See Steve Jobs...

... for more details!

Read the Overclockers post...

... "i payed for dead space 2 today. installed it and ran the game. went to settings, controls , to custom them, and guess what!!! theres no way to have the walk forward on a mouse button..."

He *has* a special controller adapted to his needs, but it's the *game* that doesn't allow the controls to be re-mapped so he can use them.

I think you ought to know...

... I'm feeling very depressed...

My God!

"You shoot small animals for fun? That's the first indicator of a serial killer, you freak!"

(c) Family Guy - Blue Harvest ;-)

Exactly...

... the question is simple: Do you treat everyone as adults or everyone as children?

Should we all be required to say "Please Sir, can I look at this" or should we say "If I have children *I* am the one responsible for their safety be it out in the big wide world or inside on the big World Wide Web...?

Re: If the Commission gets any more pro consumer

Well they could start by deciding that grey imports are *not* covered by Copyright and Trade Mark legislation!

Difficult? I hope you mean "impossible"...

... then you can wrap up the IWF entirely, close it down and stop trying to pretend that because *you* don't like something *WE* shouldn't be allowed to see it.

Obviously you and all the other IWF prod-noses are such paragons of Moral Virtue that you can see this "bad stuff" without being affected by it, but we are such Morally Bankrupt and Weak-Minded individuals that we will immediately go and and commit murders, rape children or commit any/ every other heinous crime in the book if we were to get the slightest sight of it...

@Lewis Page

"Google usually works better than demanding fact checks in comments, though"

But putting it in the article (come on, you *know* someone was going to ask and if the OP hadn't, I certainly would have) would have been even better.

As the old students' maxim has it...

... if you copy from three sources, that's *research*!

"a brilliantly elegant core search formula...

"...that yields the most useful result almost every single time"

Err, which search engine is this, then?

It certainly isn't Google when so many searches seem to have been "gamed" to the top...

Surely...

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078681/

Sounds like Rincewind...

... who claimed that his mother ran away before he was born!

@AC

No, you are failing to understand the point. To answer your questions:

1) In order to ask this question you first have to know what the limit *IS*. The Scottish law effectively simply says that the limit is "too fast".

2) You say "the prosecutors don't make the law" but then you give an example which seems to suggest that the Police do! (They don't of course)

3) There are Home Office Guidelines on the amount of drugs above which someone can be classed as having "possession with intent to supply".

4) This is not just distasteful, it is stupid and irrelevant. The offence is you forcing yourself on someone else without their consent, that is the limit which is clearly defined in law, unlike the definition of so-called "Extreme Porn" which is *not* defined.

@Gerhardt

Oh, well, yes, now you say that it's obvious that our opinions should be:

"It doesn't affect me, so I'm alright Jack and screw anyone else!"

@da'squid

Nobody here is dense but you.

As with the English version of the law there are a vague and ill-defined set of stipulations that:

"An image is extreme if it depicts, in an explicit and realistic way any of the following—

"(a)an act which takes or threatens a person’s life,

"(b)an act which results, or is likely to result, in a person’s severe injury,

"(c)rape or other non-consensual penetrative sexual activity,"

The first problem here is that just because it is "realistic" does not mean it is *real*! Consequently a staged photograph which was actually taken will every possible safety precaution observed could *still* fall foul of this law because it is "realistic".

The second problem is what "threatens a person's life"? This is entirely subjective and relies on someone's *opinion* of what it looks like is happening in a picture, instead of what *actually* happened.

Look at some Goth imagery and you'll often see pictures of young ladies in erotic poses in floaty white dresses who are being threatened with knives of have apparently had their throats or wrists cut because they're covered in (fake) blood. Now again if that looks "realistic" it could be covered by this law even though nobody was harmed in the making of that picture.

The same goes for "severe injury" which, in the Scottish case is even broader than the English law which at least only covered injury to the "Breasts, Genitals or Anus", meaning that a picture of someone who has (consensually) been caned leaving bruises and raw skin on their buttocks could be adjudged to be of someone who has sustained "severe injury".

Finally the "rape" clause has the same problem in that if it *looks* like rape, it's illegal, no matter that, again, its a staged act between consenting adults.

Consequently what you have is a law where what is or is not illegal is *not* in any way clearly defined, so it's not a case of "how far over 30mph you are" it's a case of "Yes, M'lud the defendant was, in my personal and entirely subjective opinion, driving too fast, so he's guilty."

PS You're right that it's not rocket science. Rocket science deals in precise statements and accurate measurements, not "how fast do we need the rocket to go?" "I don't know, let's just see what happens when we try to launch it..."

@AC "How very clinical"

"I wonder if you'll find consolence in your words when someone close to you dies."

You mean like when my father died of a brain tumour when I was 16?

I could see it happening. I knew it was going to happen. Yes, I was sad, but I was old enough that nobody tried to "sugar coat" it by effectively denying what was happening or saying "he's going to live with Jesus".

I'm now 45, older than my father when he died, I know I'm mortal. I know my mother and sister are mortal, I know at some time we're all going to die. That doesn't mean I won't be saddened by their deaths, but neither does it mean that I'll try to ignore the fact.

@Lee

"I suggest you need to do some more research."

Why? Because I pointed out that your "explanation" for WW2 was simplistic and overlooked major causative factors?

As for your suggestion that people weren't lobbing nukes because "everyone had seen what they were capable of", I suggest *you* look firstly at the US use of Napalm in Korea (far more than was used in Vietnam) which in large quantities had effects very similar to a nuclear strike and secondly consider that MacArthur wanted to use them to blockade the border between North Korea and China to prevent them getting supplies and reinforcements by using radioactive cobalt in a "scorched earth" policy, risking potential like-for-like retaliation against US targets.

Had there not been that risk of retaliation, that war and the world could be a very different place.

@alannorthhants

"without clear guidelines as to what constitutes "extreme porn", potential perps may be able to get off by simply saying "how am I to know I was breaking the law"

You are exceptionally naiive if you think that is going to happen! As has already been shown in England (eg with the "Tony the Tiger" case) prosecutors will push to the limits of the law (and beyond) in order to get a conviction, their argument will simply be "ignorance of the law is no defence" (the fact that they were ignorant of what the law says because it stipulates that someone should consider an animal to be *real* or that it was a *joke* wasn't important to them!)

PS As for "someone being prosecuted for having a copy of Mayfair, it could happen simply because before the last Government changed the law, it was legal to print porn showing girls who were aged 16, but now the law says that the definition of a child is age 18, so some back issues have been rendered illegal.

@James Hughes 1

Or you could try the old analogue method of licking a finger and moving towards where it feels coldest.

(Hang on, wouldn't that be "digital"?!)

@Test card numbers which pass the validation process

4111 1111 1111 1111 works for Visa cards

@Lee a History Lesson for you...

"one of the reasons for WW2 was that the German army was allowed to march home intact after WW1, rather than in disgrace as a conquered army."

The Treaty of Versailles restricted the German army to 100,000 men and drastically limited military production, so hardly "intact" and Germany was forced to admit guilt and sole responsibility for starting the war, this after they'd laid down their arms and accepted the Armistice proposal based on Woodrow Wilson's "Fourteen Points" which was considered a betrayal of their honour.

Oh and of course WW2 was nothing, of course, to do with the crippling reparations that were demanded by France and its Allies which let the Nazis use the rallying cry of "Freedom and Bread" to raise support for their cause...

As for nukes, McArthur wanted to use them in Korea and it was only because Russian had managed to make their own atomic bombs that he wasn't allowed to.