shinRaiden

Archives at seattletimes.nwsource.com and seattlepi.nwsource.com. About two miles or so on arterial roads. Quotes from Seattle PI articles, Times coverage was crappy and Eastside Journal doesn't have online searches back that far. The only time I ever shot a pistol was a custom 400 special that had just been rebuilt. I'd shot shotguns and rifles before, but having never shot a pistol previous, I'm grateful the owner had the gumption to only hand me one round and the chamber open for inspection, and an inspected empty mag. Then he stepped back and well to the side. You can get yourself in trouble so fast, the first recoils more than you expect, so you panic on the second and who knows where the third will go. ---------------------------- On a lighter note, the first time I ever heard a 44mag was on a pack trip in the mountains when the outfitter blasted a huge porquipine ~3m from where I was sleeping. He had a beautiful pair of long-barreled ivory-grip six shooters he got from his dad from back on the ranch. That wakes you up in the morning like nothing else.

Well, you do have the triads and the yakuza who have no qualms about blasting people, but they often fall into the wannabe crowd. No, the difference is in cultural attitude. The overwhelming 'groupthink' cultural perspective, combined with draconian communist PR and control in china specifically, I think is the the reason you see much less statistical and purportional incidents in Asia. In japan, when people want to commit suicde, they don't go get a gun and blow their brains out in private, they jump infront of a train in the mid-morning commute. The reason why is that they feel that society doesn't care about them, so dramatically affecting society will get their attention if but for a moment, but without inflicting any real damage on other people. Here in the US, where you have many people who don't give a rip about others, it's much more everyone for themselves. We also have suicide-by-police as well, and that's dispurportionally here as well. ---------------- Story was from April 21, 1997. It was a "powerful revolver" the guy had rented and loaded full. The woman shot two rounds and she failed to check the recoil after the 2nd round and the third round discharged directly behind her into the guy's neck. He was standing behind her observing and guiding her.

I have a sister who took one look at the extra pedal in the car (clutch) and said "what's that for, I can drive without it, and what do you need all those extra shifts for, its too much hassle." Dad promptly banned her from ever driving that car until she gets a clue. I have a brother younger than her just got his license, and wants to learn how to drive a stick. So he came to someone who knows how and asked to be taught, and is learning quite quickly - because he wants to and is mature enough to understand the additional complexity. Similarly, there was a case a few years ago here in seattle where a bunch of people went to a professional shop / range, very above board place, unlike the shop Malvo & Muhammad got their stuff at. (used to drive by there all the time going to school. Across the street from the Amtrak station in Tacoma, WA.) Anyway, somebody had a .44 mag or some other large handgun and all the guys were ogling it. Well, a girl in the group (all mid 20's) wanted to try and somebody handed it over with a round in the chamber and one in the mag. I don't think she had ever picked up a pistol before. The double-tap on reflex came as the pistol recoiled out of control over her shoulder killing the guy behind her. How many rules were broken in that case? We had a woodpecker trying to drill out our gutters, and one day my mom decided to grab the bb gun and go out after it. Even mom's have to have a refresher or reminder once in a while. You never just grab a gun and run, you always check it out before you use it, and make well sure you know what you are doing before you touch it. I quickly discovered she didn't know how the safety worked on the bb gun, didn't have a good idea how it loaded, and was carrying it pumped up pointed at her foot. I traded her for the pellet gun, walked her through all the safety's and loading steps empty, handed her one pellet, and told her not to load it until she had a clear shot. Then I took off for the opposite side of the yard. In the hunters safety course I took years ago, the part pounded into our heads the most was to never point a gun at anything you didn't want to shoot and weren't prepared to clean up. If you've never handled that gun before, you absolutely have to work through it to make sure you know how the safety's and mechanisms work. When your focus is on going out to play instead of primarily on how to be safe, people get hurt. When tupac got wasted, was it the 'banned' guns or was it the 'illegal' AK's smuggled in from China? The folks that are going to buy these are aficinado's who want it because it looks cool. They're not going to hunt anything other than Jack rabbits with them. The only 'practical' regulation aside from non-licensed bans on civilian ownership of military weapons would be to have a pshrink verk you over... "Pveas tell me vhy joo want a gun, you right-wing nut-job..." I've been snookered before by somebody who was convinced that I was nuts and had me hauled into brain-picking when it turned out he was the one who was nuts all along, and everyone but the mad doctor knew that. Unlike others, I don't have a problem with putting something like a VIN number on guns. However the impracticality of so many regulations such as gun-locks in your own home (hmm... random inspections? I don't think so.) and easy mechanical ability to part-out guns would make so much of the do-gooder's efforts meaningless.

I went through a pile of monitors this summer until I figured out that having two right next to each other on all day long was over-heating them. So I built a hideous four-fan octopus assembly out of 90cm fans, spare molex connectors, a flexy tube from home depot and no-skid pads from lowes, and a brick adaptor from Radio Shack. It's horribly ugly, but works wonders, and nobody else makes them. Thank goodness for a wonderful warranty. Kegs has a list, but I can't remember the link off the top of my head. Basically -nosplash, -nomap, -x=, -y=, -mod=, -window should pretty much cover it all.

Bad cap's. (Capacitors.) Long story, a shop in asia threw in the trash a design that didn't work. Competitor dumpster-dived and copied it as-is. That got stolen outright by a mole for yet another component shop and everyone started cranking out these faulty caps years ago. Mobo's started melting and leaking and all sorts of weird crap. It's been a huge mess, welcome to the club. Anything made new in the last couple of years or less should be past that though... Some AMD boards don't use the P4 12v plug, I wonder if that hurts them by not using it. Anyway, Tom's (THG) had a nasty writeup a while back about PSU's, the no-labels and even many big-labels had serious as-advertised performance issues. Ambient heat can cause card creep too.

OFP currently supports texture replacement for injuries and broken windows. Dirty textures could be handled as a replacement or a multistage alpha overlay.

Thanks. I can't decide if I'm a pixel to the east or not, but that's not going to make a whole lot of difference. Btw, ~160w & ~0n in the pacific is named for my crazy great-great-great-grandfather who sailed round the world a couple of times on merry adventures.

Enumclaw, WA, USA (45min east of Ft. Lewis, greater Seattle area) Latitude 47.2044 Longitude -121.9903 Thanks.

Hold on there. Before you go grabbing an nforce2 board, make sure you check out the relevant links at nforcershq per manufacturer here. Make sure that whatever nf2 board you look at has the newer chips that have resolved the AGP + goobs of ram low power issue. I dunno about the p4 dept, I don't keep up on that side of the pipeline. Actually, you shouldn't need to get a new mobo if I read your post right. If you can get OFP+R installed on any PC anywhere with your serials, all you need is that to get the keys built. The actual contents of a correctly dumped regfile will look like this: I haven't (can't) try this from 9x -> XP, but if the layout of the .reg file is different, you can copy and paste the hex value for the key to make it work right. Now the tricky part comes with patching. You need the the regkeys in place, and the appropiate version files (inc. the exe) before the patch will take effect. Once you have a system all patched up, it is really handy to dump that entire 'raw' OFP folder to disk, netshare, cd's, or a dvd, so that you don't have this hassle again.

Your current settings in your flashpoint.cfg call for a resolution / refresh combination that your monitor can't handle. Open the preferences app and select something like 800x600. If changing that still doesn't work, open up your flashpoint.cfg file with notepad and adjust these four lines as-is: If this doesn't work, get a new monitor. If it does, quit OFP and open up your display properties and test your available video modes - resolution and refresh combo's - note them down, and try the best in OFP. Windows will 'fall back' if you don't confirm success, but OFP won't.

Hey, I leeched for months before registering, and hung out a while before posting. Look at the threads count though, and see how good things really are.

Splitting pros: everything blackdog said. This forum has the best coverage on military issues globally like the russian hostage situation, scandanavian robberies, and such. No place like here for the best news, and mission material. ;) Cons: much easier to prune politics. Those so cloistered may get a bit more krumedgeonly in their ways.

True, the only factor consistent with CJK work is that it is all double-byte. It would be nice if Japan would standardize on UTF-18 or -16, but there is so much legacy systems in EUC, shift-JIS, the ISO JIS, that programmers are stick-in-the-muds. If you mandate usage of stringtable files you could get by with a single internal engine format and do something like in your stringtable.csv with a default to one of the en's. BTW, on chinese, is it only in the mainland usage that the simplified (kanji) are used, or does Taiwan use them as well?

I keep my dump on my linux box, and when ever I flatten my windows box I just copy the folders over, and import the registry keys. There are two keys in each folder benu mentioned, the serial and the path. You need both, so that's why benu said to grab the whole parent folder. Once you've exported you will have a nice little text file that you can confirm in notepad.

I think Walker's time line is spoton, which means that this is just further evidence that terrorism is taking a significant militant shift. Everyone was expecting a repeat of the theater, and so were the terrorists, as evidenced by the hostage management and fixed placement of the bombs, and the dogs. If they conduct future attacks with similar planning (god forbid), I think the gas option will become a one-time thing of the past. The other issue is the accelerated timeline being pressed. Terrorists used to have tons of patience, and still do when money is involved. But if they're whacked enough to seize a school, I doubt they're going to be open to any sort of negoiation, or even total caving. Rather, I think the outcome that came is along the lines that they intended all along. There was a quote I saw once from Yitzak Shamir about dealing with the palestinians. Asked what the Israeli response would be if the Palestinians tried mano-a-mano army to army in 'conventional' war, he responded instantly that there "would not even be a memory left of them". In the process, he acknowledged that the terrorists tactic of targeting civilians precluded 'military' action, leaving the situation as an ongoing police debacle. I don't know of any historical precedent for this kind of school hijacking, but this is an atrocious precedent, and will almost certainly be seen again, as long as there is nutz in the world, whether from Chechnya or elsewhere. As to the situation with the delay again in medical evac, I presume that the reason was twofold: 1 - Nobody expected it to escalate this fast, although I would have thought that the psyops people would have had a clue that the terrorists might be a bit edgy and sleep-dep. 2 - Because of the political relationship with chechnya, and the firepower invovled, this was a military operation. The military, especially spec.for., is not trained to handle mass civilian trauma, their job is to inflict it. Conversely, civie paramedics aren't trained to handle live fire situations. We had a case here a month ago in Seattle where a bum killed a guy with a golf club, and the firefighters saw the whole thing, but they don't get intervention training. The basic rule is that nobody moves in until the area is secure, so tough. If the area is not secure, nobody gets out. But the biggest lesson from this and the Imam Ali mosque and the guys who killed Paul Johnson is Folk's, control your your perimeter! I know I don't have the military background, but at least have the police or somebody wall off the place. Those who survive and get away live to fight another day, and they learn from their mistakes. Don't give them that liberty. The pictures on the AP wire are absolutely apaling. God willing, the Chechen people turn those guys out on their ears, but I fear the attitude will only be "well, they had it coming." I suppose that we'll only have news of further carnage in the area in the weeks to come.

Lets hope that Russia is able to come up with alternatives to fumigating the complex. If they continue to rely on that method and the media continues to cover the MO in depth, sooner or later the terrorists will catch on and prepare appropiately. The chechens have already proven that they are willing to innovate new tactics and methods. The line needs to be drawn there and now to discourage this kind of behavior from spreading.

The problem as viewed by the terrorists is that as people are inherently mindless minions who automatically become duplicates of their parents, those children will one day automatically become adult infidels, making them eligible opponents. As their fate is inevitable, the extrapolation is that they are embryonic enemies, and better to root it out before it has the chance to mature. Anything less than militant action comparable to the actions of the jihadists is viewed as best as inferior work of slackers, and at worst as aiding and abetting the enemy. To excerise obligations of in this case Russian allegience and citizenship, such as voting for enemies of Chechen seperatists, is viewed as allegience to an enemy party by the terrorists. The palestinians have attempted to extrapolate this argument and imply that as Israel has mandatory reserve duty (with some exceptions) that all Israelis are or will be military personel, negating 'civilian' immunity. That argument is not applicable here so long as iirc Russia does not have compulsary service. Irregardless, the war continues between believers in self-determination who value individuality, and those seek to expand their hegemony of presumed inevitability and compulsary assimilation.

Where on earth is our favorite Intelligence KFOR Expert Analyst at a critical time like this? The one and only Ikea here in Seattle is laid out with as much sanity as the OFP AI shows in CQB collision avoidance. They bought two adjoining warehouses, repainted them, and I guess just shoved all the stuff in there in a drunken frenzy. The the ironies get started across the street where in identical colors is the local NAPA auto parts warehouse. It is laid out very methodical so you can immediately find whatever part or tool you need. Now the mayor of the town where Ikea set up shop is having to rebut rumors of corruption and such after renameing the street out front Ikea Ave. Seems the truck manufacturer (Paccar, makes Kenworths and such) down the street and several other old-timers are taking it as a personal insult.

Kegetys (of course) has brought it to my attention that -twomon is not needed for multiple monitor spanning support in OFP. In fact, he showed that there is no support for a "-twomon" commandline switch. I don't know how that story got started, but it's at least a year and a half old now. So... To enable multiple monitor support, you must have the following setup: OFP:RES >= 1.85 Video card: GeForce 4 or higher Nivida card that supports nView desktop spanning. I know the Quadro NVS supports four displays, I don't have an NVS and four displays, so I dunno on that one. Also, as I don't have two pci-x nv40 boards, I don't know if you can cross cards or not. Anyway, current Nvidia cards only have two outputs, so you are limited there to two displays. Alternatively, you can check out the Matrox Parhelia series. These support two displays as-is, or three outputs with a funky octopus cable sort-of-thing iirc. Performance is alleged to be in the range of Gef4 42~4800 range. These are almost certainly the cards used in the VBS screenies. OS configuration: You need to be using nVidia's drivers, not MS's, and enable horizontal spanning from the nvidia specifc advanced options. This 'hides' the existing display wrappers, and creates a single virtual display. OFP sucks up the the provided display resolutions dutifully and launches into spanned mode. As mentioned elsewhere, you will need to double your horizontal fov display settings in your userinfo.cfg. Thanks.

Argh... I just wrote one too for a dialog tut package I'm building, but yours looks nicer. One feature I added in mine is a keypad scrambler, for all those who think they're l33t and check for prints and wear.

Figures, since the political table doesn't have any substantial AF opfor that would need a furball obilterator. The mission profile for the tomcat - go in so fast as to scare the bejeebers out of the bandits and zap them from 100miles out - died a long time ago. Now the primary role is multi-role, which the hornet fits better at. If you need to run beggars canyon popping womprats with lgbs, you're not doing it at mach two with phoenix's. It's the same as the Mig-25. That was designed strictly to take out the Valkyrie (which would have really been fun to see) before the Soviet ground-to-air missiles were sufficently developed. The F-15 was designed as a counter to the foxbat, but they got real lucky and ended up with a platform that blended well into a variety of mission profiles, that the -14 did not. I hope the USAF has the presence of mind to keep a squadron at least and have them tour with the blue angels.

That means: 1 - We won't pay to fly you out for an interview. If you're really that hot of an asset, you would have been sought out already. 2 - We're not paying relocation for your average Joe. Standard line in this field. With the high position-rollover of software dev jobs over a career, this makes sense financially at this level. 3 - It may not be worth your while to move yourself in light of the offered terms. Then again, last time I checked, Florida had a much lower Cost-of-living than west of the mississippi, especially more than the west coast. 4 - In the art field, it's your portfolio that sells you. If you already have a reputation, they'd know about you. If not, you'd have some fast talking to do to explain how you would be more of an asset to the company and not just a raving fan wasting their time. -------------------------------------- Furthermore in the case of minors, you at best could only hope for an internship, and you can kiss that goodbye once the school year legally starts due to state and federal laws. For map makers, you need extensive professional GIS experience, not just OFP-specific stuff. IE, this needs to already be your day job, and you better have a good reason for quitting your day job to chase this. Programmers and developers have schedules and deadlines to meet, and quality standards to achieve. You don't get paid to learn to code, you get paid to make solid code out of the blocks under pressure, and in this case in a restrictive environment. Reading Clancy books is not going to make you a superior scriptor. Remember, VBS is for real-world training for standard operating proceedures, not rambo adventurers. You need to already have a solid foundation in a wide range of military SOP's, have a strong advanced math and programming background, and be recognized for creating evolutionary content. So take a break, think about RL, think about what you have to offer, before you go running off doing stuff. Besides, do you know of anyone that will rent a car to anyone younger than 24?

Ah, I only did a brief search and didn't spot that thread. However, the tangent I was on was a bit different. In order to effectively utilize something like unicode, it would have to go in at the very core, because every thing will have to been written in and handled in unicode: * Scripts and functions * Config.cpps * Description.exts * -maybe- p3d names * save files * wrp data files * any where a string gets stored, read, passed, or parsed And you don't want to go and try mixing formats, the only clean way to do that is to change your "string" into something like (0x0234;0x0345;0x456;0xETC), which is very dev-unfriendly. I'm not familiar with the inards of how OFP display's text (whether it uses 'real' bitmap or vector fonts), but what ever it does is secondary to the core.

Problems with OpenGL programming: 1 - ATI fans will be outraged, but not take it out on ATI's crummy implementation. 2 - No kickbacks from MS. 3 - Engine would not be cross-portable to xBox.

Just curious, was it the silver star with or without the crossed V? Which of the three significantly different citiations on file for that silver star is the most accurate? As Kerry claimed to be a war criminal, and I suppose the UCMJ has provisions for dealing with such, why did he not seek a pardon or some kind of legal closure? If he puts the US into the ICC, and Vietnam decides to send an indictment to The Hague, then what? Finally, why did he write in his journal a week after his first purple heart that they had not yet been fired upon? I can understand lying to a country, we all pick and choose who we accuse of that. But when you can't be consistent and honest to yourself, how can he competently do anything?