It's not actually that popular around here to stick up for the US. People will point to all the problems, stupid policies, bad decisions the government has made. But think about it... how far did someone have to go before the US government started reacting? Publishing illegally obtained classified documents from the military and state departments. Overall, considering that this is a pretty damn grey area, I think the US governments' response has been rather subdued.
Press members in the US, as far as I can tell, don't really have cause to fear for their safety or their freedom no matter what they're reporting, unless they actually break laws to obtain that information. Despite all the hand-wringing, our basic freedoms are still pretty well protected, especially when compared to a lot of places on earth where basic human rights don't mean squat.
Does that means we should stop trying to improve and better ourselves and our country? Of course not. But I think it's better to be honest in our discourse and discussions, and acknowledge the fact that overall, we have it pretty good. The ridiculous level of hyperbole I see in these discussions, I feel, tends to marginalize the valid points I see being made. I've seen some people making comparisons to North Korea, and no one calls them out on it. Seriously?
I think he simply banks on the likelyhood that his customers are not sociopaths (unlike him), and prefer to go through the proper channels of authority when confronted by clearly illegal and threatening behavior.
Yeah, I hear you though. I got pretty steamed reading that story. Part of me does sometimes wish someone would take matters into their own hand and turn his kneecaps into jello, but that course of action rarely ends well, even in the movies.
About the best you can say about the authorities is, apparently, I guess they eventually do their job if you scream loud and long enough. Sort of depressing...
Yeah, definitely no troll here. This is far worse. If you read the full interview, it's pretty clear the man is a certified sociopath. He has absolutely no moral compass... no notion of right or wrong. No notion that doing something to harm others is something you should even worry about.
I hope they throw the book at him. Unbelievable.
Oh, and I was happy to hear that Amazon doesn't screw around with allowing this sort of behavior (even if he does have an Amazon store). Too many unhappy customers and you're gone. One more reason I'm doing all my Christmas shopping through Amazon this year.
But no one wants to lug around a phone, a PC, a camera, mp3 player, a pager, kindle and a PS3!!
No one would lug around all those devices at once, of course, but I could see someone bringing along at least two of those devices at any one time, depending on their interests. The issue at hand is mostly one of the tradeoffs in both functionality and form-factor when creating an all-in-one devices. For instance, fewer people want clunky game-type pushbuttons and a dpad on their phone, and many games absolutely require these for any sort of serious gameplay.
It's the same reason why I still prefer my Kindle for reading, the iPad for web-browsing, my high-end digital camera for photography (ok, it's hypothetical, but the point stands). I think the dedicated mp3 player and pagers will go away except for ultra-tiny dedicated devices (again, a form-factor issue). If I don't anticipate using the devices, then the smartphone works in a pinch as a substitute. However, if I'm going to be doing a lot of reading, I might take a dedicated e-book reader along, much in the same way I might bring a paperback book with me. Or, I might choose the gaming device if I've got hours to kill. If I was a photog and was in a scenic area, I'd sure want a real camera instead of a built-in device.
I think the smartphone is going to kick ass in the casual gaming market (or more hardcore games that do really well with a touch-screen), which will probably eclipse the hard-core gamer demographic in terms of sheer numbers. However, I still think there will always be a significant market for dedicated devices that are first and foremost optimized for gaming.
The economy was in the crapper when Reagan took office. He popularized the phrase "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?", if I recall. See also: "National malaise speech" by Carter.
Does the argument "it doesn't affect me personally so I'm ok with it" work any better? Or even, "I stand to personally profit if copyright is abolished or non-enforceable."
I doubt most people here have completely altruistic motives regarding this debate, even if they've convinced themselves of that. Just saying...
The top 1% of income earners ($380,354) pay 38% of income taxes. The top 10% of income earners ($113,799) pay 70% of income taxes. The top 25% of income earners ($67,280) pay 86% of income taxes.
I doubt you can get away from basic economic reality that easily. I'd imagine that if only corporations are taxed instead of people, they'd have to make up the difference in cost. That means either cutting costs in some way (layoffs are the simplest), or raising prices.
It's the same sort of logic people use when trying to tax the rich. Unfortunately, the rich (and upper-middle class) are the entrepreneurs and venture-capitalists, and tend to be job creators. If you try to tax them, they end up working to just preserve their own capital instead of investing it back into the economy where it does the most good. It's quite simple - if you remove the potential reward, it's not worth the risk of investment.
When you siphon off money from the economy via taxes, it doesn't really matter where you take it from. It all has the same negative drain on the economy.
No, I don't think they could. There's a constitutional prohibition on interstate taxes, if I remember correctly. I'd bet "impractical things" would be correctly seen as an out-of-state tax.
Yes, and where are most Xbox subscribers located? Hint: it's not in Japan.
For Americans and Europeans, the swastika represents Nazi Germany, not an eastern good-luck symbol. This particular symbol will probably never be otherwise because of the magnitude of the Nazi party's influence on Western history.
I don't know what's so hard about this... any 14-year old kid in the US that puts together a Swastika is just doing it to piss people off / get attention. Any notion of them actually caring about the swastika symbol is absolutely laughable. Xbox live is not the place for that debate.
And all the ones that were free to play from the start are still doing alright (Like Guild Wars).
I've heard some people making a slight distinction for games like Guild Wars, calling it "Buy to Play", or B2P. The distinction is that ArenaNet is making its money primarily off box sales. They do have an in-game store, but they just sell extra storage, character slots, costumes, etc... all stuff that doesn't really affect gameplay.
This is a bit different than the "Free to Play", or F2P, model where the game is given away, but you must pay money for substantial in-game items, advancement, or character classes, and it's expected you'll have to pay money to advance significantly in the game.
I think it makes sense to distinguish between the two. For instance, you can buy Guild Wars and comfortably play the game without ever purchasing anything else, much as like a single player game. That's a wholly different experience than a "Free to Play" MMO.
I'm not saying one is better than the other per se. The F2P model is nice because it essentially gives players a very deep demo of the game before spending any money. The GW B2P model means a one-time purchase covers what you *have* to pay for the lifetime of the game.
Some people don't like monthly fees. Makes them feel like they have to play to get their money's worth. Silly perhaps but it is what it is. My coworker is like that. He likes to buy points in DDO, rather than pay a subscription. Makes him happier.
It's not really silly. Say, for instance, your friend would like to put the game down for a month or two (maybe try some other games, MMOs or otherwise). With a subscription fee, short of canceling the account, it's not very practical to do this, as you're essentially paying for a service you're not using.
Subscription fees work well enough for people that play one MMO exclusively and regularly. For everyone else, a la carte offerings make more sense.
It's funny, the bar for Pixar movies is so high that, for me at least, Wall-E was a "flop" even though I'd have to still give it an 7 or 8/10. If it was one of the worst films ever made, you apparently haven't seen a lot of films, or your tastes differ from most people's to a pretty extraordinary degree.
Honestly, I'm also getting tired of thinly-veiled environmental messages shoved down my throat (see: every other Miyasaki movie), and at this point it just puts me in an off mood for the rest of the movie. It didn't help that Pixar has no qualms about shoveling a bunch of cheap, plastic, disposable crapola toys and other marketing material at us to promote the movie, thus demonstrating their utter hypocrisy.
Yep, I'd mostly agree with that assessment. I've worked on a number of AI systems for professionally released games... among them, roaming deer for a hunting simulation, bots for a shooter, bots for a 2d brawling game, etc. There are some things that a computer AI can do very, very easily, and some things that humans are far better at - at least in a real-time environment.
For the brawling game, as one example, my co-worker and I discovered that the simplest way to scale the difficulty was to delay reaction time. However, without cheating at all, we couldn't program the AI to be as good as a good human player despite our best efforts. The problems of basic navigation planning and situational awareness (we had very complex environments to navigate) are vastly more complex than most people give credit for. Most of all, humans are really good at instantly adapting, and this is something that most AI systems are still fairly bad at. Also, it's also the kind of thing that's really easy to talk about and describe, but hard to actually implement in an actual, honest-to-god game that has real constraints, such as a shipping date and CPU budgets (it's gotten easier lately with modern multi-core processors, but there were some serious challenges writing AI on a PS2).
In the case of the shooter, the thing I had to tone down was, of course, the bot's accuracy. I solved that issue by putting a target attached to a virtual spring on the player. The aim vector was affected by these springs, so sudden, unpredictable motion would tend to throw off the aim similar to a human. The human still had a vast advantage in navigation (our game had jumpjets, which were a nightmare to code the AI to use correctly).
Oh, and in all the games I've worked on, one of the most important parts of the AI is to leave a small amount of randomization in the system. Nothing fools the player into thinking there's some deep, sophisticated AI than the occasional random decision that just happens to work out brilliantly. It can work the other way as well, so you have to constrain it, of course.
I haven't worked on an RTS AI, but I'd imagine that true tactical awareness is an incredibly difficulty thing to code for such a system. I'll agree with you: I'd imagine the Blizzard AI coders made deliberate decisions to have the AI play as close to humans as possible, not taking advantage of key elements, such as parallelism or raw speed. That sort of computer advantage just isn't fun to compete against.
There's a chance the Gates foundation may very well be funding this (or similar projects), as global eradication of malaria seems to be one of their causes.
Also, on the Wikipedia article I read regarding the elimination of infectious diseases, it appears some drugs are actually donated by "Big Pharma". I have no idea how widespread that practice is though.
It's a series of shooter-type games created by a lone Japanese developer. And because it's Japanese, there are apparently lots of cute Anime-style girls involved somehow. No idea beyond that.
My guess is that this would be an additive to a normal malaria immunization shot. So, when an immunized human is bitten by any mosquito, that mosquito also becomes immune to becoming a malaria carrier as well. It's a neat way to piggyback a secondary immunization strategy onto an infrastructure required for primary immunization. It would make that single immunization more effective than it otherwise would have been.
Sure, if you can immunise all the malaria sufferers, it'd be neat-o - end of disease. However with all the time and resources you need to do that - not to mention that the guy is going to die anyway - is it really worth it?
I consider wiping out a deadly disease to be a pretty good long-term investment for humanity. Maybe you don't feel the same way.
The mosquitoes are immunized by biting the humans.
The next question was how to get the mosquitoes to pick up the antigen. Since it is easier to get people to take injections than it is to find mosquitoes, the answer was to allow people to transmit it to mosquitoes when they bite. The antibody itself doesn't protect against malaria, but when a mosquito bites a treated person, the parasite can no longer use the mosquito's gut to reproduce.
a lot of the reason they've done well over the years is understanding how glacially slow businesses can move and keeping software functional long after its natural expiry date.
See, that's the thing about businesses. They don't understand why software should have an expiration date. And honestly, I have to agree with them to some degree. Case in point: my parents' business is using a custom piece of software written specifically for their business. It's a DOS app, and was created a little under two decades ago. The thing is, all their people know how to use it and it does the job well enough. In fact, it works better on more modern OSes than on the original DOS machines (who remembers Lantastic networks?). Why should they spend a huge amount of money upgrading to a modern system? It's not like the code degrades over time, right?
It's easy for us as developers to froth about people using decades-old software, because we live and breathe in the high-tech, shiny NOW of technology, but to businesses, software is just a tool, no more exciting than a copy machine. They just want the technology to work and stay out of the way of their actual job.
Yeah, I agree with your post, right up until you talk about being "stuck" on Windows 7 and IE 8. If we're going to be honest, most of the crap people are dealing with is because of poor coding standards which were allowed (and encouraged, in fact) by previous versions of operating systems and browsers (for instance, users running as an admin by default). I'm not sure about the browser side of things, but I do know a bit about Windows development. If you write an app for Windows today and follow best practices, there's nothing that prevents your app from moving forward. For the most part, Microsoft is really good at preserving backward compatibility, which is why businesses love them. In this particular case, they happened to screw up pretty badly, and everyone except the devs who originally shat out these crappy IE apps are paying the price.
It's a shield in the same way we're "shielded" from tsunamis and hurricanes by coordinated early-warning systems. That's essentially what they're describing, near as I can tell from the article.
Oh, and BTW, since when is a physical shield the epitome of high-tech? Don't you watch Star Trek?
After all, when we're playing a game of baseball (right, right, I know, this is slashdot), and a ball is coming towards us, we aren't calculating in our heads the velocity, air resistance and other variables involved in catching the ball. We just reach out our arms and our brain makes its best guess based on some sort of heuristic or something to make the catch.
You should read "On Intelligence" if you're at all interested in that subject. Jeff Hawkins (Palm inventor) proposes a fascinating theory of the inner workings of the brain.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not actually that popular around here to stick up for the US. People will point to all the problems, stupid policies, bad decisions the government has made. But think about it... how far did someone have to go before the US government started reacting? Publishing illegally obtained classified documents from the military and state departments. Overall, considering that this is a pretty damn grey area, I think the US governments' response has been rather subdued.
Press members in the US, as far as I can tell, don't really have cause to fear for their safety or their freedom no matter what they're reporting, unless they actually break laws to obtain that information. Despite all the hand-wringing, our basic freedoms are still pretty well protected, especially when compared to a lot of places on earth where basic human rights don't mean squat.
Does that means we should stop trying to improve and better ourselves and our country? Of course not. But I think it's better to be honest in our discourse and discussions, and acknowledge the fact that overall, we have it pretty good. The ridiculous level of hyperbole I see in these discussions, I feel, tends to marginalize the valid points I see being made. I've seen some people making comparisons to North Korea, and no one calls them out on it. Seriously?
I think he simply banks on the likelyhood that his customers are not sociopaths (unlike him), and prefer to go through the proper channels of authority when confronted by clearly illegal and threatening behavior.
Yeah, I hear you though. I got pretty steamed reading that story. Part of me does sometimes wish someone would take matters into their own hand and turn his kneecaps into jello, but that course of action rarely ends well, even in the movies.
About the best you can say about the authorities is, apparently, I guess they eventually do their job if you scream loud and long enough. Sort of depressing...
Yeah, definitely no troll here. This is far worse. If you read the full interview, it's pretty clear the man is a certified sociopath. He has absolutely no moral compass... no notion of right or wrong. No notion that doing something to harm others is something you should even worry about.
I hope they throw the book at him. Unbelievable.
Oh, and I was happy to hear that Amazon doesn't screw around with allowing this sort of behavior (even if he does have an Amazon store). Too many unhappy customers and you're gone. One more reason I'm doing all my Christmas shopping through Amazon this year.
But no one wants to lug around a phone, a PC, a camera, mp3 player, a pager, kindle and a PS3!!
No one would lug around all those devices at once, of course, but I could see someone bringing along at least two of those devices at any one time, depending on their interests. The issue at hand is mostly one of the tradeoffs in both functionality and form-factor when creating an all-in-one devices. For instance, fewer people want clunky game-type pushbuttons and a dpad on their phone, and many games absolutely require these for any sort of serious gameplay.
It's the same reason why I still prefer my Kindle for reading, the iPad for web-browsing, my high-end digital camera for photography (ok, it's hypothetical, but the point stands). I think the dedicated mp3 player and pagers will go away except for ultra-tiny dedicated devices (again, a form-factor issue). If I don't anticipate using the devices, then the smartphone works in a pinch as a substitute. However, if I'm going to be doing a lot of reading, I might take a dedicated e-book reader along, much in the same way I might bring a paperback book with me. Or, I might choose the gaming device if I've got hours to kill. If I was a photog and was in a scenic area, I'd sure want a real camera instead of a built-in device.
I think the smartphone is going to kick ass in the casual gaming market (or more hardcore games that do really well with a touch-screen), which will probably eclipse the hard-core gamer demographic in terms of sheer numbers. However, I still think there will always be a significant market for dedicated devices that are first and foremost optimized for gaming.
The economy was in the crapper when Reagan took office. He popularized the phrase "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?", if I recall. See also: "National malaise speech" by Carter.
I'm starting to think N. Korea is spot on...
That's sort of like amputating a leg to take care of a pesky ingrown toenail.
Advertisement is the motivation for collecting the data. We might be able to solve the collection problem by removing the monetary incentive.
Does the argument "it doesn't affect me personally so I'm ok with it" work any better? Or even, "I stand to personally profit if copyright is abolished or non-enforceable."
I doubt most people here have completely altruistic motives regarding this debate, even if they've convinced themselves of that. Just saying...
Some 2008 tax numbers for you to chew on:
The top 1% of income earners ($380,354) pay 38% of income taxes.
The top 10% of income earners ($113,799) pay 70% of income taxes.
The top 25% of income earners ($67,280) pay 86% of income taxes.
Tell me again how the rich don't pay any taxes?
http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/250.html
I doubt you can get away from basic economic reality that easily. I'd imagine that if only corporations are taxed instead of people, they'd have to make up the difference in cost. That means either cutting costs in some way (layoffs are the simplest), or raising prices.
It's the same sort of logic people use when trying to tax the rich. Unfortunately, the rich (and upper-middle class) are the entrepreneurs and venture-capitalists, and tend to be job creators. If you try to tax them, they end up working to just preserve their own capital instead of investing it back into the economy where it does the most good. It's quite simple - if you remove the potential reward, it's not worth the risk of investment.
When you siphon off money from the economy via taxes, it doesn't really matter where you take it from. It all has the same negative drain on the economy.
No, I don't think they could. There's a constitutional prohibition on interstate taxes, if I remember correctly. I'd bet "impractical things" would be correctly seen as an out-of-state tax.
Yes, and where are most Xbox subscribers located? Hint: it's not in Japan.
For Americans and Europeans, the swastika represents Nazi Germany, not an eastern good-luck symbol. This particular symbol will probably never be otherwise because of the magnitude of the Nazi party's influence on Western history.
I don't know what's so hard about this... any 14-year old kid in the US that puts together a Swastika is just doing it to piss people off / get attention. Any notion of them actually caring about the swastika symbol is absolutely laughable. Xbox live is not the place for that debate.
And all the ones that were free to play from the start are still doing alright (Like Guild Wars).
I've heard some people making a slight distinction for games like Guild Wars, calling it "Buy to Play", or B2P. The distinction is that ArenaNet is making its money primarily off box sales. They do have an in-game store, but they just sell extra storage, character slots, costumes, etc... all stuff that doesn't really affect gameplay.
This is a bit different than the "Free to Play", or F2P, model where the game is given away, but you must pay money for substantial in-game items, advancement, or character classes, and it's expected you'll have to pay money to advance significantly in the game.
I think it makes sense to distinguish between the two. For instance, you can buy Guild Wars and comfortably play the game without ever purchasing anything else, much as like a single player game. That's a wholly different experience than a "Free to Play" MMO.
I'm not saying one is better than the other per se. The F2P model is nice because it essentially gives players a very deep demo of the game before spending any money. The GW B2P model means a one-time purchase covers what you *have* to pay for the lifetime of the game.
Some people don't like monthly fees. Makes them feel like they have to play to get their money's worth. Silly perhaps but it is what it is. My coworker is like that. He likes to buy points in DDO, rather than pay a subscription. Makes him happier.
It's not really silly. Say, for instance, your friend would like to put the game down for a month or two (maybe try some other games, MMOs or otherwise). With a subscription fee, short of canceling the account, it's not very practical to do this, as you're essentially paying for a service you're not using.
Subscription fees work well enough for people that play one MMO exclusively and regularly. For everyone else, a la carte offerings make more sense.
It's funny, the bar for Pixar movies is so high that, for me at least, Wall-E was a "flop" even though I'd have to still give it an 7 or 8/10. If it was one of the worst films ever made, you apparently haven't seen a lot of films, or your tastes differ from most people's to a pretty extraordinary degree.
Honestly, I'm also getting tired of thinly-veiled environmental messages shoved down my throat (see: every other Miyasaki movie), and at this point it just puts me in an off mood for the rest of the movie. It didn't help that Pixar has no qualms about shoveling a bunch of cheap, plastic, disposable crapola toys and other marketing material at us to promote the movie, thus demonstrating their utter hypocrisy.
Yep, I'd mostly agree with that assessment. I've worked on a number of AI systems for professionally released games... among them, roaming deer for a hunting simulation, bots for a shooter, bots for a 2d brawling game, etc. There are some things that a computer AI can do very, very easily, and some things that humans are far better at - at least in a real-time environment.
For the brawling game, as one example, my co-worker and I discovered that the simplest way to scale the difficulty was to delay reaction time. However, without cheating at all, we couldn't program the AI to be as good as a good human player despite our best efforts. The problems of basic navigation planning and situational awareness (we had very complex environments to navigate) are vastly more complex than most people give credit for. Most of all, humans are really good at instantly adapting, and this is something that most AI systems are still fairly bad at. Also, it's also the kind of thing that's really easy to talk about and describe, but hard to actually implement in an actual, honest-to-god game that has real constraints, such as a shipping date and CPU budgets (it's gotten easier lately with modern multi-core processors, but there were some serious challenges writing AI on a PS2).
In the case of the shooter, the thing I had to tone down was, of course, the bot's accuracy. I solved that issue by putting a target attached to a virtual spring on the player. The aim vector was affected by these springs, so sudden, unpredictable motion would tend to throw off the aim similar to a human. The human still had a vast advantage in navigation (our game had jumpjets, which were a nightmare to code the AI to use correctly).
Oh, and in all the games I've worked on, one of the most important parts of the AI is to leave a small amount of randomization in the system. Nothing fools the player into thinking there's some deep, sophisticated AI than the occasional random decision that just happens to work out brilliantly. It can work the other way as well, so you have to constrain it, of course.
I haven't worked on an RTS AI, but I'd imagine that true tactical awareness is an incredibly difficulty thing to code for such a system. I'll agree with you: I'd imagine the Blizzard AI coders made deliberate decisions to have the AI play as close to humans as possible, not taking advantage of key elements, such as parallelism or raw speed. That sort of computer advantage just isn't fun to compete against.
Of course, I can do that at home too, but you know what I mean.
Don't worry, we'll be looking into that little loophole soon enough.
Love,
Your Nanny-State Govt.
There's a chance the Gates foundation may very well be funding this (or similar projects), as global eradication of malaria seems to be one of their causes.
Also, on the Wikipedia article I read regarding the elimination of infectious diseases, it appears some drugs are actually donated by "Big Pharma". I have no idea how widespread that practice is though.
It's a series of shooter-type games created by a lone Japanese developer. And because it's Japanese, there are apparently lots of cute Anime-style girls involved somehow. No idea beyond that.
My guess is that this would be an additive to a normal malaria immunization shot. So, when an immunized human is bitten by any mosquito, that mosquito also becomes immune to becoming a malaria carrier as well. It's a neat way to piggyback a secondary immunization strategy onto an infrastructure required for primary immunization. It would make that single immunization more effective than it otherwise would have been.
Sure, if you can immunise all the malaria sufferers, it'd be neat-o - end of disease. However with all the time and resources you need to do that - not to mention that the guy is going to die anyway - is it really worth it?
I consider wiping out a deadly disease to be a pretty good long-term investment for humanity. Maybe you don't feel the same way.
The mosquitoes are immunized by biting the humans.
The next question was how to get the mosquitoes to pick up the antigen. Since it is easier to get people to take injections than it is to find mosquitoes, the answer was to allow people to transmit it to mosquitoes when they bite. The antibody itself doesn't protect against malaria, but when a mosquito bites a treated person, the parasite can no longer use the mosquito's gut to reproduce.
a lot of the reason they've done well over the years is understanding how glacially slow businesses can move and keeping software functional long after its natural expiry date.
See, that's the thing about businesses. They don't understand why software should have an expiration date. And honestly, I have to agree with them to some degree. Case in point: my parents' business is using a custom piece of software written specifically for their business. It's a DOS app, and was created a little under two decades ago. The thing is, all their people know how to use it and it does the job well enough. In fact, it works better on more modern OSes than on the original DOS machines (who remembers Lantastic networks?). Why should they spend a huge amount of money upgrading to a modern system? It's not like the code degrades over time, right?
It's easy for us as developers to froth about people using decades-old software, because we live and breathe in the high-tech, shiny NOW of technology, but to businesses, software is just a tool, no more exciting than a copy machine. They just want the technology to work and stay out of the way of their actual job.
Yeah, I agree with your post, right up until you talk about being "stuck" on Windows 7 and IE 8. If we're going to be honest, most of the crap people are dealing with is because of poor coding standards which were allowed (and encouraged, in fact) by previous versions of operating systems and browsers (for instance, users running as an admin by default). I'm not sure about the browser side of things, but I do know a bit about Windows development. If you write an app for Windows today and follow best practices, there's nothing that prevents your app from moving forward. For the most part, Microsoft is really good at preserving backward compatibility, which is why businesses love them. In this particular case, they happened to screw up pretty badly, and everyone except the devs who originally shat out these crappy IE apps are paying the price.
It's a shield in the same way we're "shielded" from tsunamis and hurricanes by coordinated early-warning systems. That's essentially what they're describing, near as I can tell from the article.
Oh, and BTW, since when is a physical shield the epitome of high-tech? Don't you watch Star Trek?
After all, when we're playing a game of baseball (right, right, I know, this is slashdot), and a ball is coming towards us, we aren't calculating in our heads the velocity, air resistance and other variables involved in catching the ball. We just reach out our arms and our brain makes its best guess based on some sort of heuristic or something to make the catch.
You should read "On Intelligence" if you're at all interested in that subject. Jeff Hawkins (Palm inventor) proposes a fascinating theory of the inner workings of the brain.