The New York State Senate has recently been working to make New York minor gamers suffer. Republican bill S.5888 aimed to start an "Advisory Council on Interactive Media and Youth Violence", which basically is a checks-and-balances system on the ESRB. It shot through the legal process with the speed and grace of a greased pig through a high school.

Said minors in New York have a new piece of legislation to worry about: Democrat-sponsored bill A08696. If it gets ratified within 120 days, then anyone who sells/rents "any game which contains 'depraved violence' or 'indecent images'." will have to deal with a class E felony charge.

We can all agree that the tragic incident that happened at Virginia Tech was horrible. However, now is the time that we have to figure out what caused someone to kill this many peers, and how we can prevent this in the future. Unfortunately, as we've seen in the techPowerUp! Forums, this is something that people do not exactly agree on. Professional lawyers, as well as the highly acclaimed Dr. Phil McGraw, are quick to blame violent video games for the killer's maniacally depressed rampage. Currently, there is no evidence that the killer even had access to a video game console, let alone play violent video games. A much more likely possibility is the way the killer reacted to his anti-depressant medications. Instead of the anti-depressants calming the killer down, like they were supposed to, they made him violent and erratic. And so, this instability could easily have caused him to snap when the killer's girlfriend dumped him.

If you trust the prosecution, Microsoft is guilty of labeling computers as "Windows Vista Capable" when they really can only run the basic edition of Windows Vista. While this sounds like an absolutely ridiculous reason to sue Microsoft, it is a very legitimate case. Microsoft labels almost all new computers as "Windows Vista Capable", which makes users think they are buying all the cool stuff that's advertised in the "Windows Vista Experience", such as Aero. In truth, users can only run the basic edition of Windows Vista, which comes with no such luxuries. The defense (aka Microsoft) claims that this is really not the case, and that "Windows Vista Premium Certified" is just one way to prove that Microsoft "conducted a very broad and unprecedented effort" to educate everyone on the latest version of Windows.

Anyone remember Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy? If not, it was a promising game with good reviews that didn't exactly do too well in the retail market. It seemed to be all but forgotten, until a screenwriter noticed strange similarities between his work (titled Psi-ops) and the previously mentioned game. Accusing Midway of plagiarism, the man is suing for $1.5 million USD. Midway has not commented on this situation.

Due to unrelenting pressure from the press, angry parents, and politicians, MySpace is releasing software that will monitor a MySpace user's activities on MySpace. The software, codenamed 'Zephyr', does look a lot like spyware, but will only report MySpace activities to parents, not unlike AOL's Parental Controls. The software would allow parents to see what name, age, and location their children are using on MySpace. 'Zephyr' would run even if the user logged in from a different location, and does not record highly private/sensitive information such as MySpace comments and email. The main reason MySpace is doing this is because a massive amount of USA senators (33) are threatening to take legal action against MySpace if it does not do something to verify the age of it's users. Other popular social networking sites, such as Facebook and Xanga, will not allow anything like 'Zephyr' on their sites, as it is a direct violation of their Terms of Service.