It’s always nice to here someone from the gaming industry speak out over the current course of DRM proliferation. We all have clearly seen the direction Ubisoft wants to go (read: fucking legitimate customers over time and time again). But that doesn’t mean all game developers are bad, stupid, or all of the above. No sir. There still is some hope left. Just Cause 2 developer and Avalanche Studio co-founder, Christofer Sundberg, has come out against the several new forms of “ridiculous DRM”, with obvious hints at Ubi being a company not to follow.
But he doesn’t stop with Ubi…
- September 9, 2009 9:58 am
According to Sascha Lobo, co-initiator of the Internet Manifesto, Journalism has to adapt to today’s as well as the futures emerging technologies. Photo: Reto Klar
Bloggers as of late have been getting a fair deal of flack from more “reputable” news sources with fat checkbooks and more legal resources than most of us would know what to do with. Time and time again we have seen bigger news publications attack smaller blogs for piracy, siphoning content, and all out theft on the digital front. Though, this borrowing and sharing of ideas (*clears throat*…the whole purpose of the internet) and the so called “rules” that apply, only go one way. Whenever big publications are threatened, legal hounds are released. But when bloggers and smaller blogs across the internet are pillaged, well, that’s a different story. This double standard and utter nonsense has infuriated many. Myself included. Thankfully, the little guys aren’t taking it lightly.
15 of Germany’s most popular blogs and bloggers came together to create the “Internet Manifesto”. It is a document informing telling everyone, big publications included, how the internet works no matter the attempts to force it into nice little pay containers and walled gardens. The Internet Manifesto has garnered a great deal of attraction already as the site it is hosted on has been up and down due to traffic. The Manifesto highlights how this growing feeling of entitlement is a disease and that the internet is a new business model — applying old business models and failing to innovate to the changing markets and times will only cast those involved further into irrelevance.
The Internet Manifesto in it’s entirety just inside for those of you wanting some enlightenment, knowledge, and more importantly, a good read.
- September 1, 2009 8:47 am
While handheld/personal breathalyzers are a drinkers best friend as the difference between a good night with a sweet morning or a bad night resulting in a hefty fine and lengthy jail stint is a mere 0.08%. For those who don’t drink, a breathalyzer is obviously useless. For those that do, and do so often or simply want to know precisely when they’ve had a tad too much. Sure you can get any run of the mill breathalyzer that sniffs out alcohol on your breath. Or, you can go the extra mile and get a little extra bang for your buck. How so? How about a breathalyzer with a built in lung cancer sniffer? Sound science fictional? Scientist in Israel are close to getting an actual working portable breathalyzer and lung cancer sniffing device that as you can guess, will determine your blood alcohol level and if you have lung cancer. Spiffy huh. Before, pretreatement of your breath was needed, adding extra time, complexity, and procedures into the mix that ultimately slow down the overall process. However, this new method can do without that pesky pretreatement junk meaning faster detection and hopefully recovery. Hopefully the kinks can be worked out in the near term so that Lung cancer patients’ longevity can be increased, providing them with longer years of healthy living.
Source: Dvice, Ars Technica, Image Source
Think of all of the addictions one could have and try to categorize them in order from least (physically) harmful to the most harmful. Usually drugs and alcohol are right near the top of the list as over time, those certainly take a toll on the body. Since the dawn of the internet, the entire world has literally been plopped down right in front of you. Why spend tens of thousands of dollars and spend weeks seeing the sights of the world when you can do so for much less from the comfort of your living room couch? Granted, some people prefer the real world experience, myself included, but that doesn’t make the couch potato world tour any less tempting. Like many other instances and scenarios in life, too much of a good thing can lead down the road to trouble. Even the internet, a highly useful tool can become so addictive and distracting that it becomes a hinderance. Enter the new wireless, always connected age and the dawn of internet addiction. But there is help.
