pkzip

Comment retracted.

quote:Originally posted by Jaguar: Sense is now prevailing Indeed. I am heartened to hear that you no longer support a nuclear strike, Jaguar.

I'm passing this along on the microscopically slim chance that it will provide some perspective for a very small handful of short-sighted people here (based on some comments I have read). I really doubt it will, but I have to try nonetheless. --------------------- --------------------- The following was sent to me by my friend Tamim Ansary. Tamim is an Afghani-American writer [who writes, among other things, children's stories that are part of many American schools' curricula]. He is also one of the most brilliant people I know in this life. When he writes, I read. When he talks, I listen. Here is his take on Afghanistan and the whole mess we are in. -Gary T. ------------------ Dear Gary and whoever else is on this email thread: I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio today, allowed that this would mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity, but "we're at war, we have to accept collateral damage. What else can we do?" Minutes later I heard some TV pundit discussing whether we "have the belly to do what must be done." And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I am from Afghanistan, and even though I've lived here for 35 years I've never lost track of what's going on there. So I want to tell anyone who will listen how it all looks from where I'm standing. I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York. I agree that something must be done about those monsters. But the Taliban and Ben Laden are not Afghanistan. They're not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think "the people of Afghanistan" think "the Jews in the concentration camps." It's not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats nest of international thugs holed up in their country. Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan--a country with no economy, no food. There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban. We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that. New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans, they don't move too fast, they don't even have wheelchairs. But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making common cause with the Taliban--by raping once again the people they've been raping all this time. So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people speak of "having the belly to do what needs to be done" they're thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many as needed. Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people. Let's pull our heads out of the sand. What's actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden's hideout. It's much bigger than that folks. Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we'd have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I'm going. We're flirting with a world war between Islam and the West. And guess what: that's Bin Laden's program. That's exactly what he wants. That's why he did this. Read his speeches and statements. It's all right there. He really believes Islam would beat the west. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the West, he's got a billion soldiers. If the west wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose, that's even better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong, in the end the west would win, whatever that would mean, but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours. Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else? Tamim Ansary --------------------

Soback, allow me to quote to you part of your very own sig line: "...keep calm and unruffled on the surface...".

quote:Originally posted by Steve Schacher: I saw reports that the oil companies (in the USA) will freeze prices -- you are seeing crude price increases due to the markets closing down and uncertainty. Also, don't forget the national Strategic Oil Reserves: the US has a huge amount of oil stockpiled. In addition, any station/company that is found to engage in price gouging will suffer severe consequences.

(nice effect on your office door, Menchise!)

quote:Originally posted by Epsilon 5: Pkzip, are you still around? I've got a suprise for you! Yes, I did it! Whoa! Awesome, chief... never thought I'd see it again. Pretty much an identical reconstruction (but currently missing the massage wenches, hehe). Better location. I am truly honored. Thanks man. I've been swamped recently, so haven't had hardly any time to check in. Good to see everyone's doing well. I'll be back when the headache du jour settles down. Oh, and my other non-BC AW project also vanished, I just checked. The Server Giveth and the Server Taketh Away. The Tourist is Dead; Long Live the Tourist.

69. Meaning, 69. 70. Geordie being pissed at Data because he knocked over the bong again.

The weather condition is "boiling Snow"? Man, that's really gotta hurt.

quote:Originally posted by Jaguar: Liked the pictures, and did not want them to get trashed, so I copied them into my name, and then deleted the tourist copies!! No prob, chief, good thinking! I'll keep those .jpg URLs alive. The Aramike 'Batman' picture is here if you want to use it too. In good taste, of course! [ 07-25-2001: Message edited by: pkzip ]

The color of the Battlecruiser Online Forum ┬╗ General Topics ┬╗ General Discussions header is identical to my current text background setting. For a couple of bizarre minutes, I couldn't figure out how you guys had made 'transparent letter cutouts.' Also, were any of the shades of blue changed? Background seems less cold of a tone.

The hypothesis is demonstrated, if not proven. However, I'm unclear about something: I had built (in Tourist mode) two picture signs of Vorpal and Miz Akuma near the bathhouse, at the corner of the brewery. Those signs are still there, unchanged, but the owner is now listed as "Brother Hood." What's up with that?

Yep, there's a whole lot of Nothing where my bathhouse once stood. No idea if the tennis stadium was deleted (had to reinstall AW and don't remember where I built the dang thing). I'm surprised it took this long for my structure(s) to be hit, but it's probably because they are further away from the main square. Sigh. I'm not mad, and I'm not sad. Hey, it's a big box of Legos, and subject to many flavors of entropy. Some of the biggest fun I've had in there is just hanging out and talking; four or five of us floating avatars and a couple of Epsilon5's dogbots running underfoot, and you've got a party, realtime. Well okay, but it sure beats an IRC channel. I still encourage anyone in this community to drop in even for just a few minutes someday, you never know who might be there. It's interesting to hold live dialogues with people whom you formerly only knew by reading their posts. And that does not require anyone to quote:register . If I become a subscriber in Active Worlds (thinking about it to protect another project in a different universe), I'll really miss the collaborative aspect of the place, when we were all tourists, and helping each other build our places together. /RP Ah, the world was a simpler time back then, in May... /RP All of the non-AW folks must get tired of seeing this thread constantly alive and bumped. Two things: (a) it's a convenient place for us AW folks to update each other, and ( it's proximate to anyone in this community who might get interested in it. Please don't anyone take offense, but: if all you can offer is the motherly "register" lecture, you shouldn't be clicking on this thread, it will only serve to annoy you. I really don't mean for that to sound that harsh, but I think you might be missing the whole point. As in many things in life, participation counts more than sympathy. It's a process, not a product.

[Wow, that was my 50th post. Commander Pkzip, eh... ]

Help me figure out how to pull this off, guys... We need a large-scale chessboard in there. Given the limited materials set we have to work with, do any of you know if it'd be possible to flip a picture object on its back, or to assign .jpgs to the top surface of an object? Then we could hover over the board and see pictures of the pieces, on the pieces. Build in Tourist mode so that anyone can move the pieces. Any other ideas about how to accomplish? It would be fun to play through some games in AW. Sure, anyone can go to www.chesslab.com , but as long we're hanging out in there...

quote:Originally posted by Commander Jamont: yeah hehe i meant im starting my own place to on active worlds ... In English, Jamont, the correct word would be "too," which means "also." "To" is your equivalent of "naar." (Roughly). Het is belangrijk om te onthouden spraakkunst, eh?

quote:Originally posted by Baloogan: We want a qualifier, a subject, and a predicate. His clause contained all three. What is missing is the object of the preposition, functioning as an infinitive (by your analysis). Lighten up, Baloogan. He's from the Netherlands. He probably speaks four languages. I'd venture to guess that he knows a whole lot more about grammar than you and me combined. [ 06-30-2001: Message edited by: pkzip ]

A "copyright" is also a state-created condition of non-natural monopoly. But you make a very good point about the "leased" versus "owned" business. We all clicked on the EULA, we knew what we were getting into. [ 06-30-2001: Message edited by: pkzip ]

Here's my quirky theory: The Windows OS* is a Public Utility product, no different than what your water/sewage or electricity or 'telephone' companies provide. A non-natural monopoly condition should be created by the state, because (a)the product is so pervasive as to be deemed necessary to the public good, and (b)the public good is best served by having only one infrastructure source for the product. For example, your house doesn't have seven powerlines coming into it and then you have to decide which company's lines to hook up to. Same for your water pipes and your 'telephone' lines. We tried it that way and it stunk, so we invented the concept of Public Utilities. In the States, a Public Utility usually is not wholly state-owned, but its behavior is very heavily regulated. It operates under a commission (as in "Public Utilities Commission") of the state. (An ancillary litmus test for a Public Utility is that the product is consumable. Well, we 'upgrade,' don't we?) And this would end up being Bill G's worst nightmare: "Well, Mr. Gates, we couldn't decide what to do with you, so we are semi-Nationalizing you and creating a new governmental body solely dedicated to regulating the Bejeezus out of you." www.microsoft.gov . Better than www.microsoft.mil . (*Remember, I'm talking not about 'water,' but the value to you of having a replenishing and controllable supply of 'water.' Substitute 'communication.' It's that Medium versus Message thing.) [ 06-30-2001: Message edited by: pkzip ]

Why was this beautiful place a DEAD GHOST TOWN when we came here? [Obviously, many reasons! Give us some good history, Old Timers! Chavik? Rattler? Echo? still out there?] Keeping on thread: "Is anyone still using Active Worlds?" ------ forgive the 'young pup barking,' but damn right I'm pissed about the DriveBy. They were shooting at YOUR pictures in the museum.

Visit reported.

quote:What's with the sig, pk? Fixed it, thanks. (Edit: It's a snippet of conversation I saw on a helpdesk forum the other day; I thought the despair was amusing. I'll remove it from the sig area and post a link to it here.) [ 06-26-2001: Message edited by: pkzip ]

quote:Originally posted by Epsilon 5: We (pkzip, menchise and I) thought it was him because ... See, this is where I get confused because I never had such a conversation with Ep5 and Menchise, which leads me to believe that this "Traveller" was impersonating me and others at different times. quote:The first attack consisted mainly of pkzip's pics being changed and phrases such as "pkzip's house of turkish delights" to be changed as "pkzip's house of PORN!!", ... My observation was that my pictures (two at the corner of the brewery) were not changed, but had their links deleted. The picture of Aramike (behind the armory) had the caption on the nearby sign changed. I repaired these changes myself. I also never observed a change to my structure's name sign. All this in the spirit of accuracy. In the spirit of full disclosure, I was present in AW the other day when "Traveller" showed up to repair the picture links. I was able to record some screenshots and engage him/her/it in a brief dialogue, the details of which I immediately and privately presented to a respected admin/investigator here. We concluded (IIRC) that since good faith effort had been made to Right the Wrong, it would be best to quietly just Let It Go. I will not publish these details; the investigator may do so if desired. So I'll tell myself that it just doesn't matter who did it; it was just an unknown one of us* having a prank in poor taste, no permanent harm done, whatever, except for the VERY ugly business of finger-pointing. $iLk, you're a heck of a guy if you can forgive the total lack of judicial equity that you were subjected to. Your tactful restraint in the face of this treatment is admirable. I want you covering my six, chief! But also the same goes to you, Ep5, and you, Menchise. We're all on the same side here, I have nothing but pride and trust for all of you. (Except for Parias, he scares me a little. Just kidding! Call off the gnomes!) Now, good people, let's roll back up the sleeves, we've got a world to build... Ep5, I need your help if we overlap in AW for awhile soon... two words: Tennis Court. 'Nuff said. (* You can be darned sure that this was not a lurker from the VoodooExtreme boards: if they ever find the place, it'll end up looking like Bosnia. Think about it.) ------------- Edit: I freely acknowledge that, as a Tourist, my structures have no Permanence rights. Point grudgingly conceded. [ 06-26-2001: Message edited by: pkzip ]

Silk, we've been hit again I think. (8:15pm GMT-6). Also, Sygan starstation was hit yesterday, and the hentai smut pics have changed since then. What is this bullsh*t.

3DGamers is up. http://www.3dgamers.com/games/bcmillenium/