Monte Carlo

^ Indeed. And in other news, this apple tastes quite different from that orange.

^ Sadly, you are correct.

Sarevok is much cooler than Jon Irenicus, he has a bwuahahahaha laugh, wears a big suit of black platemail and kills your stepdad after being hit with a magic missile. He has platoons of mooks trying to kill you and lives in an old graveyard in a dungeon under a city. Honestly, he's a proper D&D villain and no mistake, AND you can recruit him and use his really cheezy powaz later on. And although she's only a minor character, the Drow chick you have to work for in the Underdark in BG2 is great: sexy, completely amoral, scheming...

I doubt it. 'Brain-washing' never stopped East Germans from braving razor wire, mines, machine-guns and dogs in Berlin, did it?

My advice to the Pentagon is, this time, have a plan for what you're going to do after you pull all the statues of Kim Il Sung down. Let's get the Chinese on board and pulverize the N. Korean regime, quickly, with as little collateral damage as possible. I suspect that North Korea is the one place where the population really will, unlike Iraq, welcome the S. Korean and US armoured columns trundling beyond the 38th parallel.

Pedant's Corner - in the ad the main character has a belt of what looks like a belt of FMJ 7.62 ball link wrapped around him. Is there a machine gun in this game? If there is the ammo belt would have been cloth / fabric, unless there's also a time travel mechanic.

Hi. In my local computer games shop Alpha Protocol is shown as their 20th best-selling game in their top 20 chart. I assume that's down to pre-orders, so a game hitting the top 20 pre-release must be a good thing for the developer, right? I've not noticed this before, is it common?

I saw the Doom movie, very drunk, eating pizza. It was great, although I think the triangulation of alcohol, fast food and late night sci-fi movie is significant. Plus Rosamund Pike is very pretty and The Rock is a likeable enough action hero.

No I didn't. You'd know

Mr. Kettle, may I introduce you to Mr. Pot? Not biting. That was a D minus.

LOL, reading all this makes me realise what a load of pretentious, navel-gazing load of old bollocks this probably was.

^ Wow, I bet you're a bundle of laughs at parties. You need to live on a small, wet island off the Northwest coast of Europe.

Read the ending summary for n00bs online... SPOILAZ Sounds not unlike the ending of life on mars / ashes to ashes.

I have never seen a single episode of Lost but find myself mildly interested by the hype. To that end could somebody please summarize all six seasons in Haiku format for me please?

Not a very scientific claim. We need to re-run this scenario with pirates to test the validity of this hypothesis.

What do you mean, 'debating' a second beer you wimp? Get on with it, pull yourself together :: mutters ::

Insanity is perhaps the wrong word and I expressed myself poorly. I mean a mindset difficult for us to imagine, say over five hundred years of life where for most of it you are relatively healthy and fit. Your perspective on life is going to shift immensely, isn't it? Your potential for advanced personal development is only matched by your potential for advanced personal depravity. Add to this the resentment of the short-lived majority. Discrimination and, ultimately, political violence seems inevitable. A sense of entitlement, ennui and self-defence might well lead the four-hundred year old billionaire with a close circle of powerful political friends to think....

This is why I was wondering about the big deal with regards to HUAC. Subsequent evidence vindicated the principle and concerns, if not methods, of the initiative. The idea that the USSR was not trying to infiltrate and undermine Western democracies is naive.

With respect, I disagree. Such long lifespans, in my mind, might well lead to a sense of ennui that borders on the insane, a sense of moral detachment whereby those living 'the lifespans of the poor' are effectively an untermensch. They might well think: why suffer sharing this potential eternal eden with vermin?

Hyperbole and strawman arguments in a perfect tango. I'm not arguing about moral relativism, which is what you are describing in extremis. I'm arguing about an opposing point of view. "Dropping bombs on civilian population centres is wrong." This is groupthink. Hiroshima looks different if your grandfather was a marine. Dresden looks different if your grandparents lived through the Blitz (that's me). If you are a Sunni Muslim in Fallujah in 2004/2005 then the Iraq war looks a bit different I guess. You drop bombs in a war of national survival to achieve strategic aims --- yes you vaporise tens of thousands of civilians so your own people don't die. Look at that, it's freaking horrible. Teaching why rational people came to that decision is a fell responsibility. You have to try to see if both ways. And all you can manage is.... Auschwitz. Mechanized slaughter based on racial hatred. Please, there is a baseline. What is the alternative argument there? There isn't one. It's the morality of the clinically insane.

The desirable standard of 'a liberal education' means just that, as others have described above. Liberal in the sense that (a) you respect the oppsing view whilst retaining the right to shoot it full of holes if you can (b) the idea that, generally, you play the ball not the man © if you play the man as opposed to the ball then there's a good reason for it (d) not taking the information provided to you on trust isn't disrespectful, it's mandatory, (e) remember, only because Dave in your English class is a bit thick doesn't mean anything - he might be a ninja in science / maths / sports so show the guy some respect and help him if he wants it, and lastly (f) provide some evidence for your assertions. If you achieve that, as per Hurlie's rather reassuring personal standards, then you can present anything to a class of young people with no worries whatsoever. I see no reason why a class of 14-15 year olds, properly educated, couldn't shoot down in flames creationism, intelligence design, kabala, scientology or any other wacky stuff you want to throw at them. Hell, I want my kids to do that. Cheers MC

The entire raison d'etre of the United States of America is that those states enjoy a considerable level of freedom from Federal government, including education. I can't see the USA accepting a centrally imposed cirriculum, no more than they would penal policy or anything else. And why should they? I wouldn't trust Dubya nor Obama with that.

A small, super-rich clique of the international elite will be able to enjoy extreme longevity. They will then create a genetic weapon that will kill all the folks who aren't like them, except for a small-ish slave caste to bury the bodies and do all the menial work. It will be like Conquistadors taking flu to the New World. Then they will have the entire planet as their eternal playground, served by advanced technologies to satsify their every whim. This doesn't strike me as a remotely outlandish theory.

Of course you'd teach religion, but in a third party way --- not as some sort of universal truth. As an admirer of the French I've long envied their robust and unapologetic secularism.

@ Calax. You've just proved my point. Dresden is a 'bad' thing, you are buying into the now-default revisionism on the subject. Group-think. How about Dresden as a good thing? Dresden as a strategic target? Dresden as logical payback for the "9/11 every week for a year" that was the unprovoked Blitz on London? Dresden as a part of the sad but irreducibly sensible way to destroy Nazism? Kids need to understand alternative POV. Intelligent Design? It's utter bollocks. But I'd be comfortable with it being taught as long as it's balanced out, I'd quote Voltaire but it's a bit of a cliche. Religion doesn't make sense to me yet it is still taught, personally I'd go all French on the issue and ban religion from schools full stop. But that's just me.