Binyam

At level 99 cooking, I can burn up to half of a load of blue crabs on lower level wood...even t7 or t8. If I have Grave Crawler (t10), I usually burn between 1 and 4 blue crab per load. Imo, that is a HUGE difference. As far as your second comment, perhaps when you stop dunging solo or with low level players, you will notice the value, and availability, of higher tiered resources. If you can't cut/fletch/burn t10 wood, you won't see much (or any) of it. When you (or a teammate) have the levels required, you will see resources at that level.

Some quests are not directed at the "average quester". There are many of us that like the challenge of rising to meet the requirements of a new quest. Many of my least favorite skills are at their current level for only this reason. Instead of complaining about it, just go do the work and get the level. Level 90 really isn't that hard, if you apply yourself. I, for one, will be working on level 90 myself in the days ahead so that I am ready for the quest. It has a couple uses. It is very nice in Dungeoneering when trying to cook high level fish (salve eels and above) and, apparently, there is a quest coming that it will be useful for ;)

Apparently, not everyone has your breadth of revelatory knowledge. I thought it was well written and presented some things in a way that I had never thought of. Just because something did not appeal to you or reveal something to you does not mean it is unmerited. Perhaps you were not a part of the target audience, in which case, you are welcome to continue reading in future issues.

You're pretty lucky to have survived that, you know? Yea, that's what I thought. Isn't that suposed to be leathal? Yea.. the survival rate for having your appendix burst is almost non-existant.. Due to neuropathy caused by diabetes, my dad survived 4 months with a ruptured appendix. Thought he had a case of stomach flu when it happened and finally went to the doctor 4 months later when he started passing air when he urinated and had blood in his stools. The doctors ended up doing an exploratory when they couldnt figure out what was wrong with him. Long story short he ended up losing half of his colon and part of his small intestine and had to have some other reconstructive work done on his renal system. Got very lucky, really. His doctors said most people go into septic shock and dont survive days, much less months. The neuropathy is what saved him. Havong lost much of his feeling, his brain didnt even realize it was supposed to go into shock.

I'm not saying it's not. The electoral system does, to a great extent, represent the wishes of the people. My argument is that the popular vote does it even better. I don't quite understand. How does pointing out that states cast their electoral votes for whomever wins the popular vote in their particular state qualify as a "conspiracy theory?" Looks like Wikipedia's in on it, too: The election of the President of the United States and the Vice President of the United States is indirect. Presidential electors are selected on a state by state basis as determined by the laws of each state. Currently each state uses the popular vote on Election Day to elect electors. Although ballots list the names of the presidential candidates, voters within the 50 states and the District of Columbia are actually choosing Electors from their state when they vote for President and Vice President. These Presidential Electors in turn cast the official (electoral) votes for those two offices. Huh?? I made by conspiracy thoery remark based on your comments: where you were alluding that states have no sovereignty at all and likened it to oppressed people of a genocidal dictatorship, then went on to site a Supreme Court case, that, near as I can tell (I am not a lawyer and will never be one...too old) UPHELD the 10th Amendment. Like I said, conspiracy theory BS

/sigh If we are going to get into a bunch of conspiracy theory BS, then i'm out of this conversation. You conspiracy theroists are all a bunch of nut-jobs that need to get sent to your own little island where you can theorize until the end of time about how you got there.

Vermont gets 3 votes and California get 55 because Vermont has a population of 630,000 and California has a population of 36,000,000 The yare not under-represented, they are equally represented, based on their population. It is not irrelevent, it will never happen because it should never happen. The United States is a republic, not a democracy. The people that come from the rural areas of the country would never pressure their state governments to support such an amendment, because fundamentally, culturally, morally and politically, people that live in rural areas tend to be far different than people in urban areas. Those people would certainly not support a system where only the urban areas are needed to decide the future of their country. This is, once again, where you seem to have no understanding of the United States government. So, once again The Unites States of America is not a democracy. It has never been a democracy and it never should be a democracy. The popular vote means absoutely nothing and has no bearing whatsoever on the election process. The process is very simply. Each state's citizens elects its own state government to govern and legislate. Each state's citizens elects its representatives to represent it in Congress. Each state's citizens elects its president. The states get a certain amount of votes, based on their population, to vote for the candidate that state has voted to be president. With the exception of Maine and Nebraska, the candidate that each state elects as president gets all of that states votes. Abolishing the Electoral College would seriously compromise the sovereignty of the states in their ability to elect a president. Since the United States is a federal republic, the states maintain all political sovereignty that they do not yield to the federation. The ability of the state to decide, as a state, who it elects as president is is one of the fundamental principals of the state's sovereignty. Taking away that ability would seriously compromise our entire system of government.

It's actually a bit more complicated than that. Article I of the US Constitution sets up the Legislative branch of government. The Senate has 2 members elected per state and is the house of congress that provides representatives for the states. Since there are 2 Senators per state, all states are equal in the Senate. The House of Representatives is the house of congress that represents the people. Each state has a number of representatives proportionate to their population. (the current average is approximately 1 representative per 650,000 citizens) Article II of the US Constitution sets up the Executive branch. This is where the Electoral College is laid out. The amount of electoral votes each state receives is the sum of their senators (2 per state) and their representatives (based on population). This way each state gets equal representation and each state gets additional representation based on their population. The more populous states get more electoral votes (California getting the most at 55), but every state (and the District of Columbia) and its citizens are equally represented. How each state dispenses its electoral votes is up to them, Currently there are two methods. The most widely used method is: whichever candidate receives the majority vote for that state receives all the state's electoral votes, so when Kerry received 54% of the vote in California to Bush's 45%, Kerry won the state's votes and received all 55 Electoral votes. Maine and Nebraska are the only 2 states currently that use a proportionate system of dividing its votes. With this method, a candidate will receive 1 electoral vote for each Congressional district it wins and the candidate that wins the most votes overall for that state would receive the additional 2 votes. If we were to use the proportionate method on California, Kerry, who won in 31 of the 53 districts would have received 33 Electoral votes from California (31 for the districts and 2 for winning the state, overall) and Bush would have received 22 Electoral votes. Personally, I would like to see the proprtionate system used everywhere, as it allows for more equal representation and would prevent a candidate from winning the election merely by sweeping the 11 largest states.

1. 2nd degree sunburn covering my chest and back. After a couple of days the area was covered in hundreds of tiny blisters that would rip apart with any movement, making larger blisters. After about a week of this, merely touching my skin would would cause large chunks of skin to fall off leaving the raw festering flesh underneath exposed. This was so painful that I ended up going through about 2 dozen T-shirts because I had to cut them of with scissors, as it was far to painful to remove them normally. 2. While deployed to Iraq, I got a very bad case of heat rash, once again covering my chest and back (basically, the area that was covered by my bulletproof vest). Due to poor sanitary conditions and wearing my vest in the sun and 130+ degree heat for at least 12 hours a day, it was impossible to control the rash and my skin became very red, hard and swollen. To compound matters, the well our showers used was going dry and our shower water was very hard salt water (to the point where soap would not lather). Bathing felt like I was showering in sulferic acid. 3. Acute appendicitis 4. Lidocaine shot over my tailbone (damn near cried like a baby :P) 5. Dislocating my hip 6. Dislocating 2 fingers in a vehicle accident (doctor popped both back in with no pain killer...pretty painful) 7. While on rotation at the National Training Center in Ft Irwin, CA, I was driving a PLS at night in full blackout using NVGs. My PLS hit a 3 foot deep wadi and the impact caused my spring ride seat to shoot me into the roof of the PLS, head first. Nice little concussion. There was also some significant neck and upper back pain. 8. While conducting convoy security in Iraq, the truck behind me was hit by an IED and slammed into my gun truck, causing me to collide with the truck in front of me. This chain of events caused my head to hit the roof of my armored HMMWV at about 40 MPH. Once again, hello concussion, and now 3 compressed vertibrae in my C-spine and 4 in my T-spine. 9. Hyper-extending my knee 10. Getting kicked in the face by a 2 yo stallion, while training it. Busted my nose and bruised up my face pretty bad.

I'm not sure I understand how the Electoral College is unfair to larger states. All representation is equal. Each state gets 2 electoral votes and each congressional district gets 1 electoral vote. Washington state has 9 congressional districts, so Washington State gets 11 votes. California has 53 congressional districts, so California gets 55 electoral votes. Hawaii has 1 congressional district, so Hawaii gets 3 electoral votes. Seems pretty fair to everyone to me. The only candidates that experience difficulty with this system are the ones that primarily target urban areas and ignore everything else (like Gore in 2000)

Nebraska and Maine (one is being proposed in Colorado as well) have a proportionate system for allocating their electoral votes. The proportionate system works like this: The winner of each district wins one electoral vote. The winner state-wide gets two electoral votes. Example: I live in Washington State and we have nine districts. In 2004, Kerry won the statewide vote. If the nine districts voted along party lines (meaning the districs that elected Democrat representatives also voted for Kerry), then Kerry would have received 6 votes for winning districts 1,2,3,6,7 and 9 and 2 votes for winning the statewide vote, giving him 8 total votes from Washington and giving Bush 3 votes for winning Districts 4,5 and 8. Personally, I think that this is a nice system to use. Here in Washington it would mean that a candidate would not be able to sweep the state vote by winning King, Pierce, Snohomish and Kitsap counties. Where a person lives doesnt necessarily decide the weight of a persons vote. There are 538 total electoral votes. 102 of them are split up 2 each state and 2 for the District of Columbia. The other 436 are given one per representative district. Representative districts are decided by population, thus more populous states naturally have more votes (California 55, New York 31, Texas 34). The problem arises when candidates concentrate their attention on only the population centers and don't actively seek the vote of the rural areas, since you only need the 11 most populous states to win (California, Texas, New York, Florida, Ohio, Illinois, New Jersey, North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania). This was the tactic Gore tried to use in the 2000 election and it backfired on him. He lost Texas (never would have had it, really), Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina and, of course, Florida. Like I said in my earlier post, everyone likes to cry about Florida, but had he only won his home state of Tennessee, he would have won anyway, with or without Florida. The fact that only 20 of the 50 states and DC elected him cost him the election. In reality, he really only needed to win West Virginia (5 votes), which was traditionally a Democrat state, and he would have won the election. The bottom line for the Electoral College is to ensure that States and not just people receive equal representation. The United States is not, nor has it ever been a democracy. The United States is a representative republic of 50 semi-sovereign states. We use a democratic process, but we are not a democracy.

I strongly disagree that the Electoral College should be abolished. Doing so would alienate all of the smaller states and grant all of the power to the larger states. The Electoral College was designed so that every state has equal representation, so that is is impossible for only the largest states to decide the fate of the election. In other words, this system was designed so that it is possible for an election to be won without gaining the popular vote. In a purely democratic system, more loosely populated states would have no importance, so why even consider them? They dont matter. Who cares about a barren patch of land that has only 500,000 people? We don't need their vote... Realistically, the Electoral College will never be abolished. It is one of the fundamental principals of the Constitution of the United States and though a few may attempt to abolish it, the process is very clear and, in this case, insurmountable, as it would alienate the very states that would be needed to pass the amendment. Proposing the Amendment: 1. Two thirds of the Senate and House of Representatives or 2. Two thirds of the State Legislatures. So, just to get the Amendment proposed, you would need Congressmen or Legislatures from 34 of the 50 states to vote for it. If the vote fell strictly along population lines, then states like Utah (5 votes), Arkansas/Kansas/Mississippi (6 votes) and Iowa/Conneticut/Oregon/Oklahoma (7 votes) would all have to vote for it. If any one of those did not vote for it, or any other state, then the vote for would have to come from the 16 least populated states. Ratifying the Amendment: 1. Three-fourths of the State Legislatures or 2. Three-fourths of State Conventions Congress decides which method of ratification is used and historically, the only proposed amendment to use the convention method was the 21st Amendment, which repealed the 18th Amendment (Prohibition). So, in this case you would need the Legislatures (or conventions) from 38 of the 50 states to vote for the abolition of the Electoral College. This means, that in addition to Utah (5 votes), Arkansas/Kansas/Mississippi (6 votes) and Iowa/Conneticut/Oregon/Oklahoma (7 votes), you would also need the approval of Nevada, New Mexico, West Virginia and Nebraska (all 5 votes). All of this so that the metropolitan areas of New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago,Washington DC,Boston,San Francisco, Philadelphia, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Miami, Detroit, Phoenix, Seattle, Minneapolis, San Diego, Denver, Cleveland, St Louis, Tampa, Pittsburgh, Sacramento, Charlotte, Cincinnati, Portland, Orlando, Kansas City, Indianapolis and Columbus could dictate to the rest of the country who is to be president. If that were true, a candidate would only have to campaign in New York, California, Washington DC, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Texas, Georgia, Minnesota, Colorado, Ohio, Missouri, Florida, Oregon, Washington, North Carolina and Indiana. Even then, they would not have to campaign in anything but the major population centers. Do you honestly think that the elected representatives of the lesser populated areas of the United States will ever allow this?? I know they won't...ever. Besides, all of this stink has come about because Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000 and George W Bush won the election. Does anyone remember the electoral count? 271-266 Do you know what that means? Florida was not the reason Gore lost. Since 1968, Florida has only voted Democrat twice. In other words, in the last 10 elections, Republicans have won Florida 80% of the time. Gore lost because he did not even win the votes of his home state of Tennessee, which voted for Clinton in both elections and elected Gore four times as a representative and twice as a senator. Thats why he lost, he ignored the little guy. He ignored his home state, and you dont win an election if you lose your home state. The only president to ever do so was James Polk, when he won the 1844 election, but lost in Tennessee.

Perhaps a review of the issue from an award winning Author/Archaeologist/Professor would shed some light on the facts.

I didn't vote. I find it rediculous that the monolithic and semi-monolithic churches in Lalibela, Ethiopia were not included in the options. They are far more amazing than some of the other entries. Lalibela

You are an idiot. Everything is all a big conspiracy for you. Everything is the end of the world...or the end of the US, anyway, and all becuase of President Bush and his so-called "The illegal and unjustified war on terror". Go home, because obviously you cannot see past the end of your nose. FOR YOUR INFORMATION: Last week, The Dow Jones Industrial Average was at an all time high, which was approximately 2000 points HIGHER than before September 11, 2001. According to the Wall Street Journal: So this was a global thing and was triggered by a selloff in stock in China, not because "It's the beginning of the end for the US dollar. Actually, it's the end of the end". If you will look at this neat little chart, linked below, by the Wall Street Journal, you will see pretty clearly that this doesn't even come close to classifying as one of the worst ever. Sure, there was a drop, but that does happen somewhat frequently. Dow Jones Industrial Average All-Time Largest One Day Gains and Losses Or, to make it even easier to understand, here is a chart by CNN.com showing the DJIA since 2003, since we started this "illegal and unjustified war". CNN Money - Dow Jones Industrial Average Stock Charts

Huh?? Honestly, I think you posted in the wrong thread.........

Ah that explains some. Discrimination can never be "better for the society" either as discrimination is not 'useful' in the first place. It's irrational, as simply follows from the definition of discrimination. Irrationality is not "better for the society" at all. You see, that implies an absolute. In Satenza's world view, all morality is subjective.

See, here is the thing. You have been stating that, in your hypothetical state, that one's freedom is subjected to whether they understand freedom. This, in itself, is a flawed process. In a state with no absolutes and individual sovereignty, who defines freedom? At some point something has to be solid. If I go down to the sandy beach and try to build a house, what will keep it there when the storm comes? At some point there has to be something that is not subject to change, or the system will fail. It will fail for many reasons, but foremost among them is that humanity is inherently imperfect and will not always do the right thing. If society removes one's status in society for "not understanding freedom", then the system has already failed because it now has a class of individuals that have no rights. If they have no rights, then the rule of law does not apply to them and the "free" class can do with them as they wish. If those individuals who "don't understand freedom" are removed from society, then the system is destined for failure because sooner or later there won't be anyone left in society but the one with the strongest will. Any system must have a foundation to be built on. That foundation cannot constantly shift back and forth or the system WILL fail. If the system fails, then it is flawed.

See, with this again, you are explaining a system of absolutes. "For the correct reasons" What is correct? who defines correct? If then, you define correct and require that people vote, only for the correct reasons, you are defining how people should vote. If that is the case, why bother holding a vote, just implement the law...Ahh, but that would define an absolute for society then wouldnt it, since they had no say in the decision. The problem there, would then be that society's absolute would be based off of your subjective morals. That's not utopia, that is authoritarian. Correct reasons being what is what they beleive to be best for society. What if they don't want to vote for the "correct reasons"? What if they decide that they will vote, based only on how much gas they had that morning? Example? Hmmm, ok. I passed gas three times this morning, so today when we go to vote on what is right and what is wrong, I am going to vote yes for the first three items and no for everything else.

So, if someone is in the society already and they commit murder, which many times is a crime of passion (aka not planned), then they would be removed from society. Still the same thing...you are saying it is an absolute

See, with this again, you are explaining a system of absolutes. "For the correct reasons" What is correct? who defines correct? If then, you define correct and require that people vote, only for the correct reasons, you are defining how people should vote. If that is the case, why bother holding a vote, just implement the law...Ahh, but that would define an absolute for society then wouldnt it, since they had no say in the decision. The problem there, would then be that society's absolute would be based off of your subjective morals. That's not utopia, that is authoritarian. Correct reasons being what is what they beleive to be best for society. What if they don't want to vote for the "correct reasons"? What if they decide that they will vote, based only on how much gas they had that morning?

So murder is an absolute then...i see, go on my young absolutist...tell me how you really feel...

See, with this again, you are explaining a system of absolutes. "For the correct reasons" What is correct? who defines correct? If then, you define correct and require that people vote, only for the correct reasons, you are defining how people should vote. If that is the case, why bother holding a vote, just implement the law...Ahh, but that would define an absolute for society then wouldnt it, since they had no say in the decision. The problem there, would then be that society's absolute would be based off of your subjective morals. That's not utopia, that is authoritarian.

See, this is where you lose me. By requiring society to only use harm for society as a measuring stick while voting, doesnt that make harm an absolute? If that is the case, then you do agree with absolutes and you would have to acknowledge that someone else's beliefs, based on absolutes, is totally valid. If it is not the case and each person can have their own interpretation of harm, then it totally invalidates the principle, because what I think is harm, you may not. So if I don't think it is harm and your opinion hold no more weight than mine, how can you tell me I am wrong. If society, through a voting process, defines what is harm, then you have a measuring stick that is constantly changing. If I murder someone and was convicted and sentanced based on society's ruling that murder is harm and next year society makes the ruling that murder is not harm, will I then be freed? If you were to say that murder is ALWAYS harm, then you are defining an absolute. If then, there is an absolute, you can not invalidate other's beliefs that are based on absolutes.