Dueling Fools: Ctrip.com
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Take the trip out of Ctrip, and let's C what you get.
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"The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture" by Andrew Keen; Currency ($22.95)  ___  Andrew Keen is an unhappy man.
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Tycho:  Having played collectible card games since the original printing of Magic - taking my dishwasher's tips across the street to Dragon Tails to secure boosters for the coveted Arabian Nights - seeing Gabriel take up the pastime has warmed (but not thawed) my black heart.  It's always a portion of myself I've bridled in his presence, kept hidden, suppressed may be the word.  To have him take it up so freely makes me wonder which perversion of mine he'll take up next.    When he started talking about his "Firestarter" deck, whose dancing fires were stoked by a mysterious device known as "The Holon Engine," I began to worry.  The dangers of Netdecking are fairly substantial when it comes to friendly play, a corrosive force that turns friendly pick-up games into ostentatious displays of wealth on par with rap videos.  If you're playing in a competitive venue, building on prior art and making loads of precision purchases is probably your only recourse.  But if you're just playing at lunch, let me be clear:  you are consorting with devils.    I took time over the weekend to hit the level cap in Call of Duty 4, and then just to be sure that I understood what was going on I played for several more hours.  I'm not the most skilled player you will encounter, with a roughly equal number of kills and deaths, but I prefer to think of my work in an assassinative context - the removal of key players at key moments.  Please let me have this.  In the absence of the game's deeply integrated progression scheme, Infinity Ward would merely have created one of the best shooters available today.  It would have staunch proponents, and they would be right to praise it.  Is there a substance within cream that can rise to the top of itself?  This substance has been discovered.  As a distillation of the Infantry FPS, this is right down to it.  This is brutal, unrepentant, bathtub fucking hooch.  It is tight and smooth, it is lethal.  Unrelenting in its intensity, your first rounds - indeed, your first few levels - will be spent without the succor of CoD4's rich rewards for continued play.  But you'll see them on the killcam, every time you go down:  this one has increased health, of course that would help.  This one does more damage.  This one, after he's killed, pulls his sidearm and takes a few final shots.  This one's shots retain more of their damage after they pass through a wall.        You earn these for leveling up, with the experience you gain for every kill, for every round.  You also earn experience for Challenges, which are (collectively) "awesome things that you did."  I completed X-Ray challenges last night for killing people behind walls, which dished up bonus XP - this is displayed with exultant audio and video cues at the very moment of success.  Killing while crouched, killing while prone, taking down an enemy helicopter, this is all gravy.  There are challenges specific to your weapon, as well:  for kills and headshots with that firearm, you travel down an upgrade path unique to that weapon that reveals sights, camouflage patterns, and other tools to customize your equipment.    Watching videos of multiplayer play online, you'll get the impression that it looks better than it does.  It looks fantastic, don't get me wrong, but it's not completely photorealistic.  What it does have is an extremely reliable framerate and excellent level design, so that during the experience of play these fantastic visuals are transmuted into something sublime.  Here's what I mean:  if a friend is over, and they are watching you play, they'll be able to detect flaws here and there.  Level geometry isn't especially fanciful, and blown paper or leaves look a little strange.  But for the player, movement is just right, player models are just right, and the environments are right so that moment to moment everything gels.      As I said on Friday, to bring this thing into the house of Halo is pretty ballsy - but it'll carve out its proper due.  On the Playstation 3, what force could stand against it?  I have a high opinion of Haze, but I've never played it - that's based mostly on my gut.  Call of Duty 4 will fall hard on that system, like shrieking artillery.
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Headed in the wrong direction A disgruntled Reg&lt;/e&gt; reader got in touch with us because he'd unwittingly bought some counterfeit X-box games on eBay.â¦
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Two unlikely foes have launched a mock feud to be waged in a sea of green.
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Spam makes sense. Sure, most of it reads like filthy gibberish. But the authors of this dreck are not semi-literate perverts. They're cool, rational business folk who have found a sleazy but effective way to make a buck.
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Plus: Geek squad comes to the rescue. [News.com Extra]
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Tycho:  When I started reading articles about Senator Brownback's bill - the one that would require that the ESRB play through games in their entirety - I expected to agree with it in principle, but take issue with its execution.  The shrill phase of the site, where I would don armor and ride under the aegis of the true gamer no matter how mild the incentive, now rests in the reliquary with Xbox Controller Jokes and Jabs At User Friendly.  I had chosen a singularly poor moment to become reasonable.  Upon further examination, the Senator's plan (which I think may be rightly called a machination) is the sort of thing one might forge in the fires of Mount Doom.
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Plus: Taxicab chats threatened by technology. [News.com Extra]
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By Tom Angleberger   tomangleberger@yahoo.com
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A Japanese firm pioneers a system to share fragrances over the internet.  Also: A Bollywood movie makes its debut on cell phones & hellip;. Merck smarting from Vioxx pull & hellip;. and more.
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Time Warner pays to settle securities fraud charges. Also: The FCC says yes to wireless internet for airline passengers & hellip;.  Google wins trademark lawsuit against Geico & hellip;. and more.
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I spent much of this afternoon in a mandatory (for poll workers) four hour training class on the Hart InterCivic eSlate voting system, soon to be in use in elections in my home county. (Hart InterCivic is a privately held firm out of Houston, specializing in election equipment and in software products for county records offices). Contrary to my previous impression, the machines are not touch screen machines, although they share some similarities.  I went into the class skeptical; I have been a critic of what I percieve as an unseemly rush to adopt insecure electronic voting systems. I emerged guardedly optimistic; the systems appear, from what I can tell, to be reasonably secure against vote manipulation by people who are not part of the election staff, and they appear to provide approximately the same level of security against election office malfeasance that paper ballots do. At the end of the day, if the election staff wants to tamper, they can; but that was true with paper ballots as well. That risk can be mitigated by election office procedures intended to mitigate it; in San Mateo County's case, those procedures have in some important regards not yet been established, as I will discuss below.
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While rappers lick standard-issue grapefruits Comments Monks at the Shaolin Temple in China were so incensed by an assertion by a Japanese internet user that a single ninja had once laid the smackdown on their greatest that they have deployed a feared warrior lawyer (presumably trained to an equally high standard in both law and arse-kicking). They have demanded that the internet user "apologise to the whole nation for the wrongs he or she did". We suggested a pay-per-view "Battle of the Titans" between the kung-fu monks and Japan's top ninjas. This is a match made in Heaven for the many thousands of you who daily debate the merits of the two sides, even if it does lack pirates.â¦
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Siblings are the first ever to be convicted for sending boatloads of junk e-mail pushing bogus products. Also: Microsoft takes MSN music download on a Euro trip....  Nokia begins legal battle against European counterparts.... and more.
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Opera CTO HÃ¥kon Wium Lie gives us a video tour of his OLPC prototype. Can you guess which browser it's running? In Monkey Bites. In Monkey Bites.
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Introducing The 404s, a contest to find the least informative military websites. Strike a blow for open government; win prizes. In Danger Room.