Dantius

"Is" banned? I thought he was banned, but has since been unbanned and just doesn't post at all.

I don't know about you, but if my kids ever lock a midget manservant in a suitcase while fleeing his bosses' murder in a stolen master assassin's private yacht, I'll count myself a fairly successful father.

Yes, but what color is it?

You must be American, then.

Minor changes to the layout of the site?

 

EVERYTHING IS RUINED FOREVER!!!!!

[someone had to take a stand for the one OS to rule them all, and it might as well be me!]

1. Windows 7 at home, and Win 7 at work. The last work distribution was XP, and I... chose poorly in having Vista on my previous personal computer.

 

2. Autodesk, Inc. Though, to be fair, I am both using their products less, and I've heard that they're releasing/have released Mac versions. So I guess mainly inertia at this point.

 

3. The vast body of every type of program imaginable for the OS. Also, the games.

 

4. "ADMINISTRATOR PERMISSION REQUIRED FOR THIS ACTION" dialog boxes that black out the screen and pop up ever five [censored] minutes.

 

5. A slide rule, drafting kit, typewriter, and a copy of Abramowitz and Stegun.

On a totally unrelated note, Nikki, I love your new avatar. It's just brilliant.

I'm using the "shklee" one from now on. Awesome.

Well, when you add the "worth listening to" criteria, it drops to like four .

I am not so sorry this must be done, Nikki.

 

So long and thanks for all the Finnish!

SIX POINT OH TWO TWO TIMES TEN TO THE TWENTY THIRD!

I think his face is pretty bad, which is the point.

It's a terrible ass face.

Well, I read it and the first thought in my mind after finishing was "R^2=0.28? That's a pretty bold conclusion for such weak support!", so at least you're not alone.

I would say that gamers tend to be younger that the population as a whole, and younger people tend to have a lower percentage of political activity in the general population. So I don't think it's so much "being a gamer mean that you become less politically active" as it is "gamers are primarily drawn from a group with lower initial political participation".

Originally Posted By: SOT

 

My two female colleagues, however, declined to undertake all that extra administrative work, since they went into science to do science themselves, not just to pull more X chromosomes into science.

 

This. This is absolutely the idea I see reflected in my female colleagues. They went into my field for the same reason that my male colleagues and I went into it: to get a job in something they found interesting in order to make money, not because they felt the gender imbalance in it was a point of concern.

 

Frankly, I'm of the opinion that affirmative action in hiring for jobs or admissions to engineering schools is too little, too late, and may actually be harmful to the women already in the field: It's not that women aren't going into the field because they are discouraged by the lack of other women in it, it's because by the time they enter first grade, they've already been convinced, by their parents, peers, or by society, that they don't want to be engineers, and frankly, if you don't want to be an engineer, you aren't going to be able to succeed as one. The real problem lies squarely with parents and early educations for instilling into women that science and math are things that people with X chromosomes Do Not Do, not with college admissions and jobs.

I haven't heard a peep from US media, and the only contact I've had with news came from an article in the Economist a few weeks ago, so I'm hardly able to draw very many conclusions about the movement.

 

This certainly does seem like something that should be discussed or at least touched on more in the US news, though.

Biology has much less to say about "human nature" per se than psychology does, and the conclusions that psychology draws are pretty famously negative- think the Stanford Prison study or Milgram's Experiment.

Of course, psychology also tends to be less, ah, rigorous than most of the "hard sciences", so it's hardly like the debate's settled. Like Lilith said, you're pretty much on your own when it comes to drawing conclusions from the available material.

Not really, since IIRC you don't figure out that Shale is female until her personal quest in Orzammar.

 

Poisoned with massive quantities of cyanide, shot, beaten, tied up, dropped in a river in the middle of a Russian winter, and he still manages to break out of his bonds before drowning.

*snort*

What you say !!

You know, I'm shocked that I of all people am the one saying this, but you do know that there were games released after the '90's, right?

1. Jade Empire

 

2. System Shock 2

 

3. Knights of the Old Republic

 

4. Starcraft

 

5. Rogue

 

6. TES IV: Oblivion

 

7. Geneforge I

 

8. Sonic the Hedgehog 2

 

Honorable Mentions: Skyrim, BoA, Battlefront II, FFI, Neverwinter Nights, Daggerfall.