LOL@Trife
"not into earth enough" yeah you are right, i don't live here. I have a real life. But i've been playing since 1997 and have some decent stats on the leaderboards. What you may consider "enough" may not be my ideal. Should i leave the game because i'm not logged in as much as you?

The twit nerve comment was cute. You go on following the Kardashians and i'll stay happy and informed following the scientific research feeds relevant to my career on twitter.

manchild!

Twitter is what YOU make of it. You choose to follow BS, you get BS. Don't bash twitter because you still use it as a man-child would.
I say this, fully realizing that some of you probably have yet to understand that a computer is more than a pron machine.

But yeah what bertz said.. i can see a twitter feed giving end of set warnings helpful especially on the single player servers. And if it could be personalized to my account, that turn overflow warning would be a welcome return.

heya der bru got to luv da yoopers!

http://dayoopers.com/...8&page=rockintro.html





x-yooper (1970's)

Grinding The Crack

http://youtu.be/TWfph3iNC-k

Blame it on my ADD baby

your multies stopped posting?

Truth. All-or-nothing. When the bonus is maxed out you can hold multiple $billion$ cash and/or hundreds of millions bushels and still play turns with zero corruption or decay.

Attempting to reach -100% resource decay asap can make you manic, to the point of setting alarm times for bonuses.
And there is a strategic impact to consider if you plan to change gov.

Sonuvafluff i am so sick of seeing this load of crap. The hardest working people i've met in my life are those that more often than not are among those paid the least. They sweat, they toil, their physical labor and work environ takes years off their lives and they have specific job knowledge that no suit with a degree can match.

And at the end of the day, when you subtract from their wages what they pay in taxes there's just not enough left to pay for food, shelter, healthcare, clothing etc let alone try to save for the future. Not many of their children will get that chance for a college education. So it's generational, and it's because of the greed and shortsightedness and apathy and personal comfort of voters like you that it will stay that way.

If you accept this is the way, and you have a small business, how the hell do you think the struggling middle class and the working poor are going to be able to buy one of your widgets? Hiring new workers is the LAST thing a business owner will do. Only when the demand for his product/service is so high that cutting every corner still won't meet the demand will the business owner hire more workers.

The wealthy are job creators? HA
The tens upon tens of millions at the bottom are the real job creators.

Spear, you say "Society is inherently unequal" and speak of a "misunderstanding of human nature" and "People are self-interested". You're right, but you seem to have no interest in changing it. I'm guessing you are white, male, and never had to worry how you are going to pay for your rent or your child's medical care.
And 'the way it is' is alright with you isn't it? You will "continue to live in the real world and take reality for what it is."
Because as you climb that "social ladder" you speak of you know that the system is gamed as zero sum and you'll not be caught on the lower rungs.

But many are. And not through any fault of their own.
They waited 30 years for the 'trickle down' theory of economics to finally work for them. They can read the charts, they see the statistics. They LIVE the statistics. They know now that trickle down was a scam, a pissONyou scam.

And they are the infrastructure of our civilization. They far outnumber you and your nearsighted armchair economists.
They watch the wealthy use their wealth to manipulate more wealth but only for themselves. They watch while the wealthy buy government favors and hold the carrot out on a stick for the middle class, turning them against the working poor while promising them 'a place in the good ol' boys club' someday.

Watch that damn video i posted upthread. Stop being a tool.

It is rising consumer demand that creates jobs. That's what feeds the economic cycle. If the working class is able to do so, they WILL purchase more widgets/widget services.
If you want your garden to grow, water the roots.
I submit:

http://youtu.be/bBx2Y5HhplI

haha yeah that too!

heh yeah i don't remember it all that well either. I think you gained Fame pts for grabbing countries closer to you in Scores, and then those fame points somehow added to your NW..?

And before there were ingame alliance tags, those members lists with country numbers were very valuable commodities.

Anyone remember the Fame attribute? My first full set on the B server, in The Union alliance, was the last set of Fame, and i've been trying to nail down the month/year.

wow the memories.. good stuff! interesting to see the POV's.
I remember "Fast Eddie's Market Empire" (something like that) where you could find, for example, announcements of upcoming public market missile sales ;)

Metallurgical failure analysis in a small independent lab using SEM, OES, AAS, XRF.
Boring, and i've been doing it for so long i think i'm starting to glow in the dark. Upside, at the end of a slow workday i get to play with the leftover liquid nitrogen.

The New Monsters were started from scratch by Frankenstein later known as Cartoon. Wish I could say i had been there from the beginning, but joined about a year later. Hilarious ingame chats with a New Monster player named Major Retard brought me to NM. ICQ chats with Cartoon were incredibly fun, and meeting him and other Monsters at Monsterfests remain notable life events :)

haha not many around here can say they've seen Cartoon speaking at a podium in a pink tutu, or been on the dance floor with LadyGrizz @<@
How many alliance get-togethers draw members in not just from several countries, but from several continents?
Much Respect to Monsters.

~ ~
And fazer, your enthusiasm for the game is great but you need to learn that you cannot circumvent the game's rules using proxies.
Many of us oldtimers, including myself in 1998, had a similar noobish enthusiasm for the E2025 game and made the mistake of playing more than one country on the same server. It was a mistake that I and almost all others that did it deeply regret to this day.

But E2025 died, and was resurrected by members of the E2025 community that care much more than the developer of E2025 ever did. That in itself deserves a special respect. And if you don't respect the game rules of Earth Empires you will never really enjoy the many subtleties of the game & its politics that are not immediately apparent to new or casual players.

If you continue to play you will make real friends and allies, and yeah maybe some enemies. But I guarantee, win or lose, perhaps years down the road, when you look in the mirror you're going to want to know you played the game clean.

Fazer, I really hope that my comments about the Monsters above will mean something to you. It really IS about how you play the game.

[quote poster=RavenBF; 18528; 342984][12:45] ...Then im thinking u have to be one of them 3rd world HIV orphans.... [/quote]



"one of them 3rd world HIV orphans"
yeah the mental image that brings to mind is so funny
Throw stones in glass houses much?


hypocrisy sucks

I never slammed you fazer. But i'd still like a response. You haven't tried to clear the air with me.

refer to my Q in this thread
http://forums.earthempires.com/...40157604&z=mgp-ganked

What happened?

First of, it's 'lose' not 'loose'.

And now something that's been weighing on MY shoulders for about 48 DAYS.

That interim between Muppets and MGP was interesting last set, wasn't it?

Fazer, in that short period of time you joined an alliance by yourself. An alliance that had never farmed your tag. We heard you were looking for a 'footing'.

Your country promptly went purple.

You quickly created another country and tagged up before the pass was changed.

And you went purple again.

You were gone without ever posting on that alliance's members forums. No explanation, no apology. Not even an acknowledgement on the original Welcome thread.

I have a Forum PM sent out to you here that you read on May 8th. It was an innocuous message, just asking what happened. Never got a reply.

You were given chances to reply in private and didn't. Maybe you'll do it here..?

What happened? I'd be very interested in your answer.. let's say, for old time's sake..

i have nothing to say
http://tinyurl.com/79ozmff

Is there rocking chair porn in Monsters, with blood pressure cuffs and IV's?

heya Pang and the Gang, your work on the game and on boxcar really are appreciated probably +more+ than you know.

There are genuine friendships here; people we probably will never meet face to face but real nonetheless.

And that's the true value you extended to us when you kept the game alive.

Have a great summer!

Boxcar reset! Yaaay and thank you!

Are you getting the MySQL error, or are you actually seeing the captcha, but it doesn't give you the bonus once you've submitted the answer?

I think there's an IP problem involved.

On the rare occasion that I could see the actual captcha on my phone (wifi disabled), but it still didn't work, i discovered while driving home from work one day that by pulling into a parking lot of a cafe and accessing their wifi hotspot i was able to get the bonus.

I just got it to work.

Usually when i cannot get the bonus on my computer, i can get it on my phone but only if i turn off my phone's wifi first. That didn't work for the last ~17 hours because all i was getting on my phone was the MySQL error.

Finally, just a few minutes ago, i tried again on phone and got the 6 digit captcha. And it worked.

This might work, it's helped some people..
If you have an old bookmark pointing to boxcarhosting.net it won't work any more. You have to use .com

n00bage

I SEND YOU PISSWORD
YOU HAN NOW

http://telstar_zero.tripod.com/ehistory2.htm

This really affects those of us planning permanent bonuses in a negative way. And it's never been fair that some can get this bonus and others cannot.
Can we just toss this bonus away for now and mathematically adjust the bonuses so as not to affect gameplay?

Of course it's an act of war.



Ever hear of Operation Ajax?

Didn't think so.

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-was-operation-ajax.htm

Blowback's a fluff

Not true. Stop trying to re-write history.

The Treaty of Tripoli, sent to the floor of the US Senate on June 07 1797, where the english version was read aloud in its entirety and ratified unanimously. President John Adams signed it and proudly proclaimed it to the nation.

Article 11 of the treaty states:
--
As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
--

This Treaty of Tripoli was written during George Washington's second term as President. Ratified and then signed into law by President James Adams.
The vote was recorded only because at least a fifth of the Senators present voted to require a recorded vote. This was the 339th time that a recorded vote was required. It was only the third time that a vote was recorded when the vote was unanimous.

The vote they cast was ordinary, routine, normal. It was, in other words, quite well accepted, only a few years after first the Constitution and then the First Amendment were ratified.

The US Constitution is godless. It calls on no higher power than "We the People". What the Treaty of Tripoli did was to powerfully reaffirm what the Constitution and First Amendment intended.

The treaty was reprinted in its entirety in (at least) New York and Philadelphia. There was no public outcry regarding Art. 11.
There is no record of any public backlash.

There were no negative repercussions for any of those that voted to ratify this treaty. Senator Theodore Sedgewick of Massachusetts went on to become the Speaker of the House.
Sen. Isaac Tichenor became Governor of Vermont, and then returned to the Senate for many years.
Georgia's Senator, Josiah Tattnall did not return to the Senate, but he did serve thereafter as one of the youngest Governors in Georgia's history.
There was no political backlash.

I'm getting weary of people that know history about as well as they know the content of their religious texts. Seems that willful ignorance will always be embraced by the bigots.

I see some religious moderates on this thread posting very thoughtful comments but i think it falls on deaf ears.

IMO it is unfortunate that moderate religious people of good character, with empathy for other points of view and a commitment to social justice, will continue to provide cover for the nutcases who cherrypick what they want from those unreasonable texts to reinforce their own blind hatred.
It's as true now as it always has been. Religion, first and foremost, divides us.

The United States hanged Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American prisoners of war.

"Whether waterboarding should be classified as a method of torture was not widely debated in the United States before it was alleged, in 2004, that members of the CIA had used the technique against certain suspected detained terrorists.[50][51]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboarding

"Chase J. Nielsen, one of the U.S. airmen who flew in the Doolittle raid following the attack on Pearl Harbor, was subjected to waterboarding by his Japanese captors.[117] At their trial for war crimes following the war, he testified "Well, I was put on my back on the floor with my arms and legs stretched out, one guard holding each limb. The towel was wrapped around my face and put across my face and water poured on. They poured water on this towel until I was almost unconscious from strangulation, then they would let up until I'd get my breath, then they'd start over again... I felt more or less like I was drowning, just gasping between life and death."[38] The United States hanged Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American prisoners of war."

If you are a thoughtful person, on which side would you want to align yourself?

this
http://youtu.be/wRxjJZFGgNM

or this?
http://youtu.be/-j0fNv2bAmE

that's ez to say when you aren't the one being shorted of particular rights.
It's not that long ago that interracial marriages were not allowed either, by the same kind of bigotry.

try .com
if your old bookmark was .net it won't work

you need some learnin' son

umm what? ladygrizz, another rd memeber?

you want to rethink that?

I'm all for fluffcanning the entire concept of marriage. It's nothing more than an in-your-face social engineering concept originally conceived to keep a father from easily abandoning his children.

The LAST thing i'm going to do in my most intimate interpersonal relationship is to invite the government in for a threesome.

I'm in a relationship with a like-minded partner. If she and i ever were to break up it is OUR business. The last thing we need is the government butt-ramming each of us because we are assumed to be unable to handle the details of the breakup ourselves.

But since we are such a young species, barely out of the trees (relatively speaking) there isn't much chance of that mindset taking hold anytime soon. And because in the US you get your health care from your employer it will never be in the corporate interest to open up to gay marriage, it would only mean more spouses for which they would have to pay their share of the insurance premiums.

So you have the religious yahoos who selectively focus on one part of leviticus while ignoring the rest, and you have the corporations who focus only on profit.

I have picketed more than once with my girlfriend with a sign that read WE WON'T MARRY UNTIL OUR GAY BROTHERS AND SISTERS CAN.

Bigots everywhere, man.. f'in disgusting ppl and ignorant too. They will declare loudly that they don't want big government but they DO want government in my bedroom and in my crotch. Dumbasses. Go vote against your own best interests some more.

There's a hidden message in there.. can u find it?

http://youtu.be/QVR5FylFF2c

perhaps

http://en.wikipedia.org/...stic_personality_disorder

To receive your weekly bonus of 4 points, you must post in the next 6.1 mins.

Religion: Giving people hope in a world torn apart by religion

well that's just peculiar! At some point, the conversation just stops, huh? okBye



But your criteria does include zygotes and embryos.

Wall Of Text explains:

Brain development begins with the formation and closure of the neural tube, the earliest nervous tissue that looks like a fat earthworm stretched out along the entire back of the embryo. The neural tube forms from the neural plate, which begins forming about sixteen days after conception. This plate lengthens and starts folding up, forming a groove at around eighteen days, which then begins fusing shut into a tube around twenty-two days post-conception. By 27 days, the tube is fully closed and has begun its transformation into the brain and spinal cord of the embryo.

Generally speaking, the central nervous system (which is composed of the brain and the spinal cord) matures in a sequence from "tail" to head. In the fifth week after conception, the first synapses begin forming in a fetus's spinal cord. By the sixth week, these early neural connections permit the first fetal movements--spontaneous arches and curls of the whole body--that researchers can detect through ultrasound imaging.
These abilities are controlled by the brainstem, which sits above the spinal cord but below the higher, more recently-evolved cerebral cortex. The brainstem is responsible for many of our body's most vital functions--heart rate, breathing, and blood pressure. It is largely mature by the end of the second trimester, which is when babies first become able to survive outside the womb.

Last of all to mature is the cerebral cortex, which is responsible for most of what we think of as mental life--conscious experience, voluntary actions, thinking, remembering, and feeling. It has only begun to function around the time gestation comes to an end. Premature babies show very basic electrical activity in the primary sensory regions of the cerebral cortex--those areas that perceive touch, vision, and hearing--as well as in primary motor regions of the cerebral cortex. In the last trimester, fetuses are capable of simple forms of learning, like habituating (decreasing their startle response) to a repeated auditory stimulus, such as a loud clap just outside the mother's abdomen. Late-term fetuses also seem to learn about the sensory qualities of the womb, since several studies have shown that newborn babies respond to familiar odors (such as their own amniotic fluid) and sounds (such as a maternal heartbeat or their own mother's voice).

In spite of these rather sophisticated abilities, babies enter the world with a still-primitive cerebral cortex, and it is the gradual maturation of this complex part of the brain that explains much of their emotional and cognitive maturation in the first few years of life.

Now the question is, if your criteria is "firing it's own neurons" do you mean the neural capacity equivalent to jerking a frog's leg in a science lab? Certainly you are not including the first ~month of pregnancy, prior to the closure of the neural tube?

And in re: to the contraception issue Melinda Gates recently gave a thoughtful presentation on TEDtalks
http://youtu.be/2BOTS9GAjc4

Do we really have to have this debate in a thread about religious leaders that come to lose their faith? Must we really track every smelly dead fish dragged across the trail of original intent?
~heavy sigh~

I am 100% in favor of preventing as many abortions as possible. In my idea of a perfect world there would be zero abortions because there wouldn't be any unwanted pregnancies and never would a woman's healthy life be threatened by pregnancy.

But we don't live in that perfect world, and since i was born with male reproductive organs i will never have to face the prospect of an unwanted or dangerous pregnancy taking place within my body.
I am pro-choice not because i celebrate abortion, but because it is a personal choice for the woman that finds herself pregnant.

I do not practice ownership of other people.

Having been called 'pro-abortion' in the past, i can only ask (plead?) that those that would label me with that disingenuous term look at the reality of the world in which we live. Examine your own priorities. Your own preconceived ideas.

Search for the cognitive dissonance within.

Life begins at conception? Aside from the magical notion that a deity injects a 'soul' into the just-fertilized egg, so what?
Identical twins occur when the zygote splits into two about 12 days after conception. Does that mean the soul splits as well?

If you are arguing that the zygote has _potential_ for human life, well so does a living sperm cell, and living ovum. Should a woman make funeral arrangements in each month she does not conceive? Should every nocturnal emission be treated as a crime against humanity?

It is, IMHO, an intellectually dishonest argument. Yeah i know i keep using that term in this thread, but DAMN there's a lot of ignorance wrapped up in these stances.

Where are the anti-abortion people after the unwanted child is born? Are you busy voting to de-fund health care for that child? Are you in favor of de-funding education to save a few $$ on your tax bill?
Are you blaming the mother for not having enough food on the table, and asking the State for help? Are you protesting government-backed programs that provide birth control?

Are you mindlessly chanting 'drill baby drill' because we have to find more oil to support our ever-expanding energy hungry population?

Do you support the death penalty?
Do you cheer when you read that a supposed terrorist is killed by a remote-control missile, and the collateral damage mentioned in the article doesn't register in your mind as innocent men, women, children, and yes unborn children being killed via your tax dollars?

If you are willing to accept all that, yet rail against a woman's right to choose what she does with her body when she finds herself facing an unwanted or dangerous pregnancy, then you are not really pro-life.

You are, to some degree and either through willful ignorance or with purposeful intent, a misogynist. You don't really care about human life. You care about power to make decisions for others.

Maybe that mindset explains why 'Thou Shalt Not Own Another Human Being' never made it into the ten commandments.

haha yeah archaic i actually thought of you when writing that. Thought of changing it because i didn't want to associate you with absurd.. but knew you would understand ;)

Rogue8, you were the first to mention 'dillusional' on this thread, and it was in respect to atheists. Note that even after I responded with the correct spelling of that word, without calling you out on it, you didn't "see the light". Is that to be construed that you are not, in fact, open minded?
ok that was an intentional jab, and tbh i'm almost sorry for it.

More to the point, if you are indeed open minded and care so much about atheist preachers, i suggest you may want to hear the the situation from the atheist preacher's point of view? I did post the link in two separate posts upthread.
Or, in your open mindedness, do you not need that information before calling fraud?

If there is a clear line separating religious fundamentalists from religious moderates please enlighten me.

Even if that line were clear, there still exists the dilemma of the religious texts. While it is true that many/most religious moderates may not affect my freedoms and my life directly, they provide a 'cover' for the fundamentalists (aka fanatics) that believe their purpose on earth is to influence the society I live in to fit their particular ideology.

Religious moderates cherrypick the 'good bits' from their ancient texts, ignoring those bits they find immoral archaic and absurd.
But it is precisely those bits that a fanatic will use to justify everything from killing infidels to firebombing planned parenthood clinics, from denying condoms to HIV stricken areas of Africa to the subjugation of women. Etc etc etc.

I'm well aware of much of what is in those ancient texts, and it's quite apparent that these fanatics are in fact 'closer to their god' than the religious moderates. They study those texts and act unreasonably and at times in violence not because they misinterpret those texts, but because they interpret their meaning precisely.

The problem I have with religious moderates is that rarely do they challenge the lunacy within those texts.

I'd wager that even a child would challenge 'The Book Of Santa Claus' if it stated that the followers of the Easter Bunny must convert to Santa-ism or be thrown into a pit to burn for eternity.

"faith for a reason" oh man that's an awesome phrase LOL but it totally lacks intellectual honesty. Gimme a reason for a faith!

Gods - all gods - are gods of gaps. Gaps in human knowledge of the natural world.
At one time gods were needed to explain thunder, earthquakes, the sunrise, birth, death and the sniffles.

Not any more.

Your gods are getting much smaller as the gaps are filled by scientific inquiry. Likely there will always be some gaps in human knowledge. How small and irrelevant must your gods become before they share status with Poseidon and Ra?

Conversational intolerance, in which personal convictions are scaled against evidence, is not only needed but absolutely required where intellectual honesty is demanded equally both in religious views and non-religious views.

Done @<@

Perhaps, but belief in an invisible man in the sky that loves all human beings while sending 99.9999999% of them to burn for eternity IS delusional.

I hear ya, ViLSE!

The link i posted upthread is to a podcast from Seth Andrews, a former christian broadcaster now producing video and internet radio content as youtube user TheThinkingAtheist. In that particular 90 minute podcast he talks with Dan Barker, former evangelical preacher and christian musician who, after deconversion, founded the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

They speak of The Clergy Project. The podcast provides a thoughtful discussion of the issues facing religious leaders that have, over time, come to dismiss their supernatural beliefs. Before judging active clergy in this very difficult situation you should hear the other side of the story. Again, the link to that podcast:
http://youtu.be/rYMxSLuO6YY

Relevant links:
http://clergyproject.org
http://ffrf.org
http://www.thethinkingatheist.com

btw I know many (perhaps all) of you will not make time to listen to that 90 minute podcast. Sadly the entire story cannot be told in a 3 minute sound bite. So I submit a sampling of 3 to 5 minute videos by Seth Andrews found at his youtube channel:
http://youtu.be/N0Ii_D3uDDY
http://youtu.be/1Rwioe1SGkQ
http://youtu.be/4zZytbe1a9s
http://youtu.be/_J4ZuHEYXkk