The jokes about Darth Jar Jar were everywhere of course, but it could have worked. Star Wars lifted a few ideas from classic SF sources including Asimov's Foundation series - in which, we might recall, the terrifying, unstoppable galactic warlord known as The Mule was hiding in plain sight as a clown, who seemed to be merely a harmless entertainer at court. His military success was chiefly thanks to his psychic ability to manipulate others' minds to his liking - Darth Jar Jar could have done very well that way!

I saw three Star Wars movies when I was young. They were great. Mainly because I was a child and this stuff was new and fresh and exciting to me. Even the Ewoks.

I saw three more when I was not quite so young. They were... poor.

I saw a couple more when I was older. One was great, the other was okay but a retread of one of the old ones, and I never got round to seeing the rest. Didn't care enough.

Now they've got more, and apparently they're based on a TV series they did, which I didn't watch because I wasn't subscribed to that streaming platform at the time. So I'm not going to see those either. Same reason I've not seen a Marvel superhero film since the first Avengers one - just too much homework required with all the backstory. Every scene is a shout out or reference that I won't get. Every character seems to be getting ever louder and angrier and more and more of them have access to time machines. I just don't have it in me to care anymore.

I like the sound of these horror films, though. They're going to tell a complete story? In one film? With a beginning, middle and end, that don't ask me to be up to date on an entire Cinematic Universe? Sounds great, time to check where they're showing!

A modern version of GTA London would be the absolute dream. Been long enough now, you could set it in the nineties and have the same retro value to it!

... why unions aren't much more common among technology workers. Especially given what you hear about the videogame industry in particular, with that mad 'crunch time' culture in which workers are ruthlessly, well, crunched. I'd always ask, well, what does your union say about it? And what do you know, there isn't one, how about that.

Nice to hear of some progress being made, then. I suppose the risk with this for the rest of us is that GTA 6 might be late to release, but, uh, at this point I think we're over that

God bless Lili St. Cyr!

Serious? No. I don't seriously expect really safe speed limits to be set up by any democracy that has so many motorists in it. But I do think that's what we ought to do. As a civilisation, we are killing our own children at an appalling rate, just so that motorists can catch up to the back of the next long line of stationary traffic a few seconds faster. In town, slow down.

Look at the scenario you described. A car doing the speed limit towards a marked crosswalk... it's such a familiar scenario that we forget to be horrified. Think about what we're doing here. We have footpaths across the street specifically for people to walk across. And then we have motorists driving straight at those footpaths, at such speed that it would literally be a crime to go any faster at all, at such speed that they couldn't possibly stop should anyone suddenly walk out on the path. These motorists expect everyone else in the world to pay attention, to stay out of their way. God forbid they themselves should slow down! They're 'doing the limit' and that makes it OK.

That limit is obviously much too high. It should come down. Twenty is plenty.

Then let's redesign those footpaths. At the moment there are raised paths either side of the street, and when the path runs across the middle of the street it is lowered. For the convenience of motorists, of course; otherwise they might have to slow down. Well, let them slow down! The path across the street is a pedestrian walkway just like the paths either side, so let's have it at the same height, for the convenience of people using wheelchairs, people pushing infants in prams, people with mobility issues. We'll put a gentle slope to either side of the path so that it isn't a nasty bump for motor traffic. Well, I mean - so that it isn't a nasty bump if the motor traffic is moving at a safe speed.

Yeah, speed limits are definitely way too high, you're right about that. 20mph in cities is plenty. Then you have a lot longer in which to notice people walking across the road, your brakes have much less work to do in order to bring the vehicle safely to a stop, and if you still fail to respond in time you'll do much less bodily harm to somebody.

you would long for the good old days when the worst you could get linked to is the goatse.cx guy

'Would'? Where've you been for the last five years? hello.jpg is positively vanilla by modern standards. People nowadays link you to 2girls1cup, 3guys1hammer, SWAP.AVI, Pain Olympics, anythingatall.on.nimp.org, cp, beheadings, mutilations, massacres, cat burnings, witch burnings... If you're still thinking of good old goatse as the worst thing in the world, wow. Go and hang around on the Russian chans, you'll find what you describe has long since come to pass.

Well, clearly you've never had a run-in with the complaints department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

Please share and enjoy.

Eh? I thought we were talking about Radiohead here.

Well, if you have a problem with 'share and enjoy', I suppose you'll just have to go stick your head in a pig.

If you make a derivation/fork with the open source Java code Oracle only extends patent grants if your fork passes Oracle's expensive certification tests for Java. This certification is impractical for most people or organizations and is inherently impossible for anybody who is interested in making a new language with the code or adapting some of the code for other purposes.

In summary:

• an alternative open source Java is quite difficult because the of the costs of certification
• use the open source Java codebase for anything else and Oracle can sue you for patent violations
• contributing to Oracle's existing OpenJDK codebase is fine

Well, look, we can analyse the details of the plot and deduce the necessity for off-screen time travel. I mean, we know full well the Doctor has all manner of adventures that don't get televised, he was only ~600 when we first met him and now he claims to be in his 900s and everyone knows he's fibbing about that (and by the way, Doctor, regenerating as a younger man every time is fooling nobody). So there's centuries of the Doctor's life we simply don't see happen.

Plotting only the time journeys that made it onto TV is more than enough of a job. Exploring the rest of the timey wimey ball... well, my monitor has only a two-dimensional display.

Seems to me that there's no need for the robots to meet to have sex. Obviously in deep space that's going to be a problem, what with distances and speeds. Instead, the robots could quite easily have sex by radio. Sex is, after all, just a way of exchanging genomic data. Let the robot broadcast excerpts from its own design data archive to anybody who cares to listen; let a robot hearing the broadcast patch the input data together with its own design data to produce hybrids.

Certainly this is unnecessary if we're postulating superintelligent machines perfectly capable of redesigning themselves on the fly to meet whatever situations they encounter. But the road to a Culture GSV is a long one. You might well begin with a swarm of rather dumb self-replicating probes with very limited capabilities - I mean, somewhere down the line there must have been an intelligent designer, and so the progenitor robot would have had to be incredibly basic. But if you give them the means to exchange design details with each other over long distances - this worked, this didn't - then eventually you might indeed have a horde of sexy, sexy von Neumann machines, all procreating and evolving their way to becoming a galaxy-spanning intelligent race in their own right.

And anyway, even if the robots do not exchange design data - if they don't have sex at all - well, most living things on Earth don't have sex either. Doesn't disqualify them from the 'life' category.

There might or might not be a $20 bill in my wallet; I won't know for certain until I look for it?

No, cash behaves fairly classically. It's the rest of the economy that's quantum. For example, your house might or might not be worth $200,000. You won't know for certain until you try to sell it.

Didn't a bunch of whackjobs a few years ago try and claim that Hurricane Katrina was the result of some Weather Control Device created by the Axis of Evil?

That was created by HAARP as well. As was the Haiti earthquake. And the Indian Ocean tsunami.

Bloody versatile device, all things considered.