Very good article at the Washington Post today by Andrew Klavan

Myth # 1. Hollywood has no political agenda -- it's just out to make money.

Would that it were so. All through 2007, Hollywood sent American multiplexes the message: "We don't like the war on terror." All year, American moviegoers sent a message back to Hollywood: "We don't care." "Lions for Lambs," "In the Valley of Elah," "Redacted," "Rendition" -- movie after movie in which our film-land elites derided U.S. efforts to smack down Islamist terrorism bombed at the box office. Even the guys who ran Fannie Mae would have figured out that this was a losing economic strategy. But not Hollywood; 2008 gave us even more anti-war flops, such as "Stop-Loss" and "War, Inc." As ace film blogger John Nolte pointed out, only one war-on-terror film, the mediocre "Vantage Point," did good business. Why? Because it showed Americans as the good guys they are. If Hollywood were all about making money, it would do that a lot more often.

Read the whole thing here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/10/AR2008101002454.html

Apple has been granted a patent for the MacOS dock.

Read the whole thing here.

Besides the general idea of a userbar with "a plurality of item representations" that consolidates features like "launching and managing running applications," the patent focuses particularly on the Dock's magnification feature that makes icons bigger as you sweep by them with a cursor.

Some may recall this article that points out that not only have docks been seen in operating systems for decades but that Stardock has been doing docks since 1994.

Look familiar?  Apple has every right to protect their inventions. But their innovation with regards to the Mac dock is extremely narrow.  Stardock doesn't patent its software as a rule for philosophical reasons. But the lack of a patent doesn't mean Stardock hasn't been heavily involved in creating prior art.

I figured that Obama narrowly won the first debate.  The VP debate was largely a draw. But the second Presidential debate I have to say McCain won decisively.  Still not going to vote for him, but McCain answered questions, was specific, and seemed to know what he was doing.  Obama came across as someone who practiced debating but seemed like an empty suit.

I got a good game of GalCiv II v2.0 in over the weekend.  Here are 10 things the game still needs.

1. The trade routes need to increase more over time than they currently do.
2. Tourism should be worth still more than it does currently.
3. AI needs to be better about researching space mining techs.
4. AI needs more variance in what it researches.
5. AI needs to focus more on miniaturization techs.
6. Integrity fields should cost the same as reinforced hull points (not more)
7. The tech rates should slow down the rate of increase.
8. Defenses should be slightly cheaper to research than they currently are.
9. Need to update the credits to say (c) 2008
10. There should be more incentive to do leases than currently.

So there will be another beta soon...

Converting media files from one format to another is a pain in the rear often times. Lifehacker has a good article on this.

Check out the whole thing here.

Incidentally, I highly recommend Ulead Video Studio for dealing with HD.

Found this interesting retrospective on the SEGA Dreamcast.

I've said before that there's no circumstance I would vote for McCain. But watching how he has dealt with this financial crisis reminds me why I would never support him. He's no maverick. There's no straight talk. He's just a politician with a marketing slogan who doesn't really know why he wants to be President.  He's Bob Dole II and he's going to lose like him.

Obama, by contrast, deserves to win.  I don't agree with Obama on any major issues. But he knows why he wants to be President.  Obama thinks the country, as it is today, is fundamentally flawed and that him and his Democratic congress will start to address those flaws.

I think Obama is naive and foolish but I have to give credit to someone who truly believes in his cause.

McCain, on the other hand, has no cause other than to be President.

Let me give you a few examples:

#1 The credit crisis

McCain takes the same view as Obama. Greedy wallstreet types. Bullshit.  The vast majority of Americans are culpable here.  If McCain were the straight talker he says he is, he would say into the camera that he has met the enemy and the enemy is us.  How many people do you personally know that have significant credit card debt? How many people do you know have refinanced their homes in the last few years and now owe more on their homes than their homes are worth? I bet the answer is: LOTS.

It's easy to blame bankers or wallstreet types for this crisis.  But they're less culpable than the American people are.  Real leadership would be to go up and say something like "We caused this together and if we want to solve it in the long term we need to quit blaming others and start living within our means."

I support the bail out. A lot of conservatives don't but I disagree with me.  A lot of conservatives don't necessarily realize that most of that bad paper ultimately leads to some individual's abandoned asset be it a house, a car, or some other big ticket item.  I recently bought 10 acres of choice property at half the price it went for 5 years ago.  Lots of banks are holding the bag on potentially trillions of dollars in fixed assets if individual Americans default on their loans. 

But sure, let's blame the banks and the financial institutions. It's a lot easier to blame them than the dead beat cousin or uncle we know who bought a $200k house with zero down, interest only ARM even though he gets fired from jobs every few months because "his boss was an asshole".

But let's be real, individual Americans caused this crisis. I'm more than happy to blame the Democrats who put pressure on financial institutions to get the poor into homes. But at the end of the day, it's we, the people who brought this on ourselves.

It's not greed and corruption on wallstreet that caused this mess. It's greed and corruption of millions of Americans who decided they wanted "stuff" they knew, deep down, they couldn't afford and then blame the banks and financial institutions for not being able to figure out the actual value of these assets now.

Where's McCain's straight talk?

#2 Valuing being buddies with his Senate colleagues more than serving the American people

McCain values experience over ideas. If one of his senate colleagues disagrees with him, he'll chalk it up to a "difference of opinion". Only on foreign policy is McCain willing to talk about what's dangerous.

You know what was really dangerous, McCain? Shoving a naive "campaign finance law" down our throats that restricts the ability of Americans to voice their opinions during an election. 

When it comes to affecting our freedoms, in a real world, practical, every day sense, domestic policy is more important than foreign policy and McCain has no real understanding or passion for it.

Obama has a passion for domestic policy. He believes in equality of results. He sees the gap between rich and poor and thinks the government should do something about it.  I think he's disastrously wrong but McCain will do little other than have a polite disagreement with Obama and Biden over basic issues that affect our basic freedoms.

McCain has plenty of passion about Obama talking about Pakistan but very little when it comes to Obama's vision of having the government take over our health care needs or Obama deciding how much people "deserve" to make or Obama's beliefs on how we should live, what languages we speak, and what cars we should drive.

If McCain deserved to win, he would be passionately defending the American people against what Obama really is.  There are millions of Americans who share Obama's vision for America and Obama is a fantastic advocate for them.  McCain is a terrible advocate for the millions of Americans who disagree with Obama's vision and deep down, we're not even sure if McCain even has a vision of what the American ideal is.

Obama would rather Americans have a poorer standard of living overall than to have such a gulf between the rich, the middle class, and the poor.  And there are lots of people who agree with him. But there are millions of undecided voters who don't realize what path Obama would take us towards.

A simple, passionate speech entitled "The government is not your baby daddy" by McCain could go a long way.  But no straight talk from McCain.

No, McCain will fixate on some comment Obama made about Pakistan rather than the substantial policy issues that Obama favors that would be ruinous to the American spirit.

#3 Nitpicking attack ads instead of substance

McCain's ads are almost all negative. I don't have a problem with that in principle but they're almost all petty and nitpicky.  If his ads were explaining the consequences of an Obama presidency that would be one thing.

McCain's ads should focus on a couple of topics and pound on them:

#1 LOWER THE DEBT. Explain how our borrowing is undermining our way of life and sapping our strength. Explain that yes, it's going to require freezing spending but as Americans, we can do it.

#2 ENERGY INDEPENDENCE. Explain how we're funding our adversaries around the world with our addiction to oil. Explain the plan to drill for more oil domestically, build nuclear plants and push for more clean coal tech while at the same time pushing hard for plug-in Hybrids and other types of vehicles that use energy that is cleaner and home produced.

#3 WRAP UP THINGS IN IRAQ/AFGHANISTAN. Explain how we are going to being drawing down troops in Iraq now that the situation is stabilizing and how we're going to continue to disrupt Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

That's it.  He's talked about these things a little bit but these are the 3 things he should just beat home over and over. They're all winning strategies and if he just pounded on those 3 things. 

Ads about "cleaning up Washington" are stupid and cliche.  We've heard these vague promises before.  Be specific.

Of course, McCain won't and that's why he deserves to lose.

•  Part I: First Impressions

Galactic Civilizations II: v2.0 is a free update for Galactic Civilizations II players. It's an expansion pack's worth of updates designed to address all kinds of suggestions players have given us.

Plus, we said that Twilight of the Arnor was going to be the last expansion pack for GalCiv II and since we're giving this away, it's technically not an expansion pack...so...we...er...made good on our promise that there'd be no more expansion packs after Twilight by giving this expansion er update away for free.

Part II: Brave New Galaxy...

One of the first things players will notice about v2.0 is the continuing graphical polish to Galactic Civilizations II.

As we come across outdated graphics,we replace create new models and render them up to place in-game.

Lots of little tweaks across the board to diplomacy and elsewhere.

Espionage has been revamped for Dark Avatar and Twilight players

Next..

Part III: Your new Empire

This week we intend to release the first update to the Demigod engine test beta (beta 1-A).  Under the hood there have been tons of changes made and we're beginning to make room for some of the more significant changes you'll be seeing in Beta 2 (beginning of November).

Here are some of the highlights:

My friend Soren Johnson has a great article entitled "the seven deadly sins of strategy games".  The bottom line is to paraphrase Sid Meijer, good strategy games give players "interesting" choices.

The flags in Demigod are going to be core element to this because controlling these flags are how the different sides will gain tremendous advantages. 

A good player (or team) would be able to quickly eliminate a new player or team simply by taking these flags and holding them long enough to overwhelm the enemy.  This prevents the problem in many multiplayer games where even when you're playing against unskilled players, you're still committing a lot of time to the game. Yet, at the same time, the game mechanic is straight forward enough that it's intuitive to players why they're winning or losing.

The team is brain storming all kinds of different types of flags. For beta 1-A, we just did gold as a proof of concept.

This next change is going to be more controversial without some explanation.   When someone posts about this saying how they hate this change, point them to this post.  The idea is that we're starting to make room in the UI and in the balancing for lots of additional skills as well as skill buffing  (where you enhance one of the existing skills with a modifier).  So don't take this screen as implying that we're going to have some dull linear progression.

The second map is in.  The mine map is somewhat smaller but has some interesting strategic conundrums.

So when will the beta be out? We are targeting this Thursday (basically we release betas on Thursdays typically).

I'm absolutely loving Windows Vista 64-bit.  I'm never ever going with a 32-bit OS ever again. I love not having to sweat memory anymore.

Once we get people away from 32-bit OSes, we will see an explosion of next-generation apps. Right now, in 2008, we still have people worrying about apps that use 20 megs of RAM. 

I look forward to a laptop with 16GB of RAM. It says something about how limiting our OS is when we have SSD units at 128GB but systems with only 2GB of RAM (RAM is much cheaper).