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Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Don Rickles honored by Friars Club

NEW YORK (AP) ? Lucky Don Rickles: The Friars Club holds a night in his honor and everyone plays nice.

Almost everyone.

Robert De Niro, who appeared with Rickles in the 1995 movie "Casino," joked that he was sure the 87-year-old comedian had died and Monday's gathering at the Waldorf Astoria was actually a memorial. "Don would have been so proud," De Niro said as Rickles laughed along.

In fact, it was a tribute to the man known as "Mr. Warmth," who received a lifetime achievement award from the Friars, with guests attending the black-tie dinner finding bottles of Jack Daniels ? a favorite beverage of Rickles' old friend, Frank Sinatra ? at their tables and boxes of Godiva chocolate.

Bob Newhart, Joan Rivers and Louis CK were among the comics praising the master roaster, while taped greetings came from Jon Stewart, Jay Leno and Jerry Seinfeld among others. Natalie Cole, John Mayer and Diana Krall sang for him, and just about everyone sweared, from Bob Costas to Bob Saget.

Lewis Black said that "Rickles" should be a verb, meaning to ridicule "exquisitely." Kathy Griffin recalled attending a Rickles show in the 1990s with Andre Agassi, the rare celebrity unamused by Rickles' patented ribbing. It turns out Agassi had a good reason to miss out on the jokes: The tennis star later admitted he was hooked on crystal methamphetamine at the time.

Rickles, of course, had insults prepared. "So many stars here, nobody big," he said. He told Krall that her husband, Elvis Costello, was the "real star" of the couple. Black was "full of anger and hate" and likely "to die young." As for Rickles himself: "I'm standing here, barely."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/don-rickles-honored-friars-club-062928639.html

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Prosecutors want to admit calls in Zimmerman trial

POOL - George Zimmerman, right, talks with defense attorney Don West in Seminole circuit court in Sanford, Fla., Monday, June 24, 2013. Zimmerman has been charged with second-degree murder for the 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin. (AP Photo/Orlando Sentinel, Joe Burbank,Pool)

George Zimmerman, right, speaks with his attorney, Mark O'Mara, during his trial in Seminole circuit court in Sanford, Fla., Monday, June 24, 2013. Zimmerman has been charged with second-degree murder for the 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin. (AP Photo/Orlando Sentinel, Joe Burbank, Pool)

Assistant State Attorney John Guy points out defendant George Zimmerman during the state's opening argument in front of the jury in the Zimmerman trial, in Seminole circuit court, in Sanford, Fla., Monday, June 24, 2013. Zimmerman has been charged with second-degree murder for the 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin. (AP Photo/Orlando Sentinel, Joe Burbank,Pool)

The parents of Trayvon Martin, Sybrina Fulton, left, and Tracy Martin, center, are greeted by assistant state attorney John Guy during the George Zimmerman trial in Seminole circuit court, in Sanford, Fla., Monday, June 24, 2013. Zimmerman has been charged with second-degree murder for the 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin. (AP Photo/Orlando Sentinel, Joe Burbank,Pool)

SANFORD, Fla. (AP) ? Prosecutors in the George Zimmerman trial want to introduce recordings of non-emergency calls he made to law enforcement to prove the former neighborhood watch leader is guilty of second-degree murder in shooting Trayvon Martin last year.

Prosecutors planned to try to convince Judge Debra Nelson on Tuesday that a series of calls Zimmerman made to authorities about suspicious people in his central Florida neighborhood in the weeks and months before the fatal shooting are indicative of the state of mind he had that night.

State attorney John Guy said in his opening statement Monday that Zimmerman thought Martin was one of the "F------ punks" who "always get away" whom he'd observed previously in his neighborhood and called police about.

But late Monday, defense attorneys objected to the introduction of the previous calls during the questioning of a witness, saying they were being used to show prior bad acts by Zimmerman. The defense maintains this should not be admissible under the rules of evidence.

The judge said she would address the matter Tuesday and sent the jurors to the hotel where they are being sequestered for the duration of the trial, which could last several weeks.

The prosecution began opening statements in the long-awaited murder trial with shocking language, repeating obscenities Zimmerman uttered while talking to a police dispatcher moments before the deadly confrontation.

The defense opened with a knock-knock joke about the difficulty of picking a jury for a case that stirred nationwide debate over racial profiling, vigilantism and Florida's expansive laws on the use of deadly force.

"Knock. Knock," said defense attorney Don West.

"Who is there?"

"George Zimmerman."

"George Zimmerman who?"

"All right, good. You're on the jury."

Zimmerman, 29, could get life in prison if convicted of second-degree murder for gunning down Martin on Feb. 26, 2012, as the unarmed black teenager, wearing a hoodie on a dark, rainy night, walked from a convenience store through the gated townhouse community where he was staying.

When Zimmerman initially wasn't charged in the fatal shooting, Martin's family claimed Zimmerman had racially profiled Martin and police were dragging their feet in bringing charges. Zimmerman, whose mother is Hispanic and whose father is white, has denied the confrontation had anything to do with race.

Randy McClean, a criminal defense attorney in Florida with no connection to the case, called the prosecution's opening statement "brilliant" in that it described Zimmerman's state of mind. But he described the knock-knock joke as less than stellar.

"If you're defending your client for second-degree murder, you probably shouldn't start your opening with a joke," McClean said.

Guy's first words to the jury recounted the profane words Zimmerman told a dispatcher in a call shortly after spotting Martin: "F------ punks. These a-------. They always get away."

Zimmerman was profiling Martin as he followed him, Guy said. He said Zimmerman viewed the teen "as someone about to a commit a crime in his neighborhood."

"And he acted on it. That's why we're here," the prosecutor said.

Zimmerman didn't have to shoot Martin, Guy said. "He shot him for the worst of all reasons: because he wanted to," he said.

The prosecutor portrayed the then-neighborhood watch captain as a vigilante, saying, "Zimmerman thought it was his right to rid his neighborhood of anyone who did not belong."

West told jurors a different story: Martin sucker-punched Zimmerman and then pounded his head against the concrete sidewalk, and that's when Zimmerman opened fire.

Showing the jury photos of a bloodied and bruised Zimmerman, the defense attorney said, "He had just taken tremendous blows to his face, tremendous blows to his head."

West said the idea that Martin was unarmed is untrue: "Trayvon Martin armed himself with a concrete sidewalk and used it to smash George Zimmerman's head."

The prosecutor, however, disputed elements of Zimmerman's story, including his claim that Martin put his hands over Zimmerman's mouth and reached for the man's gun. Guy said none of Zimmerman's DNA was found on Martin's body, and none of the teenager's DNA was on the weapon or the holster.

But West said that doesn't prove anything, arguing that crime-scene technicians didn't properly protect Martin's hands from contamination.

Two police dispatch phone calls that could prove to be important evidence for both sides were played for the jury by the defense. Martin's mother, Sybrina Fulton, left the courtroom before the second recording, which has the sound of the gunshot that killed Martin.

The first was a call Zimmerman made to a nonemergency police dispatcher, who told him he didn't need to be following Martin.

The second 911 call, from a witness, captures screams in the distant background from the struggle between Zimmerman and Martin. Martin's parents said the screams are from their son, while Zimmerman's father contends they are his son's.

Nelson ruled last weekend that audio experts for the prosecution won't be able to testify that the screams belong to Martin, saying the methods used were unreliable.

Other witnesses who testified Monday included a convenience store clerk and the 911 dispatcher who took Zimmerman's call when he was following Martin, who had gone to the convenience store to buy Skittles and a can of iced tea.

The 911 dispatcher, Sean Noffke, testified that he had advised Zimmerman not to follow Martin.

___

Follow Kyle Hightower on Twitter at http://twitter.com/KHightower

Follow Mike Schneider on Twitter at http://twitter.com/MikeSchneiderAP

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2013-06-25-Neighborhood%20Watch/id-c080015197f14db0a643dba021e9e033

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Michelle Trachtenberg as Marina Oswald in Killing Kennedy: First Look

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Monday, June 24, 2013

What Games Are: Reinventing The Games Console Half Way Won't ...

Editor?s note:?Tadhg Kelly is a veteran game designer, creator of leading game design blog?What Games Are?and creative director of Jawfish Games. You can follow him on Twitter?here.

In some ways you?ve got to feel bad for Microsoft. The company has spent years trying to find ways to expand its Xbox idea. It put together a very interesting camera peripheral that many people bought into, but not too many games. It?s tried, on several occasions, to use the games console as a way to win access into the living room. Yet now it?s at the point of having to roll back many of its big ideas because the market reacted so negatively. The company has run into a hard truth: In the minds of the market ?console? means something specific, and is not inclined to expand its thinking.

In essence what Microsoft wanted to do was similar to what Apple did for phones. Long before iPhones there were many years of terrible feature phones. They had Java games, shambolic web interfaces and data plans that charged per megabyte. They?stuck resolutely to sticky keys and small screens, and at best some of them had styluses that pretended to be able to recognize handwriting.?Apple managed to leapfrog that mess by reinventing how it controlled, how it looked and what it felt like. Mobile phones went from being cellular devices to something else, something with sexy touch-screen effects and whatnot, and that in turn opened the door to many other innovations.

That, in essence, was Microsoft?s big idea with Kinect. If the company could redefine control to be much broader than stuffy old joypads, then that opened the door to lots of other avenues. In a sense it was trying to take ?console? into the realm of ?smartconsole? but it had an unwillingness to really go for that. Like Sony and Sega before it, Microsoft has attempted to achieve its vision by expanding the metaphor of what ?console? is supposed to mean rather than defining a new type of product from the ground up. And the market has yet again said no.

Unlike in the computing space where one machine acts as arbiter and translator of all content toward multiple screens, the living room has never really been able to unify. We have several smaller devices that all plug into one big screen. And often they have duplicate functions.?The games console seems like it should solve that. It should be a point of access for content and functionality, roles already filled by computers but in the living room.?So much more could be brought to the living room?if only the audience would get behind that idea. Throw out all your confusing boxes, it seems to say. Bring back some sanity to your life. One box to rule them all and make your life elegant.

Yet no company can really get there. No one company can strike deals with all cable-box makers to essentially cut them out of a key part of their value chain. Nobody is yet able to convince television manufacturers to get behind one standard control method. And since that means there will always be fragmentation,?players really just want consoles to play games. They view consoles as essentially gaming CD players, and preferably cheap ones at that, and steadfastly refuse to buy into the bigger picture.

Their resistance is with good reason:?Transitioning from cheaper many-box to expensive one-box means giving up a lot. It means forfeiting the chance to play games on other systems. It means disconnecting from a pre-existing media service and converting or dumping a lot of material in the process. (Could you ever see iTunes on your Xbox?) The argument has not yet been made strongly enough to the market that the trade-off is worth doing. While smartphones show that dramatic evolution is possible,?a platform holder like Microsoft needs to go much further than it already has if it?s going to change how gamers think.

Several commenters have lamented that Microsoft?s recent reversal on DRM is caused by players being short-sighted, putting immediate value (used games) ahead of long-term potential gains (digital connectedness). To me this reflects a key dissonance.?It?s rare that the market gets educated, and instead much more common that it gets fixated on an idea of what a product category is. It hears ?PC? and it thinks ?powerful desktop computer.? It hears ?console? and it thinks ?shiny games deck.? It sees one sort of trying to act like the other and resists. No no, it says. The device is supposed to be like this.

Even though every PC, smartphone and tablet in the world has a front-facing camera, for example, the market finds something weird about consoles doing likewise because that doesn?t seem to add much to what it believes??shiny games deck? is supposed to be. Even though Nintendo has a great idea for how second screen gaming could work, the market fundamentally regards it askance. A shiny games deck is supposed to be about joypads and such. The tribe only understands ?console? as one thing and is only really interested in features that bolster that vision. All else is viewed with suspicion.

There?s some kind of smart-TV idea trying to be born at Microsoft, an interesting technology which seems just out of reach. There?s something to its Minority-Report-esque idea of swiping, swishing and talking to your television. There?s some notion in the middle of that with tablets and interactions and second screens.?But to get there needs a deep reinvention, and the road toward it does not lead through changing everyone?s minds about the meaning of ?console.? Instead it needs to be a new product, even a whole new category, and its adoption has to go slow.

Rather than adapting a product into something that is complicated, confusing and suspicious, the right approach would be to create something new. One example would be a Kinect standard that could be licensed to television makers and integrated into sets. A standalone camera, irrespective of gaming, that perhaps makes all sorts of remote control tasks easier. And not called ?Xbox? at all. Not called ?console? either.?Or, if the vision mandates that gaming still be involved, a gaming deck that gets beyond the joypad.

Much as the iPhone managed to sell itself by walking away from keypads, arguably the gaming machine that moves beyond ?console? as a product category needs to move beyond the joypad. This is very hard to do. Nintendo almost managed it with Wii before running out of steam and then trying to create a joypad/tablet combo that few people really like.?Kinect tried too, but gestural games are somewhat limited in their scope. Perhaps through SmartGlass or some haptic variant of that in combination with Kinect, Microsoft could get us all into the idea of a new product category like ?smartconsole.?

Or maybe the reason that this product struggles to come to life is simply that there is no place for it. There isn?t anything fundamentally wrong with the games console as a device.?If you like to shoot stuff, jump on platforms, race, and play sports or roleplaying games, the console form factor that we have right now does that. All of the sector?s problems are about how it runs as a business rather than a form factor (which is why microconsoles are a big deal, as they primarily innovate on the business).?Much like the computer or the car, the form factor for doing all those things has not significantly changed in 30 years ? and there?s precious little need for them to.

Blaming the market is all well and good, but there?s no reason for it to change its idea about what a games console is.?And that?s a hard truth. That?s the sort of truth that makes games executives depressed. That?s the kind of truth that, after years of working on grand visions game makers often realize (and become bitter about) that they have to lower themselves back down into the muck. Rather than change the fundamentals the market consistently tells game makers to lean in. Make it bigger. Make it better. Make it play well. Make it feel right. Make it cool. Make it, you know, a great game. That?s all the gaming market cares about, and as yet no one?s made a compelling case for it to think differently.

Tadhg is a senior video game designer, producer and creative director. Tadhg has held roles at various video game development, technology and publishing companies. Since the early 90s, Tadhg has worked on all sorts of game projects, from boardgames and live action roleplaying games through to multi-million dollar PC projects. He has served as lead designer, senior producer and a number of other roles at several companies including BSkyB, Lionhead and Climax. Tadhg is also a published games industry...

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Microsoft, founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, is a veteran software company, best known for its Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite of productivity software. Starting in 1980 Microsoft formed a partnership with IBM allowing Microsoft to sell its software package with the computers IBM manufactured. Microsoft is widely used by professionals worldwide and largely dominates the American corporate market. Additionally, the company has ventured into hardware with consumer products such as the Zune and...

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Source: http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/23/reinventing-the-console/

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AP Source: NSA leaker Snowden's passport revoked

WASHINGTON (AP) ? The former National Security Agency contractor who disclosed a highly classified surveillance program has had his U.S. passport revoked, an official said Sunday.

Edward Snowden's passport was annulled before he left Hong Kong for Russia and while that could complicate his travel plans, the lack of a passport alone could not thwart his plans, the U.S. official said. If a senior official in another country or with an airline orders it, a country could overlook the withdrawn passport, the official said.

The U.S. official would only discuss the passport on the condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss the matter.

Snowden's allies said he was heading toward Ecuador, where the foreign minister said the government had received a request for asylum.

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki refused to comment on Snowden's passport specifically but said individuals facing arrest warrants could have their passport withdrawn.

"Such a revocation does not affect citizenship status. Persons wanted on felony charges, such as Mr. Snowden, should not be allowed to proceed in any further international travel other than is necessary to return him to the United States," Psaki said in a statement.

The State Department said the United States was in touch, through diplomatic and law enforcement channels, with countries that Snowden might travel through or to.

Snowden, a CIA technician and former NSA contractor, helped The Guardian and The Washington Post to disclose surveillance programs that collects vast amounts of online data and email, sometimes sweeping up information on ordinary American citizens. Officials have the ability to collect phone and Internet information broadly but need a warrant to examine specific cases where they believe terrorism is involved.

Since news organizations began publishing reports based on Snowden's disclosures, he had been in hiding in Hong Kong, a former British colony with a high degree of autonomy from mainland China. The United States formally sought Snowden's extradition from Hong Kong but was rebuffed; Hong Kong officials said the U.S. request did not fully comply with their laws.

Snowden was said to have landed in Moscow on Sunday but was not seen leaving the airport.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/ap-source-nsa-leaker-snowdens-passport-revoked-174449436.html

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