DarkSkiesAhead - Slashdot User

Can a Video Game Solve Hunger, Disease and Poverty? 72

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday April 07, 2010 @01:46AM from the edible-games-are-the-future dept.

destinyland writes "Dr. Jane McGonigal of the RAND Corporation's Institute for the Future has created a game described as 'a crash course in changing the world.' Developed for the World Bank's 'capacity development' branch, EVOKE has already gathered more than 10,000 potential solutions from participants, including executives from Procter & Gamble and Kraft. '[Dr. McGonigal] takes threats to human existence — global food shortage, fuel wars, pandemic, refugee crisis, and upended democracy — and asks the gaming public to collaborate on how to avoid these all too possible futures.' And by completing its 10 missions, you too can become a World Bank Institute certified EVOKE social innovator. (The game designer's web site lays out her ambitious philosophy. 'Reality is broken,' but 'game designers can fix it.')"

EVE Online Battle Breaks Records (And Servers) 308

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday January 05, 2010 @02:09AM from the blame-it-on-the-torrents dept.

captainktainer writes "In one of the largest tests of EVE Online's new player sovereignty system in the Dominion expansion pack, a fleet of ships attempting to retake a lost star system was effectively annihilated amidst controversy. Defenders IT Alliance, a coalition succeeding the infamous Band of Brothers alliance (whose disbanding was covered in a previous story), effectively annihilated the enemy fleet, destroying thousands of dollars' worth of in-game assets. A representative of the alliance claimed to have destroyed a minimum of four, possibly five or more of the game's most expensive and powerful ship class, known as Titans. Both official and unofficial forums are filled with debate about whether the one-sided battle was due to difference in player skill or the well-known network failures after the release of the expansion. One of the attackers, a member of the GoonSwarm alliance, claims that because of bad coding, 'Only 5% of [the attackers] loaded,' meaning that lag prevented the attackers from using their ships, even as the defenders were able to destroy those ships unopposed. Even members of the victorious IT Alliance expressed disappointment at the outcome of the battle. CCP, EVE Online's publisher, has recently acknowledged poor network performance, especially in the advertised 'large fleet battles' that Dominion was supposed to encourage, and has asked players to help them stress test their code on Tuesday. Despite the admitted network failure, leaders of the attacking force do not expect CCP to replace lost ships, claiming that it was their own fault for not accounting for server failures. The incident raises questions about CCP's ability to cope with the increased network use associated with their rapid growth in subscriptions."

Comment Re:You can't dumb down rocket science (Score 2, Informative) 177

by DarkSkiesAhead on Thursday September 17, 2009 @02:19PM (#29456591) Attached to: Gravitational Currents Could Slash Fuel Needed To

starglider29a

TFA makes this sound really easy, cheap and quick.

From TFA

The trade off was time, he said. It would take a few months to get round the Jovian moon system.

Wouldn't that be the opposite of what you just said?

Garlic Farmer Wards Off High-Speed Internet 475

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday September 17, 2009 @12:14PM from the attack-of-the-killer-garlic dept.

DocVM writes "A Nova Scotia farmer is opposing the construction of a microwave tower for fear it will eventually mutate his organic garlic crop. Lenny Levine, who has been planting and harvesting garlic by hand on his Annapolis Valley land since the 1970s, is afraid his organic crop could be irradiated if EastLink builds a microwave tower for wireless high-speed internet access a few hundred meters from his farm."

Submission + - How To Go To MIT For Free

Submitted by

theodp

on Saturday January 06, 2007 @01:15AM

theodp writes: "Can't scrape up the bucks for junior college tuition? Don't worry, there's always MIT. By the end of 2007, the contents of all 1,800 courses taught at MIT will be available online to anyone in the world, anywhere in the world thanks to OpenCourseWare (OCW). Learners won't have to register for the classes, and everyone is accepted. The cost? It's all free of charge."

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