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POPSVirtual worlds carve out new path "The first step is to have virtual worlds as a common medium for ordinary people. It has to become far more ubiquitous, more like a toaster than a DVR," What virtual worlds do well is contextualise social encounters in a way that social networking cannot do, he thinks. "Without places it is hard to have activities. The bowling alley or the alcohol does not matter as much as the people but if you do not have the bowling alley or the alcohol it's just an empty room and no-one comes,"
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POPSGames and reality, Which affects which? on the other hand, "some biologists think the game could have educational value just by making users think about science, like an entertaining hook into evolutionary biology." "Ultimately, games are made to engage the people who play them. Provoking wonderment or debate is a good thing. Wright abstracts grandiose topics, and he does it well. Not enough game designers have the stones or the vision to try the same, which is why we get battered with endless versions of Madden NFL (also put out by Electronic Arts). In the end, that's also why Spore leaves such an impression. It's more than just fun. It's worth arguing about."
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POPSphotos from the 2008 Summer Paralympic Games in Beijing Click through for captions & explanations of the photos. I love how scarred & battered their chair wheels are in the photo of the wheelchair rugby players. It seems that rugby is rugby, regardless of how you play it. I have a feeling that their street wheelchairs have the classic bumper sticker: "GIVE BLOOD: PLAY RUGBY". :-)
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POPSPervasive games The IPerG researchers’ experimental pervasive games range, for example, from Insectopia, a kind of treasure hunt in which participants roam around a city collecting virtual insects from Bluetooth devices, to Epidemic Menace, a whodunit in which players try to stop a scientist from spreading a virtual virus in a real-world setting.
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POPSAn Olympic Stadium Worth Remembering More than 90,000 spectators will stream through its gates on Friday for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games; billions are expected to watch the fireworks on television. At the center of it all is this dazzling stadium, which is said to embody everything from China’s muscle-flexing nationalism to a newfound cultural sophistication.
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POPS'Muslim Massacre' video game (you couldn't make it up) article continues: But Mohammed Shafiq, chief executive of The Ramadhan Foundation, Britain’s leading Muslim youth organisation, said that the game glamorised violence against Muslims whether or not it was satirical. “Encouraging children and young people in a game to kill Muslims is unacceptable, tasteless and deeply offensive,” he said. “There is an increase in violence in this country and some of it comes from video games. When kids spend six hours a day on violent games they are more likely to go outside and commit violence. “If it was the other way around, with a game featuring Muslims killing Israelis or Americans, there would be uproar and rightly so. “We would urge ISPs to take action against sites like this.” The game was first released in January this year, but has become more popular in recent days after being linked to by several prominent blogs.
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POPSDizzler - All in 1 Mediaplayer Online - TOP!
Dizzler free downloadable application allows users to search online and play free music, videos, games, and radio stations on their desktop or mobile device. Our goal is to create a place where media creators and users can come together and share their passion. We want our members to be able to enjoy all of the free media content on the web as safely and easily as possible without any SPYWARE, ADWARE or storage constraints. All you need is access to the internet and our free media player. Where does the music, video and games come from? When you make a search, Dizzler only returns publicly available content from the Internet. Dizzler’s technology indexes and then encrypts in-line links to 3rd party websites that publicly host media using the same standards and practices as the major search engines (Google, Yahoo). This encryption prevents Dizzler users from accessing the actual paths to content in order to thwart inappropriate downloading, copying or sharing of files.
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POPSLifelike Animation Breakthrough AMD last week released a new chip with a billion transistors that will be able to show off creations such as Emily by allowing a much greater number of computations per second. "If you're trying to process the graphics in a photo-realistic animation, in real-time, there's a lot of computation involved," said Mr Koduri. He said that AMD's new chip - the Radeon HD 4870 X2 - was able to process 2.4 teraflops of information per second, meaning it had a capability similar to a computer that - only 12 years ago - would have filled a room. AMD's chip fits inside a standard PC. But he said that the line between what was real and what was rendered would not be blurred completely until 2020.
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POPSThe Return of the Robber Barons Another deceit is the measure called “core inflation.” This measure of inflation excludes food and energy, two large components of the average family’s budget. Wall Street and corporations and, therefore, the media emphasize core inflation, because it holds down cost of living increases and interest rates. In the second quarter of this year, the Consumer Price Index (CPI), a more complete measure of inflation, increased at an annual rate of 5.2 per cent compared to 2.3 per cent for core inflation. An examination of how inflation is measured quickly reveals the games played to deceive the American people. Housing prices are not in the index. Instead, the rental rate of housing is used as a proxy for housing prices. More games are played with the goods and services whose prices comprise the weighted market basket used to estimate inflation. If beef prices rise, for example, the index shifts toward lower priced chicken.
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POPSIndia's Goldfinger : Abhinav Bindra No individual gold has mattered so much to so many people in the history of Olympics... !!! i don't really understand the distant relation between India & the Olympics??
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POPSChina Goes Out With a Bang....... ........ and The Whimper of the Oppressed is Barely Heard........ I wonder, though, if anyone oohing and aahing over the fireworks in Beijing gave thought to the thousands of Chinese peasants who will die because their government took their water away so it could produce the fake beauty of the Olympic compound. Maybe we’ll see that story show up in an NBC news report, do you think? I’m sure the network will get right on that as soon as it gets up off its knees and straightens up its clothing.
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