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Do you also think the entire civil service ought to be elected? It's civil servants who actually make the decisions which affect you, not your MPs. An MP makes some catch all law but it's the civil service who decides if you get benefits, tax credits, and so on. And the people who work out the order in the NHS waiting lists, I suppose they ought to be elected as well? How about the principals of schools, refuse collectors and the Chief Constable, or the Chief Justice?

The House of Lords, as it exists today, is mostly a traditional matter like the monarchy, but has a role in which it can not veto legislation, but delay it pending further consideration from the Commons. They can recommend changes to proposed laws. It is the Commons who actually decide finally whether to change the draft documents or not. If we didn't have them, any time a cr-aaaaaaaa-zy law got passed, we'd all ask why we didn't have some kind of system to stop The Sun and The Mirror pressuring parliament into passing some ridiculous reactionary measure law. They're good at that job. Just because we didn't hold a popularity contest beforehand doesn't change that.

Whether or not they saved our ass is irrelevant.. the fact of the matter is that they are unelected and thus have no right to veto the legislation put forward by elected officials.

They are incredibly experienced and wise men. Their right to veto comes from that they know better about what is best for the country than most of parliament and certainly most of the country.

For instance, take Harold Wilson. Legalised homosexuality and abortion in the 60s, as well as passing other important legislation on censorship and immigration. The general public was furious and hated the thought of it, but Wilson knew it was good for them, and even just a few years later, people realised he had been right. Politicians like him no longer exist, they cannot, thanks to the media. The House of Lords provides the same influence today as Wilson did then, guiding the decision making of Parliament against the context of the whole of British history, and the aspirations and philosophical imperatives of our society.

Also I think it's a bit glib of Tuomas to infer that the Queen and the Lords secretly run the country like Jews doing 9/11, I mean, neither of them have any REAL power. The Queen has none at all, and the Lords really just have the power to send a Bill back to the Commons with a post-it note on it saying "You're idiots who can't see the big picture, try again."

It's amazing how you can not be elected, then lose the next election, and still be Prime Minister.

Edit:
I'd also like to point out that the House of Lords are... a really, really good thing. People tend to think "unelected decision maker" and therefore "NO DEMOCRACY!!!" but quite apart from having no real power, their most important role is to request that parliament reconsider some dubious legislation. They have saved our asses countless times.

[Unionists]

Actually Calin, the Conservatives don't have that right. They won the most seats out of any party, but they failed to reach the threshold for forming a minority or coalition government. It's Gordon Brown's right as the incumbent to remain in office until it has been decided who would be best to form a government, and he's perfectly welcome to say that would be Labour and Lib Dem.

Cameron is piling on the pressure, claiming that his effective majority gives him the right to try to form a coalition, and it seems like Clegg agrees with him to some extent. It's certainly looking like the Lib Dems are going to control the outcome of the election after all.

Also, in response to the Lib Dem's poor election results, they actually did a lot better than you'd think. They won about 23% of the votes. Labour won 29%, and the Conservatives won 36%. And yet, the Conservatives won 6 times as many seats. Under a nominally "fairer" system, the Lib Dems would hold around 149 seats, Labour would hold 188, and the Conservatives 234.

I'm sure receiving less press is the amazing upset in Northern Ireland, so I'll tell you a bit about that. The most important news is that the leaders of two of the main parties lost their seats. The DUP's Peter Robinson lost his East Belfast seat to the Alliance party (Lib Dem) following a torrid series of personal and political scandals. Even more shocking is that the Ulster Unionist Party failed to win even a single seat, with their leader Reg Empey losing in South Antrim and likely now stepping down as the leader of the party. Their previous only MP, Lady Sylvia Hermon, left the party to run as an Independent following the link with the Conservative party, and won with a massive majority of the vote in her North Down constituency. To put this in context for you, this is massive; the leaders of two of the main parties, and the two main Unionist parties at that, have lost their seats. The result for Fermanagh has yet to be returned because there were only 8 votes in it, but the shocking result is that the DUP looks to have won a seat away from Sinn Fein, in the middle of Republican heartland.

Another fascinating tidbit of news, quite fascinating, is in South Down where we see Unionists voting for the SDLP, as a tactical measure to prevent Sinn Fein's Catriona Ruane from returning to power. It really feels amazing to be living in a time where the people of Northern Ireland can put aside tribal politics for just a little while, recognising that there is a common evil who must be vanquished. For those of you who don't know, Catriona Ruane is the Stormont MLA who removed our academic selection system and replaced it with... nothing. Not even an idea that didn't work out. Just nothing.

The repurcussions of all this are likely to be a reallignment of Unionism in Northern Ireland, and a likely precedent for fielding a single Unionist candidate in each constituency to prevent the parties from splitting the unionist vote between themselves to the extent that the SDLP or Sinn Fein takes the seat.

You know what I hate. I hate people dying. You know what I hate more? Is people living like they're dead!
I've had it. I don't care if Greece ends up anarchy. I don't care if it ends up with full hospitals.

What I can't cope with is having my god-damn everyday life!

All there years, we're like, oh, it's okay, things will get better.
Oh, it's okay, things will get better. I'm not saying go kill. I'm saying go do something. And if we're actually gonna go eye for an eye, head for the parliament. Tear down that building, it's only a symbol of Democracy, Freedom, Justice. Where the fuck are those things?

"I don't need to tell you things are bad, everybody knows things are bad..."

Gasoline for â,¬1.20 would be a dream, it's £1.20 in the UK, ie. â,¬1.40 or so. So I feel your pain in that regard. Also 60% of that price is duty and tax. I love hearing Americans complain about petrol prices when they still pay about half what we do.

Also Nikolas, thank you for this overview. I admit I wasn't really sure what was happening before, the news about it only trickled down as far as Greece getting loans, I didn't know about the cuts in public spending and the riots :/ . I hope things don't get too unpleasant for you.

It does make me wonder why they didn't increase tax for the very rich. Although in the UK if you earn a considerable amount of money, the tax is like 50%, which is just obscene and absolutely unfair as well.

TSL had better be the single best game ever made.

Edit: In all seriousness though, this is a pretty interesting development, and it's hard not to get pulled into the excitement even though I was never really a KQ fan.

You could always use: noloopcheck  (check it up in the manual)

Oh god, I never knew about that. I've already rewritten code because of it. Admittedly it's better code now, but still.

I think it's okay without the head bob, considering that the rest of the body is properly moving up and down.

AGS will crash if you make it run a single loop more than 15,000 times, just to warn you incase you forsee jumps of that size. You could work around this by making the increment of the score relative to the increase in score.

Just remember to convert all decimal numbers back to integers and watch out for overshooting your target.

So for instance you might want code that does the following:

Code: ags

int increase; //amount hp will go up by
int new_hp = hp + increase;
int increment = increase/10; //then convert this to an integer, I don't remember the code off the top of my head.
//You'd ideally make the 10 relative to the size of increase, since depending on your method of converting to 
//an integer, values of increase below 5 will always result in an increment of 0.

while (hp<new_hp){
         if (new_hp - hp < increment) { //if the difference is less than the increment value 
                                        //ie. if the next increment would overshoot the target
                       hp = new_hp; //just add the difference and reach the target already
         }
        else { //otherwise, run our standard code here
                      hp = hp + increment;
                      Wait(20);
        }
}

This is more complicated than you need probably, but it represents a more flexible solution which might be helpful to someone in the future when searching for how to do this.

My actual favourite sammich is just ordinary ham on mighty white bread. Happy now?

My girlfriend makes these and they're delicious. I promise I am not trolling.

Brown bread, cucumber slices, peanut butter, chili paste (sambal, but any chili paste designed for use as a condiment would work).

Can I just ask; don't use made up ridiculous things.

If the player has to compare your classes/races to other existing types, then you've failed.
A good example I think are the FF13 classes, I've yet to see a review of this game which doesn't qualify the classes by an explanation of what they REALLY are. Something similar applies to races; calling your elves "N'y'rwold Treefolke" and your goblins "horklings" isn't the same as being original, and it's arguably worse than just using the standard tropes.

The website link does indeed point to some sort of porn aggregation site. There's not much explicit content on the actual site but it looks like the domain name no longer belongs to Phil at any rate.

I don't have a copy of it any more, but it was from some underling, not either of the big cheeses, and it was along the lines of "we could not permit or condone unauthorized use of Red Dwarf even for a non-profit."

Actually, now that I remember this, they actually said it was because an official Red Dwarf game was under consideration. I doubt it was very SERIOUS consideration, but they wanted to keep the market clean and clear for themselves.

Lib Dems will reppeal the Digital Economy Bill.

You know, that bill which sees you disconnected from the internet and fined, a sentence handed down by an unelected official who is not even a judge but a civil servant, and a penalty which you cannot appeal against because they inherently need no actual proof to hand it out to you? You know, that Digital Economy Bill?

That's reason enough to vote Lib Dem, don't you think?

As a citizen of Northern Ireland, I may either vote for the Conservatives, or a local party who can't go to Westminster.

Yay, democracy.

Don't email Grant Naylor. I did with my project and I guarantee you they won't support it.

I think using a well designed adventure game to teach a language is an amazing idea, and I'd definitely play a game like this.

I'm from Northern Ireland, and I absolutely understand what you mean about the Irish language being considered almost a thing of shame, to be hidden and not talked about. Infact what you said really struck a chord with me, we don't actually learn it in the north, but there's a very strong bias and suspicion against it. If you were to learn Irish, people would instantly assume you were a Republican. I also think a modern teaching method like this would be brilliant for helping to get rid of that pastoral, rural image Irish is mired with.

I can't say I know any Irish, but I do know some Dutch, which I'm told is one of the three languages (Irish and Arabic being the others) to contain the throat G (that horrible throat cough of a letter). My experiences of learning Dutch would have been so much easier if I'd had practice on the Irish throat G (it's probably not a G in Irish). That said, the throat G is probably the thing people will have most trouble picking up, I'd suggest either looking into using the softer alternative (an H, plus a throaty exhale) or giving some special help with the pronunciation of it. For instance, I find it easier to say if I imagine it as a kh sound. Or, better yet, you could anchor it into familiar words like the Scottish loch, which has the same sound (ch).

Looks like a flash game.