Thursday Next

Typoed. I wrote it at like 6am. Shut up. Typographical errors will not be tolerated. No excuses. Under the Internet Statute of 1782 I win all arguments between myself and Nexus stemming from or otherwise occurring after the offending post until such time as I make a similar error. Gagging orders will be ignored unless presented in the form STFU with an accompanying GTFO in the manner prescribed in the Internet Injunction Act of 1337.

Well you've restored some hope for me, up until now pretty much everything I've heard about Pirates 4 has been negative. Really? Not sure what people were expecting from it. It's a 12 rated Disney film... and the fourth in a franchise. Most of the complaints seem to be that they've seen sword fights and Depp's Sparrow before, but, well, I don't know... It's a pirate film, swashes get buckled, timbers get shivered and swords get fought.

Pirates O' the Caribbean 4. Great film, more of the same really. Jack and Barbosa carry on their friend/foe relationship Gibbs is still Jacks right hand man, McShane played a ruthless Blackbeard. Everything I liked about 1-3 was there, without the bland two dimensional love story between Will and Elizabeth. Surprised at the 12 rating, it was a bit vicious in parts, I'd think twice about taking a very young child to see it, unless you have confidence in their fortitude. Savvy?

Nexus found Chell amusing? Either that or s/he needs to learn the difference between "protagonist" and "antagonist". Still, good list so far. Have we had Ico yet? I'm betting on Imagine Babyz for #1.

Better than real LCD's. You can easily replace dead pixels.

"Destroy Aperture Science by wiping your fingers over the screen." OMG! Valve have betraaaaaaaayed PC gamers! A pox on all touchscreen noob scum for they have doomed us all. Doooooooooooomed!

https://twitter.com/#!/Fauxtaku I *love* that Plunkett is a follower.

Mwuhahahaha! My insidious plan to introduce "deets" to the global lexicon is progressing well! There are now four times as many people using it as there were yesterday.

lol, nope. The US went off the gold standard in 1971. Since then the dollar has been a free-floating currency. It's not pegged to anything. Oops... forgot that.

I thought we used the Catholics to scare the Zombies... or was it the other way around?

UK (and others) ID Theft deets: http://blog.eu.playstation.com/2011/05/17/details-of-snee-scees-identity-theft-protection-programme/

We used to hang people all the time in the UK. Of course that was for sensible things like being armed, in a park, with a blacked face, as opposed to being born black and walking in a park with linked arms... Seriously, the blacked face thing is true. http://www.exclassics.com/newgate/ng169.htm Joking aside, I do get that America is uncomfortable with certain aspects of her past, and after the Resi 5 thing, discretion is probably quite wise.

Prefer the hanged man. The zombie makes me think "This is an island full of zombies that I'm going to slaughter." the hanged man makes me think that this game will have some intelligent comment on the impact of the events on the islands residents. It's like comparing Zombieland and The Walking Dead. There are plenty of Zombieland games out there. Dead Rising in particular. There aren't any The Walking Dead games (at least not to my knowledge).

Sounds like Night Trap http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Trap You probably mean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deception_series

Ok... so early on we used to operate on a needsies and wantsies basis, "I'll swap my Shearer for your Fowler." known as bartering. Then we found something that everyone valued relatively equally. E.g. Gold, Silver, known as "Commodity Trading". That is, the item being traded is valuable in and of itself. Gold was pressed into coins so that people knew how much gold they were getting, a flat square may look the same-ish size as a cirle, but the circle has greater volume, and so is more gold. "Coins" just meant everyone had a reference point without needing cumbersome scales and such. Now we use "Fiat Money" which is the trade of rusty piece of crap Italian cars items (coins, notes, etc) that have no intrinsic value other than that value conferred on them by government statute. Basically, there is a law that says "£1 is worth this much." In the past the government used to state that it would personally redeem currency for gold at that rate, that then changed to being guaranteed by tax revenue. At the moment (most) currencies are valued against the US Dollar, which is itself valued against gold. That said, the "value" of a pound is entirely relative. £1 may officially equal €1, but if all you've got is €20, the taxi driver tells you the fare is £15 sterling and a passer by offers you £15 for your €20, then €20 could suddenly become very worth £15.

Infamous and Dead Nation for my PS3, ModNation and Pursuit Force on the PSP. Plus my 60 day Plus subscription. Oh, and the ID theft cover... that seems to have gone a bit quiet.

I guess, I just don't get it. Who creates it? Who verifies it? How do we know how much currency there is? There has to be some sort of central infrastructure to decide all this because the bitcoin has no intrinsic value, it's not a goat or a lump of gold, it has no use beyond its symbolic value and is not a finite or tangible resource.

[quote name=「Advent Chaos」 @Thursday Next You have some interesting friends and family there, I knew CoD was popular, but I never thought it would generate that kind of fan-dism (?) I've seen quite a few examples of such "fanaticism" on Sony's Facebook and PlayStation Blog site. As much as everyone here derides the CoD fanbase (with good reason - my cousin, much as I love the guy, is a stereotypical CoD fan. Doesn't really know his games that well, plays pretty much exclusively racers and shooters, is a bit of a chav...) they are rabidly loyal.

I'd guess the same system that tells my computer that I have part 0042 of latest EA game, and someone in brazil is missing part 00042 of same game, and so sends that chunk from my PC to the brazil PC? Also it uses a hash, which would make duplicates pretty unlikely. (as in unlikely as someone in the world being born with the same DNA as you) It was some Googlers side project so I assume out of any part of the idea, the tech side is down to pat. It's the economical stuff where it's wobbly. Like where the value comes from. People make unauthorised duplicates of EA's games all the time... I think there's a thread on it somewhere called... um... "Piracy"? What's to stop someone making a pirate copy of a bitcoin?

Bwahahahahaha! I think that might be a touch on the sensational side. Just a hunch. As you say, the mining sounds dodgy. The lack of a central, regulated, independent institution is also troubling, without that I don't get how you can't just make loads of duplicate bitcoins, I mean if I give two different people bitcoin number 00000002, how will they know that I've spent the same coin twice? And what's to stop me claiming that I also own bitcoin 00000012?

Great episode, really can't wait for the next. Matt Smith is turning out be a wicked Doctor, he just keeps getting better.

I think playing online was (rightly) the priority. A couple of my PS3 owning friends and family were considering trading in so that they could play CoD online (I know, I know). Think Sony might just have pulled it out of the fire timing-wise.

Possible that Ethan didn't sign into his main/original PS3? Weirdly, my PS3 YLOD'd a while back, tried logging in on my Slim (just to see if it worked) and it did. Odd no? I thought I was gonna have to wait on an email. Still, yay! BFBC2 tonight. Doubt I'll be able to hit the broad side of a barn though.

I don't, to be honest. I've heard reasons, but none of them make any sense to me. To me the GTA games were always about a rags to (ill gotten) riches tale. Vice City was pretty much Scarface with a happy ending, San Andreas too charted the rise to greatness of a nobody from the hood. GTAIV had none of that, it felt dull, grey and bland as a result. ^In my opinion.^

I'd quite like to meet the individual who coined the word "preboot". I already hate that word and I've only read it in two places (including my use just then).