The Truth About The National Debt & The Last Decade

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Government site

Cartoon Of The Decade

Thanks Stephanie!

What's Changed This Decade

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Just a few of the incredible factoids:
Internet users increased from 350 million to 1.7 billion.
A trillion web pages have been created.
1.12 million Americans were killed by obesity.

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The 15 Most Influential Video Games of the Decade

The 2000s will be remembered as the decade when the videogame industry got flipped on its head.

Going into the year 2000, the general feeling was that the game industry was ready to put away childish things. The era of Nintendo and kiddie entertainment was over, and the videogames of the future were about multimillion-dollar budgets, mind-blowing photorealism and “digital actors” playing out their parts with human realism thanks to “emotion engines,” etc.

Instead, it went down like this: A whole bunch of companies dumped a whole lot of money down the next-gen sinkhole, and the number of publishers that could be counted on to deliver bleeding-edge entertainment without going broke in the process dwindled to just a few.

Meanwhile, many more publishers came to the belated realization that all those simple, accessible games from days gone by weren’t obsolete; in fact, there were untold millions of people playing Solitaire on their computers, just waiting for something better to come out.

Our list of the most influential games of the past decade includes, therefore, many games that made big leaps and defined what would come to be traditional aspects of the big-budget grand adventure, and others that pushed the reset button on game design.

Half-Life 2 (2004)

If Halo is the game of choice for the trigger-happy, Half-Life 2 is the thinking man’s shooter, the game that got our brains churning. Puzzles relied on physics, the well-written story wasn’t spoon-fed, and the protagonist saw the world through prescription lenses. Half-Life 2 ensured that we’d never think about the first-person shooter in the same way again.

World of Warcraft (2004)

The MMORPG had its genesis in the ’90s with EverQuest and Ultima Online. But Blizzard’s World of Warcraft blew them all away, taking MMOs from niche pursuit to mainstream passion. Besides establishing that a critical mass of players will pay $15 per month to play a single videogame if it is sufficiently complex, WoW created a gold standard by which all other massively multiplayer games are measured. By grouping players into alliances and guilds, WoW created strong social circles among its devotees, who are so deeply involved in the culture that they attend the yearly BlizzCon convention. The game has influenced many other publishers to jump feet-first into the MMO genre. Most, so far, have failed miserably.

Grand Theft Auto III (2001)

Few games this decade generated such controversy — or inspired so many other designers. Yes, any game released a month after Sept. 11, 2001, that allowed players to kill civilians and public servants was certain to be controversial. But beneath those attention-grabbing elements was a revolutionary open-world gameplay system. Grand Theft Auto III defined the “sandbox,” a sprawling playground with sports cars instead of swingsets, rocket launchers instead of monkey bars. Players weren’t forced to advance the Scarface-style criminal narrative; they could just amuse themselves in Liberty City. Forget the avalanche of clones: It’s hard to find any third-person action adventure game nowadays that doesn’t crib at least something from the GTA formula.

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Via and a few others

I guess on the 1990s list Madden had to be #1, although it's improved so much more since about 2003 than it did right off the bat. I'm also guessing that it's the title of the article "most influential" as opposed to "best". The Madden NFL series has seriously kicked most other sports games well out of commission.

Posterizing the 2000s

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The Decade in News Photographs

This September 10, 2008 NASA handout image received on September 12, 2008 shows a picture of Hurricane Ike downlinked by the crew of the International Space Station, flying 220 statute miles above Earth. The center of the hurricane was near 23.8 degrees north latitude and 85.3 degrees west longitude, moving 300 degrees at 7 nautical miles per hour. The sustained winds were 80 nautical miles per hour with gusts to 100 nautical miles per hour and forecast to intensify.

Call it what you will, "the noughties", "the two-thousands" or something else, the first decade of the 21st century (2000-2009) is now over. Looking back on the past ten years through news photographs, it becomes clear that it was a dramatic, often brutal decade. Natural disasters, terrorist attacks and wars were by far the most dominant theme. Ten years ago, Bill Clinton was ending his final term in office, very few had ever heard of Osama bin Laden, the Taliban ruled Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein still ruled Iraq - all that and much more has changed in the intervening time. It's really an impossible task to sum up ten years in a handful of photographs, but below is my best attempt at a look back at the last decade - feel free to let me know what I missed in the comments below.

Drummers perform during the Opening Ceremony for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics at the National Stadium on August 8, 2008 in Beijing.

This unsourced picture allegedly shows ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein being dragged out of his hiding following his capture by US troops 13 December 2003 in an underground hole at a farm in the village of ad-Dawr, near his hometown of Tikrit in northern Iraq.

See the rest.. (50 images)

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The 20 Best Gadgets of the Decade

The new Millennium got off to a great start where the world of gadgetry was concerned. For our 20 best we selected only actual gadgets—no websites like YouTube or Facebook, no software programs and no innovative companies like Netflix. From listening to music to trips to the lavatory, each of these gadgets has made life a little more enjoyable. Congrats to the inventors—now quit dawdling on the video-camera watch and the personal jetpack.

TiVo DVR (1999)

That little black-and-silver box revolutionized the television experience, shifting power to the audience in an unprecedented fashion. No longer do you have to plan your schedule around your favorite shows. Had to work late, caught a ballgame or met friends for a drink instead? You can still watch your Lost (or whatever your jam is) when you get home without having to worry about blank VCR tapes. And, of course, you don’t have to suffer all those obnoxious commercial interruptions. But even beyond the more obvious benefits, TiVo inspires a sense of discovery with its recommendations function, learning your tastes based on what you already like, and helping you find great programming you might otherwise have missed. And though some units did ship in 1999, we certainly consider it an artifact of the 2000s.

Slingbox (2005)

This genius device gives viewers access to their cable television programming anywhere with a computer and high-speed internet connection. While initially hailed as a solution for dorm-dwellers without space for a television, the slingbox has become a favorite of travelers who can’t miss their favorite shows or games just because they’re away from home.

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