Sam

I tend to make one city and get it started, then ASAP make four other cities, one on each of its borders and get them started. I prefer mine to be all of a similar age. You need to make sure your rich sims are very close to their workplace and you really don't want them to have to cross a city border to their workplace.

Welcome to Simtropolis. For the commute time, your problem is most likely that you have too many rich sims. You want mostly poor sims, some medium wealth sims and only a few rich sims to keep your city balanced. Not everyone can be a company CEO, you still need the workers. The rich sims think anything more than a few minutes is a long commute, so they won't put up with an average 70 minutes. They also don't like public transport and prefer their cars. The less wealthy sims are less of a problem. They will use your public transport and don't mind a slightly longer commute. You should also have at least some of each developer type in each city, i.e. some residential, some industry and some commercial, even if it is a small amount. For your utilities cities, start them off with some residential and your build your population while you upgrade the utilities and get the achievement rewards. Once you have those, phase out the residential and move it to the neighbouring city. Also make sure when connecting your cities that you don't allow your roads to do a circle so they can loop back into any of the cities they came from otherwise the sims will just stay on the merry-go-round and keep going around and around and around. Its called eternal commuter syndrome. CAM may be able to help to some extent with eternal commuter syndrome and some other issues. NAM can help with various transit issues including additional options. NAM should be on the STEX, CAM is over at SC4 Devotion (www.sc4devotion.com).

That would seem to indicate you should first try taking all your non essential plugins out of the plugins folders into a holding folder while you do your PIM stuff. Just have in there the items you are actually going to PIM. You can put the others back in when you want to play the game again.

Check what version of the game you are running. If you have only vanilla and not Rush Hour or Deluxe you may have problems if you use content that was built using them, or if you use tools that were designed to work with them. Normally a simple missing textures should not cause that problem, although they may cause others like blue tiles or missing items. It sounds more like you are missing a game file or something.

It is certainly possible it is "intelligent design" but of human origin rather than any non-human deity or supreme power, i.e. the remnants of the social structures our ancestors created for themselves. We wouldn't say our ancestors were unintelligent, some of them were certainly intelligent enough, and powerful enough, to set up social systems that were more favourable to some people over others, rather than based on mutual respect. Even though progress has been made in addressing the various inequalities over time and in some parts of the world, there is still plenty of work to be done, as your example illustrates. However yes, there are many things in biology to start with that don't make much sense unless absence of intelligence is considered as a factor.

And if there isn't one well there goes that plan then. Personally I prefer any offenders are punished right here on earth, where we can be sure its done. And on what basis is this known? Why does a god have to be impartial just because he/she/it is a god? Who says any such being will be doing any judging at all? If it is yours who doesn't have any interest in the universe now, then again there isn't going to be much judging or punishment happening. And the Christian God specifically says he is a vengeful god, so I doubt there's much impartiality there even though there would be plenty of judgement and punishment happening by all accounts there. Agreed. Punishment should always be proportional to the offence. Definitely agreed. And as the saying goes, an eye for an eye just leaves everyone blind.

Whoever survives should be executed for murder. Would not that itself be murder?

Actually we don't. As mentioned earlier, disorder is not entropy, and entropy is not disorder. At least not in the ordinary sense that most people would understand "order". As Astronelson said, it didn't decrease. "Prior" to the big bang, even if entropy was at a "maximum" (the maximum allowed by that form of the universe) then the expansion of the universe resulted in the maximum allowable entropy of the universe to increase, so that what was there prior was no longer at a maximum. There was "space" or capacity for entropy to further increase, not by decreasing the entropy, but by increasing the maximum limit allowed. But since the universe keeps expanding, that allowed maximum keeps increasing. It is like relieving a demand cap in SC4 by placing parks. With the placing of each park, the maximum allowable limit of sims in your city is raised, allowing your city to continue to grow. We do. As far as we know, at the level of the universe (under ordinary physics), when all is taken into account, nothing is observed to violate this. Not life itself, not the formation of stars or galaxies, nor anything else we've seen, at least on a universal level. When you take all factors into account in these processes, the level of entropy in the universe increases. If it doesn't, then you are probably not taking all the factors into account (i.e. you are probably only looking at the system and not its surroundings and the energy/matter flow between the system and its surroundings, or you are only looking at a part of the system). Locally however, as Fukuda pointed out, it is possible for local decrease in entropy to occur by natural processes, but you will always find that entropy elsewhere has increased by a greater amount, giving a net increase in entropy overall. There is nothing very mysterious about this, and nothing about biology or evolution violates this. You just have to take all factors into account. Its ok, we are all just having a friendly discussion here. Most people here know from experience that RL has to take priority and sometimes people can't respond straight away.

ah ok, sorry.

I do not disagree with you on that. And it is not just on an astronomical level that it is important. Awesome picture by the way.

But they too think they are right. And agnosticism is not exclusive of any of the other views you mentioned. I am both atheist and agnostic for example. Evolution is certainly not responsible for the creation of the universe. The universe had been around a long, long time before life, at least on this planet, and therefore evolution, got going. The Big Bang probably isn't responsible for the creation of the universe either for all we know. It is as far back as we know anything about, but its nature beyond that is the subject of ongoing investigation. And entropy is not synonymous with disorder. Entropy relates to energy unavailable to do work (in the thermodynamics sense). You answered that earlier in the same paragraph: Consider this: A hypothetical isolated system consisting of a container filled with an ideal gas at equilibrium: Double the volume of the container: The gas (and therefore the rotational and translational energy of its particles) can now expand, and it does: Now, the energy in the system in image 1 could not spread out any further, i.e. entropy is high. In image 2 the container is expanded, and the energy can now disperse more widely (i.e. entropy can now increase further, image 3). So even though entropy is high in the first image, the expansion of the container in image 2 allows entropy to increase further. You said it yourself. The universe is expanding. See this link for more information on what entropy is about: A Student’s Approach to the Second Law and Entropy

If that is the case then could you please post what the solution was so that other people who are having the same problem can also know? Thanks.

Requests for lots to be made should always be made in the Lot Request Thread, which is pinned at the top of this forum. This keeps the forum tidy and the requests all in one place where people can find them. It would be really appreciated if you could help out with this by using the official thread for your requests. Thanks. Edit: Posts have now been moved.

Welcome to SImtropolis. To install lots you unzip them and put them in your SC4 plugins folder. The one in My Documents, not the one in Programs. Also when posting on the site it would be appreciated if you could make sure you post your question in the most appropriate thread on the forum or make a new one if it doesn't fit into an existing one. It makes it easier for everyone to find what they are looking for, especially for people who come after you and have the same question. Thanks.