Chindie

Spawn the movie, even as someone who kinda likes the character, is dreadful, and moreover is an incredible waste of the character and concepts.

Inevitable. I wish him well, and think he'll be one of the few to leave here and have success. He didn't have the chance to succeed.

I can kinda see the point you're making, but the IRA, Breivik and Timothy McVeigh, amongst others, kinda undermine it to the extent it's groundless.

My initial reaction, not knowing the full story, it doesn't sound like a terrorist incident.

Look up Tenura matting. Its a slightly rubbery net life fabric that grips pretty much anything. Reasonably cheap as well.

Plenty of people haven't bought PS4s yet, and if you've got the capability to do minor tweaks that your developers are whinging about, why not? Especially if some of those tweaks might add another feather to your cap and tie into marketing buzzwords that are hot currently and might force a few hands (HDR, 4k...). They don't really expect every PS4 owner to rush out and buy new ones, a few might but the sales pitch is basically for new adopters who want a few of these new features and may be prepared to pay a premium for it. Further it's a first step to normalising a more regular upgrade cycle. Whether that catches or not is up in the air, but they'd like to get towards releasing new hardware on a shorter timescale than we've got currently - perhaps breaking the generation structure entirely.

Iron Giant please. Which is finally getting a Blu-ray release this year.

I'm not sure I agree. The PC has become the avenue for VR because of the power necessary to operate it to a good standard. It's incredibly hardware demanding. The PlayStation VR needs a booster pack to operate to full capacity because the PS4 isn't capable of running it alone. The Rift specs are so high that most things released today are going to be playable on a Rift machine. There may be some variance in quality but that's standard on PC at this point. Pretty much everything is playable. There's nothing stopping developers making good VR games with this variance. At the moment the problem is understanding how to make VR games. So far the obvious moves have been cockpits, and less commonly 'table top' viewpoints. Going forward they will fix that, but for the time being they have to push the technology and see how things work. That's why the day one Rift offering was rubbish. It literally is tech demos in many cases. That'll change - whether it becomes a successful format with killer titles of up in the air - I'm not convinced. The PS VR was demoed recently and that had as much tech demo feel as Rift does. Perhaps some of them hide it a little better, but you have things like Headmaster which is absolutely a proof of concept demoing ideas in a mini game. Much like the Rift. Battlefront is being spoken as an 'experience' -they aren't porting Battlefront to VR wholesale, they're developing something that takes elements of it and uses VR to complement it. They may never do a true VR Battlefront. VR's hurdles to overcome are the technical limitations, working out how it works, what works, how to use VR in gaming successfully, and secondly the cost. The cost is a massive barrier to entry. The Rift and Vive are too expensive at the moment for many to join in, and have associated cost of a PC able to use it. But the PlayStation VR is expensive as well. It's cheaper, but it still isn't going to get massive numbers on board. It won't become mass market until the jumping on point is attainable and justifiable for the masses. I'm not convinced it'll do that any time soon.

Depends. It could be considered terrorism, dependant on what actually happened. But the bloke that did it is a 66 year old pastor from Tennessee who had a history of disrupting Congress. Seems he flipped.

What are your thoughts for X? Presuming it's some kind of military action, this is exactly what ISIS wants. They believe in a scenario that was apparently prophesied where an end of times battle takes place in Dabiq which proceeds the return of Jesus and the end times. By issuing an ultimatum that says 'the next attack will be followed by US invasion of Syria and an eradication of IS' you'd have an attack in days. You may as well just go in. Everything IS is doing and inspiring abroad are jabs at the world to encourage the reaction - to enchanted us to do something that drives more people to them, and ultimately to force us to enact their prophecy and get embroiled in a nightmare... Assuming we did go in and fight IS proper, what is the plan assuming you can capture all that territory? You're signing up to nation building, which to date has been a fools errand in the Middle East. Nation building is difficult in the best of circumstances (if not impossible). In Syria and Iraq? You'd be signing up for generations long campaigns which will sow the seeds of the next terror group. If you just turn large chunks of Syria to glass, and walk away at a job well done, who's going to fill the gap? Assad? He's a lunatic murdering his people en masse. The Kurds? A lot of Syrian people will have a problem with that, and likely other people in the region too. The anti Assad forces? You're just setting the battle lines for a war that will possibly lead to a genocide. And so on and so forth. A power vacuum and misguided meddling helped to make IS, another will just foster the next. And that's not accounting for wider regional games of influence and power with the Iranians and the Saudis, or Shia and Sunni generally. There isn't an easy answer to this. If there was we'd already be doing it. Pandora's box has been opened and we're going to watch it play out until things change to such a degree we can try to fix it.

The Samsung one has improved sensors and so on that improve latency, and also has lenses that improve the effect considerably. The ones based off Google Cardboard are just holders for the phone with lenses.

The case against Apple has been dropped. Because the FBI managed to crack it anyway with help from 'a third party'.

I think that's giving any terrorist group too much credit. I'd stake good money they didn't have the faintest idea of any weakness of the Belgian services. And if wager that even if they now did, it wouldn't particularly influence they way they did things. What the communication problems between departments and districts highlights is a weakness that lets things be missed, or fall through the cracks. Now they have been burnt by it, they can try to close that crack and stop it happening again. The communication failings let this group get lucky.

The French were blindsided. It happens. The Belgians were hit by a cell they knew, linked to the French atrocities, that they had already in part apprehended and dealt with in the aftermath of Paris, after it took them 4 months to find the remaining perpetrator they had discovered a stone's throw from his known residences, by people they knew and by people they'd been told to monitor. They dropped the ball, badly. By all accounts a lot of home truths are coming out about the Belgian security services, not least of all the fact that different elements of it don't speak to each other, seemingly due to language issues, which just seems bizarre.

Having watched more of the live stream (which if still going, 8 hours after it started) most of these titles are gimmicks or absolutely dreadful. There are a handful that seem to gain anything from VR.

It's not going to be a generational leap. As far as games are concerned at absolute worst you might see the new model capable of higher detail (slightly better textures, slightly more detailed models - same as pushing the graphics slider on a PC between high and ultra, perhaps). More likely it'll be frame rate and resolution consistent and stable across titles, which the PS4 nearly does anyway. And the consistent rumour is 4k gaming resolution, which everyone is reporting as an upscaler because it's the only way they could do it and sell any of them. Anything else starts to significantly split the user base and potentially cause compatibility issues. Elsewhere it might have capability for UHD Blu-ray, and more likely HDR, which will cost little to add in and is this year's buzz tech in TVs, and might be a more significant development than 4k is, if your TV can decode it, which isn't guaranteed even if you bought a new TV yesterday. It's probably not going to offer much 90% of people will either notice or need.

I wouldn't think of it like that. Sony aren't about to release a PS5, and abandon the PS4. It's most likely they're going to be releasing a revision of the PS4, at a higher price point, which offers fairly minor performance and feature upgrades - stable frame rates, consistent 1080p, perhaps some more grunt to handle VR without the need for the breakout box, capable of 4k upscaling, maybe UHD video capability. On the scale of things none of that is a game changer. It's nice, and developers will be happy to have a bit more scope for stable performance, but at the end of the day it's a PS4 still. Playing the same games. I wouldn't be rushing out to upgrade if that was the offering. It's nice. But wouldn't be enough to splash out unless the money was burning a hole in my pocket.

Not enough burning people in your back catalogue for her tastes, or too much?

Swim Deep are a local band who are so 80s it hurts in many respects.

Yep, completely same reaction here. When that scene started I was thinking 'surely not?!' and as the camera panned up to that reveal I was shaking my head in disbelief and turned to my girlfriend and said 'come on, really!?' laughing and she was doing the same thing. It's absurd.

40% of the prison population isn't Muslim. It's more like 14%. The Christian prison population is nearly 50%. I assume we'll be sending all church going people to the camps. The other 'stats' are misleading as well. The Tamil Tigers 'invented' suicide attacks in the modern era and they were active until 2009 - they aren't Muslims. Historically the methodology had been used by Russians, the Japanese famously, etc etc. Not all suicide bombers are Muslim. Like the Tamil Tigers the Kyrds have also used it for nationalistic aims. There's been an obvious vogue for it in the last 20 odd years amongst Islamic extremism, but it's not uniquely Islamic by any means. The 'stat' that there have been more in the last 3 years than the past 100 is very misleading. You can also say that there have been examples of cyber attacks in the last 3 years than the last 100 - it's simply down to the fact it's a relatively new tactic in this style. The figure is meaningless. Suicide bombing is, as Robert Pape will tell you, quite successful - groups undertaking suicide bombing tend to achieve more of their aims than groups that do not use it. It's also a very 'successful' tactic generally. It carries a greater punch than is equivalents, because the bomber has control to the nth degree and can hit much more effectively than a static bomb. Combine that with various things going on the world on the Islamic sphere and how it can tie into versions of Islam and can why it's become popular. But that still doesn't change the fact that the stat is incredibly misleading to make out this is a long standing problem being exponentially worse recently, when really its only a comparatively modern thing that has grown in the last decade or so, and still, on the scale of things, remains fairly minor, even of you go beyond the UK and extend it to Europe generally. As for the world getting more dangerous... Statistically not really. Terrorism is still a blip on death tolls worldwide, thankfully. I always quote this, but I always remember it from essay research - in every year apart from 2001, Americans were more likely to die drowning in a public toilet than in an act of terrorism.

Picking up on the ending a minute, I had 2 problems with it. Massive ending spoilers for Batman v Superman follow I can see why they did it, and Snyder has also given his own apparent reasons, but it doesn't work. It's too forced, too rushed, and too cynical.

What was happening was the ritual death and desecration of any remaining life in the Terminator franchise. Awful film. Emilia Clarke is a hopeless actor and absolutely nothing like Sarah Connor in any facet. Her arrival firing the pistol with the gun bouncing around in her hand and her shutting her eyes was ridiculous for an apparently trained badass character.

Giant Bomb are doing an Oculus live stream currently, and watching it I still can't quite escape from the fact that this technology, for gaming at least, at this moment in time, only seems to revolutionise experiences where you are seated in a first person environment. I've not seen everything there is on offer so I'm prepared to revisit that opinion, and of course it's still early days in VR, but on current showing I would run out to join the VR revolution. At worst some of these titles are bad tech demos to my eyes.

I'd be surprised if they went down the add on route. I think they will release a '2016 PS4.5' or whatever. All the rumours point towards relatively minor hardware tweaks that I would be surprised if many people would put down significant money to have - 4k capability (UHD Blu-ray maybe?), slight performance boosts, possibly 'cleaner' VR capability. I see them marketing it almost as a PS4 premium that offers better entertainment centre offering and slightly improved performance for an additional cost, and they keep selling the basic PS4 as their bread and butter.