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.

Yes, technically summer has just ended but it won't be getting cooler for quite a while. It can be very hard to get anything to grow during summer, especially traditional kitchen garden plants. Summer can be more deadly to the plants than winter is. But a few weeks from now will be one of the best times to be planting in the year if it cools down enough. Autumn is often even better than Spring for gardens as you can usually fit in a fast growing crop as well as some plants to harvest through winter. The Diggers catalogue has just arrived, but I haven't looked through it yet. Bolting is pretty much what Easy Bakes described and is a big problem with some of the common vegetables here. The seeds I was using were even a bolt resistant variety, but they still went to seed at about three weeks old. It means you can't really grow lettuce through summer which is the time you really want to be eating it. The time it does grow well, winter, is the time you don't really feel like eating lettuce. I tried some Amish Deer Tongue lettuce in the spring, and apparently you can use it like spinach as well.

That's a good idea especially if it gets really hot where you are as small tubs will heat quickly from the concrete. Cucumbers especially don't like the heat so you might even want to raise a board on some bricks so air flows underneath. The basil in my garden (i.e. collection of pots) is going really well and I'm also getting some cayenne and jalepeno chillies. I've also got a guava tree in a pot and it is now fruiting. Most other things aren't surviving at all well with the fickle weather we are having. I put some lettuce in and they bolted before they fully grew to edible stage.

Originally posted by: blakesterville I'm back, I guess, after a terribly long break. (I was recovering from another round of mental illness. ) quote> Welcome back. Long illnesses are never much fun to endure. I hope you are feeling better. I wondered what had happened and if you were ok. I've been away a bit too, and I'm not sure I'm quite back yet. Originally posted by: astronelson On a completely different note, did you know there's a description of a clinical trial in the Bible? Daniel 1:8 8But Daniel purposed in his heart that he would not defile himself with the portion of the king’s meat, nor with the wine which he drank: therefore he requested of the prince of the eunuchs that he might not defile himself. 9Now God had brought Daniel into favour and tender love with the prince of the eunuchs. 10And the prince of the eunuchs said unto Daniel, I fear my lord the king, who hath appointed your meat and your drink: for why should he see your faces worse liking than the children which are of your sort? then shall ye make me endanger my head to the king. 11Then said Daniel to Melzar, whom the prince of the eunuchs had set over Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, 12Prove thy servants, I beseech thee, ten days; and let them give us pulse to eat, and water to drink. 13Then let our countenances be looked upon before thee, and the countenance of the children that eat of the portion of the king’s meat: and as thou seest, deal with thy servants. 14So he consented to them in this matter, and proved them ten days. 15And at the end of ten days their countenances appeared fairer and fatter in flesh than all the children which did eat the portion of the king’s meat. 16Thus Melzar took away the portion of their meat, and the wine that they should drink; and gave them pulse.quote> quote> No I didn't know about that particular one, although there are other interesting references in the bible, such as the plague of fiery serpents. Originally posted by: blakesterville OK, about this "thor" thing, everyone knows that lightning is not caused by some mythological "thor" out there. Let's start there... quote> Why not? It's as good a place as any. If you were a Viking in the 11th Century, then you and everyone else would know that lightning was indeed caused by Thor. A Viking, seeing a phenomenon he couldn't explain, was driven to provide an explanation in the only way he knew - there was no known natural way this could happen, so it had to have been caused by an intelligence - a god, using tools familiar to the Viking - a hammer causing sparks. And everyone "knew" this was the only possible and true explanation for lightning and that Thor was therefore real. So let's compare this to today. An unknown phenomenon for which there is yet no known cause demands an explanation. Because everyone "knows" there can be no natural explanation since they don't know of one, there can only be one possible and true cause - an intelligent being (a god), who has characteristics drawn directly from the experiences of the people doing the explaining. The question is, what are the differences between the reasoning of our 11th Century Thor believing Viking explaining lightning, and our 21st Century creationist explaining the Big Bang? How do you know that modern creationist explanation of the Big Bang is not going to end up the same way as the Viking's explanation of lightning? Originally posted by: blakesterville Now, we have to explain how the universe came to be. quote> Whether a god exists or not you would still have to explain that. That a god did it is not in itself an explanation. And would that explanation end up being much the same as one that doesn't refer to a god? But on top of that you would then also have to explain the god as well. Originally posted by: blakesterville My point is that, without a god, these things become impossible to explain. quote> No, not impossible. In fact a lot is known about many of these things already, and we aren't done yet. Probably people once said of these things we now know that they would be impossible to explain. Why, not all that long ago, people thought that complex things like weavils spontaneously sprang into being from wheat grains.

Cyclone Yasi is due to cross the North Queensland coast in 1 hour 21 minutes, and is likely to remain a cyclone as far inland as Mt Isa. Here are some more comparisons of the size of Yasi, by overlaying on other continents: How Cyclone Yasi Compares Around the World. Yasi would cover most of the US, or large parts of either Asia or Europe.

Yes I wondered at the time if they were swimming around the suburbs instead of being in the river. It would have been a feast for them with all the rubbish around. Maybe it just smelt the beef patties and decided they were an easy meal.