Stardock Magazine December 2006 Announcing the GUI Champs Winners! Our Gift to you - Christmas Time Theme Stocking Stuffers Stardock: The year in review Announcing the GUI Champs Winners! The 2006 GUI Championships are now complete. The inter-website contest in which skinners from around the world get together and compete for over $12,000 in cash and prizes has produced some of the best icons and WindowBlinds skins we've ...
The expansion pack to Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords ( Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar ) has a new beta up. Gamers can still pre-order and get the beta. This build should be just about ready to go other than omissions (i.e. unhooked up features). It shouldn't crash or be unstable. Here are some (but not all) the changes: ** MAJOR ADDITIONS ** + When a civilization is killed, it will give its remaining military ships to either the pirates or another civ. ...
It's not often I have to ban people from JoeUser.com. The Terms of Service (linked below) spell out the definite no-no's. But that doesn't stop some people from trying to play victim if they get banned. I'll be the first to admit that the rules are not universally enforced. That's mostly an issue of the administrators only being able to read a tiny % of the articles on the site. So statistically, what happens is that banning occurs in discussions in which an administrator is a particip...
So I got my new Quadcore in. 2.667Ghz of Quadcore power. I love it. And as an AI developer, the future looks increasingly bright with features such as Quadcore coming. Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar, will support Dualcore CPUs. If you turn up the CPU options, more advanced algorithms come into play. But think of a future where Quadcore is common. I could have, literally, a thread dedicated to doing nothing else than statistical analysis of data running in t...
The Iraq Study Group report is finally out. It's a bit surprising in a few areas. First, it doesn't suggest that the US needs to exit immediately but rather that over the course of the next year the US should transition to a more supporting role of training Iraqi forces. Then, after that, the troops should come home -- ready or not. It also advocates talks with Iran and Syria. James Baker makes the case that the US had regular talks with the Soviet Union for 40 years even though th...
Almost exactly a year ago I wrote an article about the Politics of Labels . I argued that American politics is really broken down more accurately into 6 categories. But in most discussions, we end up funneling everything into left vs. right or liberal vs. conservative. The more simplified you make these labels, the less accurate they are. Yet, it turns out that most people are able to identify themselves into one or the other. No one is purely a conservative and no one is pure...
I am having some pain on the AI. You know you see the computer players do something dumb and you instantly think that the AI programmers must not know what they're doing. "Why didn't they think of X". But normally the thing is, the AI developer DID think of X but the AI still isn't doing it. I have this marvelous bit of code that the AI intelligently weights how close good planets of other environments are, how far they are, and how close other opponents are to it. It then is su...
A long time ago I wrote " the value of working hard ". One of the comments I made is that in my experience, having grown up around genuinely poor people that most of them are poor because, frankly, they're losers. Show me a consistently poor American and I'll show you someone who is either disabled, or more commonly a fool. Joe Knowledge followed this with an article called " poor people are stpuid " as a response to what I had written arguing that most poor people are poor becaues of c...
Earlier this week 6 Islamic Imams were taken off a US Airways flight after what was deemed "suspicious behavior". The mainstream media, naturally, tried to report it as "racial profiling" in action. But as more information becomes available, it has become clear that there was something up. The Imams not only were not sitting in their own seats but had spread out in groups of 2 in every section of the plane (like the 9/11 hijackers). At least one had asked for seat-belt extenders that were ...
While left of center regularly call me "intolerant" because I don't agree with their views (even as I provide a free blog for them to speak out), the left continues its consistent display of intolerenance by physically assaulting those who don't agree with them. This week's example is here in Michigan at MSU. To disagree with the left used to be just a matter of being ignorant and unenlightened . Nowadays, you're not only ignorant and unenlightened but too repulsive to allow to have your ...
It's the beginning of December 2006. What are the big news items today? I mean REAL news? Using Google News as a source which is based on consensus it would seem to be: Radiation detected in body of Italian KGB expert. This radiation poisoning of former KGB spy is pretty interesting and pretty newsowrthy. Phillipine typhoon may have killed more than 450 people. Definitely newsworthy. That's a huge storm. Iraq Study Group latest leaks. This is an interesting story too as ...
The left is dominated by pseudo-intellectuals who typically know enough on a given subject to be obnoxious but not enough to discuss the issue with any depth. The right has a significant number of social conservatives who are content to let you think what you want but quietly think you're going to burn for it. I find both pretty obnoxious but it is the left that tends to be more overtly arrogant in its pronouncements. The typical left-wing tactic boils down to this: IF you disagree w...
This past week's 20/20 explores some of the myths of who gives and who doesn't in America and in the world. It was a fascinating look at the giving habits of different segments of society. A few points that were brought up: The working poor give the most (as a % of income) The non-working poor (welfare people) give the least, even as a %) Rich people give more (as a %) than middle class people. Conservatives give a lot more than liberals Americans give 7 times more to char...
A black professor (on CSPAN) today suggested that the only solution for African Americans is to exterminate all the white people on Earth. Not in jest. It will be interesting to see what the reaction is.
One of the ongoing issues people who want to discuss the nature of Islam or other cultures is that inevitably, someone will come on and accuse everyone else of being "racists". The goal of calling people racists is always the same -- to prevent a given topic from being discussed. I am not a racist. But I don't really care if people think I am. If someone wants to think I'm some sort of bigot because I'm not a fan of Islam then I'm perfectly okay with that. The reason being, I only...