That was happening on my daughter's old PC a couple of years ago.  It's some kind of malware that masquerades as internet explorer and sucks up all your CPU capacity. If you cancel the process on the faux IE (in Task Manager), you'll see a small process with a name that's a random string of 4 or 5 letters start running for just a few seconds, then the faux IE starts up again.  If you cancel it several times in a row, it will go dormant for a while, but that's only a short term fix.  It starts up again later. The usual antispyware and antivirus programs don't fix it. Or at least they didn't back then. It's been a while since I looked for information. I never did succeed in getting rid of it -- the PC was old and she wanted a laptop, so I finally gave up.

You're trying for a canned paragraph to use as an educational aid elsenet, right?  My $0.02 worth:

The first sentence is confusing. People won't understand what a "stargazing cycle" is.  I'd start out with the information about which telescope. (Also, I assume the information about how any sim, male or female, teen through elder, can get abducted, but only adult males get pregnant, will have already been covered.) Then I'd say something like:

<i>"There's a 1 in 2000 (0.05%) chance of getting abducted every 5-6 minutes while stargazing. If your sim stargazes continuously all night long, that adds up to about a 1 in 20 (5%) chance for the night."</i>*

Then your last two sentences about lifetime odds are fine.

* Yanno, on second thought, I'm not sure it's a good idea to go into the 5-6 minute thing at all, even without calling it a "stargazing cycle".  It might be more productive to say there's a 1 in 200 chance for one hour and a 1 in 20 chance for all night. It kinda depends on who your audience is. For typical BBSers, I'd keep things very, very short and very, very simple.  For people who comprehend sentences more than four words long, you can flesh it out a little more.

If you have already flipped a coin twice, and it came up tails both times, and you ask what the probability is that you will get heads on the next flip, the answer is 50%. It doesn't matter if you just got 10 tails in a row, or 100, or none.  The odds for any single flip are always the same: 50%. You are right about that.

But if you are going to flip a coin multiple times, and ask what the probability is that you will get heads at least once during those multiple flips, you are asking a completely different question.
   - If you flip a coin once, there are two possible outcomes: H or T. One of those includes one or more heads, so the probability with one flip is 1 in 2, or 50%
   - If you flip a coin twice, there are four possible outcomes: HH, HT, TH, or TT. Three of those include one or more heads, so the probability with two flips is 3 in 4, or 75%
   - If you flip a coin three times, there are eight possible outcomes: HHH, HHT, HTH, HTT, THH, THT, TTH, TTT. Seven of those include one or more heads, so the probability with three flips is 7 in 8, or 87.5%.
   - If you flip a coin four times, there are 16 possible outcomes: HHHH, HHHT, HHTH, ... (you try listing the rest). 15 of those  include one or more heads, so the probability with four flips is 15 in 16, or 93.5%.

See how it keeps getting larger? This is why the overall chances for success are greater with multiple tries, even though the chances for any single try never change.


Yes. But not as much better off as you think.

I'd been wondering how exact the 5.5 minutes was.

I just enjoy playing with the numbers. Looking at the range of possibilities, I get:

Assuming 4:00AM to be the latest possible abduction time
    5 min/cycle --> 5.3% per night; 78% per adult lifetime
    6 min/cycle --> 4.4% per night; 72% per adult lifetime
 
Assuming 6:00AM to be the latest possible abduction time
    5 min/cycle --> 6.4% per night; 84% per adult lifetime
    6 min/cycle --> 5.4% per night; 79% per adult lifetime

Meh. So the answer is somewhere between 4.4% and 6.4% for one full night, and between 72% and 84% for 28 nights. I can't quarrel with "about 1 in 20"  and "about 3 in 4". That's close enough, and easier for most simmers to understand.

Aha! That's why I'm getting slightly different results than you for the 28 day odds. (The difference isn't enough to matter for gameplay purposes. It's only relevant to math geeks.  )

There are either 2744 or 2772 cycles in 28 days.  Not 2749. This is why:

(9 stargazing hours / night * 60 minutes/hour ) / (5.5 minutes/stargazing cycle) = 98.18 cycles/night
0.18 cycle * 5.5 minutes/cycle = 1 minute

The end of the 98th cycle occurs at 3:59AM. The following night, the stargazing starts over at the beginning of a new cycle, so the extra 1 minute is lost.  OTOH, if the abduction check is made at the very beginning of the cycle, or if the complete cycle is executed once it's begun, it's possible for that 1 minute to effectively become a 99th cycle. But there are an integral number of cycles per night; either 98 or 99. No fractional cycles are carried forward to the next night, which your calculation is doing.

Try putting "" "" (two pairs of double quotes) at the end of each line.

Could you elaborate on what exactly to delete?  After I've identified which ones, that is. Do you mean the XOBJ line in the Resource List window?

The way I learned it was that if you have more than one B, they are Bs. But if you have more than one A, they are A's, due to the potential confusion of As.  What I'm not sure of is if you have more than one A and more than one B.  My sense of order is offended by A's and Bs, and wants to make it A's and B's.

Hmmph.  I should have known someone would if I just waited.

(Went and registered at TSR to get them, grumble, grumble.)

Yeah, I've got the closet nooks already built into a number of houses--with dressers in them.

::grumble:: 

I've sucessfully avoided TSR for 2 1/2 years.  But I want closet rods!

::mutter::

I guess I'll have to do it.

That's gonna make for some interesting hardware specs! 

There's http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=112110 and http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=112249 -- but I tried those a long, long time ago, and I think they're borked.  (Don't remember the details, but I had some kind of trouble with them and ended up deleting them.)

It's something I would very much like to have a working version of.

I've seen several reports of that headlight problem on the BBS. At least one claimed that all headlights of all cars were doing that until he pulled the Mustang back out of his downloads. 

::Shrug:: The usual sheeple credibility rules apply.

I'm a remodelling whore.  All my houses start out as econoboxes, then get expanded as needed. It depends on what direction gameplay has taken my family in, as to what gets added on.

I used it on my AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ desktop and got noticeable improvement in everything except Sims. In my game, the change has been slight at best.

However, I also have crappy onboard graphics, which has been on my list of things to take care of, just not at a very high priority.  This has moved getting a decent graphics card up the priority list. I expect that's the limiting factor now.

That one FAQ thread you've already been linked to is the only FAQ.  There are a lot of good infomational threads around, but not in any easily findable location. That's part of what that FAQ is--a collection of links to all the good stuff.

Oh, I think I'll manage to remember that little clicky thingy now...now that I've publicly exposed my suckosity.

The odds of twins is 10%, right?  If I remember my probabilities correctly, that makes the odds of three in a row 1 in 1000. 

Rare, but not outrageous.  If you consider only those who post and/or lurk here regularly, I expect we collectively account for well over a thousand sim births.  Even counting only the natural births.

OK, I am even lamer than I thought.  I had already looked there.  I was hoping it would be that trivial.  I don't suppose I can get away with claiming the button wasn't there earlier, can I?

Feel free to point and laugh.  I know I did something stupid; I just can't figure out exactly what it was.

I was in the neighborhood screen for Pleasantview, trying to get familyfunds to work when there are several families with the same name.  Never did figure that out either, but that's not the question at hand.

What I think I did was fatfinger ctrl-shift-C so the cheat box never opened, but I didn't notice and went on typing anyway.  It's possible that I was still holding down ctrl while typing some portion of that. 

Apparently some key combination in there switched the neighborhood view to nighttime.  It's kind of cool looking--the cars on the streets have their headlights on. But it makes it difficult to see things, and it would be nice to switch it back to normal.  Does anyone know how?

Yes, but...  If you read on down, it shows how to do a manual uninstall on an EP when the uninstaller doesn't work. 

Aha!  I knew I had seen instructions on how to change the location of My Documents, and I finally remembered where. http://www.modthesims2.com/article.php?t=53400

What I wish for, and haven't seen, is a way to take the EA Games folder out of My Documents, so My Documents would only be used for stuff like, yanno, my documents.  It would make it a whole lot easier when I want to backup everything except Sims.

I voted "No Change", but my real opinion wasn't one of the choices.  I would like to see an increase in truly random deaths, and a corresponding decrease in the predictable ones. 

I don't think I've had any unintentional deaths since I was first learning the game. An occasional random death would add some risk.  On the other hand, the WTF deaths really annoy me.  My (pre-Seasons) sim can spend hours engaged in a variety of outdoor activities with no problem, but if he looks at the sky a falling satellite is gonna crush him?  That doesn't make any sense.

Interesting suggestion.  I checked mine.  There's only one command that isn't a "prop" or an alias.  It's faceblendlimits off, and I can't really say I've seen much evidence that it's working. Kinda forgot it was there, actually.