BlueLancer

Oversaturated market, there are so many amazing multi-million design companies in the business you will just become disappointed. I'd kindly recommend checking professional firms like D2P or Red2 (who actually partnered with Microsoft), they have 50+ employees and huge portfolios, it's crazy to compete with them. If you freelance, the competition is also huge. Just putting it bluntly: It's not worth it.

Electricity. Electricity comes, for the most part, from where, again? :roll: Usually from a 110 kV+ power transmission grid, which is fueled by a turbine that feeds on boiled water steam from nuclear fission or the currently most popular (and also most polluting) one, the burning of coal and petroleum. Maybe some people think electricity just "comes out of the wall" :lol: So yes.. You're right in saying that powering our society basically comes down to fire. Gas, water and wind-powered electricity is also becoming popular though, they are quite ecological choices. The only problem is that few nations have the will to spend millions of dollars on wind turbines, etc., when they can just use the old sources and spend no extra.

You can make way more with C/C++/Python programming than $970 canadian per week. My friend makes more per year with a programming job than I've made with any business, without giving an exact figure, it's around $250k american per year (though way less if you don't include the project extras and bonuses) With 21 day working months and 8-10 hour shifts, that's around $900USD per day. By a guy who is merely 3 years post-grad. There are few professions in the world with such good wages and salaries, other than specialist doctors and lawyers. Most people slave away with some $30k annual. Coding takes extreme patience though :P Brain killer... I know basic C++ by interest and earlier study, but couldn't do it for a job like you're probably going to.

Yeah I agree... It doesn't mean you're a boring nerd or have no sense of humor if you don't go along with dumb stuff & laugh at stupid jokes/lame innuendo. There's bad and good jokes, then there's plain out stupid ones, which are usually made by teenagers. For some people it never goes away, they think they're grown up yet still act like 12... But generally speaking from life experience, people often change at about 19-20 years old, most often towards the better. Doesn't apply for every person, but you'll be able to have an actual conversation way easier with a girl/guy in their early 20's or late teens, than the typical 13-16 year old hormone raging kid. So for the time being.. You have no option but to suck it up 8-) :lol: (At least at school, unless you have older friends)

Strict 'political ideology' goes strongly against an objective view of reality, politics, the world in general... There is no single solution to a country's problems, let alone the world's, no matter how much soapbox communists or right-wing capitalists wish to believe so. Every country is individual, has a different culture, history... Every country has it's own key to survival & progress. And not to offend any specific people.. But it's extremely adolescent and immature to absolutely oppose every other view than yours, and despise people who dare to have a differing opinion. The 70's are over, so are hostile propaganda politics & ideology-based politics in the western countries. It's increasingly going towards welfare of the people, tolerance of various opinions & religions, instead of cold war/DDR-age bickering.

It's somewhat relevant, because amount of time logged-in is a major variable when Jagex flags users for suspicious activity. Really, regardless of polyphasic sleep, snorting cocaine or whatever... If you remain logged in for hundreds of hours consecutively gaining XP in a certain skill, it simply alerts Jagex to a possible bot. It's pretty darn easy to compile a list of the top logged-in characters every day/week & visit them, they do log individual player data. If you were to play for such amounts of time and did have an extreme case of insomnia, using drugs to stay awake, etc.. Nothing to worry about. But be prepared they might suddenly teleport your character to a random location, like those fishers doing nothing except moving a few square spaces for 24+hours talking nothing, not picking up, banking or cooking the fish. It's very naïve and ignorant to assume they are all just legit players who muted chat and want to level in peace. You might just as well assume every time an average person in real life gets a million transfered to their bank account, "there's nothing illegal in the background; They probably won the lottery". Thankfully Jagex doesn't think this way and monitors highly abused skills like woodcutting for any big sudden XP gains in short timeframes & investigates players.

I remember reading on the p-mod forum that Jagex has been profiling 'power-trainers' for years, not just in 2007-2008 but way before that. It made the job of banning obvious auto'ers and account sharers easy, because a single person would be logged in for periods barely physically possible by a normal, non-insomniac person. Constantly gaining XP in a single skill, moving in the same 30ft area and being logged in for 24 hours a day for multiple consecutive days/weeks is really counterproductive if you do use an illegal training bot. It will raise so many warning flags it's not even funny. Expect a pretty swift visit from a Jagex staff member. By the way, if the old rules still apply, if you're suspected of macroing & a J-mod teleports you to another location and asks you questions... You get permanently banned on the spot if you fail to respond to a question he asks you. If you're macroing, you take a risk of losing all that work just to gain XP in a cheap way. It's not physically sustainable for months, especially if the gaming periods are constantly 48-96+ hours long with only a few minutes of logouts/logins in between. In those cases it's almost certain a bot controls the account, but they wont ban on pure suspicion of course (unless your click patterns are exactly the same all the time, repeating clicks in exact-pixel areas hundreds of times in a cycle, in which case you do get auto-banned)

Good job, Siobhana 8-)

Yes, it's almost common knowledge by now that obesity is just about the biggest cause of health problems and deaths in western countries.. It's hard to ban fatty foods, but the way they are prepared, the materials used.. Can be healthier. Less buns on hamburgers, more of the meat, lettuce, etc. More potato on the french fries, less soaking in grease, etc... More milk in the milkshake, less of the added sugar and fat.... It's possible to engineer tasty foods without having to load them with carbohydrates/ create unhealthy weight bombs. At least some companies already took the initiative, like Coca Cola with their Zero line of products (which have zero calories per bottle, using artificial sweeteners).

I gotta withdraw that above explanation then. Didn't see the interview, but the way a person talks, dresses, attitude, first impression, can actually tell alot about his (or her) personality & motives even if you haven't known him for long. I assumed people would base him being obnoxious on just a few lines of text.

I also wonder why people miss the point: CR and QoS are pre-"suave" Bond: It shows his life before he became a sophisticated, cynical guy who likes the small luxuries in life and sipping drinks in a hotel room, playing baccarat, eating in restaurants, while occassionally embarking on an assignment. The whole argument that he's "just not Bond" is thus pretty void. He's not supposed to be anything like the Roger Moore or Brosnan type yet.

Heh, maybe I'm emotionally dead. I don't feel any different if talking to a woman compared to a man, or any kind of lust. I sort of treat everyone as if they were a brother, sister, uncle, aunt. Respecting everyone as a person unless they've done something worth losing the basic respect.

If there's something I've learnt in life.. It's that you can't judge anyone's true personality and motives by a few sentences. Not even by knowing someone for a day, week, even a month. Eventually down the path, you'll be damn surprised when you discover facts about a person you thought you knew. For all you know it's just a big joke (which it seems to be) and he really doesn't have any ego issues. Likewise, you read the following sentence in the news headlines: "Man kills another". There can be so much history, reasons, hatred, justifications, guilt that can lead to the action, it's impossible to condemn anyone primitively and dismiss it by "what a horrible man".

Not true. Federal law supersedes state law, so if the state law has a lower minimum wage the federal law takes precedent. The national minimum wage in the US is 5.75$ an hour. In no state can it be lower then that. Straight from the website of the Kansas Department of Labor: http://www.dol.ks.gov/ES/HTML/laws_RES.html Federal law doesn't surpass it, and there have been many attempts to raise the pathetic minimum wage of $2.65: http://www.unionvoice.org/kansas_workbe ... id=1551213 As the article says, if you were to work full time in Kansas at minimum wage, you'd earn $5,000 per year. You can't live on that. Minimum wage employees that would be eligible for the FLSA are schools, government agencies and large companies; For which few poor people have qualifications to work for (should include the Burger Kings and fast food restaurants though)

Off topic really.. Great poses (behind the lens) though :lol: Continue discussion in Gallery.

Unlike pollution, smoking in western countries is steadily decreasing, so that statement really has no substance. In the US it's been dropping since the 1960's... For the first time ever, the total % of smokers in the US has hit under 19% last year: In the 50's and 60's, 40-60% of the adult population were smokers. Pollution currently just keeps going upwards but smoking is more or less disappearing year by year.

Submit various RS screenshots on this sticky: viewtopic.php?f=30&t=760931

Snus It does contain much more nicotine than cigarettes, but other than that... It has no 2nd-hand effects on other users, no apparent health hazards, etc... I don't see why it's really illegal at all.

Snus is way better than cigarettes.. Only problem is: It's illegal in a ton of countries, including all EU countries (Sweden has a special permit to sell and produce it). You can buy snus from any european country under the counter without penalties, but if the seller gets caught they will get hefty fines and a possible short jail term for smuggling.

Don't agree. Minimum wage differs in various states. Here in Oregon, it's 8$. That means you will get arond 1200 each month working 10 hour shifts Mon-Thursday. Average rent for a single room/bath apartment is 500-600$. You can definately survive but you're going nowhere in life. Add to that food costs/groceries, possible electricity/water bills, clothing, public transport to your work, necessities like paper towels/toilet paper/soap... You're barely going to survive on minimum wage. Don't even dream of medical insurance; If you get sick on minimum wage and have no savings, you're screwed. Feeding a family, at least in the US, is literally impossible with a single minimum-wage job. You can't fit 3 or more people into that budget. You'd have to get a second job and work it on weekends just to survive. The second parent would also definitely need to get a full time job. Minimum wage in Kansas is $2.65 per hour by the way: http://www.dol.gov/esa/minwage/america.htm Have fun surviving off that.. It's sickening. In general the median seems to be about $6 per hour which is still a ridiculous wage for a full grown adult.

As mentioned.. It's good for students, temporary workers, but that's it.. It's the "minimum" wage for a reason, you'll want to move away from it as soon as possible. If you want to sustain a family with a house, car and a kid or two... Minimum wage is a joke. You'll end up on the streets... A humane wage in the US for an average middle class person would be around $2,500-$3,500 a month. You'll earn peanuts compared to businessmen and entrepreneurs, but it will guarantee a safe life, access to credit, and a good standard for living. You can survive on less than that, but if you have a family & you're the only one working, you will have financial problems/deal with poverty. To put in perspective, working 10 hour shifts at minimum wage with weekends free is $1100 per month. You can *barely* sustain one person living alone on that in the US, if you rent an apartment, have no car, no credit, probably no internet connection/phone.

Do you have a source with the taxes brought in for the whole US? Because in 1998, the estimated health care costs of smoking were $72.7 billion.[1] If the health care costs exceed the taxes, it's awfully dumb of the government to have smoking be legal. For the whole world, it's clear revenue from cigarette taxes greatly surpasses any healthcare-related costs: http://www.wpro.who.int/media_centre/fa ... 020528.htm For USA, the health issues are far more considerable than the 1998 statistics - in 2001 alone, smoking caused $167 billion dollars in economic losses across all states. The entire revenues aren't listed, but a collection of 20 states according to the NCSL bring in merely 3 billion in tax revenue every year. In USA, it might be actually economically viable to ban smoking... The only problem remains: The tobacco lobby puts politicians in power and finances their campaigns. No politician is stupid enough to want to stop their business and effectively end their own political career as well.

Yep, but republicans are an additional voting block a politician will likely lose if he proposes pro-gay legislation in the US. In most other western countries, there isn't an ideologically identical party to the US Republican party. The problem exists everywhere, just to a greater degree in the US compared to, say, European countries. Take Sweden for example... The political system and the will of the people allow ultimate freedom for anyone, even gays. Heck, even the Church of Sweden approves of gay marriage and will bless gay couples in churches. In Sweden, a politician can support any reasonable issue without losing any significant voter blocks due to the absence of significantly conservative political entities like the Republicans in the USA.

"Should"? Absolutely, from a rational viewpoint. I've also smoked in the past (though only moderately) and think it has zero reason not to be classified as a dangerous substance. "Can"? It will never be illegal in reality, especially in the United States. In New York alone, the cigarette tax brings in $265 million per year. In the US collectively, we're talking about tens of billions of dollars every year. It might be short-sighted to look at short-term profits and ignore all the lost taxes from those smokers who will die... But that's how the government partly finances it's operations. Just as alcohol & it's prohibition showed... Some substances cannot be, and are not financially viable to be banned due to the massive demand & generation of tax money.

This is stunningly true, regardless of polls showing support or disfavor towards things like gay marriage, it's ultimately up to the politician. Let's be realistic... In any country as of today, even in western 'free' democracies, supporting gay rights/marriage makes you lose voters. You lose a big portion of key demographics such as catholics, the elderly, conservatives, and in America, most of the time, republican voters. Gay marriage and abortion are illegal because few politicians dare use their voice to raise concerns about either issue. If they approach either issue, it will brand their entire career and tarnish their image with the party, instead of just being a 'stable' politician sticking with 'safe' issues and legislation. http://uspolitics.about.com/od/gaymarri ... us_N04.htm Even if the majority of eastern states & their populations don't oppose gay marriage, gay marriage or adoption don't have the power of law and remain illegal due to lack of will from politicians.