CBS is sticking to its guns despite increasingly overwhelming evidence that the documents they used as the basis for their anti-Bush national guard story were forged.

CBS's "independent" source has come forward saying CBS misled him by indicating that the documents were "hand written". Having seen the documents, even he says they were probably computer generated.

What's really startling is just how obviously computer generated they were.  These "memos" weren't just made with MS Word.  They were made with MS Word with all the default settings. Most people, if they were going to do a forgery, would probably at least change something - margins, spacing, something.  These documents were not just done on the computer, they were done with a specific program.

This image from Little Green Footballs shows MS Word and a scan of the original memo overlayed. The odds of having such a perfect match and not being from the same source are well, basically zero. This isn't a case of where "we'll never know for sure". This is pretty much a slam dunk and CBS blew it by not coming clean.

Bear in mind, the above is Word and the original document overlayed. That's how exact they are -- you can't even tell there's an overlay.  It's not just the superscript "th" either. It's a dozen other things that make it obvious. 

When is the TV media going to simply show this image? A picture is wort a thousand words.

(comparison in print out using MS Word and the alleged document from 1973)

CBS's 60 Minutes may have fallen for a hoax yesterday. After airing documents that claimed to show that pressure was put on officers to "sugar coat" Bush's national guard service, blog sites such as Little Green Footballs and this one seem to provide compelling evidence that this was a hoax.

Story developing.

Looks like the documents that 60 Minutes showed "proving" Bush hadn't completed his National Guard duties were made with MS Word. 

Not too much copies of Windows were running in the 70s.

Apparently the new Grand Theft Auto game will require that you work out to stay in shape -- in the game. Now, why would I do something in a game that I won't bother to do in real life?

It reminds me of the early days of playing Ultima Online:

[Select Mining Pick]
[Target Rock]
"No ore found"

[Select Mining Pick]
[Target Rock]
"No ore found"

[Select Mining Pick]
[Target Rock]
["Iron Ore found. 1/1000 units to create ingot. 50 ingots needed for 1 gold coin. 10 gold coins needed to purchase leather boots."]

(much time passes)

[Purchase: Leather boots]

"I'm going to go exploring!"

["You are traveling the path, a group of travelers stand in the road."]

[Draginol speaks: "Hi Guys! Seen anything cool?"]

[l33tDude Casts Fireball]

[Draginol Dies]

["You have died. Items lost: Leather boots."]

["You have been resurrected near the iron mine. 0/1000 iron units in hand to create ingot. 50 ingots needed for 1 gold. You have 0 gold."]

This is what leads to people going onto eBay and buying a buff character. 20 minutes later and $50 poorer.

[["You are traveling the path, a group of travelers stand in the road."]

["BastardDraginol casts chain lightning"]

["l33tDude dies"]
["Megadeath dies"]
["OwnzU dies"]
["NBKillR dies"]

So the question is, will we be able to buy bad ass Grand Theft Auto guys from eBay?

Just so that everyone is aware: This is not an official support channel.

PoliticalMachine.com is run by Stardock. We are the software developer who wrote the game. This support channel isn't an "official" channel. The official support options for the game are in the back of The Political Machine user manual.

So any support we provide is in addition to those channels. Think of this forum as the last line of defense, it shouldn't be your first option. I.e. this forum is not sanctioned by Ubi Soft in any way to provide support for the game. It's just there because we want to make sure you, our customers, are taken care of.  We have full confidence in Ubi Soft's support abilities and provide this merely as an extension of those support channels.

DesktopX 2.21 has been released.  DesktopX is a program that extends Windows to support true objects on the desktop. These objects are used to do everything from have "super icons" to being combined together to create "widgets" as well as building entire desktops.

DesktopX is actually what Stardock used to develop the user interface in The Political Machine. With DesktopX, Stardock was able to create the actual game screens and prototype them at the same time. The finished screens were then exported out of DesktopX and are read in by the 3D engine in The Political Machine to display the screens. As a result, Stardock's graphics team could literally draw up the user interface how they want including fonts, positioning, alpha blending, etc. 

This same technology will be used to create Galactic Civilizations II. 

DesktopX is a free download at http://www.desktopx.net

Included in this ZIP is a file we hope will fix the following:

1) The endorsement crash problem (Cause: Windows 98 handles INI files differently than other OSes)

2) "Cannot initialize display" (Working attempt here is to try to force into various other modes in the driver to see if we can get around it)

3) Game crashes after intro.

If you're not running into any problems, then don't bother with this.

https://www.stardock.com/private/test102.zip

Unzip into your political machine directory. Only works on the full version and you still need your CD on the drive and such.

DesktopX 2.21 has been released.  DesktopX is a program that extends Windows to support true objects on the desktop. These objects are used to do everything from have "super icons" to being combined together to create "widgets" as well as building entire desktops.

Version 2.21 is mostly an update for those who like to create widgets and themes but has some memory saving features as well:

• Smart-Bitmap Loading to support animated multi-state objects/widgets
• Widgets now have their own name space
• Holding down the Ctrl Key will always move/select an object in DesktopX regardless of how it's grouped
• Sub-Child activation fixed (clicking on a parent object will activate its children and those children will activate their children and so forth)
• DX labels not responding correctly to resolution changing
• Includes new Weather widget that has features for changing color on the fly and other goodies.
• Bundled objects and widgets updated to better show off what DesktopX can do.

At this stage there are two main issues we find some people having:

1) Cannot Find Display

or

2) Game crashes after intro.

Problem #1 has to do with their video card and problem #2 has to do with the Safedisc copy protection and can be fixed by contacting either [email protected] or [email protected]

Now for those of you having problem #1 OR some other video card/system problem that prevents you from running the game, help us to help you:

Tell us:

• What kind of video card you have (brand and model)
• What operating system you're running
• What version of the video drivers are you running on that card

The only video card we are aware of that cannot run the game is the older Intel integrated video adapter (though we haven't found out if it will work if people update their drivers).  Because if there is some video card that isn't compatible for some reason, we can go out and try to get that card and figure out what the deal is.  The game DOES work on pretty much every reasonably supported video card out there (from an nVidia TNT all the way up to an ATI X800).  As long as you have 16 megabytes of video memory, the game should work on your computer.

Thanks in advance.

http://www.naturaldesktop.com

Let us know what you think.