According to a complaint filed with the US District Court of Northern Califormia filed on June 5, 2008:

“Electronic Arts has driven its competition out of the market for interactive football software, including most significantly Take Two Interactive Software, Inc., the maker of interactive football software title NFL 2K5 and has prevented additional competitors from entering the market.”

The Plantiffs in the case claim that EAs agressive negotiation of exclusive rights with the National Football League (NFL), National Football League Players’ Association (NFLPA), National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA), and Arena Football League (AFL) has led to an EA monopoly of football video games that violates California law and has allowed EA to force a 70% price increase on consumers of it’s Madden NFL video game title.

So what? Well, according to court documents, if you’ve  purchased Madden NFL, NCAA Football, or Arena Football League titles between Jan 1, 2005 and the present you’re “in the game” as  part of the class action lawsuit against Electronic Arts.

An email sent to me by the legal team representing the Plantiffs informs those who have purchased any of these EA games in the time span that unless you opt out of the suit, “you will be bound by the court’s rulings in the lawsuit, including any final Settlement or Judgment.”

Electronic Arts denies any wrong doing. However, for a software franchise that has sold more than 85 million copies this wide-reaching legal action has gone from virtual to reality.

If interested, you can learn more about the case at www.easportslitigation.com.

(mobile readers, click here to view on vimeo)

When Canon’s t3i hit the market, we were interested in the new digital zoom feature offered on the entry-level DSLR.

Any good photographer knows that the usefulness of digital zoom for stills is limited…but what about video?

Since even full HD images are roughly 2 megapixels (or about 6mp on a non-3CCD sensor), there’s been buzz about using the new digital zoom for video to extend the t3i’s optical reach.

We use a quick and dirty test to see if this theory is fact…or a digital dream.

Thanks, @seancom for the testing idea…

Mild or Wild? Click to help BP spin the Wild-O-Meter...

BP puts the “slick” in oil slick. They’ve positioned themselves to raise oil prices, tie the hands of the government, and still have a chance to save their oil well for future use.

Did BP purposefully blow up their own offshore oil platform? Of course not. Are they still trying to turn disaster into dollars? Absolutely.

Now that the “top kill” method has failed, BP has been presented with a best case senario from their point of view. Rather than being forever frozen in a layer of concrete, the well-that won’t-die is still open for future business. According to the Washington Post, John Tesvich, head of the Mississippi State Oyster Task Force, wasn’t surprised the top kill tactic didn’t work:

For them to say that its success ratio was 60 to 70 percent, for a company that’s trying to spin everything as positive as it can, that probably means they knew it wasn’t likely to have an effect. And that’s what’s being borne out now. It now looks likely that this will be an ordeal — that the oil will be spewing most of the summer.

The people on the ground in Mississippi aren’t surprised, neither should we be.

How BP spells “relief”: Ka-ching

The only way to stop the spill? Drill a “relief well.” Poor BP. They’ll have to sink another well into the Gulf. Considering the drilling ban recently enacted by President Obama, BP must devastated with the prospect of another chance to tap into the Gulf’s oil reserves. The net result will be not one but two BP wells pumping side-by-side off the coast of Louisiana by the time this ordeal is over.

And a summer-long oil leak will be all that’s required to send oil and gasoline prices on an extended spike while BP and the rest of the oil industry cash in on the profits. This despite the fact that, as huge as this spill is, it represents a tiny fraction of the 81 million barrels of oil produced globally each year according to BP’s own 2009 statistical review.

(On a side note, here’s the pdf of BP’s global oil production chart for 2009 and here’s a pdf of BP’s powerpoint presentation on world energy statistics presented at the USAEE.)

Obama’s over a barrel

Meanwhile, Obama’s over a barrel. The American people want accountability for the disaster, but the government has neither the technical expertise to address the spill on their own nor the ability to threaten the powerful oil industry with economic ultimatums.

President Obama is not known as a man of action by either party. Teddy Roosevelt spoken softly and carried a big stick; President Obama prefers to speak sternly and carry a selection of tasty candy. But as his recent press conference on the fiasco demonstrated, Obama isn’t even speaking sternly this time.

Where are the massive fines for every day BP does not stop that well? You can’t tell me that if BP had to scratch a $2 million check for every day this spill goes on their team of scientists wouldn’t be a little more motivated. Interactive oil spill timeline here.

Somehow, BP has reduced the President of the United States to a sequence of “concerned thoughts” and “I-don’t-know-what-any-of-my-departments-are-doings.” All President Obama can do is sit in the Oval Office and watch the live video feed of oil bubbling up from the floor of the Gulf like the rest of us.

Now that’s slick, BP.

BP: Mild or Wild?

So where does all this put BP on the Wild-O-Meter? Well, you have to look at this from two sides.

On the Evil side, there’s the fudging numbers, greasing palms, half-hearted containment efforts, the ruining of fishermen’s livelihood, and the endangerment of miles of beautiful American coastline. That’s pretty evil. Evil generally gets a very low Wild-O-Meter reading.

But there’s also the Genius side. BP is turning disaster into dollars, putting slick moves on Obama and the Feds, and setting themselves up for expanding their business in the Gulf. And no one can stop them. Strategically, that’s just brilliant.

Evil+Genius = Evil Genius. That’s why the Wild-O-Meter gives BP’s handling of the oil mess in the Gulf….  2.5 roaring kittens out of five.

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• This girl had no option to chose that “none of the children are bad.” She was forced to make a value judgment.
• Lack of variables. No other visual characteristics like hair color/length, eye color, clothing or even position of light and dark illustrations in the line-up were introduced in the line of questioning. Would the girl have made a different choice if the darker-skinned illustrations where wearing purple dresses and the survey taker’s favorite color happened to be purple? The survey doesn’t rule out these possibilities.
• Because of the lack of variables introduced, no correlation can be drawn between the girl’s choices and her racial attitudes. It’s scientifically useless.

Since this survey did not introduce any other possible variables – say, asking the same question but with the illustrated children arranged in a different order in the visual, for example – the survey isn’t scientifically conclusive.

But then, why would a black child point to the light-skinned child as being “good” or “smart”?

The survey’s results say that even black children pointed to light-skinned illustrations as being the “good” or “smart” children. How could it be anything but the child reflecting a belief that light-skinned individuals are somehow better then them or, at least, better off socially?

Here’s something else to consider. Children are not able to think abstractly at this young survey-takers’s developmental stage. When she is picking a child out of the line up, she isn’t drawing abstract conclusions about value based on skin color. Quite the opposite, she sees herself as a “good” and “smart” child, so she picks the illustration that “is like me.” (If you watch the video, you’ll see this is the case.)

This survey could just as easily be viewed as a measure of a child’s self-esteem than a test of his/her views on an abstract race construct.  Why would a black child pick a light-skinned illustration as the “good” one? Maybe his or her parents and teachers have sent the dark-skinned child negative self-esteem messages. Therefore, the “good” child is the one that is opposite to them. That’s a self-perception that would fall on the shoulders of parents, teachers, and other influences in the child’s life.

Since the survey didn’t test for these possible variables for the responses it gathered, it’s interesting but scientifically useless. Again, this is not a defense of any kind of racist behavior. But, in the race to call young Americans “racist” I’m just flipping on the yellow light of caution.

Just because this survey is labeled “science” doesn’t mean it’s the genuine article.

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