Taxing Video Games and Equipment?

MADISON, Wis. — Electronics might be the hot item on all gift lists this holiday, but it’s also on the list of some lawmakers.
A proposed bill in Wisconsin would add an extra sales tax to electronics.
The bill’s author, state Sen. Jon Erpenbach, said the money raised from the tax isn’t to dissuade gamers, but to […]

Commercial rant #2 - McDonald’s/gofbot.com

Watch me be much too lazy to copy the formatting from the first one of these I did! Hopefully I’ll get close enough. I had such lofty plans to make them all look the same… oh well.
I have a vile and thorough hatred for all of McDonald’s advertising, particularly since they adopted the obnoxious “I’m […]

Baby monitor picks up Space Shuttle video

PALATINE, Illinois (AP) — An elementary school science teacher in this Chicago suburb doesn’t have to turn on the news for an update on NASA’s space mission. She just turns on her video baby monitor.
Since Sunday, one of the two channels on Natalie Meilinger’s baby monitor has been picking up black-and-white video from inside the […]

Another three letter domain name bites the dust - wtf.com

APRIL FOOLS!
Well, I guess nothing lasts forever… Though truth is, I never through this would happen quite so soon.
A site I used to be staff on, wtf.com, has recently sold it’s domain name to everyone’s favorite evil search giant, Google.com and the sale closed more than 3 weeks ago.
While the old site, a nice place […]

France opens secret UFO files covering 50 years

PARIS (AFP) - France became the first country to open its files on UFOs Thursday when the national space agency unveiled a website documenting more than 1,600 sightings spanning five decades.
The online archives, which will be updated as new cases are reported, catalogues in minute detail cases ranging from the easily dismissed to a handful […]

Google admits to mobile phone project

Google is working on a basic mobile phone to extend its dominance in internet advertising to handheld devices, according to analysts.
Richard Windsor, of Nomura, the broker, said that Google representatives had talked about a device at an industry event in Germany. The report followed remarks by a Google executive in Spain, who admitted the company […]

PlayStation 3 in Europe will play fewer old games

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - The European version of PlayStation 3 will play fewer PlayStation 2 video games when it launches on March 23 compared with models launched earlier in Japan and America, Sony Corp said on Friday.
“The backwards compatibility is not going to be as good as the U.S. and Japan models,” a Sony spokesman said.
PlayStation […]

Pirates beware, thar be a new weapon in the e-waters!

SAN FRANCISCO: As media companies struggle to reclaim control over their movies, television shows and music in a world of online file-sharing software, they have found an ally in software of another kind.The new technological weapon is content-recognition software, which makes it possible to identify copyrighted material, even, for example, from blurry video clips.
The technology […]

Female Gamers Have More Sex

According to a survey conducted by Gametart, a game rental service in the UK, chicks who game get more lovin’ than those who don’t. Out of a sample of 200 ladies (or should that be “laid-ees”?), the ones who gamed got, erm, fragged 1.1 more times a week than those who didn’t.
So what I’m saying […]

eBay Delisting All Auctions for Virtual Property

The growing popularity of Massively Multiplayer games has brought the issue of ownership rights in virtual worlds, and the appropriateness of what is called ‘real money transfer’ (RMT) into an increasingly public light. The success of the company IGE, as well as the launch of Sony Online Entertainment’s ‘Station Exchange’ service would seem to indicate […]