BlueTear

Ah, but why? Why does the media continue to propagate what is ultimately a deviation of the ideal which are hardcorded for, the ideal which we will strive for when we seek a mate? 'cause it makes them money. The masses see images of women they'll never meet in real life - and I mean that in the sense that the women on that Victoria Secrets add do not exist without hours of makeup, carefully arrayed lighting under controlled conditions and some computerized assistance to add the finishing touches - and still we continue to buy into them. Blaming the media for this is best related to the proverb "Shame on you if you fool me once, shame on me if you fool me twice". You can't argue that "we don't know any better" when it comes to beauty ideals, that we are forced to accept the view the media spreads, because it's easy enough to prove that we do know better. As I said, I'm not saying the media doesn't need to do a serious reality check on what they publish, but they're not the ones to be blamed for repeating a behaviour which actually rewards them; We buy it. We choose to buy it. If blame is to placed, look at a society in which young women and men gain their views of they should look and act to attract the opposite sex not by actually communicating with the opposite sex to find out what they like, oh no, but by accepting images put forward by advertising agencies with an axe to grind. I don't want to veer too far of on a tanget, but if you're going to blame something, blame political correctness taken so far the reality behind sexual attraction is replaced by ads for cosmetics and underwear.

No, they don't. Healthy- and fertile looking women are what looks attractive to males. Social status is also a factor. These are the underlying concepts on which all definitions of beauty, always, are based because that's what we're genetically coded for. If it's a beauty ideal, it can be traced back to these factors. And skinny doesn't mean unhealthily starved. Nevertheless, who is the more fit and healthy? It's not the media's idea, it's genetically hardcoded. The media cannot randomly decide what is attractive and convince people of it. In western society today, when food habits and a sedetary lifestyle doesn't particularly run on the healthy side of things, healthy changes it's meaning. But the view of the males is not altered by this. Look up physical attractiveness on wikipedia, they cite a study in which the males continue to go for "average, healthy looking". The media does not set the ideal; Populations do.

*poke* Am I being ignored or did you just blow right past my post =P

Waist-to-hip ratio, the fact that young average female faces are in studies always deemed most attractive - both of which can be traced to evolutionary concepts, due to their respective coorelations to fertility. The average bit as to do with a concept called koinophilia, which also explains why computer generated melds of several faces produces results that, in studies, are labeled as more attractive then their component faces are. These are not minor details, they're the underlying basics So in one beauty ideal - from a time in which starvation was fairly common and the yield per acre of farmland had not yet learned of "mechanized agriculture" - being well-feed was a good thing. A healthy thing. In todays modern society, particularly in the west, who are fat? The rich, the famous, the succfesful? Are the wealthy well-fed? ... or the poor? That one is, regarding american society anyway, scientifcally established AFAIK; Obesity is not a sign of a positive social status, and I mean that in economic sense. That particular ideal changing is, ultimately, a sign of a radically changed lifestyle in which a healthy lifestyle is not one where there is enough food to stay away from starvation, but one in which you abstain from food and excercise regularly to avoid obesity. Either way, the women men want are the ones who look healthy. Fertile-looking. I'm not saying the media doesn't need to perform a reality check on what they're publishing, but blaming our current ideals on the media is ridicolous. (apologies for funny spelling mistakes, kinda tired and despite proof reading I think some really weird words slipped through in the wrong places)

The human race has only managed to survive cause the dirt-poor potato farmers of centuries past had no media access, and left without a guide to beauty, had to marry something. Clearly. ;)

So universal beauty ideals common for every culture is a myth, it's all dependant on what the media tells us?

In the US Cyclone battlegroup, where Boulderfist-US is, the top 10 5v5 that has no paladin is exactly 1. All of the others either run with a paladin always, or more than 50% of the games played to get to the top. I wasn't looking that hard, but I didn't see a single paladin who'd lost more than won. In the EU Misery battlegroup, where Boulderfist-EU is, there's also just one team in the top 10 5v5 that does not regularly include a paladin in it's setup. ... I don't think they're Retribution paladins.

I quite like paladin healers myself in PvP. Oh sure, maybe not 2v2, but above that... Get a proper LoS healing going and you can do some serious healing. A lot harder to manaburn than a priest too. Full pushback protection ain't that bad either, in larger battles. Blessing of sanctuary basically owns the crap out of a fair number of crowd control techniques. Bubble can be used on the rest. BoP on a focused target can be the difference between life and death.

Is the family unit in any way dependant on the excercise of a ceremony and the existance of a piece of paper called a "marriage certificate"? Or put it differently; Is a family unit defined by that paper, or by the actions of the people involved?

And thus you wave your true colours; It's not about preserving the life of an innocent child - who is just an innocent when it comes to rape as when it comes to unintended pregnancies, yet you consider one to be morally justified and one not to aboty - it's about punishing the woman for having the audacity to make her own choices regarding her own body. Her body. Her choice. When the foetus can be sustained without her body, then it's an independant entity with it's own rights. Until that point, it is her body.

Perhaps our socialist state-run system is not nearly as ineffecient as sheer ideology would suggest? (Not saying it doesn't need a fair bit of improvement, quite frankly, considering what we pay in the form of taxes it should be even better, but at the same time... Considering what we are getting, we can't be losing that much money to ineffeciency compared non-socialist healthcare models.)

... that an opinion based on analyzed facts and comparisions, or a knee-jerk ideological reaction stemming from the traditional american view of socialism? As far as I know, after poking around wikipedia, in Sweden - highest taxes in the world - the state pays for far more of the healthcare than in the US, yet we spend a lower % of our GDP on healthcare. Higher life expectancy and lower infant mortality rate aside.

Sheep the melee adds. We use two mages for perma sheeping, they just tag two melee adds and keep them sheeped until lurker is dead. Means less worrying about DPS'ing the adds down before he reemerges.

Traffic cameras. I refer back to my first question about how often people leave their houses without their cellphone, and as long as your cellphone is on, it can be contacted. But the point isn't that it's impossible to eliminate some traces of your presence, the point is that unless you expend a considerable amount of energy to do it, the wonders of modern technology can already track you as effeciently as with any RFID chip with a GPS function, but no one's all up on arms about that. And the GPS function could easily not be implemented except as, say, a way to keep track of criminals on parole/probation, and just stick to identification and medical uses for regular citzens. And again, this should of course be completely voluntary, but the considering the benefits, I don't see how or why anyone would forgo one.

Explain to me how the same cannot be done by tracking credit card usage or cell phone data, or tell me you never use either, EVER, because you don't like the exposure it creates for you. In which case I would once again have to point out we're on the internet, everything we type passes by the Echelon programme and the deathsquad is alread en route to your location, so you're screwed anyway.

I'll chip in my personal class recommendation on top of Nads explanation: Don't roll a pure DPS class. The current design philosophy, explicitly stated regarding how they intend tanking to function, is that "hybrid tanks" should all perform equally in 5-man instances and then differ in raiding instances. A druid has a shedload of hp, a warrior can stance dance/block (now that fearward's been nerfed) and a paladin can AoE tank like there's no bloody tomorrow anywhere in sight. So either way, with the proper gear, you can tank, experience the tanking playstyle and fill the tanking role in a party, should you fancy doing so. Although not explicitly stated, the same principle is/has been gradually applied to many other hybrid classes, giving them utility and better performance in hybrid roles. If you instead like to heal rather than tank, that's just a matter of gear and a respec for druids and paladins (spare feral druids DPS in our raids). Warriors are decent DPS machines on a fair number of encounters. Priests can be both healers and DPS/utility. It depends on which playstyle you feel like experiencing, and if you get proper gear, the switch between the playstyles is a matter of a respec, or in some encounters, just a gear switch (my GM has a tankadin, and he goes into healing mode by just equipping his healing gear). You roll a hunter, mage, warlock or rogue, you're DPS. Endof. No "I want to do something different" short of a reroll. Now, I've played a warlock for two years, have no plans on really getting into any serious raiding with another character (though my druid alt is now 38), and I _like_ being a warlock. But never having healed, there's a whole playstyle I've just never experienced in two years of playing the game (I'd count tanking, but I was Twin Emps tank so I've sort of done that, in a manner of speaking...) tl;dr: You want the most experience out of a single class, go druid. They can be melee DPS, tanks, caster DPS and healers and they can stealth. If you're unsure of what to pick, this is the class that will offer you the largest amount of playstyle choices at lvl 70. (That being said, I didn't play a warlock for two years because the warlock playstyle bores me to tears; I'm a dot-[bleep] and I love it, ranged DPS is what I want to do in a raid. But I know that's what I want, and if you're not entirely sure... Druid is an excellent choice to let you find out what you want to do)

Since we're having this discussion on the internet, I'd wager it safe to say you own a computer connected to the same. The chance that your run-of-the-mill script kiddie will be able to aquire your personal information is considerabe. If you have an improperly configured wireless network, it's even larger. If we include dumpster divers, those odds are even less favourable. Heck, if you don't keep your voice down when talking on the phone while riding the bus, you're giving out personal details. "Cutting of your arm" is hardly more alarmist than setting you on fire after stealing your wallet, bank codes, left kidney and parts of your left eye. Yes, theoretically possible, but not bloody likely. And anyone who cries about GPS is free to volunteer how often they leave their homes without a cellphone and/or tinfoil hats. Ah, no worries then mate, I'll have my chip in my left hand, problem solved.

QFT. Cleaned my room out and found some old essays I made a year or two ago. I'd never have done them of it weren't for the various political debates we had right here. (... and they were good essays too...)

http://www.underwatertimes.com/news.php ... 2101064738 And estrogen from birth control pills are screwing up the fish everywhere the pills can be afforded, what's your point?

The short version goes a little bit something like this; They designed and made a game with several, at the time, unique MMOG concepts, some of which are groundbreaking to this day. Then they spent the following two years failing miserably in balancing it. Some mean that the complexity of the system they designed made it impossible, others that they didn't have enough manpower to do it properly in the timeframe alloted, others that they just sucked. Then WoW came and turned into a smash hit. Bigtime. So someone over at either SoE or LucasArts figured "ours isn't working, and our license > their license. Let's change the game!" and the end result was basically a poorly made WoW clone with jedi. It was not the game I had bought two years earlier, nor was it the game people were expecting when they preordered the upcoming expansion back. We were offered refunds on our preorders, and a lot of people took it and walked away; Myself included with the reasoning "why pay for a poorly made clone, when I can pay for the real deal". There are no worse examples of how to make your longterm subscribing customers go "This isn't the game I bought" in an effort to attract loads of new customers. (Lol, it really does still piss me off to think about)

Not even close to the way Sony gutted SWG. Not even close. ... I really thought I was over that til you brought it up lol

Wait til you get to fly...

The trick is to have a big freezer and make foods that, in theory, last indefinitely in said freezer. Done right, you should be able to go at least a two or three weeks straight without cooking, never eating the same meal without having at least four other dishes in between. If you really want to get fancy, you make the food you freeze modular; It can be eaten with rice, or you could take some frozen pasta to the microwave (that's for speed, for taste, you fry the pasta in garlic or somesuch), offering some more variation. Done properly, you can take 3-4 jars out of the freezer, mix a little bit from each, microwave it, and have a ready meal.

... I blame you two for me setting foot on runescape.com for the first time in years. You teasers =P And I didn't even get what you were refering to once I was there =/ Btw, seeing the memory usages of your addons sort of worry me... I run at 70kb+ constantly and in the interest of performance, I should really go figure out where all that memory is going. But I cba... >_>

Parents having the right to teach their children what they want should be interprated as parents having several years on which to impress on their young, by both example and reasoning, the validity of their chosen lifestyle to offer as a guide when the child makes a decision regarding his/hers own life. Not as unchallenged indoctrination of whatever the parents happends to believe is right.