We have gun laws here. I've never wished me or any member of my family or any of my friends or anyone I know had a gun in some situation they were in so that they could've defended themselves. I don't live in a quiet out-of-the-way place, I've lived in capital cities for all of my adult life. There is gun crime here but it's the gang members and they're importing illegal guns to do drive-bys on other gangs. Do you know who has the largest gun force? The people we've selected to keep the peace. We have as much crime as anybody, but to be honest, I'd rather be threatened with a syringe or a flick-knife than a gun, I feel like I have a better chance of seeing at least a few more years after that encounter. Maybe that's just me. Pretty difficult to accidentally stab someone you're threatening with a knife and easy to get jumpy with a trigger.

You can have your safety and your rights and your bravado and your paranoia about your government or whatever you need, but I wish you could experience my life so you'd see how much safer you can feel unarmed.

Out of curiosity, if it was legalised for the purposes of food and building materials but nothing else, would you be satisfied? Or are you really just pointing out good qualities of the plant to make it more available for other purposes.

As an aside, I have absolutely no problem with legalising dope, I just find the pot smokers to be really boring at parties.

I saw Waiting for Godot when the production with (sir) Ian McKellen in it came through town. I thought Roger Rees played a good part but I can only imagine what it must've been like with McKellen and Patrick Stewart as it was a year ago...I think it's the sort of play that only draws you in with a good cast, but if you have the chance to see this particular production, you don't need my recommendation, you can listen to the critics.

I count them as a genre because they're usually made up of genre-benders.

Do you mean casual games? Indy devs get antsy about being synonymous with casual...

Is it possible that this article is made up mostly of fabrications and out-of-context muddlings? because I've never known a set of policies I completely and whole-heartedly disagree with before...

I feel sorry for her. That's bad, right?

I'm breaking months of forum silence to say: I just got a call to say my copy is here!

I'd post impressions n stuff but...I'll be busy playing spore...

Because, apparently, my knowledge about olfaction isn't as good as yours, would you be so kind to explain it on a bio-chemistrical level? And then explain how molecules, which are detected in the nose can give an answer on how far it is away?

Well, I dont know if MY knowledge of olfaction is any better than yours but try this one out:

There is far more information processing on the visual responses from your retina then just the raw data of what comes in through your pupils. The brain uses a bit of trig and your stereoscopic vision to work out distances to objects as well as past experiences of shadows, textures and memory of any recognisable object's size to give you information about depth. This processing is all done AFTER the cones and rods have triggered as a result of light hitting them which would be the eye's equivalent to molecules of smell hitting your sensory neurons.

What I'm getting at is that a 'visual image' of locations of objects would be a result of data analysis done after you've gathered the data. For example, maybe you could have stereo-olfactic depth information similar to stereoscopic vision. It could hook into your visual cues, connecting remembered smells with visible objects. Hell, it might even be a kind of overlay over your vision with a big red x saying "I think it's coming from here"

Another option would be for the visual representation to just be a series of colours and shapes to identify the molecular structure of the smell because our brains are more highly developed for pattern recognition in visual data then any other sense.

That's not true. The cockroaches you're referring to actually come from the tropics and can only survive inside buildings in the colder zones. Though they existed before man and now live in almost every country, the majority of them would go extinct if human dies out. Only the specimen in the warmer regions would survive. In colder regions, they are like parasites living off the human, by living inside its buildings, eating its food and using its transport vehicles for spreading across the globe. And as any parasite, it dies together with its host.

I dont know where you're from but where I'm from we have something called the bush cockroach which survives anywhere in coastal australia - much like Australians. I imagine there is a similar "race" of cockroach which can survive on any habitable landmass, much like ours. The bush cockroach was here long before people (or at least, european people) and my point stands even if it wasn't. We have food and shelter and the cockroach takes it and we cant stop it. This is an act of dominance.

I think you're confusing quantity with dominance.

Quantity IS dominance. A human being on his own cannot control the technologies we boast about. One man can kill a wolf with a gun but a pack of wolves can take down a gunman. Noone could claim that man in the singular sense dominates the world, they mean that Man in the collective sense dominates the world. In any case, it is not the quantity of cockroaches that makes them dominant, it is our inability to control them. Dominance is control.