How is that possible, NRA members post here about how gun ownership prevents all crime. I've lost count of the number of accounts of people single-gunedly saving the world that have been posted here.
To those who think I am being unfair, the above is meant in jest (hence the wild overstatements).
25. Do you know the terrible secret of space? 25a. Do you have stairs in your house? 25b. Do you have bread? 25c. Do you have old people? 25d. Pusher? 25e. Shover? 25f. Are the old people protected?
I find this hard to explain. I also find it quite personal and rather dark. I don't like where it leads and maybe thats why I don't go further then I don't know. Contemplation can be a powerful thing. Maybe I am not a point where I am ready to look that hard at that, or as you said maybe I'm lazy and intellectually dishonest, but I can think of few people who would readily admit that to themselves.
I know I do not believe/have faith. What I have seen in several organized religions has caused that. I shun organized religion because for the good they do far too much harm is done and they will never catch up. It's an inherent feature of any organized anything (even school boards or local book clubs) to become corrupt and hurt people, because thats the easy thing to do. I also do not have my own singular hodgepodge system (I used to a long time ago).
It may be that because I was raised in/around many religions (minor christianity through my grand parents, hinduism through my parents, read up on buddhism and taoism myself, saw a lot of new age types around me doing their thing) that I do not say there is no god, and find myself getting by with I don't know.
I'd say I want to believe something, (cue X-Files music) but I don't even know if thats what I want any more. Ferreting out an answer right now seems to be too much work and far to painful a process to be worth the answer. That I guess makes me lazy and intellectually dishonest if I get what you are saying correctly.
There is a spark of something I feel, but I cant seem to connect it to anything any more. I call it hope. It isn't hope that I believe, or that there is a god. It may just be some echo from the past, a brief fluttering of feeling, of happiness from before reality/the world made thing clear to me how they worked. The ghost (sorry for using that word) of those childhood feelings you mention in your post maybe? Because the way it feels to me is that if/when that last bit of me dies (good going humanity) I will probably give up... (or spend all my time posting to/.). It isn't because I have a belief in god, afterlife, or hell that I don't do that now.
God or the non existence of god seems to have no place in my life. Maybe one day it will or continue not to. I think that I am content with I don't know because I feel it does not matter.
Probably, as you said, we are using the word agnostic wrong. To me it seems to be the proper thing to describe how I feel since people seem to understand a little of my feeling from that. I don't use atheist because it does not seem to convey what I want to the person I am talking to.
Combating superstition is fine, but do you stand outside schools screaming kids who are won't step on a crack? I am both perfectly at home and terrified for my life in the dark. I can move and operate quite well. My problem is that some part of my irrational mind starts to murmur, most of the time I am able to ignore it, other times (quite rare) I am flooded with panic and terror. I can still operate and perform tasks with the same clarity as before because I know it is an irrational fear but it takes some effort to control the flight instinct. Superstition is powerful at times and humanity will never be completely rid of it. This does not me we let it rule our lives just like I do not let it drive me out of the dark.
I do know that I have a different view of religion then you. I don't see it as a poison if people are not doing harm. This would appear to me to place me as your enemy (because I fail to combat superstition). I agree with your view that letting it rule us is bad. The examples you give are bad and pushing religion is whats behind them. I don't know if your level of militancy (what I get from your tone, I may be reading to much into it) will help or hinder.
The problem I think is this is a complex subject touching on many aspects of who we are, how we are, and what we are. There are so many things caught up, intertwined, and cross connected in all of this i
I can honestly say I do not know. I was raised in religion, but have seen things across the world that make me (for the last 10 years or so) dislike all organized religion. I do not believe in any particular religion or god or higher power. I just dont know, and have not been able to decide what I think. I have thought about this many time, and have always come back to "I just do not know". It's a weird feeling and frankly if I could just be done with it and state (with any real conviction) that there is no god or that there is god/gods, life would be much easier.
Maybe more agnostics would be more willing to talk with you if you didnt start out insulting them saying they are lazy and intellectually dishonest.
OS/2 was not a complete failure. Have you never had a bank account or used an ATM. Sure in the last few years more and more have been moved off of OS/2 but to say it was a complete failure is like saying our space program never left the ground.
From chapter one of the Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
Confucius and you are both dreams, and I who say you are dreams am a dream myself. This is a paradox. Tomorrow a wise man may explain it; that tomorrow will not be for ten thousand generations.
--Chuang Tse: II
Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss. The light shines through it, and the dark enters it. Borne, flung, tugged from anywhere to anywhere, for in the deep sea there is no compass but nearer and farther, higher and lower, the jellyfish bangs and sways; pulses move slight and quick within it, as the vast diurnal pulses beat in the moondriven sea. Hanging, swaying, pulsing, the most vulnerable and insubstantial creature, it has for its defense the violence and.power of the whole ocean, to which it has entrusted its being, its going, and its will.
But here rise the stubborn continents. The shelves of gravel and the cliffs of rock break from water baldly into air, that dry, terrible outerspace of radiance and instability, where there is no support for life. And now, now the currents mislead and the waves betray, breaking their endless circle, to leap up in loud foam against rock and air, breaking . . . .
What will the creature made all of seadrift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking?
From experience due to having over 400 "events" a night that prevented me from getting more then 120 solid seconds of REM stage sleep. I can say that it starts out with getting sleepy easily (the motion of driving for about 10 minutes) and progresses into things like auditory hallucinations, your mind jumping tracks and going off on a random tangent instead of what you were trying to communicate, all the sudden you are talking crazy stuff and not what you were intending to say. Next is instant sleep, you would drop off like someone has flipped a switch BANG! you end up in the middle of a dream.
After the sleep study and getting a CPAP machine to sleep with, I no longer have any of that happen to me.
I think I would be dead due to falling asleep driving or from long term oxygen deprivation. While I "slept" my blood oxygen count was supposedly dangerously low. I suspect this has affected my memory and a few other things, since brain damage is linked to chronic low oxygen.
I still sometimes do not get enough sleep due to life and I have no idea how badly I am in sleep deficit or how long until I am truly caught up.
Thing is, it looks to me like all those sales are to replace failed units, it's not like new customers are coming in at any significant rate.
I'd put some money on there being only about 35 Million actual PS2 owners (if that) even though the shipped (and thats an important word) numbers from sony are over 100 Million.
My work machine has never had anything done to it after the initial load of XP. It was at SP2 when we were graciously taken from 512MB RAM to 1GB RAM. After the reboot (all that was changed was amount of RAM) I got nailed by product activation and it made me call in, on-line activation aparently would not work for some reason.
Exactly. I'm on my third PS2. I keep them in a low dust smoke free environment and treat them well. They still quit reading stuff after some random amount of time. I had to resort to using the one that could read PS1 games still to install a softmod and put dump my games onto a HDD, and use HD loader to play my games now that none of them can read the DVD media. Even after 12 re-designs (and from looking in the guts of my 3 I see they changed DVD drive design every time it seams) I still see people talking about how they bought a slim PS2 and the DVD drive conked out on them.
This really sucks because I cant throw in Monster Rancher, or any games that allow you to put in a music CD (rare I know).
Maybe if the PS3 price comes down and I see that quality isn't shit I can finally play games again without all this jumping through hoops.
Strangely enough, I'm still on my 1st Dreamcast, Turbo-Duo, Sega-CD, and Sega Saturn. Now most of those are CD drives, but the DC had a high density media drive and they managed to make one that didn't eat itself.
I once had a Walkman that was almost completely in pieces (took a lot of abuse when I had a dish washing job at a restaurant) but played tapes and radio flawlessly even in the state it was in. I miss those days.
I'm gutting mine and modchipping it so I can put in a quite HDD and DVD drive and mount it all in a AV type project box.
I'm doing this because it is actually painful to use the thing for either games or video playback. It's like there is a banshee inside of it. It was nice and quite (in comparison) when I first bought it (I think it's version 1) but not any more. My version 1 gamecube only got a little louder with age.
Each character can license up to 3 mist techniques. Each mist tech. learned gets you an extra chunk of magic bar. Each chink of magic bar is a guarantee of a successful mist tech at level 1. I notice that you seem to have to hit the button twice to get it to register for the next part of the chain. As an example: One party member starts off with a level 1 mist tech. Another with 3 levels of mist tech can either be guaranteed of firing level 3 mist tech, a level 2 mist tech or a level 1 mist tech. What they can do is random and symbolized by the golden oval (or several) after their name. As long as they have at least 1 full magic bar they will at a minimum show up as being available to launch a level one mist tech with no wait or r2 pressing.
Another example: 3 person party each with 3 mist licenses. Fran starts off with a level 3 mist tech, this will completely deplete her magic bar. During her animation you will see her name with no golden ovals. You hit the button for Vaan which has a single golden oval next to his name. This will use 1/3 of his magic bar and during his animation Farn will still show no golden symbols while he and Balflear will have some. Vaan will at max now show 2 ovals (due to randomness he might show 1). Lets say you hit the button for Balflear during Vaans animation and he had 2 golden ovals after his name. Party status is now: Fran no MP chunks left Vaan 2 MP chunks left Balflear 1 MP chunk left
Each time an animation is playing any character who has a full MP chunk will always show up as an option to chain to.
The max chain I managed to get so far was 14 and I did 22K damage to some sphere of electric death in the desert (only half it's life bar).
The trick to making massive chains and getting the higher bonus affects is that any time you get the count down bar and a character who has no golden ovals after their name has a button show up to press, press it. This is a free magic recharge of a random amount (you get to do a free level 1 or 2 or 3). During this free mist tech, you get another chance, all the characters who still have a MP chunk will always be there to select so the chain can not die. The trick is to take advantage of every one of those time where someone who is out of MP gets a free chance.
Once all 3 characters are out of MP chunks for mist techs (if you use the above strategy), chances are the time bar is moving so fast you will not get a chance to effectively hit r2 and then a button twice before you get "OUT OF TIME". It sucks major when you hit the first button hear the sound and then the time runs out before the second press registers.
Luck plays a HUGE role in this. sometimes it just sucks and 5 presses of r2 never give you a chance, and other times every time you press r2 several people can go. Thats why I take advantage of every free go I get before people are out, they are kinda a backup to keep things going. I also always choose level 1 items for the people who still have MP because that means I will get more tries at free charges before I am out. Sometimes you don't get the choice of a Level 1 and you choose the character who will use the least.
I hope this helps out, because when I first got a mist tech for 1 character and no one else had any it was so frustrating to figure out why things seems to not work the way videos and web sites showed.
You bring the kid in the room and show them the screen, saying "Now whatever you do do not click on this button." and then leave them alone for some time.
Slashdot Mirror
How is that possible, NRA members post here about how gun ownership prevents all crime. I've lost count of the number of accounts of people single-gunedly saving the world that have been posted here.
To those who think I am being unfair, the above is meant in jest (hence the wild overstatements).
25. Do you know the terrible secret of space?
25a. Do you have stairs in your house?
25b. Do you have bread?
25c. Do you have old people?
25d. Pusher?
25e. Shover?
25f. Are the old people protected?
Who was the monolith I saw you with last night?
I find this hard to explain. I also find it quite personal and rather dark. I don't like where it leads and maybe thats why I don't go further then I don't know. Contemplation can be a powerful thing. Maybe I am not a point where I am ready to look that hard at that, or as you said maybe I'm lazy and intellectually dishonest, but I can think of few people who would readily admit that to themselves.
/.). It isn't because I have a belief in god, afterlife, or hell that I don't do that now.
I know I do not believe/have faith. What I have seen in several organized religions has caused that. I shun organized religion because for the good they do far too much harm is done and they will never catch up. It's an inherent feature of any organized anything (even school boards or local book clubs) to become corrupt and hurt people, because thats the easy thing to do. I also do not have my own singular hodgepodge system (I used to a long time ago).
It may be that because I was raised in/around many religions (minor christianity through my grand parents, hinduism through my parents, read up on buddhism and taoism myself, saw a lot of new age types around me doing their thing) that I do not say there is no god, and find myself getting by with I don't know.
I'd say I want to believe something, (cue X-Files music) but I don't even know if thats what I want any more. Ferreting out an answer right now seems to be too much work and far to painful a process to be worth the answer. That I guess makes me lazy and intellectually dishonest if I get what you are saying correctly.
There is a spark of something I feel, but I cant seem to connect it to anything any more. I call it hope. It isn't hope that I believe, or that there is a god. It may just be some echo from the past, a brief fluttering of feeling, of happiness from before reality/the world made thing clear to me how they worked. The ghost (sorry for using that word) of those childhood feelings you mention in your post maybe?
Because the way it feels to me is that if/when that last bit of me dies (good going humanity) I will probably give up... (or spend all my time posting to
God or the non existence of god seems to have no place in my life. Maybe one day it will or continue not to. I think that I am content with I don't know because I feel it does not matter.
Probably, as you said, we are using the word agnostic wrong. To me it seems to be the proper thing to describe how I feel since people seem to understand a little of my feeling from that. I don't use atheist because it does not seem to convey what I want to the person I am talking to.
Combating superstition is fine, but do you stand outside schools screaming kids who are won't step on a crack? I am both perfectly at home and terrified for my life in the dark. I can move and operate quite well. My problem is that some part of my irrational mind starts to murmur, most of the time I am able to ignore it, other times (quite rare) I am flooded with panic and terror. I can still operate and perform tasks with the same clarity as before because I know it is an irrational fear but it takes some effort to control the flight instinct. Superstition is powerful at times and humanity will never be completely rid of it. This does not me we let it rule our lives just like I do not let it drive me out of the dark.
I do know that I have a different view of religion then you. I don't see it as a poison if people are not doing harm. This would appear to me to place me as your enemy (because I fail to combat superstition). I agree with your view that letting it rule us is bad. The examples you give are bad and pushing religion is whats behind them. I don't know if your level of militancy (what I get from your tone, I may be reading to much into it) will help or hinder.
The problem I think is this is a complex subject touching on many aspects of who we are, how we are, and what we are. There are so many things caught up, intertwined, and cross connected in all of this i
I wish more people would show up at churches to give news, rather then waste money by tithing ;-)
Due to a recent /. link I seem to be thinking it's time to update some older documents. All men are created only 90% equal.
Did you see any horse racing or was your view blocked by a bunch of poker chips?
I've been reading this and I am sorry to jump in.
I can honestly say I do not know. I was raised in religion, but have seen things across the world that make me (for the last 10 years or so) dislike all organized religion. I do not believe in any particular religion or god or higher power. I just dont know, and have not been able to decide what I think. I have thought about this many time, and have always come back to "I just do not know". It's a weird feeling and frankly if I could just be done with it and state (with any real conviction) that there is no god or that there is god/gods, life would be much easier.
Maybe more agnostics would be more willing to talk with you if you didnt start out insulting them saying they are lazy and intellectually dishonest.
OS/2 was not a complete failure. Have you never had a bank account or used an ATM. Sure in the last few years more and more have been moved off of OS/2 but to say it was a complete failure is like saying our space program never left the ground.
OS/2 still exists and is available now.
Where do you think JFS2 came from?
Check out the badly named (IMO) ecomstation. It is what has become of OS/2.
From chapter one of the Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
Confucius and you are both dreams, and I who say you are dreams am a dream myself. This is a paradox. Tomorrow a wise man may explain it; that tomorrow will not be for ten thousand generations.
--Chuang Tse: II
Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss. The light shines through it, and the dark enters it. Borne, flung, tugged from anywhere to anywhere, for in the deep sea there is no compass but nearer and farther, higher and lower, the jellyfish bangs and sways; pulses move slight and quick within it, as the vast diurnal pulses beat in the moondriven sea. Hanging, swaying, pulsing, the most vulnerable and insubstantial creature, it has for its defense the violence and.power of the whole ocean, to which it has entrusted its being, its going, and its will.
But here rise the stubborn continents. The shelves of gravel and the cliffs of rock break from water baldly into air, that dry, terrible outerspace of radiance and instability, where there is no support for life. And now, now the currents mislead and the waves betray, breaking their endless circle, to leap up in loud foam against rock and air, breaking . . . .
What will the creature made all of seadrift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking?
From experience due to having over 400 "events" a night that prevented me from getting more then 120 solid seconds of REM stage sleep. I can say that it starts out with getting sleepy easily (the motion of driving for about 10 minutes) and progresses into things like auditory hallucinations, your mind jumping tracks and going off on a random tangent instead of what you were trying to communicate, all the sudden you are talking crazy stuff and not what you were intending to say. Next is instant sleep, you would drop off like someone has flipped a switch BANG! you end up in the middle of a dream.
After the sleep study and getting a CPAP machine to sleep with, I no longer have any of that happen to me.
I think I would be dead due to falling asleep driving or from long term oxygen deprivation. While I "slept" my blood oxygen count was supposedly dangerously low. I suspect this has affected my memory and a few other things, since brain damage is linked to chronic low oxygen.
I still sometimes do not get enough sleep due to life and I have no idea how badly I am in sleep deficit or how long until I am truly caught up.
This must be that "Supply Side Jesus" I keep hearing people go on about.
Thing is, it looks to me like all those sales are to replace failed units, it's not like new customers are coming in at any significant rate.
I'd put some money on there being only about 35 Million actual PS2 owners (if that) even though the shipped (and thats an important word) numbers from sony are over 100 Million.
I'm on number 3.
My work machine has never had anything done to it after the initial load of XP. It was at SP2 when we were graciously taken from 512MB RAM to 1GB RAM. After the reboot (all that was changed was amount of RAM) I got nailed by product activation and it made me call in, on-line activation aparently would not work for some reason.
Exactly.
I'm on my third PS2. I keep them in a low dust smoke free environment and treat them well. They still quit reading stuff after some random amount of time. I had to resort to using the one that could read PS1 games still to install a softmod and put dump my games onto a HDD, and use HD loader to play my games now that none of them can read the DVD media. Even after 12 re-designs (and from looking in the guts of my 3 I see they changed DVD drive design every time it seams) I still see people talking about how they bought a slim PS2 and the DVD drive conked out on them.
This really sucks because I cant throw in Monster Rancher, or any games that allow you to put in a music CD (rare I know).
Maybe if the PS3 price comes down and I see that quality isn't shit I can finally play games again without all this jumping through hoops.
Strangely enough, I'm still on my 1st Dreamcast, Turbo-Duo, Sega-CD, and Sega Saturn. Now most of those are CD drives, but the DC had a high density media drive and they managed to make one that didn't eat itself.
I once had a Walkman that was almost completely in pieces (took a lot of abuse when I had a dish washing job at a restaurant) but played tapes and radio flawlessly even in the state it was in. I miss those days.
Just wait till your Xbox is a few years old.
I'm gutting mine and modchipping it so I can put in a quite HDD and DVD drive and mount it all in a AV type project box.
I'm doing this because it is actually painful to use the thing for either games or video playback. It's like there is a banshee inside of it. It was nice and quite (in comparison) when I first bought it (I think it's version 1) but not any more. My version 1 gamecube only got a little louder with age.
I seem to remember COLECO systems had them as well.
Crazy people urinating on lead.
It took me a while to figure it out.
Each character can license up to 3 mist techniques.
Each mist tech. learned gets you an extra chunk of magic bar.
Each chink of magic bar is a guarantee of a successful mist tech at level 1. I notice that you seem to have to hit the button twice to get it to register for the next part of the chain.
As an example:
One party member starts off with a level 1 mist tech.
Another with 3 levels of mist tech can either be guaranteed of firing level 3 mist tech, a level 2 mist tech or a level 1 mist tech. What they can do is random and symbolized by the golden oval (or several) after their name. As long as they have at least 1 full magic bar they will at a minimum show up as being available to launch a level one mist tech with no wait or r2 pressing.
Another example:
3 person party each with 3 mist licenses.
Fran starts off with a level 3 mist tech, this will completely deplete her magic bar. During her animation you will see her name with no golden ovals.
You hit the button for Vaan which has a single golden oval next to his name. This will use 1/3 of his magic bar and during his animation Farn will still show no golden symbols while he and Balflear will have some. Vaan will at max now show 2 ovals (due to randomness he might show 1).
Lets say you hit the button for Balflear during Vaans animation and he had 2 golden ovals after his name.
Party status is now:
Fran no MP chunks left
Vaan 2 MP chunks left
Balflear 1 MP chunk left
Each time an animation is playing any character who has a full MP chunk will always show up as an option to chain to.
The max chain I managed to get so far was 14 and I did 22K damage to some sphere of electric death in the desert (only half it's life bar).
The trick to making massive chains and getting the higher bonus affects is that any time you get the count down bar and a character who has no golden ovals after their name has a button show up to press, press it. This is a free magic recharge of a random amount (you get to do a free level 1 or 2 or 3). During this free mist tech, you get another chance, all the characters who still have a MP chunk will always be there to select so the chain can not die. The trick is to take advantage of every one of those time where someone who is out of MP gets a free chance.
Once all 3 characters are out of MP chunks for mist techs (if you use the above strategy), chances are the time bar is moving so fast you will not get a chance to effectively hit r2 and then a button twice before you get "OUT OF TIME". It sucks major when you hit the first button hear the sound and then the time runs out before the second press registers.
Luck plays a HUGE role in this. sometimes it just sucks and 5 presses of r2 never give you a chance, and other times every time you press r2 several people can go. Thats why I take advantage of every free go I get before people are out, they are kinda a backup to keep things going. I also always choose level 1 items for the people who still have MP because that means I will get more tries at free charges before I am out. Sometimes you don't get the choice of a Level 1 and you choose the character who will use the least.
I hope this helps out, because when I first got a mist tech for 1 character and no one else had any it was so frustrating to figure out why things seems to not work the way videos and web sites showed.
"Both Xboxes are based closely on PC architectures so on release developers know how to get a result."
A 3 core, in-order executing, RS6000 chip is what you consider PC architecture?
480P is 720x480. A VGA resolution is 640x480.
Because for years I though "A Horse with no Name" was a Neil Young song.
"and Rockstar isn't known for their social commentary"
Have you listened to any of the radio station in any of the GTA3 series games?
You bring the kid in the room and show them the screen, saying "Now whatever you do do not click on this button." and then leave them alone for some time.