Phantom islands aren't really anything new in themselves, but they usuallly date from before satellite imagery: a ship would spot what looked like an island in the distance, nobody on board would bother to go and confirm the existence of terra firma, the island would be named and reported to cartographers later on, and it would keep turning up on charts until someone tried and failed to find it. Some of the better stories that grew up around these islands are in this book: http://www.librarything.com/work/20956/

If you have server space, there's SemanticScuttle. Works nicely for me--once I fixed it so it (a) didn't expect to be importing from a file with uppercase HTML markup, and (b) didn't insist on converting all my tags to lowercase. Unfortunately, it can't import the del.icio.us privacy settings, so your imported bookmarks will end up globally public or globally private.

As far as I am aware, there is nowhere I can find a copy of the Communications Act after the changes from later legislation have been applied.

This should be it, but I don't think it's been brought up to date yet. (Quoting from here: 'Update Status Warning: There are effects on this legislation that have not yet been applied to the Statute Law Database for the following year(s): 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010.' Oh well, it exists in theory.)

Are they more likely to take it when they get it...?

At least your students use spellcheck; some of mine last year thought they could do without both that and proofreading. Fewer by the time of the second assignment...

I don't know about his legal theory, but presumably the people writing moralityware like the program in this story tell themselves they're doing it to bring people back to the path of righteousness. So that's their duty of care taken care of.

The difficulty in evaluating Akismet - I speak not as a user but as someone who ended up apparently blacklisted and having to try their appeals system - is that everyone I see praising it is by definition the kind of person who pays attention to the filter and therefore will train it effectively. Since your average wordpress.com user more likely lets false positives pile up, I'd love to know how effective it is for people who don't wonder how effective it is.

I'll grant that Planescape: Torment is notoriously verbose and that that doesn't suit every project, but 'giving the user control and freedom to express himself within the framework of the story' was pretty well its raison d'Ãtre; and when you're offering actual choices and branching narrative, 'the illusion of choice' is superfluous. So overall it's unclear to me what point you're trying to make.