This past week, Epic's VP Mark Rein spoke with the gentlemen at 1up on the '1up Yours' Podcast. It was ... most informative. It seems that the much-delayed downloadable content for Gears of War is being held up by Microsoft, who wants to charge for the content for the game. "In the effort of promoting a profitable marketplace, however, Microsoft's compromised with the studio by deciding to follow the successful model that Halo 2 pioneered a few years ago: the new Gears of War maps will be available for a to-be-determined fee, and made free a few months from now." The site also has hands-on details for 'Annex', the new (free) multiplayer gameplay type.

AlexGr sends us to InternetNews.com for an account of a Microsoft VP demonstrating Microsoft's ASP.NET AJAX product running on Ubuntu at AJAXWorld. In his earlier keynote, Brad Abrams had declared that, when it comes to AJAX, Microsoft is not the cathedral and open source isn't really a bazaar. He noted that ASP.NET AJAX is available under Microsoft's permissive license with full source code. "The Web is built on open standards and we at Microsoft believe that we have to enable those open standards," Abrams said.

140Mandak262Jamuna writes "IIT Bombay, one of the top Indian engineering schools, is restricting internet access to its students. The restriction is simply to cut off all internet access at night from the dorms. The school claims the 24/7/365 internet access is hampering academic performance, personality development and extra curricular activities. Though these are the 'official' reasons, it appears there are other reasons too. Mr Prakash Gopalan, the Dean of Student Affairs, says, 'one only had to look at the hard drive of any of the students' computers to see that bad content dominated over good.'"

An anonymous reader writes "The Internet Archive is being sued by a Colorado woman for spidering her site. Suzanne Shell posted a notice on her site saying she wasn't allowing it to be crawled. When it was, she sued for civil theft, breach of contract, and violations of the Racketeering Influence and Corrupt Organizations act and the Colorado Organized Crime Control Act. A court ruling last month granted the Internet Archive's motion to dismiss the charges, except for the breach of contract claim. If Shell prevails on that count, sites like Google will have to get online publishers to 'opt in' before they can be crawled, radically changing the nature of Web search."

xiox writes "The UK government is planning to stop funding a study to understand obesity in children. The study fits children with accelerometers to measure how much energy each child uses in a day by moving. The results are surprising. Those children who do sports at school do not burn more calories than those who don't. Furthermore there is no correlation between body mass index and the number of calories used! The results are very interesting, suggesting that genetics and diet are the main reasons for childhood obesity, not sport. The UK government is trying to increase the amount of sport in schools."

Snowgen writes "Viacom has filed a $1,000,000,000.00 lawsuit for 'massive intentional copyright infringement' against Google over YouTube video clips. '"YouTube's strategy has been to avoid taking proactive steps to curtail the infringement on its site," Viacom said in a statement. "Their business model, which is based on building traffic and selling advertising off of unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws.'"

Bengt writes "The Inquirer has a story about a brute force Vista key activation crack. It's nothing fancy; it's described as a 'glorified guesser.' The danger of this approach is that sooner or later the key cracker will begin activating legitimate keys purchased by other consumers. From the article: 'The code is floating, the method is known, and there is nothing MS can do at this point other than suck it down and prepare for the problems this causes. To make matters worse, Microsoft will have to decide if it is worth it to allow people to take back legit keys that have been hijacked, or tell customers to go away, we have your money already, read your license agreement and get bent, we owe you nothing.'"

jakosc tips us to a disturbing article in PloS Biology on the avoidance of the word "Evolution" in scientific papers and grants. From the paper: "In spite of the importance of antimicrobial resistance, we show that the actual word 'evolution' is rarely used in the papers describing this research. Instead, antimicrobial resistance is said to 'emerge,' 'arise,' or 'spread' rather than 'evolve.' Moreover, we show that the failure to use the word 'evolution' by the scientific community may have a direct impact on the public perception of the importance of evolutionary biology in our everyday lives... It has been repeatedly rumored (and reiterated by one of the reviewers of this article) that both the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation have in the past actively discouraged the use of the word 'evolution' in titles or abstracts of proposals so as to avoid controversy."

zakkie writes "New Zealand fisherman have caught a massive 450-kg colossal squid in Antarctic waters. This is by far the biggest yet found, measuring over 10 meters in length and weighing 450 kg. It has been taken back to New Zealand for study." The NZ government's announcement page features a downloadable backgrounder on the colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) and a 1.1-MB popup portrait of the animal in the fishing boat's hold.

PetManimal writes "Computerworld is reporting that gamers who have installed Vista are reporting problems with first person-shooter titles such as CounterStrike, Half-Life 2, Doom 3. and F.E.A.R. (Users have compiled lists of games with Vista issues.) The complaints, which have turned up on gamers' forums, cite crashes and low frame rates. Not surprisingly, the problems relate to graphics hardware and software: 'Experts blame still-flaky software drivers, Vista's complexity, and a dearth of new video cards optimized for Vista's new rendering technology, DirectX 10. That's despite promises from Microsoft that Vista is backwards-compatible with XP's graphic engine, DirectX 9, and that it will support existing games. Meanwhile, games written to take advantage of DirectX 10 have been slow to emerge. And one Nvidia executive predicts that gamers may not routinely see games optimized for DirectX 10 until mid-2008.'"

Wired has up a very thoughtful article examining the current anti-violent gaming trends in Germany, and reflecting on their connection to WWII. Article author Bruce Gain discusses some of the history of post-Nazi Germany, and points out how violent games rile politics in that country by reminding it of its past. Says Gain: "Some German officials link these games to an increase in violence among the young and cite at least one instance where a gamer applied the lessons learned from a first-person shooter to a real-life murderous rampage. Remove the connection, they argue, and you prevent further violence. Germany has a lot of gamers, but the violence found in many of these games is widely criticized there. It has some of the strictest video-game censorship laws in the Western world. For example, laws prohibit the sale of Counter-Strike and other titles with blood-depicting graphics switched on. But for many politicians, the laws don't go far enough."

Wowzer writes "EA and Valve today announced the product configurations of Half-Life 2's The Black Box and The Orange Box, while at the same time confirming another worldwide release date delay from summer 2007 to winter 2007. If you thought the delay was the only bad news, then artwork fans haven't seen the ugly new boxart yet."

inetsee writes "According to Groklaw, SCO has admitted in a 10K filing that if the court grants any or all of IBM's six motions for summary judgement, 'We can not guarantee whether our claims against IBM or Novell will be heard by a jury.' The site goes through a statement by statement run-down of SCO's filing, noting things like the absence of employee numbers (a piece of information they told investors they would disclose). Elsewhere in the document, it is revealed that SCO's stock is in danger of being delisted from NASDAQ, they may come under further litigation from an unrelated legal matter, and SCO is now claiming that OSes like HP-UX and Solaris are derivatives of code that they 'own'. Despite the dire pronouncements throughout the filing, if everything else runs according to plan their 10K indicates they could keep fighting the good fight for another 12 months."