SAN FRANCISCO, July 13 (Reuters) - The maker of the video game, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, said on Wednesday that hackers were responsible for a downloadable modification that enabled sexually explicit minigames to be played in the game.

The modification, which allows simulated sex in the PC version of the game, has led to an investigation by the industry ratings board.

Rockstar Games, a subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive Software, said that it was investigating ways to increase the security protection of the source code and prevent the game from being altered.Quoted from: Hackers Modify PC Game - New York Times

Apparently, the company wrote the scene but then removed it from the game. Someone then leaked a code to the internet that re-enabled the scene. I read Hillary Clinton is taking the company Rockstar to court. If that is true, it is outrageous does she not have better issues to deal with right now like the fact we have no money upstate and our hospitals are having to store medical waste becaus ethe company thats take sit refuses to take any more till they get paid. Furthermore, the game is already pretty violent and questionable, so parents who are even concerned about sex scenes in the game should really already be worried that their kids are even playing the game in the first place.

Also, if you think about the fact that kids have to download this code from the internet in order to see the sexually explicit modifications then have to also consider they have pretty unlimited internet access and can download any other sexually explicit stuff they want. I guarntee if a kid is about to download and install a sexually explicit patch onto a video game they can type sex into google image search with filtering disabled.

I hate to write this for fear that someone picks up on it, but should google be sued for enabling minors to get sexually explicit material. I mean maybe you should have to enter in a credit card number or your ID to get sexually explicit search results. Think about that. If you were 16 and went to the corner store and paged through a hustler magazine or tried to buy one, the store could seriously get in trouble, right?

Why is it that the artvoice best of 2005 contest has 166 dynamically loading questions on one page. So many people keep telling me they can't even vote because their computers can't deal with such a large page. Even on broadband it takes a while. I would have the questions cached as html until a new question is added instead of being dynamically generated each time (I only suspect this by the way it loads) and definately, break it into sections for each category e.g. dining has its own page. I hope that enough people can get through to vote. Maybe they should hire me to be their web deisgner. I only want 30k/year and a hosting space for estrip.

Who are some of the other "blogs". Some of them don't even show up on the web like lake.com. And what about digitup.com. I love them - I mean I agree with them and think they have a great cause getting rid of nuclear waste but it is in west valley. I don't know if that counts as local so much. I hope we win! Vote if you haven''t

In this case I am refering to the code running the site and not the site or community itself.

I think after some time documenting and organzing I am going to make an (e:strip) lite that is totally open source and comes with an installer. It is already pretty simply customizeable, it will just require some cleaning up and some documenting. I mean, for many communities it would be exactly the thing they need to maintain contact without having to program anything. It pretty much just requires PHP and MySQL and what doesn't these days. Wel all the RoR stuff I guess.

My biggest concern is security. I just don't like everyone knowing how this site works because I feel it gives them a major advantage if they wanted to ever hack it. That has consisently been my problem with open source projects. Also, I hate giving up control of something that is so my little baby. Another thing that kills is that I can't stand the fact that people will some how profit off my my hard work.

I know that technically I can make it so that people can't legally use my code for for-profit endeavours but that doesn't mean anything. I have seen so many of my students just rip code off the net for commercial projects and just take the credits out. Hell, I have even seen other professors using non-commerical open source code for commercial projects with the idea that no one will ever know what's going on behind the scenes. It makes me want to kill.

I am deleting and organizing stuff to make myself feel better. i guess it is my version of shopping [inlink]hodown,165[/inlink] Along the way I found the code for the xml version of my haiku writer. It is the last remaining copy of the code. I gave it a wrile and I got this.

submitted worried ,
about publish able what ,
be to seem want blog .

I think it really sums up how I feel these days. I deleted all the code that used to run the "advertising" module that I never wanted.

Can anyone else work when it is 92 degrees out and you thought it was bad in DC (e:southernyankee)

I am supposed to be writing my thesis today but all I can think about is developing new web applications and moving the server. Unfortunately, moving the server is far more complicated than I thought and I am not so sure if I want to do it anymore. It means I would have to get rid of vonage, cancel adelphia, and order a verizon phone line. Then I could apply for DSL but they can't promise any speed until after I have a phone line, but I don't really want the phone line if the DSL isn't going to be fast enough. I really need a solution now I am tired of uploading.

I guess when I look back on this time period I am either going to be really happy about what I accomplished or really hate myself for letting it control my life. (e:shawnr) got me to look around the web some more at what is going on and I still feel like a country mouse developer in the land of the city mice with my stupid VPS.