Thursday Next

You seem to be arguing against your point. If the electricity companies will already cut off an entire house thus causing people to freeze to death, then surely it's better that they only cut off the non-essentials? Of course, this all presumes a certain level of external visibility that was not mentioned in the video, but if you bought a TV on hire purchase or rented it or whatever, and stopped paying for it, why shouldn't the owner of the TV have a kill-switch? Again, it's got to be a better alternative than having some heavies kick down your door and walk away with it and some other stuff to cover what you owe. It all seems a bit tin-foil hatted to me to worry about stuff like this. There are a lot of good applications for this technology, not everything in SONY's R&D labs is a form of DRM.

Because you only play Journey and it has no VoIP? Do you sit in your room "pinging" whenever someone approaches?

I care.

I think it's a good idea. You go out, your missus thinks she's left her hair curlers switched on, you go to the cloud and disable them. Boom. You don't want the kids to be able to watch TV past 8pm? Set the power thingy to a timer and at 8pm the TV is off.

Not sure how it works in the US, but in the UK you get taxed on the earnings above the threshold so if you earn £200k, the first £37.5k is taxed at 20%, then the next £112.5k is taxed at 40% and the last £50k is taxed at 50%. Of course once you get into the 10's of millions you might as well call it 50% on the lot as the first £150k is a drop in the ocean, but for those just above the threshold, it's an important distinction.

The legal definition of Theft is the dishonest appropriation of the property of another with the intent to permanently deprive. "Stealing" isn't a legal term. Steal: 1 [with object] take (another person’s property) without permission or legal right and without intending to return it: thieves stole her bicycle (as adjective stolen) stolen goods Yet the Cambridge definition is "to take something without the permission or knowledge of the owner and keep it". Again, no requirement to deprive. Just to take and keep. Piracy is stealing the crime you will be charged with is Copyright Infringement, not Theft. But, as noted above, it's all semantics.

It's not theft. It is stealing. Theft requires that a person be permanently deprived of their property. Stealing is just appropriating or taking property wrongfully.

"Spying" pah. Like how the police "spy" on me when I'm in the privacy of my own car breaking the speed limits so they can "catch" me in the act.

Not sure that fudging your budgets counts as lying. He's guilty of being blindly optimistic, but that's about it. What's he supposed to say? "We've been quoted $900b but we all know that's crap so we've set aside $2t."? All that would do is guarantee that you'll hit your $2t and then some because your contractor knows what their real budget is.

Sounds like they take it a bit far to be honest. The name "The Hobbit" fine ok. Gandalf cocktail? Sure, bit tacky, but whatever. Tolkein characters on the sign? Ok I guess, but you couldn't have drawn your own instead of going off the film? Elijah Wood on your loyalty cards? Bit far, especially if Wood hasn't okayed it. Selling t-shirts? Probably crosses the line, especially as they probably look like the film cast. Altogether, sounds like they've overstepped the mark. ZSC would have to intervene, or risk losing their trademark entirely. Also, bear in mind that although the sign says "Free house" that does not mean this is a little independent pub that is owned and run by three generations of Hobbit landlords. It's owned by Punch. It's pretty much the Wendy's of Pubs (to Weatherspoon's McDonalds). As someone who was raised in proper Free house, I find Punch to be somewhat distasteful.

Yeah, totally understand. If you want me to I'll raise it with our CE guy in the US. To be honest I probably will anyway.

Nostalgia. Survival Horrors (early RE games and Silent Hill) had fixed cameras. Also, for theatrical reasons. You can frame a scene more cinematically with a fixed camera. If you want to people to discover the scary things in the right order you fix the camera. Finally, a fixed camera gives a sense of being watched, which is creepy.

Don't know what to tell you mate. I could probably get you a code but that's not really the point is it? This is really shoddy advertising and while I am sure that there was no intent to mislead, the ad has obviously mislead you.

Brilliance. Sheer brilliance. Santorum is obviously using some Derren Brown / Jedi mind trick / reverse psychology tactics to get everyone to vote for him by telling them that they need to vote for someone else.

Yeah, the email has a link that says "Not displaying blah blah blah" that should be an html link to the email without your details on it (check first though ). EDIT: Cheers Judging by the sentence structure (or lack thereof) Royal is an outsourced name.

Ouch. That is fucking shoddy. EDIT: Ethan, can you link to the HTML? I'd like to get that fixed.

I remember walking through the doors of M&S and feeling like the energy was literally being drained from my body. It'd make a good Doctor Who episode. All the men folk in that shop look like husks of themselves until they escape its life absorbing field. A stroll round HMV is usually the perfect tonic.

Maybe it's indoctrination or whatever, but I really like that about UK stores. Nine times out of ten I just want to be left alone to shop. Having someone cluck around me like an old mother hen seeing if I "need help with anything" is a bit irritating. I like grocery shopping oddly enough. It's a bit like cleaning, you can leave the higher brain to get on with whatever it wants to do while your lizard brain picks up the slack. When someone talks to me it snaps me out of that... trance which is a bit jarring.

Eh? What's your point?

Ummm...

Not sure what level of transparency is needed / required / whatever. To hear some people talk they won't be happy until we install webcams in all our offices and they can see a Truman show style live stream of the game being developed.

I mean that I can only ever do half of the quests but by the time I've done them, I have a whole new bunch of quests. Strangely though, the dude who collects Freeman Armbands is no longer accepting them. I've 50 of the bastard things sitting in my inventory. I need to get rid but he's not playing ball. I might go smack the shit outta him next time I see him, see if that changes his mind.

I never get the till assistant to bag my stuff. It's much quicker if they scan things through and I shove them in the bag, that counts double when I'm not shopping on my own. I have in the past responded to "Would you like help packing your bags?" with "No thanks, would you like a hand waving stuff over the scanner?" it didn't go over well. As for how they're laid out, I get why all the useful stuff is at the back and all, but man does it annoy me when they move stuff around. I get why, they don't want you moving in your set pattern buying your set things, they want to trick you into going down strange aisles that you would never normally visit, still irks me though. Also. I never know where eggs are. I always head towards bread and milk but then I think to myself, that they should perhaps be somewhere more meaty. It's like playing King of the Hill with a moving hill some times. I'm sure the eggs relocate every 30 seconds.

Ok, like Dean says. Much more sensible. Also, love that cracked article. I'm pretty sure I've said some of those things... or at least alluded to them myself.