According to the BN website ( http://www.barnesandnoble.com/nook/features/ ) you're also invited to "Protect your Nook". Sage advice, you should always keep your nook protected.

Couldn't've said it better.

We're hit with media stories every day, and it's important to build a set of add-on attachments for your Bullshit Meter.

The one on display here is "if the source is using an exciting fantasy to sell you on their premise, there might be bullshit"

Also, "If the source is speaking in general terms about technology, there might be bullshit"

There is an ArrayObject class in PHP http://us2.php.net/manual/en/class.arrayobject.php

But like a lot of the stuff in the SPL, no one ever uses it (including me). I'm not sure why.

I live in New Orleans. from the article, this was filed "on behalf of the Louisiana Conference of Catholic Bishops". If you've never been here, Catholicism is huge in south Louisiana.

This bill has nothing to do with any sort of research or proposed research in the state. There are no biomedical companies here threatening to build mutant humans. Louisiana doesn't generally have the sort of biomedical research centers that would do work of that sort. We're happy if the Germans build a steel mill here.

This is just another one of those ideas based on a garbled sci-fi fear of Science, made by people who'd rather not have to learn anything before forming an opinion, and who have far too much access to lawmakers.

I have no doubt the law will pass, the religious community here will crow about it for a few days, and then absolutely nothing tangible will have changed. Except that a few hundred thousand more of my state tax dollars will have been spent on bullshit.

This isn't just about MMORPGs; written literature has a similar issue.

As some have pointed out above, it's far easier to invent a story-framework when you don't have to deal with plausibility.

In our technologically sophisticated world, and especially among gamers, we have a territorial claim on technology and scientific plausibility. We're much more critical of sci-fi, because we feel comfortable judging sci-fi settings. In contrast, fantasy is allowed and expected to exhibit arbitrary rules like magic, and to develop romantic stories involving heroes.

If, in a fantasy setting, I'm jumped by rabid fairies from the Underworld, I can buy it. If they cast eternal drowsiness on me and limit my mobility for 10 seconds... OK that's fine. If, in retaliation, I cast a spell to call down meteoric fire from the sky, that's totally believable (not to mention awesome). Fantasy doesn't invite us to call bullshit.

But if, in a sci-fi setting, I'm attacked by robots, well OK that's plausible. Maybe they're programmed to attack outsiders, I can buy that. They hit me with their laser guns... OK, I can buy that that's possible in the future with advances in battery technology. And I guess I didn't get cut in half because I was wearing special nano-armor that, ummm, absorbs laser light. But in retaliation I cast my hacker-spell and... wait... I smell bullshit.

It's easier as an author to just cut yourself loose from present-day reality. It's far more challenging to write in a future-of-now setting, and deal with the annoyances of the real world's rules and history.

The good ole' 5-year technology promise. Close enough to be exciting and get attention, but far enough away that you'll forget about their claim before they miss their deadline.

It's time for the government to implement some documentation upgrades.

With open-source collaborations, the code has to be easily accessible and clearly documented if you have any hope of bringing new contributors up to speed. Dense projects with bad documentation fail.

A member of the public that wants to research existing law and proposed changes has no effective tools on hand. This THOMAS thing is a joke compared to other documentation search systems.

I don't have to get a doctorate in computer science to read the Firefox source code, and I shouldn't have to get a doctorate in law to understand what the senate voted on this week.

As long as we're blowing tax money like a coke-fueled Vegas bender, we should develop a strategy for semantic markup of legal documents, and bring legal documention into the 21st century. Ideally:

a) Legal documents should be revised data, with diff revision histories instead of separate amendments. Try searching THOMAS for a document, and see how many amendments you get. Now go look at the revision history of any Wikipedia article.

b) Legal documents should be machine readable. If they're too complicated to search effectively, then they're not semantic enough. If google can index an internet's worth of websites, then the government should be able to build a searchable legal structure.

This isn't even discussing realtime data access like budget or spending reporting. It's all in a computer somewhere, why can't I see it? If google can show me the trends of a world-full of internet search requests, why can't I see a real-time report of money flow at all levels of the government? Why can't I see a list of all the assets the government owns?

I think when all's said and done, you'll find an awful lot of resistance from any given politician to any idea of over-the-shoulder oversight from the public. Bad documentation and eye-glazing legal syntax is their obscurity blanket.