Well given that the title of the game is Mass Effect, I think the word play was intentional. I have played through the game, and am on my second run through. It is good but not as great as previous efforts such as Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR). He hints at the problem in the article, when he says that it's hard to keep the game consistent given your choices. HELLO!!! I don't want the game to be the same given my choices, it should change depending on my choices. Weather I am Mr. nice guy or Master Chief I still end up the hero of the universe.
The problem is that, until someone invents an AI GM that can at least pass the Turing test, what you ask is simply not feasible. Someone has to design and code all those states you changed.
I mean, let's pretend we design a game where each quest truly changes the game's world.
E.g., you can decide that instead of saving Bastila on KOTOR, you capture her and sell her to the Sith. (Sure, _Malak_ would probably kill you if you ran into him face to face, but there's no reason you couldn't go be the dark apprentice of some Sith who's never anywhere near Malak.) And the game branches from there. Taris is never destroyed. You never get the Ebon Hawk, even, since the Sith lift the blockade and Canderous doesn't need you to get off the planet. You never fly to Dantooine to become a Jedi. Etc. Let's say the whole story can fork like that at any point.
Well, now let's say we allow only 3 solutions to each such point: good, evil, don't do it. (After all, it's unrealistic that I _must_ do something at any point in the game.)
After the first such quest, there are 3 possible paths. The next one multiplies them to 9. Then 27. Then 81. Then 243.
Sounds good, right?
Well, it would, if the devs had infinite funds. In practice you can look at it more realistically like this: they'd have to code 243 outcomes and 1+3+9+27+81=121 quests, just to give you... a chain of exactly 5 quests. And you'd think "gee, this game sucked, it had a whole 5 quests."
Alternately, if they made it a completely linear game, you could see all 121 quests. And probably think, "bestest game evar! It had more quests than KOTOR 1+2 combined."
For the same development money, the linear solution will actually be the better game.
The problem with that branching is _literally_ that the chain you see is a logarithm of the total number of quests they have to code. Which gets shittier with each level you add to that pyramid. Adding a 6'th quest to the chain seen by the player, in a truly branching game would raise the number of quests you need to code by another 243. It's a mammoth cost and effort just so the player sees a total of 6, no matter what kind of character they play.
Worse yet, most of that immense number of branches will never be taken by anoyne. Most players play consistently all good or all evil, at least on the major issues. Branches and quests that would be only visible if you play good once, evil twice, neutral once, and good again, would be seen by maybe 0.1% of the players, so they'd be a major waste.
That, in a nutshell, is why everyone avoids branching like the plague.
KOTOR didn't truly branch either. Heck, even in Oblivion or Morrowind, open-ended as they are, the story doesn't really branch. The world, in fact, doesn't change much as a result of your actions.
What good designers really do is
A) contain the effects. Sure, they might tell you that you just got the Republic kicked off Manaan, but it won't influence the rest of the game at all. Yeah, you just got told that you gave the Sith a major advantage, but it's not like now they'll finish the conquest before you reach the Star Forge.
B) create an illusion of having some consequence. Sure, you'll get an alignment number, NPC's talking about you like you're Mother Teresa or Jack The Ripper, etc, but that's all an illusion that doesn't influence anything else.
Basically that way they can give you all the quests and a number of ways to solve each, without the possibilities exploding out of control. The trick is to keep it all an illusion.
If it makes you feel any better, you're not the only one. Any other application of "black" to a day seems to have meanings a lot more... well, dark.
E.g., "Black Tuesday" is when the Great Depression hit.
Heck, even "Black Friday", other than that particular meaning, was applied to massacres, riots, major financial scandals, you get the idea.
So I can't help wonder what kind of idiot chose "Black Friday" to mean "we're selling lots of stuff". I mean, gee, it must be such a dark and depressing thing.
More importantly, it's the kind of language that obscures instead of informing. For someone who doesn't know that particular pun already, it evokes the exact opposite image. I'll confess that I too, when reading that summary, was left thinking, basically, that it was some great catastrophe that befell them.
On second thought, though, heh, it sounds like what marketers and management tend to do to sound smart... when they aren't. Now I'm not saying that all of them are clueless, far from it. Just that you can often tell the ones who _are_, by the inclination to speak gobbledygook and think that having a buzzword for everything makes them so great.
It is refreshing to see a post from someone who obviously knows their history. For that, you have all my respect.
However, if I'm allowed a minor nitpick:
The Germans did however enjoy two tactical advantages: their optics were better, which gave them more accurate long-range gunnery
I'd argue that this matters a lot less than some people claim.
Even the towed 37mm and 50mm German AT guns ended up known as the "door knocker": they couldn't actually penetrate a T34's front armour (and as you correctly note, even less so against a KV-1), but did an outstanding job of giving away the gun's position.
The ones on the tanks, at a range too... well, those optics might have made a difference if they shot at a T34 from behind. As you undoubtedly know, penetration does go down with distance. So from the front or even sides, at the range where those optics made a difference, the 37mm and 50mm tank guns were simply useless.
That leaves the 76.2mm gun on the IV series... which was a short barreled anti-infantry howitzer until 1942. Even ignoring the penetration problem (it was _not_ an anti-tank gun) the German version was 24 calibres long, the Soviet one even on the first T34s was 30.5 calibres long. (Later replaced by one 42.5 calibres long.) The German one simply had a more curved trajectory, and I'd argue that those better optics at most compensated for that.
before 1941 the soviet tanks were outdated and were easily dispatched by the germans. The russians started developing a better tank (T-34) after this time. So, originally their tanks were inferior.
Operation Barbarossa started in June 1941. So, well, what German tanks could do _before_ 1941 against Soviet tanks, tends to be relatively unimportant:P
Prior to 1941, well, ok, I guess a theoretical point could be made that the BT series of Soviet tanks were kinda crappy, by later standards. "Land battleship" experiments -- an obsession of Stalin -- also didn't help much.
Then again, _everyone_ had crappy tanks before '41. As I was saying, Germany went into Poland with Pz-I and Pz-II tanks. The BT's were actually better than those.
The only instance of pre-41 Soviet vs German tank fighting was in Spain. The 45mm gun on the BT-5 actually made short work of the Pz-I's.
Don't get me wrong, though. The Soviets didn't yet go all-T34 in '41 or anything. The bulk of their army was still older models. Probably that's what you've read.
But they did have a far better tank that had just gone into mass production, and soon they were churning them by the thousands. Germany didn't yet have anything equivalent even on the drawing boards. That's what I'm saying.
That isn't exactly correct, and, more importantly, war doesn't boil down to just having the best tanks. What's more important is how you use them.
1. German tanks _were_ weaker. Yes, everyone knows about Tigers and Panthers later, but in 39 we entered the war with Pz-I and Pz-II. That was the bulk of the German army. The I series was little more than an armoured car with two _medium_ machineguns in a turret. They were intended to be training tanks, but got pressed into the war because of lack of anything better.
Plus a couple of better ones, half of them captured from the Czechs, but they were anything but the bulk of the army.
Most German soldiers were equipped with a bolt action rifle until the end of the war.
Where Germany excelled were the doctrines. I.e., how you use that equipment.
E.g., tanks were weaker, but that was ok, because they were only supposed to punch through or bypass, take some important position, then let the enemy attack you to take it back. And then you could use the 88mm FLAK gun to kill any better tanks the enemy might have had. That was Blitzkrieg.
E.g., the soldiers may have had bolt action rifles, but that was ok because the German infantry doctrine had the squad machinegun as the central piece, and the rest of the squad was mostly support for it. (By comparison, the Americans saw it the other way around, so they were saddled with the shitty BAR as a piss-poor substitute for a squad MG.)
2. The Soviet union was more technologically advanced than you seem to think, grasshopper.
The T34 was years ahead of anything anyone else had. The 76mm gun could break through any other nation's tanks' armour even with the high explosive round. And the front armour was just short of invulnerable to anything Germany had on a tank.
The T34 was one of the reasons why Germany rushed to attack the USSR early. Hitler couldn't risk waiting until it's produced in large numbers.
You know the (in)famous German Panther? Well, that was a shameless copy of the Soviet T34. Really. The initial proposal was to just start manufacturing T34s, but it was seen as a matter of national pride to not be that obvious about it. So they changed the gun on it and a few other details, but otherwise it was still just a modded T34.
The KV-1 and KV-2 were a nightmare for the German army too. It took quite literally hundreds of hits to disable one. That was _years_ before the Tigers.
Add other advances, like rocket artillery, early semi-automatic rifles (and mass use of SMGs, far ahead of the numbers the Germans had), etc, and the Russians weren't technologically handicapped at all.
Heck, even their AT guns, Germany used any they could lay their hands on. There were whole series of vehicles built with captured soviet AT guns. That says something, doesn't it? They wouldn't have used something that's two generations behind.
3. Don't get me wrong, the USSR did have its own problems and handicaps. But it wasn't as handicapped as most people seem to assume anyway.
The biggest and foremost problem the USSR had wasn't technological at all. Their army had just gone through Stalin's purges, and was (A) lacking competent officers, (B) paralized with fear of being the next scapegoat if they show any initiative, and (C) put under the control of comissars who were there just for political reasons, not for any military competence. The USSR, including the army, also had a _massive_ morale problem. At least half the people (and almost all the minorities and non-Russian Soviet republics) would have been happier to fight against Stalin than for him.
_That_ is the main factor that almost doomed the USSR in the early days of Operation Barbarossa.
A second problem -- again, mostly because of doctrine and political idiocy, rather than technology -- was that the Russians didn't believe in using radios on their tanks. They had them in homeopathic quantities, if at all. So once they were buttoned up in combat, each tank was almost on its own and had
While normally I would encourage a moderate dose of paranoia, I'd also recommend it to be balanced by Hanlon's Razor: never attribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
This being Germany, for a start you have to realize that the police doesn't seem to be particularly incline toward conspiracies, nor any good at it. They're also (still) more monitored than what, judging by the news coming from the USA, seems to be the case with the FBI and CIA. These guys will tell you up front that they want stuff like the "federal trojan". Then it gets struck down as unconstitutional, lather, rinse, repeat.
At any rate, they're not the kind who'll do a backroom deal with some ISP to do it in stealth and secrecy. They're very open in requesting to be allowed to do all sorts of stupid stuff. Which I guess is the whole idea in a democracy and rule of the law.
Also, well, I don't know which particular group tried to crack skype, but the general stereotype about German public servants is... not very flattering. Not that they're evil or insidious, mind you. They tend to actually be nice people. More like just thoroughly lazy, incompetent, underworked, underachieving... you get the idea. Some more extremely than others. There's a whole category of jokes about them.
So, well, going by the stereotype, I'd really go by Hanlon's Razor there. There's a possibility that they genuinely don't have anyone who can crack anything above ROT13.
First, without tidal interaction with a large moon, the earth would spin a great deal faster on its axis, resulting in much stronger and consistent winds. It would be hard for anything to be more than a few inches tall except in the windshadow of tall mountains, which themselves would erode much faster.
Uh, look at Venus please. It's the same size as Earth, it formed in a slightly faster spinning band of the accretion disk, yet it spins a heck of a lot slower. In fact, if you look at the 4 rocky planets' time for a complete rotation:
Mercury: 59 Earth days
Venus: 243 Earth days (by comparison, it takes only 224.65 days for a full orbit, so actually Sun rises in the west and sets in the east)
Earth: 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.091 seconds
Mars: 24.623 hours
So Earth spins faster than any of the 3 without a giant moon. Mars is the only one that comes reasonably close, but even that falls a little short. (Mars has two smaller moons, though.)
So what would happen if less cosmic radiation caused mutations on Earth? Well,
A) buggerall, that's what. That's a tiny part of the mutations that have any role. Sure, UV might give you a skin cancer, but it won't mutate your eggs/sperm/embryo, depending on what gender you are.
So I'd say I've at least brushed with that aspect:)
Maybe it wasn't that explicit and clear, but I think my posts are huge as they are. Going into even more details, well, probably even less people would be arsed to read them:)
To be honest, I'm not convinced that you can take a SF plot device and run away with it too far in the real world.
1. Radiation. Actually, Earth probably has the least radiation problem in the solar system, because of its strong magnetic field.
Venus, for example, started extremely similar to Earth but was doomed because its dynamo stopped (and was probably weaker to start with). So the solar wind stripped away all hydrogen, leaving it with an atmosphere of CO2.
Mars hardly has a dynamo because its core froze already. Fat lot of good it did for intelligent life there.
Mercury. Ditto. Its magnetic field is at a whole 0.1% of Earths.
So even when you factor in the different mass and conditions, it seems to me like Earth is unique in having too _strong_ shielding, not in needing some plot device to weaken it.
2. (Or 1a.) If allowing more radiation in was better, you don't need a moon for that. Just rotate slower.
(And indeed the way I remember it, the collision theory says that the same collision that created the moon actually accelerated Earth's rotation a lot.)
Or lose your water, which stops plate tectonics, which kills off the dynamo. Easy.
In fact, you need a whole bunch of special conditions to _keep_ your shielding. Losing it seems more like the norm for a rocky planet in the right band to not turn into a snowball. If the moon's positive influence were punching a hole in our shield... heh... then a lot of planets would get there without a moon just as well.
3. Mutations. Longer text, so have patience please.
Well, this is stuff that happens anyway, simply because some UV gets through, there are radioactive elements in the soil, and even because simply errors happen when transcribing DNA. Especially look again at the last parts: even if you kept something under a slab of lead, without UV or cosmic radiation at all, it would still mutate.
Most of the history of life (except for virii, some bacteria and your immune system) was about _preventing_ mutations. Your cells have layers upon layers of defenses against that kind of thing. Starting with the very fact that you're DNA instead of RNA based, and all the repair proteins, and it goes on and on.
Heck, even the fact that you age is a defense against cancer, i.e., against mutation. Your cells start with a max division counter and literally count divisions. So if that mechanism didn't break down too, a tumour would reach a maximum size and stop. Unfortunately that also means that as more and more of your cells reach that limit natuarally, there's more and more damage which can't be repaired, and you discover the fun of old age.
At any rate, any multi-cellular kind of life, actively fights off mutations. Simply because you can't exceed a certain complexity without preventing mutations. You can't have a body consisting of gazillions of cells, if they don't obey the rules. If cells in your palm randomly tried to evolve into a nose, your left foot tried to become a palm, etc, your body would break apart pretty fast.
You also have to understand that this all happens on a "good enough" basis. Your body could evolve even more fool-proof defenses -- and through the billions of years it has, slowly -- but beyond a point they wouldn't be worth the extra complexity and energy requirements. Plus, in the long term, perfect repairs would also mean an inability to evolve. So anything that got too good at it just disappeared later in the next glaciation, when it was unable to evolve.
And in rare cases, even conversely: if it's of advantage to mutate faster (if still in a controlled manner), mechanisms evolve to create just that. E.g., there are cells in your immune system which actively mutate certain genes randomly, to try to produce a protein that exactly matches a target protein. (E.g., a piece of a new virus's capsid.) There's literally an enzyme in there whose sole role is to junk a random codon (think: byte) of DNA, so the repairs would kick in and some of them would get i
I guess the best way to say it is: it boils down to how long your loading times are. If they're fast enough, sure, you can put them in a background thread. If not, not.
It may sound like merely stating the obvious tautology, but there are some actual game design implications there.
If we decide that all games must be seamless and loading screens are sooo last century, then that puts an upper limit on how complex your game can be. Complete changes of scenery (e.g., from jungle woods to high-tech research bunker) are right out, because there you get to pretty much replace the whole set of textures. Extremely high polycounts and texture detail are out too, because obviously loading another 16 MB for the next zone is much faster than loading 256 MB for the next zone. And extremely complex scripts and dialogues are out too, because one way or another you do end up loading them.
You can't really have both. Morrowind tried, and it became just a case of annoying breaks more often, instead of them being at points where you're warned and expect a load time. Instead of having one load screen every zone change, it just ended up having one a hickup every 30 ft. It just became a constant annoyance.
Second, keeping in memory the data to decide exactly what you want to load means more memory needed too, so it comes at the expense of something else. Sure, you don't need much RAM to decide it when you load just terrain for a FPS, but in a complex RPG it can be subtly more complex. The more that could have changed in the world as a result of the player's actions -- or of player mods -- the more you might have to process an area before it's ready to render.
Pre-optimizations are also right out. You can't pre-compute too many NPC's paths and schedules, if you have to be ready in milliseconds. So that again will have to come at the expense of something else. Either then you need more CPU power during the game, or you load the pre-computed data to a file... but that again brings you back to the problem that now you're waiting for IO, so you have to reduce some other data being loaded. It also throws a spanner into modding, since now changing a cell -- Morrowind or Oblivion style -- essentially invalidates anything you might have pre-computed when developing the game.
Basically what works for a flight sim, may not necessarily be the best way for a complex RPG like NWN2.
That's not to say that you'll end up with a bad game. WoW can be seamless and a good game. But if you re-read the above paragraphs and have played WoW, you might recognize some of the tradeoffs they had to do, to keep it seamless.
It's not applicable to all games, that's what I'm saying.
Elevators too, are nice but aren't for all games. You'd be hard pressed to justify an elevator in a medieval setting, for example. Heck, even in a modern setting, if you have elevators between bits of outdoor scenery, it looks just bloody stupid.
So basically, yeah, it would work in an old-style FPS consisting of small mazes of small rooms. But I'd rather that not all games became clones of Quake 2 and its engine's limitations.
Well, making a broad generalization, is because people
A) want miracle solutions, and
B) preferrably ones that require less effort on their side, and
C) want more to look like they're doing something, than to actually do something. (The incompetent manager syndrome.)
So between something like (I) just eat less calories than you use, and something like (II) just stop eating bread, the latter will win on all accounts.
The latter requires less discipline and willpower, less counting, less putting up with meals that taste insipid for lack of fat, no getting off the sofa and exercising, etc. It's simply less effort. And it's sold with enough hocus pocus and scientific-sounding words to sound like magic to the uninitiate. (Somethimes it does have some science behind it, sometimes it doesn't, but that's all irrelevant anyway to Joe Sixpack who wouldn't know what a complex carbohydrate is if it bit him in the arse.) And it's something as conspicuous as it gets. You don't have to wonder whether you're doing it right. See, it's without bread! I'm doing something!
Now again, I'm not saying that Atkins is necessarily bad. But there was plenty of other stuff which didn't have any scientific basis and got swallowed by the masses anyway, on account of the three points above.
Between (1) all the effort of exercising and dieting, and (B) conspicuously waving some magic wand, the average Joe Sixpack will choose the latter every single time. That's all I'm saying.
If you did understand what radiotherapy or chemotherapy do, you'd probably be _more_ inclined to buy a magic amulet.
The only way we know how to "cure" cancer is this: cancerous cells typically have broken or weaker DNA repair mechanisms. So a cancerous cell is more likely to die when you break its DNA.
A healthy cell might repair itself. Or, here's the important part: it might die too, or mutate into a cancerous cell itself.
So radiotherapy basically exposes you to a beam of highly ionizing radiation. It breaks the DNA of a lot healthy cells, and of a lot of cancerous cells too in its path. Chemotherapy does the same with chemicals that break the DNA. (As a comparison, that's how mustard gas works.)
Basically it's the same as exposing yourself to UV-B to fight skin cancer.
Even when it works, you'll destroy a lot of tissue periodically, and might have just traded a cancer now for a new cancer a bit later.
It's not only the snake oil peddlers who noticed that there's something wrong with the cancer cure statistics. (They tend to be not in cases cure, but in how much longer a cancer patient lives nowadays... partially because earlier detection. They also invariably omit the "relapses", which seem to be more like the rule than the exception.) Even real doctors and skeptics like IIRC Dr Ben Goldacre on badscience.net occasionally picked on them.
So, well, I can see how someone would be desperate enough to try even snake oil there. Just because, you know, they pretty much have nothing else to lose. You have this scientific cure which will very probably just kill you a bit later. Or you have the magical snake oil which claims to really cure it. Can you really blame it for giving it a try?
I'm against spammers rabidly, but even I don't see the problem as that simple. The guy takes several leaps of faith, based on little more than redefinition of terms or postulating axioms. And by his own incoherent account, he's done them in front of the judge too.
1. He seems to think that it can only count as a personal email if it's from people he personally knows, or who know him personally. (Seein' as the cornerstone of his argument is that noone who knows him would think that he owns Slashdot.)
Well, stop right there. That was not how email was supposed to work. It _is_ what it degenerated into, thanks to spammers, but it was supposed to be a more general all-purpose communication medium, including from people you don't personally know. It was for example considered proper nettiquette to use your real email in usenet postings, for example, so people don't pollute the whole newsgroup when they wanted to go off-topic with you or ask/add stuff that they didn't think would interest everyone.
The judges interpretation of "personal email" seems to be more along the (saner) lines of person-to-person communication. And, honestly, I don't see anywhere that enough information has been presented to rule that out. We don't know, beyond reasonable doubt, if it's not just a room-temperature-IQ (in Celsius) moron who genuinely thought that the submitter owns Slashdot, and sent exactly one message to suggest a link exchange. Sure, it could be spam, but it's not quite proven beyond reasonable doubt.
Basically what I see him doing there is redefining, or mis-understanding, in one fell swoop:
- what personal email means
- what burden of proof means
- what the judge meant (just ruling that someone could have genuinely thought you own Slashdot, isn't the same as ruling that you do own it)
2. The argument that noone who knows him would think X is a tenuous one too.
Point in case: I had a (now ex) girlfriend who seemed to genuinely think that I'm a mighty wizard and can exorcise ghosts. No, I don't know how would anyone sane get that idea, but kinda that's the whole point: she wasn't sane after all. What I assumed to be just a nonsense talking contest and nodded through, Eliza-style, turned out to be her probing whether she can tell me that she sees ghosts in her room. She seemed to be schizophrenic enough to actually see those, but also still sane enough to realize that if you just tell people that you see ghosts, they'll think you're crazy.
That's the disconnect you occasionally get shoved in your face, between what you imagine about the people around and what they know or think, and the reality of what they actually know or think.
So even "noone who knows me would think I own Slashdot", is a somewhat fragile assumption of what people know or think.
Doubly so, since, see point 1, it's not a requirement for someone to personally know you, for it to count as personal email. So once you disregard the "who knows me" part, you're left with the whole cornerstone of the lawsuit being that everyone should know that he's not the webmaster of Slashdot. You know, all 6 billion people on the planet. Noone could possibly make a honest mistake.
3. What to do now? Blimey, of course, name and shame the judge. Don't just get angry that she didn't side with your leap of faith, but also include some snide remarks about how it's scary that we also let people like her judge cases like rape, property damage and other such serious stuff.
2. Dumbass decides to sue, purely because that kind of lawsuits seem to be his idea of entertainment. (Even he admits that there are more efficient ways to attack spam than what he does there.) Although he doesn't have the evidence that it's spam, and he doesn't seem to know what the laws actually say about spam.
3. Judge decides that, based on the presented evidence, she can't rule out that it might have been genuine stupidity.
Remember: email from strangers isn't against the law, and it was in fact how email was supposed to work. So you have to prove that it's actually spam, and not some genuine idiot who sent exactly one message. Yes, it _could_ have been spam, but that's far from proven here.
Also remember: the burden of proof lies on the litigant. Sorta the extension of "innocent until proven guilty" to civil lawsuits. If my whole base for a lawsuit is my claim that you broke the law, then it's my job to present all the proof, beyond a reasonable person's doubt, that you're indeed guilty. If not, then the only safe position to take is to assume that you're probably not. If there is enough doubt -- even Hanlon's Razor -- that you might not be, then I failed to make my case, and the judge is _supposed_ to rule in your favour.
4. Dumbass takes it personally and tries to name-and-shame the judge in a public forum. (Pay attention now.) Add some childish tantrum about how then she's also unfit to judge more vital cases like child custody, property damage, or rape.
He hasn't proven that either, but, apparently just as with his lawsuit, we're supposed to just believe him that the judge is unfit because he said so. And he's so l33t that he can't _possibly_ be wrong. He may not know what the law actually says, he may not have bothered to gather the evidence, but by Jove, if the judge didn't _instantly_ see that he's obviously right just because it's him, then that judge is obviously unfit.
Let me tell you how _I_ see that:
A) Good! That's exactly the kind of judge that I'd want there in a lawsuit about rape, child custody or property damage. I want a judge who'll just look at the evidence, and decide impartially if it meets the standard or not.
I _don't_ want a judge who'll decide based on emotions, sympathies and what some bit looks like when taken out of context. Yes, it's sad when a spammer gets out free, but it would be even sadder if judges started screaming "Off with her head!" like the Queen Of Hearts just because someone _might_ be a spammer, without seeing enough evidence. It's called rule of the law, not rule by emotions and personal sympathies/antipathies.
_Especially_ if it's a rape trial, I'd want the judge to weigh the evidence and make an informed decision, not to side with whoever he personally sympathises the most with. (E.g., "I'm a woman, so obviously the guy is guilty" vs "I'm a guy, so probably the bitch was asking for it.")
B) The whole name-and-shame thing just leaves a bad aftertaste. It looks like nothing more than someone's attempt at cyber-bullying someone who disaggreed with him.
It's stuff like this that makes me appreciate the school bullies more in retrospect. At least those had the balls to punch you in the face and deal with whatever consequences. Whereas the pimple-faced cyber-bully expects someone else to do the dirty job for him. As low-lifes go, it's one step lower than the real bully. It's someone who probably would have done the same, just never had the balls to.
A product is worth exactly what it's purchaser will pay for it.
Bringing free market theories into it is good and fine, but only if you also realize the context in which they apply. The free market is a bit more complex of abstraction. There are a heck of a ton of assumptions there, such as that the products are interchangeable, there are many suppliers, etc. And most importantly in this context: the buyers are perfectly informed.
That last part is crucial here: a product is worth exactly what you paid, only if you knew _exactly_ what you're buying. I.e., that doesn't apply to scams and cons.
If you think you bought Product A, but instead you got Product B, then that whole "is worth exactly what the purchaser paid" assumption falls flat on its face. Your judgment of whether or not it was worth it was based on Product A, not on product B.
E.g., if I offer to sell you, say, Porsche Carrera, how much is that worth to you? Even second hand it's still worth tens of thousands. Now imagine that you pay that money and I give you a toy car. That's just not the product you thought you were buying. Saying that it's worth exactly as much as you paid for it, would just be stupid.
Now that's a case where the fraud is easy to spot. This kind of snake oil is the same kind of fraud, only it's a lot harder to spot for the uninitiated.
E.g., if you had cancer and I promised you a medicine that can cure you, how much is that worth to you? Quite a lot, I'd bet. People have been known to blow their life's savings on such a miracle medicine or cancer-curing gizmo, in that situation. But that was worth the price only assuming that it is what I assured you it is. If instead I give you coloured water or a box that displays random numbers, then it's just not the product for which that price was judged.
It's the same fraud as in the car example: you were promised Product A and were given ample assurance that it is indeed Product A. That's what you judged that price for. But instead you were given Product B, which isn't even remotely the same thing. That's what makes it a fraud.
Now if those things were sold honestly as snake oil (think, "this bracelet won't do jack shit for your health, but we think that industrial cable looks cool and we're charging 500$ for it anyway"), _then_ that "it's worth what the purchaser paid" idea would apply. Sure, then the buyer knew exactly what he's getting, judget it worth every cent. Fair enough. If someone knew they're buying just a piece of steel cable, and was ok with paying that price for it, I can't argue with that.
But as long as the buyer was deliberately mis-led into thinking they bought something completely different, sorry, no. Just no.
The Randi Challenge is open to everyone, you know
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10 Great Snake-Oil Gadgets
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· Score: 4, Informative
The Randi challenge is open to everyone, you know, so it's hard to argue with a straight face (and an undamaged brain) that somehow the real dowsers just mysteriously slipped through the cracks, and all the thousands of studies picked just the wrong ones.
It's open to everyone. If anyone thinks he's a real dowser (or a real telepath, or anything else "paranormal"), he can register, prove it and walk with a cool million dollars for their efforts. That's more than they make out of finding water for some farmer too, so it should be incentive enough to register if they actually have the gift. Heck, a million dollars isn't bad at all a deal for a couple of day's work even for someone who's in the business of dowsing for oil or minerals. Plus they'd get the free publicity of it all. People went through a lot more effort for a lot less gain.
To my mind that's as close as testing literally everyone as it gets. If at least one person on the whole Earth had such powers, they're not just free to get it tested, but actually invited and promised a nice reward.
And the first test there is: do they even genuinely believe they have those powers, or do they know that they're running a scam? If they don't even try to register there, you can already know in which category to file them. The _vast_ majority of dowsers, magicians, clairvoyants, mind-readers, etc, fall in that category by their own hand.
But of course that still won't stop gullible people from believing in fairy tales, just because they feel a need to believe in fairy tales.
Yes, well, that's all insightful and all, and I'm not trying to exonerate the dumb outsourcers. But that's really a whole other problem. It's orthogonal, if you wish.
Basically we can agree that someone _should_ have kept an eye on the potential thieves, _but_ that doesn't mean I'll have any less contempt for the actual thieves either. It's just different problems. Someone was incompetent or maybe gullible. They don't get much respect from me for that. But someone else was actually dishonest, and not as in "little white lie", but to the point of being outright "evil." (Sorry, toxic toys and toothpaste and medicine in the name of a quick embezzle, I can't name it anything else than evil. It's even the disproportionate kind of evil where the gains are a tiny fraction of the damage done.) And for that they've fully earned my heartfelt contempt.
It has nothing to do with bigotry. I have nothing against the Chinese as such, and in fact I'm somewhat an admirer of their history... until the Qing dynasty took over.
China can just fucking clean up their corruption, and then I'll have nothing against it any more. That's all.
But in the meantime, a system where someone can just bribe the right people and get away with using cheaper toxic glue or paint in kids' toys (kids _will_ try to bite anything they lay their hands on), or with using highly poisonous ethylene glycol in toothpaste instead of the more expensive glycerine, is a place I can only have contempt for.
Even nationalism is that-a-way, but kleptocracy and corruption are a whole other direction of its own. Replacing the paint and embezzling the difference isn't some great act of rebellion against the foreign powers. It's just a dumb theft that hurts their own country and company.
And I'm willing to bet that they're doing the same to their local market too. At the very least, when those toxic toys or toothpaste are sent back to China, I'll take a wild guess that you won't see most of them in a landfill. Some enterprising soul will find a way to sell them. Re-labeled, if needed.
At any rate, as I was saying, I have nothing against the Chinese. The big fuck-up that is China for the last couple of centuries straight, though, that's another story. Either they figure out a way to clean up that act, or, well, trust me, I don't feel the slightest guilt for having contempt for corruption and dishonesty. If that's bigoted in your view of the world, fine, I can live with that. Quite happily.
Well, sorta. There are people without scruples anywhere, and the large mass is just as easy to lead in whatever direction you wish everywhere.
The difference, the way I see it, is that some countries are fighting harder to control it (mind you, not 100% successfully) while in the others the whole system and structure degenerated into something where everything is for sale. Justice, quality controls, etc.
And yes, it's nothing surprising that individuals without scruples or morals from the west, just see the situation in China/Africa/Ex-USSR as just another way to do business and just another opportunity. I'm sure they'd do the same at home, whenever it looks like they can get away with it. In fact, there are more than enough cases where they tried, and some where they even got away with it.
The difference is really the extent to which they can get away with it.
And I'm still under the impression that democratic societies experience the problem to a much lesser extent, given enough time to fight it. It's not that the kind of person who makes it to the top in the west is any better. It's just that they're a lot more watched and controlled. Whereas wherever whole hierarchy pyramids are really that pyramidal, with each level being judge, jury and executioner for the level below, eventually some enterprising souls make it to the top who just sell the jobs below them to the highest briber and their influence to the highest briber. And from there it just propagates.
The difference in the west is basically just that what looks very superficially like a pyramid is really a lot more complicated than that. You have the press poking his nose at higher levels. You have whole pieces like justice which are (more or less) outside the normal pyramid and given free hand to poke their nose above their level. You have the guys at the bottom actually controlling more or less what those at the top do. You have investors and unions controlling what the CEOs do. Etc.
Not saying that corruption doesn't happen in that kind of a system. It does. But to a much more limited extent and in more secrecy.
Whereas totalitarian places tend to congeal that structure really into a pyramid. The press is a part of that pyramid, and the guys above it dictate what it can print. The police and justice are a part of that pyramid, and the guys above it dictate what it can investigate. Etc.
It's a system which can _only_ generate corruption, given enough time for the right sociopaths to rise to the top. Because essentially they've just risen above the levels where the safeguards apply. And they can further control and pervert those safeguards.
Honestly, the more I hear about China, the more it sounds like the (stereo)typical massive corruption scenario.
I.e., no need to assume that there's some government hand behind it, or some meaningful form of protest against the west. It can be simply that some guy running their DNS servers/proxies/great-firewall/whatever got a nice bribe to redirect the lookups to someone selling the same kind of product, or an importer, or really whoever was willing to pay.
The way the kleptocracy/corruption scenario goes is, basically, it doesn't matter how much you're paid, it only matters how much you can steal/embezzle/get-as-bribes. Whole hierarchies are formed where any job worth anything (in loot/bribes/whatever) is essentially either given to party leaders' relatives or auctioned to the highest bidder. And then it's considered pretty much normal and expected that you'd get your money back, and a nice profit, by stealing/embezzling/demanding-bribes/etc. Whatever works, really.
My favourite example of what corruption _can_ do, and incidentally also is (A) about China, and (B) nicely illustrates that there is no need for it to even be motivated by some higher ideals or nationalism, is the Battle of the Yalu River in 1894.
Among various surrealism of it all, many shells used by the Chinese fleet were filled with sawdust or cement, because some enterprising souls in the navy had embezzled the funds for cordite and split the loot with the manufacturer. Or stuff as monumentally surrealistic as that a battleship was missing two main guns, which again had been stolen and sold on the black market. Yep, you've read that right: big f-ing guns off a battleship, simply dismantled and sold on the black market.
You also find such surrealistic stuff, as that the fleet's second in command -- no doubt, some fellow with either high placed relatives, or who bought the job fair and square -- deliberately didn't relay the order to deploy into battle formation. The formation where the big ships could fire at the Japanese was also the formation where the Japanese could fire at the ship he's on, and, you know, he wasn't going to do stupid stuff like risk his own life for his country. At any rate, someone felt protected enough to ignore a direct order, even if it cost the country a humiliating defeat.
That's the kind of thing that corruption can do. Someone didn't give a fuck about their country or about sticking it to the foreigners. They just cost their country a humiliating defeat, simply because, you know, there was something to steal or he had bribed someone powerful enough to ignore a direct order.
So, regardless of whether you wish to see a continuity of that in China or not, well, that's how far corruption can go.
And you don't even have to look one century back, the (ex)communist block provides a ton of more recent examples. And not even just the commies. Just about anywhere where some people were given enough unchecked power, some enterprising souls proceeded to sell their influence for cash. With similar results.
The more devastating result being that they invariably destroyed a whole country's culture in the process. The little guys were allowed to steal or get a bribe worth maybe 1$, so they wouldn't mind when the party leaders stole a million bucks in one fell swoop.
So now look at this particular incident, and you tell me if you really need some higher reason or motivation than bribe to explain it.
Since filesystems are so closely tied to cylinders, tracks, sectors and blocks...how does this play on SSDs? If I'm not mistaken, when allocating new extents, filesystems take into account physical locations to minimize future seek times...is that valid on a SSD?
Actually,
1. Even for low level disk access, that hasn't been so since the days of MFM hard drives. Nowadays everything uses LBA (Logical Block Addressing). Meaning that when the computer wants a certain sector it tells the hard drive, quite literally, something like "give me block #13526".
2. As a side effect, this already allows the hard drive to remap around bad sectors. If you read blocks #13525, #13526 and #13527, you might get the middle one from a whole other position than the other two because it was remapped.
Disk defragmenting is based on the assumption that contiguous logically _probably_ means contiguous physically too, but there is no guarantee that it's actually so. _Probably_ the HDD won't remap when there's no need, but again, it wouldn't tell you anyway.
3. For _filesystems_ doubly so. Even the FAT in DOS 1.0 didn't work with tracks and sectors, it worked with block numbers. The translation to cylinder, head and sector was made at a whole other level to actually read or write the data. But the filesystem didn't contain any reference to those.
E.g.: a 1.44 MB hard drive image still works flawlessly when copied to the first 1.44 MB of a CD. (That's how bootable CDs work. They have a floppy image at the start, and it's really booting that.) The FAT contained no references to cylinders and heads, so the exact same image works just as well off a CD.
4. Well, it's not that new a problem. You know those USB memory sticks one can buy? Or connecting a Flash-based MP3 player to your PC and copying files on it? Those tend to be formatted as FAT. So there you go. They don't have to invent anything new for an internal SSD. They already did it on other devices.
It's not the same thing. For a start, it's not even necessarily software. It's a mathematical algorithm.
So, yes, the implementation can be buggy, but for something like cryptography you'd at least expect the maths behind it to be rock-solid.
A lot of cryptography is based on stuff like that it's _far_ easier to multiply two prime numbers, than to find out which two large primes are the factors of a very large number. (I don't know this particular algorithm in TFA yet, so I used RSA as a simple example.) Once some maths guy has figured that out, and how it can be used, then the actual implementation in software tends to be actually very simple and straightforward. You just do one operation over and over again to encrypt the stuff, and another operation again and again to decrypt it. So even an error in the implementation is pretty inexcusable, because it's not a lot of code and you have a step-by-step description of exactly what to do.
Usually when an error in the implementation happens, it's not as much a programming bug, as the fact that (again) someone didn't understand the underlying maths and principles. E.g., I vaguely remember a disk encryption program which used a secure algorithm, but... had an invariable and huge block of known text at the beginning of it, which meant it was crackable anyway.
Anyway, to get back to the important part: it's not software, it's maths. Pure old-fashioned maths.
And... well, I'm not saying that that maths is easy. The average code monkey trying to invent encryption _will_ come with something ridiculously easy to crack.
But I'll say this: if the best and brightest mathematicians the NSA can find, still aren't competent enough, then I'd worry about the USA. I'm not even an American, and my attitude is somewhat anti-American (or at least anti-Bush), but even I in my crankiest hour wouldn't have _that_ bad an opinion of the USA.
To put it in perspective: something like this isn't like your average piece of code that someone typed on a Friday afternoon and never bothered to test. Something like this is bound to be reviewed by at least 2-3 other pairs of eyes before it becomes an official spec. So if they simply couldn't find anyone qualified enough to review it... I'd worry. A lot.
The conspiracy theory there is actually the _far_ more flattering alternative.
Little kids don't like being beaten at a simple game consistently
So use a cooperative game instead. Little kids tend to try to help even IRL, so...
Older ones can be impatient attempting to show their parents the ropes.
Again, a lot of games are cooperative and basically non-zero-sum. As long as you don't do something as spectacularly stupid as, say, figuring out how to aggro the whole level on top of the rest of the gang, even hanging around as arrow bait in NWN2 can be some modest contribution.
Sometimes parents want to play when they see their kids playing with their friends. The kids don't like to have their friends see how much the parents suck at the game.
Actually,
1. being the opponent who always loses, if played right, can make you the most popular guy in a lot of games. That's one thing I learned accidentally in childhood, and lemme tell you, everyone wanted to play cards with me ever since. (Well, except Bridge. It doesn't work in team games.) And pretty much the only secret to playing it right is: nobody likes a sore loser. Be nonchalant about it, be the guy that's having fun even if he lost, and you'll do just fine.
2. if nothing else works, well, everyone does need some time alone with their friends too. It doesn't have to be 24h surveillance, because we're still talking a kid not an inmate.
3. It depends on the age. If we're talking rebellious teenagers, well, good luck to you, but pre-teen kids are wired to follow their parents around and try to do stuff together. You _can_ get them annoyed, but it takes some effort.
Stereotype of parents not being cool *period*
See point 3 above. Until puberty hits, you're cool by default, and it takes some effort (intentional or just being mis-guided enough) to lose that status.
After that, well, probably noone has 100% sure recipe, but it's not 100% impossible to be a "cool" parent either. It tends to help if you remember that you're dealing with what's biologically an (inexperienced) adult, and that like in most mammals the wiring did switch from "follow mommy like a good cub" to "go mark your own territory." Taking the role of an absolute dictator, ruling by divine right, well, gets you a status about as "cool" as Stalin was to his subjects. But again, noone has a guaranteed recipe. Try and see. Who knows? You might be less uncool than you think, after all.
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The problem is that, until someone invents an AI GM that can at least pass the Turing test, what you ask is simply not feasible. Someone has to design and code all those states you changed.
I mean, let's pretend we design a game where each quest truly changes the game's world.
E.g., you can decide that instead of saving Bastila on KOTOR, you capture her and sell her to the Sith. (Sure, _Malak_ would probably kill you if you ran into him face to face, but there's no reason you couldn't go be the dark apprentice of some Sith who's never anywhere near Malak.) And the game branches from there. Taris is never destroyed. You never get the Ebon Hawk, even, since the Sith lift the blockade and Canderous doesn't need you to get off the planet. You never fly to Dantooine to become a Jedi. Etc. Let's say the whole story can fork like that at any point.
Well, now let's say we allow only 3 solutions to each such point: good, evil, don't do it. (After all, it's unrealistic that I _must_ do something at any point in the game.)
After the first such quest, there are 3 possible paths. The next one multiplies them to 9. Then 27. Then 81. Then 243.
Sounds good, right?
Well, it would, if the devs had infinite funds. In practice you can look at it more realistically like this: they'd have to code 243 outcomes and 1+3+9+27+81=121 quests, just to give you... a chain of exactly 5 quests. And you'd think "gee, this game sucked, it had a whole 5 quests."
Alternately, if they made it a completely linear game, you could see all 121 quests. And probably think, "bestest game evar! It had more quests than KOTOR 1+2 combined."
For the same development money, the linear solution will actually be the better game.
The problem with that branching is _literally_ that the chain you see is a logarithm of the total number of quests they have to code. Which gets shittier with each level you add to that pyramid. Adding a 6'th quest to the chain seen by the player, in a truly branching game would raise the number of quests you need to code by another 243. It's a mammoth cost and effort just so the player sees a total of 6, no matter what kind of character they play.
Worse yet, most of that immense number of branches will never be taken by anoyne. Most players play consistently all good or all evil, at least on the major issues. Branches and quests that would be only visible if you play good once, evil twice, neutral once, and good again, would be seen by maybe 0.1% of the players, so they'd be a major waste.
That, in a nutshell, is why everyone avoids branching like the plague.
KOTOR didn't truly branch either. Heck, even in Oblivion or Morrowind, open-ended as they are, the story doesn't really branch. The world, in fact, doesn't change much as a result of your actions.
What good designers really do is
A) contain the effects. Sure, they might tell you that you just got the Republic kicked off Manaan, but it won't influence the rest of the game at all. Yeah, you just got told that you gave the Sith a major advantage, but it's not like now they'll finish the conquest before you reach the Star Forge.
B) create an illusion of having some consequence. Sure, you'll get an alignment number, NPC's talking about you like you're Mother Teresa or Jack The Ripper, etc, but that's all an illusion that doesn't influence anything else.
Basically that way they can give you all the quests and a number of ways to solve each, without the possibilities exploding out of control. The trick is to keep it all an illusion.
Yes, and in the same age of red ink and black ink, the day of the Great Depression was still called "Black Tuesday", not "Red Tuesday."
If it makes you feel any better, you're not the only one. Any other application of "black" to a day seems to have meanings a lot more... well, dark.
E.g., "Black Tuesday" is when the Great Depression hit.
Heck, even "Black Friday", other than that particular meaning, was applied to massacres, riots, major financial scandals, you get the idea.
So I can't help wonder what kind of idiot chose "Black Friday" to mean "we're selling lots of stuff". I mean, gee, it must be such a dark and depressing thing.
More importantly, it's the kind of language that obscures instead of informing. For someone who doesn't know that particular pun already, it evokes the exact opposite image. I'll confess that I too, when reading that summary, was left thinking, basically, that it was some great catastrophe that befell them.
On second thought, though, heh, it sounds like what marketers and management tend to do to sound smart... when they aren't. Now I'm not saying that all of them are clueless, far from it. Just that you can often tell the ones who _are_, by the inclination to speak gobbledygook and think that having a buzzword for everything makes them so great.
However, if I'm allowed a minor nitpick:
I'd argue that this matters a lot less than some people claim.
Even the towed 37mm and 50mm German AT guns ended up known as the "door knocker": they couldn't actually penetrate a T34's front armour (and as you correctly note, even less so against a KV-1), but did an outstanding job of giving away the gun's position.
The ones on the tanks, at a range too... well, those optics might have made a difference if they shot at a T34 from behind. As you undoubtedly know, penetration does go down with distance. So from the front or even sides, at the range where those optics made a difference, the 37mm and 50mm tank guns were simply useless.
That leaves the 76.2mm gun on the IV series... which was a short barreled anti-infantry howitzer until 1942. Even ignoring the penetration problem (it was _not_ an anti-tank gun) the German version was 24 calibres long, the Soviet one even on the first T34s was 30.5 calibres long. (Later replaced by one 42.5 calibres long.) The German one simply had a more curved trajectory, and I'd argue that those better optics at most compensated for that.
Operation Barbarossa started in June 1941. So, well, what German tanks could do _before_ 1941 against Soviet tanks, tends to be relatively unimportant
Prior to 1941, well, ok, I guess a theoretical point could be made that the BT series of Soviet tanks were kinda crappy, by later standards. "Land battleship" experiments -- an obsession of Stalin -- also didn't help much.
Then again, _everyone_ had crappy tanks before '41. As I was saying, Germany went into Poland with Pz-I and Pz-II tanks. The BT's were actually better than those.
The only instance of pre-41 Soviet vs German tank fighting was in Spain. The 45mm gun on the BT-5 actually made short work of the Pz-I's.
Don't get me wrong, though. The Soviets didn't yet go all-T34 in '41 or anything. The bulk of their army was still older models. Probably that's what you've read.
But they did have a far better tank that had just gone into mass production, and soon they were churning them by the thousands. Germany didn't yet have anything equivalent even on the drawing boards. That's what I'm saying.
Nah, most of their tanks came from Tankograd, a city they built pretty much from scratch around some enormous tank factories.
That isn't exactly correct, and, more importantly, war doesn't boil down to just having the best tanks. What's more important is how you use them.
1. German tanks _were_ weaker. Yes, everyone knows about Tigers and Panthers later, but in 39 we entered the war with Pz-I and Pz-II. That was the bulk of the German army. The I series was little more than an armoured car with two _medium_ machineguns in a turret. They were intended to be training tanks, but got pressed into the war because of lack of anything better.
Plus a couple of better ones, half of them captured from the Czechs, but they were anything but the bulk of the army.
Most German soldiers were equipped with a bolt action rifle until the end of the war.
Where Germany excelled were the doctrines. I.e., how you use that equipment.
E.g., tanks were weaker, but that was ok, because they were only supposed to punch through or bypass, take some important position, then let the enemy attack you to take it back. And then you could use the 88mm FLAK gun to kill any better tanks the enemy might have had. That was Blitzkrieg.
E.g., the soldiers may have had bolt action rifles, but that was ok because the German infantry doctrine had the squad machinegun as the central piece, and the rest of the squad was mostly support for it. (By comparison, the Americans saw it the other way around, so they were saddled with the shitty BAR as a piss-poor substitute for a squad MG.)
2. The Soviet union was more technologically advanced than you seem to think, grasshopper.
The T34 was years ahead of anything anyone else had. The 76mm gun could break through any other nation's tanks' armour even with the high explosive round. And the front armour was just short of invulnerable to anything Germany had on a tank.
The T34 was one of the reasons why Germany rushed to attack the USSR early. Hitler couldn't risk waiting until it's produced in large numbers.
You know the (in)famous German Panther? Well, that was a shameless copy of the Soviet T34. Really. The initial proposal was to just start manufacturing T34s, but it was seen as a matter of national pride to not be that obvious about it. So they changed the gun on it and a few other details, but otherwise it was still just a modded T34.
The KV-1 and KV-2 were a nightmare for the German army too. It took quite literally hundreds of hits to disable one. That was _years_ before the Tigers.
Add other advances, like rocket artillery, early semi-automatic rifles (and mass use of SMGs, far ahead of the numbers the Germans had), etc, and the Russians weren't technologically handicapped at all.
Heck, even their AT guns, Germany used any they could lay their hands on. There were whole series of vehicles built with captured soviet AT guns. That says something, doesn't it? They wouldn't have used something that's two generations behind.
3. Don't get me wrong, the USSR did have its own problems and handicaps. But it wasn't as handicapped as most people seem to assume anyway.
The biggest and foremost problem the USSR had wasn't technological at all. Their army had just gone through Stalin's purges, and was (A) lacking competent officers, (B) paralized with fear of being the next scapegoat if they show any initiative, and (C) put under the control of comissars who were there just for political reasons, not for any military competence. The USSR, including the army, also had a _massive_ morale problem. At least half the people (and almost all the minorities and non-Russian Soviet republics) would have been happier to fight against Stalin than for him.
_That_ is the main factor that almost doomed the USSR in the early days of Operation Barbarossa.
A second problem -- again, mostly because of doctrine and political idiocy, rather than technology -- was that the Russians didn't believe in using radios on their tanks. They had them in homeopathic quantities, if at all. So once they were buttoned up in combat, each tank was almost on its own and had
While normally I would encourage a moderate dose of paranoia, I'd also recommend it to be balanced by Hanlon's Razor: never attribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
This being Germany, for a start you have to realize that the police doesn't seem to be particularly incline toward conspiracies, nor any good at it. They're also (still) more monitored than what, judging by the news coming from the USA, seems to be the case with the FBI and CIA. These guys will tell you up front that they want stuff like the "federal trojan". Then it gets struck down as unconstitutional, lather, rinse, repeat.
At any rate, they're not the kind who'll do a backroom deal with some ISP to do it in stealth and secrecy. They're very open in requesting to be allowed to do all sorts of stupid stuff. Which I guess is the whole idea in a democracy and rule of the law.
Also, well, I don't know which particular group tried to crack skype, but the general stereotype about German public servants is... not very flattering. Not that they're evil or insidious, mind you. They tend to actually be nice people. More like just thoroughly lazy, incompetent, underworked, underachieving... you get the idea. Some more extremely than others. There's a whole category of jokes about them.
So, well, going by the stereotype, I'd really go by Hanlon's Razor there. There's a possibility that they genuinely don't have anyone who can crack anything above ROT13.
Uh, look at Venus please. It's the same size as Earth, it formed in a slightly faster spinning band of the accretion disk, yet it spins a heck of a lot slower. In fact, if you look at the 4 rocky planets' time for a complete rotation:
Mercury: 59 Earth days
Venus: 243 Earth days (by comparison, it takes only 224.65 days for a full orbit, so actually Sun rises in the west and sets in the east)
Earth: 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.091 seconds
Mars: 24.623 hours
So Earth spins faster than any of the 3 without a giant moon. Mars is the only one that comes reasonably close, but even that falls a little short. (Mars has two smaller moons, though.)
So I'd say I've at least brushed with that aspect
Maybe it wasn't that explicit and clear, but I think my posts are huge as they are. Going into even more details, well, probably even less people would be arsed to read them
To be honest, I'm not convinced that you can take a SF plot device and run away with it too far in the real world.
1. Radiation. Actually, Earth probably has the least radiation problem in the solar system, because of its strong magnetic field.
Venus, for example, started extremely similar to Earth but was doomed because its dynamo stopped (and was probably weaker to start with). So the solar wind stripped away all hydrogen, leaving it with an atmosphere of CO2.
Mars hardly has a dynamo because its core froze already. Fat lot of good it did for intelligent life there.
Mercury. Ditto. Its magnetic field is at a whole 0.1% of Earths.
So even when you factor in the different mass and conditions, it seems to me like Earth is unique in having too _strong_ shielding, not in needing some plot device to weaken it.
2. (Or 1a.) If allowing more radiation in was better, you don't need a moon for that. Just rotate slower.
(And indeed the way I remember it, the collision theory says that the same collision that created the moon actually accelerated Earth's rotation a lot.)
Or lose your water, which stops plate tectonics, which kills off the dynamo. Easy.
In fact, you need a whole bunch of special conditions to _keep_ your shielding. Losing it seems more like the norm for a rocky planet in the right band to not turn into a snowball. If the moon's positive influence were punching a hole in our shield... heh... then a lot of planets would get there without a moon just as well.
3. Mutations. Longer text, so have patience please.
Well, this is stuff that happens anyway, simply because some UV gets through, there are radioactive elements in the soil, and even because simply errors happen when transcribing DNA. Especially look again at the last parts: even if you kept something under a slab of lead, without UV or cosmic radiation at all, it would still mutate.
Most of the history of life (except for virii, some bacteria and your immune system) was about _preventing_ mutations. Your cells have layers upon layers of defenses against that kind of thing. Starting with the very fact that you're DNA instead of RNA based, and all the repair proteins, and it goes on and on.
Heck, even the fact that you age is a defense against cancer, i.e., against mutation. Your cells start with a max division counter and literally count divisions. So if that mechanism didn't break down too, a tumour would reach a maximum size and stop. Unfortunately that also means that as more and more of your cells reach that limit natuarally, there's more and more damage which can't be repaired, and you discover the fun of old age.
At any rate, any multi-cellular kind of life, actively fights off mutations. Simply because you can't exceed a certain complexity without preventing mutations. You can't have a body consisting of gazillions of cells, if they don't obey the rules. If cells in your palm randomly tried to evolve into a nose, your left foot tried to become a palm, etc, your body would break apart pretty fast.
You also have to understand that this all happens on a "good enough" basis. Your body could evolve even more fool-proof defenses -- and through the billions of years it has, slowly -- but beyond a point they wouldn't be worth the extra complexity and energy requirements. Plus, in the long term, perfect repairs would also mean an inability to evolve. So anything that got too good at it just disappeared later in the next glaciation, when it was unable to evolve.
And in rare cases, even conversely: if it's of advantage to mutate faster (if still in a controlled manner), mechanisms evolve to create just that. E.g., there are cells in your immune system which actively mutate certain genes randomly, to try to produce a protein that exactly matches a target protein. (E.g., a piece of a new virus's capsid.) There's literally an enzyme in there whose sole role is to junk a random codon (think: byte) of DNA, so the repairs would kick in and some of them would get i
Well, that doesn't necessarily scale.
I guess the best way to say it is: it boils down to how long your loading times are. If they're fast enough, sure, you can put them in a background thread. If not, not.
It may sound like merely stating the obvious tautology, but there are some actual game design implications there.
If we decide that all games must be seamless and loading screens are sooo last century, then that puts an upper limit on how complex your game can be. Complete changes of scenery (e.g., from jungle woods to high-tech research bunker) are right out, because there you get to pretty much replace the whole set of textures. Extremely high polycounts and texture detail are out too, because obviously loading another 16 MB for the next zone is much faster than loading 256 MB for the next zone. And extremely complex scripts and dialogues are out too, because one way or another you do end up loading them.
You can't really have both. Morrowind tried, and it became just a case of annoying breaks more often, instead of them being at points where you're warned and expect a load time. Instead of having one load screen every zone change, it just ended up having one a hickup every 30 ft. It just became a constant annoyance.
Second, keeping in memory the data to decide exactly what you want to load means more memory needed too, so it comes at the expense of something else. Sure, you don't need much RAM to decide it when you load just terrain for a FPS, but in a complex RPG it can be subtly more complex. The more that could have changed in the world as a result of the player's actions -- or of player mods -- the more you might have to process an area before it's ready to render.
Pre-optimizations are also right out. You can't pre-compute too many NPC's paths and schedules, if you have to be ready in milliseconds. So that again will have to come at the expense of something else. Either then you need more CPU power during the game, or you load the pre-computed data to a file... but that again brings you back to the problem that now you're waiting for IO, so you have to reduce some other data being loaded. It also throws a spanner into modding, since now changing a cell -- Morrowind or Oblivion style -- essentially invalidates anything you might have pre-computed when developing the game.
Basically what works for a flight sim, may not necessarily be the best way for a complex RPG like NWN2.
That's not to say that you'll end up with a bad game. WoW can be seamless and a good game. But if you re-read the above paragraphs and have played WoW, you might recognize some of the tradeoffs they had to do, to keep it seamless.
It's not applicable to all games, that's what I'm saying.
Elevators too, are nice but aren't for all games. You'd be hard pressed to justify an elevator in a medieval setting, for example. Heck, even in a modern setting, if you have elevators between bits of outdoor scenery, it looks just bloody stupid.
So basically, yeah, it would work in an old-style FPS consisting of small mazes of small rooms. But I'd rather that not all games became clones of Quake 2 and its engine's limitations.
Well, making a broad generalization, is because people
A) want miracle solutions, and
B) preferrably ones that require less effort on their side, and
C) want more to look like they're doing something, than to actually do something. (The incompetent manager syndrome.)
So between something like (I) just eat less calories than you use, and something like (II) just stop eating bread, the latter will win on all accounts.
The latter requires less discipline and willpower, less counting, less putting up with meals that taste insipid for lack of fat, no getting off the sofa and exercising, etc. It's simply less effort. And it's sold with enough hocus pocus and scientific-sounding words to sound like magic to the uninitiate. (Somethimes it does have some science behind it, sometimes it doesn't, but that's all irrelevant anyway to Joe Sixpack who wouldn't know what a complex carbohydrate is if it bit him in the arse.) And it's something as conspicuous as it gets. You don't have to wonder whether you're doing it right. See, it's without bread! I'm doing something!
Now again, I'm not saying that Atkins is necessarily bad. But there was plenty of other stuff which didn't have any scientific basis and got swallowed by the masses anyway, on account of the three points above.
Between (1) all the effort of exercising and dieting, and (B) conspicuously waving some magic wand, the average Joe Sixpack will choose the latter every single time. That's all I'm saying.
If you did understand what radiotherapy or chemotherapy do, you'd probably be _more_ inclined to buy a magic amulet.
The only way we know how to "cure" cancer is this: cancerous cells typically have broken or weaker DNA repair mechanisms. So a cancerous cell is more likely to die when you break its DNA.
A healthy cell might repair itself. Or, here's the important part: it might die too, or mutate into a cancerous cell itself.
So radiotherapy basically exposes you to a beam of highly ionizing radiation. It breaks the DNA of a lot healthy cells, and of a lot of cancerous cells too in its path. Chemotherapy does the same with chemicals that break the DNA. (As a comparison, that's how mustard gas works.)
Basically it's the same as exposing yourself to UV-B to fight skin cancer.
Even when it works, you'll destroy a lot of tissue periodically, and might have just traded a cancer now for a new cancer a bit later.
It's not only the snake oil peddlers who noticed that there's something wrong with the cancer cure statistics. (They tend to be not in cases cure, but in how much longer a cancer patient lives nowadays... partially because earlier detection. They also invariably omit the "relapses", which seem to be more like the rule than the exception.) Even real doctors and skeptics like IIRC Dr Ben Goldacre on badscience.net occasionally picked on them.
So, well, I can see how someone would be desperate enough to try even snake oil there. Just because, you know, they pretty much have nothing else to lose. You have this scientific cure which will very probably just kill you a bit later. Or you have the magical snake oil which claims to really cure it. Can you really blame it for giving it a try?
I'm against spammers rabidly, but even I don't see the problem as that simple. The guy takes several leaps of faith, based on little more than redefinition of terms or postulating axioms. And by his own incoherent account, he's done them in front of the judge too.
1. He seems to think that it can only count as a personal email if it's from people he personally knows, or who know him personally. (Seein' as the cornerstone of his argument is that noone who knows him would think that he owns Slashdot.)
Well, stop right there. That was not how email was supposed to work. It _is_ what it degenerated into, thanks to spammers, but it was supposed to be a more general all-purpose communication medium, including from people you don't personally know. It was for example considered proper nettiquette to use your real email in usenet postings, for example, so people don't pollute the whole newsgroup when they wanted to go off-topic with you or ask/add stuff that they didn't think would interest everyone.
The judges interpretation of "personal email" seems to be more along the (saner) lines of person-to-person communication. And, honestly, I don't see anywhere that enough information has been presented to rule that out. We don't know, beyond reasonable doubt, if it's not just a room-temperature-IQ (in Celsius) moron who genuinely thought that the submitter owns Slashdot, and sent exactly one message to suggest a link exchange. Sure, it could be spam, but it's not quite proven beyond reasonable doubt.
Basically what I see him doing there is redefining, or mis-understanding, in one fell swoop:
- what personal email means
- what burden of proof means
- what the judge meant (just ruling that someone could have genuinely thought you own Slashdot, isn't the same as ruling that you do own it)
2. The argument that noone who knows him would think X is a tenuous one too.
Point in case: I had a (now ex) girlfriend who seemed to genuinely think that I'm a mighty wizard and can exorcise ghosts. No, I don't know how would anyone sane get that idea, but kinda that's the whole point: she wasn't sane after all. What I assumed to be just a nonsense talking contest and nodded through, Eliza-style, turned out to be her probing whether she can tell me that she sees ghosts in her room. She seemed to be schizophrenic enough to actually see those, but also still sane enough to realize that if you just tell people that you see ghosts, they'll think you're crazy.
That's the disconnect you occasionally get shoved in your face, between what you imagine about the people around and what they know or think, and the reality of what they actually know or think.
So even "noone who knows me would think I own Slashdot", is a somewhat fragile assumption of what people know or think.
Doubly so, since, see point 1, it's not a requirement for someone to personally know you, for it to count as personal email. So once you disregard the "who knows me" part, you're left with the whole cornerstone of the lawsuit being that everyone should know that he's not the webmaster of Slashdot. You know, all 6 billion people on the planet. Noone could possibly make a honest mistake.
3. What to do now? Blimey, of course, name and shame the judge. Don't just get angry that she didn't side with your leap of faith, but also include some snide remarks about how it's scary that we also let people like her judge cases like rape, property damage and other such serious stuff.
1. Dumbass gets a spam email.
2. Dumbass decides to sue, purely because that kind of lawsuits seem to be his idea of entertainment. (Even he admits that there are more efficient ways to attack spam than what he does there.) Although he doesn't have the evidence that it's spam, and he doesn't seem to know what the laws actually say about spam.
3. Judge decides that, based on the presented evidence, she can't rule out that it might have been genuine stupidity.
Remember: email from strangers isn't against the law, and it was in fact how email was supposed to work. So you have to prove that it's actually spam, and not some genuine idiot who sent exactly one message. Yes, it _could_ have been spam, but that's far from proven here.
Also remember: the burden of proof lies on the litigant. Sorta the extension of "innocent until proven guilty" to civil lawsuits. If my whole base for a lawsuit is my claim that you broke the law, then it's my job to present all the proof, beyond a reasonable person's doubt, that you're indeed guilty. If not, then the only safe position to take is to assume that you're probably not. If there is enough doubt -- even Hanlon's Razor -- that you might not be, then I failed to make my case, and the judge is _supposed_ to rule in your favour.
4. Dumbass takes it personally and tries to name-and-shame the judge in a public forum. (Pay attention now.) Add some childish tantrum about how then she's also unfit to judge more vital cases like child custody, property damage, or rape.
He hasn't proven that either, but, apparently just as with his lawsuit, we're supposed to just believe him that the judge is unfit because he said so. And he's so l33t that he can't _possibly_ be wrong. He may not know what the law actually says, he may not have bothered to gather the evidence, but by Jove, if the judge didn't _instantly_ see that he's obviously right just because it's him, then that judge is obviously unfit.
Let me tell you how _I_ see that:
A) Good! That's exactly the kind of judge that I'd want there in a lawsuit about rape, child custody or property damage. I want a judge who'll just look at the evidence, and decide impartially if it meets the standard or not.
I _don't_ want a judge who'll decide based on emotions, sympathies and what some bit looks like when taken out of context. Yes, it's sad when a spammer gets out free, but it would be even sadder if judges started screaming "Off with her head!" like the Queen Of Hearts just because someone _might_ be a spammer, without seeing enough evidence. It's called rule of the law, not rule by emotions and personal sympathies/antipathies.
_Especially_ if it's a rape trial, I'd want the judge to weigh the evidence and make an informed decision, not to side with whoever he personally sympathises the most with. (E.g., "I'm a woman, so obviously the guy is guilty" vs "I'm a guy, so probably the bitch was asking for it.")
B) The whole name-and-shame thing just leaves a bad aftertaste. It looks like nothing more than someone's attempt at cyber-bullying someone who disaggreed with him.
It's stuff like this that makes me appreciate the school bullies more in retrospect. At least those had the balls to punch you in the face and deal with whatever consequences. Whereas the pimple-faced cyber-bully expects someone else to do the dirty job for him. As low-lifes go, it's one step lower than the real bully. It's someone who probably would have done the same, just never had the balls to.
Bringing free market theories into it is good and fine, but only if you also realize the context in which they apply. The free market is a bit more complex of abstraction. There are a heck of a ton of assumptions there, such as that the products are interchangeable, there are many suppliers, etc. And most importantly in this context: the buyers are perfectly informed.
That last part is crucial here: a product is worth exactly what you paid, only if you knew _exactly_ what you're buying. I.e., that doesn't apply to scams and cons.
If you think you bought Product A, but instead you got Product B, then that whole "is worth exactly what the purchaser paid" assumption falls flat on its face. Your judgment of whether or not it was worth it was based on Product A, not on product B.
E.g., if I offer to sell you, say, Porsche Carrera, how much is that worth to you? Even second hand it's still worth tens of thousands. Now imagine that you pay that money and I give you a toy car. That's just not the product you thought you were buying. Saying that it's worth exactly as much as you paid for it, would just be stupid.
Now that's a case where the fraud is easy to spot. This kind of snake oil is the same kind of fraud, only it's a lot harder to spot for the uninitiated.
E.g., if you had cancer and I promised you a medicine that can cure you, how much is that worth to you? Quite a lot, I'd bet. People have been known to blow their life's savings on such a miracle medicine or cancer-curing gizmo, in that situation. But that was worth the price only assuming that it is what I assured you it is. If instead I give you coloured water or a box that displays random numbers, then it's just not the product for which that price was judged.
It's the same fraud as in the car example: you were promised Product A and were given ample assurance that it is indeed Product A. That's what you judged that price for. But instead you were given Product B, which isn't even remotely the same thing. That's what makes it a fraud.
Now if those things were sold honestly as snake oil (think, "this bracelet won't do jack shit for your health, but we think that industrial cable looks cool and we're charging 500$ for it anyway"), _then_ that "it's worth what the purchaser paid" idea would apply. Sure, then the buyer knew exactly what he's getting, judget it worth every cent. Fair enough. If someone knew they're buying just a piece of steel cable, and was ok with paying that price for it, I can't argue with that.
But as long as the buyer was deliberately mis-led into thinking they bought something completely different, sorry, no. Just no.
The Randi challenge is open to everyone, you know, so it's hard to argue with a straight face (and an undamaged brain) that somehow the real dowsers just mysteriously slipped through the cracks, and all the thousands of studies picked just the wrong ones.
It's open to everyone. If anyone thinks he's a real dowser (or a real telepath, or anything else "paranormal"), he can register, prove it and walk with a cool million dollars for their efforts. That's more than they make out of finding water for some farmer too, so it should be incentive enough to register if they actually have the gift. Heck, a million dollars isn't bad at all a deal for a couple of day's work even for someone who's in the business of dowsing for oil or minerals. Plus they'd get the free publicity of it all. People went through a lot more effort for a lot less gain.
To my mind that's as close as testing literally everyone as it gets. If at least one person on the whole Earth had such powers, they're not just free to get it tested, but actually invited and promised a nice reward.
And the first test there is: do they even genuinely believe they have those powers, or do they know that they're running a scam? If they don't even try to register there, you can already know in which category to file them. The _vast_ majority of dowsers, magicians, clairvoyants, mind-readers, etc, fall in that category by their own hand.
But of course that still won't stop gullible people from believing in fairy tales, just because they feel a need to believe in fairy tales.
Yes, well, that's all insightful and all, and I'm not trying to exonerate the dumb outsourcers. But that's really a whole other problem. It's orthogonal, if you wish.
Basically we can agree that someone _should_ have kept an eye on the potential thieves, _but_ that doesn't mean I'll have any less contempt for the actual thieves either. It's just different problems. Someone was incompetent or maybe gullible. They don't get much respect from me for that. But someone else was actually dishonest, and not as in "little white lie", but to the point of being outright "evil." (Sorry, toxic toys and toothpaste and medicine in the name of a quick embezzle, I can't name it anything else than evil. It's even the disproportionate kind of evil where the gains are a tiny fraction of the damage done.) And for that they've fully earned my heartfelt contempt.
It has nothing to do with bigotry. I have nothing against the Chinese as such, and in fact I'm somewhat an admirer of their history... until the Qing dynasty took over.
China can just fucking clean up their corruption, and then I'll have nothing against it any more. That's all.
But in the meantime, a system where someone can just bribe the right people and get away with using cheaper toxic glue or paint in kids' toys (kids _will_ try to bite anything they lay their hands on), or with using highly poisonous ethylene glycol in toothpaste instead of the more expensive glycerine, is a place I can only have contempt for.
Even nationalism is that-a-way, but kleptocracy and corruption are a whole other direction of its own. Replacing the paint and embezzling the difference isn't some great act of rebellion against the foreign powers. It's just a dumb theft that hurts their own country and company.
And I'm willing to bet that they're doing the same to their local market too. At the very least, when those toxic toys or toothpaste are sent back to China, I'll take a wild guess that you won't see most of them in a landfill. Some enterprising soul will find a way to sell them. Re-labeled, if needed.
At any rate, as I was saying, I have nothing against the Chinese. The big fuck-up that is China for the last couple of centuries straight, though, that's another story. Either they figure out a way to clean up that act, or, well, trust me, I don't feel the slightest guilt for having contempt for corruption and dishonesty. If that's bigoted in your view of the world, fine, I can live with that. Quite happily.
Well, sorta. There are people without scruples anywhere, and the large mass is just as easy to lead in whatever direction you wish everywhere.
The difference, the way I see it, is that some countries are fighting harder to control it (mind you, not 100% successfully) while in the others the whole system and structure degenerated into something where everything is for sale. Justice, quality controls, etc.
And yes, it's nothing surprising that individuals without scruples or morals from the west, just see the situation in China/Africa/Ex-USSR as just another way to do business and just another opportunity. I'm sure they'd do the same at home, whenever it looks like they can get away with it. In fact, there are more than enough cases where they tried, and some where they even got away with it.
The difference is really the extent to which they can get away with it.
And I'm still under the impression that democratic societies experience the problem to a much lesser extent, given enough time to fight it. It's not that the kind of person who makes it to the top in the west is any better. It's just that they're a lot more watched and controlled. Whereas wherever whole hierarchy pyramids are really that pyramidal, with each level being judge, jury and executioner for the level below, eventually some enterprising souls make it to the top who just sell the jobs below them to the highest briber and their influence to the highest briber. And from there it just propagates.
The difference in the west is basically just that what looks very superficially like a pyramid is really a lot more complicated than that. You have the press poking his nose at higher levels. You have whole pieces like justice which are (more or less) outside the normal pyramid and given free hand to poke their nose above their level. You have the guys at the bottom actually controlling more or less what those at the top do. You have investors and unions controlling what the CEOs do. Etc.
Not saying that corruption doesn't happen in that kind of a system. It does. But to a much more limited extent and in more secrecy.
Whereas totalitarian places tend to congeal that structure really into a pyramid. The press is a part of that pyramid, and the guys above it dictate what it can print. The police and justice are a part of that pyramid, and the guys above it dictate what it can investigate. Etc.
It's a system which can _only_ generate corruption, given enough time for the right sociopaths to rise to the top. Because essentially they've just risen above the levels where the safeguards apply. And they can further control and pervert those safeguards.
Honestly, the more I hear about China, the more it sounds like the (stereo)typical massive corruption scenario.
I.e., no need to assume that there's some government hand behind it, or some meaningful form of protest against the west. It can be simply that some guy running their DNS servers/proxies/great-firewall/whatever got a nice bribe to redirect the lookups to someone selling the same kind of product, or an importer, or really whoever was willing to pay.
The way the kleptocracy/corruption scenario goes is, basically, it doesn't matter how much you're paid, it only matters how much you can steal/embezzle/get-as-bribes. Whole hierarchies are formed where any job worth anything (in loot/bribes/whatever) is essentially either given to party leaders' relatives or auctioned to the highest bidder. And then it's considered pretty much normal and expected that you'd get your money back, and a nice profit, by stealing/embezzling/demanding-bribes/etc. Whatever works, really.
My favourite example of what corruption _can_ do, and incidentally also is (A) about China, and (B) nicely illustrates that there is no need for it to even be motivated by some higher ideals or nationalism, is the Battle of the Yalu River in 1894.
Among various surrealism of it all, many shells used by the Chinese fleet were filled with sawdust or cement, because some enterprising souls in the navy had embezzled the funds for cordite and split the loot with the manufacturer. Or stuff as monumentally surrealistic as that a battleship was missing two main guns, which again had been stolen and sold on the black market. Yep, you've read that right: big f-ing guns off a battleship, simply dismantled and sold on the black market.
You also find such surrealistic stuff, as that the fleet's second in command -- no doubt, some fellow with either high placed relatives, or who bought the job fair and square -- deliberately didn't relay the order to deploy into battle formation. The formation where the big ships could fire at the Japanese was also the formation where the Japanese could fire at the ship he's on, and, you know, he wasn't going to do stupid stuff like risk his own life for his country. At any rate, someone felt protected enough to ignore a direct order, even if it cost the country a humiliating defeat.
That's the kind of thing that corruption can do. Someone didn't give a fuck about their country or about sticking it to the foreigners. They just cost their country a humiliating defeat, simply because, you know, there was something to steal or he had bribed someone powerful enough to ignore a direct order.
So, regardless of whether you wish to see a continuity of that in China or not, well, that's how far corruption can go.
And you don't even have to look one century back, the (ex)communist block provides a ton of more recent examples. And not even just the commies. Just about anywhere where some people were given enough unchecked power, some enterprising souls proceeded to sell their influence for cash. With similar results.
The more devastating result being that they invariably destroyed a whole country's culture in the process. The little guys were allowed to steal or get a bribe worth maybe 1$, so they wouldn't mind when the party leaders stole a million bucks in one fell swoop.
So now look at this particular incident, and you tell me if you really need some higher reason or motivation than bribe to explain it.
It's freakin' sad, that's what it is.
Actually,
1. Even for low level disk access, that hasn't been so since the days of MFM hard drives. Nowadays everything uses LBA (Logical Block Addressing). Meaning that when the computer wants a certain sector it tells the hard drive, quite literally, something like "give me block #13526".
2. As a side effect, this already allows the hard drive to remap around bad sectors. If you read blocks #13525, #13526 and #13527, you might get the middle one from a whole other position than the other two because it was remapped.
Disk defragmenting is based on the assumption that contiguous logically _probably_ means contiguous physically too, but there is no guarantee that it's actually so. _Probably_ the HDD won't remap when there's no need, but again, it wouldn't tell you anyway.
3. For _filesystems_ doubly so. Even the FAT in DOS 1.0 didn't work with tracks and sectors, it worked with block numbers. The translation to cylinder, head and sector was made at a whole other level to actually read or write the data. But the filesystem didn't contain any reference to those.
E.g.: a 1.44 MB hard drive image still works flawlessly when copied to the first 1.44 MB of a CD. (That's how bootable CDs work. They have a floppy image at the start, and it's really booting that.) The FAT contained no references to cylinders and heads, so the exact same image works just as well off a CD.
4. Well, it's not that new a problem. You know those USB memory sticks one can buy? Or connecting a Flash-based MP3 player to your PC and copying files on it? Those tend to be formatted as FAT. So there you go. They don't have to invent anything new for an internal SSD. They already did it on other devices.
It's not the same thing. For a start, it's not even necessarily software. It's a mathematical algorithm.
So, yes, the implementation can be buggy, but for something like cryptography you'd at least expect the maths behind it to be rock-solid.
A lot of cryptography is based on stuff like that it's _far_ easier to multiply two prime numbers, than to find out which two large primes are the factors of a very large number. (I don't know this particular algorithm in TFA yet, so I used RSA as a simple example.) Once some maths guy has figured that out, and how it can be used, then the actual implementation in software tends to be actually very simple and straightforward. You just do one operation over and over again to encrypt the stuff, and another operation again and again to decrypt it. So even an error in the implementation is pretty inexcusable, because it's not a lot of code and you have a step-by-step description of exactly what to do.
Usually when an error in the implementation happens, it's not as much a programming bug, as the fact that (again) someone didn't understand the underlying maths and principles. E.g., I vaguely remember a disk encryption program which used a secure algorithm, but... had an invariable and huge block of known text at the beginning of it, which meant it was crackable anyway.
Anyway, to get back to the important part: it's not software, it's maths. Pure old-fashioned maths.
And... well, I'm not saying that that maths is easy. The average code monkey trying to invent encryption _will_ come with something ridiculously easy to crack.
But I'll say this: if the best and brightest mathematicians the NSA can find, still aren't competent enough, then I'd worry about the USA. I'm not even an American, and my attitude is somewhat anti-American (or at least anti-Bush), but even I in my crankiest hour wouldn't have _that_ bad an opinion of the USA.
To put it in perspective: something like this isn't like your average piece of code that someone typed on a Friday afternoon and never bothered to test. Something like this is bound to be reviewed by at least 2-3 other pairs of eyes before it becomes an official spec. So if they simply couldn't find anyone qualified enough to review it... I'd worry. A lot.
The conspiracy theory there is actually the _far_ more flattering alternative.
So use a cooperative game instead. Little kids tend to try to help even IRL, so...
Again, a lot of games are cooperative and basically non-zero-sum. As long as you don't do something as spectacularly stupid as, say, figuring out how to aggro the whole level on top of the rest of the gang, even hanging around as arrow bait in NWN2 can be some modest contribution.
Actually,
1. being the opponent who always loses, if played right, can make you the most popular guy in a lot of games. That's one thing I learned accidentally in childhood, and lemme tell you, everyone wanted to play cards with me ever since. (Well, except Bridge. It doesn't work in team games.) And pretty much the only secret to playing it right is: nobody likes a sore loser. Be nonchalant about it, be the guy that's having fun even if he lost, and you'll do just fine.
2. if nothing else works, well, everyone does need some time alone with their friends too. It doesn't have to be 24h surveillance, because we're still talking a kid not an inmate.
3. It depends on the age. If we're talking rebellious teenagers, well, good luck to you, but pre-teen kids are wired to follow their parents around and try to do stuff together. You _can_ get them annoyed, but it takes some effort.
See point 3 above. Until puberty hits, you're cool by default, and it takes some effort (intentional or just being mis-guided enough) to lose that status.
After that, well, probably noone has 100% sure recipe, but it's not 100% impossible to be a "cool" parent either. It tends to help if you remember that you're dealing with what's biologically an (inexperienced) adult, and that like in most mammals the wiring did switch from "follow mommy like a good cub" to "go mark your own territory." Taking the role of an absolute dictator, ruling by divine right, well, gets you a status about as "cool" as Stalin was to his subjects. But again, noone has a guaranteed recipe. Try and see. Who knows? You might be less uncool than you think, after all.