Nathan Smart writes "A writer for satire site The Game Rag watches 24 hours of G4TV and lives to tell about it." From the article: "'Cheat' had to evolve into a broader format, which coincidentally no longer involves actual cheating, and became a show about walkthroughs and tips. So right off the bat there's an immediate problem, and it ties back into that internet-thing I said earlier. There is nothing, seriously nothing, you can get from this show that you couldn't find with a simple trip to your local neighborhood Gamefaqs.com. Nothing. And Strike two is the disgustingly cheerful host, Kristin Holt. My assumption is that G4 wanted to hire some attractive women, as that falls under the category of 'things nerds like to look at', but Miss Holt, in my professional opinion, has NEVER SEEN A VIDEO GAME IN HER LIFE." He's already posted the second part of his outing, and G4 has a response to his project on their website.

netbuzz writes "Rule #1 when doing PR for an antispam vendor: Don't spam. This isn't exactly brain surgery, yet the fellow at a PR agency called Rocket Science managed to violate Rule #1 while attempting to drum up publicity for Singlefin, which provides e-mail, IM and Web filtering services to the likes of Juno and NetZero. He also violated Rules #2 and #3." Given the hundreds of press releases I get in my inbox on a weekly basis, PR folks in general need to learn that lesson regardless of their clients.

jaredmauch writes "USA Today is reporting that TiVo will measure how many users skip ads of roughly 20k random users. This follows Nielsen Ratings service providing individual commercial ratings. Overall this is expected to reduce the cost of advertisements on television and perhaps make them more on-topic? I'd consider providing feedback (thumbs-up/down) to ads if it'd make those that are no longer relevant to me go away." I'm kinda surprised they don't have this data already. I mean, weren't they able to track the Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction a few years ago?

SaturnTim writes "Babylon 5 fans rejoice! It appears that our favorite space outpost is back. It will be returning soon in a series of direct-to-DVD 20min episodes, each featuring the past of one of our favorite characters."

Krishna Dagli writes "The U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday approved a bill that would make it a federal felony for Webmasters to use innocent words like "Barbie" or "Furby" but actually feature sexual content on their sites. Anyone who includes misleading "words" or "images" intended to confuse a minor into viewing a possibly harmful Web site could be imprisoned for up to 20 years and fined, the bill says." Terrible news for the Barbie/Furbie fetishists out there, to say nothing about being completely impossible to enforce globally.

Erick Lionheart at www.gamersloot.net writes "Presence-pc at reports that France Telecom just announced they are offering 2.5 Gb/s Internet connections to select cities in the Paris region. For ... $85(70 Euros) a month you also get free phone and TV. From the article (in French): 'The historical operator opted for a GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Network) FTTH architecture (Fiber To The Home). This technology allows up to 2.5 Gbits/s download and 1.2 Gigabits/s upload.'"

Finin writes "In February 2005, Google was sued by Lane's Gifts & Collectibles in a class-action lawsuit over click fraud. The company alleged that Google had been improperly billing for pay-per-click ads that were not viewed by legitimate potential customers. As part of a settlement earlier this year, Google agreed to have an independent expert examine their click fraud detection methods, policies, and procedures and make a determination of whether or not they were reasonable measures to protect advertisers. The report of the expert, NYU Information Systems Professor Alexander Tuzhilin (a Professor of Information Systems at NYU), is now available." Update 07/26/2006 at 12:52 GMT by SM: Fixed the link to Tuzhilin's report.

Rob Carr writes "During the most recent Cassini fly-by, the surface-mapping radar spotted what appear to be lakes in the high northern latitudes of Titan. From the article: 'The channels have a shape that strongly implies they were carved by liquid. Some of the dark patches and connecting channels are completely black, that is, they reflect back essentially no radar signal, and hence must be extremely smooth. In some cases rims can be seen around the dark patches, suggesting deposits that might form as liquid evaporates.' At Titan's temperatures, water is a solid; the lakes would be comprised of methane and ethane. The fluids are different, as are the temperatures, but these lakes cement Titan's status in the solar system as the place with the most earth-like weather — except for Earth, of course."

ChelleChelle writes "In an entertaining yet well thought-out article, software architect Alex E. Bell of The Boeing Company lashes out at the so-called 'Silver Bullets' and those who rely on them to solve all their software development difficulties. From the article: 'the desperate, the pressured, and the ignorant are among those who continue to worship the silver-bullet gods and plead for continuance of silver-fueled delusions that are keeping many of their projects alive.'"

Krishna Dagli writes to tell us Yahoo! News is reporting that NASA scientists have managed to simulate the merger of two massive orbiting black holes. Using technology from Silicon Graphics, Inc. built from 20 SGI Altix systems the team was able to show how the resulting gravitational waves would interact with surrounding space.

Doofus writes "The New York Times is running an article, Celebrating puzzles, that is about a puzzle exhibit opening at the Lilly Library at Indiana University. The primary collector, a Mr. Slocum, has been collecting interesting and challenging 3D puzzles for many years, and has helped to curate the exhibition. The article describes one variation of the towers of Hanoi puzzle that involves 65 rings and has a mind-blowing 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 moves in a perfect solution. A twist on the standard museum exhibition — the puzzles on exhibit are stored each night in drawers — that must be puzzled open by the first visitors the following morning."

dark-br writes to tell us TechWorld is reporting that the next Debian release will be able to run native on AMD64 processors for the first time. From the article: "The GNU/Linux 4.0 operating system, also known as "Etch," is planned for release in December, the group said. It will also have new security features, including encryption and digital signatures to ensure that downloaded packages are validated."

niabok writes "According to a message sent by Rob Braun to the OpenDarwin mailing lists, the OpenDarwin project will be shutting down, saying that 'OpenDarwin has failed to achieve its goals in 4 years of operation, and moves further from achieving these goals as time goes on.' The project's servers will remain online long enough to allow developers to move their various projects elsewhere."

BalanceOfJudgement writes "A major victory by the federal government was won today when a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit against AT&T for providing phone records to the federal government. From the article: 'The court is persuaded that requiring AT&T to confirm or deny whether it has disclosed large quantities of telephone records to the federal government could give adversaries of this country valuable insight into the government's intelligence activities'" Not to be confused with the EFF case, this case was filed by the ACLU on behalf of author Studs Terkel and other activists who argued that their constitutional rights had been violated by the actions of AT&T and the NSA.

Jane Walker writes "Dave Roberts talks about Vyatta's open source router and how open source technology may soon alter the landscape of enterprise networking." From the article: "Initially, we believe that the x86 PC running Vyatta -- given the range of hardware that's available in the PC world -- can basically replace the midrange of the router market; to use Cisco terminology and model numbers, simply because it's convenient shorthand, basically from the 2800 series to the 7200 series. There's a whole host of equivalent products from Nortel and Alcatel -- but essentially in that range. I wouldn't describe it as Cisco model numbers so much as T1 branch office to gigabit LAN product categories."