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Submission + - Anita Sarkeesian, creator of Tropes vs. Women, driven from home by trolls (theverge.com)

Submitted by Sonny Yatsen
Sonny Yatsen writes: Anita Sarkeesian, the creator of Tropes vs. Women — a video series exploring negative tropes and misogynistic depictions of women in video games, reports that she driven from her home after a series of extremely violent sexual threats made against her. Her videos have previously drawn criticism from many male gamers, often coupled with violent imagery or threats of violence.

Submission + - The Lovelace Test Is Better Than the Turing Test at Detecting AI (vice.com)

Submitted by meghan elizabeth
meghan elizabeth writes: If the Turing Test can be fooled by common trickery, it’s time to consider we need a new standard. The Lovelace Test is designed to be more rigorous, testing for true machine cognition. It was named it after Ada Lovelace, often described as the world's first computer programmer.

An intelligent computer passes the Lovelace Test only if it originates a “program” that it was not engineered to produce. The new program—it could be an idea, a novel, a piece of music, anything—can’t be a hardware fluke. Now here’s the kicker: The machine's designers must not be able to explain how their original code led to this new program.

Submission + - The Simultaneous Rise and Decline of Battlefield (polygon.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Ben Kuchera at Polygon recommends against buying the upcoming Battlefield Hardline first-person shooter. Not because it's bad — in fact, he doesn't really offer an opinion on how good the game is — but because it's time to stop incentivizing poor behavior from Electronic Arts and its Digital Illusions CE development studio. After EA acquired DICE, Battlefield game launches accelerated, and launch issues with each game were hand-waved away as unpredictable. The studio's principled stand against paid DLC evaporated in order to feed ever-hungry beast of shareholder value. Kuchera says, "EA continues this because the Battlefield franchise is profitable; we as players have taught them that we'll buy anyway, and continue to support games that don't work at launch." He suggests avoiding pre-orders, and only buying the game if and when it's in a playable (and fun) state. "Every dollar that's spent on Hardline before the game comes out is a vote for things continuing down an anti-consumer path. If the game is a hit before its launch, that sends a message that we're OK with business as usual, and business as usual has become pretty terrible."

Submission + - Teaching College Is No Longer a Middle Class Job (guernicamag.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: When you think of somebody who teaches at a college, you typically bring to mind moderately affluent professors with nice houses and cars. All that tuition has to go into big salaries, right? Unfortunately, it seems being a college instructor is becoming less and less lucrative, even to the point of poverty. From the article: "Most university-level instructors are ... contingent employees, working on a contract basis year to year or semester to semester. Some of these contingent employees are full-time lecturers, and many are adjunct instructors: part-time employees, paid per class, often without health insurance or retirement benefits. This is a relatively new phenomenon: in 1969, 78 percent of professors held tenure-track positions. By 2009 this percentage had shrunk to 33.5." This is detrimental to learning as well. Some adjunct faculty, desperate to keep jobs, rely on easy courses and popularity with students to stay employed. Many others feel obligated to help students beyond the limited office hours they're paid for, essentially working for free in order to get the students the help they need. At a time when tuition prices are rising faster than ever, why are we skimping on the most fundamental aspect of college?
United States

Mozilla Offers FCC a Net Neutrality Plan With a Twist 123

Posted by samzenpus from the how-about-this? dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Mozilla Foundation is filing a petition asking the FCC to declare that ISPs are common carriers, with a twist. 'The FCC doesn't have to reclassify the Internet access ISPs offer consumers as a telecommunications service subject to common carrier regulations under Title II of the Communications Act, Mozilla says. Instead, the FCC should target the service ISPs offer to edge providers like Netflix and Dropbox, who need to send their bits over ISP networks to reach their customers. Classifying the ISP/edge provider relationship as a common carrier service will be a little cleaner since the FCC wouldn't have to undo several decade-old orders that classified broadband as an "information" service rather than telecommunications, Mozilla argues.'" Here's the Mozilla blog post and the 13-page petition.
Portables (Games)

Epic Games Predicts Console, Mobile Convergence 104

Posted by Soulskill from the sounds-like-a-job-for-ben-heck dept.
An anonymous reader writes "After taking the stage at the Apple iPhone event in September, game developer Epic Games has finally revealed more about its plan to release Unreal Engine for the iOS devices. UE3 is incredibly popular on consoles, and its free UDK has been really great for us modders. In this new interview, engine boss Mark Rein says the developer envisions a future where all game devices are handhelds, with high-end processors inside: 'It feels like there's a great opportunity for game consoles to cease to be something you plug into the wall and rather become something you take with you. Of course it will be more than just your game console; you can have your productivity apps, your documents, and your media collections on it as well.'"
Privacy

FBI Bringing Biometric Photo Scanning To North Carolina, Via DMV 221

Posted by timothy from the if-you-have-nussink-to-hide dept.
AHuxley writes "The FBI is getting fast new systems to look at local North Carolina license photos via the DMV. As the FBI is not authorized to collect and store the photos, they use the North Carolina Division of Motor Vehicles. The system takes seconds to look at chin widths and nose sizes. The expanded technology used on millions of motorist could be rolled out across the USA. The FBI's Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System is also getting an upgrade to DNA records, 3-D facial imaging, palm prints and voice scans."
Games

Should Computer Games Adapt To the Way You Play? 404

Posted by Soulskill from the worked-for-commander-data dept.
jtogel writes "Many games use 'rubberbanding' to adapt to your skill level, making the game harder if you're a better player and easier if you're not. Just think of Mario Kart and the obvious ways it punishes you for driving too well by giving the people who are hopelessly behind you super-weapons to smack you with. It's also very common to just increase the skill of the NPCs as you get better — see Oblivion. In my research group, we are working on slightly more sophisticated ways to adapt the game to you, including generating new level elements (PDF) based on your playing style (PDF). Now, the question becomes: is this a good thing at all? Some people would claim that adapting the game to you just rewards mediocrity (i.e. you don't get rewarded for playing well). Others would say that it restricts the freedom of expression for the game designer. But still, game players have very different skill levels and skill sets when they come to a game, and we would like to cater to them all. And if you don't see playing skill as one-dimensional, maybe it's possible to do meaningful adaptation. What sort of game adaptation would you like to see?"
Google

Google SideWiki Brings Comments To Everyone 221

Posted by timothy from the obvious-things-are-hard-to-get-right dept.
Rophuine writes "Google has launched a product called SideWiki. It takes the form of a plug-in to Firefox and Internet Explorer which allows users to mark up the web by adding comments which can be seen by anyone else running SideWiki." Google's version joins a long line of attempts to impose a layer of comments on the Web, including Microsoft's Smart Tags and Third Voice.
Role Playing (Games)

Submission + - New Dungeons & Dragons Declares War On Open Ga

Submitted by
mxyzplk
mxyzplk writes: "Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast shocked the role-playing game industry today by announcing that anyone wanting to publish material for the new Fourth Edition of D&D, expected out in June of this year, must forgo open licensing entirely as part of their new Game System License.

With the launch of the third edition of the popular game eight years ago, Wizards had sponsored an open licensing scheme. This license, called the Open Gaming License, or OGL, was a kind of open source license designed for game publishers. The result was an explosion of third party game companies supporting D&D and establishing their own game lines. Many of these companies became quite large and successful, notably Paizo Publishing, Green Ronin Publishing, and others.

Now, however, Wizards has stated that any company hoping to publish products for their new edition must agree to discontinue any currently open licensed products and produce no further open products at all — Dungeons & Dragons related or not. A number of companies had leveraged the OGL for their indepedent games, for example the pulp game Spirit of the Century.

In response to questions about this policy, Scott Rouse, D&D Brand Manager for Wizards of the Coast, says that "We have invested multiple 7 figures in the development of 4e so can you tell me why we would want publishers to support a system that we have moved away from?"

It seems to me that this is the equivalent of Microsoft telling people "If you want to make and sell software for Windows Vista, you can't make and sell any Linux/open source software!" Since this is a small niche market without the visibility of a Microsoft, this play to muscle out competition by making them choose "between us and open licensing" will probably succeed. Some other game companies are rebelling; Paizo Publsihing, for example, has declared their intent to move forward with the open-licensed previous version, essentially 'forking' the Dungeons & Dragons code base. But small gaming companies are small indeed, and Wizards of the Coast is owned by Hasbro (a recent development likely not unrelated to this change of heart)."

Comment Re:An MMO that requires character dexterity? Great (Score 1) 292

by SJMinkoff (#14927744) Attached to: Dungeons and Dragons Online Impressions
Where I feel the problem lies is this: The game seems to ignore CHARACTER dexterity in combat, and instead relies more on PLAYER dexterity. There is a difference. I am not in the peak of health (as my character is supposed to be) nor am I trained in combat (as my Fighter is supposed to be). I am also constrained by a very artificial interface (KBD/mouse/monitor) instead of being actually in the room. The role-playing implies that I am NOT my character and he is not me, but that the character is a separate role that I am playing, and should be as little restricted by my abilities as possible. Maybe it's just me, but RPGs just shouldn't be action/FPS (first person spellcasting) clones. It seems to me that the game mechanics and your character's skills should matter more than your manual dexterity.

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