The world is a weird place, and although I can see the military uses for this, can you imagine this in your living room. I mean, seriously, next it will be sim-drugs, maybe a helmet that makes you nuseau’s and similutes the sound of an ambulance coming to save you? who knows, but who’s seriously want to buy a computer game that delivered an electronic shock? even worse, I can see the mods now, with home brew variations that pump up the juice on the shock so as to risk even full cardiac arrest, or then again it would be just like having your own heart start machine, maybe the game can ship with a “rescue” disk which instructs users how to restart a heart? Bizarre…..

Sydney Morning Herald: “Coming soon: a PC combat game that shoots back“

A combat simulator developed for the US military that “shoots” back, delivering an electric shock strong enough to knock down players, could be the next big thing for home-computer games.

A Texas-based company, VirTra Systems, is selling the combat simulator to military and police forces around the world. Its spokesman, Steve Haag, said Australian armed forces had expressed an interest in getting one.

Players enter a platform with a 360-degree screen that shows scenarios such as freeing hostages, street gun fights, taking out suicide bombers and team attacks on enemy positions. And VirTra takes the simulations a step further by enabling the computer game to “shoot back”.

If a player fails to kill an enemy in time and the enemy is able to shoot back, the simulator delivers a powerful electric shock through the player’s hips. You definitely know you have been hit,” Mr Haag said. “It has the same power as a stun gun. It knocks you down.

“You have to continue to work through the pain and keep on fighting, as that is what you need to do – to keep on fighting even when wounded.

“You have to regain your composure, shake your head, and get back in the fight as your life and your unit’s life depends on it.”

There’s an old saying about avoiding politics and religion when you want to make friends, and I broke the second rule on the Blog Herald when I couldn’t help but take the piss out of a femenist mormon website. Naturally, Google’s Adsense provided a list of mormon sites in which to visit, and one struck my eye:

Free Delivery to the MTC
Send Hot, Fresh Krispy Kremes or other treats to your LDS Missionary
www.supportyourmissionary.com

That’s right, there’s a whole site set up to send doughnuts to mormon missionaries around the planet at $1 a pop! Hillarious! But if thats not enough, you can send M&M’s as well, perfect for keeping the extra wives sustained whilst in deepest darkest Africa!

Strange but true: it might be time to ban lawyers in the States:

“Denver Post: Two Durango teens thought they’d surprise neighbors with nighttime deliveries of home-baked treats. But one woman was so terrified, she sued and has won….Two teenage girls decided one summer’s evening to skip a dance where there might be cursing and drinking to stay home and bake cookies for their neighbors…Big mistake…They were sued, successfully, for an unauthorized cookie drop on one porch.”

From the state that gave the world Mormonism, comes an interesting tale

Murray school’s ‘cutest couple’ title awarded to lesbian pair: Salt Lake Tribune
Face it: politics aren’t pretty. They aren’t even cute. The “best of the seniors” election at Murray High is no exception. Hanging chads and confusing butterfly ballots were not the issue. But when two separate couples – including a lesbian pair – were told last week that they had clinched “the cutest couple” title, things turned ugly. “

Check out the pairs names though: bizarre in themselves.

This is very funny, take yourself back to 1983, throw on a dress and open your favourite teen magazine, and what do you see?
http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=272750&st=0&#entry585309992

Am I the only person on the planet who thinks that Microsoft launching an anti-spyware product is seriously f*cked up. I mean, if they just fixed up the holes in Windows and IE to start with, we wouldn’t need this product, would we.

http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx
The spiel: help protect your computer from unwanted spyware

I’ve got a better idea, piss Windows off and install Linux, or by a Mac. Hang on a sec, we cant because Microsoft monopolises nearly every piece of software on the planet, and yet warns people that Apple is becoming too dominate in music players…… hmmmm…..

Bizarre….

Wired: Wild animals seem to have escaped the Indian Ocean tsunami, adding weight to notions they possess a sixth sense for disasters, experts said Thursday.

Sri Lankan wildlife officials have said the giant waves that killed over 24,000 people along the Indian Ocean island’s coast seemingly missed wild beasts, with no dead animals found.

Being Australian and have a patchwork of scars on my back from the moles cut out due to cancer scares I know the stats in this Wired story but I don’t know until today if I upgrade from my regular radiant to the colour version (I think its about $1 extra for memory) I now get UV protect for my clothes. Bizarre yet useful.

The UV protection from Australia’s Radiant 3 in 1 Colour Care laundry detergent comes from a special UV-absorbing chemical compound called Tinosorb FD, which is made by Switzerland’s Ciba Specialty Chemicals. Tinosorb FD helps protect against both UVA and UVB radiation.

What will they think of next?
Phone booths resurrected for cell users: Fort Wayne Journal
“Phone companies have eliminated more than a million traditional pay phones in the past eight years, many of them in phone booths, according to the Federal Communications Commission. Now, some restaurants, libraries and other businesses are slowly bringing back phone booths, without the phone this time. Users bring their own mobile phone and can talk as loud as they want without bothering anybody else or being asked to step outside.”

I think the famous line went, First it was the jews, then the gays… or the like, but you get the context. This nutter from Alabama is trying to censor books that mention gay people, labelling them as gay propoganda. If the bill became law, public libraries couldn’t offer books with gay or bisexual characters. We are not talking porn here, but general books in a library. You will find few people who agree with the entire cotents of a library but its our freedom of speech that provides the diversity under which we maintain the right to choose what we like and read.

AL.com> An Alabama lawmaker who sought to ban gay marriages now wants to ban novels with gay characters from public libraries, including university libraries.

A bill by Rep. Gerald Allen, R-Cottondale, would prohibit the use of public funds for “the purchase of textbooks or library materials that recognize or promote homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle.” Allen said he filed the bill to protect children from the “homosexual agenda.”