The "standing on the shoulders of giants" phrase comes to mind.
Humans did use their intelligence to try to live better, but each step had to solve certain problems before they could move on to the next step.
E.g., before you can have agriculture, you needed to have (A) the right conditions, which is why it evolved in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and (B) a calendar.
Being able to just flood a plot of land, or have it naturally flooded for you, is godsend at that point in time. For starters it allows you to live on far less "modern" plants, and with less work. To put things in perspective, even as late as European middle ages, you'd harvest 2 to 7 grains of grain for each grain planted. (By comparison, nowadays you'd get several hundred grains per grain planted.) Now move backward a bit more, and griculture evolved on really really shitty plants. So the fertility boost of irrigation may have been not just an extra, but actually _needed_ to be able to subsist on agriculture at all. You _had_ to have that to get agriculture "bootstrapped".
The type of soil is important too. A plough usable on northern european soil, for example, wasn't even invented until AD times. (That and the invention of the horseshoe by Germans was one of the factors that suddenly allowed them to challenge the Romans.) So having a bunch of earth turned into mud regularly may have been the _only_ way to start planting anything at all.
A calendar is also more important than it sounds, because the seasons go on whether you like it or not. If you don't start, say, harvesting at the right point of time, the next flood of the Nile comes and destroys your whole crop right there. So someone has to figure out how to count the days right, and/or how to build a stick in the ground and some markers that tell him when to start doing this or that.
That's just one example of a problem which looks trivial in retrospect, but it was the culmination of a whole chain on non-trivial discoveries.
To make things worse, now picture that:
A) You have a chicken-and-egg problem: before you have agriculture, the pressure is a heck of a lot lesser to figure out the calendar. You don't have a tech tree, like in Civilization games, to look ahead at and see "oh, now we have to work on inventing the calendar, or we'll never get agriculture in time."
As a hunter-gatherer, you just go hunting and gathering daily, and live off whatever you find. There's no use even trying to plan ahead, until you can actually store stuff for the winter, and that won't happen with berries and hunted meat. (Until you can cure meat somehow, there's no way to keep it around in a useful form anyway, so you have to go hunt your dinner daily regardless of whether you figured out the seasons or not. And to give you a timeline, AFAIK, it wasnt until the Roman empire that someone finally figured out how to, essentially, ferment meat and make a sausage out of it.)
B) You have small isolated populations, and everyone has to spend most of their day either hunting/gathering their dinner, so there aren't that many people to stay around and think up new stuff and experiment with new stuff.
For contrast sake: we all know how many great things the Greeks invented or thought up, but the thing is: the Greeks could afford to have as much as 1/3 of the population (the free males) sitting around playing philosopher in between wars. Because the other 2/3 of the population (the women and slaves) supported them. That was a _lot_ of manpower dedicated to figuring out how the world works in ancieng Greece.
And remember that as late as the ancient Egyptian Old Kingdom era, if you plotted a Gauss curve with the age at which people died, the peak would be in the 30's. (Plus a spike in the first 3 years of life.) In caveman times, I wouldn't be too surprised if it was even less. You just didn't have the time to learn a lot, think a lot about the world, make great discoveries, etc. You'd marry at 12, make a bunch of kids in a hurry, and die, and work the whole
Think of it this way: in the beginning code was new, and like any program written in the last 7 days before the deadline (ok, only 6 'cause on Sunday He rested), not exactly tested. Weird bugs happened all the time, and God had to really use His imagination to explain them all as miracles, or to fix them.
Sometimes things got so far out of whack, that He had to do a player-wipe and start anew. (See, the flood.)
I don't envy his job there, really. I mean, you have an obscure race condition and just _one_ virgin girl gets pregnant out of nowhere, and people still talk about that after 2000 years. Like noone else ever had a race condition in their code.
And that's not even talking about the kind of players he had. The very first two, you tell them to stay away from that tree 'cause it's still buggy and does crazy stuff to your int stat, and what do they do? Right. Anyone who's ever been a coder/wizard/builder/whatever on a MUD is probably with me when I say I really feel His pain there.
Or you have just one loophole in the physics code, and a whole freakin' nation starts building a tower to abuse that loophole.
But as time went by, the thing got better and better debugged, and you can let the physics engine run everything for years without a glitch. None of that having to intervene personally to fix things, or explain creatively why some guy got 100 times as many bread and fish out of a basket as he put in.
So nowadays God can relax and play a bit of WoW instead. Yeah, it's an easier job, but I think he earned a break fair and square;)
I'm sorry, but lying under oath isn't exactly a legal requirement.
You'll notice that they're not accusing him of human rights violations, they're accusing him of lying to congress. If I read it right, in a sworn testimony too.
So let's put _that_ defense away already. They're not condemning Yahoo for doing business with China. Period.
Plus,
1. it cuts both ways. If he's supposed to comply with Chinese laws and regulations to do business in China, then by the same logic he's supposed to comply with US rules and regulations to do business in the US. That includes such concepts as, basically, that you're not supposed to lie in a sworn testimony.
2. "But <insert other arsehole> is doing it too!" is a defense that was considered laughable even in kindergarten. If Johnny was hitting other kids, it wasn't considered an invitation to do the same even in kindergarten. So it's equally laughable to see it used to defend all around immoral business practices.
3. Especially when it's based on a very warped notion of what it means "doing it too." I don't think the US government officially aided China in hunting down its disidents. There's a big difference between (A) turning a blind eye to someone else doing something wrong, when you can't prevent it anyway, and (B) actively aiding them in doing it. To give an example, it's the difference between, (A) ignoring a bank robbery in progress, since I can't dodge bullets anyway, (B) actually driving the escape car for the robbers. Neither is "knight in shiny armour", but it takes a very disfunctional view of the world to put an equals sign between the two. Neither is white, but they're very different shades of grey.
So to cut it even shorter: just because someone else isn't 100% pure paladin-in-shiny-armour defender-of-all-oppressed, it's not a blank-cheque excuse to be an outright arsehole.
4. I'm sorry, but "cost of doing business" isn't a moral wildcard excuse. You don't have a sacred human right to make a profit at all cost, and it doesn't supersede all other moral and legal expectations.
Sure, we're glad for you if you do manage to make a profit. Kudos and more power to you, and we might even admire you for it.
But if you're an arsehole in the name of doing business and making a profit... well, you're still an arsehole.
Now I'm not working at MS, so no way to _know_ it, but I don't think they'd move file copying into the _kernel_. (Then again, they did move stuff to kernel space before to gain 1% more speed, so it's not outright impossible.) But seriously, the kernel in any OS is there to provide the essential stuff, not file copying. You might get file open, file read, file write, and file close in there, but not the graphical shell's implementation of reading from one and writing in the others.
Additionally, _if_ they had file copy implemented in the kernel, then there would be no way for Kaspersky to get in the way there and make it any worse. So they probably don't have a kernel function that copies files.
What I'm getting to with this big tangent is: probably some other kernel function is leaking, and it's probably called from other programs too. I.e., you might get some side-effects even if you _don't_ copy sixteen thousand files in one go. If it's a memory leak in the file-related functions, any other program opening and closing files lots would have the exact same effects... eventually. Even if it doesn't fully run out of memory, well, wth, I have better uses for my RAM than to have 100 MB wasted to such leaks.
E.g., if I brute-force search for some text in all files on my hard drive (I do exactly that now and then), even with some other program (e.g., I use Total Commander lots), how do I know it doesn't happen to use the same functions?
Plus, what interests me more is this: well, copying 16k files in a burst is a good way to cause a leak to run out of RAM. But what happens if you just leave your computer on long enough and copy lots of small files in smaller batches? I mean, wth, nowadays a lot of people leave their computers on. It isn't just for linux uptime brag-fests any more. Does the same effect happen if I leave my computer on for a month and copy, say, 600 files a day?
Read the list of charges, lemming. Skipping over whether the spamming alone would have richly deserved that, there are still charges like money laundering and fraud. And you think that 5 years are too much for _that_?
What do you propose, then? That we let fraud and money laundering run rampant, as we give convicted criminals a gentle slap on the wrist for that? Or maybe even a slap on the wrist is too brutal by your reckoning?
Also, sad to rain some clue upon your bleeding-heart parrade, but:
1. Fraud and money-laundering laws aren't _that_ new. You could get sent to jail for either of them, hundreds of years ago just as well. Or do you consider anything newer than Hammurabi's Code to be too new to enforce?
2. I'm sorry, but there is no grey area about when a law starts to apply. If you want to protest it, lobby your senator. Breaking a law because until recently it wasn't there, is just about the dumbest excuse I've ever heard.
But more importantly:
3. Get this: the aptly named CAN-SPAM law in the USA says just that: you _can_ spam. You're just not allowed to fake the sender (so no joe-jobs), you're supposed to honour opt-out requests, and some other common sense restrictions. So noone yet has been sent to jail for the act of spamming. The closest they got to that, was getting convicted for breaking the other provisions of the law.
That's the crucial bit that the horde of bleeding-heart idiots miss when moaning that any punishment is too high for spamming: noone ever got convicted for spamming. But if you start doing joe-jobs, using botnets, trying to circumvent not only opt-out but people's filters too, and generally be a major asshole to millions of people just because you can... well, then don't expect the rest of us to have any sympathy. If your attitude to the larger community is "you all can kiss my arse, I'll do whatever I want to you because I can", then don't be surprised if the answer is "you can kiss all _our_ arses, because we'll get rid of you and your kind". And if we need a new law for that, we'll make one.
Actually, the scary part is that I can easily see how someone will take it as an invitation to install more bloat on your hard drive, do things even less efficiently, etc.
I started my programming experience almost directly with assembly. Well, I had about a year of BASIC on my parents' ZX-81 first. But that was a damn slow machine (80% or so of the CPU was busy just doing the screen refresh) and Sinclair BASIC was one of the slowest BASICS too. So with that and 1K RAM (you read that right: one kilobyte), you just couldn't do much, you know. So my dad took the Sink-Or-Swim approach and gave me a stack of Intel and Zilog manuals. Anyway, you had to be particularly thrifty on that machine, because your budget of CPU cycles and bytes makes your average wristwatch or fridge nowadays look like a supercomputer.
I say that only to contrast it to the first time I saw a stacktrace (Java, obviously) of an exception in a particularly bloated Cocoon application running in WebSphere. If you printed it, it would run over more than two pages. There were layers upon layers upon layers that the flow had to go through, just to call a method which, here's the best part, didn't even do much. That nested call and all the extra code for reusability sake, and checks, and some reflection thrown in for good measure, obviously took more time than the method code itself needed.
It hurt. Looking at that stacktrace was enough to cause physical pain.
Now I'm not necessarily saying you should throw Cocoon and J2EE away, obviously there are better ways to do that even with them. Like, for a start, make sure your EJB calls are coarse granularity so you don't go back and forth over RMI/IIOP just to check 1 flag.
But how many people do?
The second instance when it caused me pain is when I was testing a particularly bloated XML-based framework, and it took 1.1 seconds on a 2.26 GHz Pentium 4 just for a call to a method that did nothing at all. It just logged the call and returned. That's it. That's 2.5 _billion_ CPU cycles wasted just for a method call. That's more than 30 years worth of Moore's law. Worse yet, someone had used it between methods in the same program, because apparently going through XML layers is so much cooler than plain old method calls. A whole 30 years worth of Moore's Law wasted for the sake of a buzzword. The realization hurt. Literally.
Again, I'm not saying throw XML away generally, though I would say: "bloody use it for what it was meant, not as a buzzword, and not internally between classes in the same program and indeed the same module." It just isn't a replacement for data objects (what Java calls "beans"), nor for a database, nor as just a buzzword to have on the resume.
Each iteration of Moore's Law is taken as yet another invitation to write crappier code, with less skilled monkeys, and don't bother optimizing... or even designing it well in the first place. Why bother? The next generation of CPUs will run it anyway.
And the same applies to RAM and HDD, more or less. I've seen more than one web application which had ballooned to several tens of megabytes (zipped!) by linking every framework in sight. One had 3 different versions of Xerces inside, and some classloader magic, just because it beat sorting out which module needs which version. Better yet, they were mostly just the GUI to an EJB-based application. They didn't actually _do_ more than display the results and accept the input in some forms. Tens of MB just for that.
So now look on your hard drive, especially if you have Vista, and take a wild guess whether those huge executables and DLLs were absolutely needed, or are there mostly because RAM and HDD space are cheap?
At this rate and given 4TB HDDs, how long until you'll install a word processor or spreadsheet off a full HD DVD?
Dude, no offense, but I see business decisions taken every day that are 100%, pure, unadulterated, _show-business_, and serves no other purpose than to boost some PHB's ego or make him feel like he's doing something (cool.) And I'm not even counting the ego-masturbation kind where some clueless PHB takes some "strategic decision" based on knowledge and expertise that he just doesn't have. (The ego-masturbation there being either pretending that he's savvy enough to even know the implications of what he decides there, or pissing on everything to mark his territory, just to show that he can.)
If your company isn't one of those places, well, count your blessings and thank your guardian-angel/ancestor-spirits/luck/RNG/whatever-you-believe-in. Seriously. Kudos and more power to you then.
But it's childish and massively uninformed to pretend that such things don't happen in the real world. Just because you might not have seen them happen (or may not have been qualified to realise what's really happening there), it doesn't mean it doesn't happen every day.
In major corporations too. In fact, _especially_ in major corporations. The more hierarchy levels between the guy taking "strategic decisions" and the guys who actually know what's happening, or make it happen, the higher the chance that he doesn't know what's happening there. In end-effect that any "strategic decision" he's taking there is as disconnected from reality as French generals in the 19'th century deciding to use the Gatling gun as an artillery piece, at artillery ranges... so by the time the enemy actually got in range, it would be out of ammo. They had never seen it firing, they had no actual idea of what it does, but they took strategic decisions about it anyway.
I swear that if clue was air, the ones at the top of some particularly deep hierarchy pyramids would be permanently blue in the face and dizzy all the time.
Of course, no manager would ever (A) admit that he's doing purely ego-boosting stuff, and in most cases (B) even know. _That_ is what makes it possible.
Well, that's what I thought about the Dreamcast too. I mean, who cares if it only sold a fraction of what the PS2 was selling? Mine will still work, right? And Sega will surely keep making games for it, right?
Well, I'm proud to say, I was partially right there. My Dreamcast still works flawlessly. Hasn't had a new game made for it for a damn long time now, though.
Seriously, the prices of developping a new game are insane these days. Actually, make it: for a decade or so now, and it's only getting worse. So they need a certain market size just to recoup the costs.
And no matter what game you make for a console, not every single owner of that console will buy it. Doesn't matter what game it is. Even Hallo 3, not every XBox owner on the planet bought it. And that was a major success. You have to hedge your bets a bit for the case when it's a lot less of a success. I.e., you have to have a bit of a safety margin there.
So if a bubble bursts, it can be bad news. But, hey, your own console will keep working.
And before someone pipes up with "But Nintendo itself will keep making games for it"... well, so much good that did to the popularity of the N64, eh?
Well, see, the old definition of "liberal" (before in the US conservatives managed to redefine it to be some commie-mutant-traitor kinda pejorative) meant... well, the best way to explain it, is what nowadays is called "libertarian". Sorta. Conservatives were for the good ol', tried-and-tested power of the land-owners and top-down way to run an economy (with the king and landowners being "top" and you being "down"), liberals were for a more laissez-faire kind of economy. Let private initiative and the free market take care of everything. That kinda thing.
That was the kind of liberalism that produced (and was produced by) the industrial revolution, which repelled the corn laws, etc.
And it seems to me that this case is as liberal as it gets there. The government wasn't involved, private initiative (of a rich mafioso) led to the optimal solution, and I'm sure that a free market and supply-and-demand economics were involved somehow too. (E.g., he has to pay a competitive wage to the hitmen, based on supply and demand;)
Heck, you can pretty much see Adam Smith's "invisible hand" metaphor in action there. To someone it the death of a spammer was worth more than whatever else he could have bought with that money -- and with the prices and wages in Russia, that must have been a lot of other stuff that could have been bought with the money -- and someone provided a supply for that demand. That's the kind of thing the wealth of nations is built upon.
Caution: some sarcasm may have been involved. I know that's not exactly what Adam Smith was advocating, but hey... An invisible hand beating the snot out of a spammer. Now that's a metaphor I can't resist;)
Thanks for the correction, I'll try to remember it. Still, what with not being a native English speaker nor in an English speaking country, if that's the worst blunder I've made... I'll take it as a compliment:P
Let's put it like this: the very same institutions "where a disruption will affect global markets and everything that follows" have, about a dozen times in the last year alone, copied sensitive data on some sales-guy's laptop and it got lost. Some of the very same institutions had got pwned and had zombies. Some of the very same institutions have offshored that kind of data to places where it's entirely out of their control, just because it was a couple of dollars cheaper. (And I don't mean just to India, but also EU banks discovering that their whole customer data is in the hands of Swift... who'll pretty much give it to anyone who asks. So they can't fulfill their _legal_ privacy obligations in the EU, much less whatever extra they promised their customers.) Some of the same institutions allowed personal laptops on the intranet without any extra checks. Some of the same institutions will cheerfully tell any data over the phone if you just claim to be someone else. At least one such institution was probed by leaving 20 virused USB sticks in front of the front door, once a day, and 17 of those got actually used. At least one got pwned by "janitors" connecting keylogger gizmos between each keyboard and the computer. Some of the very same institutions forgot to disable employees' logins after firing them... or had one login for the whole department on everything except the personal workstation, so there's no easy way to invalidate it for only one employee. Etc.
Do you honestly see no disconnect there?
Because from where I stand, it looks like building an anti-asteroid defense system on my roof, but leaving the front door open. Not just unlocked, but wide open. It's ensuring against a SF threat, but being blissfully oblivious to the real every day threat.
You want decent physical security? A normal building and a couple of guards can offer you just that. You don't need to be dug in 50 ft below the ground. Put it on the last floor, so it doesn't get flooded, too.
Even if they sent some ninjas/007/mission-impossible/whatever types to physically steal your data, noone's going to blow up your freakin' wall to get in. So whether it's 50 ft of mountain or 1 ft of concrete, it's irrelevant. Unless those computers are (A) not connected to anything outside the bunker, and (B) not serviced by any humans, there are _far_ easier ways to get to that data.
_That_ is why I'll call it ego masturbation. I'm not against sane physical security, but, please. When something is this disproportionately blown out of any proportion or usefulness, I have this gut feeling that there wasn't much (real) analysis done when choosing it.
Pseudo-security is a bad thing, because it gets people to let their guard down. When they think that some magical talisman they bought (or in this case a bunker) makes the server super-extra-uber-secure, then the next thing that happens is that they cut the funding for real security.
Think of the dot-com era, really. How many times have you heard companies going "we're secure because we use 128 bit HTTPS! See that padlock icon? It means we're secure!" and then they forgot to check rights in their web site and/or just leave internal files around in the web server's directories or on some public FTP directory? Or leave their web server, some active ftp daemon, and God knows what else run with the default admin password? I can think of a couple which cheerfully left text files with user data and credit card numbers available for everyone. But, hey, they have 128 bit HTTPS, so they're secure.
Or I know of at least one corporation which bought all sorts of expensive appliances to scan all JMS messages and SQL statements for malicious stuff... but then noone actually configured rules for those. They used them effectively as some magical talisman that makes them secure just by being there, no extra work required. And some of them were bogus talismans anyway, pure snake oil that couldn't even have done the job right.
_That_ is the problem. When someone is as disconnected from reality as to think that security means preventing teams of ninjas from physically breaking in, something tells me that they probably didn't have thought much about actual security. And will think even less about it in the future.
Basically, yes, they're there to boost some manager's ego. I haven't even heard of a recent data loss or theft that involved a team of ninjas breaking in and stealing hard drives. The ones I did hear about, offhand, involved stuff like:
- pissed off admin exports the customer database and sells it to a spammer
- a hired rent-a-coder working at home is given an export of the fucking productive database, just so he can work out the report formatting. So he asks for help in a forum and attaches a zip file of said productive database. Just so, you know, others can try their hand at formatting that data too. (And if you think that's a one-off thing, at a recent consulting job I've seen exactly that happen, with the dumbass PHB's blessing. They exported the productive database, installed it on a test machine, then let the external contractor -- not me, but the guy whose neverending mess I was supposed to help fix -- copy it all on his private laptop too. And since he was not supposed to connect an external laptop to the internal network, the PHB cheerfully supplied an USB stick to transfer the data with. Made me cringe. But, hey, he was cheaper than doing it in-house.)
- productive data, complete with customer names and personal data, is copied on some salesman's laptop, because god forbid that you inconvenience the sales guys in the least bit, even by making them log in to a web site. Plus, I'm sure he thinks he's a wizard with Excel and God knows what ad-hoc graphs and reports he might need to generate on the spot from that data. Then said laptop is forgotten on the airport or stolen. (I can remember a dozen or so instances of this in the news without even googling.)
- social engineering and/or lax security standards (As an extreme case, I've actually worked for a dot-com back in the day, who told their 1st level support to give anyone an admin account who calls in and asks for one. It's easier than just creating one for the regional managers -- although I'd debate whether those need one in the first place. Nah, just tell them to phone in and ask for one. Eventually after a year they realized that they have a few thousand admin accounts and nobody knows who those people are.)
- pwned machines on the internal network that haven't been patched since Jurassic. I remember one touching story about IIRC Slammer, where a company got hit hard because they were running with completely unpatched workstations, since apparently installing any service pack broke one of the internal applications they were using. And, of course, they'd rather save money than fix the stupid application.
- pwned machines on the internal network because some dumbass PHB or marketter figured out (or bribed an engineer for the knowledge) how to open a tunnel from inside to his home machine and leave it on, so he can access the company network from home. So when his unprotected, crapware-ladden home machine got pwned, it was connected to the intranet.
- pwned machines on the internal network because just about anyone is allowed to plug their laptop in
The last three are especially nice if everything is one big network zone.
- pwned machines because some dumbass programmer would rather argue that SQL-injection and cross-site-scripting are just hype, instead of fixing his freakin' application. I'm still suprised at the number of people who don't even know how to quote a string for use in a web page or in the database. Or better yet, to use prepared statements and/or some template/framework that handles that kind of thing for you. And, yes, I remember at least one article linked even on Slashdot where the idiot was arguing that cross-site-scripting vulnerabilities are inevitable and harmless.
- pwnage via any of the above methods (including social engineering or dishonest employees) because noone bothered setting productive database passwords more creative than the same as the app name, and/or using more than one account for a whole department. Or indeed for the whole company. It's too much work
Though which would you rather have: decreased blood flow or the side of your heart blow out?
Decreased blood flow is nasty in its own right too, especially reduced blood flow to the brain. It can mean often dizziness, confusion and/or constant anxiety (due to CO2 poisoning) even _with_ the heart allowed to expand to compensate for the valves malfunctioning. Reduce flow some more and, well, you might start losing neurons fast to lack of oxygen. And those don't regenerate, btw.
Not that the other organs are better off with restricted blood flow either. We're talking basically shock and shock can and does kill.
So basically if you wanted to say that it's better than being dead, well, it's hard to argue with that. But you might actually end up dead sooner _if_ it restricts blood flow enough, than if you waited until your heart fails naturally. You'd also be pretty much in constant shock before you die, which, as I was saying, is nasty.
Now that all is a big "if" there. That all only applies _if_ it indeed decreases blood flow. I'm not saying it does or doesn't, I don't have half the data to make that kind of judgment. I'm just saying that decreased blood flow isn't something to be shrugged off.
Also note that there are other operations that can help there, including getting mechanical valves installed. So there isn't necessarily a dichotomy there. The question is whether this helps more, not whether it's this or you wait until your heart blows up.
Well, that's an interesting theory, no doubt. Still (without being as smart as Sagan) my impression is a bit the opposite.
See, the funny thing is that humans seem to be built to (A) see and filter patterns in the input data, (B) need a simple explanation, and (C) subconsciously try to keep their mental "model" of the world coherent.
Especially the last one seems to screw us up no end: it's the way cognitive dissonance happens. The way the subconscious seems to work there is that if facts X and Y can't simultaneously be true, one of them will have to be discarded or altered. Which is actually almost a scientific frame of mind. Unfortunately it seems to have little qualms about which it discards, as long as the end result is self-consistent. It can keep and rationalize the blatantly bogus X and discard the common-sense Y only because it really wants to believe Z, which in turn depends on X. Or discard Y because it would imply P, which would imply Q, which is something really bad for one's self-esteem or morale.
For example the textbook example of cognitive dissonance goes something like this: you make some students do a boring and repetitive and seemingly pointless job. They'll hate it. Then you tell them they can stop, but offer them 1$ if they can convince someone else to do it for you. Watch them end up convincing themselves that it's a really good and fun job.
The way that seems to work is a conflict between X = "I'm a honest guy", Y = "honest people don't lie", and Z = "omg, I just lied to someone for a lousy 1$". Therefore they'll convince themselves that Z wasn't really a lie.
Or there was this fun experiment in asking some people to write an essay defending a position that's the exact opposite of what they really believe. Just, you know, to play the devil's advocate. Or so someone can study the graphology effects of writing a lie, or some other bogus justification. Not to actually believe that position, just to write an essay on something that they fully think is bogus. The fun part is that after a few weeks their own position will have shifted more or less towards what they wrote there. Essentially they altered their model to make that essay feel like less of a lie.
Or the pattern seeing also can work funny: if you really want to see a certain pattern, you _will_ see it. It's called selective confirmation.
So basically what makes us as a species such dumbasses at times, are the exact same traits that make us so smart and able to do science. We have the right reflexes, they're just not... polished enough. They can operate on bogus data and apply fallacies just as cheerfully, if not even more cheerfully, as doing real logic.
Actually, seeing beta-test as "suply the beta testers with a free game for the next 6 weeks for no purpose" is arguably the worst attitude a company can have, and chances are the effects will be seen in the final game.
1. That's some people who put up with some major bugs and crap balance, to help you fix the game. For the price of a "free game." If you were to hire internal testers for that, even at minimum wage in Elbonia, it would cost you more than 10$-15$ a month. In fact, you'd have to give those a copy of the game too, so that evens out to meaning that the volunteers essentially work for you for 0$ a month.
If anyone actually sees it as doing them some royal favour by letting them beta-test your crap, it denotes a head-up-the-ass attitude that doesn't put much value on getting those bugs reported and fixed. It doesn't bode well.
But more importantly
2. If it had been beta-quality stage, never mind the stage where it would actually be offering a finished game for free, it makes no sense to abort it for 6 months. Either (A) you decide it's actually ready and proceed to the stress test and launch, or (B) that final stage is one of continuous tweaking-and-seeing-the-results and a rush to find as many bugs as you can. Both are things you don't do in short fits and bursts. Well, not if you actually care about delivering a finished and polished product.
Balance tweaks, for example, you can get sorta right on paper with lots of maths. (Though the average game designer seems unable and uninterested in taking a spreadsheet and nailing that maths in detail.) But to _really_ know if it works or not, you have to see what thousands of players come up with as ways to abuse it. And see what happens if you add 1% to this spell, or subtract 1% from that armour class. It's not something you can get right in 1-2 big sweeping changes tested briefly every 6 months.
Bugs too don't just mean the big obvious fuck-ups, which shouldn't have made it past the internal testing anyway. It means race conditions that happen to the average player maybe once a month, or stuff that involves the player being on the exact pixel between terrain tiles, or whatever. Because it's that kind of thing that will bite you in the arse at release. A bug that happens only once a month to 1 player, will happen 10,000 times a day when you have 300,000 subscribers.
So it makes no imaginable sense to abort a beta for 6 months, if the game was indeed at beta stage. It only makes sense if you decide that you fucked up so badly, that you need 6 months just to (hopefully) bring it to a _real_ beta stage.
It's not pessimism, it's just realism. That's how it works.
Duly noted, but I don't think there's evidence that they were on ergot all the time. As someone else pointed out, the vasoconstriction side-effects are _very_ nasty. Even if you could get used to the LSD-like effects, gangrene would still set in.
Also, bear in mind that ergot doesn't grow on everything. It doesn't grow on wheat, afaik, and that was the main dietary stapple. It grows on rye occasionally, but not all the crops are affected. So I'm guessing unless some area was living mostly on rye, they wouldn't be permanently on ergot.
They did have to grow _some_ rye, though, because it's more tolerant to cold than wheat. And because (A) ploughing with an ox is very slow, and (B) during most of the middle ages, production was as piss-poor as 2 to 7 grains harvested for each grain planted, and thus (C) a peasant had to plough some insanely large surface, by modern standard, just to feed his family and 1/5 of a knight. (By comparison nowadays it's in the hundreds.) So by necessity some crops would have to be planted later, and harvested later, which meant it better be resistant to cold.
So they'd all be exposed to some rye and some risk of ergot posioning, but I doubt that it would be anywhere near permanent.
At any rate, IMHO the chronicles are pretty clear about the outbursts of dancing in the streets and mass religious epiphanies. Someone who'd be that tolerant to it, would IMHO get gangrene long before they experience something of that magnitude.
But at any rate, that was all irrelevant to the main point. (If nevertheless interesting in its own right.) What is important is that -- for whatever reasons or mechanisms -- such mass hallucination and euphoria events did happen, and people did get religious visions during them.
It's not entirely a new phenomenon, and your mentioning acid reminds me of the rampant ergotism, a.k.a. St Anthony's fire they had at times in the middle ages.
Short version: it's produced by the toxin a parasitic fungus that grows on certain kinds of grain and grass. Eating contaminated grains produces LSD-like hallucinations, but also extreme vasoconstriction that often (but not always, if the dose is low enough) results in gangrene. Which in turn often resulted in death.
Apparently, the problem was big enough at times that (A) they had a monk order (the Order of St. Anthony) specialized in trying to save people affected by the result, and (B) outbreaks of whole freakin' cities dancing euphorically in the streets and having mystical/religious visions and revelations.
Kinda makes me wonder how many of the prophecies and martyrdoms that the the various religions were based on, well, were just the result of hallucinations. I mean, obviously some people lied their arse off to gain an advantage or revenge in the name of religion, but I'm willing to admit that some were genuinely honest and relating miracles and stuff they actually witnessed. Or, rather, and this is the important part: thought they witnessed, while on an ergot trip. Or while they were delirious with fever, or having a bad heat stroke (having visions and revelations in the desert sure was common), or any other kind of hallucination and delirium.
For example, at the risk of offending the French, I wonder about Joan d'Arc. Went and fought for the good ol' Salic law that women can't inherit anything at all, and got burned at the stake... all supposedly because of a divine vision commanding her to. Could it be that the poor girl had just eaten a bit of bad rye?
How many other saints and prophets had?
Or given a tightly knit group that travelled and ate together (e.g., monks in the same monastery, or let's say... 1 guy and his 12 apostles?) it only takes one contaminated meal for _all_ of them to have an acid trip together.
Or here's another thought: almost 1% of the population are schizophrenic, and at least _some_ forms of it are characterized by hallucinations. And in the ancient times and middle ages, it could only be worse, since they didn't have psychiatrists and neuroleptics: once started on the road to madness, the only way was towards worse. Stuff like hearing voices, seeing ghosts, etc. Given thousands of years and populations of millions of people, odds are good some will eventually have delusions of divine miracles and messages.
Briefly: Is it still a miracle if it only happened in someone's drug-addled brain?
The funny thing is that there are well known effects that skew the effects of polls, among which:
1. People are nice social beings. They tell you what they think you'd like to hear. It's a reflex and enculturation effect that, well, I suppose helps us live with each other. If you know someone, say, likes pink, the nice social reflex is to say "yes, it's a nice colour."
Why does that matter? Most people, even on a perfectly anonymous poll, tend to answer what they think would please the poller. If they're polled by eBay, of course they'll say what they think eBay would like to hear.
2. (Or 1.b.) The wording is very important. If you present a skewed view where option 1 is pure good and option 2 is pure evil, you've already told them what you think on that matter. So they'll subconsciously try to be nice and agree with what you told them you like, regardless of what they actually think on the matter, and regardless of whether they even give a damn at all.
3. All things being equal, there's a bias towards answering more "yes" and less "no". I guess we've all been educated that it's not nice to disagree all the time. So well design polls actually randomize the questionnaires so 50% will ask the question one way, and 50% ask the negative version.
E.g., if half the questionnaires ask "should we stay in Iraq?", the other half must ask "should we pull out of Iraq?", because otherwise you get it skewed towards "yes". If you only ask "should we stay in Iraq?" you'll get your results skewed as some people will vote "yes" just because it's, you know, a "yes."
4. Biased sample fallacies. Was that sample representative, or was it, say, only the people who visit site X? E.g., if you were to make a poll about computers or OSes on Slashdot, I hope you can see how the results wouldn't really reflect what the whole population thinks.
Etc.
Now I don't know how the poll in TFA was done, so I'm not commenting on that. But basically if you want to know what people _think_, then you _don't_ do a poll along the lines of "do you think we should stop ISP extortion?" If you do that, you'll just get a false result that's good for self-shoulder-patting, but won't reflect what they actually vote for in the next elections.
Unlike the Canadians and Aussies, Americans didn't leave the UK cheerfully and amiably. Not only there was the independence war, there was _another_ war with England right after, as the Brits were blockading US trade with continental Europe. You know, what with having the very national anthem of the USA based on the British fleet bombarding a US fort, including with the newfangled rocket ships. (A very primitive rocket artillery, basically.)
Add the whole USA jingoism ("manifest destiny", for example) in the 19'th century, conflicting with Britain's own delusions of grandeur, plus various other frictions, and the USA and UK started as anything _but_ friends. Heck the UK was better friends with the Ottoman Empire than with the USA at one point.
The relations normalized later and got eventually to friendly, but it started as anything but friends.
I'm sorry, but lesser misunderstandings and enmities have lasted a _lot_ longer across language and culture boundaries, and in some cases went further downhill.
To give one of the mildest examples: compare that to the relations with France. The USA started pretty much best buddies with France. France played a _major_ role in the US Independence War. A tiny bit later, the USA got in a war with England... because it wanted to keep trading with France, and the UK blockaded Napoleon. Then there was the thing about the Statue of Liberty, which again is a French donation. (And not as in giving away some old statue, but it was made especially for the USA.) Whereas today in France it's somewhat much fashionable to be anti-american, and viceversa in the USA it's fashionable to be anti-french.
Basically, from where I sit, and taking an over-simplified view of it:
- same language: started as enemies, then normalized to "don't give a damn" and eventually to friends
- language barrier and lack of communication: started as best buddies, ended up... well, not really enemies, but not on the most cordial terms, to say the least
As I was saying, it's a relatively mild example, because it didn't end up in all-out war or anything. But lack of communication allowed the occasional sabre-rattling leaders and idiot journalists to deteriorate a relationship from excellent to at least rivalry. That's the phenomenon I'm talking about.
Ya know, screw both English and Chinese. That's a problem created by humans, so maybe we should just take a step back. A UK cat has no problem communicating with an Asian breed, for example. (Well, when it can be arsed to communicate, anyway;) It's a global language. So I say let's all learn to meow.
On the upside, IIRC they have like 100 words total, so we can give up on the whole character set madness. (If I give you a.txt file, is it in UTF-8, UTF-16 -- big or small endian at that? --, or one of the two dozen ISO-8859 flavours, or EBCDIC, or what?) Good old fashioned 7 bit is enough for whole words.
Plus, it'll be easier to know if your cat is actually plotting against you.
Plus, think how much easier poetry will be. E.g., you have to rhyme with "meow", you can't go wrong with "mew" or "mrow".
I know you're just joking, but, just in case, consider this: how much manipulation is facilitated by the fact that those doing it can cherry-pick what they translate, and rely on a mass of sheep who don't know the other language and can't be arsed to check?
If someone in, say, America were to tell you that the Canadians as a whole are preaching holy Jihad upon the infidel Americans, everyone would just call him nuts. There are maybe millions of people who live close to the border or travel across the border, and can tell you relatively first hand what the Canadians actually say. Or if not, you can just order a newspaper and read for yourself what they do say. Even if they were to manage to find one nutcase preaching holy war, everyone would point out just that: it's just one idiot that noone else takes seriously.
Now try Americans vs Arabs, Arabs vs Jews, or whatever other manipulation across a language barrier. Now that works much better, doesn't it? You can cherry-pick which extremists (on both sides) to translate out of context, to make it sound like a whole language or ethnic group is hell-bent on wiping you off the face of the Earth. (Never mind that no group that size ever agreed on anything else, for as long as we have a recorded history.)
It goes sorta like this: Some fringe group on side A does a bit of fist shaking and maybe sabre rattling. Idiot politicians or journalists on side B take that out of context, maybe even mis-translate it a bit, present it as "Look what side A is saying about us!" Then some easily excitable nutcase on side B goes, basically, "yeah, well, I say nuke the idiots until they glow and let their god sort them!" Then idiot politicians or journalists on side A (or whoever has a vested interest in stirring up the pot) take _that_ out of context, maybe even take a pick of words when translating to sound even more ferocious, and present it as "Look what side B is saying about us!" Loop.
Sometimes even the subtle meaning of one word can be altered enough in translation to cause a big rift, although technically it is a honest-to-god translation.
E.g., a lot of the relatively early Christian problems leading schisms and heresies, a good thousand years before Hus and Luther, were... translation problems. Stuff that made sense about Christ in Greek, sounded like a major heresy when translated in Syriac, because the nuances of some words were different.
And that was guys who did a good faith effort to translate the scriptures and the dogmas decided in the church councils. Now imagine what you can do when you aren't that honest, and don't stop short of outright distorting the other side's words.
Or the even shorter version: if that quote was right, the USA, the UK, Canada and Australia should be the greatest enemies in history.
The short and skinny version (of what's already a summary) is that:
1. Guys may write on a questionnaire that they're looking for this or that personality trait, but then base their actual decision 100% on looks. (I guess "she's got a great personality" _is_ an euphemism to the average guy;) Women tended to actually choose what they said they wanted.
2. Women tended to be indeed more choosy, but adjusted their aim to what they think they can actually get and keep, no higher. Less attractive women aimed for less desirable guys. Men seemed to have the same (or similar) threshold regardless of how attractive or desirable he actually is.
So basically, ok, looks that I was remembering wrong that guys generally aim too high, but not by much: some guys still aim too high. Even the least desirable guys will still aim above that threshold. (And since we're talking nerds here, yeah, they won't aim for a woman who'd actually want them.)
The other conclusion still stands, though: a _lot_ of women will be ignored every time.
Note however that the ages involved in this study are 26 to 40 years old, i.e., when people already start being a bit more realistic. I'm still under the distinct impression that if we're talking high school and, to a somewhat lesser extent college, choosing a girlfriend or boyfriend is a lot more of a status-symbol exercise. How you think at 26 is quite a bit more mature than how you think at 16, and how you think at 21 is still closer to the former than to the latter.
At 26, or better yet at 40, you might settle for "oh well, I'll just get a wife who doesn't look too bad", but I'd be genuinely surprised if many 16-year-olds thought like that. High school is an artificial status-symbol based society. It's all about being seen with the coolest guys or gals, being allowed at the most popular kids' table, etc.
On a related note, I also recall some study done recently (on a university campus, maybe ?), basically on how successful the "Wanna fuck" pickup line works on males vs females (obviously they werent quite that crude, but it sums up the objective). From memory, the "success rate" of males vs females was something like 20% vs 80% (ie: 80% of women received a positive answer to their attempt, only 20% of men did - certainly the difference was dramatic). Further, of the men who declined, the reason was almost always due to some form of outside restriction on their ability to say agree (spouse/significant other, unavailable at the requested time, inappropriate relationship, etc) rather than not being interested in the sex. For women, the reasons were basically reversed - most said no because they weren't interested.
Well, I can believe that very easily, but that doesn't modify the problem by much IMHO.
1. For a start you don't tell me how good the guys or gals doing the proposal looked. I'd be genuinely surprised if there was no threshold whatsoever there.
2. Women wanting a stable relationship (or at least more than one date) before they take off their panties, well, for most guys just means you have to go that route. And there we're back to the previous problem. (Some) Guys may fuck almost anything once, but, see the study I linked: they may not want a second date with someone who doesn't pass certain attractiveness criteria.
Basically I largely still stand by what I've said: the average looking girl in the back row might be technically able to get laid if she went to a nerd and asked "wanna fuck?" But talk about a second or third date, and she goes back to being invisible again.
Slashdot Mirror
The "standing on the shoulders of giants" phrase comes to mind.
Humans did use their intelligence to try to live better, but each step had to solve certain problems before they could move on to the next step.
E.g., before you can have agriculture, you needed to have (A) the right conditions, which is why it evolved in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and (B) a calendar.
Being able to just flood a plot of land, or have it naturally flooded for you, is godsend at that point in time. For starters it allows you to live on far less "modern" plants, and with less work. To put things in perspective, even as late as European middle ages, you'd harvest 2 to 7 grains of grain for each grain planted. (By comparison, nowadays you'd get several hundred grains per grain planted.) Now move backward a bit more, and griculture evolved on really really shitty plants. So the fertility boost of irrigation may have been not just an extra, but actually _needed_ to be able to subsist on agriculture at all. You _had_ to have that to get agriculture "bootstrapped".
The type of soil is important too. A plough usable on northern european soil, for example, wasn't even invented until AD times. (That and the invention of the horseshoe by Germans was one of the factors that suddenly allowed them to challenge the Romans.) So having a bunch of earth turned into mud regularly may have been the _only_ way to start planting anything at all.
A calendar is also more important than it sounds, because the seasons go on whether you like it or not. If you don't start, say, harvesting at the right point of time, the next flood of the Nile comes and destroys your whole crop right there. So someone has to figure out how to count the days right, and/or how to build a stick in the ground and some markers that tell him when to start doing this or that.
That's just one example of a problem which looks trivial in retrospect, but it was the culmination of a whole chain on non-trivial discoveries.
To make things worse, now picture that:
A) You have a chicken-and-egg problem: before you have agriculture, the pressure is a heck of a lot lesser to figure out the calendar. You don't have a tech tree, like in Civilization games, to look ahead at and see "oh, now we have to work on inventing the calendar, or we'll never get agriculture in time."
As a hunter-gatherer, you just go hunting and gathering daily, and live off whatever you find. There's no use even trying to plan ahead, until you can actually store stuff for the winter, and that won't happen with berries and hunted meat. (Until you can cure meat somehow, there's no way to keep it around in a useful form anyway, so you have to go hunt your dinner daily regardless of whether you figured out the seasons or not. And to give you a timeline, AFAIK, it wasnt until the Roman empire that someone finally figured out how to, essentially, ferment meat and make a sausage out of it.)
B) You have small isolated populations, and everyone has to spend most of their day either hunting/gathering their dinner, so there aren't that many people to stay around and think up new stuff and experiment with new stuff.
For contrast sake: we all know how many great things the Greeks invented or thought up, but the thing is: the Greeks could afford to have as much as 1/3 of the population (the free males) sitting around playing philosopher in between wars. Because the other 2/3 of the population (the women and slaves) supported them. That was a _lot_ of manpower dedicated to figuring out how the world works in ancieng Greece.
And remember that as late as the ancient Egyptian Old Kingdom era, if you plotted a Gauss curve with the age at which people died, the peak would be in the 30's. (Plus a spike in the first 3 years of life.) In caveman times, I wouldn't be too surprised if it was even less. You just didn't have the time to learn a lot, think a lot about the world, make great discoveries, etc. You'd marry at 12, make a bunch of kids in a hurry, and die, and work the whole
Think of it this way: in the beginning code was new, and like any program written in the last 7 days before the deadline (ok, only 6 'cause on Sunday He rested), not exactly tested. Weird bugs happened all the time, and God had to really use His imagination to explain them all as miracles, or to fix them.
;)
Sometimes things got so far out of whack, that He had to do a player-wipe and start anew. (See, the flood.)
I don't envy his job there, really. I mean, you have an obscure race condition and just _one_ virgin girl gets pregnant out of nowhere, and people still talk about that after 2000 years. Like noone else ever had a race condition in their code.
And that's not even talking about the kind of players he had. The very first two, you tell them to stay away from that tree 'cause it's still buggy and does crazy stuff to your int stat, and what do they do? Right. Anyone who's ever been a coder/wizard/builder/whatever on a MUD is probably with me when I say I really feel His pain there.
Or you have just one loophole in the physics code, and a whole freakin' nation starts building a tower to abuse that loophole.
But as time went by, the thing got better and better debugged, and you can let the physics engine run everything for years without a glitch. None of that having to intervene personally to fix things, or explain creatively why some guy got 100 times as many bread and fish out of a basket as he put in.
So nowadays God can relax and play a bit of WoW instead. Yeah, it's an easier job, but I think he earned a break fair and square
I'm sorry, but lying under oath isn't exactly a legal requirement.
You'll notice that they're not accusing him of human rights violations, they're accusing him of lying to congress. If I read it right, in a sworn testimony too.
So let's put _that_ defense away already. They're not condemning Yahoo for doing business with China. Period.
Plus,
1. it cuts both ways. If he's supposed to comply with Chinese laws and regulations to do business in China, then by the same logic he's supposed to comply with US rules and regulations to do business in the US. That includes such concepts as, basically, that you're not supposed to lie in a sworn testimony.
2. "But <insert other arsehole> is doing it too!" is a defense that was considered laughable even in kindergarten. If Johnny was hitting other kids, it wasn't considered an invitation to do the same even in kindergarten. So it's equally laughable to see it used to defend all around immoral business practices.
3. Especially when it's based on a very warped notion of what it means "doing it too." I don't think the US government officially aided China in hunting down its disidents. There's a big difference between (A) turning a blind eye to someone else doing something wrong, when you can't prevent it anyway, and (B) actively aiding them in doing it. To give an example, it's the difference between, (A) ignoring a bank robbery in progress, since I can't dodge bullets anyway, (B) actually driving the escape car for the robbers. Neither is "knight in shiny armour", but it takes a very disfunctional view of the world to put an equals sign between the two. Neither is white, but they're very different shades of grey.
So to cut it even shorter: just because someone else isn't 100% pure paladin-in-shiny-armour defender-of-all-oppressed, it's not a blank-cheque excuse to be an outright arsehole.
4. I'm sorry, but "cost of doing business" isn't a moral wildcard excuse. You don't have a sacred human right to make a profit at all cost, and it doesn't supersede all other moral and legal expectations.
Sure, we're glad for you if you do manage to make a profit. Kudos and more power to you, and we might even admire you for it.
But if you're an arsehole in the name of doing business and making a profit... well, you're still an arsehole.
That actually makes me worry even more.
Now I'm not working at MS, so no way to _know_ it, but I don't think they'd move file copying into the _kernel_. (Then again, they did move stuff to kernel space before to gain 1% more speed, so it's not outright impossible.) But seriously, the kernel in any OS is there to provide the essential stuff, not file copying. You might get file open, file read, file write, and file close in there, but not the graphical shell's implementation of reading from one and writing in the others.
Additionally, _if_ they had file copy implemented in the kernel, then there would be no way for Kaspersky to get in the way there and make it any worse. So they probably don't have a kernel function that copies files.
What I'm getting to with this big tangent is: probably some other kernel function is leaking, and it's probably called from other programs too. I.e., you might get some side-effects even if you _don't_ copy sixteen thousand files in one go. If it's a memory leak in the file-related functions, any other program opening and closing files lots would have the exact same effects... eventually. Even if it doesn't fully run out of memory, well, wth, I have better uses for my RAM than to have 100 MB wasted to such leaks.
E.g., if I brute-force search for some text in all files on my hard drive (I do exactly that now and then), even with some other program (e.g., I use Total Commander lots), how do I know it doesn't happen to use the same functions?
Plus, what interests me more is this: well, copying 16k files in a burst is a good way to cause a leak to run out of RAM. But what happens if you just leave your computer on long enough and copy lots of small files in smaller batches? I mean, wth, nowadays a lot of people leave their computers on. It isn't just for linux uptime brag-fests any more. Does the same effect happen if I leave my computer on for a month and copy, say, 600 files a day?
Read the list of charges, lemming. Skipping over whether the spamming alone would have richly deserved that, there are still charges like money laundering and fraud. And you think that 5 years are too much for _that_?
What do you propose, then? That we let fraud and money laundering run rampant, as we give convicted criminals a gentle slap on the wrist for that? Or maybe even a slap on the wrist is too brutal by your reckoning?
Also, sad to rain some clue upon your bleeding-heart parrade, but:
1. Fraud and money-laundering laws aren't _that_ new. You could get sent to jail for either of them, hundreds of years ago just as well. Or do you consider anything newer than Hammurabi's Code to be too new to enforce?
2. I'm sorry, but there is no grey area about when a law starts to apply. If you want to protest it, lobby your senator. Breaking a law because until recently it wasn't there, is just about the dumbest excuse I've ever heard.
But more importantly:
3. Get this: the aptly named CAN-SPAM law in the USA says just that: you _can_ spam. You're just not allowed to fake the sender (so no joe-jobs), you're supposed to honour opt-out requests, and some other common sense restrictions. So noone yet has been sent to jail for the act of spamming. The closest they got to that, was getting convicted for breaking the other provisions of the law.
That's the crucial bit that the horde of bleeding-heart idiots miss when moaning that any punishment is too high for spamming: noone ever got convicted for spamming. But if you start doing joe-jobs, using botnets, trying to circumvent not only opt-out but people's filters too, and generally be a major asshole to millions of people just because you can... well, then don't expect the rest of us to have any sympathy. If your attitude to the larger community is "you all can kiss my arse, I'll do whatever I want to you because I can", then don't be surprised if the answer is "you can kiss all _our_ arses, because we'll get rid of you and your kind". And if we need a new law for that, we'll make one.
I'm not against stacktraces, of course. I'm against the fact that it was 100 levels deep, just to check a freakin' flag.
Actually, the scary part is that I can easily see how someone will take it as an invitation to install more bloat on your hard drive, do things even less efficiently, etc.
I started my programming experience almost directly with assembly. Well, I had about a year of BASIC on my parents' ZX-81 first. But that was a damn slow machine (80% or so of the CPU was busy just doing the screen refresh) and Sinclair BASIC was one of the slowest BASICS too. So with that and 1K RAM (you read that right: one kilobyte), you just couldn't do much, you know. So my dad took the Sink-Or-Swim approach and gave me a stack of Intel and Zilog manuals. Anyway, you had to be particularly thrifty on that machine, because your budget of CPU cycles and bytes makes your average wristwatch or fridge nowadays look like a supercomputer.
I say that only to contrast it to the first time I saw a stacktrace (Java, obviously) of an exception in a particularly bloated Cocoon application running in WebSphere. If you printed it, it would run over more than two pages. There were layers upon layers upon layers that the flow had to go through, just to call a method which, here's the best part, didn't even do much. That nested call and all the extra code for reusability sake, and checks, and some reflection thrown in for good measure, obviously took more time than the method code itself needed.
It hurt. Looking at that stacktrace was enough to cause physical pain.
Now I'm not necessarily saying you should throw Cocoon and J2EE away, obviously there are better ways to do that even with them. Like, for a start, make sure your EJB calls are coarse granularity so you don't go back and forth over RMI/IIOP just to check 1 flag.
But how many people do?
The second instance when it caused me pain is when I was testing a particularly bloated XML-based framework, and it took 1.1 seconds on a 2.26 GHz Pentium 4 just for a call to a method that did nothing at all. It just logged the call and returned. That's it. That's 2.5 _billion_ CPU cycles wasted just for a method call. That's more than 30 years worth of Moore's law. Worse yet, someone had used it between methods in the same program, because apparently going through XML layers is so much cooler than plain old method calls. A whole 30 years worth of Moore's Law wasted for the sake of a buzzword. The realization hurt. Literally.
Again, I'm not saying throw XML away generally, though I would say: "bloody use it for what it was meant, not as a buzzword, and not internally between classes in the same program and indeed the same module." It just isn't a replacement for data objects (what Java calls "beans"), nor for a database, nor as just a buzzword to have on the resume.
Each iteration of Moore's Law is taken as yet another invitation to write crappier code, with less skilled monkeys, and don't bother optimizing... or even designing it well in the first place. Why bother? The next generation of CPUs will run it anyway.
And the same applies to RAM and HDD, more or less. I've seen more than one web application which had ballooned to several tens of megabytes (zipped!) by linking every framework in sight. One had 3 different versions of Xerces inside, and some classloader magic, just because it beat sorting out which module needs which version. Better yet, they were mostly just the GUI to an EJB-based application. They didn't actually _do_ more than display the results and accept the input in some forms. Tens of MB just for that.
So now look on your hard drive, especially if you have Vista, and take a wild guess whether those huge executables and DLLs were absolutely needed, or are there mostly because RAM and HDD space are cheap?
At this rate and given 4TB HDDs, how long until you'll install a word processor or spreadsheet off a full HD DVD?
Dude, no offense, but I see business decisions taken every day that are 100%, pure, unadulterated, _show-business_, and serves no other purpose than to boost some PHB's ego or make him feel like he's doing something (cool.) And I'm not even counting the ego-masturbation kind where some clueless PHB takes some "strategic decision" based on knowledge and expertise that he just doesn't have. (The ego-masturbation there being either pretending that he's savvy enough to even know the implications of what he decides there, or pissing on everything to mark his territory, just to show that he can.)
If your company isn't one of those places, well, count your blessings and thank your guardian-angel/ancestor-spirits/luck/RNG/whatever-you-believe-in. Seriously. Kudos and more power to you then.
But it's childish and massively uninformed to pretend that such things don't happen in the real world. Just because you might not have seen them happen (or may not have been qualified to realise what's really happening there), it doesn't mean it doesn't happen every day.
In major corporations too. In fact, _especially_ in major corporations. The more hierarchy levels between the guy taking "strategic decisions" and the guys who actually know what's happening, or make it happen, the higher the chance that he doesn't know what's happening there. In end-effect that any "strategic decision" he's taking there is as disconnected from reality as French generals in the 19'th century deciding to use the Gatling gun as an artillery piece, at artillery ranges... so by the time the enemy actually got in range, it would be out of ammo. They had never seen it firing, they had no actual idea of what it does, but they took strategic decisions about it anyway.
I swear that if clue was air, the ones at the top of some particularly deep hierarchy pyramids would be permanently blue in the face and dizzy all the time.
Of course, no manager would ever (A) admit that he's doing purely ego-boosting stuff, and in most cases (B) even know. _That_ is what makes it possible.
Well, that's reassuring to know. Now I regret that I never learned Japanese, though ;)
Well, that's what I thought about the Dreamcast too. I mean, who cares if it only sold a fraction of what the PS2 was selling? Mine will still work, right? And Sega will surely keep making games for it, right?
Well, I'm proud to say, I was partially right there. My Dreamcast still works flawlessly. Hasn't had a new game made for it for a damn long time now, though.
Seriously, the prices of developping a new game are insane these days. Actually, make it: for a decade or so now, and it's only getting worse. So they need a certain market size just to recoup the costs.
And no matter what game you make for a console, not every single owner of that console will buy it. Doesn't matter what game it is. Even Hallo 3, not every XBox owner on the planet bought it. And that was a major success. You have to hedge your bets a bit for the case when it's a lot less of a success. I.e., you have to have a bit of a safety margin there.
So if a bubble bursts, it can be bad news. But, hey, your own console will keep working.
And before someone pipes up with "But Nintendo itself will keep making games for it"... well, so much good that did to the popularity of the N64, eh?
Well, see, the old definition of "liberal" (before in the US conservatives managed to redefine it to be some commie-mutant-traitor kinda pejorative) meant... well, the best way to explain it, is what nowadays is called "libertarian". Sorta. Conservatives were for the good ol', tried-and-tested power of the land-owners and top-down way to run an economy (with the king and landowners being "top" and you being "down"), liberals were for a more laissez-faire kind of economy. Let private initiative and the free market take care of everything. That kinda thing.
;)
That was the kind of liberalism that produced (and was produced by) the industrial revolution, which repelled the corn laws, etc.
And it seems to me that this case is as liberal as it gets there. The government wasn't involved, private initiative (of a rich mafioso) led to the optimal solution, and I'm sure that a free market and supply-and-demand economics were involved somehow too. (E.g., he has to pay a competitive wage to the hitmen, based on supply and demand;)
Heck, you can pretty much see Adam Smith's "invisible hand" metaphor in action there. To someone it the death of a spammer was worth more than whatever else he could have bought with that money -- and with the prices and wages in Russia, that must have been a lot of other stuff that could have been bought with the money -- and someone provided a supply for that demand. That's the kind of thing the wealth of nations is built upon.
Caution: some sarcasm may have been involved. I know that's not exactly what Adam Smith was advocating, but hey... An invisible hand beating the snot out of a spammer. Now that's a metaphor I can't resist
Thanks for the correction, I'll try to remember it. Still, what with not being a native English speaker nor in an English speaking country, if that's the worst blunder I've made... I'll take it as a compliment :P
Let's put it like this: the very same institutions "where a disruption will affect global markets and everything that follows" have, about a dozen times in the last year alone, copied sensitive data on some sales-guy's laptop and it got lost. Some of the very same institutions had got pwned and had zombies. Some of the very same institutions have offshored that kind of data to places where it's entirely out of their control, just because it was a couple of dollars cheaper. (And I don't mean just to India, but also EU banks discovering that their whole customer data is in the hands of Swift... who'll pretty much give it to anyone who asks. So they can't fulfill their _legal_ privacy obligations in the EU, much less whatever extra they promised their customers.) Some of the same institutions allowed personal laptops on the intranet without any extra checks. Some of the same institutions will cheerfully tell any data over the phone if you just claim to be someone else. At least one such institution was probed by leaving 20 virused USB sticks in front of the front door, once a day, and 17 of those got actually used. At least one got pwned by "janitors" connecting keylogger gizmos between each keyboard and the computer. Some of the very same institutions forgot to disable employees' logins after firing them... or had one login for the whole department on everything except the personal workstation, so there's no easy way to invalidate it for only one employee. Etc.
Do you honestly see no disconnect there?
Because from where I stand, it looks like building an anti-asteroid defense system on my roof, but leaving the front door open. Not just unlocked, but wide open. It's ensuring against a SF threat, but being blissfully oblivious to the real every day threat.
You want decent physical security? A normal building and a couple of guards can offer you just that. You don't need to be dug in 50 ft below the ground. Put it on the last floor, so it doesn't get flooded, too.
Even if they sent some ninjas/007/mission-impossible/whatever types to physically steal your data, noone's going to blow up your freakin' wall to get in. So whether it's 50 ft of mountain or 1 ft of concrete, it's irrelevant. Unless those computers are (A) not connected to anything outside the bunker, and (B) not serviced by any humans, there are _far_ easier ways to get to that data.
_That_ is why I'll call it ego masturbation. I'm not against sane physical security, but, please. When something is this disproportionately blown out of any proportion or usefulness, I have this gut feeling that there wasn't much (real) analysis done when choosing it.
Pseudo-security is a bad thing, because it gets people to let their guard down. When they think that some magical talisman they bought (or in this case a bunker) makes the server super-extra-uber-secure, then the next thing that happens is that they cut the funding for real security.
Think of the dot-com era, really. How many times have you heard companies going "we're secure because we use 128 bit HTTPS! See that padlock icon? It means we're secure!" and then they forgot to check rights in their web site and/or just leave internal files around in the web server's directories or on some public FTP directory? Or leave their web server, some active ftp daemon, and God knows what else run with the default admin password? I can think of a couple which cheerfully left text files with user data and credit card numbers available for everyone. But, hey, they have 128 bit HTTPS, so they're secure.
Or I know of at least one corporation which bought all sorts of expensive appliances to scan all JMS messages and SQL statements for malicious stuff... but then noone actually configured rules for those. They used them effectively as some magical talisman that makes them secure just by being there, no extra work required. And some of them were bogus talismans anyway, pure snake oil that couldn't even have done the job right.
_That_ is the problem. When someone is as disconnected from reality as to think that security means preventing teams of ninjas from physically breaking in, something tells me that they probably didn't have thought much about actual security. And will think even less about it in the future.
Basically, yes, they're there to boost some manager's ego. I haven't even heard of a recent data loss or theft that involved a team of ninjas breaking in and stealing hard drives. The ones I did hear about, offhand, involved stuff like:
- pissed off admin exports the customer database and sells it to a spammer
- a hired rent-a-coder working at home is given an export of the fucking productive database, just so he can work out the report formatting. So he asks for help in a forum and attaches a zip file of said productive database. Just so, you know, others can try their hand at formatting that data too. (And if you think that's a one-off thing, at a recent consulting job I've seen exactly that happen, with the dumbass PHB's blessing. They exported the productive database, installed it on a test machine, then let the external contractor -- not me, but the guy whose neverending mess I was supposed to help fix -- copy it all on his private laptop too. And since he was not supposed to connect an external laptop to the internal network, the PHB cheerfully supplied an USB stick to transfer the data with. Made me cringe. But, hey, he was cheaper than doing it in-house.)
- productive data, complete with customer names and personal data, is copied on some salesman's laptop, because god forbid that you inconvenience the sales guys in the least bit, even by making them log in to a web site. Plus, I'm sure he thinks he's a wizard with Excel and God knows what ad-hoc graphs and reports he might need to generate on the spot from that data. Then said laptop is forgotten on the airport or stolen. (I can remember a dozen or so instances of this in the news without even googling.)
- social engineering and/or lax security standards (As an extreme case, I've actually worked for a dot-com back in the day, who told their 1st level support to give anyone an admin account who calls in and asks for one. It's easier than just creating one for the regional managers -- although I'd debate whether those need one in the first place. Nah, just tell them to phone in and ask for one. Eventually after a year they realized that they have a few thousand admin accounts and nobody knows who those people are.)
- pwned machines on the internal network that haven't been patched since Jurassic. I remember one touching story about IIRC Slammer, where a company got hit hard because they were running with completely unpatched workstations, since apparently installing any service pack broke one of the internal applications they were using. And, of course, they'd rather save money than fix the stupid application.
- pwned machines on the internal network because some dumbass PHB or marketter figured out (or bribed an engineer for the knowledge) how to open a tunnel from inside to his home machine and leave it on, so he can access the company network from home. So when his unprotected, crapware-ladden home machine got pwned, it was connected to the intranet.
- pwned machines on the internal network because just about anyone is allowed to plug their laptop in
The last three are especially nice if everything is one big network zone.
- pwned machines because some dumbass programmer would rather argue that SQL-injection and cross-site-scripting are just hype, instead of fixing his freakin' application. I'm still suprised at the number of people who don't even know how to quote a string for use in a web page or in the database. Or better yet, to use prepared statements and/or some template/framework that handles that kind of thing for you. And, yes, I remember at least one article linked even on Slashdot where the idiot was arguing that cross-site-scripting vulnerabilities are inevitable and harmless.
- pwnage via any of the above methods (including social engineering or dishonest employees) because noone bothered setting productive database passwords more creative than the same as the app name, and/or using more than one account for a whole department. Or indeed for the whole company. It's too much work
Decreased blood flow is nasty in its own right too, especially reduced blood flow to the brain. It can mean often dizziness, confusion and/or constant anxiety (due to CO2 poisoning) even _with_ the heart allowed to expand to compensate for the valves malfunctioning. Reduce flow some more and, well, you might start losing neurons fast to lack of oxygen. And those don't regenerate, btw.
Not that the other organs are better off with restricted blood flow either. We're talking basically shock and shock can and does kill.
So basically if you wanted to say that it's better than being dead, well, it's hard to argue with that. But you might actually end up dead sooner _if_ it restricts blood flow enough, than if you waited until your heart fails naturally. You'd also be pretty much in constant shock before you die, which, as I was saying, is nasty.
Now that all is a big "if" there. That all only applies _if_ it indeed decreases blood flow. I'm not saying it does or doesn't, I don't have half the data to make that kind of judgment. I'm just saying that decreased blood flow isn't something to be shrugged off.
Also note that there are other operations that can help there, including getting mechanical valves installed. So there isn't necessarily a dichotomy there. The question is whether this helps more, not whether it's this or you wait until your heart blows up.
Well, that's an interesting theory, no doubt. Still (without being as smart as Sagan) my impression is a bit the opposite.
See, the funny thing is that humans seem to be built to (A) see and filter patterns in the input data, (B) need a simple explanation, and (C) subconsciously try to keep their mental "model" of the world coherent.
Especially the last one seems to screw us up no end: it's the way cognitive dissonance happens. The way the subconscious seems to work there is that if facts X and Y can't simultaneously be true, one of them will have to be discarded or altered. Which is actually almost a scientific frame of mind. Unfortunately it seems to have little qualms about which it discards, as long as the end result is self-consistent. It can keep and rationalize the blatantly bogus X and discard the common-sense Y only because it really wants to believe Z, which in turn depends on X. Or discard Y because it would imply P, which would imply Q, which is something really bad for one's self-esteem or morale.
For example the textbook example of cognitive dissonance goes something like this: you make some students do a boring and repetitive and seemingly pointless job. They'll hate it. Then you tell them they can stop, but offer them 1$ if they can convince someone else to do it for you. Watch them end up convincing themselves that it's a really good and fun job.
The way that seems to work is a conflict between X = "I'm a honest guy", Y = "honest people don't lie", and Z = "omg, I just lied to someone for a lousy 1$". Therefore they'll convince themselves that Z wasn't really a lie.
Or there was this fun experiment in asking some people to write an essay defending a position that's the exact opposite of what they really believe. Just, you know, to play the devil's advocate. Or so someone can study the graphology effects of writing a lie, or some other bogus justification. Not to actually believe that position, just to write an essay on something that they fully think is bogus. The fun part is that after a few weeks their own position will have shifted more or less towards what they wrote there. Essentially they altered their model to make that essay feel like less of a lie.
Or the pattern seeing also can work funny: if you really want to see a certain pattern, you _will_ see it. It's called selective confirmation.
So basically what makes us as a species such dumbasses at times, are the exact same traits that make us so smart and able to do science. We have the right reflexes, they're just not... polished enough. They can operate on bogus data and apply fallacies just as cheerfully, if not even more cheerfully, as doing real logic.
Actually, seeing beta-test as "suply the beta testers with a free game for the next 6 weeks for no purpose" is arguably the worst attitude a company can have, and chances are the effects will be seen in the final game.
1. That's some people who put up with some major bugs and crap balance, to help you fix the game. For the price of a "free game." If you were to hire internal testers for that, even at minimum wage in Elbonia, it would cost you more than 10$-15$ a month. In fact, you'd have to give those a copy of the game too, so that evens out to meaning that the volunteers essentially work for you for 0$ a month.
If anyone actually sees it as doing them some royal favour by letting them beta-test your crap, it denotes a head-up-the-ass attitude that doesn't put much value on getting those bugs reported and fixed. It doesn't bode well.
But more importantly
2. If it had been beta-quality stage, never mind the stage where it would actually be offering a finished game for free, it makes no sense to abort it for 6 months. Either (A) you decide it's actually ready and proceed to the stress test and launch, or (B) that final stage is one of continuous tweaking-and-seeing-the-results and a rush to find as many bugs as you can. Both are things you don't do in short fits and bursts. Well, not if you actually care about delivering a finished and polished product.
Balance tweaks, for example, you can get sorta right on paper with lots of maths. (Though the average game designer seems unable and uninterested in taking a spreadsheet and nailing that maths in detail.) But to _really_ know if it works or not, you have to see what thousands of players come up with as ways to abuse it. And see what happens if you add 1% to this spell, or subtract 1% from that armour class. It's not something you can get right in 1-2 big sweeping changes tested briefly every 6 months.
Bugs too don't just mean the big obvious fuck-ups, which shouldn't have made it past the internal testing anyway. It means race conditions that happen to the average player maybe once a month, or stuff that involves the player being on the exact pixel between terrain tiles, or whatever. Because it's that kind of thing that will bite you in the arse at release. A bug that happens only once a month to 1 player, will happen 10,000 times a day when you have 300,000 subscribers.
So it makes no imaginable sense to abort a beta for 6 months, if the game was indeed at beta stage. It only makes sense if you decide that you fucked up so badly, that you need 6 months just to (hopefully) bring it to a _real_ beta stage.
It's not pessimism, it's just realism. That's how it works.
Duly noted, but I don't think there's evidence that they were on ergot all the time. As someone else pointed out, the vasoconstriction side-effects are _very_ nasty. Even if you could get used to the LSD-like effects, gangrene would still set in.
Also, bear in mind that ergot doesn't grow on everything. It doesn't grow on wheat, afaik, and that was the main dietary stapple. It grows on rye occasionally, but not all the crops are affected. So I'm guessing unless some area was living mostly on rye, they wouldn't be permanently on ergot.
They did have to grow _some_ rye, though, because it's more tolerant to cold than wheat. And because (A) ploughing with an ox is very slow, and (B) during most of the middle ages, production was as piss-poor as 2 to 7 grains harvested for each grain planted, and thus (C) a peasant had to plough some insanely large surface, by modern standard, just to feed his family and 1/5 of a knight. (By comparison nowadays it's in the hundreds.) So by necessity some crops would have to be planted later, and harvested later, which meant it better be resistant to cold.
So they'd all be exposed to some rye and some risk of ergot posioning, but I doubt that it would be anywhere near permanent.
At any rate, IMHO the chronicles are pretty clear about the outbursts of dancing in the streets and mass religious epiphanies. Someone who'd be that tolerant to it, would IMHO get gangrene long before they experience something of that magnitude.
But at any rate, that was all irrelevant to the main point. (If nevertheless interesting in its own right.) What is important is that -- for whatever reasons or mechanisms -- such mass hallucination and euphoria events did happen, and people did get religious visions during them.
It's not entirely a new phenomenon, and your mentioning acid reminds me of the rampant ergotism, a.k.a. St Anthony's fire they had at times in the middle ages.
Short version: it's produced by the toxin a parasitic fungus that grows on certain kinds of grain and grass. Eating contaminated grains produces LSD-like hallucinations, but also extreme vasoconstriction that often (but not always, if the dose is low enough) results in gangrene. Which in turn often resulted in death.
Apparently, the problem was big enough at times that (A) they had a monk order (the Order of St. Anthony) specialized in trying to save people affected by the result, and (B) outbreaks of whole freakin' cities dancing euphorically in the streets and having mystical/religious visions and revelations.
Kinda makes me wonder how many of the prophecies and martyrdoms that the the various religions were based on, well, were just the result of hallucinations. I mean, obviously some people lied their arse off to gain an advantage or revenge in the name of religion, but I'm willing to admit that some were genuinely honest and relating miracles and stuff they actually witnessed. Or, rather, and this is the important part: thought they witnessed, while on an ergot trip. Or while they were delirious with fever, or having a bad heat stroke (having visions and revelations in the desert sure was common), or any other kind of hallucination and delirium.
For example, at the risk of offending the French, I wonder about Joan d'Arc. Went and fought for the good ol' Salic law that women can't inherit anything at all, and got burned at the stake... all supposedly because of a divine vision commanding her to. Could it be that the poor girl had just eaten a bit of bad rye?
How many other saints and prophets had?
Or given a tightly knit group that travelled and ate together (e.g., monks in the same monastery, or let's say... 1 guy and his 12 apostles?) it only takes one contaminated meal for _all_ of them to have an acid trip together.
Or here's another thought: almost 1% of the population are schizophrenic, and at least _some_ forms of it are characterized by hallucinations. And in the ancient times and middle ages, it could only be worse, since they didn't have psychiatrists and neuroleptics: once started on the road to madness, the only way was towards worse. Stuff like hearing voices, seeing ghosts, etc. Given thousands of years and populations of millions of people, odds are good some will eventually have delusions of divine miracles and messages.
Briefly: Is it still a miracle if it only happened in someone's drug-addled brain?
The funny thing is that there are well known effects that skew the effects of polls, among which:
1. People are nice social beings. They tell you what they think you'd like to hear. It's a reflex and enculturation effect that, well, I suppose helps us live with each other. If you know someone, say, likes pink, the nice social reflex is to say "yes, it's a nice colour."
Why does that matter? Most people, even on a perfectly anonymous poll, tend to answer what they think would please the poller. If they're polled by eBay, of course they'll say what they think eBay would like to hear.
2. (Or 1.b.) The wording is very important. If you present a skewed view where option 1 is pure good and option 2 is pure evil, you've already told them what you think on that matter. So they'll subconsciously try to be nice and agree with what you told them you like, regardless of what they actually think on the matter, and regardless of whether they even give a damn at all.
3. All things being equal, there's a bias towards answering more "yes" and less "no". I guess we've all been educated that it's not nice to disagree all the time. So well design polls actually randomize the questionnaires so 50% will ask the question one way, and 50% ask the negative version.
E.g., if half the questionnaires ask "should we stay in Iraq?", the other half must ask "should we pull out of Iraq?", because otherwise you get it skewed towards "yes". If you only ask "should we stay in Iraq?" you'll get your results skewed as some people will vote "yes" just because it's, you know, a "yes."
4. Biased sample fallacies. Was that sample representative, or was it, say, only the people who visit site X? E.g., if you were to make a poll about computers or OSes on Slashdot, I hope you can see how the results wouldn't really reflect what the whole population thinks.
Etc.
Now I don't know how the poll in TFA was done, so I'm not commenting on that. But basically if you want to know what people _think_, then you _don't_ do a poll along the lines of "do you think we should stop ISP extortion?" If you do that, you'll just get a false result that's good for self-shoulder-patting, but won't reflect what they actually vote for in the next elections.
Just saying...
Unlike the Canadians and Aussies, Americans didn't leave the UK cheerfully and amiably. Not only there was the independence war, there was _another_ war with England right after, as the Brits were blockading US trade with continental Europe. You know, what with having the very national anthem of the USA based on the British fleet bombarding a US fort, including with the newfangled rocket ships. (A very primitive rocket artillery, basically.)
Add the whole USA jingoism ("manifest destiny", for example) in the 19'th century, conflicting with Britain's own delusions of grandeur, plus various other frictions, and the USA and UK started as anything _but_ friends. Heck the UK was better friends with the Ottoman Empire than with the USA at one point.
The relations normalized later and got eventually to friendly, but it started as anything but friends.
I'm sorry, but lesser misunderstandings and enmities have lasted a _lot_ longer across language and culture boundaries, and in some cases went further downhill.
To give one of the mildest examples: compare that to the relations with France. The USA started pretty much best buddies with France. France played a _major_ role in the US Independence War. A tiny bit later, the USA got in a war with England... because it wanted to keep trading with France, and the UK blockaded Napoleon. Then there was the thing about the Statue of Liberty, which again is a French donation. (And not as in giving away some old statue, but it was made especially for the USA.) Whereas today in France it's somewhat much fashionable to be anti-american, and viceversa in the USA it's fashionable to be anti-french.
Basically, from where I sit, and taking an over-simplified view of it:
- same language: started as enemies, then normalized to "don't give a damn" and eventually to friends
- language barrier and lack of communication: started as best buddies, ended up... well, not really enemies, but not on the most cordial terms, to say the least
As I was saying, it's a relatively mild example, because it didn't end up in all-out war or anything. But lack of communication allowed the occasional sabre-rattling leaders and idiot journalists to deteriorate a relationship from excellent to at least rivalry. That's the phenomenon I'm talking about.
I dunno... it makes me really wonder.
Ya know, screw both English and Chinese. That's a problem created by humans, so maybe we should just take a step back. A UK cat has no problem communicating with an Asian breed, for example. (Well, when it can be arsed to communicate, anyway;) It's a global language. So I say let's all learn to meow.
.txt file, is it in UTF-8, UTF-16 -- big or small endian at that? --, or one of the two dozen ISO-8859 flavours, or EBCDIC, or what?) Good old fashioned 7 bit is enough for whole words.
On the upside, IIRC they have like 100 words total, so we can give up on the whole character set madness. (If I give you a
Plus, it'll be easier to know if your cat is actually plotting against you.
Plus, think how much easier poetry will be. E.g., you have to rhyme with "meow", you can't go wrong with "mew" or "mrow".
I know you're just joking, but, just in case, consider this: how much manipulation is facilitated by the fact that those doing it can cherry-pick what they translate, and rely on a mass of sheep who don't know the other language and can't be arsed to check?
If someone in, say, America were to tell you that the Canadians as a whole are preaching holy Jihad upon the infidel Americans, everyone would just call him nuts. There are maybe millions of people who live close to the border or travel across the border, and can tell you relatively first hand what the Canadians actually say. Or if not, you can just order a newspaper and read for yourself what they do say. Even if they were to manage to find one nutcase preaching holy war, everyone would point out just that: it's just one idiot that noone else takes seriously.
Now try Americans vs Arabs, Arabs vs Jews, or whatever other manipulation across a language barrier. Now that works much better, doesn't it? You can cherry-pick which extremists (on both sides) to translate out of context, to make it sound like a whole language or ethnic group is hell-bent on wiping you off the face of the Earth. (Never mind that no group that size ever agreed on anything else, for as long as we have a recorded history.)
It goes sorta like this: Some fringe group on side A does a bit of fist shaking and maybe sabre rattling. Idiot politicians or journalists on side B take that out of context, maybe even mis-translate it a bit, present it as "Look what side A is saying about us!" Then some easily excitable nutcase on side B goes, basically, "yeah, well, I say nuke the idiots until they glow and let their god sort them!" Then idiot politicians or journalists on side A (or whoever has a vested interest in stirring up the pot) take _that_ out of context, maybe even take a pick of words when translating to sound even more ferocious, and present it as "Look what side B is saying about us!" Loop.
Sometimes even the subtle meaning of one word can be altered enough in translation to cause a big rift, although technically it is a honest-to-god translation.
E.g., a lot of the relatively early Christian problems leading schisms and heresies, a good thousand years before Hus and Luther, were... translation problems. Stuff that made sense about Christ in Greek, sounded like a major heresy when translated in Syriac, because the nuances of some words were different.
And that was guys who did a good faith effort to translate the scriptures and the dogmas decided in the church councils. Now imagine what you can do when you aren't that honest, and don't stop short of outright distorting the other side's words.
Or the even shorter version: if that quote was right, the USA, the UK, Canada and Australia should be the greatest enemies in history.
Sure: Men want hot women, study confirms
The short and skinny version (of what's already a summary) is that:
1. Guys may write on a questionnaire that they're looking for this or that personality trait, but then base their actual decision 100% on looks. (I guess "she's got a great personality" _is_ an euphemism to the average guy;) Women tended to actually choose what they said they wanted.
2. Women tended to be indeed more choosy, but adjusted their aim to what they think they can actually get and keep, no higher. Less attractive women aimed for less desirable guys. Men seemed to have the same (or similar) threshold regardless of how attractive or desirable he actually is.
So basically, ok, looks that I was remembering wrong that guys generally aim too high, but not by much: some guys still aim too high. Even the least desirable guys will still aim above that threshold. (And since we're talking nerds here, yeah, they won't aim for a woman who'd actually want them.)
The other conclusion still stands, though: a _lot_ of women will be ignored every time.
Note however that the ages involved in this study are 26 to 40 years old, i.e., when people already start being a bit more realistic. I'm still under the distinct impression that if we're talking high school and, to a somewhat lesser extent college, choosing a girlfriend or boyfriend is a lot more of a status-symbol exercise. How you think at 26 is quite a bit more mature than how you think at 16, and how you think at 21 is still closer to the former than to the latter.
At 26, or better yet at 40, you might settle for "oh well, I'll just get a wife who doesn't look too bad", but I'd be genuinely surprised if many 16-year-olds thought like that. High school is an artificial status-symbol based society. It's all about being seen with the coolest guys or gals, being allowed at the most popular kids' table, etc.
Well, I can believe that very easily, but that doesn't modify the problem by much IMHO.
1. For a start you don't tell me how good the guys or gals doing the proposal looked. I'd be genuinely surprised if there was no threshold whatsoever there.
2. Women wanting a stable relationship (or at least more than one date) before they take off their panties, well, for most guys just means you have to go that route. And there we're back to the previous problem. (Some) Guys may fuck almost anything once, but, see the study I linked: they may not want a second date with someone who doesn't pass certain attractiveness criteria.
Basically I largely still stand by what I've said: the average looking girl in the back row might be technically able to get laid if she went to a nerd and asked "wanna fuck?" But talk about a second or third date, and she goes back to being invisible again.