dwarfie76

Indeed. J.S. Mill's "On Liberty" is one of the works I base my own philosophy on. The other being Holyoake's "Principles of Secularism".

But what is "good" and what is "bad"? We don't live in a black and white world and what might cause joy in one person may cause suffering in one hundred. No single act can be considered "good" or "bad". We can only consider the varying degrees of happiness or suffering that it may cause.

I love the first cutscene where the duke kicks the monkey. I love the new diving gear and crab stuff. Weildable cooking implements rock. Having a bank in Lumby is cool. And with the shop there too it's now better than the cooking guild.

Exactly... playing a female character is no more a reflection on my latent transvestitism than reading a book with a female protagonist would be.

Fair enough. Like you I was curious to see how far your beliefs extended. That's where I'm having trouble too. What is the logic of the anti-abortion mindset. Why is it morally or ethically wrong to abort a fetus - even a perfectly healthy one? My logic may well be based on a premise that's unappealing, but it's still a logical argument.

Agreed, I made a couple of hundred K selling pineapples, lemons and oranges at the gnome tree this morning. LOL, kinda funny since you can talk to the barman and he sell you lemon and orange 8) That's what I figured, and pineapples are free for the picking on karamja. And if people are silly enough to stand around yelling "Buying lemon 5k" instead of exploring the game more, then far be it for me to get in the way of how they want to play.

Not being renowned for tact and diplomacy, yes - more than likely I would. However we're not talking about retrospectively aborting people who have already been born, are we? Appealing to emotion is a pretty flawed argument, especially when it involves a logical contradiction. Oh I agree, there are plenty of other options. Putting the baby up for adoption would be my preferred one in an ideal world. The aim wasn't so much to get people to choose between P or Q, but to try and draw out the reasons why people believe abortion to be so wrong. The usual answer being along the lines of that it prevents a life from developing to it's fullest potential. My example illustrated that having the baby would also prevent the life of the baby that the couple would have had 8 or 10 years down the track from developing to it's full potential. And "quality of life" is hardly a "vague term" when it is univerally used and the meanings agreed upon by healthcare professionals and economists alike. The contributing factors of quality of life are the foundations of most planning decisions made by government agencies. But for the sake of this argument I was referring to quality of life in relation to the ability to live a full and healthy life and be able to take advantage of the same social and economic opportunities as their peers. To be able to be fulfilled according to Maslow's heirarchy. Another hypothetical to further illustrate the point: A couple find out that their unborn child suffers from a rare disorder that, should it be born, would see it suffering from severe mental [developmentally delayed]ation and severe physical abnormalities that will require extensive and expensive therapy for the duration of it's reduced life expectancy of fifteen years. Should they have this child, the couple will no longer be in a position to be able to afford the family of five they had planned on as their finances will now largely go on medical bills and all their time will be taken up caring for their severely disabled child, and by the time he/she finally dies a merciful death after a life of pain and misery the couple will be beyond childbearing age. What do you do? Abort the child who has nothing to look forward to but a life of pain and a premature death and allow the couple to raise the three happy, healthy children they were looking forward to? Or not?

Yes, he's rude and obnoxious and getting traded for runes as soon as I manage to finish this quest.

Agreed, I made a couple of hundred K selling pineapples, lemons and oranges at the gnome tree this morning.

OK, caught plenty of rats... got no spices. Some sort of trick to it, or just a waiting game?

I play a female character. Get a ton of propositions from teen (and probably younger) boys. It's always fun to see their reactions when I tell them I'm a 30yo bald dude instead of the hottie they might be imagining.

Why? Why is bringing a child into the world only to have it live a life of suffering preferable to not bringing that child into the world in the first place? If a pair of highschool sweethearts find themselves pregnant, isn't it better to abort, finish school and university, establish careers and save some money, then have more children than drop out of school and try and raise a child on whatever you can scrape together? I mean, the same number of children will be born, just in the first option they will have a much better quality of life than the second. I guess it depends on what you feel is important in life. Raising the standard and quality of life of your fellow man, or doing what the church tells you.

Yeah, all those fourteen year old rape victims should have simply insisted their attackers wear a condom.

Who are we to decide that it's not?

Well, she had to tell him sometime. And it's not exactly the sort of information that tends to bring men running to a woman's door. Whatever her past mistakes might have been she's accepted them and is trying to make a go of being a mother to her two children. She also has a right to try and find a life partner who will make her happy. However, I don't think your seventeen year old friend is neccessarily mature enough to deal with the prospect of becomming an instant dad. I know I wouldn't have been at seventeen. If he can't handle it - and I don't think many people would think badly of him for not wanting to - then he should be open and honest about his reasons. He hasn't done anything wrong and there's no reason why the two of them can't remain friends after the fact. However, I do know some guys who became fathers at 16, 17, 18 years old and managed very well, so he might decide that this is what he wants given time. But honesty and respect are probably the two key issues here. Without them there is nowhere to go but separate ways.

I got burnt the same way. Used the same password I used to use in runescape in here. Unaware until I found my account had been accessed of a vulnerability in phpbb (the freebie software this forum runs on) that allows the password hash for any user to be obtained and cracked at their lesiure. So use a unique password in game, make it longer than 8 characters and a combination of letters and numbers. Because although runescape itself is pretty secure, other places where you enter you passwords are not.

As is not using the same password anywhere else, like here. I recently found my account had been accessed. No spyware or keyloggers on my system, I couldn't work out what was going on, until I read about a vulnerability in phpbb run forums that will allow you to access a user's password hash and crack it at your lesiure. I'd used the same password here as I had in runescape. Thankfully my bank pin prevented everthing except the rune off my back from being stolen. Use a unique password as well as being random.

I was wandering around a while back when I get told to follow this guy and he'd tell me something. Curiosity piqued I duly followed. When we got to a nice deserted area he told me he could turn addy armour into rune and that I should bring him all my addy armour. Time to play scam the scammer. I told him to wait, and went back to the bank and grabbed my rune, then went back to the scammer and told him that I didn't need him to do it for me because someone else already showed me. Well, that got him interested (curiously he was trying to scam me into believing that you could turn addy into rune, yet believed me when I said someone already showed me how to do it.) "Tell me how" he demanded. "You said you already knew" I responded. So he said "Well there are lots of ways you can do it." After a bit of bickering I eventually told him that you need Zamorak Wine. Off we traipsed up to the chapel. He grabbed, I closed the door... the inevitable happened.

There's absolutely nothing like slogging your guts out for the day digging in the yard or carving up firewood... and having someone hand you an ice cold beer at the end of it. That moment when the first sip of sweet sweet beer hits the back of your throat is as close to heaven as I'm ever going to get.

Water usually won't do any long term harm as long as it gets a chance to dry out before any electrons hit it. I upended a very large cup of coffee all over my thinkpad a few months ago, while it was switched on. It fizzled and died. But I pulled it apart, dried off all the components under the hand drier in the bathroom, put it back together and crossed my fingers. Typing this message on the same machine right now.

That wasn't very kind... No, but it was certainly deserved.

Not a fan from a desktop machine. But an actual fan that sits on the desk - for cooling humans instead of machines. If you use it to blow air over the machine, enough will circulate in and over the circuitry to (hopefully) keep the motherboard from overheating.

Could be an overheating issue. Take the case apart and make sure that it's not filled with dust or fluff that could be impeding the airflow around the circuitry. Also check that the fan is actually working, it may be gummed up with dust or crumbs also. Laptops are prone to airflow issues because of the tight spaces. Grab a can of compressed air, you should be able to find one with a little hose on the end so you can direct the blast. Use that to clear out any foreign matter accumulated inside your machine.

That, my friend is what it known as a platitude.

Good work. I'm a member of the Australian Libertarian Society and the Liberal Democratic Party Last time I sat down and looked into the American political system, their Liberals were very different to that of Australias. IIRC, their Liberals are our Labour (or something like that). I'll have to dig up the information to be certain. That would be correct. Although they use the small "l" liberal as more of a general descriptior rather than indicating membership of a political party like our big "L" Liberals here. However, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) is not the same as the Liberal Party (LIB). I am not a member of the political party that currently forms the Australian federal government.