They finally started using the Osprey in a combat situation…http://edition.cnn.com/2007/US/04/13/osprey/How long has it been in development? This was one of 4 helicopters in an old DOS game that I played often. LHX. It was released in 1990. 17 years after it is developed and used in a game, they finally deploy it to some combat situation.Thank you, government, for not getting into health care.

Would you be shocked to hear that it might very well be the generosity and goodness of most Americans that could be keeping third world countries impoverished? I’m about to make that point, and how the old statement about all those good intentions being bricks on the road to hell just might be true. Here’s 3 scenarios. 1. A bunch of students hear that slavery is still practiced in many third world countries.

Penny Arcade, in their latest news post, berated Gamestop for their practice of selling used games. I’ve a bit of a mixed opinion about this. Hopefully I can explain it clearly. The used game market is absolutely essential to gaming today. Games are only printed for so long and they go out of stock pretty quickly. Some game shops only sell a subset of the games released, so you never end up getting the game in your area even if you want it new.

They limit it to the ability to sacrifice for the greater good (Link Dead) but I can see how certain people will see this part of the brain as an impediment to their goals. The ability to sacrifice yourself and your children for the greater good is a trait to be commended in socialistic and communistic societies. It’s what they’re founded on. This part of the brain is responsible for thoughts of the rights of the individual.

This review, of 300 (LInk Dead) has made me want to see it when I had no interest in the movie at all before. If the euro critics think it’s bad because it is too american and jingoistic, then it has to be good. ;)I’m sure these same eurocritics gave An Inconvenient Truth a high score solely because of its politics as well.

Only 2 weeks after finishing Suikoden 3, I’ve also polished off Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana. It’s a fun little game, but it’s also not nearly as serious as the other games I’ve been playing lately. 2d sprites, 2d backgrounds, 3d overworld maps. A very simple RPG. I got a ton of the items in the game and did quite a few sidequests. It’s worth a play if you don’t mind the dated style of graphics.

Instead of left and right media this time, it’s pro-sony and anti-sony media. Two stories that seem completely contradictory until you look deeper. In this case, it’s 2 stories on each side.Anti-sony,http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/156082/sony_playstation_3_preorders_begin.html(Link Dead)Pro-Sony,(Link Dead)(Link Dead)So, which is it, are the PS3 preorders the fastest ever, or are they very slow like the article with the snail suggests?The anti-sony articles touch on this very lightly, the second more than the first, but the real story is likely that Sony has just allocated far more consoles than either Nintendo or MS to europe.

I had a thought today when going through my email. The perfect way to pass messages undetected would be to pass them in a form that people normally delete and disregard out of habit. Spam! Pass messages by encoding them in spam. Spam already has random artifacts in it, letters altered from what they would normally be. All you have to do is find a technique to modulate those artifacts and interpret them on the other side.

Took long enough, but I finally polished off Suikoden 3. I guess it’s a tribute to my limited time that it’s taken me 6 months to finish. It was one of the first games I rented on Gamefly, and the first one I purchased and set out to complete. After doing all of the chapters with all 6 main characters, I’m sitting at 82 hours. I feel I’m missing out on some of the inside jokes in the game however.

With the fluorescent debate in another person’s LJ, I did a bit of research on if Luxeon soft-white LEDs could be an alternative to the somewhat annoying CFB’s that have been pushed recently. I’m discovering though that they’re somewhat lackluster in the energy savings and cost department. A Luxeon 3300k 1watt bulb puts out 20 lumens. According to Wikipedia, 40 and 60 watt incandescent bulbs put out 500 and 850 lumens respectively.