taks

i never bothered with the scripts other than with the tanks. i simply hit pause every so often to have my mages/clerics cast a spell. don't play bards, either, so i didn't have to worry about that, and rogues are actually rather tough if beefed properly. i've played the game so many times it is literally impossible for any of my characters to die till the final TOB fights... taks

it's pimlico's estate, and yes, part of the korgan quest. go here if you want to get more information on the quest. taks

oh, i did not realize you had two separate IPs from your ISP. i'm used to the router solution, and i only have one assigned IP from my ISP. the router deals with the local IPs. taks

i should add, the two most unreliable components in any system are almost always a) router/hub and b) nic. i'm not sure why because i've never actually looked at what they do, but i almost never have a hub/router make it more than 6 months to a year before at least one port is dead, and i've lost a few nics as well. taks

sounds like whatever took your 'net down dragged your nic with it. if switching ports did not help, more than likely the issue is on your pooter. one worthwhile check is to open up a command window and enter ipconfig /release then follow it with ipconfig /renew which will force your pooter to attempt to get a new IP addy (i've found that rebooting does not always sufficiently do this). taks

hmmm... sounds like alcohol. taks

i got myself one of them little HP pavillion tablet PCs. 12.1" and only 3 lbs. or so. quite nice, actually, though i must admit i hate Vista with a passion. taks

i probably wouldn't use live anyway. it'll be upstairs on the shiny new LCD that i'm getting from santa this year and i do not have network access to that port at the moment (not that i couldn't get it set up... just don't care to do that). xbox, btw, solely because the game selection is better, IMO. the fact that it is cheaper than the PS3, with a brighter future to boot, is secondary. taks

the RRoD is supposedly solved on any box with the Falcon chipset, which means any of the newer premiere or elite packages. i'm thinking about buying one myself soon. taks

my wife and i met after my career had already begun, 9 1/2 years ago (actually, we met a few years before that but did not "hook up" till 9 1/2 years ago). i was 3 months from my 30th birthday at the time (she's a month older than me), and she also had a career of her own (which she recently restarted and loves her new job) that was well established. granted, i had only been working a few years, but had been out of my first stint in college for 8 years by the time the hook up went down. we also waited 4 years before producing "tiny" (michele's name for john). no super-efficient semiconductor from me, but thanks for the nod, hehe. radar is my thing (well, comm too, but i spend more time with radar than anything). anyway, i disagree that wanting to be single is a bad thing, or a sign of immaturity, or whatever. some people just don't need it, nor are they built for it. if it weren't for michele, i probably would have stayed single as well (she's the only person that was able to tolerate me... surprise, surprise, i really am this argumentative in real life, hehe). my uncle is a 67 year old life-long bachelor (most of you guys would actually like him quite a lot, btw). yeah, there's 6 billion people on the planet, but not that many in any one personal circle, and very few if you try to narrow your search to "compatible." besides, there's nothing quite like not needing to worry about all the things that can have a major impact on a family, but are of no consequence when your dog is your only dependent. much less stress. taks

taking care of a child is a very rewarding chore. i can't say i see the world any differently, however, though i do pay attention to certain things a bit more closely (like education matters). taks

my family is tiny, and living in st. louis for the most part. i did not get home for turkey day this year, though due to an unfortunate incident, i was home the weekend before turkey day. same goes for xmas. my wife doesn't have enough vacation to take off for the holidays. her family is in upstate NY, so we see them even less often. of course, i talk to my mother 3 times a week, and since mizzou is #1 in the BCS at the moment, my brothers and i are talking constantly. we normally keep in touch every other week otherwise. given recent events, my mother intends to be out to CO much more often in the future (particularly if she retires), but probably not till i graduate in may. my uncle, her brother, even threatened to come with her in may if she drives (he doesn't fly). taks

indeed, the government would really, really, really like to regulate games. taks

since the ESRB is not a government mandated rating organization (or system), there's not a whole lot you can do about it. the problem is that there are enough consumers out there that want something on the box to give them a hint as to its content. the best way to fight the system is to boycott, but i guarantee the stores that sell the most games are looking at which audience is larger: the one that doesn't care about ratings and the one that does. the latter is much, much, much larger in the end. btw, saying with shock seems a little odd to me, actually. the conservative religious side (extreme right) of the american populous is probably on the order of 20%, so 1/9 is actually low if you want to divvy it up. those are also the people that are concerned about video game content. the hard left probably does not care as much, if at all. personally, i think ratings are a joke, at least in terms of using them to restrict the audience. i don't mind a sticker on the box that gives you a hint as to content (movies in particular, since it is difficult to find out what they contain). it should be left up to parents to restrict their children, and the ratings should simply serve as indicators of what to expect. taks

uh, wasn't there a thread about this a couple weeks ago and we all decided that this is nothing more than web-crawlers searching around for content on the intraweb? taks

the roswell thing really is something that could have been covered up by a massive disinformation campaign. remember, lots of folks _did_ speak out, but they have been largely discredited. personally, the "disinformation" that resulted was probably more a bit of incompetence, but it served its purpose to deflect attention from what was likely happening (some classified program). too many people worked on the apollo missions, however, for disinformation to really work. 10s of thousands cannot be silenced. well, that's a bit more difficult to say for sure. suppose something did land there, and we did recover some great new technology, how would you ever know whether technological advances that happened, no matter how insignificant, were not a result of the alien technology? perhaps had there been no landing (devil's advocate here), we might not have fiber optics, kevlar, etc... perhaps the gov't really is smart enough to trickle things out, or perhaps the technology is sooooo advanced that we're still trying to reverse engineer it? taks

von daniken thinks they are simply older than we think... the same goes for the sphinx. taks

i absolutely love all of the UFO stories that get done on the various discovery channels, as well as the stories about the past where some "crackpot" has an interesting new theory about our history (which sometimes includes UFO references), e.g. dating the pyramids or other egyptian monuments. not so much because i think they are true, but simply because they could be true. we know so much, and yet so little. unfortunately, the bulk of this type of work is carried out by the so-called heretics, so it never gets the focus from legitimate science that i would like to see (which translates to research funding). taks

indeed, i agree. an unidentified flying object is more than likely one of the two scenarios i described above. it could be that some are actual alien UFOs, or alien USOs as has been proposed, but i'd rate it as highly unlikely, particularly the latter. taks

some former pilots are pushing to reopen government initiated research into the UFO pheonmenon. now, i for one am quite skeptical of most UFO claims. i'm quite certain that nearly all can be explained either by a) classified projects conducted by various governments or b) natural phenomena, either known or unknown, but without enough data from the "sighting" to draw clear conclusions. that said, if there is any single supernatural phenomena in the world that i believe is at least possible, it would be the existence of extraterrestrial life. of course, that such life exists is one level of possibility, and that it would be visiting us is an entirely different matter with a much lower probability. thoughts? taks

yeah, it is very area dependent, and places that are land-locked for whatever reason are the first to require up instead of out. fortunately, i've got all of west kansas in my back yard so i can probably be guaranteed a large yard any time in the next 100 years or so. taks

it is never good to hear the mention of sex and the japanese in the same paragraph. *shudders* taks

um, GM's income statement indicates a net profit of $900M on $40B in the Q ending Jun 07??? either way, GM has $200B in sales in a year... apples and oranges. atari (aka infogrames) has loss numbers that exceed their gross income - $12M loss on $10M income for the Q ending Jun 07. doomed is an understatement. taks

militarily, of course. taks

i wouldn't mind seeing something that was connected, but the shard-bearer was not the primary character (i.e. you play someone that is dealing with the fallout or whatever, of all the events in the first 2). perhaps a mid-level campaign. taks