british

Open your wallets, Ultima fans. Lord British needs cash.

The RPG pioneer and space tourist has a Kickstarter campaign to raise $1 million for an Ultima-style game called Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues and he's well on his way to that goal.

Lord British, whose real name is Richard Garriott, says Shroud will be "a fantasy role-playing game that will focus more on player choices and discovery than on level grinding." … Read more

Google said today that it had filed suit against British Telecom in the United States and the United Kingdom claiming patent infringement, just over a year after BT alleged that Google infringed on its intellectual property.

CNET reviewed the U.S. lawsuit, which alleges that BT infringes on four Google patents relating to the transfer of files within a network. The patents at stake in the U.S. suit were acquired by Google from companies including IBM and Fujitsu.

The new filing comes in the wake of BT's December 2011 lawsuit against Google, which alleged that the Mountain View … Read more

One of my favorite things about watching old movies is hearing how people might have spoken in eras past -- the expressions they used, their old-school smack talk. But what did the languages from thousands of years back sound like? Hollywood, as far as I know, has yet to make a movie in which characters talk in authentic proto-Austronesian.

The language nerd in me, was, therefore, excited to discover that scientists from UC Berkeley and the University of British Columbia have created a computer program to rapidly reconstruct vocabularies of ancient languages using only their modern language descendants. … Read more

Antarctica isn't the friendliest place on earth. It's cold. It's snowy. It's tough on researchers and tough on their research stations. The cold continent has seen its fair share of stations abandoned as they're slowly consumed by layers of snow and ice. A new research station is looking to outlast its predecessors by crawling up above the snow when needed.

The Halley VI research station is the newest addition to the family for the British Antarctic Survey. It's known as the "first fully re-locatable research station in the world." That means it's got legs and it knows how to use them.… Read more

Sometimes when people send me an abusive, ignorant tweet, I retweet it.

Because, well, it seems somehow the right thing to do to make them feel better.

However, I am not Britain's flagship airline, with customers whose sensibilities are touchy at best.

Please feel the pain, therefore, of British Airways, which today retweeted this: "@JoeLadd @British_Airways F*** You. F****** cancelling my flight! #bunchofc***s"

That's a partial quote. As if the fusillade of four-letter phrases wasn't enough, the retweeted tweet topped it all off with a racial epithet.

It seems entirely unsurprising that others who … Read more

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Anthropologist says Apple is definitely a religion.

- Google brings Street View to the Grand Canyon.

- Apple now owns the trademark to The Beatles' Apple Corps Logo.

- What I learned while live-tweeting a friend's funeral.

Video voice mail: Mossimo has a positive update on a previous video voice mail.… Read more

Nothing gets older faster than high-tech, but the Harbeth P3ESR sounds so good you may never want to replace it with another speaker. That's no hype; I know audiophiles still using similar speakers originally manufactured in the 1970s.

That's when American audiophiles first fell in love with small British monitor speakers engineered and designed by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), and manufactured by a number of companies, including KEF, Goodmans, Rogers, Spendor, and Harbeth. Though the speakers were all built around the same design, known as the LS3/5A, not all LS3/5As sounded exactly the same. Back … Read more

Roku, the maker of a popular player for streaming Web content to TV sets, has closed a new round of funding.

The company has landed a $45 million investment from companies including News Corp. and British Sky Broadcasting, it announced today.

Also participating in the round were prior Roku venture investors Menlo Ventures and Globespan Capital Partners, as well as an unnamed strategic investor. In addition to the cash injection, News Corp's chief digital officer, Jon Miller, has joined the Roku board of directors, while Roku CEO Anthony Wood remains chairman.

"Our philosophy is to give consumers the … Read more

I have just gotten off an American Airlines flight on which, as I approached my window seat, an off-duty airline lady crew member suggested I sit in the aisle seat instead "as that's what men normally want."

This peculiarly sexist foray into the personal psychology of the male I found slightly disturbing.

However, would I find it disturbing if, on checking in with an airline, the member of staff said: "Loved your post yesterday about men who code naked."

I fear I might like it. Which is why I am in three minds (at least) … Read more