The Force Trainer

I had no idea that brain/computer research had advanced so far as to be ready to be marketed as a Star Wars game. Using just your mind you are suppose to be able to make the ping pong ball in the column rise and fall at will. I recently saw on 60 minutes how paralyzed people can operate computer cursors with only their mind but come on! Am I the only one freaked out about this. If a toy based on EEG machines is out there can you imagine what they got working in some secret underground government mountain science lab? They already trained this generation of fighter pilots and infantry grunts with video games - why wouldn't this be the next step? Train the next generation to operate equiptment from some hidden bunker in a battle with space aliens that the higher ups already know are coming? Reminds me of the Scott Orson Card book Ender's Game and we all know how well that turned out. There are some things man is not meant to mess with and I can totally imagine a scenerio where this gets out of control and some asshole with a god complex takes his skills and training off the reservation. Imagine the havoc someone like that could reak before they are brought down...IF they can be. Science fiction is not suppose to be science fact but I suppose that is inevitable. I feel like I am in the 1930s reading some pulp science magazine that predicts the coming of atomic weapons and moon launches. Combine this with the super secret whatevers that are allowing the Americans to make major gains in the 'war on terror' in Iraq (according to Bob Woodward) and we are entering a whole other level of scary.



"No, you're not tapping into some "all-powerful force controlling everything," as Han Solo said in the movies. But you are reaching out with mind power via one of the first mass-market brain-to-computer products. "It's been a fantasy everyone has had, using The Force," says Howard Roffman, president of Lucas Licensing.

Mind-control games may be the coming thing: Mattel plans to demonstrate a Mind Flex game (also due this fall), which uses brain-wave activity to move a ball through a tabletop obstacle course, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas."

In the same vein I have to present this action figure I found on a Star Wars site that highlighted some Star Wars action figures that did't quite make the cut like dead Ewok and of course the FORCE non articulated figure which would totally have sold as an empty package to all those Star Wars completists out there.