All Posts by Jimmy_Scythe

And that's pretty much what fail is. I hope this helps...

I'm not voting this time around. If I do, I'm putting Ron Paul on the "other" section as a vote of no confidence. I don't really feel that either candidate this time around will benefit the American people.

Let's start with McCain. Here we have a man that served in Vietnam and was a prisoner of war. Sounds like he's got some balls right? Well, not anymore. The last time he ran the republican party questioned his sanity, due to his experiences as a POW, and then slandered him by claiming that he was taking care of an illegitimate black love child. BTW, McCain adopted a little orphan girl from Bangladesh and W muck rakers just took family pictures of this off color child out of context in order to sway racist voters. Thing is, McCain is STILL in the republican party!! I don't know about the rest of you, but I would have told the GOP to go fuck themselves after just one of those things. McCain took both and continued to be a complacent little lap dog. I wonder if it hurt when they removed his spine...

Obama, on the other hand, is probably the most talented and gifted politician any of us are likely to see in this generation. The problem is that he's the most talented and gifted politician that any of us are likely to see in this generation. He's slick and it's hard to take anything he says at face value. I honestly don't see him taking office and dismantling Homeland Security or disposing of the Patriot Act or removing any of the consolidated executive powers that have been accumulating over the past eight years of the Bush administration. Considering that Obama would be occupying a position that has traditionally been denied to African-Americans and the guarantee that there will probably be constant assassination attempts, removing any of the executive powers that are currently in place would be absolutely suicidal. The end result is a continuation of democratic lip service to change as they sit on the sidelines and let republicans continue to whittle away at our constitutional rights. There is a slight chance that we can leave Iraq gracefully if (when) Obama gets elected, but I'm not holding my breath.

The rest of you can argue over who's better for the job and talk about how conservatives / liberals are destroying this country and blah, blah, blah. The rest of us realize that this country was bought and paid for long before we were ever born.

As an afterthought: Isn't it interesting that there was so much venom directed at W. Bush but not one person took a shot at him? Sure, somebody shot Reagan, but out of mental illness and not politics. This is the reason we have a right to bear arms people. Politicians can ignore marches, petitions, sit ins, slogans, etc. it's much harder for them to ignore bullets. I guess we didn't hate W so much after all...

$3.99!!!???

Where I'm at it's $4.50 a gallon and further up north it's a full five dollars!!!

... lucky bastard....

the death and resurrection thing is actually pretty common in all theistic religions. Dionysus, Odin, Osiris, and so on, all died and returned according to their respective mythologies. This tablet neither confirms nor disproves anything.

Then you'll have to take baseball off of the list. Yes, there are parts of baseball that can be pretty physical. However, most of the action takes place when (sometimes more like if) someone actually hits the ball. The rest of the game is just waiting for something to happen. You have plenty of time to catch your breath before you need to swing, throw or run. The pitcher is probably the only person that could be considered to be getting a workout, but I've never seen one that looked physically exhausted before.

Originally posted by PureChaos

yes as said before hydrogen has its issues, it may be the future it may not, Or maybe it will just be all like minority report where the cars are electric and magnetic to go up buildings :)

Anyway the point is none the less that we need to get off of oil, be it a little at a time or large swoop. Start usuing ethanole and bio diesel(80% of what you use to make it actually become bio diesel) its cleaner and requires a highly less amount of oil. Was actually on dirty jobs recently , the guy who had the car got about 40 mpg and spends about 10$ to fill his tank (forget how much his tank is) and as noted its emissions are much cleaner and smells like fahitas.

Be it a eviromental issue or a economy issues getting off of oil is important no matter how ya swing it,

I oppose ethanol because that cuts into the food supply. Feeding people takes priority over driving. I do, however, support the production of biofuels from recycled sources such as used restaurant frying oil or agricultural waste.

I'm not so much about getting off of oil, there's enough oil under North Dakota to last us a couple hundred years at least, but more along the lines of driving down the price of gas. If enough people aren't buying petroleum, then the result is a surplus and a decrease in price.

Originally posted by nurgles  

what is HHO? i must have missed something.

Oxyhydrogen. It's two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen.Very flammable and corrosive to boot.

You aren't thinking to scale. If you look at some of the related searches you'll see that electric companies in the southwest have been using parabolic mirrors and sterling engines for a while now. If you mirrored a fifteen foot fiberglass satellite dish ( about 75% mirrored) and placed an appropriate sized sterling on it, you could probably generate about 10 to 14kw for quite a bit less than the cost of photovoltaic cells of the same capacity. You might even be able to get an added boost by adding a fresnel lens below the engine at the dish's focal point.

So I'm not a big environmentalist. I don't talk to trees. I don't wear hemp clothing. I eat meat. I own pets. I bath and shave regularly. I hold a job. You get the idea.

But every now and then, the green cult comes up with ideas that are... practical. And by practical, I mean they save you some money. Turning an old satellite dish into a solar trough for a sterling generator turns out to actually work. Growing your own vegetables in a garden or greenhouse to cut down on food expenses seems like a no brainer to me. And cutting fuel costs buy car pooling, using public transit, or riding a bike (distances of five miles or less) also makes a lot of sense. Unfortunately, alternative fuels are one of those things that don't fit the practical idea category.

The current darling of alternative fuels is hydrogen. Actually it's HHO. You can make this stuff relatively easily with simple electrolysis and all kinds of DIY cheapskates are doing just that in the assumption that this will make them free of $10 a gallon gas. If only it were that easy.

Let's start with the second thermodynamic law. Whenever you convert energy from one form to another, you lose some energy in the form of heat. In layman's terms, the electricity that you use to separate the hydrogen from water could just be used to power your car directly without any loss of power. With fuel cell cars, the commercial kind that convert hydrogen back into water to generate electricity, you lose even more power since it takes energy to make the hydrogen, then even more energy to create electricity. If you were powering your car on straight electricity or straight hydrogen you would be more efficient than a fuel cell car. Did I mention that a small amount of water is destroyed, never to come back? Yeah. There's also that. Check this out:

Water electrolysis does not convert 100% of the electrical energy into the chemical energy of hydrogen. The process requires more extreme potentials than what would be expected based on the cell's total reversible reduction potentials. This excess potential accounts for various forms of overpotential by which the extra energy is eventually lost as heat. For a well designed cell the largest overpotential is the reaction overpotential for the four electron oxidation of water to oxygen at the anode. An effective electrocatalyst to facilitate this reaction has not been developed. Platinum alloys are the default state of the art for this oxidation. The reverse reaction, the reduction of oxygen to water, is responsible for the greatest loss of efficiency in fuel cells. Developing a cheap effective electrocatalyst for this reaction would be a great advance.

The simpler two-electron reaction to produce hydrogen at the cathode can be electrocatalyzed with almost no reaction overpotential by platinum or in theory a hydrogenase enzyme. If other, less effective, materials are used for the cathode then another large overpotential must be paid.

The energy efficiency of water electrolysis varies widely with the numbers cited below on the optimistic side. Some report 50–70%^[2], while the theoretical maximum efficiency of the electrolysis of water is between 80–94%.^[3] These values refer only to the efficiency of converting electrical energy into hydrogen's chemical energy. The energy lost in generating the electricity is not included. For instance, when considering a power plant that converts the heat of nuclear reactions into hydrogen via electrolysis, the total efficiency may be closer to 30–45%.^[4]

But why not run your car on straight HHO? Well... For starters, it burns hotter than gasoline. H2 is used in wielding, normally when you want to cut solid steel. If you get the mixture of H2 going into your fuel injectors wrong, your engine block will melt like a pop sickle in a toaster oven. Then there's the fact that you'll be storing this stuff in a pressurized tank (several hundred PSI) attached somewhere on your car. Better hope you don't get into any accidents or you'll be engulfed in a horrifying, super heated, visually spectacular fireball that's hot enough to vaporize most metal alloys.

But if hauling around a potential hydrogen bomb doesn't bother you then the only thing you can do that might reduce your car's gas consumption is injecting hydrogen into your engine ALONG WITH gasoline. However, to do this you have to know your car and the physics behind this cold or you'll destroy your car and possibly be injured or even killed.

To be honest, I'd rather just convert my old Pontiac into an electric rather than take that kind of a risk. I can't imagine that the fuel cell cars that are currently being built will be any safer TBH.

Hate to break this to you guys but the intelligence quotient is just a number based on the average performance of just the people that take that particular test. The average IQ for a man is 90 while the average IQ for a woman is 100, but those numbers mean different things depending on the size of the sample and the time that the survey was taken.

As bone through nose stupid as most people are today, I don't think that an IQ of over 100 really means a as much as it might have in say... 1920. With the average intelligence of people today, you'd probably score genius if you can find your own ass with both hands

BTW, I took an IQ test when I was in Junior high, can't tell you which one, and I think I scored at or around 120. I'm not sure and I haven't been retested since. No surprise there. I stopped comparing myself to others a long time ago.

link's dead bro'

Personally, I think that Atlantica is gonna be the next big free MMO....

If you have a lot of machine and plenty of spare time then go with Supreme Commander. Be warned: This game will bring a mid-level PC to it's knees in short order. Also be warned: a full game can take upwards of three hours, I shit one not.

I'm also partial to the 40K Dawn of War series. I'm sure Starcraft 2 will be awesome, but Dawn of war does it's own thing and does it very well. Just make sure you buy all the expansions as well or you'll be missing out on a lot of what makes the game so replayable now. Namely the campaign modes and multiplayer campaigns.

I've only played the demo of Sins of A Solar Empire thus far. It's a nice game, but I have a lot of trouble keeping track of everything that's going on. The developers tried to design the maps so that players would only have to focus on a few choke points, but the logistical situation can be truly daunting. I'm sure I'd get the swing of it with a couple of days of playing, but the presentation is kinda dry and doesn't really compel me to play it. Still, It's getting a lot of love for a game that has no marketing so to speak.

It never ceases to amuse me that both the pro-gun and anti-gun movement is motivated by the fear of black men with guns.

Tyrants may use political maneuver or violence to gain power, but the tyranny doesn't truly begin until the population is defenseless.

Yep, downtown Baghdad has much more gun violence than any inner city in the U.S., but citizens can defend themselves.

Columbine, Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois University, they were all gun free zones.

You're a criminal that gets off by inflicting pain on whole families at a time, do you take door number 1? Or door number 2?

And the Japanese weren't the only people that understood this. China has 1/6th of the worlds population and the means to deliver military force to our land, but they choose to trade with us instead. Why is that?

Robbery and rape become way less appealing when it turns into a game of Russian Roulette.

If you're looking for MMOFPS games then you need to cruise over to Massive FPS. Be warned, there isn't a whole lot going on with MMOFPS games outside of Asia, so there isn't a whole lot going on at Massive FPS.

As for what I want out of an MMOFPS.... I really dig what they did with Field of Honor. It's basically FPS versus RTS with some players controlling a zerg-like insect swarm RTS style and other players controlling single marine units FPS style. Believe it or not, it actually works pretty well. Or maybe I'm just olde skool enough to still be able to appreciate the glee of strafing around huge hoards of enemies and spraying explosive death into the crowd without reloading.

I'm imagining a huge persistent world game like Savage 2 mixed with elements of DoTA.

Originally posted by Alekhin

The OP is obviously seeking the truth. And his questions are valid. I have my own beliefs on what life is about but won't expound on it here.

There are three fundamental questions that any person should ask about life:

1. Where did I come from?

Your parents. More to the point, you represent a link in a very long and fragile chain of events that have allowed life to continue.

2. Why am I here?

That is entirely up to you. Your life is short and that gives it meaning, but what you are supposed to do with your time is really your responsibility.

3. Where am I going after death?

The same place you were before your great grandparents were ever born. Being cannot contemplate not being. I was not for the space of about two minutes. I can't tell you what that was like because those two minutes were an instant transition for me. I was on, I was off, and I was back on again, but all I perceived were the two on states with no conscious sense of being connecting the two. I know that doesn't explain much, but try not thinking or being aware. You can't even do that when you're asleep. But that is what waits for you when you pass on.

 

Originally posted by Torak

Originally posted by Jimmy_Scythe

So I found myself in a discussion about religion the other day. For the record, I don't run around announcing to the world that I'm an atheist or insulting religious people at every opportunity. Yet, if someone asks me point blank about my religious leanings then I reply plainly and honestly. It's usually at this point that the bullshit occurs.

Once a religious person finds out that I'm an atheist they usually proceed to try and call me out on my "beliefs." I use scare quotes because atheism is the lack of belief altogether. I don't believe. I've tried to believe. At one time I really, really wanted to believe. But I don't believe.

This fundamental misunderstanding is what brings me to this topic. Theists always want non-believers to answer for their point of view. They demand explanations. The problem with this is that atheists don't have answers in regard to religion. Atheists only have question about religion that have never been adequately answered.

Here's a short list:

Where did God come from? This is a big one. This is a question so simple that most five year olds jump right on it. To clarify, if the universe is so large and complex that it requires an intelligence that is an order of magnitude more complex to design it, who made that intelligence? And who made the maker's, maker's, maker? This question leads to an infinite loop. As far as I'm concerned, this is the knockout punch. Theists go to great lengths to avoid this issue for a reason.

If God loves us so futher mocking much, why does he inflict pain and death on us? Pushing on past the first question, we reach for the all knowing / loving / powerful aspect. It's the Epicurean question. Is God willing and able to prevent evil? Your average theist will answer yes right off the cuff, but then why is there evil. Theists will then counter with man's free will which means that God is indeed unable and therefore not omnipotent. Theists will then revise their answer that God chooses not to interfere with man's free will which means that God is unwilling and therefor malevolent. You can have one or two, but not all three.

Why only one God? Why not a thousand, or even a million? Whenever this issue comes up I'm usually asked to prove that there is no God. But this cuts both ways. Why don't you prove that there are no other Gods than your God...? Exactly!

Why doesn't God heal amputees? God heals tumors, mental illness, blindness, deafness, paralysis, etc., yet no amputee has ever regrown a limb at a faith healers tent. WTF?!

And the questions go on from there. While different people have different reasons for being atheists, many of us simply don't believe because religion provides nothing but unanswered questions. It's that simple.

You are asking questions humans have been asking since we first conceived the notion of God(s)

Are you at conflict with religion or the concept of God or the ideal of spirituality? They are and at the same time are not interchangeable.

Most of your questions seem to grounded in religion. Religions are made by humans. Humans have no clue thus they are the least reliable as a source of information.

What does your heart tell you?

 

My heart tells me that WYSIWYG. I've seen enough of death to understand the truth of it. That doesn't mean that there is no God, just no afterlife. The two are not mutually inclusive. But if there is a God, then we get stuck at the first question.

The idea of spirituality is a little harder to dismiss depending on how you define it. If you define spirituality as a person's subjective sense of being or essence, then I don't have a problem with that and can't argue against it. I'm not a total nihilist after all. But if you define spirituality as some objective, metaphysical weight that imbues things with being, then I completely disagree.

So I found myself in a discussion about religion the other day. For the record, I don't run around announcing to the world that I'm an atheist or insulting religious people at every opportunity. Yet, if someone asks me point blank about my religious leanings then I reply plainly and honestly. It's usually at this point that the bullshit occurs.

Once a religious person finds out that I'm an atheist they usually proceed to try and call me out on my "beliefs." I use scare quotes because atheism is the lack of belief altogether. I don't believe. I've tried to believe. At one time I really, really wanted to believe. But I don't believe.

This fundamental misunderstanding is what brings me to this topic. Theists always want non-believers to answer for their point of view. They demand explanations. The problem with this is that atheists don't have answers in regard to religion. Atheists only have question about religion that have never been adequately answered.

Here's a short list:

Where did God come from? This is a big one. This is a question so simple that most five year olds jump right on it. To clarify, if the universe is so large and complex that it requires an intelligence that is an order of magnitude more complex to design it, who made that intelligence? And who made the maker's, maker's, maker? This question leads to an infinite loop. As far as I'm concerned, this is the knockout punch. Theists go to great lengths to avoid this issue for a reason.

If God loves us so futher mocking much, why does he inflict pain and death on us? Pushing on past the first question, we reach for the all knowing / loving / powerful aspect. It's the Epicurean question. Is God willing and able to prevent evil? Your average theist will answer yes right off the cuff, but then why is there evil. Theists will then counter with man's free will which means that God is indeed unable and therefore not omnipotent. Theists will then revise their answer that God chooses not to interfere with man's free will which means that God is unwilling and therefor malevolent. You can have one or two, but not all three.

Why only one God? Why not a thousand, or even a million? Whenever this issue comes up I'm usually asked to prove that there is no God. But this cuts both ways. Why don't you prove that there are no other Gods than your God...? Exactly!

Why doesn't God heal amputees? God heals tumors, mental illness, blindness, deafness, paralysis, etc., yet no amputee has ever regrown a limb at a faith healers tent. WTF?!

And the questions go on from there. While different people have different reasons for being atheists, many of us simply don't believe because religion provides nothing but unanswered questions. It's that simple.