Blackjack writes "Ars Technica looks at recent failures to pass laws regulating the sales of violent video games. They ask whether politicians are finally wising up to First Amendment issues and the costs associated with lawsuits resulting from the laws. Recent attempts to pass video game legislation in Mississippi, Utah, and Indiana have either failed or been put on indefinite hold. 'Now, state lawmakers are more cognizant of the constitutionality issues at stake. The judicial landscape is littered with the charred husks of laws passed by Illinois, Washington, Michigan, California, Louisiana, and others. All of them tried in some way or another to regulate the sale of violent video games to children, and all of them were struck down on First Amendment grounds.'"

Gamasutra is running a follow-up to their annotated contract piece from last month. As you may recall, the contract became public knowledge because of a court case between Spark unlimited and Activision regarding the title Call of Duty : Finest Hour. The article also covers a legal dispute between Spark/Activision and EA during the formation of the troubled development house. Now, the site is running an in-depth look at their legal dispute. The article explores some of the problems that can face any developer/publisher relationship, and how the legal case has affected that already strained situation. "A constant source of friction was Activision's desire to see a fully functioning game early in the development process. 'At Electronic Arts', he wrote, 'the level vision was able to be constructed without the constraints of frame rate, or memory to get the body of the game in and working,' a process which left polish until the end of the development cycle. 'However, under the more risk-averse Activision system, polish happens through the entirety of the process and there is a consistent desire to have the game playable on disc and running at 30 fps.'"

1sockchuck writes "ICANN says it will terminate RegisterFly's accreditation as a domain registrar if the company can't fix its problems within 15 days. The edict comes with RegisterFly in chaos and current management blaming a departed executive for its woes. The situation is complicated by the fact that RegisterFly sold some of its domains through a reseller agreement with eNom, and others using its own accreditation."

Ant writes "This HardCOREware review reports that the current video game console war takes an interesting twist as the power consumption levels of each of the three new consoles (Nintendo Wii, Sony Playstation 3 (PS3), and Microsoft Xbox 360) were explored. Video game playback, DVD playback, and other console functions were tested. One of the most interesting stats were the console idle power usage: 'Wii - 1.3 watts, Wii (Connect 24 On) - 9.6 watts, Xbox 360 - 2.5 watts, PlayStation 3 - 1.9 watts. Nothing significant here; you're looking at spending about $0.20 USD a month to keep the PS3 plugged in, which isn't much. The Wii requires 10 Watts to run Connect24 (which will connect to Nintendo's online service and notify you of system updates) racking up a cost of about $1 a month which is nothing too significant, but still about 5X more than if it were just turned off. Turn Connect24 off, and it's back down to normal.'"