The Voting for the new CSM finished just over 12 hours ago - so I guess it's a tie into the current CSM election

Eve is not a hard game at all, Go is a hard game, Chess is a hard game, Eve is a broad game with a lot of things you can choose to learn. The process to build a tech 3 cruiser and subsystems is pretty complex, but buying and flying one doesn't need you to know about that.

I play Eve with my 5 year old daughter (when she's been good of course) and she's quite capable of building a ship and taking it out to run missions, she'll tell you all about her Omen or Punisher and how the colour of the laser affects range and damage. She was even involved in a carrier kill recently, getting a grand total of 5hp damage before her frigate was demolished by smartbombs.

Anyway your characterisation of ' Widespread Protests is so ridiculously wide of the mark that it demands correction, the CSM process includes a method to protest the vote, you simply select the 'abstain' option, and in CSM4 less than 3% of votes registered this option. Turnout is low, sure, but that's more an indication of the indifference by many players, or a general acceptance that the people that do get elected generally are quite committed and don't do a bad job. Even Larkonis Trassler who was kicked off the council for insider trading had been relatively effective at raising issues.

I was also a candidate for CSM this year, wish this story had hit Slashdot yesterday so I could have trying to court the slashdot readers voted.

You're so wide of the mark, sure you start out with few skills, but real world skills make a huge difference. There's a great video showing a couple of 2 day old characters flying into 0.0 and PVP'ing in rifters successfully - real world skills and teamwork make a huge difference. I have 30million SP, but I'm not a great solo PVP legend, I do occasionally get on a few killmails as part of fleet actions with a team of people that know what they're dong, and there it's T1 battleships, which I've been able to fly since 3 months after I started. Sure I can fly all sorts of fancy t2 ships - Heavy Interdictors, Recons, Logistics, but I don't generally bother because there are usually better pilots filling those niche roles.

My kids got interested, and since I had some use for a spare character they both got low level pilots who *love* flying around with me in frigates and blowing things up, they don't have SP or real world skills but they get excited and have a whole lot of fun.

imeem has been doing something similar for a long time - supposedly it was started by some ex-napster people and has basicly turned into napster in a browser, where people can share any music by uploading it to the site, and anyone can listen to it. Advertising is all over the plance and is used to pay the labels/artist/lawyers.

imeem have been doing this for the last few years, and they don't use audible magic, they used the Snocap fingerprint system which apparently was good enough for them to buy Snocap. Their business model has always been built around using the content identification system to make sure the right people get paid for audio played on the site.

imeem is primarily used by people uploading and sharing audio, so using an audio fingerprinting system seems more appropriate than youtube relying on an audio fingerprinter for video content.

A bigger effect on the number of users downloading has been the emergence of imeem and Myspace Music which both provide instant on demand access to almost everything ever released. imeem isn't nearly as well known as myspace, but because it allows users to upload their favorite tunes to share it has a larger selection (imeem was founded by a load of ex-napster 1.0 engineers). So between them they've essentially removed a huge number of people who would go to P2P to just find one or two songs. There are a load of other less popular music sites (last.fm, pandora etc) but myspace and imeem are vastly more popular (and legal), so they're having the biggest effect.

imeem.com used to have a special version for the wii browser which let you play all their music, but it seemed to stop working. It had a few bugs, but it was amazing to be able to search for any artist and play all their music instantly.

It's not even accurate, when it comes to streaming music sites.... imeem.com has twice the users of last.fm, it was the biggest site until September when myspace music piggybacked on myspace and claimed more than double the users of imeem.com

Yes, the revolutionary and industry shaking part of napster 1.0 clearly never got sold along with the brandname.