Not to mention the shops are awful for browsing. What they need is some system where I can pick up a game I've not seen/heard about, scan it at a booth and pull up gameplay video, reviews, etc, even be able to try it out before I buy. Having 20 copies of an identical empty box with three lines of blurb and an artist rendition of the game tells me nothing as a potential customer. They should be doing more of what tabletop game stores do. Run game nights with leagues and competitions, help people connect with other local gamers who enjoy the same types of games, turn it from somewhere you only go if you want the game right now and everywhere else on the high street is sold out to somewhere you actively want to go and spend time. They could do most of this with volunteers (give them some kind of loyalty rewards/discount vouchers for helping out) and it needn't cost them much at all. That's how a bricks and mortar game store differentiates itself from internet/supermarket stores. Cramming people in like cattle and filling all available space with stuffed Yoshi dolls isn't going to cut it.

I wonder if it's to do with capacity at peak times. Perhaps having two or three stores during their peak run up to Christmas generates enough additional profit (or at least they were hoping it would but it sounds like they miscalculated) to cover the surplus stores for the rest of the year (and since they can't just rent and outfit the stores they need for those three months, it's better to have them open than closed so long as they're breaking even). The Game and Gamestation proximity thing is easier to explain, as they were originally competitors and Game bought Gamestation out. Likely they had sufficiently long leases on some of the Gamestation stores that, again, it made more sense to keep them open and breaking even than close them but still pay rent.

The article alluded to the one benefit bricks and mortar games stores can offer, unfortunately it's one thing Game never got right. It specifically says game stores are needed so that customers can try before they buy, yet Game and Gamestation where always awful for this. If you were lucky there'd be one or two consoles switched on, more often than not the controllers wouldn't be hooked up so there was no "trying" component, and god forbid you ask them to reconnect them or, even worse, throw in a different game to the one that's looping through the start screen demo... not gonna happen. The stores themselves are cramped, every available space crammed with junk merchandise, the staff waver between jumping on you if they think you're looking at a big ticket purchase like a sale or ignoring you if you have questions about anything else (right up until it's time to pay where they'll offer you five or six point of sale offers you're clearly not interested in).

I genuinely think they should make the stores more like a hangout, big comfy sofas, a whole bunch of consoles (with some kind of hub system so you can choose which games you want to try). They could easily stop people abusing it by limiting the amount of time you can play games (have you create some kind of account in store and then use a system similar to OnLive, give you 30 minutes per title to try it out). There's not really any need to have every available shelf space crammed with copies of games, either - use that space to make the place a more inviting venue for customers. I avoid Game stores like a plague as you really feel like cattle, churned through the store (it's so crammed you can only move in one direction), channeled through the point of sale then dumped out onto the street. I'd rather wait two or three days and save money than subject myself to that. Create a more relaxed, fun atmosphere and people will be willing to spend time in your store and that in turn will lead to spending.

We didn't listen to those people during the last 25 years of fossil fuel burning, so why do we need to listen to them now? There will always be fundamentalists at both ends of the spectrum, that doesn't mean the rest of us can't recognise a need to move away from fossil fuel burning and towards cleaner alternatives as a good thing and accept some compromises. It's just a shame big oil's lobbyists prevented us doing so much earlier.

Did you not just answer your own question before you asked it? The reason it's being given away is because your participation is valuable to them. Sure, it might go away at some point, but it's doubtful it will just be turned off without warning. On the other hand solving speech to text is not a trivial thing, especially considering language is constantly evolving, if they're deriving benefit from being able to gather this data then it's not something they'll suddenly stop gaining benefit from in the near future.

Not to mention that the US isn't the only market where they could get a foot in the door. Auctioning of the spectrum is currently a hot topic here in the UK with current and potential new carriers all squabbling about who should be first in line. Given the smaller size of the market and the comparatively large size of business done via mobile/internet (largest ecommerce spend per head in the world) it would be a great proving ground for Google to trial such a service without committing to a larger, logistically more troublesome market right off the bat.

No, this doesn't make sense. If there's some guy selling copies of your work on the local market, and he's an amazing salesman, it's not hypochritical of you to approach him and ask if he wants to sell the real thing instead. If that deal falls through then it's still not hypochritical to go report him to the police. And in any event, one party being a hypochrite bears no weight on the legality or illegality of the other party's actions. I'm certainly not going to stand up and argue in favour of MPAA/RIAA as I think they're vampiric entities that need to be ended, but like GP I feel I'm missing whatever point Dotcom is making.

Maybe we shouldn't have names on ballots at all. Maybe ballots should be a list of the party promises, in random order, re-written by an independent body to remove any rhetoric or identifying information, and people have to actually read and understand the policies they're voting on, not just vote for the tallest guy with the best haircut.

This, to me, is the single biggest issue in politics. There is zero accountability any more. You can basically take a look at the latest exit polls, figure out which way the wind is blowing, promise whatever it takes to get into power and there is nothing in place to ensure you do any of it. Broken election promises seem to be the norm these days. I'd argue for a system where manifesto pledges had to be categorised into "We will definitely do these" and "We will aim to do these", and by law the items in list A have to be implemented (or at least tabled and given full party support in any vote). Make it so that failure to fulfil List A pledges prevents the party forming a government in the next term so there's some real teeth (and of course, give the possibility of a referendum if, for some unforseen reason, the party really does think it can't deliver on a particular promise). We'd quickly see parties re-arranging their goals if they were held accountable for them in this way, it would be interesting to see how many hot topic pormises get pushed into List B, making it clear they were just empty promises. Of course, all of this is a pipe dream, the people who have the power to enact it never will, turkeys don't vote for Christmas.

I totally agree, it's a shame in some ways that their roots have given them the piracy tag and this will be used as a means of attack by their political opponents, because what we've really needed for a long time now is a technologically aware party. One who actually understands the basics of, and can see the pitfalls in, many of the poorly thought out, lobbyist-driven laws we're seeing enter the statute books.

Indeed, almost all of the proposed solutions to the big issues (in terms of the environment) are technological solutions. This almost demands a party who recognise that rampant abuse of IP law needs to be reined in so that it's no longer one of the major stumbling blocks to technical innovation.

I wonder how many of those hundreds of millions are still actively using the instant messenger component, since I notice logging into Hotmail seems to log me into web messenger (at least by default) and I assume those instances also count towards this total.

They knew this once, that's why the TARDIS was written to be so unreliable. You couldn't rely on it to go back five minutes and give you time to defuse the bomb or whatever. At best, you point it at a destination in time and space and end up vaguely in the ballpark. This meant you could use it as a device to put the characters in new and interesting situations, but if your plan to save the day relied on getting it into one exact position at one exact time (using it to catch River Song after she jumps out of a tall building in the recent series, for instance), then you'd better go back to the drawing board.

I think Smith could have made a much better doctor if he'd been given the role ten years later. I don't understand the need for ever younger doctors, I'd like to see a return to an older actor with more gravitas. I really liked Tenant, but mainly because he brought something different to the role, I don't want that approach to become the norm.

You missed the part about being cowards or dying all the time. Both Mickey and Rory were protrayed, at least at the start, as bumbling idiots more interested in running away from danger than diving in (and reluctantly being dragged into dangerous situations by their headstrong female companions). Both did eventually get storylines in which they got to play a more heroic role, but then it seems like the interest in doing anything with them tapers out and they either revert to form, or they leave, or we see an event every week that isolates them from the doctor and the female companion who go on to save the day themselves.