Microsoft, USO Links Troops Worldwide Via Xbox

Thanks to Reuters for their story reporting on Microsoft and the U.S. armed forces' plans to expand a program bringing Xbox Live to troops overseas. There's a press release on the USO site with more details, including a U.S. Air Force lieutenant's comments: "Xbox Live allows me to play my favorite games with friends and family as though I am sitting on the couch right next to them back home in Garden Grove, Calif. We share stories, laugh and poke fun at each other in real time as we play." We previously covered a pilot scheme using the U.S. Air Forces in Europe, and a spokesman "...said the program was such a success it will be expanded to nearly every Air Force base around the world."

Comments

Not to troll but...

[icemax]

What are troops doing playing Xbox? Isn't there a war that we're trying to win still? Nonetheless a cool technology application, I'd think that they would want videoconferencing/voice chat first, then games.

US Troops use MS, UN advocates Linux...

[stanwirth]

MS' agenda is to dominate markets by locking customers into an asymmetric "tech providor vs tech consumer" relationship.

In short, technological hegemony -- much like the hegemonistic agenda certain elements in the US military-industrial complex are often accused of.

OSS' agenda, on the other hand, is to empower individuals, and individual nations, to make their own technological choices. So the UN advocates OSS in its WSIS, a move that is vigorously opposed by only one nation: the US.

The pattern is pretty clear.

Now if the DOD could only ban OSS in its own organisations. But they can't. The MITRE study demonstrated that the DOD and associated organisations' research, infrastructure and security efforts would themselves grind to a halt if they banned OSS from their own operations.

Technological knowledge due to the proliferation of OSS is, increasingly, the key to both autonomy and power for a nation, and an individual.

So, the efforts of the US to deny OSS to the rest of the world, and (outside of it's engines of power) to it's own people are in line with the agenda of hegemony the US is are often accused of. It's similar to the consolidation of land and informational assets in the hands of a small group of increasingly powerful people in developing nations, whose actions result in the people not being able to grow their own food or publish their own views and information--just look at what the US did to Latin America throughout the 20th century.

I predict that the export of US-sanctioned "democracy" will be accompanied by the export of US-developed MS-based easily-hacked voting systems which will only result in the fraudulent election of officials (e.g. GWB) who will promote the same kind of economic and technological dependency on the US, while real technological democracy, in the form of publicly validated, secure and properly audited OSS voter registration systems, voter information systems, and the voting systems themselves will be denigrated as "substandard and not valid" by the same people that brought you the massacre at el Mozotol (and fired Ray Bonnert, the correspondent to the NY Times who reported it).

I wonder if the School of the Americas has a new course, "Skewing Election Results Without Getting Caught (much) 101: Diebolt Systems Under The Hood."

Re:Commercial

[Acidic_Diarrhea]

The majority do allow voice communication. Is the extra cost worth it so that "all" games are covered?