The Washington Post has an interesting article about how colleges are increasing their support for game developers as a genuine career.
Highlighted in the article is Stardock's own Scott Brodie, an intern at Stardock from Michigan State University who is working on the space battles for Galactic Civilizations II.
Web logging, or blogging for short, has become quite popular. And we invite you to join JoeUser.com -- the world's first blog community. It's a free blog site in which you can use your WinCustomize UserID and create your own blog site that automatically creates your own sub-domain (like http://frogboy.joeuser.com). The topics you write there are syndicated elsewhere based on the topic (such as to here at WinCustomize.com if it's related to computers or to TotalGaming.net if it's about gaming. And like I said, it's free.
What makes JoeUser.com special is that your blogs become part of a general community. The home page of JoeUser.com has articles featured from across the community with top bloggers and their articles highlighted.
It never ceases to amaze me how blinded some people are by their religion. They seem to be completely unaware of how their religion has biased them taking a more open-minded approach to scientific research.
Let me give you a tale of two theories.
Evolution is a theory that stipulates a set of principles on how life on earth changes (evolves) over time. It has a great deal of documented evidence to support it. However, because evolution contradicts the bible, many religious people try to find ways to discount it. They close their minds to it. In the bible, life as we know it did not evolve but was rather created directly by the hand of God. This is especially true of humans. Most religious people either take the stories in Genesis to not be true in the literal sense but try to argue that it is true symbolically (though even that's a stretch). But the point being, because evolution contradicts an existing deep held religious belief, some people have trouble accepting it.
But compared to the theory of gravity, evolution is rock hard fact. We actually do not know how gravity works. We have observed that gravity is related to mass. And we have made some formulas that describe how gravity is related to mass (F=MA for example). But we still do not have a clue as to what causes gravity. Why does mass create gravity? No idea (and things get sketchier about strong and weak forces too but we'll hold off that for another time). But religious people don't challenge the theory of gravity even though it's on weaker ground. But imagine if the bible had stated something vaguely that God's arms push down on all things to keep them in place on the world. That his infinite arms pushed objects towards bigger objects.
One can imagine the debates we'd be having if the bible spoke on gravity. Instead of the accepted belief that gravity PULLS objects towards each other, we would instead have people arguing that no, God PUSHES people towards things based on their size or something. We'd have "Intelligent Gravitation" or something like that. And because of that, we could potentially have real damage done to genuine scientific research because some people would insist on looking for data that supported that some mystical, super natural force was pushing people against objects rather than focusing on mass creating a pull effect (gravity) and trying to figure out why that is.
That's why things like intelligent design are so problematic. Because they're not based on any scientific evidence (no more than the belief that some unknown force is pushing all things towards other things based on their size) it can slow down scientific advancement and cloud education.
I much prefer to have my beliefs be based on the evidence rather than looking for evidence to support my pre-existing beliefs. But religion tends to be pretty dogmatic and blind people to looking at other possibilities. It's not as if religion doesn't get its shot for explaining the universe. Most Americans who believe in evolution (statistically) were raised in a Christian household. That means most of them changed their views because the data supporting evolution was more compelling than the data supporting Creationism.
Evolution wasn't taught in my high school. I, like most people, started out believing in the bible's explanation on how humans got here. It was only over time that I found that the bible's explanation was not plausible. The earth was simply too old. There were too many extinct creatures. There was too much rather obvious local adaptation by animals to believe that some super natural being (or alien) was sitting around tweaking some caterpillar to look like the local vegetation in South America that had only been growing there for the past 8 million years.
As time went on, evolution and natural selection became more and more compelling as causes of where the bio-diversity we have came from. And even once I was convinced that the theory of evolution was fact, more evidence still came my way. Just a few years ago when DNA came to be better understood there would be occasional reports on how scientists tweaked some gene in some animal to produce a radically different animal. Then came Mitochondrial DNA tracking in which we can tell when one species was another and when.
But such evidence doesn't exist in the same form for the theory of gravity. Luckily, the bible doesn't speak about it (which is odd since gravity is a pretty crucial thing that you would think a super being would want to talk about unless of course the writings were not by a higher being but rather by pre-industrial humans with a limited understanding of their environments but I digress).
Most people are aware that politics can affect how history is recorded. But every scientific endeavor suffers from such things. In biology, zoology has gone through the same sort of thing. When you are dealing with anything subjective (and lots of things in science is subjective) politics come into play.
And few things are more subjective than organism classification. With that said, zoologists have a basic classiciation system. It's not perfect, but it is accepted and that's what matters.
Lay people tend to mix up the different types of classifications on a regular basis. So here is a chart of the basic ordering of creatures on Earth:
The basic unit of organism is species. If creature A and B and reproduce together and produce offspring that can reproduce, then they are the same species. If they can't, they are different species.
Hence, a Poodle and a St. Bernhard are the same species -- they can (unfortunately) reproduce.
Moving up you have similar animals. A Lion and a Tiger are both types of cats. But they are different species. They cannot reproduce viable offspring.
Further up you have Families. Dogs and Cats are actually quite similar. But they're obviously not very closely related. But they are in the same basic family of animal. They are, a lot more similar than say a Cat and a Mouse or a Dog and a cow. Dogs and Cows are both in the same order. They're both types of mammals.
Next up you have classes. Now you're really talking different things. Mammals and birds are a lot more similar to one another than say Insects. So Mammals and birds would be part of the same Phylum and Insects would be in their own.
And then finally you have Kingdom. Animals and Plants for example. There's also fungus, and protistas which should be called "Pretty weird stuff". And there's even one above this not regularly referenced but if you're really geeky like me you can talk about and that's Domain where you have Bacteria, Archaea, which I've never seen as they live in extreme environments. They were probably amongst the first lifeforms. We're part of the domain Eukarya incidentally.
That said, once you get outside species, things get more subjective. For instance, Bacteria, why should they get their own Domain? Couldn't they be argued as a plant? Admittedly, I doubt there are message forums where PhDs sit there and have flame wars over the classification of bacteria. 
What exactly is evolution? Evolution is a theory. It is not a hypothesis. A theory is a set of scientific principles that is supported by observable facts. A hypothesis, by contrast, is a statement not backed up by facts.
The theory of evolution is as follows:
Fact #1: Random mutations occur in nature.
Fact #2: Mutations tend to be passed onto off-spring.
Fact #3: If one organism is genetically different enough from another organism then they will not be able to reproduce together.
Therefore:
Traits that benefit an organism (or at least don't kill it) will be passed onto its offspring. Over millions of years, the accumulation of these changes, both big and small. will result in different species based on the local geographic conditions.
For example, a bear that spends most of its life swimming around in the water gives birth to offspring with clubbed feet. This bear is able to swim better as a result than other bears and is thus more likely to catch fish and therefore more likely to survive to pass on its genes. Over time, all the bears in that geographic area will have clubbed feet.
By contrast, same bear, 10 miles inland, born with same clubbed feet is no longer able to hunt food in the woods. It dies before it can reproduce. And with its death so too does that genetic trait.
Our water-loving, club-foot bears, by contrast, have now specialized (or adapted) to life in the water. Even though they are, at this point, still the same species as their wood-prowling cousins, they no longer interact/interbreed because they spend all their time in the water. But they are still the same species at this point.
Time passes. More genetic mutations occur over a very long period of time. Other changes are simply the result of certain genes that are already part of the bear being more survivable. Living in the water all the time has fewer size restrictions. Larger bears are thus not at a hunting disadvantage as their forest living cousins are. So they get bigger and bigger as subsequent generations pass. Bears, which are fatty to begin with, get fattier still because there's no disadvantage to it and those that are fatty can survive in the cold water better. One day a genetic mutation results in offspring that has no hair. The water-swimming club-footed, fatty large bear would have died if the mutation had occurred 50,000 years before when they didn't have all the fat on them from the cold water. But now it's no disadvantage at all. In fact, this bear can swim even faster thanks to not having hair dragging it down. Those genes pass onto their off-spring.
Repeat the process over 50 million years and the genetic differences create a new species. It's still basically a bear but it can no longer breed with its forest-living ancestors. It doesn't look like a bear though. It's hairless and its arms are clubbed and its tail looks like a big old fin now and its hind legs are just vestigial. One day, a human spots one in the water and gives it a name -- whale.
Of course, there are also various species that are in-between those stages or have gone off in their own directions. After all, different environments favor different traits. We have walrus's, seals, etc. They took different paths from one another and became their own species.
What evolution is NOT:
Evolution does not talk about how life came to be on Earth in the first place. There are no theories on how life started on Earth. There are numerous hypothesis's on it. Maybe amino acids got together in some random way and pretty soon you have the earliest forms of primitive life. Perhaps the first single celled life forms were seeded from aliens (which only begs the question, where did they come from?). Maybe God or some other super-natural force created the first spark of life. We don't know. We may never know (though my bet is that they'll find a way to create life in a lab at some point from inorganic molecules).
Evolution vs. Intelligent Design
Intelligent Design is a new hypothesis (or at least a new name for creationism). It argues that God or an alien force created life on earth and then has directed its "evolution" on earth. It is not science. It's not science because nothing in it can be scientifically tested or proven. By contrast, evolution can and has been tested. Even before we had DNA tracking technology, evolution had been well documented in countless cases (particularly in the case of Pacific Island birds where we can see a single species of bird turning into hundreds of species of different birds of different genus's in the course of hundreds of thousands of years). Today, with the ability to look at Mitochondrial DNA we can literally graph where different species evolved from and how long ago it occurred.
What about "Missing Links"?
Discussion of missing links and the like do nothing to disprove evolution, as a theory. When someone says "There is a hole in the fossil record" one might say "Well of course there is." Missing links were more interesting before mitochondrial DNA research became widespread. Barring a time machine, no one can say for 100% that evolution is how we have all the different types of animals we have today. But it is, by far, the strongest explaination we have.
A new episode of PowerUser.TV is now available. The recently launched podcast site is a team effort between WinCustomize.com and Neowin.net. The new episode covers the recent controversy with Grand Theft Auto, some views on Internet Explorer 7 beta 1, and the demise of OS/2.
This October will be the 12th year that I've run a C-class corporation. That means stockholders and what not. As a result, I have long been familiar with the rights and priviledges of stock holders, even minority ones.
In 12 years of business, I don't think anyone could find a single disgruntled business partner. That is, in 12 years, no one we've worked with has ever expressed any dissatisfaction with how they were treated. So even though we're "evil capitalists" I think we've tried to be ethical, evil, capitalists.
But what if we started firing people left and right who owned stock? Maybe our reasons were legitimate. But what woudl the rights of the minority shareholder be?
Unlike public corporations, private corporations (closely held corporations) do have to tip toe a bit on how they treat their shareholders. The majority shareholders have to treat minority holders "fairly", "honestly", and "openly". It is called the "fiduciary" duty. Officers, board of directors, are even more liable -- legally -- to treat minority holders fairly.
The courts have ruled already on what happens to private corporations who violate these rules. The relief has included:
· Dissolution of the corporation;
· Ordering a buy-out of the minority shares;
· Appointment of a provisional director, custodian or receiver;
· Rescinding corporate acts unfair to the minority;
· Awarding damages to minority shareholders.
Many private corporations have discovered that they cannot just walk over minority holders. Having 51% control of a company, for instance, doesn't give you the ability to go hog-wild. As distasteful as it often is for majority shareholders, major corporate decisions have to be documented, minutes included from meetings, with minority share holders. I couldn't, for instance, simply terminate a significant shareholder of the company without a formalized vote and ample documentation (heck, I can't even fire employees without ample documentation).
The best route to take with shareholders is to just set your company up with a formalized ethical business practices. Individual actions, even ones that the officers feel are perfectly just and right, can be interpreted to be unethical and judged illegal. That is why openness with shareholders is key. Document. Document. Document. And openness between shareholders.
Software patents are the devil. Let me get that out of the way. My day job is writing commercial software so it's not just open-source people who don't like software patents. Software patents are incredibly prone to abuse and are really only of use to companies with deep pockets to enforce their patent.
In 1995, Stardock considered getting a software patent. It had come up with a way to embed web-based content into the desktop. So users would be able to have pieces of their desktop wallpaper be displaying information and data from the Internet via web portals in the desktop itself. This was 3 years before Active Desktop made its debut. But as we started to go through the patent process, we realized that it would be incredibly expensive to enforce because the patent office itself was incredibly backward technologically. They didn't understand what we were trying to patent so enforcing the patent against violators would have been tricky.
Software patents can also have a chilling effect on innovation. For example, imagine if Stardock had patented the technology behind WindowBlinds. Windows XP would have had to license it from Stardock or fight Stardock's patent (ironically, Microsoft went ahead and patented their uxtheme implementation despite the fact that it's the same as what WindowBlinds does but we don't care as long as they don't try to enforce their patent).
Not having software patents doesn't hurt intellectual property rights. Patents are just one form of protection. There is still copyright and there's trade secrets. Admittedly, trade secrets are tougher in software because some companies will run people's software through a decompiler to see how it works and can make a copy of it that way.
No system is perfect and in a world with "one-click purchase" patents and other such nonsense, I think we have to pick with lesser of two evils.