Steve Schacher

quote:Mets Call for New World Series By Dorothea Cooke CNS Satire November 15, 2000 New York (CNSNews.com) - The New York Mets announced Wednesday they are petitioning Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig and the US District Court in New York City to get an additional inning added to Game 5 of the World Series, which they lost to the Yankees by a score of 4-2. The game ended on a pop-up by Mets slugger Mike Piazza, giving the game and the championship to their cross-town rivals. Piazza said there was no way he meant to hit the ball to Yankees centerfielder Bernie Williams on the warning track of Shea Stadium. "I meant for that ball to go all the way out of the park and take us to the next game. I misread Mariano Rivera's pitch. I mean let's face it, I'm Mike Piazza and it is my right to hit a home run. That's what I've done all season. I demand another at bat." Mets General Manager Steve Phillips and Manager Bobby Valentine said the outcome of the game could alter their earlier decision to fire hitting coach Tom Robson. "Because of the confusion of the balls being thrown our way, a man has lost his job," said the usually emotional Valentine. Between tearful sobs, Valentine said the Yankees admitted to deliberately confusing Mets batters by mixing up their pitches and making it impossible for his normally hot-hitting team to win. "We are going to keep playing Game 5 until we like the outcome," said Valentine. "We want a new game and new balls." Mets management was joined by members of the Major League Baseball Players Union, who said they supported the Mets, but urged everyone "not to rush to judgment and let this game be played out," for the sake of the fans. "We meant to hit those pitches from the Yankee pitchers," said Phillips. "We were confused by the irregularities of the pitches we received and believe we have been denied our right to hit." Yankees pitcher Andy Pettitte, winner of game 5, said there was "no way" he was going to "telegraph" to the other team when he was throwing his sinking fastball. "I did that last year and it took all the fun out of the season and almost got me traded," Pettitte said while fishing in his home state of Louisiana. One claim specifically noted by Mets attorney Alan Dershowitz was that a small percentage of the Mets batters had intended to swing at Roger "The Rocket" Clemens fastballs, but couldn't keep up with them. However, that should not disqualify them from being allowed to bat continuously, Dershowitz argued. But a high-ranking front office official for the Yankees who requested anonymity accused Dershowitz of "extreme partisanship," in the matter, citing the attorney's support of the Boston Red Sox, arch rivals of the Yankees. "The friend of my enemy is my enemy," said the official. Several hitters said they found themselves confused by closer Marino Rivera's cut fastball as well. Mets hitters said they weren't sure if they were swinging at sliders or curveballs from any of the Yankee pitchers. One Major League Baseball official, who asked not to be identified said, "It was clear that these batters never intended to swing at curve balls, though a much higher percentage were not confused by the pitches." Several sports reporters at the press conference pointed out that the Mets had extensively reviewed film of the Yankees pitchers prior to the World Series and had in fact faced the Yankees in inter-league play earlier in the year. "The fact remains that some of the pitches confused us and denied us of our right to hit," said Valentine. "The World Series is not over yet and the Yankees celebrated prematurely and we understand they are already ordering their championship rings." Major League Baseball has reviewed the telecast of all the World Series games and recounted the balls and strikes called by the umpires of each game. "While some of the strikes called against the Mets were, in fact, balls, there were not enough of them to change the outcome of the World Series," said Selig. Another portion of the Mets legal claim stated that according to the on-base percentage of the team, the Mets had actually won the World Series, regardless of the final scores of the games. "It's clear that we were slightly on-base more often than the Yankees," said a Mets spokesman. The Mets had eight hits compared to seven for the Yankees in Game 5. "The World Series crown is rightly ours," said Valentine, but Yankee Manager Joe Torre dismissed the claim, calling the Mets "sore losers." "Quite frankly I expected more from them. They are a class organization from top to bottom," said Torre. "But this World Series was clearly an engagement of democracy in action. Everyone on the team produced, from utility infielder Luis Sojo to Jose Vizcaino and an injured Paul O'Neill. In certifying this victory for the Yankees, we respect and abide by the will of baseball fans everywhere." [This message has been edited by Steve Schacher (edited 11-15-2000).]

From the Washington Times: quote:Beret policy ambushed by special forces reaction Army documents show service leaders methodically planned how to sell the idea of issuing berets to all soldiers but failed to anticipate the ongoing firestorm of protest from special operations warriors. The Army predicted soldiers would accept the change "in stride." In reality, commandos have barraged the Army and unit leaders with complaints. Opposition to universal berets became so intense that one commander at Fort Bragg, N.C., ordered soldiers to stop using official e-mail addresses to vent their anger and to stop talking to the press. Full story here: http://www.washtimes.com/national/daybook-20001113224752.htm

quote:Al Gore wants the fate of the presidency to be decided by people who can't even figure out a damned ballot!!! Anyone who screws up a simple voting ballot shouldn't be allowed to vote. The funny thing is, they don't have a problem keeping track of 20 Bingo cards at one time! quote:And finally, my outlook on Democrats - They hail the constitution when it befits them, change it when it doesn't. The Bush DUI flap was revealing in how Bush handled it. He went out onto the streets to talk to reporters, he admitted it, and answered direct questions. If it had happened to Gore, he would sent out a spokesperson to make an initial statement while everyone else hunkered down and got their stories straight. The next day, Gore would go out and give a statement, maybe take a question from Wolf Blitzer, and then leave to do the people's work. Now we come to today, and compare how Bush and Gore are behaving. Gore is reverting to legalisms and distractions to try and take the election. Bush is acting calmly and not attacking the electoral process. Gore is saying that he won the popular vote and that Bush has to let the "will of the people" decide. Bush may still take the popular vote when California's 1.2 million absentee votes are counted. If this is how Al Gore behaves in a crisis, then I don't want him in the White House in a crisis.

SC, Can you code up a special Tennessee zone on Earth so I can nuke it from my BC?

Read this article ( http://presidentelect.org/letter.html ) for one person's view on how the Electoral College actually gives minorities stronger representation in national presidential elections than they would have in a popular vote. Here's an excerpt: quote:The Electoral College protects minority interests from a tyrannical majority. For example in a direct election, since African-Americans account for about 13% of the population, they could only account for 13% of the vote. In the Electoral College, African-Americans account for 25% of Alabama's 9 votes, 27% of Georgia's 13 votes, 31% of Louisiana's 9 votes, etc. Farmers, once a very influential constituency, now make up less than 4% of the population. Why would a candidate worry about this small group in a direct election? In the Electoral College system, farmers do make up sizable parts of several states, and thus their combined strength in a smaller pool of voters gives them more power. Because minority groups (be they African-Americans in the south, farmers in the midwest, etc) are usually concentrated in some states and not spread evenly throughout the country, their influence is greater. quote:why don't we just let the Senate and House determine the President?! They do, in the case of an electoral vote tie. [This message has been edited by Steve Schacher (edited 11-09-2000).]

The other thing about the Electoral College is this: The Constitution recognizes two main entities: The Federal Government and the State Governments. This was intended to be a Federal government of the people (through the States, based on the Tenth Amendment). These governments had to mutually co-exist. Individuals were represented as States, and the States were represented in the Federal government. Regarding the Electoral College, think of it as each State government having its own Presidential election. It is the States that decide the President, not the individual people. The people vote within their states, and then the State votes for the President. Congress is also aligned by State. Each state gets two Senators and several representatives. If we want to eliminate the Electoral College as a State device, why don't we also eliminate State representation in Congress and elect everybody by national election?

quote:how democratic is that? Where one guy got the majority of votes but yet may not win....why have a vote if the majority doesnt win. First, everybody has to remember that we are not a democracy -- we are a Republic. That means we elect Representatives who do the actual voting, whether in Congress or the Electoral College. In the Electoral College it is the states that vote, not the people. A bit of history: The Constitution recognizes two main entities: the Federal government, and the States (made up of the people). James Madison said: quote:"The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation and foreign commerce. ... The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives and liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement and prosperity of the State." There was no popular vote until about 1820 or so. Back then, distances between towns was great, and news traveled slowly. The states would vote on Electors who would travel to the state capitals, where they would deliberate on the candidates. The intent was that the most knowledgable or well-informed would make up a committee which would evaluate all the candidates and make a recommendation to the state as to who should be president. Then, the state votes would be tallied (weighted by population) and the winner would become President. Sometime around 1820, the popular vote started to be recorded, and this debate has been ongoing ever since.

I voted first thing this morning. Get out and VOTE!!!

It's boxed up in my garage, so it might not fit your category, but I have an Apple //e with 128K of ram, a 5.25 Duodisk, a Zipchip that runs at twice the speed of the regular 6502 (I couldn't afford the 4x chip), and a color monitor! If I were to hook it up again, I'm sure it would work just fine.

They'll want you. It'll just cost you more.

quote:Grrrrrr..... Down, boy, down...

Unless he meant planetary ops to be traveling between planets, and surface ops to be operating on surfaces. Anybody else care to opine on what the SC means when he says things?

I just got sucked into a planetary gravity well. The 'O' key worked for me, but I had to F8 to an external view before I could see what my altitude was.

j.w.pepper, Unfortunately, the first ACM is a bad measure of how the game normally plays. Just for kicks, try starting a new free-flight game. After you launch, fly around a little and tell us what your frame rate is. I am running a Gateway Pentium 3 550 mhz 128 mb ram system, and I'm getting average frame rates in the 45-55 range when there is little going on. In a fresh game, I've seen it up in the 60-70 range (I'm now in Gammulan territory, so I probably have a lot of regions active). During battles, the frame rate drops to 20+, and when lots of missiles are floating around it drops in spikes to 6-7. I don't know much about Windows ME, but I haven't heard good things about it yet. That may be the reason for your poor performance. I just found a program called MemTurbo that I'm trying out. It's supposed to defrag memory and boost performance. I don't know if it really does anything noticable yet, but on your low-memory (64mb) system you might want to try it out. It's at www.memturbo.com. They have a free trial version that you can test. Maybe you are memory-constrained.

Glad to hear that you got some improvement. What kind of frame rates are you seeing now? Press CTRL-V and monitor how the frame rate varies with activity.

Following are excerpts from a Friday sermon in the Zayed bin Sultan Aal Nahyan mosque in Gaza, broadcast live on the official Palestinian Authority television. The speaker is Dr. Ahmad Abu Halabiya, Member of the PA appointed "Fatwa Council" and former acting Rector of the Islamic University in Gaza quote:"O brother believers, the criminals, the terrorists - are the Jews, who have butchered our children, orphaned them, widowed our women and desecrated our holy places and sacred sites. They are the terrorists. They are the ones who must be butchered and killed, as Allah the Almighty said: 'Fight them: Allah will torture them at your hands, and will humiliate them and will help you to overcome them, and will relieve the minds of the believers..." quote:"This is the truth, O Brothers in belief. From here, Allah the almighty has called upon us not to ally with the Jews or the Christians, not to like them, not to become their partners, not to support them, and not to sign agreements with them. And he who does that, is one of them, as Allah said: 'O you who believe, do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies, for they are allies of one another. Who from among you takes them as allies will indeed be one of them...'" quote:Have no mercy on the Jews, no matter where they are, in any country. Fight them, wherever you are. Wherever you meet them, kill them. Wherever you are, kill those Jews and those Americans who are like them - and those who stand by them Follow this link for an overview of the sermon and links to more detailed information: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/bluesky_btl/2...isten_to_.shtml

j.w.pepper, There are other things you can do to try to boost the game's performance. How many of these things have you tried yet: 1. Tweak various settings on your computer for better performance? Maybe better caching of your virtual storage, BIOS settings, etc. Did you check MyComputer->Properties->Performance to verify that your machine is configured for maximum video and disk acceleration? 2. Are you closing down all desktop programs before running the game? Close down everything in your system tray, then press CRTL-ALT-DEL to bring up the task manager and try ending anything that is not absolutely necessary. Then you'll be running BC3k without anything else competing for the CPU. 3. What does your config.sys look like? I hate to say this, but I had problems on my machine when I followed the instructions in the FAQ. I ended up deleting the config.sys entirely and let my system use the Windows defaults. For me, the game never ran better after doing that. 4. How much memory is DOS getting? Start an MS-DOS session and enter the MEM command. What does it say? These are just my thoughts. I'm no expert, by the way...

Here are some that I use in my job: "When your only tool is a hammer, all your problems look like nails." "We never have the time to do it right, but we always have the time to do it over." Here's one I read from an Sci-fi book a long time ago: "Coincidence means that you weren't paying attention to the other half of what was going on." I'm sure I'll think of more. I'll update my post if I do.

Talk radio is saying that this is the latest attempt by the powerful left to demoralize the last remaining elite forces in the military by taking away their symbol of pride and accomplishment. First, the officers were not re-upping or resigning, and now this. [This message has been edited by Steve Schacher (edited 10-18-2000).]

I'll put this here, since it's military-related: Army's New Uniform Code Intended to Boost Morale All U.S. Army soldiers ÔÇô including the clerks and the cooks and not just Special Forces commandos and Rangers ÔÇô will get to wear berets under a morale-building moved to be announced by the Army command today. In a speech set to be delivered this afternoon, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, will tell an Army convention that this "symbol of excellence" once reserved for members of elite units will be made available to all soldiers as "a signal to the young that we are moving, we are changing." Here's the full story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artic...-2000Oct17.html

If you guys want a gun photo to obsess on, take a look at this! http://www.newsmax.com/showinsidecover.sht...00/10/16/195448 p.s. Mike, you killed my best joke!!!

quote:As far as I know, The navy still uses AFS/AFO Ships. That's one of the most important links in the chain of the US Navy's ability to perform it's designated mission. Retired Colonel David Hackworth has been reporting the following (from a Newsmax transcript of Fox News Channel's Hannity and Colms): Hackworth said the Navy's inability to refuel at sea was a direct result of declining military readiness during the Clinton-Gore years. "We go to the point of readiness. Admiral Clark, the chief of naval operations, said, 'Look, we had to go there because we couldn't refuel at sea cause we don't have any tankers, any oilers.' So as a result of that, why don't we have any oilers? Why didn't the chiefs of the United States Navy sound off?" "We've got this argument going on between Bush and Gore," said Hackworth. "Bush says readiness sucks. Gore says everything's peachy keen. All of the brass are sitting there with their mouths shut. But now we don't have enough oilers to refuel that ship and we lose those people because our readiness is not squared away?" Hackworth confirmed that 22 of the Navy's refueling tankers have been placed in mothballs since 1993, and that the overall fleet had declined from 435 ships to 311 during the Clinton-Gore years. "That ship that was taken out of the Middle East was part of a battle fleet," Hackworth responded. "They stripped it from the battle fleet, they said go all by yourself, stop at Aden, get some refueling, and then go up in the Gulf. And that shows you how stretched our United States Navy and our total military really is." "It's a national disgrace and somebody should hang," said Hackworth, who then looked at Andrews and added, "and it should start right with you congressfolks." Hackworth's latest column: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/bluesky_hackw...o_more_co.shtml [This message has been edited by Steve Schacher (edited 10-17-2000).]

Some random thoughts: ----------------------- A twelve-year-old Palestinian boy is shot dead on international TV by Israeli soldiers during a rock-throwing riot. Question: what was he doing there in the first place? Was this a spontaneous riot and he and his father were caught in the middle of it? Or was it a strategy to push the young ones to the front lines for photo-op sympathy? ------------------------ Israeli soldiers retaliated to the beating death of the two soldiers at Palestinian police headquarters by 1) announcing a missile attack three hours before the intended time, 2) announcing the exact location of the attack, and 3) at the designated time they launched the attack. No one was hurt, although bunkers were demolished. Why did the Israelis make sure that nobody would be harmed by giving a three-hour warning? -------------------------- An old internet-joke from several years ago goes like this: First Man: Do you believe in the First Amendment right to free speech? Second Man: Why yes, I do. First Man: Do you own a gun? Second Man: No, I don't. First Man: Then, shut up!!!

quote:The real fix is even simpler: If the ships are in close proximity to each other, issue the RTB to each ship individually with a one second break between orders. Guaranteed no crashes then. True, but then it defeats the purpose of the BC global order for all interceptors/shuttles/ships to RTB. Why have that command if it causes all ships to jump to the same point and then explode? Of course, when your ships are all over the region, then they won't jump to the same point on RTB. But when they are near each other (like if IC2 is defending IC1), then they might.

quote:What's that saying? "Doc, it hurts when I do this!" Doc: "Then don't do that!" Hey, I used that line further up the thread!! Seriously, it would be nice to randomize the jump points slightly within a radius of +-1. I've seen other anomolies along these lines, like two generated explorers following each other too closely (probably with the same starting and ending points), bumping into each other and slingshotting across the region only to make it back to the original starting point, bump, slingshot, return, ad infinitum... I've also targeted a ship for attack, and when it gets too damaged it heads for a jump gate. My BC follows in pursuit only to jump to the exact spot as the fleeing ship, blowing out half it's hull in the collision. A slight random factor in the jump destinations might make this go away. [This message has been edited by Steve Schacher (edited 10-16-2000).]