by James R. Berry, Contributor, Mechanix Illustrated
It’s 8 a.m., Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2008, and you are headed for a business appointment 300 miles away. You slide into your sleek, two-passenger air-cushion car, press a sequence of buttons and the national traffic computer notes your destination, figures out the current traffic situation and signals your car to slide out of the garage. Hands free, you sit back and begin to read the morning paper–which is flashed on a flat TV screen over the car’s dashboard. … You whiz past a string of cities, many of them covered by the new domes that keep them evenly climatized year round. Traffic is heavy, typically, but there’s no need to worry. The traffic computer, which feeds and receives signals to and from all cars in transit between cities, keeps vehicles at least 50 yards apart. There hasn’t been an accident since the system was inaugurated. Suddenly your TV phone buzzes. …
by Steve Boriss, Associate Director of the Center for the Application of Information Technology, Washington University
So, has New Media changed the way we select our presidential nominees? Has it fulfilled its promise to reduce the ability of the mainstream media and the political establishment to pick our candidates for us? It might not seem so. After all, the three remaining possibilities are all U.S. senators perennially embraced by Old Media. Moreover, mainstream media has been mocking conservative talk-radio hosts and bloggers for their inability to defeat McCain. But, a look beneath the surface reveals that finally, during this election cycle, New Media has seized control of the nominating process, probably forever.
Don’t think for a minute that Microsoft is ignoring the iPhone. In fact, the software giant is probing the gadget for profit opportunities. For a little more than a week, a team of the company’s Silicon Valley software engineers has been examining the iPhone software development kit (SDK for short), a set of tools Apple released this month that let outsiders build software for the iPhone and the iPod touch. Microsoft executives aren’t sure yet whether they’ll find worthwhile opportunities to sell iPhone software–but they seem eager to find out.
In real life, people rarely want to get into a firefight. But in many video games, particularly military-themed first-person shooters (FPS) like the just-released Rainbow Six Vegas 2, you can’t wait to step into the line of fire. After all, you’re an elite commando, and there’s no way not to fight–no button to press to call your nervous wreck of a wife or go hang out with the kids. It doesn’t matter how many bullets you take while gunning down whole platoons of terrorists and mercenaries, because this is red-blooded escapism at its geekiest. So shut up and start shooting, guys.
But unlike sci-fi FPS games such as Halo or Doom, military shooters have a tradition of so-called realism. Most of the in-game weapons are available now–or at least loosely based on designs that could eventually reach the likes of Iraq and Afghanistan. In other words, as optimistic as game developers might be about a high-tech replacement for the M-16 assault rifle, there are no plasma rifles or rail guns in your arsenal. … So as this successful genre continues to deliver best-selling titles, will increasingly powerful PCs and game consoles allow military shooters to become more realistic than ever?
by Warren Cohen, Contributing Writer, Rolling Stone
Wal-mart wants every CD you buy to cost less than 10 bucks. And the nation’s largest retailer–which moved a quarter of a trillion dollars’ worth of goods last year–usually gets its way. Suppliers who don’t accede to Wal-Mart’s “everyday low price” mantra often find their products bounced from the chain’s stores, excluded from being sold to the 138 million people who shop at a Wal-Mart store every week.
While most of us slept on the morning of March 19, hours before the death of famed science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke was announced, a shot rang out in the Universe the likes of which are unknown in human history. By a preliminary analysis, this object was visible to the unaided human eye in the constellation Bootes, and at an estimated 7.5 billion light years, it was the farthest object ever observable by the human eye in all of recorded history. In addition, it was 2.5 million times more luminous than the most luminous supernova ever recorded, making this event, according to a NASA news release, “the most intrinsically bright object ever observed by humans in the universe.”
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