That's what I wondered about too. Every time there was some [NEXT GAME] coming out soon, be it LOTRO, WAR, AOC, or even duds like D&D Online or Tabula Rasa or Vanguard, the guild chat was _full_ of disgruntled WoW players talking non-stop about how they're gonna move to it as soon as it launches and never look back. Then somehow they come back anyway.
Even the idea that WoW should annihilate the other games otherwise, is stupid. WoW may well be what keeps those other duds alive in the first place.
Last I've heard a statistic, the average player stayed on an MMO for 6 months. Sure, some stay for ever, but they're few. Some leave when the "free" month is over. But on the average, it was 6 months. Then they get bored and bugger off.
I'm betting that a lot of the customers of those other games are recycled ex-WoW players. People spend their months on WoW, get bored of doing the same raid again, get ideas like "meh, I wonder if WAR/LOTRO/EQ2/Whatever is any better."
Plus, look at the MMOG charts. Before WoW the western MMOs recycled the same pool of IIRC about a million players total. Each newcomer getting another 100,000 was visible in the others losing a total of 100,000. WoW increased that 10 times over night. And again, their players fall off and try other games too. (But actually keeping them, that's another problem.) In effect it increased the pool for a lot of "me too" MMOS from "whoever of those 500,000 EQ1 players gets bored and wanst to try something else" to "whoever of WoW's 10,000,000+ players gets bored and wants to try something else."
For a lot of the incompetent designers and incompetent publishers (I'm looking at you, Sony), WoW has been a windfall, not their doom.
At any rate, what I see there is the usual fanboy rationalization, except this time it's called an article.
Then again, AFAIK a dual-core CPU does have at least _some_ separate cache for each CPU. Plus, I'd feel very shafted if Intel and AMD try to sell me dual- and quad-core CPUs that "are not at all designed for multi-tasking." What's the second CPU for, then?;)
COH is not WoW, though. I fancy I have a fairly high end system (dual core CPU, veloci-raptor drives, 4 GB RAM, GTX-285 graphics card with 1 GB RAM, you get the idea), and with two instances of COH, it drops to low single digit FPS in some zones or situations.
It's weird. It's not that FPS drops to half, like you'd expect. (Actually, I'd expect even less, because any half-competently programmed program wouldn't render at all when minimized. Well, if COH could stay minimized, that is.) It drops disproportionately more when dual-boxing on the same computer.
Part of it, I suspect, is also because COH doesn't actually play nice with multitasking, period. Even getting it to fucking stay minimized when I want to check something in Mozilla can be a chore. It just wants to hog the screen, no matter what. Sometimes even ALT-TAB doesn't work right out of it.
To cut a long story short, yes, for COH I'd recommend two boxes even if you wanted to dual-box by yourself.
I don't know what kind of computer could dual-box COH on the same machine, but probably it would cost a lot more than two high-enough-end machines to run an instance of COH each.
Well, unlike what virgins living in their mom's basement may imagine, sex is only a small part of the time spent together in a relationship.
For a start, you can't keep it up all weekend. (Cue the willy-wavers to come swear they keep it up 24/7;)
Second, a woman tends to get unflattering ideas if your interest in her starts and ends at sex.
Third, humans generally, that is, including men, have more needs than sex. Look at Maslow's pyramid sometime. There's stuff in there like safety, confidence, respect, self-esteem, etc, which are actually antithetical to the role of being just a pussy on legs. You can't get much of a feeling of security of the family if, for all you know, you're just a perfectly fungible sex object in that family.
Basically I dare say that if your wife's interest in you started and ended at sex, you too would probably get insecure and unsatisfied eventually. I mean, what hint would you have that you're not just there until she finds someone with a bigger tool or more stamina?
If you bothered to RTFA, you'd find that it's not for when the kid did anything wrong. It's to get a kid sedated when he's got a medical problem, might even be in pain, and he's likely scared too.
Now I can imagine alternative ways to calm a scared kid down, but advocating smacking an already scared and sick kid... strikes me as the most idiotic thing I've read on Slashdot in ages.
Look, I'm not going to get into the whole debate about punishments. But this isn't even for when the kid did something wrong. It's a kid with a medical problem, which makes a lot of adults anxious too, in an unfamiliar place, etc. It's a kid which is ill, maybe in pain, and scared.
So your solution is obviously to smack him upside the head... Just because in your day they didn't have ways to make an already shitty situation less traumatizing. Better make sure your kid is properly traumatized by the experience too.
Right...
Geeze. This must be a new low even by the standards of Slashdot trolling.
Which basically isn't far off from dual-booting, as inconvenience goes. Boot the browser when you know you'll _only_ want to surf, boot your OS for when you think you might also want to listen to your MP3s, encode a video, play a game, or any of the other gazillion activities that a real OS can do. I don't know about you, but I'll take another 15 seconds to boot XP once, instead of booting several times between BIOS-OS and real OS.
I'm suspecting that most people will do the same. They'll try the cute BIOS thing a couple of times, then discover that they just end up booting XP later anyway, so they end up just booting XP and using IE or Mozilla or whatever in the first place.
You know, I never bought that idea that most people don't do more than email and browsing with their computer. It seems to me more like a mixture of arrogance (we're the savvier ones, see?) and wishful thinking.
From my experince, for example, image processing is a _lot_ more widespread than you seem to think. There's a reason for all those cameras sold even in phones nowadays, and for all those photo printers sold, you know? Even your average grandma nowadays occasionally gets ideas like even just changing the contrast of those photos she took of her grandchildren before printing. Some get even more complicated ideas.
So that's one thing where if he/she depends just on some online thing, he/she's going to be very annoyed occasionally.
DVD ripping is not exactly niche either nowadays. At least here a lot of people took notice of "rent 3 pay 2" deals and the like, and some got the idea that they can rip them instead of staying up all night to see all 3 in a day. And even when the network _isn't_ down, trying to use the average throttled ISP's service to rip via some online service... well, let's just say it would involve uploading a DVD. With the A in ADSL being what it is, it would take bloody ages for most people.
Movie (as opposed to photo) cameras are also becoming gradually more common.
I suppose someone could offer some service which uploads your holiday directly from your camera to YouTube, so you have no more need for a local hard drive or a DVD writer. But not all of us are that much of an exhibitionist as to want every single such movie online. E.g., let's just say that if you filmed yourself making love to your girlfriend, you might rediscover masturbation soon if that goes directly online.
E.g., more people play games than you'd think. A lot of those Johnny User will actually enjoy playing some game now and then. There's a reason why the average gamer is in the 30's nowadays, and even the retired senior citizen segment is rising fast for the last years. A lot more will have children.
And I really don't think you want to play most video games in a browser.
Pretty much hit the nail right on the head. That's exactly what happened. Every single AE mission I've been invited to has involved one single damage type (e.g., all enemies do only lethal (sharp) damage, one of the two easiest to resist or dodge for anyone), all of the enemies were melee only, none of them had any stun/hold/sleep/etc attacks, none seemed to resist such status attacks, etc.
You do realize you are quite obviously describing your own bad experience and deciding that it must be "the whole game" for everyone?
Unfortunately, for most people it _is_ the kind of crap he described.
E.g., I have a _lot_ of low level alts and routinely group with newbies. And with other players who made alts. I've yet to see one who's happy with the grind to level 20-22. If the topic comes up, virtually _everyone_ just gnashes their teeth and grinds through the non-fun teen levels, to the point where they finally get their Stamina and stop sucking.
So, yes, I still wonder why the COH team doesn't fucking fix their game to be fun at all levels already. There was no level range on WoW where I had the impression that I just need to grind 9 more levels and _then_ it'll be fun. Whatever class I was playing, and I've played all 10, had a good enough mix of spells to be fun playing at any level from 1 to 80. Why can't COH be the same?
E.g., both in game and on the forums, the consensus is that if you're, say, a Blaster, oh well, you better get used to faceplanting lots and being in xp debt half the time. Or that you can't really solo past a point anyway, because everyone and their grandma mezzes and you just have no protection against being mez-locked. It's one of those things that just are, like the sun coming up in the east.
But if you think about it... why? It's the most piss-poor example of game design. How about some actual balance?
And is it surprising that then a lot of them went and made custom missions full of enemies which _can't_ mez for a change?
Honestly, it's not the system, and it's not even a lot of players. It's the tools who come in, pay real cash for IG money and levels, and will soon get bored and move on anyway. Screw them. You can't base your business model on that.
Unfortunately, it ruins the experience for everyone else too.
E.g., a lot of grouping before in COH had been for xp. Let's not pretend we're just a more social bunch and need to go even to the toilet in groups. The game just gave a bigger group xp bonus than, say, WoW does, so people grouped.
But then suddenly farming AE missions came and offered much higher xp than anything else. You can see where that's going.
I pretty much gave up on playing my defenders (support chars, for whoever isn't a COH player) because the chances of being invited to anything else than yet another AE farming session became almost nill.
Even on other characters it's a rare day when you find a non-farming group and it doesn't degenerate into "why don't we go farm AE missions instead? They're more xp." And then into "screw this, guys, I need xp" if you don't want to go farming.
E.g., you can see the effects on the auction house. Certain kinds of common drops (especially in the pre-50 ranges everyone skipped) became rare because nobody does those enemies any more.
Uh-huh. And in the two years the professional CoH designers and coders were thinking daily about this problem, in their two years of doubtless intensive meetings, not one of them ever once considered your idea. Right? The only possible alternative is that perhaps your two-minute inspiration isn't a perfect solution -- that it may even have unsuspected shortcomings. Nah, that couldn't be. Yeah, they're just dumb.
I know the above has become a popular argument to make on Slashdot in any topic, but in COH's case, as someone who's played it from launch, I can tell you that your faith is misplaced. Yes, COH actually has a long history at implementing stuff without thinking, and then being suprised when they discover how it can be (ab)used.
From day zero there had been such "exploits" (read: just doing what the system allowed) as the smoke grenade that could floor the enemy's to-hit, or the Hasten which could end up stacking with itself. Let me explain the latter because it's a case where, yes, 2 minutes and some basic arithmetic could have foretold it.
"Hasten" was supposed to be a situational power, which for a while made all your attacks recharge much faster. But it wasn't supposed to be permanent. But the darndest thing is: nobody seems to have actually tested what happens when you put six Single-Origin recharge reducers in it, a perfectly valid scenario allowed by the game. In fact, it was possible to make it permanent (recharge time equalled the time its effect stayed up) with only _two_ Single-Origins. Anything more would cause it to recharge faster than it stays up, so you could even have it stack with itself.
Statesman seemed genuinely surprised that this is possible. Nobody did the maths there, and we're talking simple arithmetic and standard "equipment" available at level 22. We're not talking some arcane combination of bonuses or epic equipment being off the chart, but the bog standard stuff bought from the vendor at level 22.
Eventually he agreed to let players have it permanently on, but said that then you'd need a full 6 SOs for that. Something he'd later turn around and present as an exploint in the ED.
The ED itself screwed up power sets like, say, defense because it was an across-the-board change to everyone without any thought about how it affects any particular build, nor any attempt to balance it. It took more than a year to fix the screw-ups introduced by the ED patch.
But to get to the present, just look at some patch notes about architect missions. E.g., one says that now all the melee sets for custom enemies have at least one ranged attack too. Aha. So they launched it without foreseeing that critters with no ranged attack, can be bombed with impunity by anyone who took Hover or Fly? In a game where half the people can fly, nobody foresaw that?
So, you tell me. How come in all their thinking and meetings and all, nobody foresaw something as elementary as that exploit?
Because from where I stand, it looks to me like, yes, sometimes they don't even try.
Actually the Bill of Rights just codified our rights. Our rights are inalienable regardless of whether or not they are listed in the Bill of Rights.
Actually, I'll call bull on that. There is no such thing as some free-floating rights that exist by themselves and they're not self-evident at all. All those rights are basically a contract between the members of society.
Basically "right to life" for example just means, in a nutshell, I don't want to be killed, you don't want to be killed, so we make a truce that we won't kill each other. That's it, really.
A lot have to do with basically just a list of abuses that those in power did before. And at some point the barons got together, took up arms and made the king write "I will not sentence people without a jury" on the blackboard 100 times... err... wrong movie. Made him sign the Magna Carta, which was really just a list of stuff that everyone was sick and tired of having done to them.
Most of that stuff isn't self-evident at all, and humanity needed literally thousands of years to figure out that they have this or that right. Some is actually from the Romans or Greeks, the result of hundreds of years of struggle between factions or social groups. (E.g., first between Patricians and a horrible Etruscan king, and then between those of Patrician and Plebeian descent.) And they needed a long time to be figured out, they didn't just spring out already self-evident and inalienable.
Some weren't evident even to the Romans at any point. E.g., there was no freedom of religion, nor separation between church and state. Indeed a big argument for more power to the patricians was that supposedly the gods will be pissed off if a lowly plebeian conducts the sacred rites that the consuls (think: president and vice president) had to perform. Yes, that's right: the head of state _had_ to conduct certain religious rituals, and that applied to many other top-level jobs in the republic. Which from the start put limits on what religion you should practice to fit that job. And if you were, say, in the army, you had a list of approved gods that you could worship. Want to be a follower of Moses for example? Not in the Roman army.
Some weren't even clear at the time of drafting the Magna Carta. E.g., it took a _lot_ of religious warfare and millions dead over exactly what flavour of Jesus is the right one, before a bunch of people figured out, basically, "you know, we could all get along better if we stopped trying to shove our personal religion down somebody else's throat." But even that wasn't self-evident to everybody, and to a lot of people it still isn't. Oh, they very much like it when you don't shove your religion down their throats, but they'd very much like to be allowed to shove theirs down your throat. I dare say that even at the time when the founding fathers drafted that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" amendment, most of the colonists would still have found it unthinkable if you told them they can't run you out of town -- or in some cases hang you -- for believing in the wrong flavour of Jesus.
Trial by your peers? A mere hundred years before the Magna Carta -- and in many places in the world even centuries _after_ it -- the barons would have more likely fought for the sacred, self-evident and inalienable right (and divine too!) to dispense their own arbitrary justice on their own lands. You know, with the baron being judge, jury and executioner. Ok, employer of the executioner.
So it's all just a contract. And you have exactly as many as you write in that contract. If it's not listed there, you don't have it. If you want more, or new developments create more ways in which you can be shafted, you have to add a bit to the list.
Except that such "it would work, if we all did X" solutions generally tend to not work. They're sorta like a prisoner's dilemma with a couple hundred million people.
And the problem gets only worse when there are some people with the means and _incentive_ to manipulate the others into a frenzy, and create a mass psychosis about something that until yesterday wasn't even a problem. Suddenly from at most "hey, that neighbour kid sure could use a bit more sunlight" it turns into "auugh, such people will murder my kid! The nice man on TV told me so!" It's hard to keep seeing it as everyone minding their own business, when it gets presented as that someone else won't mind theirs and might even kill you and your family. (And if you're the ignorant and gullible sort, of course.)
It's something that we really don't have safeguards against. The free press was supposed to balance the government, but lately it's only in as much occasionally a scary lie cancels out the opposite scary lie. But both have something to gain from creating a new scare where there used to be none. And sometimes those invented scares just support each other, instead of cancelling each other out.
To not pick on the USA for a change, and to illustrate that the rest of the world does the same (and a good thing to think about, when it comes to the war on drugs too, incidentally), take the criminalization of absynthe. A couple of alarmist tabloids in France, waay back then, rand whole weeks of horror stories in which they hammered on the idea that absynthe is some dangerous drug and turns people into raving murderers.
They only had a couple of coincidences, actually, where some murderer was also known to be an absynthe drinker. A couple more were spun into maybe also having been absynthe drinkers, but nobody had any proof or anything. But a media scare was manufactured anyway, and some scared ignorant people fully supported criminalizing it. Which the parliament promptly did.
What also didn't help absynthe's case was the bunch of pretentious artist types -- make no mistake, including some very famous and very talented ones -- who swore that absynthe has some consciousness altering abilities, and lets them see reality in ways they couldn't possibly see otherwise. What the press lacked in actual examples of people actually turning murderous on absynthe, it had in testimonies by all these artists about the psychoactive effects of absynthe. It was hard to make the case that none of those people who swear their reality perception is altered radically by it, could possibly have it altered in a way that makes them dangerous. I mean, sure, these artists just proceeded to write dadaits or surrealist plays on absynthe, but who knows what a more base and brutal person would do?
In reality, when they finally tested that stuff in a proper fashion, it turns out that the _only_ psychoactive substance absynthe turns out to be the alcohol. Wormwood doesn't really do jack squat. And certainly not in the quantities you'd possibly get before getting in an alcohol coma from the alcohol in that absynthe. Both those who saw in it some murderer-maker _and_ those who swore that it lets them see reality in various altered-consciousness way, were simply deluded. Neither the murderers nor the artists had been any more altered-consciousness on absynthe than they'd have been on a bottle of Vodka or even on enough beer.
It was one of those chapters that would have been worthy of a chapter in MacKay's book, if it hadn't been more than half a century after that book. People were pretending to have all sorts of altered consciousness effects on absynthe, just because it was fashionable for a proper artist type to say that he does. An Emperor's New Clothes situation, if you will. Or like proper audiophiles convince even themselves that they actually hear different bass over a $500 network cable (digital!!!) or with a wooden volume knob. Back then it was that if you're the creative type, you're supposed to rant at length about how you got all these revel
Reading that synopsis of that movie, that sounds like pretty much the worst possible idea.
See, _male_ chimps are even worse even if you treat them nicely. Eventually they get ideas that they want to be the alpha, _especially_ against women. And if the signs aren't properly understood and the proper chimp submission signals given, they _will_ escalate it to some rather nasty violence. Bear in mind that even against a submissive chimp female, the chimps can be violent at times. Against one who doesn't accept the proper hierarchy? Ooer.
Sorta like how male dogs start giving signs that they want to challenge you for alpha around two years of age. Except against most dogs you have the size advantage, so they generally don't push it too far. Plus, with dogs you can do tricks like grabbing their throat and pinning them to the ground, which is accepted by dog standards to be the "I win because I could tear your throat off now if I wanted to" situation. (With another dog it would be a pair of jaws around the throat, not a hand.) With a chimp they have the strength advantage and the brains to know it, and if you're in range to reach for his throat, so is he for your throat. And, really, their conflicts and challenges are solved only by beating or intimidating the other into submission anyway.
Now maybe with a bonobo you could get along better. Those guys don't sound like they'd resort to violence if they're well fed and generally if they don't have to fight for limited resources. And they like to solve almost any social situation via sex (heck, even as a greeting), so the plot would sound sorta believable if you're willing to not think much about it. But the movie sounds like it has a common chimp, and with those a chimp-and-lone-woman scenario is a recipe for grievous injury in the long run.
On the other hand, humans have huge genitals compared to any other primate I know of. So that women (of any race) would actually want an ape as a lover (except maybe as part of some severe schizophrenia), that's IMHO very unlikely. I may rant against the obsession with huge penises that some people have, but ridiculously undersized is a whole other dish altogether, and that's really what you'd get from an ape. I'm only saying that as a way of saying: no, I don't expect that HIV was propagated via some endemic male-chimp-on-female-human scenarios either.
I know you're probably saying that as a hyperbole, but sometimes I do kinda wonder.
Way I see it, any working democracy nowadays has the politicians and some non-elected body to fix the politicians' deliberate self-promoting screw-ups. In some countries (e.g., the USA) it's the judges. In some (e.g., the UK) there are some non-elected lords who get to say "that's stupid and unconstitutional, screw that."
Seriously, you'd expect the aristocracy to be the self-serving self-centered barstards, and the politicians to represent the common man. But the way it seems to work entirely too often is that the politicians pull some populist stunt as a law, and then keep their fingers crossed that the non-elected guys have the balls to strike it down. I'm thinking just of the slew of recent "think of the children" laws (saving them even from non-threats like video games) that seem to crop up everywhere before elections.
Except sometimes the non-elected guys don't intervene, or nobody challenges it all the way to the apropriate level to strike it down, and the rest of the country is saddled with the stupidity its politicians wrought. And even in the best case scenario, often it can take several years before its escalated to the point where it can be removed.
Now I'm not entirely deluded. I know how totalitarian regimes historically were worse, and why some people shed blood to get, say, the Magna Carta signed by the king.
But I still wonder. It seems to me like at the very least for each two evils we avoided via democracy, we introduce a new one _because_ of the way modern democracies work.
I'm not sure what a better system would look like, but sometimes I wish someone would invent it already.
Well, if a guy takes a chimp girl to a restaurant and a movie, maybe a little dancing too, and she puts out afterwards, who am I to say it's wrong? Well, as long as they're consenting adults, anyway. If it's an underage chimp or he slips her a roofie, that's just sick;)
Well, sorta. I generally see your point, but that was one of the reasons why I chose porn to illustrate my point. It actually was there for a bit more reason than "hur hur, I like porn" factor.
The people we actually choose for our relationships, yeah, there's a lot more at work there than merely what's considered attractive. There are considerations about security, compatibility, even bragging rights, etc, who could push one to pick a partner even if otherwise it wouldn't be their first pick. For example, in addition to what you already mention, just look at who was trying to get whom in high school. There are a lot of status-symbol girlfriends and status-symbol boyfriends, chosen more for bragging right value than for anything even vaguely resembling compatibility or natural attraction. E.g., some guy who otherwise might prefer more natural proportions, might try to bag the Barbie-type cheerleader just to show that he can. And viceversa, make no mistake, a lot of women try to bag the top jock just because he's a rare commodity, not because they actually get along.
I'm using porn because that's something that people actually choose to get off to, and because it has virtually no bragging-rights value for most people. Your average guy wouldn't advertise being a wanker, nor build his claims to greatness on masturbating to an older instead of a younger model, or viceversa. There is not much pressure or social norm about what genre of porn he should be wanking to (in fact, the social norm tends to be "all of it is bad"), so he's free to choose whatever he alone likes the most. If some people actually pay to get off to pictures of old or obese women, well, I'm guessing that there's a genuine turn-on factor there. For them. For whatever reason. And, again, _some_ people must be paying for that stuff.
There have been several reports http://cogprints.org/690/ that show that what men find beautiful is directly correlary to how long it takes the brain to process and encode into memory the face. Beautiful means simple, with few convex polygons. Period.
Ok, then here's the most beautiful woman ever. Mona Lisa or Helen Of Troy have nothing on her:
[O_O]
I'm sure you can't get a face in much less details than that, so it should be beautiful, right?
That said, I'm also pretty sure that it must be a little more than that. I'm not convinced for example that the face of an obese woman would have to have any more lines than that of a thin woman. So it should be beautiful, right? Well, she wouldn't find many boyfriends in today's culture.
My own _guess_ would be more along the lines of: See, they too thought that some foreigners have huge dicks. It seems to me like that's a constant human complex. There's always someone, some tribesman somewhere who's got a 3 ft long dick and is gonna steal your women. We make such generalizations about blacks today. But funnily enough some blacks, at their first encounter with europeans, thought that the europeans had such long dicks that they wrap them around their waist. And the Greeks thought that the uncivilized germanic and celtic barbarians up north have, you guessed, huge dicks.
In a way, it's funny. The Greeks (who probably averaged the same approx 6 inches as the rest of the species) thought that the northern europeans have huge phaluses. And now the descendants of those northern europeans, people who in all likeness aren't hung any worse than those barbarians who complexed the Greeks, are in turn complexed and think that some other uncout tribe down the line have giant dicks. How the history repeats itself...
Except the Greeks apparently chose to go the other way around about it. (At least officially.) Pretty much, "ok, we're proud to be Greeks instead of barbarians, with all that that means." If the barbarians were thought to have huge dicks, then by Zeus the Greeks were proud that theirs are smaller. 'Cause that makes them proper Greeks instead of barbarians.
Maybe it's just me, but the size of their biceps isn't what stops me wanting to have sex with chimps?
Point taken, but that's orthogonal to what I was really trying to say. The point isn't whether that biceps would make someone less horny for hot chimp booty, but whether you could survive trying to rape that chimp. They'd use those strong arms to inflict some hideous blows or can even tear you apart, if they wanted to. Plus, we're talking a species intelligent enough to use tools. Any item that can be swung around like a club, a chimp can actually use it like that. They use rocks, branches or even sharpened sticks routinely in their own habitat too. Unless you try to rape that chimp in a padded room, they can brain you with a chair, umbrella, branch, or a few other things that your human mind wouldn't even register as a potential weapon. And again, they'll have some mighty arm muscles and length (for momentum) to put some serious strength behind such a blunt impact.
We blame AIDS on African Africans love for bush meat because them raping Bonobos wouldn't be seen as politically correct. The chances of getting infected with HIV while butchering or eating an infected individual are close to zero. I could believe it if it had happened only once, but at least two strains and a new related virus are too much for me to believe the official story. There is a reason AIDS is considered an STD.
I know it's all the rage nowadays to troll in the name of racism and stuff, but at least you could try to use your brain first. At all. Propaganda doesn't work well if it's that incredibly stupid and unbelievable, you know?
1. Raping a chimp is a horribly bad idea. They are fast, have incredible upper body strength (they use their arms for locomotion, you don't), good reach with those arms, and don't have hangups about killing a human in self-defense. (You're not even the same species, so their mirror neurons won't even fire to prevent deadly injury.)
Briefly, it's only one notch less dangerous than trying to rape a tiger.
So the thought of an african raping one... damn, if they could do something like that, I'm starting to have serious respect for them.
2. The virus can actually be transmitted by _any_ kind of contact between infected blood/flesh/membranes and mucous membranes or unprotected flesh. E.g., probably more humans got infected with AIDS from reusing syringes, than from actual sex. Also, roll it a bit in your head that oral sex can also get you infected with AIDS: the virus _can_ enter your blood stream through the mouth.
What I'm getting at is that eating that meat raw (including smoked, as salami, etc) can get enough viruses in your mouth to run the risk of infection. It won't happen every time, but get a few million people doing it regularly, and someone will hit the jackpot.
Also, look at that "unprotected flesh" bit. Simply cutting yourself while preparing infected meat, can get _any_ infection into your bloodstream. That's in fact one risk that surgeons face every day: if you cut yourself while operating on someone with an infection, you can get infected too. (As a bit of trivia: doctors finally started washing their hands only after one operated after having dissected a corpse, and managed to kill himself by septic shock too, not just his patient.)
The chances of your wife being 'deeply beautiful' are almost nil. So yes you are sucking up to your wife. And no men don't gradually find girls they live with to be more and more attractive over time. On the other hand, women find men they like to be more attractive than they really are.
So, in a fundamentally subjective matter, you presume to tell people that their own perception is wrong? I'm used to this kind of crap coming from game fanboys, but it's a new twist to actually see it applied to something as _blatantly_ subjective as physical beauty.
If a woman X is attracted to man Y, that's it. That's by definition "attractive". He's attractive... for her. Hint: notice the common word root in there.
Who the fuckk do you think you _are_ to tell her that, in something that's 100% personal perception, her perception is wrong?
And yes, it's 100% subjective. Some people like older women. In fact, for some, it's a major turn on. There's a whole genre of porn about 70+ year old women. (So, yes, to answer that objection, that's one case he actually might like her more after 40 years of marriage.)
Some people like women who are anything between a bit overweight, to outright obese. Again, check out some of the BBW porn out there, and some looks like they filmed a vaguely humanoid blob of fat. Someone pays to watch those, you know?
Some people like huge breasts. Some actually like them small. And I won't just use porn this time, but look at the ideal of female beauty of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Look at all those sculptures that are barely A cup. Presumably because it represented a young woman who hasn't had children yet. (Ditto about the huge penis obsession recently, BTW: the greeks considered a perfect penis to be rather small, and they actually exaggerated in that direction in a lot of their statues. Huge phaluses were considered something the barbarians have.) To get back to breasts, the romans are sometimes credited with inventing the bra, but that's misleading. What actually got into fashion there wasn't some padded wonderbra, but just a strip of cloth tied over the breasts to press them down, so she looks like she has smaller breasts than she actually has.
A lot of people people like redheads, and especially in places where there aren't that many born naturally that way. But in the UK where they have the highest percentage of them, a lot of people aren't turned on by that mutation at all, and the term "ginger" is used as an insult.
Etc. It's really that subjective.
Maybe his wife wouldn't be "deeply beautiful" to you, but how do you know it isn't for him? Oh, right, you presume to tell someone that his tastes are wrong and yours are some kind of platinum standard for all humanity. Carry on.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what I wondered about too. Every time there was some [NEXT GAME] coming out soon, be it LOTRO, WAR, AOC, or even duds like D&D Online or Tabula Rasa or Vanguard, the guild chat was _full_ of disgruntled WoW players talking non-stop about how they're gonna move to it as soon as it launches and never look back. Then somehow they come back anyway.
Even the idea that WoW should annihilate the other games otherwise, is stupid. WoW may well be what keeps those other duds alive in the first place.
Last I've heard a statistic, the average player stayed on an MMO for 6 months. Sure, some stay for ever, but they're few. Some leave when the "free" month is over. But on the average, it was 6 months. Then they get bored and bugger off.
I'm betting that a lot of the customers of those other games are recycled ex-WoW players. People spend their months on WoW, get bored of doing the same raid again, get ideas like "meh, I wonder if WAR/LOTRO/EQ2/Whatever is any better."
Plus, look at the MMOG charts. Before WoW the western MMOs recycled the same pool of IIRC about a million players total. Each newcomer getting another 100,000 was visible in the others losing a total of 100,000. WoW increased that 10 times over night. And again, their players fall off and try other games too. (But actually keeping them, that's another problem.) In effect it increased the pool for a lot of "me too" MMOS from "whoever of those 500,000 EQ1 players gets bored and wanst to try something else" to "whoever of WoW's 10,000,000+ players gets bored and wants to try something else."
For a lot of the incompetent designers and incompetent publishers (I'm looking at you, Sony), WoW has been a windfall, not their doom.
At any rate, what I see there is the usual fanboy rationalization, except this time it's called an article.
Well, that's certainly a possibility too.
Then again, AFAIK a dual-core CPU does have at least _some_ separate cache for each CPU. Plus, I'd feel very shafted if Intel and AMD try to sell me dual- and quad-core CPUs that "are not at all designed for multi-tasking." What's the second CPU for, then? ;)
COH is not WoW, though. I fancy I have a fairly high end system (dual core CPU, veloci-raptor drives, 4 GB RAM, GTX-285 graphics card with 1 GB RAM, you get the idea), and with two instances of COH, it drops to low single digit FPS in some zones or situations.
It's weird. It's not that FPS drops to half, like you'd expect. (Actually, I'd expect even less, because any half-competently programmed program wouldn't render at all when minimized. Well, if COH could stay minimized, that is.) It drops disproportionately more when dual-boxing on the same computer.
Part of it, I suspect, is also because COH doesn't actually play nice with multitasking, period. Even getting it to fucking stay minimized when I want to check something in Mozilla can be a chore. It just wants to hog the screen, no matter what. Sometimes even ALT-TAB doesn't work right out of it.
To cut a long story short, yes, for COH I'd recommend two boxes even if you wanted to dual-box by yourself.
I don't know what kind of computer could dual-box COH on the same machine, but probably it would cost a lot more than two high-enough-end machines to run an instance of COH each.
Well, unlike what virgins living in their mom's basement may imagine, sex is only a small part of the time spent together in a relationship.
For a start, you can't keep it up all weekend. (Cue the willy-wavers to come swear they keep it up 24/7;)
Second, a woman tends to get unflattering ideas if your interest in her starts and ends at sex.
Third, humans generally, that is, including men, have more needs than sex. Look at Maslow's pyramid sometime. There's stuff in there like safety, confidence, respect, self-esteem, etc, which are actually antithetical to the role of being just a pussy on legs. You can't get much of a feeling of security of the family if, for all you know, you're just a perfectly fungible sex object in that family.
Basically I dare say that if your wife's interest in you started and ended at sex, you too would probably get insecure and unsatisfied eventually. I mean, what hint would you have that you're not just there until she finds someone with a bigger tool or more stamina?
If you bothered to RTFA, you'd find that it's not for when the kid did anything wrong. It's to get a kid sedated when he's got a medical problem, might even be in pain, and he's likely scared too.
Now I can imagine alternative ways to calm a scared kid down, but advocating smacking an already scared and sick kid... strikes me as the most idiotic thing I've read on Slashdot in ages.
Look, I'm not going to get into the whole debate about punishments. But this isn't even for when the kid did something wrong. It's a kid with a medical problem, which makes a lot of adults anxious too, in an unfamiliar place, etc. It's a kid which is ill, maybe in pain, and scared.
So your solution is obviously to smack him upside the head... Just because in your day they didn't have ways to make an already shitty situation less traumatizing. Better make sure your kid is properly traumatized by the experience too.
Right...
Geeze. This must be a new low even by the standards of Slashdot trolling.
Which basically isn't far off from dual-booting, as inconvenience goes. Boot the browser when you know you'll _only_ want to surf, boot your OS for when you think you might also want to listen to your MP3s, encode a video, play a game, or any of the other gazillion activities that a real OS can do. I don't know about you, but I'll take another 15 seconds to boot XP once, instead of booting several times between BIOS-OS and real OS.
I'm suspecting that most people will do the same. They'll try the cute BIOS thing a couple of times, then discover that they just end up booting XP later anyway, so they end up just booting XP and using IE or Mozilla or whatever in the first place.
You know, I never bought that idea that most people don't do more than email and browsing with their computer. It seems to me more like a mixture of arrogance (we're the savvier ones, see?) and wishful thinking.
From my experince, for example, image processing is a _lot_ more widespread than you seem to think. There's a reason for all those cameras sold even in phones nowadays, and for all those photo printers sold, you know? Even your average grandma nowadays occasionally gets ideas like even just changing the contrast of those photos she took of her grandchildren before printing. Some get even more complicated ideas.
So that's one thing where if he/she depends just on some online thing, he/she's going to be very annoyed occasionally.
DVD ripping is not exactly niche either nowadays. At least here a lot of people took notice of "rent 3 pay 2" deals and the like, and some got the idea that they can rip them instead of staying up all night to see all 3 in a day. And even when the network _isn't_ down, trying to use the average throttled ISP's service to rip via some online service... well, let's just say it would involve uploading a DVD. With the A in ADSL being what it is, it would take bloody ages for most people.
Movie (as opposed to photo) cameras are also becoming gradually more common.
I suppose someone could offer some service which uploads your holiday directly from your camera to YouTube, so you have no more need for a local hard drive or a DVD writer. But not all of us are that much of an exhibitionist as to want every single such movie online. E.g., let's just say that if you filmed yourself making love to your girlfriend, you might rediscover masturbation soon if that goes directly online.
E.g., more people play games than you'd think. A lot of those Johnny User will actually enjoy playing some game now and then. There's a reason why the average gamer is in the 30's nowadays, and even the retired senior citizen segment is rising fast for the last years. A lot more will have children.
And I really don't think you want to play most video games in a browser.
Etc.
Pretty much hit the nail right on the head. That's exactly what happened. Every single AE mission I've been invited to has involved one single damage type (e.g., all enemies do only lethal (sharp) damage, one of the two easiest to resist or dodge for anyone), all of the enemies were melee only, none of them had any stun/hold/sleep/etc attacks, none seemed to resist such status attacks, etc.
Unfortunately, for most people it _is_ the kind of crap he described.
E.g., I have a _lot_ of low level alts and routinely group with newbies. And with other players who made alts. I've yet to see one who's happy with the grind to level 20-22. If the topic comes up, virtually _everyone_ just gnashes their teeth and grinds through the non-fun teen levels, to the point where they finally get their Stamina and stop sucking.
So, yes, I still wonder why the COH team doesn't fucking fix their game to be fun at all levels already. There was no level range on WoW where I had the impression that I just need to grind 9 more levels and _then_ it'll be fun. Whatever class I was playing, and I've played all 10, had a good enough mix of spells to be fun playing at any level from 1 to 80. Why can't COH be the same?
E.g., both in game and on the forums, the consensus is that if you're, say, a Blaster, oh well, you better get used to faceplanting lots and being in xp debt half the time. Or that you can't really solo past a point anyway, because everyone and their grandma mezzes and you just have no protection against being mez-locked. It's one of those things that just are, like the sun coming up in the east.
But if you think about it... why? It's the most piss-poor example of game design. How about some actual balance?
And is it surprising that then a lot of them went and made custom missions full of enemies which _can't_ mez for a change?
Etc.
Unfortunately, it ruins the experience for everyone else too.
E.g., a lot of grouping before in COH had been for xp. Let's not pretend we're just a more social bunch and need to go even to the toilet in groups. The game just gave a bigger group xp bonus than, say, WoW does, so people grouped.
But then suddenly farming AE missions came and offered much higher xp than anything else. You can see where that's going.
I pretty much gave up on playing my defenders (support chars, for whoever isn't a COH player) because the chances of being invited to anything else than yet another AE farming session became almost nill.
Even on other characters it's a rare day when you find a non-farming group and it doesn't degenerate into "why don't we go farm AE missions instead? They're more xp." And then into "screw this, guys, I need xp" if you don't want to go farming.
E.g., you can see the effects on the auction house. Certain kinds of common drops (especially in the pre-50 ranges everyone skipped) became rare because nobody does those enemies any more.
I know the above has become a popular argument to make on Slashdot in any topic, but in COH's case, as someone who's played it from launch, I can tell you that your faith is misplaced. Yes, COH actually has a long history at implementing stuff without thinking, and then being suprised when they discover how it can be (ab)used.
From day zero there had been such "exploits" (read: just doing what the system allowed) as the smoke grenade that could floor the enemy's to-hit, or the Hasten which could end up stacking with itself. Let me explain the latter because it's a case where, yes, 2 minutes and some basic arithmetic could have foretold it.
"Hasten" was supposed to be a situational power, which for a while made all your attacks recharge much faster. But it wasn't supposed to be permanent. But the darndest thing is: nobody seems to have actually tested what happens when you put six Single-Origin recharge reducers in it, a perfectly valid scenario allowed by the game. In fact, it was possible to make it permanent (recharge time equalled the time its effect stayed up) with only _two_ Single-Origins. Anything more would cause it to recharge faster than it stays up, so you could even have it stack with itself.
Statesman seemed genuinely surprised that this is possible. Nobody did the maths there, and we're talking simple arithmetic and standard "equipment" available at level 22. We're not talking some arcane combination of bonuses or epic equipment being off the chart, but the bog standard stuff bought from the vendor at level 22.
Eventually he agreed to let players have it permanently on, but said that then you'd need a full 6 SOs for that. Something he'd later turn around and present as an exploint in the ED.
The ED itself screwed up power sets like, say, defense because it was an across-the-board change to everyone without any thought about how it affects any particular build, nor any attempt to balance it. It took more than a year to fix the screw-ups introduced by the ED patch.
But to get to the present, just look at some patch notes about architect missions. E.g., one says that now all the melee sets for custom enemies have at least one ranged attack too. Aha. So they launched it without foreseeing that critters with no ranged attack, can be bombed with impunity by anyone who took Hover or Fly? In a game where half the people can fly, nobody foresaw that?
So, you tell me. How come in all their thinking and meetings and all, nobody foresaw something as elementary as that exploit?
Because from where I stand, it looks to me like, yes, sometimes they don't even try.
Coming up next: the Pope's guide to good sex and the Dalai Lama's tips on cooking meat.
Actually, I'll call bull on that. There is no such thing as some free-floating rights that exist by themselves and they're not self-evident at all. All those rights are basically a contract between the members of society.
Basically "right to life" for example just means, in a nutshell, I don't want to be killed, you don't want to be killed, so we make a truce that we won't kill each other. That's it, really.
A lot have to do with basically just a list of abuses that those in power did before. And at some point the barons got together, took up arms and made the king write "I will not sentence people without a jury" on the blackboard 100 times... err... wrong movie. Made him sign the Magna Carta, which was really just a list of stuff that everyone was sick and tired of having done to them.
Most of that stuff isn't self-evident at all, and humanity needed literally thousands of years to figure out that they have this or that right. Some is actually from the Romans or Greeks, the result of hundreds of years of struggle between factions or social groups. (E.g., first between Patricians and a horrible Etruscan king, and then between those of Patrician and Plebeian descent.) And they needed a long time to be figured out, they didn't just spring out already self-evident and inalienable.
Some weren't evident even to the Romans at any point. E.g., there was no freedom of religion, nor separation between church and state. Indeed a big argument for more power to the patricians was that supposedly the gods will be pissed off if a lowly plebeian conducts the sacred rites that the consuls (think: president and vice president) had to perform. Yes, that's right: the head of state _had_ to conduct certain religious rituals, and that applied to many other top-level jobs in the republic. Which from the start put limits on what religion you should practice to fit that job. And if you were, say, in the army, you had a list of approved gods that you could worship. Want to be a follower of Moses for example? Not in the Roman army.
Some weren't even clear at the time of drafting the Magna Carta. E.g., it took a _lot_ of religious warfare and millions dead over exactly what flavour of Jesus is the right one, before a bunch of people figured out, basically, "you know, we could all get along better if we stopped trying to shove our personal religion down somebody else's throat." But even that wasn't self-evident to everybody, and to a lot of people it still isn't. Oh, they very much like it when you don't shove your religion down their throats, but they'd very much like to be allowed to shove theirs down your throat. I dare say that even at the time when the founding fathers drafted that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" amendment, most of the colonists would still have found it unthinkable if you told them they can't run you out of town -- or in some cases hang you -- for believing in the wrong flavour of Jesus.
Trial by your peers? A mere hundred years before the Magna Carta -- and in many places in the world even centuries _after_ it -- the barons would have more likely fought for the sacred, self-evident and inalienable right (and divine too!) to dispense their own arbitrary justice on their own lands. You know, with the baron being judge, jury and executioner. Ok, employer of the executioner.
So it's all just a contract. And you have exactly as many as you write in that contract. If it's not listed there, you don't have it. If you want more, or new developments create more ways in which you can be shafted, you have to add a bit to the list.
Except that such "it would work, if we all did X" solutions generally tend to not work. They're sorta like a prisoner's dilemma with a couple hundred million people.
And the problem gets only worse when there are some people with the means and _incentive_ to manipulate the others into a frenzy, and create a mass psychosis about something that until yesterday wasn't even a problem. Suddenly from at most "hey, that neighbour kid sure could use a bit more sunlight" it turns into "auugh, such people will murder my kid! The nice man on TV told me so!" It's hard to keep seeing it as everyone minding their own business, when it gets presented as that someone else won't mind theirs and might even kill you and your family. (And if you're the ignorant and gullible sort, of course.)
It's something that we really don't have safeguards against. The free press was supposed to balance the government, but lately it's only in as much occasionally a scary lie cancels out the opposite scary lie. But both have something to gain from creating a new scare where there used to be none. And sometimes those invented scares just support each other, instead of cancelling each other out.
To not pick on the USA for a change, and to illustrate that the rest of the world does the same (and a good thing to think about, when it comes to the war on drugs too, incidentally), take the criminalization of absynthe. A couple of alarmist tabloids in France, waay back then, rand whole weeks of horror stories in which they hammered on the idea that absynthe is some dangerous drug and turns people into raving murderers.
They only had a couple of coincidences, actually, where some murderer was also known to be an absynthe drinker. A couple more were spun into maybe also having been absynthe drinkers, but nobody had any proof or anything. But a media scare was manufactured anyway, and some scared ignorant people fully supported criminalizing it. Which the parliament promptly did.
What also didn't help absynthe's case was the bunch of pretentious artist types -- make no mistake, including some very famous and very talented ones -- who swore that absynthe has some consciousness altering abilities, and lets them see reality in ways they couldn't possibly see otherwise. What the press lacked in actual examples of people actually turning murderous on absynthe, it had in testimonies by all these artists about the psychoactive effects of absynthe. It was hard to make the case that none of those people who swear their reality perception is altered radically by it, could possibly have it altered in a way that makes them dangerous. I mean, sure, these artists just proceeded to write dadaits or surrealist plays on absynthe, but who knows what a more base and brutal person would do?
In reality, when they finally tested that stuff in a proper fashion, it turns out that the _only_ psychoactive substance absynthe turns out to be the alcohol. Wormwood doesn't really do jack squat. And certainly not in the quantities you'd possibly get before getting in an alcohol coma from the alcohol in that absynthe. Both those who saw in it some murderer-maker _and_ those who swore that it lets them see reality in various altered-consciousness way, were simply deluded. Neither the murderers nor the artists had been any more altered-consciousness on absynthe than they'd have been on a bottle of Vodka or even on enough beer.
It was one of those chapters that would have been worthy of a chapter in MacKay's book, if it hadn't been more than half a century after that book. People were pretending to have all sorts of altered consciousness effects on absynthe, just because it was fashionable for a proper artist type to say that he does. An Emperor's New Clothes situation, if you will. Or like proper audiophiles convince even themselves that they actually hear different bass over a $500 network cable (digital!!!) or with a wooden volume knob. Back then it was that if you're the creative type, you're supposed to rant at length about how you got all these revel
Reading that synopsis of that movie, that sounds like pretty much the worst possible idea.
See, _male_ chimps are even worse even if you treat them nicely. Eventually they get ideas that they want to be the alpha, _especially_ against women. And if the signs aren't properly understood and the proper chimp submission signals given, they _will_ escalate it to some rather nasty violence. Bear in mind that even against a submissive chimp female, the chimps can be violent at times. Against one who doesn't accept the proper hierarchy? Ooer.
Sorta like how male dogs start giving signs that they want to challenge you for alpha around two years of age. Except against most dogs you have the size advantage, so they generally don't push it too far. Plus, with dogs you can do tricks like grabbing their throat and pinning them to the ground, which is accepted by dog standards to be the "I win because I could tear your throat off now if I wanted to" situation. (With another dog it would be a pair of jaws around the throat, not a hand.) With a chimp they have the strength advantage and the brains to know it, and if you're in range to reach for his throat, so is he for your throat. And, really, their conflicts and challenges are solved only by beating or intimidating the other into submission anyway.
Now maybe with a bonobo you could get along better. Those guys don't sound like they'd resort to violence if they're well fed and generally if they don't have to fight for limited resources. And they like to solve almost any social situation via sex (heck, even as a greeting), so the plot would sound sorta believable if you're willing to not think much about it. But the movie sounds like it has a common chimp, and with those a chimp-and-lone-woman scenario is a recipe for grievous injury in the long run.
On the other hand, humans have huge genitals compared to any other primate I know of. So that women (of any race) would actually want an ape as a lover (except maybe as part of some severe schizophrenia), that's IMHO very unlikely. I may rant against the obsession with huge penises that some people have, but ridiculously undersized is a whole other dish altogether, and that's really what you'd get from an ape. I'm only saying that as a way of saying: no, I don't expect that HIV was propagated via some endemic male-chimp-on-female-human scenarios either.
I know you're probably saying that as a hyperbole, but sometimes I do kinda wonder.
Way I see it, any working democracy nowadays has the politicians and some non-elected body to fix the politicians' deliberate self-promoting screw-ups. In some countries (e.g., the USA) it's the judges. In some (e.g., the UK) there are some non-elected lords who get to say "that's stupid and unconstitutional, screw that."
Seriously, you'd expect the aristocracy to be the self-serving self-centered barstards, and the politicians to represent the common man. But the way it seems to work entirely too often is that the politicians pull some populist stunt as a law, and then keep their fingers crossed that the non-elected guys have the balls to strike it down. I'm thinking just of the slew of recent "think of the children" laws (saving them even from non-threats like video games) that seem to crop up everywhere before elections.
Except sometimes the non-elected guys don't intervene, or nobody challenges it all the way to the apropriate level to strike it down, and the rest of the country is saddled with the stupidity its politicians wrought. And even in the best case scenario, often it can take several years before its escalated to the point where it can be removed.
Now I'm not entirely deluded. I know how totalitarian regimes historically were worse, and why some people shed blood to get, say, the Magna Carta signed by the king.
But I still wonder. It seems to me like at the very least for each two evils we avoided via democracy, we introduce a new one _because_ of the way modern democracies work.
I'm not sure what a better system would look like, but sometimes I wish someone would invent it already.
Well, if a guy takes a chimp girl to a restaurant and a movie, maybe a little dancing too, and she puts out afterwards, who am I to say it's wrong? Well, as long as they're consenting adults, anyway. If it's an underage chimp or he slips her a roofie, that's just sick ;)
Well, sorta. I generally see your point, but that was one of the reasons why I chose porn to illustrate my point. It actually was there for a bit more reason than "hur hur, I like porn" factor.
The people we actually choose for our relationships, yeah, there's a lot more at work there than merely what's considered attractive. There are considerations about security, compatibility, even bragging rights, etc, who could push one to pick a partner even if otherwise it wouldn't be their first pick. For example, in addition to what you already mention, just look at who was trying to get whom in high school. There are a lot of status-symbol girlfriends and status-symbol boyfriends, chosen more for bragging right value than for anything even vaguely resembling compatibility or natural attraction. E.g., some guy who otherwise might prefer more natural proportions, might try to bag the Barbie-type cheerleader just to show that he can. And viceversa, make no mistake, a lot of women try to bag the top jock just because he's a rare commodity, not because they actually get along.
I'm using porn because that's something that people actually choose to get off to, and because it has virtually no bragging-rights value for most people. Your average guy wouldn't advertise being a wanker, nor build his claims to greatness on masturbating to an older instead of a younger model, or viceversa. There is not much pressure or social norm about what genre of porn he should be wanking to (in fact, the social norm tends to be "all of it is bad"), so he's free to choose whatever he alone likes the most. If some people actually pay to get off to pictures of old or obese women, well, I'm guessing that there's a genuine turn-on factor there. For them. For whatever reason. And, again, _some_ people must be paying for that stuff.
Ok, then here's the most beautiful woman ever. Mona Lisa or Helen Of Troy have nothing on her:
[O_O]
I'm sure you can't get a face in much less details than that, so it should be beautiful, right?
That said, I'm also pretty sure that it must be a little more than that. I'm not convinced for example that the face of an obese woman would have to have any more lines than that of a thin woman. So it should be beautiful, right? Well, she wouldn't find many boyfriends in today's culture.
That is, of course, a possibility.
My own _guess_ would be more along the lines of: See, they too thought that some foreigners have huge dicks. It seems to me like that's a constant human complex. There's always someone, some tribesman somewhere who's got a 3 ft long dick and is gonna steal your women. We make such generalizations about blacks today. But funnily enough some blacks, at their first encounter with europeans, thought that the europeans had such long dicks that they wrap them around their waist. And the Greeks thought that the uncivilized germanic and celtic barbarians up north have, you guessed, huge dicks.
In a way, it's funny. The Greeks (who probably averaged the same approx 6 inches as the rest of the species) thought that the northern europeans have huge phaluses. And now the descendants of those northern europeans, people who in all likeness aren't hung any worse than those barbarians who complexed the Greeks, are in turn complexed and think that some other uncout tribe down the line have giant dicks. How the history repeats itself...
Except the Greeks apparently chose to go the other way around about it. (At least officially.) Pretty much, "ok, we're proud to be Greeks instead of barbarians, with all that that means." If the barbarians were thought to have huge dicks, then by Zeus the Greeks were proud that theirs are smaller. 'Cause that makes them proper Greeks instead of barbarians.
Point taken, but that's orthogonal to what I was really trying to say. The point isn't whether that biceps would make someone less horny for hot chimp booty, but whether you could survive trying to rape that chimp. They'd use those strong arms to inflict some hideous blows or can even tear you apart, if they wanted to. Plus, we're talking a species intelligent enough to use tools. Any item that can be swung around like a club, a chimp can actually use it like that. They use rocks, branches or even sharpened sticks routinely in their own habitat too. Unless you try to rape that chimp in a padded room, they can brain you with a chair, umbrella, branch, or a few other things that your human mind wouldn't even register as a potential weapon. And again, they'll have some mighty arm muscles and length (for momentum) to put some serious strength behind such a blunt impact.
I know it's all the rage nowadays to troll in the name of racism and stuff, but at least you could try to use your brain first. At all. Propaganda doesn't work well if it's that incredibly stupid and unbelievable, you know?
1. Raping a chimp is a horribly bad idea. They are fast, have incredible upper body strength (they use their arms for locomotion, you don't), good reach with those arms, and don't have hangups about killing a human in self-defense. (You're not even the same species, so their mirror neurons won't even fire to prevent deadly injury.)
Briefly, it's only one notch less dangerous than trying to rape a tiger.
So the thought of an african raping one... damn, if they could do something like that, I'm starting to have serious respect for them.
2. The virus can actually be transmitted by _any_ kind of contact between infected blood/flesh/membranes and mucous membranes or unprotected flesh. E.g., probably more humans got infected with AIDS from reusing syringes, than from actual sex. Also, roll it a bit in your head that oral sex can also get you infected with AIDS: the virus _can_ enter your blood stream through the mouth.
What I'm getting at is that eating that meat raw (including smoked, as salami, etc) can get enough viruses in your mouth to run the risk of infection. It won't happen every time, but get a few million people doing it regularly, and someone will hit the jackpot.
Also, look at that "unprotected flesh" bit. Simply cutting yourself while preparing infected meat, can get _any_ infection into your bloodstream. That's in fact one risk that surgeons face every day: if you cut yourself while operating on someone with an infection, you can get infected too. (As a bit of trivia: doctors finally started washing their hands only after one operated after having dissected a corpse, and managed to kill himself by septic shock too, not just his patient.)
Nah, she's ugly.
So, in a fundamentally subjective matter, you presume to tell people that their own perception is wrong? I'm used to this kind of crap coming from game fanboys, but it's a new twist to actually see it applied to something as _blatantly_ subjective as physical beauty.
If a woman X is attracted to man Y, that's it. That's by definition "attractive". He's attractive... for her. Hint: notice the common word root in there.
Who the fuckk do you think you _are_ to tell her that, in something that's 100% personal perception, her perception is wrong?
And yes, it's 100% subjective. Some people like older women. In fact, for some, it's a major turn on. There's a whole genre of porn about 70+ year old women. (So, yes, to answer that objection, that's one case he actually might like her more after 40 years of marriage.)
Some people like women who are anything between a bit overweight, to outright obese. Again, check out some of the BBW porn out there, and some looks like they filmed a vaguely humanoid blob of fat. Someone pays to watch those, you know?
Some people like huge breasts. Some actually like them small. And I won't just use porn this time, but look at the ideal of female beauty of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Look at all those sculptures that are barely A cup. Presumably because it represented a young woman who hasn't had children yet. (Ditto about the huge penis obsession recently, BTW: the greeks considered a perfect penis to be rather small, and they actually exaggerated in that direction in a lot of their statues. Huge phaluses were considered something the barbarians have.) To get back to breasts, the romans are sometimes credited with inventing the bra, but that's misleading. What actually got into fashion there wasn't some padded wonderbra, but just a strip of cloth tied over the breasts to press them down, so she looks like she has smaller breasts than she actually has.
A lot of people people like redheads, and especially in places where there aren't that many born naturally that way. But in the UK where they have the highest percentage of them, a lot of people aren't turned on by that mutation at all, and the term "ginger" is used as an insult.
Etc. It's really that subjective.
Maybe his wife wouldn't be "deeply beautiful" to you, but how do you know it isn't for him? Oh, right, you presume to tell someone that his tastes are wrong and yours are some kind of platinum standard for all humanity. Carry on.