You might recall the article from Sunday about the cost of Google's search engine on the environment. Well, the physicist that did the original research is revealing that he made no such conclusions in his research. "I have no idea where they got those statistics," he is quoted as saying. This article takes answers from him and Google on the Times Online article that was stretching his research into the realm of fiction.

You may wonder what exactly happens to a site when Slashdot sends its legions of page requests to it. Well, The Metric System blog has an analysis of what happened on November 6th when they received 31,218 page views. You see the breakdown by site and you also see an increase in traffic by 89,094%. While this may by anecdotal, it's the first time I've seen hard numbers on the Slashdot/Digg effect.

One of my favorite series has released its third movie, "Bender's Game." Wired has an interview with some staff from Rough Draft Studios (The Simpson's Movie, Ren & Stimpy) that was entertaining. Get out and buy Futurama to support the show!

Obama was brutally attacked by MPAA lobbyists mere hours after his acceptance speech today. Who else is already pandering to the president elect?

From the mouth of John Cleese, it's official: Sarah Palin is funnier than Michael Palin!

I hate to sound like an Amazon fanboy ... what with their 1-click patent crap and all ... but if you've read my comments related to anti-DRM you know I love their MP3 service. It's completely DRM-less (unlike Apple's) and has quite the selection. Well, today I discovered that the yet to be released David Byrne & Brian Eno album has a free MP3 listed for download on Amazon.

This excites me as I hope to see all music distributors (labels, retailers, sites, etc) move towards a model similar to that of Afternoon Records site where the artists pick one or two songs from each album to be distributed for free. Although this doesn't satisfy the N'Syncs and Britney Spears of the music world (where one pop single should sell an entire album of 95% filler), it completely draws me into purchasing more and more music from artists that write their own music.

These selections still seem few and far between on Amazon (Brian Setzer, Ted Nugent & The Apples in Stereo are the only others I can find at the moment) but let's hope this spreads.

I can't tell if this is legit or not but Torvalds may be blogging. It's just inane enough that it might be him though it doesn't have the same feel as his posts that I've read at the KernelTrap.

For example, he seems to use _exclamation_ on kernel threads instead of exclamation like the blog has.

If you're a coder who uses .NET, I recently came across some new neat tools by ItJustWorks. The four tools are:

• IJW Profiler for .NET & Java
• Corfu Text Editor
• IJW Framework
• IL to Native Compiler

There's a worthwhile This American Life episode about 419 scammers (Act I just past the intro).

Quite interesting (and I must admit it's a more than a little amusing). It begs the question: Do 419 scammer scammers take their anti-scamming too far?

A developer posted a brief blog outlining the libraries that Google Chrome uses. Since it's open source, you can see how many (and which) libraries they chose to use. Interesting stuff if you want to get an idea of what is needed to start an open source browser like Chrome. Another blog talks about the security implications of this.

Artists like the eloquent poet Kid Rock are taking a stand against iTunes as they continue to see album sales fall while their hit singles skyrocket in sales on the popular music distribution application. He will be joining Jay-Z in not putting his latest album up for sale on iTunes. I guess Kid's fans were either sending him a message he didn't want to hear or it's just not fair to give consumers a choice. Either way, the world will mourn the loss of Kid's music on iTunes. </sarcasm>

How robust is your religion? Have all the boundary cases been tested and thought out or does it have more holes and contradictions than the USSR's Penal System? Well, the Vatican is shoring up some questionable parts of Catholicism in regards to those pesky extraterrestrials that may or may not exist. In fact, some major theologians are speculating that each sentient creature would need its own Jesus Christ to save them from certain doom while others claim that it was a one shot deal for everybody. Still others speculate that there could be an alien race that never committed sin. Guess the movies have it wrong. A recent Vatican Newsletter proclaims: "The extraterrestrial is my brother."

Alright, on an early Friday morning, this live performance brought a genuine smile to my lips.

From the lyrics:

Kill Dash Nine!

There's a tiny graphic depicting the time line of Unix. I found it interesting as I've never realized the sheer volume of incarnations of Unix until now.

Half a week ago I was lucky enough to have a friend who works at Best Buy hook me up with a Wii. I've been playing Smash Bros fairly obsessively but it's not like Warcraft or Star Wars Galaxies obsessive. Why is this?

I found an interesting article about Sega claiming the Wii has been inappropriately written off as being not for 'hardcore' gamers. So I would like to ask Slashdot if they, as members of a gaming community, feel that the Wii is inaccessible because it doesn't offer the time consuming grind of achievements (like the XBox 360) or even the endless single player RPG (like the PS3)? Is it seen as a system purely for the 'casual gamer' and not someone who wants to dump a whole Saturday into progress? Is it's popularity based on this image? I remember the backbreaking days I put into Gauntlet & Bionic Commando, has Nintendo forgotten the games that require hours and hours of practice and finesse? Is this a side effect of the occasionally glitchy and not too precise wiimote?