The public beta of the expansion pack, Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar is scheduled to start on November 16th.  We have the main features done, still doing AI which will continue right up until release.

The main features of the beta over Galactic Civilizations II v1.4 include (but are not limited to):

1. Planet environments. You can't immediately colonize all the good worlds. Now players will need to research the correct technology for that.
2. Agents. Players can spend money on espionage to hire agents who in turn are assigned to defend planets or do harm to opponent planets (they nullify the activity of most planetary improvements).
3. Custom Opponents. You can design your own opponents including what they look like and what their ships look like (i.e. you can assign what the AI uses for various classes of ships). A lot of modding support has been done so that modders can upload their own ship styles rather than replacing what's on disk.
4. Templates. Players can design a template ship and use it in the future.
5. Two new civilizations. Are now in.
6. Tons of new ship parts -- hulls, and extras.
7. Ship Intelligence center.
8. Asteroid Fields. Players can now harvest resources from an asteroid field and send it to a destination planet.
9. Lots of new planetary improvements and techs.
10. Diplomatic treaties. There are some new treaties players can make with alien players.
11. Graphics. Overall the graphics in the game are noticeably better across the board.

What's not quite ready yet but will appear somewhat in the beta:

1. The Epic Generator. It..kind..of..works...but...it's really complicated. This is something the betas will help pin down since it's so subjective.
2. Super-Abilities. To make each civilization truly unique, they've been given their own special super ability (i.e. an ability with code behind it). These..kind of work sort of but not in all cases. Still working on these.
3. Mega Events. Same. We have some in, but a lot more need to be added. These are like regular events in GalCiv II except a lot more of them.

What's not in at all yet: The new stream-lined technology tree interface.  That should be in by December.

The beta will be available to everyone who has pre-ordered the game.  See the link below to learn more about Dark Avatar and how to get it.

Recently Microsoft announced licensing terms for Windows Vista which made many users cringe -- your Vista license was essentially tied to a single machine. You could upgrade the machine -- some -- but the activation was pretty strict on how much you could change and how often.

Many users were understandably upset.  Microsoft was thinking of piracy while many hardware enthusiasts felt that they were being left out in the cold.  Many MANY users rebuild machines and don't want to pay hundreds of dollars for another copy of the OS.

Microsoft's new system is much more fair and, in my opinion, quite impressive in the technical work that had to be done to make the change on such short notice. 

With the new license, you can uninstall the software and install it on another device instead. But you can't have it on two machiens. That is what is nice about activation when it reaches its potential -- since it's "Calling home" upon installation, it can tell how many devices it is being put on and you can (one presumes) deactivate it on the previous machine.

This is similar to what users already see with products like iTunes where users can deauthorize a machine when they upgrade.

So hooray for Microsoft for this one thing.

Now, if they can listen to Robert McLaws suggestion that they make family upgrade pricing more affordable (so that a household with multiple computers can get multiple licenses very cheaply) then we'll be really talking (my household has 4 machines plus I have 2 laptops on top of it, would be nice to get a discount for those 6 machines that are only going to be used by 3 people).

Today I thought I was going to just crawl under my desk and die.

I worked from home today and was using a VPN to connect to my work machine.  I was working on a lengthy documented in Microsoft Word and had been saving periodically during the day.  On my last save, Word locked up. Locked up hard.

It turned out that my VPN disconnected me during the middle of the save. No warning, it just had. But Word didn't handle the lost connection gracefully and it died taking out not just my recent changes but the entire document itself.

Because the document was confidential in nature, I didn't have it on the network, only my work computer and now the file was gone. I had a USB backup from some months ago but I'd made so many changes to it that that would have been useless.

What saved me was KeepSafe.  I have it installed here and every time I had made a save to the document, KeepSafe had made an archive of each one (I have it set to save the last 10 revisions of .DOC files).  So I pulled up KeepSafe, typed in the name my document and pulled the one up the version from 17 minutes before the disaster.  I still lost 17 minutes but I could have lost the document entirely (or even if I had daily backups, I would have lost many MANY hours of work -- creative work at that).

I have to say, of all the software I use on my computer, the one I absolutely must have on there is KeepSafe.  I've had it save me in the past from more minor stuff but never from a disaster of this magnitude.  I had forgotten I even had it installed almost until the sweat was coming down my forehead and I was trying to think of some way to get my file back.

In the classic book, Atlas Shrugged, the government begins a program in which wealth is distributed based on need rather than merit. This requires that wealth is confiscated by those who are producing it to be handed to those who aren't.  The more productive a citizen you are, the less of what you produce you get to keep. The less productive you are, the more you receive. Eventually, the producers of America go on strike and the country collapses.

The points made in the book are stunning for their obviousness -- government doesn't make wealth, people do.

In the October US News and World Report, Editor-In-Chief Mortimer Zuckerman has an editorial entitled "A fairer America" with the point "The income gap between the richest and poorest Americans is wider than at any time in history and we must take urgent measures to begin closing it."

Who's 'we'?

What Zuckerman fails to realize is that the only way to close the gap is to make everyone poorer. If you want a society in which everyone is equal, it will be a society in which everyone lives in misery. The question, therefore is, how much poorer do you want everyone to live in order to satisfy some arbitrary statistical result?

The people who produce the items that enrich our lives -- homes that are very inexpensive per square foot despite having a wealth of features we take for granted, personal computers, cell phones, automobiles, televisions, Internet services, you name it, can be classified as the top 5% or so of the economic population.

When those top 5% are targeted by the government, they adapt and everyone else faces the consequences. These consequences, are amazingly ignored by Zuckerman who behaves as if some of today's realities (outsourcing, automation, downsizing) were somehow inevitable.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Zuckerman writes that in the late 1800s there was a huge gulf between the rich and the poor. And yet somehow, most Americans were far better off than their parents were. (By magic one presumes).

"Capitalism played a big role, but government did too, with the passage of the Homestead Act of 1862 giving 160 acres to settlers who would live on the land for at least five years.."

The government was very generous with other people's lands weren't they? I am not condemning the Homestead act, but I would not be quick to praise the confiscation of millions of acres of lands from one people to hand to another.  Nor would I be quick to claim that "giving" 160 acres unearned helped the economy anywhere near what free market did. 

Perhaps Zuckerman should take a look at a map of the United States and look at the areas that were covered by the Homestead act.  Was providing 160 acres, unearned, to settlers the cause of the economic boom of the late 1800s?  Was Colorado, Wyoming, Montana (for example) the center of the industrial revolution?  372,000 farms were created but is anyone going to argue that this is what made the average American better off than his parents?

Zuckerman, who as a reminder, is promoting the concept of closing the income gap, notes that the 1970s were known as "the great compression" where the income gap between rich and poor shrank sharply.  Does anyone want to go back to the 1970s?

In the early 80s, Ronald Reagan was able to get through massive tax cuts and massive deregulation of industry.  Most adults alive today know the results -- a great increase in the real world standard of living.  But laments Zuckerman, the gap between rich and poor increased.

Let's be clear: The gap between rich and poor is a measurement of how regulated an economy is. Period.

It is not about "fairness".  If you have two runners in a marathon, the gap between them will grow over time as one runs faster. The only way to shrink that gap is to force the faster running to run more slowly.

But since the 1980s, the government has increasingly meddled, especially in the area of corporate taxes. If my company makes $100,000 profit, almost 40% of that profit will go to the federal government. Moreover, the federal government has opened US companies up to "free trade" by enabling foreign competition in (which is good) but forced companies to continue to have to face mounds of regulation and taxes compared to those companies (that is bad).

But what does Zuckerman conclude of the obvious result:

"Today, however, the wealth escalator doesn't work. In fact, while many families thought they were going up, they have actually been going down. In sectors of the economy where jobs could be mechanized or automated, tens of thousands now have no work. At the same time, most of the income gains we have reaped from productivity went to just the top 1% of Americans..."

Well DUH. 

First off, families thought they were going "up" because they were. They don't pay attention to CPIs. They pay attention to how they are living -- bigger houses with air condition, nicer cars, computers, better food at lower prices, etc. Clothes that don't look and feel like a now-illegal method of interrogation.

Secondly, the guys at the top 1%, let's call them what they are -- business owners -- faced with foreign competition thanks to "free trade" but still faced with a myriad of government imposed costs in hiring human beings (there is no payroll tax on machines) did the only sane thing -- they replaced low skilled labor with machines. And who's fault is that?

The problem with people like Zuckerman is that they think that the government has something to do with the production of wealth. It doesn't. It merely sets the rules. And business follow those rules (in general).

Business owners are motivated by profit. Profit is not the same as greed (greed is a term used by class warriors to smear the productive class).  Profit to them is merely the measure of how effective they are.

So if you make it more profitable for business owners to either replace human beings with machines / hire the same work force that the foreign competitors are using instead of hiring Americans because you've made it impractical to do so, that is what they'll do.

Zuckerman, whose article reads almost as a parody of one of the sad sacks in Atlas Shrugged makes some startlingly illogical conclusions:

"Even college graduates, who have long enjoyed a big edge in wage and benefits, are feeling the pinch because of soaring costs of tuition..."

And why are college tuitions "soaring"? Most universities are publicly funded. Name a single privately produced product that has not changed in quality or quantity and is not in short supply whose costs have "soared"?  Only a government run system could function in an environment in which it charges more while producing inferior results.

But Zuckerman's prescription? (and I'm not kidding, it's in the same article):

1. MORE support for education at all levels
2. A major effort to brake soaring healthcare costs
3. A NEW minimum wage

I'm serious. After making a fantastic case (unintentionally) for getting the government out of education and for decreasing its interference in the private workplace he recommends the opposite.

And why are healthcare costs going up? There's a lot of reasons. $10 co-pay? What the hell were they thinking? How about 10% co-pay. There's no incentive right now for competition based on price in the healthcare market and we're paying -- literally -- the price. 

And we Americans demand ever more sophisticated medical technology. You want cheap healthcare? Then let's go back to 100 years ago when Asprin was the treatment. That was cheap. Or maybe just 30 years ago where you had antibiotics but if you got anything serious (heart disease, cancer, or any chronic illness) the prescription was for you to die. That was pretty cheap too. 

Here's a clue to Zuckerman: More stuff costs MORE than less stuff. Especially if there's no incentive ($10 co-pays) for that top 1% to produce drugs based on price as opposed to effect.

If any American reading this thinks they are worse off today than they were 30 years ago, I can only wish they could find a time machine to go back to 1976. Land of lead smelling air, obscenely expensive air travel (before adjusting for inflation even), no cell phones, no computers, no DVD players, 8-track, no air conditioning if you lived in the North, no Internet and if you got cancer or had heart problems, or any other serious medical condition, you died.  Yea, those were the days. And it was a "fairer" America too!

Amazingly, Zuckerman ends with "Inequality and insecurity have simply become too pervasive a feature of American life. The American Dream shouldn't be just a dream."

Apparently, to Zuckerman, who must have emigrated from the former Soviet Union, the American dream is for everyone to live equally, presumably in state mandated housing because, you know, if someone has more than you, it hurts you -- it's at YOUR expense. And job security is a god-given right that can only be provided by the government one supposes.

Stardock is pleased to announce that Space Rangers 2 is now on TotalGaming.net.  Space Rangers is one part strategy game, one part adventure game, and one part space simulation.  It has received very good reviews (85% overall average making it one of the highest rated PC games of the last couple of years).

As Gaming Trends put it:

There is not a single second wasted in the entirety of the game and there is no mistaking it for a small game. Space Rangers 2 is epic in scope, gargantuan in size, and goes so far beyond fun it borders on ridiculous. I am absolutely drunk in love with this magnificent title and have forced myself to finish this review just so I can get back to saving the universe - with a little pillaging on the side.

The game is truly epic in scale. A great deal of it feels like a role playing game. Other parts feel like a strategy game. It's difficult to describe the genre since it encompasses so many different elements. It's the same difficulty many had explaining Star Control 2. Adventure game? Strategy game? Action game? All of the above?

You can read their full review here.

But now you can get the award-winning Space Rangers 2 digitally via TotalGaming.net.  The same convenience (and no DRM) found in Galactic Civilizations II can be had with Space Rangers 2. Just press a button and install it to your machine. Get a new machine 5 years from now? No problem, just re-download it. 

With TotalGaming.net you can manage all your games from a single UI -- Stardock Central.  No renting, no DRM, it's your game, any time, anywhere.

And what about price? Space Rangers 2 is only $19.99!

I have a lot of friends. But I try to keep the number of close friends down to a very small group.

So what does close friendship mean to me?

1) I am always glad to hear of the success of my close friends. I take personal pride (for no rational reason) when my friends are doing well. The better and more successful they are, the happier I am about it. Their victory is my victory. Their good fortune is mine.

2) I try to be very loyal to my close friends. I keep their confidence. I stand up for them. I don't tolerate criticism about them behind their backs. I am on their side. I'm not neutral. I'm not unbiased. I am not objective. I make no bones about it - I am a partisan for my close friends. A zealot. Don't mess with them.

3) I don't judge them. I want to have close friends who feel they can truly be themselves around me. I do not look at differences in lifestyles or life choices as being opportunities to judge them and find them wanting. I assume my close friends are as intelligent as I am and have made their life choices based on what works best for them. I respect them for who they are.

4) I don't keep track of favors. I recognize my own strengths and weaknesses. I've been materially successful in life so I like to do things for my friends but I try to be empathic enough about it to know when it might make them uncomfortable (I sometimes fail at that).  I feel confident that my close friends feel the same about me.  I'm not looking for balance, if I can help, I will. Period. I don't do things looking for something in return.

5) I keep the number of close friends down to a minimum.  I have a lot of friends. I could even break it down to 4 levels: Acquaintences, Friends, Good friends, and close friends.  It would require a hall to have all our friends together in one place. I could throw a decent sized party at our house for good friends. But I could fit all my close friends into our living room. It matters to me that they know how much I value their friendship and that it's not some nebulous large group. It can't be shallow.

Someone might ask, what's the difference between good friends and close friends? It's a matter of degree. But it's not linear. That is, there's a significant difference between good friends and close friends in terms of how much the 5 things I listed above apply.  With good friends (or friends or acquaintences) I will tend to provide as much if not more than I receive of the 5 things I listed. But usually a good friend isn't a close friend either due to geography/scheduling or because they lack one of the 5 qualities.

It's not really that hard to seperate out good friends from close friends. Think of the friends you have. Now think of how many of them exhibit the 5 things I just listed.

Seriously. How many of the friends you have are happy for you when something goes well as opposed to being not so discretely jealous? How many of them make you feel like you're being judged? How many of them are truly loyal? Do they tell people things you told them in confidence? Or maybe you had too much to drink and your loose lips said things that you wouldn't normally say. Which friends of yours would keep those things in confidence? Which friends do you feel would protect you but in a non-paternalistic way but instead as a true ally?

Sometimes there are good friends who would be close friends but simply can't be due to geography, schedules, etc.

But just as often good friends aren't close friends because they don't have all of the 5 qualities. They're still good friends. People you'd like to get together with and hang out because you like their personalities. But maybe they once told your "group of friends" some personal issue that you had intended to be private.

Or maybe when you bought that new car you could tell they weren't happy for you (in my case, that's actually a big issue -- consider this -- MOST people talk about their jobs or even brag a little bit about what they've done lately. I have to be very careful about that, I've come to realize that even with close friends I recognize there's a threshold. Are they happy if you make $100k per year while they make $80k? How about $500k? How about $1M? What about $3M? Where do you draw the line?). As some know from my blogs, I recently bought a cottage on the lake. Career-learned empathy makes it pretty easy to tell which good friends are happy about it and which ones are secretly thinking "Must be nice..." (the words of death).

Or maybe they not so subtlely look down at your wife because she's (gasp) a home maker. That because she gets fulfillment raising our 3 children and taking care of our lives that she's somehow not..quite..as..good as the woman who works in an accounting office or whatever.

Or maybe you found out that they've been criticizing you to other people.

That doesn't make them not good friends but it definitely keeps them from becoming close friends. And hell, I'm guilty too. I have good friends who have faults that I've discussed with my close friends. "Yea, and then his kid took a marker and scribbled on our freshly painted wall and he didn't even punish the kid other than saying 'no no, don't do that..'" Not every good friend is a candidate for being a close friend, there's a lot of other intangible attributes involved too.

So to whoever is reading this, I hope you have lots of friends, many good friends, but only a few close friends.

They say you shouldn't talk about politics, religion, or money with friends.

Naturally, I violate all 3 rules regularly.  I have some friends I've learned not to discuss politics with while there are others I can heartily talk about politics. Here are some of the rules I've come up with over the years.

#1 DO NOT discuss politics with people who feel that a political disagreement is tantamount to a moral failing on your part.  There are people out there who believe that a disagreement in political philosphy is the result of you being a bad person, morally corrupt, etc.

#2 DO NOT discuss politics with people who feel that political disagreements with them rise from ignorance on your part. Some people become so unempathic when it comes to politics that they simply can't grasp that someone might be well informed on political issues but have formed a different opinion.  Instead, they simply assume that if they can educate them, you're surely come to the "correct" opinion.

#3 DO NOT discuss politics with people who become emotionally involved in the topic. For me, politics is like talking about sports. I certainly care deeply about what's happening in the world. And I have strong opinions about how the problems of the world are best solved. But I don't pretend I'm about to run for emperor. I express my influence on policy through my measely vote and to a slightly greater extent, my blogs that may convince some small group of the value of my opinion. 

But some people really get wrapped up in these issues and get very very upset at disagreements. This is particularly true of people whose opinions are based on their feelings. "I just don't like <President X>. I just don't trust him."  If they use the phrase "I just..." you're probably dealing with someone who's emotional.

And that's about it.  Sometimes I've determined this sort of thing too late -- after damage has been done. 

I've had friends who clearly think I'm some sort of horrible, uncaring guy because I don't agree that the solution to poverty is to confiscate the property that one person has earned to hand it over to those who have not earned it. Obviously, I WANT people to starve because I'm an uncaring bastard.

I've had friends who think that I'm an unenlightened ignorant tool because I don't think the invasion of Iraq was motivated by Bush's obvious need to control their oil wells for "his buddies". Why can't I just open my eyese and see the obvious?

As I get older, I tend to have a lot thinner skin about those kinds of things. I don't like having to be the "bigger person" and turn the other cheek and absorb being patronized or looked down as some sort of moral dwarf.  So I just try to avoid the topic if it's with someone who has any of the 3 traits I mentioned above.

Stardock has released Galactic Civilizations II v1.4.  The new version has some updated graphics, updated balancing of planetary improvements, a host of fixes to make modded games more robust, and much more.

You can download it via Stardock Central or as a stand alone download from the Downloads area.  The full list of changes can be found here.

One of the many reasons I'm not a fan of Bush is that he continually allows his opponents to re-define his own objectives. 

How many times has the "Mission Accomplished" photo-op been thrown back in his face? And yet, what was the mission that was accomplished? Deposing Saddam Hussein.  That was the mission. That was precisely what the war was about - to remove a dictator in a critical part of the world that was an open enemy of the United States. Period.

But now, "success" is being measured as whether we can turn Iraq into some idealized democracy like...um...Germany or Japan or maybe South Korea?  It's worth noting that we still have troops in those countries. We had more troops in Germany 20 years after the end of World War II than we have in Iraq today.

The problem is, there is no way that Iraq will be a "success" by the definitions being generated by Bush's opponents.  If utter placity and a compliant government are the measurments of success, then we lost World War II.

So what should we do in Iraq?

1) AFTER the election we should set up a time table for Iraqi responsibility. This time table would not be connected to US withdrawal (Because I don't expect the US to leave Iraq in the next 40 years). But the time table would indicate that certain domestic security responsibilities would be turned over at that time. The time table would be roughly 18 months.

2) Once the time table was over, the US would start to draw down forces. However, a significant contingent (a couple of divisions) would remain in Iraq but well away from urban areas (preferably in in areas controlled by the Kurds). This troop level would probably be around 35,000 to 50,000 troops in total that would be permanently based there to provide support and as an insurance policy to prevent any terrorist group from being able to set up shop in Iraq.

3) We would make clear what US national interests are. Namely, a peaceful Democratic Iraq is something we'd hope for but is not required. If the Sunnis and Shiites want to kill each other, that's really none of our concern. If Iraq is in a state of quasi-civil war, that is, again, really not our concern as long as we have enough force in place to prevent any terrorist groups from setting up a permanent base of operations (ala the training camps that once existed in Afghanistan as well as a sanctuary for terrorist leaders).

By defining these 3 things, it would also send a clear message to other nations in the region and Europe. Those countries, not the United States, suffer if Iraq is in a civil war. Very little of our oil comes from Iraq (contrary to the "no blood for OIILLL" crowd). We don't need a stable Iraq.  We want a stable Iraq.  Europe, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other countries have a vested interest in a stable Iraq, if they want to help out, they are certainly welcome to. But as long as we are defining success based on the stability of Iraq, they have no incentive to help us. That needs to be changed.

It's worth noting that toppling Saddam's regime was done with fewer than 500 combat deaths. The thousands of American casualties in Iraq since then have been in the name of this new, previously unannounced "mission" of creating a stable and democratic Iraq.