Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader writes "The media would have you believe that violent video games will be the downfall of our civilization and the cause of moral decline in young people. A recent study suggests that most people aren't so easily influenced by the violence; instead, just a few bad apples are likely to react poorly, with everyone else showing little or no effect from playing these games." The American Psychological Association has posted the academic paper (PDF) as well, in addition to a few related studies. One examines how games can be a force for good (PDF), and another looks at the motivations behind children playing such games (PDF).

Jim Kennedy lost his six-figure corporate development job 19 months ago, his house went into foreclosure, and his bankruptcy will be finalized in January. A story that is not uncommon these days. What is unusual about Kennedy is how he has been living since his financial meltdown. He has been supplementing his cost of living with reward points from hotel and airline loyalty programs. From the article: "This week, Kennedy is at the Holiday Inn Express in San Clemente, where he converted his United Airlines miles. He brought down the 7,000-points a night cost to 5,000 by adding $100 for his four-night stay, so it costs him $25 a night. But there’s an added benefit because he can expand his food budget with the free breakfast. It’s also convenient, as he can drive up the 5 Freeway to get his mail at the Mailboxes Plus in Irvine – he has a post office box because he has no address. It’s here he gets his unemployment checks, which he and 147,000 other jobless people in Orange County are using for survival."

arcticstoat writes "Forget Farmville, Flash puzzlers and 8-bit home computer emulators. The next generation of browser games will be able to take advantage of DirectX 11 effects, not to mention multi-core processing and both Havok and PhysX physics effects. A new browser plug-in called WebVision will be available for Trinergy's new game engine, Vision Engine 8. This will enable game developers to port all the advanced effects from the game engine over to all the common browsers. Of course, any budding 3D-browser-game dev will face the problem that not every PC has a decent graphics card that can handle advanced graphics effects. Not only that, but limited bandwidth will also limit what effects a developer can realistically implement into a browser game. Nevertheless, this is an interesting development that could result in some tight 3D programming, as well as some much more interesting browser games."

Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences is holding its first ever conference on alien life, the discovery of which would have profound implications for the Catholic Church. For centuries, theologians have argued over what the existence of life elsewhere in the universe would mean for the Church. Among other things, extremely alien-looking aliens would be hard to fit with the idea that God 'made man in his own image' and Jesus Christ's role as savior would be confused; would other worlds have their own Christ-figures, or would Earth's Christ be universal? Just as the Church eventually made accommodations after Copernicus and Galileo showed that the Earth was not the center of the universe, and when it belatedly accepted the truth of Darwin's theory of evolution, Catholic leaders say that alien life can be aligned with the Bible's teachings. 'Just as a multiplicity of creatures exists on Earth, so there could be other beings, also intelligent, created by God,' says Father Jose Funes, a Jesuit astronomer at the Vatican Observatory and one of the organizers of the conference. Others do not agree. 'If you look back at the history of Christian debate on this, it divides into two camps. There are those that believe that it is human destiny to bring salvation to the aliens, and those who believe in multiple incarnations,' says Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist. 'The multiple incarnations is a heresy in Catholicism.'"

Over at the BBC, music journalist John Harris speculates on what may become of the music business now that we have entered the golden age of infinite music. "I've just poured the music-related contents of my brain into a book, and I would imagine that 30-ish years worth of knowledge about everyone from Funkadelic to The Smiths has probably cost me a five-figure sum, a stupid amount spent on music publications, and endless embarrassed moments spent trying to have a conversation with those arrogant blokes who tend to work in record shops. Last weekend, by contrast, I had a long chat about music with the 16-year-old son of a friend, and my mind boggled. At virtually no cost, in precious little time and with zero embarrassment, he had become an expert on all kinds of artists, from English singer-songwriters like Nick Drake and John Martyn to such American indie-rock titans as Pavement and Dinosaur Jr. Though only a sixth-former, he seemingly knew as much about most of these people as any music writer. Like any rock-oriented youth, his appetite for music is endless, and so is the opportunity..."

An anonymous reader writes "Facebook is on a never-before-seen legal rampage against high profile internet spammers. Today Facebook was awarded yet another nine-figure settlement, this time for over $700 million. Facebook also has a criminal contempt case on Wallace, which means a high likelihood of prison, a big win for the internet and a milestone in cyber law. 'The record demonstrates that Wallace willfully violated the statutes in question with blatant disregard for the rights of Facebook and the thousands of Facebook users whose accounts were compromised by his conduct,' Jeremy Fogel wrote in his judgment order, which permanently prohibits Wallace from accessing the Facebook Web site or creating a Facebook account, among other restrictions."

PhotoSketch, a new image manipulation program that combines stick-figure sketches, internet image search and pattern matching, seems to be spreading like wildfire. Created by five Chinese students at Tsinghua University and the National University of Singapore, the tool takes a basic sketch and simple labels and turns it into a polished image. "Although online image search generates many inappropriate results, our system is able to automatically select suitable photographs to generate a high quality composition, using a filtering scheme to exclude undesirable images," say the PhotoSketch team in an abstract outlining the tool. "We also provide a novel image blending algorithm to allow seamless image composition. Each blending result is given a numeric score, allowing us to find an optimal combination of discovered images. Experimental results show the method is very successful."

coondoggie writes "Too many online scammers get away with what amounts to a wrist-slap, but a case if Las Vegas this week seems to be heading the right direction. According to the Federal Trade Commission, a business opportunity scammer has been held in contempt for the second time by a federal court and ordered to turn over the title of his home in Las Vegas or face jail time. The court found that the operator of the scam, Richard Neiswonger, failed to deliver marketable title to his home, in violation of a previous court order entering a $3.2 million judgment against him, the FTC stated. The FTC charged that the defendant deceived consumers with false promises that they could make a six-figure income by selling his 'asset protection services' to those seeking to hide their assets from potential lawsuits or creditors."

History's Coming To writes "xkcd creator Randall Munroe has revealed on his blag that the acclaimed stick-figure comic will be produced in real dead-tree book form. Fantastic news for all fans of comedy, maths, science, and relationship screw-ups — especially given that the book will be sold in aid of the charity 'Room To Read.' Rumors that the book contains a joke in the ISBN remain unconfirmed." The NY Times article that Munroe links (registration may be required) is from April of this year, and I am amazed that this community didn't note the story at that time. The book will be published by breadpig, which was created by Alexis Ohanian, one of the founders of reddit.

carstene writes "Qualification rounds for the NASA Centennial Challenge Power beaming contest are underway at the Dryden Flight Research Center. The contest uses a scale model of a space elevator as a race track. Entrants must build a robot to climb a cable, suspended by helicopter, 1 km into the sky without any on board energy storage. The teams are using high power laser beams to transmit power from ground stations to photovoltaic arrays on the robots. If a team can accomplish this at 5 meters per second average speed then they could win up to 2 million dollars. One day this technology could be used to power rovers in shadowed areas of the moon or to recharge electric UAV's in-flight or even a space elevator in the far future. A blog of the event can be found here. Full disclosure: I'm a member of the LaserMotive team that you can follow on twitter, or or via blog."

CWmike writes "When FreeLegoPorn.com began publishing pornographic images created with Lego toys, Lego acted quickly. "The content available on the site consisted of animated mini-figures doing very explicit things. We were not amused," says Peter Kjaer, an attorney for Denmark-based Lego. Lego didn't go to court. Instead it filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization, which ruled in its favor. The domain registrar for FreeLegoPorn.com, GoDaddy.com, eventually shut down the site and transferred the domain name to Lego under ICANN rules. But it's not just Lego and Verizon that are suffering. Green energy is a hot topic, so cybersquatters have been targeting wind and solar energy start-ups. And malicious sites can create havoc with a brand's reputation. Cybersquatting activity rose by 18% last year, with a documented 440,584 cybersquatting sites in the fourth quarter of last year alone, according to MarkMonitor's annual Brandjacking Index report. And WIPO cited an 8% jump in dispute filings in 2008, to 2,329 complaints — a new record. Now, ICANN is preparing to open a potentially unlimited number of new top-level domains as early as the first quarter of 2010."

angry tapir writes "In a landmark decision, the High Court of Australia has ruled that Electronic Program Guide (EPG) vendor IceTV has not violated the copyright of Channel 9 by reproducing programming information in its third-party EPG. This case has been running since May 2006, when the Nine Network alleged that IceTV's electronic program guide infringed the copyright of Channel 9's television schedule."

svonkie writes "Despite launching on the T-Mobile G1 with little mainstream fanfare, Google Inc.'s Android OS appears to have gained strong interest in the open source development community. According to a survey of Black Duck Software's Knowledge Base, Apple Inc.'s iPhone led the industry with 266 open source project releases during 2008, while Android followed in second place with 191 releases. Black Duck compiled the data after scouring through over 185,000 of open source projects across 4,000 Internet sites."

javipas writes "A simple analysis of the most updated version (a Git checkout) of the Linux kernel reveals that the number of lines of all its source code surpasses 10 million, but attention: this number includes blank lines, comments, and text files. With a deeper analysis thanks to the SLOCCount tool, you can get the real number of pure code lines: 6.399.191, with 96.4% of them developed in C, and 3.3% using assembler. The number grows clearly with each new version of the kernel, that seems to be launched each 90 days approximately."

David Gobaud writes "Jason Sobel, the manager of infrastructure engineering at Facebook, gave an interesting presentation titled Needle in a Haystack: Efficient Storage of Billions of Photos at Stanford for the Stanford ACM. Jason explains how Facebook efficiently stores ~6.5 billion images, in 4 or 5 sizes each, totaling ~30 billion files, and a total of 540 TB and serving 475,000 images per second at peak. The presentation is now online here in the form of a Flowgram."

Bibek Paudel writes "Comcast on Tuesday announced that it would partner with Pando Networks to create a P2P bill of rights for file-sharing networks and Internet service providers. Comcast and Pando will meet with industry experts, other ISPs, and P2P companies in order to come up with a set of rules that would clarify how a user can use P2P applications and how an ISP can manage file-sharing programs running on their networks. Last month, Comcast announced that it had reached an agreement with BitTorrent whereby Comcast agreed to alter its network management practices, and BitTorrent acknowledged that Comcast has the right to police its own network. Comcast's battle with P2P networks started last year after the Associated Press published an article that accused Comcast of blocking peer-to-peer services like BitTorrent. Comcast admitted to delaying P2P traffic during peak times, but denied that any file-sharing applications were being completely blocked."

The Xoxo Reader writes "A new filing in the Autoadmit Internet defamation lawsuit (previously discussed here on two occasions) reveals how the plaintiffs' lawyers have attempted to discover the identities of the defendants, who posted under pseudonyms on a message board without IP logging. The defendants had posted links and excerpts of several Web pages that mention the plaintiffs, including a Washington Post article, a college scholarship announcement, and a federal court opinion. Now the plaintiffs are asking those Web sites for logs of everybody who accessed those articles in the hours before the allegedly defamatory content was posted. (All the more reason to read the web through Google cache!) The plantiff's motion for expedited discovery includes copies of the lawyers' letters to hosting providers, ISPs, and others. It also includes replies from the recipients, many of whom point out that the lawyers' requests are technically impossible to fulfill. No matter; the plaintiffs are asking the court to issue subpoenas anyway. This thread contains a summary of the letters in the filing."

WoW Insider had the chance to sit down with Ed Fries, the founder of the new and highly unique business FigurePrints. Fries is best known for his work at Microsoft on the original Xbox, but he hasn't been idle since he left the company in 2004. His newly launched service allows World of Warcraft players to 'print' their characters out as 3D sculptures. He and blogger Mike Schramm discuss the origins of the company, and the process used to make the figs: "At heart, it's basically an inkjet printer, which is pretty cool. It actually uses HP-11 inkjet printheads. But instead of printing on paper, it prints on a thin layer of plaster powder. So you have to imagine that there's a bay with a platform, and a spreader bar comes in and spreads a very thin layer of plaster powder, which has the consistency of flour. So it gets spread onto the platform, like a sheet of paper. And then the printheads come out, and they print right into that plaster. It sets the ink on top of it, and like paper it soaks into it-that plaster hardens."

Ponca City, We Love You writes "New technologies could soon allow scientists to generate a complete wiring diagram of a piece of brain. With an estimated 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses in the human brain, creating an all-encompassing map of even a small chunk is a daunting task. Only one organism's complete wiring diagram now exists: that of the microscopic worm C. elegans, which contains a mere 302 neurons. The C. elegans mapping effort took more than a decade to complete. Research teams at MIT and at Heidelberg in Germany are experimenting with different approaches to speed up the process of mapping neural connections. The Germans start with a small block of brain tissue and bounce electrons off the top of the block to generate a cross-sectional picture of the nerve fibers. They then take a very thin slice, 30 nanometers, off the top of the block. 'Repeat this [process] thousands of times, and you can make your way through maybe the whole fly brain,' says the lead researcher. They are training an artificial neural network to emulate the human process of tracing neural connections to speed the process about 100- to 1000-fold. They estimate that they need a further factor of a million to analyze useful chunks of the human brain in reasonable times."

l2718 writes "Edgar Bronfman, CEO of the Warner Music Group, has publicly framed the music industry's failure to accommodate file-sharing as an 'inadvertent' war on consumers. I'm left wondering how you can file a series of lawsuits inadvertently. 'We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding ... By ... moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find and as a result of course, consumers won.'"