Walsingham

I feel I'm maybe missing part of your point, but time is limited so I'll forge ahead. Intellectual property has to be treated as property and protected or the production of that substance will wither. Surely this is a simple dynamic. What we are talking about here is the way property moves, and you are suggesting that it must move freely. However, distributing material which YOU have generated yourself is different from material which others have generated. OK, lost my thread now. Back to work.

Bill Murray needs more Bill Murrays.

When you try to imagine these things getting actioned, it helps to picture a boardroom full of senior staff who have no clue whatsoever what is being said, and a bunch of junior staff who don't know why they're saying it.

Dragon Age Origins had DRM? I don't recall any obtrusions when I installed it...or was it a silent but deadly killer or something? Well I know I can't play it now. Bioware must know that my copy was activated, and it hasn't been activated elsewhere. Yet I don't even get the courtesy of a reply when I ask for support. Seriously. What ****ing company doesn't even send a "**** you" or a "we're sorry you" to customer correspondence? God, it makes my blood boil.

I for one certainly care what is used. I simply won't buy any Ubisoft products I've had so much of a problem with their DRM. Bioware annoyed the crap out of me with their whole customer control strategy, but I'm more sanguine about their performance otherwise.

If I come in then I say we should 'do' that witch near the bridge. And the subsequent barney in the docks. Because I'm a wordkiller, you see?

Like Tigs I agree that for social purposes people have to be treated equally. But at an engineering coal-face level they simply aren't. Physically the point is glaringly obvious, psychologically it's more subtle but sometimes more pronounced. Perhaps it's more constructed than predestined. But try and (for example) manage two single sex teams identically and you're going to get very divergent results.

Probably because people being sexy in anime are usually crying. Those wacky wacky Japanese.

You mean the exploding octopus?

Photographer documented before, during and after shots of British squaddies on tour. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegal...fghanistan.html Includes some mindquaking observations from folks who've been there. ~~~ Feel free to post your own galleries on other topics.

Sounds like the chrome is rubbing off a bit of your life, mate. Don't sweat it. Some things really are solid silver.

Captain of sunk ship claims he 'tripped and fell' into lifeboat. Was not running away. link I honestly couldn't believe how hard I laughed when I saw this. My nose hurts.

Mad Moxxi's theme

Damnit.

Burn with the undeserving! (NSFW) (Biblical)

Borderlands - Ain't no rest for the wicked

That poor alien. Can you imagine a cross body block with those blades?

Only fair to point out that I just needed to look up the constituents of saltpetre, and couldn't. At least not until I remembered I have, you know, BOOKS.

I should like to remind everyone that thanks to the humiliating and retarded DRM on Dragon Age 1 I am simply not buying (and not playing) DA2. DRM win!

I'm happy to take my chances at level 1 until I can get dragged up by the rest of the higher level party killing stuff. If I die I die.

Uh okay ? Point was it's nothing to be shocked at or more outraged over as it's expected as they're being "funtwits" with big games. The reported 25% was a lot lower than I was expecting though. OK. I got confused. Thought you were saying it was OK for them to bury indie startups which they COULD afford in the same way that they were mildly annoying bigger game companies whose products they could afford less.

I haven't time to run through an entire case here, but I would like to air a view which I haven't seen in the papers: I agree that forcing a business to take charge of copyright infringement will mean the effective end of free user-generated content. But is that really so earth shattering? I mean it is for some of the biggest websites online currently, like wikipedia. But honestly how bad is it if they fail? It's not as if this is awfully unjust. As Guard Dog will be happy to illustrate to you, govt regulation frequently strangles businesses on the vine. These companies who stand to lose out the most are the biggest winners of the last few years. Youtube, wikipedia, facebook. I just can't get worked up on their behalf.

May have already mentioned this, but a friend of mine is writing a book on his father's experiences in a prisoner of war camp. To my enormous surprise and pleasure it's actually very good. As a wordish side-salad I'm reading UK Eyes Alpha by Mark Urban. Published in 1998 it's a somewhat (but presumably not entirely) outdated look at the British Intelligence Services. I hoover up stuff like this, but I'm also curious to know what shape the services were in just before 9/11. The biggest point so far is that Sovbloc intelligencers rule the roost with carefree abandon. Every other area languishes!

Oh, man. Now I want to eat a unicorn.