Ha! It's better than that! US debt ensures that all citizens in the World economy are on the hook. We're all dependent upon each other. This was made clear by the global market instability during this last recession. Mutually assured economic destruction - hopefully it'll be as successful as nuclear MAD.

We give away privacy to gain certain benefits. I work on code projects at coffee shops sometimes, instead of at home, despite the reduction in privacy. The benefit that I get is that I feel slightly more social, and I get to drink some good good espresso. Just because I choose to buy into the ridiculous game of corporate bs and use credit sensibly for all types of purchases does not make me a lemming. My fursuit does that just fine thankyou. Typed on my AndroidMegaCorp2000FancySchmantzPhone.

I agree with you vadim. If I was in this situation, for at least the first two weeks the idea that I could just quit and go back to everyday life at anytime would be at the top of my mind. There are few consequences to quitting in this situation, compared to those in a real mission. In a real mission you're completely committed both physically and mentally, in a fake mission it's a mental game.

Yeah, I remember the same sort of stuff from Usenet - where do they think RTFM came from? This question isn't even bad.

How many libraries of congress/libraries of congress is it?

Ha, I love this. My gut reaction is to call you delusional, but upon further inspection I must call you brilliant. Your Noam Chomsky quote is great too.

F--k... Bruce Perens? What the heck are you up to these days, man? Wait a second, I'll just click on your webpage and find out...

With all the /. users saying "this is going to be pointless," and "it's already easy enough as it is," this is sure to be a hit.

Red balloons really piss SkyNET off. You don't want to make SkyNET angry.

Yeah! Those jerks should get back to coding! I'm not paying them to goof off!

I didn't see this already mentioned, but the Wikipedia page on Aminoglycosides mentions that these aminoglycoside antibiotics are already being investigated to treat cystic fibrosis because of their ability to make a cell "skip" the "termination codon." It says that a compound called gentamicin does this. So, these drugs are already being investigated for similar purposes. Maybe that'll speed the approval/testing of these things for HIV! It seems like somebody must already have an idea of what kinds of side effects will be encountered. This sounds like some pretty awesome stuff...

I have new hope for Slashdot and the Internet in general.

I agree. I've seen one or two of these things before and it usually seems like it'll turn into more of a social playground than a training environment.

I can understand how this might allow med students to practice diagnosing something, but the OPs point about it being more valuable than resuscitating a dummy in real life seems way off. They will never be able to teach something that requires a specific physical action in a simulated world. For instance, you have to actually practice CPR on something that resembles a human in order to truly understand how to do CPR. You have to actually practice placing the defibrillator paddles on a human form, you can't just right click and select "defibrillate."

Now maybe if we had a Matrix-style brain jack...

I dream of the day that we see the article titled: "A Windows distro needing Linux to install?!?!"

This is great! I'm building some home automation hardware and wanted something to serve up control software webpages. For a little over a year I've been putting all my computers into sleep when I leave to conserve power and I was dreading going back to the old mode of operation. I considered modding my WRT54G to have a USB port-serial port, then adding a webserver, but this seems like the perfect solution.

Good timing!