Of course there's no way to stop sociopaths from spamming. There's also no way to stop sociopaths from murdering, either, but that doesn't mean we can't make it an unattractive choice. The main reason spammers are so hard to catch and hard to block consistently is because e-mail, as currently implemented, allows you to hide where the e-mail has come from. If this was not possible, it would be a simple matter to figure out where most of the spam is coming from and block it. Most e-mail servers would quickly do this, most of the spam wouldn't get through anymore, they'd get an even lower response rate as a result, and bam! Unprofitable. The problem largely disappears.
What's so hard about that?
I think that legal measures, in this case, are justified and a good idea. But technological measures are not too hard to do either, if we were really determined. This problem is by no means unsolvable.
Yes... SERVERS in China. I'll bet that many or most of the spammers themselves, however, are located in the States. All we need is for them to be found and fined out of existence (or better yet, jailed), and a lot of that spam from China will stop.
No, it doesn't. Spammers earn far more money by spamming than they ever would by turning each other in. There's no incentive for them to do that.
Besides, even if one spammer turned in another, that one could just turn him in too. The feds probably wouldn't offer any sort of immunity for something as trivial as this. Why should they?
The point is, though, that it doesn't matter WHY they are starving... it only matters that they are, and they're still having kids knowing full well that they can't feed them. This kind of foolish behavior is the reason this is their own fault. Why shouldn't they take responsibility for their own actions?
It is Darwinism because those people stupid enough to have kids in those conditions will be unable to feed them and they will die. It sucks to be them, but that's what happens when you try to live beyond your means. If you're starving, don't have kids.
That's not it at all. It's just that it's dumb to have a general rule about getting parental consent for things as trivial as aspirin but having an exception for something as serious as an abortion. If the parents have the right to know about anything in their kid's life, they have the right to know about that, wouldn't you say?
Just because they'd tell the parents doesn't mean the kid's gonna wind up raising the child herself, which I agree is probably not a good idea.
But being a pro-nuclear activist during the cold war only makes sense. If you push for the West to disarm and they do, then you get nuked or invaded by the Soviets. The only way to stay safe is the threat of Mutual Assured Destruction. Didn't those hippies in Britain who started chanting for nuclear disarmament realize this? Did they think a Soviet invasion would be a good thing? Or did they somehow think that if the West unilateraly disarmed, the Soviets would voluntarily give up their now-advantaged position?
So being a pro-nuclear activist in a time of dire danger doesn't necessarily make you a conservative. It just means you're not an idiot.
P.S. Calling for both sides to disarm their nukes in ways that can be verified (which is arguably a good thing) is not at all the same as calling for only one side to do so. CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) did the latter.
This has been pointed out by others before, but it's worth saying again. Preventing corporations from donating to political parties or politicians won't solve the problem, it'll just make it worse. TV networks and media corporations will still be able to push for the candidates they want by simply publicizing them, and lesser-known candidates, unless they're rich, will never be able to raise enough money to become well known.
That's not how it works. Water injection by itself doesn't add any power at all, but rather acts to prevent detonation (you know, pinging). Most fighter engines in World War II had variable-speed superchargers, but they couldn't use max boost below the critical altitude because it would cause detonation. The Americans used a water injection system that could be used in emergencies to prevent that and allow a higher boost setting to be used, increasing power. The Germans used MW-50, a 50/50 mix of water and methanol which served the same purpose and may have been more effective at it; I don't remember.
I think that extreme cooling would counteract the higher voltage unless you go nuts and use more than 1.85 volts on a.13 micron CPU, which is a bad idea at normal temperatures. Like you said, electromigration does depend on temperature, so who knows what a good maximum voltage would be at 15 below? Not knowing how it varies with temperature, I have no idea.
Increased cooling also seems to give you more overclocking headroom at the same voltage, something these guys never investigated. I guess the noise in the signals (which the higher voltage helps with) is partly temperature dependant, which makes sense if you've ever seen a computer lock up because it's too hot and then work fine again once you've let it cool off. This gave me the idea that maybe if you keep a CPU cold enough, you could keep the voltage within reasonable limits and still get a good overclock. A while back, I had the idea of constructing a system to keep a CPU at around -40, but nothing came of it.
You could also use transformer oil for cooling instead of water, as someone suggested in another story here weeks or months ago. Transformer oil transfers heat as well as water does (I think) but it doesn't conduct electricity, nor does it corrode metal. Even if the system did spring a leak (which would be less likely) it could still shut itself down, you could fix the leak, and then it would be back online.
I doubt if it was that fast. The speed of any digital circuit is limited by the propagation speed of the signals within it, and that in turn is a function of the design of the circuits and the switching speed of the individual transistors. Neither of these things are affected at all by cooling. In fact, higher voltages make transistors switch more slowly. The only reason increasing the voltage makes your CPU go faster, not slower, is because it's not limited by signal speed at all at normal temperatures and voltages, but rather by noisy voltage levels and heat.
So there exists a point where no matter how much you cool the CPU, and no matter what voltage you give it (high or low), it will refuse to run any faster because the signals can't go through it fast enough. I guarantee you that this point will be reached before you can get a P100 anywhere near 1 GHz.
I think that in most cases, when Pentium 4's do much better than the Athlons, it's not because their FPU performance is better but rather because they're using SSE2 extensions and are not even touching the FPU proper. It's well known that the Athlons have the best x86 FPU implementation out there, but that doesn't help when the software uses something on Pentium 4's that they don't have.
It is depressing... If AMD came out with the Athlon 64 in the spring instead of in September, this disparity wouldn't exist anymore as they implement the SSE2 instruction set, and AMD would rule once more.
As far as I know, the static linking restriction applies to the LGPL, not the GPL. The restriction in this case is that it can't be compiled in the kernel with the normal distribution, but they can include the source if they want, and you can compile your own kernel with any GPLed software linked in it.
Saying "Apples grow on trees in Washington State" is less accurate, as is saying "Islam breeds terrorism." It implies that only Washington state trees can grow apples.
It implies no such thing. All that statement does is tell the truth (presumably). The reader may infer that apples only grow on Washington State trees, but the statement says nothing about that.
Go ahead and make a dumb shit statement like "religion breeds terrorism" if you want to. It might even be true, from a certain point of view. This point of view is not at all useful. Let's assume for the sake of argument that most terrorists are religious people and that their causes have something to do with their religion. Now, are most religious people terrorists? No, of course not. They make up a tiny minority of the largely peaceful whole. But religion is still largely a prerequisite for terrorism, by our assumption. Fair enough. You know what else is, though? Terrorists have to be human beings. They're mostly men, too. These are prerequisites for terrorism as well, and once again, just as with religion, the vast majority of these groups aren't terrorists. So while you can say "religion breeds terrorism," and it does have a measure of truth, so do the statements "men cause terrorism," "human beings cause terrorism," and "the planet Earth breeds terrorism." Hell, why stop there? "Women marry for money," (true in that most people who marry for money are women, although debatable) "men cause war," and "cars kill people." (That last one is a bit different in that not only cars kill people, but it's similar in the way I'm talking about.) All these statements are true, and all are equally useless.
Your original analogy "apples grow on trees" is remarkably similar to this. Once again, the vast majority of trees do not produce apples even though trees are a prerequisite for apples. It is a similar statement to "apples are fruits" or "apples come from plants": a specific thing that requires but is not implied by something general. But this time we know of another statement with more meaning than that one: "apples grow on apple trees." This statement differs from the rest in that not only must apples come from apple trees, but apple trees usually (as in most of the time) produce apples! Look at that! Apple trees cause apples! They produce them! Apples are an inherent property of apple trees!
This is not true of terrorism and religion. That's why I, and others, object to that statement. Even though it is technically true or at least arguable that terrorism requires religion, religion does not produce terrorism the same way that apple trees produce apples. The way it is said, though, that's how it looks it was meant.
Saying "Islam breeds terrorism" would be bigoted because it would require pointedly ignoring the fact that terrorism is in no way limited to Islam.
It would require nothing of the sort. Saying "Islam breeds terrorism" does not imply that Islam is the only thing that does so, any more than saying "cows eat grass" implies that only cows eat grass.
Saying "Islam breeds terrorism" and "religion breeds terrorism" are basically on the same level: most religious people aren't terrorists, and most Islamic people aren't either. It's kind of like saying "black people cause crime" simply because there are more black criminals than white in places like the United States. Sure, it's true in that a given person being black might make them somewhat more likely to be a criminal, statistically speaking, but the overall probability is quite low either way, and it hardly gets at the root of the problem, now does it?
"I see a MAJOR boon in ALU performance - Adds/subtracts/etc. take up FAR less propagation time than multiplies/divides - but in synch logic the ALU has to operate at the speed of the slowest instruction."
That is technically true, but I've never heard of any chip that does multiplies synchronous with additions. All CISC designs implement them in microcode, and it was my understanding that RISC designs usually don't implement them at all, leaving that to the programmer. Those RISC designs that do implement them have the multiply instructions take longer... just like with CISC chips. See the PA-RISC, for instance.
Hello again. My post is already overly long, so I'll get right to the point.
"video game female characters... tend as a whole to be physically weaker and more dependant than their male counterparts (i.e. magic users. Look at Squaresoft's female characters--even the fighters like Tifa and Yuffie from FFVII are routinely weaker than the male characters. Not convinced? Look at Resident Evil.)"
I haven't played either of these games, but I agree, it is a trend. However, it reflects real life. Women are generally weaker than men: there are exceptions, but generally, that's the way it is. Even in fighting disciplines this is usually the case: women can beat men in combat, but if they do it's usually because they're faster or more experienced, not because they hit harder. Those are good qualities, of course, and I like to see people win sparring matches because of finesse rather than brute force. Actually, I like to win them that way myself.:) But I digress.
In the video games I've played, women are always depicted as attractive and sexy. They're also usually strong in some way, whether by fighting skill or by strength of character. Rarely are they disproportionate like Lara Croft is... but I could be wrong, not having played too many games recently. My point is that since they're fictional characters, created, not real, their creators have no reason to make them anything other than attractive. Might as well make them pleasing to look at, after all. They of course have no reason to make them as unrealistic as Lara Croft, but I don't that is the general rule. I think the general rule is to have beautiful women, but that's as far as it usually goes. Of course, it can be argued that having beautiful women around all the time is unrealistic, and of course it is... but it is a video game after all, and it is fantastical. You will never find plain-looking women in fantasies. Nor average.
"this image is found everywhere, on television, in movies, in print media, advertisements, and video games. This inundation of unrealistic images of women that are created to emphasize their sexual aspects is clearly capable of changing the way women are looked at in real life."
First, not that you said anything specifically about this, I think the trend reflects the cultural standard of beauty more than it creates it, although it probably does both. Consider: what we see in the media would not last long unless it already fit the stereotype of what female beauty is: if it did not fit that stereotype, we wouldn't see it as beautiful. At the same time, it influences people's perceptions by virtue of it being part of the background of what we see in day-to-day life. I've seen some studies that show this; I don't think it's a point we disagree on. I think what we do disagree on is the extent of this effect.
I used to know a girl who was uncomfortable with her body image. Thing was, she really was a bit pudgy. But just a bit: I told her she was fine, but she never really believed me. She did have self-esteem issues. Now, she would almost seem like a good example of a girl whose self-esteem was affected by the media's image of beauty... except that she really was less attractive (although not much) than other girls. She would have felt bad about herself even if there was no media showing her what they considered beautiful. She was just that kind of person. A victim. And aside from her, I've never really met any girls that self-conscious and critical of themselves. I've met some who are shallow and superficial, and excessively critical of others, but none of them looked much like what we're talking about here. From what I knew of them, I think they would have been as shallow and critical even without any media influence in their lives. They were just that kind of people. I even once heard of a study (I can't, unfortunately, direct you to it) where people in nudist colonies were just as critical about the appearance of others as everyone else is. This in nudist colonies, where a big part of their supposed reason for being is to get away from the traditional standards of beauty that separate us all. But they can't get away from their own nature...
Now I'm aware that the set of girls I've met is not a statistically significant sample, but that's what I've experienced, and that's what I believe.
I think that one of the biggest effects of the media's portrayal of women is to make some people take notice and think: that's not realistic. That's not right! And they realize that not all women look like that, and they realize that it's not an ideal that women need to reach, and then they want to make sure everyone else knows that too, and then they argue about it in school and on Slashdot... (Heh heh.) But the thing is, most people already know that. It still has an effect on people, but I believe it's a subtle one, and I think girls already know that they don't have to look like the models they see on TV, and men already know most girls don't have to look like models to be pretty. They know better.
Moving on:
"What does victimize women is how men's sex drives are catered to in the media."
I think this is the main point of contention. I do not think this victimizes women at all. Let's look at an extreme case. I posit that even if women in the media were only ever portrayed as being servile sex slaves to men, THAT wouldn't even victimize them simply because no one is being made a victim. It would be highly negative to portray women that way, but it wouldn't victimize them. If some guy watches some rape porn, gets worked up into a frenzy, and then goes and rapes some girl, then yes, she was victimized... BY HIM. Not by the porn. The porn in this case would be highly negative, offensive, downright wrong... but it itself didn't victimize anyone. Not even the girl making the porn, since unless she was forced into it, then she made the decision herself to be in the flick. I hope I am making myself clear. (Of course, maybe that's not what you meant and I'm just picking nits...)
"if you focus _only_ on a person's sexual aspects, and disregard or downplay the rest of them, that is objectifying."
We'll go with this. Yes, it does make sense. I still don't think it's wrong. Look at dance clubs, for instance. I remember when I went to one in Grande Prairie, Alberta, on a vacation. The people there, they were just going in there and thinking "I wanna FUCK!" And the way they acted, and the way they dressed, and the way they DANCED and ground against each other spoke volumes about what was on their minds. They wanna FUCK! they screamed out when the DJ asked "Who's feeling horny tonight?" Now that is objectifying... but it's just human nature. People can't get to know other people in a dance club, they can only see how much sex appeal the other people have, and then what they do with that is up to them. In a similar way, men thinking about women is normal and healthy, and thinking about women's bodies is normal, and talking about the scene in Spiderman where Kirsten Dunst was in the rain without a coat, that's okay, and thinking about women's bodies and whacking off is fine too. These are all normal things, and maybe they are objectification, but if so then that's normal too. It's one thing to think about women in purely sexual ways once in a while, and it's quite another to be a walking hardon all the time. Even then, that's just being a creep, and then it's a problem of excess.
What pisses me off is when people throw the term "objectification" around without thinking about what it really means. A good example: one time I was eating lunch with two girls and the conversation turned, for some reason, to some recent wet T-shirt contest. One of them, Kathryn, had gone to see it, and the other, Sarah, had wanted to but didn't. They talked about how much money the girls got for entering it and then Sarah said something like: "Wouldn't you do it for that much money? I mean, sure, you're being objectified, but so what for that money?" ExCUSE me? You're gonna go and flash your boobs in front of a million leering guys FOR MONEY and then accuse them of objectifying YOU? What the fuck do you think it is YOU'RE doing to YOURSELF? What do you think you're being paid for? What the fuck do you EXPECT people to think of you when that's what you're doing?
You said yourself, onemorehour, that a girl could conceivably objectify themselves if they purposely downplayed their other qualities... well, what would you call that? It seems to fit, don't you think? What made me mad was the implication that it would somehow be the fault of the men for seeing her as a purely sexual object when that's how she was presenting herself. The implication was inherent only in the word itself, and she probably didn't realize that, and that is why I object (pun not intended) to the term being used at all: it carries the connotation of men putting down women when it can quite often be women putting themselves down or people just being sexual.
I think that's pretty much all I have to say. You don't want to reply in this thread anymore; fair enough, but if you do want to reply, feel free to e-mail me. You've been quite polite to me and interesting to talk to as well, which is more than can be said about most conversations on Slashdot... I rather enjoyed it.
It is the point, though. Onemorehour said he doesn't think having a sex drive is anything to be ashamed of, but his arguments about "objectification" don't seem to have any justification if that is the case. I'd like to know why he thinks they do.
I'm not really talking about why women don't play Tomb Raider, nor am I suggesting that I personally find her attractive. (Besides, some women do like Tomb Raider, as others have pointed out.)
Let me get this straight. Lara Croft, by virtue of her (ostensibly) being attractive, is objectified, an object, an unthinking item. Okay... but isn't she a video game character? Isn't she already an unthinking item? Is she somehow being hurt by this, or being degraded, when she doesn't really exist? What does it mean to objectify something that is already an object?
Okay, so maybe that's not quite what you meant when you said Lara Croft was being objectified. So let's look at your second attempt to explain yourself. Lara Croft is deliberately given her looks to cater to the male sex drive. So? Is that all it takes to be "objectified"? Let me ask you this: Is there a practical difference between creating a character to look pretty and a woman making herself look pretty? Both are trying to appeal to the sex drive. Is she being objectified by doing that? Is she objectifying herself? Are men objectifying them when they look at them and think "she's hot"? Is that a bad thing?
And if there is nothing wrong with having a sex drive, like you say, then why is there something wrong with fantasies or characters or appearances that stimulate it? And if there is nothing wrong with that, why is there something wrong with "objectification"?
I found Infonaut's post here informative: sure, she's a caricature of the voluptuous female form. But as he puts it: "she's not stupid, she routinely guns down bad guys, she's strong, and she's capable". Clearly she plays a more complex role in the game than that of a mere sexual toy. Is she really objectified? If she is, why is it bad?
In my experience, the word "objectified" is arbitrarily defined to support the misguided view that men's sex drives victimize women. If you've got a better definition, I'd like to hear it.
Dude! He did his own tests on the chips. He watched them fail. He videotaped it! I watched them fail too! Read about it here. It doesn't matter if it makes sense or not, it happened. And unless he's flat-out lying, he called the motherboard manufacturer and they told him that the diode could only handle a 1 C/s increase. This could well be false (probably is, even, since I believe the motherboard has to implement the heat-protection circuitry itself, which in my opinion is a misjudgment on AMD's part), but it's not Tom's mistake.
Maybe it was a flaw in the motherboard's heat-protection circuitry, rather than a flaw in the thermal diode. Maybe it's a combination of things. But how the hell was Tom supposed to know the ultimate cause? He did a test and reported what happened. Or do you think he made everything up?
Off topic, I know, and I already addressed this once before, but sir, the case of the 79 year old woman who sued McDonald's for burns is not the frivolous lawsuit you seem to think it is. But I don't blame you for not knowing, since no one else seems to know that either.
Point... the analogy was flawed. A glove having an extra finger isn't unusable in the same way a glove having too few fingers would be. Still, if you don't like the glove, buy a different kind... Don't start whining and complaining about it and forcing other people to accommodate you. (Not that you are doing this or even saying it's right... this is just my view.)
And in this case, the fact that he couldn't use the website doesn't mean he couldn't have gotten tickets over the phone, like I said. Even to a pro-ADA whacko, I don't think this should qualify as something that the company needs to fix because he didn't use all the means available to him to get what he wanted. Ie, he was inconvenienced, not barred from access completely.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you on glue?
Of course there's no way to stop sociopaths from spamming. There's also no way to stop sociopaths from murdering, either, but that doesn't mean we can't make it an unattractive choice. The main reason spammers are so hard to catch and hard to block consistently is because e-mail, as currently implemented, allows you to hide where the e-mail has come from. If this was not possible, it would be a simple matter to figure out where most of the spam is coming from and block it. Most e-mail servers would quickly do this, most of the spam wouldn't get through anymore, they'd get an even lower response rate as a result, and bam! Unprofitable. The problem largely disappears.
What's so hard about that?
I think that legal measures, in this case, are justified and a good idea. But technological measures are not too hard to do either, if we were really determined. This problem is by no means unsolvable.
Yes... SERVERS in China. I'll bet that many or most of the spammers themselves, however, are located in the States. All we need is for them to be found and fined out of existence (or better yet, jailed), and a lot of that spam from China will stop.
No, it doesn't. Spammers earn far more money by spamming than they ever would by turning each other in. There's no incentive for them to do that.
Besides, even if one spammer turned in another, that one could just turn him in too. The feds probably wouldn't offer any sort of immunity for something as trivial as this. Why should they?
The point is, though, that it doesn't matter WHY they are starving... it only matters that they are, and they're still having kids knowing full well that they can't feed them. This kind of foolish behavior is the reason this is their own fault. Why shouldn't they take responsibility for their own actions?
It is Darwinism because those people stupid enough to have kids in those conditions will be unable to feed them and they will die. It sucks to be them, but that's what happens when you try to live beyond your means. If you're starving, don't have kids.
Good point.
It's probably just for comparison with 10^(10^28) though.
That's not it at all. It's just that it's dumb to have a general rule about getting parental consent for things as trivial as aspirin but having an exception for something as serious as an abortion. If the parents have the right to know about anything in their kid's life, they have the right to know about that, wouldn't you say?
Just because they'd tell the parents doesn't mean the kid's gonna wind up raising the child herself, which I agree is probably not a good idea.
But being a pro-nuclear activist during the cold war only makes sense. If you push for the West to disarm and they do, then you get nuked or invaded by the Soviets. The only way to stay safe is the threat of Mutual Assured Destruction. Didn't those hippies in Britain who started chanting for nuclear disarmament realize this? Did they think a Soviet invasion would be a good thing? Or did they somehow think that if the West unilateraly disarmed, the Soviets would voluntarily give up their now-advantaged position?
So being a pro-nuclear activist in a time of dire danger doesn't necessarily make you a conservative. It just means you're not an idiot.
P.S. Calling for both sides to disarm their nukes in ways that can be verified (which is arguably a good thing) is not at all the same as calling for only one side to do so. CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) did the latter.
Don't you mean... in Soviet Russia?
This has been pointed out by others before, but it's worth saying again. Preventing corporations from donating to political parties or politicians won't solve the problem, it'll just make it worse. TV networks and media corporations will still be able to push for the candidates they want by simply publicizing them, and lesser-known candidates, unless they're rich, will never be able to raise enough money to become well known.
That's not how it works. Water injection by itself doesn't add any power at all, but rather acts to prevent detonation (you know, pinging). Most fighter engines in World War II had variable-speed superchargers, but they couldn't use max boost below the critical altitude because it would cause detonation. The Americans used a water injection system that could be used in emergencies to prevent that and allow a higher boost setting to be used, increasing power. The Germans used MW-50, a 50/50 mix of water and methanol which served the same purpose and may have been more effective at it; I don't remember.
I think that extreme cooling would counteract the higher voltage unless you go nuts and use more than 1.85 volts on a .13 micron CPU, which is a bad idea at normal temperatures. Like you said, electromigration does depend on temperature, so who knows what a good maximum voltage would be at 15 below? Not knowing how it varies with temperature, I have no idea.
Increased cooling also seems to give you more overclocking headroom at the same voltage, something these guys never investigated. I guess the noise in the signals (which the higher voltage helps with) is partly temperature dependant, which makes sense if you've ever seen a computer lock up because it's too hot and then work fine again once you've let it cool off. This gave me the idea that maybe if you keep a CPU cold enough, you could keep the voltage within reasonable limits and still get a good overclock. A while back, I had the idea of constructing a system to keep a CPU at around -40, but nothing came of it.
You could also use transformer oil for cooling instead of water, as someone suggested in another story here weeks or months ago. Transformer oil transfers heat as well as water does (I think) but it doesn't conduct electricity, nor does it corrode metal. Even if the system did spring a leak (which would be less likely) it could still shut itself down, you could fix the leak, and then it would be back online.
Much better than having water spray everywhere.
I doubt if it was that fast. The speed of any digital circuit is limited by the propagation speed of the signals within it, and that in turn is a function of the design of the circuits and the switching speed of the individual transistors. Neither of these things are affected at all by cooling. In fact, higher voltages make transistors switch more slowly. The only reason increasing the voltage makes your CPU go faster, not slower, is because it's not limited by signal speed at all at normal temperatures and voltages, but rather by noisy voltage levels and heat.
So there exists a point where no matter how much you cool the CPU, and no matter what voltage you give it (high or low), it will refuse to run any faster because the signals can't go through it fast enough. I guarantee you that this point will be reached before you can get a P100 anywhere near 1 GHz.
I think that in most cases, when Pentium 4's do much better than the Athlons, it's not because their FPU performance is better but rather because they're using SSE2 extensions and are not even touching the FPU proper. It's well known that the Athlons have the best x86 FPU implementation out there, but that doesn't help when the software uses something on Pentium 4's that they don't have.
It is depressing... If AMD came out with the Athlon 64 in the spring instead of in September, this disparity wouldn't exist anymore as they implement the SSE2 instruction set, and AMD would rule once more.
As far as I know, the static linking restriction applies to the LGPL, not the GPL. The restriction in this case is that it can't be compiled in the kernel with the normal distribution, but they can include the source if they want, and you can compile your own kernel with any GPLed software linked in it.
Saying "Apples grow on trees in Washington State" is less accurate, as is saying "Islam breeds terrorism." It implies that only Washington state trees can grow apples.
It implies no such thing. All that statement does is tell the truth (presumably). The reader may infer that apples only grow on Washington State trees, but the statement says nothing about that.
Go ahead and make a dumb shit statement like "religion breeds terrorism" if you want to. It might even be true, from a certain point of view. This point of view is not at all useful. Let's assume for the sake of argument that most terrorists are religious people and that their causes have something to do with their religion. Now, are most religious people terrorists? No, of course not. They make up a tiny minority of the largely peaceful whole. But religion is still largely a prerequisite for terrorism, by our assumption. Fair enough. You know what else is, though? Terrorists have to be human beings. They're mostly men, too. These are prerequisites for terrorism as well, and once again, just as with religion, the vast majority of these groups aren't terrorists. So while you can say "religion breeds terrorism," and it does have a measure of truth, so do the statements "men cause terrorism," "human beings cause terrorism," and "the planet Earth breeds terrorism." Hell, why stop there? "Women marry for money," (true in that most people who marry for money are women, although debatable) "men cause war," and "cars kill people." (That last one is a bit different in that not only cars kill people, but it's similar in the way I'm talking about.) All these statements are true, and all are equally useless.
Your original analogy "apples grow on trees" is remarkably similar to this. Once again, the vast majority of trees do not produce apples even though trees are a prerequisite for apples. It is a similar statement to "apples are fruits" or "apples come from plants": a specific thing that requires but is not implied by something general. But this time we know of another statement with more meaning than that one: "apples grow on apple trees." This statement differs from the rest in that not only must apples come from apple trees, but apple trees usually (as in most of the time) produce apples! Look at that! Apple trees cause apples! They produce them! Apples are an inherent property of apple trees!
This is not true of terrorism and religion. That's why I, and others, object to that statement. Even though it is technically true or at least arguable that terrorism requires religion, religion does not produce terrorism the same way that apple trees produce apples. The way it is said, though, that's how it looks it was meant.
Saying "Islam breeds terrorism" would be bigoted because it would require pointedly ignoring the fact that terrorism is in no way limited to Islam.
It would require nothing of the sort. Saying "Islam breeds terrorism" does not imply that Islam is the only thing that does so, any more than saying "cows eat grass" implies that only cows eat grass.
Saying "Islam breeds terrorism" and "religion breeds terrorism" are basically on the same level: most religious people aren't terrorists, and most Islamic people aren't either. It's kind of like saying "black people cause crime" simply because there are more black criminals than white in places like the United States. Sure, it's true in that a given person being black might make them somewhat more likely to be a criminal, statistically speaking, but the overall probability is quite low either way, and it hardly gets at the root of the problem, now does it?
It is a shortsighted view you have indeed.
just the girl geeks
Pssh. Like they exist.
"I see a MAJOR boon in ALU performance - Adds/subtracts/etc. take up FAR less propagation time than multiplies/divides - but in synch logic the ALU has to operate at the speed of the slowest instruction."
That is technically true, but I've never heard of any chip that does multiplies synchronous with additions. All CISC designs implement them in microcode, and it was my understanding that RISC designs usually don't implement them at all, leaving that to the programmer. Those RISC designs that do implement them have the multiply instructions take longer... just like with CISC chips. See the PA-RISC, for instance.
Hello again. My post is already overly long, so I'll get right to the point.
:) But I digress.
"video game female characters... tend as a whole to be physically weaker and more dependant than their male counterparts (i.e. magic users. Look at Squaresoft's female characters--even the fighters like Tifa and Yuffie from FFVII are routinely weaker than the male characters. Not convinced? Look at Resident Evil.)"
I haven't played either of these games, but I agree, it is a trend. However, it reflects real life. Women are generally weaker than men: there are exceptions, but generally, that's the way it is. Even in fighting disciplines this is usually the case: women can beat men in combat, but if they do it's usually because they're faster or more experienced, not because they hit harder. Those are good qualities, of course, and I like to see people win sparring matches because of finesse rather than brute force. Actually, I like to win them that way myself.
In the video games I've played, women are always depicted as attractive and sexy. They're also usually strong in some way, whether by fighting skill or by strength of character. Rarely are they disproportionate like Lara Croft is... but I could be wrong, not having played too many games recently. My point is that since they're fictional characters, created, not real, their creators have no reason to make them anything other than attractive. Might as well make them pleasing to look at, after all. They of course have no reason to make them as unrealistic as Lara Croft, but I don't that is the general rule. I think the general rule is to have beautiful women, but that's as far as it usually goes. Of course, it can be argued that having beautiful women around all the time is unrealistic, and of course it is... but it is a video game after all, and it is fantastical. You will never find plain-looking women in fantasies. Nor average.
"this image is found everywhere, on television, in movies, in print media, advertisements, and video games. This inundation of unrealistic images of women that are created to emphasize their sexual aspects is clearly capable of changing the way women are looked at in real life."
First, not that you said anything specifically about this, I think the trend reflects the cultural standard of beauty more than it creates it, although it probably does both. Consider: what we see in the media would not last long unless it already fit the stereotype of what female beauty is: if it did not fit that stereotype, we wouldn't see it as beautiful. At the same time, it influences people's perceptions by virtue of it being part of the background of what we see in day-to-day life. I've seen some studies that show this; I don't think it's a point we disagree on. I think what we do disagree on is the extent of this effect.
I used to know a girl who was uncomfortable with her body image. Thing was, she really was a bit pudgy. But just a bit: I told her she was fine, but she never really believed me. She did have self-esteem issues. Now, she would almost seem like a good example of a girl whose self-esteem was affected by the media's image of beauty... except that she really was less attractive (although not much) than other girls. She would have felt bad about herself even if there was no media showing her what they considered beautiful. She was just that kind of person. A victim. And aside from her, I've never really met any girls that self-conscious and critical of themselves. I've met some who are shallow and superficial, and excessively critical of others, but none of them looked much like what we're talking about here. From what I knew of them, I think they would have been as shallow and critical even without any media influence in their lives. They were just that kind of people. I even once heard of a study (I can't, unfortunately, direct you to it) where people in nudist colonies were just as critical about the appearance of others as everyone else is. This in nudist colonies, where a big part of their supposed reason for being is to get away from the traditional standards of beauty that separate us all. But they can't get away from their own nature...
Now I'm aware that the set of girls I've met is not a statistically significant sample, but that's what I've experienced, and that's what I believe.
I think that one of the biggest effects of the media's portrayal of women is to make some people take notice and think: that's not realistic. That's not right! And they realize that not all women look like that, and they realize that it's not an ideal that women need to reach, and then they want to make sure everyone else knows that too, and then they argue about it in school and on Slashdot... (Heh heh.) But the thing is, most people already know that. It still has an effect on people, but I believe it's a subtle one, and I think girls already know that they don't have to look like the models they see on TV, and men already know most girls don't have to look like models to be pretty. They know better.
Moving on:
"What does victimize women is how men's sex drives are catered to in the media."
I think this is the main point of contention. I do not think this victimizes women at all. Let's look at an extreme case. I posit that even if women in the media were only ever portrayed as being servile sex slaves to men, THAT wouldn't even victimize them simply because no one is being made a victim. It would be highly negative to portray women that way, but it wouldn't victimize them. If some guy watches some rape porn, gets worked up into a frenzy, and then goes and rapes some girl, then yes, she was victimized... BY HIM. Not by the porn. The porn in this case would be highly negative, offensive, downright wrong... but it itself didn't victimize anyone. Not even the girl making the porn, since unless she was forced into it, then she made the decision herself to be in the flick. I hope I am making myself clear. (Of course, maybe that's not what you meant and I'm just picking nits...)
"if you focus _only_ on a person's sexual aspects, and disregard or downplay the rest of them, that is objectifying."
We'll go with this. Yes, it does make sense. I still don't think it's wrong. Look at dance clubs, for instance. I remember when I went to one in Grande Prairie, Alberta, on a vacation. The people there, they were just going in there and thinking "I wanna FUCK!" And the way they acted, and the way they dressed, and the way they DANCED and ground against each other spoke volumes about what was on their minds. They wanna FUCK! they screamed out when the DJ asked "Who's feeling horny tonight?" Now that is objectifying... but it's just human nature. People can't get to know other people in a dance club, they can only see how much sex appeal the other people have, and then what they do with that is up to them. In a similar way, men thinking about women is normal and healthy, and thinking about women's bodies is normal, and talking about the scene in Spiderman where Kirsten Dunst was in the rain without a coat, that's okay, and thinking about women's bodies and whacking off is fine too. These are all normal things, and maybe they are objectification, but if so then that's normal too. It's one thing to think about women in purely sexual ways once in a while, and it's quite another to be a walking hardon all the time. Even then, that's just being a creep, and then it's a problem of excess.
What pisses me off is when people throw the term "objectification" around without thinking about what it really means. A good example: one time I was eating lunch with two girls and the conversation turned, for some reason, to some recent wet T-shirt contest. One of them, Kathryn, had gone to see it, and the other, Sarah, had wanted to but didn't. They talked about how much money the girls got for entering it and then Sarah said something like: "Wouldn't you do it for that much money? I mean, sure, you're being objectified, but so what for that money?" ExCUSE me? You're gonna go and flash your boobs in front of a million leering guys FOR MONEY and then accuse them of objectifying YOU? What the fuck do you think it is YOU'RE doing to YOURSELF? What do you think you're being paid for? What the fuck do you EXPECT people to think of you when that's what you're doing?
You said yourself, onemorehour, that a girl could conceivably objectify themselves if they purposely downplayed their other qualities... well, what would you call that? It seems to fit, don't you think? What made me mad was the implication that it would somehow be the fault of the men for seeing her as a purely sexual object when that's how she was presenting herself. The implication was inherent only in the word itself, and she probably didn't realize that, and that is why I object (pun not intended) to the term being used at all: it carries the connotation of men putting down women when it can quite often be women putting themselves down or people just being sexual.
I think that's pretty much all I have to say. You don't want to reply in this thread anymore; fair enough, but if you do want to reply, feel free to e-mail me. You've been quite polite to me and interesting to talk to as well, which is more than can be said about most conversations on Slashdot... I rather enjoyed it.
It is the point, though. Onemorehour said he doesn't think having a sex drive is anything to be ashamed of, but his arguments about "objectification" don't seem to have any justification if that is the case. I'd like to know why he thinks they do.
I'm not really talking about why women don't play Tomb Raider, nor am I suggesting that I personally find her attractive. (Besides, some women do like Tomb Raider, as others have pointed out.)
Let me get this straight. Lara Croft, by virtue of her (ostensibly) being attractive, is objectified, an object, an unthinking item. Okay... but isn't she a video game character? Isn't she already an unthinking item? Is she somehow being hurt by this, or being degraded, when she doesn't really exist? What does it mean to objectify something that is already an object?
Okay, so maybe that's not quite what you meant when you said Lara Croft was being objectified. So let's look at your second attempt to explain yourself. Lara Croft is deliberately given her looks to cater to the male sex drive. So? Is that all it takes to be "objectified"? Let me ask you this: Is there a practical difference between creating a character to look pretty and a woman making herself look pretty? Both are trying to appeal to the sex drive. Is she being objectified by doing that? Is she objectifying herself? Are men objectifying them when they look at them and think "she's hot"? Is that a bad thing?
And if there is nothing wrong with having a sex drive, like you say, then why is there something wrong with fantasies or characters or appearances that stimulate it? And if there is nothing wrong with that, why is there something wrong with "objectification"?
I found Infonaut's post here informative: sure, she's a caricature of the voluptuous female form. But as he puts it: "she's not stupid, she routinely guns down bad guys, she's strong, and she's capable". Clearly she plays a more complex role in the game than that of a mere sexual toy. Is she really objectified? If she is, why is it bad?
In my experience, the word "objectified" is arbitrarily defined to support the misguided view that men's sex drives victimize women. If you've got a better definition, I'd like to hear it.
Dude! He did his own tests on the chips. He watched them fail. He videotaped it! I watched them fail too! Read about it here. It doesn't matter if it makes sense or not, it happened. And unless he's flat-out lying, he called the motherboard manufacturer and they told him that the diode could only handle a 1 C/s increase. This could well be false (probably is, even, since I believe the motherboard has to implement the heat-protection circuitry itself, which in my opinion is a misjudgment on AMD's part), but it's not Tom's mistake.
Maybe it was a flaw in the motherboard's heat-protection circuitry, rather than a flaw in the thermal diode. Maybe it's a combination of things. But how the hell was Tom supposed to know the ultimate cause? He did a test and reported what happened. Or do you think he made everything up?
Off topic, I know, and I already addressed this once before, but sir, the case of the 79 year old woman who sued McDonald's for burns is not the frivolous lawsuit you seem to think it is. But I don't blame you for not knowing, since no one else seems to know that either.
Point... the analogy was flawed. A glove having an extra finger isn't unusable in the same way a glove having too few fingers would be. Still, if you don't like the glove, buy a different kind... Don't start whining and complaining about it and forcing other people to accommodate you. (Not that you are doing this or even saying it's right... this is just my view.)
And in this case, the fact that he couldn't use the website doesn't mean he couldn't have gotten tickets over the phone, like I said. Even to a pro-ADA whacko, I don't think this should qualify as something that the company needs to fix because he didn't use all the means available to him to get what he wanted. Ie, he was inconvenienced, not barred from access completely.
That's all I'm saying.