Walsingham

Where else do they get to compete head to head? Other than in salaries and box office takings? Also, how large is your garden? And have you been vaulting the sundial as I imagine?

Does this mean I've finally got an excuse to march on the Federal Reserve, with an angry mob holding torches?

Dozens dead? Unusually high for NZ, isn't it?

I just like the notion of 'smuggling' an aircraft carrier disguised as a novelty casino. Pretty good deal, only 20 million. And good for teh Ukraine who don't have to pay to scrap it.

Somebody sounds like they've met me.

LoF refuses to tell us what his job is! What if he's in charge of the Fed!?

I have decided that the best breakfast ever is chops and oatcakes.

You're missing my point, old son. The fact is that most senior people, and most members of the public look at the graph, not the numbers. Which makes the use of scale critical to the meaning of the information imparted, at least at the surface level. I'm intertested in setting some standard metric for scaling. Could be cool.

Interesting angle. How would this explain the failure of revolts in several places? Does it correlate with the spread of such comms? I've no idea. If so, get a paper out about it, double quick.

Which proves without doubt that Yoda was a troll.

This made me laugh. Hadn't come across it before: Cunning devils.

The only terrifying thing about Titanic was how much money it made.

Good to see you back, sluggo. Remember the mantra: "If only the folks back home could see me now."

Rostere, I don't want to jump all over you with boots here. However, we've seen precisely one regime change thus far. From a force-based* one man state to a military junta. Elsewhere we've seen popular uprisings smacked down like a drunk donkey. The faith certain people - not necessarily you - have in bloodless replacements of dictators is like a faith in miraculous healing in its persistence, lack of any logical reasoning, and paucity of examples. Whereas the notion that regimes can be** changed by invasion is backed by the whole of human history. ~~ BTW, again with kind permission of www.stratfor.com

I have been reading reporst today, all of which include bar charts, and was reminded of the way in which teh scale of a chart can exaggerate or minimise the relative strengths of differences in the data. That is, if you chart, say, horse weights where the horses are all between 270 and 300 kgs, with the maximum being 300 then that will make the heaviest look much heavier than if you took the chart against a maximum theoretic weight for a horse - say 600kgs. It made me stop and wonder if there was some better system of presenting data. A convention, which might reduce the potential for misrepresentation. Maybe something based off standard deviation within the data plus some additional relative constant?

It would seem that the sacred precincts of matrimony are obvious even to toasters.

Console gamers. Or in other words people who burrow into a game like a tick into a dog's neck. HA! Doubt it. I've never witnessed a single desicion like that being made because of a dev team, or console gamers... Usually its some retarded exec going "I'm confused, I don't play games, you need to point this out to me" I think those days are long gone. Probably more likely to be a focus group of morons, or as I now christen it a 'monkey palace' approach.

Idea: Counter-insurgency hero. A game where you and your friends all receive plastic models of infantry weapons and a massive humidifier that makes jungle noises. The game is to be played at the end of long frustrating nights clubbing, when you're all tanked up. You go on pointless patrols during which several of you may stand on boobytraps and die, then you are put into a village where you have to choose the right villagers to execute. Although you will receive points for ALL executions, bullying of team mates, and inventing reconnaissance reports. Well, I find the idea funny.

Ah... imagination.

Console gamers. Or in other words people who burrow into a game like a tick into a dog's neck.

Well lets hope the new patch fixes the issue's they promise it will, especially the performance ones. I'm now playing Fallout Tactics. And good fun it is too.

Well, cancer is a Big Bad for our times. I'm fairly certain a lot of people would choose demonic possession over cancer any day. Although in large part that's because we have little to no awareness of what real evil entails. And hene little notion of what being possessed by an anthropomorphised version of it would be like.

To totally throw the angle of the thread.. Haven't you heard? They usually blame it on the european colonialism and exploitation of the past few centuries.... I don't know why, but this made me laugh quite loudly. ~~ I guess the 'purpose' of this thread is to give readers a reminder that there is such a thing as evil. It's also interesting to see what real bandits/'raiders' get up to. Which in turn is peripherally what interested me about New Vegas. Which was that although it had tos truggle against the 'one size fits all' avatars, the wasteland had nasty people.

Everyone has a man-crush on Wals. I hear he smokes a pipe ya know. Sign me up for the Wals' fan club. You'd better be writing that while seated in a solidly upholstered armchair, with both feet firmly on the floor...

Don't be like that, doofus. My fallschirmjaeger friend is merely pointing out one of the bits of neocon thinking which liberals conveniently never addressed - that neocons felt a more democratic, nicer world would serve their evil purposes; and that the US should take serious concerted action to achieve that world. Although of course in at least the case of Rumsfeld he fethed that notion sideways by doing things like using obviously insufficient troops, and handing over civil reconstruction to firms which have never done the work. It is interesting to see by contrast what a liberal US president is doing on the cusp of democratic revolutions in multiple gok-hole dictatorships. Which is to say sweet FA.* *it would be pleasing to assume this was true. But I'm sure he's doing something via the CIA. I just think it's fair enough for me to rant on the basis that I can't see him doing that. And I enjoy a good rant as much as the next man.