Your local news is probably the closest to being a friend for broadcast television. By only running three or four hours of news every day, they don't have to sensationalize news in-general just to survive, the bulk of their other programming does that for them.

I personally like NPR and some of the PBS news, but they're not infallible and they've made mistakes.

My point in originally posting *yawn* it's worth taking with a grain of salt. I was judging the reporter, not the report. It may be factual, or it may be wildly inaccurate, or it might be factual from a technical perspective by narrowing or qualifying the statement, I do not know. I do know that I'm not going to take NewsCorp's word for it.

Fact of the matter is, I do not trust NewsCorp's motives as I do not know what those motives are in-whole, but the way I interpret their past direct actions, ie, that which they have themselves published or broadcast through their various properties, leads me to not assume that their intentions are what they seem to claim them to be. Even if they immediately decided to be wholly transparent and above-board it would probably take several years for me to be able to trust them, as there's usually no benefit in changing a negative opinion once it has been demonstrably earned.

I still have a Model 500 around here somewhere. As a teenager I had modified it to allow me to record telephone conversations to cassette tape.

Okay, post-acquisition, did WSJ make a point of investigating the Sarah Palin private yahoo e-mail that she used for business while in power as the Governor of Alaska to circumvent Alaskan law? I don't remember coverage of that being terribly strong. I also don't remember WSJ asking the public to comb through through the gwb43 e-mail personally.

Wouldn't that be 471 beads?

This isn't the first time that I've seen mention of this. If I'm remembering previous articles correctly, these beads are ending up being consumed by very small sea creatures, who cannot process them, who then are eaten by bigger sea creatures, who also cannot process them, etc, until they build up in large concentrations toward the top of the foodchain to poison those alpha predators. There's concern for humans that eat those largest animals too.

Honestly I'm surprised that they were legal in the first place, but if there wasn't an explicit law against them then I guess the companies that have manufactured and used them were free to do so regardless of any perceived morality on the matter.

In a world where an organization dedicated to publishing the damning evidence of cults is forced into bankruptcy and then purchased by one of those cults, who continues to operate the organization as a means to identify individuals against their cause, I'm generally willing to take the acquisition of a group originally with certain positions by a group with differing positions with a bit of a grain of salt.

The Wall Street Journal has been a decent publication, but is now owned by a media entity whose management staff has an agenda and has nakedly used its media holdings to advance that agenda. The very name, "NewsCorp," is doublespeak when the bulk of their prominent content is not news. I have no doubt that WSJ's acquisition was in part strategic.

Not that it's much consolation to an anonymous coward like you, but I don't exactly put a lot of stock in CNN or MSNBC or whatever they're currently called either. The 24-hour news cycle is one of the worst things in that because it's ad-revenue based, it has to continually attract attention to itself to remain profitable, so it makes much ado about nothing in order to keep its audience. That means polarizing the audience because there's nothing people love more than to have some feeling of theirs reinforced. They're all echo-chambers that feedback on their respective audiences.

I think that's the crux of it for ex-cons, but not for the reasons most people think.

When a former convict goes back into the same community that he committed his crimes in, he's probably going to fall back into roughly the same life that he had before as that life was probably the path of least-resistance for that neighborhood. Put him into a different neighborhood and he has to learn a new way to live, and there's a greater chance over the previous one that it will not include crime. No guarantee, but it's probably better odds.

Yawn...

I wouldn't have minded sequels with the same game engines and basic gameplay or even recompilations for newer technology and OSes depending on the cost of those titles. Some games just worked really, really well. I really liked the original Quake, much more than Quake ][ or Quake ]|[ with their revised gameplay and different engines. I really like Warcraft II and was disappointed when an overhead-style Warcraft III wasn't released while I was still into gaming, or that Warcraft II wasn't released in a Windows format that could take advantage of high resolution screens to show more of the battlefield at a time.

You know, as much as I liked titles that came out in the later video-acceleration era with advanced music and sound effects, there's still nothing quite like that first level of DOS-based DOOM with the overdriven guitar coming out of an FM-synth midi chip on a Soundblaster 16, with the monsters roaring and the lights flickering.

Heh. I guess it's been a long time since I played SimCity titles regularly. I kind of gave up when The Sims came out and went in a completely different direction than the city-building games had gone. Thought about playing Streets of SimCity, but between the original overhead-view Grand Theft Auto and the first-person Carmageddon II and Monster Truck Madness on the PC plus Twisted Metal on the Playstation I didn't really feel a need to get into even more games. I didn't even know that EA bought-out Maxis.

Was there really any improvement in the SimCity titles after SimCity 2000? That was probably the last one I played regularly. It seemed, at the time, to be perfect. One could control the terrain, within reason, the under-terrain infrastructure, the water table, and obviously the roads and zoning. What else did a city simulator need?

For POTS lines I prefer the Western Electric 2500 or 2554 depending on a tabletop vs wallmount application. They were designed when the phone company owned them and they were leased with the service, so they were overdesigned to last decades. Nearly every phone in my house is one of these two models.

"I've got a karma-enhancing knife! It gives me a +1 against comments!"

With apologies to Dead Alewives and Dr. Demento...

You know, with that attitude they're probably not going to give you the job, Rincewind...