Re:It gives you something just as bad...
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Review: Spore
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Apparently you haven't been paying close enough attention. All those downloadable content packs, and other micropayment things are busily tying your games to your console and/or your account. You can't separate them, or resell them, or lend them to your friends.
In the case of the Wii for example, if you buy a downloadable and your wii dies and you use N's repair service they'll transfer all your rights and games to the new wii. But if it just dies out of warranty and you've got the games backed up on an SD card, and you buy a used wii cheap from one of those PS3 fanbois who proclaim all theirs does is collect dust, you can't use those games, etc. Console DRM is fast becoming more than just 'dont make copies of our games' to 'you are licensed to use this game, and no one else is, you can't transfer it or sell it, and if your hardware dies you better hope we still care.'
I'm not entirely sure what the restrictions are on the PS3 or Xbox360, but you can bet your ass they are there too in some form or other.
Hey! You GOT it. You use the word influence as if it means "cause" and that's totally fucked up. They are two entirely different meanings but you insist in conflating the two.
Look up influence in the dictionary some time. Face it. Using 'influence' is defined in terms of how it 'causes' others to change or make changes. Using influence is also illegal in many circumstances because it can be an 'overriding force'.
I have waiting and waiting for you to run out of other excuses and finally end up at the end of the road which is "fire in a theater". Now that you are here, we can agree on one thing. You got here because every other defense of censorship you've tried were losers.
Nope. I used it because its a classic and can be summed up in a single line.
Kiddie porn works just fine too provide its framed in a context where its reasonably influencing people to abuse children. For example running a website dedicated to sharing kiddie porn, perhaps with a moderation system offering members status like 'excellent' or for contributing the best stuff or contributing the most frequently.
Now, here's why fire in a theater is not a free speech issue. It is because it is ALSO a threat, just like pointing a gun at someone is a threat.
Oooo. A 'threat'. A site advocating and compelling its members to sexually abuse kids is a 'threat' too, to the children within 'reach' of the sites visitors.
A guy standing on the corner pointing at me calling me a nigger, using his influence to turn my neighbors against me claiming I'm some sort of sub-human monster that will probably rape their wives, using his influence to turn potential employers away from hiring me reducing my prospects to raise a family or sleep peaceably at night. I don't call that merely a 'threat'. I call that causing measurable harm.
it might help if you keep in mind that pointing a gun at someone is not speech at all, thus the concept of a threat is distinct from speech
More semantics. So now you are saying speech is only curtailed when its a threat? a threat of causing harm? Great. So kiddie porn, if the people perceive it to be a threat to cause harm, should be illegal. And we're right back where we started, and you obviously agree with me. I'm glad.
Re:Are Quests in MMOGs doable?
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Quests
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The problem of low-level or casual players not being able to attain the really big items can easily be compensated for by creating quests for them that are related to it, quests with their own unique (or semi-unique) rewards.
Easily be compensated? Don't be ridiculous. The problem is that you can't easily create anything unique. The entire point of games in terms of economics (ALL GAMES) not just MMOGs, is that you develop a small amount of content to be played hopefully by several hundred thousand or million players.
To give casual players quests with their own unique or semi-unique rewards would turn that upside down... you'd be writing quests and designing items with the intention that only single or at least a small fraction of the players could use it. Since a given player will only play a small fraction of the quests you have to develop 10s of thousands of quests. Meanwhile the cost to develop your game goes WAY up, while players are PISSed because the quests they had available to them weren't as good as what their fellow players had.
but I could envision a game where a half-dozen high-level guilds all fight to collect a set of relics that will . Those guilds could sponsor, hire, or intimidate other, smaller guilds into fighting proxy wars and doing various other things for them.
Oh whee how fun for the casual player that would be! Lets log in and be some one eleses bitch. Lets mule their stuff around, and become their grunts and their farmers. Yeah that's real fulfilling and fun. I know I can't wait to farm 1000 units of tin and 2000 orc scalps and 4000 small stones so that your 'top' guild can build a catapult in its pointless never ending dick waving contest against some other 'top' guild.
I hate to burst your bubble, but nobody wants to play THAT game except the people at the top, the people who think they can get to the top, and the lunatic fringe whose dream in these games is to run a flower shop, or be a tailor.
Most "casuals" are exactly like hard core players except for the time invested per week. They want the good items, they want to see the end game. They are frustrated that the progress is stupidly slow (which is designed to keep hard core players from racing through it. They are frustrated that the end-game is blocked to them because you simply have to start scheduling life around the game to participate in raids, and they simply won't or can't do that. But its what they WANT.
What would casual players REALLY want from an MMO? That the hardcore players somehow weren't in it.
That way they would be able to be in the top guilds. They would be able to make discoveries. The designers could remove the most egregious of time-sinks because the casuals aren't going to race through it anyway. The designers could do the end game so that it could be played by pick-up groups instead of scheduled guild raids. That they'd get their money's worth since they weren't subsidizing piles of content they'll never be able to see and subsizing the bandwidth hardcore players use.
I'm not sure HOW to best accomplish this, but that's what casual players really want. They want to play in a world DESIGNED to let them play as casuals, competing and adventuring with other casuals.
Nobody really wants to be a casual in a hard core game, and suggesting that a hard core game would be 'teh awesome' for casuals if the hard core players could sponsor and intimidate them into doing their menial shit represents a complete and total failure to 'get it'.
Influence is one thing, action is entirely seperate. As long as you believe that anything more than one's own brain is responsible for one's actions, then you not only don't believe in free speech, you believe in fascism because that's the only logical way to run a society where people are not responsible for their actions.
Your point is what exactly? If you want to phrase it as 'society censors certain types of speech to prevent it from "influencing" people towards making a choice to do something society abhors' instead of 'society censors certain types of speech to prevent it from "causing" people to make a choice to do something society abhors'... well... to me that is pointless semantics.
So if you yell fire in a theatre. You didn't 'cause' a stampede that gets people trampled and killed. Each individual in the audience chose for themselves not only to believe you, but also to exit in an disorderly fashion. Therefore the person yelling "fire" isn't and shouldn't be personally responsible for causing any harm at all, is that what you are saying?
Society disagrees with you.
You sure don't know many fundamentalists, do you? The most extreme of the fundamentalists are not the ones who were "raised that way" - its the recently converted.
I didn't say "most extreme of the fundamentalists" I just said fundamentalists. As in the majority of the people who live in the Bible-belt. Most of them are not "recently converted".
Hate speech does not CAUSE physical action. The will of the individual is what causes physical action. You know personal responsibility, the right of self determination. Your argument is the equivalent of denying the existence of free will,...
That's quite a stretch about denying the existence of free will.
You can have free will and still be influenced the world around you.
If you decide to haul off and take a swing at me, that's 'free will' right? The fact that I just broke one of your kneecaps didn't CAUSE you to do anything. It was your choice. You know personal responsibility and the right of self determination and all that.
Now, if instead of breaking your kneeaps I show you a recording of me raping your family and breaking their kneecaps, hey, I didn't cause anything... if you lose your cool and take a swing at me, it was your choice. Should I bear any responsibility for inciting your violent outburst?
What if the recording was faked? I just photoshopped your family into it? Hey, I thought I was being 'artistic' and 'clever', and besides I apparently think your asshole. Do I bear any responsibility for inciting your little outburst now?
Speech IS physical action, as much as any other physical action you can make.
A fundamentalist christian didn't really choose to be one, not really, not in any meaningful sense. That is how they were raised. They were taught not to question, and they don't. Same goes for fundamentalist followers of Islam. And I suspect most people who tried Pepsi-Blue wouldn't have done it without the massive advertising Pepsi did on its behalf.
Bottom line: People can have free will, and still be HEAVILY influenced by the speech around them.
Threating to kill someone isn't covered by the first amendment right to free speech. Neither is making terroristic threats. If you did the things you describe, you would be committing various crimes and opening yourself up to civil penalties should the target of your assaults choose to sue.
They are still limitations on your right to express yourself. Society does not value all the things you can say equally, and places limits on some of them.
Using racist langugage, advocating for different age of consent, or engaging in other protected forms of speech are not the equivalent of the actions you described.
You, like so many posters, are choosing to misrepresent what I said.
I never said merely 'using rascist language' should be censored. I did not say advocating a different age of consent should be censored. You saying I said those things doesn't make it so.
If it were up to me I would have said something like 'dressing up in pointy white hats congregating in front of someones house and burning images of local residents while chanting racist slurs' should be censored. To me, the latter satisfies the "fire in a crowded theatre" test for harm, and I really have no problem curtailing their right to do that.
Try again though please. Perhaps you should focus even more tightly then before on how we should just think of the children, that seems to be working like gangbusters for you so far.
The point of invoking that meme was because, like or not, the people who 'just think of the children' outnumber you (and I, despite your desperate desire to lump me in with them) a million to one. And because of that, they always get their way. No court can stand up to a majority like that. They'll just rewrite the laws, or amend the constitution itself.
You truly believe hearing something that you find offensive is harmful enough to warrant restraining free speech? Your ignorance astounds me. There is a HUGE difference between yelling "FIRE" in a crowded theater and yelling "FUCK BUSH" in a crowded theater: one endangers lives, one only causes unpleasant sensations that cannot be independently measured.
When did I ever so much as hint that there would ever be a situation where I thought yelling "fuck bush" would qualify as speech deserving of censorship? That's seriously misrepresenting my position here.
"Emotional harm" is not a sufficient justification to infringe on free speech. Grow a spine and realize that your "right" not to be offended doesn't trump my right to speak my mind. If you don't like what I'm saying then start shouting an opposing point of view or walk away. Don't whine about "emotional harm" and try to censor me.
I'm sure you wouldn't mind if I followed you around, taunting you, calling you at work, leaving threatening messages, drawing pictures of your family getting murdered and raped and leaving them where you can see them, issuing anonymous police reports that I saw child porn on your laptop. Following your 6 year old daughter around telling her I'm going to kill her mommy and daddy, and putting bestial and necrotic pornography with your head photo shopped onto the models on the side of my van parked on your street.
Grow a spine. If you and your family doesn't like it than start shouting an opposing point of view or walk away. I'll just shout louder though and I'll be here when you get back. And I won't stop.
If you don't like it, maybe you shouldn't leave your house.
Or maybe, just maybe, you should have the right to live in peace. You shouldn't have to spend your whole life locked up in your home, or shouting at the top of your lungs whenever you do go outside.
Censorship is bad. But using your freedom of speech to harass someone or some group is bad too.
No it does not, and to claim otherwise is to make a false analogy, just watch as you do it:
Yes it does.
Hate speech fosters hate crime; it recruits the disenfranchised, and gives them a target.
Following people around threatening them deprives them of their sense of security and peace of mind and makes it impossible for them to live their lives.
Making false claims about what the snake oil I sell does and what its contents are can lead to people choose to use it, and suffering horribly.
et cetera
You should rape children. GO! Do it now! You will really like it!
Clearly your purpose with that expression was to make your argument, you obviously aren't really advocating it. Furthermore your argument has social value, and should be protected.
Harm is not caused by speech. Harm is caused by physical action.
Your point? Speech causes physical action which causes harm. If stopping the speech is not harmful itself and will prevent harm, then stopping the speech is good.
People like you who falsely claim to believe in freedom of expression are just conflating the two because, like all censorship, it is easier to identify and squelch speech about harmful actions than it is to identify and stop individuals who actually commit those actions and cause actual harm.
That's rather the point. Its easier to wash your hands after using a bathroom than to cure the diseases you might get if you don't. That's precisely why we advocate hand-washing.
You get the warm fuzzy of appearing to do something about a problem with high emotional content without all the cost of actually making a real difference.
When judging an action its intention is more important than its outcome. Its better to try to make a difference for the better and fail, than not to try at all.
The failure in our society is not that we pass ineffective laws with good intentions, its that we have no mechanism for un-passing laws that aren't effective, and very few metrics to assess the effectiveness of laws.
By the way, bonus points for using "But think of the children!" as your example. I can't think of another meme that has been so widely abused to justify censorship with such little actual reduction in harm.
That's why I chose it. Society en masse is quite comfortable with erring on the side of caution in that particular case, and I readily concede that it hasn't done nearly as much good as the effort taken would suggest. But the real question you have to answer is what real harm has been caused by it?
Nobody wants to censor talk about mom and apple pie. The right of free speech only matters when it comes down to speech that somebody finds offensive.
Right.
If you aren't willing to defend the freedom to speak about stuff you find offensive, then you didn't ever really believe in free speech to begin with.
Bullshit. Freedom of expression is just one universal human right, and like anything, when it its in competition with other universal rights a balance is struck that effectively curtails it.
The right to free expression conflicts with the right to be free from harm. If your expression is causing harm then perhaps your expression should be curtailed.
The fact that most people accept a limit to free speech doesn't mean they "don't really believe in it", rather it means that they aren't single minded idiots that can't hold two thoughts inside their head at the same time. It means they can see the conflict between the ideal of free expression and the ideal of avoiding harm and have struck a personal balance, such that the imperative of protecting free speech becomes progressively weaker as we become increasingly in conflict with the principle of avoiding harm.
In other words, at some stage up around advocating the raping of children most normal people find that DESPITE believing in free speech, they are uncomfortable with the harm they perceive it to be causing, particularly when they perceive that its PURPOSE is to cause harm and has no value beyond that, and perhaps they even perceive that they are being MANIPULATED into providing protection for that harm by the perpetrator... why should we be critical that their resolve to protect that instance of speech has significantly been diminished, perhaps even to the point that they elect to curtail it?
I have never believed that sales necessarily equals quality.
But Nintendo is a business, and the Wii is a product released to make money, not meet some fuzzy ideological concept of what a perfect console should be.
Releasing a more powerful more expensive product would very likely have reduced its commercial success.
And Nintendo could have just taken a smaller profit on the systems (or even subsidized them a la Sony/MS).
Now why the hell would they want to do that?
I like the Wii, I just wish, for my own sake, it was technologically more advanced.
EXACTLY. For your sake.
But the reality is that if they'd built it like that it would have cost more and they likely would have been a commercial flop. The casual gamers that bought them in swarms would never have materialized, and it would be the PS3/Xbox running for the 'hardcore crown' with Wii trailing behind relying on its first party franchises -- e.g. the last generation all over again.
As it is my favorite genre of games (graphics-intensive 3d action/adventure) is severely underrepresented, partially because of this I think.
The moment you define your genre as 'graphics-intensive' I get a horrible feeling... is your favorite movie genre 'CGI-intensive'?;)
Seriously, yes the Wii being weaker than the PS3/360 has meant it doesn't make sense to do 3-way ports of the big PS3/360 titles.
But the Wii could easily handle games like Halo, Halo2, God of War, etc... but we aren't seeing many of those either. And the reason sadly is that there are a lot of people who are graphics snobs... if its not the latest shiny they aren't interested.
So even if there were piles of God of War class games on the Wii, these people wouldn't really be interested in them -- as they'd be 'inferior' to the 'new shiny' on the 360/PS3. I mean they used to slavor all over xbox 1 and PS2 stuff... and now you couldn't get them to play a PS2 game to save their lives.
To a real game God of War didn't become any less fun simply because the PS3 is on the market, but you'll find swarms of people would 'epic phail' God of War if it were released today.
Does anyone not use Google (for example) because of their privacy policy, or their use of beacons?
Yes. I don't avoid google entirely; their search engine is too useful, but I block their scripts, and don't use a single one of their services.
Ok ok... I do have a gmail account (along with other webmail accounts) that I use from time to time to confirm that an html newsletter I send (yes, to double-opt-in-subscribers) renders correctly, but that's it.
Good point. I probably wouldn't have thought of that even. It's just another reason why having mandatory second languages hurts companies and the consumer.
Lots of companies dealing in Canada don't have french support. Even many Canadian companies don't. Head over to to the West Coast (French is primarily spoken in Quebec eastwards, and dwindles the farther west you go.) By the time you reach Vancouver the odds of a small business having any one that speaks french above a pre-school level is pretty low.
Sure their products still have bilingual labels and instruction booklets and they'll happily ship them to Quebec, but that's about the extent of it, and its not expensive to have a translator write those for you. Point is, lots of Canadian websites and companies are english only.
Dell does have to provide french language manuals and labelling with their products which is a minor burden, but they do not have to provide french language support.
They offer french support not for regulatory reasons, but for competitive reasons, to appeal to french speaking Canadian, and also to make them eligible to sell to large Canadian enterprises and government entities that require bilingual support for practical reasons -- they want to buy computers from a company that provides support in the same languages that their employees speak.
Because Dell chooses to offer support in French, its in the interest of customer support simplicity to offer it consistently across all their products, not just some of them.
As evidenced by studies of foraging societies surviving into recent times, smaller bands conglomerate seasonally to groups of around a hundred individuals, and also raiding other bands for women has been observed in some.
100 individuals. Men, women, children, and the elderly (to the extent you could become elderly). Hardly a harem of a 100 fertile women.
Unless that culture has been around for at least hundreds of thousands of years, it has not resulted in any evolutionary impact, and is irrelevant to this context
You keep returning to the actual circumstances of human hunter gatherer tribes, and that's fine, but its missing the point. My original post was on the more abstract 'what reasons would promote monogamy in a hypothetical hunter gatherer tribe society', not necessarily the particular hunter gatherer society we descended from. I have no dispute with the premise that alpha male strategies were in effect and successful in our past, both ancient and recent.
However, its not hard to imagine a hypothetical situation where that would not be true.
Way to try to equate alpha with criminal and aggressor.
There was no try. Alphas are more aggressive. And violent criminals do tend to have more alpha personalities.
But that's not to say beta's can't be criminals too; you don't have to be an alpha to be a criminal.
Perhaps I should have clarified that sterilization be carried against 'criminals with a pattern of violent aggressive behavior'.
Defensive because of a feeling of inferiority?
Is this some sort of feeble attempt to exert dominance over me? Or are you just being a dick for no reason? Either way it reflects poorly on you and your arguments.
There is very little natural selection occurring in an industrialized human society, and eventually the effects of sexual selection will wane as well due to birth control, as noted. But there is no significant selective pressure to revert existing behaviors either...
Maybe. But consider that the wealthier and more successful you are the fewer children you have in our current industrialized societies (including wealthy alpha males doing dozens of successful women)... that suggests we are effectively selecting for traits that the 'breeders' have... not that you can select for 'lower class' and 'uneducated' and 'inability to use birth control effectively' but you can select for 'low focus' 'low drive for personal success' 'lower intelligence' and so forth...
Its not that 'successful people' don't reproduce, but that they reproduce less.
You don't HAVE to transmit in 1920x1080 mind you, but having that option would be good. Action games with a lot of things on screen could use a lower resolution, but static images and puzzle games could take advantage of the higher resolution.
Don't be absurd. If they'd done that they would have been crucified for it on every game that couldn't do it, and you know it. They resleased a console that was spec'd for non-HD, and its powerful enough for that.
I see very little difference graphics-wise between the Wii and the Dreamcast, and the Dreamcast is close to a decade old now.
Sure lets compare the strongest most expensive console from last generation that failed and nearly bankrupted Sega to the weakest and least expensive console from this one.
Sorry, the Wii's graphics are still markedly better, hands down, no contest. But I'll agree the Wii fits solidly in the space between the dreamcast and the PS3, which all things considered is exactly where one would expect it to sit.
I mean, if you're not going to do that why not just develop the wiimote for the gamecube?
Because then they would have sold 0.5 million remotes instead of 30 million consoles.
Everytime someone says Nintendo should have done the Wii differently, all one has to do is point back to the sales. They've sold 30+ Million of the things in under two years, and made profit on each of them.
Dreamcast sold 10M and nearly bankrupted. PS3 launched the same week as the Wii and has sold half the number of units, and has lost money hand over fist so far. Xbox360 launched a year in advance, lost billions, and Nintendo has already sold 3 Wii's for every 2 Xboxes.
Say what you will about how the Wii could have been "better", or what they could have done to make YOU like it more. But Nintendo's strategy was obviously a very good one. I'm sure they could have improved it, but I'm skeptical that simply throwing some more power at it and upping the price, and positioning it closer to the 360 and PS3 would have accomplished anything.
Well that's the problem, the hardware just isn't as fast as it should be. They should have gone with something faster and more powerful, and they definitely should have put in HDMI/DVI support.
Somethings gotta give.
If they'd put in Hidef support, on the existing CPU/GPU, the framerate would have sucked. You can't just pump 5x as many pixels by adding an HDMI connector.
So they would have had to significantly bump up the CPU/GPU just to deliver the same performance on HD.
And then you want more available CPU too? Well, we just bumped it up to keep up with HDMI, but all the extra horsepower is used up just keeping up with the HD.
So we have to bump it up again to give you some more horsepower to actually work with.
So now we need to quadruple the processing and video power, license hdmi, probably need to worry about cooling the damned thing now too. Something's gotta give...
Price.
So now instead of $279 its $399 at launch, and competing directly with the PS3, sales are significantly lower, and 4 out 5 users don't have an HDTV anyway. Oh and the hidef games cost mroe to develop too... so those go up in price too.
Epic fail.
For what its worth, I'd love a hi-def Wii too, and if they were launching NOW instead of 2 years ago, we'd probably have gotten one. But I think Nintendo made the right choice this 'generation'. Its obviously served them better than chasing the 360 and PS3 hardware. They are the ones that actually make money in this business.
I really don't understand that, given that the Xeons had full clock caches and weren't much faster, if at any faster, than the Pentium branded version of the same chip. The Pentium version had half-clock caches.
It wasn't that the 300A overclocked to 450MHz was much faster; it was only marginally faster. But at the time the PII450 was the 'top of line' desktop cpu, and the PII Xeon 450s were the 'top of line' period.
And a $110 Celeron 300A overclocked (by simply changing the FSB from 66 to 100MHz by moving a jumper on the motherboard) was in the same performance league, required no special heat sinks or anything.
And it wasn't just the same league, it actually eked out better scores vs a Pentium II 450 on some benchmarks... where the full speed small cache was a better fit to the benchmark than the larger but slower PII caches. And even the Xeon's were (barely) out matched in some cases... again, due to the L2 being on-die instead of off die.
But seeing a $5000 CPU beat out by a $110 'budget' CPU on -anything- even if only by a hair, was pretty nuts. (And an overclocked 300A could wipe the floor with a still-ridiculously-expensive Pentium II Xeon 400)
Typically at that time you could move a CPU one, maybe two 'models' up by over clocking it... take a Pentium 350 and get it up to 400 sort of thing... no big deal really, and not always entirely stable. Enthusiasts were the only people who took the effort and risked the damage and stability.
But now we had a case of intel's absolute cheapest CPUs rivalling its most expensive CPUs. Everyone got in on it... Mom&Pop whiteboxes were selling 300A based system explaining how to overclock them, some of them even did it for you...
Those Celery 300As (GREAT chips) had 128KB L2 cache. But it was nice and fast since it was on-die, a novelty at the time
And overclocked from 300MHz to 450MHz without blinking, and were actually faster than a PII450 as I recall, due to the cache being overclocked too on the 300A, but not on a real PII.
The 'fabled' northwest passage is a shipping route linking east to west, navigable by normal cargo carrying ships.
The northwest passage, which obviously existed since well before it was first crossed in 1906 by Amundsen, and still to this day, is a hazardous journey requiring an expedition and specialist ice breaker ships to cross.
Should enough ice melt that it actually becomes usable as a shipping route, then at least the 'fabled northwest passage' will be reality.
These numbers are ludicrous, and you clearly are unable to make a common sense order-of-magnitude estimate.
Watch march of the penguins sometime. The environment pretty much gaurantees 100% mortality if either parent fucks up on their responsibility. There are plenty of human examples of nearly as harsh a life... such as desert nomads or inuit.
But EVEN if it were 100-fold, it's still less effort for an alpha male to get 100 women in a year's time than help support a pregnant woman and then her and a child.
He has to get them all pregnant, not just copulate with them. Good luck getting 100 women pregnant in a single year. Hell, many hunter gatherer groups probably didn't have 100 suitably aged females available.
And it has nothing to do with culture; we're talking about ancient hunter-gatherer societies (though modern day alpha males are at least as "productive";
It has a great deal to do with 'culture' and the structure of the 'society'. just because they are 'ancient hunter-gatherer' types doesn't tell us the degree to which this sort of alpha male behaviour will be accepted by the group. Lions and Wolves for example are both 'hunter tribes' and both have alpha males, but the 'sleeping arrangements' are entirely different.
The AC already answered this nicely, and I'll add that obviously these "get-together's" don't work out because the alphas remain dominant to this day.
Maybe you haven't been paying attention:
We have court ordered paternity tests, child support laws, wage garnishment. I would consider this a case of the 'betas' have gotten together to force the alphas to commit resources to support their offspring.
Exactly who do you think it was that did that? The alphas? It was all part of their master plan to be coerced into paying for his abandoned offspring?
The legal system in general, from the courts to the police to the prisons clearly represents the 'beta' placing constraints on 'alpha dominance'. Sure the 'betas' haven't wiped them out, but they aren't even really trying to. If breeding out aggression were the point, their would be sterilization for convicted criminals, their offspring, and perhaps even their siblings.
Finally, "PUA" stuff is hardly 'alpha male' in any real sense; its more like learning interrogation techniques... reading body language, a bit of psychology, etc.
I know several that do dozens of women every year).
I do to. And a lot of them are little chickenshits when push comes to shove; hardly what I'd call 'dominant alpha males'.
I also know several that could do dozens of women every year, but don't. They have the same ability to read women and flirt etc; they can get almost whoever they want; but have no inclination to take advantage of it beyond securing the woman they want.
Finally alpha male behaviour as a strategy for procreation is doomed in societies with advanced birthcontrol, and a high percentage of women utilising it.
Its not at the point yet, but may well soon be as birth control prices drop, effectiveness increases, and utilisation increases, that to have any chance of having a child, it will need to be planned. 'Aplha male' strategies at that point will be entirely ineffective and vestigial. Not only will they have to attrack and seduce the woman, but will also have to convince her to choose to conceive.
Couple that with the legal framework that forces him to pay child support if she does have the child. I hardly see the alpha male 'sleep with everything that moves strategy' being particularly viable in the future.
without any sort of fluid movement the board still heats up really fast. I recommend either putting pumps in it or placing some fans in it to move the fluid around, even better if you can force the fluid through a radiator.
Hot water is less dense than cold water so it should rise, while cold liquid falls to take its place... and so some sort of natural cycle should take place shouldn't it?
As long as you are using a liquid where heating it makes it less dense this should work.
Granted that pumping it etc would keep it even cooler, but if it can be kept cool enough without it, not having to pump it would make it completely silent.
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Apparently you haven't been paying close enough attention. All those downloadable content packs, and other micropayment things are busily tying your games to your console and/or your account. You can't separate them, or resell them, or lend them to your friends.
In the case of the Wii for example, if you buy a downloadable and your wii dies and you use N's repair service they'll transfer all your rights and games to the new wii. But if it just dies out of warranty and you've got the games backed up on an SD card, and you buy a used wii cheap from one of those PS3 fanbois who proclaim all theirs does is collect dust, you can't use those games, etc. Console DRM is fast becoming more than just 'dont make copies of our games' to 'you are licensed to use this game, and no one else is, you can't transfer it or sell it, and if your hardware dies you better hope we still care.'
I'm not entirely sure what the restrictions are on the PS3 or Xbox360, but you can bet your ass they are there too in some form or other.
Hey! You GOT it. You use the word influence as if it means "cause" and that's totally fucked up. They are two entirely different meanings but you insist in conflating the two.
Look up influence in the dictionary some time. Face it. Using 'influence' is defined in terms of how it 'causes' others to change or make changes. Using influence is also illegal in many circumstances because it can be an 'overriding force'.
I have waiting and waiting for you to run out of other excuses and finally end up at the end of the road which is "fire in a theater". Now that you are here, we can agree on one thing. You got here because every other defense of censorship you've tried were losers.
Nope. I used it because its a classic and can be summed up in a single line.
Kiddie porn works just fine too provide its framed in a context where its reasonably influencing people to abuse children. For example running a website dedicated to sharing kiddie porn, perhaps with a moderation system offering members status like 'excellent' or for contributing the best stuff or contributing the most frequently.
Now, here's why fire in a theater is not a free speech issue. It is because it is ALSO a threat, just like pointing a gun at someone is a threat.
Oooo. A 'threat'. A site advocating and compelling its members to sexually abuse kids is a 'threat' too, to the children within 'reach' of the sites visitors.
A guy standing on the corner pointing at me calling me a nigger, using his influence to turn my neighbors against me claiming I'm some sort of sub-human monster that will probably rape their wives, using his influence to turn potential employers away from hiring me reducing my prospects to raise a family or sleep peaceably at night. I don't call that merely a 'threat'. I call that causing measurable harm.
it might help if you keep in mind that pointing a gun at someone is not speech at all, thus the concept of a threat is distinct from speech
More semantics. So now you are saying speech is only curtailed when its a threat? a threat of causing harm? Great. So kiddie porn, if the people perceive it to be a threat to cause harm, should be illegal. And we're right back where we started, and you obviously agree with me. I'm glad.
The problem of low-level or casual players not being able to attain the really big items can easily be compensated for by creating quests for them that are related to it, quests with their own unique (or semi-unique) rewards.
Easily be compensated? Don't be ridiculous. The problem is that you can't easily create anything unique. The entire point of games in terms of economics (ALL GAMES) not just MMOGs, is that you develop a small amount of content to be played hopefully by several hundred thousand or million players.
To give casual players quests with their own unique or semi-unique rewards would turn that upside down... you'd be writing quests and designing items with the intention that only single or at least a small fraction of the players could use it. Since a given player will only play a small fraction of the quests you have to develop 10s of thousands of quests. Meanwhile the cost to develop your game goes WAY up, while players are PISSed because the quests they had available to them weren't as good as what their fellow players had.
but I could envision a game where a half-dozen high-level guilds all fight to collect a set of relics that will . Those guilds could sponsor, hire, or intimidate other, smaller guilds into fighting proxy wars and doing various other things for them.
Oh whee how fun for the casual player that would be! Lets log in and be some one eleses bitch. Lets mule their stuff around, and become their grunts and their farmers. Yeah that's real fulfilling and fun. I know I can't wait to farm 1000 units of tin and 2000 orc scalps and 4000 small stones so that your 'top' guild can build a catapult in its pointless never ending dick waving contest against some other 'top' guild.
I hate to burst your bubble, but nobody wants to play THAT game except the people at the top, the people who think they can get to the top, and the lunatic fringe whose dream in these games is to run a flower shop, or be a tailor.
Most "casuals" are exactly like hard core players except for the time invested per week. They want the good items, they want to see the end game. They are frustrated that the progress is stupidly slow (which is designed to keep hard core players from racing through it. They are frustrated that the end-game is blocked to them because you simply have to start scheduling life around the game to participate in raids, and they simply won't or can't do that. But its what they WANT.
What would casual players REALLY want from an MMO? That the hardcore players somehow weren't in it.
That way they would be able to be in the top guilds. They would be able to make discoveries. The designers could remove the most egregious of time-sinks because the casuals aren't going to race through it anyway. The designers could do the end game so that it could be played by pick-up groups instead of scheduled guild raids. That they'd get their money's worth since they weren't subsidizing piles of content they'll never be able to see and subsizing the bandwidth hardcore players use.
I'm not sure HOW to best accomplish this, but that's what casual players really want. They want to play in a world DESIGNED to let them play as casuals, competing and adventuring with other casuals.
Nobody really wants to be a casual in a hard core game, and suggesting that a hard core game would be 'teh awesome' for casuals if the hard core players could sponsor and intimidate them into doing their menial shit represents a complete and total failure to 'get it'.
Influence is one thing, action is entirely seperate. As long as you believe that anything more than one's own brain is responsible for one's actions, then you not only don't believe in free speech, you believe in fascism because that's the only logical way to run a society where people are not responsible for their actions.
Your point is what exactly? If you want to phrase it as 'society censors certain types of speech to prevent it from "influencing" people towards making a choice to do something society abhors' instead of 'society censors certain types of speech to prevent it from "causing" people to make a choice to do something society abhors'... well... to me that is pointless semantics.
So if you yell fire in a theatre. You didn't 'cause' a stampede that gets people trampled and killed. Each individual in the audience chose for themselves not only to believe you, but also to exit in an disorderly fashion. Therefore the person yelling "fire" isn't and shouldn't be personally responsible for causing any harm at all, is that what you are saying?
Society disagrees with you.
You sure don't know many fundamentalists, do you? The most extreme of the fundamentalists are not the ones who were "raised that way" - its the recently converted.
I didn't say "most extreme of the fundamentalists" I just said fundamentalists. As in the majority of the people who live in the Bible-belt. Most of them are not "recently converted".
Hate speech does not CAUSE physical action. The will of the individual is what causes physical action. You know personal responsibility, the right of self determination. Your argument is the equivalent of denying the existence of free will, ...
That's quite a stretch about denying the existence of free will.
You can have free will and still be influenced the world around you.
If you decide to haul off and take a swing at me, that's 'free will' right? The fact that I just broke one of your kneecaps didn't CAUSE you to do anything. It was your choice. You know personal responsibility and the right of self determination and all that.
Now, if instead of breaking your kneeaps I show you a recording of me raping your family and breaking their kneecaps, hey, I didn't cause anything... if you lose your cool and take a swing at me, it was your choice. Should I bear any responsibility for inciting your violent outburst?
What if the recording was faked? I just photoshopped your family into it? Hey, I thought I was being 'artistic' and 'clever', and besides I apparently think your asshole. Do I bear any responsibility for inciting your little outburst now?
Speech IS physical action, as much as any other physical action you can make.
A fundamentalist christian didn't really choose to be one, not really, not in any meaningful sense. That is how they were raised. They were taught not to question, and they don't. Same goes for fundamentalist followers of Islam. And I suspect most people who tried Pepsi-Blue wouldn't have done it without the massive advertising Pepsi did on its behalf.
Bottom line: People can have free will, and still be HEAVILY influenced by the speech around them.
Threating to kill someone isn't covered by the first amendment right to free speech. Neither is making terroristic threats. If you did the things you describe, you would be committing various crimes and opening yourself up to civil penalties should the target of your assaults choose to sue.
They are still limitations on your right to express yourself. Society does not value all the things you can say equally, and places limits on some of them.
Using racist langugage, advocating for different age of consent, or engaging in other protected forms of speech are not the equivalent of the actions you described.
You, like so many posters, are choosing to misrepresent what I said.
I never said merely 'using rascist language' should be censored. I did not say advocating a different age of consent should be censored. You saying I said those things doesn't make it so.
If it were up to me I would have said something like 'dressing up in pointy white hats congregating in front of someones house and burning images of local residents while chanting racist slurs' should be censored. To me, the latter satisfies the "fire in a crowded theatre" test for harm, and I really have no problem curtailing their right to do that.
Try again though please. Perhaps you should focus even more tightly then before on how we should just think of the children, that seems to be working like gangbusters for you so far.
The point of invoking that meme was because, like or not, the people who 'just think of the children' outnumber you (and I, despite your desperate desire to lump me in with them) a million to one. And because of that, they always get their way. No court can stand up to a majority like that. They'll just rewrite the laws, or amend the constitution itself.
You truly believe hearing something that you find offensive is harmful enough to warrant restraining free speech? Your ignorance astounds me. There is a HUGE difference between yelling "FIRE" in a crowded theater and yelling "FUCK BUSH" in a crowded theater: one endangers lives, one only causes unpleasant sensations that cannot be independently measured.
When did I ever so much as hint that there would ever be a situation where I thought yelling "fuck bush" would qualify as speech deserving of censorship? That's seriously misrepresenting my position here.
Look up "Strawman". Your guilty of it.
"Emotional harm" is not a sufficient justification to infringe on free speech. Grow a spine and realize that your "right" not to be offended doesn't trump my right to speak my mind. If you don't like what I'm saying then start shouting an opposing point of view or walk away. Don't whine about "emotional harm" and try to censor me.
I'm sure you wouldn't mind if I followed you around, taunting you, calling you at work, leaving threatening messages, drawing pictures of your family getting murdered and raped and leaving them where you can see them, issuing anonymous police reports that I saw child porn on your laptop. Following your 6 year old daughter around telling her I'm going to kill her mommy and daddy, and putting bestial and necrotic pornography with your head photo shopped onto the models on the side of my van parked on your street.
Grow a spine. If you and your family doesn't like it than start shouting an opposing point of view or walk away. I'll just shout louder though and I'll be here when you get back. And I won't stop.
If you don't like it, maybe you shouldn't leave your house.
Or maybe, just maybe, you should have the right to live in peace. You shouldn't have to spend your whole life locked up in your home, or shouting at the top of your lungs whenever you do go outside.
Censorship is bad. But using your freedom of speech to harass someone or some group is bad too.
No it does not, and to claim otherwise is to make a false analogy, just watch as you do it:
Yes it does.
Hate speech fosters hate crime; it recruits the disenfranchised, and gives them a target.
Following people around threatening them deprives them of their sense of security and peace of mind and makes it impossible for them to live their lives.
Making false claims about what the snake oil I sell does and what its contents are can lead to people choose to use it, and suffering horribly.
et cetera
You should rape children. GO! Do it now! You will really like it!
Clearly your purpose with that expression was to make your argument, you obviously aren't really advocating it. Furthermore your argument has social value, and should be protected.
Harm is not caused by speech. Harm is caused by physical action.
Your point? Speech causes physical action which causes harm.
If stopping the speech is not harmful itself and will prevent harm, then stopping the speech is good.
People like you who falsely claim to believe in freedom of expression are just conflating the two because, like all censorship, it is easier to identify and squelch speech about harmful actions than it is to identify and stop individuals who actually commit those actions and cause actual harm.
That's rather the point. Its easier to wash your hands after using a bathroom than to cure the diseases you might get if you don't. That's precisely why we advocate hand-washing.
You get the warm fuzzy of appearing to do something about a problem with high emotional content without all the cost of actually making a real difference.
When judging an action its intention is more important than its outcome. Its better to try to make a difference for the better and fail, than not to try at all.
The failure in our society is not that we pass ineffective laws with good intentions, its that we have no mechanism for un-passing laws that aren't effective, and very few metrics to assess the effectiveness of laws.
By the way, bonus points for using "But think of the children!" as your example. I can't think of another meme that has been so widely abused to justify censorship with such little actual reduction in harm.
That's why I chose it. Society en masse is quite comfortable with erring on the side of caution in that particular case, and I readily concede that it hasn't done nearly as much good as the effort taken would suggest. But the real question you have to answer is what real harm has been caused by it?
It shouldn't.
Why shouldn't it?
Nobody wants to censor talk about mom and apple pie. The right of free speech only matters when it comes down to speech that somebody finds offensive.
Right.
If you aren't willing to defend the freedom to speak about stuff you find offensive, then you didn't ever really believe in free speech to begin with.
Bullshit. Freedom of expression is just one universal human right, and like anything, when it its in competition with other universal rights a balance is struck that effectively curtails it.
The right to free expression conflicts with the right to be free from harm. If your expression is causing harm then perhaps your expression should be curtailed.
The fact that most people accept a limit to free speech doesn't mean they "don't really believe in it", rather it means that they aren't single minded idiots that can't hold two thoughts inside their head at the same time. It means they can see the conflict between the ideal of free expression and the ideal of avoiding harm and have struck a personal balance, such that the imperative of protecting free speech becomes progressively weaker as we become increasingly in conflict with the principle of avoiding harm.
In other words, at some stage up around advocating the raping of children most normal people find that DESPITE believing in free speech, they are uncomfortable with the harm they perceive it to be causing, particularly when they perceive that its PURPOSE is to cause harm and has no value beyond that, and perhaps they even perceive that they are being MANIPULATED into providing protection for that harm by the perpetrator... why should we be critical that their resolve to protect that instance of speech has significantly been diminished, perhaps even to the point that they elect to curtail it?
This is the action of a sane and rational person.
WTF? You thought he was serious? Retard.
Perhpas the OP was referring to this...
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/03/0210220
I have never believed that sales necessarily equals quality.
But Nintendo is a business, and the Wii is a product released to make money, not meet some fuzzy ideological concept of what a perfect console should be.
Releasing a more powerful more expensive product would very likely have reduced its commercial success.
And Nintendo could have just taken a smaller profit on the systems (or even subsidized them a la Sony/MS).
Now why the hell would they want to do that?
I like the Wii, I just wish, for my own sake, it was technologically more advanced.
EXACTLY. For your sake.
But the reality is that if they'd built it like that it would have cost more and they likely would have been a commercial flop. The casual gamers that bought them in swarms would never have materialized, and it would be the PS3/Xbox running for the 'hardcore crown' with Wii trailing behind relying on its first party franchises -- e.g. the last generation all over again.
As it is my favorite genre of games (graphics-intensive 3d action/adventure) is severely underrepresented, partially because of this I think.
The moment you define your genre as 'graphics-intensive' I get a horrible feeling... is your favorite movie genre 'CGI-intensive'? ;)
Seriously, yes the Wii being weaker than the PS3/360 has meant it doesn't make sense to do 3-way ports of the big PS3/360 titles.
But the Wii could easily handle games like Halo, Halo2, God of War, etc... but we aren't seeing many of those either. And the reason sadly is that there are a lot of people who are graphics snobs... if its not the latest shiny they aren't interested.
So even if there were piles of God of War class games on the Wii, these people wouldn't really be interested in them -- as they'd be 'inferior' to the 'new shiny' on the 360/PS3. I mean they used to slavor all over xbox 1 and PS2 stuff... and now you couldn't get them to play a PS2 game to save their lives.
To a real game God of War didn't become any less fun simply because the PS3 is on the market, but you'll find swarms of people would 'epic phail' God of War if it were released today.
I suggest you check out:
http://www1.ca.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.aspx/linux_3x?c=ca&cs=cadhs1&l=fr&s=dhs
Its actually not even CLOSE to outselling the Wii over the last couple years. And the Wii is -still- somewhat supply constrained.
It is pretty neck and neck with the PS3 and Xbox though, even outselling them at times.
Does anyone not use Google (for example) because of their privacy policy, or their use of beacons?
Yes. I don't avoid google entirely; their search engine is too useful, but I block their scripts, and don't use a single one of their services.
Ok ok... I do have a gmail account (along with other webmail accounts) that I use from time to time to confirm that an html newsletter I send (yes, to double-opt-in-subscribers) renders correctly, but that's it.
Good point. I probably wouldn't have thought of that even. It's just another reason why having mandatory second languages hurts companies and the consumer.
Lots of companies dealing in Canada don't have french support. Even many Canadian companies don't. Head over to to the West Coast (French is primarily spoken in Quebec eastwards, and dwindles the farther west you go.) By the time you reach Vancouver the odds of a small business having any one that speaks french above a pre-school level is pretty low.
Sure their products still have bilingual labels and instruction booklets and they'll happily ship them to Quebec, but that's about the extent of it, and its not expensive to have a translator write those for you. Point is, lots of Canadian websites and companies are english only.
Dell does have to provide french language manuals and labelling with their products which is a minor burden, but they do not have to provide french language support.
They offer french support not for regulatory reasons, but for competitive reasons, to appeal to french speaking Canadian, and also to make them eligible to sell to large Canadian enterprises and government entities that require bilingual support for practical reasons -- they want to buy computers from a company that provides support in the same languages that their employees speak.
Because Dell chooses to offer support in French, its in the interest of customer support simplicity to offer it consistently across all their products, not just some of them.
As evidenced by studies of foraging societies surviving into recent times, smaller bands conglomerate seasonally to groups of around a hundred individuals, and also raiding other bands for women has been observed in some.
100 individuals. Men, women, children, and the elderly (to the extent you could become elderly). Hardly a harem of a 100 fertile women.
Unless that culture has been around for at least hundreds of thousands of years, it has not resulted in any evolutionary impact, and is irrelevant to this context
You keep returning to the actual circumstances of human hunter gatherer tribes, and that's fine, but its missing the point. My original post was on the more abstract 'what reasons would promote monogamy in a hypothetical hunter gatherer tribe society', not necessarily the particular hunter gatherer society we descended from. I have no dispute with the premise that alpha male strategies were in effect and successful in our past, both ancient and recent.
However, its not hard to imagine a hypothetical situation where that would not be true.
Way to try to equate alpha with criminal and aggressor.
There was no try. Alphas are more aggressive. And violent criminals do tend to have more alpha personalities.
But that's not to say beta's can't be criminals too; you don't have to be an alpha to be a criminal.
Perhaps I should have clarified that sterilization be carried against 'criminals with a pattern of violent aggressive behavior'.
Defensive because of a feeling of inferiority?
Is this some sort of feeble attempt to exert dominance over me? Or are you just being a dick for no reason? Either way it reflects poorly on you and your arguments.
There is very little natural selection occurring in an industrialized human society, and eventually the effects of sexual selection will wane as well due to birth control, as noted. But there is no significant selective pressure to revert existing behaviors either...
Maybe. But consider that the wealthier and more successful you are the fewer children you have in our current industrialized societies (including wealthy alpha males doing dozens of successful women)... that suggests we are effectively selecting for traits that the 'breeders' have ... not that you can select for 'lower class' and 'uneducated' and 'inability to use birth control effectively' but you can select for 'low focus' 'low drive for personal success' 'lower intelligence' and so forth...
Its not that 'successful people' don't reproduce, but that they reproduce less.
You don't HAVE to transmit in 1920x1080 mind you, but having that option would be good. Action games with a lot of things on screen could use a lower resolution, but static images and puzzle games could take advantage of the higher resolution.
Don't be absurd. If they'd done that they would have been crucified for it on every game that couldn't do it, and you know it. They resleased a console that was spec'd for non-HD, and its powerful enough for that.
I see very little difference graphics-wise between the Wii and the Dreamcast, and the Dreamcast is close to a decade old now.
Sure lets compare the strongest most expensive console from last generation that failed and nearly bankrupted Sega to the weakest and least expensive console from this one.
Sorry, the Wii's graphics are still markedly better, hands down, no contest. But I'll agree the Wii fits solidly in the space between the dreamcast and the PS3, which all things considered is exactly where one would expect it to sit.
I mean, if you're not going to do that why not just develop the wiimote for the gamecube?
Because then they would have sold 0.5 million remotes instead of 30 million consoles.
Everytime someone says Nintendo should have done the Wii differently, all one has to do is point back to the sales. They've sold 30+ Million of the things in under two years, and made profit on each of them.
Dreamcast sold 10M and nearly bankrupted.
PS3 launched the same week as the Wii and has sold half the number of units, and has lost money hand over fist so far.
Xbox360 launched a year in advance, lost billions, and Nintendo has already sold 3 Wii's for every 2 Xboxes.
Say what you will about how the Wii could have been "better", or what they could have done to make YOU like it more. But Nintendo's strategy was obviously a very good one. I'm sure they could have improved it, but I'm skeptical that simply throwing some more power at it and upping the price, and positioning it closer to the 360 and PS3 would have accomplished anything.
Well that's the problem, the hardware just isn't as fast as it should be. They should have gone with something faster and more powerful, and they definitely should have put in HDMI/DVI support.
Somethings gotta give.
If they'd put in Hidef support, on the existing CPU/GPU, the framerate would have sucked. You can't just pump 5x as many pixels by adding an HDMI connector.
So they would have had to significantly bump up the CPU/GPU just to deliver the same performance on HD.
And then you want more available CPU too? Well, we just bumped it up to keep up with HDMI, but all the extra horsepower is used up just keeping up with the HD.
So we have to bump it up again to give you some more horsepower to actually work with.
So now we need to quadruple the processing and video power, license hdmi, probably need to worry about cooling the damned thing now too. Something's gotta give...
Price.
So now instead of $279 its $399 at launch, and competing directly with the PS3, sales are significantly lower, and 4 out 5 users don't have an HDTV anyway. Oh and the hidef games cost mroe to develop too... so those go up in price too.
Epic fail.
For what its worth, I'd love a hi-def Wii too, and if they were launching NOW instead of 2 years ago, we'd probably have gotten one. But I think Nintendo made the right choice this 'generation'. Its obviously served them better than chasing the 360 and PS3 hardware. They are the ones that actually make money in this business.
I really don't understand that, given that the Xeons had full clock caches and weren't much faster, if at any faster, than the Pentium branded version of the same chip. The Pentium version had half-clock caches.
It wasn't that the 300A overclocked to 450MHz was much faster; it was only marginally faster. But at the time the PII450 was the 'top of line' desktop cpu, and the PII Xeon 450s were the 'top of line' period.
And a $110 Celeron 300A overclocked (by simply changing the FSB from 66 to 100MHz by moving a jumper on the motherboard) was in the same performance league, required no special heat sinks or anything.
And it wasn't just the same league, it actually eked out better scores vs a Pentium II 450 on some benchmarks... where the full speed small cache was a better fit to the benchmark than the larger but slower PII caches. And even the Xeon's were (barely) out matched in some cases... again, due to the L2 being on-die instead of off die.
But seeing a $5000 CPU beat out by a $110 'budget' CPU on -anything- even if only by a hair, was pretty nuts. (And an overclocked 300A could wipe the floor with a still-ridiculously-expensive Pentium II Xeon 400)
Typically at that time you could move a CPU one, maybe two 'models' up by over clocking it... take a Pentium 350 and get it up to 400 sort of thing... no big deal really, and not always entirely stable. Enthusiasts were the only people who took the effort and risked the damage and stability.
But now we had a case of intel's absolute cheapest CPUs rivalling its most expensive CPUs. Everyone got in on it... Mom&Pop whiteboxes were selling 300A based system explaining how to overclock them, some of them even did it for you...
It was the golden age of overclocking.
Those Celery 300As (GREAT chips) had 128KB L2 cache. But it was nice and fast since it was on-die, a novelty at the time
And overclocked from 300MHz to 450MHz without blinking, and were actually faster than a PII450 as I recall, due to the cache being overclocked too on the 300A, but not on a real PII.
YES! How long until it is 1906 again?
The 'fabled' northwest passage is a shipping route linking east to west, navigable by normal cargo carrying ships.
The northwest passage, which obviously existed since well before it was first crossed in 1906 by Amundsen, and still to this day, is a hazardous journey requiring an expedition and specialist ice breaker ships to cross.
Should enough ice melt that it actually becomes usable as a shipping route, then at least the 'fabled northwest passage' will be reality.
These numbers are ludicrous, and you clearly are unable to make a common sense order-of-magnitude estimate.
Watch march of the penguins sometime. The environment pretty much gaurantees 100% mortality if either parent fucks up on their responsibility. There are plenty of human examples of nearly as harsh a life... such as desert nomads or inuit.
But EVEN if it were 100-fold, it's still less effort for an alpha male to get 100 women in a year's time than help support a pregnant woman and then her and a child.
He has to get them all pregnant, not just copulate with them. Good luck getting 100 women pregnant in a single year. Hell, many hunter gatherer groups probably didn't have 100 suitably aged females available.
And it has nothing to do with culture; we're talking about ancient hunter-gatherer societies (though modern day alpha males are at least as "productive";
It has a great deal to do with 'culture' and the structure of the 'society'. just because they are 'ancient hunter-gatherer' types doesn't tell us the degree to which this sort of alpha male behaviour will be accepted by the group. Lions and Wolves for example are both 'hunter tribes' and both have alpha males, but the 'sleeping arrangements' are entirely different.
The AC already answered this nicely, and I'll add that obviously these "get-together's" don't work out because the alphas remain dominant to this day.
Maybe you haven't been paying attention:
We have court ordered paternity tests, child support laws, wage garnishment. I would consider this a case of the 'betas' have gotten together to force the alphas to commit resources to support their offspring.
Exactly who do you think it was that did that? The alphas? It was all part of their master plan to be coerced into paying for his abandoned offspring?
The legal system in general, from the courts to the police to the prisons clearly represents the 'beta' placing constraints on 'alpha dominance'. Sure the 'betas' haven't wiped them out, but they aren't even really trying to. If breeding out aggression were the point, their would be sterilization for convicted criminals, their offspring, and perhaps even their siblings.
Finally, "PUA" stuff is hardly 'alpha male' in any real sense; its more like learning interrogation techniques... reading body language, a bit of psychology, etc.
I know several that do dozens of women every year).
I do to. And a lot of them are little chickenshits when push comes to shove; hardly what I'd call 'dominant alpha males'.
I also know several that could do dozens of women every year, but don't. They have the same ability to read women and flirt etc; they can get almost whoever they want; but have no inclination to take advantage of it beyond securing the woman they want.
Finally alpha male behaviour as a strategy for procreation is doomed in societies with advanced birthcontrol, and a high percentage of women utilising it.
Its not at the point yet, but may well soon be as birth control prices drop, effectiveness increases, and utilisation increases, that to have any chance of having a child, it will need to be planned. 'Aplha male' strategies at that point will be entirely ineffective and vestigial. Not only will they have to attrack and seduce the woman, but will also have to convince her to choose to conceive.
Couple that with the legal framework that forces him to pay child support if she does have the child. I hardly see the alpha male 'sleep with everything that moves strategy' being particularly viable in the future.
without any sort of fluid movement the board still heats up really fast. I recommend either putting pumps in it or placing some fans in it to move the fluid around, even better if you can force the fluid through a radiator.
Hot water is less dense than cold water so it should rise, while cold liquid falls to take its place... and so some sort of natural cycle should take place shouldn't it?
As long as you are using a liquid where heating it makes it less dense this should work.
Granted that pumping it etc would keep it even cooler, but if it can be kept cool enough without it, not having to pump it would make it completely silent.
Its actually not illegal to commit suicide in many jurisdictions.
In places where it is illegal, its primarily to give the government more ability to intervene.