Fear not, fine citizens- no matter what your ailment, affliction, or illness, there’s a drug for you! You can just swallow one of these magical little pills and watch all your problems fade away…if you can even remember your name through the drug induced mirage.

What is it that drives Americans to find bottled up solutions for all of our problems? Over at Wired, John McHugh discusses this very issue in reference to Charles Barber’s book, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry is Medicating a Nation. Mr. Barber acknowledges that there are indeed times when medication is necessary, but also implies an increasing trend of unnecessarily prescribed drugs.

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It could redefine our conception of space and time, open a gateway into alternate dimensions, and even put an end to all existence as we know it– and no one’s even talking about it. It may prove itself as the most important contribution to particle physics (perhaps even modern science) since the beginning of mankind, but the information is available only to those who seek it out.

Coming May of this year, experiments are slated to begin within the confines of the world’s largest particle accelerator. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), appropriately a product of the world’s largest particle physics laboratory (the European Organization for Nuclear Research [CERN]), is a seventeen mile (27 km) long particle accelerator nestled 100 meters underground between the Geneva airport in Switzerland and the Jura mountains north of the Alps. The LHC will utilize about 5,000 of what CERN calls “huge superconducting magnets” to accelerate protons to unprecedented speeds, closer than ever to the speed of light. The goal? Every scientist’s dream, of course: smash ‘em together!

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I have mentioned before that I try to remain relatively neutral in the Apple/Microsoft battle. I dual boot XP and OS X on a MacBook (via Boot Camp), own two iPods, built a mid-range gaming PC with Vista (specs below), and am happy as a cow at a pig roast.

I have been a Windows fan since Workgroups 3.11, and became a proponent of OS X only recently, after purchasing a MacBook. Now, almost a year after its release, I am truly hard-pressed to bash Vista. I am far from being a fan-boy and will admit that as an operating system Vista certainly has its shortcomings; however, in my personal experience this has been Microsoft’s most stable off-the-shelf release. Perhaps it’s because my hardware is up to snuff, none of my software is dated, and I have tweaked and optimized my system to ensure smooth performance…or perhaps it’s because Vista, for me, is merely a means of accessing WoW and Orange Box. Also worth an honorable mention, CS3 runs like a dream. Read the rest of this entry »

Ladies and gentlemen, we have broken the threshold for tolerable stupidity. The latest news in the media pilgrimage to cut down the gaming industry comes in the form of two teens allegedly practicing moves they learned from the game Mortal Kombat, inadvertently killing a seven year old girl. From Associated Press:

Lamar Roberts, 17, and Heather Trujillo, 16, were charged as adults on one count each of felony child abuse causing death…According to a police affidavit, the teens were baby-sitting Trujillo’s half-sister, Zoe Garcia, on Dec. 6 while the girl’s mother was at work. Zoe lost consciousness and stopped breathing after the teens hit, kicked and body-slammed her, imitating moves used in the video game, the document said.

Trujillo and Roberts tried reviving the girl by putting her under running water and attempting CPR before they called her mother and 911, the affidavits stated. The girl died at a hospital.

An autopsy showed she had a broken wrist, more than 20 bruises, swelling of the brain, and bleeding in her neck muscles and under her spine, the affidavits said.

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Once upon a time, the word “monopoly” referred to a harmless board game. Actually, I would imagine the word came first, then the board game… In either case, the scenario is the same - market takeover. The recent Activision and Vivendi merger shows us that no industry is exempt from the reach of capitalism (just in case EA’s undefeated trek of growth through acquisition hadn’t convinced you); and while technically a monopoly eliminates opposition and offers a strictly single-seller marketplace, this news comes as clairvoyant insight of a bleak future. I get a bit watery-eyed just thinking of all the blood, sweat, and tears ‘mom & pop’ game developers and publishers, now void in a world succumb to sweat-shop produced games: just imagine thousands of innocent third-world foreign children packed in warehouses, overworked and underpaid, programming away into the wee hours of morning over obsolete workstations. OK, not exactly…but this is still huge. From DailyTech:

With the combined forces of Activision and Vivendi, Activision Blizzard is expected to have approximately $3.8 billion in pro forma combined calendar 2007, potentially overtaking EA with the highest operating margins of any major third-party video game publisher.

Let’s just hope we don’t see some sort of hack & slash cost-cutting routine (there’s a pun in there somewhere), because that’s when the consumer loses. Oh, and on a side note– Activision Blizzard?? Are they serious? $3.8 billion in a calendar year makes them the new powerhouse in interactive entertainment and the best name they can come up with is Activision Blizzard? Nice, throw a few to marketing for that one.