rebootied

Employment within the US games sector has risen slightly on last year thanks to the opening of a number of new games studios dedicated to social and online gaming, research has found.

A census of North American gaming companies found that employee numbers have risen from 44,400 in 2008, to 44,806 in the US. Of that small rise, many come from an unusually large number of new studios, particularly social and online ones, which have sprung up to counterbalance the closures felt throughout the rest of the industry.

Meanwhile Canadian companies have seen "explosive" growth throughout the year, said the report, with the establishment of new studios and the expansions of existing ones contributing to a 30 per cent increase - to 12,480 - in the region's employee count.

The findings come from the third annual Game Developer Census compiled by Game Developer Research.

California remained North America's heavyweight area, with 20,815 developers employed there (46 per cent of the US total). Washington was the second most popular with 4500 employees, and Texas third with over 2600.

However, anecdotal evidence uncovered by the research indicated American game development was becoming less clustered around urban centres.

By Kevin Poulsen Email Author |  August 14, 2009 | 2:51 pm |

It’s official. There’s nobody in the chat rooms but pedophiles and undercover police.

On Thursday, a federal appeals court upheld the conviction of an Indiana man whose online efforts to proposition underage girls led him to not one, not two, but three undercover cops, none of whom apparently knew about the others.

The case began in August 2006, when aspiring sexual predator James Daniel started an online conversation with Amanda_13, a fake 13-year-old girl voiced by Sergeant Richard Howard of the Porter County Sheriff’s Department.

After several highly explicit chats, Daniel asked Amanda_13 to meet him at a park in Valparaiso, Indiana, to have sex. When he showed up, he was arrested for inducing an individual under 18 to engage in criminal sexual activity.

When Secret Service agents searched Daniel’s computer, they found logs of chats with two other apparent minors, who described themselves as 13 and 15 years old, respectively. Federal prosecutors introduced the chats at Daniel’s trial as evidence of his perverted motives.

Supposedly, it was only after Daniel was convicted that the feds realized that one of those girls, daisy13_Indiana, was also a cop working the very same Secret Service operation. They informed Daniel’s attorney, who appealed on the grounds that the government improperly withheld information that would have proven entrapment.

The case became even more bizarre when the three-judge appellate panel reviewing the conviction saw the screen name of the third supposed teenager, blonddt, and recognized it from an earlier case.

“To our surprise, the government was unaware until this panel told it at oral argument that the other screen name, blonddt, was also an officer from the Indiana operation,” wrote Judge Diane Wood (.pdf) on Thursday.

Despite the prosecutorial missteps, the panel upheld Daniel’s conviction, ruling that the additional chat logs still showed his intent to commit a crime. Daniel is serving a sentence of 17-and-a-half years in prison, followed by supervised release for life.

There’s no evidence in the record that he ever succeeded in talking with a real underage girl.

As a counterpoint to Obama's defense of his policies, protests were held in Washington, Chicago, Boston and other cities. Organizers said the protests were inspired by the 1773 Boston Tea Party rebellion against British colonial taxes, which helped spark the American revolution.

The "tea party" protesters demonstrated against taxes, government bailouts and Obama's budget proposal.

Rallies were planned at state legislatures across the South, the most conservative region of the United States. In Mississippi, around 2,000 people gathered on the steps of the state capitol in Jackson.

"Our biggest thing is to protest the overspending of our government. They are not looking at the people. They are just automatically dipping into our pockets," said Julia Hodges, an organizer of the Tax Day Tea Party in Mississippi.