Necromagus

I like how in America 18 year olds are considered mature enough to get their legs blasted off in the desert yet not mature enough to enjoy alcohol... Over here the drinking age is 16 for beer and wine, 18 for anything stronger. Coffeeshops only sell to 18 and over. Over the past few years there have been some isolated incidents that have led the government to crack down on stuff like alcohol advertising on TV and the selling of breezers in supermarkets. The main problem seems to be is that parents are too lax. To be honest, I'd rather have my 17 year old child getting high than getting drunk though...

Considering the franchises Bioware has right now... it could be a massive three way nerd civil war as Fallout, KOTOR and Baldur's Gate fans fight in wave after wave of guerilla combat to see their franchise get the MMO treatment.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/tees/7057812.stm The music industry should adapt to the internet era rather than trying to fight it. The big record labels are pricing themselves right out the market by overcharging for CDs while at the same time internet radio and services like iTunes are giving new exposure to musical talent independent from their corporate control. As long as CDs are overpriced and musical artists are pushed onto the radio and TV for their marketability rather than their talent, people will look for their music elsewhere. The record labels should have realized that ten years ago. They're quickly making themselves obsolete and don't seem to be willing to do anything about it.

I'm still upset that Doug Stanhope got too lost in the bureaucracy to continue his campaign. I'd've voted for him on the debates alone, just to watch the 'real' politicians cower as they're confronted with common sense in stead of the usual framework of corporate talking points.

I couldn't imagine living in a place like California, with 30+ C temperatures even now. I love the mist here when coming out of a bar late at night. The canals are lined with old fashioned street lights lit with bright yellow bulbs. On a proper foggy night it's like there's spheres of yellow light disappearing off in every direction.

http://www.abcnews4.com/news/stories/1007/465601.html Seems relevant enough to this topic...

No Zelda games? Shame on you :shame:

Well, in medieval times football was hooliganism. They were basically just massive semi-organized gang wars between feuding families or towns. The games were generally so violent that several kings and religious leaders tried to ban them.

If you're really my friend, you'll tell that shady looking Italian type that I can't make this week's payment for me

The full bit is a few lines longer, but I don't really feel like typing it all out.

Well, if you checked the link above the picture... he had been huffing gold spray paint, and was arrested when he walked into a shop to buy more.

If they just wanted to beat the crap out of each other, it wouldn't be a problem. However, hooliganism also causes millions of euros in property damage each year. During the 80s, when hooliganism was at its height, gangs would often descend upon a town on the afternoon of a big game, steal everything that wasn't nailed down, watch the game, beat up whoever was in their sights, then vandalize everything between the stadium and their ride back home. Furthermore, hooliganism is often associated with hard drug use, and the hooligans of certain clubs (Lazio Roma comes to mind) have ties to militant rightwing extremist groups.

When people are discussing musicians or artists in general, eventually somebody always seems to bring up someone who everybody agrees died too young. Everybody always seems to agree that it's some sort of massive tragedy. However, I think that dying young is actually great for one's career. When a musician dies at 30, there will be an endless amount of speculation of what they could've achieved if only they had lived to grow older. However, people also won't see the ravaging effects of a slowly fading career and old age. If Michael Jackson had died in 1992, I think he'd be much better off in a certain way. People would only remember him for the peak of his musical achievement, without having to watch him become a massive joke because of the lawsuits and the theme park mansion he built for himself. How would you know that Jimi Hendrix wouldn't end up doing Superbowl halftime duets with Elton John or selling replica guitars on home shopping channels? George Carlin was once one of the sharpest, most viciously funny comedians out there. However, in the last ten years all he seems to be doing is building shows and writing books that are essentially just rehashing his old material without adding anything new. Ars longa, vita brevis (Art lasts, life is short) seems fitting here. When you're a true artist, it's all about legacy. It seems that in a lot of cases, that legacy seems to suffer a lot from spending too much time in the public eye. From Mozart on however, every artist that died "before their time" always seems to achieve some sort of status that places them one step above those who died of old age.

If I had children, I'd take their media devices away if they tried to listen to bad music :-w...

Heh, I loved the choir bits in Prince Igor when I was young, it was the only reason I listened to that song... probably had a fair bit of influence on my development in musical taste. Panzer Ag - Machinegun Gogo

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/ - A convenient little website that gathers the arrests and mugshots of the most bizarre cases in the American justice system, along with dirt on pretty much every celebrity out there. Some of my favourites: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0721051gold1.html (I guess they didn't make those I-Doser things in "Gold Spraypaint") http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/ye ... ards1.html http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/11 ... uice1.html They have a huge archive. Not just bizarre arrests, but also historic cases. Anything from Rosa Parks' mugshot to Dr. Kevorkian.

I don't mind piercings on a girl... since we're already quoting comedians in this thread, I'll just add Doug Stanhope's rebuttal: "If a girl is willing to put chunks of metal into her own face, imagine what she'll let me do to her."

Trackmania is a lot of fun if you're looking for a racing game. As for FPS... Call of Duty, Unreal Tournament, Quake, the usual list I guess...

http://portal.wecreatestuff.com/ 2D Portal, for those of you who are into that, or can't afford/run the box

I never claimed the Iranians had a good heart. I really doubt anyone with a good heart could make it to the upper tiers of any national government. I merely said that the Iranians were smart enough not to hand their nuclear arms over to third parties or use them against America or at all. The nuclear arms race is cyclical. If Iran were to use its first nuke to immediately strike against a large population center in Israel or America, we'd look at a death toll of 1-2 megadeaths, tops. Immediate retaliation against all of Iran's major population centers would be good for about 15 megadeaths, depending on how aggressive the retaliation is. No matter of religious fundamentalism is going to be able to stand up against those numbers. My point is, any nuclear strike against America or Israel would immediately result in the complete and utter destruction of Iran. America, France, Great Britain and Israel would retaliate on a scale that would leave no survivors. If the death toll isn't enough to convince those religious nutjobs, they would still be justified in hitting them where it really hurt: Mecca and Medina. As for the killers remark... America is already practicing Mutually Assured Destruction on a small skill in its own twisted way by its lax gun control laws. Of course that comparison is a bit shaky due to scale, but the general idea is there: If I have a gun I don't have to be afraid of other people with guns. It's dubious on an individual level, but when you increase the scale to the point where the people are nations and the guns are nukes, it becomes a lot more stable. The Soviet Union and America had political semi-control over pretty much every country in the world and both sat on enough nuclear weapons to destroy each other three times over. Because of Mutually Assured Destruction, that never happened.

From all the angles they showed, I couldn't really tell. There was always one or more bodies blocking the exact moment.

What are you looking for? Strategy? FPS?

Combichrist - Enjoy the Abuse Really thought-provoking lyrics :-w

Bush recently said that Iran acquiring nuclear weapons would lead straight to World War 3. Of course this is an extremely suspect rhetoric, but with nine countries already having nuclear warheads ready to go (America, Russia, France, Great Britain, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel), would Iran really be the tipping point? Mutually Assured Destruction - The idea is pretty simple. There are so many nuclear weapons in the world that it would be impossible for one country to disable the nuclear capabilities of another in a single strike. If one nation would launch a nuclear strike at the other, the other nation would retaliate with such force that the attacker would come out just as damaged as the defender. The idea of Mutually Assured Destruction kept the Soviet Union and America going into all out nuclear war during the Cold War era. The Strangelove Scenario - Named after Stanley Kubrick's cinematic attack on the madness of nuclear proliferation. In the movie, Russia decides that the nuclear arms race becomes too expensive to keep up with. In stead of building more and more nukes to keep up the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction, they look for a new deterrent. They set up a system of sensors across their soil and link them to a supercomputer that's designed to set off a massive bomb armed with a nuclear payload with a halftime of 97 years, big enough to destroy the entire human race. The bomb has been designed to go off as soon as somebody tries to disable it. The upkeep is much cheaper than the cost of continuing a nuclear arms race. America has employed some highly dubious tactics in the past to try and keep other countries from developing a nuclear arsenal. In the 1970s the Pakistani PhD Abdul Qadeer Khan was employed in a Dutch uranium enrichment facility, where he gathered information on the development of weapons grade nuclear material. The information he gathered ended up not only in his homeland of Pakistan, but also in Libya, Iran and North Korea. He had been apprehended twice by the Dutch secret service, but his release was requested by the CIA both times because they wanted to continue monitoring him. In 1976 he suddenly disappeared to his homeland, out of their reach. Iran isn't stupid enough to sell weapons to anybody. Within six hours of a nuclear detonation on our soil, we'll know where that device came from. Thirty minutes later, that nation will cease to be a viable habitat for multicellular life. Identifying the source manufacturer for detonated fissile material is a science with a history that dates back to 1948, when we collected fallout from the Little Joe device via spyplane. Iran knows this. Ahmadenijad knows this. So the man isn't about to authorize the sale or donation of complete or armed weapon systems to anybody. Why shouldn't a sovereign nation own nuclear weapons no matter what flag they fly under? I really don't understand why we the Western Hemisphere Good Old Boy's Club has the right to tell any other nation or group of nations that they aren't allowed to have access to the exact same weapons we have for the past 62 years. Not only did America create nuclear weapons, but they used them. Twice. And neither use was directed towards a legitimate military goal. In fact, America delayed the Japanese surrender and accelerated its own nuclear destruction of Nagasaki. They even chose previously undamaged centers of human habitation so we could have 'virgin' targets for a proper Bomb Damage Assessment. And neither of those cities had a meaningful military presence. In my extremely cynical opinion, a nuclear-armed Iran would be the best thing for the Middle East. If Iran had a nuclear delivery system, it would force Israel to seriously negotiate for the first time in their history while dampening Teheran's rhetoric. Ahmadenijad is not a madman. He knows that the price of nuclear warfare in even its smallest capacity means death counts in the millions, if not outright destruction of his nation. The man is just as rational as you or I in that regard. Mutually Assured Destruction is and has for the past six decades been a marvelous deterrent to nuclear warfare. I can hardly see why it would cease to work with Iran.

Well, it sounds like you have more experience with IV breeding than I do... I just breed for moves and nature most of the time. Still need to find me a male Misdreavus. I couldn't have the patience some breeders have, going for the right nature, the right moves, good IVs and a Hidden Power of exactly the right type and at least 60 power. Of course this would be even more frustrating if you also had to deal with multiple abilities. On another message board some guy said he nearly threw his DS out of the window when he realized he had hatched a Bold Happiny with 31 in all IVs, but with Serene Grace in stead of Natural Cure.