Oh look, yet another OSS project forking in order to escape Oracles clutches. You have to wonder just what kind of crack Ellison is smoking, in the space of a year Oracle have caused at least 3 major open source projects to fork in order to escape their control. On top of that the forked projects are taking all the developers away and so Oracle loses any of the original benefit in acquiring the original projects in the first place. The oracle versions will simply stagnate and the forks will continue to improve at a rate of knots. Add to that the Java debacle and you end up with a serious case of "WTF Oracle!?"

So I say once more:

What the fuck is wrong with you Oracle?!

victory.

Tomorrow I'll officially be a year older. I've always found this measuring system more than a little nebulous. It's as if, in the space of a day, an entire years accumulated time is totted up and meted out upon you and there's no GM to tell you how much XP you racked up and whether or not you get to level up. And where does it all go? It feels like it was just the other day that I was celebrating/commiserating my last birthday and now I'm another year closer to 30 (bring on the pre-emptive midlife crisis).

In other news, Picard is better than Kirk. That's right bitches, I said it.

and to be perfectly honest I don't fucking care. This is my response to the widespread support Mumtaz Qadri has received for his cowardly murder of the moderate progressive Pakistani politician Salman Taseer. Before I continue I'd like to point out that all Taseer did was call for a reform of Pakistans insane blasphemy laws. That was enough to get him killed and to add insult to injury Qadri has received support from all of Pakistans major Muslim religious groups. Religion of Peace? I don't fucking think so.

"Taseer was buried in his home town of Lahore. The 66-year-old was assassinated yesterday by Mumtaz Qadri, one of his police bodyguards, after he had campaigned for reform of the law on blasphemy.

Qadri appeared in court, unrepentant, where waiting lawyers threw handfuls of rose petals over him and others in the crowd slapped his back and kissed his cheek as he was led in and out amid heavy security"

- The Guardian, UK

What the fuck Islam?, in the words of PZ Myers: "it sounds like Islamic Paradise.". So here is my little homage to 'Islamic Paradise'.

As I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death,
I take a look at my life,
And realize there's nothing left,
'Cause I've been blindly obeying so long
That even the Imam thinks that my mind has gone.
Damn right I'll kill a man that didn't deserve it.
You best not diss my God, you know that's unheard of,
You better watch how you're talking, and where you're walking,
Or you and your homies might be lined in chalk,
I really hate to think, but I gotta Loc,
As they croak I see myself in the pistol smoke,
Fool, I'm the kinda fundie the jihadis wanna be like,
On my knees in the night
Saying prayers in the Mosque light.

[Chorus]
We've been spending most our lives
Living in Islamic paradise.
We've been spending most our lives
Living in a Islamic paradise.
We keep spending most our lives
Living in a Islamic paradise.
We keep spending most our lives
Living in a Islamic paradise.

Look at the situation, they got me facing,
I can't let others live their lives, unless they agree with me.
So I gotta be down with the militant team,
Too much religious thinking, got me chasing dreams.
I'm an uneducated fool with bigotry on my mind
Got a Koran in my hand and a gleam in my eye.
I'm a thoughtless killer, murderous motherfucker
And my Ji-homies are down so don't arouse my anger.
Fool, death ain't nothing but a fatwa away,
I'm living life do or die, what can I say?
I'm twenty-three now, and I won't live to see twenty-four,
Got semtex strapped to my chest and a trigger in my paw.

Tell me why are they
So blind to see.
That the ones we hurt
Die deservedly?
We've been spending most our lives
Living in Islamic paradise.
We've been spending most our lives
Living in a Islamic paradise.
We keep spending most our lives
Living in a Islamic paradise.
We keep spending most our lives
Living in a Islamic paradise.

Power and the fear, fear driven power,
Minute after minute, hour after hour,
Everybody's running, but half of them ain't looking
It's going on in the kitchen
We got the high explosives cooking.
They say I gotta tolerate
But I will never listen.
If they can't understand it, I guess I'll have to kill 'em
I guess they can't,
I guess they won't,
I guess they front,
That's why I know their lives are out of luck, fool!

We've been spending most our lives
Living in a Islamic paradise.
We've been spending most our lives
Living in a Islamic paradise.
We keep spending most our lives
Living in a Islamic paradise.
We keep spending most our lives
Living in a Islamic paradise.
Tell me why are they
So blind to see.
That the ones we hurt
Die deservedly?
Tell me why are they
So blind to see.
That the ones we hurt
Die deservedly?

Thank you and good night.

Some awesome science fail at the badscience.net forums here. This thread is like a car crash. It's impossible to stop reading the inanity of the OP's views. As Evilerik pointed out, MMEA must rate at least 0.7TC (TimeCube) on the crackpot scale.

Right, so I've completed the storyline in AC Brotherhood and here's the review:

This game is simply awesome. It does have its faults, every game does, so let's get them out of the way first.

Controls. The AC series control setup on the 360 has always been, in my opinion at least, a bit iffy. The contextual switch when entering combat situations doesn't always work and you can end up taking a pasting before Altaïr/Ezio gets his shit together and actually lets you fight back, directional controls tend to be at the whim of an ever moving camera which can make some of the free-running sequences intensely frustrating and the auto-lock aiming for ranged weapons can sometimes fail to engage at all. Usually at the most irritating moment possible.

Time limited sequences. This may just be a personal thing but I hate (I can't emphasise enough how much) time limited sequences. I like to take my time and pick off all the guards carefully, one by one, before advancing on the main target. There are several mission sequences that involve chases that are, by and large, pointless. The opportunity to kill the target is present from the beginning anyway. Why not simply take them out and be done with? I'd like the option to play through some sequences with a more gung ho approach and just storm in, blades out, throats being torn asunder left and right. It'd be nice to not be quite so limited by the requirements of a 'memory'

Only one city. Don't get me wrong, the city of Rome as rendered in Brotherhood is fantastic and extremely well done but I do miss the variation of locations found in AC2.

Now that that's out of the way let's talk about the good stuff. The gameplay, once you're accustomed to the control schema, is great. There's something intensely satisfying about wandering across the rooftops of Medieval Rome picking off guards with your crossbow as you stroll from one mission to the next. The Temples/Lairs of Romulus are fairly well laid out although the focus in some of them on combat rather than puzzle solving is a tad annoying, this game already has plenty of combat and could do with more puzzles.

The Brotherhood itself is handy as well, once you've trained up a decent set of Assassins they become invaluable to you. It's also a lot of fun to walk the streets and have them take out groups of guards for your own amusement/looting. Add to that that they can be very useful in chasing down and taking out Borgia messengers for you and there's a lot of potential profit in them.

The story is engaging and fairly good and even leaves room for yet another game in the series by the end but the lack of variation in the locations available is disappointing. On the plus side, once you complete the main storyline you can still wander about Rome and complete more tasks, unlock more items and generally enjoy the place. I admit I haven't tried the multiplayer yet, I don't think any of my friends have been playing Brotherhood. Let's hope they bring out some sweet DLC soon.

All in all 8/10