Tag archive: Thompson

In a moment gamers around the world have been awaiting for years, one of gaming’s most vocal and extreme critics, attorney Jack Thompson, has been disbarred. Best known for his attacks on the Grand Theft Auto series and publicized sparring with gaming advocates like the authors of Penny Arcade, Thompson’s over-the-top methods were also the final straw that lead the Supreme Court of Florida to take away his license to… Read More

It’s 10 years since the concept became concrete. The idea was simple enough – letting customers pay online merchants easily, without revealing personal details, and at the same time letting merchants receive payment quickly. And so PayPal was born. Along the way, as well as helping people, it’s made its founders rich, to the tune of the $1.5 billion eBay paid to acquire the service six years ago. The company was put… Read More

A number of the world's leading manufacturers of high-definition televisions have filed a patent suit against low-cost HDTV maker Vizio, claiming the company is violating some 15 patents key to supporting MPEG-2 video in its products. According to the complaint, both the individual companies—which include heavy hitters like Sony, Samsung, Mitsubishi, and Phiips—has pursued Vizio about licensing the patents, but the company… Read More

It was a decision that raised a lot of hackles. But when the BBC officially launched its iPlayerservice that lets people stream or download programs and watch them for a week after they were first aired, it was only available for PC.   It’s still that way, but at least there’sfinally hope for Mac users.   In a blog posting, BBC director general Mark Thompson wrote,   "I hope this good news is evidence of the hard… Read More

In a massive legal move, storage and portable media player developer SanDisk has filed three patent infringement lawsuits alleging some 25 companies that manufacture, import, or sell everything from USB flash drives to multimedia cards to portable media players infringe on SanDisk patents. The suits were filed in the U.S. District Court in the Western District of Wisconsin and with the U.S. International Trade Commission; the suits allege… Read More

In the ongoing debate over video-game violence, no players are perhaps more vigorous and vitriolic in their opposition to one another than Jack Thompson and the guys at Penny Arcade, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik. After several public quarrels through e-mail and phone calls, the duo at Penny Arcade apparently decided it best to let Thompson confront someone from the gaming industry in a face-to-face debate at their annual Penny Arcade… Read More

The shipments of more than 1 million units will be made in the latter half of this year. DirecTV holds a subscription base of 12 million persons with annual sales of US$2.3 billion. Samsung began its set-top box businesses in 2001 and supplied Movie Beam, a product for the VoD services, to Disney in 2003. This conflicts with earlier reports that Thompson will be suppling DirecTV with their own set-top boxes. Read that story here.