Which again is missing the point. Batman is TECHNICALLY human - but his abilities make him so superior to all other humans as to make him superhuman from the point of view of the hero model which is related to human psyschology.
We're not discussing dictionary definitions here, but metaphysical concepts and human psychological responses. People do NOT view Batman as a normal human being. That was even explicitly stated in the first Batman movie, even though the reference was to his mental state. And the whole point of BEING a "Batman" in the first place was to make his enemies fear a superhuman presence. And that jibes with the genre. So calling Batman an "ordinary human being" is just pedantic and pointless even if technically true.
The main problem with your post is that having babies is not an equivalent to "wanting to be a sex goddess". And nobody has ever demonstrated that having the unfortunate side effect of having too many babies has ever stopped women from having sex or at least wanting to have sex.
As for a "minority of women", I refer you to the interview by Gene Simmons (of KISS fame) with a guy who makes these lame "babe videos" ("Spring Break" crap, etc.). The guy said he started by approaching some women and offering them BEADS to take their clothes off for his video. Gene asked him, "And the clothes came right off?" And the guy replied, "And the clothes came right off!" To which Gene replied, "God bless America!"
Tells you all you need to know right there. If you need further edification, just do a Google for "naked women"...
The bottom line: point a camera at a woman, throw some money - or even beads - her way, and - unless she's a really frigid religious or rabid feminist type - the clothes come right off.
I'm being less than totally serious here, but in reality if you review the big picture, you'll see this is a not unfair depiction. Black pimps have been relying on this for their income for decades.
If you read some of the "sex-positive feminist" literature, and some of the "evolution of sex" type books, you might get a more balanced view.
Yes, the female strategies are different, but the net effect is the same. Both sexes want sex because both sexes need bonding. It has not been established by science yet as to exactly how many purposes sex serves other than genetic diffusion, according to a Scientific American article I read some years ago. But clearly once it was attached to the human capacity for conceptual processing and imagination, it became much more important than merely insuring procreation.
The problem is that all primates fear other members of their species more than they fear anything else, so this causes stress between the requirement to bond and the fear. This is the sole cause of bad relationships. Add in the inability of most males and females to comprehend the purpose of sex, the different modes of mental functioning and the evolutionary roles of each sex, and the results make long-term relationships almost impossible.
Finally, most primates do not bond in long-term relationships. Bonding may be important to primates, but not long-term bonds. Bonobo chimpanzees, our closest genetic relatives, are totally promiscuous. So to label non-monogramy "immoral", as some morons do, is simply to lack a comprehension of both our genetic heritage and the pure lack of logic of the concept of monogamy itself. There is NOTHING in human nature or society that requires the concept of monogamy. It is purely a religious and social artifact without any rational basis whatsoever (except possibly in certain social contexts in certain societies in history - anything might have made sense at some place and time.)
Wolverine wasn't irradiated, and except for the Adamantium in his bones, and his mutant healing power, and highly developed senses, he's probably one of the more "human" superheroes.
I can't count Daredevil since he was irradiated - although later it was revealed that actually had nothing to do with his supersenses.
There are probably hundreds of non-irradiated superheroes, and probably hundreds of strictly human ones as well.
But you're probably right that Batman was the FIRST (or nearly so) of the strictly human ones (if you don't count myths and legends, but only comics.)
But to pick a superhero because he is most human is to underestimate the importance of the genre. The genre is nothing more than a modern manifestation of the human desire for a Transhuman existence. Therefore it is necessary that even the most human of superheroes be so superior to the average human (even Captain America can press 800 lbs which very few real humans can do) that they stand as a symbol of divinity. Even your Batman is not strictly human, both because of his technology and because of his vast experience - and that apparent inhuman nature is something he specifically trades on to intimidate his enemies.
OTOH, Superman, although a godlike entity, is represented in the comics as almost absurdly human, even to the point of being absurdly AMERICAN. I haven't read the stories in recent years, so they may have changed him, but I doubt it. His superpowers still make him a divinity, but DC went to great lengths to make him acceptable to humans.
Marvel did the same thing with their "teenage-angst superheroes" like Spiderman - which is why I never was as attracted to Spiderman as I was many other Marvel characters. Fortunately, they also provided seriously powerful entities as well - the success of the character Thanos - who is truly a demi-god and has actually BEEN a genuine divinity at least twice - and has been converted from a pure villain to an ambiguous character - is an example.
Even many of the Marvel supervillains have been altered to make them almost superheroes - Doctor Doom (my main man!) and Magneto, as well as Thanos, are examples. These characters tend to exaggerate human failings to a degree that makes them almost divine - but still understandable to humans, just like the gods of human myth such as Zeus or Odin (not to forget that even those gods are part of the Marvel pantheon.)
Superheroes and supervillains are about being "super" - which means more than human. And that is the bottom line to the literary genre.
The women in X-Men and a number of other comics from Marvel and others are not exactly sex slaves (unless you've read the X-rated X-Men comic some knockoff did). Rogue might be a bit stereotyped, but Storm faced down Wolverine several times with authority - and Logan is about as macho a superhero as it gets.
Besides, this is anti-male feminist bullshit. Every woman (except maybe Andrea Dworkin, who's a total loss anyway) wants to be a sex goddess and every man wants to be a sex god. And the psychology behind this goes a lot deeper than the surface motivations attributed to either sex by the feminists (or by male misogynists). Without some comprehension of human and cultural evolution and primate neuroscience anything said about this is likely to be bullshit.
Since I once worked at Bank of America, I don't have to wonder: I KNOW bank managers are idiots.
To hand over ten million pieces of confidential data to U-P-fucking-S? When they send their bank accounting data via licensed and bonded courier companies in armored cars? You know, the ones that say "Accounting data only" on the side?
And THEN have the GALL to say, "Well, it was on mainframe computer tapes, so nobody can read it!"
Go here and tell me some guy isn't extracting this stuff right now.
"A shift from proprietary to commodity hardware will also help keep costs down, as will the planned move away from a proprietary 64-bit operating system to open-source Linux. Though the move chimes with Sanger's open-source ethos for its sequence data, Butcher cites solid practical reasons for the change. "HP [Hewlett Packard] pulled the plug on the Alpha chip," he says, "so we have nowhere to go." Moving to another proprietary system means it could happen again, he says. "I want something we can rely on and have control over our destiny for a good few years into the future.""
And if IE and the other browsers properly supported the "object" tag, you wouldn't need iframes, which are supposed to be superceded by the object tag.
I mucked around with this crap for several weeks a few months ago trying to get a simple form of dynamic page loading done. Can't be done with the lame support for object in most browsers. At first I tried iframes using the JavaScript trick of extracting content from an invisible iframe. Not good enough. Tried object - much cleaner, but not supported properly on all common browsers.
Frames are bad news, iframes are inadequate, and objects aren't supported.
Get on the fucking stick, browser makers! Stop adding bullshit like "voice commands" (Opera) to your browsers until you make the STANDARDS WORK!
"So now every single page on every single website has to have a reload script to cover for a security flaw in one browser?"
So now every single page on every single website has to have a script to cover for the myriad security flaws and lack of standards support in one browser?
I've never understood why they do that anyway. I always end up clicking on the "see image in original size" button anyway and viewing it in a separate window.
They don't put a frame on news articles from Google News, why bother doing it with images?
"I mean really wanting women to dress up in anime costumes?"
Really? Have you seen the Tomb Raider movies, hypocrite?
Just because Angelina doesn't serve YOU tea doesn't mean US geeks aren't as rabid about game play as the otaku. How much money is being spent on neon-lit game case crap in this country?
My computer is stock and intends to remain that way. I swore off computer games twenty years ago because I KNOW I could get addicted to that time-wasting crap. A recent relapse into "Hit Man" "re-cured" me (although I still have "flashbacks" making me want to find a first-person shooter that actually lets me win.)
you'd see the program is not intended to "simulate the entire human brain" but in reality to model a SINGLE STRUCTURE in a RAT brain which has a few thousand neurons - of which the rat brain has 10,000 of these structures and the human brain has one million.
And they need an IBM supercomputer to do this much.
Without a nanotech processor, this is going to take a while, folks.
If you have XP Home because it was bundled and don't care because you don't use any of the features on XP Pro, fine.
My point stands. Most people who don't KNOW the difference between Home and Pro are too dumb to hack the Registry (even two bytes worth).
And I wasn't advocating Microsoft suing anybody. I was merely insulting Windows users. I run XP Pro myself - but dual boot with Mandrake. I do PC tech support and not having access to Windows is not an option (at least until I build the Linux migration part of the business.) I'm talking about Windows users who are too ignorant to know there are other options and/or too dumb to take advantage of them.
As for the last point, I find the hack "interesting", too. But I also don't give a shit about it. I'm hardly going to run out and get a copy of Home somewhere and then "upgrade" it to Pro, when I got Pro (and Windows 2003 Server) free through a college program anyway.
ALL my Windows - 2000, 98, XP, Server - I got free. AND ALL my Linux, too (well, except for my old Red Hat 7.3 I bought on eBay for $18.)
None of this is a surprise anyway. Years ago, some major hardware company - might have been Sun or Amdahl or somebody - used to sell companies systems with the maximum complement of memory. When you paid enough, you got to use all of it, otherwise you didn't. But it was always there. It was an "upsell" marketing method (See! You can upgrade easily! - was the pitch)and cheaper than making systems with different amounts of memory and having to send a CE out to install it.
1) If you're dumb enough to get stuck with XP Home, you're too dumb to do this hack, so it doesn't matter to you.
2) If you're not dumb enough to get stuck with XP Home, but you were dumb enough to get Windows at all, you deserve to go to jail or sued for getting caught doing this hack.
3) If you're smart, you run Linux (or at least dual-boot with XP Pro already), so you don't give a shit about this hack.
Slashdot Mirror
Which again is missing the point. Batman is TECHNICALLY human - but his abilities make him so superior to all other humans as to make him superhuman from the point of view of the hero model which is related to human psyschology.
We're not discussing dictionary definitions here, but metaphysical concepts and human psychological responses. People do NOT view Batman as a normal human being. That was even explicitly stated in the first Batman movie, even though the reference was to his mental state. And the whole point of BEING a "Batman" in the first place was to make his enemies fear a superhuman presence. And that jibes with the genre. So calling Batman an "ordinary human being" is just pedantic and pointless even if technically true.
The main problem with your post is that having babies is not an equivalent to "wanting to be a sex goddess". And nobody has ever demonstrated that having the unfortunate side effect of having too many babies has ever stopped women from having sex or at least wanting to have sex.
As for a "minority of women", I refer you to the interview by Gene Simmons (of KISS fame) with a guy who makes these lame "babe videos" ("Spring Break" crap, etc.). The guy said he started by approaching some women and offering them BEADS to take their clothes off for his video. Gene asked him, "And the clothes came right off?" And the guy replied, "And the clothes came right off!" To which Gene replied, "God bless America!"
Tells you all you need to know right there. If you need further edification, just do a Google for "naked women"...
The bottom line: point a camera at a woman, throw some money - or even beads - her way, and - unless she's a really frigid religious or rabid feminist type - the clothes come right off.
I'm being less than totally serious here, but in reality if you review the big picture, you'll see this is a not unfair depiction. Black pimps have been relying on this for their income for decades.
If you read some of the "sex-positive feminist" literature, and some of the "evolution of sex" type books, you might get a more balanced view.
Yes, the female strategies are different, but the net effect is the same. Both sexes want sex because both sexes need bonding. It has not been established by science yet as to exactly how many purposes sex serves other than genetic diffusion, according to a Scientific American article I read some years ago. But clearly once it was attached to the human capacity for conceptual processing and imagination, it became much more important than merely insuring procreation.
The problem is that all primates fear other members of their species more than they fear anything else, so this causes stress between the requirement to bond and the fear. This is the sole cause of bad relationships. Add in the inability of most males and females to comprehend the purpose of sex, the different modes of mental functioning and the evolutionary roles of each sex, and the results make long-term relationships almost impossible.
Finally, most primates do not bond in long-term relationships. Bonding may be important to primates, but not long-term bonds. Bonobo chimpanzees, our closest genetic relatives, are totally promiscuous. So to label non-monogramy "immoral", as some morons do, is simply to lack a comprehension of both our genetic heritage and the pure lack of logic of the concept of monogamy itself. There is NOTHING in human nature or society that requires the concept of monogamy. It is purely a religious and social artifact without any rational basis whatsoever (except possibly in certain social contexts in certain societies in history - anything might have made sense at some place and time.)
This is modded "Insightful"??! Funny, maybe, but "insightful"?
The moderators are on crack again today, I see.
Or were you thinking of Naomi Wolf?
Try a Google Image Search and tell me which one you think is sexy.
"He just threw some insults and pretentious words to "prove" a dubious point."
/.?
/. without a single point of your own to make.
And you didn't? While lecturing me on how to insult morons like you on
Here's an insult: eat dick, pasty-faced twerp. You're just another big mouth on
That make you happy, troll? Got your response you were looking for?
Have a nice day, moron.
Since when are camp whores NOT considered whores?
Strange concept of history you have. Or maybe you don't know what "camp whores" refers to at all?
And, no, it does not refer to all women. Nor do I believe that all women are whores - I'm not a Christian, thank you very much.
Wolverine wasn't irradiated, and except for the Adamantium in his bones, and his mutant healing power, and highly developed senses, he's probably one of the more "human" superheroes.
I can't count Daredevil since he was irradiated - although later it was revealed that actually had nothing to do with his supersenses.
There are probably hundreds of non-irradiated superheroes, and probably hundreds of strictly human ones as well.
But you're probably right that Batman was the FIRST (or nearly so) of the strictly human ones (if you don't count myths and legends, but only comics.)
But to pick a superhero because he is most human is to underestimate the importance of the genre. The genre is nothing more than a modern manifestation of the human desire for a Transhuman existence. Therefore it is necessary that even the most human of superheroes be so superior to the average human (even Captain America can press 800 lbs which very few real humans can do) that they stand as a symbol of divinity. Even your Batman is not strictly human, both because of his technology and because of his vast experience - and that apparent inhuman nature is something he specifically trades on to intimidate his enemies.
OTOH, Superman, although a godlike entity, is represented in the comics as almost absurdly human, even to the point of being absurdly AMERICAN. I haven't read the stories in recent years, so they may have changed him, but I doubt it. His superpowers still make him a divinity, but DC went to great lengths to make him acceptable to humans.
Marvel did the same thing with their "teenage-angst superheroes" like Spiderman - which is why I never was as attracted to Spiderman as I was many other Marvel characters. Fortunately, they also provided seriously powerful entities as well - the success of the character Thanos - who is truly a demi-god and has actually BEEN a genuine divinity at least twice - and has been converted from a pure villain to an ambiguous character - is an example.
Even many of the Marvel supervillains have been altered to make them almost superheroes - Doctor Doom (my main man!) and Magneto, as well as Thanos, are examples. These characters tend to exaggerate human failings to a degree that makes them almost divine - but still understandable to humans, just like the gods of human myth such as Zeus or Odin (not to forget that even those gods are part of the Marvel pantheon.)
Superheroes and supervillains are about being "super" - which means more than human. And that is the bottom line to the literary genre.
At least BEFORE you fight naked...
Afterwards you get to join the camp whores.
You haven't read many comics lately, have you?
The women in X-Men and a number of other comics from Marvel and others are not exactly sex slaves (unless you've read the X-rated X-Men comic some knockoff did). Rogue might be a bit stereotyped, but Storm faced down Wolverine several times with authority - and Logan is about as macho a superhero as it gets.
Besides, this is anti-male feminist bullshit. Every woman (except maybe Andrea Dworkin, who's a total loss anyway) wants to be a sex goddess and every man wants to be a sex god. And the psychology behind this goes a lot deeper than the surface motivations attributed to either sex by the feminists (or by male misogynists). Without some comprehension of human and cultural evolution and primate neuroscience anything said about this is likely to be bullshit.
Holy Woomera, Batman! How can we get there?
Simple, Robin! We'll take the Bat-Kangaroo!
the Citi managers are.
Since I once worked at Bank of America, I don't have to wonder: I KNOW bank managers are idiots.
To hand over ten million pieces of confidential data to U-P-fucking-S? When they send their bank accounting data via licensed and bonded courier companies in armored cars? You know, the ones that say "Accounting data only" on the side?
And THEN have the GALL to say, "Well, it was on mainframe computer tapes, so nobody can read it!"
Go here
and tell me some guy isn't extracting this stuff right now.
"A shift from proprietary to commodity hardware will also help keep costs down, as will the planned move away from a proprietary 64-bit operating system to open-source Linux. Though the move chimes with Sanger's open-source ethos for its sequence data, Butcher cites solid practical reasons for the change. "HP [Hewlett Packard] pulled the plug on the Alpha chip," he says, "so we have nowhere to go." Moving to another proprietary system means it could happen again, he says. "I want something we can rely on and have control over our destiny for a good few years into the future.""
Linux rules again, proprietary fanboys!
"unless you take words out of context"
/. - that's what we DO here!
This is
Tell me again how it's going to "promote innovation" for someone to have copyrights for ONE HUNDRED FUCKING YEARS!
Morons.
Fortunately it won't matter - by 2063, I expect a lot of people will be too busy ducking Transhuman nanotech to give a shit about the Beatles.
And if IE and the other browsers properly supported the "object" tag, you wouldn't need iframes, which are supposed to be superceded by the object tag.
I mucked around with this crap for several weeks a few months ago trying to get a simple form of dynamic page loading done. Can't be done with the lame support for object in most browsers. At first I tried iframes using the JavaScript trick of extracting content from an invisible iframe. Not good enough. Tried object - much cleaner, but not supported properly on all common browsers.
Frames are bad news, iframes are inadequate, and objects aren't supported.
Get on the fucking stick, browser makers! Stop adding bullshit like "voice commands" (Opera) to your browsers until you make the STANDARDS WORK!
"So now every single page on every single website has to have a reload script to cover for a security flaw in one browser?"
So now every single page on every single website has to have a script to cover for the myriad security flaws and lack of standards support in one browser?
IE.
Yes, Microsoft fanboy.
I've never understood why they do that anyway. I always end up clicking on the "see image in original size" button anyway and viewing it in a separate window.
They don't put a frame on news articles from Google News, why bother doing it with images?
Google, get RID of the frame!
They named it after that lame little town in Alabama near to Fort Rucker where I was stationed from 1968 to 1970?
Talk about obscure code names!
"I mean really wanting women to dress up in anime costumes?"
Really? Have you seen the Tomb Raider movies, hypocrite?
Just because Angelina doesn't serve YOU tea doesn't mean US geeks aren't as rabid about game play as the otaku. How much money is being spent on neon-lit game case crap in this country?
My computer is stock and intends to remain that way. I swore off computer games twenty years ago because I KNOW I could get addicted to that time-wasting crap. A recent relapse into "Hit Man" "re-cured" me (although I still have "flashbacks" making me want to find a first-person shooter that actually lets me win.)
the first 1,500 bug reports will be up on their bug reporting system by tomorrow morning.
This is what they get for releasing early.
you'd see the program is not intended to "simulate the entire human brain" but in reality to model a SINGLE STRUCTURE in a RAT brain which has a few thousand neurons - of which the rat brain has 10,000 of these structures and the human brain has one million.
And they need an IBM supercomputer to do this much.
Without a nanotech processor, this is going to take a while, folks.
"No, its DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) formerly known as MPD (Multiple Personality Disorder)."
Next week to be referred to as "Honey, I Lost My Personality Disorder"...
You gotta love psychiatrists.
Maybe "Einstein joins Red Hat Fedora Foundation"?
Or "George Washington funds development of Red Hat Directory Server"?
How about "Jesus blesses newly released Red Hat Directory Server"?
And some moron says, "Well, this story includes the LINK!"
DUH!
If you have XP Home because it was bundled and don't care because you don't use any of the features on XP Pro, fine.
My point stands. Most people who don't KNOW the difference between Home and Pro are too dumb to hack the Registry (even two bytes worth).
And I wasn't advocating Microsoft suing anybody. I was merely insulting Windows users. I run XP Pro myself - but dual boot with Mandrake. I do PC tech support and not having access to Windows is not an option (at least until I build the Linux migration part of the business.) I'm talking about Windows users who are too ignorant to know there are other options and/or too dumb to take advantage of them.
As for the last point, I find the hack "interesting", too. But I also don't give a shit about it. I'm hardly going to run out and get a copy of Home somewhere and then "upgrade" it to Pro, when I got Pro (and Windows 2003 Server) free through a college program anyway.
ALL my Windows - 2000, 98, XP, Server - I got free. AND ALL my Linux, too (well, except for my old Red Hat 7.3 I bought on eBay for $18.)
None of this is a surprise anyway. Years ago, some major hardware company - might have been Sun or Amdahl or somebody - used to sell companies systems with the maximum complement of memory. When you paid enough, you got to use all of it, otherwise you didn't. But it was always there. It was an "upsell" marketing method (See! You can upgrade easily! - was the pitch)and cheaper than making systems with different amounts of memory and having to send a CE out to install it.
1) If you're dumb enough to get stuck with XP Home, you're too dumb to do this hack, so it doesn't matter to you.
2) If you're not dumb enough to get stuck with XP Home, but you were dumb enough to get Windows at all, you deserve to go to jail or sued for getting caught doing this hack.
3) If you're smart, you run Linux (or at least dual-boot with XP Pro already), so you don't give a shit about this hack.
Yes, if you mean viruses, spyware, adware, Microsoft Office...
But if you mean Windows ITSELF, no - that's just garbage. The collector is then the user.