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Supporters wondering exactly what they’ll be able to play when the open, Android-based Ouya console is released can wonder a little less today, as the indie-friendly console maker announced that OnLive’s library of hundreds of streamable games would be available at launch.
The move should somewhat allay concerns that Ouya’s TEGRA 3-based chipset won’t be able to compete with its more powerful console competition, since games running on OnLive’s servers can be as resource intensive as they need to be. Still, you’ll need a better-than-decent broadband connection to stream those games in a playable form, and even then you might notice some controller latency and video issues, if our previous OnLive tests are anything to go on.
What makes this move especially interesting is that OnLive currently sells its own HDTV MicroConsole and controller for $99, the same price as the multifunctional Ouya. It’s enough to make you wonder why OnLive has to charge so much for what is essentially a modem with an HDMI output (though, to be fair, OnLive does frequently offer free MicroConsole units as a perk with various game purchases).
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Valve head—and one-time Microsoft employee—Gabe Newell has branded Windows 8 “a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space” at videogame conference Casual Connect in Seattle. The Valve boss continued, saying that in the fallout from Windows 8, “we’ll lose some of the top-tier PC/OEMs, who will exit the market. I think margins will be destroyed for a bunch of people.” Newell criticised Windows 8 while talking about the future of the gaming industry, and you can read everything he said at VentureBeat.
He argued that one of the last remaining things keeping people away from Linux was the lack of games. Valve is working to bring Left 4 Dead 2 and other Steam titles to Linux in a move that Newell describes as “a hedging strategy.” If
his predictions about Windows 8 come true, he says “it will be good to have alternatives to hedge against that eventuality.”
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New surveillance laws being proposed in countries from
the United States to Australia would force makers of online chat software to build in backdoors for wiretapping. For years, the popular video chat service Skype has resisted taking part in online surveillance—but that may have changed. And if it has, Skype’s not telling.
Historically, Skype has been a major barrier to law enforcement agencies. Using strong encryption and complex peer-to-peer network connections, Skype was considered by most to be virtually impossible to intercept. Police forces in Germany complained in 2007 that they couldn’t spy on Skype calls and even hired a company to develop covert Trojans to record suspects’ chats. At around the same time, Skype happily went on record saying that it could not conduct wiretaps because of its “peer-to-peer architecture and encryption techniques.”
Recently, however, hackers alleged that Skype made a change to its architecture this spring that could possibly make it easier to enable “lawful interception” of calls. Skype rejected the charge in a comment issued to the website Extremetech, saying the restructure was an upgrade and had nothing to do with surveillance. But when I repeatedly questioned the company on Wednesday whether it could currently facilitate wiretap requests, a clear answer
was not forthcoming. Citing “company policy,” Skype PR man Chaim Haas wouldn’t confirm or deny, telling me only that the chat service “co-operates with law enforcement agencies as much as is legally and technically possible.”
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Gamasutra has a fascinating article on how developers in war-torn regions cope with developing games in the midst of chaos and bloodshed created by violence. Some, like Radwan Kasmiya from Syria, have fled to other countries but still find the wars they ran away from having a long arm and a strong influence on the ability to practice their craft.
“I don’t think it’s safe,” he tells Gamasutra. “Because I’m still trying to go back and forth to Syria, and I still have family there. I’m not going
to jeopardize anything. … I can’t practice my freedom of making art or releasing
my own creations. I always have to consider these other things. We are not free. I am not free.”
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Three companies with major involvement in video games—EA, Zynga and Microsoft—have
joined some 40 other companies, including the Gap, Google and Starbucks, along with several cities, including New York, Boston and Los Angeles, in filing a brief to support a legal challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act. The Act, signed into federal law in 1996, defines marriage as between a man and woman, restricting tax and health benefits from gay couples. The companies say the law is discriminatory, hurts morale and is onerous to comply with.
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This November, three states will vote on whether to legalize marijuana for old-fashioned “getting-high purposes.” Colorado is the best
bet—one poll has the public behind the bill by a 61-27 margin—but Oregon and/or Washington might as well, and even if all of them chicken out, Julian Brookes of Rolling Stone thinks the end of marijuana prohibition is nigh. “The status quo, people are starting to notice, is a total disaster.”
We can only hope.
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Truth In Trials Act, Medical Marijuana Protection Bill, Proposed By Bipartisan Group Of Lawmakers
Jul29
A bipartisan group of House lawmakers introduced a bill
this week designed to create enhanced legal protections for valid medical marijuana patients prosecuted due to conflicting state and federal laws regarding the legality of the substance.
Under the Truth In Trials Act, sponsored by California Democratic Rep. Sam
Farr and co-sponsored by other representatives such as Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Ron Paul (R-Texas), state-licensed medical marijuana users would be given the right to provide an “affirmative defense” in the case of a federal prosecution. This effectively allows them to prove that their actions, while illegal at the federal level, were in fact protected under state law.
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The Black Plague – It’s not ancient history as you might think. This
rare disease from Medieval times, responsible for nearly wiping out entire populations in regions of Europe, is still showing up. A man in Oregon is recovering from the deadly disease. But could it happen here?
It’s hard to look at – the blackened, swollen hands of Paul Gaylord, recovering in a Bend, Oregon hospital from the Black Plague.
When Gaylord was trying to rescue his cat – choking on a dead mouse – the frightened cat bit him. Days later he was diagnosed with the Black Plague, a disease that devastated Europe in the 1300s. Sources say it killed hundreds of millions of people.
Stacy Lovelace – Epidemiologist ND Department of Health: “The average in
the US is 7 cases a year.
Last time you’ve likely heard about the Black Plague was in high school or college textbooks while studying the middle ages. Images show massive amounts of people dying from the disease. Now, people say it’s shocking to hear of something like this happening in the 21st Century.”
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Fred Willard was caught with his pants down in a movie theater Wednesday evening and arrested for “lewd conduct,” according to TMZ.
The “This Is Spinal Tap” actor visited the Tiki Theater, an adult movie theater in Hollywood, where he was spotted by authorities with his “penis exposed and in his
hand.” The 72-year-old “Anchorman” actor was arrested at 8:45 p.m. and released from police custody not long after.
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Here’s why guns are good when used like a responsible person. Saves lives.
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Legendary emcee and producer Lord Finesse
has filed a lawsuit against Mac Miller for unauthorized use of one of his beats.
Lord Finesse has filed a $10 million lawsuit against Mac Miller for using the former’s “Hip 2 Da Game” beat without permission.
Finesse, a member of New York’s Diggin’ in the Crates Crew (D.I.T.C.), released “Hip 2 Da Game” in 1995. The song was featured on Finesse’s third solo album, 1996′s The Awakening, as a single. It was performed and produced by the Bronx native
According to Courthouse News Service, Lord Finesse
is suing Mac Miller because of Miller’s use of the “Hip 2 Da Game” beat on the song “Kool Aid & Frozen Pizza (The Kool Aid Song).” Miller’s song is featured on his mixtape K.I.D.S.: Kickin’ Incredibly Dope Shit:
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(NaturalNews) James Holmes, the Aurora, Colorado shooter who reportedly opened fire at a Batman movie premiere, was a medical student at the University of Colorado, pursuing a PhD in neuroscience, reports ABC News. (http://abcnews.go.com)
As part of the attack, Holmes painted his hair red and referred to himself as “The Joker,” one of the arch enemies in the DC Comics-inspired Batman movie series. (http://newyork.cbslocal.com)
According to news reports, this sudden violent rampage was completely out of character for James Holmes, who was described as “shy.”
The New York Times is now reporting:
BillyKromka, a pre-med student at the University of Colorado, Boulder, worked with Mr. Holmes for three months last summer as a research assistant in a lab of at the Anschutz Medical Campus. Mr. Kromka said he was surprised to learn Mr. Holmes was the shooting suspect.
“It was just shocking, because there was no way I thought he could have the capacity to do commit an atrocity like this,” he said.
(http://www.nytimes.com)“He spent much of his time immersed in the computer, often participating in role-playing online games…”
There is already conjecture that James Holmes may have been involved in mind-altering neuroscience research and ended up becoming involved at a depth he never anticipated. His actions clearly show a strange detachment from reality, indicating he was not in his right mind. That can only typically be accomplished through drugs, hypnosis or trauma (and sometimes all three).
This article has been passed around quite a bit in the weeks following the tragedy in Aurora, Colorado. There’s a lot of info in here that’s suspect. Read and decide for yourself, but our bullshit detector went off when we read it.
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James Holmes, the suspected shooter in last week’s movie theater massacre, has told his Colorado jailers he doesn’t know why he’s locked behind bars, the Daily News reports.
But no one at the Arapahoe County Detention Center is buying Holmes’ story, a lockup worker told the News. The jailers who
come in contact with Holmes, who is sequestered from other inmates, believe he’s faking amnesia.
Since the 24-year-old PhD dropout was accused of killing 12 theatergoers and wounding 58 at a midnight screening of “The Dark Knight Rises” last Friday, the media has lavished attention on Holmes’ odd behavior.
The suspect appeared in court on Monday with brightly dyed orange hair and made peculiar facial expressions. At times his eyes bulged and he often appeared tired.
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MEDITATION increases our ability to tap into the hidden recesses of our brain that are usually outside the reach of our conscious awareness.
That’s according to Madelijn Strick of Utrecht University in the Netherlands and colleagues, who tested whether meditation has an effect on our ability to pick up subliminal messages.
The brain registers subliminal messages, but we are often unable to recall them consciously. To investigate, the team recruited 34 experienced practitioners of Zen meditation and randomly assigned them to either a meditation group or a control group. The meditation group was asked to meditate for 20 minutes in a session led by a professional Zen master. The control group was asked to merely relax for 20 minutes.
The volunteers were then asked 20 questions, each with three
or four correct answers – for instance: “Name one of the four seasons”. Just before the subjects saw the question on a computer screen one potential answer – such as “spring” – flashed up for a subliminal 16 milliseconds.
The meditation group gave 6.8 answers, on average, that matched the subliminal words, whereas the control group gave just 4.9 (Consciousness and Cognition, DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2012.02.010).
Strick thinks that the explanation lies in the difference between what the brain is paying attention to and what we are conscious of. Meditators are potentially accessing more of what the brain has paid attention to than non-meditators, she says.
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To give a
sense of the scale of the personal drone movement, DIY Drones—an online community that I founded in 2007 (more on that later)—has 26,000 members, who fly drones that they either assemble themselves or buy premade from dozens of companies that serve the amateur market. All told, there are probably around 1,000 new personal drones that take to the sky every month (3D Robotics, a company I cofounded, is shipping more than 100 ArduPilot Megas a week); that figure rivals the drone sales of the world’s top aerospace companies (in units, of course, not dollars). And the personal drone industry is growing much faster.
Why? The reason is the same as with every other digital technology: a Moore’s-law-style pace where performance regularly doubles while size and price plummet. In fact, the Moore’s law of drone technology is currently accelerating, thanks to the smartphone industry, which relies on the same components—sensors, optics, batteries, and embedded processors—all of them growing smaller and faster each year. Just as the 1970s saw the birth and rise of the personal computer, this decade will see the ascendance of the personal drone. We’re entering the Drone Age.
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