Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Messages - Align

Pages: 1 ... 123 124 [125] 126 127 ... 138
3101
Gaming / Re: A new TMNT fighting game for Wii...
« on: January 23, 2009, 11:36:51 PM »
If it doesn't let me play with a friend as we slash, thunk, snikt and thwack our way through hordes of footclan soldier-filled levels, it's not worth looking at.

3102
Fan Creations / Re: Rebirth of the Rockman-Themed Stolen *Bleep* Thread!!
« on: January 23, 2009, 10:49:44 PM »
I hate that boss. [tornado fang]er deserves it.

3103
Emulation / Re: The X4 That We're Fighting For! (UPDATED January 21)
« on: January 23, 2009, 10:49:09 PM »
That's what I was saying though, it oughtn't be able to change a registry reference to something else, just roll back or prevent the change in the first place. But oh well, I'm not sure how the registry even works in the first place - certainly didn't think it could make an old file be used even after it's been overwritten.

3104
Fan Games / Re: Megaman Flash Fangame
« on: January 23, 2009, 10:45:26 PM »
I don’t know what you see on the songs that they are familiar, maybe because I’m not the music kind of guy.
Well, this would be better put to Nitro himself, but... The songs all have the same guitar as the main instrument, in the X games it varies a lot between stage BGMs which instrument is at the front, giving them all a distinct sound.
That and the pacing.
Compare the BMGs of Blizzard Buffalo and Neon Tiger for an example of what I mean.

3105
Fan Games / Re: Megaman Flash Fangame
« on: January 23, 2009, 03:08:37 PM »
I hate the crystal cave tune.
Other than that, I'm just worried about the songs being too similar.

3106
Emulation / Re: The X4 That We're Fighting For! (UPDATED January 21)
« on: January 23, 2009, 03:03:09 PM »
Keep a live registry monitor always active to know what's going on with my registry, but while I was installing the game the software crashed and that seemed to have caused the malfunction.
That's one of the most paranoid things I've ever heard of...
But if it's just monitoring it shouldn't be able to alter the registry, should it?

3107
Off The Wall / Re: Reposted Picture Thread (56K Warning)
« on: January 23, 2009, 12:26:12 AM »
Still don't get what I'm supposed to see in that picture.

3108
Emulation / Re: The X4 That We're Fighting For! (UPDATED January 21)
« on: January 22, 2009, 10:32:10 PM »
How did you [tornado fang] up your computer so badly the registry got messed up?

3109
Emulation / Re: The X4 That We're Fighting For! (UPDATED January 21)
« on: January 22, 2009, 08:06:51 PM »
Delete the mentioned files, see what happens.

3110
Off The Wall / Re: Reposted Picture Thread (56K Warning)
« on: January 22, 2009, 08:06:15 PM »
CHIQUITA BOMB OH FUX

3111
Gaming / Re: Capcom & Monumental Team Up To Make Me Worry
« on: January 22, 2009, 12:59:32 AM »
like PSO ^^
Marginally. The only skill in PSO was timing your shots (easy as [acid burst]) and your location in space making a bigger difference. Enemies had more visceral schticks, but they weren't unique in online RPGs to have ones.
Hell, Diablo took slightly more skill, and PSO is a diablo-clone through and through...

3112
Off The Wall / SIDS, Infanticide, and Abortion
« on: January 22, 2009, 12:30:59 AM »
There's no Discussion board on these forums, so I guess this goes here.
http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/328184.html
Quote
In my famously favorite passage from Arthur Machen's influential short story "The Great God Pan," just before the end, one of two amateur investigators has just uncovered the secret of what it was that was driving young, healthy, wealthy, secure young men to commit suicide on three continents, in a manuscript left behind by one of the suicides. After reading only a few words, the partner says, "Take it away, Villiers, never speak of this again. Are you made of stone, man? Why, the dread and horror of death itself, the thoughts of the man who stands in the keen morning air on the black platform, bound, the bell tolling in his ears, and waits for the harsh rattle of the bolt, are as nothing compared to this. I will not read it; I should never sleep again." The original investigator assures him that it is true, but finishes by agreeing with the sentiment: "Oh, Austin, how can it be? How is it that the very sunlight does not turn to blackness before this thing, the hard earth melt and boil beneath such a burden?"

I think that 30 scientists and researchers from a half dozen or more different fields who gathered in rural France in 1990 to check each others' work must have felt something of that same horror when they found that they could not disprove their mutual finding. It was something that none of them wanted to believe. It was a thought that only one of the 30 of them was willing to confront the implications of, and do further research to explore the implications of. And I'm sure that they knew or at least suspected that no matter how important their scientific finding was, they would be vilified for a lifetime if they made society confront this awful truth, and that was a price that they were unwilling to pay. And see, that, to me, is the fascinating thing, even more fascinating than the awful truth itself. On the contrary, almost all of my friends that I've discussed this with since I read the book have agreed with me that, given the weight of the evidence, the awful truth in question is pretty undeniable, is important to know, and (contrary to what some might think) it is something we can learn to live with the knowledge of. If this knowledge becomes widespread, it may and probably will cause some hardship for some innocent people. But the good to society will, I believe, out-weigh those harms. So no, really, the awful truth that I'm about to reveal to you will seem anti-climactic compared to the dread that the scientists who discovered it felt.

After a several year career as one of the second generation of women to do fieldwork in primatology, Sarah Hrdy and her husband decided to have their first child. She was already in the middle of preparations to shift her career from primatology to a subject that would allow her to do her fieldwork closer to home, with fewer long absences from home, and in a more comfortable setting to raise a baby in, namely evolutionary biology, when it occurred to her (as a mother to be) just out of personal interest to study the mothering patterns of the colony of monkeys she was observing. She knew to expect high infant mortality. Primatologists have known for over a hundred years that baby monkeys and baby apes are at extreme risk from any male other than their father. (As are baby humans.) But Hrdy was startled to discover, when she tracked the mothers of new infants carefully, that infants were at almost as much risk of murder from their own mothers as they were from unrelated male adults. This baffled her for several reasons, not least of which that while there had been a great deal of research into infanticide in primates, nobody had ever reported a case of a female primate killing her own offspring except by freakish accident. The other reason it baffled her was that, as an evolutionary biologist, she could make no sense whatsoever as to how evolution could produce individuals that destroyed their own offspring, especially among such slowly reproducing species as primates. So she contacted a few other primatologists studying other colonies of monkeys and asked them to carefully monitor the actions of new mothers ... and to their astonishment, they observed the same thing.

So she gave a preliminary paper on the subject in 1976, suggesting that more research was needed to explain how this behavior could possibly have evolved in primates, only to be interrupted in mid talk by an audience member, a prominent expert in her field. He stood up, tried to stop her from finishing reading her paper, announced that primate females absolutely do not every murder their own children, and that if she had observed a primate colony in which primate females were killing their own children, it could only be because of something she had done to them; she must have committed some horrible breach of experimental ethics that so deranged these monkeys that she had driven them insane enough to do something that no monkey had ever done before. He then stormed out of the talk and went directly to the scientific press to denounce her for whatever it was that she had done to that monkey colony, so it probably is a good thing that she was already planning on changing fields, no?

So she quietly continued her study, working behind the scenes with other researchers while she directed her own studies towards less controversial animals, such as insects. Eventually she discovered something that appalled even her with its simplicity. Not only do mothers sometimes kill their own children, they are almost never insane when they do so. On the contrary, for a mother to murder her own child is an evolutionary adaptation without which our species would not have survived some of the environmental and social disasters of the past. What's more, the actual reasoning behind this is so simple that a straightforward simple equation in four variables is sufficient to provide a reliable estimate of the probability that any particular mother will murder any particular infant: the age of the mother, whether or not this child is the gender that the mother wanted (which, itself, turns out to be easily and universally predicted based on only two variables, the mother's social status and the predicted reliability of the food supply), the child's birth weight (and to a lesser extent other indicators of long-term viability), and her estimate of whether or not attempting to nurture this particular child will only get both her and the child killed. When she took her early estimates for this equation to the 1990 conference, she discovered that epidemiologists studying SIDS, primatologists studying infanticide (following her 1976 tip), historians digging through old records to try to quantify infanticide throughout the ages, criminologists and social psychologists trying to come up with statistical models to predict mother-on-child infanticide, and anthropologists trying to statistically analyze what variables are most consistent with cultures that have high versus low rates of infanticide, had all independently discovered the same equation. And from her viewpoint as an evolutionary biologist, Hrdy demonstrates that any sane, healthy, normal, intelligent mothers who weren't capable of coldly murdering their own infant children almost certainly had no surviving descendants at all to be our ancestors during some of the species-wide threats that have been demonstrated to have happened from the fossil record and from studies of rates of genetic drift.

I mention SIDS. One of the researchers, she says, was an epidemiologist who, in the process of trying to quantify his hunch, initiated a study in which social workers and police very, very intensively interviewed and background checked a long string of crib deaths that had been explained away as unexplained random respiratory failure. It turns out that his equation was able to predict, with high (but not absolute) reliability, which infants had actually been the victims of homicide or malign neglect. If the infant was a boy when the mother wanted a girl or vice versa, if the infant was born weighing less than 8 pounds, or if the mother was in any kind of economic or physical danger if this child survived, then the baby was doomed. His final estimate, from that initial study, was that seventy five percent of all SIDS cases are actually homicides. But, he admitted, just acknowledging this possibility puts us in an awful dilemma. To catch the 3 out of 4 women whose babies suddenly die that were actually murderers, we have to treat all SIDS cases as potential homicides, therefore piling yet more heartbreak and tragedy on the 1 out of 4 who just randomly went through the worst tragedy any family can know, the sudden and unexpected death of a beloved child. Even using the predictive equation to narrow the field of homicide investigations, we'd still be casting a very scarily public accusation of homicide on an uncomfortably large number of grieving mothers.

I also mention social psychology. The central tenet of the field of social psychology is that if under a given situation, all or nearly all individuals will engage in the same unwanted behavior, then there is less to be gained by stigmatizing those individuals and lauding the ones who don't than by studying the situation with an eye towards changing it. And you can see in a heartbeat how that applies here: if infants are at extreme risk whenever one or more of three variables are present, then we can reduce the rate of (massively under-reported, intentionally under-investigated) maternal infanticide by decreasing the economic and evolutionary pressures behind gender preference, by providing mothers with as much economic assistance and physical protection as it would require for them to feel safe providing for this baby, and by intensify supervision for the first several months of life of mothers of infants who are born weighing less than 8 pounds or looking otherwise sickly. But addressing the issue in this way, and looking into the roots of the equation that predicts maternal infanticide, makes social psychologists confront the queasy implication of all of their work: if it's that sane and natural for them to do this awful thing, if this awful thing is so hard to resist, how can we justify stigmatizing and punishing them? And if we can't, then how can we live with ourselves having just (the historian points out) joined the 85% of all known historical societies, up to and including Christian western Europe as late as the late 19th century, that socially tolerated infanticide any time in the first couple of days after birth? There's pro-choice, I mean, and then there's being so pro-choice as to join the ranks of societies that have denied the humanity of a breathing infant up to 48 hours old ... are we willing to go there? Or to at least show understanding and compassion and tolerance towards societies that did or that do? The anthropologists at the conference were especially terrified of releasing their research findings, because they knew that the accusation that a society or tribe kills children has been used to justify no shortage of genocidal invasions.

I cultivate a readership that's willing to think the unthinkable, so perhaps most of you are still baffled by what part of this spawned such a terror of confronting their own research findings that 29 out of 30 scientists who discovered it immediately and without any external pressure moved to suppress their own research findings. Frankly, good -- I distrust that impulse, too, and think that we are always better off knowing the truth than not knowing it. But as you go about your day, remember this: research shows that your own mother consciously or unconsciously considered murdering you in your crib, off and on for at least the first 48 hours after your birth and not improbably for the whole first two weeks of your life, maybe even the first two months. And if your mother was under 30 when she had you and you were born male in a poor family or female in a wealthy family during times of economic hardship, or weighing less than 8 pounds, or at a time when your mother thought that her own chances of survival would improve if you didn't survive so (for example) she could get pregnant by her new husband more quickly or so she could return to work more quickly, you very nearly didn't make it. And she would have gotten away with it, too, because mothers have traditionally had along list of potential murder weapons ready to hand, from handing you over to caretakers or adoption agencies even if she knew they had a 99% chance of killing you, to smothering you with a pillow, to switching you to infant formula that she knew was diluted with unsafe water, to declining to lift a hand to save you from some mortal peril. And because "everybody knows" that mothers don't kill their own children, nobody would have questioned her about it. Have a nice day!

3113
Gaming / Re: Capcom & Monumental Team Up To Make Me Worry
« on: January 21, 2009, 07:58:23 PM »
Hmm... has Capcom made any MMOs before? They might be the first to get it right.

3114
Off The Wall / Re: Reposted Picture Thread (56K Warning)
« on: January 21, 2009, 06:39:25 PM »
Demotivators. Very old meme by now. Started with this site:
http://despair.com/viewall.html
of course, by now people just use it like it was a caption rather than an actual demotivation, so the name isn't especially accurate

3115
Rockman Series / Re: Ancient Theories/Fanon
« on: January 21, 2009, 01:42:01 AM »
Well, that's how fanon works, essentially. True until proven false. Having some solid ground to stand on is just a nice bonus.

3116
Fan Games / Re: Megaman Flash Fangame
« on: January 20, 2009, 05:06:01 PM »
And I will most likelly have the Phoenix Buster not work underwater.
This sounds kind of show-stopping, unless you can switch it out on the fly.

3117
Fan Games / Re: Megaman Flash Fangame
« on: January 20, 2009, 03:10:06 AM »
Got a name for that already?

I'd call it "Nereid Armor"
more like, NERD armor

3118
X / Re: You know, X and Zero's action poses?
« on: January 19, 2009, 08:59:00 PM »
I don't think normal martial arts rules apply to people who can lift several tons and have a rather different body configuration(HUEG FEET), as well as the ability to zip over the ground at speeds rivalling that of modern vehicles, though.

3119
News and Announcements / Re: Rockman X9 getting big support from fans!
« on: January 19, 2009, 08:56:22 PM »
I'd like it to be for PC.

3120
News and Announcements / Re: Rockman X9 getting big support from fans!
« on: January 19, 2009, 06:37:59 PM »
How exactly would the wiimote make a difference, did you say?

I'd be happy with up-dash and double buster/special weapon functionality, so I can put Thermal Wave on the left arm and Magnet Brick on the right arm, then charge and fire the two separately.

3121
Fan Creations / Re: Rebirth of the Rockman-Themed Stolen *Bleep* Thread!!
« on: January 19, 2009, 02:10:10 PM »
flat Ashe :(

3122
Zero / Re: Can someone explain something to me?
« on: January 19, 2009, 12:25:00 PM »
I don't think the public would have been satisfied with just letting the guy rest in peace after ruining the entire world.

3123
Zero / Re: Can someone explain something to me?
« on: January 19, 2009, 04:37:14 AM »
It was impossible to predict, and was the best alternative...

3124
X / Re: You know, X and Zero's action poses?
« on: January 19, 2009, 04:05:42 AM »
But where would we be if the main character didn't hold his fist in front of his face, ever ready to shake it at evildoers?

3125
Off The Wall / Re: Reposted Picture Thread (56K Warning)
« on: January 19, 2009, 02:59:46 AM »
Ordering specific pieces? DEFINITELY cheating.

Pages: 1 ... 123 124 [125] 126 127 ... 138