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First lady launches contest for healthy kids games
By DARLENE SUPERVILLE, Associated Press Writer Darlene Superville, Associated Press Writer
ARLINGTON, Va. – First lady Michelle Obama challenged software and video game designers Wednesday to develop games and tools that get kids, especially 9- to 12-year-olds, excited about eating better and exercising more.
The carrot? A chance to share in $40,000 in cash prizes.
The Apps for Healthy Kids contest is part of Mrs. Obama's "Let's Move!" campaign to raise public awareness about the national problem of childhood obesity. One in three U.S. children is overweight or obese, putting them at higher risk of developing diabetes, high blood pressure or other medical conditions.
Mrs. Obama said kids spend an average of seven and a half hours a day watching TV or playing with computers, video games or other devices.
"Maybe you've seen those dance video games or those exercise games that families are playing together at home, or the ones that kids play using their mobile phones and home computers?" she said at the national Parent Teacher Association conference. "Those are the kinds of games that we're talking about."
A second set of prizes will be awarded for tools designed to help parents make better food choices for their children.
"So if, for example, you're at the grocery store and you're trying to figure out whether one food is healthier than the other, then you can pull up that answer on your iPhone," Mrs. Obama said.
The contest will be run by the Agriculture Department. A panel of judges, including Apple, Inc., co-founder Steve Wozniak, will determine the winners. Entries must be submitted by June 30.
Mrs. Obama also said she will meet next week with food manufacturers to discuss her campaign.
Source: Yahoo News
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US military to step up video-game training
WASHINGTON (AFP) – The US military plans to step up the use of video-games, hoping to curb casualties on the battlefield by training troops through simulations, a commander said Wednesday.
The Pentagon this week approved a plan to direct an unspecified amount of funding into research on how to benefit from the game industry's advances, said General James Mattis, head of the US Joint Forces Command.
Noting that the infantry suffered 80 percent of US casualties since World War II, Mattis said simulations aimed to put troops through "as many tactical and ethical challenges as we can before they go into their first firefight."
"I've been in a lot of fights, and this isn't scientific, but I'd say ... half the casualties I've seen on our side were for silly, stupid reasons," Mattis, a Marine infantryman, told the House Armed Services Committee.
"If we can put people through simulation, it's not so they know one way to take down an enemy stronghold, but so they know five different ways to do it," he said.
Mattis, whose command is involved in training and innovation, said that defense planners have worked through the ethical dilemmas of video-game simulations.
"We will still have to do live fire training. It won't give us a risk-free environment," he said.
"But I'm convinced, both ethically and casualties-wise, we can reduce the missteps that we are taking on the battlefield, and reduce them significantly," he said.
The US military already develops the war simulation "America's Army," which has become a best-selling video-game and is credited with helping recruitment for the nearly 1.5 million-strong US armed forces.
But so-called "militainment" has plenty of detractors, who worry that new recruits accustomed to pressing reboot on a machine will not fully appreciate life-and-death decisions on the battlefield.
Writing in the latest issue of Foreign Policy magazine, Brookings Institution senior fellow P.W. Singer said that simulations can be "potentially revolutionary" by adjusting to individual learners' pace and saving millions of dollars that would go to live training.
But he wrote that there were concerns that simulations would make the nature of war fuzzier, particularly at a time when the US military is increasingly relying on unmanned drones.
Source:
WASHINGTON (AFP)
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4 Free WiFi Sites That Show Hotspot Locations Near You
Imagine you would not have to go to work to work. Imagine you could work from home, from a nearby cafe, from the park, or from the beach somewhere far away. In other words, imagine you were free to work from anywhere.
This scenario is becoming increasingly real. Many people work in jobs that don’t rely on their physical presence since they can complete and submit their work electronically. Thus, they are free to work wherever they want. An essential ingredient for this freedom is wireless LAN or WiFi.
Besides, having access to the internet from anywhere is nice to have, even if you don’t need it for work. This article covers free WiFi sites that allow you to find hotspot locations near you.
This directory lists over 30,000 hotspots worldwide. The most prominent locations are Europe and North America with over 10,000 hotspots each. Not all of the listed hotspots are free.
To locate free WiFi locations near you, use the search form, where you can select your country and enter your state, city, or ZIP code. You can also specify an operator and the type of place you’re looking for, i.e. park or internet cafe. To find only free wifi hotspot sites and locations, be sure to tick the respective box!
The search form also provides a link through which you can browse all cities.
Do you crave for a cafe that serves delicious coffee, offers free WiFi, and a power plugin for your laptop? Then you need to have a look at LaptopFriendlyCafes.com. Here you will find a list of places that offer the full service.
So far, their collection contains over 300 cafes, with most being situated in the cities London, New York, and Sydney.
If you know another one anywhere in the world, please go ahead and submit it.
Do you have an iPhone? Get their iPhone app to spot cafes close to where you currently are.
Continue...
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Amazon cuts off Colo. affiliates because of tax
DENVER – Amazon.com Inc. cut ties Monday with Colorado online businesses that help it sell products because of a new state law aimed at getting out-of-state, online retailers to collect sales tax.
The move hurts businesses — many of them small, home-based operations — that earn money by using their Web sites and blogs to link customers to online retailers. Colorado has at least 4,200 such businesses, known as affiliates or associates, accounting for about 5,000 jobs, and most of them rely on Amazon to some degree, according to their trade group, the Performance Marketing Association.
The group's executive director, Rebecca Madigan, said some get only about 10 percent of their revenue from Amazon but others are totally reliant on it.
Colorado's largest affiliate, ShopAtHome.com, works with 5,000 online merchants and will be able to recover from the lost business, president Marc Braunstein said. But many "mom and pop" affiliates will suffer.
"There are a lot of people who are going to be hurt, and that's a shame," Braunstein said.
In an e-mail to affiliates, Amazon said the new sales tax regulations, which took effect last week, were burdensome and unlike rules in any other state. An Amazon spokeswoman declined to elaborate.
The company previously cut off affiliates in two other states that passed online sales tax laws, Rhode Island and North Carolina. Those states said online retailers had a presence there through affiliates and therefore had to pay sales tax. At the urging of affiliates, Colorado lawmakers took a different approach that attempted to leave affiliates out of the fight.
The law here says retailers can either collect sales tax or send customers an annual statement telling them how much they spent and how much sales tax they should pay the state on their own. The state would be able to force retailers to turn over customer sales records to enforce the law.
Democratic lawmakers, including Gov. Bill Ritter, criticized Amazon for cutting off affiliates, with some calling it "corporate bullying." They said Amazon will still be on the hook to either collect the tax or tell their customers to pay it.
"They've done nothing here but spit in our face," Senate Majority Leader John Morse said.
Braunstein said he was also puzzled by the move and wondered if the company was trying to make some kind of point.
Republican lawmakers, who opposed the online sales tax bill and other tax hikes to balance the budget, criticized Democrats for pushing ahead with it.
"It's exactly what we said would happen. They're going to put people out of work. It's a game of chicken with people and their jobs, and they lost," said House Minority Leader Mike May, R-Parker.
Sen. Greg Brophy, R-Wray, said lawmakers should move to repeal the law.
"Their actions have had real-life consequences for real-life Colorado citizens," he said.
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Associated Press writer Steven K. Paulson contributed to this report.
Source: Yahoo News
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