I remember way back in the Genesis days...
My parents bought me what was perhaps the strangest input device ever... a chair. Basically, it was a seat mounted on top of a set of joystick actuators, so that when you leaned left the game received a "left" input, etc. It even had a vertical grip for each hand that had the buttons mounted in the handle.
One of my favorite games ever for that was Road Rash. Road Rash was a series of motorcycle racing/combat games. Motorcycle racing was especially well-suited to the chair/controller contraption, because in order to turn your bike left, you just leaned left, a lot like on an actual motorcycle.
I loved that thing, until the actuators finally wore out.
I think this Kiswahili wiki-dictionary is really just a sign of how much Africa, and specifically East Africa, is changing. I spent quite a bit of time living in Kenya, and to this day I am amazed at just how "Western" a lot of Africa is becoming, especially in the big cities like Nairobi. One Kenyan NGO I worked with had a larger IT staff than I have here in the States, and a Kenyan friend of mine had his own graphic design firm at age 22, and could whip up artwork in Photoshop and Illustrator like you wouldn't believe. Even in some of the tribal areas, you run across the occasional person with an old laptop computer.
But an unfortunate consequence of all of this Westernization is that many of the urban youth, especially in Nairobi, don't even speak Kiswahili anymore. They all speak English, as well as Sheng, which is an English/Kiswahili pidgin language spoken exclusively by the younger generation, using a lot of slang. I lived there for quite a while, and I can't recall a single situation where I was forced to call upon my Kiswahili language skills.
You laugh, but it's true. I spent some time living in Kenya, and Internet cafes are everywhere. The power grids in these countries are already so stressed that to have a chip that drastically reduces power consumption in these places would be a tremendous help. And not just for Internet cafes, but for point-of-sale terminals, businesses, etc. (And yes, they really do have point-of-sale systems in the "third world.")
First of all, I think this is a good idea for public safety, but I wonder how one determines what an "inappropriate location" is.
Also, I wonder if this is just the first step toward government tracking of the civilian population. It seems to me that sex offenders are being used as guinea pigs. First it's GPS tracking. Next, they'll be using RFID tags to track every purchase they make, in order to be sure they're not buying "inappropriate merchandise."
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If a made-up science makes up a word, is it still considered a "real" word?
I remember way back in the Genesis days... My parents bought me what was perhaps the strangest input device ever... a chair. Basically, it was a seat mounted on top of a set of joystick actuators, so that when you leaned left the game received a "left" input, etc. It even had a vertical grip for each hand that had the buttons mounted in the handle. One of my favorite games ever for that was Road Rash. Road Rash was a series of motorcycle racing/combat games. Motorcycle racing was especially well-suited to the chair/controller contraption, because in order to turn your bike left, you just leaned left, a lot like on an actual motorcycle. I loved that thing, until the actuators finally wore out.
I think this Kiswahili wiki-dictionary is really just a sign of how much Africa, and specifically East Africa, is changing. I spent quite a bit of time living in Kenya, and to this day I am amazed at just how "Western" a lot of Africa is becoming, especially in the big cities like Nairobi. One Kenyan NGO I worked with had a larger IT staff than I have here in the States, and a Kenyan friend of mine had his own graphic design firm at age 22, and could whip up artwork in Photoshop and Illustrator like you wouldn't believe. Even in some of the tribal areas, you run across the occasional person with an old laptop computer.
But an unfortunate consequence of all of this Westernization is that many of the urban youth, especially in Nairobi, don't even speak Kiswahili anymore. They all speak English, as well as Sheng, which is an English/Kiswahili pidgin language spoken exclusively by the younger generation, using a lot of slang. I lived there for quite a while, and I can't recall a single situation where I was forced to call upon my Kiswahili language skills.
You laugh, but it's true. I spent some time living in Kenya, and Internet cafes are everywhere. The power grids in these countries are already so stressed that to have a chip that drastically reduces power consumption in these places would be a tremendous help. And not just for Internet cafes, but for point-of-sale terminals, businesses, etc. (And yes, they really do have point-of-sale systems in the "third world.")
First of all, I think this is a good idea for public safety, but I wonder how one determines what an "inappropriate location" is. Also, I wonder if this is just the first step toward government tracking of the civilian population. It seems to me that sex offenders are being used as guinea pigs. First it's GPS tracking. Next, they'll be using RFID tags to track every purchase they make, in order to be sure they're not buying "inappropriate merchandise."