overlord2 - Slashdot User

Submission + - DVDs, Blu-Rays To Show 20-Second Unskippable Warnings (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by bonch on Thursday May 10, 2012 @04:40PM

bonch writes: DVDs and Blu-Rays will begin displaying two unskippable anti-piracy screens, each 10 seconds long, shown back-to-back. Six studios have agreed to begin using the new notices. Of course, pirated versions won't contain these 20-second notices; however, an ICE spokesman says the intent isn't to deter piracy but to educate the public.

Submission + - Dish Network Announces Prime Time TV with No Ads

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens writes

on Thursday May 10, 2012 @04:28PM

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Forbes reports that Dish Network has announced a new feature called called Auto Hop for its satellite TV subscribers that will let you automatically skip all commercials for prime time television from the four major broadcast networks when you watch the day after the programs are first aired. “Viewers love to skip commercials,” says Vivek Khemka, vice president of DISH Product Management. “With the Auto Hop capability of the Hopper, watching your favorite shows commercial-free is easier than ever before." Craig Moffett says that its going to be hard for Dish to maintain good relationships with its programming affiliates when they start offering a feature intended to cut out the bulk of the affiliates’ revenues and adds that whether the auto-skip feature can withstand legal challenge remains to be seen. “Given the already long list of industry-unfriendly features promoted by Dish, one wonders if Auto Hop will be the final straw that provokes legal action from the broadcast networks,” says Moffett. "We suspect Auto Hop probably uses some sort of bookmarking insertion based on automated recognition of commercial inserts (called ‘fingerprinting’), which if true could certainly be argued to be a manipulation of the content stream by the distributor.”"

Microsoft Research Takes On Go 175

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday January 02, 2011 @04:28AM from the narrowing-the-possibilities dept.

mikejuk writes "Microsoft Research has used F# and AI to implement a consumer-quality game of Go — arguably the most difficult two-person game to implement. They have used an interesting approach to the problem of playing the game, which is a pragmatic cross between tree search with pruning and machine learning to spot moves with a 'good shape.' The whole lot has been packaged into an XNA-based game with a story."

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