Having grown tired of defending my “no, Twilight is awful, you can tell from the first four pages, not to mention the horrendous misogyny in every quote” stance to all and sundry, I’m going to put them down with legitimacy by actually reading the vile tome. I’ll probably do some minireviews of particularly dreadful bits…
21st March update: it didn’t begin. It will begin soon.
In the last ten years, the proliferation of high-speed internet access amongst residential customers has, in more economically-developed countries (MEDCs), reached astounding levels- 30% or more by person (OECD), and approaching 90% (OECD, 2009) by household, now have access to “broadband” (definitions as to what constitutes a “broadband internet connection” differ for political reasons) internet connections. Furthermore, the nature of residential broadband, combined with technological innovation, has made it extremely easy for the end-user to share files. However, looking at the history of some of the filesharing technologies currently popularised, especially Bittorrent, it is clear that they are simply “dumb pipes” for content, with legitimate uses as well as illegitimate ones. Bittorrent especially has seen adoption amongst the independent content industries (Revision3, an independent TV company distributing HD video over Bittorrent, has built a business model around being able to reduce bandwidth costs by using peer-to-peer (P2P) technology), as well as established companies such as Blizzard Entertainment (Blizzard Entertainment) (World of Warcraft) and Valve Software (Schiesel, 2004) (Steam) using Bittorrent-based systems to distribute legitimate content. Read more »
There’s been a lot of trouble in the last couple of days over Modern Warfare 2, and in particular one level: infiltrating a terrorist cell, you’re charged with taking part in an atrocity, namely gunning down an airport’s-worth of civilians. Obviously, this is pretty reprehensible stuff- so reprehensible that according to reports, there’s an “are you alright with this” screen before it, and an option to skip the level. Now, it’s easy to see where this has come from: the battle to hit an M, not an AO, from the ESRB (and therefore manage to get onto Wal-Mart, and many other brick-and-mortar retailer, shelves), and Infinity Ward and Activision have succeeded: MW2 is coming out under the happy banner of an M For Mature rating, and it’s going to make them a hell of a lot of money out of doing so. Read more »
First, explanation: Jordan, of ResumePlay.net fame, spurred me on to this. Handily, I’ve just finished KOTOR2, so I’m in a fairly good place to talk about it. So, let’s begin: KOTOR2, bastard sequel to KOTOR, was pushed out less than eighteen months after KOTOR, to capitalise on the all-important holiday season. Regrettably, eighteen months is not enough to produce a 20+ hour RPG, as we will see.
Famously, KOTOR2 has substantial cut content left on the Xbox disk, and thanks to this, we can see just how good we could have had things: instead, let’s pick up on the Ravager, when things really start heating up. Visas (Troubled Dark Jedi and Love Interest right out of the Star Wars EU playbook) has a nice, complete backstory: we finish up the Ravager, Nihilus (Big Bad #2) is defeated, and her redemption is basically completed. As a plot device, the Ravager is a nice setpiece, with a few vaguely original objectives and a lovely bit of loose-end tying, notable for its’ rarity in the KOTOR2 endgame: our misguided-but-definitely-evil Grand Vizier type, Colonel Tobin, gets to blow the charges that (for some unknown reason) we had to set to blow the ship up, rather than letting the enormous battlefleet on our side do the work for us. But hey, it gives us an excuse to troll around the (rather nicely designed, actually) ship for a bit, murdering sith, picking up lovely high-level stuff that my Weaponmaster has no use for, since he already has a maxed-out lightsaber and enough feats to take on the Persian Army by himself. The Ravager explodes, in a dated-when-it-came-out 800×600 Bink Video prerendered cutscene, and we’re off to the real disappointment: Malachor V. Read more »
In contemporary discussions, a 50% top rate of income tax set at the high-earner level has been a feature of modern (post-Blair) Labour policy, being initially introduced in the 2008 Pre-Budget Report at 45%, and subsequently raised to 50% in the April 2009 Budget. (Darling, 2009) However, the notion of a 50% income tax band is not old: in terms of ideological basis, it is a staunchly socialist redistributive measure, although the interpretation of the new 50% tax band could be seen as pragmatically, rather than ideologically motivated, in light of the current financial crisis and the necessity of shoring up the British financial system against an increasing level of inflation (Office of National Statistics, 2009), and to cover the expected increase in government spending in the coming years, as the cost of fighting wars and expanding and improving public services hits home, as well as the attempt to reduce the operating national debt in line with the UK’s obligations under the Treaty of Maastricht to maintain a debt of less than 40% of GDP (by current estimates, the UK’s debt was 43.2% of GDP in 2008 (Office of National Statistics, 2008), and if following the trend, will continue to rise incrementally year-on-year. Read more »
In considering whether to scrap Trident, it is first important to define exactly what one means by Trident: it is neither the UK’s entire nuclear programme, nor simply the missiles alone: indeed, Trident is the third iteration of a weapons programme begun with the Blue Danube/V-bomber system, continued with Polaris, and currently implemented in Trident: hence, “scrapping Trident” can take on two completely opposite meanings: the first, the replacement of Trident with a new nuclear deterrent; and the second, unilateral British disarmament. Important in considering this, however, is that though the question is a fairly pressing one, Trident was designed with a service life of 25 years (UK MoD/Foreign & Commonwealth Office, 2006) in mind; even the earliest-commissioned Vanguard-class submarine began operations in December 1994 (Pike, 1999), making them each a little over halfway through an unextended lifespan. This is not to say that the problem of replacement or decommissioning is one to be considered in the future: the leadtimes associated with the development of nuclear submarines, or indeed any nuclear deterrent, means that such policies are unusual in UK politics as requiring tacit crossbench support, sometimes across governments: indeed, Chevaline, the successor warhead project attached to Polaris (Moore, 2004), required the cooperation of the Wilson, Heath, second Wilson and Callaghan governments, crossing party lines repeatedly (although this took place in the era of post-war consensus, which has lost relevance in the post-Thatcher years)- the decisions made now are, for the most part, the ones which must be carried through to completion around 2022-4 (when a successor system is predicted to become fully operational, or the current Vanguard-class suite will be due for a substantial refit) (UK MoD/Foreign & Commonwealth Office, 2006)- indeed, the current commitment to a Trident successor was made in 2006, even in light of a five-year service life extension already proposed and agreed. Hence, it is evident that the maintenance of a nuclear deterrent is both a difficult issue to tackle for ideological and strategic reasons, and requires delicate handling due to the timespans involved in the creation and maintenance of such a deterrent. Read more »
This week, I have been mostly being educated, but in my off hours, have done the stereotypical teenage thing and occasionally checked the dark pit that constitutes facebook. A slight damper has been put on this, in that for four days, it was horrendously, infuriatingly broken, with a little rolling outage on either side confusing the hell out of me and everyone else. Presumably, some piffling rollout of an internal API tweak managed to break something, and has now been fixed, but this is not the point of the post: what happened to test/production servers? Surely a corporation as big as facebook can afford a little closed ecosystem that they can throw patches at?
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