Emasher

I remember Toy Story and A Bug's life being some of my favorites early on. Particularly I remember the long wait between seeing A Bug's Life in the theater and the day it came out on VHS. I still remember going to the video store to buy a copy. I also remember the Buzz Lightyear movie and watching the telivions series that followed it, but I was a little bit older at that point. Star Wars came next. My dad introduced me to the original series and a year, or maybe it was a few years after that, the Phantom Menace was announced. I remember not being allowed to see it in the theater due to my sister also wanting to go, and my parents thinking that it might scare her, as she was only 3 or something like that at the time. Needless to say, I was quite annoyed by that, but I saw it when it finally came out on VHS and, enjoyed it, only being a kid at the time.

I'm in. Hopefully this works out better than the last time we tried to do this.

Are you looking to build it yourself or buy a pre-built?

I'm somewhat feeling the same way now. I finished my last exam over a week ago and I graduate from high school (High school means ages 15 to 18 where I live) on Tuesday. I'm starting university over the summer (just one course though), and I've got a job lined up for August, but neither of those are going to take up that much of my time really. Currently I'm playing through Oblivion in preparation for Skyrim, but I really can't seem to play more than a few hours a day even when I have nothing else going on. I'm considering writing some sort of daily game making/programming tutorial to release on the forum here, sort of as a community learning thing.

My comment was geared a little bit more towards anonymous than lulzsec actually (as I've noticed the conversation seems to be lumping them in with everything now). Lulzsec still isn't trying to use fear to manipulate people though, its pretty obvious that they're just doing things because they can, and pretending to be grayhats as an excuse. Except they aren't trying to use fear to manipulate people. I'm not saying what they do is right, just that calling them terrorists isn't quite accurate.

First of all, there's no evidence yet that Ryan was actually responsible for any of the attacks. All that is know for sure is that he hosted the IRC channel used by Lulzsec, which doesn't prove he was involved in the group's activities. Unless some evidence has been released in the last few days that I'm unaware of. Secondly, Calling any of these groups terrorists is not only a very serious accusation, but, considering the way these groups operate is also simply inaccurate. Terrorism is the act of using fear to get ones own way, usually politically. These groups don't use DDoS attacks or anything else to create fear, they use them to bring attention to issues that nobody has heard of. For instance, the attacks against scientology weren't to cause scientologists to fear them and change their ways, they were launched so that they made headlines before the real life protests to bring more attention to the issue. Nobody was ever physically harmed, and nobody had any legitimate reason to be fearful. The word terrorist has a clear definition. You can't simply throw it around by using it to describe every group that's done something you don't agree with. DDoS attacks are more like a bunch of people standing around the headquarters of a company their protesting blocking the entrance and disrupting the operations of a company or organization. I'm not saying this is right, but its a far cry from flying a plane into a building or detonating a bomb in a crowded street. These groups have been involved in many legitimate protests for human rights and to completely write them off because you disagree with how a few of their operations were carried out is a little bit shortsighted.

So apparently TF2 is now free on steam.

I've been looking at a few more articles about this, and I still think its really difficult to judge this incident without knowing the details of the actual rape. Overall though, it seems that whatever issues are going on in the school now would be completely irrelevant if the courts had originally just placed a simple restraining order on the assailant.

Here's a better analogy, you wouldn't apply for a job at the same place where a person who rapped you worked, it would be perfectly acceptable for your boss to fire you if you refused to work when they were around. Although, she really should have pushed to have a restraining order put in place, which would have caused this whole situation to be avoided. I'm not trying to blame the whole thing on her, but I don't think its the school that's in the wrong in this case. Its more how the original case was handled really.

Honestly, I don't think we know enough about the original case to make any judgement here. Unfortunately there's a growing trend of females claiming that either males rapped them, or that consensual sex was rape. We don't know the details of the case, so how can we know that the sentence the male student received wasn't just. I'm not saying it was, I'm just saying we don't know enough to determine that it wasn't. As far as the situation with the school goes however, if the female student in question isn't actually going to participate in the activities that she's supposed to as part of the squad, perhaps she shouldn't have become part of the squad in the first place. You wouldn't take a job knowing that someone you hated worked there and then refuse to work shifts where you might have to work with them.

Its not going to go that far in the west in the near future. I expect censorship will be limited to blocking IRC channels/boards that have been used by groups like lulzsec, most of the chans will be safe as they have too large a user base to be taken down unnoticed. This of course will be annoying to any non-criminal users of such boards, and will also be counter productive as far as police investigations go as it will be more difficult to track down the actual criminals (who are more than capable of using more secure methods of communication). There will also be several freedom of information type sites (Wikileaks being the first example of this) attacked by various governments in order to keep the flow of important information restricted to government influenced organizations, this will be done by labeling these sites/groups as terrorists or whatever society's witch is at that point. What you can expect though is a lot more un-constitutional privacy violations. Its clear now that the Patriot Act isn't going anywhere in the US. Canada's currently implementing similar legislation (which the mainstream media hasn't even been reporting on), and the UK's been a nanny state for years and is only getting worse. Within the next decade, the police will likely be able to monitor all your web traffic at the ISP level without any sort of warrant, they'll also be given the power to demand any information about your online accounts without a warrant (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) Expect legislation to be passed that stops these services from notifying you before your account is subpoenaed as well. Also, new laws like the ones in Canada banning anonymity on the internet aren't going to be enforced on everyone, but they will be used as an excuse to arrest people who are outspoken against their governments in more extreme circumstances. For instance, if someone's planning a non-violent protest when it would be inconvenient for the government. For the most part, any protest that involves small groups of people who become violent will be treated as if the entire protest has become violent, and police will use everything they can short of live fire to terrorize innocent people, anyone arrested will also be denied their legal rights (see the CBC Fifth Estate documentary on the Toronto G20 protests).

Honestly, I think I had more fun with IV. IV also tends to go on sale on steam quite often. Expect to be able to get the game plus all expansions at some point in the summer for $9.99.

That would be incorrect. Anonymous was only responsible for a short DDOS attack that was unrelated to the longer downtime.

France bans all face coverings, not just Burkas. You can't wear a ski mask in public either.

I don't see how the two are comparable really. A necklace is harmless, allowing people to cover their faces in public creates all sorts of security problems. It would be like allowing people to cover up the license plates on their cars. I'm all for allowing people to dress as they like, but there are limits to every freedom.

I just finished my last exam in high school today (I realize high school means something different in different parts of the world so, I'll be going to University next year if that helps to determine what I'm talking about), its good to finally be done.

SQLi and DDOS attacks are NOT hacking, SQLi is considered cracking, DDOSing isn't even considered cracking because the attacker never gains access to a restricted system For a good description of what hacking actually means: http://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html

Gametrailers' "Invisible Walls" isn't bad.

In this thread perhaps. There have been tons of negative comments about this one in other places though, way more than usual (Saying that, I did like it personally).

So I was looking on the South Park studios website to see if they had made any comment about the episode (All I could find was that this was the mid-season finale and that the rest of the season will resume in the fall). Anyway, while I was there I clicked on the link to the forum, and for some reason I've been banned from it, yet I've never actually used their forum before. I don't really care but it was quite weird.

One thing I'd like to see in Skyrim is more seamless words. If the game can keep track of such a large detailed world, why should you have to wait at a loading screen every time you go into a small building? There were mods that allowed cities to be part of the main world space in oblivion, so its definitely technically possible.

Best one in a while. I'm glad they've decided to end it before they completely run the series into the ground. Its been a long run, longer than most shows ever can hope to get, I mean, when it started (not that I watched it back then) I was about the age that the kids have been throughout the series, younger even. Hopefully in the remaining episodes they tie up all the loose ends and bring all the significant characters that were lost over the years back for one last spectacle.

Lots and lots of 360/PS3 ports. Take the amount of PS2 games that were ported to the Wii and multiply that by 10, and there will be more yet. They'll be exactly the same with the exception of having menus on the controller and slightly better graphics (comparable to the PC versions for a lot of them, especially the older ones. This is assuming the rumors about the 47xx based graphics card are true). Some companies will be slow to jump on the bandwagon, but expect EA, Activision, Ubisoft, 2K, etc. to start releasing their stuff right away. The majority of multiplatform games getting released between the launch of the Wii U and the launch of the PS4 and next Xbox will make it to the Wii U, from that point on, it depends on how powerful the new consoles as well as the Wii U are. I can see a ton of shovelware DS games having their graphics upgraded being released on the Wii U as well so the publishers can make a quick buck. Personally I'm not really that concerned about what 3rd party games get released on the Wii U though. I have a PC that can run anything anyway, and I doubt the Wii U will get that many exclusives, the industry is moving away from 3rd party exclusives these days. I do hope some of these games get re-released on the Wii U for the sake of those who only own Nintendo consoles though, it would be a shame for people to not experience games like Fallout 3 etc.

Look in the manual that came with your case, a lot of them will specify which way the PSU should be facing.

That's correct. Although, it wasn't dumbed down as much as other games have been recently. They've been claiming that they're focusing more on the PC side with Skyrim, although that's probably just marketing.