dorbie

Clicking on links between whatever else you're doing hardly takes the effort & focus of WoW.

P.S. anyone who thinks this is just another hobby, I know college dropouts who dropped out because they discovered MMORPGs. I have had colleagues who spent almost every waking moment in them. I know otherwise serious people who maintain multiple WoW accounts and obsessed over the game. I know several people who quit cold turkey because they spent yet another weekend where EVERY waking moment with little sleep was spent in-game, and some of these people were married. Others having reached lvl 60 and raided available dungeons looked around in IF and saw almost everyone else was lvl 60 or near hunting for the same gear drops. These are COMMON stories and I think they are closer to the norm rather than the exception. Just go online and read about what it takes to actively participate in a high level guild and what these people think a minimum is for a 'serious' player. It is simply not accurate to say this is just video game playing or like any other hobby.

Since it's just a hobby, type /played on the WoW command line for each of your chars, add them up & post the total.

Yup, there's this really great Massively Multiplayer Game called life. The graphics are amazing. The AI is unbeatable too. If you're sitting playing any MMORPG instead of that you're a sucker. And I'm speaking as an ex-player who deleted a lvl 60 char in WoW more than a year before the Burning Crusade launched. It was fun at times but ultimately a hollow and pointless experience, that's despite having a professional interest and not being into it as much as most sad sacks. Seriously walk away people who advise you otherwise are the aforementioned suckers trapped in a Plato's cave of their own making and are to be ignored. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave Being in Plato's cave as a function of life's great mystery and the limits of one's intellect and experiences is one thing. To enter a cave within a cave and voluntarily manacle yourself to a literal manifestation of the same is quite possibly the dumbest thing a human being can do to their spirit. You will never get the time back that you burn in a MMORPG. Walk away!

Microsoft has completely screwed the pooch with Vista. Go back to XP, people will not be moving over any time soon, Vista will be the longest product transition in Microsoft's history, it may even outclass "Windows me" as a total clusterf*&%k. The major OEMs have already given in and put XP back as an option.

The theme is free shit for your kid, if they have to splurge on a costume.......

Sorry no, never felt the urge.

Just walk away now and you can have a life.

Too late did Doug learn that his foreskin had a purpose.

I've attached an image of the damage and a Google Earth placemark that orients 'up' to the direction of that view so you can see exactly where this is and the extent of the damage. P.S. use "Save As" if Google Earth can't open it from temporary internet files.

Did you see the video of the thing collapsing? There was a series of small explosions right at the base just as it was collapsing (like there were explosives planted there.) Thermite I tell ya, THERMITE!!!

Agreed, except for the 30k jump, it's about the visuals at 30k and the delay. I think every skydiver should do a helo or balloon jump at some point, (unless perhaps you're already a BASE jumper).

I'm with you on the B-17, I don't see the value. My jet jump was $85 and I got to exit first on a light load. You missed a popular one: Helicopter - $50 (?) P.S. if I had to pick ONE I'd do the 30k jump, night or not. (might be better during the day actually)

Was the boat for small jumpers only?

Yes it was your fault entirely.

Is he still dead? Sometimes these vampire bastards come back to life!

In the UK it seemed worse (at least the last time I was there). In the US cellphone use is prevalent but casual. In the UK I noticed way more people walking around making a big show of being on the phone, projecting their voice having an 'important' very public conversation. I don't know exactly what the cues were, it was more than just volume but it just ratcheted up the annoyance factor. This happens occasionally in the USA but it was off the charts in Britain. A buddy of mine caught someone having yet another 'power' conversation on the London Tube for everyone to hear. Instead of just tollerating it, he decided to repeat everything he heard really loudly. Naturally it made the dozey twat on the phone seem like an idiot for saying such things in public. In the end he got a round of applause from other passengers. It's funny what factors annoy us about other speaker's calls on the phone, context, volume, topic, or a perception that they're only doing something irritating (or exaggerating it) because they think it impresses people around them.

This accident is 100% your fault. There are many bumper stickers that would be more appropriate in this case, I'll leave them to your imagination.

And to think before we even have this fine safety device mandated by law we actually ENCOURAGE this dangerous activity with carpool lanes.

You'd best get on that right away and pass a law then. And while you're at it you should ban talking to passengers whilst driving, I mean that's some stupid shit right there. Gawd and skidiving, only a moron skydives, there's no need for it, that's some stupid shit IMHO. Skydiving is a privilege not a right you do understand that don't you? Of course it's all meaningless shit, and I have absolutely no RIGHT to tell you not to skydive, but screw you, I'll call it a privilege demagogue and get enough whuffos to ground your privileged ass because this is the land of the free, MY FREEDOM to tell your ass what you can & can't do. P.S. I don't want to hear any squealing from you once you're grounded, geeze you'd think skydiving was in the constitution or something, frikin daredevils.

The wing is flying forwards, the pilot is rotating backwards since they are both pivoting around a point between the pilot and the wing. If you see a good SAT you'll see a similar effect (there are a few shitty SAT videos that are more like spirals out there). This starts with a SAT: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7omi796EmeM

Existing copyright laws already did just that. The DMCA is a disaster of a law that has far reaching implications outside the trivialities of Hollywood's hogs. I would eviscerate the entire movie-making industry in LA if it meant we could get rid of the DMCA, it's that bad and that much more important than the business of the celluloid phonies. Of course that is not a prerequisite for getting rid of the DMCA, and it certainly wouldn't be a consequence of it. It just emphasizes what a terrible piece of legislation it is and anyone who thinks this is just about copy-protecting DVDs has no idea what the ramifications of the law are nor any idea of just how ineffective it truly is at that objective. The solution according to the MPAA is to go all out on even more draconian and frankly technically insane copy protection methods that are not merely about protecting casual copying but are an earnest attempt to keep the genie in the bottle even from those who might have extremely sophisticated equipment. It is doomed to failure but will cost everyone except the MPAA many billions of dollars. It almost makes it a pleasure to watch them completely screw up the HD business as everyone else who touches it succeeds. That's mainly format related but boy, we're looking at some lean years here where it COULD have exploded by now. Serves these dinosaurs right. They're too busy trying to own the content to realize that it's worthless unless they can sell it, 100% of nothing is still zero.

Raw ginger is supposed to do the trick. Mythbusters tried this and it actually beat out dramamine for motion sickness in their experiments. So try raw ginger root, the kind you get with sushi. Eat a bit and sucking on a bit.

Meh, the exception that proves the rule. Besides there's cultural contamination that oozes over on the televox. I never heard it used as such in the three decades I lived in the UK, privilege was almost exclusively used in a class/wealth related context. In the USA more often than not it relates to someting typically taken for granted to emphasize that it might be taken away. It is used with prevalence in relation to all sorts of "privileges" by every legislator, lobbyist and servant in a peak cap. Of course for American kids and prisoners life consists entirely of privieges that can be capriciously withdrawn on any whim so they are well conditioned for the 'freedom' of the nanny state. Maybe it is a sign of the times.

I've had friends die in traffic accidents so I really don't care for your hackneyed grizzled cop routine. When I was in primary school about 10 years old we had a British bobby come in and give us the "these are the hands that have held the bodies, these are the hands that have knocked on the door to give the bad news" speech. It was telling that even at the tender age of 10, an entire class of 30 was supremely unimpressed by that crap. I could just as well argue that your excessive exposure makes you supremely unqualified to make a balanced judgement. I've heard some anecdotal fucking horseshit from British cops on traffic safety that really jades me to this kind of 'expert' opinion, one particularly memorable encounter was with a lying rat who pulled me over on my motorbike and started giving me the routine about how dangerous they were and if I skidded on a bike I was dead (he was that clueless about bike handling) right before he threw 3 alternate charges at me based on a lie and his opinion. I respect good cops, but you get one vote the same as everyone else. It's already been established that the UK has outlawed talking on a handset. Some studies also concluded that hands free was not much better. But they don't account for the big picture, like rushing to get home or stress or distraction over wondering about the call you missed, or of pulling over at random times to take a call & getting rear ended. The tests you cite are extremely suspect and I helped some other engineers build the simulators used in such tests in the UK. I unhesitatingly say that they are some of the most underspec'd shittiest sims I have seen in my career with horrible latency and the worst graphics I have ever seen. This was compounded by absolutely terrible engineering which I was powerless to remedy, and it is shocking to me that they are used for any kind of empirical research, yet they are used extensively and exclusively to produce empirical data of all sorts. None of this accounts for individual variation or even training to make a call. It can be done and it is a cop out to say that everyone is a distracted idiot on the phone. I have seen people go into a trance on the phone and gesticulate as if they have no other task at hand and others who focus on their driving despite the call. You can say this is just me saying I'm better than everyone else, but it has noting to do with me, it is just an absolutely glaringly obvious factor to any observant individual who cares to take note. It is insufficient to respond to this with name calling and denial in support of the usual one size fits all dogma.