Messages

[Gothic]

I second the suggestions for the Gothic series (I to III with expansions), in comparison to Morrowind and the like, the game world seems more alive and believable.

Ahh... my gaming life is complete again 

Does anyone have any idea how to get their mittens on this piece of ancient history? The dl links everywhere seem to be broken.

I think other religions 'lifted' stuff from Christianity. If you compare even just the 'creation story' from each religion, you'll see that most other religion's 'legends' are very similar to the Adam and Eve tale.

Most religions have somewhat similar creation story, but since Christianity certainly isn't the oldest religion in the world, it means that they have been influenced by already existing stories, not the other way around.

If Christianity acknowledges Satan, why does satanism discount God?

Sure Satanism is the antithesis of Christianity?

Depending on the type of Satanism you subscribe to, some discount and some don't. Some forms of Satanism could certainly be called variations of Christianity, while many are purely atheistic philosophies.

In any sense Satanism is not just flipside of all aspects of Christian faith, it just focuses on different priorities and sees things from a different angle. There's certainly Good and Evil aspects in both of them (depending on how you define good and evil, I suppose).

Alliance:  The fact that you accept Satan's existence means you also must accept God's existence.   In such a case, would you really want to be on the losing team?

To say that someone's religion - any religion - is a "losing team" is extremely arrogant and intolerant. To believe in existence of God and Satan doesn't mean you have to believe what the bible tells about them - theistic satanists can consider bible to be worthless christian propaganda, and have every reason to believe their side is the "winning team".

None of the satanists I personally know represent theistic satanism, ie. believe in existence of God or Satan as such. As far as I know, those who do are a minority of people who would classify themselves as satanists - most of them are atheists or agnostics. They see Satanism as a personal philosophy rather than a religion. Atheistic Satanists generally see "rituals" by Satan's worshippers as childish and useless as they see other religious rites.

Let's tweak the pyramid to make it into a real moneymaker. Instead of 5x5 matrix, let's do a 5x10 matrix. You still only have to find 5 buddies to continue the system, but you have to pay to 10 levels above you. For the first person who actually has the 10 levels above him, it'd still only cost a mere $50. Not an enormous investment, and the system should certainly be equally plausible as the original one.

I mean, you still only need to find 5 buddies and who wouldn't be able to do that? And doubling the investment to $50 is still peanuts. The profit is sort of cool too, instead of $15,000 you'd make $61 million!


Now, if we assume that making the 61 million isn't plausible, we must also assume that the original 5x5 system wasn't plausible either. After all, we didn't change anything extremely crucial as far as individual persons stakes of joining the pyramid is concerned.


Sorry, I'm just a big fan of pyramid schemes and MLMs  :

Okay, so the mathemathics kill everything.

Final questions; Would then making a 4 people list instead of 5 make it more realistic?
Also repeating the recepients isn't excluded, right?

In the end your own effort in the pyramid is somewhat irrelevant for your chances of getting the money. It's not about you, it's about the levels below you. The reason why no chain letter/pyramid scheme has ever completely run out of people on earth is that there aren't awfully many people who take the bait. If a 5-people-list scheme would have a participation rate of 20% (which would be optimistic), the pyramid would not grow exponentally as one person could get only one other below them, and so on. That would mean that for your $25+expenses investment you would get back $25.

Plus some of your friends would be annoyed since you tried to pull them into an illegal scheme with no real earning potential.


But to answer your question, in a system designed for quintuple growth for it's level depth you don't gain anything by limiting the amount of people directly under you. In a completely new pyramid, 4, 3 or 2 below you don't make much difference because for the same amount of money, you need the money to run up more levels. (which would also make initial participation more expensive). The same basic problems for pyramids would still be in effect:

1. If it would work as described, it would run out of potential participants in just a few levels
2. In reality it doesn't, because participation is very low, which means profit is only a fraction if any



What MLM companies (think Amway, Quixtar, Mary Kay etc.) really have is a same setup with some coverup products and cult like peer pressure systems to disguise the impossibility to earn money. No MLM distributor can make a living for their own sales only - the theoretical income potential comes from the recruits below, and distribution of their startup fees to the upline. In order for system like this to run, you need people underneath you who need people underneath them and so on... until it starts to sound eerily similiar to a simple chain letter. Average monthly income for average Amway (the largest MLM company in the world) distributor is $115 before expenses, which often are many times that much, making the business cost money to most participants.

[illegal]

I don't know what the original link was, but your standard pyramid scheme is illegal in pretty much every country. It's not a MLM if there isn't a product and most of the potential income come from honest sales. That being said, even legal MLMs are generally immoral as rarely more than 1% of the participants ever make any profit.

There's many other illegal ways to get some money. Mug someone, for example. It'll also be many thousands times more likely to yield profit than a pyramid scheme.


Now, to the mathematics of this specific moneymaking machine. You say it's not difficult to get 5 people to go along with this. You might be right, you might be wrong. But this trend to continue on multiple levels is quite unlikely.

Let's assume, even for argument's sake,  that the person who started this has just now made the 15k, so you're on the 6th level of the pyramid. There's about 3900 people in the whole pyramid, and 3125 of them are in the same level than you. For you and the others on the level 6 to get their money, 12 million new people have to be recruited. For all of them to get paid, 38 billion people need to be recruited.

The last time I checked, world population was at 6.6 billion. About 1 billion have internet.


Now to the tricky bit: If it was really that easy to find 5 people to go along with this, it should be just as easy for everyone else. And the next thing you notice, the world ran out of people. In reality the participation percentage on these very basic kind of pyramids is very low these days, as they have bad rep and people are smart enough to make the calculations. 10% would be very optimistic. That means that in order to get 12 million people in, 120 million needs to be contacted (by your level alone!).


For what it's worth, I'll repeat: in pretty much every country in the world, participating in a pyramid scheme is illegal

Its probly WifFixerPro/WinAntivirusPro 2007 advertisment wich I'm getting constantly now.

I successfully removed WinFixer/Vundo infection from a clients computer a few weeks ago. You need to do it manually with instructions, just an antivirus software cant do it.

Just remove IE's proxy and MSN stops using it too. Control Panel (Ohjauspaneeli) - Internet Options - Connections

Simply put, a proxy is a server in between you and the web server that holds the pages you're looking at. So, when you're browsing on a mexican cactus cultivation site, the page is sent to your computer from your university server instead of all the way from this side of the world. That is, if someone else in your network has requested the same page in the recent history.

Does your opera have the proxy settings correct? What about firefox? Also, messenger takes proxy settings from IE, but you can set them manually too, from the tools menu.

In my experience, Norton AV is bloaty, inefficient and can be painful to get rid of (worse than many viruses I've encountered). Same goes for McAfee.

For my own computers I've used F-Secure (which isn't really lightweight) and AVG (which actually is quite light). All of them have their problems. I recently manually removed bits of an infection from a client's computer that had AVG in it, with the latest virus databases. The virus itself was over 6 months old, but full scan with AVG came up with nothing. Similiar stuff happened with F-Secure too couple years ago.


I agree that common sense and a good firewall can keep you fairly well protected. However, roughly 90% of internet users don't have even trace amounts of common sense in them.

As far as I know http traffic uses port 80 no matter what browser you use. A configured proxy can use something else (such as 8080). If you don't use a proxy in opera, I doubt it's the external firewall that's causing the problems.

Does MSN (messenger?) and opera work if you unload your ZoneAlarm?

The floor tiles seem to be a bit busy and distracting, you could try to lower the contrast between the tile and the seam.

Not really brand spanking new, but here's one of mine:

(I don't think old images should count, just posting because phriday threads tend to be too quiet)

Once we degenerate all the way down to Bush=Gollum=lol level then I'll have something to link.

Made that a while ago

Ok guys, looks like the second week was less busy than the first one. Still, maybe this is better pace than once a week. There's only so much photoshoppery one can do a month.

While there's boatloads of PS parodies made of American Gothic, Toy Story fits there very well. So, Squirtle, I choose you! Water attack! No, wait.. Darth, I choose you!

Nice work from the other participants too, good luck for the next PP.