taks

dang, it keeps locking up on the second game. taks

oh.my.garage. how, how... how sick, how perverted, how evil, how... deviant! <proceeds to squash sheeple> taks

hehe, strapon. taks

me. well, as of this coming tuesday. taks

same for me, theslug, my ninjaness is equal to yours! You scored 8 Honor, 6 Justice, 3 Adventure, and 6 Individuality! many of the questions were just too strange to mean anything, and some had multiple answers that actually meant the same thing. the one, when you're throwing a party, I WOULD BE THE DRUNK GUY! no way for me to appropriately answer that as my wife would have to take care of any other drunk guy, including me (at least, the last time i threw a party it was that way). taks

true. D&D was just soooo incomplete, but that's OK in a tabletop pnp implementation since house rules are easy to put into play on the fly. in fact, many, if not all, of the updates in subsequent rule sets were indeed house rules that the writers used in their own campaigns. i suppose a crpg is nothing more than "D&D with the developers' house rules used to clean up the mess." WotC would have to come out with a crpg variety of D&D/d20 if we really wanted a less clunky implementation. taks

yeah, the "virgin" thing seems to be implied in context in many of its other references (though never really explicitly stated from what i gather). also, using the term "young maiden" or even "young girl" at that time often implied virgin anyway since pre-marital sex wasn't nearly as common then as now. anything that was written several thousand years ago, in a language that otherwise no longer exists, with translations, retranslations, committee rewrites (new testament) and what have you, is bound to have tons of inaccuracies and inconsistencies in it. taks

there's also question as to whether the "parting of the red sea" should actually have been translated as "the parting of the reed sea," which brings up questions of that account. taks

AD&D is still my fav. i never noticed much difference with 2nd edition, but by the time it came out, i wasn't playing much other than crpgs anyway. 3E has its pros and cons for me... i second the BG3 hope, btw. unfortunately, i'd want it to be a slicker version of the BG2 interface, 3/3.5E rules would be fine, but i just love the top-down aspect and limited view those games offered. somebody mentioned a variant of the toee engine would be cool, and i'd go for that, too, particularly if they could improve the TB combat a bit (toee was ok in this respect, but there were plenty of awkwardnesses that i hated). taks

NWN2 came out last December right? It is still selling for top dollar ($40-$50) in the US so it must be doing well. really? no discounts yet? wow, i'm impressed. well, i know that my otherwise non-gaming buddy really digs it. heck, he actually enjoyed NWN OC of all things (though he wisely preferred HoTU over the OC and SoU). taks

unfortunately, democratic leadership has taken an approach that appeals really only to the far left. their nanny-statism is too much for me. in practice, republicans do the same when in control, so it really doesn't matter in the end. what we need is one party in control of congress, and another in control of the presidency. personally, i'd prefer a libertarian of sorts, but they're almost the joker of the candidate deck when it's all said and done. taks

i don't disagree. i was only pointing out that china, given the current leadership, will eventually reach a limit to their growth. they may reach us in terms of economic strength in the mean time (though not in per capita given their huge population), and maybe even military strength, but the democracies of the world will likely continue to grow, again outstripping china in short order. i.e., economic reforms are necessary, but not sufficient. taks

doesn't matter. given such a large universe, this scenario is actually likely to happen at least _somewhere_ (as we can see, it did), and the results are thus the conditions for life. for all we know, this has happened in many other galaxies, triggering the same conditions for life there as well. i.e., trying to extrapolate a small probability for a single event, based on a very narrow view of the entirety of the universe, to the entirety of the universe over the length it has existed is a fruitless effort. this is sort of like a random noise experiment. given a noise source with a mean voltage of 0 V, say a 10 V threshold has a probability of occurring once per trillion seconds. in 13 B years (the age of the universe give or take), a trillion seconds elapses 390000 times. the likelihood that at least one 10 V crossing has occurred is nearly 100% (i'd have to get out a book to tell you exactly, it's not as straightforward as it seems), even though the original occurrence only had a probability of 0.0000000001%. taks

i'll do my part. it's almost worth keeping just to see GD keep coming back. it's like "watch this box (by yourself) and don't press the big red button, it's bad. i'll be back in an hour." the big red button will get pressed 50 times before you return. taks

that's the final part of communism that i was referring to. if they don't dump the totalitarian gov't, i doubt their growth will continue at this pace. a free exchange of ideas is required to fully support free market economics, and they do not have that. they can't even publish news articles about tianamen square. i suppose you mean "dependent on oil?" either way, they both have some issues they cannot overcome with their heavy handed governments. i'm guessing we'll see civil war in both sometime in the future. as the middle class in china grows, it will want more freedom. russia's just, well, a mess. i feel sorry for them. they got their long awaited freedom only to have improper management by the government. they didn't know how to deal with it and things spun out of control. corruption ruled. taks

If we used your logic gravity would also be called into question, as there is at least as much -if not more- evidence for evolution. not necessarily. gravity is considered law simply because it is observed and always happens. this is one of the few cases where something can actually be proved. now, the mechanism which drives gravity is still unknown, and may never be. this was one of einstein's hopes: to pull together gravity with relativity (part of the grand unification scheme, and he hated the quark view of the world, btw). that said, i think people are getting even more wrapped around the "theory" axle that i did (during my pedantist rants earlier). theory is pretty solid, and, probably as close to "fact" as you can get without actually being voted fact (or law). if something becomes a theory, that means it has been tested to death, and few, if any, cracks in the underlying hypothesis can be found. in other words, it's not just "explanation with backing facts," it's "hypothesis with an overwhelming body of evidence, observed, measured, and tested, to support it." big difference between those two statements. i should add, creationism is an hypothesis. it can never progress beyond that as all of its assumptions are untestable. it could very well lie at the beginning of all of evolution (as has been discussed), but we cannot observe, nor test that part of it. with the exception of the very beginning of the evolution process, nearly all of it can be observed or tested. taks

i was gonna mention them thar branes. now am i leaving for no raisin! taks

i keep hearing that. i haven't been following, so i'm not up on the issues. taks

FSM. that said, my headache is reaching a pinnacle of sorts. it may be the end of the work day for me. taks

agreed. i just hope it ain't mccain. he has that molester look about him. taks

sure, and that position requires just as much faith as an assumption that some random set of events "kicked off" the universe and thus its inhabitants. in the former, god must have existed _prior_ to the existence of the universe, so what created him? the latter requires an acceptance that _something_ existed prior to the universe, otherwise, how did it know to start? taks

yeah. i get into the BB game (as an observer) once every couple of years. it moves too slowly to keep up with on a daily basis so i simply check back in after a time and get caught up. most of the disgusting details are beyond my capabilities anyway. taks

ok, i'll bite. i'll also condense the text a bit to make it easier to read.... actually, if we go with sand's statistical concept, i'd be surprised if anyone WAS the same. all of the above are fictional concepts of man's own creation. feelings are nothing more than chemical responses that have evolved to serve some purpose, particularly: propagation of the species. keep in mind, too, that we often visualize random as "not repeatable" and even, "unlikely to occur more than once." when put into the context of how minuscule our existence is compared to the vastness of everything else, such "random coincidences" seem so improbable, to the point of impossibility, that we cannot fathom how they can be true without some "other" explanation, namely, god. however, taking a broader view, the universe is soooooo large, nearly infinite in all respects (particularly at the atomic level), that just about anything will occur. some even propose that there are an infinite number of universes, each with its own unique configuration. almost an argumentum ad ignorantium (no, i'm not calling you ignorant). i.e., "i can think of no other way, therefore this must be true!". or perhaps, what is actually true is something you have not considered (or even, something none of us can ever understand). knowing the box from within the box is difficult indeed. taks

yeah, perhaps. that'll change again i'm sure. taks

your problem lies in the supposition that "statistically improbable" has meaning in this context. taks