Just Seen: Die Another Day

[IMDB]
Gadgets - check
Explosions - check
Megalomaniac with mwahahahaha factor - check
Evil Villian's Lair™ - check
Q telling Bond to bring the gadgets back this time - check
Verbal sparring between Bond and M - check
Digs at the Americans - check
Feisty Women - check
Innuendo and punslinging between Bond and said women - by the truckload.

This film is silly. Preposterously, gloriously silly, in a completely over-the-top, "My car's got more gadgets than your car" kinda way.

In many ways, Die Another Day is a Bond film by-the-numbers, possibly featuring more Bond clichés in one film than any other film ever (Austin Powers might beat it). Luckily, it has an exuberance that is infectious, and never fails to be entertaining.

I loved it, and spent a large fraction of the film with a stupidly big grin plastered across my face.

[note to the people who made the Avengers disaster: THIS is how you do it]

[note to people planning to take kids along: never mind the film itself, the (utterly fabulous) fire sprites/burning women in the opening credits would have given me nightmares at the age of 9 or 10]

UT2K3 vs people

I've been playing UT2K3 a bit online, and I'm fairly chuffed that I'm holding up well. The game works better with people, and while I may not have much experience with Unreal-engine games online, I have been playing FPS games for over a decade now, and online for 4 years, so I can still show these young whippersnappers a thing or two.

Playing against people has really shown up how inhuman the bots are. People just don't start blazing away at targets waaaay across the map like the bots do. The lack of psychic powers on CTF and BR maps is noticable, too. The other thing I've noticed, however, is just how clunky it feels online, compared to TFC. If nothing else, I have a new appreciation of just how slick Half-Life's net code is.

yay!

Seeing documents like this cheers me up. While some parts of the world are disappearing up Microsoft's butt, at least some areas are putting up a fight (in this case, India, though a certain Peruvian Congressman deserves a very honourable mention too)

[link: slashdot]

Jaw-on-floor

The Recording Industry Association of America has demanded that The Register remove an article about the RIAA's actions against "music pirates" within the US Navy.

Let's get this straight: a US-based Industrial Organisation is attempting to strongarm a UK-based news website into retracting an unfavourable news report. Go Register!

[Postscript: all is not as it may appear - read comments]

Only two weeks late...

Mozilla 1.2 is out. Get it here, if the download servers can take the strain.

From my experience with the nightlies, it should be pretty stable. There are few obvious changes from the previous release, but lots of little improvements lurking around the edges.