the government does follow this route, the real bonus would be better transparency. Procurement in general in the public sector is poor - those of us working in defence often seriously question the choices that are made, not to mention the massive overspends and delays.

That said, the average person in the UK is more interested in what celebrities are doing than how their government spends their taxes.

Yes: Booble, NudeVista and the excellently named "Mr Stiff". You can Google them. ;-p

See this is the problem with Wikipedia references.

I haven't seen the show, I'm in the UK, but I know the reason Italian-American interest groups are offended is because of a recent incident where "Snooki" was punched by a man who fits the stereotype they object to.

The interesting thing is MTV's hypocrisy over dealing with the issue, they blacked out the assault when shown on TV and offered a link to a support line after the show but showed a male being assaulted during another show about teen pregnancy.

Must be all about the memory, I had it running on a DX33 with 8Mb. It was fine but I remeber having a terrible time with a driver for the Avance Logic graphics card that it had fitted. Things like the clock (when you double clicked the time) as the hand swept round the screen wasn't redrawn.

Strangest thing was that the card worked fine in Slackware.

...eh? That's rubbish.

I thought that was funny.

Deploying a game for an entire cohort to play at the same time requires more problem-solving than you might expect. We ultimately decided that hardware, installation, and licensing issues were complex enough to dissuade us from teaching Portal in all sections of the course this year; so I and a group of eager colleagues will play the game in our sections to work out the kinks. I don't want our first college-wide experience with a game to be plagued with problems.

I'm sure when the issue of accessibility will be identified.

I'm not blaming Sony and I didn't say I was. I said that if PSN was subscriber funded it would encourage Sony to put pressure on developers to fix bugs IF PSN started losing subscribers.

You can only mute in game, not in the waiting areas.

100% legit e-meters

Never thought I'd see that on Slashdot!

What I find with PSN is that a lot of games, big titles too (Call of Duty 4 and 5 for example) have some horrendous bugs that ruin online play - such as the (now patched) CoD5 Castle level where you could get under the play area and kill but not be killed.

If Sony pays the bills with content providers and not from its customers subscriptions then there isn't the direct incentive to put pressure on developers to fix games quickly that there would be if the customer base withdrew funding.

They also seem to care less about there customers online experience - PSN really needs the ability to kick some players - I'm all for freedom of speech but I'm sure it doesn't include the right to whistle in your headset or sit right in front of the TV creating the feedback loop from hell. I'd pay for that.

Can you clarify why (3)(2) gives them wiggle room:

"A person is guilty of an offence if at the time when he does the act he has the requisite intent and the requisite knowledge to cause a modification of the contents of any computer and by so doing impair the operation of any such program or the reliability of any such data."

IANAL but that seems pretty watertight and section 17 paragraph 18 is also pretty succinct:

"(8) Such a modification is unauthorised if-- (a) the person whose act causes it is not himself entitled to determine whether the modification should be made; and (b) he does not have consent to the modification from any person who is so entitled. "