No, you misunderstand my point. Probably I didn't explain it well enough.
I'm _not_ saying that altruism and arts are useless. God forbid.
I'm saying only that evolution was most often a matter of predator and prey trying to out-evolve each other. In this case, the humans were both predator and prey. That's really all I'm saying.
Maybe altruism played some role in being able to survive. Could be. Sticking together certainly did. But that's already a bit of a tangent. And I never intended to say that altruism was worthless, or anything. (Though I would bet that a lot of altruistic people got themselves out of the gene pool anyway.)
I'm just saying that humans _did_ kill other humans, regularly. There was much the same eco-system as between foxes and rabbits, or lions and gazelles, but this time with humans in both roles. And that seems to me like plenty of natural selection.
But I never meant that only the predators evolved. There's just as much pressure on the prey to evolve.
What I'm saying is that between the two factors
A) evolutionary pressure based on survival or death (as in, literally, if you don't think fast, someone will literally lop off your head and put it on a pike), and
B) the evolutionary pressure of picking the prettiest wives,
Dunno, the former seems to me like a much stronger pressure. In fact, for most of human history, the latter was probably rather weak.
Even if you look at selecting the guys or gals who look healthy, I'm betting there were more short time pressures to actually _be_ healthy. Looking healthy might have given you a little better chance of finding a good husband, but actually _being_ healthy meant you actually survived the next famine or epidemic. Not looking healthy might have had an effect in the decimals, but not _being_ healthy actually killed.
Actually, as soon as Homo Sapiens discovered bows, we start getting paintings in caves of groups of archers (typically led by some shaman with some holy symbol) shooting at each other. And graves with human bones with stone tips embedded in them. That's stone age.
Also, the Aztecs were decidedly stone age, and were some of the most bloodthirsty people.
American Indian tribes too were only peaceful and nature-loving in romanticized revisionism. The most peaceful tribes there raided their neighbours only about once a year, on the average.
Now I'm not saying that warfare was already a major factor of evolution yet. Just that it already existed.
I probably didn't explain it clearly enough. By self-selection, I didn't mean you evolved (or ever had) the occasion to select for yourself whether you want to live or die. I mean, blimey, then everyone would choose to live.
I meant in the sense where predator "selects" the prey. Rabbits evolve to be faster, because the fox kills the slow ones. Gazelles get to be fit and have a working immune system because even the slightest illness is disproportionately more fatal: you get to be eaten by a lion if you're under the weather enough to be slower. Etc.
What I'm saying here is that humans were both predator and prey lately. And inherently both predator and prey evolved at the same rate. The more fit humans who evolved as prey (e.g., the survivors of enemy raids), some of them were then the predators in the next cycle. That's one hell of an evolutionary pressure.
That said, you're probably right that culture played some part too. As I was saying, the ones that managed to climb up the social pyramid, did get a massive survival advantage. I can see how culture would play a part in that.
Uh, what? Mortality is still disproportionately higher in the lower classes. Everywhere on the globe. And that shows not the slightest sign of changing. As a matter of fact I'd be willing to define "classes" along the lines of life expectancy. How else would you do that? Even the lowest hobo can own a DVD player these days. But he can't afford health insurance...
Ah, right, the USA. In Europe everyone gets healthcare, so sometimes I forget that somewhere an advanced society would leave its less fortunate members just die, out of no other reason than greed. Thanks for the correction.
Absolutely nothing whatsoever has changed since the 20th century. The same atrocities are committed right this moment by the same power-hungry tyrants all over the planet for the same reasons.
A) Not on the same scale, buddy. And,
If you look some 2000-3000 years back, going and enslaving your neighbours and treating them like in the nazi slave-labour camps was a lot more common. Some greek city states had slaves as a third of their population.
And while again we remember the nicer parts -- e.g., the clerk or home servant slaves that were freed later by the rich Romans in Rome itself -- the same Roman society used slaves elsewhere as just a long death sentence. The cost of keeping buying new slaves to replace the dead ones, was an integral part of the cost of business for, say, mines. Or the same rich Romans let slaves starve in Sicily so they could export more grain to Rome. There was at least one slave revolt motivated literally by hunger.
So basically wake me up when you have 100,000,000 people in Guantanamo. That's when you'll have the same extent of the problem.
B) Now at least the common people tend to be horrified about it. In times past they actually were part of the problem. The very fact that you seem pissed off and disillusioned about it, is actually a sign of how much we progressed.
If you look as little as, say, 1000 years back in time, the medieval communes (towns whose citizens swore to stand together for their rights against the noble of the land) found it perfectly ok that, when they were wronged grievously by a noble, they'd go kill the noble's peasants. Or burn his crops so, again, then some peasants would starve.
We're not talking about power hungry tyrants. We're talking about ordinary citizens who found it perfectly normal to go kill some peasants to get their point across.
Or if you look farther back in time, you see such examples as Sparta. A relatively small city held a much larger population of hellots in line by sheer terror. Kids' graduation to adult consisted of being sent to terrorize and kill a few hellots for sport and training.
Basically, nowadays it may be the sport of kings, but back then it was a mass sport. That's already some progress.
Well, that's insightful, and probably how that evolution _really_ worked.
See, selection based on beauty, niceness, etc, are shiny-happy feel-good theories. They make us feel better about us as a species.
They also utterly fail to explain stuff like the ultra-fast evolution of, say, intelligence related alleles.
Now let's think about it for a bit. What's one situation which drives evolution like _hell_? What drove the early evolution of hominids? Having to survive in the face of a nasty predator. That's one _hell_ of an evolutionary pressure.
The early hominids, for example, faced the pressure of having to move out of the trees and compete with nasty carnivores for food. It was a monkey (ok, ape) too unfit to hunt (as late as the Neanderthals, they still couldn't do ballistics: Neanderthals were survival-spec melee hunters;), so it had to steal the food some carnivore had hunted. And it was even less fit to fight tigers barehanded. That's what drove the fast evolution of the brain. Stealth and cunning were the only things that worked.
Now move to the last 20,000 years or so, and humans faced an even nastier predator: other humans.
The history of mankind is, sadly, one of constant warfare, atrocities, etc. Tribes raided each other constantly, and then states fought each other like crazy. And let's remember that this was:
A) millenia before the Geneva convention. If you couldn't take a fortress, it was considered perfectly acceptable to kill or enslave the peasants instead.
B) millenia before logistics. As a peasant in those times, you'd get looted by both the enemy (whole campaigns got slowed down by waiting for the villages in their path to harvest the grain, so the army can loot it) and your own side (as levies.)
So, yeah, humans selected themselves all right. At spear point. Being able to, say, hide and hide your harvest when the next raid came, was already a hell of an evolutionary advantage.
Also let's remember that mortality was disproportionately higher among the lower classes until very very recently. As in, until 2 centuries ago or so. Famine, plagues, war atrocities, etc, took their toll starting from the bottom.
Even if you look at the renaissance era, let's just say we're almost all the descendants of the rich folks back then. The poor mostly died out over enough generations. Or IIRC in China they actually did some study and IIRC some 80% of a province's population carried the genes of one imperial family. That's how disproportionate a survival advantage that was.
So that's your other natural selection factor: those who figured out some way or another to claw their way up the social pyramid, had more chances to pass their genes on.
Some did that by just being smart and hard working. Learning enough of the alphabet would automatically qualify one for a scribe job in a lot of places, from ancient Egypt to China. That already made it a lot less likely that they'll starve during the next famine, plus ensured that they can afford to educate their children too.
Some did it by a lot less nice means.
But at any rate, that's another case of humans selecting themselves.
Etc.
Basically, yes, the ones who survived were the ones who went "And I pick... me!" And proceeded to gain some kind of advantage over the others.
Not a nice thought, but history or humanity weren't nice until the 20'th century. Stuff that we all now get horrified about, when we read about the Third Reich or Stalin, were the stuff human civilization was built upon.
So, yeah, let's instead believe bogus shiny-happy fairy-tales where surely the biggest advantage was being sexy. Heh.
Here's another not-nice thought: mortality among women was disproportionately higher than mortality among men. In the Old Kingdom period, for example, the peak of the mortality gauss curve was in the 20's for women, and in the 30's for men. (Of course, again, the rich tended to live longer.) And even primitive tribes raided each other to s
It takes some getting used to, and you _can_ get pretty good with it. But you'll notice that I didn't even make that claim in the original message. Even if you never get as good as with a keyboard and mouse, the important part is: you'll _very_ soon be better than with a gamepad:)
Heh. Yeah, I know what you mean. I know I was thinking exactly that when playing Legend Of Dragoon on the old Playstation. They had this party member who was an exotic dancer or such, and ran around in a tiny skirt and generally minimalistic outfit. So as my party was working its way through some frozen area (I can't remember which), I just felt... _sorry_ for her.
On one hand, yes, the average WoW player seems to not care about anything except epic loot. I won't argue with you about that. It _is_ the truth.
On the other hand, I've ended up in a guild where "epic" was a forbidden word on the guild channel. Mostly formed out of people who had enough of the raiding guilds drama and obsessions. Some had founded a guild, and ended up kicked out of it, because they couldn't take part in _every_ _single_ MC raid. (Yeah, it was before BC.) Which I guess just confirms your point about most guilds.
But the fact remains, you do have a choice of people you associate with. If hanging around with a bunch of virtual sociopaths, who care only about their precious loot and who see your only value as helping them get it, starts to get on your tits, you can always find yourself a different group.
Of course that might mean kissing goodbye the chances of getting the missing pieces of your top tier gear. So I guess it's time to ask yourself what your priorities are.
Me, I actually found it a lot more fun to hang around people who actually act like a bunch of friends. I was actually glad to be rid of "contribution points", planned raid nights, peer pressure, and all that stress. It's actually more fun (for me) to know that if, say, my engineer made a rifle and scope for some newbie hunter, it's just, you know, because I like helping newbies. Not for 2 contribution points, not because they might have a high level alt to help me in return, just because I was bored enough to make a rifle for a newbie. Or maybe I'll go run a perfect stranger warrior through RFK for their armour quest instead of doing the raid of the day. Just because they asked politely and said "please." Pick their hunter friend too, because he wanted to tame one of those boars. Or whatever.
But I guess everyone's mileage varies, so I'm not saying that everyone should swear off their epic gear. Just saying that such guilds do exist. Whether you're crazy enough to actually want to be in one, that's not for me to decide.
You know, some time in 2003 or 2004, I was talking to a gamer coleague about FPS on consoles, and bitching about how much it sucks with twin sticks compared to a good keyboard and mouse. And from there it went into the all time nerd favourite, singlehandedly solving all the world's problems, like Picard. In this case, well, how would _you_ make a console controller that works well in FPS.
So what we came up with was: a trackball. No, really.
Think a standard console controller. Say, a Dual Shock, because everyone knows it. But it's the same principle for an XBox pad, Dreamcast pad, Gamecube pad, whatever, really.
Now think replacing the right stick with a small, thumb-operated trackball.
Think about it. A trackball has much the same advantages a mouse has, because it _is_ a mouse turned upside down. You can turn around 180 degrees at the flick of the thumb, and stop on exact pixel you want to. The problem of joystick vs mouse is really that moving with a joystick can be very fast or very accurate, but not both at the same time. A mouse lets you do both. So does a trackball.
Well, I guess it boils down to whether you need it or not. Bang/buck is a very variable thing, especially in a matter of personal tastes where everyone has another idea of what the "bang" is.
If you're into such figurines, yeah, it's not a bad price at all. If you don't, then it is.
If you always wanted such a figurine, yeah, it beats sculpting one yourself. But even there it forks. For some people it's doing it that's the fun, not the owning the figurine.
E.g., a lot of tabletop wargame players actually are more into modding and painting the figurines than in actually playing with them. Actually playing a, say, 2000 point battle, is half way an occasion to show those figurines off, and half way an excuse as to why they're doing it. But some have painted 10 times the figurines they'll ever need, and have plenty they've never used.
Well, as I was saying, if for you that's fun, by all means, please do continue to do it. And taste being a subjective matter, well, yes, I do expect that a lot of people will find wandering around the woods in RL more satisfying than running around the virtual woods in WoW:)
In a messed up way, that's probably the most concise and insightful explanation.
See, back when games were abstract, like Pong and Pac-Man, we already know that they drew about 50-50 crowds. Just as many women were into those games as men were.
Then gradually the industry became a boys' club. Male nerds began using the extra polygons and pixels to catter to other male nerds' needs, and often it was just the publisher's heavy handed intervention that stopped it from becoming all out porn. (Read Bartle's surrealistic "I was young, I needed the money", if you don't believe me. The surrealistic story of his trying to make a cybersex MUD, in spite of the management's keeping telling him not to, and that they'll never find a publisher for that.)
Women in games became helpless princesses to be rescued, rewards for the brave knight, erotic objects, and other such roles.
As an illustration of how far downhill that went, when Tomb Raider decided to have a woman as the main character (IIRC because a guy there thought it would be more fun to stare at a woman's arse in third person, than at a guy's arse), it was something almost revolutionary. It had become that much taken for granted that the player or the hero must be a guy, and the women are just the rewards he gets. And even that franchise eventually became an excuse to show Lara's... assets.
A lot more took the same route and assumed that any female char _must_ be played by a guy, and/or for the benefit of other guys. So, you know, a female knight can't possibly fear a sword to the gut or a severed femoral artery. (The effect of which on your blood content is not unlike cutting the bottom off a cup.) Of _course_ they'll go into battle wearing just a chainmail bikini;)
A lot of games which grudgingly offered women as playable characters, gimped their stats in various ways. Just because, you know, in a game where you shoot fireballs, ride dragons, and generally rape the laws of physics, chemistry and biology with a vengeance, it would be _so_ unrealistic if a woman (even a rare, exceptional, non-typical one) could possibly have the same strength or constitution as a guy.
And, gee, who would have guessed? Eventually that ratio between male and female players wasn't anywhere near 50-50 any more.
Maybe that quote hits the nail on the head. Maybe women do need a reason to play an inflatable sex doll.
Actually, would the males play such a character if it were male? I know quite a bunch of us had an aversion to playing Voldo in Soul Calibur. (For those who don't know the chap, he was dressed in a BDSM outfit, and with arse-less leather pants.) And that's still one notch above the portrayal of women in some games.
Mind you, it's getting better, but just saying... maybe that quote does condense a lot of wisdom in a very concise form.
What better way to remember the complete waste your life is sitting in front of a computer for hours and hours each day...
"Oh I've wasted my life..."
As opposed to someone whose life is so meaningfully spent trolling a message board? Oh yes, that's _got_ to be some achievement and valuable skills for life. How I envy you, sir;)
Newsflash: yes, the _whole_ purpose of it is to waste some time in a fun way. We already know that. And I'm writing that as someone who doesn't even play WoW any more.
Thing is, humans weren't built to sit and stare at the walls. Even spreading some fresh paint on them and watching it dry, isn't actually all that exciting;)
So we find things to fill our time with, that's more fun, and preferrably something different than what we do at work. You know, so those parts of the brain get some rest and some time to index and pre-process the information into permanent storage.
So some people sit at the couch and watch football. It's technically time wasted, but if they have fun there, that's what matters.
Some spend their life playing prom-queen, yakking the most recent gossip, and playing a complicated game of who's-popular-with-whom. It's rarely as useful as its proponents make it sound. Most of those people will give even less of a damn about you in a pinch, than your guildmates in WoW. Not saying that the latter is some gold standard of human empathy and helpfulness. More like that a clique of wannabe prom-queens is even more likely to just worry about their own "score" in that fucked-up game than about your problems.
In effect, that's mostly just another way to waste some time in a more entertaining way than watching paint dry.
Some people go sit on a lake's edge with a fishing rod, and pretend that it's some valuable survival skill (it isn't), or could feed a family (it doesn't), or that it builds character (it doesn't.) See, that thing doesn't really scale. We're too high a population, to feed ourselves with a fishing rod, and a too fucked up economy to buy anything with money earned selling that fish. The only way to make any money with fish is with either a fish farm, or a big fucking ship with nets and huge fridges. Unless you can afford either, you will _not_ keep your family fed with fishing, even in the most fantastic scenario imaginable.
Nope, that's just another way to waste some time in a way that the fisher finds more fun than watching paint dry.
Some people spend half of their free time fiddling with their car, and pretending that it makes them Real Men. Oh, and usually it comes with some pretense that it saves them such a huge heap of money. Newsflash: if it were about money, then get a second job in that time, and take your car to a mechanic when it breaks. Saving maybe 20 bucks on repairs even 1-2 times a year, at the expense of spending hundreds of hours in the garage per year, doesn't actually work out as great money/hour even in the poorest countries.
So, nope, that's another way to waste some time in a more entertaining way than watching paint dry.
Some go out in some god-forsaken woods or on some god-forsaken mountain and pretend that they're learning such great skills in the process. Well, yes, they do, except the catch is: the only times they'll ever use those skills is when they next do that highly unnatural exercise. There is _no_ time in a city when you'll have to find your way by seeing which side of the trees the moss grows on. And if you're into finding your way by the sun or stars, good luck with having line of sight or visibility for either. And here's another fun thought: you want _practical_ orientation skills? Get a GPS navigation sytem and learn to use it. _That_ is where orientation is at nowadays. So, anyway, it's skills that are in practice just as useful as my WoW skills: useful only when you go there again.
Yup, you've guessed my verdict: it's just another way people spend their time to h
Well, what you propose is IMHO no different than the prisoner's dilemma, only scaled to some millions of people. And it just doesn't scale.
The mechanics are just like in the prisoner's dilemma, really. With two people it's just "am I sure that my pal will do the same? or am I shooting myself in the foot?" Which boils down to how well you know him, I guess. There have been plenty of people who've been surprised there. With millions of people, it becomes "am I sure that all these millions will do the same? or am I just the idiot depriving himself of something, while everyone else doesn't give a damn?" Since you don't know them all, the latter becomes the far safer bet. And you know they'll think the same.
Briefly, if your rights depend on some tens of millions of other people doing the same thing, you've already lost them. Isolated individuals are insecure, weak, vulnerable, easy prey for FUD, etc.
No, what most of the world discovered a long time ago, is that you need some laws if you're against something.
E.g., if you want, say, the factories to stop polluting rivers, you need a law that forbids that or at least gives them a cost feedback for it. Because just hoping that everyone will suddenly say "well, I'll refuse to work for anyone who pollutes, or buy their products" just doesn't work.
Same here. If you don't like copyright law and the loopholes/privileges/whatever it gives to the RIAA, then have that law changed. Just hoping that millions of independent people will individually decide to boycott them, never worked, never will.
Or at the very least, get organized. If you want people to stand up for something, at personal cost or inconvenience, see the prisoner's dilemma again: they have to be sure that everyone else, or at least enough others, do the same thing. Plus, it gets you taken more seriously by the other side you're negotiating with. A group of a million or two sworn to never buy CDs until fair use is respected, has some bargaining power. Isolated individuals whining separately do not.
The last paragraph is why unions appeared. Much as that seems to be a swearword for many nerds.
Or before them such things as the guilds or medieval communes. Isolated burghers were no match for the noble of the land. A whole city standing together for their rights, well, now that got taken a bit more seriously.
Well, as far as I can understand it, it _is_ the "making available" argument, because that's what happened when you copied them to your Kazaa (or other P2P program's) shared folder. You just allowed world+dog to download them from you.
Authorized copies is a broad term. It's authorized or unauthorized depending on the purpose. Which in turn stems from the fact that you don't own the music itself, that remains property of the publisher. They just allow you to do this and that with it, but not everything else.
E.g., even if you didn't rip it, you may be authorized to play that CD in your home, but not authorized to play it in a disco or broadcast it on your village's radio station. If you want to do those, you need a whole other license.
Way I see it, the same applies to it once it's ripped to MP3s. You _are_ still authorized to listen to it, no matter in what folder it is. You're not authorized to offer it for download. Different authorizations, you know. And what they argue is that once you copied it to the shared folder of Kazaa, you offered it to world+dog to download, while failing to have the latter authorization. Although, again, you still have the former.
It's not really that new a concept to have different authorizations for different things. E.g., at work you may be authorized to access the intranet web sites over HTTP, but not to FTP to them and change their contents. You may be authorized to edit your programs and compile them, but in many companies you're not authorized to install new software on that machine. (Partially because the BSA can rip them a new one if you do.) Etc.
So, really, it does noone any service to pretend that there are no shades between "completely unauthorized to do anything" and "authorized to do everything whatsoever." Even my dog can understand that there are things he's authorized to do in the house, and things he's not. There's no such thing as a blanket authorization to the house. (And I'm willing to bet that you're smarter than that dog by far, so you shouldn't really have problems with that concept either;)
Now I'm not saying that what RIAA does is good. But, really, change the laws if you don't like them. You do pretend to be a democracy, right? Make your own party, like the Swedes did. Heck, you even have the RIAA making the case why anyone should vote for you then. But pretending that you don't understand "authorized" doesn't really solve much, sadly.
If used as you describe, true, it's _sometimes_ better than nothing.
Then again, sometimes worse than nothing. An incomplete, distorted understanding of something may actually compound the problem, instead of making it any better. E.g., an incomplete, distorted mis-understanding of each other is largely why we have a perpetual conflict in the Middle East, or Islamist nuts blowing themselves up. E.g., an equally unqualified monkey reinforcing an already wrong idea, might just give people enough confidence to do something very stupid, instead of staying at the stage of wondering about it. Etc.
Seriously, we already have people taking their knowledge from movies, urban legends, PR, whatever. You can read about some of them, for example, on the various "dumbest criminals" lists. A site looking like a more reputable way to get a quick and supposedly informed answer, might just fool more people.
The second problem is that more and more schoolkids and students are using those as a substitute for learning or thinking for themselves. Now this isn't necessarily a fault of the site itself. And if it worked for anyone, I'd blame the school first. Nevertheless, it might bite us all in the arse later. Hard.
Heh. Well, no. It was decades after the days of Mel too, as far as I can tell. But I guess there are many paths to enlightenment and many Buddhas/prophets/avatars/etc one can stumble upon and be humbled by their wisdom. Mine was thousands of miles away and decades after, but the effect was the same;)
No, you don't understand. He didn't calculate the address to jump to. _That_ I could quite easily understand, actually. He calculated the code to execute. I thought I was teh uber assembly guru, but just realizing that that's what's happening made me go cross eyed:P
I remember one piece of code that makes even that seem tame. Assembly, mind you, back in the 386 days.
Someone had calculated something as a 4 byte float, then took it as a 32-bit integer, swapped the higher and lower 16-bit words, wrote it into a memory location at the start of a function, and then actually jumped to that location. I.e., he actually executed that result. That was actually in the (uncommented) assembly source code, mind you, not some accidentally disasssembling a piece of the data segment and discovering that it makes no sense.
To this day, I have no clue what that did. Awestruck is putting it mildly.
Come on. When was the last time you had anything good to say about anybody else's code? Ever? All programmers say all other programmers are incompetent. And typically, management believes us.
Not quite true. I can think of a few people whose code gave me no reason for complaints. To pick just two extremes out of the pool:
- one of them is pretty much the pragmatic programmer prototype. He'll (also) apply some pattern only if it's needed, not because it would be fun to have it on the resume. Sometimes a switch block with 10 cases is really all you need, you know? His programs tend to be compact, work and be actually fairly easy to get the hang of.
- one of them is, well, pretty much the opposite. His programs tend to be a lot larger than they need to be, and have layers upon layers of patterns even to print "Hello World". With some reflection thrown in for good measure. Strangely enough, though, they _are_ well organized, and you can fairly easily find the class that processes a given event or command... or the singleton factory that supplies it, or the manager class it's registered with, or...
Are they perfect according to my tastes? Nope. But I can nevertheless tell good code when I see it, even if it's not perfect. And say it.
On the other hand, at the other end of the spectrum, I've had to deal with pieces of code which were truly atrocious. E.g., one particular program not only raped all best practices known to mankind, but also was living illustration of half the techniques from How to write unmaintainable code. Literally. It even had stuff like the using people's first names for variables, in addition to the more mundane techniques like mere undescriptive names, obfuscated flow, heavy use of global variables, non-obvious side-effects to those variables, or methods which can also do some 2-3 other unrelated things if called with the right parameters. And I don't mean just side-effects or cramming more functionality in one call than expected. I mean stuff like the class which should have normally sent an email, could render and print a PDF _instead_ of sending one email, or update the contract in the database instead. And for bonus points, not even determined by parameters, but by the contents of those global variables. But, again, the nicest touch was finding uninformative variable names like Pete and Eve in the very first class I opened.
Basically IMHO lumping it all into one everything-is-the-same "all programmers hate each others' code" pool doesn't do it justice, and paints a misleading image. _Some_ may be just nitpicking about the style, but some code is genuinely evil stuff that should be buried at crossroads with a stake through its chest.
First of all: should he care about my opinion? Well, no, he's supposed to use his own brains. I'm anonymous guy number #1234567 on the Internet. I'd be more worried if he took my words as gospel.
Second: I guess there are ways to be diplomatic about it, but I genuinely fail to see the point. The way I see it, it's just a variant of the grammar nazi troll.
Much as I'm a nerd myself, and not a particularly socially-adept one either, there's one kind of nerd that I have increasingly more... disgust and contempt for. The kind who'll see any discussion as serving one reason only: showing everyone, and especially to his own insecure ego, that everyone else is more stupid than he is. Or, as Scott Adams once put it, "It doesn't matter who you know, it matters who knows less than you do." Some people's lives seem to revolve around just that: going through conversations, boards, mailing lists, etc, for no reason than to find something debatable someone else said, and blow it out of proportion as some proof of how much smarter he is. Even if he's going to have to distort people's words, deliberately mis-understand, or pull assumptions out of the arse about what the other knows or meant. He's out to prop his ego and, by Jingo, he's not going to fail in that mission.
And I won't even mind that, as long as it's actually contributing some useful information. But some are just disruptive cretins, butting in for no other reasons than to, say, make a whole fuss about your using the wrong word. See, the common grammar nazi. The idiot whose only contribution to a discussion is being the guy who's condescending about the fact that you typoed a word in the third sentence on the fourth paragraph. It's not contributing anything, it's just some retard's ego-stroking. Yay, he's so smart because he knows how to write a word. (Which the other guy probably knew too, but hit the wrong key at some point.)
Same here. Yes, writing "USSR" instead of "Russia" was a brain-fart, but that's what occasionally happens when writing stuff in a hurry and without proof-reading it. Sure, it was an error. No doubt.
But it takes a special kind of dysfunctional cretin to blow it out of proportion as "you don't even know that the USSR doesn't exist any more." It doesn't even contribute anything useful to the conversation. It serves no purpose than to allow an otherwise dysfunctional loser to get his "yay, I'm smarter than some random guy on the Internet" ego boost. It's the grammar nazi troll in a new guise. No more, no less.
And, as I was saying, I'm increasingly having only disgust towards that kind of a person.
Third: well, I'm not sure what your point is. That you'll filter your information by how nice was the person who said it? Fine. I'm not a nice person. Now you know. I'm sure you can find nicer people to trust, then;)
Oh, that cat language, like when it says "oh hai, i upgraded yr ram" or "My Pokemons, let me show you them"
More like when it says "mrrk" (sometimes transcribed as "mrrh") from the hall, and you just know, "oh shit, she's brought me another dying bird she hunted." As far as anyone can tell, that's their word for "food", typically as in "I brought you some." That's the word they use to call their weaned kittens to dinner when they hunted something for said kittens. But they've been known to try to feed their human room-mates too:P
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No, you misunderstand my point. Probably I didn't explain it well enough.
I'm _not_ saying that altruism and arts are useless. God forbid.
I'm saying only that evolution was most often a matter of predator and prey trying to out-evolve each other. In this case, the humans were both predator and prey. That's really all I'm saying.
Maybe altruism played some role in being able to survive. Could be. Sticking together certainly did. But that's already a bit of a tangent. And I never intended to say that altruism was worthless, or anything. (Though I would bet that a lot of altruistic people got themselves out of the gene pool anyway.)
I'm just saying that humans _did_ kill other humans, regularly. There was much the same eco-system as between foxes and rabbits, or lions and gazelles, but this time with humans in both roles. And that seems to me like plenty of natural selection.
But I never meant that only the predators evolved. There's just as much pressure on the prey to evolve.
What I'm saying is that between the two factors
A) evolutionary pressure based on survival or death (as in, literally, if you don't think fast, someone will literally lop off your head and put it on a pike), and
B) the evolutionary pressure of picking the prettiest wives,
Dunno, the former seems to me like a much stronger pressure. In fact, for most of human history, the latter was probably rather weak.
Even if you look at selecting the guys or gals who look healthy, I'm betting there were more short time pressures to actually _be_ healthy. Looking healthy might have given you a little better chance of finding a good husband, but actually _being_ healthy meant you actually survived the next famine or epidemic. Not looking healthy might have had an effect in the decimals, but not _being_ healthy actually killed.
Actually, as soon as Homo Sapiens discovered bows, we start getting paintings in caves of groups of archers (typically led by some shaman with some holy symbol) shooting at each other. And graves with human bones with stone tips embedded in them. That's stone age.
Also, the Aztecs were decidedly stone age, and were some of the most bloodthirsty people.
American Indian tribes too were only peaceful and nature-loving in romanticized revisionism. The most peaceful tribes there raided their neighbours only about once a year, on the average.
Now I'm not saying that warfare was already a major factor of evolution yet. Just that it already existed.
Heh... well, that's not quite what Smith meant with the "Invisible Hand" metaphor. On the other hand, I think I can see your point too.
I probably didn't explain it clearly enough. By self-selection, I didn't mean you evolved (or ever had) the occasion to select for yourself whether you want to live or die. I mean, blimey, then everyone would choose to live.
I meant in the sense where predator "selects" the prey. Rabbits evolve to be faster, because the fox kills the slow ones. Gazelles get to be fit and have a working immune system because even the slightest illness is disproportionately more fatal: you get to be eaten by a lion if you're under the weather enough to be slower. Etc.
What I'm saying here is that humans were both predator and prey lately. And inherently both predator and prey evolved at the same rate. The more fit humans who evolved as prey (e.g., the survivors of enemy raids), some of them were then the predators in the next cycle. That's one hell of an evolutionary pressure.
That said, you're probably right that culture played some part too. As I was saying, the ones that managed to climb up the social pyramid, did get a massive survival advantage. I can see how culture would play a part in that.
Ah, right, the USA. In Europe everyone gets healthcare, so sometimes I forget that somewhere an advanced society would leave its less fortunate members just die, out of no other reason than greed. Thanks for the correction.
A) Not on the same scale, buddy. And,
If you look some 2000-3000 years back, going and enslaving your neighbours and treating them like in the nazi slave-labour camps was a lot more common. Some greek city states had slaves as a third of their population.
And while again we remember the nicer parts -- e.g., the clerk or home servant slaves that were freed later by the rich Romans in Rome itself -- the same Roman society used slaves elsewhere as just a long death sentence. The cost of keeping buying new slaves to replace the dead ones, was an integral part of the cost of business for, say, mines. Or the same rich Romans let slaves starve in Sicily so they could export more grain to Rome. There was at least one slave revolt motivated literally by hunger.
So basically wake me up when you have 100,000,000 people in Guantanamo. That's when you'll have the same extent of the problem.
B) Now at least the common people tend to be horrified about it. In times past they actually were part of the problem. The very fact that you seem pissed off and disillusioned about it, is actually a sign of how much we progressed.
If you look as little as, say, 1000 years back in time, the medieval communes (towns whose citizens swore to stand together for their rights against the noble of the land) found it perfectly ok that, when they were wronged grievously by a noble, they'd go kill the noble's peasants. Or burn his crops so, again, then some peasants would starve.
We're not talking about power hungry tyrants. We're talking about ordinary citizens who found it perfectly normal to go kill some peasants to get their point across.
Or if you look farther back in time, you see such examples as Sparta. A relatively small city held a much larger population of hellots in line by sheer terror. Kids' graduation to adult consisted of being sent to terrorize and kill a few hellots for sport and training.
Basically, nowadays it may be the sport of kings, but back then it was a mass sport. That's already some progress.
Well, that's insightful, and probably how that evolution _really_ worked.
See, selection based on beauty, niceness, etc, are shiny-happy feel-good theories. They make us feel better about us as a species.
They also utterly fail to explain stuff like the ultra-fast evolution of, say, intelligence related alleles.
Now let's think about it for a bit. What's one situation which drives evolution like _hell_? What drove the early evolution of hominids? Having to survive in the face of a nasty predator. That's one _hell_ of an evolutionary pressure.
The early hominids, for example, faced the pressure of having to move out of the trees and compete with nasty carnivores for food. It was a monkey (ok, ape) too unfit to hunt (as late as the Neanderthals, they still couldn't do ballistics: Neanderthals were survival-spec melee hunters;), so it had to steal the food some carnivore had hunted. And it was even less fit to fight tigers barehanded. That's what drove the fast evolution of the brain. Stealth and cunning were the only things that worked.
Now move to the last 20,000 years or so, and humans faced an even nastier predator: other humans.
The history of mankind is, sadly, one of constant warfare, atrocities, etc. Tribes raided each other constantly, and then states fought each other like crazy. And let's remember that this was:
A) millenia before the Geneva convention. If you couldn't take a fortress, it was considered perfectly acceptable to kill or enslave the peasants instead.
B) millenia before logistics. As a peasant in those times, you'd get looted by both the enemy (whole campaigns got slowed down by waiting for the villages in their path to harvest the grain, so the army can loot it) and your own side (as levies.)
So, yeah, humans selected themselves all right. At spear point. Being able to, say, hide and hide your harvest when the next raid came, was already a hell of an evolutionary advantage.
Also let's remember that mortality was disproportionately higher among the lower classes until very very recently. As in, until 2 centuries ago or so. Famine, plagues, war atrocities, etc, took their toll starting from the bottom.
Even if you look at the renaissance era, let's just say we're almost all the descendants of the rich folks back then. The poor mostly died out over enough generations. Or IIRC in China they actually did some study and IIRC some 80% of a province's population carried the genes of one imperial family. That's how disproportionate a survival advantage that was.
So that's your other natural selection factor: those who figured out some way or another to claw their way up the social pyramid, had more chances to pass their genes on.
Some did that by just being smart and hard working. Learning enough of the alphabet would automatically qualify one for a scribe job in a lot of places, from ancient Egypt to China. That already made it a lot less likely that they'll starve during the next famine, plus ensured that they can afford to educate their children too.
Some did it by a lot less nice means.
But at any rate, that's another case of humans selecting themselves.
Etc.
Basically, yes, the ones who survived were the ones who went "And I pick... me!" And proceeded to gain some kind of advantage over the others.
Not a nice thought, but history or humanity weren't nice until the 20'th century. Stuff that we all now get horrified about, when we read about the Third Reich or Stalin, were the stuff human civilization was built upon.
So, yeah, let's instead believe bogus shiny-happy fairy-tales where surely the biggest advantage was being sexy. Heh.
Here's another not-nice thought: mortality among women was disproportionately higher than mortality among men. In the Old Kingdom period, for example, the peak of the mortality gauss curve was in the 20's for women, and in the 30's for men. (Of course, again, the rich tended to live longer.) And even primitive tribes raided each other to s
It takes some getting used to, and you _can_ get pretty good with it. But you'll notice that I didn't even make that claim in the original message. Even if you never get as good as with a keyboard and mouse, the important part is: you'll _very_ soon be better than with a gamepad :)
Heh. Yeah, I know what you mean. I know I was thinking exactly that when playing Legend Of Dragoon on the old Playstation. They had this party member who was an exotic dancer or such, and ran around in a tiny skirt and generally minimalistic outfit. So as my party was working its way through some frozen area (I can't remember which), I just felt... _sorry_ for her.
Whoa. Yep, that's a variant of exactly what I had in mind. Yep, I'd buy one of those if it were supported by console FPSs.
It depends on the guild, I guess.
On one hand, yes, the average WoW player seems to not care about anything except epic loot. I won't argue with you about that. It _is_ the truth.
On the other hand, I've ended up in a guild where "epic" was a forbidden word on the guild channel. Mostly formed out of people who had enough of the raiding guilds drama and obsessions. Some had founded a guild, and ended up kicked out of it, because they couldn't take part in _every_ _single_ MC raid. (Yeah, it was before BC.) Which I guess just confirms your point about most guilds.
But the fact remains, you do have a choice of people you associate with. If hanging around with a bunch of virtual sociopaths, who care only about their precious loot and who see your only value as helping them get it, starts to get on your tits, you can always find yourself a different group.
Of course that might mean kissing goodbye the chances of getting the missing pieces of your top tier gear. So I guess it's time to ask yourself what your priorities are.
Me, I actually found it a lot more fun to hang around people who actually act like a bunch of friends. I was actually glad to be rid of "contribution points", planned raid nights, peer pressure, and all that stress. It's actually more fun (for me) to know that if, say, my engineer made a rifle and scope for some newbie hunter, it's just, you know, because I like helping newbies. Not for 2 contribution points, not because they might have a high level alt to help me in return, just because I was bored enough to make a rifle for a newbie. Or maybe I'll go run a perfect stranger warrior through RFK for their armour quest instead of doing the raid of the day. Just because they asked politely and said "please." Pick their hunter friend too, because he wanted to tame one of those boars. Or whatever.
But I guess everyone's mileage varies, so I'm not saying that everyone should swear off their epic gear. Just saying that such guilds do exist. Whether you're crazy enough to actually want to be in one, that's not for me to decide.
You know, some time in 2003 or 2004, I was talking to a gamer coleague about FPS on consoles, and bitching about how much it sucks with twin sticks compared to a good keyboard and mouse. And from there it went into the all time nerd favourite, singlehandedly solving all the world's problems, like Picard. In this case, well, how would _you_ make a console controller that works well in FPS.
So what we came up with was: a trackball. No, really.
Think a standard console controller. Say, a Dual Shock, because everyone knows it. But it's the same principle for an XBox pad, Dreamcast pad, Gamecube pad, whatever, really.
Now think replacing the right stick with a small, thumb-operated trackball.
Think about it. A trackball has much the same advantages a mouse has, because it _is_ a mouse turned upside down. You can turn around 180 degrees at the flick of the thumb, and stop on exact pixel you want to. The problem of joystick vs mouse is really that moving with a joystick can be very fast or very accurate, but not both at the same time. A mouse lets you do both. So does a trackball.
So, really, why doesn't anyone do just that?
Well, I guess it boils down to whether you need it or not. Bang/buck is a very variable thing, especially in a matter of personal tastes where everyone has another idea of what the "bang" is.
If you're into such figurines, yeah, it's not a bad price at all. If you don't, then it is.
If you always wanted such a figurine, yeah, it beats sculpting one yourself. But even there it forks. For some people it's doing it that's the fun, not the owning the figurine.
E.g., a lot of tabletop wargame players actually are more into modding and painting the figurines than in actually playing with them. Actually playing a, say, 2000 point battle, is half way an occasion to show those figurines off, and half way an excuse as to why they're doing it. But some have painted 10 times the figurines they'll ever need, and have plenty they've never used.
So I guess everyone's mileage varies.
Well, as I was saying, if for you that's fun, by all means, please do continue to do it. And taste being a subjective matter, well, yes, I do expect that a lot of people will find wandering around the woods in RL more satisfying than running around the virtual woods in WoW :)
In a messed up way, that's probably the most concise and insightful explanation.
;)
See, back when games were abstract, like Pong and Pac-Man, we already know that they drew about 50-50 crowds. Just as many women were into those games as men were.
Then gradually the industry became a boys' club. Male nerds began using the extra polygons and pixels to catter to other male nerds' needs, and often it was just the publisher's heavy handed intervention that stopped it from becoming all out porn. (Read Bartle's surrealistic "I was young, I needed the money", if you don't believe me. The surrealistic story of his trying to make a cybersex MUD, in spite of the management's keeping telling him not to, and that they'll never find a publisher for that.)
Women in games became helpless princesses to be rescued, rewards for the brave knight, erotic objects, and other such roles.
As an illustration of how far downhill that went, when Tomb Raider decided to have a woman as the main character (IIRC because a guy there thought it would be more fun to stare at a woman's arse in third person, than at a guy's arse), it was something almost revolutionary. It had become that much taken for granted that the player or the hero must be a guy, and the women are just the rewards he gets. And even that franchise eventually became an excuse to show Lara's... assets.
A lot more took the same route and assumed that any female char _must_ be played by a guy, and/or for the benefit of other guys. So, you know, a female knight can't possibly fear a sword to the gut or a severed femoral artery. (The effect of which on your blood content is not unlike cutting the bottom off a cup.) Of _course_ they'll go into battle wearing just a chainmail bikini
A lot of games which grudgingly offered women as playable characters, gimped their stats in various ways. Just because, you know, in a game where you shoot fireballs, ride dragons, and generally rape the laws of physics, chemistry and biology with a vengeance, it would be _so_ unrealistic if a woman (even a rare, exceptional, non-typical one) could possibly have the same strength or constitution as a guy.
And, gee, who would have guessed? Eventually that ratio between male and female players wasn't anywhere near 50-50 any more.
Maybe that quote hits the nail on the head. Maybe women do need a reason to play an inflatable sex doll.
Actually, would the males play such a character if it were male? I know quite a bunch of us had an aversion to playing Voldo in Soul Calibur. (For those who don't know the chap, he was dressed in a BDSM outfit, and with arse-less leather pants.) And that's still one notch above the portrayal of women in some games.
Mind you, it's getting better, but just saying... maybe that quote does condense a lot of wisdom in a very concise form.
As opposed to someone whose life is so meaningfully spent trolling a message board? Oh yes, that's _got_ to be some achievement and valuable skills for life. How I envy you, sir ;)
;)
Newsflash: yes, the _whole_ purpose of it is to waste some time in a fun way. We already know that. And I'm writing that as someone who doesn't even play WoW any more.
Thing is, humans weren't built to sit and stare at the walls. Even spreading some fresh paint on them and watching it dry, isn't actually all that exciting
So we find things to fill our time with, that's more fun, and preferrably something different than what we do at work. You know, so those parts of the brain get some rest and some time to index and pre-process the information into permanent storage.
So some people sit at the couch and watch football. It's technically time wasted, but if they have fun there, that's what matters.
Some spend their life playing prom-queen, yakking the most recent gossip, and playing a complicated game of who's-popular-with-whom. It's rarely as useful as its proponents make it sound. Most of those people will give even less of a damn about you in a pinch, than your guildmates in WoW. Not saying that the latter is some gold standard of human empathy and helpfulness. More like that a clique of wannabe prom-queens is even more likely to just worry about their own "score" in that fucked-up game than about your problems.
In effect, that's mostly just another way to waste some time in a more entertaining way than watching paint dry.
Some people go sit on a lake's edge with a fishing rod, and pretend that it's some valuable survival skill (it isn't), or could feed a family (it doesn't), or that it builds character (it doesn't.) See, that thing doesn't really scale. We're too high a population, to feed ourselves with a fishing rod, and a too fucked up economy to buy anything with money earned selling that fish. The only way to make any money with fish is with either a fish farm, or a big fucking ship with nets and huge fridges. Unless you can afford either, you will _not_ keep your family fed with fishing, even in the most fantastic scenario imaginable.
Nope, that's just another way to waste some time in a way that the fisher finds more fun than watching paint dry.
Some people spend half of their free time fiddling with their car, and pretending that it makes them Real Men. Oh, and usually it comes with some pretense that it saves them such a huge heap of money. Newsflash: if it were about money, then get a second job in that time, and take your car to a mechanic when it breaks. Saving maybe 20 bucks on repairs even 1-2 times a year, at the expense of spending hundreds of hours in the garage per year, doesn't actually work out as great money/hour even in the poorest countries.
So, nope, that's another way to waste some time in a more entertaining way than watching paint dry.
Some go out in some god-forsaken woods or on some god-forsaken mountain and pretend that they're learning such great skills in the process. Well, yes, they do, except the catch is: the only times they'll ever use those skills is when they next do that highly unnatural exercise. There is _no_ time in a city when you'll have to find your way by seeing which side of the trees the moss grows on. And if you're into finding your way by the sun or stars, good luck with having line of sight or visibility for either. And here's another fun thought: you want _practical_ orientation skills? Get a GPS navigation sytem and learn to use it. _That_ is where orientation is at nowadays. So, anyway, it's skills that are in practice just as useful as my WoW skills: useful only when you go there again.
Yup, you've guessed my verdict: it's just another way people spend their time to h
Well, what you propose is IMHO no different than the prisoner's dilemma, only scaled to some millions of people. And it just doesn't scale.
The mechanics are just like in the prisoner's dilemma, really. With two people it's just "am I sure that my pal will do the same? or am I shooting myself in the foot?" Which boils down to how well you know him, I guess. There have been plenty of people who've been surprised there. With millions of people, it becomes "am I sure that all these millions will do the same? or am I just the idiot depriving himself of something, while everyone else doesn't give a damn?" Since you don't know them all, the latter becomes the far safer bet. And you know they'll think the same.
Briefly, if your rights depend on some tens of millions of other people doing the same thing, you've already lost them. Isolated individuals are insecure, weak, vulnerable, easy prey for FUD, etc.
No, what most of the world discovered a long time ago, is that you need some laws if you're against something.
E.g., if you want, say, the factories to stop polluting rivers, you need a law that forbids that or at least gives them a cost feedback for it. Because just hoping that everyone will suddenly say "well, I'll refuse to work for anyone who pollutes, or buy their products" just doesn't work.
Same here. If you don't like copyright law and the loopholes/privileges/whatever it gives to the RIAA, then have that law changed. Just hoping that millions of independent people will individually decide to boycott them, never worked, never will.
Or at the very least, get organized. If you want people to stand up for something, at personal cost or inconvenience, see the prisoner's dilemma again: they have to be sure that everyone else, or at least enough others, do the same thing. Plus, it gets you taken more seriously by the other side you're negotiating with. A group of a million or two sworn to never buy CDs until fair use is respected, has some bargaining power. Isolated individuals whining separately do not.
The last paragraph is why unions appeared. Much as that seems to be a swearword for many nerds.
Or before them such things as the guilds or medieval communes. Isolated burghers were no match for the noble of the land. A whole city standing together for their rights, well, now that got taken a bit more seriously.
Well, as far as I can understand it, it _is_ the "making available" argument, because that's what happened when you copied them to your Kazaa (or other P2P program's) shared folder. You just allowed world+dog to download them from you.
Authorized copies is a broad term. It's authorized or unauthorized depending on the purpose. Which in turn stems from the fact that you don't own the music itself, that remains property of the publisher. They just allow you to do this and that with it, but not everything else.
E.g., even if you didn't rip it, you may be authorized to play that CD in your home, but not authorized to play it in a disco or broadcast it on your village's radio station. If you want to do those, you need a whole other license.
Way I see it, the same applies to it once it's ripped to MP3s. You _are_ still authorized to listen to it, no matter in what folder it is. You're not authorized to offer it for download. Different authorizations, you know. And what they argue is that once you copied it to the shared folder of Kazaa, you offered it to world+dog to download, while failing to have the latter authorization. Although, again, you still have the former.
It's not really that new a concept to have different authorizations for different things. E.g., at work you may be authorized to access the intranet web sites over HTTP, but not to FTP to them and change their contents. You may be authorized to edit your programs and compile them, but in many companies you're not authorized to install new software on that machine. (Partially because the BSA can rip them a new one if you do.) Etc.
So, really, it does noone any service to pretend that there are no shades between "completely unauthorized to do anything" and "authorized to do everything whatsoever." Even my dog can understand that there are things he's authorized to do in the house, and things he's not. There's no such thing as a blanket authorization to the house. (And I'm willing to bet that you're smarter than that dog by far, so you shouldn't really have problems with that concept either;)
Now I'm not saying that what RIAA does is good. But, really, change the laws if you don't like them. You do pretend to be a democracy, right? Make your own party, like the Swedes did. Heck, you even have the RIAA making the case why anyone should vote for you then. But pretending that you don't understand "authorized" doesn't really solve much, sadly.
Well, yes and no, sorta.
If used as you describe, true, it's _sometimes_ better than nothing.
Then again, sometimes worse than nothing. An incomplete, distorted understanding of something may actually compound the problem, instead of making it any better. E.g., an incomplete, distorted mis-understanding of each other is largely why we have a perpetual conflict in the Middle East, or Islamist nuts blowing themselves up. E.g., an equally unqualified monkey reinforcing an already wrong idea, might just give people enough confidence to do something very stupid, instead of staying at the stage of wondering about it. Etc.
Seriously, we already have people taking their knowledge from movies, urban legends, PR, whatever. You can read about some of them, for example, on the various "dumbest criminals" lists. A site looking like a more reputable way to get a quick and supposedly informed answer, might just fool more people.
The second problem is that more and more schoolkids and students are using those as a substitute for learning or thinking for themselves. Now this isn't necessarily a fault of the site itself. And if it worked for anyone, I'd blame the school first. Nevertheless, it might bite us all in the arse later. Hard.
Heh. Well, no. It was decades after the days of Mel too, as far as I can tell. But I guess there are many paths to enlightenment and many Buddhas/prophets/avatars/etc one can stumble upon and be humbled by their wisdom. Mine was thousands of miles away and decades after, but the effect was the same ;)
No, you don't understand. He didn't calculate the address to jump to. _That_ I could quite easily understand, actually. He calculated the code to execute. I thought I was teh uber assembly guru, but just realizing that that's what's happening made me go cross eyed :P
Ah, kids these days... so easily impressed.
I remember one piece of code that makes even that seem tame. Assembly, mind you, back in the 386 days.
Someone had calculated something as a 4 byte float, then took it as a 32-bit integer, swapped the higher and lower 16-bit words, wrote it into a memory location at the start of a function, and then actually jumped to that location. I.e., he actually executed that result. That was actually in the (uncommented) assembly source code, mind you, not some accidentally disasssembling a piece of the data segment and discovering that it makes no sense.
To this day, I have no clue what that did. Awestruck is putting it mildly.
Not quite true. I can think of a few people whose code gave me no reason for complaints. To pick just two extremes out of the pool:
- one of them is pretty much the pragmatic programmer prototype. He'll (also) apply some pattern only if it's needed, not because it would be fun to have it on the resume. Sometimes a switch block with 10 cases is really all you need, you know? His programs tend to be compact, work and be actually fairly easy to get the hang of.
- one of them is, well, pretty much the opposite. His programs tend to be a lot larger than they need to be, and have layers upon layers of patterns even to print "Hello World". With some reflection thrown in for good measure. Strangely enough, though, they _are_ well organized, and you can fairly easily find the class that processes a given event or command... or the singleton factory that supplies it, or the manager class it's registered with, or...
Are they perfect according to my tastes? Nope. But I can nevertheless tell good code when I see it, even if it's not perfect. And say it.
On the other hand, at the other end of the spectrum, I've had to deal with pieces of code which were truly atrocious. E.g., one particular program not only raped all best practices known to mankind, but also was living illustration of half the techniques from How to write unmaintainable code. Literally. It even had stuff like the using people's first names for variables, in addition to the more mundane techniques like mere undescriptive names, obfuscated flow, heavy use of global variables, non-obvious side-effects to those variables, or methods which can also do some 2-3 other unrelated things if called with the right parameters. And I don't mean just side-effects or cramming more functionality in one call than expected. I mean stuff like the class which should have normally sent an email, could render and print a PDF _instead_ of sending one email, or update the contract in the database instead. And for bonus points, not even determined by parameters, but by the contents of those global variables. But, again, the nicest touch was finding uninformative variable names like Pete and Eve in the very first class I opened.
Basically IMHO lumping it all into one everything-is-the-same "all programmers hate each others' code" pool doesn't do it justice, and paints a misleading image. _Some_ may be just nitpicking about the style, but some code is genuinely evil stuff that should be buried at crossroads with a stake through its chest.
*shrug*
;)
First of all: should he care about my opinion? Well, no, he's supposed to use his own brains. I'm anonymous guy number #1234567 on the Internet. I'd be more worried if he took my words as gospel.
Second: I guess there are ways to be diplomatic about it, but I genuinely fail to see the point. The way I see it, it's just a variant of the grammar nazi troll.
Much as I'm a nerd myself, and not a particularly socially-adept one either, there's one kind of nerd that I have increasingly more... disgust and contempt for. The kind who'll see any discussion as serving one reason only: showing everyone, and especially to his own insecure ego, that everyone else is more stupid than he is. Or, as Scott Adams once put it, "It doesn't matter who you know, it matters who knows less than you do." Some people's lives seem to revolve around just that: going through conversations, boards, mailing lists, etc, for no reason than to find something debatable someone else said, and blow it out of proportion as some proof of how much smarter he is. Even if he's going to have to distort people's words, deliberately mis-understand, or pull assumptions out of the arse about what the other knows or meant. He's out to prop his ego and, by Jingo, he's not going to fail in that mission.
And I won't even mind that, as long as it's actually contributing some useful information. But some are just disruptive cretins, butting in for no other reasons than to, say, make a whole fuss about your using the wrong word. See, the common grammar nazi. The idiot whose only contribution to a discussion is being the guy who's condescending about the fact that you typoed a word in the third sentence on the fourth paragraph. It's not contributing anything, it's just some retard's ego-stroking. Yay, he's so smart because he knows how to write a word. (Which the other guy probably knew too, but hit the wrong key at some point.)
Same here. Yes, writing "USSR" instead of "Russia" was a brain-fart, but that's what occasionally happens when writing stuff in a hurry and without proof-reading it. Sure, it was an error. No doubt.
But it takes a special kind of dysfunctional cretin to blow it out of proportion as "you don't even know that the USSR doesn't exist any more." It doesn't even contribute anything useful to the conversation. It serves no purpose than to allow an otherwise dysfunctional loser to get his "yay, I'm smarter than some random guy on the Internet" ego boost. It's the grammar nazi troll in a new guise. No more, no less.
And, as I was saying, I'm increasingly having only disgust towards that kind of a person.
Third: well, I'm not sure what your point is. That you'll filter your information by how nice was the person who said it? Fine. I'm not a nice person. Now you know. I'm sure you can find nicer people to trust, then
More like when it says "mrrk" (sometimes transcribed as "mrrh") from the hall, and you just know, "oh shit, she's brought me another dying bird she hunted." As far as anyone can tell, that's their word for "food", typically as in "I brought you some." That's the word they use to call their weaned kittens to dinner when they hunted something for said kittens. But they've been known to try to feed their human room-mates too