NCAA Football, long a staple of the EA Sports gaming line-up, will cease to exist after the current version—a least under that name.
The NCAA announced yesterday that it would not renew its long-standing licensing deal with Electronic Arts. An agreement between the two parties has existed in some form for 20 years. The reason for the change is fairly simple: The Ed O’Bannon lawsuit creates huge potential liability for the NCAA. Should a court rule that the organization must compensate athletes for the use of their likenesses, the NCAA could be on the hook for millions upon millions of dollars, depending on where the “line” is drawn for damages in terms of timing and the size of the class eligible for recovery.
Naturally, the NCAA says that “We are confident in our legal position regarding the use of our trademarks in video games. But, given the current business climate and costs of litigation, we determined participating in this game is not in the best interests of the NCAA.”
In other words, “We believe we will win this suit. But, all B. S. aside, we probably won’t. So, we’re going to mitigate against future liability while we still can.”
Voters in North Carolina elevated the state’s ban on same-sex marriage to its constitution this week. The amendment also added a constitutional ban on civil unions or similar arrangements. The measure passed by a comfortable margin.
I was a guest on 
But, without a media willing to “corroborate” that point for the American public, the revelations from the hearings will do only modest good.
We’d get a disposable opinion piece once in a while, and the odd publication here or there would announce with a modest dash of self-congratulation that it would henceforth refuse to use the team nickname in its NFL coverage. Generally, this was the sports equivalent of the intermittent, scary “summer of the shark attack” story: A few people would get riled up, we would worry about it and discuss it for a few weeks, but all was forgotten…
I actually closed my office door for about an hour the day the Redskins announced Gibbs was coming back, peppering my friends with phone calls at work as we gleefully giggled like schoolgirls as visions of Lombardi Trophies filled our heads.
The Axis of Ego 
Would-Be Robot Overlords Suffer Setback
I’ve recently become a contributor for a website called A New Voice. It’s a commentary site with its focus on pop culture and politics (especially the intersection of the two), with a right-of-center point of view and an additional goal of outreach for a youth- and minority-oriented audience. This is my most recent piece.
As someone who worries about a future robotic takeover, I’m cautiously optimistic that the Bristol Robotics Laboratory announced in a recent press release that it would spearhead a research effort to make robots more “trustworthy.”
Robots increasingly serve “helper” roles in society, such as aiding patients recovering from injury or illness. As direct robot / human contact occurs more frequently in contemporary culture, issues of human safety understandably become more a pressing issue.
But the BRL’s research goes a step beyond mere concerns about a malfunction or design flaw injuring a human.
Say hello to your future master (or murderer).
From the press release: “[I]t is still crucial to understand not only whether the robot makes safe moves, but whether it knowingly or deliberately makes unsafe moves.” (emphasis mine)
Translation? The good folks at the BRL know that it may be just a matter of time before disgruntled robots turn on their unwitting and vulnerable makers (i.e. you and me).
The research project is quite broad and, in addition to industry experts, will enlist the assistance of several UK institutions. Besides the BRL, which consists of scientists from the University of the West of England and the University of Bristol, colleagues from the University of Liverpool and the University of Hertfordshire will also join in the effort to postpone a possible mechanized takeover of Earth.
The program, called the “Trustworthy Robotic Assistants,” or “TRA” project, has already made use of a robot named BERT to test scenarios in manufacturing where a human employee collaborates with a (possibly sinister, scheming) robot coworker.
There will also be more mundane experiments conducted in the University of Hertfordshire’s “Robot House.” Such experiments will deal with everyday interaction between humans and robots in home-assistance scenarios. This seems wise, as the opening salvo of any robot revolution would undoubtedly take place in our kitchens and bathrooms.
“Safety assurance of robots is an urgent research challenge that must be addressed before many products that already exist in labs can be unlocked for mass production,” explains Dr. Kerstin Eder, the principle investigator for the BRL.
The project will cost the equivalent of 1.8 million dollars and take three-and-a-half years to finish. Luckily, the projected completion date of my robot-proof bunker is only two years away. The BRL research is especially crucial as advances in artificial intelligence steamroll toward a possible AI singularity that would see robots equal (and then surpass) human intelligence.
I can only hope the BRL isn’t too late to spare us all from our otherwise-certain doom. Godspeed, Brits.
I’ll be in my bunker if you need me.
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