"A person who solely 'thinks for themselves' i.e. who never checks their reasoning, ethics, or assumptions against another person cannot be relied upon to think reasonably, or to reason morally, because humans naturally skew their reasoning towards their own benefit." Chris, I suspect this may say more about your own definition of "reasonable thinking" than anything else - in particular that you have some notion that "reasonable thinking" should not skew a person's reasoning towards their own benefit. I don't think one can go down that road without agreeing with Bentham; if we follow that route, we should all work tirelessly to improve the lot of (particularly) people in the developing world rather than our own position in life. I don't see that happening out there in the world, so there's a mismatch somewhere? Cheers, Peter

It's my only way of playing MechWarrior 3 - still my favourite "first person shooter".

Thanks for this! As an alternative, if (like me) you're one of those sad people who keep old OS disks, you can: 1) Install a free virtual machine environment. I use VirtualBox, but others are available. 2) Install Windows 98 in that environment from your Windows 98 installation CD. 3) Install Discworld Noir onto the virtual machine. 4) Play.

I think you might appreciate the footnote at the end of http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/08/worstall_i_support_the_green_party_natalie_bennett_minimum_basic_income/ in relation to this piece! I'll hold off further discussion until I've read the next article. P.S. Yes, and we'll be there - thanks very much!

An interesting question: Does the complete edit and talk history of an article on Wikipedia, which ascribes provenance to each character and shows up actively contentious parts, gives you *more* information? Articles in a conventional encyclopaedia may not be credited and necessarily do not carry their edit history with them.

I like your poetic description, actually - how one thinks/speaks of oneself is probably closer to what I was getting at. OK, so to bring this back towards the original discussion, how about "There's a new World of Warcraft expansion coming out in a couple of weeks and I, as a member of a world-leading guild that gains fame and fortune by its successes, will take all reasonable steps in my power to make sure I'm in on the world-first clear of the first raid." Is that an end? If so, might they be affected by rights?

"To will something is to commit to taking all steps in your power to bring it about (as far as Kant is concerned)." By that definition I have no ends*, and never have had. I will take *reasonable* steps in my power, subject to re-evaluation of priorities in the future. I may want something, but I do not will it in that sense. Part of me's saying "why the bloody hell would anyone ever be that crazy?" Regarding the transience of ends, might we perhaps approach a definition based on the end being sufficiently significant to the person that they will remember the event in the future and attach significance to that memory? * Arguably one: to protect my wife. The argument is beyond the scope of this comment ;-).

You seem to be making a qualitative distinction that I consider to be a mere difference of degree. Given that an end need not be a goal that lasts the remainder of your life (you cite getting a degree as a legitimate end), where does an end stop and why (for example) is aiming for a cold beer not an end? I admit that I've not (yet!) read Chaos Ethics, which may clarify that, so feel free to point me in its direction. Blizzard has forced an unexpected quasi-end on me recently: I've stopped playing WoW without reaching my own desired quasi-end of settling my characters somewhere peaceful, because it has become clear that in order to maintain what they refer to as a "hero crucible" that peaceful place must not exist in the game. Because WoW is an evolving world controlled by the developers, it's possible for a games company such as Blizzard to change the game world so that one's ends are unachievable. Whether or not this meets any sensible definition of "rights" can be debated, but to the person at the sharp end it does rather feel like the laws have been arbitrarily changed!

There's presently this dichotomy between centralised networks (Facebook, Twitter) that provide rich cross-linking but require centralised money (advertising money) to maintain, and decentralised networks (Diaspora, blogs) that are paid for by their users but have much poorer linking and search facilities. I'm working on (OK, thinking how to implement) a decentralised platform that allows rich linking, potentially removes single points of failure, provides strong identity guarantees (that two items come from the same account or from different accounts, not who holds those accounts) and where service nodes can be placed anywhere you like, with users storing content across any nodes with which they can negotiate an appropriate legal agreement. Oh, and where users are actively encouraged to use a wide variety of readers, which are explicitly allowed to transform what they display (for example, to remove advertising). Service nodes could, for example, be Raspberry Pi-sized (or one of the wall-socket micro-servers), and hence very affordable. In that environment, advertising is much less advantageous and there is no requirement to have it.

Earl Grey, please...

Still here. Posting on Week 1 as I was out of mobile coverage due to holiday, otherwise I'd have seen this!

Yay! I'm still around, but many of your recent pieces are so far away from my areas of competence that I'm simply not equipped to comment.

Hmm. You've now got me wanting to look out the source of "do not bite the fan that heeds you". One of Arthur C. Clarke's fans to him after a grumpy comment I *think*.

Oh, good. I much preferred the blog when it was somewhere I felt I could join in the discussion rather than admiring the finished works.

Moore's Law has not been kind to the console. Once upon a time, expensive dedicated hardware was essential in order to obtain any useful performance out of many games. These days, a multi-hundred MIPS processor costs cents in bulk and tens of gigaflops of GPU power costs little more - look at the economics of the Raspberry Pi for a fascinating example. Once you can embed something that's "good enough" for many users for many games as a tiny cost as part of a general-purpose device, whether that's a phone, tablet, TV or smart glasses, the economics change completely.

I'm not planning to enter the competition, but would appreciate it if you'd sign my copy at some point.

"moral values intimately entail facts" Sure? My own entailment arrow would be the other way round. But then, maybe I'm just a positivist :-).

Yowch! All the best for a swift recovery. Must be catching, by the way. For the first time in... oh... three decades or so? I fell out of bed last night, via a rather sharp drawer edge.

I suspect if you asked people on each side to define the word "marriage", you would get different definitions. Asking the question "should group X be allowed to marry?" without agreement on the definition of marriage will produce heat, but little light as the two sides aren't answering the same question.

As a mere thought experiment that's probably been done: what happens if you add (let's say) a distance measure of "relatedness" or "careness" to the "number" measure of a consequentialist ethics, such that different people can calculate different answers to the same question based on their relationships with the people involved? Certainly this can neatly solve the Repugnant Conclusion if the measure is designed so that any number of low-careness individuals can be outweighed by one high-careness individual. If one assumes that Deep Judge could be built with such a framework, I think some very interesting discussions ensue :-).

So move to Chorlton Village :-).

Amazingly or amusingly, I'm *still* playing and enjoying World of Warcraft five years on, and it's still all about the people and the exploration. Oh, hang on, Brainhex has me tagged as a seeker/socialiser...

Necro-comment - sorry! "Sometimes people cheat, but in order to cheat you must already have acknowledged that there were rules that could be broken." Mmm. I'll point to relativism again. Who asserts that the person has cheated? Can a person who believes that they're playing a game to different rules than another legitimately believe they haven't cheated when the second player believes they have?

The large rights holders are leeches and can, as far as I'm concerned... how to put this politely... go and die in a fire. That said, I quite appreciate the small fractions of a cent Albireo gets for each listen to a track over a legal streaming medium. Between that and online track and album purchases, we've racked up... ooh... tens of dollars. Total, not each. It's still fun.

I'm puzzled. Why do you think that studios will feel they have to support multiple input schemes on one title if they can guarantee that the console ships with their controller of choice?