Category: Interesting Reads

The technology behind the game

First, apologies for 2 days without updates.  There was nothing worth updating for on Friday, and I just had no time for updates on Saturday.  I’m still trying to catch up with my geek readings in the world.  So expect plenty of updates tomorrow.

That said, here’s a cool article at Engadget about some of the technology that makes the Super bowl work.

Telecom bigwig makes moronic statement

Really hard to explain all the potential problems with his desired outcome.  Thus spoke AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre on the concept of charging content providers for running their content over “the telecoms’ pipes:”

That ought to be a cost of doing business for them. They shouldn’t get on [the network] and expect a free ride.

Ummmm, aren’t we, the customers of the telecom companies, already paying for the pipes?  This is a bad idea, and if you agree, you should visit Common Cause and help in their fight against this.

[tags]Telecom, Greed[/tags]

Blizzard and the whole GLBT thing

Very nice post at Joystiq that consolidates a lot of the information and discussion on Blizzard’s shutting down a GLBT guild.

Sara Andrews was recruiting players for her gay-and-lesbian-friendly guild when she received a warning from Blizzard that if she didn’t stop doing that, she’d be banished from the game.

Blizzard’s argument in making this threat: bringing up such touchy subjects in the game world ultimately devolves into a nasty shouting match that creates a negative atmosphere for all players. By forbidding public discussion of such topics, Blizzard believes the game will be a more pleasant place for everyone.

I don’t know where I stand on this, really.  I believe Blizzard really is trying to prevent harrassment of the people who would join this guild, but I also think the proper way to handle this is by going after the harrassers, and not the harrassed.  Blizzard seems to be trying to prevent griefing, but doesn’t seem to be doing it in the smartest way.  Read more of the Joystiq commentary and the other web sites linked off of that post for a better understanding of the whole affair.

[tags]GLBT, WoW, Warcraft, MMO[/tags]

Stick to your beliefs, get fired. Woohoo!

I’m not talking about fringe religions, or sexual practices, or anything potentially odd to some.  In this case, Inga Chernyak was fired from her job as a legal clerk at an intellectual property law firm in midtown New York because she gave an interview in which she took a view of DRM which differed from her employer’s.  She was assured of her right to hold her view, and then fired for them.  Thankfully, she held her view of DRM problems to be more important than her job.

As an active member of FreeCulture.org, and the president of the NYU chapter, I feel both obligated and prepared to stand behind the organization’s stance on where copyright is headed, and where it should be. I can not, in good conscience, renounce my beliefs in the hopes of gaining a rung on the corporate ladder. Still, I would like to say a few words in my own defense.

[tags]DRM, Legal, Intellectual Property[/tags]

The science President

Can’t really say it better than this, by Chris Mooney.

A while back I blogged about an idea floated by Morton Kondracke: That George W. Bush should try to become the “science” president by emphasizing, in his State of the Union speech, themes of global scientific competitiveness and the need to ensure that the good old USA is leading the pack. Well, it now seems official: According to the Boston Globe, in his speech tonight Bush plans to highlight Norman Augustine, a former Lockheed Martin CEO who “last year led a congressionally mandated National Academies team that issued a report warning that America is ‘on a losing path’ in the global marketplace.”

EFF sues AT&T for assisting NSA with President Bush’s illegal wiretaps

Full link.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T on January 31, 2006, accusing the telecom giant of violating the law and the privacy of its customers by collaborating with the National Security Agency (NSA) in its massive and illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans’ communications.

[tags]EFF, Wiretaps, NSA, Bush[/tags]

Smart fridge magnets make poetry

From Engadget. Here is a set of refridgerator magnets made up of a 16 character LCD display. The magnets can recognize what other parts of speech are nearby and adjust themselves to make poetry without user interaction. And if you don’t like what comes up, you can shake a magnet to change its word.

As you compose a poem, placing words in grammatical order, the magnets communicate with each other to learn the grammar rules you are using.

Once they are ‘trained’, the magnets can change the words they are displaying to substitute words that don’t fit the established grammar rules, like an autocorrect function.

[tags]Poetry, magnets, Cool[/tags]

Senators see the light on broadcast flag

Over at EFF (support this group if you don’t already – they work to protect our digital rights), there is an article about how some Senators are turning against the broadcast flag. The reason for this is they now see that the broadcast flag would make Senator Stevens’ ipod fairly worthless. This matters, because Senator Stevens is one of the original proponents of the bill.

[tags]Broadcast flag, EFF, Digital rights[/tags]