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The BBC have also picked up on the 'women in games' issue recently: more coverage on Wonderland and the Guardian Gamesblog. Nice to see us girl gamers being written about, again...

It's not totally a dupe, it was in fact "launched" at the O'Reilly Where 2.0 conference today.

Receiving no attention is the news that Yahoo also released their maps API today as well. You can read a ranty blogpost from a Yahoo developer about the differences.

I pilfered all of the above links from rc3.org

The problem is that there's no learning path. You have to spend many hours before you can even start typing.

This is true. Morse students, in their early phases, can copy words like EAT and SIN but it does take a few weeks to get to where you can comfortably copy the whole alphabet.

However, this is not such a big problem in this application. In order to utilize Morse as a text entry tool you only need to memorize the characters and be able to send them. The more difficult, and steeper, learning curve, is being able to receive them by ear. When you are receiving code, the characters are coming in a steady stream that you don't get to pause while you try to remember what DAHDAHdiDAH is. When you send, though, especially into a caching device like a phone, you can send characters at your own rate, so you can take a few seconds to think "Q... Q... oh yeah, DAHDAHdiDAH". Thus, one would be up to speed with being able to send Morse to a text phone much more quickly than if one were studying to take a receiving test.

I don't really advocate changing over to this wholesale, nor do I argue that it is right for the average person, just like I don't think you need to learn how to use emacs and TeX just to write a letter to your grandma. It would be a useful accessory for those of us who are already proficient in Morse. The blog entry referenced earlier on the Morse app for Nokia phones is not surprising, given the state of high-tech in Finland and the large number of amatuer radio operators who work for Nokia (including Martti, OH3BH, one of the world's best known hams).

According to a Digg article, RCA will stop producing televisions and sell off their electronics division.

A couple of interesting links: Nokia has filed a patent for tranmitting and receiving optical messages (blinking LEDs) in morse code. Morse Texter is an open source morse code application for Nokia/Symbian Series 60 phones.

Nice analysis, however morse code is in fact faster since it is very easy to provide a -natural- way for inputing morse code on the phone almost as fast as the morse equipment!
In fact you provide a way in your own comment!

> the reason morse is as fast as it is is because you hardly have to move your finger at all.

That's why typing SMS using this program for morse code IS ACTUALLY FASTER.
http://laivakoira.typepad.com/blog/2005/05/morse_t exter.html

You use the keypad on the phone to type the dit and dah (left, right) and click to seperate letters/words. Try it if you have access to a symbian phone!

Even if you don't know morse code by heart.
Write a message to send by sms, look up the morse equivalent and write it down too.
Try to input the words as sms, now try the dots and dashes (follow what you have on the paper without thinking, left for dot, right for dash, click to separate letters, another click to separate words) ...
So if you know morse code it is actually faster than sms! Now learning it is a whole other issue http://www.learnmorsecode.com/.

After watching the Jay Leno episode I was about to start writing a program to do that on my 6600, luckily I did some research before starting and found this with the source included!

You write the sms in morse and it converts and sends it as a regular sms.
You can use the joystick on the phone (left for dot and right for dash) so you have your finger on one button all the time!

Also I found this page for learning morse code ...

If Europe loses 13,000 jobs, and India gains 14,000, how is that less work for fewer people? Don't Indians count?

Lower wages where? If IBM moves 14,000 jobs to India, India's economy is growing, and there are more jobs chasing fewer qualified workers. So while wages may go down in Bavaria, they're going up in Bangalore.

But more than that, economic growth isn't a zero-sum game. A healthy economy will not only import jobs but also create them. There's no way you can trace job growth in India and China to job loss in the rest of the world on a dollar for dollar basis. There are definitely new jobs being created in the countries with the most business-friendly policies.

Don't get me wrong - there's no question this all sucks if you work in Europe. But it's the voters, through their elected governments, who've created this situation, and they're the ones who will need to fix it. Britain and the US went through that transition in the 80s. Continental Europe will do so when the tax base can't support the lifestyle it's become accustomed to. But the voters will cling to their inflexible labor markets as long as they can, and they'll seize any excuse to blame outsiders for their problems until reality intrudes too much to be ignored.

If you're gonna libel the entire Army, at least do it with a crime that's not as falsely reported as rape. And give links to actual websites, it's not my job to provide evidence for your claims, I'm quite capable of typing in Army rape in google.

These false rape allegations constitute 41% the total forcible rape cases (n = 109) reported during this period.

Warren Farrell, in his book The Myth of Male Power (1993, p.322), cites an Air Force study that investigated 556 charges of rape by servicewomen. In that investigation, 27% ADMITTED that their accusations had been false either before or after being confronted with lie detector tests.

Unfounded charges of assault, which like rape is often productive of conflicting testimony, comprise only 1.6% of the total compared to the 8.4% recorded for rape.

Province-wide, the system reports that about 5.7 percent of all such allegations are false. Meanwhile, analyses of incidents involving a Toronto police squad that restricts itself to handling major rape cases where the assailant is unknown to the victim, a whopping 30 percent of cases -- 69 out of 232 cases -- turned out to be false.

The fact that you choose the emotionally charged crimes of rape and domestic violence to back up your claim, instead of, oh, say, violent crime in the army, lends credence to the conclusion that for whatever reason you have some axe to grind with the military.

The current meme among left wing academia is that capitalism gives consumers too many choices. Oh the tyranny of having too many brands of toothpaste to choose from! Microsoft is merely providing a service, by eliminating choice. We should thank them for not being greedy capitalists and burdening us with the tryanny of choice!

I suspect that his sketch won't do so well in the courts. That both designs display using a Miller column browser (with different content!) and can show an image won't be sufficient.

Design patents prohibit a third-party from making, selling or using a product of the protected design. To infringe a design patent, the infringing container and the container shape shown in the design patent must look alike to the eye of the ordinary observer.

In Gorham v. White (1871), the Supreme Court set the standard for design patent infringement:

"If, in the eye of an ordinary observer, giving such attention as a purchaser usually gives, two designs are substantially the same, if the resemblance is such as to deceive such an observer, inducing him to purchase one supposing it to be the other, the first one patented is infringed by the other."

Just having similar functions and a vaguely similar appearance is not sufficient, as shown by the amusing "Colida v. Sharp Electronics and Audiovox" (Fed. Cir. March 9, 2005):

http://patentlaw.typepad.com/patent/2005/03/design _patents_.html

The functional features described in a design patent are not particularly relevant. (They would be in a functional patent, of course.) To infringe on a design patent, the infringing product has to look so much like his sketch that the infringing product would deceive the customer into thinking it was the patented product.

An example of a product which might be found to infringe on a well-known design patent might be:

http://www2.luxpro.com.tw/e_575d.htm

Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration.

No, you are wrong. What we are seeing are bad patents that are neither unique nor novel and companies abusing the patent system here in the US.

So we end up with patents like Amazon's assinine "one-click" patent, to Kodak pulling out their Wang patents against Java.

I could post links to bad software patents all day long that pretty much 'eclipse' your idea of "really good arguments".

Personally, I take a more balanced view

But the problem is that the system is so abused that it is dishonest, if not immoral. You would think that EU representatives/legal committees would recognize this, hence my parent post.

Also, I find your comment about little software companies really offensive, as many of us work for such companies and it's how we put food on the table.

No, you are wrong. What we are seeing are bad patents that are neither unique nor novel and companies abusing the patent system here in the US.

So we end up with patents like Amazon's assinine "one-click" patent, to Kodak pulling out their Wang patents against Java.

I could post links to bad software patents all day long that pretty much 'eclipse' your idea of "really good arguments".

Personally, I take a more balanced view

But the problem is that the system is so abused that it is dishonest, if not immoral. You would think that EU representatives/legal committees would recognize this, hence my parent post.

Also, I find your comment about little software companies really offensive, as many of us work for such companies and it's how we put food on the table.

No matter who you are, someone you don't know has found the coolest stuff.

The sad reality is that most of my friends have rotten taste in music (I don't hold it against them), while the music recommendations I actually follow are mostly from people I've never met.

The assumption that there's a correlation between the people I like and the products I like is a flawed one.

Anyone here actually trust Yankee Group anymore? Remember this? http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/05/ 007214&tid=163&tid=187&tid=109&tid=98&tid=106 Well, it turned out that the study was funded by a windows house: http://filtered.typepad.com/markjones/2004/04/abou t_face_on_y.html "The survey was funded and carried out by Sunbelt Software, a vendor of Windows utilities, which publicised the survey through a mailing list called W2Knews, which bills itself as "The world's first and largest e-zine designed for NT/2000 System Admins and Power Users"."

So who funded this report?

"It's terrible," De Raadt says. "Everyone is using it, and they don't realize how bad it is. And the Linux people will just stick with it and add to it rather than stepping back and saying, 'This is garbage and we should fix it.'"

The bottom line is that it works better than commercial software. Anyone can look at the source code and see the comments, which are blunt about what needs fixing and how crappy the hardware is. Even commercial Linux rocks next to popular alternatives. For ease of installation, use, relative protection from mal and spyware, you can't beat a distribution like Mepis. Winners can step up to pure Debian, "losers" can fall all the way down to Caldera Open Linux and still do better than what 90% of the world uses.

There's also a difference in motivation. "Linux people do what they do because they hate Microsoft. We do what we do because we love Unix," De Raadt says. The irony, however, is that while noisy Linux fanatics make a great deal out of their hatred for Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ), De Raadt says their beloved program is starting to look a lot like what Microsoft puts out. "They have the same rapid development cycle, which leads to crap," he says.

That's what Micrososoft would have everyone believe, and so Microsoft is worth hating. People use Linux for freedom and the superior performance it brings. Study after study show this. Why people like Dan Lyons don't get it is beyond me, except that he might be a Fanboy.

Let's look back at other nasty junk he's written:

• seems to have noticed Red Hat in 1999, cites M$ hatred as reason d'etre.
• Big SCO supporter who's finally turned around? I doubt it. His long series of BS about SCO is where I remember him from. What a HUGE TROLL.
• Others use him as a case study of what's wrong with Tech Journalism. They are being generous and ignoring his pro-M$ slant.
• Here's another guy who's being generous.

Dan Lyons, you are a shill. I dare you to make the entire tapes of your interview with Theo available. Anything less is second hand BS and the kind of thing the web makes obsolete.

JavaScript has contributed nothing but unnecessary complexity to reading website documents. As if animated GIF images aren't enough a bad choice, now we have Flash media to insult the relevant HTML document format. Isn't Javascript responsible for pop-ups and also serve as the delivery mechanism to attack one's computer through the webbrowser?

For all the damage JavaScript has caused, I refer this flame to express my anger to remove javascript.

linking to a site called p2pnet.net doesn't really prove your point.

Did you even click the link provided? Try actually looking at it sometime before deciding you already know what it is.

By the way, I do live in the real world, thank you. The world is full of cynics like you too, you're proof of that. But if you have facts that show the music industry is losing money--as opposed to just releasing fewer titles so it can blame p2p for a "loss in sales"--why don't you provide these? Someone might consider taking your argument seriously.

If this were the case, all stores would have all items for free with a place to send your money "if it was worth it" or the customer would have to return it. This doesn't happen because any store that did this would go out of business within the first week

True, duh. That's cause stores are selling objects. Music is not an object that can be picked up and carried off. (A CD is. But we're not talking about "stealing music" as in people stealing CDs. That's something else entirely.) Music and the software files that package it is incorporeal, can be duplicated indefinitely without harm to the original, and can be broadcast worldwide, using the existing digital infrastructure, without the cost of shipping or logistics management. Apples, meet oranges. Your point about the Steven King book was more germane, but again, books are not music. Books take hours to read and are rarely re-read once the reader is finished. Music is meant to be enjoyed many times, and the effort required by the listener is nil, whereas a book requires the reader's primary attention. Apples, meet pineapples. Do better.

Dan was the San Jose Merc's tech columnist, has a done a lot of serious thinking about where blogs are taking journalism, and it's in that blog. Two cent summary for the lazy:mainstream media, especially newspapers, are dying already; they are going to have to make radical changes. But read the blog and associated links, and you'll understand why, and probably come to agree if you don't already.

The real question is how many blogs are actively maintained and is there any useful information in those blogs that are maintained? I started "blogging" per se back in 2001 making irregular entries up until February of this year, when I decided to post more regularly. However there is content there that gets an incredible amount of traffic. I get several hundred Google hits/day for everything from specific images to reviews I did for Macintosh specific stuff like CPU upgrades and commentary about the science of vision loss when using Viagra. Surprisingly, there are many search terms where my blog comes up in the first three Google and Yahoo searches, and my site is a very small personal site where I write mostly for friends and family. Friends blogs that cover more specific issues such as venture capital or more common interest subjects garner traffic in the thousands to hundreds of thousands of hits per day. However, there are many blogs with infrequent entries, and low traffic levels that may in fact contain very useful information. The trick (search companies know) is to find that information and rank it according to its usefulness, playing off of the Long Tail Model of Chris Anderson.

Obligatory pdf link here...

Quote for those without pdf reader:

"Individuals have historically underperformed the markets, earning just 2.6% vs. the S&P 500 gain of 12.2% between 1984 and the end of 2002*. Research in the U.S. has shown that this dramatic underperformance comes as a direct result of client behaviour, or more specifically, the attempt to avoid bad performance while seeking out better returns" -- Dalbar Inc... Jul 2003

Bill sponsor's discussion of the HB260:

http://jdougall.typepad.com/dynamic_range/2005/06/ deseretnewscom__19.html

You can read commentary by the author of the Utah porn bill here: http://jdougall.typepad.com/dynamic_range/

He feels that the bill is no different than requiring that adult subject books/magazines/video be in special sections (age restricted) in physical stores.

I have spoken with John about his bill. His goal is to create a law that brings consistency to online and physical rules for restricted speech and passes "constitutional muster." It remains to be seen whether he met these goals.

As far a filtering goes Comcast already provides this service http://www.comcast.net/help/faq/index.jsp?faq=Serv icesSecurity_Manager17985. In Utah, many ISPs advertise specifically this type of service.

I remember a story back in the day about how many NT boxes it took to run the house (something like 90 IIRC). A quick google turned up this article describing dinner at Bill's house.

An interesting link.

You are also very wrong about your idea that Google is a small company that doesn't buy up every other corporation:Google acquisitions

Furthermore they are poaching top technologists from all over the sector. Yes, they continue to innovate, but if they aren't going to be bringing out an OS sometime soon, are we losing really good engineers who could innovate in other areas of technology to Google?

Here is an interview I had with Cochran about the possibility that homosexuality is caused by a virus:

Interview Interview Extras

Here is an interview I had with Cochran about the possibility that homosexuality is caused by a virus:

Interview Interview Extras

My workplace is one of the many that has a "No camera phone" policy (thankfully not enforced). It really doesn't make any sense. There was a good Dilbert strip that sums it up pretty well.

Actually no, that's not its only function. The CIA has many functions with HUMINT actually being one of the smallest, though arguably the most important. It is split up into different departments with the Directorate of Intelligence being the largest. The DI specializes in Analysis and reporting. The Directorate of Operations, which specializes in human intelligence is what you are referring too. The CIA also have a paramilitary wing which was extensively used in Afghanistan. The paramil wing has a role similar to the special forces. It also has a Research and Development wing, which specializes in intelligence technology.

Also an offensive tasking seems like it would more likely be a DoD thing, Airforce maybe though who knows.

The proper parlance is the intelligence world is covert action. And with many departments these days trying to keep up with netwarriors (I don't mean hackers, check the link) they have to assume organisational and offensive formlessness and take up roles which in the past they wouldn't have taken up. This includes the use of covert action by agencies that were considered pre-9/11 as collection agencies.

Just to clarify for some /.'ers who may have a narrow view of intelligence. The intelligence world is split up into collection (HUMINT, SIGINT, IMINT, OSINT etc.), analysis, covert action and counter-intelligence. Pre-9/11 most agencies were traditional set in stone in these areas, however due to 4th Generational warriors and netwarriors the traditional agencies have had to change in the areas of organisation, doctrine and culture. So don't think that traditional agencies still keep their same roles. Their roles are blurred and operate under a complete different set of rules from the soviet era.

This story is important not only because Morse code is demonstrated, atleast in this fashion, to still be relevant 170 years later, but also because we are on the cusp of a new innovation in mobile phone text messaging technologies: Morse code cellphone input for text messaging. As another poster already pointed out there is third party app already available for symbian based phones to do text messaging with morse input and its only a matter of time before we start seeing this built into cellphones from the start bringing MORSE CODE BACK FROM THE GRAVE.

ALL CAPS. YES.

Its just so insanely interesting to me that cellphones are now on the cusp of reviving Morse code and I plan on doing everything I can to promote this idea to make sure the cellphone companies hear it. One for the love of Morse but two because I'd love to be able to both send and receive text messages in Morse-- imagine the cellphone vibrating out in Morse code the text messages you've just received so you don't have to take your eyes off the road, or look at the phone in the middle of a meeting. Interestingly enough Nokia has pioneered informative Morse code messages on cellphones-- their SMS alerts can be set to send ...--... or SMS when a text alert comes through and also there is a Nokia ringtone that has morse code in it as well. Further proof: Nokia has filed patents for morse code related technologies.

It's coming. Like it or not, Morse code is going to take over the world. Again.

this is old news... we already have cell phone aps out there...



unrelated: /. editors... please at least TRY and keep up

Engadget is reporting that there's a Morse Text utility for Series 60 phones. the original story, Preview, download it here

Someone already wrote an application for Nokia phones that lets you write your SMS by using Morse code.

For those with Nokia Series 60 phones, here's an app that will let you type in SMS using morse code: http://laivakoira.typepad.com/blog/2005/05/morse_t exter.html

Oil prices are not high if you adjust them for inflation. They have gone up recently, but the price hasn't even caught up to inflation. The highest price was reached in 1981 at about $3.00 a gallon in the USA. Gas with inflation chart

Top secret documents mysteriously discovered in forgotten archives! History as we know it must be revised! Read all about it, etc.

For all I know, the document found could of course be both genuine and significant. But when it sounds a little to good to be true,...

another website :
http://labs.pcw.co.uk/2005/05/computex_zalman.html

just the picture :
http://vnuuk.typepad.com/.shared/image.html?/photo s/uncategorized/zalman_fan_1.jpg

But it seems quite real (just 3 or 4 times higher compared to regular coolers) so it's maybe not the same we are speaking of. I can't tell, the link and coral links are /.ed

I think the article linked to in the article says much more about this next gen gaming: This article sums up the next-gen from the developers perspective, a view I've been trying to get across to those here on /. who seem to overlook this perspective when it is the most important one!

These new consoles (especially the PS3 and Xbox 360) which are all about the numbers are going to suck at housing anything but pretty games. They both use in-order CPU's which kills all attempts at AI and gameplay improvements, these are streamlined for graphics only and this is a big mistake. After playing one or two FPS titles in HD and maybe a sports/racing title what is going to be left to play on your new console? Nothing. Thats why Sony and MS are pushing the "its not a game console" so heavily, they know developers are not going to support these systems with their high priced development costs.

Microsoft is off in left field with their grand idea to take the scum of online MMORPG's and put them on high with their SUPPORTING real life sale of virtual items, and Sony created their own ebay-like site to also support this degenerative practice. WTG, dickheads.

People need to wake up and see these new consoles are 98% marketing and 2% games, they are going to bomb bigtime... maybe not upfront on console sales (which neither of these two care about anyhow because they are taking a loss on the hardware), but on licensing, amount of games developed, and reception of the public.

Only Nintendo is aiming for the true gamers and they have it right this time, cheaper console, simple console, simple games, game delivery system, cheap development costs (this is huge!), innovative titles, and also including families and older gamers.

These are sad times for us true gamers, and when the FPS and GTA games fall flat, I can't wait to see Nintendo standing on the burning rubble of the so-called competitors.

Minorities can certainly always wreak havoc on the freedom of others. There have been plenty of examples throughout history where small group dictate the masses. This almost always happens with violence (dictatorships with the help of 1984-style mind control hasn't become known as of today).

Consider this discussion of Kim Il Jong of North Korea given in this blog:
http://mansei.typepad.com/dogstew/2004/10/popular_ support.html
Especially the PBS interview mentioned in the blog:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/shows/northkorea /transcript.html
Basically the Dear Leader uses both violence and mind control.

The second point is certainly acceptable by all people, the first needs some explanation. The fundamental problem is that configuration options are bad. Be it at runtime or at compile. Ideally there is one configuration which works everywhere. Every new configuration increases complexity. Not linearly but instead exponentially. Each option might influence every other option. This is a disaster not only for users, but also the developers. It means exponential growth of testing. Which of course won't happen and therefore the code is basically untested. For developers this means that often only one or two configurations are really tested. Any us of another configuration is probably doomed to failure in any non-trivial project.

I am a Macintosh programmer from long ago. In the Pre-OS X days I worked extensively with the mac ports of libxml, libxslt, and TCL. I played with other open source software on the mac as well like MacPerl and the early mozilla builds. The mac port was generally a point release or 2 behind the main development. I assume the blogger udrepper is talking about people like me. The usual situation I encountered was that mac programmers had to support the macintosh port with little input from the non-mac programmers. The project "owners" would include the mac support files in a subdirectory of the project source tree. Everybody on the project understood that the contents of this subdirectory was only of interest to mac programmers.

This was quite a reasonable situation. No mac-specific configuration options affected the rest of the project. It is no longer the case. Now the OS X (usually spelled "darwin") build is another option in the makefile.

For my new projects the razor is even sharper. Only Linux is supported and only the few interesting mainstream architecture with reasonable APIs are maintained. Support for architectures with deliberately different APIs (i.e., IA-64) can be contributed. No other configuration is supported, actively or not, and people would have to exercise their right to add patches or fork the entire code to add other support.

Over-dramatic; leads to fragmentation which leads to redundant work. I think you would do better to revert to the platform-specific sub folders and let the programmers of that platform update their patches at their own pace. This saves the "minority users" the problem of maintaining a new website and CVS system. You get the benefit of some contributions to the main development since a new feature or two usually must be added by the minority platform programmers.

If you really want to support exactly one platform with few options, then be sure to use a scripting language (any of the P* languages will do), or maybe java and/or mono.

Don't let Minorities dictate the direction!

The leadership of any substantial group of people is always a minority. How many bosses do you have? How many people work for him?

neslted in point one of the article is a link to an IGDA developer's panel. interesting opinions and information from a few insiders:

http://crystaltips.typepad.com/wonderland/2005/03/ burn_the_house_.html

Both France and Germany have double-digit unemployment rates and unemployment in Germany is the highest it has been since the early 1930s when (cue spooky music) Hitler took power. That's why Schroder's socialist party just lost badly in a district they've carried in every election for the past 39 years. It's also why French and German politicians rant so much about the US. They're trying to deflect voters' attention away from their own economies. Visit: Medienkritick for more details.

If France and Germany don't create more productive economies modeled on those in the US, UK and much of Asia, they'll end up in a death spiral. Poor economies demand more social programs, which mean more taxes, which create an even weaker economy. And that at a time when baby boomers are about to retire. But given the 'hate Bush and the US" mindset of many French and Germans, change is unlikely.

A century ago, some warned that "anti-Semitism was the socialism of fools." Today it's anti-Americanism that draws fools like moths to a flame.

--Mike Perry, Seattle, Untangling Tolkien

P.S. And what will France and Germany do if the Middle East democraticizes and there are no corrupt regimes eager to buy weapons from them to crush internal dissent?

You forgot "lawsuits"

Too Late

and just didn't serch them after their primary servers were destroyed. I think the problem was in not turing over what they had. Or to but it in lawyer terms the e-mails were "discoverable" (that is avilable in some form and relevant) and were not "produced" (turned over to the other side) http://litsupportguy.typepad.com/litigation_suppor t_guy/2005/05/the_woodshed_re.html

I find it hard to believe that a free and democratic country like India has been put into the same category as Syria, Libya, Pakistan, North Korea and Iran. This is after India and US are close allies.
India has never exported nuclear or missile or chemical weapons technologies (compare it with the US trackrecord on this). On the other hand, India has been one of the biggest victims of terrorism in the world accounting for around half of the incidents last year.
[ Source: The Counterterrorism Blog: GOODBYE PATTERNS OF GLOBAL TERRORISM? (UPDATED 4/16) http://counterterror.typepad.com/the_counterterror ism_blog/2005/04/goodby_patterns.html ]
It took the tragic incident of 9/11 for the US to wake up to the international scourge of terrorism and now it wants to punish close friends and other victims? US has a serious problem of differentiating between friends and foes.
Posting as 'anonymous coward' to avoid retribution.

Oh wait, it's CBS - it must be false. Damn that freedom-hating, non-good-news-reporting, liberal media!

You may post TEXT about the joys of sex with 4 year olds all you want.

Actually, if you are in the US (or many other European nations), you can't even do that. It is illegal to even create simulations of child pornography (this even includes fiction). Freedom of speech indeed!

Interesting note: while googling for the law so I could link you to it, a link came up as The Link Between Trekkies and Pedophilia. Just thought /. might like to know about that one! (Note: I didn't even go read it, so I don't know what it's about)

Oh, brother. In the olden days, O'Gara would have been given a medal for generating readership.

To which olden days do you refer, Mr. Dvorak? Perhaps you mean those olden days of yellow journalism. Sorry, but I prefer a more ethical style of online writing. Dan Gillmor says it best: Be honorable.

Not big and commercial, but maybe paired with MythTV or some other kind of box, it could take off... http://participatoryculture.org/

I still prefer the term "nichecasting" for this kind of idea (microcasting implies "small"), and it's particularly cool when you look at it from a Long Tail perspective. So if we can [n]cast for virtually no cost, all we need to do is create stuff for virutally no cost. RvB is still, I think, the best example of that kind project. Does anyone know of any other FOSE[ntertainment] out there?