... have always talked about on here.

Software patents are tired, pointless and ultimately just fucking dumb.

Watching the patent wars that are continuing to errupt in the mobile telecoms market is clear evidence of this. Everyone is suing everyone else for breaching ideas, rather than implementations.

I may have gotten this completely wrong, due to all the Chinese Whispers that comes with this kind of thing, but if it's true, how on earth can Apple patent the idea of recognising a phone number in a piece of text. Jesus Christ, you can do that with a fucking regular expression..!

(surely the above is not what they're suing HTC over, right???)

Software patents need to go, as this is all starting to become fucking ridiculous.

Instead of innovation to draw customers and and generate revenue, Microsoft, Apple and even now HTC are reaching into their portfolios and waving crappy bits of paper in each others faces.

"Customers? We don't need customers!" they screech. "We're just going to make our money off you, instead!"

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Others may not agree, but to me Portal 2 is AAA. I watched my brother playing through the single player (on PS3) and thought that the length of the game was spot on.

We then started on the split-screen co-op (which plays really nice!). I was expecting it to last maybe 2 hours or so, over just a handful of levels. How very wrong. The game seems never ending! Every time I believe we've gotten to the end, GLADOS opens up yet another set of missions to play.

I guess the real measure of things is this: how long is a piece of string? As long as it needs to be. A game, movie, book, etc. should be as long as they need to be to fulfill their purpose.

If a shooter is 4 hours long, but gives you one hell of a ride that would have been ruined at additional padding, then it's served its purpose. If its 30 hours long and gives you a deep, engaging experience, filled with memories and interesting experiences, then that's good, too.

... of the wicked king Gate, who tormented his peoples by raping and pilaging the standards. For he believed that from his throne, only he could command what people who read and see, and how they should do it.

"Help us!" cried the people. "Will someone please do away with this madman and bring us technology that we can love and a man whom we can follow and trust!"

And lo, did a man step up, his man Jobs, his name noble and his deeds promising to be just. Gathering an army of Pods, he made for Gate's castle, unseating him and casting him from the realm.

His peoples set up shop, The Apple Store, and all was good for many years. The people prospered, adoring his fine gifts of Pods and Phones and TVs and Books.

Peace had come to the kingdom of Net...

... or so it seemed. For Jobs grew comfortable in his position, feeling that it was his right and his only to remain here. Turning to his closest servants his said to them: "We must keep the unworthy from this place! In order to keep Net free and clean, we must destroy the Flash!"

"Gordon?" came the reply.

"All of them," Jobs said, as he stood on his balcony. He then grinned, turning to face the seas of W3C, the Free Lands. "Tonight, the true battle begins... and nothing can save them. Not Google, nor their Androids." He patted at the papers in his cloak, the Patents of Power; the ancient documents that would mean he could never be defeated...

The Moral of the Story: Power Corrupts :)

Whilst I have read a lot of people pointing fingers at Sony and jeering them for this breach, some of the more savvy commentators are now asked how safe ANY online data really is.

Suppose you really did have a situation where the user's personal details and CC data were encrypted. Would you actually just put a press release along the lines of:

"Yeah, we got hacked. The hacker downloaded 77 million account details, all of which was AES secured. Nothing to see here, move along."

Or, would you tell people to delete their CC details and change their password anyway..?

I'm not saying that encryption is pointless, but it feels like the reasonable action would still be to err on the side of caution.

In a situation like this, there's no knowing how far the criminal underworld might be willing to go to attempt to crack the data wide open. Some might already employ massive server farms for this very purpose.

This is Sony we're talking about - they will of course have installed in a rootkit into the data... ;)

I don't know about anyone else, but I was beginning to get very pissed off with looking up things on Google and constantly being linked to Big Resource, which was just a huge page of nothing.

Gettin' even bigger? Get as big as you like, you'll soon not see any visits from me...

... that the idea behind human rights was to prevent torture, exploitation and give everyone the right to the fair trial.

Internet access? How pathetic the human race has become.

... I don't mean to sound negative, but I expect a number of these aren't people who are genuinely interested in computer science, more the kind of person who wants to write an iPhone app and retire a millionaire within 5 years...

TFA says "out", not "off"

Sendo

"Unfortunately although Google has moved swiftly to remove the apps, they have already been downloaded by at least 50,000 Android users"

Bet that remote kill and remove ability that some people were bitching about a few months back isn't looking like such a bad thing right now, is it?

Just wait until the Daily Mail gets a load of this..

Kung Lao Buzzsaw fatality

My favourite horror game of all time has to be Silent Hill 2. It worked on so many levels, the entire town becoming the James' own personal hell until he was finally able to confront the truth of what had really happened to him.

It was a game that genuinely terrified me at times, but not due to the gore, which there was not that much of, but the psychological fear it evoked, often making me wish that I could make James just turn around and drive away from that place.

I found myself not wanting to boat across the lake to reach the hotel, knowing it could only result in something utterly awful for him.

And that plot twist. Wow. Just... wow. Sounds weird, but I'll never forget staring at the TV screen, open-mouthed not believing what I was seeing.

"The most frustrating part of this is that Watchmen was actually *good*"

Yes, right up until they changed the ending and basically implied that an American man, rather than an alien race, was responsible for the destruction of New York city.

I always thought that the point of the ending in the comic book was to gather the human race together, to defend themselves against an alien aggressor. In the movie, it felt as though the attack had been perpetrated by a man who was at one time in his life an American citizen...