Chindie

Isn't that story about 3 weeks old, at least?

Florida could be headed for a recount, talk of problems flying already.

Its the competition that most shows up Mancini's frailties evidently.

There are 5 paths to a tie in swing state voting, which, barring a complete miracle, would likely see Romney President and Biden VP. Won't happen though.

Paths to the Whitehouse. Obama has about 5 times as many permutations to win as Romney does as far as the swing states (i.e. the ones that 99% of the time are the only ones that matter) go, which is why today Obama was coming in as a 1/6 winner, opposed to Romneys 4/1.

Assassin's Creed 3 is well on the way to killing any love I have for the series. It's a mess in so many ways. I don't know whether I'm just not paying attention, or if the game expects you to know a lot about the American revolution, but it feels so disjointed. I'm playing it and seem to be bouncing around missions with little rhyme or reason. I recognise faces and names and places and some events, but there seems to be a distinct lack of joining the lot together, what's going on, why am I doing this or that. It isn't helped by the fact one minute you're in Boston, the next you've had a loading screen and you're in Philadelphia for a cutscene. It also spends an absolutely obscene amount of time getting going. You remember Assassin's Creed 2 took a while to get going? This makes that game look like it's full of get up and go. I'd estimate theres a good 6/7 hours in this before you even come close to feeling like the game has decided to let you get playing it proper. It does an absolutely horrendous job of explaining many aspects of gameplay and often doesn't give you any idea of what is expected of you from mission to mission, which is a bit shit when this is a game that **** loves instant fail states (i.e. if you're spotted, go back unt do it again!). And then after another baffling switch of scenario it'll give you express instructions for daft things, such as 'Interact with door' (that's a verbatim example I had this afternoon). Gameplay systems it does go through pains to explain it does poorly. The new craft/trade/money making minigame thing has an explicit tutorial that apparently doesn't actually tell you all the aspects of the system. At times it actually tells you things that are wrong - early(ish - this is behind about 6 hours of pissing about) on you'll be given a task by Sam Adams where he will tell you to follow him to a printers. He then won't move. You have to lead him. He will then tell you he'll show you a tunnel system, follow him. He doesn't move, and neither does the objective marker that has been on your screen for the past minute. It's quite easy to assume the game is bust at this point - you would assume that your objective marker would change as your objective has changed, and you'd expect a character telling you to follow them, to lead you somewhere. It suffers from the usual Assassin's Creed infuriating problems - the shonky issues with traversal where it will cock up and cause you to fail through no fault of your own mainly, and things like rubbish lip syncing. But it also riddled with bugs - silly stuff like clipping everywhere, models simply vanishing, spelling mistakes all over the place, a spoiler in a piece of reading material it gives you in the first hour... I had a particularly weird issue earlier where the camera simply would not allow me to pan up or down, which given that I was in what amounted to a forced stealth section where it was a complete necessity to be able to view the surroundings, meant I failed. And so much of it feels passionless. The actual tasks it gives you are not that dissimilar from any other game in the series from 2 onwards, but they seem so dull. The game lacks the character that Ezio's best moments had - Connor is a damp squib (the game attempts a revelation early on that falls entirely flat and seems to be the only attempt at making the character interesting), the other characters feel danced around as historical figures that are worshipped as godlike in their native US. And the environments suffer terribly from the time period. Boston and New York are well realised but neither is exciting, neither has any interest and sadly, yes, they really lack the verticality this franchise has been marked by. The tallest building in Boston will see you climb to the top in 10 seconds, and there's not many buildings that challenge it for height. The Frontier areas, areas of wilderness with trees and animals, don't help. Again, they are pretty, but theres so little to do with them. You'll climb the same tree time and again if you search out viewpoints in the frontier, encounters with animals are largely pointless and predators attacks are just the same QTEs time and again. The sci-fi storyline continues to make a game argument for it's being ditched entirely too. It's getting more and more daft and feeling more and more pointless. I'm not sure why no-one at Ubisoft has decided to quietly kill off the whole pretence and the whole thing doesn't add anything to the game - Desmond is an awful character, the concept is moronic (DNA holding historical memory?! Weird unexplained 'First Civilisation' aliens?) and the bits out of the Animus add nothing to the series at all. This time round you do some genuine missions as Desmond and they're um... shit. I've done 2 so far, the first was so laughably easy and boring that it was barely worth the effort, and the second was similar but with added instant fails with half the gameplay systems (hiding in groups particularly) turned off. Just sweep the lot under the carpet and pretend it didn't happen, and stick to a straight historical romp. The games best moments are when you just wandering the environments doing the simple side tasks, and it's pretty and in some cases had obviously had money thrown at it but... well... it's just not great. It's a 7/10 game at best, and a clear indication that the series needs a break.

4-0, Manchester United never troubled.

Second trailer is due on the 14th.

If Obama wins Florida then the games basically over. Mick McCarthy would need all the other swing states to win, which is an obscenely unlikely scenario. As said before, while the result itself is almost certain to be close, the chances of victory weigh hard in Obama's favour. Looking at it that way, its not close at all.

I rather like the Geordie vampire girl in the Halloween BT ad... although the main girl is of course hot as ****. Anywho... does anyone know why I wake up with a headache every morning? It's getting on my nerves.

All of it, everything, is a lie?

The thing is Mark, the opposite is true too. Neither side in those threads comes out smelling of roses. A lot of tit gets thrown against the tat from the opposition. The debate then devolves into an unreadable mess that you can't reply to even if you wanted simply because it would be futile - the core issue is lost and it falls to being about Labour or the Tories rather than the issue at hand, making the whole thing a pointless endeavour. And in many cases even if you did care for the pointless partisan stuff, the... tone, manner, style of argument in some cases is... well, poisonous.

It would be nice if the political threads, well... the domestic political threads, really... could be less tedious reads. When I do poke my head in one these days (for a long time I just didn't bother - they were infuriating) there does seem to be a particularly grim atmosphere to things, the way arguments are made really don't show any involved in a particularly good light, in either trench.

Really? I'd never have guessed. I'd have thought all those people in shitty parts of London were just doing it to make a statement. People vote for Labour in the South, just like people vote for Conservatives north of Watford. IIRC the BNP's past lies in the North, the National Front grew in the North and it ingratiated itself into political culture in the North where it's roots where, it's main rise followed the squeeze of that region's working class in the 70s. The same isn't true of the South. The South has also been less 'affected by immigration for the common man' (London apart, but even that is somewhat of a special case) than the North, making the correlation between the North and BNP more obvious.

The people more likely to subscribe to racist ideology are ones that will come from similar backgrounds to those supporting Labour. There isn't necessarily a connection between being a Labour supporter and then turning to the BNP. It is simply that the demographic base for such ideologies overlaps - deprived areas, working/lower class, etc etc. The difference is, the Labour supporters chose to chase a cause with the common man at it's forefront (allegedly), and the BNP supporters chose to blame their strife on other races, foreigners and so on. The same can't be said of the Conservative heartlands. Generally, BNP fans that would traditionally vote Conservative are thinner on the ground simply because there's nothing forcing them to make a choice, they're just morons as opposed to morons looking for an easy hate figure for their worries. There is a lower proportion of people in the South, generally, who are deprived hence the lower general BNP supporting population. This also explains why the BNP's support flourishes when things get to shit - more morons get squeezed into looking for blame and take an easy answer. Edit - Of course all of this is simply stereotyping but the gist is bang on.

I agree with Bicks on that - UKIP generally are just Tories disaffected with Tory actions with the EU, and the BNP are just neo-Nazis trying to hide it best they can. I would add though, that the BNP know what demographics to appeal to, and they certainly gun for Labour voters. They've pinched loads of their 'manifesto' that isn't about hiding how much they hate non-whites, from what you would probably think of as bottom of the class teenagers idea of what Labour stand for (loads of NHS/benefit stuff - funnily enough they don't ever seem to have cottoned on to the idea that taking all the foreigners and non-whites out of the NHS would see it collapse overnight).

The rise of the Right has been happening in Europe for a while, in fairness, although in places in Greece it's now got the real ire to stoke it's growth. It'll spread, of course, fastest through the south of the Union as they've got it worse than the northern countries. Same old story really, thins go bad and fear sends people to the right, the right makes hay with sweet nothings.

IIRC Romney has advocated taking a sterner line with Iran and has intimated that he wouldn't place military action too far from the agenda. He hasn't straight up said 'I'm bombing Iran!' but, given it's a cartoon and he's a bit of a hawk, not really too much of a stretch.

I was reading earlier that it's not really that close of an election, in that it's more likely Obama will win than Romney. The margin for the win will be tight but Obama is markedly more likely to take a tight victory than Romney is. Or something. So yeah, Mick McCarthy is unlikely be in the Whitehouse. Apparently.

Aye I understand what you're getting at, I was only talking in degrees of statistics as thats what Bazdavies had chosen to frame the question in. As I said above, you're not talking about odds, chances, where you to have such a model to work off, you're talking in certainties. On the chaos thing, for what it's worth I believe that such a model couldn't exist (even if it were feasibly possible to do) purely because I think when you got right down to it, right at the root of all that made the universe what it is, it wouldn't be possible to accurately model because of chaos in the system at such a low level. I think you'd start to see an extension of what we already see when you get down to quantum level (things acting in manners we would not expect when we first started to be able to contemplate that level of reality), going from things acting... strangely, counter intuitively, whatever... to things acting entirely randomly, which would make a perfect model impossible even if it where feasible to do anyway. But of course, I could be entirely wrong on that front.

The word on the Newsnight naming thing the other night is that the lawyers got involved sharpish and Newsnight was put in the position where they would be in the shit if they named any names. The alleged name isn't some new revelation anyway, if 'the rumour mill' is to be believed. It was already one that had come up the rumours, so for anyone invested in the background to all this would probably already know.

If you could do what TheDon is saying (and believe it to be accurate), there wouldn't be any 50/50 about it - you would know with absolute certainty what would happen. There would not be any chance about anything. You would know the outcome of any scenario because things would act in a manner that doesn't change. The only chance you would talk about in any situation would be 100%.

Added another release to my in progress pile, Assassin's Creed 3. Suffers like 2 with taking an absolute age to get going it seems (I've not actually started the game proper yet and I'm 4 hours in...) but the things that stand out for me at the moment are it's obvious pushing of what the 360 can do, it looks a little rough in places but that's to be expected now I think, and that fact that it appears to be massively rushed in places. There are loads of little things that just feel like they weren't thought through. Missions often have curious swifts in fail states, it's often not entirely clear what you're required to do or, perhaps worse, the specific criteria of how the game wants you to go about things. The opening... acts I guess, of the game have also felt thrown together, it hops around it's narrative in those opening hours making the whole shebang feel quite bizarrely disjointed. This has plagued all of the games to some degree but this one feels particularly oddly disjointed to me. I'm hopping that will all be forgotten when it really get's going but crikey, it's taking it's time. It's not helped by the story getting increasingly daft (which is saying something for this series). Theres a load of potential there and I'm hoping, given a good session, I'll be singing it's praises in time.

You wouldn't. If you take what TheDon posted to be an accurate scenario, the only way 2 outcomes would prove to be statistically identical would be if the outcomes where identical. If there were 2 different outcomes, they would be statistically different and you could predict which would chosen. When you get to the kind of degree of accuracy TheDon is talking about (which is basically perfect accuracy, a perfect representation of the everything to the smallest degree in a closed system) statistically identical is identical. I'm not sure how much I would completely agree with the idea (I think there is a degree of chaos in everything that would prevent a perfectly predictable model of everything ever existing, should such a thing be considered even vaguely possible) but if you assume it is, you can't have different statistically identical outcomes in that situation.

Apple really don't want to pay any respect to our courts... The 'apology' above ended up with them back in court and earned them a reprimand and extra orders, one being that they had to place a correction to the statement, in at least 11 point font, on their homepage. So what they've done is specifically altered their homepage to, as far as possible, hide this statement. They've actually altered the way their UK homepage displays so you are forced to scroll to see any mention of the court order Link. rocket polishers