I wonder if part the reason Sheffield has swung towards Lib Dem in the polls and in the 2008 local elections is because Nick Clegg their most recent leader is from there and he understands local issues well as a result maybe whilst at the same time, Labour appears to have completely and utterly lost the plot on almost everything. I'm not even sure they do much to protect the low paid now with their stunt the other year of removing the lowest tax band thereby increasing tax for the lowest paid people in society (i.e. those on less than around £16k a year iirc- ouch!)
It looks fairly decent- I notice it's secondary level though, is it mandatory or optional?
It's certainly better than nothing at least although it'll likely take at least another government term before kids brought up with it will be able to vote. Also there's an issue of whether schools offer it. Certainly I remember I was quite lucky to have a school in Leeds where I could opt to do Electronics, IT and Business studies- it was rare to find a school that offered all 3!
It's more a thing of jest, someone might say for example "I'm from Peterborough" but we'll just call them Londoners because anything that far south is "London". I guess it's a bit like how some people call Canadians Americans, it's a play on humorous ignorance of geography I guess;)
Yes, it's important to realise I'm not suggesting every kid that goes to a religious school is going to be indoctrinated but my point is more that there are a lot of parents out there who couldn't care less whether their kids grow up to have a choice of religion and don't even think about asking to opt-out for precisely the reason it is an opt-out. There are plenty of kids who come through church schools without being religious (I'm one, although only at primarily level did I go to a Church school) but there are also some that don't.
I believe it should be left to kids to decide for themselves what their beliefs are rather than have some beliefs forced into them over others at an age too young to tell any better such that some and again, of course, not all, grow up believing what they've been taught to believe is fact and furthermore, then believing they should attempt to push this belief on to others in cases where it's taught as part of that belief!
Some Church schools are a lot more open minded, but others aren't and it often comes down to the teachers- particularly the example I gave of a teacher making the kids pray to god before letting them go home which implies to the children that worshipping god is an important part of daily life when the reality is there's no reason they couldn't have gone home anyway!
Yes, but it also makes it easier for those who use the software to locate and fix the flaws first;)
To give a better explanation of why OSS is more secure though, think about this scenario. You have a web server on the wide open internet serving an important web page for your business or institution and any downtime will lose you thousands, maybe millions of pounds of profit (think how much Amazon would lose if it's site goes down for example). If you run an open source web server and an exploit is uncovered by security researchers that allows an attacker to take over your web server then you can edit the source code to fix it immediately, or at least put a quick fix in place to block the attack and have very little, perhaps even no downtime.
If however you rely on a propriatary vendor, say Microsoft, to fix it and it takes them 2 weeks to release a patch, what do you do in the meantime? Do you keep your web server up and risk having your web server hijacked or do you take it down and lose millions in business?
This is just an example, you can mitigate the problem by having a firewall block attacks but this only works to a degree. I wasn't too sure about why OSS myself was more secure for a while, but it's one of those things that when you look into the reasoning behind such comments you'll see realise that yes, they're right, OSS really is fundamentally a more secure concept.
Of course, the other thing to realise is that binaries are themselves fairly trivial to interpret for people who have a strong computer science background such that it's not even particularly a massively difficult task to spot exploits in closed source software. It is however often much harder to fix faults in closed source software in the same way.
We're you a product of our fine education system by any chance because your comments are exactly the problem I'm talking about;)
Regarding your last comment- it would only be indoctrination if it favours a specific party rather than explaining the different components of our political system and so on. Religious education class in the UK isn't allowed to teach that a specific religion is truth, rather it teaches the history and beliefs behind many different religions. As a kid I thought it was funny to ask religious teachers if they believed in god and I recall not one of them being religious, but all being atheists.
That said, we do have religious schools however that can teach kids a belief in god outside of specific religious education classes, working IT support in schools once some years ago at a religious school I was rather sickened to hear the teacher make the kids pray to god before they were allowed to go home, now that IS indoctrination. Religious schools exist because they're funded by the church, so effectively, cutting out all the bullshit, churches are paying for a quota of kids every year to be indoctrinated now that IS a problem. My first question would be- would churches still be willing to fund schooling and show themselves as being a positive force in society if there was the condition that no school is in any case allow to push any specific religion over any other? I'm guessing not.
I know exactly where your coming from and I think it's another reason that politics should be taught in school, I think if it was then we would have a much better variety of political parties to represent our views.
Also I think the Lords problem would be solved if we could solve the commons problem, the commons has the power to eventually remove control from the Lords and so I think the Lords issue would be resolved as a side effect of fixing the commons.
Personally, I'll probably vote Lib dems next election because I think although they don't fully represent my views, they come the closest. David Davis is about the only guy in the Conservatives I trust and as you mention, he's not even part of the core team anymore.
Regarding the Lib Dems though, I think some of the things they say that sound impossible are actually quite reasonable, one strikes me in particular as I can confirm it's validity. The Lib Dems have mentioned that they would make savings in public sector of around £20bn if I recall, I've encountered many people say that's a joke, there's nothing to save but having worked in public sector for a few years I can confirm that it is quite a valid claim to make and in fact, I think they're underestimating the amount that could be saved. I worked in local government and saw potential for millions to be saved in a single local government department alone, extrapolated across all public sector departments, across the whole country I think their claim is quite valid. My real concern is that Labour and to a lesser extent, the Conservatives seem quite ignorant about how much really could be saved.
As I just posted to the AC that replied to me- apologies for that one, it's a local Yorkshire thing, we often tend to refer to the south east as just "London", as noticed by another person in response to me it's the whole North/South divide thing where anyone in the South East is a Londoner! I should've been more specific bearing in mind this is an international audience and not a local audience;)
It's a local thing, a fair few people here in the North just refer to the central south east area as London so apologies for being a little unclear on that.
But my question to you is your last comment- are you really trying to suggest the UK does have a politics education for the period kids have to be in education (i.e. pre-GCSE until Labours recent push for mandatory schooling to 18). If so can you point me to it? My education was split between Bristol and Leeds as I moved from Bristol to Leeds when I was 13 and at neither of these schools did I encounter any kind of politics education.
> It's an indication of how IT is going to be a battleground in the future general election.
Indeed Mr AC, you're right.
The UK doesn't have battleground issues in politics like the US, the UK is plagued with football team style voting, most of Yorkshire will vote Labour, most of London will vote Conservatives, the rest of the country will vote one or the other depending with a few Lib Dem pockets (Sheffield, Cambridge) littered in between.
It doesn't matter what their policies are, people don't care about that, the people in Yorkshire (disclaimer: that's where I live) will as always go on about how Thatcher ate their babies in the 70s/80s and so vote Labour, the people in rich areas will go on about how Labour caused a big recession in the 70s and vote Conservatives and the few parts of the country capable of intelligent, dynamic thought will actually vote for the party that actually fits their political hopes best.
People here rarely seem to vote on the merit of a party's politics or agenda but instead based on whatever x party did 20 to 40 years ago and those that weren't around then still vote on what party x did 20 to 40 years ago because their parents have whined to them all their lives about how hard party x made life for them all that time ago.
I think part the problem is that in the UK we get no political education whatsoever, kids grow up without a clue as to what left wing and right wing are, what the different flavours of conservatism for example are, what liberalism and libertarian are and where our parties sit in these areas. We're never taught the importance of voting, or how our vote can effect the outcome of an election, hell most people don't even know what the house of Lords is, they think parliament is one big single chamber of sheer boredom. I find this quite shocking, because whilst I can see the merit in music class, religious education, art and so on I really do think politics is perhaps more important, yet oddly entirely neglected. I could quite happy have lived without the hour a week spent in music class, or the 2 to 3 hours spent on English literature (although language is of course important), I understand some people do want to know this, but it should've been optional whereas I'm not convinced politics should be. We already have history lessons to teach us about our and the world's past so I simply cannot see what is more important about analyzing Wordsworth's Daffodil poem, searching for things that Wordsworth probably never really actually intended us to decide was there as a hidden meaning in the first place to merit a complete national ignorance of how our country is run and how our elected powers work.
I wonder if part the reason there's no will to change this is because both Labour and the Conservatives know that whilst no one has a clue about politics then one or the other is guaranteed to get in via the current football team voting mentality and as such there will be no threat to power being taken away from either of them- when one has had a few years, the other is bound to get in, rinse and repeat.
I think this is the fundamental difference between British and American politics at least, whilst you do get Republicans who always vote Republican and Democrats that always vote Democrat at least you had the likes of Colin Powell endorsing the Democrats because he realised despite them being the opposition, they had the better policies at the end of the day.
The difference is, Bill Gates isn't as I'm aware responsible for anyone's death. So to put him in the same group as Stalin and Bush is pretty silly. At worst he held the computer industry back, but at best he pushed it forward. It's impossible to tell where computing would be without Gates and Microsoft, no one can say for sure.
Yeah, I don't really see that as a problem if that's all it is, it's not too much of a hassle to drop a tab and that's what'll happen if sites use this sort of thing. It's not like the days of old where you had to actually shut every single individual window.
Because then we can attach it to every P2P client on earth and it'd mean the RIAA was no longer allowed to collect any information on the files being shared whilst at the same time you could still just share CNN's content, win win!
If Obama can't come forward and say to us "Yes, your courts can now open that evidence" then it is evidence of one important fact. Obama is a fraud.
He cannot possibly on one hand talk of bringing those guilty of torture to justice and then prevent us doing so on the other.
I think that it's actually our government that's playing up here because they do not want it coming out in the open that our security services were equally guilty of assisting in torture, but all Obama needs to do to make that clear is come forward. By the sounds of it our foreign secretary hasn't even approached the Obama administration yet and if that's true then it's a local issue, if that's not true then the world has bigger problems.
If he can't then yeah, I think he's a fraud and yeah, I think these RIAA appointments possibly are more than just a case of hiring experienced lawyers (i.e. did they work for the RIAA because they believed the cause, or for the money?).
I truly hope it's not too much to ask to at last have an important world leader that can walk the walk not just talk the talk.
Your browser has to call your OS to open a god damn Window, how hard is it to intercept such a call based on the URL of the content to be loaded into the Window really?
It's not like there's even any need to parse the markup or script or is this article talking about CSS style popups that just popup as part of the page rather than in a new window? There didn't seem to be any real information on that. If it's just popups on page rather than on your desktop in the form of a new Window I could honestly care less anyway, I just wont bother with that page if it's too annoying to use, it's not like I have to close a thousand external Windows, I just drop the tab in the browser.
I think that's the thing. Gates actually had a really good vision, he wants to see our lives go digital and all our digital devices interconnected and everything integrated to work as a single beautiful system.
The problem is, his view of how this occurs is via Microsoft producing everything in that overall system, rather than use of open standards. This is not even necessarily because he thinks open standards are a bad thing, but simply because he was in charge of a company that has to answer to share holders who want nothing but profit and in that scenario, he perhaps had no choice but to go down the route of having Microsoft do it all.
But I never found anything inherently wrong with WAR that wasn't also a problem in every other MMO ever developed (i.e. the grind!). I was primarily responding to the comments made by the person I replied to regarding translation and that IS GOA's area and GOA's fault.
Gates has always been largely hated here and in the IT community because of course he's the one who lumped us all with the worst of Microsoft's products as well as the best ones. It was his company that was hit by the major anti-trust suit and so on. Whilst the company he was responsible for is indeed guilty of being not particularly nice and whilst it's a fair comment to make that if he was in charge, then he is responsible too I think it's a little more complex than that.
Microsoft as a company aside, I'm not convinced Bill Gates is actually that bad a person.
I think maybe he got blinded sometimes by the position he was in and made bad decisions, other times there's been videos of him snapping at staff and so on but these strike me as particularly human traits, in the case of geeks who aren't the greatest at dealing with people, the latter doesn't strike me as being particularly unusual. After all, even Steve Jobs who is much more of a people person that Gates has ever been is equally guilty of such treatment of his staff. What's more, Jobs has also never been one for philanthropy either- in fact, on the contrary, he actually cut Apple's philanthropy programs when he returned to the company and never brought them back.
Some may argue the only reason he gives to charity is as a tax dodge, but if that's really true why does he do things like this? If it were a mere tax dodge, then there's no reason he'd need to waste his time.
This view I have of him nowadays was somewhat reinforced in a recent documentary on him that I watched the other day - "Bill Gates - How a Geek Changed the World" which was certainly interesting. Of course, we never know whether documentaries like these are made with an air of bias to them or not, similarly we don't know if everything Bill does really is just a show. But honestly, now he's no longer at Microsoft and still is willing to do things like this I think I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt for now unless he does something to prove otherwise.
I think it's true when some commentators suggest that a few decades down the line, when Gates is old and dying that he indeed wont be remembered as that guy that ran that evil company and is hence evil himself, but will be seen more as a pretty decent bloke. I think as a person, Microsoft as a company has actually done more harm to his image than he perhaps deserves. I'm just not convinced anymore that Gates is one of those people who does necessarily deserve to go down in history as a bad guy. I may be proven wrong as time goes on, but only time will tell I suppose.
I'd hope that it's done like Ground War in Call of Duty 4 (it switches between capture and hold and team deathmatch, but CoD4 drops to lobby between rounds) whereby you select that particular playlist but can alternatively choose a playlist that only has one game mode.
It sounds very much like it's taken a lot of hints from Call of Duty in this respect, the game modes, the levelling up and unlocking thing etc. the only innovation here seems to be removing the drop back to lobby between game modes although even there it does so to load a new map, whereas here you'll be on the same map all the way through by the sounds of it!
As you say though, I'd hope that they haven't done this no drop back to lobby at the expense of removing choice else it's a step backwards rather than a step forwards.
I think Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 1 & 2 offer coop/competitive multiplayer 4 way split screen as does Rainbow Six Vegas and I think all the Call of Duty series offer competitive 4 way split screen. I don't think Blazing Angels 2 should be dismissed either, it's quite a good fun arcade style shooter, it's certainly funny flying round in Spitfires, Zeros and P51s etc. trying to shoot each other down;) In terms of non-shooter retail games, then Thrillville is good for a laugh and provides lots of different game modes (particularly the bikes mini-game is fun), Viva Pinata: Party animals, despite an inititally rather childish look is actually quite fun with a few people as well as it has a very mario kart-esque racing mode and lots of decent mini games.
Note though that that list doesn't include Live arcade games. There's loads on live arcade that's rather good for this type of thing too, notably Geometry Wars 2 for starters which really is good fun 4 player with friends.
GOA were the worst MMO company I've ever used when I played the English version of DAoC, everything from having their servers hacked, to having an overheating processor lead to database corruption through to continuing to charge people for subscriptions who had cancelled their accounts.
I have no idea why Mythic chose GOA for Warhammer, I think it's cos they'd been picked up by EA afterwards and couldn't run the Euro show on their own so the contract was already signed, but the important thing to take away from this is that the quality issue isn't Mythic's fault directly (only indirectly for choosing GOA again), if you play the US servers the quality is vastly superior, support is much better and so on.
Shame on Mythic for letting GOA host Euro when they already knew every single European customer hated them when they ran DAoC, but can't criticise them for the way they run their show. I specifically imported US DAoC and US WAR in the end to the UK so I didn't have to deal with GOA. Perhaps this is why I'm sat puzzled as to why there are complaints here about QA- certainly that didn't seem the case on Mythic's own US servers.
Huh? WAR had PvP in it, especially if you play on the PVP servers. What was the PVP problem with it exactly? What do you play instead that has better PVP?
Slashdot Mirror
It was a trick to confuse people too stupid to realise I meant "Were"
I wonder if part the reason Sheffield has swung towards Lib Dem in the polls and in the 2008 local elections is because Nick Clegg their most recent leader is from there and he understands local issues well as a result maybe whilst at the same time, Labour appears to have completely and utterly lost the plot on almost everything. I'm not even sure they do much to protect the low paid now with their stunt the other year of removing the lowest tax band thereby increasing tax for the lowest paid people in society (i.e. those on less than around £16k a year iirc- ouch!)
It looks fairly decent- I notice it's secondary level though, is it mandatory or optional?
It's certainly better than nothing at least although it'll likely take at least another government term before kids brought up with it will be able to vote. Also there's an issue of whether schools offer it. Certainly I remember I was quite lucky to have a school in Leeds where I could opt to do Electronics, IT and Business studies- it was rare to find a school that offered all 3!
It's more a thing of jest, someone might say for example "I'm from Peterborough" but we'll just call them Londoners because anything that far south is "London". I guess it's a bit like how some people call Canadians Americans, it's a play on humorous ignorance of geography I guess ;)
Yes, it's important to realise I'm not suggesting every kid that goes to a religious school is going to be indoctrinated but my point is more that there are a lot of parents out there who couldn't care less whether their kids grow up to have a choice of religion and don't even think about asking to opt-out for precisely the reason it is an opt-out. There are plenty of kids who come through church schools without being religious (I'm one, although only at primarily level did I go to a Church school) but there are also some that don't.
I believe it should be left to kids to decide for themselves what their beliefs are rather than have some beliefs forced into them over others at an age too young to tell any better such that some and again, of course, not all, grow up believing what they've been taught to believe is fact and furthermore, then believing they should attempt to push this belief on to others in cases where it's taught as part of that belief!
Some Church schools are a lot more open minded, but others aren't and it often comes down to the teachers- particularly the example I gave of a teacher making the kids pray to god before letting them go home which implies to the children that worshipping god is an important part of daily life when the reality is there's no reason they couldn't have gone home anyway!
Yes, but it also makes it easier for those who use the software to locate and fix the flaws first ;)
To give a better explanation of why OSS is more secure though, think about this scenario. You have a web server on the wide open internet serving an important web page for your business or institution and any downtime will lose you thousands, maybe millions of pounds of profit (think how much Amazon would lose if it's site goes down for example). If you run an open source web server and an exploit is uncovered by security researchers that allows an attacker to take over your web server then you can edit the source code to fix it immediately, or at least put a quick fix in place to block the attack and have very little, perhaps even no downtime.
If however you rely on a propriatary vendor, say Microsoft, to fix it and it takes them 2 weeks to release a patch, what do you do in the meantime? Do you keep your web server up and risk having your web server hijacked or do you take it down and lose millions in business?
This is just an example, you can mitigate the problem by having a firewall block attacks but this only works to a degree. I wasn't too sure about why OSS myself was more secure for a while, but it's one of those things that when you look into the reasoning behind such comments you'll see realise that yes, they're right, OSS really is fundamentally a more secure concept.
Of course, the other thing to realise is that binaries are themselves fairly trivial to interpret for people who have a strong computer science background such that it's not even particularly a massively difficult task to spot exploits in closed source software. It is however often much harder to fix faults in closed source software in the same way.
We're you a product of our fine education system by any chance because your comments are exactly the problem I'm talking about ;)
Regarding your last comment- it would only be indoctrination if it favours a specific party rather than explaining the different components of our political system and so on. Religious education class in the UK isn't allowed to teach that a specific religion is truth, rather it teaches the history and beliefs behind many different religions. As a kid I thought it was funny to ask religious teachers if they believed in god and I recall not one of them being religious, but all being atheists.
That said, we do have religious schools however that can teach kids a belief in god outside of specific religious education classes, working IT support in schools once some years ago at a religious school I was rather sickened to hear the teacher make the kids pray to god before they were allowed to go home, now that IS indoctrination. Religious schools exist because they're funded by the church, so effectively, cutting out all the bullshit, churches are paying for a quota of kids every year to be indoctrinated now that IS a problem. My first question would be- would churches still be willing to fund schooling and show themselves as being a positive force in society if there was the condition that no school is in any case allow to push any specific religion over any other? I'm guessing not.
I know exactly where your coming from and I think it's another reason that politics should be taught in school, I think if it was then we would have a much better variety of political parties to represent our views.
Also I think the Lords problem would be solved if we could solve the commons problem, the commons has the power to eventually remove control from the Lords and so I think the Lords issue would be resolved as a side effect of fixing the commons.
Personally, I'll probably vote Lib dems next election because I think although they don't fully represent my views, they come the closest. David Davis is about the only guy in the Conservatives I trust and as you mention, he's not even part of the core team anymore.
Regarding the Lib Dems though, I think some of the things they say that sound impossible are actually quite reasonable, one strikes me in particular as I can confirm it's validity. The Lib Dems have mentioned that they would make savings in public sector of around £20bn if I recall, I've encountered many people say that's a joke, there's nothing to save but having worked in public sector for a few years I can confirm that it is quite a valid claim to make and in fact, I think they're underestimating the amount that could be saved. I worked in local government and saw potential for millions to be saved in a single local government department alone, extrapolated across all public sector departments, across the whole country I think their claim is quite valid. My real concern is that Labour and to a lesser extent, the Conservatives seem quite ignorant about how much really could be saved.
I'd like to think so, I just hope the media most people have been consuming isn't the Daily Mail! ;)
As I just posted to the AC that replied to me- apologies for that one, it's a local Yorkshire thing, we often tend to refer to the south east as just "London", as noticed by another person in response to me it's the whole North/South divide thing where anyone in the South East is a Londoner! I should've been more specific bearing in mind this is an international audience and not a local audience ;)
It's a local thing, a fair few people here in the North just refer to the central south east area as London so apologies for being a little unclear on that.
But my question to you is your last comment- are you really trying to suggest the UK does have a politics education for the period kids have to be in education (i.e. pre-GCSE until Labours recent push for mandatory schooling to 18). If so can you point me to it? My education was split between Bristol and Leeds as I moved from Bristol to Leeds when I was 13 and at neither of these schools did I encounter any kind of politics education.
> It's an indication of how IT is going to be a battleground in the future general election.
Indeed Mr AC, you're right.
The UK doesn't have battleground issues in politics like the US, the UK is plagued with football team style voting, most of Yorkshire will vote Labour, most of London will vote Conservatives, the rest of the country will vote one or the other depending with a few Lib Dem pockets (Sheffield, Cambridge) littered in between.
It doesn't matter what their policies are, people don't care about that, the people in Yorkshire (disclaimer: that's where I live) will as always go on about how Thatcher ate their babies in the 70s/80s and so vote Labour, the people in rich areas will go on about how Labour caused a big recession in the 70s and vote Conservatives and the few parts of the country capable of intelligent, dynamic thought will actually vote for the party that actually fits their political hopes best.
People here rarely seem to vote on the merit of a party's politics or agenda but instead based on whatever x party did 20 to 40 years ago and those that weren't around then still vote on what party x did 20 to 40 years ago because their parents have whined to them all their lives about how hard party x made life for them all that time ago.
I think part the problem is that in the UK we get no political education whatsoever, kids grow up without a clue as to what left wing and right wing are, what the different flavours of conservatism for example are, what liberalism and libertarian are and where our parties sit in these areas. We're never taught the importance of voting, or how our vote can effect the outcome of an election, hell most people don't even know what the house of Lords is, they think parliament is one big single chamber of sheer boredom. I find this quite shocking, because whilst I can see the merit in music class, religious education, art and so on I really do think politics is perhaps more important, yet oddly entirely neglected. I could quite happy have lived without the hour a week spent in music class, or the 2 to 3 hours spent on English literature (although language is of course important), I understand some people do want to know this, but it should've been optional whereas I'm not convinced politics should be. We already have history lessons to teach us about our and the world's past so I simply cannot see what is more important about analyzing Wordsworth's Daffodil poem, searching for things that Wordsworth probably never really actually intended us to decide was there as a hidden meaning in the first place to merit a complete national ignorance of how our country is run and how our elected powers work.
I wonder if part the reason there's no will to change this is because both Labour and the Conservatives know that whilst no one has a clue about politics then one or the other is guaranteed to get in via the current football team voting mentality and as such there will be no threat to power being taken away from either of them- when one has had a few years, the other is bound to get in, rinse and repeat.
I think this is the fundamental difference between British and American politics at least, whilst you do get Republicans who always vote Republican and Democrats that always vote Democrat at least you had the likes of Colin Powell endorsing the Democrats because he realised despite them being the opposition, they had the better policies at the end of the day.
The difference is, Bill Gates isn't as I'm aware responsible for anyone's death. So to put him in the same group as Stalin and Bush is pretty silly. At worst he held the computer industry back, but at best he pushed it forward. It's impossible to tell where computing would be without Gates and Microsoft, no one can say for sure.
Yeah, I don't really see that as a problem if that's all it is, it's not too much of a hassle to drop a tab and that's what'll happen if sites use this sort of thing. It's not like the days of old where you had to actually shut every single individual window.
Because then we can attach it to every P2P client on earth and it'd mean the RIAA was no longer allowed to collect any information on the files being shared whilst at the same time you could still just share CNN's content, win win!
Oh well, we can always dream ;)
I'm currently more interested in this as a real test of the Obama administration's sincerity:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7870049.stm
If Obama can't come forward and say to us "Yes, your courts can now open that evidence" then it is evidence of one important fact. Obama is a fraud.
He cannot possibly on one hand talk of bringing those guilty of torture to justice and then prevent us doing so on the other.
I think that it's actually our government that's playing up here because they do not want it coming out in the open that our security services were equally guilty of assisting in torture, but all Obama needs to do to make that clear is come forward. By the sounds of it our foreign secretary hasn't even approached the Obama administration yet and if that's true then it's a local issue, if that's not true then the world has bigger problems.
If he can't then yeah, I think he's a fraud and yeah, I think these RIAA appointments possibly are more than just a case of hiring experienced lawyers (i.e. did they work for the RIAA because they believed the cause, or for the money?).
I truly hope it's not too much to ask to at last have an important world leader that can walk the walk not just talk the talk.
Your browser has to call your OS to open a god damn Window, how hard is it to intercept such a call based on the URL of the content to be loaded into the Window really?
It's not like there's even any need to parse the markup or script or is this article talking about CSS style popups that just popup as part of the page rather than in a new window? There didn't seem to be any real information on that. If it's just popups on page rather than on your desktop in the form of a new Window I could honestly care less anyway, I just wont bother with that page if it's too annoying to use, it's not like I have to close a thousand external Windows, I just drop the tab in the browser.
I think that's the thing. Gates actually had a really good vision, he wants to see our lives go digital and all our digital devices interconnected and everything integrated to work as a single beautiful system.
The problem is, his view of how this occurs is via Microsoft producing everything in that overall system, rather than use of open standards. This is not even necessarily because he thinks open standards are a bad thing, but simply because he was in charge of a company that has to answer to share holders who want nothing but profit and in that scenario, he perhaps had no choice but to go down the route of having Microsoft do it all.
But I never found anything inherently wrong with WAR that wasn't also a problem in every other MMO ever developed (i.e. the grind!). I was primarily responding to the comments made by the person I replied to regarding translation and that IS GOA's area and GOA's fault.
Gates has always been largely hated here and in the IT community because of course he's the one who lumped us all with the worst of Microsoft's products as well as the best ones. It was his company that was hit by the major anti-trust suit and so on. Whilst the company he was responsible for is indeed guilty of being not particularly nice and whilst it's a fair comment to make that if he was in charge, then he is responsible too I think it's a little more complex than that.
Microsoft as a company aside, I'm not convinced Bill Gates is actually that bad a person.
I think maybe he got blinded sometimes by the position he was in and made bad decisions, other times there's been videos of him snapping at staff and so on but these strike me as particularly human traits, in the case of geeks who aren't the greatest at dealing with people, the latter doesn't strike me as being particularly unusual. After all, even Steve Jobs who is much more of a people person that Gates has ever been is equally guilty of such treatment of his staff. What's more, Jobs has also never been one for philanthropy either- in fact, on the contrary, he actually cut Apple's philanthropy programs when he returned to the company and never brought them back.
Some may argue the only reason he gives to charity is as a tax dodge, but if that's really true why does he do things like this? If it were a mere tax dodge, then there's no reason he'd need to waste his time.
This view I have of him nowadays was somewhat reinforced in a recent documentary on him that I watched the other day - "Bill Gates - How a Geek Changed the World" which was certainly interesting. Of course, we never know whether documentaries like these are made with an air of bias to them or not, similarly we don't know if everything Bill does really is just a show. But honestly, now he's no longer at Microsoft and still is willing to do things like this I think I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt for now unless he does something to prove otherwise.
I think it's true when some commentators suggest that a few decades down the line, when Gates is old and dying that he indeed wont be remembered as that guy that ran that evil company and is hence evil himself, but will be seen more as a pretty decent bloke. I think as a person, Microsoft as a company has actually done more harm to his image than he perhaps deserves. I'm just not convinced anymore that Gates is one of those people who does necessarily deserve to go down in history as a bad guy. I may be proven wrong as time goes on, but only time will tell I suppose.
I'd hope that it's done like Ground War in Call of Duty 4 (it switches between capture and hold and team deathmatch, but CoD4 drops to lobby between rounds) whereby you select that particular playlist but can alternatively choose a playlist that only has one game mode.
It sounds very much like it's taken a lot of hints from Call of Duty in this respect, the game modes, the levelling up and unlocking thing etc. the only innovation here seems to be removing the drop back to lobby between game modes although even there it does so to load a new map, whereas here you'll be on the same map all the way through by the sounds of it!
As you say though, I'd hope that they haven't done this no drop back to lobby at the expense of removing choice else it's a step backwards rather than a step forwards.
I think Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 1 & 2 offer coop/competitive multiplayer 4 way split screen as does Rainbow Six Vegas and I think all the Call of Duty series offer competitive 4 way split screen. I don't think Blazing Angels 2 should be dismissed either, it's quite a good fun arcade style shooter, it's certainly funny flying round in Spitfires, Zeros and P51s etc. trying to shoot each other down ;) In terms of non-shooter retail games, then Thrillville is good for a laugh and provides lots of different game modes (particularly the bikes mini-game is fun), Viva Pinata: Party animals, despite an inititally rather childish look is actually quite fun with a few people as well as it has a very mario kart-esque racing mode and lots of decent mini games.
If you want coop then check here:
http://www.co-optimus.com/system/1/XBox_360.html
Note though that that list doesn't include Live arcade games. There's loads on live arcade that's rather good for this type of thing too, notably Geometry Wars 2 for starters which really is good fun 4 player with friends.
About 9 years ago.
This was always going to happen, why? GOA.
GOA were the worst MMO company I've ever used when I played the English version of DAoC, everything from having their servers hacked, to having an overheating processor lead to database corruption through to continuing to charge people for subscriptions who had cancelled their accounts.
I have no idea why Mythic chose GOA for Warhammer, I think it's cos they'd been picked up by EA afterwards and couldn't run the Euro show on their own so the contract was already signed, but the important thing to take away from this is that the quality issue isn't Mythic's fault directly (only indirectly for choosing GOA again), if you play the US servers the quality is vastly superior, support is much better and so on.
Shame on Mythic for letting GOA host Euro when they already knew every single European customer hated them when they ran DAoC, but can't criticise them for the way they run their show. I specifically imported US DAoC and US WAR in the end to the UK so I didn't have to deal with GOA. Perhaps this is why I'm sat puzzled as to why there are complaints here about QA- certainly that didn't seem the case on Mythic's own US servers.
Huh? WAR had PvP in it, especially if you play on the PVP servers. What was the PVP problem with it exactly? What do you play instead that has better PVP?