antiquity... well, go look the Cursus Honorum up some day. It was just a codified way to gain any political power, and started with ten years of military duty. (Although nepotism was considered normal, so a lot just followed a general relative around as an aide.) That's ancient age, you know.
If using the expression "fucked up" a couple of times offends you so much, I wonder... can you even manage to watch a movie, what with all that cursing and stuff?
Well, yes, bingo. We need more scholarship and less... uninformed idealists trying to rewrite human history to fit their utopian ideals. The fact is, history isn't nice at all. And I don't see what's to gain by pretending that it was a rose-tinted time with honourable warriors, rosy-cheeked peasants, and prosperous healthy craftsmen, all shiny-happy collectivist and honest too.
I'm sorry, but from human emotion? Other than some quick modern redefinition, the idea of "honour" was mostly what it is on WoW. I can think of at least one time and place off the top of my head, where they actually had honour points for killing enemies. Ok, not everyone was that organized, but mostly it was about warfare and your duty to go die for your king, just because kings are so awesome and have a divine right.
So, I'm sorry, but exactly which fundamental human emotion was at work there? Do we have that fundamental an instinct to kill each other? Or what?
It and the closely related notion of "chivalry" was also warped to fit the current interests of the rich and powerful, and included such quirks as:
- while you were supposed to afford chivalry and honour to the enemy nobles and knights, because they could be ransomed for good money, it was perfectly ok to kill prisoners if they're pesants and mercenary. (Before Agincourt, for example, Henry V told his troops that while the nobles would be captured and held for ransome, everyone else damn better fight for their lives. And just to illustrate that he _was_ right, when the French managed to capture the undefended English baggage train, they did kill the unarmed attendants and page boys, mostly children.)
- same about your fucking _own_ troops, if they're of low birth. (E.g., at Crecy, the French knights rode over their own Genoese crossbowmen mercenaries, who were retreating after taking heavy losses from the English crossbowmen. Apparently precisely _because_ of such a fucked up idea of honour: the knights were apparently disgusted that the mercenary cowards wouldn't stand there and die gladly for the king.)
- but it's ok to kill the captured nobles too, if you can't hold on to them or it's otherwise too inconvenient. (E.g., Henry V at Agincourt again.)
- and those rules of chivalry only applied if you weren't outnumbered or something (See, the Black Prince.)
- and while chest-thumping about honour and chivalry in battle, it was ok to loot the peasants' grain for your troops and horses along your way. Both enemy peasants and your own.
- the same knights who'd be all chivalrous to other knights, had no problem with beating their wives _literally_ senseless. (There are "manuals" for knights who recommended exactly that. Oh, and at least one recommended breaking the wife's nose, so other guys won't find her pretty while you're away.)
Etc, etc, etc.
And just so I'm not so euro-centric, the Japanese atrocities in WW2 were almost all motivated by a fucked-up feudal idea of "honour" too.
The massacre of Nanking, for example, was because the oh-so-honourable Japanese warriors were disgusted at the idea that an enemy soldier would do something as dishonourable as throwing away their uniform and hiding among the civilians instead of surrendering. So, you know, going on a rape and massacre rampage was the proper way to punish that dishonour.
Or their atrocious treatment of prisoners was motivated, or at least rationalized, by some fucked up idea that a properly honourable warrior dies, but never surrenders. So obviously the enemies that surrendered were so dishonoured, as to not even qualify as humans any more.
To make things funny, some of those exaggerated ideas of Samurai honour and valour, stemmed from an era where Japan had no wars for hundreds of years. So they wrote a lot about being fearless and stuff, without having actually seen a battlefield in their lives, and knowing that they probably never will. And each author tried to sound even more completely fearless than the previous generation... on paper.
Etc.
So, heh, human emotion? The history of "honour" is just a codified justification for being an arsehole. It was part indoctrination so some dolts would go die for you, and part rationalization of why you're an arsehole and it's good to be one. The only good aspects of it, were the ones where you stood to make a personal gain. E.g., yeah, you were supposed to be honourable and hospitable with captured nobles, because they could be ransomed, but that didn't extend to anyone who couldn't be ransomed.
Indeed, I didn't mean exclusive or, nor see much benefit in going XOR about it. Thanks for the clarification.
Hmm... I see your point, and I can see how further sub-classing would make sense. So please don't take what follows as _too_ much arguing your point.
Still, on the other hand, way I see it, both stem from the same fundamental desire to _know_ stuff. We explorers are the nerds of MMOs/MUDs. We're the guys who find it _fascinating_ how a transistor works, or how to get the +5 Sword Of Ganking, just because it's, you know, _knowing_ stuff. We're the guys that imagine that being able to spew the exact spawn points of the +5 Sword of Ganking, or for that matter exactly how a radio works from antenna to speaker, gets everyone in awe.
(I used to pull the latter stunt in school pretty literally, and imagine that people actually enjoy being enlightened and are in awe of my smarts. Yeah, so I'm an aspie;)
It may be knowing where Nirnroot is on the map, instead of knowing exactly which spell is the best at level 31, but they're both facets of wanting to _know_ stuff. We're both the guys who, basically, fit Raph Koster's idea of, "learning new stuff is what fun is" (not a literal quote, but that's the general gist of it.)
So, yeah, I can see your point that further subdivision may bring even more insight, but I'm saying that both are subcategories of the same basic category.
I see your point that people define their own systems of meaning, and it's true and insightful on a very profound level. But that's (partially) another way of saying that different people have different goals and motives. Ok, it's more profound than that, but you probably get my general drift. An explorer (of either kind) will still build their own particular meaning around their own drive to learn new stuff and know more than the average bear.
What I'm trying to say is: that division isn't _that_ horribly arbitrary. Sure, each player will build their own meaning around it, but it will (very roughly) fall in one of the four quadrants, depending on what their primary drive is. An explorer will figure out their own meaning along the lines of how much they learn, an achiever will build their meaning around what they can achieve and brag about, etc. Of course, each group can be further subdivided, and refined, and combine with some other axis. But as one partition of the player space, and one set of axis out of many, and essentially one starting point towards understanding it all, I don't feel that it's that horrible.
You know, the funny thing is: the body if anything above the simplest creatures is built to self-tune. The cells have the proteins, and the DNA coding them of course, to (A) give a chemical signals along the lines of, "oi! I need more X down here!", and (B) react to that signal, if apropriate.
So for example, you're not hard-coded to have X millimeter thick muscles, or a certain bone density, or exactly this pattern of capillaries. You're built to react to how much do you need. So if you regularly pull/push at heavy weights, you get to look like Rambo, and if you sit at a computer like most of us here, you get to have just enough muscle to be able to walk.
(And if you feel a need to post something like, "well, I'm a nerd and exercise daily, and look like Rambo, and fuck a super-model", then consider yourself smacked upside your head. I didn't say _everyone_ was like that, did I?;)
This is out of very pragmatical reasons too. If your particular genetic mutations or diet make you heavier, you get to survive by adapting to it. Otherwise any mutation that changed your metabolism, would be _fatal_, if it didn't come together with a mutation that changes your muscle mass. Which is a hell of a lot less probable a coincidence. A gene set that self-regulates is more robust and survivable.
Anyway, what I'm getting at, is that the same applies to capillaries. Cells that lack oxygen give a chemical signal that tells other cells, basically, "Jesus F. Christ, guys, I'm choking in here!" So some other cells' proteins will take that as a hint to fork an existing blood vessel to cater to that group of cells.
(Side-note: I'm talking about proteins because, basically, that's the active molecule in your body. Proteins are a standardized way to build molecules which interact with other molecules. You have a small number of aminoacids which can be chained to interact with whatever other molecule they have to. Or build another molecule that can. Ranging from regulating what can enter your cells, to simple enzymes like breaking fructose or maltose into glucose, to something as complex as a ribosome or DNA repairs. It's not always the most efficient way, but they can be coded in a standardized way.)
So what I'm REALLY getting at is: does this make any sense? Building a bunch of synthetic capillaries, or getting an "oxygen therapy" or whatnot, seems to be just a way to tell (other) cells, basically, "oh, we have all the oxygen we need here, kthxbye." So basically just some other capillaries won't form. Or disappear right back.
Don't get me wrong, though, I'm not flat-out saying that this is useless. I'm sure smarter people than me have figured out a practical use, and they're not posting at 2 AM or after 2 beers either. Just wondering what that use might be. And how are they going to solve the practical problems, like other capillaries not forming any more. I just want to know, that's all.
My Bartle score is something like explorer/socializer, and let me tell you, discovering where stuff is on the map isn't exactly at the top of _my_ list. That's not to say it isn't fun, but there are more fun things than that. For me, discovering how the game works, that's the top priority and fun. Still qualifies as an explorer.
Figuring out -- or rather second guessing -- the design decisions is a part of that too. If you can figure out what kind of a design decision went into something, it already tells you something about where to look for the same effect, or what to expect ahead. (Map-wise, but also what to expect at higher levels.)
So basically, I stand by what I was saying. TFA, or at least the summary, seems to assume that only game designers play a game to reverse-engineer it, but, really, about a quarter of the gamers do that to various extents. Some just as idle curiosity on the side, but some really as their main motivation to be there in the first place.
Other than that, nothing to object to your other two paragraphs. Very insightful and informative, that.
Actually, it seems to me like it's simply about what Bartle used to call "explorers". Just to summarize it (badly) for whoever didn't read the paper, basically he looked at what players are doing in a MUD and came up with 4 categories, by what a player's main activity and drive seems to be. (Bear in mind that all people do more than one thing, though not always to the same extent.)
- socializers: their primary goal is to interact with people, make friends, chat, etc
- achievers: the folks who play it for the high score and bragging rights, basically. They work dilligently at achieving the highest level, having the top tier equipment set, having the biggest castle if the game allows that, etc.
- explorers: the folks who like to discover where everything is, and how everything works. These folks, yes, get their jollies by reverse-engineering your game.
- killers: the folks who like to harass, annoy, and hopefully drive someone completely off your game. (I.e., perma-kill them off the game, hence the name.)
That's, of course, just one way to split players into categories. You also have crafters vs adventurers, twitch gamers vs strategists, roleplayers vs munchkins, etc, etc, etc. The fun part is that most are orthogonal too, so it's really a very multi-dimensional universe.
I guess, I can see how someone could end up a game designer if they're in the explorer category.
But personally, I'd have an even bigger... well, not "advice", but "request" really, to game designers: don't assume that everyone else is a clone of yourself. E.g., if you play to reverse-engineer a game, don't assume that every single player out there is wired _exactly_ the same as you are. It may seem obvious, but smarter people have built whole theories -- or rather, hypotheses -- on the assumption that everyone else is ticking exactly the same. (Plus, it's the stuff fanboy flamewars are made of.)
Aiming to not have your game suck is a noble goal, and you have my thanks and respect for that already. But, really, "sucking" is a very subjective thing. It just means that in that multidimensional space of player goals, aspirations, personalities, play-styles, etc, your personality falls far enough from the volume covered by the game. E.g., if the game caters mostly to achievers with twitch-reflexes, and you're an explorer/strategist type, you'll think it sucks.
So one way to make it suck less -- or rather, suck for less people -- is to make sure that more than one type of players can pursue their own path and goals through it. It'll never be possible, nor often desirable, to make _everyone_ happy, but it's often possible to enlarge the space covered quite a bit.
Also, please try to avoid intersections where you should be doing unions. A game where it's possible to play as, say, a diplomat _or_ a gunner, tends to cover the tastes of more people than a game where you have to be a diplomat _and_ a gunner. The first is a union of people sets, the latter is an intersection, and much smaller than either set at that. A lot of games ended up sucking for more people because they failed to understand that: when trying to cater to more than one audience, they ended up catering to the intersection instead of the union.