No really. The television news services are really only interested in whose been raped/killed/imprisoned, and when it comes to foreign affairs, they show the nasty stuff more than anything.

if ten people out of thousands in a protest start to fight, or do something like break windows, *thats* what they show, and they call everyone there anarchists. Honestly, it makes me sick.

My last Employer actually expected me to write code in the morning! We are talking pre 10am here. I still have nightmares...

I agee completelly with your sentiment. (This post was brought to you by the new iPod shuffle).

Rubbish. I pay £12 for an unlimited 8mb connection. Really unlimited, we have caned it for three years now, sometimes over 200Gb a month, and its been fine.

I use Gmail, so the spam I get is nicely packed into the spam folder.

I don't just clear it though. An amusing minute can be had reading the subject lines they come up with before hitting the delete button.

This is a viewpoint I hadn't considered. I saw this and thought initially of the great programming experience the people involved would be having, not of the lack of originality.

Why should it try and compete? They don't have the money, true, but so what?

Did the people who wrote Narbaculer Drop have much money? Nope, did they create an awesome game that got picked up and remade as a hugely succesful commercial product? Yep.

Tried World of Goo yet? That was low budget, almost certainly less graphically pretty than would have been the case if they'd had more cash, but the game is a commercial success.

Good graphics and funding won't create good ideas. For that you need a passion for the subject, artistic ability and lots of experience with games in general.

Possibly the guys writing it may be getting more out of the experience then the people who play it, but thats because they are also getting exactly the skillset that would put them in a good position to apply for positions at games development companies.

I find a lot of younger players are habituated to beleive graphical goodness == a good game, so they look at these less visually impressive works and extrapolate that the game itself is poor. Its hard getting past that. My son has managed it, but only because he was trying to 'get' why I still play games that were written before he was born.

The simplest answer it "don't like something in a project? Join the project and improve it". Alas this isn't usually what happens, because for every person with the skills, there are a thousand with loud ideas and critisism but no actual ability. Trying to clear the cruft from the mass of potential project members is a problem that can make you just reject everyone.

I know, I had the same problem. After receiving a huge amount of offers to assist in my project, I only found one person with the right attitude and skill. Most came in with grand plans, and then disappeared before doing anything more than taking up my time with emails.

Unless the names or the people who paid were 'grnfrgleArghhhBurble' or 'snap'.

He co-wrote it. I have the comics here.

Alan Moore's Judge Dredd was a major part of my staple fiction diet during my youth. Those stories were dark, amusing, insightful, prophetic, and downright nasty and callous in places.

All in all excellent stuff, with some stories that still make me dig out my collection.
Yup, still got every one up in my loft, as bought from the newsagent each week as they came out.

Never read Watchment though, to be honest I hadn't heard of it till this movie. My main fascination is SF pulp from the fifties and sixties though, so I kind of hang out elsewhere in the SF biosphere.

How does it compare to Judge Dredd? (anyone who thinks I mean that godawful film needn't reply..)

Any system to be used in the event of a fire *cannot* be optional, or under the control of those subjected to it. Thats a fact, one learned the hard way in the past, that cannot be argued. Give people the option of not doing something, and they won't, at least not always, because 'nothings going to happen'.

Most likely it was someone who looked at the amount of physical registers needed for the current system, thought an electronical system would be cheaper/more efficient, and it got pushed through. I agree with the fire safety side,. Its a shame that people will likely need to die in fire even to start an 'urgent review' of the system if it gets widely adopted.

Whenever I read of things like this I'm always reminded of the university office of a lecturer whose research speciality was issues around the paperless office. Her room was so full of piles of papers, boxes of papers, books and other processed tree junk that she only had around a third of her desk available for her laptop. She also had *really* nice legs, but thats off message somewhat..

The issue is not whether to legitimise it, the issue is whether the industry trying to kill the second hand market will succeed in getting enough corporate mindshare to have it thought of as a bad thing.

Every major high street game pc/console game retailer I have seen has a secondhand section.
Amazon sell used books too, another practice that printed word distributers tried to kill off (a bizarre strategy in itself).

This limited activation DRM thing is part of the idea that secondhand game sales can be prevented, but it still doesn't work. All it means is those games become useless to someone in the habit of selling off their used games to buy new ones (I used to), so they tend not to purchase them new either.

Did you actually read my post?