KunMatt

The answer is "maybe".

If you have less than an i5 CPU or 4GB RAM then your system will be bottle-necked no matter how good your graphics card is however it depends on the game. I installed an nVidia GTX970 into an old 32bit Intel CPU and 4GB RAM and most games were more than 60 fps at Ultra settings. Checking system resources showed that my CPU was 100% though meaning it was the bottleneck in my system.

You actually don't need a top of the range card to play games at max settings. Depending on your TV/Monitor the best you can achieve may be 1080p, Ultra settings at 60fps. Most TVs cannot handle anything higher than this so aim for these settings by checking the hardware requirements for a new game you want to play at max settings.

My problem is not getting the items to Thailand , it is the length of time they stay dormant.

Like I say , I have one now that has been in Thailand since 10:30 Friday morning and it hasn't moved.

Other times it is in the postmans house cos he is to busy to deliver it.

Sounds like you are expecting 1st world service in the rural part of a 3rd world country. Be happy you even have a postman who does eventually deliver your mail to your house!

Not really mate , just expecting a half decent service that has been paid for .

You get your mail delivered to your house as promised, that is more than half decent service. If it was always lost or interfered with you may have a point. You really aren't a "glass half full" kind of a guy, are you?

My problem is not getting the items to Thailand , it is the length of time they stay dormant.

Like I say , I have one now that has been in Thailand since 10:30 Friday morning and it hasn't moved.

Other times it is in the postmans house cos he is to busy to deliver it.

Sounds like you are expecting 1st world service in the rural part of a 3rd world country. Be happy you even have a postman who does eventually deliver your mail to your house!

Isn't this "soft racism": infantilizing Thais, treating them as too incompetent and backwards to be held to held to any sort of standards. Sometimes, "TIT" doesn't quite cut it, in my opinion. "1st World service"??? Really??? To act on the basis that if you pay for a service, you have a reasonable expectation of getting what you paid for? Come on!

Seems to me you are exposing your own racist opinions of Thais there. I never said anything about Thais and here you are thinking they are all backwards and incompetent, tsk tsk.

I was just telling the guy not to sweat the small stuff, he gets his mail eventually, be happy with that, he expects it to be delayed so why get stressed if he understands the situation?

Living in Isaan is a life full of concessions. If small things like your mail taking a little bit longer to be posted to your house aggravates you so much then you're in for a stressful life there.

My problem is not getting the items to Thailand , it is the length of time they stay dormant.

Like I say , I have one now that has been in Thailand since 10:30 Friday morning and it hasn't moved.

Other times it is in the postmans house cos he is to busy to deliver it.

Sounds like you are expecting 1st world service in the rural part of a 3rd world country. Be happy you even have a postman who does eventually deliver your mail to your house!

Never had any problems getting anything delivered to a village in Ubon over the last few years, video games, baby clothes and toys, various things from eBay from all over the world, never been hit up for tax there either. It was expected that the mail would take 2 to 4 weeks to arrive from the UK.

In Bangkok I got stung for import tax because I sent a few of my personal items from the UK with FedEx, that was a 5,000 baht learning experience. The only piece of mail that has ever been lost in 6 years was a replacement debit card.

I just had a parcel sent last Wednesday from the UK containing video games, baby toys and books, and it arrived to our condo in Bangkok this morning so just 7 days.

If 20 people were hurt in a single vehicle accident in the UK, including the death of a 4 year old kid, there would be an uproar about it. But here, it happens at least weekly if not daily and nobody cares at all. Zero common sense or awareness.

Those scooters from Big C are a waste of money IMO, very difficult for young kids to balance on or control. Get one with 2 wheels are the front. The best ones are the Micro Scooters, you can buy them in Bangkok but I carried one from the UK last time we went for my 3 year old, now planning to get a smaller one for my 2 year old.

http://www.micro-scooters.co.uk/

I love my freedom here and riding my bike with NO helmet, it is called freedom and I hate all the nanny state do gooders who preach about safety all the time, jeees it is not safe to walk down the street so we will all have to stay indoors in padded cells to stop hurting ourselves!!!! Live your life how you want to and stop telling others how to live theirs.

I could not agree more. One of the many reasons I love living here. I am a bit fed up of these little western nazis trying to impose there values on places like Thailand. If the law doesnt effect you stop trying to impose it on others. I know when I get in a car without a seat belt or bike without a helmet that it is more unsafe. My choice end of. I dont need a government to try and save me from myself.

Have you actually read what this thread is about?

Yes so whats your point?

So why have you started on your little rant about western Nazis then? Is Thailand proposing a solution to children being killed in motorbike accidents affecting your rights?

Get a 12Call SIM and for 74baht a week you can have unlimited internet over 3G/HSPA+. Tether this or create a WIFi hotspot so you other devices can use it

I do it every week for when I'm out and about, it's fast enough to stream YouTube, I even download torrents with it sometimes.

Just *777*731# to activate it for one week. You can make it recurring every week by calling the helpline and talking to an operator.

I upgraded my PS4's HDD to a Seagate 1TB Hybrid drive about a year ago. Changing the drives is really easy and I just transplanted the original PS4 500GB drive into my PS3. To be honest there is barely any performance upgrade that I could test when going from a HDD to a hybrid drive. I would just advise to get a larger standard HDD instead.

I saved all of my game saves to cloud and just re-downloaded all the games I had again which was the longest part of the exercise and re-downloaded all of the save games from the cloud, it was pretty effortless. I'm not sure if you can backup the games to an external drive and copy them back onto the PS4 like you can do with the PS3, I'm pretty sure you cannot which is why I downloaded everything again.

The only thing you need to make sure you get is the larger firmware installation which installs to a clean system.

So I found these practice tests

http://examenglish.com/KET/

Are these what to expect when doing the A1 KET English test in Bangkok? Are these the current standard, format and level of the exam?

Thanks

Are there any practice tests for the A1 KET exam online? Or any videos giving a brief of what to expect?

I cannot find any useful material anywhere to help prepare for this exam or to find out the type and level of questions to expect.

Why do people who dislike Fundamentalists then proceed to try to imitate them? You quoted a piece of the verse, not the whole verse, and then proceed to take it completely out of context in addition to that.

The actual verse starts with "God said to the angels", which makes it sound a bit ambiguous...is he speaking to men or to angels? It also puts it in the past tense, which raises questions. These ambiguities mean that extreme Islamists and Islamophobes alike will steer clear from actually quoting the whole verse.

But if you actually read the whole chapter, the ambiguities are resolved. It does appear that Mohammed was intending men to be the target (or at least angels carrying out the actions of men), however:

1) The chapter is in the context of battle.

2) It is talking about a specific event that happened in a specific battle, not some general command for all time.

3) It is referring to something that happened already in a PAST battle, explaining why they won and did what they did, not giving any sort of command for what should proceed in general life in the future.

So no, the verse doesn't remotely suggest that its followers should cut off the heads of all non-Muslims. He's talking about specific actions of war that occurred in a specific situation, and it's already said and done with.

I'm no Muslim sympathizer. I don't follow Islam, and I don't believe it is a very good way to try to get to God. I disagree with a lot in the Koran. But when I was younger and tried to tell people how awful the Koran was, I actually looked up the proof-verses I wanted to use...and found that in context most of my arguments kind of sucked. Nearly all of the violence is in the context of battles, as often started by the Muslims opponents as themselves, and differs little from the justifications for violence given by most of the world until very recent memory (actually, probably by most of the world even now).

It is a factual account of a real battle that Mohammed fought in, so it is of course to be used as a guidance for how to act in a battle against non-believers.

Surah 8:12 was written during the Battle of Badr, the first great battle against pagans.

In that time beheading on a battlefield was usual, even so the fingers were removed from prisoners if they were captured to be slaves.

That's how battles were fought back then.

There are more than 100 others like this. Please don't ask me to explain them all.

You didn't explain it, you just confirmed my point. It is literally instructing Muslims to cut off non-believers heads. It doesn't say that this practice is limited to any time, it just says to cut the heads off of all non-believers so this instruction is still valid for Muslims today.

So the Koran is not being misunderstood or twisted in any way like you apologists want to make out, there are not several interpretations of verses, they are literal and they are calling for the murder of anyone who stands in the way of Islam, which is exactly what ISIS are doing. They are being true Muslims and following the Koran as instructed as it is written. Any other Muslim who does not cut off the heads of non-Muslims or go to Jihad like instructed in the Koran are not being good Muslims or following the Koran properly.

ISIS is Islamic fundamentalism. It has nothing to do with traditional Islam.

Islamic fundamentalism is a response to the evolution in modernity and the ties with the West. It's historically a recent phenomenom. For some others a trend and/or a cult image.

They reject their modern evolution and the Western ties by applying strict Sharia Law.

Furthermore they equalize wrongly their radical perspective of Islam to their political ideology.

Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Lybia, Egypt, Mali, Syria and other traditional Islamic governments are fighting for decades against Islamic Fundamentalism. That's for me the best point I can give you that traditional Islam and fundamentalism are not the same.

You can't ignore the revolt, struggle of traditional Islamic population, even if the fundamentalists win democratically the elections in their countries.

OP comments are correct.

Could you please differentiate which version of the Koran ISIS are following and which version the "moderate Muslims" are abiding by?

Are ISIS using an outdated version or a wrongly translated version of the Koran and this explains why they are living like a 7th century mob of brutal genocidal bandits?

The fact is ISIS are following the only version of the Koran and they do it page by page and word by word the same as every other Muslim in the world reads. Everything that they use to justify their actions is taken from the Koran verbatim so the only excuse apologists have to fall back on is that ISIS are "taking things out of context" and to that I would say that it's pretty difficult to take something like "I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them" (Koran 8:12) as anything other than the Koran instructing all Muslims to kill anybody who does not believe? I'm sure you know there are dozens more examples of quotes just like this.

Apologists will always have an excuse for the inexcusable. On a daily basis we are seeing horrific crimes against humanity being done in every country where there is a large percentage of Muslims and I'm tired of being told how merciful Islam is when all it does is kill anyone in it's way.

There's no differentiation applicable to explain the interpretation because there's only one Koran.

The philosophical context however it's different. In terms of essentialism and dualism you will observe clear, major differences between the fundamentalists and the tranditional Muslims.

Both layers of interpretation are essential to make difference between both coming from one devine script.

Again, comments in OP are correct.

ISIS is Islamic fundamentalism. It has nothing to do with traditional Islam.

Islamic fundamentalism is a response to the evolution in modernity and the ties with the West. It's historically a recent phenomenom. For some others a trend and/or a cult image.

They reject their modern evolution and the Western ties by applying strict Sharia Law.

Furthermore they equalize wrongly their radical perspective of Islam to their political ideology.

Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Lybia, Egypt, Mali, Syria and other traditional Islamic governments are fighting for decades against Islamic Fundamentalism. That's for me the best point I can give you that traditional Islam and fundamentalism are not the same.

You can't ignore the revolt, struggle of traditional Islamic population, even if the fundamentalists win democratically the elections in their countries.

OP comments are correct.

Could you please differentiate which version of the Koran ISIS are following and which version the "moderate Muslims" are abiding by?

Are ISIS using an outdated version or a wrongly translated version of the Koran and this explains why they are living like a 7th century mob of brutal genocidal bandits?

The fact is ISIS are following the only version of the Koran and they do it page by page and word by word the same as every other Muslim in the world reads. Everything that they use to justify their actions is taken from the Koran verbatim so the only excuse apologists have to fall back on is that ISIS are "taking things out of context" and to that I would say that it's pretty difficult to take something like "I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them" (Koran 8:12) as anything other than the Koran instructing all Muslims to kill anybody who does not believe? I'm sure you know there are dozens more examples of quotes just like this.

Apologists will always have an excuse for the inexcusable. On a daily basis we are seeing horrific crimes against humanity being done in every country where there is a large percentage of Muslims and I'm tired of being told how merciful Islam is when all it does is kill anyone in it's way.

Thank you all for your advice! Yes, I would generally be spending (roughly) 3 weeks per month in Thailand, and the remaining week or so in other places around Asia and/or USA (I'm a US Citizen). If I do this consistently for a year just using the 30-day Visa Exemption, I should have no problems, right? Since I'd be away from Thailand for at least a week before entering again each time.

I realize nothing is ever certain, but just wanted to make sure my chances were good. I would make sure to have 20k baht on me as well and bank statements showing that I have sufficient funds.

Thai immigration likely won't be a problem upon your entry, however the airline carrier may refuse you boarding if you cannot show onward travel. As long as you have flights booked for departing Thailand before the 30 days then you should be fine.

It depends on the carrier and I've been declined boarding once with Emirates, I've been asked to show a visa or onward travel several times with Qantas (I was holding a tourist visa at the times though) and just this month Thai Air in Heathrow asked me for a visa and said that if I didn't have one they would have denied me boarding. I was travelling with my Thai wife and our 2 kids and even with my 60 day tourist visa he had to check with his supervisor to see if I would be allowed to travel.

What a ding dong. Only a bell-end would show such disrespect for a sacred artifact. If anyone sees this guy do ring the authorities.

Would be funny if they now found this Chinese guy and his name was "Ding Dong".