The dangers of discloser of your DNA to potential insurers and employers would seem to create an opportunity for people to self-test.
At the moment for a fee you can send a swab to a lab, and they'll return the results to you. That's reasonably private until Acxiom buys a copy of their database or the Department of Homeland Security decides it wants to know your genetic code for whatever reason.
But if you had an affordable device you could drop a swab into and have it return results, there would be no need for anyone else to ever be the wiser.
In the meantime, the only way I can think of to get the results of such a test without risk of others finding out is if you have access to the necessary lab equipment and ran the tests yourself. I know if I had, I would.
without a Constitutional ammendment guaranteeing our right to privacy.
And it's not just on the level of DNA testing. We're already hearing about the dangers that data-mining companies like Acxiom are posing to privacy through their purchase and aggregation of previously unrelated databases.
Universal healthcare in the United States would fix one part of the problem, which is that you could be denied insurance coverage based on factors over which you manifestly have absolutely no control.
However, discrimination from employers would persist.
There's an additional danger: loss of reputation. Imagine the damage you could do to a political rival if you could access their DNA and learn that they are genetically predisposed for cancer.
If the Whitehouse can bully Congress into passing retroactive immunity to the telecoms for warrantless wiretapping, then they also by extension are exhonerated. So, they get to get a free pass for breaking the law without directly asking Congress to give it to them.
We need a paradigm shift in transportation, because it causes so much climate change.
My immediate family is lucky, economically--we live in New York and don't need a car; but that doesn't exempt us from the environmental consequences of the internal combustion engine.
But even environmental consequences aside, the rising cost of oil has put the squeeze on the rest of my family who aren't fortunate enough to live in areas where public transportation is available/reliable/efficient. When you consider the relative share of annual income that they pay for basic transportation versus mine, it's dramatic how high such a fundamental cost of living is in the United States.
So, ask yourself--how competitive can an economy remain when it spends such an out-sized amount on such a basic service? It should be driving the costs of transportation down to the level of a utility and investing the surplus in cutting-edge technologies.
I sincerely hope that Obama wins the Whitehouse, and I sincerely hope that he acts to finally put a Constitutional Ammendment guaranteeing the right to Privacy on the books.
As a professor of Constitutional law at the University of Chicago, he should be abundantly aware of how fragile our right to privacy is in this country, being that it's an inferred right that rests only on precedent.
As an American, I take exceptionally strong exception to this. The general chilling effect that employers have come to have on free speech in this country has become beyond intolerable. It's gotten to the point where, unless you're an independently wealthy heiress who posts sex videos of yourself, or some blue-blood entitled schmuck, that you're not free to express your opinions about anything without consigning yourself to the poor house. That means, effectively, 99% of the country that has to work for a living.
If you're a newscaster, at work, on the air, as a representative of CNN, and you come out with your own personal spin instead of just stating the reported facts, then yes, you should be fired. But Bill O'Reilly and Glen Beck do that on a daily basis and yet get away with it scot-free, so what are you really arguing here?
This guy blogged on his own private time, using his own private equipment, without representing his opinions as those of CNN. Therefore, it is absolutely and utterly protected by the Constitution of these United States. If we allow his employer to lay blanket claim to all his expression, then we effectively deprive him of his human rights.
So, for me and many others, what you have said here represents a despicable conflation of professional and private life, to the great detriment of the latter. If I could have any wish made on this President's Day past come true, it would be that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln would rise from the grave, pick your sorry butt up by the scruff of the neck, and kick it off our shores.
It shames me that you carry the same passport I do.
Economic shifts and dislocations happen to all of us. Why should you be immune?
I started out in hedge funds. Then Long Term Capital Management flamed out and took most of that industry with it.
I taught myself to program and got into I.T. That was a great ride, but then the dot-bomb happened and took most of that industry in New York with it. The demand for I.T. recovered, but the clients and companies decided to outsource most of it to India instead of hiring back trained natives.
Advertising, however, continued, so I switched to project management for interactive. I had to learn, shudder, to deal with people. But I sucked it up and did it because it was necessary.
In short, re-tooling and acquiring new skills has to be part of your stock in trade in this Brave New World, compadre. Being "creative" does not bestow some magical immunity from that necessity, I'm afraid.
But look on the bright side, being "creative" should give you a leg up in figuring out what to do next. And figure it out you should, because entertainment as we know it is about to fall off a cliff.
BBC News America with Matt Frei. It's what journalism in this country used to be. It's excellent. Many others seem to be discovering this too, because it runs on at least four separate channels on my cable (DirecTV).
Taken a different way, perhaps branding in linux might be good. Let's say your company is Accelerology and you put Ubuntu on your corporate systems. But come to find out Ubuntu doesn't have a driver for your gravitometer. You could pay Ubuntu to develop the Accelerology driver for the gravitometer.
That way, you get the driver you need, Ubuntu gets some cash, the linux codebase expands, and you get a little bit of branding and name recognition within a highly focused audience. As a business owner, I would be interested in attaching my name to something that would be mentioned over and over for years--it's like how Kleenex became the common word for "tissue."
It would be less of a competitive advantage for me if everyone did. As it stands, my competitors are mostly encumbered with Vista, XP, and all the virii and spyware and security risks that come with them.
into irrelevance that is the Olympics and its masters, the IOC. So rife with corruption, so lousy with commercialism, so compromised by professional "amateur" athletes.
Really, the original intention of the Olympics has been completely sand-blasted away. The IOC not allowing the very people who are making the whole pageant possible to talk/blog about what the experience is like? It's the absurd cherry on top of one giant whopping sundae of hypocrisy.
I will probably be shouted down by those who can't wait to wave the patriotic flag of country X at the games, but I say down with the Olympics, down with the IOC, and down with commercialized professional sports, for that matter.
Wake me up if the world ever gets back to sports that are about community and excellence and human achievement. Until then, there are many better things to do.
He would make an excellent Congressman and technology advocate. Personally, I think Lawrence Lessig would make for the right template to choose Congressmen. That is, they both have general competence and area-specific knowledge. Rather than the old method of electing political cronies or party insiders or business schmucks or mercenary, power-hungry lawyers, we could elect men and women who are strong contributors to our civic life and also experts in their particular field.
For instance, I would feel much better about food safety legislation designed by a Congresswoman who was an actual FDA scientist. Then I could be reasonably sure that facts played a large role in her decisions.
If Republicans are angry with Democrats for pursuing the matter of contempt citations against Bolton and Miers instead of voting to condone the telecom's crimes, then I'm angry with the Congress for holding hearing after hearing on steroids in baseball instead of holding hearings on impeaching Bush and Cheney for repeatedly breaking the law and violating the Constitution.
For those out there who oppose Constitutional checks and balances, and oppose impeachment of the Pres. and VP for running roughshod over our rights, consider what will happen if Hillary Clinton gets into office with that impunity and immunity and absolute power established by Bush's precedent. That should make you shudder. I know it does me.
Self-winding watches are great, because you don't have to do any extra work to wind them; they wind themselves according to the work you already do raising and lowering your arm (weight of the watch notwithstanding). Knee braces and such, though, break that model, because you have to do more physical work to generate the power.
There is a lot of passive mechanical energy in our environment that can be harvested to generate power. But it has to make economical sense. If you can coat your house in nano piezoelectric filaments that generate twice the current that they cost, then good. Otherwise, why bother?
The last time I used a joystick as the exclusive interface for a console was the Atari. Since then, games have grown more sophisticated, and require a more sophisticated interface, not because a more sophisticated interface is most appropriate to the game at hand, but because it's more versatile.
Take driving games, for instance. Using a steering column is a more natural interface for them. But you can only use that interface for the driving game, not for an FPS. So as a developer, which would you rather code for, a single-use interface, or one that bridges the game universe for a given console?
Sure, for nostalgia's sake I miss the good ole days of playing Star Command on a joystick. But I would trade that innocent fun for the immersive experience of GTA on a PS?/Xbox*/Wii any day.
In like fashion I long ago abandoned the paddle wheel used for Pong. It carries fond memories, sure, but after Breakout it ceased to be relevant.
Fun and playability are the constants, to my mind. Focus on those, less on eulogies for lost interfaces.
We've become quite dependent on others for our entertainment/creative fix. But culture, stories, entertainment, and art are things you and I can create without needing permission from anyone else, or big financial backing. The portrait you paint or the sculpture you sculpt might not be displayed in the Museum of Modern Art, but who cares? The rush of creating it with your own hands is better than paying $20 to view the crap MoMA considers art, or $70/mo. for cable to see the tripe the 'experts' consider entertainment.
During the Writer's Strike, after depleting Netflix and playing every game I had into the ground, I took up writing. Nothing much, just vignettes. Maybe some of them will grow into stories. If not, no biggie.
But the act of writing them is a lot more fun than watching formulaic sitcoms interlaced with scores of commercials and impregnated with endless product placements.
I hope many others got the chance to discover their muse during this hiatus, and that they keep running with it. The country would be a more excellent and interesting place to live for it.
China is not some innocent, maligned party. It is a populous country with a burgeoning economy and rapidly modernizing military that also has an enormous chip on its shoulder, a racially-based national ideology, and an expansionist foreign policy.
They mean to take Taiwan forcibly, and know they have to get through the United States to do it. Therefore they are pursuing a comprehensive strategy that includes cyberwarfare to achieve that goal. Every year there is a report to Congress on it:
There would be no impression-based advertising, and you would only hear about products you were actually interested in, from people you actually know. Everything would spread virally, and no other way. Alternatively, if you knew you needed a certain kind of product you could set a search bot to track it down for you on the Web without any further action from you.
That is to say, it is useful to find out about useful things. It is conversely irritating to find out about endless irrelevant things.
The man or woman who finds a way to make that world a reality will be a trillionaire, and rightly so.
Demonstating a willingness to invade an ill-behaved country (Iraq) is a form of soft power that your ideology prevents you from seeing. It is possible to observe that the Patriots lost the Super Bowl without others extrapolating an ideology that demands you hate Boston, everything that Boston stands for, and everyone who's ever been from Boston.
and their deterrent power shouldn't be downplayed.
But amidst news of new systems a lot of folks forget that the greater part of U.S. strength is so-called "soft power." Economic strength, alliances, energy security, cultural strength, and good-old fashioned good will are examples.
They are harder to develop but are also harder to fight and confer an immeasurable advantage. Building hypersonic weapons is a good thing, but it's a lot easier for your geopolitical competitors to steal the plans and copy it than it is for them to steal your alliances or international good will.
Sources of soft power aren't usually included in defense planning because areas like economic policy and cultural strength appertain variously to non-military departments or even the private sector. But they should be, because our competitors (like China) are.
That said, the United States has a lot of work to do to restore the soft power that eight years of the Bush administration has squandered. Let's hope the next administration is more astute and capable.
There's been a lot of ink on Wii Play and the innovative controller. But it bears repeating. It's not just that the Wii is family friendly and attracts a lot of non-traditional gamers, it's that the controller lets you interact with the game on a whole new level.
When you have to swing your arms to swing a sword or tennis racket, you're engaging whole other parts of your brain that bring you into the experience. Working up a sweat playing tennis against my wife is something that's never happened to me before, and I played Pong and dumped buckets of quarters into Double Dragon like anyone else.
Even traditional FPS titles like Call of Duty are more intense on the Wii. When you have to pump your fists in the air during hand-to-hand combat with the Kraut who ambushed you, it's freaky.
So there's a hook for traditional gamers who want to experience old genres in a new way.
This is OT and all that, but I heartily agree. Slashdot is a news aggregator too, of course, but it's the reader comments I come back for. No one can be an expert on everything, but on Slashdot there are experts for everything.
If there's another article on the RIAA, for example, there will be at least one insightful post from NewYorkCountryLawyer, who is an actual lawyer fighting the RIAA's lawsuits. You don't get that kind of quality, inside perspective from Digg.
Digg's posters remind one rather strongly of the early days of BBS'es, when childish comments and flame wars that lasted a generation swept from one side to the other.
Let Slashdot remain Slashdot, and let the kiddies and trolls stay on Digg.
There's a Congressional whitepaper that gets put out every year or so on assessment of China as a rival/potential threat. This is a link to the 2005 version that Google found:
So yes, China is actively seeking U.S. military secrets. It's official policy. I've read in past versions before 2000 that Chinese govt. policy was also to employ all the means to deter U.S. intervention in armed conflict with Taiwan, among which was to use anti-satellite missiles to neutralize U.S. surveillance capabilities, cyberwarfare to bog down the U.S. military and country in general, and also to use economic warfare to make the United States too frightened of losing its standard of living to bother about a small island in the South China Sea.
Given China's recent successful test of Anti-Satellite weapons and forays into cyberwarfare, the level of U.S. debt China holds, and the Bush administration's willingness to sell it to them, is particularly alarming.
Interestingly enough, many of the U.S. military secrets they acquire they get via Israel, our good friends, who steal them from us at will and get a free pass from the U.S. Congress because they're our good friends. (NPR story on the leaders of AIPAC, spying on the U.S. and passing secrets to Israel: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4802479)
Yes, this submission to Slashdot refers to space shuttle technology. Maybe that technology is valuable, maybe it isn't. But if we don't shut this activity down, it will bite us in the ass more than it already has.
For instance, Clinton authorized the sale of sensitive satellite technology back in the late 90's that allowed the Chinese to significantly upgrade their long-range targeting capability. Now, the Chinese don't have that many long-range missiles, so being able to target more effectively works wonders for their nuclear capability.
Not more than a few months after the Chinese got the tech from Clinton, India, which has fought border wars with China and lost ( http://www.fas.org/irp/world/india/threat/china.htm ), suddenly declared itself a nuclear power. Pakistan, of course was right on their heels, being eager to let India know they can play too.
So Chinese espionage, and foolish U.S. administration policy, has already directly caused a nuclear standoff in South Asia and given the Chinese the ability to reach and hit cities on the western U.S. mainland.
Slashdot Mirror
The dangers of discloser of your DNA to potential insurers and employers would seem to create an opportunity for people to self-test.
At the moment for a fee you can send a swab to a lab, and they'll return the results to you. That's reasonably private until Acxiom buys a copy of their database or the Department of Homeland Security decides it wants to know your genetic code for whatever reason.
But if you had an affordable device you could drop a swab into and have it return results, there would be no need for anyone else to ever be the wiser.
In the meantime, the only way I can think of to get the results of such a test without risk of others finding out is if you have access to the necessary lab equipment and ran the tests yourself. I know if I had, I would.
without a Constitutional ammendment guaranteeing our right to privacy.
And it's not just on the level of DNA testing. We're already hearing about the dangers that data-mining companies like Acxiom are posing to privacy through their purchase and aggregation of previously unrelated databases.
Universal healthcare in the United States would fix one part of the problem, which is that you could be denied insurance coverage based on factors over which you manifestly have absolutely no control.
However, discrimination from employers would persist.
There's an additional danger: loss of reputation. Imagine the damage you could do to a political rival if you could access their DNA and learn that they are genetically predisposed for cancer.
If the Whitehouse can bully Congress into passing retroactive immunity to the telecoms for warrantless wiretapping, then they also by extension are exhonerated. So, they get to get a free pass for breaking the law without directly asking Congress to give it to them.
We need a paradigm shift in transportation, because it causes so much climate change.
My immediate family is lucky, economically--we live in New York and don't need a car; but that doesn't exempt us from the environmental consequences of the internal combustion engine.
But even environmental consequences aside, the rising cost of oil has put the squeeze on the rest of my family who aren't fortunate enough to live in areas where public transportation is available/reliable/efficient. When you consider the relative share of annual income that they pay for basic transportation versus mine, it's dramatic how high such a fundamental cost of living is in the United States.
So, ask yourself--how competitive can an economy remain when it spends such an out-sized amount on such a basic service? It should be driving the costs of transportation down to the level of a utility and investing the surplus in cutting-edge technologies.
I sincerely hope that Obama wins the Whitehouse, and I sincerely hope that he acts to finally put a Constitutional Ammendment guaranteeing the right to Privacy on the books.
As a professor of Constitutional law at the University of Chicago, he should be abundantly aware of how fragile our right to privacy is in this country, being that it's an inferred right that rests only on precedent.
Teleporn would be better. Having sex from a distance--think of the marriages that could be saved, the diseases that wouldn't be spread!
As an American, I take exceptionally strong exception to this. The general chilling effect that employers have come to have on free speech in this country has become beyond intolerable. It's gotten to the point where, unless you're an independently wealthy heiress who posts sex videos of yourself, or some blue-blood entitled schmuck, that you're not free to express your opinions about anything without consigning yourself to the poor house. That means, effectively, 99% of the country that has to work for a living.
If you're a newscaster, at work, on the air, as a representative of CNN, and you come out with your own personal spin instead of just stating the reported facts, then yes, you should be fired. But Bill O'Reilly and Glen Beck do that on a daily basis and yet get away with it scot-free, so what are you really arguing here?
This guy blogged on his own private time, using his own private equipment, without representing his opinions as those of CNN. Therefore, it is absolutely and utterly protected by the Constitution of these United States. If we allow his employer to lay blanket claim to all his expression, then we effectively deprive him of his human rights.
So, for me and many others, what you have said here represents a despicable conflation of professional and private life, to the great detriment of the latter. If I could have any wish made on this President's Day past come true, it would be that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln would rise from the grave, pick your sorry butt up by the scruff of the neck, and kick it off our shores.
It shames me that you carry the same passport I do.
Economic shifts and dislocations happen to all of us. Why should you be immune?
I started out in hedge funds. Then Long Term Capital Management flamed out and took most of that industry with it.
I taught myself to program and got into I.T. That was a great ride, but then the dot-bomb happened and took most of that industry in New York with it. The demand for I.T. recovered, but the clients and companies decided to outsource most of it to India instead of hiring back trained natives.
Advertising, however, continued, so I switched to project management for interactive. I had to learn, shudder, to deal with people. But I sucked it up and did it because it was necessary.
In short, re-tooling and acquiring new skills has to be part of your stock in trade in this Brave New World, compadre. Being "creative" does not bestow some magical immunity from that necessity, I'm afraid.
But look on the bright side, being "creative" should give you a leg up in figuring out what to do next. And figure it out you should, because entertainment as we know it is about to fall off a cliff.
BBC News America with Matt Frei. It's what journalism in this country used to be. It's excellent. Many others seem to be discovering this too, because it runs on at least four separate channels on my cable (DirecTV).
No one brought up the inevitable hack to enable "no-hands" surfing for pr0n.
Taken a different way, perhaps branding in linux might be good. Let's say your company is Accelerology and you put Ubuntu on your corporate systems. But come to find out Ubuntu doesn't have a driver for your gravitometer. You could pay Ubuntu to develop the Accelerology driver for the gravitometer.
That way, you get the driver you need, Ubuntu gets some cash, the linux codebase expands, and you get a little bit of branding and name recognition within a highly focused audience. As a business owner, I would be interested in attaching my name to something that would be mentioned over and over for years--it's like how Kleenex became the common word for "tissue."
It would be less of a competitive advantage for me if everyone did. As it stands, my competitors are mostly encumbered with Vista, XP, and all the virii and spyware and security risks that come with them.
into irrelevance that is the Olympics and its masters, the IOC. So rife with corruption, so lousy with commercialism, so compromised by professional "amateur" athletes.
Really, the original intention of the Olympics has been completely sand-blasted away. The IOC not allowing the very people who are making the whole pageant possible to talk/blog about what the experience is like? It's the absurd cherry on top of one giant whopping sundae of hypocrisy.
I will probably be shouted down by those who can't wait to wave the patriotic flag of country X at the games, but I say down with the Olympics, down with the IOC, and down with commercialized professional sports, for that matter.
Wake me up if the world ever gets back to sports that are about community and excellence and human achievement. Until then, there are many better things to do.
He would make an excellent Congressman and technology advocate. Personally, I think Lawrence Lessig would make for the right template to choose Congressmen. That is, they both have general competence and area-specific knowledge. Rather than the old method of electing political cronies or party insiders or business schmucks or mercenary, power-hungry lawyers, we could elect men and women who are strong contributors to our civic life and also experts in their particular field.
For instance, I would feel much better about food safety legislation designed by a Congresswoman who was an actual FDA scientist. Then I could be reasonably sure that facts played a large role in her decisions.
If Republicans are angry with Democrats for pursuing the matter of contempt citations against Bolton and Miers instead of voting to condone the telecom's crimes, then I'm angry with the Congress for holding hearing after hearing on steroids in baseball instead of holding hearings on impeaching Bush and Cheney for repeatedly breaking the law and violating the Constitution.
For those out there who oppose Constitutional checks and balances, and oppose impeachment of the Pres. and VP for running roughshod over our rights, consider what will happen if Hillary Clinton gets into office with that impunity and immunity and absolute power established by Bush's precedent. That should make you shudder. I know it does me.
Self-winding watches are great, because you don't have to do any extra work to wind them; they wind themselves according to the work you already do raising and lowering your arm (weight of the watch notwithstanding). Knee braces and such, though, break that model, because you have to do more physical work to generate the power.
There is a lot of passive mechanical energy in our environment that can be harvested to generate power. But it has to make economical sense. If you can coat your house in nano piezoelectric filaments that generate twice the current that they cost, then good. Otherwise, why bother?
What about the paddle wheel?
The last time I used a joystick as the exclusive interface for a console was the Atari. Since then, games have grown more sophisticated, and require a more sophisticated interface, not because a more sophisticated interface is most appropriate to the game at hand, but because it's more versatile.
Take driving games, for instance. Using a steering column is a more natural interface for them. But you can only use that interface for the driving game, not for an FPS. So as a developer, which would you rather code for, a single-use interface, or one that bridges the game universe for a given console?
Sure, for nostalgia's sake I miss the good ole days of playing Star Command on a joystick. But I would trade that innocent fun for the immersive experience of GTA on a PS?/Xbox*/Wii any day.
In like fashion I long ago abandoned the paddle wheel used for Pong. It carries fond memories, sure, but after Breakout it ceased to be relevant.
Fun and playability are the constants, to my mind. Focus on those, less on eulogies for lost interfaces.
We've become quite dependent on others for our entertainment/creative fix. But culture, stories, entertainment, and art are things you and I can create without needing permission from anyone else, or big financial backing. The portrait you paint or the sculpture you sculpt might not be displayed in the Museum of Modern Art, but who cares? The rush of creating it with your own hands is better than paying $20 to view the crap MoMA considers art, or $70/mo. for cable to see the tripe the 'experts' consider entertainment.
During the Writer's Strike, after depleting Netflix and playing every game I had into the ground, I took up writing. Nothing much, just vignettes. Maybe some of them will grow into stories. If not, no biggie.
But the act of writing them is a lot more fun than watching formulaic sitcoms interlaced with scores of commercials and impregnated with endless product placements.
I hope many others got the chance to discover their muse during this hiatus, and that they keep running with it. The country would be a more excellent and interesting place to live for it.
China is not some innocent, maligned party. It is a populous country with a burgeoning economy and rapidly modernizing military that also has an enormous chip on its shoulder, a racially-based national ideology, and an expansionist foreign policy.
They mean to take Taiwan forcibly, and know they have to get through the United States to do it. Therefore they are pursuing a comprehensive strategy that includes cyberwarfare to achieve that goal. Every year there is a report to Congress on it:
http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/china.html
It is therefore not untoward to acknowledge that China is gunning for the United States, nor is it unnatural for Americans to react to that.
Putting it down to 'typical' American parochialism or some deep-seated bigotry is contrary to the facts and dangerously dismissive.
There would be no impression-based advertising, and you would only hear about products you were actually interested in, from people you actually know. Everything would spread virally, and no other way. Alternatively, if you knew you needed a certain kind of product you could set a search bot to track it down for you on the Web without any further action from you.
That is to say, it is useful to find out about useful things. It is conversely irritating to find out about endless irrelevant things.
The man or woman who finds a way to make that world a reality will be a trillionaire, and rightly so.
and their deterrent power shouldn't be downplayed.
But amidst news of new systems a lot of folks forget that the greater part of U.S. strength is so-called "soft power." Economic strength, alliances, energy security, cultural strength, and good-old fashioned good will are examples.
They are harder to develop but are also harder to fight and confer an immeasurable advantage. Building hypersonic weapons is a good thing, but it's a lot easier for your geopolitical competitors to steal the plans and copy it than it is for them to steal your alliances or international good will.
Sources of soft power aren't usually included in defense planning because areas like economic policy and cultural strength appertain variously to non-military departments or even the private sector. But they should be, because our competitors (like China) are.
That said, the United States has a lot of work to do to restore the soft power that eight years of the Bush administration has squandered. Let's hope the next administration is more astute and capable.
There's been a lot of ink on Wii Play and the innovative controller. But it bears repeating. It's not just that the Wii is family friendly and attracts a lot of non-traditional gamers, it's that the controller lets you interact with the game on a whole new level.
When you have to swing your arms to swing a sword or tennis racket, you're engaging whole other parts of your brain that bring you into the experience. Working up a sweat playing tennis against my wife is something that's never happened to me before, and I played Pong and dumped buckets of quarters into Double Dragon like anyone else.
Even traditional FPS titles like Call of Duty are more intense on the Wii. When you have to pump your fists in the air during hand-to-hand combat with the Kraut who ambushed you, it's freaky.
So there's a hook for traditional gamers who want to experience old genres in a new way.
This is OT and all that, but I heartily agree. Slashdot is a news aggregator too, of course, but it's the reader comments I come back for. No one can be an expert on everything, but on Slashdot there are experts for everything.
If there's another article on the RIAA, for example, there will be at least one insightful post from NewYorkCountryLawyer, who is an actual lawyer fighting the RIAA's lawsuits. You don't get that kind of quality, inside perspective from Digg.
Digg's posters remind one rather strongly of the early days of BBS'es, when childish comments and flame wars that lasted a generation swept from one side to the other.
Let Slashdot remain Slashdot, and let the kiddies and trolls stay on Digg.
There's a Congressional whitepaper that gets put out every year or so on assessment of China as a rival/potential threat. This is a link to the 2005 version that Google found:
http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/china.html
So yes, China is actively seeking U.S. military secrets. It's official policy. I've read in past versions before 2000 that Chinese govt. policy was also to employ all the means to deter U.S. intervention in armed conflict with Taiwan, among which was to use anti-satellite missiles to neutralize U.S. surveillance capabilities, cyberwarfare to bog down the U.S. military and country in general, and also to use economic warfare to make the United States too frightened of losing its standard of living to bother about a small island in the South China Sea.
Given China's recent successful test of Anti-Satellite weapons and forays into cyberwarfare, the level of U.S. debt China holds, and the Bush administration's willingness to sell it to them, is particularly alarming.
Interestingly enough, many of the U.S. military secrets they acquire they get via Israel, our good friends, who steal them from us at will and get a free pass from the U.S. Congress because they're our good friends. (NPR story on the leaders of AIPAC, spying on the U.S. and passing secrets to Israel: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4802479)
Yes, this submission to Slashdot refers to space shuttle technology. Maybe that technology is valuable, maybe it isn't. But if we don't shut this activity down, it will bite us in the ass more than it already has.
For instance, Clinton authorized the sale of sensitive satellite technology back in the late 90's that allowed the Chinese to significantly upgrade their long-range targeting capability. Now, the Chinese don't have that many long-range missiles, so being able to target more effectively works wonders for their nuclear capability.
Not more than a few months after the Chinese got the tech from Clinton, India, which has fought border wars with China and lost ( http://www.fas.org/irp/world/india/threat/china.htm ), suddenly declared itself a nuclear power. Pakistan, of course was right on their heels, being eager to let India know they can play too.
So Chinese espionage, and foolish U.S. administration policy, has already directly caused a nuclear standoff in South Asia and given the Chinese the ability to reach and hit cities on the western U.S. mainland.