Have you been keeping tabs on the latest Wii U news, but have yet to pre-order the console and live near New York City? Seeing as how pre-orders for the Wii U are going fast, it might be in your best interest to attend Nintendo's midnight launch event at Nintendo World.

The launch event is scheduled to take place on Saturday, November 17th at 6 p.m., but if I know one thing about New Yorkers, it's the fact that they tend to wait in line for things way earlier than people expect. I wouldn't be surprised if there were people waiting in line at Nintendo World days, maybe even a week before the Wii U launches.

Aside from being one of the first to purchase a Wii U, Nintendo of America's President Reggie Fils-Aime will be there to count down the launch of the company's next console and hand off a Wii U to the first person in line. Not only that, but Nintendo will have New York-themed T-shirts with Mario's image on it for sale at the event, whose proceeds will be donated to the American Red Cross to support Hurricane Sandy victims.

The closer we get to the holiday season, the more people are going to start looking at deals so they don't break their bank account buying presents for their loved ones. One item that will most likely be on most people's holiday list this year, and every year for that matter, is the iPad. But one place you should never buy an iPad is at a gas station in Arlington, Texas.

Jalonta Freeman was pumping her gas at an Arlington gas station, when a man approached her saying he has iPads and laptops for sale. Jalonta, being the savvy consumer, thought she would take advantage of the opportunity by purchasing an iPad from the gentleman, which normally retails for $800, for only $200.

Once the transaction was complete, the man was in a hurry and drove off before Freeman could inspect what she just purchased. As you could assume, the deal didn't go quite as planned as it turned out Freeman purchased a fake iPad.

I'm based in Australia and I'm completely against mandatory filtering by my ISP - sure, they probably already do it (I could place bets on this), but the Australian government have stepped up and announced they're dropping their plans of a mandatory ISP filter:

The Federal Government has formally abandoned plans to introduce legislation for mandatory ISP filtering, closing a dark chapter in politics concerning Australia's internet.

But - come on, you knew there'd be a but - they still want Australian Net feeds to be filtered:

Microsoft is pretty much only known in the operating system world for Windows, but the Redmond-based software giant have been working on another OS in secret, cheating on Windows.

The secret OS is known as project Midori, and according to ZDNet's well-sourced Mary Jo Foley, it has definitely been beating along in the labs at Microsoft. Midori is a new OS believed to be designed around Singularity, which was a Microsoft Research microkernel OS. The under-development OS was, and most likely still is, overseen by senior vice president of technical strategy, Eric Rudder.

The OS is reportedly a distributed, concurrent OS, and was referenced during a presentation last month at the OOPSLA 2012 conference. A handful of Microsoft employees presented a paper during the event which was titled Uniqueness and Reference Immutability for Safe Parallelism.

Rumors have unfortunately been confirmed, with Blizzard's expansion pack to StarCraft II has been delayed, Heart of the Swarm was scheduled for a Christmas release, but has been delayed until some time in 2013.

Heart of the Swarm originally was meant to add seven new units to the game, and remove three existing numbers for balancing reasons. But behind closed doors, Blizzard have changed their plans, dropping the planned Shredder and Warhound units for the Terrans due to balancing problems, replacing them with Widow Mines - variants on Spider Mines that fire splash-damage missiles, and tweaks to the Hellion, Ghost, Battlecruiser and Reaper units.

Protoss players will receive three of the four new multiplayer units, while the Replicant has been thrown away over fears that it would encourage players to spam masses of identical units. There are also single player modifications where an expanded plot would continue where Wings of Liberty finished.

Every time I hear something new about the upcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, I get a little bit more excited. For instance, I just learned that Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 will allow players on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 to stream they're gameplay live to the internet so friends and random people alike can watch you play.

"With Call of Duty: Black Ops II, people can live stream their gameplay directly from the game or watch the best players live on YouTube, which is an awesome next step for the eSports community," said YouTube's Sang Kim, head of game partnerships.

Now everyone will be able to watch you get that amazing headshot, or tea bag the player you just knifed in the back. Whatever your playing style, you'll be sure to get numerous comments on YouTube, both good and bad. This live streaming of play is a really cool feature and ushers in the future of eSports.

Twitter may have withstood the election wave of tweets successfully, but their security is apparently still pretty lax. Today, Twitter sent out an e-mail to a large number of users urging them to change their respective passwords. The root cause for this is that several (number undetermined) accounts had been compromised through a third-party site.

The hacked accounts were then used to send out spam, the one problem every website with user contributed content faces. Twitter acknowledged that the accounts had been compromised, changed the passwords on them so as to make them inaccessible, and sent out the following e-mail, which explains some background and provides instructions for getting your account back:

Twitter believes that your account may have been compromised by a website or service not associated with Twitter. We've reset your password to prevent others from accessing your account.

With Samsung and Apple taking up most profits in the mobile sector, it leaves just scraps to the rest of the market, thus most companies are struggling right now. One of these companies is Sharp, and it looks like Apple analyst Horace Dediu may have discovered something quite worthy of a RumorTT post.

The analyst looked into Apple's 2012 capital expenditures and found some spending which was much higher than Apple previously disclosed. Dediu noticed that Apple had spent $2.3 billion more than it had forecast on "product tooling, manufacturing process equipment and infrastructure".

Dediu believes that the Cupertino-based iDevice maker bailed Sharp out, who were in serious financial issues earlier this year:

With other companies like THQ having serious issues, competitor and much bigger juggernaut Activision have posted record revenue for Q3. The company has reported $841 million, up from $754 million in the same period last year.

Activision also delivered record earnings per share of 20 cents, compared to the third quarter of 2011. Their results beat the company's outlook, which saw them hoping to achieve around 6 cents per share over a revenue of $740 million. These results also blew away analysts' expectation, which are better to compare against the company's non-GAAP earnings.

These calculations, excluding some results, saw Activision reporting 15 cents per share in profit on revenue of $751 million. This kills analyst expectations which were projecting just 8 cents per share in profit over revenues of $708 million.

Solar panels are slowing oozing their way across the world, being slapped onto peoples' houses to power their houses. But, some panels don't have enough tech inside to completely power your house from the sunlight captured.

Well, research and development into new methods of capturing sunlight on solar panels is an ongoing thing, with the New Zealand territory of Tokelau being a great example. Tokelau is a group of three islands in the South Pacific which now has enough solar panel installations to completely meet their electrical needs.

Just recently, the islands relied on importing diesel fuel to power electrical generators, but as the New Zealand Foreign Affairs Minister, Murry McCully has said, this has huge economic and environmental costs. The project was funded by the New Zealand government to the tune of $7 million, with a collection of solar panels installed on each of the three islands.