FYI, i have used Aurora/DevEdition almost exclusively (outside of testing) on at least a dozen different Windows and OS X machines ever since the Aurora channel was created and i have never once had a serious problem. Occasionally i find little visual glitches or whatever, but it rarely ever crashes and i never get data loss or anything severe like that.
That is not at all what 'radical' means in the context of 'radical sub-culture'. The definition you're looking for is one of:
2. thoroughgoing or extreme, especially as regards change from accepted or traditional forms: a radical change in the policy of a company.
3. favoring drastic political, economic, or social reforms: radical ideas; radical and anarchistic ideologues.
I guess you could argue that trans people fall under definition # 2 from the perspective of many (most?) people, but i also think that 'radical sub-culture' generally implies some kind of conscious action — i don't think that simply existing as a member of a minority makes you inherently 'radical'.
I'm not looking for a definition at all; I'm perfectly comfortable with the primary definition of 'of or going to the root or origin; fundamental.' I'm not going to dispense with perfectly reasonable vocabulary just because alternative interpretations of a term exist.
If you're not sure what someone means, consider asking them rather than complaining about it. Transitioning to a different gender from one's birth default is (for the time being) a radical change involving extensive medical evaluation, a lifetime drug regimen and ultimately major surgery, to say nothing of the social difficulties.
How are you going to cite a study disproving the inherently subjective and hyperbolic definition of 'everywhere'? There is literally nothing in the universe that is 'everywhere'. Can you link an academic paper establishing a quantitative definition of when something can be referred to as being 'everywhere'?
I am not a scientist but i don't think hydrogen occupies every single point in space everywhere in the universe
Anyway, if 5 in 1000 (as your own link states, these numbers are inherently difficult to quantify — but i'll go along with it) is not enough to qualify as everywhere, what is? What's your exact limit on everywhere? 1 in 500? 1 in 100? 1 in 10?
The suicide rate in the US is ~12 in 100'000, but you didn't seem to think mentioning it hurt OP's credibility (or, by association, the credibility of people who've committed suicide).
And that may be obvious to an adult or someone with a fully developed mind but let's not pretend that when you were this age everything felt 100x more important than it was looking back. This is always going to be the case but it get's better as you get older. At that age being ostracised by classmates and/or parents can feel like the end of the world.
Of course, that's the point. When that teen is in their Tumblr bubble, and all the other teens in that bubble say, "yes you're right, this really is the end of the world", is it any surprise that some of them take radical self-harm actions?
That's a very good point, still I worry about destroying, infiltratration, censoring these "bubbles". We don't know the stats of kids who were considering (or had resigned themselves to suicide) who then found such a bubble that gave them the support they needed to keep living. What I'm saying is the effort to stop this from happening may have worse consequences than doing nothing or rather working to fix the root issue instead of playing whack-a-mole when it is finally staring us in the face and we can't ignore it any longer (See: War on Drugs).
At least in the western world, I think that's significantly less of a problem as much more progress has been made for example when it comes to marriage or representation in the media. It also appears that "peak resistance" has been overcome and further progress is inevitable.
Even so it has to be taken with a grain of salt. Everyone can escape school, escaping a country, state or just city for a more accepting environment is a lot more difficult.
While I 100% agree that gays/lesbians have it "easier" than trans I wouldn't come close to acting like it's no longer an issue. Trans rights still have quite a way to go but I really do believe that it will get better. It's not going to happen overnight but I do believe it will happen so I don't consider it "an obvious lie". Thanks for the response!
I agree with you. I work in software development and have followed Mozilla's bug tracker for over 5 years, and i STILL don't really understand how to use Bugzilla.
On the dozen or two occasions that i've filed a ticket, probably 1/3 of them ended up being duplicates (which i always search for, but never find, because i don't get how to use Bugzilla's search function), and another 1/3 end up going un-acknowledged. The remaining 1/3 get acknowledged, but i've yet to see one actually get fixed (which i understand is a function of resources and blah blah, i'm not bitter about it or anything).
On one occasion, i was able to locate the source of the bug i had, and, even though i had absolutely zero experience with 'lower-level' languages like C++ at the time, i decided i would fix it. I pulled trunk and managed to build it, which was an enormous affair, let me tell you, and in the end i had a fix. I submitted the patch, but was told that i would need to put it through their testing system. I was given a link to a wiki, but this entire process was just absolutely beyond me at the time and i bailed on it. I just wanted to help them fix a bug. The bug is still there to this day.
To Mozilla's credit, they did (do?) have a user-feedback extension with the beta/Aurora builds that allows regular users to report bugs in a simple manner directly from the browser. You'd pick 'Firefox made me sad' and then just type what the problem was and click submit. However, i have no idea where these bugs go, how closely they're looked at, or how successful they've been in reducing bugs.
I was really really into the GameShark during the PSX days. The original one was nice, but the best thing was the GameShark Pro, which allowed you to (amongst other things) generate your own codes via a rudimentary hex editor/comparison tool that could be invoked by pressing a button on the device. (You could also connect it to a Windows PC via a parallel port on the back, which was tedious, but the accompanying software was easier to work with.)
So to create (e.g.) an infinite-ammo code, you would reload so that you had a full magazine of 30 rounds, and press the button. Then you'd have the GameShark search for addresses with a value of 30. Usually it'd return a huge amount of mostly garbage, so then you'd return to the game, shoot once or twice to change the number of rounds, and go back and tell it to narrow the results down by showing only the addresses that had changed to 29 or whatever.
After doing that two or three times, you'd have a working code that you could save to the device or share with people.
Sometimes it wasn't obvious what the value of a variable was, so you'd have to do a 'not equals' search. So to get weapon values, you would equip a knife, do a search, change to a hand gun, do a 'not equals' search, usually repeat that many times (because there are always going to be things changing) until you finally end up with an address that specifies the weapon (and sometimes one or two accompanying addresses).
Firstly, by watching the value of these addresses (you could always return to the results screen and see what the new value was), you would find out which values correspond to which guns. The knife might be 01, the hand gun 02, the rocket launcher 0A, and so on. That would allow you to take the address and create many codes for different weapons by adjusting the values.
More humorously: In some games, like Resident Evil, the address for the weapon function would be accompanied by another address for the weapon ammo. You could adjust the two values so that they differed from each other — for example, set the function to 01 and the ammo to 0A — and then you would end up with a knife that shoots rockets.
The codes that were the most challenging to create, and also probably the most fun, were what i used to call 'abusive codes'. Abusive codes were usually more humorous than practical — instead of giving you useful things like infinite ammo or lives, abusive codes would screw with the game's display or physics.
One of my favourite abusive codes was roller-skate mode for Silent Hill. Silent Hill is an extremely frightening and morbid horror game (i still can't play it alone), and enabling roller-skate mode completely changed the dynamic. First of all, during game-play, Harry's legs wouldn't move — he would just scoot around like he was sliding on ice. What was funnier, though, was that the sliding would persist into the game's cut scenes (which usually involved the discovery of something gruesome). So for example Harry would come across some mutilated corpse, the music would get all shrieky and he would exclaim how terrible it was, and all the while he would be scooting all over the screen. It turned the game from something frightening into something hilarious.
Most of the other abusive codes that i and my friends experimented with had similar effects on the physics. For example, in Resident Evil 2, we created a code where, if you pressed a certain button on the controller, the characters legs would shoot around like a helicopter and, if you held it long enough, they would gradually 'fly' up through the ceiling and off the screen.
Other games would allow you to alter aspects of the display. You could make the characters into giants, or make specific body parts extremely large or small, or make all of the doors turn into different objects. This was 'after my time', so to speak, but one of the Resident Evil games for GameCube allowed you to adjust the main character's breast size. If you cranked the value high enough, you could make her boobs fill the entire screen.
I have always felt that this is an issue, as i have personally had many problems when interpreting road signage.
For example, i once pissed off some builders by following a truck into their work zone (they were working on a highway lane). The truck had a huge sign on the back that said 'do not follow into work zone', but how can i possibly know if i'm following a truck into a work zone without some indication of where the work zone is? There were no other signs or lights or orange barrels or anything.
Another example is the way exit ramp signage is written where i live. Highway signs don't include units of measure when they refer to distance, so the first few times i saw the sign 'ABC ROAD — 2' i had no idea that it was telling me that the exit for Abc Road was in 2 MILES, not that i was meant to take Exit 2, which happened to be the very next exit after the sign.
The 11foot8 Web site linked elsewhere in the thread mentions that the rail bridge has a flashing sign that says 'OVERHEIGHT WHEN FLASHING'. The site calls this 'pretty good' signage. It makes sense sitting at my computer reading about it, but i can almost guarantee that if i was seeing that sign for the first time on the road i would have absolutely no fucking idea what it was talking about until after i had already crashed into the bridge.
I have a DeathAdder. The mouse itself (the hardware) is great. However, the software (the thing that really makes the mouse functional and configurable, which is what i thought i was paying for) is one of the most absurd and infuriating things i have ever had to deal with.
The configuration tool was designed in the vein of Steam — it requires an Internet connection to use it. At all. So before you can change the mouse settings, before the mouse will even LOAD its settings, you must create a Razer account and sign in to their online service through the tool. Only then will you be able to do anything with the mouse.
Also like Steam, there is an option to 'go offline', but it (perhaps unintentionally) doesn't seem to persist across sessions. So if you lose your connection and then you reboot the computer or the tool crashes (which is semi-frequent), you're back to where you started — a log-in prompt.
In addition to that, just from a usability perspective, the software is a disaster. It is a mass of grey-on-grey text, modal panes, near-full-screen sliders, and unexplained icons that i dread even thinking about using. In addition, the tool adds an ugly menu-bar icon that you can't get rid of, and once you install the software you can never close it — if you try to kill the tool or any of its background services, the entire thing will respawn. And just to give you that extra punch in the face, every time the tool starts (at boot or because one of its background services crashed) the giant black-and-green blob pops up on top of everything else. HEY, HEY, LOG IN TO YOUR MOUSE NOW
The scroll wheel is also apparently non-configurable on OS X, which is incredible because the default behaviour is some pre-Windows-95 we've-just-invented-scroll-wheels one-pixel-per-rotation insanity.
Lastly, every single update to the software requires that you reboot the entire machine.
I am not exaggerating when i say that i loathe using this god-damn mouse.
> HEY, HEY, LOG IN TO YOUR MOUSE NOW
> Lastly, every single update to the software requires that you reboot the entire machine.
I only used the software once, a few years ago. I never logged into anything, it never required internet access, it never frequently updated and it never required a reboot.
You realise you don't need the software right? You can use the mouse perfectly without it. All the software lets you do is change the sensitivity (any good OS will let you do that), turn off the light, and program the "bottom" button. The light is under your hand 90% of the time and is off when your computer is off. It's a non-issue. The button the bottom is in an irritating position and I have never needed to use it. Sure, you could configure it to change sensitivity during a game (consider running and gunning vs. accurate sniping, perhaps?) but in reality no one is going to lift their mouse during an computer game to adjust the sensitivity.
> the default behaviour is some pre-Windows-95 we've-just-invented-scroll-wheels one-pixel-per-rotation insanity.
I have never experienced this problem. I don't know what you're talking about.
> I only used the software once, a few years ago. I never logged into anything, it never required internet access, it never frequently updated and it never required a reboot.
They changed the software package literally less than a week after i bought the DeathAdder. Previously there was a specific 'DeathAdder' utility which, as you said, didn't require any online junk. But they completely removed it from existence once their port of the Windows software left beta or whatever.
I did try installing a copy of it that i had saved from before, but it seems that the act of installing the new software somehow broke the ability to use the old one, and i didn't want to spend hours fucking with some mouse driver.
> You realise you don't need the software right? You can use the mouse perfectly without it.
No, you can't. Or i can't, anyway. The default tracking is unusable to me (i like it much slower and smoother-scaling than most people seem to), and OS X's tracking slider didn't help. The only way to make it even tolerable was to use the software. Additionally, the buttons would be recognised incorrectly unless you told the software what you wanted them to behave as.
> I have never experienced this problem. I don't know what you're talking about.
Obviously i was being facetious, i'm sure it was actually one line per 'click' or whatever. Each click had far too much travel for that to be usable. Especially in comparison to the Magic Mouse and Mighty Mouse, with which you can near-instantaneously flick to the bottom of a long Web page.
If you didn't experience that, i guess i don't know what to tell you.
I don't have a DeathAdder, but I have had really a lot of mice over the years whose software (especially on OS X, but really just in general) utterly sucks.
At least through 10.6, 10.7, and 10.8, and maybe going back longer than that, I've been using ControllerMate to program the functionality of all my mice (and some of my non-Apple keyboards). It's more of a general purpose visual programmer for input devices than a mouse driver, but works great for that limited use case.
It's a great help for the common case with mice of great hardware coupled with terrible software. I haven't installed third-party mouse software since I found it. Might be worth checking out. (Not affiliated, just find it useful...)
I got an Abyssus, it has all it's settings as hardware switches, so it doesn't require any software.
Most of the time installing mouse "drivers" for any vendor it's a waste of time, since the settings they provide should be adjusted in-game (default driver should give you a 1:1 sensitivity and 0 acceleration).
I have been using DeathAdders since 2009 (2, one broke after 3 years) and think they are amazing, hands down. Never bothered to install their software, as they work perfect for me without.
Try being a woman on the Internet — anywhere on the Internet, not this one idiot site — and then talk about insane double-standards.
When every other online interaction involves at least a few men commenting on your fuckability or how much of a 'bitch' you are, or going digging through all of your previous posts or even tracking down your Facebook account so that they can publicly share your body with all of the other men reading, and you have no recourse lest you be labelled an 'angry feminist', you will find that one single Web site where women treat men in a similar fashion does not inspire the same level of passion that it is doing here.
It is a terrible Web site, obviously, but i am envious of the social position that leads to such a complete lack of irony and self-reflection as seen in these comments.
The fact that other double standards exist in other parts of the internet isn't what I was debating. I won't argue with you that there is an inherit double standard among both sexes, but seeing as this thread is about the website in question -- that's the one I was addressing.
Also, in no way should double standards and sexism lead to more double standards and sexism.
If you had simply decried the site's 'sexism' i would not have taken issue with your post. What you'd said was that it was an 'insane double standard'.
The definition of a double-standard is 'the application of different sets of principles for similar situations, or two different people in the same situation'.
Your use of the term 'insane double standard' (not to mention the other comments here using similar language) therefore suggests that the existence of one single Web site dedicated to women objectifying men is a 'similar situation' to living every single day in a culture where only the OPPOSITE is actually a real problem.
And as much as i can identify with the distaste over this Web site, i find that that implication is laughable and the emotional outrage over it is therefore severely misplaced.
I understand why people dislike websites like this, or the Diet Coke ads (men stripping their shirts off while women ogle) and I'd join in the criticism. But the ranting sometimes feels so overblown.
