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Sci-Fi

Firefly MMORPG Announced 309

Posted by CowboyNeal from the space-ships-and-capes dept.
bishiraver writes "Multiverse has announced that they have gained rights to a Firefly Massively Multiplayer Online Game. Multiverse is a company started by several former Netscape employees, and they have developed an engine/network that works for all of their games. They intend to break into the MMO industry by being an MMO publisher of sorts. By standardizing, they can provide a less expensive alternative to the tens of millions of dollars and several years it takes to currently develop an MMO. They have said they will hire out a studio to build the game for them. Corey Bridgets, Massive's Executive Producer, says: 'If you're doing science fiction, you have to really think it out and create an incredibly rich environment that is compelling in its own right, and worth exploring and going back to week after week. That's what Joss Whedon did with Firefly.'"
Music

RIAA Victims Bring Class Action Against Kazaa 288

Posted by Zonk from the playing-right-into-their-hands dept.
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In Chicago, Illinois, a Kazaa customer has filed a class action against Kazaa, Lewan v. Sharman, U.S.Dist. Ct., N.D. Ill 06-cv-6736. The lead plaintiff, Catherine Lewan, was a Kazaa customer who was sued by the RIAA for her use of Kazaa, and paid a settlement to the RIAA, and she sues on behalf of others in her position. In her complaint(pdf) she alleges, among other things, that Kazaa deceptively marketed its product as allowing 'free downloads' (Complaint, par. 30); it designed the software in such a manner as to create a shared files folder and make that folder available to anyone using Kazaa, while at the same time failing to make the user aware that it had done so (Complaint, par. 36-37); and it surreptitiously installed 'spyware' on users' computers which made the shared files folder accessible to the Kazaa network even after the user had removed the Kazaa software from his or her computer (Complaint, par. 42-45)."

Feed A Brief History of Smell-O-Vision (wired.com)

From feed by wiredfeed
Why has society shown such resistance to a technology that will allow them to smell their favorite Hollywood stars? The foul stench of Smell-O-Vision's tragic history wafts from Table of Malcontents.


Graphics

Submission + - Xbox 360 Graphics Superior To PS3

Submitted by
smackenzie
smackenzie writes: "Not yet tired of the console wars, even though we are now well into the holiday season of peace and joy? Well, here are two articles that pit the XBox 360 against the PS3 in the graphics department and are sure to draw some irate fanboy feedback.

GameSpot compares a number of cross-platform games side-by-side. The conclusion:
"You'd think that the PS3 versions would be exactly the same or slightly superior to the Xbox 360 versions, since many of these games appeared on the 360 months ago, but it seems like developers didn't use the extra time to polish up the graphics for the PS3. We found that the Xbox 360 actually had better graphics in the majority of the games we compared."
The GameSpot article can be found here.

H3TV performed a blind, giant HDTV direct comparison. The conclusion:
"H3 Enterprises, Inc. (OTC Pink Sheets: HTRE) reported this morning that in a totally unbiased side-by-side face-off on H3TV, witnessed by cameras from CNBC and BET as well as a slew of magazine and newspaper reporters, Xbox 360 administered a convincing beat-down to it's highly sought after rival, PS3."
The H3 Enterprise press release can be found here.

Was Ken possibly wrong when he "labeled the Xbox 360 as 'just an Xbox 1.5' and stated that it was 'only going after PlayStation 2'? Or is the Playstation 3 really a Playstation 2.4 going after the XBox 1?"
Security

Submission + - DHS Passenger Scoring Illegal

Submitted by Vicissidude
Vicissidude writes: At the National Targeting Center, the ATS program harvests up to 50 fields of passenger data from international flights, including names, e-mail addresses and phone numbers, and uses watchlists, criminal databases and other government systems to assign risk scores to every passenger. When passengers deplane, Customs and Border Protection personnel then target the high scorers for extra screening. Data and the scores can be kept for 40 years, shared widely, and be used in hiring decisions. Travelers may neither see nor contest their scores. The ATS program appears to fly in the face of legal requirements Congress has placed in the Homeland Security appropriations bills for the last three years, which states, "None of the funds provided in this or previous appropriations Acts may be utilized to develop or test algorithms assigning risk to passengers whose names are not on government watch lists." The prohibition most recently appeared in section 514(e) of Congress' 2007 appropriation, which was signed into law by President Bush on Oct. 4th. Marc Rotenberg, the director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said he was unaware of the language but that it clearly applies to the Automated Targeting System, not just Secure Flight, the delayed successor to CAPPS II. "Bingo, that's it — the program is unlawful," Rotenberg said. "I think 514(e) stands apart logically (from the other provisions) and 514 says the restrictions apply to any 'other follow-on or successor passenger prescreening program'. It would be very hard to argue that ATS as applied to travelers is not of the kind contemplated (by the lawmakers)."

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