Hmm, not sure I mentioned pins anwhere there. Did I?
Otherwise, yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if a joke turns out to be less than an accurate prophecy in 15 years from now. I mean, if I could see 15 years in the future, I'd be making a fortune on the stock market instead of posting wisecracks on Slashdot;)
Then again,
1. Some of Jules Vernes's ideas weren't that horribly off the mark. For example, his obsession with gun cotton was justified, and to this day we use exactly that in bullets. Ok, so we use cordite, which is basically guncotton treated so it won't spontaneously ignite. Submarines are also in use, and even equipping it with a ramming spike did remain the leading way to damage an ironclad for a really long time.
2. The same would have been said in the 80's if you told someone about computing in 2007. "Imagine running that CPU off a hard drive, then multiply the speed by 1000, and... umm... you're back to where you started. Anyway, that's how computers will work in 2007." He'd have laughed his arse off at you.
Speaking of scorch marks on the wall behind the computer, Arthur C. Clarke's Venus Prime had a Steam Cooled Nano-Supercomputer. It looked like one of those aerators you screw on to the end of the faucet on your kitchen sink. And that's what the main character did with it. The water would vaporize as steam, dissipating enormous amounts of heat.
Ah, a sauna and computer room in one. Nice. I can see it now, being in the underwear and sweaty in front of the computer for a WoW raid won't be some insult thrown around by non-gamers, but actually normal and healthy.
Ya know, it might even help get laid. Once you have a computer like that, you just need to find an excuse to show her something on the computer, and then you can casually mention, "you might want to take off some of the clothes before I start it, or you'll get them all sweaty." Might even work, now that I think about it. I was reading somewhere that if you get her to take her shoes off, the rest is somewhat easier. I figure that by the time you got her to remove her blouse, skirt and stockings because you're about to start the sauna, it should be even less of a struggle ahead;)
Damn... now I wish I had one of those back in university, when I was doing the asignments of anyone who was a female and willing to ask...
I must admit, that beats my samovar idea handily. Well done:)
Well, I wish the best of luck to them if they want to stick to only articles with "no cleanup tags, no "citation needed" tags, no disambiguation links, no dead external links, and no fair use images" before even considering them for review.
Already the average article on Wikipedia looks somewhat like this:
"Twenty-sided dice have by definition 20 sides [citation needed], meaning that they're Icosahedron-shaped [citation needed]. They're used as dice in many tabletop role-playeing systems [citation needed], such as the D20 system [citation needed] developped originally by Wizards Of The Coast [citation needed] for the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons. [citation needed] The Source Reference Document first edition states [citation needed]: 'You'll use twenty-sided dice for most rolls to determine the success or failure of an action.'[citation needed]"
That is, unless someone _also_ decided to flag it NPOV because it said "have 20 sides" instead of "are believed by many people to have 20 sides", or conversely flagged it as weasel wording if it did say "are believed by many people to have 20 sides".
Mind you, that's a made up quote, but it has the right "feel" to show what I mean. Some articles look genuinely like that.
I'd be tempted to see that as another form of vandalism, but then I remember Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity." I mean, I'd normally say noone is so stupid as to stamp a quote with "citation needed" in good faith, but... each time I assumed something like that about any action, someone selflessly volunteered to prove that indeed people can be even more stupid. The Darwin Awards are full of such selfless people, for a start;)
Space travel, the trial-and-error way, eh? You mean, Wan Hu style?;)
"Early in the sixteenth century, Wan decided to take advantage of China's advanced rocket and fireworks technology to launch himself into outer space. He supposedly had a chair built with forty-seven rockets attached. On the day of lift-off, Wan, splendidly attired, climbed into his rocket chair and forty seven servants lit the fuses and then hastily ran for cover. There was a huge explosion. When the smoke cleared, Wan and the chair were gone, and was said never to have been seen again."
Dunno about you, but I'd rather have it designed by the kind of people who'd rather sit down and calculate, instead of just doing the first dumb thing that comes to mind and see if it works.
Yes, _sometimes_, for a very narrow class of problems (like counting the bytes) the simplest way is to just do it and measure the number. But when you actually have to design something more complex, that quickly becomes a horrible idea. Even for something as simple as a watch, the probability to get it right by just throwing some parts together repeatedly and seeing if the result works, is close to nil. At some point you have to sit down and calculate the size of those cogs.
Plus, there is a lot of other stuff around you that happened only because someone sat down and calculated stuff, instead of good ol' dumb trial-and-error.
There's no way to invent a laser by trial and error, for example. The probability that just accidentally you'd have the right kind of material, and the right kind of coating at the ends, and the right light wavelength to excite it, and it's cut at the exact right length, is completely negligible. Humans have been cutting and setting rubies for millenia, and there are exactly _zero_ that started just emitting a laser beam by trial and error. It took someone calculating what happens there, before you could even know that a laser is possible, and how to make one.
In fact, pretty much the last major invention (that I know of) that was perfected by trial and error, was the light bulb. And, at least according to Tesla, that was a monumentally wasteful undertaking. To quote Tesla, "His method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 percent of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor's instinct and practical American sense."
But even that stopped working for anything more complex than a light bulb. There's no way you could design a CPU nowadays by trial and error, for example. Even with specialized tools and massively simulating everything ahead, just one glitch sunk 3DFX. (Their Voodoo 5 was supposed to compete with the Geforce 1, but due to having to fix the malfunctioning chip design produced by their tools, it ended up competing with the Geforce 2 instead.) Now picture doing that layout by dumb trial and error instead. I wouldn't even try.
Heck, even in the job of counting bytes, sometimes the "American approach" (*) you describe would give the awfully wrong results until you've fully ported it. E.g., if the code was written with hard-coded constants for the saved data (which probably wouldn't be the case in Oracle's code, but I've seen it happen in other places), then compiling and running it would give the wrong results anyway. E.g., if someone saved an int by writing exactly 4 bytes to disk, it would still be 4 bytes for 64 bit code... and the very incorrect answer.
(*) As a side note, I hate thinking of those as "American approach" and "German approach", as it's really just the approach of whatever person gave that answer. I know there are plenty of Americans too who will stop and calculate, because otherwise the
Aye, lad, of course you can imagine a beowulf cluster of these. But that's the easy part. Everyone can do that these days. Why my nephew could imagine a beowulf cluster on a good day, and he's a toddler.
Now try imagining cooling it. That's the real challenge. That's what makes grown up men cry like little girls.
I mean, look 15 years back in time. That was in 1992. We still had desktop cases without fans (except maybe on the PSU, though even there not on all), CPUs without heatsinks (and in fact, the chip even included in a big slab of resin or such and it made no difference to cooling anyway), and computers could safely run on PSUs whose wattage was a 2 digit number. We also still had RAM fast enough that you didn't need a CPU cache (nor had a transistor budget for it, anyway). And we thought that a program that takes a whole floppy is bloated. Etc.
So I'm going to put on my wizard hat and rub the ol' crystal ball, and tell you how I see computing in the future.
- seein' as case fans started from none, and now we're at two or more 120mm fams and ducts per case, I see the computer of the future as a cube, whose whole face (or maybe side) is one big 14" fan (yes, inch, not cm) blowing air in and another in the back blowing it out. In fact, it will all be one big square wind tunnel, or an oversized hair dryer.
You'll alos be advised to not put anything more flammable than asbestos behind it, and fence it so your cat or toddler can't get behind the computer and get cooked.
- a decent power supply will be around 3-4 kilowatts, but Nvidia will recommend 5 kW for their latest graphics card, more if you run a SLI setup.
- or maybe water cooling will become the standard, and the computer will nicely double as a samovar and espresso machine.
- heatsinks will be made of pure silver. And ATI will still need something that sounds like a jet fighter at takeofff to keep their GPU at only 90C.
- continuing the trend, graphics cards will keep needing increasingly more dedicated power connectors, and increasingly more pins on them. We started at 1 with 4 pins, and now we're at "ATI won't activate this or that function if you don't have 8 pins on the second power connector." I foresee that in 15 years we'll be at 6 power connectors with 16 pins each, just to bring enough current to the graphics card.
- still noone will have invented a better use of all that silicone than adding yet another core, so given that 15 years is no less than 10 cycles of Moore's Law, you'll have anywhere between 2048 and 4096 cores in your PC. More time will be spent passing messages between those and serilizing access to data, in algorithms that were never meant to be massively parallel, than actually computing the useful part. People will still argue that it's the fault of game programmers that they don't split processing 5 NPCs between 2048 CPUs, or for that matter, the fault of compiler makers that they insist on reading the file sequentially instead of each core processing every 2048'th line of the file.
- We'll be up to, oh, maybe DDR9, or maybe some newer standard. It still won't have lower latency in nanoseconds than the old SDR, but people will still buy it based on theoretical burst speed. Even more ridiculously larger caches will be needed just to keep all those cores working at all, instead of spending thousands of cycles waiting for the RAM to finally answer. On the bright side, though, we'll have enough budget of transistors form 2 to 4 gigabytes of cache on the CPU.
- As that trend continues, eventually the disparity between RAM and CPU will get so high that it will be entirely feasible to skip RAM completely, and run the programs off the hard drive and the CPU's L3 cache. (The disparity between CPU speed and RAM latency is _already_ as big as that between the 8088 in the IBM PC/XT and the hard drive it had.)
- People will still take the extra power as an invitation to write bloated and slow code. So even th
Transferring links around isn't the hard part. The hard part is to actually get something that's relevant for that search string.
Just simple lists of keywords associated with that link won't do. We already had that kind of search engines long before Google, and there's a reason why Google handed their arse to them.
And then there are the people gaming the system for a quick profit... even if it means ruining a valuable resource for everyone else. There was an almost epidemic of link spam on all possible forums and blogs, for example, just to raise the Google rank of a couple of pages.
Most of Google's uphill battle so far has been tweaking the algorithm to defend against such "attacks".
(And now that I mention it, it dawns upon me that maybe that's why smaller national engines can do better locally. With everyone trying to game Google and generally the larger English-reading world, it could be that noone bothered polluting the smaller national searches.)
So just being able to swap links around won't do much.
A second and third problems I see with your idea are, well:
1. timing. When I search for something, I'd rather not depend on the right people being online at that exact time. I also want the answer in half a second. Google does that with in-RAM indexes. I wouldn't bet a fortune on someone doing that equally fast via several hops over the net, P2P style.
2. reliability. P2P traffic has been poisoned repeatedly by interested parties, like, say, the RIAA and MPAA. And it's entirely trivial to do so. So what's to keep other interested parties from poisoning P2P search with falsely tagged links?
Even on Google, it's not entirely rare that someone buys ad-word keywords on their competitors' trademarks or such. E.g., if you have a company called, say, "Houndwire", I could buy that keyword for an ad for my company. Now everyone who searches for your company, will have my ad served to them. Then keep my fingers crossed that if I'm in roughly the same market, some people will just go ahead and buy from me. There have been even laws proposed against that kind of impersonation.
Now for adwords it's one thing, but the same could just as well be applied to poisoning a P2P search. Which could ruin its usefulness pretty fast.
Looking through some of your other comments, you really like playing the crusader of poor oppressed heretical theories, don't you? But that's not the important part.
The _real_ mark of the crackpot is believing such bullshit as that there's some high priests with some immutable dogma, quashing poor heretic visionaries like Mr Arp.
The truth is that nothing is that stationary or frozen in conjecture. Especially not in astrophysics. The domain has evolved a _lot_ in the last, say, half a century, and stuff that was heresy once is the mainstream consensus now.
E.g., dark matter would have gotten one laughed out the door some decades ago, now it's exactly the mainstream consensus that you rant and rave against. Dark energy actually came even later.
E.g., space expansion itself was far from being set in stone in the 60's, when Arp published his claim. Heck, we didn't even have an estimate for Hubble's constant until 1958, and it would be another couple of decades until there was a consensus on it. Do you even understand what that means? It wasn't even a law or a theory yet, because noone had measured a falsifiable value to put on those equations.
Also, it helps to remember that he's not exactly a nobody that you can handwave away, contrary to whatever mis-understanding you seem to operate on. He's well know, he's got a Ph.D. in the domain (so it's not as easy to hand-wave him away as the normal crackpots), he's got an atlas of galaxies that's still used as a reference, and many galaxies are still referenced by their Arp number. He's not easy to ignore. He stands out like a sore thumb. There have been a _lot_ of people who've studied his claims.
Basically the last point alone should already tell you how bogus your conspiracy theory is. The idea that millions of people worldwide have somehow all decided to support red-shift in spite of all proof to the contrary, all just toed the party line without questioning, and somehow noone ever broke the pact... is what makes any other conspiracy theory laughable in the first place. Governments and secret agencies hardly ever manage to keep a secret when more than 2 people know it, but somehow millions of astrophysicists all decided to ignore Arp's evidence... and none of them squeaked to the press yet. Amazing. Bloody amazing, that's what it would be.
And so on, and so forth.
Arp wasn't some heretic oppressed by the mainstream High Priests, because there was no such mainstream consensus yet. His hypothesis was actually taken as a very serious possibility at the time, and had to pass the same standards for proof as anyone else's hypothesis. It just happened that another (now) theory fit the actual measured data better. That's all. No more and no less.
So, you know, far from me to keep you from fighting crackpot crusades, if that's what keeps you feeling important. But, please... There are better ones than this kind of thing.
More likely because a key factor in the Windows+Office+IE monopoly is its ubiquity. Remember: it's only a "de facto standard" or "industry standard" if, indeed, pretty much everyone and their grandma is inofficially accepting it as a standard, and when your program/format/whatever is subconsciously synonimous with the whole category.
The way it works is like this: (very nearly) everyone uses product X (where X can be Excel, Word, whatever) with its proprietary format Y. At home, at work, etc. The effects are, in no particular order:
1. That it's taken for granted that almost everyone already knows how to work with X, but you might need to train them to use the competitors' equivalent. This is a very big factor when corporations decide to standardize on something. And, at least subconsciously, it's then a factor in what people use at home. You've already used or seen X used at work, so there's no point in wasting your time learning something else instead.
2. Because of 1, knowing how to use program X suddenly is a "skill" you might need at work. You know chances are overwhelming that, unless you're a linux admin or such, the PC at your next job will have X installed on it, and you'll be expected to know how to use it. It might even be an explicit requirement in the job ad. (Remember: training them is expensive, so you might as well hire those who already have the skills you want.)
So the maths already becomes screwed up. If product X costs, say, 500$, it already paid for itself with interest if having that skill saves you even a month of looking for a new job. Or if it lets you move to a job that pays as little as 50$ a month more than your current one, it paid for itself in 10 months flat. "But some other equivalent is free" just lost a lot of appeal in that context.
3. Because "everyone" has program X, thus they "all" can (and do) use its proprietary format Y. (See the recent linked story about even most OOo users saving in.doc or.xls format.) So it becomes the de-facto format of communication, and everyone is supposed to be able to read and write it flawlessly. If you're the guy who can't read format Y, you're as much an oddball as if you were the local luddite without a phone.
And especially for a company, "we don't do Y files" is a big no-no. It doesn't take more than one contract lost with a big customer because you told him you don't want to install Word, to make a bigger loss than buying a retail copy of it for every computer.
This is somewhat easier to get around, since nowadays OOo does a decent job of reading _most_ office files. But, still, the more it gets taken for granted, the more you're expected to be a 100% flawless emulation, down to the 65536 bug. And it gets pointed as a show-stopper if one guy's spreadsheet uses some obscure old function or macro that you don't emulate 100% accurately.
4. Even more importantly, well, you can't have a monopoly on interchangeable separate pieces. That kind of a market can be attacked one product at a time. You want every product to depend on every other product. You want people to say, "yeah, Linux is nice, but does it run the latest version of Word?" and the like.
But to cut this long rant shorter, again, it all boils down to ubiquity. It boils down to the next manager doing any purchasing thinking "naah, _everyone_ knows how to use Windows and Word, but we'd need to retrain everyone if we installed Linux and OOo."
And in that aspect, raising a whole bloody generation of Indians and Chinese on Linux and OOo, is probably something that scares the seven shades of shit out of MS. It's the kind of thing that could lead to "nah, if we're offshoring there and/or importing workers from there anyway, we'd Linux and OOo are for free and we'd need to retrain them for Windows and MS Office." Or worse yet, to realizing, "hmm, everyone there uses ODF, don't they? I guess it would cost us more to force them to accept.xls files." It's that kind of things tha
Well, the Earth is pulling the moon towards it too, and yet we still have a moon after all these billions of years. The Sun is pulling the Earth towards it, but, funnily enough, after all these billions of years we're not quite there yet.
In a sense, the Hitchhiker's guide got that right: ""There is an art to flying, or rather a knack. It knack lies in learning to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, that provides the difficulties."" We keep falling in an almost circular orbit around the Sun and ending up (almost) where we started.
What I'm trying to say is that those super-massive black holes obviously do suck everything towards them. But the rest of the galaxy sees it as centripetal force and rotates around them.
The problems with a black holes are at closer ranges.
For a start, if you do get closer to it than its event horizon, then you're properly fucked. There is no way to get out of there, not even theoretically. Not even light can get out of there. Hence, the name black hole.
However, I'll return to the analogy with the solar system. With the Sun's massive gravity well, it's damn near impossible to hit it, even if you wanted to. If you dropped a big rock right at it, even the slighest deviation or initial speed sideways (like would happen if you dropped it from Earth), would cause a clean miss and you'd just get that rock in some kind of orbit around it. The only way to actually hit the sun would be if that orbit was flattened enough that it passes through the sun.
And the same problem applies to black holes too. Remember that it's a more massive gravity well _and_ the "bullseye" is much smaller, at least in relation to the gravity well. As you fall even a little off the centre, your speed would increase enough so at one point the centrifugal force (yes, I know it doesn't even exist, but it makes the explanation easier) just flings you clean around it.
There's even at least one theory that nothing ever finishes falling into a black star. Although there is energy loss due to that X-ray emission and all, basically matter just spirals closer and closer to the event horizon without ever reaching it. Think an asymptotic decay. It gets closer and closer and closer over time, but never quite reaches it.
The second problem is, well, tides. If you get close enough to the centre of a gravity well, say, looking at the centre, then your front is pulled towards it much stronger than your back is.
This is actually true for any gravity well, and, again, you can see it in action in the solar system too. That's why the moon is tidal-locked with the Earth and you always see the same face of it.
But for a massive enough gravity well, the force difference gets larger and can rip a star or a planet apart. That's how stars and black holes end up occasionally peeling another star apart, pretty much syphoning its outer layers.
So basically you could be past the event horizon and still be properly fucked, in slightly different way.
But even that only extends so far. IIRC there are stars orbitting the centre of a galaxy with a period measured in hours. Admittedly, that's not as close as it might suggest, again because of the massive gravity. Even with that angular speed, you still need a heck of a radius to stay in orbit there. But, still, if those survive just fine, then you can probably see how the rest of the galaxy is safe.
1. That's not the definition of optimism I've learned.
Just in case my grasp of English isn't up to snuff, let's look at what the American Heritage Dictionary has to say about it:
1. A tendency to expect the best possible outcome or dwell on the most hopeful aspects of a situation: "There is a touch of optimism in every worry about one's own moral cleanliness" (Victoria Ocampo).
2. Philosophy
1. The doctrine, asserted by Leibnitz, that this world is the best of all possible worlds.
2. The belief that the universe is improving and that good will ultimately triumph over evil.
Miriam-Webster says: "an inclination to put the most favorable construction upon actions and events or to anticipate the best possible outcome"
I don't see any mention that being an underachiever is an integral part of it.
Yes, I guess one way to expect the most favourable outcome is to redefine your criteria so that anything short of a total disaster is a win. Then you won't have many "losses" in your experience, or much reason to expect a loss.
On the other hand, I don't see anywhere that "deluded" can't possibly be it. If you expect the best possible outcome where everyone else sees that chances are 99.99% that it will go bad, you _are_ deluded. You're also still an optimist, according to both quoted dictionaries.
To pick on your own examples, I see nothing in both that says an optimist wouldn't ever try to hit on a movie star. In fact, from where I stand, if anyone's going to try that, it'll be an optimist. The pessimists will look at that course of action, think "screw that, the way the universe hates me, she wouldn't even spit on me" and go do something else.
So it seems to me like you're just giving there a recipe of how to be happy, rather than define optimism. In fact, I'd say you're writing there the exact _opposite_ of what the dictionary says. Expecting the worst so your expectations are exceeded all the time, well, is exactly at odds with the dictionary's "expecting the best possible outcome."
2. It also seems to me that if I were to believe your definition, that's actually worse than pessimism. That's the recipe for being an underachiever. A _happy_ underachiever, duly noted, but an underachiever anyway.
Simply put, humans do what (they think) works and produces the desired results. If you're going to see even missing the target completely as still a great success, then there's no logical need to spend a lot of time and effort trying to hit the bullseye.
As a personal anecdote, I've actually tried your kind of (redefined) "optimism" at some point in college. I can tell you that my grades dipped very very fast. The idea that "ah, who cares about grades, any grade that passes the year is just as good" caused not just half my grades to be just that in one semester, but I actually flunked an exam in the next one. That was the time to revise that philosophy.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you should be ultra-competitive and obsessed with clawing your way to the top at all cost, either. But there are a lot of comfortable shades of grey between that and lowering your expectations to meet the results. A more realistic assessment of where you are, what worked, what didn't, what was really a success, and what wasn't, what you really needed, and what you didn't really need, can be a lot more productive.
Sometimes you don't need to win first prize in a category, yes, that much is true. But then decide that logically and fully aware why and what's the tradeoff. Don't just lower your expectations until whatever happened is great. Because if it's just a reflex to keep doing that to stay happy, then you'll lower them even for the things that do matter.
Past a threshold, maybe. But I could ask the same question about the other side of the coin: "are _optimists_ brain damaged?"
It seems to me that the only position that is actually any use is the center line: realism. A healthy realistic assessment of how the world works and what are the _real_ chances that Y happens when you do X.
Think of, say, the japanese game Go. You look at a group of pieces. Are they alive? Are they dead? The only good position is to just count eyes and conclude impartially based on the rules. Pessimism is, obviously, bad. If you make your decisions starting from "bah, with my luck, those are probably dead too" you'll tend to let groups die which could have been saved, and lose the game. But I'd argue that excessive optimism is actually _worse_. Newbies get pwned most of the time is because they insist on trying to save a dead group or follow a losing ladder, and just give the opponent a bigger capture.
If you don't know Go, think of Chess, Poker, Blackjack, whatever you know. Same idea. Excessive illogical pessimism is bad, but advancing into a trap because of excessive illogical optimism is, I would argue, even worse. Betting the house on the slim chance that you'll get another ace and turn a 20 into a 21 at Blackjack, just because you have a good feeling about your luck and know you can do it, is blatantly stupid.
At some point you just have to face reality and admit that taking or continuing a course of action is stupid and possibly self-destructive. Not because of overwhelming pessimism, not because you'd rather sit in a corner and do nothing, etc. Simply because some other course of action might yield better results with the same time, money and effort investment.
Honestly, the Darwin Awards are full of people who killed themselves because they massively mis-judged their chances on the optimistic side. Like the priest who was sure that his faith will let him walk on water. Doubly so, without a backup plan: he couldn't swim. Can we say that he was a bit too optimistic when judging that course of action?
Or look at the economy. How many people venture their lifetime savings without a realistic plan, just because they use optimism instead of logic? The dot-com bubble -- like most bubbles in history -- was based on optimism too. Forget logic, just dump your money on a company with no product or customers, and if it goes wrong, you know you're lucky enough to sell them to some other dolt before it bombs. How many lost their lifetime savings that way?
Pyramid scams? Same thing. Even people who understand exponentials ended up losing their money to those because they were optimistic enough that they're starting early and will get their payoff before it bombs.
Stock spam? Same thing. There _still_ are people who believe that they can act just fast enough to beat the scam and make a profit there. It doesn't ever actually work, but they're optimistic.
Briefly: much ink has been used in praising the importance of taking the opportunity when it presents itself. And indeed to much pessimism can hinder that. But I fear that not enough has been said about the importance of recognizing what's an actual golden ring that you can grab, and what's the ring on a grenade. History is full of people who'd rather pluck the latter than let a possible opportunity go by... and lost.
Well, it's kinda f. The fact is, all first world governments nowadays are essentially Keynesian. There have been some minor refinements of it, but essentially no big change to the core of it. The whole USA, EU _and_ Commonwealth (the UK one, not the ex-USSR) still _are_ keynesian, and the majority of economists still are keynesian. By what kind of reckoning, then, is it not modern any more?
There are fringe groups (e.g., the Libertarians, since you've linked to that site) which think that Keynes is wrong or outdated, that much is clear. But it will become "not modern" when, you know, at least one major first-world economy runs on something better. A theory only supercedes the old one when it's been tried and tested, not when one fringe group starts screaming that they know better. The way I see it, the Libertarians don't as much have "theories" now, they just have an untested "hypothesis". They think they know better how the economy should be run, but we don't really have any proof that things actually work that way.
In fact, if we're talking Libertarians, most signs point at "we've already been there, and it didn't work too well." Which places even more burden of proof on the ones claiming to know better. If I jumped off the house once and broke my leg, someone damn better have a very convincing proof that jumping off the house is good.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying their view is necessarily wrong. Who knows, they could even be right. Just that it's untested, and _didn't_ replace Keynesian economics yet.
As for that site and analysis of the Great Depression... well, I didn't have the time for an in-depth study of that particular text yet, but let's just say, as a superficial impression and gut feeling that:
1. Well, I might even take that site seriously, if it wasn't an overt libertarian propaganda site. The emphasis not being even as much on "libertarian" as on "propaganda". You only need to click on their "about" link to basically be told, in so many words, that it's all about propaganda. It speaks over and over again about being born out of a vision that they don't just need ideas, they need to disseminate them.
And somehow I don't expect a balanced view of the world from a site which is (A) overtly aligned with one point of view as their holy truth, and (B) overtly dedicated to bringing the Word to the masses. It's akin to asking for an unbiased academic discussion of the world's religions on Vatican's site.
2. Suspiciously enough, it also runs contrary the more mainstream analyses of the Great Depression which, funnily enough, are the exact opposite.
The fact is, the USA government didn't even have the means to do that at the time. It also omits the fact that it was just the latest and biggest of a whole cycle of booms-and-depressions that plagued the whole 19'th century and early 20'th century, most of which happened in decisively laissez faire times. (I.e., practically libertarian times.) And which cycles are not only documented everywhere, but even Marx's prediction of a self-destruction of capitalism was based on them. It was _that_ predictable where it's headed. It also seems to blatantly omit the fact that countries where the government _did_ massively spend (e.g., the USA with its New Deal, Germany with its rearmament, etc) got out of the depression the fastest, while those who stuck to lean government ideas (e.g., Canada) were stuck with a depression until the 40's, when they finally got dragged into WW2. Etc.
Briefly, it just seems to be a bit too unbelievable a whole to swallow.
Nothing stops these governments from issuing bonds on the private market. If private investors are not willing to lend them money without high interest charges or requesting structural reforms, there's usually a very good reason. Would you be willing to risk your retirement savings on Nigerian dams or helicopters?
That's very insightful indeed, but then at least let's stop sneering at them because they're poor.
Poverty is, basically, a vicious circle. You don't get a loan because you're poor, and you can't get out of poverty without some money to industrialize with.
Saying that some third world country is inept for not building a helicopter factory, is kinda silly.
It's like saying that a homeless should just take a loan and open a supermarket. That's a non-functional plan to get out of poverty. He can't get that kind of a loan because he's poor in the first place. (And, yes, I can understand why the banks don't want to risk that money.)
Except that a homeless in the USA or EU could still (at least theoretically) get a job at a car wash and use that income, no matter how meager, to slowly crawl his way up. Third world nations without much natural resources (mainly read: oil) can't even do that. The only way up is to invest in industrializing, and they don't have the money to do that. And if anyone offers them some money, it's tied to the condition that it helps destroy the little industry they already had.
Briefly: I'm not asking anyone to risk their retirement savings to help Nigeria, or any other poor country. But I _am_, basically, saying, "let's not be so snotty, shall we?" The snotty attitude that they must be poor only because they're inept, is... rarely that simple. I'd say it reeks of the medieval elitism that the peasants must be poor only because they're stupid and lazy, except it doesn't just reek of it, it _is_ the same elitism in a more enlightened disguise.
The problem with "inept" government in the third world usually goes somewhat like this: to build anything, you need money. Loans and foreign aid are available, of course, only they come tied to one or both of:
1. you _must_ use that money to buy from the country that gave you the money. Often they'll even tell you what, and from exactly what company.
For example, let's say Nigeria wants to build a dam. (Or anything else, including helicopters.) The sane way would be to pay some local construction company to build it. After all, they work cheaper, you inject some money in the local economy, and might even stimulate some specialists to stay in your county instead of skipping over the border at the first oportunity. But you won't get a loan, much less foreign aid, for that. Unless you can prove that you're so solvable that you didn't even need a loan at all, except for some uncontrollable desire to pay interest.
The loans you can get come with strings attached like "but you'll contract the building from this American corporation." Sometimes you don't even actually see the money. They're transferred from an USA bank account to another USA bank account, and that's that. Of course, it only costs a few times more than letting the locals do it, and helps ruin yet another local industry, but such is being on the shit end of the imperialism stick.
And if you think that dam building is something you can do without, picture the same deal on grain, trucks, and other such. Essentially there's a _shitload_ of loans and foreign aid that isn't what you think it is. It's tied to destroying your local agriculture and industry.
2. you _must_ implement some good ol' right-wing reforms. Cut government spending, let companies go bankrupt, cut down social security, raise interest rates, etc.
Sounds like good, common sense advice, right?
Well, the problem with common sense is that it isn't that common and often makes no sense. In this case, according to modern Keynesian economics, those are the exact measures that will transform a recession into a depression, or a depression into a crash. That's stuff you do in an economic boom, not during times of crisis. It's counter-intuitive, but modern economics tend to be that way.
Essentially we, the West, have been asking the third world countries to destroy their own economy, ever since WW2. Welcome to the wonderful world of imperialism. They're supposed to be busy sewing cheap sports shoes and mining cheap iron for us, not to start industrializing.
And as a third world government, you'll be nailed to a cross whether you take it or not. Your choices there are (A) refuse and get to explain to a whole country why they'll have less bread or more brownouts this year, and that in the long term it's better for them, or (B) take it even if you know that in the long term you're only harming your country. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, and someone will blame you for either choice.
Oh, and if you chose A, congrats, now you've got all the first world treating you like the great Satan too, for refusing to play their game. Some economic sanctions might be in your future, to destroy you that way. On the other hand, choice B at least makes you look good in the short term and often comes together with some bribe.
It's easy to blame it on inept governments or kleptokracy, but that's really the only choices they typically have there. It's a lose-lose choice. But option B at least doesn't cause massive unrest and a bunch of other problems.
It's easy to look at it and say that they took choice B only because they're fucking stupid or because of the bribe. And I guess it some cases it even is so. But in a lot of cases I genuinely wonder if it's that simple.
Jesus F. Christ... if you use 10-20 litres / 100 km, then you really should consider a smaller car for a change. If nothing else, for how much you pay for fuel.
There are already cars that run on 3 litres diesel / 100 km. The VW Lupo 3L comes to mind, for example, and that wasn't even a hybrid or anything. Just plain old internal combustion engine.
Want something with a bit more power under the hood and acceleration? Toyota claims 4.2l/100km on the highway for their Prius. Or a Honda Civic Hybrid claims 4.3l/100km under the same conditions.
At any rate, the comparison is very much possible. If you have 1 passenger with you, with such a car you're already comfortably below the 2.9 litres/100 passenger kilometres you mention for the A380.
Heck, even an Audi R8 only burns some 10.2l/100km on the highway, or so Audi claims. And that's, you know, their highest end car. It's a V8 engine, a bit over 4 litres. It takes that kind of a motor to reach 10 litres / 100 km on the highway, and even that doesn't come even close to 20 litres / 100km.
I keep talking about fuel use on the highway because, really, that's the only thing worth comparing to an airplane. You wouldn't take a plane around town, so there's no point in comparing the car's fuel use in town to an airplane.
So basically, what I'm saying is:
1. Let's all stop pretending that air travel is soo economic and environment friendly.
2. If your car actually burns 20 litres / 100 km, you might was to consider getting an actual car instead of driving a tank;)
On one hand, you're indeed not going take a train or drive a car across the Atlantic. That much is obviously true.
On the other hand, flying across the USA or Europe is a whole other thing. I always wondered why don't more countries build their own equivalent of the French TGV (really fast train, basically.) When you consider what joke flying always was, and only got worse, you don't even need _too_ high speed to reach your destination faster than with an airplane.
Just add the whole coming one hour early for the security check and finding your gate, the whole waiting on the runway because the luggage truck didn't come on time, the waiting for your luggage at the other end, etc. Add stuff like that airports are built outside the town and you have to drive there. Now divide the distance by _that_ total time, and you average speed for the whole experience isn't that hot any more.
I mean, I'm too lazy to search for the actual data right now, but let's say an airplane cruises at a generous 1000 km/h, which is transsonic or close enough. Let's say yout travel 1000 km with it. Not a long trip, to be sure, but also high enough for many people to take a plane anyway. Ok, so that plane would spend only 1 hour in the air. From my experience with air travel, however, you're not getting much change out of 3 hours for that trip, once you factor in all the inconveniences of modern air travel. So a train would only need a bit over 300 km/h to compete with that. It's feasible.
Now also consider that travel by train is a _hell_ of a lot more comfortable (unless you pay an arm and a leg for first class on the plane, I guess), doesn't put you through all those inconveniences, is a lot more reliable (it would take a _hell_ of a storm to keep a train from departing), and you don't get your luggage lost or dropped on concrete (or if you do, you only have yourself to blame.) Dunno about you, but I'd prefer that train every time it was possible.
And for the eco-slant, well, trains run on electricity. It is possible to run them on hydro power or nuclear power just as well. Now those have their own debatable downsides, but neither produces any CO2.
Before I get started, please don't take it as siding with Comcast, not even in a "playing the devil's advocate" kind of way. I'm just going to explain how it works. The morality of it, or of acting against it, well, you can decide for yourself. I'm not going to tell you what to think.
1. The pricing model for ISP's was based on the idea that the provider of that content paid for the bandwidth. That's why you can get a flat rate, in a nutshell. If someone put a 1 MB file on their site and you downloaded it, the site would pay for that MB. Each and every single MB you downloaded, would be an MB that someone else paid for.
Then the ISPs and backbone would split the loot according to who pushed what over whose lines.
And that worked remarkably well, while the Internet meant mostly HTTP. (Well, except emails, but those too used to be smaller and fewer.)
Enter P2P, and now there's a lot of data being transferred between the users, with noone paying for it. If I download a WoW patch from Tom, Dick and Harry -- the WoW patch downloader being a modified BitTorrent client -- we're all on flat rate, so noone pays. Every 1 MB I download is 1 MB that Blizzard didn't pay for. Worse yet, it's actually a bit more data transferred than 1 MB coming over HTTP.
"Legal" BitTorrent transfers tend to fall in that category. Someone thought he's smart if he, basically, cheats the ISPs of the bandwidth price. Instead of putting the file on a site and paying for the bandwidth, now he leaves it to a bunch of users that the ISP can't figure out how to bill for it.
Simply put, that price model is breaking down. And all the king's horses and all the king's men... err, I mean the ISPs, can't figure out how to put it back together again.
2. To make things work, paying for the receiving end too was based on oversell and... well, a self-throttling sharing scheme.
Let's say you're a really small ISP and have a 1 Gbit/s connection to the backbone and 1000 users. You sold each a 6 mbit/s connection. Now as long as most of them aren't downloading full time, they might even actually get 6 MBit/s. But in the worst case scenario, if each has one download going at the same time, they end up splitting your backbone connection evenly and getting 1 Mbit each. They'll grumble, but live with it.
What BitTorrent does, though, is best described as "not playing nice" in that sense. It will keep opening more and more and more connections until it fully saturates those 6 Mbit/s, everyone else be damned.
In the same scenario, just 150 users with BitTorrent are enough to gobble up almost 900 MBit/s out of your total 1000 MBit/s, and squeeze everyone else in the remaining 100. That's 15% of the users, using 90% of the bandwidth. And if you get 20% of them on BitTorrent, God help you, because those alone are already trying to use more bandwidth than you have total, and if bandwidth was air everyone else would be blue in the face like a Smurf.
Now again, I'm not saying that Comcast and the gang are doing the right thing there. I'm just saying what their problem is. You can take it as an example of a problem their own massive oversell created, if it makes you feel any better.
First of all, if you talk about something that actively takes control of my character for me, to do all that stuff, you're talking a bot. Which is against the TOS on any MMO, and can get you banned on the spot. I very much doubt that anyone will implement one right in the client, as some next great feature.
Second, those exist already. See, WoW Glider.
(Note that I'm not actually advertising using it, and if anyone gets banned using it, I'll cheer for the Blizzard employee that banned them. Just using it as an example that they exist.)
Third, well, if you want your character to go level himself up without your help, you probably couldn't care less how. So there is no particular reason to want it to find quests, group with people (or other bots) in a meaningful way, and solve clever puzzles (though there are only a couple of quests on WoW which involve any kind of puzzle solving anyway). If it goes and stabs rabbits for 8 hours, who cares.
Quests and stories are for humans who actually want to be told a story. They don't do jack squat for either the bot, or the kind of human who only cares about XP and levels enough to use a bot. That kind of human will just want his bot to go grind whatever NPCs offer the quickest rewards. A bot that travels between Gadgetzan and Darnassus repeatedly to follow a FedEx quest line for a for a few thousand XP a pop is all around bad bang-per-buck, or rather xp-per-hour. Grinding whatever NPCs are around your own level is much better xp-per-hour. It only makes sense to do those if you're the kind that gets bored of just stabbing rabbits for hours, and bots don't get bored easily anyway.
So automatizing my character to go pick and hand in quests while I'm AFK sounds... well, I'm sorry if it sounds offensive, but like a poorly thought out idea. If I'm the kind of guy who actually gives a damn about quests and stories, why would I want a bot to go do that for me? It would be a bit like using a robot to watch the next Star Wars for me. Either I still care enough about it to watch it personally, or I might as well not bother at all. At any rate, that's not the kind of bot that people use.
Fifth, for the kinds of bots actually in use, building a clever neural network just to make an even better bot seems a bit... overkill. On SWG people were making that kind of bots even with the game's own script language, which wasn't even that great a script language in the first place. I'm saying that just to illustrate how little is really needed to have a working bot. You just need a loop and a few ifs, really.
Sixth, I was under the impression that they're talking about interpolating/predicting what other characters do, rather than being a bot for one's own character. Hence, the answer was about that.
Duly noted, but still... if in those 500 ms it guessed that my Priest hit his psychic scream (i.e., fear) spell and he didn't, you're at a disadvantage. In fact, you're at a bigger disadvantage than if I _had_ used that spell and you wouldn't know it for half a second. In the latter scenariom you'd run around for half a second without knowing it, and _then_ hit your Will Of The Forsaken. My next spell wouldn't even be available in those 500ms, so you wouldn't even be hurt yet by that delay. But hit your fear protection prematurely because of a mis-guess, and you've put yourself at somewhat of a disadvantage when it wears off.
Well, I suppose I can concede that it might work for the daily PvE grind. It's not like those critters do much unexpected stuff, so interpolating 500ms is probably feasible. I just don't see a good PvP player as being that predictable, though, and the consequences of taking a decision based on a bad guess can be more dire.
Dude, let's just look at what Fiduciary really means, before going down that line of reasoning.
In a nutshell it just means that they'll do a honest job and not defraud the investors to enrich themselves. That's it. They have the respeonsibility to do a honest job... the same as everyone else.
Every single employee in the company is held to the same expectation. (If less sometimes less formalized.) The lowly janitor too isn't supposed to let himself be bribed to install a few keyloggers and sell the company's secrets to the competition. The database admin too isn't supposed to export the production database and sell it to the competition. The accountant isn't supposed to invent new taxes payable to his own account, either. Etc. They're all, simply put, expected to do a honest job.
Shouldn't they be paid millions per year too, then?
Do you genuinely think that paying them tens of millions a year is the only way to keep upper management honest?
1. That's such a bad opinion of them, that it stands out even on Slashdot. But more importantly,
2. Repeatedly it didn't really work. Enron and WorldCom sure weren't kept honest by high management salaries, for example. Or I can remember at least one case where one guy gutted a company just for the hell of it, and actually cooked the books to make it look like his cost-saving measures were doing anything positive at all.
3. Even more importantly, you can look at continental Europe or Japan, places with much more reasonable GINI indexes. Meaning that the difference between a director's wage and the janitor's wage is a helluva lot less than in the USA. If what you say was true, then both should see some massive corruption and have their economies ran into the ground as everyone who gets to the top starts defrauding the company to fill his own pockets. And somehow, while such cases occasionally do exist, they tend to be rather isolated, few and far in between.
Contrary to somewhat popular misconception, there isn't some income limit at which people suddenly become honest because they already have all the money they might ever need. The guy with 2 million a year, wants 3 million a year. The guy with 20 million a year, wants 30. If you paid someone 2 billion a year, the only effect would be that he'd want 3 billion, so he can buy an aircraft carrier as his personal yacht.
You can see that for as long as we have a recorded history. Whoever was an earl wanted to be a duke, whoever was a duke wanted to be a king, and whoever was a king wanted to be an emperor. It's just human nature, and it's how the human brain is wired.
The brain sees differentials, not absolute happiness values, so there simply is no point where you'll say "ok, I have enough, I can stop now." And if you had an inclination to supplement your income by dishonesty when you had only $100,000 a year, you'll have the same inclination at $10,000,000 a year.
Simply put, past maybe the poverty limit, more money doesn't make one more honest.
All that's maybe changed is the sum that looks like an acceptable bribe, but no more. But even then, if the only thing that keeps a director honest is that the company is paying him more money than he could steal from it on his own, then that company just replaced an illegal drain with an even bigger drain that it called legal. It's a Baldrick-class cunning plan akin to giving each bank robber a million a month, 'cause it's more than they could find in any bank in cash to rob.
So to cut this long rant short, I might even swallow the argument that such a big pay is needed because of their uber-l33t skills, and the rarity of such skills. Tell me that you need the 0.1% best managers and economists that ever walked the Earth, and I might even see how such a salary would be warranted to secure their services. (Though, then again, the top 0.1% physicists don't make tens of millions a year.) But that they need tens of millions in compensation for doing their job honestly? Heh. Gimme a break.
For starters, let's look at the plain old interpolation. I see it kicking in all the time in MMOs (e.g., WoW), and players seem to run ahead for half a mile until the game gives up and disconnects them. Or spend the next 5 minutes running in place against a fence.
Let's take just that one simple action: running. How do you know where I'm going to interpolate it right past a second or two. If I arrived at, say, Westfall (to give a low level example that anyone who's ever played WoW will have seen), coming from the north. Will I:
1. keep running towards the Deadmines?
2. turn left into Duskwood? (It is right west of Sven and the cemetery, after all.)
3. turn right and go into the town? And then what? Do I go there to take the gryphon to somewhere else? Or to the inn, so I can set my hearthstone and/or log off in an inn? Go up the tower to talk to the ancestor cow for that event? Or what?
4. Stop and use the vendors on the east side of the road? (It is a convenient spot to repair my equipment, stock up on arrows and/or do some cooking, after all.)
Really, it's not even a large town. In fact, it can't even be called a village, since it has no actual houses. It's just an inn, a tower, a lumber mill, and a gryphon master. Even outpost sounds too much for that thing. But the possibilities already branch considerably.
Now think PvP combat. It tends to be fast and furious, compared to PvE, and there'll be much jumping around and quick reflexes needed.
How does your client predict when my Warlock or Priest will fire off their fear spell? What if my Priest just shields and bandages himself instead at that moment? If your client guessed wrong, you'll have wasted some slow-recharging skill (e.g., Will Of The Forsaken) for nothing, and get kicked right in the nuts when it wears off. In fact, you'll be worse off if your client guesses "you're feared now" at the wrong spot, than if it didn't interpolate anything whatsoever.
Or did my druid use a bleed-effect DOT finishing move, _or_ maybe aimed for the lower damage instant-damage one? The answer there determines, for example, if your dwarf should use its stone form or not. If you guessed wrong or too early, I'm going to use the other one. Or maybe I'll shift back to humanoid and kite you to death.
And that's just scratching the tip of the iceberg.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that they're uber-complex ultra-intellectual games. At the bottom of it, there _is_ some repetition involved. At a very over-simplified level, you attack, you defend, you jump around if you're in PvP, and occasionally hit your shield or healing (potion), or whatever you have. But that's only the undetailed big picture. The order and exact details will vary a _lot_. Now maybe not enough to make the game interesting to you, if you weren't interested in the game in the first place. But it might just be too many possibilities to predict right.
Why is being rich considered by rich people a license to be evil?
First of all, let's qualify "evil". A lot of people (probably not you, but just to get it cleared anyway) have this "Black and White" idea that "evil" means being on a self-destructive quest to cause as much pain as possible, fuelled by pure hatred towards your fellow man. Unfortunately those don't really get ahead in the real world.
These are people who, simply put, don't give a flying fuck about their fellow man. You're an NPC to them. They don't hate you, they just don't care. They might harm you if it provides some momentary entertainment, and they think they can get away with it, but just as well they might pretend to be your friend if it helps them get an advantage that way.
They also tend to be people who can (A) read others perfectly, and (B) fake any feeling convincingly. They can look hurt when they need to look hurt, shed a tear when that gets the emotional message across, or sell you logging rights in Sahara with the most sincere look on their face. They could tell you to do something that will ruin your life with a perfectly straight face, and be perfectly able to look themselves in the mirror the next day. Why not? You're just an NPC to them. You don't matter.
Just as an example of lying with a straight face, a lot love to reinvent their past as something that milks the most sympathy. It helps manipulate people.
And my take is that it isn't money that turns people into sociopaths, but the other way around: in the race up the corporate ladder, these guys have a natural advantage. And in the race between corporations, the one without principles or scruples will have the lower costs and get ahead.
If being rich changed someone that way, then he probably was thinking that way long before. All that's changed now is that he feels powerful enough to drop (a part of) the mask and act like the asshole he always wanted to be.
In a sense, we even expect them to. The idea that a corporation should have no other goals or responsibilities than making more money, at all cost, is, well, just saying that said corporation should act like a sociopath. Unfortunately, a corporation is nothing more than a bunch of people, and its decisions _are_ taken by people. So if we expect corporations to act that way, and put our money on those which act that way, we're pretty much asking them to be led by sociopaths. Or if they aren't, we'll sell their shares and move our money to the ones who can act properly antisocial.
Who says it was Leonardo who couldn't stop. Let's face it, if it went anything like modern project management in a lot of places, it would be more like:
Act 1:
Leonardo's PHB: Good news Leonardo! We've won the preliminary round of talks with Francesco del Giocondo for a painting! Now he'll only want a time and cost estimate, and a tech demo to help him make up his mind! Leonardo: Great! Did he say _what_ he wants painted? How big? I mean, the cost and time depends on that. Leonardo's PHB: Now, now, Leonardo... what did I tell you about scaring the customers with that kind of technical questions? Get working on that demo already, and we'll ask for more details after he sees it. Leonardo: Hmm, ok, WTH, I'll just paint the castle then... Leonardo's PHB: That's the spirit!
Act 2:
Leonardo's PHB: Sad to say, Mr del Giocondo wasn't impressed with your demo. He said it was too sketchy and lacking any detail, but luckily the VP of Marketing managed to convince him to give you another chance. Leonardo: Whoa there, you said he wanted a demo, not a full painting. Of course it's sketchy! Leonardo's PHB: Now, now, we're not at assigning blame. What matters is that we get the contract, right? Leonardo: Right. I guess I'll go back to painting the castle, then. Leonardo's PHB: Oh, right, I forgot to mention that. He thinks that it doesn't quite fit what he had in mind, so he'll want it changed to a lake. Leonardo: Ah well, I'll just get a fresh canvas then. Leonardo's PHB: Not so fast, we don't have the budget for a new painting. You'll have to change the demo from a castle to a lake. Leonardo: You're kidding, right? I mean, seriously... Leonardo's PHB: Do I look like I'm kidding? I already promised the CEO it'll be ready in half the time of a new demo. Leonardo: Oh, for fuck's sake...
Act 3:
Leonardo's PHB: Good news, Leonardo. Francesco was pleased, now he wants to see how the lake looks as a background for a woman's portrait. Leonardo: Let me guess, he wants her painted _over_ the lake, because someone told him it'll be cheaper, right? Leonardo's PHB: Well, duh, of course. Leonardo: So when does he send this woman here, so I can paint her? Leonardo's PHB: Who said anything about doing the final product already? You're just supposed to do another demo, so he can see if that's what he wants. Just take any woman and paint her there. Leonardo: Grrr... Ok, I'll just paint my girlfriend, then.
Act 4:
Francesco del Giocondo: Ah, yes, Mr da Vinci, I presume. Yes, that's very interesting, indeed. See, the lake is exactly what I had in mind for the background, but what I actually want is a portrait of my wife, Lisa. Leonardo: Great. I'll just get a new canvas, and we can talk about what time should I start. Francesco del Giocondo: Wait, new canvas? I was assured that we can just change that bit in the demo. I mean, look at it, it looks almost ready... Leonardo's PHB: Yes, of course, Mr del Giocondo. No need to waste money on starting from scratch. Leonardo: Guys, that's crazy, that wasn't supposed to work that way. Francesco del Giocondo: Well, I see... I guess I'll have to find another painter, then. Leonardo's PHB: Leonardo, so help me God, if we lose this customer, I'll make sure you never work again in this city! Leonardo: Ok, ok, I'll just... ummm, make her a bit thinner then to match Mrs Gioconda. Right. Francesco del Giocondo: Oh, I'm so delighted we could reach an agreement.
Act 5:
(Several months later.)
Mona Lisa: Hmm, no, those eyebrows just won't do... They'll have to go. Leonardo: Completely?? Mona Lisa: Yes. My friend, Maria assures me that that's the latest fashion in Constantinople. Leonardo: But... but... you'll look like a radiotherapy patient without them. Mona Lisa: Mr da Vinci, I think you forget who's the customer here! No way I'm accepting this product as it is! Leonardo: Ah, ok, let me get my turpentine bottle then. Anything else? Mona Lisa: In fact,
I think a calendar comes into play when you have a society that is dependent upon producing a considerable agricultural surplus. I don't think a subsitence farmer needs one that is that sophisticated. Granpa says when the Sun comes up between those two hills when you stand at the bend in the river, it's time to plant.
Yes, well, see, discovering _that_ for the first time is really what discovering the calendar was all about.
Your grandpa probably got that idea from someone who used a real calendar, though. Then someone noticed that the time when the noble/boyar/elder/whatever tells them to start ploughing is when the sun is rising between those hills.
But now think that you're the first human who's trying to discover that from scratch. You don't know what is the magic date, and you don't know which local landmarks to use there. Trial and error are a pretty risky proposition there, since there's a huge time between the experiment and seeing whether you were right, and it only takes one really bad error to starve over the winter.
I don't buy the argument that the "Fertile Crescent" was uniquely suited for agriculture. It isn't really an ecologically contiguous area.
Well, it wasn't me who used that argument, or at least not about the ecology of it. Honestly, I don't know if there was anything special about the flora there.
What we do know, though, is that the Nile valley and Mesopotamia used irrigation, and were _much_ more fertile than any other place at the time. Later, sure, it meant making a surplus and trading it for other stuff. But now think that evolution of plant usefulness. If there's a breaking point where finally the crops become just abundant enough to feed you and your family until next year, then that's where that would happen. A plant which would still be a piss-poor crop anywhere else, might just be just productive enough in a very fertile and irrigated place.
Think those indians you mentioned, which originally just grow a little vegetable stuff to supplement their hunting and gathering. You can't really live off that alone, but it helps. And then one of them discovers this place where, if you plant right after the river floods, you suddenly get a _lot_ of crop for a lot less work. It might just be the breaking point where they say, "screw this moving around following the buffalo herds, let's stay here and plant this stuff."
It is a crossroads migration paths cross and ideas can tag along from the Nile to the Tigris and vice versa.
Which is actually a very important thing too, if you think about it.
You need a certain population, within communication range to each other, to start getting any real progress. In the 20'th century we've seen that fast progress because, basically, suddenly we were a huge pot of 6 billion people exchanging ideas. Someone could get a neat idea in New York, and within a week someone in Moskow could hear about it and build from there.
You just don't get that kind of progress with isolated tribal villages of 50-100 people.
I mean, at the risk of sounding snotty and elitist, most humans go through their lives without ever getting a too innovative idea, or having the time to toy with it and turn it into something useful. We have billions of humans, but maybe a few tens of thousands total can be credited with any signifficant innovation in the whole last century. The same applied to ancient Greece too, since I mentioned their philosophers earlier: they had literally tens or hundreds of thousands of wannabe philosophers, but if you look at how many actually discovered anything worth remembering, you nave maybe a couple per century.
So as long as you have isolated communities of tens of humans, well, it will take longer. You might get many thousands of years between each noteworthy idea.
And you probably don't even get information about previous unfinished/failed ideas and experiments either,
The thing is, I'm not convinced that in the mid-term, the shift to agriculture was all that wonderful for the average human. [...] But I agree agriculture was the key development. What isn't clear is why it took 90% of the species span of existence to discover it.
So basically you almost answered your own answer there: if in the short term it didn't look better than hunting/gathering, then why bother with it?
They weren't clairvoyant, you know. They didn't _know_ that if they started doing agriculture, some 100,000 years later they'll have all this wonderful stuff.
Humans do decisions based on short-term rewards all the time. Heck, you'd think we're smarter than them, but 21'st century corporations still take decisions based on what's the reward in 1 quarter. If switching to agriculture isn't better for feeding your family _right_ _now_, you don't get started on it. And until the right conditions and pre-existing inventions were in place, agriculture might have been so piss-poor as to not even keep you fed until next year.
Well, that's just one factor, but I see no point in repeating the previous message again.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, not sure I mentioned pins anwhere there. Did I?
;)
;)
Otherwise, yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if a joke turns out to be less than an accurate prophecy in 15 years from now. I mean, if I could see 15 years in the future, I'd be making a fortune on the stock market instead of posting wisecracks on Slashdot
Then again,
1. Some of Jules Vernes's ideas weren't that horribly off the mark. For example, his obsession with gun cotton was justified, and to this day we use exactly that in bullets. Ok, so we use cordite, which is basically guncotton treated so it won't spontaneously ignite. Submarines are also in use, and even equipping it with a ramming spike did remain the leading way to damage an ironclad for a really long time.
2. The same would have been said in the 80's if you told someone about computing in 2007. "Imagine running that CPU off a hard drive, then multiply the speed by 1000, and... umm... you're back to where you started. Anyway, that's how computers will work in 2007." He'd have laughed his arse off at you.
Just saying
Ah, a sauna and computer room in one. Nice. I can see it now, being in the underwear and sweaty in front of the computer for a WoW raid won't be some insult thrown around by non-gamers, but actually normal and healthy.
Ya know, it might even help get laid. Once you have a computer like that, you just need to find an excuse to show her something on the computer, and then you can casually mention, "you might want to take off some of the clothes before I start it, or you'll get them all sweaty." Might even work, now that I think about it. I was reading somewhere that if you get her to take her shoes off, the rest is somewhat easier. I figure that by the time you got her to remove her blouse, skirt and stockings because you're about to start the sauna, it should be even less of a struggle ahead
Damn... now I wish I had one of those back in university, when I was doing the asignments of anyone who was a female and willing to ask...
I must admit, that beats my samovar idea handily. Well done
Well, I wish the best of luck to them if they want to stick to only articles with "no cleanup tags, no "citation needed" tags, no disambiguation links, no dead external links, and no fair use images" before even considering them for review.
;)
Already the average article on Wikipedia looks somewhat like this:
"Twenty-sided dice have by definition 20 sides [citation needed], meaning that they're Icosahedron-shaped [citation needed]. They're used as dice in many tabletop role-playeing systems [citation needed], such as the D20 system [citation needed] developped originally by Wizards Of The Coast [citation needed] for the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons. [citation needed] The Source Reference Document first edition states [citation needed]: 'You'll use twenty-sided dice for most rolls to determine the success or failure of an action.'[citation needed]"
That is, unless someone _also_ decided to flag it NPOV because it said "have 20 sides" instead of "are believed by many people to have 20 sides", or conversely flagged it as weasel wording if it did say "are believed by many people to have 20 sides".
Mind you, that's a made up quote, but it has the right "feel" to show what I mean. Some articles look genuinely like that.
I'd be tempted to see that as another form of vandalism, but then I remember Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity." I mean, I'd normally say noone is so stupid as to stamp a quote with "citation needed" in good faith, but... each time I assumed something like that about any action, someone selflessly volunteered to prove that indeed people can be even more stupid. The Darwin Awards are full of such selfless people, for a start
Space travel, the trial-and-error way, eh? You mean, Wan Hu style? ;)
"Early in the sixteenth century, Wan decided to take advantage of China's advanced rocket and fireworks technology to launch himself into outer space. He supposedly had a chair built with forty-seven rockets attached. On the day of lift-off, Wan, splendidly attired, climbed into his rocket chair and forty seven servants lit the fuses and then hastily ran for cover. There was a huge explosion. When the smoke cleared, Wan and the chair were gone, and was said never to have been seen again."
Dunno about you, but I'd rather have it designed by the kind of people who'd rather sit down and calculate, instead of just doing the first dumb thing that comes to mind and see if it works.
Yes, _sometimes_, for a very narrow class of problems (like counting the bytes) the simplest way is to just do it and measure the number. But when you actually have to design something more complex, that quickly becomes a horrible idea. Even for something as simple as a watch, the probability to get it right by just throwing some parts together repeatedly and seeing if the result works, is close to nil. At some point you have to sit down and calculate the size of those cogs.
Plus, there is a lot of other stuff around you that happened only because someone sat down and calculated stuff, instead of good ol' dumb trial-and-error.
There's no way to invent a laser by trial and error, for example. The probability that just accidentally you'd have the right kind of material, and the right kind of coating at the ends, and the right light wavelength to excite it, and it's cut at the exact right length, is completely negligible. Humans have been cutting and setting rubies for millenia, and there are exactly _zero_ that started just emitting a laser beam by trial and error. It took someone calculating what happens there, before you could even know that a laser is possible, and how to make one.
In fact, pretty much the last major invention (that I know of) that was perfected by trial and error, was the light bulb. And, at least according to Tesla, that was a monumentally wasteful undertaking. To quote Tesla, "His method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 percent of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor's instinct and practical American sense."
But even that stopped working for anything more complex than a light bulb. There's no way you could design a CPU nowadays by trial and error, for example. Even with specialized tools and massively simulating everything ahead, just one glitch sunk 3DFX. (Their Voodoo 5 was supposed to compete with the Geforce 1, but due to having to fix the malfunctioning chip design produced by their tools, it ended up competing with the Geforce 2 instead.) Now picture doing that layout by dumb trial and error instead. I wouldn't even try.
Heck, even in the job of counting bytes, sometimes the "American approach" (*) you describe would give the awfully wrong results until you've fully ported it. E.g., if the code was written with hard-coded constants for the saved data (which probably wouldn't be the case in Oracle's code, but I've seen it happen in other places), then compiling and running it would give the wrong results anyway. E.g., if someone saved an int by writing exactly 4 bytes to disk, it would still be 4 bytes for 64 bit code... and the very incorrect answer.
(*) As a side note, I hate thinking of those as "American approach" and "German approach", as it's really just the approach of whatever person gave that answer. I know there are plenty of Americans too who will stop and calculate, because otherwise the
Aye, lad, of course you can imagine a beowulf cluster of these. But that's the easy part. Everyone can do that these days. Why my nephew could imagine a beowulf cluster on a good day, and he's a toddler.
Now try imagining cooling it. That's the real challenge. That's what makes grown up men cry like little girls.
I mean, look 15 years back in time. That was in 1992. We still had desktop cases without fans (except maybe on the PSU, though even there not on all), CPUs without heatsinks (and in fact, the chip even included in a big slab of resin or such and it made no difference to cooling anyway), and computers could safely run on PSUs whose wattage was a 2 digit number. We also still had RAM fast enough that you didn't need a CPU cache (nor had a transistor budget for it, anyway). And we thought that a program that takes a whole floppy is bloated. Etc.
So I'm going to put on my wizard hat and rub the ol' crystal ball, and tell you how I see computing in the future.
- seein' as case fans started from none, and now we're at two or more 120mm fams and ducts per case, I see the computer of the future as a cube, whose whole face (or maybe side) is one big 14" fan (yes, inch, not cm) blowing air in and another in the back blowing it out. In fact, it will all be one big square wind tunnel, or an oversized hair dryer.
You'll alos be advised to not put anything more flammable than asbestos behind it, and fence it so your cat or toddler can't get behind the computer and get cooked.
- a decent power supply will be around 3-4 kilowatts, but Nvidia will recommend 5 kW for their latest graphics card, more if you run a SLI setup.
- or maybe water cooling will become the standard, and the computer will nicely double as a samovar and espresso machine.
- heatsinks will be made of pure silver. And ATI will still need something that sounds like a jet fighter at takeofff to keep their GPU at only 90C.
- continuing the trend, graphics cards will keep needing increasingly more dedicated power connectors, and increasingly more pins on them. We started at 1 with 4 pins, and now we're at "ATI won't activate this or that function if you don't have 8 pins on the second power connector." I foresee that in 15 years we'll be at 6 power connectors with 16 pins each, just to bring enough current to the graphics card.
- still noone will have invented a better use of all that silicone than adding yet another core, so given that 15 years is no less than 10 cycles of Moore's Law, you'll have anywhere between 2048 and 4096 cores in your PC. More time will be spent passing messages between those and serilizing access to data, in algorithms that were never meant to be massively parallel, than actually computing the useful part. People will still argue that it's the fault of game programmers that they don't split processing 5 NPCs between 2048 CPUs, or for that matter, the fault of compiler makers that they insist on reading the file sequentially instead of each core processing every 2048'th line of the file.
- We'll be up to, oh, maybe DDR9, or maybe some newer standard. It still won't have lower latency in nanoseconds than the old SDR, but people will still buy it based on theoretical burst speed. Even more ridiculously larger caches will be needed just to keep all those cores working at all, instead of spending thousands of cycles waiting for the RAM to finally answer. On the bright side, though, we'll have enough budget of transistors form 2 to 4 gigabytes of cache on the CPU.
- As that trend continues, eventually the disparity between RAM and CPU will get so high that it will be entirely feasible to skip RAM completely, and run the programs off the hard drive and the CPU's L3 cache. (The disparity between CPU speed and RAM latency is _already_ as big as that between the 8088 in the IBM PC/XT and the hard drive it had.)
- People will still take the extra power as an invitation to write bloated and slow code. So even th
Transferring links around isn't the hard part. The hard part is to actually get something that's relevant for that search string.
Just simple lists of keywords associated with that link won't do. We already had that kind of search engines long before Google, and there's a reason why Google handed their arse to them.
And then there are the people gaming the system for a quick profit... even if it means ruining a valuable resource for everyone else. There was an almost epidemic of link spam on all possible forums and blogs, for example, just to raise the Google rank of a couple of pages.
Most of Google's uphill battle so far has been tweaking the algorithm to defend against such "attacks".
(And now that I mention it, it dawns upon me that maybe that's why smaller national engines can do better locally. With everyone trying to game Google and generally the larger English-reading world, it could be that noone bothered polluting the smaller national searches.)
So just being able to swap links around won't do much.
A second and third problems I see with your idea are, well:
1. timing. When I search for something, I'd rather not depend on the right people being online at that exact time. I also want the answer in half a second. Google does that with in-RAM indexes. I wouldn't bet a fortune on someone doing that equally fast via several hops over the net, P2P style.
2. reliability. P2P traffic has been poisoned repeatedly by interested parties, like, say, the RIAA and MPAA. And it's entirely trivial to do so. So what's to keep other interested parties from poisoning P2P search with falsely tagged links?
Even on Google, it's not entirely rare that someone buys ad-word keywords on their competitors' trademarks or such. E.g., if you have a company called, say, "Houndwire", I could buy that keyword for an ad for my company. Now everyone who searches for your company, will have my ad served to them. Then keep my fingers crossed that if I'm in roughly the same market, some people will just go ahead and buy from me. There have been even laws proposed against that kind of impersonation.
Now for adwords it's one thing, but the same could just as well be applied to poisoning a P2P search. Which could ruin its usefulness pretty fast.
Looking through some of your other comments, you really like playing the crusader of poor oppressed heretical theories, don't you? But that's not the important part.
The _real_ mark of the crackpot is believing such bullshit as that there's some high priests with some immutable dogma, quashing poor heretic visionaries like Mr Arp.
The truth is that nothing is that stationary or frozen in conjecture. Especially not in astrophysics. The domain has evolved a _lot_ in the last, say, half a century, and stuff that was heresy once is the mainstream consensus now.
E.g., dark matter would have gotten one laughed out the door some decades ago, now it's exactly the mainstream consensus that you rant and rave against. Dark energy actually came even later.
E.g., space expansion itself was far from being set in stone in the 60's, when Arp published his claim. Heck, we didn't even have an estimate for Hubble's constant until 1958, and it would be another couple of decades until there was a consensus on it. Do you even understand what that means? It wasn't even a law or a theory yet, because noone had measured a falsifiable value to put on those equations.
Also, it helps to remember that he's not exactly a nobody that you can handwave away, contrary to whatever mis-understanding you seem to operate on. He's well know, he's got a Ph.D. in the domain (so it's not as easy to hand-wave him away as the normal crackpots), he's got an atlas of galaxies that's still used as a reference, and many galaxies are still referenced by their Arp number. He's not easy to ignore. He stands out like a sore thumb. There have been a _lot_ of people who've studied his claims.
Basically the last point alone should already tell you how bogus your conspiracy theory is. The idea that millions of people worldwide have somehow all decided to support red-shift in spite of all proof to the contrary, all just toed the party line without questioning, and somehow noone ever broke the pact... is what makes any other conspiracy theory laughable in the first place. Governments and secret agencies hardly ever manage to keep a secret when more than 2 people know it, but somehow millions of astrophysicists all decided to ignore Arp's evidence... and none of them squeaked to the press yet. Amazing. Bloody amazing, that's what it would be.
And so on, and so forth.
Arp wasn't some heretic oppressed by the mainstream High Priests, because there was no such mainstream consensus yet. His hypothesis was actually taken as a very serious possibility at the time, and had to pass the same standards for proof as anyone else's hypothesis. It just happened that another (now) theory fit the actual measured data better. That's all. No more and no less.
So, you know, far from me to keep you from fighting crackpot crusades, if that's what keeps you feeling important. But, please... There are better ones than this kind of thing.
More likely because a key factor in the Windows+Office+IE monopoly is its ubiquity. Remember: it's only a "de facto standard" or "industry standard" if, indeed, pretty much everyone and their grandma is inofficially accepting it as a standard, and when your program/format/whatever is subconsciously synonimous with the whole category.
.doc or .xls format.) So it becomes the de-facto format of communication, and everyone is supposed to be able to read and write it flawlessly. If you're the guy who can't read format Y, you're as much an oddball as if you were the local luddite without a phone.
.xls files." It's that kind of things tha
The way it works is like this: (very nearly) everyone uses product X (where X can be Excel, Word, whatever) with its proprietary format Y. At home, at work, etc. The effects are, in no particular order:
1. That it's taken for granted that almost everyone already knows how to work with X, but you might need to train them to use the competitors' equivalent. This is a very big factor when corporations decide to standardize on something. And, at least subconsciously, it's then a factor in what people use at home. You've already used or seen X used at work, so there's no point in wasting your time learning something else instead.
2. Because of 1, knowing how to use program X suddenly is a "skill" you might need at work. You know chances are overwhelming that, unless you're a linux admin or such, the PC at your next job will have X installed on it, and you'll be expected to know how to use it. It might even be an explicit requirement in the job ad. (Remember: training them is expensive, so you might as well hire those who already have the skills you want.)
So the maths already becomes screwed up. If product X costs, say, 500$, it already paid for itself with interest if having that skill saves you even a month of looking for a new job. Or if it lets you move to a job that pays as little as 50$ a month more than your current one, it paid for itself in 10 months flat. "But some other equivalent is free" just lost a lot of appeal in that context.
3. Because "everyone" has program X, thus they "all" can (and do) use its proprietary format Y. (See the recent linked story about even most OOo users saving in
And especially for a company, "we don't do Y files" is a big no-no. It doesn't take more than one contract lost with a big customer because you told him you don't want to install Word, to make a bigger loss than buying a retail copy of it for every computer.
This is somewhat easier to get around, since nowadays OOo does a decent job of reading _most_ office files. But, still, the more it gets taken for granted, the more you're expected to be a 100% flawless emulation, down to the 65536 bug. And it gets pointed as a show-stopper if one guy's spreadsheet uses some obscure old function or macro that you don't emulate 100% accurately.
4. Even more importantly, well, you can't have a monopoly on interchangeable separate pieces. That kind of a market can be attacked one product at a time. You want every product to depend on every other product. You want people to say, "yeah, Linux is nice, but does it run the latest version of Word?" and the like.
But to cut this long rant shorter, again, it all boils down to ubiquity. It boils down to the next manager doing any purchasing thinking "naah, _everyone_ knows how to use Windows and Word, but we'd need to retrain everyone if we installed Linux and OOo."
And in that aspect, raising a whole bloody generation of Indians and Chinese on Linux and OOo, is probably something that scares the seven shades of shit out of MS. It's the kind of thing that could lead to "nah, if we're offshoring there and/or importing workers from there anyway, we'd Linux and OOo are for free and we'd need to retrain them for Windows and MS Office." Or worse yet, to realizing, "hmm, everyone there uses ODF, don't they? I guess it would cost us more to force them to accept
Well, the Earth is pulling the moon towards it too, and yet we still have a moon after all these billions of years. The Sun is pulling the Earth towards it, but, funnily enough, after all these billions of years we're not quite there yet.
In a sense, the Hitchhiker's guide got that right: ""There is an art to flying, or rather a knack. It knack lies in learning to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, that provides the difficulties."" We keep falling in an almost circular orbit around the Sun and ending up (almost) where we started.
What I'm trying to say is that those super-massive black holes obviously do suck everything towards them. But the rest of the galaxy sees it as centripetal force and rotates around them.
The problems with a black holes are at closer ranges.
For a start, if you do get closer to it than its event horizon, then you're properly fucked. There is no way to get out of there, not even theoretically. Not even light can get out of there. Hence, the name black hole.
However, I'll return to the analogy with the solar system. With the Sun's massive gravity well, it's damn near impossible to hit it, even if you wanted to. If you dropped a big rock right at it, even the slighest deviation or initial speed sideways (like would happen if you dropped it from Earth), would cause a clean miss and you'd just get that rock in some kind of orbit around it. The only way to actually hit the sun would be if that orbit was flattened enough that it passes through the sun.
And the same problem applies to black holes too. Remember that it's a more massive gravity well _and_ the "bullseye" is much smaller, at least in relation to the gravity well. As you fall even a little off the centre, your speed would increase enough so at one point the centrifugal force (yes, I know it doesn't even exist, but it makes the explanation easier) just flings you clean around it.
There's even at least one theory that nothing ever finishes falling into a black star. Although there is energy loss due to that X-ray emission and all, basically matter just spirals closer and closer to the event horizon without ever reaching it. Think an asymptotic decay. It gets closer and closer and closer over time, but never quite reaches it.
The second problem is, well, tides. If you get close enough to the centre of a gravity well, say, looking at the centre, then your front is pulled towards it much stronger than your back is.
This is actually true for any gravity well, and, again, you can see it in action in the solar system too. That's why the moon is tidal-locked with the Earth and you always see the same face of it.
But for a massive enough gravity well, the force difference gets larger and can rip a star or a planet apart. That's how stars and black holes end up occasionally peeling another star apart, pretty much syphoning its outer layers.
So basically you could be past the event horizon and still be properly fucked, in slightly different way.
But even that only extends so far. IIRC there are stars orbitting the centre of a galaxy with a period measured in hours. Admittedly, that's not as close as it might suggest, again because of the massive gravity. Even with that angular speed, you still need a heck of a radius to stay in orbit there. But, still, if those survive just fine, then you can probably see how the rest of the galaxy is safe.
Just in case my grasp of English isn't up to snuff, let's look at what the American Heritage Dictionary has to say about it: Miriam-Webster says: "an inclination to put the most favorable construction upon actions and events or to anticipate the best possible outcome"
I don't see any mention that being an underachiever is an integral part of it.
Yes, I guess one way to expect the most favourable outcome is to redefine your criteria so that anything short of a total disaster is a win. Then you won't have many "losses" in your experience, or much reason to expect a loss.
On the other hand, I don't see anywhere that "deluded" can't possibly be it. If you expect the best possible outcome where everyone else sees that chances are 99.99% that it will go bad, you _are_ deluded. You're also still an optimist, according to both quoted dictionaries.
To pick on your own examples, I see nothing in both that says an optimist wouldn't ever try to hit on a movie star. In fact, from where I stand, if anyone's going to try that, it'll be an optimist. The pessimists will look at that course of action, think "screw that, the way the universe hates me, she wouldn't even spit on me" and go do something else.
So it seems to me like you're just giving there a recipe of how to be happy, rather than define optimism. In fact, I'd say you're writing there the exact _opposite_ of what the dictionary says. Expecting the worst so your expectations are exceeded all the time, well, is exactly at odds with the dictionary's "expecting the best possible outcome."
2. It also seems to me that if I were to believe your definition, that's actually worse than pessimism. That's the recipe for being an underachiever. A _happy_ underachiever, duly noted, but an underachiever anyway.
Simply put, humans do what (they think) works and produces the desired results. If you're going to see even missing the target completely as still a great success, then there's no logical need to spend a lot of time and effort trying to hit the bullseye.
As a personal anecdote, I've actually tried your kind of (redefined) "optimism" at some point in college. I can tell you that my grades dipped very very fast. The idea that "ah, who cares about grades, any grade that passes the year is just as good" caused not just half my grades to be just that in one semester, but I actually flunked an exam in the next one. That was the time to revise that philosophy.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you should be ultra-competitive and obsessed with clawing your way to the top at all cost, either. But there are a lot of comfortable shades of grey between that and lowering your expectations to meet the results. A more realistic assessment of where you are, what worked, what didn't, what was really a success, and what wasn't, what you really needed, and what you didn't really need, can be a lot more productive.
Sometimes you don't need to win first prize in a category, yes, that much is true. But then decide that logically and fully aware why and what's the tradeoff. Don't just lower your expectations until whatever happened is great. Because if it's just a reflex to keep doing that to stay happy, then you'll lower them even for the things that do matter.
Past a threshold, maybe. But I could ask the same question about the other side of the coin: "are _optimists_ brain damaged?"
It seems to me that the only position that is actually any use is the center line: realism. A healthy realistic assessment of how the world works and what are the _real_ chances that Y happens when you do X.
Think of, say, the japanese game Go. You look at a group of pieces. Are they alive? Are they dead? The only good position is to just count eyes and conclude impartially based on the rules. Pessimism is, obviously, bad. If you make your decisions starting from "bah, with my luck, those are probably dead too" you'll tend to let groups die which could have been saved, and lose the game. But I'd argue that excessive optimism is actually _worse_. Newbies get pwned most of the time is because they insist on trying to save a dead group or follow a losing ladder, and just give the opponent a bigger capture.
If you don't know Go, think of Chess, Poker, Blackjack, whatever you know. Same idea. Excessive illogical pessimism is bad, but advancing into a trap because of excessive illogical optimism is, I would argue, even worse. Betting the house on the slim chance that you'll get another ace and turn a 20 into a 21 at Blackjack, just because you have a good feeling about your luck and know you can do it, is blatantly stupid.
At some point you just have to face reality and admit that taking or continuing a course of action is stupid and possibly self-destructive. Not because of overwhelming pessimism, not because you'd rather sit in a corner and do nothing, etc. Simply because some other course of action might yield better results with the same time, money and effort investment.
Honestly, the Darwin Awards are full of people who killed themselves because they massively mis-judged their chances on the optimistic side. Like the priest who was sure that his faith will let him walk on water. Doubly so, without a backup plan: he couldn't swim. Can we say that he was a bit too optimistic when judging that course of action?
Or look at the economy. How many people venture their lifetime savings without a realistic plan, just because they use optimism instead of logic? The dot-com bubble -- like most bubbles in history -- was based on optimism too. Forget logic, just dump your money on a company with no product or customers, and if it goes wrong, you know you're lucky enough to sell them to some other dolt before it bombs. How many lost their lifetime savings that way?
Pyramid scams? Same thing. Even people who understand exponentials ended up losing their money to those because they were optimistic enough that they're starting early and will get their payoff before it bombs.
Stock spam? Same thing. There _still_ are people who believe that they can act just fast enough to beat the scam and make a profit there. It doesn't ever actually work, but they're optimistic.
Briefly: much ink has been used in praising the importance of taking the opportunity when it presents itself. And indeed to much pessimism can hinder that. But I fear that not enough has been said about the importance of recognizing what's an actual golden ring that you can grab, and what's the ring on a grenade. History is full of people who'd rather pluck the latter than let a possible opportunity go by... and lost.
Well, it's kinda f. The fact is, all first world governments nowadays are essentially Keynesian. There have been some minor refinements of it, but essentially no big change to the core of it. The whole USA, EU _and_ Commonwealth (the UK one, not the ex-USSR) still _are_ keynesian, and the majority of economists still are keynesian. By what kind of reckoning, then, is it not modern any more?
There are fringe groups (e.g., the Libertarians, since you've linked to that site) which think that Keynes is wrong or outdated, that much is clear. But it will become "not modern" when, you know, at least one major first-world economy runs on something better. A theory only supercedes the old one when it's been tried and tested, not when one fringe group starts screaming that they know better. The way I see it, the Libertarians don't as much have "theories" now, they just have an untested "hypothesis". They think they know better how the economy should be run, but we don't really have any proof that things actually work that way.
In fact, if we're talking Libertarians, most signs point at "we've already been there, and it didn't work too well." Which places even more burden of proof on the ones claiming to know better. If I jumped off the house once and broke my leg, someone damn better have a very convincing proof that jumping off the house is good.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying their view is necessarily wrong. Who knows, they could even be right. Just that it's untested, and _didn't_ replace Keynesian economics yet.
As for that site and analysis of the Great Depression... well, I didn't have the time for an in-depth study of that particular text yet, but let's just say, as a superficial impression and gut feeling that:
1. Well, I might even take that site seriously, if it wasn't an overt libertarian propaganda site. The emphasis not being even as much on "libertarian" as on "propaganda". You only need to click on their "about" link to basically be told, in so many words, that it's all about propaganda. It speaks over and over again about being born out of a vision that they don't just need ideas, they need to disseminate them.
And somehow I don't expect a balanced view of the world from a site which is (A) overtly aligned with one point of view as their holy truth, and (B) overtly dedicated to bringing the Word to the masses. It's akin to asking for an unbiased academic discussion of the world's religions on Vatican's site.
2. Suspiciously enough, it also runs contrary the more mainstream analyses of the Great Depression which, funnily enough, are the exact opposite.
The fact is, the USA government didn't even have the means to do that at the time. It also omits the fact that it was just the latest and biggest of a whole cycle of booms-and-depressions that plagued the whole 19'th century and early 20'th century, most of which happened in decisively laissez faire times. (I.e., practically libertarian times.) And which cycles are not only documented everywhere, but even Marx's prediction of a self-destruction of capitalism was based on them. It was _that_ predictable where it's headed. It also seems to blatantly omit the fact that countries where the government _did_ massively spend (e.g., the USA with its New Deal, Germany with its rearmament, etc) got out of the depression the fastest, while those who stuck to lean government ideas (e.g., Canada) were stuck with a depression until the 40's, when they finally got dragged into WW2. Etc.
Briefly, it just seems to be a bit too unbelievable a whole to swallow.
That's very insightful indeed, but then at least let's stop sneering at them because they're poor.
Poverty is, basically, a vicious circle. You don't get a loan because you're poor, and you can't get out of poverty without some money to industrialize with.
Saying that some third world country is inept for not building a helicopter factory, is kinda silly.
It's like saying that a homeless should just take a loan and open a supermarket. That's a non-functional plan to get out of poverty. He can't get that kind of a loan because he's poor in the first place. (And, yes, I can understand why the banks don't want to risk that money.)
Except that a homeless in the USA or EU could still (at least theoretically) get a job at a car wash and use that income, no matter how meager, to slowly crawl his way up. Third world nations without much natural resources (mainly read: oil) can't even do that. The only way up is to invest in industrializing, and they don't have the money to do that. And if anyone offers them some money, it's tied to the condition that it helps destroy the little industry they already had.
Briefly: I'm not asking anyone to risk their retirement savings to help Nigeria, or any other poor country. But I _am_, basically, saying, "let's not be so snotty, shall we?" The snotty attitude that they must be poor only because they're inept, is... rarely that simple. I'd say it reeks of the medieval elitism that the peasants must be poor only because they're stupid and lazy, except it doesn't just reek of it, it _is_ the same elitism in a more enlightened disguise.
The problem with "inept" government in the third world usually goes somewhat like this: to build anything, you need money. Loans and foreign aid are available, of course, only they come tied to one or both of:
1. you _must_ use that money to buy from the country that gave you the money. Often they'll even tell you what, and from exactly what company.
For example, let's say Nigeria wants to build a dam. (Or anything else, including helicopters.) The sane way would be to pay some local construction company to build it. After all, they work cheaper, you inject some money in the local economy, and might even stimulate some specialists to stay in your county instead of skipping over the border at the first oportunity. But you won't get a loan, much less foreign aid, for that. Unless you can prove that you're so solvable that you didn't even need a loan at all, except for some uncontrollable desire to pay interest.
The loans you can get come with strings attached like "but you'll contract the building from this American corporation." Sometimes you don't even actually see the money. They're transferred from an USA bank account to another USA bank account, and that's that. Of course, it only costs a few times more than letting the locals do it, and helps ruin yet another local industry, but such is being on the shit end of the imperialism stick.
And if you think that dam building is something you can do without, picture the same deal on grain, trucks, and other such. Essentially there's a _shitload_ of loans and foreign aid that isn't what you think it is. It's tied to destroying your local agriculture and industry.
2. you _must_ implement some good ol' right-wing reforms. Cut government spending, let companies go bankrupt, cut down social security, raise interest rates, etc.
Sounds like good, common sense advice, right?
Well, the problem with common sense is that it isn't that common and often makes no sense. In this case, according to modern Keynesian economics, those are the exact measures that will transform a recession into a depression, or a depression into a crash. That's stuff you do in an economic boom, not during times of crisis. It's counter-intuitive, but modern economics tend to be that way.
Essentially we, the West, have been asking the third world countries to destroy their own economy, ever since WW2. Welcome to the wonderful world of imperialism. They're supposed to be busy sewing cheap sports shoes and mining cheap iron for us, not to start industrializing.
And as a third world government, you'll be nailed to a cross whether you take it or not. Your choices there are (A) refuse and get to explain to a whole country why they'll have less bread or more brownouts this year, and that in the long term it's better for them, or (B) take it even if you know that in the long term you're only harming your country. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, and someone will blame you for either choice.
Oh, and if you chose A, congrats, now you've got all the first world treating you like the great Satan too, for refusing to play their game. Some economic sanctions might be in your future, to destroy you that way. On the other hand, choice B at least makes you look good in the short term and often comes together with some bribe.
It's easy to blame it on inept governments or kleptokracy, but that's really the only choices they typically have there. It's a lose-lose choice. But option B at least doesn't cause massive unrest and a bunch of other problems.
It's easy to look at it and say that they took choice B only because they're fucking stupid or because of the bribe. And I guess it some cases it even is so. But in a lot of cases I genuinely wonder if it's that simple.
Jesus F. Christ... if you use 10-20 litres / 100 km, then you really should consider a smaller car for a change. If nothing else, for how much you pay for fuel.
;)
There are already cars that run on 3 litres diesel / 100 km. The VW Lupo 3L comes to mind, for example, and that wasn't even a hybrid or anything. Just plain old internal combustion engine.
Want something with a bit more power under the hood and acceleration? Toyota claims 4.2l/100km on the highway for their Prius. Or a Honda Civic Hybrid claims 4.3l/100km under the same conditions.
At any rate, the comparison is very much possible. If you have 1 passenger with you, with such a car you're already comfortably below the 2.9 litres/100 passenger kilometres you mention for the A380.
Heck, even an Audi R8 only burns some 10.2l/100km on the highway, or so Audi claims. And that's, you know, their highest end car. It's a V8 engine, a bit over 4 litres. It takes that kind of a motor to reach 10 litres / 100 km on the highway, and even that doesn't come even close to 20 litres / 100km.
I keep talking about fuel use on the highway because, really, that's the only thing worth comparing to an airplane. You wouldn't take a plane around town, so there's no point in comparing the car's fuel use in town to an airplane.
So basically, what I'm saying is:
1. Let's all stop pretending that air travel is soo economic and environment friendly.
2. If your car actually burns 20 litres / 100 km, you might was to consider getting an actual car instead of driving a tank
It depends from where to where, I guess.
On one hand, you're indeed not going take a train or drive a car across the Atlantic. That much is obviously true.
On the other hand, flying across the USA or Europe is a whole other thing. I always wondered why don't more countries build their own equivalent of the French TGV (really fast train, basically.) When you consider what joke flying always was, and only got worse, you don't even need _too_ high speed to reach your destination faster than with an airplane.
Just add the whole coming one hour early for the security check and finding your gate, the whole waiting on the runway because the luggage truck didn't come on time, the waiting for your luggage at the other end, etc. Add stuff like that airports are built outside the town and you have to drive there. Now divide the distance by _that_ total time, and you average speed for the whole experience isn't that hot any more.
I mean, I'm too lazy to search for the actual data right now, but let's say an airplane cruises at a generous 1000 km/h, which is transsonic or close enough. Let's say yout travel 1000 km with it. Not a long trip, to be sure, but also high enough for many people to take a plane anyway. Ok, so that plane would spend only 1 hour in the air. From my experience with air travel, however, you're not getting much change out of 3 hours for that trip, once you factor in all the inconveniences of modern air travel. So a train would only need a bit over 300 km/h to compete with that. It's feasible.
Now also consider that travel by train is a _hell_ of a lot more comfortable (unless you pay an arm and a leg for first class on the plane, I guess), doesn't put you through all those inconveniences, is a lot more reliable (it would take a _hell_ of a storm to keep a train from departing), and you don't get your luggage lost or dropped on concrete (or if you do, you only have yourself to blame.) Dunno about you, but I'd prefer that train every time it was possible.
And for the eco-slant, well, trains run on electricity. It is possible to run them on hydro power or nuclear power just as well. Now those have their own debatable downsides, but neither produces any CO2.
Before I get started, please don't take it as siding with Comcast, not even in a "playing the devil's advocate" kind of way. I'm just going to explain how it works. The morality of it, or of acting against it, well, you can decide for yourself. I'm not going to tell you what to think.
1. The pricing model for ISP's was based on the idea that the provider of that content paid for the bandwidth. That's why you can get a flat rate, in a nutshell. If someone put a 1 MB file on their site and you downloaded it, the site would pay for that MB. Each and every single MB you downloaded, would be an MB that someone else paid for.
Then the ISPs and backbone would split the loot according to who pushed what over whose lines.
And that worked remarkably well, while the Internet meant mostly HTTP. (Well, except emails, but those too used to be smaller and fewer.)
Enter P2P, and now there's a lot of data being transferred between the users, with noone paying for it. If I download a WoW patch from Tom, Dick and Harry -- the WoW patch downloader being a modified BitTorrent client -- we're all on flat rate, so noone pays. Every 1 MB I download is 1 MB that Blizzard didn't pay for. Worse yet, it's actually a bit more data transferred than 1 MB coming over HTTP.
"Legal" BitTorrent transfers tend to fall in that category. Someone thought he's smart if he, basically, cheats the ISPs of the bandwidth price. Instead of putting the file on a site and paying for the bandwidth, now he leaves it to a bunch of users that the ISP can't figure out how to bill for it.
Simply put, that price model is breaking down. And all the king's horses and all the king's men... err, I mean the ISPs, can't figure out how to put it back together again.
2. To make things work, paying for the receiving end too was based on oversell and... well, a self-throttling sharing scheme.
Let's say you're a really small ISP and have a 1 Gbit/s connection to the backbone and 1000 users. You sold each a 6 mbit/s connection. Now as long as most of them aren't downloading full time, they might even actually get 6 MBit/s. But in the worst case scenario, if each has one download going at the same time, they end up splitting your backbone connection evenly and getting 1 Mbit each. They'll grumble, but live with it.
What BitTorrent does, though, is best described as "not playing nice" in that sense. It will keep opening more and more and more connections until it fully saturates those 6 Mbit/s, everyone else be damned.
In the same scenario, just 150 users with BitTorrent are enough to gobble up almost 900 MBit/s out of your total 1000 MBit/s, and squeeze everyone else in the remaining 100. That's 15% of the users, using 90% of the bandwidth. And if you get 20% of them on BitTorrent, God help you, because those alone are already trying to use more bandwidth than you have total, and if bandwidth was air everyone else would be blue in the face like a Smurf.
Now again, I'm not saying that Comcast and the gang are doing the right thing there. I'm just saying what their problem is. You can take it as an example of a problem their own massive oversell created, if it makes you feel any better.
Yes and no.
First of all, if you talk about something that actively takes control of my character for me, to do all that stuff, you're talking a bot. Which is against the TOS on any MMO, and can get you banned on the spot. I very much doubt that anyone will implement one right in the client, as some next great feature.
Second, those exist already. See, WoW Glider.
(Note that I'm not actually advertising using it, and if anyone gets banned using it, I'll cheer for the Blizzard employee that banned them. Just using it as an example that they exist.)
Third, well, if you want your character to go level himself up without your help, you probably couldn't care less how. So there is no particular reason to want it to find quests, group with people (or other bots) in a meaningful way, and solve clever puzzles (though there are only a couple of quests on WoW which involve any kind of puzzle solving anyway). If it goes and stabs rabbits for 8 hours, who cares.
Quests and stories are for humans who actually want to be told a story. They don't do jack squat for either the bot, or the kind of human who only cares about XP and levels enough to use a bot. That kind of human will just want his bot to go grind whatever NPCs offer the quickest rewards. A bot that travels between Gadgetzan and Darnassus repeatedly to follow a FedEx quest line for a for a few thousand XP a pop is all around bad bang-per-buck, or rather xp-per-hour. Grinding whatever NPCs are around your own level is much better xp-per-hour. It only makes sense to do those if you're the kind that gets bored of just stabbing rabbits for hours, and bots don't get bored easily anyway.
So automatizing my character to go pick and hand in quests while I'm AFK sounds... well, I'm sorry if it sounds offensive, but like a poorly thought out idea. If I'm the kind of guy who actually gives a damn about quests and stories, why would I want a bot to go do that for me? It would be a bit like using a robot to watch the next Star Wars for me. Either I still care enough about it to watch it personally, or I might as well not bother at all. At any rate, that's not the kind of bot that people use.
Fifth, for the kinds of bots actually in use, building a clever neural network just to make an even better bot seems a bit... overkill. On SWG people were making that kind of bots even with the game's own script language, which wasn't even that great a script language in the first place. I'm saying that just to illustrate how little is really needed to have a working bot. You just need a loop and a few ifs, really.
Sixth, I was under the impression that they're talking about interpolating/predicting what other characters do, rather than being a bot for one's own character. Hence, the answer was about that.
Duly noted, but still... if in those 500 ms it guessed that my Priest hit his psychic scream (i.e., fear) spell and he didn't, you're at a disadvantage. In fact, you're at a bigger disadvantage than if I _had_ used that spell and you wouldn't know it for half a second. In the latter scenariom you'd run around for half a second without knowing it, and _then_ hit your Will Of The Forsaken. My next spell wouldn't even be available in those 500ms, so you wouldn't even be hurt yet by that delay. But hit your fear protection prematurely because of a mis-guess, and you've put yourself at somewhat of a disadvantage when it wears off.
Well, I suppose I can concede that it might work for the daily PvE grind. It's not like those critters do much unexpected stuff, so interpolating 500ms is probably feasible. I just don't see a good PvP player as being that predictable, though, and the consequences of taking a decision based on a bad guess can be more dire.
Dude, let's just look at what Fiduciary really means, before going down that line of reasoning.
In a nutshell it just means that they'll do a honest job and not defraud the investors to enrich themselves. That's it. They have the respeonsibility to do a honest job... the same as everyone else.
Every single employee in the company is held to the same expectation. (If less sometimes less formalized.) The lowly janitor too isn't supposed to let himself be bribed to install a few keyloggers and sell the company's secrets to the competition. The database admin too isn't supposed to export the production database and sell it to the competition. The accountant isn't supposed to invent new taxes payable to his own account, either. Etc. They're all, simply put, expected to do a honest job.
Shouldn't they be paid millions per year too, then?
Do you genuinely think that paying them tens of millions a year is the only way to keep upper management honest?
1. That's such a bad opinion of them, that it stands out even on Slashdot. But more importantly,
2. Repeatedly it didn't really work. Enron and WorldCom sure weren't kept honest by high management salaries, for example. Or I can remember at least one case where one guy gutted a company just for the hell of it, and actually cooked the books to make it look like his cost-saving measures were doing anything positive at all.
3. Even more importantly, you can look at continental Europe or Japan, places with much more reasonable GINI indexes. Meaning that the difference between a director's wage and the janitor's wage is a helluva lot less than in the USA. If what you say was true, then both should see some massive corruption and have their economies ran into the ground as everyone who gets to the top starts defrauding the company to fill his own pockets. And somehow, while such cases occasionally do exist, they tend to be rather isolated, few and far in between.
Contrary to somewhat popular misconception, there isn't some income limit at which people suddenly become honest because they already have all the money they might ever need. The guy with 2 million a year, wants 3 million a year. The guy with 20 million a year, wants 30. If you paid someone 2 billion a year, the only effect would be that he'd want 3 billion, so he can buy an aircraft carrier as his personal yacht.
You can see that for as long as we have a recorded history. Whoever was an earl wanted to be a duke, whoever was a duke wanted to be a king, and whoever was a king wanted to be an emperor. It's just human nature, and it's how the human brain is wired.
The brain sees differentials, not absolute happiness values, so there simply is no point where you'll say "ok, I have enough, I can stop now." And if you had an inclination to supplement your income by dishonesty when you had only $100,000 a year, you'll have the same inclination at $10,000,000 a year.
Simply put, past maybe the poverty limit, more money doesn't make one more honest.
All that's maybe changed is the sum that looks like an acceptable bribe, but no more. But even then, if the only thing that keeps a director honest is that the company is paying him more money than he could steal from it on his own, then that company just replaced an illegal drain with an even bigger drain that it called legal. It's a Baldrick-class cunning plan akin to giving each bank robber a million a month, 'cause it's more than they could find in any bank in cash to rob.
So to cut this long rant short, I might even swallow the argument that such a big pay is needed because of their uber-l33t skills, and the rarity of such skills. Tell me that you need the 0.1% best managers and economists that ever walked the Earth, and I might even see how such a salary would be warranted to secure their services. (Though, then again, the top 0.1% physicists don't make tens of millions a year.) But that they need tens of millions in compensation for doing their job honestly? Heh. Gimme a break.
I kinda doubt that it works that well.
For starters, let's look at the plain old interpolation. I see it kicking in all the time in MMOs (e.g., WoW), and players seem to run ahead for half a mile until the game gives up and disconnects them. Or spend the next 5 minutes running in place against a fence.
Let's take just that one simple action: running. How do you know where I'm going to interpolate it right past a second or two. If I arrived at, say, Westfall (to give a low level example that anyone who's ever played WoW will have seen), coming from the north. Will I:
1. keep running towards the Deadmines?
2. turn left into Duskwood? (It is right west of Sven and the cemetery, after all.)
3. turn right and go into the town? And then what? Do I go there to take the gryphon to somewhere else? Or to the inn, so I can set my hearthstone and/or log off in an inn? Go up the tower to talk to the ancestor cow for that event? Or what?
4. Stop and use the vendors on the east side of the road? (It is a convenient spot to repair my equipment, stock up on arrows and/or do some cooking, after all.)
Really, it's not even a large town. In fact, it can't even be called a village, since it has no actual houses. It's just an inn, a tower, a lumber mill, and a gryphon master. Even outpost sounds too much for that thing. But the possibilities already branch considerably.
Now think PvP combat. It tends to be fast and furious, compared to PvE, and there'll be much jumping around and quick reflexes needed.
How does your client predict when my Warlock or Priest will fire off their fear spell? What if my Priest just shields and bandages himself instead at that moment? If your client guessed wrong, you'll have wasted some slow-recharging skill (e.g., Will Of The Forsaken) for nothing, and get kicked right in the nuts when it wears off. In fact, you'll be worse off if your client guesses "you're feared now" at the wrong spot, than if it didn't interpolate anything whatsoever.
Or did my druid use a bleed-effect DOT finishing move, _or_ maybe aimed for the lower damage instant-damage one? The answer there determines, for example, if your dwarf should use its stone form or not. If you guessed wrong or too early, I'm going to use the other one. Or maybe I'll shift back to humanoid and kite you to death.
And that's just scratching the tip of the iceberg.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that they're uber-complex ultra-intellectual games. At the bottom of it, there _is_ some repetition involved. At a very over-simplified level, you attack, you defend, you jump around if you're in PvP, and occasionally hit your shield or healing (potion), or whatever you have. But that's only the undetailed big picture. The order and exact details will vary a _lot_. Now maybe not enough to make the game interesting to you, if you weren't interested in the game in the first place. But it might just be too many possibilities to predict right.
First of all, let's qualify "evil". A lot of people (probably not you, but just to get it cleared anyway) have this "Black and White" idea that "evil" means being on a self-destructive quest to cause as much pain as possible, fuelled by pure hatred towards your fellow man. Unfortunately those don't really get ahead in the real world.
RL "evil", especially of the corporate kind, is really just Sociopathy, a.k.a., Antisocial Personality Disorder. And indeed there seem to be a lot of them in management, and especially CEO positions.
These are people who, simply put, don't give a flying fuck about their fellow man. You're an NPC to them. They don't hate you, they just don't care. They might harm you if it provides some momentary entertainment, and they think they can get away with it, but just as well they might pretend to be your friend if it helps them get an advantage that way.
They also tend to be people who can (A) read others perfectly, and (B) fake any feeling convincingly. They can look hurt when they need to look hurt, shed a tear when that gets the emotional message across, or sell you logging rights in Sahara with the most sincere look on their face. They could tell you to do something that will ruin your life with a perfectly straight face, and be perfectly able to look themselves in the mirror the next day. Why not? You're just an NPC to them. You don't matter.
Just as an example of lying with a straight face, a lot love to reinvent their past as something that milks the most sympathy. It helps manipulate people.
And my take is that it isn't money that turns people into sociopaths, but the other way around: in the race up the corporate ladder, these guys have a natural advantage. And in the race between corporations, the one without principles or scruples will have the lower costs and get ahead.
If being rich changed someone that way, then he probably was thinking that way long before. All that's changed now is that he feels powerful enough to drop (a part of) the mask and act like the asshole he always wanted to be.
In a sense, we even expect them to. The idea that a corporation should have no other goals or responsibilities than making more money, at all cost, is, well, just saying that said corporation should act like a sociopath. Unfortunately, a corporation is nothing more than a bunch of people, and its decisions _are_ taken by people. So if we expect corporations to act that way, and put our money on those which act that way, we're pretty much asking them to be led by sociopaths. Or if they aren't, we'll sell their shares and move our money to the ones who can act properly antisocial.
Who says it was Leonardo who couldn't stop. Let's face it, if it went anything like modern project management in a lot of places, it would be more like:
Act 1:
Leonardo's PHB: Good news Leonardo! We've won the preliminary round of talks with Francesco del Giocondo for a painting! Now he'll only want a time and cost estimate, and a tech demo to help him make up his mind!
Leonardo: Great! Did he say _what_ he wants painted? How big? I mean, the cost and time depends on that.
Leonardo's PHB: Now, now, Leonardo... what did I tell you about scaring the customers with that kind of technical questions? Get working on that demo already, and we'll ask for more details after he sees it.
Leonardo: Hmm, ok, WTH, I'll just paint the castle then...
Leonardo's PHB: That's the spirit!
Act 2:
Leonardo's PHB: Sad to say, Mr del Giocondo wasn't impressed with your demo. He said it was too sketchy and lacking any detail, but luckily the VP of Marketing managed to convince him to give you another chance.
Leonardo: Whoa there, you said he wanted a demo, not a full painting. Of course it's sketchy!
Leonardo's PHB: Now, now, we're not at assigning blame. What matters is that we get the contract, right?
Leonardo: Right. I guess I'll go back to painting the castle, then.
Leonardo's PHB: Oh, right, I forgot to mention that. He thinks that it doesn't quite fit what he had in mind, so he'll want it changed to a lake.
Leonardo: Ah well, I'll just get a fresh canvas then.
Leonardo's PHB: Not so fast, we don't have the budget for a new painting. You'll have to change the demo from a castle to a lake.
Leonardo: You're kidding, right? I mean, seriously...
Leonardo's PHB: Do I look like I'm kidding? I already promised the CEO it'll be ready in half the time of a new demo.
Leonardo: Oh, for fuck's sake...
Act 3:
Leonardo's PHB: Good news, Leonardo. Francesco was pleased, now he wants to see how the lake looks as a background for a woman's portrait.
Leonardo: Let me guess, he wants her painted _over_ the lake, because someone told him it'll be cheaper, right?
Leonardo's PHB: Well, duh, of course.
Leonardo: So when does he send this woman here, so I can paint her?
Leonardo's PHB: Who said anything about doing the final product already? You're just supposed to do another demo, so he can see if that's what he wants. Just take any woman and paint her there.
Leonardo: Grrr... Ok, I'll just paint my girlfriend, then.
Act 4:
Francesco del Giocondo: Ah, yes, Mr da Vinci, I presume. Yes, that's very interesting, indeed. See, the lake is exactly what I had in mind for the background, but what I actually want is a portrait of my wife, Lisa.
Leonardo: Great. I'll just get a new canvas, and we can talk about what time should I start.
Francesco del Giocondo: Wait, new canvas? I was assured that we can just change that bit in the demo. I mean, look at it, it looks almost ready...
Leonardo's PHB: Yes, of course, Mr del Giocondo. No need to waste money on starting from scratch.
Leonardo: Guys, that's crazy, that wasn't supposed to work that way.
Francesco del Giocondo: Well, I see... I guess I'll have to find another painter, then.
Leonardo's PHB: Leonardo, so help me God, if we lose this customer, I'll make sure you never work again in this city!
Leonardo: Ok, ok, I'll just... ummm, make her a bit thinner then to match Mrs Gioconda. Right.
Francesco del Giocondo: Oh, I'm so delighted we could reach an agreement.
Act 5:
(Several months later.)
Mona Lisa: Hmm, no, those eyebrows just won't do... They'll have to go.
Leonardo: Completely??
Mona Lisa: Yes. My friend, Maria assures me that that's the latest fashion in Constantinople.
Leonardo: But... but... you'll look like a radiotherapy patient without them.
Mona Lisa: Mr da Vinci, I think you forget who's the customer here! No way I'm accepting this product as it is!
Leonardo: Ah, ok, let me get my turpentine bottle then. Anything else?
Mona Lisa: In fact,
Yes, well, see, discovering _that_ for the first time is really what discovering the calendar was all about.
Your grandpa probably got that idea from someone who used a real calendar, though. Then someone noticed that the time when the noble/boyar/elder/whatever tells them to start ploughing is when the sun is rising between those hills.
But now think that you're the first human who's trying to discover that from scratch. You don't know what is the magic date, and you don't know which local landmarks to use there. Trial and error are a pretty risky proposition there, since there's a huge time between the experiment and seeing whether you were right, and it only takes one really bad error to starve over the winter.
Well, it wasn't me who used that argument, or at least not about the ecology of it. Honestly, I don't know if there was anything special about the flora there.
What we do know, though, is that the Nile valley and Mesopotamia used irrigation, and were _much_ more fertile than any other place at the time. Later, sure, it meant making a surplus and trading it for other stuff. But now think that evolution of plant usefulness. If there's a breaking point where finally the crops become just abundant enough to feed you and your family until next year, then that's where that would happen. A plant which would still be a piss-poor crop anywhere else, might just be just productive enough in a very fertile and irrigated place.
Think those indians you mentioned, which originally just grow a little vegetable stuff to supplement their hunting and gathering. You can't really live off that alone, but it helps. And then one of them discovers this place where, if you plant right after the river floods, you suddenly get a _lot_ of crop for a lot less work. It might just be the breaking point where they say, "screw this moving around following the buffalo herds, let's stay here and plant this stuff."
Which is actually a very important thing too, if you think about it.
You need a certain population, within communication range to each other, to start getting any real progress. In the 20'th century we've seen that fast progress because, basically, suddenly we were a huge pot of 6 billion people exchanging ideas. Someone could get a neat idea in New York, and within a week someone in Moskow could hear about it and build from there.
You just don't get that kind of progress with isolated tribal villages of 50-100 people.
I mean, at the risk of sounding snotty and elitist, most humans go through their lives without ever getting a too innovative idea, or having the time to toy with it and turn it into something useful. We have billions of humans, but maybe a few tens of thousands total can be credited with any signifficant innovation in the whole last century. The same applied to ancient Greece too, since I mentioned their philosophers earlier: they had literally tens or hundreds of thousands of wannabe philosophers, but if you look at how many actually discovered anything worth remembering, you nave maybe a couple per century.
So as long as you have isolated communities of tens of humans, well, it will take longer. You might get many thousands of years between each noteworthy idea.
And you probably don't even get information about previous unfinished/failed ideas and experiments either,
So basically you almost answered your own answer there: if in the short term it didn't look better than hunting/gathering, then why bother with it?
They weren't clairvoyant, you know. They didn't _know_ that if they started doing agriculture, some 100,000 years later they'll have all this wonderful stuff.
Humans do decisions based on short-term rewards all the time. Heck, you'd think we're smarter than them, but 21'st century corporations still take decisions based on what's the reward in 1 quarter. If switching to agriculture isn't better for feeding your family _right_ _now_, you don't get started on it. And until the right conditions and pre-existing inventions were in place, agriculture might have been so piss-poor as to not even keep you fed until next year.
Well, that's just one factor, but I see no point in repeating the previous message again.