Flatpackhamster

Duke Nukem Forever. And it was shit.

This is par for the course for the big ISPs, though. I moved to IDNet a few years ago. On the very rare occasions that there's an issue I call tech support, I'm straight through and I talk to someone who isn't reading from a script. But it costs more. You've got to make a choice between great customer service and price because you won't get both.

Aren't there enough follow-the-player-through-checkpoints shooty type games already on the PC?

I think he's wrong, and it's the wrongness born of not knowing what is involved in running an IT system. It's a disease which sadly afflicts practically every person who reaches management level.

Great graphics but simplified gameplay and crap plot? Anyone would think it was a console game.

Oh, please. Less of the melodrama. We were already doing ourselves out of a job. Instead of, 10 years ago, needing one tech per 30 machines, you now need one for 500. Remote management, remote this, more efficient the other, automated that - makes it all far more efficient but needs fewer boots on the ground. That's progress, that's how it's been since the first ape-man carved the first silicon chip in 14 million BC.

If you're planning to suck another generation of console junkies dry, that's exactly the right way round.

As has been pointed out, piracy is automated through torrents. I've seen clients' kids with ten thousand pirated music tracks. They don't listen to them. Same'll go for games. Of course it's easy to willy-wave about the Big Amazing Blockbuster game and how many copies it's sold, blah blah. Those super-big games that appear amidst an orgy of hype and advertising, people buy them, play their 20 hours and then get rid of them and six months later, there's another one. What's being ignored here is the Indie game market, which is truly colossal. And where do Indie game makers go? Do they rush off to the supposedly massive console markets? Nah, of course not. PC is where it's at. Look at Minecraft - released on the PC first. Yes, there's now an XBox version, but the PC is still outselling the XBox version (7 million versus 5 million sales).

I would say you worked at Curry's.

A catchy soundbite which doesn't mean that being able to have a pint with your lunch at a motorway service station is 'broken Britain'.

So it's "broken Britain" to have a pint with your lunch if you're a passenger in a car? Woe unto us... How patronising to think that drivers are suddenly going to start swilling the ale after 3 decades of falling drink-driving rates and falling road deaths. Should we close pubs by main roads too? After all, look at the 'temptation' for drivers to knock one back.

Holidays...what a quaint notion.

I wasn't suggesting you'd murder his mother in retaliation. I'm asking you if you'd 'wish harm' on someone who did something wicked to someone you loved (which was the exact phrase you used). And you've pretty much said that you would 'wish harm' on them. My point is - you don't know what you're capable of until you're put under pressure, and the cosy little first-world lives we lead mean we will almost certainly never have to find out. How lucky we all are. Have you got children? Serious question. Because before my girl turned up I felt much the same as you. Now, I'd shank them and cook them to feed her. And she wouldn't be allowed to leave the table until she'd finished her delicious homo sapiens avec un sauce pommade et tuile verite. There's nothing bleak about my view at all. I recognise the capacity for kindness and decency but I also recognise that most of it is an artifice created by a time of essentially limitless resources. Roll back to a time of hunger and you'll soon see what happens to that compassion and resilience. And yes, I am an atheist, and yes, you're lucky aren't a neighbour when the apocalypse comes.

I hope it doesn't. The reason I hope it doesn't is that if it does then it's grown in to a far more efficient means of social control. Yes, yes, I recognise that you think religion makes people do bad stuff. My point is that I think that the actions of the people were dictated not by the religion but by the nature of the people themselves. I think that some people would do bad things regardless, and some good things regardless. Religion is no more and no less than a tool and it is how that tool is wielded that matters, not the existence of the tool itself. Wouldn't you? What if someone cut up your mum with an axe? Would you wish harm on them then? What if you had a daughter to feed and were nearly out of food and someone came to you and asked you for your last bit of food? Would you refuse to help them or let your daughter starve? Would you kill to feed your family? Is it bleak to recognise the feral nature of the animal beneath the civilised exterior? Three meals away from anarchy, as the saying goes. It's only when you realise that it's there that you can learn to contain it.

I suspect that the only way that will happen is for the earth to be invaded by aliens. At that point the entire human race would work together, obliterate the aliens - and then turn on each other again with shiny new PodBlasters or whatever they've salvaged from the alien death ships. Either that, or once they've defeated the aliens, they'll develop interstellar flight and spread out in to the galaxy - and then the galaxy really will be in trouble.

Stalin and Mao both saw established religion as a threat to their power bases. But they ought to be salutary lessons as to what happens when you get rid of religion as an established power base. You end up with religion in another name, the cult of the individual - Stalin or Mao. The same applies in North Korea where the Cult of the Leader exists. Crimes committed by Stalin and those who did his bidding aren't committed 'in the name of atheism' but they are committed by, and for, an atheist who persecuted the religious just as assiduously as he did anyone else. Would a truly religious individual have carried out such brutal acts against a church which represented his God? Of course not. So how do you separate a crime by or for an atheist from a crime 'in the name of atheism'? @witch wrote earlier that the Muslims who beheaded this poor soldier in Woolwich couldn't be Muslims because Islam doesn't allow them to do what they did. Yet they claim to have acted in the name of Islam. And look at the flip side. In the name of religion, people have made huge sacrifices for other people. Can you name anyone carrying out huge sacrifices for someone else 'in the name of atheism'? I can't. I can't think of anyone standing up and saying 'I give my life for random fluctations in the universe'. The sacrifice and the violence of religion are an inherent part of it and there's no way to separate them. You lose one, you lose the other. But religion and patriotism also create tolerance amongst people for other people with whom they would share nothing in common. It's no co-incidence that religion arose once social groups became too large for a single individual to easily manage, and that patriotism arose once societies became too large for religion to easily manage. If you get rid of religion and patriotism, you scrap any reason for people to look out for each other or work together for a common goal.

Sorry, I forgot who I'm dealing with. GOD NOT MAKE MAN BAD NOT GOD NOT MAKE MAN GOOD HURRR. I hope that's clearer.

Why is it irrelevant? It's a good way to demonstrate that religion doesn't make you a bad person and atheism doesn't make you a good person.

It's like you didn't understand the words in my post.

Atheists can be just as bad. Stalin was an atheist. People will carry out brutal acts in the name of an atheist system or demonstrate bravery and generosity in the name of a religious one. It comes down to the individual at the end of the day. And if you want us to 'grow out of xenophobia' I think you're going to be bitterly disappointed. Our inherent nature is tribal and has been for half a million years. You can't just wish that away. You'd have as much success just banning dickheads as banning organised religion. We're wired for it, like it or not. Again, part of our evolutionary heritage.

Does anyone know why people who live in areas like that build their houses out of balsa wood and paper instead of concrete and bricks?

All the more reason to own it - it'll be so expensive to run he'll hardly ever take it out so it'll reduce the risk of him having an accident. Sometimes I amaze even myself.

How about this? Volvo 740 GLE 4dr Saloon 2.3 1987 One of those colossal, built-like-a-tank volvo estates for £470!

What's this with focuses and unreliable electrics? I've never had a peep from mine. Never met anyone who did. Is this some sort of hangover from the 1970s 'Fords have unreliable electrics' thing?

A link from the IPPR. A Fabianist, leftist group of professional meddlers. You'll forgive me if I disregard their reports entirely. What about the external costs of sitting around waiting for a bus for 40 minutes? What about the external costs of not being able to get to work because the train drivers are on strike because they want a 98% pay rise this week? Did they include those external costs? Here's a crazy concept. Let's try not spending so much money.