By nearly unanimous vote, the New York State Senate has passed a new bill governing the sale of video games in the state. Having already been approved by the Assembly earlier this week, the bill is now on its way to the governor for final approval.

This latest attempt by lawmakers to make themselves look tough on supposed bad influences on America's youth is, as usual, pointless and unfounded. The primary features of the bill include making the already-pretty-much-universal ESRB ratings on video games mandatory, making the parental controls which all current-generation consoles already have (you guessed it) mandatory, and establishing a governor-appointed board that will meet twice a year to talk about video game violence's effect on the youth of New York.

Will lawmakers ever realize that self-regulation is best, and that it's up to parents to decide what their kids play? Probably not. In the meanwhile though, (even though it's already passed both houses of legislature) if you're in New York and don't like seeing your taxes wasted on such pointless bills, please, speak up about it.

More Firefox news today! Some of you may be aware of Firefox's notorious record for memory usage in older versions--slowly growing throughout the day to the point that few dark corners of your RAM were free from its grasping tendrils. Happily, it looks like those days are now over.

Programmer Sam Allen of Dot Net Perls has released the results of some real-world usage testing of Firefox 3 and other current and upcoming browsers, and Firefox users will find the results quite pleasing: FF3 appears to be far better at using less, and cleaning up no-longer-needed memory than previous versions (usage remained low and fairly steady throughout the testing session).

...Well, not quite, depending on your definition of a life. Perth, Australia resident Ian Usher has placed all of his material belongings, plus a chance to take over his job and introductions to his friends up for auction on eBay.

The auction ends this weekend, and he plans to walk out his door afterwards with little else than his identity and the clothes on his back.

Is amassing possessions all there is to life? He seems to be betting a lot of people think so, while believing otherwise himself. It's certainly a brave (or crazy) thing to do, and one has to wonder if he's truly giving up everything as he claims, or if he's already made plans and arrangements for his new life.

Do you think you could do this--give up everything you've got, and start all over? Granted, the proceeds from the sale will surely help Ian, but what if you had to do without that?

Gartner Research announced today that the number of computers currently in use worldwide has now surpassed one billion machines. That's nearly one machine for every six people!

As computers become bigger and bigger parts of our lives, one can only wonder how the world might change with the next billion. Will things get better or worse? Will the continued proliferation of computers usher in a golden age of free knowledge and human networking, or will they isolate us from each other by allowing us to see and hear only what we wish?

On a less philosophical note, how many of us have old machines just collecting dust in the closet (I've got a few myself)?

There are all sorts of potential projects or uses for those old machines and hardware (some helpful, some less so)--any ideas to put them to good use, rather than just wasting space until they find their way to the garbage?

Last night, 2K Games announced that effective immediately, all limitations (install count limits, in particular) have been removed from Bioshock's activation system. A 2K representative further commented that the SecuROM activation system does remain, but it won't stop users from installing the game as frequently as needed.

Building on this fulfilled promise, she also vowed to users that should support for the game be ended in the future, 2K will ensure that users are still able to install and play it.

Following Tuesday's release of Firefox 3, and despite a couple of server downtimes (due to the huge demand), the Mozilla Foundation has announced that the new version of their browser was downloaded more than 8 million times in the first 24 hours of availability! Their claim to the record of most downloads in one day is still being verified by Guinness, but it's still quite an amazing feat.

Personally, I've only just gotten the browser this morning (I first tried during one of the above mentioned downtimes), but already it seems tremendously faster than Firefox 2. I haven't really had much chance to look into the new UI elements just yet, but at least most of my add-ons (all the important ones, anyway) had updates available, and so far they all seem to be working well.

What does everyone else think so far, especially those who weren't previously Firefox users? Is Firefox 3 going to make you switch from IE or Opera? If not, why not?

While the OTF here is the catch-all place for anything you want to discuss that's not games-related, we request that users refrain from starting overtly political and religious threads here, or others that are very likely to veer to such topics. Such threads more often than not degenerate into flamewars and do nothing to engender friendship and camaraderie among fellow players; in fact they often do the opposite and drive players away. That is not to say that Stardock has anything against su...

Torians have hooves! 

I don't think we'eve ever had a desktops thread here before--let's see what all you Galcivver's desktops look like! Here's my laptop... currently the "Green Machine" To post your own, just press PrintScreen on your keyboard, open up a graphics program such as MSPaint, and paste the image in. Save it, then upload it to an image hosting site such as http://imageshack.us . If you're using Imageshack, get the image into the forums here by copying the code where it says 'thumbnail f...

Despite much trumpeting of Democratic "victories" such as maintaining control of the Virginia governorship and defeating Armie's propositions in generally Demoract California, Democrats suffered a major defeat here in Ohio yesterday. For those not in the know, a mostly out-of-state funded Democrat interest group calling itself Reform Ohio Now had been pushing for various changes to the Ohio elections system that would make it possible for them to actually win elections--something they've l...

'Nuff said.

Image courtesy LGF--I just added the red captions for clarity. Hoax or no, look at it and decide yourself. A picture's worth a thousand words, IMHO.