My expectation is that if my taxes are funding their salaries that pays them to run the country, then as public figures they should be expected to behave in a "whiter-than-white" manner.
I'm probably a similar age to Ms. Harman and I, and many other people like me, have managed to get to this age without criminal records because we've always taken responsibility for our actions and considered the ramifications of what we do before we do it - if you've been brought up a moral (and as an agnostic I don't necessarily mean religious) and decent person, it's fairly automatic and not difficult to do.
Yes, people make mistakes and the legal system exists to punish those mistakes accordingly - but if you're in a responsible position then you have a duty to lead by example.
I'm no fan of the monarchy but I'll bet you that the Civil List wastes about 1000 times less public money than the lazy good-for-nothings who draw unemployment benefit who can't be bothered to get a job, the proportion of the 3,000,000 drawing sickness benefit who have nothing wrong with them, and the amount the National Health Service wastes on overpaid managers & giving free treatment to health tourists.
Our monarchy hasn't helped its reputation with the silly scandals in recent years but the undeniable fact is that they do give something back to the country by encouraging trade and tourism.
And if we're going to scrap the monarchy, let's also scrap the hereditary peers and the "boys club on an endless public-funded jolly" that is the House Of Lords.
Just to correct you, it was Jacqui Smith who was involved in the porn on expenses scandal.
However, the pair of them are evil, menopausal bitches from hell - and Harriet Harlot was also the one who toured her own constituency in an armoured vest.
Personally, I'm not letting the pair of them anywhere near my cock.
The following list of things should not be considered as trustworthy babysitters and are no substitute for proper parenting skills:
An Internet connected PC A box of fireworks A games console A set of throwing knives
Now kindly stop with trying to fulfill your lives by shitting out more kids that you're not prepared to be responsible for and expecting the rest of us to make concessions for them.
So presumably Facebook is a danger to kids whilst her talking on a mobile phone while driving is safe for kids who could be out in the street at the time?
I do find our government's attitude to the whole child porn thing somewhat amusing.
Firstly, the subject gets brought up every time the government wants to win brownie points with the great unwashed - yet the reality of the situation is that kids are far more likely to suffer mental and physical abuse from bullying peers at school rather than the supposed paedophiles that we're told are there on every street corner.
Secondly, the whole child porn thing could be stopped in its tracks if spineless governments actually took on the big financial corporations & forced them to police themselves. Thankfully I'm no expert on child porn but the solution seems fairly logical - the stuff is being produced to make money for someone, therefore there are lots of credit card transactions going on in the sale of the stuff. Therefore force the credit card companies to police those transactions and stop them happening - if they don't, name and shame them in the public media.
I'm just saying it like I see it, I don't do the "celebrity worship" thing - as far as I'm concerned, I pay money for musicians or actors to entertain me and what they do between bouts of entertaining me is their own business.
But I'm sure Shatner has accumulated enough wealth during his career to never need to earn any more money ever again - so I'm sure there's other reasons he's doing it.
There are lots of people who will go to the Louvre Museum in Paris, look at the Mona Lisa and say "That's nice", then move on to look at something else.
Others will go look at the same painting & be so enthused by it that they'll want to know more about the mind of Leonardo Da Vinci... they'll go see his other work, buy books containing pictures of his paintings, read a biography on his life...
Music's no different. Some people can sit down and enjoy a piece of music, then go do something else - others feel the need to here demo tracks from when the album was recorded, maybe they want to hear unreleased tracks, perhaps they're interested in hearing the music remastered...
Box sets just appeal to the enthusiasts, nothing more.
As I've purchased their entire discography, I'm coming round your house to collect the money you owe me for subsidising your music collection... or just to beat the living shit out of you...
Sorry, I'm getting a bit sick and tired of hearing the crap from you "rebellious Robin Hood music Musketeers" thinking you're doing the world a favour... the fact is that dishonest twats like you have something to obtain freely in the first place only because people like me go out and buy it.
If you think something is too expensive then get a backbone, don't buy it, don't copy it and send the seller an email or a letter explaining why you think it's overpriced - that way, I won't get DRM foisted on me as an honest buyer because people like you give them just the excuse they need to do it to me in the first place.
Your analogy is at fault - Pink Floyd are not withholding the sale of their music, just withholding some of the ways in which it can be sold. This is no different from, say, Levi's stopping supermarkets stocking their jeans or Apple only allowing their products to be sold through licensed stores.
Not that I'm a great Disney fan, but I would be very surprised if there was anywhere right now where I could go and digitally download every Disney movie title.
Solution - go find something else to listen to then...
Sorry to use a car analogy but you can't go into a car dealership and demand they sell you a car that has a Mercedes chassis, BMW engine & Rolls Royce interior...
"Have it your way" is fine for hamburgers but sometimes you just have to accept that you cannot customise *everything* to how you want it, particularly when it comes to stuff like art which comes from the mind of the creator(s) - sometimes, you just have to be satisfied with simply liking or disliking something the way it is.
Besides which, if you think, say £10 (or equivalent local currency) is a fair price to pay for a CD that's great from start to finish, then it also follows that £5 (or equivalent) is a fair price to pay for a CD where only half the tracks are good - in which case, wait for a bargain sale or buy it used.
...if you're stupid enough to part with good money just for the pleasure of having your hard disk heads move in such a way so as to create some crappy, lossy music files on your PC, then you're probably too stupid to appreciate their music...
Sorry, kiddies, but you need to face some facts - the vast majority of modern music is about elevating talentless people into the limelight as quickly as possible so they're too shell-shocked to demand too much in royalties; this maximises record company profits & means they're also cheap to dump when they start getting too greedy.
This in turn implies that due to a lack of musical ability, they're incapable of producing music albums that have more than one or two good tracks on them, thus explaining why the modern "great unwashed" now want to treat music like "Pick N Mix" sweeties and just choose the tracks they like (which also happen to be the only ones that are any good).
So speaking as the complete and utter music snob that I am, let me sit here and do nothing else but enjoy my nice hi-fidelity, old-fashioned Pink Floyd music CDs from start to finish on my nice expensive hi-fi system whilst you children go off & run around at the gym whilst listening to your "ever so modern" formulaic plastic music...
I have a lot of time & respect for Mr. Shatner these days - after spending decades as a bit of prima donna, in these twilight years of his he does appear to have developed something of a sense of humour & the ability to not take himself too seriously.
And whilst I don't deny his impact on sci-fi TV & movies, he has put his name to a total of three trilogies (yes, nine books!) detailing the second coming of Captain Kirk following his resurrection by the Borg after "joining the choir invisibule" in Star Trek Generations. For those of you who haven't read any of them, rumour has it they were ghost written by Judith & Garfield Reeve Stevens (who have written a host of other Trek books) but within those volumes, The Risen Kirk goes back to meet and ultimately defeat himself as the Emperor of the Mirror Universe, single-handedly defeats the remainder of the Borg race Picard didn't defeat in Star Trek First Contact, and has many other adventures alongside Picard, Janeway, and just about every other character & spaceship from TNG, DS9 & Voyager... and I haven't even read the last trilogy yet!
Don't get me wrong, they're occasional "The Adventure Book For Boys" fun pulpy reads in a similar fashion to those "Commando" war comics where every German stormtrooper dies at the dangerous end of a British Tommy's machine gun next to a "Yiearrggh!" speech bubble, but they're hardly classic science fiction...
I'm sure Bill's heart's in the right place & there's a fun element to what he's trying to do here - but I wouldn't ask a teenage McDonalds employee to give me his opinion on cordon bleu cookery, so I'm certainly not going to take Bill's views on sci-fi too seriously either...
My gaming history goes back some 25 years now, back to the days of the ZX Spectrum & the Commodore Amiga.
In those days, it was possible for a single programmer or tiny software house to create games that were very new & different, I remember strategy games like X-Com/UFO Enemy Unknown, Millennium 2.2 and Deuteros (its sequel), Dungeon Master and Civilization (I) with particular fondness...
But I think it's unfair to pan modern games & modern gamers, just like it's unfair to pan modern music. Ultimately, nobody forces an old duffer like me to buy and play/listen to all the modern stuff, & in both cases there's enough old stuff out there to keep me entertained anyway - plus there's the occasional modern game/music CD that grabs my attention anyway.
Personally, I'd like to see two things happen in the games industry:
1. Games are given a very fixed lifespan of, say, 10 years, after which time games companies are "encouraged" to release the source code to the general programmer population, thus ensuring that old games can be tweaked/recompiled for newer platforms, and,
2. Games companies paying more attention to mod programmers, due to the number of mods that start off as great ideas but never see completion. Ultimately it's about programmers not realising the work involved before they begin it and ultimately not being able to devote the level of free time necessary. If games companies "sponsored" mod programmers by letting them take some money for their work, maybe hosting the mods on their own sites and taking a percentage cut.
Yes, ultimately that's not the way the games industry works, they want formulaic sequels that guarantee massive profits from sales within the first couple of weeks of release; but I'd also argue that there's an untapped market of "old duffers" like me who could potentially be spending a lot more on games but don't do so because there's not much that gets released these days that they fancy playing.
I have come across WoG before but never got around to loading it up, I will do so based on your recommendation.
As for VCMI, that's a new one on me but a quick look at the site has told me it's something I definitely need to keep an eye on - so thanks for the recommendations...
I've not really got into Supreme Commander at all but TA had a unit limit of 500, 100 by default if you didn't tweak the totala.ini file. And probably 1/4 to 1/3 of those "units" were factories, mines, wind generators, etc. So I think it's fair to call TA "skirmishing" on that basis.
A couple of times a month, a few friends of mine play LAN games of Red Alert 2, Starcraft, TA and games of that ilk. One friend of mine in particular has a strategy of sneaking in "behind enemy lines" and attacking the rear, something that actually adds to the fun of playing the game with him and which wouldn't be possible if you could zoom out to see the whole battlefield.
So I would argue that a zoom feature can give "too much information" and detract from the game somewhat...
I basically read that as, "I don't know why I don't like it, but I'm going to pull a reason out of my ass and as an added bonus, it makes me look like an elitist prick."
And I read that as you having an inability to present your argument in a rational way without resorting to abuse.
My friend, you need to remember "it takes all types to make a world". Just like I have absolutely no interest in games like Modern Warfare 2 and tried World of Warcraft and didn't think much of it, does not make me right and everyone else wrong.
Deep strategy games will only ever appeal to a minority which is why, I state again, that some games have been dumbed down in their sequels, in order to appeal to more people - it does not mean I expect *ALL* games to be deep strategy, it is just an observation based on over a quarter century of computer gaming experience.
Now please excuse me - I've wasted enough time on your trolling and would prefer to read intelligent responses from people.
I admire anybody who can play a single game many times over using different strategies - I always end up being "Mr. Highly Advanced" and/or "Mr. Super Nice".
I tend to take the viewpoint that if I've got the most advanced hardware then I need less of it protecting my cities (Civilization) or planets (Master Of Orion 2/Galactic Civilizations). Because I pump so much focus on technological advancement, my defences are always very light so I end up having to be super nice to everyone so they don't pick any fights with me during the early parts of the game - at least in GalCiv 2 you can "sell" older technology to other races that not only subsidises the huge tax deficit because almost your entire population are scientists, but also makes them a bit more friendlier to you anyway.
Even in Fallout 3 I've tried being Mr. Evil but that lasted about 4 hours before I got bored with it!
I do own Civ IV as I bought it in the "Civilization Chronicles" box set, I installed it briefly but, perhaps unfairly, was put off by the 3D graphics before getting into it fully.
I'm not sure if I'm really a total Civ freak anyway because the version I play most is Test Of Time because I really like the Space Race ending... I remember at the time it got quite badly panned by reviewers who seemed to prefer Call To Power.
I will make a point of installing and trying Civ 4 again in the very near future...
Slashdot Mirror
My expectation is that if my taxes are funding their salaries that pays them to run the country, then as public figures they should be expected to behave in a "whiter-than-white" manner.
I'm probably a similar age to Ms. Harman and I, and many other people like me, have managed to get to this age without criminal records because we've always taken responsibility for our actions and considered the ramifications of what we do before we do it - if you've been brought up a moral (and as an agnostic I don't necessarily mean religious) and decent person, it's fairly automatic and not difficult to do.
Yes, people make mistakes and the legal system exists to punish those mistakes accordingly - but if you're in a responsible position then you have a duty to lead by example.
I'm no fan of the monarchy but I'll bet you that the Civil List wastes about 1000 times less public money than the lazy good-for-nothings who draw unemployment benefit who can't be bothered to get a job, the proportion of the 3,000,000 drawing sickness benefit who have nothing wrong with them, and the amount the National Health Service wastes on overpaid managers & giving free treatment to health tourists.
Our monarchy hasn't helped its reputation with the silly scandals in recent years but the undeniable fact is that they do give something back to the country by encouraging trade and tourism.
And if we're going to scrap the monarchy, let's also scrap the hereditary peers and the "boys club on an endless public-funded jolly" that is the House Of Lords.
If you're a British politician, you automatically go on "Arsebook".
If you're a parent without parental responsibility, your "Facebook" account gets transferred to "Arsebook".
And if you've queued up at midnight for a computer game or an iPhone, you go into the "Arsebook" "What A Total Arse" section.
That'll soon learn them...
I stand by the link - if you're going to force your morality on others then it's a damn good idea to be a fine upstanding citizen yourself.
Sorry, didn't cut and paste the second link correctly:
Harriet Harlot in an armoured vest
Just to correct you, it was Jacqui Smith who was involved in the porn on expenses scandal.
However, the pair of them are evil, menopausal bitches from hell - and Harriet Harlot was also the one who toured her own constituency in an armoured vest.
Personally, I'm not letting the pair of them anywhere near my cock.
The following list of things should not be considered as trustworthy babysitters and are no substitute for proper parenting skills:
An Internet connected PC
A box of fireworks
A games console
A set of throwing knives
Now kindly stop with trying to fulfill your lives by shitting out more kids that you're not prepared to be responsible for and expecting the rest of us to make concessions for them.
...that got done by the police for driving without due care and attention?
So presumably Facebook is a danger to kids whilst her talking on a mobile phone while driving is safe for kids who could be out in the street at the time?
I do find our government's attitude to the whole child porn thing somewhat amusing.
Firstly, the subject gets brought up every time the government wants to win brownie points with the great unwashed - yet the reality of the situation is that kids are far more likely to suffer mental and physical abuse from bullying peers at school rather than the supposed paedophiles that we're told are there on every street corner.
Secondly, the whole child porn thing could be stopped in its tracks if spineless governments actually took on the big financial corporations & forced them to police themselves. Thankfully I'm no expert on child porn but the solution seems fairly logical - the stuff is being produced to make money for someone, therefore there are lots of credit card transactions going on in the sale of the stuff. Therefore force the credit card companies to police those transactions and stop them happening - if they don't, name and shame them in the public media.
Green Orion women have voracious sexual appetites so are unlikely to be virgins.
I, on the other hand...
I suspect the database fields are out of alignment.
I'm just saying it like I see it, I don't do the "celebrity worship" thing - as far as I'm concerned, I pay money for musicians or actors to entertain me and what they do between bouts of entertaining me is their own business.
But I'm sure Shatner has accumulated enough wealth during his career to never need to earn any more money ever again - so I'm sure there's other reasons he's doing it.
There are lots of people who will go to the Louvre Museum in Paris, look at the Mona Lisa and say "That's nice", then move on to look at something else.
Others will go look at the same painting & be so enthused by it that they'll want to know more about the mind of Leonardo Da Vinci... they'll go see his other work, buy books containing pictures of his paintings, read a biography on his life...
Music's no different. Some people can sit down and enjoy a piece of music, then go do something else - others feel the need to here demo tracks from when the album was recorded, maybe they want to hear unreleased tracks, perhaps they're interested in hearing the music remastered...
Box sets just appeal to the enthusiasts, nothing more.
Please send me a reply with your address in it.
As I've purchased their entire discography, I'm coming round your house to collect the money you owe me for subsidising your music collection... or just to beat the living shit out of you...
Sorry, I'm getting a bit sick and tired of hearing the crap from you "rebellious Robin Hood music Musketeers" thinking you're doing the world a favour... the fact is that dishonest twats like you have something to obtain freely in the first place only because people like me go out and buy it.
If you think something is too expensive then get a backbone, don't buy it, don't copy it and send the seller an email or a letter explaining why you think it's overpriced - that way, I won't get DRM foisted on me as an honest buyer because people like you give them just the excuse they need to do it to me in the first place.
...unless it's the "Animals" album, in which case they conpigenate all the songs into one file.
Your analogy is at fault - Pink Floyd are not withholding the sale of their music, just withholding some of the ways in which it can be sold. This is no different from, say, Levi's stopping supermarkets stocking their jeans or Apple only allowing their products to be sold through licensed stores.
Not that I'm a great Disney fan, but I would be very surprised if there was anywhere right now where I could go and digitally download every Disney movie title.
Solution - go find something else to listen to then...
Sorry to use a car analogy but you can't go into a car dealership and demand they sell you a car that has a Mercedes chassis, BMW engine & Rolls Royce interior...
"Have it your way" is fine for hamburgers but sometimes you just have to accept that you cannot customise *everything* to how you want it, particularly when it comes to stuff like art which comes from the mind of the creator(s) - sometimes, you just have to be satisfied with simply liking or disliking something the way it is.
Besides which, if you think, say £10 (or equivalent local currency) is a fair price to pay for a CD that's great from start to finish, then it also follows that £5 (or equivalent) is a fair price to pay for a CD where only half the tracks are good - in which case, wait for a bargain sale or buy it used.
...if you're stupid enough to part with good money just for the pleasure of having your hard disk heads move in such a way so as to create some crappy, lossy music files on your PC, then you're probably too stupid to appreciate their music...
Sorry, kiddies, but you need to face some facts - the vast majority of modern music is about elevating talentless people into the limelight as quickly as possible so they're too shell-shocked to demand too much in royalties; this maximises record company profits & means they're also cheap to dump when they start getting too greedy.
This in turn implies that due to a lack of musical ability, they're incapable of producing music albums that have more than one or two good tracks on them, thus explaining why the modern "great unwashed" now want to treat music like "Pick N Mix" sweeties and just choose the tracks they like (which also happen to be the only ones that are any good).
So speaking as the complete and utter music snob that I am, let me sit here and do nothing else but enjoy my nice hi-fidelity, old-fashioned Pink Floyd music CDs from start to finish on my nice expensive hi-fi system whilst you children go off & run around at the gym whilst listening to your "ever so modern" formulaic plastic music...
Rant mode disengaged.
I have a lot of time & respect for Mr. Shatner these days - after spending decades as a bit of prima donna, in these twilight years of his he does appear to have developed something of a sense of humour & the ability to not take himself too seriously.
And whilst I don't deny his impact on sci-fi TV & movies, he has put his name to a total of three trilogies (yes, nine books!) detailing the second coming of Captain Kirk following his resurrection by the Borg after "joining the choir invisibule" in Star Trek Generations. For those of you who haven't read any of them, rumour has it they were ghost written by Judith & Garfield Reeve Stevens (who have written a host of other Trek books) but within those volumes, The Risen Kirk goes back to meet and ultimately defeat himself as the Emperor of the Mirror Universe, single-handedly defeats the remainder of the Borg race Picard didn't defeat in Star Trek First Contact, and has many other adventures alongside Picard, Janeway, and just about every other character & spaceship from TNG, DS9 & Voyager... and I haven't even read the last trilogy yet!
Don't get me wrong, they're occasional "The Adventure Book For Boys" fun pulpy reads in a similar fashion to those "Commando" war comics where every German stormtrooper dies at the dangerous end of a British Tommy's machine gun next to a "Yiearrggh!" speech bubble, but they're hardly classic science fiction...
I'm sure Bill's heart's in the right place & there's a fun element to what he's trying to do here - but I wouldn't ask a teenage McDonalds employee to give me his opinion on cordon bleu cookery, so I'm certainly not going to take Bill's views on sci-fi too seriously either...
My gaming history goes back some 25 years now, back to the days of the ZX Spectrum & the Commodore Amiga.
In those days, it was possible for a single programmer or tiny software house to create games that were very new & different, I remember strategy games like X-Com/UFO Enemy Unknown, Millennium 2.2 and Deuteros (its sequel), Dungeon Master and Civilization (I) with particular fondness...
But I think it's unfair to pan modern games & modern gamers, just like it's unfair to pan modern music. Ultimately, nobody forces an old duffer like me to buy and play/listen to all the modern stuff, & in both cases there's enough old stuff out there to keep me entertained anyway - plus there's the occasional modern game/music CD that grabs my attention anyway.
Personally, I'd like to see two things happen in the games industry:
1. Games are given a very fixed lifespan of, say, 10 years, after which time games companies are "encouraged" to release the source code to the general programmer population, thus ensuring that old games can be tweaked/recompiled for newer platforms, and,
2. Games companies paying more attention to mod programmers, due to the number of mods that start off as great ideas but never see completion. Ultimately it's about programmers not realising the work involved before they begin it and ultimately not being able to devote the level of free time necessary. If games companies "sponsored" mod programmers by letting them take some money for their work, maybe hosting the mods on their own sites and taking a percentage cut.
Yes, ultimately that's not the way the games industry works, they want formulaic sequels that guarantee massive profits from sales within the first couple of weeks of release; but I'd also argue that there's an untapped market of "old duffers" like me who could potentially be spending a lot more on games but don't do so because there's not much that gets released these days that they fancy playing.
I have come across WoG before but never got around to loading it up, I will do so based on your recommendation.
As for VCMI, that's a new one on me but a quick look at the site has told me it's something I definitely need to keep an eye on - so thanks for the recommendations...
I've not really got into Supreme Commander at all but TA had a unit limit of 500, 100 by default if you didn't tweak the totala.ini file. And probably 1/4 to 1/3 of those "units" were factories, mines, wind generators, etc. So I think it's fair to call TA "skirmishing" on that basis.
A couple of times a month, a few friends of mine play LAN games of Red Alert 2, Starcraft, TA and games of that ilk. One friend of mine in particular has a strategy of sneaking in "behind enemy lines" and attacking the rear, something that actually adds to the fun of playing the game with him and which wouldn't be possible if you could zoom out to see the whole battlefield.
So I would argue that a zoom feature can give "too much information" and detract from the game somewhat...
I basically read that as, "I don't know why I don't like it, but I'm going to pull a reason out of my ass and as an added bonus, it makes me look like an elitist prick."
And I read that as you having an inability to present your argument in a rational way without resorting to abuse.
My friend, you need to remember "it takes all types to make a world". Just like I have absolutely no interest in games like Modern Warfare 2 and tried World of Warcraft and didn't think much of it, does not make me right and everyone else wrong.
Deep strategy games will only ever appeal to a minority which is why, I state again, that some games have been dumbed down in their sequels, in order to appeal to more people - it does not mean I expect *ALL* games to be deep strategy, it is just an observation based on over a quarter century of computer gaming experience.
Now please excuse me - I've wasted enough time on your trolling and would prefer to read intelligent responses from people.
I admire anybody who can play a single game many times over using different strategies - I always end up being "Mr. Highly Advanced" and/or "Mr. Super Nice".
I tend to take the viewpoint that if I've got the most advanced hardware then I need less of it protecting my cities (Civilization) or planets (Master Of Orion 2/Galactic Civilizations). Because I pump so much focus on technological advancement, my defences are always very light so I end up having to be super nice to everyone so they don't pick any fights with me during the early parts of the game - at least in GalCiv 2 you can "sell" older technology to other races that not only subsidises the huge tax deficit because almost your entire population are scientists, but also makes them a bit more friendlier to you anyway.
Even in Fallout 3 I've tried being Mr. Evil but that lasted about 4 hours before I got bored with it!
I do own Civ IV as I bought it in the "Civilization Chronicles" box set, I installed it briefly but, perhaps unfairly, was put off by the 3D graphics before getting into it fully.
I'm not sure if I'm really a total Civ freak anyway because the version I play most is Test Of Time because I really like the Space Race ending... I remember at the time it got quite badly panned by reviewers who seemed to prefer Call To Power.
I will make a point of installing and trying Civ 4 again in the very near future...