Valve Software is coming out with the Half-Life demo tomorrow? What the hell? Half-Life has been out for months. What happened to demos coming out before the game, so people can actually try it out before they buy it? Did game companies decide that people might decide not to purchase the game? Or is this more evidence that today's computer game industry rushes projects out the door before they're ready?

This morning on the Today show Matt Lauer conducted an interview/debate with the mayor of New Orleans and a representative of Glock. I can't say that either one did particularly well. The mayor of New Orleans sounded like the Reverend Lovejoy's wife on the Simpsons stuck in a continuous loop: "Won't someone think of the children? Won't someone think of the children!" He was under the delusion that the cable locks that now ship with new guns are a component of new and advanced "smart gun" technology, not the decades-old tools that they are. And the first mayor to bring suit against gun manufacturers for their flooding of the market with weapons apparently authorized the selling of thousands (?) of police-confiscated weapons to gun manufacturers for resale to the public. Sounds really committed to the cause, doesn't he?

The representative from Glock (some V.P.) did not impress me one bit. He had a bad habit of smirking at the mayor's comments. Sure, the cry of "for the children" is often used to legitimize the most ludicrous and invasive violation of freedoms, but the public needs to be educated, not misled into thinking that gun owners do not care about kids. Although he did mention the safety programs initiated by the NRA, he failed to adequately address the issue.

Hopefully in future "debates", the manufacturers and groups will be a little more careful in their choice of representatives.

This is an oldie-but-goodie. The US Supreme Court Justices upheld a fine made against a male lawyer for a frivolous lawsuit he made. Apparently, he was forced to share a men's restroom with women (!) at a San Diego rock concert in 1995. The suit against the city was for $5.4 million dollars. The judge decided that he should pay the city $2,000, and also another two grand to the concessions company he had found liable, because they sold him the beer that made the bathroom trip necessary.

How awful for him! Poor baby. Maybe this is a sign of the civil court system finally turning around... yeah, and maybe I'm a Chinese jet pilot. I guess he didn't buy the beer, the company sold it to him. One, you see, makes him responsible. The other puts them at fault. Don't you hate it when people grab money out of your wallet and stick a cup of beer in your hand?

Well, just played the Blood 2 demo. The level of detail seems much higher than Shogo, even on "Low". People have well-defined faces and rather complex body structures. I imagine this has something to do with the choppiness on my system. It's playable, but a lot of lag between the mouse movement and the screen movement, especially when there's a lot of surfaces being displayed. I was rather shocked to find that the first three weapons (the pistol(s), the submachine gun(s), and the assault rifle) all used the same ammo! You can imagine my surprise when I switched from the used-up assault rifle to the submachine gun only to find an empty chamber staring up at me. The bullet holes in walls and other materials seemed to have been done better in Shogo than Blood 2, but still, everything in Blood 2 seems a lot more photorealistic.