Word: booms
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...when you walk in front of the thing and it immediately recognizes your face and logs you in. Very Star Trek. A few months ago Microsoft demoed Project Natal for Steven Spielberg, who in addition to directing movies designs video games, including Medal of Honor and the Wii title Boom Blox. He's one of the few movie people who really gets games as an insider, and Microsoft was looking for his blessing. He gave it. "The technology recognized me as a full person," he says. "It identified me, my legs, my arms, all of my movements, not just...
...that boggle the mind. In late March, for example, the government began soliciting bids for the Hong Kong - Zhuhai - Macau highway, a bridge-and-tunnel complex 16.5 miles (26.6 km) long that will allow connections among 35 ports in the Pearl River Delta, the cradle of China's economic boom. When completed in 2015, the $10 billion project will cut driving time from Hong Kong to the industrial area of Zhuhai from about four hours to just 30 minutes...
Graft was rife in construction projects long before the current downturn. "Public spending is already subject to considerable siphoning off and, perhaps even more critically, waste," says Andrew Wedeman, a political scientist and Chinese-corruption expert at the University of Nebraska. During the boom years, such waste mattered less because growth was so robust. But if China's GDP expands only 6% to 8% this year, as some predict, corruption could dampen recovery. "What really matters is not if funds will be siphoned off or how much will be siphoned off," Wedeman says, "but rather whether the siphoning will have...
...changed people, even as we revert to age-old patterns. (This season on 24, Jack Bauer sounded ambivalent about torture but roughed up people anyway.) The zeitgeist makes convenient wrapping to repackage the same sitcoms, hospital dramas and game shows: what was "comfort food" after 9/11, "optimism" in boom times and "inspiration" after Hurricane Katrina is "escapism" today...
...demand plummeting, driving world oil prices down to $10 a barrel. "If we run out of storage it could prompt a collapse in the price," says Wardell. Oil producers might then choose to dramatically cut output in order to run down the surplus. (See pictures from Azerbaijan's oil boom...