John Prezioso

No problem. quote: When does one reach a point where it's just becomes better to give up, have your standard of living drop a little but the "benefit" of not having to work. The major difference is that in a Socialist environment, there is no incentive to work harder because any money made through your own added effort has only minimal benefit to YOU. All of your added wealth is seized for re-distribution. Simply not ethical. Conversely, in our society in the U.S., for example, there are many barriers to success, true, and some may seem insurmountable, but ALL may be overcome with hard work and persistence. No one, and I will repeat it, NO ONE is stuck where they are if they choose not to be. Opportunity is always there, but unfortunately our nation's "poverty pimps" like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton (just to name 2) only enhance the victim mindset of the poor, shamelessy exploiting them for the political gain to be had by large amounts of disgruntled poor constituents. In my view, the evil of socialism is two-fold: 1) It fosters the entitlement mentality; that hard work isn't necessary because the world owes you everything you need. 2) It victimizes society's hardest workers and biggest contributers, discouraging further success by stifling the value that hard work normally yields without the arbitrary robin hood concept of stealing from the "rich" and giving to the "poor".

It has been widely publicized that Klebold and Harris played DOOM and other violent videogames prior to their attack. It has even been speculated that they played them just prior to the attack in order to "work themselves up into a violent frenzy". They also copied very closely the scene in "Basketball Diaries", and were have known to listen to ultra-violent rap music often. So, I guess in the name of consistency, if we are going to restrict guns because of Columbine, then logically we have to restrict all of the violent media, including videogames. Maybe even ban them all. See how slippery this slope is? The guns did not carry themselves into school and start emptying clips into classmates - the evil bastards Klebold and Harris did. If guns were not available, they could have just as easily used the pipe bombs they had been making, causing just as many if not more casualties. Never make the mistake of blaming anyone or anything other than the perpetrators of the crime.

America definitely needs more naturalized citizens.

quote:I'm watching some people here make sweeping generalities to the effect that religion is anti-science and religious people want to return to the dark ages when in fact science before, during, and after the enlightenment was conducted by people who felt that the nature of that discipline was to uncover the wonders of God. Exactly right. I know I said I was done with this topic, but I had to back up Zane on that one. I had no idea you were such a scholar, Marlowe. Most impressive.

Well, how about Washington, D.C.? And welcome to the 3000AD community! I can't make out where your from, though. Bergen, Norge? Never heard of him. Edit: Ah, I see you fixed it. Norway, huh? Good skiing, I hear...

Well, I assume your talking legal here. *AHEM* I can't think of anywhere you can legally download free sheet music. Just about anything can be found on Bittorrent, but the legality of a lot of it is dubious to say the least. I am a guitar player, but I use mostly tabs like on the sites Grizzle and I mentioned. There very well may be a place to download sheet music. My advice is to join a forum like "Jam Session". http://guitar.zentao.com/forum/ It's a guitar site, but there are thousands of registered musicians. If there is a free sheet music site out there, my guess is someone there will know about it.

I have heard this called a "must-see" in several reviews, and for the life of me I can't see why. I suppose if there are people out there naive and/or gullible enough to think that all those intense firefights that you see on the History Channel and CNN news clips are the norm of military life, then maybe for them it would be a good lesson. Mostly, the movie exemplified my own military service - excruciatingly long dull periods filled with tedium with some moments of mild excitement thrown in. Make no mistake, this is NOT a war movie. It has NO action, and there really is no point or message to it that I could see. Foxx was good, but he always is. Not good enough to save this meandering and mostly pointless film however. 4/10

quote: Do you mean that because you won't pursue this discussion, everybody else has to desert this thread ? A bit arrogant don't you think ? Umm... no. Boy Howdy! You are getting EVERYTHING wrong. I simply was stating that I MYSELF am done with this topic. Feel free to continue, by all means. Please don't automatically assume that your scientific knowledge is somehow superior to mine. I think you would be rather surprised at the extent of my affinity for and understanding of the sciences. Arrogance is not really becoming on you. Beating my head against a wall is not my idea of fun, nor is debating someone who is only willing to repeat their stance over and over again, never adding anything new or willing to hear a word the other party is saying. Have fun arguing with yourself!

Okay. So because you read somewhere that a frickin single cell organism accidently popped out of some petri dish, there is no God. What can I say? You couldn't have a worse perspective on this, and I could not disagree with you more. This is what they call an impasse, and it would be pointless to continue. Next topic, please.

Done!

Is this for guitar? If it is, you can try one of the links on this page: http://www.guitartabs.net/

Thanks for the link Aperson. But I think you guys might be falling a little bit on the alarmist side. Excerpt from CBS news poll story : "But most would not substitute the teaching of creationism for the teaching of evolution in public schools." As for the ID crowd, their "agenda" could be just a scientific validation of their beliefs. I don't know, since I don't have an agenda. I believe in intelligent design, I believe that scientific evidence supports it, and I teach it to my kids at home. Case closed, for me. What the public schools do, I really couldn't care less about.

quote:...That the majority of the US population is suspicious about the validity of evolution... Where did you find that, Nomad? At any rate, I haven't heard a single person on these boards claim evolution isn't a perfectly viable theory. Who are you arguing against? The hundreds of millions of people across the globe who don't buy into your disbelief? Evolution is a good explanation for how we came to be how we are today post-creation. Most normal Christians recognize that. We've all said it here on these boards. Why do you persist?

Tuesday - anytime.

Kinda weak.

France has 30-40% unemployment in some areas, and no sense of security for millions held prisoner in their own homes by a few marauding thugs. Personal property is casually destroyed and no justice exists. Some might say that, in a manner of speaking, France has already imploded.

I've been trying to drive that point home. Nomad is not getting it. Had the South succeeded in succession in 1861, the majority rule would have been that slavery remain. Mob rule is a terrible way to run a country. Grizzle - quote: Well Soback, apparently the framers themselves could have used a small lesson in understanding what they wrote given that half of them were slave owners.Now hold on there. Remember the context of the time. You cannot apply today's social standard to a different era - you need to understand the way things were back then. Men who owned slaves inherited plantations that already had slaves on them. Even the "separate but equal" concept introduced was a radical departure for the time. Tha slavery was and still is an abhorrent practice is without question. Just don't be too quick to judge those back then without understanding the climate of the time. It was the same kind of visionaries as the framers that led to the abolishment of slavery. At the time of the revolution, it was a matter of priortiy - survival as a nation superceded all other issues. 100 years from now, people may look back at our society and scorn us as hypocrites for allowing anything as heinous as abortion to be legal. (As an example, not to turn this into an abortion debate...)

The Next Generation Mod (For Freelancer) Fantastic mod. I have this one myself. It improves the game immeasurably.

Outstanding! Best of luck (and Blessings if you'll have 'em) to you and your wife!

I agree completely. What makes me mad is that now that the latest Tribes game was such a flop, the series is probably effectively dead. What a shame.

This was taken from a Veteran's Day tribute on a conservative web site, but it is completely politically neutral. About Courage "Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. 'He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,' is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. The paradox is the whole principle of courage, even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity and I certainly have not done so, but Christianity has done more. It has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living, and him who dies for the sake of dying, and it has held up ever since, above the European lances, the banner of the mystery of chivalry, the Christian courage, which is a disdain of death." G.K. Chesterton, 1908 Thanks to all of you who served or are now serving, and especially to those who are no longer with us. Thank you for your sacrifice.

Well, it started when the hardcore Tribes community (and you don't know the meaning of "hardcore" until you saw the Tribes community) almost universally panned the game because of the changes Irrational made to the gameplay and style, as well as some touted features that were not in the boxed copy (but were promised in a future patch). The blood in the water mentality was widespread and contagious, and before you knew it, the game was dead before it ever had a chance. The constant drubbing the game received killed it at retail - it sold abysmally. Because of the utter commercial failure it ended up being, Vivendi stopped all work on the massive patch that Irrational had been working on to get the game to where it needed to be, (and more complete), inciting near-riots on the Tribes community forums about the evil developer and publisher who ripped the paying customers off, etc. etc. etc. Heck, there was even talk about a lawsuit by some of the people who did buy it and felt Vivendi stole their money by releasing it unfinished and cancelling the patch. In reality the game was nowhere near as bad as the hardcore Tribes "fans" made it out to be, and as I mentioned before, the singleplayer portion was solid and entertaining. I wonder if SC knows anything else about what went on, as I imagine he pays attention to these sorts of things.

quote: Lets continue to keep it clean gentlemen. Or else you will be smitten too! Anyway, very well put, Remo. I really have nothing to add, except to say that, while I am a Christian, Robertson does not speak for me.

Thief 3 is amazing, if a little more consolized than 2. You really can't go wrong with Freelancer or Homeworld -absolutely stellar games. (Freelancer had some stilted dialogue and repetitive missions, but it is still great imo.) I might suggest max payne or its sequel for some really cheap, insanely fun shooting action. The self-aware cheesey noir style and the brilliant action sequences are top-notch. Tribes V has a good single player campaign, but there is huge controversy surrounding its multiplayer. Quite an infamous title, that one. Other cheap but awesome games - Medieval Total War(RTS), Far Cry(one of the best FPS's ever), and Freedom Force (Superhero RPG).