With Tivo Series 3 already a success, the company has announced that development on Series 4 is already underway. While the complete set of features and enhancements are still being worked out, Tivo has released an initial wishlist that they hope will be implemented with Series 4.

Enhancements / Features

• More Space - the product will come with a single hard drive option - 20 terabytes (approx. 20,000 gigabytes) and will be come with 10 pre-loaded HD movies of your choice.
• New Colors - the system will come with 9 colors - white, blue, black, red, green, pink, brown, purple, and grey.
• Hidden Suggestions - the “suggetions” feature will feature an option users can set to hide all adult programming so that visitors won’t see what you’ve really been watching.
• Wii integration - use Nintendo’s Wii remote to navigate the Tivo menus and control playback options.
• Online Messaging - able to create a “buddy list” that users will be able to use to send messages back and forth.
• Voice Recognition and Tivo Personalities - perhaps the biggest feature will be the new TivoPersonal option. When you buy your Tivo, you’ll be able to purchase a specific personality for your box. These personalities will work with advanced voice recognition software to learn your likes and dislikes and will be able to better interact with you and provide you with a better overall entertainment experience. Reps say these personalities will show a variety of emotions from joy and excitement to anger and jealousy. Examples include how recording too much porn could make your TivoPersonal personality jealous or over protective. Go on vacation or just not turn on your TV for awhile and your Tivo may get lonely. Tivo reps fully believe the personalities will add a new dimension to home entertainment that people have been lacking.

Tags: Tivo Series 4, Tivo features

Blizzard’s latest World of Warcraft patch (2.1.0) put in place many countermeasures to slow and possibly stop the practice of farming in game gold and selling it for real-world cash. Along with the patch, Blizzard has announced that it has taken legal action against Peons4Hire, one of the largest virtual gold selling firms around.

Blizzard hoped the combination of the anti-spam advertising features released in the patch and the lawsuit against Peons4Hire would be welcomed by it’s growing player base and help continue their dominance in the MMO field. Unfortunately for Blizzard, their latest actions have outraged most of WoW’s populace. Players, once able to quickly achieve higher ranks and obtain l33t l00t via the services provided by firms like Peons4Hire, now are faced with the grim realization that they must actually do the hard work themselves. As such, many players have decided to stay logged off until Blizzard changes its policies. Those that do login usually find themselves picketing the virtual streets of WoW.

To make matters worse, Blizzard has just received in-game WoW statistics that show 79% of WoW players were employed by gold farming/power levelling firms like Peons4Hire. With the new restrictions and penalites in place, the player base instantly dropped over 95% as gold farmers and the players who depend on them protest by not logging in.

Blizzard continues to emphasize it’s resolve in not allowing gold farming firms to affect the gameworld’s progress, but there’s no denying the impact such resolve has had on the company’s business.

Tags: World of Warcraft, gold farming, Peons4Hire

Nintendo’s Mario Party franchise has become well known for being a great drinking game for college student while the game itself leans towards the more innocent and “kiddy” with cartoonish characters and relatively simple games. For many years people have had to come up with their own rules to transform the party game into a drinking party game, but Nintendo plans on changing all that with their newly announced Wii Drink Party.

So far Nintendo has been fairly tight lipped about the game, though some details have recently been leaked. We do know that some traditional drinking games will make it into the final product, including beer pong, quarters, California Kings, and flip cup. On top of that, Nintendo promises to include some original drinking games that are made possible with video games and more specifically the motion controlled Wii.

It’s also been revealed that the game will come with four clips that will enable the Wii remote to be attached to drinking cups, thus allowing the game to determine how much each player drinks during the drinking parts of the game. Similar to Wii Sports, Wii Drink Party will intersperse screens between games reminding players to not drink and drive and to drink responsibly.

No release date has been announced.

Tags: Wii games, drinking games, Wii drinking game

NBC recently revealed Heroes: Origins, a Heroes spinoff that’ll introduce new characters and storylines and will hopefully help maintain the huge success Heroes has been for NBC. Along with this news, it has been discovered that there are in fact, 14 different spinoffs that the show’s creators are planning depending on how well the Origins spinoff does.

Below are a few of the confirmed possibilities:

Heroes: HB
A troubled teen hero makes his way to Huntington Beach where a well-to-do family takes him in and gives him a reason to stay out of jail. The family’s nerdy son becomes best friends with the new hero as they poke fun of the artificial culture around them.

Superpowers in the City
Four females gossip about their recent relationships with the city’s heroes (and the occasional villain). The main character writes her own column about the city’s heroes and the superpowers she’s constantly falling in and out of love with.

Extreme Makeover: Heroes Edition
Hosts of the show meet up with various heroes who have fallen on hard times. Sometimes helping the heroes develop their powers, other times helping them find just the right costume for a Friday night. The show looks to bring hope to all heroes out there who just need a little push in the right direction.

Charlie’s Heroes
Three scantily clad female heroes work at a private investigation company. Charlie, their rarely seen boss, sends them out undercover on various missions where their cover is always inevitably blown.

Dancing with the Heroes
Heroes are paired up with professional dancers and compete to see who’s the best. Judges rank them on their grace, poise, movement, and power usage.

Survivor: Heroes
Heroes are all put on an island with no food or shelter where they must compete to see who’ll be the last hero standing. The heroes all use their powers during competition to fight for immunity so they can avoid the risk of being voted off by their team members.

Two and a Half Heroes
A hero and his son move in with the hero’s brother. The brother, constantly using his powers to pick up women, and the father, ever reluctant about using his powers, are constantly battling with each other’s parenting style which puts the boy in awkward situations.

Tags: Heroes spinoff, Heroes: Origins

It’s been many months since Pluto was downgraded from an official planet to a dwarf planet, but the controversial decision apparently was just the beginning. Yesterday, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) released a new list of astronomical changes that will likely be even more controversial than the Pluto decision.

The list of changes include Saturn being downgraded to a “weird thing with rings”, Uranus being renamed to Urpenis, and Earth being downgraded to debris.

Earth being downgraded to debris is apparently due to the fact that the makeup of Earth’s atmosphere and mass is now largely human waste and other such garbage. According to IAU’s complex algorithms, the increase of waste now forces them to designate Earth as merely debris. Many religious spokespersons have spoken out against the change as it largely undermines the foundations most religions are based on.

President Bush has made a statement urging the IAU to come up with new algorithms that will allow Earth to remain a planet and has said he’ll use “any means necessary” to make sure it happens. He’s also suggested that the new definition could perhaps be due to a connection between the IAU and al-Qaeda.

Tags: Pluto, IAU, International Astronomical Union

A new study by a 17 year old high school student showing that iPods can negatively affect pacemakers has prompted an ongoing investigation to other possible side effects for the popular portable music device.

5 newly discovered effects have been released:

• Insomnia - 100,348 cases have reported where people claimed having an inability to sleep without the use of an iPod.
• ADHD - prolonged exposure to the sounds produced by the iPod has caused a reported 1,238,205 individuals to develop ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) due to increased dependency on background music.
• Paranoid Schizophrenia - 60,304 iPod users have developed paranoid schizophrenia as their brains now translate the noises they hear as people being “out to get them”.
• Spontaneous combustion - the heat given off by the iPod has been linked to at least 5,325 cases of spontaneous combustion.
• Death - so far there have been 32,303 reported cases of iPod causing death (number does not include those associated with spontaneous combustion).

Tags: iPod side effects

A recent Wired article asking whether or not virtual rape is a crime has stirred up trouble for virtual communities everywhere. In the article, the author brings up the issues surrounding virtual sexual advances and how unwarranted advances have been compared to real world rape. The conclusion drawn at the end of the article is that while such acts may be quite awful, they are not criminal. Lawyers and activists seem to have ignored that part as a movement has started targetting all deviant behavior found in all sorts of online communities, including, but not limited to social networking sites and video games.

People Against Common Sense (PACS) is the name of a new group formed to take on online communities where this “deviant” behavior can be found. The group claims that all sorts of digitally realized crime should be punishable by the “real world” counterpart. For example, PACS suggests that a person who kills another person during an online game such as Counterstrike or Battelfield should face first degree murder charges. Similarly, underage restrictions such as those dealing with drinking, gambling, and driving will be targeted. This means that all driving games will be restricted to persons 16 and older in most US States.

PACS has already drafted a bill and almost has enough backing in the legislature to see their goals realized. Gamers everywhere are protesting, but with political candidates eager to add such legislation to their “selling points”, it’s likely that some form of PACS bill will become law.

Tags: game politics, game laws, satire

I doubt anyone is surprised that Spider-Man 3 is already a huge success. The fact that it’s already breaking records and is on it’s way to breaking more isn’t much of a shock eithert. People are already expecting a sequel, but what they weren’t expecting was Sony’s recent announcement that plans have already been put into motion create not one, not two, but 31 sequels to the popular Spider-Man franchise.

Movie rights to Marvel’s Spider-Man franchise have been bought through the year 2056. In fact, scripts have already been drafted and approved for the next 12 Spider-Man movies - which should be released over the next 20 years. Sony expects each to be released approximately every other year, though there may be exceptions.

Sony has also signed Tobey Maguire for at least the next three movies and has rights to his first born son to play Peter Parker once Tobey has aged beyond the role’s requirement. There’s no word on whether Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, or any other stars have been signed for future films, though it’s expected that Dunst will surely be on board.

In an extremely controversial move, Google has announced that the first beta of their new mapping program, Illegal Immigrant Maps (IIM), will be released invitation only sometime next month. With immigration being a hot topic in politics and the press, Google hopes to create a tool that could potentially be used by law enforcement and politicians to better gauge how severe the illegal immigration problem truly is.

As with their searching technology, Google refuses to release any details on how the new mapping program will work, saying they don’t want to give their competitors any advantages. They did say that it will be integrated into the current Google Maps application so that users can choose to display markers where illegal immigrants can be found.

Google reps do stress that the new technology will only show where illegal immigrants are located, not legal immigrants. This seems little comfort to much of the population, however, as just about every civil rights group is clamoring to come up with legal action to stop Google’s new technology. Home Depot is leading the charge, fearing that the maps could reveal a bit too much about the workers that set up shop outside their stores.

Tags: Google maps, illegal immigration