I made a news item on WinCustomize.com tonight about the 5th anniversary of 9/11.  It's always a touchy thing putting up a political hot potato on WinCustomize.com.  One thing I have learned over the years is that many non-Americans who visit WinCustomize.com have an extremely poor opinion of the US, its policies.  I don't think that's representative of foreign readers of WC, just those who happen to post.

But 9/11 was a big deal. And at the end of the day, we're an American company.  We have people from all over the world that we work together with. A good portion of our development team is from UK for instance and we also have developers in Italy, Poland, and elsewhere.  But we are not neutral. What happened on 9/11 was unprovoked, monstrous, and required a strong response.

If nothing else, people, especialy people outside the US, need to understand how big of a deal 9/11 was in the United States.  I don't think most people, even today, realize the scale of 9/11.  There's been no terrorist attack, anywhere, in history that is remotely on the scale of 9/11.

The twin towers, even when pictured, don't show their scale because the pictures are so far away.  The twin towers alone supported a population that about a quarter of Detroit Michigan. And those two buildings weren't the only ones that were destroyed as a result (a couple of other nearby buildings were also destroyed).  Largely, only by luck, was the death toll not catastrophically higher. 

The twin towers, supporting up to 150,000 people when at full capacity, were cities unto themselves. Cities full of innocent people who had just gone to work that day.  Destroyed over an evil, fascist ideology that is based on a particular interpretation of Islamic theocracy. An ideology that is widespread in the middle east but not generally acted out upon - thankfully.

9/11 was a wake up call to the United States that the people who want to exterminate every man woman and child that adheres to western culture really were getting serious and needed to be dealt with now rather than wait until they managed to obtain even deadlier weapons.  The product of a failed culture that blames those failures not on themselves but on external enemies believes that if they can appease Allah and reintroduce the Caliphate (as a starting point) modeled after the Taliban, that Allah might then strike down the decadent, corrupt, immoral western nations and pave the way for a world of Islamic fascism.

The word fascism, has become a pejorative. A word that is used to insult rather than as a strict definition. I use the term fascism in its true sense -- a form of organization that is led by a single person or small group that is not accountable to the people and promotes an ideology based on the hatred of outsiders, other religions and racism. That is the way of life that these fundamentalist Muslims have in mind for the world.

It is something that must be fought against. It cannot be ignored. While one can debate the effectiveness of the current administration's attempt to fight Islamic Fasicm (Or Islamism), there should be no doubt that it exists, is real, and must either be dealt with now or dealt with later (except at a vastly higher cost).

Those who think that the problem can be ignored need only look at history.  9/11 was merely the most recent and most deadly attack by these extremists.  Since 9/11, the US has improved its intelligence, defense, and covert operations to the point that no new attacks have occurred on US soil since 9/11 (while there have been attacks overseas in places easier to carry out such attacks).

To see the announcement on WinCustomize.com along with the responses to it, click below.

Five years ago on September 11, 2001, 19 men boarded four planes in the United States with the intention of hijacking them and crashing them into important buildings with the hope of killing as many people as possible.

Three of those planes made it to their targets killing over 3,000 people. The fourth one crashed after passengers attempted to retake the plane after learning the fate of the other three planes.

For Americans, September 11th marked a major turning point for how the country viewed the world. For people outside the United States, the choices and response to September 11th has stirred a great deal of debate.  Even within the United States, there is a great deal of disagreement over how best to continue to carry out the response to the terrorist attacks and the growing movement of violent Islamic radicalism.

The people who attacked the United States were part of a terrorist organization called Al Qaeda. A radical Islamic group dedicated to restoring the historic caliphate that once existed from Spain to the far east, Al Qaeda considered the United States as an obstacle to their goals of turning "moderate" Muslim states such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt into fundamentalist Islamic Republics modeled after then Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. Their belief was that if the US presence in the middle east as well as its support of countries such as Saudi Arabia and Israel could be removed that they moved one step closer to their goal. They believed, wrongly, that the US response would be to withdraw its presence from the middle east just as it had done so in Somalia in the mid 1990s.

On this day, we at this site give our thoughts to the families of the men and women who died on that day. And we support the valiant men and women in the armed forces from the United States and other countries who are working to put an end to organizations and movements that support the indiscriminate wholesale annihilation of innocents.

We hope the world does not forget 9/11.  We certainly will not.

Stardock has teamed up with the popular Civilization-fan site, CivFanatics.com to bring you a contest I think many GalCiv II users will find very interesting -- a character creation contest.

The upcoming expansion pack for Galactic Civilizations II, Dark Avatar, will feature several in-game characters who will be part of the story for the campaign portion of the expansion pack.

Now, players will have the opportunity to propose characters for the story of the game. We will select 3 characters to integrate into the story of Dark Avatar.  Check out the contest info over at CivFanatics.com for more details.

Have fun!

There's a lot of super powers to choose from.  Flight, super strength, invulnerability, super speed, invisibility.

But if you had to choose one? Which would it be?

Being invulernable would be kind of nice but on the other hand, you could get stuck in a bad situation.  That's where super strength would be nice.  But super strength would be problematic because you could really hurt yourself.

The more I think about it, the more I conclude that most powers need to come in pairs with invulernability being one of them.  Take flight.  How fun would flight really be in practice as bugs and other things start flying in your face or you accidentally hit a tree or telephone wire or something?

Invisibility wouldn't require another power but I'm not sure what good it would do.  Yea, you can spy on people. Meh.

There's plenty of other powers that I haven't listed. But if you could only choose one power, which would it be?

They've built a plant that uses plasma arcs to take sewage and garbage and convert it into energy with the resulting steam being used by another plant and the remaining hardened sludge used for roads.

Gotta love that.

Read the whole thing.

I don't know how many of you listen to our podcast, PowerUser.TV.  But Episode 53 came out recently and it was our first video show. So if you've ever wanted to see me rant as opposed to just read my rants, here's your chance.

ABC's upcoming TV movie, "Path to 9/11" has some portions that are quite critical of the Clinton administration. One part in particular has Clinton and Democrats up in arms. 

The part in question has to do with a missed opportunity to take out Bin Laden in the late 90s. In the unedited version of the movie, CIA agents request permission to capture Bin Laden.  The agents are refused citing fear of accidentally killing him and the US being condemned internationally for "assasination" as well as risks to civilians.

The Clinton administration denies this ever happened. The CIA source used in the movie claims it definitely happened. Other CIA sources claim that it happened as well. 

But the reality is, like many things, somewhere in between.  The movie blames Sandy Berger and Madeline Albright but the CIA isn't sure who exactly killed the mission only that it came from the white house.

Or put another way, the left is unhappy about the details but wants everyone to ignore the general truth of the matter.

I don't know how many of you have Stardock Central, but it's been updated to use the new forum backend and to put it simply -- it's amazing.  It's like having all the advantages of a news group and a forum put together.

Most of our updates are essentially about adding new features. This is a bug fix update.

We broke some of the selection code which affects the turn button turning green, keyboard control of ships, auto-select next ship, etc.  To say I'm disappointed in us for letting such a boo-boo get in is an understatement. 

So how did this happen?

It's convoluted but for aspiring developers worth the tale:

Several users on our forum have been asking that we make it so that when you click on a ship that is on guard or on sentry that it would not activate the ships (i.e. take them off guard or sentry).  It was decided to go ahead and make that change even though the behavior was working as intended.

That change in turn affected all kinds of other things that one would not have thought it would affect with regards to ship selection.  While not that severe of a problem, that isn't the point -- these updates are supposed to improve the game experience, not detract.  Anyway, the bug slipped through and went into release.

I felt that the problem was significant enough to roll the dice and put out this new update on a Friday night. We've been playing with it all evening and we like the results. Hopefully it will solve the problem. 

It's only available right now via Stardock Central. We'll get a stand alone installer going soon.

(it should be up by 2am EST 9/9/06).

Want to know how to get rich? I have the secret. It's very simple. Assuming at least average levels of ambition your income will ultimately be directly proportional to the wealth you generate in a given time period.

Easy right?  Too simplistic? No, I'm being serious. The problem is that most people don't understand how to generate that wealth in the first place.  It's not having a good idea. It's not your ability to inspire others. It's your ability to execute on what you want to get done combined with the thing you wanting to get done generating income.

One of the things I see time and time again at work and elsewhere is that people may have a good idea but they want someone else to actually roll up their sleeves and do it.   I've complained before that I'm not outstanding at really specific, concrete thing.  But I suppose that's really not the whole story. I think I'm pretty good at execution.  I am willing to do what needs to be done to get the job done -- even if I'm doing menial things or things. 

To use my own business as an example in a given day I might:

• Design a webpage that is actually on the server (as opposed to writing up content in MS Word and giving it to someone else -- as soon as you're handing it off to someone else to do, you've decreased your value -- delegation is good but you have to weigh it carefully).
• Write code (as opposed to put together specifications or guidelines to hand off to someone else)
• Write documentation in both its rough form and in the final form (as opposed to writing a bunch of notes, handing it off to someone to make into Word and then handing that to someone who makes it in Quark Express or Adobe inDesign -- I'll do the whole thing).
• Take screenshots.
• Do a video demo.
• Test the software. (as opposed to having someone else just make a report and relyng on that)
• Make a skin.
• Make a theme.
• Write a mailer, FTP it to the mail server, use a cryptic mailing package to send it out.
• Set up my own machine (which lets me know more about my own computer).

In other words, I try to be as self-sufficient as possible. I rarely let myself get stymied because I am waiting for someone else to do something.  I delegate (increasingly) on things where me doing it myself would result in me not executing on something else that is more profitable.  I used to personally send out the news items on our software to third party sites. I don't do that anymore usually. Not because it's not worth doing but because it took time away from doing other things that generate more revenue.  It's still a very important thing, however.

The one thing I can't execute on that regularly frustrates me and is something I hope to address when I have more time is web development. I hate wanting a new website created that I am certain I could whip together both the layout, graphics, and SQL in an afternoon if I just knew how to do it but having to wait for others to do it. Drives me crazy. It's my biggest profesional weakness not knowing ASP.NET and SQL.  But I digress.

The point being, if you want to be successful -- really successful -- you will have to teach yourself the skills in your job so that you can cut down the number of people you rely on to get your job done.  If the widget your making is worth $1 million but you need 5 people to be involved to make the widget, then your value is diluted. 

And often, increasing your value means learning how to do things that seem menial or "not worth your time" but in the bigger scheme of things, it's not just how good of a job you do, it's how good of a job you do per unit of time. And when you have to involve other people, you dilute yourself.  You can mitigate that dilution to a degree if you make yourself an expert on executing your plans and goals via other people. But I think the best strategy is to do the things you can do yourself (and learn how to do as much as you can) and then learn how to get those you do rely on to execute what they have to do as fast as they can while maintaining the required quality levels.