Sam

Indeed.

Basically, England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are all countries. The United Kingdom is a sovereign state (and is therefore also more or less a country), so you basically have 4 countries within one big country. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own governments and each have varying levels of powers with Wales having the least power and Scotland and NI having the most. England doesn't have its own government, it is run by the UK Government which is housed in the Palace of Westminster (Big Ben!) and it has representatives from NI, England, Wales and Scotland so there's an interesting thing where members of parliament from Scotland, Wales and NI can vote on issues that affect England but since Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own parliaments, members of parliament from England can't vote on a lot of things that affect Scotland or Northern Ireland as they are reserved for the Scottish and Northern Irish parliament. So basically you have the UK Parliament that deals with issues regarding England and in some cases Wales and the whole of the UK (borders, defence, taxation, security, foreign relations, that sort of thing). Then you have the Scottish Parliament and Northern Ireland Assembly which have powers to make laws in Scotland and Northern Ireland regarding issues that aren't reserved for the UK parliament. Wales has its own parliament too, the Welsh Assembly, but it has less powers than Scotland or Northern Ireland.

Well, you weren't wrong actually. Edinburgh is the capital city of Scotland, yes, but Scotland is (at least until next year) part of the UK which is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, so we're British as well. There is of course a significant difference in the culture of English and Scots though. You have tea and crumpets on one side and deep fried chocolate bars and fish and chips on the other. Speaking of pizza, I do indeed enjoy a Dominos every so often. Especially when they always send me free pizza vouchers after I send them complaint letters every time they deliver the wrong pizza, no pizza at all or forget my drink and/or ice cream/desert. There was one time I got the wrong order altogether as well, and that warranted an immediate phone call to the store to demand they rectify the situation (which they did).

No tea! I usually get something to eat at Waverley station, either a burger king, some nice sandwiches or another nice hot food item like a steak pastry. Today, however, it is sandwiches, Fanta fruit twist, apple wedges, berry smoothie and Belgian chocolate smothered butter toffee popcorn. Quite the lunch indeed. I would say, however, that when I get a Burger King at like 10am, my scottish-levelTM goes off the scale.

Mine goes something like this: 1. Be rudely awoken by alarm 2. Promptly press snooze button on alarm 3. Repeat steps 1 to 2 a few times 4. Drag myself into the shower, etc. 5. Pack my laptop and stuff 6. Bus to Edinburgh Waverley station 6. Train to Stirling 7. Bus to University of Stirling And yeah, time to get off the bus right now actually.

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Two weeks ago we rolled out our new forum layout which, as far as we can tell, has been quite successful in providing a better and more organised home for things throughout the board. The discussion sections are certainly very active, and people seem to be taking advantage of the dedicated showroom forums too which should let more people have the chance to have their content and creations noticed. We still have quite a bit of work to do in moving topics, but we've done close to 2,000 I think since the roll out so I suppose we're actually making very good progress as far as that is concerned and I'm pretty confident that most of the popular and otherwise important topics have been moved which is good too. Moving on, I have some fairly significant news to share with everyone in that I will be stepping down in my role as Community Manager for at least the next two to three weeks. Unfortunately I simply don't have enough time to dedicate towards managing our staff team and keeping tabs on all that's going on in the community because of my pretty busy university schedule including two graded assignments and ultimately these need to be prioritised. With that being said, because of this I'll be using as much of my spare time as I can to continue working with LMS on LCPDFR 1.0 and what we are very much still committed to getting a release out by the end of the year. Furthermore, those of you who visited the site while we were busy moving the forums around were treated to a picture of the Taser functionality we've developed for the backup officers and we'll definitely keep previews and such coming as the weeks go by. For those of you interested, I've just finished developing a custom task for the AI cops to use to search for a suspect on foot which scans interiors, alleyways and other hiding spots nearby and can work with up to 50 officers searching for a suspect at the same time. This all ties in with our new pursuit system, which really is part of the backbone of the mod now as it essentially acts as a framework for us to make someone wanted by the police and has all sorts of settings and tasks associated with it like search areas, lethal force and tasks like the one described above. Back on the subject of the community though, NicolaiB, our Community Team supervisor will be stepping in as acting community manager for now until I come back and as such he'll be responsible for all the day to day operations of everything and should you need to get in contact with us regarding anything related to community management, please contact him in the first instance. I also understand that Nicolai is keen to take in suggestions from everyone regarding our moderation policy and things like the group system and I'm sure that he'll share further information about that very soon. Still on the subject of staffing, Jay will no longer be involving himself with the community aspect of things here and instead will be focusing his skills and attention on the technical side, continuing to develop and improve the website for everyone through improvements to our existing systems like the Groups and possibly new systems based on the suggestions of everyone here, and some ideas that we also have too. I will most likely be back with another update in three or four weeks and of course Nicolai might have some of his own before then, Sam.

You should make a new topic about this next time, this topic is 5 months old.

Good thing we don't have them up here.

There just needs to be sensible cut backs in government spending and someone has to take control of things that go way over budget or cost ridiculous amounts of money. E.g. how can it cost $60,000 a day to keep the statue of liberty open, and how can it cost close to $100,000 a day to keep the Grand Canyon open? Also, Mount Rushmore seems to cost just over $15,000 a day? How can it cost that much for people just to drive up and look? One way of cutting spending would be to seriously re-evaluate how on earth things like this cost so much, and do it across the board.

I'm not saying that it is by any means a good law, but the the facts are clear: Passed by the house Passed by the senate Signed by the president Upheld by the supreme court There's simply no justification for the GOP going out of their way like this to use the budget to fight this law. If there is a problem with a law, then you repeal it. The fact is is that there's no chance Obamacare can be repealed, because the democrats control the senate. Best way to sort this problem? People to vote for the republicans. At the last presidential election Obama overwhelmingly won the popular vote, which you have to assume means there's popular support for his flagship policy too. Indeed, its worth nothing that perhaps the repubs don't quite have the mandate you think they do. In the last 6 presidential elections, they've only won the popular vote once. It's not about Obama and how he's failed to deliver (which he has) or the flaws in obamacare (which there are), its simply about the democratic process. Do you really have a healthy system of government when one house of congress can cause this much of a mess? The US was literally a couple of hours away from defaulting on its debt because of a fight over a law that had already been passed, signed and upheld.

It doesn't really matter whether or not they like Obamacare though, because both houses of congress passed it and it was signed into law as the Affordable Care Act. Republicans have been trying for years now to repeal the law, and they've never been successful. Instead of giving up and letting the people actually see for themselves 'how terrible' the law is, they decided to stoop down to the level of trying to put clauses into the budget to deny it any funding. That's not how you repeal a law - that's called underhanded political opportunism. A bill removing and denying all funding to obamacare was never, ever, going to pass in the Senate. Surely everyone knew this? If so, why would they go ahead with this knowing that it would never pass in the Senate, meaning that no budget would get through, and therefore the government would shut down. The Republicans were relying on Obama giving into their blackmail, and he didn't, and now they've had to surrender because of it. Besides, I thought Republicans hated the government anyway, shouldn't they be happy they shut it down?

I wouldn't say LCPDFR is a beat cop mod, it's just a cop mod. With LCPDFR, and even more with 1.0, we've tried to give people a framework and a set of mechanics with which they can be the police in GTA IV. The focus of LCPDFR isn't one particular area or type of policing, but rather just providing the essentials in a way that is integrated as seamlessly as possible with the normal game. You can still be the FIB or be a NOOSE Agent with LCPDFR, and likewise you can be a normal cop too. Our goal has been to make sure that all the stuff that a cop typically does is there for you, like stopping, detaining and searching people, pulling over cars (and stopping fleeing suspects), making arrests and calling in all sorts of backup. The rest is more or less up to you and your imagination, we don't want to force any particular style of play on you. That's why there's no penalties for killing innocents or executing surrendered suspects and it's why with 1.0 when it comes to missions and callouts and such, we decided to introduce the API so that you can script your own scenarios based on your own taste.

When we get around to building our global headquarters, I'm gonna make sure it looks like this!

The movies are brilliant too. Some really side splitting stuff in them.

It's on hold while we focus all our efforts on LCPDFR.

Here's something for your authoritative and viewing pleasure. Maybe a select few will get the background behind this one!

According to Alexa, relative to the general interest population, females are greatly over-represented at LCPDFR.com.

I've always done all the logos and banners and such. Any of them that feature cool images in them probably use Lil Q's pictures, I remember seeing his stuff for the first time and just being blown away by how awesome it was. They're pretty much everywhere from the blue headers with titles where there's the lightbar in the right corner, to many of our old backgrounds, to crime stats signatures. I hope to get around to putting up a better history and about page sometime. It'd be cool to explain the complicated origins of some things, like G17 Media and G17 from which it was derived, which actually goes back a few more years than LCPDFR itself and didn't even involve myself or anyone here when it did start.

Not quite sure what I would've done if you didn't show up with awesome pictures all the time! Here's some more I found (old G17 logos):

More visual treats for your viewing pleasure:

I really liked Boston's Finest. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrHzp47pueg

So I just found this hidden away under heaps of dust! I think this was the first 'logo' we had for our IPB forums when we switched to them from Drupal ages ago. Embarrassing!

it is more or less possible, but they wouldn't be able to shoot or anything. It'd probably look really bad,