I can barely read this article, I better get a new video card! Shameless comes to mind.

Unfortunately, for the most part we don't know the people on our Facebook accounts. I am a loser at the facebook game, I only add people I actually know, but still sometimes end up going 'who is that, why did I accept them?' Once you factor this into the argument, it's easy to see how the 6 degrees of seperation can be diluted down to 4.74, artificially through 'friends' that we don't even know of.

Games motivates kids, but explaining beyond what they know it becomes really easy to lead into anything CS: databases (WoW and F.Book), algorithms (video game special effects), physics (Portal), etc. :-)

A Turtleneck too far?

Valve have spent countless time and money nurturing the Steam Community. Running forums, making changes based on the community, creating events, keeping the griefers under control; all of this requires funding. Given how much been put in to build such a strong community, they have really earnt this level of support form their community (which is obvious through the positive response by their community). Good work!

I can second this, my Superdisk drives have saved many a disk worth of data. :-)

My view is that if you buy the original, there's no crime in using a ROM. Having the cartridges may or may not do anything for the legality of your situation, but if it ever got to the courtroom ,and you had an entire back-catalogue of the originals for all of your 'infringements', I'm sure it would help a lot. Also the box art is mad!

I do workshops for 15 year olds +, so this may be useful to you: There are many great stories of disasers that have been caused by software. This lets me explain how my job is to create software that does not make those mistakes. :-)

Hopefully the controversial (and I think stupid) Australian Internet Filter http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/06/24/052258/Australian-ISPs-To-Start-Filtering-the-Internet can do something for the people of Australia by black-banning this website which will no doubt be a source of many mass spam attacks on the Australian public at large... :-)

This is oh so similar to the Australian movie 'The Tunnel' which raised funds through a pre-release 'buy a frame from the movie' approach. Regardless of something similar being done before, it's still great to see people solving piracy without lawyers and punishing the consumer! Go FTW!