xyrec

That's the American way! No statement has ever been more accurate....or frightening. A friend of mine got AOL for over 2 years free by calling in at the end of every month and yelling at them about how crappy their product was until they agreed to give him free months so he'd stay.

But going to the doctor costs money, even if you do have insurance so his parents will have to be involved in some way. Even if they just take him and then he talks to the doctor by himself, his parents will want to know why he wanted to see a doctor and if he refuses to tell them it will just make them nosey and suspicious. Anyway, depression usually comes and goes. It doesn't always have to be tied to an external cause. However, if there isn't an external cause(by external cause, I mean something that has happened to make you feel depressed, such as parents getting divorced, girlfriend/boyfriend leaving you, a physical injury that keeps you from doing things you like, etc, etc.) and the depression continues for a long period of time, you definately want to see a doctor. It's not considered normal to just continually feel depressed, gloomy and bleak for no reason and if there is something that a doctor can do to help you, why just settle for feeling like crap all the time instead of getting treatment? Keep in mind that some forms of depression are not just related to mood and are caused by an imbalance in the chemicals in your brain that causes you to feel differently than you should. That is something that you can't just fix. Don't feel ashamed to tell your parents if you really think you need help. After all, you're telling all of us about it and we're just a bunch of dorks on the internet. If you really don't want to tell your parents you could go to another relative that you feel more comfortable talking to.

Question 1 Yes, muscles do break down and in some cases tear and have to regenerate themselves after being used. Also your body rebuilds stronger to help you cope with the increased physical activity. That's how people go from being weak to being able to lift hundreds of pounds when they lift weights for a long enough period of time. Because of the damage to your muscles you have to eat protein and other nutrients or your body won't have anything to rebuild the muscles with. Imagine if you were living in the gulf area and the hurricane knocked big holes in your house and you had to rebuild it but didn't have any plywood, 2x4's, bricks, and mortar. Your house would just slowly break down more and more. Question 2 You really should speak to a professional to get a workout routine put together. What works for one person won't always work for another. If you go to a gym you can usually pay a small fee, like 10 or 15 bucks and one of their personal trainers will examine you and give you a workout routine or if they're a qualified dietician they'll even give you a diet plan. They can customize it to what you want to accomplish, such as bulking up, slimming down, cutting body fat, gaining strength, increasing stamine, etc, etc. They usually take your body's measurements, weight, body fat %, test your resting heart rate and then make you excercise for a bit and take it again to get your heightened heart rate, blood pressure, even flexibility. Then from that they can tell exactly what you need to do and even the weight you should start at and the amounts of reps. Then when you use the routine they give you, as you get stronger you can increase the amount of weight and reps as they instruct without having to go back to them very often. Every now and then you can go back and see how much you've progressed(how much weight you've lost, inches gained or dropped in various areas, lowered blood pressure, better heart rate, etc.). Question 3 Yes, the reason we get 2, 4, or 6 packs is because with less fat the muscles can be seen more easily. It also helps if you work out those muscles so they grow larger but basically everyone has the same muscles(of varying sizes of course) just you can't see them on most people because they're covered by a layer of fat.

Try using "Rayovac Maximum Plus" batteries. They're the high end Rayovac batteries, comparable to duracell ultra yet they're cheaper and from my experience are equal to or better than duracell ultra.

I don't see the arrival of such a show as surprising considering that the type of comedy featured on it is basically how the majority of youth in this country make eachother laugh when they're hanging out. It's just a guy runnig around doing random stuff and acting intentionally stupid. I'd say most people have at one time or another joked around in an totally goof manner with their friends and as far as the misbehaving in public....the rent-a-cops around here have a full time job just chasing kids at the mall who bother shoppers. Most every teen at one time or another has been dared by their friends to go do something really stupid like hit on a hot chick with some incredibly corny punch line to see if she'll knee him in the groin, or maybe going up to some guy and telling him that you're imagining his girlfriend naked just to see if he'll punch you in the face. That's just the state of american youth culture. I think you underestimate the depths of stupidity that television is probing as of late. All of tv is being slowly but surely engulfed by the black hole that is reality tv and hardly any of it is original. They just take an assortment of volatile people and mix them together like nitro glycerin and let us sit and watch for an explosion. Occasionally they add a twist(who am I kidding, it's not much of a twist because they all do it) and throw in some sort of competition for money which is the equivalent of throwing a live rat into a barrel full of ill-tempered starving rattle snakes and then shaking it up for good measure. Oh and they usually include some sort of way for all of them to stab eachother in the back to get the money instead of just making it a good clean competition. They know we all enjoy watching human beings stoop to unbelievable levels out of sheer greed. For crying out loud, one of MTV's biggest shows was the Ozbournes and all it is, is a bunch of people running around cursing at eachother and at the dogs for crapping on the carpet. Occasionally the none stop cursing is interrupted by the kids acting spoiled and bratty or the dad trying to figure out the tv cuz he's a frickin moron. Of course he can't figure out the tv and just resumes the cursing because he can't grasp the controls of a tv...... Then there was the Anna Nicole show....that actually made it into it's second season! SECOND SEASON!?!?!? MTV isn't just going to run shows for the heck of it, if they arn't getting ratings they won't get paid as much for advertisements so they wouldn't run the show without good ratings. But to get good ratings it means people ACTUALLY WATCHED IT! I can understand why people might tune in to watch the show once....who could resist tuning in at least once, just to see what all the fuss is about, especially since it's about a former playboy playmate, model, billionaire's widow who has two D size breast implants crammed in each boob,(I"m sure that inspired at least a few guys to tune in long enough to see how fat she'd gotten) who carries around an urn with her dead 90 year old husband's ashes in them and talks like her brain was liquified by drug use and ran out her ears while her dog humps a teddy bear in the background? I'm sure someone at MTV thought that show was bullet proof but despite the shocking fact that it actually made it to it's second season before it was cancelled tells you what kind of garbage the average tv user is used to viewing. When it comes down to it, some guy going around acting like an idiot to make us laugh isn't really that bad......

I mainly only use a couple names online and all of them I thought up myself, didn't take them from anywhere else. Xyrec, my name on here when I do a google search comes up with profiles from games i've never played and sites i've never visited. And Xyron, worst of all happens to be an office supplies company.

O.O Are you seriously attempting to claim that all religion causes people to be narrow minded, immature, and egotistical? Even considering what the likely definition of religion you're referring to, that is ridiculous. A religion can be any cause, belief, principle of set of principles in which one believes. I think it's pretty safe to say that all people believe in something so if you're right, all of human kind are "narrow minded, immature morons who believe they are right about EVERYTHING." I'm not trying to respond for blazer but I must say....that is perhaps the most self assuming, supercilous, egotistical, imperious satement i've ever seen. How could you possibly know how someone else you've never even met lives their life and whether or not your life has more of a purpose than theirs. Are you trying to start a flame war so you can see this topic locked or what?

The point is that without a head figure to hand down law of some sort, there is no true right or wrong. If there was no universe, only you, and then you created a universe, you would have the express right to control what goes on in that universe and to say what is right and wrong. However if there is no god and we're all just an accident, right and wrong are up to interpretation and anyone who decides that it's right to kill people can kill people and basically be right since there is no definition of right and wrong. Just because a person who claims to be religious commits a crime, it doesn't mean that religion is false and it shouldn't reflect on the God they believe in either. Unless of course they believe that God directly controls all of their behavior.... The notion that humans evolved over millions of years is one of the holes in evolutionary theory. Despite there being fossils of untold numbers of animals including ancient primates, there are none of any "missing links" of any kind. There is no fossil evidence present of humans evolving over time, it just isn't there. There are no complete skeletons of ancient humans. They have chunks that arn't enough to prove that they're anything other than a fossil of something that was once alive. According to Natural Selection only favorable evolutionary changes survive to perpetuate and negative changes are weeded out. So any ape-man type creature who would've evolved from ancient apes should've been more capable of surviving yet today we have chimps and gorillas, and then humans, with a huge gulf in between the two. It defies logic that a whole series of ape-men who were perfectly suited to survive in their environment would all be wipe out, yet the higher ape-men and lower apes would somehow survive. Also if humans have been developing for millions of years then humans should've been just as intelligent as they are now for tens of thousands of years, considering that humans from all of recorded history were just as intelligent as we are now. So if humans have been as intelligent as we are now for many many thousands of years, why have advanced cultures only poped up within the 6000-4000 years? There should be archaelogical evidence of human cultures developing as far back as 50,000-100,000 years ago, but the evidence just isn't there. At best scientists think that maybe they've found some things that are 10,000 years old but what they find hardly convinces me. However a perfectly preserved man in ice whose 6000 years old and is basically identical to modern people does convince me of something, but that something isn't evolution. You can argue til you're blue in the face that proving one thing wrong doesn't prove another thing right but even science doesn't back you up on that. They prove things all the time by proving another thing wrong or right. Many scientific theories are based upon the observation of an effect that something has on it's surroundings even though it can't be seen. None of us has ever seen gravity, but if you've ever jumped, you've seen it's effects and know it's there. If you could prove that abiogenesis followed by evolution is impossible without some sort of outside influence then it would by extension prove that some higher power does exist because as I"ve said before, life is here, at one time it wasn't here, and if it didn't start by abiogenesis, then it had to be helped along by some outside influence. Refer to previous paragraph. If it's not possible for life to have gotten here through chemical reaction and evolution, then that only leaves on scientific conclusion, outside influence. Just because no one can bring you god for show and tell doesn't mean there's no way to show proof of his existence. I can't bring gravity and show it to you, but we know it's there. That makes no sense. Of course you can falsify something that has no evidence to support it. If I say the sky is orange with no evidence to support that you can easily prove me wrong. Go to a scientist and get the right equipment and you can measure the vibrations of the wavelengths of light that are difused through our atmosphere and tell with all certainty where on the spectrum of light that it falls and thus prove me wrong. You don't seem to see that this attitude leads you to follow the same path you accuse religious people of following. If you simply settle on the notion that it's impossible to prove that god exists, then you'll never bother to try and prove it and never learn from your pursuits. If scientists just said "well it's impossible to prove evolution happened so we just won't bother trying" then they wouldn't have learned anything. No where in the definition of Intelligent Design does it say "the belief that man should not attempt to explain how anything works because it's god's magic and not meant for men to understand." That is a very closed mined notion. It's unfair to say that religion in some way stifles learning just because some religions have held science up. The greeks were both religious and superstitious yet they were some of the greatest inventors, thinkers, philosphers, mathematicians, and scientists of their time, and just generally very learned. When Alexander the Great founded Alexandria they built the largest library of knowledge in the ancient world and founded schools and colleges to educate the people, including a medical college where they disected humans to learn how they worked instead of just saying "it's magic, don't mess with it." A lot of factors have contributed to the rise of knowledge and science in our age, it isn't just as simple as "they quit being religious nut jobs and suddenly got smart." At various times in history most people never left their own villages and traveled, thus they didn't share knowledge at the rapid pace that later cultures spread their knowledge. Also there weren't as many places to go and learn so those who were blessed with intelligence were rarely ever able to put their genius to use. Even if you were the smartest man in history, you wouldn't get far in your brief life span with no education in science to even start from. Imagine learning everything from scratch....even a super genius couldn't get far in a life time. Also paper to write messages and books was at one time a luxury, not an abundant resource so it wasn't always easy to spread the knowledge you had gained. Until very recently only the rich could afford to buy many or any books. In the last 200 years we were able to start communicating by telegraph which allowed for much more rapid transfer of information and that has progressed to the point where nowadays any information is available to almost anyone and can be transferred from the farthest reaches of the globe in a heart beat. Now if a scientist discovers something it takes only a moment for the news to travel to his fellow scientists across the globe and they can immediately begin working with that information. In the past his works might not have been fully understood and distributed for many years after his death. People like Newton, Gelileo and Kepler were developing theories about how the celestial bodies moved and interacted with one another when maybe only a stones throw from their own homes were countless people who believed with all their hearts that the world was flat, the universe was geocentric and the stars were just hanging on a black background around the end of the universe like flies stuck on flypaper. Due to many factors like this science can't help but develop exponentially. Oh and don't ignore the accomplishments of ancient people either, it's not like as if everyone before a few hundred years ago were slobbering club wielding cave men. The Egyptians, Chinese, Mayans, Incas, Manchay, the inhabitants of Malta, Romans, Greeks and other ancient civilizations all built impressive megalithic monuments that required complex geometry to build so that they could stand the tests of time and survive to our day.

*barges into thread* I think that many atheists/agnostics (including me) would argue that there's nothing about a human that's fundamentally different from a plant or atom. I know you didn't really get to finish your argument, so I'll ask you: what makes you believe that a human isn't simply a collection of atoms? Humans are just a collection of atoms. However so is a house. If you saw a house would you assume that it spotaneously came into existence by some process of nature until proven otherwise? I won't even bother going into a discussion about irreducible complexity because it always gets ugly.... The thing that's different about a human and a plant is that a plant works as part of the ecosystem and helps keep nature in balance. Humans on the other hand have a long standing track record of upsetting the balance of nature by, for example, hunting for sport instead of just survival and as a result driving animals into extinction. Or deforestation and destruction of natural resources. Compared to all other life on the planet humans are by far the most unnatural of all things in nature. It's like as if humans weren't originally a part of the ecosystem.

Ummmm....slight mistake there. Jehovah's Witnesses don't believe that blood contains a person's soul. They don't even believe in an immortal soul. The reason for denying blood transfusions has to do with respect of the sanctity of blood. It's true that some parts of the bible arn't explicit in their meaning and thus are up to interpretation but some things are too clear to be up to interpretation. If the bible says "thou shalt not 'blank'!" then it's pretty obvious, we shouldn't do whatever blank is. So is the whole bible up to interpretation? I don't feel so...some people obviously do though because I've already seen people say that they think most of the bible is made up despite it being a very historically accurate book.

When it comes to religion I have a step by step line of reason as to why I believe what I believe. Step 1: I notice that there is life on earth(obviously). Step 2: If earth was once a gaseous cloud that was pulled together by gravity and solidified into a sphere, it at one time didn't have life. Step 3: The conclusion that I draw from the previous two steps is that at some point, life started. Step 4: Now I must consider how that life may have begun. Due to the fact that science falls short(in my opinion) of convincing me that life started through abiogensis and has continued to evolve since, I conclude that some higher power influenced the development of life on this planet. There really arn't any other options, either life started without outside influence, or it did start with outside influence. Step 5: Due to my conclusion that there is a higher power, I wish to learn of this higher power and study religion that seeks to explain various higher powers in hopes of one day understanding why I am here and what purpose if any my life has. To Hannibal, While I do agree with some of the points you made, I have to disagree with one thing you discussed. There may not be a text book definition of "true christians" but that doesn't mean that there can't be christians that don't do things correctly. Being christian is defined as "Professing belief in Jesus as Christ or following the religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus." and since the bible is the only text we have that teaches of jesus it's rather hard to believe in Jesus and his teachings, but not in what the bible says when it's the only place we can learn about his teachings. Thus if you believe in Jesus to the point where you would consider yourself a christian you should also believe in the bible because Jesus taught from the scriptures. If then you don't follow what the bible says you arn't really following the teachings of jesus and couldn't consider yourself a "christian." As you said though God Judges on actions, not religious affiliation. The bible confirms this at Revelation 20: 12, 13 "And I saw the dead, the great and the small, standing before the throne, and scrolls were opened. But another scroll was opened; it was the scroll of life. And the dead were judged out of those things written in the scrolls according to their deeds. And the sea gave up those dead in it, and death and Ha'des gave up those dead in them, and they were judged individually according to their deeds." So we agree here, christian or not, "true christian" or "false christian", according to the bible what matters is our deeds, not our title. Anyway, I also don't like when people try to force religion or beliefs on me. I personally feel that people should be able to practice whatever beliefs they want as long as it doesn't interfere with the lives of other people. I don't force my opinions of religion on others and I generally expect the same respect from others. If people want to know my opinions, I give them, if they don't, I drop the subject.

I don't have the time to read what people have posted so far because I need to go to bed but it's always good to include your extracurricular activities because they look at those kind of things to see what type of person you and it tell them things about you that they need to know to gauge how good of a student you'll be. Also you should include any volunteering you may have done, if any, because it speaks well for your character. Noting any recreational reading you do or a second language or anything like that, that shows that you do a lot of personal study and enjoy furthering your education and increasing your knowledge will help.

Here's my room, it's a real mess and as you will be able to tell some of the pictures were taken at different times. I tried to avoid taking pictures of the mess(the enormous pile of junk on the floor for example). Here's a lava lamp I bought at meijers, which I rarely ever run but it matched my wall paper so I bought it. I chose the wall paper when I was 13 or 14 so don't blame me if it seems a bit kiddy, I'm 19 now. You can also see one of my computer speakers. I got the system for 30 bucks, it came with 2 flat panel speakers and sub that they connect to and it can blow away more hundred dollar 5.1 systems people buy for their computers.There's also our cordless phone and some cans of compressed air for dusting off my computer stuff. A view of my wall and the headboard of my bed. Up in the corner is one of my surround sound speakers I hung up there. Here's a picture of my bed with a puppy sleeping on it. Here's another surround sound speaker. Here's my book case, I have a variety of books on it. There's also a lot of junk that doesn't belong there like that big battery and a bottle of alcohol. The speaker up there is connected to my old stereo, not my home theater system...although I ended up wiring the two together so I can combine their power and get basically 9.1 surround and 320 watts of total power. Here's my closet, you can see my gig bag sitting here. Also behind it is the box for a fishing reel that my dad got me before we went on a fishing vacation. It's by far the finest reel I've ever used. There is also the box that my car stero came in. Wanna see the car it was in? Oh, and there is also another surround sound speaker there. Tada! I wrecked it. That's what happens when you flip a car onto it's side in a ditch. Here's my guitar outside of it's gig bag. Note the puppy in the background attempting to ignore my late night shananigans. Here's the back of the guitar and in my opinion, the most beautiful piece of wood on it. Here's the headstock, and as you can see, it's a Dean. Ignore the string hanging off. I had a string break while tuning and when I replaced it I didn't have any needle nose pliars around to snip it with. It's been trimmed for a long time now. Here you can see the sub for my theater system. There is also the base of my floor lamp, my english books(which i've finished already), some CDRs, a bit of my knee and on top of the sub is a cd holder and a box of kleenex stacked on top of that. Here you see my tv(20") and the tv stand it's on. Within the tv stand is an n64, ps2 and theater system. On the floor you can see my gamecube and wireless wavebird controller. On the tv is the center channel speaker for my tv. On the left you can see the club I would use to chase a burglar out of the house if one ever broke in. On the right is my computer speaker sub, and on top of it my cable modem. There's also a sliver of my comptuer tower and wireless keyboard visible. That stuff on my bed has been cleaned off long ago, it was only there a short while when I was doing some cleaning in my room, it's an old picture. The black thing that the clothes are sitting on are storage units with drawers, and I put a lot of that stuff in and moved to our basement. You can clearly see my computer that I built about 2 years ago. The monitor might not be a flat panel lcd but I don't care, it has a bright clear picture and it's 19" which I prefer over 15" and mine was much cheaper too.... You can also see my stereo that I mentioned earlier, the one that's hooked up to the big speaker in my book case. The painting on the wall was made by my grandfather. Him and my grandmother took some painting classes and they got pretty good at it. There's also my wall clock, and some frames that have my Net+ and A+ certifications in them. The trinkets all over the shelves is mostly souvenirs from vacations or souvenirs that people got for me while they were on vacation(hey, we just went to the bahamas, here's a keychain, merry ****ing christmas!). Well that's my room, the little nook of the world that belongs to me and where I play rs from.

I doubt thats true, I know their coming out With ff7:DC, but thats about it. FF7 dc? you mean ac, advent children? I knew about that, but it's just a movie. Anyway, I just read on a site that they played an FF7 cinema on the PS3 as a demo at E3 but they announced that they had no plans of doing a remake. I guess that's where the rumor came from that I heard. I hope with all my strength though that they do a remake.

My best friend can't even eat chocolate it disgusts him so much. The taste of it makes him want to vomit. Who says you have to be normal anyway? Personally I like both candy and choclate but I like candy better. My favorites include skittles, sweet tarts, shock tarts, anything gummy(bears, worms, dinosaurs, whatever, they're all made of the same thing, just different shapes) as well as the sour versions of those gummy candies.

Be careful loosing weight that fast. Usually dieticians recommend only loosing a few pounds a week. I hope you arn't starving yourself to loose that weight because if you do your body will think you're starving and lower your metabolism to try and keep you alive. Lower metabolism means less energy so you won't have the strength to keep up your excercise routine. Not to mention your body may consume some of your muscle before the fat and make you weaker because muscle cells when consumed produce more energy than fat and if your body thinks it's starving it'll go after the higher energy fuel first. Also if you excercise it causes slight damage to your muscles(or signifigant damge if you lift weights) and your body has to repair that every day before the next time you excercise and if you don't consume enough protein and other nutrients it has nothing to repair the muscles with.

Probably one of the best sources of protein, and one of the cheapest as well, is the humble egg. Hulk Hogan said on tv that when he body builds he eats 24 boiled eggs a day. The yolks contain a good amount of fat however. Although fat isn't as bad as most people make it out to be, if you're gonna eat a lot of eggs it might be a good idea to remove the yolk from some of them. If you fry the eggs don't use too much butter. Biking is a good form of excercise to get started on. For someone who is overweight it can be hard to start out running so biking is probably a good start for you. You might wanna do more than 5 miles though. Maybe start at 5 and add a mile every 3 or 4 days. On a bike you can move a lot faster than running so even 15 miles a day wouldn't be too much considering at 15mph(you outta be able to average that speed) it'll only take you an hour out of the day. If you have trouble affording a gym membership of 600-800 a year you might want to reconsider getting a bowflex, they're kinda expensive. I'd say your cheapest option is to get an adjustable weight bench that has a pack that can lay flat, incline or decline. A friend of mine got a really nice one for I think 150. Then go buy one of those 300lb olympic weight sets, they're not too much, probably less than 100 bucks and then buy an olympic weight bar and an olympic curl bar. They will have the same ends so you'll be able to use the weights on both. Then you just need some stands to sit out to the side of your bench to hold the weight bar for bench pressing. All that should run you less than 400 bucks if you shop around and you'll have it forever, unlike a gym membership. Just be careful, it's easy to injure yourself with free weights. Oh and don't do pushups and situps before bed or any other excercising right before bed because it disturbs your sleep and the soreness will make you squirm in your sleep and you'll wake up really sore. The soreness will probably keep you from excercising the next day if you're anything like me, and if you end up skipping days you'll eventually end slowing down and stopping excercising at all...if you're anything like me(yeah, this has happened to me).

I don't think they have to be the same type(although I wouldn't ever do it in any computer of mine), just if you use two different speeds it'll run at the speed of the slower one. I may be wrong on this, someone correct me if I am. According to IBM's website that's the right type of ram and amount. However the price is massively inflated. I found this one at tigerdirect.com for 92bucks and some change. http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications ... pNo=379706 It's PNY brand which I've never used so I can't speak for the quality of their products. Kingston(which is the brand in my pc) has several prices from sites that sell their products that range from 140-193. http://www.ec.kingston.com/ecom/configu ... -TP133/512 This one is 104 dollars, but it doesn't mention the number of pins, it just says it's guarunteed to work on your laptop. http://www.4allmemory.com/index.cfm?fus ... y_id=75954 IBM was over 250 per 512mb so I didn't even bother to post their link. I can't find the right ram on circuit city....it's sad, some of the older ram is more expensive nowadays than the new stuff. You can get ddr ram most of the time for cheaper than pc133 or pc100....a friend of mine was trying to find ram for a computer that only took pc66...ick.

Put the case back on! Taking the case off can make things worse because cases are designed to move air through the pc to carry the heat out. If you have the case off there is little to no circulation and the heat can build up faster. Not to mention dust can settle inside the pc easier and get in places it shouldn't go. There are systems you can buy to monitor the heat in your pc and the efficiency at which your fans are running. You may want to invest in one of these as well as some bigger fans. Also they make kits of heat sinks that you can stick onto some of the other chips on the motherboard to keep them cooled down. Another thing you might consider investing in is a water cooling system. I've never even seen one though so I couldn't tell you what kind to get or how to set them up. Next pc I build I"ll probably put in a water cooled system. Electronics in general tend to run better when cooler and last longer as well. I read an article in a pc magazine where a bunch of companies sent in their top of the line gaming pc's and then they compared them. One pc had the top of the line hardware with everything overclocked, even the processor on the graphics card, but it had a water cooled system so they could safely overclock it without overheating.

So far we only have specs to go on but if sony and microsoft are telling the truth about their systems, no computers haven't already passed them up. The PS3 has a custom made chip that sony and another company(forgot it's name) developed that is not available anywhere but the PS3 as of right now and boasts the largest number of transistors of any processor on the market at 300million transistors. The 360 isn't any small fry either, sporting 3 processors, and not puny processors either, 3.2ghz intel P4's with hyper threading. I haven't sat down and compared all the specs(or even looked up the ones I don't understand, it's been a while since I took A+ training and most of this stuff has come into existence in the last year or months) but it looks like PS3 is ahead in some areas and behind in others, and the 360 is ahead in others. Likely I'll have had a job for a while by the time both have been out for a few months and I'll probably buy both. I may buy the revolution as well just for the ability to download old nintendo games from their archive.

I usually leave my pc on round the clock. I dunno what the difference is in the power bill because I live at home and my parents pay it. At night I usually just hit ctrl alt del and click "lock computer"(i have windows 2000) and turn the monitor off. Then when I get back on the next day I don't have to wait for it to boot and usually my rs windows and tip.it or whatever else i was using is there waiting for me. I've left it on for more than 2 weeks at a time without windows giving me any issues. Usually when I restart it has nothing to do with windows becoming unstable, more like having to restart after installing something. The only problem I have is with the heat that my computer spews out constantly. I have a small room and I keep the door shut and locked, even when i'm not in it(that's right, i have a keyed lock on my door....parents didn't like it at first but i just ignored their complaints til they got over it) so it keeps all the heat in and my room ends up like a furnace. I have a wall clock that gives the time, date and temperature and my room has been as high as 92degrees that I can remember. It's 84.1 right now.... farenheit of course. I don't think leaving your computer on is bad for the computer, because mine has run for literally thousands and thousands of hours and nothing has ever gone wrong with anything on it other than the keyboard. Cost me about 1000 bucks to build and I'm fairly certain I've gotten my use out of it. I also know a ton of people who leave their computers on and they have about the same track record as me.

Of RE, I own the first movie, and code veronica x for ps2, so I can't say which I like the best of the games but I know I liked cvx quite a bit. The only problem I had with it is that sometimes you can get stuck at a spot because you overlooked one little thing in an area and you may not even be able to go back and get whatever it was. I played once and got stuck at the part where you're supposed to go to the airport. Then I played again and made it to the airport only to run out of ammo. Then I played again using a walkthrough and made it all the way through. The guys that write those walkthroughs must have no lives because they seem to know EXACTLY what to kill, what to just run past, and what to use which ammo on so that you can minimize your ammo consumption and never even come close to running out. They must have to play the games for days writing down every detail and calculating. On my own I ran out of ammo so fast it wasn't even funny. With the walkthrough I had ammo running out my ears. At one point I decided to fire all my ammo wildly and then shut the game off without saving, just to see how much firepower I had exactly and it took me more than 5 minutes just to fire it all off.

I dunno which system if any(I'm broke right now although that could change if I get a good job) I'll get but they all have features that interest me. The revolution is supposed to allow you to download all of the old games, like the ones for nes and snes and maybe for n64 as well. So we can all say goodbye to funcoland(I think they got bought out by another company), their poor service, and half broken goods. Xbox 360 and PS3 both look like they'll be really powerful platforms and have good games on the horizon. As of right now it looks like the 360 is winning out on games but PS3 boasts more computing power with it's fancy new processor so they may win over some game developers who want more power to work with in expressing their creativity. I know microsoft has claimed that their system is more developer friendly but lets face it...what has microsoft ever made that was user or developer friendly? Either way, both systems look good and strong. I"ve heard they plan on putting out an FF7 remake on the PS3 and I"d buy it just for that alone(I bought my PS1 just to play FF7.

Yeah, no joke. I'm pretty sure crude oil refinement isn't that costly and no one gives much thought to the fact that they use crude oil and some of the leftover material from the refinement process to make all sorts of things like motor oil, fuel additives(injector cleaner) and I think they use something from oil refinement, in the production of rubber. All corporations lie about their profit. All you have to do is look at their stock prices though to get an idea. According to the statistics at sharebuilder.com Exxon Mobile has had a 52week low of 46.65 per share and it's up to 62.97. Their current total maket capitalization is 397,034,196,296...... If you divide that by 62.97 you get their current number of shares, which is....6,305,132,544 shares. So if their number of shares has stayed around 6 billion, take that times 46.65 and you get their lowest market capitalization for 52 weeks....being 279,900,000,000. If my calculation is even remotely accurate their market capitalization has risen over 100billion in the last year. EDIT: Oh and I just checked petro-canada's stats and their 52week low was 46.91 and it's now 83.75 per share which is only 10 cents short of it's 52 week high so they're staying around their high and probably continuing to go up. 2% profit? Pfffttttt

Hannibal....flaming means that you insult the poster instead of just disagreeing with them. You insinuated that my education about the economic system was lacking. You tried to make me sound like I was somehow less intelligent or informed or whatever, because of having held a menial job for a period of time. Some people can't get work any better than a grocery store bagger or cashier, it isn't their fault if those are the only jobs that are easy to get and not everyone has the luxury of job hunting for months until they find a good job. Anyway, I would consider some of the things you said as an insult and thus it is a flame, not just your input on the conversation. If you weren't speaking directly to me(which you were in some instances) you shouldn't have quoted me and then replied. Besides, I didn't start this topic as a "whaaaa, our gas prices are too high" thread. I was asking about people's opinions of the cause of the increase and where they think the price could climb, as well as alternatives to even using gas. No, you didn't specifically say that all economies are the same but you might as well have because you keep acting like the US shouldn't complain about high gas prices without really giving any information that would indicate that americans are financially capable of dealing with a large increase in gas prices. Just because gas is more expensive in Britain doesn't mean it's less affordable for british people than for americans. I really don't know because I don't have the charts and graphs of the average financial situation of people in both the US and Britain. You said that they have to pay more taxes there and for all I know that may be true but americans are far from tax free. We get huge taxes on our income and then they tax us on the property we own and after already taxing us on the money we earn they tax us on everything buy with that money. Even if they do have higher taxes in Britain, they have socialized medicine so a higher tax rate wo udl be acceptable. Here in the US we have to pay out of pocket for our medical or pay a monthly fee to an insurance company which will in turn pay part(not all) of our medical expenses and for most people, save money in the long run. A friend of mine recently spend over 250 dollars on a doctor visit and all they did was look at his eye and tell him it was infected, then perscribe some 100 dollar a bottle eye drops he had to use for 2 weeks or risk going blind if he didn't pay for the drops. That's hard on somebody who has 2 siblings and lives in government funded housing because his mom has mental and physical problems that prevent her from getting a good job and he's had to work 2 jobs while going to college just to help her feed the other two. All this health insurance stuff is no cake walk either. My grandmother just got done having a back surgery and ended up having 4 strokes because she didn't receive proper medical care and they did their best to boot her out of the hospital before she was recovered. She has an artificial heart valve and it makes her body react by thickening the blood and to keep from forming clots and having a stroke she has to take blood thinners. To do a surgery though your blood has to be thick enough that you don't bleed to death and for some reason, going off of the blood thinners totally destabalized her blood and it hasn't even gotten back to normal yet after well over a month. Yet because of medicare saying they would only pay for 5 days of hospitalization after the surgery they pushed her out the doors after 5 days and her blood was way too thick and she started having strokes. Medicare and the Insurance companies tell the hospital, we will only pay for this much care. If you give them more healthcare than that, we won't pay. Then because of that they don't give you the healthcare you need, they give you what is being paid for and that may not be enough. I don't know the national average for health insurance but it's not cheap. Most people that work for large companies can get a special healthcare policy that the company negotiates with the insurance company. However people like my father that run a small business have to pay a lot more and at one time I think our insurance was over 400 dollars a month. That's not easy to manage for a family that's total income is 2000-2200 bucks a month and still have to pay taxes, phone bill, gas bill, water bill, sewage and garbage pickup bills, food, mortage on the house, car payments and any random expenses that crop up like the roof starting to leak, damage from storms, mechanical failure in your car, any number of things. I don't know how to compare the british and american economies but don't think for a second that just because americans pay less for gas that it's somehow easier on them. Not all americans drive enormous gas guzzling SUV's and many of us have financial difficulties. Some people, usually elderly are on a fixed income. They're retired and so their income will never go up for the rest of their life. However much they get from their retirement funds, social security and what not is all they get, no matter how much the price of things like gas or food goes up. A gas price increase hurts many of us and we have as much right to complain as any other country. My point was that just because something is cheaper in one country doesn't mean it's more affordable to the people because not all economies are the same. I think we can agree on that, it's enough said. Most we've just been comparing gas prices and complaining but what I was trying to do were get people's opinions on whether this price hike in the US that is supposedly the result of hurricane katrina is really legitimate or if gas companies are just taking the opportunity to gouge and make a big profit. Also I want people's opinions of renewable energy sources, or energy sources that pollute less. Some people have mentioned biking, but that's only practical for a small number of people. You can't ride a bike in the rain or with a suit on and expect to look even halfway presentable when you make it to the office where you work. Hydrogen fuel cell cars have the potential to run on water which isn't exactly a renewable energy source because there is only so much water on the planet but by the time we'd actually run out of water our planet should be advanced to the point where we can go harvest materials we need for earth from other planets and use them to replenish what we've lost over time. Ethanol is another good solution becuase it's easily renewable, doesn't pollute, not difficult to produce, runs well in our current automobiles so no new fancy technology has to be brought out which takes time. Not to mention most people already understand how their internal combustion engines work and can work on them, maintain them and fix them in necessary but if you introduce a whole new type of car then everyone has to learn a ton more stuff. Electric cars are a nice idea but in parts of this country and in many places round the world there are constant power shortages and that would only be compounded if everyone in the world had their car plugged in and charging in the evening after driving all day long. Hybrid cars are good because they get more mileage for your money which reduced pollution because less gas is burned but like people have said already, they cost more and it takes longer for someone to begin seeing the savings. Since hybrids are new technology you can pretty much only buy them brand new, you almost never see a used one for sale. Not everyone can afford to buy a brand new car so it's not a solution for everybody. As far as electric(which is needed to power electric cars) goes, wind, hydro and solar energy are always there, it's just a matter of harnessing it. Hydro dams can be expensive to make although I've had some ideas floating around my head for some time. Wind isn't always present so it isn't always a reliable source in all areas. Solar energy is pretty practical because it's always there for most of the day, every day. You can use some sort of solar system to heat your water so you don't have to expend gas or electric to get a hot shower and electric producing solar panels give a decent amount of power. The only thing is, I've heard that the method of making solar panels employs chemicals that arn't so great for the environment and to have power when the sun is down you need an expensive power grid system that runs on batteries and uses the solar panels to charge it up during the day so you have power all night long. Thoughts and ideas about gas prices and alternatives to gas and polluting forms of energy, not flames, that's what I'm hoping to see.