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Got this in my Inbox today, anybody else seen or received it? ------------------------------------------------- MR. GEORGE EDIALE FEDERAL MINISTRY OF PETROLEUM RESOURCES FEDERAL SECRETARIAT IKOYI, LAGOS-NIGERIA. EMAIL: [email protected] DATE: JUNE 05, 2002 Attn: Patrick Gregory ( Dear Sir, RE: URGENT AND CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS PROPOSAL I am Mr. George Ediale, the Director and Funds Co-ordinator of the Finance/Contract Department of the FEDERAL MINISTRY OF PETROLEUM RESOURCES. Terms of Reference. My term of reference involves the financial management and disbursement of proceeds from petroleum products and also the award of contracts to multinational companies. My office is also saddled with responsibility of screening categorization and prioritization of projects embarked upon by this Ministry as well as feasibility study for selected projects and supervising the project consultants involved. A breakdown of the fiscal expenditure by this office as at the end of the fourth fiscal quarter of 2000 indicates that this Ministry paid out a whooping sum of US$736M ( Seven hundred and Thirty Six Million United States Dollars) to successful contract beneficiaries. The Ministry is now compiling beneficiaries to be paid this second quarter of 2001. The crux of this letter is that the finance/contract department of this Ministry deliberately over-inflated the contract value of the various contracts awarded. In the cause of disbursements, this department has been able to track down the sum of US$41.5M (Forty One Million Five Hundred Thousand United States Dollars) as the over-invoiced sum. This money is now lying and floating in the Ministry's domiciliary account with the Apex Bank, Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN). My colleagues and I now want to quickly transfer this funds to a safe nominated account for possible investment abroad. We are not allowed as a matter of Government policy to operate any foreign account because of our status as Civil/public servants. Hence the need to solicit for your account to transfer this fund into. We have also evolved a sharing formula as follows: (1) 25% for the foreign account owner (2) 70% for I and my colleagues (3) 5% will be set aside to defray all expenses both locally and internationally during the course of this transaction. Furthermore, we shall be relying on your advice as regards investments of part of our share in any blue-chip Company in your country. Be informed that this business is genuinely and 100% safe considering the high-powered government official involved. Send your private fax, telephone numbers and your mobile telephone if any and same of your Bank and Account number. This is to facilitate easy communication with you. Contact me strictly by email. Looking forward to healthy business relationship with you. Sincerely, MR. GEORGE EDIALE NOTE: PLEASE ACKNOWLEDGE THE RECEIPT OF THIS MESSAGE, THANK YOU.

In reply to the title of the thread, the answer looks like 'No'. And another thing, how can an opinion be 'amateur'. An opinion is an opinion, whether you get paid for it or not. Maybe you mean misinformed, or maybe any opinion which is contrary to your own you deem as 'amateur'. [ 06-06-2002, 12:34: Message edited by: Paddy Gregory ]

According to all news reports I read, the bus was full of soldiers and civilians. [ 06-06-2002, 12:36: Message edited by: Paddy Gregory ]

Just a thought, I assume that IS you with the hottie?

Nice idea, but can I say 'Bandwidth'?

To display FPS, go into the .ini file and change Show FPS = 0 to Show FPS = 1 (or something like that). You 'll see it in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. I'm generally getting 15 - 25FPS outdoors and 30-60 indoors. View distance at @80%, 1024 x 768 (I think). See my profile for my specs.

Er, Grayfox, have you ever come across American tourists in Europe? Believe me, I have. Unfortunately, the majority of them speak English in loud voices, demanding to be understood. That is NOT a stereotype, I see it week in week out over here. Fortunately for them, a high percentage of Europeans speak English. It's nice to see that you would make an effort though. It's a shame many of your compatriots aren't as concientious. Having said that, the Brits abroad are no better.........

The more reasons I find for NOT playing a Celine Dion CD, the better.

quote: I on the other hand am VERY proud of this countries history and heritage, sure, we did some things that may not have been real nice, Indians, slavery etc, but the fact is that those things were OK then, just because they are not OK now, does not mean that we should be ashamed of them. Learn from them and move on. That's horsesh*t and you know it. Slavery and genocide have NEVER been a good thing, not now or 200 years ago. With regards to Australia nd the US and firearms, I have access to UK news 24/7 and I can't remember the last time a death from shooting was reported. It's just not in our culture and never has been. I've stated this before, the fact that legitimate firearms are so freely available in the US means that there are more firearms in the system, which in turn means there are more available to the criminal. Simple common sense. Having said that, when was the last time a known criminal burst into a school / office / factory / restaurant and opened fire? The criminals are not the ones who you should be afraid of, it's the slightly unhinged neighbour, the bullied or persecuted student, the jilted lover, the dismissed and disgraced employee. Those are the people who you should be afraid of and chances are they are the 'citizens' who have a perfectly legal right to own firearms under the 2nd Amendment. Like is stated so many times in the various debates on socialism v capitalism, socialism won't work because of 'human nature'. For that same reason there will always be unhinged individuals who flip out and go on a shooting spree. Flipping out is a part of human nature, unfotunately. You cannot predict it, you cannot prevent it, you cannot legislate against it, but what you can do is restrict their access to a firearm by restricting everyone's access to a firearm. Yes, they could flip out with a knife, but how many people would they mange to kill before a several brave individuals overpowered them? Not so easy if they're carrying a firearm, is it? OK, you might say that if a teacher or security guard had a gun, it wouldn't have happened. Look at Erfurt in Germany, one of Robert Steinhäuser's first victims was an armed Police officer. What good did his gun do for him? The fact is, it should have never come to the point where armed teachers and security guards are required, it is indeed a sad reflection on your country that it is so. The sooner people realise that the 2nd amendmant is outdated and does not reflect current technology and attitudes, the better.

I do now.

Have you been able to spend much time on Morrowind, SC? First impressions?

I don't know much about Fortuyn, but he seemed closer to the British Conservatives than to the likes of Le Pen. Talking of Haider, I wonder what the hell he's doing in Baghdad at the moment?

Like I said, it happened to my sister-in-law in Manchester. It would be tough for me to seek my own justice........... Then again, my wife is from Northern Ireland and I'm sure her sister knows people, who know people, who know other people who would jump at the chance at a bit of indiscriminate Brit-bashing............

No thanks, I really wanna get my hands on one of those Furtados if you don't mind (Huh, don't we all?)

Having seen a couple of news items recently, I really have come to the conclusion that justice and policing suck. Big time. Did you hear about the unemployed guy who was retrieving golf balls from a lake and reselling them? Jailed for 20mths or something for theft. I mean, wtf? As far as the Golf club and its members are concerned, those balls were lost forever, fair play to the guy for a bit of ingenuity (and he WASN'T claiming unemployment benefit or anything). Then you compare this to something which happened to my sister-in-law a couple of weeks back; she was driving down the Motorway round Manchester and she cut up some guy in a Range Rover or something (she drives a beat up Renault 5), well he comes up right behind and she thinks he's going to ram her. what he does is pull up alongside, reach over into the backseat, wind down the window and throw a hopusebrick, A FRIGGING HOUSEBRICK! at her windscreen. Fortunately, it only caused a minor crack. Not being content with this, he pulls up along the other side, gets another brick and throws it through her rear window, completely shattering it! Now she's obviously shaken up, but her friend is with her, so she's able to keep her calm. Luckily they get the number of the car and immediately call the police. Get this, rather than going round to the guy's house to arrest the f*cker, they call him up and ask him about it. well, he tells them that he has his own builing business and that his employees often use his car and that he couldn't be sure who was driving it at the time, but would 'ask around'. Basically, the police tell my sister-in-law that there is probably very little they can do about it, unless they can find out who exactly was driving the car at the time. I was so bloody angry when my wife told me about this, what if she had been killed? What if there were kids in the back? What if it had caused a major accident? He'll probably get off scott-free and the poor golfball diver gets put in the clink. There is NO justice! I'm so angry about this, I'm shaking as I type. I'm tempted to go over there with a few friends and several cricket bats and beat the living sh*t out of this piece of crap lowlife.

quote: Let us keep our lumber and we'll give you Celine Dion If you're giving away female singer / songwriters, can I have Nelly Furtado please?

Jesus, he's just a geek for God's sake. It's not as if he killed or raped anyone.

This is killing me, I pre-ordered from Amazon.co.uk and I probably won't get it till late May. Then again, I won't be getting my new Vid card till next week (GF4 Ti4400, hopefully) so I'll just be patient...........

Tom and Jerry?

Another 2 quick points: 1. Jaguar, you could just as easily write 'Israeli' as well as your persistance in writing 'Palestinian', and more justfiably so; the vast majority of current 'Israelis', especially those in power, are European Jews who arrived, or are descended from thoise who arrived, ealier this century. Arabs have continually inhabited the area of Palestine for centuries. 2. What have the 'Israelis' got to hide in Jenin? Another refugee camp massacre à la Lebanon (funnily enough, Sharon was heavily involved in that one too)? PS Nice find, Nick. [ 04-30-2002, 08:42: Message edited by: Paddy Gregory ]

This is something which happens intermittently to me, so it's not a bug per se. If I resume or restore a game, occassionally the game hangs and becomes completely unresponsive. Then only option is to reboot. I noticed it seemed to happen just after the music starts, so being a bright spark, I turned off the music and it worked fine. Going into Config and and re-enabling the music doesn't seem to trouble it. Anyone got any bright ideas where I should start looking? I've got the Liveware 3.0 update for my SBlive! I tried the kxdev link mentioned above, but it's dead. This is in my WinXP boot BTW. Just a sidenote, now I have a half-decent machine, the game looks great at 1024 x 728 (or whatever) and 4xS AA. This will improve somewhat when I get a GF4 Ti4600 tonight

Woot! 33! Bloody triple bogey on the 18th too

Hmmm, haven't you worked out what could be causing it yet? Just kidding, of course. Congrats man, and best wishes to 'er indoors, hope everything goes OK. Paddy [ 04-27-2002, 18:42: Message edited by: Paddy Gregory ]

Something odd happened to me yesterday, I'm in the WinXP boot on my machine, go to fire up BCM and nothing, just the splash screen and nothing. So I tried 3Dmark 2001SE, again nothing, but with a pointer to an error message. Looked at eror message; 'No texture mapping'. Huh? Checked the Madonion website, they suggested running dxdiag, so I did and it failed at the Direct 3D test for DX8. After a bit of further research, all I had to do was disable then re-enable Direct Draw acceleration and Direct 3D acceleration in Dxdiag, which fixed it. I'm just curious as to why this would happen spontaneously, I hadn't touched anything in DirectX since my previous BCM session or 3D Mark test. Rather strange don't you think?

quote: Downside.. its single player. Bleagh. No one will know of my exploits and god-like powers except that poor AI bot I just tortured to death. Bummer. You know, that's part of what attracted me to it. No MP means they've concentrated their efforts on the SP without having to pander to the fickle whims of the online gaming community. All kudos to them for having the gonads to do so. I pre-ordered my copy from Amazon.co.uk yesterday. (Also thinking of getting a Gf4 Ti4600, just to play this and XP1 )