You certainly have a point, but supercars at this level can be dangerous even at legal speeds.

At low speeds, these cars have two particular challenges for the driver; a huge amount of torque in the lower gears and a lack of the downforce that they rely upon for stability. You need an absolute feather touch on the accelerator or you will spin out - and this is much more likely to happen at 40mph than 140mph.

This isn't a touring car like an Aston DB series or a lower end Porsche. Those are designed to be a pleasant high-end driving experience - not to provide maximum performance. The Carrera GT is effectively a road-going version of a full-fledged race car and, as such, needs a lot of skill to drive safely under any conditions. Personally, I'm not sure why you'd even want to take one onto normal roads; the concentration and restraint needed to keep it under control must surely make it much less fun than taking out a more normal high-performance car and letting it rip.

I read the entire core series, but none of the spin-offs. The books are pretty short and not exactly challenging and I have a substantial commute (via train), so I blazed through it pretty fast.

There are times it is pretty damned fun - basically when it is being a kind of low-brow abbreviated Tom Clancy (which is a lot of the time in the early books).

The scary bit is when you get the slightly more "out there" religious stuff and you remember - "this isn't like other sci-fi/fantasy religions - the guy writing the book and most of the readers in its core audience actually believe this stuff". That's scary.

But hey, seeing other perspectives is a good thing and I'm glad I read it.

I make a point once a year of reading something that falls outside the spectrum of "the stuff I would normally read". Exposure to other perspectives and all of that.

This year's choice was Atlas Shrugged.

Yes, some of the criticisms of Rand and her philosophy are justified. Yes, as a novel rather than a political tract, it doesn't hang together particularly well. Yes, she really, really doesn't understand the specific economics of the railway (I spent 5 years working in that field). But it's also a much smarter book than a lot of people give it credit for, with many elements of its central thesis that are incredibly hard (if not impossible) to refute.

And yes, Latin America features in it quite prominently, with the People's Republics there getting up to things exactly like this. This is an instance where there really are rather fewer shades of grey than you might normally expect.

And on a side note, last year's something-I-wouldn't-normally-read project was the Left Behind series (apocalyptic evangelical fiction). That was pretty much the polar opposite of Atlas Shrugged - disturbingly readable as entertainment (and downright fun at times) but with a fairly terrifying intellectual vacuum at its heart.

Don't get me wrong, I'd like to see viable competition to Steam (monopolies are not good for consumers in the long run) - but you're missing the whole point. Steam's position has never been stronger.

It doesn't matter to Valve that you can pick up old and low-budget games for cheaper elsewhere most of them time. There have been intermittent cases of GoG being cheaper than Steam on certain for a couple of years now. But it's irrelevant. Why?

First, these titles are a pretty small part of Steam's market. Steam is primarily about the higher end commercial market. Sure, the classic games are one of its income streams, but most people on there are either playing full-sized commercial games or monetised free to play titles like DoTA2. And in the former market in particular, Steam remains well ahead of the competition. Origin's pricing is better than it used to be on many titles, but it still struggles to match Steam on either variety or price point.

Second, Steam has a very, very aggressive and very potent flash sales model. Let's say Indie Game X is $9.99 on Steam and $8.99 on GoG or another competitor. Now, you could save a dollar by going for the GoG version. Or, if you're not desperate for the title, you could wait. Because come the summer sale, the Christmas sale or just one of the regular midweek, weekend or daily sales, you might be able to get that game off Steam for just $2.99.

Third, Steam is a lot more than just a storefront. It's also a fairly comprehensive suite of back-end functions, on a par with those offered by Xbox Live or the Playstation Network. Given a choice between a DRM-free version of a game and a Steam DRMed version, you'd expect most people to go for the former, right?

Wrong.

If you read articles like this you can see pretty clearly that Steam copies of games are more sought-after than DRM free versions. People actually value the friends-list, messaging and other back-end services that go with Steam and they value them much more than they value concepts like the freedom to do what they want with software they've bought. That may be an unpopular sentiment on slashdot, but it is the way things are moving out there in the market.

Whether or not you agree with Steam's business practices, we are a long way from even starting to see signs of its decline.

Although of course in Europe, unless you imported from the US (as I did) you never even got the choice of a back-compatible machine to begin with.

There were a lot of mistakes made with the PS3 (as I think even Sony would acknowledge). The fact that it's probably the only console in history to have lost features consistently over the course of its life-span is among the worst.

It doesn't even have the usual argument in its favour that stripped-down versions of consoles put out after their successor appear usually have; back compatibility.

The Wii-U's back compatibility with Wii games is very good. Not quite perfect (one or two titles are ever so slightly glitchy), but certainly good. On a par with the PS1 back-compatibility on the PS2, certainly. I don't like much about Nintendo (region locking, online restrictions, attitudes to IP that would make Sony blush, game pricing, general arrogance and paternalist ethos), but back-compatibility is one thing they consistently do right.

One of the reasons the PS2 continued to sell so well after the PS3 release was that unless you moved quickly and got a first-generation Japanese or US model, the PS3 basically didn't do back compatibility. Sure, there have been HD-remasters and the PSN "PS2 Classics" range - but those involve paying again for what you may already own. If you had a large library of PS2 games and your PS2 failed, then having a cheapo-stripped down version of the PS2 available to buy as new was a fairly useful safety valve.

Similarly when the PSP headed into retirement, though it had generally been forgotten in the West, it retained a big fanbase in Japan. The Vita can run PSP games purchased via the store from memory stick (and no need to re-buy them if you already bought them online from the store for the PSP), but the lack of a UMD drive means that physical copies of PSP games can't be used in its successor. So a cheapo basic PSP model for Japan made a lot of sense (and is precisely what Sony did).

In this case, I just can't understand the justification for keeping stripped down models of the Wii on sale for so long. Hell, if somebody has a lot of Wii games and their Wii dies at this point, from Nintendo's point of view, that's an opportunity to tempt them into a Wii-U purchase. Maybe Nintendo's internal data on the Wii-U's commercial position is even worse than is commonly suspected and it's preparing to ditch the platform? But that feels "too soon" right now. They've got another roll of the dice with the new Mario and Mario Kart games (although it doesn't help that the PS4 and Xbox One are launching in the same window). A cut-and-run scenario might look more plausible in 6 months if the Wii-U has a bad Christmas.

Yes, I've noted the same thing.

The nasty suspicious part of my mind can't help but wonder whether the submitter isn't somehow releated to our "friend" Bennett Haselton. It's not a huge leap of logic from "an email can't be spam if I sent it" to "a website can't be infected if I manage it" after all.

Yeah, this is pretty bad. Don't get me wrong, I still intend to get a PS4 soon after launch (probably not launch day this time - the fuss and queues trying to get a 360 and Wii at launch are not something I want to repeat) but this is an irritation. Particularly given that the PS3's media streaming functionality was so much better than the 360's.

Of course, the lack of backward compatibility on both the PS4 and the Xbox One means that anybody intending to buy either console will need to hang onto its predecessor unless they're willing to discard their entire games library for it (barring whatever titles are selected for "remastering"). Sadly, said lack of backward compatibility was pretty much inevitable from the day the specs of the 360 and PS3 were announced. If the PC-like architecture of the new systems is going to be the way of the future, then hopefully this is the last time we have to suffer that particular irritation.

Our police (I'm British) do seem to be on a bit of a PR flurry at the moment, trying to get headlines by puffing up raids and arrests in response to whatever the moral panic of the day is.

A cynic might suspect that it's related to a general crisis of confidence in them, relating to:

- several years of stories about the doctoring of crime statistics
- violent over-reactions in some public order situations
- attempted cover-ups of said over-reactions
- catastrophic under-reactions in other (genuinely dangerous) public order situations
- the sale of confidential information to certain journalists
- a brazen attempt to "stitch up" the career of a Government minister they didn't like (not a very likeable one, but that's not the point), through a series of increasingly barefaced lies
- increasingly silly uniforms (admittedly that one not really their fault)

Don't get me wrong, this isn't a general anti-police rant. I know that most of them are honest and do their best in a bloody awful job, in a country where even serial burglars routinely get community sentences (primarily the fault of successive government policies, with courts also sharing some of the blame). But there are plenty of signs that British policing in general is at a real low ebb right now and desperately reaching for all of the positive news stories it can get.

Without wishing to go overboard on defending the company (I'm yet to be convinced by their console and would agree with you on recoery mode), is their attitude on custom firmware really "shocking"? I mean, my interpretation of that quotation is:

"We're not ruling it out, but we have finite time, finite resources and a lot of other things to focus on. Custom firmware is something that matters an awful lot to a very small number of people. We'll get around to it when we can, but it probably won't be any time soon."

Which is probably a fair enough comment, given we are not talking about some vast multinational company here.

Yes, damn those pesky independent game developers who really would quite like it if they could make a living by selling their games. The blood-sucking parasites who put time into making games and then sickeningly say they'd like to focus their attention on the platforms where their sales might actually let them break even. The absolute epitome of sour, angry greed, aren't they?

Congratulations - you win the "Angry Communist Fuckwit of the Week" award. On slashdot, that's quite an accolade.

Undoubtedly a horrible idea. But some of the people we're talking about here are, shall we say, at the Homer Simpson end of the intelligence spectrum. And so it happens...