well, maybe this will make the point clearer. What are you sending in the mail that you don't want three tiers of post office inspectors checking? What are you cooking on your barbecue on Saturday that you don't want the police coming over and sampling? What are you doing late at night in front of the computer that you don't want a federal trace record of that is available as a matter of public record? Personally, I don't want a federal public record of my internet traffic because I don't think my neighbors really need to know what kind of porn I enjoy...

Okay, so I'm not a rocket scientist, nor an engineer on staff for a power company, or any such thing. However, having a college education has allowed me this much insight on this topic. Space based solar collectors offer no real advantage to ground power grids. However, establishing a space based solar array would greatly facilitate all future space missions and conceivably (read if built right) provide a platform for assisted launches, crap cleanup (space junk is a serious problem, it is like we are building our own private meteorite shower in orbit), and provide high intensity remote power for long distance missions within the solar system. Assisting the ground power grid would only be an added, and very inefficient, benefit. So, in conclusion, I am for the building of space based solar arrays, but trying to say that it will fix our ground power problems is fallacious.

Thank you! This is quite possibly the funniest post I have read all day. If only I had mod points for you good sir...

I personally was hoping for the prophesied Great Merging of the SIM titles (e.g. Sim Earth, Sim Life, Sim City, etc..) . I look at how old those games are, and think to myself, "wow.. if an older, less powerful platform could run just one of the these individual simulations, couldn't our newer, bigger, stonger, faster platforms run them all *together*?" It turns out that, no... no they can't.. because Will Wright is a dream killer...

I know that it wasn't stated specifically that you had any updates recently, but my g/f's laptop recently took a similarly stinky dump. I have changed HDDs and totally wiped the o/s (low level format of the drive... can't beat THAT). After fully re-installing, it was still slow. I have narrowed the problem down to a driver issue, it would appear that two of the drivers are arguing over resources and that is causing the computer to spaz out every so often (say every one or two seconds?) . I have yet to locate the angry drivers because windows does not report any conflicts. So, long story short, if you are experiencing a regular near stoppage of processing that lets up after a second you may be experiencing an un-announced resource sharing conflict. To identify this, get into safe mode and see if it works better there, if it does, then remove all the drivers and start into normal mode. If it works well while re-installing drivers, but takes the same dump after restart, my guess is you are in the same boat as I am! Good luck and god speed sir!

I have worked four ten hour shifts as well, and personally, I don't see any great benefit to having an extra two hours off on a work day. I did, however, see a tremendous benefit to having an extra day off during the week. That allowed me to run errands and the like on a weekday and then *actually enjoy* my weekends. Plus, there are many errands that you cannot complete on the weekends, so you try to sneak them in right after work... when everyone else is trying to do the same thing... and no one wins... except for those that had the whole day off and went out on the road early to get it done.

after looking at my post... maybe 100k is kinda ridiculous for your world chunk updates.. but I still feel that my sprite updates would require a significantly smaller (by a factor of ten or better) quantity of data.

On an MMO level, however, couldn't this end up requiring that the servers be dumping out massive quantities of data? The return of this world data would have to be relatively instant in order to maintain gameplay and these data chunks would be be... what... 100k in size... maybe more? if you have more than 10 players in a localized area where a world change happens, then you would have to dump out about a meg in less than a second. Scale that up for thousands of players and you begin to see my quandry. I did, however, have an idea since my orginial posting. You could reduce the amount needed to update by simply populate "world modifier sprites" that would be simple creature flags in essence, but instead of causing the players interface to display a creature, they would cause the player's interface to modify the terrain. these sprites need a small amount of information transmitted (smaller than regular creatures since the have no real interactive nature) and thus would need only around maybe 1k or less. These sprites could also be transmitted on a low priority in between realtime packets so that gameplay would not be affected... right?

Actually, this is an idea I have been kicking around with my friends for about a year now... I call it a "persistent universe" for a MMO. The background coding for this actually would be fairly easy... the difficult part comes in updating the player interfaces to reflect the newly modified universe. In essence, how do you keep the data throughput down while continuously updating the "universe" that the player is interacting with? If bandwidth wasn't an issue, this would be easy, but we all know that bandwidth IS and issue... I simply cannot figure a good way to transmit at least semi real-time modifications to a players interface without dumping out huge quantities of data from my servers.