Anime (V33.0709) This course introduces students to the rich world of Japanese animation or anime, its form and style, history, popular genres and themes, major authors, and fan culture. We will explore the popularity of anime in relation to the cultural conditions of contemporary Japan and to the context of cultural globalization which is radically transforming the way audio-visual images are produced and consumed.
Exam questions:
1) What happens in 'End of Evangelion' after Eva-01 is crucified? Why?
2) Explain the neurological causes of epileptic seizures as induced by flashing lights.
3) Discuss the role of transvestism and transsexuality in anime and manga.
4) Explain briefly how you would go about constructing a giant killer robot today, assuming a reasonable level of military funding.
5) Tokyo has a typical life expectancy of half an hour after anything unusual happens; then it usually blows up. Explain how you would improve civic security to prevent major loss of life in future battles.
I was happy to read the news of governor George Ryan changing 156 death sentences into imprisonment in Illinois. Be not quick in dealing out death to those who deserve it if you can't give life back to the dead who deserve it.
The pity of George Ryan may rule the fate of many - yours not least.
You guys still have that whole Queen thing going, eh? I thought you dumped her a while back.
I gather the Australians _nearly_ dumped her a couple of years ago, but decided not to because they weren't entirely sure what to replace her with. However, the heir to the throne talks to trees without the excuse of insanity, so chances are there'll be a whole lot of new republics founded the moment Liz Windsor dies...
So downloading mp3s isn't theft either then?? Cause all i'm doing is depriving them of money I MIGHT have given them, if I didn't know about mp3s that is.
p?No, it's not theft. It's copyright infringement, which is an entirely different crime.
I don't think so, if you go by that logic then unlocking your cpu so you can overclock it is also stealing. If you can get more out of your own property by changing the way it works, how is this even morally wrong?
I can get more out of my TV decoder box by changing the way it works, so that it decodes everything whether I pay it to or not. Is this even morally wrong?
I'm denying some pay-TV company the earnings it otherwise might have had, just as by hacking a 9500 into a 9700 I'm denying ATi the earnings _they_ otherwise might have had. In neither case am I stealing, but people who would never say that upgrading a video card is wrong would usually say that pirating pay-TV is wrong. Where's the moral difference?
This looks like stealing. Does it look like stealing to anyone else?
No, it's not stealing. For it to be stealing, you would have to take something without the owner's consent. As it is, you're simply depriving them of money you _otherwise_ might have given them, had you not known how to turn a 9500 into a 9700. That's not theft at all.
Maybe ATi could argue that they're entitled to the money - that these people are enjoying the benefits of owning a 9700 card without having paid for one. But they haven't _stolen_ it, they've simply obtained the benefits by unconventional means. AFAIK there's no law against upgrading and overclocking; maybe there was something in the EULA for the drivers, but apart from that there's no problem.
Talk about large-scale engineering.
Bolder's Ring is large scale engineering. The Xeelee have to be the ultimate civilisation - they are frequently described as 'owners of the universe' and their power justifies that claim - at least as far as baryonic matter is concerned. Stephen Baxter's SF tends towards the cosmological.
No, that's Deep Space 9. Towards the end of the 90s, NASA began a series of missions aimed at developing new space technology rather than directing them at any particular scientific objective.
Deep Space 1 was intended to test out the new ion drive, and also experiment with a variety of new navigation systems. All were successful to way beyond the expected limits, and ion drives are now being proposed for inclusion on many future missions. Deep Space 2 was a pair of microprobes that would be dropped from the Mars Polar Lander, with the intention of penetrating the surface and exploring the Martian permafrost; both were lost along with the lander itself, owing to negligence on the part of the people responsible for testing the descent engine. Deep Space 3 and 4 were cancelled.
Right, well, I'm setting up in competition. MY system of fixing a child's sex is more reliable, you see. In fact, it's so reliable that I'll guarantee your money back if it fails plus 50% extra in compensation!
The nuclear reactor powers an electric motor like the one on Deep Space 1. It ionises xenon and then accelerates it out the back using electromagnets. The electrical output of the nuclear reactor can thus drive the ship, and it means that a lot less of the Mars ship's mass needs to be fuel. So you can either build a lighter, faster ship, or you can build a ship that carries more people and equipment.
they are right with linux... as linux is ther kernel and underlying OS that runs your/bin/bash program to give you a human interface..
So that's the OS, then? I was told that the userland tools and the kernel together comprised an OS, and therefore we should call the operating system GNU / Linux rather than just Linux. Richard Stallman wouldn't have lied to me, would he?
... the home computers of the early '80s didn't really have OSes, they had programming languages. You'd boot a BBC Micro and it would fire up into BBC Basic - with a few * commands for file system manipulation. Or you'd boot a Spectrum and you'd get the same: the name of the system and a prompt to begin typing your program.
No matter what you put in, you get a file back instantly, some of which are some kind of pornbots or something, and i have had a few where they are a virus, i believe. It seems to change the names of its files on the fly. Its kinda neat, in a way, i wonder who it is.
The dummy results always come from the same few machins; they say they're running Gnucleus, and I believe it - access to the source code helps if you mean to screw with Gnutella in this way.
The.exe files in the !!_YEEHAA_!! zip files probably hijack Internet Explorer - going by what comes out of running 'strings' on them, they also add a whole lot of porno bookmarks - venusseek.com in particular. This is just a guess as I'm not planning to actually run this thing on Windows:-) The images and mpgs just show an ad for some porno site.
The.vbs viruses... they seem to have come from Columbia. A look at the source of one of them reveals
rem "Plan Colombia" virus v1.0
rem by Sand Ja9e Gr0w (www.colombia.com)
rem Dedicated to all the people that want to be hackers or crackers, in Colombia
rem This program is also a protest act against the violence and corruption that Colombia lives...
rem I always wanting that all this finishes, I have said...
rem Santa fe de Bogotá 2000/09
rem I dedicate to all you the song "GoodBye" of Andreas Bochelli
It relies on user stupidity and Windows' habit of hiding file extensions. Instead of 'virus.mp3.vbs' the user sees 'virus.mp3' and thinking all is well doubleclicks to play it. VB script promptly scans the whole hard disk and creates a copy of itself under the name of every MP3 it finds. That's why you tend to get double results - maybe Quadrophenia.mp3 and Quadrophenia.mp3.vbs from the same user. It also seems to redirect IE's start page to a FortuneCity site, and has a bunch of other stuff going on related to script kiddie life and Colombian politics.
Compared to this sort of malevolence, a Coral song that craps out after five seconds and continues in silence is positively benign.
What I want to know, though, is why I keep getting back 'Free Bird' by Lynyrd Skynyrd no matter what I search for?
Seems reasonable. The US government is worried about spies from 'rogue states' whose available technology is in inverse proportion to their available sand. Everyone else is worried about spies from the US. Naturally, therefore, they're a bit more thorough about deletion...
Excellent! In MOO2 I was always infuriated by the choice of weapons on my starbases. Antaran death rays are nice, but impractically large; I'd rather have my starbase capable of firing several smaller shots. Later in the game, if you go into extreme physics territory, your conventional weapons have been miniaturised to such an extent that your Star Fortresses are totally outclassed by your light cruisers.
You can have multiple starbases over a planet and they actually orbit the planet during combat. Beta testers have described the weapon capacity of larges starbases as "staggering". Planets and starbases have enormous range on their weapons - *if* they can see you.
Proposed plan of attack: take a Doom Star hull and fill it with rocks. Launch it directly towards the starbase at high speed, and have the fleet follow close behind it. By the time the planetary defences have melted the thing down, the fleet's there on the spot and has negated the starbase's superior range. In general, can my lightly armoured killer ships hide behind tougher ones?
One thing I'd like to see (and I imagine it's a bit late to hope for it to be in MOO3:-) is for there to be a benefit from standardisation. As it is, I decide I want a battleship, and I specify a variety of parts to go into it, then I order it to be built. So the parts are manufactured, a hull is built, the ship fitted and configured as a one-off affair. What I want is a discount if I order ten at a time.
Or perhaps more realistically, I might run an imperial arsenal. Things like stellar converters and black hole generators I'll only ever need a few of, but I get through thousands of point-defence phasors and pulson missiles. I should order them in bulk, and allocate them to shipbuilding projects as required. Once stockpiled weapons become obsolete, a new option arises for the technologically leading player - become an armsdealer! I notice the Sakkra and Klackons are having a major and very bloody war - would either of you two be interested in buying a few dozen ex-Psilon graviton cannons?
every time I tried to board an antaran ship it blows up...
They carry a Quantum Detonator. It has two effects - first, it gives a 75% (I think, might be 50%) chance of a warp core explosion if the ship is captured, and second, it triples the damage done by that explosion.
The odds are very much against you if you launch assaults on Antaran ships - they have excellent marines on board, and even if you do win chances are the ship will blow anyway - but it can be done.
Then destroy the AI with Champion Halfling Slingers or Champion Javelineers. Mwahaha:-)
Don't take _all_ Life. Mostly Life, but have one Chaos and one Nature book. Then you can have what is probably the most powerful conventional unit possible.
Halfling Slingers, Adamantium weapons, Champion level, with the spells Flame Blade and Giant Strength cast on them, and accompanied by Torin and an Archangel (for the leadership and bless effects) - I make that 18 attack strength, multiplied by eight in the stack equals 144 damage. Ouch.
stellar converters on cruisers? holy crap how high did you need on the advanced research to get to that?
Lots. Lots and lots and lots of advanced physics, I think I'd got to something like 30 levels or so. Why bother? I decided I wanted to end the game with _all_ the technology, and I needed a black hole generator from an Antaran ship to do that. So I'd sit about waiting for Antaran raiders to come through with a battleship or better - the smaller ships don't carry black hole generators - and then have my fleet of assault carriers (Titans with Class X hard shields, troop pods and lots of assault shuttles) meet them and start a boarding action. Antarans don't come around that often, though, so I had a lot of time doing research.
It's cute to see the message 'Send 1 ship to attack Antares?' It's even more fun when it's only a cruiser (I couldn't do it with a destroyer without using the timewarp / cloak cheat - that would allow me to do it with a frigate.) I didn't use the stellar converter for that, though - miniaturised Maulers were more space-effective.
The 1.31 patch with ship initiative turned on
negated some of that though.. had to start
re-thinking strategy due to that!
Awww. Did they break the cloaking cheat, too? (For those who don't know, Orion 2 had a device called the Phasing Cloak, which was totally impenetrable - a phasecloaked ship couldn't be seen, let alone shot at, but had to decloak to fire and had to go a turn without firing to recloak. The Timewarp Facilitator gives the ship two turns in a row before the enemy gets a shot. This gave people a wonderful loophole...)
I never played the second one much, but I remember in the first one if you were whipping up on a race and had them down to 1 or 2 planets early in the game, they'd suddenly whip out a stack of 32,000 ships and attack you. There was no way they had the resources to legitimately build that many ships and they'd wipe out planets that you had worked diligently to build up. Very frustrating.
Of course the AI will cheat - they always do. If an AI doesn't cheat it hasn't a hope against a competent human. It took decades of programming work to develop chess programs that could take on good human players on even term; Civs and Moos are far more complex games than chess, and their developers haven't had anything like as long to develop the AI. As long as the AI doesn't cheat and get caught, then we're OK. It should really be spelled out in the manual: 'Easy: The AI pays extra for all its ships, its population grows more slowly, and it has trouble keeping its people happy. Normal: The AI plays on even terms. Hard: The AI gets discount ships, faster population growth, and less unrest. Impossible: As Hard, but more so. Also, AIs will be naturally more friendly with each other than with you.'
I think MOO2's AI cheated in the opening game, then stopped. AIs always used to build their first few colony ships and cruisers more quickly than I could. Later on, they came out with some very large fleets, but this seemed to be a policy of going for quantity over quality, and I didn't catch them cheating in their production.
As a matter of fact, I _liked_ seeing someone cruising about with a fleet of 120 obsolete battleships. Cheap to build, sure, but the upkeep on those things must be crippling. Here comes my small but perfectly formed Psilon cruiser to help cut their government spending... *gloat* They definitely have to pay upkeep on their fleets - I tested this once. I had an enemy on his knees, in the last free star system in the galaxy. I ordered the fleet to guard the neighbouring systems, and gave the enemy 10% tribute. This is an enormous sum - most of my great war factories are idle, churning out Trade Goods. AI promptly invests this money in producing all the ships it can, and once it considers its bases adequately defended it starts sending out fleets to attack me. I then cancel the 10% tribute, and watch the economic crisis begin;-)
I'm pretty sure the AIs don't cheat when against the wall; usually when they're in that state you have full sensor coverage of their territory, and are watching everything that happens. If a dozen warships appear out of thin air the player will notice something awry.
There is one thing the MOO2 AIs do that _really_ annoyed me, but it isn't cheating. The Galaxy's split between me, another superpower that I'm reluctant to fight, and several small empires. I'm storming into one of the little guys in a blatant landgrab, and they realise they're doomed. They immediately surrender - to the other superpower. Aargh!
The stellar converters were awesome. On very stressful days, I'd sometimes go around trying to destroy every planet in the galaxy by not quite killing off an enemy, letting him settle a new world, then vaporizing it. A guilty pleasure. I suppose I'm going to be up in front of a war crimes tribunal some day
MoO2 seemed a little unclear on what exactly constituted a war crime. Dropping bioweapons from orbit - war crime. Blasting every settlement on the face of the planet with disruptor cannon from space - not a war crime. Saturating the place with antimatter bombs - not a war crime. Sending down troops to exterminate the population in person - not a war crime, but carries a diplomatic penalty. Demolishing the entire planet - not a war crime.
That's how I played Stars! Anyone remember that one? Anyone interested in cowriting a Linux or Java clone?
Stars! works fine in regular WINE. A Linux clone would be nice, but it would be difficult to make it interoperate with Windows Stars! hosts in multiplayer - there are copy-protection lockouts.
As far as I'm concerned, turtling in Stars! is just a non-starter. The early game is a landgrab and nothing but. If you leave it to late in the game to take on an AI, the sheer scale of the game defeats you. You can knock out his bigger planets and annihilate his main battle fleet, but colony ships are just so damn cheap... AIs always seem to have patrol ships, freighters and colony ships in random thermal motion throughout their territories, which makes it a nightmare to actually exterminate anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
Exam questions:
1) What happens in 'End of Evangelion' after Eva-01 is crucified? Why?
2) Explain the neurological causes of epileptic seizures as induced by flashing lights.
3) Discuss the role of transvestism and transsexuality in anime and manga.
4) Explain briefly how you would go about constructing a giant killer robot today, assuming a reasonable level of military funding.
5) Tokyo has a typical life expectancy of half an hour after anything unusual happens; then it usually blows up. Explain how you would improve civic security to prevent major loss of life in future battles.
The pity of George Ryan may rule the fate of many - yours not least.
I gather the Australians _nearly_ dumped her a couple of years ago, but decided not to because they weren't entirely sure what to replace her with. However, the heir to the throne talks to trees without the excuse of insanity, so chances are there'll be a whole lot of new republics founded the moment Liz Windsor dies...
So downloading mp3s isn't theft either then?? Cause all i'm doing is depriving them of money I MIGHT have given them, if I didn't know about mp3s that is. p?No, it's not theft. It's copyright infringement, which is an entirely different crime.
I can get more out of my TV decoder box by changing the way it works, so that it decodes everything whether I pay it to or not. Is this even morally wrong?
I'm denying some pay-TV company the earnings it otherwise might have had, just as by hacking a 9500 into a 9700 I'm denying ATi the earnings _they_ otherwise might have had. In neither case am I stealing, but people who would never say that upgrading a video card is wrong would usually say that pirating pay-TV is wrong. Where's the moral difference?
No, it's not stealing. For it to be stealing, you would have to take something without the owner's consent. As it is, you're simply depriving them of money you _otherwise_ might have given them, had you not known how to turn a 9500 into a 9700. That's not theft at all.
Maybe ATi could argue that they're entitled to the money - that these people are enjoying the benefits of owning a 9700 card without having paid for one. But they haven't _stolen_ it, they've simply obtained the benefits by unconventional means. AFAIK there's no law against upgrading and overclocking; maybe there was something in the EULA for the drivers, but apart from that there's no problem.
Talk about large-scale engineering. Bolder's Ring is large scale engineering. The Xeelee have to be the ultimate civilisation - they are frequently described as 'owners of the universe' and their power justifies that claim - at least as far as baryonic matter is concerned. Stephen Baxter's SF tends towards the cosmological.
No, that's Deep Space 9. Towards the end of the 90s, NASA began a series of missions aimed at developing new space technology rather than directing them at any particular scientific objective.
Deep Space 1 was intended to test out the new ion drive, and also experiment with a variety of new navigation systems. All were successful to way beyond the expected limits, and ion drives are now being proposed for inclusion on many future missions. Deep Space 2 was a pair of microprobes that would be dropped from the Mars Polar Lander, with the intention of penetrating the surface and exploring the Martian permafrost; both were lost along with the lander itself, owing to negligence on the part of the people responsible for testing the descent engine. Deep Space 3 and 4 were cancelled.
Right, well, I'm setting up in competition. MY system of fixing a child's sex is more reliable, you see. In fact, it's so reliable that I'll guarantee your money back if it fails plus 50% extra in compensation!
The nuclear reactor powers an electric motor like the one on Deep Space 1. It ionises xenon and then accelerates it out the back using electromagnets. The electrical output of the nuclear reactor can thus drive the ship, and it means that a lot less of the Mars ship's mass needs to be fuel. So you can either build a lighter, faster ship, or you can build a ship that carries more people and equipment.
So that's the OS, then? I was told that the userland tools and the kernel together comprised an OS, and therefore we should call the operating system GNU / Linux rather than just Linux. Richard Stallman wouldn't have lied to me, would he?
Columbia is also a groupie and a space shuttle.
... the home computers of the early '80s didn't really have OSes, they had programming languages. You'd boot a BBC Micro and it would fire up into BBC Basic - with a few * commands for file system manipulation. Or you'd boot a Spectrum and you'd get the same: the name of the system and a prompt to begin typing your program.
The dummy results always come from the same few machins; they say they're running Gnucleus, and I believe it - access to the source code helps if you mean to screw with Gnutella in this way.
The .exe files in the !!_YEEHAA_!! zip files probably hijack Internet Explorer - going by what comes out of running 'strings' on them, they also add a whole lot of porno bookmarks - venusseek.com in particular. This is just a guess as I'm not planning to actually run this thing on Windows :-) The images and mpgs just show an ad for some porno site.
The .vbs viruses... they seem to have come from Columbia. A look at the source of one of them reveals
rem "Plan Colombia" virus v1.0
rem by Sand Ja9e Gr0w (www.colombia.com)
rem Dedicated to all the people that want to be hackers or crackers, in Colombia
rem This program is also a protest act against the violence and corruption that Colombia lives...
rem I always wanting that all this finishes, I have said...
rem Santa fe de Bogotá 2000/09
rem I dedicate to all you the song "GoodBye" of Andreas Bochelli
It relies on user stupidity and Windows' habit of hiding file extensions. Instead of 'virus.mp3.vbs' the user sees 'virus.mp3' and thinking all is well doubleclicks to play it. VB script promptly scans the whole hard disk and creates a copy of itself under the name of every MP3 it finds. That's why you tend to get double results - maybe Quadrophenia.mp3 and Quadrophenia.mp3.vbs from the same user. It also seems to redirect IE's start page to a FortuneCity site, and has a bunch of other stuff going on related to script kiddie life and Colombian politics.
Compared to this sort of malevolence, a Coral song that craps out after five seconds and continues in silence is positively benign.
What I want to know, though, is why I keep getting back 'Free Bird' by Lynyrd Skynyrd no matter what I search for?
Seems reasonable. The US government is worried about spies from 'rogue states' whose available technology is in inverse proportion to their available sand. Everyone else is worried about spies from the US. Naturally, therefore, they're a bit more thorough about deletion...
Gobbles?
He's the retarded turkey, right? Timmy!
Excellent! In MOO2 I was always infuriated by the choice of weapons on my starbases. Antaran death rays are nice, but impractically large; I'd rather have my starbase capable of firing several smaller shots. Later in the game, if you go into extreme physics territory, your conventional weapons have been miniaturised to such an extent that your Star Fortresses are totally outclassed by your light cruisers.
You can have multiple starbases over a planet and they actually orbit the planet during combat. Beta testers have described the weapon capacity of larges starbases as "staggering". Planets and starbases have enormous range on their weapons - *if* they can see you.
Proposed plan of attack: take a Doom Star hull and fill it with rocks. Launch it directly towards the starbase at high speed, and have the fleet follow close behind it. By the time the planetary defences have melted the thing down, the fleet's there on the spot and has negated the starbase's superior range. In general, can my lightly armoured killer ships hide behind tougher ones?
One thing I'd like to see (and I imagine it's a bit late to hope for it to be in MOO3 :-) is for there to be a benefit from standardisation. As it is, I decide I want a battleship, and I specify a variety of parts to go into it, then I order it to be built. So the parts are manufactured, a hull is built, the ship fitted and configured as a one-off affair. What I want is a discount if I order ten at a time.
Or perhaps more realistically, I might run an imperial arsenal. Things like stellar converters and black hole generators I'll only ever need a few of, but I get through thousands of point-defence phasors and pulson missiles. I should order them in bulk, and allocate them to shipbuilding projects as required. Once stockpiled weapons become obsolete, a new option arises for the technologically leading player - become an armsdealer! I notice the Sakkra and Klackons are having a major and very bloody war - would either of you two be interested in buying a few dozen ex-Psilon graviton cannons?
... Does that include the drinks?
They carry a Quantum Detonator. It has two effects - first, it gives a 75% (I think, might be 50%) chance of a warp core explosion if the ship is captured, and second, it triples the damage done by that explosion.
The odds are very much against you if you launch assaults on Antaran ships - they have excellent marines on board, and even if you do win chances are the ship will blow anyway - but it can be done.
Then destroy the AI with Champion Halfling Slingers or Champion Javelineers. Mwahaha :-)
Don't take _all_ Life. Mostly Life, but have one Chaos and one Nature book. Then you can have what is probably the most powerful conventional unit possible.
Halfling Slingers, Adamantium weapons, Champion level, with the spells Flame Blade and Giant Strength cast on them, and accompanied by Torin and an Archangel (for the leadership and bless effects) - I make that 18 attack strength, multiplied by eight in the stack equals 144 damage. Ouch.
Lots. Lots and lots and lots of advanced physics, I think I'd got to something like 30 levels or so. Why bother? I decided I wanted to end the game with _all_ the technology, and I needed a black hole generator from an Antaran ship to do that. So I'd sit about waiting for Antaran raiders to come through with a battleship or better - the smaller ships don't carry black hole generators - and then have my fleet of assault carriers (Titans with Class X hard shields, troop pods and lots of assault shuttles) meet them and start a boarding action. Antarans don't come around that often, though, so I had a lot of time doing research.
It's cute to see the message 'Send 1 ship to attack Antares?' It's even more fun when it's only a cruiser (I couldn't do it with a destroyer without using the timewarp / cloak cheat - that would allow me to do it with a frigate.) I didn't use the stellar converter for that, though - miniaturised Maulers were more space-effective.
Awww. Did they break the cloaking cheat, too? (For those who don't know, Orion 2 had a device called the Phasing Cloak, which was totally impenetrable - a phasecloaked ship couldn't be seen, let alone shot at, but had to decloak to fire and had to go a turn without firing to recloak. The Timewarp Facilitator gives the ship two turns in a row before the enemy gets a shot. This gave people a wonderful loophole...)
Of course the AI will cheat - they always do. If an AI doesn't cheat it hasn't a hope against a competent human. It took decades of programming work to develop chess programs that could take on good human players on even term; Civs and Moos are far more complex games than chess, and their developers haven't had anything like as long to develop the AI. As long as the AI doesn't cheat and get caught, then we're OK. It should really be spelled out in the manual: 'Easy: The AI pays extra for all its ships, its population grows more slowly, and it has trouble keeping its people happy. Normal: The AI plays on even terms. Hard: The AI gets discount ships, faster population growth, and less unrest. Impossible: As Hard, but more so. Also, AIs will be naturally more friendly with each other than with you.'
I think MOO2's AI cheated in the opening game, then stopped. AIs always used to build their first few colony ships and cruisers more quickly than I could. Later on, they came out with some very large fleets, but this seemed to be a policy of going for quantity over quality, and I didn't catch them cheating in their production.
As a matter of fact, I _liked_ seeing someone cruising about with a fleet of 120 obsolete battleships. Cheap to build, sure, but the upkeep on those things must be crippling. Here comes my small but perfectly formed Psilon cruiser to help cut their government spending... *gloat* They definitely have to pay upkeep on their fleets - I tested this once. I had an enemy on his knees, in the last free star system in the galaxy. I ordered the fleet to guard the neighbouring systems, and gave the enemy 10% tribute. This is an enormous sum - most of my great war factories are idle, churning out Trade Goods. AI promptly invests this money in producing all the ships it can, and once it considers its bases adequately defended it starts sending out fleets to attack me. I then cancel the 10% tribute, and watch the economic crisis begin ;-)
I'm pretty sure the AIs don't cheat when against the wall; usually when they're in that state you have full sensor coverage of their territory, and are watching everything that happens. If a dozen warships appear out of thin air the player will notice something awry.
There is one thing the MOO2 AIs do that _really_ annoyed me, but it isn't cheating. The Galaxy's split between me, another superpower that I'm reluctant to fight, and several small empires. I'm storming into one of the little guys in a blatant landgrab, and they realise they're doomed. They immediately surrender - to the other superpower. Aargh!
MoO2 seemed a little unclear on what exactly constituted a war crime. Dropping bioweapons from orbit - war crime. Blasting every settlement on the face of the planet with disruptor cannon from space - not a war crime. Saturating the place with antimatter bombs - not a war crime. Sending down troops to exterminate the population in person - not a war crime, but carries a diplomatic penalty. Demolishing the entire planet - not a war crime.
Stars! works fine in regular WINE. A Linux clone would be nice, but it would be difficult to make it interoperate with Windows Stars! hosts in multiplayer - there are copy-protection lockouts.
As far as I'm concerned, turtling in Stars! is just a non-starter. The early game is a landgrab and nothing but. If you leave it to late in the game to take on an AI, the sheer scale of the game defeats you. You can knock out his bigger planets and annihilate his main battle fleet, but colony ships are just so damn cheap... AIs always seem to have patrol ships, freighters and colony ships in random thermal motion throughout their territories, which makes it a nightmare to actually exterminate anyone.