The Economist and the Financial Times were all over this story two years ago - doing what everyone else does, picking up their science news from New Scientist on a Friday morning. The BBC can't even do that any more.
Maybe they just trawl old magazines when one of their three thousand News & Current Affairs staffers visits the dentist on a slow news day.
BTW, I thought that some WoW players were deliberately infecting pets and smuggling them out as plague bearers. Count that as one 'miss' in the BBC coverage. Another is that both pets and characters have long-term value in WoW, so you get a very different set of behaviours to more abstract 'what if' simulations where the operators aren't really players with an emotional investment in the outcomes.
I have stated this before: if you're interested in futurology and really disruptive ideas, start watching for something totally left-field coming out of either virtual worlds or MMORPG's. The virtual plague and its consequences fizzled out two years ago, but the potential of these networks for real-world modelling has been conclusively proven... And no, I don't think that's the Next Big Thing either. Sometimes, it's best not to be too specific in your predictions.
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The Economist and the Financial Times were all over this story two years ago - doing what everyone else does, picking up their science news from New Scientist on a Friday morning. The BBC can't even do that any more.
Maybe they just trawl old magazines when one of their three thousand News & Current Affairs staffers visits the dentist on a slow news day.
BTW, I thought that some WoW players were deliberately infecting pets and smuggling them out as plague bearers. Count that as one 'miss' in the BBC coverage. Another is that both pets and characters have long-term value in WoW, so you get a very different set of behaviours to more abstract 'what if' simulations where the operators aren't really players with an emotional investment in the outcomes.
I have stated this before: if you're interested in futurology and really disruptive ideas, start watching for something totally left-field coming out of either virtual worlds or MMORPG's. The virtual plague and its consequences fizzled out two years ago, but the potential of these networks for real-world modelling has been conclusively proven... And no, I don't think that's the Next Big Thing either. Sometimes, it's best not to be too specific in your predictions.