Ginger_Warrior

360 (Beta 1.6.6): For those who don't already know, the bug which makes clay rarer than diamonds will possibly be fixed in a bug update in the net few weeks. Thank heavens, because making everything out of wood and stones is getting pretty boring. The next proper update will be Beta 1.7.3 (pistons, shears, stackable fences, despawning squid). Likely for July, which means the Xbox edition, effectively in Beta, will be even further behind the PC version than it was on release, despite the aim being to bring the Xbox edition eventually in-line with the PC version. I eventually decided where to place a portal yesterday and entered the Nether. I placed the portal in the centre of the map so, obviously, it made the Nether's portal nearer to the centre as well. The ghast that was attacking me at the centre could also attack me from the bedrock edges (coded in, because of the world size limit), it's that small. I'm also not sure why the leaderboard feature has a column for pumpkins, baring in mind pumpkin farming is literally impossible at the moment apart from what you happen to find lying on the surface to start with. You can really gauge how empty this version is right now by watching the Yogscast Xbox Let's Play. A lot of the time they're deliberately dragging it out to fill a fifteen minute episode.

Will the conditions you're living in prevent you from gaining the most out of this internship, and if so, can your living conditions be improved at short notice so that you can gain the most? I think the answer to that question should probably decide whether you stay or not. Clearly, it's not helpful to be living next to alcoholics and drug addicts if you're there to work, gain lots of experience and develop your skills.

Furthermore, can you provide an example where a hijab is incapable of fulfilling whatever religious significance only a full-veiled niqab or burqa can accomplish? It is true that the Qu'ran talks of purdah, and that some women interpret and choose to follow this as meaning they should cover their faces completely, not just partially, but it is also true that mainstream, moderate Islam, as any other religion, places a large emphasis on its followers adapting to the society they live in so as to promote cohesion between themselves and other social groups. The vast, vast majority of Muslim girls I grew up with (and compared to most Britons, coming from Preston, I grew up with a lot of them) had no real complaint about wearing a hijab since 'masks' of any description were banned on school premises, be they religious, political or otherwise. Of course, that could be because Muslims in my generation are likely to be more accustomed to British traditions than previous generations. In Western democracies, we're quite clear on the fact that what happens behind closed doors is, largely, of no business to the state, and if female Muslims (or females from any religious denomination for that matter) want to cover their faces in private areas, no one has any right to stop them. When you're in a public area, however, we have a set of unwritten rules that we encourage everyone, regardless of religion or lack thereof, to generally comply with. Showing your face to people you're interacting with is one of those rules, because doing otherwise means we can't communicate with each other as well as we could and it's therefore seen as showing a lack of respect to the other person.

There appears to be no option for, "Realise there's at least a good few million other girls around your age in this country to go for, some of which may not ignore you in the first place."

Jack Straw is an Anglican, and he also made negative comments about women who came to his MP's office wearing a full-face veil (the niqab). I doubt you can pin that on irreligiousness. French culture has always emphasised the importance of putting the French part of a person's individual identity before all else, including religion, and in France, the vast majority of people consider it rude to talk to someone who isn't showing you their face, as many people do in Anglophone countries as well. Therefore, the consensus was that full-face veils used for non-vital reasons weren't appropriate. The fact those veils had religious significance was coincidence, but if you look at it from the inverse perspective, can you really justify reversing that judgement because it's a piece of religious clothing. Why is it something that would otherwise be banned anyway, not be banned because it's "religious"? How do you define religion from any other set of values under the same circumstances?

Don't most people complain on FB these days? Usually on profiles which have the would-be SO added as a friend...

I think everyone has their own concepts of death and beliefs about what happens after death. Naturally this means different people adopt different coping strategies as a response to death. Some strategies are better than others, while a select few are destructive and they don't help the grieving person to move on. If I was to take a broad-spectrum view on people who I know have grieved, I'd say the key turning moment is accepting that death, at least in this lifetime, is a one way process, and final. They won't see their loved one again, so it doesn't help to fantasise otherwise. Once they realised that, they were 'over the hump' in terms of the grieving process. When my mother died when I was aged 9, my dad sent us to school the next day as usual. When my grandparents both died within a year of each other, I went to college the next day as usual. I know they wouldn't have wanted me to stop on their behalf, so I didn't, and got on with my own life. Nowadays when I'm work and one of our clients dies (I work as a carer), I'm upset of course, however I feel more sorry for their family, and I remind myself that there's still a good few dozen more people I need to look out for.

So my manager asked me to take a picture of her to put on the staff board at the main entrance at work. So I did, printed it off. She complained her chest area looked too big, so could I crop it. My face:

I'm not that fussed about timing, but making someone wait three hours for you when you'd already arranged plans to meet them strikes me as being plain rude. Dem girlfriends...

I have no business here, except to leave this: [hide=][/hide] Ahh... perspective.

No. But then our education system teaches far more about the Battle of Britain and gas chambers than it does about Roosevelt and the conversion of US foreign policy to interventionism, therefore the half-truth that "We beat the Germans" still continues to perpetuate with an almost racist glee in the general public, so what did you honestly expect? It's like the jubilee and the wedding last year; you'll find no shortage of people in the coming months as we approach the Olympics who wouldn't normally purposefully go around trying to pronounce their British-ness suddenly wearing Union Jack waistcoats while singing all the full verses of God Save The Queen (including the bit where they kill Scottish people). Am I British? Yes. Am I proud to be British? Yes, although it's not like I had a choice in the matter, I still have a high respect for my society's shared commitments to egalitarianism, democracy and free expression. Do I feel a need to express my nationalist pride by hating Germans at every available opportunity, or supporting a football team just because they happen to play at a ground some 300 miles from where I live which I've never visited before, or even ever cared about visiting? Oh, and by the way, a club whose captain is due to stand trial for racially abusing another player? Don't be ridiculous. I'm secure enough about my national identity that I can support a German team because, shock, they play better football. </rant> Last night I supported the team that dominated the game. Just as I did in the semi-final Chelsea played in. And was thoroughly disappointed on both occasions to see Sam Allerdyce football taken to its uber-extreme, "beat" far better opposition. Sixth in the Premier League, "Champions of Europe". I found it silly when Liverpool won the Champions League finishing fifth that season, and I find this even more baffling. Not that it would have been much better had Bayern won instead, I'll admit, what we all really wanted was an El Classico final because they are, indisputably in my opinion, the best two club teams on the planet.

You don't really give any reasons for why people should have classes on how to cook in school other than because you think they should. It's not like people are dying because they didn't know how to cook a pizza, if people really needed to learn they could do that pretty easily. When you look at how the causes of deaths have changed over the past half century or so and how that shift is so complexly linked to changes in our lifestyle, most of which have been for the worse from a healthcare point of view, I beg to differ that people aren't dying because they don't know how to cook properly. They aren't dying of starvation, I'll give you that, but they are dying from other things associated with poor diet. We teach people how to perform trigonometry without needing a reference book to remind them how, but we fail to teach people basic skills in cooking, housekeeping or emergency resilience in general.

Yeah, that's what I meant by 'take over conventional gameplay'. One extreme is to say, "No microtransactions at all". I was highlighting the other extreme of that spectrum in my post. What happens between the two is much more of a balancing act on Jagex's part, exactly as you point out.

Considering how much of the game has been stripped down from the current PC version to the Xbox 360 version (which is effectively 1.6.6 Beta in PC money), the map is just about big enough to accommodate what's actually left in the game, although being able to walk from one side of the "world" to another in twelve MineCraft hours is a bit of a joke. The idea is that they will, in time, update the 360 edition to be in-date with the PC version so maybe they'll increase the map size in time. AFAIK they haven't definitely said, "1000x1000 blocks, end of discussion".

Is the awkward silence as awkward for him as it is for you? Some people just like to have a break from talking, especially when they're watching a film. (I actually hate people who try talking to me when I'm watching something...)

When I was at university, my housemate honestly asked me how to boil pasta! I managed to explain how without smirking once. Thing is, I did receive 'Food technology' lessons for three years during high school (it was part of the mandatory curriculum). All we ever cooked was shortbread and fairy cakes. It's the teachers that need sacking or else otherwise retraining.

And when you're running tight on time, you can't afford to try to cook a meal, screw up, make something inedible and waste another 30 minutes after that heating up a processed oven meal.

Which is why I've never believed RuneScape will allow microtransactions to take over conventional gameplay. If they allowed somebody with a huge wad of cash to come along and buy in ten minutes what others have toiled hours and hours for, they don't really again anything from it money-wise. The former may get the instant gratification from having 'earned' the item, but chances are they won't have been sucked into the game's various addictive mechanisms, because they haven't had to work for it (at least not through the game any way) and so won't continue their membership for much longer. Compare that to someone who's decided to work and work and work for their fancy items and high leveled stats, and has progressively become more and more conditioned to the game's monotonous grinding (lever pressing). They'll be paying that subscription fee for a long time to come, quite often years, perhaps providing more over the long term than the other guy gave in one transaction. It'd be like giving the hamster a lever to prevent any future need to press any more levers. The researcher would gain nothing, and lose everything because the hamster is no longer doing what it's been manipulated to do. Jagex would gain nothing either, and lose its hold over the players it has also manipulated into an exaggerated sense of accomplishment. Think of a dishwasher. In my experience, stuff that gets cleaned with a dishwasher is no cleaner than stuff that gets cleaned the old fashioned way, but how many people with dishwashers continue to clean their plates with elbow grease and washing up liquid, when they know they could take the lazy option which doesn't involve monotonously placing a dish into a basin, scrubbing it and putting it on a drying rack? Jagex know full well that if they gave players an option which meant they no longer needed to grind, players would jump on it and not look back, but Jagex need players to pay their subscription fees, so providing said option is not in their own interests.

On that note, doctors who write death certificates. Takes an hour long, they get £75 for it or something stupid, even the NHS ones. I made the wrong move leaving med school if I wanted the easy life...

Microtransactions are a separate issue, likely decided by different sub-teams within the development team itself, so let's not confuse matters. re: Combat changes, specifically this issue of reward output vs skill/attention input. How can you justify a system where person x receives exactly the same reward for doing a task as person y, when x demonstrated his personal skillset and knowledge of the game meant that he completed the task more successfully than y? That's nothing to do with being more like WoW. That's the most basic, fundamental principle of any game. The person best at playing it, wins more than everyone else.

A game where the best skilled players are most successful... Holy [bleep], crazy idea.

The Red Sox have always tried to buy players at good value for their worth. It was the wasteful spending, in addition to his perceived mismanagement of the Suarez incident, which let Dalglish down in the eyes of Henry. They won't allow that mistake to happen again, and there won't be a very large pot of money to buy new players with for whoever takes over, be it Rafa, Martinez, or the gaffa of my local seven-a-side.

The thing that amuses me, as a pedestrian, is why you should drive safely because there's a baby in the car ahead. A major accident would cause serious injury, potentially death, to a person of any age and any level of disability (or lack thereof). Surely, you should be driving safely any way, even if the car ahead is being driven by a single, perfectly healthy male in his early twenties.

Or through the eyes of an advertiser. We've just spent 3 days talking about it, and very few of us actually saw it on television. Seems like pretty successful advertising to me. ;-) I'm not sure how successful an advert can be considered if it's advertised to people who've already bought the product. The acid test is how successful it's been with people who haven't heard of it before. Also, I am 100% in with that camp that says the CGI trailer represents nothing of what RuneScape is actually about. In advertising, themes and messages are essential. The theme I would pick up from that trailer with no prior knowledge is what I would normally associate with a single-player adventure game, not a MMORPG. The message appears jumbled and incoherent. The TV advert for Halo: Reach for example depicted Noble team in action, with a "plain" character (you) using a jetpack--a new addition to the Halo franchise with Reach--to take down an airship. It features the main plot, and the new additions into the game. I'm not sure what message this trailer was meant to convey, but it certainly doesn't give any such insight into the reality of playing the game, or why it's so popular.

I personally don't believe there is any tangible argument for the existence of a god or any 'master plan'. I'll concede that there's no argument to say the opposite either, but logically the burden of proof should be for the existence of something, not the absence of it. If you choose to believe in gods/God/Allah/whatever, more power to you. Your choice, I genuinely hope it goes well for you and it makes you happier or at least more contented.