Rostere

I don't see how you can justify Iranian nuclear weapons. No country needs nukes. The Palestinians have suffered a cruel treatment in Israel, it's really sad it's only a question of who's the underdog. If the Palestinians had more money and weapons, I bet the jews would be walled up in ghettos and have their land taken from them in defiance of international laws. It's kind of funny but also sad that Israel, which is kind of a rogue state that does not respect human rights and was formed through the only example of modern- day colonization has the support of many Western countries.

I don't see how owning a gun protects you from a "gun- toting criminals". If they're professional criminals, they will always be better armed than you are. If they aren't, you have pushed the armed criminal in question to a dangerous situation which is more likely to end up with you being hurt than if you were unarmed. Making guns more easily available wouldn't make crime decrease, it would just increase the number of people being shot or even killed by guns. I firmly believe in mental healthcare and the prison system to decrease crime, something which (to a certain degree) the society itself is often responsible for.

lol, I'll give you that. But come on, do you other people at the forum know a lot of crazy gun- toting rednecks?

I'm not so sure. I've never met a person in my entire life who's interested in non- hunting guns, that is to say they would be interested in acquiring one for whatever purpose. Prohibiting the ownership of such weapons wouldn't make anyone angry, except maybe a couple of maniacs who are only going to kill someone later on anyway. Oh, and I guess that whether these "gun lovers" care or not if their weapons are banned depends on what kind of punishment owning one entails.

This entire regulation issue is really a question of striking the right balance. You could write en entire book about this subject, it underlies the entire phenomenon of people governing other people. It basically a fact that people do not always act for their own best. From that follows logically that societies (or, the global society at large) do not always act in their own best interest. A good, but very cheap example, of people not knowing their own best, is children. They lack experience to see their own urges and whims in a broader perspective. In the very same way, although to a lesser degree, do adults behave the same. Both complete regulation and complete freedom are absurdities that should be avoided. In our time and age, it is often seen as obvious why total regulation is a bad idea. But the reasons why total freedom of regulation is bad are equally plain to see, if you make use of analogies: We regulate our bodies with medicines and surgery. Would you choose to be without medical aid only because nature must have its way? We regulate our children (lol ) with education when we raise them. Would you choose an environment for your children to grow up in without any education by other people, because they should learn only directly from the world, regardless of its perils? And so on, blah blah The point that I want to make is that there is no sacred border you cross or holy right you infringe when you, say, as a government, choose to intervene in a free market. Which regulations you should have is of course an entirely different question that depends on the current circumstances.

Personal collection maybe? (even if this sector is really small). As Xard said, a vast majority of all weapons in Finland are used for hunting. Trying to ban guns will never lead you anywhere. It's like aspirin against braincancer. I don't know. The uses of a small gun are very few and very vague... Plus, we don't have any school shootings in Sweden, where we have stricter laws for small guns. Oh, and I do believe that banning guns will reduce the number of dangerous weapons in circulation, altough this is definitely not the only measure to take to prevent accidents of theis kind. More funding for mental healthcare is for example a more important step. But banning small arms would be so easy, if you think of what you would gain.

Are you sure you don't mean game? Anyway, the first game I played must have been Full Throttle. That was way back in 1996, when I was only six years old. Needless to say, I got some help from my dad with translations. I also learned the basic commands in DOS and how to navigate Windows 3.1. And ever since that I've been into PC games. The first game I ever owned myself was Caesar 3 for the second computer I played games on (from back when you were cool if you had two Voodoo 2 cards). I also used to play console games, but only at friends houses. I fondly remember Sonic 2, Super Mario World, and Zelda: Ocarina of Time even though I've never owned a single one of them myself. Among the computer games I played early on were also Red Alert, Starcraft, Age of Empires 2, Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 and Sacrifice... The period 1998-2001 was truly the golden era of good games.

I've never really understood that guy.

What is the point with owning a gun anyway? A gun is a weapon, not a tool. I could see how people could make civil use of a hunting rifle, but I think ownership of small guns should be completely prohibited.

Well, in Sweden banks seem quite stable, although Swedbank, (very active outside Sweden) is speculated to have problems similar to the American banks in the Baltic sector of their business. It is important to remember in this context that Sweden already had what some might call a crisis in the beginning of the nineties, which led to the creation of institutions well prepared for these occasions.

Ok, 4e DnD sucks, but 4e Realms... Is an entirely different thing. And not in a good way.

Tomed.

Stopped counting when I came to 40... Got to remember to uninstall all these games after I'm done with them

When the computer gets hotter, energy costs will get higher as a side effect of increased resistance in the computer parts. As stated earlier, costs for running fans are diminuitive. You might just as well save some money adding fans to your computer (assuming it runs very hot without additional fans).

I guess you've lied your entire life in the US then? Remember that Thorton is an international superspy. In most countries you can't find bullets lying next to the cabbage at every Wal-Mart in town. In Sweden, bullets are under exactly the same strict supervision as weapons. Hard to come by. It's not just Sweden. In fact, I believe the US must be one of the easiest places in the world to acquire guns and ammunition.

Ok. So I made 2 pics, one of them is based on my avatar pic Couldn't make the frame with the glasses work though

Well, keeping your peripherals cooled and keeping your case cool are two different things. You can have good fans inside your computer, but they won't be of much use unless you have a flow of air through the case. Most good cases will come with several slots at both the back and the front for installing more fans.

I got that info from here. This meeting is also of some significance (note which countries were at the meeting which formulated the mission of the UN - and how similar it is in spirit to the Atlantic Charter). You are absolutely right that what we today call the UN was not officially formed until after WW2 (or at least not before Germany's defeat), but an alliance existed and the plans were laid out much earlier for the purpose of uniting as many countries as possible against the Axis and establishing a hegemony of power after WW2. It is not just a coincidence that the founding members of the UN were simply the signatories of the Atlantic Charter. Note also how all of the countries of the Axis were left out of this alliance for a considerable length of time after WW2. In fact, the term "the United Nations" was actually synonymous with the Allies during the war. The UN was from the beginning virtually the same as the Allies, only that they re- established their organization after WW2, perhaps in order to gain credibility for having authority also over the Axis powers. Oh and FYI I would have liked to vote for Obama (if I had lived in the US) if it hadn't been for his protectionist tendencies

Doh. If conversation turns into a stupid metagame like this, why have dialogue options at all?

Me too. I wish Baldur's Gate had a turn-based option. I know, however, that others have argued here that by trying to implement both realtime and turn-based, neither were particularly good. I'm not a connaisseur of combat, so I don't know these things. Of course Arcanum could be improved in many ways, but my only solid piece of negative criticism is actually that all the charcters look funny when they are running.

So I herd you are bitching about combat in Troika games. I love the combat in Arcanum, and even more the TB/ RT hybrid in Fallout: Tactics (just so you know!). *Ducks and covers for eventual hailstorm of disagreement*

What does it matter if the US has any allies? If I could bribe the world into joining me in invading, say, Denmark, it wouldn't make it a lesser crime. And I don't see why you consider supporting a corrupt fascist regime like Saakashvilis a merit. The mere fact that Georgia is one of the few nations willing to partake in the war on Iraq just makes it even more farcical. Oh, I'm sure the US would gladly buy troops from Mugabe or any other third- world corrupt leaders of the same style and fashion, if they only could. I don't understand with absolute certainty if you are trying to imply by stating that "Many times have they avoided treatys and the crys of other countries." that Russia is clearly the "bad guy", but I guess that by writing such a sentence you know nothing of the Kyoto Protocol? The Mine Ban treaty? The Comprehensive Test Ban treaty? The Convention on the Rights of the Child which forbids death penalty for minors (only countries that haven't signed are US and Somalia)? The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (voted against in the UN council only by Iraq, Qatar, Libya, Israel, the People's Republic of China, the United States, and Yemen)? All of these international treaties on environmentalism and humanitarianism have been rejected only by countries as North Korea, Israel, the US, China and various autocratic Islamic countries, i.e. your usual suspects for abusing human rights. To avoid embarassing self- contradictions, I would advise you to read up on the facts and to not shout so loud to other people that they have no idea what they are talking about. I could perhaps understand why people are so eager to side with Georgia though, since it's such a cute and small country at war with the vast Evil Empire Russia. But that is a very narrow point of view. Just because a country is small does not mean it cannot also have a corrupt, nationalistic and downright stupid government. The Russians and the Georgians are in the same league, only difference is that one country is small and has lent soldiers to the US in the war on Iraq. There are simply no countries who are innocent, not Russia, not Georgia and not the US.

From my point of view, both Georgia and Russia are undemocratic nations ruled by warmongers. Let them blow each other to smithereens until they can elect a proper government, that's what I say. There's just this problem that one of them is much larger than the other.

It's basically the same thing in Swedish secondary school. The system where schools get funds based on how many students they have combined with the current notion that basically everyone should be able to start their own school (to provide a multitude of choices for the students) has catastrophic consequences. This will obviously create schools where the owners will try take out as much of the state funding as they can for themselves, and/ or schools which spend exessively much on advertisement. There are actually lots of examples of these kinds of schools... Jensen, Cybergymnasiet, International IT College of Sweden, Europaskolan and many more. I wonder how long it will be until all students graduate with the same grades? I find it highly ironical that our current government who claim they take education very seriously are contributing to this system that 1) will end in a devaluation av grades, (the goal of their political adversaries!) 2) is a reckless waste of government funding 3) is a stab in the back for those students who deserve their grades and for those who get ads in the subway instead of qualified teachers.