Putting aside the fact that we are talking about a comic book movie which means it is full of cliches and crummy dialog, X-Men 3 was easily the best of the 3.

Director Ratner, not a popular guy amongst fans, managed to crank out one hell of a good ride. There was some sloppy editing but overall, the number of times I went "OH MY GOD! I CAN'T BELIEVE THEY DID THAT!" was higher than any franchise film I've ever seen.

This movie is no-holds barred. I suspect the more you like the comic book the more you'll like the film. Not because they stay true to the comic books (they don't) but because the whole thing plays out like an almost alternative "end game" for the Marvel X-men universe.

Of course, that said, some hard core fans are going to be TICKED by what they did too. They want X-men 4, 5, 6 and so forth. Since there were no plans, they decided to just go crazy and put in a ton of plot lines into a single movie.  But if you take the movie for what it's supposed to be, it's extremely entertaining.

There won't be an X-men 4. I feel confident in saying that. There may be spin-offs of some of the major characters. But the X-men ensemble that we've known in the past will never be together again. This is truly a spectacular ending for a really well done movie series.

I give it a 4 out of 5.

There are a LOT of changes in here. And in fact, the example mod we did (which mostly did not require any code changes) has become quite a journey unto itself.  Paul has been working on an alternative game interface for the mod to show how users can use DesktopX to create their own stuff. The alternative main game UI isn't ready yet so that will go into the next beta but there's a lOT of stuff in the example mod we've included.

To use a mod, go to the OPTIONS screen and then select the directory that has the mod. The done button will highlight if you're in a directory with a valid mod. You'll have to restart the game. But you'll be able to get an idea of what is possible.

The mods are located in the \mods directory in the GalCiv2 folder. Each full mod really should have its own sub-directory.  So if I were going ot create a Carebears mod, I would have \Mods\CareBears directory.  Cari will be posting documentation shortly on some of the intricacies but the example should give you a taste of what is possible.  Full conversion mods are very possible and not terribly difficult to do.

So below is what we've got for Beta 1 of Galactic Civilizations II v1.2.  Beta 2 will likely go up at the end of next week and the final the following week. Then we'll start in v1.3.

The main highlights that users will notice besides the extensive modding support are the UI changes, some AI enhancements, significant performance and memory improvements, the new combat system (both ships fire at the same time) and just general tweaks and improvements in all kinds of areas. We will take feedback and put those into beta 2 along with fix bugs we've likely introduced and finish up some of our mod stuff. 

The team has kind of gone overborad on the mods stuff here, if you check out the \mods directory contents you'll get an idea. We REALLY hope people are able to do some stuff with this.  Hold off on uploading mods until 1.2 is DONE. 

We hope you like what you see. 

+ The AI is now allowed to win via a technology victory. A warning dialog is brought up if the AI is going for that tech...similarly, the AI is now informed when a human player is going for a tech victory.

+ "launch all ships in orbit" and "clear all info icons" buttons hooked up into the main game screen

+ put glow around icons for "Advanced Farming" and "Industrial Sector"

+ lengthened 'Moves' field on stacked ship window to prevent elipsing

+ ColonyManagementList: Can now set production focus in the list.

+ ColonyManagementList: Class shows number of unused green tiles.

+ Fleet Wnd: Construction button added.

+ Fleet Wnd: Upgrade Button added.

+ Fleet Wnd: Displays troop and colonist counts

+ Fleet Wnd: Displays destination

+ Main Game Wnd: Added tooltip on "current money" to show cashflow details (VERY USEFUL)

+ Replaced old planet "sphere.X" file (which cinsisted of an gluttinous 4500 polys!) with a new 1000 poly model (making gigantic maps much peppier)

+ Quick Project/Ship Window: Hooked up CANCEL button, so now you can leave without changing your ship.

+ Ship Details Wnd: Upgrade Btn Hooked Up - can now upgrade from the details window!!!

+ Ship Details Wnd: Construct Button Hooked Up - can now build a starport from the details window!

+ Ship Details Wnd: Lists Crew Count of Colony and Transport Ships

+ Ship Details Wnd: Shows destination of ship.

+ AI more effective in strategic conquest planning AI more likely to ally together Some AI players will focus more on government techs and diplomacy techs

+ More work on improving AI's planetary improvement handling (it is not designed to be "perfect" but rather "good").

+ Fix to bug that would cause AI to build an unlimited # of morale or influence improvements on a planet.

+ Tweak to galaxy seeding code to have player starting positions more spaced apart

+ Default tech setting a bit more expensive (i.e. more resources needed to get higher techs)

+ Example Mod included

+ Changed the default mods directory to GalCiv2\Mods instead of My Documents\My Games\GalCiv2\Mods

+ Made it so that the Done button on the Browse dialog is only enabled if there is an ModsDescription.xml file in that directory

+ Destination Cursor is no longer hard-coded ( can support mods folder )

+ Added a mod for destination cursor color change to Example mod

+ Made star colors read in from StarTypes.xml file instead of being hard-coded.

+ fixed crash caused by AI giving away mini-freighters (which apparently have an attack value) (rare case)

+ added code so that modders can enabled the Dread Lords ship style on the customize race screen

+ fixed code that corrupted save games if it failed to save a shipcfg file

+ added debug code to try to find out why (and recover from) bug occurrs where game thinks it is not a metaverse game

+ added code to prevent mini-freighters from getting deleted when they are being reset

+ added code to make sure that CreateGameWindows only gets called once

+ added code to make sure that dummy windows don't get created, which may have been causing small memory leaks.

+ Fixed null pointer crash in classAICivilization_Crazy::AIFindConstructorDestination

+ removed message about not being able to find a TGN serial number; now it will only complain if it can't find any serial numbers.

+ added code to create a mod description xml and read it in

+ fixed some hardcoded text

+ fixed crash in AssasinateLeader random event

+ made it so that the category strings can be translated by making the category string in the GC2Types.xml file the fieldname for a string in the string table SDesignWnd.

+ made anomalies tooltip use the description from screens.str instead of their name

+ added ignore flag to raceconfig so that you can disable races; ignored races cannot be selected on RaceWnd or OpponentWnd

+ tweaked code in Font Manager that calculates the character widths so text should display a bit better for both English and foreign languages

+ Mods Directory Browse Dialog

+ fixed crash with bad trade route

+ fixed bug reading in invasion tactics

+ made info icons save their parsed definitions so that they'll come up faster

+ fixed 2 string not found in invasions

+ changed it so that you can't set relations higher than friendly on the opponentwnd in a metaverse game

+ changed GetDistanceInTiles to round down when using the Euclidean heuristic so that partial tiles in the starbase ZOC will count

+ fixed bug where unknown minor race could steal techs for you but you couldn't see them on the minor race screen because you hadn't met them.

+ added check for failed NewShip in function RandomEventFindShips

+ fixed a few bugs in the ship movement code to help AI ships recover if they don't have a destination

+ added code to make mini-freighters not get deleted if they're being reset

+ Fixed "stuck turn button" issue some people have run into.

+ Recalculates the civ's population if an anomaly adds to the population of a planet

+ Fixed bug where after building a ship, if you viewed the ship in the ship yard, it would cause the ship on the map to scale incorrectly

+ Fixed music volume bug:  The problem was in the SetFadeIn/Out functions.  These would be called before any music was playing, so the end volume would not get set to the current volume and it would remain at its default value of 1.0 (full volume)   The fade in effect was then increasing the volume until it reached this full volume.  So I’ve changed these functions so that they set the start and end volumes and fade direction regardless of whether the music is playing or not.  That way, when the music does start, the fade effect will not increase the volume past the user’s selected volume.

+ Fixed rare crash in UpdateStackedShips

+ Added code to prevent infinite loop of messages if a ship without survey ability is on auto-survey and hits an anomaly

+ Fixed bug where engine exhaust would be added to any frame with an E in it instead of frames that began with E

+ Fixed "String Not Found" message when trying to delete a custom race

+ Fixed UP Law "Minimum Constructor Speed" so any constructor below min speed will be bumped up to min speed.  Any constructor above the min will not have its speed changed.  Previously all constructors were having their speed set to the min speed.

+ Performance Improvements to Planet screen: Queues and menus can be updated only when they are empty. The build menu was being updated twice when you chose a project to build. Now it is only called once.

+ Plays debris cut scene when you lose by tech victory

+ Fixed display bug where if you set difficulty to Easy, then added a Bright opponent, the difficulty would still display as Easy

+ Fixed placement of engine trails in full battles Fixed bug where engine trails for ships that die were lost when full battle was restarted

+ Fixed crash if sphere.x fails to load

+ Fixed bug where war, peace, and surrender icons would appear twice if they happened during the AI's turn

+ Fixed bug where peace notifications would not appear in some cases

+ Fixed bug where right-clicking declare war icon would scroll to enemy planet even if it was hidden by fog of war

+ Fixed broken tool tips for list grid controls

+ Added descriptive tooltips to the component icons in the ship designer

+ Fixed bug where tooltips would not show up for any items inside of a custom list box. For example: Ships in orbit, improvement summary list, etc

+ Fixed bug where fleet hit points would display show correct amount of hit points (It would add an extra bonus for HP)

+ Fixed bug where troops from information warfare would be added onto transports at the end of a battle if they were the only casualties of the invasion.

+ New Combat System: 1 on 1 Ship Battles:

    If both sides kill each other in the same round, the ship with the most max hp will escape as the winner with 1 hp.   If they have the same max hp, the attacker wins.

+ New Combat System: Fleet Battles:

    If both sides kill off the attacking ships in the same round, the last attacking ship on each side is compared for max HP.  The one with the most max HP survives with 1 hp.   If they both have the same max HP, the attacker wins.

+ Added option “Move Camera to Selected Colony in Colonies List “

   When this option is checked, the camera will scroll to a planet when it is selected in the civ manager colonies list

+ UI Tweak: Selecting a planet no longer deselects ships.  This allows you to select ships, then select a planet, see if you want to send ships there, then click another planets to check it out, and see if you want to send the ships there.  You do not lose selection of the ships.   This is similar to how it worked in Galciv 1.

+ Fixed bug where planets that used terraform improvements did not have the correct planet quality after loading a saved game.

   The stored improvement value for Planet Quality is saved, all other stored improvement values can be recalculated, but planet quality can’t be recalculated since the terraform improvements do remain after they are built.

+ Battle System:  Ties go to attacker (as discussed at the meeting)

+ Combat Viewer: Ships have their frames cloned so they can scale correctly for the battle

+ Colony Manager: Population is now displayed with 1 decimal place instead of 3 ( to allow more room on the screen for other things )

+ Changed the way ship frame cloning works so it is more efficient (major memory saver!)

+ Fixed bug in frame sharing where mini-freighters and normal freighters would not be the correct size

+ Fixed a bug where only the first starbase of a type that was built would animate, others would not animate unless the first one was on screen.

+ Added GNN notifications and dropdown icons for the following events:

    1) A civ declares war on another civ
    2) A civ makes peace with another civ
    3) A civ surrenders to another civ

+ Left-clicking the drop down icon will speak to the main civ involved (For war and peace, it’s the one who initiated it (or the other civ if you initiated it).  For surrender, it’s who they surrendered to (or the icon is removed if they surrender to you).

+ Right-clicking the drop down icon will scroll the map to the home planet of the main civ involved.

+ Currently the icons are using the ship icon.  Paul is making some new icons for these events.

+ Planet screen now shows max possible population

+ Planet screen now updates its data as buildings are destroyed

+ Fixed bug in the turn event log save code

+ Wormholes now have a light-yellow tactical icon to differentiate them from normal anomalies

+ You can now use the T button on the keyboard to set a planet rally point from the planet management and planet details screen

+ You can now use the T button on the keyboard to set a rally point for selected colony in the Civ Manager colony list

+ Foreign Treaties window: Race logos now have tooltips which display the race name

+ Removed debug info from frame cache

+ Implemented shield on colony list to indicate defended colonies

+ Fixed sorting by net income in colony list

+ Implemented “Ship Graphic Frame Sharing” system (increased performance, memory savings). This is a pretty significant engine change but we hope it will increase performance and set the stage where we can have larger sized galaxies.

    1) Ships now share their frame data

    2) ALT+TAB will clear out the frame data, and new frames are created, these also get stored the first time, and from then on ships that are restored use the new frame data

    3) Frame Cache is cleared out in UIBeginGameHelper

    4) Frame Cache is also cleared in galaxy destructor

    5) If a ship is about to explode, its frame data is cloned, so it can be altered without affecting the other ships of the same type

    6) Made changes to various screens so that they use the scene node util function that uses the cache instead of allocating their own ship graphics

+ Implemented Planetary Invasion Turn Event

+ Optimized battle code that selects a weapon component

+ Optimized code that selects a component from a ship frame

+ You can now select an improvement that is being upgraded, and select Decommission to both stop the upgrade AND decommission the existing improvement

+ You can now use the DEL key to decommission an improvement.

+ You can now use the DEL key to remove improvements from the build queue

+ If you scroll down through the list of available improvements, select an item, and then build it, the list will remain scrolled to where you were when you built the improvement.

+ Fixed bug where selecting Nothing in the Quick Build window would set a planet to build a Ranger

+ Fixed UI bug where starport icon on a planet would not show correct status after planet invasion

+ Fixed bug where if you send a constructor to the starbase, and “Prompt to Upgrade Starbase” option was disabled, the constructor would enter the starbase’s tile

+ Added GetNumIcons function to the info icon manager (Requested by Scott)

+ Civ Manager Colonies list will now display the net income for a planet and color it red if is negative, white if not

+ Fixed a crash in Ship Graphic render function so it gracefully exits

+ Improved performance on Civ Manager screen when going back and forth from colony list to planet screen.  It now updates only the planet that changed instead of refreshing the whole list

+ Civ Manager: If you go to a planet screen from colony list, and return to colony list, and only if the data in the column that is being sorted changed, the colony list will be resorted

+ Reversed planet rotation direction on planet screen so it matches rotation direction on map

+ Starbase window now uses standard scene node creation function instead of using its own code to make a starbase

+ Fixed starbase trading exploit

---
The "Example" Mod includes:

FleetFormations
- Adds 10 new formations to the combat viewer

Anomalies.xml
- Added 4 money-giving anomalies
- Added 2 money-taking anomalies
- Added an anomaly that increases the player's maximum number of trade routes by 1
- Added a surprise worm-hole anomaly that looks like an asteroid, but teleports the ship like a worm-hole
- Added an anomaly that adds population to a random planet that belongs to the player

PoliticalParties.xml
- Added Totalitarian party ( Economy +10%, Military Production +20%, Loyalty +10% )
- Added Expansionist party ( Speed +1 parsec, Range +20%, Population Growth +20% )

AbilityBonuses.xml

- The player can use ability points to add to their miniaturization ability

TechTree.xml
- There is now a branch of 4 techs from Advanced Hulls that increase your ship HP (2 were moved from after Master Hull Building)
- A new "Supreme Logistics" tech has been added after "Ultimate Logistics" that increase your logistics by 15
- A new branch of 5 techs for increasing your Repair ability has been added from Basic Logistics

StarbaseModules.xml
- Added "Starship Repair Bay" module for increasing repair ability for ships in the base's area of effect (Requires new "Basic Starship Repair" tech)

CustomMaps.xml
- PlanetStardock.raw
- Added custom planet with Stardock logo as a continent

Events.xml
- Added 5 more random events
---

I'd like to get a virtual (IRC) chat going amonst skinners and wanted to get an idea of what the best time would be.  There are a LOT of things going on that we need to go over and we woudl like the skinning community to be involved directly in how things progress. Please let me know what time of day and general best availability so we can try to pick a good time to have it.

You're going to hear the term "gadget" a lot over the next year as Windows Vista gets closer.  Stardock's DesktopX Pro lets you create gadgets that require no additional downloads (not even .NET).

And one of the most popular gadget authors in the community has released three new Galactic Civilizations II gadgets.

Downloads:

GalCiv II Media Player

GalCiv II Drive Meter

GalCiv II Meteverse

 

Ever wonder how effective advertising is? I remember when I was a kid hearing how much was spent on TV ads and thinking "What a waste of money" for most of those ads. I think ads about "Branding" or on immediate needs (like food or toiletries) can be effective. But many other ads, I dunno.

Magazine ads are something I don't know about either.  And yet here we are, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per quarter. How effective are they?  Does that $20,000 two-page spread in a game magazine generate 2X in sales of the game?  At least with web ads, you know how many impressions and click-thrus you get.  But on magazine ads, who knows. Is anyone seeing them? Might make for an interesting poll question.

And then there's the "well if they see them..." did it make them more inclined to buy the game? 

I admit to having a bit of a personal reason for wanting to advertise so heavily in the magazines and on certain webzines.  I don't believe in "karma" but I felt that for years, our company was too poor to support the magazines that had been kind and fair to use over the years.  Computer Gaming World, for instance, covered The Political Machine with a Tom vs. Bruce article.  CGW knew there would be no ads. They covered it because they thought it was of interest to their readers. People have to respect that kind of integrity.  So as our company grew, I wanted to support those who had supported us.  But that is a seperate issue from the straight mechanics of how effective are advertisements in generating sales.

What do you think?

We're nearly done with Galactic Civilizations II v1.2.  The new version of the game is free for everyone who has purchased the game already.

We are also pleased to report that our sales last week at retail were actually higher than the week before which is likely due to the release of 1.1 and 1.11.  Thank you for supporting the game!

Anyway, the features in v1.2 are:

1. Modding UI. Players will be able to select distinct UIs. This is the main thing we're still working on -- an example mod that has some meat.
2. Updated UI. There are a ton of minor but important UI improvements as suggested by players.
3. New battle system.  Ships fire at the same time in battle.
4. AI Improvements. Lots of tweaks that we think will make the game more fun, especially for veteran players.
5. Memory usage/performance improvements. Lots of DirectX-techno stuff that as a non-DirectX guy I can't explain but memory use is noticeably less and performance on lower end systems should be significantly even better thanks to new techniques.

Our goal is to have this out this week in Beta form so people can play it over Memorial Day weekend.

The GalCiv II team keeps working on new updates. But more and more of that coding is occurring during the spare time of the developers.  For example, I'm only budgeted to work on the game a few hours per week at this point. In effect, most of my time working on the game is during my nights and weekends.

On every Stardock game for the past several years, my job has been to manage the overall project and then come in near the end to go hard core on the parts of the game that need the most work or that I'm specialized on.  Computer AI has been my programming specialty for the last decade or so.  As a result, I typically only do serious coding on a given project during the last few months. 

Once the game is starting to come together into something that can be played as opposed to being a technology, I move from managing the project to actively programming on it. I would also fill in the gaps that our project design document didn't assign out.  On GalCiv II, for instance, I came in and wrote up most of the technology descriptions, a good chunk of the alien conversations, the ship components, planetary improvements, and much of the "data" parts.  I also wrote most of the AI for GalCiv II (except for the diplomacy screen logic which was cobbled together by eveyone and the planetary surface/improvement backend for picking out what gets built on planets).  The economics and tons of gameplay tweaks I also code on.

After the game ships, I get involved in pieces here and there. I'm like an older, uglier (but better spelling/grammar <ducks>) version of Boogiebac where I look at what I think needs to be tweaked in text or in code and does what needs to be done with a heavy bias towards AI and economics.

But at this point, it's on weekends.  There's a LOT of stuff that I have to do during the day.  Running a company is a full-time job unto itself as you might imagine.  And the 3/4ths of our business that isn't games (like Object Desktop) is getting ready for next year's release of Windows Vista.

Like many gamers and modders out there, I enjoy doing this stuff.  I like reading the forums (most of the time) and playing the game. I get ideas or spot stupid AI things and then go in and try to figure out why it did something stupid or how I can make it better.

For instance, tonight I changed the starting position code a bit so that there tends to be a bit more space between players. I also tried to improve the planetary improvemenet handling.  The original coding for planet surface stuff is expertly written but it's not my code and I have a hard time following some of it. It's also different from how I would have written it so I do my best to update it to try to be "Smarter" based on playing the game and reading posts.  I think I've gotten it so that it won't build a gagillion embassies or entertainment centers. The cause seems to be that those two types of buildings were not defined and as a result there was no limit on how many of that "kind" of building could be made. It was pretty deep in there so it took some doing. 

I also put in more code to make different players play more differently in terms of what they research, how aggressive they are, and numerous other things.  Another thing I did was change the way the AI handles bribes/gifts so that players won't necessarily (easily) just give it a bunch of goodies, crank relations up to close and ally. 

One area I think was significant improved but we'll have to wait until more players get their hands on it is in terms of strategic gameplay.  The AI tends to focus on sectors to conquer (much like a human would) but it woudl tend to focus on too many sectors still and its forces would never be focused enough to overwhelm an expert human player who was focusing their resources.

A challenge that will take more time to deal with is that the computer players have reached the level where they are plenty tough for me.  That is, unless I'm playing on a very specific setting or playing with a very specific style, the AI at higher than tough difficulties will cream me.  My view is that anyone being 1.2 at anything higher than tough consistently is probably doing some sort of exploit at which point you just gotta decide whether you want to play a game or game the program? The AI doesn't "care" whether it loses. So if you figure out that you can some starbase/resource/ship combo or find some diplomacy trick to "Win" then knock yourself out.  But I won't be spending my summer weekends trying to "fix" something like that.

After 1.2, the update path starts to slow a little as we move towards expansion packs. There will be a 1.3 still but the development team (even now) is working on this stuff in their spare time too.  When you see a post from one of us on the weekend, don't think we're getting paid to do that.   We do it because we love the game and love you guys.  We love the community.   At the same time, I hope people realize that it is the good will and encouragement from that community that keeps these incredible updates going. 

Sometimes I see things on the forums or in email (particularly Cari's email) that are incredibly rude and come across with such an attitude of entitlement that it can really take the wind out of ones sails.  When someone makes a post like "X MUST be fixed" (where X is some trivial issue that few people care about) or a post that makes outright demands (as opposed to requests) on what "MUST" be in 1.2 or 1.3 that sort of thing is pretty grating.  I know seeing some guy on the forum saying how the "AI sucks" doesn't make me inclined to spend a sunny weekend working on it.  I mean, heck, I've been making games for 15 or so years now. And I've been playing them longer than that.  I have a decent idea of what is "good" and what is "bad".  No game is perfect. But we left "good enough" a long time ago. Someone listing out a spelling error or some UI thing they don't like or some goof one of the AI players makes on occasion is not something that "must" be fixed out of some sense of quality control.  This isn't WoW where people are paying $15 a month and hence one expects continous updates. We keep updating it because - like I said - we love the game and we love the community.  It's a labor of enjoyment/love.   We're not looking for adoration, just respect and decency.

The betas of 1.2 should still show up sometime this month. The main features of 1.2 can be listed as:

1. UI to choose mods (such as total conversion mods)
2. Sample mod
3. Significant UI improvements
4. Some AI fixes/enhancements
5. Memory optimization
6. New Combat system (ships fire at the same time)

I am thinking of putting in a request so that the attacker gets a 25% attack advantage for that first round so that there is still an advantage in being the attacker.

For 1.3, it'll be fairly modest tweaks and improvements.  After that, the team will be working on the expansion pack.  The art team is currently split between making cut-scenes for the expansion pack and making ship-content for an $8.95 ship component pack.  The idea is to be able to lower the cost of the expansion pack a bit.  People (like me) who love having cool looking hulls and ship parts can get those (And I've seen some early stuff, it's far better than what's in the game, the art team has really mastered how to do this stuff). And the people who don't care about the ship design stuff can skip that if they want.

Same story, different actors.

WinCustomize gets slow, flakey, etc.  We fix problem with new code or new server. Site gets faster. Traffic increases. Then the next item on the list of things that causes pain comes to a head and the site gets slow, flakey, etc.

The good news is that we have a quad dualcore 64-bit server with 12 gigs of RAM to be the new MASTER database server which all the clustered machines answer to.  The bad news is that it will take a couple of weeks to make that migration.

We're trying different things so that the overall experience on the site is smoother while we get the new mega server up.  This weekend, we're turning off personal pages to see what impact that has.  We will be interested in hearing whether the site performs better for users with that feature disabled temporarily.

Also, users have asked about the status of the GUI Championships.  We originally planned to do this in March but the website issues that have been cropping up have taken precedence.  We don't feel that we should take on doing a major multi-site contest like that until we get our house here in order.  The plan is to do this later this summer. 

We also plan to soon have an IRC meeting to fill people in on what we think the next step in skinning is likely to be now that we're fully briefed on Windows Vista and have a good handle on what can be done with it (lots of interesting things).  We'll announce a time shortly.

It's ironic that Democrats despite President Bush so much when Bush has worked so tirelessly to destroy the Republican party.  The Republican party as we know it is dead. It's still moving around, still animated, but as the midterms are likely to show, the carcas has passed on.

To be fair, it has taken Bush about 6 years to destroy the Republican party and Democrats, who are certainly not the party of rocket scientists (both literally and figuratively) have seemingly been unaware that Bush has been painstakingly gutting the core principles of the Republican party such that as the summer of 2006, few former-Republicans would even consider voting for a Republican let alone Bush.

Where do we start?  Let's start with the spend-a-thon that Bush has been on since 2000.  Republican apologists on TV and in print have made the pithy, if unhelpful, statement of "We're at war, deficit spending is normal in times of war."  Please.

As a % of our GDP, our military spending isn't remotely where it was during the cold war.  The most generous description of our military spending is that Bush halted the decline of the US's military spending as a % of GDP that we saw during the 90s.  I am not arguing that we need massive military spending increases, only that military spending has little to do with why we have deficits now.

The biggest reason we have deficits has to do with the economy slowing down when Bush took office.  That wasn't his fault.  But the wasteful spending in congress -- a Republican congress -- shows that Republicans are no better than Democrats when it comes to spending. 

Here's the thing that many Democrats don't understand about Republicans and it's a very straight forward thing -- most Republicans do not believe that it is the JOB of the federal government to provide a social safety net for its citizens.  It has nothing to do with being "greedy" or "not caring" or "being mean". It's a matter of principle.  I don't expect my cable company to provide me with prescription drug coverage and I don't expect my government to make sure I have health insurance.  When the government does something, the citizenry that benefits from the program, over time, begins to feel entitled to it and it takes away the personal responsibility element that every citizen should have in my opinion.

But thanks to Bush, the Republicans have gotten the federal government into the health care business. Not as bad as it could be but still.  And while he does get points for trying to get the federal government out of the social security business, that ultimately failed.

Besides the unchecked spending, what really opened Republican eyes to the real George W. Bush was him picking his personal lawyer to be on the supreme court.  That choice unraveled the Bush presidency in my opinion.  It permanently took away the benefit of the doubt that many Republicans had given the President.  It set Bush up for what amounts to the most disastrous immigration plan in American history.

Which is what the hot topic is.  Immigration.  Personally, I don't get hot and bothered about illegal immigration.  What I do care about are sudden, significant, demographic changes in my country.  I like my culture. The American culture, and don't kid yourself that there isn't one, travel abroad for a few weeks and you will be left with no doubts that there is an American culture, is worth preserving.  I don't believe in laws forcing people to speak a language, but I am glad that we have a culture that essentially forces people to speak English in order to function (92% of immigrants learn English within 5 years).  Language is what ties a culture together.

Bush's plan would do more to alter the demographics of the United States than any "amnesty" plan in the history of the country.  Besides providing a fast-path to citizenship for 12 million immigrants (an instant 3% population demographic change). It also paves the way for those people to be able to easily bring in their relatives which instantly creates a multiplying effect.  Some estimates say that another 30 million latinos could become part of the population (on top of the 12 million we already have) within 10 years.  You are talking, at that point, a major demographic shift in our country. 

In the early 20th century when Americans were up in arms about immigration due to the Irish, Italians, and others coming in from Europe, you were talking a relatively trivial % difference in the overall demographics of the United States.  What also makes this different is that these immigrants would be coming from a country that they could easily return to "to visit" which slows cultural assimilation.  Moreover, unlike immigrants of the past, latino immigrants are much less interested in assimilating to begin with.  Spend some time in southern Texas or Arizona or southern California and there is not only a vocal (and sizeable) minority of Mexican immigrants who have no interest in becoming part of the American culture, they see those border states as belonging to Mexico and would love nothing else than to use their political power to cede those states back to Mexico in all but name.  I was at a T-shirt store picking up vacation shirts and there was an entire rack of T-shirts with slogans (mostly in Spanish but I could read what they said) that said things like "This land belongs to Mexico".  The attitude is obviously popular enough that someone selling T-shirts sees a demand to sell such shirts.

So what should Bush's plan been if he had...you know, principles?

Let me put forth this:

1. Create a Guest Worker program that only people who are residing outside the United States can apply for. If you're already illegally residing in the United States, then you should go back to your country of origin and sign up.
2. No mass deportations, just common sense -- if you get caught, either doing something illegal or using services then yes, you'd be deported. We wouldn't go out of our way to deport people, no mass raids of businesses or communities, just a common sense - if you get caught shop lifting or applying for welfare or going to the emergency room (yes, that sounds mean and I would support someone going to the emergency room getting full treatment first but they're not supposed to be here -- ask Mexico what THEY do with illegal aliens).
3. If you do get caught here, it would make it harder to get a guest worker program permit and make it much harder to become a future citizen.
4. Significantly tougher border security. Each state's governor would be able to call in up to 3,000 national guardsman. Not for enforcement but to free the border patrol to do more enforcement. The guard would handle logistics and monitoring (similar to what has been proposed but each state would be able to call in different numbers).
5. Funding to build several massive border detention centers to hold captures illegal aliens for up to 90 days before deporting them back to Mexico.

I'd also support a public pounding of any fool that feels the need to say "We are a nation of immigrants".  Yea, and the Germans coming into Poland in 1939 were merely immigrants too.  Immigration is one thing, invasion is another. Every culture has a threshold of when immigration becomes disruptive to a society.  A nation of 300 million people (of which approximately 15 million are already unassimilated latinos according to some of the stats I've seen) is not in any position to throw on another 40 million unassimilated latinos. It's not about their skin color or whatever nonsense libelous charge that pro-amnesty forces like to use to silence their critics. It's about a society's ability to assimilate masses of people.

And George W. Bush clearly doesn't understand that or doesn't care.  It's the end of a long line of dumbass Republican actions.  And the result is that in the next election, citizens that might have been inclined to vote for Republicans are going to be taking a cold hard look at the voting record.  The politican that thinks "the masses" are stupid and don't pay attention to these things is in for a wakeup call.

Anyone who's been around Stardock's various websites knows the pattern.  We find a new way to make things faster or upgrade some piece of hardware to make the sites run smoother and the traffic instantly jumps which brings back the problems for the regulars.

The #1 performance hogging feature on all of Stardock's sites (whether it be JoeUser or WinCustomize or GalCiv2.com or TotalGaming.net) is the same thing -- the referrals.  That is, all items actually look at where a visitor is coming from and then adds to a massive table in a massive database on where that referral came from and what the URL was to get back to it. 

When you have, literally, hundreds of thousands of people coming to the site every day (which is thousands per hour) it's a significant strain.  There's no OFF button for it, it would be a lot of changes in a lot of places in code. 

But people feel the pain of that database being hit because it's tied to the article database -- commenting timing out being one of the most common. 

We have a new server for the database that is a real monster. It has 12 gigabytes of memory, 4 dual core CPUs, you get the picture. But it will take some weeks to migrate things to it.  The same person doing the migration could be asked to go and turn off the referrals which would make things nicer but that would delay the migration which will make everything faster.  Hence the dilemma.

I am tending to just let it suffer so that the migration goes quicker and refrain from writing articles like this one (that is why today was so slow) until the migration is done.