I got the same treatment the first time I went to Canada, I'm British through and through and couldn't for the life of me understand why they'd wonder such a thing, it turned out it's because they felt I had too much money in my account (a question they asked at the beginning of their 3 hour interrogation of me) to be merely there for a holiday!
I do wonder if that was simply bullshit however, and they realised after holding me for about an hour that they'd stuffed up royally and just needed an excuse. Still my experience is it doesn't matter the country, immigration and customs officials are complete and utter cocks whatever country they're from it simply doesn't matter, they all like power tripping and it wouldn't suprise me if this case with Bill Gates was just that - an immigration official wanting to make himself feel like he was actually worth something to the world by denying someone famous.
About the only country I haven't experienced asshole immigration officials was Norway but that's probably because there weren't any, when we landed in Narvik they literally let us straight off the plane into Norway without a single passport or customs check, I guess they figure that if we'd been allowed on the plane by strict British security then we can't be too dangerous to let off at their end, particularly when Narvik is the arse end of nowhere, inside the arctic circle and only got 2 hours of light a day at that time of year;)
Perhaps Wii games just don't really appeal to me but I just can't get into the Wii for the life of me. Frankly I think one of the main reasons is because after a long days work I just wanna sit back and play mindlessly, many 360 games allow me to do this whereas using the Wii remote actually requires you to put effort in. Other than that I think it's just that games on the 360 to me appeal more.
One final reason that I'm a bit pissed about the Wii is that I bought a bunch of Virtual Console titles I was looking forward to playing, yet there's a bug that's existed since release effecting EU PAL consoles and the virtual console whereby many games don't work correctly with HD displays over Nintendo's component cable and I don't have any other inputs spare (I have a PC on digital in and the 360 on analog in). Some Nintendo apologists blame the displays but when other devices (including the Wii itself outside of it's VC) quite happily display in 480p okay it's pretty obvious where the fault is. It doesn't even seem like a hard fix as when you call up the Wii menu and interrupt the VC game it actually shows the game okay in the background, thus far Nintendo's only response to me has been "we're aware of the problem", unfortunately that's the same response they've given me for almost a year now.
I don't hate Nintendo and I don't hate the Wii, I still play Wii sports now and again and I play various party games like Rayman's multiplayer mode, Warioware etc. when friends are over but for every hour I play on the Wii I seem to spend about 200 on the 360 or PC. The lack of worthwhile multiplayer is another major turn off.
I'm hoping they bring a new pikmin game out or something, I loved them on the Gamecube and I think that might give me the Wii the attention it deserves, because when it comes to I still think the concept of the Wii is awesome. Until that game comes along that draws me in though the Wii just isn't for me - I'm sure I'm a minority but I doubt I'm alone either.
...shopto.net is selling the XBox 360 PREMIUM for £194.99, to get rid of pre-bundle stock;)
I was going to say that's quite a hefty price drop and nice to see the premium finally reach the sub-£200 mark, makes the 360 damn attractive. Their prices have always been good and they did the same with the PS3 but I almost thought it was a typo when I saw it!
They've been selling red ring free consoles for a fair while now. I'd imagine that the announcement of putting aside $1 billion to solve the warranty issue was around the time they were sure the issue was resolved and that that was the maximum they'd need to pay out should all existing consoles fail under the new 3 year warranty.
There's certainly far less red ring reports nowadays so it would seem their fix has been fairly successful thus far unless it's due to some other reason, i.e. people just not bothering to bitch about it anymore!
The most silent place on Earth I've ever been was monument valley just over the border from Arizona in Utah, however it is a native American reservation so I'm not sure whether you need some kind of permission from the locals to go there by yourself or not.
Of course there's also no guarantee that the most silent place on Earth I've been is going to be the least lit but I'd say there's a fair chance.
In all honesty the clearest skies I've seen have always been in Canada and not even necessarily terribly far from Ottawa which isn't the biggest of cities but small enough not to particularly pollute the night sky badly it would seem, or perhaps my perception of what a perfect night sky is like is blurred by the fact I've never or rarely seen it but either way it was a million times better than anywhere here in England!
Maybe it's because if we have a star count it's easier to write alarmist headlines like "Light pollution prevents us seeing 10 million stars" or whatever, i.e. the type of headline required nowadays to pull Joe average's attention away from Britney Spears' child custody battle.
That said however I'm sure they could calculate how many stars aren't visible due to light pollution using some math/science type thing but perhaps again it's because by making a big deal out of it it's easier to bring people's attention to the issue.
This news doesn't suprise me, Rare worked with Nintendo platforms years and years before being snapped up by Microsoft and at a Microsoft game developer conference early last year one of the questions we asked was whether they miss working with Nintendo.
The general response was that they prefer working with MS, partly because their work/life balance is better in that MS has the money to look after it's employees and that on a technical level MS' development platforms were nicer to work with. However, at the same time they noted that they did indeed miss working with Nintendo but that MS wasn't preventing them from doing so hence Diddy Kong racing on the DS being a product of Rare released well after MS' takeover of them. Furthermore, the Rare staff noted to us that MS was allowing them to develop for various mobile platforms, including those supporting Java over Windows mobile.
It's not suprising to me therefore that Rare is possibly intending to port Viva Pinata to the Wii, after all MS clearly isn't opposed to letting it's studios work with Nintendo, Rare's roots are with Nintendo and it's something the staff seem happy to do. Likewise with Mistwalker, whilst they may be a primarily Microsoft dev studio I'd imagine their situation is pretty similar to that of Rare's.
I think it all reinforces the view that Microsoft doesn't actually see the Wii as a particularly direct threat to the 360 as they have sometimes mentioned in the past because of the different target audiences of the two consoles and because for those willing to pay the price of a PS3 they can instead get both a Wii and a 360 in the process neither harming the sales of one or the other. Furthmore, MS can reap the benefits of Wii/DS game sales without worrying about the associated R&D costs of developing the hardware of that platform when they let their game studios develop for Nintendo platforms making the whole thing a win/win situation. I think MS' stance is that if it pulls in money without risking 360 sales their game dev. studios are welcome to do what they want, that seems a pretty sensible attitude to have. In business I imagine profit comes above fanboyism with regards to whoever's console is best.
Yes, because without Bittorrent I'd just use the KAD/eMule networks or simply USENET or FTP for exactly the same purposes.
Put simply, it doesn't matter if bittorrent vanishes overnight, there's still massive amounts of redundancy in terms of ways to get the content bittorrent provides, stopping bittorrent wont stop demand and as a result it sure as hell aint gonna stop supply.
It's sad, because I can get a lot of books cheaper from Amazon.com than I can from Amazon.co.uk even with international shipping. The only downsides really are that it takes a little longer for delivery and I feel a little more guilty about having it shipped all that way. The same goes for some computer games or DVDs, if I buy a couple at once even with import duties it's still cheaper.
...the word on the street is simply that one of their staff signed up to a torrent site from one of MediaDefender's IPs with the same gmail address as username and password as he used for his gmail account where all these e-mails had been archived.
It's true that simple mistakes lead to major errors, you only have to look at the Half-Life 2 source code leak where a member of staff was e-mailed a key logger trojan giving the attacker all the info they needed to get the code out of there.
As you've noted, VAT is 17.5%, all too often us Brits get charged 50% - 100% more for some items over US prices, with no valid excuse other than simply ripping us off.
It's not going to change though because it also benefits the goverment far too much in that if the consumers are being ripped off, there's an even bigger amount for them to scrounge as tax to make up for all the shite they waste our already plentiful taxes on. Having worked for the goverment, I'm simply sickened by the billions of pounds that are wasted on incompetence, ignorance and stupidity every single year.
I'm from the UK, but even being in Ottawa earlier this year at night showed me how much darker the sky is there. I live in a pretty rural area here in the UK, each city is a good 30miles away but you can still easily see the glow of them, another 20 miles wouldn't make enough difference for me. I think the case of Ottawa, it helps that it's just one city by itself quite decent distance away from the likes of Montreal and Toronto. That kinda suggests to me that it's not even just the distance from the city but simply the amount and size of the cities that play a massive role in light pollution - if you have a city 30miles in each direction it's going to suck, if you have one 50miles in one direction and nothing in all other directions then you'll probably get a decent view, again as per Ottawa.
Of course you could go all the way and live in the Canadian wilderness with no cities at all to pester you;)
It's probably worth pointing out also that Russia is still happy with the Russian Bear as it's been flying sorties to just outside US airspace recently. The Bear is probably one of the closest competitors to the B52 in terms of performance and role and hence until the competitors produce something better than the B52 then why do the American's need anything better? If you need something stealthy instead for covert operations the US has the B2, if you want something faster you'll probably just use cruise missiles or smaller aircraft but those are by definition different roles to that filled by the B52 and the Bear - put simply, they're still probably just the best in their class at the end of the day.
As silly as it sounds, I've come across so many new Linux users who have messed up their display settings in some way, been unable to use the command line to fix it and have just resorted to giving up or reinstalling, neither is really an ideal option.
Whilst to the average Slashdotter this may sound silly, I'd bet it's one of the biggest things that puts your average Joe off Linux through the years. Being able to easier recover from broken Linux installs will, imo go a long way to keeping people using Linux rather than the current situation where quite a few try, but many give up. Linux is generally nice and stable, but when it does go wrong, to most people it's just far, far too hard to recover your installation back into a working state - much more so than, dare I say it, Windows. This is however why I'd say Ubuntu has been making such headway in attracting new users to Linux because they do seem to understand what problems exactly that up until now have been putting many new users off Linux.
I have a Wii but I just can't spend long on the Wii, there's simply nothing on it to keep me playing. Play through Zelda, play through Red Steel, have a bit of a bat about on Wii sports or a play around on Rayman now and then but that's pretty much all there is to the Wii. It does however have a lot of potential, and many publishers have realised this, that's why, whilst the Wii is selling well I personally wouldn't recommend it to people right now unless you live in a house with a bunch of mates or so where you'll daily have a laugh with it's party games. Give it 6months to a year, when all the latecomers like EA who realised it's got a lot of potential have had time to develop their titles and I think there'll be a whole lot more reason to bother with the Wii.
As for the DS, I don't think anyone was really a latecomer to it, by the time I realised it's existence it already had so many games around and now it just has hundreds and hundreds of top quality games. I play my DS a whole lot more simply because there are so many good games out there.
All that said however, I play my 360/PC more than either of them, perhaps because I'm a so-called "hardcore" gamer and don't fit Nintendo's target demographic anymore. Whilst I think my 360 is going to dominate my time in the next 6 to 12 months with the likes of Halo 3, Mass Effect, Blue Dragon and so forth upto Christmas and Fable 2, Alan Wake and so forth after Christmas I can quite easily see from Mid next year onwars the Wii stealing a vastly larger portion of my time as the developers finally catch on. I kinda want a PS3 to play Resistance, and honestly if it was as cheap as the Wii I'd impulse buy it for just that, however, like the 360 it's not a cheap console, the difference being that right now it has the high cost like the 360 and the shortage of good games like the Wii so for me it's hard to justify purchasing it. Perhaps by next Christmas the PS3 will be a decent choice with many more games and a easier to justify price and so I'd imagine around then is when I'll be likely to get one. Well, that's assuming the Wii hasn't filled my previous prediction that the late comers mentioned in this article haven't got me so utterly addicted with their new games by that point;)
J&J could just be launching a pre-emptive strike, I support the Red Cross' work but have absolutely no sympathy for them here, what goes around comes around I suppose, I'd argue they brought this upon themselves when trying to aggressively suggest they have the sole rights to the red cross symbol, something which as an Englishman, who's flag is a red cross I find rather offensive.
Just minding my own business, driving round in this car that wasn't mine and these cops came and pulled me over and arrested me, I was like "WTF? I was only joyrid.. I mean driving round in it for 20 seconds!".
Don't get me wrong I hate the RIAA as much as the next Slashdotter and I don't really agree with heavy handed tactics but at the same time the law is the law and I don't think it's the brightest thing to do. Frankly when I go into a cinema I feel a bit uneasy about even having a camera phone because I know how bitchy they can be so I keep it in my pocket at all times. There's also not really any way we can verify the truth of her story, for all we know this could just be her excuse and she could just as well have been sat for half an hour recording like that before they decided to call the police in.
As has been mentioned here already, at the end of the day it's for the courts to decide whether she just made a silly mistake or if she was a fully fledged movie pirate. Arrrrr.
It doesn't say what illness they suffered. For all we know, they could have caught something like AIDs although that said groups like this would probably then have us believe mobile phone masts causes AIDs also. Seriously though, it could just as well be something blatantly unrelated like flu that they suffered.
I got a response also today from Jeremy Hunt, Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. He avoided many of my points and gave pretty much the same information, that they back a copyright extension to 70 years and so on and so forth.
I'll reply to him tonight reinforcing my original points, questioning why my other points were avoided in a calm and polite manner and see if he dodges the issue again or simply ignores me this time.
The situation has me intrigued however and I fully intend to look into this further, I'll ask for a response to the same questions from Labour, the Lib Dems and so forth. It would be nice if we could push this in some way to try and get some media attention, but for me the biggest problem is that whilst Slashdot has some awesome posts regarding why extended copyright terms are bad they're not correlated in a logical efficient manner.
Perhaps it would even be worth putting forth an ask Slashdot on how best to put our point across to the various parties in an unambiguous way that prevents them avoiding the issue. Obviously the key is to include the counter arguments in the original message so that they can't be used in the response to dodge the questions, e.g. include things such as:
"Many extended copyright term supporters suggest that copyright theft funds terrorism, however this is unproven and in the case of for personal use file sharers makes no sense"
Regardless, it's probably a good time to bring this issue up, not just in the UK but worldwide with Russia, the UK and the US heading towards election time, it's certainly not going to be on everyone's agenda but it's the kind of issue that if you can get into the public's eye via the media that people will still pay close attention to - no one wants themselves, or their kids criminalized and with a noticeably portion of the population involved (Around 10% 4 years ago, this is bound to have risen since) it's a big enough issue to put a noticeable dent in a party's voter base should they follow the conservative attitude.
Hate to say it but the AC is right, most your comments seem to be based on a lack of understanding about XHTML and what HTML is.
"Indeed they do, but in 10 years if every web board declares XHTML strict convention, there's plenty of handy stuff that no longer works, and has no replacement."
Got any examples of what you can't do in XHTML that you can do in HTML? At the end of the day you can always embed CSS directly into your code when using something like a form on a forum using the style attribute, for example:
Blah blah
It ain't good practice, but backwards compatibility isn't necessarily about good practice because sometimes the things you're being backwards compatible with weren't good practice to start with.
Furthermore, you talk about additional functionality being missing from XHTML that's available in HTML but again, this misses one of the core points as to what XHTML is about, the X in XHTML means extensible, XHTML is designed to be a solid core of HTML markup that's embedded in the XML rules, so that any application can define a new doctype with new tags to do new things as needed. HTML doesn't have this option without simply breaking the standard.
Many of your comments also suggest you don't understand the concept and importance of separation of code, content and presentation and what this means. The W3Cs recommendations aren't about creating new standards to stay relevant, they're about pushing standards that improve:
- Accessibility - Extensibility - Compatibility
I can't see how this is in any way a bad thing for anyone other than those who simply can't be arsed to spend 10 minutes finding out what's different!
Slashdot Mirror
I got the same treatment the first time I went to Canada, I'm British through and through and couldn't for the life of me understand why they'd wonder such a thing, it turned out it's because they felt I had too much money in my account (a question they asked at the beginning of their 3 hour interrogation of me) to be merely there for a holiday!
;)
I do wonder if that was simply bullshit however, and they realised after holding me for about an hour that they'd stuffed up royally and just needed an excuse. Still my experience is it doesn't matter the country, immigration and customs officials are complete and utter cocks whatever country they're from it simply doesn't matter, they all like power tripping and it wouldn't suprise me if this case with Bill Gates was just that - an immigration official wanting to make himself feel like he was actually worth something to the world by denying someone famous.
About the only country I haven't experienced asshole immigration officials was Norway but that's probably because there weren't any, when we landed in Narvik they literally let us straight off the plane into Norway without a single passport or customs check, I guess they figure that if we'd been allowed on the plane by strict British security then we can't be too dangerous to let off at their end, particularly when Narvik is the arse end of nowhere, inside the arctic circle and only got 2 hours of light a day at that time of year
Perhaps Wii games just don't really appeal to me but I just can't get into the Wii for the life of me. Frankly I think one of the main reasons is because after a long days work I just wanna sit back and play mindlessly, many 360 games allow me to do this whereas using the Wii remote actually requires you to put effort in. Other than that I think it's just that games on the 360 to me appeal more.
One final reason that I'm a bit pissed about the Wii is that I bought a bunch of Virtual Console titles I was looking forward to playing, yet there's a bug that's existed since release effecting EU PAL consoles and the virtual console whereby many games don't work correctly with HD displays over Nintendo's component cable and I don't have any other inputs spare (I have a PC on digital in and the 360 on analog in). Some Nintendo apologists blame the displays but when other devices (including the Wii itself outside of it's VC) quite happily display in 480p okay it's pretty obvious where the fault is. It doesn't even seem like a hard fix as when you call up the Wii menu and interrupt the VC game it actually shows the game okay in the background, thus far Nintendo's only response to me has been "we're aware of the problem", unfortunately that's the same response they've given me for almost a year now.
I don't hate Nintendo and I don't hate the Wii, I still play Wii sports now and again and I play various party games like Rayman's multiplayer mode, Warioware etc. when friends are over but for every hour I play on the Wii I seem to spend about 200 on the 360 or PC. The lack of worthwhile multiplayer is another major turn off.
I'm hoping they bring a new pikmin game out or something, I loved them on the Gamecube and I think that might give me the Wii the attention it deserves, because when it comes to I still think the concept of the Wii is awesome. Until that game comes along that draws me in though the Wii just isn't for me - I'm sure I'm a minority but I doubt I'm alone either.
Because whilst there are good games companies out there, there are games companies producing better games than EA can.
If EA can destroy everything better than it, then the standard is lower and EA games become the most attractive thing out there.
...shopto.net is selling the XBox 360 PREMIUM for £194.99, to get rid of pre-bundle stock ;)
I was going to say that's quite a hefty price drop and nice to see the premium finally reach the sub-£200 mark, makes the 360 damn attractive. Their prices have always been good and they did the same with the PS3 but I almost thought it was a typo when I saw it!
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/10/01/ms_ships_65nm_xbox/
They've been selling red ring free consoles for a fair while now. I'd imagine that the announcement of putting aside $1 billion to solve the warranty issue was around the time they were sure the issue was resolved and that that was the maximum they'd need to pay out should all existing consoles fail under the new 3 year warranty.
There's certainly far less red ring reports nowadays so it would seem their fix has been fairly successful thus far unless it's due to some other reason, i.e. people just not bothering to bitch about it anymore!
The most silent place on Earth I've ever been was monument valley just over the border from Arizona in Utah, however it is a native American reservation so I'm not sure whether you need some kind of permission from the locals to go there by yourself or not.
Of course there's also no guarantee that the most silent place on Earth I've been is going to be the least lit but I'd say there's a fair chance.
In all honesty the clearest skies I've seen have always been in Canada and not even necessarily terribly far from Ottawa which isn't the biggest of cities but small enough not to particularly pollute the night sky badly it would seem, or perhaps my perception of what a perfect night sky is like is blurred by the fact I've never or rarely seen it but either way it was a million times better than anywhere here in England!
Maybe it's because if we have a star count it's easier to write alarmist headlines like "Light pollution prevents us seeing 10 million stars" or whatever, i.e. the type of headline required nowadays to pull Joe average's attention away from Britney Spears' child custody battle.
That said however I'm sure they could calculate how many stars aren't visible due to light pollution using some math/science type thing but perhaps again it's because by making a big deal out of it it's easier to bring people's attention to the issue.
This news doesn't suprise me, Rare worked with Nintendo platforms years and years before being snapped up by Microsoft and at a Microsoft game developer conference early last year one of the questions we asked was whether they miss working with Nintendo.
The general response was that they prefer working with MS, partly because their work/life balance is better in that MS has the money to look after it's employees and that on a technical level MS' development platforms were nicer to work with. However, at the same time they noted that they did indeed miss working with Nintendo but that MS wasn't preventing them from doing so hence Diddy Kong racing on the DS being a product of Rare released well after MS' takeover of them. Furthermore, the Rare staff noted to us that MS was allowing them to develop for various mobile platforms, including those supporting Java over Windows mobile.
It's not suprising to me therefore that Rare is possibly intending to port Viva Pinata to the Wii, after all MS clearly isn't opposed to letting it's studios work with Nintendo, Rare's roots are with Nintendo and it's something the staff seem happy to do. Likewise with Mistwalker, whilst they may be a primarily Microsoft dev studio I'd imagine their situation is pretty similar to that of Rare's.
I think it all reinforces the view that Microsoft doesn't actually see the Wii as a particularly direct threat to the 360 as they have sometimes mentioned in the past because of the different target audiences of the two consoles and because for those willing to pay the price of a PS3 they can instead get both a Wii and a 360 in the process neither harming the sales of one or the other. Furthmore, MS can reap the benefits of Wii/DS game sales without worrying about the associated R&D costs of developing the hardware of that platform when they let their game studios develop for Nintendo platforms making the whole thing a win/win situation. I think MS' stance is that if it pulls in money without risking 360 sales their game dev. studios are welcome to do what they want, that seems a pretty sensible attitude to have. In business I imagine profit comes above fanboyism with regards to whoever's console is best.
Yes, because without Bittorrent I'd just use the KAD/eMule networks or simply USENET or FTP for exactly the same purposes.
Put simply, it doesn't matter if bittorrent vanishes overnight, there's still massive amounts of redundancy in terms of ways to get the content bittorrent provides, stopping bittorrent wont stop demand and as a result it sure as hell aint gonna stop supply.
It's sad, because I can get a lot of books cheaper from Amazon.com than I can from Amazon.co.uk even with international shipping. The only downsides really are that it takes a little longer for delivery and I feel a little more guilty about having it shipped all that way. The same goes for some computer games or DVDs, if I buy a couple at once even with import duties it's still cheaper.
...the word on the street is simply that one of their staff signed up to a torrent site from one of MediaDefender's IPs with the same gmail address as username and password as he used for his gmail account where all these e-mails had been archived.
It's true that simple mistakes lead to major errors, you only have to look at the Half-Life 2 source code leak where a member of staff was e-mailed a key logger trojan giving the attacker all the info they needed to get the code out of there.
As you've noted, VAT is 17.5%, all too often us Brits get charged 50% - 100% more for some items over US prices, with no valid excuse other than simply ripping us off.
It's not going to change though because it also benefits the goverment far too much in that if the consumers are being ripped off, there's an even bigger amount for them to scrounge as tax to make up for all the shite they waste our already plentiful taxes on. Having worked for the goverment, I'm simply sickened by the billions of pounds that are wasted on incompetence, ignorance and stupidity every single year.
Have you tried Canada?
;)
I'm from the UK, but even being in Ottawa earlier this year at night showed me how much darker the sky is there. I live in a pretty rural area here in the UK, each city is a good 30miles away but you can still easily see the glow of them, another 20 miles wouldn't make enough difference for me. I think the case of Ottawa, it helps that it's just one city by itself quite decent distance away from the likes of Montreal and Toronto. That kinda suggests to me that it's not even just the distance from the city but simply the amount and size of the cities that play a massive role in light pollution - if you have a city 30miles in each direction it's going to suck, if you have one 50miles in one direction and nothing in all other directions then you'll probably get a decent view, again as per Ottawa.
Of course you could go all the way and live in the Canadian wilderness with no cities at all to pester you
It's probably worth pointing out also that Russia is still happy with the Russian Bear as it's been flying sorties to just outside US airspace recently. The Bear is probably one of the closest competitors to the B52 in terms of performance and role and hence until the competitors produce something better than the B52 then why do the American's need anything better? If you need something stealthy instead for covert operations the US has the B2, if you want something faster you'll probably just use cruise missiles or smaller aircraft but those are by definition different roles to that filled by the B52 and the Bear - put simply, they're still probably just the best in their class at the end of the day.
As silly as it sounds, I've come across so many new Linux users who have messed up their display settings in some way, been unable to use the command line to fix it and have just resorted to giving up or reinstalling, neither is really an ideal option.
Whilst to the average Slashdotter this may sound silly, I'd bet it's one of the biggest things that puts your average Joe off Linux through the years. Being able to easier recover from broken Linux installs will, imo go a long way to keeping people using Linux rather than the current situation where quite a few try, but many give up. Linux is generally nice and stable, but when it does go wrong, to most people it's just far, far too hard to recover your installation back into a working state - much more so than, dare I say it, Windows. This is however why I'd say Ubuntu has been making such headway in attracting new users to Linux because they do seem to understand what problems exactly that up until now have been putting many new users off Linux.
I have a Wii but I just can't spend long on the Wii, there's simply nothing on it to keep me playing. Play through Zelda, play through Red Steel, have a bit of a bat about on Wii sports or a play around on Rayman now and then but that's pretty much all there is to the Wii. It does however have a lot of potential, and many publishers have realised this, that's why, whilst the Wii is selling well I personally wouldn't recommend it to people right now unless you live in a house with a bunch of mates or so where you'll daily have a laugh with it's party games. Give it 6months to a year, when all the latecomers like EA who realised it's got a lot of potential have had time to develop their titles and I think there'll be a whole lot more reason to bother with the Wii.
;)
As for the DS, I don't think anyone was really a latecomer to it, by the time I realised it's existence it already had so many games around and now it just has hundreds and hundreds of top quality games. I play my DS a whole lot more simply because there are so many good games out there.
All that said however, I play my 360/PC more than either of them, perhaps because I'm a so-called "hardcore" gamer and don't fit Nintendo's target demographic anymore. Whilst I think my 360 is going to dominate my time in the next 6 to 12 months with the likes of Halo 3, Mass Effect, Blue Dragon and so forth upto Christmas and Fable 2, Alan Wake and so forth after Christmas I can quite easily see from Mid next year onwars the Wii stealing a vastly larger portion of my time as the developers finally catch on. I kinda want a PS3 to play Resistance, and honestly if it was as cheap as the Wii I'd impulse buy it for just that, however, like the 360 it's not a cheap console, the difference being that right now it has the high cost like the 360 and the shortage of good games like the Wii so for me it's hard to justify purchasing it. Perhaps by next Christmas the PS3 will be a decent choice with many more games and a easier to justify price and so I'd imagine around then is when I'll be likely to get one. Well, that's assuming the Wii hasn't filled my previous prediction that the late comers mentioned in this article haven't got me so utterly addicted with their new games by that point
1. Make a big god damn cage and stick them in it ...
2. Tell travel agents about massive trapped killer monkey cage
3.
4. Profit
You're thinking of the British (England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland) flag the Union jack:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Britain
The flag for England itself is St George's Cross:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_England
The articles are pretty good in demonstrating how the Union Jack was born of the English, Scottish and Irish flags.
Just to put a different perspective on things:
_ cross_v.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/11/canadian_red
J&J could just be launching a pre-emptive strike, I support the Red Cross' work but have absolutely no sympathy for them here, what goes around comes around I suppose, I'd argue they brought this upon themselves when trying to aggressively suggest they have the sole rights to the red cross symbol, something which as an Englishman, who's flag is a red cross I find rather offensive.
Just minding my own business, driving round in this car that wasn't mine and these cops came and pulled me over and arrested me, I was like "WTF? I was only joyrid.. I mean driving round in it for 20 seconds!".
Don't get me wrong I hate the RIAA as much as the next Slashdotter and I don't really agree with heavy handed tactics but at the same time the law is the law and I don't think it's the brightest thing to do. Frankly when I go into a cinema I feel a bit uneasy about even having a camera phone because I know how bitchy they can be so I keep it in my pocket at all times. There's also not really any way we can verify the truth of her story, for all we know this could just be her excuse and she could just as well have been sat for half an hour recording like that before they decided to call the police in.
As has been mentioned here already, at the end of the day it's for the courts to decide whether she just made a silly mistake or if she was a fully fledged movie pirate. Arrrrr.
So that's why the bombs in London and the Glasgow airport attack the other week failed miserably.
They thought their spell of detonation and shield of fire protection worked outside the game too.
It doesn't say what illness they suffered. For all we know, they could have caught something like AIDs although that said groups like this would probably then have us believe mobile phone masts causes AIDs also. Seriously though, it could just as well be something blatantly unrelated like flu that they suffered.
I got a response also today from Jeremy Hunt, Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. He avoided many of my points and gave pretty much the same information, that they back a copyright extension to 70 years and so on and so forth.
I'll reply to him tonight reinforcing my original points, questioning why my other points were avoided in a calm and polite manner and see if he dodges the issue again or simply ignores me this time.
The situation has me intrigued however and I fully intend to look into this further, I'll ask for a response to the same questions from Labour, the Lib Dems and so forth. It would be nice if we could push this in some way to try and get some media attention, but for me the biggest problem is that whilst Slashdot has some awesome posts regarding why extended copyright terms are bad they're not correlated in a logical efficient manner.
Perhaps it would even be worth putting forth an ask Slashdot on how best to put our point across to the various parties in an unambiguous way that prevents them avoiding the issue. Obviously the key is to include the counter arguments in the original message so that they can't be used in the response to dodge the questions, e.g. include things such as:
"Many extended copyright term supporters suggest that copyright theft funds terrorism, however this is unproven and in the case of for personal use file sharers makes no sense"
Regardless, it's probably a good time to bring this issue up, not just in the UK but worldwide with Russia, the UK and the US heading towards election time, it's certainly not going to be on everyone's agenda but it's the kind of issue that if you can get into the public's eye via the media that people will still pay close attention to - no one wants themselves, or their kids criminalized and with a noticeably portion of the population involved (Around 10% 4 years ago, this is bound to have risen since) it's a big enough issue to put a noticeable dent in a party's voter base should they follow the conservative attitude.
Ooops, I got owned by the very thing we're talking about ;)
My XHTML example got embedded in the post!
"Indeed they do, but in 10 years if every web board declares XHTML strict convention, there's plenty of handy stuff that no longer works, and has no replacement."
Got any examples of what you can't do in XHTML that you can do in HTML? At the end of the day you can always embed CSS directly into your code when using something like a form on a forum using the style attribute, for example:
Blah blah
It ain't good practice, but backwards compatibility isn't necessarily about good practice because sometimes the things you're being backwards compatible with weren't good practice to start with.
Furthermore, you talk about additional functionality being missing from XHTML that's available in HTML but again, this misses one of the core points as to what XHTML is about, the X in XHTML means extensible, XHTML is designed to be a solid core of HTML markup that's embedded in the XML rules, so that any application can define a new doctype with new tags to do new things as needed. HTML doesn't have this option without simply breaking the standard.
Many of your comments also suggest you don't understand the concept and importance of separation of code, content and presentation and what this means. The W3Cs recommendations aren't about creating new standards to stay relevant, they're about pushing standards that improve:
- Accessibility
- Extensibility
- Compatibility
I can't see how this is in any way a bad thing for anyone other than those who simply can't be arsed to spend 10 minutes finding out what's different!