Oh for shit's sake people, am I the only person who can use Google? Is 2008 good enough for you, assface? At a certain point when evidence is presented it becomes rather weak-looking to keep asking for more without presenting any evidence disproving those things already presented.
First, according to the Ethnographic Atlas Codebook, of 1231 societies studied, only 186 were monogomous, 453 practiced some polygyny, 588 had more frequent polygyny, and 4 were polyandrous. In fact, ethologists now believe that
only one to two percent of all species may be monogamous (Tucker, William In press National Review: All in the Family. New York: National Review Press). None of the
simian species are strictly monogamous; our closest relatives, the chimpanzees,
practice a form of group marriage. Among the 849 human societies examined by the
anthropologist Murdock (1957: American
Anthropologist: World Ethnographic Sample. 59: 664-687.), 75% practiced polygyny.
Those are just the first three things I came up with in a five minute search. There have been hundreds, even thousands, of scholarly papers written on this subject. It is so common, so fundamental to sociology and anthropology that I have no reservations on calling you out. You probably never knew anything about the subject to forget.
In retrospect, you're partially correct, 'learned behavior' is a poor choice of words. However, the point is that I am not an automaton that simply does whatever a god/government/parental authority tells me is right. I study, hypothesize, test and question until I find the closest thing I can to truth. Somebody whose morality is dictated to them by another authority is by definition a sheep.
Holy crap, dawg. Study some anthropology. Damn near every ancient society was polygynistic. Most of Asia was even into the beginning of the 20th century, and some in Africa still are. That's about as far from 'human nature' as it gets.
There are so many misconceptions in this I don't know where to start. In the first place there is sociological evidence that a preoccupation with genetic primacy is not common to all males or all societies. The ancient Romans for example were particularly keen on adoption, and IIRC Roman law dictated that adopted sons could never be disowned where biological ones could be.
Secondly, making the assumption that your use of 'God' means Yahweh, there was no divine mandate for monogamy before Christ and/or the Apostle Paul. Most of the Biblical patriarchs had many wives and even more concubines which themselves were usually prizes from the battlefield whose lives were only granted at the price of systemic rape at any time. Got to love that old time religious morality.
Frequently polygynous family units. Men could have multiple women because they were stronger. You'll find that biology isn't all that interested in equality, fairness, or morality.
I find these reasons rather hollow. Privacy isn't really much of a choice if society punishes voluntary public exposure.
Further, problems professionally with having children are not an argument for privacy but characterize a fundamental flaw with society that needs to be fixed. Yes, pregnancy is bad for business, but every company that talks out of both sides of its mouth needs to be taught a lesson. Either come out and just say 'we don't support working mothers because we are selfish assholes' and deal with the backlash from customers who withdraw their support (funny, that), or make it a policy to be supportive of working mothers. It would even be possible in the latter case to try to get more customers through publicizing that positive aspect.
Lastly, the jealousy of strangers is the dumbest reason not to do something. I know some people are jealous of my house and income, does that mean I should live in a tenement and only take minimum wage? That's idiocy. If my being happy makes other people depressed, fuck them, they need therapy. I don't need to stop being happy to make them happy.
I agree completely. Relationships, even marriage, should neither be about nor founded on sex. My own wife and I have an 'open' marriage, and it has worked very well for years. The key is real trust, not acting in bad faith or hiding anything.
People really need to question more *why* they believe what they believe. I think if more people really took an honest look at their positions they would see how much of it is social construction and learned behavior.
If you'll pardon the expression, amen. Though I think we're going to have to wait at least until the Millennials replace the Boomers, probably longer, before we see pervasive social change.
It's rather ironic actually, a lot of Millennials grew up in stereotypical picket fence households where parents went out of their way to keep anything remotely sexual away from their children. Now that generation is, to some degree, hiding their sexuality from their parents but less so from each other. I only hope they learn their lesson and are equally as open with subsequent generations.
Nice assumptions, too bad they're all wrong. While I have used Steam (once, against principle, and not doing it again), I know of these truly negative experiences only second hand. That these impacted persons constitute a minority *does not* excuse the deficiency of the model. By you logic you could justify any mistreatment so long as most people weren't impacted and/or those impacts were kept quiet enough that people don't take them into consideration when they are deciding whether to use the service or not.
I use Windows to play games because I must, not because I prefer it, let alone support or condone MS's practices. I run Linux (Mint) for everything else.
And further, experiences that are normal effectively don't matter. Nobody worries about having a normal experience. There's nothing to fear from having a normal experience. However, it should be the abnormal, negative experiences that *are possible* that should worry people. The degree to which such experiences are negative, specifically losing access to everything you've paid for in some cases with no hope of appeal, and frequency with which these experiences happen, which I assure you is more than a handful. Just do a search for all the accounts of things like this happening on forums. That these accounts are not representative of a majority *in no way* invalidates them.
Well, after all, if he were to orbit the earth in such a way that he experienced multiple sundowns every 24 hours, he would probably want a more efficient way to drink his own piss.
I think there is a fundamental difference between old and new porn consumers. The old porn consumer is used to actual movies that are linear, that's what they expect and want and therefore the previews work as intended to bring them in. The new porn consumer has a short attention span typical of younger generations. Speaking for myself, as porn previews have gotten longer and longer and the tube sites have come online with many of the whole movies, I've actually found a lot of them to be... too long. I've gotten so used to moving through different people and ideas that watching a single scene the whole time is actually boring. I now actually generally avoid scenes longer than 10 min even if they are of interest to me so long as shorter ones are as/more interesting.
I'm glad that your personal experience is the sum total by which the universe is judged. Never mind all the others who have had their Steam accounts locked or banned. They're not you so they don't exist or matter.
That might be a comforting idea to you in your advanced age, but actually, as a class, no. The over 35 crowd that actually developed the internet was vanishingly small. They were a minority in society even if they once were a majority of internet users and developers. It wasn't until Millennials and later that a whole generation became native internet users and developers, and that was actually a social tipping point that dragged the previous generations in where before they had shunned the minority of their contemporaries as 'geeks' and 'nerds'.
But you see that is a lie. There are artists who draw erotic imagery for fun, and even though the best usually end up taking commissions, almost nobody starts at that level. Further, other people get off on exhibition and make and post recordings of their intercourse without (perceivable) cost (bandwidth costs are usually defrayed by ads, etc.).
You're also disregarding the market of secondary products, a lot a big name stars make money from selling physical items such as autographed things.
That's cute, but you see Mr. AC, when you're going to watch something for 2+ hours, a lot of people prefer it not to look like pixelated trash. These people buy movies.
Now I can only speak for myself, but I think that porn a) isn't necessarily linear for most who grew up online and b) doesn't require the same degree of quality as it's usually a 30ish minute exercise anyway.
It's a false dichotomization of the market though. It's not just legal vs. illegal, but commercial vs. free as well. Before the internet free music (aside from radio which hasn't gone anywhere) essentially didn't exist because of production and distribution costs. Now I have thousands of tracks of free-as-in-non-commercial music and more is produced all the time. This pressure along with others such as the elimination of false scarcity is driving the price of music to consumers down, and that generally means slimmer margins and less profit, per capita or otherwise. Piracy is a part of this decrease, but it is hardly the sum total.
Here's a tip that doesn't involve any torrents. Take any fetish you have, and put it into Google along with the term 'tube'. If you ever exhaust that supply, well, you might want to seek professional help.
Honestly I wonder how the porn industry makes any money anymore. It must all be off of people over the age of 35 who don't know how the internet works.
Except that Steam is DRMed shit. If anything what is needed is a GOG or Amazon music or other DRM free thing for movies. If I buy something I don't want some random suit somewhere deciding I can't have it anymore and flipping a proverbial switch that invalidates my purchase.
In the first place, I mean 'oldfag' in the 4chan sense, as in I've been around 4chan and before that SomethingAwful when both sites were new, and I'm proud of not having any life to speak of. Further, although my/. UID is not low, that's because I only signed up when I saw there were going to be parties for the 10th Anniversary and I wanted to go. I'd been lurking/. since 1998.
Speaking as somebody who had a seat in bleachers to a government project that went under because of a misplaced faith in COTS: Fuck you. You don't have any idea what you are talking about, and because there are people like you making decisions, that is why so much money is wasted on shit that doesn't work, and then hundreds lose their jobs because some genius decided to cut corners in proposal.
It's easy to blaise about the Toughbook, never mind how much R&D was necessary to make it COTS. To hear you talk it sounds like you think some guys just picked up a laptop and said 'hur dur, let's make this *tougher*!' and it magically happened, and now you can buy them. You should take a look at the Army's standards for certifying these units, and maybe you'll be able to deduce that the 'modification' required to achieve these ends is rather more than 'a bit'.
Designs for field use of this kind have to build from the ground up at a component level. Chassis construction and composition has to be different, circuit board substrate has to be different, component quality, solder and soldering methods have to be different, QA has to be different, hell, for government work even supply chains, distribution, export control and the training and clearance for the staff at all levels of the operation have to be different.
Armchair fucktards like yourself have not even the first inkling of how shit like that comes together.
Except that you are a liar, for I used both OSes around their launch, and XP was great. It was insecure, yeah, but that's a different thing from being so fucked up that you have to restart it at least every two days just to stay online.
True story: One of the updates to Vista before the first service pack broke things so bad that at least once every 24-48 hours HTTP, SMTP, POP, and IMAP would stop working. The machine would still be online, I could even keep using IRC or ping anything I wanted, but not browse any web pages or send/receive any email. Crazier still, the machine was set up to be a gateway, and any system on the other side had no trouble, so the problem was limited somehow to the user session. It was bullshit. Repairing the connection didn't work, you could restart any number of network related services and nothing, driver updates didn't work, adapter settings had no effect (why would they with an application layer problem?), etc. etc.
Luckily the service pack for Vista finally fixed that shit, but it was so significantly shitty that it pushed me over the edge and got me using Linux full time on my primary personal desktop.
I also wouldn't be surprised if, documented or not, it wasn't hardened to withstand some measure of EMP or other ECM, not to mention inimical natural environments.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh for shit's sake people, am I the only person who can use Google? Is 2008 good enough for you, assface? At a certain point when evidence is presented it becomes rather weak-looking to keep asking for more without presenting any evidence disproving those things already presented.
First, according to the Ethnographic Atlas Codebook, of 1231 societies studied, only 186 were monogomous, 453 practiced some polygyny, 588 had more frequent polygyny, and 4 were polyandrous. In fact, ethologists now believe that only one to two percent of all species may be monogamous (Tucker, William In press National Review: All in the Family. New York: National Review Press). None of the simian species are strictly monogamous; our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, practice a form of group marriage. Among the 849 human societies examined by the anthropologist Murdock (1957: American Anthropologist: World Ethnographic Sample. 59: 664-687.), 75% practiced polygyny.
Those are just the first three things I came up with in a five minute search. There have been hundreds, even thousands, of scholarly papers written on this subject. It is so common, so fundamental to sociology and anthropology that I have no reservations on calling you out. You probably never knew anything about the subject to forget.
In retrospect, you're partially correct, 'learned behavior' is a poor choice of words. However, the point is that I am not an automaton that simply does whatever a god/government/parental authority tells me is right. I study, hypothesize, test and question until I find the closest thing I can to truth. Somebody whose morality is dictated to them by another authority is by definition a sheep.
Holy crap, dawg. Study some anthropology. Damn near every ancient society was polygynistic. Most of Asia was even into the beginning of the 20th century, and some in Africa still are. That's about as far from 'human nature' as it gets.
There are so many misconceptions in this I don't know where to start. In the first place there is sociological evidence that a preoccupation with genetic primacy is not common to all males or all societies. The ancient Romans for example were particularly keen on adoption, and IIRC Roman law dictated that adopted sons could never be disowned where biological ones could be.
Secondly, making the assumption that your use of 'God' means Yahweh, there was no divine mandate for monogamy before Christ and/or the Apostle Paul. Most of the Biblical patriarchs had many wives and even more concubines which themselves were usually prizes from the battlefield whose lives were only granted at the price of systemic rape at any time. Got to love that old time religious morality.
Frequently polygynous family units. Men could have multiple women because they were stronger. You'll find that biology isn't all that interested in equality, fairness, or morality.
I find these reasons rather hollow. Privacy isn't really much of a choice if society punishes voluntary public exposure.
Further, problems professionally with having children are not an argument for privacy but characterize a fundamental flaw with society that needs to be fixed. Yes, pregnancy is bad for business, but every company that talks out of both sides of its mouth needs to be taught a lesson. Either come out and just say 'we don't support working mothers because we are selfish assholes' and deal with the backlash from customers who withdraw their support (funny, that), or make it a policy to be supportive of working mothers. It would even be possible in the latter case to try to get more customers through publicizing that positive aspect.
Lastly, the jealousy of strangers is the dumbest reason not to do something. I know some people are jealous of my house and income, does that mean I should live in a tenement and only take minimum wage? That's idiocy. If my being happy makes other people depressed, fuck them, they need therapy. I don't need to stop being happy to make them happy.
I agree completely. Relationships, even marriage, should neither be about nor founded on sex. My own wife and I have an 'open' marriage, and it has worked very well for years. The key is real trust, not acting in bad faith or hiding anything.
People really need to question more *why* they believe what they believe. I think if more people really took an honest look at their positions they would see how much of it is social construction and learned behavior.
If you'll pardon the expression, amen. Though I think we're going to have to wait at least until the Millennials replace the Boomers, probably longer, before we see pervasive social change.
It's rather ironic actually, a lot of Millennials grew up in stereotypical picket fence households where parents went out of their way to keep anything remotely sexual away from their children. Now that generation is, to some degree, hiding their sexuality from their parents but less so from each other. I only hope they learn their lesson and are equally as open with subsequent generations.
Nice assumptions, too bad they're all wrong. While I have used Steam (once, against principle, and not doing it again), I know of these truly negative experiences only second hand. That these impacted persons constitute a minority *does not* excuse the deficiency of the model. By you logic you could justify any mistreatment so long as most people weren't impacted and/or those impacts were kept quiet enough that people don't take them into consideration when they are deciding whether to use the service or not.
I use Windows to play games because I must, not because I prefer it, let alone support or condone MS's practices. I run Linux (Mint) for everything else.
And further, experiences that are normal effectively don't matter. Nobody worries about having a normal experience. There's nothing to fear from having a normal experience. However, it should be the abnormal, negative experiences that *are possible* that should worry people. The degree to which such experiences are negative, specifically losing access to everything you've paid for in some cases with no hope of appeal, and frequency with which these experiences happen, which I assure you is more than a handful. Just do a search for all the accounts of things like this happening on forums. That these accounts are not representative of a majority *in no way* invalidates them.
Well, after all, if he were to orbit the earth in such a way that he experienced multiple sundowns every 24 hours, he would probably want a more efficient way to drink his own piss.
I think there is a fundamental difference between old and new porn consumers. The old porn consumer is used to actual movies that are linear, that's what they expect and want and therefore the previews work as intended to bring them in. The new porn consumer has a short attention span typical of younger generations. Speaking for myself, as porn previews have gotten longer and longer and the tube sites have come online with many of the whole movies, I've actually found a lot of them to be... too long. I've gotten so used to moving through different people and ideas that watching a single scene the whole time is actually boring. I now actually generally avoid scenes longer than 10 min even if they are of interest to me so long as shorter ones are as/more interesting.
I'm glad that your personal experience is the sum total by which the universe is judged. Never mind all the others who have had their Steam accounts locked or banned. They're not you so they don't exist or matter.
That might be a comforting idea to you in your advanced age, but actually, as a class, no. The over 35 crowd that actually developed the internet was vanishingly small. They were a minority in society even if they once were a majority of internet users and developers. It wasn't until Millennials and later that a whole generation became native internet users and developers, and that was actually a social tipping point that dragged the previous generations in where before they had shunned the minority of their contemporaries as 'geeks' and 'nerds'.
But you see that is a lie. There are artists who draw erotic imagery for fun, and even though the best usually end up taking commissions, almost nobody starts at that level. Further, other people get off on exhibition and make and post recordings of their intercourse without (perceivable) cost (bandwidth costs are usually defrayed by ads, etc.).
You're also disregarding the market of secondary products, a lot a big name stars make money from selling physical items such as autographed things.
That's cute, but you see Mr. AC, when you're going to watch something for 2+ hours, a lot of people prefer it not to look like pixelated trash. These people buy movies.
Now I can only speak for myself, but I think that porn a) isn't necessarily linear for most who grew up online and b) doesn't require the same degree of quality as it's usually a 30ish minute exercise anyway.
It's a false dichotomization of the market though. It's not just legal vs. illegal, but commercial vs. free as well. Before the internet free music (aside from radio which hasn't gone anywhere) essentially didn't exist because of production and distribution costs. Now I have thousands of tracks of free-as-in-non-commercial music and more is produced all the time. This pressure along with others such as the elimination of false scarcity is driving the price of music to consumers down, and that generally means slimmer margins and less profit, per capita or otherwise. Piracy is a part of this decrease, but it is hardly the sum total.
*Buy* porn?! Ahahahahahaha!
Here's a tip that doesn't involve any torrents. Take any fetish you have, and put it into Google along with the term 'tube'. If you ever exhaust that supply, well, you might want to seek professional help.
Honestly I wonder how the porn industry makes any money anymore. It must all be off of people over the age of 35 who don't know how the internet works.
Except that Steam is DRMed shit. If anything what is needed is a GOG or Amazon music or other DRM free thing for movies. If I buy something I don't want some random suit somewhere deciding I can't have it anymore and flipping a proverbial switch that invalidates my purchase.
In the first place, I mean 'oldfag' in the 4chan sense, as in I've been around 4chan and before that SomethingAwful when both sites were new, and I'm proud of not having any life to speak of. Further, although my /. UID is not low, that's because I only signed up when I saw there were going to be parties for the 10th Anniversary and I wanted to go. I'd been lurking /. since 1998.
Now *that* is how you goatse. Even got me, and I'm an oldfag.
Speaking as somebody who had a seat in bleachers to a government project that went under because of a misplaced faith in COTS: Fuck you. You don't have any idea what you are talking about, and because there are people like you making decisions, that is why so much money is wasted on shit that doesn't work, and then hundreds lose their jobs because some genius decided to cut corners in proposal.
It's easy to blaise about the Toughbook, never mind how much R&D was necessary to make it COTS. To hear you talk it sounds like you think some guys just picked up a laptop and said 'hur dur, let's make this *tougher*!' and it magically happened, and now you can buy them. You should take a look at the Army's standards for certifying these units, and maybe you'll be able to deduce that the 'modification' required to achieve these ends is rather more than 'a bit'.
Designs for field use of this kind have to build from the ground up at a component level. Chassis construction and composition has to be different, circuit board substrate has to be different, component quality, solder and soldering methods have to be different, QA has to be different, hell, for government work even supply chains, distribution, export control and the training and clearance for the staff at all levels of the operation have to be different.
Armchair fucktards like yourself have not even the first inkling of how shit like that comes together.
Except that you are a liar, for I used both OSes around their launch, and XP was great. It was insecure, yeah, but that's a different thing from being so fucked up that you have to restart it at least every two days just to stay online.
True story: One of the updates to Vista before the first service pack broke things so bad that at least once every 24-48 hours HTTP, SMTP, POP, and IMAP would stop working. The machine would still be online, I could even keep using IRC or ping anything I wanted, but not browse any web pages or send/receive any email. Crazier still, the machine was set up to be a gateway, and any system on the other side had no trouble, so the problem was limited somehow to the user session. It was bullshit. Repairing the connection didn't work, you could restart any number of network related services and nothing, driver updates didn't work, adapter settings had no effect (why would they with an application layer problem?), etc. etc.
Luckily the service pack for Vista finally fixed that shit, but it was so significantly shitty that it pushed me over the edge and got me using Linux full time on my primary personal desktop.
I also wouldn't be surprised if, documented or not, it wasn't hardened to withstand some measure of EMP or other ECM, not to mention inimical natural environments.
Air conditioning is more expensive than you think. It's already cost the armed forces 20 billion by itself.