GorunNova

Chimpanzees 'hunt using spears' Well, if they start cooking their kills with fire, then we'll know they're on the way to becoming protohumans... ^^

What I find funny is banks are often effectively borrowing our money... and they charge US for the privilege! There's no legitimate reason that a bank should charge a fee for having a bank account. -_-' Then again, the bank I deal with only charges people who have low balances and waives the fee otherwise...

I've been boycotting them since the gratuitous lawsuits began... and it doesn't seem to be doing that much. ^^' Well... boycotting them if never buying disks new = boycotting. ^^

The 'White Guardian' is supposed to be the personification of goodness and order in the Doctor Who universe, and even the Time Lords give him respect... so I can see why he picked that name. ^^ The Black Guardian is more notable to watchers of the old series, though... mostly because he's evil.

Personally... I think Sasuke, Sakura, and Naruto are WAY too similar to Orochimaru, Tsunade, and Jiraiya... but given that's intentional, there's not much to be said about it. ^^' Edit: Just as a random bit of trivia, did you know that Kakashi Hatake can be translated loosely as 'Farmland Scarecrow'? XD

Heh... Sorry, I interpreted 'active users' as 'users who actually post'. ^^ Wouldn't users that just look be 'passive users'?

"Well, I'd say put the oak quarterstaves in the corner over there, and the hickory ones behind the door over there..." Whoa... I think there's more staff than active members... oO

I've seen a couple episodes of it, and I have to say... it's nice to have crossed the Sea of Unending Filler and be back to manga-supported episodes.

Not exactly a fan of any of the RE movies... so I guess I'm not looking forward to this one, either.

You don't need to know about how 'radiation men' work to understand radiation. Also, now that I think of it... I think he's not so much a radiation man but an electromagnetic radiation man capable of emitting hard radiation, light, AND heat (as they're all basically the same thing). That makes what he did in the house, and the subsequent survival of the family, plausible... he was focusing on heat and light, and so wasn't irradiating everyone to hell like he did in the graveyard. i.e. they DID do their research, and he's more than just a guy who throws out the sort of 'radiation' most people think of when they hear that word. (i.e. not 'radiation' in the nuclear sense, but 'radiation' in the electromagnetic sense, as varying frequencies and intensities of photons).

I was under the impression this forum rendered spoiler tags as a 'show/hide' button with no highlighting required. No muss, no fuss, no real extra effort to read if you want to read it, and no complaints. <- agrees with Tenebrae... I always stop watching before the previews on all shows I watch because they tend to spoil things next week. Well, -almost- all. I can't seem to help it with Doctor Who. <- agrees again with Tenebrae. Radiation doesn't knock people back... but the means of generation may do so. (i.e. radiation has nothing to do with the explosive force of nuclear weapons... that's purely a result of generating massive amounts of energy in the form of heat. It's the small remainder of non-heat energy that ends up being radiation.) If the guy really did only create radiation, he'd act like a neutron bomb... invisible, but lethal to all nearby living things (i.e. like the graveyard scene earlier in the series, as opposed to his flashy-flashy stunt in the house.) I think the creators of the show are letting their ignorance of how radiation works really show itself with that guy... What ever happened to good research? Then again... it's all electromagnetic, so maybe he was emitting gamma in the graveyard, but rendering it mostly as thermal and visual in the house?

If they HAD been accurate about the radiation, everyone but the guy himself and Claire would have been as good as dead at the point when he was visibly glowing, much less burning things nearby. Other than that minor quibble, this was a great episode. It could be that the Haitian works by causing the memory of how to use their powers to be suppressed (not erased, as he'd have to touch them to do that). Yeah... that may be stretching, but unless Mr. Bennett is the power suppressor, there's no other explanation that I can think of. Also... only information that would lead Mr. Bennett's superiors to find Claire were erased... not all memories of Claire herself (i.e. the stopping on the bridge, the -plan- of stopping on the bridge, the actual shooting, etc. would probably have been erased, but he's still remember everything before the hostage situation and the things during and after the situation that would suggest where Claire would be going). Maybe the mind reading could have been blocked by thought training (i.e. keeping the mind blank, that sort of thing) as opposed to actually suppressing Matt's powers.

Yeah, the special skills would be hard to manage and distribute, plus would need serious tinkering and experimenting to get right. The intention of having some players being clearly a danger to the alien, and having others capable of protecting him (at a cost, of course), was to make the whole thing more tactical... but also, unfortunately, more complicated. ;) Anyways, the idea was that the alien is a 'parasite', and the 'parasite' passes from one victim to another, killing the original victim in the process. The next victim in the line becomes the 'killer', choosing the next host, and the players have to figure out who's the new victim. As an analogue to the 'seer', was a covert 'alien hunter' that can scan one crewmember to determine if he's the current host or not. Simple 'nuf, there. The reason I talked about various abilities for various crewmembers is that when the alien jumps to someone new each round, the game degenerates into 'random choice'... it really needs some characters with skills to narrow down the options to give the crew a fighting chance against the alien. Then again, how about this... Every round, instead of a vote, the crew can choose to 'scan' one player with the ship's medical scanner, and if they pick right the alien's discovered and the players win. To make things more interesting (and mimic the 'two werewolf action' of the original game), the alien could have one free 'jump', fleeing the discovered host (without killing him) and taking over one of the other surviving players picked at random by the person running the game. This eliminates the problems of an alien hunter that has to keep his or her identity secret, while allowing players to test for the alien's presence. It also leads to a longer game, given that the scan doesn't kick players out of the game. ;) Unfortunately, it also means that the alien would lose the moment it's down to two players, so maybe let the alien win if there's only one crewmember left (i.e. requires two or more crewmembers to be able to subdue and eliminate the alien)? This variant wouldn't need a vulnerable 'alien hunter', too. ^^

I got... *drumroll* You Pilot Gaiking! "You're very curious about things aren't you? You and your friends like to explore all the little things life has to offer. Don't take too many risks in this regard however, as some things are better off not knowing much about, and still other things are more important to learn about. Keep your priorities in order." Whee... a mech from an anime I've never heard of!

Basically, the anime version of Berserk covers the 'Golden Age' arcs... and then stops when it gets back to present day. The manga keeps following him on his quest for revenge, and he picks up an entirely new set of companions on his way. Also, the manga is more violent than the anime... but also covers the story better. It's definitely a great story, but it's NOT for kids. ^^

Still awaiting the next manga chapter here... and yes, the manga is still way ahead of the anime at this point, but that was why they threw in the 'Sea of Filler' in the first place. ^^ ... it's gonna take at least a year (and probably more) before the anime catches up to the manga. ... and, I repeat, unless you like lots of sex, nudity, gore, and variable female proportioning at the same time, avoid Gantz. (Seriously, other than one character, women in Gantz vary in anatomy from slightly higher than normal to humongous between frames! >_<) Oh, wait... that's probably encouraging people to read it, isn't it? -_-' Edit: I'm currently reading Berserk, and even though the violence and sex is rather high (nowhere near the state of Gantz, of course, except for in one or two places), the story seriously kicks arse and often the sex and nudity isn't gratuitous. ^^

Yeah, daily backups may be the thing to do given this forum's luck lately. Still... it could be worse...

My question is... why would a system boot faster if loaded from a USB stick? USB sticks aren't that fast... every one I've ever used can't even match a fraction of the full USB 2.0 throughput. The only possible benefit would be that it could load files from the USB stick and the main drive at the same time, but you'd get the same benefits (and probably higher speed) by installing XP to a small partition on a rarely used disk, while installing all your programs to another drive. Even better, you could use interleaved RAID... hard to beat THAT sort of performance. Then again, if Vista really is getting a file-based symlink scheme, you could always move your main OS and program files around to several disks (USB or local) and symlink them to the main disk, so that the OS can take advantage of reading from multiple drives at the same time. Of course, that's assuming their symlinking isn't back-a##ewords and won't link between drives... (totally expects this). Of course, in this case, removing the USB stick after bootup would guarantee the quick and hideous death of your system if important files are on it... Instant OS lobotomy. (Edit: That wouldn't work too well, though... the files that Vista needs to load would already be loaded and immovable by the time you get to a point where you can move the files around. It's not like Linux, where you can move and delete libraries even when they're loaded and in use without killing running programs.) As a side note, I use this symlink trick on my multi-drive Linux system, and the performance gain is noticeable. ^^ (Edit: Then again, I have three hard drives in it, so that helps. ^^') Another question is... why do they keep using hard drives for paging instead of a secondary array of cheap and slow RAM? Even slow RAM blows away the speeds of hard drives... As for .NET compatibility... whenever mono comes close, expect M$ to release a new set of .NET APIs for the non-locked-in-standard bits of .NET to force mono to be 'behind'. Microsoft always does that. Why do you think the WINE project has such headaches? -_-'

Who's for betting that this new windows that'll happen in 2009 will actually happen in 2012, and have entirely new APIs that force everyone to upgrade or not be able to run stuff? Baah... they're trying to instill an 'upgrade or else' scheme to force people to keep paying them in order to be able to use their programs.

Agreed... about effin' time. This is one hydra that needs all it's heads chopped off. -_-'

Oh, very believable... very unlikely to work, too. What's next... are they going to try dowsing? Maybe read entrails? "Oh bloody intestines of the sheep, tell me... where's those lost episodes of Doctor Who?" Entrails: "Get a life, loser."

... the manuals probably don't mention it because 1) they're probably incomplete, or 2) because CMOS batteries (I assume that's the type you're talking about) tend to outlast the actual computer's lifecycle. What will happen if you pull the battery, is that everything in BIOS and CMOS will reset to default values (probably January 19-something-a-long-time-ago for date). What it sounds like is that the battery came a little loose or something, and the jiggling reseated it properly... especially since the problem seemed to go away.

Whoo! Science is staving back the population growth vs. food supply barrier yet again, it seems. ^^ I'm all for it. Not only would it be a lot more efficient as far as food stock goes (i.e. growing the meat probably requires less nutrients than it currently takes to raise whole animals), but it means a reduction in the slaughtering of animals. Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those PETA people who want to stop all animal product use... it's just that when it comes to a choice between eating something that was alive and felt vs. eating something grown that never actually lived, the answer is obviously the latter for me. The lack of hormones and antibiotics in the meat is a definite plus, too. <- has heard about this a while ago, and I fully support it.

... and may the 'larfing' ... begin! And possibly the barfing, depending on how messy eaters the dinosaurs are. ^^

For me, it's about ... umm, a hundred times less, at least. Then again, I guess I don't exactly encourage PMs. ^^' ... 3/4rs of those are leftovers from my brief time as a werewolf, too...