rob86

Why can't I edit posts anymore, geez that's annoying! Take a look at this, In August 1992, on a vacation in the Alps, he fell and struck his head against a radiator.On Friday July 17, 2009 Benedict was hospitalized after falling and breaking his right wrist while on vacation in the Alps. You think the guy would take a hint! Don't go to the Alps, man!

Well inverse_bloom, he is 82 years old! Being 'young', I rarely worry about falling down. I slip on the ice, fall down stairs, trip over rocks while jogging, and go on with my life like nothing happened. My grandmother on the other hand, who is about the same age as the Pope, tripped on something while walking around at a grandma's pace and was out of commission for months, and she was "lucky" to heal so fast! When she stubs her toe and almost falls over, it's like a near death experience for her. It's hard for me to imagine what it's like, but old people are quite frail and falling down is serious stuff. I guess that's why they took him to the hospital. At first I was like, he fell over and they rushed him to the hospital? What a wimp! But then I remembered he was old and fragile!

It's the controversy surrounding the study of intelligence and race that interested me more-so than the study itself. It sparked my interest when I was discussing the news article with someone and they immediately became offended and dismissed the research as a load of crap, purely because of the sensitive subject matter.So really, my thread wasn't about whether a race is more born with more of an intelligence handicap than others, but how the world would handle the whole situation if it were found to be true, if some highly esteemed scientist said it was true. It doesn't have to be a race related topic, it could be hair colour, or eye colour. I chose race because that's what that's where all the controversy is.I think it's _possible_ that someone with for example, brown hair is born with more potential to be intelligent than blonde hair. Anything is possible. What if it was somehow proven, would people accept it, or be offended and dismiss it as crap?How come I can't edit my posts anymore?! I wanted to add something.It doesn't have to be about intelligence either, it could be anything. I heard a couple days ago on the news that the Human Attractiveness depends on the positioning of the eyes for example. What if science could prove something like the most attractive person has a distance between the eyes of exactly ___mm. Would the world believe it, or dismiss the science?

In my language, this how I say Merry Xmas to most of my relatives: !@#$ off! Now that's some of the real Christmas spirit! Well I don't really say that, but I'd like to!

The topic of this thread was brought about because I just remembered some news I read a long time ago where science experiments showed results that one race was more intelligent than another, because of.. whatever, I'm not into biology. I can't remember what it said. They were studying brain and what makes it tick. I don't know whether the science was accurate or not, I don't even remember the races in question, I just remember what I wondered about at the time.There are a lot of things people say about people with different races, but one thing people are particularly sensitive about is intelligence. Nobody likes to be called "stupider". (Yes, that was a play on words). But what if one race did have more 'brain-power', would we as an international community accept the scientific facts? I know that the definition of intelligence is much debated, and there's no real consensus on what intelligence is, but let's assume it's simplified and more understood in the future. What would happen? A huge resurgence of racism and hatred? Would everyone just insult the scientists and call them racist quacks? Would we just ignore the results to be polite, the way we avoid saying something about a person with a disfigured face even though it's hard not to notice? The fact as I see it is, there's a good chance that not every race is made equal. Obviously, we're different in a lot of ways. Why not intelligence?I don't know what I'd think if some scientists said my race was the dumbest of them all. I guess I'd accept it? Tell myself it's just a generalization and it isn't representative of EVERYONE? Riot? I don't know, I guess I'd just joke about it and not take it too seriously and hope nobody else treats me poorly because of it!

RC toys seem to have become less popular with the rising popularity of more high-tech toys. I remember my first RC truck, it was an all-terrain monster truck. At that age, it was about the best present I ever could have imagined. Toys didn't get much better than that. Controlling a truck with a controller? Wow! I know I was impressed. I used to drive it all around, impressed by it's ability to traverse any terrain, including kicking up snow. I tied a trailer to it and towed things around. My dog liked chasing it too..I've always wanted to try some more RC toys, maybe a boat, but especially a plane. I was amazed that RC toys could drive around, you can imagine how controlling something that could fly would impress me. I think the RC planes are quite expensive, the ones for adults, not the 'toys'. Some day, I'll try them!

Sowubana, ninjani? Siyanamukela e Xisto. Did you know that language? Yebo? No?

Hello Kevin, good to see another Canadian around! It's aboot time! I live on the east side of Canada. Happy Holidays, eh!

I think Santa's website has a great theme. Normally I don't like bright themes, and on most sites I would hate those colours, but it fits the theme of the site well in my opinion. In fact, one of the reasons I enjoy browsing the website is because of it's lively and cheery atmosphere. The theme makes it pleasant to look.

According to divorcerate.org, divorce rate in Japan is 27%. I wonder what the divorce rate will be with video game characters? It would be interesting to see who's happier with their marriage, a real couple or a semi-real couple. Did anyone watch the wedding video? I don't feel like wasting my time with it, but did want to know if it was a real wedding. There's no way I could ever 'accept' this as being normal though. In some weird way, I can understand a person falling in love with this perfect woman. I'm not insulting the people that do. A quick look on Google shows that this is not an isolated thing. Men are taking their Nintendo's to bed, to the bath, their real wives are getting angry. People fall in love over the internet, so it's not so outrageous to think that these men become attracted to a beautiful video game character who was designed to have an attractive personality. However, these people should admit that real life marriage with a game character -- carrying around a Nintendo DS -- just isn't normal. A person like this is either making a mockery of marriage, or needs mental help.

Can anyone find me a picture of the case? The OCZ/NZXT ATX Case. I tried googling it, but I didn't find it. I don't know what I'm looking for, it's all a bunch of capital letters to me, I don't know what's a brand or a model or anything..

What about Jagged Alliance 1 or 2? Older games, but I really liked them. Surprised you didn't mention them though, maybe you already tried them. They're called "x-com with personality". I've never tried x-com, I was going to try UFO but it takes so long for me to download anything. In regards to Glest, it's insanely difficult the first few times but once you "get it", it's simple to win.. nice looking free game, but kind of boring game singleplayer for me. First few games I played I was like, "Wth, this is too hard?" then when my skill increased to defend against their annoying attacks, I attacked and literally all I did was just try to corral all of my units into the enemies base and they obliterated it without even a shred of tactics. Boring!A game series I really liked, which apparently works on Wine according to some fan forums (but personally I haven't been able to run it ). is Close Combat. I had it running on Wine, the graphics were weird, but apparently this isn't normal. If you like tactical war games, then this is great fun and the system requirements are really low. What I liked about these games is that one, they load quick, they play quick, and they're fun. A typical game lasts about 15 minutes, The AI is challenging, the morale model is realistic, there are lots of mods. I have CC3 and CC5 - CC3 is the Russian Front, and there are lots of open terrain to fight on and winter maps. CC5 is Invasion Normandy, obviously set in Normandy with lots of hedge fighting (i prefer the open terrain and hills of Russia, but some prefer hedges.. ). There's definitely reason to keep your soldiers alive in this game, as they gain experience and resources are limited, which is something I like in strategy games. The biggest improvement CC5 has over CC3 is a campaign mode. You can choose which areas of the map you want to to fight in. Both are fun and worth having though, if you like the game.The games is certainly showing it's age graphics wise, but there's nothing else like it. I've looked all over for modern games that could rival the gameplay of Close Combat, and I can't find any. It's a great series.

It's $969CAD and called a "Gaming PC" by the small shop that's selling it. I guess the store owner is trying to compete with the bigger stores by building it a little different than FutureShop, which is about the only other store around here I can find that sells desktop PC's. I couldn't find anything with a better than ATI HD4650 graphics card at FS. An ATI HD4870 is about $300, ATI HD4650 is about $100, so that apparently makes up a big chunk of the price. If I have to choose, it seems better to spend money on graphics than fancy DVD's though. I imagine I would be using Linux anyway, so that would cut down on RAM usage a lot. Windows 7 would have to be damn good to tear me away from Linux now, and I'm not expecting to be too impressed by it.

I've been reading the replies, sorry for not replying I haven't been neglecting the help! What does everyone think of this computer, for my needs. I want to play games, that's about it. I mean I obviously want to do other things, like run Cubase-ish things, or Photoshop-ish things, but I've been surviving with 512RAM up until now and have had no major complaints. I've never actually run out of RAM doing what I do normally, except when I was converting images in ImageMagick. Does anything stand out as being bad? I don't want to get ripped off, ya know. I don't know much about motherboards or processors these days, and don't really have time to google everything. Here are some concerns I have about it. For the price, it seems to have a better graphics card than I expected. I was really looking for one with a 4670 as was recommended, but stumbled on this. I'm thinking there has to be some kind of a trade-off, because most computers with comparable prices come with at best, HD 4650, at worst, some Intel thing. What is it? Less RAM? No Lightscribe? I also notice that it doesn't have "HD Audio" which I know nothing about. Is this a big deal? I don't plan on having a very fancy sound system any time soon, so I'm wondering if I should even care that the soundcard is just basic. What about Lightscribe? Do people actually use Lightscribe after the initial gimmick wears off? I don't want to miss out on playing with some new modern PC feature, because it's really sucking me in, wanting to witness a disc have an image etched on it, but I have to be realistic here. I can't see myself using Lightscribe disks very often. Should I be concerned that it's DDR2 RAM and not DDR3? Is 4GB enough, or would I be kicking myself for not getting at least 6GB? Adding a bit more ram isn't the end of the world though, so no big deal there. The HDD seems to be about average, most PC's I see are 1TB. Oh, I forgot about all the other things like card readers. The fact that it doesn't even mention a card reader is disturbing, I thought they were standard on all. There's no picture, so I don't know if it's not included, or they just didn't mention it. Hmm.. 6+2 USB ports seems below average too, it's actually less than my PC now. However I'm only using two or three ports, so maybe plugging a few things in the back instead of the front isn't THAT inconvenient. Thanks for the help guys, I appreciate it!

Haven't been playing this much lately, as it gets kind of slow and un-enjoyable when I have around 40 dwarfs. I'm hoping to get a new PC soon, and will try it out on that. I hope it runs faster. I wasn't done with the game! I wanted to see what other nobles would come along and play with magma. I haven't even seen a siege yet!

I used to read a lot years ago, but as the Internet got more interesting, I stopped reading before bed, heck, I stopped going to bed! I'm thinking that I should start reading a bit more, something other than Wikipedia (Heh, anyone else a Wiki addict like me?) and short stories seems like a good place to kick-start my interest in reading. Does anyone have any suggestions? Preferably something that's well known and available online. I'll read just about anything, from horror stories like Edgar Allen Poe's (I've only read tell-tale heart and Cask of Amontillado) to classic "children" stories. Something a little more mature than Green Eggs and Ham though, please!

Sounds like it's going to be another disaster, not a financial disaster mind you, but an embarrassingly bad interpretation of Sherlock Holmes. Action packed? This is Sherlock Holmes, man known for his wit and intelligence, not an action star like Jet Li or Arnold Swartzeneggar. I suppose they'll take the standard hollywood formula of throwing in some guns, naked women and special effects and ruin another classic! They ALWAYS do that. They butchered the Get Smart movie I was long anticipating, squeezing out every ounce of humour and charm, and put in Anne Hathaway and guns. They did it to The Day The Earth Stood Still too. I was left in awe by the thought provoking original, and left wishing I had my life back after the FX-heavy remake. Can't blame them though, it does make money.

Did news of the N.B. chainsaw murderer make it to where you live jlhaslip? The young man who went berserk and decapitated his elderly neighbours a few years ago? It was big news here, after he murdered the couple, he successfully crossed the border into Maine with a bunch of weapons, and a bloody chainsaw. I'm not sure what happened to him, he faded out of the news, I think they found him mentally insane. What about the man who decapitated another man on a bus in Manitoba? I can think of two other recent 'random' attacks in N.B., I think one African young man was paralyzed in a racist assault, another man severely beaten for his money. I used to think Canadians were civilized, that life-threatening crime wasn't a major concern here, but apparently we have a lot of violent psychopaths running around too. I'm starting to worry I'm too careless about my safety, having lived in a what I thought was a safe area for so long, I've never really feared for my life, or worried about someone stabbing beating me up for my money, I think if I ever visited New Yawk, or Los Angeles, or Detroit or something, I would be murdered the first day due to my naivety. Lovely evening for a stroll in the back alleys carrying $2000 of cash in my pocket, eh? I did watch Rumble in the Bronx a couple times, so hopefully I have some self defense skills.

What is personality? It's that word you use when you don't want to sound like a chauvinist pig. It's definition is abstract, and only understandable at the quantum level. For example, a man will often say to a beautiful woman, "Sure, you're beautiful, but looks aren't important to me like they are with other men, it's your personality I'm really attracted to". By some unexplainable phenomenon, the woman's personality will 99.9% of the time apparently match the man's idea of a perfect woman almost exactly; loving, faithful, hates ballet, etc. The complexity lies in the fact that the woman's personality is in reality about as amiable and pleasant to be around as a dog turd in the middle of a sidewalk.

I'm not sure what kind of guitar FX apps are on Linux, I tried a few on Windows but I could never get them to work right, the latency was really bad and made it unusable. Maybe my sound card wasn't good enough. I've never tried Rakarrack.

I think I saw this android before, maybe in the news, and if I remember correctly, the body was designed by that company who makes the realistic sex dolls with realistic anatomy. I can't remember the name.. but really, the technology isn't too far off to make something along these lines. They've already got the realistic body, which I don't doubt is already selling well for a high price, the Le Trung guy obviously has the sensors working, some arm movement, voice. Sadly for this poor Android and it's sisters, I can definitely see it's first job in the history of our world being a disgraceful one. I can imagine people in the future, studying our generation. "The first Android was made in the early 2000's, and almost immediately was mass produced for sexual pleasure. Robotics technology made little progress for a few decades, reasons to this day are known only to the scientists of that era." Why didn't they give the android a more, I don't know, stereotypical female Asian sounding voice? I think it would have improved it.. it sounded so unrealistic when it talked.I wonder about this Le Trung guy, because I'm almost certain he must become really obsessed with his work like anybody would. Spending all your time with a robotic female that you built to fit your idea of perfect, with an attractive appearance, I can't help but feel the guys going to develop some mental issues!By the way, has anyone seen any of the Twilight Zone episodes with androids? I can't remember them all, but I think there were a few. I sing the body electric was one. Another one is "Steel", which is being remade into a movie starring Hugh Jackman. Oh yeah, "The Lonely", "In His image"..

FL Studio isn't really just MIDI composing software. It's way more powerful than that. It's really good though of course, provided you can get it working on Linux, which frustratingly enough I can't! You may not be a guitarist, but Guitar Pro is an excellent MIDI composing software and there are tons of tablature files on the web. (.gp3 etc) If you're looking for a free alternative, TuxGuitar is pretty much the same thing, supports GP files but is free for Linux users! I used it to learn some piano tunes, and I sometimes use it for composing midis. It's designed for guitarists, with addons like guitar tuners, options like slides, bends, vibrato, harmonics, etc.. but if you happen to know what the words mean, this only means it's got more stuff to work with, if you don't you just avoid the extra buttons, it's not a problem. It's quite powerful software, the toolbar can be intimidating with a whole bunch of music symbols (Tupleto, Tied Notes, Piano Pessismo.. stuff like that). Don't let the Guitar in the name scare you off, it's good. Of course, you have to have some musical knowledge, either with Piano or Guitar. I mean, you have to know what notes are and stuff.. or you won't know what to click on to make music. FL Studio and LMMS are little more lenient here, they're relatively easy to use. It's a lot easier and faster to compose something in one of those two than any MIDI software, in my opinion.I don't use MIDI stuff often, so I can't really remember what all is out there. I had a few free ones on Windows, but not much on Linux, yet. Some aren't very impressive, and really just do basic stuff. Tux Guitar is much, much better. You might like LMMS, we've been discussing it in another thread here. It's meant to be like FL Studio but OSS and free. Not quite in the league of FL Studio, but not too bad for free software. It's a lot more fun than MIDI with better sound quality. Midi's are pretty dull sounding, MIDI technology has it's uses, for recording electronic drums, or from a keyboard.. but composing with MIDI.. not too great. If you do insist on using MIDI, add some reverb to the percussion, it improves the sound a little bit. It's still cheesy and fake sounding, but it's a little less cheesy and fake sounding. Maybe you can get sound fonts or something to improve the way Midi's sound? I'm not sure.. I never did too much with MIDI. Have you tried Hydrogen 2? It's an "Advanced Drum Machine" for linux. It deals entirely with percussion (obviously) but it's fun to play with if you like drums at all. Looks well designed. In all of the MIDI editing software I've tried, even Tux Guitar, percussion is a pain to do. You have to go make "chords" out of different drums, layering different "notes" (not really notes, but that's how it works in MIDI) and it's really annoying. Editing percussion in FL Studio is of course a breeze, you get what you pay for! Hydrogen 2 ADM's features would only be a small part of the stuff FL Studio can do.If you're feeling adventurous, there's an Indian Classical Music software called SwarShala which let's you compose Indian style music. The demo lets you use a few popular Indian instruments, it's not too bad for a bit of fun and learning. Personally I think it's pretty neat but there's a big price tag on it, so I've never tried the full version. If you're using Ubuntu, you might have to work a bit to get MIDI working unless you're lucky and it works already. I had to install TiMiDiTy I think before MIDI's would work.

I installed the latest version of wine, but now I'm having trouble with wine-gecko. When I first ran FL Studio, a window popped up and let me install wine-gecko, but it was going slow so I figured I'd do it later. I can't get that to pop up anymore, and my attempts to manually install wine-gecko failed. Maybe I'll figure it out later..

The main drawback of the BOSS BR-600 is definitely the small storage capacity. It's only like what, 128mb? I can't remember, but there's no room at all to store many full songs. It only supports 1GB cards max, I can't bring myself to buy a $60 1GB card available from Roland when they are selling 8GB cards for $20 in the computer store. Nobody sells 1GB cards anymore. I use it for a practice tool which it does really well, record a few rhythm tracks, loop it, jam for hours.. If I was going to do some serious recording, I'd probably get something more powerful. I'm not too fond of recording directly to a computer because of all the wires everywhere, and the acrobatics involved in doing anything. I'm constantly yanking my headphones out of the socket, or knocking things off the desk with a guitar, breaking my back trying to stretch and reach a guitar pedal on the floor with my hand, pulling a muscle trying to stretch that extra inch to reach the record button with the mouse. Then sometimes, I want to throw some keyboards in, I have to set it on my lap.. constantly balancing it from falling over, how uncomfortable is that! In theory, there's probably some way to organize things a little more intuitively, with longer cables but still. Organization was never my strong point.You should do some more guitar-related posts, It'd be great to see some posts like that this one going on around here more often. What kind of stuff do you play? Rock? Blues? I was working on a guitar related website actually, but I got distracted and nothing really came of it.

I was disappointed that FL Studio didn't work so great with Wine. It crashes when I try to save things. It renders it pretty much useless to me. I often miss being able to use it, but I don't want to boot up Windows just for it. My friend who I mentioned in my earlier post had even worse luck, and couldn't even get it started with Wine. I had a lot of fun bragging about my good fortune until I realized it wasn't working quite as good as I thought it was. In general, I find the music software on Linux pretty limiting. I don't think professional musicians ever use Linux for this stuff do they? I always hear about Mac and Windows software, never Linux. I've certainly never seen any pre-built computers in music stores with Linux software. I prefer hardware to software anyway, whether it's recording, mixing, or using a synth, but of course, it costs a lot more so it's more of a dream of mine to have a studio of high end equipment than a reality.