To all those who have had to fight in wars justified and unjustified; To all who have left their families, uncertain if they would ever return; To all who may have lost everything from limbs to families:

Thank you for fighting and keeping us safe. Without you, we wouldn’t have the great country we have - one where we even have the freedom to protest against the wars it rages.

A BBC News story has pointed out that my prior post (which I can’t find on my first blog) in which I called this guy a moron for spending $17 thousand to buy land in a virtual world. Afterall, it’s only an investment if you can sell if for a higher price. However, according to the story, there is a strong chance this guy and others will be making money! Should we all rush in and do this? Nah! I think it’s probably like most investments, if you’re not the first one in, you’re not going to make as much money. Afterall, you have to pay more and then hope the price goes up even more. This may end up making a lot of money for the first batch and be a bust for everyone else. Time will tell and I’ll keep a close eye on this story.

BBC News has reported today that Sony BMG implanted malware into one of their country music CDs to prevent it from playing in certain Windows Media players. Not only that, but the software installs itself into the dark recesses of the computer where only the most technologically savy can find it. This is the kind of crap I expect when installing Kazaa, not when LEGALLY using a STORE BOUGHT CD. I don’t want anything installed on my computer unless I installed it myself purposefully. That’s why I use Mozilla Firefox instead of Internet Explorer and limit my usage of shady Internet-downloaded software. And, if I decide to do one of these things, I take a calculated risk. How badly do I want a program to, for example, remove region restrictions on dvds? Is it worth possible spyware and malware? But NO ONE thinks of those things when they put a musical CD into their computer. This is a blatant faus pax and Sony is extremely lucky that this story doesn’t seem to have made news in the United States. Again, people escape media wrath because American news organizations are relatively lazy. I advocate making this a huge deal and I hope more bloggers help push this story to the mainstream.

Today I read something that delighted me! On the back of the volume 2 DVD of Tom and Jerry it read “this dvd is intended for adult collectors and may contain material unsuitable for small children.” Why did it make me happy? Because it’s finally an admission that cartoons were not created originally created for children. Most of the cartoons played prior to movies with adult and/or family audiences. So I hate this sanitizing of cartoons that has been occuring on some of the box sets lately. Also, there were some cartoons which would never have been made into today’s PC world. But they WERE made and I think it is an important cultural history that we preserve these cartoons instead of putting them in the closet. We need to see these cartoons and understand why they are wrong and why they were ok back then. I think it’s important and the past can’t be changed, so don’t try to change the record! So I will enjoy this DVD more than I have enjoyed most recently.

Here’s a save file from my first civ game. All you need to do is load up the game and hit “enter” to complete my turn. This will give you something to compete against in your Hall of Fame - unless you’re way better than me. My brothers and I started doing this with Civ3 sine we each had our own computers so the score from the others wouldn’t show up in our Hall of Fame. It’s fun to compete against yourself, but not as much fun as competing against others.

Over at Geek Ramblings they pointed out just one more blow to Microsoft FUD. The article says MS will be deploying tens of thousands of routers around the world which will be running Linux. All the while, MS has be claiming that Linux is a POS. This is almost as great as when I heard that the new Halo movie would be made using Linux computers. Of course, what does a Halo movie mean for the folks over at Rooster Teeth- the Red vs Blue creators

Technorati.corn is a blog search engine. (They also search flickr images, but that’s a minor part of their operations) They are considered to be so important that, on more than one occassion, I have seen CNN’s Internet reporters referring to technorati’s top search items as expressive of what Americans (and others) are interested in. The top search items, appearing under the search bar in the home page, are updated every hour to reflect what most people are searching for. About 1-2 weeks ago, I finally joined technorati. I had always been pinging technorati, but you have to claim your blog for the results to show up publicly - at least that’s what it seemed like in my experience because when I searched for stuff I had blogged about before joining, it was not displayed.

I am now on post 202! If you combine this with my previous blog Eric’s Binary World 1.0, it comes out to about 900 posts!

If you think that my review of Civ4 was a bit too rosy, check out this review by Tara, who has a review close the middle, but a little more towards the negative side. A verteran civ gamer, like myself, she found herself basically feeling something was different without quite being able to put her finger on it.

One thing we both noticed was that the huge map is much smaller than a huge map in civ3. I felt as though the map wasn’t as large, but I wasn’t sure if it just felt that way. Good to see someone else agree. Check out the review - it’s well written and have even more screen shots!

Bush asked Congress to earmark approximately $7 billion to help save us from a bird flu pandemic. I think this is good, but with the regular “plain jane” flu season around the corner, I think we’re going to have a huge problem. First of all. Congress takes forever to take action on Bush’s initiatives, if they take action at all. Remember all that money Bush promised the Katrina-ravaged gulf states? The vast majority of it still hasn’t been approved/sent out to the states that need them so badly. And this is something that has already happened, therefore allowing people to demand action. We usually have a problem getting a large number of people mad about something that may happen in the future, but people can protest really quickly over something that has already happened and is currently affecting them.