Having a language that allows you to freely express whatever you are thinking in whatever form occurs to you at the time is, of course, great for rapid development of scripts. It is also a nightmare when it comes robustness and maintainability of code - it encourages cute tricks, neat hacks, and idiosyncratic expressions that leave the maintenance coder baffled and the person ding debugging wondering about what bizarre side-effects this particular way of expressing this idea might have.
I love Perl, and for come projects it is definitely the right choice because of its remarkable flexibility. I have also come to admire more restrictive languages like Python, or Ada, or Eiffel, particularly for projects where maintainability has any part to play. You should also note that the three languages mentioned are also languages that are all quite easy to read even if you don't know the language, which is to say, they are all very readable and maintainable.
The weather is cyclical and isn't static. So it is possible that it isn't caused by humans. Having said that, I don't know whether or not there is damning proof it's being caused by humans.
Well what we do know is that as CO2 emissions have increased in the last 200 years, raising the global atmospheric C02 concentration a significant amount (an order of magnitude larger than any fluctuation in C02 levels in the last 650,000 years). We also know that average global temperature has risen over roughly that same time frame.
Of course correlation does not prove causation. What tends to weigh in heavily on the side of causation is that we know from basic physics that atmospheric C02 will trap heat, so we have good reason to believe that C02 levels may be causing observed warming. When computer climate models are used we find that the increase in C02 levels and the predicted rate of heat retention accounts for that portion of warming (about 60% of the increase) for which we have no other explanation.
So yes, correlation does not prove causation, but then we have a lot more to claim causation than just a correlation.
They don't handle foreign affairs, but focus on at home threats (Which made me question the need for Homeland Security, but anyway). The point is, their entire job is to monitor the US and US Citizens.
I'm honestly not sure how you could be more wrong. Instead of just guessing at what you think they do based on your own bizarre interpretation of the name of the agency, you could try actually looking up real information on what the role of the NSA is. From their website we see that their stated mission is a dual one, involving "Information Assurance" to protect US information, and "Foreign Signals Intelligence" to collect and process foreign communications. Feel free to actually read the executive order that defines what the NSA does. Spying on US citizens is precisely what the NSA is prohibited from doing, and handling of foreign intelligence is part of their mission statement.
Bush followed all the applicable laws, and members of congress knew about it. I don't see what the problem is.
It represents a significant change in policy. The relevant directive, to which this more recent policy represents a significant change, is United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18. That document makes for interesting reading. While chunks have been redacted the important point is that, according to that document, the NSA took the fourth amendment very seriously and had tight regulations as to exactly what conditions needed to be met before any interception of communications from anyone inside the US can occur. Given that, any weakening of this policy, such as what has been reported, potentially conflicts with the fourth amendment and would thus be unconstitutional.
The Visual-Python is a simple, easy and comfortable way to develop python while working on a Windows machine. It blends in nicely with Visual-Studio and provides all those little things that make writing code nicer easier and sleaker.
Well there's always PyDev for Eclipse. It's reasonably mature, takes full advantage of what Eclipse has to offer (integration, debugging, code completion etc.) as well as having nice integration of other tools such as bicycle repair man for refactoring and pylint for static checking.
A quick question. Has anyone made a plugin for Eclipse to handle Perl or any of the other popular scripting languages?
Yes, people have made some very good plugins for Eclipse to handle Perl, Python, and other scripting languages. If you're willing to use Eclipse they turn it into quite a nice environment for the scripting language fo your choice, including debugging, good code completion, on the fly syntax checking and error flagging, and many other nice features.
If you want plugins for a big heavy IDE for Perl and Python then Eclipse still works just fine. For Perl there's EPIC, and for Python there's PyDev. Both are reasonably mature, quite featureful, and generally pleasant to work with.
The only reason to be using vi/Notepad/whatever is if you are wanting to stay away from big heavy IDEs. That's not to say that isn't a perfectly sensible reason, just that the existence or not of VisualPerl and VisualPython really doesn't have a lot to do with it.
What would change this is to go in and change the underlying political structure that leaves a select few in power with no real incentive to change things, and leaves the masses unable to prosper.
Unfortunately, the translation of "Change the underlying political structure" into practical action is "Go in and take out the corrupt|inept|racist|whatever regime and replace it with one that uses an actual workable political/governance system".
That sounds nice, but in practice you can't just go in and install democracy by fiat. Democracy, to work well, to retain some semblance of stability, relies on an educated and informed populace. Just making a country a democracy by order leaves the political system wide open to abuse: it is far too easy for populists to promise and cajole and get elected and never deliver. That happens, at least to some extent, in first world countries that have a high mean level of education and decent and widely read press that keeps the populace informed as to what is happening; consider the results in a country with lower average education levels, and a poorly informed populace.
And what is going to happen after you install this democracy? Are you going to constantly police it to ensure the same kinds of corruption don't creep back in? How do you intend to do that without, in effect, simply installing a puppet government? First world countries rely on an informed electorate to not tolerate excessive corruption, and even then things are far from perfect. Do you really expect such a thing to work in a country that you've walked into and eclared a democracy?
In practice democracy is an outgrowth of an educated and informed populace. It is something that the people have to want, and it works best when it is pushed for, and created by, the people themselves. Trying to install a democracy from outside is, most likely, ging to create an unstable one. Providing the people with the means and the encouragement and support to move to a democracy is going to be the best way to reform such countries. That's a very large task. The $100 laptop project simply represents a small piece of the "educated and informed populace" part of the puzzle. It is an effort aimed at making it easier for people to get the education that they crave, and to communicate and be informed about what is actually going on. How well it succeeds at that is going to be an interesting question, but I don't tink you can categorically state, a priori, that it is a waste of effort - rather it seems like an interesting idea.
I think the problem is that Emacs is getting squeezed. For coding, including writing LaTeX documents (and I'm guessing there's probably a SQL plugin out there) Eclipse is making significant headway. It either already has a language plugin, or is going to have one developed soon. Yes it's got some catching up to do to cover the same range as Emacs, but it is getting there and fast. More importantly it's getting there with a more modern more complete interface, and still having that pluggable extendable architecture that made Emacs so great. At the heavy end of things Emacs is getting out done by something even bigger and heavier.
If you want to edit a diary of meetings, quickly edit some remote files, or what have you then there are a number of smaller faster lighter editors (vi springs to mind) that are more than adequate at efificently pushing text. Emacs has, and always will be, relatively heavy compared to a lot of text editors. All that weight buys you features, but for quick and simple text editing Emacs is getting out done (and always has) by the lighter more nimble editors.
Emacs still has it's niche, and it is definitely a great editor. The niche it fulfills is getting smaller though, and it is definitely possible that Emacs could be subsumed at some time in the future.
Very good points. For me, having done a job that had some rather interesting non-standard and often vert varied editing requirements these two points:
While it is somewhat long to learn, you do just everything without needing to move your hands from the keyboard, and without needing to watch the screen. I can't stress this point enough;
being a Lisp machine, it's just natural to extend it, starting with little ad-hoc ELisp snippets, which sometimes turn into whole ELisp packages;
Where the vital ones. When you're spending a large part of your day doing nothing but moving blocks of text around being able to do it without having to keep reaching for a mouse is vital. If that were all then vi would probably have been ideal - however, as I said, things were fairly non-standard and varied, and that often necessitated writing quick extensions to automate things (that could go well eyond what simple keyboard macros can provide) or provide functions to make certain tasks easier (including colouring the text according to some obscure rules, opening a "matching" file in a second pane and syncing it to the current by regex matches etc.) Emacs made it easy to bash out simple functions in Elisp, and once you get enough you dump it into a package and share it with everyone else (as well as getting sme of their more useful extensions).
I will cease being quite as profitable once the culture changes - whether that will actually happen is a very dubious proposition indeed. If guys as group can grow up a little and stop being quite so shallow in their concepts of sexuality we might see some improvement. Then again you can argue that it's hard wired: look at male gay erotica - it's not about objectifying women anymore, yet the imagery is just as simplistic and exaggerated.
Urgh! *shudder*. No offense, but I think you've just confirmed your status as a man with that spectacular lack of insight into what women find sexually attractive. Now, I caveat that I am not speaking for every woman - a really fit guy in a loin cloth could be attractive in context... but crotch grabbing and wobbling penises?
I wasn't claiming that's what women find sexually attractive, merely that it was a means of overtly sexualising the characters - in this case probably mostly toward a gay male fantasy because it has a lot more easily exaggerated characteristics. The fact is that what women want is a man is often rather more subtle and complex than male sexual desires in women (or in other men in the case of gay male fantasies). It's the very simplistic male sexual fantasies that are partly the problem in the manner of exaggeration, and thus for the sexually exaggagerated male character it's best to stick with simplistic male sexual fantasies - and that means gay male fantasies.
Until these changes are made, I say we just accept that women in games will be hotter than women in real life, just like men in games are cooler than men in real life.
And there's the issue right there. The male characters are focussing on the fantasy of being the ultimate fantasy of a cool guy that men want to be. Contrary to popular male opinion a woman's fantasy of what she would like to be is not solely focussed on how "hot" she is and how every movement she makes is sexually suggestive - other things are slightly more important. I'm sure a game that provided an equivalent female character to what guys have to choose from for male characters would not be unattractive, but I don't think how hot she is would be the primary focus of the character either. Male characters are images of what men want to be, while female characters are images of what men want women to be and don't necessarily square especially well with what women want to be. It's a matter of a rather perversely misplaced focus.
I think there is defiantly a stark difference, the male equivalent would kind of be weasily stick thin characters with no muscles but great hair and an absolutely massive penis (something I've yet to have noticed in many games).
I don't think that's what the equivalent guy would be, but your point is generally correct, it's about the nature of the exaggeration rather than the fact that features are exaggerated. The women are all exaggerated in a very sexualised way. All the actions and movements and animations have a certain amount of sexualised aspect to them. If you want an equivalent for male characters, you could imagine games where all the male characters were straight out of male gay porn calendar, moved in overtly sexual ways the whole time, and had inordinate focus on making sure you could see the penis wobbles whenever they walked.
Why don't girls get that us men have to put up with the same damn thing? I don't look like Duke Nukem, or Doom guy, maybe close to Freeman but not very close.
It's about whether its a fantasy character that you could want to be, which is what the male charatcters are, or a fanatsy that has been overtly sexualised. Don't get what I mean? Imagine playing a game where all the male characters looked a little more like this and this. Slightly less appealing to you? Well, that's how a lot of girls feel. The characters aren't really a fantasy ideal of what girls would like to be.
I have to wonder what games (or comics) would look like where the men and women were exaggerated to match women's ideals. Would we have the same reactions to their idealized men?
Well you can get some idea, not of what the image of men would be like when idealized in a sexual way by women, but when at least idealized in a sexual way, by looking at various artwork like, for instance, "Tom of Finland". Here's a guy who draws somewhat comic book looking art of idealised men - it's just that instead of being idealised as what men would want to be it's idealised as a sexual object (the same way the women are idealised in comic books and video games). Try showing "Tom of Finalnd"'s art (even the stuff that's just suggestive rather than explicit) to random average guys and asking them if they'd like to read a comic book about these guys, or play a video game where the guy was the lead character. You'll get a resounding "No!".
It's a fantasy setting. The male characters are as crazily out of proportion as the female characters. There are plenty of girls who are happy to play a super-endowed, super-athletic character in a game. Wouldn't want to be that top-heavy or dress like that in real-life, but that's why it's a game.
Sure both are exaggerated, but I think the complaint is that the female characters are exaggerated in a very sexualised way, not just in proportion, but in motion. I think if every game featured only guys in very tight suits or loin cloths such that you could always see the carefully animated wobbles of his apparently massive penis, and many of the characters moves and animations were such as to emphasise that in a particularly sexual way, along with a number of patently sexualised animations (think a whole lot of deliberate hip grinding, crotch grabbing and such like) then I think guys wouldn't be attracted to those games. Mostly they just say they were all "gay" etc. All that is being said here is that women are not particularly enthralled with games that portray women in a similar pointlessly sexualised way.
All this really goes to show is that, much as one might have expected, Australians really are as stupid as people from Utah. Then again what can you really expect from a country with people dumb enough to elect Pauline Hanson to parliament.
To all those intelligent people in Australia and Utah (don't worry, I know you exist): you have my condolences, but really, isn't it about time you thought about moving or something?
Try Uncaused Force, Teach the Controversy! then. It's every bit as scientifically valid, detailed, and correct as any ID publication. Feel free to check the references - they are all peer reviewed articles saying exactly what the article claims they say. Of course the conclusion is that the theory of gravity is wrong and we need to teach our children about the "uncaused force" that moves objects - some would say that an uncaused force is God, but of course the theory need not explicitly state that.
Origin of Species... as in how we ended up with all the different species of animals and plants we now have. It was not called "Origin of Life" and did not try to explain how life began.
Really dumb plots, reasonably dumb one-note characters, cheap-looking Dr. Who-caliber sets. Does it get better later on? How many bad Farscape episodes does one have to slog through to get to the good ones?
It does improve, but there are some things you have to look past and live with. The cheap looking Dr. Who-caliber sets for one. The series was filmed for an extremely low budget in Australia - it never really got any better in the effects department than it started with. The plots and characters, on the other hand, do improve. Farscape tended to have long scale story arcs, but that isn't at all apparent at the beginning when they are essentially doing one off stories that help to lay background. If you can slog your way to the end of the first season (and there are some ups and downs getting there) you might start to see how things could go - the concluding episodes of the first season start to string into the longer term arc, and definitely start to string together. By that stage you've also got the beginnings of slightly more interesting and complex characters.
Personally I found the second season, overall, to be underwhelming (mostly for failing to deliver on the promise of the end of the first season), the third stooping to soap opera but with good points, and the fourth to be exceptionally variable (some very good episodes, and some appalling space filler episodes).
Farscape isn't great, but it does actually have some strong points once it gets going, mostly concerning the characters and their interactions. It suffers from a lot of padding (in the form of rather weak episodes to fill in the gaps between the better ones), but its high points are pretty strong if you're willing to sit through some lows to get there. If you can get through the first season, if you don't find anything compelling by that point it just means Farscape definitely isn't to your taste.
Ridicule aside -- this achievement broke what record?
The most Babylon 5 scripts penned by one man. No one previously had managed to write as many scripts for Babylon 5. It also seems likely that no one in the future will ever beat this record - though I guess if you include "fanfic scripts never filmed" the record is probably already held by someone other than Mr. Straczynski.
The whole tone of mindless breathless worship tended to detract from the review badly. Couldn't have just had something like "Straczynski penned 92 of the 110 episodes, something uncommon in modern television scriptwriting where the creator of a series will often use a writing team to help share the load after establishign the setting and characters." or some such?
And that was a shame in some cases (and not in others - I don't think anyone was sad to see SeaQuest die, I believe Roy Schieder's stated reason for leaving the show was "I don't want to do crap anymore").
Adventures of Brisco County Junior: 1993 Space - Above and Beyond: 1995
These two were actually quite good, or at least somewhat individual. Space Above and Beyond, particularly the later half of the season, was easily the darkest grittiest science fiction to make it to mainstream TV and probably had some very strong influences on the new Battlestar Galactica. Brisco County Junior... a quirky science fiction western comedy with Bruce Campbell in the lead? It's a shame that one died, it could have been fun.
No advanced search. You can't search more than a single mailbox at a time.
That's what vFolders are supposed to be for - they can span all your mailboxes: local, remote, the lot. I tend to skip over the individual mailboxes and simply use a few usefully configured vFolders with search criteria I use often and that span mailboxes instead. Searching across those works just fine too.
Slashdot Mirror
Having a language that allows you to freely express whatever you are thinking in whatever form occurs to you at the time is, of course, great for rapid development of scripts. It is also a nightmare when it comes robustness and maintainability of code - it encourages cute tricks, neat hacks, and idiosyncratic expressions that leave the maintenance coder baffled and the person ding debugging wondering about what bizarre side-effects this particular way of expressing this idea might have.
I love Perl, and for come projects it is definitely the right choice because of its remarkable flexibility. I have also come to admire more restrictive languages like Python, or Ada, or Eiffel, particularly for projects where maintainability has any part to play. You should also note that the three languages mentioned are also languages that are all quite easy to read even if you don't know the language, which is to say, they are all very readable and maintainable.
Jedidiah.
The weather is cyclical and isn't static. So it is possible that it isn't caused by humans. Having said that, I don't know whether or not there is damning proof it's being caused by humans.
Well what we do know is that as CO2 emissions have increased in the last 200 years, raising the global atmospheric C02 concentration a significant amount (an order of magnitude larger than any fluctuation in C02 levels in the last 650,000 years). We also know that average global temperature has risen over roughly that same time frame.
Of course correlation does not prove causation. What tends to weigh in heavily on the side of causation is that we know from basic physics that atmospheric C02 will trap heat, so we have good reason to believe that C02 levels may be causing observed warming. When computer climate models are used we find that the increase in C02 levels and the predicted rate of heat retention accounts for that portion of warming (about 60% of the increase) for which we have no other explanation.
So yes, correlation does not prove causation, but then we have a lot more to claim causation than just a correlation.
Jedidiah.
They don't handle foreign affairs, but focus on at home threats (Which made me question the need for Homeland Security, but anyway). The point is, their entire job is to monitor the US and US Citizens.
I'm honestly not sure how you could be more wrong. Instead of just guessing at what you think they do based on your own bizarre interpretation of the name of the agency, you could try actually looking up real information on what the role of the NSA is. From their website we see that their stated mission is a dual one, involving "Information Assurance" to protect US information, and "Foreign Signals Intelligence" to collect and process foreign communications. Feel free to actually read the executive order that defines what the NSA does. Spying on US citizens is precisely what the NSA is prohibited from doing, and handling of foreign intelligence is part of their mission statement.
Jedidiah.
Bush followed all the applicable laws, and members of congress knew about it. I don't see what the problem is.
It represents a significant change in policy. The relevant directive, to which this more recent policy represents a significant change, is United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18. That document makes for interesting reading. While chunks have been redacted the important point is that, according to that document, the NSA took the fourth amendment very seriously and had tight regulations as to exactly what conditions needed to be met before any interception of communications from anyone inside the US can occur. Given that, any weakening of this policy, such as what has been reported, potentially conflicts with the fourth amendment and would thus be unconstitutional.
Jedidiah.
The Visual-Python is a simple, easy and comfortable way to develop python while working on a Windows machine.
It blends in nicely with Visual-Studio and provides all those little things that make writing code nicer easier and sleaker.
Well there's always PyDev for Eclipse. It's reasonably mature, takes full advantage of what Eclipse has to offer (integration, debugging, code completion etc.) as well as having nice integration of other tools such as bicycle repair man for refactoring and pylint for static checking.
Jedidiah.
A quick question. Has anyone made a plugin for Eclipse to handle Perl or any of the other popular scripting languages?
Yes, people have made some very good plugins for Eclipse to handle Perl, Python, and other scripting languages. If you're willing to use Eclipse they turn it into quite a nice environment for the scripting language fo your choice, including debugging, good code completion, on the fly syntax checking and error flagging, and many other nice features.
Jedidiah.
If you want plugins for a big heavy IDE for Perl and Python then Eclipse still works just fine. For Perl there's EPIC, and for Python there's PyDev. Both are reasonably mature, quite featureful, and generally pleasant to work with.
The only reason to be using vi/Notepad/whatever is if you are wanting to stay away from big heavy IDEs. That's not to say that isn't a perfectly sensible reason, just that the existence or not of VisualPerl and VisualPython really doesn't have a lot to do with it.
Jedidiah.
What would change this is to go in and change the underlying political structure that leaves a select few in power with no real incentive to change things, and leaves the masses unable to prosper.
Unfortunately, the translation of "Change the underlying political structure" into practical action is "Go in and take out the corrupt|inept|racist|whatever regime and replace it with one that uses an actual workable political/governance system".
That sounds nice, but in practice you can't just go in and install democracy by fiat. Democracy, to work well, to retain some semblance of stability, relies on an educated and informed populace. Just making a country a democracy by order leaves the political system wide open to abuse: it is far too easy for populists to promise and cajole and get elected and never deliver. That happens, at least to some extent, in first world countries that have a high mean level of education and decent and widely read press that keeps the populace informed as to what is happening; consider the results in a country with lower average education levels, and a poorly informed populace.
And what is going to happen after you install this democracy? Are you going to constantly police it to ensure the same kinds of corruption don't creep back in? How do you intend to do that without, in effect, simply installing a puppet government? First world countries rely on an informed electorate to not tolerate excessive corruption, and even then things are far from perfect. Do you really expect such a thing to work in a country that you've walked into and eclared a democracy?
In practice democracy is an outgrowth of an educated and informed populace. It is something that the people have to want, and it works best when it is pushed for, and created by, the people themselves. Trying to install a democracy from outside is, most likely, ging to create an unstable one. Providing the people with the means and the encouragement and support to move to a democracy is going to be the best way to reform such countries. That's a very large task. The $100 laptop project simply represents a small piece of the "educated and informed populace" part of the puzzle. It is an effort aimed at making it easier for people to get the education that they crave, and to communicate and be informed about what is actually going on. How well it succeeds at that is going to be an interesting question, but I don't tink you can categorically state, a priori, that it is a waste of effort - rather it seems like an interesting idea.
Jedidiah.
I think the problem is that Emacs is getting squeezed. For coding, including writing LaTeX documents (and I'm guessing there's probably a SQL plugin out there) Eclipse is making significant headway. It either already has a language plugin, or is going to have one developed soon. Yes it's got some catching up to do to cover the same range as Emacs, but it is getting there and fast. More importantly it's getting there with a more modern more complete interface, and still having that pluggable extendable architecture that made Emacs so great. At the heavy end of things Emacs is getting out done by something even bigger and heavier.
If you want to edit a diary of meetings, quickly edit some remote files, or what have you then there are a number of smaller faster lighter editors (vi springs to mind) that are more than adequate at efificently pushing text. Emacs has, and always will be, relatively heavy compared to a lot of text editors. All that weight buys you features, but for quick and simple text editing Emacs is getting out done (and always has) by the lighter more nimble editors.
Emacs still has it's niche, and it is definitely a great editor. The niche it fulfills is getting smaller though, and it is definitely possible that Emacs could be subsumed at some time in the future.
Jedidiah.
Very good points. For me, having done a job that had some rather interesting non-standard and often vert varied editing requirements these two points:
While it is somewhat long to learn, you do just everything without needing to move your hands from the keyboard, and without needing to watch the screen. I can't stress this point enough;
being a Lisp machine, it's just natural to extend it, starting with little ad-hoc ELisp snippets, which sometimes turn into whole ELisp packages;
Where the vital ones. When you're spending a large part of your day doing nothing but moving blocks of text around being able to do it without having to keep reaching for a mouse is vital. If that were all then vi would probably have been ideal - however, as I said, things were fairly non-standard and varied, and that often necessitated writing quick extensions to automate things (that could go well eyond what simple keyboard macros can provide) or provide functions to make certain tasks easier (including colouring the text according to some obscure rules, opening a "matching" file in a second pane and syncing it to the current by regex matches etc.) Emacs made it easy to bash out simple functions in Elisp, and once you get enough you dump it into a package and share it with everyone else (as well as getting sme of their more useful extensions).
Jedidiah.
I will cease being quite as profitable once the culture changes - whether that will actually happen is a very dubious proposition indeed. If guys as group can grow up a little and stop being quite so shallow in their concepts of sexuality we might see some improvement. Then again you can argue that it's hard wired: look at male gay erotica - it's not about objectifying women anymore, yet the imagery is just as simplistic and exaggerated.
Jedidiah.
Urgh! *shudder*. No offense, but I think you've just confirmed your status as a man with that spectacular lack of insight into what women find sexually attractive. Now, I caveat that I am not speaking for every woman - a really fit guy in a loin cloth could be attractive in context... but crotch grabbing and wobbling penises?
I wasn't claiming that's what women find sexually attractive, merely that it was a means of overtly sexualising the characters - in this case probably mostly toward a gay male fantasy because it has a lot more easily exaggerated characteristics. The fact is that what women want is a man is often rather more subtle and complex than male sexual desires in women (or in other men in the case of gay male fantasies). It's the very simplistic male sexual fantasies that are partly the problem in the manner of exaggeration, and thus for the sexually exaggagerated male character it's best to stick with simplistic male sexual fantasies - and that means gay male fantasies.
Jedidiah.
Until these changes are made, I say we just accept that women in games will be hotter than women in real life, just like men in games are cooler than men in real life.
And there's the issue right there. The male characters are focussing on the fantasy of being the ultimate fantasy of a cool guy that men want to be. Contrary to popular male opinion a woman's fantasy of what she would like to be is not solely focussed on how "hot" she is and how every movement she makes is sexually suggestive - other things are slightly more important. I'm sure a game that provided an equivalent female character to what guys have to choose from for male characters would not be unattractive, but I don't think how hot she is would be the primary focus of the character either. Male characters are images of what men want to be, while female characters are images of what men want women to be and don't necessarily square especially well with what women want to be. It's a matter of a rather perversely misplaced focus.
Jedidiah.
I think there is defiantly a stark difference, the male equivalent would kind of be weasily stick thin characters with no muscles but great hair and an absolutely massive penis (something I've yet to have noticed in many games).
I don't think that's what the equivalent guy would be, but your point is generally correct, it's about the nature of the exaggeration rather than the fact that features are exaggerated. The women are all exaggerated in a very sexualised way. All the actions and movements and animations have a certain amount of sexualised aspect to them. If you want an equivalent for male characters, you could imagine games where all the male characters were straight out of male gay porn calendar, moved in overtly sexual ways the whole time, and had inordinate focus on making sure you could see the penis wobbles whenever they walked.
Jedidiah.
Why don't girls get that us men have to put up with the same damn thing? I don't look like Duke Nukem, or Doom guy, maybe close to Freeman but not very close.
It's about whether its a fantasy character that you could want to be, which is what the male charatcters are, or a fanatsy that has been overtly sexualised. Don't get what I mean? Imagine playing a game where all the male characters looked a little more like this and this. Slightly less appealing to you? Well, that's how a lot of girls feel. The characters aren't really a fantasy ideal of what girls would like to be.
Jedidiah.
I have to wonder what games (or comics) would look like where the men and women were exaggerated to match women's ideals. Would we have the same reactions to their idealized men?
Well you can get some idea, not of what the image of men would be like when idealized in a sexual way by women, but when at least idealized in a sexual way, by looking at various artwork like, for instance, "Tom of Finland". Here's a guy who draws somewhat comic book looking art of idealised men - it's just that instead of being idealised as what men would want to be it's idealised as a sexual object (the same way the women are idealised in comic books and video games). Try showing "Tom of Finalnd"'s art (even the stuff that's just suggestive rather than explicit) to random average guys and asking them if they'd like to read a comic book about these guys, or play a video game where the guy was the lead character. You'll get a resounding "No!".
Jedidiah.
It's a fantasy setting. The male characters are as crazily out of proportion as the female characters. There are plenty of girls who are happy to play a super-endowed, super-athletic character in a game. Wouldn't want to be that top-heavy or dress like that in real-life, but that's why it's a game.
Sure both are exaggerated, but I think the complaint is that the female characters are exaggerated in a very sexualised way, not just in proportion, but in motion. I think if every game featured only guys in very tight suits or loin cloths such that you could always see the carefully animated wobbles of his apparently massive penis, and many of the characters moves and animations were such as to emphasise that in a particularly sexual way, along with a number of patently sexualised animations (think a whole lot of deliberate hip grinding, crotch grabbing and such like) then I think guys wouldn't be attracted to those games. Mostly they just say they were all "gay" etc. All that is being said here is that women are not particularly enthralled with games that portray women in a similar pointlessly sexualised way.
Jedidiah.
All this really goes to show is that, much as one might have expected, Australians really are as stupid as people from Utah. Then again what can you really expect from a country with people dumb enough to elect Pauline Hanson to parliament.
To all those intelligent people in Australia and Utah (don't worry, I know you exist): you have my condolences, but really, isn't it about time you thought about moving or something?
Jedidiah.
It's a straw man argument.
Try Uncaused Force, Teach the Controversy! then. It's every bit as scientifically valid, detailed, and correct as any ID publication. Feel free to check the references - they are all peer reviewed articles saying exactly what the article claims they say. Of course the conclusion is that the theory of gravity is wrong and we need to teach our children about the "uncaused force" that moves objects - some would say that an uncaused force is God, but of course the theory need not explicitly state that.
Jedidiah.
If you have a vFolder for "All Accounts" (easy enough to setup) then a keyword search on that will automatically search across everything.
Jedidiah.
What was Darwin's book called again?
... as in how we ended up with all the different species of animals and plants we now have. It was not called "Origin of Life" and did not try to explain how life began.
Origin of Species
Jedidiah.
Really dumb plots, reasonably dumb one-note characters, cheap-looking Dr. Who-caliber sets. Does it get better later on? How many bad Farscape episodes does one have to slog through to get to the good ones?
It does improve, but there are some things you have to look past and live with. The cheap looking Dr. Who-caliber sets for one. The series was filmed for an extremely low budget in Australia - it never really got any better in the effects department than it started with. The plots and characters, on the other hand, do improve. Farscape tended to have long scale story arcs, but that isn't at all apparent at the beginning when they are essentially doing one off stories that help to lay background. If you can slog your way to the end of the first season (and there are some ups and downs getting there) you might start to see how things could go - the concluding episodes of the first season start to string into the longer term arc, and definitely start to string together. By that stage you've also got the beginnings of slightly more interesting and complex characters.
Personally I found the second season, overall, to be underwhelming (mostly for failing to deliver on the promise of the end of the first season), the third stooping to soap opera but with good points, and the fourth to be exceptionally variable (some very good episodes, and some appalling space filler episodes).
Farscape isn't great, but it does actually have some strong points once it gets going, mostly concerning the characters and their interactions. It suffers from a lot of padding (in the form of rather weak episodes to fill in the gaps between the better ones), but its high points are pretty strong if you're willing to sit through some lows to get there. If you can get through the first season, if you don't find anything compelling by that point it just means Farscape definitely isn't to your taste.
Jedidiah.
Ridicule aside -- this achievement broke what record?
The most Babylon 5 scripts penned by one man. No one previously had managed to write as many scripts for Babylon 5. It also seems likely that no one in the future will ever beat this record - though I guess if you include "fanfic scripts never filmed" the record is probably already held by someone other than Mr. Straczynski.
The whole tone of mindless breathless worship tended to detract from the review badly. Couldn't have just had something like "Straczynski penned 92 of the 110 episodes, something uncommon in modern television scriptwriting where the creator of a series will often use a writing team to help share the load after establishign the setting and characters." or some such?
Jedidiah.
It's just the rest of them were flops...
And that was a shame in some cases (and not in others - I don't think anyone was sad to see SeaQuest die, I believe Roy Schieder's stated reason for leaving the show was "I don't want to do crap anymore").
Adventures of Brisco County Junior: 1993
Space - Above and Beyond: 1995
These two were actually quite good, or at least somewhat individual. Space Above and Beyond, particularly the later half of the season, was easily the darkest grittiest science fiction to make it to mainstream TV and probably had some very strong influences on the new Battlestar Galactica. Brisco County Junior... a quirky science fiction western comedy with Bruce Campbell in the lead? It's a shame that one died, it could have been fun.
Jedidiah.
No advanced search. You can't search more than a single mailbox at a time.
That's what vFolders are supposed to be for - they can span all your mailboxes: local, remote, the lot. I tend to skip over the individual mailboxes and simply use a few usefully configured vFolders with search criteria I use often and that span mailboxes instead. Searching across those works just fine too.
Jedidiah.