As I've been saying before, the situation is pretty skewed for both genders.
- About half the guys in a high school or university want the top 10 super-models. Move a bit lower and about 90% of the guys want the top 10% girls. Some might eventually get realistic enough to settle for a bit less, but only grudgingly.
- About the same applies to the girls. Half the girls want the top 10 jocks. Some 90% of the girls want the top 10% most desirable guys.
Interestingly enough, according to a recent study, girls seem to be a bit more realistic as to who they can actually get. Guys will tend to aim above what they can get.
Basically anyone who says that someone can get laid anytime she wishes and by anyone she wishes because she's a girl, probably is doing the same daydreaming: thinking about those top 10 most popular girls in the whole damn college. Noone thinks of the shy, flat, nerdy girl in the back row when they make such generalization. That's her problem in a nutshell: to 90% of the guys she's just short of invisible, or little more than a piece of decor.
To put it even more bluntly, half the western culture (of both genders) is generally more about getting a status symbol than someone they actually plan to get along with. It's the same as getting, say, the sportiest BMW you can afford: it's typically not as much because you actually need something that expensive and that much of a gas guzzler, but just to show everyone that you can afford what most others can't. Same here: girlfriends and boyfriends get chosen as status symbols more than anything else.
And same as almost noone wants the lower half of the guys, if they have a choice, noone wants the lower half of the girls either. Note that I'm not talking about the butt-ugly gang of either sex. Just being _average_, already isn't much of a status symbol.
So my take of what's going to happen is basically:
1. They _will_ find a bunch of girls noone else wants, willing to give it a try. Then they'll get to go, "eeew" as they discover that they didn't get some smooth and highly desirable jock. (Who just happened to be single and limited in nerdiness to knowing how to install Windows.)
2. The guys, conversely, will drool at the thought, right until they find out who they got to meet. And that it's not the horny super-model with huge tits, that they thought they _deserve_ for being so smart and for knowing all that command line stuff. Cue the mandatory "eew" from the guys too.
Nice try, but probably no banana.
Both groups will eventually settle on something more realistic, but if we're talking university LUGs and sororities, not yet. Well, not for most of them.
(And before anyone accuses me of being sexist, note that I've talked about both genders.)
Just to clarify why I wrote the previous long rant: because redefining liberties like that is essentially one step towards losing them.
The root of all recent erosion of liberties and human rights is... people not knowing what their rights or liberties are, or what a human right or freedom is in the first place. The easiest way to take something from someone is when they don't know they had it in the first place.
Some while ago there was a poll in the USA, regarding what people think the first amendment covers. Turns out that most thought it covers everything _except_ their relation with the government. They think they have a right to call the neighbour names or to troll a privately-owned message board, an woe if anyone tries to moderate them. But the government? Nah, of course the government can censor them. Duh, that's what a government is supposed to do.
Sad.
So redefining such private crusades as "protecting freedom of speech" or such, is just muddying the waters some more. And I think we could all do without that.
You want say that corporations are evil or that all source should be open? Fine. Say it. That's freedom of speech. No more, no less.
But redefining "I can force you to show me _your_ code" as freedom of speech, is bogus. It's already claiming the non-existent right to tell someone else what to do. I can see the legality of it, and even the morality, as essentially a method of payment in a contract. Sure, go ahead, demand whatever payment you wish for your work, and the market will decide if it wants to pay your price. But some sacred human right it ain't, and freedom of speech it ain't.
And I'd rather see more people know what "freedom of speech" really is, and when their government violates it. Instead of thinking that freedom of speech violation means when <insert firewall manufacturer> stealing a bit of GPL-ed code. The latter is copyright and contract violation, and despicable in its own right, but it's not a human rights violation. And thinking it's the other way around, is the first step towards losing the real human right.
And "we have to restrict some of your real rights, to preserve some bogus 'right' we just invented/redefined" is a slippery slope in and by itself. It ranks up there with "we have to restrict some of your rights, to preserve your right to live in communism." Once you accepted that it's ok to give up some rights for RMS's personal ideological crusade, then, pray tell, why not for Marx's?
Ok, so maybe Marx is a bad example there, as it's a discredited ideology already. The same applies to any other ideological crusade, though. "We have to restrict some of your human rights, to preserve your right to live in a christian fundamentalism and stop the Islam" for example is exactly of the same calibre. Or insert any other ideology.
Simply put, equating "ideology" with "human rights" (or "freedom") and seeing nothing wrong with giving up some of the later for the sake of a bit of the former, is a dangerous frame of mind. I'd rather people understood "ok, it's a contract, I'm demanding X as payment for my Y" than get used to nodding that it's really no different to giving up some of their rights to gain a bit of ideological feel-good.
The question is, however, whether that comparison even holds any water in the first place. The whole concepts behind modern western law are some (supposedly) inalienable human rights, and how to best strike a balance to preserve them. E.g., you have a right to life, but I don't have some fundamental right to take yours, so we get laws against murder.
The GPL just isn't preserving any fundamental human right (much RMS and ESR like to rant and rave about "freedom of speech" vs "free as in beer") in any commonly recognized moral or philosophical system. I'm sorry, it's just a contract, not some fundamental human right. Asking for your code in payment for using mine in a commercial project is just a method of payment, in the end, not preserving some fundamental liberty. It's like saying that to use my digital photos, you have to send me a sixpack of beer, or that you can use my thrash can if you march around the town for at least one mile chanting "Moraelin is hung like a horse" loudly.
It's just "if you want my X, I want your Y". It's contract law, not the freakin' bill of rights.
Let's talk about "freedom of speech" too. Freedom of speech just means noone will send you to Guantanamo for saying something. The _spirit_ of it was also: something (true) about the government that it would like to keep hidden. That's its use against tyranny that those founding fathers had in mind. Noone can come round you up because you said the King did this or that, or that some other political system would be better. But let's not even go that far. Let's stick to: noone will send you to Guantanamo for saying something. For code, I guess that means publishing it.
That's all. That's "freedom of speech". You put your own code on some FTP, and the FBI or CIA didn't come kick your door in for it. No more, no less.
Pray tell, why do you need GPL to do that? And how does the GPL protect you there? Does sticking the GPL on a 'printf("The government has been supplying the same arms to terrorists that they now use against us.")' totally prevent censorship of that code, or what?
Additionally, get this: anything I ever said or wrote, including this message or whatever code I might ever release, is automatically copyrighted by me. I don't need to stick the GPL on it to be mine from the moment I wrote it. The notion that it prevents some evil corporation from taking my code and forbidding me from using it ever again, is blatantly absurd. Any evil corporation trying to apropriate my code is already violating the law as it is, if I didn't explicitly grant them a right to.
Now I may or may not have the means to fight them off. But that's an entirely different topic, and just sticking the GPL on it won't change it one bit. If I don't have the means to fight off, say, SCO for a piece of my code without GPL, I still don't have the means with GPL on it too. OK, I know, I can now also write off my code to the FSF and let them fight it out. Again, it's nothing but a bit of contract, not some fundamental freedom: I give you X if you fight off evil corp Y for me.
So basically it's all about contract, all about "but you'll give me your Y if you want my X". No more, no less. Gimme your changes, if you want my code, for example. It may fit some personal ideological crusade, but some fundamental human right it ain't.
And there it just becomes a case of "well, am I interested in getting that in exchange for my work?" No more, no less. Maybe I don't want your code at all. Maybe I just want my name in bold letters up there, because that's the kind of vain person that I am, and signing off my own code to the FSF just doesn't serve _my_ interests there at all. Maybe I want a sixpack of beer for it. Maybe I want to enforce my _own_ moral code there, not RMS's code. Or whatever.
Rights and liberties aren't that flexible or tied to one particular kind of contract. Your right to, say, criticize the government (i.e., "freedom of speech") is universal, not a consequence of slapping a GPL on a piece of speech.
You know, it kinda makes me wonder how that increase will happen.
Will it be mostly in the industrial sector for example?... In which case people buying energy-saving appliances will make almost no difference to the total.
Will it just mean more energy used in currently third world countries?... In which case they can build their own power plants, thank you very much. Electricity can't even be transported over _too_ large distances, so it's not like more space heaters in India will cause brownouts at your power plant in Florida.
I'm saying that because, alarmism be damned, I just don't see that kind of increase in what people use electricity for. If I look at what I have around the house these days, vs what my parents had back in 75 (to use the same time interval back as what you propose forward to 2040), I'm not sure I actually use more energy than they did. E.g.,
- they had big ol' fashioned 100W lightbulbs all around the house, I have 15W CCFLs. Their (admittedly large) living room alone had 5x 100W light bulbs lighting it, I only have 2x 15W in mine.
- they had 1 fridge, I have 1 fridge. I think mine has better insulation, because, well, people discovered stuff in 30+ years.
- they had 1 washing machine, I have 1 washing machine. Theirs used a lot more power, I think. (When they bought a particular washing machine, we quickly discovered that the breakers kicked in when the washing machine's water heater, fridge and god knows what else, all kicked in.) Plus mine is rated for pretty high energy efficiency, while way back the notion wasn't even invented yet.
- for washing, there's only so much you can save, you know. (Short of stopping washing. Then again, looking at one particularly stinky co-worker... please, please, please don't. Saving the planet be damned, go take a shower;) Heating 1 litre of water by 1 degree has a lower limit on how little energy you can use, because, you know, it's just physics. Plus heating it was always as efficient as it gets: converting electricity to heat, we can do with 100% efficiency. It's only converting to other stuff that starts to be inefficient. The only thing that works differently is the insulation, and I think that's getting better too.
- they had 1 TV, I have 1 TV. You could keep the room warm with theirs, way back. Literally.
Etc.
The only thing that comes to mind as more energy used these days is my computer. Let's say that's, oh, I don't know, 200 or let's say 300W total. Just the lightbulbs in the living room cover that difference comfortably.
Ah, don't sweat it much. Just about everything can, and occasionally _will_, get modded -1 Overrated. You could post something that's textbook physics (e.g., "E=mc^2") and someone will mod it overrated. Literally, I've seen terse excerpts of highschool level physics modded as overrated. It's too sad to make up. I have to wonder about the kind of mind for which reality is overrated, but there you go.
You have to realize that Slashdot moderation is... weird, and mostly irrelevant. Best thing to do is ignore it completely. Whether your message is right or wrong, depends only on what you wrote there, not on how many people agree with you. And sometimes it doesn't even have anything to do with agreeing with what you actually wrote.
E.g., the easiest was to get a -1 Overrated is as some comically impotent kind of "revenge" for disagreeing with someone in another thread. In which case, it doesn't as much reflect the quality of your message, but the "quality" of the person doing it.
E.g., one of the constants of the universe is that some people will _grossly_ mis-understand your point, and you can pretty much _count_ on regularly getting answers that have nothing to do with what you actually wrote. E.g., some people give up reading after a paragraph, or occasionally after the first sentence. Now realize that all those also get mod points eventually. Right.
So IMHO, don't sweat it much. Just say what you think, and who cares about moderation?
Don't get me wrong, I still think you're shallow to reject a game based on graphics alone, but I can genuinely appreciate coming forward and saying so. Moderation be damned.
Well, maybe it's incorrect to say that they're flat out "not lying". My point was rather that they're not _consciously_ lying. The human brain seems to have this knack of twisting reality to preserve some semblance of integrity of the mental model.
Also btw: now I don't now you enough to accuse you of lying, so don't take this as an accusation, but think this: is there anything you can say you're sure 100%? Beyond any shadow of a doubt? Can't possibly be false or even inexact? Well, that-a-way lies the path to cognitive dissonance and subconsciously twisting reality to fit a pre-conceived notion.
That's the way the brain works. If both A and B are apparently true, but mutually exclusive, then if A is 100% certain, B must be false. No matter what fallacies need to be involved, no matter what facts need to be discarded, no matter to what absurd extremes logic needs to be twisted.
E.g., are you _sure_ that you're always honest? 100%? Well, that-a-way lie the most bizarre rationalizations as to why something blatantly false wasn't _really_ a lie. That's the necessary first step to that particular kind of cognitive dissonance.
That's very true and insightful, but IMHO it fits in the same category I've described: gaming the opponents' image analysis. It only works because the brain processes that information in a certain way.
That said, I'd add that some animals are both counter-shaded and disruptive, though the only examples that come to mind atm are predators. E.g., a tabby cat is both.
Again, it's not particularly disruptive to a primate brain, so most people wouldn't think of an orange tabby as camouflaged. In practice, it only needs to disrupt a mouse's senses, though.
Well, it just occured to me that one image is worth one thousand words. Here's a pattern that disrupts even a human brain, badly. Try to focus on it. Heck, set it at someone's background wallpaper if you're pissed off at them.
(And no, it's not the goatse pic. Much as that's been known to disrupt human thought patterns, this time we're talking just overloading the image processing;)
So basically now think an animal with maybe 1/10 of your optical nerve's bandwidth, and even less neurons in their brain dedicated to processing the image. I have no doubt that a zebra's pattern appeared and thrived because at some point it had the same effect upon some predator (who needs to estimate distances very accurately) as the above-linked wallpaper.
That's very insightful and true. Though if I'm allowed to make two minor additions, I'd also say that:
1. Primates have vastly higher bandwidth along the optic nerve than some other species (e.g., IIRC you have about 10 times the bandwidth of a hamster) and vastly increased number of neurons reconstructing and analyzing the image in the brain. If you go even lower down the chain (since we're talking 80 million year old reptiles), a frog for example doesn't even transmit the tones at all, but has its neurons fire information that's split roughly into the streams:
- something just brightened
- something just darkened
- there's probably an edge here
- a group of pixels moved here
So a frog's mental image doesn't even contain the information to accurately reconstruct a greyscale image. Instead most of its mental image is pretty literally composed of edges and things that moved.
I.e., while _you_ would still see a battleship painted in dazzle camouflage as a battleship, and might just be confused when rangefinding or judging direction (via that painted bow shock at the wrong end), a frog would literally see it as a mess of edges that make no sense whatsoever.
So basically while indeed, various forms of camouflage do work on humans too, the less evolved life forms are a lot easier confused.
2. While you're right and very insightful about mis-judging direction and speed and distance when finally attacking, I'd add that an even more critical stage is the lying in ambush stage.
Cats for example are mostly ambush hunters. Even if a mouse judges everything correctly when the cat is already dashing for the kill, it's even more important that the mouse doesn't recognize the cat while the cat is waiting to ambush it. Either disruptive or cryptic camouflage can make a huge difference at that stage. Sure, the movement recognition will kick in when the cat starts the sprint, but at that point it's already too late.
But to agree with your other point, though, yeah, it does work on humans too, to various extents. Some leopards have been known to be just short of invisible to humans when they want to. A particularly infamous one is credited with over 400 human kills after she got wounded by a hunter and apparently decided to have her bloody vengeance. The number two spot goes to one credited with 125 human kills. You'd think a big orange cat with lots of spots would be easier to spot, especially when you already know she's on a human killing spree in the area, but there you go.
(And to go on an off-topic tangent, it kinda makes me wonder about their intelligence. If you think about it, something like deciding to have vengeance upon a whole species or race needs a few rather abstract concepts, that you wouldn't expect a cat to have, or need.)
Well, given that I'm not a zoologist, probably "talking out the arse" is a more apt description than "educated guess". So take it with more than a grain of salt.
That said, if the above paragraph didn't drive you off yet, there have been studies exactly on this domain. I didn't keep a list of links, being that I just read a ton of unrelated stuff and just rely on memory from that point, but some quick googling turns up quite a few links on animal vision and camouflage.
E.g., This one seems to discuss just that, and even says that patterns evolve and are optimized by natural selection. It give the zebra's stripes as an example of disruptive camouflage right in the first column. (As opposed to cryptic camouflage, where the animal tries to blend in the background by imitating the background pattern.)
The fact that the mammal eye (including human) is pretty much hard-wired to detect edges, is well known. I'm too lazy to search for a more authoritative source, so Wikipedia. The key paragraph there is "Spatial Encoding". Each photoreceptor is physically wired to inhibit the surrounding ones, so basically large patches of exactly the same colour will produce very little signal, if at all, while the edges will produce the most.
We also know that various animals (A) have a lot less bandwidth for transmitting the result to the brains, so the image will be much more aggressively reduced to edges. (E.g., IIRC a hamster has about 10 times less bandwidth than a human.) And/or (B) have various adaptations to recognize certain patterns, sometimes as early as the eye itself. (E.g., it seems that a frog's eyes and optic nerve actually have separate data channels for "there's probably an edge here" and "there's something moving here" (a.k.a., the "bug detector".) See a summary for example, here. Not a primary source, but it nails it pretty well and gives you some names to search for if you feel so inclined.) And/or (C) actually respond differently to different patterns and shapes. (E.g., the thing I mentioned about birds recognizing foes by eye position was actually an experiment in seeing how they react to various artificial heads.)
The idea that primate evolution was at least partially driven by the need to recognize snakes, is from a recent news piece that appeared all over the net a while ago. Among other places, you can see it on National Geographic.
Well, you get the idea. It's not _my_ guess, I know I've read it and various other bits before in various places, but, well, my memory has been known to fail before. So take it with a grain of salt and do your own search:)
Well, if you look at nodern carnivores, you see such examples as:
- the fox, which is pretty darn red
- the tiger, which is relatively bright orange and with stripes too (and cats somewhat inherited that: a normal tabby male is almost always orange, though the females are nearly always grey when they're tabby.)
In fact, think about this: the most logical camouflage colour would be green, right? That's the colour we dress our soldiers in, right? Well, in practice mammals are coloured anything but green.
A hypothesis there is that camouflage doesn't always mean having the same colour as the surroundings. Three quarters of camouflage in the animal world seems to have to do more with the mental capacity of your opponent (prey or predator, as the case may be) than with blending in.
Primates have very evolved, arguably top-of-the-line image analysis and recognition capabilities. A lot of more primitive animals don't. For example, strange as it may seem to you, a lot of animals have trouble recognizing a snake as a snake. (In fact, one hypothesis is that a lot of the natural selection pressure for increasingly bigger brains in primates was... snake recognition.) A lot take "shortcuts" to save neurons, like mainly processing edges instead of whole shapes, or mainly seeing stuff that moves instead of analyzing the whole picture. A lot are nearly colour-blind, or have other primary colours for their vision than humans have. Some species (e.g., a lot of birds) don't even try to recognize another animal as a whole, but just look at where the eyes are: both in front for stereoscopic vision means predator, eyes on the sides means harmless herbivore. Etc.
So basically don't assume that what's piss-poor camouflage for _you_, also counts as such for another species. It may be actually _excellent_ camouflage in the environment that animal has to deal with.
E.g., lots of stripes and dots may look like begging for attention to you, but may severely overload the edge detection in more primitive species, by creating lots and lots and lots of extra edges, and thus prevent them from figuring out the whole.
E.g., the reason a lot of exotic fish are orange, yellow and red, is because those frequencies get absorbe the fastest in water. If you go deep enough, pretty much all available light is... blue. So you don't really need to colour yourself black, you only need to absorb blue. A simpler and cheaper to produce pigment can serve the same purpose and achieve the same effect.
E.g., a big tail like that of the pheasant may look like an unexplainable handicap, until you realize that most animals have a very simplified way of judging how big an opponent is. They only judge how big the image looks, not try to reconstruct the 3D animal in their brain and judge the size that way. There's a reason cats puff up and turn sideways when they might need to fight. To _you_ it's the same cat turned sideways, but to more simple-brained animals (apparently including other cats) it just became a lot larger and thus more dangerous. Or to the same animal you might look like a lot of an easier prey if you crouch or sit than if you stand up. So, depending on what predators it had to evolve with, being able to fan a giant tail can actually act as a deterrent.
So basically, we probably can't extrapolate what the raptors' plumage looked like. It probably depends a lot on the environment, and on how their prey's brain worked. And given the many millions of years involved, I wouldn't be surprised if it changed over time as their environment and prey evolved.
It's not as simple as, "Fact is, most people do not care about their privacy." The same people who spew "you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide" all over the place, would sue your arse into oblivion if you were a peeping tom under their window. Or would ostracize you very quickly if you gossipped to their enemies every word they said.
Some time ago I was reading some anthropology books, to figure out how people work. (Since I'm naturally blind to body language or such, so not much chance to figure it out on my own.) One thing that stuck into my head was that there's a _massive_ disconnect between what people say about themselves -- even on a completely anonymous poll -- and what they actually do. What they say is an ideal self image, the self that they'd like to be, not the self that they actually are. And that ideal self has more to do with social acceptability than with anything else.
E.g.,
- a community had this shiny-happy self-image that they help each other all the time, work their fields together, help each other build a house or a barn, etc. And they all answered just that on a poll. Turns out that in practice the last time anyone actually did that was half a century ago.
- a tribal community had this self-image of being brave warriors and hunters, etc. And almost everyone defined themselves as a hunter on a poll. Turns out that in the meantime they were mainly agriculture-based, and most didn't even have a weapon to hunt or fight with. But they still thought of themselves as hunters and warriors.
- on one occasion where meat prices rose, a western community was asked if they eat more or less meat. Almost everyone said some (more polite) version of "fuck that, I'm not paying that much. I'll buy less meat until the prices come down to something sane." Well, funny thing is, they then asked the local supermarkets and actually went through the thrash to see what people throw away. Turns out the meat consumption was actually higher. (I guess some kind of weblen effect.)
Etc.
Plus, even on anonymous polls you have to deal with effects like:
- people trying to pick the answer they think would be more socially acceptable or would please the person polling them. E.g., if one choice has even vague negative conotations, or is phrased to sound that way, people will try to avoid it.
- more people will answer "yes" than "no", presumably because we've all been educated that it's not nice to refuse too much. So professional polls actually switch the question around on half the forms, to average that effect out. E.g., if the question is "should we pull out of Iraq?" half the forms will actually ask the opposite, "should we continue the war in Iraq?" Otherwise you'll have the results skewed.
Now this may sound like a case of "who the heck said anything about polls?" but bear with me. The same effects will be visible in day-to-day conversations, posts, etc. In fact, to a higher extent.
Briefly, just because some people chest-thump that they have nothing to hide, doesn't mean that they actually don't. It just means that their ideal self image is like that, plus it makes them look better to their peers. It doesn't mean that they match their own ideal, though.
And finally, note that this isn't necessarily "lying". Most people actually genuinely see themselves as better than they really are. It's really just a combination of selective confirmation (you'll remember the times you acted according to your principles, but forget those times when you did the opposite) and cognitive dissonance (rationalizing something so it fits the rest of your mental model. E.g., honest people don't lie, I'm a honest person, omg I just lied to someone for a petty personal advantage... therefore it wasn't really a lie, now that I think about it.)
*shrug* Now _I_ too would say "who cares about graphics? Gameplay is king." However I end up talking almost daily with a couple of gamer co-workers, who, any way you want to slice it, _do_ place graphics above everything else.
They might _say_ that they value gameplay more, but any talk about some game they've bought will revolve 90% around how awesome or how sucky the graphics are, an you'll have to work on it to get even a nodding acknowledgement of anything else in the game.
A recent conversation with one, for example, went loosely from memory like this. (It's about a game which will remain unnamed because I'm not discussing here whether the game is good or bad. I'm just illustrating how -- whatever other faults the game might have had -- they didn't even play long enough to discover those, they got stuck on "eew, the graphics look like PS2 graphics!")
Him: "Hey, I went and bought game X because you said it's OK, and it's the biggest piece of crap ever. You made me waste my money on it." (Not the most polite way to start a talk, but maybe he's just joking.) Me: "Hmm? Well, ok, I guess these things are subjective. What didn't you like about it?" Him: "The graphics! It looks like a PS2 game! Or like something that might have been ok on the Wii or maybe on the XBox last year, but in the meantime people discovered how to use all three GPUs!" (I didn't know the XBox had 3 GPUs, I thought the 3 were the CPU cores, but ok.) Me: "Hmm, well, maybe you shouldn't take advice from me if your tastes are that different. I generally don't pay much attention to graphics." Him: "Well, I don't care about graphics either, but these are crap! They look like on the PS2!" (Bit of a contradiction there, I would guess. But let's prod it some more.) Me: "No, when I say I don't care about graphics, I mean I've played a bit of <insert PS1 game from the 90's> over the weekend." Him: "Eeew... Isn't that almost 10 years old and with 2D graphics?!?" Me: "Yep, that's the one. Just saying, I don't care much what it looks like." Him: "Well, I don't care about graphics either, but, eew, that's 2D and low res." Me: "Well, the one you were talking about isn't." Him: "Yeah, but it looks like on the PS2! They can publish that kinda crap on the PS2 or the Wii, if they want to, not on the XBox!"
And so on and so forth.
Now how many gamers are that shallow, I couldn't tell. I like to think that this guy is an extreme case. Still, as they say, if you're one in a million, there are 6000 exactly like you. Plus by virtue of it being a continuum, there'll be some tens of millions in shades of grey on that side of zero.
And to return to whether TFA is fluff or not, well, think of it this way: people tend to gravitate around sites and magazines which see things that way. If one magazine or site told the above-mentioned guy to buy a game 'cause the gameplay rules, even though the graphics suck, I'm guessing it wouldn't take more than 1-2 times following their advice to stop reading it completely. So as long as there are people basing their purchases on glitter above substance, there will be people catering to that market segment. It's only capitalism in action, after all.
Now before I get started, bear in mind that not only I'm not a chemist, but Chemistry is one of the things I understand the least. So major talking out the arse follows. If anyone who knows chemistry better wants to correct me, please do, it's very much appreciated.
That said, looking at the illustration of the mollecules interacting in TFA, it looks to me like their dye binds to just the nitrate anion, and there is no trace of urea to be seen at all there. I.e., what is so funnily coloured is their mollecule after stealing a nitrate anion from _any_ nitrate whatsoever.
It could be that other mollecules don't give their nitrate as gladly as urea nitrate, or whatever. Again, I don't know enough chemistry to rule that out.
But unless I forgot chemistry completely, _any_ salt will split into a number of ions in a solution. Heck, even water doesn't stay H2O, a number of mollectules split into HO- and H3O+ ions. Ph 7 is basically just the equilibrium point for that mix.
So basically even if you handled potassium nitrate for your orchids, or made a sandwich with ham cured with that (preservative E252 _is_ potassium nitrate), or just are a chain smoker (tobacco is quite commonly treated with it too), or made a model rocket recently, etc, etc, etc... you'll have plenty of nitrate anions on your skin for this thing to bind to. Heck, it's increasingly used in toothpaste too.
And that's just one nitrate. Another common one that comes to mind is ammonium nitrate. Ok, so that one _can_ be used for an ANFO bomb, but is also used by the ton by farmers and even by miners.
So I'm, you know, _curious_ what their miracle aerosol does in the presence of those. Did they spray it on a slice of cured ham and it _didn't_ turn purple, for example? Did they check it on ammonium nitrate too? On a pingpong ball? Basically which nitrates _does_ it react with, and which not? Because again, my uninformed interpretation of their drawing is that it would react with any nitrate whatsoever.
So then lemme get this straight: then the great advantage of the Taser is... that it finally brought the US police on par with the USSR police? You know, the USSR guys might beat you up after they arrest you, the US guys taser you repeatedly even if they've got nothing to arrest you for.
<sarcasm>'Course, blimey, noone should be worried if individual people start being tortured by the police. It's totally a direction that we should be glad that a democratic state takes.</sarcasm>
You know, the funny thing is, even the most hardened dictatorships only used "kalashnikovs for crowd control" when things really got out of hand. I know of at least one Eastern European revolution where the oppressive communist government first tried to hose them with water and whatnot, and we're talking revolt against the government there.
Compare it to the neverending stream of Taser stories from the USA. People got tasered occasionally as torture (people which had _already_ been restrained) or because a cop got a chip on his shoulder, for reasons as ridiculous as:
- asking too many questions at a political rally (see the recent story)
- being at a library without their library card (guy got tasered _repeatedly_ after he had already accepted to leave)
- diabetic guy in a medical emergency calls 911 for an ambulance, cops show up first and taser him in his bed (apparently one guy sick enough to be stuck in bed was considered dangerous enough to the cops to warrant use of the taser)
Etc, etc, etc.
Dearie, get this: even China, and even the fucking NKVD under Stalin, wouldn't have used a gun in _those_ situation. Yes, China did shoot some of the people demonstrating in Tiananmen square against the government, but not even in their darkest hour would they consider shooting a sick guy for calling an ambulance.
Effectively the idea that a taser is "non-lethal" has lowered the bar to ludicriously low extremes. It's not replacing the use of guns, as if you were to do something that warrants shooting at you, they'll _still_ shoot at you. (E.g., if you pulled a gun at a cop, I do believe they won't draw the tasers.) It just created a whole new possibility to inflict pain (again, sometimes repeatedly) on someone for minor misdemeanors or just for disliking him or just for fun. It's not replacing guns, it's _in_ _addition_ to guns, for stuff where you previously wouldn't even _think_ of drawing a gun.
Sadder still: for stuff where even China or the USSR wouldn't have even dreamed of using a gun on someone.
So the question isn't whether you'd rather get the ray or a round. For any stuff that would previously warrant getting a round, you'll still get a round. Only now you'll get the ray for everything else. Whop-de-do, big improvement there.
Frankly, I'm not all for this idea. It creates a cumbersome and abusable solution to something that was solved better already.
E.g., whatever happened to running something in a sandbox, ffs? You can go as far as running something untrusted (e.g., a plugin, ActiveX control, etc) in a virtual box, but even a chroot jail is a good start. It _is_ possible to isolate something to the point where it can't do any harm at all, and can't touch anything except itself. It's also possible to nice it to the point where it only runs when nothing else wants to, so it can't DOS your system that way.
So why doesn't anyone do just that already? E.g., MS could have fixed their own ActiveX crap that way ages ago. Instead we got this baroque, but fundamentally broken, model where you get to decide (or have decided for you based on zones) whether something can't run at all, or can run with full rights as an executable. Except if a malicious one slipped through the cracks, it's still a full executable running on your machine.
Heck, even Java is essentially the wrong way about it as a browser plugin. It tried to implement itself some restrictions which belong in the OS or browser itself, and if the JVM itself is compromised (there _have_ been a couple of JVM vulnerabilities), it can do anything. Kudos to Sun for trying that, but it's a workaround essentially. It shouldn't have been the JVM which does that, it should have been the OS and browser.
Whitelisting is just an extra step in that wrong direction, essentially. Instead of making sure that a malicious thing in the browser can't touch anything else, we're one step further in the baroque, fragile and monumentally work-intensive direction of determining which of them should be allowed. Except again, if something slipped through the cracks, you'll still get screwed so hard you'll walk bow-legged for a week.
You may be more right than some probably realize. See, whitelisting is essentially all that "trusting computing" was about.
Yes, "trusted computing" had all that DRM stuff and crypto signatures and all components authenticating themselves and their drivers, but essentially that's what you need to have a bullet-proof whitelist.
- E.g., if you don't have a strong hash to be sure that it indeed is the program you think you're running, and it's an untampered executable, then you don't really know what you're running. (E.g., if you were to do it just by name, and you allow, say, "WoW.exe", then you'll also run a virus attachment called "WoW.exe" just as cheerfully.)
- E.g., if you don't make the system startup itself bullet-proof, people will use spoof drivers and whatnot to compromise that security
So basically we're essentially back to the same Palladium shit that we ranted and raved against as the great Satan. It's what MS wanted in Vista in the first place, but apparently realized grudgingly that noone else wanted. And _of_ _course_ Vista would be on the list. In fact, better than that, Vista was supposed to be the one enforcing it. (Which, if you think about it, is pretty much needed. If the OS doesn't do it, and doesn't double-check its startup and components at that, any other link down the chain is not guaranteed to be guaranteed enough to be the uncompromised.)
So now it's snuck back under the same claim that you need it to protect you from the evil hackers. Right.
Well, the problems are the same any way anyone wants to slice it. E.g.,
- it essentially discourages running stuff you compiled yourself. (Just changing the options you compile a kernel with, for example, is enough to change the hash, if the hash is any good. So essentially the only safe thing a "trusted computing" system should conclude there is that the system itself has been tampered with and is no longer secure or trustable.)
- it places an undue burden on small time developpers and hobbyists. I know if I was distributing a small utility on sourceforge, I'd be annoyed if I had to re-certify it every time I refactor something or fix some obscure bug. Doubly so if it costs anything to get it certified, which would likely be the case if a commercial entity is doing it. Getting it virus scanned, ran through some automated heuristics, hashed, and put on the list, can take some time and infrastructure and a paid employees time costs money.
And, frankly, even if it was something as trivial as 10$, why would I pay it for something that makes me no money? It'd be like ROI except without the R. And if you want it thoroughly dissected and certified that it 100% can't possibly be a virus, then it'll cost a heck of a lot more than that.
- it can be used to shaft you the other way around too. A program can authenticate the system it runs on, and some might even need to. (E.g., I sure hope an anti-virus utility pipes up loudly if it thinks it runs on a system where the OS itself has been compromised. E.g., I sure hope a banking applet pipes up loudly if it runs in a browser that's been compromised.) So there's nothing to keep someone from making a program that refuses to run in Wine or a flash applet that refuses to work in Mozilla.
And if you think noone other than MS would ever do that, think again. There was this recent story even on Slashdot about webmasters who explicitly don't want Mozilla users because they block their ads.
Ah, I remember a while ago, we were waiting for a game announcement from Blizzard. Everyone was sure it'll be Starcraft 2 or Diablo 3. I mean, it made sense, right? They had all the fans lined up waiting for them. Instead we got World Of Warcraft.
So my bet is that now we'll get something like a space flight sim set in the world of Starcraft:P Could be something else, but that's the only idea I have at the moment of completely mis-using an existing franchise. Oh, or maybe a city building game set in the world of Diablo. Sort of like Sim City except instead of a tornado, you get the gates of hell breaking open under the local church;)
If you don't think that invading someone's privacy is wrong, or entrapping people into squeezing money out of them is wrong, there is something wrong with you.
I'm sorry, while I'd even agree with the privacy slant, and I don't really have much love for the RIAA... excuse me? Entrapment?
Let's have look at dictionary.reference.com, shall we. The only definitions that fit in a legal context, seem to be the likes of "the luring by a law-enforcement agent of a person into committing a crime" (Random House Unabridged Dictionary) and "To lure into performing a previously or otherwise uncontemplated illegal act. (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Also note the following note from Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Law: "Entrapment is available as a defense only when an agent of the state or federal government has provided the encouragement or inducement. This defense is sometimes allowed in administrative proceedings (as for the revocation of a license to practice medicine) as well as criminal proceedings. In order to establish entrapment, the defendant has the burden of proving either that he or she would not have committed the crime but for the undue persuasion or fraud of the government agent, or that the encouragement was such that it created a risk that persons not inclined to commit the crime would commit it, depending on the jurisdiction. When entrapment is pleaded, evidence (as character evidence) regarding the defendant that might otherwise have been excluded is allowed to be admitted."
I.e., pay attention: Entrapment is when some government agent (e.g., an undercover cop) persuades you to do something illegal that you wouldn't have even considered otherwise. Just getting caught when doing something on your own is _not_ entrapment, much as it seems to be a popular mis-conception on Slashdot.
E.g., if you're some random Joe minding your own business and some undercover cop comes and coaxes you and promises you big bucks if you'll grow hemp for him in your basement, that's entrapment. It can be argued that you wouldn't have considered doing it on your own. Maybe you're just gullible, not a crook. On the other hand, if you're selling dope anyway and an undercover cop comes and buys some hemp from you, that's not entrapment.
E.g., I seem to vaguely remember a terrorism-related case where it was argued that the cop had pretty much manufactured the whole cell. He wasn't (supposedly) recruited into a cell, he recruited a bunch of disgruntled muslim immigrants and persuaded them that it's Allah's will to blow shit up and punish the infidels, and promised them money, weapons and fake papers. It may show that they were not morally above that, given the right persuasion and incentive, but they weren't doing it until that cop coaxed them.
On the other hand, had the cell existed and planned that shit on its own, then an undercover cop infiltrating it would _not_ count as entrapment.
E.g., to further illustrate the delimitation, IIRC there was this case of a woman trying to hire a hitman to kill some neighbours. The undercover cop posing as a hardened hitman, precisely to avoid any possibility of entrapment, actually tried to talk her _out_ of it, and asked several times if she's completely sure she wants to go ahead with it. Just being an undercover agent may be a lie, but it's not entrapment. It would be entrapment if he went and convinced a neighbour how much easier things would be if she killed everyone she doesn't like.
So pray tell, how did the RIAA entrap these poor people? Did some undercover RIAA agent go to their house, befriend them, and beg them to share some songs online? Or what?
In most cases the RIAA didn't even know who the fuck was at that IP address until the ISP told them. They even got some awfully bad info in some cases, resulting in some PR screw-ups of epic
Well, here's an idea: because such discussions help raise various points, and awareness of them, which some of us wouldn't even consider otherwise when choosing a license.
We're not all lawyers, and such fine points may go right over our heads when choosing a license.
The GPL or BSD license aren't a goal by themselves (except for a few zealots who rarely provide more than lip service), they're _tools_. If I wrote a piece of code, the question isn't what can I do to serve BSD or GPL, the question is which of them serves _me_ best. If I'm not making any money out of it anyway, it might as well try to fit my moral code, or vanity, or whatever.
E.g., if, say, I want my name on that piece of software in perpetuity, then a license which allows removing it (or conversion to a license which does allow it), then I'm not interested in that license. E.g., while I'm somewhat "laissez faire" when it comes to enforcing my own strict moral code on others, conversely I wouldn't go with a license which enforces the opposite of that moral code. I might not generally force you to do the rightest thing, but I sure as heck won't force you to do what I consider the wrong thing.
If none of the existing licenses fit my views, maybe I'll just make up my own or maybe I'll just release the damn thing as public domain. If none of _my_ points of view are served right by either GPL or BSD, then, wth, why would I make a contribution to _that_ crusade.
So, yes, while I probably should see an actual lawyer for the actual license, it's good to hear what problems do other people see. _Especially_ if they're not lawyers. Maybe I was under the same mis-understanding, or maybe their moral code loosely matches mine, or whatever. E.g., if I too was under the misunderstanding that, say, under BSD license noone can remove my name from the credits, but a lawyer went on record to say that someone else (even the original author of some module I contribute to) can do just that, then that just raised a problem I'm very interested in.
Even if they can't provide a legally sound answer, they can, quite often, clarify the _question_. That's equally valuable.
Basically, talking about it is good.
And, no offense, I wish all the "nooo, you're not worthy enough to question these guys. Just trust the authority figures and don't try using your own head!" gang on/. would just shut up for once. I don't know when or why that fashion got started, but it's getting old. That's religion. No, seriously. There is no pre-requisite needed to use your own head.
Actually, the previous message may be even underestimating the lack of importance MS had.
When I say that MS launched a TCP/IP stack and a browser in Windows '95 (launched at the end of August 1995), you have to actually remember that IE 1.0 was actually only available at the time in the Win 95 "Plus Pack", that cost extra money and most people didn't actually buy. It also was mostly advertised as a collection of themes and some minor utilities, not as internet access.
IE 1.0 only became a free download in late December 1995, moving the timeline to: 10 days _after_ AltaVista was launched.
But that's irrelevant anyway, because noone gave a damn about it until IE 3.0. It also only started actually being included with Windows (i.e., you know, the point at which you can argue with a straight face that MS really did more to bring it to the masses than the gang who were also offering a free download) in Windows '98.
By which point already a lot of search engines aready existed.
Google itself was incorporated in September 1998. Although that _is_ technically right after the Windows 98 release, it's outright laughable to assume that in slightly under 3 months Win '98 had already changed the face of the internet so much that it singlehandedly made Google necessary.
By the same logic you could say that transport ships caused the Vietnam war, 'cause that's what everyone used to go there. Or that tophats caused WW1, because all those funny-looking politicians were wearing one when they declared war on each other.
MS was there at the time. That much we can aggree. But when you move into whether people would have thrown away their PC or given up Internet without MS's blessing, heh, now that's just funny.
Get this: the move to Internet was already happening, with or without MS. I already mentioned Trumpet Winsock, but there were others at work there already. Compuserve offered Internet access _and_ a browser in April 1995, i.e., before Windows '95. They already had 3 million subscribers. AOL was offering some internet access through a proprietary interface even earlier (e.g., they added Usenet access in '94, much to the annoyance of everyone else who was on Usenet) and by '95 they had already moved to just implement a proper TCP/IP stack and let everyone just use whatever browser they wish. Etc.
Both Compuserve and AOL advertised massively too, and were already mail-bombing everyone with free diskettes. They weren't the only ones.
So let me tell you what would have happened if MS dragged their feet: If Joe Average wanted to get on the 'Net, he'd just have gotten a free AOL diskette and went online anyway. In other words, the only one to suffer there would have been... MS. If MS dragged its feet at that point, MS would have missed the boat. That's all.
And to get back to MS's surrealistic claim that they created the environment that needed search engines:
WebCrawler was the first full text search engine, and it went live on April 20, 1994. I.e., you know, a whole bloody year before Windows '95. Obviously work on it must have begun earlier, so the need for a search engine must have existed as early as 1993. (Yes, later WebCrawler switched to just aggregating results from other search engines, but originally it was a standalone search engine with its own crawler and database.)
Work on Lycos as a web search project was started in 1994 too.
AltaVista, for example, was launched in December 1995, a mere 2-3 months after the release of Win '95. But again, work must have begun before Windows 95.
Etc.
So the search engine game was on even without MS's blessing. So their claim that they created the platform and need for search engines is _absurd_. Search engines were already being coded, and some were already launched too, long before MS's blessing.
Actually, the devil is in the details: when you said that GW is instance based instead, then "one world" doesn't even mean the same thing as in WoW. GW, just like Diablo 2, is the exact opposite. Everything is instanced. It doesn't even _have_ a real shard or world, in the WoW sense.
To illustrate what I mean: in WoW I can for example take a treck from Anvilmar to Ironforge to Stormwind to Goldshire (see for example the funny video with the 40 level 1 gnomes raid on Hogger for a group doing just that) and meet a few thousand players playing in the same world. _That_ is WoW's "world". And going "one world" would mean essentially all 9 million players literally running around in the same world. Not in instanced versions of it.
Does any part of GW have that? No, I don't think so, everyone who isn't in your instanced game, just doesn't exist in your "world".
Technically speaking, GW has lots of smaller shards, not one big world for everyone. It just invented a way to spawn new shards as needed, that's all.
This isn't to say that GW is bad or that WoW is better. I can see the point in instanced content. But let's not go redefining terms for "my game can beat yours" willy-waving. Just having basically a lobby from which you can start an instanced game or join one, does not make a "one world game" in the sense discussed here. It's just not the same kind of "one world", so making the claim that it did it before WoW is meaningless. It's like saying that cats invented leatherworking because your cat has white "shoes".
Wake me up when you can have 36,000 people in your GW game running around independently and actually randomly seeing or meeting each other. That's currently the average population per server in WoW. _That_ is the point at which you can claim with a straight face that GW even does the same thing in that aspect. Do it all in all world? Well, wake me up when it supports 9 million players in the same game, running around and whacking NPCs independently.
And here's another thought, and what the guys in the summary missed:
Chances are you don't even have enough geography for that. If you parked one player per square metre, you'd need a 3 km by 3 km world just to have the players stand there. If you want them to actually have some space to move around and hunt without stepping on each other's toes, you end up needing a world as big as TES Arena. Except at that point you also need a hell of a lot more quests (people won't be happy if they have to run an hour just to get to the next quest giver), and other problems start to creep in too. _That_ is why noone, WoW and GW included, ever tried doing that.
So people coming up with ideas like "hey, look, it's technically possible" have just missed the point.
Don't ignore history; DOS and Windows were the large majority of the market even then. Its doubtful anyone would jump from PC to some propritary and more expensive hardware just to get on the internet. At that point, businesses still didn't know what quite to do with it, and consumers were (likely) draw to the sex sites.
No offense, but please take your own advice and don't ignore history. At the time:
1. There was nothing magical about DOS. It just happened to be the OS that IBM selected for their computer, and their computer turned out to be insanely popular. People didn't give a fuck about the OS as such, it was just the thing that came with their PC. If Microsoft hadn't existed, IBM maybe would have made a better offer for CP/M or maybe would have written their own micro-OS.
There was nothing revolutionary about DOS. It was a clone of CP/M. And having worked with both MS DOS and CP/M, I can tell you they were barely program loaders and the most primitive filesystem imaginable (though each in its own way.) Even you could have written your own DOS, if you wanted to, and so could IBM. But again, IBM wouldn't really have had to: CP/M was already insanely popular on 8 bit micros, so it would have been a no-brainer to license it instead.
2. Windows was nothing special either. OS/2 had a graphical interface too, and so did GEM and half a dozen other stuff. MS Windows may have been the most popular graphical interface at the time, but it wasn't the only one by far. The idea that without MS Windows you'd have had to buy some uber-expensive hardware instead, is just absurd. Without MS, you would have gotten GEM or any of the other GUIs instead.
Even skipping past the fact that someone would have filled the void eventually anyway, the fact is: they wouldn't have had to, because there was no void to start with. Alternatives already existed.
Now we can debate whether Windows was the best, and it certainly was the most popular. But thinking that without MS you wouldn't have had a graphical browser on the PC, is just absurd.
3. The IBM PC itself, again, was nothing fundamentally special. There were _plenty_ of other computers competing for the market at the time. Another one would have filled the void.
Everyone rants and raves about how MS brought us finally to $300 computers, but seem to ommit that we had been there before already. E.g., my first computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000, a.k.a., ZX-81, which cost IIRC 60$. Now ok, a ZX-81 couldn't exactly run a graphical browser, but a lot of others could. I see no reason why a Sinclair QL or Amiga couldn't have evolved to fill the niche if the PC didn't exist.
Basically the PC may have been the best bang/buck, but it wasn't the only offering by far. It also wasn't the cheapest.
So basically the assertion that without a PC surely you'd have ended up with something much more expensive to go online, is flawed. We don't know at what price the market would have stabilized, if the PC hadn't pushed everyone else out of the market.
4. You'd be surprised how much of the PC's evolution had _nothing_ to do with MS. It was wildly cloned because IBM allowed anyone to clone it, as long as they paid the royalties for the BIOS. Then Compaq did a clean room reverse-engineering and that was the beginning of PCs which aren't encumbered even by that. And so on.
There were a myriad of factors that combined to make the PC ubiquitous, most of which had nothing to do with MS. Hearing that MS single-handedly brought computing to the masses is nothing but revisionism of ludicrious proportions. While they might have had _some_ of the merit, they were just one among hundreds of companies which contributed to the phenomenon.
Heck, even with their DOS, at some point IBM got sick and tired of MS's 32 MB partition limit, so they bought DOS from MS, wrote a better filesystem and sold it back to MS. The intermediate IBM version was IBM DOS 4.0. Or for Windows a lot of the work was paid for b
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As I've been saying before, the situation is pretty skewed for both genders.
- About half the guys in a high school or university want the top 10 super-models. Move a bit lower and about 90% of the guys want the top 10% girls. Some might eventually get realistic enough to settle for a bit less, but only grudgingly.
- About the same applies to the girls. Half the girls want the top 10 jocks. Some 90% of the girls want the top 10% most desirable guys.
Interestingly enough, according to a recent study, girls seem to be a bit more realistic as to who they can actually get. Guys will tend to aim above what they can get.
Basically anyone who says that someone can get laid anytime she wishes and by anyone she wishes because she's a girl, probably is doing the same daydreaming: thinking about those top 10 most popular girls in the whole damn college. Noone thinks of the shy, flat, nerdy girl in the back row when they make such generalization. That's her problem in a nutshell: to 90% of the guys she's just short of invisible, or little more than a piece of decor.
To put it even more bluntly, half the western culture (of both genders) is generally more about getting a status symbol than someone they actually plan to get along with. It's the same as getting, say, the sportiest BMW you can afford: it's typically not as much because you actually need something that expensive and that much of a gas guzzler, but just to show everyone that you can afford what most others can't. Same here: girlfriends and boyfriends get chosen as status symbols more than anything else.
And same as almost noone wants the lower half of the guys, if they have a choice, noone wants the lower half of the girls either. Note that I'm not talking about the butt-ugly gang of either sex. Just being _average_, already isn't much of a status symbol.
So my take of what's going to happen is basically:
1. They _will_ find a bunch of girls noone else wants, willing to give it a try. Then they'll get to go, "eeew" as they discover that they didn't get some smooth and highly desirable jock. (Who just happened to be single and limited in nerdiness to knowing how to install Windows.)
2. The guys, conversely, will drool at the thought, right until they find out who they got to meet. And that it's not the horny super-model with huge tits, that they thought they _deserve_ for being so smart and for knowing all that command line stuff. Cue the mandatory "eew" from the guys too.
Nice try, but probably no banana.
Both groups will eventually settle on something more realistic, but if we're talking university LUGs and sororities, not yet. Well, not for most of them.
(And before anyone accuses me of being sexist, note that I've talked about both genders.)
Just to clarify why I wrote the previous long rant: because redefining liberties like that is essentially one step towards losing them.
The root of all recent erosion of liberties and human rights is... people not knowing what their rights or liberties are, or what a human right or freedom is in the first place. The easiest way to take something from someone is when they don't know they had it in the first place.
Some while ago there was a poll in the USA, regarding what people think the first amendment covers. Turns out that most thought it covers everything _except_ their relation with the government. They think they have a right to call the neighbour names or to troll a privately-owned message board, an woe if anyone tries to moderate them. But the government? Nah, of course the government can censor them. Duh, that's what a government is supposed to do.
Sad.
So redefining such private crusades as "protecting freedom of speech" or such, is just muddying the waters some more. And I think we could all do without that.
You want say that corporations are evil or that all source should be open? Fine. Say it. That's freedom of speech. No more, no less.
But redefining "I can force you to show me _your_ code" as freedom of speech, is bogus. It's already claiming the non-existent right to tell someone else what to do. I can see the legality of it, and even the morality, as essentially a method of payment in a contract. Sure, go ahead, demand whatever payment you wish for your work, and the market will decide if it wants to pay your price. But some sacred human right it ain't, and freedom of speech it ain't.
And I'd rather see more people know what "freedom of speech" really is, and when their government violates it. Instead of thinking that freedom of speech violation means when <insert firewall manufacturer> stealing a bit of GPL-ed code. The latter is copyright and contract violation, and despicable in its own right, but it's not a human rights violation. And thinking it's the other way around, is the first step towards losing the real human right.
And "we have to restrict some of your real rights, to preserve some bogus 'right' we just invented/redefined" is a slippery slope in and by itself. It ranks up there with "we have to restrict some of your rights, to preserve your right to live in communism." Once you accepted that it's ok to give up some rights for RMS's personal ideological crusade, then, pray tell, why not for Marx's?
Ok, so maybe Marx is a bad example there, as it's a discredited ideology already. The same applies to any other ideological crusade, though. "We have to restrict some of your human rights, to preserve your right to live in a christian fundamentalism and stop the Islam" for example is exactly of the same calibre. Or insert any other ideology.
Simply put, equating "ideology" with "human rights" (or "freedom") and seeing nothing wrong with giving up some of the later for the sake of a bit of the former, is a dangerous frame of mind. I'd rather people understood "ok, it's a contract, I'm demanding X as payment for my Y" than get used to nodding that it's really no different to giving up some of their rights to gain a bit of ideological feel-good.
The question is, however, whether that comparison even holds any water in the first place. The whole concepts behind modern western law are some (supposedly) inalienable human rights, and how to best strike a balance to preserve them. E.g., you have a right to life, but I don't have some fundamental right to take yours, so we get laws against murder.
The GPL just isn't preserving any fundamental human right (much RMS and ESR like to rant and rave about "freedom of speech" vs "free as in beer") in any commonly recognized moral or philosophical system. I'm sorry, it's just a contract, not some fundamental human right. Asking for your code in payment for using mine in a commercial project is just a method of payment, in the end, not preserving some fundamental liberty. It's like saying that to use my digital photos, you have to send me a sixpack of beer, or that you can use my thrash can if you march around the town for at least one mile chanting "Moraelin is hung like a horse" loudly.
It's just "if you want my X, I want your Y". It's contract law, not the freakin' bill of rights.
Let's talk about "freedom of speech" too. Freedom of speech just means noone will send you to Guantanamo for saying something. The _spirit_ of it was also: something (true) about the government that it would like to keep hidden. That's its use against tyranny that those founding fathers had in mind. Noone can come round you up because you said the King did this or that, or that some other political system would be better. But let's not even go that far. Let's stick to: noone will send you to Guantanamo for saying something. For code, I guess that means publishing it.
That's all. That's "freedom of speech". You put your own code on some FTP, and the FBI or CIA didn't come kick your door in for it. No more, no less.
Pray tell, why do you need GPL to do that? And how does the GPL protect you there? Does sticking the GPL on a 'printf("The government has been supplying the same arms to terrorists that they now use against us.")' totally prevent censorship of that code, or what?
Additionally, get this: anything I ever said or wrote, including this message or whatever code I might ever release, is automatically copyrighted by me. I don't need to stick the GPL on it to be mine from the moment I wrote it. The notion that it prevents some evil corporation from taking my code and forbidding me from using it ever again, is blatantly absurd. Any evil corporation trying to apropriate my code is already violating the law as it is, if I didn't explicitly grant them a right to.
Now I may or may not have the means to fight them off. But that's an entirely different topic, and just sticking the GPL on it won't change it one bit. If I don't have the means to fight off, say, SCO for a piece of my code without GPL, I still don't have the means with GPL on it too. OK, I know, I can now also write off my code to the FSF and let them fight it out. Again, it's nothing but a bit of contract, not some fundamental freedom: I give you X if you fight off evil corp Y for me.
So basically it's all about contract, all about "but you'll give me your Y if you want my X". No more, no less. Gimme your changes, if you want my code, for example. It may fit some personal ideological crusade, but some fundamental human right it ain't.
And there it just becomes a case of "well, am I interested in getting that in exchange for my work?" No more, no less. Maybe I don't want your code at all. Maybe I just want my name in bold letters up there, because that's the kind of vain person that I am, and signing off my own code to the FSF just doesn't serve _my_ interests there at all. Maybe I want a sixpack of beer for it. Maybe I want to enforce my _own_ moral code there, not RMS's code. Or whatever.
Rights and liberties aren't that flexible or tied to one particular kind of contract. Your right to, say, criticize the government (i.e., "freedom of speech") is universal, not a consequence of slapping a GPL on a piece of speech.
You know, it kinda makes me wonder how that increase will happen.
... In which case people buying energy-saving appliances will make almost no difference to the total.
... In which case they can build their own power plants, thank you very much. Electricity can't even be transported over _too_ large distances, so it's not like more space heaters in India will cause brownouts at your power plant in Florida.
Will it be mostly in the industrial sector for example?
Will it just mean more energy used in currently third world countries?
I'm saying that because, alarmism be damned, I just don't see that kind of increase in what people use electricity for. If I look at what I have around the house these days, vs what my parents had back in 75 (to use the same time interval back as what you propose forward to 2040), I'm not sure I actually use more energy than they did. E.g.,
- they had big ol' fashioned 100W lightbulbs all around the house, I have 15W CCFLs. Their (admittedly large) living room alone had 5x 100W light bulbs lighting it, I only have 2x 15W in mine.
- they had 1 fridge, I have 1 fridge. I think mine has better insulation, because, well, people discovered stuff in 30+ years.
- they had 1 washing machine, I have 1 washing machine. Theirs used a lot more power, I think. (When they bought a particular washing machine, we quickly discovered that the breakers kicked in when the washing machine's water heater, fridge and god knows what else, all kicked in.) Plus mine is rated for pretty high energy efficiency, while way back the notion wasn't even invented yet.
- for washing, there's only so much you can save, you know. (Short of stopping washing. Then again, looking at one particularly stinky co-worker... please, please, please don't. Saving the planet be damned, go take a shower;) Heating 1 litre of water by 1 degree has a lower limit on how little energy you can use, because, you know, it's just physics. Plus heating it was always as efficient as it gets: converting electricity to heat, we can do with 100% efficiency. It's only converting to other stuff that starts to be inefficient. The only thing that works differently is the insulation, and I think that's getting better too.
- they had 1 TV, I have 1 TV. You could keep the room warm with theirs, way back. Literally.
Etc.
The only thing that comes to mind as more energy used these days is my computer. Let's say that's, oh, I don't know, 200 or let's say 300W total. Just the lightbulbs in the living room cover that difference comfortably.
Ah, don't sweat it much. Just about everything can, and occasionally _will_, get modded -1 Overrated. You could post something that's textbook physics (e.g., "E=mc^2") and someone will mod it overrated. Literally, I've seen terse excerpts of highschool level physics modded as overrated. It's too sad to make up. I have to wonder about the kind of mind for which reality is overrated, but there you go.
You have to realize that Slashdot moderation is... weird, and mostly irrelevant. Best thing to do is ignore it completely. Whether your message is right or wrong, depends only on what you wrote there, not on how many people agree with you. And sometimes it doesn't even have anything to do with agreeing with what you actually wrote.
E.g., the easiest was to get a -1 Overrated is as some comically impotent kind of "revenge" for disagreeing with someone in another thread. In which case, it doesn't as much reflect the quality of your message, but the "quality" of the person doing it.
E.g., one of the constants of the universe is that some people will _grossly_ mis-understand your point, and you can pretty much _count_ on regularly getting answers that have nothing to do with what you actually wrote. E.g., some people give up reading after a paragraph, or occasionally after the first sentence. Now realize that all those also get mod points eventually. Right.
So IMHO, don't sweat it much. Just say what you think, and who cares about moderation?
Don't get me wrong, I still think you're shallow to reject a game based on graphics alone, but I can genuinely appreciate coming forward and saying so. Moderation be damned.
Well, maybe it's incorrect to say that they're flat out "not lying". My point was rather that they're not _consciously_ lying. The human brain seems to have this knack of twisting reality to preserve some semblance of integrity of the mental model.
Also btw: now I don't now you enough to accuse you of lying, so don't take this as an accusation, but think this: is there anything you can say you're sure 100%? Beyond any shadow of a doubt? Can't possibly be false or even inexact? Well, that-a-way lies the path to cognitive dissonance and subconsciously twisting reality to fit a pre-conceived notion.
That's the way the brain works. If both A and B are apparently true, but mutually exclusive, then if A is 100% certain, B must be false. No matter what fallacies need to be involved, no matter what facts need to be discarded, no matter to what absurd extremes logic needs to be twisted.
E.g., are you _sure_ that you're always honest? 100%? Well, that-a-way lie the most bizarre rationalizations as to why something blatantly false wasn't _really_ a lie. That's the necessary first step to that particular kind of cognitive dissonance.
Just something to think about.
That's very true and insightful, but IMHO it fits in the same category I've described: gaming the opponents' image analysis. It only works because the brain processes that information in a certain way.
That said, I'd add that some animals are both counter-shaded and disruptive, though the only examples that come to mind atm are predators. E.g., a tabby cat is both.
Again, it's not particularly disruptive to a primate brain, so most people wouldn't think of an orange tabby as camouflaged. In practice, it only needs to disrupt a mouse's senses, though.
Well, it just occured to me that one image is worth one thousand words. Here's a pattern that disrupts even a human brain, badly. Try to focus on it. Heck, set it at someone's background wallpaper if you're pissed off at them.
http://www.uncg.edu/%7Ewhanthon/illusions/optical_illusion.jpg
(And no, it's not the goatse pic. Much as that's been known to disrupt human thought patterns, this time we're talking just overloading the image processing;)
So basically now think an animal with maybe 1/10 of your optical nerve's bandwidth, and even less neurons in their brain dedicated to processing the image. I have no doubt that a zebra's pattern appeared and thrived because at some point it had the same effect upon some predator (who needs to estimate distances very accurately) as the above-linked wallpaper.
That's very insightful and true. Though if I'm allowed to make two minor additions, I'd also say that:
1. Primates have vastly higher bandwidth along the optic nerve than some other species (e.g., IIRC you have about 10 times the bandwidth of a hamster) and vastly increased number of neurons reconstructing and analyzing the image in the brain. If you go even lower down the chain (since we're talking 80 million year old reptiles), a frog for example doesn't even transmit the tones at all, but has its neurons fire information that's split roughly into the streams:
- something just brightened
- something just darkened
- there's probably an edge here
- a group of pixels moved here
So a frog's mental image doesn't even contain the information to accurately reconstruct a greyscale image. Instead most of its mental image is pretty literally composed of edges and things that moved.
I.e., while _you_ would still see a battleship painted in dazzle camouflage as a battleship, and might just be confused when rangefinding or judging direction (via that painted bow shock at the wrong end), a frog would literally see it as a mess of edges that make no sense whatsoever.
So basically while indeed, various forms of camouflage do work on humans too, the less evolved life forms are a lot easier confused.
2. While you're right and very insightful about mis-judging direction and speed and distance when finally attacking, I'd add that an even more critical stage is the lying in ambush stage.
Cats for example are mostly ambush hunters. Even if a mouse judges everything correctly when the cat is already dashing for the kill, it's even more important that the mouse doesn't recognize the cat while the cat is waiting to ambush it. Either disruptive or cryptic camouflage can make a huge difference at that stage. Sure, the movement recognition will kick in when the cat starts the sprint, but at that point it's already too late.
But to agree with your other point, though, yeah, it does work on humans too, to various extents. Some leopards have been known to be just short of invisible to humans when they want to. A particularly infamous one is credited with over 400 human kills after she got wounded by a hunter and apparently decided to have her bloody vengeance. The number two spot goes to one credited with 125 human kills. You'd think a big orange cat with lots of spots would be easier to spot, especially when you already know she's on a human killing spree in the area, but there you go.
(And to go on an off-topic tangent, it kinda makes me wonder about their intelligence. If you think about it, something like deciding to have vengeance upon a whole species or race needs a few rather abstract concepts, that you wouldn't expect a cat to have, or need.)
Well, given that I'm not a zoologist, probably "talking out the arse" is a more apt description than "educated guess". So take it with more than a grain of salt.
:)
That said, if the above paragraph didn't drive you off yet, there have been studies exactly on this domain. I didn't keep a list of links, being that I just read a ton of unrelated stuff and just rely on memory from that point, but some quick googling turns up quite a few links on animal vision and camouflage.
E.g., This one seems to discuss just that, and even says that patterns evolve and are optimized by natural selection. It give the zebra's stripes as an example of disruptive camouflage right in the first column. (As opposed to cryptic camouflage, where the animal tries to blend in the background by imitating the background pattern.)
The fact that the mammal eye (including human) is pretty much hard-wired to detect edges, is well known. I'm too lazy to search for a more authoritative source, so Wikipedia. The key paragraph there is "Spatial Encoding". Each photoreceptor is physically wired to inhibit the surrounding ones, so basically large patches of exactly the same colour will produce very little signal, if at all, while the edges will produce the most.
We also know that various animals (A) have a lot less bandwidth for transmitting the result to the brains, so the image will be much more aggressively reduced to edges. (E.g., IIRC a hamster has about 10 times less bandwidth than a human.) And/or (B) have various adaptations to recognize certain patterns, sometimes as early as the eye itself. (E.g., it seems that a frog's eyes and optic nerve actually have separate data channels for "there's probably an edge here" and "there's something moving here" (a.k.a., the "bug detector".) See a summary for example, here. Not a primary source, but it nails it pretty well and gives you some names to search for if you feel so inclined.) And/or (C) actually respond differently to different patterns and shapes. (E.g., the thing I mentioned about birds recognizing foes by eye position was actually an experiment in seeing how they react to various artificial heads.)
The idea that primate evolution was at least partially driven by the need to recognize snakes, is from a recent news piece that appeared all over the net a while ago. Among other places, you can see it on National Geographic.
Well, you get the idea. It's not _my_ guess, I know I've read it and various other bits before in various places, but, well, my memory has been known to fail before. So take it with a grain of salt and do your own search
Well, if you look at nodern carnivores, you see such examples as:
- the fox, which is pretty darn red
- the tiger, which is relatively bright orange and with stripes too (and cats somewhat inherited that: a normal tabby male is almost always orange, though the females are nearly always grey when they're tabby.)
In fact, think about this: the most logical camouflage colour would be green, right? That's the colour we dress our soldiers in, right? Well, in practice mammals are coloured anything but green.
A hypothesis there is that camouflage doesn't always mean having the same colour as the surroundings. Three quarters of camouflage in the animal world seems to have to do more with the mental capacity of your opponent (prey or predator, as the case may be) than with blending in.
Primates have very evolved, arguably top-of-the-line image analysis and recognition capabilities. A lot of more primitive animals don't. For example, strange as it may seem to you, a lot of animals have trouble recognizing a snake as a snake. (In fact, one hypothesis is that a lot of the natural selection pressure for increasingly bigger brains in primates was... snake recognition.) A lot take "shortcuts" to save neurons, like mainly processing edges instead of whole shapes, or mainly seeing stuff that moves instead of analyzing the whole picture. A lot are nearly colour-blind, or have other primary colours for their vision than humans have. Some species (e.g., a lot of birds) don't even try to recognize another animal as a whole, but just look at where the eyes are: both in front for stereoscopic vision means predator, eyes on the sides means harmless herbivore. Etc.
So basically don't assume that what's piss-poor camouflage for _you_, also counts as such for another species. It may be actually _excellent_ camouflage in the environment that animal has to deal with.
E.g., lots of stripes and dots may look like begging for attention to you, but may severely overload the edge detection in more primitive species, by creating lots and lots and lots of extra edges, and thus prevent them from figuring out the whole.
E.g., the reason a lot of exotic fish are orange, yellow and red, is because those frequencies get absorbe the fastest in water. If you go deep enough, pretty much all available light is... blue. So you don't really need to colour yourself black, you only need to absorb blue. A simpler and cheaper to produce pigment can serve the same purpose and achieve the same effect.
E.g., a big tail like that of the pheasant may look like an unexplainable handicap, until you realize that most animals have a very simplified way of judging how big an opponent is. They only judge how big the image looks, not try to reconstruct the 3D animal in their brain and judge the size that way. There's a reason cats puff up and turn sideways when they might need to fight. To _you_ it's the same cat turned sideways, but to more simple-brained animals (apparently including other cats) it just became a lot larger and thus more dangerous. Or to the same animal you might look like a lot of an easier prey if you crouch or sit than if you stand up. So, depending on what predators it had to evolve with, being able to fan a giant tail can actually act as a deterrent.
So basically, we probably can't extrapolate what the raptors' plumage looked like. It probably depends a lot on the environment, and on how their prey's brain worked. And given the many millions of years involved, I wouldn't be surprised if it changed over time as their environment and prey evolved.
It's not as simple as, "Fact is, most people do not care about their privacy." The same people who spew "you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide" all over the place, would sue your arse into oblivion if you were a peeping tom under their window. Or would ostracize you very quickly if you gossipped to their enemies every word they said.
Some time ago I was reading some anthropology books, to figure out how people work. (Since I'm naturally blind to body language or such, so not much chance to figure it out on my own.) One thing that stuck into my head was that there's a _massive_ disconnect between what people say about themselves -- even on a completely anonymous poll -- and what they actually do. What they say is an ideal self image, the self that they'd like to be, not the self that they actually are. And that ideal self has more to do with social acceptability than with anything else.
E.g.,
- a community had this shiny-happy self-image that they help each other all the time, work their fields together, help each other build a house or a barn, etc. And they all answered just that on a poll. Turns out that in practice the last time anyone actually did that was half a century ago.
- a tribal community had this self-image of being brave warriors and hunters, etc. And almost everyone defined themselves as a hunter on a poll. Turns out that in the meantime they were mainly agriculture-based, and most didn't even have a weapon to hunt or fight with. But they still thought of themselves as hunters and warriors.
- on one occasion where meat prices rose, a western community was asked if they eat more or less meat. Almost everyone said some (more polite) version of "fuck that, I'm not paying that much. I'll buy less meat until the prices come down to something sane." Well, funny thing is, they then asked the local supermarkets and actually went through the thrash to see what people throw away. Turns out the meat consumption was actually higher. (I guess some kind of weblen effect.)
Etc.
Plus, even on anonymous polls you have to deal with effects like:
- people trying to pick the answer they think would be more socially acceptable or would please the person polling them. E.g., if one choice has even vague negative conotations, or is phrased to sound that way, people will try to avoid it.
- more people will answer "yes" than "no", presumably because we've all been educated that it's not nice to refuse too much. So professional polls actually switch the question around on half the forms, to average that effect out. E.g., if the question is "should we pull out of Iraq?" half the forms will actually ask the opposite, "should we continue the war in Iraq?" Otherwise you'll have the results skewed.
Now this may sound like a case of "who the heck said anything about polls?" but bear with me. The same effects will be visible in day-to-day conversations, posts, etc. In fact, to a higher extent.
Briefly, just because some people chest-thump that they have nothing to hide, doesn't mean that they actually don't. It just means that their ideal self image is like that, plus it makes them look better to their peers. It doesn't mean that they match their own ideal, though.
And finally, note that this isn't necessarily "lying". Most people actually genuinely see themselves as better than they really are. It's really just a combination of selective confirmation (you'll remember the times you acted according to your principles, but forget those times when you did the opposite) and cognitive dissonance (rationalizing something so it fits the rest of your mental model. E.g., honest people don't lie, I'm a honest person, omg I just lied to someone for a petty personal advantage... therefore it wasn't really a lie, now that I think about it.)
*shrug* Now _I_ too would say "who cares about graphics? Gameplay is king." However I end up talking almost daily with a couple of gamer co-workers, who, any way you want to slice it, _do_ place graphics above everything else.
They might _say_ that they value gameplay more, but any talk about some game they've bought will revolve 90% around how awesome or how sucky the graphics are, an you'll have to work on it to get even a nodding acknowledgement of anything else in the game.
A recent conversation with one, for example, went loosely from memory like this. (It's about a game which will remain unnamed because I'm not discussing here whether the game is good or bad. I'm just illustrating how -- whatever other faults the game might have had -- they didn't even play long enough to discover those, they got stuck on "eew, the graphics look like PS2 graphics!")
Him: "Hey, I went and bought game X because you said it's OK, and it's the biggest piece of crap ever. You made me waste my money on it."
(Not the most polite way to start a talk, but maybe he's just joking.)
Me: "Hmm? Well, ok, I guess these things are subjective. What didn't you like about it?"
Him: "The graphics! It looks like a PS2 game! Or like something that might have been ok on the Wii or maybe on the XBox last year, but in the meantime people discovered how to use all three GPUs!"
(I didn't know the XBox had 3 GPUs, I thought the 3 were the CPU cores, but ok.)
Me: "Hmm, well, maybe you shouldn't take advice from me if your tastes are that different. I generally don't pay much attention to graphics."
Him: "Well, I don't care about graphics either, but these are crap! They look like on the PS2!"
(Bit of a contradiction there, I would guess. But let's prod it some more.)
Me: "No, when I say I don't care about graphics, I mean I've played a bit of <insert PS1 game from the 90's> over the weekend."
Him: "Eeew... Isn't that almost 10 years old and with 2D graphics?!?"
Me: "Yep, that's the one. Just saying, I don't care much what it looks like."
Him: "Well, I don't care about graphics either, but, eew, that's 2D and low res."
Me: "Well, the one you were talking about isn't."
Him: "Yeah, but it looks like on the PS2! They can publish that kinda crap on the PS2 or the Wii, if they want to, not on the XBox!"
And so on and so forth.
Now how many gamers are that shallow, I couldn't tell. I like to think that this guy is an extreme case. Still, as they say, if you're one in a million, there are 6000 exactly like you. Plus by virtue of it being a continuum, there'll be some tens of millions in shades of grey on that side of zero.
And to return to whether TFA is fluff or not, well, think of it this way: people tend to gravitate around sites and magazines which see things that way. If one magazine or site told the above-mentioned guy to buy a game 'cause the gameplay rules, even though the graphics suck, I'm guessing it wouldn't take more than 1-2 times following their advice to stop reading it completely. So as long as there are people basing their purchases on glitter above substance, there will be people catering to that market segment. It's only capitalism in action, after all.
Now before I get started, bear in mind that not only I'm not a chemist, but Chemistry is one of the things I understand the least. So major talking out the arse follows. If anyone who knows chemistry better wants to correct me, please do, it's very much appreciated.
That said, looking at the illustration of the mollecules interacting in TFA, it looks to me like their dye binds to just the nitrate anion, and there is no trace of urea to be seen at all there. I.e., what is so funnily coloured is their mollecule after stealing a nitrate anion from _any_ nitrate whatsoever.
It could be that other mollecules don't give their nitrate as gladly as urea nitrate, or whatever. Again, I don't know enough chemistry to rule that out.
But unless I forgot chemistry completely, _any_ salt will split into a number of ions in a solution. Heck, even water doesn't stay H2O, a number of mollectules split into HO- and H3O+ ions. Ph 7 is basically just the equilibrium point for that mix.
So basically even if you handled potassium nitrate for your orchids, or made a sandwich with ham cured with that (preservative E252 _is_ potassium nitrate), or just are a chain smoker (tobacco is quite commonly treated with it too), or made a model rocket recently, etc, etc, etc... you'll have plenty of nitrate anions on your skin for this thing to bind to. Heck, it's increasingly used in toothpaste too.
And that's just one nitrate. Another common one that comes to mind is ammonium nitrate. Ok, so that one _can_ be used for an ANFO bomb, but is also used by the ton by farmers and even by miners.
So I'm, you know, _curious_ what their miracle aerosol does in the presence of those. Did they spray it on a slice of cured ham and it _didn't_ turn purple, for example? Did they check it on ammonium nitrate too? On a pingpong ball? Basically which nitrates _does_ it react with, and which not? Because again, my uninformed interpretation of their drawing is that it would react with any nitrate whatsoever.
So then lemme get this straight: then the great advantage of the Taser is... that it finally brought the US police on par with the USSR police? You know, the USSR guys might beat you up after they arrest you, the US guys taser you repeatedly even if they've got nothing to arrest you for.
<sarcasm>'Course, blimey, noone should be worried if individual people start being tortured by the police. It's totally a direction that we should be glad that a democratic state takes.</sarcasm>
You know, the funny thing is, even the most hardened dictatorships only used "kalashnikovs for crowd control" when things really got out of hand. I know of at least one Eastern European revolution where the oppressive communist government first tried to hose them with water and whatnot, and we're talking revolt against the government there.
Compare it to the neverending stream of Taser stories from the USA. People got tasered occasionally as torture (people which had _already_ been restrained) or because a cop got a chip on his shoulder, for reasons as ridiculous as:
- asking too many questions at a political rally (see the recent story)
- being at a library without their library card (guy got tasered _repeatedly_ after he had already accepted to leave)
- diabetic guy in a medical emergency calls 911 for an ambulance, cops show up first and taser him in his bed (apparently one guy sick enough to be stuck in bed was considered dangerous enough to the cops to warrant use of the taser)
Etc, etc, etc.
Dearie, get this: even China, and even the fucking NKVD under Stalin, wouldn't have used a gun in _those_ situation. Yes, China did shoot some of the people demonstrating in Tiananmen square against the government, but not even in their darkest hour would they consider shooting a sick guy for calling an ambulance.
Effectively the idea that a taser is "non-lethal" has lowered the bar to ludicriously low extremes. It's not replacing the use of guns, as if you were to do something that warrants shooting at you, they'll _still_ shoot at you. (E.g., if you pulled a gun at a cop, I do believe they won't draw the tasers.) It just created a whole new possibility to inflict pain (again, sometimes repeatedly) on someone for minor misdemeanors or just for disliking him or just for fun. It's not replacing guns, it's _in_ _addition_ to guns, for stuff where you previously wouldn't even _think_ of drawing a gun.
Sadder still: for stuff where even China or the USSR wouldn't have even dreamed of using a gun on someone.
So the question isn't whether you'd rather get the ray or a round. For any stuff that would previously warrant getting a round, you'll still get a round. Only now you'll get the ray for everything else. Whop-de-do, big improvement there.
Frankly, I'm not all for this idea. It creates a cumbersome and abusable solution to something that was solved better already.
E.g., whatever happened to running something in a sandbox, ffs? You can go as far as running something untrusted (e.g., a plugin, ActiveX control, etc) in a virtual box, but even a chroot jail is a good start. It _is_ possible to isolate something to the point where it can't do any harm at all, and can't touch anything except itself. It's also possible to nice it to the point where it only runs when nothing else wants to, so it can't DOS your system that way.
So why doesn't anyone do just that already? E.g., MS could have fixed their own ActiveX crap that way ages ago. Instead we got this baroque, but fundamentally broken, model where you get to decide (or have decided for you based on zones) whether something can't run at all, or can run with full rights as an executable. Except if a malicious one slipped through the cracks, it's still a full executable running on your machine.
Heck, even Java is essentially the wrong way about it as a browser plugin. It tried to implement itself some restrictions which belong in the OS or browser itself, and if the JVM itself is compromised (there _have_ been a couple of JVM vulnerabilities), it can do anything. Kudos to Sun for trying that, but it's a workaround essentially. It shouldn't have been the JVM which does that, it should have been the OS and browser.
Whitelisting is just an extra step in that wrong direction, essentially. Instead of making sure that a malicious thing in the browser can't touch anything else, we're one step further in the baroque, fragile and monumentally work-intensive direction of determining which of them should be allowed. Except again, if something slipped through the cracks, you'll still get screwed so hard you'll walk bow-legged for a week.
Am I the only one who finds that dumb?
You may be more right than some probably realize. See, whitelisting is essentially all that "trusting computing" was about.
Yes, "trusted computing" had all that DRM stuff and crypto signatures and all components authenticating themselves and their drivers, but essentially that's what you need to have a bullet-proof whitelist.
- E.g., if you don't have a strong hash to be sure that it indeed is the program you think you're running, and it's an untampered executable, then you don't really know what you're running. (E.g., if you were to do it just by name, and you allow, say, "WoW.exe", then you'll also run a virus attachment called "WoW.exe" just as cheerfully.)
- E.g., if you don't make the system startup itself bullet-proof, people will use spoof drivers and whatnot to compromise that security
So basically we're essentially back to the same Palladium shit that we ranted and raved against as the great Satan. It's what MS wanted in Vista in the first place, but apparently realized grudgingly that noone else wanted. And _of_ _course_ Vista would be on the list. In fact, better than that, Vista was supposed to be the one enforcing it. (Which, if you think about it, is pretty much needed. If the OS doesn't do it, and doesn't double-check its startup and components at that, any other link down the chain is not guaranteed to be guaranteed enough to be the uncompromised.)
So now it's snuck back under the same claim that you need it to protect you from the evil hackers. Right.
Well, the problems are the same any way anyone wants to slice it. E.g.,
- it essentially discourages running stuff you compiled yourself. (Just changing the options you compile a kernel with, for example, is enough to change the hash, if the hash is any good. So essentially the only safe thing a "trusted computing" system should conclude there is that the system itself has been tampered with and is no longer secure or trustable.)
- it places an undue burden on small time developpers and hobbyists. I know if I was distributing a small utility on sourceforge, I'd be annoyed if I had to re-certify it every time I refactor something or fix some obscure bug. Doubly so if it costs anything to get it certified, which would likely be the case if a commercial entity is doing it. Getting it virus scanned, ran through some automated heuristics, hashed, and put on the list, can take some time and infrastructure and a paid employees time costs money.
And, frankly, even if it was something as trivial as 10$, why would I pay it for something that makes me no money? It'd be like ROI except without the R. And if you want it thoroughly dissected and certified that it 100% can't possibly be a virus, then it'll cost a heck of a lot more than that.
- it can be used to shaft you the other way around too. A program can authenticate the system it runs on, and some might even need to. (E.g., I sure hope an anti-virus utility pipes up loudly if it thinks it runs on a system where the OS itself has been compromised. E.g., I sure hope a banking applet pipes up loudly if it runs in a browser that's been compromised.) So there's nothing to keep someone from making a program that refuses to run in Wine or a flash applet that refuses to work in Mozilla.
And if you think noone other than MS would ever do that, think again. There was this recent story even on Slashdot about webmasters who explicitly don't want Mozilla users because they block their ads.
Etc.
Ah, I remember a while ago, we were waiting for a game announcement from Blizzard. Everyone was sure it'll be Starcraft 2 or Diablo 3. I mean, it made sense, right? They had all the fans lined up waiting for them. Instead we got World Of Warcraft.
:P Could be something else, but that's the only idea I have at the moment of completely mis-using an existing franchise. Oh, or maybe a city building game set in the world of Diablo. Sort of like Sim City except instead of a tornado, you get the gates of hell breaking open under the local church ;)
So my bet is that now we'll get something like a space flight sim set in the world of Starcraft
I'm sorry, while I'd even agree with the privacy slant, and I don't really have much love for the RIAA... excuse me? Entrapment?
Let's have look at dictionary.reference.com, shall we. The only definitions that fit in a legal context, seem to be the likes of "the luring by a law-enforcement agent of a person into committing a crime" (Random House Unabridged Dictionary) and "To lure into performing a previously or otherwise uncontemplated illegal act. (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Also note the following note from Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Law: "Entrapment is available as a defense only when an agent of the state or federal government has provided the encouragement or inducement. This defense is sometimes allowed in administrative proceedings (as for the revocation of a license to practice medicine) as well as criminal proceedings. In order to establish entrapment, the defendant has the burden of proving either that he or she would not have committed the crime but for the undue persuasion or fraud of the government agent, or that the encouragement was such that it created a risk that persons not inclined to commit the crime would commit it, depending on the jurisdiction. When entrapment is pleaded, evidence (as character evidence) regarding the defendant that might otherwise have been excluded is allowed to be admitted."
I.e., pay attention: Entrapment is when some government agent (e.g., an undercover cop) persuades you to do something illegal that you wouldn't have even considered otherwise. Just getting caught when doing something on your own is _not_ entrapment, much as it seems to be a popular mis-conception on Slashdot.
E.g., if you're some random Joe minding your own business and some undercover cop comes and coaxes you and promises you big bucks if you'll grow hemp for him in your basement, that's entrapment. It can be argued that you wouldn't have considered doing it on your own. Maybe you're just gullible, not a crook. On the other hand, if you're selling dope anyway and an undercover cop comes and buys some hemp from you, that's not entrapment.
E.g., I seem to vaguely remember a terrorism-related case where it was argued that the cop had pretty much manufactured the whole cell. He wasn't (supposedly) recruited into a cell, he recruited a bunch of disgruntled muslim immigrants and persuaded them that it's Allah's will to blow shit up and punish the infidels, and promised them money, weapons and fake papers. It may show that they were not morally above that, given the right persuasion and incentive, but they weren't doing it until that cop coaxed them.
On the other hand, had the cell existed and planned that shit on its own, then an undercover cop infiltrating it would _not_ count as entrapment.
E.g., to further illustrate the delimitation, IIRC there was this case of a woman trying to hire a hitman to kill some neighbours. The undercover cop posing as a hardened hitman, precisely to avoid any possibility of entrapment, actually tried to talk her _out_ of it, and asked several times if she's completely sure she wants to go ahead with it. Just being an undercover agent may be a lie, but it's not entrapment. It would be entrapment if he went and convinced a neighbour how much easier things would be if she killed everyone she doesn't like.
So pray tell, how did the RIAA entrap these poor people? Did some undercover RIAA agent go to their house, befriend them, and beg them to share some songs online? Or what?
In most cases the RIAA didn't even know who the fuck was at that IP address until the ISP told them. They even got some awfully bad info in some cases, resulting in some PR screw-ups of epic
Well, here's an idea: because such discussions help raise various points, and awareness of them, which some of us wouldn't even consider otherwise when choosing a license.
/. would just shut up for once. I don't know when or why that fashion got started, but it's getting old. That's religion. No, seriously. There is no pre-requisite needed to use your own head.
We're not all lawyers, and such fine points may go right over our heads when choosing a license.
The GPL or BSD license aren't a goal by themselves (except for a few zealots who rarely provide more than lip service), they're _tools_. If I wrote a piece of code, the question isn't what can I do to serve BSD or GPL, the question is which of them serves _me_ best. If I'm not making any money out of it anyway, it might as well try to fit my moral code, or vanity, or whatever.
E.g., if, say, I want my name on that piece of software in perpetuity, then a license which allows removing it (or conversion to a license which does allow it), then I'm not interested in that license. E.g., while I'm somewhat "laissez faire" when it comes to enforcing my own strict moral code on others, conversely I wouldn't go with a license which enforces the opposite of that moral code. I might not generally force you to do the rightest thing, but I sure as heck won't force you to do what I consider the wrong thing.
If none of the existing licenses fit my views, maybe I'll just make up my own or maybe I'll just release the damn thing as public domain. If none of _my_ points of view are served right by either GPL or BSD, then, wth, why would I make a contribution to _that_ crusade.
So, yes, while I probably should see an actual lawyer for the actual license, it's good to hear what problems do other people see. _Especially_ if they're not lawyers. Maybe I was under the same mis-understanding, or maybe their moral code loosely matches mine, or whatever. E.g., if I too was under the misunderstanding that, say, under BSD license noone can remove my name from the credits, but a lawyer went on record to say that someone else (even the original author of some module I contribute to) can do just that, then that just raised a problem I'm very interested in.
Even if they can't provide a legally sound answer, they can, quite often, clarify the _question_. That's equally valuable.
Basically, talking about it is good.
And, no offense, I wish all the "nooo, you're not worthy enough to question these guys. Just trust the authority figures and don't try using your own head!" gang on
Actually, the previous message may be even underestimating the lack of importance MS had.
When I say that MS launched a TCP/IP stack and a browser in Windows '95 (launched at the end of August 1995), you have to actually remember that IE 1.0 was actually only available at the time in the Win 95 "Plus Pack", that cost extra money and most people didn't actually buy. It also was mostly advertised as a collection of themes and some minor utilities, not as internet access.
IE 1.0 only became a free download in late December 1995, moving the timeline to: 10 days _after_ AltaVista was launched.
But that's irrelevant anyway, because noone gave a damn about it until IE 3.0. It also only started actually being included with Windows (i.e., you know, the point at which you can argue with a straight face that MS really did more to bring it to the masses than the gang who were also offering a free download) in Windows '98.
By which point already a lot of search engines aready existed.
Google itself was incorporated in September 1998. Although that _is_ technically right after the Windows 98 release, it's outright laughable to assume that in slightly under 3 months Win '98 had already changed the face of the internet so much that it singlehandedly made Google necessary.
By the same logic you could say that transport ships caused the Vietnam war, 'cause that's what everyone used to go there. Or that tophats caused WW1, because all those funny-looking politicians were wearing one when they declared war on each other.
MS was there at the time. That much we can aggree. But when you move into whether people would have thrown away their PC or given up Internet without MS's blessing, heh, now that's just funny.
Get this: the move to Internet was already happening, with or without MS. I already mentioned Trumpet Winsock, but there were others at work there already. Compuserve offered Internet access _and_ a browser in April 1995, i.e., before Windows '95. They already had 3 million subscribers. AOL was offering some internet access through a proprietary interface even earlier (e.g., they added Usenet access in '94, much to the annoyance of everyone else who was on Usenet) and by '95 they had already moved to just implement a proper TCP/IP stack and let everyone just use whatever browser they wish. Etc.
Both Compuserve and AOL advertised massively too, and were already mail-bombing everyone with free diskettes. They weren't the only ones.
So let me tell you what would have happened if MS dragged their feet: If Joe Average wanted to get on the 'Net, he'd just have gotten a free AOL diskette and went online anyway. In other words, the only one to suffer there would have been... MS. If MS dragged its feet at that point, MS would have missed the boat. That's all.
And to get back to MS's surrealistic claim that they created the environment that needed search engines:
WebCrawler was the first full text search engine, and it went live on April 20, 1994. I.e., you know, a whole bloody year before Windows '95. Obviously work on it must have begun earlier, so the need for a search engine must have existed as early as 1993. (Yes, later WebCrawler switched to just aggregating results from other search engines, but originally it was a standalone search engine with its own crawler and database.)
Work on Lycos as a web search project was started in 1994 too.
AltaVista, for example, was launched in December 1995, a mere 2-3 months after the release of Win '95. But again, work must have begun before Windows 95.
Etc.
So the search engine game was on even without MS's blessing. So their claim that they created the platform and need for search engines is _absurd_. Search engines were already being coded, and some were already launched too, long before MS's blessing.
Actually, the devil is in the details: when you said that GW is instance based instead, then "one world" doesn't even mean the same thing as in WoW. GW, just like Diablo 2, is the exact opposite. Everything is instanced. It doesn't even _have_ a real shard or world, in the WoW sense.
To illustrate what I mean: in WoW I can for example take a treck from Anvilmar to Ironforge to Stormwind to Goldshire (see for example the funny video with the 40 level 1 gnomes raid on Hogger for a group doing just that) and meet a few thousand players playing in the same world. _That_ is WoW's "world". And going "one world" would mean essentially all 9 million players literally running around in the same world. Not in instanced versions of it.
Does any part of GW have that? No, I don't think so, everyone who isn't in your instanced game, just doesn't exist in your "world".
Technically speaking, GW has lots of smaller shards, not one big world for everyone. It just invented a way to spawn new shards as needed, that's all.
This isn't to say that GW is bad or that WoW is better. I can see the point in instanced content. But let's not go redefining terms for "my game can beat yours" willy-waving. Just having basically a lobby from which you can start an instanced game or join one, does not make a "one world game" in the sense discussed here. It's just not the same kind of "one world", so making the claim that it did it before WoW is meaningless. It's like saying that cats invented leatherworking because your cat has white "shoes".
Wake me up when you can have 36,000 people in your GW game running around independently and actually randomly seeing or meeting each other. That's currently the average population per server in WoW. _That_ is the point at which you can claim with a straight face that GW even does the same thing in that aspect. Do it all in all world? Well, wake me up when it supports 9 million players in the same game, running around and whacking NPCs independently.
And here's another thought, and what the guys in the summary missed:
Chances are you don't even have enough geography for that. If you parked one player per square metre, you'd need a 3 km by 3 km world just to have the players stand there. If you want them to actually have some space to move around and hunt without stepping on each other's toes, you end up needing a world as big as TES Arena. Except at that point you also need a hell of a lot more quests (people won't be happy if they have to run an hour just to get to the next quest giver), and other problems start to creep in too. _That_ is why noone, WoW and GW included, ever tried doing that.
So people coming up with ideas like "hey, look, it's technically possible" have just missed the point.
No offense, but please take your own advice and don't ignore history. At the time:
1. There was nothing magical about DOS. It just happened to be the OS that IBM selected for their computer, and their computer turned out to be insanely popular. People didn't give a fuck about the OS as such, it was just the thing that came with their PC. If Microsoft hadn't existed, IBM maybe would have made a better offer for CP/M or maybe would have written their own micro-OS.
There was nothing revolutionary about DOS. It was a clone of CP/M. And having worked with both MS DOS and CP/M, I can tell you they were barely program loaders and the most primitive filesystem imaginable (though each in its own way.) Even you could have written your own DOS, if you wanted to, and so could IBM. But again, IBM wouldn't really have had to: CP/M was already insanely popular on 8 bit micros, so it would have been a no-brainer to license it instead.
2. Windows was nothing special either. OS/2 had a graphical interface too, and so did GEM and half a dozen other stuff. MS Windows may have been the most popular graphical interface at the time, but it wasn't the only one by far. The idea that without MS Windows you'd have had to buy some uber-expensive hardware instead, is just absurd. Without MS, you would have gotten GEM or any of the other GUIs instead.
Even skipping past the fact that someone would have filled the void eventually anyway, the fact is: they wouldn't have had to, because there was no void to start with. Alternatives already existed.
Now we can debate whether Windows was the best, and it certainly was the most popular. But thinking that without MS you wouldn't have had a graphical browser on the PC, is just absurd.
3. The IBM PC itself, again, was nothing fundamentally special. There were _plenty_ of other computers competing for the market at the time. Another one would have filled the void.
Everyone rants and raves about how MS brought us finally to $300 computers, but seem to ommit that we had been there before already. E.g., my first computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000, a.k.a., ZX-81, which cost IIRC 60$. Now ok, a ZX-81 couldn't exactly run a graphical browser, but a lot of others could. I see no reason why a Sinclair QL or Amiga couldn't have evolved to fill the niche if the PC didn't exist.
Basically the PC may have been the best bang/buck, but it wasn't the only offering by far. It also wasn't the cheapest.
So basically the assertion that without a PC surely you'd have ended up with something much more expensive to go online, is flawed. We don't know at what price the market would have stabilized, if the PC hadn't pushed everyone else out of the market.
4. You'd be surprised how much of the PC's evolution had _nothing_ to do with MS. It was wildly cloned because IBM allowed anyone to clone it, as long as they paid the royalties for the BIOS. Then Compaq did a clean room reverse-engineering and that was the beginning of PCs which aren't encumbered even by that. And so on.
There were a myriad of factors that combined to make the PC ubiquitous, most of which had nothing to do with MS. Hearing that MS single-handedly brought computing to the masses is nothing but revisionism of ludicrious proportions. While they might have had _some_ of the merit, they were just one among hundreds of companies which contributed to the phenomenon.
Heck, even with their DOS, at some point IBM got sick and tired of MS's 32 MB partition limit, so they bought DOS from MS, wrote a better filesystem and sold it back to MS. The intermediate IBM version was IBM DOS 4.0. Or for Windows a lot of the work was paid for b