There has been an ongoing legal battle over the past few years about how and when game makers can use the likenesses of football players without their permission. Former college football player Samuel Keller filed a class action suit in May against Electronic Arts for the publisher's use of NCAA players' information — including things like jersey number, height, weight, skin tone and hair style, but not names — to recreate actual teams within sports games. An earlier suit filed by NFL Hall-of-Famer Jim Brown brought up the fact that video games weren't even a consideration when contracts and licensing rights were negotiated in the '50s and '60s, yet many football players from that era (including Brown) are represented in the occasional sports game whether they like it or not. A ruling came down from a district court judge last Wednesday stating that video games are "expressive works, akin to an expressive painting that depicts celebrity athletes of past and present in a realistic sporting environment," and are thus protected under the First Amendment. Brown and fellow Hall-of-Famer Herb Adderley are now seeking to throw their support behind Keller's lawsuit.

goran72 writes "A new image, taken with an infrared camera on the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii, has revealed a cosmic fireworks display, in the form of tens of thousands of previously unseen comet-shaped knots inside the Helix Nebula. Unlike previous optical images of the Helix Nebula knots, the infrared image shows thousands of clearly resolved knots, extending out from the central star at greater distances than previously observed. These images enable astronomers to estimate that there may be as many as 40,000 knots in the entire nebula, each of which are billions of kilometers/miles across. Their total mass may be as much as 30,000 Earths, or one-tenth the mass of our Sun."

Kheldon tips an interview with Petroglyph's Chuck Kroegel about an upcoming MMO called Mytheon, which will be free to play, but also involve micro-transactions. It's an action strategy game with RTS and RPG elements. He says, "The game starts in the Greco-Roman era, as well as Egypt, and as time goes on we'll expand throughout the whole world. Something everyone has in common is they all have their mythologies, these beasts and these stories that have come to us through legends and folklore. All the nations of the world, they all have their own. So in our game Mytheon, we can eventually fill the Earth in terms of being able to explore mythologies of all nations. It's an action/strategy game, with elements of RPG, and elements of RTS that people have to come to appreciate and enjoy."
Update — 4/30 at 17:30 by SS: The summary originally linked to an article stating that Petroglyph was working with Trion World Network on Mytheon. This is not the case; they are working together on a different game, which is the MMORTS previously referenced in the title.

Jon Larsson writes "Yesterday, the 33rd World Finals of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest were held at KTH — The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. World Champions, for the second consecutive year, are the Saint Petersburg State University of IT, Mechanics and Optics. They won in competition with 99 other teams from all six continents — the best of the over 7000 teams participating in the qualifying rounds during the past half year. The full results can be found here and the contest problem set is available here (PDF). For the first time ever, the whole event was broadcast live, both on the web and on national TV in Sweden. The broadcast was produced by media students of KTH and the Lillehammer University College in Norway. The webcast in its entirety (over 7 hours) can be viewed here."