Prompted by Senator's Brownback's legislation, an interesting discussion is taking place on the ESRB, and gaming related politics. Next Generation offers up a damning look at the ESRB, wherein author Aaron Ruby says that the organization is 'incapable of effectively communicating with consumers, nor of fending off attacks from the industry's many critics.' At the Sony Online 'Station Blog', SOE's John Smedley retorts, saying that an industry-wide mentality is to blame for the ESRB's precarious position. Meanwhile, EGM's editor Shoe has some choice words on claims the organization shouldn't have to 'play through' every game that comes to market. From this last piece: "Sure, you usually can't see 100% of a game on an average playthrough. But I guarantee if you get three guys to sit down and finish every product, you can learn a lot more about what these games contain than from watching a bunch of highlight reels, which, remember, are edited by companies who have huge stakes in what the ratings turn out to be -- talk about conflict of interest!"

Davemania writes "CNN reports that the Nobel Prize in Physics has been award to John C. Mather and George F. Smoot for their contribution to the big-bang Theory." From the article: "Their work was based on measurements done with the help of the NASA-launched COBE satellite in 1989. They were able to observe the universe in its early stages about 380,000 years after it was born. Ripples in the light they detected also helped demonstrate how galaxies came together over time. 'The very detailed observations that the laureates have carried out from the COBE satellite have played a major role in the development of modern cosmology into a precise science,' the academy said in its citation." If you're interested, you can read a rundown on the prize-winning work (pdf) provided by the prize organization.

An anonymous reader writes "Julian Murdoch from GamersWithJobs asks the question 'Can game violence be good?' in a provocative article entitled The Red Suit. After a week playing Introversion Software's Wargames-inspired nuke game Defcon, his answer is that it can be, if not good, then at least informative. 'I admit that in a rousing teamspeak game of Defcon I am not drawn into bouts of real-time reflection. But on closing down the game for the night, I find myself oddly thoughtful: sad, reflective, a bit fragile. But not upset, and not wanting to wipe the game off my hard drive. Violence in games can teach us things. It can reach us in ways beyond mere titillation. It's all about context.'"

lizzyben writes "CIOinsight.com is hosting an interview with Robert Scoble on life after Microsoft. 'By blogging for the world's largest software company, Scoble changed the way companies communicate with the world and became an industry celebrity in the process.' He talks about MS culture, senior management and the benefits of blogging from inside the belly of the software beast." More from the article: "We used blog-search engines to find anyone who wrote the word 'Microsoft' on their blog. Even if they had no readers and were just ranting, 'I hate Microsoft,' I could see that and link to it, or I could participate in their comments, or send them an e-mail saying, 'What's going on?' And that told those people that someone was listening to their rants, that this is a different world than the one in which no one listens. It was an invaluable focus group that Microsoft didn't have to pay for."

Ars Technica's Opposable Thumbs column discusses comments by Ubisoft president Yves Guillemont. Mr. Guillemont's kind words for the 360 prompted thumbs poster Ben Kuchera to think even less well of Ken Kutaragi's recent arrogant windbag statement. Essentially, Mr. Kuchera is of the opinion that at this stage of the game Sony not only should 'care', they should be worried. From the article: "I wonder what the talk is within Sony... are they talking about the increased competition this generation, or do they all share Kuturagi's confidence? This isn't the same fight they had with the Dreamcast and the Xbox: in that case they had Sega's last system that never enjoyed EA's support, and Microsoft's first, unproven piece of hardware. Now they are up against Microsoft's second system, with very strong software support and online support, and the very popular and affordable Wii."

We posted Jay Rosen's Call for Questions on September 25. Here are his answers, into which he's obviously put plenty of time and thought. This is a "must read" for anyone interested in the growing "citizen journalism" movement either as a writer/editor or as an audience member -- and please note that Rosen and many others say, over and over, that one of the major shifts in the news media, especially online, is that there is no longer any need to be one or the other instead of both.

morpheus83 writes "Sony has decided to call the PS3's wireless controller 'Sixaxis' as it has sensors which allow it to sense linear motion along six axes. The Bluetooth controller charges when connected via the USB cable, after a full charge it is good for 30 hours of gaming. It becomes a wired controller when charging so you can continue playing." The Next Generation article also offers some further details on PS3 accessories: "Sony will also sell a memory card adapter used to upload data from PS or PS2 memory cards to the PS3 hard drive. That peripheral will go for 1500 yen ($13) and will be available at launch as well. A Blu-ray/DVD movie controller will also be in the accessory mix, selling for 3600 yen ($31)."

narramissic writes "Nokia has developed a new, short-range wireless technology, called Wibree, that it says is a lot more power efficient than Bluetooth, which means it could be used in smaller and less costly devices. It can also use the same radio and antenna components as Bluetooth, helping keep costs down further. Wibree could compete with Bluetooth in the workplace as a way to link keyboards and other peripherals to computers. But it could also have more interesting applications for consumers, in devices such as wrist watches, toys and sports equipment." What does this say about Bluetooth, considering Nokia is a member of the Bluetooth Promoters group?

saintory writes to mention a Dallas Morning News article about Gamestop's annual new product conference. Employees and new vendors were given a chance to take a look at the upcoming next-gen consoles, and a few details about the Wii retail strategy were revealed. For example, Gamestop will be the only place to demo the Wii prior to the November 19th launch. More frustratingly, "GameStop has not yet decided when, or even if, it will offer pre-orders for the new systems ... Last year, at the launch of Microsoft's Xbox 360, GameStop accepted more pre-orders before Christmas than it was able to satisfy. Microsoft's manufacturing problems turned into GameStop's angry customer problems. 'We did learn a lesson last year,' said Steve Morgan, president of GameStop. 'I think the lesson is caution and optimism at the same time.'" Update: 10/03 18:20 GMT by Z : Okay, there is *some* pre-order news. I was told last week to contact the Gamestop folks today (Tuesday) for details. At least at my local Madison store, they're going to be accepting preorders as of Monday the 16th (two weeks from yesterday). One would assume they're not some sort of 'rebel' store, so this is probably along the lines of what we can expect nation-wide.

LifesBlood writes to mention the news that Foundation 9, one of the largest independent game development firms, has acquired the non-game assets of Shiny Entertainment. You may recall Shiny as the makers of titles like Earthworm Jim, Enter the Matrix, and (though I'm the only one who ever played it) the unusual strategy title Sacrifice. From the article: "Shiny was originally purchased by Atari in 2002 for an estimated $47 million, but financial terms of the sale to F9E were not disclosed. F9E did reveal that the acquisition was funded by Foundation 9's recent investment from Francisco Partners, which gave F9E a capital infusion of $150 million over the next few years. Under the terms of the transaction, F9E will acquire all the non-game assets from Shiny, while Atari will retain its current project planning formerly developed by Shiny, including Earthworm Jim."

eldavojohn writes "The recent update to Amazon's A9 service has removed its ability to record searches. A9 (which now uses Windows Live & Alexa) used to tout the ability to save every single search the user made, which required a login. Now, they no longer require you to log in and have dropped the recording of searches from their toolbar. What they added was aesthetic changes to the search site. What they dropped was the A9 Instant Reward, the A9 Toolbar, the A9 Yellow Pages, the A9 Maps (including Block View), the user diary, bookmarks, and history. Although they claim that A9 is merely 'shifting its priorities to areas where it can provide the greatest benefit for customers,' this smacks of a move to avoid the ethical controversies and pressures that come with retaining your user data. What does the rest of Slashdot think about retaining search data? Is it a liability or an asset?"

mikesd81 writes to mention an article at Engadget exploring what the Zune's wireless is good for. It turns out that, at least for now, that's not much. From the article: "You can search for and find other Zunes nearby. You can send songs / albums for the 3 x 3 trial. Songs past the three days / listens are deleted at next sync, but catalogued on your PC for record-keeping should you want to purchase them later. No word on whether Microsoft is going to keep track of which files are traded. You can send and receive image files for 'unlimited viewing.' (Oh, so copyrighted images aren't worth DRMing?) You can't: Connect to the internet, Download songs directly from the Zune store via WiFi, Sync to your computer via WiFi."

saintory writes "Ars Technica has an article up looking at how the Wii was born. It's a nice overview of how Nintendo's culture came up with the 'new-gen' system." More from the article: "'Diverging from the road map takes a fair amount of courage,' [Engineer Shiota] said, 'especially when we didn't have a clear image of what we were going to do with this hardware.' However, once he saw the power level reduction (from one-third to as little as one-fourth that of current hardware) he was very excited. Instead of competing on 'how many more times the CPU is going to be faster, how much more memory is going to be on the machine, and how many more polygons can be rendered' he saw Nintendo as being able to do something different and unique."

CCFreak2K writes "Slackware 11 has been officially released, just over a year after Slackware 10.2 became available. Software available with Slackware 11 includes KDE 3.5, Mozilla Seamonkey 1.0.5 and X11R6 6.9. As usual, ISOs are available through BitTorrent and FTPs, packages can be synced through FTPs, and you can always buy a copy."

Binary-Blob writes "Kernal Trap has an article up in which some key OpenBSD developers accuse Intel of being an open source fraud. The issue stems from the prevalence of firmware 'blobs' in open source projects, and OpenBSD's reluctance to use them unless they are distributed freely and without restrictions. Leading project creator Theo de Raadt offers that Intel should follow the example of other companies in the market: 'Intel must do this firmware grant in the same way that Adaptec, Atmel, Broadcom, Cirrus Logic, Cyclades, QLogic, Ralink, and LSI and lots of other companies have granted distribution firmware to be used by others.' He concluded by requesting that the open source community contact Intel to help get them to change their policies"