Ryan Mustard

You paid too much for these books.

Apple

The US Department of Justice has won its antitrust case against Apple, with District Judge Denise Cote today ruling that "Apple conspired to restrain trade" by leading a conspiracy to raise e-book prices above the low prices charged by Amazon.

"The Plaintiffs have shown that the Publisher Defendants conspired with each other to eliminate retail price competition in order to raise e-book prices, and that Apple played a central role in facilitating and executing that conspiracy," Cote wrote in her decision. "Without Apple’s orchestration of this conspiracy, it would not have succeeded as it did in the Spring of 2010."

Just how Apple will be punished is yet to be determined. The plaintiffs "are entitled to injunctive relief," Cote wrote. "A trial on damages will follow."

Up until Monday, Xbox Vice President Don Mattrick seemed like a shoe-in to take over the brand new hardware-focused division that was going to replace the current Entertainment and Devices division in an upcoming Microsoft reorganization. But with Mattrick's sudden departure from the company to become the new CEO at Zynga, Microsoft has been left scrambling to find someone else to fill that important role.

Today, Bloomberg reports that the company is looking at current Head of Windows Product Development Julie Larson-Green to lead that division, which will oversee the Xbox line as well as Microsoft's surface tablets and other hardware. The business news site cited an anonymous person "familiar with the matter" for the insider information, but it notes that the decision isn't yet final and could still change before the reorganization is officially announced, possibly next week.

Larson-Green has been with Microsoft for nearly two decades and joined the Office division in 1997, leading UI design for the product through 2007. She then moved to head up the "Windows experience" group in the company, where she oversaw the rollout of Windows 7 and 8.

As is my unhealthy obsession, I waited impatiently for BioShock Infinite to unlock on Steam—then I played the game through in a single sitting. It took about 11 hours (on normal difficulty), though I didn't "complete" the game in the sense of finding all the secrets it contains. I left some doors locked, and I didn't find all the codes, but I did fully experience the game's main draw: its story.

While many first-person shooters have a story that's incidental at best, either because it's barely developed and irrelevant (see early titles such as Doom and Quake) or because it's badly written and still irrelevant (see the Call of Duty series), that's not the case with BioShock Infinite.

You play Call of Duty to see the next spectacular special-effects-laden set piece lifted from one Hollywood blockbuster or another. BioShock Infinite doesn't really have these set pieces. What it has is an interesting universe (a probabilistic multiverse in which you can leap between timelines), at least one compelling character (the mysterious Elizabeth who you're sent to rescue/kidnap/protect), and a bunch of unanswered questions. The whole point of the game is to find out the answers to those questions, and that means playing it for the story.

Los Angeles Police Department officers found themselves in a rather awkward situation at the Robotoki video game developer studio after an employee accidentally hit their security system's "armed threat" panic button. The office just happened to have a life-sized statue of the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 character Simon "Ghost" Riley on display by the entrance, armed with a menacing-looking mock assault rifle. When police arrived on the scene and noticed the gun-wielding figure, they immediately stormed the building in a tense 15-minute standoff. After realizing the effigy was not a threat, the police reportedly left the building while laughing at the absurd incident.

Submitted by: Unknown (via Geekscape)

Don't let Joel's cold, haunted expression fool you. He'd do anything for that girl.

Joel trusts Ellie, Ellie trusts Joel, and that basic relationship between those protagonists defines the game. But it doesn't start out that way. At first Ellie is just cargo, yet another smuggling job for Joel to take on to earn those basic resources that are increasingly hard to satisfy 20 years after a zombie infection has decimated the world's population. It's not an extremely natural pairing, either: he's a gruff, old, tough-as-nails survivor who absolutely refuses to deal with the obvious trauma of a loss he suffered decades earlier. She's a remarkably resilient, bright, self-reliant 14-year-old who has never known a world that wasn't defined by the response to an overwhelming zombie threat.

But they stick to each other because there really isn't much else to stick to. While the zombies are the extant threat in the world of The Last of Us, the way the humans have responded to that threat really defines the bulk of this world. The major cities have been turned into authoritarian quarantine zones where the military shoots on sight for an infraction as small as being out past curfew. The areas outside those zones are even worse, characterized by rubble-lined streets and buildings, roving packs of bandits serving as the de facto authority figures, and the ever-present threat of the infected. Underscoring it all are the Fireflies, a shadowy and elusive revolutionary group trying to restore America to the rule of law that existed before the outbreak. This is the group that Ellie and Joel are both desperately trying to find.

Joel and Ellie occasionally have to rely on other allies, but not nearly as much as they rely on each other.

As they criss-cross the country, struggling together to just survive, Joel becomes just as charmed by the rambunctious Ellie as anyone who plays the game will. Like any 14-year-old worth knowing, she is at turns playful, reflective, tough, and mature beyond her years. One moment she's cursing out an enemy as she bashes in his head with a brick, the next she's admitting to a fascination with garden gnomes (but not garden fairies—they're creepy). She's just as likely to make a sarcastic crack about a new plan as she is to reflect on the role of the soul in a zombie-infested world.

Submitted by: Unknown

Riot Games founders and League of Legends creators Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill have encountered bad behavior in massively multiplayer online games since the days of Ultima Online and EverQuest. In all that time, the typical moderator response to the all-too-common racial epithets, homophobic remarks, and bullying that borders on psychological abuse in MMOs has been to simply ban the players and move on. League of Legends definitely could have afforded to go the same route, bleeding off a few bad apples from its 12 million daily players and 32 million active monthly players (as of late 2012) without really affecting the bottom line.

But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn’t an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference.

Prior to the launch of the formal initiative, Riot introduced "the Tribunal" to League of Legends in May of 2011. The Tribunal is basically a community-based court system where the defendants are players who have a large number of reports filed against them by other players. League players can log in to the Tribunal and see the cases that have been created against those players, viewing evidence in the form of sample chat logs and commentary from the players who filed the reports.