"I mean, you're recommended to give to the collections in church, but people give you dirty looks if you don't"
Since we're already off-topic, how do you figure this? Most people I know tithe once a month. You've usually got different ushers passing around the collection plate, so why in the world would somebody give you dirty looks if you've only got a one in four chance of putting anything in the pot per month anyway? I've been an usher, and I tend to avoid looking at people so that they *don't* think that I'm implying anything by my runaway facial expressions.
But... this is relevant, because... er... oh! Yeah, I've been to a... church in Kokomo. They didn't frown their either when I passed the collection plate by without putting anything in.
Sigh... you're absolutely right. This story makes me want to go back and load up FO1/2 and play through them again. Oh, how I wish for a true spiritual successor to the series, rather than Daggerfall: Fallout.
"Actually, I'm 100% sure you could not beat Fallout 2 with H2H combat..."
Heh, you're wrong. It's entirely possible to defeat the end baddie in hand to hand combat with a mega power fist and lots of criticals. I did this about two weeks ago.
...attempts to merge a gelatinous cube with a Honda Civic have been less than successful. Kobold scientists blame this frustrating failure on a lower fuel efficiency due to the inefficient wind flow design. "We'd like to take these experiments to the next level," the designers said, "but we just don't have the experience at this time."
My first was a Tandy 1000. Whopping 4.? MHz processor, no HD, *16* colours, and sprung for an extra DD 5.25 drive and 640k total RAM. No hard drive. The beast cost me something like $4000 CAD when I bought it.
One of my fondest memories of that computer was when I bought the CRPG "Megatraveller" and discovered that it required a hard drive. After a lot of trial and error, I managed to copy all of the files onto 4 DD 5.25 disks and use each one under certain circumstances (startup, space, first half of planets, second half of planets). It was great.
I also remember asking a guy a few years later how much it would cost to upgrade to a couple of 3.5 drives, but he just laughed at me. Bastard figured it wasn't worth the money to do so. Oh well.
As I've gotten older, I've had to cut out FPS games completely. You can imagine how disappointed I was when Half-Life 2 made me so nauseous that I almost threw up. Haven't tried another one since. Had no problems with Wolfenstein 3D through to the greats of the era, System Shock 2 and Deus Ex.
But on the plus side, there are plenty of "thinking" games coming out that put more emphasis on gaming than graphics. This includes Introversion's upcoming Defcon and SunAge (published by Lighthouse Interactive, a RTS in 2d (!). Recent games such as Weird Worlds (makers of Infinite Worlds in Strange Space) also lead me to believe that not all companies are going to go for beaucoup graphics as technology matures, but will be focusing their talent more and more on gameplay.
"The violoation of every individual right is unimaginably useful to someone."
I looked for instances of a certain term in a database that doesn't display the full-text of most books. I then took these references, most of them long out of print, and looked them up in a library. Yup, call the police, I'm definitely abusing the system!
If you honestly think that Google Scholar will lead to the propagation of facism and the obliteration of civil liberties in the world, you need to take a good, hard look at *real* injustices being perpetrated across the globe.
I do have access to MLA, JStor, and Muse, as well as ArticleFirst/PapersFirst, CBCA, ECO, InfoTrac, and the ProQuest databases. These were the first sources (after a token Google search) that I turned to. Your point is taken, but in this instance, Google scholar is the *only* resource that turned up any info about this particular artefact. If I missed something on JSTOR or InfoTrac, though, feel free to prove me wrong! Really!
You can't imagine how useful Google's book search is useful for research projects until you actually experience it. I'm working on my MA thesis about possession in William Gibson's sprawl trilogy & needed to find some information about the "soulcatcher." I was able to discover through Google that it was a tool used by Native Northwest shamans, but Google was fairly useless for anything else. Amazon.com was also fairly useless, simply because they haven't yet indexed any books that contain scholarly info on the subject. Subject headings at the university library didn't turn up anything, and randomly searching books related to various tribes who used the soulcatcher (Tlingit, Bella Bella, Haida, and Tsimshiam) also was fruitless, as many of these books either had no index or didn't index this particular item.
Then I remembered Google's book search, which came up with at least five or six solid hits that actually helped - the books were in my local library, and their titles/subjects had absolutely nothing to do with what I was looking for, but the info was there. Without Google book search, I'd still be looking through stacks at the library. There's a time and a place for reading every available book tangentially related to a subject, but there are other times when an indexing service simply speeds up research.
I should point out that most of the pages I needed to read were blocked by Google; they only allow you to look at random pages out of certain books. But they index the entire book & tell you on exactly what pages you can find word references. A very, very useful tool, one that I will use in the years to come. I hate to sound like a shill for Google, but for what it's worth, this has been my experience with the service, and for this very specific and uncommon topic, it was very helpful.
At this price point, the 1GB shuffle looks *very* appealing to me. But before I fork out $100 CAD + for a shuffle, are there any alternatives out there that are perhaps better? I don't need the wow factor of an Apple product, and it'd be nice to have a device with user-replacable batteries, but I have absolutely no experience in the portable music world since I bought my minidisk player in 99. So, how about it: a 1GB shuffle, or something else? And why?
A screen isn't necessary, but it might be nice. I'm most concerned about durability, battery life, and sound quality.
I may not have taken a lot of history in Uni, but elves? Taurons? Orcs? WoW is fantasy, not history-based. If we're going to broadly refer to WoW as history-based, then the GNAA is too, as it has roots in the oppression of certain religious groups who emigrated to North America and eventually founded the United States. (And no, I've never played WoW and don't care to.)
-Defcon (from Introversion) is set to be released in April 2006.
-Sword of the Stars, a new 4x MOO-like, has a release date of June 2006.
-Sins of a Solar Empire, another moo-like (RTS), is also Q1 2006.
-War World is going to be coming out in Februrary.
-Finally, Sun Age is Q1 2006 too.
It didn't tell me why Obelix is so quick despite his girth, what's in that magic potion, or why my favourite Asterix film, Asterix and the Twelve Tasks, hasn't received an NTSC-DVD release yet. Instead, the interview was all about technology or some such nonsense. Don't the submitters check their links before they turn them in?
"I don't mean to sound like a asshole but that "Be proud of your heritage!" thing reminds me of something... ummm... oh yeah! The KKK!..."
There's nothing wrong with even KKK members saying that they're proud of their heritage. There is something wrong, however, with KKK members saying that, because they're white, they're superior to every other race on the planet. Why shouldn't I be proud of my parents for what they've achieved in their lives? They're part of my heritage. What about my grandparents? Is it wrong to feel pride in their accomplishments? How about the fact that my great-grandparents came from a specific country, and I can relate to other descendents of members of that country? Is it wrong to feel pride because I originally came from a specific place and time, and thus am part of a community within Canada, the country I'm currently living in?
You're right: a white person saying that they're proud of their -white- heritage would be considered a Klanner. But a white person saying that they're proud of their German heritage, or their Irish heritage, or their Swiss heritage wouldn't be, would they? Political correctness is occasionally useful, in that it stands in opposition to the kind of hatred and intolerance that the KKK epitomises, but no person, no culture, no people-group should feel shame for their heritage because of the remarks of another person. There's a sharp difference between feeling pride over one's heritage and using that pride to deride a person not belonging to that same heritage.
You're talking about genetics, but I'm talking about a cultural heritage. Cultural pride is necessary in order to have a well-balanced self-identity. The trick is not to let your cultural pride override everything else: pride in your own culture goes hand-in-hand with the acceptance of other cultures.
Short version: cultural pride, in balance with cultural tolerance, makes for a balanced person. I'm more interested in culture than I am in pure genetics.
They've said all along that "standard" controllers will work with the rev (crossing my fingers for native compatibility with my wavebird). So the next Prince of Persia game will be released for all three next-gen platforms, right? But Electroplankton Revo or Tokyo Laser Symphony Revo will only work with the revo's unique controller - playing games built for the revo controller on a PS3 or an Xbox360 is like playing Donkey Konga with the standard gamecube controller.
Anyway, it makes sense that the revo will get independent and interesting games, if only because of the controller, while the other two consoles will get the same old, same old. Not that there's anything wrong with a new NHL game for the Xbox360 or PS3;)
Huh. Must be nice to be able to put your cultural identity in your pocket and fit in with the dominant culture once in a while. Some of us can't take off our skin colour. Having said that, if an employer doesn't want you because you're not white, it's not an employer worth working for. Be proud of your heritage!
You're not taking into account that the BetaMax/VHS war occurred before the Internet existed. This might have driven the industry back then, but I can almost guarantee you that stores like Wal-Mart push the DVD industry today when it comes to sheer volume. What I'm saying is that, if you wanted to watch a porn movie, you needed to buy/rent it (hence the format war), but now you've got a divided marketplace, with physical copies on one hand and digital copies on the other.
What's going to decide a winner is going to be pricing for the average user, not the adult film industry: most people will go to Best Buy and look at a HD & Blu-Ray player side-by-side, compare features, and above all compare the price of the players and the costs of the disks themselves. Furthermore, I can also almost guarantee you that most people are already happy with the quality of DVDs, and only enthusiasts are going to be early adapters. There's no rush to get the latest & greatest if what's out now is good enough.
Finally, a home movie machine was *new* back then: the entire concept of watching a film (porn, in this case) on your TV was novel. Customers flocked to the stores to purchase VCRs for this very reason (well, not specifically for porn, but you get the idea). The release of next-gen players isn't going to cause as big a stir in the marketplace as it did then, simply because the idea of watching films at home is so common, and because one can watch porn with or without a next-gen DVD player.
In sum: a divided marketplace for porn consumers and the fact that we've already got porn machines at home means that the adult film industry isn't going to be the deciding factor over which format becomes the de facto standard. On the contrary, it's my contention that pricing of players & movies, as well as availability of film titles, will ultimately be the deciding factor in which standard gets adopted - but unless either HD or Blu-Ray drops out of the marketplace, we're not going to see a clear winner for a while, simply because most people will continue to buy films on the cheaper and more widely-available format, DVD.
At the very most, it's erotica - if we consider it to be an example of an ideal married relationship, rather than a metaphor for the relationship between Christ and the church (which is stretching it a bit, methinks).
A discussion of women's breasts as tasty fruit is tasteful (if you'll forgive the pun). But how is talking about the female form, even genitalia, considered to be pornographic? The purpose of porn is sexual titilation. The Bible is mostly story-driven, and its purpose is to teach and to inform; most of the stories themselves are there because they give us illustrations of fellow humans who have failed miserably or succeeded magnificently.
If you think the Bible is porn, wait until you see this anatomy textbook I've got! Talk about your playmate of the month!
Given that Lot thought God would be thrilled for Lot to send his daughters out to the crowd to keep the rowdy neighbors from bothering his angelic neighbors...
And general Christian thought is that Lot was a hypocrite for doing so.
... the wife-stealing, husband-murdering David was the anointed of God...
Widely thought of as a failure of David's, and the reason why he wasn't allowed to build God's temple.
... the mother of Christ was an unwed teenager already engaged to somebody else when she got pregnant...
By the Holy Spirit. According to church thought, Mary did nothing wrong.
...and the wild adventures of Onan who was supposed to commit adultery against his own wife by impregnating his dead brother's wife...
First of all, nowhere in Genesis 38 does it say that Onan was married. Second, there were some very good reasons for levirate marriages to be performed during this period.
...and you get one heck of a lot of porn in the Bible itself.
Porn? Porn is, as far as I'm concerned, defined as gratuitious sexual references in whatever format designed to titilate. Lot's actions showed us how screwed up he was. David's actions, too, go to show why God's chosen wasn't allowed to build the temple. Mary did absolutely nothing wrong, and there's no reference to sex *at all* in the accounts of her conception in the Gospels. The closest you have to any kind of graphic sexuality is the story of Onan, but the story was about how he was disobedient; it wasn't a pornographic story in any way, shape, or form.
Perhaps you're confusing "sex" with "porn," in which case yes, there are several sexual references and stories with sexual overtones in the Bible. But these references do not mean that the Bible is pornographic, any more than this post is pornographic.
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Since we're already off-topic, how do you figure this? Most people I know tithe once a month. You've usually got different ushers passing around the collection plate, so why in the world would somebody give you dirty looks if you've only got a one in four chance of putting anything in the pot per month anyway? I've been an usher, and I tend to avoid looking at people so that they *don't* think that I'm implying anything by my runaway facial expressions.
But... this is relevant, because... er... oh! Yeah, I've been to a... church in Kokomo. They didn't frown their either when I passed the collection plate by without putting anything in.
Sigh... you're absolutely right. This story makes me want to go back and load up FO1/2 and play through them again. Oh, how I wish for a true spiritual successor to the series, rather than Daggerfall: Fallout.
Heh, you're wrong. It's entirely possible to defeat the end baddie in hand to hand combat with a mega power fist and lots of criticals. I did this about two weeks ago.
...attempts to merge a gelatinous cube with a Honda Civic have been less than successful. Kobold scientists blame this frustrating failure on a lower fuel efficiency due to the inefficient wind flow design. "We'd like to take these experiments to the next level," the designers said, "but we just don't have the experience at this time."
One of my fondest memories of that computer was when I bought the CRPG "Megatraveller" and discovered that it required a hard drive. After a lot of trial and error, I managed to copy all of the files onto 4 DD 5.25 disks and use each one under certain circumstances (startup, space, first half of planets, second half of planets). It was great.
I also remember asking a guy a few years later how much it would cost to upgrade to a couple of 3.5 drives, but he just laughed at me. Bastard figured it wasn't worth the money to do so. Oh well.
So, did your experience with the recruitment process match with your current impression of the company?
But on the plus side, there are plenty of "thinking" games coming out that put more emphasis on gaming than graphics. This includes Introversion's upcoming Defcon and SunAge (published by Lighthouse Interactive, a RTS in 2d (!). Recent games such as Weird Worlds (makers of Infinite Worlds in Strange Space) also lead me to believe that not all companies are going to go for beaucoup graphics as technology matures, but will be focusing their talent more and more on gameplay.
I looked for instances of a certain term in a database that doesn't display the full-text of most books. I then took these references, most of them long out of print, and looked them up in a library. Yup, call the police, I'm definitely abusing the system!
If you honestly think that Google Scholar will lead to the propagation of facism and the obliteration of civil liberties in the world, you need to take a good, hard look at *real* injustices being perpetrated across the globe.
I do have access to MLA, JStor, and Muse, as well as ArticleFirst/PapersFirst, CBCA, ECO, InfoTrac, and the ProQuest databases. These were the first sources (after a token Google search) that I turned to. Your point is taken, but in this instance, Google scholar is the *only* resource that turned up any info about this particular artefact. If I missed something on JSTOR or InfoTrac, though, feel free to prove me wrong! Really!
Then I remembered Google's book search, which came up with at least five or six solid hits that actually helped - the books were in my local library, and their titles/subjects had absolutely nothing to do with what I was looking for, but the info was there. Without Google book search, I'd still be looking through stacks at the library. There's a time and a place for reading every available book tangentially related to a subject, but there are other times when an indexing service simply speeds up research.
I should point out that most of the pages I needed to read were blocked by Google; they only allow you to look at random pages out of certain books. But they index the entire book & tell you on exactly what pages you can find word references. A very, very useful tool, one that I will use in the years to come. I hate to sound like a shill for Google, but for what it's worth, this has been my experience with the service, and for this very specific and uncommon topic, it was very helpful.
A screen isn't necessary, but it might be nice. I'm most concerned about durability, battery life, and sound quality.
I may not have taken a lot of history in Uni, but elves? Taurons? Orcs? WoW is fantasy, not history-based. If we're going to broadly refer to WoW as history-based, then the GNAA is too, as it has roots in the oppression of certain religious groups who emigrated to North America and eventually founded the United States. (And no, I've never played WoW and don't care to.)
Dang it Bobby, I got the +5 Ring of Propane stuck in my urethra...
-Sword of the Stars, a new 4x MOO-like, has a release date of June 2006.
-Sins of a Solar Empire, another moo-like (RTS), is also Q1 2006.
-War World is going to be coming out in Februrary.
-Finally, Sun Age is Q1 2006 too.
It's going to be a great year for PC gaming!
No kidding. See "Primer" or "El Mariachi" for examples of low-budget films that also happen to be kick-ass.
Nah, it's Bizarro McBride! (Huh... sounds like a WWF wrestler...)
It didn't tell me why Obelix is so quick despite his girth, what's in that magic potion, or why my favourite Asterix film, Asterix and the Twelve Tasks, hasn't received an NTSC-DVD release yet. Instead, the interview was all about technology or some such nonsense. Don't the submitters check their links before they turn them in?
There's nothing wrong with even KKK members saying that they're proud of their heritage. There is something wrong, however, with KKK members saying that, because they're white, they're superior to every other race on the planet. Why shouldn't I be proud of my parents for what they've achieved in their lives? They're part of my heritage. What about my grandparents? Is it wrong to feel pride in their accomplishments? How about the fact that my great-grandparents came from a specific country, and I can relate to other descendents of members of that country? Is it wrong to feel pride because I originally came from a specific place and time, and thus am part of a community within Canada, the country I'm currently living in?
You're right: a white person saying that they're proud of their -white- heritage would be considered a Klanner. But a white person saying that they're proud of their German heritage, or their Irish heritage, or their Swiss heritage wouldn't be, would they? Political correctness is occasionally useful, in that it stands in opposition to the kind of hatred and intolerance that the KKK epitomises, but no person, no culture, no people-group should feel shame for their heritage because of the remarks of another person. There's a sharp difference between feeling pride over one's heritage and using that pride to deride a person not belonging to that same heritage.
Short version: cultural pride, in balance with cultural tolerance, makes for a balanced person. I'm more interested in culture than I am in pure genetics.
Anyway, it makes sense that the revo will get independent and interesting games, if only because of the controller, while the other two consoles will get the same old, same old. Not that there's anything wrong with a new NHL game for the Xbox360 or PS3;)
Huh. Must be nice to be able to put your cultural identity in your pocket and fit in with the dominant culture once in a while. Some of us can't take off our skin colour. Having said that, if an employer doesn't want you because you're not white, it's not an employer worth working for. Be proud of your heritage!
What's going to decide a winner is going to be pricing for the average user, not the adult film industry: most people will go to Best Buy and look at a HD & Blu-Ray player side-by-side, compare features, and above all compare the price of the players and the costs of the disks themselves. Furthermore, I can also almost guarantee you that most people are already happy with the quality of DVDs, and only enthusiasts are going to be early adapters. There's no rush to get the latest & greatest if what's out now is good enough.
Finally, a home movie machine was *new* back then: the entire concept of watching a film (porn, in this case) on your TV was novel. Customers flocked to the stores to purchase VCRs for this very reason (well, not specifically for porn, but you get the idea). The release of next-gen players isn't going to cause as big a stir in the marketplace as it did then, simply because the idea of watching films at home is so common, and because one can watch porn with or without a next-gen DVD player.
In sum: a divided marketplace for porn consumers and the fact that we've already got porn machines at home means that the adult film industry isn't going to be the deciding factor over which format becomes the de facto standard. On the contrary, it's my contention that pricing of players & movies, as well as availability of film titles, will ultimately be the deciding factor in which standard gets adopted - but unless either HD or Blu-Ray drops out of the marketplace, we're not going to see a clear winner for a while, simply because most people will continue to buy films on the cheaper and more widely-available format, DVD.
Link? Proof?
At the very most, it's erotica - if we consider it to be an example of an ideal married relationship, rather than a metaphor for the relationship between Christ and the church (which is stretching it a bit, methinks).
A discussion of women's breasts as tasty fruit is tasteful (if you'll forgive the pun). But how is talking about the female form, even genitalia, considered to be pornographic? The purpose of porn is sexual titilation. The Bible is mostly story-driven, and its purpose is to teach and to inform; most of the stories themselves are there because they give us illustrations of fellow humans who have failed miserably or succeeded magnificently.
If you think the Bible is porn, wait until you see this anatomy textbook I've got! Talk about your playmate of the month!
And general Christian thought is that Lot was a hypocrite for doing so.
Widely thought of as a failure of David's, and the reason why he wasn't allowed to build God's temple.
By the Holy Spirit. According to church thought, Mary did nothing wrong.
First of all, nowhere in Genesis 38 does it say that Onan was married. Second, there were some very good reasons for levirate marriages to be performed during this period.
Porn? Porn is, as far as I'm concerned, defined as gratuitious sexual references in whatever format designed to titilate. Lot's actions showed us how screwed up he was. David's actions, too, go to show why God's chosen wasn't allowed to build the temple. Mary did absolutely nothing wrong, and there's no reference to sex *at all* in the accounts of her conception in the Gospels. The closest you have to any kind of graphic sexuality is the story of Onan, but the story was about how he was disobedient; it wasn't a pornographic story in any way, shape, or form.
Perhaps you're confusing "sex" with "porn," in which case yes, there are several sexual references and stories with sexual overtones in the Bible. But these references do not mean that the Bible is pornographic, any more than this post is pornographic.