Too Much Bad News? Here's A Roundup of Games, for Distraction

Over at C|Net, there is a handy round-up of upcoming computer games. My current favorite is BioShock, and BioShock Infinite is a first person shooter where you assume the persona of former Pinkerton agent Booker DeWitt. He is assigned to investigate the flying city of Columbia -- a rescue mission to save Elizabeth, who has been imprisoned since childhood. A thematic storyline and cool abilities to unlock make this a good distraction.

My current favorite board game is Carcassonne, which, surprisingly, doesn't use dice. Players draw tiles out of a bag (the random factor) to build out a 16th century French countryside, and build cities and roads. Each tile might feature a city, a road, a monastery, plains or some combination. They are placed adjacent to tiles that have already been played, in such a way that cities are connected to cities, roads to roads, until all tiles are places. Players get points, and the player with the most when all tiles are placed, wins. Here's a video of game play.

Intellectual property and file sharing co-habitation re-think needed

As this ZDNet opinion rightly points out, file sharing and copyright infringement are not synonymous. Kim Dotcom

deserves the protection of New Zealand's legal system; the case against him is muddled, and a rush to extradite him to the U.S. was ill-thought-out. Even if he broke some U.S. laws, Kim Dotcom's mega site may not even be about theft, as the New York Times points out.

In the middle of the 20th century, criminal law reformers were sufficiently annoyed by all of this specialization and ad hoc-ness that they decided to do something about it.

In 1962, the prestigious American Law Institute issued the Model Penal Code, resulting in the confused state of theft law we’re still dealing with today.

In a radical departure from prior law, the code defined “property” to refer to “anything of value.” Henceforth, it would no longer matter whether the property misappropriated was tangible or intangible, real or personal, a good or a service. All of these things were now to be treated uniformly.

Before long, the code would inform the criminal law that virtually every law student in the country was learning. And when these new lawyers went to work on Capitol Hill, at the Justice Department and elsewhere, they had that approach to theft in mind.

Then technology caught up.

The NYT presents a pretty clear thesis: "...stop trying to shoehorn the 21st-century problem of illegal downloading into a moral and legal regime that was developed with a pre-20th-century economy in mind. Second, we should recognize that the criminal law is least effective — and least legitimate — when it is at odds with widely held moral intuitions."

Atlantis final mission

End of an era - the space shuttle Atlantis is to be decommissioned after completing its latest mission STS-132. The shuttle launched on May 14, 2010, returning on May 26, 2010.

The shuttle was originally a pretty cool idea then co-opted by the military-industrial complex (i.e., the air force and intelligence community). As a 'limited reuse' vehicle, the program has been the U.S.'s sole foothold in space for quite some time. With no replacement even on the drawing board, i suspect my children won't be witnessing much more in the way of cool American ingenuity.

Heros - in short supply these days. Sigh.