Month: May 2016

(credit: Descrier)

The Federal Communications Commission proposal to boost competition in the cable TV set-top box market is facing opposition from some members of Congress who claim the plan will lead to copyright violations.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and ranking Democrat John Conyers (D-Mich.) described their concerns in a letter to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler Thursday, as noted by Politico. The letter echoes arguments made by cable lobbyists and some groups representing copyright holders.

"Creators have shared concerns that under the FCC's proposed rule, future set-top boxes or their replacements could purposely be designed to distribute pirated content obtained from sources that primarily offer stolen content," Goodlatte and Conyers wrote.

(credit: Mike Licht)

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the one that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed is allowing the government to obtain the metadata of every phone call to and from the United States, approved every surveillance request from US authorities in 2015.

Reuters news service, which reviewed a secret document outlining the figures, reported that the FISA Court granted every one of the 1,457 surveillance applications last year. The scope of the surveillance is unknown but vast. A single application is all it takes for the FISA Court to require the nation's telcos to scoop up and retain the telephone metadata on all phone calls. The court, based in the District of Columbia and whose members are appointed by the Supreme Court's chief justice, approved every one of the 1,379 applications for the year 2014 as well, according to the memo.

The memo said the FISA Court, which was created in 1978 with the stated goal of acquiring intelligence on foreign suspects, had modified 80 warrant applications last year, up from 19 the year before.

Having apparently run out of incoherently threatening foreigners to shoot here on earth, Activision and Infinty Ward's next Call of Duty game will take the wholly original angle of shooting enemies in space, a concept which we believe has never before been done in video games.

A new three-minute trailer for the previously rumored Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare is heavy on the usual jump cuts and explosions amid rubble and showers of gunfire, only now some of those scenes are set in the vacuum of space (or the cold, dead light of a space station). There are a few shots of space-based combat that look more at home in a game like Elite: Dangerous than in a Call of Duty game. One shot of floating amid a ruined space station could have come right out of Adr1ft, while another scene walking through a dark corridor looks pulled directly from the Dead Space series.

The new trailer follows an earlier teaser that revealed the Settlement Defense Front, a new antagonist that promises, "You will know loss. We will be the architects of your pain. We will build monuments to your destruction."

(credit: Flickr user andrew and his family)

Male competitiveness is pretty engrained in our culture, with popular images of it encompassing everything from sports to business to the PlayStation. And there are some studies that have shown men to be more competitive than women, but this effect hasn’t been studied all that deeply. A new paper published in PNAS shows that gender’s effects on competitiveness go away when the stakes of the competition are related to children’s benefit, rather than personal gain. When children are at stake, women and men are equally competitive.

The study is based on the idea that women aren’t necessarily less competitive than men, but there are gender-specific spheres of competition. The authors hypothesized that one of those spheres involves offspring. To test this hypothesis, the researchers asked participants of both genders to perform tasks under two different reward schemes. In the first reward scheme, participants received cash, a standard incentive in psychology experiments. In the second reward scheme, participants received a scholastic bookstore voucher worth the same value. This voucher was a proxy for children’s benefit.

This study was conducted in China, and all participants were parents of school-aged students. The authors think that Chinese culture’s heavy emphasis on education makes it more likely that the participants would see a “scholastic bookstore voucher” as something that would benefit their child. This expectation was confirmed via interviews with local teachers and parents, who agreed that Chinese participants would likely use a scholastic bookstore voucher to buy educational books for their children.