It really isn't very fun to get continually pwned by your opponent while you're still trying to figure out how to even hold the controller, much less which buttons do what. And the parent's aggravation will just aggravate the kid. "No, daddy, hit the X button! X BUTTON!" "Uh..." *looks down at the controller* "Which is the X button again?" *splat*
No offense, but... you underestimate adults, and seem to have forgotten your childhood days already too.
1. I've actually tried teaching grandma to play a Sierra empire building game, more for experiment sake than anything else. Bear in mind that she's not just old (as in, she's a great-grandma by now), but had been pretty much a luddite to that point. No computer, no email, no nothing. Closest she's been to doing anything with a computer was when she washed my old 486 and monitor in the bathtub. (Well, they were getting a bit stained by cigarette smoke.)
I'll admit, I wasn't expecting much.
To my surprise, though, she (A) was learning very fast for (what I expected about) her age, and (B) she was actually having fun. Sure, she did need a bit of coaching, but not half as much as you'd expect. She did seem to have a recurring problem with the left and right mouse buttons, though, so I guess Apple has a point. Still, we're talking about someone who, until an hour before, had never even touched a mouse. Ever.
Even console controllers aren't much harder to learn. I gave my parents an N64 and a Playstation when they were well in their 50's, and they took to them like a duck to water. Next thing I knew, they were only talking about Mario 64 for the next two months straight.
Plus, just a few months later dad handed both me and my brother our arses to us in Dead Or Alive. Not much to complain about the old man's use of controller buttons. And he seems to aim very well with a lightgun too in gun games.
2. Getting embarassed by your parents only comes _much_ later. Until puberty hits, kids are still wired in the standard cub mode of all mammals. Meaning that being near mommy and daddy and getting attention from them counts as good times by itself. Trust me, at that age, you won't mind it that horribly much if daddy is doing less than flawlessly.
3. Not all games are competitive, so you might not need to give the kid a challenge. There are a ton of cooperative games, and in fact I'd even recommend going the coop route instead of the cut-throat competitive ones.
In a lot of them, well, basically you've lost nothing by having an extra character with you, no matter how bad they play. E.g., try making a character and tagging along in NWN2. The game doesn't give any extra enemies or anything for it, so even if you're just arrow bait, you've still contributed something. E.g., in COH a force-field defender can turn someone else into almost god mode by just hanging around and remembering to re-cast the buffs occasionally. You don't even need to attack or anything.
4. About split screen... well, console games did often have that problem, but PC's have network play. And most consoles are going that route too nowadays.
5. _If_ your kid is that focused on what you're doing wrong... well, it _could_ be that you've given him a bad example. I'm not saying that that's necessarily the case, but you might want to at least re-evaluate the past approaches just in case.
Thing is, focusing on what someone did wrong and never on what they did right, is just a way to turn them into a neurotic and/or someone who never tries anything for fear of getting berated again.
I've actually had the mis-fortune of growing up with this kind of feedback on almost anything I ever did, and I can tell you first hand that the results are _exactly_ those stated in the comic. I still have to roll for will power to even chuck the laundry into the washing machine. There's a circuit somewhere in the back of my brain that goes "ya know, mom wouldn
Well, that seems to be easy then. Make the kid a mage or sorc and tell him/her that fluffy is a familiar. People tend to take care of those, what with the penalty for getting your familiar killed.
'Course, I guess it can backfire. Next thing you know, the kid could decide he/she wants a bat or a pig as a familiar. And may Mielikki have mercy on you if your kid wants to be a Druid or Ranger;)
Toxoplasma also causes exactly what you describe. In order to complete the cycle and end back in a cat's gut, the parasite literally reprograms the rodent to actually like cats instead of getting a panic attack. Sick enough rats have been known to actually go looking for a cat, or for places marked by a cat.
1. First of all, you seem to assume that the gene that recognizes "cat smell" just appeared out of nowhere. That's not the case. Even one cell organism have various degrees of analyzing the chemistry around them, because that's such a damn useful signal. Primitive sea organisms had some kind of sense of smell long before they even evolved eyes. Move out of the water and even primitive insects have a lot of smell sensors on their antennae.
So by the time they evolved to a mouse, it _already_ had a very sophisticated sense of smell, and the brain power to process, analyze, categorize and react to smells.
2. Even being sensitive to a very specific cat protein, if they have such cells, is easily explainable by mutation. Binding to some other mollecule is what proteins _do_. There are thousands of enzymes in your body that, basically, interact with just a single chemical, repeatedly. That's how you can process fructose (corn syrup) into glucose: an enzyme just breaks one molecule after another.
Heck, you even have cells in your immune system which _deliberately_ mutate until they make a protein that can match another protein. There's an enzyme whose sole role is to junk a random codon (think: byte) of DNA, so the DNA repair mechanisms would kick in, and occasionally get it wrong. And given enough time eventually you end up with a gene, by sheer random chance, that exactly matches the capsid of a new virus or some membrane proteins of a new bacteria. Amazing (and amazingly inefficient, if some God designed it), but there you go: making a protein that matches another protein is nothing new.
So given billions of billions of individuals, over millions of years, it wouldn't be surprising at all if some mice accidentally evolved noses perfectly attuned to cats. It could even start with a mouse with allergy to, say, FEL-D1 (a protein all felines have, and which is triggers cat allergies in some people), and it ended up giving his kids an advantage. From there it could evolve from mere allergy to panic attack, because the more scared you are of a cat, the more survival chances you have.
3. It's all chemistry, and there aren't that many mediators that regulate the moods. Triggering, for example, a panic just involves giving the right chemical signal.
And in the case of mice and rats, it's just that. There is no higher logic circuit in deciding to run from a cat. The smell just literally gives them a severe, illogical panic attack. When they test anxiety medication on rats, it's quite common to use cat urine to give them a reflex panic attack, then see if your drug calms them down. The running away is just the result of that panic, nothing more.
So don't think there's some complex coding involved. Even a simple enzyme could do just that: process the protein or chemical specific to cats, into the chemical that puts the brain into panic mode.
Plus, the way proteins work is rarely orthogonal coded. A small change here, produces an unrelated effect there. Some circuit in the brain could have simply been accidentally mis-wired to relay the signal along the wrong path, or release the wrong mediator.
At any rate, so a proto-mouse got a severe panic attack at the smell of a proto-feline, just because of a mutation, and it ended up saving his/her life. Then the kids inherit it and are the ones who have less of a chance of getting eaten.
4. Precisely the fact that it _doesn't_ react to other predators, should probably tell you that there is no higher intelligence or design at work.
The mice simply evolved to deal with the _existing_ threats, not to be the thing that can universally deal with any imaginable carnivore. Threats that actually existed and killed some of the mice, were evolutionary pressures. The mice which could deal with them, were more likely to survive, so those genes got passed on. The threats that they didn't have to deal with, _weren't_ evolutionary pressures and made no difference. So if a mouse-e
Heh... while I understand your righteous rage, you might want to calm down and understand that there are shades of grey between instant awe of any (often pseudo-)science journalism and attacking science as a whole. One can nit-pick at breakthrough claims without questioning science as a whole, you know.
In this case, the fact is, we don't know a lot of the things that would be needed to present the claim in the summary as proven fact.
We don't know, for a start, that the particular protein they changed has exactly one role, and one alone. You'll find that "God" (and I use that term mostly as a metaphor, because I'm really an agnostic leaning towards atheism) loves spaghetti code, and never heard of cohesive and loosely coupled modules. It's quite common for the same protein to affect half a dozen logically unrelated things, and then the "code" segment that encoded it to _also_ be data segment for another protein. And it's quite common for one change to to affect stuff that you wouldn't even think about off the top of your head. And there are no regression tests to run.
So, for example, did removing the sense of smell really make the mice fearless because the same brain lobe processes both? _Or_ maybe it's just that the same protein is responsible for the functioning of more than one part of the brain? It's very possible that the same change that removed their sense of smell, for example, also makes them schizophrenic or stupid or generally broke a whole other circuit.
Second, we don't know what is cause and what is effect there. Did removing their sense of smell really remove their circuitry for fear? _Or_ maybe it just removed an input to the latter?
I can see how smell would be the primary input for a later stage that decides whether to flee. Why? Because cats are ambush hunters, and most natural species of cat heavily employ disruptive camouflage. The stripes of a tabby cat, for example, makes it very hard for the limited neuron budget of a mouse brain to decode the shape of the whole. (And ironically a zebra uses the same against lions.) It's harder to decide by sight whether that's a stationary cat or a mess of leaves and grass, than to use your nose and run like crazy if you smell one.
So did removing the smell there, really remove fear _or_ did it just remove the primary input to a later circuit?
Noone's saying that the experiment as a whole is meaningless. But I too would say that we probably don't really know exactly what it means.
Maybe more experiments later will shed some more light on it. I sure would hope so. But right now it's too early IMHO for that kind of a running leap to conclusions.
Too true... I wish I could give you a +1 this time.
If you read about genes and the proteins they encode, it's nuts. Mother Nature is the biggest hacker there is. The same gene, for example, a mutation in MC1R responsible for red hair and not getting a tan, _also_ influences:
- freckles
- pain sensitivity (and at that, differently by kind of pain. More sensitivity to, for example, burns, but less to pain caused by electricity.)
- response to pain killers and anesthetics (again, quite differently by type: it makes people less responsive to some anesthetics, but more responsive to others)
- temper (or at least so the stereotype goes)
and who knows what else.
Some DNA pieces are even known to be both code segment _and_ data segment.
So basically you make my point, the way I see it. There _are_ plenty of licenses and flavours to choose, to fit whatever moral code you like. Whether they're called Creative Commons or not, there are already plenty to choose from, and you can even create your own if neither fits your moral principles. The only people left moaning retroactively about morality-vs-legality are the ones who were too stupid to choose the right license. In which case, it's not the world at large or the rule of the law that's at fault there.
Though, the way I see it, that doesn't change the point I was making at all. If Wikipedia covered their arses legally, then there is _no_ "morality vs legality" lament to be made about them. Definitely kudos to them, but, anyway, then they _don't_ have a grey area between what's legally expected and what they morally expect. Making the whole GGP lament rather irrelevant too.
I stand by what I've said: the only people who find themselves moaning about morality vs legality, are the ones who were too fucking stupid to choose the right license for whatever morality they expect.
How about the fact that the license explicitly gives them the right to? We have all the laws there to assign any license you wish to your work, to fit whatever moral rules you wish.
Find it distasteful for example that someone would use your work for profit? Fine! Put a "not for commercial use" clause on it then. Or put the BSD "thou shalt give credit" license on it. Or whatever you wish.
But if you chose to place your work under, say, the Creative Commons, you've just told the world at large, "here, take it and use it as you wish, I don't want anything in return, I don't forbid anything, have fun with it." So please have the _decency_ then to not act enraged when someone does just that. You _had_ all the framework you needed to protect it in any other way, and you chose explicitly not to. People are doing exactly what you officially told them it's ok.
Or do you think it's morally superior to make an U-turn on your word there. "See, I said you could use it, but I didn't _really_ mean it. Now let me tell you retroactively the _real_ conditions that I want you to obey. And let me call you names, while I'm at it." It's like me telling you that, sure, you can use my ballpoint pen, and then retroactively making a fuss that you used it to sign a cheque and trying to impose conditions retroactively. See, I thought it would be self-evident that it's only for non-commercial stuff and that you must worship the ground I walk on for letting you do that.
No, the problem isn't with laws vs morals, it's with idiot utopians getting surprised that the world doesn't work like their utopian fantasy world, and that they've been preaching a stupidity all along. Again: you had your chance to impose any morals and conditions on using your work as you can possibly wish for. If you chose to essentially waive all rights and demands, it's pretty damn stupid to expect everyone to somehow just know that you don't _really_ mean that. It's not exploiting some obscure legal loophole, it's doing what that license explicitly told them that it's allowed.
Briefly: if you explicitly chose a license that, essentially, goes contrary to your morals/beliefs/sense-of-justice, then it's not the world at large who's callous and immoral when they obey that license. It's you who's too fucking stupid to even know what you really want.
Oh please, spare me the "boohoo, we're all to blame" BS.
If you want to talk willing minions, get this: a full 1% of the population scores a clean psychopath score, and some 3 to 4% (depending on the country and sample) score high enough to be called a sociopath. There are plenty of them available to fill the spot of heartless minion. No, it's not the sheeple who turn into the likes of Yezhov (the "toxic dwarf" that led the NKVD at the apex of its brutality during Stalin's age) because they follow the leader. It's people who were psychopaths in the first place, who find the jobs where such ruthlessness gets them a good pay or free hand in terrorizing others.
The "sheeple" as you call them have many faults, and do tend to be passive and easy to lead or to terrorize. That doesn't make the victims share the blame equally with the butchers, though, any way you slice it.
That seems to assume that the rich boys have some empathy for each other.
The fact is, a lot of those who end on top are, simply put, sociopaths. A lot of CEOs for example are, and I'd wager that the percentage is even higher (if that's even possible) among politicians.
We're talking people with no empathy for any other human. They're people who can tell any lie or cause any bad things to happen to others, with a straight face. And not have any bad feelings about it later. Because you don't matter. You're an NPC to them.
Some even find entertainment in seeing how much they can harm someone else, and get away with it. In that you are right that some may even start a war, if it looks like they have anything to gain from it, even some momentary entertainment. At the risk of invoking Goodwin's law, Hitler had been diagnosed a psychopath in the first world war.
A lot reinvent their past to whatever milks the most sympathy. It helps manipulate people.
They also have such useful traits (for politics games) as never feeling responsible for anything they've caused, including to themselves. They're also nearly immune to threats, although the smart ones will be logical enough to avoid exposing themselves to unnecessary dangers and repercussions. (E.g., death treats might still make them wear a kevlar vest.) And unlike the popular novel mis-conception, no amount of reasoning or appealing to their feelings and humanity will change them: any attempt at psychotherapy just makes them better at hiding it.
The dumb ones tend to end up in prison or shot by the SWAT, but the really smart ones end up CEOs and politicians.
To get back to the topic, though, there is no indication that they feel any more empathy for each other. It isn't the-rich-vs-peons, it's really each rich psychopath for himself. They'll try to shaft each other just as well.
And, partially also in response to your "welcome to the future," history is full of kings and nobles doing all sorts of painful things to each other.
The age of chivalry existed just because (A) holding an enemy for ransom was more profitable than skinning them alive, and (B) it made it easier to manipulate the peons and lower knights to fight for you. But even then, the same "noble" knights and ladies that afforded chivalry to an enemy who can be ransomed for a tidy sum, seemed to have no qualms with poisoning each other or their relatives for a quick inheritance buck. Some even did it for sport.
Basically, if you couldn't be ransomed or, worse yet, someone stood to make a profit from your death, the whole chivalry ideals ended right there. Then you could expect something arsenic-based in your wine.
So, to get back on topic, when those good ol' rich boys' clubs meet, it's not as much friends, it's more like a thieves' club trying to look friendly until they can rob each other. They won't think they're brothers, they'll think as lowly of each other as they think of the peons. They'll just be polite and pleasant because it's good for business.
1. At one point in time there was a substantial difference between RISC and CISC architectures. CPUs had tiny budgets of transistors (almost homeopathic, by today's standards), and there was a real design decision where you put those transistors. You could have more registers (RISC) or a more complex decoder (CISC), but not both. (And that already gives you an idea about the kinds of transistor budgets I'm talking about, if having 16 or 32 registers instead of 1 to 8 actually made a difference.)
Both sides had their advantages, btw. If it were that bleeding obvious that RISC = teh winner and CISC = teh loser, a lot of history would be different.
The difference narrowed a lot over time, though, so neither is purely CISC or RISC any more (except marketting bullshit or fanboy wars.) Neither the original RISC idea nor the CISC one scaled past a point, so now we have largely the same weird hybrid in both camps.
E.g., the Altivec instruction set on PowerPC is the exact opposite of what the original RISC idea was. The very idea of RISC was never to implement in hardware what a compiler would do for you in software. So the very idea of having whole procedures and loops coded in the CPU instead of in software would have seemed the bloody opposite of all that RISC is about, back in the day.
At any rate, what both are today is what previously used to be called a microcoded architecture. It's sorta like having a CPU inside a CPU. The smaller one inside works on much simpler operations, but an instruction of the "outer" CPU translates into several of those micro-operations. Which in turn are pipelined, reordered in flight, etc, to have them execute faster.
What both sides are doing nowadays for marketting reasons is basically calling the inner architecture "RISC", because marketing really likes that term, and the lemmings have been already conditioned to get excited when they hear "RISC". Really, PowerPC's architecture is only "RISC" on account of basically "yeah, but deep down inside it's still sorta RISC like"... and ironically the x86's can make the exact same claim too.
At any rate, whether you want to call that RISC or not, once you look inside it, both the PowerPC and the Pentiums/Athlons have nearly identical architectures and modules. Sure, the implementation details differ, and some have advantages over other implementations (the Netburst ones had too long pipes, while a G4 had a tiny pipe, so the G4 did have better IPC), but essentially they both are based on the exact same architecture. Neither is more RISC than the other. We can lay that RISC-vs-CISC war to rest.
2. That said, the x86 still was somewhat hampered by the lack of more general purpose registers. Although the compilers and the CPU itself did optimize heavily around the problem, they didn't always do the optimal job.
That has changed in the 64 bit version, though. AMD went and doubled the number of registers for programs running in 64 bit mode, and Intel had to use the same set of instructions so they have that too nowadays.
The performance penalty of that architecture basically became a lot lower than it was in the days of G4 vs Pentium 4 flame wars.
Just counting lines of code can be highly misleading:
1. IIRC that was a flawed metric anyway. That was final number of lines of code, divided by developpers, divided by time. It just isn't the same as what you seem to think it means. E.g., lines of code changed or refactored or whatever, would not be counted in that number.
Judged by that kind of a flawed metric, my contribution to some projects would actually be a negative number of lines of code per time unit. E.g., each time I moved someone's copy-and-paste code to its own method and replaced it with a call... well, let's say it was in 3 places, 20 lines of code, replaced with a method and a call each. That's minus thirty-something lines of code in a quarter of an hour by that metric. Am I the worst programmer ever, or what?
I'm sure CVS counts them for yours, though. So you're not comparing the same number.
Now I'm not saying that that alone accounts for that kind of a difference, but it's a start.
2. Just writing code is easy. It's debugging it that takes a lot of time. So the limiting thing is really how well you want that code to work. Going from, say, 90% caught bugs to 95% can easily double your development time on the whole... and thus halve your average lines per year.
Yes, I know, it's MS, but they still have a policy to not ship with known bugs. (Though obviously the unknown ones are more than enough in their own right.) So they'd inherently have less lines of code per year, compared to, say, Google which is officially a perpetual beta.
3. Lines of code / time doesn't scale linearly as the program complexity and team size grow. In other words, you can't just add man-months.
I thought I was so smart too in college, when I could write a program or module of several hundred lines of code in a day. But then that was the whole program, that was the whole complexity, and I was the whole team. That's the easy scenario.
Now move to something the size of Vista and it's just not the same thing any more. Now you suddenly have to deal with stuff like how your code works together with Tom, Dick and Harry's, what they want from your code, and what you need from theirs. There's a lot of overhead just to synchronize it all, document it all, learn other people's APIs, and deal with the increasing level of mis-understanding each other's interfaces.
Now I'm not saying that MS is necessarily the paragon of efficient coding anyway, but I am saying that a lot of people waving that number around... just aren't qualified to make that judgment. They've never actually worked on something that size, and that total team size. I've seen teams hit a wall and get bogged by the fact that each time one guy changes something, it broke some other guy's code, long before being anywhere near the size of MS or of Vista.
4. Well, I also don't like that metric because I've seen people actually abuse it. Not all lines of code are born the same.
E.g., my good coleague Wally would have topped that metric easily, because the guy just copied and pasted everything in sight to make it look like he's doing something. Not only he had whole open source projects pasted into his code tree, but also such surrealistic stuff as: a Swing (standalone GUI framework) file chooser dialog hidden deep in the source code of one of his EJBs (server-side thing.) That thing didn't serve any purpose. It was just there to inflate the number of lines of code he supposedly produced.
Replacing that monstrosity with something smaller and simpler, not only cut down the size (hence, less average lines of code per year for the team, ya know), but also made it run around 40 times faster.
You can also inflate the number of lines of code arbitrarily by just liberally mis-applying patterns. Just have everything get packed in a decorator, made by a factory, which is a singleton, register it with a manager, etc, etc, etc. The number of lines of overhead can be grown arbitrarily, without actually adding any functionality. And past a size wit
You forget the time scales involved
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Is SETI Worth It?
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· Score: 1
You're doing the usual SF failure: you forget the time scales involved, and assume that two meeting civilizations will be roughly at the same (or comparable) point on a technology scale.
The Sun still has some 5 billion years left, but let's say things might start getting funny a bit earlier, so, hmm... 4 billion years for the maximum span of humanity? Just for comparison sake, humans have only existed for 200,000 years total, and civilization is extremely recent even at that scale.
Let's say two random civilizations are at different points along such intervals. It could mean literally being a billion years apart, technologically. Think: a million times bigger difference than between us and, say, the Normans at Hastings. _That_ freaking huge a difference.
Technological exchange in such a scenario is freaking useless for both. The side that's a billion of years ahead will get as much benefit out of it, as you would if you bought the technology to make caveman knives out of stone. And the other side would get as much benefit as a caveman being told "psst, use a modified electron-scanning microscope to make smaller transistors".
Let's say that technology is only of any use to each other, dunno, in a +/- 200 year interval. If it's more than 200 year old, you either already have it, or it's obsolete anyway. (Think how relevant galleon-building techniques from 1807 would be to today's shipbuilding, for example.) If it's more than 200 years in the future, you won't have the pre-requisites to even understand wth it's about.
So for each civilization it's a bet that the other is no more than 200 years ahead, and no more than 200 years behind. That gives you a total 400 years interval, centered on where you currently are. Inside a possible space of 4 billion years. The chance that the others will be in that useful range is exactly 400/4,000,000,000 or 1/10,000,000. It's a hundredth thousandth of a percent.
Do you honestly expect anything useful given those chances?
Not to mention that if they've got at least half a brain, they'll realize that we have to be the less advanced ones, so they have nothing to gain from such an exchange.
So, yeah, "greed within the limits set by society." Why would that mean they have to give us stuff for free? We're not even the same species, much less the same society that set those restrictions. Even to members of the same species, those limits imposed by society mean it's ok to not give another group anything if they can't pay for it.
Let me rephrase that right back at you, using "novel" instead of "game", and maybe you'll realize just how silly it sounds: "Did we forget novels are for fun, not for work? [...] If you lose the bookmark, then the novel should still be fun if you read it again. If not, you stop reading. Not like you're being forced to.
Seriously. If you've read half a novel, would you rather read the next part, or go back to reading the first half again?
Yes, a good novel should be fun to re-read, eventually, but at some point you just want to see how it ends, not to read the first chapter again.
Way I see it, the same applies to games.
Also, what if a sequel or expansion pack came out, and I want to take my old characters to the new world? Do I have to re-play the first game just for that, before even unpacking the _new_ game I just bought? That's a bit like saying that if you've bought "Life, the Universe and Everything", you should first have to re-read "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe" before even opening it. Sure, they're fun books to re-read, but which would you rather do first?
Now some games allow you to re-create an almost exact copy of your old char. E.g., unless you were playing a Neverwinter Nine or Shadow Thief Of Amn, you can re-create your old NWN2 character almost verbatim in Mask Of The Betrayer. Although, even there, what if you _did_ play a NW9 or Shadow Thief?
But other stuff isn't half as easy to reproduce.
For example, take Paradox's series of grand strategy games. It think that at least theoretically, you could play Crusader Kings (medieval strategy) to the end date, then export that map and continue playing that country in Europa Universalis 2 (late medieval / renaissance strategy) until the 19'th century, then export it and continue playing it in Victoria Revolutions (19'th to 20'th century strategy), then export it and continue playing it in Hearts Of Iron Doomsday (WW2 strategy.) That's stuff that would take weeks to reproduce if you wanted to start all over again from Hastings without a saved game.
Now I'm not saying you _should_ do that, because honestly, history will be severely off the track in that case. But what if you do want to do just that? There are people who've achieved highly improbably states, like rebuilding the Byzantine empire starting from Byzantium surrounded by the turks. If I had a saved game like that, I'd _definitely_ want to see how it does in another era. E.g., who would the Byzantines ally with in WW1? Would they fare any better than the Ottomans at the end of it? It's just, you know, curiosity.
Should someone have to replay everything from the 1400's just to get back to that state? Would they even get the same result again? To hammer some more on that Byzantine Empire example, that's stuff that's invariably a pretty improbable gamble. While gamer skill was most certainly involved, there were invariably a lot of other highly improbable events that made that possible, such as someone else keeping the Turks busy at exactly the right moment.
i don't understand how people can be upset about content that is effectively unlocked from the game unless you go out of your way to unlock it.
Bah, you obviously haven't had the traumatizing experiences some of us had.
I remember when someone made patch for The Sims that removed the pixelated blur when they were naked. E.g., in the shower. So I downloaded it.
Lemme tell you, I wasn't just upset, I was appalled. They didn't look anything like naked people. They looked like a barbie doll that someone dropped in a mud puddle. (Presumably so the contrast would look right through the blur.) Plus, not only they didn't have genitals, they didn't even have nipples.
And if you think all that's shocking so far, wait for the real horror. You know how the same blur showed up when they sat on the toilet? Well, without the blur you can see that they sit down and take a dump, without pulling down their pants first. Now that's an image that you'll wish you never saw.
So, yeah, sue their pants off, I say. Preferrably before they sit on the toilet;)
Sorry to rain some reality on your hopeful dreams, but an alien civilization that altruistic wouldn't even make it out of the stone age.
We already have (or had) a group like that on Earth. They did everything together, had peaceful resolution mechanisms for conflict, helped each other and learned early how to control their population growth without institutionalized murder (a.k.a., war.) It's the Bushmen. Yeah, they never made it out of stone age on their own.
If you look at the history of humanity, all progress was made (A) in the name of greed, and (B) by those which, partially because of A, could afford the cost and manpower to invest in new stuff.
You know the golden age of Athens in ancient times? Athens had managed to gradually move its function from merely the head of a defensive coalition of equal states against Persia, to being the master of those states and fleecing them in wholesale. Those states were moved from bearing an equal share of the military burden (at their choice whether in troops or money), to just having to pay heavy taxes to Athens. And instead of paying for defense against the Persians, it eventually moved to being just a protection racket: pay up or _we_ will attack you. They did it quite a few times too.
All those fabulous temples and monuments and the thousands of people with nothing better to do than play armchair-philosopher, those were paid with the money they levied in taxes from their "allies."
Or look at the middle ages. We already had a shiny-happy community kind of village, where everyone gets enough land to survive if there is any land left, they (often) owned the oxen together, they had common-owned pastures and woods, etc. (Now the relationship with the nobility was very inequal, but the villages themselves were a different story.) It was a poverty trap. If any surplus land is given to anyone who might need it, then noone has the surplus to invest in anything whatsoever.
The moment things started moving forwards was when (A) some people could get more land because of the the black death, but more importantly, (B) when they switched to fenced plots. Basically from "this is the common land of the village and we're using it together" to "this is my land, and you can fuck off and starve for all I care, you're getting none of it." Even as the population rebounded after the initial devastation, the guys who had taken control of more land, no longer went and divided it with everyone in the village.
Sure, there were other factors too, like switching to the more profitable raising sheep and exporting the wool instead of subsistence farming of grain, but it all boils down to the same thing: it's _my_ land, I do what _I_ want with it, and I'm not sharing any of that with you lot. If you went back to dividing the land so noone starves, you'd be right back to the poverty trap even with sheep.
What mattered and eventually resulted in the industrial revolution was that some people could (A) get a surprlus and trade it, even while at the same time someone else starved to death, and (B) invest the profit into getting even more profit, following their own self interest. It could mean buying more land from people who were less efficient, or buying some machinery, or whatever. Again, motivated by self-interest.
The Age Of Exploration... what do you think motivated it? Well some merchants' greed, that's what.
The birth of capitalism... well, read Adam Smith some day. Even though admittedly his ideas are almost socialist in regards to what the state should do, he did notice that, essentially, the most efficient way to optimize producing what people need isn't via charity and selflessness, but via the merchants' acting in their own interest. And indeed that's been the chief driving force ever since.
Etc.
Basically I find it funny to see all the utopian ideas about enlightened selfless aliens who'd just hand over all their technology to the first apes they find. Just because they're that kind and enlightened.
They should have known about this reaction, but didn't do their research.
A better question is: did they even care?
There seem to be an awful lot of such incidents lately, involving swapped materials, ranging from poisonous toys to ethilene glycol in toothpaste to exploding lithium ion batteries, all coming from China. I'm sorry, but that's no longer looking like isolated "oopsie" cases where someone forgot to do their research. It starts to look like they have a whole culture based on not doing that research at all, or plain old not care as long as they can pocket the difference.
I mean in this case one might even argue that they didn't research what it decomposes into, but other cases involved such blatant cases as:
- lead paint, which is _known_ to be toxic. You don't have to research what it metabolizes into, it's just toxic as it is.
- ethilene glycol, a known poison, used instead of the more expensive glycerine in toothpaste
- the membrane which should collapse and open the circuit when a battery overheats, replaced with much cheaper stuff that doesn't. It doesn't take that much research to understand why it's there, and why a battery without that safety can burst into flames.
Etc.
In fact, I'll venture a guess and say what it really reminds me of: corruption and kleptocracy. Now I don't have any first-hand experience with China, but I've seen cases in other places, and, honestly, the more I hear about such Chinese manufacturing incidents, the more it starts to sounds like that.
The way that works is, sorta, along the lines of "it doesn't matter how much you're paid, it matters how much you can steal / embezzle / demand in bribes / etc". Whole pyramids get built where any good job (judged through the aforementioned criterion) is either given to relatives of party officials, or essentially auctioned to whoever gave a bigger bribe. Then essentially the winner is inoffficially _expected_ to get that money back with interest, by abusing that function to take more bribes or plain old steal.
In which case, the way it would go, isn't even that some ruthless capitalist wanted to cut production costs, gain a competitive advantage and invest it in some form or shape into expanding his operations. It's probably just some private guy along the chains who switched materials and pocketed the money. It's not the evils of capitalism, it's plain old the evils of unchecked corruption.
Especially the communist block generated quite a few such structures, which is why I wonder about China.
Actually, I'll give you one more reason why I worry about China. Because they have a whole _surrealistic_ history of just that.
If you look as far back in time as the Battle of the Yalu River, you'll find such surrealistic stuff as that many shells used by the Chinese fleet were filled with sawdust or cement, because some enterprising souls in the navy had embezzeled 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. If you didn't go "WTBF?!" already, read it again and roll it a bit in your head. Big Fucking Guns, off a battleship, stolen and sold on the black market.
At this point, I'm sure someone will point out that it's been more than a century since then, and China did have two (or arguably even 3) changes of regime and direction in the meantime. But did the culture change in that time? Because from where I stand, it doesn't look that way. The corruption of the Qing empire continued seamlessly into the surrealistic warlord era during Chiang Kai-shek's regime, which in turn continued seamlessly into the corrupt regime under Mao. And now we have arguably the same guys who enriched themselves during the communism, and not by honest means either (the official salaries of government offi
Did you ever wonder why that only happened in early comics? Has the possibility crossed your mind that the reason modern comics feature almost exclusively complex, flawed heroes is that comics about flawed heroes are more popular than comics about unassailable gods with perfect morals?
And did you ever wonder why those modern comics with weak and morally ambiguous heroes only sell a tiny fraction of what comics used to sell? Why now it's regarded as a weird geek hobby, when it used to be entertainment for the masses?
Now I'm not saying that's the only factor, or even the main one, but the fact remains: millions of people were buying every issue of those comics with god-mode heroes. At the very least, it wasn't that major a turn off.
And conversely, switching to dubious heroes that half the time you're not even sure if they're any better than the villains, sure didn't seem to make them much more popular. At best they traded one market segment for another.
Yes, James Bond always blows up the villain and gets the girl, but you know damn well he's going to fall for the wrong girl, get captured, and face torture and "certain" death first.
Yes, and equally you know from the start that he won't get killed, and he'll have some gadget or ace up the sleeve for any situation. You want it to look like it would be certain death for the average monkey on the street, but your super-hero is super enough to not break a sweat over it.
Bzzt, wrong. Look at some of the early comics, and super-heroes were just that: unassailable gods with perfect morals.
Superman, for example, started with no vulnerability whatsoever. The whole "kryptonite" thing was invented as a tongue-in-cheek explanation when they had to skip an episode or two for the radio version later, for example because the actor was on vacation. And even there it wasn't actually used _in_ any story line. Superman didn't have to battle anyone wielding kryptonite at that point.
Mind you, if you're going to say that that's not (necessarily) much fun in a game, we can even aggree quickly.
But that's a limitation of video games, not a limitation of super-heroes. Literary or comic book characters can be as god-like as the author wants, and still be fun and popular.
Heck, you don't even have to look only at superhero comics. Take Terry Prattchett's Diskworld books, for example. Cohen the barbarian is, for example, so good at dodging that in Interesting Times he even dodges a cannonball from a gun that got teleported right in front of him and fired. Rincewind is comically incompetent except he always ends up on top, even if by sheer luck and without fully realizing what he's done. The witches are just short of god-like in their own right, and can pretty much get what they want even from Death himself. Wossname the monk learned from yetis how to "save and reload" IRL, so he just comes back after being beheaded. Etc, etc, etc. Almost every single major character in those books has some kind of super-power that makes him completely invincible and unstoppable, even by the whole freakin' army of China (or the DW equivalent of it.)
Does that make the books any less fun to read? Nope.
Think action movies. Rambo can stand tall with a machinegun in front of a whole tank division, or get in a pissing... err... shooting contest with a gunship and come out on top. Jedi in SW movies are just about gods that can only kill each other. But they're way out of the league of mortal soldiers or drones, even when those are in brigade-sized formations and with AT-AT and air support. Etc.
And you know what? I dare say that that's actually good character design. People want to be told a nice story where the hero overcomes everything, and everything ends with a happy ending.
Not many people want to be told a tale where the hero thought he could fly circles around the Death Star, but the laws of firepower always beat the rules of literature. Or not many want to be told the story of the guy who thought he could jump in front of the enemy company with a pistol, and was riddled with bullets before he even finished the clip. Those are depressing stories of failure. They're not fun.
We want to be told stories where one determined guy changes the world for the better, and nothing whatsoever can stay in his way. Not one where he fails in the first 15 minutes.
But, again, I can see how that doesn't translate into a fun video game. We just have to accept that it's simply different media, with different rules.
You're forgetting something about perma-Hasten. (And before I get started: this is coming from someone who never used it, just to be different from the cookie-cutter builds.)
Perma-hasten wasn't an exploit. It was the officially allowed possibility, with Cryptic's blessing.
As the game was launched, you could make Hasten permanent with IIRC 2 SOs. Or maybe 3? I can't really remember. At any rate, you could not only make it "perma", you could have it stack with itself most the time.
Statesman seemed to be genuinely surprised that this was possible. Like many other powers (remember the City Of Blasters smoke grenades for example?) noone at Cryptic had done the maths. What happened with which powers on SOs, was a genuine surprise to them.
So as a sort of compromise, Statesman accepted that, yeah, perma-Hasten is a useful thing and will remain available, but it's only fair to need 6 slots for that. So the maths were changed to produce just that result. Officially, and with Cryptic's blessing. It was _not_ an exploit, any way you want to slice it.
Which just made the sudden U-turn in ED more baffling. They painted some things as evil exploits, that previously they treated as just normal tweaks allowed by the game.
1. Google for the so called "ED" or "Enhancement Diversification".
In a nutshell, the game already been nerfed twice in a row, especially the tanks and a smaller nerf to regen. (Regens had been nerfed in each patch since I1, so we were already used to that.)
And by "nerf" I don't mean the small tweaks you see on WoW. CoH under Statesman had never discovered fine tweaks. The COH kind of balance tweaks were the kind where one class went from God Mode to nobody, and another class was buffed into being God Mode. The game for example started as City Of Blasters (as a devices blaster could make themselves just 5% short of invulnerable to any enemy) and had become City Of Fire Tankers by I4. (Fire tankers were the "squishiest" kind of tank, as damage mitigation went, but even they could solo a mission instanced for 8 people.) That's the kind of massive balance changes that happened in COH.
The last two ones had been rather severe, and this time noone was buffed, it was rather all nerf and no carrot. Still it was accepted among (A) promises from Statesman that this is absolutely the last big change to the game, and (B) people grudgingly realizing that the balance _had_ been crap. So, anyway, the promise from Cryptic was that this is the last big change, the game is finally working as intended, everyone can relax, respec their chars to deal with it, and enjoy the game. Fine.
Then out of nowhere came the "ED". It's hard to explain it to a non-COH-player without explaining all the game system, but let's just say that _everyone_, every single class, lost up to 1/3 of all they could previously do. Fire blasters suddenly did 2/3 of their previous damage, healers could heal 2/3 as well as before, tanks had their armour class reduced to 2/3, etc. It was across the board. Every single power that you could previously enhance to 300% of base value, now went only up to 196% or so of base.
Due to game mechanics as well, for some the effects were more dramatic than it would seem. For example for a tank, going from 80% damage mitigation to 60% damage mitigation means taking twice the damage. The maths isn't exactly linear there.
In some cases, because of former synergies, the losses were even bigger. E.g., a healer that previously relied on permanent hasten, now also had lost that reduction in time between heals, because, well, with the new changes hasten no longer could be made permanent.
Because the change was so uniformly applied across the board, with no regards to who actually needed it, and who was already at the pain limit, some classes lost a lot more than others. E.g., every single class that was based on defense instead of damage reduction, suddenly became useless. Ice tanks and SR scrappers could even be killed by minions. Again, because game maths worked against those. Cryptic took almost a year IIRC to fix defense after that fuck-up.
And best of all was the justification for it. Statesman got that idea from playing a Gameboy game. No, seriously. It wasn't based on some analysis of what actually happens in the game and what players want, it was Statesman playing with his GBA and thinking, "gee, I like it more when fights take longer." Hence, let's nerf everyone to make them take more time to kill an enemy.
Don't get me wrong, it was possible to adapt to the game after the ED. But it did leave a bitter aftertaste in many people's mouths anyway. And for some it was the straw that broke the camel's back.
2. Well, I don't know how to say it nicely, so I might as well not even try: keep the "{{citation needed}}" trolling where it belongs, on Wikipedia.
Now I'm not telling you to believe everything blindly, quite the contrary. But I'm saying to do your own fucking googling. It's not writing a reference for posterity, it's just a fucking message in a thread that will scroll off the main page in a day. Give it a week and noone will even remember that it ever existed. So if you think anyone will spend half a day researching and cross-referencing the bibliography -- by which time, the thread will already be at most visible in that small list on the right -- then I suspect that either you haven't put much thought into it, or some brain damage may be involved.
Actually, it's even funnier. COH and COV are the same game. Whether you have "both" installed, or only one of them, you run the exact same executable, use the exact same resource files, and connect to the exact same servers, and your stuff is saved in the exact same database.
The only difference between COH, COV or both, was your account. If the account says you only paid for COV, then their server will only let you play on the COV side. But, again, you already had both.
Slashdot Mirror
No offense, but... you underestimate adults, and seem to have forgotten your childhood days already too.
1. I've actually tried teaching grandma to play a Sierra empire building game, more for experiment sake than anything else. Bear in mind that she's not just old (as in, she's a great-grandma by now), but had been pretty much a luddite to that point. No computer, no email, no nothing. Closest she's been to doing anything with a computer was when she washed my old 486 and monitor in the bathtub. (Well, they were getting a bit stained by cigarette smoke.)
I'll admit, I wasn't expecting much.
To my surprise, though, she (A) was learning very fast for (what I expected about) her age, and (B) she was actually having fun. Sure, she did need a bit of coaching, but not half as much as you'd expect. She did seem to have a recurring problem with the left and right mouse buttons, though, so I guess Apple has a point. Still, we're talking about someone who, until an hour before, had never even touched a mouse. Ever.
Even console controllers aren't much harder to learn. I gave my parents an N64 and a Playstation when they were well in their 50's, and they took to them like a duck to water. Next thing I knew, they were only talking about Mario 64 for the next two months straight.
Plus, just a few months later dad handed both me and my brother our arses to us in Dead Or Alive. Not much to complain about the old man's use of controller buttons. And he seems to aim very well with a lightgun too in gun games.
2. Getting embarassed by your parents only comes _much_ later. Until puberty hits, kids are still wired in the standard cub mode of all mammals. Meaning that being near mommy and daddy and getting attention from them counts as good times by itself. Trust me, at that age, you won't mind it that horribly much if daddy is doing less than flawlessly.
3. Not all games are competitive, so you might not need to give the kid a challenge. There are a ton of cooperative games, and in fact I'd even recommend going the coop route instead of the cut-throat competitive ones.
In a lot of them, well, basically you've lost nothing by having an extra character with you, no matter how bad they play. E.g., try making a character and tagging along in NWN2. The game doesn't give any extra enemies or anything for it, so even if you're just arrow bait, you've still contributed something. E.g., in COH a force-field defender can turn someone else into almost god mode by just hanging around and remembering to re-cast the buffs occasionally. You don't even need to attack or anything.
4. About split screen... well, console games did often have that problem, but PC's have network play. And most consoles are going that route too nowadays.
5. _If_ your kid is that focused on what you're doing wrong... well, it _could_ be that you've given him a bad example. I'm not saying that that's necessarily the case, but you might want to at least re-evaluate the past approaches just in case.
Thing is, focusing on what someone did wrong and never on what they did right, is just a way to turn them into a neurotic and/or someone who never tries anything for fear of getting berated again.
I've actually had the mis-fortune of growing up with this kind of feedback on almost anything I ever did, and I can tell you first hand that the results are _exactly_ those stated in the comic. I still have to roll for will power to even chuck the laundry into the washing machine. There's a circuit somewhere in the back of my brain that goes "ya know, mom wouldn
Well, that seems to be easy then. Make the kid a mage or sorc and tell him/her that fluffy is a familiar. People tend to take care of those, what with the penalty for getting your familiar killed.
;)
'Course, I guess it can backfire. Next thing you know, the kid could decide he/she wants a bat or a pig as a familiar. And may Mielikki have mercy on you if your kid wants to be a Druid or Ranger
Toxoplasma also causes exactly what you describe. In order to complete the cycle and end back in a cat's gut, the parasite literally reprograms the rodent to actually like cats instead of getting a panic attack. Sick enough rats have been known to actually go looking for a cat, or for places marked by a cat.
You have some wrong implicit assumptions there.
1. First of all, you seem to assume that the gene that recognizes "cat smell" just appeared out of nowhere. That's not the case. Even one cell organism have various degrees of analyzing the chemistry around them, because that's such a damn useful signal. Primitive sea organisms had some kind of sense of smell long before they even evolved eyes. Move out of the water and even primitive insects have a lot of smell sensors on their antennae.
So by the time they evolved to a mouse, it _already_ had a very sophisticated sense of smell, and the brain power to process, analyze, categorize and react to smells.
2. Even being sensitive to a very specific cat protein, if they have such cells, is easily explainable by mutation. Binding to some other mollecule is what proteins _do_. There are thousands of enzymes in your body that, basically, interact with just a single chemical, repeatedly. That's how you can process fructose (corn syrup) into glucose: an enzyme just breaks one molecule after another.
Heck, you even have cells in your immune system which _deliberately_ mutate until they make a protein that can match another protein. There's an enzyme whose sole role is to junk a random codon (think: byte) of DNA, so the DNA repair mechanisms would kick in, and occasionally get it wrong. And given enough time eventually you end up with a gene, by sheer random chance, that exactly matches the capsid of a new virus or some membrane proteins of a new bacteria. Amazing (and amazingly inefficient, if some God designed it), but there you go: making a protein that matches another protein is nothing new.
So given billions of billions of individuals, over millions of years, it wouldn't be surprising at all if some mice accidentally evolved noses perfectly attuned to cats. It could even start with a mouse with allergy to, say, FEL-D1 (a protein all felines have, and which is triggers cat allergies in some people), and it ended up giving his kids an advantage. From there it could evolve from mere allergy to panic attack, because the more scared you are of a cat, the more survival chances you have.
3. It's all chemistry, and there aren't that many mediators that regulate the moods. Triggering, for example, a panic just involves giving the right chemical signal.
And in the case of mice and rats, it's just that. There is no higher logic circuit in deciding to run from a cat. The smell just literally gives them a severe, illogical panic attack. When they test anxiety medication on rats, it's quite common to use cat urine to give them a reflex panic attack, then see if your drug calms them down. The running away is just the result of that panic, nothing more.
So don't think there's some complex coding involved. Even a simple enzyme could do just that: process the protein or chemical specific to cats, into the chemical that puts the brain into panic mode.
Plus, the way proteins work is rarely orthogonal coded. A small change here, produces an unrelated effect there. Some circuit in the brain could have simply been accidentally mis-wired to relay the signal along the wrong path, or release the wrong mediator.
At any rate, so a proto-mouse got a severe panic attack at the smell of a proto-feline, just because of a mutation, and it ended up saving his/her life. Then the kids inherit it and are the ones who have less of a chance of getting eaten.
4. Precisely the fact that it _doesn't_ react to other predators, should probably tell you that there is no higher intelligence or design at work.
The mice simply evolved to deal with the _existing_ threats, not to be the thing that can universally deal with any imaginable carnivore. Threats that actually existed and killed some of the mice, were evolutionary pressures. The mice which could deal with them, were more likely to survive, so those genes got passed on. The threats that they didn't have to deal with, _weren't_ evolutionary pressures and made no difference. So if a mouse-e
Heh... while I understand your righteous rage, you might want to calm down and understand that there are shades of grey between instant awe of any (often pseudo-)science journalism and attacking science as a whole. One can nit-pick at breakthrough claims without questioning science as a whole, you know.
In this case, the fact is, we don't know a lot of the things that would be needed to present the claim in the summary as proven fact.
We don't know, for a start, that the particular protein they changed has exactly one role, and one alone. You'll find that "God" (and I use that term mostly as a metaphor, because I'm really an agnostic leaning towards atheism) loves spaghetti code, and never heard of cohesive and loosely coupled modules. It's quite common for the same protein to affect half a dozen logically unrelated things, and then the "code" segment that encoded it to _also_ be data segment for another protein. And it's quite common for one change to to affect stuff that you wouldn't even think about off the top of your head. And there are no regression tests to run.
So, for example, did removing the sense of smell really make the mice fearless because the same brain lobe processes both? _Or_ maybe it's just that the same protein is responsible for the functioning of more than one part of the brain? It's very possible that the same change that removed their sense of smell, for example, also makes them schizophrenic or stupid or generally broke a whole other circuit.
Second, we don't know what is cause and what is effect there. Did removing their sense of smell really remove their circuitry for fear? _Or_ maybe it just removed an input to the latter?
I can see how smell would be the primary input for a later stage that decides whether to flee. Why? Because cats are ambush hunters, and most natural species of cat heavily employ disruptive camouflage. The stripes of a tabby cat, for example, makes it very hard for the limited neuron budget of a mouse brain to decode the shape of the whole. (And ironically a zebra uses the same against lions.) It's harder to decide by sight whether that's a stationary cat or a mess of leaves and grass, than to use your nose and run like crazy if you smell one.
So did removing the smell there, really remove fear _or_ did it just remove the primary input to a later circuit?
Noone's saying that the experiment as a whole is meaningless. But I too would say that we probably don't really know exactly what it means.
Maybe more experiments later will shed some more light on it. I sure would hope so. But right now it's too early IMHO for that kind of a running leap to conclusions.
Too true... I wish I could give you a +1 this time.
If you read about genes and the proteins they encode, it's nuts. Mother Nature is the biggest hacker there is. The same gene, for example, a mutation in MC1R responsible for red hair and not getting a tan, _also_ influences:
- freckles
- pain sensitivity (and at that, differently by kind of pain. More sensitivity to, for example, burns, but less to pain caused by electricity.)
- response to pain killers and anesthetics (again, quite differently by type: it makes people less responsive to some anesthetics, but more responsive to others)
- temper (or at least so the stereotype goes)
and who knows what else.
Some DNA pieces are even known to be both code segment _and_ data segment.
It's nuts, really.
So basically you make my point, the way I see it. There _are_ plenty of licenses and flavours to choose, to fit whatever moral code you like. Whether they're called Creative Commons or not, there are already plenty to choose from, and you can even create your own if neither fits your moral principles. The only people left moaning retroactively about morality-vs-legality are the ones who were too stupid to choose the right license. In which case, it's not the world at large or the rule of the law that's at fault there.
That's all I'm saying.
Thanks for the correction.
Though, the way I see it, that doesn't change the point I was making at all. If Wikipedia covered their arses legally, then there is _no_ "morality vs legality" lament to be made about them. Definitely kudos to them, but, anyway, then they _don't_ have a grey area between what's legally expected and what they morally expect. Making the whole GGP lament rather irrelevant too.
I stand by what I've said: the only people who find themselves moaning about morality vs legality, are the ones who were too fucking stupid to choose the right license for whatever morality they expect.
How about the fact that the license explicitly gives them the right to? We have all the laws there to assign any license you wish to your work, to fit whatever moral rules you wish.
Find it distasteful for example that someone would use your work for profit? Fine! Put a "not for commercial use" clause on it then. Or put the BSD "thou shalt give credit" license on it. Or whatever you wish.
But if you chose to place your work under, say, the Creative Commons, you've just told the world at large, "here, take it and use it as you wish, I don't want anything in return, I don't forbid anything, have fun with it." So please have the _decency_ then to not act enraged when someone does just that. You _had_ all the framework you needed to protect it in any other way, and you chose explicitly not to. People are doing exactly what you officially told them it's ok.
Or do you think it's morally superior to make an U-turn on your word there. "See, I said you could use it, but I didn't _really_ mean it. Now let me tell you retroactively the _real_ conditions that I want you to obey. And let me call you names, while I'm at it." It's like me telling you that, sure, you can use my ballpoint pen, and then retroactively making a fuss that you used it to sign a cheque and trying to impose conditions retroactively. See, I thought it would be self-evident that it's only for non-commercial stuff and that you must worship the ground I walk on for letting you do that.
No, the problem isn't with laws vs morals, it's with idiot utopians getting surprised that the world doesn't work like their utopian fantasy world, and that they've been preaching a stupidity all along. Again: you had your chance to impose any morals and conditions on using your work as you can possibly wish for. If you chose to essentially waive all rights and demands, it's pretty damn stupid to expect everyone to somehow just know that you don't _really_ mean that. It's not exploiting some obscure legal loophole, it's doing what that license explicitly told them that it's allowed.
Briefly: if you explicitly chose a license that, essentially, goes contrary to your morals/beliefs/sense-of-justice, then it's not the world at large who's callous and immoral when they obey that license. It's you who's too fucking stupid to even know what you really want.
Oh please, spare me the "boohoo, we're all to blame" BS.
If you want to talk willing minions, get this: a full 1% of the population scores a clean psychopath score, and some 3 to 4% (depending on the country and sample) score high enough to be called a sociopath. There are plenty of them available to fill the spot of heartless minion. No, it's not the sheeple who turn into the likes of Yezhov (the "toxic dwarf" that led the NKVD at the apex of its brutality during Stalin's age) because they follow the leader. It's people who were psychopaths in the first place, who find the jobs where such ruthlessness gets them a good pay or free hand in terrorizing others.
The "sheeple" as you call them have many faults, and do tend to be passive and easy to lead or to terrorize. That doesn't make the victims share the blame equally with the butchers, though, any way you slice it.
That seems to assume that the rich boys have some empathy for each other.
The fact is, a lot of those who end on top are, simply put, sociopaths. A lot of CEOs for example are, and I'd wager that the percentage is even higher (if that's even possible) among politicians.
We're talking people with no empathy for any other human. They're people who can tell any lie or cause any bad things to happen to others, with a straight face. And not have any bad feelings about it later. Because you don't matter. You're an NPC to them.
Some even find entertainment in seeing how much they can harm someone else, and get away with it. In that you are right that some may even start a war, if it looks like they have anything to gain from it, even some momentary entertainment. At the risk of invoking Goodwin's law, Hitler had been diagnosed a psychopath in the first world war.
A lot reinvent their past to whatever milks the most sympathy. It helps manipulate people.
They also have such useful traits (for politics games) as never feeling responsible for anything they've caused, including to themselves. They're also nearly immune to threats, although the smart ones will be logical enough to avoid exposing themselves to unnecessary dangers and repercussions. (E.g., death treats might still make them wear a kevlar vest.) And unlike the popular novel mis-conception, no amount of reasoning or appealing to their feelings and humanity will change them: any attempt at psychotherapy just makes them better at hiding it.
The dumb ones tend to end up in prison or shot by the SWAT, but the really smart ones end up CEOs and politicians.
To get back to the topic, though, there is no indication that they feel any more empathy for each other. It isn't the-rich-vs-peons, it's really each rich psychopath for himself. They'll try to shaft each other just as well.
And, partially also in response to your "welcome to the future," history is full of kings and nobles doing all sorts of painful things to each other.
The age of chivalry existed just because (A) holding an enemy for ransom was more profitable than skinning them alive, and (B) it made it easier to manipulate the peons and lower knights to fight for you. But even then, the same "noble" knights and ladies that afforded chivalry to an enemy who can be ransomed for a tidy sum, seemed to have no qualms with poisoning each other or their relatives for a quick inheritance buck. Some even did it for sport.
Basically, if you couldn't be ransomed or, worse yet, someone stood to make a profit from your death, the whole chivalry ideals ended right there. Then you could expect something arsenic-based in your wine.
So, to get back on topic, when those good ol' rich boys' clubs meet, it's not as much friends, it's more like a thieves' club trying to look friendly until they can rob each other. They won't think they're brothers, they'll think as lowly of each other as they think of the peons. They'll just be polite and pleasant because it's good for business.
Well, bear some things in mind:
1. At one point in time there was a substantial difference between RISC and CISC architectures. CPUs had tiny budgets of transistors (almost homeopathic, by today's standards), and there was a real design decision where you put those transistors. You could have more registers (RISC) or a more complex decoder (CISC), but not both. (And that already gives you an idea about the kinds of transistor budgets I'm talking about, if having 16 or 32 registers instead of 1 to 8 actually made a difference.)
Both sides had their advantages, btw. If it were that bleeding obvious that RISC = teh winner and CISC = teh loser, a lot of history would be different.
The difference narrowed a lot over time, though, so neither is purely CISC or RISC any more (except marketting bullshit or fanboy wars.) Neither the original RISC idea nor the CISC one scaled past a point, so now we have largely the same weird hybrid in both camps.
E.g., the Altivec instruction set on PowerPC is the exact opposite of what the original RISC idea was. The very idea of RISC was never to implement in hardware what a compiler would do for you in software. So the very idea of having whole procedures and loops coded in the CPU instead of in software would have seemed the bloody opposite of all that RISC is about, back in the day.
At any rate, what both are today is what previously used to be called a microcoded architecture. It's sorta like having a CPU inside a CPU. The smaller one inside works on much simpler operations, but an instruction of the "outer" CPU translates into several of those micro-operations. Which in turn are pipelined, reordered in flight, etc, to have them execute faster.
What both sides are doing nowadays for marketting reasons is basically calling the inner architecture "RISC", because marketing really likes that term, and the lemmings have been already conditioned to get excited when they hear "RISC". Really, PowerPC's architecture is only "RISC" on account of basically "yeah, but deep down inside it's still sorta RISC like"... and ironically the x86's can make the exact same claim too.
At any rate, whether you want to call that RISC or not, once you look inside it, both the PowerPC and the Pentiums/Athlons have nearly identical architectures and modules. Sure, the implementation details differ, and some have advantages over other implementations (the Netburst ones had too long pipes, while a G4 had a tiny pipe, so the G4 did have better IPC), but essentially they both are based on the exact same architecture. Neither is more RISC than the other. We can lay that RISC-vs-CISC war to rest.
2. That said, the x86 still was somewhat hampered by the lack of more general purpose registers. Although the compilers and the CPU itself did optimize heavily around the problem, they didn't always do the optimal job.
That has changed in the 64 bit version, though. AMD went and doubled the number of registers for programs running in 64 bit mode, and Intel had to use the same set of instructions so they have that too nowadays.
The performance penalty of that architecture basically became a lot lower than it was in the days of G4 vs Pentium 4 flame wars.
Well, for an even more comprehensive index, see: how to write unmaintainable code
Just counting lines of code can be highly misleading:
1. IIRC that was a flawed metric anyway. That was final number of lines of code, divided by developpers, divided by time. It just isn't the same as what you seem to think it means. E.g., lines of code changed or refactored or whatever, would not be counted in that number.
Judged by that kind of a flawed metric, my contribution to some projects would actually be a negative number of lines of code per time unit. E.g., each time I moved someone's copy-and-paste code to its own method and replaced it with a call... well, let's say it was in 3 places, 20 lines of code, replaced with a method and a call each. That's minus thirty-something lines of code in a quarter of an hour by that metric. Am I the worst programmer ever, or what?
I'm sure CVS counts them for yours, though. So you're not comparing the same number.
Now I'm not saying that that alone accounts for that kind of a difference, but it's a start.
2. Just writing code is easy. It's debugging it that takes a lot of time. So the limiting thing is really how well you want that code to work. Going from, say, 90% caught bugs to 95% can easily double your development time on the whole... and thus halve your average lines per year.
Yes, I know, it's MS, but they still have a policy to not ship with known bugs. (Though obviously the unknown ones are more than enough in their own right.) So they'd inherently have less lines of code per year, compared to, say, Google which is officially a perpetual beta.
3. Lines of code / time doesn't scale linearly as the program complexity and team size grow. In other words, you can't just add man-months.
I thought I was so smart too in college, when I could write a program or module of several hundred lines of code in a day. But then that was the whole program, that was the whole complexity, and I was the whole team. That's the easy scenario.
Now move to something the size of Vista and it's just not the same thing any more. Now you suddenly have to deal with stuff like how your code works together with Tom, Dick and Harry's, what they want from your code, and what you need from theirs. There's a lot of overhead just to synchronize it all, document it all, learn other people's APIs, and deal with the increasing level of mis-understanding each other's interfaces.
Now I'm not saying that MS is necessarily the paragon of efficient coding anyway, but I am saying that a lot of people waving that number around... just aren't qualified to make that judgment. They've never actually worked on something that size, and that total team size. I've seen teams hit a wall and get bogged by the fact that each time one guy changes something, it broke some other guy's code, long before being anywhere near the size of MS or of Vista.
4. Well, I also don't like that metric because I've seen people actually abuse it. Not all lines of code are born the same.
E.g., my good coleague Wally would have topped that metric easily, because the guy just copied and pasted everything in sight to make it look like he's doing something. Not only he had whole open source projects pasted into his code tree, but also such surrealistic stuff as: a Swing (standalone GUI framework) file chooser dialog hidden deep in the source code of one of his EJBs (server-side thing.) That thing didn't serve any purpose. It was just there to inflate the number of lines of code he supposedly produced.
Replacing that monstrosity with something smaller and simpler, not only cut down the size (hence, less average lines of code per year for the team, ya know), but also made it run around 40 times faster.
You can also inflate the number of lines of code arbitrarily by just liberally mis-applying patterns. Just have everything get packed in a decorator, made by a factory, which is a singleton, register it with a manager, etc, etc, etc. The number of lines of overhead can be grown arbitrarily, without actually adding any functionality. And past a size wit
You're doing the usual SF failure: you forget the time scales involved, and assume that two meeting civilizations will be roughly at the same (or comparable) point on a technology scale.
The Sun still has some 5 billion years left, but let's say things might start getting funny a bit earlier, so, hmm... 4 billion years for the maximum span of humanity? Just for comparison sake, humans have only existed for 200,000 years total, and civilization is extremely recent even at that scale.
Let's say two random civilizations are at different points along such intervals. It could mean literally being a billion years apart, technologically. Think: a million times bigger difference than between us and, say, the Normans at Hastings. _That_ freaking huge a difference.
Technological exchange in such a scenario is freaking useless for both. The side that's a billion of years ahead will get as much benefit out of it, as you would if you bought the technology to make caveman knives out of stone. And the other side would get as much benefit as a caveman being told "psst, use a modified electron-scanning microscope to make smaller transistors".
Let's say that technology is only of any use to each other, dunno, in a +/- 200 year interval. If it's more than 200 year old, you either already have it, or it's obsolete anyway. (Think how relevant galleon-building techniques from 1807 would be to today's shipbuilding, for example.) If it's more than 200 years in the future, you won't have the pre-requisites to even understand wth it's about.
So for each civilization it's a bet that the other is no more than 200 years ahead, and no more than 200 years behind. That gives you a total 400 years interval, centered on where you currently are. Inside a possible space of 4 billion years. The chance that the others will be in that useful range is exactly 400/4,000,000,000 or 1/10,000,000. It's a hundredth thousandth of a percent.
Do you honestly expect anything useful given those chances?
Not to mention that if they've got at least half a brain, they'll realize that we have to be the less advanced ones, so they have nothing to gain from such an exchange.
So, yeah, "greed within the limits set by society." Why would that mean they have to give us stuff for free? We're not even the same species, much less the same society that set those restrictions. Even to members of the same species, those limits imposed by society mean it's ok to not give another group anything if they can't pay for it.
Let me rephrase that right back at you, using "novel" instead of "game", and maybe you'll realize just how silly it sounds: "Did we forget novels are for fun, not for work? [...] If you lose the bookmark, then the novel should still be fun if you read it again. If not, you stop reading. Not like you're being forced to.
Seriously. If you've read half a novel, would you rather read the next part, or go back to reading the first half again?
Yes, a good novel should be fun to re-read, eventually, but at some point you just want to see how it ends, not to read the first chapter again.
Way I see it, the same applies to games.
Also, what if a sequel or expansion pack came out, and I want to take my old characters to the new world? Do I have to re-play the first game just for that, before even unpacking the _new_ game I just bought? That's a bit like saying that if you've bought "Life, the Universe and Everything", you should first have to re-read "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe" before even opening it. Sure, they're fun books to re-read, but which would you rather do first?
Now some games allow you to re-create an almost exact copy of your old char. E.g., unless you were playing a Neverwinter Nine or Shadow Thief Of Amn, you can re-create your old NWN2 character almost verbatim in Mask Of The Betrayer. Although, even there, what if you _did_ play a NW9 or Shadow Thief?
But other stuff isn't half as easy to reproduce.
For example, take Paradox's series of grand strategy games. It think that at least theoretically, you could play Crusader Kings (medieval strategy) to the end date, then export that map and continue playing that country in Europa Universalis 2 (late medieval / renaissance strategy) until the 19'th century, then export it and continue playing it in Victoria Revolutions (19'th to 20'th century strategy), then export it and continue playing it in Hearts Of Iron Doomsday (WW2 strategy.) That's stuff that would take weeks to reproduce if you wanted to start all over again from Hastings without a saved game.
Now I'm not saying you _should_ do that, because honestly, history will be severely off the track in that case. But what if you do want to do just that? There are people who've achieved highly improbably states, like rebuilding the Byzantine empire starting from Byzantium surrounded by the turks. If I had a saved game like that, I'd _definitely_ want to see how it does in another era. E.g., who would the Byzantines ally with in WW1? Would they fare any better than the Ottomans at the end of it? It's just, you know, curiosity.
Should someone have to replay everything from the 1400's just to get back to that state? Would they even get the same result again? To hammer some more on that Byzantine Empire example, that's stuff that's invariably a pretty improbable gamble. While gamer skill was most certainly involved, there were invariably a lot of other highly improbable events that made that possible, such as someone else keeping the Turks busy at exactly the right moment.
Bah, you obviously haven't had the traumatizing experiences some of us had.
I remember when someone made patch for The Sims that removed the pixelated blur when they were naked. E.g., in the shower. So I downloaded it.
Lemme tell you, I wasn't just upset, I was appalled. They didn't look anything like naked people. They looked like a barbie doll that someone dropped in a mud puddle. (Presumably so the contrast would look right through the blur.) Plus, not only they didn't have genitals, they didn't even have nipples.
And if you think all that's shocking so far, wait for the real horror. You know how the same blur showed up when they sat on the toilet? Well, without the blur you can see that they sit down and take a dump, without pulling down their pants first. Now that's an image that you'll wish you never saw.
So, yeah, sue their pants off, I say. Preferrably before they sit on the toilet
Probably any MUD ever that's changed anything. I know I've heard or read that stupid threat on more than one MUD.
Sorry to rain some reality on your hopeful dreams, but an alien civilization that altruistic wouldn't even make it out of the stone age.
We already have (or had) a group like that on Earth. They did everything together, had peaceful resolution mechanisms for conflict, helped each other and learned early how to control their population growth without institutionalized murder (a.k.a., war.) It's the Bushmen. Yeah, they never made it out of stone age on their own.
If you look at the history of humanity, all progress was made (A) in the name of greed, and (B) by those which, partially because of A, could afford the cost and manpower to invest in new stuff.
You know the golden age of Athens in ancient times? Athens had managed to gradually move its function from merely the head of a defensive coalition of equal states against Persia, to being the master of those states and fleecing them in wholesale. Those states were moved from bearing an equal share of the military burden (at their choice whether in troops or money), to just having to pay heavy taxes to Athens. And instead of paying for defense against the Persians, it eventually moved to being just a protection racket: pay up or _we_ will attack you. They did it quite a few times too.
All those fabulous temples and monuments and the thousands of people with nothing better to do than play armchair-philosopher, those were paid with the money they levied in taxes from their "allies."
Or look at the middle ages. We already had a shiny-happy community kind of village, where everyone gets enough land to survive if there is any land left, they (often) owned the oxen together, they had common-owned pastures and woods, etc. (Now the relationship with the nobility was very inequal, but the villages themselves were a different story.) It was a poverty trap. If any surplus land is given to anyone who might need it, then noone has the surplus to invest in anything whatsoever.
The moment things started moving forwards was when (A) some people could get more land because of the the black death, but more importantly, (B) when they switched to fenced plots. Basically from "this is the common land of the village and we're using it together" to "this is my land, and you can fuck off and starve for all I care, you're getting none of it." Even as the population rebounded after the initial devastation, the guys who had taken control of more land, no longer went and divided it with everyone in the village.
Sure, there were other factors too, like switching to the more profitable raising sheep and exporting the wool instead of subsistence farming of grain, but it all boils down to the same thing: it's _my_ land, I do what _I_ want with it, and I'm not sharing any of that with you lot. If you went back to dividing the land so noone starves, you'd be right back to the poverty trap even with sheep.
What mattered and eventually resulted in the industrial revolution was that some people could (A) get a surprlus and trade it, even while at the same time someone else starved to death, and (B) invest the profit into getting even more profit, following their own self interest. It could mean buying more land from people who were less efficient, or buying some machinery, or whatever. Again, motivated by self-interest.
The Age Of Exploration... what do you think motivated it? Well some merchants' greed, that's what.
The birth of capitalism... well, read Adam Smith some day. Even though admittedly his ideas are almost socialist in regards to what the state should do, he did notice that, essentially, the most efficient way to optimize producing what people need isn't via charity and selflessness, but via the merchants' acting in their own interest. And indeed that's been the chief driving force ever since.
Etc.
Basically I find it funny to see all the utopian ideas about enlightened selfless aliens who'd just hand over all their technology to the first apes they find. Just because they're that kind and enlightened.
If su
A better question is: did they even care?
There seem to be an awful lot of such incidents lately, involving swapped materials, ranging from poisonous toys to ethilene glycol in toothpaste to exploding lithium ion batteries, all coming from China. I'm sorry, but that's no longer looking like isolated "oopsie" cases where someone forgot to do their research. It starts to look like they have a whole culture based on not doing that research at all, or plain old not care as long as they can pocket the difference.
I mean in this case one might even argue that they didn't research what it decomposes into, but other cases involved such blatant cases as:
- lead paint, which is _known_ to be toxic. You don't have to research what it metabolizes into, it's just toxic as it is.
- ethilene glycol, a known poison, used instead of the more expensive glycerine in toothpaste
- the membrane which should collapse and open the circuit when a battery overheats, replaced with much cheaper stuff that doesn't. It doesn't take that much research to understand why it's there, and why a battery without that safety can burst into flames.
Etc.
In fact, I'll venture a guess and say what it really reminds me of: corruption and kleptocracy. Now I don't have any first-hand experience with China, but I've seen cases in other places, and, honestly, the more I hear about such Chinese manufacturing incidents, the more it starts to sounds like that.
The way that works is, sorta, along the lines of "it doesn't matter how much you're paid, it matters how much you can steal / embezzle / demand in bribes / etc". Whole pyramids get built where any good job (judged through the aforementioned criterion) is either given to relatives of party officials, or essentially auctioned to whoever gave a bigger bribe. Then essentially the winner is inoffficially _expected_ to get that money back with interest, by abusing that function to take more bribes or plain old steal.
In which case, the way it would go, isn't even that some ruthless capitalist wanted to cut production costs, gain a competitive advantage and invest it in some form or shape into expanding his operations. It's probably just some private guy along the chains who switched materials and pocketed the money. It's not the evils of capitalism, it's plain old the evils of unchecked corruption.
Especially the communist block generated quite a few such structures, which is why I wonder about China.
Actually, I'll give you one more reason why I worry about China. Because they have a whole _surrealistic_ history of just that.
If you look as far back in time as the Battle of the Yalu River, you'll find such surrealistic stuff as that many shells used by the Chinese fleet were filled with sawdust or cement, because some enterprising souls in the navy had embezzeled 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. If you didn't go "WTBF?!" already, read it again and roll it a bit in your head. Big Fucking Guns, off a battleship, stolen and sold on the black market.
At this point, I'm sure someone will point out that it's been more than a century since then, and China did have two (or arguably even 3) changes of regime and direction in the meantime. But did the culture change in that time? Because from where I stand, it doesn't look that way. The corruption of the Qing empire continued seamlessly into the surrealistic warlord era during Chiang Kai-shek's regime, which in turn continued seamlessly into the corrupt regime under Mao. And now we have arguably the same guys who enriched themselves during the communism, and not by honest means either (the official salaries of government offi
And did you ever wonder why those modern comics with weak and morally ambiguous heroes only sell a tiny fraction of what comics used to sell? Why now it's regarded as a weird geek hobby, when it used to be entertainment for the masses?
Now I'm not saying that's the only factor, or even the main one, but the fact remains: millions of people were buying every issue of those comics with god-mode heroes. At the very least, it wasn't that major a turn off.
And conversely, switching to dubious heroes that half the time you're not even sure if they're any better than the villains, sure didn't seem to make them much more popular. At best they traded one market segment for another.
Yes, and equally you know from the start that he won't get killed, and he'll have some gadget or ace up the sleeve for any situation. You want it to look like it would be certain death for the average monkey on the street, but your super-hero is super enough to not break a sweat over it.
Bzzt, wrong. Look at some of the early comics, and super-heroes were just that: unassailable gods with perfect morals.
Superman, for example, started with no vulnerability whatsoever. The whole "kryptonite" thing was invented as a tongue-in-cheek explanation when they had to skip an episode or two for the radio version later, for example because the actor was on vacation. And even there it wasn't actually used _in_ any story line. Superman didn't have to battle anyone wielding kryptonite at that point.
Mind you, if you're going to say that that's not (necessarily) much fun in a game, we can even aggree quickly.
But that's a limitation of video games, not a limitation of super-heroes. Literary or comic book characters can be as god-like as the author wants, and still be fun and popular.
Heck, you don't even have to look only at superhero comics. Take Terry Prattchett's Diskworld books, for example. Cohen the barbarian is, for example, so good at dodging that in Interesting Times he even dodges a cannonball from a gun that got teleported right in front of him and fired. Rincewind is comically incompetent except he always ends up on top, even if by sheer luck and without fully realizing what he's done. The witches are just short of god-like in their own right, and can pretty much get what they want even from Death himself. Wossname the monk learned from yetis how to "save and reload" IRL, so he just comes back after being beheaded. Etc, etc, etc. Almost every single major character in those books has some kind of super-power that makes him completely invincible and unstoppable, even by the whole freakin' army of China (or the DW equivalent of it.)
Does that make the books any less fun to read? Nope.
Think action movies. Rambo can stand tall with a machinegun in front of a whole tank division, or get in a pissing... err... shooting contest with a gunship and come out on top. Jedi in SW movies are just about gods that can only kill each other. But they're way out of the league of mortal soldiers or drones, even when those are in brigade-sized formations and with AT-AT and air support. Etc.
And you know what? I dare say that that's actually good character design. People want to be told a nice story where the hero overcomes everything, and everything ends with a happy ending.
Not many people want to be told a tale where the hero thought he could fly circles around the Death Star, but the laws of firepower always beat the rules of literature. Or not many want to be told the story of the guy who thought he could jump in front of the enemy company with a pistol, and was riddled with bullets before he even finished the clip. Those are depressing stories of failure. They're not fun.
We want to be told stories where one determined guy changes the world for the better, and nothing whatsoever can stay in his way. Not one where he fails in the first 15 minutes.
But, again, I can see how that doesn't translate into a fun video game. We just have to accept that it's simply different media, with different rules.
You're forgetting something about perma-Hasten. (And before I get started: this is coming from someone who never used it, just to be different from the cookie-cutter builds.)
Perma-hasten wasn't an exploit. It was the officially allowed possibility, with Cryptic's blessing.
As the game was launched, you could make Hasten permanent with IIRC 2 SOs. Or maybe 3? I can't really remember. At any rate, you could not only make it "perma", you could have it stack with itself most the time.
Statesman seemed to be genuinely surprised that this was possible. Like many other powers (remember the City Of Blasters smoke grenades for example?) noone at Cryptic had done the maths. What happened with which powers on SOs, was a genuine surprise to them.
So as a sort of compromise, Statesman accepted that, yeah, perma-Hasten is a useful thing and will remain available, but it's only fair to need 6 slots for that. So the maths were changed to produce just that result. Officially, and with Cryptic's blessing. It was _not_ an exploit, any way you want to slice it.
Which just made the sudden U-turn in ED more baffling. They painted some things as evil exploits, that previously they treated as just normal tweaks allowed by the game.
1. Google for the so called "ED" or "Enhancement Diversification".
In a nutshell, the game already been nerfed twice in a row, especially the tanks and a smaller nerf to regen. (Regens had been nerfed in each patch since I1, so we were already used to that.)
And by "nerf" I don't mean the small tweaks you see on WoW. CoH under Statesman had never discovered fine tweaks. The COH kind of balance tweaks were the kind where one class went from God Mode to nobody, and another class was buffed into being God Mode. The game for example started as City Of Blasters (as a devices blaster could make themselves just 5% short of invulnerable to any enemy) and had become City Of Fire Tankers by I4. (Fire tankers were the "squishiest" kind of tank, as damage mitigation went, but even they could solo a mission instanced for 8 people.) That's the kind of massive balance changes that happened in COH.
The last two ones had been rather severe, and this time noone was buffed, it was rather all nerf and no carrot. Still it was accepted among (A) promises from Statesman that this is absolutely the last big change to the game, and (B) people grudgingly realizing that the balance _had_ been crap. So, anyway, the promise from Cryptic was that this is the last big change, the game is finally working as intended, everyone can relax, respec their chars to deal with it, and enjoy the game. Fine.
Then out of nowhere came the "ED". It's hard to explain it to a non-COH-player without explaining all the game system, but let's just say that _everyone_, every single class, lost up to 1/3 of all they could previously do. Fire blasters suddenly did 2/3 of their previous damage, healers could heal 2/3 as well as before, tanks had their armour class reduced to 2/3, etc. It was across the board. Every single power that you could previously enhance to 300% of base value, now went only up to 196% or so of base.
Due to game mechanics as well, for some the effects were more dramatic than it would seem. For example for a tank, going from 80% damage mitigation to 60% damage mitigation means taking twice the damage. The maths isn't exactly linear there.
In some cases, because of former synergies, the losses were even bigger. E.g., a healer that previously relied on permanent hasten, now also had lost that reduction in time between heals, because, well, with the new changes hasten no longer could be made permanent.
Because the change was so uniformly applied across the board, with no regards to who actually needed it, and who was already at the pain limit, some classes lost a lot more than others. E.g., every single class that was based on defense instead of damage reduction, suddenly became useless. Ice tanks and SR scrappers could even be killed by minions. Again, because game maths worked against those. Cryptic took almost a year IIRC to fix defense after that fuck-up.
And best of all was the justification for it. Statesman got that idea from playing a Gameboy game. No, seriously. It wasn't based on some analysis of what actually happens in the game and what players want, it was Statesman playing with his GBA and thinking, "gee, I like it more when fights take longer." Hence, let's nerf everyone to make them take more time to kill an enemy.
Don't get me wrong, it was possible to adapt to the game after the ED. But it did leave a bitter aftertaste in many people's mouths anyway. And for some it was the straw that broke the camel's back.
2. Well, I don't know how to say it nicely, so I might as well not even try: keep the "{{citation needed}}" trolling where it belongs, on Wikipedia.
Now I'm not telling you to believe everything blindly, quite the contrary. But I'm saying to do your own fucking googling. It's not writing a reference for posterity, it's just a fucking message in a thread that will scroll off the main page in a day. Give it a week and noone will even remember that it ever existed. So if you think anyone will spend half a day researching and cross-referencing the bibliography -- by which time, the thread will already be at most visible in that small list on the right -- then I suspect that either you haven't put much thought into it, or some brain damage may be involved.
Actually, it's even funnier. COH and COV are the same game. Whether you have "both" installed, or only one of them, you run the exact same executable, use the exact same resource files, and connect to the exact same servers, and your stuff is saved in the exact same database.
The only difference between COH, COV or both, was your account. If the account says you only paid for COV, then their server will only let you play on the COV side. But, again, you already had both.
And yeah, "both" were published by NCSoft.