Walsingham

If I can go back to an earlier point. The suggestion - I think from Tigs - was that causal gamers don't object to DRM. My furious reaction to this is that casual gamers aren't pirating! A further point. Using DRM costs the company money. They have to comission or license it, and they have to maintain servers to cope with it. If it does not reduce piracy - and it would appear that it doesn't - then it is a parasite on my favourite industry.

*Engage ponce drive* Art is a question of subjective interpretation. Something only ceases to be art when the impact of the object or event is unequivocal. If I hammer a nail into the top of your head that is not art, at least so far as you are concerned. The relevance of this point is that if a game consist of nothing more than see object, track object, hit object, then two things happen. Firstly the degrees of freedom you have to interpret it are absolutely minimal. Secondly that interpretation must necessarily be almost identical to every other game which uses the same task basis. You have not created a new game, you are copying an older game. You are putting mask on grandma.

Ok, I hate pirates now.

Oh man, that's HARSH.

Yay! War among the people! Let's let a mob decide who lives and dies!

Oh, ok. I see what you mean. And yes, that's one reason why I hate prop rep. I thought it always worked the way you described. And I can see why you feel the way you do, up to a point. Mandelson is now a Lord. Current political theory is that he can only be removed from politics by a wooden stake through his heart, but since he clearly has shrunk that organ to the size of a lentil I can only recommend a course of penicillin.

Yesterday I discovered that I could make the dog make guitar style yowling noises when I was air guitaring to Walk This Way. He just copies the howling. So I picked him up and air guitared the dog.

Yeah, as if it wasn't clear which country they were from. I don't so much mind if it's a congressman, but the President?

A further point: discussing organised crime is appropriate in a discussion of terrorism. All three main organised criminal traditions mafia/camorra/'ndrangheta, the triads, and yakuza were all 'freedom fighters' when they started out. Gradually the violence, the code of silence, and illicit income evolves into organised crime and little else.

Uh, they're corrupt and self serving before they come into power. Especially the leadership. The only purpose of a party is to win elections. After that its: not to lose the next elections. Everything else is smoke and mirrors. I'm 22 and one voting was enough for me to decide that they wont be needing my participation in the future. As Emma Goldman said:

I applaud the spirit of your objection. However, I disagree. For me the argument is as follows 1. DRM does not stop piracy. Therefore the cost half of the cost/benefit equation had better be bloody good. 2. DRM is intrusive and monkeys about with the foundations of my PC. I find that disrespectful, but it's a minor point. 3. Most DRM requires me to be online, which mean if for some reason I can't pay for internet I won't be able to play my favourite games. 4. DRM can and does add instability to the game. 5. In the case of Steam these costs are offset by a positive cost of community support and general slickness. ## In short: no benefit, plenty of costs. in fact I'd go so far as to suggest it may encourage piracy, because only people who pirate don't have to put up with DRM!

Is that the terrorist one you showed us? Yes, sorry. Forgot to link.

One of the few things I agreed with my high school politics teacher on was that ANY party in power for more than three cycles becomes corrupt and self-serving. Some say that FPTP causes this to happen too often, but the saving grace is that when we do change we stick it to the outgoing party with a vengeance. AND we get to directly choose who goes. My own constituency lost the incumbent Labour MP who was a Brown loyalist. The MP would NEVER have been ditched by the party apparatus. Anyway, I was struck by a link to the landless peasants party. Thought you might like them, Monte. EDIT: I was required to do a profile of John Reid a few years ago. He has his flaws as an organiser and manager, but he's not short of balls. I think I'd like him if we met. Of course he'd think I was a terrible arse.

Inca God - Streetdegree Didn't like it. Turned up the volume. Like it now.

Yes, I can vouch for this system too. They've been using in in the Gothic series since 2001 and it's very instinctive, very audiovisual and it gives you a chance to at least avoid some enemies, if not all. I would vastly prefer this to being hunted by one hundred giant rad scorpions all over the wasteland. I dunno. Now you mention it the thought of you being pursued by a chitinous wave of clacking pincers is quite funny.

I'm still waiting for Four Lions.

As I said before I was already considering emigration, but that's mainly because Canada sounds awesome, and I've been offered work there. EDIT: I was appalled, but not surprised to discover that the Prime Minister couldn't be arsed to sing the National Anthem on Saturday. Can you imagine any other antional leader throwing a strop on remembrance day? What a collosal **** the man is.

Got it in one. Didn't we once suggest that survival skill should factor into hostility of baddies. So maybe the key is survival allwos you to skew what you run into. So you can set your attitude to 'spoiling for a fight' or 'just trying to get home'.

Your interest does you credit, but you just need to think about the mechanics. A kilo of heroin base can cost as little as $100 at source (sometimes lower). When that kilo finally hits London or New York it is worth many thousands of pounds. As a material it grows almost anywhere, requires almost no special handling, and has a long shelf life. It's also not hard to smuggle drugs when you consider the huge quantities of legal merchandise and people crossing state boundaries. This is one reason why extreme violence is employed to retain control over the supply chain. Once you get it into the consumer country you run via middle men who operate dealing franchises. The really risky and cut-throat end isn't even part of most organised crime any more. Why bother when you have a limitless supply of mooks literally dying to get a slice? You ask who is financing terrorism? *shrugs* We are. That is every supermodel and producer. Every banker. Every junkie lifting wallets and mobile phones. Interdiction doesn't just fail, it simply can't help but fail. So yes, we need to choke terrorism from its finances and there are only two ways to do that: 1. Reduce demand 2. Reduce profitability We can do a lot more to make drug taking morally unacceptable. I have several friends in Brighton, which is a holiday town which has a big 'anti war' sentiment expressed through rallies and whatnot. But they shovel away the drugs like there is no tomorrow. The town is a 24/7 Live Aid festival for murder, rape, and torture. If you look at the factors which make drugs profitable the number one factor is the fact that supply is illicit. This stifles competition and keeps the prices and profits artificially high. Bit off topic, slightly, but I think it's basically relevant.

Brown has announced he is going to resign, although given his track record he may always go back on his word. Can someone explain how two parties with a poor showing may come to form the next government? It's a bloody stitch up. It's not as if bloc negotiation is even going to work. Because with such a finely balanced parliament I think we may actually see MPs doing their jobs and voting as relatively independent characters, not just the obedient animals of the whips. So a paper coalition could result in serious fractures. Aside: can someone explain how - with alternative voting and single transferrable voting - teh voter is able to commit themselves fully to a single party? Because from what I've been reading there's a persistent trend to shuffle support around. Which means I might regard the libdems as a very very distant second to my main choice, but they end up hoovering up my 'vote' quite easily. Forgive me if I'm being thick.

It's a luxury of living in a peaceful state. Boring. Btw you're not peaceful. You're involved in two wars at the moment. Its just that all the shooting and killing is not happening in your back yard. We're very peaceful at home. Exvluding town centres at weekends, and public transport at any time.

Never found the raiders or enclave fast to respawn. With Yao-Gui and radscorpions yeah, but outdoors it makes sense that animals might roam into an area you've cleared out so intellectually that's never been a problem. Except the Fallout universe has a magical pill that removes all radiation from a person. So any argument about what should happen with radiation is kinda moot. And everytime people come out of a vault into the wasteland they're bringing science, math, reading and writing with them. I wondered about little lamplights population. Its curious. Maybe I'm just unlucky, or I stroll across into different zones or something. But in an average six game hours I get through about 12 giant radscorpions and 6 yao guai. That's a lot of predator meat to just wander along. If you ask me Bethesda just have the retard view that players aren't happy if they aren't in a fight every minute. It's fine if we're forging new territory, but limping back down the trail it gets real tiresome. I don't see that radiation isn't a problem. Radaway is a rare item, and quite valuable. on top of which, just read the diary of the nurses at the Germantown police station.

I'm watching the videos now. It's certainly interesting. My biggest objection is that one of the greatest contributors to operational failure is a lack of social/human 'grip' by a general on his subordinate commanders. I don't see any of the appropriate 'levers' to represent this. Still, it's definitely something I'll buy come next paycheck.

I've never encountered instantly respawning enemies before. If I kill a Talon company group, enter the sewer and leave they're still dead. Even in the metro area, there's a group of respawning super-mutants near the area where the Jefferson Memoria/Rivet City road meets and they never respawn instantly. I agree this was an oddity; most places look like people just moved in. And yet, for example, the musuem where the ghouls live has been occupied since right after the bombs fell. Mind you, there's also the problem of dead bodies laying around for ages outdoors...surely something would scavange them pretty quickly (either people for whatever equipment you didn't pick up or animals for the food). Why wouldn't they be able to read? The Little Lamplighters, for example, seem to teach other to read before sending the old-ones out into the wasteland. There are still pre-war books around in other places. I'd think the level of knowledge and the friendliness would change from locale to locale though. 1. Talon company don't, but those bear things, and giant radscorpions breed like amoeba. So do raiders and enclave. 2. Agreed, but I think teh patterns in things are more important than continuity errors. The human brain is really extremely good at picking up on patterns. If there isn't something approaching a sensibel pattern to objects then it all feel wrong. I'll hazard that even console teenagers pick up on it without being consciously aware. 3. (the BBC did a dramatised documentary on the after effects of a nuclear strike called Threads. Watch it.) Living above ground after a nuclear strike means absorbing a lot of rads. People die in their mid teens. The old don't pass on skills, since there's no time. Language devolves. 'Fortunately' with no social restrictions or protection the young breed younger. Don't get me started on how creepy it is that little lamplight has only little kids in it yet they're breeding.