It never ceases to amaze me how blinded some people are by their religion. They seem to be completely unaware of how their religion has biased them taking a more open-minded approach to scientific research. Let me give you a tale of two theories. Evolution is a theory that stipulates a set of principles on how life on earth changes (evolves) over time. It has a great deal of documented evidence to support it. However, because evolution contradicts the bible, many religi...
Most people are aware that politics can affect how history is recorded. But every scientific endeavor suffers from such things. In biology, zoology has gone through the same sort of thing. When you are dealing with anything subjective (and lots of things in science is subjective) politics come into play. And few things are more subjective than organism classification. With that said, zoologists have a basic classiciation system. It's not perfect, but it is accepted and that'...
What exactly is evolution? Evolution is a theory. It is not a hypothesis. A theory is a set of scientific principles that is supported by observable facts. A hypothesis, by contrast, is a statement not backed up by facts. The theory of evolution is as follows: Fact #1: Random mutations occur in nature. Fact #2: Mutations tend to be passed onto off-spring. Fact #3: If one organism is genetically different enough from another organism then they will not be able to reproduc...
The points system doesn't exist to promote fairness. It doesn't exist to encourage competition. It's not even designed to encourage bloggers to blog more. The points system is designed spefically to promote articles and bloggers that have already gained a readership. It doesn't care what you write about. It doesn't care whether you're a liberal or a conservative. It doesn't care what color your skin is or what sex you are. It simply designed to promote thos...
In about 10 days we are going to do a points audit on the site. Every time someone makes a comment, post, etc. they receive points for it. It's recorded in a log. I know, from casual inspection, that some people have far more points than their available # of comments and articles could possibly warrant. Now I have a confession to make, I've been very competitive in my life and I've played the system my share of times. I haven't done so here since I'm the #1 user because I know...
A long-time friend of mine is facing real difficulties right now over at the site he helped create -- deviantART.com. It's almost a text-book example of business men vs. engineers on the surface. The idea guys, the founders, the visionaries versus the suits, money men, and biz guys. In these situations, the biz guys almost always win because they are the ones who have put together all the legal paperwork for the company and can make sure they are legally unassailable by founders wh...
My friends have talked me into a joining a Fantasy Football league. Anyone have any tips, sites, whatever for that?
Ever taken a purity test? How pure are you? MOS = Member of opposite sex.
Does JoeUser.com seem like it's faster? In the past week in the course of trying to fix the site, we (and by we I really mean T-Man and Alberto) have been working like madmen to optimize the site code to make it more efficient. Hopefully, getting to articles and such feels a lot faster. How does it feel to you? It should feel significantly faster so if it doesn't, let us know. Thanks!
JoeUser has been going up and down and up and down. What's the deal? This is going to be a bit technical but we want you guys to know exactly what is happening. All Stardock community sites share the same underlying Stardock.net database structure. Your UserID and Password will work on JU, GalCiv2.com, TotalGaming.net, WinCustomize.com, SocietyGame.com, PoliticalMachine.com and even in Stardock.com's forums. The same is true of the blogs/posts. When I write a blog...
I suspect like many of you, I've been very frustrated with JoeUser's unreliability and downtime recently. It's just one of the downsides of increasing popularity and not having the resources to address it. Last week, it really came to a head and we literlaly had to take the site down in ordre for any of our sites to stay up. So while it was down, we started cleaning things up where we could. We're still not happy where things rae but right now, we're up. I am really sorr...
We're trying to figure out a database issue that is related to JoeUser.com. So we have been having to take JU down periodically in order to test potential solutions.
There's a lot going on in skinning this summer. And with with the Longhorn beta about to start, get ready for a ton of Longhorn-style themes to be made. If you're in the beta, you'll be happy to know that the current version of WindowBlinds that's available to Object Desktop users should work fine on Beta 1 of Longhorn. Only gotchas are that the Start menu has an entry field that obviously existing skins will have some cosmetic issues with and the same for the new toolbar...
Ever wanted to start a company and make your own console game? Check out this article that gives a story about a company that tried to do just that.
The team is getting features in like a well oiled machine. The new research screen just totally rocks. Kudos to Mudflap and Mormegil for getting that stuff humming. BoogieBack and the Elf Girl (doncha just love these handles) made good progress for getting the new star base system in and the new freighters in. Our newest team member, Jesse (no cool handle yet), has started on the ship battles. We want the ship battles to be really impressive and we want ships to show damage....