metadigital

Not having been briefed on GL's personal musings on the subject, I would infer his stance would be the ol' duck anaolgy, namely: "If it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck, smells like a duck, feels like a duck and tastes like a duck, then it can be copulated like a duck." "

I'm just urging you and everybody else to stick to the subject - Jedi and love.....not a philosophical argument on the issue does love even exists or not...... I apologize if I may seem bossy, but I just don't want this thread closed, that's all.....no hard feelings <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Okey dokey. Well, back to the Force Sensitives: is it an issue for Sith to have loving relationships (as much as this is an oxymoron)? I think this poses an equally baffling conundrum, namely do Sith have mates? I.e. loving relationships; Passion over peace? Or is it more akin to the mating rituals of crocodiles or Preying Mantises? Where the biological imperative is served selfishly, without regard to personal sensibilities: males behave like Ghengis Khan and females like Cleopatra.

KotOR 2 would have been better if OE just took the existing engine and added more planets and threaded them together with a robust narrative with plenty of off-the-beaten-track dalliances for further game play. (To be fair, OE tried this with the Influence system, but I feel the good idea never translated into its full potential and seemed less effective than the side-quest mechanism in the first game.) I didn't think the extra bangs-and-whistles added to the sequel's engine were worth the effort; certainly if I didn't know they existed I wouldn't have missed them. I did like the narrative of the sequel. I liked the shades of grey in the plot. I liked the excellence shown in the scripts where it was not always as clear to decide if a response was lilly-white or pitch-black. However, I didn't think it was completed; there were more holes than just the dangling plots of obvious cliff-hangers that beg the additional sequel question; certainly I would have liked more flesh on the bones of the main story. It was almost like there was a standing order to say as little as possible about the significant and mundane aspects of the narartive; the result was a paucity of minuti

... and we can have a Force Power / weapon like the gravity Gun.

I'm beginning to hate that place... <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Haha, amen to that. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> How can it start there, there's nothing left of that place. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> They can always rebuild it. (The tree in the middle of the conclave seemed more than symbolic, I think it might be an integral part of the Jedi consciousness, so they'd have to incorporate it into the next Jedi conclave. And maybe the tree is ancient and impossible to move. And maybe it is huge, multi-dimensional being, with only a fraction of this dimensional bit visible above the surface of the planet ...) Don't worry, it is patently obvious you never liked her anyway. You make a valid point. There is opportunity to have a grey/black culture amongst/beneath the visible one that people are overtly aware of; in such an environment there is scope for all the moral dilemmas required for stocking a good story. (Don't tell me the bit of Coruscant that Obi-Wan and Anakin chase the assassin through in AotC is a nice middle-class suburb!) The main obstacle that I see is a practical one; the engine has not been robust enough to have more than a dozen NPCs on the screen at once and a market place on the Core worlds would be teeming with lifeforms. That said, I'm sure the Jedi conclave on Coruscant would be self-contained enough to have a section of the narrative located there: it would be similar to the Taris bases.

) The Jedi Neck Pinch ..!

Well, I'm all for it, except that it gets really cold in Russia in Winter, and I kinda like warmer weather. :D But, build it and they will come! We just have to convince the errant rulers of your hypothetical utopia to vacate power in some sort of "velvet revolution" ... nuts, I think it's easier to stop genocide ...

That doesn't account for the sound travelling through the vacuum of space. But I can suspend my disbelief for a little longer by pretending that, if I could hear it, that's what the battle would sound like. (It still bugs me that Hollywood insists on dumbing down to the audience like this: perhaps there are commercial imperatives to provide a suitable canvas for the spanky THX sound systems ...)

Obviously didn't notice my little "pulling your leg" emoticon there, then.

Hmmm, okay penitence is a good thing, but I still don't understand why the person decided that attacking the group of volunteers (about their spelling, of all things) was a valid way to question the status of the mod. I was merely trying to impart some empathy on the poor individual; I may have applied the lesson with a little excess vim. (Anything that threatens the project, even ignorance, should be combated and defeated!) And perhaps I was a little hasty in my pronouncements; time will tell.

I think "we" [read: Global Community] already have the means to...if we could somhow co-operate. There are always going to be countries like North Korea that will happily starve their population and sped money on weapons...until the US decides they are a threat to US Security and forcibly makes democracies out of them. How about you all? Would you support your country going to war against any government that was butchering its own people, or pretend it didn't happen, like everybody did during the Khimer Rouge in Cambodia? (I'm not suggesting the reason behind the war on Iraq was at all noble, merely asking if you'd support going to war to stop local/national genocide). <{POST_SNAPBACK}> It is a tough call. Generally local communities loath interference from any outsiders, and will actively oppose them in spite of the local political situation -- except in rare, extreme cases, when most of them would probably be more involved dealing with the more pressing issue of staying alive, such as Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge dictatorship, from the revolution in 1975, till he fled the Vietnamese in 1979. The thorny issue is who decides when to intervene? When does a government become an unwelcome / unrepresented / indefensible organisation? The UN decides? With the existing Security Council vetoes? China is particularly wary of any interventionist actions (can you say "Tibet", boys and girls?) and specifically blocks all such debate: the only reason they are onboard with the North Korean disarmament talks is because they share a border with these poor people with the nutters still running the asylum. The only security action ever passed before the first Gulf War, to push the Iraq forces out of Kuwait, was the Korean "police action", and that was passed when Moscow had temporarily boycotted the UN. The Balkan crisis of 1999 was not sanctioned by the UN; it was a NATO conflict operating outside UN durisdiction. So there you have the dilemma defined: try sorting out Northern Island or Somalia by wading in with a peace-keeping force, or preventing China from annexing territory it belives to be sovereign without starting WWIII.

Or I could take a crash course in Swedish ... Anyway, gott arbete!

This is for the most part an urban legend. While in many respects the Betamax format can argue a mild quantitative statistical advantage over VHS, the practical effect of that statistical edge on final home NTSC TV viewing was ultimately trivial, while the significance of the greater recording length of the VHS format over Beta proved immediately fundamental to the value of the format. Meanwhile, tape dimensions proved a non-factor. The reasons for the acceptance of the one over the other are in many respects political, but the idea that politics thwarted the inherently superior format which deserved otherwise to succeed doesn't really hold water. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Well, not everyone uses the inferior NTSC standard. PAL, for example, has higher resolution and faster frame rate; just because the difference was negligible to the lowest common denominator doesn't mean it was non-existent. You may also think that analogue vinyl records have no better sound quality than a digital CDs, or vacuum tubes are obsolete in amplifiers but many audiophiles would argue the contrary. It is not an urban legend.

But, I LIKED the combat in Deus Ex. Deus Ex:Invisible War wasn't as good, but the original was kewl, especially how you gained experience and allocated it for particular weapon categories: I like the pistol specialization, so I could use the tranquilizer darts (after all, I'm not a brute) on the innocent grunts and my silencer-equipped pistol with scope to take out the evil mechs. Last time, I went most of the game without high levels of electronics / lockpicking / computer aptitude in order to gain mastery of pistols asap; also added all weapon distance- and accuracy-upgrades to the pistol, so that it had a long range and 101% accuracy. :D I thought the difficulty in aiming long distances was especially well done. (Okay, the "hostile reset" factor of the AI was a little silly, but I can suspend my disbelief by imagining my PC has to run-and-hide-for-a-set-time-before-returning in the time occupied by this game feature.) What didn't you like?

Hooray! I win by default. Now, let's solve world hunger. ...

I take it the dude in the middle doing a muscle pose is Carth, and the orange-suited one is Revan? Whoever is wearing orange looks like they might have filled their pants, though. (I thought the second from the end was Carth, but I decided that he was Jolee, instead.) Malak is cool!

Kaftan isn't German! You should instead say gott arbete. :cool: (Mein Gott!)

I knew a Danel once ... he was from NZ ...

And was she apprehensive in the photo, or did I totally misread your portrayal ?

Is this an imitation thread? Is it art imitating life, or life imitating art? :D

Now its my turn to require clarification: I am sure you are contradicting yourself in the above abstract of your last post. I assume you are saying that most women don't find abortion "causal" nor "easy". I would agree. There are always the sociopaths, but it pays us not to focus on the the extremes. (An estimated 2% of the men didn't feel emotionally bankrupt after the several weeks' non-stop combat commenced from the D-Day landing, for example: nowadays we refer to such people as sociopaths and psychopaths.) My objection to the pro-life campaign is the insistence of these people that their beliefs entitle them to decide how a woman may deal with what is ultimately the most private of all decisions. I still say we should all be compulsorily (reversibly) sterilized pre-puberty, and selectively licenced couples should be allowed to procreate. ...

Not at all, I am all in favour of scientific research. Morals are definitely required to temper the implementation of our discoveries into our societies, but they play no part in scientific research. (I was just playing a little Devil's advocado ) Well, morality is not necessarily religiousity ... maybe your "Chaotic Evil" forum alter ego is reforming ...? Or is it a cunning feint ?

Nope, that's evolution, on the only scale someone in the present day is likely to find evidence for it. That kind of evolution can take place in a few generations. Only people who call it 'micro-evolution' are 'Creation Scientists'. Thier 'research' is mostly taken out of context. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Evolution is more observable to us when we look at creatures with shorter lifespans: bacteria have a life cycle of approximately forty minutes, so they are ideal to study evolutionary behaviour. (MRSA is Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, and has come about from the decimated populations of bacteria that had a natural restitance to the drug -- Methicillin -- and have bred successfully in the environment that is toxic to less restitant strains.) Also the drosophila melanogaster (or fruit fly) is used to study genetic mutation and the consequential evolution. Genetically speaking, if there is a creator than that being is extremely lazy. The genome of a human shares about 90% of its (estimated mostly leftover rubbish) length with a potato. And about 97% with a lizard. The human embryo grows gills and a tail early on, before they disapear, and the legs are longer than the arms for most of the interuterine period, coincidentally () mirroring scientists estimations of evolution. (Don't take my word for it, go and read the Readers Digest Book of Facts: don't forget that the Readers Digest is a right wing religious mouthpiece.) Human evolution can be traced via different techniques: the migration and evolution of languages being one recent analysis that agrees with the established evolutionary theory. If you are interested in evolutionary theory, I read a book -- about fifteen years ago -- that is very educational for this subject called Timescale: An Atlas of the Fourth Dimension which I heartily recommend.