Agreed. And I keep my distance from the YECs as often as I can; there are too many things seen in the world today that indicate an old earth for them to be right.
Last time it came up in a church setting and someone asserted the young earth theory, I asked them if God deceives us. The answer was "no, of course not." Then I pointed out the fossil record, the geological record, the speed of light and distance to other stars, et cetera. If God doesn't deceive us, why does the earth *look* so old when examined?
Whether crystals grow in a lab or in nature, they grow in a similar fashion and are governed by the same laws. The lab-grown crystal grows in conditions that, from the start, have a designed result and require very little additional influence from their creator. From inside the crystal all you would see is growing crystal; it's not until you look at it from outside that you understand that its growth has purpose.
Evolutionary science sees chaos because God cannot be accounted for in science. We look at the forces acting upon life throughout natural history and see a near-random system. That does not mean that it is not directed; it means that such direction cannot be observed by science.
Many evangelical Christians loathe Hollywood: money, fame, beauty, and pure evil (to hear them speak of it.) Many radical Muslims loathe the West in general for exactly the same reasons.
I loathe Hollywood because they're the frontrunners in the ruination of our culture as we try ever-harder to emulate Paris Hilton and keep track of which marriages are ending this week. It's full of uncreative, untalented people who play to the lowest common denominator so they can make the biggest buck, and contribute to the ignorance of the population in doing so. It's the culture that brought us reality TV and pop stars who all look the same (bleached blonde bimbo clones and white hip hop boy bands, for example), and helped usher in a new age of rampant, wasteful consumerism that ignores the well being of the individual and the community in favor of making sure everyone has the latest MP3 player, cell phone, game console, clothing fashion, and diet book.
Not a single denomination, but certainly a collection of them. The push largely comes from evangelical protestants. I suppose I would fall into that group as it is defined by most; I'm definitely a Protestant and I do follow most of the ideals of the evangelicals. The difference is I'm not a fundamentalist, and it shows any time such issues come up at church. There are some people who really wish me and my rational answers would go away:)
I don't believe humans were ever perfect. The Bible doesn't say that (that I can recall) and, seeing as we sinned at our first temptation, I doubt perfect describes Eve or Adam very well.
There was a point at which man was no longer just another animal, but a human being. I believe that is when Man first had a soul, which is what God is interested in. It wouldn't be until we had souls that God communicated with us on any meaningful level. Without communication we couldn't have known the rules, therefore we couldn't willfully disobey them (sin). So there would be somewhere in there a definite starting point that sin was possible.
Really, I think the most important chafing point is the understanding that humans are somehow special - created in God's own image, whereas that's usually associated with evolution is that we're an unremarkable (except by our own measure) midpoint in a process of random chance that has been happening for billions of years and will happen for billions more.
There are things that man creates that require a process and use natural bahaviors to facilitate manufacture. We grow crystals using the same process found in nature, but influence that growth at key points with catalysts and other devices to shape the crystals.
Evolution could be the same thing. In order to reach the end result he wanted, God might have taken a more subtle approach than clapping his hands and having everything spring into being. We would be no less "created", just created by a different means than we would expect.
I've been appalled lately by some of the things I've seen, and some of Jesus Camp portrays that. People are teaching their children an unrealistic and unbalanced view of the world, thus setting them up for failure. Either they will retreat into their religion and use it as a shield, trying to push the world away with it and not fulfilling the comission of Christianity, or they will abandon it and
As for the four issues you mentioned:
Abortion: I oppose it on the basis that I believe the fetus is a human being with a right to life that should only come into question should the mother's life be threatened.
Gay marriage: I both support and oppose it. As a Christian I have to say that I believe gay marriage is a contradiction in terms; gays cannot be married because marriage has a very specific definition to me and I will never personally recognize a homosexual union as being the same as what I have with my wife. On the other hand, as an American I see a very clear injustice in the fact that any heterosexual couple can marry and get significant financial and legal benefits, regardless of how they then behave in that marriage. I reconcile these two positions by advocating civil unions that join any two consenting adults with all the rights and privileges of marriage, and moving marriage to being a purely religious thing so that the religious communities can work it out for themselves.
evolution: My stance should be obvious.
Global warming: It really doesn't matter whether global warming is happening or whether we caused it. Most Christians grow up hearing about how we should be good stewards of all God's gifts to us; we should manage our money well, take good care of our property, and treat our families with love and respect. This world is also God's gift and we should treat it with the same care. That means keeping the air and water clean and doing our best to preserve the natural order of things.
I'm speaking of the Church in the Biblical sense: the body of Christ, the whole of believers. Something of which I am a member, as I indicated in my post. I do not recognize the artificial divisions we have created from differences in dogma and tradition. The church body has divided itself because interpretations of single events depicted in the book of Revelation; I have no interest in playing to those divisions. We are all one Church or we are not Christians; any divisions are of our own making and serve only to allow us to form groups of like-minded individuals for worship.
Can't see youtube at work, but I can comment on Dawkins.
He's worse than most evangelical fundamentalists I've met. His absolute faith in his own mind, his determined certainty that he is right and everyone else is wrong is alarming and dangerous to the scientific world. Atheists like him are why so many Christians think atheism is dangerous. He's a spiteful, bitter man who needs to take the chip off his shoulder and have a rational discussion with those who would have one rather than attacking straw man after straw man and cherry picking his targets to ensure he will win all his arguments.
Michael Moore and Bill O'Reilly do the same things.
If evolution is true, you'd agree that God did not create Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, right?
Not necessarily. Not that when their son Cain fled after murdering his brother, he went out among other people. Adam and Eve couldn't have populated even a single village with children, so the other people came from somewhere.
I'm a pseudo-watchmaker Christian. I believe in an old universe and evolution, but believe that there is something about us that was the goal of the whole thing. The Bible says we were created "in his image". I seriously doubt we look like God, so the resemblance is something other than physical...our souls, or some aspect of our souls (free will, immortality, etc). God tampers with the watch just enough to keep things going in a given direction without interfering too much in our ability to choose our own lives.
After spending quite some time trying to wrap my head around the Big Bang, I'm fairly convinced there's a divine component there. It's probably just that the math is way over my head, but it strikes me as odd that we basically have to rearrange all the laws of physics in order to create a model which explains the initial expansion of the universe. "God did it" seems as plausible as "the core forces of physics were combined into a single force and matter and energy didn't behave the same way and somehow the entire universe escaped from its own gravity"
I'm not one of those people to say "See, the world proves God exists" or anything like that. I just think that when we get so deep into theoretical science as the big bang equations take us, there's a lot of room left for divine influence. Right now that particular field is theory upon theory upon theory, trying to describe an event that hasn't been observed using concepts that can't be tested.
I guess I just don't see where science could be construed as a lack of faith. It's a desire to understand *how* the world works. If God wrote the laws of physics, shouldn't we consider learning and understanding the nature of those laws to be equivalent to studying the Bible? Both are the work of God.
Noah didn't have any daughters, at least they aren't mentioned. Get your facts straight: his grandkids were the incestuous ones, getting it on with their first cousins. His sons' wives' pedigrees aren't known, or I can't recall them being mentioned.
Tangent: first cousin incest isn't particularly risky and can be tolerated in the gene pool for several generations before it becomes an issue. With the genetic contributions of four families, it's not all that unrealistic.
I don't understand why such a large portion of the Church is opposed to science and evolution.
Science is the endeavor to explain what can be oberved. It does this by creating models which explain current observations and predict future results. It then tests these models by setting up scenarios in which the predictions can be determined to be accurate. In short, from a Christian perspective it's an attempt to understand the universe God created and how it works. I can imagine no greater subject of study than that of the works of God.
Evolution is a scientific model. It looks at the current state of life, fossil records, and historical accounts and establishes a model of life which fits all thse observations. Each new finding tests the model, and it has several times been refined by new discoveries. The system of evolution is almost undeniably correct; it is difficult to argue that evolution can occur in the way it is described. The evolutionary history of various organisms is debateable, as there is always a chance that new findings will change the current version. That's how science works.
So many of my fellow Christians seem to think that evolution is an attack on us and our beliefs. It's not. It is simply the result of rational consideration of the facts at hand. Science is not (well, should not be) malicious and has (should have) no interest in attacking religion, as the existence of diety is currently outside the reach of science.
They also make the mistake of lumping everything they disagree with under the name "evolution". I've heard the Big Bang mentioned in discussions of evolution, even though it's part of a completely different field of science.
My whole point is that with DnD, your character goes through multiple campaigns. You might finish your first at lvl 10, your second at 16, your third at 25, and so on. There's no pressure to push the player through the entire range of character growth in a single campaign, which is what they do with current RPGs.
Titan Quest is somewhere in the middle; you have to finish the same campaign three times, each time increasingly difficult to max out your character's stats. It wouldn't be a big leap from that to change it to three unique campaigns.
I think the recent explosion in episodic content may change this. If you could take a character through a variety of campaigns in no particular order with no (or few) prerequisites, I think you'd have a killer RPG. There could be massive campaigns that take hundreds of hours for single play and short campaigns that will finish in six hours for LAN parties. They've successfully marketed such a system with DnD for years, it's just a matter of translating it to the computer.
Black people get blamed for a lot they didn't do and can't afford fancy overpriced lawyers the whites can. Is it any wonder we blame them for murders they didn't commit to ease our own burden?
Uh huh. So basically five out of six black convicts were framed for crimes committed by whites? Gotcha.
For proof, look at any confirmed serial killer, they are always white. Now ask yourself why that isn't the case in normal murders. Does it make sense? No.
Hyperbole, and grossly inaccurate. It's hard to get good statistics on serial killers, but I'll agree that whites dominate the category. Of course, serial killers are a specific kind of murderer with radically different motives than an armed robber or jilted lover. The profile for a serial killer generally indicates a measure of wealth...it seems that poverty produces few serial killers. Last I heard, blacks were three times more likely to be poor, so of course their serial killer rates are low.
Like with Hurricane Katrina, it takes disasters like this to show how rasist society really is. When a cop is looking for a murderer, he's 10x more like to detain a black person than a white person. Now ask yourself why do all the convicted "murderers" are black.
Proof? Proof? Proof? (/Ben Stein)
I suspect if you could administer a 100% accurate lie detector test, the black populations would be cut by 80% in prisons and the white population would skyrocket.
And I suspect if you actually put any stock in what you were saying, you wouldn't be posting AC. I also strongly suspect that all your statistics are hand-delivered by a proctologist...they were too deep for you to find without help.
Here's my typical rant on this topic:
There is a culture in America that appeals to the poor urban population, a population that is steadily becoming black in most of the country. It's a culture that glorifies violence, demonizes education, and preaches that success can only be had through conflict or physical prowess. It, like a lot of cultures born out of poverty, keeps those born into it uneducated and poor. The difference between this and other poverty cultures is that violence is a major part of daily life, and that is carried by those who rise out poverty--just look at professional athletes and rap stars. Because this culture maintains ignorance and preaches oppression, no outside influence is going to undo it. It's up to the millions of blacks in America who want the same things the rest of us want to put a stop to the cycle of poverty, ignorance, and violence that is plaguing them as a people.
Blame DnD for that. They're trying to compress into a single gameplay experience what DnD players may see across several campaigns. They follow the pattern of creating a character and pushing through the early levels so that the character has a more "natural" development. Rather than choosing all your high-end abilities right away, you start with less and discover new ones, integrating them into your gameplay.
Titan Quest used the storyline to facilitate this quite well. You kind of stumble into the action, and in doing a few small things to help people out you find yourself more and more involved in the plot. And that's just a Diablo clone ARPG.
I don't think starting from the bottom is a bad thing. It forces a player to learn to use all the aspects of a character than that just powering through with high-level abilities.
A good way to adjust for this is to allow the player to modify their character somewhat during the creation process. Put a "level up" button right there, and every time it's clicked have them select abilities and attributes like they normally would. Want to start as a level 10? Just click through nine levels and start.
They both were engrossing from the start. I'm going to venture a guess (without reading tfa) that the author is speaking more in terms of MMOs, which as I understand it put you through a lot of tedious crap before you get to the good parts of the game.
I say should be because I can't currently view the page...my office's content filter doesn't like it. It should show that roughly half the murders committed in the US were committed by blacks, the other half by whites. Hispanic is not considered a race by the FBI, and are grouped in with whites--you'll need to account for that when viewing the table in the first link.
It would appear that the death row in Texas fairly accurately reflects national murder trends, with blacks grossly overrepresenting themselves by commission of the crime.
Tangent: There are roughly six times as many whites in the US as there are blacks. According to the FBI statistics, they split the murder statistics equally...making a black person six times more likely to commit murder than a white person. Of course, some 85+% of their victims are black; as a white man, I'm six times more likely to be killed by a white person.
Right now some people who know me by a different name from a different web forum just figured out who I am:D
A law stating that any genetic pattern found to exist in any natural organism cannot be patented. If the pattern is patented and then found in nature, it is immediately voided.
I don't want to get hit for patent infringement because I decided to have kids and just happen to possess a genetic pattern someone claims to own...and don't think they wouldn't do it if they could.
Slashdot Mirror
Because that takes effort, and this is Slashdot?
I'd suggest questioning the ability of anyone who works at LeTorneau (or however it's spelled) University to verify something as complex as fusion.
(I live near LU, and my very competent boss is an alumni. It's just not somewhere you'd expect such findings to come from)
Wasn't it recently published that it could take billions of years to effectively colonize the galaxy?
Agreed. And I keep my distance from the YECs as often as I can; there are too many things seen in the world today that indicate an old earth for them to be right.
Last time it came up in a church setting and someone asserted the young earth theory, I asked them if God deceives us. The answer was "no, of course not." Then I pointed out the fossil record, the geological record, the speed of light and distance to other stars, et cetera. If God doesn't deceive us, why does the earth *look* so old when examined?
If you want a scientific rebuttal, you have to make a scientific argument. You haven't yet.
The problem with trying to detect an all-powerful being is...what if he doesn't want to be seen?
You misunderstand.
Whether crystals grow in a lab or in nature, they grow in a similar fashion and are governed by the same laws. The lab-grown crystal grows in conditions that, from the start, have a designed result and require very little additional influence from their creator. From inside the crystal all you would see is growing crystal; it's not until you look at it from outside that you understand that its growth has purpose.
Evolutionary science sees chaos because God cannot be accounted for in science. We look at the forces acting upon life throughout natural history and see a near-random system. That does not mean that it is not directed; it means that such direction cannot be observed by science.
Many evangelical Christians loathe Hollywood: money, fame, beauty, and pure evil (to hear them speak of it.) Many radical Muslims loathe the West in general for exactly the same reasons.
I loathe Hollywood because they're the frontrunners in the ruination of our culture as we try ever-harder to emulate Paris Hilton and keep track of which marriages are ending this week. It's full of uncreative, untalented people who play to the lowest common denominator so they can make the biggest buck, and contribute to the ignorance of the population in doing so. It's the culture that brought us reality TV and pop stars who all look the same (bleached blonde bimbo clones and white hip hop boy bands, for example), and helped usher in a new age of rampant, wasteful consumerism that ignores the well being of the individual and the community in favor of making sure everyone has the latest MP3 player, cell phone, game console, clothing fashion, and diet book.
Not a single denomination, but certainly a collection of them. The push largely comes from evangelical protestants. I suppose I would fall into that group as it is defined by most; I'm definitely a Protestant and I do follow most of the ideals of the evangelicals. The difference is I'm not a fundamentalist, and it shows any time such issues come up at church. There are some people who really wish me and my rational answers would go away :)
I don't believe humans were ever perfect. The Bible doesn't say that (that I can recall) and, seeing as we sinned at our first temptation, I doubt perfect describes Eve or Adam very well.
There was a point at which man was no longer just another animal, but a human being. I believe that is when Man first had a soul, which is what God is interested in. It wouldn't be until we had souls that God communicated with us on any meaningful level. Without communication we couldn't have known the rules, therefore we couldn't willfully disobey them (sin). So there would be somewhere in there a definite starting point that sin was possible.
Really, I think the most important chafing point is the understanding that humans are somehow special - created in God's own image, whereas that's usually associated with evolution is that we're an unremarkable (except by our own measure) midpoint in a process of random chance that has been happening for billions of years and will happen for billions more.
There are things that man creates that require a process and use natural bahaviors to facilitate manufacture. We grow crystals using the same process found in nature, but influence that growth at key points with catalysts and other devices to shape the crystals.
Evolution could be the same thing. In order to reach the end result he wanted, God might have taken a more subtle approach than clapping his hands and having everything spring into being. We would be no less "created", just created by a different means than we would expect.
I've been appalled lately by some of the things I've seen, and some of Jesus Camp portrays that. People are teaching their children an unrealistic and unbalanced view of the world, thus setting them up for failure. Either they will retreat into their religion and use it as a shield, trying to push the world away with it and not fulfilling the comission of Christianity, or they will abandon it and
As for the four issues you mentioned:
Abortion: I oppose it on the basis that I believe the fetus is a human being with a right to life that should only come into question should the mother's life be threatened.
Gay marriage: I both support and oppose it. As a Christian I have to say that I believe gay marriage is a contradiction in terms; gays cannot be married because marriage has a very specific definition to me and I will never personally recognize a homosexual union as being the same as what I have with my wife. On the other hand, as an American I see a very clear injustice in the fact that any heterosexual couple can marry and get significant financial and legal benefits, regardless of how they then behave in that marriage. I reconcile these two positions by advocating civil unions that join any two consenting adults with all the rights and privileges of marriage, and moving marriage to being a purely religious thing so that the religious communities can work it out for themselves.
evolution: My stance should be obvious.
Global warming: It really doesn't matter whether global warming is happening or whether we caused it. Most Christians grow up hearing about how we should be good stewards of all God's gifts to us; we should manage our money well, take good care of our property, and treat our families with love and respect. This world is also God's gift and we should treat it with the same care. That means keeping the air and water clean and doing our best to preserve the natural order of things.
I'm speaking of the Church in the Biblical sense: the body of Christ, the whole of believers. Something of which I am a member, as I indicated in my post. I do not recognize the artificial divisions we have created from differences in dogma and tradition. The church body has divided itself because interpretations of single events depicted in the book of Revelation; I have no interest in playing to those divisions. We are all one Church or we are not Christians; any divisions are of our own making and serve only to allow us to form groups of like-minded individuals for worship.
Can't see youtube at work, but I can comment on Dawkins.
He's worse than most evangelical fundamentalists I've met. His absolute faith in his own mind, his determined certainty that he is right and everyone else is wrong is alarming and dangerous to the scientific world. Atheists like him are why so many Christians think atheism is dangerous. He's a spiteful, bitter man who needs to take the chip off his shoulder and have a rational discussion with those who would have one rather than attacking straw man after straw man and cherry picking his targets to ensure he will win all his arguments.
Michael Moore and Bill O'Reilly do the same things.
If evolution is true, you'd agree that God did not create Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, right?
Not necessarily. Not that when their son Cain fled after murdering his brother, he went out among other people. Adam and Eve couldn't have populated even a single village with children, so the other people came from somewhere.
I'm a pseudo-watchmaker Christian. I believe in an old universe and evolution, but believe that there is something about us that was the goal of the whole thing. The Bible says we were created "in his image". I seriously doubt we look like God, so the resemblance is something other than physical...our souls, or some aspect of our souls (free will, immortality, etc). God tampers with the watch just enough to keep things going in a given direction without interfering too much in our ability to choose our own lives.
After spending quite some time trying to wrap my head around the Big Bang, I'm fairly convinced there's a divine component there. It's probably just that the math is way over my head, but it strikes me as odd that we basically have to rearrange all the laws of physics in order to create a model which explains the initial expansion of the universe. "God did it" seems as plausible as "the core forces of physics were combined into a single force and matter and energy didn't behave the same way and somehow the entire universe escaped from its own gravity"
I'm not one of those people to say "See, the world proves God exists" or anything like that. I just think that when we get so deep into theoretical science as the big bang equations take us, there's a lot of room left for divine influence. Right now that particular field is theory upon theory upon theory, trying to describe an event that hasn't been observed using concepts that can't be tested.
I guess I just don't see where science could be construed as a lack of faith. It's a desire to understand *how* the world works. If God wrote the laws of physics, shouldn't we consider learning and understanding the nature of those laws to be equivalent to studying the Bible? Both are the work of God.
Noah didn't have any daughters, at least they aren't mentioned. Get your facts straight: his grandkids were the incestuous ones, getting it on with their first cousins. His sons' wives' pedigrees aren't known, or I can't recall them being mentioned.
Tangent: first cousin incest isn't particularly risky and can be tolerated in the gene pool for several generations before it becomes an issue. With the genetic contributions of four families, it's not all that unrealistic.
I don't understand why such a large portion of the Church is opposed to science and evolution.
Science is the endeavor to explain what can be oberved. It does this by creating models which explain current observations and predict future results. It then tests these models by setting up scenarios in which the predictions can be determined to be accurate. In short, from a Christian perspective it's an attempt to understand the universe God created and how it works. I can imagine no greater subject of study than that of the works of God.
Evolution is a scientific model. It looks at the current state of life, fossil records, and historical accounts and establishes a model of life which fits all thse observations. Each new finding tests the model, and it has several times been refined by new discoveries. The system of evolution is almost undeniably correct; it is difficult to argue that evolution can occur in the way it is described. The evolutionary history of various organisms is debateable, as there is always a chance that new findings will change the current version. That's how science works.
So many of my fellow Christians seem to think that evolution is an attack on us and our beliefs. It's not. It is simply the result of rational consideration of the facts at hand. Science is not (well, should not be) malicious and has (should have) no interest in attacking religion, as the existence of diety is currently outside the reach of science.
They also make the mistake of lumping everything they disagree with under the name "evolution". I've heard the Big Bang mentioned in discussions of evolution, even though it's part of a completely different field of science.
For most DND players...their first one.
My whole point is that with DnD, your character goes through multiple campaigns. You might finish your first at lvl 10, your second at 16, your third at 25, and so on. There's no pressure to push the player through the entire range of character growth in a single campaign, which is what they do with current RPGs.
Titan Quest is somewhere in the middle; you have to finish the same campaign three times, each time increasingly difficult to max out your character's stats. It wouldn't be a big leap from that to change it to three unique campaigns.
I think the recent explosion in episodic content may change this. If you could take a character through a variety of campaigns in no particular order with no (or few) prerequisites, I think you'd have a killer RPG. There could be massive campaigns that take hundreds of hours for single play and short campaigns that will finish in six hours for LAN parties. They've successfully marketed such a system with DnD for years, it's just a matter of translating it to the computer.
Black people get blamed for a lot they didn't do and can't afford fancy overpriced lawyers the whites can. Is it any wonder we blame them for murders they didn't commit to ease our own burden?
Uh huh. So basically five out of six black convicts were framed for crimes committed by whites? Gotcha.
For proof, look at any confirmed serial killer, they are always white. Now ask yourself why that isn't the case in normal murders. Does it make sense? No.
Hyperbole, and grossly inaccurate. It's hard to get good statistics on serial killers, but I'll agree that whites dominate the category. Of course, serial killers are a specific kind of murderer with radically different motives than an armed robber or jilted lover. The profile for a serial killer generally indicates a measure of wealth...it seems that poverty produces few serial killers. Last I heard, blacks were three times more likely to be poor, so of course their serial killer rates are low.
Like with Hurricane Katrina, it takes disasters like this to show how rasist society really is. When a cop is looking for a murderer, he's 10x more like to detain a black person than a white person. Now ask yourself why do all the convicted "murderers" are black.
Proof? Proof? Proof? (/Ben Stein)
I suspect if you could administer a 100% accurate lie detector test, the black populations would be cut by 80% in prisons and the white population would skyrocket.
And I suspect if you actually put any stock in what you were saying, you wouldn't be posting AC. I also strongly suspect that all your statistics are hand-delivered by a proctologist...they were too deep for you to find without help.
Here's my typical rant on this topic:
There is a culture in America that appeals to the poor urban population, a population that is steadily becoming black in most of the country. It's a culture that glorifies violence, demonizes education, and preaches that success can only be had through conflict or physical prowess. It, like a lot of cultures born out of poverty, keeps those born into it uneducated and poor. The difference between this and other poverty cultures is that violence is a major part of daily life, and that is carried by those who rise out poverty--just look at professional athletes and rap stars. Because this culture maintains ignorance and preaches oppression, no outside influence is going to undo it. It's up to the millions of blacks in America who want the same things the rest of us want to put a stop to the cycle of poverty, ignorance, and violence that is plaguing them as a people.
Blame DnD for that. They're trying to compress into a single gameplay experience what DnD players may see across several campaigns. They follow the pattern of creating a character and pushing through the early levels so that the character has a more "natural" development. Rather than choosing all your high-end abilities right away, you start with less and discover new ones, integrating them into your gameplay.
Titan Quest used the storyline to facilitate this quite well. You kind of stumble into the action, and in doing a few small things to help people out you find yourself more and more involved in the plot. And that's just a Diablo clone ARPG.
I don't think starting from the bottom is a bad thing. It forces a player to learn to use all the aspects of a character than that just powering through with high-level abilities.
A good way to adjust for this is to allow the player to modify their character somewhat during the creation process. Put a "level up" button right there, and every time it's clicked have them select abilities and attributes like they normally would. Want to start as a level 10? Just click through nine levels and start.
They both were engrossing from the start. I'm going to venture a guess (without reading tfa) that the author is speaking more in terms of MMOs, which as I understand it put you through a lot of tedious crap before you get to the good parts of the game.
Race statistics on current Texas death row inmates:
i me/murder_homicide.html
:D
http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/stat/racial.htm
Compare that to the race statistics for murders nationwide that *should* be available here:
http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/05cius/offenses/violent_cr
I say should be because I can't currently view the page...my office's content filter doesn't like it. It should show that roughly half the murders committed in the US were committed by blacks, the other half by whites. Hispanic is not considered a race by the FBI, and are grouped in with whites--you'll need to account for that when viewing the table in the first link.
It would appear that the death row in Texas fairly accurately reflects national murder trends, with blacks grossly overrepresenting themselves by commission of the crime.
Tangent: There are roughly six times as many whites in the US as there are blacks. According to the FBI statistics, they split the murder statistics equally...making a black person six times more likely to commit murder than a white person. Of course, some 85+% of their victims are black; as a white man, I'm six times more likely to be killed by a white person.
Right now some people who know me by a different name from a different web forum just figured out who I am
A law stating that any genetic pattern found to exist in any natural organism cannot be patented. If the pattern is patented and then found in nature, it is immediately voided.
I don't want to get hit for patent infringement because I decided to have kids and just happen to possess a genetic pattern someone claims to own...and don't think they wouldn't do it if they could.