Given the outcry (is that too strong a word? I dunno) about the new D&D Essentials line and the ongoing changes to the system made by the Errata and Updates, my question is a simple one: Should Wizards of The Coast introduce public playtesting for key changes to D&D before making them official?

Whenever we take a road trip, we make sure that an FM radio transmitter is in our vehicle. Shuffling around CDs is an outdated form of listening to music quickly on the way to joining cassettes and 8-tracks. Almost every music connoisseur that walks the planet owns an MP3 player whether its a pocket-sized device like an iPod, a mobile computer, a smartphone, or a media center. Not every car has an auxiliary port. This is where the FM radio transmitter bridges today's electronics with the tried and true functionality of a car stereo system.

What if you could own your internet connection? It may sound strange, and it's certainly not what we're used to. Today we have a "carrier-centered" model; phone and cable companies spend billions to build, operate, and own the "last-mile" connection — the copper, cable, or fiber wires that come into your house. Individual consumers then pay for particular services, like phone service or Internet access. In turn, we tend to think about broadband deployment in carrier-centric ways.

This is a huge turning point. Jim Griffin has been telling everyone to "monetize the anarchy" for essentially the entire decade. This solution was on the table dating back to Napster.

Jailed for over 25 years in apartheid South Africa, Mandela celebrates his 92nd birthday. To be honest, I do not remember hearing anything about him until my early teen years when this song came out. Mandela's release from prison, the changes in South Africa, and his election to the government all seemed too good to be true.

I've been thinking about the implications of Judge Gertner's ruling in Sony v. Tenenbaum, and have had the good fortune to discuss it with copyright expert Thinh Nguyen. One unexpected effect of the decision, I believe, will be to increase the cost of copyright litigation, perhaps significantly. Judge Gertner employs the Supreme Court's Due Process rulings on damages, especially punitive damages, to hold that there must be some relation (how close a relation, we're not sure) between actual damage / actual harm, and the amount of statutory damages awarded. This is problematic, for two reasons.

Mark Twain's antiwar leanings are already common knowledge (or should be), perhaps best of all through his haunting short story "The War Prayer." But now, as his complete autobiography is being published for the first time by University of California Press, the true radicalism of his position is becoming more evident than ever.

Ran across an interesting story on Slashdot this weekend: ScienceBlogs.com, a high-profile and respectable collection of scientific blogs, is in a bit of a kerfuffle after including a paid "nutrition" blog from PepsiCo. In response, some bloggers have left the site, others are on hiatus, and some call the whole thing an overreaction. The PepsiCo blog has since been cancelled with an apology of sorts.

You're going along, minding your own business when all of a sudden you realize, you've hit a wall. You're stuck. And you don't see a way around it. What can one do to help one's self out of this situation?

I've been doing a lot of content curation lately; you know, the latest fashionable trend in digital content. At least, I hope it's fashionable, because it's a wonderful development that throws a wrench in the works of automated delivery.

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