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Do you seriously think that the Soviets could have run hundreds of thousands of main battle tanks across Europe to the English channel even with nothing standing in their way?

You must have played with toy forts too much Bill.

Silly person who seems never to had read any history.

... and they certainly would tell, too, that Radio Free Europe with its Hungarian language program misled the Hungarian people that NATO or United States would intervene if citizens continued to resist.

Last week at E3, the excitement, creativity and future of our industry was on display for a global audience.

For us, the future comes in the form of Xbox One, a system designed to be the best place to play games this year and for many years to come. As is our heritage with Xbox, we designed a system that could take full advantage of advances in technology in order to deliver a breakthrough in game play and entertainment. We imagined a new set of benefits such as easier roaming, family sharing, and new ways to try and buy games. We believe in the benefits of a connected, digital future.

Since unveiling our plans for Xbox One, my team and I have heard directly from many of you, read your comments and listened to your feedback. I would like to take the opportunity today to thank you for your assistance in helping us to reshape the future of Xbox One.

You told us how much you loved the flexibility you have today with games delivered on disc. The ability to lend, share, and resell these games at your discretion is of incredible importance to you. Also important to you is the freedom to play offline, for any length of time, anywhere in the world.

So, today I am announcing the following changes to Xbox One and how you can play, share, lend, and resell your games exactly as you do today on Xbox 360. Here is what that means:

An internet connection will not be required to play offline Xbox One games – After a one-time system set-up with a new Xbox One, you can play any disc based game without ever connecting online again. There is no 24 hour connection requirement and you can take your Xbox One anywhere you want and play your games, just like on Xbox 360.

Trade-in, lend, resell, gift, and rent disc based games just like you do today – There will be no limitations to using and sharing games, it will work just as it does today on Xbox 360.

In addition to buying a disc from a retailer, you can also download games from Xbox Live on day of release. If you choose to download your games, you will be able to play them offline just like you do today. Xbox One games will be playable on any Xbox One console — there will be no regional restrictions.

These changes will impact some of the scenarios we previously announced for Xbox One. The sharing of games will work as it does today, you will simply share the disc. Downloaded titles cannot be shared or resold. Also, similar to today, playing disc based games will require that the disc be in the tray.

We appreciate your passion, support and willingness to challenge the assumptions of digital licensing and connectivity. While we believe that the majority of people will play games online and access the cloud for both games and entertainment, we will give consumers the choice of both physical and digital content. We have listened and we have heard loud and clear from your feedback that you want the best of both worlds.

Thank you again for your candid feedback. Our team remains committed to listening, taking feedback and delivering a great product for you later this year.

By the time Scott Kaufman was 3 years old, he’d had 21 ear infections and was diagnosed with an auditory processing disorder that made it nearly impossible for him to understand words in real time. The hearing lag, he explains, “made me appear really slow in any classroom type environment.”

At 9, when he was given an IQ test, he had trouble catching what the test administrator was saying. As a result, Kaufman was held back in the third grade and relegated, for the rest of elementary school, to special education, or the “resource room” as he calls it, in his new book, Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined, which examines the severe limitations of the conventional metrics we use to measure student intelligence— like the IQ test and the SAT.

Kaufman warns parents and educators about the dangers of labeling kids early on as either “ungifted” or “gifted and talented”— and creating a self-fulfilling prophecy for students that can follow them into adulthood. He says the latter group can feel enormous fear about losing the label, and avoid seeking new skills and react unhealthily to minor setbacks.

Luckily for Kaufman, everything changed one day in the ninth grade. A young teacher, Joyce Juell, who was substitute teaching in special education, took him aside and asked why he was still in the “resource room”.

“It was pretty amazing,” recalls Kaufman, “and everything just accelerated rapidly from there. Because this one teacher saw beyond the label of a ‘special ed kid,’ she empowered me to question the experts’ opinion of my intelligence.”

Today, at 34, Kaufman is a psychology professor at New York University, with a Ph.D. in cognitive science from Yale and a blog “Beautiful Minds” on Scientific America. After that fateful encounter with Juell freshman year, he says, he went on to earn straight A’s in regular high school classes, where he’d been getting C’s and D’s in his special education ones.

But why wouldn’t Kaufman have performed better in his special education classes if, clearly, he was so capable of it?

The answer may lie in something called the “expectancy effect.” According to Kaufman, educational research shows that pigeonholing students can actually create outcomes, so that children placed in special education or called “ungifted” can become much less motivated than their peers—because they internalize the label and eventually believe that they aren’t intelligent. He illustrates in his book how studies have also shown that teachers treat students differently based on their “status,” are more respectful of “regular” kids than the “ungifted,” and have higher expectations for “talented” children, creating a kind of intelligence feedback loop.

Jessica Lahey, an English and Latin middle school teacher in Lyme, N.H., who writes about education for the New York Times, says that she believes even one positive interaction— like the one Kaufman had with Juell— can reorient a student’s frame of mind.

She recounts the story of a boy who was “really disruptive” and “drove her nuts” in the classroom. He really was on the verge of failing, Lahey says, and she realized she had to try something different— and come up with a way to have at least one positive interaction with the “problem student.”

Instead of chastising him for his poor behavior and lackluster academic performance, she came up with one seemingly small compliment— a deliberate step to change their dynamic— and six months later, his grade and attitude were completely different.

Students pushed into less competitive tracks or special education, aren’t potentially only held back by their own sense of identity and their teachers’ expectations, it can also affect how they do on the SAT, experts say.

“The SAT is absolutely not an intelligence test. It’s entirely based on coursework,” says Leslie Sepuka, a spokesperson for The College Board, the non-profit organization that administers the SAT.

The best way to prepare for the SAT, she explains is to take challenging courses in high school. According to Sepuka, SAT takers in the class of 2012 who reported taking The College Board’s “core curriculum” scored 144 points higher, on average, than those who did not.

Because of some students like Kaufman's more limited coursework, they’re already taking the SAT with one hand tied behind their back too, likely garnering them lower scores, and college rejections— all reinforcing the label they may have acquired a decade earlier.