AMLinington

As a fully paid up member of the tin-hat brigade my future-childs school is going to receive very strict instructions regarding the things I do not consent to regarding my children. Use of their images and names in school publications will be banned, videoing and photography of my child will be strictly prohibited so that teacher that thinks they can get away with not teaching a class in the guise of kids creating 'videos' will suffer my wrath. School photo day will not be a problem for my child as they will not be permitted to be photographed. I will not allow the school to take or use their fingerprints either. Whenever a parental consent form comes home the blanket answer will be 'NO'. Many many people have very strong feelings about their child's image NOT being used. I would definitely say 'Permission all the way'. If a teacher wants to submit something to the school website, the TEACHER should seek permission from the child's parent or Guardian for both Image AND Name. That way any child requiring special protection such as anonymity can still be protected and there is no abiguity. If they have not signed (and ticky boxes can be filled in by the student so a signature is much better) for the Name as well as the image, then only the image can be used. It covers you as well so if they try to sue you can point at the signed permission form and say 'you said we could use name AND image'. Child protection would definitely say 'keep the names out of it' though.

Argh tell me about it. I tried to get on last night for a quick half hour before aerobics and got error code 37. When I finally got past this and logged in it took 10 minutes to load my hero list. Once that was loaded I tried to resume my game and got a whole spectrum of errors preventing me from actually resuming my game. When I finally logged in and actually made progress on the questline (all 7 minutes of it) I was halfway through fighting an epic mob with the promise of decent loot when 'Error 37 - you have been disconnected from the server' ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH So I'll have to start AGAIN assuming I can get on tonight ofc.

I remember lots of fun little games from back in the day - I remember playing an old school Columbus game on a massive set of disks on a BBC micro. It was great because we had to balance our cargo and take on provisions and stuff all using various maths concepts. I also remember absolutely loving Twinworld. At the risk of sounding a bit cliche, I think you need to write your story first. What is the objective? Who are the main characters and what are their alliances. Is the objective exploration? If so what are you hoping to find? Few people game for the experience of the game unless there is something at the end of it. How are you going to keep people interested? How are you going to power up your character - will they use weapons or 'magic'? Weapons mean 'Ammo packs', magic means 'Power' levels or infinite power? Have you designed the different types of Mobs and their abilities? Will there be logic puzzles to solve to advance certain sections? Secrets? Secret Levels? I could go on all day but I think the first thing you need to do is decide what happens at the end. What is the 'point' of playing. Even if it's a highscore-style game like pacman that is still an objective. A 'Survive as long as you can' objective is still fun as long as a point will be reached where someone can either defeat the game (as that is the purpose of surviving as long as you can - if the game is unwinnable why try?) or otherwise have some sort of achievement.

Having always been a Mage (before I got into Pala and Druid Tanking in WoW) I went with a Wizard and I really enjoy the varied play style. Most of the time I stick to certain primary and secondary spells but the variety of functionality gives me options to customise my attacks depending on the mobs and boss tacs. Often I find myself changing my spells before a boss fight - I know I did with Butcher. The only problem with the Wizard is that it's a bit squishy, especially when paired with the Scoundrel or Enchantress. I tend to have better survivability with the Templar on a mixed heal/prot spec.

I'm pretty certain you guys have hit the nail on the head with WAR. I am almost certain it was a Warhammer game. Definitely post-dated WoW, the graphics weren't brilliant but I remember it being feted as serious competition to WoW at the time. It was a third person RPG and not at all like Diablo. I remember saying to said friend that I preferred WoW because of the UI addons and that this game was horrible because the action bar functionality was poor. I'm certain LeBoyfriend went through a phase of playing it but got bored of battling the terrible graphics and awful LAG. I tried 'Runes of Magic' but it was full of kids running around with characters called Sm3llyP00.... At least in WoW you still have some people that take it seriously.... Occasionally....

I think @witch has a point - climbing Everest and K2 are endurance events, they are not 'simple' climbs. Given enough time and blister plasters even I could probably manage to wander up Mount Snowdon, but Everest is a totally different ballgame and it ravages you. That being said, if you have enough energy and drive to walk on past a dying person clearly you are not THAT ravaged. You still have to come down again too. I don't think it is right to leave people to die, but I'd have to question whether or not they should be there in the first place. Perhaps some of the blame should lie with companies that organise and promote climbs for people rich enough to pay rather than for people who are fit enough. You'll never answer this question because you will always hit the brick wall of 'Who are you to tell me what I can and can't do?'. You will never stop people from capitalizing on extreme sports. Two words: Darwin Award.

I should clarify - specific screenshots of female magi riding the disks. Although I remember the game being a lot less detailed so I am not sure Age of Reckoning is old enough. I wondered about Wrath of Heroes but none of these titles rings a bell. I have asked LeBoyfriend to look out his disk if he nips home for lunch

Yes, the Blacksmith it very poor for the money. I don't think I've used a single item from him yet as its too poor and I have collected better in the world.

@sonofsanta I did think it might have been Age of Reckoning but I can't find any screenshots to prove it was the one I meant. I didn't think the name was that long either so perhaps it was another Warhammer game?

Sorry, none of those. I swear it had something to do with Warhammer but I can't find anything in the Warhammer game set that matches it...

Although to play devils advocate, these people are not going into the climb blindly. They are aware of the risks and should have a contingency plan. I don't think people should climb alone either. It is a sad state of affairs today when people put their own ambition over the lives of others, but equally, when all your supplies are planned and packed down to the last granule and everything you need you have to carry, I can't see how people would have spare oxygen or equipment for others on the mountain. This then puts them at risk. Climbing Everest is not like climbing mount Snowdon - it is a tough endurance trek with harsh conditions. If you have not planned properly and die as a result why should others put their own lives at risk to save you? Why should others waste all the time, effort and money they put into properly planning their expedition? Why should other climbers put themselves at risk to carry you down when it is unlikely you will live through the descent (although obviously no-one has the right to decide this as it is tantamount to 'mercy killing'). IMO all Climbers should climb as a group and if one fails the group should be responsible for returning them to a base camp. If you choose to take the risk and climb alone then you also choose to accept the potential consequences - even is that is death. A more basic analogy is speeding. If a driver chooses to exceed the speed limit, they are therefore by default accepting the consequences. Including but not limited to fines, points, loss of licence, etc. They are also therefore, by choosing to speed, accepting that if they hit someone doing 60 in a 30 zone and that person dies of injuries related to the excess speed, then they are responsible for that persons death. Although it must be said that you can kill someone hitting them at 5 miles an hour if they hit their head or break a rib and puncture a lung, this is just an illustration. So by the same logic, if you CHOOSE to climb Everest poorly planned, on your own without sufficient supplies, you are choosing to accept the consequences of your actions. OFC accidents happen, but this is why you plan - you arrange to go in a group and you arrange for the group to take responsibility for injured party members. It's not a day out in picturesque countryside - it is a dangerous activity and should be treated with the appropriate respect.

Hi All, Following on from a Diablo III conversation in our office this morning, a friend of mine is insisting that he installed Diablo II. I have never played Diablo II and believe he is referring to another MMO that we played very very briefly in which I played a spellcasting class that hovered on a strange-looking disk. To my knowledge I have only played World of Warcraft, Runes of Magic (boring, clunky), this mystery game I can't remember, Star Wars : The Old Republic and Diablo III (I've played other games too but I'm concentrating on RP fantasy games here). Here is my question: What in the seven flaming hells is the name of that game? I remember it being very briefly a threat to WoW until people played it and discovered that it was terrible. I know it is not Guild Wars and I know it was a game you purchased, but I cannot for the life of me remember the title. I thought it might have been Warhammer online but nothing I have seen of the Warhammer MMO games rings a bell. I also for some reason seem to think it began with B but this may be wrong too. So, can anyone help me identify this mystery game. All I remember is the weird hover-disks the spellcasters rode about on. They were horrible to control IIRC and were part of the reason I gave up after playing for about 5 minutes.

I'd understand this if it were a MMORPG where your gear level MATTERS. Where how epic your gear is will directly impact the raids you do and the groups you get. It also affects the respect other players afford you. In Diablo you are getting shiny-shiny for shiny-shiny's sake. To me, a newbie to Diablo, the game to me is about the Story. It's about the progression of the story from beginning to end. Upgrading my gear is a bonus sideline. Perhaps I have not been playing long enough to really appreciate it or perhaps it is the different way I think about games or my own personal gaming style. To me, PvP is horrible, I never do PvP in WoW. I love raids and dungeons, I love to progress in content and to do this I need to progress my gear. I can't do that pottering around in random places and killing mobs. Diablo III turns that on it's head - you HAVE to potter about killing things to get gear and level enough to progress the story, which is great as a single-player game. Why then would you hammer through the story (which is the bit I enjoy the most) only to farm for good gear at higher difficulty levels which ultimately you don't do anything with. You've already killed the bosses so why are you farming loot? Perhaps I've just not grasped the Diablo concept yet or perhaps my gaming style and preferences don't match up with it. I don't know. Although I do have to ask: If I complete a quest chain in 'normal', when I go back to an area all the mobs I killed are still dead, so there are no more mobs to kill. Lets say I complete the story then switch to nightmare mode, will the previously seen areas re-spawn at nightmare level? Do I have to start the quest chain again in each mode? If so, will the mobs and drops scale with my level?

This is the first time I've played a Diablo game. Seasoned Diablo players in our office are complaining that it's a bit 'samey' but I think Diablo III is gorgeous. The backdrops and cinematics are beautifully done and the game is lush to look at. Having never played Diablo before I am enjoying learning the game and it's great to have a game like this I can pause. I am a seasoned WoW player though and still love my MMORPG, but Diablo is great fun and to pick it up where I left off is nice. I do wish there were more quests available though. There are massive areas of land and random dungeons just 'lying around' in the terrain and it would be great if there were quests or objectives you could pick up around them (like refugees begging you to rescue kidnapped children or something) otherwise it's very tempting to go A to B on the main quest objective / quest line without exploring these beautifully crafted areas. There are some dungeon objectives but you have to go quite far in before you find them so you have to decide - Am I going to spend time exploring here with possibly no purpose or am I going to progress the quest and storyline (I like progressing the storyline at a reasonable pace as I am keen to find out what happens next)? It also annoys me a bit that the map areas you have already explored don't remain 'visible' when you next log in - you have to explore it all again to be able to 'see' the map. But otherwise it's great. Having both Diablo III and WoW to play pretty much satisfies all my gaming needs. I did stupidly buy a copy of Star Wars : Old Republic but I've become very very bored with it. I'm waiting until it does what Star Trek online does and goes Free-to-play. I might go back to it then.

Eurgh, powerpoint for your best mans speech? Sorry but tech at a wedding never goes to plan. To be honest, write a speech that will fit on 3 of those large index cards (single side only). 3 Paragraphs each about different things. The guests will thank you. Guests hate powerpoints and lengthy speeches. I know I do. If I were you I would do something simple, not embarrassing, maybe with a cheesy self-deprecating joke about terrible best man jokes, a CLEAN, funny story and some thank-yous. That will go down far better with the guests than a great long powerpoint thing that you spend 10 minutes fumbling over whilst the fizz in the champagne peters out and goes warm. I'm with Elsiegee - short and sweet. The worst part of the speech will be preparing something someone else will cover. Overlapping speeches that thank everyone-and-their-dog will be boring. Might I venture a small suggestion: Paragraph 1: Open with a little joke about best man speeches. Explain your relationship to the Happy Couple for those that don't have a clue who you are (probably about 2/3 of the room). Little bit of background to your relationship with the Groom. Maybe a silly anecdote about how you've been best friends since that time you did XYZ. Paragraph 2: Say something nice about the bride. Even if you hate her. Wish them luck and love and happiness in their marriage. If you know the grooms family well and his parents are happily married, wish them as much joy as Mr and Mrs Senior. That sort of thing. BIG Time family bonus points. Paragraph 3: Invite the audience to raise their glasses and toast the happy couple. Thank everyone for their patience. Sit. Relieved applause will ensue and you will have avoided doing one of the many many best man sins: 1. Upsetting the bride by putting humiliating photos out there. She will have planned every detail and smutty pictures of her new husband in Amsterdam with his arms around a 'Lady in red' will be guaranteed to enrage her, upset her and alienate her family and probably some of his. It's a bad idea and will leave a sour taste in everyones mouths. I will specifically instruct my venue NOT to permit slideshows or projectors of any kind without my express WRITTEN approval (unfortunately I know LeBoyfriends mates - LeBoyfriend is a sensible chap but his mates are little more than purile teens). 2. Babbling - Nothing is worse than sitting there waiting for the best man to get to the point of a story you have no interest in hearing. It's boring and will alienate guests. 3. The curse of TMI - No-one wants to hear about the Groom's unfortunate rash or how you once walked in on them 'in flagrente' and the groom was wearing a dog collar. It's nasty. No-one likes that. Keep it clean. I'm such a control freak I will ask for a copy of the Best Mans speech to veto it. If it's too filthy the Best Man will be prevented from speaking. I am also going to prepare my own speech as a contingency if LeBoyfriend fails to cover all the important thank-yous and acknowledgements. Or I might just write it for him...

I suspect I'm using the Virgin DNS as I have not yet gotten around to changing it. Every time I log into the interface the wireless goes down so I tend not to fiddle with it too often. I will probably use openDNS when I'm configuring my own hardware but until then, we're having so many issues with it and calling support so often that it's not worth changing their defaults as they use it as an excuse to fob us off... Although, since a reboot resolves the issue, I am more inclined to think it's an issue with the shoddy firmware more than anything else as it will randomly stop one or two devices from accessing anything. LeBoyfriend can be browsing fine on his laptop, but his phone won't be able to connect, my laptop will have no connection but my phone will be fine and the XBox is fine too. I'll then boot another machine and it will fail to find the network SSID. Weird. Stupid. Virgin. Nuff said.

I've had intermittent issues accessing the Southern Electric site but a reboot of the router usually fixes it. Although I am having to reboot that router far more than I would like for other reasons too, so I'm not convinced it isn't the shoddy firmware TBH... My wireless seems to die at least once a week. Can't wait for the decorating to be finished so I can bung it into bridged mode and hook up my own hardware.

To be honest, I use Pinterest personally and cannot quite work out how it works, but suffice it to say that I believe the basic premise is that if I find something I like I can pin it, it then becomes public and the more other people see that pin and repin it the more popular the article becomes so the more people see it. I can't quite work out how you'd effectively maintain or generate a school presence on there or indeed how much benefit it would be to do so. Half the time the page doesnt even load properly for me anyway.

LOL I thought the same thing. I also wondered by he didn't try pressing some of the buttons, would have been interesting to see whether they are bound to 'real' functions...

LOL Amazon should know better than to allow reviews on these products by now.

More like a case of the poster using models and the model himself standing in front of it?

Wow. I'd like to say I was shocked by this video but no, I really wasn't. People have no respect or decency anymore. You find people like this in all professions that should be 'caring' professions - child care, nursing (especially nursing), people working in elderly care homes and dementia wards (I shan't go into too much detail about the dreadful indignities my grandmother suffered before she died, but suffice it to say they deliberately left her in urine-soaked bedding, ultimately leading to the MASSIVE infected bedsore that we believe led to her death from multi-organ failure). If you want my opinion, the humiliation this child suffered was the very smallest tip of a very large iceberg. I've seen cctv footage and read stories of teachers forcibly restraining autistic children by tying them to their seat and hitting them then blaming the bruises on the childs violence. Our nephew is mildly autistic and sometimes he can be a challenge so I can appreciate the distress their cruelty caused him as he wouldn't have the capacity to understand that they were lying to him. He took it at face value so telling a child he can't see his father is probably very frightening. I'd have found this video more shocking if there was evidence they had hit or restrained the child or refused him basic rights such as a toilet visit or a drink, but sadly, humiliation in the classroom and poor attitude are not in the least bit surprising to me in the world we live in today... Especially where vulnerable people are concerned - children, mentally or physically disabled people, the elderly or infirm - it makes me frightened to trust the care of my future children to anyone! Edited to add: I must also confess to being terrified of ever needing long term care as I hate to imagine the abuse I'll suffer as an elderly person. I've already had a couple of horrible hospital experiences with surgeons telling me they will remove the wrong thing and anaethetists ignoring my distress and causing me a lot of pain! I hope assisted suicide is legal by the time I reach that level of need because I am not prepared to suffer this kind of abuse!

Oh the fire alarm rigmarole still exists in the private sector, you just have 'weekly tests' where you have to listen to it shriek in your ear for a while and the bi-annual 'random' fire drill - usually conducted when it's raining where you troop out to the car park and a fire warden counts you all twice whereupon you return to your desk to find a phone ringing off the hook and 2 servers that have crashed in your 15 minute absence. Cue MORE phone calls from users who suddenly, inexplicably can't get on the internet. OH NOES THE WORLD IS ENDING! LOL.

The problem with asking for opinions on a company in a public forum is that people who have had bad experiences can't or won't go into detail for obvious reasons, and people with good experiences are more than happy to expand on it at length so it is difficult to judge. Unless you get an overwhelming 'ARGHHHHHHHHH' response, a mixed bag is perfectly normal. No-one will ever have the same experience - I was trying to buy car insurance recently and we ended up having a great big debate in the office as every insurer I looked at SOMEONE had a bad experience and someone had a good experience. Ultimately I think it depends on what you want. If you are looking for a managed service, find people that use them for a managed service and ask them. If you simply want a single product or selection of products supplied then you have the upper hand as a buyer. I always base my judgements of companies on how they deal with first contact. I will always be deliberately vague (even though I know exactly what I want) so I can judge how well they know their product range and whether they will offer me something closely approximating what I have in mind or whether they will bloat and inflate the quote with unnecessary rubbish. I am also terribly judgemental about whether people do what they say they will - if they promise to call me at a certain time and don't that makes me mad. 3 times Aviva promised to call me at 18:30 and failed. I still bought the insurance online as it was the best price but the operative lost my commission. They do get points for proactivity though... Out of interest, what ARE you looking for?

Yvettes bridal has to be a joke of some description. Either that or it started as a poorly made site, then the web server was hacked and the layers of trash have slowly evolved. Since it is now offline, I can't speculate as to how this site remained online since surely SOMEONE was paying for the domain and hosting (possibly)? One of our engineers found the most amazingly naff site I've ever seen but for the life of me I can't find the URL... It has musical menus and star trek sound effects.