General J

I do agree that some of our problems stem from overall population growth. However, land is not the issue. Here in Missouri, the majority of our land is rural or undeveloped. I do agree with Shaft on the concrete thing. Concrete absorbs and stores heat and doesn't allow for natural run off. But, I do not believe that water is an issue either. Sure, there are places where water is in short supply. I lived in north Idaho for about 3-4 months and it was dry... 107 degrees one day with 7% humidity. Yet people still watered their lawns and had bright green grass. My in laws had an agriculture grade pump for their well. You would have had to run it at max GPM for a long long time to ever drop the water level.

People complain that we waste water. But where does it go? If you water your grass, it either soaks down through the soil to the water table. It might be soaked up by the roots of grass and plants, then released back into the atmosphere. Or, as in the case of out west, and in dry climates, it is evaporated back into the air long before it soaks in. Same thing as when we drink the water. Do you not pee? What do you suppose you are peeing out? It doesn't magically disappear. However, I do worry about the things we put into the water. Soaps, chemicals, detergents, etc.

Just to correct samurai, I live outside of St. Louis, MO, and we have had drought warning many times in my lifetime. Our city is on the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers which are 2 of the biggest rivers in the world. So you would not think we would be vulnerable... Also, if you remember a year or so ago, Atlanta was having an extreme drought problem.

And, we all seem to forget about the dust bowl, which occurred long before the large industrialized cities that we now have out west. Dry spells happen... and eventually they are countered by long wet spells.

I do not believe in global warming ala Al gore style. I believe the earth's climate goes in cycles.

Not to hijack the thread and go in a different direction, but I have one major problem with environmentalists that I feel the need to vent. I was watching a news story about people catching "the last ships to see the glaciers before they melt." All I could think the entire time I was watching this was that there was a scare about future ice age in the 70's, and that there had been calls to melt the polar ice caps to prevent such a thing. Then I started looking at the whole thing scientifically... Take two cups of tap water at the same temps. Put a large ice cube in one glass and put a small piece of ice in the other. Which melted first? Then think about the ice breaking ships they take through the ice caps? What happens to those small pieces of ice that the ship breaks off. Maybe we should just leave the ice alone and we wouldn't have to freak out about the ice caps disappearing? Just my two cents.

I guess I applaud them for not burning the flag... But this still bothers me. This is the United States of America... That was a public school funded by Americans...

Shaft, this is not a grey area. We have laws about immigration for a reason. If you really desire to relocate to this country, you have every right (as long as your home county allows it) to do so. Yes, there are some "hoops" that you have to jump through to do so. Although I do not personally agree with it, I don't believe that you even have to speak English or ever intend to learn English (hopefully someone corrects me on this). I work with quite a few immigrants, mostly Bosnian, that are all legally here and love it.

My question: What other country would allow you to immigrate, whether legally or illegally, and then conform to your needs? Do you think that the Mexican gov't would mandate SSL (Spanish as a Second Language) classes just for illegal immigrants children? What about France, Germany, China? Think you could just move there and demand that they conform to the English language? You had better learn their language, and fast, or you would have a hard time surviving. I honestly can't believe that citizens of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California, to name a few, stand for their tax money paying for ESL schools. Learn the language and go to the same schools as everyone else if you want to assimilate. I don't believe immigrants should completely throw away their culture. That would be very un-American. But I do believe that if you come to this country for the perks you need to assimilate, try to make something of yourself, and don't complain about the way you are treated if you don't at least attempt to be an active citizen.

AND - If you are here illegally, or your parents came here illegally, don't complain about the people and government who are providing the infrastructure for you to succeed. Protesting against the United States, while living and going to a public school here is ridiculous. Maybe the first English phrase we should teach is "Don't bite the hand that feeds!"

In that CNN clip with the idiot reporter, did no one notice that someone is holding up a sign that says "Republicans suck too"? These protests are not just right wing "nut jobs" bashing Obama.

If we walk away with nothing else from these protests, we can at the very least see how one sided and voluntarily ignorant the majority of our media types really are. Reporting gathers all sides of a story. The only thing I saw from the last minute reporting was that the conclusion was drawn that anyone who attended these protests were extreme right wingers opposing taxes. I think Gond picked out the right person to link to. Glenn Beck was the only one that I saw that got the fact that this was not only about taxes, but about liberty and freedom as well.

I, for one, am happy to see other people finally voicing the anger that my wife and I have held for quite some time now. It's not just Obama, and it wasn't only Bush. Clinton's terms in office created a lot of legacy debt, not to mention the mortgage programs that Yo had mentioned. Bush came in to office and government just kept going down the same path. 9/11 was a different sort of beast. And it has cost a lot of money. I do not personally blame Bush for this. But, no one can disagree that Bush was responsible for the first round of major bailouts. If Bush were still in office and continuing this non sense, people would still be out to protest.

But, Obama is not only pumping out large sums of money with no regard for what happens next (namely, hyper inflation). He has already gone back on his promised tax cuts for the majority. He is trying to force universal health care down our throats. His administration couldn't even see the fallacy of raising taxes on tobacco products to pay for SCHIP. What happens when people stop smoking because they can't afford it anymore? Where will the money for SCHIP come from then? He has not even attempted to hide his socialistic views since taking office. He has shown that our government is not strong on our convictions anymore (N. Korea missile test ring a bell?) People are starting to fear that the constitution will be "shredded" under this administration. I am currently watching the talks with Mexico very closely. I see the eraser coming in close to the 2nd amendment.

The sad thing is, Obama or not, I see our county going in a very bad direction very quickly. The house and the senate are not helping anything either. All we can hope for is that someone wises up and stops the endless printing and spending of our money. I worry what this country will be like in the future for my young children and future grand children.

I never fully understood the need for steam. Launching the stand alone game and finding servers through it always worked for me... But forcing you to run your games through their software, which then has to be connected to the internet is a bit ridiculous. If their servers are down, you can't play a game that you bought to be able to play whenever you wanted.

I understand they wanted Steam to be able to have the game store and for ease of updating, and the ability to download your games to whatever computer you are using is nice. But I like the old fashioned stand alone games better.

I'm in. Haven't played a fantasy baseball league in years!

So, would this work in similar fashion to Quake Live, where you wouldn't need the hardware since everything is run on the back end?

Anyone remember Sega Channel? They would stream sega games to the console through your cable service. You could access a fairly large library of games through it.

But the difference between Sega Genesis games and modern day games is a bit extreme.

I always check the servers, but no one is ever playing at the times I do.

Bullet? How ya been? Now all we need is gooters or El Barto to post up and it will be a reunion party!

Why would you switch to a "better" OS and then use the evil/crappy competitors office programs? OpenOffice FTW no matter what OS you choose!

On a serious note, I have quickly realized how handy having a netbook/ultra-portable would be. Toting around a 15.4" laptop that weighs 6 lbs. is not ideal, even for at home use. My wife has been using my laptop around the house while searching craigslist, checking email and such while going room to room chasing the kids. We both came to the conclusion that this thing is best on a table or desk, and maybe the occasional trip. 2-3 lbs. netbooks seem more and more appealing each time I try to carry the full size one and use it at the same time.

I had a few issues trying to get FarCry to run on Vista 64-bit. I finally downloaded the 64-bit patch for it, and now it runs smoothly.

What games are you trying to install? Someone may have already had some experience installing and running them.

On a side note: I wish that Microsoft would not say that each new version of windows will be backwards compatible. They never are very seamless at this, which I would think would lead to a lot of frustration for their customers. If it is going to have some major issues with software made for previous versions (XP, 98/2000/NT) just tell people!

Ughh... It's a Dell... Running OS X.... Double Whammy. They just took two overpriced brands and mashed them together. What will the world come up with next?

I guess if you just couldn't break that mac addiction, this is a pretty cool deal. But from past experience with both Dells and Macs, I will take a pass.

Should it surprise anyone that this happens when the government tries to artificially prop up the economy by "creating" huge sums of money to distribute to failing sectors? At least one person at the Fed had to have raised a voice and said that flooding the market with the amount of money that has been introduced was going to end in disaster. If not, we really need to come up with a new economic controller.

This is pretty scary stuff when you stop to think about it. I keep hearing about hedge funds and investment groups dumping their gold assets to raise cash, thus dropping the price now. And, people are purchasing "assets" with 0% interest.

I hate sounding like a fear monger, but I think things could get very bad, very quickly. Could you imagine what would happen to us if countries like China called our debts due?

What amazes me is that people are outraged that we have such a deep national debt. Yet, these same people are calling for huge bailouts for everyone and their grandmother. Where does that money come from when the government is already in a hole to begin with? Simple economics would tell you that if someone asks for $100, and you don't have $100, you are going to have to say, "sorry, I can't do that right now."

<looks at post count and server play time>

 

<looks at post count and server play time of supposed "original gangstas">

 

The originals don't seem to play as much. I played a whole lot pre - Source. Those were the days. Until they added that freaking riot shield.

Then I got married and had children... Play time went down hill in a hurry.

About all I have time for anymore is gun game servers where I can leave without being in the middle of a round.

I do Yo! You haven't been around if you don't know what LC stood for, or you never used the MMMMCS board.

It started after I downloaded ZP. I have also heard that it is the most CPU intensive Source based game.

I had thought about uninstalling Steam and all apps and starting over again. That just sounds like a pain. Guess I will give it a try when I get some time.

I really like ZP. But if a fresh install of Steam and CS:S fixes the problem, then I may have to forget about ZP for now.

I guess I had chalked up my problem to some odd compatibility issue with the laptop drivers or some such thing.

So, I have been using my Asus G50V A1 laptop for a little while now and I generally like it. I have been using it as my primary computer, so gaming is one of its duties. I was playing CS:S with no problems, and I had downloaded a few demos, Crysis and COD 4, to see what it could handle. I also got Far Cry 64 to work as well. Everything runs smoothly.

So, then I found Zombie Panic and started playing. The laptop now has what I call "fits" in the middle of the game. It acts like really bad lag, but I have watched my ping through the scoreboard and through netgraph and it does not fluctuate. Everything becomes very jumpy for a very short time, then returns to normal. The laptop has a display that shows CPU load, and it doesn't fluctuate during the fits either.

I could write the fits off as a quirk of running heavy loads on a laptop, but it is more than powerful enough to handle the games. (Note: this only happens in Zombie Panic and CS:S, that I have noticed.)

The kicker is this: Either during or after these "fits", my console text and text chat (pressing "Y" or "T" type of chat box) language switches to Chinese. Now, not all of the text turns to Chinese since it gives me a translator option of English. But, anything I type out in the console or chat is in Chinese characters. It is easy enough to fix. All I have to do is right click the text line and change the language back to English. But, the annoying thing is that once it has done this once, it will do it randomly through out the game.

Any ideas?

The other issue I am having is the keyboard keeping up with my typing. It misses letters if I type too fast. And no, I am not missing them when I type. It is hard to miss the space bar!

EDIT: Who will loan me $10,000? I'll pay you back, I promise!

+1 for building your own. I had basic computer knowledge (well, still do...) when I built my desktop. Had some rough goings at first with formatting and getting all the bios settings to run everything at proper speeds. But, once it was done, I had a fresh install with none of the manufacturer bloatware. It's been about 5 years since the build and it still runs fast today. Outdated, yes. But it runs well.

My best advice to you if you decide to build, buy a nice mobo. I cheaped out on mine and I regret it to this day. It was supposed to handle the RAM speeds that I bought and be ok for overclocking. But it wasn't. I had to run RAM at a lower speed and keep the CPU at stock speed. Lesson learned though, and I will do better research on my next one.

I got the message when I tried to join from Steam. But when I joined from within CSS, it downloaded just fine.

Any way a separate page or sticky could be made with previous maps listed in it?

EDIT: Never mind. When I connect to the server from within CSS it allows me to download it.

Where can I get the custom maps from? I am getting a message saying something about map consistency enforced. But I do not have the current map.

The problem with teaching politics in school is that you hardly ever end up with a neutral teacher. I agree very strongly that we should teach our children our national history, about the political system and parties. But it needs to be in a neutral way.

For instance, I am sure you all can look back to learning about the civil war. It was taught that it was solely about slavery, right? If it wasn't in your school, then good for your teacher. Another example would be that racism is taught in school as being whites hating blacks. If you go back and read your old text books, I believe you will find that they are very biased or, at the very least, vague about many topics without a teacher adding their own rhetoric.

I pay taxes to cover what my child uses in the school system. To force anyone to do community service is a horrid abuse of government IMO. Sounds like another excuse to create another agency to further bloat our government and increase control over the populous. (maybe I should post that in the conspiracy forum LOL)

Gond hit on something that my family has discussed for a while now. You pay taxes locally to cover your school district. Why should the federal government be in the local school systems anyways? Have you seen No Child Left Behind in action? It is just about the worst system ever. Teachers don't educate kids anymore. They don't teach children to actually think. They cram a load of facts and dates into the kids heads and HOPE (that's an Obama word ) that the actually remember everything when the assessment test dates come around.

I hated school because it was mind numbing. Then, my senior year of high school, I took a tech school class called Computer Information Systems - Networking. Suddenly I had all A's because it wasn't the facts and dates. We actually had to think on our own, and did things that were hands on and interactive. I am in no way saying that facts and dates aren't important, but that should not be the only thing that kids learn at school.

Sorry Obama fans... I couldn't get the other "key" word in there... Maybe we can CHANGE our country, and get away from Big Centralized Government that has the need to rule all.

I still believe there is a possibility we will never know whether or not they were really working on nukes or any form of WMD. I know we watched Saddam's every move like a hawk, and I understand that we already knew about the underground "city" beneath Baghdad. But think about this. They built a very elaborate system of tunnels wide enough to move troops in, and areas large enough for storage under a major city. You don't think they were capable of hiding things under remote regions of that country? Most nuclear test facilities are underground, as was the case with Syria's supposed test facilities that Israel hit.

I don't think the debate should be about whether they had or did not have. Widely spread intelligence (dating back to the Clinton admin, for you lefties) agreed that they were working on something. Turning away nuclear inspectors and looking like you are trying to cover something up is never a wise idea, as it turned out for Saddam. The question should be: Should we have invaded, and subsequently occupied, a sovereign nation on the grounds that they had weapons in development?

For me, that is a hard question. Suppose a foreign nation already had nuclear technology and we didn't. How would we feel if they tried to tell us no way in hell would they allow us to develop a technology that others already have for use? I believe we would be none too pleased.

Saddam had a violent history and temper to go along with it. See Saddam gassing the Iraqi Kurds for one. Who knows what he would have done with a nuclear weapon, if anything.

It's a sticky situation no matter which way you look at it. And I am sure it was a very difficult decision for the current administration. I don't care how you look at Bush or his admin team, you have to admit that they did not make that decision lightly.

I'm with clueless... It's a heck of a lot nicer weather wise south. And a whole lot easier to disappear, I would reckon. AND, your lawn service wouldn't be illegal anymore.