At stake in Terminator vs. video games? "The future of media"
Mike Gallagher is the President and CEO of the Entertainment Software Association, the trade group that serves that needs of the video game industry. We spoke recently, and Gallagher shared the story of the first time he met with Governor Schwarzenegger to discuss video games. It's an interesting picture.
There is a conference room at the Governor's office, and the Governor himself sits at a single chair at the end of a very long table; visitors sit along the side. Behind him is a credenza, upon which sits a velvet-lined box holding the sword from Conan the Barbarian. Governor Schwarzenegger is a man who knows his history, and he understands that the money and fame that led to his political influence came from violent media. Today the Terminator games sit on the shelf alongside the Terminator movies. The difference? If Governor Schwarzenegger has his way in the Supreme Court case Schwarzenegger v. Entertainment Merchants Association & Entertainment Software Association, it will be illegal to sell the games to children.
I asked Gallagher what's at stake in the Supreme Court case that will determine whether or not California can outlaw the sale of some games to children. He was blunt in his answer. "The future of media in the 21st century. That's what I think is at stake in this case... I believe it certainly is that far-reaching." Here's why.
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Feature: Statecraft as entertainment: Ars reviews Civilization V
The date is 4000 BC, and the world is fresh and new—it's about time you started ruling it. Like its predecessors, Civilization V is a turn-based strategy game that takes place in the historical world. You select a civilization from the 18 available to play, including old standbys like the English, French, Germans, or Americans, and some newcomers like the Songhai, led by Askia Muhammad the Great. Then you select a map to play on, and the games drops you into history with little more than a settler for company.
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MacSpeech Dictate gets major overhaul, new name
After MacSpeech Dictate (read our initial review, and the follow-up)—the only game in town for voice recognition on the Mac—was acquired by Nuance back in February, it was only a matter of time until the "Macspeech" branding gave way to Nuance's "Dragon" branding. That happened today, as newly-christened "Dragon Dictate" received a version upgrade to 2.0 and some slick new packaging.Even before the acquisition, MacSpeech had used the Dragon NaturallySpeaking recognition engine under license, providing the program with terrific accuracy. Unfortunately, doing anything other than dictating a straight column of text was unbearably painful; editing, making corrections, manipulating the operating system—you wouldn't bother unless you were a masochist.
Nuance has addressed some of these deficiencies in its 2.0 overhaul of the product. The recognition engine is now the same one used in the latest version Dragon NaturallySpeaking for Windows (version 11), and the software adds better controls for manipulating the mouse cursor and for performing basic tasks, like searching Google. And editing, long the thing that kept me from using MacSpeech Dictate on a regular basis, is now said to be better, with commands that are "easy to say, easy to remember, and designed to simplify and speed up editing by voice." We'll see.
The new version requires Snow Leopard. It goes for $199, though users of earlier Dictate versions can upgrade for $49. We'll put the new Dictate through its paces and bring you a full review soon.
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Zune Marketplace going to Europe, Down Under, this autumn
Microsoft today announced the rollout of its raft of Zune services beyond American borders. Rumors of an expanded Zune Marketplace have been kicking around for a few weeks, and this announcement confirms many of the previous predictions.Zune Marketplace's four services—the Zune Pass music subscription, music sales, video sales, and movie rental—are all being brought to new markets. The services available will vary from country to country; the UK and France will get all four, but other territories—including Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, and Australia—will get only a subset, with the full list available in the press release.
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The world gets a national broadband plan
In case you didn't get enough of Ars Technica's coverage of our Federal Communications Commission's National Broadband Plan, you'll be pleased to know that lots of other countries have them too. In fact, it turns out that there's an NBP for the whole world, just released by the United Nation's International Telecommunications Union."In this brave new world of 'digital opportunity', we believe the burning issue is what price will be paid by those who fail to make the global, regional, national and local choices for broadband inclusion for all—choices which must be made sooner rather than later," the "Outcomes" section of ITU's world Broadband Report warns.
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For the clumsy, or the unlucky: the Ballistic HC iPhone case
It's time to take a long, cool drink of Hatorade, because we're about to review an iPhone case. Not just any iPhone case—a case that is supposed to keep your phone safe no matter what. Well, excluding water and probably small explosions. The Ballistic HC case is actually a series of layers, and you can use or discard as many as you'd like depending on your needs. This is what your phone will look like with every layer, including the belt clip, attached. Yes, there is an iPhone 4 hidden in that Batmobile.
The case, all armored up
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Licensing agreement means live Apple TV might be on the way
Apple has entered into a multi-year agreement with Rovi Corporation, allowing it to license intellectual property from the digital content management company, according to an SEC filing. Details on the deal are sparse, but it has led to speculation that Apple may be up to bringing even more content to the Apple TV.Rovi Corporation is a player in a number of different fields, including software that allows devices to sync with one another, program guides for service providers, and content-protection technology for producers. Because of the nature of Rovi's business, Piper Jaffray's go-to Apple analyst Gene Munster observed in a note to investors (detailed by Business Insider) that such a licensing deal points in the direction of an all-in-one Apple TV, complete with DVR functionality.
Munster believes that this could happen within the next 2 to 4 years. The time frame would put Apple significantly behind Google in the competition to take over your living room, but Apple has had a great deal of success coming to market second but with a few new paradigms. The strategy could work out well again, assuming Apple's implementation is easy to use.
Munster seems to believe that the Apple TV truly has the potential to be Apple's next great cash-cow. The analyst feels Apple will sell 1.5 million units in fiscal year 2011 alone, up more than a million units from previous years. Further, Munster all but guarantees that Apple will come out with some sort of giant iMac all-in-one TV (it should be noted that this is one prediction that we don't exactly believe in). Still, Apple continues to say that the Apple TV is just a hobby, so perhaps it's wise to see whether the current $99 device survives the next couple years first.
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Shellfish feel the burn: damage linked to atmospheric CO2
Last week, the National Academies of Science released a report on research of what has been called "the other carbon problem"—ocean acidification. Excess carbon in the atmosphere has been lowering the ocean's pH (increasing its acidity), which has the potential to severely alter the ocean's chemistry. The NAS report says that we're way behind in studying this problem, which wasn't even fully recognized until recently. Just how far behind we are is made clear by a paper that will be released this week by PNAS, which reveals that two species of commercially harvested shellfish are likely to already be suffering increased mortality due to ocean acidification. The basics of ocean acidification are fairly simple. Roughly a third of the CO2 emitted by human activity has ended up dissolved in the oceans; some fraction of that has combined with water to form H2CO3, a weak acid. These reactions take place quickly enough that a drop in pH has been apparent in some long-term monitoring stations. Overall, current estimates are that the pH of the oceans have dropped by 0.1 units (pH is a logarithmic scale) since the beginning of industrial carbon emissions.
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Crank that iPod: hearing loss rates lower than thought
We all surely remember what our parents drilled into our brains about listening to loud music: turn that sh*t down or you'll go deaf! As it turns out, the instance of young people suffering from hearing loss thanks to loud music may be much lower than previously believed, according to a new report published in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. Although the latest findings go against recent research, the researchers warned that we should still be cautious of our exposure to loud noises over time.The paper's authors, from the University of Minnesota, believe that conventional hearing tests are producing false positives when measuring low levels of hearing loss in children and teenagers. According to U of M Department of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences professor Bert Schlauch, who headed the study, 10 percent or more of children are falsely identified as having noise-related hearing loss this way.
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Bill would give Justice Department power to shutter piracy sites worldwide
Lawmakers introduced legislation Monday that would let the Justice Department seek US court orders against piracy websites anywhere in the world, and shut them down through their domain registration.The bipartisan legislation, dubbed the "Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act," (.pdf) amounts to the Holy Grail of intellectual-property enforcement. The recording industry and movie studios have been clamoring for such a capability since the George W. Bush Administration. If passed, the Justice Department could ask a federal court to for an injunction that would order a domain registrar or registry to stop resolving an infringing site’s domain name, so that visitors to PirateBay.org, for example, would get a 404 error.
"In today’s global economy the Internet has become the glue of international commerce—connecting consumers with a wide-array of products and services worldwide. But it’s also become a tool for online thieves to sell counterfeit and pirated goods, making hundreds of millions of dollars off of stolen American intellectual property," said Orin Hatch, R-UT.
But whether the proposal would ever become law is unclear.
The Bush administration in 2008 threatened to veto legislation two years ago that created the nation’s first copyright czar unless similar Justice Department powers were removed.
The White House, in successfully pressuring for a rewrite to the legislation, said the original proposal requiring the attorney general to sue copyright infringers "could result in Department of Justice prosecutors serving as pro bono lawyers for private copyright holders regardless of their resources. In effect, taxpayer-supported department lawyers would pursue lawsuits for copyright holders, with monetary recovery going to industry."
Bob Pisano, the Motion Picture Association of America chief executive, applauded the measure’s introduction.
"These sites, whose content is hosted and whose operators are located throughout the world, take many forms. But they have in common the simple fact that they all materially contribute to, facilitate and/or induce the illegal distribution of copyrighted works, such as movies and television programs," Pisano said.
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4chan tries to change life "OUTSIDE the basement" via DDoS attacks
The Internet—or rather, that subsection of it called "Anonymous" that organizes through 4chan—has had it with the RIAA, MPAA, and other antipiracy outfits. This weekend, the angry masses staged a distributed denial of service attack on the sites, bringing them down for a few hours. "Didn't realize this was so easy to do with a big enough crowd. Power to the people," wrote one Twitter user.
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