Chindie

Fully aware of the politics of fear, trust me. I don't, however, subscribe to the idea that this is planned and orchestrated to further a crack down on freedoms - I honestly think governments are too messy and stupid to manage that. It happens because they react moronically, and because the public that matters is slightly right of Hitler and reactionary in the extreme, the government is encouraged to react stupidly. They'll basically achieve this curtailment of liberty through incompetence rather than carefully considered plans. I can't say I blame the police for reacting as they did, they basically had to, but you kinda hope that a bit more thought was put into things before someone on a megabus sees a bloke making a cuppa (no doubt a Muslim looking bloke) and immediately goes 'BOMB!' and then half of Staffordshire constabulary shuts the M6 Toll, inconveniencing literally 15 people this afternoon.

And shock horror, it appears the M6 Toll thing is nothing - no suspects. It's going to end up being some bloke making a pot noodle, the Guardian's even reporting it was hot water.

A Megabus on the M6 toll doesn't make a lick of sense for a terror attack.

A female friend went to see the new Spidey and has effectively raved about it since - better than the Avengers in her eyes. I'm still cynical but her rating it has made me curious.

You want to be careful throwing those 'we's around Mike.

Night watch would make a great film if done right. It really would. Unfortunately it'd only work as a sequel, you need to know the characters to start with to understand a lot of what makes the book good. Which is annoying because I'm convinced they'll never do proper film adaptations of the Watch books. Be a nightmare to cast - Vimes is a great character but I really couldn't place an actor to nail that role. Pisses me off that Pratchett probably will never get a top quality film adaptation. Sky's attempts have been... varied. EDIT - In fairness I listened to the adaptation of Small Gods the Beeb did for radio and that worked far better.

I tried to get out of doing R.E. when I got even half a chance. When I got to picking my GCSE subjects our teachers took us aside and spoke through our options, usually trying to convince us to do their subject. I'd had the same R.E. teacher since Year 7 (and in the end had her right through to leaving). She called me over and just said 'Don't do R.E. GCSE, you don't have the mind for it'. It also turned out that the compulsory GCSE course was somehow shared with the compulsory I.T. GCSE, both short courses. A rumour went round that if you did the GNVQ ICT course, you couldn't do R.E.. I signed up for the GNVQ instantly - unfortunately still had to do short course R.E., which basically turned into the 'Abortions might be bad' course.

No, I just already knew that. I said as much on the original hadron collider thread which is a good couple of years ago now I think. Interested in these things you see.

No. They don't teach Spider-man and Batman at school, and they contain just as many moral tales and about as much truth, and don't claim as truth many things that are patently wrong. It would be better replaced with a proper 'citizenship' lesson - something that could teach you, at a younger age, about different cultures and so on that make up our society/world (with a very clear message of 'so and so believes this' without legitimising it which in my experience R.E. was loathe to do), and later on be used to give kids the tools to prepare for life in the modern world - understanding how to manage your finances and what not, getting a job... whatever. A lesson specifically dedicated to teaching nonsense should not exist.

You missed a trick here, you should have said "we've **** your mom", as obviously someone in the human species has, so therefore we can all claim credit for it. :? Who said anything about everyone being able to take credit for the potential discovery? :?

Van Persie's not signing a new contract with Arsenal so... where's he off to?

Depends on the film I think. A lot of block buster/churned out bean counting/kids stuff is edited down to a 'sellable' length and they're filmed with that in mind. Others are trimmed to that length after the fact (I suspect this happened with Prometheus, it was too long so the studio leant on the production to be cut back - the end result being a bit of a mess). Nolan with this I think will have been told 'Don't come back with a 4 hour film, but within reason, do what you like', simply because he's made so much money for Warner Bros they don't care, and this film will rake in money no matter what.

'We' as in 'we, the human species'. It strikes me as fairly obvious thats what I meant. I trust you've never used 'we' to refer to Aston Villa? I got made redundant from Gamestation.

Discovering the Higgs boson is a landmark in physics. We've suspected it had to be there because if its not everything we know about particle physics is potentially wrong. We used to look at what made up atoms and could work out how it worked but then did the maths and discovered that, whilst we could see what we assumed was right, the numbers didn't add up so to speak. So it was hypothised that this other particle, the Higgs boson, had to exist. By (potentially - at the moment it's just looking very likely) finding it, we open the door to another stage of understanding, which could be potentially enormous. We want to look at what the Higgs boson does under different circumstances, what it degrades into, what fiddling with it will do to atoms. It could lead us to understanding things we've absolutely not got a clue about, dark matter and so on. It has the potential to be the first step to very important discoveries.

Thats more or less where I stand. The run time doesn't necessarily bother me - if I know the material will warrant it. I saw the LOTR films at the cinema and knew there was so much material they had to get in there they simply had to be that length, even with cuts (for example the final film annoys fans by cutting the pygmy people - but they're totally superflous to much of the plot and you could cut them without harming a thing). I love the TDK and it is the ferry scene and the bits around that that I feel start to have film feel it's length - but I let it off because I saw what they were doing and I loved every moment of the rest of it. So the length of TDKR doesn't worry me in itself - I know Nolan is going to have an absolute fuckton of stuff to put up on screen - he has to tie into TDK, get the plot of this film itself going (which we can guess is going to be convoluted with all we can suspect is going to happen with the numerous nods to established Batman plots), introduce at least 2 new characters proper, and finally round out what is the finale of a trilogy. Thats a lot. The only worry that I have, and it is minor, is that Nolan does have this habit of his films losing pace a little, becoming baggy, and the longer it is the more likely that is to happen and thats where the restless sets in. I'm actually glad of the length to some degree, because I want to savour the final moment of what could be a really great series of films, and the length hopefully will let Nolan go to town with the film.

2 and 3/4 hours isn't too long, it's far from it. But it will make it a long film and given Nolan's record, at times it's going to feel long imo. Suggestion a 165min film needs to be cut into 2 bits is daft. And I certainly wouldn't want to encourage a trend for milking films by chopping them into seperate parts, either.

Indeed, as I said it'll get better. But nothing will prevent it not being able to do a great deal of things. The nature of the beast is that it cannot work in a great many game types, and can only 'augment' them, not actually be a sole play device. Any incarnation of the Kinect that sees it be based around a camera with no other input will not allow much beyond minigames. I don't care about minigames. You're never going to have true 'genres' utilising Kinect hardware alone. The Wii, for all it's flaws, could do that. Even if the Kinect does evolve to use the controller as well as standard, as Steel Battalion suggests it might (and lets for arguments sake assume that that continues into it's future incarnation), the motion aspects are gimmicks and imo are likely always to be. I'm not a fan of the Kinect.

It's too limited. The new Steel Battalion game that came out a couple of weeks ago was heralded as the game to make Kinect relevant to gamers... and it's a broken unplayable hideous mess, often entirely unfunctional. And then you just repeat that for Kinect game after Kinect game. A number of games that Microsoft is marketing as 'Better with Kinect' just use the thing as a glorified voice command tool... perhaps better known as a mic... which you may have had bundled with your Xbox... but that doesn't make Microsoft silly money so they don't implement it. I've no doubt they can improve it, and they will because they've made Kinect into a 'thing' so well that they're guarenteed to release a new one for the new console, but even that is not going to revolutionise what the Kinect can do. It's the very nature of the technology. I'm hoping that Microsoft are smart enough to continue to peg it as a 'companion' to proper games and not force it into being a necessity.

I'm not sure I could actually. As much as I like Nolan's work, he's not flawless. TDK is over 2 and half hours and at times feels it - the final act sometimes feels leggy. Inception suffers similarly. I'd expect that a theoretical 4 hour Nolan film would have it's worrying lagging moments. And thats when you start to become aware you've been sat there for quite a while and your arse hurts... Anywho, with the film just over 2 weeks away loads of stuff is starting come out about it through merchandising and so on. I think a lot of the plotline guesswork is going to proven correct... Warner Brothers themselves have released some of back story/scene setting materials that seem to suggest that part of the plot will involve Wayne Enterprises investing in a search for clean energy - one that is also suggested to be quite dangerous. And the synopsis is out too

Perhaps... but I prefer armageddon - it's the only way to be sure.

The Kinect is terrible, and I'd wager the future generation of it isn't much better. It's such a limited idea an it doesn't even work particularly well as it currently stands.

I'm a big Pratchett fan, love his books. His best, Night Watch, got adapted for BBC Radio a few years ago, and I stumbled on it on Youtube. It's terrible.

It's terrifying, it really is. We shouldn't be allowed near fire let alone anything else - we're too thick. Potentially a significant portion of the most powerful nation on earth believes in guardian angels. We're doomed.

BBC Perhaps now they'll own up about God by the same logic? Incidentally, it's this kinda thing that makes you think that, in some way, we more or less deserve extinction. Too stupid to live and all that.

People sure must look different in Singapore...