Re: Search for which morons or morons your morons liked!

"I'd rather not waste two hours watching The Texan Chainsaw Massacre remake when ALL signs are that it is complete shit."

It's a remake of The Texan Chainsaw Massacre, what did you expect?

In fact, never mind the remake, the name of the film is "Texas Chainsaw Massacre". Were you expecting Citizen Kane?

Re: "and if I swallow anything evil, put your finger down my throat..."

Bring back the tunnels that you use to exit sports stadia? I didn't know they'd been banned. Is that why football fans are always so angry - because they can't get out?

So you could have bought it online but because you needed it now it cost double the price? That is, in some respects, neither unusual nor immoral. If I haven't bothered to make sandwiches yesterday, then I will need to pay double for a pair from the shop what I could have paid for the ingredients. And they won't taste as nice or be as filling either.

Obviously the problem Comet couldn't survive just on the minority who need something urgently.

Also, you could have saved money by telling your son it won't kill him to play outside for a few days.

Re: High as a kite

You refer to that article and don't quote the bit where he discusses shoving 'bath salts' up your arse to induce 'hypersexual behaviour'?

Personally I can't think of anything more likely to turn on a woman than a man with dyed hair and moustache emerging from the jungle of Belize brandishing guns and foaming at the mouth and rectum. It all sounds like some sort of twisted Lynx advert.

It's probably not a bad job, it's just that nobody played as the male Shepard so nobody knows what he looks like.

(For those unfamiliar with the game, it's not a transvestite fantasy thing; the voice actress who played the female Shepard is much better than the bland male one. I remember PC Gamer highlighting this in its review and I'm fairly sure it wasn't the only one.)

If I was a creative type making an advert for Grand Theft Auto 4, what I would do is have Surly Moustachovic carjacking a Toyota, which then transports him into the real world, where he drives around sensibly for a while observing the speed limit and stopping at traffic lights. It would have made the game look much more fun than it actually was.

Re: Race to the Bottom

"You either have a very short or selective memory: Nick Davies in The Guardian broke the details on the bubbling-under phone hacking scandal that eventually brought down a certain newspaper."

And? One, everyone who reads Private Eye knew that phone-hacking was standard practice in UK newspapers already. We can thank Nick Davies for the juicy details which got everyone all outraged - dead schoolgirls, JK Rowling, etc - but not for revealing the actual practice, which was already public knowledge for anyone who bothered to take an interest.

Two, it was all very fascinating but had no significant effect. Watergate didn't inspire a cliché because it turned out that a politician lied, it was significant because it forced the President's resignation and altered the course of history. So what did Phonegate achieve? News International got to slim down its workforce early and bring forward the long-planned merger of the NotW with the Sun. Murdoch senior and junior had to go and kow-tow to the local parasites. We got to watch Mrs Murdoch karate-kick a pie-thrower in the face. Who cares? Journalists bribing plod for info was the only element of real public interest, but it's plod - nothing has been and nothing will be done, just like the current Hillsborough and Rotheram scandals.

It provided good fodder for newspapers and water-cooler chat, but there was no significant public benefit - and therefore no justification for an ongoing subsidy.

Re: Risk is too big

Ideally yes. The problem is that most of the pages PR companies tend to edit do not have many eyeballs on them. There aren't many people who will be naturally attracted to edit articles about companies. A few big multinationals in the popular consciousness - McDonalds, Exxon, etc - will attract attention, but that is a minority. Most companies don't have any contentious issues for editors to hash out a consensus over, or interesting events that require the page to be updated regularly. They don't attract academic or hobbyist interest and aren't something that will ever appear on Mastermind as someone's specialist subject. So they aren't on many people's watchlists.

One of the more tiresome wiki-arguments is "you shouldn't just delete what people add even if it's naked PR guff, you should try to edit it into an encyclopaedic state". If someone dumps a barrowload of shit on your doorstep, most people won't bother to pick through it looking for undigested bits of cereal, because it is not a productive use of your time. When someone C&Ps several paragraphs of text from the company website going "Bellend Inc is globally recognised as one of the leading producers of high-quality brass clappers, with a proud history... shared ethos... years to come" etc etc, it's just going to be deleted because rewriting that sort of thing requires as much effort as writing it from scratch. And the reason no-one wrote up the company's history in the first place is because nobody cares.

One thing the article also doesn't mention is that, as a lot of the PR dumps are copy-and-pasted from the company's promotional literature, they are copyright violations, and must be binned immediately, regardless of merit.

"Off to read the Daily Fail to see how they explain it to the common people."

Headline: "Neutrinos Travel At Faster Than Speed Of Light After Gypsies Steal Them"

Sub-headline: "Jew Gets Laws Of Universe Wrong, Should Probably Stick To Eating Christian Babies"

Editorial: "We at the Daily Mail always knew that things could travel faster than light. Among the objects we have personally observed going faster than a neutrino: our judgement (when travelling out of the window), our knee tendons (when oscillating after seeing a photo of a junior martial arts contest), and human drool (coming out of our mouths while taking photos of celebrities in swimsuits, preferably underage)"

Resistance 2 has been out for two and a half years. You probably don't want us to tell you that Darth Vader is Luke's father either. Or that Jesus gets nailed to a cross but comes back to life after three days. Oops.

You're assuming the rationale is punitive - actually it's economic. Firstly, most of the rioters were professional criminals, and it just doesn't make sense to subsidise the theft and destruction of property. Never mind the moral and sociological issues, we're broke and we can't afford it.

Secondly, there is a massive difference, practically and psychologically, between trying to take someone's money, and declining to pay them more money. Fines are a joke in this country and are rarely enforced (the middle class and their traffic fines aside), because it requires re-arresting the bugger and going through the whole judicial process all over again. Much more difficult than putting an X next to someone's name on the DWP's list.

I admit that perhaps not all the 200,000 completely thought it through though.

Re:

"Perhaps, some laws are wrong, and we need to think about and change them?"

And you seriously believe that "Don't take other people's stuff without paying for it" is one of them?

Title

"I would also like my family to benefit from my work when I'm no longer around to provide for them."

So would everyone. Unfortunately, for the vast majority of people - from binmen to ultrapaid execs - their power to earn money dies with them. They content themselves with not blowing all the money they make while alive and leaving that to the kids. Why should arty types be special in that regard?

Re: The content companies started it

Bingo.

If a car you bought legitimately refused to start for 5 minutes each morning while it screamed "STOP STEALING CARS, YOU TERRORIST" from the satnav, then another 5 minutes telling you you should go back to the dealership and buy some more cars before it deigned to drive off, while a pirated car would start instantly, even the car manufacturers would download cars.

Title

"If he'd shouted such a comment in the street then people wouldn't have been surprised by such an outcome"

Yes they would. In fact if he'd shouted it in the street it would have been even less menacing, because in the flesh you can tell when someone is in a murderous rage and when someone is joking.

Alternative

Good pun, but in all the stories I've read of that ilk, Facebook was the channel used to spread the word. Can't we therefore call it "face-sitting"? I'll just Google it to make sure it's not already taken... oh.

@Jared

Shah Rukhkhan is one of the most famous and tediously omnipresent actors in the biggest entertainment industry in the world. Bonus, he goes on a chat show in a foreign country, where he can repeat all the anecdotes that the Indian audience will have heard already. And you think his life is so dull that he'd have to make up a "you'll never guess what happened to me in the airport" story in order to have something to say to Jonathan Ross?

Er

It must be Monday because I can't get my head round this at all.

If you wanted to raid an office, and you were hoping not to find anyone there, why not just go after office hours? This has two advntages over the phone book approach: a) you don't have to worry about the remote possibility that more than one person might work in the office, and b) at some point it gets dark and makes it more difficult for passers by to see you breaking in.

Nonsense

Since when was refusing to see someone's film on the grounds that they previously made something crap some kind of martyrdom? Surely it's the opposite - it's just good sense to avoid things you won't enjoy. Particularly as James Cameron shows every sign of an artiste who's become infected with a belief in his own hype.

I refuse to see any film starring Meg Ryan (unless the title contains the words "Saw", "Hostel" or "Entrenching Tool Rampage" - still waiting), and she's only an actress, much less responsible for her films than James Cameron. But I'll still defend that as a rational position to the death.