Disney's lawyers must think they are pretty clever with their 57-page, on-screen EULA that comes with the Sleeping Beauty Blu-ray disc. I can just imagine them giggling hysterically into their Martinis as they sit around in the bar after work, congratulating themselves on this master stroke. The idea that anyone - I mean literally anyone on the entire planet - will actually read through 57 pages of small print displayed on their TV screen is of course risible.

That's the whole point. The number 57 was decided on by extensive focus group testing as being precisely the number of pages required to ensure that no one will read to the end. And in fact pages 3 to 56 are probably just cut and pasted from various random legal documents culled from the net. Their purpose is to act as a buffer, to place soothing distance between the inviting convenience of the "I Agree" button and the crucial page 57. Which says this:

"By reading this document, you agree to upgrade your entire collection of Disney movies to Blu-ray, within six weeks of them being released and to similarly upgrade your library to each and every new format as and when they become available. This shall occur regardless of the fact that your youngest child is now 27 and you have seen Aristocats approximately 860 times."

Well, it probably doesn't say that. But it might, who knows? The point is that whatever it does say, you'll agree to it anyway.

I should probably point out at this point that, by reading this sentence, you are deemed to have agreed to my EULA, which requires you to "accede to my every whim, however unreasonable". No, it's no use looking away quickly. I know you read the EULA. That means you agreed and now I own you.

It goes without saying that these are times of great economic uncertainty. But just when I thought I had adequately factored in the upheaval in the money markets, something happens to throw the whole thing into flux again.

Next week, the new talents and class changes will go live on all realms in World of Warcraft, as has been widely anticipated. But included with this patch is the new Inscription profession, which will therefore be available to level up to a skill of 375, before Wrath of the Lich King goes live! Since the raw material for inscription will be herbs (to make inks for scrolls), this will send the price of herbs through the roof. Cash-rich, level 70 players typically have at least one crafting profession already maxed-out at 375 and they will be highly unlikely to drop this because of the exciting new recipes that will soon be available for skills above 375. This means that any 70s wanting to take up inscription will be dropping their gathering profession, and that means they will be buying all their herbs on the auction house.

I had plans in place to drop mining for herbalism and level it to 375 before the expansion in November so that I could make a killing selling herbs to impatient noobs. But now I need to get to 375 in less than a week! If I wait until the expansion, the first rush will already be over and prices will stabilise as everyone gets bored with their Death Knights and runs them round Elwyn Forest picking peacebloom. But if I spend my limited play time picking low level herbs in Arathi and Stranglethorn Vale, I can't finish levelling my character. I'm stuck at level 65 at the moment and I'll need to be at least 68 to be on that first wave of pilgrims heading to Northrend in six weeks.

It is for this reason that I shall be appealing to the Chancellor for an emergency cash injection of 50 billion or so. This will allow me to hire a team of bots to pick herbs for me, with enough left over to pay myself a modest City bonus.

Why do we insist on using computers to do everything? Things that are already easy. Things that weren't even problems that needed solving until we realised how hard they were for computers to do. Maslow said that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

What we have is a world where every eighteen months, the hammers can hit twice as hard as they did before. So even things that didn't look like nails in the past, might yet be persuaded to yield, if only we hit them a bit harder.

Using computers to recognise human faces is like employing a human to do your arithmetic for you, instead of a calculator. It's a gross misuse of talents. The human brain is the most sophisticated facial recognition device that has ever existed.

It is possible that one day, we (and by "we", I mean someone that is neither you nor me) will build a device that exceeds our own natural talent in this regard. But at what cost? And to what end?

We aren't busy perfecting robot earthworms to digest leaf litter because we already have actual earthworms that do the job perfectly well. If Microsoft replaces the receptionists in its offices with a web cam and a digitised face, what exactly have they achieved?

They have taken a job that can be done by virtually any human to an extremely high degree of competence, including coping with visitors wearing large hats or the outbreak of unexpected building fires, and replaced it with a computer that will only order you a taxi, if you spend 10 minutes patiently navigating your way through voice menus.

Yes, I know you won't need to pay the computer - but you will need to pay for the computer and you will certainly need to pay the team of 20 sysadmins it takes to keep it running. Holidays are just replaced with essential system maintenance, sick leave with the Blue Screen of Death. In the end, all you have is an expensive way of doing the same job badly.

And if that's all they want, they could just as easily hire me.

Everyone knows that Warhammer Online is not going to beat World of Warcraft. WoW's unassailability is now axiomatic and all that is left is the fighting over the carrion scraps for second place. But in trying to carve a viable niche for itself, Mythic has failed to understand the psychology of an MMORPG.

They have looked at WoW and concluded that it does PvE very well and PvP very badly and in this they are right. They have also concluded that they should therefore attack WoW's weak spot and concentrate on PvP and in this they are wrong.

WoW does have rubbish PvP. I mean really rubbish. There is such an enormous power imbalance between level 1 and level 70 players that battlegrounds have to be divided into brackets 10 levels wide but even then a ten level difference is essentially insurmountable so when you ding from 39 to 40 and find yourself in the next bracket up, you can more or less forget PvP until you hit at least level 48.

Gear dependent

And even if you and your opponent are both the same level, WoW is a hopelessly gear-dependent game. That's actually the whole point of the game – killing stuff to collect new gear to make you better at killing stuff. If the other guy has better gear than you then you start at a huge disadvantage and balancing PvP for this is virtually impossible.

But this is an intrinsic problem with any game where your character's power is not solely dependent on your own skill as a player. The most ridiculous extreme of this can be seen on the role-playing servers where some lunatics engage in a sort of combat called power emoting.

This is where they just stand there and use the chat interface to say things like "I summon elf energies from the nether darkness to blast you", countered with "Ah but I am a 3,000-year-old immortal elf and your spell bounces harmlessly off me." Fun PvP works because your avatar is simply an extension of your own ability.

Your fireball doesn't hit harder because you say so or because you spent three days killing locusts in a cornfield until one of them dropped the ultra-rare Trinket of Awesome Fireballs, it hits harder because you aimed accurately and scored a head-shot. Planetside did this pretty well and I played it with a suicidal fervour for about six months.

Kinda boring

But in the end, pure PvP always gets boring. Ironically, the unpredictability of a human opponent gets averaged out into just another kind of predictability in the massively-multiplayer context. And you never actually achieve anything because captured flags just get uncaptured again and you can't ever gain any cool kit or powers because it would unbalance the game.

With a PvE game, you can allow players to steadily get more powerful because you give them bigger monsters to fight. Sure, like one of those weird rising scales you never actually reach the top, but that doesn't really matter because you still have the sense of constant progression and when you stand in the lowbie zones and watch the baddies die just from the light of your glowing sword, you feel like a true hero.

Progression in PvP is more like building sandcastles on the beach. However impressive your fortification is today, it will all be washed away by the tide and tomorrow you start again with exactly the same blank canvas.

I am quite sure that the realm-wide PvP in Warhammer will be great fun – for a while. I even think it will be better than Planetside. But you're not going to play it for three years. That kind of commitment comes only from the PvE game and in that regard, Warhammer doesn't have anything that WoW hasn't had for ages.

Or won't add with the next expansion. When World of Warcraft is eventually toppled from its throne, it will be because someone finds a way to make killing locusts in a field feel even more epic than WoW does. I'm thinking zapping space locusts in an asteroid field, maybe.

Why is the space character so hated by the internet? How is it that in cyberspace, the one thing you won't find is a space? At least not in domain names. But why, exactly? It's just another character. Surely if we are going to bother translating numerical IP addresses to a human-readable form at all, we might as well go that extra yard and actually make it pronounceable as well.

The whole point of punctuation is that it increases clarity and reflects the natural rhythms of speech. But with a domain name, you are forced into the ridiculous position of having to explicitly state each non-alphanumeric character. Is it pennyarcade or penny-arcade? Worldofwarcraft or world-of-warcraft? And what do we do about "Mamma Mia!"?

And while I'm on the subject, why do we still need to specify www? If I type "Luis Villazon" into my browser address bar, it works out that I meant to include the http:// but stupidly doesn't assume www. It also substitutes %20 for the space, which no domain name on Earth uses, rather than simply omitting it, and doesn't bother with a TLD suffix of any kind.

Of course, who still uses the address bar anyway? We all have Google right on the toolbar so it's much easier to just type something into that, even when you know the domain name perfectly well. Except that there are two problems with this.

1. It forces an extra step because I need to go to the results page first.

2. I can't force my domain to appear higher up the list, unless I pay for google adwords. DNS is just a lookup table that matches certain text strings to IP addresses. Why can't I just register "Luis Villazon" and have that match to my IP address, instead of www.luisvillazon.com?

Because the internet is stupid, that's why.