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Music

Submission + - French government may subsidize music downloads (goodgearguide.com.au)

Submitted by
angry tapir
angry tapir writes: "The European Commission has approved a French program to subsidize legal music downloads for young people. The Carte Musique scheme gives €25 (US$35) to French residents aged 12 to 25 to spend on music downloads or subscription services. Young people can purchase a €50 card for just €25, with the balance paid by the state."

Submission + - Autonomous Taxi Can Be Hailed With An iPad App (gizmag.com)

Submitted by cylonlover
cylonlover writes: Earlier this year the Berlin-based AutoNOMOS group, unveiled the FU-X "Made in Germany," a tech-laden VW Passat that uses GPS, video cameras, on-board laser scanners and radars to navigate autonomously, giving it the potential to be used as a driverless taxi cab. Its latest trick — you can now hail it with an iPad app.
Privacy

Submission + - Data miners scraping away our privacy (correntewire.com)

Submitted by
Presto Vivace
Presto Vivace writes: "Twig, writing for Corrente reports on data scrapers. They are not looking for passwords and such; scrapers are looking at blogs and forums searching for material relevant to their corporate clients. We are assured that the information is “anonymized” to protect the identities of forum participants. However, a new tool, PeekYou permits users to connect online names with real world identities. No worries though, if you have a week to spare, you can opt-out of some of the larger data banks."
PlayStation (Games)

Best Buy Unapologetic About Charging For PS3 Firmware Updates 454

Posted by Soulskill from the a-fool-and-his-money dept.
donniebaseball23 writes "After discovering that electronics retailer Best Buy was charging ignorant customers $30 for the 'service' of installing updated firmware on PS3s, IndustryGamers got word from the company on its policy. Best Buy sees no problem with charging for this convenience, even though it's something Sony provides to PS3 owners completely free. 'While many gamers can handle firmware upgrades easily on their own, those customers who do want help can get it from Geek Squad, and we continue to evaluate this offering to ensure it meets their needs. The service goes beyond a firmware updates, and includes user account setup, parental control setup and other components,' a representative said."
Privacy

Blizzard Rolls Out Real ID Privacy Options 145

Posted by Soulskill from the step-in-the-right-direction dept.
tacarat writes "The last time Blizzard mentioned their new Real ID system, there was a strong backlash from users over privacy issues. Blizzard reconsidered their plans to require real names for forums, and little has been heard about it since. Now, they've announced new privacy settings, allowing users to limit how their name gets shared or to disable the system entirely. Quoting: 'These options provide Real ID users with additional tools for customizing the service based on their preferences, enabling the ability to opt in or out of the Real ID "Friends of Friends" and "Add Facebook Friends" features or to turn off Real ID altogether.'"
Games

Submission + - Infinite Mario with Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment (ucsc.edu)

Submitted by bgweber
bgweber writes: There's been a lot of discussion about whether games should adapt to the skills of players [http://games.slashdot.org/story/09/10/13/078247/Should-Computer-Games-Adapt-To-the-Way-You-Play]. However, most current techniques limit adaptation to parameter adjustment. But if the parameter adaptation is applied to procedural content generation [http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/04/24/2327249/IEEE-Introduces-Mario-Level-Generation-Competition], then new levels can be generated on-line in response to a player's skill. In this adaptation of Infinite Mario (with source [http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~bweber/mario/AdaptiveMario.jar]), new levels are generated based on the performance of the player [http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~bweber/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=infinite_adaptive_mario]. What other gameplay mechanics are open for adaptation when games adapt to the skills of specific players?
Idle

Submission + - Internet Petitions Stephen Colbert To Hold 'Restor (huffingtonpost.com)

Submitted by
jamie
jamie writes: "A grassroots campaign has begun to get Stephen Colbert to hold a rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to counter Glenn Beck's recent "Restoring Honor" event. The would-be rally has been dubbed "Restoring Truthiness" and was inspired by a recent post on Reddit, where a young woman wondered if the only way to point out the absurdity of the Tea Party's rally would be if Colbert mirrored it with his own "Colbert Nation.""
Displays

Nanoresonators Create Ultra-High-Res Displays 231

Posted by Soulskill from the don't-tell-crytek dept.
TuurlijkNiet writes with this excerpt from Linux for Devices: "Eat your heart out, 'Retina display.' A new technology unveiled yesterday will allow creating pixels eight times smaller than the ones on Apple's iPhone 4, eliminate the need for polarizer layers, and allow screens to make much more efficient use of available light, say University of Michigan researchers. ... The pixels in the nanoresonator displays are about ten times smaller than those on a typical computer screen, and about eight times smaller than the pixels on the iPhone 4, which are about 78 microns, according to Guo. Such pixel densities could make the technology useful in projection displays, as well as wearable, bendable or extremely compact displays, according to the researchers."
Games

Do Gamers Want Simpler Games? 462

Posted by Soulskill from the i'd-say-no-but-i-used-to-love-frogger dept.
A recent GamePro article sums up a lesson that developers and publishers have been slowly learning over the last few years: gamers don't want as much from games as they say they do. Quoting: "Conventional gaming wisdom thus far has been 'bigger, better, MORE!' It's something affirmed by the vocal minority on forums, and by the vast majority of critics that praise games for ambition and scale. The problem is, in reality its almost completely wrong. ... How do we know this? Because an increasing number of games incorporate telemetry systems that track our every action. They measure the time we play, they watch where we get stuck, and they broadcast our behavior back to the people that make the games so they can tune the experience accordingly. Every studio I've spoken to that does this, to a fault, says that many of the games they've released are far too big and far too hard for most players' behavior. As a general rule, less than five percent of a game's audience plays a title through to completion. I've had several studios tell me that their general observation is that 'more than 90 percent' of a game's audience will play it for 'just four or five hours.'"
Java

IEEE Introduces Mario Level-Generation Competition 114

Posted by timothy from the so-they-hate-employment dept.
bgweber writes "Last year, the IEEE conference on Computational Intelligence and Games hosted a competition to determine who could write the best AI for playing Mario levels (YouTube video). This year, the conference has expanded the competition to include a track on level generation as well, where the goal is to generate new levels online procedurally. Submitting an entry is as easy as implementing a Java interface that performs procedural content generation. The implications of this competition are techniques for greatly increasing the replayability of games, since each gameplay session could present new levels to the player."
Java

Submission + - Mario Level Generation Competition

Submitted by bgweber
bgweber writes: Last year, the IEEE conference on Computational Intelligence and Games hosted a competition to determine who could write the best AI for playing Mario levels (http://games.slashdot.org/story/09/08/05/0438241/Mario-AI-Competition, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlkMs4ZHHr8). This year, the conference has expanded the competition to include a track on level generation as well, where the goal is to procedurally generate new levels online (http://www.marioai.org). Submitting an entry is as easy as implementing a Java interface that performs procedural content generation. The implications of this competition are techniques for greatly increasing the replayability of games, since each gameplay session could present new levels to the player (http://eis-blog.ucsc.edu/2010/04/infinite-fun-mario/).

Submission + - Russian Hacker Selling 1.5M Facebook Accounts (nzherald.co.nz)

Submitted by Sir Codelot
Sir Codelot writes: A hacker who calls himself Kirllos has obtained and is now offering to sell 1.5 million Facebook IDs at astonishingly low prices — $25 per 1000 IDs for users with fewer than 10 friends and $45 per 1000 IDs for users with more than 10 friends. Looking at the numbers, Kirllos has stolen the IDs of one out of every 300 Facebook users.

Submission + - Branson Says Flight Ban an Overraction (yahoo.com) 1

Submitted by HaymarketRiot
HaymarketRiot writes: Richard Branson has claimed that the flight ban, due to the eruption of the volcano Eyjafjallajokull, was an overraction on the part of the authorities. Britain's government has even called for the airlines to be compensated. This does look like a perfect excuse for already greedy airlines to try and get more money...any experts care to comment on the effect of volcanic ash on planes?

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