In 2003 the nonprofit organization Child’s Play was created by gamers in response to wild accusations that video games only hurt children. The organization is dedicated to making a child’s visit the the hospital more comfortable by donating money and games to hospitals around the world. Many other examples of charitable organizations formed around video games include: Get Well Gamers and Fun for our Troops.
Here is an example of what can happen when games are introduced into what would otherwise be a somber situation, from ArsTechnica:
Ryan related a story about how he witnessed two young amputees—one missing the left hand, the other missing their right—joining forces to master the guitar in Rock Band. “One child strums with their one hand, and the other child frets with their one hand. It’s truly an amazing act, and they’ve gotten through songs on the Hard difficulty together! I can’t even finish most songs on hard!”
Filed under:Technology — posted by Q Ball on @ 1:15 am
The IOC has capitulated to the Chinese government over the censorship of the Internet for foreign reporters:
Jonathan Watts, president of The Foreign Correspondents Club of China, said he was disappointed that Beijing had failed to honor its agreement to temporarily remove the elaborate firewall that prevents ordinary Chinese from fully using the Internet. “Obviously if reporters can’t access all the sites they want to see, they can’t do their jobs,” he said. “Unfortunately, such restrictions are normal for reporters in China, but the Olympics were supposed to be different.”
This is why the IOC should have never agreed to let a country that is so obviously on the wrong side of human rights host the games. Although, maybe this will put the spotlight on China and the people of the world will realize that “free” citizens in China have access to less internet sites than do prisoners in the United States of America.
To purchase and activate iPhone 3G, you need the following:*
* Credit card
* Social security number
* Valid, government-issued photo ID
* Your current wireless account number and password or PIN (if you’re new to AT&T)
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Democrats who changed their votes on the new FISA bill received an average of $8,000 from Verizon, Sprint and AT&T. Will the public servants with real convictions please stand up? Check out the data at MAPLight.org
“To assume that [climate change] is a problem is to assume that the state of earth’s climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn’t change.”
Senator Chris Dodd has inserted into a new housing bill a requirement that all electronic payments be reported to the government.
Privacy groups like the Center for Democracy and Technology and small business organizations like the NFIB sharply criticized this idea when it first appeared earlier this year. What is the federal government’s purpose with this kind of detailed data? How will this database be secured, and who will have access?
In a paper published in the current issue of Science, a team at the company’s research centre in San Jose, California, said that devices which use the new technology would require much less power, would run on a single battery charge for “weeks at a time”, and would last for decades.
So-called ‘racetrack’ memory uses the ‘spin’ of an electron to store data, and can operate far more quickly than regular hard drives.
Researchers with Princeton University and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have found a flaw that renders disk encryption systems useless if an intruder has physical access to your computer — say in the case of a stolen laptop or when a computer is left unattended on a desktop in sleep mode or while displaying a password prompt screen.
Thats right. Miami Police are going to deploy hovering UAVs a la Dark Angel and Minority Report. Finally, something I can shoot down with my shot gun that PETA wont give me grief over.
England has just installed several cameras in a park that have speakers connected to them, so that operators may tell off people who are behaving in an “anti-social” manner.
“We are not in a police state, we are in a democracy and people understand we are doing it for their safety. This will help make these places safe.â€
Sounds like the beginning of a police state to me. It is the responsibility of each individual in this world to make sure they survive and live until the next day. In the very rare case that a person is attacked they must be ready to defend themselves. If nothing else, run away.
By the way on the scale of democracies England falls below the United States and if we in the US are not careful this could happen here.
University of Minnesota researchers created a beating rat heart in a laboratory by using the valves and outer structure of a dead rat’s heart as scaffolding for new heart cells injected from newborn rats.
Scientists should be able to grow a human heart by taking stem cells from a patient’s bone marrow and placing them in a cadaver heart prepared as a scaffold.
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“DRM Free” isn’t just a political statement, but a real consumer benefit: such files are compatible with virtually everything, any PC, Windows, Linux or Mac, and virtually any handheld, from iPods and iPhones to Sony PSPs and smartphones of all flavors. Suddenly the idea of branding those “unlocked” files started to make perfect sense.
CBS has put out a job listing for a new reporter to cover the environment, without any knowledge of the subject as a requirement.
Check here for the posting.
Planebuzz has a story on a passenger who was influenced by iPhone pilot/weather commercial…
“Some guy with an IPhone says the weather is good, and wants to know what the real reason is for the delay. Is something wrong with the plane?â€
So, the pilot gets on the PA and responds…
“If the passenger with the IPhone would be kind enough to use it to check the weather at our alternate, calculate our fuel burn due to being rerouted around the storms, call the dispatcher to arrange our release, and then make a phone call to the nearest Air Traffic Control center to arrange our timely departure amongst the other aircraft carrying passengers with IPhones, then we will be more than happy to depart. Please ring your call button to advise the Flight Attendant and your fellow passengers when you deem it ready and responsible for this multi-million dollar aircraft and its passengers to safely leave.â€
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On my first day of my new position as civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals dealt my previous employer, the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, a fantastic victory. The court’s ruling in Golan v. Gonzales is also a triumph for the First Amendment and for the overwhelming majority of creators.
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Check out this website in Germany. I was looking for an update to the sniffer I use called KisMac to make sure no one around me is trying to spoof the WiFi hotspot I’m using. They had to leave their country to avoid imprisonment.
MAPLight.org is a cool new website which tracks contributions given to politician alongside their voting records. The site also gives information on which companies or industries are in support of each bill. MAPLight does a great job of collecting all of the data into easy to read graphs that anyone can understand. There is also a function that allows a visitor to create a custom graph using any of the available data on the website.
