Like a greatly confused child that can’t make up its mind whether or not to play nicely, Microsoft both is and isn’t sharing its latest toy, Windows XP Service Pack 3.

Win XP SP3 was released for manufacturing and volume licensing customers. But at the last second Microsoft pulled it away from the majority of the world by taking it out of Windows Update.

The reason?

“In the last few days, we have uncovered a compatibility issue between Microsoft Dynamics Retail Management System (RMS) and both Windows XP SP3 and Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1),” says Microsoft.

“In order to make sure customers have the best possible experience, we have decided to delay releasing Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) to the web.”

So a “compatibility issue” is to blame. Microsoft’s official standpoint seems to be that their Dynamics Retail Management System (RMS) has a conflict with the Windows XP SP3 and the Windows Vista SP1. What, that it wants to issue out both service packs to Windows XP machines? Or to Vista machines? Or maybe just to those running their Dynamics RMS? Would that mean the “Dynamics” part isn’t so … dynamic? Frankly, your bafflement is as good as mine. If there’s one thing Microsoft does best, it’s not document things properly for world + dog to draw meaning from.

But by the sounds of it, no matter how you slice it, Microsoft’s inability to manage Windows Vista properly is now not just screwing over Windows Vista customers, but also Windows XP customers. Congratulations Microsoft on proving yourself to the world. Can I get a “Huzzah!” from the audience? … … … No. I didn’t think so.

Of course most Windows XP users will at least have that awful situation Microsoft has created mitigated by the fact that the third Windows XP service pack isn’t actually going to do much of anything for you anyway, and you’d probably never have even noticed if it had been installed. In that respect, nothing has changed really. The only reason I could think for installing it was to get Windows Update off your back about installing it. Now that Microsoft has pulled it, it rather amounts to the same thing really. And without all of that time wasted downloading and installing a service pack that did nothing for you.

Now where’d I put that DVD of the latest Ubuntu distro…

UPDATE! Now it turns out (though perhaps it should have been obvious in retrospect) that Microsoft has also taken Windows Vista SP1 offline, for the same reason. So no Windows Update Vista SP1 for you!

Okay, not really. That’d be a funny enough story. In this case however the man wasn’t actually so disgusted with his humanzee daughter that he vowed not only to never do it again, but to prevent any and all people from ever doing it again. No. In this case the man is just a religious zealot that’s pretty much against any and all genetic manipulation that involves human DNA, but especially weird stuff like animal-human hybrids and gays having babies.

Calum MacKellar, a trained biochemist and now Elder of the Church of Scotland and bioethics think tank operator (quite the scary thought mixing religion and science like that), is warning the UK government that the The Human Fertilisation and Embryo Bill isn’t enough. For example, while it specifically prohibits the placement of animal sperm into a woman, it does not prohibit the opposite, of Scotsmen shagging sheep … or in this case Brits boffing chimpanzees … for science. I did it for science!

I guess I can kind of see the point. It is an interesting loophole. So if you’re going to ban cross-species genetic tampering, perhaps you should actually ban all interspecies sperm spewing. At least when it involves human DNA. And especially when it involves chimps. Because if there’s one thing the world is really scared of, it’s a humanzee. For some reason.

So yes, ban it I say.

Still…

Making things illegal seems to not exactly stop these things from happening. It just makes us feel better that the government theoretically says no. And it most definitely doesn’t prevent someone from doing it in some other place where it is legal. And with something as hot of a topic as a humanzee, no doubt, someone, somewhere, is going to do it at some point. For science. So all laws like this really do is put a government up on their soapbox so that they can say, “Not in my back yard!” While this sad world still turns.

Which in itself raises an ethical question. Would you rather have a well cared for humanzee in a first-world country with ethics you trust, or would you like to roll those dice and hope the humanzee’s quality of life doesn’t come up snake-eyes? It makes one ponder. Is moral indignation a satisfactory defense for ethical shunning?

Ah well. Such is life. At least Calum MacKellar gets to feel better about himself. If only it was that easy for the rest of us.

So here’s one you don’t hear of often. You might have even wondered if it still existed. Last I remember of it was on a funny little box shoved in the corner that no one touched in years, along side that DEC Alpha box that never did have software support. Yes, that’s right, we’re talking about Sun’s Solaris operating system. It’s up to version 10 now. And people really do use it. Somewhere. In theory. Or at least Sun likes to think so.

Well, anyway, Sun released an update for Solaris 10. It allows virtualized instances of Solaris 8 and 9 to run inside of Solaris Containers. So that you can still run Solaris 8 and 9 apps on Solaris 10. Which sounds neat. But also makes you wonder why it didn’t do that right out of the box.

Also under the lines of why didn’t they do this sooner, the update also adds support for Intel’s SpeedStep power management technology. Again … why did it take this long?

But then, it’s Solaris. So who cares? No one uses it anyway. It just sits in the computer graveyard with the rest of the great ideas that never panned out junk.

But if you do use Solaris, it’s good to know that Sun hasn’t left you in the dark. (Ha ha.)

So last night on the Sci-Fi channel was BloodRayne II: Deliverance.

DON’T WATCH THIS MOVIE!!!

There. You’ve been warned. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. It’s quite clear, right there, don’t watch this movie. Trust me.

Okay, so the first movie of BloodRayne was dull as sin … which is actually a strange statement for people to make since I’ve often found sin to be quite enjoyable, where as BloodRayne wasn’t. You have a half vampire … that generally tries not to be a vampire … but seems to have no real qualms with sucking blood when it suits her purpose. In medieval times. I suppose she’s meant to be hot. At least in the temperature sense, since she’s always running around scantily clothed while everyone else dresses sanely. Which no one seems to notice or mind. And instead of vamping people, she runs around with something kind of like bladed tonfa (or a pair of somethings that are a cross between swords and police batons if you prefer) and chops off the heads of vampires with them. Or, well, more often just slits their throats. It’s a strange vampire lore when that kills vampires left and right, but whatever.

So that’s the first movie.

The second movie? Same thing. Only she also carries some six shooters, because now it’s the wild west period instead of medieval.

If anything, the pace with which the movie moves (or in this case, doesn’t move) is just as slow and boring. The storyline just as dull. The acting just as bad. And the period accuracy just as inaccurate. Yippee ki-yay!

Oh, wait, it gets better. The “bad guy” this time isn’t just a vampire. He’s Billy The Kid. In vampire form. With a bad European accent. (Because there’s no such thing as an American master vampire I guess.) And he’s come to the town of Deliverance to steal people’s kids and turn himself an army of vampires. Why? Because. Just … because.

And even though in the first movie pretty much anything could kill a vampire, in this one … supposedly … only silver bullets sprinkled with holy water and rubbed in garlic can kill vampires. Normal bullets just piss them off. Except that, having laid that rule down in the beginning of the movie, by the end the plot seems to have forgotten details like that.

Frankly, I just don’t get it. Now, I haven’t played the BloodRayne video games. Maybe there’s actually something to enjoy there. But certainly not in the movies. And of the two, most definitely not in the second movie. At all. Not even a little.

So please, for the sake of Pete, do not make an effort to see BloodRayne II: Deliverance. If you watch this movie, you will regret it. I give it a rating of zero, yes, zero European Vampire Billy The Kids out of five … or … well … any number, because no matter how you slice it zero is zero is zero in any fraction. It could be zero out of a million European Vampire Billy The Kids for all I care. It’s still zero. The movie still sucks just as badly.

Frankly, they could have done a Lego freeze-frame animation of little Lego wild west vampires being killed by a little Lego BloodRayne with little Lego bladed tonfas and sixshooters and it’d have at least made me chuckle. Where as BloodRayne II: Deliverance just made me groan and yawn the whole way through. I think I even napped for a bit without managing to miss a single thing. How bad is that?

Okay, so my somewhat recent review of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. might have been a tad premature on my part. I hadn’t put that many hours into it at that time. I’ve toyed with it some more on and off since then.

I still stand by my review.

So by now I’ve gotten a hold of a few increasingly accurate SMGs. Some with scopes. I’m not convinced that they’re the 4x scope claimed. I’m also not sure why people would even bother with a crappy little 4x scope. Oh, right, because the weapons still are rather inaccurate. Better, but still not even rifle quality. And why are there no rifles yet? Beats the heck out of me. I’ve got two RPGs. I’ve got a six-pack grenade launcher. I’ve got a sawed-off shotgun. I’ve got a combat shotgun modified with a gravi artifact if I remember correctly. I’ve got a pistol modified to fire rifle rounds. I’ve got various pistols and sub-machine guns up the wazoo. But no rifle. And especially no long-range sniper rifle with a high powered scope. I don’t get it. I really don’t. I expect I’ll probably find some laser gun before I find a single simple accurate long-range bolt-action rifle.

I guess stalkers just aren’t snipers.

And I’m still amazed at how bad some elements of the game are. Clear an area. Trigger a quest element. Watch that area suddenly be occupied by god and country again. Or better yet, my personal favorite. Clear an area. Start dragging bodies off to the side and sorting through the gear of the dead. Then watch some random punk just suddenly spawn in out of the corner of your eye. Just bam, teleports in! What, they couldn’t even wait for you to clear that map? And they couldn’t designate a spawn-in point at a distance and make him walk over? And they don’t even give you a moment to sort through the gear? They just send in the clones?!

On the plus side, once you know to expect it, you can rather rack up a lot of ammo. Just wait for the clone to pop in, hit him before he sees you so that you don’t get shot, grab his gear, drag the body over to the burning pile, and wait for the next one. Who needs money for ammo when you have teleporting clones?

Yeah. The game is that bad. Not even Doom, which has teleportation, does it that badly.

As I said before, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has a lot of interesting concepts and good ideas. Unfortunately the game is so rough and unpolished that it’s more crap than gem. And the sad part is, it really wouldn’t have taken all that much more work to polish it.

Okay, moving on. Next up is a movie I just caught on FX called Equilibrium. It’s a weird little movie. It takes place after World War 3 hits, sometime in the early 21st Century. As a side note, I like the vagueness there. How many sci-fi movies give dates, only to make us laugh ourselves silly when that day comes and the future is actually nothing like the prediction.

But back to Equilibrium. So a fascist government run by “The Father” decides that war is caused by emotion. The solution? Everyone, every day, shoots themselves up with emotion-suppressing drugs. And a military-like police force that’s half religious (for that added “un-emotional” zeal?) is formed. They hunt down all works of art, literature, etc. that provoke emotion and burn them. And equally, hunt down all people who smuggle and treasure these items, and burn them. Or put a bullet through them if they try to fight back.

And at the top of this weird police force are “clerics”, who train in a weird martial art specializing in pistols.

Now, I’ve never actually liked whenever guns get combined with martial arts. I’ve personally always seen guns as rather being the antithesis of martial arts. There’s something about personal energy and a forced responsibility for your actions in martial arts, where as guns to me have always been rather an impersonal energyless void of a way to maim or kill someone.

That said, the martial arts in this movie are awe inspiring, and even to an extent force me to admit that if someone tried, they could indeed put the spirit back into the firearm. It’s just amazing. In my opinion the choreography just blows away movies like The Matrix or Ultra Violet.

But kick-asterisk fight scenes aside, the basic premise is also cute. It provokes thought. I can’t say that it’s in any way believable, nor even entirely logical. But it at least gives one pause to wonder, and that itself is awfully rare in movies these days. I say, if you haven’t seen it, give it a shot. The plot is not exactly surprising, but at least done well. The action is good. Emotion is provoked. And all-in-all it’s far better than most of the tripe out there. I’d actually give it four out of five blazing pistols. Or should that be burning books…

The funny thing is, having just watched that movie, I then hop onto my computer to find report of something akin to it (though in a much smaller sense) happening over in the UK. It seems that across the pond is brewing a bill, the UK Criminal Justice Bill, that itself perhaps goes a tad too far to police their state? Specifically I bring up Clause 63, which illegalizes “extreme pornographic images”. What is an “extreme pornographic image”? It doesn’t say. But having laws against specific ones like child pornography, it certainly can’t be those. With such vague wording, this is something new. And unfortunately very open to broad interpretation.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that perhaps the internet could use a bit of cleaning up. You can’t search for adam from eve without running across gobs of porn. Some sort of regulation to at least separate the wheat from the chaff would be nice.

That said, making it illegal to have downloaded (intentionally or unintentionally … such as having happened to just run an image search or read a blog with one tasteless spot) images of sexuality that someone considers “extreme”, seems a tad … fascist? Why would it be perfectly legal to perform the act, but not legal to view a picture of it. Where does that ill-fated line between “right” and “wrong” belong? And what government dare tread so far across that line as to extend themselves well past the inspiration of man in the enjoyment of something so wonderfully fun as sex? Making it illegal to download pictures of an illegal act I can see. But making it illegal to download pictures of a legal act lest it, what, promote more legal behavior, is not something you’d expect from any sane modern government.

**cough** America’s Fair Use copyrights being trod on left and right by the government under the offer of campaign funds pressure of the RIAA. **cough**

So I guess every country has its abusers of the law. And by that I don’t mean the general public. I mean those making the law.

Still, fear of theoretical monetary damage from copyright abuse is almost something plausible. Generally unstoppable, but almost plausible.

Where as fear of seeing a picture of an “extreme” (whatever that means) sex act theoretically leading to legal behavior in the privacy of one’s own home between consenting adults? And this is a danger or harm to anyone … how? It’s just loony if you ask me. Let’s hope rights over in the UK aren’t actually spiraling down the toilet as fast as they are over here in the USA.

Where does one draw that line between protecting a populace and oppressing them?