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Comment Art is also surrounded by commercialization (Score 1) 278

by backganon (#35507606) Attached to: Revisiting Ebert &mdash; Games <em>Can</em> Be Art, But Are They?
Art is an industry, art makes products. Kitsch is a term used for art of poor quality in both conceptualization and execution. The vast majority of games today are kitschy in the sense that their concepts are juvenile, i.e. they're interactive versions of Hollywood blockbuster movies, which in most people's opinion rarely qualify as art. There is a great resistance from the "fine art" industry to the idea that a video game can be art, mainly because due to the high technical complexity of the medium, its members (coming from a background in the liberal arts), cannot dominate it. Current fine artists and the marketing machinery that supports them (curators, gallery owners and lazy art professors), fear for their livelyhood and have consistently attacked the new medium ever since its inception through its various mouthpieces. A video game can achieve a similar cultural significance as any Marcel Duchamp piece as long as it commits itself to excellence in it's conceptualization and execution. This regularly means substituting juvenile content with subject matter more intimately connected with the human condition, while taking advantage of the high degree of interactivity the medium offers.

Comment Re:Hey while we're there... (Score 1) 241

by backganon (#35415502) Attached to: Go For It On Fourth Down? Ask Coach Watson

Why should we even let humans obey the orders? Machines can do it more efficienty.

And then why do we need to do it in the physical world? It might be more interesting if there's no gravity, or higher gravity or something.

So the entertainment of the future will involve us seeing computers play video games in front of us.

Humans need to obey the orders because it is easier for the sports fan to relate to humans than to, say, video avatars or robots. In their secret hearts, sport fans actually believe that they're Mo-ron James or whoever is chasing the spheric object around the court at any particular moment, and they pay good money for it. Athletes are not the brightest bunch, neither are coaches, so I heartily welcome any technology that somehow increases the probability of either group being pushed off the gene pool: we can't have your players yet, we'll start with your coaches.
It's funny. Laugh.

Tofu Activists Spoof Meat-Based Indie Game 420

Posted by Soulskill from the have-a-burger-to-celebrate dept.
Faulkner39 writes "In response to the recently released independently developed platformer Super Meat Boy, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has released a Flash-based spoof game titled Super Tofu Boy. The spoof attempts to mirror the original by featuring a protagonist made of tofu and an antagonist made of meat in a statement promoting animal rights. Ironically, however, the original game is about a human boy who is vulnerable because he lacks skin (Meat Boy), raising the question: 'is the spoof in reality really about cannibalism?'" The Super Meat Boy team posted a response on their Twitter feed.
Software

Aussie Government Gives PDF the Thumbs Down 179

Posted by timothy from the how-was-this-study-published? dept.
littlekorea writes "The central IT office of the Australian Government has advised its agencies to offer alternatives to Adobe's Portable Document Format to ensure folks with impaired vision are able to consume information on the Web. A Government-funded study found that PDFs can present themselves as image-only files to screen readers, rendering the information contained within them unreadable for the vision impaired."
Canada

Quark-Gluon Plasma Observed At LHC 155

Posted by timothy from the particular-particles dept.
Canadian_Daemon writes "A phase of matter created moments after the Big Bang is thought to have been detected at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. 'Striking' evidence of a quark-gluon plasma has been observed by a team of researchers, including Canadians, at the facility near Geneva, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced Friday."
Government

UK Asks News Outlets Not To Publish WikiLeaks Bombshell, US Prepares For Fallout 606

Posted by Soulskill from the much-ado-about-something dept.
Stoobalou writes "The UK government has issued Defense Advisory Notices to editors of UK news outlets in an attempt to hush up the latest bombshell from whistle-blowing web site WikiLeaks. DA Notices, the last of which was issued in April 2009 after sensitive defense documents were photographed using a telephoto lens in the hand of Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick as he arrived at No 10 Downing Street for a briefing, are requests not to publish, and therefore not legally enforceable." This news comes alongside a raft of articles detailing the US government's preparations for the release. Officials are warning allies that the documents will be more damaging than previous releases, to the point of potentially damaging diplomatic relations with countries like Turkey. The Vancouver Sun wonders if this will lead to a change in the way diplomats communicate.
The Internet

Google, Microsoft Cheat On Slow-Start — Should You? 123

Posted by Soulskill from the reply-hazy-ask-again dept.
kdawson writes "Software developer and blogger Ben Strong did a little exploring to find out how Google achieves its admirably fast load times. What he discovered is that Google, and to a much greater extent Microsoft, are cheating on the 'slow-start' requirement of RFC-3390. His research indicates that discussion of this practice on the Net is at an early, and somewhat theoretical, stage. Strong concludes with this question: 'What should I do in my app (and what should you do in yours)? Join the arms race or sit on the sidelines and let Google have all the page-load glory?'"
Iphone

When Your Company Remote-Wipes Your Personal Phone 446

Posted by kdawson from the unfair-exchange dept.
Xenographic writes "NPR has a story about someone whose personal iPhone got remotely wiped by their employer. It was actually a mistake, but it was something of a surprise because they didn't believe they had given their employer any kind of access to do that. This may already be very familiar to Microsoft Exchange admins, but the problem was her iPhone's integration with MS Exchange automatically gives the server admin access to do remote wipes. All you have to do is configure the phone to receive email from an MS Exchange server and the server admin can wipe your phone at will. The phone wasn't bricked, even though absolutely all of its data was wiped, because the data could be restored from backup, assuming that someone had remembered to make one. But this also works on other devices like iPads, Blackberry phones, and other smartphones that integrate with MS Exchange. So if you read your work email on your personal phone or tablet, you might want to make sure that you keep backups, just in case."
Earth

One Giant Cargo Ship Pollutes As Much As 50M Cars 595

Posted by kdawson from the stink-pots dept.
thecarchik writes "One giant container ship pollutes the air as much as 50 million cars. Which means that just 15 of the huge ships emit as much as today's entire global 'car park' of roughly 750 million vehicles. Among the bad stuff: sulfur, soot, and other particulate matter that embeds itself in human lungs to cause a variety of cardiopulmonary illnesses. Since the mid-1970s, developed countries have imposed increasingly stringent regulations on auto emissions. In three decades, precise electronic engine controls, new high-pressure injectors, and sophisticated catalytic converters have cut emissions of nitrous oxides, carbon dioxides, and hydrocarbons by more than 98 percent. New regulations will further reduce these already minute limits. But ships today are where cars were in 1965: utterly uncontrolled, free to emit whatever they like." According to Wikipedia, 57 giant container ships (rated from 9,200 to 15,200 twenty-foot equivalent units) are plying the world's oceans.
Space

SpaceX Gets First Private FAA Space Reentry License 108

Posted by kdawson from the interpanetary-driver's-license dept.
coondoggie sends in a Network World story that begins "Space Exploration Technologies (Space X) got the first-ever Federal Aviation Administration license allowing the reentry to Earth of a privately developed spacecraft. The license was needed because the Space X Dragon space capsule is scheduled to launch atop Space X's Falcon 9 rocket on Dec. 7 and return to earth. The Launch of the rocket had already been approved by the FAA. The FAA Office of Commercial Space Transportation noted that it has licensed over 200 successful launches."

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