Guard Dog

Here is a rotten potato in the stew: Officials: Arson Behind Santiago Fire

Like Tale said, the wind is the killer out there. It's spreading the fire faster than it can be controlled and hampering air dops at the same time. Talk about a two edge sword. Firefighters from six states plus Navy and Marine Corps assets are hitting it around the clock. I just saw an article on cnn.com about a family in a shelter that saw their house burning on TV. I can not even imagine that. Not for nothing but I'd bet a thousand dollars California's law against cutting fire breaks in public land gets changed after this. All of the sudden hurricanes don't seem that bad.

Nevermind, I figured out how to do it. Close this thread please Lucian.

Does anyone who still has KOTOR I installed have the Padawan or Force Sensitive mod? If so please PM me. Thanks!

Thats is a heck of a good idea. I am so going to do that in my NWN2 mod. actually you should pull volo and cano and put yourself and taks in as you two are now some of the more active political debaters. Heh, Taks will get in but not me. That would be a little narcissistic. Besides I was already in NWN1. I'm standing outside the Shining Knight in the City Core. . As for the mod, all of the dialog, journal entries, floaters, and most of the scripts are written. I write in Word then copy to the TS. About 1/2 the areas are done in at least rough form, some are pretty much finished. Heck all the writing weighs in at 65000 words not counting scripting. I wrote most of it during downtime at work. Back OT, I was lurking on the BIS forums during the submit-a-character mess. It was a shame something that could have been a lot of fun turned into such a debacle.

The leveled gameplay part that just bugged the heck out of me was bandits wearing daedric armor. Why were they hitting me up for 100 coins when their armor alone could have bought all of Bravil?

Thats is a heck of a good idea. I am so going to do that in my NWN2 mod.

That is an excellent point. I will admit to having pretty narrow tastes in RPGs and not many out there appeal to me (I'm more into RTS games now) but it is nice when there are a few decent if not so flashy "cookie cutter" games with a few subtle twists to fill in the time between the big titles.

Tarna as a point here. 4 years ago GSM was in it's infancy and almost all cell phones used either IS-136 (TDMA) or IS-95 (CDMA). Today TDMA is utterly obsolete and is not sold anywhere, and most companies have dismateled their TDMA networks. IS-95 is still around but only in small markets and GSM and CDMA-2000 are the standard signal formats. They are both very very different from their predecssors and if TDMA might have caused interference it certainly does not follow that GSM would. The modulation and transmission format are totally different. Ditto for IS-95 and CDMA2000. Citing old data when talking about cell phones does not mean anything really. If it's 2-3 years old, everything has changed since. On a side note, GSM is about to give way to UMTS.

Actually Tale, if you are really interested in this subject there is a book I highly reccomend: Six Easy Pieces and Six Not So Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman. OK, I'll be honest, I never finished it. I really only read the parts about Gauss's law and Kirchhoff. But what I did read was pretty interesting. It is not a text book, and it will not make you a physics expert but it does a pretty good job breaking down the concepts to the essentials

See post #18 on pg 2 of this thread.

Frequency=3.0x10^8/Wavelength. I use that almost every day for channel planning.

Does in game advertising and product placement detract form the experience? Or make it more realistic? I could ask the same about movies too. Opinions?

I don't play sport games. Oh, I don't eat at McDonald's either or drink Starbuck's coffee. I also don't shop at Wal-Mart. So you are thin, sleepy, and pay too much for groceries. But seriously, it does not make sense to say all Bioware games will suck now because of EAs involvement. EA may well let Bioware continue to do their own thing. Past history would seem to say no, but as someone else said, we can hope. My niggest Beef with EA is that they are not interested (so far) in unique and new IPs. As someone else pointed out, the like a secure franchise title and simply rehash a slightly improved version every few years.

Well I can prove that temperature rise creates increases in CO2 (just burn a piece of charcoal). But no I can not prove the reverse which is what Gore assets to be true. Of course neither can he. But as Calax says you have to have faith! It's funny, this whole global warming thing is nearly becoming a religion. And it is a zealous one that hates pagans and heretics (thats you and me Taks).

I'm sure you have heard of the legend of the frog and the scorpion? Sometimes a company (or a person, or a scorpion) does things just because its what they do. Even if it is against their interests, it's just their nature. Now, I haven't taken many classes in the way of economics, but I'm pretty confident that a thomistic/teleological account of market dynamics isn't terribly popular or well-supported. Nobody mistakes a company's past behavior with an obligation to some account of "nature". Sorry Pop, I didn't realize we were having a serious discussion on this. I usually go to WOT for those. Besides, I've been waiting for a chance to use that story!

That is true. Global warming became a hot button issue in scientific communities about 15 years ago. Al Gore is only using it to give himself an issue to stand on. I remember the first major news article about global warming I read was in 1991. That was right about the time the chicken littles of the world realized the dire warnings about "Global Cooling" from the 1970's were bunk. Oh yes, here is a link to one of the thousands of dire warning about how humans were causing global cooling. The part I like is about how the glaciers would cover North America and Europe by the late 1990's and they seriously discussed ways to melt the polar caps to stave off an ice age. For you reading enjoyment: http://www.denisdutton.com/cooling_world.htm and http://www.businessandmedia.org/specialrep.../fireandice.asp. As for you second point that is a fair argument. But I would point out there are a large number of VERY fuel efficient models of cars and light trucks for sale here. But they do not sell well because they are very expensive and not very durable. The government cannot compel a company to sell certain models, or not not sell others here. Just as they cannot compel me to buy them. But they can reward me for doing so. And they do. If you buy a fuel efficient car you get a nice tax break. I will tell you right out, I drive a Mercury Mountaineer. It is not terribly fuel efficient but I have a lot of dogs and I need a truck that can carry as many as possible at one time if needs be. The little electric hybrids will not do that.

I'm not so sure about that one. I'm thinking the ones who do follow the Gore mantra get more press because by and large the press wants it to be true because it fits their political agenda. By and large that is. The press of the world is not solely left leaning but the majority of it is. As far a cutting carbon emissions, thats easy, replace coal burning electric plants with Nuclear plants. Easy, and much much more enviormentally friendly. But no the envoirmentalist leftists don't want to hear that either. Science and politics make as poor a mix as religion and politics.

I'm sure you have heard of the legend of the frog and the scorpion? Sometimes a company (or a person, or a scorpion) does things just because its what they do. Even if it is against their interests, it's just their nature.

It is hard not to be pessimistic about this. I's not as if what Sand is saying has never happened bafore. Several times.

Has anyone here ever tried astrophotagraphy?

Here is some interesting reading: Excerpt: Link to the rest:http://www.smh.com.au/news/environment/gor...1696238792.html Dr Gray does not advocate the same theory I do, but once again this files in the face of the slogan spouting "Consensus formed" and "The science is settled" crowd that make up Gore's disciples.

Yes I saw that. That is one theory, but a body like that increasing in temp as it heads away from the sun and doing so at a consistent rate as all of the other planets supports the theory I posted about. There was another article that was to long to post about the moons Europa, and Io, and Dione, and Encladeus and how they were heating up but there were of course alternate theories about that as well. One that I thought was intersting was how orbital changest in Encladeus resulted in it radiating more geothermal energy but then goes on to say no orbital changes had been noted withing the time Cassini arrived. With Europa and Io, it was theorized they were warming because of increasing radiation from Jupiter. But there in the last paragraph was the caveat, Jupiter is increasing it's radiation because it is receiving more from the sun. The point I'm getting at here is too many of you are confusing politics with science. When they wave their hands and say "Humans are the cause (particularly American humans), the science is settled" it strikes me as the perfect marriage between arrogance and ignorance.

Hmmm. Well, lets just see here. We are all intelligent people on this board (with a few exceptions) to lets outline the problem. We have a planet whose mean temperature has increased by 0.65 C since 1970. It's polar caps are melting (it has been confirmed that the largest mean change in temp is at the poles), and CO2 as a percentage in the atmosphere has increased by 2.3% since 1976. Does that sum it up? Mkreku? Meta? Nick? Gorgon? Do we all agree on these facts? OK. Now what could be causing this? Most of you would probably say humans. The Nobel Laureate has. What if I could prove to you it is not. Well, here you go: It's not Earth, it's Mars: http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070402/ful...ws070402-5.html. It's true kiddies, Mars is experiencing global warming at a rate commensurate of that on Earth. As most of you are aware (pay attention here Mkreku) there are no humans on Mars. No phones, no lights, no motorcars, as natural as can be. But wait, there's more! What if I told you there is a planet that has seen a 5% increase in mean temp since 1989? What if I told you that this planets atmosphere is less than 0.0000000001% CO2 but it is still warming anyway. And here is the kicker, the largest changes are happening around the poles! It's true! That planet is Neptune http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2006GL028764.shtml. And by way of further proof Neptune's largest moon Triton is also warming at about the same rate as Mars, Neptune and (gasp) the Earth http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/199805260...trunc_sys.shtml. Still with me kids? Great. I thought most of you would be on the floor covering you eyes and ears by now. Well, there's more. It's happening to Pluto too: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/plut...ing_021009.html. I might add that Pluto is heading toward it's apoapsis (that means it's getting farther away) and it is still warming up. Oh, by the way, there are no SUVs on Pluto. Saturn is also getting warmer. Since 1981 it's atmosphere temp has increased by a mean of 3.1 Kelvin and it also boasts an increase of 5 degrees Kelvin at the Poles. http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm Hey didn't Al Gore say the Earth is warming fastest at the poles? Well, as we established. We are all reasonable and intelligent people here right? What do all these planets have in common beside the fact they are experiencing the same rate of warming as Earth. I'll give you a hint; It's not humans. I'll give you another; It's not CO2 (half of the list worlds have little to no CO2). What could it be? The SUN! Yes indeed, the all orbit the same star that has since 1971 become more active: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml.../ixnewstop.html and http://www.livescience.com/environment/070...ys_warming.html. So there we have it. The Nobel Laureate is sitting in his palatial mansion in Nashville (that consumes more energy than an entire city block: http://www.tennesseepolicy.org/main/articl...?article_id=367) polishing his Nobel Prize, telling us WE need to shut down the factories scrap OUR cars and change all the world to a socialist/agrarian economy (and elect him to run it I'm sure). Maybe before you just nod your empty heads and agree with him you should do a little research. Here endeth the lesson. I realize I have just committed a major heresy to the PC religion so many follow, so flame away if you like.