metadigital

Listening to the developers' notes on the dialogue track of Half-Life 2: Episode 1, the Source engine has already been updated (something about shinier textures for Alyx as she manu

<{POST_SNAPBACK}> clickie!

Being alanschu is a bit easier, you may want to try that <{POST_SNAPBACK}> That must be what I'm doing wrong! Reminds me of the dyslexic agnostic insomniac ... lying awake all night wondering if there really is a dog ...

Well, I can't argue predestination is wrong anymore than you can argue coincidence can't be the explanation for all those events. I take it you are assuming a Light Side Exile. If the Exile is able to control the force, then the Exile is a (demi-)God, surely? If nothing else, if the Force has a will, then it now has multiple personalities! Competing goals (the Exile never claimed nor appeared to be able to understand the the Force's will) only mean trouble, too ... unless the Force is somehow controlling the Exile, which seems to be counter-intuitive the theory, or somehow able to predict the Exile's behaviour. Competing goals means trouble (too many Jedi cooks spoil the Force broth), and (the road to hell is paved with good intentions) ultimately a serious conflict ... wouldn't the Exile end up as another Nihilus, with the universe (and the Force) fighting to remove the aberration? What if they didn't make mistakes ... what if they were just in a dilemma, where there isn't a wrong choice, just consequences ...

Hitachi have just announced the 1TB drive: Deskstar 7K1000 (3

Who cares about the weak and ignorant? (Rhetorical, of course.)

I have a lot of trouble being alanshu.

It's a test to see if you are intelligent enough to play the game. Seriously, you should check out their forum for specific help, if we can't help with general issues. (You are the first person to say they can't run the game.)

Actually Jungists might use this concept to help diagnose and treat psychological maladies, but (technically) it is more metaphysics than analytical psychology. Jung didn't restrict himself to labelled areas, he was more interested in seeking ultiamte universal truth(s). Technically the collective unconscious isn't part of the human mind either; human minds are part of it. Excellent, then, otherwise Jung would have been plagiarizing Hinduism. So, what's the point of being a Hindu atheist, then? Why not just use Occam's Razor and be an atheist?

The Dark Side is evil by definition. You are correct that the KotOR (and all of SW?) alignment system is rudimentary and arguably poorly thought out. I could see a powerful Good deity using evil-serving people to achieve some ultimate good objective; for example, in On Free Choice of the Will, Augustine argued that Epicurus had ignored the potential benefits of suffering in the world. What you are trying to speculate about is whether the end justifies the means. Which is one of the oldest (if not the oldest) questions in philosophy. Take a monotheistic (omnipotent, omniscient omnipresent, and omnibenevolent) god, for example, and the problem of evil. How can such a god, it is argued, allow suffering (i.e. specifically eternal damnation)? The only satisfactory answer usually lies in semantics: god(s) are beyond the definition of good and evil precisely the same way that a lion isn't evil for killing antelope to feed her pride or a female preying mantis kills her mate after mating with him. This is an inherent weakness in RPG alignment systems: it would be more realistic if a given alignment restricted the actions of a character, rather than just reflected the latest action ... people rarely (ever?) spontaneously change their alignment without some major turning point in their life. Additionally, the fact that it is possible to descry a character's alignment and that alignments have corporeal manifestations (planes of evil and good and even neutrality) removes all relativity from the alignments; viz. they are no longer able to be described in "relative" terms: Good is good, evil is evil. This is a big can of worms.

Listen, you do your Kobayashi Maru and I'll circumvent it with my own initiative, and get a special commendation

Not really. Brahman cant really be described as anything that is a part of the human mind/psyche. You can say that the mind somehow taps into some force that enables it to be conscious. This force is Brahman/the soul, of which consciousness is a property. Only through overcoming the human ego and gaining knowledge of the true nature of reality can the mind be enlightened and the consciousness liberated. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> As I said, that is identical to Jung's collective unconscious. Jung postulated that the Psych, or consciousness (the bit of the mind that results from the focus of the attention) is only able to communicate with the collective unconscious through the personal unconscious (what Freud thought was only good for repressing thoughts about sexual gratification ). The collective unconscious held such concepts as race memories and what he initially termed acausal parallelism (he later called this synchronicity), to describe events that are connected by meaning rather than cause-and-effect.

I'd recommend paratroopers to secure the end-points, but make sure you don't overextend your forces (a conservative two bridges, rather than all-out for three); be careful, too, because the low-lying Dutch countryside will play havoc with the radio communications of the day ... "

Someone screwed the pooch there.

That isn't very reassuring.

I only have laptops at the moment, so my cables are all printed circuits on IC boards. :D The cables that snake out of my docking station are all tidied away, though, so that I can keep everything clean. I remember way back when I first started work, whilst still at school, as a PC repairman and I confounded a user by diagnosing his keyboard problem as a voltage jump across the PC's cables (including the keyboard cable); I simply separated them and the problem was solved. :D (Stupid unshielded cables.) When I buy my next PC, which will be a gaming rig, I will pay particular attention to air flow, and that means keeping the cables tidy (though one must be mindful of coiling any unshielded cables ... ).

As the train is empty of people, I would derail it.

That happens IRL, though (to me at least), when I pick up a conversation much later as it occurs to me that I don't know the conclusion to it (and so I can't store and appropriately categorize the facts elicited from it when my mind does its admin functions), because I left it dangling due to a tangential discussion sparked by a tiny detail ... :D

That's because Republicans (being one of only two parties that can take office) just happened to be the party that fundamentalist religious groups sided with; they couldn't very well side with the libertarian Democrats, even though

I don't think anyone here morally disagrees with the 100 (red. Iraqies) defending themselves.. although many would probably disagree from either a political/religious or pragmatic viewpoint.. also a tougher moral dilemma usually involves the ones you ask and a tangible number of other people to sacrifised .. like this one: let's say you were in a control room in a trainstation - you suddenly see a train approaching a Y split - on one of the tracks 5 men are reparing a signal (all wearing headphones which means they can't her the train) and on the other track a single man is inspecting the rails (also wearing headphones).. none of them are noticing, or will notice, the approaching train.. the train will hit the five men unless you redirect it.. which only requires you to psuh a single button.. what will you do? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Stop the train, of course. ^_^

I think of all the major religions Buddhism makes the most sense. I'm secular humanist myself. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I was going to correct you and say that Buddhism is a philosophy, but it seems that it is more correctly termed a "non-theistic religion (which seems to be self-contradictory, but then again it is metaphysics ). Jung did some non-insignificant study of religion, and he came to the conclusion that Eastern religions were different to Western ones as introverts are different to extroverts in personal psychology; namely that the path to enlightenment in the Orient was through a deeper understanding of the self, whereas the Occident sought to find wisdom through a synthesis of the efforts of others: he reasoned that we need both approaches to facilitate individuation (which was what he believed should be the ultimate goal of a person, usually manifesting at Lebenswende, more commonly referred to as a mid-life crisis: "is this all there is to life?", etc; i.e. right back to metaphysics). Thought this was relevant, too: Major world religions Advaitic(monist) atheist Hindus do accept the idea of a universal principle called Brahman. Consciousness is said to be a property of this universal principle. The physical universe is relatively real, superimposed on Brahman, the absolute reality. The soul is regarded as the consciousness within us. However the individuality of the soul is illusory. Actually all souls are non different from Brahman. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> That means Brahman is actually identical to Jung's collective unconscious.

Allegedly ... "