Of course those actions appear petty. Petty is 99% of what Anonymous gets its kicks from. From abusing 12 year old girls (even if they kind of asked for it) to posting insulting comments about physically disabled people. The stuff like Project Chanology (the attacks on Scientology) was an aberration and really involved more non-Chan New Friends then it did Chan Old Friends, even though it started on the Chans. Anonymous originally got media attention for Habo Hotel/Second Life raids and harassing people on MySpace/Facebook.

Anonymous isn't your friend. Anonymous aren't moral crusaders. Anonymous are in it for the lulz.

Of course Anonymous has leaders. A leader is someone who inspires people to follow them. However those leaders normally aren't "defined" (ie have names, ranks, titiles etc) and arise out of the masses when someone feels strongly enough about an issue. There are plenty of people who organise outside the Chans on IRC etc and think themselves bigshots, but they have no more influence on Anonymous then any other anonymous poster*.

However if you lurk on the Chans enough, and spam your message enough, you will gain a following no matter how weak. But Anon will do anything, ranging from abusing 12 year old girls to tracking down animal abusers, if they find it amusing.

The problem the MiB types have is that they think that they can just identify a core group and remove them. That wouldn't stop the random chaos that Anonymous partakes in, because new "leaders" with new ideas for lulz would emerge.

The high profile hacking attacks aren't really "Anonymous" though, they are people who met on the Chans that decided to create more formalised groups with fixed agendas. Anyone can call themselves Anonymous, but the strength of the original idea relies on the Anonymous nature of Chan style image boards.

* Which is why I go to 4chan. It is interesting to have discussions without reputation and the like clouding the strength of an argument. On other forums you normally get insiders and outsiders and people react very differently to the same argument depending upon the screen name attached to it.

Actually you are wrong, the case of actual, give a kid a peanut and they die due to anaphylaxis, nut allergy has increased massively in recent times (and there are several theories as to why, from industrial pollutants to kids having hypersensitive immune systems due to lack of germs). People who are "peanut intolerant" etc are normally whackos, but nut allergy is increasing and can be shown in double blind conditions. Unlike "electromagnetic sensitivity".

Except it is being made by Starbreeze studio who did the brilliant Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butchers Bay game. In fact playing DXHR I was struck by how much it owed to Riddick, but really didn't live up to the physicality of the "take downs" and melee combat in that game. I was against this Syndicate FPS until I saw that it was by Starbreeze, now I can't wait to play it.

And people need to realise that this is the announcement that the game is almost finished. NOT THAT DEVELOPMENT IS STARTING NOW. This game would have been in development before anyone knew anything about DXHR.

Except this game was in development before DXHR was released. The summary makes it sound like the announcement that they are starting development but the actual article is that they are announcing it is almost ready. Modern games take 3-4 years to make unless you are just re-heating the same old stuff (aka Call of Duty). As I have already said it is more about the current major settings for FPS being tired out. WWII and Modern day FPS have been done to death.

I suspect you are wrong. What the issue would be is that NASA doesn't produce this stuff, it pays contractors to develop it. And those contractors have the rights to the processes involved and it isn't like preserved food is cool and futuristic any more. It has been a long time since preserved food was such a novelty that people would pay a decent mark up for it (in the 19th century rich people used to serve horrid tinned meats because they were a novelty).

Fruitcake is great if it is a cake with some fruit in it. But so many people make a "fruitcake" that is more compressed fruit and nuts then anything resembling a cake, and is only fit for display purposes.

I doubt the success of Deus Ex: Human Revolution played much of a role in the decision because it will be 3-4 years before this Syndicate game hits the market (DX:HR started development in 2007). The games industry isn't like Hollywood where you can churn out a movie in 6-months to a year to ride the coat tails of a blockbuster.

Rather I think the games industry has entered a nostalgic era where the 20 and 30 somethings are pining for the games of their youth (and instead getting FPS re-makes in the same setting) AND the modern combat FPS is getting really bloody stale. Going to something like Cyberpunk is a better option then Yet-Another-Modern-Combat-Shooter OR even worse a return to Yet-Another-WWII-Shooter (remember when modern day shooters were a refreshing change from repeatedly storming Normandy?).

Easy, new ideas are hard to come up with. It is far easier to steal someone else's idea and re-implement them. Hollywood makes plenty of re-makes of movies that would have little relevance to modern audiences, but the ideas behind them are still good (and the average studio executive has a hard time deciding what to have for lunch).

FPS is probably my favourite genre, but even I am annoyed that we seem to only have three major genres any more: FPS, RTS, and RPG/"Adventure". I love a good turn based strategy or RPG but they aren't made by major studios any more, and the indie versions don't live up to the late 90's games.

IMO the reason everything is being re-made as an FPS is because they sell so well on console. A bad FPS on console probably out sells any other game genre on PC. Consoles are just not good for the old school complex genres like XCOM and major publishers pretty much don't make PC only games any more.

The reason civilian casualties were so high in the initial years of Iraq is because the US military had been deliberately equipped and trained to fight conventional wars against ex-Cold War opponents. The US military had NO INTEREST at the highest levels in counter-insurgency or "small wars" as a result of Vietnam and Operation Gothic Serpent (aka Black Hawk Down). If you go back and look at Gulf War I the leading Generals tried to get their Arab partners to carry most of the load because they did not want to "get involved" and end up with another Vietnam (and all those guys were Vietnam vets, so they knew the reality). In the Balkans conflicts the US tried to limit its involvement to an air campaign only, despite such an approach probably increasing civilian casualties (as you don't have eyes on the ground to verify targets).

This led in the early 21st century to a military that was not equipped in the slightest to fight either a counter-insurgency OR fight in a way that limited civilian casualties. It was trained in the Cold War style where a commanders number one priority was carrying out the mission and keeping his troops alive, even if this meant dropping a 1000 pound bomb on a village with two snipers in it. In conventional war civilians have always got the worst of it, the various bombing campaigns of WWII mostly did no real military or industrial damage and just slaughtered civilians.

This is way so much of the direct fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan after the invasions fell to Special Forces units as they were trained for counter-insurgency and limited warfare. But Special Forces soldiers take a long time to train.

You can't take an 18 year old, give them 6 months to a year of basic infantry training, and expect them to be able to fight a counter-insurgency with low civilian casualties. Especially when, politically, every friendly casualty costs you more then a thousand foreign civilians dead, which is the reality of the modern media war.

Nope, because even crappy kits would be better then no-kits, whereas the Commodore and Amiga "come backs" didn't fill any gaps. I find it an indictment of Australian culture (and most other Western countries aren't that much different) that the main source of basic kits like crystal radios is dodgy Chinese copies with incomprehensible instructions.

These kinds of kits is how you get kids interested in engineering, and how you educate others on basic principles of the technology we rely on.

It is lucky DIY was only mostly dead for twenty years, because the effects if the gap had of been larger would have been the final blow in Western economies competing with Chinese ones.

Here in Australia you do get "some EE" knowledge through an electrical apprenticeships (I have been researching it recently because that is what I am trying to get into). However you don't need advanced calculus and physics to pull cable and wire junction boxes, and having a degree doesn't mean people will follow directions or work to the standard correctly either (just ask my Civil Engineer friend about architects).

I think apprenticeships are the superior training method for any work that doesn't involve just sitting in an office. Writing essays on the difference between the TCP/IP model and the OSI model doesn't prepare you for real work in networking.

P.S. There is a reason you get Data & Comms techs to run networking cable and not electricians.

The reason is probably because having a CS Major over qualifies you for most jobs in IT. CS is great if you are going to be designing and building systems, but most jobs in IT are maintenance. The problem is modern governments who think that they need to push more people to get degrees to have highly skilled high tech workers. That makes as much sense as requiring electricians to get degrees in electrical engineering.

Roman wars were generally cheap. At worst the Romans stood to lose some soldiers and their gear. The US and friends knew that they couldn't have a "real war" in Vietnam* and so tried to win with minimal man power** and throwing cash at the problem. In some battles in Vietnam the US dropped more bombs in a few weeks to months then fell on Germany in the entirety of WWII. Doing the war on the cheap also meant the US had to attempt a war of attrition instead of securing the country side and using normal counter-insurgency tactics. Unfortunately for the US and friends Ho Chi Minh and friends where willing to sacrifice every man, woman, and child in Vietnam to achieve victory.

* Due mainly to needing to keep large amounts of forces in Western Europe and not wanting to piss off the Chinese into doing Korea II.
** Refusing to declare a war meant enlistments couldn't be lengthened, which meant people rotated through units on an individual basis. This was devastating for morale and unit effectiveness.

Nothing of significance cause I guarantee you that AIDS and malaria research receives more money then one team investigating aspects of how our largest organ works.

Also accusing scientists of not doing "noble enough" research while screwing around on Slashdot is like a fat guy complaining about the form of a sprinter.