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Monday 29 November 2004

Gategate [Am]

It surprises me now, on an almost daily basis, that the repeated hammering of my forehead against this desk at the fucktardy du jour has not caused either a cranial prolapse or at least a trip down Ikea and an order for a new monitor. Today gave me more cause to wonder....
Latest in the list of interminable reasons to search through your draws for the Humanity Warrantee and seek to post it off asking for a full and immediate refund is the case of a mediumly attractive dutch girl who has had to validate her tits. Yes you heard it correctly, the dutch, a nation let it be said which is one of the only ones on the face of the planet to vaguely get with the whole might-as-well-be-fun-and-decent-since-we're-only-here-for-a-short-time (others including the Irish, the Carribean nations and goddam it yes the antipodeans) have become obsessed with the bona fides of the norks of some MAW (model / actress / whatever) from the flatflands.
Georgina Verbaan has managed to extract herself from the usual carsmash of colliding constenants that is the dutch language and has today posted online an x-ray mammogram to prove that she has not had her front bumpers augmented. Geen vals luchtkussen in ook niet tit as they say over an unfeasibly strong beer while playing backgammon smacked out their brains on finest Afghanistani bud. (No false airbag in either tit). As you can see, the suggestion that she had, ahead of a Playboy shoot, pumped up her puppies had apparently had the entire nation rapped and had become referred to as Boobgate.
Boobgate. They may be a nation of mayonnaise smugglers in every last filthy way that would make it inconceivable to trust a man with a jar of Helmans but "Boobgate"?
Smack goes the forehead. ~Wang~ goes the desk of fortitude quivering in sympathy.
Enough frigging -gates already! Hello can you hear me? No....more....friggin' -gates already! I'm not quite sure when I ran out of gatequota but it was a long wanking time ago. Don't believe me? Wikipedia has a damn good list of this most overused of taglines.
Pretzelgate? A titanic battle of hard baked snack product versus an intellectual inferior who also happens through the sort of co-indidences that gets a triple ~wang~ off the desk to be the President of the most powerful nation on earth. Camillagate? The humiliation of a nation as its future king casts Barry White into sharp relief as he tells his mistress that he wants to be her tampon. (No really for those of you reading this overseas). Nipplegate? The Janet Jackson no I really do *not* give a shit she got her puckered dinnerplate out on in the middle of the superbowl but for heavens sake is this just the sign of the stupidity of a nation that she actually thinks that she can say its a wardrobe malfunction when she's wearing some fucking happy star round it?
Gates have to finish. Here's the plan.
From now on I'm gonna saturate -gates. This is blog-gate. From now one whenever you see something unpalatable, try and drum up the filthiest -gate you can think of so eventually, finally, even the press will blanch at using it. Lewinsky-gate? Nah, should have been Cumgate. Or Sploogegate. Spatgate with a side order of Babybattergate. Cigarstuffergate. Someone in parliament has an upset tummy? Shitgate. Marmitegate. Bovrilguzzlergate. Chocolatewristgate. Royal gets a bit of acshun in the bogs of Annabels? OneoffatheWristgate. Toffgumgate. Jizzgate. Garglegate. Sloanymouthwashgate.
Anything readers. Just anything. Just getting the friggin gategates oot mah fookin headgate.

Friday 26 November 2004

Bluesky Half Life 2 Mods [Slim]

You've played Half Life 2, if you've an ounce of taste you fucking loved it and your weary tongue is now feeling a sad and empty socket where the golden molar of gaming goodness should be. But let me help you fill that weeping cavety with some half life 2 most wanted moddery wishlisting!
Lets throw the floor open here guys! We need to reintermediate efficient niches here and maximise shareholder values by engineering distributed partnerships, or something.
I'll go first.. I'd like to see something use the gravity gun, because it was the single most fucking cool arse thing about the game. Not something totally based on it mind, but something that uses it in a similar fashion to the ole grappling hook in quake 2 ctf. Like ctf in arenas where you use your trusty grav gun to pull and push platforms and swing bridges and shit around. You can also use shit as shields and stuff, ace for when you're leggin it with the flag, suck up a bit of steel and cower under the fucker!

Important Warning [Vagga]

I hate hoax warnings, but this one is important.

Please send this to everyone on your e-mail list.If a man comes to your front door and says he is conducting a surveyand asks you to show him your arse, do not show him your arse.This is a scam; he only wants to see your arse.

I wish I'd gotten this yesterday. I feel so stupid and cheap.

Monday 22 November 2004

Want to be the next president of U.S.A? [Shedir]

http://www.chuckherrin.com/hackthevote.htm
It seems its pretty easy to crack the voting machines!
Personally, I'll vote for Am.
AmLan 2008 in the Oval Office, you know you want it.
Jay don't hit the big red button, it's not teletext selection you know ;)

Sunday 21 November 2004

AmLAN - The Aftermath [Spiny]

Wow, what a weekend! Great to see everyone & dish out large helpings of 0wnage topped off with smack talk sauce. Ahem.
Here's a classic weekend moment. When watching the vid, just remember how everyone was cheering & chanting Dave to victory. Heh.
Post your snaps up here & for heavens sake G-man, get that Singstar wobbly cam footage up. Slim's Ace of Spades was a hoot.
I'll echo the others thanks to Clan-Am & start thinking about Wurzel-LAN 05 & let the detox begin....

Tuesday 16 November 2004

AmLan - Getting there by Train? [Vagga]

Right then I've been busy at work and have been paying no attention to who is going where and how for AmLan, but given Am has just told me 17 people are going Im taking a wild guess (given fuck all of us drive) we have fuck all cars going from London to AmLan that have we dont have anything even coming close to space; even for a monitor, let alone a big boned bloke :)
I therefore realise its totally pointless even asking about the subject, and assuming its the train I'm getting :)
Train is Victoria to Whitstable; from there Gareth picks us up at the far end.
There are trains every half an hour on saturdays, journey is about 90minutes. Cost seems to be 16.10 each way..
Its going to be a right pain with a PC and monitor, but we can do it :) Taxi to Victoria, train, and car from far train station to AmLan HQ - not hard :)
Who else is 'slumming it' then..

Monday 15 November 2004

AmLan - The Final Countdown [Am]

Some of you may remember Europe, a dodgy band who's lead singer almost succumbed to a fatal attack of hairspray in the mid-80's. Whatever the state of poodle-rock danger, it should be noted that The Final Countdown is now underway. In 72 hours we'll be looking at the biggest gathering of EED in the history of ummmm EED.
Well there's some shit to sort out with rides and kits but when you're in a clan that put the EE in L33T then you know stuff'll come right.
So to our readers, followers, fans and the plain people who popped around going "wtf", can I just say; This weekend the crosshatch will be basically closed down. We will be doing what proper clans do which is play shit loads of games but also get rip snortingly ripped to the tits and fall over a lot by the beach.
EED. What a fucking clan ought to be. (TM).

The night before.. [Slim]

Twas the night before half life and all through the net,
not a peon was bleating the forums were set,
the steam client was loaded in the task trey with care,
in hopes that gordon freeman soon would be there.

Half-Life 2 has not been released [Lurks]

AmLanAid [DrDave]

I just got off the phone with Midge Ure. He said this year's wanky pop acts couldn't sing for toffee and Band Aid looks as though it's going to turn out "fucking shite" (his words). I could hear Sir Bob crying in the background.
So he's asked if he could tap into the collective leet power that will be present over the weekend and maybe try to put some much needed spark into the charity single. We've been throwing around some ideas in channel and come up with this, which I think captures the essence of giving that EED so cherishes:
Leet The World: Do They Know It's 0wning Time
It's 0wning time, there's no need to be afraid
At 0wning time, we let in leet and banish gheys
And in our world of fatties, we will utter 'really, loike'
Throw your nukes around the world, at 0wning time!

But say a prayer
Pray for the pe0ns
At Amlan time, it's hard, like when you're poking bum
There's a world outside your windows
A world of lunix fa-got-try
Where the only skillz a' flowing, are the pe0n skillz of fear
And the MP3s that play there, are not even VBR'd

Well tonight thank Rebot it's them, instead of you

And there will be skillz in Whistable this 0wning time
The greatest gift we'll get this year is Half Life
(Oooh) Where bloggers never go
No fucking hits you know!
Do they know it's 0wning time at all?

(Here's to you) fuck them up their shit again!
(Here's to them) camping base, the dirty scum!
Do they know it's 0wning time at all?

LEET THE WORLD!
(Do they know it's 0wning time?)

LEET THE WORLD!
(Do they know it's 0wning time?)
[fade]

Saturday 13 November 2004

Half-Life 2 and what it means for PC games [Lurks]

Its close. The 16th November, US time, which presumably means Wednesday in European civilisation. Needless to say we're all looking forward to this game like nothing before. We've also dished out no end of criticism to Valve on the delays, broken promises and Steam.
As an observer and participant in the games industry for a number of years, I remember working on a PC gaming magazine back when the original came out and I was tasked to review it. The game was revolutionary as we all know and that's what we're going to get this time around as well. Yet I want to step back a little from the game itself and analyse what Half-Life 2 means for the PC gaming genre due to Valve's unique publishing mechanism for the game.
Have you been puzzled as to why it hasn't been doing the rounds with tens of thousands of leechers on the warez sites? Maybe you've even been having a sly look on those sites yourself? I mean you're going to buy it anyway right? You have to for the multiplayer stuff.
It might be useful to quickly digress to examine the genesis of a pirated game; As a rule, games are generally leaked in the testing stage which is also the same end-stage of a game's development as when journalists get the code. So an equivalent of a release candidate, if you like, is what generally gets warezed and on the rare occasion that pikey journos/tests don't leak it, the next stage is that a retail copy is liberated from a duplication house. That's generally a week to two weeks before the on-sale date.
Half-Life 2 has been in duplication for some time with a number of people already obtaining boxed copies due to some retailers breaking the release date already. But still no warez, why is that do you think?
What has subsequently emerged is that even with the boxed copy, one must go online and register the game so you're able to play it. This is a brave move and one which has never been done before. It requires that the target audience has an Internet connection so you can add that to the minimum requirements, whether or not you intend to play multiplayer.
The simple logic here must have been game sales lost to piracy is greater than game sales lost to people without a 'net connection. On past evidence, that seems a pretty fair conclusion, particularly given that this is a core gaming title that demands a more or less modern PC and those obviously tend to be those with internet connections.
Beyond that, how is it then that the misdirected talent of some acne infested youth has not managed to zap the registration and crack the game for full play. Clearly it is not for lack of trying.
The answer, when you think about it, is simple. Valve have a digital content delivery system in the form of Steam as we all know. Therefore the easiest way for them to ensure that no one will be cracking anything is basically not to give you some vital bits of the game. Most likely bits of the actual engine, which aren't too large, but basically without them you don't have the brain of the game and so any crack attempt is going to have to involve working out how the game engine works and filling in the blank bits. That's beyond the abilities of said acne-wonder, certainly within the time frame which this scheme has to last. Which is just three days more.
Another fact here is that Valve hired the author of Bittorrent. That might mean that Steam will get something of the same technology of a peer-2-peer network, then again it might not. It doesn't really matter. What is significant is that Bram Cohen wrote a file transfer mechanism which basically chopped up the data into lots of tiny little packets and then distributed those at random. Is that not exactly the sort of clever thing you'd do with Half-Life 2?
Lets take it a logical step further in terms of software engineering. If you're missing 0.1%, for example, in random chunks of a set of data, particularly if its encrypted or compressed in some way, its not only very difficult to restore to a working condition but it will even be very difficult to decompress/decrypt as well.
Like all the best ideas, this one is as simple as it is clever. There's no getting around it. You need to get Valve's server to send you the bits you need before you have the game. Effectively we have a zero-day retail release and every bastard that likes PC games is going to have to buy it. Hats off to Valve, this is brilliant and they deserve every success - not just because they've made the best PC game so far but they've also worked out how to shaft the pie-rat scum too.
Of course when the game comes out, all bets are off. As soon as a cracker has a full copy of the game they can easily package it up into a warez bundle which will work for anyone - bypassing the log-in stage. There's nothing anyone can do about that. The achilles heel of any copy protection scheme is that ultimately the code must load correctly and be resident on a PC to play it, and if that's the case, a cracker can simply get at the end result.
This approach is going to work so well that the rest of the PC games industry is going to sit up and take note. Its not a difficult stretch of the imagination to predict that where Valve have pioneered here, others will follow.
Let's assume, by say 2006, that this mechanism is standard practice across the industry. What does this actually mean?
1. Reviews: It means that you wont get every web site and magazine reviewing beta code sent to them so you end up with 98% scores for games (because they got an 'exclusive') that don't see the light of day for three months. You'll still see some of this but your big early reviews will be from the major gaming titles, the top magazines and web sites because the publisher will fly them to the developer to play the game in order to review it.
The interesting knock-on here will be that for less than triple-A titles, they'll probably be no early reviews because web sites and mags won't be arsed to spend the time and the publisher won't have the budget.
2. General health: With piracy down and sales up, the industry itself gets a welcome shot in the arm. Those studios and publishers that have deserted the PC due to the rampant piracy will once again see it as a viable platform. Particularly when it comes to easier publishing via digital content delivery systems. Now it isn't necessarily a requirement to buy the prominent shelf-space in the major retail chains to end up with a blockbuster title.
3. Complexity and annoyance: The publishers aren't going to all rush to Valve for Steam. They're going to want to build this stuff themselves. It seems likely that you'll end up having an EA application, for example, which does your digital content delivery for their games. Naturally they'll also build in all the community and multiplayer stuff into their application, having failed to attract mass consumers to their web-site offering. EA and Ubi[soft] are prime examples here. These applications may turn into monsters. They'll be flashing you advertising, they'll be pushing content. It'll be like the Real Player of games.
4. Revenue in the mod community: This week Bioware started selling premium 'modules' for Neverwinter Nights. These were started as community mods, if you like, but were then spruced up by the developer and turned into commercial products - rather like Counter-Strike was. There's always a thriving community of people making quality mods as a hobby and as an avenue into the industry. With those digital content delivery applications, this will make it easier for publishers to do the sort of thing Bioware is doing. It'll also provide revenue for modders who are moving up to the realms of the the semi-pro. It will, ultimately, be feasible for some people to make a living as a modding group so that no longer is their best prospect that of being bought out by the guys who made the host game - ala Trauma Studios and Desert Combat for Battlefield 1942.
This is a great thing because this is what we want. We want more content for the games that are familiar with the engines we've set up and know how to play - particularly on the multiplayer side of it. But often these things aren't polished very well and you never get to hear about the good ones and no one has downloaded them or is playing them anyway, in the case of multiplayer mods. This mechanism means that the developer/publisher can select a number and raise the standard to the point that it's something worth paying for.

It'll be a brave new world, a frightening and complicated world of PC games but one which has a future which is brimming with new titles, content and amateur diversified innovation. This is a good thing because, by and large, the computer games industry had been giving serious thought to the viability of the PC gaming platform - with most commentators having a negative outlook on the prospects. A successful platform means more games, bigger games, better variety of games.
I hope in the final analysis, the irony is not lost on you. What is ushering in this brave new world, trail blazing the concept into our collective consciousness? Steam, that's what. Who'd think that annoying little system tray applet could mean so much in the wider scheme of things eh?
Valve may justifiably consider they got the last laugh after all.

Thursday 11 November 2004

Exile In A Wilderness Of Xboxes [DrDave]

Modded xboxes... marvellous things. Play emulators, re-enable the progressive scan mode, use it as a media centre, even stick a copy of Linux on it and use it as a capable server. Some unscrupulous cads even use it for playing "backups" obtained illegally across the interweb - hellions! Okay, it's true that Microsoft like to ban modified xboxes from connecting to their online gaming servers, but they have to catch you first and the addition of a simple switch was the perfect antidote to this heavy handed piece of facism.
See, the thinking always went like this: if you turn the chip off, then there's no way on earth that MS can detect a modification. The chip simply isn't there as far as they're concerned. So a generation of happy modders enjoyed the best of both worlds. After all, who was really losing out? Playing on Live requires the chip to be off, so modders were forced to actually (*gasp*) buy original titles. It seemed like the perfect arrangement...
But MS are rich and clever. Since March, they've been keeping lists and checking them twice. When you first connect to Live with an xbox, MS record your HD serial number and your xbox eeprom version number. MS have rather cleverly realised that the first thing a modderdoes is put a new HD in their xbox - to facilitate all that lovelypiracy see? The bounders. So... in theory, if the eeprom number doesn't match the HD number, then they've netted themselves a modder. They don't even need to see the chip, because the only way you can use a different HD is in conjunction with a mod chip. Three suckling pigs and a comely maiden - pure and true - to the MS drone who came up with that plan!
For some reason though, they never did anything about it. The modders continued to enjoy the benevelence of MS and everybody put in a pre-order for Halo 2 - the game destined to be the best reason to take your xbox online.
Then a few nights ago, somewhere deep within his orbital headquarters, Bill Gates stroked his long haired cat, sighed a long sigh and issued the command: "Ban them, ban them all."
A button was pushed, a dial tweaked, a lever engaged and from then on, anyone connecting to xbox live with a modified box that had been used online in its unmodified state previously... was banned. No appeal. No chance of reversing it. The entire box, blacklisted. The only possible solution: buy a new xbox.
Gentlemen, let this be a warning.... I was caught out. Yes, I thoughtmyself so clever as I cocked-a-snook in Redmond's direction. But they had my number, they were simply toying with me as a cat toys with a mouse.
I turned on my xbox last night to load my pristine, shrink-wrapped Halo 2 only to be greeted with an "unable to connect, modified xbox detected" message. Go to jail, do not pass go, do not play Halo 2.
Am I bitter? Nah. Am I angry? Nope. Do I feel cheated? Not really... I knew the Terms and Conditions when I signed up. I have the contented, if a little sore, feeling of having been buggered by a true pro, a real bedroom gymnast. Microsoft have played their hand admirably on this one - store up the information, bide your time, wait for the Halo 2 transactions to go through and the money to land in Bill's current account, then WHAMMO!
MS: I doff my cap to you.

Tuesday 9 November 2004

Ultimate gaming laptop [Beej]


This clan is no stranger to warm laps, and as I understand we also have a few happy notebook 0wners too (ba-boom tish!). I digress...

If there is an ultimate gamer laptop, and money were not the number one issue, what can you get?

I've been looking around over the last few weeks and have come up with the following ugly-looking sons of beehatches:

Alienware Area-51® Extreme - Mmmmmmmmm! I'll spare any attempt at a review because there are others who can wipe the floor with a more authoritative opinion :) For price, a P4 @ 3.2 + 1GB PC3200 + 128MB Radeon 9700 seems to come out at around $2500 (£1350). Hexus review here.

Voodoo ENVY M:780 - as I understand it, the same innards as the Alienware. Specs up to more or less the same too, except with 256MB on the 9700 and with a 1680x1050 WSXGA+ screen. Somehow though, I seem to have got the spec-o-matic up to $4900 (£2650) without noticing, whoah!

Falcon Northwest Fragbook - appalling named, but a bit of a beast. Black Ops™ aluminium carry case, ooooooooh! Comes in two flavours: "TL" thin and light with 15 inches, and "DR" desktop replacement at 17 inches. A hefty Prescott 3.2 config comes out at $4300 (£2300) which beats the Voodoo but still way right of field!

xVx Monstruo-M - no better named, but at last a lappy with 64bit. This is good right? A full on sensible but up-spec Athy 3700+ (rated 2.4GHz?) with a gig of the good stuff and a Radeon 9700 "Turbo 256MB" comes in at $2200 (£1200), so on a par with the Alienware.

Acer 3200 Ferrari - a bit overstyled for me, and prancing horse means "tiny penis" where I come from, but it has the 9700, and I've used one and it ain't too bad for your top-shelf lappy. $2000 (£1100). There are probably better Acers, but shopping for these things notebooks is a nightmare of numbers and it's almost as bad as surfing the VAIO catalogue... which brings me on to...

Sony VAIO T1 - successor to the TR1MP but designed for looks? Is any VAIO suitable for, say, DOOM3 and teh HL2 futar? I'm guessing no, it's for the clan posers :)

If the trick to buying a DR gaming lappy is getting the best graphics chipset available and a good-sized screen, then that means coming up trumps are the Alienware and the xVx. Battery life - well an issue if you're doing app stuff, and how do you tell? An optional second battery or HD would be a bonus. The Fragbook reads lubberly but that sort of money - even in a "money no object" blog - doesn't seem to be in the realms of normality.

What's the Area-51m like then?

Monday 8 November 2004

I want my HDTV! [Lurks]

Why is television so fucked in the UK? We've got this great public service called the BBC and yet they only manage to get on one or two must-watch shows a year tops despite having a budget 10 times that of the likes of HBO in the states. But let's just ignore content for awhile, I want to talk about technology. Despite the fact that we PAL based and therefore had an inherently superior television system to the Americans and Japanese for the longest time, these standards are positively archaeic in comparison with HDTV.
Why is it the Yanks are all over HDTV like a 'cheap suit' as I'm sure they'd tell you? Was the inherent shittiness of NTSC so bad that they broke first? Yet here in the UK we have a supposedly competent satellite broadcast monopoly in the form of the Evil Empire (Murdoch) BSkyB. These guys got EPGs right, they were the first people worldwide to offer a consolidated PVR-based service technology for consumers and they are one of the very few which have yet to have their encryption broken too.
And yet... where are we at today? I've got a big screen, a projector, as you've seen elsewhere. BSkyB looks pretty bad on that, blocky artifacts and all that jazz but the competition are even more of a farce. Bravo on my telewest broadband service is seriously transmitting at sub-VCD levels of quality. Even the best of the best show blatant DCT ringing around sharp edges (like their cunningly positioned station logos) and as soon as anything moves, the picture is demolished into a haphazzard collection of lego blocks like you've just passed the screen through Photoshop's mozaic filter. It's piss poor, really poor and no one seems to give a shit.
But surely they should give a shit? Surely the object is to make people watch more teles and subscribe to premium channels and pay-per-view movies rather than go to the cinema? It's similar to the loony tunes stuff we've seen with DAB radio in the UK. So many piss poor rubbish stations vying for the bandwidth that everyone transmits in low bitrates and looks shite. Own goal for the industry surely?
How can we arrive at the ludicrous situation where I am downloading American television episodes on my broadband and these rips, off HDTV sources in the US and transcoded to MPEG-4 for nice tidy 350MB downloads, are substantially better quality than my own fucking subscriber digital television?! To say nothing of the fact that I'm sitting back here watching ReGenesis and it's got the original AC3 sound track so I've got the full audio experience too.
Now why in the seven realms of shit isn't the BBC trialling some proper HDTV shit? Why, if this country was for so long the bastion of television production worldwide, is everyone pissing about with crappy outdated video equipment instead of the proper stuff? Why is it that Spooks was filmed and only will ever be available in standard crappy resolutions with a 2.0 sound track.
At once I've nothing to complain about because I get to pick the best of the yank stuff and I have the means to display it but why can't I get that from the BBC since this fucking government is forcing me to pay for that. I want more. I want HDTV and I want it fucking soon, even if I have to subscribe and pay more for it.
It's the year 2004 and it's time to move on so why is Britain just dragging their feet in the very industry it used to lead?

Thursday 4 November 2004

You got a poppy? [Brit]

November 11th is Remembrance Day in the UK and the British Legion have yet to appear in force anywhere to remind the public.
Despite working in the center of London, I have only seen one person with a box of poppies, at Paddington Station - and that person was seemingly being pointedly ignored by just about everyone.
The British Legion do fantastic work for ex and current servicemen and women, and of course are the bastion of Rememberance; an annual uncomfortable reminder of just how ugly things can get.
I always wear a poppy, but I can't help thinking that perhaps the reasons for wearing it are no longer properly communicated to folk - after all, if people understood, surely they would buy one and support the Legions' work?
Perhaps in this society of what amounts to near selfishness & apathy across the board, the poppy and Rememberance Day simply doesn't have the meaning and import that it a) used to, and b) should still.
If that's the case, it's a very sad state of affairs indeed; so go on, buy a poppy.

Tuesday 2 November 2004

EED Christmas Party 2004 [Brit]

It's that time again!
EED holds its 4th annual Chrimbo blowout - Chrimbo PARTEH!
Go to the Chrimbo parteh site at:
www.eedchrimboparty.co.uk for details and get your details and questions sent in.
Secret Santa is a goddamned go. Oh yes.
Go! Go! Go!

Monday 1 November 2004

A plan so cunning... [Muz]


Good day readers. I was having a conversation this morning with a fellow student, and as student conversations tend to do, it turned to politics. While discussing the asylum situation, the point was made that asylum seekers overall are a very hardworking group. The unemployment rate among asylum seekers is almost non-existant, and because they possess a great desire to stay in this country, they also tend to be very conscientious in whatever employ they find.

This is when it hit me. What we need to do is take advantage of this phenomenon. I submit it to you, readers, a plan so elegant in its simplicity that Baldric himself would be hard pressed to match it.

1) Round up the entire adult chav population.2) Deport, kill, or otherwise dispose of half of said population.3) Use freed up accomodation to house hardworking asylum seekers.

Can there be any drawbacks to this plan? A decrease in the chav population can only be a good thing - they are procreating far too rapidly for anyone's liking. The disposal of half of them will hopefully motivate the remaining half to get off their backsides and do something to enrich society. At the same time, the hardworking asylum seekers who take all the working class jobs that British people don't want realise that they aren't unappreciated. Getting rid of such a large proportion of our population in order to make room for them can only be seen as a supreme gesture of goodwill.

So, does anyone have any other plans for curing Britain's social ills? Or even refinements to my own?