Kotaku reports the news that problems with breaking Wiimote straps has resulted in a class action lawsuit against Nintendo. From the press release about the suit: "Green Welling LLP filed a nationwide class action lawsuit on behalf of the owners of the Nintendo Wii against Nintendo of America, Inc., in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington. The class action lawsuit arose as result of the defective nature of the Nintendo Wii. In particular, the Nintendo Wii game console includes a remote and a wrist strap for the remote. Owners of the Nintendo Wii reported that when they used the Nintendo remote and wrist strap, as instructed by the material that accompanied the Wii console, the wrist strap broke and caused the remote to leave the user's hand. Nintendo's failure to include a remote that is free from defects is in breach of Nintendo's own product warranty."

James Edward Gray II writes "If you have been swept up by the Rails craze or are even just a casual fan, you have probably been waiting for the terrific books to start rolling in. Some early entries, like Agile Web Development with Rails, were very solid but for me greatness arrived with Rails Recipes. For those who are not familiar with it, Rails is a full-stack web application framework, for quickly developing state-of-the-art web applications. Rails Recipes is the latest book on the subject from the Pragmatic Programmers." Read the rest of James's review.

tjcrowder noted that Boing Boing is reporting that Flickr has filed for a patent on a system for determining "interestingness". From the patent application abstract: "Media objects, such as images or soundtracks, may be ranked according to a new class of metrics known as "interestingness." These rankings may be based at least in part on the quantity of user-entered metadata concerning the media object, the number of users who have assigned metadata to the media object, access patterns related to the media object, and/or a lapse of time related to the media object." So basically, nobody else can use tags to label files. Totally original thinking from the folks at flickr. *cough*

stewwy writes "It looks like the the shenanigans have started already, the Register is running a story about the difficulty early voters are having with casting votes for Democrats." From the article: "The touch-screen gizmos seem strangely attracted to Republican candidates. One voter needed assistance from an election official, and even then, needed three tries to convince the machine that he wanted to vote for Democrat Jim Davis in the gubernatorial race, not his Republican opponent Charlie Crist."

Sanity writes "The Freenet Project has just released the first alpha version of the much anticipated Freenet 0.7 branch. This is a major departure from past approaches to peer-to-peer network design, embracing a 'scalable darknet' architecture, where security is increased by allowing users to limit which other peers their peer will communicate with directly, rather than the typical 'promiscuous' approach of classic P2P networks. This means that not only does Freenet aim to prevent others from finding out what you are doing with Freenet, it makes it extremely difficult for them to even know that you are running a Freenet node at all. This is not the first P2P application to use this approach, other examples include Waste, however those networks are limited to just a few users, while Freenet can scale up almost indefinitely. The new version also includes support for NAT hole-punching, and has an API for third-party tool development. As always, the Freenet team are asking that people support the development of the software by donating."

Hack Jandy writes "For those of you who bought one of the first generation Macbook Pros, a new replacement may be in your future. Flickering LCDs, overheating and intermittent WiFi connections are all common place for many of these first generation machines, but apparently Apple is fixing the problem. The article claims 'According to Apple, it has begun replacing the mainboard inside its MacBook Pros with a new revision. It calls the updated product "revision D," which is identifiable by product serial number.' If you have a reservation at an Apple Store, they may even replace your MBP with a new one."