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South Korea loosens game censorship
Game censorship is a big news item in the past few months. Political types of all walks of life enjoy trying to stifle the medium by passing laws that don't hold up in court in the US and even get through without much of a hitch in Europe. On the other side of the world, one nation is going the opposite direction. South Korea, which recently proposed an anti-gold farming bill, has pulled censorship on games depicting military action against their northern neighbor. Under the ban, any game that was negative toward North Korea was not permitted for sale in the South, citing they would only inflame the existing tension. However, wiser South Korean lawmakers finally realized video games have little impact on the real world, cut the rule and games like Ghost Recon 2 can now be sold. Lawmakers from the West take note; South Korea has the right idea. When they're sitting right next to an unstable tin-pot dictator and decide that games aren't going to cause a mass invasion, we should start reassessing this whole "games make people violent" kick. Our only hope is wiser people end up in leadership positions who actually try to solve problems instead of deflecting the responsibility on an unrelated party.
Michigan taxpayers owe ESA $182,349, rules judge
US District Court Judge George Caram Steeh has ordered Michigan to pay $182,349 to the Entertainment Software Association for costs incurred during litigation over the state's now defunct anti-violent game law. In April, the law was ruled unconstitutional.According to the ESA, more than 1.5 million tax dollars are currently owed to the organization as a result of similar rulings in other states and cities, including: Illinois ($510,000), Washington ($344,000), Indianapolis ($318,000), and St. Louis ($180, 000). ESA president Douglas Lowenstein delivered some harsh words in the wake of the Michigan ruling, suggesting, "States that pass laws regulating video game sales might as well just tell voters they have a new way to throw away their tax dollars on wasteful and pointless political exercises that do nothing to improve the quality of life in the state ... What's worse, the politicians proposing and voting for these laws know this will be the outcome."
Detroit-area teen builds nuclear fusion reactor
We've heard of plenty of DIY projects, ranging from an MP3 player to a Wacom tablet, but a kid building a small nuclear fusion device in his parents' basement? That's something special. Thiago Olson, a 17-year-old from Oakland Township, outside Detroit, has just completed a 1,000-hour (that's over 40 days worth, but he spread it out over two years) project to build a small-scale nuclear fusion reactor. How does it work? The short of it is that Olson takes a vacuum chamber, fills it with deuterium gas and then jolts it up with 40,000 volts, which creates a very small amount of nuclear fusion. That sounds easy enough -- but now the question is, can young Dr. Strangelove hook up his reactor to the house so he can pay his parents' electrical bill? [Via MAKE: Blog, photo courtesy Detroit Free Press]
Time Warner Ohio subscribers missing the big game...again
Even as most of us get set in front of our HDTVs to watch the very Game of the Century we bought them to watch, Time Warner customers in central Ohio are left frustrated again. Just like during the Super Bowl, due to the ongoing dispute between the cable company and the owner of the local ABC and Fox affiliates, Sinclair Broadcasting. As we're all too familiar with and our good friends in New Orleans recently found out, some affiliates want cable companies to pay up to provide an HD signal to their customers, while the cable co's refuse to pay for what is already available freely over the air. In Ohio, Insight and Wide Open West have made deals with Sinclair to provide HD programming so customers can switch. According to the article, Time Warner has been giving away antennas to interested customers to keep people from switching. Sinclair even plans to start charging to rebroadcast its SD channels, we'll see who blinks first in this standoff or if the FCC somehow steps in.
Self-healing chips could function forever
Although you may have never given a thought to what transistors do to repair themselves when certain sectors fail, there are a few organizations who make it their life's work. Researchers from the National Science Foundation, the Semiconductor Research Corporation, and the University of Michigan have a mission to complete before their grant money runs dry: to create semiconductors that can heal themselves without the burdensome redundancy currently used. The goal here, which could seem a tad superfluous until you consider these chips operate in things like airplanes and medical devices -- you know, fairly critical applications -- is to design a semiconductor that runs more efficiently and can be counted on to function no matter how crucial the situation. By designing a chip that can auto-detect a problem, then shift the resources to a functioning area while the chip diagnoses and repairs the issue with help from "online collaboration software," you'll get a slimmer semiconductor that suffers no noticeable loss in performance while self-repairing. If this circuitry talk has your wires all crossed up, here's the skinny: more dependable chips will make everyone's life a bit easier, and if the team's plan is free of defects, we can expect to see prototypes within the next three years. [Via Mobilemag]
