Connection

just a guess here, but i think "Posting on F|A Forums" is probably at the top of the list as well...

can't believe puking doesn't get more votes. it's such a relief! and definitely the ultimate goal. i mean, how can you say you were drunk? if you didn't puke, you weren't really that drunk. everything else on the list can be done sober or on some other drug - but alcohol pukes, there's only one way to gain that satisfaction. srsly.

i look at them through my binoculars, or toss a landmine at them, so i'll have a good excuse when they kill me.

i like these headphones: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUfDhjjgdn4&feature=related

dyno kills are the best. either randomly dropped dynos, or getting multikill at an objective as 3 defending players get there a moment too late, or planting a dyno just off the objective that explodes 10 sec before the one on the objective does, wiping out the room. dyno kills are the hardest to come by, and they're my fav. figuring out spawn timing and planting one just where the spawn shields drop is great too, but also very hard to pull off. killing any 156hp medic with a cocky attitude when you are any only at 68hp because of sk attempts and your health doesn't regenerate. it's great to listen to these big egos complain that rnades or panzers should not be allowed, or that your grenade was 'lucky' straffing behind a tree without shooting back while they run out of ammo is a fun way to set up such a kill. turning around and blowing the head off a covi that thinks he hasn't been noticed just before he tries to knife you. perfectly timed grenades through windows or from any unlikely angle. one of my favourite all-time grenade kills involved low gravity panzer war at goldendunk.. me and another guy were chasing each other around for over a minute trying to line up a shot until finally i switched weapons and dropped a single perfectly timed grenade from the top of the map onto his head while he bounced across the floor. to me, a skillful grenade toss is 10x more impressive than a camper with a kill spree. getting killed by a covi while trying to prime a nade, then watching him explode when he tried to gib you for your pants. shooting down a nub chasing you through a wide-open space with a flamethrower. they're like nub. they are awesome in enclosed spaces. any indoor mortar kill, suicide or not. and finally, pushing you off a cliff.

unless mpg, comfort, seating for more than 2 ppl or handling are important to you. also if you ever have to have a kid in a car seat, you have to have a back seat. not that there's not a place and time for truck - it's just not 'perfect' for all occasions and all ppl.. no car is. i still say test drive at least 5 different vehicles before you choose something. if you want to see fuel economy, safety testing or anything else for different vehicles, look them up on cars.com -- but most important is that you feel comfortable sitting in and handling whatever you end up with. heck test drive 15 cars. the more experience you get with more types of vehicles, the better you will be able to make a decision. also, get a new 4 door maserati.

don't spend all your available funds. get something about $1000 cheaper than your limit -- buying used, you'll be sure to find something that needs replaced or upgraded.. like tires, stereo, something is bound to be about to wear out; that's why ppl trade cars in in the first place. get something you feel comfortable driving in - it's a big purchase and you'll spend alot of time in it, so make sure it's something you 'feel' right in. if you get something that looks really nice, you'll be pressured to spend lots of time keeping it nice. if you get something that already has some scratches and dents, you won't be freaked out when you scrape it against a fence or sideswipe the mailbox. take it for a test drive and get out of the car once the engine is warm, while it's running. look underneath for leaking stuff ( besides the AC that should leak water out of the tailpipe ). groan about anything wrong with it; get the dealer to take the price down or fix it. if your family has a mechanic you trust, test drive the car to the mechanic's and let him look it over for you. most dealers should be OK with you doing that 0 if they're not OK with you having a mech look at it, don't trust them. get a stick shift if you can drive one. most used cars are near needing a new transmission -- a clutch is alot cheaper to replace than an automatic transmission, + you get better mileage with a stick, you can roll start it if your battery dies, it's more fun, and you'll be less likely to try texting or talking on your ### phone while you're driving, because you need two hands to shift gears and steer. srsly, don't even answer the #### phone while you're driving.. please?? my first car was a 68 VW beetle =D cost $300, drove it for 2 years before i put in in a ditch on slick roads. well, greasy shoes slipped off the brake.. moral is if you wash dishes, change your shoes before you drive home. other moral is don't skimp on tires. tires = very important. well good luck! i wouldn't go looking for something in particular being your first car - just go looking for what's in your price range, and test drive at least 3-5 different things before you decide. after you've had a few cars you'll know better just what particular car you would want.. PS figure i should leave a stupid comment too -- get a new $40,000 STI

i have to keep myself away from the cassini mission's home page. I could literally spend all night staring at the imagery - words fail. so i picked a new desktop background; just wanted to share and possibly turn some ppl on to a great site if you haven't been there.. it's the best images of the saturn system ever taken, and they belong to everyone on this planet. this visible light image of dione with titan in the background gets to display on my monitors for a while: here is LINK to the mission home page, where the pic is hosted

i'm with you on that. this is a big stereotype-generalization, but i think it has some merit: the whole problem is that players who know the map best tend to play on the attacking team, and go for the objective, whereas players who just want to frag tend to play on the defending team, and camp ( spawn camping aside, you always know roughly where the attacking team is headed, but not so with a defending team. ) this is a big deal on 'new' maps that a lot of players may not be familiar with - people that know the map and the obj go for it and don't encounter much resistance from the players who don't know what to defend ( or don't care ). map ends quickly and noobs don't have time to learn the map. aforementioned noobs say "this map sucks" for obvious, often mistaken reasons. IMO if we could just get more quality nazis on the servers it would do a lot to alleviate the issue. @ zetag: this is actually an objective based game. if you look in the limbo screen, there's a list of objectives. there are also frag maps, but that's not really what this thread is about. it's ppl who only want to camp and slaughter a bunch of predictably-moving allies, instead of playing the objectives that make the map rushing an issue. map rushing isn't an issue on maps that require a bunch of events to take place before the map can be won -- like it's not really possible to 'rush' goldrush or venice, because two vehicles have to moved a distance - there's a lower limit on the shortest possible time it could take to win the map. but say you plow through goldrush in 7-8 minutes. is it sportsmanlike to leave the truck 10 ft from the end of the map? let the game go on for 10+ minutes of allies SK the axis? after the truck passes 2nd barrier many axis players just sit afk in the spawn because there's really no point in going for the truck. granted, the least amount of time to win goldrush is pretty close to %40 of standard map time, but you get the point. you just turn into a frag scenario with the defending team doing the camping instead. why do ppl who don't care about the obj care that the map ends in under 5 minutes? because they can't get 50+ kills in short time, and the thing that makes the game fun to them is looking at their high kill death ratios and kill sprees. so maybe map rotations should include more frag maps, with no objectives. set amount of time. let players who don't do objectives have their fun, and then play objective map after that. maybe fraggers won't be upset map ends quickly, because they get to play a non-objective map next in rotation. but more likely, no matter what you do, someone will b***.

@ phantasm -- OOPS i didn't read all the thread before i posted.. %800 off LMAO i was not aware of that result. but i have always been skeptical about hubble's law and redshift in general -- i am not at all surprised. as you said, gravitational effects on light cause redshift. interstellar dust causes redshift. for all we know, photons degrade over periods of millions of years, causing redshift. when you think about 70% or more of the matter/energy density of the universe possibly being unknown, you start to wonder just what else might be out there interfering with light and also causing redshift. not surprised at all... thanks for the info!

redshift isn't used to measure the distance a star is from us. remember Hubble? showed that the further away from us a star is, the more it's apparent redshift? well, you would expect that before he could show that, he'd have to have a list of how far away the stars were, wouldn't he... for the most part, astronomers used 'triangulation' -- well a better term is parallax -- to measure the distance to stars. this only works to about 400 light years out though, because of the width of the earth's orbit. parallax measurements basically work like this: you measure the exact location of a star in the sky at some point during the year. 6 months later you measure it again. you assume that the 'background' stars motion is very small compared to the apparent motion of the star you were locating, and do some geometry calculations to get the approximate distance to the star. think of it like this: hold your thumb in front of you with your arm stretched all the way out. close one eye and move your thumb so it covers something far away down the hallway or out the window. now keep your thumb steady and close the other eye ( don't forget to open the other eye! ). your thumb is now some apparent distance from the object it was covering. you know how long your arm is, you know how far apart your eyes are, you can measure how far your thumb appeared to move.. the rest is geometry. draw a picture; it'll make sense. but parallax doesn't work very well when stuff is REALLY far away - because you're looking for VERY small apparent changes, even with the diameter of the earth's orbit to work with, space numbers get very big very quickly. when parallax fails, there are a few other tricks. for one thing a star's color spectrum is a good indicator of it's absolute magnitude ( i.e. brightness, but astronomers reserver brightness to describe something slightly different ). . color spectrum is an indicator of exactly what a star is made of ( everything burns a different color ), and we've figured out roughly what a star's life cycle is, which involves burning through different color phases.. so if we know what color a star is, we can tell about how old it is, or at least where it is in it's life cycle. from using parallax and comparing the color of stars with a roughly know distance, a relationship was discovered between absolute magnitude ( how bright a star looks from a given, set distance ) and color spectrum. i.e. stars have a pretty much standard magnitude for any given point in their life cycle. ( look up the "hertzprung-russel diagram" ). long story short, you can see what color a star is. stars with a given color are roughly a given magnitude. now, a 60w light bulb looks so bright when you are next to it, and less bright when you are across the room.. the drop in brightness can be calculated if you make some assumptions about how much 'fog' or dust etc is in between you and the light bulb - or star. so knowing what color a star is, you *know* how bright it would be if you were in the room with it. knowing how bright it seems to be and comparing this with how bright it should bee, you can figure out approximately how far away it is. yeah, there is alot of approximately and guessing involved - no astronomer says such and such is exactly however far - but the distance involved is so big that it's OK to be off a few million miles. 100 zillion 6 million is not much different than 100 zillion 24 million if you get my drift. another trick is to use a 'standard candle' -- there is a type of star called a cephid variable that gives off pulses of light at a regular rate. they're like lighthouses, rotating and shining a beacon at you every time they face you. well the faster they spin, the faster the pulsing.. neat thing is ( thanks, God ) that their luminosity -- absolute magnitude & radiation you can't see; magnitude is only visible light -- can be very precisely calculated if you know how fast they pulsate. basically, if you find a cephid variable in a certain galaxy, you can watch how fast it pulsates and figure out it's absolute magnitude - from it's apparent magnitude you can then figure out about how far away it is. this gives you a rough estimate for the distance to all the stars in that galaxy! there's a type of supernova that's also a 'standard candle' because it's peak luminosity is a known amount.. but you have to be lucky enough to catch one going off to use it to measure anything. there are some other more complicated ways of guessing at it.. if you don't know physics it's probably just going to make your brain hurt even more to read my crappy explanations so i'll stop there. that's the major 3 ways of finding it. thing to keep in mind is that there's alot of estimating and assuming involved, but the distances are so great that the estimates are generally pretty good - nothing too accurate though. the further out, the worse the guess are.. as i said earlier it's only the local 3-400 light years that are really good estimates of distance, because parallax is probably the best bet as there are few assumptions. redshift is NOT a way to determine distance. it's a way to determine speed toward/away from you, but that is a calculation full of assumptions as well. it's only used to estimate the distance of VERY distant galaxies, so far away that we can't use cephid variables or spectral analysis.. you have to assume that hubble's relationship holds for all spacetime at a constant rate, and that the amount of interstellar dust is constant over space and time - both probably bad assumptions - and then you calculate how far away you think it is based on how fast it appears to be moving, using hubble's law. personally i see alot of problems with hubble's law in general.. so working it in reverse to find distance is not a great idea i think. then again, the error involved is still much smaller than the distance involved, so for very distant galaxies it's a good tool. OK i take back what i said about it not ever being used for distance measurements.. i haven't ever done a calculation, but i bet if you try to measure the distance to jupiter, or to alpha centauri using redshift you'd get a poor answer.. good question -- ain't it amazing how much you can figure out about something just by looking at it?

used to play in the woods alot. can't stand courses / speedball etc, but scenarios can be cool. a buddy has ~ 80 acres of mountain with old houses and barns in the middle of the forest - just a great environment.. so when it got more popular and sppedball places sarted appearing, i was like " this is lame" in comparison. i've played in abandoned hotels and warehouses.. now that's some cool paintball. got out of it because of the expense and just not having time anymore when i went to college. this was a long time ago, a year or so before the tippman 98 first came out. i'd really like to get my hands on a pistol, the kind with no hopper and an internal clip and air canister, size and feel of a real pistol. play with that sort of thing. the game really changed for me as guns got faster and faster - i like it better when no one has a practically full-auto weapon. none of that 'spray and pray' crapola. but yeah, paintball is great fun! oh yeah and i've got an amber lens mask too -- love it. you know what else paintball masks are AWESOME for? some hardcore sledding in the winter =p

you might have heard about this breaking and entering / attempted rape in huntsville the other day.. i don't mean to make light of it, but bear with me and watch these clips.. the crime is not funny at all, and it's good that it was stopped in progress. the victims brother however is quite a character.. watch this vid of the news report: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXM2D_NypfA&feature=youtu.be now that you've seen that, make sure you're sitting down and check THIS out:

anyone play lockout? it's a king-of-the-hill type map, where the obj is to capture and hold a flag at the center of the map. the map is however 'broken' so that the winner is the team holding the flag at the last second of the map, irregardless of what went on during the rest of the time limit. so.. i just sit AFK for the entire map and only play the last 10 seconds of it. i understand the rule, and the reasoning, but the consequence is that 40% of the maptime is meaningless.

are you talkin about stalingrad map? it's broken map. you only have to plant on one tank to win; you can't plant both tanks. at least thats how i remember it. don't mind me i don't play ET anymore haha.