alanschu

San Jose in 6 Detroit in 6 Vancouver in 5 Chicago in 6 Boston in 4 Washington in 6 New Jersey in 5 Pittsburgh in 7

EA obviously feels otherwise.

I agree with Gorth. If someone was concerned about the install limit, this seems to resolve the issue they had.

I like the dual speccing because most people in our guild with viable alternative specs had all the gear for it anyway. It just saves them the hassle of heading to Stormwind (or wherever) to respec their character for 50 gold. I guess some people might have a "trash" spec and a "boss" spec but I'm not too worried about it. It's also nice because if you're in a raid and someone has to leave due to real life, if it's a healer/tank they can be replaced without much downtime.

We have group number issue for our 25 man Naxx We haven't cleared 25 yet, but we have done Malygos.

You tanked the dragon at the end? My rogue, in pretty much full level 80 gear, can't tank her.

Oooo http://allansville.myminicity.com/ind/

About effing time.

I'm currently learning Johnny Cash's cover of Hurt. Powerful song! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AO9dbmJ_2zU

How is it done then? You say it has happened a lot? What exactly are the numbers of people that have had their steam accounts hacked and manipulated to a point where it permanently affected their ability to play their games (which seems to me only can happen if there was a VAC ban)? Looking closer at the VAC Ban, this isn't even so much a DRM distribution issue, but rather a way of dealing with the rampant amounts of cheating that was occurring in their games (Counterstrike especially) and is akin to Battle.net's Closed Servers for Diablo II. Get caught cheating, you lose your access to VAC validated servers.

Your ire is misdirected taks. You called him a "moronic hypocrite" and he said "what does that sound like? Libertarianism." He tried spinning your insult back on yourself. I fail to see how a Libertarian could be a moronic hypocrite. My question was to him, not you.

How is that "moronic hypocrisy?"

I did some quick late night looking around. According to Wikipedia, there's only been two incidents of false positives with VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat), and they were both immediately rescinded when they were discovered. Also, according to Valve directly, being caught cheating by VAC will only prevent you from playing on VAC Secure servers. Quite frankly, I do not consider this a negative at all. If you happened to have cheated on a multiplayer only game, I certainly don't feel sorry for you for being a selfish twit and ruining the online experience of everyone else playing the game.

I certainly won't dispute that Steam's method isn't for everyone.

LOL!

VAC ban, disabled account, hijacking, phishing, etc; The list goes on and on. down.gif How often do these things happen in situations where it's not justified? But hey, the list goes on and on. Valve isn't complete ****ing tools. Steam wouldn't work if it made a habit of ****ing over valid users. You know, I bet it probably isn't. Well whoop-dee-****ing-do. You two are the only people I have ever met that have never misplaced anything in your computer game collections. You must have immaculate computer areas and I bet you get pissed at people that touch your computer collection without your permission. I've been a computer gamer for 26 years now. Even if I had best intentions of keeping my entire library of games intact over that time, I doubt I'd be able to. Without even factoring in the various consoles I've owned over the years. The sheer clutter of it all would have been ridiculous. I'd have to have full rooms dedicated to just the storage of the media. Yeah it's direct to drive. I started to shift more to digital distribution in general with that comment. Good for you. You don't like it. You've made it painfully clear. It must be such a pissoff for you that it's so successful. I accept it as a viable business solution because I do not find it particularly intrusive, and I see it as a moderately effective way to combat piracy. If pirates didn't pirate software it'd be less of an issue. Tell pirates to stop pirating and maybe you'll get a more concerted effort to drop DRM. Ironically you still support it though. If you're going to jump down someone's throat everytime they make a comment that they like something that you hate, then get a ****ing life.

Here's a cookie for you. I can (and often do) misplace CDs. Especially when I move and whatnot. As for "waiting," I don't. I install the games I'm interested in playing right away. It's not like I have to download Left 4 Dead every time I want to play it. I bought Fallout 3 at 2 AM and was playing it when I woke up in the morning. In fact I even had Neverwinter Nights 2 done and beaten before most of the people on this very board even had their copy. Including those who preorder.

Yep, so if anything happens to that account you're ****ed. Nice system if you're willing to put all your eggs in one basket. Such as? But keeping your CDs is a nice system if you're willing to put all your eggs in one basket. It would suck if your house burned down.

He'll fit right in. We're passionate people!

The problem with this is that if there was something biological, I would expect it to be more constant despite cultural differences. That is, the actions performed wouldn't vary by culture. I will agree that there will be biological pressures to seek a mate, but feel that human beings as social creatures socially create much of the process, and the fact that what is deemed attractive changes so much even within cultures, leads me to believe a primary influence of social and psychological factors. In order to procreate and satisfy the biological desire, all people need to do is have sex. As we all know though, in reality it's a lot more complicated to find a mate! The thing is, people really aren't just looking for someone to copulate with, and I think that that is very much a social construction. I am not closed minded to the issue of biological influence. I just feel it's not nearly as significant. If I see something that shows me otherwise, I will change my tune, because I've already changed my tune. I used to buy into the biological perspective a lot more, and I don't discount it has its place, but with a lot of my education and reading I have done, I've changed my perspective. I've done it for a great deal of things. In fact the other issue I have actually discussed quite passionately about on these very fora is the death penalty. But that's a whole other ball of wax.

I don't. Steam is just another form of DRM, albeit a slightly more attractive one than most. I agree that Steam is just another form of DRM, but I think it is less attractive than most. Most games of the past few years have still used CD activation keys and I find those to be far more attractive as a form of DRM. I love the Steam one because when I reformat my computer getting all my Steam games back is uber-easy. It's easier to redownload 50GB of games than to reinstal it from CDs? Yup. Assuming I haven't misplaced my CDs, I can literally install steam, tell it what games I would like it to download, and go to sleep, go for a run, do anything else really.

That sounds a lot like Carl Jung's hypothesis about the collective unconsciousness ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_unconscious ). I still feel that much of how boys and girls express themselves and whatnot are socially constructed expectations. For instance, boys and girls both cry when hurt when young, but this behaviour is deemed unacceptable for boys at a very early stage, and they condition themselves not to cry when experiencing physical pain (or even emotional pain). I think the idea of men and women expressing themselves differently is also based upon the norms and mores of a society. A man will get ridiculed for expressing his feelings (I know, I have hahaha). It's my own confrimation bias, but I struggle to understand why anything physiological would affect such a social action. Can this psychological makeup be passed on? I'm not so sure. I tend to think Jung is a bit of a crackpot with this theory, and the unfortunate thing is that it's not a falsifiable one. As a result I don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about it. EDIT: It seems the relationship between testosterone and aggression continues to be controversial. The general idea it seems, from some quick reading I did just now, that the presence of testosterone may result in an increased likelihood of aggressive behaviour, given the appropriate stimulus from the environment. However, there have been studies that have demonstrated that people with aggressive behaviour of a sample group exhibited less testosterone than the people lacking in aggression. http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neur...eb1/csante.html http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8885586 (unfortunately just an abstract and old) http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/46365/abstract (merging biological and social factors)

You certainly have NOT given that impression at all. You've done little but minimize the entire perspective, while contributing nothing but vague questions yourself. We can play the "what if there's more" game. But if you want to argue semantics and worse use some more, you'll notice I used the word "if." Then don't be a doofus and ridicule me asserting the possibility that I feel the only difference between men and women in physical strength, and then mention testosterone as if it's unrelated to the point I was making. Any person that might stroll into this thread, and read what you're writing, because I certainly do not want people reading it, and then interpreting your position as somehow being one that convinces people that the OTHER issues are in fact WRONG. Exhibit A: Climate Change. Quite frankly, I think you grossly understate the sociological and psychological effects on people. That's why I say it. History is overflowing with people that have tried to use genetics and biological explanations for why people should be undermined, held back, and restricted (or sometimes worse and outright exterminated and/or euthanized). You get people like Cesare Lombroso and the idea of the born criminal, and using his research to "prove" biological traits that lead to criminal behaviour, resulting in people discriminating against those that have those traits, even if they aren't a criminal. We are studying the issue. People have been studying what you're asking about for a long time. Who gives a **** if discrimination isn't even the primary culprit....it is something that can be changed, and it IS something that has shown conclusively to have powerful effects on human behaviour. Should we NOT research the human body more? Absolutely not, and I never made a claim. However, However, if there were significant differences in intellectual capability of men and women, I would be exceptionally surprised if we haven't actually found it yet. There IS ideas that men tend to be more logical and so forth, but that can't even escape the influence of society and how we raise boys and girls differently. I've never implied you're sexist. If anything I've implied that you have blinders on and are insisting on minimizing volumes of research that has been done because of some "well maybes." Posing hypothetical questions is nice and all...but ultimately what does it accomplish? You're wrong if you think you're the only person asking these questions. Should they be asked? Absolutely. But you cannot do it at the expensive of overlooking and ignoring the actual data that has been researched and analyzed. To me, it's like you have this mountain of data, such as twin studies, cultural analysis between cultures, analysis of the same culture over different times, and all that it says, and you've on a hunch decided "you know, I think it's more biological." They seem pretty ancillary (at best) to a discussion about how men and women tend to behave differently in my opinion. Look at your post on the first page, where you start talking about how you feel women tend to prefer feminine things, and then completely miss the point by making comments such as: "Should we despise a woman who decides that her family is more important than her career? ... Should we make fun of a girl who likes a frilly pink dress more than blue jeans?" If you feel that women are more likely to want to play with dolls, wear makeup, and tend to act more feminine based on their physiological make up, then that's your prerogative. I adamantly disagree. As for your questions, I do feel that sexual orientation is genetic. I could split hairs on transgender, since gender itself is a social construct, but I'll go with biological on that sense. People preferring blue or red or pink? I'm skeptical towards a biological predisposition to preferring certain wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. But when twin studies show twins growing up separated in very different environments having such a profound effect on how they behave, I strongly favour nurture over nature when it comes to these types of scenarios. Why do you feel so strongly that it's biological? EDIT: (removed a block of text since it'd only contniue the bickering)

I don't. Steam is just another form of DRM, albeit a slightly more attractive one than most. I agree that Steam is just another form of DRM, but I think it is less attractive than most. Most games of the past few years have still used CD activation keys and I find those to be far more attractive as a form of DRM. I love the Steam one because when I reformat my computer getting all my Steam games back is uber-easy.

The strength is a byproduct of the testosterone, as testosterone is an anabolic steroid. I didn't spell put that connection because I didn't think it was necessary. I made an assumption that people here are intelligent enough to know what causes the increase in strength for men. Men aren't just "magically" stronger...they are stronger because their body facilitates the growth of muscle mass. By acknowledging the strength difference I implicitly acknowledged the role testosterone has (which is the physiological difference). And at no point did I ever state that the only "physiological difference" between men and women is physical strength. Since you decided to put words in my mouth, I am going to be a bit of an ass and clarify to you that physical strength itself, is not a "physiological difference." It's the byproduct of the difference in testosterone levels. First of all, you're comparing two different things. My "unclear" statement was about "gender roles" and the second statement was specifically about whether "women tend to drift towards different jobs" (emphasis added) These two things are NOT equivalent. I stand by my statement. I've seen lots of evidence and support for societal and psychological influences. I've seen little support for hormones telling girls to go play with dolls and to be all frilly and girly. I don't buy into the idea that women seek different types of employment based on their biological makeup because by doing so, I help people rationalize the systemic discrimination the exists in our society. The arguments that you're using are the same arguments that the male dominated labour unions of the industrial revolution used to keep women out, ensuring the status quo and continuing to undermine the opportunities available for women. I can't think of anything to suggest that the general division of labour in the paid market between men and women is better explained through biological means than some other means. Does a larger brain correlate with anything, outside of the fact that men tend to be larger, complete with larger skulls and hence more room for more brain matter? If brain size had anywhere near the impact in making a difference between men and women that physical strength does, we'd already have seen it because the strength one is THAT obvious. The correlation would be exceptionally strong. Instead, you're just throwing out "what ifs" that aren't supported by anything. It's a convenient way for people to ignore the perspectives that they don't want to believe, and you see this everywhere too. You'll get people on both sides of the climate change argument saying "well we don't understand exactly how things work" on BOTH sides of the argument to support BOTH ideas. Stop the cognitive dissonance that we experience, by rationalizing a different explanation. I don't just post for your pleasure I'm sorry to say. I just happen to disagree vehemently with your stance of "well despite all of the evidence and demonstrable differences between cultures that exist, the idea that men and women are physically different leads me to believe that this is why they drift towards the tasks and interests, in spite of demonstrable proof." Of course, it's easier that way. I mean, if it's all biological, then people can sleep soundly knowing that there's nothing they do about it. Because it's genetic that women just don't want to be doctors. It's a safe and easy way to remove cognitive dissonance. Even if you aren't sold it's the primary cause, you're just putting your head in the sand if you can't acknowledge that it's a significant cause.