Thursday Next

Having done a bit of reading around the intertubes, it seems that "some scholars" as there always seem to be, are of the opinion that the word taken to mean "homosexual" could just be a misinterpretation of "prostitute" or generally "sexual deviant". In Corinthians the word arsenokoitēs (ἀρσενοκοίτης) appears in a list of sexy/raucous/otherwise fun things that you can't do. Someone somewhere along the line has taken the Ancient Greek translation of an Arabic word and decided that it means homosexual intercourse and thus it is banned.

I guess it all depends on the dogma you adhere to and how strongly. Homosexuality Performing a homosexual act is a sin (good point Ethan), so is eating meat on a Friday, going to work on Sunday and coveting another person's possessions (thought-crime tastic). Also, apparently Deuteronimy sp? Also has some stuff on this as does Romans 1, though the "author" of that gospel has had a lot of stuff disregarded, like how cool slavery is, and how women are 2nd class citizens.

Well, you have to pay for the plan too so I'm not going to... I hear tell that if you have an iPhone (maybe other phones too?) then you can tether your 3g connection from that to the Vita. That's exactly what I intend to do. WiFi Hotspot the phone et voila, 3G. No separate pay as you go sim or contract. Besides which, the use cases for 3G are pretty limited.

It's pretty similar, largely because it is based on the Christian ceremony that pre-dates the discovery of America. You don't actually need a license per se. You do however (but only for a Civil Marriage) need to give notice of your intent to marry / civilly partner consisting of full name, age - minimum of 18 (or 16 with parental consent), address, nationality, current status (single, divorced, etc), occupation, and intended venue for your marriage or civil partnership. After 15 days, you will be granted authority. How this boils down in practicality is you will go to your registry office (or church) and when you book in a date you will have to supply those details. Your earliest available date will be at least 15 days out. Notice will be publicly displayed for 15 days by the registrar or the vicar will press-gang you into attending church for at least 6 months and make a "Banns" public announcement of the impending doom marriage 3months prior depending on whether you have gone CofE or Civil. The idea is to give people plenty of time to "speak now" before having to "forever hold their peace". Interestingly in the UK marriages must take place between 08:00 and 18:00, hence the lack of chapels operating at 4am and overseen by Elvis impersonators. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo6/12-13-14/76/section/4

How about we let both gay people and straight people choose whether they want to marry and enter a civil union? I bet there's people on all sides of the fence wishing they had access to the other option. Couldn't agree more.

I've got Uncharted and Rayman on the way. Wipeout is pretty cool. Motorstorm RC is a pretty interesting title. Speaking to a Sony rep yesterday he said that if you buy one version of it (PS3 or Vita) you get the other one free. I'm also pretty sure that the trophies for them are the same so you can play on the go, then when you get home boot up the big version and carry on where you left off. I don't think saved games auto-sync (yet) so you'd have to do a bit of copying across. Ruin does this too and the save data definitely syncs on that one. EDIT - Apparently Ruin is called Warrior's Lair now. Obviously no one told the Sony rep. Other titles with this cross play stuff include Wipeout 2048. I got the impression that Sony are very keen to push this whole buy one version-get both thing so I'd expect most first party titles to do it (as they should) and many third party ones too.

Then a civil marriage is for you, which forbids the mention of religion, so you already have an option for what you want. If you're attaching any religious connotations to marriage in general, then it is entirely your own doing. And your point about people saying it is wrong that straight people can't have a civil partnership is exactly my point the whole reason there are civil partnerships is to make it different from a civil marriage between straight people - it is not what gay people want. We want marriage equality not so-called "gay marriage". With regards to incest, I agree about the parent child issues but I would imagine siblings that embark on an incestuous relationship are probably psychologically damaged. Maybe they had abusive parents that pushed them closer together, so while they may be consenting, it's probably a n unhealthy relationship. I just don't like the term "marriage" and prefer "partnership" for a number of reasons. 1. "Marriage" has religious connotations for me. 2. "Partnership" better expresses the type of relationship I would want to commit to. 3. To your point above. If we're going to say that marriage and civil partnerships are the same, then I should be allowed to have whatever joining ceremony I like. As for sibling relationships being born out of strife. I'm sure this isn't always the case. There are numerous stories of separated at birth siblings who have led perfectly healthy lives and got into relationships with each other unknowingly. Besides which, if we're going to legislate relationships based on the emotional state of the people involved then that's going to be a pretty sweeping law. Provided they are both medically of good mental capacity, then the law should butt out. For example, we don't legislate against girls marrying boyfriends who beat them up. We don't impose a statutory cooling off period after receiving your Decree Absolute before you can marry again. People do lots of things that are potentially unhealthy. Drinking, smoking, eating at McDonalds, having unprotected sex with strangers, body modification (sometimes all within the space of a single evening)... we don't legislate on any of it it so long as the people involved are adults (McDonalds excluded) and have the capacity to consent to what they are doing, and I don't think that we should.

If you want a (very big) ballpark gauge on whether or not a game was successful. A blockbuster title needs to reach top 15 to break even.

Dean's right about the Civil Partnership thing, legally there is no difference. In fact, one large area of dispute about Civil Partnerships is that they are only available to same sex couples. I have no intention of ever getting "married" standing in a church, lying to a priest, who knows I'm lying and have only been attending his church for the last 6 months so that I can hold my sham of a ceremony there, forcing all my relatives (most of whom either have no faith, or are lip-service Christians / Muslims) to sit there and chant along and all that rubbish. Further I don't particularly want any ties to marriage / religion whatsoever. I'd much rather declare my commitment and snag a bunch of lovely tax breaks by having a Civil Partnership with a girl. With regard to incest and polygamy, well, I couldn't give less of a crap how many people you want to marry/partner with. Incest carries a certain degree of personal... discomfort. It's something that is pretty ingrained in our society (outside of Norfolk) that incest is far from best. However, if two people want to consent to it, I don't see why it should be an issue legally. Playing the genetics card is bullshit imho. It would only affect heterosexual incestuous couples. There will be no deformed babies as a result of a couple of brothers going at it, if we're going to use genetic deformities as a reason to ban couples from having sex then that is a hop, skip and a jump from Eugenics which makes me waaaaaay more uncomfortable. The parent / child thing is more tricky as it's not necessarily just about two consenting adults. One of those adults has spent a considerable amount of time in a position of trust and authority over the other. To me that issue is more like Doctors getting involved with the patients they are treating.

Correction, Pseudo-intellectuals tend to vote Democrat. So do anti-religious bigots. I imagine they did vote democrat too. You don't win an election in a two party system without the majority of the public voting for you, even the pseudo-intellectuals and anti-religious bigots get a vote. (unless you are a sneaky Republican). P.S. Can I just be an anti-religious-pseudo-intellectual please? No need to throw around labels like Democrat.

I thought we'd already established that all intellectuals went Democrat because Republicans are a bunch of evolution denying, science hating, hill-billies. I suppose indies could be less-idiotic Republicans, or less intellectual Democrats?

One of EA's strengths is having the infrastructure needed to bring a large quantity of a product to market. The flip side of that is that it takes less time for supply to outstrip demand and sometimes leaves a surplus of titles. Mirror's Edge was another game that suffered from this, though a lot of that was the fault of an ignorant bunch of reviewers who didn't know good gaming when it ran up a wall and kicked them in the face. (Not that I'm bitter or anything).

The only way this would work is if you set your company up as a partnership. There is only one large company I can think of that runs this way http://www.johnlewispartnership.co.uk/about.html. I would love to see a videogame publisher that operates like that. I used to work for both Waitrose and John Lewis on the bottom rung, shop floor roles and it was one of the nicest working environments I've ever experienced. Also, yeah, he does. Sneaky Russian.

Generally, there are no laws against being a bit of a dick (lucky me). "Hate Speech" laws are pretty much phrased as "Inciting Racial Hatred" etc. So yeah, it's the whole getting a bunch of like minded idiots to rally around you and beat up a queer sort of speech as opposed to "I disagree with x". Europe is pretty harmonised on this point, the rules are pretty similar everywhere. Places like Germany (who have a somewhat unique history wrt minority groups) are very careful to promote tolerance of personal beliefs and freedoms which can sometimes and somewhat ironically limit freedom of expression. France on the other hand is a bit more bullish about the whole thing (hence the thrice cursed Toubon law).

In that case, it is ludicrous to expect each individual to get paid for whatever they did on a game in perpetuity. I can pretty much guarantee that there is not a single game in existence where everyone on the credits list is still employed by that company the logistics involved in tracking individuals as the move around, out of and back into the industry would be phenomenal.

Our butter doesn't come quite so delineated. Though I believe it does have blocks of 100g measured off on some packs.

If I'd not used EA ones, I'd have been pulled up on it. Ok, but I mean, what's the point? Yes, not everyone involved in a game will receive money for that game forever. To break that question down more let's start with: Who is a "dev"?

With regard to that list, examples such as Pandemic and Bullfrog are pretty misleading. The "developer" in that instance does not receive money directly because they sold the entire business along with all the rights to make money from those IPs to another company, included in that price would be the amount of money that the developer expects to make from its current stock of games out in the wild. The individual coders (or at least some of them) now work for that other company so will indirectly receive money from those game sales, in the form of shares, wages etc. Not sure what this list is really looking to prove other than to point out that selling the IP on which a game is based is a lot different to selling the game itself.

With some of the driving I've seen out there, a dummy would be preferable, unmanned driving system notwithstanding.

Panic over, it dispatched.

I don't really want to argue semantics so I'll just say that in my opinion conciousness defines life. If something should happen to me and I were to be rendered "brain-dead" I would want my organs harvested for transplants and what remains to go to science. By the same token, if a bundle of cells has yet to achieve life / conciousness / sentience / whatever, then I don't think it should qualify as a person and as such it should be the woman's choice whether she wants to continue with the pregnancy or not. How do you stand on "morning after pills"? Are they ok because it's potentially a potential child?

Totally agree with Ethan. You can't end a life that hasn't begun and all the evidence we have suggests that you have to be well into the second trimester before anything like what I would call Life begins. Arguing that preventing the potential survival of an offspring is tantamount to killing them is a dangerous path. It's the same rhetoric that the church has been preaching in Africa to discourage the use of condoms and has resulted in a huge number of easily preventable deaths due to AIDS and other STIs.

Hmmm, hope my collectors edition dispatches today. The product is kicking up an error now, which I'm hoping just means they're not taking new orders on it... and not that their imminent collapse has led to the product disappearing. http://www.game.co.uk/en/final-fantasy-xiii-2-limited-collectors-edition-155053

Abortion has to be the choice of the person carrying the baby. Also, I'm pretty sure that abortions have to be carried out well before the kicking phase. When exactly does a foetus become a baby? When it's two cells? four cells? four thousand cells? The human body will reject a foetus that can't be carried to full term because of a defect, it can also miscarry if the mother is too frail to carry the infant to full term. As a species we've evolved to be able to use reason, if we reason that carrying the child to full term we would then not be able to support it, or that it would suffer from a low or no quality of life then we should be allowed to induce a miscarriage.

We're going to contract out to Burns Slant Drilling Co.