metadigital

Dopio espresso whilst I study.

Back off-topic, Income Tax was "temporarily" levied on the British population to prepare for the Napoleonic wars, in 1798, by Pitt the Younger to help bail out the government's debt. linkie!

Sit in the corner and suck on your lollipop. There's a good boy. Don't let the nasty complicated science hurt you. I thought you'd retreat once I took the semantic argument from under you. I'll reply in detail shortly. Nice side-step on my counter proposal. I'll conclude that you concede that point.

Shocking.

I haven't played NWN1 in ages and only played the Paladin Trilogy as a player made module (well I only got through half of Midnight before a problem warranted a reformat), but do you have to roll back patches to play these modules (I have 1.68 and they need 1.62)? I'm pretty sure those are minimum requirements (I haven't been to the vault for a few years); part of the fun of patch management is ensuring that existing reliant software still works ... backward compatibility, as it were. The only area that could possibly be a problem is if the author had manually patched the module to customise some code from NwN that has subsequently been modernised by Atari. Which is a vanishingly small probability.

It is an ex-virus.

Here is the issue: there is no reason to assert that, because P is true therefore Q follows. It is stated that this is a fact, without any support. Why does Q follow P? Dragons exist because people play DnD? Penguins fly because a Gold atom has 79 protons in its nucleus? If Q was a consequent of P then we would know so, because we would observe it somewhere. Under such a circumstance, modus ponens is certainly logical, valid and correct. Just invoking MP on an arbitrary collection of assertions is fruitless and illogical. I'll assume you didn't follow the links I provided in my last reply, due perhaps to the new forum formatting. Fallacies of Definition As for splitting hairs about whether it is informal or formal, I draw your attention to the wikipedia again: Formal Fallacy Informal Fallacy There is no empirical a posteriori ratification for the statement "Intercessory prayers > Purgatory". It is affirming the consequent: P: Purgatory exists for those whose sins aren't so bad as to be sent straight to Hell [completely suppositious, and supposititious to boot] Q: people pray to ease the suffering of those in Purgatory [observable fact] affirming the consequent My highlights.

I know you will all be upset to know that I have had a cold this past tenday, too.

Actually I agree; HK-47 was arguably the most well-grounded character, certainly better than most evil characters in almost any game you can name. He wasn't mad and he wasn't silly, he was just using a Nietzschean

Not to mention that tertiary degrees cost significant funds, and most students graduate with a

Verily that is true. But that doesn't discount the mechanic ... in fact it could be used to help make the life of the PC more relevant, more special because it is limited ... can you imagine fighters losing strength and dexterity with age, and would end up as a private militia (if they are unlucky), or a leader of same (if a bit luckier). Magic Users end up as tutors, and old clerics just end up dribbling in the corner ... er, helping out in the poorer parts of town, or becoming an episcopal leader (if their religion has such). I'm suggesting that people would play these roles (though they could easily do so: not everyone wants to play an

It's not a bad business model.

But you can sneak around to both sides ... like Clint Eastwood's character in A Fistful of Dollars!

Burnt toast?

Arts degree graduates now actually have a lower mean salary than people who have no tertiary qualification, here in the UK.

Ah, but it IS a major part of DnD ... one of the major controls on level nine spells is that they age you ... a Wish spell ages you about 20 years, IIRC.

Sorry taks, just had to do it.

Fallacies of definition

The Dictionary Switcher extension.

Well, I could just make the snide comment about the chieftain on the last planet. *makes snide comment about the chieftain on the last planet*

Or, to state it another way, mumbling isn't threatening.

Are you still using XP? I've heard the Vista drivers are far from usable ... purple terrain in Oblivion for example. If it isn't overheating, and the GPU is performing as expected in other games, then it must be the drivers.

I wasn't "gone to another tangent", I was giving further evidence of faulty logic. I answered your query against my comment by saying that it was both faulty premise AND faulty logic. You may think that circular logic is not a fallacy, but it is. It doesn't "prove" anything, except that which was assumed to be correct in the first place. (This cannot avoid confirmation bias.) In other words, it's superfluous to the process: you might as well use "proof" as a synonym for "assumption", for all the service it provides in this definition. You are polluting the meaning of "proof". This is why scientific method (see also logical positivism) is all about DISPROVING a hypothesis ... failure to be able to disprove that a force acts on two objects proportional to their masses and inversely as the square of their distance apart means that we accept that this is true (and call it something nifty, like gravity); the fact that we cannot disprove it no matter how many times we try, with bodies of all sizes, anywhere, means that it stands up to scientific rigour. To illustrate, at enormously large scales, there is a small fraction of a percent that isn't explained by Newton's law ... this has been corrected by implementing Quantum Gravity, which can explain satisfactorily the tiny imprecision at large scales (super massive black holes with singularities the size of the diameter of the solar system, for example, and their warping effect on space-time). Hence, science does not defend Newton just because he was a great thinker. Neither does his idea get special protection, just because of precedence, or because we are comfortable with the notion. That's the point of science: it seeks truth, not comfort. Your neat little deductions are proceeding fallaciously. Why does Q imply P? That is an assumption. You are defining that Q follows P. There isn't even any observable data! You are just re-stating assumptions in a different order. P = Dragons exist Q = People play DnD 1) P > Q 2) Q ∴P See? It's pointless. And definitely not logical. I didn't think it was worth refuting a posteriori arguments, typified by Thomas Aquinas (The Unmoved Mover, The Uncaused Cause, The Cosmological Argument: all of which rely on the idea of infinite regress, and use God to terminate it, assuming that God is immune to it, by definition, then further assuming that this terminator has other properties like omniscience and omnipotence ... those paradoxes notwithstanding, usually manifested with arguments about free will and the problem of evil); nor a priori arguments (i.e. not requiring any real-world data) typified by St Anselm's Ontological Argument, which arbitrarily decides that existence is "more perfect" than not existing, then uses this assumption to prove that God must exist, because s/he is the most perfect thing. Faulty premises AND faulty logic.

Good, because I don't want to have to buy a new ear horn.

What I found fascinating is that, because of the wobble in the Earth's axis of rotation (called precession), which has an 22,000 year circular cycle, the seasons move about the calendar, so that Winter would be six months away from where it is now in about 11,000 years' time. In other words, back in classical Greek times, the seasons were about a month or so away from where they are now.