Well, as a long COH fan myself, my own impression is more like "meh" somehow.
The good is that there are a lot more costume pieces, and, face it, if you were into COH, you like to dress up dolls. Welcome to the club, and remember that there's nothing wrong with that. Now let's sit our dolls together and have a tea party;) More seriously, I wish more game had this much freedom in coming up with a costume. You can be anything from werewolf to elf to dwarf to orc to Superman to... well, almost anything you can imagine.
Also good is that you no longer have the horrendous waiting for endurance to refill that plagued the teen levels of COH.
The bad is... well, subjective. I can understand why they deviated from COH in some aspects, but I don't have to like it. YMMV.
For a start, yes, combat is fast paced, but it's also actually a lobotomized button masher designed for a gamepad. You only need an attack button and a block button.
Combat is simply an affair of starting your weak-and-often auto-attack, at which point your character will start madly pummelling on the enemy on his/her/its own, albeit not necessarily doing much damage. This however also regenerates your energy, so whenever you have enough of it, you hit your more powerful attack. When you run out of energy again, you let it on auto-attack again. It's really that brain damaged... err... I mean "casual gamer friendly";)
Yes, there is a block button too, and, guess what? You _only_ need to use it when you see that charging-up-a-power-attack icon above the enemy's head. It's not even the kind of block and counterattack combos in most action-adventures, it's really like one of those events like in console games where an icon appears on the screen and you have to push a button on the controller quickly. Until you see that icon, you can safely ignore the block button entirely.
What disappoints me more seriously is the reduced customization in the actual powers. It's like the new costume pieces came at the expense of the customization of the actual powers.
E.g., in Champions Online you will never ever have more than one passive power. So you slot a regeneration or dodge buff in it, and that was it. There is no minmaxing, no "do I get Fast Healing too, or stick to Integration", none of the other things that actually made builds unique in COH. In the defense aspect, the characters aren't even uni-dimensional -- which would imply a continuum of possible values, even if in just one variable -- they're zero-dimensional.
Attack too, has been turned from something where I actually had to manage chains of attacks and mixes of cooldowns, to a 1-button masher, essentially.
Yes, it has stats, but not only they're unintuitive in what they do, they're unintuitive even after you figured out what they do. E.g., Strength affects your melee damage, yes, as you'd expect, but actually the effect is capped so brutally and early, that you can pretty much ignore that stat entirely. Counter-intuitively, as a melee character you actually benefit more from dexterity. And even in the "Strength == more melee damage" aspect, it's not as simple as you'd assume. E.g., the ego blades are based on another stat, not on Strength.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying "it's crap" or anything of the kind. It just feels... "meh". Believe me, as a bored COH player I was waiting for CO like the fundies await the second cumming of Christ. Maybe that was my mistake.
I guess a couple of co-workers are actually just taking good care of their health. I'm pretty sure one of them doesn't come anywhere near this bacterium more than twice a year.
Except that's not what controversy means. Controversy means basically an unsettled and ongoing debate as to whether something is good or bad, black or white, etc, and usually neither side really has more than opinion to support their version. But anyway, the jury is still out on which of them is right.
Exactly which of those aspects you've correctly linked to is still a controversy? Is the jury still out on whether vulnerabilities that could get your machine pwned are good or bad? Do we still have compelling arguments for both sides of the issue of whether private and sensitive user information should be encrypted when sent over the internet? Or what?
It seems to me like nowadays "controversial" has become the euphemism for, basically, "I think it's bad, but I want to pretend to be nice and balanced, so I must find another word."
Well, I guess technically if there was something stupid, evil or simply wrong that requires them to pay money for, they'd probably try to weasel out of it:P
I wonder how much of it is there pretty much because
A) it's expected. It's my unscientific impression that women are more likely to try to fit in a group, and do whatever is needed to that end.
B) they can. Honestly, if I could get someone else to do some jobs, I would too. If all it takes is some "oooh, you're so big and strong, I'm weak and affraid of X" to get someone else to take care of X, _and_ it was socially acceptable, wouldn't you do it? Heck, screw the "socially acceptable" too:P
And I don't think humanity ever had any real insticts against rodents, plus 50 years is a bit too short to lose genuine instincts. More likely, it was just learned behaviour both then and now. It might happen to be different behaviours, depending on the time and place, but nevertheless learned behaviour.
Except that seems to me like a very serious flaw. Doing a scientific test when you don't even know what you're measuring or what it means, seems to me incredibly unscientific. If they can't actually prove that "more time looking == more scared", then the whole conclusion isn't really supported by anything.
To see how bogus the whole "more looking == more fear" thing is, a whole other team used "more looking == more attractive" when they tried to prove that there is a hard-wired beauty ideal. If I'm to believe this team's "more looking == more fear", than the other team proved that a hourglass woman figure with big breasts is actually scarier than hell to babies. And viceversa, if I'm to believe the other team's interpretation for "more time looking", then this team showed that girls are attracted to spiders and snakes. (Cue trouser snake jokes;)
But really it shows how bogus it is. Nobody actually knows what "more time looking" actually means in those babies. Two different teams assigned two fundamentally opposite interpretations to it. And neither actually has more than handwaving to support that crucial proposition in their inferrence.
There are ways to see which brain zones are triggered, e.g., MRI. If you see the zone for anxiety triggering on a MRI scan, that's a pretty conclusive "yep, it's fear."
Why don't they do just that, instead of guessing what "more time looking" means?
Except it's not that clear at all, so, yes, _I_ will call it blind guesses.
For a start, the evolution of the homo species has involved _reducing_ sexual dimorphism. All along the line we moved from disproportionately larger males than females and males with born natural weapons (e.g., bigger teeth and jaws) to something more gender-equal than any other ape. Clearly there wasn't as big a need for big males protecting weak females.
Also, if you're actually looking at primitive cultures, you must be looking through tinted glasses. Because it never was a case where females sit in the cave and just take care of the babies. In hunter-gathering cultures, the males were the hunters, yes, but the females were the gatherers. Obviously we lived with their being out of commission while pregnant just fine.
Furthermore, the actual roles in those cultures aren't anything like the modern stereotype in western culture. Women aren't the weaklings jumping on a chair when they see a mouse, and men aren't the stereotypical testosterone-poisoned idiots.
Women out gathering must be able to take care of themselves. Sure, they won't go wrestle tigers, but they must out-wit, out-run or out-climb any dangers they may meet.
And most importantly, they have to somehow finish gathering food for their family and come back even if they see a spider or a snake. Jumping on some branch and shrieking every time you see either, won't get you too far. There is no guy around who'll bravely come and kill the snake for you, because the guys are out hunting.
There are no guys on escort duty for the women gathering berries. If they need to save their skin, they must do it themselves.
But most importantly the guys in those cultures aren't the kind who'll think with his dick and wrestle tigers to impress the girls either. The role of the men is to hunt some antelope or whatever is available, but try to avoid the predators just like the women do. There is no way a lone bushman hunter will take on the lions, and even a group has nothing to gain and everything to lose from trying to. So he'll just try to avoid them.
Basically _both_ genders' roles were to avoid danger in as much as possible.
Yes, all cultures tried to give their women slightly less risky jobs, but
1. that doesn't really mean more than that they were protecting their pussy supply, to be blunt. For most of human history, the life expectancy for women was lower than for men. Because of birth-related death and complications. As modern civilizations as Old Kingdom Egypt had the median of life expectancy, if you got past the peak of infant mortality, in the 20's for women and the 30's for men. _That_ disproportionate. Warfare to capture women was a stapple all the way to late Roman republic at the very least.
So, yes, those guys tried to protect what was a limited supply of nookie, because demand always outstripped supply. It doesn't have to mean any different wiring or natural handicap or anything.
2. "that's the way it's been done" isn't really proving anything. Equally slavery was the way things were done for millenia, and nobody would still argue like Aristotle that some people were born to be slaves.
3. Even gathering was only marginally less risky, and was still a vastly more risky job than any moder woman will ever have to do. (Unless she's a tiger tamer or something.) Or than most modern men will.
What people are trying to apply to modern jobs and tasks, was actually the difference between (A) might have to outrun a tiger attracted by that freshly hunted antelope, and (B) slightly lower chances to meet the same tiger, but is good enough to save her skin if she does. Stupid "eeek, a mouse!" acts don't even come close to be justified by that ancient division of labour. If one of those gatherer women even heard of someone making a fuss over a mouse or bug -- when, again, they actually had to somehow deal with actual predators -- they'd probably be pretty perplexed.
So, between your one girl once and at least two villages in my experience which didn't even look twice at a mouse, guess which one I'm going to trust more?:P
But that actually raises a good nature vs learned behaviour question. Was that girl actually wired that way, or had she learned from movies that that's the expected behaviour?
Actually, is there one? Mice are a fact of life in rural areas. I can't imagine women being able to function at all in, say, medieval Europe if they were wired to shriek and jump on the table at the sight of one. Rats and mice were really that common.
Heck, even in the 20'th century, I've seen more than one when visiting either grandma as a child. And that's not counting the ones the cat used to bring us. And I don't remember anyone freaking out.
Honestly, other than in Hollywood movies and cartoons, I can't remember even hearing about someone who reacts that way to mice.
So is it a real phenomenon, or one of those movie stereotypes like computer displays with huge letters and a "hack password" command?
Actually, from my experience the "cruft" that supposedly gets Windows bloatier and slower, isn't as much a Microsoft issue, but the result of all those crap half-arsed 3'rd party installers and (more importantly) uninstallers, that placed crap all over the place and then forgot to uninstall it.
On my home machine I must have thousands of copy protection DLL's and drivers from all those paranoid game publishers alone, because God forbid that they don't place yet another obfuscated and untested driver on the DVD chain. You know, what with all the pirates running a cracked version without that anyway, God forbid that they'd stop punishing us honest paying customers instead. I must have such an unholy mix of StarForce, SafeDisc, SecuROM, and a few other things shat by the bowels of Hell, that it's got to reach either critical mass or sentience one of these days and start WW3.
And of course half the uninstallers forget to take _that_ crap out.
Then there are all the non-game things that just have to try to keep themselves resident, load their DLL's or custom libraries deep in Windows, and whatever. Last time I installed even Mozilla or Open Office from scratch (admittedly, that was way back in 2.0 days), they just had to try to keep themselves resident in memory, to appear that they launch faster than the MS alternative. Using the user's few RAM as your own private RAM-Disk has got to be an acceptable substitute to optimizing your own freaking code to actually load faster. But nah, the user surely has nothing better to do with his RAM than to help with out willy-waving, and will gladly buy another gigabyte just to help one more incompetent company brag about loading faster than MS.
Or here's an idea: how about using the standard widgets of whatever OS and window manager you run on? Now that ought to shave off the time of loading yet another cutesy skinned UI.
And then there's stuff loaded apparently for my convenience, that is "mine" only if I happened to be a marketroid for one of those vendors. Like EA's auto-downloader trying to stay resident in the tray, for no other reason than that apparently they don't want to let me download patches with a browser. Sun's Java trying to stay resident in the tray, just so it can pester me with reminders to get the latest Java 1.6... when I'm deliberately trying to test code that _must_ run with Java 1.4. Etc.
And then there's the occasional screw-up like an older version of McAffee antivirus which, I swear to the elder gods, actually couldn't cope with being installed in another directory than the default. So the first update actually installed a second copy, at the default location, but let the old one active too. So suddenly I had two antiviruses stacked in memory, and of course uninstalling only removed one. Took some grumbling and digging through Windows innards, just to get rid of it.
Then there's the stuff which plants its bits so deep in Windows, that you almost have to kill the host to get the parasite out. Goa'uld style. And I'm not even talking actual viruses and trojans, but antiviruses, and the occasional program which just has to bombard you with ads at all times. (And I'm still not even talking proper malware. An older RealPlayer version did just that... and that's why it was the last version I ever tried.)
Then there's stuff which just has to add some unneeded functionality, apparently just because they can't trust the default Windows implementation to do its job. I'm talking stuff like Creative adding its own disk change detector, never mind that Windows's auto-play works perfectly well as it is. Or that if I disabled that, I don't want Creative automatically starting to play anything either.
Then there are all the tons of custom skinned widgets, libraries that I need just for one single program (yeah, I sooo always wanted a display driver that needs.Net, thank you ATI), etc.
It's just sad. It used to be that you needed a virus to get your computer to crawl, while your hard drive icon and modem LEDs blink like crazy. For the last decade increasingly you only need to install legit paid-for software.
Both launches where reported as: "the smoothest launch in MMO history!" - we know how smooth both went..
Well, in much the same way as the launching of the Vasa, the flagship of the Swedish crown that sank 120m from the shore after being launched. But the launch itself, as anyone present could attest, was as smooth as anyone could expect. It's only (immediately) after launch that the problems started;)
If you want a citation saying that he was proven by jury of doing it with his own hand, it ain't gonna happen, because he was better than that and quite a bit above the law.
But the fact remains that his opponents, like that Grandier guy, ended up on trial based on surrealistically over-the-top forged documents in their handwriting. If you want to believe that that's pure coincidence, fine. Me, I find it highly suspicious.
Even if ad absurdum they weren't commissioned by Richelieu himself, itt's stuff that should cause any educated man even in that time to go, no shit? stolen from Satan personally? WTF?" The fact that such prosecution went through, tells me that, at the very least, Richelieu wasn't above using a blatant forgery anyway, regardless of who originated it. The alternative would be that he was completely gullible, and, honestly, his political success would say otherwise.
Eh, it was mostly supposed to be funny, rather than be any kind of judgment on South Africans. (Whom I have no experience with, anyway.)
Though that would make them different from the rest of the western world, I guess. I've yet to see anyone who's deterred by costs or bandwidth limits, when it's the company's not his personally. Let's just say I've seen all those even on an old dual ISDN connection, nevermind that it was stuffing the network for everyone else. Down the network admin being on sexnet all day, although the nickname has been changed to protect the idio... erm... innocent.
Well, I'm actually against the death penalty, so I'm not going to argue much with you there.
Still, I think it doesn't change my point much. As long as _some_ kinds of murder are still illegal (e.g., those not sanctioned by the state) a totalitarian government who's free to forge confessions and evidence in your handwriting, can still only need 6 lines in your handwriting to convict even the most honest man. Or take your pick of any other behaviour that is illegal for a reason. Highway robbery? Rape? Theft? You have to have _some_ stuff that's illegal, and even one is enough for what Richelieu was actually doing.
Basically that's the core of my beef with that Richelieu quote: it gets throw around as support or evidence for some kind of, basically, "let's make criminalize everything, to the point where even the most innocent text by the most honest man is confession of a crime." But that's not really what Richelieu was doing, and isn't even remotely close to the situation in France at the time. In reality when Richelieu said "I'll find something in it that will hang him", that "something" was just a sample of the victim's handwriting. It has nothing to do with there being too many or too few laws.
And I don't think that arguing over whether a hanging should or should not be considered murder changes that core point:p
Except you too don't seem to understand what that quote really meant.
Richelieu needed those 6 lines written by the hand of a person, so he could forge evidence of some crime in the handwriting of some person.
To that end, it doesn't matter at all how many laws there actually are, and how many things are illegal. As long as there's at least one single thing that's illegal, say, murder (I think we can agree that there's no reason to make murder legal) Richelieu could still forge a letter in your writing when you say you're the one who committed some recent murder. Then you'd get tortured until you confess, and hang for it.
It's not about too many or too few laws. It's about abuse of power, really.
Yes, even he couldn't come out and say out loud "I'll forge a pact with the devil in his handwriting", hence the "I will find something" euphemism. But the process of "finding something" actually ended up being more like "hey, looky, the handwriting is exactly like this pact with the devil we just for... err.. had delivered to us by a repenting sinner who stole it from Satan's own desk drawer."
And if you think the above is just hyperbole, think again. Historically, Father Grandier (an opponent and critic of Richelieu) was waterboarded and exected for a pact with the devil, in his handwriting and signed by him in blood, which someone supposedly stole from none other than the Devil himself. Literally.
That was the kind of "finding something that will hang him" that Richelieu actually did.
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
I see that Richelieu quote thrown around each time laws or restrictions are discussed, and I can't shake the feeling that the ones who use it the most have no real clue what it means.
It doesn't mean he'll make whatever is written there illegal, nor that there are so many laws that everything is illegal, nor anything of the kind.
The actual keywords there are "written by the hand of". Richelieu, see, was not above paying to forge handwritten evidence. If he wanted Person X out of the way, he'd need those 6 lines so a competent forger would write, say, a contract with the devil in the handwriting of Person X. Then Richelieu would have him waterboarded until he confesses. Then, yes, hang him like in the quote. Or maybe burn him alive, or chuck him into the dungeon for the rest of his days.
Point taken, but in these guys' case their network only managed to transmit 4% of that 4GB "packet" in 2 hours. So a rough estimate of the time for the whole packet is 50 hours.
I'm sure you'll agree that for their particular network, 4 GB per packet is not the optimal block size. A kilobyte and a half should be ok, but 4 GB is not quite the optimal block size there IMHO.
I fear that this might have been an unfair comparison, though. The pigeon was, after all, dedicated to only that one transfer.
For a more apples-to-apples comparison with most companies' networks, the pigeon should also be transporting:
- a porn DVD or two
- half the collection of lolcat movies on youtube
- and half the collection of funny clips
- a periodic refresh of Slashdot, in 1 second intervals.
- an IRC session on sexnet for the network admin. Logging connections doesn't apply to him, after all. You can contact him under the nickname Linda1991 faster than through the internal channels.
- a couple of managers' correspondence with the distressed widdow of a nigerian prince. Hey, they're only trying to help her.
- a trojan download or two, from those guys in marketing who got admin rights on their computer because they can't work without it. And now can't work without the latest animated gizmo off www.i-pwn-your-machine.ru.
- the keylogger traffic in the other direction from the couple more who already downloaded it.
Actually, we know it was 4 GB and that in 2 hours the Telekom transferred only 4% of that data. Let's say approximately 4000 MB for ease of calculation. A whole 4% of that is 160 MB transferred in two hours.
Now bytes are not bits, and network speeds are usually specified in megabits per second. Allowing for handshake, headers, etc, and again going just for a rough ballpark figure, I'll take x10 for the bytes to bits conversion.
So it's 1600 megabits in 7200 seconds. 1600 / 7200 = 0.22 megabit / sec.
Honestly, even ADSL upload speeds in the western world tend to be better than that.
Germans sometimes perplex and leave you breathless...
You seem to assume that this is something "the germans" as a whole have something to do with, or that it's inherently something that wouldn't happen elsewhere.
In reality, it's just capitalism finding a way to exploit a legislation loophole. There are some hefty subsidies for energy put back into the grid, on the assumption that (A) it would be some green energy like solar or wind, and (B) that it wouldn't happen otherwise, because, (C) there's not much you can put in that way.
Germany is way north, and in at least half of it there are plenty of cloudy days. The same gulf stream influence that makes us not have the climate of, say, Canada or Siberia, well, warm air coming from the direction of the ocean, you do the maths. In, say, Düsseldorf probably a vampire could probably get a day job because there aren't many days with direct sunlight;)
So solar power isn't a very efficient way to generate energy. Wind is a bit better, but still takes a long time to pay for itself otherwise. So someone figured they'd subsidize people who nevertheless buy a turbine or solar pannels, to have _some_ green energy, even if expensive green energy. Debatable, but Idon't think it's downright stupid or perplexing by any reckoning.
It was not particularly designed for people running diesel or gas generators in that basement, because, well, there weren't any significant numbers of those.
So now two companies figured out they can use a loophole to sell more of their own crap.
Whop-de-do. If you think no American company would do the same abusing a loophole, you haven't been paying attention much. There have been even more stupid attempts, all the way to trying to sell a SMG without the trigger (it would start firing automatically when you chambered a round, and only stop when the magazine was empty) because some PHB thought it wouldn't qualify as an automatic weapon that way. Apparently the BATF thought it still did, though.
Well, it would probably cost too much, since then you'd have to raise it on perfusions and generally artifficial life support. I mean, properly without a brain, it wouldn't even breathe.
It's probably more economical to remove just the pain part, and let the rest of the brain in place. That way it could still autonomously eat, crap, breathe, and so on.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, as a long COH fan myself, my own impression is more like "meh" somehow.
The good is that there are a lot more costume pieces, and, face it, if you were into COH, you like to dress up dolls. Welcome to the club, and remember that there's nothing wrong with that. Now let's sit our dolls together and have a tea party ;) More seriously, I wish more game had this much freedom in coming up with a costume. You can be anything from werewolf to elf to dwarf to orc to Superman to... well, almost anything you can imagine.
Also good is that you no longer have the horrendous waiting for endurance to refill that plagued the teen levels of COH.
The bad is... well, subjective. I can understand why they deviated from COH in some aspects, but I don't have to like it. YMMV.
For a start, yes, combat is fast paced, but it's also actually a lobotomized button masher designed for a gamepad. You only need an attack button and a block button.
Combat is simply an affair of starting your weak-and-often auto-attack, at which point your character will start madly pummelling on the enemy on his/her/its own, albeit not necessarily doing much damage. This however also regenerates your energy, so whenever you have enough of it, you hit your more powerful attack. When you run out of energy again, you let it on auto-attack again. It's really that brain damaged... err... I mean "casual gamer friendly" ;)
Yes, there is a block button too, and, guess what? You _only_ need to use it when you see that charging-up-a-power-attack icon above the enemy's head. It's not even the kind of block and counterattack combos in most action-adventures, it's really like one of those events like in console games where an icon appears on the screen and you have to push a button on the controller quickly. Until you see that icon, you can safely ignore the block button entirely.
What disappoints me more seriously is the reduced customization in the actual powers. It's like the new costume pieces came at the expense of the customization of the actual powers.
E.g., in Champions Online you will never ever have more than one passive power. So you slot a regeneration or dodge buff in it, and that was it. There is no minmaxing, no "do I get Fast Healing too, or stick to Integration", none of the other things that actually made builds unique in COH. In the defense aspect, the characters aren't even uni-dimensional -- which would imply a continuum of possible values, even if in just one variable -- they're zero-dimensional.
Attack too, has been turned from something where I actually had to manage chains of attacks and mixes of cooldowns, to a 1-button masher, essentially.
Yes, it has stats, but not only they're unintuitive in what they do, they're unintuitive even after you figured out what they do. E.g., Strength affects your melee damage, yes, as you'd expect, but actually the effect is capped so brutally and early, that you can pretty much ignore that stat entirely. Counter-intuitively, as a melee character you actually benefit more from dexterity. And even in the "Strength == more melee damage" aspect, it's not as simple as you'd assume. E.g., the ego blades are based on another stat, not on Strength.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying "it's crap" or anything of the kind. It just feels... "meh". Believe me, as a bored COH player I was waiting for CO like the fundies await the second cumming of Christ. Maybe that was my mistake.
I guess a couple of co-workers are actually just taking good care of their health. I'm pretty sure one of them doesn't come anywhere near this bacterium more than twice a year.
Except that's not what controversy means. Controversy means basically an unsettled and ongoing debate as to whether something is good or bad, black or white, etc, and usually neither side really has more than opinion to support their version. But anyway, the jury is still out on which of them is right.
Exactly which of those aspects you've correctly linked to is still a controversy? Is the jury still out on whether vulnerabilities that could get your machine pwned are good or bad? Do we still have compelling arguments for both sides of the issue of whether private and sensitive user information should be encrypted when sent over the internet? Or what?
It seems to me like nowadays "controversial" has become the euphemism for, basically, "I think it's bad, but I want to pretend to be nice and balanced, so I must find another word."
Well, I guess technically if there was something stupid, evil or simply wrong that requires them to pay money for, they'd probably try to weasel out of it :P
Ok, I'm curious now. Exactly what was the controversy about it? Whether it sucks or it blows? :P
I wonder how much of it is there pretty much because
A) it's expected. It's my unscientific impression that women are more likely to try to fit in a group, and do whatever is needed to that end.
B) they can. Honestly, if I could get someone else to do some jobs, I would too. If all it takes is some "oooh, you're so big and strong, I'm weak and affraid of X" to get someone else to take care of X, _and_ it was socially acceptable, wouldn't you do it? Heck, screw the "socially acceptable" too :P
And I don't think humanity ever had any real insticts against rodents, plus 50 years is a bit too short to lose genuine instincts. More likely, it was just learned behaviour both then and now. It might happen to be different behaviours, depending on the time and place, but nevertheless learned behaviour.
I wasn't talking about TFA here, though, but mainly addressing the OP point that girls somehow inherently fear mice.
Except that seems to me like a very serious flaw. Doing a scientific test when you don't even know what you're measuring or what it means, seems to me incredibly unscientific. If they can't actually prove that "more time looking == more scared", then the whole conclusion isn't really supported by anything.
To see how bogus the whole "more looking == more fear" thing is, a whole other team used "more looking == more attractive" when they tried to prove that there is a hard-wired beauty ideal. If I'm to believe this team's "more looking == more fear", than the other team proved that a hourglass woman figure with big breasts is actually scarier than hell to babies. And viceversa, if I'm to believe the other team's interpretation for "more time looking", then this team showed that girls are attracted to spiders and snakes. (Cue trouser snake jokes;)
But really it shows how bogus it is. Nobody actually knows what "more time looking" actually means in those babies. Two different teams assigned two fundamentally opposite interpretations to it. And neither actually has more than handwaving to support that crucial proposition in their inferrence.
There are ways to see which brain zones are triggered, e.g., MRI. If you see the zone for anxiety triggering on a MRI scan, that's a pretty conclusive "yep, it's fear."
Why don't they do just that, instead of guessing what "more time looking" means?
Except it's not that clear at all, so, yes, _I_ will call it blind guesses.
For a start, the evolution of the homo species has involved _reducing_ sexual dimorphism. All along the line we moved from disproportionately larger males than females and males with born natural weapons (e.g., bigger teeth and jaws) to something more gender-equal than any other ape. Clearly there wasn't as big a need for big males protecting weak females.
Also, if you're actually looking at primitive cultures, you must be looking through tinted glasses. Because it never was a case where females sit in the cave and just take care of the babies. In hunter-gathering cultures, the males were the hunters, yes, but the females were the gatherers. Obviously we lived with their being out of commission while pregnant just fine.
Furthermore, the actual roles in those cultures aren't anything like the modern stereotype in western culture. Women aren't the weaklings jumping on a chair when they see a mouse, and men aren't the stereotypical testosterone-poisoned idiots.
Women out gathering must be able to take care of themselves. Sure, they won't go wrestle tigers, but they must out-wit, out-run or out-climb any dangers they may meet.
And most importantly, they have to somehow finish gathering food for their family and come back even if they see a spider or a snake. Jumping on some branch and shrieking every time you see either, won't get you too far. There is no guy around who'll bravely come and kill the snake for you, because the guys are out hunting.
There are no guys on escort duty for the women gathering berries. If they need to save their skin, they must do it themselves.
But most importantly the guys in those cultures aren't the kind who'll think with his dick and wrestle tigers to impress the girls either. The role of the men is to hunt some antelope or whatever is available, but try to avoid the predators just like the women do. There is no way a lone bushman hunter will take on the lions, and even a group has nothing to gain and everything to lose from trying to. So he'll just try to avoid them.
Basically _both_ genders' roles were to avoid danger in as much as possible.
Yes, all cultures tried to give their women slightly less risky jobs, but
1. that doesn't really mean more than that they were protecting their pussy supply, to be blunt. For most of human history, the life expectancy for women was lower than for men. Because of birth-related death and complications. As modern civilizations as Old Kingdom Egypt had the median of life expectancy, if you got past the peak of infant mortality, in the 20's for women and the 30's for men. _That_ disproportionate. Warfare to capture women was a stapple all the way to late Roman republic at the very least.
So, yes, those guys tried to protect what was a limited supply of nookie, because demand always outstripped supply. It doesn't have to mean any different wiring or natural handicap or anything.
2. "that's the way it's been done" isn't really proving anything. Equally slavery was the way things were done for millenia, and nobody would still argue like Aristotle that some people were born to be slaves.
3. Even gathering was only marginally less risky, and was still a vastly more risky job than any moder woman will ever have to do. (Unless she's a tiger tamer or something.) Or than most modern men will.
What people are trying to apply to modern jobs and tasks, was actually the difference between (A) might have to outrun a tiger attracted by that freshly hunted antelope, and (B) slightly lower chances to meet the same tiger, but is good enough to save her skin if she does. Stupid "eeek, a mouse!" acts don't even come close to be justified by that ancient division of labour. If one of those gatherer women even heard of someone making a fuss over a mouse or bug -- when, again, they actually had to somehow deal with actual predators -- they'd probably be pretty perplexed.
So, between your one girl once and at least two villages in my experience which didn't even look twice at a mouse, guess which one I'm going to trust more? :P
But that actually raises a good nature vs learned behaviour question. Was that girl actually wired that way, or had she learned from movies that that's the expected behaviour?
Actually, is there one? Mice are a fact of life in rural areas. I can't imagine women being able to function at all in, say, medieval Europe if they were wired to shriek and jump on the table at the sight of one. Rats and mice were really that common.
Heck, even in the 20'th century, I've seen more than one when visiting either grandma as a child. And that's not counting the ones the cat used to bring us. And I don't remember anyone freaking out.
Honestly, other than in Hollywood movies and cartoons, I can't remember even hearing about someone who reacts that way to mice.
So is it a real phenomenon, or one of those movie stereotypes like computer displays with huge letters and a "hack password" command?
Actually, from my experience the "cruft" that supposedly gets Windows bloatier and slower, isn't as much a Microsoft issue, but the result of all those crap half-arsed 3'rd party installers and (more importantly) uninstallers, that placed crap all over the place and then forgot to uninstall it.
On my home machine I must have thousands of copy protection DLL's and drivers from all those paranoid game publishers alone, because God forbid that they don't place yet another obfuscated and untested driver on the DVD chain. You know, what with all the pirates running a cracked version without that anyway, God forbid that they'd stop punishing us honest paying customers instead. I must have such an unholy mix of StarForce, SafeDisc, SecuROM, and a few other things shat by the bowels of Hell, that it's got to reach either critical mass or sentience one of these days and start WW3.
And of course half the uninstallers forget to take _that_ crap out.
Then there are all the non-game things that just have to try to keep themselves resident, load their DLL's or custom libraries deep in Windows, and whatever. Last time I installed even Mozilla or Open Office from scratch (admittedly, that was way back in 2.0 days), they just had to try to keep themselves resident in memory, to appear that they launch faster than the MS alternative. Using the user's few RAM as your own private RAM-Disk has got to be an acceptable substitute to optimizing your own freaking code to actually load faster. But nah, the user surely has nothing better to do with his RAM than to help with out willy-waving, and will gladly buy another gigabyte just to help one more incompetent company brag about loading faster than MS.
Or here's an idea: how about using the standard widgets of whatever OS and window manager you run on? Now that ought to shave off the time of loading yet another cutesy skinned UI.
And then there's stuff loaded apparently for my convenience, that is "mine" only if I happened to be a marketroid for one of those vendors. Like EA's auto-downloader trying to stay resident in the tray, for no other reason than that apparently they don't want to let me download patches with a browser. Sun's Java trying to stay resident in the tray, just so it can pester me with reminders to get the latest Java 1.6... when I'm deliberately trying to test code that _must_ run with Java 1.4. Etc.
And then there's the occasional screw-up like an older version of McAffee antivirus which, I swear to the elder gods, actually couldn't cope with being installed in another directory than the default. So the first update actually installed a second copy, at the default location, but let the old one active too. So suddenly I had two antiviruses stacked in memory, and of course uninstalling only removed one. Took some grumbling and digging through Windows innards, just to get rid of it.
Then there's the stuff which plants its bits so deep in Windows, that you almost have to kill the host to get the parasite out. Goa'uld style. And I'm not even talking actual viruses and trojans, but antiviruses, and the occasional program which just has to bombard you with ads at all times. (And I'm still not even talking proper malware. An older RealPlayer version did just that... and that's why it was the last version I ever tried.)
Then there's stuff which just has to add some unneeded functionality, apparently just because they can't trust the default Windows implementation to do its job. I'm talking stuff like Creative adding its own disk change detector, never mind that Windows's auto-play works perfectly well as it is. Or that if I disabled that, I don't want Creative automatically starting to play anything either.
Then there are all the tons of custom skinned widgets, libraries that I need just for one single program (yeah, I sooo always wanted a display driver that needs .Net, thank you ATI), etc.
It's just sad. It used to be that you needed a virus to get your computer to crawl, while your hard drive icon and modem LEDs blink like crazy. For the last decade increasingly you only need to install legit paid-for software.
Well, in much the same way as the launching of the Vasa, the flagship of the Swedish crown that sank 120m from the shore after being launched. But the launch itself, as anyone present could attest, was as smooth as anyone could expect. It's only (immediately) after launch that the problems started ;)
If you want a citation saying that he was proven by jury of doing it with his own hand, it ain't gonna happen, because he was better than that and quite a bit above the law.
But the fact remains that his opponents, like that Grandier guy, ended up on trial based on surrealistically over-the-top forged documents in their handwriting. If you want to believe that that's pure coincidence, fine. Me, I find it highly suspicious.
Even if ad absurdum they weren't commissioned by Richelieu himself, itt's stuff that should cause any educated man even in that time to go, no shit? stolen from Satan personally? WTF?" The fact that such prosecution went through, tells me that, at the very least, Richelieu wasn't above using a blatant forgery anyway, regardless of who originated it. The alternative would be that he was completely gullible, and, honestly, his political success would say otherwise.
Eh, it was mostly supposed to be funny, rather than be any kind of judgment on South Africans. (Whom I have no experience with, anyway.)
Though that would make them different from the rest of the western world, I guess. I've yet to see anyone who's deterred by costs or bandwidth limits, when it's the company's not his personally. Let's just say I've seen all those even on an old dual ISDN connection, nevermind that it was stuffing the network for everyone else. Down the network admin being on sexnet all day, although the nickname has been changed to protect the idio... erm... innocent.
Well, I'm actually against the death penalty, so I'm not going to argue much with you there.
Still, I think it doesn't change my point much. As long as _some_ kinds of murder are still illegal (e.g., those not sanctioned by the state) a totalitarian government who's free to forge confessions and evidence in your handwriting, can still only need 6 lines in your handwriting to convict even the most honest man. Or take your pick of any other behaviour that is illegal for a reason. Highway robbery? Rape? Theft? You have to have _some_ stuff that's illegal, and even one is enough for what Richelieu was actually doing.
Basically that's the core of my beef with that Richelieu quote: it gets throw around as support or evidence for some kind of, basically, "let's make criminalize everything, to the point where even the most innocent text by the most honest man is confession of a crime." But that's not really what Richelieu was doing, and isn't even remotely close to the situation in France at the time. In reality when Richelieu said "I'll find something in it that will hang him", that "something" was just a sample of the victim's handwriting. It has nothing to do with there being too many or too few laws.
And I don't think that arguing over whether a hanging should or should not be considered murder changes that core point :p
Well, it's in the rough ballpark of 256 kb/s upload speeds on really crappy ADSL contracts.
It's usable for most home uses, but this was a company. I would kinda expect them to have a bigger pipe.
Except you too don't seem to understand what that quote really meant.
Richelieu needed those 6 lines written by the hand of a person, so he could forge evidence of some crime in the handwriting of some person.
To that end, it doesn't matter at all how many laws there actually are, and how many things are illegal. As long as there's at least one single thing that's illegal, say, murder (I think we can agree that there's no reason to make murder legal) Richelieu could still forge a letter in your writing when you say you're the one who committed some recent murder. Then you'd get tortured until you confess, and hang for it.
It's not about too many or too few laws. It's about abuse of power, really.
Yes, even he couldn't come out and say out loud "I'll forge a pact with the devil in his handwriting", hence the "I will find something" euphemism. But the process of "finding something" actually ended up being more like "hey, looky, the handwriting is exactly like this pact with the devil we just for... err.. had delivered to us by a repenting sinner who stole it from Satan's own desk drawer."
And if you think the above is just hyperbole, think again. Historically, Father Grandier (an opponent and critic of Richelieu) was waterboarded and exected for a pact with the devil, in his handwriting and signed by him in blood, which someone supposedly stole from none other than the Devil himself. Literally.
That was the kind of "finding something that will hang him" that Richelieu actually did.
I see that Richelieu quote thrown around each time laws or restrictions are discussed, and I can't shake the feeling that the ones who use it the most have no real clue what it means.
It doesn't mean he'll make whatever is written there illegal, nor that there are so many laws that everything is illegal, nor anything of the kind.
The actual keywords there are "written by the hand of". Richelieu, see, was not above paying to forge handwritten evidence. If he wanted Person X out of the way, he'd need those 6 lines so a competent forger would write, say, a contract with the devil in the handwriting of Person X. Then Richelieu would have him waterboarded until he confesses. Then, yes, hang him like in the quote. Or maybe burn him alive, or chuck him into the dungeon for the rest of his days.
See for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudun_possessions
Point taken, but in these guys' case their network only managed to transmit 4% of that 4GB "packet" in 2 hours. So a rough estimate of the time for the whole packet is 50 hours.
I'm sure you'll agree that for their particular network, 4 GB per packet is not the optimal block size. A kilobyte and a half should be ok, but 4 GB is not quite the optimal block size there IMHO.
If your network uses 4 GB packets, I fear that you might not get much advanced out of the whole packet switching concept :p
I fear that this might have been an unfair comparison, though. The pigeon was, after all, dedicated to only that one transfer.
For a more apples-to-apples comparison with most companies' networks, the pigeon should also be transporting:
- a porn DVD or two
- half the collection of lolcat movies on youtube
- and half the collection of funny clips
- a periodic refresh of Slashdot, in 1 second intervals.
- an IRC session on sexnet for the network admin. Logging connections doesn't apply to him, after all. You can contact him under the nickname Linda1991 faster than through the internal channels.
- a couple of managers' correspondence with the distressed widdow of a nigerian prince. Hey, they're only trying to help her.
- a trojan download or two, from those guys in marketing who got admin rights on their computer because they can't work without it. And now can't work without the latest animated gizmo off www.i-pwn-your-machine.ru.
- the keylogger traffic in the other direction from the couple more who already downloaded it.
Actually, we know it was 4 GB and that in 2 hours the Telekom transferred only 4% of that data. Let's say approximately 4000 MB for ease of calculation. A whole 4% of that is 160 MB transferred in two hours.
Now bytes are not bits, and network speeds are usually specified in megabits per second. Allowing for handshake, headers, etc, and again going just for a rough ballpark figure, I'll take x10 for the bytes to bits conversion.
So it's 1600 megabits in 7200 seconds. 1600 / 7200 = 0.22 megabit / sec.
Honestly, even ADSL upload speeds in the western world tend to be better than that.
You seem to assume that this is something "the germans" as a whole have something to do with, or that it's inherently something that wouldn't happen elsewhere.
In reality, it's just capitalism finding a way to exploit a legislation loophole. There are some hefty subsidies for energy put back into the grid, on the assumption that (A) it would be some green energy like solar or wind, and (B) that it wouldn't happen otherwise, because, (C) there's not much you can put in that way.
Germany is way north, and in at least half of it there are plenty of cloudy days. The same gulf stream influence that makes us not have the climate of, say, Canada or Siberia, well, warm air coming from the direction of the ocean, you do the maths. In, say, Düsseldorf probably a vampire could probably get a day job because there aren't many days with direct sunlight ;)
So solar power isn't a very efficient way to generate energy. Wind is a bit better, but still takes a long time to pay for itself otherwise. So someone figured they'd subsidize people who nevertheless buy a turbine or solar pannels, to have _some_ green energy, even if expensive green energy. Debatable, but Idon't think it's downright stupid or perplexing by any reckoning.
It was not particularly designed for people running diesel or gas generators in that basement, because, well, there weren't any significant numbers of those.
So now two companies figured out they can use a loophole to sell more of their own crap.
Whop-de-do. If you think no American company would do the same abusing a loophole, you haven't been paying attention much. There have been even more stupid attempts, all the way to trying to sell a SMG without the trigger (it would start firing automatically when you chambered a round, and only stop when the magazine was empty) because some PHB thought it wouldn't qualify as an automatic weapon that way. Apparently the BATF thought it still did, though.
Well, it would probably cost too much, since then you'd have to raise it on perfusions and generally artifficial life support. I mean, properly without a brain, it wouldn't even breathe.
It's probably more economical to remove just the pain part, and let the rest of the brain in place. That way it could still autonomously eat, crap, breathe, and so on.