Aileron

Look, Crossader, I haven't played Hostile Space, but I've been around the block a few times with these online games. There's one important thing you need to know about this situation: You will never get revenge on the clans you want to get back at. Why? Because the people running it want money. The dominant players in your game have probably been around since it was being beta tested, and are their biggest contributers. The entire settings and management of the game is skewed in favor of those clans. Those clans in turn piss everyone off, and convince players they need to buy something just to compete. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that if you pay up, that you'll be able to compete with them. Wrong again. The people running Hostile Space don't want money from just you, they want money from everyone. The big clans have a proven track record of pissing players off and getting them to buy the upgrade. You don't. You will in fact interfere with the big clans, so while they want your money, they don't want you to actually win. The big clans will still have an advantage because the current settings are probably a compilation of their suggestions, and also the settings probably just favor the reigning champion anyway. Thus while it seems like you will have a fair shot, you really don't. The only way to win this game is to turn around and walk away without giving them a dime. This isn't to say that I don't like games trying to get you to pay for them. Actually I think that's Continuum's biggest problem. It works if the payment is up front costs to play the game. When its eventual costs to buy settings, it ruins the game.

I think Veg's point is: quit blaming Bush for everything. Not too long ago Bakarau volunteered me to set up some stuff on his site. I politely* declined, saying I have things to do and bills to pay. His response was 'We all have bills to pay thanks to Georgie'. *okay, okay, okay, I wasn't exactly 'polite' about it - but you can't just volunteer someone to help you. WTF? Did capitalism not exist before George Bush took office? I remember growing up under Bill Clinton - my parents had bills. Are we to believe that before George Bush, all expensive items such as apartments, cars, loans, and insurance, were given away for free so that no one had to pay for anything? I'm tired of hearing it, so here is a list of things that George Bush has been blamed for which the blame should rest on others. 1) WMDs in Iraq. Whether you think they didn't exist in the first place, or weren't found after the war, both jobs are the responsibility of the CIA. The CIA is the president's eyes and ears, and the president can only be expected to make decisions based upon the information our intelligence agencies give him. If that information is inaccurate or vague, the president can only make a decision blind. 2) Not finding Osama Bin Laden. Again, that's the CIA's job. It's not George Bush's job to wander around Afghanistan and Pakistan looking for Bin Laden. All he can do is tell the CIA to look for him, which he did. The fact that they can't find him is another sign of the CIA's incompetence. 3) Hurricane Katrina. A class 5 Hurricane hit a major metropolitan area placed in a geological bowl, originally founded in a location ideal for exporting furs on to wooden sailing ships, not supporting skyscrapers. It was going to be a disaster no matter what. George Bush can't control the weather. The more popular blame is that FEMA was slow, and George Bush somehow caused them to be. Guess what? FEMA is part of the Federal Government. The Federal Government has ALWAYS been slow and inefficient since the presidency of George Washington because by its very nature it has most of an entire continent to manage and is over-centralized. That inefficiency is the ENTIRE reason State and Local governments even exist; governments who didn't step up to the plate to handle the situation. George Bush can't make the federal government efficient any more than he can control the weather. (Actually the technology to prevent hurricanes by 'seeding' them isn't that far away. I think weather control will be developed far sooner than an efficient federal government.) 4) Global Warming, !@#$%^&*uming what Al Gore says is true, which it isn't, but just for argument. I guess the argument here is that fumes from cars cause pollution, and that Bush has ties to the companies which produce the gas which fuel those cars. By the same argument I could claim "If George Bush was such a good president, why am I so fat?" (If it weren't for oil companies, we would all have to do a !@#$%^&* of a lot of walking.) The problem here is people want to avoid personal responsibility, so they blame the president. Those oil companies didn't make so much money because no one bought their product. Oil use was growing exponentially long before Bush took office. All he can do about it now is fund alternative energy and be pro-nuclear, which he is. From then on all we can do is hope a scientist figures something out. Note that during Bush's presidency many automakers started selling hybrids and even some hydrogen fuel cell cars, so Bush was clearly friendly enough to alternative energy to make it possible. I'm not saying credit Bush solely - those things were in development for decades. I'm saying don't claim that he hasn't done his part to help out. 5) No Child Left Behind. I think by this time liberals counted every proposal Bush made as a 'problem' just for the sake of doing it. It wasn't; it was an considerable improvement. The idea behind NCLB is to make a federal standard for public schools and to open up options to move students from school to school if certain public schools are failing. Before NCLB, there was nothing close to a federal program for public schools. So, NCLB is simultaneously the best, worst, and only large scale federal public school program we ever had. Sure before that there was funding programs and initiatives, but not any actual legislation. Obviously it had flaws. But heck, even the founding fathers didn't get the Cons!@#$%^&*ution right the first time around. The important thing about NCLB is that initiated a program, making improvements possible. I'm sure McCain will improve NCLB considerably right after mopping the floor with Obama. 6) The Patriot Act, Wiretapping, Security at Airports, Racial Profiling, etc. If you haven't noticed we are in the middle of a war. Historically, most democratic countries go completely communistic in wartime, as it is often the only way to deal with the short term situation. Now, Terrorism is clearly going to be a long term problem, so we can't use the same tactics as FDR did in WW II. Still, the government isn't going to find terrorists unless they look for them. Bush's job as the executive is to try to make the search as efficient as possible. Its the Supreme Court's job to watch out of personal freedoms. That's the Check and Balance system. Them having run-ins with each other is a sign the system is working. The sign of a failure in this case would be if they were not arguing, because if they weren't that would mean one of them wasn't doing their jobs. 7) Alleged cases of torture on captured terrorists. That's the case of guards not doing their jobs right. All Bush can do is discharge the offenders and press charges, which was done. Overall, people need to remember how the US government works. It isn't a monarchy. The federal government has an Executive branch, a Congress with two houses, a Supreme Court, and bunch of Agencies. Also, the Federal Government isn't the entire government either. Each state has Executive, Legislative, Judicial, and Agencies as well, and on top of that there are local governments for cities and townships. The whole system contains checks and balances so that no one man in the government has sole power to do everything. On top of that, we live in a free society, so individuals and businesses are perfectly capable of causing problems on their own. On top of that, Acts of God can also cause problems. The President doesn't have the power to run the country all by himself, and thus isn't responsible for everything that happens outside his sphere of influence. So, no, the president is not at fault for the recession. It is a capitalist system, not socialism or communism. Those who blame Bush are really making the argument that he should somehow convert the US government into a Socialist system so that he would have the power to prevent recessions, so that blaming the president for a bad economy would be logical. I'd rather we keep the small problems we have now rather than cause much bigger problems when the federal government tries to micromanage economics.

Obviously all health care workers are liable under the federal HIPAA act to keep all medical information confidential, and a database such as this would fall under that bill as well. I think what Wild Luck was referring to would be a security breach where some hacker, some quack, or minimum wage worker who has access, steals information from the database. That would obviously cause a certain amount of chaos, though people usually aren't interested in the medical condition of strangers. You might see cases of 'medical iden!@#$%^&*y theft' where people could use someone else's insurance to get plastic surgery, or use several people's accounts in order to get multiple prescriptions of the same drug. All anyone could do with that is keep the database as secure as possible and hope for the best. Really, its a case of encrypting it enough that it's more profitable for a thief to look elsewhere. That's actually pretty easy, because medical records information can't be directly turned into cash. It would be far more cost-effective to steal product secrets from corporate databases and sell those to a compe!@#$%^&*or.

Well, battles are definitely broken... maybe its just between the two of us, and that the server still thinks we are fighting since you challenged me a few weeks back. You can see a list of active members on the bottom of the 'statistics' page, except there aren't any active people so its blank. I don't think I'll bother posting in the tech support topic. The programmer hasn't posted in it in four months. I checked the PHP code and as far as I can tell, this message should only pop up if either the challenged has no HP or the challenger is already in another battle. I don't know what to do about it.

I worked in a hospital for a while. The records were on the internet. The hospital I worked for was a little laggy as far as technology is concerned, so I'm sure internet records are used at most health care ins!@#$%^&*utions. It certainly isn't anonymous. Records must include a patient's name, SSN, and health insurance information.

Sorry about the wait. I was busy all week. I'll see if I can get on that tonight, and if not, tomorrow. If you want more bots, see the pinned topic about adding content. All you need to do is give a name and a few stats really.

Well, as a Republican I want Obama to win the Democratic Primary for the following reasons: 1) Clinton is much more likely than Obama to run as an independent if she loses the primary. 2) When the debates for the final take place, McCain is going to make Obama look like the idiot he is. 3) I just don't want to see another Clinton in the White House. 4) I don't believe being a housewife qualifies somebody for presidency. Both Hillary Clinton and John Kerry were housewives, and I think it would be a bad precedent for a political party to nominate candidates based upon who they are married to. 5) Obama is at least consistent. 6) Hillary Clinton puts her party before the country. The reason why most Democrats voted yes to going into Iraq is because if the war didn't happen, they wouldn't have anything to protest. The plan was clearly to support Bush going into the war and then double-back and oppose it in the middle. 7) The Clintons have access to many illegal campaign funds from felons and such. Those funds would be unavailable for Obama should he get the nomination. If Hillary wins the primary, two decades from now Chelsea is going to run for president. 9) People tend to become more conservative as they mature. Obama is young and likely to swing closer to the right as he ages. Clinton is clearly undead and not liable to change her policy ever. 10) If Clinton makes the presidency, the duo will be receiving the biggest retirement pension in the history of the US government, useful for writing books, making museums, and a bunch of other annoying things I don't want to see.

Disenfranchised. I live in PA and McCain has already clinched the Republican nomination. Maybe I'll show up just to vote on the local seats. For reference, I'll vote for Huckabee. I anything to show McCain that he does need to pay some attention to his core.

I have no problem changing the topic though. Veg can move as he sees fit. First off, if a biological theory has validity, it doesn't need to be propped up by lawyers. That court case in Dover exactly describes what I am talking about. Rather than discuss the matter like biologists, evolution is propped up by ACLU laywers who sue anyone who disagrees with them. The whole incident was set up as a legal intimidation tactic. In fact, the Judge of the case, John E. Johns, copied his opinion from the ACLU. The ACLU proposed a "Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law" in the case, and the Judge's opinion was a copy of that nearly ad verbatim with 5,458 of the 6,004 words of the Judge's findings being the same as the ACLU do!@#$%^&*ent. What really annoys me regarding this matter is that conservatives want a discussion, liberals want to censor, but liberals will turn around and act like they are being the fair-minded ones on this issue. But, I didn't even mention intelligent design. Read my last post...Did I mention intelligent design at all? All I'm saying is that 120 years ago Darwin made a theory. Since that time, it has gone nowhere. It hasn't changed. It hasn't been proven. Subsequent theories haven't been developed. There have been questions like "How was the eye developed?" for which the vague answer provided today are the same one provided by Darwin in the original theory, but in all of that time no one has actually proved the process. Infact, some of the most famous proofs of the theory, such as the Peppered Moth Experiment, have been since discredited. (The experiment didn't take into account the moth's natural behavior.) There has also been an experiment where two batches of fruit flies, one who would eat a poison, one who wouldn't, were studied in an environment where that poison was present. As it turns out the poison-eating flies survived. It was regarded that the gene to selectively not eat poison caused too many 'survival costs'. This means that if a population of fruit flies tries to evolve into a more intelligent creature, survival costs will pull it back down. Now, a questioning scientist would ask "Does this 'survival cost' impact other species as well?" My gut tells me this would probably apply to most if not all insects, but I don't know because no one ever bothered to find out. The next question would be "How does intra-species evolution occur if every time a population strays too far from the norm it starts incurring survival costs?". I'm not saying those questions don't have an answer; they probably do. What I'm saying is that biologists, intimidated into compliance by the ACLU, are not asking those questions, nor are they experimenting. The experiment should have led to a dozen or so other experiments, but instead it was quietly silenced and ignored. If this were physics, the theory would have been shot down by now! But, it hasn't been. I'm not saying we all should get on the ID bandwagon, but I am saying that biologists are simply unwilling to apply any sort of discerning opinion regarding Darwin's Theory. Its not the outcome of the theory I have a problem with, it is the process used to arrive at that outcome.

That statement is entirely wrong. Personal beliefs are secondary to ability and duty which can only be shown by accomplishment. Now, it would be fair to say Huckabee doesn't have a lengthy list of accomplishments either, but its wrong to judge somebody on personal beliefs. This is academic though. Huckabee is out of the race as McCain has clinched the Republican nomination...and Ron Paul was never really in it to begin with. I actually agree with Huckabee on that evolution thing. I don't like the Theory of Evolution. It has its flaws which biologists simply won't address because to question evolution is heresy against atheism. Not flaws as in 'throw out the theory', but small flaws - sort of the type of flaws in Newtonian Physics which caused Einstein to create Relativity. I do think that without this strict devotion to Darwinism status quo, biologists would have a more sophisticated set of qualifiers on the theory.

I don't like Obama because this isn't a high school student council election. If you looked at the list of Obama's accomplishments, it would be a blank piece of paper. If Obama had previously championed a bill or two, maybe. Again, it goes back to the Democratic Party leadership deciding the outcome of this primary in 1996. Obama is their intended 2012 or 2016 candidate. The idea was to get his name out now, get him to do some executive-style stuff within the next 4-8 years, and then run him for President for real when he's more well-rounded.

I'm definitely sure you people are counting the Republicans out way too quick. Under scrutiny, the Democrats are nothing but whiners. All the democrats have been doing was complain, criticize, fillibuster, undermine, and generally oppose the established strategies of Bush. Without Bush, the Democrats have no one to oppose and thus have no platform. That will become apparent in the secondary debates. Hillary Clinton is definitely NOT going to be anyone's running mate. She's too old for a VP position.

Bak, I am !@#$%^&*uming they have the ridiculous amount of energy needed to get 99% c. Yes, its ridiculous. We all know its ridiculous. You don't need to state it. All I'm saying is that if we !@#$%^&*umed that we had a battery with that much energy in it, the next problem would be predicting where a habitable planet is going to be X million years in the future when all of our information is X million years old. Wormhole theory is vague and based upon another theory (Einsteins Theory of Warped Space - much more credible, but still not a Law.) Even with such a sketchy thing, there are still multiple problems with wormholes, most notably of which is all natural wormholes last mere nanoseconds, and that all natural wormholes are still light-years away from Sol so we would need to solve the problem of inter-stellar travel anyway. No new element would help with light-speed travel, unless it's nuclear processes can be utilized to create the aformentioned ridiculous energy battery which Bak is anal about. The only particle which would help is "Tachyons", by definition a particle traveling faster than c, which are another science fiction construct and don't exist. What also could help is either 'anti-m!@#$%^&*' or 'inertial dampeners', which would effectively reduce the transported items' m!@#$%^&* thus enabling large objects to accelerate towards c without as much force requirement. Again, science fiction, though more slightly credible than wormholes or faster than light travel. Still won't happen though.

I've come up with a theory. The next president of the United States will be Huckabee. Here's why: On the Republican end, there are two candidates left. McCain and Huckabee. Since most conservatives don't like McCain, I suspect that they will all vote for Huckabee, and after he gets some momentum, Huckabee might just pull the Republican primary. Meanwhile, on the Democratic primary, people are realizing that they don't have to vote for Queen Hillary if they don't want to. I think Obama is going to win that one. What's going to happen however is that Hillary isn't going to settle for that. She's been the queen of the Democratic party since 1992, and they have been planning on running her for 2008 since then. They fixed the 2004 election so she wouldn't have to compete with a democratic in!@#$%^&*bent, and fixed the 2008 primary by only giving tickets to a bunch of inexperienced morons. Additionally, the Democratic congress has done absolutely nothing, because they want any successes to be attributed to Queen Hillary. Clinton seems to believe that she is somehow owed the presidency, as if she rightfully inherits the position from her husband and that the desires of the country should cater to that. Point being, if Obama takes "her" nomination, she'll get angry and run as an independent just to screw up his chances, and to improve her chnaces at 2012. She'll run as an independent, split the liberal vote. We'll have a three-way race between Obama, Huckabee, and Clinton, and Huckabee is going to win.

To answer the question: Yes. Relativity is freaky stuff. It honestly amazes me how popular science fiction puts so many barriers into people's creativity. Look, we don't need faster-than-light travel to leave the solar system. If humankind were leaving the planet, all we would need is a ship going close to the speed of light. It would take millions of years universe-time, but depending on how fast the ship was going the passengers might experience it in as little as seconds due to relativistic effects. The tricky part is predicting a planet that would be habitable upon arrival, and I would emphasis that this would be a one-way trip. Also there would be the problem of not crashing into anything when the ship would be moving ridiculously fast, though if future humans have the technology to am!@#$%^&* the amount of energy needed to pull the feat off, I guess quantum computer navigation would be feasible. I don't know how that energy would be transferred to motion in the vacuum of space either. I guess the key is human beings will have to settle for one planet at a time.

Well, here are the balancing issues so far... First of all, Str, Def, and Int after items are too powerful relative to HP and MP. It is too easy to kill a bot with one shot, and in PvP the challenger always wins merely because he gets the first shot. Since the player has to load a whole page for every battle, individual battles are too much of a hassle. Secondly, spells are in major need of balancing. I honestly didn't know about the 'spell level' stat until after the game restarted and after I had used spells like nuts in the game. With it, spells have potential to get really powerful. MP cost of spells is about right for the world map (where you would have to endure several battles between rest and restocking opportunities), but far too cheap for single battles. Bots are a problem. Currently the first problem of the one-shot kill battles is really hurting the bots' effectiveness. However, on a fundamental level, players always get to choose the bot they wish to challenge, and players are always going to choose the strongest bot which they aren't going to lose to. Experience gained seems to be dependent most of all on the target's W/L ratio, and since players don't lose to bots, all of the bots give out lousy XP. The good news is that this rewards players who play PvP. The bad news is that we want the bots to win matches once in a while. How to fix them: Base stats, as well as stats boosts from inventory need to be adjusted. Spells need to be weaker with a higher MP cost. Gold payout of the bots needs to increase dramatically, as well as cost of high level inventory items. So much so that the player could never reasonably be expected to afford a plasma weapons by taking out anything weaker than a twer. Beefing up the bots' offensive capability probably wouldn't hurt.

You don't at this point, as the map is far from completed. If it were, you would get off by the Star icon next to the Lancaster. Then, it would take you to the star map which is in the pinned user submissions topic. You would then use that to travel to other locations. However, I haven't uploaded it because there is as of yet only one location, and there are more important things to be done with the V RPG than adding more world maps. If anyone wants to make a world map, feel free. Just pm me first because I have something very specific in mind for each one.

You mean the massive amount of exuberation...

Well, first off, the End of All Things is definite. Nothing lasts forever. Scientifically the whole Universe is going to split apart into a cloud of gasious matter, and between now and then something is going to destroy the Earth along the way. By another arguement, nothing else in life lasts forever, so why should the Earth be any different? The question of 'when' is a fundimentally religious one. Athiests like to catagorize religions based upon the number of deities worshiped. I for one like to catagorize them by how they deal with questions like this one. There are two answers possible: 'We don't know' and 'Its going to be on...'. In my mind, every religion is a combination of Holy and Unholy. Holy religions function to guide the participants towards higher morality. They try to encourage people to be more civilized human beings. Unholy ones function as a means to 'discover' the 'inside track' to how the world works. They try unsuccessfully to give a guide to predicting the future, avoiding bad things happening, and cause certain random events to happen. Simply put when asked a question like 'When is the world going to end?', a holy religion will answer 'unkown to humans'. An unholy religion however is expected to name a date. As for the 'science' statement...things get tricky when science gets involved. When we learn more about the universe and as the end draws closer, there is bound to be some point when human knowledge will know what is going to happen. Religion is the realm of what is believed. However, what science knows is that the magnetic pole is going to shift, the next step of athiests or scientologists believing that said magnetic shift is going to cons!@#$%^&*ute the end of all things is religious. Multiple theories of the End only proves that Unholy religions existed, which is known anyway.

Merged. Your topic was redundant. Using potions in battle causes a bug. The programmer has been aware of that bug for months. By the way, knowing more than one spell also creates a bug. The 'World Map' is a game world. You move around, battle enemies, collect gold, etc. Admittingly it would would be much better if you couldn't do all those things on other tabs, and if you couldn't choose who you fight in a 'random battle'. (BTW, this page of the world map doesn't have any random battles) No Those messages are present, unless you are running your game on Internet Explorer in which case it won't quite run correctly because the guy who programmed this is a FireFox Nazi.

!@#$%^&*, leveled up spells are everything in this game. I just blasted the High Twop. I cast level 3 Wizard's Lightning on him and he went down with one hit. I seem to have made many false !@#$%^&*umptions about the settings. I !@#$%^&*umed that spells won't double, triple, quadruple, etc. in effectiveness if you use them for a few levels. Also, it seems the experience bots give are dependent upon their win/loss record, as the experience I got from the Twops decreased rapidly as I defeated them. Gives me a case of 'What were they thinking?' really.

Actually, nikegirl, you aren't quite correct. The Patriots were taping ALL of the player callers on EVERY team. The Jets just happened to be the people who caught them because one of their coaches were working for the Patriots the year before and was in on it.

If you are talking about some Mercury Gloves, double check your level.

Core 3 doesn't have those Turns features?!?!? NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!! Yeah, my thoughts on the matter is the designer messed up the whole concept of 'elements'. Elements should be different types of damage. What needs to be done is that Str & Def need to be changed from ints to four or five element arrays. I have found that Int can replace Str, so mages can balance with fighters. Here's the calculations: Damage for attack: rand(Attacker's Str - 10, Attacker's Str) - (Defender's Def) = Dmg Damage for spell: (Spell Str * Spell lvl) + (Caster's Int) - (Defender's Def) = Dmg Spell lvl is something that increases as the user casts that spell, so spell lvl 2 means your spell strength is nearly doubled. I'm thinking spell-casting might be the way to go.

I don't mind Tom Brady that much. I mean, its fun to watch him get sacked, but he does seem to have class. I would like to call back the debate from the beginning of the season where the Pats go caught taping the other teams' signals. People did ask the question if knowing the other team's plays in advance could really affect the outcome of the season. I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that it is most certainly true. If the Patriots did not get caught cheating, and had continued to do it, them knowing the Giant's plays could have EASILY caused the Patriots to win that game, and then they would have had a perfect season and would have gone down in the NFL Hall of Fame and stuff like that.