GetOutOfBox

I don't know where you get your dates, but humans as a species have only existed for approximately 200 000 years, and only 50 000 out of those 200 000 years have we existed in the stage we are currently at now (i.e behavioral sophistication, intelligence level, etc). The thing that confuses people about evolution, is that when a species undergoes a massive evolutionary change, it is no longer considered the same species. For example, the Homo Sapiens race (modern humans) originated from Homo Habilis, which would be our furthest ancestors in the "Homo" Genus. The thing is, Homo Habilis was more like modern Chimpanzee's than modern Humans, utilizing basic tools, but nothing very advanced. Sure, we (Homo Sapiens) originated from that race, but scientifically speaking modern humans are considered a different species than humans from that time. Due to this oversight, most people conclude that modern Humans do not evolve, which is not the case.

It's a common belief that humans aren't capable of physically evolving, that our intelligence replaces the concept of evolution. Humans do evolve, but just like all creatures our evolution occurs extremely slowly over time and evolutionary changes are only made when their is a constant need for them. Our intelligence is pretty adaptable, we build shelters, make tools, etc, we no longer have any need for things like fur. Though there are some aspects of us that are evolving, for example wisdom teeth and the jaw in humans. Back in the stone age, we had much bigger jaws. Over time as we've evolved, the jaw has shrunk slightly, reducing space for the additional 4 wisdom teeth, which we have yet to evolve away from. An example of a large evolutionary change is the different skin color between Caucasians and Africans. In Africa, the melanin (the pigment that causes the dark skin color) serves to protect the humans living there from the larger amount of UV radiation they are exposed to in that continent. When some humans migrated to what is now called Europe, we no longer had the need for the extra amount of melanin, and hence the amount of it was reduced over time by evolution.

Generally, it's best to install all of the patches before adding mods/starting a game. I'm guessing the patch probably reset some of the variables in the ini file, try installing the Unofficial Oblivion patch if you haven't already, as it fixes some incorrectly set variables in the Oblivion.ini file. Also, always use "BOSS" (an auto-load order arranger), it ensures mods load order is correct.

What are you talking about, Skyrim isn't out yet, it won't be for a while, as it hasn't even been officially confirmed. As for your blurry/square landscape textures, assure that you've updated your copy of Oblivion to 1.2.0416, as that update significant improves LOD texture blending.

Actually the Metric System was first used by France in 1781, the Romans did not use the Metric System.

I don't what you just said, are you agreeing or disagreeing with me? From what I'm guessing you meant, I suggest re-reading my post, as I never said that an animal could not evolve to a have a higher intelligence, I merely stated that raw intelligence is not the only thing required to make a race such as ours, a species would need a combination of an advanced intelligence and a body capable of allowing the intelligence to observe and experiment with the world around it. The fact that dolphins lack any form of limb made for grasping limits there potential growth of intelligence, as without limbs or some other method to fashion tools, experiment with the world around it (i.e create fire) a race with a high intelligence will find little use for its advanced intelligence.

im sorry,i meant that i love to play xbox 360 games [snip] on my pc. Which is completely impossible, since many of today's PC's have trouble emulating a Nintendo DS console, let alone a console as complex as an Xbox 360. Think of it like this, emulating gameboy games still causes lag even on devices literally 100 times more powerful than the gameboy itself (i.e the iPhone). The very concept of emulating a console like the Xbox is beyond the scope of even the most high-end PC currently. There's also the fact that there are no emulators for the Xbox360, so unless you programmed an emulator completely from scratch and assembled a PC with a price range of around $9000, what you just said makes no sense.

My parents divorced when I was 8, it sucks when relationships don't work out, but its better that parents decide to split up if they honestly no longer love each other, it'll make your relationship with them much less tense, and they'll be happier. There's nothing worse than living in a home where your parents are constantly arguing over the smallest things. At first, It'll feel really strange and depressing, but don't worry you'll get used to it over time. The best thing I can advise is being open about your feelings with your parents and not build up any resentment. If its your wish to visit your Dad and Mom equally, as long as both parents are considered equally eligible to care for a child, they can have joint custody and you can rotate between visiting your Dad and your Mom. Keep in mind that they both still love you, and that this is not your fault (sounds cheesy I know, but I often found myself unconsciously pondering whether it had something to do with me when my parents broke up). Like you said, it's a good idea to get some distractions right now, if you're into books, here's some of my personal favourites that are great reads, really exciting: Fantasy Genre: The "His Dark Materials" trilogy by Phillip Pullman, The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass the "Redwall" series by Brian Jaques, tons of books in this series Adventure: Zorro by Isabel Allende - This is an amazing addition to the plethora of Zorro books, its packed with action, character development, change in scenery, etc Sherlock Holmes books, any of them, most are pretty good You could also try some video games you haven't played before, here's some that I recommend playing if you haven't already: Team Fortress 2 - best multiplayer FPS game there is in my opinion, its both casual and intense, it has a strong class system Age of Empires 2 - I'm not a big RTS fan, but AoE 2 is an amazing game, I've put hundreds of hours into it Civilization 5, another amazing strategy game, unlike AoE, this is turn-based Crysis The Pokemon games, despite having a reputation of being immature (due to the anime being targeted towards children) are actually quite fun, you can tons of game time out of them. You could also get a ton of movies you'd love to watch/rewatch, here's some of my favs: V For Vendetta Howls Moving Castle Spirited Away Lawrence of Arabia The Lord of The Rings (you've probably watched this, but its an amazing trio of films, possibly the best I've ever seen) Avatar: The Last Airbender (movie): Before everyone literally shits their pants that this is on my fav list, it's not because the movies good, but because the movie is so horribly written and badly acted that you'll find yourself laughing at it. Seriously. The Shawshank Redemption Escape from Alcatraz Die Hard 300 - this movie is by no means perfect, but its still a great movie to watch, if not just for the "THIS IS SPARTA" scene. Forrest Gump I hope the lists were helpful :)

Living forever would be great for the first few thousand years, but as millenia fly by, you'd begin to tire of life. You'd find that you'd experienced life enough already and would begin to grow bored of what life has to offer. You would begin to long for death, even if was truly the end of your being, just to escape the mind numbingly boring experience life had become. Still, I think that if offered an Immortality Pill, I'd be weak enough to take it. As a skeptic, I don't truly believe in an afterlife as I can find no evidence of one (this is not a criticism of those that believe in an afterlife, I have no prejudice against those with faith in a religion), so to be honest, the idea of death is quite disturbing. But then, I'm still young, when I'm old, I may be able to embrace death without worry.

I'm 16. I must admit I generally tell people on the internet I'm 18, due to the prejudice most people have towards those under the age of 18 because of the general assumption in many forums that people who are not legally adults are all either ITGs (Internet Tough Guys), completely immature or angsty self-proclaimed non-conformists. Well you've just found one. My main priority at the moment is perfecting my knowledge of the C++ programming language, and my general priority in life is expansion of my knowledge (from reliable sources) in various fields of science (math too, but that's one of my weak points). I have an open mind when it comes to video game genre's, some of my favorite games are from the 90's, so cutting-edge graphics are not a must for me. And no, I'm not some fat kid who acts smart to compensate for a total lack of social skills, I'm not a basement dweller if you get my drift. Sure, in the 'realm of real life', a majority of 16 year old guy's priorities are either getting laid (don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those guys who absolutely can not get a girlfriend and sneers at people who do, I just don't find sex an important priority for me at the moment), playing Call of Duty, etc, but its unfair to assume all 16, even 15 year olds are immature.

I totally agree, most Americans envision "switching" to the metric system as learning how to convert imperial units to metric units. The system itself should be taught, as in using the actual measurement system, not using the metric system as a frontend for the imperial system. The metric system is unarguably a superior system. I know this sounds controversial, but the there is no reason why one would want to use the imperial system over the metric system, as the metric system has only advantages and no disadvantages compared to the imperial system. The most important improvement is that metric units can easily be converted back and forth without requiring (relatively) complex formulae. For example, a centimeter is exactly one hundredth of a meter (1 m =100 cm), 1 kilometer is exactly 100 000 centimeters. 1 kg is exactly 1000 grams, 1 liter is exactly 1000 milliliters. Now take the imperial system's units and try converting them: 1 foot = 12 inches 1 gallon = 128 fluid ounces How much is 1638 gallons in fluid ounces (1 gallon = 128 fluid ounces)? Sounds pretty difficult huh. You have to multiple 1638 by 128, by no means an easy thing to do for most people. How about 1638 Liters in milliliters (1 liter = 1000 milliliters)? Pretty easy, since all you have to do is add 3 zeros to the the number of liters (x1000). The only reason America hasn't switched is because unfortunately many Americans don't realize that it would be easier and more effective for them to use the metric system, if Obama proposed a conversion to the metric system, even slowly over time, he'd probably be accused of being a communist. (I'm not being stereotypical either, this speech of his generated controversy where he was accused of promoting marxism and socialsm. Yes, its just a stay in school speech. It was banned from some schools according to parental demand.)

I agree that humans have had a negative impact on the climate in recent years, mostly due to the ozone layer being damaged, but climate cycles are a regular occurence that has been happening for earths entire existence. Earth's likely had many ice ages and warm ages during its existence, and it will keep having these as long as it lasts. It would be incredibly difficult for humans to damage the planet in such a way that it would never recover. For example, once we push the environment to a point where earth is inhospitable to humans, or at least to our current population and lifestyle, once the factories, homes, vehicles, etc stop putting out carbon emmisions, the ozone layer will slowly over time regrow, the polar ice caps reform after a long ice age, etc. Even with a nuclear war that completely devastated the surface of the planet, life would slowly but surely return, stemming from life forms we know live deep in canyons at the bottom of the ocean. Even if those lifeforms were destroyed, various elements could still over time come together to form single celled organisms, which would again be the start of life.

No other current animal/insect/life form we know of on this planet is currently evolved in such a way that it could control the planet as we have. Technology has made us an exception to the general order of nature, almost all other animals follow a controlled population size, they all play a part in maintaining a stable environment. We can bulldoze (metaphorically and literally) over any race that stands in the way of our expansion, there is no race that can stop us from expanding into its territory and hogging its resources. Our extremely developed and intricate social herd behavior also has given us unity in extremely large groups (humans form "herds" numbering in the millions vs most other social animals forming herds between 4 and 30, a few hundred at the max (with the exception of certain seasons when the animals gather for mating, etc) which allows us to compensate for our lack of individual strength in comparison to other animals like bears. Basically, all of our weaknesses are compensated (and vastly overcompansated) by our strengths, mainly our intelligence, intricate social behavior ,communication and physical dexterity. We literally have no weakness that can easily be exploited by another animal. If we disappeared from the earth, there would unlikely be any vastly dominant race (cockroaches would have the highest population, but the lowest impact, they really couldn't "rule" the world due to their lack of any form of intelligence beyond autonomy). Most races would remain pretty equal to each other, with dominant races emerging in individual ecozones, but nothing that would rise to rule the world in our stead. Given time (as in thousands of years) primates and some other animals may evolve to our level of intelligence, though for example, take dolphins, they're considered highly intelligent mammals (not as intelligent as us, but they definitely show some decent reasoning and planning), but even if their intelligence evolved to match ours, they'd still be hindered by the fact that due to their lack of limbs, they're not physically capable of constructing tools, exploring ideas through physical experiments, etc. Their development would be extremely held back by the fact that they could not implement it in any useful way beyond what they already do.

At this point in time the perfect world would be one without humans, but we are slowly but surely evolving for the better. We've ascended out of the anarchy and primitive culture of the past to the better feudal system which unites a nation under one leader allowing for technological and cultural growth, but is flawed in such a way that unless that leader has good intentions its easy to exploit people in a feudal government. We moved from feudal to various republic type government which gave more freedom and a voice to the people, allowing for peaceful changes in law and beliefs (ideally at least). We moved from that to today's democratic type system many countries employ. Various economic changes have occurred as well, capabilities and global economy being one of the most beneficial of them (though not the best conceivable economic systems, just the best implemented successfully). If we could successfully adopt a Socialist system many more great advances for mankind would be made, though such a large change will take a while to be conceived, as the people's culture must move into the future with it. Basically, I'm optimistic that one day humans will get to the point where we've managed to set aside our differences and live in harmony. It is possible, just difficult and will take time. A good example how humans can become more accepting of each other is black people being considered equal to white people in many of todays countries. In my country, Canada, a black person is considered completely equal to a white person, most people don't even think of the difference. The same goes in America. Compare that to about 150 years ago, in the time of my Great-Grandfather's youth, black people were still being sold as slaves in America, even in Canada, where slavery was illegal, there was still much prejudice against black people, they still were considered less intelligent and physically capable than white people. Now back to today, most people in America/Canada don't even really distinguish between black and white people, they consider them to be the same (which makes sense since the only difference between black and white people is a few aesthetic differences, we're still the same race, the most obvious physical proof being that a white person can conceive a child with a black person). If we can do that in 150 years, I'm sure in the next 500 years, racism will be considered a thing of the past, something the "barbarian ancestors" practiced.

It depends, if I was allowed to slightly "tweak" the fictional worlds, than there'd be many I'd love to live in. If I had to live in the world exactly as it was described in the book, I'd have to say the world depicted in Brian Jaques "Redwall" series. Yes, its a world with anthropomorphic (human-like, i.e humanoid) animals ranging from rodents to larger mammals, though they're generally implied to be roughly the same size with some variations (i.e most animals are implied to be around an average caucasion height, i.e between 4-6 feet.), but it's portrayed in a mature and non-fetishy kind of way, it doesn't feel like some angsty 16 year old girls fanfic :rolleyes: . I'm not a furry, I don't dream of being an animal (LOL IM A WOLF IN A MANS BODY), its not being one of those animals that interests me, its their lifestyle and late-medieval style world that I find really interesting and exciting. Anyone interested in medieval fantasy should take a look at the "Redwall" series, they're really amazing. The only thing you'll have to keep in mind is that you can read them in two different order-types, you can read them in the order the author recommends, which is not chronological, though the author feels they're best read in that way, or you can read them in chronological order. For sake of making it easier to get into them, I recommend reading them in chronological order, as you may get confused by the standard order where its jumping back and forth through time. If you like re-reading books, read them in the recommended order the second time around.

It depends on what the classified information contains. Take the recent Wikileaks release of classified information about the war in Afghanistan. I found that totally immature and pathetic, since the information jeapordized international relations, the lives of soldiers fighting there, and the reports really contained nothing signifigantly important for the public to need to know. If the leak contained information revealing some huge government conspiracy, something that was covered up for "greedy" reasons (i.e a perpetual power source was invented, but since it threatened the oil industry the government made the inventor "disappear" locked the prototype away in some gov warehouse). The information in the recent Wikileaks leak was not released to the public for several legitimate reasons: 1. The information jeapordized international relations 2. It contained important information relating to US stance and plans for the future in Afghanistan that could potentially threaten the lives of soldiers if it fell into the hands of Al-Quaeda. Basically, if the government hid the information for an illegitamate and greedy reason, than yes, I think it should be released. If the government hid the information for the sake of national security and relations, than it seems pretty clear to me that it should stay hidden. It all comes down to the fact that many people seem to have this idea that their country's entire government is out to get them and is composed of hundreds of psychopaths whose only goal is to make money. It doesn't occur to them that there may be legitimate reasons not to advertise military positions and incidents to all those who'd like to hear. I personally dislike Julian Assange, he seems to get off to leaking important military secrets without considering the negative repurcussions on the very people he claims to be representing. Yes, technically he didn't leak the information, the guy in the military who sent it to him did. But it basically comes down to the fact that he knew it was classified and that it had not been cleared for release. He was an accomplice to the guy who gave him the information. Even worse is that Anonymous took it upon themselves to take down Mastercard, paypal, and Visa simply because they cooperated with the law and closed his accounts with them. In fact, at least in Paypals case, he filled out fake personal information for the accounts registration, meaning that he broke their TOS anyways. The only thing I must say in his favor is its kind of funny how instead of just straight up arresting him with charges of violating the laws laid out in the Espionage Act, soon after the first leak suddenly a warrant is put out for his arrest for rape charges. LOL totally not a smear campaign.

FYI I'm talking about the time it takes for the webpages to be downloaded, I'm talking about lag I experience doing normal stuff in the forums (i.e scrolling down a page) I've found that for whatever reason, the nexus forums render really slowly on my system, and seem to generate a lot of CPU usage spikes. Just these websites. In Internet Explorer 7 at my workplace, the forums are almost unusable. Here's the kind of issues I'm talking about: Scrolling down/up/sideways on the forums web pages is really slow and kind of stutters. Firefox memory usage shoots up about 30MB when I have any nexus forum page opened. Simply scrolling down a page creates a huge spike in CPU use. This is not a hardware issue, as I have a high-end gaming PC. Specs: Phenom 2 X4 2.5GHZ G.Skill 4GB DDR2 RAM (DDR800, CAS 4) Radeon 6870 OS is on an SSD, Firefox is on a mechanical drive (defragmented once a week) I only experience these issues with the nexus forums, and the lag is incredibly bad in Internet Explorer 7 at my workplace, a totally different computer, totally different network. Is it just me, or is anyone else noticing these issues?

You can run Oblivion in Windowed mode, which partially allows you to alt-tab between apps, its kind of neat, since when you alt-tab out of the game, the rendering engines threads are paused, so it shouldn't bog down your CPU/GPU when alt-tabbed out of it. The downside is that you'll still very often find that after alt-tabbing back to the game, it simply won't restart the rendering engine, you'll have to close it via task manager.

By the way, I don't know about you, but I seem to be able to use OBGE, and force AA through my drivers control panel. They're definitely both working, as I'm seeing no jaggies, both near and far from me, and SSAO is definitely on, since if I disable/enable it in OBGE's menu, I can see the the shading turning on and off.

Nope, its an inherent glitch in the game. It's actually pretty common, it's generally not advisable to be switching between a 3D game and applications.

*facepalms himself for forgetting* Bah I had forgotten that the his sapphire had a lower clock speed and presumed it higher. On the other hand, I had thought that Oblivion's recommended settings are well within the range of his computer's specs. Even if there was lower performance, it wouldn't be enough to account for having extremely low FPS, even more so if he is capable of running other games smoothly. I'm guessing the poor performance is probably also due to the monitor resolution he's using, which he didn't mention. If you want to use a large resolution in any game, Crossfire/SLI is a must, as performance will experience an extreme drop in single card setups. He probably like most PC builders (including myself at one point ;) neglected the Power Supply, if the PSU's amperage on the 12-Volt rail is not sufficient for the card, the card may still run, but with subtle errors and performance fluctuations. It's generally difficult to effectively test a component to be completely stable, as some "instructions" are difficult to be written in such a way a checksum is reliably calculated. This is especially true with video cards, due to the Hardware Abstraction Layer in the form of DirectX, with CPU's you can just use assembly language, doing so with GPU's is much more difficult. He may also have damaged or incorrectly configured RAM, as often the system will boot and appear to be operating normally, but may operate slower or have functions crash or return strange results. Testing for memory errors is generally easy, using a utility like memtest86+

There are many possibilities as to whats causing his speed issues, to mention a few: 1. His Power Supply maybe has insufficient amperage on the 12-volt rail, which may allow the graphics card to function, but just barely. 2. A deffective card, though this is unlikely if other games work fine. 3. Oblivion has misdetected his video cards shader capabilities and is using an inferior shader package And of course the likely cause of your 3870 outperforming his 5550, is that the 3870 is a high-end card, albeit older, while his 5550 is literally the bottom of the 5000 series. Your card has a GPU clock of 775mhz, his 550 mhz, your card has a memory clock of 1125mhz, his card 400mhz, your card as 1GB of video ram, his 512 mb. Basically, your card is vastly superior to his in everything except DirectX support, and since Oblivion is made for DX9, which both cards support, the fact that the 5550 has DX11 support is meaningless in this case.

Which is not possible, since as I said already, applications are written for DirectX, not a specific GPU(s). The internal operations of a video card are completely transparent to the game. The only exception to this is if the card has a bad implementation of DirectX, which has only been known to happen once, with an old NVIDIA series, and that was considered a serious issue at the time that was fixed immediately in the next card revision. The 4000/5000 series have not been known to have such issues, as they would be immediately obvious to reviewers.

That 3GB memory patch is known to cause instability, regardless of what program its used on. All that utility (and all the utilities like it) do is add the "/LARGEADDRESSAWARE" flag to the executables headers. Not only is it more complicated than simply adding a flag to an executable to get it to use more than 2GB of memory, the very concept of this system causes issues and its generally reccomended that developers use a 64-bit executable instead. 1. This flag is usually added by the compiler when the developer is compiling their applications source code into an executable file, but the application must be specifically designed in such a way to take advantage of the extra memory space, all this flag does is tell Windows the application is capable of it, but keep in mind, if the flag has been added, but the application itself is not designed to be Large Address Aware, at best, you'll simply see no improvment, at worst you'll get memory corrupt (basically crashes). TL;DR, the application must be written to have support for this, the flag just tells the operating system the application can, its still up to the application to utilise the extra memory 2. This creates bloated memory allocation, and basically makes the OSes kernel operate in a way it was not designed to. So even if you get this working, you may actually run into even worse performance issues. 3. In Windows XP, you have to add "/3GB" to the boot config file so that LAA even works, or be using a 64-bit operating system. All in all, I reccomend you avoid these types of patches, especially if you're experiencing crashing.

lol what